 
The Chiropractor's Assistant

A collection of short stories by

Barry Rachin

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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Published by:

Barry Rachin on Smashwords

The Chiropractor's Assistant

Copyright © 2011 by Barry Rachin

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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

This short story represents a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Table of Contents

Epistemology

Everyone must have Two Pockets

Curbstone Justice

Nagel's Bagels

A work in Progress

The Indigo Children

Old Man & Old Woman

The Chiropractor's Assistant

No Bear, No Forest

Leaky Pipes

Five Hundred forty-three Parishioners

Switched at Birth

Legacy

A Room without a View

Epistemology

Ronda Wickford, assistant manager of the Brandenberg Supersaver Grocery Mart, located Scotty Bergeron over by the leafy green vegetables filling a bin of baby carrots. "I need someone to run produce." Scotty continued to spread the individual packages in the refrigerated case. A stocky middle-aged man, his dirty brown hair was still thick but fading to gray at the temples. "There's a generous bump in salary plus benefits," Rhonda added.

What she didn't bother mentioning was that, choking back a fistful of tears, the current produce manager's wife called the previous afternoon to say her husband had been on a bender since the third week in November. Soused. Blotto. Bombed. Plastered. Four sheets to the wind. A distraught family was trying to coax Donovan O'Brien into rehab. Was it rehab or detox? Ronda couldn't recall. And this wasn't the first time; the hard-drinking employee had fallen off the wagon twice before.

Scotty stared at her with a blank expression. "Dewey's next in line for the job. He's got seniority and "

"Dewey Epstein's a halfwit who couldn't tie his shoelaces without a training manual much less manage a produce department." Rhonda lowered her voice a handful of decibels. "More to the point, since Donovan hit the skids, you've been doing three-quarters of his work and all of your own. Anyone with half a brain can see that."

After Supersaver went union in the early nineteen sixties, it was harder to get rid of troublesome employees like Donovan O'Brien. Worse yet, the change sometimes afforded habitually lazy or unqualified workers leverage when a plum position came available. But Ronda possessed considerable leverage of her own in this particular instance. She wanted to sack Donovan over a month earlier, but the union representative begged her to hold off. He was going to straighten things out with the irascible Irishman, help him put his pathetic life back together. Think wonders. Shit blunders.

Pulling a box cutter out of a back pocket, Scotty slit the tape on a second carton of carrots. He glanced up but only for a split second without bothering to make eye contact. "Yes, I'll take the job. When do I start?"

"Yesterday morning. I'm making it retroactive to the beginning of the week," she replied and walked off.

Back in the main office Rhonda told Marna, who handled personnel, to upgrade Scotty to the new position. "Something funny?"

"A philosophy professor in charge of string beans and Brussels sprouts. That's got to be a first for the market."

"I thought he worked maintenance at some community college in Minnesota," Ronda replied. She slid into a swivel chair and fired up the Windows Vista program. "He was a custodian. Twenty-six years."

"I cleared the references when Scotty applied," Marna replied, "the man was chairman of the philosophy department at Rutland Community College."

Ronda watched the computer screen come to life, fleshing itself out with a dozen colorful program icons. Clicking on the Microsoft Excel tab, the circular bluish mouse symbol pulsated, waiting for the spreadsheet to load.

A philosophy professor in charge of string beans and Brussels sprouts. Something had gone haywire. A stickler for details, Ronda would never just assume Scotty was a blue collar stiff. She brought up the accounts receivable invoices and started analyzing expenditures by departments.

Wait a minute! Now she remembered - a trivial incident. The day before Thanksgiving Ronda ran into the new produce manager sipping coffee in the employee lounge. "What a waste," Scotty muttered.

"Excuse me?" She hadn't spoken and had no idea what he was referring to. The man gestured toward an electrician in blue coveralls removing a fluorescent light fixture from the dropped ceiling grid. "If it was just a dead bulb, we'd replaced it," Ronda replied, "but the whole unit's shot."

"Yes, but do you see the round compartment in the center of the fixture?" Ronda squinted at the light just as the workman pulled the aluminum housing free of the ceiling, lowering the bulky unit to a second worker standing beside the ladder. "There's a small ballast resistor that controls the individual lights behind that plate. All the electrician had to do was replace the part, rewire a handful of connections and the light would operate good as new." Scotty broke a piece off an apple Danish and washed the sticky dough down with a mouthful of coffee. "Now the store has to junk all that perfectly good metal and spend additional money on a replacement."

"Yes, that's true," Ronda mused. What she opted not to mention was how many thousands of dollars corporate bigwigs routinely threw away on lavish perks and sublime foolishness. She considered herself fairly thick-skinned, but some of the extravagance made her want to retch.

That brief conversation in the employee lounge - yes, that was where she got the cockamamie notion Scotty was the hands-on type rather than an academic. Half an hour later, Marna left to deliver a box of gift cards to customer service. When she was gone, Ronda hurried over to the file cabinet. Fishing through a stack of manila folders, she found what she was looking for:

Scott B. Bergeron age 58.

Chairman of the philosophy department

Rutland Community College, Rutland Minnesota.

Marital Status: widowed.

Children: two.

Ronda skimmed through the references, all glowing tributes to a dedicated academic and educator.

A young Hispanic woman with a spidery hairnet covering her black curls knocked lightly and stuck her head in the door. Ronda crammed the file back in the drawer and slammed the cabinet shut. "Yes, Miriam?"



Later that night at home Ronda tried to make sense out of fragments of reliable information, hearsay, idle gossip and innuendo she had puzzled together over the previous year regarding the taciturn enigma she had just promoted.

Widowed with two children. The wife was dead. Was it an accident, chronic illness, stroke or fatal heart attack? No one at the market had any right asking what happened. There but for the grace of God... Of course the children would be young adults now. And that business with the ballast resistor – if the man was previously married and paying a mortgage on his own place, he probably took more than just a passing interest in home repairs.

But why would a well-educated person moved half way across the country to end up at an entry level position in a supermarket? A college professor no less! The Supersaver routinely employed retirees to bag groceries, run down errant shopping carts in the parking lot and fulfill other menial positions, but this guy didn't fit the mold. At fifty-eight he was far too young – too young by a dozen years – to be working for a few lousy bucks over minimum wage, padding a monthly social security check.

And his body language was all wrong. The tight-lipped fellow with the limpid hazel eyes that never quite settled on you for more than a fleeting millisecond, was infuriatingly disengaged. Detached from all the incestuous intrigues and petty bickering endemic to such workplaces. Case in point: in November Adrian Peters, a divorcée from bookkeeping with a stunning figure, invited Scotty over to her place for dinner. The guy thanked Adrian profusely but noted a prior commitment. Perhaps he did have some other pressing engagement, but Scotty never bothered to follow up on the hospitality by asking for a rain check.

And regarding their brief exchange earlier in the day, Scotty seemed inconvenienced! The serendipitous promotion to produce manager - it didn't make a damn bit of difference. If Ronda had suggested, "Why don't you take my job for the next five years and I'll price baby carrots and unload tractor trailers full of vegetables," he might have just grinned foolishly and stared serenely into space. Like some middle-aged Hindu ascetic who renounces all worldly possessions, abandons wife and family to sit lotus style in a mountain cave contemplating his navel, Scotty Bergeron floated through his twilight years in a bland state of cosmic indifference.

The phone rang. "Hello mother." Ronda slumped down on the living room couch and teased a scrap of lint from her rayon skirt. "That's very sweet of you, but I'm spending the holidays with friends," she lied. "Yes, people I know from the market. Thanks for the invite." She chatted a few minutes longer and lowered the phone back onto the cradle.

Two weeks to Christmas. She had no plans other than to hunker down with a bottle of white wine and the latest Debbie Macomber novel. Ronda was addicted to the knitting series. They were holding the book, which had been out of circulation for weeks, at the front desk of the Brandenberg Public Library.

Last Christmas she was dating someone. That ended badly. Now she was alone and probably better off emotionally. Over the summer, Rhonda had come to the dour conclusion that 'romance' was highly overrated. When things turned ugly, people wielded human affection like a lethal weapon. Cupid's curse – it was an emotion entanglement with potentially homicidal tendencies. What people really needed wasn't love with all its messy excess baggage but common decency. Better they should skip romance altogether and simply be kind to one another.

What to eat? Ronda shuffled to the kitchen and peered into the refrigerator. As store manager she could purchase the freshest vegetables and prime meat cuts on a daily basis. Instead she bought odds and ends from the deli. A quarter pound of Finlandia cheese. Another quarter pound of Boarshead roast beef. A couple of torpedo rolls from the self-serve bins near the bakery. "Will that be all?" The young girl behind the deli counter flashed Ronda a sick smile. What sort of stingy slob buys their meals in such meager quantities? Answer: dirt-poor loners and romantic losers.

Last Christmas when she was hopelessly enthralled by Mr. Wrong, Ronda cooked a teriyaki pork roast tenderloin. She used the pan drippings for marinade which she brushed over the succulent carrots and potatoes. As a side dish she sliced butternut squash together with baking apples– for tantalizing flavor she always bought braeburn, northern or empire—which she heaped together with brown sugar, cinnamon and cranberries. The aromatic concoction went in the oven alongside the pork.

For the piece de resistance, Ronda made a special trip five miles across town to an Italian specialty store where she bought a round loaf of panettone, which she cut up in bite-size chunks. She mixed the sweetbread with raisins and vanilla pudding. Scooping the sticky batter into a Teflon cupcake pan, she set the timer for twenty minutes. When the desert came out of the oven Ronda sprinkled rum over the toasted crust and finished the culinary masterpiece with a dollop of whipped cream - the homemade variety, not from an aerosol can.

That's how a woman cooked when she was in love. Or imagined she was before the balmy emotions soured, atrophied, shriveled up and blew away in the chilling late December wind, and she was reduced to a quarter-pound of cheese and roast beef.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Later that night in the bathroom the hot water refused to shut completely. Even when she twisted the knob firmly to the left a thin trickle of water dribbled out of the spout. Prying the plastic cap off the top of the knob with a Phillips screwdriver, she loosened the set screw, lifting the handle away altogether.

No luck! Only the metal stem protruded from the chrome housing. The defective washer was buried on the underside of the unit with no apparent access. Replacing the handle, she went to bed.



Friday morning Ronda found a message on her answering machine.

This is the last day we can hold

the Debbie Macomber book you

requested before making it readily

available to our general readership.

Respectfully,

The circulation desk

Brandenberg Public Library

At eleven o'clock an elderly lady slipped on a patch of black ice in the Supersaver parking lot. An ambulance had to be called and accident report filled out. After lunch, Ronda sat down – an impromptu meeting – with the New England regional buyer regarding a new distributor for cosmetics. Certain hair care products were being discontinued and a line of new items required shelf space.

The Debbie Macomber book. She made a mental note to swing by the library on her way home. Otherwise, the new release would go back on the shelves. At two in the afternoon, Dwight Epstein stuck his head in the door. "Got a minute?"

Ronda shoved a pile of invoices aside and stared frigidly at the youth. Even his appearance was offensive. Overly tall and disjointed, he seemed ill at ease in his ungainly body. The blond hair sat like a bushy mop on his massive head. Ronda doubted he owned a toothbrush much less a comb.

"Yes, Dwight?"

"I was pretty upset when you promoted Scotty. Not that he ain't a nice enough guy, but, properly understood, I got seniority. What's fair is fair."

What's fair is that you possess the maturity and innate intelligence to perform the entry-level job we originally hired you for. The previous week Dwight forgot to change the setting on his labeling machine and priced kiwi fruit at half the normal cost. Five hundred kiwi flew out the door before one of the girls at the checkout counter realized what was happening.

"As other management openings come available we will keep your name in the mix," Ronda said. She didn't bother to explain that placing someone's name in the running didn't mean the person received special consideration.

"When do you think that'll be?"

"Don't know, Dwight. But you have got to understand that promotions are based on merit. You have to bring certain personal skills to the workplace or it's just the Peter Principle."

His rheumy eyes clouded over. "Peter what?"

An unfortunate slip of the tongue. She wasn't about to explain the facetious proposition that employees in an organization tend to be promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. "When we find a job that's more suited to your particular talents," Ronda parried the question, "we can sit down and talk."

"Yeah, well I hope it ain't too long. I sure as heck like produce, but I'm not gonna wait around twiddling my thumbs." The youth shambled out the door. After Dwight was gone Ronda continued to stare morosely at the open doorway for a good half a minute longer.

No other employee at the Supersaver market would have dared talk to her in that tone. Ronda had slogged away ten solid years in the trenches before the promotion to assistant manager. And for that she was eternally grateful. Humbled! What was it with these addle-brained kids? They expected—no, demanded—a standing ovation for arriving to work on time. No need to serve apprenticeships, to work as journeymen perfecting skills. No, it was Dwight Epstein's manifest destiny to start at the top!

The facetious proposition that employees in an organization tend to be promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. At a Supersaver management seminar held the previous year in Boca Raton, the guest speaker discussed long term costs to businesses when key employees quit and went elsewhere. The company frittered away skill, talent, intelligence, leadership. Intangible assets to be sure, but ones that could mean the difference between a good store and a truly great place to work.

Democracy was the great equalizer. It leveled the playing field for dolts like Dwight Epstein threatening to dumb everyone down to a uniformed mediocrity. But that would never happen while Ronda was assistant manager. She viewed herself as a benevolent autocrat. Fair. Dispassionate. An unbiased decision maker. The Peter Principle be damned! She would make sure, that Dwight Epstein's long-term future at Supersaver reflected the man's intrinsic worth to the company.



A scheduling glitch in the deli department kept Ronda at work till past seven. She drove straight for the library A massive building constructed of granite blocks, the Brandenberg Library was originally built in eighteen sixty-five. When it was renovated a few years back, the architect cleverly arranged to retain many of the building's original features. The vestibule in the entryway sported an elaborate mosaic design, the tile imported from Genoa. Mahogany wainscoting wrapped around the walls with a matching gingerbread trim nearer the ceiling.

Only a few yards from the circulation desk, she pulled up dead in her tracks. In a reading room off the periodical section, Scotty Bergeron was hunkered down at an oak table. A hardcover book lay open in front of him. Half a minute passed. Reaching up with his right hand he flipped to the next page but only briefly before lowering it back where it originally lay.

Moving quietly forward, Ronda went directly to the circulation desk. "You're holding a book for me."

"Name please." Before she could reply the front door flew open as though smashed by a battering ram and a bearded man in his early sixties staggered into the library. Disheveled with matted hair and glassy eyes, he spun about unsteadily. Almost from the moment the fellow appeared, the air reeked of cheap booze and rancid body odor.

"Excuse me." The librarian stepped out from behind the counter. "I'll have to ask you to leave." She spoke in a papery-thin officious tone.

"That so?" The man's mouth sagged open and his eyes gawked about the room without focusing on any particular object.

"You're obviously drunk," her voice rose to a strained falsetto, "and this is totally unacceptable."

"I'm drunk and you're a pain in the ass, but I don't hold that against you."

The drunk staggered off in the direction of the stairwell leading up to the second floor landing where the children's' books were located, but before he reached the first riser a sturdy hand snaked around the man's shoulder pulling him back. "Hey, Frankie."

The fellow blinked twice then draped both arms around Scotty Bergeron's waist in a fierce bear hug. "Didn't expect to see you here."

"It's getting late," Scotty said, "and the library closing in fifteen minutes." Propping the man upright, he coaxed the drunk back toward the foyer of the building. "Might as well head out together."

When they were gone, the librarian noted, "That's a sad case. The man served in Vietnam during the late sixties. Came back from the war all screwed up. Frankie Manning. His name shows up on the police blotter at least twice a month for disorderly conduct, drunkenness, loitering. He finds his way in here at least a couple of times each month. We just call the police and they swing by to collect him."

"Does he live local?"

"The Veterans Administration got him a place over at Chelmsford Arms."

Chelmsford Arms – a glamorous name for low-rent housing, mostly one bedroom efficiency apartments over on the east side of town that catered to welfare types, recovering alcoholics and younger people on disability pensions. Scotty Bergeron lived there, which would explain how he was on familiar terms with the bearded man. But Scotty certainly wasn't a down-and-outer. So why was he renting in a crappy flophouse, consorting with mentally defectives and the likes of Frankie Manning? Nothing made any sense.

"I can help you now." Having returned to her post behind the circulation desk, the receptionist was gesturing at Ronda.

She didn't hear a word the woman said. Rather, her eyes were drawn to the quarter-sawn, white oak table in the reading room where a bulky text lay open. A woman with a toddler in tow pushed past her and deposited a load of children's books on the polished counter. Ronda meandered unobtrusively into the reading room where she collected the abandoned text, tucking it in the crook of her left arm.

"Wittgenstein," the librarian pressed a date stamp onto a paper flap pasted to the inside cover, "will be due back in three weeks."

"Excuse me?" In her haste, she hadn't even bothered to glance at the title.

The librarian pointed at the bulky tome Ronda was holding. "Your philosophy book."



Ronda rushed home, took a quick shower and brushed her teeth. Drip. Drip. Drip. The pitter-patter of tepid water even more insistent now, the leaky bathroom faucet had noticeably worsened. She'd call her plumber in the morning.

Ronda massaged an Oil of Olay moisturizer into the crow's feet feathering the outer edges of her eyes. The woman first noticed the unflattering filigree when she hit the big three-0. In a mild panic, Ronda bought Frownies—packaged all-natural strips impregnated with a secret revitalizing emollient— that she plastered on either side of her face at night before going to bed. The rational was that the strips would 'retrain' the facial muscles, help the aging tissue regain its youthful vigor and firmness. One day in late August as she was driving to work, the assistant manager glanced in the rearview mirror and spied a beige strip of tape dangling from her right cheek. Later that evening, she threw the Frownies box along with a full three-week supply of rejuvenating strips in the trash.

In her prime, Ronda Wickford had always been reasonably attractive. High cheekbones and a dainty chin were framed by a swirl of jet black hair. It didn't matter if she let the dense strands cascade down to the small of her back or nipped them in a jaunty pageboy. Either way, the effect was stunning. Now the aristocratic cheekbones had settled like a slightly tipsy structure searching for bedrock. And the irresistibly cute chin had a mate that Ronda air brushed away each morning with various shades of powdery cosmetics.

The book Scotty was hunched over in the reading room of the Brandenberg Public Library was a collection of essays discussing the linguistic philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Facts exist in what Wittgenstein calls "logical space" Logical space is effectively the realm of everything that is logically possible. For instance, though it is not true that Toronto is the capital of Canada, there is nothing illogical about supposing that it might be, so its possibility exists in logical space. Some items in logical space (for instance, "Ottawa is the capital of Canada") are true, while some items in logical space are false. True or false, everything in logical space is possible. "Love is purple" is not an item in logical space, because it is not logically possible (love is not the kind of thing to which we can ascribe a color).

"This is nuts!" Ronda fumed. "Pure and simple."

Love was not something that could be assigned a color. Sure, that made sense. But in life, nothing was ever what it seemed to be. Love could make a jilted soul feel blue with misery or blood red with homicidal rage. So how did the human heart factor into the equation? Or did the illustrious Herr Professor Wittgenstein conveniently ignore that ephemeral organ?

The world is "the totality of facts, not of things", which is to say the world is the totality of lit light bulbs, not of power sources.

"Okay," Ronda mused. "That's a bit hard to digest but perfectly manageable." Sitting alone in your comfy condo thinking about sex was not quite the same as what Wittgenstein might describe as "the totality of facts', which was a rather insipid way of saying that fornication - raunchy, hedonistic, libidinous sex - had distinct physical and emotional advantages over its cerebral counterpart.

The phone rang. It was her mother. "Yes, I still have plans for Christmas." The conversation limped along for another fifteen minutes. Ronda's father needed a hernia repair. Nothing serious. The doctor would schedule him sometime after the beginning of the year. Married Thirty-five years, Aunt Thelma was considering divorce. She wanted a new life. A few years shy of social security and Medicare, Aunt Thelma wanted to reinvent herself - ditch Uncle Morty with his smelly cigars and penchant for soft porn videos. According to Thelma, he rented at least three or four a week from the cable TV network.

So you give you not-so-perfect spouse the bum's rush. For what? To end in a one-bedroom condo with a refrigerator stocked with quarter pounds of stale deli meats and cheeses? Nobody bothered to enlighten Aunt Thelma that sometimes, according to Wittgenstein, True Love is not an item in logical space.

Signs are given meaning through their use in propositions, so it follows that if a sign is used in two different ways we are actually dealing with two different signs. For instance, the "is" in "John is tall" is different from the "is" in "John is the captain of the guard."

Ronda Wickford "is" the current manager of the Brandenberg Supersaver Grocery Mart. That very same Ronda "is" also an unmitigated idiot who drove to the library for the sole purpose of picking up Debbie Macomber's latest bestseller, but brought home the Wittgenstein compendium.



"Scotty Bergeron – where's he live?" Rhonda tried to affect an unassuming tone. Not that she didn't already know the answer.

Marna who was running a stack of forms through the copier, looked up. "That cheesy factory complex that was renovated into affordable housing off Busby Street." She snapped her fingers together, a repetitive motion, trying to conjure up the name.

"Chelmsford Arms," Ronda volunteered.

"Why the sudden interest?"

Ronda told her about the incident at the library.

Marna removed the original from the copier, adding it to the pile. "Can't hardly imagine," she mused, "why a guy like Scotty would be schmoozing with mental defectives and stumblebums."

"Probably saved the drunk a trip to the pokey." Ronda left the office and went directly to the produce department. A pimply-faced teenager was sorting five-pound bags of Idaho potatoes. "Where's Scotty?"

"Out on the loading dock. Eighteen wheeler just pulled in."

Ronda doubled back to the office to grab her coat. The temperature overnight had dropped to sixteen degrees with a wind chill of minus two. Out on the loading platform she found the truck pulled up snug to the cement platform with the rear door ajar. Scotty Bergeron was examining a bill of lading, while Dwight pulled cardboard boxes and thin wooden crates from a tall stack buried deep in the bowels of the container.

"You taught philosophy at the community college in Minnesota?" Puffs of steamy air like miniature clouds escaped her mouth as she spoke.

Scotty glanced at her distractedly then turned to Dwight. "What's in those boxes?"

Dwight pulled back on a two-wheeler stacked chest-high with a green leafy vegetable. "Lettuce," he mumbled, obviously unhappy with the extreme weather. "Romaine."

Scotty kneeled down on the muddy bed of the truck and tore an emerald-colored leaf from one of the boxes. "That's escarole not romaine." He penciled a notation on the bill of lading.

"Yeah, I knew that," the youth shot back indignantly.

Staggering forward under the heavy load, Dwight headed off in the direction of the warehouse. When he was gone, Scotty turned to Ronda. "Yes, I taught philosophy. Epistemology. That was my specialty."

"Which is?"

"From the Greek episteme, knowledge. The study of the nature, sources and limits of knowledge."

"Quite a mouthful," Ronda remarked with a dry smile. "So what are you doing out here on the loading platform with the likes of Dwight Epstein, when you could be in a toasty warm classroom ministering to fawning graduate students."

The man hauled down a column of boxes with similar markings, stacking the produce off to one side. Dwight returned looking utterly morose. Scotty loaded up the two-wheeler then helped him tip the hand cart at a sharp angle. Ronda noted that the boy's jacket was much too thin for the frigid New England weather.

"In a warped sort of way," he finally replied after making another entry on the paperwork, "dealing with Dwight presents even more of a challenge than a classroom full of precocious preppies."

Ronda felt her brain going numbed, as much from the bone-chilling dampness in the carcass of the container truck as the pointless conversation. She stamped her feet vainly trying to restore some semblance of circulation to the frozen flesh. "My bathroom faucet leaks."

"How's that?"

Ronda told him about the incessant drip and how she had tried to fix it. When she finished Scotty said, "The damaged washer sits below on the bottom side of the unit."

Putting the clipboard aside, he disappeared into the warehouse and returned momentarily with a vise grip. "Lock this onto the rectangular base and ease the wrench counterclockwise to break the seal." "The rubber washer will be located on the underside of the shaft. Make sure that when you - "

Before he could finish Dwight returned dragging the two-wheeler haphazardly behind him. "I'm going on break," he muttered.

"Yes, that's fine. There isn't that much left. We can finish with it after." Dwight shambled off.

"Right is tight. Left is loose. Just remember that. When you free the washer unit just take it to a hardware store so they can match up the replacement." "Now let's get out of here." Scott tucked the pencil behind his right ear and moved toward the protective warmth of the warehouse.



After lunch Ronda called the Borders book store at the Emerald Square Mall. "The new Debbie Macomber novel. I was wondering - "

"Yes," the salesgirl cut her off in mid-sentence. "A very hot item!"

"Could you please put a copy aside for me."

"That won't be necessary. We have dozens on display in the front of the store and boxes more in the back room."

"Yes, I'm sure you do," she returned curtly. "My name is Ronda Wickford. Please put one aside at customer service, and I'll be by to get it shortly after five."

As she was hanging up the phone, Scotty appeared. "Here's the invoice from that eighteen wheeler." He laid the paperwork on her desk. "By the way, make sure to shut off the water supply before you loosen the faucet."

"I didn't when I removed the handle and nothing leaked."

The man scratched an earlobe. " That's because the water pressure is below the housing."

Ronda felt her cheeks flush. "And where do I find the water supply?"

"Under the sink you'll see a pair of shut-off valve." Scotty nodded and went back to his department.

Epistemology. The study of the nature, sources and limits of knowledge. Knowing about the water supply lines – an innocuous detail – had just averted a potential disaster.

Saturday afternoon Ronda tackled the leaky sink. Removing the handle, she studied the chrome base. A raised rectangular piece of metal snaked around the rusty stem. She adjusted the vise grip until it was mated to the protruding section and locked the wrench in place.

Shut the plumbing supply line! Dear God! She almost forgot the most important step. Ronda dropped down on her haunches and fished about under the sink, locating the valves. Right is tight, left is loose. She shut both hot and cold for good measure.

Gripping the vise grip with both hands, she pushed back to the left. Nothing budged. She leaned into the fitting with all her weight, but the tool didn't moved, not even a fraction of an inch. On the third try, she felt a subtle give, a relenting of some pent up tension in the mechanism and the threaded tubing slid noiselessly in a circular direction.

Ronda felt a heady surge of adrenalin, an exuberant rush of joy. That was it! The unit was free. No need for additional leverage, she removed the vise grip and unscrewed the wobbly stem by hand. Lifting it free of the sink, she turned the grimy metal upside-down. Buried in the bottom of the stem was a badly bruised and disfigured rubber washer.

At the hardware store, a willowy sales clerk - he couldn't have been much older than Ronda's fifteen year old nephew - replaced the damaged washer. "That'll be a quarter."

"A quarter?" Ronda fumbled with her change purse. "Somehow I thought it would be more expensive."

The skinny boy smiled good-naturedly. "It's just a rubber washer, lady."

"I noticed that the one you sold me is thicker and shaped differently."

The boy leaned across the counter. "Your old washer was probably the same thickness when new." He ran a finger over the outside edge of the new purchase. "The convex shape is just an improved design."

The world is "the totality of facts, not of things", which is to say the world is the totality of lit light bulbs, not of power sources.

Later that night as she was getting ready for bed, a revelation occurred to Ronda. The properly functioning bathroom sink resembled a lit light bulb in that something had to happen in the finite, real world before the abstraction of a damaged washer was resolved. Now, not only did the water shut off completely, but the unnerving drip, drip, drip ceased altogether long before the handle reached to the far side of the sink. Ludwig Wittgenstein, may he rest in peace, could surely have seen the humor in that.



"Won't need this anymore." Ronda handed Scotty back the vise grips.

"How did you make out?"

She told him about fixing the sink. "What type of philosophy did you specialize in?"

"Wrote my dissertation on linguistics, but I also gave several courses each year on logical positivism. "

"That's a mouthful."

"Logical positivism asserts that all we can ever truly know are things grasped immediately with any of the five senses."

Ronda picked a Bartlett pear from the bin and raised it to eye level. "It you see it, feel it, taste it, the thing exists."

Scotty smirked then patted his chapped hands lightly in silent applause. "The statement, ten thousand angels can dance on the head of a pin, may be an interesting from a theoretical standpoint but is unverifiable."

"Santa Clause lives at the North Pole," Ronda offered.

Scotty's smile broadened. "Funny you should bring that up this time of the year." His expression grew more sober. "The logical positivists would suggest that both statements are frivolous because they can't be proven, but there's an inherent flaw with their own argument."

"Which is?"

"The foundation of their philosophical system is built on an a priori abstraction."

Ronda's brain fogged over. "You're losing me."

"According to the logical positivists, only that which can be verified empirically by one or more of the five senses is real."

"Yes, you already said that."

"The statement: 'Only that which can be validated by one or more of the five senses is real.' is an abstraction no better or worse than the one about angels dancing on the head of a pin."



For Christmas Ronda visited the Pit Stop Diner in downtown Brandenberg. No reservations required. Also, no fear of running into any of her coworkers or neighbors from the condo complex. They would all be at home with family or away visiting friends.

Except for a few elderly who had hobbled over from the senior high-rise, the diner was empty. The place smelled of fresh-baked turkey, mulled cider and sweet potatoes. Ronda slid onto a stool at the counter. A waitress approached, arranging silverware, and placing a glass of water on the Formica counter.

"The holiday special will be fine." Ronda handed the menu back to the woman. The door opened and the bearded veteran who had staggered into the library the previous week lingered in the entryway. He looked sober and physically pulled together, but then it was only twelve-thirty. Scanning the room, his eyes came to rest on Ronda sitting at the counter.

"You mind?" He slid onto the stool directly to her left.

"No, not all." The food arrived and she lowered her head.

"Don't make no trouble, Frankie," the waitress spoke with mock severity. "I got my eye on you."

"It's Christmas," he returned in a soft, even tone. "I ain't in no trouble making mood." She took his order and went off to the kitchen.

Jekyll and Hyde. The Vietnam vet with his elbows resting easily on the counter was not the same wild man flailing about in the Brandenberg Library. His flannel shirt and Docker slacks were perfectly clean if somewhat wrinkled, and the only disagreeable odor emanating from his body was stale tobacco. "I remember you from somewhere but can't put a time or a place on it."

"The Brandenberg Library last Friday night." Ronda sliced a piece of turkey breast, dipped it in the brown gravy and raised the fork to her mouth.

The man groaned and ran a calloused hand over his face. "Not one of my better nights." The waitress returned with coffee. "As I vaguely remember, a friend had to help me home."

"Scotty Bergeron."

He gawked at her in mild surprise. "You know him?"

"We work together at the market."

The man nodded and sipped at the coffee. The waitress returned and placed his dinner on the counter. Hunching over the steamy food, Frankie Manning turned his full attention to Christmas dinner and didn't say another word until the plate was empty, the last streak of gravy wiped away with the remnants of a buttered bun. "Too bad about Scotty's wife," he said shaking his head with a somber expression.

The casual remark caught Ronda off guard. "He's widowed but I'm not familiar with the details."

"Hit and run. Some joker in a half-ton pickup ran her down like a stray dog."

"How awful."

"DUI. It was the guy's eighth offense. After the funeral, Scotty took a leave of absence from the university. Hardly ever left the house except to pick up a few things to eat."

"The college sent a chaplain over to visit. God's appointed servant was spouting some moronic nonsense about how it was divine destiny that the poor woman got mangled and how Scotty ought to come to terms with the senseless tragedy." He cleared his throat and fixed Ronda with a malicious grin. "Then the chaplain began preaching some gobbledygook about being washed in the blood of the lamb, and that's when Scotty sort of lost it."

"Lost it?"

"Went ballistic. Postal. Wiped the living room floor with the Catholic cleric." Pulling a wallet from his shirt pocket, Frankie peeled several bills from a clump and placed them on the counter next to his plate. "When he got out of the hospital, the priest didn't press charges. A month later Scotty sold his three-bedroom colonial and moved east." He gulped down the last of the coffee. "Don't you just love a story with a happy ending," The vet rose and turned to leave.

"Merry Christmas," Ronda finally blurted. "And all the best in the New Year!"

"Ditto."



On Wednesday of the following week a woman from the deli counter announced that she was pregnant and going out on maternity leave the middle of June. There would be ample time to recruit and train a replacement. In the late afternoon one of the part-timers, a high school girl, had an anxiety attack, hyperventilating and sobbing uncontrollably. On Christmas day shortly after passing out presents, the girl's parents announced they getting divorced. Happy Holiday! Ronda made her lie down on a sofa in the employee lounge and breath into a paper bag, while she called the girl's mother.

At dusk snow started falling. The weather channel was predicting a little over a foot of heavy white stuff by midnight. Ronda had just renewed the contract with the plowing company. They would wait until closing when the parking lot emptied out to begin the clean up.

Dwight Epstein stopped by "Any news?"

Ronda, who was typing up some notes for an administrative staff meeting, withdrew her fingers from the keyboard. "Last Wednesday you didn't showed up for work," she replied icily. "Never called in your absence. That's the third time in as many months you've dropped off the radar screen with no reasonable explanation."

"Grandmother died," he mumbled with a hurt expression.

"Which one?"

"What?"

"Was that your father's or you mother's parent?"

Dwayne began to fidget, rubbing his hands on the side of his hips. His features clouded over. He poked his tongue in the left side of his mouth causing the cheek to bulge freakishly. "Mother's."

Ronda tapped the snooze button on the computer keyboard and watched the screen fade to black. In no great hurry, she rose and drifted over to the file cabinet, extracting a manila folder. Pulling a half sheet of paper from the folder, she waved it in front of Dwight's nose. "Says here you took bereavement time on February eighteenth of last year because your mother's mother passed away."

"Not so!" he muttered indignantly. "Someone must of screwed up the message."

"Last Wednesdays, we had to pull Trudy Rabinowitz from dairy to help Scotty keep his shelves stocked." What she didn't bother to mention was that Scotty was so impressed with the girl that he asked if Ronda might consider transferring Dwight elsewhere and letting him keep Trudy permanently in produce.

Yes, Ronda would do just that!

With an inch-thick wad of letters of reprimand in Dwight's folder, the assistant manager could 'transfer' Dwight straight to unemployment, tell him to clear out his locker and vacate the premises without the least concern that he would ever collect a penny of benefits from unemployment.



"That nice Jewish girl, Trudy, is moving to produce the middle of next month."

Scotty ran his pricing gun over a row of prepackaged sliced mushrooms. "Then you found another job for Dwight."

"A position that uniquely suits him," Ronda confirmed. "Got any plans for Christmas?"

"I think you might be off by the better part of a week."

"Not necessarily." Ronda stepped closer and tapped him on the forearm. "According to Wittgenstein, facts exist in 'logical space', which is the realm of everything that is logically possible."

Scotty, who was holding a blue carton of mushrooms, put the vegetables aside and didn't respond for a good long time. "Yes, that's so."

"For instance," Ronda continued, "though it is not true that Toronto is the capital of Canada, there is nothing illogical about supposing that it might be at some future time."

"I think I can see where this is going." The words tumbled from his lips in slow motion.

"If I were to cook a teriyaki pork tenderloin roast with baked potatoes, an apple, cranberry and butternut squash casserole along with bourbon glazed panettone topped with whipped cream, then January second - not the twenty-fifth of December could be the bearded fat man in the red suit's special day."

"Christmas in January." There was a look in his eyes she had never seen before. A subtle relenting, like when the vise grip slipped effortlessly to the left and the unnerving task was done. Scotty picked up the price gun and slapped a barrage of ivory stickers on the next row of packaged mushrooms. "I'll bring the wine."

Return to Table of Contents

Everyone must have Two Pockets

The dark-haired girl arrived unannounced. Though the weather was humid in the mid-eighties, she wore long sleeves buttoned at the wrists and a drab, moss green skirt that hung well below the knees. The skin was pale with an ivory texture and lush, jet-black eyebrows that lent the otherwise placid features a haughty boldness. "My name is Miriam Applebaum and I live in the slate blue house with the shutters on the corner."

Mark, who was seated at the kitchen table drawing up a list of building supplies, threw the pencil aside. "Yes, I know the house."

The Applebaums had moved into the community several years back. They belonged to an Orthodox Jewish synagogue, Beth Ohavai Shalom, off Seneca Drive. Every Saturday the congregants traipsed in and out of the temple, the men dressed in black with skullcaps and prayer shawls. The women covered their heads with scarves even through the scorching summer months. "What can I do for you, Miriam Applebaum?"

The exotic-looking girl took several steps forward and was standing at the kitchen table now. She was medium height with a fleshy body. "Your pickup truck pulls onto the street every day in the late afternoon." "Fournier Builders. General carpentry. New construction, interior and exterior renovations." She recited verbatim as though reading directly from the metallic red lettering on the cab of the truck.

An easygoing affable smile lit up her features, and the thought occurred to Mark that the annoyingly persistent Jewish girl with the long sleeves wasn't leaving anytime soon. "I was wondering if you had an entry level position available."

A Chevy pickup with a blown muffler pulled into the driveway and his foreman, Kenny, lumbered up the backstairs and into the kitchen. Kenny handled the finished work – oak staircases, cornices, custom fireplace mantles, fancy trim, baseboard, windows and moldings. Noticing her strange dress, the middle-aged man gawked uncertainly at the girl.

"This is Miriam from down the street," Mark said. "She's looking for an entry-level job in construction."

Kenny rubbed the back of his sunburned neck with a row of stubby fingers. The nail on the right index finger was blackened from an errant hammer. "What can you do?"

Again, as if on cue, her malleable features dissolved in an eager grin. "Anything, everything. I've never done this sort of work before, but woman work in construction and I thought maybe ..." The sentence sort of petered away.

"Since Smitty quit, we ain't got no helper," Kenny ruminated, as though talking more to himself than anyone else in the room. "And we need someone to prime all that fascia and baseboard trim."

A week earlier, Mark placed an order with the lumber company for several hundred square feet of molding. The shipment of wood arrived bare, with no protective primer coat. Rather than return the wood, the lumberyard agreed to sell him the entire load at cost. When Mark balked, the purchasing agent threw up his hands and said, "We got no use for it either. Take the crap and we'll eat the loss." The senior center project was already three days behind schedule due to bad weather and now a new headache; since Smitty quit, the mountain of unpainted lumber that cost him diddly-squat was utterly useless. Think wonders, shit blunders!

"What's a helper do?" Miriam pressed.

"Anything and everything," Mark repeated what she had said a moment earlier. "One minute you're filling a dumpster with worksite debris, the next your lugging four-by-eight sheets of plywood to where a crew is installing subfloors." Mark stood up and leaned forward so that his nose was a fraction of an inch from the girl's face. "Do you have any idea what you're getting yourself into?"

The girl never blinked. She only grinned all the more brazenly. "How soon can I start?"

Fifteen minutes later, as she was leaving, Mark called out, "Wait up!" Lumbering to the front door, he positioned his work boot over Miriam's string sandal and pressed down gently. "Imagine, instead of this being my foot it's a pressure-treated four-by-four post slamming down on your big toe." He eased the dirt-crusted shoe off her foot. "You're gonna need a pair of steel-toed work boots when you start on Monday. Also, no skirts. Pants or dungarees but no skirts."

"Anything else?"

The impish grin was beginning to grate on his nerves. "Yeah, pick up a pair of work gloves, preferably heavy-duty."

"Now comes the hard part," she said, the smile wilting noticeably."

"How's that?"

"I've got to go home and tell my parents."

Later that night as Mark was preparing for bed, the phone rang. "I bought the steel-toed work boots."

"Where did you get my telephone number?"

"Off the side of your pickup truck, of course."

"That's nice." He didn't quite know what else to say.

"And a pair of genuine rawhide work gloves, too." When there was no reply she added. "Should I go directly to the worksite?"

"No, just drop by my place at around eight o'clock."

"Good night." She hung up the phone.



Miriam Applebaum showed up Monday morning for her first day at Fournier Construction dressed in a navy blue uniform that made her look more like a janitor or maintenance worker than carpenter's helper. "We need some raw lumber primed." Mark brought her out back of the Brandenberg senior center where several sawhorses were lying next to a pile of molding and random boards. "The paint and brushes are just inside the door." He pointed to the back entrance to the building. "Any questions?" She shook her head, which was covered by a dark scarf similar to the ones he had seen the other Jewish women wearing as they walked back and forth from the Orthodox synagogue on Saturday mornings.

Mark went to the front of the building where a heavyset man with blond hair was framing the walkway for a handicapped ramp. "There's a girl taking Smitty's place. A nice kid. You leave her alone, okay? No foul language, ethnic slurs or dirty jokes."

The fellow slid a metal-shanked, Estwing hammer from his carpenter's belt and looked up. "Why should I give her any grief?"

"Because you're an asshole with a warped sense of humor," he replied and walked away.

The previous week they gutted the interior of the main function hall, framing the structure according to the architect's new plans. Now three palettes of drywall had to be installed before the plastering crew arrived midweek. Because the building was older construction, an extra width of board had to be doubled up to reach the ten-foot ceiling. More aggravation and wasted time. At ten-thirty Mark laid his pale blue Makita screw gun on the ground and turned to Kenny. "I gotta check on the Jewish girl."

Out in the back of the building he found a row of freshly painted boards lined up on the ground. "Not bad."

A drop of white paint was smeared across the side of her cheek. "It's not rocket science."

He waved a hand at the remaining pile of unpainted boards. "We got two more piles of this stuff coming. Once the wood is done, we'll get you inside and involved with some basic carpentry."

"Okay." She dipped the brush in the can and wiped a glob of excess paint on the inner rim.

"I met your father," he suddenly said, shifting gears.

She lay the brush aside momentarily. "When was that?"

One day in late September Mark was coming home from work and spotted a heavy-set, older man standing next to a Subaru with a flat tire. Mark pulled over. "What's the problem?"

The bearded man, who was dressed in black pants and a white shirt, waved a tire iron in the air and glowered at him suspiciously. "Lug nut's frozen. Won't budge."

Mark went back to his truck and returned with his own iron. "Too big!" The middle-aged man exploded. "You don't see what a little tire I got?"

Mark pointed at the four-posted tool. "Each end has a different size socket. This one should fit your car." Still fuming, the man reluctantly stepped aside. Mark seated the tool over the frozen nut. "Because of the T-shaped design, you get twice the torque to muscle rusty bolts free." Bracing his legs, he leaned into the tool twisting counter-clockwise, and, after a moment, the nut slid to the left. He loosened the rest of the bolts and stood up. "Can you handle it from here?"

"Yes, thank you so much." There was a perceptible softening to the man's tone, tinged with appreciation. As he was climbing back into the cab of his truck, Mark noticed a tall, emaciated youth with a wispy beard and skullcap lingering near a crab apple tree on the front lawn.

"The younger fellow with the thin beard?" Mark asked.

Miriam resumed painting, brushing the creamy white paint over a length of beaded molding in smooth, even strokes. "That would be my brother, Saul." Finishing with the fancy strip, she laid it aside to dry and reached for another.

"What does he do for a living?"

"Oh, he doesn't work. Saul is too busy with other pursuits."

"Such as?"

"My brother spent most of last year at a yeshiva, a Jewish seminary, in Jerusalem. He's studying to be a rabbi."

"He's very devout."

"Yes, when he's not chasing Jewish whores, he is the model of spiritual virtue and godliness."

The odd remark caught the carpenter off guard. "Where does a rabbinical student in the Holy Land find prostitutes?"

"In Jerusalem, there are Jewish refugees recently emigrated from Russia. Many of the women arrive in Israel with no money. They can't speak the language or find meaningful work. The more desperate girls sell themselves for a few liras." She ran a second coat of paint over the wood to touch up the bare spots. "A handful of these downtrodden Russians also find their way to America."

Mark had to get back to the sheetrock, but lingered a moment longer. "Does your father know about his son's shenanigans?"

Miriam squatted down on her haunches, took a wooden stirrer and mixed paint, which had begun separating from the base coat. "About a month ago, my father spoke with a shadchun, a Jewish matchmaker, about finding my brother a suitable match and weaning him away from his perverted pastime."

"And?"

"She found an eligible woman, the daughter of Mordechai Gorelnik." She glanced up with a dry smile.

"Gorelnik's Appliances?"

"None other." Miriam nodded.

The Gorelniks owned a string of appliance outlets – ranges, refrigerators, dryers and washing machines - throughout southeastern Massachusetts and nearby Connecticut. Their radio and TV ads ran non-stop from early morning through the late-night talk shows. "Not a very pretty girl, but when your father has that much money, ones physical attributes don't necessarily figure in the equation."

Mark went back to work.



On the ride home after Miriam's first full day of work at Fournier Construction, a cell phone with a decidedly minor-keyed melody chimed and Miriam fished about in her pocket "Nu?... Gar nicht. Ich bin fahrtig." She hung up the phone, glancing at the driver self-consciously. "My mother. She wanted to know if I'd been molested or forced to bow down before graven images."

Mark, who was becoming accustomed to the girl's eccentric mannerisms shrugged. "Why do your parents dress like they're living in the Middle Ages?" They were a mile from home, pulled up at a traffic light.

"We're Hasidic Jews. The Eastern European tradition goes back to two hundred years."

Which tells me nothing."

Miriam stared out the passenger side window for the longest time before replying "According to Hasidic tradition, everyone must have two pockets, so they can reach into the one or the other, according to need." Mark flipped his directional on as they neared Hathaway Street. "In the right pocket are to be the words: 'For my sake was the world created,' and in the left: 'I am dust and ashes.'"

The truck pulled up in front of the slate blue house with the shutters. "See you tomorrow, Miriam Applebaum."



Three months passed. Bit by bit, Miriam learned construction. Not that she was anything more than a carpenters helper, rank novice, gofer - go for this, go for that - or fledgling apprentice. Still, she got up every day, and, even when her back ached, hauled her weary carcass off to work.

At first her father showed no interest one way or the other in his daughter's aberration. To his way of thinking, that's all it was – a fleeting mental derangement. The Goyim weren't necessarily bad or misguided; they just did things differently. Religious Jews led perfectly sensible lives. Nice Jewish girls didn't pound nails. They didn't work in blue collar trades, building homes for people who worshiped several gods at once and had spent the last two thousand years tormenting God's Chosen People.

But by the third week of the second month, Morris Applebaum had seen enough. "Meshugenah! What is this craziness?"

Miriam had just returned from work. She unbuckled her leather carpenter's tool belt and let it fall on the floor next to the bed. "We finished the senior center today," she said ignoring his belittling tone. "Tomorrow we start renovating that mill complex over by the YMCA. High-end luxury condos—that's what the developer wants."

"And this is a job for a nice Jewish girl? Nothing good can come of it." Rolling his eyes, Morris Applebaum began pacing back and forth, hands clasped behind his back. Miriam momentarily drifted into the bathroom where she stripped her clothes off down to her underwear. Pulling a bathrobe over her limbs she returned to the bedroom. "Fifteen pounds," she said. "I lost fifteen pounds since I started this job, and I never felt so healthy in my life."

"You know what you are?" The father suddenly wheeled around waving a finger menacingly in the air. "You're a Babel. An Isaac Babel!"

"Gotenu! Bite your tongue to say such a thing!" Miriam's mother was standing in the doorway. The large-bone woman placed a trembling hand over her mouth. "Isaac Babel was no better than a traitor,... a Molotov-cocktail-throwing Jew who joined the Cossacks, the very people who persecuted our race. How could you say such a thing?"

You're a Babel. An Isaac Babel! Miriam understood perfectly well what Morris. Applebaum meant by the outlandish remark. Isaac Babel was a haskelah Jew, an enlightened soul equally comfortable among Bolshevik rabble rousers as mystical Jews. His stature as a great writer only complicated matters. Hero, traitor, lunatic, visionary, political agitator, heretic, prophet – how one understood the anomaly that was Isaac Babel depended as much on one's personal biases as what side of the bed he woke up on.

Mr. Applebaum threw both hands up in an attitude of despair and rushed from the room almost knocking his wife down in the bargain. When he was gone, she slumped down on the bed next to her daughter, took Miriam's hand and kissed it. Then she turned the palm over. "Your beautiful fingers are covered with calluses."

"From honest labor." In the yard adjoining their property, a lawnmower fired up. Miriam retrieved her framing hammer from where she abandoned it in near the closet. "Kenny, the man who does all the fancy work, showed me how to properly set nails." She raised the shank chest high. "Your arm is just an extension of the tool." She snapped her wrist and let the head of the hammer fall in a broad sweeping arc, striking an imaginary nail dead center. "I can set a sixteen-penny framing nail in three strokes. No wasted effort. Perhaps it's not as impressive as studying the midrash but still it's an accomplishment of sorts."

Miriam's mother kissed her cheek and sighed. "What we have here," she waved a hand fitfully in the air, "it's not enough for you?"

"I'm going to take my shower now," Miriam replied evasively.

Before she reached the doorway, her mother said, "In a fit of anger, your father compares you to Isaac Babel." The older woman spoke in a confidential tone so the words wouldn't carry beyond the threshold. "But deep down, in his heart-of-hearts, you're the ben h'bachoor."

"The first-born son," Miriam translated from the Hebrew. The tacit implication was both flattering and unsettling. The first-born son inherited the father's fortunes; he honored and preserved his family's good name. Saul, the religious zealot and sexual glutton, was not up to the task. Wrong man for the job. Miriam was the new ben ha'bachoor – by default, the Applebaum dynasty's heir apparent.

Her father could rage about the house, muttering to himself, arms flailing like a madman, but squirreled away behind the fierce eyes and bushy eyebrows was an inchoate fear. The fear of losing his beloved Miri, the indisputable ben habachoor. Mr. Applebaum followed all the precepts of his religion. He recited his prayers, never straying from Hasidic custom. When he crawled out of bed in the morning, the stoop-shouldered man carried the added burden of two thousand years of Jewish tradition on his portly frame. But not one word in the many dozens of frayed books that lined his study taught the devout seeker of eternal truths how to love his wayward daughter with moderation.

"Any news from the Shadchun?

"Your father met with Mr. Gorelnik on Tuesday and they discussed certain possibilities."

"What about the daughter's feelings?"

"Things haven't progressed that far yet."

Miriam lowered her voice. "What Saul does with the Russian girls isn't right – not for Jew or gentile. Some of those girls are here without work permits or proper visas. If someone abuses them, they have no place to turn."

"Once your brother is engaged to the Gorelnik girl," her mother replied nervously, "all that ugliness will all be in the past."

Miriam laughed abruptly making an unfeminine snorting sound through her nose. "The past has consequences that can come back to haunt you."



Since graduating high school, Miriam noted a creeping malaise among her friends. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something to happen. But waiting for what? For the moshiach, the messiah, to come the first time? The 'other one', according Mr. Applebaum was a well-intentioned, if somewhat misguided, false prophet.

Her best friend, Mitzi, was waiting – waiting to find a husband and begin raising a family. Mitzi's brother, Yossi, attended Brandeis. He returned from the prestigious college with a bachelor's degree in nothing-in-particular. After loafing about the house for the better part of a year, the boy went to work in his uncle's delicatessen cooking brisket, corned beef and tongue. And waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Waiting to figure out what to do with the rest of his miserable, well-educated existence on planet earth.

Of course, Miriam's brother, Saul, didn't suffer from any such existential ennui. On Saturday evening, she spied him prancing about the house in a freshly ironed shirt, his frizzy hair blow dried, and cheeks reeking of St. Johns Bay Rum cologne. He favored the fragrance with West Indian lime that left a cloying trail of pungent citrus odors in every room he passed through. "Where're you going all dolled up?"

Saul was preening in front of the bathroom mirror. With a pair of pointed scissors, he snipped a few errant hairs– his beard was still a work in progress - from the side of his chin. "No place special." Pulling a billfold from his back pocket, her brother took silent inventory of his finances.

"Must be a heavy date," Miriam said in a goading tone.

Flashing her a dirty look, he bolted for the front door.

Did he have to call ahead, Miriam wondered, to let the Russian whores know that the rabbinical student, Saul Applebaum, was on his way? Slathered in St. Johns Bay Rum with a hint of lime and horny as hell, God's anointed messenger would be arriving shortly.

Later that night as she lay under the covers, Miriam felt like a dry leaf in late October. Waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. For what? To fall. To fall and, perhaps, be caught in a frigid updraft of autumnal air. No more malaise. A new life. A new beginning. Which was not to say that Miriam would ever turn her back on her faith. Once a Jew, a Jew for life. But a Jew with a myriad of options. Just as the Sephardic Jews in Medieval Spain learned from the Moslem invaders to cross-pollinate their Cabalist theology with Sufi metaphysics, so too would Miriam Applebaum, the carpenter's helper, find a way to pass cleanly through the eye of the needle.



On Saturday afternoon, Miriam walked over to Mark's house, where she found him in the driveway hosing down the truck. "I want my own circular saw." Over the past few months she had been borrowing a reconditioned Ryobi model that the crew used for odds and ends.

Mark ran a soapy sponge over the tires and muddy hubcaps. "They got a real nice seven-and-a-quarter inch Rigid over at Home Depot for a little over a hundred with discount if we put it on the company account." He rinsed the wheels off and carried the bucket of soapy water around to the opposite side of the truck. "That's worm drive, not traditional."

"Worm drive?" Miriam repeated.

"The motor housing runs parallel with the saw blade and uses gears to increase torque," Mark explained, "so it's better suited for the type of heavy-duty construction we do."

"How soon could I get it?"

He came out from behind the truck, tossing what remained of the soap out across the lawn. "Let me clean up and we'll take a drive over there right now."

At Home Depot they went directly to the tool department. "The handle feels a bit strange." With the fingers of her right hand wrapped around the grip, Miriam hoisted the tool up in the air and made several passes over an imaginary sheet of half-inch plywood.

"Once you get use to it, you won't feel comfortable with anything else." He grabbed a carbide-tipped, Freud blade off the display rack. "You'll want a decent blade to compliment the new saw. My treat."

After paying for the tools, they went to Friendlies for coffee and dessert. "My father's unhappy with my choice of careers."

"Can't imagine he would be."

"He called me a modern-day Isaac Babel." Mark stared at her blankly. "A turn-of-the-century, Russian Jew," she explained the obscure reference, "who ran off and joined the Red Cavalry." "Babel was on familiar terms with rabbis, thieves, Cossacks, religious mystics, anti-Semites and murderers. Being a traditional, goody-two-shoes Jew was never enough."

"So, what happened him?"

"Under Stalin's reign of terror, Babel was arrested by the Soviet secret police, tortured and executed."

Mark shook his head in disbelief. "Just what I like - a story with a happy ending."

"Yesterday in the late afternoon," Miriam's mind scurried off in another direction, "Tom was hanging sheet rock in the vestibule."

Tom McSweeney, an immigrant Irishman, was painfully shy. He arrived fifteen minutes early to work every morning with a metal lunch box, thermos of hot chocolate and piece of fruit. Not much of a talker, he was always kind and respectful. The previous week, when the fire-coded wall board that lined the stairwell leading to the second floor arrived, Tom warned Miriam, "Don't try lifting that alone." Interrupting his own work, he helped her lugged the absurdly heavy sheets to the where a metal staging had been erected in the stairwell.

No one on the crew could hang drywall as fast or accurately as Tom. At six-foot-four, the gangly Irishman with the scraggily red beard was constantly in motion, measuring cutting and screwing the gypsum boards in place. Like a whirling dervish, he snapped a line of blue chalk every sixteen inches, hoisted the board in place against the studs, then ran a vertical row of black screws from ceiling to floor leaving a dimpled impression in the gypsum board.

Tom started the vestibule a little after four and by five-fifteen had the entire room covered with the gypsum board from sub-floor to the scruffy furring strips that crisscrossed the ceiling joists. Letting the electrical cord slither through his fingers, the tall man gently lowered his screw gun to the floor. Removing his dark-frame glasses, he wiped the lenses clean. "Here, let me give you a hand with that." He grabbed a push broom and began sweeping up the white powder and scattering of blue-black sheet rock screws that littered the perimeter of the room.

As they were leaving work that day, one of the other carpenters offered Tom a pair of tickets to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. "Thanks but I got choir practice all week."

In response to her questioning look, Tom explained, "I sing liturgical music in a community choir. We're getting ready for a big concert with full orchestra. Carmina Burana."

"Carmina what?"

"It's a collection of religious songs dating back to the Middle Ages," Tom noted. "Pretty intense stuff."

Miriam leaned across the table. "If I hadn't come to work at Fournier Construction, I'd never have met someone like Tom."

"He's married and the wife's pregnant with their third kid, so don't get any ideas."

Miriam made a face. "You know perfectly well what I mean."

Mark sipped at his coffee. "There's Tom and then there's foul-mouthed Ralphy, who whacks his wife around, goes on a bender and drinks up all the grocery money." Mark shook his head from side to side. "You're glamorizing a mundane task; it's just Tom, a journeyman carpenter, working at his chosen trade." He gulped down the last of the coffee. "I got to get home and make some calls."

On Friday afternoon as work was winding down, Mark took Miriam aside. "I'm having a barbecue Sunday afternoon for the crew and their families, if you'd like to join us."

"I'd love to, but my cousin Sophie had a baby and I got to attend the bris." In response to his quizzical expression she added, "On the eighth day after male babies are born, there's a ritual circumcision."

Miriam's cousin already had two daughters so the bris was a big deal. All the relatives crowded into the cramped house, while the mohel laid out the various tools of his trade – the hemostat, scalpel and surgical gloves. When the bris was finished along with the prayers and blessings, the family retreated to the living room for coffee and dessert.

"Our living room is so cramped," Sophie groused. "I feel like I got to apologize when company comes to visit."

Miriam pointed at the partition separating the living room from the kitchen area. "Why don't you just knock that wall down and make the two rooms one."

"Do that," Sophie's husband, Jacob, noted, "and the roof might cave in." Jacob, who taught philosophy at the state college, ran a thumb and forefinger through his goatee.

"That wall," Miriam clarified, "runs parallel to the roof rafters. It's not load-bearing and serves no structural purpose."

"Look at all the light you're losing." Miriam rose and stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling glass slider that opened out onto the rear deck. "The light bounces off that partition," she pointed at the wall in question. "Get rid of it and not only do you open up the space, but all that glorious sunlight streams straight through to the kitchen area.

"It's not a load-bearing wall?" Jacob repeated what she said just a moment earlier.

"Absolutely not," Miriam replied. "That's the supporting wall over there - the one that runs side to side. This is just a partition. Nothing more."

"Well, it makes no difference," Jacob added with a constipated expression, "The wall is a minor inconvenience. Otherwise, we're perfectly happy with the house."

Later that night, Miriam's mother came to her room. "Cousin Sophie's on the telephone."

Miriam went to the kitchen. "Yes, Sophie."

"Can you tear down the wall?"

"Yes, I suppose. But I thought - "

"I'm the one who slaves away in that claustrophobic kitchen seven days a week—a kitchen that resembles a gloomy dungeon." There was a brief pause. "About the cost ..."

"Just buy the materials. You don't need to pay me."

Suddenly an argument erupted on the other end of the line and Jacob was talking on the extension. "What about the ceiling? You're going to ruin a perfectly good ceiling."

"When the partition comes down," Miriam explained, "it leaves a one-and-a-half inch gap that's patched over with drywall."

"And the floor?" He sounded borderline hysterical. "There's fancy Italian tile in the kitchen and carpeting on the other side."

"I can lay a solid oak threshold over the damaged area. Or you and Sophie can go to the lumberyard and pick out whatever you want."

"What I want," Sophie interjected, "is a new kitchen. And we won't let you work without being paid. How soon can you start?"

So the renovation wouldn't interfere with her regular job, it was agreed that Miriam would do her cousin's work on weekends. The first Saturday she brought a DeWalt reciprocating saw to cut down the wall. Sophie had sent her girls to stay with the grandmother for the day. Jacob was pacing the den like a lunatic, fumbling with his beard and muttering to himself.

"It's going to get a bit messy," Miriam cautioned. After smashing a few holes in the sheetrock with her framing hammer, she ran the reciprocating saw through the top row of vertical studs, then cut away the section altogether from the bottom. Easing what was left of the dismembered wall out the patio slider, Miriam dragged the refuse into the back yard.

The two-by-four sole plate was pried free with a foot-long gooseneck wrecking bar. A nail claw made short work of the handful of bent and disfigured nails. Next, Miriam brought down the top piece in sections, hurling it out into the back yard in a heap with all the other debris..

"Baruch ha Shaim! Baruch ha Shaim! – Praise God! Praise God!" Sophie danced about the open space. "So much light. My new kitchen - it's like miracle."

"A dusty miracle," Miriam qualified. She went out to the car and brought back her screw gun and utility knife. "Now the fun starts."

Earlier in the week, the supply company had dropped off several sheets of drywall, which Jacob lugged into the living room. She cut a length of sheetrock to fill the cavity left in the wall, and then screwed the board firmly in place.

"You and Jacob can hold this board up against the ceiling, while I secure it to the joists," she said, indicating a thin strip eight feet long. Climbing up on a step ladder, Miriam fished a handful of sheetrock screws out of her leather pouch. Whirr. Whirr. Whirr. Five minutes later, the ugly gash in the ceiling was repaired with drywall.

"That's enough for one day," she said.

Jacob was wandering about the room with a glazed expression. "What a difference." He pointed at the late afternoon light flooding in through the patio slider. "All that glorious light."

Later that night while she was preparing supper Miriam's mother said, "You're becoming quite the celebrity." She was grating potatoes into a bowl for latkes. She diced some onion then added a raw egg, salt and a fistful of flour. "Even hoity-toity Jacob was telling everyone how great the new kitchen looks."

"There is no new kitchen." Miriam grabbed a gooey wad of potato batter, shaped it into a pancake and placed it in a pan of hot vegetable oil. After a moment, the edges of the batter began to bubble and turn light brown. "It's just the old kitchen minus one wall."

Five minutes later, Miriam removed several latkes, placing them to drain on a paper towel. "It's a wonder they didn't laugh me out of the house, I looked so silly."

Mr. Applebaum said that it wouldn't be proper for Miriam to wear her work clothes during the renovations, so the girl chose the overly long, moss green skirt and a demure, checkered blouse that buttoned at the wrists - no makeup whatsoever, hair tied back in a dark kerchief. To this drab outfit she added her steel-toed work boots. No matter how absurd, the boots were a matter of safety and non-negotiable. "I can be a good Jew and a carpenter."

"Yes, Miri." Her mother brought a braided challah from the breadbox. "It is becoming quite evident that you have knack for doing both equally well."



In the morning, Miriam arrived back at Sophie's house with a five-gallon bucket of joint compound and a bag of taping tools. First, she ran a length of mesh tape over the section of ceiling that needed repair. With the blade of a putty knife she kneaded the spongy joint compound deep into the crevice, burying the seam.

"Where'd you learn to do that?" Sophie asked.

Miriam held a twelve-inch sheet of aluminum centered on a plastic grip in her left hand. With a flat putty knife she was working a thick glob of joint compound into position. "You got to get it just right on the edge of the knife," Miriam explained, "or the trailing edge will run rough and leave a jagged mess." She flicked the white gooey mix onto the taped sheetrock, pulling a moist line the length of the wall. "Now, we feather the edges away from the joint so the surface stays nice and flat." She lifted the blade at a sharp angle and made a second, lighter pass over the fresh work.

At noon Sophie called and ordered pizza. When it arrived, she set the food out on the deck. No sooner had they begun eating, the baby woke and began whimpering. The mother brought the new edition out to join them, and, cradling the infant in her lap, began breast feeding.

The late June sun was high in a cloudless sky. Near the rock garden, a goldfinch flitted from a Scotch pine to the telephone line. "My husband doesn't agree with your choice of professions," Sophie spoke with a self-deprecating smile as she shifted the baby to a more comfortable position. "Actually, it's not the work so much as the fact that you're employed outside the Jewish community."

"Jacob works at a secular university, where half the student body is either Latino or black." Miriam reached for another slice of pizza. "I think your husband ought to get his priorities in order."

"The man is an intellectual snot, but he's got a heart of gold." With her free hand, Sophie poured herself some black cherry soda. "I think the prevailing sentiment is that Miriam Applebaum is such an attractive and resourceful woman. It would be a shame if she became emotionally involved with a shegitz, one of those knuckle-dragging Neanderthals from the construction site." Sophie spoke with a droll, deadpan expression that belied her underlying sense of the absurd.

"Another limb ripped from the tree of Judaism." Finishing with the pizza, Miriam collected the plates and silverware.

The baby, having finished with his own liquid diet, was sleeping soundly in the mother's arms. "Truth be told," Sophie added, "most of the Hassidic men folk would be jealous of any woman who could tear down walls and flood my gloomy kitchen with heavenly sunshine."



The following Saturday afternoon when Miriam returned home from work, she found a police cruiser pulled up in front of the house. She could hear her father bellowing like an ox from fifty feet away. Inside the house a uniformed officer, hands on hips, was glowering at the older man. "Don't shoot the messenger, Mr. Applebaum." The officer was clearly in a rotten mood. "I drove over here as a courtesy to you and your family." Without waiting for a reply, the officer spun around on his heels, went back to his cruiser and drove off.

Miriam's mother was standing by the stove with her face buried in her cupped hands crying noisily. "Okay. Okay," Mr. Applebaum spoke in an unnaturally furtive, high-pitched tone. "It's not the end of the world. Now, let me go upstairs and get my checkbook."

"What happened?" Miriam asked when her father was out of earshot.

"Saul was arrested for soliciting a prostitute."

"One of the immigrant Russian girls?"

"Ten times worse!" the mother wailed. "An undercover police officer. They got my baby, the future rabbi, locked up in the pokey."

Mr. Applebaum returned. He had changed into a freshly ironed shirt. "I'll go with you," Miriam said, draping her tool pouch over a chair. On the short ride to the police station, Mr. Applebaum was unnaturally quiet. An air of resignation, more like defeat, had settled over his grim features. "It's not like someone was maimed or murdered," Miriam spoke softly. "I can think of a hundred things worse than what Saul did."

Her father cleared his throat. "Name one."

Incest. Sodomy. Pedophilia. Fratricide. Almost immediately, Miriam regretted her last remark.

"What he did isn't the problem." Mr. Applebaum looked straight ahead. "The schlimazel never learns from his mistakes." Like a blind person groping his way down an unfamiliar street, the older man tripped and faltered over his words. "He doesn't understand why it's wrong to do what he does." The older man's lips trembled. "It's the 'why', not the act itself, that worries me."

At the Brandenberg Police Station, Mr. Applebaum craned his neck to one side, scrunching his shaggy eyebrows together while sniffing the humid air. "Well, your brother's definitely been here." The undeniable scent of St. Johns Bay rum with a hint of West Indian lime seemed embedded in every permeable object.

They discovered Saul waiting docilely in a cramped jail cell. Out of a sense of compassion – or was it sick humor? – the door had been left wide open. There he sat with his neatly-trimmed, wispy beard, wire-rimmed glasses and paisley yarmulke like a traveler seated on a bench waiting for the next bus to pull up to the curb.

"What happened to your hands?" Miriam asked.

Saul stared at his bony fingers which were smudged with dark stains. "They fingerprinted me."

Miriam could just picture her brother having his fingers rolled over a pad of blue ink. Then the humiliating mug shot. Did he even have the good sense to remove the yarmulke? If the picture appeared in the local press, the entire Jewish community, not just immediate family, would be scandalized!

A thirty-something blond with a voluptuous figure was sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup thirty feet away. Her top, a low-slung halter trimmed with frilly sequins, was overly tight. She had kicked off a pair of patent leather, stiletto heels, which lay to one side on the linoleum floor. The woman was chatting energetically to a uniformed officer. At one point she glanced brazenly over at Miriam's brother but just as quickly averted her eyes. In her left hand she clutched an official-looking document, most likely the police report identifying Saul Applebaum as the dim-witted 'John' who propositioned her earlier in an otherwise uneventful evening.

"You couldn't keep your lousy schmeckel in your pants," Mr. Applebaum, who was staring morosely at the well-endowed under-cover officer, growled. "Now the whole family's disgraced."

Saul cringed and seemed to wilt under the crass indictment. Miriam, who had never heard her father use foul language, felt her brain grow numb. The penultimate insult - now, not only had her brother victimized the Russian immigrant women, but his parents as well. What was it she told to her mother only a week earlier? The past has an uncanny habit of doubling back and biting you squarely on the tuchas. With the vengeance of a deranged pit bull, it rips your tender ass to shreds.

"Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay." Mr. Applebaum's voice had gotten even softer, almost childlike. Not a good indicator of things to come. He turned to the officer who had brought them into the rear holding area where the prisoners were held. "Now we will pay the bail and go home."

At the front desk, Saul had to sign for his belongings: a gold watch – a cheap knock-off of a Rolodex he bought from a street vendor on the Avenue of the Americas in New York City, his belt, wallet, some pocket change, a handkerchief with his initials embroidered in wine colored thread and two lubricated condoms wrapped in plastic. "Why two?" Miriam thought. "Was he planning to move from one brothel to the next?"



Around ten o'clock Mark Fournier heard the doorbell chime. Miriam was standing on the front stoop with a pillow and an overnight bag. "Was wondering if I could crash for the night."

Mark held the door open. "This wouldn't have anything to do with the cop car in front of your place earlier this afternoon?"

She told him about her brother soliciting the undercover police officer. "He gave her thirty bucks so they got him dead to rights."

"Tough luck."

Miriam grinned. "No, fitting justice. His name will be printed in the Brandenberg Gazette police log along with all the sordid details." She tossed the pillow onto the sofa, depositing the bag on the floor. "In the morning, my father will call the shadchun and withdraw Saul's name as an eligible suitor. Ellie Gorelnik will be free to look elsewhere."

"You seem a little ..." Mark didn't quite know how to finish the sentence. "Can I get you something to drink? A cup of soda or tea?"

"Why don't you ever ask me out on a date?" She blurted the words with such force that he took a full step backwards.

"You're an Orthodox Jew. I figured - "

"Well maybe you figured wrong. Remember, I'm the heretic, the Isaac Babel of the female set."

Mark leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. "Don't talk nonsense. You're not like that."

She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back. "I want to sleep with you tonight. In your bed."

"I don't have any protection."

Miriam fished a Trojan condom from her shirt pocket.

"Where did you get that?"

"While my father was downstairs berating my brother, I went rummaging through his dresser. He had a whole carton full."

"Guess he won't need them any time soon." Mark pulled her close and felt her warm cheek wedged against his neck. "That Hasidic saying about the two pockets—tell it again."

"According to Hasidic tradition, everyone must have two pockets, so they can reach into the one or the other, according to need." Her voice was tinged with a dreamy, effervescent quality, a breathy, musical sonority such as he had never heard before. "In the right pocket are to be the words: 'For my sake was the world created,' and in the left: 'I am dust and ashes.'"

"And what are we?"

"Too soon." She rose up on tiptoes, brushing his ear with her lips. "Ask me again in the morning."

Return to Table of Contents

Curbstone Justice

Seventy-eight year old Melba Fischer rested her body weight on the arms of an aluminum walker as she stared out the living room bay window. The lilac bushes bordering her rock garden were in full bloom, perfuming the air with a sweet fragrance. Pivoting gingerly on the yellow Addidas tennis balls her son, Dwayne, had wedged onto the walker's front feet, the frail woman shuffled back to the kitchen.

"Brandenberg Police Department. Is this an emergency?"

Melba squinted dully at the phone while holding the receiver at arm's length for a good ten seconds before returning it to her mouth. "Melba Fischer here. Slate blue house on the corner of Hathaway and Elmgrove. I'd like to report a strange occurrence."

"Is this an emergency, mam?"

Melba sighed, causing her thick shoulders to heave, and made a disagreeable face. "In a matter of speaking, yes. I'd like to report a semi-naked man in my front yard."

"Naked?"

"Mostly." Melba eased down into a rattan chair. She made a mental note to put on her pressure stockings as soon as she hung up the phone. The edema always worsened as the morning progressed making it next to impossible to accomplish the task if she let it go much beyond ten o'clock. "There's some fuzzy stuff... looks like feathers or a geriatric diaper, but other than that he's buck naked."

There was a prolonged silence. "The corner of Hathaway and Elmgrove. We'll send a patrol car over there right away." Through the slider near the kitchen sink, Melba had a clear view of the bird feeder where a bevy of raucous blue jays were laying waste to the last of the corn and thistle seeds. The thistle was meant for the smaller birds – goldfinches preferably – but the aggressive jays effectively scared all the other species away. "Lady?" The officer on the other end of the line rudely dragged her to the present predicament.

"Yes?"

"You might want to lock the front door."



"Dana, get in here!" Chief Polanski hollered. The head of the Brandenberg Police Department only raised his voice with that degree of gruff insistence when the patrolmen's union was planning a strike or the mayor threatening to slash the annual budget.

A slim brunette drifted into the cluttered office and closed the door behind her. In her late twenties, Dana Crowley's body exuded an androgynous, tomboyish quality, as though the adolescent years had wound down prematurely. But what the detective lacked in feminine charms she recouped in other ways; close-cropped chestnut-colored hair, a pert chin and slender neck complimented her economical features to good advantage.

"You heard about the two-bit punk they found hogtied on Mrs. Fisher's front lawn?"

"Town Bully, Wally Whitcomb, gets his comeuppance," she returned with a poker face as though reading a fictitious headline smeared across the front page of the Brandenberg Gazette.

"The perps beat Wally half to death," Chief Polanski noted with a sober expression. "Of course, hospital staff only discovered the injuries after cleaning away the tar and feathers.

Debridement – that was the technical term the emergency room doctor used. Dana had watched with grim fascination as they alternately bathed, lubricated and plucked away the noxious debris. "Maybe the attack was gang-related... a vendetta."

Chief Polanski waved a thick hand dismissively. "They beat him meticulously with a blunt object... a rubber hose or baseball bat. They took great care to inflict as much physical pain as possible without breaking a single bone. I figure the lowlifes this joker hangs out with wouldn't go to half that trouble." The chief shifted in his seat and lowered his voice to a whisper. "What with the way the situation unfolded, we want to keep it hush hush."

What with the way the situation unfolded...

When the police arrived at Melba Fischer's home they found Wally Whitcomb hogtied with a burlap sack secured over his head. Blubbering inconsolably, the high school dropout was covered head-to-foot with tar and chicken feathers. Dana arrived fifteen minutes after the first patrol car. Wearing latex gloves, the detective, delicately removed the handwritten note pinned to the outside of the sack, depositing it in a plastic evidence bag. Totally hysterical now, Wally was carted off to the hospital by ambulance, red light and siren all the way.

Only when she arrived back at the station, did Dana examine the note.

Take Notice!

Rotten coyotes and smelly, flea-bitten varmints beware!

The Hopalong Cassidy Gang don't stomach no

Egregious, scoundrelly behaviors.

Perpetrators of said unruly mischief will receive

The requisite curbstone justice.

Hopalong Cassidy

Max B.

Zane

Louis

Tyrell Sackett

Major Molineux

On a second note the police later found stuffed in the victim's shirt pocket a grim message was scribbled in red pencil:

Any more shenanigans

and you'll spend the rest

of your natural-born days

singing soprano in the eunuch's choir.

Dana wasn't sure if anyone had bothered sharing that additional bit of unsettling trivia with Chief Polanski, but the message was crystal clear. Town bullies' only got one warning from the Cassidy Gang before they lowered the boom!

The rap sheet on Wally Whitcomb dated back to third grade when he set the wildlife sanctuary in back of the Baptist Church on fire. Throughout middle school, the remorseless thug shook down half the freshman class each year for lunch money. Chump change. One boy who refused to cooperate ended up with his head wedged up to his earlobes in a toilet - an unflushed toilet. A distraught mother even enrolled her daughter in parochial school to spare her child further torment.

There were the endless fistfights, pulverized mailboxes (an unofficial count registered two dozen), shards of broken flagstones and roofing nails thrown in Mrs. Horowitz' new swimming pool, and on and on and on and on. The list of outrages, personal insults and abominations were all catalogued in his juvenile record. Wally Whitcomb had terrorized the townsfolk with impunity for over a decade. Now he finally got his just dessert—a classic example of curbstone justice at its finest.

On her drive back to the police station, one question recurred with nagging insistence: did anyone in Brandenberg or anywhere else on planet earth really care if this crime was solved? What happened to Wally Whitcomb - could it even be properly defined as a crime or was it simply a matter of belated retribution?

Dana doubled back to town and went directly to the second floor of the public library. "These names mean anything to you??" She slid the list, which she had copied onto the back of an envelope from the original note, across the desk.

Eunice Crabby, the reference librarian, adjusted her bifocals and surveyed the names. In her late sixties, Eunice was something of town celebrity. Possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of all things literary, the elderly woman had spent the last thirty years behind the reference desk on the second floor.

"Not much of a challenge here," Eunice observed.

Dana took out a pad and stubby pencil. "Tyrell Sackett," the old woman tapped the second name from the bottom with an arthritic index finger, "is a frontiersman, a colorful character in a series of Western novels written by the fourth person on your list, Louis L'Amour."

"One character's real," Dana interjected, "the other pure fiction."

Eunice nodded. "Zane quite obviously is Zane Gray, author of Riders of the Purple Sage." She looked up from the paper. "Quite a literary classic in its time. Defined the shoot-em-up Western genre."

"And this one?" Dana gently drew her attention back to the list.

"Max Brand. The Jewish cowboy." Eunice tapped her chin reflectively. "His real name was Frederick Faust. Dreamed of writing classic poetry in the European tradition, but proved a much better commercial novelist than poet." Eunice fixed Dana with an amused expression. "This wouldn't have anything to do with that despicable thug covered in chicken feathers that showed up on Melba Fischer's front lawn?"

Dana was beginning to wonder if there was anyone in Brandenberg who hadn't heard about Wally's fall from grace. "Maybe yes, maybe no," she muttered noncommittally. "What can you tell me about L'Amour?"

Eunice emerged from behind the desk, heading off in the direction of the fiction shelves. The woman had a pronounced hitch in her gait, as though one leg was decidedly shorter that the other. From the standpoint of speed, the aberration presented no impediment, as she covered the distance from her desk to the stacks in seconds leaving the much younger Dana lagging far behind. "Louis L'Amour, the most prolific Western writer on the planet, wrote eighty-nine full-length novels, including a slew of works about the Sackett clan and the wily gunslinger, Hopalong Cassidy."

"I don't know what you're up to," Eunice said, suddenly shifting gears, "but Louis L'Amour isn't going to help you get to the bottom of what happened."

"Why not?"

Eunice grabbed a volume randomly off the shelf, opened the front cover and held the date stamp flap just under Dan's nose. "How many times has this novel been out of circulation in the past few years?" Dana stared at a flap of paper peppered with dozens of purple markings. Eunice replaced the book in its rightful place alongside thirty other Louis L'Amour offerings. "Judging by Louis' popularity," Eunice was grinning mischievously, "half the male population of Brandenberg ought to be at the top of your list as probable suspects."

"I use to be a big fan of Charles Bronson," Eunice said. "You ever see any of those movies he made in the late seventies?" noticeably.

To this day, Dana retained a morbid fascination with the protagonist, a successful New York architect, who, after his wife is murdered and daughter raped, becomes a vigilante, one-man, crime-fighting machine. "There wasn't much humor in those movies as I recall. No tar and feathers."

"Or geriatric diapers," Eunice added with glee.

"No, such foolishness for sure," Dana confirmed. What the Hopalong Cassidy Gang did to Wally Whitcomb bordered on theater of the absurd.

They headed back to the front desk where a high school girl with braces needed help with a modern poetry assignment. "Stay away from Berryman's Dreamsongs," Eunice indicated a slim volume the girl had rested on the counter. "Most literary scholars have no idea what he's babbling about. And that wretched Ashbury you're clutching like it's God's gift to the literary set isn't much better. His free verse reads like gibberish." The girl's mouth fell open. "Go back to the stacks and get some ee cummings, Whitman and Adrienne Rich. That should suffice."

When the girl was gone Dana said, "Tell me something I don't know that would be helpful."

Eunice Crabby lowered her eyes for a moment. When she finally raised her head the expression was sober. "Louis L'Amour believed that, even if it meant putting one's life on the line, a person should never back down from a bully. Otherwise, life simply wasn't worth living. In his fiction, the Sacketts and the Cassidys always stood their ground." Another high school student was waiting with a question and Eunice abruptly turned away.

What if? What if? It was a cerebral game crime scene investigators played when trying to break a stubborn case, ferret out the truth from all the false leads, idle conjecture and miscellaneous nonsense. There was little likelihood that one person alone could have pulled off the crime. And the notion that the crippled Eunice Crabby along with a battalion of brazen hussies attacked Wally was equally ludicrous. Dana had talked to virtually every neighbor up and down the length of Elmgrove and, though there were plenty who openly wished they had been a part of the brutal mayhem, no one jumped out at her as a credible suspect.

What if a family feud triggered retaliation? Brothers, uncles, halfwit cousins, in-bred nieces and nephews once removed settling a longstanding grudge? Highly unlikely. Wally lived alone in a squalid bungalow that probably hadn't seen a drop of paint since the Kennedy assassination. Most of his immediate family were either dead, wasting away in prisons, mental asylums or relocated in a witness protection program.

Dana descended to the lobby. A group of young mothers with preschoolers had assembled in the children's section. Every Thursday at eleven-thirty through the summer months the staff read selected stories and did simple crafts. Dana wondered if Wally Whitcomb's mother had ever brought her son to similar enrichment classes. Fat chance!



Armed with a list of local residents, Dana headed over to Elmgrove Street. Rufus Dracut lived in the tidy cape abutting Melba Fischer's property. She found him out back painting his shed. "Wally Whitcomb ended up in the hospital last night." Dana tried to sound breezy, nonchalant, but Rufus wasn't buying any of it.

"That fat turd?" the big boned, heavy set man replied. "First I heard of it." He scratched a scraggily, brown beard and pointed at the plywood door. "See that?" Dana peered at the plywood panel where the metal latch had been ripped away leaving an ugly gash. A replacement latch and sturdy lock had been installed directly below the old one. "Wally did that just last October."

"Did you actually see him break the lock?"

Rufus scowled and spit on the ground no more than six inches from Dana's shoe. "No one ever sees Wally when he does his dirty work." Without warning his anger dissolved in mirthful snicker. "Course what they done to him with the geriatric diaper - that was pretty damn funny."

"Thought you just said this was the first you heard of it."

"Don't remember any such thing." He wagged a paintbrush loaded with pea green latex paint in Dana's general direction. "Regardless, I sure wish I had a hand in it."

"Any idea who did?"

His expression soured instantly. "Wouldn't tell you if I did." Rufus muttered something else under his breath followed by a slew of vulgar epithets.

"Excuse me?"

"A dozen times I called the cops, when I caught sight of that piece of crap prowling the neighborhood." Rufus raised a fist as big as a hammer and shook it in Dana's face. "A patrol car hardly ever showed up."

Dana held her tongue. Rufus Dracut's' last remark was dead on the money. Over the years, there had been no end to the number of complaints registered against Wally Whitcomb, the town bully. Ultimately, it was a Death Wish type bounty hunters, not the local authorities, who put an end to the fat slob's reign of terror.

The color was beginning to separate from the latex base coat. Rufus dropped down on his haunches and began stirring the syrupy mix with a wooden stick. "Like the color?"

Dana would have opted for either a minty pastel or darker earth tone. "Nice. Yeah, real snazzy." The detective wandered back out to the street. The split-level ranch with the decorative shutters diagonally across from Rufus Dracut's place was owned by Sheldon Rothstein, a bone fide eccentric who spoke to none of the other neighbors. He power walked up and down the main drag every evening around supper time, averting his eyes or crossing over to the opposite side of the street when people approached from the other direction. The misanthrope was just too damn weird. Dana mentally scratched Sheldon off her list of plausible suspects and headed off in the direction of a brown cape with a flagstone walkway.



Later that night, Dana recalled a chilling incident dating back to when she first joined the Brandenberg PD. She was working the graveyard shift. At three a.m. on a late August morning, Dana spotted a mud-splattered pickup truck weaving all over the road on a stretch of highway bordering the town dump. She pulled the truck over. A bleary-eyed Wally Whitcomb was craning his thick neck out the driver's side window. "What's the problem?" His tone was hoarse, combative. Suddenly and without warning he lurched down from the cab and leaned drunkenly up against the fender. "What the hell you pull me over for?"

Dana glanced anxiously about. The section of road was still undeveloped with no houses for a good mile in either direction. No street lights either. Wally was less than ten feet away. If the glassy-eyed thug jumped her, the mace and nightstick strapped to her waist would be of no practical benefit. Her sidearm, a 9mm, short recoil Glock, was still wedged in its holster with a leather strap buttoned over the hammer. The semi-automatic pistol featured a spring-loaded firing pin with a 17-round magazine. When a bullet was fired, the trigger bar quickly reset so the striker was captured in half-cock. But all this modern efficiency was of no benefit unless the officer's hand was firmly wrapped around the stippled grip, the snub-nosed barrel aimed at the offender. "Your left break light is out."

"Big deal."

Dana could smell the stale liquor on his breath. "What did you say?"

"I'll replace the crummy light."

"What happened to your face?" A ragged gash trailed down the right side of Wally's cheek. Stained with clotted blood the grisly, quarter-inch wound was too deep to heal of its own accord.

"Some biker dude whacked me upside the head with a Heineken longneck." He ran a stubby finger over the bruised flesh. "This ain't nothin'. That sorry-ass fool's in a hell of a lot worse shape than me."

"You're going to need stitches."

Wally just shrugged and stared sullenly into space. He wouldn't go to the hospital. In the morning, the bloated lout would scrounge a Band-Aid or scrap of surgical tape to rig a butterfly bandage. A month from now, the unsightly scar would be just one more badge of honor.

The breathalyzer testing kit was sitting on the passenger seat of the cruiser, but she made no effort to retrieve it. Ten minutes earlier, the only other late-shift patrol car was called away on a domestic disturbance. She heard the dispatcher's message over the short wave radio. "You get that break light fixed." The fear had inched up from her wobbly, spaghetti legs to her voice now, and she knew he heard it—smelled her fear. Dana retreated back to her patrol car. She was having trouble catching her breath.

Wally Whitcomb kicked at the loose dirt sending a rock skittering in her general direction—one last brazen act of defiance. Swinging his beefy leg up, he missed the interior of the cab altogether and keeled over in the dirt. He just lay there, laughing like hyena until he finally hoisted himself back into the truck. Once Wally's tail lights were gone from sight, Dana began to cry. She wept silently letting the tears dribble down into her lap without bothering to even arrange a handkerchief to catch the wetness. Eventually the emotions ran their course. She turned the cruiser around and drove aimlessly about the town, avoiding the distant back roads for the remainder of her shift.

For months afterward, Dana agonized about that frightful confrontation. Had she done the right thing backing down? Was her choice on that backwater road an act of cowardice or intuitive good sense? Wally Whitcomb was a bona fide psychopath. You sensed it in the coldblooded, leaden eyes. The man possessed no conscience, utterly no sense of common decency. With one swipe of his pudgy fist he could have knocked Dana senseless, strangled her and hurled the broken body in the drainage ditch. She never doubted for a moment that, if she had forced the issue about his drunkenness on that deserted highway where the only palpable witnesses were crickets, bullfrogs and a lone hoot owl, certain diabolical inclinations might have gotten the upper hand.



The hospital kept Wally for less than a week. His tar-covered skin healed nicely, but the town bully had arrived in an incoherent, vegetative state. When the mental condition did not improve from one day to the next, the medical staff transferred him to a locked ward at Bridgewater State Mental Hospital.

On Thursday morning, Dana drove out to Bridgewater where she met with Dr. Macgregor, a red haired, neatly dressed Scotsman. "Sadly, Mr. Whitcomb still remains in a regressive funk."

They were seated in Dr. Macgregor's office. The locked section where Wally resided was situated two floors above. The ward was kept locked at all times to make sure patients didn't accidentally wander off or get in trouble. A separate unit for the criminally insane was located in a building at the far end of the grounds.

"Why isn't Wally getting any better?"

"Hard to say." The psychiatrist rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Strolling leisurely over to the far wall, he reached down and yanked an electrical cord out of the wall. The computer blipped out and the screen quickly faded to black. Dr. MacGregor inserted the cord back in the outlet. After a while the computer cycled through a series of test patterns before settling on a 'safe mode' screen.

"When the brain has been traumatized in some grotesque manner, it shuts down to protect itself from further, irreparable harm. Like a computer that's been turned off improperly, it loads in 'safe mode'."

"Think of Wally's primitive state as a coping mechanism."

"But, eventually, he'll get better?"

"Maybe yes, maybe no. Unfortunately, there's not much we can do to facilitate the process." The psychiatrist grabbed the mouse, clicked 'normal' on the computer screen icon and watched as the programs loaded in orderly fashion. "The human mind isn't always as accommodating as a personal computer."

"Can I see Wally?"

Dr. Macgregor rose to his feet. "Don't get your hopes up. He's still in a very fragile state."

At the far end of the hallway on ward 3-B was a glass enclosed solarium. Wally Whitcomb was sitting alone dressed in street clothes. At three hundred pounds, the flabby-faced man with stringy brown hair gave new meaning to the term 'freaky'. He didn't bother to raise his head when she approached. "How are you feeling today, Wally?"

"Poof!" Wally sputtered. Despite the inappropriate outburst, the young man seemed docile – engulfed in a mawkish, cartoonlike universe of his own making. His shaggy head bobbed up and down in rhythm to some demented interior monologue. He was also drooling nonstop. Dana went to the nurse's station and returned with a paper towel. She wiped away the spit.

"What happened to you, Wally?"

A patient dressed in a hospital Johnny with the flap open in the rear was pacing. Every tenth tile on the linoleum, he whipped about with military precision and revisited the same claustrophobic parcel of space. An orderly stopped him just long enough to tie the flap over his buttocks.

"Poof! Poof!" Fifteen minutes passed. Dana wiped the drool from Wally's lip twice more before signing herself off the ward. On her way to the visitor parking lot, she passed a building with heavy metal grates covering all the windows. Would that be the ward for the worst of the worst – the pyromaniacs, necrophiliacs, mass murders, sodomizers, psychopaths and criminally insane?

The meeting with Wally Whitcomb was nothing more than a formality. Nobody in Brandenberg wanted justice for the town bully. Chief Polanski had assigned the case to Dana with a wink and a nod. It was a procedural matter. Investigate. File a police report with a determination of no finding. Close case.



"Where's Eunice?"

The middle-aged man behind the reference desk gestured with a flick of his head toward a room near the water cooler. "Refurbishing damaged inventory."

Dana stuck her head in the door. Eunice Crabby, dressed in a gray tweed suit, was standing beside a work bench fitted with a metal vise. A thick volume was wedged in the jaws of the vise, and the older woman was running a back saw tilted at a sharp angle over the spine of the book. "Buddenbrooks," she announced as Dana stepped closer. "Thomas Mann's classic bildungsroman was coming apart at the seams, but we'll give the German masterpiece a second life."

Dana watched as the woman carved four shallow kerfs in the spine, each cut slanted toward the center of the book. Then she ran a length of linen binder's thread through each opening to the bottom of the cut, weaving back and forth, in and out. "Now for the final touch." She spread a gooey layer of white film over the entire length of the spine brushing the liquid deep into the cuts and folds. The jaws of the vise effectively kept the wetness from bleeding through onto the printed page.

"Elmer's glue?" Dana ventured.

"Polyvinyl acetate, better known as PVA or bookbinder's glue. It's acid neutralized and flexible enough so the backing won't crack or separate." Laying the brush aside, Eunice spread a cloth mull on the wet spine before spreading a second coat of the rubbery glue over the top of the cloth.

"So what can I do for you?" Having left the brush to soak in soapy water, Eunice was drying her hands.

"The cowboy books ... which would you recommend?"

Eunice headed off in the direction of the stacks. She grabbed a L'Amour western off the shelf. "This one is quite popular."

"And something for light reading."

The reference librarian pursed her lips. Shifting two rows over toward the beginning of the alphabet, she wriggled a thick volume free from its mates. Willa Cather's Collected Short Stories. She opened the book to the table of contents. "Read this one first. And then read it again. And after you finish the book, go back and read The Neighbor Rossicky a third, fourth and fifth time." Thrusting the book into Dana's hands, the woman turned to leave.

"One last question." Foraging about in her pants pocket, Dana removed a crumpled slip of paper. "When I showed you this list the other day, you missed the bottom entry."

Eunice peered at the list through her bifocals. In a heavy leaded pencil the words 'Major Molineux' were scrawled across the page, sliding tipsily at an oblique angle. "I didn't miss it. Just chose to leave it out."

"And why's that?"

"Doesn't fit with the others."

"And who exactly is the major?" Dana pressed.

Eunice smiled cryptically. "My Kinsman Major Molineux is, quite possibly, Nathaniel Hawthorne's most famous short story." "In the days before the American Revolution, a young boy arrives by ferry in Boston looking for his relative. Major Molineux, an official in the British colonial government, has promised him work. But no one in the town can tell him where the major is."

"And what's this have to do with Wally Whitcomb?"

"Well, I was just getting to that." Eunice let her bifocals slip down over her sweater on a braided metal chain. "One person he meets threatens the youth with prison, and an innkeeper accuses him of being a runaway bond-servant. Finally, he learns that his kinsman will soon pass in the street. As he waits on the steps of a church, the young boy hears the roar of a mob and there in the midst is Major Molineux tarred and feathered."

Eunice Crabby shook her head with a disagreeable expression. "I've committed literary sacrilege."

"How's that?"

"The Hawthorne story loses so much in the paraphrasing," she replied peevishly. "It begs to be read in the original."

"I just came from visiting Wally Whitcomb," Dana said, deflecting the conversation elsewhere.

"And how did that go?"

"He drools and talks gibberish."

Eunice's eyes assumed a glassy radiance as the wrinkled lips sagged with the vaguest insinuation of a smile. "It would appear that both Wally and the major chose badly."

Return to Table of Contents

Nagel's Bagels

Fifteen year-old Curtis Stedman was slouched over at a table in the rear of Nagel's Bagels coffee shop sobbing mawkishly. His slender body flopped about like a marionette where some practical jokester was jerking the strings causing the limbs to lurch about spastically - an utterly grotesque parody of genuine despair. Just two weeks earlier, the boy had been hired to work Saturdays plus two afternoons a week.

Becky Borelli was bringing a tray of gourmet cream cheeses from the bakery proper out to the selling floor. She eased back through the swinging door, gestured to her mother and muttered, "New kid's gone mental."

Mrs. Borelli approached and asked what was wrong, but the blond haired boy only wailed all the louder, his bony elbows flailing about aimlessly. A metallic blue Camaro eased into a parking space in front of the store. A platinum blonde, her hair done up in a tight bun and held in place with a ebony comb, eased out of the driver's seat.

"Marone!" Mrs. Borelli grabbed Curtis under the armpit, wrestled him to his feet and navigated the distraught youth into rear of the bakery.

"Can I help you?" Becky smiled stiffly.

"A dozen hermit cookies."

"Sold out an hour ago. Sorry." A mournful howl erupted from behind the swinging doors followed by a series of muffled sobs. Becky could hear her mother whispering furtively to Curtis Stedman. .

The blonde scrunched up her face, shifting a Vera Bradley handbag to the opposite shoulder. "Forget it." She hurried out the door.

Becky waited on a steady flow of customers. One elderly Italian lady, whose breath reeked of garlic, placed an order for a wedding cake. Her mother usually handled special orders, but it was nothing fancy, just a flat cake with white frosting and "Happy Birthday, Buffy!'

A half hour later, Becky's mother drifted back to the counter. "He's gone, thank God!"

"Gone?"

Mrs. Borelli waved her hand, a peremptory gesture barring any further discussion of Curtis Stedman's employment status. "Your father is whipping up a tray of cannolis and apricot farfalla. What else we need?"

"Maybe just a few anise biscottis."

The new dishwasher at Nagel's Bagels lasted two week. Not even. By Becky's reckoning, Curtis Stedman flung the crumpled apron on the counter next to the pepperoni spinach pies and was out the door—adios, sayonara, bye-bye, aufwiedersehen, shalom—by one-thirty Saturday afternoon. Stranger still, there had been no indication anything was wrong, neither the first week nor the second. Curtis arrived promptly at the designated time. He washed out the doughy mixing bowls and muffin pans that Becky's father stacked in a precarious heap on the stainless steel sink. Then he swept the linoleum floor, bussed tables and polished all five glass display cases with a bottle of Windex.

"I need a new clarinet reed," Curtis said. He had just finished cleaning a refrigerated display full of cheese Danish and apple squares.

"You play clarinet?"

"Marching band and high school wind ensemble." Curtis pushed his gold, wire-framed glasses up on the bridge of his nose.

"There's the store across the street," Becky offered.

Curtis peered nearsightedly out the window. Diagonally across Turner Boulevard was a shabby building with a hand-carved sign over the doorway. Music Depot. Most of the maroon paint had peeled away and the final letter 'T' was missing. A young girl carrying a guitar case that was almost as long as she was tall exited the music store into the bright sunlight. "Rico number two."

"Excuse me."

"Rico number two. That's the reed I need." He picked up the Windex, ran an arc of spray across the glass and began polishing the cake display. "Maybe I'll run over on my lunch break."



Becky slipped out the front door and crossed Turner Boulevard. All lights were off in the music store, the front door bolted tight. "Aw, crap!" She hurried back across the street.

"So why'd he quit?"

Mrs. Borelli slid a tray of cookies into the oven and closed the lid. "None of your business." Stocky with a swarthy complexion and auburn hair, Becky's mother was pretty in a matronly sort of way.

"I got an idea what happened."

"Good!" The woman flung the word in her face like a wet dishrag. "So there's nothing more to discuss."

Becky locked eyes with her mother. Mrs. Borelli knew what happened to the recently unemployed Curtis Stedman but wasn't talking. A high-pitched tinkling sound announced someone entering the store. "Go wait on the customer and, while you're at it, put the 'Help Wanted' sign back in the window.

Later that afternoon while she was cleaning up, Becky noticed a well-thumbed paperback on the floor near the rest room. The pages on the left were printed in French, mirroring the English translation on the facing page. Candide by Voltaire.

In a peculiar sort of way, the debacle was Becky's fault. Not that she meant to intentionally hurt Curtis Stedman – a part-time dishwasher prone to emotional excesses, who read French literature, played clarinet in both the marching band and wind ensemble. Becky was born and grew up on Federal Hill. The place resembled a parallel universe where conventional rules of social etiquette didn't necessarily apply. One wrong turn could lead you down a loathsome cul-de-sac into a nether world of sordid vice. She knew her way around – not just the physical streets but the gritty, dysfunctional mindset. There were unsavory things you took for granted, shrugged off. That's just the way it was.



"Is Curtis home?"

"Who's calling?" The woman's voice betrayed a lilting, earthy resonance."

"I got a book that belongs to him," Becky side stepped the question.

"Curtis skates at the Finch Arena till eight. Call back then if you like."

"Yes, I'll do that." Becky hung up the phone.

The Finch Municipal Ice Skating Rink was situated over by the old YMCA on Broad Street. Too far to walk, the distance was negotiable by ten-speed bike. Pedaling like a demon, Becky arrived with fifteen minutes to spare.

Only a handful of skaters were still on the ice. A group of beginners with their instructor huddled together near the entrance. Several teenage girls wearing leg warmers and sequined skating outfits were going through a repertoire of choreographed routines. The only male among two dozen females, Curtis Stedman was cruising the outside perimeter of the ice at a brutal clip.

Becky cringed inwardly. The rowdy boys she knew from the varsity hockey team didn't wear sissified figure skates with ankle supports that rose halfway to the crotch. Their skates were masculine and sleek with pearl white blades. But what would you expect from someone who tooted a liquorish stick and read Voltaire? On the fifth go round, Curtis veered out into the center of the rink. His left arm swung far back as his broad shoulders pivoted a half-turn counter-clockwise. Then, as if on cue, the other skaters stopped what they were doing and watched attentively. The boy's waist snapped sharply to the left as the arms folded together chest high in a prayerful attitude. As the spin gathered momentum, the cupped hands descended ever so slowly until they were locked between the thighs. Round and round he went, a blond-haired whirling dervish. Curtis held the spin a full ten seconds before deftly easing back to his regular skating form. The other skaters looked away. No one applauded, cheered or gave notice that anything out of the ordinary had just happened.

"Curtis can throw a triple."

Becky glanced down at a young girl with Oriental features—she couldn't have been any older than eight or nine—who had just come off the ice with the beginners. The girl was wearing a blue skating costume with a wine-colored scarf knotted in her hair and matching gloves. "Triple what?"

"Triple axel," the girl explained. "That's when you leap in the air and spin around three times before touching down. Most of the instructors can't throw a triple, but Curtis can." The girl nodded her slim head twice as though confirming the utter veracity of what she had just told Becky. "I'm still working on my toe loop and camel." The dark skinned girl with the fleshy nose who went by the unwieldy moniker of Kioko Spiegelman gestured with her eyes in Curtis' direction. "Nice scratch spin, huh?

Becky grinned. "Yeah, that was really neat."

"That was nothing!" Kioko entwined her fingers and raised both hands slowly up over her head as high as they would reach. "When he gets full extension, Curtis twirls lightening fast." The girl's clasped hands floated downward between her knees mimicking his move toward the end of the spin. A loud horn blared and the few remaining skaters deserted the rink. A Zamboni lumbered onto the rink spraying a fresh coat of water over the surface of the bruised ice.

"You forgot your book." Becky said.

Curtis took the book sheepishly and crammed it into a back pocket. "How'd you know where to find me?"

"Called your home." He was loosening his skates, tugging at the laces. "I know what happened."

"Your mother promised not to tell anyone."

"Didn't have to. I went across the street. The Music Depot was closed. They're normally open until five on a Saturday. I put one and one together and came up with two and a half." Curtis stuffed a skate into a canvas bag and reached for his sneaker. "Rico number two. That's what size reed you needed."

The boy straightened up and stared Becky full in the face. "You knew what they did over there?" His tone was mildly accusatory.

"Everybody on the hill knows what they do over at the Music Depot," Becky replied soberly. "It's Federal Hill, for Christ sakes!"

On any given day of the week, a steady stream of youngsters and an occasional diehard grown up could be seen lugging their instruments to lessons. The Music Depot provided rentals – trumpets, saxophones, flutes and even an occasional student model oboe or French horn - by the month, sold sheet music and instructional manuals. They carried a decent selection of trumpet mouthpieces from the standard Bach 7-C to the extra-wide symphonic models. But the owner didn't make his living off instrument rentals and half-hour lessons. The store was a front, a betting parlor that catered to a motley crowd of compulsive gamblers—horses, dogs, college and professional football, whatever.

A loan shark who weighed three hundred pounds, Bernie Antonelli, advanced patrons short-term loans at the perfectly reasonable rate of thirty per cent interest. If you missed a payment, interest was compounded along with a late fee penalty using an accounting method that only Bernie properly understood. It wasn't usury, per se. Unfortunately, if you missed more than one payment, Bernie would call you up and politely request a meeting at the Music Depot so that a arrangement benefiting both parties could be satisfactorily consummated.

The Zamboni had cleared away most of the damaged ice now and was making the final couple of passes. "I was outside admiring this Selmer clarinet in the storefront window." Curtis fussed with his sneakers as he spoke. "Not some cheap student model but a rosewood beauty with gold-plated keys and custom engraving on the lacquered bell. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I see this muscle-bound goon with biceps out to here, smack some old geezer in the side of the head." Curtis wiped down the blade of the second skate with a cotton towel, stretched a plastic skate guard over the metal edge and looked up with a grim expression. "Brass knuckles. The goon slugged him here," he pointed to a soft spot just above his right ear, "with a set of brass knuckles. Then, while the guy was writhing on the floor, the thug stomped him half to death."

They watched in silence as the Zamboni reached the far end of the rink and pivoted back in their direction. "Nasty stuff like that... it don't happen that often."

"Small consolation," Curtis replied peevishly.

The previous year, the owner of the Music Depot spent eight months at a federal prison in Upstate New York. His enforcers were shaking down the venders at the annual Feast of Saint Anthony. Two hundred bucks to insure that your grilled sausage and onions stand didn't end up a pile of splintered toothpicks. Unfortunately, one of the venders who refused to cough up the protection money turned out to be an FBI undercover agent. A month after the Feast of Saint Anthony, a half-dozen cheap hoodlums and tough guy wannabes were indicted and sent off to prison.

The Zamboni was gone, the shimmery ice rendered clear as glass. A set of goals had been positioned at either end of the rink and a stream of well-padded hockey players in full gear was circling the ice. "Come back to work."

"After making a total ass of myself?"

"Come back to work," Becky repeated, grabbing his wrist and squeezing as hard as she could. "I'll teach you the rope so crap like that doesn't happen again. Or, if it does, God forbid, you won't go ballistic with a spaz attack." Curtis stared at her dumbly, a sad smile creasing his slightly parted lips. Becky Borelli was not to be denied. "Come back to work at Nagel's Bagels."



"Spoke to Curtis earlier this evening." Becky was sipping a cut of Twinning's tea laced with honey at the kitchen table.

Mrs. Borelli, who was mending the hem on a dress, looked up. "That so?" Becky told her about her clandestine visit to the Finch Arena.

"Normally, I'd have told you to mind your own business." She pushed the needle through the cloth and pulled the thread taut. "Is he a good skater?" Becky told her mother about the scratch spin.

During the winter Olympics, she watched the American figure skaters run through their arsenal of spectacular moves usually culminating in the final, gravity-defying triple axel. It was one thing to sit on a couch a thousand miles away, but in person, the experience was sublime. At the arena a cluster of girls, several of whom were considerably older than Curtis, were practicing spins, but none convincingly. Either their limbs went askew throwing their torso out of whack. Or they began smoothly enough, perfectly centered, only to end up in a disjointed, wobbly heap eight to ten feet away from the original mark.

"Miraculous," Becky blurted the word with wistful insistence. "His scratch spin was perfectly miraculous."

Mrs. Borelli adjusted the silver thimble, wedging it tighter on her index finger. "Yes, I'm sure it was."

Becky's eyes clouded over. "What do we ever do that's even half as special?"

Mrs. Borelli looked up from her sewing with an amused expression. "Baking bread and feeding the masses – that's miracle enough."

Baking bread and feeding the masses... Becky sat quietly watching her mother sew. This was their life - baking bread and pastries for the working class families of Federal Hill. She still had to wash her hair before going to bed. Rising, she brushed her mother's cheek with a feathery kiss and turned to leave.

"He's gifted." Mrs. Borelli threw the words out in an offhand manner not bothering to raise her head from her sewing.

"What's that?" She shuffled back to where her mother was sitting.

"I know Curtis' mother from Saint Gregory's. The family doesn't like to make a big deal about his uniqueness, but it just slipped out when we were commiserating one day after Mass."

"Yeah?"

"According to Mrs. Stedman, there are five levels of gifted intelligence ranging from bright to profoundly gifted. Her son falls in the 'exceptional' category."

"Exactly how exceptional?"

"One in every thirty thousand people is exceptional, which puts him in the 99.997th percentile."

Becky paused to digest the information. In the short time that he worked at the pastry shop, Curtis never once acted smug or superior. At the ice rink, if anything, he seemed humbled by Becky's insistence that he return to the bakery. "I suppose that explains his talent as a skater."

"No," her mother corrected. "According to Mrs. Stedman, Curtis may be a good skater but that's not his special forte."

"The clarinet?"

"Not that either." Mrs. Borelli removed the thimble and laid the material on the table, smoothing the new seam with the palm of her hands. "History," she said emphatically. "Ancient history back before the time of Christ." "But according to his mother, the boy tends to get it jumbled up with current events in his oversized brain. That's why she thought it might be a good thing if Curtis got a job in the real world. Little did we know ...."

Becky took a shower, washed her hair then styled the limp, chestnut-colored strands with the curling iron. One in every thirty thousand people... It didn't just make her feel dumb, but downright ridiculous.

There she was at the Finch Arena initially making fun of Curtis Stedman only to discover that the boy sweeping confectioner's sugar and King Arthur flour from the bakery floor was an underage Einstein! But how could she have thought any different? From the first day he arrived at the bakery, Curtis seemed fogbound, loopy, eccentric, spaced-out - just a tad out to lunch. It took the 'gifted child' half an hour to figure out how to manage a mop and pail where he wasn't sloshing sudsy water all over the display room floor. But then it went with the territory—all these 'gifted' types were like that. Becky remembered her physics teacher commenting that Einstein didn't speak until he was two.

Asynchronicity. That was the loopy, twenty-five cent word Mrs. Stedman used when explaining to Becky's mother why her teenage son sometimes seemed ham-fisted or dull-witted undertaking simple chores. Gifted children developed unevenly, their hypersensitive, overdeveloped craniums far outstripping everything else in their genetic makeup.

Becky propped the hot curling iron on a metal stand and reached for a brush. A weird incident earlier in the week should have sent up a red flag. On Tuesday, Becky found Curtis sprawled on the bakery floor. "There's a wrinkle in my sock," he explained, waving a sneaker fitfully in the air. The boy ran a probing finger over his instep then slipped the sneaker back on but immediately removed it a second time.

Becky glanced at his foot. "I don't see a wrinkle."

"Well, I can feel it and the damn thing's driving me nuts."

Becky shrugged and went off to wait on a customer. A half hour later, she spied Curtis near the industrial mixer with the same shoe off and turning the offending sock inside out.

On another occasion, she found Curtis at the front of the store fidgeting and glancing over his shoulder at the far wall.

"What's wrong?"

"That clock's ridiculously loud."

Becky gawked stupidly at the clock, the same one that had hung over the frosted tarallo and coconut macaroons for the past ten years back to when Morris Nagel still owned the bakery. In all that time she never found the clock a distraction. Even now, the second hand bumped along inconspicuously accompanied by a whisper-soft ticking. Being in the 99.997 percentile definitely had its drawbacks.



Morris Nagel and wife, Nadine, opened Nagel's Bagels shortly after the Second World War. Most Rhode Island Jews settled the tony East Side of Providence, where they built synagogues, a YMHA sports facility, kosher establishments, gift stores and upscale boutiques. Why the orthodox Jew chose Federal Hill was a mystery as inscrutable as a Zen koan.

Immigrant and first-generation Italians favored the 'Hill'. Accumulating a little money, they moved up to Smithfield or Cumberland. Well-heeled mobsters frequently took their tax-free wealth and settled respectable, upscale bedroom communities like Lincoln and Johnston. Swamp Yankees opted for the remote rural sections of Foster and Gloucester.

Over the years, numerous bakeries came and went from Federal Hill, but the local intelligentsia knew that, if you wanted a first-rate pignolati, a melt-in-your-mouth fig-filled cucidadi, cashew bar, quaresimale or a golden wandi dusted with powdered sugar, you had to go see the Jew!

Most mornings around ten, Mr. Giannini, the wraithlike owner of the Music Depot would stop by. "The usual?" Morris stood behind the counter, hands on hips.

Mr. Giannini ran a thumb and index finger reflexively through a meager moustache. "Yeah, same shit."

Mrs. Borelli prepared a mocha latte cappuccino sliding it onto the counter next to a garlic bagel slathered with cream cheese shot through with orange flecks of smoked salmon and fresh chives. Then with an affable nod of his bald head Morris Nagel barked something in a garbled, unintelligible tongue.

Mr. Giannini grabbed the paper plate off the counter. "Same to you Morris."

The following day, the same bland ritual. One morning Becky asked, "That thing you say to Mr. Giannini—what does it mean?"

"Soll zyne in drehrt, fershtunkener Goniff!" Morris repeated the phrase with the same unfettered warmth that he reserved for the owner of the music store. "The phrase is an eclectic mix of Yiddish \- a bastardize Medieval German - and ancient Hebrew."

"So what's it mean?"

"Soll zyne in drehrt, fershtunkener Goniff!" Again, the same hearty tone. "Rot in hell, you lousy crook!" Becky's mouth fell open. "In his youth, that lowlife thug was a gifted violinist." Morris added, deflecting the conversation elsewhere.

"You can't be serious!"

Morris shook his head emphatically. "He recorded with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. There's a picture of him with Arthur Fiedler hanging over the file cabinet in his office. I seen it with my own eyes!" The name meant nothing to Becky. "The conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra," Morris clarified.

So what happened?"

"Who the hell knows!" Morris raised his eyes and stared out the window in the direction of the Music Depot. "Soll zyne in drehrt, fershunkener Goniff!"

In the late sixties Morris Nagel retired and sold his business to Becky's father, head for the past ten years "Don't screw around. Use only the best ingredients." Those were Morris' final words before handing over the keys.



Tuesday was slow. Very little foot traffic, but business steadily picked up from midweek on. Nothing more was mention about Curtis' crying jag or the macabre shenanigans at the Music Depot. Becky's father taught the boy how to braid fancy bread loafs and baste the tops with butter before dusting the surface with poppy seeds, caraway, oat flakes or sesame.

At two o'clock on Friday afternoon, a pudgy, bald-headed man with a mottled nose like a cherry tomato pulled up at the curb in a rust-pocked Volare minivan. "Bladder's ready to explode. Gotta use the crapper." He disappeared into the bathroom.

When he reemerged the man strolled into the back and said something to Becky's parents before returning to the front of the store. "Just made a run to New York. Picked up some decent shit." He glanced uncertainly at Curtis. "If you're interested," he qualified, running a hand repeatedly over his hairless head in an aimless stroking gesture. "What size you take?"

"Size what?" Curtis asked.

"Waist."

"Thirty-two."

The bald man chuckled good-naturedly. "I ain't seen thirty-two since a week after I left my mother's womb." He surveyed Curtis from the waist down. "Yah, I got plenty of thirties. Inseam should be no problem either." The man rushed out the door.

"That's Uncle Harry. We call him 'Hot Stuff'". Through the plate glass window, they could see the squat fellow hurrying door to door. A minute passed. A stream of people converged on the rusty minivan. He threw the rear cargo lid up and was handing out jeans and sweatshirts.

"It's all designer stuff. Top shelf," Becky said. "Same name brands you see in the posh shops on Fifth Avenue or Newbury Street in Boston except a fraction of the price."

A middle-aged woman who Curtis recognized from the pizza joint at the end of the street was rushing off with an armload of clothing. "If it's such a good deal, how come you don't grab something?"

Becky shrugged. "My folks don't appreciate what Uncle Harry does for a living." She turned away from the window. "Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. That's what my mother says about people like him."

Curtis took one last look. Outside in the street, the crowd had thinned. Uncle Harry, A.K.A. Hot Stuff, was stuffing a bulky wad of bills into his pocket. "My mother and Uncle Harry had a falling out. She hardly talks to him anymore."

Becky's uncle was a devout Catholic. He attended church every Sunday, observing all holy days of obligation. He even put up five thousand dollars toward the Our Lady of Perpetual Devotion building fund to lay an elaborate mosaic in the church sacristy. A solid brass plaque identifying Uncle Harry as the primary donor would be prominently displayed on the wall once the project was completed. But several parishioners approached Father Tomasi complaining about Uncle Harry's largesse. A harmless, low-level hoodlum, he had been indicted a half dozen times, spending two short stints at minimum security facilities in Connecticut and New Jersey. Nobody knew where he got his merchandise – the designer jeans and handbags, Rolodex watches, jewelry and, on occasion, electronic equipment – that he hawked on the fly out of the rear of his minivan. Uncle Harry certainly wasn't registered with the Providence Chamber of Commerce or Better Business Bureau.

Parishioners at Our Lady of Perpetual Devotion objected on moral grounds. No matter how elegant the church mosaic, the money was tainted. Uncle Harry was a conniving hypocrite trying to barter his way into heaven, the five thousand dollars no better than a modern-day papal indulgence.

In the end, expedient self-interest prevailed. Father Tomasi waved all protests aside, depositing the stack of small denomination bills held together by a rubber band in the church's bank account. Paolo and Guido Ricci, gifted artisans who emigrated from Naples in the late eighties, were commissioned to design and build the floor. When the project was three-quarters done, Becky visited the church. The intricate mosaic, constructed from glazed tiles, was breathtakingly beautiful. On the wall directly above a granite bowl containing holy water was a garish plaque with Uncle Harry's name prominently displayed.



Every Saturday Curtis took a coffee break in the late afternoon. He usually sat near the window sipping a mocha latte cappuccino while staring with his signature dreamy-eyed expression out the picture window. Becky slid into a chair beside him. "My mother's car was stolen last month."

Curtis glanced at her curiously. "The beige Toyota with the moon roof?"

"Yes. It was gone two days, and the thieves returned the car in better shape than when they stole it."

Baroooom! On the third Monday in February, Mrs. Borelli heard an engine fire up in the middle of the night. The noisy car sped away rather abruptly down the darkened street but she thought nothing of it. The neighbor two doors down drove a delivery truck for UPS and sometimes went off to work at all hours. It was only when Becky's mother looked out the kitchen window and saw the empty space where she had parked the car the previous night that she realized the Toyota was missing.

Mrs. Borelli called the police. A young officer with a swarthy complexion arrived and took an incident report. "You better notify the insurance company," he said. "This doesn't smell like teenage prank."

Mrs. Borelli felt a tightening in her stomach. "Why do you say that?"

He tucked the small notepad into a breast pocket. "There's been a rash of similar car thefts in the area. Hard core, professional thieves. Probably a chop shop." He repositioned his cap pulling down on the visor. "They grab a car, dismantle it down to the tiniest computer modules and then sell all the parts on the black market."

When the police car finally drove off Mrs. Borelli went back in the house. "Call Uncle Harry," Becky said.

"Over my dead body!" Mrs. Borelli hissed.

After her mother left the house, Becky dialed her uncle. "Mom's car was stolen last night." She told him what happened.

"Where's your mother now?"

"Took a taxi to work. She didn't want to call you."

"Yeah, what else is new?" he shot back in a surly voice. The man coughed - a hacking smoker's cough - and blew his nose. "Don't go anywhere." He hung up.

Ten minutes later, Uncle Harry called back. "Here's the deal." His mood was upbeat, positively buoyant, alternately chuckling as though at some private joke while trying to affect a semi-serious tone. "I located your mother's car, but it's gonna take a few hours for the chumps to put everything back together."

"Put what back together?"

"Tonight around nine o'clock, a guy's gonna drop the Toyota off at the athletic field around the corner from your house. He'll leave the vehicle in the parking lot. They hotwired the ignition, so you'll need a spare set of keys to drive it home. You can pick the car up any time after nine. Capishe?"

"Yeah, I get it."

"And, for God's sakes, don't do anything stupid like calling the police or telling my sister you spoke with me."

"No, I wouldn't do that. Thanks Uncle Harry."

There was an uncomfortable silence. "Just because I share a passing acquaintance with these scum-of-the-earth lowlifes, doesn't mean I condone what they do for a living." Without waiting for a reply, he hung up the telephone.

Later that night around eight-thirty Becky clipped the leash on the beagle, who had been sleeping curled up on the living room sofa. "Let's go for a little stroll, Ralphy." The sleepy-eyed dog, who had already settled in for the night and had no desire to leave the comfort of the sofa, eyed her warily.

"Where you going with the pooch?" Mrs. Borelli intercepted Becky as she was heading for the front door.

"Ralphy's got to pee."

"I took him out after supper."

"Yeah well I found him scratching at the back door," Becky lied.

Mrs. Borelli shrugged and gave ground. Becky walked the dog to the athletic field where it was totally dark, the parking lot empty. She led Ralph over to a maple tree; he lifted his hind leg, a ceremonial gesture, and anointed the trunk. At five minutes passed nine, a beige Toyota crept into the lot and eased up to a parking space. Purposefully and in no great hurry whatsoever, a young man wearing a brown leather jacket climbed out of the car. He stretched his limbs. Clearing his throat, he spit on the ground then stuck an unfiltered cigarette between his lips, lit the tobacco and sucked a deep draft of smoke into his lungs. Noticing Becky with the dog over by the swings, the man nodded affably then turned around and leisurely strolled away.

She dragged the sleepy beagle over to the car. Her mother's burgundy mohair sweater was draped over the passenger side seat and a pair of Nike sneakers – the ones Mrs. Borelli changed into when her feet became swollen after long hours at the bakery, was propped on the rear seat. The car had been vacuumed, all the empty coffee cups and refuse thrown away.

"Well, this sure is weird!" Picking the dog up, she placed him in the back of the car and slid into the driver's seat. When she turned the ignition, the engine instantly fired up and a country-western tune – Jesus take the Wheel by Carrie Underwood - was purring through the speakers. She shut the radio, put the car in gear and drove home.



"The thug in the brown leather jacket," Curtis ventured, when she finished the story, "who was he?"

Becky shrugged. "What difference does it make?" She answered his question with one of her own. "We got the car back in one piece along with the sweater and my mother's sneakers, and that's all that really mattered."

"Lie down with dogs; get up with fleas." For the first time since she joined him at the table, Curtis' habitual blank expression dissolved in a conspiratorial smirk. "What did you tell your mother?"

"I told her I walked Ralphy to the park and found the car just sitting there." Curtis crooked his head to one side and the foolish expression deepened. "Of course, she didn't believe me," Becky added, anticipating his unspoken thoughts. "She damn well knew I called Uncle Harry, but let it slide."

In the street, a chubby man in his late twenties was hurrying across Atwels Avenue in the direction of the Music Depot. Becky had seen the jerk in the breakfast nook, Ollie's Omelets, one street over hawking jewelry – rings, bracelets and designer watches – to the breakfast and lunch crowd. Nobody knew if the stuff was stolen or just cheap knockoffs worth a fraction of the selling price. He visited Nagel's Bagels early on but Morris sent him packing with a few choice words in a sharp tongue and dialect that no one, except the proprietor, understood.

"The Assyrian King, Assurbanipal," Curtis said in a thin, wispy voice, "had the walls of his palace decorated with magnificent carvings."

The strange comment caught Becky off guard. She wasn't quite sure if he was talking to her or thinking out loud. "One scene shows Assurbanipal and his queen enjoying a picnic in their lush palace garden. The mood is relaxed and elegant. Hanging from a tree branch just behind a harp player is the severed head of a defeated king."

"Why are you telling me this?"

He sipped at the coffee. "Whether it's ancient Mesopotamian or Federal Hill, nothing ever changes



"The Ricci Brothers finished Uncle Harry's mosaic." Becky announced. Three months had passed since Curtis' mental meltdown and things were progressing smoothly at the bakery. "The church is just around the corner if you'd like to see it."

Becky's father, who always arrived at work hours before everyone else, had already gone home for the day and her mother was closing up. "The mosaic built with questionable funding." Curtis reached for his jacket. "Yeah, let's take a look."

Becky told her mother she was leaving and went out into the March sun. A handful of crocuses and daffodils – just the pale green stems not the flowers yet – had poked through the thawed soil in a flower pot next to the bakery. They hurried down Atwels Avenue, past the high-rise housing for the elderly, Caserta's pizza and the Tuscan Gardens restaurant.

In late December Bobo Maroni, a low-level enforcer was shot dead, execution style, in broad daylight at the Tuscan Gardens. A brief article appeared on the second page of the Providence Journal. Bobo was eating lunch at the bar - linguini with white clam sauce, a glass of Chianti and a small Greek salad, according to the newspaper. At exactly twelve noon, a middle aged man decked out in a stylish, camel hair coat, a dark fedora pulled down over his eyes, entered. The fellow went directly to the bar and disposed of Bobo with a hollow-point slug from a high-caliber handgun.

What went unreported in the newspaper was the fact that, at approximately eleven forty-five, that is to say, fifteen minutes before his demise, the other patrons sitting at the bar drifted elsewhere. As if on cue, they discretely vacated the premises. That is, everyone except the marked man. Becky learned this curious bit of incidental minutia from Uncle Harry, who dispensed the information glibly with a poker face. Obviously the luckless slob had offended some Federal Hill muckamuck, stepped over that invisible line. The police had to fish Bobo Maroni's brains along with feta cheese, anchovies and Greek olives from the half-eaten salad.

"So how do you like it?" They were standing in the entryway to the church staring at a group of dolphins frolicking in a turquoise stone ocean. The circular mosaic, done in earth tones and pastel hues, ran twenty feet in diameter and was ringed with decorative brickwork.

They entered the church, which was empty except for an older woman over by the confessional, doing the Stations of the Cross. The old woman finished the last station, dipped her fingers in a basin of holy water and left the building.

"That particular design - it's not Roman," Curtis said.

"The mosaic?"

He shook his head. "The dolphin theme predates the Romans. It's more Minoan."

"Really?" Becky glanced up briefly. Curtis' face held that same obsessive, pinched look as when he was trying to smooth the imaginary wrinkle from the underside of his athletic sock. "Minoans flourished between 1750 – 1500 B.C.. They ruled a vast trading empire that stretched from Greece across the Aegean Sea to Ephesus in Asia Minor." The blond-haired youth tossed these historical tidbits off as though they were common knowledge.. "The Minoan rulers lived in a vast palace at Knossos on the island of Crete. The palace walls were covered with colorful frescoes, watercolor paintings done on wet plaster." He removed his glasses momentarily and massaged the bridge of his nose with the tips of his fingers. "The dolphin mosaic probably came from one of those original frescoes."

A priest entered the church, lit several candles near the altar then disappeared out a side door. The air was shot through with acrid, sweet-smelling incense. "You sure are a strange one," Becky murmured, resting a hand gently on his shoulder. "What else should a teenage girl who works in a bakery on Federal hill know about Minoan culture?"

Curtis' cracked a dreamy, introspective smile. "Minoans were shrewd sea traders. Unlike the Romans, their success was based on trade not conquest. Their women had more rights than in most ancient civilizations."

Without warning, Becky lifted up on her toes, snaked her arms around his shoulders and kissed him deeply on the lips. "Liberated females – I like that." Curtis' jaw sagged open like a gate on rusty hinges. His thin lips fluttered spastically but no sounds emerged. "Don't stop!" Becky cradled her head on his chest. "Tell me everything about Minoan culture."

Curtis' eyes glazed over. He let all the air out of his lungs in a deep, contented sigh. "Europa the beautiful daughter of the king of Phoenicia was gathering flowers, when she saw a bull quietly grazing with her father's herd. The bull was actually Zeus, king of the gods, who had fallen in love with her. When Europa reached to place flowers on his horns, he suddenly bounded in the air and carried the weeping princess far off across the Mediterranean Sea to the island of Crete. Eventually Europa married the king of Crete and gave her name to a new continent."

Curtis bent down and caressed her neck with a flurry of kisses. "But, of course, it's just a myth," he added as an afterthought.



"Sunday afternoon three to five is family skate over at the Finch Arena."

"How'd you know?" Curtis asked.

"Saw a flyer that day I stopped by." An elementary school age girl with Coke bottle glasses was lugging a trombone case in the general direction of the Music Depot. The missing 'T' had been secured in its proper place and the sign spruced up with a fresh coat of eggshell white paint. "So I was thinking, maybe we could—"

"Yeah that would be nice."

Becky had in mind to say something more. She had a whole speech worked out, but the door burst open and the platinum blonde strutted into the shop. She sported a new comb fashioned from an exotic wood that Becky couldn't identify and a compact Etienne handbag.

"Hermit cookies. Two dozen." The woman waved an American Express credit card imperiously in the air.

"She never actually looks at you," Becky said, placing the credit receipt in the cash drawer after the woman was gone. "So what's that mean?"

Curtis removed his glasses and wiped a film of flour from the lenses. "Either you're a pathetic loser or the blonde's an egotistical snot."

Becky pursed her lips. "I'll go with the latter."



At the Finch Arena, Becky rented skates and lumbered unsteadily out to the ice.

"Hello again." Tugging insistently on her sleeve and gesturing toward a colorful patch freshly sewn onto her jacket, Kioko Spiegelman was grinning shamelessly. "Free-style two. I passed my evaluation yesterday."

"That's real nice." Through the open doorway she caught a glimpse of Curtis, who had just arrived, settling down on a bench. She waved and he waved back.

"Curtis your boyfriend?"

"We just work together, that's all."

"The way he looked at you, I thought maybe..." The young girl with the free-style two insignia stepped gingerly onto the ice and glided off.

To the strains of Doctor Zhivago blaring over the PA system they skated counter-clockwise around the rink. Before the melody came to an end she pulled him up short and said," "I need a favor." Two boys wearing sleek hockey skated raced by, laughing hysterically and pounding the chilled air with their clenched fists. She edged closer, lifting up on her toes and arching her neck so that the steamy air escaping her lips hovered just under his chin. "Teach me a perfect scratch spin."

Deftly skating backwards while looping one dainty foot over the over, Kioko shot by in a blur. "What's in it for me?"

"I'll pull the plug from the clock over the biscotti's, then I'll smooth all the imaginary wrinkles in your athletic socks." She placed a hand lightly on his chest just as Kioko Spiegelman flew by a second time waving frenetically.

"You can't work on spins during family skate. It's not allowed." Curtis mumbled something else but his words were drowned out by the raucous music and incessant chatter of the skaters. "Give me a kiss," he repeated more insistently.

"Not now," Becky shot back impatiently. "I'll buy ice time in the evenings. Teach me the spin."

"I'm crazy about you." He had that queer, spaced out look that he got when his well-ordered universe was spinning out of control.

"Yes, I love you, too," she spoke hurriedly, tripping over the words, "but we're talking at cross purposes." The pale blue eyes behind his wire-framed glasses held a limpid sheen such that Becky could see straight through to the core of his being.

Return to Table of Contents

A Work in Progress

Looking up from an inch-thick pile of invoices on her desk, Tawana Saunders recognized the middle aged fellow standing in the doorway as a reporter with the Brandenberg Gazette. Back in April, he had written a few paragraphs on the ShopRite Supermarket when they donate food to the local soup kitchen on the south side of town.

"Eudora Grossberg working today?" the reporter asked.

Peering over the reporter's shoulder at an oblique angle, Tawana could see the beanpole of a girl stuffing butternut squash in a plastic bag. Favoring dark-framed glasses that were forever sliding down on the bridge of her narrow nose, she reminded Tawana of the rubber-necked Olive Oil in the old Popeye cartoons. And then there were the wrinkled cotton blouses haphazardly thrown together with frumpy, mismatched skirts that looked like they were bought, sight unseen, off the bargain rack at a consignment shop. Eudora Grossberg was a grotesque—a physical train wreck of a woman with no polish or pizzazz. "Checkout aisle three. She's bagging groceries."

He fished a fountain pen and small pad from a shirt pocket. "Mind if I borrow her for ten minutes?"

The black woman pushed her seat away from the desk. "For what purpose?"

"We got a letter from the senior editor of the Yale Review. They published one of her short stories in their hoity-toity literary quarterly this past spring, and now the piece is being anthologized. There may even be a book deal in the works." The reporter was noticeably pleased at the young grocery clerk's good fortune. "Our newspaper wants to do an article in the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday edition on a local, up and coming fiction writer."

"Yes, I don't see why not. Spend as much time as you need."

The reporter made a motion to leave but turned back. "Do you know how many unsolicited manuscripts the Yale Review receives in the course of a month?" Tawana shook her head. "Hundreds if not thousands. And that includes a smattering of established writers with national name recognition."

"And they chose our own Eudora."

"Chose her twice—¬once when they printed the story and a second time when the editorial staff recommended it to the anthology." The man left the office. Tawana sat down at her desk and craned her neck staring up over the flat panel computer screen. The reporter was gibber jabbering away with the lanky girl who never even bothered to pause from sorting the customer's groceries as she fielded his questions. Eudora positioned a bulky, twenty-five pound bag of Purina dog food on the bottom rack of the metal cart along with a jumbo pack of toddler diapers. Fifteen minutes later Tawana paused and looked up again. The reporter was gone. Eudora had shifted over to aisle five, where an older cashier, who was painfully slow and prone to mood swings, was ringing up an order.

By noon everyone in the store knew about the reporter and Eudora's short story, but that wasn't the girl's doing. Gail Crowley, the bigmouth gossip from customer service, collared the reported as he was leaving and extracted a blow-by-blow description of what was going on. "We got a regular Shakespeare among us!" the tubby blonde crowed. Gail, who probably hadn't read anything more challenging than the National Inquirer in the last dozen years, waddled off to tell the workers in fresh produce about Eudora's newfound celebrity status.

Back in her office, Tawana checked her calendar. In the morning, she had to be in district court. A seventeen year-old youth was caught shoplifting the week before Thanksgiving. At his arraignment, he pled 'no contest'. An incorrigible thug, it was his sixth offense, and Tawana had to appear in court Tuesday morning representing the market as plaintiff.

"Congratulations!" As she was leaving work for the day, Tawana bumped into Eudora running down stray grocery carts in the ShopRite parking lot.

"It's no big deal." She jabbed at the bridge of her glasses with an index finger, pushing the frame up on her nose, but they immediately careened back down coming to rest at a cockeyed angle.

A grocery cart began rolling away and Tawana positioned it back in the stack. "What's your short story about?"

"It's creative fiction," the girl replied.

"Yes, I understand, but where do you get your ideas?"

Eudora stared at the black woman then waved her bony hands in the air. "That's a bit hard to explain." She leaned heavily into the train of shopping carts that ran a good twenty deep and inched them forward toward the front of the store.

Tawana felt her face flush hot. Of course Eudora would conveniently sidestep both questions. Properly understood, creative fiction was meant to be read not served up like a platter of exotic pastries at a coffee klatch. "I just read a wonderful book." For some inexplicable reason, the store manager was tripping over her words. "Maya Angelou's collected poems." By way of response, Eudora snorted making a disagreeable sound. "You don't like her poetry?"

Eudora studied her bony hands which were chapped and raw from the cold. "Robert Hayden - now there's a decent poet."

"Never heard of him," Tawana replied.

The girl swallowed and her Adam's apple bobbed up and down in typical Olive Oil fashion. "Hayden wrote a poem, Those Winter Sundays." Lowering her eyes, she recited the poem from beginning to end in a lilting singsong cadence. When the poem was done, she raised her head and noted, "A writer could spend a life time laboring at his craft and never create anything quite so perfect."

A flurry of icy wind caught up a pile of dead leaves and sent them swirling in a brittle, orangey funnel. Tawana could feel her heart pounding in her ears. The poem was devastatingly beautiful. "Yes, that was quite amazing."

A freckle faced boy and his mother passed by with a load of groceries, mostly junk food—potato chips, frozen pizzas, ice cream, three quarts of cream soda plus a carton of cigarettes. Tawana had a compulsive habit of reading the shoppers by their purchases. The black woman waited until they were a good thirty feet away. "I've wanted to write something for quite a while but don't seem to get anywhere."

Eudora smiled opaquely. "And what's the something you want to get down on paper?"

"That's the problem," Tawana replied with an embarrassed frown. "Perhaps I should join a local writers' group."

"In all likelihood, you'll end up with some MFA graduate student." The thin girl pulled her collar up around her throat, but the flimsy coat was of the early fall variety and much too thin for a blustery December. "A snooty misogynist, who filters your prose through his male chauvinist biases."

Eudora collected the shopping cart that the freckle faced boy had abandoned, adding it to her collection and pushed off toward the front of the building. "Why don't you bring in a few pages of your writing and I'll take a look at it."

"Yes, I'd appreciate that." She watched the girl struggling with the absurdly long wagon train and had to stifle an impulse to help negotiate the carts toward the front of the building. But then, store managers were obligated to maintain a certain professional decorum.

Later that night, Tawana told her husband, Ellis, about the Brandenberg Gazette reporter and her odd encounter with Eudora in the ShopRite Supermarket parking lot. "If she's so bright, how come the woman's bagging groceries?"

Déjà vu. Tawana had asked herself the very same question. By taking an entry level position and showing no inclination to improve her circumstances at the supermarket, Eudora Grossberg had effectively turned the American dream upside down. The girl was hardworking and honest; she got along well with coworkers and scrupulously avoided the endless petty gossip and intrigues endemic to such businesses.

A low profile oddball, Eudora never flaunted her eccentricities. She brought her lunch plus a piece of fruit to work in a brown paper bag and drank coffee from a thermos rather than indulge herself with a café mocha cappuccino or any of the Green Mountain deluxe blends they sold by the cup at the deli counter. The girl seemed intent on earning the least amount of money possible while subsisting on a pauper's salary. Was it a masochistic act of penance? Denial and self-flagellation worked well for medieval nuns and half-naked religious zealots contemplating their navels in Himalayan caves, but at the ShopRite Supermarket such austerity was neither fashionable nor chic.

Tawana knew friends from college who were active in social causes. The class valedictorian ran off and joined the Peace Corps where he served in Kenya for a year and a half doing God-knows-what. Then he returned from the Dark Continent, enrolled in law school and later earned a fortune as a six-figure ambulance chaser in the medical malpractice racket. The last time they met at an alumnus function, there was no more talk about hybrid, high-yield grains or crop irrigation systems in underdeveloped, third world countries. The social activist had morphed into an insatiable braggart with an equally revolting ego to match.

"That lovely poem Dora recited from memory,... there were well over a dozen stanzas."

"Impressive!" Her husband chuckled. "So how are you doing with your writing?"

"What writing?" Tawana rolled her eyes. "I got an outline that's little more than a mishmash of fragmented ideas. Three pages that go absolutely nowhere." The woman had gotten the notion into her head that she would write a book. Something with an ethnic flavor—spunky black woman climbs the corporate ladder to claim her niche in the American business community. Horatio Alger with an Afro-American, chick-lit twist.

Think wonders, shit blunders.

A great idea in principle, her manuscript never emerged from the embryonic drawing board. For all her determination, Tawana Saunders couldn't finesse the project off the ground. Chalk it up to writer's block, brain freeze, anticipatory fright—she began the literary undertaking eight months earlier and had absolutely nothing to show for it except a new computer with all the fancy bells and whistles.

In the den she sat down at the computer and Googled Robert Hayden. Yes, there it was—the sublime, precious pearl-of-a-poem Eudora shared with her in the frigid parking lot.

Sundays too my father got up early

And put his clothes on

in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather

made banked fires blaze.

No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold, splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he'd call

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

Of love's austere and lonely offices?

Tawana read the poem through a second time and then a third. Yes, it was a masterpiece—a cri de coeur as poignant and resonant as any full length novel. A simple and unadorned poem written by an unassuming black man over half a century ago! No flowery rhetoric or purple prose. Just a sixteen line barrage of innate wisdom.

"That lovely poem Eudora Grossberg recited—I just found it on the internet." Tawana was lying in bed next to her husband in the dark. "The imagery was so beautiful it took my breath away."

"That's nice." Ellis had been fading off to sleep. "Don't forget to pick up the application for Saint Xavier's."

"I've some free time in the morning. I can do it then." Twenty years earlier, Tawana had attended Saint Xavier's parochial school. Now her daughter would follow suit. The local high school had a decent reputation but the parochial school offered one of the finest graphic art programs in the state. And they never molly coddled the students, because their parents could afford the tuition and ninety-three per cent of the senior class went on to college.

"Here's the crazy thing," Tawana drew the conversation back to her original remarks. "A casual reader would never imagine an Afro-American had written the poem."

"Your point?"

"Hayden came from the ghetto. His parents fought constantly throughout his childhood."

"How do you know all this?"

"After locating the poem, I researched his bio on the internet."

Throughout his childhood, Robert Hayden's home was filled with the 'chronic angers' and violence he hinted at in his poems. Nearsighted and short of stature, he was ostracized by his peers at school and suffered debilitating bouts of depression.

"From an sordid life he fashioned exquisite poetry." In the street a dog barked setting off a cacophony of yips and yaps as far as several streets away. There were other thoughts that Tawana Saunders meant to share with her husband, but a snuffling sound followed by the man's steady breathing indicated Ellis had drifted off to sleep.

What did I know, what did I know

Of love's austere and lonely offices?

What did it take to write a sentence half that beautiful? Perhaps she would consult Eudora Grossberg, who dressed like a bag lady and chased down runaway shopping carts in the ShopRite Supermarket parking lot. Yes, she must make a mental note to do just that. No, better to get up out of bed right this very minute and scribble a brief reminder—something, anything to jog her memory so that in the morning when she was rushing about getting her daughter's breakfast together, feeding the dog, washing the early morning dishes ... Before she could put a period to the sentence, Tawana Saunders had slid off the shelf of consciousness and joined her husband in sleep.

In the morning, Tawana reviewed work schedules for the coming week. Myra Dobbins from the dairy department was going out on maternity leave, and one of the meat cutters slashed a finger to the bone the previous Wednesday trimming a pot roast. When Eudora Grossberg took coffee break at ten forty-five, the store manager slipped the girl a small manila folder. "Some recent writing. Mostly character sketches and dialogue."

Eudora took the folder and laid it on the table next to her food. "Give me a day or two."

"One question." The store manager smoothed the front of her dress with the flat of her hands. "You are obviously an articulate, intelligent woman. There are conservatively a dozen positions here at the market you'd qualify for, if you wanted to earn a bit more money."

"If I didn't know any better," Eudora replied unscrewing the cap on her thermos, "I might imagine you playing Henry Higgins to my Liza Doolittle." There was no trace of anger or resentment in her tone. The My Fair Lady quip was self-mocking.

Tawana chuckled and shook her head. "Touché. I was totally out of place."

"No offense taken."

Tawana sat down on the chair next to her. "I hunted down the Hayden poem on the internet."

Eudora crooked her head to one side and winked at the store manager, a conspiratorial gesture. "Doesn't get much better than that."

"No it doesn't, does it?"

At the Brandenberg Courthouse, Tawana watched her handbag drift into the X-ray machine then stepped through the metal detector and confiscated it on the far side. She waited on a badly scarred, wooden bench on the third floor until a bailiff emerged and called, "ShopRite Supermarket versus Reginald Owens!"

In the courtroom, the bailiff took Tawana aside. "You the ShopRite manager?" Tawana nodded. "Sit over there." He indicated a bench at the extreme opposite end of the room from where the defendant was sitting with his mother. All the macho swagger and cockiness were gone now. Reginald Owens didn't look nearly as brazen and self-assured as he did the afternoon of the theft.

"A black kid in the meat department is ripping off steaks," Ned Scolby spoke in a faltering voice. A high school junior who worked part time after school and on weekends, the boy was trembling and ready to burst into tears from one minute to the next. Ned was so upset he probably didn't even realized what he said or that the store manager was herself dark-skinned.

Tawana grabbed the boy by the wrist. "Go tell Gail Crowley to call 911 and have the police waiting outside in an unmarked car when the thief emerges."

Now a flood of tears were cascading pell-mell down the young boy's face. Ned made a motion to rush off but the store manager clung to his shirtsleeve. "Dry your eyes first," Tawana spoke in a steely, matter of fact tone, "then wait behind the counter at customer service until everything is settled."

Tawana headed off in the direction of the meat department. En route, she grabbed a pricing gun off a half-open carton of Caress toilet paper. Like a vulture, Reginald Owens was still in the meat department, hovering over a refrigerated display full of select cuts. Well-built and muscular, the youth's midriff bulged like a distended kangaroo's pouch. He hadn't seen the store manager yet. Tawana grabbed a box of oatmeal cookies off a shelf and began mashing blank pricing stickers onto the plastic. Five minutes passed. Reginald zipped up the front of his thick winter coat and sauntered toward the front of the market. As he passed Tawana, the youth flashed an insolent, mean-spirited grin.

The shameless idiot doesn't have a clue! He thinks he's untouchable, a real smooth operator! At the front of the store, the boy stopped to chat with a portly negro woman, who was waiting in the checkout line along with three younger siblings. At that moment, Tawana Saunders felt an intense self-loathing, an unquenchable hatred for her own kind. How had the guileless Ned Scolby so aptly put it? A black kid in the meat department is ripping off steaks.

Stripping the language bare, Ned gave voice to the unthinkable. The previous month the perpetrator had been a fourteen year-old Caucasian, a bleary-eyed, latchkey brat from one of the inner city subsidized housing projects. And a month earlier, an unwed Latina on AFDC. Driven by poverty, stupidity and enlightened self-interest, they came at you from multiple directions, in all ethnic varieties, sexes, shapes and colors.

In the parking lot, two plain clothes detectives nabbed Reginald Owens as he was unlocking a metallic blue Cavalier sedan. They handcuffed him and threw the youth in the back of an unmarked police car but not before relieving him of his stash of stolen meats. A small crowd gathered, watching from a discrete distance. What must they be thinking? A black kid in the meat department...

The fourteen year old boy who was caught in a similar bind in October became so unhinged when the police collared him, that he wet his pants. The urine ran all down the front of his dungarees reaching to the cuff. That was a good thing. At least, at some primitive level, the under-aged crook grasped the severity of his predicament. Reginald Owens was too thick-skinned. When the cops pulled him aside, he affected the hollow-eyed indifference of a hardened felon.

Tawana Saunders spoke briefly with the police officers before they took Reginald Owens away then went inside. "Where's Ned?"

"Pricing vegetables," Gail replied.

Tawana found the boy sorting through a carton of packaged baby carrots. She gave him a big hug and didn't care what anybody thought. "You did fine today."

The boy lowered his eyes, which were still blotchy and red. "When somebody steals they create chaos and turn everything we work for here at the market upside-down. That's not a good thing." She took a bag of carrots and stared vacantly at the vegetable. "Are you OK now?"

"Yeah, I'm sorry I got upset."

She handed him the bag. "Like I said, you did the right thing and I'm proud of you."

Judge Florence Mahoney, a severe looking, middle-aged woman with her hair tied up in a bun, turned to face the teenage boy. "Last time you were in my court, Mr. Owens, what did I tell you?" Reginald Owens muttered something unintelligible. "Speak up!"

"Don't rightly recall." The boy squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. "Can't remember that far back."

"Really?" the judge's shot back, "That's awfully strange, since you were in this same court room less than three months ago for a similar offense." She leaned forward in her seat and jabbed the air with a maroon fingernail. "Don't play me for a damn fool. What did I tell you back then, Mr. Owens?" Again the youth made a guttural sound under his breath. "I can't hear you."

"Said you never wanted to see me back in court."

The judge read through the charges out loud in a booming voice. The boy was apprehended with three packages of porterhouse steaks and two choice-cut filet mignons. Occurring the week before Thanksgiving, the incident was his sixth offense in less than three years. "You celebrated a birthday recently?"

"September fifth. Turned seventeen."

"Which was over a month before your most recent offense," the judge noted. "So, Mr. Owen, technically you're not a minor anymore." The judge began writing furtively on a court document. "I'm remanding you to the custody of the courts. You will be taken from this room at this time and transferred to the Cedar Junction facility where you can sit and contemplate the error of your ways for the next three months." She threw the paperwork aside. "Bailiff, take this man downstairs for processing. Case closed!"

As the judge rose to leave the court, a fat woman next to the defendant's table burst into inconsolable tears and had to be physically restrained by one of the officers. The bailiff placed Reginald Owens in handcuffs and lead him toward a door in the rear of the room.

Another court official sidled up next to Tawana and was gesturing toward Reginald Owens' family. "Wait until they leave." She watched the distraught family hugging and consoling each other, drying tears, muttering in bitter, defiant tones. What was it the arresting officer said at the Brandenberg Police Station later in the afternoon following the shoplifting incident? The Owens clan was 'bad actors'. The father was currently in prison for forging stolen checks, a sister had been arraigned on multiple occasions for prostitution and the matriarch of the family—the obese woman who was sneering at Tawana from across the room—boasted a prior conviction for welfare fraud.

From the court, Tawana drove five miles down the road to Saint Xavier High School, where she went directly to the administrative offices. "I need a student application."

A large brass crucifix along with a portrait of Bishop O'Malley in a scarlet robe hung on the wall next to the clock. The receptionist handed her a folder from a stack on the top of the desk. "Admissions department will be scheduling freshman interviews the first week in February."

"Yes, I'm familiar with the process."

An elderly nun, her wrinkled face shrouded in a gray habit drifted down the corridor. Sister Mercy taught Tawana's faith class the entire four years she had attended. A sweet, God-crazed woman, who never doubted the inherent goodness of mankind, Sister Mercy could probably even find something favorable to say about Reginald Owens, which was more than Tawana could boast about her own slightly tainted view of the human condition.

"Daughter or son?"

Tawana turned back to the receptionist. "My daughter. She's over at the middle school now."

The receptionist smiled affably. "Be sure to list any community service and parish activity. They take all that into account."

"Yes, I certainly will."

Tawana went back out into the hallway. A bell rang and a swarm of uniformed children exploded from open doorways, rushing off to class. She felt a soothing tug of nostalgia. Twenty years earlier Tawana Saunders—her maiden name was Smithers back then—had raced idealistically about the same corridors dressed in her tartan plaid skirt, starched white blouse and shamrock green sweater. It was the singular most idyllic period of her life. Back then, there was a sum total of fourteen black student scattered among twelve hundred. Sixteen the year she graduated. No one treated them any different. They were all a part of the close-knit Saint Xavier family.

Studious kids didn't worry about fitting in. It was cool to be smart. Bullies and bigots were in short supply. Saint Xavier groomed Tawana Saunders for business college, gave her the confidence to compete and succeed in the white world. Now she wanted the same level playing field for her own daughter.

A group of students loaded down with musical instruments hurried past. "What's going on?" Tawana asked.

"Marching band," a petite brunette with a slide trombone that looked as long as she was tall replied.

"There was no marching band when I went here."

"How long ago was that?"

"Somewhere in the nineteen eighties give or take a few decades."

Where's Eudora?" Tawana asked early Monday morning.

"Called out sick," Gail said. "She's got that twenty-four hour bug that's going around. Poor kid! Couldn't stop coughing and sneezing in the message she left on the answering machine." She leaned over the counter. "Did you read that article about her in the Sunday paper?"

"Yes, it was quite something," Tawana replied. A New York literary agent had noticed Eudora Grossberg's story when it first appeared in the Yale Review and, on the merits of the single work, offered her a contract. A collection of short stories and poetry was scheduled for release in the spring. "Where does Eudora live?"

"Buckley Place." Lois replied.

Tawana drummed her fingers on the Formica counter. "That old mill complex that was renovated into apartments?"

"Yeah, that's it." Over by the railroad tracks, Buckley Place was a grimy, low rent residence, mostly tiny efficiency apartments.

Tawana went back to her office, closed the door and called Eudora at the number listed in her personnel file. An answering machine picked up. She replaced the receiver on the phone without leaving a message.

Around four in the afternoon, she made her way to the deli counter. "What are the soups?"

"Beef barley and chicken escarole," the man behind the counter replied.

"Give me a quart of each."

Tawana left work early and drove across town to Buckley Place. She parked her Toyota Celica in a lot marked 'visitor parking'. The building, which had been given a cosmetic face lift only a few years earlier, already exuded a down-at-the-heels shabbiness. The lobby was dimly lit making it next to impossible to read the tenant directory.

"Got a cigarette?" Like an apparition from the nether world, a disheveled, middle-agede man with a lumpy, disfigured nose lurched out from an open doorway. He smelled of rancid body odor and his shirt pocket was torn away in a useless flap.

"Don't smoke." Tawana edged away and, while still eyeing the man, groped for the doorknob leading back out into the street. What was I thinking, coming here alone without mentioning it to anyone?

"Who're you looking for?" The fellow's eyes, bulgy and jaundiced, never strayed from her face.

"No one in particular." Tawana took a tentative step backwards but the queer fellow immediately closed the gap and was hovering so close she could feel his sour breath on her cheek. "Eudora Grossberg," she mumbled still fumbling for the illusive doorknob. "I brought her some soup."

The man swayed back and forth as though in a drug-induced stupor. "Dora? She's up in 3B." He hurried to the far end of the foyer and jabbed the elevator button several times. "Dora's sick bad. Threw up twice last night. Can't keep nothin' down."

When the elevator door opened, the strange fellow stumbled in and held the door open for her. "Say, you wouldn't have a cigarette to spare? I'm just about crapping my pants for a butt."

Tawana was feeling a bit light headed. "You already asked me a moment ago and I told you I don't smoke."

Looking muddled, the man scratched an earlobe. "Funny, I don't remember."

The carpet on the third floor landing was torn and one of the fluorescent lights recessed in the ceiling was flickering erratically. He shambled down the unheated hallway a short distance and knocked at a door.

"Who's there?"

"Just me," the fellow replied, "and some fancy shmancy lady. She didn't offer a name and I didn't ask."

The door opened. Dressed in flannel pajamas and bedroom slippers, Eudora Grossberg squinted myopically out at them. "I heard you were sick so brought fresh soup from the market."

If Eudora was shocked to see the store manager standing in the dank hallway, she didn't show it. "How sweet! Sure, come in." She held the door wide, and the odd fellow trailed Tawana into the efficiency apartment, flopping down on a chair near the window. "I see you've met Dennis."

The man with the shapeless nose grinned sheepishly, pushing his bottom lip out in a perverse caricature of a smile. Only then did Tawana realize he was mentally retarded. "So how you doing?"

"Hungry as hell." Eudora removed a couple of spoons and bowls from a cupboard, poured a generous portion of chicken escarole into each, handing one to Dennis. They ate in total silence. When the soup was gone, Eudora had a mild coughing fit then turned to the man with the funny nose. "You didn't jump out in the hallway and scare Mrs. Saunders, did you, Dennis?"

"Oh no," he blustered. "Didn't do no such thing."

"Actually, he was quite polite," Tawana protested. "Even told me what apartment you lived in and escorted me up here like a perfect gentleman." Dennis sat up straighter in his chair and puffed out his lower lip, which was still moist from the soup. Then he rose and, without saying goodbye, wandered out of the apartment leaving the door wide open.

Eudora shut the door. "Dennis, he's a little ..."

"Yes, I can see that," Tawana said.

"I had a chance to read through your material." She lifted the manila folder off a shelf and handed it back to the black woman. "The writing is solid, but the author, Tawana Saunders, is among the missing."

"Which is a polite way of saying it's bland and predictable." Eudora nodded, an abrupt flick of the head. "You're not telling me anything I don't already know."

Eudora put the soup in the refrigerator and rinsed out the bowls. "About the Robert Hayden poem," Tawana continued. "It took my breath away."

"That visceral quality ... It's what's missing in your writing."

"What do you suggest?"

Eudora sat down on the edge of the bed. "Don't play it safe. Write from your discomfort, your confusion and darkest fears."

"Like Hayden does."

"It's a good place to start," Eudora confirmed."

The apartment was tiny. The bedroom and kitchen merged into one living space with a closet and claustrophobic bathroom near the rear wall. By the window a computer rested on a table. It was a Windows 98 model, a prehistoric relic that backed up off old-fashioned plastic diskettes and couldn't support any of the sophisticated thirty-two bit software programs that had emerged in recent years. The supermarket had shifted over to the Microsoft XP software in two thousand six and junked all the outmoded machines. Next month they would switch again to the Vista operating system. More elaborate gadgetry, bells and whistles.

"We're all works in progress." Eudora Grossberg was sitting up on the center of the bed now in a modified lotus position. There was something transcendently beautiful about the awkward, introverted woman.

Works in progress. Sadly, not all mortal creatures turn out all that well. A fleeting image of a defiant Reginald Owens and his pig-headed, sociopathic mother flitted across her mind. A minute passed. Dennis returned with a fresh cigarette. He sat down at the kitchen table and smoked voraciously, discarding the burnt ash into an empty coffee cup. "This cigarette's got menthol," Dennis noted. "I don't like menthol, cause it tickles my tongue."

"I want to apologize again for my faux pas—the My Fair Lady gaff. Who the hell am I, an upwardly mobile, middle-aged black woman, telling you or anyone else for that matter what the hell to do with their life?"

Eudora exploded in a spastic coughing fit. When it was done and her breathing back under control, she blew her nose and lay prone, staring up at the ceiling. "Myra Dobbins is in her eighth month and fat as a whale," Eudora spoke in a hoarse, nasally tone. "I'd like a crack at her job unless it's already promised to someone else."

Dennis took a final drag on the stumpy, mentholated cigarette. He tossed what little was left of the butt into the cup, rose and went off to panhandle another smoke.

"The job is yours." Tawana also got up to leave. "I'll post the position as tentatively filled first thing in the morning." She placed a hand on the sick woman's shoulder. "You don't look so hot, Dora. Take the rest of the week off."

Later at home, Tawana sat in front of her fancy new computer staring at an empty white canvas. What was it Eudora Grossberg suggested? Don't play it safe. Write from your pain,... your discomfort, confusion and darkest fears.

An hour later Leslie wandered into the room. "What are you doing?"

"Writing the great American novel."

The girl pointed dismissively at the screen. "All you got is three lousy paragraphs."

Tawana leaned over and brushed the girl's ebony cheek with her lips. "Consider it a work in progress."

Return to Table of Contents

The Indigo Children

Jason Endicott arrived at the Seekers of Truth commune shortly before noontime. The mid-July air was stifling, temperatures hovering in the low nineties. He lingered outside the renovated cow barn that served as a meditation hall. Most of the animals having been sent away, the few remaining Holsteins that made up the herd were housed elsewhere. Over the years, the foundation settled, pitching the structure at an odd angle. Most of the red paint had flaked away or faded to a muddy brown.

"Sister Wendy's been delayed," a young, rather effeminate-looking man wearing Bermuda shorts and floppy sandals approached from the direction of the dining hall. "You can wait here or down by the lake." He pointed toward a ridge of trees at the far end of an organic vegetable garden. No water was visible from where they were standing. "She'll be back half an hour tops." The young man shuffled away.

A bug-eyed gray squirrel scurried across the rutted ground before disappearing up a thick maple tree. Subdued by the oppressive heat, the songbirds were less vocal than earlier in the morning. Abandoning the meditation hall, Jason struck out for the wooded area beyond the vegetable garden. He passed a group of women weeding. Dressed in jeans and cotton blouses, they were in their early twenties to late thirties. Nobody looked particularly happy with the brutally humid weather as they bent over the rock-strewn earth, tugging clumps of weeds and throwing them aside.

At the edge of the field, Jason spotted a dirt path leading down to a small lake. Fifty feet from shore a solitary woman was sitting on a rock. She was lean with no figure to speak of. A thin slash of a mouth was offset by dark hair and hazel eyes. The girl had the sort of hardscrabble, androgynous face that would have been equally suited for a member of either sex. Still, she was mildly attractive with a rough-textured feral quality that stood in stark contrast to most of the women he had passed just a moment ago.

"Want a toke?" The girl, whose dirty brown hair was tied back with a red bandana, raised her arm to reveal a marijuana joint." Jason shook his head. The girl shrugged, sucked a deep draft of sweet smelling smoke into her lungs and gazed serenely out over the placid water. Alongside a clump of water lilies, a painted turtle's wedge-shaped head emerged for a brief moment before disappearing beneath the surface.

"Is that allowed?"

"I should hope not," the girl replied with mock severity. "But I been here three months now and know all the tight-ass elders. You don't fit the mold." She took another hit and leaned back. "I'm Maribel. Maribel Munsen."

"Jason Endicott. I'm with the Brandenberg Gazette. We're doing an article on the commune. I'm here gathering information."

The newspaper had sent him to do a human interest story on the New Age commune that set down roots five years earlier in the dilapidated farmhouse west of the city. The Seekers of Truth were antagonizing local residents with their long, flowing robes, odd beliefs and messianic zeal. Jason visited the commune once previously to see about doing a piece for the newspaper's Sunday supplement, but nothing came of it. As an outsider and 'nonbeliever', the group elders who managed the sect's day-to-day operation didn't trust him. But now they needed some positive press to offset the creeping paranoia emanating from the local community.

"Have you seen the trout?" Maribel strolled over to a small dock that extended twenty feet out into the shallow water. Before they even reached the pressure-treated, slatted walkway, he could see a school of huge fish gliding back and forth between the short pilings. Their underbellies sported a rainbow of pastel hues ranging from tangerine to neon green. "What a waste of protein!" Maribel muttered.

"How's that?"

She fixed him with an impish grin. "The Seekers of Truth believe in the Buddhist concept of ahimsa, which states that all life is one and sacred."

"Which is to say, the sect is vegetarian." She nodded once. "And what's your take on that?"

She took a final hit on what was left of the joint and flicked the smoldering roach in a lazy arc into the water. Several curious fish swam to the surface for closer inspection. "Give me a worm, a piece of string and a hook and I'll hand you your answer on a serving platter."

A huge trout suddenly broke the surface of the water snagging a water bug in its smallish mouth. "After three months, you must have formed an opinion regarding the sect."

Maribel retreated back to a grassy stretch of soil and sat down. "I'm leaving next week. That should tell you everything you need to know."

"Actually, It tells me nothing," Jason shot back.

The girl removed her bandana and let her hair fall down around her shoulders. "You passed a bunch of girls weeding the vegetable garden on your trip down to the pond." Jason nodded. "Did you notice the freckle-faced blonde with the big boobs?"

Jason grinned self-consciously. "She's probably the only one from the group I do remember."

"That's Gwen. She's twenty-three. Ran off and left hubby with and two toddlers in a ratty, third-floor apartment in Central Falls so she could come here and connect with her inner essence."

Melanie stuck a piece of straw between her teeth and lay back prone on the lumpy ground. "You can shit all over your spouse and abandon your children, all in the name of personal fulfillment." She rose up on her elbows and smiled good naturedly at Jason. "Like I said, next Wednesday I'm heading out to Alaska. See if I can scare up a job cooking on a commercial fishing trawler." She pointed at the endless parade of trout slithering in and out from under the dock. "No more ahimsa."



"It is our belief," Sister Wendy explained,, "all that exists is God. This of course leads naturally to the concept of personal divinity." The red-robed woman was college educated, svelte with dark hair knotted in a tight bun - the picture of discrete respectability.

"We are all Gods," Jason parroted back the implicit message.

They were sitting on a pair of ornate, brocade cushions in the meditation hall. Much cooler inside, the room was empty except for a large Persian carpet near an altar decorated with fresh-cut wild flowers and a picture of the sect's leader, an elderly man of Eastern descent with a flowing white beard. The room reeked of incense – patchouli, sandalwood and several exotic scents he couldn't identify.

"You certainly are a quick study,"

"Dr. Raschke, professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver, describes New Age practices as the spiritual version of AIDS. What's your take on that?"

Sister Wendy's expression soured. "I'm unfamiliar with Dr. Raschke's beliefs." "From a Pantheistic point of view, all religions are simply different paths to that ultimate reality." The woman spread her arms, palms upward, in an expansive gesture. "The universal religion can be visualized as a mountain with many sadhanas or spiritual paths." "All paths," she held the final consonant in 'all' out for dramatic effect, "eventually reach the top."

Sister Wendy was the perfect shill, huckster, promoter, pitchman and metaphysical cheerleader for the Seekers of Truth. But Jason wasn't buying one word of her fabulous esoterica. To be sure, the woman possessed a clever tongue. She would have made a great lawyer or politician. Problem was The Seekers of Truth were just a tad too far left of the loony bin to ever gain any traction in a straight-laced community like Brandenberg.

They might have made inroads with the acupuncture or homeopathy. But the Primal Scream Therapy and iridology pushed the local yokels over the edge and gave the clan members a pair of black eyes from which they could never recover. Each whacky pursuit – polarity therapy, crystal healing, spirit channeling, divination, I Ching, Tarot Cards, scrying, dervish whirling, séances, reflexology and therapeutic touch – only served to push the group further to the margins.

At one point toward the end of their meeting, a young boy – he couldn't have been any older than six or seven – ran pell-mell into the room. Spotting Jason, he smiled and rushed back out the door. "One of our Indigo Children," Sister Wendy gushed.

"Never heard the term before," Jason replied.

"It is our belief in the New Age movement that children with special powers and indigo colored auras have been born in recent years. As small children, Indigo's are easy to recognize by their unusually large, clear eyes."

"Okay," Jason murmured skeptically.

"They are precocious children with amazing memories and a strong desire to live instinctually. These Indigo Children are sensitive, gifted souls with an evolved consciousness who have come here to help change the vibrations of our lives and to create one land, one globe and one species."

"And that little boy?"

"My son. One of the Indigo Children."

Jason had the sudden urge to vomit, to regurgitate his entire lunch, a Kentucky Fried Chicken value meal with coleslaw and potato wedges, in Sister Wendy's velvety lap.

Kaching! Kaching! Kaching!

The Elders of the commune planned to build a substantial guest house divided into dormitories where, for a modest fee, spiritual novices could deepen their appreciation of the Eastern mysteries. Of course it was no mystery where they got the money to bankroll the commune. A brochure of scheduled summer events listed no less than fifty-two offerings! Which probably explained why Sister Wendy could afford to drive around in a fully-loaded BMW convertible. Kaching!



Later that night at home, Jason went upstairs to the bedroom opposite the den. His daughter, Carmen, was perched on the top of the bed lotus-style, thumbing through a fashion magazine. "That TV wasn't here when I left for work," He said gesturing at a forty-inch plasma, LCD display.

Carmen threw the magazine aside. "Got it for a steal."

The flat screen TV looked ridiculously huge perched on the dresser six feet from the foot of the bed. "I prefer you tell me before making major purchases. How'd you pay for it?"

The blonde-haired girl smiled and glanced in her father's general direction without making eye contact. "Credit."

"I'm baking fish for supper. Salmon with that nice lemon-dill marinade." His daughter seldom cooked and when she did it was always a disaster. The meatloaf she threw together as a special treat for Father's Day turned out dry as a communion wafer and with about the same appeal. She seldom bothered with spices, never set the timer so she could gauge when an expensive cut of meat was properly done. Jason bought her a crock pot as a birthday present, but found the cooker buried in the hall closet under a pile of woman's footwear in its original packaging. Fishing the recipe booklet from the bottom of the box, he whipped up a fire engine chili con carne that was to die for. Now the crock pot sat on the counter next to the microwave.

"I'm going to steam some Basmati rice as a side dish."

"Okay." Carmen retrieved the magazine. Jason went back down stairs.

Later that night over supper, Jason said, "You came home awfully late last night."

They were seated at the kitchen table. Since his wife filed for divorce, they didn't use the living room for much of anything. "I met the girls for a few drinks after work."

"A few and then some," Jason corrected. She smiled sheepishly and turned her attention back to the fish.

Around three in the morning, Jason heard the clumsy fumbling at the front door; his daughter stumbled over the threshold and, leaving a trail of feminine outerwear strewn across the lower landing, dragged her drunken carcass upstairs. Carmen never bothered to undress or shower. Jason found her lying supine, neck tilted to the side with a sliver of hardened drool tracking down her cheek onto the patchwork comforter. In the harsh early morning light, her bronzer made her look like she spent too much time under the lights at the tanning salon.

This wasn't the first time Carmen came home wasted. But at least she was sleeping it off in her own bed. Alone.

"About that TV... I'm not paying for it."

"I don't expect you to," she returned petulantly.

"We own a perfectly nice television. High definition with Dolby surround sound."

"It's in the den. I wanted a little privacy."

A few minutes passed in silence. "I'm doing a story on that sect that took over the old Wilson farm." He told her about Sister Wendy and the Indigo Children.

"Sounds like a lot of hooey."

Jason raised a forkful of butternut squash laced with honey and cinnamon to his lips. If the elders had located their commune in hippie-dippy California, preferably somewhere north just off the Pacific Coast Highway, the group might have stood a much better chance of attracting a following. But thirty miles outside of Boston with its Calvinist work ethic and Puritan mindset was a long shot. The sort of hard-working, blue collar stiffs that populated Brandenberg weren't about to be snookered by a crackpot, New Age cult. Jason would write the article, trying to edit out his own personal bias and let the proverbial chips fall where they may.

His daughter carried her empty plate to the sink. "Since I cooked the meal," Jason remarked as Carmen headed back in the direction of her forty-inch, liquid crystal display TV, "would you terribly mind rinsing out the dishes?" Reluctantly, she turned back. "And don't put the Pyrex dish in to soak for at least ten minutes," he cautioned, "until it has a chance to properly cool."

After supper Jason drifted into the living room and put on Frank Zappa's Hungry Freaks, Daddy from the classic mid-sixties recording. He raised the speaker volume then went in the kitchen where he mixed a sloe gin and tonic. The sickly-sweet, pink liqueur always gave him a fuzzy drunk followed by an atrocious hangover. But sometimes that wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

Mr. America, walk on by your schools that do not teach

Mr. America, walk on by the minds that won't be reached

Mr. America try to hide the emptiness that's you inside

But once you find that the way you lied

And all the corny tricks you tried

Will not forestall the rising tide of HUNGRY FREAKS DADDY

Jason could sit on plush cushions in The Seekers of Truth meditation hall listening to Sister Wendy hawk her metaphysical wares, but it didn't make him any less of a hungry freak. He was slip sliding away. Sister Wendy with her corny bag of tricks just left him more jaded, misanthropic.

They won't go on four no more

Great mid-western hardware store

Philosophy that turns away

From those who aren't afraid to say what's on their minds

The left behinds of the great society

HUNGRY FREAKS DADDY!

After the third listening, Jason reduced the volume by half. He didn't want the neighbors accusing him of noise pollution. And Carmen might storm downstairs, demanding to know what was wrong with her normally staid and respectable old man.

Later that night as he was laying under the covers, his daughter shuffled into the room and stood in the darkness near the foot of the bed. "Daddy."

"Yes, Sweetheart?"

"Are my eyes overly large and clear?"

"Like twinkling diamonds."

"And is my mind precocious with an amazing memory?"

"Einstein, da Vinci, Victor Hugo,... you put them all to shame."

"Am I one of the Indigo Children?"

"Yes, of course, Carmen," he replied dreamily. "I'm shocked you would even feel the need to ask."

"Thank you, Daddy." She padded back to her own room and shut the light.

At two in the morning, Jason's shiatsu, Grover, began pawing insistently at the bed rail. Throwing a flannel bathrobe over his pajamas, he accompanied the dog to the back door and watched as it scampered down the stairs, disappearing into the darkness. Normally, Jason might have gone back inside, fixed a cup of tea and waited for the dog to return. But coyotes were recently sighted in the nearby woods and residents warned to keep small pets indoors. Wandering out to the middle of the yard, he found Grover sitting on his haunches like a halfwit staring aimlessly into space. When he approached, the dog stuck out its tiny tongue and started panting. "False alarm?"

Earlier that day, while Jason was relaxing in the cool comfort of the meditation hall with Sister Wendy, his mind kept flitting back to the young girl at the trout pond. In a few days, Maribel would travel to Alaska. He imagined her below decks on a rust-bucket trawler slopping gooey pancake batter onto a griddle to feed a dozen hungry fishermen. There certainly was nothing glamorous about the job. Along with the crew, she would freeze in winter and risk being caught far out at sea in dangerous weather. Jason sensed that, from Maribel Munson's flinty perspective, the only calamity more terrifying than shipwreck was the prospect of spending another tedious week with The Seekers of Truth.

"Finally!" Grover lifted a hind leg and did his business. Almost immediately, the dog rushed aimlessly in circles sniffing the darkened grass - always a sure sign that the best was yet to come.

Jason gazed up at a clear sky, quarter moon and broad expanse of stars; an aromatic potpourri of fresh-mown grass and lilacs perfumed the dew-drenched, early morning air. When Jason was Maribel's age, had he ever done anything quite so reckless as shipping out on a commercial fishing trawler?

Reckless, with its implicitly disparaging connotation, was a poor choice of words. Courageous, endearing, pigheaded, outlandish, daring, desperate, exhilarating – all more vivid terms to properly describe Maribel's wanderlust!

There were a handful of 'magical' first moments Jason could look back on with fading nostalgia. The first time he snagged a large mouth bass on ten-pound line with a lemony hula popper lure. The first time he smacked some wiseacre in the nose at a high school hockey game. The jerk promptly got up off the ice and returned the favor bloodying Jason's lip, another unforgettable experience. The first time he rode the death-defying roller coaster at Nantasket Beach (the amusement park was closed down many years now). The first time he embraced his future wife.

So when had these magical moments become passé? Or were they nothing more than a transitory right of passage from reckless youth to bland adulthood? You bartered away those high adventures for more sedentary dreams.

The shiatsu with the corkscrew tail suddenly flipped about, a full three-sixty, hunched over, grunted and dumped yesterday's lunch under a red oak sapling. "Okay, Grover, let's call it a night." Sweeping the pooch up in his arms, he bounded up the steps and returned to bed.



A week passed. Jason wrote the commune article. The reportage was fair and objective, leaving the reader to decide for himself if The Seekers of Truth was a legitimate religious order or motley collection of dysfunctional weirdoes.

Wednesday afternoon, the receptionist at the Brandenberg Gazette buzzed Jason on the intercom. "Young girl wants to see you."

Maribel Munsen was sitting in the lobby her tanned legs splayed to either side. "I left the commune."

"For good?"

She nodded. "I'm driving cross-country in the morning." She rose and stretched her lanky limbs. "Where can I get a decent burger around here?"

"Depends on how you define the term 'decent'."

Maribel lowered her eyes. When she finally looked up, a silly smirk was inching its way across her face from the upturned corners of the lips to the dark eyes. "This svelte Jewish girl arrived at the commune a few days after I got there. By the beginning of June she'd gained thirty pounds and was suffering from chronic diarrhea." She lowered her voice a handful of decibels. "I've spent the last twelve weeks farting my brains out on tofu salads, organic bean sprouts and whole grain breads heavier than paving stones. Now I need some real food."

Jason grabbed his car keys off the desk, "I know just the place."

They drove across the town up route 156 past the junior high school and Benny's Hardware to Toner Boulevard. "What do you think?"

A Burger King sign loomed directly ahead. Maribel grinned broadly. "Yeah, that should do just fine!"

At the counter, the girl ordered a double cheeseburger and fries with a strawberry smoothie. "Would you like to biggie-size that," the cashier asked, "for an extra fifty cents?"

Without waiting for Maribel's reply, Jason said, "I'll have the same and biggie-size both orders."

"How old are you?" he asked when they were seated.

She dangled a French fry dripping with catsup in front of her lips. "Twenty-five."

"I got a daughter your age."

"And what's she like?"

He didn't respond right away. "Carmen,... she's got a drinking problem. The girl's up to her eyeballs in credit card debt and sleeps with every horny bastard that sweet-talks her into the sack. Other than that, she's a swell kid."

Maribel blinked twice. "You sure are a strange one. So what are you gonna do?"

"About what?"

"Your slutty daughter."

"I thought we were talking about the drawbacks of a vegetarian lifestyle?"

"We're finished with that for now. You never heard of tough love?"

Jason was familiar with the concept, but, where Carmen was concerned, it was so much easier to side-step the issue. "The busty blond girl weeding the vegetable garden," he said, shifting gears. "Is she still there?"

"Studying pagan rituals. Gwen wants to be a Wiccan. She put her husband and kids on the back burner indefinitely so she can howl at the moon and do whatever unencumbered spirits do with their newfound freedom." Maribel screwed her face up in a foul expression. "There are a lot of lost souls – mostly college dropouts – at the farm. But, truth be told, they're just a symptom of what's ailing this country."

Reaching out, Maribel rested a hand on Jason's forearm, "I'm not looking down my snotty nose at Gwen. The Wiccan priestess,... she's just metaphysical road kill - one more victim among a myriad of disenfranchised, lost souls." The door burst open and a clot of teenage girls dressed in soccer uniforms and calf-high athletic socks flooded into the restaurant. Jason watched the youngsters mugging it up as they formed a raggedy line snaking toward the front counter. What Maribel was saying – it was just an updated version of the sixties Frank Zappa musical anthem: more hungry freaks with no viable options.

Maribel stuffed what little remained of her double cheeseburger in her mouth. The food gone, the girl wiped her mouth then leaned across the table and kissed Jason lightly on the cheek. Totally spur of the moment, there was nothing suggestive in the act; the gossamer brush of her lips was quite possibly the nicest thing to happened to him in ages. "If you don't mind, I'm going to grab a bowl of chili to take with."



As weeks passed, the impression left by Maribel Munsen did not fade but intensified, taking on a life of its own. Jason could see the angular, chiseled features as though the young girl was standing in the room no more than three feet away. She wore no makeup. The clothes were neat but utterly unremarkable - her only bit of jewelry, if you could even call it that, a rawhide bracelet looped over her slender right wrist.

At night sometimes when he was having trouble falling asleep, Jason would conjure up her image for a nocturnal tête-à-tête.

"Well hello there, Maribel."

She was sitting on the Naugahyde sofa Jason's ex-wife, Melanie, bought with money she earned from the sale of a duplex early on in the marriage "Why do you keep dragging me back here, Jason?"

"I need help sorting things out."

"What things?"

"The train wreck which is my personal life. What should I do with Carmen?"

"Throw her to the wolves."

"She can't cook or keep house. She's promiscuous and drinks too much."

"You already told me that at the burger joint," Maribel reminded him. "Anyway, Carmen's not the issue."

"How's that?."

"You're not doing Carmen any favors by wiping her tender nose every time she does something sickening. Your daughter can fend for herself."

"Those are very sweet sentiments."

"Can I leave now?"

"No, please... just a little longer."

"Goodbye!"



One day Jason was in the upstairs study writing out a check for the quarterly real estate tax. Eight hundred thirty-one dollars and seventy-five cents made payable to the City of Brandenberg. All that money for the privilege of living on the goddamn street three more months! He felt a sudden impulse to rip the check into a hundred pieces and then to do the same with the rubbish and water bill that would be arriving in a week's time. Build a lean-to from twigs and leaves in the woods. Dig a well and live off the land. What land? There was no more free or even affordable land in America. According to Melanie, a tiny parcel no bigger than a quarter acre cost a small fortune!

And about the taxes, the town would eventually put a lien on his split-level house until he paid up or, worse yet, after a few years, confiscate the property. Then he'd be penniless. Homeless. You couldn't win. All the precocious, bright-eyed Indigo Children had grown up and put their intellects to work as city planners, public officials, lawyers, speculators, financiers and politicians.

For fear of ending up in a straight jacket, Jason scrupulously avoided telling anyone about his growing disenchantment with the American dream. Now, for the first time, haltingly and with a growing sense of personal conviction, he told Maribel Munsen. But he only did this late at night when he had trouble dropping off to sleep, and, if she complained about his morose moods, Jason quickly changed the topic to something less strident.

"I found this lovely poem by the German poet, Rilke, buried away in the stacks at the library." Jason recited the short verse from memory.

Sometimes a man stands up during supper

and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,

because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his house,

dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,

so that his children have to go far out into the world

toward that same church, which he forgot.

After the poem was done, the spectral Maribel stood perfectly still for the longest time. "I hope you're not planning to share those sentiments with your straight-laced coworkers at the Brandenberg Gazette."

"Not in this lifetime," Jason snickered. "Lately I feel more and more like that pathetic slob, dying inside the dishes and the glasses."

"Problem is," Maribel replied, "there are no more churches in the East."



Jason's former wife, Melanie, flipped houses. She bought foreclosed real estate. Business or residential – it made no difference. Or she found out about someone who was in a financial bind, medical crisis or personal upheaval and turned a tidy profit on their misfortune. His wife always pointed out that what she did was scrupulously honest, since the property owner's calamity was none of her doing. If anything, she was simply 'facilitating' a resolution of unfortunate circumstances.

When Mrs. Abercrombie, who lived three streets over, lost her husband to prostate cancer, Melanie was there in a heartbeat. She arrived at the woman's front door in the late afternoon with a condolence card, bouquet of roses and offer to buy the property at fair market value. Her idea of fair market value topped out at eighty per cent of the appraised value of residential property in the area, but the distraught widow was only too happy to get rid of the furnishings and move to an assisted living facility in Brookline that boasted gourmet dining and regular trips to hear the Boston Pops Orchestra perform at Symphony Hall.

Melanie unloaded the property within a week of the widow Abercrombie vacating the premises and pocketed close to ten thousand dollars in clear profit. Then she drove to the newsstand at the corner of Murphy Boulevard and bought a newspaper to check the obituaries and new listings of area property being sold for liens and back taxes. The fact that Jason refused to buy into the Melanie's version of the American Dream had them sleeping in separate bedroom by the time Carmen entered kindergarten.

One day he returned home from work and found the answering machine flashing with a new message. "This is Angelina Fuentes from 32 Scenic Vista Drive," the woman with the thick Hispanic accent was sobbing into the phone. "Please call me."

Melanie was late getting home that night. She checked messages then fixed herself a Caesar's salad and cup of tea. "What did Mrs. Fuentes want?"

His wife teased a crouton onto the tangs of her fork and raised it to her lips. "She's three months behind on her mortgage payments. The bank started eviction proceedings."

"Why is she calling here?"

Melanie shrugged. Reaching for a knife she slathered butter on a slice of fresh sourdough bread. "No idea."

It was a cat-and-mouse game. She wouldn't volunteer information about the tearful Mrs. Fuentes. Being a reporter, Jason was used to puzzling stories together from tidbits of random information. Three years earlier, his wife had hooked up with Willow Tree Lending, a financing firm that specialized in the subprime real estate market. They wrote mortgages for people with bad credit, no credit and questionable income. Since then, there had been at least eight similar calls from people losing new homes, being evicted and thrown out in the street. "What you're doing is criminal." Jason made no effort to hide his disgust.

"Coming from someone who considers 'work' a four-letter word, I'll let that slide."

"You knew perfectly well when you sold the property that the woman couldn't afford the monthly payments. You earn a hefty commission, while Mrs. Fuentes and her children end up in the poor house." Jason waited but there was no response. Melanie wasn't flustered. Neither was she angry or conflicted in any way. Finishing with the light meal, she leaned back leisurely in the chair and took a sip of tea.

"Want to know the difference between you and a vulture?" He didn't bother waiting for a response. "By scavenging nature's waste, the bird serve a useful purpose."

In early May, just before Mother's Day, Jason spotted Melanie sitting at the counter in Ryan's Diner. They had been divorced ten years. She was hunched over a copy of The Brandenberg Gazette clutching a yellow magic marker. Jason imagined his ex-wife circling prime pickings among the obituaries and recently foreclosed properties. Her hair was going gray at the temples and the crow's feet around her eyes lent the middle-aged face a haggard quality. Melanie had always been modestly pretty in an ebullient, if somewhat harsh, sort of way. Now the effusive enthusiasm that blunted the sharp edges of her temperament had faded. All that wheeling and dealing came with a price tag. Cosmetic surgery or a few Botox injections could repair the external damage. Only the external damage.

Things had been spiraling out of control in the marriage long before Melanie walked out. His ex-wife complained that Jason wasn't enterprising enough. He lacked motivation, direction, and initiative. All of which was true or at least it was accurate from her stilted, money-grubbing perspective.

His wife earned conservatively three times what he did. She said he was low energy, complacent, – worse yet, an inveterate underachiever. So Jason was secretly ecstatic when Melanie rented a U-haul and cleared out her belongings to set up housekeeping with a senior partner at the firm. He never felt cuckold, betrayed. On the contrary, he experienced a queer sense of moral vindication. Let the greedy bitch satiate all her needs, carnal and otherwise.

Jason once considered cataloguing Melanie's verbal abuse in an informal compendium. He would pilfer a roll of toilet paper from the hall closet and, with an indelible marker, inscribe each new level of insult on the perforated sheets.

'I wipe my ass with a chronicle of your complaints' was the not-so-subtle message. The fantasy was infantile and only lent further credibility to his wife's argument that Jason was a lost soul.—half baked, childish, atrophied, a near-do-well, character disordered inadequate personality (Melanie borrowed that twenty-five cent gem from a friend with a PhD in abnormal psychology), and all-around ineffectual loser.



"Do you know what I want?" Jason was lying in bed at three-forty-five in the morning. A late spring thunderstorm was whipping sheets of rain against the storm windows with unrelenting force.

Maribel Munsen's wraithlike doppelganger was perched on a Windsor chair strategically placed near the foot of the bed. "If this degenerates into another rant against your ex-wife," Maribel warned, "I'm history."

"You already are history," Jason corrected. "No, it's nothing of the sort." "Did you ever hear that Frank Zappa tune about hungry freaks in America?"

Maribel shook her head. "That was before my time." A bright gash of light ricocheted off the far wall followed by a rumbling of thunder that built momentum until it finally climaxed in a deafening roar.

"First few years of our marriage, my wife and I used to go camping in the White Mountains. Sleeping bags, Coleman stoves, birding binoculars, hiking gear—the whole shebang." "One day Melanie comes to me and says Willa Cather betrayed the woman's movement and her books should be banned from libraries."

"Willa who?"

"Cather. A novelist from the eighteen hundreds."

"What crime did she commit?"

"In My Antonia the middle-aged heroine marries a farmer and begins raising a family. The National Organization of Woman, in their infinite wisdom, felt the ending to the novel was a betrayal of feminist ideals."

"So your ex-wife morphed from a naturalist into a bra-burning feminazi," Maribel was clearly unimpressed. "That woman's less a physical presence in your life than I am, but you're still agonizing over her." "Your wife and daughter,... They're just symptoms. They're not the disease that's eating away at you."



"What're you doing? Carmen returned home from work the third week in September to find her father laying out underwear and athletic socks across the bed.

"Taking a sabbatical from the rat race." Straightening up, Jason wrapped his daughter in a generous bear hug. "I bought a Eurrail Pass—twenty-one countries over six weeks." Scooping up a backpack mounted on an aluminum frame, Jason slipped the harness over his shoulders. The price tag was still dangling from a chrome post. "What do you think?"

Carmen's face cycled through a series of unflattering contortions before settling on anxious disbelief. "I think you drank from a well with crazy water. What about the newspaper?"

He waved a hand in a placating gesture. "I had some vacation time coming. It's no big deal." Locating a map on the bureau, he splayed it on the surface of the bed. The itinerary took Jason in a sweeping arc from Luxembourg up through the Scandinavian countries then backtracking through southern Germany, Switzerland and Italy. "From Florence," he thumped the map weaving a finger along the Mediterranean, "I'll skirt the coast and spend a few days in Paris. From there, head south, cross the Pyrenees and tour Spain."

"What about accommodations?"

Jason removed the backpack and leaned the metal frame up against the bedrail. "I'll be staying at dirt-cheap pensions and youth hostels along the way." He waved a copy of Fodor's Essential Europe, The Best Of 16 Exceptional Countries under his daughter's nose. "Already got a list, country by country."

"Don't you think you're a little old for the Youth Hostel circuit?" Carmen groused.

"I'm considering a side trip," he ignored the remark, turning his attention back to the crumpled map, "through southern Spain to the port city of Algeciras, where I could cross the Bay of Gibraltar by ferry to North Africa." He tousled his daughters blond hair. "Bring you back a souvenir or two from the Arab bazaars in Casablanca."

"When do you leave?"

"A week from Friday."

Twin rivulets began to dribble down Carmen's cheeks. "In your absence, I'll starve to death."

"You'll do just fine." Jason steered her out of the bedroom in the direction of the stairs. "I already set up the crock pot on the kitchen counter along with a dozen beginner recipes. Even wrote out step-by-step instructions for the lemon-dill salmon." Draping an arm over her shoulder, he pulled her close and planted a sloppy kiss on Carmen's cheek. "This is just the beginning."

"Beginning of what?"

"Not sure." Releasing his grip, Jason held his daughter at arm's length. "When I get back, we'll just have to play it by ear."

Return to Table of Contents

Old Man and Old Woman

"We need to talk." Clarice's tone was frigid, all business. Throwing the covers aside, she slithered off the side of the bed. Moving to the center of the room, she placed her fleshy arms up over her head and began to gyrate – as lewd and suggestive a performance as a person might expect at two in the morning in the VIP room of the Foxy Lady Lounge in downtown Providence.

But it was a perfunctory display of physical assets. Clarice wasn't trying to arouse or titillate Alex, at least not in the conventional sense of the words. When the raunchy dance was done, she lowered her arms. "Eight months we have been dating. If you don't want marry me before the year is out, I can live with that. But, we should at least live together. One way or the other, I got to get on with my life."

Alex gave the woman an appraising once over before glancing away. Clarice was physical perfection personified – the luscious breasts that stood at firm attention even with her arms down, the straw-colored blond hair and velvety skin that blushed pink when she stepped out of a steamy shower. The other night, Clarice wore a strapless, black evening gown with pearl drop earrings to a family gathering, and the odd thought flitted across Alex's mind that the woman was quite possibly even more beautiful with clothes than in the buff.

Then why the hesitation? Cold feet were one thing, but there was nothing intrinsically wrong with Clarice. Besides her bodacious charms, the woman was reasonably intelligent, had a great sense of humor and came to the relationship with no excess emotional baggage. "Okay," Alex beckoned with outstretched arms. "The beginning of the month we'll set up housekeeping together."

When Clarice was gone, Alex drifted into the kitchen and put the coffee on. Agreeing to cohabitate with the luscious vixen registered a perfect ten on the Richter scale of dopey deeds. Alex had no intention of ever setting up house with the blonde much less marrying her. Outside of maintaining her gorgeous looks, the woman had few interests. Clarice was sweet, kind and considerate. But he wasn't in love with her. She was a trophy wife, not a woman to grow old with.

Alex would be seeing Clarice again around mid-week. He would tell her the truth straight out. He had spoken prematurely; the notion of setting up house together was a bad idea. Maybe they should start seeing other people. She would throw a hissy fit. The woman would accuse him of being a selfish lothario, an inconsiderate bastard. Then, inside a week, she would dry the crocodile tears and put her luscious, thirty-something flesh back in circulation. No need to pity Clarice during her short-lived, dark night of the soul. There would be more guys queuing up for a date with Clarice than diehard, New York fans vying for tickets to a Yankee's World Series game.

But why didn't he just tell the woman the truth?

I think you're a swell human being,, if just a tad bit vapid and narcissistic. What did he really want? He didn't want some upwardly mobile fashion plate who pulled up short every time she passed a mirror. To be sure, Clarice's ultimatum had caught him at the worse possible time. At the home care agency, receivables were chasing expenses like the proverbial carrot on the end of a stick. No matter how much money he brought in, there was never any profit margin from one month to the next. In April, Alex had to borrow ten thousand dollars to cover payroll and a federal tax payment. You didn't screw around with the Feds. So why, if the company was expanding and taking on new contracts, was money so tight? In a panic, Alex had called the accountant and a meeting was set for later that morning.



At Caring Hearts Home Care, Phyllis Moon, the office coordinator, was waiting with a stack of messages when Alex arrived. A health aide called out sick with strep throat and all of her elderly clients would need coverage through the week. Mrs. Mancuso left a vulgar message on the answering machine to the effect that the home health aide had stolen one of her hearing aides. In her nineties, the client was demented and constantly misplacing things. Still, the case manager over at the Department of Elderly Affairs would need to be notified as well as Mrs. Mancuso's daughter.

"You look tired," Phyllis observed.

"Yeah, well maybe a little." The early morning lovemaking coupled with Clarice's ultimatum put Alex out of sorts.

"Can I get you a coffee or anything?" she added.

Alex stared at the woman. "No, thanks." Where Clarice was the quintessential hot tamale, Phyllis resembled a soothing gazpacho. A slender beanpole of a woman, the receptionist's dark skin and short-cropped raven hair framed a face that was pleasant if unremarkable. She wore dark-framed glasses and infuriatingly drab skirts and blouses that reminded Alex of the scholarly, old spinster you might find in Copley Square behind the reference desk at the Boston Public Library. But the woman was efficient and dependable. Phyllis knew how to calm a crotchety client addicted to stool softeners, to finesse a homemaker into taking on a difficult case while keeping office politics to a bare minimum.

"Your accountant's stopping by this morning."

"Yes, I know," Alex replied. "Clarice wants us to live together... cohabitate."

"That's nice." Phyllis replied in an introspective, low-keyed monotone.

Both lines lit up simultaneously. "Caring Hearts Home Care." Phyllis put the first caller on hold and attended to the second.

Alex picked up the flashing line. "Can I help you?"

"Sarah Cohen from Scenic View Apartments. Is my aide coming this morning?"

Alex glanced at the clock on the far wall. "It's not quite nine o'clock. The girl should be there momentarily."

"I got an appointment with the podiatrist. Senior van is picking me up at eleven. She gotta help me get dressed."

"The aide will be there shortly," Alex promised.

"Ingrown toenail. It's all infected...pus and everything. The girl's got to help me get ready."

"Has Mildred ever been late?"

"No, never," the old woman observed with genuine feeling. "Mildred's good as gold."

"So you're all set then?"

"Yeah, for sure." There was a slight pause. "This is the third time."

"Third time what?"

"I got this crumby foot infection." Alex could hear a commotion in the background. "Wait, somebody's at the door. I gotta hang up."

"That would be Mildred," Alex noted but the line had already gone dead. Hanging up the phone he turned back to Phyllis. "Clarice and I have decided to live together."

"Yes, you just told me a moment ago." Phyllis tilted her slender neck to the side and smiled opaquely. "Congratulations."

Alex headed down the hallway in the direction of his office. "Let me know as soon as the accountant arrives."



"I examined your accounts receivable," Howie Tittlebaum noted. He was a small man with pale, flaccid skin and a receding hairline. "Company income is way up."

"I'm projecting a million five this year," Alex was seated behind his desk in the back office. A coffee-colored UPS truck swerved onto the street. That would be the non-surgical glove shipment he ordered the middle of last week. Ten cases of latex-free, powdered gloves for the health aides who bathed their clients.

"That's good," Howie observed, "but profits are in the toilet." He laid a spreadsheet on top of the desk. "Look here." He stabbed at a double line midway down the page. "Caring Hearts brought in close to four hundred thousand in gross sales through March, but blew three-quarters of the revenue on payroll."

Alex's expression darkened. "Our business is labor-intensive. To stay competitive with the nursing homes, we give regular pay raises. But then the state nickel-and-dimes us to death." Alex cracked his knuckles and shook his head in disgust. "A ton of money flows in every month but it flies back out the window in operating expenses."

"You think you're in health care?" Howie waved his slender hands in the air, assuming the gently mocking tone of a practical jokester. "Surprise! Surprise! You're in the garment trade!" He burst out laughing hysterically at his own joke.

"The garment industry in New York," the humor was tempered now with an equal measure of gravitas, "functions on a razor-thin profit margin. The small shops can't raise prices, because the jerk down the street will undercut them; so clothiers got no control over their operating expenses. Millions of dollars in, millions out." "You can cart the goddamn money to the bank in a freakin' wheelbarrow, but if it's all eaten up in wages, there isn't a plug nickel's worth of profit at the end of the day."

"So what do you suggest?"

"You don't need more money, you need stronger profit," he replied. "Hit the state for a rate increase when you renegotiate contracts." Howie rose and, reaching across the desk, pumped Alex's hand up and down. "When you own your own company," he quipped, "everybody thinks you're rolling in dough."

Alex gazed distractedly about the room. His eyes came to rest on the new computer and dot matrix printer they used for processing the continuous-feed payroll slips. That set him back a good penny. Now he had to fork over another three hundred dollars to the Peachtree software company that designed the automated accounting program. Every couple of years they came out with an updated program that rendered what Alex was currently using obsolete. "Little do they know."



"Do you like Clarice?"

Phyllis Moon gawked at him with a quizzical expression. "You put me in an awkward spot with a question like that."

A homemaker wearing a green smock came to pick up directions plus pay slips for a new client. "It's not a trick question," Alex groused when the homemaker was gone. "Either you like my future wife or not."

Phyllis removed her dark-frame glasses, sprayed the lenses with a pocket-size cleaner then wiped the surface dry with a tissue. "You just went from dating to cohabitating to wedding bells."

Before he could respond, a dark blue Toyota sedan with a moon roof pulled up in front of the building, and, what was turning out to be a totally crumby day suddenly got a whole lot worse. "Oh, God!" Alex muttered. "That's Jessica Stern from the Department of Health."

Every year without notice the Brandenberg Department of Health bushwhacked the home care agencies with an unscheduled visit. The purpose ostensibly was to make sure that paperwork was in order, employees' medical records up to date and agencies were following regulations. That was the stated purpose for the inspections. But Jessica Stern always brought a secondary agenda. The dour woman would dig and dig and dig and dig until she found some petty indiscretion, lapse of bureaucratic procedure or infinitesimal sin of omission. Then, like a gladiator in the Roman coliseum, Jessica Stern launched a full frontal attack.

Alex set the inspector up in a small vestibule off the entryway. Five minutes into her visit Jessica flagged him down. "The elder abuse hotline number on the patient bill of rights form is incorrect," she said in a pinched tone. The woman was tall, over six feet, with a wide jaw and meticulously combed auburn hair. "What you have here," she repeated "is an outdated number."

"We were never notified of the changed," he replied weakly.

"The Department of Health contacted every provider." Jessica gave him a withering look that precluded any further discussion of the matter. "When did you print these forms?"

"Just last week. We ordered fifteen hundred."

"They'll all have to be destroyed, and every client issued a new one with the correct telephone number before the end of the month." "This is totally unacceptable!" she added for good measure. "Where's your Emergency Disaster Control Plan?"

"Disaster Control Plan," Alex repeated dully. Three years earlier, following the 911 terrorist attack, the state told all health care providers to draw up a written plan detailing how they would continue to operate following a national catastrophe – germ warfare, nuclear explosion, earthquake, flood, holocaust, God-knows-what. Alex had dutifully churned out ten pages of surrealistic drivel over the better part of a week. The original document was buried in his computer hard drive, the printed version filed away somewhere in the office.

Alex rummaged through the three-ring folders and manuals lining the credenza. No luck. He sat down. A fat bumblebee just outside the window was circling the mouth of an orangey tiger lily. Across the street the driver of a Pepsi Cola van was stacking crates of soda on a hand truck to be wheeled into the grocery market.



Alex allowed himself one colossal, ignominious blunder per year. Every three hundred and sixty-five days, give or take a month, he could transgress, do something so utterly regrettable that he cringed with mortal embarrassment.

One stupendously stupid blunder per year. In less than an hour he had tripled the quota! Alex groaned inwardly. Why did he tell Phyllis they were moving in together? And, worse yet, why did he describe Clarice as his future wife? One lie heaped on another. A fetid pile of deceit! Was Alex even capable of being truthful anymore?

Yes, his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend was a fatuous airhead, but he, the owner of Caring Hearts Home Care was a pathological liar incapable of stringing two modestly truthful statements back to back. And now he couldn't find the goddamn Emergency Disaster Control Plan.

The Emergency Disaster Control Plan read like bad science fiction. Militant Pakistanis had just dropped a nuclear bomb on downtown Brandenberg. Alex would of course ignore immediate family and rush back to the demolished home care agency. To do what? To insure that Sarah Cohen from Scenic View Apartments got her pussy toe lanced by the podiatrist; to make a side trip to the drug store (if it hadn't already burnt to the ground or been looted) to purchase an organic laxative for the lady with fecal impactions. The town had just been incinerated on a scale similar to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but the bureaucratic master plan trumped all mundane considerations.

So what did he really want? Alex wanted someone like Phyllis Moon, the home care receptionist. Phyllis or a close facsimile. The near-sighted woman with the self-effacing manner wasn't a sexual firecracker. She was a plain Jane—pleasant, reliable, dependable, durable, forthright, stolid and on and on and on and ....

She was also spoken for.

Phyllis had a steady boyfriend, Donald. Alex assumed the pudgy man with the swarthy, pock-marked face was either Arab or Hispanic. Always polite, with a gently, self-effacing smile, Donald stopped by the office occasionally to take Phyllis out to lunch. Though she never discussed her personal life, Alex assumed they were engaged.



"Did you check the blue binder?"

Alex looked up. Phyllis was leaning against the door jamb.

"That's where we store the telephone logs."

"Yes, but you have a tendency to cram all sorts of junk in there." She opened the folder and thumbed through the blue binder, section by section. "Yes, here it is. Right where you filed it away three years ago." She pried the metal rings apart, extricating the Emergency Disaster Control Plan. "I'll bring it out to Mrs. Stern." She hurried off.

When Jessica Stern was gone, Alex called the Brandenberg Department of Health. "This is Alex over at Caring Hearts Home Care. We need the new Elder Abuse Hotline number."

"Yes, I have that right here," the woman on the other end of the line replied. "Eight, four, nine,... nine, six, five, three."

Alex felt like he had been sucker punched in the solar plexus. "No that's the number we presently have. It's been replaced, updated."

"One minute please." After a lengthy pause the receptionist returned. "I'm so sorry. The correct number is six, one, five ..."

"Well that went well," Alex said bleakly. He told Phyllis about the comedy of errors with the outdated telephone number. "Jessica Stern is writing us up... giving the agency a deficiency."

Phyllis smirked. "Sort of like high school, when you flunk a test or get caught smoking in the bathroom."

"A lot more costly," Alex observed. "Those forms we have to scrap cost over a hundred bucks."

"What are you doing this weekend?" he asked.

"I'm camping in the White Mountains," she replied. "Gonna hike the trails and maybe do some fly-fishing."

"You don't strike me as the outdoors type."

"Is that so?" There was no immediate reply. "What's my name?" Alex stared at her queerly. Between Clarice and Jessica Stern, he was too washed out to respond. "What's my name?" she prodded.

"Phyllis. Phyllis Moon."

"I was born Phyllis Half Moon. When I moved east from the reservation in Butte Montana I dropped the 'Half'."

"I would like to think," there was neither any hint of rebuke or anger in her voice, "that a full-blooded Blackfoot Indian should know a thing or two about communing with Mother Nature."



Later that night, Alex called Phyllis at home. "You work for me five years and only just now get around to telling me about your heritage?"

"What the heck do you know about my heritage?" She had never spoken to him in that way and the caustic tone brought him up short. "How many tribes make up the Blackfoot Nation?" This time she didn't bother to wait for a reply. "Four – the North and South Peigans, the Kinai Nation, also known as the Bloods, and the Siksika."

What did Alex know about the American Indians? In his junior year in high school the history teacher touched briefly on the ugly legacy of Manifest Destiny. In the far west, the Spanish wanted to convert all the Indians to their way of life and, on the whole they were surprisingly successful. The English never tried to make Englishman out of the Indians. Instead they saw the red man as part of the wilderness that they aimed to clear away.

"I want to go camping with you in the White Mountains."

The remarked was greeted with a whooping belly laugh. "That's ridiculous! You're virtually engaged to Clarice."

"Not so," he protested. "And, anyway, I just need to get away."

"A vision quest," Phyllis said tongue in cheek.

"What's that?"

"A young Indian wanders off into the wilderness alone and fast. After three or four days of mortification of the flesh, the Great Spirit sends a message. Or maybe nothing at all."

"Sounds a little intense. Can I go with you to the White Mountain?"

"No," she hissed. "Absolutely not."

"For my mental well being, I got to get away."

Alex watched the second hand on the wall clock tick ten, fifteen, twenty-five seconds. Out in the street, an ambulance or fire truck sped by red light and siren. "Separate tents. No funny stuff. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, of course. So what do I need to bring?"

"I'll do up a list. What about Clarice?"

"I'll just say I'm going away on business."

"You'll do no such thing. You can tell her that you're camping in the White Mountains with friends."

"What if she demands particulars?"

"That's none of my business, because I'll be driving up alone," she replied and hung up the phone.



The rest of the week flew by. Jessica Stern mailed a list of infractions and deficiencies which required a written plan of corrections within ten days. Thursday afternoon Clarice called. "I'm three blocks from your apartment."

Alex immediately hung up and began rehearsing his we-need-to-talk spiel, but when Clarice arrived the issue never came up. "My father had emergency surgery to remove a blood clot in his leg."

"When was this?" Alex felt a huge sense of relief.

"Earlier this morning." I'm flying out tonight to be with my mother. Won't be back until sometime the middle of next week."

"Need a lift to Logan?"

"You're so sweet." She slipped her arms around his waist and leaned forward. "Want to grab a quickie before I go?"

By the scattered tone and the way her eyes flitted distractedly about the room, Alex understood the offer as more formality than a matter of sexual need. "Not necessary."

She kissed his cheek then wiped the wetness away with the heel of her hand. "Poor boy, you'll be all alone this weekend."

Alex felt a queer rush of joy tinged with anticipation. "Oh, I'll just have to make do." "By the way," he added, shifting gears, "Howie Tittlebaum stopped by the office Monday."

"The accountant."

"He claims I've been spending too much time growing revenue when I should be focusing on profit."

Clarice picked at a cuticle. "What's the difference?" He repeated the comparison Howie had made between home care and the garment industry. "You earn over a million dollars," she spoke slowly measuring her words, "but you're still a pauper?"

"The agency rakes in tons of money," Alex said, "but the after-tax profit is pitifully low."

She flashed him a sick look. "I'm sure you'll figure something. And I got to get to Logan Airport in less than two hours."



Friday afternoon Alex told Phyllis about Clarice's abrupt departure. "Is Donald joining us?"

"Joining me," Phyllis corrected. "No. He has a drinking problem and we're not dating anymore."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Alex said. "For the life of me, I don't see why we can't drive up together."

"Because," Phyllis' stony expression never wavered, "to do so would be crass and smarmy."

"I'm not two-timing Clarice."

"No," Phyllis replied evenly, "but you're not being terribly honest either."

"I still don't see why we can't drive up in one car."

Phyllis turned away. "Clearly you didn't hear a solitary thing I said."



Saturday morning, Alex drove north through Boston, where he caught the Route 93 Interstate to the New Hampshire state line. He continued on through Plymouth and Compton, skirting to the west of Lake Winnipesauke. The campground was well over two hours away and the unsavory thought had occurred to Alex even before he left Brandenberg that Phyllis might pull a practical joke and not show up. Then what would he do? Check into a motel for the night? Now that made perfect sense! He bought a tent, sleeping bag and lengthy list of necessities that Phyllis Moon (or was it Half Moon?) recommended, but would end up spending the night in some dumpy, flea-bitten motel before driving back like a total fool.

At Holdeness he entered the southern tip of the White Mountains National Forest and continued on for another thirty miles veering off the interstate onto route 112 heading east to Loon Mountain. At the third set of traffic lights he pulled over at a small coffee shop; Phyllis was waiting near a picnic table sipping a cup of coffee. She was dressed sensibly – a pair of heavy-soled hiking boots, khaki shorts and a plaid blouse.

"Is there anything you need?" He shook his head. "The campground is two miles up on the right. You can follow me." She climbed into a tan Subaru sedan and edged out into traffic.



Phyllis had called ahead earlier in the week to reserved a space near the lake. "You'll want to get the gear set up and campsite arranged to your liking."

Once they lugged their supplies down to the water, Phyllis started unpacking. Alex was in no great hurry. Instead, he wandered down to the lake then doubled back to the registration office where he picked up a few brochures describing local attractions. "Is that a tent or a Mediterranean villa?"

Phyllis, who was pounding a metal stake into the spongy earth, nudged her glasses up on the bridge of her nose and grinned. The elongated tent featured two doors with a massive vestibule plus a six-pocket gear loft. The poles were anodized aluminum with a mesh canopy and overhead vents to eliminate condensation. "It's the Big Agnes Emerald Mountain model." "The design is particularly good," she added as she pounded away at the last stake, "weathering high wind situations." Having finished she ran a hand over the bed of pine needles carpeting the earth. "Where's your hatchet?"

"I forgot to bring one."

"Here, use this." She handed him the one at her feet. "I'm going back to the car to get the rest of my stuff."

It took Phyllis Moon three leisurely trips back and forth to her car to retrieve the rest of her camping gear. She brought a sleeping bag, flashlight with extra batteries, a kerosene lantern, transistor radio and folding chair. The bug spray and plastic cooler she left under a shaggy hemlock tree. Other items such as the mess kit, plastic cups, pot holders, a slightly scorched aluminum pan and spatula she arranged in the vestibule of the Big Agnes.

"What's the bucket for?" Alex asked.

"Hauling water." Phyllis wound a plastic alarm clock and set it just inside the front tent flap. "We can cook simple meals over the fire," she pointed to a blackened dirt cooking pit ringed by large stones, "but there's a pizza joint and breakfast nook three miles down on the right so, if the weather turns bad, we don't have to starve." She took a short handled spade. "I'm going to dig a shallow hole over behind that stand of birch trees. Do your business in the hole." Rummaging about in one of her waterproof storage sacks she removed a roll of fluffy toilet paper. "Don't throw the paper in the hole. Put it here." She held up a Ziploc storage bag with a plastic clip. "I'll hang it beside the hole."

When Alex's tent was erected and sleeping bag unrolled, Phyllis announced that she was going for a walk. "Did you bring extra socks?" Alex shook his head up and down. "How many pair?"

"Three."

"That's good. I've got a clothesline and detergent just in case."

"Was there anything you didn't bring?" She cracked a tepid smile and headed away from the lake toward the main trail.



The campground was shot through with an endless series of ponds, bogs and rocky hillocks that weaved around the lake. They came up over a gravelly hill. Phyllis knelt down and fingered a dull pink flower with feathery tendrils bursting from the center. "Blazing star," she pointed to a charred tree trunk nearby. "They don't like shade and tend to appear after the land has been scorched by fire."

Further on she pointed at a scattering of wildflowers sprouting on a rocky granite outcrops. "Be careful not to step on any of those."

Alex studied the delicate rather homely looking plant with its tiny pastel pink buds. "And why's that?"

"Silverlings have been disappearing here in the Northeast and some blame recreational hikers." They reached a clearing where the dense pine trees no longer hemmed them in. The sky was clear with a scattering of cumulus clouds. A brown hawk was circling on an updraft, searching for prey. "I climbed that mountain directly ahead last summer. At the summit, there were balsam fir and black spruce only thigh-high like miniature clumps of bonsai trees."

As she explained it, at the higher elevations many of the alpine plants were dwarfed to avoid the brutal winds and survive in the nutrient-poor substrate that couldn't possibly maintain regular forest plants. Even the shrubs were ground-hugging with thick, leathery leaves that sometimes curled at the margins to help reduce the physical abuse and dehydrating effects of the mountain winds.

"So when exactly," Alex pressed, "were you planning to tell me about your Indian heritage?"

Phyllis shrugged and, cresting the rise, started down the far side. "What do you want to know?"

"I'm not sure. Start at the beginning."

They passed a clump of fleshy white baneberry. "There was once a time when there were only two people in the world, Old Man and Old Woman?"

"A creation myth," Alex said.

As Phyllis Half Moon explained it, the Old man said that they should decide how everything worked properly in the new world they were creating, and that he should have first say in everything. Old Woman agreed as long as she could have the second say. Then the Old Man said, "Let the people have eyes and mouths in their faces, but they shall be straight up and down."

"No,' said the Old Woman. We will not have them that way. We will have the eyes and the mouth in the faces, as you say, but they shall be set crosswise."

They passed through a gash in the hillside where granite boulders rose thirty feet high on either side of the cleft. Small wildflowers, mosses and seedlings that Alex hadn't noticed previously clung to the steep sides of the bald-faced rock—a vegetative world in microcosm. "Is that the only story about the Old Man and Old Woman?"

"Oh, no," Phyllis laughed. "Here's another."

"The Old Man said the people shall have ten fingers on each hand, but the Old Woman said, 'Oh, no. That will be too many and they will be in the way. There shall be four fingers and one thumb on each hand.'"

"'Well' said the old man, 'we shall beget children. The genitals shall be at our navels.'"

"'No', said the Old Woman, 'that will make childbearing too easy; the people will not care for their children. The genitals shall be further down.'"

Alex began to chuckle. They had arrived back at the campsite. "I think I've heard enough for the time being."



"Why did you change your name?" They were down by the pond in the early afternoon. Phyllis was fly-casting, whipping a strand of translucent monofilament line out over the placid water. As she retrieved the feathery lure, she flicked her wrist to simulate a bug flitting about the watery surface.

The woman waded further away from shore until the water crawled up her slender thighs and was nipping at the hem of her shorts. She let out a length of line and slingshotted the fly in a wavy ribbon back out into the pond. "Being Native American," she addressed his earlier question, "is a state of mind. I don't have to wear my Indian heritage like some badge of honor."

Sitting twenty feet away on a stump Alex, nodded. He had always felt uncomfortable at Fourth of July ceremonies, watching the doddering, eighty year-old VFW members with pot bellies and hip replacements limp by wearing their pointy military caps.

"My people lived for centuries in these very same woods before they migrated to the northwestern Great Plains hunting buffalo and gathering wild plants. The Blackfeet were the strongest military power in the region during the buffalo days and all the neighboring tribes, the Shoshonis, Kutenais and Flatheads, feared them."

Slogging back into shore she removed the fly, exchanging it for another with a fluffy lemon-colored feather and silver spinner. "Being Indian is a state of grace," she repeated what she had said a moment earlier only altering the last word.



In the late afternoon, Phyllis sent Alex to collect kindling and scrounge up thicker deadwood for the campfire. Once the fire was established, she steamed a cup of whole grain rice and sautéed onions and green peppers over the open flame."

"You even remembered to bring salt," Alex shook his head, "and sugar for the coffee." The light was seeping out of the sky leaving the landscape shrouded in dull shadows. "Howie says we're not doing so hot." After they had finished the meal, he told Phyllis about the accountant's assessment earlier in the week.

She sat on a blanket sipping black coffee from a battered tin cup. "This is what I think." A light breeze sent a rustling through the trees. Somewhere in the distance a small creek was gurgling a soothing, repetitive melody. "Hold off until September, then cut benefits. Do away with all sick days. No more time-and-a-half for evening service, and make the direct-care employees pay fifty-fifty toward their medical coverage."

Alex mulled the suggestion. "Isn't that a bit drastic?"

"And what are your alternatives? Howie says we're no better than the garment industry. Well, the garment industry has been around for a hundred years. We won't survive much beyond January, from what I can see, unless you do something drastic."

"Some people will quit."

"So you swallow hard and hire replacements. Start them at entry level salaries. When the state gives us a rate increase, you can reward the loyal troops with a decent raise." Phyllis rose and threw the last few drops of coffee onto the fading embers, which sent up a steamy, aromatic smoke. "Now, I'm going to bed. See you in the morning."

Around three o'clock, Alex had to pee. He had forgotten to bring a flashlight, but the moon was bright, and he relieved himself behind a clump of evergreen bushes with bright red berries that Phyllis had identified earlier as a rare mountain variety of wild cranberry that only grew in western Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. Back in the cozy comfort of the sleeping bag, Alex realized that, for the first time in ages, he was sublimely happy.

Earlier while Phyllis was preparing supper, Alex insisted, "Tell me another story about Old Man and Old Woman."

She was filleting a trout she caught. "Old woman asked, 'What should we do about life and death? Should the people always live or should they die?'"

They had some difficulty in agreeing on this; but finally Old Man said, that he would throw a buffalo chip into the water, and, if it floated, the people will die for four days and live again. But if it sank, they would die forever. So he threw it in and it floated.

But Old Woman said that they would not decide in that way. She would throw a large rock. If it floated the people would die for four days. If it sank they would die forever. Then Old woman threw the rock into the water, and it sank to the bottom. "There," she said. "It is better that the people die forever, for, if they did not die forever, they would never feel sorry for each other, and there would be no sympathy in the world."

Somewhere in the darkness an owl hooted. An army of bullfrogs buried in the rushes was croaking their hearts out, an impromptu chorus. Of the four Blackfoot creation myths, Alex definitely liked the last story the best. Rolling over on his side, he went soundly off to sleep.



In the morning while Alex got the fire ready, Phyllis drove to a convenient store and picked up some English muffins, fresh eggs and bacon. In her absence, he let the wood flare up then burn down to a smoldering redness before adding a few small branches. "I'm breaking up with Clarice as soon as she gets back from visiting her parents."

Phyllis, who was cracking eggs in a bowl, didn't bother to raise her eyes. "You didn't seem very well suited for one another." Drizzling shredded cheddar cheese over the egg, she poured the mixture into the frying pan. "Such a pretty woman, Clarice won't have much trouble finding a new partner."

A light breeze kicked up, fanning the warm pine smoke in Alex's face, forcing him to shift a half-turn to the right. "After I settle things with Clarice, I thought maybe we could start seeing each other."

The egg batter began to congeal and Phyllis stirred it with a spatula. "Perhaps, but not right away. That would be in bad taste and give rise to gossip."

Strips of hickory-smoked bacon were bubbling on a separate griddle that she positioned on a slower burning section of wood. "How long should we wait?"

"At least a month. Perhaps two." She scraped some eggs onto a plastic dish and handed it to him. "The bacon will be ready in a moment. You can brown the English muffins with a little butter on the griddle, but wipe the grease away first."

Return to Table of Contents

The Chiropractor's Assistant

A week before the poet, Gregory Stiles, was to read from his award-winning collection at Brown University, Elliot Slotnick threw his back out changing a flat tire. He almost had the wheel free of the axle with one rusty lug nut frozen tight. Setting his feet firmly on the asphalt, he gave the tire iron an extra twist and felt the icy burst of pain approximately eight inches up from the base of his tailbone. Lumbar three. At least twice a year, he did something whacky, injuring the same part of his back.

The next afternoon he was lying on his stomach in the chiropractor's office, his mouth and nose protruding through a strategically placed hole in the leather-padded examining table. The pain in his back was miraculously gone, replaced by a dull, achy soreness. He recognized the soreness from previous injuries and luxuriated in the promise of restored health. Dr. Edwards, the chiropractor, had gone off to tend to the next client. His assistant, a zuftig blonde on the front side of middle age, spread a cold gel on his lower back; a moment later, she was massaging the area with an electronic device that made his skin tingle.

"Does that feel better, Mr. Slotnick?"

"Yes, it does, thank you." Sad to think this was the closest Elliot had come to female companionship in the past six months. "Yes, that feels much better!"

From his prone position Elliot's field of vision was extremely limited, but he could picture the attractive, white-frocked woman in his mind's eye. The way she walked with her wide shoulders thrown back and chin held erect. The cheekbones were high offsetting a pair of thin but delicate lips. Elliot had spent the better part of his adolescence well into young adulthood lusting after erotic goddesses like her. Was there a brain in that gorgeous head? What were her interests and hobbies, her aspirations, her dreams? He peered down at the floor through the hole in the table and watched a dust bunny no bigger than his fingernail drift aimlessly across the linoleum.

The assistant left the room so he could put his clothes on. As he buttoned his shirt, Elliot studied himself in the full-length mirror. Upon his arrival a half hour earlier, the right shoulder sagged two inches below its mate. A subluxation of the lower spinal column, Dr. Edwards pointed that disconcerting fact out to him during the initial examination. Now both shoulders were more or less aligned.

"Is this yours?" The chiropractor's assistant had returned and was holding a blue flyer, which she fished out from under the table.

"It's just a notice for a poetry reading." Elliot was mildly embarrassed. So few people had any interest in poetry. Even among his students at Brown where he taught comparative literature, he would be shocked, pleasantly so, to see more than one or two familiar faces in the meager crowd.

"A poetry reading?" There was a hint of awe mingled with envy in her tone. "It sounds so refined."

"Well yes, I suppose." Elliot folded the flyer into a compact square and buried it in his pants pocket. "If the poet has a bad night or the material he chooses isn't up to par, it can be a huge bore."

"I wouldn't care," she replied.

"How's that?" His bushy eyebrows edged up a fraction of an inch.

"My last reading was tarot cards and tea leaves." She flashed him a sick grin and began straightening up the examining room.

Elliot rubbed his chin thoughtfully and lowered his eyes. The light banter was drifting off in an unexpected and potentially troublesome direction. He could let the conversation lapse, die a natural, painless death, and that would be the end of it. On the other hand, if he asked her to join him, it wouldn't be a date per se. The woman had never been to a poetry reading and Elliot, without any ulterior motive or devious intent, would simply be accompanying her.—a literary tour guide, so to speak. The fact that she was outrageously attractive was an incredible stroke of good luck, an act of serendipity like winning the lottery or getting an unexpected promotion, and nothing more.

"You could come with me, if you like."

Unable to call them back, he watched the words fly stupidly out of his mouth, and, before he could even consider the consequence of what he had done, the chiropractor's assistant said, "Yes, that would be nice."

Elliot Slotnick's Grandmother, Esther, came to America from Kiev in the Ukraine. She arrived as a young girl in 1912. There had been a pogrom, a massacre of Jews, in the town where she was born close by the Dneper River. One night during an unusually cold winter, the Cossacks rampaged through the Jewish quarter waving their swords in the air and screaming for blood. It was the week before Passover. Three people died. A dozen chickens and a brown cow were stolen, several buildings burnt to the ground. After the incident, it was decided that the family, which had relatives already firmly established in America, would emigrate.

When Elliot was a little boy, Grandma Esther sang a whacky song in Yiddish - a lilting, repetitious ditty that she learned from her own parents as a young girl not much older than Elliot. She sang the song during the day as she kneaded the dough to make her sugar-glazed, apple and cinnamon strudel; over and over she repeated the absurd refrain as she sprinkled lemon and orange rind, black raisins and honey onto the paper-thin crust. Later in the evening, she hummed the minor-keyed melody, however inappropriately, as a lullaby to send her favorite grandson off to sleep

Shiker ist a Goy,

und nichter ist a Yid.

Geht a Yid

in Bet Hamikdash arein,

und habt er dort a kaddusha...

The Christians are all drunkards

and the Jews are all sober.

The Jews go to the Synagogue

and say their prayers,

while the Christians ...

As he grew older, Elliot could not remember the final verse. It was lost to him along with his grandmother's cock-eyed, superstitious logic and secret recipe for strudel. But he imagined that the Christians acted much like the Cossacks who had terrorized his not-so-distant relatives - running amok, raping, pillaging, and murdering righteous Jews.

If Grandma Esther were alive and knew Elliot was attending a poetry reading with the chiropractor's assistant, an idol-worshipping shiksa and veritable heathen, she would have recited the Prayer for the Dead and sent the Golem, medieval Jewry's version of the Frankenstein monster, to hunt Elliot Slotnick down and tear him limb from repulsive limb.

Marilyn Moneghan. That was the woman's name. She reminded Elliot of another Marilyn - the one who, in the early 60's, was romantically linked with President Kennedy - not so much in face but in her generous bosom and milk-white, translucent skin. The jutting breasts and immaculate, baby-soft skin were right up there with those of her glamorous, Hollywood namesake.

On the night of the poetry reading, Elliot drove cross town to a tidy, two story tenement in the working-class, Silver Lake district. When he arrived at the apartment, Marilyn opened the door and stepped out onto the landing. "There's a problem," she said in a pinched tone.

She wore a fashionable, print dress with low heels and a pair of teardrop, pearl earrings. The effect was stunning. "My daughter is giving me fits. She doesn't want to stay home alone."

"Bring her along, then."

"You're sure it's all right?"

"It's not unusual for people to bring children."

"I'll be just a minute." Marilyn disappeared back into the apartment. A moment later, she reemerged with a young girl, a physically underdeveloped version of the mother but with a taciturn expression. "Chrissy, this is Mr. Slotnick." The girl, who pushed her lips out in a petulant scowl, glanced vaguely in Elliot's direction while taking special precaution not to make direct eye contact or alter her expression. She was wearing a Black Sabbath T-shirt and jeans with a tear in one knee. "Should I have her change into something more formal?"

"No, she looks just fine."

"About tonight's reading," Elliot said. "Gregory Stiles is something of a legendary figure among the West Coast, beat poets." Marilyn was sitting next to him in the front seat with her hands folded neatly in her lap. Chrissy was slouched down in the back at such an angle that Elliot could not locate her in the rear view mirror. "In the mid-sixties he bummed around the Bay Area, working odd jobs and writing some amazingly good poetry - mostly about his childhood." Elliot turned onto Broadway heading east toward the downtown area. It was already quite dark out. They passed a number of tall buildings with intricately carved, gingerbread trim in Victorian style.

Gregory Stiles was considered one of the young lions, a literary prodigy, whose first book of poems, a small collection of no more than sixty pages, was noteworthy for, among other things, its simple, uncluttered language. There was at least a dozen new books over the next ten years, and the author became a fixture at writing seminars and college workshops throughout the country. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way from journeyman poet to literary lion, the wellspring of Gregory Stiles' creative juices ran dry; his writing lost much of its crispness and verve. In his prime, the man had written some first rate poetry; if the material which followed didn't quite measure up, Elliot saw no reason to share this unpleasant detail with the woman sitting next to him.

The poetry reading was billed as a retrospective, but for some reason Gregory - a thinly elegant man with bifocals and a thick head of unkempt, silver hair - chose to open with ten poems from his most recent publication. He read with a renewed passion and sincerity that caught many of the listeners off guard and left the audience hanging on every poignant image and jaggedly sculpted verse. A half hour into the reading, the author shifted to a work-in-progress, a series of haiku-style, shorter poems which, while not as interesting as the earlier material, was still quite remarkable.

On the ride home, Elliot glanced at Marilyn. Again, her hands were folded demurely in her lap, a contented smile coloring her lips. Chrissy had moved to the front seat wedged between her mother and the window. The scowl was gone, replaced by an expressionless, neutral mask

When they reached the apartment, Chrissy nodded, almost but not quite cordially, and vanished into the apartment. "Thank you so much, Elliot," Marilyn said. "I can't remember when I've had such a wonderful time." She leaned forward, cocked her head to one side and kissed Elliot full on the lips. The kiss was generous and lingering; she was in no hurry to give it up. And yet, the gesture was perfectly discrete.

Elliot's first wife, Nadine, had been an effusively wet and sloppy kisser, one might even say an hysterical kisser. Even before their marriage, her emotions careened haphazardly all over the place. She favored the shotgun approach to sexual bonding, spraying her affection (and her rage) like buckshot pellets. Marilyn Moneghan's approach was totally focused and deliberate - like a hunter with a single-shot, high-powered rifle. There was nothing random or arbitrary about the woman.

The following Saturday, Elliot took Marilyn on an outing to Horseneck Beach. Before they left, she asked Elliot to stop at her church. The request caught Elliot off guard. But then, so many unusual things had happened in recent days that he simply shrugged and replied, "Yes, of course," as though it was the most ordinary thing to do.

At Saint Mary's, Elliot followed her up the stone stairs and waited in the foyer as Marilyn lit a candle and knelt

briefly in prayer. The church smelled of incense and musty hymnals. In an alcove was a statue of the Virgin Mary, one hand poised gracefully over her heart, the other extended in a supplicating gesture. Elliot, who associated statues of any kind - even plastic lawn ornaments - with idol worship, moved several feet to the right so that he was no longer directly in front of the Holy Mother. When Marilyn finished her petition, she crossed herself and came out to join him.

"You pray to the statues?" Elliot indicated a row of decorative, plaster images - apostles, angels and saints - that lined the far wall of the church.

"I pray through, not to them," she corrected. Standing there in the entry of the church with her thin, chiseled lips and high cheek bones, there was a pristine, almost spiritual elegance about her. "I ask the Holy Mother to intercede for me and grant my prayers."

Elliot had studied Jewish law: the Talmud, Shulchan Aruch, Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed, the Torah and its various commentaries - even some of the esoteric, otherworldly works of the Hassidim - but his approach to God was more pragmatic than devotional.

Marilyn dipped her fingers in a porcelain bowl of holy water and touched her hand to her forehead. "Do you believe in prayer?"

"Half-heartedly," Elliot replied. "I've never been terribly sure that God hears my prayers or cares enough to act on them."

"Sounds more like a politician than a supreme being."

In lieu of a formal response, Elliot shrugged.

"I've been having some pain in my hip," Marilyn said, turning the waistband of her skirt inside out to reveal a small patch of red velvet no bigger than a postage stamp, which had been attached to the fabric with a small safety pin. "My mother gave me this piece of cloth. She brought it back from a pilgrimage to a shrine in Southern France." She let go of the waistband and the cloth disappeared back under her skirt.

"It's going to cure your hip?"

"Certainly can't hurt."

"And if the pain doesn't go away?"

"I'll let Dr. Edwards have a crack at it."

Elliot scratched his ear and stared at the statue of the Madonna. The benevolent, enlightened eyes and outstretched hand seemed less imposing. "You believe that silly little piece of cloth can heal your hip?"

"It doesn't matter what I think," she replied, ignoring his sarcasm. "My mother believes in the miraculous powers of the cloth." She showed him the red velvet patch again. "It was cut from a much larger piece of material that was blessed and touched to the base of the shrine. The cloth has special, healing powers." Though she said this with childlike innocence, there was nothing frivolous or naive in her demeanor.

He reached out and grabbed her right hand and studied the long, slender fingers with the pale red nails. "When you crossed yourself after saying your prayers, your hands were so lovely." He released his grip, and they headed back in the direction of the car. Elliot picked up Route 195 East a short distance outside of the city and, a half hour later, crossed over the Mount Hope Bay. When they reached Fall River, they turned south on Route 88 and rode the highway straight to the ocean.

They had been dating a month and Elliot told Marilyn he wanted to make love to her. They were driving home from the movies. She edged closer to him on the seat. "I can't sleep over," she cautioned. "We have to be discrete." It was a dry, clear summer night with a multitude of stars. "On Saturdays, Chrissy takes flute lessons at the Conservatory. If I'm not home when she gets back, she won't think anything unusual."

For the sake of modesty, Elliot went about the apartment drawing the shades, but for some crazy reason, all the lights - even his 200-watt reading lamp - were burning when Marilyn arrived and began peeling her clothes off. First the blouse, then the bra. Wriggling out of her panties, she dropped them near the night table and stretched out on the bed sheets. Elliot was more shock by her nonchalance than seeing her in the buff. He quickly undressed and lay down beside her. "Aren't you going to turn the lights off?" she asked in her gravelly monotone. He threw the switch and, as he turned back to face her, was met with a kiss and tangle of arms and hair.

Afterwards, Elliot had to admit that it wasn't what he had expected. Despite her libidinous good looks, Marilyn was basically a meat-and-potatoes romantic, a sedate and comfortable lover. There were no animalistic excesses, no kinky eccentricities. The sex was far more perfunctory than funky. "I'm going to take a shower now," she said when the lovemaking was finished. With her flawless, ivory-colored breasts swinging gloriously from side to side, Marilyn Moneghan sashayed out of the room.

Around the middle of the following week, Elliot called. "There's an art exhibit on the East Side Friday night."

"It's no good. I'm spending some time with my parents."

"Well, what about Saturday?"

"Sorry, that's out, too. I've already made plans."

There was a short, uncomfortable pause. "What sort of plans?"

"I've got a date."

"With who?" Elliot felt a tightening in his throat.

"Just someone I met, that's all."

"I see." Elliot didn't really see anything at all. He was blinded by resentment. "Have a nice time," he said and hung up. Why was he wishing her a nice time? He didn't want her to enjoy herself with some sex-starved lothario. Short of sodomy and food poisoning, he wanted Marilyn Moneghan to have every woman's worse nightmare of a date - the quintessential date from hell.

Over the remainder of the week, Elliot slipped into a disagreeable funk. On Sunday morning rather than call, he drove over to Marilyn's apartment with a dozen warm bagels and a small container of whipped cream cheese with chives. Chrissy showed him into the living room.

"I didn't know you were stopping by," Marilyn said.

"Thought I'd surprise you," He said, affecting a flippant tone and handed her the bag.

"Truth is, I don't much like surprises." They went into the kitchen and Marilyn began slicing the bagels.

"So, how was your date?"

"We went out to eat, that's all."

Chrissy wandered into the room and sniffed at the food. The word 'Hootie' was etched on the back of her neck in two-inch high red and black letters. "I hope that isn't permanent," Elliot said.

"It's just a rub-on," Chrissy replied. "I got it at a novelty shop."

"What's it mean?"

"Hootie and the Blowfish. They're the hottest group in rock." She tore a sesame bagel in half and smeared it with a thick glob of cream cheese. "Their debut album, Cracked Rear View, sold 13 million."

"I don't know," Elliot countered testily, "that it justifies using the back of your head as a billboard for some obscure rock group."

"When you sell 13 million albums, there's a certain amount of name recognition," Chrissy said drolly and left the room.

"You know what I mean," Elliot said turning to Marilyn.

"It's not the sort of thing you or I would do, but so what?" Elliot made an unintelligible sound by way of protest. "She's 13 years old. Can't you remember what it was like to be that age?"

Unfortunately, Elliot did remember. At 13 he was barmitzvahed. His face was covered with pimples and he was obsessed with the female genitalia - a subject about which he possessed absolutely no first-hand knowledge.

"Hootie and the Blowfish. I'll have to remember that name." His thoughts reverted back to Chrissy but for a different reason. He wondered if the girl knew that her mother had been out with another man. He felt foolish, humiliated.

Marilyn set the toaster oven on top brown and placed several bagels on the metal rack. When the bagels were done, she arranged them on a small serving tray. "Coffee or tea?"

"Tea's fine." Elliot took a tentative bite. "So are you going to see this fellow again?"

She put the kettle aside and stared at Elliot with a fixed expression. "I appreciate your driving over here with the bagels. That was a sweet gesture. But I don't like being put on the spot because I did something you don't approve of." She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue and scowled at the floor. "If you get bent out of shape because I have a date, it's your problem, not mine."

Elliot, who thought he had hit rock bottom when he discovered Marilyn's quasi-infidelity, slid another few notches down into crushing worthlessness. They ate in silence. "I don't think we should see each other for a couple of weeks," she said as she was walking him to the door.

Elliot heard the words filtered through the numbness of his gloom. "Are you breaking up with me?"

"No. That's not it." Marilyn placed a hand on his shoulder and kissed him with a casualness, an unassuming briskness, that only added to his misery and confusion. "Things are getting a bit too intense."

Everything was falling to pieces. His self-serving ploy with the bagels had been exposed for what it was \- a transparent sham - and blown up in his face. "All right," Elliot mumbled. He turned to go but lingered uncertainly in the doorway. "What should I do, then?" he asked like a contrite child.

"Call me in a couple of weeks."

"Fourteen days?"

"And we'll pick up where we left off."

"That sounds fair enough." Actually, it didn't sound fair at all. She might as well have chained Elliot to the wall in the basement and beat him nightly with a pressure-treated 2 by 4. That would have been preferable to the Chinese water torture of a two-week wait.

Elliot called the following Sunday.

"I thought I said two weeks."

"Yes, but I wanted to hear your voice. What's the harm in that?"

"The harm is you didn't fulfill your end of the bargain."

"What bargain?"

"You agreed to wait until the second Sunday. I was quite clear about the length of time."

"So I'll hang up and call back in seven days." Elliot could feel the insane panic gurgling up from his bowels into his chest. Or was it flowing in the opposite direction? He couldn't be sure about much of anything these days.

"Two weeks is two weeks," Marilyn said evenly. "We'll start from scratch. Call back two weeks from today."

"Two weeks from today," he could just barely manage to keep the hysteria in his voice under control, "will be three weeks if you count the time that's already passed."

"We had an agreement. Don't you dare call me for another 14 days."

She hung up and that's when Elliot began to cry. He stormed about the apartment kicking at things, throwing books and magazines, banging his fists against the hardwood table until the knuckles ached and his hatred of Marilyn Moneghan and the entire Christian community became slightly more manageable.

Two weeks. A British fortnight. Elliot had to survive the next 336 hours - 21,160 minutes - and hope that, between now and then, which would put him into the middle of June, Marilyn Moneghan would not become formally engaged and with-child. Elliot was crushed, demoralized; the idea of anyone else putting their grubby hands on her body made him physically sick.

Shiker ist a Goy, und nichter ist a Yid. Drunken Cossacks rioting in the streets. That had been his grandmother Esther's reality. Here Elliot was, less than a century later, fawning over a devout Catholic with breasts the size of melons, a woman who dated other men, humiliated and degraded him with her unwavering edicts.

At the end of the two-week hiatus, Elliot and Marilyn picked up where they left off with no apparent damage to the relationship. There was no further mention of the other man, and Elliot had the good sense not to bring the matter up again. In the bedroom, he might have wished for more variety, but there was something comfortably engaging in Marilyn's blunt, no-nonsense approach to sex. When the lovemaking was over, Elliot would stare at her lovely body, the ivory skin lathered in a thin film of sweat, and count his blessings. The sight of her with her wide shoulders thrown back and hips rocking gloriously from side to side as she glided naked about the room, took his breath away.

"How can you stomach that awful nonsense!" Friday night they were sitting on the sofa at her Silver Lake apartment. Marilyn was watching The Wheel of Fortune.

She turned and stared at him with mock indignation. "It's just something to pass the time."

Vanna White had just revealed another letter. Marilyn, her lips moving silently, was cycling through a series of words that might unravel the phrase on the game board. She leaned forward, momentarily tuning Elliot out. "I hate these shows. They drive me nuts!"

"Would you like me to turn the volume off?"

She reached for the clicker, but Elliot grabbed her hand. "No, that's not necessary. I just don't grasp what you see in it."

"I could say the same about some of the books you read." She lifted a hard-cover volume from his hands and, fixing her eyes on a paragraph midway down the left-hand page, began to read out loud:

"Deconstructive fiction is parallel to revisionist

history in that it tells the story from the other

side or from some queer angle that casts doubt

on the generally accepted values handed

down by legend. Whereas metafiction deconstructs

by directly calling attention to fiction's tricks, - "

She stopped reading but kept her eyes glued on the printed matter. "You obviously like this stuff or you wouldn't waste either your money or your time on it."

Elliot could feel his ears burning. She handed him back the book, lowered the volume on the television by half and settled in with what was left of her game show.

"How's the stiffness in your hip?" he said shifting gears. "You never mentioned it after the trip to Horseneck Beach."

"Everything's fine now."

"You went to Dr. Edwards?"

"There wasn't any need. The pain went away."

Elliot ran his finger over the spine of his book. "The red cloth miraculously healed your leg?"

"I'm sure it helped," she said in an offhand manner.

Elliot was more put off by her blind faith, her pig-headed guilelessness, than by the fact that something inexplicable might have occurred. "But there's no proof that anything happened."

"The stiffness is gone." Again, her tone was bland and unquestioning.

"Perhaps it went away of its own accord. A spontaneous remission."

"Yes, that's also a possibility." Her mind was like a body of water flowing easily and smoothly around an immovable object.

"Shiker ist a Goy, und nichter ist a Yid."

"What was that?" Elliot told Marilyn the story of his Grandma Esther.

After he had finished she kissed him on the cheek and said, "Now I understand why you are such a doubting Thomas."

Tears glistened in his eyes, which he made no effort to hide. "I was thinking," he said in a choked voice, "of asking you to marry me."

If the abrupt shift in both his tone and mood caught Marilyn off guard, she revealed nothing. "When were you planning to do that?"

"In a month or so." Elliot rose and went to the window. There was a warm breeze. The smell of summer barbecues and fresh mown grass hung sweetly in the humid air. "I was wondering what your answer might be."

"Hard to say. A month is a long way off and a lot could happen." Marilyn took an elastic band from her pocket, gathered up her hair and secured it in a cropped ponytail. "I suppose that, if things continue as they have, I'd agree to marry you." She rose and joined him by the window. "A word of advice, though. Between now and then, you might want to work at improving your delivery."

Return to Table of Contents

No Bear, no Forest

Around two in the afternoon an olive-skinned girl wandered down to the lake and started skipping stones across the placid water. One of the rocks almost struck Lester McSweeney's bobber. "Would you please stop doing that."

The girl scowled then came and stood next to him. She wore tan shorts and a crisp white blouse. The face was finely chiseled with a broad sweep of delicate, ebony eyebrows. "Catch anything?"

Lester reeled in, the line weighted down by a slimy tangle of vegetation. "Almost."

"I don't see any fish so I will assume you're having a crappy day." The girl, who spoke with a thick guttural accent, turned and stared at him impudently. The way she sauntered about, hands on hips, one might have thought she owned Lake Winnipesauke, all the guest cabins and the humpbacked mountain range off to the east.

Lester adjusted the bobber so that the leader hung six inches lower. Having finished threading a fresh worm on the hook, he cast the line out over the water. The bobber skidded several times and came to rest near a patch of water lilies.

A light breeze skimmed across the water nudging the lifeless bobber toward a rotted stump. If the hook snagged a submerged root, Lester would lose his gear, not to mention losing face with the obnoxious girl. "You see that cove off to the left?" He pointed to a curved section of shoreline fifty feet away. A ridge of emerald algae rimmed the water, which was dappled with a profusion of ivory water lilies. "I hooked a huge pickerel about twenty minutes ago, but he leaped clear of the water and threw the hook."

The pickerel was the biggest fish Lester had ever hooked—a foot longer than the blue fish he snagged in Buzzards Bay on the Cape Cod Canal. A veritable monster, Lester played him expertly with just the right amount of drag, understanding full well that to try and haul the feisty fish in without weakening him first would have been foolhardy. But, in the end, it didn't matter. He lost the fish in the shallows no more than thirty feet from shore.

The girl scratched an earlobe. "So the fish got away?" Lester nodded. "No one else saw it?"

"Besides a collection of noisy bullfrogs and a painted turtle, no." For the first time since the pesky girl arrived, Lester gave her the once over, eyeballing her up and down. Her hair was jet black and close cropped. The olive skin was darkened, deep baked in a permanent, year-round tan. Everything about her was clean, concise and economical. He couldn't decide if she was modestly pretty or infuriatingly plain.

The girl smiled as though at some private joke, but it was not a particularly pleasant expression. "Lo doobim v'lo ya'ar." Lester's mouth fell open. "There was no bear and there was no forest," the girl translated. "It's a Hebrew expression."

Lester wished the girl would go away. Far away. To another galaxy. Instead she prattled on in her coarse, mannish voice. "A fellow goes into the forest and is attacked by a ferocious bear. He has no weapons—no gun, knife, not even a flimsy stick to defend himself. In desperation, he punches, kicks, bites and gouges until the wild beast finally runs away. Then the fellow hurries back to town and tells everyone who will listen about his magnificent adventure."

"My name is Tovah Moshel. I am staying in Cabin 34B, if you care to visit." Her pretty hips rocking from side to side, the girl sauntered off down the gravel path toward the guests' living quarters.



Later that evening the McSweeneys and Moshels sat at a rustic table in the main dining room of the Lake Winnipesauke resort. The girl had a younger brother, Ari, about the same age as Lester's sister, and the two children immediately struck up a friendship. Meals were served family style - bowls of mashed potatoes flavored with cheddar cheese, string beans and baked chicken spread out across the center of the table. Mr. Moshel, a thin, fair-skinned man with the wistful, far off look of a poet or anarchist, had trouble cutting his chicken.

"Did you remember to take your medicine, Moishe?" Mrs. Moshel asked. She was a pretty woman, dark like her daughter but with a warm, engaging smile.

"Yes, I took the pills." The man's hands were trembling badly as he raised a slice of chicken to his mouth. "He chewed at an odd angle, his chin tilted to one side, as though all his inner resources were focused on masticating the meat without choking to death. When he finally swallowed, Mr. Moshel turned to Lester. "Very tasty, don't you think?" Whatever was wrong with him physically hadn't effected either his sense of humor or appetite.

All the while, Tovah ignored everyone; she cleaned her plate and took a second helping of beans and mashed potatoes. The girl said something to her mother in rapid-fire Hebrew and Mrs. Moshel replied, "It is impolite to speak in a foreign language when other people are present." In response, her daughter spoke again in her native tongue. Her father smiled and shook his head.

Later back in their cabin Mrs. McSweeney said, "That poor man, did you see how his hands tremble?"

Her husband wagged his head from side to side but had nothing to say. Lester was sitting at the kitchen table cleaning his spinning reel. His plan was to head out early in a small dinghy that was pulled up on the sand and look for the thirty-six inch pickerel. There was no bear and there was no forest. The Israeli girls dismissive sarcasm stuck like a jagged bone in his craw. Just because no one was present to see the fish didn't mean it didn't exist. It was not like he lied, pretended that he actually caught it.

Mrs. McSweeney wandered to the screen door and stared out into the darkness. A powdery mother crashed into the wire mesh and flitted away. "I ran into Mrs. Moshel in the ladies' room. She confided that her husband has this rare, incurable disease. The poor man! He can't work or do much of anything."

"Probably came here for treatment," the husband added and took a sip of lemonade.

Mrs. McSweeney started straightening up the room. "Yes, I would imagine." She came up behind Lester and watched as he smeared a generous glob of grease onto the main gear sprocket and began closing up the casing on his fishing reel. "The daughter's pretty, don't you think?"

"Not my type." He eased the handle forward until the metal line guide clicked into place then continued to work the reel for another dozen or so revolutions. The action was buttery smooth.

"So what's wrong with the girl?" his father pressed.

"Not my type," Lester repeated dully and left the room.



Lester set the alarm for six, was fully dressed and out of the cabin in less than half an hour. The row boat would surely be where he spotted it the previous day near the cove. If he could catch the pickerel - not just any respectable fish but that three-foot brute and mother-of-all-game-fish, Lester McSweeney would march right over to Cabin 34B and lay the angler's trophy on the front stoop.

Yes, Tovah Moshel, there was a bear!

Not that he had anything to prove, but the Israeli girl had figuratively tweaked his nose and the only reasonable response was probably lurking under a bed of water lilies fifty feet out in a scenic New Hampshire lake.

In May Lester and his father fished South Cape Beach in Mashpee. Lester bought a special lure for the occasion, a Rebel, Wind-Cheater Minnow. You didn't just cast the six-inch Wind-Cheater and retrieve it like a conventional lure. The savvy fishermen used a special 'rip and stop' action to mimic the behavior of a wounded bait fish struggling to regain its swimming form. Surfcasting from the sandy beach, the youth hooked a four-pound striper that fought him like a demon. The picture his father took of Lester with the bass was framed and perched on his bedroom bureau.

Lester flipped his Red Sox baseball cap around so the visor was facing backwards. When he reached the water's edge the rowboat was gone. Who besides a hard-core fishing enthusiast would be on the water this early in the morning? He scanned the shoreline.

"Crap!" Thirty feet out in the lake the Israeli girl was rowing at a leisurely pace. "What a royal pain in the ass!" Lester abruptly decided to cut his loses and slink back to the cabin.

Too late! Tovah Moshel was waving energetically. Pulling hard with both oars, the girl resumed rowing into the sandy beach. "Were you planning to go out in the boat?"

"Well, I ..."

"It wasn't a trick question. Either you'd like to use the boat or not."

There it was again—that peremptory, autocratic tone. Lester didn't know what he wanted anymore. This boorish girl confounded his brain, pulverized his thinking processes into mental mush. "Yes. I would like to use the boat, if you don't mind."

"Well, then, I'll join you. Help you fish."

Lester stared at her morosely. Fishing is a solitary pursuit. It's not like playing baseball or ballroom dancing. "Okay. Let me get my gear situated." The plan was to row slowly back and forth as close to the lilies as feasible to lure the pickerel out. Conditions were ideal. The water was calm with early morning temperatures in the low seventies. It wouldn't stay this cool for long, though. Tovah sat at the stern of the rowboat next to the rod. "It's a good day to get a tan, don't you think?"

"Yes I guess so."

The girl sprawled out her pretty legs askew and slender chin tilted up to catch the sun. Fifteen minutes passed. "Shouldn't you have caught something by now?"

"It doesn't work that way." They had already made a full pass around the outer perimeter of the cove and Lester was directing the boat toward the deeper water nearer the center.

"What's that?" The girl said, indicating a well-thumbed paperback wedged beneath a jumble of nylon leaders and lead weights in his tackle box. She reached into the box and wriggled the book free.

The artwork on the cover depicted a band of cowboys riding through rugged hill country somewhere in the Midwest. A huge lake or river loomed in the far distance framed by a handful of scraggily pine trees. "Louis L'Amour," Lester said. "He's just about the greatest Western writer in the whole world."

"Cowboys and Indians." She tossed the book dismissively back into the box. "Childish nonsense!"

A person could blaspheme God almighty—spit in the face of the Virgin Mary—but, where Lester McSweeney was concerned, you couldn't say a bad word about Louis L'Amour. He'd read the collected short stories and frontier tales, from cover to cover plus all four Hopalong Cassidy novels. Lester was halfway through the saga of the Sackett clan, averaging a book a month. Just about everything the boy knew about life—betrayal, greed, sacrifice, courage and cowardice—he'd gleaned from his cowboy books.

Lester was trying his damnedest to think of something insulting to say—cut the snippy foreigner down to size— but all he could manage was, "Louis L'Amour's the smartest guy I know. He's my hero." Almost before he opened his mouth, Lester regretted his words. The remark sounded stupid. Utterly childish and inane.

"Ever kissed a girl?"

His mind went blank. "What?"

The Israeli sat up now and stared at him. "Have you ever smooched, sucked face, French kissed, got it on?"

"Well, yes."

"How many times." she pressed.

A dragon fly flitted across the bow of the small boat and settles on the golden centerpiece of a lily. It's transparent wings were tattooed with a delicate fabric of veins. Lester was feeling dizzy, lightheaded from all the rowing and the rising humidity. "I don't know. A half dozen."

Tovah let a hand slip over the side and scooped up a handful of water. Her expression was neutral, utterly impassive. "We went to a restaurant Sunday night." She directed her remarks at the dragon fly. "My mother ordered boiled lobster. When you answered a moment ago, your face turned the same color as the lobster's shell." Only now did she look him full him the face. "Why did you lie? Why couldn't you just say, 'No, I never kissed a girl.'"

The boy could feel his cheeks burning even hotter than a moment earlier. This was too much! Lester threw the oars aside and began reeling in the line as fast as he could. He had to get rid of this deranged Semite.

There was no middle ground. You couldn't fish. You couldn't just laze about in a rowboat. You couldn't -

"Ask me."

He stowed his gear in the bottom of the boat and was pulling for shore with choppy, visceral strokes. "Ask you what?"

"If I've ever kissed a boy."

No, he wasn't going to play this foolish game. They were less than fifty feet from shore. Lester would haul the boat up a good ten feet from the water line, tie the mooring rope to a bush - a double half hitch to show the arrogant creature that he knew something about knot tying, if nothing else, and storm off. No goodbyes, no small talk, no nothing.

"As a matter of fact," she answered her own question, "I never kissed a boy. Not yet, anyway. And needless-to-say, I'm still a virgin." She made a disagreeable face. "Now was that so hard?"

Lester gave one last pull on the oars and let the boat glide the last few feet into the sandy shallows. "Congratulations on both counts."

Tovah watched him secured the nylon rope. She tore a sprig of purple lupine from the side of the trail and twirled the wildflower under her nose. "My father can't control his hands. They shake quite badly." She spoke in a casual, off-hand manner. "Sometimes I have to cut his food, help him with his socks or button a sweater. But I don't do these things in public."

Lester had already turned away and was headed in the direction of the visitor cabins. He pulled up abruptly. "He has some rare, incurable disease. Your mother mentioned it."

"A medical condition?" The Israeli girl sighed and threw the flower away. "Sugar-coated lies are so much easier to swallow than bitter truths."

Lester turned and came back to where the girl was now sitting in the beached rowboat. "Yes, I did hook a 36-inch pickerel over there in the cove, but the stupid fish got away. No, I never had sex or kissed a girl either." He climbed in and sat opposite. "Now will you tell me why your father's hands shake so badly?"

Fifteen minutes later, after Tovah Moshel had answered Lester McSweeney's impertinent question, the boy leaned forward and kissed her on the lips—a drawn out, sweet annihilating gesture. "We're both still virgins, but at least that's out of the way."



At three o'clock in the afternoon the Wasserman family arrived. They drove up to the resort office in a brand new Lincoln Continental. Lester, who had accompanied his sister to the shuffleboard court, watched the family pile out of the fancy car. The mother was a pear shaped woman with calves as thick as bowling pins. The father was also huge, well over six feet with a pendulous gut. A Cuban cigar wedged in the corner of his fleshy mouth, he was decked out in Bermuda shorts and a garish Hawaiian shirt. The son, who looked to be a year or two older than Lester, was quite handsome with a mop of black hair and bushy eyebrows that offset his pallid complexion.

"Hey, I like your beanies!" Sylvia shouted.

Both father and son were wearing Jewish skullcaps. The father scowled at her before lumbering into the motel office to announce their arrival.

"Cripes, Sylvia!"

Later that evening, the Wassermans sat opposite the McSweeneys and Moshels at the supper table. "Hey, boychik," Mr. Wasserman was staring straight at Lester. "Do you think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?"

Lester's lips were moving but no audible sound escaped his lips.

"What about you, Morris?" He turned to his son. "Rain gonna damage the rhubarb crop this year?"

"Not if it's in cans." Like the straight man in a comedy routine, the boy delivered his punch line without missing a beat.

"Enough with the corny jokes, Herbert." Mrs. Wasserman chided.

The food, pasta with meatballs and a tossed salad, arrived and the guests began passing the dishes around the table. Herb Wasserman turned to Lester's father. "What's your line of work?"

"Hardware," he replied. "And yourself?"

Mr. Wasserman took a piece of Italian bread and slathered it with butter. "Footwear."

"Which chain?"

Mrs. Wasserman laughed in a high pitched, squeaky voice. "My husband doesn't sell shoes."

"Actually," Mr. Wasserman added by way of explanation, "I buy in bulk from overseas distributors then resell in the domestic, wholesale market. Think of me as a middleman, sort of like a sports lawyer who negotiates deals." Lester glanced about the table. Tovah clearly had no interest in anything the portly man was saying, but the adults were listening attentively.

"Our town boasted several shoe manufacturers," Lester's father noted, "but they went bust in the late fifties, early sixties. Stetson Shoe Company just up the road a piece in Randolph—they closed down. Couldn't compete with the overseas markets."

"Chinese," Mr. Wasserman noted. "can manufacture a sneaker for pennies on the dollar. Labor and operational costs are minimal. I buy a container load—five, ten thousand at a time then locate my own markets here in the good old US of A."

"Admittedly it's a bit speculative, Machiavellian, but so what? As the saying goes, carpe diem." He cracked an insolent grin. "Make the best of present opportunities!" His wife tittered in her high pitched squeaky laugh and everyone turned their attention back to the food.

Shortly before dessert was served, Mr. Wasserman asked, "Is that an Israeli accent?" When Mr. Moshel nodded in the affirmative, the man added, " We're making alyiah next year."

"Immigrating to the land of milk and honey," his wife added for the benefit of the non-Jews at the table.

"That's very nice," Mr. Moshel smiled pleasantly. He folded his hands in his lap, lacing the slender fingers together. The tremors extended from the wrists up the forearm before petering away at the elbows.

"Do you speak the language?" Mr. McSweeney addressed his remarks to Mr. Wasserman.

"My wife and I studied at the Hebrew Teacher's College in Brookline." He gestured with his eyes in the direction of his son. "Morris also took a crash course last summer, but he could use some help with grammar."

Lester stared at Morris Wasserman who, from the moment he arrived, had been ogling the Israeli girl. The Wasserman boy had changed skullcaps opting for a more stylish one fashioned from a plaid fabric and held in place by a single bobby pin. He wore a lemon colored sports shirt with an Izod logo, tan boat shoes and an expensive looking gold wristwatch.

"Say," the wife interjected, "maybe your lovely daughter could help Morris with his dikdook."

Dikdook Lester cringed inwardly. The word sounded vulgar, pornographic.

"Yes, everyone struggles with grammar," Mr. Moshel said. "It's the most challenging part of any new language."

"Well I assure you," Mr. Wasserman speared a meatball with his fork and waved it in the air, "Morris will prove a quick study. He's a straight-A student and president of the honor society."

Mrs. Wasserman turned to Mr. Moshel. "Are you native born Israelis?"

He nodded in the affirmative. "We lived on a kibbutz, a communal farm, in the Upper Galilee. Harvested mostly citrus—oranges, grapefruit, lemons. There was also a small herd of cattle."

"Any problems with the Arab population?" Mr. Wasserman inquired.

"Guerillas lobbed Katyusha rockets down on us from the Golan heights and Lebanese foothills. On occasion, they infiltrated at night to plant moakshim in the fields." He glanced at his daughter.

"Land mines," Tovah translated without bothering to raise her eyes from the food.

Mr. McSweeney shook his head somberly. "Heck of a way to live."

"Yes," Mr. Moshel agreed, "but what's a person to do?" He took a sip of water. "The fruit trees, which were our livelihood, required constant care." The brief exchange had exhausted Tovah's father. His eyelids drooped precariously and he hunched forward balancing on his elbows.

"What part of Israel will you be settling in?" Mrs. Moshel asked.

"The West Bank. A new settlement near Hebron."

The Israeli woman glanced nervously at her husband and dropped her eyes. "The West Bank is Palestinian land," Tovah entered the conversation. "It doesn't belong to Jews."

Mr. Wasserman who was chewing a piece of bread, choked on his food. He took a sip of water to clear his throat. "We captured the West Bank during the Six Day War. It's ours now."

Tovah spun pasta onto her fork, guiding the noodles with a tablespoon. She seemed in no great hurry to respond. When the fork was properly loaded, she raised it to her lips. "If you choose to live on land that, for centuries and by birthright, belongs to someone else, that makes you a thief. A thief and a bully."

Mrs. Wasserman's eyes alternately grew inordinately large then squished tightly together as though someone had sprayed her with pepper mace. Her fleshy chin flattened out and lips puckered reflexively in a pugnacious expression. The woman looked like her head was going to explode. Turning to Mr. Moshel she hissed, "You allow your daughter to insult guests and fellow Jews at the dinner table in such a manner?"

"My daughter was simply expressing a heartfelt conviction and nothing more."

The waiters were bringing out desert, a cherry cobbler with whipped cream. "And what are your thoughts about Jews living in Hebron?" Mr. Wasserman twirled his wedding band with the thumb of the same hand. The man was smiling or, at least, his lips were, but the eyes belied a ruthless, brittle-minded obstinacy.

Tovah's father gazed congenially at the large man. He poured a splash of cream into his coffee and had to steady the cup with both hands as he raised the warm beverage to his lips. "Believe me, Mr. Wasserman, you don't want to know what I think about the matter."

There was no more conversation. After the meal, the Wassermans rose abruptly and scattered from the dining room.



In the morning the McSweeney's drove to an Audubon bird sanctuary ten miles up the road. The strip of land nestled in a white pine forest crisscrossed with rocky streams and wetlands. At the visitor bureau Mrs. McSweeney announced, "Everyone pee before we hit the woods."

Near the top of the first trail Lester's mother spotted a piping plover with its scalloped black collar and russet colored wings. Then just a short distance away she sighted an American Golden, a close relative to the plover. "Mr. Moshel seemed a bit better at breakfast, don't you think?" Lester asked.

They approached a small trestle footbridge that spanned a gully. "Hard to say," his father replied. "He's only in his forties but looks like an invalid."

Mrs. McSweeney hurried ahead as they approach a rest area with an information board alerting visitors to recent sightings of uncommon birds. Two American oystercatchers and a Virginia rail were seen on the island of Shoals on June first plus a sandhill crane only a few miles down the New Hampshire coast a day earlier. Mrs. McSweeney pulled out her Sibley's Birding Guide for a quick reference. Sometimes she also brought along Mac's Field Guide to water birds of the Northeast Coast. The prudent woman had sealed several pages of her Mac's guide in waterproof plastic for easy reference; the brightly colored pictures featured head and wing markings as they appeared in various seasons. Winter plumage, which was frequently much lighter and less dramatic, could easily confuse even a veteran bird watcher.

"Seventy-five black scoters were spotted along the coast, mainly off North Beach in Hampton," Mr. McSweeney read from the list as his wife thumbed through her manual.

Neither Lester nor his father shared the mother's passion for birding, but they readily got caught up in her zany enthusiasm. Up ahead on the trail was a tulip polar with a thick spread of golden leaves. Mrs. McSweeney located a outcropping of rocks overlooking a meadow and was scanning the brush and foliage with her Eagle Optics birding binoculars. The waterproof lenses featured nitrogen purged fogproofing. Nobody—not even Lester's father—had a clue what nitrogen purged fogproofing was but it sure sounded special and his mother claimed that the lenses remained clear even in the worse weather.

"Mr. Moshel isn't sick," Lester said. "Least not in the conventional sense."

"Is that so?" his father slowed to a halt and lowered his voice. "What's the matter with the man?"

"The Israeli Army court marshaled him. They sent Mr. Moshel to a military prison for half a year"

As Tovah explained it sitting in the beached rowboat, Mr. Moshel served three years as a tank commander in the Israeli Defense Force. Following the second invasion of Lebanon he returned from fighting in the northern campaign and muttered, "Maspeek! Enough! This is no war. It's a goddamn massacre! I will not kill defenseless people."

Bogade. Traitor.

When he refused to return to active duty, the military banished him to a prison in the Negev desert south of Tel Aviv where the food was inedible, living conditions intolerable. Eventually his health broke down. The IDF agreed to release him on one condition: the man recant his foolishness and immediately return to his military unit. Sick as he was, Mr. Moshel opted to serve out the remainder of his prison term.

Mr. McSweeney kicked at the loose dirt and a stone went skittering into the underbrush. "The War in Lebanon was an ugly affair."

Up ahead Mrs. McSweeney was waving her binoculars over her head, indicating that she had finished studying the meadow and was continuing on down the trail. "Do you think Mr. Moshel's a traitor?"

Mr. McSweeney was staring at a patch of bunchberries with clusters of turgid, reddish fruit dangling from the plant. Further down the trail a profusion of hollyhock, their ivory petals stained with purple bleeding toward the edges, spilled over a granite ledge. "Hell no!" He rubbed his jaw between a thumb and forefinger, heading off down the trail without further elaboration. After traipsing over three and a half miles of rugged trails in the midday sun, Mrs. McSweeney never saw a single oystercatcher, Virginia rail or black scoter but she did spot a blue-winged teal, which was so gorgeous she talked incessantly about the magnificent bird all the way back to the cabin.



There was no bear and there was no forest.

Mr. Moshel, the tank commander, would have stood a better chance fighting off a rabid grizzly bear barehanded! Even Lester's father was at a loss for words when he learned what happened to the Israeli and, out of a sense of decency, the boy had glossed over some of the more unsettling details! Nothing made any sense.

There was a story in a Louis L'Amour collection—Caprock Rancher– about an crusty cowboy with a broken leg who outsmarts a band of thieves. It was one of Lester's all-time favorites. The injured rancher shows the outlaws for what they are: a band of cowardly hooligans. Toward the end of the story, the leader of the desperadoes, an ornery psychopath named Hazeltine, is reduced to a whimpering bloody mess with all the piss and vinegar beaten out of him by the rancher's teenage son.

Instead of fighting off a band of unruly gunslingers, Mr. Moshel had the entire Israeli army to contend with. Not a fair fight. Short of alchemy, it didn't seem to Lester the sort of material even a literary magician like Louis L'Amour could do much of anything with.

No, not even Louis L'Amour could fix what was broke on Lake Winnipesauke. The master storyteller would have to revise the sordid history of Western civilization, rework the bogus script. Perhaps in the new and improved version, Lester would marry the persnickety Israeli girl and travel west. They'd build a log cabin in the wilderness country of Oregon, buy cattle, preferably Durhams, that they could graze and breed on the open range. Lester would purchase a rifle, maybe a .56 caliber, 360 grain Spencer plus a .44 caliber derringer to hide up his sleeve with a rubber band. The Spencer could blast a hole as big as a frying pan in any nasty varmints, two-legged or otherwise. For horses, he would get buckskins - mustangs used to living out in the wild in all sorts of weather.

The Moshels could come and visit any time they felt the urge. In the rarified, high country mountain air, Mr. Moshel's health would quickly be restored and the only time his hands would ever shake again would be to applaud the antics of his half dozen, give or take a few, grandkids.

And of course with her nitrogen purged, Eagle Optics binoculars, Lester's mother could study native birds of the scenic northwest. She might even spot a Beckwicks wren with its elegant brown tail arched over a slender back.

Lester and his new bride, Tovah McSweeney, would live off the land, can berries and fruits, smoke fish like the Indians anticipating the winter shortages of fresh game, hunt and trap until their cattle business was firmly established then trade for cloth, spices and other necessities

.



Tovah Moshel's penchant for uncompromising honesty was too much! Even Lester, recently graduated from middle school knew better than to say every fool thing that stumble-bumbled into his adolescent head. If the Israeli girl chose to ridicule him over the phantom fish that got away, that was one thing. Mrs. Moshel shamelessly lied about her husband's physical affliction—to save face and avoid embarrassment. Tovah had no qualms about telling Lester or anyone else who cared to listen the ugly truth.

The girl was stubborn, opinionated, arrogant, combative, insolent, uncompromising and utterly disinterested in anyone else's point of view. A boorish blockhead wrapped in pig-headed certitudes, she edited and filtered nothing that escaped her lips. Like that nutty business about first kisses and virginity. People didn't talk that way. At least normal people didn't.

Later that night as he was lying in bed, a stab of pain, more like an inconsolable grief, coursed through Lester's body. The boy was shattered by the purity of his feelings. First love—it snuck up on tiptoes, beguiled, tantalized and scared the bejeezus out of him.



The day after the trip to the Audubon bird sanctuary, Lester heard a horse whinny. Zigzagging through a stand of willows, he followed the braying and snorting to a small stable hidden away behind the main dining room. A brown mare with three white stockings from fetlocks to knees was grazing on the vegetation, cropping the grass and clover right down to the bare earth. Lester reached through the pole fence and ran a hand over the animal's withers. Several bales of fresh hay were neatly stacked in a barn adjacent to the outdoor pen.

Lester noticed a metallic object abandoned in a clump of goldenrod. Reaching down he retrieved a small cap gun. The barrel had broken off, the left side of the handle smashed. He pulled the trigger and watched as the hammer sprung back and the chamber shifted one make-believe slug to the right.

For his tenth birthday he begged his parents for a pair of cowboy guns and matching holsters. Not just any firearms. Lester insisted on Colt 45 six-shooters, the original Peacemaker model.

'You can hear the hoofbeats & smell

the gun smoke of the old West!'

Or at least that's what the promotional material guaranteed. The gun that tamed the Wild West. Prized by the U.S. Army, frontiersmen, cowboys and Indians as they blazed new trails. Jesse James, Bat Masterson, Billy the Kid lived by this gun. Lester's set was nickel plated even though the military version was gun blue. Another saying on the side of the box boasted: God made man, Colt made them equal.

Saturday morning an hour before the McSweeney clan left on their Lake Winnipesauke vacation, Lester strapped the double holsters around his waist and stood in front of the closet mirror practicing his quick draw. He could shoot from the hip and twirl both barrels simultaneously a full 360 degrees on taut index fingers. God made man, Colt made them equal. The macho sentiment had a comforting ring.



The kiss changed everything.

Though the lake was loaded with pickerel, largemouth bass, sweet perch, slimy, bottom feeding horned pout—some people called them bullhead catfish—and god knows what else, all Lester could think about lately was the feathery caress. The way the dark-skinned girl snaked her lanky arms around him, wrapping Lester in a bear hug until the succulent kiss was finished. Even then, she held on for a full half minute longer.

The night before the vacation ended, Lester escorted the Israeli girl down to the coral. The brown mare was huddled between a swaybacked nag and sorrel gelding. He waved a bag of carrots in the air, and the horses shambled across the muddy pen to where they were waiting. They ate noisily mashing and grinding the carrots into orange pulp.

"Give me a kiss," Tovah murmured. He obliged her. "The Boston Red Sox are the home team?"

Lester eyed her quizzically. "Here in New England, yes."

"And David Ortiz's the best hitter."

"Ortiz and Rodriquez. Manny Rodriguez. They're both batting up over three hundred."

The Israeli girl leaned against his chest and raised her chin expectantly. After a flurry of kisses she cradled her cheek against his chest. "Tom Brady?"

"The Patriot's quarterback." The horses had drifted away and were huddled together at the far end of the coral. "Since when did you become such a sports enthusiast?"

Somewhere in the darkened New Hampshire countryside an owl hooted. The smell of fresh mown hay and fetid horse dung permeated the warm air. A good half mile away, an animal barked like a dog—a convulsive burst of short, feral yips. Coyotes had raided a chicken coop the previous night. They also ran off with a plump bunny from the resort's petting zoo leaving only the severed head. "Our life in Israel is finished. My father says we will stay here and become American citizens."

A horse pawed the ground, a staccato pitter-patter of hoofbeat. "Where will you live?" Lester asked

"For the time being, with my mother's relatives in Brighton."

Lester did some reckoning. The red line MBTA train ran to Park Street where the green line ferried passengers the length of Commonwealth Ave. "I'll come visit you every weekend."

"What about your fishing?"

"Fishing?" He raised her hand to his lips, kissed the palm then all five fingers. The crickets were out in force now, beneath a full moon and myriad of stars.

Return to Table of Contents

Leaky Pipes

Bartholomew Schroeder watched the girl approach from the entrance to the hotel dining room. In her late teens, she was about the same age as his youngest granddaughter. "My name," she stumbled over the words, which sounded stilted and rehearsed, "is Holly Heatherton, and my family came over Monday on the same ferry from Woods Hole."

"Yes, I remember -"

"No, don't speak!" She waved a hand distractedly and, for a brief moment, Bart thought the girl might do something outlandish. He once watched a woman dancing with her husband at a wedding. The woman was quite drunk. The husband said something disagreeable and the woman pulled her slinky black evening dress up over her head, revealing a dainty white camisole and a pair of control-top nylons. Not that he thought Holly Heatherton was inclined to make a similar scene, but the girl was noticeably agitated, distraught.

"I dreamed about you last night." The girl moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue and slid down into the vacant chair opposite the older man. A thin girl with chestnut colored hair that hung limply down almost to the small of her back, there was an austere refinement to the pale face. A patrician's daughter? An ax murderer? "In the dream you were surfcasting off the breakwater." She pointed out the window toward the Oak Bluffs Bay.

"I don't fish," he replied. "Not salt water or fresh."

"I was walking near the shore searching for sea glass," she conveniently ignored the remark, "and, when I passed by, you whispered, 'I have a message for you, Holly Heatherton.'"

Mr. Schroeder blinked and stared at his breakfast, which was growing cold. Eggs scrambled with flaked salmon, chives and a tart, Monterey jack cheese - a meal to die for under any other circumstances. The waitress approached and asked the girl if she needed a menu.

"No, that looks scrumptious." She pointed at Mr. Schroeder's plate. "Could you also bring me a coffee and small orange juice."

"Listen here!" Mr. Schroeder objected. "Your parents will be coming down to eat any minute now, and when they see you sitting here -"

"They know," Holly interrupted.

"Know what?" Bart Schroeder could feel any semblance of normality slipping away.

"I told them about my mysterious dream and that I intended to speak with you."

The elderly man cleared his throat but could think of nothing to say. Finally, he took a sip of tepid coffee and glanced out the bay window. A trawler with a winch at the stern and woven net was sputtering out toward open water. "My name is Bartholomew Schroeder. A plumber by trade, I'm recently retired. I spent the last forty years installing boilers and commercial air conditioning units. I possess no supernatural powers. I don't commune with the dead or much of anyone else if I can help it. I'm a misanthrope."

That the girl was emotionally disturbed was fairly obvious. Even a blue collar, working stiff with no college education could sense her distress. The waitress returned with her drinks. "Why me?" Bart asked.

Holly shrugged. Since breaking the ice, she seemed less agitated. More to the point, all of the willowy young girl's anxiety had been conveniently transferred over to Bartholomew Schroeder. "I had a feeling about you from when we boarded the ferry back in Falmouth."

"A feeling?"

"You came to the island unaccompanied. Each day I see you roam the beach alone, and in the late afternoon, you sit over by the landing staring out to sea like a true believer, a mystic."

"I believe in central heating and keeping cool during the dog days of August."

That his wife of forty years died a year ago to the day he wouldn't tell her. Three days earlier, Bart drove across the Bourne Bridge to Falmouth where he parked his car and took the shuttle to Woods Hole. He was a man on the run from memories, loneliness and profound grief. The mourning process had continued unabated through the previous year. Bart Schroeder had come to the island of Martha's Vineyard to find solace; instead he got Holly Heatherton, a mentally unbalanced, first year piano major at the New England Conservatory of Music.

During her freshman year at college, something had gone haywire. Reclusive by nature, Holly made few friends. A psychiatrist prescribed adapin for anxiety, but then she got depressed. Really depressed. The young girl didn't bother to complete the semester., taking a medical leave of absence.

"I'm not totally whacked out." There was a subtle loosening, a relaxation in her tone. "It's not like I'm going to swill a bottle of sleeping pills or rat poison."

"Or slash your wrists," Bart interjected.

She grinned sheepishly. "I just prefer being alone more than with people." She ran an index finger around the rim of her coffee cup.

The waitress brought the girl's eggs. "Do you have many friends?" Mr. Schroeder asked.

"No, not particularly."

"On occasion, you must meet someone pleasant or interesting?"

"Yes, of course, but most people ..." She seemed to lose interest in the topic. "Does that make me crazy?"

Mr. Schroeder smiled. Her candor was a bit unnerving. "No, certainly not."

Holly gestured with her eyes in the direction of two elderly women seated at the far end of the dining room. One was short with frizzy blonde hair and bowling pin legs, the other bean pole skinny. "Stay away from those bitches," she counseled.

Bart stared at the women. He had seen them traipsing about the town. "Why? Are they dangerous?"

"They were sitting out on the porch last night when you returned from your walk. The fat one leaned closer to skinny Minnie and sniggered, 'There goes Bartleby, the Scribner.'"

"You're losing me."

Holly placed a sliver of salmon on her tongue and washed it down with a swig of coffee. She slathered her toast with globs of jelly from a small crock. "Bartleby was a fictional character in a Herman Melville story. He became distraught and completely withdrew from society. When anyone tried to talk to him or get him to do anything, Bartleby repeated the same five words over and over again."

"Which were?"

"I would prefer not to." The girl flicked a strand of dark hair away from her eyes. "Having mental issues myself, I resent it when other people act that way."

Mental issues. Yes, Bartholomew Schroeder had been living in something of a hermetically-sealed vacuum, a numb existence for the past twelve months. He ignored friends, let his membership at the golf club lapse and avoided Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Devotion. "So what happened to Bartleby a k a Bartholomew the Plumber?"

"Oh, he went nuts. Totally bonkers." She was nibbling on the last of the toast. "The medical authorities locked him away in the loony bin."

Bart chuckled good-naturedly. "I've got my pension and social security so hopefully that will cushion the blow." He glanced distractedly at his plate. The cheese had congeals, stuck to the flaked salmon like mortar on chimney brick. Not a very appetizing sight. "You said something about a dream?"

Holly's eyes brightened and she leaned forward across the table. "As I approached, you put your fishing rod aside and said, 'Holly Heatherton, I have a message for you.'" She stared intently at the older man as though this latest tidbit of information might jog his flawed memory.

"A message," he repeated dully. Gurus and wise men brought messages. So did hucksters, charlatans and flimflam artists, when the price was right. Lawyers, politicians and priests favored portentous pronouncements. Bartholomew Schroeder had nothing to tell the petite, dark-haired girl. The waitress arrived with the bill. "My treat."

As they were leaving the dining hall Bart said, " Let me think about it and I'll get back to you, Holly."

Should he have used her first name? Mr. Schroeder climbed slowly to the second floor landing, lumbered into his room and locked the door behind him. For good measure he threw the security bolt.

In December two years earlier, Penelope Schroeder suffered a massive stroke. "Your wife will require round-the-clock, custodial; care," the hospital social worker spoke in a no-nonsense, officious tone.

"Custodial," Bart muttered. He usually associated the word with janitors and maintenance workers.

"We're talking parenteral feeding, nasal oxygen, a Foley catheter bag to manage incontinence, infusion therapy and a host of other neurological and skilled nursing services." The woman removed her glasses and gently massaged the bridge of her nose. She wasn't soliciting Bart's opinion; she only wanted a signature on the discharge paperwork.

The following day, the brain damaged woman was shipped via ambulance to Shady Pines Rehabilitation Center. The two-story building offered independent living on the first floor and, for people in failing health, a fully-accredited, acute care rehabilitation center upstairs. Strange thing was, the residents on both floors looked pretty much alike. They hobbled about on canes and aluminum walkers. Some arrived in wheelchairs; more than a handful lugged bottled oxygen about in portable canisters.

"Hey, mister." An elderly woman in a motorized wheel chair was beckoning to Mr. Schroeder who had just arrived to visit his wife. The woman was gussied up in a floral pantsuit. The outfit was impeccably tailored with a matching scarf knotted at the neck. She wore a collection of gold bracelets and her nails were brightly enameled.

Bart approached and bent down. "The waiters served an absolutely mouthwatering cherry cobbler al a mode for lunch." The woman's eyes sparkled. "A la mode. It's a French expression. It means - "

"I know what it means."

The woman stabbed at a lever on the armrest causing the wheelchair to lurch forward banging Bart in the knee. "Go to the kitchen and speak with Alfonzo about extra servings. One for me. One for you."

"But I don't work here. I'm visiting my—"

"Make sure," the woman continued, "he warms the cobbler. It never tastes right unless the ice cream softens before it's served."

Bart went out into the main hallway and headed off down the corridor toward the rehabilitation unit. Off to one side was the dining hall where healthier residents ate their meals. The space was arranged like a swanky restaurant with a centerpiece of fresh-cut flowers on each table. The high back chairs were covered in a maroon, floral brocade fabric.

Bart shrugged. The place reminded him of a Holiday Inn he renovated in the late sixties. Halfway down the corridor was a small reading room with hardcover books arranged neatly on shelves. A copy of Tom Sawyer in large print for the visually impaired lay on an end table. "Well, this is cozy," he mused, "except for the fact that nobody's here." At the end of the hall was a spacious recreation room with a flat screen TV showing local news. A dark-skinned, Hispanic woman dressed in a white uniform was sitting on a sofa eating an apple. A banner across the top of the television news desk read La Planetera.

Bart counted thirty doors the length of the hallway but not one solitary person. Nobody coming or going. All the doors were shut. Locked. The place was less like a hotel than a morgue. And there was a tedious sameness to everything, a benign gentility, the man found unnerving.

So where were the residents? Squirreled away in their tidy apartments? Doing what? Reading the newspaper? Watching television? Waiting to give up the ghost with neither loving family nor close friends to bless their soul's passage to the next world?

On the wall at the end of the corridor hung a portrait of a young girl with a sun bonnet and lace shawl escorting a herd of cows down a country lane. A very safe and appropriate painting. Bart felt an evil urge to blacken a couple of the girl's front teeth with an indelible marker and scrawl a bristly moustache over the dainty top lip for good measure. In the morning, how many of the elderly residents would appreciate the bawdy humor? A bullet to the brain.! If I ever become that debilitated, get a gun and just put me out of my misery.

The third week of January Penelope Schroeder died in her sleep. A meager blessing of sorts, the woman never emerged from the coma.

God was playing a trick on Bartholomew Schroeder. A nasty, malicious prank. Struggling with his own dark night of the soul, what scintillating message could he possibly offer Holly Heatherton, musical prodigy and social malcontent? He lay down on the unmade bed and fell asleep.

At noon Bart wandered down to the bar. He needed to sit by himself in a darkened corner and think things through. Right brain, left brain. A Heinekens might lubricate the powers of reasoning.

He found a stool at the far end of the mahogany bar and ordered his drink. Tilting the glass at an angle, he poured the amber liquid. A message for Holly Heatherton. What message? Someone entered the room and Bart shifted in his seat so that his back was facing the door. He felt a moral obligation to do something for the girl, who reminded him of a frail and utterly defenseless animal caught in a snare. Holly's life was just beginning while his was winding down. How many close friend had died in the last year alone? Nothing made any sense. If death was simply a culmination, a recapitulation of all the successes and failures of a life well lived, then he ought to be able to tell the child something. But Bartholomew Schroeder was never particularly good with words. Metal pipes, blowtorches, solder and PVC were his stock in trade.

"Retired?" The bartender, a tall, stoop-shouldered man on the front side of forty, was leaning on the bar.

Bart looked up momentarily. "Five years now."

He nudged a plastic bowl of pretzels crusted with salt within arm's reach. "That's swell." The bartender looked bored. There would be little activity in the bar until after supper. Five minutes passed without a word. "Red Sox won last night."

"That so?"

"Five to three. Wakefield the knuckleballer got the decision." It was a guy thing. A room full of men could stand around scratching their crotches and nursing beers. They didn't agonize over the inevitable or suffer existential ennui tinged with spiritual angst. Rather, they nibbled pretzels and talked sports.

The bartender rubbed at a water spot with a towel and went off to service another patron. A message for Holly Heatherton. Bart Schroeder was getting nowhere fast.

Then there was that odd incident with the piano.

Bart Schroeder was heading back to his room after breakfast. As they reached the staircase, Holly Heatherton grabbed his arm. "Just a moment." In a small sitting room off the dining hall was a baby grand piano. Holly sat down on the bench. Positioning her hands, she began to play an impressionistic passage built on fourths and odd-sounding passing tones. The music was fairly simple, an intermediate level version of the original composition. After only a few measures, she removed her hands from the keys. "Did you recognize that?"

"Debussy," Mr. Schroeder replied.

She nodded. "And this?" She offered up a jagged, dissonant theme in a percussive rhythm. The meter kept changing every third or fourth measure so that it was impossible to follow.

"Not even a clue," Mr. Schroeder said when the strange tune came to an abrupt end.

"Bartok." She launched into a third piece that was even more obscure with a series of tone clusters played in the bass as the right hand hammered out single notes in a random, vertical pattern. She played the melody through from beginning to end, including a legato interlude.

"That was a twelve-tone row by Hindemith," Holly said, turning completely around to face him. A large, egg-shaped tear glistened in the corner of either eye. She reached up and deftly wiped them away. "Very unusual, don't you think?"

"Not as accessible as the Bartok," Mr. Schroeder said, "but interesting."

"Few people appreciate Hindemith's music. It's an acquired taste." The tears had reformed but this time she let them be and they quickly multiplied, dripping down her cheeks in thick rivulets. "You do understand what I'm talking about?" Her chest - what there was of it - heaved up and down in womanly anguish.

"Yes, I understand."

"So what should I do?"

Bart Schroeder was beginning to feel edgy again. "I don't understand the question."

"About my miserable life?"

A young family cut through the sitting room on their way to the dining room. "Let me think about it," Bart replied, "and I'll get back to you."

"Drinking alone?" Bart felt a warm, slightly sweaty hand resting on his forearm. The fat blonde from breakfast had eased up on the stool next to him and was smiling garishly. A double martini with a plump olive rested on a coaster. The woman was skunk drunk. Before Bart could collect his thoughts she added, "I got a bottle of red wine up in my room, if you care to join me."

The woman was wearing a frock that did a commendable job camouflaging the excess flesh. She tilted her head to one side and ran her tongue over her top lip, a transparently salacious gesture. The act both horrified and titillated him at the same time. She wanted to fornicate, have someone - it didn't matter who - do obscene and unspeakable things to her morbidly obese body. Bartholomew Schroeder felt a massive erection coming on.

Throwing a bill down on the bar next to his beer, he climbed off the stool. The fat woman was staring at the grotesque bulge in his pants. Herman Melville. Bartleby the Scribner... What was that gibberish, the bizarre phrase the deranged character repeated endlessly?

"I would..."

"Yes?"

"I would prefer not to," Bart Schroeder mumbled as he brushed past the florid woman and left the bar.

Two streets down in back of the old-fashioned Movie Theater, Bart rented a three speed bike with a straw basket draped over the handlebars. "Bike path is up by the dock. It winds all the way to Edgartown and the southernmost beaches," the proprietor noted. "Take it slow, though, in this heat."

Bart pedaled out to the landing and watched the afternoon ferry dock with a fresh load of tourists, then he headed out to the bike path that skirted the harbor. Up ahead, a pink burst of color from a hedge of salt spray roses edged the trail. A seagull resting on a telephone pole watched him pass with stony indifference.

The plan was to ride several miles south from Oak Bluffs to Edgartown along the winding trail dotted by sand dunes and scenic marshland. Bart walked the bike up the steeper hills and glided down effortlessly with the shift set in first gear.

A message for Holly Heatherton. Salt air and a tart, late summer breeze off the ocean accompanied the ride. Yes, this was much better than trying to sort things out in the bar, which reeked of stale cigars and flat beer.

Bartholomew Schroeder lived with his wife forty-three years and thirteen days. They raised three sons and two daughters. He understood plumbing, soldering and most mechanical contraptions. Penelope handled domestic engineering, childrearing and all matters intuitive and otherworldly. "There's this precious slip of a girl," Bart addressed the monologue to his late wife, "whose life is a mess, and she wants me to set her universe back on an even keel." He had to wait for a family of five returning from the lighthouse further down the coast to pass. The youngest daughter's bike sported training wheels and a bell which she sounded as she glided past.

"Okay, where was I? Oh, yes, the girl expects me a retired plumber to deliver the cosmic goods and I haven't a clue -"

"Hey, man." A teenager with hair down to his shoulders and a goatee was waving at Bart, who braked to a halt. A paisley bandana was knotted around the youth's neck. "Any idea where John Belushi's buried?"

"The cemetery in Chilmark," Bart replied.

"Where the hell's that?"

"Fifteen miles that way." He pointed due east.

"Way wicked cool!" The youth turned around, flung a backpack with an aluminum frame over his shoulders, and headed off down the road.

Bart rested the bike on the kickstand and leaned against a scraggily pine. Ten minutes passed. He climbed back on the three-speed and pedaled leisurely back to Oak Bluffs.

"The Heathertons, what room are they in?"

The desk clerk checked the register. "Room 301."

Bart took the elevator to the third floor, locating the room at the far end of the hallway. "My name is Bartholomew Schroeder and I'm here to see Holly."

"Yes, of course." The woman stepped out on the landing and closed the door behind her. "I haven't a clue what you said to my daughter, but she's much calmer since breakfast."

"I'm a plumber not a psychiatrist," Mr. Schroeder qualified.

"Holly is even talking about returning to school in September." The woman reached out and grabbed his hand. "That's a good sign."

"In the morning, I'm leaving the island on the first boat out from Vineyard Haven and I wanted to say goodbye." He gave the woman's hand a gentle squeeze. "I'll wait for her downstairs."

Before descending to the lobby, Bart went back to his room, washed his face and combed his hair what little there was of it. Then he bent down and felt the pipe under the toilet tank. The metal was dry.

The night the man arrived at the Oak Bluffs Hotel he spotted a ring of wetness pooling on the floor near the toilet. Drip, drip, drip. A steady stream of cold water was bleeding out from the compression fitting. He closed the shut-off valve feeding the tank and went down to the front desk.

"My toilet's leaking."

"Oh, dear," the desk clerk seemed flustered. "Finding a plumber at this late hour on a weekend could be a problem."

"I'm a plumber."

The woman's mouth fell open. "You're joking?"

"If you can scare up an adjustable wrench, I'll fix it myself."

The desk clerk fished a small toolbox from under the counter. Bart rummaged through the offerings, finally settling on a small pair of pliers. "This should do the trick."

Back in the room, he loosened the fitting and separated the flared section of tubing from its narrower counterpart. The metal was mildly corroded but nothing looked structurally damaged. After washing the crud from the mating surfaces with hand soap, Bart dried the metal.

The trick was to secure the fitting, which looked to be about ten or fifteen years old, tight enough to seal the joint and no more. Even the slightest excess pressure might stress the metal and fracture the delicate tubing. Sliding the pipes together, Bart screwed the compression fitting in place, hand tight with a little play, then opened the water supple. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Grabbing the fitting with the pliers, he twisted the nut clockwise a quarter-turn. Drip. Pause. Drip. Pause. Drip.

Another eighth of an inch. One final drip then nothing.

He wiped the pipes dry and a slick film of moisture quickly reappeared but it was condensation, nothing more. The leak was fixed. He sat down on the edge of the tub. Five minutes later the floor beneath the toilet intake line was still bone dry.

Booth Bay Harbor, Maine. Four decades earlier.

Bartholomew Schroeder and his new bride were settling into their honeymoon suite. A six-foot tall, soft bellied woman of Norwegian descent, Penelope ran the bath water but the tub wouldn't fill. Using a silver quarter as an impromptu screw driver, Bart loosened the bolts and pulled the chrome lever and face plate away from the wall. The rod that connected the drain and overflow assembly had slipped off its mounting bracket. He crimped the wire and tightened the two bolts holding the mechanism in place but, when he raised the lever and turned the water back on, the gurgling continued unabated.

Coming up behind him, Penelope wrapping her arms around his chest. "What's the matter?"

"Minor adjustment, darling" he murmured, brushing her cheek with a flurry of kisses. "No need to panic."

Bart removed the bolts a second time, pulling the entire bucket assembly out through the hole in the tub wall. He adjusted the heavy brass plunger three full revolutions lower and put everything back together. Yes, that did it! Mr. and Mrs. Schroeder took their first bath together as a married couple.

"I'm getting out now," Penelope said and leaned forward, but her husband held her by the shoulder.

"Open the drain," Bart said. Penelope reached up with her right toe and nudged the chrome lever upright. The soapy water rimmed with lavender scented bubble bath made a loud gurgling sound before beginning its slow descent.

"Now close it again," Bart instructed. Curling her toe like a prehensile tail around the lever, she yanked the metal straight down.

Glob! There was an abrupt noise as the brass plunger slammed downward like a guillotine shutting off the rush of water. Silence. Bart released his grip. His bride of six hours rose from the warm bath water but, instead of climbing out of the tub, turned to face him. Penelope Schroeder raised her elbows high in the air, crisscrossing the forearms directly over her head then nonchallantly squatted, her glistening buttocks coming to rest on his stomach. "Now, if you have no objections, I'd like to go in the next room and make babies."

Holly Heatherton wore a print dress, her hair tied back in a French braid when she joined him in the lobby. Bart led the way back up the main drag toward the Steamship Authority landing where they watched as an endless stream of cars, motorcycles and produce trucks crept out of the belly of a docked ship. When the last vehicle left the hold, the ferry began loading passengers headed back to the mainland.

Bart turned away from the pier and, in no great hurry, retraced his route toward the town center. He ducked into a building where a crowd of parents and young children were queuing up to ride the musical carousel. The hardwood floor was littered with pop corn, the nonstop calliope music deafening. Riders leaned far forward gripping the horses' reins with one hand as they lunged for brass rings dangling from a wooden chute positioned at a steep angle. Each time a rider managed to snare a ring, another one slid down to take its place.

Bart bought bags of popcorn. They went out in the street where the sun was almost down. A trawler that might have been the same ship he had seen on the morning that Holly joined him for breakfast was lurching in to shore. "There's something I want to show you."

He led the way back to the hotel and brought the girl up to his room. "Sit there." He indicated a Windsor chair with curved armrests and spindly legs splayed at a generous angle. Next to the chair was a bedside table that Mr.. Schroeder had dragged to the center of the room.

"Where did you get all this stuff?" Holly indicated a collection of plumbing supplies—tubing cutters, copper fittings, emery cloth, lead-free solder and rosin flux.

"Hardware store." Mr. Schroeder reached for a propane torch. "I'm going to teach you what little I've learned about this beautiful and sordid world we live in. Are you ready?"

Holly Heatherton, folded her hands in her lap. "Yes, I'm ready."

Half an hour later he shoved the night table back where it belonged. "That's all I have to say," Mr. Schroeder muttered. "Did you understand what I told you?"

"Yes, emphatically."

Shrouded in a twilight haze, objects in the room were beginning to lose definition, blend and blur. The nautical pictures hanging over the brass bed had shed their vivid colors in favor of more somber, elegiac tones, while the reading lamp was dissolving into the night table. "So what did you learn about the human condition?"

"Copper tubing must be bone dry and heated to the proper temperature," she said, "before solder flows into a fitting sealing the joint."

"Patience is a virtue. What else?"

A muggy breeze from the open window carried with it an acrid potpourri of decomposing fish, slimy seaweed, salt spray roses and fresh-mown grass. "Some plumbers dress the joints by cleaning away excess flux and solder but the final step is more a matter of professional pride and not absolutely necessary."

"You'll be alright, then?"

"Can't imagine why not."

"Here, take this," he handed her a small piece of emery cloth stained with flux, "to remember me by."

"A talisman of sorts."

In the morning for his last meal on the island, Mr. Schroeder ordered the salmon omelette with Monterey jack cheese, chive and diced scallions. The ferry departed promptly at eight o'clock. For the first time in over a year, he felt free and unencumbered, as though a slab of stone as thick and weighty as a granite cemetery monument had miraculously lifted from his heart.

Return to Table of Contents

Five Hundred Forty-three Parishioners

Mortimer Goldfarb was replenishing a bin of 3-inch molly screws in his uncle's hardware store when a tall, heavyset black man with a sour expression lurched through the door. "Abraham Lefkowitz?"

Morty's uncle, a gaunt, sallow-faced man with a mop of thinning hair that he seldom bothered to run a comb through, stepped out from behind the counter. "What can I do for you?"

The black man yanked a thick wad of papers from his back pocket. "You're hereby summoned to appear in district court on the eighteenth of September." He jiggled a pen in front of the hardware store owner's nose. "Sign here."

The old man's' face blanched. "What, I committed a crime?"

"Maybe yes, maybe no. Paperwork explains everything." Retrieving the clip board, the black man disappeared out the door.

Morty removed the papers from his uncle's trembling hands and scanned the document. "Florence Catelli, that divorcee who worked here a month and a half, ... she's suing you for sexual discrimination."

The old man shook a fist in the air. "I never laid a hand on that frumpy bitch!"

"Apparently, you didn't have to."

Florence Catelli came to work at Lefkowitz Hardware the middle of August doing bookkeeping three days a week. A month into the job, she approached Abe Lefkowitz and announced she was leaving early for a doctor's appointment.

"You sick?"

"Pregnant." The woman, who was well into her second term, walked out the door and promptly dropped off the face of the earth. No notice. No nothing. Abe called Florence's house a half dozen times and left messages on an answering machine but she never returned his calls.

"You asked her to bring you a note from the obstetrician."

"Yeah, what's the harm in that?"

Morty thumped the legal brief with his index finger. "Asking pregnant women for a doctor's note is against the law without a written company policy."

"Such stupidity!"

A contractor entered the store and requested ten pounds of roofing nails. Still clutching the court papers, Morty went off to the back of the store to fill the order. While his uncle was ringing up the sale, he drifted out the front door. Across the street at a diagonal loomed a new office building \- high rent, executive business suites. A sign on the front lawn read Garret, Meyers and Morales, Attorneys at Law.

Louisa Morales' name was prominently listed on the summons. Morty shook his head in disbelief. Florence Catelli probably waltzed across the intersection to Garret, Myers and Morales as soon as she left Lefkowitz' Hardware Store on her last day at work.

Emotional damages. Psychological abuse. Loss of income. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching! The woman with a penchant for lottery tickets and frittering her weekends away stroking the one armed bandits at Foxwoods Casino just over the state line in Connecticut must have thought she died and flew straight up to heaven when Ms Morales told her what Abraham Lefkowitz' indiscretion might be worth.

At four-thirty, while his uncle was talking to a contractor, Morty ducked into the back room and called the law firm. "Ms. Morales, please?"

"Who should I say is calling?"

"Mort Goldfarb. I need to speak with her regarding my uncle, Abe Lefkowitz."

After a brief pause a woman came on the line. "Yes, can I help you?"

"Your firm is representing Florence Catelli."

"Are you a lawyer?" The voice was frigid.

"No, I'm Abe Lefkowitz' nephew, but I thought -"

"If your uncle wants to negotiate a settlement that's fine," the woman brought him up short, "but otherwise Mr. Lefkowitz needs to hire an attorney. Under Massachusetts state law, neither he nor a family member can represent the corporation."

"It's a family-owned hardware store hardware, not some goddamn Fortune Five Hundred conglomerate!"

"That's irrelevant. Is your uncle ready to settle?"

There was an uncomfortably pause. "You can't be serious," Morty blustered.

By way of a reply, Louisa Morales hung up the phone.

Ten thousand dollars for emotional damages and lost wages plus legal fees—that's what the suit was demanding. And the language was brutal:

"With total disregard for Ms. Catelli's modesty, Mr. Lefkowitz demanded my client provide him with medical information of a most private and confidential nature. .... Ms. Catelli felt violated, degraded, humiliated by the store owner's insensitivity to her condition as a pregnant woman well advanced into her second trimester."

"From the outset of her employment at Lefkowitz Hardware, Ms. Catelli was treated in a most condescending and patronizing manner, as the several examples listed below will attest."

The examples were hogwash, a figment of Florence Catelli's deviant mind and Louisa Morales' creative writing skills. With a master's degree in literature, Morty Goldfarb knew perfectly well that the lawyer had embellished Florence's verbal diarrhea. Abraham Lefkowitz, a devout, orthodox Jew who would carry a lady bug outside on a Kleenex rather than harm the insect, was demonized, vilified and transformed into the employer from hell! Every pregnant working woman's worse nightmare!

From the outset, Morty had a bad feeling about the woman and tried to talk his uncle out of hiring her. Florence Catelli's employment history resembled Swiss cheese. A week here. A month and a half there. Endless holes. The red head talked too fast in a loud garish voice and, during the job interview, her eyes flitted about the hardware store in a distracted manner. But his uncle prevailed. "Give the woman a chance. Maybe she'll surprise you."

Surprise! Surprise!

"Where're that legal papers?" Abe asked around five o'clock as they were getting ready to lock up for the night.

"Let me read it over at home later tonight," Morty deflected the request, "and we can review it in the morning."

His uncle shrugged. "So, how does it feel having a bona fide sexual pervert for an uncle?"

"Pretty much the same as it did before we knew the sad truth." His nephew turned the lights off and locked the front door. When his uncle drove away, Morty put the car in gear, but instead of bearing right out of the driveway as he usually did, he snaked his way across the street to the new office building and took the elevator to the sixth floor.
"Is Ms. Morales in?"

"Do you have an appointment?" the secretary asked. "We spoke on the phone briefly earlier today," he replied vaguely. "I only need a moment of her time."

The receptionist went off down the corridor. In a room off to the right, Morty could see a mahogany conference table with a set of matching faux leather chairs. Row upon row of legal books lined the shelves. The artwork which decorated the walls was an eclectic mix of post-modern Jackson Pollack and the organic minimalist, Paul Klee.

"Third door on the right." The receptionist had returned.

"Mr. Goldfarb?" Louisa Morales looked up from a stack of legal briefs she was perusing on her desk. Inordinately large, charcoal-colored eyes lay deep-set like precious jewels in buttery smooth, pecan-colored skin. Decked out in a sky blue, ruffle-hem jacket dress with vented cuffs, the woman was voluptuously stunning.

With Morty, on the other hand, there was no pleasant way of putting it: since college, the man had put on considerable weight, and at five feet six, a hundred and eighty pounds, he was a physical wreck. A victim of male pattern baldness, all the hair covering the top of his head had fallen away. A few tufts still clung to the temples and skin around the ears, but the general impression was that of a relatively young, overweight man going completely, utterly and indisputably bald.

Beyond the first disdainful once over, Louisa Morales averted her eyes and assumed an air of bored disinterest. "You've got five minutes and then I'm throwing you out and calling the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination to have Mr. Lefkowitz' case officially calendared."

Gazing out the window six stories down, Morty could just barely recognize Lefkowitz Hardware Store across the street. By comparison, the building looking shabby and unappealing. "Morales," Morty said, "that's Hispanic?"

"Your question's irrelevant."

"We're Sephardic Jews," Morty ignored the sarcasm. "My family can trace our ancestors back to 14th Century Portugal. My Uncle Abe speaks both fluent Spanish and Ladino, which, as I'm sure an educated woman such as yourself would know, is a romance language derived mainly from Old Castilian with many borrowings from Turkish, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and French."

Louisa Morales scowled and cracked her knuckles one at a time. "Why are you telling me this?"

Morty pulled a tattered news clipping from his breast pocket and laid it on the woman's desk. "My Uncle Abe teaches English as a second language, mostly to immigrants from Latin America. Twenty years now he's been doing it. The city honored him with a citation last year." Morty pointed at one of the legal briefs littering the woman's desk. "He's not the callous and depraved monster you described in the court papers."

Louisa Morales leaned back in her chair causing her breasts to jut suggestively. The erotic display was a playful taunt. There on the sixth floor of the swanky law offices, Louisa Morales was a legal star on the rise, a gorgeous, well-educated Latina; Morty Goldfarb was a low rent shlemazel, a regrettable forgettable nobody. "Your uncle's generosity is commendable." She handed him back the clipping without bothering to look at the picture. "Now, Mr. Goldfarb let me tell you how the legal game is played."

Louisa Morales was demanding ten thousand dollars, not a penny less. The sum was nonnegotiable. If the suit before the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination failed, Louisa Morales would simply bump the case up to the next highest civil court and so on and so forth. Like a diabolical, perpetual motion machine, she would pursue Florence Catelli's sexual discrimination case all the way to the Supreme Court (Morty thought she might have been posturing but wasn't completely sure). Over the long haul, court costs and legal fees would be astronomical—in the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Truth, justice, fairness—such noble virtues and sentiments didn't factor into the equation. This was the American judicial system at its finest! A blood sport bordering on blackmail.. The moment Abraham Lefkowitz told Lenore Catelli to bring a doctor's note the game was on.

In the morning, a steady stream of roofers, general contractors, handymen, painters and plumbers kept Morty busy straight through until eleven o'clock. Then a shabbily dressed Hispanic woman carrying a broken pane of glass trudged into the store and spoke with Abe in her native tongue. Her gaunt face smeared with a maze of wrinkles, the gnarled old woman could have been sixty or a hundred and sixty. "Cut Mrs. Lopes a replacement for her kitchen window and give her a lift back to Wickendon Street." Abe handed him a plastic tub of glazing compound and a putty knife. "And while you're there, you might as well install the new glass."

Morty's mouth fell open. "I know the family from the Literacy Center," his uncle explained. "Husband died of lung cancer last year. She lives with a granddaughter. They can just barely afford the glass much less paying someone to fix it."

"I wanted to talk to you about the legal problem."

Abe waved a hand impatiently over his head. "When you get back. Go fix the window."

Morty grabbed some additional tools and went out to the car with Mrs. Lopez bringing up the rear. He arranged the new glass in the bed of the trunk. "How did you get here?"

"Boat," Mrs. Lopez replied.

"No, I don't mean the country. How did you get to the hardware store this morning?"

They were cruising down Thayer Street in the direction of the East Side. "Walk."

"You walked a mile and a half carrying a broken pane of glass?"

There was a long pause. The woman peered out the window with a relaxed, self-absorbed expression. "Senõr Lefkowitz mucho honest. I walk."

The woman lived on the third floor of a wooden tenement that smelled of black beans and cilantro.. A half-eaten taco—homemade not the Taco Bell variety—sat on a plate by the sink.. Pulling on a pair of rawhide gloves, Morty cleaned the broken shards of glass from the window frame. Twenty minutes into fixing the window, a pudgy, round-faced woman came into the apartment. The granddaughter, who was carrying a Spanish paperback, said something to Mrs. Lopez who answered her in their native tongue then left the room with a load of laundry.

"You're from the hardware store?" Her English was impeccable with barely the hint of an accent. Morty nodded. "Everybody knows Mr. Lefkowitz." The girl, who looked to be in her early thirties, sat down at the kitchen table.

Now that Morty had all the broken glass dug from the window, he chipped away at the last few remnants of brittle putty then grabbed a small propane torch. The woman stared at him in disbelief. "It's to soften the putty." He ran the flame over the window frame briskly several times then scraped the last few remnants of debris away.

"What are those little shiny things?"

Morty held up a tiny, wedge-shaped piece of metal. "They're called glaziers' points." With the flat blade of a screwdriver, he pushed one down into the wood snug against the new glass. "The stays hold the glass in place, while the putty is setting up." He gestured at the book. "Lituma en los Andes. Is that Death in the Andes?"

The woman's forehead furrowed. "You've read it?"

"Only in English translation." Morty replied. "Llosa is a brilliant writer, but, unfortunately, the book's a flawed masterpiece." Now that the window frame was cleaned up, he repositioned the glass, securing the new pane in place with more of the metal glaziers' points, which he pressed into the soft wood. "Unfortunately, the author tried to stretch what should have been a novella with a thin plot into two hundred pages."

The young woman smiled engagingly and crossed her arms over her breasts. "Well, I've only finished the first chapter so I couldn't argue the point even if I disagreed." With her fleshy shoulders and thick torso, she was far more Rubenesque than the sort of woman someone might expect to find gracing the centerfold of a Victoria Secret lingerie catalog. But she had a modestly pretty face with a flat nose and limpid brown eyes.

Morty opened the can of glazing compound and rolled a pencil-thin snake between the palms of his hands. Jamming the putty into the upper corner of the window, he ran a triangular bead at a sharp angle the entire length, trimming the excess away with the opposite end of the tool. "You speak good English."

"I came here from Guatemala as a little girl so English was never a problem." She stared at him with an amused expression. "Do you usually install the glass?"

Morty finished shaping the bead around the top of the window and was working on the opposite side. "No, not as a rule."

When the job was done, he packed up the tools.

"I'm finishing my degree in journalism at Brown," the girl said.

"Well, then we have something in common. I studied comparative literature there."

"But you work in a hardware store?"

He shrugged. "Things don't always turn out the way we plan." He washed his hands in the kitchen sink. "I didn't catch your name."

"Maria. Maria Escobar."

"Morty Goldfarb."

Mrs. Lopez, who had come back into the room a few minutes earlier, placed a twenty dollar bill on the table next to the tools. Morty took the bill and placed it back in the old woman's hand. "No pay today. Free installation."

"You nice people. Muchos gracias!"

Maria Escobar accompanied Morty down to the car. "That was very sweet of you."

A group of college students sauntered by on their way to class. Morty watched the students until they were almost gone from sight. "Does the name Louisa Morales mean anything to you?" Maria shook her head. "My uncle got himself into a legal bind and I don't know what to do." He told her about the lawsuit and his disastrous visit to Garret, Myers and Morales."

"What a shame!" She made a face. "Sexual harassment is the hot button issues on campus lately."

"Every premenstrual, bra-burning feminist," Morty noted, "with a chip on her shoulder will want Abe Lefkowitz' head mounted on a stake." He blew out his cheeks in frustration. "Even with a good lawyer, I don't see how my uncle can get a fair deal."

It didn't matter if Abraham Lefkowitz was a leading advocate of woman's rights, a philanthropist, lover of small children, bunny rabbits and baby ducks. Fling enough shit at a guileless individual and something foul was bound to stick. Afterwards, the person could spend the better part of a lifetime trying to undo the damage. "I shouldn't be burdening you with our problems." Morty turned the engine over and drove off.

When Morty got back, his uncle asked, "Did you fix Mrs. Lopez' window?"

"Good as new."

"She try to pay you?"

"Twenty dollars. I gave her back the money."

"Good boy." Abe Lefkowitz seldom charged any of the cash strapped customers full price on anything. When Morty challenged him on his pricing philosophy, he said, "I charge them what I think they can afford."

"Then you should inflate the price when some grosser macher buys stuff."

"That would be dishonest, and anyway, Mrs. Lopez is devoutly religious. A regular saint."

"That so?" Morty scratched an earlobe thoughtfully. "How would you, an orthodox Jew, know about Mrs. Lopez' religious habits?"

Abe slit open a cardboard box containing small containers of pumice and rottenstone. "I drive past Our Lady of Guadalupe Church every day on the way to work, and more often than not that woman is coming or going from the building."

"Is that a fact?" Morty rubbed his chin. "How many Spanish speaking people do you figure you taught English since you started with the literacy program?"

"Hard to say. A couple hundred or so."

"What other church do they attend?"

"There is no other church that caters to the Hispanics. They all go to Our Lady of Guadalupe."

"What about the middle class."

His uncle waved his hand impatiently. "The Mass is in their native tongue. They all go there." He resumed sorting the polishing agents.

Morty couldn't get the phantasmagoric image of Louisa Morales out of his brain. The voluptuous, dark-skinned goddess utterly lacking in the milk of human kindness. "We can't put this off any longer. We have got to talk about the legal papers."

"And I agree." Abe Lefkowitz draped a hairy forearm around his favorite nephew's shoulder and steered him into the cluttered office. Pushing him down in a chair, the older man rested his buttocks on the edge of the desk. Lifting the phone off the hook, he covered the receiver with a greasy towel. "I'm gonna talk and you're gonna listen."

The previous afternoon, while Morty was trying to match wits with Louisa Morales, Abe Lefkowitz went to the synagogue to pray over his latest misfortune. "I was reciting the Shma Yisrael Adoinoi Eluhainu, Adonoi achod, when suddenly my whole body went numb and I heard this voice."

"What sort of voice?" Morty gawked at his uncle uncomprehendingly.

"God spoke to me. Here." He pointed to his heart. "It was no different than Moses on Mount Sinai."

"Moses got the Ten Commandments," Morty wasn't buying any of this nonsense. "What did you get?"

"God said not to worry. He would smite my persecutors, shame and humiliate them in the eyes of their own kind."

Florence Catelli was suing them for ten thousand dollars plus legal expenses and Abraham Lefkowitz was hearing celestial voices from the cosmic beyond. "God intends to smite your persecutors?" Morty jumped up from the chair and began pacing the tiny office like a wild man. "What the hell does that mean?"

"I don't know."

Morty rubbed his eyes with the spatulated tips of his fingers. There were times—floods, natural disasters, unavoidable human tragedy—when a soul required divine intervention, when nothing else but God's personal solace could set things right in the universe. Other times you needed a hard nosed, take-no-prisoners lawyer. "Maybe," Morty was clutching at straws, "you had a spiritual epiphany, an intimation of divine solace and -"

"He said no lawyers."

"What?"

"The last thing God said was no lawyers. He would handle Florence Catelli on his own, divine terms." The man's features were suffuse with a radiant, ecstatic glow as Abraham Lefkowitz replaced the telephone on the hook and went back out to check on customers.

The rest of the afternoon flew by in an emotional blur. A friend from college stopped by the hardware store just before closing. "Did you here? Naomi Abraham's getting married."

"That so?" Morty was restocking the sandpaper bins. First an edict from God and now this! He felt dizzy, like he needed to barf his brains out or stumble off the curb in front of a fully loaded cement mixer.

"She went on a Club Med vacation and met this orthodontist. One month later the dentist, who is already set up with his own practice pops the question."

Morty could feel his brain shutting down. "That's nice."

"Picture's in the society section of today's paper. I never seen her look so radiant!"

After his friend left, Morty hurried across the street and bought a copy of the Brandenberg Gazette. Yes, there she was. The future Naomi Skolnick. Lithe with curly brown hair, she was never particularly pretty, but the girl had a certain perkiness and haughty style that rendered her irresistible. Six weeks ago Morty Goldfarb and Naomi Abraham were living together. Now she was featured in the society section engaged to Myron Skolnick of Fort Pierce, Florida. Surprise! Surprise!

Naomi and Morty met in college. An elementary ed major from a wealthy family on Long Island, when she moved into his tidy apartment, the woman brought a truckload of designer clothes and shoes, a two thousand dollar Bose stereo system and flagrant disdain for everything middle class. "Time to replace these Stone Age relics," Naomi pointed to the rabbit ears perched on top of the television.

"What did you have in mind?" Morty asked.

"I already put in a call to Direct TV. They're installing a satellite dish a week from Tuesday."

The sixty-dollar, TV antenna Naomi was consigning to the junk heap was a top-of-the-line Godar, the first rabbit ear antenna to incorporate a broadband 14-element inline log periodic. Morty had no idea what that meant, but the picture was always clear and he could pull stations all the way from Boston and even southern New Hampshire with little or no ghosting. But, of course, that wasn't the issue. Naomi needed MTV, Bravo, CNN, and a dozen movie channels.

The following Tuesday, a white van sporting the Direct TV logo pulled up in front of the apartment building. An hour and a half later Morty was channel surfing through the various offerings, which didn't look much different than what he originally had except now there was a monthly fee.

They were living together four months and Naomi said, "You earned a master's degree in literature and could teach at the college level, but you waste your talent hawking masking tape and bug spray at a stupid hardware store. I don't get it."

Morty had worked for his uncle all through high school and college. When he graduated, with a degree in comparative literature, the family assumed the studious bookworm would apply for a teaching position. Instead, Morty meandered back to Lefkowitz Hardware.

Now they were being pummeled by the 'big boxes', the Home Depots, Lowes, Ace True Value, Benny's plus a dozen-and-one other corporate chains that stayed open seven days a week, boasting fifty times the floor space plus every conceivable hardware gizmo known to man. "My uncle's getting on in years. He can't manage alone," Morty replied evasively.

But that wasn't the real reason. Academia, especially in the Ivy League, MFA programs, was a hot house for pontificating fools and scholastic snobs who penned highbrow literary criticism that even their own colleagues couldn't penetrate. A lot of what passed for scholarship was little more than intellectual masturbation.

The previous day at Lefkowitz Hardware a young man cornered Morty over by the key machine. "I got to cut a hole in a piece of wood."

A hole in a piece of wood—that was simple enough, right? Well, let's see. The customer could use a spade drill bit or maybe he might prefer something a bit neater so he shells out a few extra bucks and purchase a Forstener, flat bottom with a self-centering spur. Or perhaps he opts for a set of hole saws with an interchangeable arbor. That will do the job and let the novice woodworker change diameters to suit the task. Or maybe all he really needed was a brad-tipped carbide model with a recessed shank? Of course, a jigsaw could do the job equally well.

Morty ultimately sold the man a one-inch spade bit. "What speed do you recommend on the drill press?"

"Step the belt down to around eight hundred rpm's. Nothing over a thousand," Morty counseled.

"And for these?" He pointed to a pair of standard, eighth-inch carbide bits."

"Keep it up around three thousand; you'll reduce drag and breakage."

This was the real universe, the world of blue collar working stiffs. The university was too goddamn safe, too antiseptic and hygienic for Morty Goldfarb's gritty temperament. Truth be told, the six years at the university had been little more than an intellectual interlude, never an expedient means to an end.

One morning in late October, Naomi blocked the doorway as Morty was heading off to work. "I treasure you dearly but I also love this." She pointed to a genuine alligator skin belt she had bought at the Chestnut Hill Mall. It wasn't just the sixty-nine dollar belt. It was the Bose stereos, haute cuisine, Coach handbags - not the cheap knockoffs scruffy street venders hawked off 42nd street in New York City. It was a package deal. Naomi wanted the whole shebang and Morty Goldfarb, all around nice guy mensch, couldn't deliver squat.

"I rented a place over by Federal Hill." The girl kissed him on the side of the mouth. There was nothing angry or hurtful about the gesture. She had always been upfront about her material wants and needs. "I'll be out of here by the weekend."

Sensing his anguish, she wrapped her arms around him. "We had some fun together but it's time to move on. Don't hate me." She pulled her head away from his chest and fixed him with the most angelic, if ever so slightly haughty, smile.

"Hate you?" Morty stumbled over the words. "I only wish ..." He couldn't think of anything coherent to say and left the sentence dangling like another domestic loose end.

When all her belongings were gone, the apartment exuded a monkish austerity. Morty called the Direct TV company. "I'm canceling service. Come at your convenience and remove the dish."

"Bill's paid up through the end of next month," the customer service representative explained. Why don't you just enjoy the programming until then and we'll shut it down?"

"Okay. That sounds reasonable." As soon as he hung up, Morty rummaged about in the closet and located his Godar antenna with the broadband 14-element inline log periodic. He removed the satellite transmitter cable and connected the rabbit ears to the back of the television.

A week passed and then a month. Like a necrotic, suppurating wound, the pain in his heart was unbearable. Morty dropped by his parent's house. "Naomi moved out. She left me." He could have phrased it more delicately, finessed the break up into a matter of mutual consent, but why bother.

His mother burst into tears, dabbing her blotchy face with a soggy Kleenex. "From the day that darling girl came into your life I was hoping..."

"Yes, I know."

His mother sighed and stared dully into space. "Abiker mama. Abiker knarr.," she mumbled and put the water on for tea.

Eternal mother, eternal fool.

One Jewish mother can raise up ten sons,

but can ten sons lift even a single mother?

Mrs. Goldfarb hungered for grandchildren. Was it too much to ask? When Naomi Abraham came on the scene, it was tacitly understood that the enterprising, slightly pushy woman would straighten Morty out, get the ineffectual dreamer back on track. Morty wasn't a bad sort. He just needed a firm shove in the right direction.

Synergy. Naomi and Morty. He was creative, intellectually adroit and could fix just about anything with the aid of a hacksaw or adjustable wrench.. She was aggressive, fun loving, faithful and a social snob. With Naomi Abraham as his helpmate, Morty Goldfarb would ultimately find his true calling and come into his own as a solid member of the Jewish community.

After Naomi deserted him, family and friends resigned themselves to the harsh truth: Morty was a lost cause. A lovable, kind hearted schnook. A neer-do-well, who worked in his uncle's hardware store, treading water, so to speak, as his insipid existence dribbled away.

The day after the 'miraculous pronouncement', as Abe described it, Morty visited his mother. "Uncle Abe's been acting strange."

"In what way?"

Morty told her about the law suit and his clandestine meeting with Louisa Morales."

Sarah Goldfarb filled a small pan with water and turned the stove on. The woman had a fetish about tea kettles. She hated them. To this day, Morty still had no idea why his mother wouldn't use a whistling kettle. "All right, so some lousy, former employee is trying to squeeze a few crummy bucks out of my brother. You hire a lawyer. What's the big deal?"

"Abe says he was so upset about the law suit, he sought God's advice."

"Yeah?"

"And God talked to him." Morty was watching as the tiny bubbles accumulated at the bottom of the pan near the center then multiplied and mushroomed into a frothy sea. Maybe his mother enjoyed witnessing her water come to a full boil, something you couldn't do with a closed tea kettle. That made perfect sense. "Since when does God talk to hardware salesmen?"

Sarah poured the tea, a cup for Morty and one for herself. "Even from when he was a little boy, my brother was very religious."

"A religious nut, maybe? A metaphysical oddball prone to emotional excesses?"

"No, a hundred times no." his mother blew on her tea and added a splash of milk. "Abe is the most down to earth, levelheaded member of the family." She pushed the carton of milk across the table toward him "Now, if your meshugena aunt Trudy said she spoke to God that would be a totally different matter."

His mother went to the cupboard and returned with a bag of Oreos. Morty twisted the two halves, separating the chocolaty wafers. "I asked him if God ever spoke to him in such a fashion before and he said this was the first time. Any suggestions?"

His mother sat staring into space for the better part of a minute. "God said He would smite Abe's persecutors?"

Morty nodded with a sick expression. "Shame and humiliate them in the eyes of their own kind."

"Your uncle is sixty years old," his mother spoke haltingly, "and devoutly religious. This is a guy who believes in tzidakah, righteousness. You spend a lifetime doing good deeds and keeping your nose clean in the here and now. The rest takes care of itself. It's a Jewish thing."

His mother brushed some crumbs into the palm of her hand. "You always hear about those hell fire and brimstone televangelists. It's 'Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!' until you read in the newspaper that the Reverend Goody-two-shoes has been shtupping his neighbor's wife for the past year and a half."

Morty stared at his mother in disbelief. He had never heard her use such language. But then, the circumstances were unusual, to say the least. "Your uncle never made a fuss over his religious beliefs, so you do it his way or no way." "Now go home," the woman ordered, "and figure out how to help your Uncle Abe."

In graduate School, Morty spent a semester in an honors class, studying Russian literature. He wrote his final term paper on one of Tolstoy's lesser novels, The Resurrection. Later that night as he was lying in bed, a scene—really nothing more than a tiny snippet— from the end of the novel floated back to him. A young boy, no more than four or five, and his older sister are traveling to the family's summer home in the Russian province. Their horse drawn carriage is held up as a ragged band of prisoners is being lead through the street to an awaiting ship where they will be transported to a harsh prison colony. As the chained and filthy prisoners stumble across the road, the sister flies into a tantrum over the minor inconvenience. The brother bursts into inconsolable tears at the sight of people treated worse than animals. Vintage Tolstoy!

Louisa Morales reminded Morty of the malicious sister just as he felt an overpowering moral affinity towards the younger brother. Tzidakah. His mother's words floated back to him in a confused muddle. How could anybody resist the lethal juggernaut that Attorney Morales intended to unleash? She would attack the righteous Jew for days, weeks, months and years on end until Abraham Lefkowitz was consigned to the poor house or gave her client what she wanted.

While he was waiting to meet with Louisa Morales, a stream of attorneys kept rushing out to the front desk with piles of paperwork that they needed copied or mailed off to various parties. A middle-aged woman with a pair of bifocals dangling from a beaded chain placed a stack of papers three inches thick on the counter. How many Abe Lefkowitzes were being euthanized, sodomized, castrated and lobotomized in the seemingly innocuous, pile of documents?

Earlier in the afternoon at the hardware store, Morty helped a man choose a router. They settled on a Ryobi with a quarter inch chuck and circular depth gauge. The fellow was originally considering an industrial, production grade Makita, but the tool was four times as costly and made no sense for a 'weekend warrior', a homeowner who only needed the tool for occasional projects.

Did the legal staff at Garret, Myers and Morales derive the same satisfaction as Morty did with the hardware customer when they ripped the gizzards out of a hapless defendant? At one point when Morty was telling Louisa Morales about his uncle's work at the Literacy Center, the woman arched her left wrist over her should and began sawing back and forth with the right hand to mimic a violinist in concert. She reduced twenty years of selfless dedication to little more than maudlin sentiment.

God would shame and humiliate Abraham Lefkowitz' persecutors in the eyes of their own kind. What the hell did that mean? It smacked of metaphysical gibberish. Morty didn't know what to think any more.

A week passed. Like a brick phallic symbol, the luxury office suites across the street seemed to grow taller and more intimidating. Mrs. Lopez returned with her granddaughter to buy a gallon of paint and a brush. While the old woman was choosing the color, Maria pulled Morty aside. "I need to talk to you about a couple of things." She lowered her voice and leaned closer. "I told my grandmother about your uncle's legal difficulties."

At the far end of the aisle, Abe Lefkowitz was loading a can of eggshell white latex paint into the automated mixer. "And?"

"At first she said, 'I'll pray to the Blessed Mother', but then she came back an hour later and muttered that sometimes it pays to hedge one's bets."

"Your grandmother said that?"

"Well not exactly in those words." Maria Escobar told him what the old woman suggested.

"Yes, that makes perfect sense," Morty replied. "Two things. You said there was something else you had to tell me."

"You were right about Death in the Andes. Llosa's book was ridiculously long for such a skimpy plot." She tapped him on the sleeve. "Stop by our apartment after supper," she whispered, "and we can plan strategy."

As the two women were leaving,, Morty could have sworn that Maria's grandmother winked and curled her lip in a defiant, toothless grin.

"What did you charge her for the paint?" Morty asked when they were gone.

"I think I'll go to lunch," his uncle said, ignoring the question.

Around two in the afternoon a skinny teenager wandered into the store. "Can I help you?" Morty asked.

"No I'm all set." The youth was holding a can of carburetor spray. His face was marred with stubborn blotches of acne and one of the front teeth on the top was chipped.

"Car problems?"

"Yeah, engine won't turn over." He shook his head and a mop of greasy brown hair fell down over his eyes.

"You were in here just a week ago with the same problem."

"Yeah, well it's an older car." His eyes flitted about the room. "Piece of junk, really."

"Maybe you just need a tune up."

The young man began rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet impatiently. His fly was open and the left cuff of his pants was torn and dragging on the floor. "I'm in a bit of a hurry."

"Let me see your driver's license."

"Left it at home," he shot back without missing a beat.

"You're sniffing carburetor fluid to get high."

"You got some goddamn nerve!"

"I can smell it on your breath. You probably sprayed five minutes ago. Filled a plastic garbage bag with fumes and took a one way trip to la-la land."

"Go to hell!" The youth spun around on his heels and headed for the door.

On Friday a registered letter arrived from the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination notifying Abraham Lefkowitz that his case would be heard on the fourteenth of the following month. He read the letter and tossed it in the trash. "Florene has the lawyers. We've got something better."

"Amen to that!" his nephew chirped.

Saturday evening, Morty, who usually slept late most weekends, set the alarm clock for six-thirty. In the morning he dressed in his best suit and drove over to Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, where he found a seat in the farthest row behind a pillar. It was his first Catholic service. He sat through all the gospel readings and even hummed along during the responsorial. After the Mass as the faithful rose to receive Holy Communion, Morty slipped out the back door and drove to his parent's home.

"Jews and Catholics share the same God."

His mother cocked her head to one side and stared at him uncertainly. "After a fashion, yes," she said. "Let's not forget the Inquisition, Auschwitz, Pope Innocent the Third and a few other catastrophic bumps in the road."

"What if the deity that spoke to Uncle Abe wasn't of the Jewish persuasion?"

Mrs. Goldfarb shook her head in exasperation. "I haven't a clue what the hell you're talking about."

"You said it yourself—if it's all about tzidakah, righteousness, then it doesn't make a bit of difference whether a Jew or an orangutan performs the good deeds."

His mother placed a hand on the side of her head. "Mortimer, my son, you're beginning to scare me."

When he reached home Morty went into the study and pulled out his Webster's New World College Dictionary.

Smite from the Old English smitan akin to Ger schmeissen to throw IE base smē-, to smear, smear on, stroke on 1 a) to hit or strike hard b) to bring into a specified condition by or as by a powerful blow c) to defeat, punish, destroy or kill d)...... 3 to affect strongly or suddenly with some feeling [smitten with dread] 4 to disquiet mentally, distress [smitten by conscience] 5 to strike or impress favorably; inspire with love [smitten with her charms]

A horny male might easily be 'smitten' by Louisa Morales' stunning good looks while she smote the libidinous loser into a state of rigor mortis with her barbed tongue. The word held multiple dissimilar meanings each of which could be used to good advantage. Catelli versus Lefkowitz: Suddenly the improbable seemed slightly more manageable.

The following Thursday at precisely ten forty-five in the morning, the senior partner at Garret, Myers and Morales buzzed Louisa Morales on the intercom.

"We have a situation developing out her in the lobby. You might want to take a look."

"Could you be a bit more specific?"

After an inordinately long pause, Frederick Garret replied, "No, I don't think so. You can either call the police or get your ass out front in a hurry."

In the lobby close to fifty Hispanic people were milling about—senior citizen , young parents with toddlers and a smattering of middle age professionals. Over by the copier machine, a frail elderly woman was leaning on an aluminum walker with neon yellow tennis balls attached to the rear legs. In the conference room, a woman with a diaper bag was sitting alone nursing an infant.

Mrs. Lopez and her granddaughter were marching about the foyer with hand painted signs that read: Louisa Morales: Shame! Shame! Shame! And 'Boycott Garret, Meyers and Morales!'

"What the hell is going on here?"

Morty Goldfarb stepped forward. "We need to talk."

Louisa Morales grabbed the receptionist's phone. "I'm calling the police."

"Could be the right thing to do under the circumstances," Morty spoke amiably, "or the worse mistake of your life."

The attorney's manicured finger was arched over the keypad. "What do you want, Mr. Goldfarb?"

"Five minutes of your precious time. Gratis."

She ushered them into the conference room. The woman with the baby looked up and smiled before settling back to the maternal business at hand. "With the exception of the young children, these fine people all have two things in common," Morty said. "They were tutored by my uncle over at the literacy center and," he paused for dramatic effect, "they all attend Our Lady of Guadalupe Church."

"So what?"

"Mrs. Sanchez," he pointed in the direction of a middle age Hispanic carrying a small American flag on a stick, "just got her US citizenship. She claims that without my uncle's help, she'd still be stuck in cultural limbo." Mrs. Sanchez glowered at the attorney and waved her flag proudly.

"Now Mr. Cordoba," he pointed to an older man with a pencil moustache and gold tooth, "is a member of the Chamber of Commerce along with your father. They've known each other for years. He came to this country from Algeciras in Southern Spain. It's a tiny seaport town on the Straights of Gibraltar. He arrived here thirteen years ago not speaking a word of English. Who do you think tutored him when Carlos showed up one day over at the Brandenberg Literacy Center?"

Louisa Morales shifted uncomfortably in her leather chair. Outside in the foyer, the front door opened and several new Hispanic families flooded into the office. "At last count, five hundred forty-three parishioners attend the first mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe, and that's not including your parents or visitors not formally registered with the rectory. If you proceed forward with this frivolous law suit, these fine Catholics will tell half a thousand people what you did to my uncle, and they'll probably tell all their relatives, friends and neighbors. After they've dragged your family's good name through the mud, you may want to change religions or move back to your native country of origin."

The commotion mushroomed in the hallway. With no place to stand, more people stormed into the law firm, forcing those who had arrived earlier to retreat further down the hallway. Morty Goldfarb leaned across the table so close that his lips actually brushed against the attorney's lovely ear. "A little voice in my heart of hearts tells me Louisa Morales has seen the error of her ways and will do the honorable thing. Tell me if I'm wrong."

Later that afternoon, Maria Escobar stopped by the hardware store. "That went well, don't you think?"

"God works in mysterious ways."

"That's a worn-out cliché." Maria shot back. "A man with a Master's degree in comparative literature from Brown ought to choose his words more carefully."

"A hackneyed phrase, to be sure," Morty agreed. A customer who had been browsing through the bargain bin went out the door. "I don't have cable TV, but I've got a very sophisticated set of rabbit ears that gets excellent reception even in the inner city."

Maria shrugged. "Why are you telling me this?"

"No reason in particular." Morty picked up a banana yellow, twenty-five foot Stanley tape measure and lofted it back and forth between his hands. "There's an Iranian foreign film playing over at the Avon Cinema this weekend and I was wondering ..."

Return to Table of Contents

Switched at Birth

"Adrian Flanagan's working three to eleven over at the Brentwood Nursing Home." Like a poker player dealt a lousy hand and waiting to see if his opponent would fold or raise the ante, Jason Mangarelli fidgeted with his hands. "Thought I might drop by later this week and see how she's doing."

His mother, who was stuffing the washing machine with a load of soiled towels grimaced but never bother to raise her head. The wiry young man, who, stood a little under six feet, flicked a shock of dark hair out of his hazel eyes and watched her measure out a cupful of Borax liquid detergent. Mrs. Mangarelli, a petite Italian woman with auburn hair and a pointy nose, sprinkled softener into the machine before closing the lid. "Not a good idea."

"Why's that?"

"The nursing home is a private business. You've no legitimate reason being there."

Jason cringed. His mother was doing the 'voice'. The voice was a stilted, phony-as-a-three-dollar-bill inflection that she inadvertently slipped into when feeling uncomfortable, out of her natural element. A set of gears in the washer clicked into place and the agitator began swirling the dirty clothes in the sudsy water. Only now did his mother step back, hands on hips, and look her son full in the face. "Some things are better left in the past."

Some things ... A year older than Jason, Adrian would have been twenty-three, though no one had laid eyes on the girl in over a decade. Raunchy rumors began percolating around Jason's sophomore year in high school. Then, mercifully, the ugliness died away. The teenage girl blipped off the radar screen, vanished presumably into some sordid black hole, only to resurface five years later. Well, not exactly. Adrian never physically resurfaced—only the swirl of smutty gossip. "I wonder if Jack Flanagan knows his oldest daughter's back in town."

Jason's mother shrugged. He could see her pulling up the drawbridge, walling herself up behind a thick slab of brittle-minded certitudes. "It's been at least a dozen years now," the boy pressed his point. "The jerk doesn't care if Adrian's alive or dead?"

"She disgraced her family."

Jason snorted sarcastically. "And in the next breath I suppose you're gonna tell me her old man's a freakin' saint?"

His mother's eyes flared, her lower jaw flattening like a battering ram but the middle-aged woman held her tongue.

Jason and Adrian grew up next door to each other. Jason remembered Adrian as a round-faced imp with coal black hair cropped short.—a persnickety tomboy with sparkling eyes, a burnished coppery complexion and stocky frame. When they were in fourth grade Adrian took Jason aside. "My father told my mother she's got shit for brains."

Jason didn't know what to say.

"Mom called him a two-timing louse." Jack Flanagan, a pot-bellied Irishman, was a loud-mouth braggart who made it big in the durable medical supply business. Adrian's mother was a hypochondriac and compulsive, non-stop talker. In later years, Jason developed the rather bizarre theory that his best friend had been switched at birth. Adrian's parents—that is, the bogus couple who brought her home from the maternity ward—couldn't possibly be biologically related to this angelic soul. "My parents hate each other so they're getting a divorce." Adrian reached out and grabbed his hand. They were sitting on a plump sofa watching a Simpsons rerun. Because of endless pranks at school, Principal Skinner had Bart sent off to France where he was working in the wine fields as an indentured servant. "You're my best friend," Adrian continued in a faltering voice.

Again, Jason didn't know what to say. He was nine years old and still struggling with long division. A few months later, Adrian was gone from their lives, dragged off to live with the garrulous mother's extended family. Jack Flanagan remarried the following year and his new wife, who was really just a repackaged, jazzed up younger version of his old wife, got down to business. Bang. Bang. Bang. They produced three children, all daughters, in rapid succession. No one ever talked about Adrian anymore. Ten years passed. One day Jason's sister, Jenna, took him aside. "Saw Adrian Flanagan last night."

"Where?"

"Went to a musical in Boston." A couple years older than her brother, Jenna was a prettier version of the mother with a less pointy nose and equally blunt temperament. "She was in the Theater District just off Tremont Street near Park Square working the crowd."

Jason's face clouded over. "I don't follow you."

"Adrian was gussied up like a hooker. A car pulled up and the driver rolled down the passenger side window. They negotiated a price. Adrian jumped in and they drove off."

Jason felt nauseous, light headed. "Did you say anything to mom?" His sister shook her head.

"Sure it was Adrian?"

Jenna nodded once. His favorite playmate from elementary school still wore her dark hair in a close-cropped, pixie style. The same squat, compact torso. "She's all grown up now," Jenna said with a sober expression. "Got hips and breasts."

Adrian Flanagan as streetwalker decked out in a flimsy halter top, neon hot pants and stiletto heels. Like the missing piece to a salacious, X-rated puzzle, this latest bit of titillating garbage fit neatly with the other outlandish fragments of hearsay, idle gossip and innuendo that filtered back to Jason over the years. A friend of a friend who knew Adrian's mother once removed heard that the young woman—she wasn't a teenager any more—was a speed freak. Adrian Flanagan ricocheted in and out of prison, was living on the streets selling her body for crack cocaine and worse. Another remake of the saga had her cloistered away in a halfway house for recovering addicts. She'd found Jesus, Krishna, Buddha or consecrated her mortal soul to some occult, fundamentalist group. Still later, Adrian was dead, buried in a potter's grave. Who the hell knew?

On Tuesday evening, Jason drove over to the Brentwood Nursing Home. He sat in the car with the engine idling for a good twenty minutes before mustering the nerve to enter the building. "Adrian Flanagan?"

"Over in the west wing." The receptionist waved a hand in the direction of a passageway. "Check with the nurse's station at the far end of the hall."

The Brentwood Nursing Home had a distinct odor—an odd mix of body wastes, cleaning fluids, and herbal ointments. Several bedridden women in adjoining rooms were moaning in a repetitive, sing-song fashion. As Jason passed the elevator, an emaciated gentleman dressed in a white johnny tried to rise from his wheelchair setting off a shrill beep. A nurses aide came running and eased the fellow back down. As soon as his withered rump made contact with the padded leather seat, the hidden noisemaker fell silent.

At the nurse's station a colored woman was writing in a patient's chart while a male orderly sorted pills in paper cups arranged neatly on a medicine tray. A stocky, attractive woman with short dark hair and a pink smock exited a room carrying a carton of juice. The stocky woman hurried past toward the nursing station. There was no recognition. Nothing. "Adrian?"

The woman in the pink smock abruptly turned and came back. She stared at him for the longest time before her features dissolved in a curious smile. "Jason Mangarelli all grown up!" She leaned forward and, as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world, brushed her lips across his cheek.

At the nurse's station a telephone rang. The fellow with the pill tray was locking the medicine cabinet with a brass key. For a split second, it was like they were back on the sofa at his parent's house. On the television screen, Bart Simpson was telling the French gendarme that he had been abducted by evil wine merchants, who were watering down the spirits with automotive antifreeze. "I get off in ten minutes. Wait for me outside in the parking lot." Like an apparition, Adrian floated off down the corridor disappearing into an adjacent room. Jason went outside and sat in his car. He felt mildly disoriented, as though time had begun flowing in the wrong direction, leaking back into the past and forward into an, as yet, unfathomable future. Einstein's theory of relativity turned upside down. A dozen years flushed down the toilet. Nothing had changed.

Well, that wasn't completely true. The girl Jason knew back in Thatcher Elementary School was a husky tomboy through and through. Back then, Adrian Flanagan's lower torso was fused with the upper half, as though a metal pole was solidly fixed from tail bone to the nape of the neck. Now her hips rocked with a supple, feminine grace. Adrian had blossomed into a woman.

A little after eleven o'clock, a steady stream of employees began dribbling out of the building. "Want to grab a coffee?" Jason asked.

Adrian shook her head. "Got to get home to my baby, but you can follow in your car. I only live a few miles down the road."

Jason went back to where he parked. Adrian was a mother. Yes, a rumor to that effect circulated for years. At fifteen, Adrian delivered a baby out of wedlock but signed away all maternal rights at birth. Sadly, like everything else, the ephemeral truth was buried beneath a bruising avalanche of tall tales, hearsay, melodrama and patently bad fiction.

Adrian lived on the second floor of a modest apartment complex in the Maryville section of town. When they opened the door, a small dog barking hysterically rushed to greet them. "My baby," Adrian said by way of explanation.

"And I thought ..." He left the sentence hanging.

In the kitchen Adrian removed a plastic container from the refrigerator. She scooped a serving into a bowl, warmed it in the microwave and placed the food on the floor.

Adrian held the container under Jason's nose. "Bowtie macaroni, sweet potato, peas, carrots, corn, sliced apples, chicken livers and ground turkey." The dog, a dirty gray shiatsu, ugly as sin, devoured a chunk of turkey then went to work on the macaroni. Wolfing down the entire bowl in less than thirty seconds, it licked its chops, then began rushing about the kitchen in a frenzy with its corkscrew tail arched over the hind quarters.

"You cook your own dog food from scratch?"

Adrian nodded. "The glutton wants more but that's all she gets."

Adrian's dog, Mitzi, previously belonged to an elderly woman brought to the nursing home from the West End Trailer Park. Multi-infarct dementia. The lady had suffered a series of mild strokes each of which further sapped her sanity and physical strength. The addled resident had been living at the Brentwood Nursing Home the better part of a week before she let slip that her dog was locked up, abandoned in the trailer. Adrian located a house key in her bedside table and made a frantic trip to the trailer. Half starved and badly dehydrated, the dog could just barely stand up. The floor was rotting out and the roof leaked. The smelly trailer was littered with dog filth, fleas and newspapers dating back to the Kennedy assassination.

Adrian brought Mitzi to her apartment and nursed the animal back to health on a steady diet of homemade dog food. Half the mutt's teeth fell out. The rickety hind legs were so badly bowed that it could only run at half-speed in a frenetic, geriatric waddle. Once Mitzi was on the mend, Adrian brought the dog to the nursing home for a visit. She licked the old woman's face and cuddled beneath her bony rib cage. In the morning the old woman was dead.

"How's my dad doing?" Adrian asked.

"Okay. We sometimes get together at the holidays," Jason replied. "He had three more daughters with his second wife."

"So I heard," Adrian's lips turned up ever so slightly in a dry smile. "Are they nice?"

She's never even met her half-sisters! Jason thought a moment. "The first two are obnoxious, but the youngest, Dawn, is sort of sweet. Reminds me of you."

Adrian scooped the dog up in her arms and nuzzled its face with her chin. "My father got himself into a legal mess a while back. I read about it in the Providence Journal. Whatever came of that?"

Five years earlier, Jack Flanagan's mug was smeared all over the Providence Journal when the IRS indicted him for tax evasion. A private accounting firm was sent to review his business records at the medical supply company and discovered the flamboyant businessman, who favored Cuban cigars, Lincoln Continentals and off-colored jokes, was 'cooking the books'. A slew of hospital beds and motorized wheelchairs that never left the showroom had been billed to Medicare along with a hundred eighty-five bogus claims for medical services. In one instance, an elderly woman with rheumatoid arthritis who was supposedly receiving inhalation therapy had been deceased a half dozen years.

Rumors circulated that Mr. Flanagan was heading to Connecticut for a little R and R courtesy of the federal government. A minimum security facility with an outstanding law library, soft ball field and state-of-the-art exercise gym. Nolo contendere. In the end, he copped a plea, paid a hefty fine and received a two-year suspended sentence. Case closed!

Throughout the ordeal, the man never showed a speck of remorse. The week before his final court date, he was yakking it up like a remorseless jackass at a Fourth of July pool party. Dressed in Bermuda shorts and a garish print shirt, Jack Flanagan poked fun at the district attorney. Everyone cheated on their income tax, right? The unfortunate glitch with the hospital beds, bottled oxygen and wheel chairs was just sloppy bookkeeping. Sloppy bookkeeping to the tune of over two hundred thousand dollars!

"He beat the wrap. Walked away with a shitty fine and slap on the wrist."

"Sounds about right." The wistful smile remained, but now her eyes turned flinty hard. "And what have you heard about me over the years?"

The question caught Jason off guard. "A lot of hooey—outrageous lies and innuendo," he stammered.

"Lies and innuendo." She lobbed the words back at him like a tennis player parrying a well-placed shot. "And how do you know it isn't all true?" Jason didn't know what to say.

"Other people have surely heard that I'm back in town," Adrian continued, "but you're the only one with the common decency to look me up." She took a step forward and draped her arms around his shoulders. "It means a lot."

After an awkward silence, Adrian refilled the dog's water bowl and watched as Mitzi drank her fill.

She put the kettle on and when the water sent up a wheezy hiss, poured tea. "The staff at the nursing home can't pigeonhole me. I'm just the new girl who showed up on the west wing a month and a half ago. They don't know my father is a thieving bastard or that my mother's a compulsive talkaholic who would sooner slit her wrists than be alone with her own vacuous thoughts for two seconds strung together."

Switched at birth. Luck of the draw—Adrian Flanagan got dealt a pair of duds, jokers from the bottom of the deck. Toxic Parents. Parents who should have had their reproductive organs cauterized at birth. Mitzi scurried up to the table and began pawing at Adrian's leg. The dog, which was near death, only a few months ago, was bursting with vitality. "There's this woman, Mrs. Galway, at the accounting firm where I work," Jason said. "Her dog, Jeremiah, got sideswiped by a car last month and is laid up with a broken hip. The vet patched him up and sent the pooch home a week ago, but he won't eat much of anything and just sulks in the basement." Jason pointed at the empty dog bowl. "Jeremiah sure could use some of your secret recipe."

"What breed?"

"Beagle. Cutest little thing. Mrs. Galway's husband passed away in August. When the dog got injured, it was like the double whammy."

"I don't work weekends." Adrian sipped at her tea. "Come by Saturday afternoon and we can whip up a fresh batch." She went to the cupboard and located a carton of sugar cookies. "But now, tell me everything that's happened to you since fourth grade and don't skimp on the details."

An hour later, after the sugar cookies and tea, Adrian walked Jason to the door. She snaked her arms around his waist and leaned forward. He could feel her chest rising and falling with each breath. A minute passed in total silence, then another. Adrian's face was cradled just beneath his collar bone. At some point Jason realized his own arms had involuntarily snaked up under the small of her back, wrapping the girl in a fierce bear hug.



When he reached home, Jason showered and got ready for bed. He was curled up under the covers reading an article in Fortune 500 Small Business when his mother entered the room.

"Something interesting?"

"A story about Ruth Handler, the businesswoman who invented the Barbie doll."

His mother cleared her throat. "About our conversation earlier,..." Jason put the magazine aside. "What with November just a few weeks away, we wouldn't want the holidays turning ..."

"Ugly," Jason volunteered.

Mrs. Mangarelli smiled stiffly. "The Flanagans will be joining us for desert later in the afternoon on Thanksgiving, and I have no intention blindsiding them with any unpleasantness." Her son had nothing to say. There was a bittersweet anecdote Jason's father once told at a family gathering several years back. Mr. Mangarelli served in the infantry during the Vietnam War. One day in the early sixties before being shipped overseas, the man was traveling through rural farmland on the outskirts of Tyler, Texas. The bus pulled up at an intersection. A sign on a dilapidated whitewashed building read: Laundromat: Whites Only.

The odd sign threw Mr. Mangarelli for a loop. Why limit potential profits? From a business standpoint, the notion was utterly impractical! Ridiculous! What about towels, blankets, colored skirts, blouses and sweaters not to mention coats and suit jackets? The bus was a good six blocks beyond the decrepit, abandoned shack before the truth of the matter sunk in.

Laundromat: Whites Only. How was it any different with Adrian? The grade-A, select members of Jack Flanagan's nuclear family were welcomed at the Mangarelli's Thanksgiving table. Pariahs, slatternly sluts and assorted social riff raff should make other arrangements.

"You're going out with Mrs. Pollack's daughter tomorrow night?" Mrs. Mangarelli asked, shifting gears.

"Yes," Jason replied.

Mrs. Mangarelli had a friend, a parishioner from Saint Mark's, whose daughter was recently divorced and looking to date. The girl, who was a year older than Jason, owned her own consulting firm. That his mother would conspire with Mrs. Pollack to arrange a blind date came as no great surprise. All through high school and well into his college years, Mrs. Mangarelli had been an incorrigible 'helicopter' parent, hovering over her son and second guessing his every move.

"She's probably homely as sin."

Mrs. Mangarelli shook her head violently. "I've seen the girl in church. She's a stunning brunette with boobs out to here." She held her hands a good foot in front of her own, smallish chest.

Just like Barbie! Jason cringed inwardly. "Thank you, mother, for your graphic description."

Mrs. Mangarelli went to his closet and began picking through the various clothes. "What are you wearing?"

Jason wanted to finish reading the article about Ruth Handler and the ubiquitous doll, who he had just learned was named after the woman's daughter, Barbara. "Haven't decided."

"The navy Dockers are nice, but then the darker colors tend to show lint. No I'd go with the tan slacks." She removed the pants from the hanger and headed for the door. "I'll press them for you first thing in the morning."

When she was gone, Jason finished the Ruth Handler article, killed the light and lay back on the bed staring at the ceiling. There was a darker side to Adrian Flanagan. In her mid twenties, she could easily pass for thirty-five. Not that Adrian had lost her good looks. If anything, she was considerably more attractive as a young woman than a gawky adolescent. The unflattering changes were less definitive and emerged in a certain harshness that lingered about eyes and rigid set to the chin when she asked Jason how much or little he believed of the 'outrageous lies and innuendo.'

If Adrian was damaged goods, the harm was manageable. The woman carried herself with a grace that affirmed her indomitable resilience. At one point shortly before he left the apartment, Jason watched as his old friend rinsed the cups at the sink. Having worked all day at the nursing home, her features were haggard and drawn. Finished, she turned and smiled. It was the same irrepressible impishness. Whatever had happened—and Jason had utterly no desire to learn more—her spirit remained intact.



Friday night, Jason picked up Mrs. Pollack's daughter, Samantha, at her condominium. She was medium height with brown eyes to complement chestnut hair and long, sinewy legs. They drove north on route three to Boston where Jason had reservations at a steak house off Commonwealth Ave.

"Waitress! Waitress!" Samantha half rose from her seat and was snapping her fingers energetically. "The silverware's covered with water spots. Please remove it." Jason studied the plates and tableware. The utensils seemed perfectly clean. Jason looked a second time. A dusky film was just barely noticeable on the tangs of his fork. Not dirt, per se, just a tiny smudge of detergent residue. The waitress, a bleary-eyes college girl stared at the woman uncertainly, then with a sullen expression picked up the entire place setting and hurried off. A minute later she returned with a replacement. Samantha stared at each utensil for a good ten seconds before dismissing the girl with a curt nod of her head.

Okay. We're off to a rollicking good start. Don't freak out. No need to hyperventilate or order a double martini. Not yet, at least.

"You're an accountant?"

"With a firm in Copley Square," Jason replied.

The waitress returned and took their orders. "I think we may have done some business with your company in the past."

Small talk. After the silverware fiasco, Jason wasn't sure where to begin. "I met an old friend from elementary school," he ventured haltingly. Without mentioning her precipitous fall from grace, he told Samantha about Adrian Flanagan, Mitzi, the trailer-park-trash pooch and his friend's homemade dog food. "Adrian's finally pulling her life together."

Sipping at a glass of Chablis, Samantha's features contorted in a disagreeable expression. "Unfortunately, she's got a dead end job and no family support. Come back in a dozen years and your friend from elementary school will still be emptying bedpans. For ninety per cent of the populace, the great unwashed, free will is nothing more than a comforting illusion."

The great unwashed. Jason Mangarelli, who had been fiddling with his linen napkin, peered leadenly across the table at his date. Samantha Pollack was grinning smugly, obviously pleased with her clever repartee. To be sure, the dynamic business consultant and motivational speaker had little interest in the likes of Adrian Flanagan. Both Adrian and her scruffy pooch lacked pedigree. They didn't measure up.

"Of course," Samantha picked up the thread of her previous remark, "your friend could parlay her cooking skills into a moneymaking venture with a line of organic pet foods. But that presupposes she has the mental discipline, marketing savvy and innate intelligence to make a go of it."

"Yes, that's true." Samantha Pollack, Jason mused, was about as much fun as a latex allergy. It would never occur to her that Adrian cooked as labor of love with absolutely no ulterior motive. Or that, because of her own unfortunate childhood, Adrian might feel a vague affinity for a bedraggled reject like Mitzi, the malnourished trailer park puppy.

"The guy who founded Dominoes Pizza," Jason added with fading enthusiasm, "never even graduated from high school."

"Your point?"

"Everybody measures personal fulfillment differently. An MBA degree and fat bank account don't necessarily guarantee happiness."

Samantha Pollack sat up straighter in the chair so that her low slung, black shell showcased her full figure to best advantage. She cracked a superior smile. "I wish your friend well, but I certainly don't envy her personal circumstances." It was clear by the curt nature of her response, that there would be no further discussion of either Adrian Flanagan or niche-marketed, organic dog food.

Beeeep! A cell phone with Beethoven's Fifth as the ring tone twittered and Samantha reached for her handbag. When she finished with the call, she said, "A speaking engagement for one of our Connecticut corporate accounts, a heavy hitter." She said coyly. "Hope you don't mind."

"No, not at all." Jason had two more bites left on his filet mignon plus a forkful of butternut squash laced with cinnamon and honey. Like Chinese water torture, dessert would drag on for another twenty minutes or so, and then a movie where he could sit in the dark spared the agony of idle chatter. Then home. Home to the safe haven of his parents' residence, where he would take a vow of lifelong celibacy. Under certain circumstances, a chaste life wasn't necessarily a burden. Jason smiled at Samantha Pollack and the business entrepreneur who drove a fully-loaded, seventy-thousand dollar, Jaguar XK-series, had no use for ineffectual losers and sported knockers out to there, winked suggestively.



When Jason arrived at Adrian's apartment the following Saturday, she was already laying vegetables out on the kitchen counter. "Here, put this in the microwave," she handed him a lumpy sweet potato and set the timer for six minutes." Covering the bottom of a skillet with a tablespoon of canola oil, she began browning a pound of ground turkey."

"I had a date the other night." He told her about Samantha Pollack.

"Planning see her again?"

Jason's eyebrows dipped. "Sooner join the marines and serve in Iraq."

"I'll take that for a no." She had Jason dice some carrots. When the turkey was almost done she drained the grease and added an apple which she cut up in small, bite-size chunks.

"What's that for?"

"Roughage and flavor," Adrian replied and seated a cover over the skillet so that the various juices would blend and meld together. She set a pot of water on the stove. "Measure out a cup of the bowtie macaroni," she instructed, "and when the water comes to full boil, cook the pasta, al dente, for twelve minutes."

"Interesting choice." Jason indicated an herb Adrian had retrieved from the vegetable bin.

"The secret ingredient."

"Which is?"

"If I told you, it wouldn't be a secret, would it?" She tossed the meat and caramelized apples into a large bowl then mixed the steamy food with a can of sweet peas and corn.

"Joseph's biblical coat of many colors," Jason chuckled when all the ingredients were finally heaped together.

Adrian leaned back on her heels with her shoulders resting against his chest. She wore a pair of jeans and a cotton blouse, but no lipstick or makeup, not that she needed any with her flawless, coppery skin. "Dogs taste with their noses not their tongues. It's the irresistible smells that drive them wild." She leaned even further back and smiled with satisfaction.

When they reached Mrs. Galway's home, Jeremiah, the beagle in question, needed little convincing. As soon as his mistress placed the bowl on the floor next to his bed, the dog raised its head and sniffed the air diffidently. Adrian dropped down on her haunches next to the animal and held a pebble-sized clot of turkey under the dog's nose. Jeremiah sniffed once. Twice. He crooked his head to one side and teased the food from her fingers.

She offered an orangey wad of sweet potato. Again the same ritual until finally the dog rose on stiff hindquarters. Lumbering gingerly over to the bowl of warm food, Jeremiah lowered his head and didn't come up for air until the bottom was licked clean. Mrs. Galway heaped the bowl with a second helping, the dog polished off the offering then laid down on its bed and drifted off to sleep. "It's like a miracle," the old woman whispered. "How can I thank you?"

Adrian pressed out the excess air in the Tupperware container and placed it on the middle shelf of the refrigerator. "Give me a piece of paper and I'll write out the recipe." She gestured in the direction of the refrigerator. "There's enough to last three days. You can substitute hamburger, veal or boiled chicken in place of the turkey. Whatever Jeremiah prefers."

"Any particular cut of chicken?" Mrs. Galway asked.

"Legs or thighs preferably. Dark meat's more nutritious." From the next room, they could hear the muffled sound of Jeremiah snoring.

"I'm going to rent my own place after the beginning of the year," Jason said. They had arrived back at Adrian's apartment. "A one bedroom preferably in the Back Bay closer to where I work."

Adrian nodded and her lips compressed in a thin sliver of a smile. "When you relocate to Bean Town, I hope you won't abandon your long lost friend."

Jason felt a wretched tightening in his throat and had to collect himself before replying. "Actually, I was hoping we might pick up where we left off."

"I have to take Mitzi for a walk, if you'd like to join us." The air had turned fitfully colder, a dry, chilly breeze, more wintry than falllish. "A very short walk."

Jason shook his head up and down, an utterly infantile gesture. He would have preferred to say something but his tongue simply couldn't negotiate the language. As Adrian explained it, the cartilage in Mitzi's left hind knee cap had recently separated from the bone causing the leg to unexpectedly give way and curl under. At such times the bowlegged dog would flop down and refuse to budge until the floating kneecap drifted back into proper alignment. The vet prescribed glucosamine, which Adrian ground up each morning with a mortar and pestle.

"Ruth Handler invented the Barbie doll." Jason blurted, a total non-sequitor.

Adrian, who was fixing the walking harness around Mitzi's chest, looked up. "Is there any particular reason you're telling me this?"

"During a European trip in 1956," he conveniently ignored the question, "Handler came across a German doll named Bild Lilli. The chesty novelty item wasn't exactly what Handler had in mind for a new product, but she purchased three of them anyway."

"Bild Lilli?"

"It was based on a popular comic strip character. Lilli was a working girl who knew what she wanted and was not above using men to get it." "Initially the executives at Mattel where Handler worked didn't like the idea so she put up her own money to bring the doll to market." Out in the street a fire truck raced by, siren blaring. "The doll made its debut at the American International Toy Fair in New York and sold three hundred fifty thousand the first year."

"Not bad for a woman with a checkered past." Mitzi was prancing and yipping loudly. "Nice story but my dog needs her exercise."

Jason leaned forward and brushed Adrian's cheek with a casual kiss not unlike the one he received a week earlier in the nursing home. "Yes, the dog."

Return to Table of Contents

The Legacy

The quarter-sawn, white oak grandfather clock in the lobby chimed eight o'clock as Benny arrived at the Brandenberg Public Library. Mounting the steps two at a time, he hurried directly to the second floor reading room, where students of various ages were already milling about, a heap of manuscripts splayed across the mahogany conference table. This was Benny's sixth season teaching the creative writing course sponsored by the humanities council.

"I want you to create a fictional character. Describe what makes the person unique or interesting, boring, obnoxious, petty or heroic." Professor Epstein began all his workshops with a similar writing exercise, an impromptu flash fiction piece.

"You can describe them physically, then delve into their psyche to reveal hidden pathology or exceptional strengths." A thirty-something housewife in jeans and plaid blouse, tittered lightly. "Whatever approach you settle on, write quickly and spontaneously. The goal is to get as much black on white as possible - an unfettered stream-of-consciousness rather than polished final draft. The good, the bad and the ugly – we want it all starting ..." Benny raised his right hand above his chest and clicked the button on an imaginary stopwatch to signal the beginning of the exercise.

The previous week, Benny called over to Irma Bradshaw's apartment to let her know that the creative writing class was being cancelled due to the impending nor'easter and parking ban.

"Irma's not here." A man's gruff voice brought him up short. "She's in the hospital."

"Nothing serious I hope." The remark was more a matter of polite formality than sincere concern. No one in the writing group had much use for Irma. The woman was a royal pain in the ass.

"I'm her brother," The man replied. "Her cancer's back. She's being discharged home around the end of the week. Doctor's give her a month to six weeks."

While Benny was fumbling with a mishmash of fractured thoughts and emotions, the brother added, "If you could remember my sister in your prayers ..."

If you could remember my sister in your prayers ... Scanning the faces scattered about the room, he couldn't get his mind off the brother's final words. The empty seat, second from the right, could have been draped in black for the chilling effect it had on him. Benny could picture Irma Bradshaw, the retired school nurse, sitting with her knobby, arthritic hands folded in her lap and head down, oblivious to the others. He knew the bony, six-foot woman with the dishwater eyes from four, previous workshops. Armed with sadistic wit and mediocre talent, she took great pleasure eviscerating the younger students. Her malicious subterfuge carried out under the guise of constructive criticism. Benny had to rein her in early on at every session she attended. He shuddered fitfully and shook his head, a reflexive gesture, causing several students to glance up inquiringly from their work.

Later that night at home, Benny told his wife, Thelma, about Irma's misfortune. "That's the older woman you never liked."

"Yes, that's true," he replied. "But Irma was a devoted member of the writing group over several years. I ought to do something."

"Like what?"

"Not sure. Haven't thought that far ahead." Benny felt stupid, thoroughly out of his element. "Maybe go see her when she gets home from the hospital."

"And what would that accomplish?"

Benny glowered at his wife. "Aren't you the fountain of human sympathy?"

"Don't be a hypocrite," she replied coolly, "This is a woman for whom you never had a kind word. Now she's dying and you're feeling what? Guilt? Remorse?"

Benny threw his hands up in the air, a futile gesture, and retreated to his study. What was it he resented about Thelma's terse commentary? Everything she said was brutally accurate. Earlier that evening, toward the end of the writing workshop, he announced, "I recently learned that Irma Bradshaw is quite ill." Then, as an afterthought, he repeated what the brother had said. "Perhaps you could remember Irma in your prayers."

The news was greeted with abject boredom. A Hispanic girl cracked her knuckles. Another classmate glanced at the empty seat for a fraction of a second, then yawned and picked at a cuticle. As the students filed out of the meeting room on the second floor landing, Benny lingered near the front of the room, waiting to see if anyone cared to learn more about Irma's situation, but, one by one, they filed out the door to the upper landing. Totally alone, a silly anecdote he stumbled across the previous winter came to mind.

Two aspiring poets meet after not seeing each other for a while. "So how you been?"

"Good. Real good. And you?"

"My grandmother died last week – dropped dead of a heart attack."

"Bummer, dude!"

"And, worse yet, I had to shell out eighty bucks on a black suit for the lousy funeral."

"That sucks!"

"Yeah, but I got a poem out of it, so it wasn't a complete waste."



On Thursday after Benny finished classes he drove across town to the Meadowlark Condominium complex. A chubby, blond-haired woman dressed in white scrubs answered the door. "Can I help you?"

"I'm here to see Irma," Benny said, lingering out in the hallway.

The woman swung the door wide. "She'll be so happy to see you."

In the bedroom, Irma Bradshaw was lying propped up in a hospital bed with rails. A plastic catheter running beneath the covers disappeared into a collection bag hanging from the side of the bed.

"You've got company." The nurse fluffed an extra pillow, wedging it between her bony shoulder blades. The tall woman, who had always been painfully thin, was utterly emaciated now—the pallid cheeks sunken, the watery, pale blue eyes hollow and grim.

"So nice of you to come," she spoke listlessly. Her skinny fingers fluttered over the top of the bed sheet as though she were composing at an invisible keyboard.

"We missed you at the writing group last week."

"Well, needless-to-say I wasn't up to it."

Benny sat down in a chair by the bed. "We discussed one of Berryman's Dreamsongs at the end of class."

There was a long pause. He wasn't sure if she heard or even understood what he had said. "Most of those poems," her voice was tinged with an ethereal sadness. "are so private as to be almost unintelligible. Even literary scholars have trouble making sense of Berryman's verse." Irma ran a tongue over chapped lips. "I was never big," she added as an afterthought, "on that 'confessional' school of poetry that was all the rage back in the hippy-dippy sixties. Too much verbal diarrhea and histrionics."

Say what you will about the cantankerous woman, Irma Bradshaw certainly knew American literature through and through. Benny, too, had been relatively unimpressed by the neurotic kvetching of the confessional poets. Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton – with the lone exception of Berryman, he had grown beyond their neuroticism and emotional excesses.

Sitting there next to an IV bag dripping electrolytes and antibiotics into the woman's left arm, the thought occurred to him: for all their literary posturing and pretense, not one of the other members of the writer's group could critique a Berryman poem with the insight of the frail woman lying next to him. At their last meeting, the housewife in the skin-tight jeans and plaid shirt had been only too happy to jibber jabber at great length about a trend in American literature that she knew absolutely nothing about.

"Hope I'm not tiring you." When there was no response, Benny looked up. Irma was resting comfortably sound asleep.

The nurse, who had been busying herself in the kitchen, stuck her head in the door. "I gave her a shot of Demerol just before you arrived so Irma may sleep for a while." She slipped a heavy winter coat over her shoulders. "I'm leaving now. Her brother, Edward, should be by in an hour or so."

"Okay." Benny stared out the window. Snow from the last storm was heaped up against the curb, the sidewalks a messy maze of slush and jagged ice. The temperature, which hadn't crawled much above twenty degrees by noon, would dip back again into the single digits once the sun went down. Twenty minutes passed. Irma hadn't stirred since the nurse went home. Benny rose noiselessly and drifted to the doorway.

"In the dresser," the dying woman's gossamer voice, brought him up short, "there's something for you."

"The dresser?" He stared at a sturdy piece of furniture fashioned from birdseye maple.

"Bottom drawer on the right."

Benny eased the drawer open and removed a carton full of random scraps of paper; some were typed, others covered in cursive script with the quaint, muddy scratchings of a fountain pen. "It's my writing ... my life work. I'd like you to have it."

Benny approached the bed and took hold of her free hand. "Thank you, Irma. I'm honored."



A week passed. "What's that?" Benny's wife asked.

Irma's poems were splayed out across the living room table. "The old lady from my writing class ... I went to see her."

"And how did that go?"

"She gave me her poems."

"What are you going to do with them?"

"Don't know. Problem is, the writing isn't very good." The woman with the masterful command of the English language, had squandered all her literary talent on nasty invectives and bilious rants. Gathering the pages back into a heap, he returned them to the cardboard box, wedging it at a cockeyed angle on a shelf in the bed room closet behind his summer-weight clothing and a pair of tennis shorts.

"Irma's poems aren't very good." They were lying in bed a little after eleven.

"I was just falling asleep," his wife hissed.

"Atrocious might be a better choice of words."

"You already said that earlier today. What's the point?"

"She didn't entrust them to me so I could toss her life work out with the recyclable paper and plastic."

"For god's sake, go to sleep," his wife whined.

"I can't. This thing's got my nerves on edge." If Irma hadn't given Benny the poems, the visit would have sufficed. It would have brought closure, at least from his point of view. "I don't know what to do." After a short pause he added, "I'm meeting with Rabbi Schneerson."

"From the Orthodox synagogue?"

"He's supposed to be brilliant."

"I heard the rabbi is eccentric and has a sadistic temper."

"Where did you hear that?"

There was no immediate reply. His wife had dropped off to sleep.



Rabbi Elliot Schneerson was a man with as many detractors as rabid admirers in the Jewish community. His father was a scholar and bibliophile who had written a number of notable commentaries on traditional halachah. The short, stocky man with the coarse beard ushered Benny into his study and closed the door. The cluttered room stank of stale tobacco.

"You mentioned an ethical dilemma?" the rabbi sat behind a desk littered with manuscripts. Benny told the Rabbi about Irma Bradshaw, his visit to her apartment and the poems. Rabbi Schneerson sat back and listened, head drooping forward as though he was dozing off to sleep. When Benny finished, the rabbi said, "Such a sad story!"

Without bothering to look up, he suddenly raised his hand and, with a limp index finger, sketched the sign of the cross in Benny's general direction. "It was very nice meeting with you, Mr. Epstein. You can see yourself out."

"Excuse me?"

"Isn't that what you came for?" The rabbi grabbed a pair of nail clippers from a drawer and began paring his nicotine-stained nails. "You wanted me to absolve you of any further responsibility for this pathetic creature and her equally pathetic prose."

"Poetry," Benny corrected. "And I never used such damning language."

"When a Catholic does something morally reprehensible," The rabbi continued with his original train of thought, "he goes and sits in the confessional. 'Father I have sinned.'" Rabbi Schneerson raised both hands high above his head in a magnanimous, if somewhat, theatrical gesture. "Recite ten Hail Marys, go and sin no more!" Making a rather revolting snuffling sound through his large, hairy nostrils, Rabbi Schneerson seemed to derive great pleasure from the sacrilegious performance.

"There are over two hundred poems in the box. What should I do with them?"

Having finished with his nails, the rabbi tossed the silver clipper aside. "How do Jews honor the dead?"

"By lighting a Yahrzeit candle."

"A Yahrzeit candle would be nice, but Ms. Bradshaw deserves something more durable than a crumby glass full of white wax." The rabbi snickered as though at some private joke; he lit what was left of a Crooks rum-soaked cigar and blew a cloud of aromatic smoke up into the air.

"Such as?"

"A legacy. Something future generations might remember her by." A newspaper was resting on the edge of the desk. He pointed at a picture plastered across the top portion of the front page. A defendant flanked by police officers was being led into Brandenberg District Court. As Rabbi Schneerson explained it, a middle-aged man with some mental issues lived with his grandmother. After a heated argument, the man whacked granny on the back of the skull with a hammer. Then he hit her a second time for good measure, crammed the old biddy in the hall closet and there she lay for the next two months. The police came in response to neighbors' complaints about a foul odor. "That's you," he said. "The one in handcuffs."

"How is that me?" By now, Benny had considered putting an end to the farce. He would just get up without saying another word and see himself out. Let the deranged rabbi prattle on – a supercilious monologue - as the ashes that he never bothered to clear away cascaded onto his lap.

"Just as the murderer couldn't dispose of the corpse, you can't seem to decide what to do with the ineffectual poems." He sucked on the cigar, short little inhalations that caused the ash to turn crimson momentarily and lengthen, before blowing another stream of white smoke across the length of the room. "Of course, in some ways, you're in a worse predicament." Again, the rabbi chuckled maliciously. "I'll bet you even brought the poems here tonight. Maybe they're outside sitting in a box on the passenger seat of your Volvo.

Benny cringed. Actually, he had placed them next to the spare tire in the trunk, because the thought of Irma's life work laying there on the passenger seat freaked him out.

"Why don't you go get them? We could recite a few Hebrew prayers, strike a match in the fireplace and be done with it. The woman's life work up in smoke. C'est la vie!"

"I came here, rabbi," Benny made no effort to mask his rage, "to learn what to do."

"What to do?" the rabbi shot back. "You must do the right thing. That is, the right thing by Irma Bradshaw."

"She wants her poems published."

"Now we're getting somewhere!"

"Not really. What publisher or literary agent in his right mind would publish this dreck?"

The rabbi stubbed the cigar out in a metal ashtray. "Go home. I'll call you in a day or two."

"That's it?" Benny couldn't believe his ears. "That's the best you can do?"

"Go home, Mr. Epstein. I'll be in touch." For the second time that night, Rabbi Schneerson lowered his eyes, signaling that the meeting was over.



I'll call you in a day or two.

When an entire week passed and Rabbi Schneerson didn't call, Benny knew he had been played for a fool by the irascible cleric. Autocrats ruled by decree. They were domineering, self-willed, dictatorial, condescending and despotic. Rabbi Schneerson fit the mold to a tee. There was something bordering on the maniacal in the way he compared Benny's predicament with that of the dim-witted psychopath who stuffed granny's carcass in the hall closet. And what was the idiotic implication – that Benny could no more dispose of the poems than the killer could divest himself of the rotting corpse? What a farce! An unmitigated joke! He had sought the rabbi out for spiritual solace and, in its place, came away with a metaphysical boot in the ass.

"How did your meeting with the rabbi go?" Thelma asked.

They were upstairs getting ready for bed. Benny pulled a pair of cotton pajama bottoms up over his underwear. "It was a disaster." He told her how the rabbi baited him almost from the minute he walked through the door.

"He hasn't called back all week?" Benny shook his head. "So what are you going to do?"

Benny set the alarm clock. He had an early morning class. "Don't know."

Thelma rolled over on her side. "Rhonda Burkowitz went to see Rabbi Schneerson in December when her husband ran off with that receptionist from the tennis club. She said the rabbi was a fountain of wisdom. Those were her exact words – a fountain of wisdom."

"It's an overworked cliché," Benny muttered. "And anyway, the filthy lech probably just wanted to get into Rhonda's panties."

"According to Rhonda, "Thelma ignore the tasteless humor, "Rabbi Schneerson's guidance saved her sanity."

"Certainly didn't save her marriage."

"You're just in a snit because he tweaked your ego." Thelma reached over and flicked the light off. Fluffing the pillow, she lay back down. "Did you want sex? Perhaps that would make you feel better... take your mind off your problems."

"If it were that simple," Benny groused, "I'd be fondling you even as we speak."

His wife patted his shoulder. "Rabbi Schneerson's gonna save the day. Mark my words."



Tuesday evening Benny was at the library with the writers' group when his cell phone twittered. "The rabbi called," his wife said. "I told him you were teaching, but he wants you to stop by his house after you finish at the library."

Benny felt his brain go numb. The class seldom got through much before nine. By the time he drove into Providence and made his way up the east side to the rabbi's residence, it would be pushing ten o'clock. "I suggested," Thelma said, anticipating his thoughts, "that maybe you could come another day when it was mutually convenient."

"And?" Benny felt a knot in his stomach.

"He said to come tonight or not at all."

Benny gazed out over the class that was busy with another flash fiction exercise. Imagine someone engrossed in a hopeless double bind. The subject matter can be as serious as a Greek tragedy or bathetic as slapstick comedy.

"So what are you going to do?"

"Don't wait up." He snapped the phone shut.

By the time Benny reached Tillman Drive on the East Side of Providence, the clock on the dashboard of his Volvo registered nine-forty. "I would have called last week, but I was missing several things and needed to order supplies." The rabbi didn't bother to elaborate which supplies or for what purpose they were needed.

"My father was a rabbi." Rabbi Schneerson seemed thoroughly relaxed, almost friendly. "Here, let me show you." Strolling over to the bookcase, he removed a thick volume bound in hand-tooled leather with gold leaf lettering on the elegant, ribbed spine.

"Your father was an author as well?"

"Oh no," the rabbi chuckled. "An amateur bookbinder. "He refurbished many of the older religious manuscripts in this library." Rabbi Schneerson gestured with a sweep of his hand at the several bookcases that lined the four walls. "Before he died, he taught me to bind books from scraps of paper, glue and cardboard; and now I pass the tradition along to you." The rabbi grabbed a small book with a wine colored cover from the desk and thrust it into Benny's hands.

Irma Bradshaw: the collected poems

edited by Benny Epstein

Opening the cover he thumbed through the pages all of which were bare. "I don't get it," Benny mumbled.

"I threw the book together," Rabbi Schneerson explained, "in my basement earlier today after the bookbinding supplies arrived." "Irma Bradshaw is dying. Her poems are her legacy. I will teach you how to transform the mishmash of papers into a perfectly attractive and presentable hand-bound edition. You take a few over to the woman before she dies; she can pass them along to family as a keepsake. Then you do up another dozen or so to be placed in libraries throughout the Providence area. As a professor of English, you shouldn't have any trouble convincing the library staff handling new acquisitions. Make sure you tell Irma about the libraries."

Benny ran an index finger over the sleek binding. He opened and closed the front cover, marveling at how the creased hinge slid effortlessly in either direction. "I don't know the first thing about bookbinding."

"I can show you now. Tonight." He led the way down a narrow hallway to the kitchen, which smelled of gefilte fish and horse radish. A door led down to an unfinished basement, where a collection of tools lay scattered across a workbench. Benny took silent inventory; there was a pot of milky glue, a carpenter's awl, blunt-nosed needles and Irish linen thread, metal rulers, clamps and an odd looking contraption that Rabbi Schneerson identified as a bookbinder's sewing jig. "Shall we begin?"

"I considered calling the police," Thelma quipped tongue in cheek, when Benny finally returned home a little after three in the morning.

"Things went a little longer than planned." He hung his coat in the hall closet.

His wife lifted up on her toes and kissed his cheek. "Four hours and the alarm clock will be clattering in your ear. Come to bed."

Benny undressed, throwing his clothes in a heap. On Thursday he had one final session with Rabbi Schneerson. The older disheveled man would teach him how to letter the cloth spine and join the finished text block to the Davies board covers. Over the weekend, Benny would do up the first couple of books in a rust-colored cloth that was particularly attractive and pay one last visit to Irma Bradshaw.

Return to Table of Contents

A Room without a View

When the Richardsons, Melvin, Clarissa and their teenage daughter, Sade, moved into the split-level ranch house on Hemlock Circle, the neighbors were pleasantly surprised. A black family in the community – how wonderful, how deliciously delightful!

Unfortunately, the euphoria didn't last.

By Late August of the first year, Billy Ray Hooper, who owned the ranch house that abutted the Richardsons property was ready to burn a cross on the black family's front lawn. In lieu of anything quite that extreme, he just refused to mow the lawn to the left of his house, a not-so-subtle way of letting the dark-skinned neighbors know what he thought of them. The stringy grass grew tall and turned to seed. Dandelions, crabgrass, goldenrod and an assortment of ugly, tenacious weeds predominated - but only on the left-hand side, close by the Richardsons' property line. Elsewhere, Billy Ray spread Scotts Miracle-Gro and TurfBuilder fertilizer on his lawn. He added weed killer plus a generous dusting of lime everywhere else. He positioned petunias, pansies and geraniums in potted plants on either side of the front stoop and trimmed the flagstone walkway with a gas-operated weed whacker. But Billy Ray left the other side of his property resembling a war zone. All that beauty and meticulous attention to detail from sheer spitefulness!

Thirteen year-old George Weiner, who lived in the house in back of the Richardsons, watched events unfold with mild confusion. George's seventh grade class was studying the history of western civilization and had only reached to the Visigoths. He didn't know if Billy Ray Hooper's feud with the Richardsons was in any way similar to the cataclysmic upheavals he was learning about in middle school. Not that he cared all that much. He got along with black people just fine and was in two classes with the Richardson's daughter.

"Why's Mr. Hooper so mad at your father?" George asked one day.

Sade – the name was African and pronounced Shar-day. It meant 'honor bestows a crown' in Swahili or some other African tribal tongue. "Mr. Hooper was mowing his lawn on Sunday morning and my father told him to stop, because that's the Lord's Day, the day of rest. But Mr. Hooper said he works six days a week at the automotive supply store and the only time he has free is Sunday." They were outside in the driveway of the Richardson's home. Sade's father had bought a top-of-the-line basketball court with spring-loaded rim and transparent, adjustable-height backboard. Tall and big-boned, Sade played center on the girls' basketball team. George went to all the games. "My father lost his temper and called Mr. Hooper a really bad name. That's when all the trouble started."

Billy Ray Hooper lived in the same home since he was a child, no bigger than George and took over the property when his parents passed away. That was over twenty years ago. The Richardsons moved on Hemlock Terrace only three years ago. George watched the girl drive to the hoop from the right side and shoot a layup. The ball ricocheted off the rim and landed in a clump of honeysuckle. She tried the same move from the opposite side, dribbling with her left hand as a defensive measure. "What name?"

Sade had measured exactly thirteen feet from an imaginary free throw line on the asphalt to the front of the rim and drawn a ragged line with a piece of chalk. She went and stood behind the line, bounced the ball a half-dozen times on the blacktop and took a two-handed set shot. Swooosh! "Asshole. He told Mr. Hooper he was a boorish asshole with no respect for the rest of the neighbors."

George retrieved the ball but did not immediately throw it back to her. "Your father's a troublemaker."

Sade waved her hand impatiently and he returned the ball. "It's a little more complicated than that. He thinks everybody's out to get him." She pounded the ball four, five, six times on the ground and then sent it, with a hint of backspin, sailing toward the hoop. At the beginning of the season, the coach started Sade in the center position because of her height and ability to aggressively snag rebounds even against taller opponents, but then he moved the girl over to power forward. On defense Sade could post up with her back to the basket or worm her way under the hoop in a man-to-man, zone defense. Now he put her back at center. George didn't understand the half of what Sade was telling him when she talked strategy. He preferred to just sit in the bleachers and cheer when the Wildcats scored points. "How about some one-on-one?" George grabbed the ball and joined her at the impromptu foul line. "First one to reach twenty-one."

A beat-up Chevy pickup truck with a blown muffler pulled into the driveway adjacent to the property and Billy Ray Hooper climbed out. Seeing Sade, he waved and cracked a toothy grin.

Sade waved back. "Hi, Mr. Hooper!"

The man crouched down and raised his hands chest high. "Palms up, knees bent when you catch outlet passes." He winked mischievously and disappeared into the house. Fifteen minutes later George was sprawled out on the grass trying to catch his breath. Twenty-one to eighteen - he had beaten the girl but just barely. When he rose to his feet, she cuffed him on the shoulder and said in a low monotone, "About what happened last Saturday at the reservoir, it was no big deal."

Mr. Richardson's silver Audi pulled into the driveway. He got out of the car and smiled at George but it was a cold, reflexive gesture. The smile dissolved into a glacial leer as he grabbed an attaché case and suit jacket. "No big deal," George repeated as he moved off in the direction of his own home.

  

The previous Saturday, George rose early and went fishing at the Brandenberg Reservoir. Technically, no one was supposed to fish or swim in the town drinking water, but the youth had found a cove squirreled away down a forgotten path overgrown with weeds and bramble. The cove was hidden behind a wall of pine trees and dense shrubbery. If he headed out around dawn and cut through the woods at the end of the street, the boy could reach the fishing spot well before any hikers were up and about. George had snagged largemouth bass and sleek pickerel casting with lures in the shallow waters. Golden perch and bottom-feeding hornpout were equally plentiful but favored worms and juicy night crawlers. For the first hour, he tried his luck with a standard red-and-white lure, casting out toward a clump of water lilies. He hooked an eighteen-inch pickerel and played the brawny fish in close to shore, but then the pickerel broke toward a clot of reeds and the monofilament line got hung up on a submerged stump.

Around eleven, the sun loomed over the tops of the surrounding trees and the temperature had inched up into the mid-eighties. A light breeze rippled the surface of the water into glossy ribbons. George removed the lure and switched over to a hook and bobber. Spearing an earthworm on the barbed shaft of an Eagleclaw hook, he cast the bobber far out into the cove. Just as the plastic splashed down, skidding across the placid water, he heard the sound of rustling leaves as someone was approaching from behind. A moment later, Sade appeared. She was dressed in shorts and a Wildcats' basketball jersey. "How was your game?" George asked.

She flopped down on a tuft of grass. "It was a rout – thirty-eight to five. We killed them."

A painted turtle raised its wedge-shaped snout above the water twenty feet from the bobber. A solitary dragon fly with transparent wings was hovering a few inched above the lily pads. "My parents had a big fight last night," George said. The bobber was drifting toward a rotted stump. He reeled the line in, steering it away from the wood and placed the rod carefully on the ground. "My father wants to put up a wooden fence bordering the property."

"Who's property?" She splayed out her tawny legs and lay back prone on the warm earth.

"Yours...ours. He's gonna ask your father's permission. My mother's worried your dad will think that we're putting up the fence because we don't like colored people living next door."

There was a prolonged silence. A redwing blackbird flitted out across the cove disappearing into a clump of gnarled birch trees. The painted turtle reemerged for a few seconds closer in to shore. "Yes, that's true," Sade finally said in a neutral tone.

"Which is true – that my father's a racist or that your old man's gonna go mental over the fence?"

"A little of both," she replied.

George, who was standing near the water, reeled in the line. The worm had been nibbled away to nothing. He replaced it and hurled the line in a sweeping arc into the middle of the cove. The sun was directly overhead now with temperatures topping out in the low nineties. He went to where the girl was resting and threw himself down on the rough grass. "I'm reading this novel by an English writer, E.M. Forster." There was no reply. "A Room with a View."

"What's that?"

"The title of the novel I'm reading."

She rolled over on her side and stared at him impassively. "Stupid title."

George couldn't help but notice that she had grown prettier over the past year. Not that the girl was particularly feminine or cute in the traditional sense. Her ebony skin was so incredibly smooth and flawless that he sometimes had the urge to reach out and touch her face. "It's not stupid at all," George protested. Sade tugged a strand of dry straw-like grass from the ground and stuck it between her front teeth. She wasn't the least bit interested in E. M. Forster or any other moldy, priggish, turn-of-the-century authors. Her team had just annihilated the competition, stomped them into the ground, run away with the basketball game. "In the story," he continued, "all the adults act silly, like spoiled little children."

"I see," she said distractedly. He could tell she wasn't listening. A pasty yellow butterfly flitted past making an erratic path toward the water line; attracted by the vibrant reds and oranges, it finally came to rest on a flowering bush.

"The grownups act thoroughly ridiculous throwing temper tantrums and feuding with one another over the most idiotic things."

Sade stared at the bobber. It hadn't moved an inch since George replaced the worm. "Why are you telling me this?"

He leaned in closer to her. "My father and mother were yelling at each other last night over this moronic fence business. They acted like characters in the Forster novel."

"The fence - it's just a stupid pile of lumber." Sade leaned forward until her face was no more than an inch from George's and then, without warning, kissed him leisurely on the lips. "I'm not interested in A Room with a View." She draped a hand around his shoulder and pulled him close again. "Now you kiss me."

George took her face in his hands and returned the favor. Pushing him gently away, she rose to her feet. "You're a good kisser."

George grinned self-consciously. "I don't have all that much experience." Actually, he had no prior experience.

"My father doesn't like you," she said, a total non sequitur.

"Why not?"

"Why do you think?"

George knew the answer but held his tongue. After a long silence he asked, "Does your father think black people should get reparations for slavery?"

"What sort of crazy question is that?"

"A simple yes or no will do." George replied testily.

"Yes," Sade replied, "my father thinks white people should pay reparations to every living black person in America."

"And why's that?"

"For all the suffering we've endure." She spoke, not from personal conviction, but as though she was regurgitating her father's brittle logic.

"But you live in a perfectly nice, middle class community. Your father drives a Lexus and earns a decent paycheck. Why should white people give him any more money than he already has?"

Sade shrugged. "I liked it better when we were kissing and discussing Ian Forest."

"Forster," George corrected. "E.M. Forster." "Okay, so give me another kiss."

"Reparations," Sade side-stepped the request, "you didn't say what that's got to do with anything."

"It's a long story," George replied evasively.

The previous night, when the quarreling had reached a crescendo, Mrs. Wiener said, "I got a rotten feeling about this fence business. Look at all the trouble Mel Richardson stirred up with Billy Ray Hooper over a moronic lawnmower." The woman laughed sarcastically. "He's the kind of malcontent who thinks his kind deserve reparations for slavery." George was crouched at the top of the stairs listening as the angry tirade filtered up from the kitchen.

"I heard the jerk's got a six-figure job with the electric company," Mr. Wiener fumed. "The shvartser will retire with a phenomenal pension and full benefits. What the hell does he need reparations for?" When there was no immediate reply, the man added in a less excitable tone, "Maybe Richardson won't care about the fence. It's not like we're asking him to reach into his own pocket and shell out any money."

The squabble had run its course, and George retreated to his bedroom. He pulled a dictionary from the shelf and thumbed through the pages to the back of the book. Reparations: compensation (given or received) for an insult or injury; Compensation exacted from a defeated nation by the victors; 'Germany was unable to pay reparations demanded for World War I.'

A weird thought occurred to George as he lay in bed waiting for sleep: if anyone deserved reparations, it was Billy Ray Hooper. Mr. Richardson had goaded him for no good reason and then felt doubly indignant when the man retaliated – a passive aggressive gesture of defiance – by letting the late summer weeds run amok. Still, despite the bad blood between him and the girl's father, Billy Ray remained perfectly pleasant to Sade. "Palms up and knees bent when you catch outlet passes!" The last image to flit across his mind before George drifted off to sleep was that of Bill Ray Hooper crouched down on his haunches in a defensive posture, elbows extended and all ten fingers splayed at the heavens.

  

The kiss changed everything and it changed nothing. It was like taking Holy Communion. Well, no, - maybe that was a bit extreme, over the top. Sade was still the female jock, the center on the girls' basketball team who effortlessly slid in front of the better-positioned defensive players in the key position and snatched rebounds. It wasn't like kissing some Barbie doll wannabe with pouty lips and a half pound of velvety eyeliner. There had been no sighing or fluttery sensation in his chest.

They had been friends for three years now, since the parents moved onto Hemlock Circle from Dorchester on the southern outskirts of Boston. Dorchester was a run-down, blighted section pockmarked with three-decker tenements and condemned buildings. Immigrant Russian Jews had lived there half a century earlier only to be driven out - white flight – by uneducated, southern blacks moving north in search of jobs and a better life. In the late sixties following Martin Luther King's assassination, riots broke out with looting and arson - not as bad as Watts, but scary stuff none-the-less. Now the more genteel, upwardly mobile descendents of those earlier Afro-Americans were drifting further south to middle class suburbs in search of the American dream. So in a symbolic sense, Sade Richardson had been pursuing George for the better part of the past sixty years, and now that the girl with the feathery soft lips and immaculate skin had caught him, the boy was in no great hurry to get away.

  

Later that evening at supper Mr. Richardson said, "I'm going mow the lawn." He was steering a row of sweet peas onto his fork. Mrs. Richardson had cooked scrod dusted with Italian bread crumbs in a lemon dill sauce.

"You already mowed the lawn," his wife replied.

"Not ours – the idiot's." The idiot, of course, was Mr. Hooper and the lawn in question was the eight-foot wide parcel of unruly wilderness on the far side of the property.

Sade raised her fork and shook it at her father. "You go over there, and he'll call the cops and have you arrested for trespassing."

Mr. Richardson grinned at his daughter, a defiant gesture, but the man was all bluff and vacuous bluster. Sade understood perfectly well that her father was just blowing off steam, a favorite pastime. He would throw back his shoulders, assume a menacing tone; once he had everyone's undivided attention, he would make a rash, provocative pronouncement. But nothing ever came of it. With Sade's father, threatening to do something homicidally reckless was more recreational pursuit than indicative of clinical pathology.

Melvin Richardson was a handsome black man with boyish, photogenic features. Like his daughter, the skin was smooth and clear with high cheekbones and sensuous lips. Deep-set eyes framed a broad forehead. When he smiled, he looked ten years younger than his wife who was born the same month thirty-eight years earlier. Mrs. Richardson, by contrast, was light-skinned and rather plain with a nervous, petulant set to her thin lips.

"You shouldn't have called Mr. Hooper that bad name," Sade picked up where she had left off. "You keep saying Billy Ray's a racist and bigot, but up until you started harassing him, the man treated us decent enough."

"Whose side are you on anyway?"

"I'm just saying maybe you should go over there and bury the hatchet."

Sade's little brother, Leon, kept looking back and forth as the conversation progressed. At ten years old, he was still too young to have an opinion one way or the other. "Yeah, I'll bury the hatchet one of these days," Mr. Richardson snickered. "I'll bury it right between - "

"You seem to be spending an awful lot of time," Mrs. Richardson turned to her daughter, "with the Wiener boy."

"George," Sade confirmed. "He's always got his nose buried in a book."

"The Wieners – they're Jewish." She turned to her husband. "The People of the Book - that's what they're called, because they're always reading, studying, advancing themselves intellectually." Fetching the coffee pot, she warmed her husband's cup and placed a peach cobbler to the table. "I remember the wife brought a chocolate cake over by way of a housewarming present the week after we settled in. Such a nice gesture, don't you think?" Her husband shrugged noncommittally and nibbled at the dessert.

"He wants to be a writer, a novelist or something," Sade ventured.

"Who does?" Leon finally entered the conversation.

"George. He reads all these crazy, grownup books and gets all excited and tells me about them."

"What books?" Mrs. Richardson offered her husband a second helping of the peach cobbler.

"I don't know. I hardly pay any attention. It's all too complicated."

Through the kitchen window, they could see Billy Ray Hooper wearing jeans and cowboy boots sauntering over to his truck. He fired up the engine, pulled out of the driveway and disappeared down the street. "Here's your golden opportunity," Sade said in a good-natured, teasing tone.

Mr. Richardson scowled. He placed his dirty dishes in the sink, went back and retrieved his coffee. "I'll deal with that redneck hooligan another day." He retreated to the den and the evening news. Leon also brought his plate to the counter and trailed away after his father.

After he was gone Mrs. Richardson said, "You take great pleasure aggravating your father."

"Mr. Hooper isn't a bigot. He doesn't care one way or the other about black people. Daddy got him all riled up and then he had to go and call him an asshole."

She usually brought her daughter up short for using foul language but did not respond this time. Rather, the woman sighed and stared at her slender fingers. "You know how your father is."

"Daddy doesn't especially like white people."

"No, it's not that," her mother protested. "He just gets agitated and acts impulsively." She began wiping down the kitchen table with a damp rag. "He shouldn't have said that to Mr. Hooper, but he's got too much pride to admit that he did anything wrong."

  

A week later on a Sunday morning, George went downstairs for breakfast but his parents were nowhere to be found. He glanced out the kitchen window. Mr. and Mrs. Weiner were standing over by a profusion of straggly lilacs in full bloom, jabbering with the Richardsons. They were breaking the news about the fence. The privacy fence – that's what they had decided to call it. Not an exclusion or security or I-hate-colored-people fence but a sturdy, six-foot cedar stockade that would sit just inside of the Weiner's property line and give both families a measure of 'privacy'.

Mrs. Richardson was all smiles. The willowy woman even laughed graciously, her head bobbing up and down in agreement with some point that Mr. Weiner had raised. Mr. Richardson was smiling too, but the expression was anything but congenial. There was much gesticulating plus several loud belly laughs and high-pitched titters that carried all the way across the back lawn and into the kitchen. It was grownups acting silly and totally out of control – it was pure, one hundred proof, straight-from-the-bottle E.M. Forster!

On the far side of the lawn, Sade's torso was framed in an upstairs window. With a bemused expression, she had been watching the freak show from a loftier vantage. When she saw him staring at her, the girl stiffened her jaw in a defiant gesture. Then she placed her powerful fingertips over her lips and flicked George a silent kiss. No one noticed. They were too engaged in fence diplomacy. It was at that moment that George understood – an epiphany of sorts - that he loved Sade Richardson. Totally. Completely. Utterly. The kiss at the reservoir was shockingly pleasant enough, but this long-distance, whimsical gesture struck him at a far deeper level. Some inchoate thread of intimacy which had been nurtured over the past few years burst into life – like forcing a dormant seed with warmth and light to germinate in the middle of a wintry deep freeze. And that, too, was so very E.M. Forster. He would have to tell her at the earliest convenience – not that Sade would give a hoot. She would roll her walnut-colored eyes and make a snotty remark, suggesting he was a total idiot. And then she would practice left-hand layups and fall away jump shots, dribble between her legs and life would pursue its lopsided, irregular course.

When his parents returned to the house, Mrs. Weiner announced, "Well, what do you think?"

George's father shook his head emphatically. "Things went as well as could be expected. They know that we're not hate mongers and that the fence benefits all concerned."

"I wish you hadn't quoted that Frost poem about mending walls," his wife noted. "That was a bit melodramatic."

Mr. Weiner made a face. "Look, we all got to live together in this goddamn community so you do whatever it takes."

"There's no reason for profanities," Mrs. Weiner's tone darkened noticeably. Everyone's nerves were on edge. "It's over and that's all that matters. They agreed in principle that a fence is a good idea."

Mr. Weiner put the coffee on to boil and got a cup down from the cabinet. "I'll call the fence company in the morning."

In the middle of the following week a truck towing a huge auger from the Providence Fence Company pulled up in front of the Weiner's home. With a Stanley twenty-five foot tape measure and can of spray paint, the crew measured and marked the locations of each of seventeen posts. They fired up the noisy, gas-operated auger and drilled down two feet into the rocky soil. By the early afternoon the crew had packed up and left. George went out to inspect. The four-by-four posts stood perfectly plumb in a slurry of gravelly cement mix. The chalky gray liquid near the street had already begun to set up and cure. George bent down and scratched the rough surface with a fingernail. It was hard as rock.

The next day the workers returned to finish the job. The individual sections of stockade fence were fastened in place using an elaborate system of metal fasteners, nuts and bolts. Gradually the rows of wooden slats crept across the grassy lawn dividing the two properties, and by the late afternoon the beautiful cedar fence stretched to the far end of both yards. Each post was fitted with a decorative crown, a graceful, scalloped pattern defining each individual slatted row. Mr. Weiner was very pleased when he returned home from work. "Money well spent!" he announced with an exultant grin.

"Yes, it's a lovely piece of workmanship," his wife agreed.

  

The following week Sade's Wildcats were playing the Donovan School. George walked a half mile to the middle school and sat in the bleachers next to a Cambodian woman, whose daughter was on the opposing team. By the end of the first quarter the Wildcats were winning fourteen to five, Sade having scored half the points and picking off almost a dozen rebounds. When the buzzer rang, the coach made substitutions and the score became more respectable. After the half, Sade went back in the game, scored a series of easy layups and the outcome was never in doubt from that point on.

George waited outside the gym and his friend, still wearing her uniform, emerged after a few minutes. Rather than go directly home, they stopped by the athletic field at the end of the street where a soccer match was underway. "There's gonna be fireworks," Sade announced, "and I'm not talking Fourth of July and the Eighteen-Twelve Overture."

George had a vague intimation what was coming. Earlier at the basketball game, Mr. Richardson had walked by the bleachers where George was sitting next to the squat Asian woman. Noticing George, his face puckered in a brusque scowl and the black man glanced away. "My father's angry as hell over the fence," Sade continued. "He says your dad's a hate monger worse than Billy Ray Hooper." After saying this she draped an arm around his waist and leaned into the boy with her supple body.

"But my parents went and spoke to him just the other week and your father agreed the fence was a good idea."

"No, he only agreed that they had the legal right to put it up."

"Did he tell my folks that?"

"No, of course not! My father's nuts." She said this with unassuming finality. He felt her grip tighten. He wanted to kiss her – to forget about cedar fencing, folksy Robert Frost poems about mending stone walls, racial reparations and all the other intrinsic stupidity that cluttered his thirteen year-old existence. But then, someone might see George Wiener kissing an attractive black girl and he would have to relocate to another part of the country, abandon scenic New England altogether. "We have nothing in common."

"That's true enough." Sade didn't bother to look at him. She was watching the soccer game. "But then you talk some moronic nonsense that I'm not even remotely interested in and then maybe a week and a half later, I get to thinking about E.M. Forster or whatever the hell his name is and it makes me feel as though the craziness in my own family is manageable which, of course, it isn't."

George wasn't sure if he was more shocked by the fact that she bared her soul or that she remembered what he had said at the reservoir and actually got the name right. Only now did she turn and look him full in the face. "I'm warning you. My father's gonna do something really stupid."

"Like what?"

"Don't know and don't especially care." She kissed him full on the lips, a leisurely, unhurried mind-bending kiss. Several of the soccer players scrimmaging off to the side of the field gawked at them queerly. "Let's go home now before we start an ugly scene of our own."

  

"How was the basketball game?" Mrs. Weiner asked.

"Good," George responded absentmindedly. He went upstairs to his room and shut the door.

It was all about muddles. According to the world's leading authority on the subject, E.M. Forster, everything that was wrong in society and between people had to do with muddles – states of confusion, bewildering ambiguity, emotional messiness, mystifying jumbles of chaos and perplexing disorder. A hopeless muddle was at the root of most problems, whether it be running a sturdy, hardwood fence across sixty feet of property or settling grievances that dated back to the Civil War. You couldn't talk it through. Rational conversation offered no solution whatsoever and frequently only made things worse.

When things were going poorly, George felt his brains all in a muddle. Nothing made any sense; there was no sense of immediacy. There were days strung together, end-to-end in a dismal row, where George felt like he was a bit player, an ill-prepared character actor, in a tacky melodrama not of his choosing. But then Sade came to visit him at the secret cove and the muddle dissolved, evaporated, was blown to smithereens by her infuriating loveliness and utter disregard for what mattered to everyone else. Each fulfilled an unmet need. He was the gossamer glue that held her fractured, dysfunctional universe together; she was the Nubian princess who – abracadabra - could banish muddles. What was required was a kiss on the lips from a girl with hands so strong and malleable that she could palm a regulation-size basketball or, better yet, a mystical novel of love and last-minute redemption written by an introverted Englishman born well over a hundred years ago.

A week later, the Wieners discovered the depth of Mr. Richardson's paranoid rage. George's mother was in the back yard hanging laundry. Mr. Weiner had fitted the pressure-treated T-shaped poles with an adjustable mechanical device. The far end of the cotton clothesline was fed through a small hole ringed with metal ball bearings. As the line began to stretch and sag from the weight of the wet clothing, a quick tug on the end of the rope would raise the line back to its original height. Mrs. Wiener had just fixed a pair of her husband's Fruit of the Loom boxer underwear on the line with a pair of wooden clothespins, when she saw a huge, almond-colored missile sail up and over the fence, coming to rest with a frightening crash among the tiger lilies in her rock garden. The middle-aged woman's legs turned to mush as she collapsed onto the grass in a terrified daze. Through a chink in the new fence she spotted Mr. Richardson wearing a lime green Izod sport shirt sauntering up the back stairs to his deck before disappearing into the house. The projectile, which he had launched like a shot putter whirling faster and faster in concentric circles, was a metal propane tank that he had borrowed from Mr. Wiener at the beginning of July.

Weeping hysterically, Mrs. Wiener abandoned the laundry basket full of damp clothes, staggered into the house and called her husband. "It would appear," she spoke in a faltering falsetto, "our neighbor would prefer reparations."

Following the propane tank incident, Mr. Wiener went to an attorney and got a restraining order against his neighbor. The legal document stated in terse, no-nonsense language that Mr. Richardson and his wife were not to speak to the Wieners except through proper legal representation; Mr. Richardson could not 'throw, drop, hurl or otherwise jettison any miscellaneous belongings' onto their neighbors' property under threat of civil litigation; and the parents were to 'cease and desist' from making any obscene, inflammatory or threatening gestures when entertaining on their deck. Other than the bizarre incident with the propane tank and a few withering stares, Melvin Richardson had done nothing of the sort, but lawyer threw the last statement in – like a warning shot over the bow - for good measure.

  

Saturday night Sade shuffled into the bathroom where her mother was blow drying her hair. She had overhead heard her parents talking earlier in the afternoon about the letter from the lawyer, which was delivered certified mail. "Is Daddy going to jail?"

Mrs. Richardson pulled a wide-toothed comb through her damp hair, waving the dryer over the limp strands. "No. He'll just keep a low profile, be on extra-good behavior and things will blow over."

"What he did was stupid as hell." Sade lowered the toilet seat and sat down on the terrycloth lid cover.

"Yes, well your father has a penchant for making dramatic statements without considering the consequences." She repositioned the hair dryer on the opposite side of her head and began to comb out the snarls and tangles. "That's why he needs the two of us."

"For what?"

"To keep him on the straight and narrow," her mother replied with a undertone of gravitas tinged with humor. "To make him realize when he's done something really wacky and needs to go into the witness protection program."

Sade had no idea what her mother was talking about except that, since the bizarre incident with the propane tank, her father had been uncharacteristically meek and obliging. Unfortunately, the eerie calm wouldn't last. Once the crisis had blown over, Mr. Richardson would begin bellyaching about some newly-imagined fault or injustice. "I kissed that Wiener boy."

The girl's mother shut the dryer off and stared at her daughter in disbelief. "You what?"

"He's very weird," Sade ignored the original question. "Always talking about books. Books, books, books. He thinks the solutions to all the world's problems can be found in some musty old text written a hundred thousand years ago."

Mrs. Richardson turned the dryer back on full speed and directed the nozzle at the nape of her neck. The hairs floated lazily on the upstream of warm air. "You and I need to have a little talk."

"About what?" The girl thought a moment. "Oh, yeah, that."

"I don't suppose there's anything in George's moldy books about dealing with irascible, short-tempered black men."

Sade smiled at her mother's backside. "Not likely."

Someone had turned the television on and Sade could hear the theme song from Hannah Montana drifting down the hallway. "I appreciate your telling me about the kiss," there was a note of urgency in the woman's voice. "I hope you will have the good sense not to share that last bit of romantic gossip with your father."

Sade headed for the open door. "Not in this lifetime."

  

"You can't go over the Richardsons' house anymore," Mr. Weiner announced in a peremptory tone. They were sitting down to a supper of meatloaf, mashed potatoes and butternut squash. "The man tried to kill your mother."

George cut a piece of meat with his fork and swirled it in the brown gravy. "Mr. Richardson is a paranoid jerk. He doesn't just hate white people, he hates everybody."

Sade told George that her father referred to Jamaicans as 'Jewmaicans', because, once they arrived from the island with their immigrant-status green card, they started saving up to buy rental property which they promptly let to poor, native-born Afro-Americans. He didn't especially like Haitians either. The women were all goody-two-shoes, religious fanatics who mixed traditional Catholicism with voodoo and animism. Their religious mumbo gumbo was enough to make a respectable, college-educated black person throw up! That's what Sade told him. Not that George had any intention of sharing any of this with his parents. "I love Sade Richardson pure and simple. Nobody can keep us apart." George said this with grim determination. "This isn't Romeo and Juliette," he muttered under his breath.

"Try telling that to the guy who lives on the other side of that fence," Mr. Wiener shot back in a surly voice.

George toyed with his squash. His mother had basted the top with a glaze of brown sugar and honey before placing it in the oven. George laid his fork down next the plate and rose from the table. "Where the hell do you think you're going?" Mr. Wiener's voice sounded mildly hysterical, childish.

"To have a little chat with the guy who lives on the other side of the cedar fence."

George walked briskly out the door into the fading light, crossed over to the Richardson's property and rang the bell. "Sade's not here." The wife answered the door. "She's at basketball practice."

"I need to speak to your husband."

The woman stared at him uncertainly. Perhaps she sensed something irreverent in his tone. Mr. Richardson inched up behind his wife with his moody mug pressed close to the screen door. "You don't get along with my folks," George said, "but that has nothing to do with me." He turned and pointed at the basketball net at the far end of the driveway. "The next time I see Sade outside shooting hoops, I'm coming over to visit. If you don't like it call the police."

"You got some god-awful nerve!" The man made a motion toward the screen door but his wife blocked his way.

George pointed a second time at the transparent backboard and cotton net. "I'm in love with your daughter," he added in a sarcastic, baiting tone, "and in another eight or ten years I could end up being your son-in-law, so we got to get beyond this childish bickering." Mr. Richardson's mouth fell open. Suddenly, he didn't look angry anymore. The expression on his face was one of utter bewilderment. He was, quite possibly for the first time in his adult life, at a loss for words.

"Yes, George, that sounds fair enough," Mrs. Richardson said quickly although it was unclear what, if anything, she was referring to as she slammed the front door shut.

The youth went home and picked up where he had left off with the butternut squash. Mr. Wiener and his wife had finished their own dinner and placed the dirty plates on the counter next to the sink. They sat drinking Bigelow tea while their son ate his meatloaf, mashed potatoes and butternut squash flavored with brown sugar and honey. There was no mention of the Richardson's feud, airborne propane tanks, restraining orders or a thirteen year-old Jewish boy's romantic predilections.

  

Toward the end of the E. M. Forster novel, one of the main characters, Mr. Emerson, described life as resembling a public performance on a violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along. Standing there on the Richardsons' front stoop with the parents staring out at him from behind the screen door, George Wiener had flailed away on his flimsy violin for all it was worth and improvised some amazing melodies. From George's vantage point, the strangest thing about the confrontation was how he maintained himself totally in the here-and-now. At no point did the youth lose nerve and slip slide into that benumbed state where he was mechanically going through the motions. He had never felt more alive, in control of his adolescent destiny as when he was reading Attila the Hun – a.k.a. Melvin Richardson - the riot act.

Later that night Mrs. Wiener entered her son's bedroom and stood stiffly by the night table. "You never mentioned what happened over at the Richardsons'."

In the darkness, George lay back under the covers and considered the question. "The man is still fighting the Civil War." He didn't quite know what else to say about his abortive confrontation with Sade's misanthropic father. "What he did last week was an act of both historical and hysterical protest, but I don't think he will be hurling any more propane tanks over the fence."

"Well that's a relief!" Mrs. Wiener turned around and abruptly left the room. George listened but didn't hear his mother's footfalls descending the stairs. Rather, she lingered on the upstairs landing, mulling something over in her mind. Finally she trudged back into the room. "Do you remember the Disney movie Bambi?"

"Vaguely."

"In the early spring, all the animals became twitterpated, intoxicated with love. They chose a soul mate, a life partner, and went romping through the fields and meadows." Mrs. Wiener sat down on the edge of the bed. "Puppy love – that's what you're feeling right now for the Richardson girl."

"Sade. Her name is Sade and it's not puppy love," George replied. "Puppy love is a shallow and transient emotion that can evaporate in a fickle heartbeat."

"Yes, that's true." Mrs. Wiener felt stymied, outfoxed by her son's precision. "I stand corrected." Rising from the bed, she left the room and retreated down the stairs.

  

In the morning, George dug through the compost heap where his parents had been dumping banana peels, eggshells, coffee grounds, fruit and other degradable refuse in a shallow pit. Inside ten minutes he had a can full of writhing worms and night crawlers. Around eight o'clock he headed out to the Brandenberg Reservoir. On the second cast he hooked a largemouth bass. Deftly playing the muscular fish into shore, he removed the hook, threading a nylon rope through the gills and back out the mouth before tossing the tethered fish into the shallow water.

Around eleven o'clock Sade appeared. "Come with me," George said flatly. "He led the way back out into an open meadow carpeted with cornflowers, chicory, ivory-colored baby's breath and snapdragon.

"What about the fishing gear?"

George waved the question off. On the far side of the meadow a muddy trail half-buried in undergrowth led back down to the water. "Look over there to your left."

They were standing on a rock ledge extending out over an algae-choked stretch of placid water. There were rotting tree stumps, cat-o'-nine-tails; and a swarm of dragon flies flitting back and forth in the marshy shallows. "I don't see anything."

George raised his hand and indicated a row of blackened stumps jutting out from the murky water. "That flat rock beside the third stump from your left."

Sade's body tightened and the breath caught like a jagged bone in her throat. Involuntarily, the girl took a step backward, leaning against his chest. Fifty feet away, sunning itself on the granite rock was a medium-size snake. The body was tattooed with brown, tan and gray crossbands. The broad head jutted out distinct from the neck, the snout blunt in profile with the top of the head extending forward slightly further than the mouth. The body had a heavy build, the tail moderately long and slender. "It's a water moccasin." George's voice hardly rose above a whisper. "I came down here first before going to the cove, but as soon as I saw our friend sunning himself, I immediately left."

"So what do we do now?"

"Leave," George replied. "The cove is a good three hundred feet away, but vipers are strong swimmers and that nasty brute could cover the distance in five minutes without even breaking a sweat."

"I thought snakes were cold blooded."

"You know what I mean." George turned and led the way back to the fishing hole, where he collected his gear. Before reaching the street, the woods emptied out into an open meadow speckled with wildflowers, the honey-colored grass in some places waist high. When they were a reasonably safe distance from the water, George threw himself down on the warm earth and Sade snuggled up next to him.

"Did you stop by my house the other day?" There was no reply. George was still thinking about the water moccasin. The mature snake looked to be about three feet long, grown strong on a diet of frogs, small fish and carrion. In the future when he fished the cove, he would have to be more vigilant, sweep the grassy shoreline and underbrush regularly with his eyes for uninvited guests. And, of course, he would warn Sade against joining him in the future. "My father says," she interrupted his reveries, "you're the craziest little shithead he ever met."

George just smiled. Twittering as they careened drunkenly through the early morning sunshine, a scattering of chickadees was flitting through the lower branches of the pine trees that rimmed the meadow. "I'm in love with you."

She rolled over in the tufted grass, her cheek resting lightly on his chest. "Now tell me something I don't already know." The tone was smug, gently mocking.

George told her about his favorite author's theory of the 'muddle' and how life often resembled an impromptu violin performance. Then he told her Forster had suggested that there was only a certain amount of kindness in the world, just as there was only a certain amount of light, and that we throw shadows wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things, because the shadows follows us. George was working himself up into a mild frenzy, which was pretty much what happened every time he got going on the Englishman, not that Sade seemed to mind. She just lay back with her eyes closed, a dreamy smile creasing her plump lips.

"'Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.' That's what Forster said." When the boy finished talking, she snuggled closer draping a leg over his thigh. The sun was almost directly overhead now, the temperature drifting into the low eighties. The sweet aroma of pine sap mixed with wildflowers perfumed the air. "Well?" he pressed.

"Well what?" She rested an arm on his chest, and he brought a hand up around the small of her back.

"Was it worth hearing?"

She caressed his face with a free hand. In no great hurry a turgid bumblebee lumbered by en route to a clump of orangey flowers. "No, like everything else you tell me, it was stupid as hell." The Chickadees' chatter was joined by the rhythmic hammering of a woodpecker. A pastel, earth-colored moth was feasting on the nectar in a bell-shaped ivory flower.

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The End

