

Brother Dionysus

Sean Brendan-Brown

Smashwords Edition

Published by MilSpeak Books

A Division of MilSpeak Foundation, Inc. (501c3)

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Copyright 2012 Sean Brendan-Brown

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Previous Publication

Anyone Is Possible: New American Short Fiction, "Monarch Of Hatred"

Fourteen Hills, "Mr. Common's Dog Pot Pie"

Greensboro Review, "A Fine Day For Lobster Liberation"

Main Street Rag, "A Tale From Anger Rapids" and "Relámpago"

Rainbow Curve, "777"

Short Story, "Beauty"; "The Finger Monkey"; "The Man Who Knew Big Words"; "Ourselves, Not War"; "Making Sense Of Shalimar"; "Nowhere When It Burns"

MilSpeak Memo, "Nowhere When It Burns"; "Beat It To Fit It, Paint It To Match"

War Stories: Veterans' Short Stories (MilSpeak Books 2012) "Ourselves, Not War"

Images and quotes within this book that are excerpted in brief form are used in accordance with fair use interpretation of U.S. Copyright Law and the Digital Millennial Copyright Act. Every attempt has been made to attribute and credit excerpted material correctly. Any errors or omissions should be brought to the attention of the publisher and will be corrected in future editions of the book. This creative work of fiction represents only the writer's opinions, ideas, and imagination, and not those of any other organization, institution, or persons. The U.S. Department of Defense, its subsidiaries and/or adjutants, does not endorse this book, nor does this book in any way represent the views of DOD or of the U.S. Government.

 MilSpeak Foundation, Inc., a 501c3 nonprofit organization, exists to raise awareness about creative works by military people to a more visible and influential position in American culture and seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for creative works by military people by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging creativity among military people.

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the NEA for a 2010 Fiction Fellowship, and to the editors of the following publications in which these stories originally appeared:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Brother Dionysus

Nowhere When It Burns

Monarch Of Hatred

Relámpago

Garden Of The Poets

Mr. Common's Dog Pot Pie

The Man Who Knew Big Words

Ourselves, Not War

The Finger Monkey

A Fine Day For Lobster Liberation

Making Sense Of Shalimar

A Tale From Anger Rapids

Porn

Beauty

Beat It To Fit, Paint It To Match

Tokkotai White Guy

About the Author

About MilSpeak Books

About Sied Books

Brother Dionysus

Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God... Do not marvel that I say to you, "You must be born again."

—Jesus to Nicodemus (John 3:3-7)

To answer an old question, I keep seeing my brother Paul because I like the ancient, syrupy scent of grapes and the rotting tons of pressings, the distant booming of skeet guns from the country club and the screech of hawks overhead diving onto a rabbit, mole or field mouse. I enjoy the greenstone well-shaft, lustrous as a gemstone and the hand-pumped water, slightly bitter with iron that Paul mixes with Maker's Mark and ice. I listen respectfully to his war-stories because dad, a medically-retired Lieutenant (3-star, wanted 4) General, said they were true. I return each pleasant smile Marisol, the tasting-room receptionist, gives me because I am stupidly in love with her. Everyone is in love with Marisol; that is her way, and the way of idiots such as myself.

I've never asked Marisol out. I'm married – not in love with my wife Susan anymore – just married. I love my kids and spend all my hours home from work improving my house, a modest rancher outside Fall City, semi-close to Seattle; I've spent a fortune updating this suburban paradise. If I divorce my house on three acres is worth nearly a million. I bought it all for two hundred thousand; Revised Code of Washington says Susan and the kids get everything, and rightfully so, if I do something so stupid as have an affair with Marisol and get caught: you always get caught, always.

I keep coming to see Paul because the smell of burnt grapes is intoxicating. I drive one hundred sixty miles into eastern Washington because Paul is my only brother. He's fifteen years older and we are nothing alike – having different mothers has nothing to do with our differences – I hate the father Paul apotheosizes, but I am faithful, as he is, to nostalgia of nuclear family, a group blown to pieces years ago and irreparable. Paul is all alone as I once was (Susan and I separated for six months) and I can't stand to think of those times his divorce brings to mind, so I return. I shred his invitations then come alone: I couldn't, for a million dollars, get my wife and daughters to accompany me on these excursions to see Paul.

The drive east, past the breathtaking peak of Snoqualmie Pass, is beautiful; my worries about work and money fall away like dead leaves. Miles of old potholed two-lane asphalt bisects the apple orchards and asparagus fields of Desert Aire and Prosser through King City and into Richland— a road originally created by the Army of Lewis following the Whitman massacre, dynamited and tramped out so battalions of howitzer could decimate the Chopunnish, Indians who chose to die instead of surrendering. A road whose summer beauty becomes treacherous in winter – black ice obscured by side-blasting whiteouts – the death toll escalates as motorists begin the Christmas through New Year drinking. I admit I drink on these drives: four cans of fruit punch flavored 4-Loko and a sixer of Red Hook iced in an Igloo Playmate as my passenger; I'm usually down half the Coppers and two Lokos before I see the Tri-Cities.

It was late summer when I drove to Paul's estate, turned my '04 Ford Ranger onto a half mile of gravel, thrust my face out the window and inhaled the vineyard odors thrown around by wind, tractor and sprinkler. I braked in front of the bottling sheds alongside a gleaming blue 2009 Corvette ZR1 and waved to Sid and Larry, Paul's groundskeepers. Ingo Sotelino, the master bottler, stood alone brooding, puffing a filterless Camel from a six inch jade holder. "Ingo," I said. "Charmed," he replied. We hate each other. I think he's a creepy fraud and I've told Paul so. When Ingo was hired, he claimed to have apprenticed at Schloss Staufenberg but I made inquiries to Durbach and they'd never heard of him.

Paul stood by his beloved Charbroil; he's always cooking something, or soaking some choice cut in spices and sauces prior to grilling. His diligence and fervor is priestly and I've told him, earning his scorn for such talk. We hullo, shake hands, hug quickly – pat-pat then break away; as our General-father never hugged, this is a huge step – and I sip my cocktail of bourbon and well-water, sit and watch him move meat through flames. Paul talked and with him it's always the same and one reason among many his wife left him. His laughter's forced; he makes great strides, for your benefit, to demonstrate humor: always insisting that in the end everything makes sense whether an error in balancing the checkbook, a disastrous love affair, or expected death with unexpected results like a legacy or promotion to CEO in a family business like Boeing, Weyerhaeuser or Ford where once you were black sheep— the son with the lowest IQ who collected stamps or coins or comics, very valuable stamps, coins and comics it turned out bought on eBay for nothing but worth thousands or millions or billions in the end.

Paul is an intelligent, sensitive, and attractive man— I worshiped him when I was a boy; I copied his speech, dress, mannerisms, as if he were my father, not an older sibling. But he has maddening quirks of personality, such as lecturing on topics so common as to be cliché, or worse, taking any opportunity during a conversation to prove his tenure as a twenty-year veteran of the University of Washington, a professor of literature— for example, Shakespeare's "all the world's a stage, and we are merely players." Paul is truly a professor; he can't stop professing.

I get it, everybody gets it, in fact it's so gettable that "All the world's a stage" are lyrics in Rush's "Superconductor" and "Limelight" as well as the title of their fifth album. But Paul will back you into a corner and explain Elizabethan drama— how actions onstage allegorize the lofty stage of God. To please the church, The Play became a tool for the "great chain of being." During performance the actors and audience connected, and upon curtain fall the audience was addressed by the Epilogue Player, much as a priest dismisses his flock with Glory be to thee, O Lord. Then the dead rise and take their bow; the living clap for joy and return to bursaries, gristmills, anvils, shops and fields. It was paramount to balance the unsaid with what is actually known in the world – the trickery and mummery completing not only relief but catharsis – a neck-verse sung for those traumatized by too-abrupt disclosures: the Epilogue satisfied them all was well, whether plague or feast; God's plan was never questioned. Scrutiny was blasphemy.

Paul sighs explosively, "My son drives me crazy! I know I was a selfish father, but does he have to demonstrate it daily with his slovenly, insane behavior?"

"It's a beautiful day," I replied. "Cheer up, Paul. Bobby's not insane, just finding himself."

He stroked a thick-bladed knife against a whetstone skree, skree until he was pleased with the edge plied against his thumb. His black eyes locked on mine. "I'm not trying to depress you, but yes, I am certainly whining and I hate that lapse in front of my baby brother. I feel I'm entitled to whine a bit, even in front of you, goddamn it. You've probably never listened to anyone explain how their life was a linear progression of embarrassment, cuckoldry, and financial convolution. I painted and could never exhibit my works, I wrote novels no publisher would touch, and when I was a professor I was never made Chair or Dean; I just taught."

"I thought you loved teaching."

"I did but that's not the point. The point is I've never been great at anything, I've just been a lifelong dabbler, amateur, dilettante."

"My god, Paul, those things are all in the past. Think about the life you've made for yourself now. Microsoft, Apple and Google stocks made you rich— even after the economic collapse you're still rich; none of the rest of us are rich."

"You know Microsoft was an accident. In 1987, I told my broker at Merrill Lynch to invest sixty thousand in junk bonds, that's what an utter fool I was and thank God he went behind my back and stuck it all in Microsoft. I've lost track of how many times my original stock split, and I always reinvest the dividends. I'm embarrassed to admit what that measly initial investment is worth now; I've gained back everything I lost following 9/11, and about half of what I've lost following the Downturn, so yes I'm rich— I can afford this vineyard and these thieving servants, in fact it's my duty, as a robber-baron, to feed the poor: noblesse oblige. I am completely frustrated with the present, just as the present was a never-ending insult to Rodin."

I could not resist rolling my eyes. Paul paused to fish a gnat from his glass of wine. He was drunk but performed the extraction expertly – coaxed the struggling insect up the inside of the glass against the ball of his fingertip – preventing with this gentle motion the wings or legs from breaking away to sully the wine. We drank an extraordinary Bordeaux, an '80 Chateau Olivier that tasted far better than it should have. Paul flicked the gnat from his finger, hurled the soggy bug over the deck rail to the Merlot arbor below. He looked at me the way friends expecting friends to speak do. I paused before I spoke. I love him as much as I loved my father and I hate him as much as I hated father. "I didn't know you were a painter," I finally said.

"I wasn't. I'm not."

"I don't understand."

"It just would have been nice if someone would have recognized what I was up to. That's all. No one ever gave one fucking sign of recognition. Would have saved me a hell of a lot of soul searching even to be told I was wasting my time, that I had no talent."

I poured more wine, waved the bottle. "Well, you've certainly done well in this business. Two silver medals in one season is impressive."

Paul shot me a jaded look and rang the bell for Marisol. I hate that sort of pretense; I despise bells, and summons, and servitude. I don't like to be waited on, not even in a restaurant where it's expected; I prefer chain-restaurants such as Applebee's, Olive Garden, or the Outback Steakhouse (when I eat out at all) because I abhor being hovered over or embarrassed; in franchises they spit in your food if you condescend to them. I'm tongue-tied and intensely uncomfortable in the presence of waiters and waitresses; I despise all servitude. The reason is our father; his great grisly joy was baiting, cajoling and chiseling waiters. His performances were legendary. I was certain, as a boy of nine or twelve, or fifteen, that we would all be poisoned by the soup, entrée, or dessert (brought back to table the third time), or shot later walking to our car leaving a table of six, eight, or even twelve without a tip.

Paul rang again. He is too intelligent to act like a slaver; I hoped Marisol would ignore his summons but instead she brought a wagon-wheel sized platter of finger-foods. "Where are the other dozen guests?" I laughed. Marisol smiled. She'd drenched herself in Ysatis, my favorite perfume, and she caught me staring at her breasts.

"Ah, buffalo wings!" For such an elegant man, Paul devoured his chicken like a savage – tearing, ripping, stripping – Marisol left, and his slimy fingers halted their destruction over a pile of bones, skin, gristle and wadded-up paper napkins crowning the plate. He wiped his hands and mouth, the spot on his white cuff, the sauce splotch on his leg, and he panted like a dog. He wiped his little mouth, dried his delicate mustache yet it gleamed with meat grease. Then Paul palmed several wing-bones and dropped them like dice in front of his plate. "If only Fate would intervene," he sighed. "If these bones would only tell me what to do."

I played along. "The Babylonians used sheep's innards for divination; sheep's guts in demon–bowls, I've read. African shamans cast bones, I believe, and the sorcerers make their diagnosis based on such witchery."

"No, I'm serious. I have no idea what to do."

"You mean about Marisol?" I asked.

"Marisol this, Marisol that; damn Marisol! No, I mean I'm broke," cried Paul.

"Bull. No one could run through so much money. You just told me you're rich."

"I lied; that is I wasn't ready to tell the whole truth. I mean it, I'm broke."

"What happened?"

"9/11 hurt worse than I admitted, way worse than this Downturn, and I never told you how much I had in Enron because that loss really made me feel like a fool. Then my broker at Goldman Sachs ripped me off; he put about half of my money with Madoff. He was fired but I still haven't recouped any cash and probably never will. The under-assistant-deputy-to-nobody at the SEC told me to get an attorney. I asked that idiot what the fuck the SEC's good for if I have to hire my own law enforcement, and now they won't take my calls. I thought I could set myself up pretty again with a stellar bottling, but my first musts went sour and so did the prime interest rate. Hell of a year. Tell Susan I'm floundering, that I'm busted. That should make her day."

"I wouldn't say that," I said. But it was true: my wife despised my brother. I stared into the rich red liquid in my hand; a delicious wine but Paul's ruin.

"I'm sorry," said Paul. "That was lousy of me. I invited you here to eat."

"It's good to see you. You know I like seeing you." I almost said you know I love you but I couldn't— our father tore the love you habit of speech and hugging, even token hugging, completely out of us. And we'd had our one hug for the day.

"Besides, I have plenty of ideas. I might just make this place a dude ranch or bed and breakfast or fat camp or yoga retreat or god knows what. Let's check the meat."

We lurched up from our chairs— intoxicated and dreary, stepping through six bright bands of sunlight under six oblong skylights to the far end of the Trex deck. Paul moved with the elaborate decorum he affects when drunk – shoulders squared like a bodybuilder – hitched his shorts and pushed his right hand into the asbestos mitt, checking the fit with the seriousness of a fireman. I licked my thumb and rubbed a spot of wine on my white shirt into a larger pink stain. Paul lifted the Char-Broil's blackened lid. Thick coils of greasy smoke momentarily obscured his bald head, then a gust of wind blew smoke and gnats westerly. He removed the mitt to grasp the salt shaker, hunched over and turned hissing, snapping Kobe steaks, or as Paul described with pride Wagyu long-bone ribeyes. Ultra-expensive, yet he had wrapped them in bacon.

Paul burned his hand. "Goddamn it all!" he roared, rubbing butter into the grill marks seared across his knuckles. I've told him before it's wrong to grease a burn. He squirted the coals with water, winched up the grill and stacked the firebox with dampened hickory chips before closing the Char-Broil's lid. "There. About five more minutes. The meat's actually done but I like to really kill the germs, though some eat Kobe raw. Cowshimi! You get worms but a least you don't have to worry about Mad Cow. Let's finish the wine."

"Let's open a bottle of your Cab," I said, hoping to broach a subject that would cheer Paul. His pride in wine making is consummate, as is his skill, regardless of his recent bad luck. "I want to try a bottle of your 2004, if any is left."

"A few, but I've decided to never again drink my wine," Paul muttered. "Never, ever."

"That's silly. Just like dad, everything with you is always about money! Whether or not you lose this place, since you began you've made the best Cab in the state, even the snottiest wine-snobs say so. You are a success as a vintner, Paul, and to insist otherwise is ridiculous."

"I'm often ridiculous. Do you know how high-tech the wine business has become? I feel more like a record producer than a vintner— spin the wrong disks, misjudge current vogues, and bottom line profits are off. And then, even if you have a hit, people don't properly pay for it like they once had to, they'll just steal it online. It's a bigger responsibility than I care for— I got into grapes because I hate vicissitudes but to survive in this business you have to mutate, and worse, you have to pander."

"But it's still just basically farming," I said. "You're a highbrow horticulturist. And how do you know so much about the music biz?"

"I don't really know anything, just what I pick up from Bobby and his friends. His band Mopani Quenelle is making another album. Well, they aren't really albums anymore: everything's done with computers and downloaded online now, there's no cassette or record or CD like I'm used to. I gave him the money to turn the old conservatory into a studio. It's still more a greenhouse if you know what I mean. I don't like him growing pot but I guess it's better than smoking crack— and his grass is exceptional, I toke now and then. Want some? I'll ring Marisol to bring a lid. But he's not even trying to audition for an established label. Bobby told me that's an old-fashioned hegemonic idea, that the artists have the power now and the record companies are all going broke. I blame it on Napster and YouTube but to Bobby and his friends YouTube is heroic. He gives away all the band's songs at their websites. When I asked him about that he said it doesn't matter anyway, it's wrong to own anything, it's all corporate greed."

"Maybe he has a point, Paul."

"Maybe he's full of shit and I'm sick of his mooching. Those websites make millions and millions off the free content those rubes send them! Oh, I love my son, but everything is going to pieces, I just don't understand this world, these kids who want nothing, and do nothing."

"It's no different than when we were kids, Paul. They just have better gadgets, just like we had better gadgets than our parents."

"Don't say that. It is different. This generation should be smart, and happy, all we've given them, all the advances in civil rights and equal rights. But they're vicious, ugly, depraved, and lazy. Bobby mocks what I do to his friends as if I were some ignorant sharecropper, grubbing around in the dirt, spreading manure, haggling over seed prices with a snuff-stuffed lower lip. And what does he do? Nothing. I pay the bills and he gives music away, if you can call that angry noise music. And what do the little bastards have to be angry about? They come from wealthy families and went to the best schools, and lived in the best neighborhoods, and never had to work."

My brother sat and nursed his burn. I looked out across the lush and beautiful terrain of his unhappy demesne. Five hundred acres of volcano-nourished loam, and an eight bedroom Queen Anne, its oriels, turrets, and porticoes refurbished at great cost to resemble, I thought, an altar: a great stone, wood, iron and glass shrine raised up from the dust, ashes and clover. In reality, the ancient shell had been consumed over time by termites and carpenter ants. What I saw was mostly plywood covered with T1-11 siding with painted-foam filigree but it looked, drunk as we were, original and solid.

I stood thinking: give me all my brother's chances, all the money my brother's ever held, and no matter the final outcome I'd be satisfied. I enjoyed the view, the green made possible by irrigation from the Herron river, a brown ribbon seven miles to the west under an eye-smiting azure of desert sky, beyond Paul's land stretched a vastness as dead as Mars— wilderness unaltered, unkempt and beautiful in the yellow blaze of sun. I stared at a glittering, quicksilver cylindrical object I guessed to be a juice vat, its roof a sheet metal dunce cap— the effect of the bright nose-cone glittering above Paul's shimmering acres of Shiraz was startling. "Paul! That looks just like a spaceship or a missile."

"Bobby. I told you he's insane. It's his way of feeling productive and creative after I told him his music is worthless. He's working on a dinosaur in the Muscat and a statue of liberty in the Lemberger."

"Isn't he returning to Colby in the fall?"

"No. They kicked him out. Just like Yale, just like Stanford." Paul served the charred Kobe steaks and we ate. "They kicked him out," he repeated. "He cursed the Provost, Registrar, and President, in that order. Sent them bizarre letters and emails. I don't know what happened to set him off and I don't care. Maine's a cold place. He's safer here. Happy. No one will mess with his head the way they messed with mine when I was Bobby's age. Yeah, he pisses me off but I still love him and I don't really want him to be just like me, though that's what he thinks and I guess most of the time that's how I come across. Tingyong-Ga and Inchon and Chosin and Pyongyang made dad tough, psycho I guess, and he mostly took it out on me. What you got later was nothing compared to what I went through. I've never abused Bobby the way dad abused me."

"Paul, I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"Fathers shouldn't be too tough on their sons. Boys are weak and girls are strong. Don't you believe that? Girls mature more quickly and have the moral prerogative. Why else do you think promiscuous women are called sluts and whores and promiscuous men are just... men?"

"I don't know, Paul. It depends. People are people. I don't judge anyone." This isn't true. I judge people all the time; we all do. The spaceship suddenly lifted, tilted on its axis and rotated three hundred sixty degrees before settling back onto the launch pad.

"Hydraulics," Paul said proudly. "Bobby can build anything. And he plays guitar, piano, violin and drums equally well. Why the hell torture him in college? What good will it do? He can live here forever. Until the Sheriff's sale, that is. Ha-ha. He's a good kid. I have to quit saying there's anything wrong with him, there isn't. I hate his friends and his band, that's true I think he's the only one with talent and they sponge off him: they're a bad influence, but Bobby's basically a good kid." My first impulse was to point out that my nephew wasn't a kid at all but a man of twenty-seven. "He's certainly a talented sculptor," I said.

"You mean that?"

"Yes, it looks real."

"I think so too," said Paul. "But you wouldn't tell Bobby that, he wouldn't take it as a compliment. His bunch scorn reality, life and emulation. If you say it looks real they just shrug and say whatever. But it's made me feel better to talk to you. Actually, I worry far too much over Bobby. I'm glad he's back, of course, but there are parts that simply don't gibe. Sometimes he gets this crazy far-off look in his eyes and when I ask him what's the matter he just shakes his head like someone coming out of anesthesia then says whatever and just like that (Paul snapped his fingers) the spell or whatever it is passes and he won't say a damn thing by way of explanation. I don't know, I never know, I honestly don't. He's sleeping with Marisol."

I took a deep breath, released the breath. "She's beautiful, Paul. What's wrong with that?"

"I used to sleep with her. In fact, occasionally, I still do."

"My god, Paul!" (I only expressed rage because I wanted her too)

"Don't you dare tell Anne." Anne is Paul's ex-wife, and Susan's sister.

"Of course I won't," I said. "But what business is it of hers what you do? Why should she care you're screwing the maid?"

"That's nasty. What's wrong with you?"

"Sorry. No, I won't say anything to Anne. We don't see her that much anymore."

"I mean about Bobby sleeping with her. I don't care a rat's ass what Anne thinks of me but Bobby will always be her little boy. If she finds out, she'll come here and hover, and I can take anything but her coming back to hover over my disasters."

This was too much. I drained my glass.

"Ah, more wine!" exclaimed Paul. "Here, have the last bit of Olivier. It's really quite delicious, isn't it? Oh, Salmanazar, Balthazar, Nebuchadnezzar!"

"Thanks," I said, and shot the wine. Paul smiled and refilled my glass. "Now get your plate ready because I'm going to fetch the smoked pheasants. I know I just checked but I'm going to check again because hunting, smoking and roasting things in fire is the oldest male art and of something I consider myself expert." He picked at another gnat from his glass, savagely crushing the insect against the rim. "Bobby!" Paul shouted. "Come and eat some dinner, son!"

From below came the sound of a shed door screeching on rusted hinges, then Robert's voice soft, clear. "Whatever." Then the flatulent pop of an acetylene torch and the sharp greedy hiss of flame through metal.

Paul lit a cigarette, smoked it down, dropped the filter into his grapes. He looked at me, shrugged. "That Bobby. He's a genius. Genius can't be disturbed." My brother smiled and swallowed the last dregs of wine and gnat, then hurled the wineglass into the vines. "You sonofabitch!" he screamed. "Have the decency to come up here and greet your uncle, at least be human and say hello!" He yanked the lid of the Char-Broil, encasing his squat upper body in sweet smoke.

My nephew finished his work and exited the shed, walking quickly through the field to his spaceship. His arms were full of pipe and coils of copper wire. He wore his welding mask and the heat-resistant appurtenance, with its dark green glass plate covering the eyes, made him resemble a creature from another planet, an alien, and I smiled at my nephew, and waved, hoping Bobby could see me. I stood between them— this son seeking galactic civilization, this father in a blood-stained apron brandishing knives, grunting over slaughter like some butcher-priest Aaron.

The difference between need and demand is the same as the difference between murder and natural selection. Nature perfects the camouflage of the hunter: in the hierarchy of things naked, myopic, multilingual man is both the weakest and most hostile, the most mistaken candidate for extinction. If there is any sense in self-pity, it goes without saying that this world could have been ruled by the huge-jawed rockfish, slow and awkward, its tongue resembling a tasty coral worm, or the cannibalistic black widow with her pheromones and hourglass, her lovers perishing: we learn from the insect how to weave a constant pattern, but from the primordial virus is man's dark side of dazzle allied— when his prehensile thumbs took over species more deserving but unarmed.

I understood then what Paul was talking about when he said ridiculous. I understood then what Susan means when she says, as she often does, that my brother is beneath me. I understood why Marisol stayed, and why Bobby was stuck too. I think I knew then as well as I ever will just how lonely a man can be when his body is bloomed from bitterness and nurtured by want— the day's collated acid, the posture of hate we attain when we've given up.

Nowhere When It Burns

Randy "Rad" Cole had been the best freshman NASCAR driver in America: rear bumper rookie-yellow yet already whispered the next Richard Petty. He messed up once, everyone messes up, and it shouldn't have been the end but in his mind it was over and he never raced again. He joined the Marines, a private of twenty-three taking orders from snaggle-toothed nineteen year old corporals, and when his Command Sergeant Major (CSM) discovered that Private Cole was ex-NASCAR star Rad Cole, he was rapidly promoted and survived five years in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) and Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) with Force Recon, 2nd Battalion. Instead of re-upping, his sixth year, Randy moved to the Navy. He lost a stripe, falling from Gunnery Sergeant (E7) to Petty Officer 1st Class (E6) but he loved his new job putting out fires and was quickly promoted to Chief. The only time his past nagged him was an incident at Quantico; drinking beer at Philly's, he saw himself on a wall, posing beside his eToys.com Thunderbird. Unsigned. He never signed photographs. He broke the glass with his fist and signed it.

Blood sugar, not an improvised explosive device (IED) or sniper's bullet, ended his career: he began awaking, sweat-drenched, a dozen times in the night to piss, chugging water, always thirsty; he quit consuming alcohol, sugary colas, and Little Debbie fried fruit pies but it was too late; when he collapsed on deck, protesting he was just overheated, he was rushed to the infirmary where the truth was finally revealed. Glipizide and Metformin had no effect on his diabetes. The ship's pharmacist taught Randy to inject himself with insulin— starting with twenty units daily then increasing to ninety; he was reduced to broke-dick duty and removed to the Temporary, then Permanent, Disability Retired Lists (TDRL and PDRL).

Damage Control CPO Randal Jefferson Cole received his medical-retirement in its slick plastic slipcase August 27, 2008 and the first thing he did as a civilian was to launch his duffel-bag overboard the carrier USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63), from its berth at Kitsap Pier, deep-sixing uniforms, citations, operations manuals and shaving kit. Into the cold, puke-green Pacific with another decade of being something that didn't work. Rad Cole was a free man.

He rubbed his crewcut (he would have sacrificed a finger, as did the Kiowa Apache women mourning their dead, to have had long hair immediately: abracadabra poof! a shoulder-length mane) as he lined up with other short-hairs and shaved-heads at the Bremerton Naval Credit Union to cash his final pay ($3,237) and travel voucher ($418.27). His 50% VA Service-Connected disability pension of $870 would begin the following month, direct-deposited to the Wells Fargo in Parkland, a suburb of Tacoma he chose because his mother lived there.

Randy stood behind a lovely TWBB (tiny waist, big butt) blond (Samantha Stark, GS-8 auditor) who smelled wonderfully of Ysatis and wasn't wearing a wedding ring. That mattered— Rad never pursued married women. He looked smart and handsome: his dinner dress whites loaded with combat ribbons – Purple Heart, Bronze and Silver Stars, the Navy Cross – and his Corfam poromeric imitation leather shoes shone gloss black; he asked her out. She loudly declined and made a big production of ignoring him, having first made sure the entire bank knew this idiot had propositioned her. Stinging with self-orchestrated humiliation, Randy stepped forward for his cash, his nose full of Ysatis. The teller, a scrawny punk with a pierced nose, pencil mustache and pork-pie hat, sneered. Randy held up the line counting the old grease and sweat-stained presidents. "Fuck you," he told the teller when he was asked to move. The teller recoiled, alarmed, swiveled his head to the security camera as if it could help him, as if it might burst from the wall and pummel this bad man. "Your job is to dispense currency, not sneer at customers." The amount was correct and as Randy exited the credit union the blond drove by in a dented BMW. She gave him the finger. Randy blew her a kiss: why all this artificial toughness from these silly fuckers who were never in combat?

He walked to the NCO club, bought a bottle of Johnny Walker and drank it. He gulped a tumbler of ice water, tipped the bartender fifty, then bought a bottle of Courvoisier. Half-way through it Randy began conversing with an intelligent and beautiful brunette who introduced herself as Yvonne. She placed an order at the bar for a table full of jarheads and paused, impressed with the massive patch of chevrons on Randy's arm. She was a hairdresser but also did the books for a HairMasters and was nearly an accountant. "CPA?" he asked, but Yvonne shook her head. That took a Bachelor's, silly. She meant an Associates but it was a good degree, nobody called them book-keepers anymore. She'd love to be a CPA, someday maybe even MBA and open her own salon specializing in her secret homemade recipe for wild yam and ginger shampoo. Had he ever tried wild yam and ginger?

"I'm like a Physician's Assistant. The CPA is like a doctor." She told him she was tired of drinking Busch beer from a plastic pitcher and that Randy's cognac was nice. The Marines took offense to this; their Staff Sergeant (E-6), the only soldier in the group with rank close to Randy's, told him to fuck off. The brunette offered to return to the Marine table. Randy encircled her waist with his arm and remarked that a woman of her mental and physical caliber fraternizing with Marines was unthinkable. The whole bar came to its feet. The drunken sailor completed some fancy footwork and several impressive left-right jab uppercut combinations at the wall of Marine Corps Combat Utility Uniforms (MCCUUs) coming down on him before blacking out.

Rad came to when the bartender spilled a pitcher of ice water over his face. "Where's the music? I put five bucks in that damn juke box." His jaws felt numb, slack under his fingers, the diabetic skin as nerveless and spongy as cold putty. "Party's over, Chief. Shore Patrol's on the way. The girl called 911. Lean on me, that's it. I already buzzed you a taxi. Was a squid myself."

Randy pressed an ice cube over his left eye, squinted over his raw, swollen knuckles. "Thanks, man. You're okay."

"Why not? You dumped enough cash in my jar."

It was seven o'clock. Outside, the dying sun had plenty of power remaining to crash into Randy's pupils like another fist. He groaned, shielded his eyes until the painful dilation ceased, walked more steadily with each step the two blocks to the bowling alley where the bartender had said the taxi would meet him. The shock of ice water after several roundhouse punches had made Randy an alert drunk – he glanced side to side for cops – he could not afford a Drunk and Disorderly or Public Intox; there remained so much to do. He tucked in his shirt tails, patted and smoothed the worsted wool fabric of his jacket into its proper shape. He'd lost his Navy Cross, DSSM, Silver and Bronze Star mini-medals in the fracas. Randy happily tore free the remaining ribbons and medals. He scraped at a spot of blood on his trousers. His dinner dress whites were ruined. "Hey, Good Humor Man!" a tall brown man in a bomber jacket waved to Randy. "You call a cab?"

Randy nodded. The taxi, a battered decommissioned police model Ford Crown Victoria, idled in a cloud of blue smoke. The homemade paintjob was yellow, Gypsy Cab spray painted in block letters. "Your car looks like shit."

"So do you," replied the cabbie. "Shikata ga nai! That's Japanese for nothing really matters. My motto is if God said it then I believe it."

Randy fell into the cab. "You Mexican-American, Japanese, or just plain crazy?"

"First and last. Jimmy Perez. Born crazy in Yakima, raised crazy in Tacoma, moved to Seattle and can't speak much Spanish. Picked up the Japanese driving the SeaTac strip. I also like dai-jobu; you hear that a lot from the businessmen and it means A-ok. My mother's Chihuahuan, born and raised in Juárez and still can't speak English. She can say hi or bye-bye or thank you or two pound hamburger please but that's about it. Once she dialed 911 when my father OD'd and said my husband too happy and they were going to hang up on her until the line was transferred to a Hispanic crisis counselor. Isn't that a scream? Hey, how'd you get that blood all over your monkey suit?"

"Fought a bunch of other monkeys. It was fun. I was a Marine once, a long time ago."

"Where you want to go?"

"The Pacific Highway route to SeaTac."

"SeaTac? Man, why you want to take a cab when you can ride the ferry? You'll be bored to tears. You'll be broke."

"No more boats," said Randy. "I'm through with boats. I want to enjoy the scenery."

"The scenery? It's Highway 16 to I-5, man. Gig Harbor? Tacoma? Federal Way? Someone must have hit you on the head real hard, man. Besides, they don't call it Pacific Highway anymore, it's SR99. What time's your flight?"

"Not the airport, just the strip." Randy's head tipped, his eyes still open, and a snore fluttered his lips. Jimmy tapped the horn until his passenger came to, mumbling, then honked until the sailor was fully awake. "Zebra!" Randy shouted. "Zebra, assemble!"

"Take it easy, Captain. I just need to know where on the strip you want to go."

Randy searched his pockets for cigarettes. He gave Jimmy a Dunhill, then stretched out, blowing smoke. "I'll let you know. Just wake me up when you get there. I have this condition, I go in and out sometimes. I'm here and then I'm not."

"Narcolepsy? Epilepsy? You have seizures? Something I should be aware of in case you spaz out on me?"

"No. It's a form of PTSD. Just don't think I'm ignoring you, or being a prick if I stare at you. And don't ever wake me suddenly by grabbing me. Honking the horn was smart."

"Say man," said Jimmy. "You don't look like you got that kind of cash. Look, let me drop you at Bremerton Terminal; I'll make the fare twenty. Then for seven more bucks they'll float you over to Seattle. They got decent coffee too. With the price of gas it's not worth my time to take the scenic route for less than three hundred." Randy handed him three hundred. "I say drive, amigo. Another hundred when we get there."

"Aye-aye, Captain!" Jimmy accelerated onto SR 304, sideswiping a van covered with a coyote mural. The coyote's snout pointed through a white, cratered moon the size of a garbage can lid. The van swerved, horn blaring. Randy laughed. "Trying to kill your own people?"

"I don't have people." Jimmy guided the cab onto the overpass, then turned south onto Highway 16. He checked the rearview mirror to see if his passenger was awake. Randy stared back at him, his eyes darting with animal alertness. "You ever watch Taxi Driver?"

Jimmy shrugged. "Naw. My son likes that crap. Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Full Metal Jacket, Scarface, Platoon: he'll watch them over and over. I like the radio, mostly." He switched the wipers to low and sang Eres Tú.

Randy stuck his head out the window into the night wind to feel the rain that snapped against the taxi's windshield like bursting insects. He pulled his head in, smoothed his hair. "I thought you said you can't speak Spanish."

"Anyone can sing Eres Tú," Jimmy replied. "It's taught in grade school. It's the only song of Mocedades I really like; my favorite band is Los Lobos. You like Los Lobos?"

"I love Los Lobos." Randy closed his eyes, a succession of memories flooding his mind: blood mostly, but the fragrance of mums, too, and the leering face of an Igboni mask that had hung in his father's trophy room in their first home in Norfolk. The cab was warm and the soft hiss of radial tires sluicing through water mesmerized Randy into almost instantaneous REM sleep. He nodded an exaggerated yes then lurched forward so violently his head thumped the back of the driver's seat. "Hey, chill out Captain," said Jimmy. "What's all that Zebra stuff mean?"

"It means I need a drink," said Randy.

"Can't help you there, partner. I'm AA, four years sober the fifth. Hey, in case you drift off for good, where do you want me to take you?"

"Shurgard. The one by Steel Lake, off old Military Road."

"Across from Summer Sands?"

Randy smiled. "That's the one. So the Sands is still there?"

"No, it burned down last year."

"In time, everything burns," said Randy.

Jimmy continued to watch his passenger from the rear-view mirror. "I hear they're putting in a huge Indian casino. Muckleshoot or Quinalt, one of them tribes. Man, they've come a long way from the firecracker stands and cheap cigs and booze trading posts." When Randy closed his eyes the cabbie sang softly to the radio. The white glare from halogen street lamps strafed the sailor's face and occasionally he would stir, suck his lips, groan. The businessmen Jimmy picked up from the strip to return to their hotels looked the same: slack, once handsome booze-ravished faces struggling against sleep and sickness, perfunctory gifts clutched in their hands— roses wrapped in green cellophane or a faux mink teddy bear, tag protruding from its ear, the heart-shaped box of Godiva chocolates or a giant Toblerone.

He exited I-5 onto 320th, exited again onto Military Road and drove the remaining three miles to the 288th St. Shurgard. He watched for drunks and meth-heads playing chicken, and the ubiquitous overloaded log trucks speeding for the Weyerhaeuser yard, or the St. Regis and Simpson pulpmills. The grinding collision of the Crown Victoria's salt-rotted muffler against the steep concrete embankment leading up to the storage facility jolted Randy into semi-consciousness. They crashed again, bounced their heads on the taxi's ceiling. The muffler collapsed with a shriek of tearing metal and scuttled away under the cab like an iron crab.

"Zebra!" Randy shouted. "Man overboard! Repair party aft."

"Wakey-wakey, it's day breaky, Captain." Jimmy pointed to the Shurgard office.

Randy blinked, groaned. "Ah sweet Jesus my head."

Jimmy patted the top of his seat. "You need a doctor, man. Your flashbacks have flashbacks."

"I've been treated by neurologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists at the Camp Lejeune Naval Hospital in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Plus I'm an alcoholic diabetic. The prognosis is probably grim." Randy pushed out, stood stretching his legs. He handed Jimmy a hundred, then another hundred the cabbie waved away. "Look— I can't leave you broke, what if you bump into the woman of your dreams?"

"I have plenty," said Randy. "I mean money, not women." He displayed his wad of bills.

"In that case thanks." Jimmy jerked the shifter to reverse, accelerated into a half turn, facing the highway. The unmuffled engine coughed, popped, backfired, roared. Jimmy listened to the noise with pleasure. Antonio "Fucktard" Fucellio would surely give him hell about the repair costs, but at that moment Jimmy was unconcerned. The sailor's money had made possible the new microphone, guitar strings, and maybe upgrade his Sonar home studio from 6 to 7. "Adios and watch your ass!" he shouted as Randy waved. "And remember, with this War on Terror, bienvenidos doesn't mean welcome!"

"What?" Randy, unsure he had heard right, cupped an ear and leaned in like an old man. Jimmy grinned, gave Randy the thumbs up sign, gunned the Ford. The taxi cut off a chrome-covered Hummer that skidded to the muddy edge of a deep culvert to avoid collision. Randy heard the screaming of the Hummer's occupants and Jimmy's high-pitched laughter. He walked to his Shurgard unit and stood for the amount of time it took him to smoke three cigarettes. From the direction of Poverty Bay he heard sirens – fire, police, ambulance, car alarms – and the staccato detonations of pistol shots. Wannabe Midnight Club racers, each driving a piece of shit (POS) Civic, sped by neck to neck, the passengers shouting obscenities and flinging beer bottles.

He pulled a jangling nest of keys from his pocket and selected the one to storage unit B-29, forced the key into the twenty-year-old Clopay steel roll-up door's rusted lock. Randy kicked the door. The key flew out of the lock and onto the ground and he sparred with the roll-up, kicking and punching until his anger diminished. The echoes of his fury resounded through the Shurgard complex like roils from a kettle drum, hailing an old woman from the main office. She approached Randy, nervously scrubbing her mouth with an edge of her multicolored shawl as she moved. "May I help you? What are you doing here? What was all that noise?"

She worked her lips noisily and rubbed them up, down, across, with the shawl. She wasn't eating, Randy noticed, and the corners of her small, pinched mouth were raw, chapped, flecked with tiny black moles and large brown hairy moles. She tilted trifocals in the poor light to bring Randy into focus. She scowled, moved her nose up and down through the air, jangling the chains that secured the rhinestone horned-rim glasses to her face. Beyond the rancid dark that bordered the Shurgard a guinea fowl cried. A loon answered. The guinea repeated its strange plaintive screech like a cat steamrollered slowly— a cry of pain and fear, of eternal ambient loneliness.

"I've been gone awhile, ma'am," Randy told her Navy-polite. "Defending our great nation from Islam and Democrats. I'm a civilian again and I've returned to claim my civilian belongings but this lock is stuck, rusted shut."

"I don't remember you," she wailed.

"And I don't remember you," Randy replied.

"I'm the new owner. They ran out that horrid Negro because of all the complaints and police raids against this place. Drugs, everywhere drugs! The DEA found four hundred pounds of marijuana stacked in A-43 and baled up just like hay! Turns out it was rented under a false name, of course. And his wife was nothing more than a common prostitute; I hear their home Internet business was nothing more than a pornography ring. Imagine!"

"Pornography is proven to lower blood pressure," Randy told her. "I mean what porn is used for, you know, masturbation. Maybe that horrid Negro was a gerontologist engaged in classified government research. Did you know that cancer patients smoke pot because tetrahydrocannabinol or THC blocks pain, it also cures glaucoma, and is useful for stimulating the appetites of anorexics. Elderly politicians are rumored to smoke pot to neutralize the effects of senility."

"I have no idea what you're talking about. Who are you?"

"I rented B-29 in 2000," said Randy. "You have received, all this time, proper payment for rent from a direct deposit to your account from Wells Fargo which used to be First Interstate."

"What? I wouldn't know. My son Ron takes care of the accounts. I don't have time to scrutinize every little detail you know."

"Close your eyes right this moment," Randy interrupted her, leaning in until she backed away, "close your eyes and visualize the location of Beirut, Lebanon on the world globe; in 1983 I was twelve, the horrid negro had returned from Beirut, a survivor of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit blown to pieces or crushed under falling debris when Muslim terrorists suicide-bombed their bivouac. That horrid Negro, as you call him, was also a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, long before he became a drug dealer and pimp. After Beirut he was at the Camp Lejeune Naval Hospital nine months, both his legs immobilized in what are called Hoffman External Fixators, then at American Lake VA psycho ward, Tacoma, for what is called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He got two Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, the Navy Cross, nominated for the Medal of Honor, and a big-titted German wife who cooked the best lasagna you ever tasted. His name was Billy James Mallory, and he bought this shithole with his life's savings. I bet the DEA set him up. He obviously burned out. He crashed like everyone else. You'll crash too."

"Oh," the manager sighed. Her chains jangled as she looked Randy up and down. "Oh. You veterans are all such trouble. My first husband was a veteran. A real veteran; Korea! Not a whiny homeless hippy like the rest of you. But all he did after the war was drink, fornicate, crash cars and fight, so I left him."

"He sounded fun," said Randy. "What about the rusted lock?"

"Stay here! I've got a can of WD-40 in the storeroom."

He waited for her, lit another cigarette with the pale blue flame from his Bic and coughed the harsh, phlegm-rich cough of a young chain smoker with a head start on lung cancer. The old woman returned with a tall bronze can of Pledge Extra-Moisturizing.

Randy pointed with his cigarette. "Jesus lady, that's furniture polish."

"Well so it is, young man. I don't have WD-40. Ron never bought it like I told him to. But this has silicone in it, just like WD-40. Read the ingredients." She tapped the back of the can with a purple nail. "I couldn't find the WD-40. I told Ron to buy more. Young people these days! You aren't dependable, any of you!"

She scuffed the shawl across her lips with her free hand, scraping and boxing at the irritated flesh. Randy lifted the Pledge from her other hand, disgusted how she tortured her mouth, hacking with the shawl at the raw skin. She shifted her weight to the other foot, waiting for him to do something. He triggered the Pledge nozzle into the barrel of the frozen lock; foam exploded around his hand— a cumulus stinking of artificial lemon. "Enough!" the old woman cried. "You'll empty out the can! Lord, think money grows on trees?"

"Know what this stuff looks like? PSF, which stands for Permanent Smothering Foam." Randy wiped his hands. "Know what PSF is, ma'am?"

The Shurgard owner shook her head. Jingle, jangle.

"We use PSF to snuff out Class-B fires. Class-B are the worst— ignited gasoline, fuel oil, lubricants, diesel, paint, and hydraulic fluid. I was a Damage Control Supervisor aboard the USS Kitty Hawk and the USS Enterprise and I'm talking about the aircraft carrier, ma'am, not Captain Kirk's spaceship. We put out big fires all the time. You wouldn't believe how badly even the best Navy and Marine pilots can fuck up and when they do the flight deck is just one big Char-Broil. The pilots fry so crisp they look like little black crickets. In Tokyo crickets are a delicacy. It takes them a while to die; I mean the pilots, not the crickets. They try crawl from the wreckage into the cold, refreshing foam we lay down, but it's twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit, ma'am— jet fuel fanned by ocean winds. I watch them burn until they quit crawling and assume fetal positions, what coroners call a pugilistic crouch, and begin to crackle. No shit, the juice bubbles and boils out of them and their bones snap like tumble weeds in a brush fire."

The old woman rubbed and tore at her mouth with the shawl, spotting the wool tufts with blood. Her hand shook as she daubed her chin; eyeglass chains jangled. "Young people! So much noise and crime, so dirty and vulgar! Give my Pledge back!" She snatched the furniture polish and backed away, shaking her head. "You veterans are all trouble! You've no backbone, that's the problem. Well, don't expect the world to feel sorry for you forever!" She entered her office and locked the door.

"The world?" Randy shouted. "I feel sorry for the world, not the other way around!" Thunder rumbled. The clouds dripped egg-reeking drizzle, a combination of effluvium from the pulp mills, methane from the mud flats and sulfur dioxide from the ancient Asarco smokestacks. The polluted droplets sputtered into the glowing tip of Randy's Dunhill. He re-inserted the key into the lock and the tumblers snapped the soft brass key off at the hilt. Randy inspected the broken key, rubbing his thumb across the stub. She watched him, her angular face masked by the trifocals, then the curtains closed.

Randy smashed at the lock with the heel of his foot. The Flowtron bug-zapper suspended by the office window exterminated a Japanese beetle; the bug flared as it fell to the bottom of the pan, then crawled over the basin's rim and plunged to the ground. A gypsy moth, fascinated by the immolation, fluttered in. The Flowtron snarled and the moth spiraled down in flames. "Zebra!" Randy shouted. "Zebra, Assemble! Boundary-Setter and Foam-Man, follow me!" He ran to the moth and beetle and stamped the corpses into whitish paste. He knelt, trembling as he covered the charred remains with a handful of damp maple leaves and evergreen needles. "PKP Dry Chemical applied to fire, fire contained!" Randy shouted. "All hands remove OBAs and stand down. I repeat, stand down, Zebra!"

"Go away!" the old woman shouted through the window pane. "Get away from here or I'll call the police!" She pressed her sharp nose against the foggy glass, squinting to see clearly through the layers of grime separating her eyes from the lunatic ranting and raving outside. Randy waved at the face. The manager didn't see him so he stepped away from the Flowtron and tapped the window, his knuckles directly above her nose. "God help me!" she shrieked.

Randy nodded. "If you were aboard ship, ma'am, you would be much safer. Instead, you are domiciled in one of King County's highest crime districts where police response can take up to half an hour. In that half an hour, ma'am, any frenzied psycho could rape and dismember you."

"Go away! I have a gun! I'll shoot! I'll call Ron! He's got guns, too!"

"Call anyone you want, shoot anyone you want," said Randy. "It's a free country, right?"

He walked back to B-29, kicked the lock until it sprung. He squatted, grunted against the roll-up with all his force. Smoke curled from his nose, his eyes rolled back, and the door screeched upward, steel rollers grinding through the rusted metal track. Inside the shed the street monster crouched – the one true love of his life – silent, waiting.

"Baby I'm home," Randy whispered. A rattle followed by scampering, scuttling movement beyond the piles of paint cans and tools signaled to him the stirring of life, a female rat carrying a blind, squeaking, pink pup in her mouth. A shaft of light stabbed around the far darkness of B-29 then broke into a halo as it dead-ended on Randy's back. His vision dimmed as he turned into the glare. "Leave us alone, damn you!"

The Shurgard owner leaned from the stoop, spotlighting him. She teetered against the double barrels of an antique 12-gauge Winchester Model 24, grasping the shotgun with her free hand, like a broom. "What have you got in there?"

"None of your goddamn business!"

"Is it drugs? I called Ron! He's on his way."

Randy flipped the cobweb-festooned single-pole switch, and after a delay weak fluorescent light filled the shed. He grasped one corner of a green canvas tarp and swept the covering from his masterpiece, every waiting inch of her. He toyed lovingly with the chrome necklaces looped through titanium bolts hung from silver hood-retainer pins, traced his palm across the metal-flake candy apple finish, up and over the black enamel hood scoop. "What's that thing?" the old woman screeched.

"She's a car, not a thing," Randy corrected. He bowed, the proud impresario. Where his fingers ended a 1969 Ford Cobra Jet-Powered Mach I Mustang began: solid steel body full, smooth, sleek, dangerous, feminine. Randy had rescued her from a junkyard and two years sixty thousand dollars later had returned her to the street in triumph and grandeur. He inhaled, like a wine-snob, the hydrocarbons toluene and xylene. Every nook and cranny of the storage room was crammed with tools, boxes of spare parts, racing slicks and rims. The air reeked of gasoline, octane booster, STP and Gunk. A greasy 351 Cleveland – the car's tiny original pulse – poked out from an engine stand pushed into one corner. He'd removed the optional 428-cid Cobra Jet engine from another wreck to power his masterpiece.

Randy unsnapped the retainer-pins which held down the pony's hood, pulled off the entire cover, and sprayed the carburetor with a starting fluid composed of equal parts ether and chloroform. He topped the radiator with Prestone and added another quart of Valvoline VR1 to the crankcase. As he connected cables to a shelved AGM Racing battery, a clanking pickup, its idle racing, drove up behind him, honked twice and killed its lights. A door slammed. "Hi, Ron."

"Hi yourself." Ron weighed three hundred twenty-seven pounds and resembled a cartoon manatee dressed in a blue Dickies coverall. His tiny feet were encased in black cowboy boots, pants legs stuffed into the boot tops. Red beard bristled from his chops like porcupine quills, decorating a face otherwise obliterated by chins and jowls. Above the bristle was an infantile, deformed bridgeless nose, common in those born with congenital syphilis, with the low-set ears and protruding eyes typical of Crouzon Syndrome. Ron's shaved pink head gleamed with grease and perspiration; the bulging eyes were further magnified by thick lenses. His right hand held a cocked .45 Colt Goldcup Commander, his left, a pint can of Rainer.

Randy pointed to the gun. "Nice Colt. Gonna shoot me?"

"Not unless you don't behave yourself." Ron unzipped the coverall and tucked the .45 behind his waist-snap. He pulled up a flap of stomach to do it and when he let go the fat holstered the pistol. "What the hell is this?" he said with awe. Randy smiled. "1969 Cobra Jet-Powered Mach I. Seven coats of candy apple sterling-flake enamel, black leather interior, Hoosier racing slicks, and one badass King 428 Cobra engine rebored to 514 insane cubic inches fed by a Holley 1150 carburetor with custom Ford Motorsport intake. You dig it?"

"Hell yes I dig it." Ron drained the Rainer, crushed and dropped the empty. "How's she stack up to the Boss 429?"

"Owned one of those, too. Hell of a car, but doesn't come close to this girl."

"Do all the work yourself?"

"Every inch. Every bolt, brush, dent, hose, pipe and screw."

"Damn," Ron whistled, running a finger over chrome, then candy apple. "Street legal?"

"Used to be, before the nitrous injector. How about your gun?"

"Used to be, too." Ron smacked the Colt against his paunch. "Bought it off a biker who took it off someone he said he killed. Paid sixty bucks to a psycho for a weapon worth eight hundred, then put another five into it." He pulled the pistol, ejected the clip, then ejected the chambered round – a heavy cartridge of brass and copper-jacketed lead – into the crook of his elbow. "Took awhile to learn that trick," he said, reinserting the cartridge into the clip. Ron handed the Colt to Randy.

"First thing I did was re-machine the slide so that ejection spends twenty percent less gas. Filed the trigger sear to one pound, breathe on it the fucker goes boom! Don't like walnut grips they get slick with sweat in a firefight so I switched to black rubber Pachmayr. Tritium sights and laser too: see the black doohickey I installed in front of the trigger guard? That's a Laserlyte." He took back the pistol and handed Randy the clip, running his finger over the top round as he did so. "Don't ever buy box ammo. I load 230 grain copper jackets Teflon coated which is why they're green. Will punch right through fucking boiler plate. Anyone wearing a bullet proof vest has no chance against this baby."

"Awesome," said Randy.

The old woman banged out onto the stoop with her shotgun. "You watch out for him, Ron! He's a crazy veteran! You should just shoot him. Shoot his leg, son!"

"Stay out of this, ma. He's okay. He's paid all his rentals, right?"

"He's an arsonist and a peeping Tom! He looks like the Green River Killer! I'm going to call the police! I'm calling the FBI and the Green River Task Force!"

"The Green River Task Force disbanded years ago," Randy told her.

"Shoot him, son!"

"For Christ's sakes, ma. Go inside and watch TV. Take your pills. Let me handle this." Ron bummed a cigarette from Randy. The owner slammed her door. Ron laughed. "Don't mind ma, she gets a little over-excited at times. The doctors call her hyperextended or whatever the hell it is that makes old people nuts. Her arteries are clogged and she's a maniac-depressive. She takes tons of pills. Blue pills, pink, white, yellow, black, red, more pills than any junkie. Tell you what, you can take me for a spin in this thing. We'll get some beer and come back. I guess I trust you enough to hang out with you. You may be some kind of crazy car-artist or something, but you don't look very dangerous to me."

"I'm not," Randy agreed. "I'm just some crazy car-artist."

Ron helped Randy re-secure the hood retainer pins. He commandeered his bulk into the passenger seat, belched wetly and sat puffing. "To the 7-Eleven, son."

Randy keyed the ignition switch and the primed engine roared to life, ether exploding out the dual exhaust pipes squirts of blue flame. As the Mach idled, lapping side to side like a boat in water, Randy checked the oil pressure gauge and tachometer before easing out of the shed and around Ron's dilapidated pickup. A Boeing 777 roared overhead, red lights flashing through the gloom. "Leaving your truck there, Ron? Why don't you park it out of the way?"

"Fuck, I don't care."

"What about the shed? Shouldn't you hop out and lock up?"

Ron wasn't going to be that easily ditched. He scratched his crotch. "Ma will take care of that. It's good for her to walk around. She'll poke around in your stuff and then close the door. When things are kind of slow she takes the keys and opens up the sheds and pokes through all the junk. Drives me crazy. She's loony."

When Ron and Randy had gone the Shurgard owner opened her door and moved cautiously into B-29, scraping her mouth with the shawl, wrinkling her nose against the stench of gasoline. She sidestepped a puddle of oil, made a face at a high stack of Hustler magazines, then reconsidered when she saw that something wasn't quite right, and then she saw that the exposed female, November 1992's "Hustler Honey" had been reworked with a unicorn's head glued over her face and some kind of paper sword piercing the woman's vagina. "God in heaven!" the old woman gasped. She upset the stack of magazines and stirred the pile with her foot, quickly ascertaining that not one of the centerfolds had escaped transformation.

"I'm throwing him out," she repeated to herself as she backed around the engine stand's sooty Cleveland and bumped the top from a brown plastic garbage pail. "Revoking his contract for perversity!" She retrieved the lid, lifted it up to the top of the container and froze. The owner blinked several times then dropped the lid and pushed the shawl to her face, biting the filthy cloth to contain her screams. Floating in the malodorous gallons of formaldehyde were four perfectly preserved human heads, all white males; one stared at her with boiled-egg eyes. She found her voice and screamed. She fell in the puddle of oil, regained her feet and ran across the wet asphalt, shrieking for her refuge, her brightly lighted hut. Inside, she clutched the empty shotgun – Ron never allowed her shells – and begged the 911 dispatcher to hurry, hurry.

Randy parked at the 7-Eleven and handed Ron a twenty. "Buy anything you want." Ron snatched the bill. The Mustang rose on its Bilstein shocks as he thrust himself out and stashed the .45 under the passenger seat. "Don't have a concealed carrying permit. Besides, this stop and rob is owned by one crazy Cambodian. Thinks everyone's out to get him. Keeps a Mossberg pump under the counter." Ron straightened with a grunt and entered the store.

Randy inched forward, revving the motor. Ron emerged with a half-rack of Rainier underarm, sucking a wad of Red Man, scowled as two members of the Westside Mob Piru branch of the Bloods sauntered up offering vials of crack. "Ten bucks, two rocks. Twenty gets you five, dog. Best shit in town, home." Ron pushed past, cursing the lunatic in the candy apple Mustang. "Come back! Sonofabitch, you got my gun! Give me my gun!"

"You got the beer!" Randy laughed, "and your life. Enjoy them both!" He tromped accelerator, expertly timing the green light at the intersection of Military and 272nd, bracing himself for collision as it went to yellow – the inevitable maelstrom of glass, fire and twisted metal if his timing was off – once again to be nowhere and burning. The wide back tires spun, ground the tarmac into molten grains. Randy flipped the red button taped to the stem of his speed shifter: the nitrous oxide injector. An orange fireball lit up the parking lot, swelling until the conflagration consumed the tail of the dragster. The column of smoke, burnt rubber, hot asphalt and flame flew from the rear of the street monster with the concussive force of an M67 hand grenade and blew Ron and the gangstas through the convenience store's double glass doors.

Former ARVN Major Phan Dhin, seventy and missing his right leg at the knee, grabbed his cash box and shotgun and dove for cover. War. All the time with these Americans, war! Phan Dhin peered over the top of his counter. The fat white man and the two Bloods groaned, rubbing their deaf ears. The magical Mustang was gone— only smoking strips of molten rubber remained to mark its passage.

****

The Neon Duck hadn't changed. From the rat-infested debris of deserted wharf, concrete pilings, and toxic waste dumps known as Zone 47 blinked the graceful green and purple loops of electrified neon gas. Same old place, Randy thought: panhandlers, winos, junkies, drug dealers, whores, perverts, narcs, insomniacs and maniacs like himself. The air smelled of brine and violence. He tucked Ron's .45 inside his jacket, right hand side for quick-draw.

The club was packed; Iron Miasma finished their set and left a smashed guitar onstage – an inexpensive Fender Squire – a cheap prop for pastiche rage. Roadies for The Dead Fetal Pigs kicked the mess around, making room for their band's equipment. Randy found a table, collapsed with his head on his arms but bolted upright as a hand clapped his shoulder.

"Rad! I knew it was you! I knew it."

"Mikey!"

Michael tapped the gash on Randy's chin. "What happened? You party somewhere else before coming to me?"

"Yeah, that was a mistake. I'm out now, a free man."

"Stay this time— I've got big plans. I could use you around here, Rad. All your drinks are on me, buddy. We'll hit some old spots later, okay? But now I got to get back, Rad. This place is crazy tonight. Full moon. Bartender robs me blind but I can't kill him because he's my brother in law." They slapped hands, palms stinging from the force, and hugged with the awkward intimacy of men. Michael went over to the bar and within minutes a waitress brought Randy a double Cuervo. Her hair was straw-colored and braided into thick pretzels reaching her waist. Randy had never seen such a striking head of hair. "Hi, princess." His voice sounded, in his head, far-away, a high-speed dub.

"Are you really Rad Cole, the racer? Those are your pictures on the wall?"

"Not anymore."

She set his drink on a purple Neon Duck coaster. "They talk about you all the time, Mr. Cole, about how close you came in the Winston Cup and that wreck you survived. Mikey plays crash videos every Friday night. Race Nite, we call it, you'll love it. Half price on all well-drinks and pitchers and free longnecks for the ladies. You'll have to bring your significant other and do it sometime. It's wild."

"It's the Sprint now, not Winston. How about I bring you?" Randy knocked his drink into his lap.

"I'll get you another, Mr. Cole, don't worry! Mikey has a movie that's my favorite; there's a man in an orange jumpsuit running through flames to the car where the guy is burning but the heat drives him back. Mikey says that guy is you. You saved two but couldn't get the last one. You're all he talks about. Keep your money, silly, Mikey said everything's on the house."

"You need a tip," Randy said. He threw down some bills. "For being so nice."

"Want some food? Mikey said you love oysters. We got fresh Hamma Hammas."

"Just another double Cuervo." She nodded and left. Randy knew that anything clean, real, beautiful had burned to a cinder years ago, that redemption and absolution were beyond his grasp. But he wanted to be remembered for more than speed and an alacrity for suppressing fires. Surviving another night meant that he'd have to find a place to stay, to rest and clear his head of the bad dreams that worsened with wakefulness. He needed energy to hunt the very special someone who would trust him completely with a body more valuable to his current race than any dull formula car or trophy. "A trophy," he used to tease Michael. "Get it? atrophy."

Heat sprang from Randy's eyes and he brushed away the water, smiling, because he had never felt better in his life – never more happy, satisfied, normal, free – seated before the flare-lighted stage where leather loons wearing piglet masks and drenched with artificial blood screeched "No One is Innocent" by the Sex Pistols. Randy gulped the fresh drink the pretty waitress brought, asked for another, extracted from his pocket the envelope of Risperidone and Clonazepam the Navy psychiatrist had prescribed.

Tear-dryers, good ole Clonazepam— best ingested sublingually, banana yellow pills held under the tongue until dissolved into a metallic slurry as bitter as nitroglycerine. Follow with sky-blue Divalproex and cloud white Quetiapine for a happy day. Randy's eyes cleared and he sat, happy in the smog and din. A woman in red leather (Karen? Yvonne?) from long ago raised something to his face (gun? blade?) and he didn't defend himself as she popped amyl nitrate under his nose and left him to dream. "Later, honey." She kissed his ear, smearing black lipstick.

"Bienvenidos," Randy called after her. He couldn't remember where he'd heard the word. The table top was littered with broken glass. Randy didn't know how the glass got there. He swept the shards to the floor but instead of the crystalline tintinnabulation of broken things it sounded like guitar strings. Michael appeared, his handsome face blurred into the head of a braying jackass, square teeth dripping crimson in the strobe light. "Rad!" he brayed. "Drink up, Rad!" The entire bar took up the chant: "Rad! Rad! Rad!"

"Mikey!" Randy drew the big Colt. The Dead Fetal Pigs stopped playing and dancers dove for cover as seven agents from the Washington State Patrol and King County Sheriff's SWAT ordered Michael, "Step away from the table! Step away now!" Michael, crying, hugged Randy tightly against his chest and refused to step away because he had been the first driver Rad Cole pulled from the burning twisted mass of cars all those years ago. Randy had returned to the crash, though forbidden to do so during a red flag stop on the track, and exited his car to dash into an inferno caused not by Rookie Rad, as was first assumed, but by "Madman Mike" Conroy.

Randy pushed the Colt around Michael's body. "Gun!" an officer shouted, leveling the laser bead from his M4A1 carbine on Randy's forehead. "No!" Michael shouted back, "no!" The cops took careful aim at Ex-DCS Chief Petty Officer Randy Cole— a man seemingly at peace, bloody left hand calmly tilting a double tequila to his lips, smiling Christ-like at everyone and everything, for all his own reasons.

Monarch of Hatred

Heavens this fuss, this peanut gallery of occluded, jabbering halfwits. Nathan Allan Waterson, having inhabited 22 years 4 months 8 days the universe's last blue-green planet (citizenship USA, state Georgia, township Half Moon) worked hard so he could eat and smoke. Festering flesh, torpid Tic-Tac mint-scented breath the totality of her voice; sempr' ab ti: "always with thee" echoed in his head and he broke her words with his charcoal stub, darkening column after column of boxes on an endless sheet of questions. "No test no BLT, no cigarettes, no banana Moon Pie," the overseers shouted after he shredded MMPIs one and two— tests designed to isolate disturbed areas of consciousness termed splinter psyches.

Splinters throbbed in Waterson's body as well as his mind— microscopic bone shards, copper jacketing fragments in wounds healed slowly: facial nerves severed, his left eye twitched; median and ulnar nerves repaired by a quack named Doc Coffey left his right arm withered, atrophied, the right hand quavering as if with Parkinson's or delirium tremens. Nathan smudged soot over his nose, chin, and forehead as he worked: his left eye was surrounded by a comical black ring identical to Petey, the bulldog from Our Gang. He littered the table with soot and broken stubs; another box of the friable charcoal sticks was opened for him— the overseers didn't mind the mess, no one wanted to facilitate matters by offering Nathan a long, hard, sharp No. 2 pencil.

The Police Psychologist studied Waterson: revolted yet fascinated, gaze unwavering, he jotted notes and puffed small fragrant cigars— cherry and grape flavored Swisher Sweet blunts. He preferred Cubans but while working his persona was totally street OG; Old Gangsta. Brutal and brilliant, when the Police Psychologist wasn't flying his Cessna 400 or shooting Kimber and Colt match pistols or riding King David, his Arabian gelding, he was totally immersed on the job. At two forty-five the Police Psychologist prompted, "What are you thinking?" and Nathan replied "Nuthin nigger," because he was on the job too: racist retard rapist sociopath and he refused to submit and describe his Dream.

"Nigger again, boy? Do you understand you mean absolutely nothing to these crackers – they hate your guts – and if I start tearing you apart they won't stop me?" The Police Psychologist, six-four two hundred fifty pounds, was sixty but looked forty and was a karate black belt. His voice resonated ancient bitterness. "I dare you. Say nigger."

"Nuh."

"Nuh? Do you speak English or do you prefer Neanderthal, like your mom looks? Seriously, Nate, the few snaggle teeth remaining are piss yellow and she's hairier than a Wookie. Lucy? Yeah, how ironic that's your mom's name, cause she looks like Lucy."

The Police Psychologist watched Nathan scratch his wounds: he scratched them as a dog scratches, hard and rapid, stopping now and then to sniff his fingertips. Fuckin' vampire, the Sheriff had said. No way any normal human being could survive the slugs we put in that freak. Nathan closed his eyes, and the fancy voice emerged. "Lucy was the first woman, first primal being, Darwin's late apologia for evolution found by Leakey's idiot savant son Richard in 1974. But the hominid skeleton's a fake, a Photoshopped ape's form because only God can make a real woman; even if she's a slut whore harlot she's God's. And FYI Lucy's not my biological mother but her half-sister which makes her not even a real aunt but we've been together a very long time so I accept your challenge and nuh, nigger!"

The Police Psychologist yanked a ribbon of gauze. Nathan didn't flinch; he smiled as pus-thickened blood burbled from the scabby Caprosyn sutures: survival had brought to him horizons impassible to pain. "Say nigger again I swear I'll kill you. I dare you say nigger again. Right here, right now, in front of God and everybody, cameras and tape recorders, fuck it, I'll snap your neck, you little nothing piece of trailer trash." The Police Psychologist fumbled to relight his dead cigar with a chrome Zippo. Excited because he was ready to diagnose he stammered "Yeah, your mama aunt what the fuck ever Lucy said you were born with a caul, what does that mean to you? I don't mean that foxfire bullshit you crackers love as much as Jesus and meth; can you express anything lucidly, Nathan, put your true thoughts in words?" Smoke burned his mouth, he coughed, glared through the stinking cloud at his patient.

Nathan touched his sores, fingers slick with blood. Stay cool and this would end up all right; no jail time mental hospital six years tops personal injury check to boot, enough for a Camaro when he got out eventually; you always got out. A life sentence meant ten years and the way they were talking – apologizing – and bringing in all these shrinks Nathan knew it meant loony-bin. But the Police Psychologist was a devil, the way he toyed with freedom words; a demon, Holy Ghost proxy, the nemesis his best daddy called the Monarch of Hatred.

Nathan struggled to think clearly then it came to him in a blinding flash that smote his vision with thousands of silver stars and tracers: God's work was never done! He spat blood onto the floor. "Nuh."

"No what?" The Police Psychologist squeezed the boy's arm, feeling and hearing scabs crackle.

"Nuh, nigger! Go ahead kill me!"

The Police Psychologist released Nathan, made several notes then steepled his fingers in the fatherly manner his favorite professor at Johns Hopkins had affected. He leaned forward, failing to calm his voice. He was certain of a diagnosis. "Well?"

"Wuh?"

"I don't want to kill you, Nathan. I loathe you, that's true, but you figured me out: I'm here because I'm paid to be. I don't give a damn about anything but getting paid, and you're really smart to figure that out. You're someone I can tell my students about. I'll get a few more publication credits with several articles about you, and then I'll forget all about you. I thought you were much smarter, deep down; I thought there was something about you extra special but I was wrong. I thought you were a redneck Mozart but in fact you're just a sick ignorant incestuous moronic horny common little fucktard like all the other imbeciles I've ever tested. And for your information, you're a mulatto. Part nigger yourself, a half-rican American. Surely Lucy told you your first daddy was black?"

"Luh. Liar. And Mozart was an idiot, a kraut Manilow. I'm more like Spinoza."

"But Spinoza was a Jew. And Jews you hate as much as blacks, right? Like your daddy?"

"Nuh. Lying bastard. Not all Jews. I love Jesus. Nuh, no way I'm black."

"Oh my God you're so stupid! So Jesus Christ looks like Brad Pitt, huh? The one and only mysteriously-white Nazarene? Jesus was an Arab; he looks like Osama bin Laden."

"My Lord's no nigger terrorist."

"Swear to God. Want to see his picture? It's a mug shot, but nicely done."

"Nuh." Concerned they might refuse him food, Nathan unclenched his fists when the guards ordered him to and smiled. "Blasphemer."

"Don't go simple on me, Nathan. I'm not a believer so I can't blaspheme; I don't believe any of the God shit twisting your tiny little brain. What about your fathers? The first – the African American who made you, the black man who gave you life – was jailed for bank robbery when you were two and stabbed to death in Buford. The second, a white retard crack addict, fucked your ten year old ass then killed your aunt the Shoney's waitress, only hard-working non-whore in your family, when she reported him. The cops couldn't prove he did it so he continued cornholing you until he cut your half-aunt mother's throat, a miracle she survived. He also died in prison. The third" (the Police Psychologist grinned up from his notes) "you seem especially fond of yet he drank himself to death just like your real mom did, what a lovely vicious circle, Nate. He's the reason you ended up in Half Moon, and why you read so much, right? But all you read is crap, pseudoscientific racist nonsense about natural selection, phrenology and eugenics. He told you the caul was magical, didn't he?"

Nathan scowled. "Nuh. The caul's so I could see."

"But it covered your face. It choked you. You still have nightmares and wake up unable to breathe, and then you scream and gasp, like a baby being born. Lucy told me so."

"Yuh. I was blind so I could see."

"You mean second sight? Clairvoyance, ESP, psychic ability?"

"Nuh. Nuh witchcraft."

The Police Psychologist leaned back, lighting a fresh cigar. "Why do you hate black people? You better learn not to, since you are too. They'll kill you for that in prison. And the white boys won't protect you, since you're not only a sex-offender but half-rican American. Lordy, boy are they going to party on your ass, but that's nothing new to you, right?"

"Nuh."

"Why do you hate women?"

"Nuh hate."

The Police Psychologist nodded, scribbled a note. They sat in silence until he asked, softly, "What are you thinking?"

"Nuh. You promised me something to eat, something better than apple fritters or glazed donuts from John's crackhouse bakery, washing down cakes and cookies with half-frozen green bottles of Mickey's Big Mouth. Junkies like sugar, wastrels on smack. I need meat. Protein."

The Police Psychologist sounded disappointed, but in fact he was delighted. So close, so close; it was no longer a question of one thing or the other, it was the other. "Nothing else, Nathan? Not at all concerned about your fate, about what's going to happen to you? Talk to me now as Megollanna the Destroyer, the Monarch of Hatred, the one with the fancy voice who knows big words, the way you were just speaking. The one you like to draw with the wings and fangs."

"Nuh. Y'all do anyhow yer evil intent. God's my judge." He rubbed his nose, smearing charcoal into a mask of pain. The nagging fairy tale paradoxes made his head ache— how could a boiled egg like Humpty Dumpty talk, when the mess inside an egg contained only DNA's soggy outline of a mouth? Or a fox eat sour grapes when anyone with a lick of sense knew that foxes ate mice, moles, shrews, rabbits, house cats and chickens? And no way could a witch gifted with Satan's karma be duped by Hansel, a chubby dope; she'd have read his mind, and his sister's, the clever little hussy, and ate them both after long torture and teasing— imagine a bride of Satan unable to distinguish a chicken bone from a boy's finger! Nathan chewed his filthy thumbnail, pondering Once upon a time the world was a black hole and the spirit of God faced the deep. He dug his fingers into his temples until a memory of strawberry ice cream flooded his tongue. He sucked saliva, a noise like birds chirping burst from his throat as his chair screamed backwards. "Nigger! God. Damn. You!"

The Police Psychologist waved the guards away and leaned forward. "That's right, boy, get it all out. Yell it all out now. Let me help you get it all out!" Nathan opened his eyes. "Nuh!" he spat, sick of questions. Once upon a time he was free and he'd be free again to do his favorite things— gather pomegranates, persimmons, wild ginger and strawberries, dead batteries, tin cans and bottles, masturbate in the gold-token booths at the Adult Desire and Pleasure Palace porno arcades with video sex-grunts of shaved-slick whores taking big ones deep and the company of other men surrounding him, jacking off. He'd clean clogged carburetor jets with a toothbrush in a Folger's can of gasoline, drinking Olde English 800 High Gravity 40s and inhaling fumes until he was no longer earthbound— he could fly. Nathan closed his eyes, smiled at images of old women in pink nylon panties, garters silver belled ringing like bird-hungry cats dancing the Krylon Cancer at midnight. Naked one-breasted women skipping through fields of okra. Mother.

"What are you thinking?"

Nathan shook his head back and forth to spill it all out: death, offal, ice cream, mastectomy; welfare surgery though mama kept drinking, smoking, toking cheap seedy dope, huffing rags of Krylon clear-coat he shoplifted for her when the pills and powders and booze ran out, when her looks were so eroded the men she fucked for drugs quit calling. A skeleton alive, as vicious and horrible as any Halloween creature, leaning forward to grab another beer from his hand, and he looked down into her tank-top at the scarred horrors that once formed the breasts he suckled as an infant, until he was five she let him nurse, although there was never any milk because she wasn't his real mother but it kept him from screaming, and he cried all the time and she cried all the time too and his suckling soothed them both. "Nathan!"

"Nuh." He needed cigarettes and food but would get nothing, not one puff or bite to eat until he completed the MMPI. He peeled the flap of a dressing and scratched a scab. Watching him the Police Psychologist leaned back, flooded his bloodshot eyes with Refresh artificial tears. God-damn this job, he thought, meaning Nathan Allan Waterson, not his career which he loved because he was a consummate player; he ached where Nathan nigger'd him, the creep had shone a flashlight down the rat and snake pit the Police Psychologist called soul: a career of giving in, Uncle Tom and Jim-Crowing, playing the game, a total loss from Marines then Army to Southern Miss to Johns Hopkins to now. It stank to play the fucking losing game, but the Police Psychologist was one of the best players, with many trophies. It was just an epithet, just a word – nigger – but it killed.

"Nuh. Nuh more!" Nathan ached where the high-velocity hollow points had broken bones, torn flesh, nerves, tendons, cartilage. The unmarked boxes taunted him worse than their words— why darken squares for Fentanyl and Pentazocine and cigarettes, coffee (double cream and triple sugar) and BLTs? They'd won; they'd caught him and nearly killed him. He'd been willing, in his surrender, to a point, but now he was unwilling. He savaged blackness into the endless hollows. "Nuh!" he cried, stabbing. Do you see things that others can't see? "Nuh!" he poked. Do you anger easily? He would never finish, not now, not never; each hour someone would enter with a fresh sheet of questions – Have you ever felt you'd be happier as a woman? – interrogations worded, like a magician's knife, to lift his scalp and peer into his brain. He was full of pain and the smell of bacon, smoke and coffee all around him was maddening. He marked yes to Have you ever wanted to be a florist? because the dank, musty cubicle reminded him of roses – off-white Kennedy roses – his mother's favorite when rarely clean or sober, the only beautiful thing about their home the bushes she tended, and when the Police Psychologist took advantage of Nathan's agitation to repeat "Why did you rape the Hawthorne girl?" Nathan shook his head and kept on sketching an amazing approximation of Chagall's Lovers in the Moonlight across the MMPI.

****

All her sixteen years Diana Hawthorne shared the township of Half Moon with Nathan Allen Waterson; he was impossible to escape: whenever warnings of "stay away from perverts" or "don't talk to strangers" came it was always an offhanded way of saying stay away from Nathan. He was just a boy himself, she knew that, but he'd dropped school when he was ten and at twenty-two looked thirty-two: a stooped gaunt malnourished wreck, stringy mustache and scant body hair like his first daddy, the "light skinned negro" killed in prison— a quiet man, good mechanic: nothing like the hellion Lucy married next, god forbid, that horrible bloody Friday, or even the last, the creep from Athens, heavens! Talked like a professor but stank of booze; would mow your lawn five bucks then break in when you were at church— steal everything not nailed down, pawn and drink it all down.

Diana's precocious world-view was based more on rigid self-adherence to homework and Scripture than any natural talent. "Who cares?" was often the stock response to her biblical ejaculations, and while the attention given her was often cruel, she retaliated with loving kindness. She was cordial – eager girl, not at all unbeautiful – clear complexion, gaunt face, crooked teeth, small sharp nose and brilliant eyes. Diana knew Nathan only through gossip that called him queer, thieving, perverted, retarded. From her school bus window Diana would see him in the sun or rain or snow, dragging sacks of aluminum cans or bottles or stolen car batteries or copper pipe to sell at the Mavis Recycling Plant. She watched him dragging his scraps and she'd shiver: the world was a brutal place, after all; Christ the gentle lover of children whipped human beings from his temple and it shamed her Christian conscience to admit that she really didn't want Nathan in her world at all.

Diana's older siblings hadn't fared well; Jesus hadn't been much help and in that sense they weren't much different from the Watersons: Troy pick-axed through the roof of a dentist's office and died inhaling nitrous oxide— the tube frozen to his lips, his lungs a gray stone butterfly. Herschel was doing life at Huntsville, Texas, after a QFC robbery ended up three people dead; he wrote Diana's father now and then for money and to curse the parole board; he wouldn't get out until the next appearance of Halley's comet without a decent lawyer. Melinda, the first-born and a transient dreamer singer poet, had disappeared following a bonfire on Alki Beach, Washington. The task force speculated that the Green River Killer liked the way her waist-length auburn ponytail, pot-scented and breeze-tossed, looked as she strolled SeaTac, hooking for drugs, and took her for her last ride. The police speculated but couldn't say for sure the precise location of Melinda's grave (a twenty mile forest between Snoqualmie Falls and Seattle) and Gary Leon Ridgway wouldn't tell, not even when he was sentenced to die or before he died or as he lay dying, rigidly strapped, Reaper's cocktail of sodium pentathol, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride flowing into his brachial artery.

Denouement. A word Diana learned in school so pretty she wrote it in her bible.

Lust. "The Devil's magnet," her mama always said.

"The everything of nothing," Dean wrote on the cover of his diary.

Sex, Herschel slurred to Diana when he was drunk and she made his coffee those semi-happy times before he drove the getaway car for the Fort Worth QFC job. "That's all the little bastards want from you, baby-girl. You stay away and get yourself in college, you hear? Forget about fucking." She'd nodded and cracked his eggs into sizzling oil. Sex, sex, sex. Floyd, the senior who'd pawed Diana's minuscule front while endeavoring to work the point of his tongue past her pursed lips (in the passenger seat of his rebuilt and repainted '89 Corvette half an hour into Scream 2 at the Starlite Drive-in which only showed movies Monday through Friday since Saturday and Sunday were flea market days) had been sternly rebuffed and lectured to about the ethereality of flesh. "Mankind," she told Floyd, "is utterly incapable of pure devotion." His erection had withered like lettuce at high noon. "Bitch," he'd cursed her. "Teasing little dyke."

But Jesus loved her, and you soon knew about it. You knew about it if you sat next to Diana on the bus – the oldest student, boy or girl, still riding the bus – as she brushed her straight ropes of uncut dark hair, the skin of her hands inflamed and split from multiple ablutions with Lava soap and boar-bristle brushes. The redness in stark contrast to the paleness of her throat, when she tweaked the mole there, an almost constant nervous habit. Her pallor was striking: dove-white face framed by complete darkness within two close-set eyes the color of maple, and the demeanor of one who had spent her short life suppressing carnal urgency and appetite— the face of a girl who had surrendered willingly only to the steadfast desire to evangelize. Who had, Floyd told his howling locker room brigade, spread only the word.

To anyone seated next to Diana, the day of her tragedy, what was notable? Flesh scented with Pond's and buried under a rough sweater that stank gently of bacon grease, turpentine, vinegar, pancake, straw, and Bag Balm. To anyone seated so close – staying and not moving away as children invariably did – she'd nod and exclaim "Beautiful morning, isn't it? Praise God!" then press upon him or her a tract with a bold rubric Repent! Jesus Is Coming! or Pray For Middle East Apocalypse! And when anyone asked what that meant, that wasn't 911 or the war in Iraq or economic collapse apocalyptic enough she'd smile, shake her wonderful mass of crow-feather hair, say "Read your Bible, especially Revelation, the End is revealed." Diana was the lastborn – conceived by a father addled from alcohol and sunstroke and the mother pleasantly surprised, as she put it, to be "in the family way at my age." Doc Warren didn't share her enthusiasm. "Thea, you can't take this chance. It could have Down's Syndrome or Spina Bifida or God knows what."

"God does know!" Althea cried indignantly, accepting from Warren only the free vitamins, and delivered at home without complication. The only incongruity or blemish Diana exhibited was the star-shaped purple birthmark crowning her skull which was nearly invisible after her hair grew. Scrawny and good-natured, self-righteous and friendly, a bible expert full of that racist love which is the spiritual prerogative of all practicing and would-be missionaries, Diana considered herself not only happy but a good preacher.

The day of Nathan's crime the last of the unpicked pomegranates had shrunken, resembling tiny skulls which, soaked by rain, had sprouted caps of green mold. The semblance of the pomegranates to rain forest talismans – morose shrunken heads with stitched lips bobbing in the chill wind – tantalized Nathan's macabre imagination. He watched Lights Out Theatre and National Geographic on his ancient black and white Zenith and knew all about the jungle: cannibalism, nakedness, torture and head-shrinking. Nathan's obsession was decapitation; he drew pictures of the guillotine and the Grim Reaper, nailing a velvet crucified bleeding Jesus above his bed for protection and fashioning a leather collar from a harness strap to stop the blade when it swung from shadows. Nathan backed up Jesus with a mojo alligator tooth, a double-heads quarter which had cost five dollars from the Seminole Trading Post, a string of purple and green Mardi Gras beads, and a rabbit's foot. In his nightmares the scythe continued to hit and his blood gushed in smoking jets onto the frozen concrete while his severed head rolled, fire ants stinging the tongue.

Nathan drew Death as a wolf with rheumy eyes full of crusts, black snout dripping foam, nostrils snorting the scent-trail of man, chained to Megollanna winged and fanged: Monarch of Hatred crayoned in red. Always sniffing or flapping its wings, always a leap and a bound away. Pomegranates earned Nathan fifty cents a pound and picking fruit for the witch-widow forced him into the wide-open where devils zeroed in, voices babbling endlessly in his ears. At such times Nathan looped FM antenna wire around his waist, ten foot tail whipping behind him— he knew that the fillings in his teeth magnified minute sounds. He stuffed his sacks with fruit until his early-warning wire screeched, ran until he was tired, stopping only to devour a pomegranate, thumbnail splitting leathery skin to reveal glistening rows of wet garnets, pungent aroma of red juice filling his nostrils, the bitter tang of inner pith souring his tongue as he ate. Always one eye out for the wolf and bad angel; the Monarch.

That day, as Nathan feasted on pomegranate, Mrs. Troy stamped across the porch of her battleship-gray trailer, screaming. Troy lawn littered with rusted tricycles, heaps of dog shit, beer bottles and cans. Dry-rotted pallets, the remains of her third husband, the trucker, poked broken slats like punji stakes; the tattered awning flapped from rusted bolts. The screen door, sagging black aluminum, was the only newness. The slavering, crazed face of the Troy's pit bull pushed the bottom screen into a hellish death-mask— it yelped to break through, it had broken through before, now mashed its hideous face into triple-strength nylon mesh, OWOWOWO roaring from its muzzle. Mrs. Troy's mouth open, round and hungry like the sex-book girls under Nathan's bed: "Git yer ass off ma yard, ya creep!" Nathan's response was to smile for he loved the heavy-breasted fat toothless ones with short oily hair. He cupped his crotch to demonstrate his love for Mrs. Troy, told her "woman, get ye behind." She cursed, falling down in her excitement to free the dog, tearing the latch from the aluminum door, locking herself out, but the pit bull got Nathan, bit his calf before Nathan turned and brained it with an oak chair leg, the end of which he'd drilled out and filled with molten lead.

Denouement. Whatever would kill him, Nathan drew: things on the ground, under the water, but especially the beasts in the air. It's a universal psychosis: Dean suffered from it (brain sarcoma) and Diana knew it as sin and the Police Psychologist wrote a beautiful paper, in the end, about murderous rage, incest, racism and necromancy, explaining how the sky actually was falling – the collapsing ozone layer exacerbating societal suffocation – the instinctive paranoia, agoraphobia, claustrophobia the good doctor termed "collective dread." No journal would touch the essay, even his alumni magazine called it aberrant. But the Police Psychologist was definitely on to something: that November afternoon Nathan borrowed a cigarette, he forgot from whom. But the cigarette-giver would remember and correctly identify Waterson from a lineup: where he was (9th and Jefferson, exiting the Pinecrest Cafe) what he was doing ("wandering aimlessly like a damn fool in the rain, kicking through puddles of water and mud like a kid") what he was wearing (Red Wing boots, blue overalls, Coors t-shirt underneath, knee-length Macintosh, collar pulled up to his ears, greasy blond hair spilling over his shoulders from the Nike ballcap) what he said: "Watch the air— it's murder-time air." And when he was told to fuck off he said again, "the air will kill you."

The justice system of Half Moon would have Nathan cold, a process which mystified him. He'd been in court before (stolen motorcycle, Kawasaki which didn't run) glared at witnesses not with hate but envy: how on earth did they do it? Heads huge Mason jars capable of storing the vegetables, jams and sauces of human detail indefinitely. "This boy's not right in the mind," the Judge said and when he asked Nathan why he stole the motorcycle Nathan shouted "nuh!" just like he shouted "nuh!" to the Police Psychologist: but he did remember, yes: Breathing in is impossible; breathing out adds to the death. The soot from the Arcadia Corporation's coal-fired power plant filled Nathan's lungs, compounding the damage of chain-smoking (three packs daily, whatever he could buy, borrow or shoplift). He tried to confess: "was the witch-widow toll me all the time" but no one heard him, or pretended not to hear him, or to understand.

That November day Nathan spent the last of his mushroom money – the wild mycelium rings he scavenged until the weather turned cold were depleted – the remaining woodears, bonebuttons and morels had decayed into a tarry mess topped by toadstools and Fly Agaric: amanita muscaria known as the Death Angel. Nathan stamped through the toadstools, preparing his poison-boots for the witch-widow, thrilled by their noxious power. He patted a mushroom burger for the Troy hound but his Siamese, Lady Wong, devoured the meat, her death throes over quickly, nothing Nathan could do but hug the cat through her final seizure and cry. Terrible but now he knew his toadstool-toxic feet could kill; up and kick a man's face and that man would die like pierced by Amazon poison-arrow frog darts, like Lady Wong died. Nathan thought of all the faces he would kick after he finished off the witch-widow: the Sheriff, Mrs. Troy, the devil. To travel, to afford to accomplish good deeds, to eat, to kick faces he needed cash and all he had left were persimmons, those spicy waxy orbs.

Enemies. Darkness-bound days which kept time in a barrel – a barrel Nathan dreamed of kicking open with his poison-boots, then he'd be free – the millions of words descending from outer space to clap his ears would stop. Like a prophet, he'd turn over everyone's whetstone, see the names underneath and thus control them, as the Bible ordered. Nathan Allen Waterson would know the right ordering of names; he would have knowledge of all good and evil. But for now he'd have to stomp and stomp the mushroom patch, prepare like David for Goliath.

On the rich side of town, at exactly the same time that Nathan cashed his final widow's check, Dean staggered out of N.B. Forrest Memorial Hospital and vomited into the railroad tie-defined rectangle of shriveled Bee Balm and bright petunia. Someone stopped to help him up. He was, after all, the Deputy Assistant Prosecutor; mostly nice guy kinda pansy, terrible at poker, charbroiled a mean t-bone but ruined it with bitter dark microbrews when ice cold Pabst or Bud or Miller was perfect. Dean wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his blue wool two button Brooks Brothers. Air, he thought. The fucking air is making me sick.

The Waterson case was Dean Evan's first participation in jurisprudence and due process the way his brother Roy insisted Andrew Jackson intended democracy to be practiced: hard and fast and Republican and damn the liberals. Roy had wrecked his Harley V-Rod, staining the Forrest County Speedway with strips of metal and flame. "Looking," he said appreciatively as the .avi movie of his crash was played to him in the hospital, "as if the devil wiped his ass on the blacktop." Dean saw less a daredevil than a torn fat man spread-eagled over a hay bale and spare tire barricade, miraculously alive. Roy recuperated three weeks at General Forrest, complained about the food and basic cable television, offended the nursing staff at every opportunity. Example: "What's your social, sir?" the phlebotomist had to ask with each blood draw. "Surcingle?" (with a wink to Dean) "Hon, I musta left that under my codpiece." Roy wasn't as funny as he thought himself, and from the evidence gathered it appears Dean hated being his brother's keeper. Page thirty-four of Dean's diary ($7.95 from Wal-Mart, vinyl with a brass-tone lock):

Shiny chrome bars like meat spits pierce my brother's leg from ankle to thigh. Wounds— tiny anuses (anusi?) pucker pink donuts where the chrome bars enter and exit his flesh. Nurses (nursi?) swab the leg with iodine, looks like Roy's being barbecued— disgusting but I continue to visit, soon he'll have the bones plated, pinned and screwed with titanium. I do his job, he's proud of me although I'm no prosecutor; I'm barely an attorney. Though I rebel against populist spoils systems I won't declare open-season on Blood and continuity: humdrum child of the unethical nineties and post-millennium neocons I remain. Daily our bourgeois noblesse oblige between god and clod, Moneyed Christian Soldier and white, black, brown, yellow – slips from importance and necessity – duty is a distraction not a virtue. Denouement, the poor girl scrawled in her bible. She had no idea. The South will rise again and when it does I hope to be somewhere else.

Dean called Judge Wilbur "a man subdued by custom doing wrongly the right thing." The reason for Dean's statement, and the brain fever brought on, as he told Roy, by "half-truths and perverted allegory" (now we know he was suffering from intracerebellar chloroma and, as he died, an undiagnosed glioblastoma, the type of brain tumor which killed Senator Teddy Kennedy, a man Dean adored) is best answered in his own words – the essay found in his briefcase – "The Suicide of Jeffrey Scottsdale-Wilbur,"subtitled The Sociocratic Anomic Immolation of Alexander the Freud.

The Hon. Wilbur devoured his favorite dinner of chicken, marshmallow-baked yams, fried okra, peach cobbler and four pralines. He unwrapped and lit a King Edward Corona, aimed peanuts at the heads of grandchildren Paul and Melody when they snubbed his offer of the paper cigar-ring, concentrating on their Nintendo DS and PSP-3000 handhelds. He swallowed three capfuls of Pepto-Bismol Max, fouled the parlor with flatulence, then retired to his study. Judge Wilbur inserted the letter (drafted in his copious Ciceronian script) between the marble board and preface of the autographed Billy Sunday: The Man and His Message, removed his tortoiseshell reading glasses and placed them atop the book. He loosened his silk ascot but left it noosed around his fleshy neck.

He drank Booker's True Barrel, finished one bottle, then sometime close to midnight broke the tax seal on a fresh bottle but didn't drink any but instead grasped a Model 1911 Colt, pulled and released the slide, chambering one round. He removed his dentures, pressed the barrel into his upper palate and triggered one .45 hardball round at 1,025 feet per second through the center of his bald dome, directly underneath the autographed photos of Lyndon Baines Johnson and Ronald Reagan. The report would have reverberated thunder in that quiet room, but no one heard. The household continued to sleep around Judge Wilbur, the roar and stench of powder and the bloody bourbon he vomited as he died contained within oak-paneled walls. When asked if it was her custom not to check on the Judge before herself retiring, Mrs. Scottsdale-Wilbur replied that she never did. She thought he was reading Duns Scotus, or Zane Grey or reviewing a case, or drinking himself to sleep upright in the chair as he often did. She preferred not to disturb the old man as she had preferred a thousand times the final decade of their marriage to leave him be.

The .45 ACP is a massive cartridge, composed of a 230 grain lead bullet enclosed in copper jacketing, a load designed by the military to kill Krauts, Commies, Hippies, Fascists, Japs, Tax-evaders, Moonshiners, Terrorists, Drug-dealers, and whoever else the agents of democracy blast it into. The .45 hollow point implodes soft matter, creating a cratered exit-wound. Former president Ronald Reagan received a string of tissue across his upper lip and in the subdued light of the study it looked like a mustache. Reagan looked like Hitler. We thought, until inspection proved otherwise, that Judge Wilbur had killed himself under a picture of Adolf Hitler.

That was the end of it, I'd hoped, but that was not the case: Sheriff Owens kept poking about saying we had to find everything and we found a hell of a lot but it wasn't all blackmail stuff or cooked books or forgeries, it was a locked drawer and a cardboard box, both stuffed with child pornography. There was all kinds of it, old black and white and color photographs and pictures obviously printed from his computer files (I guessed his password and wiped everything), loose Polaroids, VHS, CDs, DVDs and glossy foreign magazines with lurid titles such as Russian Lolitas and Ukrainian Hussy; some of it was nudist stuff but most of it was sickeningly hardcore: children having sex with adults or other children, or penetrating themselves with adult sex toys, and then Owens started giggling and guffawing, not because he thought it was funny but because he was astounded; he stuffed his jowl with Redman and spit the juice right onto the Judge's carpet since there was no sense being respectful anymore and I felt the same way and smoked a cig and stomped the butt into the carpet. There was a lot of horrific shit but the worst – I can't get it out of my mind – was the photo of an Asian girl, nine or ten years old, scarlet lipstick and green eye shadow, scrawny chest like a whippet, no breasts, skinny legs in black fishnet stockings, sneering the leer of a practiced whore for the camera while spreading apart with two fingers her tiny undeveloped vulva.

"Goddamn," Owens kept saying. "Goddamn sonofabitch was a pervert!"

We burned everything. The DVDs, CDs and video tapes we smashed first but the Judge preferred his porno on paper, and the Sheriff and I bought a case of Miller and trucked this filth to the river and burned it up. He's not such a bad guy, Owens, if you get to know him, if you drink a case of beer with him while torching a wealthy, powerful, dead pedophile's stash. He's less of a Colonel Blimp to me now and more an avuncular curmudgeon, but with saving graces. We're going fishing soon. I don't really like to fish but I said I'd go.

****

Dean, driving in the dark from his office, spotted the first opossum trotting along the soft shoulder and avoided it; the second he swerved over with his Mustang, screaming Hissatsu! ("sink without fail!") the cry of Kamikaze pilots. Persimmons hung from denuded limbs— glistening balls of scarlet-splotched orange twisting in the wind. West of Old Military Road the persimmon groves, starkly tall in the abandoned pastures, were fed by stagnant ponds. Opossums were everywhere, yowling over windfalls, rustling through the cowslips: their growling and squabbling over road-kill, carrion, and overflowing garbage cans could drive anyone, even a man who had never deliberately run anything over, crazy. Dean, fighting the radio for soothing classic rock, heard that was no storm at Christ's passing, son, that was the earth mourning.

November fifteenth a mist thick with ice pellets struck Nathan's face as he worked. Diana was afoot, having missed the bus. She missed the bus every Thursday to preside over the school's four member Youth For Christ organization. Nathan gathered persimmons, his hands tarred with orange pulp. He sold the fruit in gallon buckets to the witch-widow. Mimi Ezell Parson (everyone in Half Moon called her "Parson's widow") boiled the raw persimmons with crab apple puree into bulk jam packaged, labeled and distributed by Maximum Fitness, a subsidiary of Atlanta-based health food giant Trendtek, Inc. Six dollars per jar for Organic Aprisimmon Slimming Conserves and new orders outpaced existing stock. The widow sold six other flavors of preserves, jelly, and chutney as well as mini-loaves of "slimming" pumpkin, cranberry, zucchini, squaw, and anadama breads. Mondays and Thursdays she drove to the Amtrak depot in her Pontiac Montana to ship goods and talk profits with Travis over sour cups of station coffee: dollar fifty each jam pint, dollar per loaf. "God-damn city folk think they're smarter than me," she'd say and the old man would nod, eager for her to depart. The widow considered herself a shrewd businesswoman, and she was. Nathan despised her because she cheated him and never offered him anything to eat.

He'd stand at the doorway of her immaculate kitchen-workshop, sniffing, his body sour with hunger, drunkenness, and venal need. He stared at the bins of buckwheat, graham, rye, corn, and oat flours; the boxes and bags of Soft as Silk, Frosty Acres, Bisquick, Dixie Crystal; canisters of brown, turbinado, powdered, rock candy, and red-beet sugars; jeroboams of olive, sunflower, corn, peanut, soy and canola oils; glass chimneys of vanilla bean, cinnamon stick, allspice, anise, granola, and citron; the squat tubs of candy sprinkles, M&Ms, and jelly beans. The widow brought his check, her cunning eyes scanning the floor for signs of his filth. "Nuh!" Nathan said, slapping the check (short, as always) into his coat pocket. "Shoo!" the widow hissed, breath reeking of unclean dentures, neck jutting from the humpback like a twisted branch, the meat-curtains of her throat bunched with a string of pearls. Nathan carried a stolen Puma folding knife; the Bible said kill witches, supernumeraries of Satan— Hansel and Gretel killed a witch and everyone told the story to children as a parable of valor, courage, and redemption. They were never called murderers, trespassers or delinquents; there was no trial, no dolor for the hag.

November fifteenth Nathan delivered four gallon-buckets of persimmons, received a short check, uttered "Nuh!" to the hag's spiel about supply and demand. He clenched his fists then slid a hand over the stag horn and brass smoothness of the Puma, locked it into its full length with a flick of his wrist and tested the razor sharp high-carbon steel on a fingernail. He wondered how loud she'd scream, how long she would take to die after he poison-booted her onto the clean floor or pushed her into one of the back rooms so he could try the knife on that ugly flesh. The widow slammed the door in Nathan's face. He peered through the pane. She stood over the sink, washing his persimmons. Nathan rapped the foggy glass and said "I'm afraid you're like me and can't be saved" but she didn't hear, yelled "Shoo! I'm expecting company and I don't want you around!"

"Nuh!"

"Here now, I said shoo!"

He cashed his check at the Winn-Dixie and bought hamburger, a carton of American Spirit menthol, Friskies for his cats, Havoline for his pickup, a liter bottle of Popov vodka from the package store across from the Flying W that tasted like disinfectant until poured into an empty plastic gallon milk jug with a quart of Welch's grape juice. This "punch" he placed on the floorboard, drinking as needed. His money gone, the day still early, Nathan returned to the persimmon grove. His eyes itched, his fingers burned; his tongue was a boiled bratwurst, the sore tip he kept nipping leaking blood. He drove slowly, cooling his mouth with punch. The pickup rattled and back-fired. The sky was ugly, mirror-gray, but Nathan noted with satisfaction that his Mackinaw was the same brown plaid of the leaves and rotten fruit underfoot.

Diana Hawthorne enjoyed the walk home. She discerned in every rock, puddle, twig, scrap of paper and broken beer bottle God's glory. She chewed a strip of licorice, mentally catalogued the dozen chores left to perform before dark. She finished the candy. The drizzle slackened and with a crack of thunder the clouds parted, revealing a crescent moon. Diana stopped and stared. It was a sign— God had great things in store for her: "Phoebus in his purple chariot chasing the moon," she whispered and splashed on, her stockings plastered with muddy leaves. She scraped at the mess, circled the cemetery behind General Forrest Memorial Soldier's Home, cut across the road and into the persimmon grove. The old Smythe mansion had burned in 1997; a chimney like a stele remained, and a foundation of blackened granite rimming a massive basement heaped with slag, charred timbers, and garbage. An owl huddled in a hackberry tree; mistletoe had killed the hackberry, its shaggy branches drooped, kudzu clutched the trunk. Diana smiled. Near the crumbled Italian renaissance revival fountain, now loaded with muck and bullfrogs, she had two summers ago found an 1863 Indian-head penny worth nine dollars.

Diana hurried on, her sudden unease crowded out with psalms and algorithms. She only stopped to talk to a good-for-nothing like Nathan Allen Waterson because, she whispered at the hospital to the cops, doctors, nurses and orderlies, "he was killing a possum." The opossum had filled its pouchy jaws with persimmons, was reaching from its limb for more, when Nathan lunged and struck it with a rake. The possum barked ker-cha!, delayed its fall with its powerful prehensile tail, swung in a dazed arc, a thin string of blood slipping down from its mouth.

"Stop!" Diana raced through the spongy grass, cowslip, and vetch of the grove-bottom. "Leave it alone!" She twisted the rake from Nathan's hands. The opossum, hissing fear, stared stupidly at them, its slack lips revealing bloodstained teeth. Its urine dribbled, spattering the leaves below. The piss sounded louder than the rain. Nathan lit a cigarette. Rain dotted the white cylinder, hissed into the ash. His fingers trembled as he drew. "Nuh— what's your name, girl?" Diana stared into the black, sodden pupils of his bloodshot eyes. She read danger and glanced back up at the safety of the road. "I feel sorry for the poor things, is all. Everyone kills them for no good reason." She hung her head. In his presence mercy sickened her, goodness was inconsequential, caring diabolical. Her wet hair shielded her face like a veil.

Nathan pushed the hair from Diana's face. She recoiled from his touch with a cry of disgust, stepped back and he followed, surprise in his eyes hardening to hate. "Whore," he spat. "Understand? This whole goddamn world's Babylon's whore." He thrust his hand again into her hair, crimped his fingers around the base of her neck. He gasped at Diana's birthmark – purple through the part in her hair – his eyes widened. "Nuh! Whore and a witch!"

"Stop it!" she screamed. "Don't touch me!"

"Gotta witch-mark, girl! What witch ever felt sorry?"

"Stop it!"

Nathan struck her, pulled her back, struck her again, wrapping her hair in his hand like a windlass until the top of her head was under his nose, his other hand gripping the nape of her neck. His stormy, triumphant eyes bored into the birthmark, he touched it with his tongue, his breath stank of smoke, alcohol, chili. Orange strings of persimmon pulp clung to his thick, drooping mustache. "Bible dropped in the dirt. Bad luck, girl, dropping God's Word." He twisted her head savagely until her eyes focused on the leather-bound King James, a gift from Reverend Fray. "Blazfemur! Jezbell!" He squeezed until bones in her neck popped. "Witch!"

"Don't touch me you ugly bastard! Mama! Mama!" Nathan kicked his poison-boots behind Diana's legs, sweeping her off-balance, then crashed down on her with his knees. He unzipped the Mackinaw, steam wisped from the chest of his sweaty Coors t-shirt before the equilibrium of nature balanced his heat with its cold and he quit steaming. Nathan patted his pockets for the knife. He sighed, remembering he'd left it on the tailgate; he'd just have to make do with his hands. "Mama!" he mocked. "Mama!"

Diana clawed his face, he beat her down. "God, don't let him kill me!" He tore her dress down the middle, peeled each half across her ribs – tucking and rolling the flap of material into a ball – the squirrel skinning method one of his daddies had taught him years before. "Please don't kill me don't kill me!" Nathan didn't kill her and when it was over – when he howled, spasms twisting him violently, then sprawled over Diana with his face in the leaves, mouth open wet gasping like a fish's – she crawled from under him, dazed with shock and pain, certain he would pounce again with his hurting hands and club her senseless like the opossum. Nathan watched Diana scramble away. "If you get a baby, girl, call him Immanuel!" She fell into the ditch and struggled up. He rose, zipped his trousers, shrugged back into the Mackinaw and chomped a persimmon. Diana made it to the road and began to stumble home, screaming "Help! Help! Someone help me!" and shielding her bruised and bleeding nakedness with scraps of torn gingham.

****

The law came looking for Nathan at the Flying W. Sammy fed them chili con carne with Pepsi and Premium saltines, then Sheriff Owens and his deputies searched the trailer at 473 Meadow Park. "Kick her in," ordered the Sheriff, standing back to let his boys do their work. It took some doing, breaking into the 1964 Airstream Bambi. The three pounded, kicked, and rammed the door with a fence post, pried out the siding with a crow bar. They smashed the small glass portal, buckled the aluminum frame, rocked the trailer but still the lock held. "Stand back!" Owens blasted buckshot into the lock, forced the door and charged in, getting the drop on five frantic cats scrambling through a towering labyrinth of stacked and piled books and mountains of manuscripts, manuals, and religious and pornographic pictures (the variety called "lipstick lesbian" and MILF "mature/ hairy housewives") downloaded from the net. There was so much stuff that several beaverboard shelves had buckled under their loads, spilling books, magazines, evangelical and racist pamphlets everywhere. The officers smoked, ground butts onto exposed greasy linoleum and filth-caked brown carpeting. Deputy Smith flicked a butt into the mounds of paper. "Hope it all burns to a fuckin' crisp!" Then Son-of-Owens drawled, "I seen Nathan at Casey's many a time. Seems he's always there when I drop in. Sits in the corner. Don't play pool. Don't talk. Just sits there drinkin."

Away they roared— Owens and Son in a 2005 CVPI Crown Victoria Interceptor, the other two deputies making do with a '99 Explorer XLT. They skidded into the gravel lot of Casey's as if making a play for home, burst into the tavern with guns drawn. Casey thrust his arms into the air. "Don't shoot! You boys need a beer just say so!" Everyone enjoyed a good laugh, settled onto stools with pints of MGD and Bud, and the investigation proceeded. "Waterson, huh? Hawthorne girl? You mean little Diana? Sumbitch. How's her folks taking it? Hell, I know where he lives – Meadow Park – he ain't there? Well, he ain't been here." They talked about the Hawthorne girl, how sweet but strange she was, being smart as a whip and religious too, a teen exemplar, and from that no-count whitetrash family! Goddamn Hawthornes deserved Nathan as a son. Diana belonged with the Tates, or the Chases or Godwins, Hoffmans, Fishers, Crandels or Ayers. They talked about Nathan, how crazy he was. They talked about Dean, how crazy he was getting. They talked about taking time off to shoot deer or squirrel or go bassin. They talked about Judge Wilbur's arraignment for racketeering, embezzlement, jury tampering and extortion. Imagine— the Judge a crook! More laughter. "I wiped my ass on my subpoena," Owens scoffed. "Wasn't for the Judge I'd still be a reserve Corporal with a bankrupt Texaco. He made this sorry fucking town what it is, and all it's ever gonna be." They drank another round then lapsed into silence. Casey belched the sour gut-flatulence of chronic dyspepsia, wiped his mouth. "Say, so where exactly did the poor girl get raped?"

The law arrived at the grove with sirens screaming, lights circling, as darkness fell. Nathan loaded the last pail of persimmons into his pickup then returned to his final chore. His back was to the officers, his hands moved over across the tailgate and they all saw a glint of blade. The cops sprinted across the grove at Waterson, their matching black sharkskin Acme boots slinging ropes of mud. They yelled "Stop! Freeze! Down!" as Nathan spun, bloody Puma in his hands. Owens fired first as Nathan leapt, the blade slicing through the fat man's forearm then uniform blouse then splitting the fabric covering his ProMax ballistic vest's Kevlar layers. "Motherfucker!" the sheriff screamed then his son kicked Nathan backwards.

Waterson fell against his truck, pushed himself up, advanced. Three Smith & Wesson semiautomatic .40s and one Colt Python .357 magnum revolver intersticed dusk with flame and the stench of chemical burning; twenty-five bullets tore into Nathan, punched holes through the rusted panels of the pickup and catapulted tassels of persimmon pulp high into the air. Out of ammo, the cops swore, reloading, fumbling magazines into the muck in their frenzy. "Goddamn you, motherfucker, goddamn you!" the sheriff howled as blood spouted from his arm, pulling the trigger of his empty Python click click click. Nathan dropped his knife, turned, swayed then collapsed face-down into the buckets of fruit— it was the heavy, quilted lining of the 100% virgin wool Mackinaw, a gift from the Half Moon Salvation Army, that slowed the slugs and saved his life.

The story was a national sensation: Drunk Sheriff Guns Down Mentally Retarded Boy! (this headline from the National Enquirer glued to page one hundred-five of Dean's diary, first sentence of text written as a caption under a photograph of Sheriff Owens, a line drawn from "Now" to his mouth):

"Now how in hell were we to know he was skinning a goddamn possum? And I wasn't drunk, and any sonofabitch cuts me with a knife you better believe I'm gonna blow him away." Owens was verbally shredded by Mayor Cole who in turn had been ripped and torn by Governor Perdue who had the day before been drawn and quartered by "that dyke bitch" (Senator Susan Ryan, MBA, MD, PhD, JD, for Christ's sake – four terminal degrees and I barely squeaked through law school – she authored the PDA bill (Protection for Disadvantaged Americans) now the allegations of Hate Crime, conspiracy and racism (Nathan's biological father was African American, although Nathan looks, everyone marvels, "completely white") had everyone pointing the finger at backward Half Moon: according to PDA, Nathan Allen Waterson was the real victim, luckless since birth when he became a ward of the State after his biological mother died in an alcoholic coma; the woman he called mother actually an aunt, also a drug addict and alcoholic. String of horrible stepfathers and live-in boyfriends, some beat and sodomized him, the last taught him the simian babble of the Aryan Nations: white supremacy, coloreds are the children of Ham, etc.

Alcohol, alcohol – the papers were all over that too – how Nathan, although on probation, was out of his mind drunk on vodka purchased from the package store. So Ned's fired and he deserves to be, seems all along he's been selling to kids and parolees for double, pocketing the difference. It's terrible what Nathan did to Diana Hawthorne but I disagree with Roy (better, though his leg's wasted away to a bluish-white pale stick pitted and Staph-scarred like a wino's). Roy says I'm "Xanthic" then he laughs. He says the problem with my whole damn life is Xanthism. I took Art 101 so I understand the insult, his imagined cleverness that I have Hepatitis C but refuse to tell anyone because I am a closet homosexual. I hate that term. I don't fuck closets. Yes the whites of my eyes have gone yellow, and my skin is going yellow but that is because I'm a closet alcoholic, as is everyone else I know. Roy says, "We'll make laws, genetic-test all babies so that the Nathan Allen Watersons can be isolated and drowned in gunnysacks like unwanted cats. Better yet, we'll kill 'em in-utero; we'll eliminate violent crime and potentially useless citizens with science."

****

"What are you thinking?" the Police Psychologist asked.

"Dreamt." Nathan had finished the MMPI and sat drumming his fingers, anticipating the bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich, Welch's grape or triple-sugar coffee, and Talwin which he loved because it took away most of the pain, or Percolone which was almost as good.

"Describe them."

"Nuh, nig..." He stopped, grinned slyly, then replied, in a loud voice mimicking Billy Mays, his favorite television personality, "Florence. Florence Nightingale." The Police Psychologist did not smile at this absurdity, he considered it a breakthrough. "Why Florence Nightingale?"

Nathan placed the crown he'd woven from dirty bandages atop his head. "Because I am the Monarch of Hatred."

"Why did you attack and rape Diana Hawthorne?"

The Monarch waggled his finger at the Police Psychologist, no-no, oh no you don't, not so easily. The Billy Mays voice continued, scoured with Delta twang: "I guess recurring dreams are most significant, ain't they? I dreamt Florence Nightingale every night this week. You ever read her book Cassandra? I bet you ain't. My foster-mother, I didn't please her so she gave me back, like a cat who shits on the carpet goes back to the pound, kept Cassandra on her shelf. I read everything on that shelf. She called me an Idiot Savage 'cause I interpret God's Message in everything I hear or see or read. In the dream I'm a British major in the Crimean. That was eighteen fifty-three to fifty-six, you don't know. Florence was assigned to my post. Wouldn't let men touch her, no sir, had to keep that babymaker pure. We drink brandy in my tent. She's on my cot, starch-white cotton uniform blood-spattered, her eyes bright with excitement; I can tell she gets off on fightin and killin; bloodlust. Maybe she's lesbo or a girl who goes both ways. She's let her hair down, she smells of sweat and soap and crotch and guts and perfume and iodine. I hike up her dress and peel down her panties. That girl make such a noise, that girl moans."

The Police Psychologist puffed the rapidly dwindling stub of his cigar and pretended, as he had pretended countless times as Nathan's diagnostician, to be unfazed by this outburst. He pushed aside his Olympus DM-1 recorder and notepad, slipped his gold-tone Cross pen into the pocket of his Arrow broadcloth shirt, opened the box of Swisher Sweets and lit a fresh cigar. Time to prove his diagnosis. "That's enough for today, Nathan."

"You don't want the rest?"

"No. What's the point? You're mentally capable of standing trial again. You raped Diana Hawthorne because you hate – it's as simple as that – you hate everything you aren't a part of and can never be a part of: love, decency, normalcy, society."

The Monarch sagged, tore the bandage-crown from his head. "Nuh!" Nathan dug his little finger deep into his ear, tasted the wax. He kicked over his chair and limped to the window. A flag of gauze fluttered from his wrist. The Police Psychologist stared at the gauze, remembering razor-sharp concertina wire surrounding the fetid concrete bunker where an Iraqi surgeon, reeking of Arak, treated his wounds. Wounds festered from the dirt he crawled through and the maddening swarms of flies attracted by pus, blood sweat, the stench of decay in the POW compound so strong he vomited the honey and mint tea his captors gave him to drink. He didn't hate the rag-heads as much as his own men: where the fuck were they (dead, but he didn't know that then, that he was the sole survivor of a friendly-fire Hellfire missile attack by an Army Reserve Major and Chief Warrant Officer in an AH-64 Apache neither was completely qualified to fly) and why the fuck they left him in the desert to die. Why?

The gauze made him remember the zip-zap thud of 7.62 rounds punching holes through his flak jacket, driving powdered fiberglass, lead and copper deep into his flesh. But then an Iraqi Lieutenant Colonel ran forward screaming, kicking the men who shot him. He laughed at that, falling bleeding, watching the soldiers pray-V their hands and bow while this pudgy gnome covered with medals like he was on parade kicked two khaki'd giants with his tiny polished boots. The Police Psychologist lived because they were NATO rounds, old Chinese cheaply manufactured; his flak jacket slowed them just enough. Fucking Marines, medically-retiring him at the insulting rank of Captain from the only job he ever really loved. Dumped him on the VA. It hurt even to remember. "Nathan! What are you thinking? Why did you rape Diana?" He could barely voice the words around the boulder of rage lodged in his throat. His fingers itched to hurt the boy, hurt him deeper than bullets in places that could not be healed or bandaged, places leaching out all the cases never understood, all the help not given. All the miserable condemned faces.

"Nuh!"

"Don't you want help?"

"Nuh, nigger. Or, since I'm mixed blood, should I say half-brother?"

"Then it's over. You'll stand trial."

Nathan shrugged. The Police Psychologist signaled for the tray of food to be brought in. There was no BLT, only corporate cafeteria fare— a brownish patty of ground Beefalo and textured vegetable protein called Salisbury streak by the inmates, with boiled corn, instant mashed potatoes and two slices of stale white bread with margarine. The Police Psychologist extracted a Swisher Sweet from the box, his fingers trembling, placed fire at the end of the cigar, and handed the cheroot to the boy. Nathan nodded and puffed. The Police Psychologist waited until Nathan smoked it down before handing the guard several tens. "Buy him a pack of Camels, and some Moon Pies and grape soda. That's what he likes. So long, Waterson."

"Mister!"

The Police Psychologist waited.

"I'm not crazy! I wanted you to think I was but I'm not! Up there (Nathan pointed to the ceiling) you boys and girls is on your own; the first last and the last first." He limped back to the window and stood chewing the cigar butt, grinning.

"Matthew 19: 30."

"Wrong," cried Nathan, triumphantly. "The other one. Mark 10: 31. If you don't know, why should I care?"

"What else do you know, Nathan?"

"I know the past, I am the present, I command the future. The wind has no mouth yet blows, the moon has no wick yet glows."

Outside, Sheriff Owens picked at the brim of his hat. Son-Of-Owens picked a pimple on his 18-inch biceps, uniform sleeve rolled to the armpit. "Well? You wire him to some machine or something? I'd love to watch you give him a good electro-shocking. Is he really nuts or what?"

"That's confidential, Sheriff."

"Bah!" Owens mashed the brown Stetson onto his head. "Bullshit mumbo-jumbo! I should've reloaded and made sure Nathan Allen Waterson was stone-dead. Sharpen a persimmon branch and drive it through his fuckin' heart!" He stomped to his car, punching at his son to follow.

Dean's diary, Pages one hundred-thirteen through sixteen: "What are we dealing with?" Magistrate Brady inquired of Dr. Alan Crowley. I snorted into my snifter of Rémy XO in spite of the gravity of our situation. We had just finished eating chicken teriyaki, gyozas, crab rangoons, and California roll the Magistrate called in from Lee and Jin-Ah, the shy Korean couple – deracinated Seattleites still unaccustomed to the heat and crushing humidity – but very welcome in Half Moon with their politeness, big smiles and Happy Teriyaki. The takeout boxes, chopsticks poking out is if stems of a blasted bouquet, offered from the wastepaper basket a constant scent of sesame oil and fishiness. I wondered if Crowley the shrink knew that Brady the arbiter was a former Grand Wizard (hate is no longer chic, the New South is all about "Pride & Progress" besides, there's a war on terror raging, one has to be careful about one's past); I decided Crowley couldn't possibly know or he'd give some sign just how difficult he was making it for our Aryan Christian Soldier to rule solely on the diagnosis of a Black Shaman sent by "that dyke bitch" Senator Ryan. I nearly bit my glass in two! Did Crowley have any idea how tough it was for the Magistrate to extend goodwill to a representative of the enemy plethora? To drink his good Caucasian cognac from his Waterford Kells gold snifter in his semi-gloss Latex white chambers? The Doctor sprawled fully relaxed in a leather Horchow cuddle-chair, gulped his cognac. He slurped three glasses as quickly as beer, declined Brady's Montecristos to smoke those horrid Swisher Sweets. God, I loved him! He swept away at that moment every man I've ever despised: nebbish, redneck, fool, father; he redeemed mankind for me. Magistrate Brady had discovered that Dr. Crowley was a POW, a Medal Of Honor nominee and Navy Cross recipient, Desert Storm, yet the good Doctor had no clue Brady was also a POW, a MOH nominee and Navy Cross recipient, Vietnam. I snorted and chomped down on my cigar because I knew and I knew these two men were cut from identical cloth differently dyed: graspers, climbers, warriors and if not architects of the future America, certainly sentinels of the stalemated present. God then, the hysteria beating the backs of my teeth with my silly tongue! I would have made it if they hadn't continued on so, if they had given up and parted company. I bit the snifter, inhaled delicious Rémy fumes, choked down screams of laughter as Magistrate Brady went to his open window and plucked, like some love-sick swain, a bruised-fleshy magnolia flower. Over the sickening odor of the dying magnolia came sulfur dioxide from the plant, and arsenic and lead from the smelter: vapid air at best, at worst an iron miasma killing us all and the panacea, according to the EPA, was to move; there's a concrete amity between big business and local government, which Roy and I help enforce, so the dumping continues. But how I'll miss the lovely Georgian summer nights, sotto voce crickets drummed to oblivion by the cicada's roar!

"Schizophreniform. Affect-laden Paraphrenia," Dr. Crowley said. Brady nodded gravely as if he understood perfectly the solicitous sham, the empathetic con of therapists, lawyers, and undertakers. "He also meets all criteria for acute severe bipolar multipersonality disorder. I've recommended immediate neuroleptic therapy, contingent, of course, upon your releasing him to the care of Dr. Osborne's Secure Unit at Central State."

"So that's it?" Brady sighed. "We can't try this animal?"

"Nathan's very sick, so far gone that as of this morning he has become non-communicative. The term's retrograde aphasia; he's more than merely contumacious, he hates everything and this rage has consumed his sanity. I'm afraid that my prognosis at this time is against any hope of remission." Brady kept nodding. "I don't give a sweet god-damn that he's sick, Doctor, in fact if you said you're were chaining him in an iron maiden with his pecker stuck in a bottle of hydrochloric acid it'd make my day. I've had it up to here with this and I'm sick to my stomach the girl is keeping the baby."

Crowley shrugged. "She's very religious. She told me it was God's will. To Diana the crux of this matter is not her rape and assault but the sin."

"Sin?"

"The doctrine of original sin. She thinks she's responsible. She forgives him. She told me she loves him, that he's her brother in Christ."

"Oh my god in heaven the world's gone mad! I don't care anymore Doctor, I don't care and I wash my hands of this abomination." He tore his magnolia flower and threw the mushy fragments out the window. "And Senator Ryan's Protection for Disadvantaged Americans?"

"They'll back off now." Crowley smiled. "So will the ACLU, although they still insist the Sheriff be fired for brutality and coercing a confession."

I let them have it then. I tipped cognac over my shirt and trousers, the shocked expressions on their faces made it worse. I soaked myself with booze. "Stop!" they say I howled. "For the love of god stop! You're killing me!"

Relámpago

The cabbie babbled about floods, how '93 wasn't actually the Flood Of The Century, this spring had been; as bad and worse to come the consensus, check Old Farmer's Almanac you doubt it: calamity, apocalypse, Armageddon before 2012 because of global warming, secret Iranian doomsday device tests, el niño. "God almighty, the rain this year, mister. Record hail too, corn's either broken down or underwater, hogs drowned or cholera'd, chickens wiped out with avian flu, cattle got the staggers, soybeans and alfalfa mostly gone too." The driver eyed the rearview mirror for some grunt or exclamation of sympathy, agreement or understanding from his passenger, but Gordon didn't give a damn about floods, storms, animal husbandry, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or agriculture. What did the ignorant chawbacons think the Great Plains were all about, anyway? What kind of imbecile plunks his house, family, town, city, county, state on a Pleistocene Epoch floodplain then, disaster after disaster, refuses to move?

He'd flown from New York to Chicago to Cedar Rapids then an airport shuttle to Iowa City then this overheated taxi reeking of exhaust, pigshit and vomit, to see his son Robert, the son he'd had with his third wife Elizabeth, the son who played baseball for the Hawkeyes which was fabulous but then he quit; quitting was becoming habitual with this offspring. Gordon hadn't called beforehand so he asked the cabbie to wait. "Hey man, if it's just a minute, you know I snooze I lose I got bills to pay." Gordon dropped a Franklin onto the seat, slamming door on the "Yeah, buddy! Name's Jessie just like Jessie James I'm your man."

The woman Robert lived with told him his son was climbing Pike's Peak and that Katherine Bates wrote America the Beautiful there in 1893. "Only danger will be Diamond Face, Longs Peak. He's attempting it rackless."

"Rackless?"

"Means without gear, Mr. Thorpe, no crashpad." She invited him in out of the rain but instead of gratitude Gordon felt scorn. The third time she said "Bobby" Gordon replied he despised the diminutive which made his son Robert, named after his great-grandfather the telephone pioneer and co-founder of IBM though he was forced out, lost everything and shot himself, sound like a fag, a bartender, a retail clerk. Carol grinned then stared at her painted toes. "Sorry," she whispered. I could fuck you, Gordon thought, you're weak and spineless and silly and I could throw you on the Broyhill leather sofa, the only decent stick of furniture you got because I bought it, right now and fuck you, bang my son's whore in the mouth and cunt and ass and you'd let me. "I'm tired," Gordon said. "Had a rotten flight and this town stinks."

She raised her eyes and smiled, nodding. I prefer Bozeman, Montana. Ever been there, Mr. Thorpe? It's paradise. So's Missoula and Kalispell, though it's all getting yuppie, Hollywood's ruining Montana." Gordon replied he hated Montana though he had been there shooting elk, bighorn and griz in 1971 during a break from Vietnam; he hadn't needed a break but his touchy-feely CO insisted so he R&R'd home and kept killing but killing animals wasn't as much fun as killing people. "You're kidding!" Carol exclaimed and Gordon assured her he wasn't. She was pretty in a porn way but too old and sleazy for his son; a black satin choker circled her tattooed tan neck, thick brassy pentagram glinting where her Adam's apple would protrude if she were male. Nose twice pierced – zirconium stud and one of onyx – she sported a fluorescent yellow kumkum dot below a moonstone bindi though she was painfully WASP: WASP eyes nose mouth tits heart soul brain. Robert's Wigga nymphomaniac earth-mama; Quitter's New Age fucktoy dolt. Gordon wondered if she'd ever done it with another woman, or two guys at once. He especially enjoyed business trips to Germany, Holland, France, Sweden because there he could rent fisting tapes which, though not Federally illegal in America continued to be unavailable in American adult video stores because of lawsuits by Republican States, a hypocrisy which enraged him, a wealthy Christian Patriot and Republican who adored porn, prostitution, marijuana. "Like a beer, Mr. Thorpe?"

"Tanqueray Malacca and tonic." He'd been to India often on business with the Import/Export and Union banks: Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Calcutta, Madras, Bombay (he hated the PC bullshit Mumbai enacted in 1996); lepers begging from mounds of carrion-stinking bandages, children and geezers starving to death in gutters— too weak to beg, just dying or dead. "Dreadful fucking bloody place," his British friend Earl Spencer had appraised even Delhi and Gordon had agreed. Wells Fargo was in charge now; fuck 'em all and their eternal filth.

She giggled. "We're outa booze. Finances kinda tight till the end of the month. Bobby's sorry I mean Robert's not working anymore and I'm almost done with a massage certificate which will be nice, there's good money in that. Down to beer, Mr. Thorpe."

"Beer's fine. I thought you had a degree, a Master's actually, Robert said."

"I have a Bachelor's in Wildlife Management. My Masters is in Zoology but I'm only half finished." Carol brought Gordon a Heineken which he drank halfway down in two tilts. "Christ," he gasped. "The first decent thing I've had in Iowa." His sudden good mood died immediately; he flinched spying the color 8x7 of himself, Elizabeth, teen Robert atop a ringed and cigarette-burned Sauder faux oak workstation. The computer was worthless too, old Dell but two years ago Robert had been excited about "constructing bodybuilding product websites" so Gordon ponied up sixty-two hundred. Now it was junk; topless HP Deskjet, carriage and ink-cartridge saddle exposed, filthy: more dirt covered the paper in the tray— Gordon approached then recoiled from wads of cat fur texturing the desktop and greasy blue fabric of the office chair. The actual cat was nowhere to be seen. Nor was there ever an online "bodybuilding product" business; "Nutrilite" turned out to be the ancient bullshit Amway repainted fire-engine red to attract new young dupes. Cartons of the overpriced and unpalatable snack and meal replacement bars and liquid drinks were stacked to the ceiling.

He grasped the family portrait, staring at them, into them, through them: ten fucking years! No excuse, ever, for Robert dropping New Haven for Iowa City. Unbelievable. Madness. Well goddamn them they'd changed, he hadn't, in fact he'd lost weight, become even more fit. His hair remained thick and grayless. Gordon hated evidence of himself with ex-wives; wasn't fairness that made him replace the frame instead of smashing it but the hope that his son would come to his senses, return to Yale or baseball but even so Robert couldn't be expected to take sides, to deny his biological mother.

"Give him this, Carol." Gordon drafted three thousand on Charles Schwab CheckInvest paper, bending the 18k gold nib of his Montegrappa Aphrodite against the slippery metal flank of the yellow refrigerator. He'd never seen a yellow refrigerator. Carol opened him another good beer, Amstel, murmuring he looked way too young to be the father of a twenty-six year old. Gordon despised her more: yes he had great hair, athletic build, a fortune dumped at the Westchester Center for Cosmetic Surgery but god damn it all he was sixty-six; the average father of a twenty-something was forty-something. She wore a kimono. The slinky fabric both aroused Gordon and made him feel terribly tired. He swallowed beer, eyeing her torso in the sexy garment, red silk dragons cavorting down the hem; Robert had said she was thirty-two. "So kick all my dreams in the balls just like your fucking mother!" Gordon had screamed, slamming down the phone. Robert had called back and apologized. He always apologized, even when the fault wasn't his; that was another time Gordon sent a big check.

Carol crossed and uncrossed her legs while explaining her work in Montana, the time of her life, she said, as a wildlife biologist – she'd been bitten and clawed by raccoon, wolverine and black bear – she showed Gordon numerous scars and (he couldn't decide if accidental or deliberate) exposed her blue panties from which glossy dark hair sprouted from either elastic side; he despised hirsute women, all his girlfriends shaved – Brazilian waxjob preferably – had been a problem with Elizabeth, she'd refused, called him a twisted bastard. When Carol suggested they drink another beer Gordon said no, he had a cab waiting. He glanced again at the picture of himself, Robert, Elizabeth. He wanted to leap right on top of the table and crush everything. "I'll make you dinner, then. Call me from your hotel if that sounds like a good idea."

"Sure, yeah," Gordon mumbled. He grabbed some money from his wallet – five hundred in fifties and twenties – and pressed it into her hand. There was another eleven thousand in his money belt. "Go buy some groceries. If I can make it I'll call you otherwise enjoy yourself. No sense starving until Robert gets back from Colorado." She squealed Oh Mr. Thorpe thank you! and kissed him, would have been lips but he turned so all she mouthed was his Lancôme flash-bronzed, Clinique post-shave lotioned cheek.

The rain continued, pouring over his cab, all creation, dulling the shine of his Moreschi Acapulcos. Jessie was blasting Creedence but turned it down to talk about rising water, ruined crops, Floods Of The Century. "Turn Creedence back up," Gordon ordered. "Before You Accuse Me's one of my favorites."

"I like em all. Especially Ramble Tamble." Jessie boosted the volume slightly. "You know I used to farm? Corn and soybeans. Lost it all to the bank. Went to night school at Davenport and got my insurance certificate. Sold Farm-Life for awhile but then I slipped on ice and busted my leg. Got pins and screws from hip to ankle. We gotta trust the President." The cabbie eyed his passenger in the rearview mirror for some grunt or exclamation of agreement or sympathy. Gordon's eyes were closed, he was thinking, Christ, how long must this shit go on? He meant his idiot son, his quadrupling of wealth (following near bankruptcy during the implosion of dotcoms) after the collapse of the WTC towers because his firm was a Pentagon/Halliburton favorite: his inability to sleep, the always horrible news, his bloodsucking partners, the Dow following the collapse of the world economy, the newly powerful Democratic party following the election of Obama, a man Gordon paid attention to because he was currently the President but could never respect because he was permanently a nigger; terming it "stress" Gordon's physician had tried medicating him for inchoate insanity – prescribing risperidone, divalproex, quetiapine which Gordon took a month before flushing the remaining pills down his black porcelain wall-mounted Caro – preferring the protean evil of his aging personality to drug-induced lassitude. Gordon did not consider himself a racist or anti-Semite; he preferred "old fashioned" as his father and grandfather before him had been old fashioned.

"Davenport's declared a disaster area, helluva thing. They say the President's coming up tomorrow to have a look. Boy, corn prices going right through the roof. Love to have three big silos right now or a couple tons sweet white cobs deep frozen. We gotta trust FEMA, we gotta trust the President."

Gordon opened his eyes. "I know him. And I know Bush. In fact George and I are good friends."

"Who you know, buddy?"

"The President." Gordon cracked the window and lit a cigarette. "He won't show tomorrow, nor will the VP; they're sending the Deputy Assistant Secretary For Congressional Relations, USDA, that's how much they care about you and your fucking soggy corn. The President doesn't give a shit about you or your problems. Black. White. Brown when we finally have a Mex prez or Yellow a Gook prez doesn't matter once they're President they don't give a shit about you, but you peasants never figure that out, you peasants keep kissing dick."

The cabbie grunted.

"Hey!" Gordon cried. "Don't you dare grunt at me. You got something to say say it."

"Yeah? No shit? Well how do you know the president?"

"The company I own makes the drones that kill terrorists."

"What? You mean those planes without pilots? You invented those?"

"Fuck no I didn't invent them, just own 'em."

"Yeah? Don't mind my askin' what do you do then that you know the president?"

"I make the rich richer, the strong stronger, the brave braver."

"No shit? well, no shit." Jessie blasted Creedence, shaking his head. Gordon stared out the window, radio soothing him with a time when music was careful, melodic, not ruined by homosexual claptrap and African-urban hip-hop poverty-babble. A woman jogged through the gloom, up to her ankles in water. Her big boobs swelled the nylon front of the soaked Nike outfit; she had a big butt too. Now that's how I like them, Gordon thought. How easy it would be for two men to stop a van, knock her senseless, throw her in back, one duct-taping her mouth, ankles, wrists, the other calmly driving to their cabin on four acres, duck pond, 12x16 shed/sex dungeon outside Ames. And what were all the cops doing? Staring stupidly at murk sloshing over bridges when there was absolutely nothing they could do, when even the Army Corps of Engineers had given up and abandoned the Coralville spillway. "That woman's an accident waiting to happen," Gordon said. "Someone will disappear her. You have a serial rapist working Des Moines and a serial killer just scored his thirteenth whore in Quad Cities yesterday— who knows, perhaps they're partners. They do that, you know, queer men who can't be queer any other way, with one in charge being the instigator, the other doing as told, the bitch."

The cabbie shrugged, accelerating onto the Burlington Street bridge. Gordon peered with disgust at the Iowa River's trash-thickened muddy flow: barrels, boxes, timber and tangled masses of fencing wire and brush. Orange lamps cast a bright glow over the section of bridge as they drove. Claws of stump-roots paddle-wheeled through the brown foam, heaps of flotsam shot past the Johnson County Power Company: a battered white refrigerator, a yellow plastic canoe spinning wildly. "Look, look!" Gordon rapped the glass, his large diamond horseshoe ring scraping tak-tak-tak. "There by the power station. A horse! There, goddamn it." Jessie glanced at the section of river yellowed by floodlight. "No shit, horse, huh? You see all kinda things in a flood. Once I saw this guy on the Cedar River gripping a log. I knew he was alive cause he waved to me just like you think you saw that horse. I raised the alarm but when he was dragged out turns out he'd been dead for hours, they had to break his arms off that log."

"That horse was alive," said Gordon.

"Hope so, buddy. Someone fished a dead lion out of the Mississippi yesterday, washed down from the Davenport zoo." The cab pulled into the Sheraton's sandbagged lot. An attendant opened Gordon's door, his large black umbrella ready, but Gordon shook his head. "No, I'm going out again." The attendant nodded and carried his umbrella to another cab.

The cabbie swung around. "So what's up?"

"I need a drink," said Gordon. He tossed the cabbie another Franklin.

"Thanks. There's Chauncy's inside. Nice place."

"Hell no, some local banker telling me how many moles he lasered off his back? Some scrawny chiropractor's wife trying to initiate a 3-way? There must be someplace fun." Sleeping alone in stale, air-conditioned suites, awakened by whimpering children, the voices of tired parents or boisterous drunks pressing the hallways, the muffled thumps, giggles, groans of lovers overhead, underneath or side-to-side as they bounced and banged, was Gordon's life – the life of any business-class traveler – and depressed him. He considered then discarded the idea of returning to his son's woman. She'd be pacing the apartment. Bored with the stereo, the incessant rain, frustrated by loneliness and poverty, she'd be holding Robert's big check, opening the yellow refrigerator for another beer and staring at the numbers – useless figures convertible to cash only when her beau returned – as she paced. Three thousand was scratch to Gordon but it would be real money to her; she'd sniff the wad of cash he gave her, pull the bills from her pocket over and over, wanting to spend them, wanting to save them, wanting more. If he showed up now, right now, they'd fuck like bunnies, no doubt about it. Gordon imagined his hands on her warm neck, the alcohol stickiness of her tongue, his hands shredding the shabby kimono, teaching her ways his son had yet to learn. He saw again the picture of himself and Elizabeth framed in silver, his ex-wife's face beautiful, always a trick of light she seemed, and in the real light of a passing car the frown of his son's mother appeared in the cab window.

"I think I want to get drunk, now it's only a matter of working out the details."

The meter clicked off digits; Jessie lit a cigarette. "You don't care if I smoke since you smoke?"

"Do your thing." Gordon lit his own.

"I gotta smoke. It's a nervous habit." He exhaled stale Carlton fumes. "Oh yeah. Illegal as hell, they could have my license but I've smoked all my life."

Gordon laughed. "Unconstitutional, the ban on smoking in public places, how come the ambulance-chasers don't take that one on, I say: sue those tobacco companies for fucking over the little guy and making him so hopelessly addicted!"

The cabbie smiled. "Yeah, I hear you. So my dad drank his liver to swiss cheese, how come I don't sue Budweiser and get rich? Ha! My brother's a big fat sonofabitch just had his third heart attack, how come he don't sue Jimmy Dean or Kraft or Hostess? So you want to get drunk you're in the right place, wish I could join you, just tell me what kinda joint you wanna go to I'll get you there."

"Women, gorgeous women."

The cabbie thought he understood. "Strippers at Dancers, next to the Red Stallion, a cowboy bar. Some pretty crazy ladies to be had there too, although I don't go for goat-roper music there's some wild chicks there. A lot of the dancers stop after work to drink and things can be arranged, if you know what I mean. I know a guy could set you up."

"No."

"Well how about Gabes, then. Or the Sanctuary."

Gordon exhaled. "Tell me about them."

"College bars. Gabes is hard rock, tattooed girls in black leather and that kind of thing. Good pool tables, steel darts. The Sanctuary is where all the smart asses go – jazz and imported beers, electronic darts, chicks with pierced noses reading books – all that."

"No." Gordon imagined himself in bed, eight am, hung over with a twenty-two year old English major. Both of them waking up, sitting up. Her newly augmented breasts, scars underneath like drips of tan wax, imprinted with the sheet-fabric, a small rose, butterfly, whale, rainbow, or other Earth-First or occult bullshit tattoo on her shoulder. While he ordered a pot of burnt-tasting watery Millstone from room service and lit his first cigarette she'd scramble around for bra, stockings, panties, squabbling I'm late for work! Oh Jesus, my boss Alan... He'd ask her where she worked and she'd reply Country Kitchen or McDonalds or Hardees or KFC or the Iowa Memorial Union cafeteria and he'd stuff cab fare in her hand, and a little extra, especially if she'd let him put it in her ass which girls were more reluctant to do now since AIDS and Hepatitis C. "No, I don't mean whores professionally, I mean a girl who thinks she's good and I make her act like a whore." The cabbie craned his neck to stare at Gordon, who grinned back lecherously and, despite his handsome face, in a manner which seemed elderly, false-toothy, corrupt. The doorman stared at the two men smoking in the cab then signaled for relief so he could hide out and smoke too.

"Let's just drive around a bit," said Gordon.

"Sure, we'll find something." The hack bumped off Burlington onto Gilbert, burst through a puddle of water, Jessie momentarily fighting for control, spinning the steering wheel. "Hey buddy, you know, this is my neighborhood. Good Irish bars. You should go to the Vine. It's quiet, good food too although I know you want to lay one on, best fish and chips in town. Fresh waffle chips too, not those mealy frozen French fries. Fitzpatricks is great too— they're both nice places where you won't be bothered."

Amused, knowing exactly what was meant, Gordon asked, "what do you mean bothered?"

"Well, now don't get me wrong but you dress fancy. I'm kinda glad you didn't go to Dancers or the Red Stallion because some people will cause trouble just to have something to do. This isn't a bad town but there's some shady folks and some tough guys."

"I can take care of myself."

"Don't doubt that at all. Just don't see why you need a bad impression of our town when it can be avoided by getting you to the right place. Nice Irish bar like Flannigans or Fitzpatricks or the Vine."

"Here! Stop right here!" Gordon slapped the seat, causing Jessie to swerve, then slow as he executed a U-turn. "Cheaters? Are you sure?"

"Absolutely."

"Cheaters is a sport's bar. Big screen football, boxing, racing, golf, hockey, hoop— you name it you can watch it. I recommend the clam strips. Tell you right off, though, you won't find many girls except the wives and girlfriends, you know. I can take you to this place in Coralville I think a fancy guy like you would like— candles on the tables, swing band, nice dance floor, champagne."

Gordon thrust several bills. "Keep the change." Jessie fingered the two hundred, stunned. "Wait!"

Gordon turned. "Tip not big enough? I'm getting soaked here."

"You made my whole week. Wanna receipt?"

"What for?"

"The Taxi and Limousine Commission says I gotta ask. In case your ride was unsatisfactory or you left something they can contact me. Plus a write-off, a business expense."

Gordon snorted. "Fuck my taxes, and goodbye." He entered Cheaters, his nose immediately assaulted by beer, Right Guard, rancid frying-oil, wet gym shoes, chemical pine from the toilets. Waitresses passed, grease-paper lined red plastic baskets brimming buffalo wings, clams, fried cheese, cayenne gizzards. Gordon settled himself at a table where he could command a view both of the door and the bar. His waitress arrived— a zaftig blond with sparkle-gloss lips, certainly not pageant-quality but with pleasant eyes and the full, bee-stung Courtney Love juicy liverish slut-mouth that made kissing and blowjobs messy but fun. She greeted Gordon. He asked for her favorite item on the menu.

"Oh, it's all my favorite. It's all yummy."

Ditz, Gordon thought, smiling. "Darling, I mean if you were really hungry and could sit down right now an eat anything at all what would you order?"

She put a finger to her mouth, kissed the nail. "Well now, I like the fried cheese balls. Don't know why but they're better than the fried cheese sticks. We got mozzarella, cheddar, and jalapeño jack. And the catfish fingers are great."

"Catfish?"

"Oh, it's great," said the blond. "Everyone eats 'em."

"From the big flooded Iowa River? You got people out there fishing all day?"

She frowned then grinned. "No, the catfish are from Dubuque, I think, or maybe Prophetsville. I'm not really sure where but I definitely know they dredge out acres and acres of ponds for the catfish and that's what they mean by catfish farms. They net up a big truckful for the restaurants when we need them."

"You're joking." Gordon was actually interested.

She chewed her pencil. "Uh-uh."

"And they're actually fingers? Bona fide catfish fingers?"

She pooched her bottom lip. "No, silly, that just means strips."

"And there's really catfish farms?"

"Oh yeah. It's awesome. I saw it on Discover, you watch Discover? At feeding time a big pipe sprinkles these food pills into the water and the catfish eat them. It's really gross how their mouths open up and they bite each other's whiskers trying to get all the pills. That's why the fingers taste so good, because the catfish farmers train the catfish to swim up instead of eating all the icky muck on the bottom of the pools. They're high in protein. You look like you work out so I though you'd like knowing they're high in protein."

Gordon nodded, pleased with her story. "Okay, I'll have the catfish. And a double Stoli on ice, twist of lemon." He normally drank vodka brio – Stoli and Yagermeister – offering vigor, vivacity, enthusiasm, and spunk (American, not British, meaning).

She left. Gordon switched his attention to the storm outside. Lightning from a squall struck closer and closer to ground-zero until bolts exploded overhead, shook the prefabricated building to its aluminum posts and metal siding, 300,000 volt discharges brightening the interior with blue-white strobes. "Tibilisi, Kosovo, Kuwait City, Cua Lo, Quang Tri" Gordon murmured, tipping his water glass. Car alarms klaxoned and several patrons jumped to see if the caterwauling vehicles were theirs. Another bolt blazed, instantly accompanied by cannon fire; Cheaters was plunged into darkness for an eight count, the interior echoing with phony screams of terror. The lights clicked back on, faltered, then regained intensity as Gordon blinked. Four army trucks – M35A3s piled with sandbags and towing generators – roared down the avenue.

"Know what that sounds like?" Gordon asked the blond when she brought his drink.

"What sounds like?"

"The noise, the booming. Relámpago: the lightning, the thunder, the goddamn voice of god. I called my jet Relámpago. Desert Storm, Afghanistan, what a fucking load of crap. I was MACV, 7th Attack Wing, flew F-105s; I trained bucked toothed limeys from Nottingham and Cockney to fly F4-C, D, and Es and the Phantom when they came along; I'm the only American to ever shoot down a MiG-21 in an F4-C; my RIO was bled out from a shrapnel headshot, I did it blind then I shot down two more the following sortie while in a Phantom with the radio blitzed and oil spouting from the modulator – fucking English make a great fucking luxury sedan – I won't drive anything but a Jaguar even though Ford owns it now but Jesus Christ their planes suck. Sometimes I performed relatively boring tasks, such as fly guns for 747s and C131s packed with new guys and kept MiGs off their ass. But mostly I dropped tons and tons of five hundred and thousand-pound bombs— HE and CBU canisters and napalm all over those Cong, NVA, even some of their fucking Russian and Chinese advisors. Jesus, though, ripping someone down with that zippy twenty mil gun was better than ass-fucking blond Eurasian twins. What do you think of that?"

She shrugged.

Gordon winked. "Don't you have any opinion at all? I mean most girls your age in 1971 were very politically minded. Radical, you know. Marxist-feminist. They hated us."

She shrugged again.

"You've seen Sleeping With The Enemy, haven't you?" Gordon asked.

"Uh-huh, I liked it a lot, but not as much as Scream or Saw."

"Yeah? Well I had my own version of it back then. My favorite trick was to go to a rally dressed to the hilt with some medals in hand I'd just picked up at an army surplus store. I'd pretend I was a Veteran Against The War and toss this junk – Army Good Conduct trinket and Rifle Marksman Badges – into a burning trash can these hippies had set up. They always fell for it. And I'd have a bag of really fine weed because there'd always be some girl – the one who couldn't take her eyes off me – and it was so damn easy. I just loved getting some hippie chick in bed and when we were done – I mean I'd fuck her good, not something she'd forget in a week – I'd tell her in explicit gory detail how I bombed shrines, hospitals and orphanages in Cambodia. Little kids and old mamasans just blown to bits by pellet bombs or running around like human torches. I'd tell her how fun it was to adjust my sights by greasing some hamlet in the free-fire zone with a chain of Vulcan-fire."

The waitress hurried off. Gordon chuckled, sucked down his drink then hailed a brunette laden with an armful of empty beer pitchers. "Sir, I'll have your regular waitress bring your drink." "She's too slow," Gordon replied. "Double Stoli. Keep the change." He slipped her a twenty. The brunette stealthed his vodka while the blond rushed a Superburger to another table. Gordon toasted her with the glass and swallowed the new drink – but now he was toasting two women –his regular waitress had returned! She banged his Stoli on a Cheaters coaster, dismissed the other girl, tossed the basket of catfish fingers and steak fries under his nose. "Enjoy your meal."

"Hey, wait!" If PTSD was his aliment it was also the condign trauma—he'd murdered men, women and children; he'd disguised his appetite for destruction—his thirst for blood and human misery—as war's lissome corruption, but nothing pleased him more than ruin. And what was his handful of hate-crime compared to the WTC massacre, naked lower Manhattan skyline where Indians once smoked salmon, the fetid mass grave at Vesey and Broadway? It made him love Islam because Islam had balls, Islam was willing to fight, it just monumentally pissed him off that he wouldn't be killing any of them. "I said wait."

The blond paused. "You want ketchup?"

Gordon laughed. "No, I want your number, better yet I want you to tell me when you're off duty so we can go out. Don't be mad, I'm just playing with you, honey. Where's your sense of humor? The world's going to shit and I just need to laugh tonight. I'll tip you very well."

She blushed. "It doesn't matter, sir."

"When you're as pretty as you are it matters. Tell you what, you tell me how much you've been tipped tonight – I mean the total amount – and I'll triple it."

"I can't do that sir." But she was interested, she forgave him and smiled. Gordon watched her ample backside as she moved on to another table. He sliced into the catfish, nibbled then spat with exaggerated revulsion, consoled himself with a long icy draught of vodka. He set to work cutting the cocktail straws from his drinks into one-inch skewers; when he'd finished a dozen he assembled his creation by impaling then connecting steak fry, catfish finger, pickle, bits of spiced apple ring. The blond approached and he sat back, pleased.

"What on earth is that?"

"A molecule," said Gordon. "I mean, it's a model for one."

The waitress cocked her head. "I don't get it. Why would you want to make a model out of your food?"

"I did it for you, darling."

"Didn't you like your meal?"

"The catfish tasted like— well, why don't you ask me what kind of molecule this is?" Ditz, Gordon thought, she's going to fall for it.

She stared at the sculpture, or at least what appeared to be sculpture, thinking that maybe he was some crazy artist or architect or something, maybe he could even be famous and it would be best to play along. Maybe he was a pervert and had to play with his food first before he could eat it (she giggled and Gordon chuckled with her) and maybe that was what turned him on— jeez he must be really weird in bed. She'd certainly had a few weird ones since coming to Iowa City from Des Moines like the guy who got off licking her armpits said the alum in her Secret deodorant puckered his mouth like meth which he didn't do anymore but still loved the taste of. She tossed her ponytail. "Okay, what kind of molecule is it?"

Gordon leaned forward. He meant to speak softly but the word roared out of his throat. "Shit. It's a great big shit molecule. The catfish tasted like shit. The world is full of shit. Do you know people crap more than they eat? Figure it out. Food is uncompacted, like popcorn, but shit is compressed, like asphalt. All the poisons of the body stick together in a gross and stinking lump of tar."

She stepped away from his table, dropped then retrieved her order pad.

"Another double, please," Gordon ordered, but she ran away. He smoked a Dunhill then slapped a twenty on the tabletop and walked to the bar. "Double Stoli, lemon."

The kid stared at him. "After that stunt? You kidding?"

"No, I never kid."

"I think you've had enough."

Gordon sized the punkass up. The brat defiantly stared back; he was big – gym muscle dense – but not so big Gordon doubted he could take him. The problem with small town bars, he knew, was you swing on one and you've got a dozen others on your back: bouncers, busboys, dishwashers, waitresses, other patrons. Gordon knew his appearance was an advantage— charcoal Zegna double-breasted, red silk Charvet bisecting a white Mark Christopher, spit-shined black Moreschis (he preferred his Davanzati alligators but they were getting resoled), Yurman platinum bullet cufflinks, 1938 Omega pilot's wristwatch; he looked fabulous and knew it, outranked the ungroomed, working class nobody in jeans, Cheaters t-shirt, Timex with black plastic strap, soiled apron.

"C'mon, I'm not such a bad guy." Gordon employed the half-smile and wink which usually charmed away his rudeness in Toronto, Paris, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Dallas, Frankfurt, Portland, Seattle, New Orleans, Vancouver. He'd gone too far yet expected compliance— it was his winning manner in business as well. "I'm not drunk. One more. C'mon."

The kid wiped his hands. "You've had three doubles. That's six regular one-shot drinks."

Gordon tilted his head to the pool tables. "And the football jocks? They're cruising through a pitcher apiece every ten minutes."

"That's right, and they're tipping two bucks average for each of those pitchers. And they're being happy, not loud and rude. They're not insulting anyone, giving me grief."

Several of the other patrons, beer drinkers staring into their glasses, watched with interest. Gordon, sotto voce, told the kid, "What the fuck is it with this town? You people just don't like outsiders or what? Here I am, a fuckin' business deal blows up in my face, I'm stuck in this flood till morning, when I fly away and you never see me again, and all I ask for is a drink and some laughs." The kid shot himself a Pepsi from the cobra-head, set his glass down and leaned into Gordon's face. "You want it straight, I'll give it to you straight. For one, it's not this town. I'm from Denver myself. This is a college town and most everybody is an outsider. It's your manners. Your attitude stinks, man. You treat your waitress like shit, so she hides in the storeroom to cry."

"Cry?" Gordon, again interested, smiled. I've lived and paid and paid and fucking paid, he thought; my death will be solatium, as was Christ's.

"Like a fuckin' fountain. This job stinks anyway without having to deal with people like you but there she is when I went back for more cans of frozen OJ, sitting on a crate of paper napkins and crying her eyes out."

Gordon nodded. He extracted his gold cigarette case and offered the kid a Dunhill. The kid hesitated, then accepted, lighted their cigarettes. "Okay," said Gordon. "I was trying to get a rise out of her with the catfish. I was just messing around. I get bored, you know? We all get bored. I bet you get bored, we all got dreams, right? I mean, why'd you leave Denver if you weren't looking for action somewhere else? We forget sometimes that the people we mess with might be tired or close to the edge or whatever. Am I right?" He glanced slyly at the bartender, then back to the mirror where his handsome Gregory Peck face (women always compared him to leading men, which Gordon enjoyed, but his last one night stand had remarked he looked like Kevin Spacey, with more hair which Gordon did not appreciate) stared back at him.

The kid nodded. "Her boy friend's a bastard, that's for sure, got a restraining order and I had to throw him out last week. And last week she got a DUI. Sometimes I get sick of hearing about it myself, but she's a damn good waitress."

Gordon nodded. "I agree, she served well. Now how about that drink?"

The kid shrugged. "I don't know. I've never gone back on a cut-off." He inhaled his cigarette, held the tube in his fingers like an hors d'oeuvre, stared at the gold crest and coat of arms stamped onto the filter. "Jeez, these are smooth."

"The best."

The blond waitress returned to the bar for a drink order. "Two 7&7s, three T&Ts, two Butterfingers, three Cosmos, four Mike's, two lime, two cran, and a pitcher of Red Dog." She didn't glance over at Gordon but he knew she knew he was staring at her. She had a wonderful caboose, and her rack wasn't so bad either. The punk finished her order and she turned around with the tray, meeting Gordon's eyes. He smiled, nodded; she went her way without expression.

"C'mon," said Gordon. He opened his wallet and placed a crackling new big-head hundred on the counter. He kept the wallet open long enough for the kid to see that he had many, many more bills of that denomination. "What's that for? I can't break that. I'm not even allowed to break a fifty unless it's within five bucks of your bar total. I know it's stupid but the owner's old-fashioned. I told him he'd net sixty grand more a year with some pull-tab bowls but he don't care about that either."

"One double Stoli. You keep the change. Split it with her if you want. Tell her I was just screwing around, you know? She took it the wrong way." Gordon was enjoying himself immensely. This was far, far more fun than he thought it would be. He didn't know what the kid was going to do but he knew what he was going to do— grab that thick neck with both his hands and squeeze if the punk refused again. Gordon snuffed the cigarette.

"You know, catfish really sucks," the kid said.

Gordon nodded.

"I tried the catfish fingers first day on the job. Thought I'd puke."

Gordon nodded.

"No bull? I get the whole thing?"

Gordon nodded.

"One drink? Hundred bucks for a drink?" The kid turned to his speedwell, rearranged then restocked several bottles. He opened the freezer and poured a very deliberate double Stolichnaya, shoved the hundred into a pocket of his Levis and walked to the end of the bar to change the CDs in the Fisher sound system from 60s rock to 90s rock.

Gordon sipped the vodka. The coppery taste of blood in his mouth revolted him— why was his mouth bleeding? He swirled his tongue around and found the wound on his bottom lip, where he'd bitten. He looked into the mirror and saw Evrlastn Gook. Gordon wished with all his heart Evrlastn would step through the mirror for a drink and talk about old times, talk about the crash –the F-105 spreading a block of flame across a Duc Pho hillside then Evrlastn's expression of sad detachment, AK-47 cradled port arms in his skinny arms, not attempting to shoulder and fire the weapon even as Gordon blasted three .45 hardballs through his chest, running as he fired, in fact running right over the Cong teen; blood squished and ribs crackled under his boots. Evrlastn jumped up, hollering, Lade! Lade!, which really blew Gordon's mind, the Cong calling after him "come here, come here" as if they were old pals, so Gordon ran until the kid fell behind, coughing, puking blood. Later, Gordon stopped to catch his breath and the boy wasn't there at all.

"Hey?"

Gordon blinked.

"Your drink. Here, I'll top it off again." And he poured.

"Sweetheart." One of the barflies who had witnessed it all leaned over his pint can of Pabst and slurred at Gordon "Hey buddy. I got a fifth of Calvert in my pickup. You can have the whole damn bottle for twenty bucks. I'll throw in my ole lady for a hundred!" He was a lonely overweight bald divorced unemployed sonofabitch trying to be friendly, to strike up any conversation which would give him reason to buy another beer and not return to his apartment. He had no ole lady, just a dog, an aging collie named Randy. He leaned over to make sure Gordon heard him. "What about this flooding? Shit!" Popping the aluminum sides of the nearly empty can with thick dirty fingers, scuffed cowboy boots hooked on the brass rail, grinning through bad teeth for some reply from the fancy man.

Gordon lifted his head from the vodka, lion's head shifting from a bloody haunch to snarl into documentary cameras; a madman temporarily exiting a mach-blue field of memory paper-scissors-stone, redundant bloody meters of hallowed ground. "Sorry buddy." The drunk turned away, shaken by the sharp-dressed man's glare of complete loathing, infinite despair and misanthropic hatred. He scooted his beer the farthest chrome and Naugahyde stool down, retreating under the blue-green (the color of blow-flies and turquoise) glare of the smallest of six televisions tuned not to ESPN but AMC, where Burl Ives crooned Permanent Tear.

Garden Of The Poets

Marquand and Ynez Aguilar de Inestrillas walked from The Court Cafe several blocks past the Art Institute, searching for Ynez's left earring, then circled back to the museum. Wasn't the diamond, she'd assured Marquand, but the Dillon pearl. He'd asked her to show him pearl from the other ear as proof then she'd replied maybe in the hotel room then he'd said she should perhaps taxi back for it then she'd exploded he was a cheap mean cold bastard and Manolita her mother was right calling him hiele arriba el ano: chilly-ass. Cultured pearl or diamond she couldn't wear anything when her earlobes were irritated, swollen, dripping pus? Marky raised both hands palms down then allowed them to fall, smacking his thighs. The thigh smacking was his gesture of "giving up" a display, which, in Ynez's opinion, he enjoyed as another form of usurpation.

She apologized, telling Marky the Jimmy Choo Watersnake pumps were killing her feet, which explained why she was so bitchy. Husband and wife crossed the intersection at Michigan and Madison, Marquand in comfortable footwear recently purchased at City Soles: Gianfranco Ferre sneaker-boots. "I should have worn the Fornarina slingbacks," Ynez said, "the ones you consider sluttish." She would have preferred a limo, or to rent their own car – something big and powerful – but Marky loved taxis, so off they went everywhere in smelly, horrid taxis: asqueroso, mierda! At Wrigleyville Marquand had bought a Bulls #21 jersey blood red trimmed black which Ynez forbid him to wear in the street; he was too old and stout. Traffic honked as squeegee-men slopped windshields; for a dollar (.8 euro, 126 pesetas— no longer legal tender but considered, by Ynez, much more beautiful and patriotic than the vulgar euro) the milky varnish vanished. "That's a con. That should be outlawed." Marquand clutched his wallet, gold-ringed hand shoved down the front pocket of his Dockers. That morning he'd read the Chicago Tribune's explicit descriptions of murder and robbery, dropped the paper onto the plush carpet of their hotel suite, and (even prone he could do it loudly) smacked his thighs. He steered Ynez around a fierce-looking panhandler with a beautiful rock-hard tushie, in her opinion, and sensual thick black lips. "Hold your purse tightly! These men look shady to me."

"Marky, loosen up. To you everyone is dangerous."

"An ounce of prevention, you know, my dear. Don't be so naive." The couple spoke an elegant rapid Spanish causing the peasants passing them to stare. Before 9/11 Ynez hadn't minded the stares; she was too wealthy, and wore her wealth too well, to ever be mistaken for a migrant worker or illegal alien. After 9/11, the stares, she felt, were hostile, disrespectful of her wealth and social position.

"You worry too much." Ynez, bored with the Indian summer (after all, she'd agreed to come with Marquand to New York and Chicago to see snow) retraced her lipstick, blotted her lips and tasting faint traces of basil, rosemary, and shrimp, wished for more Chalk Hill Chardonnay. Lunch had been fun but Marquand always rushed her. She needed another drink. "Marquand!" Ynez paused, touched her reflection in the glass front of a bistro advertising 2-dollar tastings. Her mother often told her she had Queen Isabella's hair, chin, eyes, skin, a comparison Marquand did not appreciate. "Isabella was a terror!" he raged, "a lunatic xenophobe, a homicidal papist, a witch." He only raged to Ynez, never Manolita, whom he adored and slightly feared. "You should have married my mother," Ynez often told him, "the way you stare at her, and feast upon her attentions."

"Let's stop here for another glass of wine, Marky." But he had gone ahead. A Streetwise vendor shouted "Hey man you want real news by real people? Just a buck!" The vendor's companion, an obese mulatto wearing the mixed-tribal clothing (fringed yellow hijab, army fatigue jacket unzipped over a voluminous bubu belted with a blue kikoy) characteristic of American Muslim conversos, grunted at Marquand and rattled a coin-can in his face. "She's deaf," the vendor explained. Marquand whirled abruptly, startling them both. "Ynez! Ynez!" he cried until she ran to him. "Why did you stop? What were you doing, rapping on the glass?" Ynez shook him off. "Don't be a fool. I just shielded my eyes from glare to see some pretty flowers."

"But you did take your medications?"

"Of course." She opened her mouth grotesquely, as if he were a dentist. "See? Nothing under my tongue, dad." Ynez laughed shrilly.

"And darkness was across the face of the earth!" Prophet Jang Hyun Sook called to them. "The Apocalypse is at hand, my brothers and sisters! Say the Lord's Prayer three times today and look to the sky for the holy signs!" Prophet Hyun evangelized from a silver Bentley Arnage-pulpit (the bonnet, ceiling and boot covered with Kinko's boxes of his product) and distributed tracts to passersby. A sandwich board worn by an assistant, six green bumper stickers on the Arnage, and the tracts he offered all proclaimed Rapture December 28 World Ends 2012!

"Excuse me," said Marquand. "The correct quotation from Genesis is and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And might I add that the Apocalypse could not be at hand since, according to Revelation nineteen through twenty-two, following the battle between the white horseman called Faithful and True and the Beast identified by the triptych six, the Kings of Earth will be defeated resulting in a one thousand year reign of Christ on earth. Afterwards Satan will be released to gather Gog and Magog for battle at Megiddo – this will be the actual apocalypse, a tournament the evil legions, according to prophecy, will lose to then be cast into the pit of eternal fire – the abyss of unending suffering, wailing and gnashing of teeth."

Ynez rolled her eyes. "Dios! Vas a callarte?" she muttered to herself, "You never shut up." Marquand's outburst eclipsed all recent others. Her English was not as good as Marky's and what he said made only partial sense to her; he was correcting the Oriental's understanding of the Bible in the same tone he used to criticize her understanding of art, history, music, religion, film, law or politics at their often incredibly stultifying faculty parties: although Professor Hubby claimed to be an atheist he had to be right in all matters, even God, even faith.

"Thank you." The Korean bowed deeply, offering Marquand and Inez tracts. "My exegesis is perhaps not in sympathy with your own, but we are both Lovers of Christ, no? I am Jang Hyun Sook, last true Prophet of the Mission For The Coming Days. Most interesting, what you said. You are a priest, sir?"

"No, no" laughed Marquand. "I'm a visiting historian. I'm delivering lectures on medieval navigation at Northwestern University until Tuesday. This is my second time in your fine city and my wife's first."

"You are German? By your accent, I mean. You look German."

"We're Spanish," said Ynez. She frowned at her tract. What if the world really did end next year? Would it matter what anyone believed?

"Ah, Spain, yes! Bullfights! Barcelona Olympics, 1992," exclaimed Hyun. "I watch on television. Very exciting. Bombing in Madrid very terrible, I love trains, I pray for all the dead. I'm from Taejon, nearly one hundred kilometers southwest of Seoul. Are you saved, sir?"

Marquand shook his head. "My wife attends church but I don't, I simply cannot go through the motions of faith when I have no faith."

"We are Episcopalians," Ynez interrupted.

"Ah, yes indeed," Marquand laughed. "A compromise between my agnosticism and my wife and her family's Catholicism."

Ynez nodded, not exactly understanding what her husband had just said. But she didn't really care about the Apocalypse. The world couldn't end next year. Men were too pragmatic. They would simply ignore the clouds of dust or build a dome on the moon or start a world war bigger than any war of God's.

"Our denominations are irrelevant. God bless you sir, God bless you madam. Have a good day and I'll see you in heaven, I hope."

"Thank you," said Marquand. He unfolded his wallet and extracted a five.

"No, no." Prophet Hyun lifted his hands. "Pray for Christ to enter you now."

"Don't you take donations?"

"El cielo odia dinero." Hyun turned to other possible converts. Marquand put away his money and stroked his beard, visibly troubled. He clapped Ynez's shoulder. "I thought the chap was another panhandler. Nice fellow, but misinformed. By Jove, he's serious about this end of the world stuff, isn't he? And wasn't that bit about heaven hating money a scream? By Jove!"

"Does it really matter, Marquand?" Nobody said by Jove anymore, she didn't even remember her grandfather ever saying by Jove. When Marky picked up things, he took a long time to drop them, no matter how many times he was reminded, the habit or phrase or gesture was annoying.

"It matters that he's serious. What kind of mindset does it imply, a fellow waiting around for the end of the world? According to Aquinas, existence is the reality bestowed by God, so if that fellow prays for Apocalypse, he is daring the Deity to not only destroy the world but to end the existence of God as well. That's twisted for a believer and I don't even believe in God. Bertrand Russell insisted on exact rationality but then he recanted in the end."

Ynez rolled her eyes; she had gorgeous green almonds for eyes and the gesture was her favorite. "For Christ-sake, forget it and let's go see your precious art." They jaywalked to the Art Institute, Marquand guiding Ynez between a taxi and a limousine. The gap was so small that Ynez brushed her leg against the taxi's bumper. A squeegee-man urinated into another squeegee-man's bucket while drivers shouted with glee and derision. The squeegee-men fought, fists echoing like gavels on each other's screaming black faces. The couple gawked several moments at the brawl, then quickly at the great bronze lion before climbing the Institute's stairs into an atrium that reminded Ynez unpleasantly of subway stations. She had as a child been treated by several prominent psychiatrists for agoraphobia.

Ynez broke from Marky as voices echoed around her, ricocheting acoustic bullets into her ears. Tuesday had been free, so Marquand asked and was told the expected donation was twelve dollars per adult; he surrendered twenty-four US dollars, made note of the corresponding Euros in his ledger and proudly clamped the admission button to his lapel. Ynez dropped her button into her purse. Marquand had discovered, online, several hotels which offered free Art Institute passes to their guests, but Ynez had rejected all as either too cheap or in areas too "crimey." The Swissotel, in her opinion, was neither too cheap nor crimey.

Hand in hand, they climbed to Maillol's bronze. "What do you think? What do you think?" Marquand smacked his lips, as if salivating over an apple-butter glazed chop, his favorite Chicago dish besides pizza. "Isn't it grand? Better than Leda?" Ynez thought it dreadful and said so. "But darling, even the name Chained Action is exciting, by Jove what technique— buttocks, hips, breasts perfectly executed!" She backed away, making a face. "Ugh. Marky, this woman has no head or arms or legs. She couldn't talk or move or make love. It's freakish."

"It isn't supposed to be practical. It's a study. It's the accepted technique to cut off the arms and legs and head and just contemplate the torso."

"I guess some men would think that's the perfect way to serve up a woman."

He raised his hands, smacked his thighs. "Ynez, my dear."

"Here, let's go up." She dragged Marquand upstairs, pulling at his hairy fist like a tugboat its hawser. "We'll never see even a fraction of it all if you hover over each little thing." He was a handsome man of considerable bulk, once a "holy terror of the kicking conversion" for Madrid as a rugby star, he actually sent men to hospital, but double ACL operations on both knees then graduate school in England followed by fourteen years teaching at the Instituto de Nautica Antiguo had softened him up. They proceeded through a simple foyer into a hall hung with the lesser paintings of great modernists.

"Oh!" cried Ynez. "Look at that!" She ran forward to the great Golden Bird and two guards stared at her from the corner until they were sure she wasn't going to touch. "Marquand, it looks like a gilded swan's head! Or the shining neck of an angel!" She clapped her hands and circled the sculpture. Marquand nodded, pleased. "It's a Brancusi. He was inspired to create a series of these Golden Birds after attending Stravinski's Firebird ballet in 1910. I think this is the best of them."

"It's wonderful!" Ynez stepped forward and slid into a sticky mess. She leaned against Marquand's shoulder to scrape a scarlet disk of chewing gum from her shoe with a tissue. "Ugh! Where can I put this?"

"There must be a trash receptacle somewhere. Let's look."

"I'll do it myself. I need the ladies room, anyway."

"Downstairs to the left," said Marquand. "Straight across from the photography exhibit. I'll wait for you." He had a photographic memory, had memorized the museum's brochure.

"Go on ahead. I'll find you when I'm finished." Ynez loathed Marquand's chaperoning. She was an educated upper-class Catalonian twelve years his junior: father a banker, mother a Zara chain store heir, she was a glittering social score for Marquand (though his name, Aguilar de Inestrillas, was noble and she was proud including it with hers, his family had been reduced as so many others had the past century, to bourgeois status; it embarrassed her when Marquand insulted nobles and poked fun of Burke's Peerage: "I work for a living" he replied when people asked about his name) but she had "troubles;" her mother called her "high spirited" her father "a handful" and both approved of Marquand, the only son of a widowed prep-school headmaster. They'd met at Sant Sebastià beach, the Barcelonan equivalent of New York's Fire Island; she was there because, only seventeen, the homosexuals bought her drinks and they read good books and watched good films and were fun to talk to. Marky claimed, laughing at dinner parties from there on, he was at SS researching an old boat. He'd found Ynez's Cartier wristwatch as she was sobbing her father would redeem the loss from her allowance, then drove her home because her date, a partial star in the BBC series Clones, passed out on a six foot long blue-parrot towel, vomiting Campari and cocaine.

Ynez didn't care for travel although she did at first prefer Chicago to London. In Heathrow, there had been a bomb scare that had worsened the already ridiculous terrorist-alert-nonsense and then in the best borough of all – Westminster – hooligans stole her Canon digital outside Parliament. Marquand had scuffled with one of them, the constables had been condescending ignoramuses with very bad breath like rotten meat, her shoulder was bruised and her dress torn. Marky believed everything was superior to home but Ynez felt the Prado was far better than any foreign museum. Murillo's "Immaculate Conception" was the most beautiful painting in the world to be seen yet Marquand's desire was to drag her around the world in quest of antiquity. Chicago was all panhandlers and no snow. Valgame Dios! Life with Marquand was taxing; she didn't consider the rank of Department Chair's wife to be prestigious or rewarding. His colleagues and flunkies mostly treated her with respect but they bored her and at such socials, she drank too much. The few dry old goats and young punks coming on to her over the years she'd put in their places.

Ynez knocked twice on the door before entering the toilet. She did this wherever she went – airports, malls, hotels, restaurants – at home too, although Marquand had assured her it was unnecessary, even eccentric. The room was very clean, as clean as a kitchen, and stank of disinfectant, aerosol potpourri, the mixed musk and florals of other women. She dropped the chewing gum and tissue into a commode and flushed. Ynez stared at the stark white tiles then the perfect porcelain receptacle of the toilet under her ass, thinking it savage that the bidet was unpopular in America. She wearied of daubing herself with handfuls of scratchy paper – a process leaving her unmentionables irritated, dry and unclean – but as a visitor what choice did she have? She went to the mirror and stood pushing her fingers through her waist-length reddish-black hair.

"You have gorgeous hair," a woman said from behind. "I envy you. Oh, such hair, and the teeny-tiniest little waist!"

"Well, thank you."

"May I touch your hair?"

"Pardon?" Ynez froze, stared at the woman's reflection.

"Why, your hair. May I touch your hair?" Ynez faced the woman. She was beautiful though bald. The baldness accentuated the perfection of her face: blade thin nose cut at the base into full lips, perfectly sculpted cheeks and symmetrical placement of cold blue eyes below thick, upward-curving lashes. The woman did not appear drugged or inebriated. "Okay." Ynez dropped her hands from her hair, her long, enameled nails gleaming coral at her sides. The woman glanced quickly at the nails before returning her gaze to Ynez's face.

"You have beautiful hands, too. You must be an Aquarius. Aquarians are always perfect." Her fingers trembled as she touched. "Oh, thank you, yes, yes, it's lovely." She stroked and stroked. "Oh, you're blessed. I've never seen such hair. I envy you!"

"I'm sorry you lost your hair," Ynez murmured. She assumed that the woman was a chemotherapy patient, or had suffered an attack of alopecia. Her skull was large, smooth, without blemish or mole, but pale and mottled pink, with several scratches at the crown and base.

"It's my own damn fault. I cut it off. It was awful. I was crying and couldn't see very well and using scissors. See that scar? Three stitches in my ear. Then I shaved my head with an antique Ward and Butcher straight razor. It was my father's. I was very, very, angry."

Ynez stepped away. "I'm so sorry. I thought maybe it all fell out. I thought perhaps you had been sick." She held her purse against her stomach, squeezing the soft suede like a small child. The woman followed her forward. "Oh, but I was sick. I guess I'm still sick, but I'm getting better, now. I'm on Sertraline and Quetiapine and Nefazodone and Divalproex. You haven't heard of Dr. Parran? She's the best in town. I guess cutting your hair is a lot better than slashing your throat, isn't it? You have a beautiful accent. Spanish, right? My name is Mary and I'm from Fort Worth. I'm a painter. I just came down from New York last year but I was born and raised in Texas and after I graduated from high school I bummed around Paris but ended up in Seville. Wasn't it horrible about the Madrid bombings? That's why I know you're Spanish, not Mexican, your accent I mean. No one you knew were killed, were they?"

Ynez wet her hands at the tap. She cooled her throat with water, cupping the liquid in her palms like Praeger's marble fauns. Why was she thinking of fauns? Ulster Museum was another place Marquand had taken her that she had been miserable. The fauns had been beautiful but she had seen a puddle of blood in the street. Didn't they even bother to hose away the blood of their dead? How long ago had that been? Three years or four? The woman with the scraped head continued to talk to Ynez until she turned. "Mary, I go to my husband now. I must go. My husband is waiting. He will be worried."

"Nice to meet you, gorgeous, and welcome to the Institute. What's your name?"

"I— I'd rather not say."

"I love you. Is that okay?"

Ynez rushed out then stood, watching people mill past her – awed tourists and placid students with sketchbooks – then heard behind her Mary repeat, as the restroom door opened, "May I touch your hair? You have such beautiful hair." She knew about lesbians – machua and lesbiana, her girlfriends had giggled about the French instructor and one of the cooks at Colegio Logos – and thought of herself as tolerant but somehow the yanquis made it dirty as they made everything dirty in their pictures and movies and songs. She could understand two women in love but she could not fathom them doing to each other what only a man should do with the tongue and lips and fingers.

Ynez's throat was still dry and she stopped to sip water before attempting to find Marquand. She climbed the stairs to the first floor and was accosted by another doomsday pamphleteer: Jesus Is Coming In The Air the bill exclaimed: red capitals on thin yellow paper which reminded her of parking tickets. "Leave me alone!" Ynez cried, pushing past. "Miss?" She looked into the kindly eyes of an aging but enormous black guard, his carrot-oil groomed mustache and cornrows glistening silver; "that man," she faltered. The guard turned from her to the fleeing pamphleteer. "Hey you! I told you to stay the hell out of here!" The guard patted her shoulder, smiled, she blinked at his huge teeth which all seemed to be solid gold. "You okay, lady?"

"Si, si," said Ynez. "Yes, thanks. I go now to my husband."

She walked from the first landing through Gunsaulus Hall, became lost, excused and pardoned her way through a dozen Japanese with Sony MiniDV camcorders trained on the suits of armor. One, a handsome youth with a bodybuilder physique and a Mohawk, helped her in Tokyo University Spanish: usted es muy cerca; gire izquierdo entonces gire a la derecha entonces vuelta izquierda otra vez, which Ynez interpreted as "you are so close; go left then right then left again," but she became lost again and was finally directed to the Gunsaulus elevator by a security guard. She rode to the second floor with a gigantically obese, profusely sweating, gray-bearded man in denim overalls who calmly lit and smoked a cigarette. Ynez stared at him.

"Congress should abolish the No Smoking In Public Places edicts," he explained. "They're unconstitutional. It's fascist. I have the right to smoke anywhere I damn well please."

"Oh." She had no idea what he was talking about – it was the strawberry birthmark on his left cheek, above the beard, she'd been staring at. The birthmark was shaped like a heavenly angel, a Christmas angel – the type children press into snow by falling onto their backs and fanning arms and legs until the snow is crushed into shape. The elevator doors opened and the man in denim exited, crushed the cigarette under his boot heel, winked at Ynez, then strode over the smoking butt and left her there staring after him. It was then that she recognized his face from one of the posters or programs or the hotel copy of Where Chicago: he was that famous paint-spatterer and dripper, that abstract expressionist called "Son-of-Pollock." The last living heir to Pollock and Ernst! advertisements had bragged, as if avoiding cirrhosis, automobile crashes, insanity and suicide was as important an accomplishment as painting well.

The butt continued to smolder. Ynez gave it a tromp of her own for good measure. "What are you doing!" a guard cried, advancing on her. "Are you crazy? You can't smoke in here! God, look at this mess."

Ynez shook her head. "I did nothing. It was the fat man, the painter." She pointed to a poster on a nearby kiosk as the guard continued to glare rudely at her. "Him. The one so fat was smoking." She walked into a chamber that reminded her unpleasantly of the Henry Frick mansion on Fifth Avenue— Mrs. Frick's study had been furnished with Marie Antoinette's boudoir. As Ynez looked into a glass, she had felt an icy hand brush her neck and she had of course screamed, much to Marky's embarrassment. The experience had greatly upset Ynez and spoiled her New York trip with Marquand (he had been there lecturing on the Phoenician lodestone compass); imagine, tramping through the toilette of a guillotined woman! All that negative resonance! Marquand had not been sympathetic.

Ynez passed through the chamber and, finding Marquand, crossed her arms and watched her husband. He stood before Van Gogh's self-portrait, scribbling furiously in his notebook and although Ynez knew what he was up to – Art, God, Madness, War – she remained suspicious of this professional obsession he was conscripted to. She had peeked over Marquand's shoulder six months ago as he had scribbled notes at the Musee Picasso, and it had been a confounding gibberish of French, Latin, Spanish shorthand. He was writing an important new textbook, that much she understood. When she asked him what it was about, he had exclaimed "Art, God, Madness, War!"

She watched, in a gallery full of priceless portraiture, the man she'd deliberately married and felt at last she truly loved— a man fattened but still handsome nonetheless. His head was well shaped (like a melon, not a bullet; Ynez hated "bullet-heads") and covered with thick reddish-black hair, like her own. His smartly clipped salt and pepper beard and straight posture was, she thought, pleasingly masculine. He was muy alto, well above six feet and stood a head taller than any of the other men in the room. Though Marquand's paunch rolled over his belt like Rodin's comical portrait of Balzac, his shoulders were wide enough to compensate for the ugliness of the potbelly. He moved and placed his face an inch from Van Gogh's until scholar and painter stood nose-to-nose, until the guard at the door tensed, ready to utter some warning or command to back off.

Ynez noted with satisfaction how smoothly Marquand's small ears lay against each side of his head. Countless times they had made love since marrying six years ago (his second legal union, her first) and yet that moment, comparing Marquand's face to the Dutchman's ugly dissipation, was the first time she'd decided that she was lucky in love. Marky wasn't bad looking, and though a bore he had perfect manners and he was also important, a world-renowned authority on ancient navigation, author of many articles and textbook chapters. God, she needed to drink. Why didn't he turn around, see her, laugh, run over and kiss her and tell her that all this close scrutiny of paint was killing his eyes and how about a bottle of wine?

Irritated, Ynez stroked on more lipstick. Marquand halted his fervent scribbling, moved to another painting, bobbed his head and began to write. From Ynez's vantage across the room, the painting appeared to be nothing at all. Then she moved forward and gigantic, grotesquely beautiful shrubbery smeared yellow, green, and blue into the canvas, opened before her eyes. She understood for the first time (she thought to herself) the language of the mystics, the fine lives of prophets, the reason for her headaches. All the answers were here in the glorious painting.

Thin, scratchy music rolled through her – Chopin's Nocturne in D-flat, her father's favorite – she shook her head, amazed at this weird coincidence, glanced at the ceiling and the corner walls, searching for some acoustic appurtenance. But the sound was in her head, not the walls, not the Muzak and voices. She pressed her fingers into the tympanic pulse at her temples until the music stopped. When the pain passed she glanced up again, Marky still scribbled. He would never notice her, not in this frenzy of writing, not in his grail-search into the Dutchman's shrubs. "Marquand!" she cried, embracing him from behind. His ledger clattered to the floor and several people stared. "I'm sorry. I'm just so glad I found you!"

"Never mind." He squeezed her arm quickly, more as one tests a tomato than one hugs, then retrieved the book. He pointed to the painting. "Look, isn't this perfect? What do you think? Do you like it?"

Ynez nodded her head. "Yes, I've been looking at it." Up close, the colors were exquisite and the wonderment creasing her face was genuine. She was puzzled and delighted— how had the Dutchman transformed those yellow, green and blue hash marks and blobs of color into a marvelous park? "See?" Marquand moved his hand in circles, the guards watched. "See the faces, these faces behind the tree?"

Ynez squinted. She rocked back and forth on the useless heels of the Jimmy Choos. She shook her head. "I don't see any faces. But how does he do this? All these hundreds of little squares and dots and daubs merge into this sky, this ground, this top of tree? It's wonderful."

"It's genius! Look! Here's a face, and another. Surely you can see them – they're Muses – Vincent incorporated the nine daughters." Marquand pointed out the metal plate on the wall and read to her: "The garden of the poets represents a place of release, a place where the imagination is freed by growth and life and the shining hopeful light of day."

"What a beautiful thought."

"Yes."

"Then why did he live such an awful life and die such a horrible death?"

Marquand shrugged. "He was an artist."

Ynez laughed. "And you are a scholar, as such safe from the calamity of emotion. It's perverted, it's sick, it's voyeuristic, and I don't understand you, my love, though always I've tried." She swayed, he caught her. "You took your medication, didn't you?"

"Yes, I swallowed all my pretty little pills in the ladies room," Ynez said. "Really, I've enjoyed today, but I'd prefer returning to the hotel."

"Of course. How selfish of me, not to see how tired you are!"

Ynez smiled. "We'll watch cable and call up a bottle of wine. I noticed the '93 Roman-Conti on their list, I know you've wanted to try it. I'll make you a present of everything in their stock!"

Marquand brightened. "God, it'll cost a fortune, it's a hedonistic thing to do, but won't it be fun! We'll drink two of their best and take the remainder home!" He smelled like a boiled sausage in his wool suit, and smelling himself decided to apply even more CK each morning. The only comfortable part was his feet, encased in the new shoes. His belt wrapped around his girth like a garrote, trapping his waist unmercifully. Marquand refused to buy the next size larger— to admit that his circumference had bulged from 36 to 38 inches. He kissed his wife with renewed interest, soon to don the terrycloth robe that smelled of bleach and the clean, "burnt" odor of the industrial dryer. Ynez would undress, sing "Lagrima" as she showered, and if drunk enough she'd dance naked emerging, shampoo-scented water spinning from her hair. Afterwards, they'd drink the fabulous '93 Roman-Conti or Dry Sack, a cheap sherry but his favorite.

"You aren't angry?" Ynez asked over and over as they descended the steps, passed through the crowd then outside to hail a taxi. "You've taken plenty of notes? You aren't upset I want to leave?" Marquand poked her with his sausage fingers. "I have had business and now I want pleasure, paloma mona, cute little dove," he grinned. "Tonight I crash through rough seas, soaking my beard in brine!" Inez elbowed his ribs and he belched corned beef.

"Oh for the love of God! Gross!"

"Sorry, Ynez. Say, I have a capital idea. Let's do Les Nomades tonight and eat nothing but desserts and appetizers."

"No." She wondered why no constable arrested the man urinating on the pedestal of the magnificent bronze lion. "Not Les Nomades tonight. That horrible waiter with the scar on his cheek— what, does he fight duels when not sticking his thumbs in the ice water? He stares at me, Marquand. Let's go out someplace ordinary. I want to wear jeans and drink like a maniac." She laughed shrilly. He frowned. "And the '93 Roman-Conti?"

"For later, of course! I'll buy you a whole case of the stuff."

"Fine. We'll do McDonald's or the Hard Rock Cafe, eat hamburgers and fries."

Ynez said nothing. Her husband was putty in her hands – that's what her mother always said – but when she pushed, sometimes Marquand resisted her with a decorum which made her seem vulgar in comparison, which infuriated her. Also, when he was riled he mocked her by speaking German, which she didn't understand at all. He'd blurt harsh, coughing noises at her, something from Goethe or Kafka— he had told her once about nihilism but she hadn't cared to remember anything bleak or depressing or sadistic.

Marquand hailed a taxi. He patted Ynez's slim torso as she slid in, eyed the bunched-up hemline, the titillating sight, before she smoothed her skirt, of muscular thigh, sheer nylons and white panties. "The Swissotel," he told the driver so brusquely Ynez looked quickly at his face but he only nodded and licked his lips. He seated himself, shifting his hams uncomfortably. Ynez, noticing Marquand's predicament, dropped her hand into his lap and squeezed. "Don't!"

"Horny old professor, to think I'm not on to you!"

The taxi braked suddenly behind a silver Bentley. The cabbie punched his horn, the Bentley howled aggressively in return. Marquand pointed. "It's Hyun Sook, that prophet fellow." The cab squealed from Michigan Avenue onto Madison, bumper to bumper with the Bentley. Ynez gazed out her window at a corner lot where a building had been razed and the rubble partially transformed into a tiny park. Three hexagonal embankments of cement sprouted wrought-iron lamps topped with frost-glass globes. Creosote-stained railroad ties divided well-nourished blue-bladed fescue into triangular plots of lawn; from each triangle jutted a single Japanese maple. The base of each maple was ringed with orange marigold and reddish-purple crocus. Ynez studied the geometric configurations and corresponding colors: she knew that somewhere was a hidden meaning, such as found in the layout of Aztec temples or Ohio serpent mounds or Egyptian obelisks or Stonehenge. She knew she had only to stare long enough, and the secret would be revealed.

"Look at the lovely park," Ynez murmured. The sun plunged behind skyscrapers, the reflected glare from Lake Michigan brushed feeble gold over the avenue. A woman with long white hair and slender body clambered down from a pile of iron and cistern-block to clip the marigolds. She dropped the flowers into a macramé bag then sheared the crocus. Ynez waved. The woman waved back to show Ynez that she was not ashamed to steal flowers. Ynez knocked against the glass. The white-haired woman stretched her mouth into an O, then waved again. Ynez rapped harder at the glass. Her long coral nails shattered to the quick and her fingers bled as she pounded. "Hey!" the cabbie shouted. "hey, lady, stop that!"

Marquand grabbed her. "Ynez!" She hammered and smeared the window with her blood. The cabbie braked. "You get out if she don't stop."

"Keep driving!" Marquand threw money over the seat. "Just get us to our hotel." He turned to his wife. She seemed to have calmed. "Ynez?"

"She waved to me. I saw her wave to me."

"You saw nothing as you always see nothing! You didn't take your medication did you?" He grabbed her wrists, his thumbs indenting the thin scars crisscrossing her ulnar veins, pulled her fists from the glass. Ynez shrieked and struggled free, fouling his jacket sleeves with blood. How could he bear wool when it was so warm outside? Indian Summer they called the day; it made no sense to her— weather was weather and Indians people. "La reina de los demonios!" she screamed. "The old woman cutting flowers! There in the park!"

The cabbie savaged his horn. The florist van wouldn't move.

Marquand looked again. "I asked if you took your pills and you said yes."

"Shut up you old dog! You gray-muzzled hound! Leave me alone!"

"Driver! Turn around and go back to that park!" Marquand tore through Ynez's purse. It was empty except for some crumpled religious tracts, her admission buttons, and the Navajo Blanket Beaded Bracelet and Glass Heart Pendant he'd purchased for her from the museum shop. "Oh baby, where are your medications, did you throw them away?" The cabbie cursed, but the meter read $5.00 and the crazy lady's old man had thrown a hundred in his lap. He U-turned, wheels screeching, two shirtless skinheads, razored white skeletons festooned with swastikas and thunderbolts, leapt for their lives, screaming "stupid bastard!" The cabbie flipped them off, turned up his radio. Chicago, Chicago!

"The queen of the demons killed the Angel Vera!"

Marquand fumbled cigarettes. "Damn it, there are no angels nor devils!" He pulled his billfold, threw another twenty. The cabbie shrugged. "Give me one of those smokes."

"I saw her Marky, and this time I know what she wants. She cuts flowers to remind me that my wrists are stems. I've been selfish. I've deceived you."

"You're just tired, Ynez. I blame myself. When I hand you your pills, when I watch your beautiful lips drink from the glass, then I know you have taken them. I failed you." Marquand sweated until the Art Institute came into view, then raged at the driver. "Damn it all, man! We've gone too far! Back to the park!"

The cabbie snapped. "You're both nuts! There's no park from where I picked you up or from to where we turned back, and I picked you up right here! You want to go to Lincoln Park or Garfield Park I'll take you but you better sit still and shut up."

"Home," said Ynez. "Marquand, I want to go home. She waved to me. She killed the Angel Vera." Ynez stared at the carnage of her fingers and smiled. Marquand raised his hands, palms down, and smacked his thighs. He turned to the driver. "I'm sorry. I can calm down, I can be logical, I can get to the bottom of this. I feel for certain that if we just keep our heads we'll certainly get to the bottom of this!" He leaned into the man's ear and whispered hoarsely, "you must know how it is, to love someone so beautiful, so young, but she is crazy? Surely you know how it is, or you've known someone, how impossible it is to leave them, how you'd rather die? Please find a park, any park will do— it won't matter to her. I'll pay you anything."

The driver sighed. "Ok, what the hell. You keep giving me money, I'll get you a park."

Mr. Common's Dog Pot Pie

I'd finished Plon's Lila Dit Ca, a prurient memoir purportedly penned by an "illiterate Arab adolescent"; the stink of writing workshop permeates it. Yawnfest, amateurish roman a clef con, sham of sexual infantilism, dumbed-down streetwise ingenuousness. True art is a wounded boar, an escaped shot beast crouched to ambush, spoor glimmering where waiting is a form of training. It's as French as Gerard Depardieu, Purple People Eater and Git Along Home Now Cindy roaring from a '48 torpedoback, mis-timed Viper V10 backfiring, translating early Bachman (e.g. The Regulators) into Universal script. So I bricked a Barnes and Noble window, unable to repossess 3.95 (bargain-bin, but four bucks is four bucks): this is a warning for all sound-idiots not to expect Hallmark— I buy Hallmark too but today no talk it.

Johnny Meggs scoots bluh-dada! up the driveway, '61 panhead Super Sport farting azure smoke; keeps it original anthracite with birch white tank panels, uses Amsol recycled oil, thinks he's assisting the environment but all he's doing is destroying a fine Harley. Engine idles like a dryer full of gravel. "Fresh dog pies out!" he shouts. I grab my jacket and hop on.

Never smelled anything so tasty, steaming pies and cloying apple-wood fire crackling in a cinderblock rectangle resembling a forge more than an oven. Mr. Common sears corn-oiled mounds of cubed flesh in cast-iron dixies so ancient they appear hacked from soot; Idaho russet Burbank potatoes, Cascabella peppers, maple-cured bacon, Oregon giant peas and Walla Walla sweets gurgling in Macbethian copper cauldrons. He waves a ladle, showering us with scalding pot liquor, scalloped blue Crystolon whetstone in his other fist, elephant grass mustache parting around the omnipresent Flamenco Robusto. "Offveer heer boys!" he shouts above the roar of twin BigFogg industrial floor fans.

Fresh pies cool on wire racks atop a sawhorse and plywood table; we rush forward, dollars in hand. Marsha's there dressed as usual in Harley Nitro leather pants, Nitro jacket, red spandex bustier; Ellen Bushossy ties four yapping cairn terriers to a redwood fence-post, drops desiccated liver treats to quiet her loves; Nannie Chestnut and Agnes Reid crunch their leviathan Dodge Polaris over a Snapple bottle; Father Rizzoni loiters under the state's largest (26 meters: 65 feet) Black Tartarian cherry, dodging crow shit and poking litter with his silver-tipped blackthorn, waiting for Nannie and Agnes to finish and leave because they are enemies, these three past, present and future, servants of the Lord.

There aren't real dogs in his pot pies, of course, just plain old everyday Black Angus, but everyone has always called them so and the dish, along with Mr. Common's dilapidated eatery The Burlington Bean Bowl, is a town institution, tradition, landmark. "Meat cobbler" best describes the ramekins' contents: alternating layers of smoky toasty sourdough with sirloin, potato, onion, bacon, carrot, pepper, peas suspended in gravy as thick as grout. Everyone feasted, smacking lips, ahhing and sighing, stacking dishes. We huddled around smoking and catching up on town gossip. Nannie and Agnes left then Father Rizzoni strode forward for his pie and Johnny took a bag of bones from Mr. Common for Chaz the poodle.

Johnny Meggs inherited Chaz. Chaz belonged to Bud McFadden but Bud died of AIDS— technically Bud quit living after deepthroating a Browning10 gauge "Stalker," leaving nothing of his head but lower jawbone connected by gristle-flap to a neck stump— in Johnny's mind Bud hadn't been despondent, suicidal until he learned he was HIV+ then so obsessed about the viral "demonic contagion" invading his blood he'd offed himself. Bud was a selfish Pan, never getting all he wanted of sex, money, attention; terrified of illness, of his bodybuilder's physique atrophying, blond mane thinning: so Johnny continued saying Bud died of AIDS.

Johnny and Chaz didn't get along. The dog was sly, a manner of eyeing you simultaneously stupid and cunning, a habit of curling its upper lip revealing a hint of teeth if you stared back, a shiftless smug expectation of being fed, brushed, let out that reminded Johnny unpleasantly of Bud. Johnny'd loved Bud more than he'd hated Bud through the infidelities and day to day common cruelties and megalomaniac's insistence on continually holding court; it troubled him to compare his dead lover to a dog, a half-blind yellowish poodle.

This morning Johnny Meggs has a fresh bitch, he doesn't want anyone wearing riding gear who doesn't actually ride. He's due in court Tuesday for disturbing the peace and public intoxication. I call him a bully. "You gotta control your temper, Johnny. All that jeet kune do and kungfu wu-su shit you've studied since you were two, what about walking through life without denting the rice-paper, or is that just fucking bullshit?"

"Of course it isn't bull."

"Then stop being taking all our heads off weird. You were nice until Bud died. Is the problem that you miss that bastard, that misanthropic narcissistic cocksucker?"

"You don't understand at all. Fuck Bud. I'm talking about the deliberate fraud, the pretense of fashion overstepping its bounds so now you have skinny white punkass skateboard teens dressing like gangbangers, and I don't care, I'm not a gangsta, I'm a biker, and I see red when I have a drink somewhere and these suits have shed their corporate plumage and strut my colors. They practice Batesian Mimicry, that phenomenon whereby a weak species copies one that kicks ass; they mimic, these clerks, brokers, attorneys, accountants in Harley leathers, pale unscarred flesh expensively tattooed with ecotourist bullshit – that cultural hodgepodge Celtic and Samoan. They've no idea who they are or where they're from, mutts striving to be AKC breeds – wasting good Marlboros not inhaling, sipping pepper vodka martinis at Chez Ganymede; I shouldn't care, I should pass without a glance, I shouldn't notice but they irritate me, I can stand quiet frauds never ostentatious ones, so I fuck with them. You're wrong to call me a bully, I rarely seriously hurt them – bloody nose, twisted arm – they gotta learn. None are exempt. Not even you."

I shut up; I'm as close to Johnny as I'll ever be, being straight— I know him better than anyone else, because he talks to me, always has, we've known each other since fifth grade, when I moved here. When his parents divorced, and he had measles in his eyes, skinny smelly kid stuck in his smelly room, face bandaged, it should have been his dad or mom sitting with him every day but his mom worked then drank, his dad shot himself in room 212 Commodore Hotel, Tacoma. When he could see again I gave him my new Crosman 760 pellet rifle, and that's when he began telling me everything, and hasn't stopped. His yesterday rant began with cheese, was in Seattle and wanted a plain cheese sandwich – Kraft American, mayo, white bread – nothing doing: asiago, brie, gjetost, edam, gorgonzola; might as well fart in a noon elevator as ask, nowadays, for anything plain, unadorned, simple, the looks you get. I tried explaining to Johnny that hyperbole is marketing's fix, that even the fad of "simplicity" is an expensive, expansive, complex, simplicity. He said "I told this fucking clerk that in the quaint, quiet, nowhere little Swiss town of Pontresina, certainly more culturally advanced, concerning cheese, than Seattle, Kraft American Singles sell as a delicacy. 29 DM – sixteen bucks – for two packages."

It's been nine months since the terrorist attacks, and life goes on – more guardedly nationalistic in this town – as before except that almost everyone flies flags; if you wear a turban you'll be looked at twice but not necessarily with hostility, except for those idiots the Slobberin' Bin Ladens, a banjo-toting yuk-yuk troupe composed of the Coffee brothers, all ex-loggers, ex-cons, and current meth-labbers on the dole since I was a teen: they commit random acts of stupidity while dressed as Hollywood Bedouins— turbans, beards dyed an unctuous Reagan-black, wise-men robes from the Pentecostal church's passion play prop closet, aviator Ray-Bans.

Take last week, I won 200 bucks on a dollar scratch so Johnny and I celebrated at Jasper's and when we were ready to quit or fall down the Slobberin' Bin Ladens entered and Fred Coffee told a lame queer joke (Johnny tells great queer jokes) then asked Meggs, "Blow any sand niggers lately, pole-smoker?" "Fuck you Coffees," Johnny snarled. "Imbecilic redneck inbred congenitally syphilitic morons; breath reeking of raw wet turds— you're faecaphages, creatures devouring shit."

I tried to calm Johnny down. "Fuck these Whiskey-Tangos; their sisters are only virgins as long as they can outrun their brothers." Jack Coffee swung, Meggs ducked then swung, busting Coffee on the jaw then I screamed kiaaa! (the way Johnny taught me to center chi energy) burying my right Redwing Irish Setter bulls-eye in the fanciest banjo – a 1935 Gibson Master Florentine which crunched and twanged disintegrating into a shower of mother of pearl – then the trio of brothers was atop me. Johnny took out Fred with a rib-kick leaving Jack and Frank pinning me down with, between them, six hundred pounds of hirsute fat. Curses panted in spitty puffs of sausage and bourbon breath, furry, greasy knuckles jabbed my face then Jones fired his 12-gauge Mossberg Maverick into the ceiling.

Now he didn't mean to fire, he ratcheted a shell into the chamber sha-lank! to get our attention but the Maverick is notorious for misfiring even with safety toggled, and buckshot blew through the plaster and lathe above our heads. Powdered lime, dust, horsehair insulation, wood chips, and squashed lead pellets rained down. "Jesus Christ!" Jones yelled, "Jasper's up there taking a shit!" We sprinted upstairs but he was okay, thank god Jones wasn't packing deer-slugs; the blast didn't penetrate the plywood and linoleum flooring, though old Jasper nearly defib'd when bloody beat to shit me, Johnny, Jones, and the Slobberin' Bin Ladens all burst in on him as he papered ass.

I still can't talk about the collapse of the WTC towers so I won't – they were beautiful edifices which should have housed humanitarian offices, not CIA fronts, narco and petro-dollar investment firms, tobacco and GE Frankenfood attorneys, agri-banks whose business was eliminating small farms, insurance concerns, tobacco and GM Frankenfood lobbyists, multinational corporate espionage cells – I advocate peaceful takeover, not annihilation: MNCs have ruined the once positive "corporate-artisan" spirit which built this nation. They've dismantled the "old guard" of true civil servant-based government regulation, substituting nominally intelligent sinecured overseers with DEA piss-test czars, FBI spies, CIA head-crackers; they've resurrected slavery as a "good" while metamorphosing purposeful work into penal colony drudgery overseen by the billionaire elite. Shall we all end in prison, will that safeguard our country— and what is safe, except an illusion of harm sidestepped for the rich, the medically coddled, celebrities with bodyguards, non driving, non flying, safe-sex vegetarians? Safe is an excuse to deprive others of liberty, as in security, as in surveillance, as in profiling, as in concentration.

I participated in the so-called "Battle for Seattle;" I was gassed, cattle-prodded, peppered, clubbed, and jailed (charges dismissed) for standing up to Big Business: I'm proud of that, I still decry the abject evil and coldhearted viciousness of the WTO as an entity, though I fistfight I'd never, not even to defend myself, kill anyone, which is why I despise the WTO— their moguls have injured, murdered, starved, diseased, defrauded and dispossessed more human beings than any terrorist clique I yet know of. September 11 millionaires and janitors alike embraced in oblivion, death is the great equalizer and I feel outrage, contempt for my country's enemies – a shock of realization that, for all my leftist anti-capitalist ranting, I'm patriotic – not a flag-waving jingoist but a justice and equality loving citizen; I care yet I refuse to accept the current thinking that "we can get them all," whatever the fuck that means, that funerals instill order when the world is a history of graves.

After the fight at Jasper's we iced our faces. "You know," says Johnny, "this gets me contemplating the history of Bruck Castle. I was twenty touristing there, not so jaded as I am now but absolutely shocked to discover Albin Egger-Lienz a superior war painter to Picasso, far better. Albin's stark bloody strokes screamed louder than Guernica's fawning truckler's antifascism: here's a man who'd choose Velveeta over camembert, a cupa joe over Starbucks Orca Mocha decaf."

You could say Johnny's crazy, or maybe schizophrenia's an evolutionary process and in the end the mentally ill shall deal best with life, parasympathetic on/off switches annulling the bestial affronts of modernity, work, competition; the abuse of the herd. "You should take your meds," I say, circling an ice cube over my eye sockets. Johnny's on divalproex, risperidone, nefazodone, sells his meds when he should be swallowing them. He claims the meds dull his sex drive and give him hairy foot tops, but Johnny's always had hairy foot tops, even as a kid. Nannie and Agnes would laugh when he was barefoot, calling him "little monkey."

Nannie Chestnut and Agnes Reid are retired nuns. I didn't know nuns retire but they do. They drink heavily, might have something to do with it or maybe drinking increased after retirement, realizing they'd been conned, preserving virginity for a papal hierarchy granting rank only to men; now too old, bitter, jaded, wasted, to do anything about it. Christ would never have wished their exsiccation – I get the impression, reading New Testament that Jesus was sexy, charismatic in the mad radical up yours, Roman Legion, I'm not sinking to your level attitude, that makes Ghandi and Buddha romantic and approachable too: theology and philosophy ruins romance – the approachable becomes inexplicable, human beings are apotheosized, calcified into a history framed by so called "followers" who don't honor anything but their piece of the action. Read the Gospels; the Apostles exasperated Jesus 99% of the time, he was rarely satisfied with their performance, always correcting their backward, whining ways.

Christ would be horrified by the modern Christian Church, the bejeweled evangelists, bloated cable TV waistlines and aged exotic dancer sidekicks; I mean every damned denomination of it— Jesus couldn't make the original twelve clueless drifters toe the line. He was a great man, I believe that, but his message of loving change is buried in multiform hatreds (misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia – all of us and especially Orientals, Jews, Muslims and Pagans): racism, sectarianism, greed, ignorance, superstition, intolerance – the Six Holy Pillars of the modern Church which claims to revere Him.

Marsha and I argue about this all the time; she thinks she was abducted— not by aliens but by an angel called Megollanna who showed her the end of the earth from a big screen TV in the realm of Arkopixis. This makes more sense to me than trying to be Catholic, as I was raised, because I don't believe in it, all the hidebound aristocratic papal "you're the sheep we herd" bullshit though I had a fabulous priest – Father Vierthaler – all you hear about now is pedophile priests but Father "Bert" as he liked to be called, was the real McCoy, a decent soul who was always in trouble for doing the right thing, such as giving clean needles to addicts, approving of female and gay priests, and hiding refugees, and I remember one rich family who owned a stained glass window at All Saints wanted a special prayer for their Naval pilot son and his F-14A Tomcat but Bert said no, all killing, for any reason, even the glory of the US military, was murder, and he caught hell for that. But then we moved to Ark and I got Father Rizzoni, a real dickhead.

Marsha is lead singer and bassist for the Stuttering Cajun Meth Whores. Used to be Wet Fyst and before that, Dekko, which I preferred because her sound was Grunge-Rave, liked even more when Marsha told me dekko's Indian for "glance around." I understand her need to shock, rock the boat, to disseminate sociopolitical propaganda and expose high-level governmental conspiracies with her music with bands such as the Dead Fetal Pigz, Champ Gurl, Plague Switch, Fuckery, Bounty Killaz, and Spyslut, yet I keep trying to convince her to return to Dekko. Marsha always tried to be tough, sometimes she was, and smart, well-read, street-wise. "Fare un ditolino" (do a little finger) she greets strangers, middle one raised; it's infamous in these parts because of the miracle – I'll explain.

Nannie had a thing for garden globes which were Fed X'd to her on certain holy days from the Silver Globe Company, Marietta Ohio. My fondest memories as a kid are those big depthless blackhole globes sprouting from the weedy lawn like Dada wands, and we thought Nannie and Agnes were witches, but outgrew that and thought they were lesbians, then outgrew that and thought they were cool old chicks because they let us drink coffee and smoke cigarettes in their kitchen when we were finding ourselves by hating high school and the burnt out losers pretending to instruct us.

Above their bed in blood: fare un ditolino, tanto credo che questi colgioni con capiscano un cazzo, romaromaroma; Father Rizzoni came to investigate the miracle. He upbraided us in the kitchen for drinking coffee and smoking, all the while lecturing swilling Starbucks from the Krupps like he'd never tasted anything so good, lighting end from end three Camels from my pack. At last he snugged on a pair of Buddy Hollyish black plastic "birth controls" and asked to see the divine revelation. We led him into the bedroom where he exploded "whores! harlots! dried up old bitches! And damn you filthy delinquents too, if you had a hand in this blasphemy, goddamn you all to hell! I won't be made a fool of!"

It took three years for the bloody message to dry and fade away – I'm telling you we covered it with 4 gallons of Dutch Boy Latex and it kept bleeding through – miraculous, and I don't believe in miracles. Why can't God have dirty aspects of mind, as at times we exhibit, and coarse humor? Though we are created in His image, our minds are deficient; who says God isn't deceitful, coy, lonely, horny? He admits to being Jealous, and if you think about it, jealousy is the most dangerous emotion of all, the root of all perversion and misanthropy: inahl rabak ars ya choosharmuta! The nuns saved Kadota and Ellen's orchards from blight by praying when blight swept all the other orchards in 1995; having the only rust-free apples around the Ryojus made a boodle.

Kadota Ryoju and Ellen Bushossy have lived together twenty-seven years, have a one-legged son Ryu ni Ryong (laid down a Suzuki Katana) and a Fuji orchard of such high quality we eat and drink record quantities— I'm good for two a day or a bottle of their Suru Gold Cider and I don't like apples. Kadota and Ellen's B&B isn't yet famous but if you'll try absolutely divine cioppino and lingcod stuffed with kumoto oysters, boccone dolce drizzled with backyard boysenberry honey finished with the local favorite catnip chicory espresso, trillium floated atop, baklava with ground hickory nuts, woodland sorrel, bleeding heart, wood violet, and pink fawn lily sauce atop, then you'll love Ark, you'll say "where's Ark?" and maybe Where Seattle will ask where's Ark?

Like Mr. Common's dog pot pie, words are mere air – the flavor, indescribably intense pleasure of chewing, smelling, swallowing apples, hard cider – such gustatory superiority excavated in Ark Washington, down the road from Glyster, ultima thule— as you'll encounter anywhere else at any price in any deli, supermarket chain, opium den or online boutique, ever. You should be here. Johnny's applied for loans to turn the 1910 elementary school ruins by the Anger Rapids salmon ladder into the Offcenter For World Peace and if he succeeds maybe we'll map this place. Ark's big enough to see all there is to see: we're alike any other rundown hard not quaint town a stone's throw from an abandoned railway depot, unfashionable river, landfill, downsized factory, mill, foundry— an enclave of the unemployed, the unbeautiful, the unrich, the unknown: we're forced to either fade or work harder to grant ourselves some dignity, beauty, provincial fame or infamy, and in doing so we may be leading more interesting and spiritually fulfilling lives than, say, some Fort Worth trust-fund poet expatriate in Paris or Seattle software trillionaire.

Johnny and I pass Orange Julius, lamed then named because an overdose of ecstasy helped him jump into the Nisqually. He floated through Thurston County before a deputy dragged him out; the paramedics resuscitated him, brain damaged, now he draws 527 a month SSI, not enough to live on, some folks help out. We stop, give OJ two bucks and tell him the pies are done but probably already gone so check the evening batch. OJ pockets the money, stands smiling in a cloud of recycled oil smoke. "Don't need food, need X, gimmee wheels if you got 'em, you got 'em I'll smoke 'em, anything you got: UFOs, green try-angles, blues; give 'em up."

OJ's looking for ecstasy, trying to hook up with the winged skull disguised as Cupid that's X – Cupid for the stupid, fumbling down reagent-grade love in a world where love has no evolutionary wellspring, where emotion is the superfluous byproduct of metamorphosed reptilian hypothalamus – why is it those who should just lay down and die never do? I've tried every kind of drug available, you name it I've done it, drowning self-pity in dregs pulled from enamel crack chimneys most lately before again finding God; by the time you dress up your new self it's gone; I'm clean now except for the sertraline and aripiprazole I digest for depression.

There's nothing ecstatic about getting high, which is why I despise ecstasy when what's meant is the blood poison MDMA: fucked up means you've given up, or on the short slide to giving up, or are giving up and don't know it yet or know it but someone else is paying the bill or covering for you so you still consider getting fucked up fun: fortunately I'm still not quite old and still somewhat beautiful, so I try reach the idiotic young and pretty to whom penalty means dollars or community service. That's the total fucking shame, the irremediable anguish, of having thrown one's days into the wind to have them swirl around your feet like scraps of dirty paper, to realize, for no profit other than grasping a simple truth, that for lack of courage, foresight, ambition, enthusiasm, your life is over and you – you alone – have played it out and run it down.

You would've liked Spokane Bob. I'm tired of talking but when I feel good again I'll tell you all about Spokane Bob. He died of diabetes. I'm thinking of him because we passed Veterans Park; he was a veteran. In the park a female student of the VocTech reads Principles of Quality Control, sunny wind stirring her oatmeal hair, aging Golden Retriever pulling cupcakes from her unzipped backpack. "That's fate, pal," Bob told me, "the sword decapitating you only scratches my nose: now I suffer from a malady worse than survivor's guilt— I'm addicted not to feeling bad but to not getting better. I mean I love support groups, the not-drunk alcoholics and clean addicts, fat rolls skeeving in spandex; Veterans complain too much. I had ugly, pale, hairy legs, then they were blown off and after my rehab and prosthetic fitting I was forty pounds lighter and two inches taller— always look for the bright side, goddamn it!"

So I do, indeed I do look. There are no practical postulates of passion, no conditions of love, no degrees of faith, no measure of anger, pain, satisfaction, no limit to grief, joy, regret. Elbow-strike the quantifiers of emotion, neck-chop the self-help entrepreneurs: cut ahead in line, kick mud on them at recess, push their heads into toilet bowls, scrub their faces with toilet brushes, for they are inhuman automaton meat-puppets, these orators of closure, these sweep it under the rug time to move on pull yourself up by the bootstraps no soliciting sympathy at my gated community middle class Oprah moralists with patsy smiles, crowsfeet Botox'd into mere frown-lines. These hit and run droning heads with their New Age Yuppie Gen X final solutions, these suburban stripmall fascist architects of the subjugation and extinction of nous, spirit, intellect, individuality. Strike harshly, erase their spatio-temporal psychobabbling mouths, crush silence into them: soar, thin-winged angels, from the klaxon's echo and pour out your noxious phials.

Harris Leventhal's Wednesday evening flight to Washington-Dulles from Seattle-Tacoma International boarded at gate seventeen, departure time seven-forty. His first class seating assignment "Teklounge" (with built-in Dell Studio 15, HP laser printer, iPod and iPhone docks with "tasteful classical assortment" over wireless headphones) numbered seven aboard the new leather, plastic, carpet-stinking "Stratocoach" Boeing 777, an airship manufactured precisely 3.7 miles southeast of SeaTac at Boeing Field. Boeing was in shambles, its executives fleeing tax-laden, energy-crunched Seattle for Chicago, yet Harry had nearly complete faith in the aircraft; his salad days post University of Washington law school he'd dog-legged labor arbitration for the firm while a newbie at Lewis, Brown & Samson: he considered the company's safety record exemplary despite recent charges of fraud, mismanagement, and technical sabotage.

Harry had flown, he mused over a J&B at Lacey's (a SeaTac members-only lounge) approximately a thousand missions his twenty years as an attorney, not counting several dozen helicopter shuttles: why now the racing heart and coursing sweat this pre-flight? Two outcomes, as always, were possible— either he'd safely descend to his destination or die in a conflagration of twisted wreckage.

Why this gut feeling the stakes had changed, this spookiness over the cabala of sevens? Harry was a paid intellectual – consultant, lecturer, author, professor – he scoffed at astrology and, though an avid gambler, didn't believe in luck. He jiggled his ice and bartender Joseph, an evening croupier at Red Wind, the local Indian casino, dumped another double scotch. Harry and Joseph had been acquainted for seven years, since 2001 when Joseph moved from Olympia's White Eagle casino (Harry had won and lost at the Red Wind and White Eagle Boolean sums) to watch over his son Joe Junior, on partial scholarship (a BIA Snyder grant) to Seattle Pacific University. Joe Junior dropped out, Joseph stayed. Joseph constructed astrological charts, dreamcatchers, and talismans of fortune and protection which he sold online through shaman.biz, so when Harry requested more liquor and said one's statistical chances of perishing in an automobile accident were ninety-seven times more likely than crashing in an airplane, the bartender knocked on Formica and laughed. "Yeah, but when you total your car you don't take two hundred people with you. You need a medicine bag, my friend."

"You mean with a medicine bag you don't worry about dying?"

"Everybody dies, Harry. A medicine bag keeps your soul in one location until it's either collected or decides where to move on."

"What do you mean collected?"

"Depends on whether you're a level one or level two soul. Level one people get collected, they have no say in the matter— that's where Christians developed their ideas of heaven and hell, God and Satan competing for souls; purgatory, limbo and all that. Level two people choose where they want to go after death."

"Well, I'm a Jew, so here's to level two," Harry toasted, gulping scotch.

A plaque posted by the register proclaimed "Drink Responsibly" and an attempt at celebrating Halloween had been launched by the bar manager: orange and black crepe paper garlands, festive skeletons, hump-backed cardboard cats, have-a-nice-day Budweiser jack o' lanterns. A motion-sensitive plastic tarantula near Harry's elbow whirred, giggling malevolently; each refill he dribbled scotch on the contraption, hoping to short it out. "Gotta go, Harry," Joseph said at seven-thirty. "Time to tux-up."

Harry's flight was boarding, the PA announced, first class assignments. He closed his tab and tipped Joseph ten dollars for four doubles. "I wish I looked as good in a soup-and-fish as you do Joe," he said, and it was true. Joseph, stocky iron-haired six-two, was a Muckleshoot Cary Grant; Harry, dumpy five-seven and bald, wasn't. Complete strangers found him high-toned but, after several drinks, likeable; he generously tipped the casino and bar employees who either aroused or entertained him, and he was fond of short haired cats and small dogs although he hadn't kept either in years. His colleagues considered him a competent if rather malicious pedagogue— but his textbooks sold well and he had been solicited, hired, and granted tenure all in the same year, at forty, following a lavish disability severance from Lewis, Brown & Samson after his third myocardial; he had, after all, brought Microsoft in, and then another dream client, Nordstrom. "The recycled Jew," Harry called himself, bitter that only at a third rate college such as Seattle Pacific was he a celebrity. "See you Friday at the Wind?" Joseph asked and Harry responded as he always did, "You know it."

He entered the restroom, wrinkling his nose at the blended disinfectant, urine, crap and fresh fart. Harry scrubbed the shine from his pink oily pate with a smooth white paper towel soaked with almond-scented liquid hand-washing detergent then slicked the beard-like hair clinging above his ears, his "whitewalls," which cowlicked if not soaped down. He devoured Propecia, pumpkin seed extract, and saw palmetto gel-caps; he doused his dome with extra-strength 5% Rogaine, and had recently ordered an illegal 10% solution from a French website. He'd tried the Beverly Hills Bosley clinic, insisting money didn't matter. This changed his status and Dr. Bosley, an amiable Donald Trump/Marcus Welby hybrid, personally performed Harry's consultation but the outcome was disappointment: even a scalp reduction wouldn't bring him to "Class 6;" he hadn't enough donor-plug hair to make any difference, and Bosley Medical had plenty lawsuits pending to risk adding another to their roster of litigation. Bosley's advice had been to shave smooth, go for the "Patrick Stewart look."

"But I don't want to look like Patrick Stewart," said Harry. "Vin Diesel, maybe." Next Harry tried Hair Club For Men, but after six months gluing a toupee to his skull with surgical adhesive, fooling no one, he'd quit in disgust with his "weave" and other silly euphemisms ("system" for hairpiece, "maintenance" for a head-wash, faded wig dye, and reattachment); worse, the vinegary stink his rug wafted after a weekend in Aruba, a terrible embarrassment when a client asked what that smell was.

"What is it you want?" he asked the bland face darkening the mirror. "You making this flight or not?"

"I think not," the bland face replied. "Get drunk, lay it on, you've earned it."

Or return home and polish the Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation brief for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York— that flight was Monday, and no way could be avoided, 777 or no 777. He'd been contacted by the State Department concerning "sensitive" documents and photos in possession of his HVAL clients, the Kiriath brothers; this brush with real power gratified Harry, he anticipated the Washington adventure with the eagerness of a schoolboy clutching a new Kodak Easyshare. His other deadline included securing, for his client Madrone Press, the declassified memoirs of a lunatic 1st army General succumbing to cirrhosis and senility in Chantilly, a far enough cry from DC, and though Reagan National would put him within four miles of the drop-off point for the Kiriath papers, it also meant piloting a rental car through a quagmire of crime and scenic devastation. Harry hated ghettos; his grandfather had died in one, resisting the Nazis in Warsaw.

"Federal Express," Harry said aloud. "Every damn bit could be overnighted. No Dulles, no Reagan, no repetitive sevens."

"Actually, the post office is better," said a man, zipping up his Brooks Brothers trousers. "They've really improved, for my business I use their Signature Confirmation Overnighters, and I saved this year twenty percent of what I used to spend on UPS and FedEx."

The bar Harry chose, at the end of the hub near short-term parking, because he liked the name and it was across from the new duty-free shop he browsed before purchasing a Dundonnell smoked salmon and giant white Toblerone, was Murphy's Pub On The Green. Typical of Pacific Northwest incongruity, Murphy's wasn't a pub, sat nowhere near a golf course, nor was it owned, nor frequented by, Irish people— a dive popular with food court employees, stewards and stewardesses, sundry local small-time pushers, con artists, and free-lance prostitutes. In the early 1980s the Green River Task Force chose Murphy's (Keg's East, it was called then) as its official watering hole; the killer was never found, but the Plexiglassed row of photos near the pay phone remained: faded 8x10s of bulky men in Haggar and Panatella flare-leg polyesters grinning over pitchers of beer.

"Gary Ridgway's not the Green River Killer. Sure, he wasted a couple whores in a sloppy amateur way, and it took the cops more than a decade to finally bust him for it, but the Green River Task Force and the FBI both fucked this one up totally, and are now attempting to bury the case with this flaccid dork. The Jerk's still out there. He's probably got a hundred by now, maybe more. We're still losing a whore a week."

"What?" Harry stripped greasy reading glasses from his face, squinted at the beautiful woman.

"The G-R-K, or Jerk, as we call him. He's still active."

"Excuse me?" Harry gaped, caught himself, and closed his mouth. "I'm not quite sure what you're talking about, Miss."

"Marla." She was tall, powerfully built, a voraciously cunning misanthrope who so skillfully practiced girlness that men who weren't her clients mistook her for cute, even harmless— she had recently strangled someone on a boat near Neah Bay with 40-lb-test Trilene and was busy writing a poem about it on a napkin. "I bartend here," she said. "I just got off work and I've had my free drink but I could always use another."

Harry went to the bar then brought her a B52 because she looked like the kind of lady who enjoyed sweet drinks.

"Thanks, but make the next one a Sapphire martini, excruciatingly dry."

"Amen." Harry saddled up beside her on the clammy faux-oak stool, pleased and grinning. He placed his cold chubby paw on Marla's forearm.

"Hey, you ain't scored yet." Marla gently brushed him off and lit a cigarette.

"I never presume," Harry lied, for he had accumulated a fortune and a sinecure on presumption. "I missed a flight and just want some pleasant company."

She decided to reveal a little Marla, see how he liked it. "Well, I'm company, but no one in his right mind would call me pleasant. In fact you should pay and leave right now, forget you ever met me."

Harry smiled, sipped his scotch, waved a stylus over his ancient PDA, updating his schedule. He owned a new Blackberry but it was complicated and he stuck with the old. Marla tapped her cigarette. "Now you're going to ignore me?"

Harry pointed to the poem-napkin. "You're busy so I thought I'd wait."

"No, I'm writing a poem, or notes for a poem, actually, but I enjoy consideration, attention and flattery, whether or not it's genuine." Harry offered his hand and she gave her name again, and after some hesitation he said, "I'm Harry. So you're a poet?"

"No. I hate television, popular music, general conversation, and poetry, in that order. What's in the bag?"

"White chocolate and a smoked salmon; not kosher but then again, my favorite vices aren't. May I read your poem?"

"Not if you're a cop."

"I'm no cop," Harry replied. "I'm an attorney."

"How lucky for me." Marla piled seven inked napkins onto the fresh one and slid the pile into Harry's hands. "I'll get us martinis while you read."

Harry gave her twenty then unfolded his still-greasy reading glasses. He wiped them, then wiped his hands and wiped them again. Marla advanced to the bar with a series of tae kwan do kick, punch, and elbow-strike combinations. "Hey, Dave." The bartender balled then shot at her a slip of paper. "You're good for a hundred, unless I beat you next time." Marla crumpled Harry's twenty, shot it at Dave. "I told you, never write it down, unless you codify as well as I do. Two double lemon Beefeaters, since you're out of Sapphire, no vermouth." Dave scowled over the drinks. "You taking him? Know what we said last night. Now you're going against your word. I don't like him."

"Don't know yet. He eats white chocolate and smoked salmon. He's almost drunk enough, and he's Jewish. Why don't you like him?"

"He looks like a dead end or a last time. You should know."

"I think you already know."

"Bitch. Whore."

"Asshole. Faggot."

"Okay, I'll tell you something he said when he first bought you a drink and said a B52 was like a 777. I don't like that— we agreed not to use off people, we'd pass on the loonies, and he's the worst kind, he doesn't even know he's crazy."

"Point taken, but remember who's boss." Marla downed both martinis. "Yuk, you bruised it. Well, they're gone, so make me and Harry another brace."

"You say that every time." Dave poured two more from the metal shaker. "How can you tell if a martini's good or not? Goddamn things taste like pine-sol and rubbing alcohol to me, no matter how they're made."

Harry removed his glasses when Marla brought his drink. "It's good. I'm kind of an amateur poet myself. I go to a lot of readings, I mean, although I've never published. I'm on the boards of three poetry societies. I mean, I give them money and they let me hang around. I even judged a book contest once."

She decided to let him have it, seal the girl completely in her pink sarcophagus. "Is that supposed to be a joke, Harry, or just pathetic? Why do the rich fuck around with art? Don't you know those shabby losers laugh at you behind your back? They hustle you, and you don't get anything in return but words or pictures or pottery and a very bizarre form of prestige, brushing lint from their asses. I despise art patrons and artist wannabes. Real artists create brilliantly for a very short while then kill themselves or go mad; they don't teach or belong to societies or scavenge grants or endowments or patrons."

Harry swayed, leaning forward to steady himself. "That's not very nice. I don't like this new fad of ranting, of exposing dirty little secrets, prejudices, and arrogances to perfect strangers. Maybe because I'm a Jew I expect exactness, if not perfection, in manners, appearance, speech, and personality. I know you just said you don't care for general conversation, but what's so wrong with being nice?" His voice slurred, he burped and gagged, grimacing at the odor of sour stomach, whisky and juniper. "And I'm not so rich, Marla. And no one laughs at me."

"Don't hate me because I have beautiful hair, Harry, hate me because I'm a bitch. What do you think of my poem?"

He brightened, happy to turn from personal revelation to the banal. "It's really good. Reminds me a bit of early Lyn Graham. Ever read her?"

"Never heard of her."

"Well, she's become a celebrity which is too bad, because poets thrive on need and want, at least that's what Neruda said. And she used to be very beautiful, like Anne Sexton before the smoke and booze wrinkled her, and Elizabeth Bishop before she got fat. I mean model beautiful, Spiegel catalogs and Glamour magazine."

"I've heard of Anne Sexton."

"Very good. Well, you remind me so much of Lyn Graham I can't believe you've never read her, I mean your style of writing, the use of deliberate neologisms and the whole theological context and the huge lines and showy caesura. I'd guess you had a BFA from somewhere, even an MFA if your spelling improved although that doesn't matter, Camus and Fitzgerald were terrible spellers, and Berryman's first drafts approach imbecilic, and Dreiser was little more than a peasant, an idiot savant— the genius is in the rewrite, my girl. You didn't really just kill someone did you?"

"Of course not."

"Then why ask me if I'm a cop?"

Marla stared at Harry, hips rolling side to side on her stool, as a cat stares at a sparrow or mouse, ass rising and settling in anticipation. "Because I'm a whore. I thought that was obvious."

"You mean prostitute."

"No, I mean whore. Prostitute is a twenty dollar blow behind a dumpster on Pike. Prostitute is a maple bar and hamburger to a runaway for a handjob. Prostitute is missionary style with a condom, clock ticking. Prostitute is an escort service bimbo, a webcam exhibitionist, a cunt with a career. I'm a whore, Harry. I'm very good at being whatever dirty little secret you want to shed for awhile, because I love it— I love being your mother, your daughter, your sister, your dog; I love beating, burning, blood, scat, piss, anal, fisting. I'm a priestess of the suicide fuck, I'll take you as far as you want to go, I never say no, and I'm very expensive."

She savored his shock, shock being the most dangerous state of arousal, according to William James— she was tempted to throw that quote at him, out-quote the quoter. "There you go again, being deliberately nasty, what is it about me, maybe because I'm a Jew I come across as too complacent, but that's not true, I have lines you can't cross, I have very narrowly defined limits of patience, retribution, and forgiveness."

"That's twice you've mentioned being Jewish, Harry."

"You have a problem with that?"

"No, but you do. Think about it— a black person saying because I'm black all the time, or an Asian saying because I'm Chinese or Japanese or Korean, or a white person saying because I'm Caucasian, or Texan, or from the east coast, or Hispanic so don't you dare group me with white people even though I'm Caucasian unless I'm actually mestizo, as so many once-Spanish-dominated peoples are, conquistadors loved rape, it was considered a perquisite of soldiering, or anyone saying for that matter because I'm Christian, or Hindu, or Muslim, or atheist, or wealthy, or poor, or educated, or stupid, or a woman, or man, or blind, or crazy, or queer: it's absurd, isn't it, an iteration of creed, race, geographical location, sexual, political, economic orientation, gender or physical or mental integrity as a proxy for individuality? We are created as God's image, for God's amusement; it is blasphemy to alter or redefine or misrepresent that image. To loathe is a venial sin, Harry, but self-loathing is a mortal sin. As a Jew, your God is Yahweh, as an Arkpixian, my God is Megollanna. My God is brutal, jealous, ancient, and delights in sacrifice, as does yours. But what I really want to know is what perverse function do you wish to perform with my body and how much are you willing to pay?"

"No, no, no, I don't want that from you," he mumbled. "I mean I won't pay you for that, that's not what I want, there's something about you I desired the minute I saw you, I admit that— but none of the filth you mentioned, nothing depraved. I'll buy you drinks and we can talk. Drink all you want, I'll pay for it, and dinner if you want, to compensate you for your time. At first I thought you were simple, even susceptible, but there is depth to you and that intrigues me."

Marla took Harry's money and Dave shook her two martinis. "He'll be coming along," she said. "He's not as off as you think. And you're right about him not knowing himself, but he's as sane as we are." Dave shrugged. She grasped his hand, a small child's paw blanched and wrinkled from slicing lemons and limes. "Not using the aloe vera gel I bought you?"

"Until some customers complained about a funny taste in their drinks and that asshole dared lecture me about washing my hands. You aren't so smart all the time, are you?" He pulled free of her and slopped about with a rag of bleach water.

"Well, sweetie, one of these nights we'll just have to bring that asshole along." Back at their table Marla asked the time of Harry's connecting flight.

"I don't have a connecting flight."

"Why'd they cancel your first one?"

"It wasn't cancelled. I just didn't board."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. I never thought I was superstitious before but I guess I am." He tried to tell her about 777 and the recurring coincidences of seven in his day up to that point and sudden, inexplicable fears which lead him to Murphy's and sitting beside her, but he broke down halfway through the story: something was definitely wrong with his mouth, his limbs, his vision. I've never been this drunk before, he thought, not knowing he'd been poisoned, the last two rounds, with a tincture Marla concocted of cane syrup, psilocybin, and methylene dioxymethamphetamine.

"I was born July seventh, that's 7/7," said Marla. "Isn't that a scream, Harry?" She didn't tell him her birthyear was 1977, considering that information overkill. She motioned with fingers above his head as if hailing a taxi, sterling bracelets jangling. Dave brought martinis. Harry slurped his, coughed. Marla patted his back, hand crawling up his spine, sharp, red star decorated silver nails teasing his right earlobe. "The Babylonians considered seven ambivalent, good for some, bad for others; it's my favorite number, anyway. You should have made your flight, Harry; tonight seven is your number." Dave returned to his station, ran a Z-tape, tipped his bar-back, surrendered till and accounting slip to a sullen Lolitish brunette everyone called Princess. She wanted the night off but Dave ordered her in and she was afraid to say no, not as much afraid of Dave but terrified of Marla. "I told you, never marry a john. I'd waste anyone did that to me, without paying," Marla laughed, tracing her finger down a blue-green thumbprint on Princess's throat. "Time to go, Mars," said Dave. "We're late as it is."

"If you want to keep drinking and telling me stories and reading my poems you need to come with me, Harry. To a party."

"When?"

"Now." She coaxed Harry to his feet, arm around his waist steadying him.

Dave cinched the sash around his black leather duster, pulled his Stetson low. They exited Murphy's through the dim, malodorous kitchen into a tiny lot strewn with empty pallets, stacked aluminum beer kegs and soda cylinders, and two brimming blue dumpsters. From the north the shriek of jets departing, and screaming brakes of those landing, was an auditory shock. "They remind me of the lions," Harry cried. He fell, they lifted him. "The lions."

"Those goddamn jets remind you of lions?" Dave shouted. They pulled Harry to the short term parking gate which Dave opened with a key card. "He means the dumpsters, darling. Why do the trash bins remind you of lions, Harry?" Marla lit a cigarette. How prey reacted to her elixir always fascinated her. "Bronze lions. Two guard the Art Institute entrance. Chicago. I want to take you there. I love it there. If I die that could be my heaven."

Dave shook his head, working a single key from a chained cluster into the door of a freshly repainted white Cadillac. "And you don't think he's touched in the brain. Fuck, he's spooky. We agreed, Mars. Not the off. You said yourself the off are off-limits." Harry fell against the cold dark leather, Marla pulled his legs up and in. Dave slammed the door, checking first that Harry's feet were clear, and started the car. "Have some of this." He passed back a bottle of Loch Indaal.

The label swam before Harry's eyes. "Oh my god! This is my favorite Islay malt. I've been out. I've been looking for this." He drank deeply, sighing and ahhing, then positioned the bottle between his legs. "I feel a little better. Islay always brings me back. How far's this party?"

"Not far," Marla told him. "You'll enjoy yourself. Lots of beautiful people, some of them poets, some of them musicians, no one really famous, though, just beautiful by Seattle standards. They wouldn't be beautiful by New York or LA standards, but they squeeze by here." They advanced up Military Road. Glancing through the hazy mist of rain and other headlights, Harry read a sign aloud: Weyerhaeuser Experimental Levee. "What's that?"

"Being a bartender you catch a bit of everything," Dave said. "The lab dinks hang at Murphy's now and then. They test the impact of pulpmill drainage – they call the shit effluvium – on trees, bushes, the water, squirrels, birds, crane flies, whatever; they want to see how deep the shit perks, and how the landscape deals with it, whether things mutate with two heads or an eye where an ear should be."

"It looks haunted." Harry drank more scotch.

"If it were light, you'd see everything is dead. Hemlock stunted, spruce brown, rhododendron black-spotted, ferns withered. No wildlife, just a mob of scrawny, stinking possums. And where it breaks from the levee and flows into the bay, you can't clam or fish or gather mussels, the mudflats are totally toxic. A guy went clamming, ate just one fucking bucket of steamers, and now I hear he's on a list for a liver transplant."

"That's outrageous," said Harry. "he needs a good lawyer."

"Can't afford a good lawyer. Hell, this loser can't even afford a bad lawyer."

"So what do they do about it?"

Marla laughed. "All the law says is to have an Experimental Levee, and you see they have an Experimental Levee."

"I'll look into it," Harry said. "It's time I add environmental concerns to my agenda."

Dave exited Military Road onto 48th then turned, at a sign completely obscured by graffiti but which said Thornbury Park, into a working class slum recently incorporated as Seattle Heights but known as The Blights. "Behold our shithole," Marla said. "Like our little neighborhood, Harry?"

He stared into a gloom of fir and hemlock. "I can't really tell. I can't really see much. The trees are nice, trees always improve a view." The Caddy bumped and scraped down a county access road, jostled through the scotch broom and cottonwood scrub badlands of Valley Ridge Park and braked to a stop on the far edge of a Christmas tree farm bordering Angle Lake. Above them crackled and hummed high-tension cables slung from the Bonneville Power Agency's massive derricks. Dave slipped the gear into neutral, set the parking brake but left the car idling, headlights high-beam. "Now Harry, don't freak out but Mars and I have to conduct a little business. This guy's an asshole so stay in the car if you want."

Harry sipped nervously from his bottle. "I can't be involved in this. I'm an attorney, I can't be involved in drugs or any illegal activity. Why don't you just take me back now?"

"It's not drugs. Stay close to me." Marla grasped his damp plump hand. He slid meekly – just as a child he followed his mother, as she insisted he follow: quietly, never tugging and in step, so as not to interrupt her thoughts or strain her back – from the Cadillac.

Marla and Harry shadowed Dave to a black Ford. "Hey," Dave called. The driver's door of the Ford opened. "Fuck you, hey. I waited a fucking hour, you amateurs. My people are not gonna like this. You're lucky I don't just drive away, they'd sink you in the fucking river for this."

"Which one?"

"Which one what?"

"Which river?" repeated Marla. "Green? White? Snoqualmie? Clatsop?"

"Are you both morons? I can't believe I'm dealing with a faggot punk and his smartass crack-whore. Do you know who I am? Have you any concept of what tiny fucking insects you are?"

"Take a Midol," said Dave. "Here's the rabbit." Harry bolted from Marla. He crouched and vomited into the moist green maw of a fern. "I'm sick, Marla. Please take me back to the airport. I'll pay whatever you want. I lied when I said I wasn't rich. Just take me back and I'll give you anything you want. I'll buy you a house, a big nice house." The man jabbed his finger at Harry. "What the hell's that supposed to be? I wanted a nigger. We agreed on a nigger. I paid for a nigger."

"So you get a rich Jew," Marla replied. "A Jew lawyer. Isn't that highest on the list for your type?"

"What'd you say, bitch? My type?" He advanced on them; the sawed-off Mossberg 935 semi-auto in Dave's hands stopped him. "Alright, okay, fuck it, fuck you. He's a Jew?" Thick, hirsute hands unbuckled and tossed a money belt at Marla's feet. She blew smoke into the savage blue eyes. Harry opened his wallet. "Here's four hundred. I can get you more, much more. And you can use the cards, I won't report them stolen." The man stabbed him. Harry gasped as the metal shaft protruding from his stomach withdrew; he grabbed and the blade slid through his fingers then back into his body.

Running took him nowhere. His legs wouldn't work properly; he fell, raised himself, and then his bowels burst with a force, it seemed to him, of all his viscera being ejected. Harry stopped struggling. "I am a Jew!" His mouth spewed blood with the words. "I'm better than you! I always have been! See how a Jew dies!" He thrust his face towards heaven— hands high above his head, not in surrender but supplication, swaying not in terror but prayer: "oseh shalom bim-romav, hu ya-aseh shalom aleynu v'al kol yisrael, v'imru!" as the man finished it. He worked at Harry's corpse, stooping like a gardener then stood, panting, breath fogging from his thick-lipped mouth, stringy arterial blood mixed with chopped fatty tissue sliding from the blade.

"What was that— that funny sounding song?" asked Dave.

"A bit of the Kaddish."

"What does it mean?"

"It means you're sad, and sorry, but you know that God is great and that's all that really matters."

"That's really beautiful," said Dave. "It was a mistake to kill him."

"It's a mistake to kill anybody."

The man rubbed his hands with a KFC alcohol towelette. "I got that Jew bastard's blood all over me. Goddamn, that was good. I think I'll order another Jew for next time. That was really good."

"This is better." Dave centered the Mossberg semi-auto on the man's chest and fired point blank, rapidly squeezing the trigger twice; he winced as the impact and exit of two supersonic 12 gauge Federal Magnum sabots painted his face with a corona of vaporized bone, heart, lung. Dave wiped gore from his eyes, unzipped the money belt then rifled the man's wallet. "He's short a thousand, Mars. How'd he expect to get away with that?"

"It's enough," said Marla.

"What the fuck you mean it's enough? He cheated us!"

Marla kissed him, savoring a victim's blood. "Dave, listen to me. For today, for what we put in, for what we need tomorrow, it's enough." Dulling her excitement loomed the morose pill to be swallowed soon, when she had to go back and life became again glancing out windows with water seeping onto floors and fuses blown and TV— Christ, she could never kill enough TVs.

From the beginning they were roommates, both responding to Little Nickel ads, both sexless, dressed as for funerals. The first time they attempted sex – out of lingering, frustration-riddled habit – she said his breath smelled like raw frog's legs dipped in egg batter right before fried and he didn't like her odor either: she detested perfume, deodorant, powder, and her sweat, said Dave, smelled like Corn-Nuts, so they gave up on sex as they'd given up on everything else and fell in love sharing the wait, the death-watch. It was enough to work and wait for the end, and love seemed a strange and presumptuous question happily abandoned under such a fulfilling and phenomenal apocalyptic countdown, this exotic dance to extinction.

The Man Who Knew Big Words

"Dee-now-ment." Skagit poked the Greyhound driver with the Colt. "Means final outcome. Now there's a word a man should know and abide by, mister."

The driver wiped his face. "Don't touch me while I'm driving."

"You looked to be nodding off."

"I wasn't."

Skagit lit a cigarette. "Stop messing around, skipper. I know I could nod off, and I ain't driving. Just tell me yes or no."

Drubb nodded. "Yes. I'm beat. What do you want me to do?"

Skagit tucked the pistol back into his belt. "Hell, man, just wanted the truth. We'll chatter then, keep you awake. I'll get you more coffee next stop. If this bus right now hit ice— say like it did crossing the continental divide when you were doing sixty, seventy downgrade but you weren't sleepy then neither so you said, say this time the bus does more than just scrape the guardrail it spins round 'n round on black ice then crashes, flipping end over end. Dee-now-ment. See what I'm saying?"

"We'd all die!" giggled seven year old Polly Tullis. Her grandfather had forbidden her to bother the men anymore but he was sleeping, happy they were to be released at the next stop's trade for fuel, food, water, cigarettes. "Could it happen, Mr. Drubb? Are you gonna crash?"

"Of course not honey," the driver replied. "There's no ice here. The sanding machines have already been through. And this bus is bigger and newer than other buses; it's a DL3 model and has great traction. And besides it's mostly flat here, we'd just plow into a field is all."

"Final outcomes are inter-midden," Skagit told Polly. "That means real bad things like losing your job or wife or a leg in the war stop just long enough to get you hoping with all your heart everything's gonna be okay then wham! pow!" Skagit spread his arms, jutted out his neck making himself resemble a buzzard. "Grawl grawl!" he cried, swooping down on the little girl and blowing smoky pepperoni breath, "vultures eat you clean to a skeleton!" Polly threw her rabbit skin coat over her head in mock terror.

All this commotion roused Goose. He coughed, blew his nose into a paper napkin, took a fresh fifth from the sack of bottles. "Where we now?"

"Nowhere we weren't last time you asked," Skagit answered.

"What's that mean?"

"Still desert, still Nevada," the driver said, not wanting them to fight again. "Near Wendover, the decommissioned Air Force nuke-testing range."

"I mean what I say," said Skagit. "I don't mince words. That's a sin."

"Not so smart," Goose belched. "Knows all these big words but here we're stuck on a damn bus going to Salt Lake when we're supposed to be in Mexico. And why's it so damned cold? Turn up the heat!

"Colder'n a witch's tit!" exclaimed Polly, pushing aside the coat to clap her hands.

"Now Polly," Drubb told the little girl, "don't go repeating everything you hear." He turned to Skagit. "C'mon, man, keep your conversation fit for the young lady."

"Pardon me. Truly. Now keep your eyes on the road or I'll" Skagit unwrapped a Hershey's, snapped off a block for Polly. "have to shoot you." The girl chewed happily. Skagit grinned. "No babe in the woods, this one, no sir. I bet she's in an advanced program at school, ain't you? Reminds me of my own little girl. Smart as a whip. Fearless too."

"How old's your daughter?" Polly asked.

"Fifteen, I think. Ain't seen her ten years and she was five or so then. Ten and five make fifteen."

"Brilliant," said Goose. "Pure fuckin' genius." Skagit smacked him, but without enthusiasm and took the bottle of Popov vodka. "You heard the Captain, retard. No cursing in front of the Missus."

Goose rubbed his ear. "You only get away with that 'cause you got the gun."

"Wanna hold it and see I don't do it again?"

"Show me the gun!" Polly tugged Skagit's bomber jacket to reveal the Colt.

"Gentlemen, please," Drubb implored. He watched, in his mirror, the convoy of police, state patrol, FBI and media vehicles following his bus, but what on earth good did any of it do? Some of his scared and exhausted passengers slept fitfully; most stared forward with roadkill eyes. Nine remained after the second trade, down from twenty, thank God. But they were cagey, wouldn't reply when he talked to them, so united in their misery, their fury at not having been chosen for release. They'd do anything, Drubb thought, to survive, to escape harm. They'd kill me, the girl, even. Burn us at the stake, offer us to the rape-mob of Sodom. Look at their eyes, poor bastards. Please help me, Jesus, help me make this turn out all right.

"Feels good to wet the whistle." Skagit drank deeply then thrust the bottle back into Goose's hand, told his partner to take his meds. Goose shook several tablets from a brown plastic container into his mouth, washed them down with vodka. "But for your information (Skagit directed this to Drubb) believe it or not I am a moderator and a mediator. A little of everything belongs to all of us, not doled out piecemeal by billionaires at their whim, that's my theory. Girl you ever seen a Sawsquash?"

Polly shook her head. "There's no such thing."

Skagit grinned. "Who told you that? I seen one in Oregon and I seen one in Idaho."

"I watched it on Discover. It's a legend. There's no Lock Nest neither."

Skagit scratched his new beard. "Well, I'm here to tell you the whole stretch of Oregon and Idaho and Utah, from Pendleton to Pocatello to Ogden, is thick with 'em. And don't believe that crap you hear about the Sawsquash being a gentle vegetarian. Big and hairy, seven feet tall and loves meat as well as you and me. They eat it raw and they're crazy for the stuff. You know what meat they most enjoy? Huh?"

Polly shook her head. Skagit fed her another piece of chocolate.

"Human rib-meat, barbecued, that's what!" he cried, poking her side. "Most the hikers and campers disappearing around here are being eaten up by the Sawsquash, is my hy-pawthis. A whole band of 'em roam at night looking for people to drag off and eat." He delivered a horse bite, gently squeezing the chubby triceps of her arm. Polly squealed, the Gameboy falling from her chocolate stained hands onto the ribbed aisle of heavy-duty rubber flooring then bouncing out of sight.

"Polly," the Greyhound driver prompted for the third time that morning, "why don't you try take a nap? Just close your eyes."

"She ain't sleepy," said Skagit. He laughed as Polly rummaged under the seat for her Gameboy, breaking off more candy for her. Goose snored, drooling. Skagit wiped, disgustedly, saliva from the shoulder of his bomber jacket then slid Goose against the window. Strong, Drubb thought, watching Skagit effortlessly handle his deadweight companion. The drunkard smacked his lips then snored against the glass, the scruffy skin of his jowls crinkling into a toothless hound's muzzle. Strong. I don't think I could take him. Twenty years ago, sure. Now, don't know.

"You been friends long?" asked Drubb.

"Long enough, skipper. Left Seattle last week. He gets a little VA disability pension direct deposited to him every month at Wells Fargo and he'd drink it all up if I didn't take it first, dole it out." He lifted Goose's limp right arm into the air. "See these finger stumps? Gook bayonet sliced through clean as butter and Goose here kept on fighting. Got the Silver Star and Navy Cross but look how he lives now. Little better than white trash, and he's a war hero. I'm Desert Storm myself so I don't expect nothing, that was no real war, we slaughtered 'em, it disgusted me."

"I was in Nam," said Drubb. "I've made the real world work. Bunch of crappy jobs before I answered a Greyhound ad and went to bus-driver's school in Reno."

"Well skipper," Skagit replied, "you're a black man. Don't take this wrong, I like you okay, but if you're colored and even the teeniest bit smart and play the game then you'll do better in this country than a white man of the same circumstances."

"I completely disagree. If you love God then you got everything."

"I do love God, but don't get me started on religion, skipper, I killed a man once over religion. We veterans gotta stick together. It's us against them."

"Remember that when the shooting starts," Drubb said softly.

"None of you gets hurt you do what I tell you." Skagit checked his watch. "Twenty minutes to high noon, skipper. Copy that?"

"Got it. And Polly? You'll let her go this round?"

"Wouldn't hurt her for the world." Skagit drew a finger across the top of the child's head. Her hair was thick and slightly oily, she was engrossed with Pokemon Yellow, increasing the stats of her favorite character, Pikkachu, and squinting close because the light wasn't good. She had a Nyko worm-light but it was broken and hadn't worked very well anyway. Her grandfather had promised her a Gameboy Advance SP for her birthday, then she wouldn't have to hunch over and squint anymore.

"That's not what I meant," said Drubb. "I know you'd never hurt her. But she likes you. It's not going to be easy, you know."

"I'm sick of waiting for nothing but another day of nothing," said Skagit. "I'm sick of the way flies make patterns on the walls – letters spelling out all the things that stink – ha ha that's a good one. Naw I'm not crazy, just damn tired of taking care of this old wino."

Drubb nodded. "What was his unit?"

"First Cav, '67-'69."

"I'll be damned," said Drubb. "I was 185th too. '69-'70. We only missed each other by a year. When he wakes up it'll give us something to talk about."

"It's a small world," said Skagit. He lit a cigarette, held then blew a thick stream of smoke. "Ain't that a stupid phrase? Why not say it's a small-minded world, and you're either in or out of what matters. People do that, you know. Stand there looking at each other like cows. Ever see two cows meet at a pond?"

"No," said Drubb. "I was a city boy. Still am. But I get what you're saying."

"Almost high-noon, skipper."

"Right," said Drubb.

Polly switched off her Gameboy, stretched. "What's high noon?"

"Nothing for you to worry about, honey." Drubb said.

"Captain's right," Skagit told her. "Nothing for you to worry about. You listen to the captain now."

"But you got the gun." Polly pointed her finger at Drubb, dropped her thumb-hammer.

"Any fool can have a gun." Skagit took her hand. "Girl, you got beautiful fingers just like my baby. Piano fingers. You play piano?" Polly accepted the last of the chocolate. "I play chopsticks and camp bells coming and furry Lisa but I hate piano, I like softball a lot better and I only play because Grampa says I have to. He makes me take lessons on Wednesdays in the church basement with Mrs. Cory who's the organist's wife and she's big and fat and makes noises with her mouth when I'm practicing and sometimes farts. Doesn't that suck?"

"Yes it does suck," Skagit laughed. "Just like you I hate being told what to do."

"I bet nobody tells you what to do," said Polly.

"Girl, you go to college and make something of yourself or there'll be no end of people always telling you what to do. I have a rebellious personality. I'm oz-ten-tay-shus they said in prison. That means you'd rather fight than listen. Then they said I had polly-dips-ya which is pretty sounding, like your name, but means I do bad things when I'm drunk. But jail was good for me. I read a lot and learned big words. I made everyone, even the warden, repeat everything many times until I had them coming and going. Wanna hear a story?"

Polly nodded. "Is it bloody and full of icky monsters?"

"Nope, but it's scary in its own way."

"Okay," said Polly, patting the rabbit coat over her knees. "I have the How book, and Lego Mania. It's for making neat stuff. My favorite is Water Jet and Slick Racer. And I collect Magic Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh though Grampa says it's a stupid waste of money. I have a Blue Divert worth twenty bucks I traded two Fogs for. And my favorite games are Monster Rancher and all the Pokemon but especially Silver, Yellow and Red and when I get my Advance I'm gonna get Pokemon Sapphire and Lufia and Mega Man."

Skagit nodded as if he understood. "When I got out of prison and into a halfway house I knew this loser named Jimmy. A halfway house is just what the name implies— parole lets you out of jail but they don't trust you all the way yet living in society so you stay for half awhile with other ex-cons and some fat ass social worker. Mess up you get sent back; that's how vocational rehabilitation works. Well, this guy Jimmy was never meant to make it."

"Was he a serial killer or arsonist?" asked Polly.

"Aw, no, girl. He stole cars but he was a junkie, and sloppy, a smash and grab man, a jacker. But Jimmy wanted to be liked so told us he was a combat vet. But you know immediately if someone's lying about that. I met him in group therapy."

"Did you go crazy?"

"Naw, everybody goes. Group was fun – coffee and donuts, shuckin and jivin – typical con stuff about how fine your ole lady is, how she's got a new car and cool job and the great setups you got waiting for you next week or next month or whenever. Well, Jimmy was completely deaf in his left ear and received a thirty-percent service-connected disability pension from the VA. Eight hundred bucks a month tax free, Jimmy was living large. I mean he wasn't missing an eye or an arm or leg. He said he lost his ear to Bouncing Betty and got a Purple Heart for it. But I knew he was lying 'cause his chubby little face was just as smooth as a baby's, not a scar on him. Asked him about that and he just made up another lie, concussion made him deaf, you know. Best to catch liars in just one lie and let it go at that."

"Who was Bouncing Betty?" asked Polly.

"It was a type of explosive, a land mine," the Greyhound driver answered. "Nestled in a canister which was sunk with a contraption resembling a post-hole digger with the handles sawn-off and right-side-up, so that Betty could fly right out like the fireballs in a roman candle."

Skagit unhooked the bottle from Goose's hand-in-lap and drank more Popov. "Like the Captain says, Bouncing Betty just popped up from the ground when you stepped on her and blew you up. Except that's not what happened at all to Jimmy. Men always lie when they're ashamed of the truth. He was never in combat. He lost his eardrum to a number two pencil. That's called sub-terfuze, girl, painting your past more colorful or braver than it really was."

Polly frowned. "Who stabbed his ear with the pencil?"

"Why he did, the dumbass, or at least he was half-responsible. Wasn't in Special Forces at all, was a clerk-typist at Fort Benning, just a damn office pogue. His job was to type out DD-214 forms and citations for Good Conduct medals and requisitions for toilet paper or foot powder and crap like that. He just sat there all day typing the exact same forms. Different names or numbers, same forms. Jimmy wasn't very smart, didn't know a lot of big words like I do. One day he was sitting at his typewriter digging earwax out with a number two pencil and the Lieutenant – he'd been busted down from Captain the year before and was always drunk – slammed in from the hall through the door and just about drove that pencil into Jimmy's brain."

"It's noon," Drubb said, wearily. "Where do you want to pull over?"

Polly stuck out her tongue. "That was so gross!"

"Ain't it?" agreed Skagit. "Tragic waste of a man's faculty. I mean Van-Go lost an ear for a purpose, cut it off for a whore. I read that in Reader's Digest so it's certainly fit for a lady, as the Captain says. Van-Go could still hear birds singing through the hole— it just wasn't so pretty. Can you imagine how humiliating to lose your hearing to a number two pencil? Reader's Digest will never have a story about poor Jimmy." Skagit elbowed Goose twice. "Get up. Let's go, old man."

"Wha," Goose mumbled, coming awake. He wiped a string of saliva from his chin, fingers quavering.

"They got our money ready," said Skagit. "We're getting off."

Goose lit a cigarette. "Now? How's that, Captain? Why you didn't wake me up?"

Drubb said nothing but slowed, looking for a stretch of shoulder without punctures. Skagit folded his arms across his chest and stared out the window at absolutely nothing, but behind his burning eyes an outline of Salt Lake City ran in multicolored streaks, a canvas horizon abandoned in a downpour at a starving artist's sidewalk sale— Paris on the salt flats. Creamy quartz monzonite towering above the jewel-bright gardens of Temple Square. The temple where, his grandmother told him, souls of millions were sealed, none forgotten on paper and the love of baptismal fonts never evaporated. Holy of Holies. He'd lost the photo of her under uplifted golden wings of Cricket-Eater, monument to the seagull, the plague nullifier. She made the best bread and though she was dirt poor she bought him new shoes and God let her die the worst way, of cancer.

"Deseret was what Brigham Young wanted to call it all," Skagit said. "In honor of the honeybee. Instead, the Feds renamed the state Utah in honor of the tribes of Utes the cavalry blew away." The noon sun was bright but cold, haloed with silver rings tossed from the chromosphere. "Here?" asked the captain. "Good a place as any," Skagit replied. Drubb pulled over, braked the bus to a complete stop, and powered down.

"This ain't the plan," Goose complained.

"New plan," said Skagit. "When I ever done you wrong?"

"That a joke?"

"No joke," he told Goose. "We'll be getting back on, rich."

"About time I see some money, by God."

"Don't go." Polly stood in the aisle. No other passenger moved. Polly's grandfather beckoned to her but she ignored him and turned back to Skagit. "Please don't go." They're already dead in their minds, Drubb thought, scanning the passengers. They're already full of bullets, torn and broken. They won't believe they're safe until they're home. Then they'll talk, or try to, or scream in their sleep. They want me to do something, all right, I won't panic, I won't freak out; I'll wipe the sweat off my face and straighten my tie and hat, I'll do that for them. "You'll come back?" Polly asked, and Drubb took her hand, pulled. She resisted him until Skagit placed his hand at her back, propelling her towards the driver. "Just the cops again, Polly. Me and Goose need to talk with 'em. I'll get you some fresh batteries and more chocolate."

"The cops!" Polly tugged Skagit's sleeve with her free hand. "They raided our house, just like on TV. Gramma was screaming and Hoover our dog bit one and I thought they'd shoot him but they sprayed him with pepper. They kicked the door down and broke Grampa's lamp. They were looking for a crackhouse so they kicked our door."

Skagit kissed the top of her head. "They do make mistakes from time to time."

Drubb opened the door. Behind him he could feel the stirring of breath and he turned to glare into the two or three faces that might have been wincing mouths into questions. He keyed his PA. "Everybody stay in your seats! And don't have your heads up rubbernecking in the windows in case of broken glass." There, he thought, I've done something. I was no coward. I drove them well, damn it. I drove.

"By-by, girl. So long, Greyhound man."

"This ain't the plan," Goose whined. "This's the middle of fuckin' nowhere."

The FBI Tactical Response and Extraction Team couldn't believe their collective eyes. "They're both clear," Team Leader Vic in his Ford Explorer radioed. "Take them. Repeat take both men." The extraction team grunts, having followed the quasi-department law enforcement caravan in a red Dodge Ram van bearing the white wrench-swinging Mister Mechanic logo, now raced forward, screeching to a halt behind the Greyhound. Two khaki-jumpsuited Mister Mechanics burst out; one swung a cut-down M16A2 (called in the field an "M4") the other cradled a Benelli M1014 twelve-gauge. Drubb began to sweat freely, water staining the brow of his cap and flooding down his neck into a dark V branding the chest of his uniform shirt.

Car 16, Nevada Highway Patrol, didn't acknowledge the extraction team or understand the significance of the red van. The troopers assigned to 16 watched Skagit push Goose forward, cold sand blowing up around both men in flimsy dust-devils. "Which one's the hostage?"

"Hell, I don't know. Cover me." The Corporal unbuckled the safety strap holding down his pistol, drew the weapon and moved forward. "Freeze!" he called when he saw the Colt in Skagit's hand.

"Go on now." Skagit gave Goose another shove. "That's the code word. They got the money. Go on up and get it."

"Freeze? What crazy kinda code word is that?" Goose squinted, trying to make out the advancing cop as frozen grit blew into his eyes. He pulled his Buck. "Hey! You got our money?"

"Down, down!" the troopers screamed.

The Mister Mechanics shouted frantically for the cops to hold fire. Goose advanced three steps reluctantly then fell to the ground, the wound in his chest spurting a watery stream of blood. He rolled to his side, knees drawing up slowly, and coughed more blood, the pocket-knife dropping from his hand. The Colt recoiled in Skagit's hands over and over until both patrolmen were down, head-shot. He crossed the highway and ditch through a hail of fire ("snow-trumpets and Chinese lanterns!" Skagit laughed) then vaulted over barbwire to stumble through creosote bush, hit again and again, his ancient Second Chance vest shredded. He ejected the GoldCup's empty magazine and slammed home a fresh clip of heavy bronze cartridges. His fingers, slippery with blood, fumbled with the slide release; a face appeared above the creosote, Skagit fired and the face disappeared. A swarm of bees enveloped his own head and dying he remembered, happily, several more big words – he loved big words because Luke had written of Jesus sitting among teachers and in the end he made fools of them all – the teachers, the Pharisees.

Polly descended two steps before Drubb grabbed her. "No!" she screamed, twisting in his grasp, "No!" Outside, the desert exploded with the cacophony of final firefight: chat-cracking M16 silenced by the 45's percussive whump-whump quickly answered by staccato pops of .9mm and .40 caliber pistol fire. Then the terrific triple boom of the Benelli's magnum shells. Then complete silence. Then the voices of men and sirens, close and distant. Drubb looked out his windshield. Far in front of the bus lay a dead seagull, wind tilting ant-freckled wings. The gull was the biggest he'd ever seen that far inland.

The same cold-soiled wind blasted through the open door of the bus, lifting Polly's Easter dress, snapping it up and down like a flag. Her panties were pink, she had matching pink stockings and black shoes. The Greyhound driver pulled the little girl close, smoothed down her dress, shielded her face from a tiny portion of all the ugliness she would from that moment on inherit.

Ourselves, Not War

The Pine Lake (neither pines nor lakes within twenty miles) Veterans Administration Medical Center's (VAMC) Mental Health Center's (MHC) first floor hall reeked of Pine-Sol and the crematorium odor of rancid brisket grease; corned beef & cabbage had been offered for supper and its scent ("Compost," said TestTube. "Farts," said RoboVoice, though he could no longer smell, the debridement of his pharynx and larynx having partially collapsed the bony structures of his face, giving him a reptilian appearance) burdened the air. Following outbreaks of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating bacteria), and Hepatitis C (HCV), HQ ordered all throughways bleached twice daily, causing the MHC's (the oldest pile in the complex) linoleum tiles to curl at the edges like antique barn shingles. In many spaces mismatched squares had been epoxied back, the overflow permanently hardened into snottish clots.

TestTube (Enlisted: Korea, 51-53; Nam 65-68: MOH, Silver, Bronze Stars, Purple Heart) and RoboVoice (Officer: Nam 68-70; 71-72: Navy Cross, Silver, Bronze Stars w/oak leaf clusters, Purple Heart) always met After Dinner— the time between six and seven-thirty when, statistically, the least amount of people die in hospitals. The elevators to 9W, "Psychiatric Stay," had been secured; the two friends from open wards, orthopedic and oncology (Bones-5W, Cancer-7E) grumbled about not being able to ping pong and warstory with the vets committed there. "Harmless babies anyway, shot up with so much shit," RoboVoice said. "Haldol, Cogentin, Hydroxyzine, Risperidone, Nefazodone, Aripiprazole, Divalproex, and Stellazine: it's not us they'd kill if they could anyway."

TestTube snorted. "Maybe. Don't care for the Desert Stormers, all that whining about the sand niggers they bulldozed— what the hell they think they went for, hummus and falafel? The bellydancing? The new rules are for the convenience of the staff is all. Ping Pong helps me sleep, praise God." RoboVoice snapped his fingers. "I lose my mind just shoot me. Pow!" TestTube stopped, stared at his blue foam slippers.

"Sorry. I keep forgetting." RoboVoice wasn't sorry for anything but didn't want to listen to the fogy's Confession or endure another "sign of the cross" ritual. RoboVoice, atheist, didn't get crossing or genuflection; when someone mentioned Jesus Christ as Personal Savior he responded any asshole believes a man can return from the dead never was no combat Marine, that's for goddamn sure.

TestTube dropped to his left knee, licked right index finger and traced a spit crucifix on the floor. "Not your fault." He stood and crossed himself: forehead father, son heart, right shoulder holy, left shoulder ghost. "Jesus Christ shed his blood for me and all worthless sinners. I still see it plain as day. I walked in on them; every detail burnt into my eyes and brain and just held there tick-tock: sweat dripping from her breasts, he sucking her left nipple, her left shoulder smeared white with Noxzema; she'd burnt terribly that Sunday on the houseboat though I warned her to keep her top on. He touched her everywhere, lifted the sweat from her with his thumbs and sucked it the way you take salt before tequila. His own sweat spun onto the sheets, like shaking turpentine off a paintbrush; I still see it all. Good blue percale sheets, we bought them at Sears. He had a hairy back. That surprised me. Angela used to joke how repulsive she thought hairy men, like baboons, but there she was working him, bucking up into him, smack-smack-mushy-mish I could hear their private areas colliding and she groaning god almighty David fuck me David. I'm not angry anymore— Christ cleansed me so when I think of Angela now I think of beauty, a thrush in the morning after rain when the only illumination is distant sheet lightning: that was from one of her poems. I never read them when she was alive I read them now. She saw me before he could. He never saw me. I'm boring you ain't I?"

"You never bore me," RoboVoice lied, but in fact this current version of The Confession delighted him; he began to tell TestTube that describing his dead wife's sweaty breasts, colliding private parts, creamed shoulder, bucking and yelling "fuck" really livened up the story. Instead he said, "You had every right to shoot them."

"No. So long ago, I'm not the same man."

"The courts thought so, too. Forgive and forget." RoboVoice lowered his Servox electrolarynx, a device resembling a pager, from the side of his neck.

TestTube was called so because the VAMC's Agent Orange Registry physicians and technicians had performed every known test and procedure, and several they invented in situ yet his guts festered: right kidney, left lung, twenty inches of colon and a cubic foot of malignant skin from his chest, neck and back had been removed. In 1980 he'd been paroled from Leakesville, a Mississippi state prison, his fifth year of slow death of a ten-year sentence, and now the cancer was in his bones. He nodded. "I've forgiven them because I'm forgiven in turn. You run things through your mind a million times a million different angles and still something dark behind pulls your strings; your thoughts aren't your own. I don't mean that crap we discuss in group about ourselves in war; I mean Hell. You think about Hell, don't you?"

"I think I've made it clear to you I think religious fanatics are deluded assholes hiding from life, and that love is the rarest goddamn element on earth and when some asshole says he loves me or Jesus loves me I want to break his face."

TestTube stopped, not realizing he was being teased. "I'm an asshole too?" He blinked, tiny points of light sparkling through the drug-dulled hazel. RoboVoice began to say yes you dweeby cheese-smelling codger. Instead he said, "I take it from you, the Jesus bullshit, because you got the Medal of Honor, because you did three tours in two wars, because you volunteered for Nam, because you rotated home and executed two people for adultery but still have the balls to lecture me about love and redemption. That's why I take it from you." His flat mechanical monotone echoed through the hallway. Laryngeal carcinoma (thirty years of filterless Camels); the laryngectomy left him voiceless, a stoma buttholed (his description) the florid skirt of his throat. "Come on, I'll buy you a Coke," said RoboVoice.

"Diet, of course," TestTube agreed. "And Cheetos."

In the fluorescent stillness of the hall seven-thirty became eight; the last visitor, a young black woman dressed in the nurse's whites of another hospital, kissed Jarak, a VA security sergeant. Jarak, a side of beef draped in blue polyester, leaned over the Formica counter. "Ah baby I love you drive safe now see ya soon. Yamba, behave now, listen to mama."

TestTube and RoboVoice watched the attractive RN exit the automatic glass doors, an open Winchell's box held low until the boy with her chose a maple bar. "Damn Jarak you got a fine ole lady," RoboVoice said, and Jarak laughed. "How you boys tonight?"

"That your kid? Good lookin kid," said TestTube, and Jarak nodded "uh-huh." He let them into the staff lounge to buy snacks then secured all entrances except the white batwings separating ambulance bay from Primary Care. Jarak hung his size 42 glossy leather belt, loaded with flashlight, Leatherman Wave, radio, pepper-spray, and bit the first of three Arby's Big Montanas. Horsy Sauce dripped down his chin, his neck muscles bulged, keys jangled; he finished the sandwich in three bites, washing the entrée down with 2 creams, 3 sugars coffee.

The "boys" moved out of sight; elevators whirred, telephones rang, from a distant corridor came an industrial mop-bucket's thumpa-squee! RoboVoice and TestTube finished their nightly round by stopping to pester MopMan. "Hey hey, Bobbie." TestTube offered his hand, high-five.

Robert balanced the mop handle against the wall, mouth agape as he formed "Huh. Hi," and gently smacked the cadaverous palm. "MopMan, my man!" RoboVoice's esophageal voice brayed; he was Pine Lake's sole laryngectomy patient (of seven) who could speak well esophageally: by swallowing air into his esophagus and flexing his sternocleidomastoid muscles six reasonably ungarbled words could be ejected. But he spit doing it, fingers crammed under the hole, a wolf-whistle. Robert didn't think it looked or sounded very nice, preferring the electronic speech. "Whu?" he asked, not understanding the continued spew of grunts. RoboVoice pressed the pseudo-larynx and repeated, "How'd your date go with Michelle?"

Robert's mouth gaped wider. His brain flashed she's fabulous; we drank two of a half-case of '92 Madison cabernet, watching the slack tide at Kalaloch rise to a killer surf, lights from Quinalt Island obscured in fog, the stink of dog fennel mixed with brine smelling, weirdly, like watermelon and gasoline, then Michelle said her grandma took quince jelly for cancer and defiance for everything else, a cool brand of homeopathy, she said, then we kissed. They waited.

"Fuh. Fine. She. Muh. Movie. We. Guh. Good time."

RoboVoice snapped his fingers. "I knew you two would hit it off. Didn't I tell you they were perfect?"

"So you did," TestTube agreed. "Bobbie and Michelle. Nice ring to it."

"MopMan and BookWorm," RoboVoice laughed. "Even better ring."

Michelle Frost worked as librarian for Volunteer Services, third floor (Freebies-3W), stocking the rolling carrels and waiting room racks with paperbacks, magazines and newspapers noon to three Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Michelle's husband Frank, a pilot, died; she married at 17, widowed at 22. The government listed him MIA 1971; in 1974 a new Major (she could tell because she'd dealt with so many Field Grade officers— old Majors sported patinaed bronze oak leaves just as Lite Colonels decaying-in-grade let their silver oaks blacken knowing they'd never make Fullbird) with a raw shaved face and Jim Beam-Colgate breath told her Frank ejected over Cambodia and died two months later of dysentery and untreated fractures in a bamboo cage in Cham. He didn't have to tell her a goddamned thing, he said, but had known and liked Frank so just sign the papers and get a check for life. She signed his briefcase of papers, then the Major with Brasso'd oak leaves asked for a drink, and when she brought him Frank's dusty Bushmills he tried to kiss her. That's what she remembered about losing her husband: the coppery stink of ink, an eggy breath toothpasted & boozy; the shine of brass and rustle of paper, the misdirected lust.

Michelle moved the library from floor to floor in three-tiered gray metal carts. She was in charge of exactly one thousand two hundred sixty-two books and periodicals, of which at any time approximately one hundred thirty were shelved in alphabetical order on an individual cart: first tier nonfiction, second tier romance, bottom tier westerns. The job infrequently presented some challenge, such as where to shelve classics, the G or W of an encyclopedia set, or textbooks; most often, she carried these "special" books home. RoboVoice, being a college graduate (BS Geology, Missouri U 66) helped Michelle sort through the cartons of newly donated books and when she'd asked, teasing, where he'd place Past And Present, Demian, and Shibumi, he'd mulled it over then stuck Carlyle in nonfiction, Hesse in romance, Trevanian in westerns.

RoboVoice fancied Michelle himself but that was impossible and he had enough dignity to not even try, turning his passion instead to brotherly matchmaker, but when much-younger Robert (Enlisted Reserve: Desert Shield/Desert Storm 90-91: Bronze Star, Purple Heart, Medical Retirement, VA 70% Service-Connected Disability) and much-older Michelle continued to ignore each other he'd become so insufferable that finally a date was made.

"Gonna take her out again, Bobbie?" TestTube asked.

"Muh. Maybe. Yuh. Yes."

"That's the spirit." RoboVoice winked, his lizard's mug so frighteningly close that Robert backed away. "How bout a Coke? We'll bring you a Coke. Want some Fritos and Coke?"

"Nuh. Juh. Jarak. Duh. Don't. Buh. Bother him." He hefted his dented green Stanley Thermos, half full of coffee. "Uh. I'm. Fuh. Fine." Every time he moved, he sold or gave or threw away everything; he kept the Thermos because he'd enjoyed working the derrick in Flatonia, Texas. Lassoing the pipe with his good hand, punching it into place in the rack with his stumped one— "Damnedest thing I ever seen" his driller bragged. Robert at peace, a new start at last he thought, just him and God, then the blowout: he'd "shined the cable" down to earth from his monkeyboard as the fireball killed everyone else on the platform. No complaints until ranchers slung coyote corpses over barbwire: coyotes murdered by set-guns firing cyanide pellets when the trap baits were bitten into. Cowardly ambush: he'd said so in a bar in Vernon, hammering the someone who jumped him, who threatened to kill him later but wouldn't press charges. Then he'd spoke up for coyotes in a Wichita Falls dive and hurt three more men. After posting Robert's bail the driller said, "You're a good man, Bobby, one of the best I ever hired, but crazy as a shithouse rat." Then the blowout and dead, these first real friends – even his army buddies weren't true friends, he was an outsider, a loner, allergic to whores, they all said, christ he likes gospel, turn that shit down – at thirty he finally had real friends, all dead.

Bobbie shook his mop. A shiny penny, green TicTac and boomerang-shaped roach leg appeared in the fallout.

"Now you got a woman, you better think about your future," RoboVoice needled. "They should promote you, you been here three years. I'll talk to Jack and see about getting you down to Physical Plant, okay?"

TestTube, caught staring at the pink mass of Bobbie's right hand, grinned and winked. Robert nodded. His brain flashed I need solitude, empty cool spaces, quiet. I'd go crazy with your imbecile friend Jack spitting mint snuff-drool into a Styrofoam cup: his Adult Pleasure Palace porno cards, his farts, fart jokes, racism, misogyny, misanthropy, homophobia. He opened his mouth wide, tongue purple and momentarily useless.

They waited.

"Yuh. You. Fuh. Find. Bluh. Bliss."

RoboVoice and TestTube laughed, puzzled. "All right, MopMan. Be cool." They moved on, TestTube mimicking Robert's stuttered F: "I thought he was going to tell you to fuh-fuck off; would serve you right." He wiggled his big toe through a tear in the blue foam slipper and RoboVoice prodded the protruding toe with his own foot, hoping to cause pain. "Replace those damn slippers. Just ask they'll toss you a new pack. The floor's got God knows what germs."

TestTube stared at his toes. "The only dirt concerns me is the dirt eternal. Christ blessed a prostitute for wiping his feet, the point being that dirt inside is far worse than dirt outside." RoboVoice began to ask whether or not Jesus enjoyed having his feet rubbed with whore's hair, and how often he had it done, but the meanness became fatigue. "I'd sell my soul to smell chocolate or beef stew or fresh mown grass." The friends bid each other good night and stood at separate elevators, as they always did, to return to their wards. Jarak once asked them why they didn't ride together, RoboVoice getting off at 5 then TestTube at 7, but the vets smiled as if he didn't get it.

RoboVoice's elevator dropped first. "Ben," he said. "Night, Allen," TestTube replied, entering his elevator immediately after; Robert pushed his cart ahead and watched the two men disappear. His brain flashed truth comes tricky down from mountaintops; carbon cools the interstellar medium, altering its subsequent chemical evolution — that is man, that is all he is, the cooling of carbon. He stopped, drank from the green Thermos, switched the cassette in his Walkman from Tchaikovsky's Dumka to Beethoven's Pathétique. Mass-produced classical music was a good thing, though eventually the tapes crackled and hissed from constant play and were replaced with offerings from the $3.99 bin at Music Mart. MopMan entered the men's toilet, slipped on elbow-length yellow rubber gloves; the fingers of the right-hand glove were tied into a knot. He slopped Pine-Sol diluted with water over the floor and urinals, mopped the powerful milk into the main drain then Windexed the mirrors and stainless steel fixtures. Robert peeled the gloves, sighing as sweat evaporated from his hands. He turned into his reflection in a mirror, smoothed his mustache, scowled at the keloid looping from his temple down-cheek to cross his throat. He pulled thick blond hair down his scar then wet his fingers and straight-backed it the way his father had: a man's hair don't hang in his face, boy.

"Hello Robert." Michelle touched him and he jumped, stripped off the headphones. "I brought some cookies. I couldn't sleep and I'm sick of TV. You like oatmeal raisin?"

He nodded. He pointed. "Uh. The. Muh. Mirror. I. Duh. Don't."

"Why shouldn't you look at yourself? I like your face." She took a bite then placed the remainder of cookie – sweet, gritty, slightly greasy – into his mouth. He ate, watching her thin-lipped mouth move as she ate. She talked so easily, with so clear a voice; they all did, even RoboVoice: cancer took his voicebox yet his thoughts exit the Servox lucid and sane: there are curses, Robert thought, superstitions based on coincidence, and then there is the disability of guilt. He swallowed, thanked Michelle— the cookie was strong cinnamon and he liked the taste.

"I love looking at you, and thinking about you," she said. "When I'm alone, I play a game with the mirror; every morning after my shower I put my contacts in and makeup on and say Michelle Frost, this is the best you can do today, be satisfied because if you're not you'll screw up everything and everyone's gonna absorb your unhappiness so pretend, if you have to. Sometimes, Robert, I draw the face I want on the mirror; sounds crazy but sometimes I lipstick the perfect red mouth I want right on the glass then grease-pencil the perfect almond-shaped eyes then I turn away and wear that face into the world." She fed him another cookie. He refused a third but held her hand then she brushed crumbs from his lips and kissed him. "Know what else I do, sometimes? No actually a lot, lately a lot, Robert." He shook his head.

"I pray," said Michelle. "Not exactly to God, or in the church way, hands clasped, words rising to heaven—

"I pray to the world. Is that crazy? I stand at night on the porch and pray that there is some force on earth that can make men someday learn to love." She kissed him again and he put his arms around her. His brain flashed ourselves, not war, is the problem: we start ourselves and all good or evil follows. Robert opened his mouth, Michelle waited. He sprayed words like bullets, not trying to control the stutter; he didn't know if she understood. Sweat poured down his neck; Michelle seemed pleased by his response— she pressed her lips to the back of his right hand, onto the scar which zigzagged down his forearm to dead-end in the stump where the denuded little finger protruded. "We need each other, don't we, Robert? I miss Frank. I've been so alone so long, so angry he wasn't coming back and why he wasn't coming back—

"—dead in a ratty mud hole. I wanted to die too, with my husband in the stink and flames, cursing back the angry babble of enemy: die with him, my body more memorable than confusion and pain. Nothing ever changes, Robert, until we love again. Let me show you."

Michelle pushed the cart of brooms, mops, rags, disinfectant and polishes aside and positioned Robert before a mirror. She licked her finger, reached around his lean frame and traced his reflection in the mirror, the moisture of her fingertip barely perceptible. "My magic pen," she laughed as she drew. "As did God in Eden, I fashion the man I want from spittle and clay." Robert bit his lips, his tongue pushed, strained— a dead and stupidly inert prosthesis. "You're with me, now," Michelle said. "I love you. I don't care how you speak. I pray I don't grow old alone, that I can be of use to someone else, that love and caring still matters. I remember every detail of our date, when I tripped you caught me, how warm and strong you were, how your sweater smelled of soap and after-shave. I wanted my sheets to smell of you. I don't care how you talk. I want you."

She stroked his chest, encouraged by the greatness in his brow. He trembled. She waited. He opened his mouth, lips stretched white, then gave up, gave in. She waited. He drew breath, shuddered. She pressed her fingers into the bony sternum guarding his heart, coaxing up sound. He closed his mouth and eyes and tried again. "Luh. Love. I love. I love you!" Robert opened his eyes and Michelle, crying, seemed very old yet very beautiful: both broken people with satchel-charge memories, he knew, but also two human beings awaking after a maddening hiatus; a night so pure the love of God seemed real, flowing from the battered painting of Jerome, the saint with kindly eyes. They slow danced, neither leading, Robert counting "one-two, three-four": words softer, less guttural, stutter slight, little hesitation, and that was enough for one day; his brain flashed a fool I've been, thinking all is flux, big talk, lotsa pray, fall down dead.

The Finger Monkey

The winter my father was killed Vida and I roomed, three stormy months sparring with vituperative bayou lawyers for my share of estate, at the Provincial on Charles – definitely not a dangerous section of French Quarter, and good reason – Vida and I drink and after ten rounds on Bourbon and Dauphine it's nice to stroll for nightcaps on a block where mugging murders are as rare as black helicopters, Frank Giffordish Elvises, or hysterical acknowledgments of Mary (Miz Gawd) in glass or cloud.

Stuck in New Orleans during Mardi Gras means, to a deep southerner, sordid and uncouth tourist hordes, exploitative pricing, food (even in the better restaurants) mama wouldn't have dropped to dogs, an already indolent, nepotistic, corrupt city government doing its own melee jig, the ubiquitous palmetto bugs and "cereal roaches" as Vida calls them (offspring even milky chlordane spray [illegal but available, works also on black widows and mice] or baits never faze that rustle boxes of cereal, rice, Bisquick; at night drinking shots of bromide over the sink you hear them behind you, above you, under you) at high tide and those freakish waterbugs whose bite, like the rat's, incises a chiseled wound of bloody Vs—"the wino's rosary" it's called in the Quarter: ribbons, half moons and whorls of keloid from ankle to wrist, varying from self-inflicted wounds by that curious sheen scars of infection and devour exhibit.

My father committed, in Hattiesburg Mississippi, what is termed "suicide by cop." He was an educated double-dipper (retired Navy, retired NASA) who unhinged, mentally and spiritually, when mama died. Don't know what he was doing in Hattiesburg – a quiet college town, "Pride & Progress" stenciled on patrol-car doors – a town converting, subverting, erasing most of its racists networks and southern charm: you see espresso kiosks, smoothie drive-throughs, a bagel franchise alongside a Phoenix-mob owned check-cashing franchise: a gerund town because the South is always want-ING this and try-ING that. Dad pulled a knife in a dive called Nicks. That was the nigger in him: he loved to pack blade and bar-fight (Buck, Schrade, Gerber and Puma his favorite brands); when the cops came he kept on and was shot. The cop who killed him was black too so there's nothing more to say.

Except one thing, his military nickname. When dad rotated out of Vietnam his first tour they gave him thirty days before shipping to his second (he had nine years time in grade navy and a newborn, my sister Keira, and they sent him back) he partied in a Pensacola bar with another lieutenant commander and the damage control petty officer who'd saved them from cremation when their F-14A Tomcat puked a'deck their carrier. A marine corporal from Cherry Point air station deliberately elbowed dad's beer and called him a monkey. Dad said, "this monkey's giving you the finger, mutherfucker," and it was a famous bar-fight, my god-father Thurman "TT" Thigpen still loves to tell the story, it's his favorite, and how when fleet-captain Doherty, DON, ordered dad to report the marine for striking an officer he refused. We still have the court martial. Insubordination charges dismissed, but dad was still passed over for commander. He died, having earned two Bronze Stars and a Navy Cross, and having set above ten NASA choo-choos (to see if the human body could withstand such Gs) a proud black sonofabitch in a nowhere-he-should've-been Mississippi town, an O-4 (any sanctioned Kennedyish Annapolis graduate now, the kind of undisciplined bastard who'd sexually molest an intern in the holiest of offices – the WHITE OFFICE – such as that sax-blowing prez, who never risked his life for America, the kind of graduate who seeks only political appointment, who views the military as a stepping stone, who graduates Annapolis with a ranking of O-3 just for leaping and jumping through four years of military finishing school).

Dad's nickname before had been "Klips" because he always squirreled away in his cockpit a dozen clips of illegal Winchester hollow-points for his Colt gold-cup .45 (he called the NATO hardballs "ladyfingers") but after Pensacola he was the Finger Monkey.

Vida doesn't want our son Chima to waste study-time playing his Sony Playstation. I'm his advocate here, pointing out to Vida that, first of all, Chima could have chosen to stay with Severine Didier, the broker/guitarist aunt with a merlot chateaux and zillions (our last visit they taught me to play Rogue Trip [I was okay as Da Kang although, and it could have been the bourbon, I fling my game-pad every time my tourist is stolen— prefer being Twisted Metal 2's ghost-missile narcissist Specter], Syphon Filter [consensus: rip off of Duke Nuke'm and Metal Gear], and Silent Hill [cool although the gloom gets to you and killing nurses with a poleax seemed more necrophilic sexual posturing and groaning than I wished in an M-rated role-play, compared to wasting Resident Evil's PG-13 zombies and mega-moles]); Chima is just fine— an intelligent child becoming a man who won't be the one to enter his school with a satchel of pipe bombs and his father's twelve gauge and proceed to decrease his generation. If I was a kid stuck in a hotel with parents I'd find someone or something else but I realize Chima's hanging in there for my sake – I promised him I wouldn't leave again – whether he believes it or not I won't separate from Vida again until my toe is tagged.

The RPG Chima's stalled in is Parasite Eve, bonus EX level, the Chrysler building. He keeps getting killed by a mega-termite on the 60th floor, so I tell him to take the elevator down, save at the police precinct, hit reset and plug the code for super machine gun into the Gameshark. "What is it, dad?" I close my eyes and numbers shimmer into view: "800cd4340003." Chima taps the cheat into his Gameshark, restarts and begins blowing creatures away with his SMG. Vida touches my right temple with an ice-cube as she passes with the bucket. "Oh brainiac, lord brainiac!" "I'm an idiot savant actually," I laugh. My brother Niall, a patent attorney body-builder (he's the screaming, flexing, baby-oiled black guy you see on infomercials hawking Lipid Blaster and Pectorals From Hell) has the gift, too, but to lesser efficacy, and calls me Christ's Rolodex. Beats my nickname in high school: naw, I won't tell ya.

Nobody here believes any grand agenda, although many fools tout conspiracy theories; autumn remains hot. In the end, brothas and sistas, we are the icicled winos at alley's end holding forth Jefferson and Descartes— perhaps somehow in the end we the colored people may rank higher than welfare's intoxicated, bowing, exponential thank-you-sir archetypal Tom or Mammy (TV tells us of all those tragic lil white boys shooting parents, teachers, school chums); vacuous condescending TV selling calm, begging "closure." Did I mention I'm still quaintly if rather faintly, sane? Still managing anger, disgust, moral repugnance, still adamant not to bother you while remaining benignly belligerent and occasionally salacious.

Time to mount again those forty-eight marble stairs. Sic em! Southern Jew lawyer on Northern Jew lawyer, Judaic fraternity – millennia comprising Diasporic bravery and truculence (when truckling proved ineffective: who understands this better than the African American?) – ignored at court all for the sake of a Slidell Louisiana darky's substantial fortune (the finger Monkey had the gift of "telling" and wagered heavily on Microsoft in 1987, triple the amount my broker-guitarist aunt advised). Since he occasionally sports a yarmulke, I asked my attorney, "do you think Ehud Barak will be a substantially better peace-keeping premier than Binyamin Netanyahu or will the National Religious Party's hatred of Syria and the Likud's tough-guy stance with Palestinians ham-string him?" "I haven't really kept up," he said.

"Look, Wohlgelernter, I've got to get the hell out of here soon. I'm cracking up."

"Relax, we'll win."

"Can you really beat Gerstenfeld-Riskin? I've really had it here, I'm juggling chainsaws, I'm spinning into the abyss."

"I can beat him. Relax. We'll win. Stop smoking."

A Fine Day For Lobster Liberation

Rainwulf Kenner sacked groceries at the Magnolia Stop & Rob. Employees called the AG-Kroger Superstore that following its fifth stickup four months of 24 hours daily openness; of all the sackers Rainwulf seemed least concerned with crime, criminals, holdups. One touchy-feely required group the corporate psychologist asked what he thought about pressure and Rainwulf replied plumbers love it. He was, David the day-manager pimple-popped (he did: sometimes, regardless who was watching, squeezed his facial sores, fingering blood and pus onto his pants) "off in his own little world."

Kenner didn't talk much or respond to the women and men who flirted with him as he bagged; considered odd for resisting promotion (expert with computers and daily asked to fix something) the geeks, dorks, nerds, dweebs common to retail store staff invited him into their inner circle; rebuffed, avoided him. He was extraordinarily handsome: freakishly good looking though he seemed not to know it; wasn't exactly colored – no one knew what he was – clove skin which became merely tan in winter, black-plastic hair rendered even more frizzy by cheap shampoo (Prell), acicular short nose, macilent lips, hazel eyes in photos struck almandite; six-two. If asked, Rainwulf would have told them nothing, maybe half-smiled; his fiancée Nethra Brahmaputra would have said he was a half Chickasaw, half Irish, 100% Mississippian in desultory attendance at the Graduate program in Fine Arts (Sculpture) at Southern (BFA Painting, U of Miami). No one ever asked.

Kenner's kin had possessed money, spoke frequently about once possessing money; Rainwulf had never seen any. Greatgrandma Misha and Greatgrandpa Shootslow, full-blood Chickasaws, made a fortune in exotic woods culturing groves of monkeypod, mahogany, rosewood, ebony across Salah Ridge west of Gulfport. Shootslow and Misha passed no business acumen to their only surviving child, Dreaming Bear. Her brother, Soaring Bolt, drowned in a pond as a toddler. Rainwulf remembered his grandmother as a friendly chain-smoking crone who tossed wonderful fry bread and bought him Matchboxes for his collection (Gruesome Twosome, Piston Popper, Blue Shark, Diamler Bus— all now so impossibly priced he sold them for rent); she died when he was eight; his mother died a year later and he remembered little about her, either, except that she was beautiful, a failed model and ex-Vegas showgirl turned Nazarene Missionary.

Kenner's father, a medically-retired Forward Observer, lost his left eye in Chu Mo Ray Vietnam (monkeys hollering, purple butterflies the size of your fist, dragon fruit pulp turning iodine canteen water to lemonade: wasn't so fucked up would've been wonderful, a vacation) and worked for the postal service. He'd dabbled in tribal politics, settled trivial lawsuits with the Oklahoma branch of the Kenners, wasted the money, and now, though on the wagon, VFW Post 45 Treasurer, Assistant Postmaster, and remarried to a widow with a mansion (Sandra Lee Davis— Rainwulf despised her), was a bitter nonpracticing Indian who fished alone. All he observed forward now, he liked to say, was unending streams of bullshit.

Rainwulf was born in 1975 in a Fireball Trailer and all talk of wealth had been just talk: he had no complaints. His teaching assistantship ($6500 and tuition waiver) was renewed each year because he was an excellent carver, welder, and shaper (he detested the terms "artist" and "sculptor"); he called himself good with his hands. A reluctant student, even more reluctant instructor, when he did show up he delivered superb stone, clay, metal, or wood compositions, and with his students he was patient, meticulous, exact. He refused to sell his art but with the TA, sporadic grants, and sacking groceries, he got by.

He got by: his life's status just after noon July 25, 2002, having finished a simple lunch of cornmeal banaha ("Indian matzo balls," Nethra called them) with a Thermos of elbow macaroni and stewed tomatoes; not a chisel or adz in his hands but a can of Del-Monte green beans. Rainwulf topped the sack with a carton of brown eggs and a cold wet shrub of celery then carried the comestibles to the woman's convertible. She was attractive in a white way: pouty lips, cleft chin, bunny nose, cold but intelligent blue eyes; she thanked Kenner, pressed two ones into his hand. Turning, Kenner saw him, a big Anglo— shorter than Rainwulf but still tall, six foot, and easily a hundred pounds heavier: he didn't even bother with a mask. He drew a revolver, comically massive chrome Dan Wesson .460 Rowland, from his belt and entered the Magnolia AG-Kroger Superstore.

"Lady," Kenner asked. "You got a cell-phone?"

She showed him— pink Nokia 3410. He decided he could use her: compound-bow lips, deep-set eyes which moved in uncanny symmetry, like an owl's; wasn't for the bastard with a gat he'd ask her then and there to sit for him— a face worth burl, pipestone, the last slab of Chavant clay. "Call the cops," he said. "Tell them the Stop & Rob's getting robbed." She nodded calmly, began dialing as he walked back. Fool! Quashquame his Fish-Spirit jabbered, go home. Rainwulf almost obeyed; this was white trouble (though half white he didn't consider himself white at all he considered himself a practicing Indian), it did not concern him. Two other lives depended on his: a fiancée and a Ka'apor capuchin monkey— a Helping Hands rescue who kept attacking the gimps it was supposed to spoon-feed. Nethra ran the YMCA Kid's Kamp and said Rainwulf was the best thing to ever happen to her. The monkey lived in an iron box at the petting zoo and was hopelessly addicted to sour apple jawbreakers and honey roast cashews.

The electric doors whooshed open. Rainwulf sighed as he always did to the sudden embrace of foggy cold air conditioning; outside was one hundred three with a skin-crippling hundred percent humidity. David the day manager was on his knees, fingers pressing his cut mouth. The big Anglo stood over him, ready to strike again. This is just one man, Kenner thought, think of dad, think of dad: LP overrun, radioing beaucoup movement to a night defensive post already annihilated, clacked three claymores, M16 emptied, stock shattered, bayonet snapped, M1911 jammed; M26A1 frag'd them, pointblank whitestar signal-flared them, K-bar'd them, choked some with his clutch belt, du ma! du ma! clopped skulls with his e-tool, broke both fists jabbing with empty magazines then, left eye blown out, right knee blown out, throat cut, gutshot, sat down to sing his death then the dustoff took him to surgeons: that's how Indians fight! "Excuse me sir," Rainwulf said calmly, his voice a small ridiculous package in that warehouse of dead foodstuffs, stacked comestibles, "can I help you?"

"Can you fucking what?

"Can I help you?"

The next second he stared into the Dan Wesson's water-pipe barrel, so close to his face that with the ancillary illumination provided by the reflective chrome surfaces he could count the lands and grooves of rifling (8), see turgid emerald (Teflon coating) armor-piercing Rowlands (a "superhot" .45 ACP) resting in the five exposed cylinders; it was actually a beautiful instrument, Kenner thought, as arguably art as anything he'd cast bronze, iron, aluminum.

"Yes you can help me, bagboy; I'm in the mood to blow someone's head off. How about yours?"

"It's not a vital area," Rainwulf answered. Quashquame jabbered like a pen of lemurs; Kenner ignored the cacophony in his head, kept his gaze and slight smile on the poisonous eye of the silver Cyclops. The big Anglo sneered. The sneer softened to blankness, then he grunted, laughed. He shoved past Rainwulf. "Okay, nice to meet someone crazy as me. You a nigger? You don't look like any race I know."

"Chickasaw."

"Injun!" He nodded. "Okay chief, say some thing Injun."

"Fohah hupishno yak."

"Sounds Jap. What's it mean?"

"I'm here with the rest."

"Well, you sure the hell are, chief. That stinking green bait tank full of lobsters, with that fucking degrading poster hanging above it depicting a lobster in tails, tophat and cane tap-dancing?"

"Yeah?" said Kenner.

"Your job is to go get them. All of them. Put the giant blue grandpa in a separate bag. Go!" The big Anglo thrust a pillowcase that Dave and the checkers had partially filled with cash to a scrawny bald codger (Johnny Mepps, ex Klan grand wizard, always complaining the Swisher Sweet cherry cigars didn't taste cherry enough though he kept buying them) quavering in a yellow and blue plaid suit. "Put your wallet and watch in, Don Knotts, and pass it around. Anyone not feeling generous is gonna get shot, goddamn it." There were murmurs of compliance, loudest from the pensioned Night Rider, and the bag was quickly laden with wallets and jewelry.

The "aquarium," a refurbished bait tank which once held minnows and crayfish, was at the other end of the store, the "meat section," and certainly did stink. Rainwulf reached into the tank; the females bunched themselves in one corner with some smaller beta-males, antenna-stroking for comfort, claws secured with wide blue rubber bands. The alpha male crouched defiantly in the center of the aquarium and lunged when Rainwulf grabbed him, his eleven pound tail flipping quarts of tank murk onto the floor. The massive decapod's bodyweight exceeded twenty pounds; approaching his forty-second birthday, having spent the first forty-one years of his life on the Continental Shelf, he was captured near Casco Bay, Maine. It's illegal to possess oversized lobsters, yet here grandpa languished, a rare sapphire/anthracite calico "colormorph" approximately 1,542 miles from home.

The Magnolia Stop & Rob featured the lobster in several television advertisements for the Milk Club— the first customer to complete a fifty-gallon punch card won the privilege of boiling alive the giant crustacean. Rainwulf carried him gently, respectfully, in an emptied "gut bucket" full of artificial seawater bailed from the tank; the lobster's claws dangled more than a foot in front of its marbled carapace, flexing against the rubber band manacles. The other lobsters (2-5 pounders) fit into plastic bags and, grunting under the load, Kenner packed them to the front of the store.

The thief's eyes lit up when he saw the colormorph. "What's Injun for lobster?"

Rainwulf thought about it. "Well, hatafo-nunni would be grasshopper fish; funni-nunni sounds better: that's squirrel fish."

"Funny Nunny it is," the big Anglo exclaimed. He grabbed the leviathan and yanked free both bands. "I'm liberating this lobster! Goddamn you people put a man ten years in a cage for killing a worthless ratfink junkie sodomite and a bull-lobster in a box of water who did no crime at all, is more innocent and worthy of freedom than any of you cringing lowlife cocksuckers." Funny Nunny's reply was to swoop down its larger feeder claw and crimp his liberator's forearm directly over a fuzzy black tattoo. A stream of blood spilled onto the floor, and Rainwulf could see muscle and fat in the yawning lip of the wound. "That's the spirit." The big Anglo carefully maneuvered the lobster into the pillowcase. It thrashed and flipped atop the money, wallets, and jewelry, slamming the fabric walls until a claw broke through, scissoring blue sky.

"Anyone poke a head out before I'm gone gets it blown off. Got it?" More murmurs of compliance, louder than the first: everyone just wanted the maniac gone. The bandit stepped through the electric doors into the terrific heat and humidity. Rainwulf frowned, expecting a fusillade of bullets after a cop bullhorn rumbled drop your weapon hands over your head! Instead, the big Anglo sat in the convertible with the pink Nokia woman. She waved, lit a Darshan with a disposable pink Xingda then accelerated as her partner settled in his seat, hands inside the bag, lobster and loot in motion.

David stumbled to Kenner's side. "Call the cops! Why aren't the cops here?" Rainwulf thrust out an arm, halting the day-manager's confused forward movement. "The lady – the very pretty one, face like a cyborg Cleopatra – who just bought eggs, lettuce, canned green beans, celery: she was his accomplice. She picked him up."

"Where are you going? Come back!" David shouted as customers streamed through the doors. "The police will need your statements." A few stopped, most shouted "no way!" and kept running.

"She tipped me two dollars," Rainwulf continued. "She was really nice, but controlled, even icy. I saw the guy standing outside, looking at the coin-op papers. He pulled a gun and went in so I told her to call the cops on her cell-phone. She actually dialed and I fell for it. I bet they're laughing now."

"You came back?" David spat, daubing his swollen lips with a Hav-A-Hankie.

"I came back."

"You're stupid, Kenner, a stupid sonofabitch. You could've gotten us all killed, you aggravated the situation, you should have called for help, I'm going to report you, demote you, I'm" his shrill voice squelched as Rainwulf lifted him off the ground. "Don't hurt me, you crazy bastard, don't hurt me!"

"You were hurt at birth." Rainwulf dropped the day-manager.

"Fired! Fired! Fired!"

"David," Rainwulf said quietly. "Shut up and go change. There's piss on the front of your pants and you smell of shit and arm pits. You should shower and change before the cops arrive."

He wanted to see Nethra right away, take her in his arms, kiss her over and over, propose "Marry me. I adore you. I don't care marriage is a patriarchal white theocentric hegemony, if you want let's do it": making fun, even in this present crisis, of the academic doublespeak both of them uttered in class and slanted into their written themes with a farrago of half-grasped cultural references and pseudo-linguistic contexts; showing her above all else he remained Rainwulf the Strong. But Nethra was with her flock— 3:30 was the time Kid's Kamp held water aerobics, it was also "parents join in" day and he didn't think he could stand people, only one person, her.

He went anyway, ignoring the shrieks, the reek of chlorine, mildew, sour socks, the blobs of crushed cockroaches, some desiccated, some gooey, silly self-important regimentation of whistle-blowers with nametags, the crowd of adolescent martial artists in pint-sized Kis surrounding the soda and candy vending machines he pushed past, the parents, some in swimsuits, most in Dockers, Polo shirts, Liz Claiborne strapless dresses, black with black white with white and though the segregation seemed an amiable consensus it still troubled him.

Rainwulf smiled finding Nethra surrounded by happily splashing children. She wore a cheap green one-piece (Value Village) her waist-length hair, blacker when wet than his, French-braided. She conversed with two deaf children in ASL, one child nodded understanding and, turning to a younger girl, chubby arms clutching swan-shaped water wings, exampled the proper method of kicking, roostertails of water spouting behind. Nethra dropped her hands and the children began, in frenzied unison, pirouettes and kicks, shouting glee.

No way Rainwulf could walk over now, hail his love and say a man just robbed the store, Nethra. He stuck a gun in my face, a hand cannon actually, and at first I wanted to kill him I didn't care what really happened but he freed the lobsters and I helped him and it's made me want to change everything: I'm going to sell now, I'm going to make us money, I'm going to make a living at this. Kenner whispered, "I love you," and returned to his car; there was another he had to see, a helper-monkey reject, second on the list but important. He drove down Hardy street to the municipal park. The stunning heat embraced him as he stepped from the battered Pinto – not a stir of wind, he was exhausted, finished, lungs squeezed into a Miracle-Whip jar of barometric pressure – tornado pressure. Sirens wavered but to rally the volunteer fire department; the sky, though purpling, wasn't yet storm sky, F4 kill you in your trailer sky.

Kenner clicked his parachute knife and with one slash halved then peeled the double-knit Magnolia AG-Kroger Superstore tee with its ridiculous floppy red collar. He stabbed the inanely grinning "Happy Dollar" logo through both eyes before allowing the ruined shirt to drop to the asphalt. Better, much better, though in the total humidity no sweat evaporated from his brown skin, now he could appraise the sun's intensity. He walked past General Forrest (locally famous rebel who killed some yankees in a swamp was all Rainwulf knew or cared to know; the statue he appraised as poorly executed, birdshit and acid rain having pitted the head and shoulders), past a softball field where a game was in final inning: people stuffed trash into Coleman ice chests and wicker baskets, called straggler spouses and children from tennis courts, jungle gym, and grassy angles of a drainage ditch where two elderly blacks, afros and goatees platinum, hefted a rusty screen, crawdads flip-flapping atop, from the dark knee-deep water.

Kenner dropped a buck, as he always did, into the honor box fronting the dilapidated petting zoo. From the hill, where the new N.B. Forrest Memorial Zoo sweltered in the heat, its stink overreaching that of the tiny petting zoo compound— a lion roared, another answered. Rainwulf headed west, past the pen of sheep, pigs, turkeys, and chickens (some joker had recently stapled a sign of cardboard and Magic Marker Edible Animals Of North America) and stopped when he reached an iron box affixed to a cedar post, the monkey's home. "Chukma," Rainwulf greeted his friend. "The lobster's were liberated, and soon shall be you. I promise I'll get you out." It was good, imagining his blowtorch, pop rolling into hiss, the blue snout of acetylene ending a prisoner's bleak longing.

Recognizing Rainwulf, the capuchin clinched its furry brow in exaggerated, rapidly modulated monkey-frowns and grimaces, bald pate flushed gray. He chattered when Kenner revealed the small plastic bottle of TreeTop apple juice. "Don't have any jawbreakers, but I'll bring some tomorrow, and cashews, and oatmeal cookies. I thought you'd be thirsty. Here. There you go." He dribbled juice into the cage and the Ka'apor jumped at it, tiny hands grasping at the bottle, chortling excitement until the apple juice emptied then working the puddle on the floor of the cage; licking each black finger, purring wooka-wooka as Rainwulf sang kowi-at shoha ofi-a lhiyohli shoha— stinking dog chases stinking cat: all is well, by animal standards.

Making Sense of Shalimar

Robert Adams kept talking at her, blah blah blah. "IPDB means Integrated Patient Database. Your software is the Oracle SQL, which means you have relational database system commonalty. Many dinosaur platforms/operating systems support Oracle: Digital Equipment Corp's VMS, UNIX Systems' OS for starters. VAX is outdated, certainly, but hey, this is the VA. We're proud of our patches, we keep the old girl chugging on. You won't need to know much more than those; I'll say it again, and I'll say it often: nothing's really complicated, just outdated. You're squared away on Power Point, right? Good. I'll need you to make me some presentations for the Director next month. Don't worry about it now, just don't make any mistakes. With all the new cases coming in from the Iraq War, our system's bursting at the seams. Imagine someone not getting approved for a disability claim because we lost a record!"

"But if I do make a mistake?" Shalimar asked.

Robert shook his head. "No sir, we won't even think about it. Okay, here's Razz, a program like Access, just not as good as Access but you know Access so this will be a breeze. Here's a little homemade forms tracking system we call Cowbell— full of bugs but also full of potential. I'll bring you aboard concerning the classified stuff, the records of veterans who are now celebrities or politicians, on a need-to-know basis. Don't even think about the internet for now— our website's down anyway, perhaps you can help us with that, but new files alone will bury you half a year."

Shalimar itched her nose. "When do I get my laptop? I work better from laptop than a station, and I prefer Vista; I haven't used Windows Office 2000 since high school and I've never used WordPerfect."

"WordPerfect is an excellent program, Ms. Lovejoy; we've used it without complaint for many years. You'll get your laptop and Vista soon, Ms. Lovejoy. You'll hear that word a lot— soon; our budget's always crunched, and as absurd as it seems you have to do Veteran Report Of Contacts typed, 3 carbons; Release Of Information won't allow us to keep only an electronic database of VROCs, that's what those wall lockers and shelves full of big manila folders are for, and that's what the Brother Correctronic 340 is for. Please be careful with this machine, do not eat or drink near it. If it breaks we go to the manual Smith Corona, it's got an original box of ribbons with an invoice dated 1952. The VAXs are hooked to inkjets which print a legible clinic-appointment form, otherwise, until your Dell is dispensed you're welcome to use my PC and laser printer."

"Thanks. What's DHCP mean?"

"Decentralized Hospital Computer Program. Data is extracted from the PFC, or Patient File Center, Austin Texas, converted to Oracle database then sent to any VA in the US, Philippines, or Puerto Rico. They're spending millions trying to improve the system but the improved system keeps crashing so we're stuck with the old one for now. I know it's a lot of acronyms for you to digest, Ms. Lovejoy, but soon you'll be rattling them off like the rest of us."

"I didn't know the job of ROI clerk was so involved," said Shalimar.

"Release of Information is very involved: it's up to us to ensure the privacy of our veterans, but also to ensure they have the information necessary for background checks or for Civil Service Veterans Preference forms when seeking employment, or for documentation to prove a Compensation and Pension claim or refute an unfavorable C&P decision; my god you'll learn what a pain those are, Ms. Lovejoy."

"Please, call me Shalimar."

"I prefer not."

Shalimar giggled.

"What is it, Ms. Lovejoy?"

"Oh, nothing. It's just – well, you know – Bartleby. He kept saying I prefer not over and over until he went insane."

Robert shrugged. "Anyway, it's simple to see what's before you. The IPDB is a decentralized relational distributed database environment encompassing d-base management along International, National, State, and Regional VAMC boundaries. You have here the information for any patient, expired or living, dating back to World War One. Input the letter of the surname and the last four digits of the SSN. See? You'll work 99% of the time with Regional Data, so don't worry too much about the rest. RD is maintained at each Regional DHCP capable of tracking patients registered in each PTF, or Patient Treatment File, by CE or Category Episode, which lists what they were treated for and LOS, or Length of Stay. See? Means Tests are listed separately to categorize veterans with pensions, insurance or other pay-capabilities. Otherwise we pay their bills if they have a Service-Connected rating of 30% or higher."

"We?"

"Well, you know," said Robert. "The VA. The Federal government."

"Are you a veteran, Mr. Adams?"

"No, Ms. Lovejoy. I have a congenital heart murmur. My father was a decorated veteran of both Korea and Vietnam. Now pay careful attention to this certain screen. See? Means Test Eligibility, Service-Connection Index, Principal Diagnosis, and LOS chronology at your fingertips. The DRG menu – no, that doesn't mean anything, Ms. Lovejoy, it's just called the DRG menu – allows you to do a combined search to see if and where the patient has ever been hospitalized in the civilian sector. The one we're programming in-house, Cowbell, will be an improvement, we hope. Now hit that button. See? A complete list of specific clinical events experienced, with the corresponding WordPerfect template for printing hard copy ROI requests. But the actual Veterans Report Of Contacts must be typed, 3 carbons filed. Non-Veteran ROCs aren't as important unless they involve lawsuits, VIP visits, or a hospitalized veteran's family. In time, you'll be able to discern what information is germane to the patient's present claim and save us unnecessary copying, faxing and mailing. See? These are all locked files, of course. Here's your card with your clearances. I suggest you remember the data ASAP then destroy your card. Under the Patriot Act, it's a crime to exploit this data, for example sell it to marketers or collection agencies. It's even a crime to lose this data."

"Sure," said Shalimar. She stared at the list of crap.

"Profile Modem Number (253) 427-4000, 4 lines, 56kbps. Check?"

"Check. 56K? are you serious? Oh my god!"

"Yes, we dream of broadband," Robert sighed. "I have Comcast at home, but that doesn't really help us here, does it?"

"Hey, what's the 280 Operator Panel?"

"Please, Ms. Lovejoy, don't push any keys not listed in your starter manual – I'll explain the 280 later – it controls the Veterans Affairs Identification Card System, which we call VIC. The database for that is the Henry Jackson VARO, Seattle. You'll enjoy doing it later, taking remote photographs then converting the pics to digital images to print on the 280 Card Printer; the vets call it their purple card and they need it to get meds or primary care. The purple card not only identifies them, but lists their current level of SCD, or Service-Connected Disability, the most common are 50 percent and 70 percent disabilities; the 100 percent ratings are usually in wheelchairs or on a ward or in a hospice. I'll show you all that stuff later, for now you're to concentrate on files." Robert cleared his throat, coughed. Shalimar wrinkled her nose. His breath smelled of sausage, coffee, cigarettes. "Profile E-Mail Access Code is URXRTNG. Profile Codes are automatically deactivated if thirty days expire since last usage. Check?"

"Check. You memorize all this stuff?"

Robert stared at her, incredulous. "Of course, Ms. Lovejoy. Suppose something was to happen to you— a car wreck or flu, or you quit, like the last clerk? I must to be able to access your last TB, or Terminal Batch to see what you've been up to. We can't have a patient waiting in Comp & Pen for an evaluation which may reduce or enlarge his or her pension or SCD rating and have all the ROI data that was assigned to you lost in outer space or crashed, can we?"

"I guess not. How many clerks do you memorize?"

Robert sighed. "I'm just a Ward Supervisor, I have three of you committed to memory. Ms. Richards, our Ward Chief, has six, including all of mine," Robert said with awe.

Shalimar giggled.

"What now, Ms. Lovejoy?"

"My access code," she laughed. "URXRTNG."

"What about it?"

"What it spells. UR XRTNG. See? You're exerting."

"I didn't really notice."

Later, in the break room, Chief Richards finished a box of reduced fat low-sodium Triscuit and tore open a family-sized box of reduced fat Wheat Thins. Robert chain-smoked menthol Marlboros. It was illegal for him to smoke in a Federal facility, and it was illegal for him to smoke in a hospital, but he was so enormously helpful, efficient, and vastly overqualified (B.S. Civil Engineering, University of Idaho; M.S. Computer Science, University of Washington) that Richards coddled him although she didn't need to: Robert loved his job and adored his boss. He had made three times his present salary as a civilian Civil Engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers, but he also suffered a mental break down and was prescribed Prozac, Divalproex, and Quetiapine. Robert still took the Prozac.

"Well? How is she?"

"I can't make sense of her. Her recommendations are excellent," said Robert. "She's competent enough, I guess. She just finished, magna cum laude, a Bachelors in business administration, concentration MIS. But she giggles."

"Giggles?"

"Yes ma'am. Over the silliest things."

"I don't care if she laughs like a damn hyena, Bobby." Chief Richards turned a cracker over in her fingers, sniffed it with distaste. "Will this one stay?"

Robert nodded. "I think so. She says she's tired of moving. She just came from Chicago, and before there it was St. Louis, then Grand Junction, Colorado, then Brownsville, Texas."

The tornado nightmares still tormented her. She didn't sleepwalk anymore, as she had as a child, and now it wasn't mother spun from her arms but herself trapped as the funnel cloud descended, nowhere to run; she dropped flat on the hail-strewn ground, her face in cowshit as panicked horses ran across her legs, breaking them – in her bed she jerked from the pain and impact, heard, above the roar of wind, the crackle-crunch of her femurs, tibias, fibulas – she screamed to her sleeping self, wake up! wake up! but couldn't. The storm passed leaving an abatis of shattered sycamore, papershell pecan, mulberry, and carcasses of cattle; she crawled through the debris, pulling herself to the ruin of her grandparents' home, calling out to them until the Timex Indiglo buzzed. Shalimar blinked, tossing the comforter aside. Rain had fallen in the night, blown onto the bedroom floor; she closed the window as a bus sluiced by, then cleaned up the mess with a wad of dirty clothes.

****

It was him again, the heavy breathing shit-eater; at least he said he wanted to eat her shit, and he promised a lot of other horrible things. This time Shalimar pegged the voice to a location, the 6th Avenue Shell station pay phone. Shalimar knew he was calling from the Shell because she could hear in the background the public address system of Ron's Big Boy blaring order 43, order 44, order 45. She also knew he must be a VAMC employee of at least GS-11 Supervisory level because he knew her name, unlisted home and cell phone numbers and her unlisted work extension, pound sign plus 6024. Her listed extension was #7214. "I want to eat your shit," he rasped. "I want to eat it right from your ass, Shal-ee-mar. I want to lick..."

"Go fuck yourself," Shalimar interrupted, though she knew that you're not to speak to obscene phone callers because getting any reaction or reply, either pleading or threatening, excited them— they made contact not for the enjoyment of intelligent conversation but to inflict mental duress, to harass and provoke an emotional outburst; the only way to discourage them was to hang up without comment.

"Spread your ass for me, Shal-ee-mar," he groaned.

"Stick a .357 in your mouth, pull the trigger, and splash your worthless filthy brains on the fucking wall." She C-pac'd the extension to Chief Richards then immediately filled and filed a Non-Veteran Report Of Contact, cc'd a copy to HQ then finished the day's Operation Enduring Freedom Registry, waiting. She'd just spent an hour learning how to copy hidden DOS files from older registries (Agent Orange and Gulf War Syndrome) using the attribute command (ATTRIB *.*.) from a VAX manual dated 1989— she felt like an archeologist, a Tomb Raider, a Lara Croft without the huge boobs, but now her good mood was shattered.

Robert was there in minutes. "Why did you bother Chief Richards, Ms. Lovejoy? It's not your break time. You know transfers to the Ward Chief are specifically to cover your station during the time of your absence. Next time transfer directly to me."

"He called again, so I passed it on. Don't play games, Robert. I'll bet Richards recognized the voice and I bet they had a cozy little chat."

"I'm not playing games," Robert protested. "If I knew who he was I'd have him arrested. I mean that. Yes, he called and Chief Richards is livid."

"Livid, huh? It's why all the other girls quit, isn't it?"

Robert flipped the cover of his chrome POW/MIA Zippo open/close over and over, releasing the peppery scent of lighter fluid. "Yes, Ms. Lovejoy, unfortunately it is. He's obviously harmless. A harmless pervert. None of the others ever physically confronted this person, nor is there any evidence he attempts to stalk you other than by phone. He doesn't stay on the line long enough to be traced. Believe me, we've tried that. No one's ever been physically harmed."

"I know where he is now. He called me from the Shell across from Ron's Big Boy. I know because I eat there every day and I know the sound of the PA system, and he must have stalked me, Robert, no matter what you say, and if he knows my unlisted extension, my cell and my home phone he works here, which means he also knows where I live."

"We'll get a plainclothesman to stake out Ron's Big Boy."

"That won't work, Robert. We're not talking about some janitor."

"At least we'll have the satisfaction of knowing we're doing something, Ms. Lovejoy. I'll have your extension changed if it'll make you feel better."

"The hell I'll feel better."

"Please calm down. I'm on your side. Do you want a new extension?"

"You've done it before, haven't you? For the last girl? And he still called, didn't he, which means he's one of the Old Farts, doesn't it? I bet you and Richards have a pretty good idea who he is, but it's one of those tricky Old Boy network situations. Tell you what, Robert— walk into the Regional Directors' Suite and see if the guy you suspect is at his desk or if his car is in one of the four slots marked reserved; if he ran every traffic light and stop sign he'd be just pulling in about now."

"Ms. Lovejoy."

"Call me Shalimar. So what are you going to do?"

"Please, Ms. Lovejoy. What can I do?"

Later, in the break room, Robert chain-smoked Kools (on his lunch break he'd bought six half-priced cartons from the Muckleshoot Trading Post) and told Chief Richards all that had transpired. She opened a Pringles cylinder and stared through the young man's placid face, munching chip after chip. She swallowed. "Bobby, what should I do? That stupid, gross old bastard— he promised to stop. Imagine, a Medal of Honor recipient going to the dogs like this. We can't lose this girl; god help us if any of this ever gets to the papers." Richards savaged more crisps with her brightly lipsticked mouth. "They'd say we covered up, Bobby, which is true, but they wouldn't care why."

Robert waved his cigarette. "That would be a disaster. Especially after the Notification and Federal Employee Antidiscrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002. If they claim we violated No FEAR, it's not just a scandal and our jobs, it's jail."

"I'm going to do what I should have done all along. He's finished. If he wants to pull rank or flash that MOH I'll threaten the publicity myself. It could get messy, Bobby."

"Yes ma'am. I hope so, actually. I've never liked him."

"Can we trust her?"

"I think so," said Robert. "There's something about her that's solid."

****

The acutance of her memory was questionable, she'd blocked out so many things; Shalimar was certain her father had killed himself though her mother always called it a car crash. Next time she saw Emory she'd ask him— big brothers knew this stuff. She'd tried Zen meditation, then philosophy, but both were so male-addled they turned her in circles; what had Hegel said? Blood is an aliquot of life as well as death: that kind of utterance excited her professor but she felt, in her heart, that it was false, pretentious, and that Hegel was a fraud.

She needed a good time. She was new in town. She needed friends, needed dance, drink, conversations about anything, perversity à gogo. Shalimar parked at Chasers, a hole between the Puyallup River and the port of Tacoma, and shouldered through the spill-off from the dance floor. The music surprised her; decent band, excellent guitarist, though what they played – vintage Top 40 – she usually called "crap;" clean cut twenty-somethings in a biker bar playing True.

Someone made room for her, watched her gulp a double Stoli.

"Get the lady another shooter, Jack."

Shalimar sized him up. He wasn't handsome, but his eyes were harmless, casual clothes a haphazard mix of Brooks, Izod, Polo; wristwatch genuine diamond Locman Quadrato— she could spot a Bangkok fake because she'd worked six months for Zales. She nodded and Jack slung her another double, knocking wood for the man's big tip. "Thanks. I'm Shalimar."

"Max. Beautiful name, Shalimar. It's derived from Shasti, the Hindu goddess who protects children. Did you know that?"

"No I didn't, Max. Are you a professor?"

"I'm a cardiologist at Harborview."

She laughed, downed the vodka. The first was hitting her hard, but wasn't this what she wanted? "I'll bet that doctor line really scores a lot of waitresses, huh?" He fished the clip-on photo ID out of his pocket and held it for her view: Maxwell Ashmann, MD. "Another round, Jack," he called and Shalimar noticed, as he closed his wallet, that all his cards were gold and platinum. She laughed again.

"Okay, what's so funny?"

"I thought you were a drug dealer, Dr. Ashmann."

"I see," he grinned. "The pimp watch was a birthday present from my ex-wife, and I shop online for my clothes – I buy whatever catches my eye from all sorts of vendors – I can't stand going to the boutiques, putting up with the clerks."

Shalimar nodded. "So, out slumming or just lost?"

"Just bored." He winked at her. "I follow this band, actually; I'm stuck in the 80s, love the music. Your turn. What do you do?"

"ROI clerk at the VA."

"Release of Information, huh? Boy, you guys can be a pain in the ass."

"Thanks," said Shalimar. "We just processed a homeless vet with staph; you turned him away for lack of insurance. Silver Star, Bronze Stars with oak clusters, Purple Heart Navy Cross— would it have been asking too much to drain a few boils and swab his butt with iodine? Would that have bankrupted you?"

"Shalimar, I don't work ER, and if I did I'd never kick anyone out."

"I think it's bullshit, how much society admires doctors, how much authority they have."

Max bowed deeply from the waist. "Touché, my angry lady. Care to dance with the enemy?"

****

A sunny Friday morning. The last bottle of Vsattui had been drunk following the last bottle of Preston merlot. Shalimar leaned back in the Ford's uncomfortable seat, picked loose wooden beads from the crumbling Shiatsu back massager purchased from Target. Each bead released from the nylon strings bounced onto her cheap new boots. Her coat, also new and cheap, was red suede, and whereas she appeared well dressed and clean, Emory looked shabby. His long blond hair was unbrushed, he hadn't shaved. His white shirt was stained with wine, his eyes puffy and bloodshot. He roamed stations of the Pioneer, settling at last for Pearl Jam's Even Flow. "We should go in now," Shalimar said. She picked a piece of string from his hair, traced her finger down a pale side of jaw. "It's all right, Em."

"I wish we had another bottle."

"So will I, after."

"I want you to tell me who he is."

"Gonna be my big brother all my life?"

"I was born into the job." She appreciated his concern, but knew his anger wasn't solely for her troubles and this baby-never-to-be; Emory's misery extended from past to present although Shalimar didn't know the true depth of it because they rarely seriously talked. He'd made a lot of money and lost it all; he'd completed an expensive rehab and relapsed. He lit a cigarette. "Those jackals outside better not say anything or I'll beat them senseless. I swear."

"I don't care what anyone says, Em."

But the jackals had scattered— some voluntarily, others in the back of a police van, wrists fastened with plastic stay-ties, following a scuffle with plainclothes officers investigating a bomb threat. Off to downtown Seattle, to the King County Jail where more cameras waited, where they could link hands in their holding cell and, in self-righteous delusion, pray, quote scripture, speak tongues, pretend to save the world. Emory paused at the door to crush out his cigarette. "God loves you! Don't kill your baby!" a woman yelled at them from the back of a slow-moving black sedan, a Lincoln Town Car with American Life League stenciled blood red on a magnetic sign hugging the driver's side door. "Abortion is murder!" the driver howled.

"Fuck you!" Emory roared. He gave the busybodies a double bird salute, then Shalimar pushed him into a lobby where security, a tall brawny black retired Master Gunny with a silver handlebar mustachio, commanded them to halt. He checked their names against his clipboard list, spoke into his Motorola 2-way, received verification, then smiled. "Okay. Go on up, folks."

The elevator was chilly, the air alternating between sweet and sour: Pine-Sol, then mouthwash from a dentist's office. At 4 the bell chimed, the doors slid open; Shalimar and Emory studied a directory to find Carrie Lynch, MD. The waiting room's decor failed at coziness but was a pleasant clutter of rattan IKEA easy chairs, philodendron, hanging hoyas, Kentia and bamboo palms, piles of magazines and a rack of medical information pamphlets, a plastic pirate's chest the size of a steamer trunk loaded with Legos, action figures, and Webkinz animals. There were three novels, none of which Emory or Shalimar had read, but they'd seen the movies: The Horse Whisperer, The Shipping News, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Emory sat across from a man hunched over until his face nearly kissed his knees, fingers interlaced behind his head, sit-up style.

"Fill this out completely."

Shalimar sat and wrote. Emory stared at the hunched over man— his shoes were wet, he was crying all over his shoes. The man glanced up, his face tear streaked, nodded to Emory then looked down again. "Em," said Shalimar, "You don't have to wait here. Come back when it's over. Take a walk, have a beer."

"No way." He'd played football in high school, she remembered once he'd come to dinner wearing his sweaty jersey and she'd held her nose and chanted you stink! until he'd beaned her with a King's Hawaiian roll. She rested her head against his shoulder, smelled her brother's smoke (American Spirit Perique) and cheap cologne (Stetson Fresh). She watched Dr. Lynch enter to talk with the receptionist. "Em?"

"Yeah, Shal?"

"Ask me about my job."

"Okay, tell me about your job."

"Everything we have is outdated and ready for the scrap pile: computers, office furniture, medical equipment, it's all crap; even the buildings are run down, the roofs and windows leak and only a few offices are air conditioned, but the veterans I work for and the staff I work with are some of the nicest people I've ever known. They are nice even when I FUBAR the VIPDB, the holiest of holies, the VAMC Integrated Patient Database. My job is PTFD Expediter, which sounds powerful, mysterious and important but I'm just a clerk. PTFD means Patient Treatment File Data and an expediter is someone who moves quickly, and often I do but sometimes I'm stuck all day on the help desk. We're supposed to remain detached, Em, but there was this guy, really funny, always cracking jokes. He had no legs and suffered with sleep apnea which means that without his breathing machine he could die in his sleep like a little baby, like SIDS. His best friend pushed his wheelchair, he hated electrics. Ned and Allen were their names, both Vietnam vets. I met them in the VA canteen, all of us eating lousy soy-grit and sawdust cheeseburgers. They told me their names and whenever I'm told a name and ward and team, for example Ned Ward 3 Green Team you can bet I know all the dirty little details: wounds, diseases, medications, criminal and psychiatric history. That's what a Release of Information clerk does. They teach you, Em, to guard your files and secrets, but they forget you have a heart, a heart that breaks! So Ned unplugged his breathing machine and a week later Allen shot himself. If I feel anything they'll say we told you so, we warned you not to get involved." She saw white Nikes, glanced up to Dr. Lynch who smiled, held out her hand. "Hello, Ms. Lovejoy. I'm ready if you are."

When it was over they followed a Post Street tunnel from porn shops, Reiki clinics and rummage stores to the fish-stink and freshly baked bread perfume of the Pike Place Market. Damp brick wallpapered with handbills advertised Tarot readings, rock bands, sensual massage and something called Ayurveda, which sounded good to eat, and a big poster for Eckankar, which made Shalimar think of insects. Street musicians performed in front of flower and helium balloon stalls; Shalimar gave a dollar to a blind dulcimer player who called himself Ptarmigan, and Emory bought her a pink foil heart which she released. They watched the balloon rise above the crowd; a mime leapt for it and missed, then stole a daffodil from a tough looking Korean vendor then returned it as a rose. "So tell me," Emory asked. "Do you think of him or her as your son or daughter?"

"Yes."

"Promise me you'll be all right, Shal. Promise you'll call again if you're not."

****

Let me tell you what is wrong, she journaled. Say I am wrong, nowadays wrong is an honor, I am certainly not as evil as the politicians, where wrong is the homage and proud exaltation of an oil war, and I am one of many who care for the mutilated combatants returned home, some medically-retired and monstrously disfigured; here two beams of day remain, dark from darker kept, yet it is the darkest dark that I crave— clock tower shadows, the vast amorphous pile of death we call a medical center.

"Welcome back, Ms. Lovejoy. I hope your leave of absence was satisfying." Shalimar accepted the offered handshake and returned it warmly. "It was, Robert."

He seemed pleased that she took his hand. As he talked he looked down at their linked hands, then to her face.

"How was my replacement?"

"Nothing like you. I'm glad you're back, Ms. Lovejoy. We all are." He snapped the latches of his metal briefcase then presented her with a nameplate: Shalimar M. Lovejoy italicized gold in walnut-grained plastic.

"Thanks." She knuckled aside tears then laughed, nervously. "It's beautiful. I've never had a nameplate."

"Oh, that reminds me, tomorrow you get another surprise – your laptop – usually accounting approves us for something refurbished and I've got to ghost it and upgrade memory, but this is excellent; a brand new Lenovo ThinkPad X-200, you'll love it. I'm still stripping factory crap from it and installing the software you need." Robert cleared his throat, coughed, and she didn't mind so much his signature morning breath of sausage, coffee, cigarettes. "By the way, he's history. It's over."

Shalimar nodded. "I was right about him, wasn't I?"

"Yes you were. More than you know. Now, a head's up about a little problem, Ms. Lovejoy. All week we've been flooded with requests for the new Accu-Chek Aviva glucometer; some idiot gave our number to Primary Care, which issued the flier to everyone on the Diabetic Registry, instead of the number to Prosthetics, which is handling the distribution of the meter. When vets call for the Aviva, just transfer them to Prosthetics: I made you a sticky note, pound plus 3345. If they need testing strips and sharps transfer them to Pharmacy, but they should know that."

"Thanks, Robert— for everything."

Later, in the break room, Robert opened his first package of low-tar, low nicotine Merits. Chief Richards had suggested that he pay more attention to his health, as well as the increasingly Draconian measures to enforce the Federal Workplace Smoking Ban, and he'd agreed to taper off for a month, then quit. She was on another diet— her third try at the Atkins after failing the South Beach and NutriSystem regimens. She chewed celery and packaged baby carrots daubed with sour, chalky nonfat ranch dip or Atkins Day Break bars, which stuck in her throat, but desired Cheetos, pork rinds, macadamia clusters, and anything KFC. Robert exhaled the tasteless, stale, non-mentholated smoke and wished for Kool, Newport, Benson & Hedges, Marlboro. Both were miserable, adhering to resolutions which robbed them of simple pleasures. Chief Richards swallowed a stringy lump of celery and gagged. "You talked to her? Everything's hunky-dory now?"

"All's well that ends well."

"She say anything?"

"She cried."

"Why on earth did she cry, Bobby?"

"She cried when I gave her the nameplate."

"She's happy then," Chief Richards said, relieved. "She'll stay now."

Robert lit another Merit from the coal of the first. Couldn't the damn things surrender even a scratch of taste? Even light beer had alcohol, you could get drunk on an overdose of the stuff, but light cigarettes made him sick. He nodded to his boss. "Yes ma'am. She's one of us now. The engraved nameplate, sheer genius on your part. I had no idea it would mean so much to her."

A Tale From Anger Rapids

Anger Rapids is a place the young eventually leave: they create an atmosphere in town of sullen expectation, sexually aggressive restlessness and violent jealousy – for recognition of their awful bands and scant talent at web design (never computer science) travel to wherever they'll get by doing the least amount of real work, a wanderlust of indolence more than ego – but for the old the excitement is the salmon's return. There are parties, an official salmon day and a salmon festival resplendent with a salmon queen, salmon smoke-out, and a parade. The return of the salmon is hailed, annually; as if cargo-cult shamans had prevailed with chants, potions and bonfires, showering the seedy lodges, taverns, guide services and charter skippers with foreign wealth. During salmon-time there exists a commensalism almost neighborly, when Anger Rapids resembles a community instead of a refugee camp occupying unkempt acres of scrubby lowland, swamp, and floodplains of mossy boulders.

An incredible journey Oncorhynchus makes from the deep Pacific underwater mountain ranges of the Bonin Trench and the Emperor Chain; they school their precious tonnage past the Bering Strait where mankind first entered North America, cruise the coast of Siberia where mass-murderer Iosif Dzhugashvili, a cobbler's son and seminary drop out, escaped prison in 1904 to rename himself Stalin, man of steel. The Chukchi, Bering, and Alaska seas spill them into Anger Rapids, past the commercial schooners, charter skippers, Shahaptian gill-netters and townie bait-casters; over the rapids and ladders they go, past the Anger and Siwash dams and residential lakes where the spillway of Seattle's almost-wealthy retire. The salmon arrange pebble nests in shaded shallows, and in this brief kingdom they've earned, shed the pink jewels and gelatinous streams of milt.

Anger Rapids swelters in summer, a humid, fly-blown depression between the Pacific Ocean and the Anger River, thirty miles east of Westport. The river in spring flood sometimes reaches the streets, muddy cold, clogged with flotsam; the resulting sandy loam nourishes aboriginal rhododendron and fern, bull nettle, ninebark, sea oats and fishhook-sharp thickets of salmonberry and blackberry. The ruins of homesteads abound; primeval roses, lavender, coreopsis and feral apples decorate the vandalized historical monuments and solitary graveyards – Grosnell, Lindermeyer, Lathim, Verlo, Sneed – uneducated, dirty, and often viciously intolerant Lutheran trespassers on Indian land but with the passage of time revered as pioneers.

May twenty-seventh, the second week of the Anger River salmon season, a red Corvette from Seattle accelerated through the harrowing twists and turns of State Road 7, its driver heading for Westport. He looked across his young passenger, out the window framing her beautiful face, and counted (in a flash of colorful decrepitude) two taxidermy shops, two gasoline stations, three taverns, and the outlandish edifice of peeled logs, quarry-stone, wrought iron and plywood parapets owned by Manny Sneed which housed Briar Cliff Antique Emporium and the Gaslight Inn, Washington State's only authentic American Bison Prime Rib and King Salmon Steakhouse.

"Imagine the indigestion you'd get," the man said. "How can civilized people eat a goddamn buffalo?"

"Bison isn't buffalo," the woman replied. "And it's high in protein, low fat except for the hump. Would you for god's sakes slow down! Better yet, stop; we haven't stopped since Olympia."

"We're making good time, is why." Two blocks past Manny's pastiche castle the marinas came into view: corrugated metal-roofed particle-board shanties which sheltered weathered lapstrake dinghies, listing trawlers, and several decayed 32 ft. Permacraft; the salmon and oyster boats of three generations of industry. "Jesus, it's like the stone age here," the man laughed. "Buffaloes and old barges." He floored the accelerator.

"Slow down, I mean it," the beautiful passenger complained. He scorned her with a snort, ejaculating air through his hairy nostrils, and she regarded him with distaste. "You're such a child," she said, and a cow stepped into the road. The cow, a massive black and white Holstein Friesian, brass bell clanging maniacally, appeared as if by necromancy; she was a gentle creature and produced, daily, eight gallons of milk. "Shit!" the man and woman screamed and then the roadway disappeared in a cloud of debris and fire as the gas tank sheared free of the car and exploded. The roadster rolled three times and became airborne over the Anger Rapids Marina boardwalk, slowing from sixty to zero atop the growing swells of medium tide. The couple sank into the sea.

The people of Anger Rapids showed up one by one, trudging from all directions to the smoking wreckage. The explosion of cow, car, and human sounded like a louder pounding of the sea, as if something had jostled the volume then returned it to normal. "What the hell was that?" Manny Sneed called from behind the oak batwings separating wet bar from kitchen at the Gaslight Inn. He was cleaving gamy racks of bison short ribs and drinking wine straight from a greasy bottle of Australian Lemberger, thirty-six dollars a case from Costco. "Maggie! You drop another tray of glasses?" Of their last day, it could be said the red Corvette couple spawned: they'd awakened at the Quinalt Lodge, completed sexual intercourse, consumed Denver omelets, journeyed high-speed up State Roads 101, 109, and 7, propelling themselves onward inland, as does the salmon, by an uncontrollable urge to do something, go somewhere.

To Pyle and Kyle Lathim, taking a break from chain sawing alder for their father's smoke house, the sound was like "Dragging a trash can down a gravel road," Pyle told Chief Pignato. "Yeah, that loud maybe," agreed Kyle. "But more loud too, like a shotgun." The brothers argued whether the crash sounded more like a trash can or shotgun, then Pyle punched Kyle's face, knocking him down. Hawser Verlo, daubing Behr Barn-Red #25 on the worm-holed cabin of his boat, turned toward the blast. "Never seen anything so awful, just like hell rolled up in one big ball. Like a movie or something."

Chief Pignato hated calling folks to inform them of death, and the case of Mr. Johnny Halpern and Ms. Elaine Barth was worse, as their relationship was adulterous and their bodies were burned and bashed beyond recognition. Halpern was married with two teenage sons on an estate in Redmond; Barth was his travel agent, unmarried and living with a sister in an apartment in Ballard. Pignato returned home that night tired, discouraged, depressed and hungry. He didn't often drink so when the next thing he did, after hanging up his gunbelt and hat, was to shoot two fingers of Jim Beam then pour another, Grace knew it was a bad day. "Tell me all about it, Andy," she insisted, and he did between bites of dinner.

"Now the wife I can't blame at all for being so cold about everything, seeing what was going on behind her back, but his brother— imagine, his own brother! He just looked down at the mess that was once Johnny Halpern, because the wife wouldn't, and said yeah, it's him. Halpern's Navy tattoos were preserved, and his face not so totally crushed as the girl's; my god Gracie you shoulda seen her driver's license she was a beauty before the wreck, but that brother. He knew about the affair, didn't care. Didn't give a damn two ways for anything actually until he saw the car towed up on the beach and you know what he said, Gracie? Can you imagine?"

"What, dear?"

"He said shit why couldn't they have totaled the '76 instead? You ever heard of such a thing, Gracie? I guess Halpern had quite a collection of Corvettes and the '76 was the least valuable. How could a man's own brother be concerned about a thing like that?"

"City people are just that way, darling."

"You know I come from the city. Way bigger than Seattle. Brooklyn."

"But your father started out as a farmer. That makes all the difference in the world. Country people see things differently. How many farmers did you say were in your platoon in Vietnam?"

"Two. And a welder from San Marcos Texas. Our sniper was a Navajo cowboy— a bronc-buster and local rodeo star from Taos New Mexico. Our medic was a bee keeper from Price Utah."

"Well, you see?" She kissed his forehead. Andy drank his whiskey. Grace collected the remains of supper (fried halibut, corn and bacon, mashed potatoes, buttered sourdough rolls) for their two beagles, Hoover and Kirby; the hounds devoured the scraps. Chief Pignato reclined, watching CNN with the volume low, and smoked a cigar while browsing his newest issues of Backyard Living and Guns & Ammo. The timer buzzed; Andy and Grace reseated themselves at the table for dessert: hot chocolate sheet-cake with butter-pecan ice cream and cups of Starbucks Sumatra. Andy fell asleep with his head in Grace's lap while she watched television. Grace roused her husband at the end of a Judging Amy re-run and the pair retired early. She removed his boots, uniform trousers and khaki blouse while he mumbled like a sleepy child. The bedroom lit up from lightning and though she waited for thunder there was none. Grace returned downstairs, surfed the cable from channels 4 to 99 then settled on the Weather Channel, chewing pretzels as a Doppler demon engulfed their town.

Marcus had never seen such wind. Each blast slammed the trailer, a 1969 Skylark, with gusts fifty miles per hour, rocking the 12x60 prefabricated box he and Julie made home; sheet metal creaked, lights flickered wildly. Marcus counted five, six, seven seconds between lulls of shrieking wind; then on the eighth beat another blast and some piece of bric-a-brac: glass unicorn, carnival monkey, softball trophy, another item from his collection of Shiner beer bottles— would crash to the floor.

"Goddamn it Marky I hate this." Julie dumped the unicorn's jagged torso into the garbage atop the shattered glass cat and slivers of gold-veined Budweiser mirror.

"The wind's coming from the sea," Marcus said. "At least it ain't a hurricane; thinka Katrina, you wanna bitch. I gave you money for beer. Where's the beer?"

She lit a cigarette. "We drank it all last night. You me Jerry and Sam."

"We got any smoke?"

"That's gone too."

"I want some beer. Let's get in the truck and get some." He pushed her over to the only real furniture they owned, an antique coat rack from his Grandfather's long-gone barbershop, and she pulled back.

"I don't wanna go to town in this crazy storm."

Marcus loaded his bottom lip with snuff. "Well, Jerry sold his other truck and Sam finally got that whiplash settlement. They always seem to make out okay." He said this bitterly, and Julie nodded. She stuffed the lacy ends of blouse into her black jeans and zipped up a mottled rabbit skin coat. Her pregnancy wouldn't show for another two months. She was banking on that, since her first pregnancy didn't show until she was four months along. Marcus knew nothing. Julie wasn't sure whether the father was Jerry or his older brother Randy.

Marcus had been back from Anchorage two weeks and she'd been pregnant eight. Seattle had a clinic at Third and Pike but it was expensive (a thousand including the Demerol) but also secret; Bible-waving creeps didn't mob the doorways shouting don't kill your baby Jezebel whore! She could go, stay the night with Jack, a dealer she knew: he'd want to fuck her or tape her fucking someone else and that was cool because his houseboat cost two million and he wasn't stingy with his drugs like Marcus, as long as you let him perv your body. She would invent some reason: someone owed her money or dope, and she'd bring him back some good stuff of Jack's and that's all he'd care about. He would give her a sloppy kiss while tearing the drugs out her hands with the fervor of a junkie.

Marcus had his own problems: Sam had Chlamydia and was afraid to tell Jerry. She had accused Marcus of infecting her. His first concern was whether or not the disease was AIDS. Sam told him Chlamydia was a highly contagious bacteria and that Julie better get checked out. Marcus had shrugged— as long as it wasn't AIDS he didn't give a damn. Fuck Jerry too. He jumped when Julie took the cigarette from his fingers for a puff.

"Freak," she said.

Marcus opened the door. The wind smote them, snatched the latch from his hands. He wrestled the flimsy door into its frame. They bent their bodies to the storm, made for the Ford. A bough of hemlock cracked from the ring of trees, smashing down to the aluminum roof. "Damn!" yelled Marcus. He yanked open the truck's door, leaned across to help Julie clear the two feet from ground to cab. She grunted her way up; the pick-up's enormous off-road tires increased the already exaggerated height of the eight-inch lift-kit Marcus had installed.

Julie slammed the door, pushed long wet hair from her eyes. She tugged until the seatbelt sprang free, lashing her thigh with the heavy chrome buckle and carrying in its wake a cascade of stale Cheetos and crumpled cigarette packages.

Marcus snapped on FM radio, twisting the volume fully clockwise. Deafening Heavy Metal filled the cab; Black Label Society blotting out the roar of the wind with Crazy or High. "That's your song all right," Julie said. She lowered the volume. He slammed the automatic shifter from drive back to park. The truck rolled several inches forward on its massive tires, lurched, idled gutturally. Julie was thrown forward, her palms slapping the dashboard.

"Marcus, what the hell are you doing?"

"Something's in front of the truck! I nearly hit it!" He stared through windshield into the maelstrom of leaves blown into a brown drape reflecting back the bright headlights and fog lights of the Ford. Something moved in front of the truck. This time Julie saw it. "Marky!" He turned to her. A deep strawberry hickey imprinted her neck and he remembered his night parked with Sam, her fragrant hair across his face as they fucked, her on top, the noise of beer bottles as her foot kicked down again and again and her anger when he sucked her neck, no you idiot it'll leave a mark.

The passenger door banged opened. Arms reached in, a hand cupped Julie's chin, snapping off her scream. The knife struck twice, severing her spinal cord at the fourth thoracic vertebra, piercing the aortic arch. Julie fell forward, her eyes blinded by her own blood. Marcus clawed under his seat for the RG .25 caliber – he'd sold all his good guns but kept the Saturday night special, cartridges green with patina, barrel rusted – with this in hand he pushed at his own door but it was already open – the arms knocking his head against the back of the cab, stunning him with fist after fist to the face. Marcus fired the junk gun once, and the bullet tore down his leg. He aimed at the killer's face, squeezed the trigger again but nothing happened; the RG had not fully ejected the brass and had jammed.

Marcus gasped as ice struck his neck and chest, then numbness flowed through his chest, sprayed from his nose and mouth, down his neck in warm streams. His head fell over onto his shoulder and looking down he could see the body of his wife but looking down made him feel dizzy as if were looking down from the thousand foot drop at Hurricane Ridge so he and stared up and out— at the porch light dancing on its chain. Howling wind, rock music and the screaming close face of the man with the hurtful arms. "You sonofabitch," said Marcus, but nothing came from his mouth but blood.

Jerry removed a glove, reached in and scratched Marcus deeply down the cheek and throat, the kind of wound a woman struggling for her life inflicts. His fingernails slid in the oily blood and he pressed harder, cutting skin. He slammed their doors, wiped each clean of blood. The sudden squaw of rain and pellet-ice, as fierce in his face as flames, was his ally in absolution, striking everything with fat searing drops, sluicing the front of his butcher's apron—thick with gore from the fury of his striking. He was flying from his 5-way, a snorted cocktail of heroin, coke, meth and Rohypnol washed in with a forty ounce Old English 800.

Marcus coughed, painting the inside surface of the windshield. His vision exploded, a kaleidoscope turning over a cap of multicolored flames, a purple Phoenix flexing its wings, bellowing strings of molten styrene into the maelstrom of wind. He fell forward, the knife's rosewood handle lurching with each gasp as he slid a cassette into the ancient Pioneer, spoke it was Jerry over and over for the tape, but the stereo couldn't record, it could only play.

The telephone roused Grace at four a.m. Chief Pignato remained locked in a pleasant dream of fishing—not salmon fishing but fly fishing for rainbow trout in Montana—his hands twitched as in the dream his hands worked the fragile reel and varnished bamboo rod, he smiled, his eyes darting under the lids from REM; Grace shook him and still smiling he came to.

"Here." Grace passed the telephone across his hairy back as he rolled. Andy listened. The storm slammed the house and several times he had to ask Corporal Bastos to speak louder. "See you in ten," said the Chief. He dressed, strapped on his Smith & Wesson thirteen-shot .40 semi-auto. Andy liked to hold the classic weapon in his hands and say, like a priest intoning, "1991 Smith and Wesson Model 4006 forty caliber, thirteen shot semiautomatic pistol, firing Federal 180 grain copper-jacketed hollow point cartridges." FBI agents carried the less reliable and over-priced Colt Delta Elite firing the 10mm round, or the Glock 9mm, a reliable weapon but not very powerful meaning you had to pump a crazed perp full of little bullets instead of one or two big ones.

"I can't believe you have to go out in this weather," said Grace.

"Well, I do. It's bad, Gracie."

"How on earth, Andy, could today get any worse for you?"

"Julie and Marcus are dead."

"Those kids? Another car wreck?"

"Murder-suicide, Bastos thinks."

"Oh good lord, but why?" Chief Pignato wouldn't have an official answer to that question for several more days of looking past the trees, seas, storms for the infernal wind-driven cry of anger. Over waves the whipped-meringue of storm water charged the salmon: hundreds glittering pink, flashing silver, then thousands. They ascended from the Pacific into the estuary of the Anger River, driven by instinct through rapids to leap the ladders, lichen-blackened portcullises all that remained of the ancient hatchery cemented to rocky banks at the bend where Mt. Salish came into view through stumps of old-growth hemlock. Onward the Chinook pushed, past the frantic bear and fishermen – those ancient enemies rarely triumphed over – to finally nest and spawn, setting the biological clock of solstice and renewal another year forward.

Porn

"If you harbor a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it"

—Martin Amis

Zenobia's resembled the other dozen dilapidated warehouses decaying above the wharf. No velvet rope, only thugs backdoor, then another thug indoors with another clipboard. You ascend iron stairs rusted by a century's leakage to the smoky temple on the second floor. Ancient planks extend to black-tiled bathrooms fogged with crack; vomiting millionaires—entertainment lawyers, recording artists, drug dealers, pornstars, guitarists and other sub-celebrities and their hipster retinues—lunged against plank walls, zipping up or zipping down.

Zenobia's stages were three sunken, circular pits—amphitheaters dominating the center of the club—noise roared from this collective abyss, spreading over writhing bodies like smoke. Brass rails topped with onyx balusters surrounded each pit and, for the VIP bands du jour—Bush, Everclear, Hole, Deftones, White Stripes— the balustrade served as seating for bouncers and bodyguards. Three lounges, each showcasing two of the city's best bartenders, endlessly cranked drinks but unless you were really somebody you had to queue for cocktails. Drinking a beer, I ran into Vern Cortázar, my best friend who hasn't really been my best friend since sixteen, save for chance meetings— we don't race anymore, or climb, ski, get high, share dreams. His dad owns Anger Rapids, outside Fall City, near Seattle. We grew up there.

"Yo!" yelled Vern.

"Hey!" Vern and his friends were drinking Ritz Side Cars and ordered me one. He took my bottle of Bud and poured it out on the floor. "That crap's not allowed around here," he laughed.

Vern's dad, Ferdinand "Fred" Cortázar made the worst toilet paper on earth. The stuff was everywhere: schools restaurants gas stations hospitals bars airport home because almost everyone in Anger Rapids or Fall City worked for Cortázar's pulp-mill. You couldn't crap from King to Thurston counties without Cortázar's scratchy one-ply monopolizing the dispenser— so flimsy no mater how much you wadded up a finger'd poke through. My dad supervised the "effluvium tanks" (euphemism for acre after dead acre of these ghastly carrion-stinking mud pits brimming toxic slurry); by "supervise" I mean he and his gang were paid to sump as much of this poison as possible into the Anger River without getting Cortázar busted by the EPA.

Cortázar's sacks really made him rich. Tacoma, Seattle, Olympia Albertson's, Fred Meyer, Safeway the baggers ask "paper or plastic?" and you take paper because you can drop an elephant into a Cortázar sack. As a rich kid Vern was never a punk, never spoiled. His dad boxed with him, a requirement not a choice, and it was serious: when those Cortázars locked horns Vern often ended up with a fat lip or a bloody nose. We had a band, Globularia, and cut three CDs before folding. He went to college and I kept jumping through bands.

I drank my Side Car. Vern ordered a bottle of cognac. He was high, his trip the tiresome "truth beauty sublimity" gobbledygook; he grew up with rare purchased things and knew no other form of the sublime. Vern introduced his wife, porn star Sabrina Harsh, then the cognac arrived: Louis XIII de Remy Martin. Vern's bodyguard Skully poured me a glass to the brim, not this "splash in a snifter" peckerwoods pull on you; Vern's a true baller, even if he is boring when high.

Vern threw up, quietly, and daubed at the mess but Skully cleaned him with a napkin, motioned with his hand. A waiter detailed the area then left with the vomity rags and two hundreds. Vern was saturated with MDMA; rave drugs make you ethereal or lovey-dovey or downright stupid or paralyzed depending on ingestion of XTC or meth or acid or Special K and how much is synergized with cocaine or alcohol. Vern said, "tell me a story, a good story."

I laughed.

"Tell me something that just happened to you. Something real." His sibilants were giving him a hell of a time, it was like conversing with a cartoon snake.

"Well, I took a train to Portland."

"Ah. Portland. Yes." He spilled his cigarettes, patted them, breaking several in half. "God damn it all," he sighed, collapsing back and a minion named Tom, some kind of attorney, retrieved them, lit him up. Skully had pushed some guy away from the inner circle and was now pointing him to an exit. "Continue please."

It wasn't much of a story but I told Vern— I'd encountered my high-school English teacher, Ms. Adams, on an Amtrak to Portland.

Vern had been chauffeured to Seattle Prep (changed him from simply not caring about Catholicism to hating Catholicism) though he wanted to go public with the rest of us and begged his dad to let him attend Bainbridge. Cortázar Castle was a historic monument, and the family lingered in Anger Rapids where great-grandpa Virgil began with a salmon cannery, a tannery, and a hotel. Cortázar was Cuban in name and blood; vicious little gangster for a pretty-boy, always carried a knife, was the first to lay girls, not just talk but actually do it. The first time I fought on his side I was grappling with Ronnie Ballard wrestler-style but Vern pulled his Buck and cut Johnny Smith's arm then Johnny and his goons ran away.

"I saw Ms. Adams in the parlor car," I said. "Sitting stiffly and formally in her swivel-seat so I figured this trip must be a gift for her, she wasn't the type to purchase a sleeper or hang out in a bar car."

Vern shot something yellow into his mouth followed by some beige tablets then some red oblongs then a thick white trapezoid.

"Since Ms. Adams had been, for better or worse, my teacher and I always try to forgive and forget, I bought her a drink. I went back to working on a song then the waitress tapped my shoulder and put the drink, a Stoli Cape Cod, down. She had the vacuous eyes and casual rudeness of the very stupid, though she was very beautiful, and said she doesn't know you, and she doesn't want the drink."

Vern nodded.

"I looked over and Ms. Adams – we called her the crocodile, and she still resembled one, all leathery and toothy – was scowling at me so I told her that at Bainbridge High in Anger Rapids she taught me English. She asked me my name and I told her, Sammy Martinéz, and she repeated I don't remember you."

Vern's chin crashed to his sternum then he snapped awake and drank.

"I told her that I wrote a poem once and she said it was too good and that I'd obviously plagiarized it. She embarrassed me in front of the entire class. After I told her this she said I finally remember you now, always the trouble maker."

"Hey!" Vern called to someone air-kissing a blond. He blew smoke in my face accidentally, then apologized. "That's my new wife Helena Watterson, aka Sabrina Harsh, the porn star. She's been on Howard Stern."

"I know, Vern," I said. Skully snorted and refilled me.

"Her ex, N.A. Fry, had his cock inked ultima ratio regum, the motto of Louis."

"The final argument of kings," I nodded. "But Louis engraved it on his bronze cannons, not his penis."

"Yeah, but nobody's hung like a nigga, just ask Skully."

Skully's a three hundred pound vegetarian ex-Seahawk; they aren't a great team, amazing they made a Superbowl, but he was a great Hawk. He shrugged, refilled my glass with the lovely cognac. His tent-like Zegna jacket flapped open revealing twin-hung Glock Model 37 forty-fives in Uncle Mike's quick-draw black nylon holsters filling both sweaty pits— he nodded again when I killed the glass, topped it.

Vern closed his eyes. His foot jerked once but his eyes remained closed. Good, I thought. He's either asleep or dead. Skully ordered another bottle of 13 and sat, smiling at me. The porn star was gone, dancing with the lead singer of Spire then a Capcom man in town buying up game-programmers. Skully lit a Salem, tipped the waitress a hundred for the bottle and a platter of Samosas with tamarind and mango chutneys, poured me a drink. "You should have one too," I coaxed. He grinned, shook his head, patted Vern's leg. Vern was as still as a corpse and I said so.

Skully tapped his chest drum-drum-drum like you signal hit me at blackjack and Vern took several gulps of air. "He's okay," Skully exhaled. The menthol smoke was sweet, rich, soothing. "He don't often ask nobody for a story, he usually does all the talkin. I know you mean somethin to him." He bit a Samosa, sucked out half the pea and potato filling, tamped the hole with chutney then devoured the remaining dumpling. "You was sayin?" I borrowed a Salem from Skully; he lit it with an antique gold-coin Dunhill lighter.

"That's pretty much it, Skully. I let her have it then, I told her I wasn't a troublemaker, I was just this poor little spic who loved English, adored it; I loved it more than she pretended to as a teacher and a failed writer. I called her a racist, frigid bitch. I reminded her that when as a kid I'd stood up to her, when she had to back down after the Principal made her change my grade and apologize, she hated me. I saw it in her eyes— how someone with my color of skin didn't deserve to be good at English. She left and, though I despise both vodka and cranberry juice, I gulped the Cape Cod and finished my song. It was a breakthrough. I'd been struggling with that damn thing a month and it just wrote itself after that."

"Like I always say," said Skully, sometime's anger's a good thing." He had a beautiful head, smallish atop the massive body, with tiny ears as shiny as patent leather; he shaved his head and you could see many scars, but his nose was so small that its breakage hadn't changed its perfect symmetry, although the bridge was scarred. His skin was dark black and his beard hair very thick so that his mustache seemed to erupt more than grow, and he grew it long and waxed the ends gunfighter-style.

"Sometime's anger's the only thing," I replied. "Uh-huh," Skully said in his gentle manner, pouring more cognac. "That's okay too."

****

Sarah (aka Candy Slyce) set Jim and John and David straight on the tough life of a porn star. She had just stripped and lap-danced for them for three hundred and was toweling off, gulping three mini-bar vodkas from a plastic cup of ice and devouring a bag of Goldfish while they made up their minds whether or not they wanted to ante up another two hundred apiece to get laid. She was so cheap because she was old, no longer made films. Candy desperately needed a fix.

Jim had insisted they call her because he owned all her VHS videos, and the two porn compilations made to DVD: Anal Nurses which had no audio, and Anal Vixens with Cal Slammer, kid with a baseball bat dick who shot himself. Jim was almost drunk and made some crack about the easy life of pornstars, to which Sarah naturally set him straight. "Oh I just lay back and fuck, huh? Or suck a few cocks?" She strode to the end of the suite and moved some furniture, arranged lamps to concentrate their glare into a blazing pool.

"The room is filled with people, your eyes burn from the lighting, cigarette and cigar smoke, and sometimes fumes from gas or paint or exhaust if it's a workshop or garage. Sometimes it's so cold you don't have to tweak your nipples to raise them, or so hot all your makeup sweats off in ten minutes, including the pancake hiding zits, shaving bumps or fucksores on your ass and cunt."

She shot another Absolut, then assaulted the line of mini-Jacks. Jim uncorked the Talisker between his legs and sweetened the glasses of his boys.

"Say it's a bad day: before my period or right after and even lubed this huge dick hurts like hell and I try shift to anal because I've already dilated my asshole with a dildo; I'm in scratchy nylons, fucked by some guy not bad looking but breath like a pit-bull, foot odor like rotten meat and farts so bad even the technicians curse Jesus Christ! while the director shouts 'Quit fucking around and fuck! Roll tape! Wait for speed! Move your ass, baby, spread those cheeks, starting transition! Anal! Touch your clit, finger your clit damn it, don't cover your pussy.....no! Wait for Action, Sarah! Goddamnit, again. Anal transition, Reverse Cowgirl then move to Flying V, finish Ass-to-Mouth just like we ran through... and... Action!"

Jim and John and David agreed it sounded much harder than it looked on tape. "And you think there's just one camera? Man, I was the real thing, I fucked for three cameras, always follow the Lead Director, always, but his seconds want their share too, in the end they pool it all and release the best, or what's legal in cases where we end up pissing or shitting or fisting beyond the thumb or wrist, yes there's distribution laws affecting both types of fisting or whether you fist anally too and whether you fist yourself or get fisted by someone else or if you fist simultaneously vaginal and anal which by the way is a mind-blowing orgasm. And then there's the still-photographers wanting hardcore poses as well as the fakey-fuck stuff too for the softcore mags and cable movies; you men! And you wonder why so many girl pornstars are dykes?" Sarah puffed her Marlboro, held smoke then made two big rings, gulped her bourbon. She staggered, grinned. "And when it's time for the money-shot and the fella with me can't cum or doesn't cum enough, they have this disgusting mixture of egg whites and tapioca somebody off-camera squirts onto my face and neck and tits in a huge blast as if King Kong just got his rocks off!"

Jim and John and David looked at each other; David nodded to Jim then John nodded to Jim and Jim nodded back, the three men feeding on each other's excitement. Some men are turned on by a piece of meat. These friends wanted each other but that was a taboo they never dared cross – they were the most dangerous type of man, the closeted homosexual who hates homosexuality – fucking another man was a line they never would cross: instead they hunted and fished and gambled and drank and camped and spent thousands on strippers and strip clubs and fucked hookers together. "Okay," said Jim. "Six hundred's a deal."

****

Wilson was bored with life, with his tri-level on Black Lake, his two cars, two trucks, two motorcycles (BMW, though as a younger man he'd bought Harleys) and triple-dipper retirement (he retired from the Army Reserve as a Colonel, the U.S. Post Office as an Assistant Postmaster, and he drew a tax-free 50% service-connected disability pension from the VA). In three years he would be eligible to draw Social Security, and planned to use the extra money to purchase gold coins. Even with the economic downturn, even though his investments lost fifty thousand a month for eight months straight, and after the shaky stabilization all of his stocks, even Google, were worth half their pre-collapse price, he was still loaded; he had plenty of dough. A widower, he'd enjoyed owning dogs but their deaths were hard on him – harder even than the death of his wife Alice; she'd had three affairs to his one but they'd reconciled and spent another twelve years before her cancer – so he hadn't replaced Kirby the beagle.

One day Wilson found himself in the poor part of town, the slum west of downtown were he'd gone to a junk store to try find a 1904 ceiling-fan paddle Home Depot and Lowe's didn't carry— there in those faltering churches of suburban self-assurance pierced and tattooed clerks stared at him and his broken sliver of wood as if both should be in some museum exhibit.

Unsure why, when all his life he'd been proprietary and sumptuary, he went for a stroll in the ghetto instead of returning directly to his Cadillac. A half-mile later he drank three skunked pints of Alaskan at a tavern called Ricky's then entered an adult bookstore and porn emporium called Desire Video. A seedy old man about Wilson's age but nowhere near as well groomed sat behind the bulletproof cashier's station smoking a cherry Swisher-Sweet. The odor of the cigar permeated the kiosk of hardcore movies and magazines to all the way downstairs where men masturbated in the murky token-booths. As Wilson browsed the assortment of VHS, DVDs, latex toys and lurid glossies, he occasionally glanced up and the old man would be watching him. He passed the cage and nodded hello one old fart to another, but the codger only puffed. He grabbed a DVD titled Barely Legal and one called Backdoor Hos and, freshly shaven face ablaze with shame and Kenneth Cole, paid for his selections.

Outside the sun was nearly hot, the lighted filth of the streets alien and ugly. Wilson continued moving away from his car, now and then pausing in the shade of a shop-front. He clutched his bag of porn, enjoying the plethora of prostitutes: bright scarves, leather and tie-dye minis, big tits, little tits, creamy powder clogging the fine lines around drug-dulled eyes, jangling earrings, chokers slick on sweaty necks. Taut, vicious-looking, bejeweled dark-skinned youths in zoot-suits or baggy rapper-gear watched him from their Beamers, Toyotas, and Hondas. "Those boys must be pimps or gangbangers," Wilson thought. His shoes began to hurt, his toes felt crushed. He itched his nose, brushed crud from his mustache. "Hey man, go for the Lady? A buck a try for the Queen of Joy. See that dog over there? Doubled his money, damn near broke me, man. Dollar down, best game in town. C'mon, man."

Wilson dug out several dollars because he knew he could be easily robbed, this wasn't a place to say no and walk on by like you owned it all; pampered white pensioners like himself, dressed like cookie-cutter Donald Trumps and possessing almost as much money, did in fact own most of it. "Okay. But I know it's a trick," he smiled.

"No man, I'm cool, best game in town." He took Wilson's money, the cracks in his fingers yellow, the skin scuffed lighter black than the remaining black. "Three cards, which one's the Lady?" Wilson pointed. "No, dude, not the deuce, you gotta find the Lady." He grinned, stuffed a dollar into his shirt pocket, leaving the other two atop his cardboard box, and re-shuffled the deck. "Okay man, show me my pretty Lady, I lost her somewheres, you get her back for me okay? I needs my Queen of Joy." Wilson chose a seven and a nine then spent five more dollars. The kid's banter pleased him; a gentle con, certainly less harmful than many of the cons Wilson had pulled in business. "You're good," he said, walking away.

He was more than two miles from his car when he reached a broken-concrete quay and dipped his hands into the Pacific. Wilson stopped for more skunky beer at a dive called the White Sands, though there had never been white sand in that part of the world, only stinking mudflats and jetty stones caked with gull shit and offal. Randall Hank Williams was always singing "Family Tradition" in these kinds of places, it seemed to Wilson, and sure enough Junior sang it, followed by "Rowdy Friends" and "This Ain't Dallas." Then a country voice Wilson didn't recognize but liked sang about chrome and some hot mama. Wilson drank three Buds quickly as the place had no Alaskan or Redhook or Mirror Pond; he hated beer actually but could manage ice-cold microbrews, preferred wine but didn't feel brave enough to order it, though the bar served it: white zinfandel, $2.25 a schooner, and looking through the dirty glass refrigerator doors he saw that their vino was a wine-tap box of Franzia. Agonizingly loud warbling siren stabbed his brain as a cop-car screamed by, flashing lights dazzling the gloom of the White Sands. "Hey there goes my ride," a tough looking man said, and his tough-looking friends laughed. Wilson played ten bucks in a dollar-a-play pulltab game called Crazy-8s and the first ticket he opened was the five hundred dollar winner, the last, a twenty-five. "Killed that fuckin' bowl," the bartender growled, crossing out the winners on the flash-card with a Sharpie, but brightened when Wilson tipped him a hundred, and bought the bar a round.

Outside, Wilson paused in a fugue-state, the beer growling his empty stomach, a traffic of trucks and delivery vans streaming past him. A horn blared, he blinked, began walking again, hands empty. He stopped, spread his fingers, stared at the mottled-pink palms, wondered what happened to Barely Legal and Backdoor Hos, but he was glad the porn was gone. It was low-tide and Wilson sank to his ankles in the filthy beach's strand of sodden mud and broken clam shells, the ocean burping over a pile of barnacle-encrusted pilings and abandoned fuel drums. "Damn!" he gasped, retreating to scrape his shoes with a spatula of driftwood.

Wilson struggled back to the road and, finding a platform of mailboxes between the White Sands and a Vietnamese Pho from which rolled the heady scent of fish, cabbage, chili paste, and rancid oil, opened one painted red/white/blue and pulled forth a thick padded envelope. The envelope had lain in the mailbox throughout the heat of the day and fit warmly in Wilson's hands. Fragile! Handle with Care! stamped red rubric warned but he could feel, under the bubble-wrap, a heavy, shifting, crackling slippery resilience. "What the hell are you doing?" Wilson muttered, hurrying away with his treasure. "What are you doing?"

****

The first time Jackie realized she could see down into his apartment Adonis had stepped from the shower and, toweling himself, sang "Lukenbach Texas." His voice was good, his physique breathtaking. The next time he was seated by the open window crapping with a magazine, and Jackie dropped Katrina when she realized Adonis was jacking off. She grabbed her Bausch & Lomb Elite binoculars, curious to see what sort of porn an incredibly handsome, not just handsome but drop-dead gorgeous man masturbates to, shocked when Field & Stream loomed into focus. She lowered the binocs then raised them again, sighting on the mystery of mysteries. "In for a penny, in for a pound," she whispered as the Siamese purred, rubbing against her legs.

Oh yes, he was doing it— spanking the monkey with what looked to her to be an exquisite erect penis, just the right length and thickness. Not that horrid mottled blue-purple color, but stone-washed pink, and not too veiny. Perfect mushroom head: nothing was grosser than a guy with a wormy purple cock headless, like a ballpoint pen. Jackie was even more stunned to discover, after watching many minutes, that he was not pulling his pud to Field & Stream, he was simply pulling his pud – a necessary but boring release as he made his other deposit into the toilet as well – and while waiting catching up on his outdoor sports. He came into a wad of tissue, wiped himself, flushed, dropped Field & Stream into a wicker magazine rack filled also with Outdoor Life, Playboy, GQ, and Forbes, zipped up, washed his hands (Jackie was pleased to see he soaped them twice) and disappeared. She hugged Katrina, kissing the calico head that smelled of flea-powder, and sighed.

"When a man that beautiful hasn't dated in 200 days and is reduced to bopping the baloney, something is very very wrong with the world, kitty!" Just then, a tri-color 1991 Eagle Talon crashed into a new 350Z with an explosion that shook her windows. She dropped the cat a second time and stumped in her blue-nylon Don-Joy brace to the window as below her a man crawled from asphalt to collapse onto her sidewalk, hand over his mouth. Blood, bone, teeth and vomit spurted through his fingers. The girl sprawled facedown in the wreckage of her day-old sports car; she had platinum hair that looked as if the ends had been dipped in red paint. She raised her arm once and then relaxed onto the steaming engine block.

Jackie wrote her brother Dear Nathan, I hope this letter finds you well. Thank you for the cards birthday Thanksgiving Christmas, and for the email after our earthquake. Nathan, this year has been such a nightmare for me I hope I don't bore you with talking, but I have no one else to say these things to. I'm in love with a man in a window. His name's Christopher, I only know that because someone crashed in front of our condos, for two years, I've called him Adonis; I dialed 911 and came down with towels and he dialed 911 and came down with towels too. The girl from the Z the Eagle wrecked died in my arms Nathan. She was cooking alive so I pulled her off the engine and held her. She never opened her eyes. Christopher cleared the man's airway and saved his life.

This summer the most absurd and awful thing also happened; I watched a man blown up at our local Chevron. He was working on a switch in an empty underground tank and he somehow made a spark and it blew him out; he landed almost at my feet, Nathan, his tools spilling all over, and gravel like shrapnel blasting across the asphalt. His clothes were blown off, and his head was gone, Christ, I mean it was a paste, like spilling liquid from a pail. I went to him but there was nothing I could do. The Korean who owns the place ran out, he's a tough old bird with one arm; he coolly hit the pump switch to turn off the gas then covered the guy whose head was blown off. One of the dead guy's friends started throwing up; the other moved his backhoe to block the entrance to the gas station. Then right before Thanksgiving, some drunk asshole totaled my car; it's a miracle I wasn't killed, Nathan, I mean my old Volvo came to pieces! I was on Martin Way when this creep crossed lanes; I was able to swerve to avoid a head-on and he T-boned me on my passenger side. I was wearing my seatbelt and my airbag deployed, which the State Patrol investigator (Sergeant Taylor) said saved my life, but I don't see how. It was a terrific explosion, Nathan, I was ejected; I felt things holding me then giving way so maybe that was the seat belt and airbag, or maybe that's what we call God.

This idiot's brother was killed immediately, his girlfriend's still on life-support. Taylor told me she was ejected too, but unlike me, both her legs were shattered, and skull, and spine severed, and left arm amputated and lungs, liver, spleen, lacerated. I tried to get up but my right knee was busted. There were like a dozen people there helping me, keeping me down, performing first aid. This bastard has no insurance, has had multiple DUIs. I'm slated for an ACL operation, eight thousand with physical therapy, third-best doctor. State Farm says my car is worth $4,000 so that's what I get for this. The MRIs and imaging contrasts alone cost $3,000. This doctor, all of 28, going to fat but perfect hair and safe little diamond stud earring, said, I recommend you seek counseling for your anger. I'm much better now, not so bitter. I know that no one wants to hear the complaints of an old maid, but I really need six thousand dollars, Nathan, and I've never asked you for anything. When you were in law school I helped you buy a car and you came here many, many times to eat and took sacks of leftovers home and cans too and blankets, sheets, pillows, curtains and bottles of beer, wine, gin, vodka, tequila, olive oil, ham, roast, cheese, soup. We always had this unspoken agreement that you would always take and never give but now I need you to give, Nathan, now I need you in return, my brother.

****

Getting dark, Anna. You asked me many times to account for myself, repair my animus, staunch the tears and re-enter your sparkling light. I nodded, fed you more drugs: how else but the obeisance of religion, politics, corporation, emotion, law, alcoholic and narcotic intoxication will we ever be controlled? Though you allowed the huge temporary wealth (and even more ephemeral shift of power from wrinkled white Christian males controlling this nation to the youth – Christ, it was glorious and then we crumbled, sold out just like our hippie grandparents and shadow-parents) of the 90s buy, penetrate, obsess and possess you – this millennium will be no different than the old, just more people and gadgets and commerce. You only repined for wasted years; you died happy I think, never longing for the trap and entrapment of celebrity, those otiose names passing for American nobility, grunge peerage going out in the end as they came in, whimpering.

We discussed the sorry rock scene in Seattle, as always the incredible 90s, how you liked "Hunger Strike" but wouldn't listen to Temple of the Dog anymore, how Queensryche's moldy sound now made you cry. Tuatara was fun for five minutes, Sleater-Kinney starting to get on our nerves though it was nice chick anti-metal still doing well. Foo Fighters crap; you liked them at first because before the tragedy you liked Dave Grohl's bucktoothed rascal-paperboy scrawny goofiness more than Cobain's haunted-waif pretty boy angst just like you liked, as your mom did, Ringo more than Paul, Townshend more than Daltrey.

The Tycoons had great promise and Braindead even more but you just spent two hours with Born Defiant and decided "Blinded by Greed's" only like the third best song on the CD, "Struggle" the best, the others too hard to figure out or just bad songs. "Alternative" a fucking useless term: alternative to what, who, when, where? An excuse for sloppiness, as "experimental" is for narcissistic, bathetic, pointless crap fiction, film, poetry. Soundgarden? Call them Smudgeon now, expect their greatest hits Toyota commercials or Campbell's soup. Thank god for injectable powders.

All those wannabees in bands with Andy Woods, the one who died beautiful, best of them all. Pearl Jam? Spoiled rich kids brainstorming richer in the end – all from other bands, much better bands: Mudhoney, Mother Love Bone, Green River. Nirvana copped Green River's style, made it way too big – started out the worst of them but had so much fun, learned to play, ended up the best of them all. Cobain wrote his best lyrics in Olympia and Sleater-Kinney writes better in Olympia too but they'll never be Nirvana. Awesomest albums ever? Hate Pearl Jam except two songs; Soundgarden rules in genius sloppiness. Absolutely everything on In Utero forever and ever amen; Audio Slave's okay, just ok, Cornell was stronger as Garden. Temple of the Dog we keep going back to— classic, better songs than "Hunger Strike" are maybe "Times of Trouble" and "Call me a Dog." Alice in Chains, I guess, but it better be cheap, nobody pays full price for AIC; "Rooster" may be the best song of all time after "Man in the Box." Who am I kidding? My hair's falling out and I'm getting fat— I'd sell my soul to have been Layne Staley.

When you passed out I put Facelift back on. I was a nerd, Texan air force brat lucky to find you sixteen at McChord AFB housing where your look I thought Joan Jett but you said no, dummy, Sue Tissue.

I said we talk way too much about Seattle, that none of the home bands, none of them, wrote anything as beautiful as Killswitch's "Fixation." Just another Iron Maiden clone but with half the lungs, you replied. I liked you so much and then I loved you until I didn't, tried to destroy myself but couldn't, crawled away from the bombs, mines, tripwires, wreckage. We scraped together enough trash from a 20-sack for a joint and smoked it, lint flaring, seeds popping then I remembered there was very good stuff hidden in the freezer and we burned that. You wore black jeans, tie-dyed t-shirt, handcuff earrings, a slim black leather collar with a single d-ring around it. You said your dad just began to shave his ears and it made him so angry, gray hair popping everywhere, even the lobes, that he cut his ears every time. You were the best rock pianist I ever heard, Jesus Christ, Anna you could play. You could play. Of course I was mad when you told me you were making porn, I mean what the hell.

You said the money was excellent, and free drugs. You said I was a moron to judge sex-workers and porn-actors, that I sounded just like the hypocrite Christian Republicans who drove our nation to the brink of collapse: mindless breeders, anti-intellectuals, greedheads and warmongers who with Prophet Bush tried to stage the Apocalypse. You said that vice cops were some of the most twisted men you'd ever had the misfortune to encounter, that they stalk and abuse prostitutes and young runaways: there's middle class American morality for you.

I said I didn't care about the serial fucking which was a lie and that I'd always love you. We were old compared to the kids we were – you 32 me 33 – now all I think about is you Anna, how I should have broken through the bullshit nonchalance and pastiche toughness and dirty deadly paid-to-be-cum-on lifestyle you considered real, ineluctably final, and held you forever. I should have stolen you back with a promise, a plan. I remember how we stumbled out, high, to buy beer and chocolate cake and pizza-by-the-slice, bumping into an old man you knew, some once-famous novelist teaching for a living, holding a big white dog on one of those automatic leashes resembling a halibut reel. The white dog, once strong now slumped in his frame like a decaying barn, shaggy and faded— fur yellowish at the roots and virtually clear at the tips, beige everywhere else, like a bleached, worn-out washcloth.

Halfdan was the dog's name, (some old Viking king or Norse poet) had the clearest, cleanest, most dignified eyes I've ever seen in a dog. He sat patiently for five minutes while you chatted with his master, then began tugging, not harshly but insistent, as a lazarillo-boy pulls a blind man's sleeve: home, sir— home! I'm a fraud and a loser, Anna, and you never were; I'm all sound and fury signifying nothing: dishing out a great guitar solo's quite simple with the Behringer ultra octaver pedal, chorus and a bit of flanging— and a whammy bar dive-bomb always makes something out of nothing when nothing's mostly what you got.

Beauty

L'ordre est ce qu'il y a de plus rare dans les opérations de l'esprit

"Order is the rarest power of the mind"

—Fénelon

My father was the most beautiful man I've ever known. By beauty I don't mean that he resembled a young Gregory Peck, though he did – his face was scarred from Korea and from street fighting as a boy, and he limped from Vietnam, not so bad when I was young but worse as he aged and arthritis set in – by beauty I mean his barbarous symmetry: his unrelenting brashness, truthful big mouth, intractable ignorance and provincialism made him perfectly imperfect, hence beautiful. Most of my life I hated him, I was at war with him and he was at war with himself, but he beat me less than he raised me, he made a man out of me, I grew up, and that too is beautiful.

Beauty isn't in the eyes of the beholder— that misperception is desire, attraction, appreciation, lust, the pathos of vanity; beauty is the eye's exact perception in a world of distortion, camouflage, and cant: beauty is never serendipity, you can't bump into it, you must track its spoor to hunt it down. The region of the brain called hypothalamus has launched so many thousands of ships – therein lies the romance in sacrifice, honor, passion, murder, dueling, suicide, for love – but my sense of beauty is the legless beggar with a faithful lover, the burned cop turned preacher, earless face a sheen of sweaty keloid, the handsome man buying porn: I mean beautifully handsome, freakishly dropdead gorgeous— why does he pay to watch ugly, diseased junkie pornstars copulate, unless he is beautiful, less an animal than them so more prone to forgiveness?

I forgive my father; I am more like him than I care to admit, though I am a liar where he wasn't – like most simple fighting men he worshipped the truth as I worship beauty – I am too smart to believe in truth as he was too violent to accept mendacity, which is why I falsely accepted our mutual hatred when in fact my father never understood that I only hated him for being beautiful, not true: American society is a logology of deceit, a daily legerdemain of lies, the indelible falsehoods of our history sowing the fiduciary duties of a new crop of liars into a lair of acid. We are no longer a stupid, servile peasant people yet our government continues to assume that we are; doesn't have to be this way, each of us can enact a revolution, a renaissance of resistance— "know and be free," St. Augustine bragged: legge et elus; "read and learn."

Had father any self-esteem he'd have been a cyber-billionaire – self-taught in electronics and the physics of radio, an 8th Army grunt in Korea, slum runaway green-card Francophone Quebecois, raised speaking joual by Mamere, a Quebeker, and Papere, a Quadroon wanted for murder in New Orleans. Naturalized by war – sergeant at nineteen, two toes frozen off at twenty, Taebaek mountains, Purple Heart, Bronze and Silver Stars; dad rotated home, dropped out of the University of Michigan after two years, joined the Air Force as an E-3, graduated OCS bottom of his class then I was born, 1965, near the bucolic cold badlands of Spokane Washington. Dad drank his way through a five-year tour of Southeast Asia at Korat, Udorn, and Don Muang Air Bases, Thailand, then Da Nang, Bien Hoah and Binh Thuy, South Vietnam. He was shit-canned to Sheppard AFB, a Major busted to Captain, and I spent the rest of my boyhood in Wichita Falls Texas.

I would not paint Jean a completely worthless father, he made me laugh sometimes, like excoriating the draft-dodgers and peaceniks cowering in Canada to avoid 360 days of service— capos, traitors and fugitives because of their cowardice and lack of faith in the probability (dad worshipped Pascal) they would survive war, that death only bullies the weak or ignorant. Grant Parker and he would stand in the oiled-gravel alleyway drinking Pabst or Pepsi, occasionally stamping their feet like impatient horses when a fire ant stung, then Grant would mention the longhairs and dad would hark a beer or pop-viscous, chartreuse loogey onto ground so hot spit sizzled. "Jay-zuz Chry-ist! All dey ass dese boyz for iz a fockin yeah! I leff Can-duh for Mer-ka to fight dem Kommies an end up fightin two wahs from begin to end!"

He wasn't proud to be Cajun and worked at eliminating his accent, though his favorite snack was always poutine (French fries smothered in melted Velveeta and beef gravy), his favorite dinner rabbit tortière, which I didn't mind unless I spooned up hair or bone, then I'd puke, and dad always called hotdogs guedilles. When I made his "gaydees" he wanted them boiled, three on a plate covered with ketchup or Ragu sauce, served with a Pepsi, three slices of buttered (Parkay) Wonder bread on the side.

Dad bought the old Hull mansion on the intersections of Grant and 9th streets, an enormous ruin, what they call in Europe a pile (crumbling stucco sloughing off in dangerous splinters, as in Chicago passers-by are occasionally killed by plunging icicles, the afternoon we inspected the place my arm was cut by a scimitar of stucco, took nine stitches) mansard roof disintegrated, cyclone-blown onto a sere half acre lawn of fire ant mounds and "zap stickers" (I learned why the local kids called sand burrs this after one ran up behind, shouted Zap! flinging the entire stalk like a German potato-masher grenade with such force it pinned the sweat-stained t-shirt to my back); mother wept but I was elated, I thought this is finally father's halting place— he will either surrender or die, at least no more moving around.

By the time I was fifteen I was in open rebellion, an angry but not sullen boy, certainly not spoiled— I took care of mother, she was dad's third, absolutely at the end of her rope. She spent her days sitting by an air conditioner watching soaps and drinking Jim Beam straight from a coffee cup. She cut the whisky with hot water honey-sweetened, which is essentially Southern Comfort, but she didn't like Southern Comfort. Mom hated the heat, and the old stucco fortress contained six evaporative coolers, monstrous machines latched to the windows with chains and trailing corroded copper tubing; the largest a four hundred pound battleship gray Champion, manufactured in Denison Texas which she called her Angel.

Mom slept in front of this iron hulk in the hall, on a sheet on the hardwood floor, because it was cold and clammy at night and she liked it though it bothered her sense of decorum to sleep on the floor. "Baby!" she'd call out at midnight or two or three, after I'd risen to pee, "Baby go back to bed!" I never remember getting up and finding her asleep. Sometimes she nestled on the floor with her silver Emerson SwingMate transistor radio, whip antenna bent to a perfect forty-five degree angle, volume so low it barely whispered Carpenters' Reason To Believe or Bread's Make It With You or Lovin' Spoonful's Close Your Eyes. T-meeno, she also called me (kitty-cat): "t-meeno, go to bed, baby."

The Champion's conduits leaked and its great excelsior-padded sides sweated continually, showering the ground below so that the areas under the swamp coolers were always lush and green and high enough to stall the mower. The recirculation pump gurgled, the squirrel-cage blower roared creeka-creeka-creeka! and all summer from the maw of the monster screeched a miasma that stank of metal, dank, of fogs and frogs, but it was blissfully cold, and unlike Freon never ran out or had to be recharged. During the day, always a dusty, red-clay dirty, sun burnt kid in front of one— me or my friends: you'd step away for just a second and the agony of sunburn would lash your skin like a whip, so we stood until our legs gave out, so hot outside even the jays, mockingbirds, crows and pigeons seemed to pant. We'd crowd around the moist blast and our dogs Ginger, T-Dolly, Growler, and Rags would sprawl downwind of the swamper's draft on the cold oak floor. Mother's angel.

Mom said the Angel sounded as if talking behind a fan, said it sighed, hissed, groaned, and that its breath smelled of rotten leaves but it cooled her so she could, if not slumber, at least relax comfortably in darkness. If I couldn't sleep I'd haunt the kitchen for spoonfuls of Peter Pan straight from the jar and handfuls of Cheerios right from the box, sometimes balanced by a Hostess fried pie, Dr. Pepper, Moon Pie, or slice of cake. Mom would come in and mix one of her special cups. "Baby go to bed," she'd say.

"Peeshwank!" Those nights he was home, dad would grab what I was snacking on and toss the remainder. "Doan eat so much, you get fat, no bebs lookit you." He had a prejudice against overweight people, and would openly laugh at them, rudely point them out. "Quelle salade!" he'd roar. "De'pouille, how groz dat beeg az!" I kept hoping someone would jump him for doing this, punch him in his scornful face, but my father was too big, too scary, and he always got away with it.

****

My best friend when I was a child, before she went completely insane, was Aunt Sophia the nurse, social worker, and ex-nun. I was too young to understand such things as madness, I thought mom's sister a unique and fascinating woman of the world; she'd been all over Africa while in the Peace Corps, and worked in the slums of Philadelphia (Lower North Central), New York (LES; Alphabet City), Chicago (Robert Taylor), and New Orleans (Bywater; Treme). Sophia told fabulous stories. Mother didn't like her to tell me any stories at all so we'd wait until mom drank enough "watereds" to need a catnap (when she kissed me bye her breath was always sweet with diluted bourbon and the scent of lemon) then Sophia would talk herself blue.

Aunt Sophia's most incredible story was about Jesus of the Consumed Cross Liberated by Megollanna the Unknown Angel of the Apocalypse. At seventeen Aunt Sophia worked the counter at Zellers, a Montreal un quinze-cennes, or five and dime, where she met the bastard (I never knew his name, she only called him "the bastard") who wooed her with lectures and tracts about The Holy Prospect Megollanna (not a church a cult, mother said) then Aunt Sophia countered that Christianity was a cult too, its precepts stolen from the Jews, the only true chosen people of Yahweh. The bastard converted her, then impregnated her, then abandoned her, and though the baby was stillborn Aunt Sophia remained loyal to The Holy Prospect Megollanna.

Once upon a time in 1927, archeologist Sir Reginald Thorpe, excavating Holy Land near the town of Philatea, caught yellow fever or dengue or plague and nearly died. He waited, in agony, for death for three weeks; he sweated blood and his urine was black, and though two educated physicians, one from Oxford, the other Cairo, gave him up for dead, an Arab shaman continued to feed him goat broth and herbal tea and he finally recovered, though he was emaciated and never fully regained the use of his left arm. While feverish he had a dream of such clarity he proclaimed it a vision, for though he had no memory at all of his sickness or even the weeks before being sick, he remembered the dream's minutest detail and wrote it down during his convalescence. Part of the dream was a map presented to him by Megollanna, the Unknown Angel of the Apocalypse, of an area of land known to local shepherds as Gideon's Rise, accursed and avoided, never before thought to be of any archeological significance other than an abandoned peasant cemetery.

When Sir Reginald was well enough he assembled a work party; none of the local diggers would touch Gideon's Rise so he sent out handbills for French, Irish, and English navies, all wretchedly savvy enough to soak him for twice the going rate, thinking he was uncovering treasure. They even plotted to steal the treasure when it was revealed, and their greed and murderous avarice made them excellent workers. It became immediately apparent that the peasant's cemetery was a ruse, the grave markers perfunctory, and when they'd excavated to a depth of thirty-six feet they discovered three charred and calcined crosses hewn from olive wood posts, a very durable timber. Scraps of mummified flesh and bone remained nailed and lashed to two of the crosses but the middle, though spiked, was bare. Around the field they discovered skeletons and fragmentary skeletons of nearly two hundred men, women, children and the remains of dozens of horses, donkeys, goats, sheep, and the scattered weaponry, heraldry, and armor of the 43rd Centurion regiment— Pilate's royal guards.

Sir Reginald presented his "findings" to the Royal Geographical Society and was stripped of everything but his barony (his father was Lord Yarmouth), howled out of academia for his conclusion: "In his final agony, Christ did indeed call upon the heavenly angels to free him, and they laid waste to everything in sight. Pilate, already a persona non grata to Rome (procurator of Judea was a demotion) invariably invented some fiction about a bandit ambush to explain the loss of sixty troopers, and of course the Apostles lied about the death and resurrection of their messiah because in His desperation, pain and fear the son of God had negated all the prophecies."

When I asked Aunt Sophia what that meant she said "That we are all free, child. Free to do, say, think, be anything at all. Even God the Father is free, which is why he chooses to stay away from earth and therefore there are no more miracles, no more meddling in our business."

I believed her but my parents said it was hogwash. Dad could've cared less, actually, he never went to church and I think he fooled around with Aunt Sophia (she was remarkably beautiful and so dark Texans mistook her for Mexican) but mom said it was nonsense so silly it wasn't even fit to be called heresy. She said that if anyone cared to look it up they'd discover that there never existed any such person as Sir Reginald Thorpe and that these cults persisted then, as now, to take advantage of halfwits, and especially sexually susceptible young girls. But I was enthralled and when I told mom I thought it made sense, and that I certainly wasn't a halfwit or a sexually susceptible young girl, she smacked me a good one.

Mom was beautiful too – not as beautiful as Aunt Sophia, but then few women were, she could have been famous as a model or movie star if she hadn't been so crazy – but mom was much smarter than her sister or dad. Of contretemps and my father, I continued the same cadence— triumphs I mention as failures until I think how far they took me through life, then I accept them as ordinary memories, as I accept that I am as crazy as Aunt Sophia.

An old dream has set my quest to find myself again, to paint my home with light and uncover with every spade-struck coordinate of earth some useful treasure; color every room emerald, sapphire, ruby, and rekindle every fire beyond the onyx hearth fragrant with apple and hyssop: once such dreams opened fragmentary doors, such dreams were never dead notions – this room I've moved into is full of strange suns, moons, husks of worlds where normally shadows glow then explode into amber mountains, not real amber, just the hue of dream – I'm sure when I dig the real thing its value will escalate beyond amber. If you don't believe in dreams, or rather accept them as psychoanalytical artifacts, then this going on about amber is meaningless to you; okay then, say I've changed my clothes.

Thorstein Veblen wrote brilliantly about the function of dress as deceit; following his injunctions to never appear as you are not, I've clothed myself as an objective observer: after the funeral of a friend I follow two scorpions under a wrought iron bench outside the Crowell Texas Farm Museum, then a string of coyotes into the Copper Breaks State Park (a beautiful place, an ancient scar surrounded by wheat, cotton, and alfalfa fields) watch a mason wasp (mud-dauber) stuff stunned spiders into red clay caskets between shutter-lips of anodized aluminum; see mice gorge in the silo packed with poisoned seed, husks dusty red. With six bicentennial quarters I rode Tulsa's Jesus-train up Turkey Mountain but finding no burning bushes, only beer cans and spent condoms, came down.

When dad was dying, I went to see him. He watched television, pointed to some cable drivel about gang violence, school shootings, AIDS, and proclaimed, "you are the lesser generation." He had almost eliminated his accent and was as proud of this achievement as he was his war medals. "None of you got no guts." This seemed profound to him; he began reading as an old man, devouring junk he bought at the Salvation Army and Goodwill: paperback Pearl Buck, Jack London, Frank Yerby, Irwin Shaw, Louis Lamour, Naigo Marsh, Tom Clancy, Max Brand. He always asked how was mom and I replied, "I don't know" because she'd died four years earlier. Dad knew this, he wrote a eulogy, maybe he didn't remember; the ravages of Alzheimer's, or he did and simply wanted to play a few more cruel games before taking his dirt-bath: what's the difference?

He remained beautiful, though bed-ridden sick out of his mind; old father, bellicose God, hanging-judge. Lesser generation? No guts? Perhaps. Why do we stomach the ruinous politics of this failed democracy, secure in the palpable anodyne of our transient jobs and a xenophobic jingoism twisted into an ekistics of urbanity, betrayal and boredom? America the beautiful. Our suicide rate is approaching our divorce rate.

George Washington, in his farewell address of September 17, 1796, insisted that the "Great Experiment" born of revolution would be a failed experiment unless the people diligently connected the permanent felicity of this Nation with its Virtue. If America as a super-power has any chance of succeeding past three hundred years (Egypt had 31 dynasties from 2920-332 BC; China, Xia to Qing, 2100 BC to AD 1911; Greece, Archaic to Hellenistic, 750-146 BC; Rome, Etruscan to The Fall, 1000 BC to AD 476; England, Roman Empire to Indian Independence, AD 43-1947; France, King Clovis to end of the Belle Epoque, AD 496-1920; Spain, Roman province Hispania to the rebellion of Cuba, 205 BC to AD1895; Germany, Roman defeat at Teutoburg Forest to Allied defeat of Hitler, AD 9-1945). The beauty of history is not that we are doomed to repeat it, but that we do repeat it, and sometimes improve its tactical mythology.

The United States, in its present condition, can't weather a thousand years, much less half a millennium, unless we yield belligerence and hostility, refute our motto in god we trust (we don't— it's blasphemy to print such an advertisement on mammon); prayer, even the prettiest and cleverest prayer, is the language of servitude. America once placed so much stock in refuting communist propaganda – what our Cold War government called the inhumanity, lies, and treachery of the Soviets, Chinese, North Vietnamese, Cubans, and North Koreans – now we must refute our own.

I told dad this, or I told the beautiful thing – the still shining shell – in bed that once housed his spirit this, and the thing understood enough to nod vigorously, blow its nose, surf from channel 45 to 120 and repeat, "you are the lesser generation."

Beat It To Fit, Paint It To Match

Mardi Gras 2011 John Prolix and I designed Krewe Kosmopolis' wildest ever float – ruptured Jupiter, orange smoke gushing from the fissure – tribute to planet-busting Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9, a big deal in 1994 and important to us still. As float nymphs and satyrs we threw silicone-chip "Screamin' Jupiter" doubloons— Nostalgia stamped on the green side, Krewe Kosmopolis For U.S. Intervention In Libya on the purple. Mother Jane was right: God's gift of a freakishly high IQ (if that's what genius really is) is wasted on me.

For all the Krewe, being a Kosmopolitan is a much-needed diversion: none of us have decent jobs; our lives mostly suck. I Release Information at the Gulfport Veterans Hospital. John's a machinist who rides with the Crazy-8s, an MC composed mostly of Union guys like himself and independent truckers. His clubname is Dragon; he's Cajun but his almond eyes, waist-length black hair, Chickasaw cheekbones and tan face (razored smooth on each side and mustachioed with a twirled Dali-strip of hair) give him the fierce features of Genghis. John has the turkey-leg forearms and thick chest of his trade. His infrequent smiles reveal pewter-colored teeth.

Marla sacks pills at the Gulfport VA pharmacy; we often lunch together, downing microwaved burritos or Cliff bars and chain-smoking under the elm tree fronting Primary Care. Juban's a topless dancer (she refuses the euphemism "exotic") and rides with the Crazy-8s. They sound tough – independent, nomadic, free-spirited – but they're really just a gang of middle-class losers barely clinging to the middle class: once you know them it's more depressing than dangerous. Jube has an amazing voice but she's determined to do nothing with it and take it with her to the grave; the last three bands she fronted – Paraplegic Platypus, Whisper Beast, Nine Dead – she was fucking awesome, was made great offers, and the minute she got those offers dropped out, fucking disappeared. She sings now with Barbwire Fleshlight, Money Cult, Violated At Birth, Stagger, Cyanide Cradle, and Moms On Meth.

The Crazy-8s rumble every July Fourth in Magnolia State Park with the Hard-Rawks, a tiny motorclub from Slidell composed mostly of overweight end of career cops and veterans— friendly fists and chains, a slash here and there with a Buck folding-knife; when it's over they drink Igloo chests of Bud, Red Stripe, and Rolling Rock, press cold wet bottles over swollen eyes and jaws while their wives grill hotdogs. "Fuck that Peeshwank," John curses Wing Carson, the Hard-Rawk leader, but they drink together and Wing always brings Hebrew National which taste better than Ball Park.

The Monday before Mardi Gras John and I always do Before Day; my Blazer dead (220,000 miled 350 Targetmaster chained to a cherry picker, half rebuilt) I piggybacked on his Harley. We had no plan but to kill time. John sought some girl in Slidell called Raven, bassist for an all-girl band called Spiritual Vagrancy and also Ceramic Beasts, Hostile Gospel, and Sunlit Conception— she'd stolen his heart, blah blah, nothing but drunk talk; it takes John several disappointments until un-infatuation: they whip their charms into a frenzy and he goes for it although I tell him to be lucky you need brains, not luck. We spotted her with The Fat Tuesday Posse, a rag-tag Before Day mob without "route." Assigned routes belong to established Krewes holding a St. Charles-Rampart-Canal parade license, and these punks are nobody, but there stood Dragon's love-object half-dressed as Madonna or Marilyn Monroe or Lady Gaga, throwing hard candy and cheap beads to tourists screaming to see her tits before it was actually time to see tits. The rich devil points his wand at drunk girls, shouts "Titicus Exposicus!" now there's a spell Harry Potter wishes he had, because with giggles and shrieks otherwise sober and educated young women bare their nubile breasts.

"I am a heretic!" John screamed, "a traitor to Catholicism: my devotion and faith no more than intellectual tricks to uncover and snuff pedophile priests; Christ I love tits and pussy! God made tits and pussy to be sucked, licked, lubed, massaged, fucked, rubbed, worshipped! Fuck all celibates! Fuck the Pope!"

John was insane tripping, totally gone on Lectric Goo, an LSD laced Junket Rennet Custard which makes hippies nice and flowery but John violent and paranoid. He screamed Raven's name repeatedly as I pushed him into Harlequin's, one of the few places you can escape ragtime or jazz and just enjoy good rock in New Orleans. We drank listening to The Rectum Bunnies (gay metal hardcore's Black Sabbath) followed by Alphabetical Slaughter, Gold Tooth, Artemisia, Catastrophe Of Love, and an awesome lesbian techno Goth troupe, Ashley's Communion, then a lesbian Ska quartet, Expect Extinction. We waited to see if Juban would front Murder & Devour, and when they began without her we finished our drinks and Tempura frog's legs.

We emerged into a softer sun, humid wind heavily laden with brine, barbecue and vomit, and the harsh ammonia dead-fish stink that permeates New Orleans now, post-Katrina, and probably forever. John coasted before a card-stand, and I was about to tell him not to knock it over, the Indian guy had a nice face, but he said he really wanted to buy something for Juban, fuck the Indian they were history's deadest soil, buying from him was sordid alms.

"John," I said. "You're an idiot. Please die." All the stuff in the kiosk was cheap, illegal to sell in America, toxic paint, recalled for destruction and recycling. John bought two pot-metal vehicles, '68 Corvette and a '42 Indian Scout. "Thanks for all the free lead and radioactivity, you Chinese fuckers!" he laughed. A tourist couple wanted our pic, so we posed: don't need to cover your face— just give the camera the finger on your nose, especially a double bird, forcing them to blur it out, if they're squares.

We turned from Severn onto 12th and someone hit us with a fistful of beads, strands boomeranging around John's face to whip my eyes, blinding us both. We went over and the leather saddle bags exploded a Metrinch chrome socket set, sawed-off Winchester Model 21 twelve gauge and a dozen buckshot shells (the lead sabots replaced with rock salt sealed with red wax; "Murder-1 reduced to fuck you," Dragon enjoyed saying). Asphalt clung to the new flame-painted peanut tank – a two thousand-dollar job – gravel scratches like diamond on glass completely through paint and primer to bright metal. Tiger-masks and out-thrust purple-nippled tit-vests as the punks cheered, "Fat Tuesday Posse rules!"

"Shoot them!" John screamed, "shoot!"

Comes the time when you just gotta cage the doves and kick ass, deliver some brutal beat down. I cracked the Winny, loaded salt-shells, snapped the breech closed. Wax burst and salt poured from the barrel onto my boots. Dragon's rage – desert sun shattering a cloud, eyes popping like water dripped in flash-point grease – exploded over me. "Shoot the mutherfuckers, they're getting away!" I loaded two fresh shells which also cracked, spilling more salt. Dragon's glare was excruciating— I had prepared this batch of faulty shells; I had failed him. "Put it away, Couillon, they're out of range now."

"I love you John, but Coo-Yon better mean best friend who puts up with a lot of your bullshit."

"It doesn't, it means fool or even more specifically stupid asshole but I take it back because you really are a good friend and you really do put up with a lot of my bullshit."

I packed the shotgun and tools into the saddlebags just as a sloppy horse cop, looking exactly like a 400 pound razorback boar astraddle a proud, gorgeous Dutch Warmblood, paused and ordered us to move on. "Mounted pig," John hissed, "isn't that a riot." He ran his fingers over the tank, traced each scratch like a blind man reading. He groped the chrome-zippered left breast pocket where he kept four no-shit sabots (Federal Hi-Shok Deer Slugs) then settled on the right pocket for cigarettes. He nodded, inhaling. "I can fix it, fuck yeah. I'm gonna get those cocksuckers, they're gonna pay for this." He exhaled, inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, flung the butt. "Fuck yeah, I can fix this, fuck yeah. Beat it to fit, paint it to match!"

Relief molded my face as the porky cop left us to harass some black kids sporting dashikis. John passed me a Ducados dipped in Zoom, an Electric Coffin Nail. Beat it to fit, paint it to match is his motto, uttered about anything he's willing to shrug off: politics, relationships, family, work. "Jaggalos and guidos, the 99% that wanna bring Wall Street down, whoo hoo whoo hoo! Yeah, the fucking true white trash! They operate the rides when the carnival comes to town; fat, sloppy, ugly, stinking of cabbage, piss, and Keystone beer but hey, they're real America!" He stared over my shoulder, dead eyes cold then suddenly bright. He grabbed the Ducados from my lips, inhaled deeply and yelled, "Here comes Jube and Marla!"

The women were with David, a rich loser we tolerated for Juban's sake. He braked his H2; the electric window purred down, the inside air stank of chilled suede and beer. Angled into view from the passenger seat, Juban blew us a kiss. With her fine-tuned sense of other people's money, she'd saved David's ass from a stomping in Treat's in December. Stripping didn't buy her all she needed, so Juban pilfered from David; his money embarrassed him, he frequently told anyone within range: "I don't really make any money writing, but then I don't really have to: my dad's Stanley Blackwell the Third."

"Who's Stanley Black-Turd?" Dragon never tired of replying, and with Louis Roederer, Dom Perignon, Moet White Star, Maker's Mark, 151, Vivid Ace, Zoom and Krystal drank snorted and popped at all the best places as well as member's only slime pits like Mulate's, Chimes and Harmony's, Jube fed David's venereal appetites and lessened his guilt; like all working girls she was a huge tipper and they regularly spent more in one night than I made in a month. David also bought her clothes, jewelry, Langlitz leathers, cruise vacations, and moved her to a big apartment though she kept her old apartment and made David pay the rent. John lived in the old apartment.

The Hummer's other passengers were Marla and Baby Bill, who in Iraq earned a medal for recovering some guy's arm and washing the sand off with a canteen of Kool-Aid so it could be surgically re-attached. When I asked him how it was he said it was bullshit and that his dad had been in Nam and that was a real war. He asked me if I'd been in Nam and I said no, I just look that fucking old, I was a Beirut Marine. Baby has no money and never will, has nothing but incredible looks, classical handsome like Burt Lancaster, not pussy handsome like Johnny Depp. Jube told Marla she would do much better to find prey like David – sense vs. romance – romantic people end up used, instead of using. God, they went at it after that. Then Juban and Marla glared at each other like cats— they'd never had a fight until Baby and snap! the claws were out.

"Happy diskette seek failure?" Juban cried. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Is my computer messing with my head?" Her laptop was a shitty ancient Dell; I told her to have David buy her an iPod or iPhone because they are superior products which render laptops antiquated but she's resistant to change and suspicious of technology. Marla and I had re-ghosted her shitty Dell a dozen times and upgraded the memory too, there was nothing else we could do.

"You're too drunk," Marla laughed. "It says floppy diskette seek failure."

"What's a floppy?"

"That was before your time, dear, but the term's still used to mean storage. The shitty Dell's telling you that you don't have the Imation USB floppy drive I set up for you plugged in."

"No, fuck that! I can't carry that bulky thing around with me!"

"Well, dear, that's why you have floppy diskette failure!"

Fuck, Marla is hot! I am attracted to MILFs with glasses and salt and peppa ponytails, don't care about tit size as long as the butt is big: the bigger the butt the better; Marla acts so square and puritanical at times, she's not, and in her plain quiet way is wilder than Juban. I mean intellectually wilder; Juban is physically wilder. It's been my experience that WASP Christian Mommies are the best sexual partners, wild when you switch them on, absolutely willing to try anything. Makes sense; all the bullshit they have to suffer from the intolerance and boredom of church life and simpering, Greedhead Republican dogma, spoiled brat children and the snobby, square, racist, buttoned-down anti-intellectual couples they socialize with; and worst of all, the flaccid attempts and epic failures of their bald, fat, cigar and scotch reeking closet homosexual husbands at sexually fulfilling these suburban sex-machine matrons. Christ, that's the part about being a young Marine I miss the most, cruising trendy bars for soccer moms, especially the ones recently temporarily separated while "daddy finds himself" and fucking until dawn. Marla and I are friends, whatever that means. I'd like to date but so far all we do is talk, and lunch together at the Gulfport VAMC, and she treats me like a brother but fuck that, I want to be her lover.

Dragon hefted and kicked over the Harley. David sipped a 4-Loko though you could tell he hated it; Baby had bought the 4-Loko: Watermelon, Lemon-Lime, Fruit Punch, Black Cherry. He'd also brewed Lean, a street-gang beverage, by mixing methylprednisolone, Propoxacet, Diazepam, Hyrocodone, Karo corn syrup and grain alcohol, then spiking two quart jugs of Gatorade with this toxic waste. Marla gets him the drugs and cough syrup to make Lean, and I joke with her that it sounds like the relationship's getting serious, not just recreational sex, and she looks at me with her safety mom MILF face, button nose flushed as she laughs nervously.

Baby and Marla clutched each other in the back seat. David's black mustache drooped schnauzer-thick over his lips. He asked where we were going. John jacked-down the kickstand, gathered beads we'd been hit with. "Here!" He flung beads into David's face. "You'll never do as good on the street!" Baby grabbed purple necklaces and dropped the beads over his head. Dragon dug an acid-bolus from his leather jacket and shot it through the Hummer's window directly into Bill's mouth. "I dropped all the Letric Goo but try that!" Marla attempted, without success, to pry open her lover's teeth. "Billy don't bite me! How many hits is that?"

"Three." Baby winked at us. His good looks were the tall, gym muscled, clean shaven, lantern-jawed, thin nose, blue eyed, blond crew-cut, so masculine he simultaneously aroused and scared the shit out of metrosexuals variety. Greek God. Fat and bald or dead by forty, but gorgeous now. Bill and Marla looked great together, and although I wanted her too I couldn't begrudge the kid his good luck. She'd rubbed her teak skin with oil and her arms shimmered like mirages. Her long hair fell in a thick black braid. Small, proportionate breasts graced her Goodwill ZooTropia T-shirt, her big but firm butt filled out plain Levis nicely. David stared at her with eyes an alert blue – both cold and sexually hungry – then moved his eyes over Juban. Ugly sonofabitch, I thought, god I hate you and all of your parasitic kind.

If I never make it with Marla, Jube could be my girl. Without David, it would be John and me and Jube at Nick's or Harry's Corner or Mulate's; with David nothing is fun— we spend his money and then when high enough she flirts with me, her lips a line of blue chalk; last New Year's kiss I got I called her on this whore bullshit and she disappeared until Mardi Gras. David shooting then barfing tequila, then blurting fadder stan blackturd until we all laughed. Like all parasitic children who can't hack a 9-5 job and live off their parents, all David talks about, besides his failed writing, is how Daddy never really understood him or why he needs to be an artist and not a businessman and how horrible Harvard Law was when he was there so he dropped out to write a novel and how mad that made Daddy; Christ what a fucking bore! I know some rich people who aren't bores, but they're all criminals, so maybe there's a connection.

When Jube bent her good-smelling head down to mine (she's six-one) for the New Year's Kiss I said, "remember the Home Alone Bridge?" and she said "That's my life story, remembering so and so at the such and such." So it was. But not enough.

Three years ago I'd driven to the Econolodge in Jersey City from Hagerstown (where I'd drunk from the Potomac on a dare and not died) to collect a debt for Dragon. Not so bad a drive, in a squat and slow (but comfortable) Econoline van. My room was dressed in orange carpeting and pecan paneling, the bed covered with a greasy blue comforter which stank of menthol cigarettes. I hate menthol. I stripped the bed and slept on the bare mattress with a much older woman who made a big deal about leaving the comforter in place. "What's wrong, you one of those tactile-sensitive people?" She returned to the bar. I needed a dark place so I rode the twenty minute train from Jersey City to Central Park. She was singing then for Drag Queen Persecution, Face-Jacker, 9/11, Trill & Sluice; good bands but not great bands.

The park at night is especially beautiful; 33rd Street has a special appeal when you're late for nothing, not living anywhere, and resisting the mindless movement— not actually daring fights, just refusing to be pushed along. There's always pushing in New York, even at night. Juban was deep down in that jungle – that rotted grass, methane and malt-liquor stinking swamp (it smells different by day – of gasoline, wine and hot-dogs, and that that unmistakable crematorium aftertaste from 9-11 both greasy and dry, smoky and acrid; after all these years I can still taste the Twin Towers). Jube stood on the simple bridge, the bridge repainted for Home Alone 2, and scattered sunflower seeds and plinked the carp, as they surfaced, with an ADC M-4 Alaskan Survival .45 derringer. Boom! Her tiny wrists held the massive recoil of the large-caliber toy gun perfectly (crack and reload) boom! boom! I could see only one carp belly-up. "Glow-stix work better," I told her. "They can't resist the light. Throw them in then shoot all the fuckers your heart desires."

"Best color?"

"Green."

"Got any?"

"No." We lived together, and it was the happiest six months of my life until she switched, in New Orleans, to John, then left us for David. But we didn't exactly jump into bed; Jube's a hard catch.

"You're a lousy shot," I told her after we first met, after I recommended Glow-stix – crack, reload, point – her ADC M-4 Alaskan Survival .45 derringer lingering in my face, lowered down the length of my body, then shoved into a pocket of her fake-fur coat. Not another single word to me at all. She'd disappeared— like necromancy, she metamorphosed into a bit of fog, a trick of smoke and mirrors. A year later, in a bar in Natchez, Juban bought me a drink. I didn't recognize her. I bought her a drink back, then she bought me another; asking me to partner her in a 500 pull-tab bowl; 400 in we won. "Wow, you're lucky! You were that guy at the bridge, the Home Alone 2 bridge." Then I remembered her. We argued about tourism – I'm an unashamed tourist but Jube despises gawking – she claims she's already seen it all in past lives. "Deja-vu means I don't have to study the same shit all over again." Study? I could stare for hours at Empire State, or the Twin Towers before they fell. That was the night the best six months of my life began.

Study? I never tired of haunting the View-Center at dusk, city lights far below a storm of color, an electric galaxy; the World Trade Center to the south: looking homeward I've seen Boeings descend with Miami-warmed passengers. Our argument centers around the importance of "things" the tourist seeks out— I need the World, Juban just needs thrills. I need to be struck small and awed and homesick, and to call old best friends and family at 3AM and to find who and what they've become on Facebook but to Juban such sentimentality is a disease. Yes, I was that fool loudly applauding Cats in the Winter Garden Theatre— a performance mediocre yet exciting because I was there to see it for the first time. The dancing! Bodies moving in my mind even now – leaping and twisting silently – no competition for memory with chainsaws, or lynx hounds baying, or rifles pop! at midnight and uncles in package stores laughing about the dead: bygod, they'd got 'em all right. By God, in the end we're all rubes, newbies, fools.

Yes, I need things; I'm needy. Memories mostly. I'm one of those saps who goes home to mother when in his head everything churns shit; for awhile I had a beautiful childhood, she made a wonderful home, but that went to shit, too. But I have only to close my eyes and I'm there in the refrigerated mansion, tornado sirens howling outside, rain at the massive windows, thunderous crashes of lightning answered by barking Great Danes, the loudest Zeus, a Harlequin stupid but gentle who would lick his boner into a grotesque purple cudgel, delighting my brothers and disgusting my sister. We all laughed when Zeus, gentle moronic giant, would stick his head into the saw palmetto and think himself hidden, would look abashed and bewildered if you called out to him, exposing his ruse! Inside smelled of lemon Pledge, marigolds, roses, mums, moth-dust, leather bound books, sherry, bourbon, Pine-Sol, mother's perfume, her ubiquitous Virginia Slim dying in a Waterford crystal ashtray, every Sunday the scent of ham, cloves, peach pie.

Dad lost his business and shot himself; I was a captive of my flawless youth, popular in high school, an Eagle Scout, I lettered as a swimmer, was spoiled and it ruined me. I dropped out of school my senior year, 1980, and joined the Marines. Best twenty-five years of my life. I'm no good at middle age: oblivion in the drinks and rent, the weedy grinding sea at the resort where I work, seasonally, as a bartender; clumsy neglect with my infrequent relationships and even clumsier civility with people in general: a successful bartender has to smile, put on a friendly face, tell jokes, and what used to be easy is getting hard. I'm better at releasing information, at working the paper and electronic morgues, and that is death too, to those who hold those swords instead of ploughshares.

Whimsey, my Dane was called, a gorgeous fawn who chased everything good naturedly, no malicious intent. It's all dead now, all of it: dogs, merit badges, swim trophies, oldest brother, and the sister— Tom in 9-11, riding down Tower 1 where he worked as a banker, and Paula, four months pregnant, murdered by a drunk driver. Yeah, the irony to a bartender; go ahead, tell me your great fucking funny joke! God knows how many people I've over-served, but then by the law of my resort town, .08 BAC, the second drink, always a double, is over-serving.

Einstein: fright wig and Meerschaum pipe, spaniel eyes, saggy tweeds, squealing chalk, glorious mind of a true scientist badgered by Nazis and our Pentagon minions, and the third rate minds of the American University system, diploma mill corporate goons, sycophants to grant, promotion and tenure. His mind was beautiful and their minds poison and killed the world. So here we are, America, broke yet at war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and, I'd argue here at home as the Occupy Movement grows into an international sensation. When the fuck will we learn to mind our own fucking business?

I wanted Juban out of the Hummer – even if it meant walking we'd be all right – we'd talk about the bridge and New Year's. "We're going on to St. Louis," David said. "I want to see the tombs."

"St. Louis is dead. Your pussy ass will be killed in the cemetery." John lit a cigarette.

David ignored the insult. "But I want to go!" he whined. Juban gave us a thumb's up. "It's almost sunset. Meet us at Jackson when it's really dark and we'll cruise Bourbon together." She swigged an airport gin, Gordon's; sterling cymbals and carnelian loops piercing her ears chimed as she drained the mini. "Dark," I agreed. John nodded. "We're outta here." David asked if Aurora connected to Nichols to Decatur. We left him speaking. Jube knew the Quarter inside and out— she'd direct him there if she wanted to, get him lost if that was her advantage.

"Fucking stiff!" I spat into the wind. "How do you stand him?"

"For Jube's sake," Dragon answered, "Just like you."

"To the river then! Death swim!"

"You'll freeze your ass off."

"Friezure Ashof? The Russian composer?"

"I despise Classical. Let's get drunk."

The river was swollen, the current a jet stream of pinkish scum-topped ripples. Dragon flung the beads around his neck into a magnolia. The bruised white blossoms drooped, reeking the putrefaction of Indian Summer in February. "Stay close to the bank," I warned. Intermittent cloudbursts had given the Mississippi spunk. "Look at that!" I said, pointing. A hog, bloated into a grotesque waterlogged zeppelin, churned by, rolling in current, stick legs a mane of weeds. Dragon stripped and dove head-first into the murk. He howled delight as the current dragged him the length of a football field before sticking him to the malodorous quay near Jaxx Brewery. I jogged over and helped him up.

"Fantastic! Awesome!"

"You fucking fool! You could've died!" But Dragon was already dead, victim of an enormously successful father who lost everything in disastrously declining schemes as his best son, the hard working and faithful son, succumbed to the piece-of-shit-son and then, when everything was lost, continued to pay dad's bills. He lost his life-time getting wealthy in the old-fashioned bitter self denial and accrual of wealth, then he lost his wealth trying to cure himself of cancer, trying to get back a few more years of life, and now the chosen son is a cosmetic surgery freak, a Vegan addicted to carrot-juice enemas, sharing an apartment with a retired barber turned faith-healer, and the son who pays his bills is a mechanic who can fix anything. And he's got this god-damn poodle I despise.

Fucking mutt stays buried in the sofa; you never see it just hear it until it snaps, whether hidden under the sofa or in it, there the fucker trembles and snarls, and you'd walk by with a paper plate heaped with potato salad and ham or hot dogs and the couch growls at you or rushes out to grab a bite once you sit down." Father said lame professor things like: "the American god is a boring moiety of celestial benefactor versus chthonic usurper, where the Apocalypse is always at hand but never actually happens, yet we're unwilling to admit we're duped and continue instilling these superstitions into our children's brains thus continuing the concatenation not of faith but rote."

Dragon smelled like shit from the river and I told him, "You smell like shit." I scraped red clay and clots of mud from his back. He crashed through a soggy moat of cattails and fell face-down. "What are those snakes?" I asked, pulling him to his feet. Dark shapes slithered around us, thumping over the spider-like roots and bulbs of the reeds and crisscrossing orange bands of dying sunlight to disappear into tall grass. Thick snakes the color of gunmetal. Rock music carried across the river from Algiers; ZooTropia in the old town elbowing grunge onto the new seltzer cafes, sushi bars, condo-shotguns and double bungalows with cactus gardens and bonsai cedars.

"Snakes?" John kicked one with his bare foot. It struck and missed. "Hell, these are good snakes— cottonmouths. They eat a rat a day. Better than cats."

I grabbed Dragon and pushed him forward to his motorcycle and clothes – the cottonmouth, or water moccasin, is one of the most lethal snakes in the South – as deadly as the diamondback. Its venom is neurotoxin, the form of poison injected by cobras and pit vipers. The Harley shimmered in yellow haze as the Jaxx halogens clicked on, the lower half of the bike and engine masked in ground fog. While John zipped into his leathers, I cast shards of concrete across the old wharf. The rats there were big. They didn't mind the light. When hit they didn't squeak, they grunted like dogs, then growled.

We rode to the Market Street Cafe via Chartres and ate poboys – shrimp, bacon, avocado, and purple onion – best in the world. John likes to lay down to eat so we rolled a block to the tiny park where by day men and women in suits eat McSalads, dropping the breadsticks to pigeons. Two kids in the park fired water-blasts over the boulevard from a hose left on by the Orange-Shirts— the French Quarter maintenance men seen twenty-four hours a day toting vomit buckets and pooper scoopers. On every bench but one couples kissed and single men drank or slept. The unoccupied bench was covered in puke. "Days of chunder," John remarked. He directed one of the kids to hose the bench clean, then gave the kid a Ducados. John strew his big body on the wet bench and feasted. I leaned against an iron latticework lamp post, poboy in one hand, 4-Loko in the other. An orange disk of moon hung above us framed in white stars winking like street lights from some distant off-limits neighborhood.

The girl came from the darkness by the empty fountain, the crumbling marble urn with the plaque which commemorated something important too long ago to matter. She looked pretty until she stepped into the light, and then she was still pretty, just rough around the edges. "Hi," she said. "Nice night." I wiped shrimp-grease from my mouth. "Yes, it sure is."

"Got a cigarette?"

"I don't smoke. Ask him." She did, and Dragon gave her a cigarette.

She blew smoke through a perfect, sharp nose and looked us over. "Wanna party?" She said her name was Lucinda and that she was a Cuban exile rap musician. She sang, planted her hands on my hips to guide me through the steps of a very close mambo rhumba salsa. John watched us with genuine interest, and applauded when Lucinda was done. "Well?" she said. "We're broke," said John. "And he's in love." He balled then flung his poboy paper (Times Picayune) into the empty fountain.

"In love? matrimonio de amor, periquito?"

"Si," I said. "A hopeless case, chiflamiento."

Lucinda shrugged. "Who isn't. You do what you want and it ends where you want it to end. Otherwise you're an idiot and deserve what you get."

"Amen! You're beautiful," said John. "Straight white teeth and black eyes like a parrot. I want to but I don't have any money. How much you trying to get?"

"Enough for a couple rocks."

"Shit, baby, I got Vivid, I got Krystal, I got Zoom."

"That'll hold me till I get some rock."

"Have fun," I said. I meant it. I walked to the cafe for a beer. When I returned, Dragon was alone. "She was different," I said, when he continued to sit, silent.

"She was magnificent. I loved a whore once. It's too much work— saying you're not jealous and all that possession is nine-tenths law and shit. I nearly killed her pimp. I nearly cut one of his ears off bashing his head into a Camaro mirror. And what no one can understand is how really terrible in bed whores are – the body, the soul, even the basic desire to fuck, it's all used up – it's the craziness I loved, the deviant worthless pity of loving one so depraved."

"Sure," I said, thinking of Juban. A Keystone Kop walked by and pointed his gun at us. A flag shot out of the end of the pistol, the gun could not kill. He shouted "mambo!" and pointed the gun at someone else. When Keystone turned around there was no seat to his trousers, just naked white ass. John shook his head. "This year's a drag. They love our Vivid Ace, but there's no spirit to this Mardi Gras, man. No spirit. Everyone's so square, so bummed out by the economy, Republican meanness and Obama's bullshit both, and Katrina, though that's old fucking news."

"Katrina will last forever."

Queens blew kisses, an Empress in feathered headdress threw more beads, then a fastball Zulu coconut that stunned a fat guy in Bermudas and a tent-like Tony Bahama yelling "Show tits! Tits or get the fuck out!" The Empress ran over and, with a barbaric yawp, scooped up the idiot's dropped iPhone 4. We left Chartres for Decatur then Bourbon; the farther we moved east from the Canal Zone, the more middle-class the crowd became, drunks awkwardly two-stepping to zithers, drum and guitars— hips locked, arms akimbo. John revved the Harley through a chorus line of cheering debutantes; I scanned the faces for Marla or Jube. They weren't in the crowd. "Look!" Dragon laughed.

There they were, climbing down from the scaffolding caging bronze Andrew Jackson rearing his patinaed and birdshit-slathered steed. David grasped Marla's ass (the old trick of rendering assistance) as Juban, cat-like in her tie-dyed sari, watched them descend. Marla's eyes, strikingly bloodshot, betrayed a crying jag. "Where's Baby?" I asked.

"Wild Bill ran away to the cemetery," David laughed. "At least, that's where he said he was going. He fell off the statue, or jumped. I think he jumped."

Marla jerked her arm away from David's and stood alone. "Find Bill for me," she pleaded.

John lit a joint and passed it to Jube. "Maybe Baby wants to be alone. You consider that? He's a PTSD headjob. Let him run it out; let him breathe."

"I know about war," said David. "I've written poems about Vietnam."

"Fuck off," I said. I don't even remember being very angry, certainly no urgency on my part to hurt anyone, I just wanted to say fuck off and leave it at that, but then I had that cunt by the throat, squeezing and lifting. "Help, help!" gasped Dave as he tiptoed, gurgling and choking, loafers scuffing concrete, arms flailing. Dragon breathed into my ear: "kill him and I'll dispose of the body." I released David, flung him to the ground in disgust.

I'm sure someone captured it on their phone and downloaded it to YouTube, Ebaum's or the plethora of sites existing to record the Fall and Decline of America; nothing is too filthy, depraved, or low for their appetites, their reality television mentality: horribly burned quadriplegic or simply a morbidly obese woman or man tripping and falling in pain? Laugh! Every fucking face-plant, every crippled limb, every drunken mayhem, laugh America, laugh your lowlife selves to death!

Juban patted Marla's shoulder. "They'll find him." I turned to Juban. "Jube, I..."

"He'll call you later," John finished, pushing after I stood too long, mouth open but silent. "We'll climb to the top of the Earthworks with a bottle, just the three of us, and watch these idiots approach critical mass." Jube nodded. "Jube I'm sorry," I repeated until Dragon pulled me away. Then we were gone, picking up speed.

"To the cemetery?" I said numbly, after several blocks.

"Fuck no. Bill won't be there. Hey, snap out of it."

"Trying not to go batshit right now."

"You're cool with Jube— you'll see, later."

"No one's cool with Jube just because they say so. She had a husband once, he tried to kill her. Took a knife to her. She shot him."

"Far out," said John. "She never told me that. You better do something about her, man, because maybe I'm falling back in love too." We rode through Vieux Carre. At a stop light I tapped John's leg. "I know a place Baby might be. Maybe he caught a taxi to LaSalle's, where all the past and present war heroes hang out. Down from the VA— the newly gimped use it for cheap drinks."

Bill was there, drinking on a retired colonel's tab. The bar listened as Baby explained the Bronze Star and severed arm. They seemed to appreciate his description of the thousands of dead Iraqis. He'd enjoyed plenty of free rounds, could hardly stand. "Come on Bill, let's get some air," I offered. He didn't want to go. "You can do this the rest of your fucking life, starting tomorrow," I said leading him out. "Kicked Saddam's ass!" the Colonel screamed at our backs. "Took the fuckin' oil back! Killed Osama bin-Laden, the sonofabitch!"

Dragon and I pushed Bill into a sitting position on the curb, between two men throwing dice at LaSalle's brick sides and a wino tying his dog to a brick. The wino moved toward the bar and the terrier leapt forward yapping, dragging the brick; the wino lifted his dog, leaned into the doorway shouting for a quart. "Yo Bobby! Olde English, man! C'mon, man!"

"No dogs in here, I told you!"

"Is she in? No, she's in my arms, you fucking moron!"

Bill tried to stand; Dragon kept a hand on his shoulder. "Sit here until you puke, or you're positive you're not going to puke."

"Take him back," I said. "I'll wait here, have a few drinks. I want to see Marla. I went off on David because of Juban but also for her but for no real reason because my head is all garbage...ah shit, I just feel mean, man. I really ripped into them for nothing but I love her, I love her John! I gotta see her, tell her how sorry I am."

"All right," said Dragon. "Don't run off then. I'll be back as soon as I drop hero here into a safe bed, you hear? I'll be back so don't fucking leave!" Baby stumbled to the Harley. He clung awkwardly to his seat, legs dangling crazily as the bike picked up speed and John slapping Baby's knees to make him hook his heels.

I climbed the eight dirty concrete steps to LaSalle's, pushed past the wino calling for a drink, the terrier wild in his arms. "Damn it, Lila, hold on! Hey," he called to me and pressed two filthy dollars into my hand. "Do a favor. God bless you man please." I bought his forty, a king-size Beernuts, and Jack Links Steak Nuggets for the dog. There was no other bar food but microwavable Tyson hot wings and mini-pizzas. I ordered a Manhattan just to see the look on the bartender's face (he didn't use rye, no maraschino cherry or bitters, and the sweet vermouth was skunked; I drank three) and dropped the wino's two soiled dollars into his tip jar. While Bobby coughed and blew his nose (quarterback blow, catching the snot with his fingers and flinging it to the floor) over the speedwell, over my shaker cup, soured red vermouth, and Monarch whiskey. I finally brought the wino his drink and sugary peanuts and beef.

"Fuck you, I thought you'd stolen my money and left by the back way!" he screamed thanks. "Rope me in, cordon me off! Why do people put up with being treated like peasants or civilian cattle, why don't they revolt and storm the gates? Why do I bother asking you, standing patiently at the door/transom/scanner waiting to be strip searched, quizzed, interrogated, bullied, though you are a patriot and pay a fortune in taxes though you hate your job and your sex life is dead: averting your insipid, servile, never question or task the system or establishment cow fucking passive sell-out eyes when I glance at you; did your mom have any kids that lived?"

"Drink up, asshole," I replied, feeding Lila the Jack's jerky. "Everything in life is precious, even you, a worthless, fetid, insanely babbling drunk like you; we are just too poorly evolved as human beings to understand it, which is why we continue, with all our amazing science, medicine and progress, to regress to religion and superstition, and hence prefer war, molestation, famine, greed, addiction, corruption, both political and spiritual, disease, financial and spiritual depression, to a true Brotherhood of Man. And so we suffer, hideously! So here's your fucking quart; drink up, asshole, drink up!"

"I'm not an asshole! God damn you all I'm still a human being! I'll be someone again someday!" He dropped Lila on the sidewalk and grabbed the cold quart bottle, shrugged when I told him the Beernuts were for him, jerked steak nuggets for Lila. He shoved the packages into a trouser pocket. I crushed a monster roach – a gleaming palmetto – as man and dog crossed the lunatic boulevard, the terrier stretching its muzzle to lick foam from the bottleneck. "Mambo!" some asshole screamed from a speeding limo, but even very drunk I was quicker than his attempt at facial vandalism, caught the flung beads and returned with multicolored necklaces into LaSalle's to drink terrible Manhattans and share the wealth.

Tokkotai White Guy

"In the Marines in Bangalore, Guam, Iowa Jima, Midway, Okinawa my dad's Japanese interpreter called him Tokkotai White Guy. Tokkotai means suicidal-crazy and is a compliment. That's how Jap aviators praised the Shinpu, one-way bombers now vulgarly known as kamikaze. Hissatsu! They'd cry, going in, going down: sink without fail! Dad loved Corporal Nakazo, a Nisei from Sacramento California. He got his head blown off at Okinawa, the easiest battle they were in, and where Nakazo's father was born, isn't that fucking ironic? Nakazo was like an absentee uncle, as a boy all I ever heard from dad was Corporal Nakazo and he did this, Corporal Nakazo and he did that."

John Haller killed a shot of 151 rum then slurped from his wine goblet. "When dad was dying of cancer, he gave me Nakazo's journals. Amazing. He was working on a novel called Divine Wind when he was killed, and it's fabulous, as important a Japanese-American book as No-No-Boy. I'll get around to publishing it one of these days."

"I'd love to see it now."

Haller eyed her, nodded, winked, scratched his left armpit. "I've read the opening so many times it's memorized. Check this out: I was told to avoid the bridge-tower and gun turrets, to aim between the smokestacks and bridge-tower, or the elevators, or the flight deck, or if I was shot and losing altitude to then push with all my might for the middle of the ship, right above the waterline. They said I would feel no pain. They said I would see my mother's face."

"Wow. I've got goosebumps. Don't you and your dad feel a bit guilty for keeping this hidden so long?"

Haller laughed. "Dad's dead, and if Uncle Nakazo wanted to be a famous novelist, he wouldn't have died on Okinawa, right? Now, that may seem to you odd or cold, but that is perfectly logical and moral thinking to a classic Japanese."

"I'm still very interested."

"Dad graduated bottom of his class, Harvard, and immediately went to war, made Captain in eleven months, Major in twenty-four, unlike halfwit presidents and fat ass VPs who are no-shows to even a police action. I spent two years in Nam and I've never written one fucking word about it, nor will I— I got three American Book Awards and two Pulitzers from here (he savagely tapped his forehead) not pimping that bullshit jungle and anyone who's anybody knows I'm next for the Nobel; I'm fucking shortlisted." Haller fumbled his package of Dunhill menthols; cigarettes scattered across his feet. He scooped a handful crushed and bent, thrust one between his lips, dumped the others into a polished gourd. "It's a hyotan," he told the girl as she traced a finger across the gourd's blackish-patina belly. "Cost me 800,000 yen and it's two hundred years old, not even an antique by Japanese standards. Really rare ones have fetched six million yen."

"How much is that in dollars?"

"About fifty-five thousand," he laughed. "For a gourd. I should open a squash-polishing facility and become a stogie-fellating capitalist." His torso was piggish, and when snoring in his hammock, belly a hirsute stupa— the runny nose he swiped was the snout of a tapir. His domed head was shaped exactly like a medieval sallet, squinty cloudy eyes visor-slits in the heavy metal; neck and facial flesh the alcohol-florid texture of a soiled muleta: drink loosened his linchpins, then the wheels flew off, a crash was inevitable; still, the Sarah Lawrence girl considered John Haller very attractive. She licked her lips when he was watching, thrilled when he blinked at her tongue.

She nodded, wrote as he repeated H-Y-O-T-A-N. "You're quoted in the Harvard Independent as saying that you don't like any writer now living. Any writer. Is that accurate? And they say that you're a homophobe."

"I meant American writers. Gore Vidal branded me years ago a homophobe, and I like Gore Vidal, but not as much as I like Vidal Sassoon."

Her look was blank and Maggie chimed in, "he knew both Vidals well, and sober he's a decent human being if you can believe that."

Haller shook his wife off. "I could name a dozen French, Japanese, German, Canadian, Russian, Italian, African, Chinese, Brazilian, Mexican novelists and I'll bet your MFA you haven't read one of them. I'm not a homophobe, they're taking out of context that I don't like gay writers whose only subject is being gay; it's boring. The problem as I see it is maturity." He coughed at the Sarah Lawrence girl, wiped his eyes, scratched his balls. "Any writer worth his salt is over forty-five, real writers, the ones who bothered to create headlines for a backwater paper, or paint houses, or drive a truck for rent and hash while making bylines. All young writers do is talk nonsense, because they're mostly professors, self-impressed gatekeepers who dole out awards, prizes, kudos, to their cronies and lovers."

"But you've won a lot of awards. Dozens."

"And I earned them, princess. Nowadays I could never have broken in, not being hetero, not being WASP status-quo chauvinist male pig. The reservation and gangbanger and bus-stop barrio trailer-park novelists – you know who I'm talking about – don't even know who in hell Brecht, Lacan, Rodin, Mann, Gogol, Chekov, Maupassant, Camus, Balzac, Hawthorne are. So you're an Indian, or black, or Latino, or pierced, tattooed, fight-club whitetrash: that allows you to steal home without ever learning to bat? That's what I'm saying." The Sarah Lawrence girl nodded, scribbled perfect Gregg shorthand, pondered her next question. The ancient Sony voice-activated cassette recorder ground on; she tapped it several times until the grinding noise slowed to a purr. Maggie Haller set the tray of wine and salmon paste/WallaWalla sweet onion puré/Tillamook cheddar canapés next to her prized Swarovski crystal swan-vase of freshly picked calla lilies. She brushed ashes from Haller's pants. "Good Lord!" she breathed. "Heavens, John!"

"Yes." He halted his ball-scratching to dig earwax. "Young writers are despicable, arrogant, dirty-minded, spoiled and overpaid; adoring potentates of misery and the scolding arms of half-baked religions, hugs of fire and violence from a self-made American purgatory of AIDS and addiction, that we never loved correctly and I'm guilty too, I condemn them but I join them too, that we never loved, only established rapprochement."

"I wasn't agreeing with you," replied Maggie. She turned to the Sarah Lawrence girl. "Please don't add that last outburst to the interview. I should have warned you, John tires quickly – maybe muddled's the better description – and says the most outrageous things, lord don't I know. And this fascination with his father! His father was the most two-faced racist, misogynist, homophobic, vicious nasty sonofabitch I've ever known."

He whirled, eyes bulging, finger stabbing at his wife. "Bitch! Don't you ever! Ever..." his breath failed him, and squeaking, he fished his cosophedrione inhaler from the top left of nine pockets festooning his Xcropolis safari jacket and inhaled three blasts. "My father was my god. My termagant mother..." he paused, as if encountering again the fresh horror of such a female. "She drank herself to death a week before my fourteenth birthday, to escape us Maggie enjoys mocking me, but Princess Mags wasn't fucking there, was she?"

"You're insane, John. And your insanity is now going to be all over the world in papers and gossip and the internet, because this shallow cunning little twit will sell it everywhere. You want that? No, you don't, drunk and crazy and ruined as you are I can still see in your eyes that you wish to project an image of a man brilliant and still working so project it, damn you, project it for her since you can't project it for me!"

"Bull. I'm just drunk, and I stand by every word. My mother was a monster. That recorder's a piece of trash. Want mine?" The Sarah Lawrence girl demurred, blushing on cue with a head shake, a ponytail toss, then she reached out and snagged John's Sony VAIRO 64X.

"Thanks."

"My breath reeks of whore's cunt, I know. A bloated leitmotif played out with symphony when a harmonica would suffice – sound and fury, as Billy said, signifying nothing – not just the insufferable dilettantes who pay my bills, these phonies with their pampered ateliers and priceless whims; argus-eyed bastards actually doing some good sometimes. I'm too cruel."

The girl blinked. "Because you make money with your writing?"

"No, I make a whole helluva lotta money writing, pumpkin. It's the reeking stinking awful whore's cunt," John grinned. "That's what I call the stink of booze; only thing to ever seriously jeopardize our marriage— Maggie doesn't care who I play around with but when I drink I ruin everything. If we're good, but mostly rich, we'll buy a seat in heaven." He harkened to the codswallop of religion and philosophy because the world to him was not the home of humanity – of the great and shining progression of mankind – but an armamentarium of vice, disease, corruption.

Maggie shook her head. "No. This isn't the time or place to go on so, John. She's just a kid from a college rag, trying to score points. Don't make me mad. I mean it, by god." She poured their wine, glasses of '87 Preston cabernet. John Haller was a great promoter of Preston wines. He had written his last best-selling novel, The Faux-Diamond Franchise, under the constant influence of the stuff, and Prozac, and asperidone, and an occasional joint and sniff of good white old-fashioned coke.

John patted Maggie's butt, grinned wider. "Don't think I don't love my wife, I not only love her, I adore her. But she's loaded, inherited so much dough makes what I've made writing look like a welfare check. When she says no I sit up, perk up my ears, sometimes even roll over."

"Mmm. This is nice." The Sarah Lawrence girl licked her lips. "California?"

"Eastern Washington," John told her. "Preston Cellars. God's country. The vineyard breezes smell like Amarige de Givenchy. You can hear Dionysus rolling and snorting in the Merlot and Cabernet and Shiraz. Bang means great in Chinese, did you know that? No wonder bang is vernacular for fuck; and did you know gay means give in Chinese? No wonder when a man wants his dick sucked properly he gets a fag to do it; and no that's not homophobic! I let a man blow me once, just to see what it'd be like, a real writer shouldn't be afraid of any experience, and it was the best orgasm I ever had, my god I nearly passed out." He tamped his cigarette and it disintegrated— cut glass fingers peeling a tiny banana.

Maggie rolled her eyes. "If this goes on like this anymore I swear to God I'll stop it, I'll throw you both out, do you understand?" The Sarah Lawrence girl nodded, switched on the recorder. "Very interesting. You're born-again aren't you, Mr. Haller?" She preferred a crystal-addled Zenish agnosticism to any church. She kept pepper-spray and a chromed Beretta .380 in her fanny-pack. She enjoyed being an intern at the University of Washington's suddenly famous Trek Magazine; she had written a thesis on Roethke, she loved the dying Rave and revived Grunge scenes. She proudly displayed the barbwire and dove Amnesty International bumper sticker on her Volvo but if you accosted her you'd be, by god, maced or shot. She was sure she could do it— she'd practiced with the pepper spray (twenty paces distant) at a facsimile Time cover of Manson; she'd bulls-eyed a dozen paper targets with the Beretta at the Marksman, an indoor range with a Starbucks and Big-G sporting goods franchises attached. But John impressed her, and still attracted her; as her eyes measured the emperor, the young small smooth hand clasping the Uniball Gel Impact limned an eye, baggy swollen diseased, but an eye that had truly seen – thus did this perilous enterprise of majestic portraiture, this interview – please the lesser artist. Strip majesty of its exteriors, and majesty becomes a jest.

John frowned. "Well now, I admit to an affection for demiurges and satyrs, none of this willy-nilly New Age quartz-stroking and suffocating in sweat lodges. It's the quietus of decapitation, to say God is evil even when God is evil, that is, neglectful of our needs. You don't create something then neglect it, unless you are vicious.

I've had this recurring dream this year, I'm Marcus Illeus, centurion commandant 2005 years ago, and my best friend and executive officer Janus Cicero jokes about his favorite whore, the Greek who likes it in the mouth more than the ass, and we're laughing when this crucified piece of Jew shit called Immanuel spasms his final agony and a final clot of his blood as he coughs spins into my mouth as I laugh. Enraged, I draw my sword and strike above but he's already dead; lightning roars down instantly killing my horse, killing my friend and his mount too but I'm left alive, pinned under massive Hadranius. The silver saddle, a gift from Gaius Caesar, has crushed my pelvis but even as the bones crunch, rolling like dice under the smashed flesh, I feel them heal, popping and crawling back into place, and my heart which had stopped beats again, as strongly true as when I were nineteen, then my eyes flood with tears, for eternity.

My surviving compatriots flee in terror, though I'm their Captain they abandon me as I curse them and swear revenge. The dead Jew's mother comes forward to press a sponge of vinegar into my mouth. The sponge is that large thick black Dead Sea variety, not dainty tan round such as the Greeks harvest, and at first I think it is a stone and she intends to crush my skull. The vinegar is light, sharp, fresh— the medicinal brew sweetened with mashed figs so popular with the Jew physicians even our Governor Pilate favors, and he orders the Jews to come succor him when he is ill. Sempr' ab ti – I always gasp – this part of the dream never alters: always with thee, I tell her, and then she collects her son's blood in an earthenware cup and I awake, for eternity." He sucked down the red wine and held out his glass for more. Maggie was slow to respond. John grabbed the bottle and drank from it.

"John!"

"Manners are for prudes," her husband defended himself. "But to hate God is banal and sophomoric, as banal as calling Cyclops a trencherman. Fucking priests! Couldn't keep their hands off children now they've destroyed the church! Pansy tetchy courtiers pinching crab lice from the velvet throne of pederasty; truly they serve no king nor God but remain whores to an ambition to slip through life as nothing, never working or marrying and clinging to the halfwit words of that faggot madman Paul; Jesus I despise Paul and Christ would have told him to go to hell too: priests! They are the most absolute cowards, the most worthless men, and we should hunt them all down and kill them like dogs." He spat on the floor and continued. "Bastards! A desire to sodomize with never a penalty motivates them, though Jesus said kill yourself before molesting a child, rope a millstone around your neck and jump into a river before hurting a kid, and yet these fucking worthless goddamned blasphemous priests! I was a Catholic and now I'm not because the church stood with Satan, the church covered up!"

"John!" cried Maggie.

"Priests!" he cried, wiping tears from his face. "And having no swordsmanship or combat experience, except the chaplains, yet that's blasphemy, as the glorious Sixth Commandment orders thou shalt not kill! No Killing! Not even for the glory of the U.S. military, or self-defense, or to execute a criminal, are we allowed, as Christians, to take any life, but as Americans of course we own the Bible, a terrific embarrassment to the Jews, who actually wrote the damn thing, and now Christianity is about being rich, and pompous, and deadly, and intolerant, and white, non of which Jesus Christ was or ever will be. So these assholes strut about hefting big brassy crosses for swords, puffing out fat greasy cheeks and bitch-titted chests decorated with exonumia and papist mummery. Every gook I killed, I'd resurrect him, and let a priest die in his place, if I could."

"John!"

"The anal-retentive compensate for moral bankruptcy and lack of spine by adhering to sumptuary laws and hidebound decorum. A good dose of Foucault and Hegel are all these crybabies need. Generation X? Bunk! I'm going to fart up now and put on my Chinese Nike or Under Armor shirt mei yoo guanchi; means okey dokey, no sweat, just do it: if we're ever going to defend democracy we must first forefend democracy, instill the abject sciolist as well as the socialist insisting the poor are well fed and the sick recovering— point out the protruding bones, ugiome faces less dreadful in morning light but still horrid in the excess and decay of dawn."

"John! Get a hold of yourself! You promised!"

Ignoring his wife and the many Dunhills readily available to light, he opened a package of Rothman cigarettes, spilled all of them, then grabbed at this pile, found one and cleaned carpet fuzz from the filter. The Sarah Lawrence girl dipped down, placed a cig between her puffy pink, labial, Angelie Jolie scorpion-stung lips, and lit them both. "Thanks," said John. He held his smoke, closed his eyes, snapped forward. "I'm winding down, I'm bored, we need to go out and eat and drink, all of us— Mags, make a rez somewhere, how about the Pink Door? Okay, let's finish this up with a bang! The problem as I see it is that young writers have buckled under the victimology of the politically correct – the godless wimps and Marxist academics – especially a few Pac-10 America-hating faggots I could name; goddamn I love the Northwest outdoors but I despise these inbred land-grant colleges posing as universities with their lumber cotillions, grunge asshole professors and octoroon dyke intelligentsia. If the real estate market wasn't dead I'd sell this fucking Mc Mansion and leave Seattle in a heartbeat."

Maggie stared, horrified. "You're a pig. I'll call you a pizza but I'll be damned if I'll go anywhere with you, to sit down and eat with decent human beings and ruin their appetites. Pig!" Haller slurped, wiped his chin, belched, lit an unbroken Dunhill, his fresh Rothman blazing in the Waterford Lismore ashtray. "I've my own system for categorizing society. At the top are the True Philosophers, those who love ideas and are concerned with progress and traditional reform. Next are the Warriors, those who live and act out uncompromisingly codes of chivalry and honor. Then you have the Plutocrats, money-grubbing yuppie bastards and the New Age phonies with their infomercial empires who punch black holes through the ozone layers of financial security and American spiritual ethos, plunging the middle class established by Andrew Jackson into the abyss of socio-economic lunacy and dissipation. Behold our fucking society!"

He raised the bottle. "Then you have the Zeros— crackheads and welfare bums who prey on everyone else. They don't believe in anything but hedonism and anarchy. When they aren't stealing or shooting up or butaning crack into their brainstems or guzzling St. Ides and Thunderbird or queuing at social services for a handout they crowd around skid-row tavern TV sets cheering the latest political scandal or ruination of a working man. I hate 'em." Haller lurched to his feet, hand pressed to his mouth. He swallowed most of it, like a man, as his father had taught him, but some of the vomit sprayed from his nose and burst between his fingers.

"Scuse me, ladies!" He ran into a bathroom – one of four toilets the Bellevue mansion contained – slammed the door, spun a gold faucet and puked. He balled his fist and punched his ugly face, but in his age and drunken softness he pulled his punch and all it did was glance off his temple, barely a slap. "Pussy!" he screamed. "Fucking useless gutless fraud!"

His world travels had been a waste of time, for he was his world, its odor hue shape; everywhere he went he saw only what he enjoyed seeing, and if it wasn't there he paid to have it dragged into view, and seasoned his foods to taste of home, and if the language ill served him, pronounced them babble and if the customs displeased him he denounced the customs as savage, bucolic, barbaric. Over and over he kept returning to Nam, to the simplicity he'd endured as an infantry lieutenant – he didn't fuck around here, not even in his deepest depressions did he ever forget that no one suffers in combat worse than the enlisted ranks level E1-E4: these are the ranks that fight for America, and die for America. But he'd surprised himself, and his father, who didn't think much of him, actually, by surviving two tours, rising to the rank of Captain before his honorable discharge, and his men loved him because he loved them – fought well, even as an awkward ridiculous know-nothing shavetail, he listened to his sergeants and learned to fight well and when the shit hit the fan he was there, first in, last out, as so few officers behave; he loved his men, and he received 3-4 letters from those he'd served with every year, praising his duty when they knew him, and his writing fame and skill now that they did not.

"My word!" The Sarah Lawrence girl exclaimed as John Haller retched and coughed a room away. Both women heard John shout pussy then fraud. The girl was used to drunks – rich suave educated ones anyway, like her father – he'd vomited many times in front of her over the years, usually gin, vodka, claret and port though bourbon especially "put him quickly over" as he liked to say, wiping noodles, drool, and booze foam from his chin after an accident. But her father was a much more polite retcher overall, emptying his stomach with tiny gasps, timing a toilet-flush to cover the noise of any splash. She tilted her Liza Doolittle hat. "His tummy's really upset, it seems."

"So's his mind, dear," Maggie sighed. She fell into the chair vacated by her husband. "I wish you'd come back when John's more civil. He's been under so much stress trying to make the deadline of his latest book. He's really not such a bigoted, provincial, homophobe, misogynist, and jingoist when you speak to him on a good day."

"Deadline?"

"Stop taking notes and I'll talk to you. It's obvious John like s you, though I have to be perfectly honest and say that I don't. You fooled me, I though you were good but you aren't good, though you're smart and well-bred, and I guess that's a decent compromise; I've wrecked my life and alienated my family being with this idiot, and I'm very smart and well-bred, as you know."

"Yes. You're from Clermont, as is my mother."

"Isn't Massachusetts quite a ways from Seattle?"

"Yes, but I'm here on several business matters. Foremost, to get this interview for the Quorum, but I'm also transferring to the MFA program at the University of Washington. They've accepted my application, offered me a full TA with tuition waiver, and most importantly I'm getting their thirty thousand dollar Weyerhaeuser."

"But Sarah Lawrence is such a good school!" said Maggie.

"Yes, in some respects." The Sarah Lawrence girl grinned and glanced around, as if careful stealing silverware without being seen. "May I let you in on a little secret, Mrs. Haller? I've been to four MFA programs so far."

"Heavens!"

"No, no," she laughed. "There's nothing wrong with me, in fact I keep this going by being a very good writer; I publish a lot of poems and stories in the better university journals."

Maggie finished her wine and poured more. "I don't think I understand you. I knew you were up to something but I thought it was simply this awful interview."

"The grants, Mrs. Haller; I score the grants, and I haven't been refused one yet: at Chicago it was the Folgers, twenty grand, at Houston the Michener, twenty grand, at Stanford the Stegner, twenty-five grand, at Sarah Lawrence the Lynch, thirty grand, and now I'll have another thirty at UW. I'll transfer from here to Iowa, which is where I've really wanted to get my MFA all along; Iowa's the only piece of paper really worth anything."

"Worth?"

"You know, more grants after graduation, fellowships, tenure back at the Writers' Workshop, the only place I'd even think of teaching although Iowa City is a disgusting little town, the river's brown and full of crud from the continuous floods, or everything's dead and dried up from the continuous droughts, and the restaurants suck. I just didn't want your husband to overhear, I don't think he'd approve."

"Honey, the only thing he'd disapprove of is the MFA in creative writing, which he considers bunk. But he'd adore the way you exploit your pathetic little system. What are you, twenty-three, twenty-four? You could be an attorney now and eighty grand would be a month's take at an honest firm, your year's salary with the State, or lunch on Wall Street."

"It's not the money, I have a trust fund. It's winning the game."

Maggie rolled her eyes. She rolled her eyes a lot, and had since a child though her father had once placed Scotch tape across her face to punish her for rolling her eyes when he talked at her. "Uh huh. John will love that too. He might even have an affair with you, which would certainly boost your career as leech and professional grad student. Here he comes now, let's tell him!"

"I'm okay with it if you're okay," the Sarah Lawrence girl grinned.

This girl had at first seemed so sweet to Maggie, the single votary from a month's mélange of I-wanna-write tourists, flowers, expensive bottles of booze, and two thousand page rough draft novels, or discs and CDs and emails or worse, dreadful poems: all seeking the holy plane and the holy father of the bitter word, the last Great American Novelist – pilgrims exacting a thrill, for John Haller sometimes invited those bearing bottles in, which only intensified the problem, as these freaks had websites and spread the word; and the women were the worst, not because Maggie was jealous, in her youth she'd joined in, she'd been wild and decadent, and now in her age she'd settled into flowers, and gardens, and gentle books, and sewing, not because she was a hypocrite but because for the first time in her life she insisted on cleanliness, quiet, peace, and she wasn't afraid to lose her husband to sexual abandon in order to have it – but those sad shabby women reminded her that feminism was dead, porn had conquered America, women were meat again, diet-pounded torsos, makeup melting in the heat, middle-age faces pentimentos of despair and religious desire: in short butt-fucking, gang-banging, and fisting turned John the Genius on.

"The deadline is everything to this man. If you want to actually understand him then understand this: he's never missed a deadline and that's why I still stay with him. He should be committed, I swear to God, I'd like to help him but I'd have to commit him because he won't get help, help interferes with his work. I love him because I've never, never known anyone so screwed up, so hopeless, yet so steadfast. His deadlines are his life."

The Sarah Lawrence girl scribbled a note. "Deadline? You mean Celluloid Firing Squad?" She'd started as a poet, then moved to creative nonfiction, then to fiction. She was tired of all the white male versifiers both living and dead, and the living dead, God knows she'd bumped into enough of those, and she'd written papers on them all – the famous jumpers like Berryman and Crane, the backstreet boys Tate, Lowell, Jarrell and poor O'Hara, if you imagine being run over as a catapulting upwards and slamming down – of gravity crushing the breath, the last iambic UGH though is iambics were rotten imitations of Auden and O'Hara was best when pretending to be a chatty Yeats on acid. God yes, she'd paid her dues, she deserved a Great American Novelist!

And the obscure professors Bell, Strand, Stern, Wagoner, McClatchy, Kinnell: they weren't really poets, and they weren't really teachers, but somehow they made a living, and their books kept coming out. She was sick, too, of the failed and never-arrived dramatists, and even the great ones, such as David Mamet or Sebastian Barry, whom she didn't understand – theater should make sense – Tennessee Williams, for instance, before he got old, so old and drunk and sexually frustrated he quit making sense, too, and Bukowski, so overrated but at least real until the end when he was too rich to be real, alcohol-addled, fat and cancer his garrote as a pill bottle cap had been Tennessee's. The Sarah Lawrence girl loved Cats, Miss Saigon, Rent, and Guys and Dolls more than Lear, Hamlet, Rose Tattoo, Glass Menagerie. And of her own father's cancer she felt joy, because she was an only child and when the nasty cocksucker was dead, she'd be rich, because her mother was spineless and she'd demand her rightful share and she'd get it.

"Oh no— he finished that one last week. I'll give you a copy of the galleys to take excerpts, if you like. The one he's stuck on is Choir of Infinity. He hasn't slept for a month; he wants that ridiculous Nobel Prize. I mean I hate Sweden, one of the filthiest, rudest, countries I've ever visited, Stockholm a nightmare; how dare they control the Nobel, if Alfred knew how they've changed, how vulgar and insular and corrupt his prize has become, he'd return from his grave and haunt them like some Dybek or wraith Poltergeist-style with clown-toys attacking their children and killer-trees bursting in windows. The Noble, to retain any dignity, must be overseen by a committee willing to tell the congenital-syphilitic nobility, governments, pseudo-intellectuals, and professors of England, the United States, France, Germany, Switzerland, and especially Sweden to kiss their asses. If the Noble were real, it'd be overseen by intellectuals from Mexico, Italy, Canada, Chinese ex-prisoners who've fled to Canada, and an Indian woman living in Montreal, a Russian man living in Paris, a Pakistani woman living in Mexico, and a Native American in the US who is actually fluent in his or her tribal language and writes about love."

"That's a tall order."

"Do you believe in the Noble Prize for Literature as a positive force for humanity, able to change the course of world events?"

"Absolutely."

"Good. Now, John also has a volume of poems coming out next month, though they're dreadful, and a country album with Toby Keith is due to be released, what, you didn't know about that? Oh my God this has been a horrible summer for me, my child! Oh, and he's still negotiating movie rights to Faux-Diamond Franchise— so you can imagine he's been berserk."

The Sarah Lawrence girl nodded. "Your husband's certainly prolific. I'm sorry you don't like me, I can't help being attracted to him."

"Honey," Maggie sighed again. "God— if you only knew. Fuck with all your might, dear, and we'll see who sinks first."

John Haller returned. "Sorry." He was pale, ill, weak; his hands shook with a fresh cigarette. He had splashed water on his face and swept back his hair so that both women could discern the front-line edge of Sta-Tape anchoring his high-quality toupee (Hair Club for Men, though they called the rug a system) and the long white drip of hardened liquid surgical adhesive, resembling cum, above his right temple sideburn (he was terrified of surgery, so hair-transplantation by Bosley was out of the question, though he'd met the man himself at his Beverly Hills office, the consultation had collapsed when he'd admitted it'd take three procedures to restore the novelist's frontal hairline. John tried Propecia, which had diminished his libido then swallowed Viagra to restore his sex-drive but the interaction with finasteride had elevated his blood pressure so he'd discontinued both and been placed by his physician of hydrochlorthaizide, gemfibrizol, and atenolol). "Maggie!" His voice quavered with stomach acid and tears. "I'm so sorry."

He popped the cassette from the Sarah Lawrence Girl's ancient recorder and ground the plastic tablet under his Tony Llama ostrich boot-heel. Then he removed the Sony Vaiso he'd given her from her beautiful little hand. He didn't realize that her IPad was recording, both words and pictures and a movie, because he didn't keep up with current technology. "Miss," he slobbered, grabbing her Clinique-scented fist and stroking it, kissing it. "Miss, I'll give you anything. I just finished a story – it's fantastic – ask Maggie. It's all about love, and manners, and forgiveness. You can have it for your little review. It's three days old, and perfect, better than some things I've worked on six months, I'll print a copy and sign it right now. I'll sign if for you."

"John!"

He wavered between them, as Eve had wavered between God and Satan, measuring her future, her chances for a life of her own. He dropped the Girl's hand and slapped his face, harder than he'd punched it in the bathroom, trying desperately to hold back the deluge he knew must come. "Oh my god I'm sorry," cried John. "Look at this, this is the best cold wine I have." He ran from the room, and they heard slamming doors and clinking of metal and glass and then he ran back, false hair worse awry, and forced glasses into their hands, then drank from his own and retched, caught the vomit, swallowed, sipped delicately from the flute, wipe the rim on his shirttail.

"Merryvale 2002's a good Chardonnay," he laughed. "I just bought the vineyard so it better be. Bottler just sent me the 2004 Merlot, you don't like this we'll drink that; I think the oh-four could be a classic, it's good fresh too but let's give it ten years and if I'm still around we'll drink more of it aged. Not enough vanilla in this goddamn shard, but the peach and apricot and oak's there for snobs to appreciate, and at 14.5 alcohol content it's the highest of any white wine so I can market it to the Extreme young filthy fucker-poseurs who just want to party and rap and drink and fuck and tattoo and pierce themselves and to hell with education, civilization, this country and this world!" He killed his drink, refilled it, splashed more into the glasses of his wife and the Sarah Lawrence Girl, though they hadn't drunk, and the wine splashed onto the floor. "Perfect with grilled salmon, hot mouth clenching your dick in the nightclub's VIP section, Hummer in the valet parking lot, hummer in your lap, fantastic date, her blind date friend waiting for her turn with you too, T-bone on the way, and a 9mm too but you're so fucking young you don't care, it's all today, you'll never be forty or fifty or sixty, you won't live to see it all ripped from your hands, see your toadies laugh in your face when you're broke, so broke the whores don't give you a second glance. Life is so damn good with Merryvale; drink up.

"I'm sorry!" he cried, falling to his knees at Maggie's feet. "My god but I'm sorry. Forgive me, I don't age well." He turned to the Sarah Lawrence Girl. "Come Monday I've been given a final opportunity to save myself, and I'm taking it. I'm sorry for ruining the interview. I saw in novels what others see in God but it doesn't work for me anymore, no one has that power anymore, all the Greats are dead, so long dead and we remaining are frauds and freaks with our silly clubs, academies, societies and secret handshakes: I'd laugh but I'm in a crying state now. Good luck with your life, I do wish you all the best." He vomited, then lurched forward into his puddle of filth, wine glass crunching into the flabby skin of his chest. "I'm so sorry!"
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sean Brendan-Brown is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently resides in Olympia, WA. A medically retired Marine, he is the author of three poetry chapbooks (No Stopping Anytime; King Of Wounds; West Is A Golden Paradise) and a fiction chapbook, Monarch Of Hatred. He has published with the Notre Dame Review, Wisconsin Review, Indiana Review, Texas Review, Southampton Review, and his work is included in the University of Iowa Press anthologies American Diaspora and Like Thunder. He is the recipient of a 1997 NEA Poetry Fellowship and a 2010 NEA Fiction Fellowship.
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