

First Edition

Published by Capacity Press (Ray Succre)

Copyright Ray Succre 2012

Cover art. Andrew David King

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A Fine Young Day

ray succre

This book is dedicated to Mary Morrison,

a loving wife and excellent mother.

Thank you for all of it.

### A Fine Young Day

**One**

Tom woke to dirt-speckled eggs fresh lifted from the bucket Jan left on the porch each few weeks. Cracked and prepared on the Westinghouse oven, an ounce of water to level. Then a sovereign glass of milk as the breath from his slow sense waking left the blunt warmth that formed morning. Nine became nine-ten and there was television to watch. Some. The news was born swift and he ate hard boiled eggs incautious of heart conditions and allotments of salt. Meg went for the mail and came back with nothing in her hands.

The television news showed the Earth had shaken down tufts of India. Quake. Nerves a-trigger in crust. Indian soil pursed in fulgent kisses that rolled men down hills into an ancient panic. The television was full of shaking ground and illness, natural terrors and the various masks of domestic collapse. Capital was missing; money had become less with the coffers of most, and some profits were absent from the great industrial houses. The television lived in many places but these were always elsewhere.

She wore the hounded dress with seams drawn tight, fabric agglomerated in the inward places and taut with the rounded others. She had not rid her life of those garments her most recent body had begun to reject. Weight carried size amidst the deceleration of her skin, an age-induced relief of her drawn sinews into loose flesh and soft drapery. She had found no mail and mentioned the red metal flag.

"Still up."

"Comes late now," Tom said.

"Mail comes whenever the postman brings it," Meg replied, "so there's no late until it's been a whole day."

"I guess so. Nice of Jan to bring these eggs."

"Oh, they have so many, though."

"They must get sick of eggs. I do."

"You're eating breakfast, aren't you?"

"I know. I said it was nice."

Lips full as leaderboards and wary of certain meets against other lips. His. Meg's head on a glide away from his own and the egg was too salty and perhaps his breath of egg and salt had caused their morning kiss to veer. The rise and dip of chins. Almost, but no touch. She entered the kitchen on a mangled thought of money. Behind him was the electric lift and drop of people against earthquake. India.

The waiting on cards in the mail was an unnecessary patience. Another of his birthdays was only a day off, but he cared little for hastily sent cards from the birthday aisle of department stores. The importance was not in receiving them, but responding to them. This was his reason for patience. A card in the mail meant a letter in return, something Meg enjoyed. It was a brighter day when Meg was pleased with something. The news flickered and he finished his milk watching her bullish rump as she cleaned beneath cans in a cupboard with damp cloth. She did this in a slower form of urgency. Each movement of her arms sudden and certain, yet her posture patient and settled. Age had taken the show that was her life and placed it in reruns. A sore spot here, a popping sound there. A series of hairstyles, just so, a few years each, repeating their order from the previous decade.

Ants had unlocked the sill for an invisible meal of sugar. The soda droplets were missed weeks ago and had no color. Easy to miss. The ants ate where all fell. Hunger was an unavoidable crib to life. Kept it going. Raised it up. The ants were swift. He admired their courier habit, watched the line carry off bits of sweet, minuscule debris. As the morning quickened, he ate his breakfast eggs, drank from the warm cup, and checked that his clothes were clean and still fit him.

He left the house and blended into work, had the day fair, stopping at the half to think over his breakfast, the cholesterol. His lunch contained neither egg nor salt. He drove home when there was no more work for him. This had become the crude of his latest days: Work ran out often, and with it the clock.

The driveway. Stepping out. Gravel beneath boots and the good, metallic scent of the idle truck. Red flag down. The mail had come, but only to ask him pay a thing. Key sounds and steps up the porch.

"How was it?" she asked.

"Same. Scrounging for material. Pull those nails to save the wood we threw out last month."

"Was there a party?"

"No. Birthday's tomorrow."

"Well, you're off tomorrow. Thought they'd do it today."

"You know there's no reason for any of that. Parties."

"But I thought they might. They did it last year."

"Well, most of those guys are laid off, anyway. Only a few left out there. So no party. And I like it that way. No attention. Okay, just work."

The ants had gained compatriots and numbered in the stars. He watched his wife a little in the evening and then watched the ants harking to their nest through inconspicuous trails in the wall of the house. Wife on fire as he wanted her. Crawl of ants. He uttered something.

"What?"

"I said we should find a way to keep these out."

"Oh, I need to get a can of Raid," she said, "End of Summer snuck up on me."

"So clean. Workin' like that. Maybe we should start feedin' em. Whole colony of pets."

"Don't be silly, Tom. Unsanitary, is what they are."

The husband and wife ate a botched shepherd's pie that had burned along the bottom. Phrasing entered his mind and he went over approaches. He had managed to pull for the two of them well enough, until things started drying out at work. He had fought against her taking a job in the past, but certain modes of this newest working world were designed for two. Kanell Materials was a husk in the sod. He knew this. His guilt was aside, but not enough to ask her just yet.

"I burned it," she said, annoyed.

"Burnt part tastes kind of nice, though."

They stayed near each other the night, slight talk and boredom approaching a late hour. They retired or just found their way toward the covers. She slept beneath cool sheets after some time of tuning out the sound of the bedroom television. He could not sleep, so watched copious action and magnanimous sex disguised as history. A plot based on a true story, meaning an imaginary tale. He was awake long after.

She turned and said something to someone who was not there. It was his birthday. He went quietly through the few channels and waited through commercials. Sheets growing too warm and the bed a busted instrument. Milliseconds between commercials making too much dark. On the way to work, day after his birthday, he would leave a little early and take a drive through town. Stop in at a place or two. Perhaps they were looking for someone down at Riter's. Fourteen years had passed but they had always liked her down there.

A barrel out front held seedlings set in the Spring and forgotten. He wondered if his mother, arriving tomorrow, would recognize the barrel. Taken from her back yard as trash years ago. Kept. Sanded. Stained. His wife's porch-side flower pot. He rose from bed and turned the television off. She surprised him by waking for several moments and a dazed statement:

"Good, keeps me awake."

Then she was out again and he crawled back under. Minutes of blank time. Dissipating breath and domestic dark. He turned in his blankets and then atop her. A munificent congress of their capitols was so welcome. There was no presence of need for her, and little want in him, but the circumstance was beside him, and there were moments in the middle age, though rare, when the existence of mere circumstance was enough to ask a man to feel something. She woke and was so pretty. Her look of disruption faded into welcome. He entered her. Inebriety. Near this and past thin windows dotted in dripped old paint, a broad cow's lull ranged. She would never say it, but they did not do this often enough. He spent quick with a nudge of shame and then closed his eyes on his side of the bed. Sleep.

Night failed to cool the outlying meadow and there were belligerent toads unusually warmed that brought him from his drift some time later. He would not allow himself to be upset his father was coming. The guise was a trip for their simultaneous birthdays, arranged by Meg and his mother, but the truth was always shook Tom up a little. There was no reason for his father to visit. Larry had no regard for Tom, and Tom had no wish to have that sensation come to visit, even if it only did so every few years. His father would speak little and infer nothing. The old man would be a bag of sand perched in a chair. Tom even knew which chair his father would take to sitting in while visiting; whatever chair a man of the house would sit in. Likely Tom's own.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes clear, left the bed, the room. Two in the morning would be coffee. Why not? It was a special occasion, his heart was sound, and the night's sleep was too distant to be found again. He opened the living room at the drapes. Overcast night but a hint of sky. Up the road he could see Maro's house lit behind living room blinds. Seemed neither of them could sleep. Unless it was Maro's wife in there. Could have been Jan studying her police books late. Criminal Justice was several of her days a week and the community college had grown busy with the occupational programs. Maybe things got shuffled from all the people, or Jan's classes were just getting harder. Maybe she read nights now.

Tom lit the dining room and looked over bank statements. When satisfied with the clarity these caused him, the Sun had risen. He showered slowly with extra time. He was neither tired nor himself. She woke to his voice.

"What time is it?"

"Still dark. Couldn't sleep," he said.

"Early?"

"Fishing early. Tide's out."

"I wouldn't."

"Need to use the checkbook," he explained.

"Well you're over on the... uh huh."

"To buy some bait. I need to use the checkbook."

"What?"

"Account's clear; I checked."

"Oh, the roof isn't sturdy. Just stay off there."

He tilted his head and lifted the rare, amused smile. Her puffy night-dim face a resemblance to little girl pout. In essence exactly that.

"You're still asleep," he said, "Okay."

"No, you're... Oh, you don't know about it."

"Back to sleep, mumbly. I'm gettin' the checkbook."

"Do whatever you want. I'm over here."

That was a dream's permission, and it was enough. The book was beneath the laundry basket in a small folder of bills. There had been no reason to carry the checkbook on him after that first demotion. Cable was cut down to the free channels. He wore the same clothes twice before she ran the wash. Freezer's meat went from steak to chuck. And fishing was for food now, not leisure.

No one needed a foreman when the workers were let go. They needed a man to do the work of four. That man was paid little. That or nothing. He had chosen little. He tore loose a check and folded it into his front pocket beside the key for the side-yard shed. The first check in two months now snug against his chest, he left the house, walking through the morning, still the night, to the shed where he kept his musty tackle. Maybe he could take the bucket of eggs Jan left on their porch every few weeks and start selling them. What shame if he was caught. Jan would judge him and Maro would offer money. Meg would be humiliated though not so much as Tom.

He discovered the light blown out. His bag of gear was easy to find on the floor near the entrance but he had no visibility in which to look for the hooks. He thought he had last set them on the dusty wood bench near the back, but could not find them there. No glint off trim plastic packaging. The road was dark a mile. Even Maro and Jan were finally dormant in a dim house.

Tom peered and felt about but came away with neither hook nor spare line. Perhaps he could buy hooks with the bait. They had food enough for awhile. Not enough for the bills, but the penalty was the same for being fifty dollars under as sixty. Maybe he could treat himself to bait, hooks, and even a six pack of beer. Who said he couldn't? His parents would arrive some time before the light faded. There was dinner for four to think over and trout was a good meal, if he could catch any. Hooks with bait. Yes, and everyone knew bottled beer helped a man sit long and still enough to catch fish. Return deposit on the bottles, too.

Cheating with his perspective. She would be upset seeing that check missing from the register. More since he had taken it on sleep permission, his first time perpetrating this odd crime. A sneak. What if he didn't catch any fish? He'd only be half-drunk on money they did not have. He was lucky in that she had taken it easy on him lately, regarding his job and the thinning of their finances. It would be cheap of him to muddy this favor by spending money now precious on a senseless and short-lived buzz.

When the trouble at work first started in on him, she had done the same, thought he needed to confront Lee about the demotion. Ask for his original wage back. Demand it. Meg didn't know Lee, however. Getting more pay out of Lee Kanell was asking a busted bootlace to mend itself. The money wasn't there to ask for, and Lee had it far worse than Tom did. Than any of them. Tom's wage, shortened as it had been, came directly from the poor sale of Lee's house, money he had thrown quickly back into Kanell Materials. There was no room to demand anything. There was only room to thank him.

Though the hard place Tom was in still pressed him toward an approaching, difficult decision, of leaving a job he knew and respected with the fervent hope he could find another, things had somewhat quieted while at home. It existed over their heads, in their breaths, always present in the rooms of the house, but Meg had been good enough to cease talking about the demotion. That was done, but he knew she talked about this in her head. He could see the thoughts and what they ate when she looked at him.

The money was bad. He had been the provider. Nothing was being provided but free eggs from Jan's chicken coop up the road. The lessening of income inferred things about Tom. Frustrating things. The electricity was going to be shut off with another missed payment. The days were slight and the nights were cold. He had become the days. Meg had become the nights. Their companionship was most awake when rummaging in physical love and talking over the dealings of money. They did not take part in these things often. He wanted a beer, just one. It would reward him with the nostalgia of previous beers, things he had drank in modes of damn-it-all or simple relaxation. How he longed for either of those sensations to overcome him, just a little, even for an hour.

Another approach to brown glass bottles:

"Fuck it. It's my birthday."

The truck. One retread. Frame hearty as an iron skillet. A wide-wheeled arc to the right, some minutes distance to the left turn through Camas Swale's outskirts and the eventual arrival at Latimer's Grocery and Bait. Stop in. Pick up, for services rendered, walk out. Then the truck again. Haven Lake Road with talk radio sitting beside him in the cab. Bait on the seat beside, the single beer as give-and-take, clutch jittering but its teeth in the gear well enough.

The road through the wood was unsound and miring. Once a swamp, Camas County had been structured around the old route from Eugene to Lincoln, as a small-trade resting point in the insensate and wild Oregon path. Years had once digested much good luck from this inhabited rest area and the word 'prosper' became a flag of resident-speak. That was an era that did not see the Depression's mull-headed approach and kept singing and trading. This ended slowly.

The road to Haven Lake was like the history of the town into collapse. Ambling, hole-spangled, the mud and moss creeping over the edges and propagating their kin in the cracks. The county had long ago subsided, fell into its small holes and let the fungus into every crevice. Tourists and those near retirement would come to look for this in time. A truck lot evolved for long-haulers. The old-folks home. Then Camas High School's football team went 4A and started chanting go-fight-win. Things happened from time to time, but not much. In the swale was a small town nearly sickened beneath the peat and slowly jotted into the birth of an industry all about trucks and the chip they could haul. The trucks drove their loads to the southern Oregon coast, down into Coos Bay, where the chip was set into those big Korean ships that crossed the Pacific. Tom was reliant on a town life that lived on wood, in a swale surrounded by it.

The live talk was political and felt rushed. Radio full of lobbyists and anger and professions of party thought. What someone needed to change or keep the same. The someone was a president. The change was common. The anger, always welcome. Talk radio accompanied him to the rim of the lake, expansive hole of water flattened out before him like saran atop a deadly deep bowl. He parked. Walked. Bait and beer in one hand. Old rod. The talk of the lake was incurious and settled for anything.

The fish were few but captured beneath. They could not leave their muddy tomb any more than he could leave the fateless town. He tugged his cap down against his forehead and scratched briefly beneath an eye. Gentle laps of liquid stalled before his feet in the gravid mud of the bank.

Haven Lake was minor. Getty Lake fed Haven in the Summer but this was near an end, and the larger had left the smaller to the cold, approaching Fall. This was the transformative span between eat and sleep for the lake. By comparison, Getty was larger and fraught with fish, but a long drive and one was never alone on its banks. The fastidious houses for the unremitting influx of Californian retirees had long ago cloistered like pigs on the Getty view. Devouring it and filling the lake with seldom-used trophy boats. They dotted every trail and access with private property signs. Rules about noise and everything else. In essence, the lake had been forced to retire like its encroachers. So Tom had Haven Lake. Isolated. Better.

Fish lived in a cold house with only their kind, riding out nothingness in the form of bid time. Spring would arrive eventually, and the fish would go mad with the rush and draw of the overrun, their dexterous tails shoving them into the temporary creek that would lead them from the county into wide King River. There was no tide, he just liked to say it. All was low. All was high.

He walked from the truck and soon found a short length of fallen tree, half rotted and scored in the hungry digs of insects. A few hand-carved hearts holding names one could no longer read. He sat and unwound his line from the loops, running it through after cutting loose the unmanageable tangles. The line was sharp against his thumb as he pulled and cut with the buck-knife. His breath showed him minuscule vapors, lithe clouds brief from a man, which dissipated as fast as the road-passed brush that dotted the lakeside road.

Calm morning. Crisp air. A spilled beer. Sudsy floor spread beneath tired boots. An animal's time and best spent alone. Good way to use a birthday.

Haven Lake was still as his eyes cutting off the small herring head for the hook. The buck-knife was dull and murmured through the meat and tiny bone. He severed with a glide and then cleared his throat. A down-pressing thumb bluntly cleaved the stubborn part against the log. The head was severed and he gently lifted it between fingers, examining the silver face. Emotionless. Stone. A frigid water surface. The hook slid through the eyes as if wind through hair and then he could cast and wait. There was little in the lake to bite, which was of strong benefit. He could wait long as he could fight off the damp air. Long as he wanted.

"I see you there. Don't move."

He turned his head and startled after. A younger man, hair tussled, shaky. Tom said nothing, head craned around, intermitted as if having spotted a solitary bear near the woods.

"I mean for your keys. Give 'em here."

Tom sheened through the moment and became conscious of his head. The pistol's sights had aligned loosely near his chin. He felt silly standing so still. The herring head on the hook in the cold behind him. His own head propped up on his dumpy body. So meaningless and small. He settled eye on the pistol once his thoughts discovered its significance.

"You go away," he said, dizzy.

"Can't. Need that truck. Give me your keys."

"Go away."

"You toss me the keys or else I take 'em. This is loaded."

"Go on. Get out of here."

"I already know it's gonna happen, old man."

"Well, you don't know me."

This last statement meant nothing, but it was something to say. Tom had left the banks of the lake and entered into isolation. The Sun tailed back behind gray and the mud around the lake grew quiet and there were only two men on Earth that existed and they were gray and quiet. They stared at one another. Living off the world for now. The young man glanced off toward the road. Tom's breath halted. Relief or fright. The young man was looking for witnesses or looking for a way to run. The pistol lost some elevation. The interloper's concentration had busted but his intent did not. Tom swallowed the thickness of his mouth and fought down a cough. The air was swimming the way a strong moment distorts truth or discovers it. The young man had begun crying.

"Keys, you old shit."

"Go on."

Glances with ardent eyes at the woods and road, quickened sight and breaths. Which way to run. Or which way to drive. The young man brought his forearm down with the pistol. Exhale and frustration. The next moment of the day wore fear and anxious thought. Woods crowding the young man and he needed to move. There was a span of inconsequence then, a moment in which Tom felt more human than he had in years, more temporary and inane.

The dead town. The slit veins of the latest economy. Ugly family and no one to think of you for what you were. Men did not matter like this. Women did not matter like this. The times were everything and the times were not made of people. They exalted egos, ignored worth, and gripped at wares. They struck with clubs and told you to go to church if you wanted security. The times. Maybe he was about to die. Maybe he needed to say something or stay quiet.

"Take the north fork," Tom said.

"They're all the same way."

"Nobody out there. Gets you to town after a bit."

"I'm not going back to town."

"North fork. Go on. Maybe stay off the road but follow it."

Tom was the old log, names carved in him, little hearts, his wood strong inside, damp and weak outside, time working away on the whole span of life. The young man backed several steps and spit badly, having to wipe away a strand from his lips. He flicked his wrist then and sniffed his nose, pistol to his side with a limp gesture. Tom's knees had retched forward a small amount, now seeming to creak between his thighs and calves. Unsteady beams that held him upright but with little certainty.

"Know what happened?" the young man asked.

"Something bad."

The interloper nodded. Tom thought about the ants then. He thought about earthquakes in India and Jan with her bucket of eggs. He thought about not writing enough love notes. Impermanence and wanting to live and all the muck between. Then he thought of last moments.

"Yeah. Something bad," the young man said.

There was a pinch in Tom's back and then his front rounded into his thoughts like a cannon. The sound happened. Startled blinks after sudden something. A hotness in the burst of its spread. The distance between the two men shortened to nil. He was on his back, could not hear the young man, who mumbled while fishing through Tom's pocket for the keys to the truck. These were taken roughly. Tom's truck started on the second attempt.

The north fork into the woods. Driving away until Tom could no longer hear his old truck's engine. The climb of the lake disregarded the still man on its bank. Were these last few seconds enough to die on, or would there be pain and then no breath to feel, first? Would there be a terrible panic for awhile? He began to feel this. An animal's time alone. Maybe for everyone who knew they were on the way out. What would Meg think? He would have given anything to see her.

Tom on his back became Tom on his side. Pained face. He was salted in sweat, or damp from the lively sense of the lake. Tom's bed was muck and belonged to insects and the dimpled footprints of birds. He rested, tried to sit up. Rested more. He thought of heartshot stags and the brief laps of the lake discomforted him with sound.

The wound in his chest riled at the touch of his restive fingertips. His shivering hand lifted into view and he peered. Muddy red and his blood more present than air. He had heard the sound of the pistol long after falling from its brunt. Too late for what had happened. A gun firing sounded different when you were in front of it than when you were behind it. What a strange thing. His chest became a separate entity then and began doing things the rest of his body went quiet for. Activity. Nerve endings. Stomach tightening and bearing down, shutting off.

A puncture in goodness. The meaningless obliteration of something in strong condition. This sensation was like a bright heating filament drawing power for its work and dimming the lights of a room for a spell. The inevitable panic was his sense of losing this precious, tiny level of remaining consciousness.

He was feeding the mud too much. He should have had children. The eyes fogged and a blink swept them clear. Tom thought to cry but could not call on this. Men should have carried pens so they could scrawl a last message to their loved ones when they were going to die. So sudden and rash and unfair. None of this had needed to occur. He wanted to do more thoughtful things for her. The hand was red and rich and aware. He thought of a message for a pen. His chest expanded, pulling at itself, straining for oxygen. A pen. _I'm sorry._ The blinks. Jaw tugging down without him, an automatic open and close. His lungs drew hard like a fish pulled from water, from the entire world.

For a moment he felt important. Then the cap slid from his head, hair in the warm mud and sky saying so much above.
**Two**

Her small waist full of white starch noodles, chicken stock, carrot. Parents watching the news. The stairs up to the hall that led to her room were a slow ascent to trouble. A certain kind. Tom had been in her room before, but years previous, as an earlier child. His eager thoughts now anticipated her, were more tuned due to entering her bedroom and engaging in proximity. On purpose. The common act of being around girls was a situation his young age endured through short bouts of anxiety. A girl's bedroom was plausibly a sort of requisite to him. A badge affair. Age-calling. And so Tom stood in her room, nervousness stuttering in a minor earthquake across those acres beneath his brain's boneshell.

Neighborhoods had tufted up between the townparts he and George shared and those in which Alan lived, separating Tom and George from their friend by a half-hour of energetic pedaling. About two miles down the wood trails, or four on the roads. Alan who did not ride well. Alan the whiner who lived in the apartment complex. He had entreated George and Tom that afternoon with the notion of seeing a girl. Dark skin and pretty eyes. She had albums and a player. Neighbor girl. George had escalated this potential meet to one of more uncertain behavior. The boys had lately become contaminated by the curio of femininity. The uprise of this new captivation with girls had sparked from images in a lingerie magazine George had found a few weeks back. The exposed undergarments and the extemporaneous presence of skin had gotten into their thoughts and wouldn't leave. There was something to it, but they couldn't quite grasp what. The three boys had examined the pictures while skulking in some brush.

George went first, returned with a smirk. Then Alan, who waved he had finished from the upstairs bedroom window. When the two boys were finished, George grabbed Tom's arm and led him to Nitya's bedroom like a guard escorting a prisoner to a lynching. It seemed George felt Tom might attempt to escape. Indian family with a familiar home but unfamiliar scents and art. They had finished dinner and the Sun was near to climbing under its covers. The parents watched the news, bored or fascinated enough to appear bored. The program explained satellites. Invisible rays of demise. Trouble from space. The future.

Trouble was George and Tom moving through the living room past the parents until meeting stairs, then ascending onto a second-floor hallway of ten steps. Trouble was Tom beside George beneath all the dirtiness. The father yawned and the mother itched her forearm while the two boys went upstairs for the daughter.

The satellites would travel around the Earth in orbit, circling with weapons downcast. In little time they could vaporize evil. The news had lately rummaged in notions of the practical applications. Mining. Remote detonation. Scanning the sea for wreckage and lost souls. The Indian parents watched and exchanged occasional statements, though the husband's were longer and more disgruntled. The duplex was saturated in the smell of chicken broth, dinner bowls and plates still on the table. Bottle of vodka on the counter. Glass in the mother's hand empty while she sat on the couch.

"Hello Tom," she called over her shoulder before accepting the television's leash again. Mrs. Baruah had remembered him.

George was hefty but the good kind. The tough kind. Generous with expletives and had quickly assembled a high knowledge regarding girls. _They have a part of the brain that makes 'em less hungry when it's time to eat._ These creatures had ceased banding into groups of brief hit-strikers and general taunters on playgrounds, and become more individually present and engrossing. Different when alone than in the packs that dominated school. _They're better swimmers, too, but we're better climbers._ They had been muddy girls that flung stones at foal boys, but had become like Summer after a time, and of more interest even than the sky under which they talked and gestured. They meant more than what they said. They did more than what you saw. Not like boys.

Only a few dolls. He had thought there would be more. Several on small perches above laid out clothes. A room filtered by the abstract of gender. Elaborate bedding. Posters. Albums on a shelf. _And they like it when you feel their hair._ Tom felt foreign here, like a single instance of cigarette smoke drifting through a clean, airy house.

Alan and George stood in the small room, toying with trinkets and looking at one another with mischief. Nitya sat at a small wooden vanity and pretended to put on makeup with a small paintbrush. There was no talk being had so Tom went through the albums. These graphic slats of cardboard were mesmerizing to him. She had her own music and a television. Her own player. Most of the albums were collections made up of well-known songs and displayed covers bound to the favorability of cute animals. _They're terrified of mice and anything little, especially spiders, but they do like kitties and dogs and stuff._ The albums were uninteresting, but the player was quite neat. Alan said he was going to hide under the bed. George disliked this.

"No, it has to be the closet."

"Why? I can fit under there just fine."

"Well, I can't. And anyway, they need privacy. That's how it works."

Tom was the third boy to lift himself onto the bed that day. His hands had no direction and his posture on the soft, tall bed was uncertain, so he laid himself straight like a plank. Head on an oddly small, lacey pillow. Waiting. George's instructions had coated his skull like warm oil. He was not nervous, so long as he kept telling himself he was not nervous. George had earlier explained that quiet was how to do it: _No one humps no one without quiet and touchin' privates._ Tom made no noise, still in the bed as Nitya set herself down beside him and elongated like a stretched cat. She looked into his ear, idle. They both waited. George and Alan in the closet, peeking out. Watching. The room was filled with weight. Strange and awkward pause with no clear initiation. It felt like church.

She reached her hand over and held his, then prepared by rolling onto her back. Lying down. Legs and arms stiff as table. Staring at the ceiling like he stared at the ceiling. Two trees felled by lightning.

"Are you gonna screw?" she asked.

"Of course. I know how."

"Okay."

The boy atop the girl, both of them rigid as joists of artless cedar. Entirely clothed atop the decorous blankets. Sort of like pretend, but a bit like something beyond pretend. Not a fun way to play, but a strange and needy sort of play. Then moving about in a jerky manner. Not looking at her. Looking at him. George left the closet and quickly turned the lights out to make it better but this did nothing. He returned to the closet where the two boys then watched through the slats. The afternoon's end beyond the windows was still a capital blue and bright, and intended to see the two children's act.

Her hair was silly. Messy from wrestling in the bed with the other two boys. She smelled of chicken soup. He kissed her cheek and her head was too warm. Funny looking. He felt dirty. Bored and a slow sneak. Alan spoke from the closet.

"You have to kiss 'em both."

"Shut up," George advised, "That's only if she has some. And she doesn't."

The uncomfortable brush of denim against his knees, forearms tiring aside her. There was something about the idea of breasts that both worried and eluded him.

Tom knew this was supposed to occur naked in order for a baby to be made. That they were fully clothed meant they were safe. No babies. Not until she decided to have babies, and not until he married her. This was called nuptials and it involved buying a house and having a job. He had thought about this much in the recent months. Designing a house in his mind and pretending someone was his wife in it. He had tried several girls he knew with this role in his mind. Nitya was not one of them, because he had forgotten her until today. Until the three boys thought of her and came to the apartment.

Tom imagined her in a wedding dress, small to fit her size, little veil like in the movies. Did Indians marry different? Jews stepped on a cup. Beneath him, her stomach sloshed with soup and she stared at him as if he was but another trinket in the room. She seemed both apprehensive and unconcerned in the same instant, but would giggle during certain motions while glancing over to the closet and the two hidden, impish spectators. _If the girl has little ears, it means she can have more than one baby at a time. Like for twins._ He would need a wife eventually, and a girl who beat his grades seemed the best choice. Smart girl. One you could ask questions. Not like his mom, who was quiet and held still too much, and only heard what you said if you kept saying it.

Nitya was not pretty to him, but would be when she grew up, like her mother. Tom could see this clearly. Even her dad had a strange, smooth-skinned prettiness. Tom did not care that she was Indian. He liked this consequence. Tom's father, Larry, had once said the Baruahs were foreigners and dirty. That Hindus were ignorant cheats. That had been said years ago, however. Tom did not see hints of cheating or dirtiness when he viewed the Baruahs. Maybe Larry just did not know them enough. Or the Baruahs had changed since then. Tom's father disliked most people in the same manner Tom disliked his father: with a kind of mistrust that swiveled in and out of the days, but always in an ever-evolving despisal.

While visiting Alan in the apartments, Tom had only ever seen Mr. Baruah go to work, come home, eat dinner, and watch TV. Mr. Baruah was friendly and talked more than Tom's father. Tom liked the accent. Made everything sound new. _If she's Mexican, then she don't like kissin'. But if she's French, she does._ Nitya was dirty just then, yes, but a different kind of dirty, and George had caused her to be that way in a bed, had gotten her to hump with them, so George was the dirtier one. Then Alan. And now Tom. Maybe all grown ups had to be sort of dirty sometimes.

In time their slight taste of adulthood was done and the boys made their quiet exit from the residence. The sky was polished in high August and sent them onward the evening, away from deluxe ordeal and into those less rarified, common things that knew boys best.

The three crossed the trestles onto pastor Frank's property, skirting the edge, staying away from the cows and following the fence. The hour had turned them from Nitya's room into the courtyard, then a search for sticks and a brief, animated fight between the three friends. The hour caked about their shoes as they proceeded across the pastor's field in the smell of caltrop manure and baking weeds. Alan was dragging a stick beside him. George was always vociferous while walking.

"She's nasty. The three of us? Little whore. That's the truth right there."

"Knock it off, George. We can't be sayin' cuss words like that," Alan protested.

"Little Indian whore," George repeated.

"You're gonna make Him mad. Get us in trouble."

"That's on Sunday, dumbass. Can say whatever shit you want on a Thursday."

Alan's glance at the pastor's house fretted his eyes with a slight panic. The defensiveness between the two boys and the guise of the argument was a longstanding dilemma. George was blasphemous. Alan was frightened of this. Tom kept quiet when the two boys started talking God.

"That's not true. He's up there listenin' to everything you say," Alan countered. He kept his eye on the pastor's house as if being near this particular residence had risen the stakes of their argument.

"Think He watched us humpin' her?" George asked.

"I bet He was. Keepin' an eye on us," Alan said.

"You goin' to Hell for it?"

"What? No way. But you _can_ go there for cussin' and takin' His name in vain."

"And not for humpin'? You should re-think that."

"No. Boys don't go to Hell for humpin'. Only girls."

Tom entered the conversation once it had withered into occasional statement. Asked if they thought he should marry her. His mind loaded itself with thoughts of a white wedding dress above expensive shoes. House and lacy pillows. Her pretty eyes and little tits and all the ceremony about getting married. He thought of the sheet-covered Nitya upright and drawing back the transparent veil. Kissing in front of everybody, even the pastor. Smell of soup. Did the rings have to be real gold?

George was against the proposed marriage, and with a quick turn of his wheaty mind, told Tom not to say that sort of thing out loud. He said a man should never marry a whore until after he moved her to a new town and no one knew her. And then only if he could keep her from being a whore after that. Tom explained he did not think Nitya was any such thing.

"She is. Told me so," George reinforced.

"That's not true. She wouldn't say that."

"Admitted it. Said 'I'm a little whore'. And you humped her good."

"Well, I think I did. But she didn't move or anything."

Tom then divulged that he thought she preferred his screwing over the others. Alan laughed. George did not. George was big and a year older and whatever he said was what you heard the most. _Girls with big rear-ends can't ride bikes because the seat goes you-know-where._ George was the best at whatever was up for scrutiny, if anyone ever wondered.

"You're full of shit. Liked it more how I did it," George bragged, "She said 'I love you' and put her arms around me."

"She said she loved me, too," Alan tossed in.

"She was just tryin' to make it fair. She knew mine was the best," George reiterated, "But it's not your fault or nothin'. I'm just older than you."

The snorts came from the copse beyond the fence, just past the pastor's property. This sound, at first been subtle and distant, closed the length quickly and became a lively sound of something consequential in the property-line brush. The boys stopped and stared. Alan thought to run.

Wood things. You never stayed around for wood things, no matter what they were. Buck. Bobcat. Person. There was no good dealing with anything out of the woods unless you went looking for it first. Alan had long supposed the woods were haunted, as did many of the townsfolk in the swale, but when George had concluded this notion to be silly, Alan had agreed. George was not always around, however. The other boys did not run, so Alan stayed. After a moment, George muttered something and Alan complied, handing the stick to the older boy, who then kept it raised, wearing on his face a serious look. Alan thought about ghosts. When the three saw the creature tumble from the brushwood, their fright subsided and became amusement. The animal ceased moving upon seeing them. There was a moment of staring between the animal and the boys. Tom knelt to be closer to it, reach eye level. The three boys breathed less then, standing still and not wanting to spook the young thing.

"Wow, it's tiny," Tom muttered.

The feral pig was likely a runt and was certainly not long into the world. Lean. Front heavy. _A doctor has to reach all the way inside her privates to get the baby out. With both hands. And sometimes they cut the kid out._ The small pig's fear of them had been overcome by another need, one that had brought the runt into rare proximity with animals it did not trust. Starvation. Necessity. Being alone on a dirt floor that continued indefinitely and only ever changed just before you got to it. Abandonment. George was wary.

"Let's get outta here. The mother might still be around. Wood pigs are mean as shit."

"No, hold on. Let's watch it. See what it does," Alan said.

"Yeah, let's watch," Tom agreed.

The matter of feeding the animal was decided on after several minutes when the small pig allowed the three of them to touch the black-dotted pinkness of the upper back. The pig swerved and gave a high reeling noise when Alan attempted to lift, however, so the three just examined it with short touches. The pig was nervous and frightened and after a few turns to face whoever was closest, Alan caught sight of the hindquarters.

"A girl," he said, "What do you think she'll eat?"

George only stared but Tom was able to pet behind the ears and atop the head once the pig adjusted to his smell. The flesh was soft like Nitya's had been, but the chassis beneath the flesh was taut and its various shapes had been exposed from hunger and misgiving. Were female spiders any softer than males?

"I think she'd eat slop like regular pigs," Tom reasoned.

"She's young, though. Probably milk," Alan decided.

"Mother must've left her."

"Maybe for good reason," George argued, "Sick or somethin'."

"Or a kid touched her and the mother left because her smell got ruined. That's how it works in the wild," Alan added.

"Wood pigs are from farm pigs that ran off and had kids. They ain't wild," George said, frowning.

"No, they'd get wild after a bit," Tom contended, "But I think you're talkin' about birds, Alan."

The runt boy was the one the piglet trusted after a time, and Alan's second attempt to lift her was done with a caution that brought acceptance. The animal whined briefly but allowed herself to be held.

"Huh! Feels just like holdin' a baby. I wonder when she was born."

They walked on, three on foot, one in warm arms. The fields became woods, and the boys pushed their forms down the dirtbends and through those bandied talons of wood that curved beside and over the makeshift trails. Tom sweet-talked her and gave in to small bouts of petting while Alan carried the pig carefully, impressed with himself and the world. George seemed annoyed with this development and kept talking about Nitya. He grew more derogatory but the other boys did not care to listen.

"Or like from Charlotte's Web. Wilbur," Alan offered.

"You can't use a name that's already famous," Tom said.

"Wally then."

"Too much like Wilbur. And those are boy names."

"I don't think it matters with animals. My neighbor's got a dog named Lou, and she's a girl dog."

"Why don't you hump it if you like the thing so damn much?" George interrupted.

They descended into the ravine that separated Pastor Frank's outer property from Vogel Road, which led to George's house. Sleepover planned for the three. _If a girl rubs clove oil on her belly even once when she's pregnant, she'll have a girl every time._ George had a room detached from the main house. Once a barn but drywalled with plug-ins and a sink. Two floors. Upper was storage. Lower was George's room. Lamp with drawings inked into the lampshade. Comics and a weight set. Old bikes for parts. Maybe George would find more blankets this time to cover out the cold.

The ravine was long, a hunched, busted back that crooked from fields and woods down into the valley that gutted Camas Swale. The King River lay at its feet, was deep but the Summer had both narrowed and deadened it. There was still a current, but the water was only chest high in places. They had crossed earlier on the way to Alan's neighborhood and the exposed stones were sparse, but small jumps managed to get a person across. At worst, someone would fall in and have to wade. This was not unfavorable in the Summer and early Fall. The evening was warm enough to swim, if they decided to do so into the dark, which would get them into trouble. They reached the ravine's floor and surveyed the river. George looked over the runt.

"Shouldn't take that pig across. She'll get spooked and bite. Or fall in."

Alan did not agree with this advice. In the course of their small hike down the ravine, he had decided on some level to keep her. A pet. Tom had also thought of this. Neither had vocalized the desire.

"Naw, we can take her over," Alan said.

"Even if you drop her, pigs can swim," Tom added. George thought this over for a moment, then rubbed his eyes and bit his lip. His irritation had capitalized on the two boys' interest for the small animal. He put his hands out, an appeasement gesture to denote he had thought over something they should hear.

"I don't know, now. That water's still kind of deep and she's not light. Heavier than you think. And she's skittish. She could bite ya, for sure. And what if she has rabies? Could have been why she got abandoned. You think of that? There's all sorts of diseases she could have."

"She doesn't have any rabies. And she's not heavy; I can carry her just fine," Alan said.

"Could you carry her if you fell in and had to swim? I don't think you could."

"No, I could do it. She's not heavy at all."

"I don't know. Let me check," George offered.

Alan leaned back and raised his arms, letting George's hands slide in around the animal with care. George lifted and gently tested her weight in his hands. He looked at the current of the water, then lowered his head to peer at her mouth.

"This looks like foam."

"You don't see nothin' like that," Alan said with a laugh. George glanced down at the long eroded flatness of the upper riverbed on which they stood. Solid. Flat. Worn floor of stone. He tested her weight in his hands again. Alan nodded.

"I'm gonna carry her. Hand her back."

"She's foamin'," George repeated.

Then George took a sharp breath and lifted high. Alan's mild response began but then warped into a panic noise as George hurled the small pig down with both hands against the exposed rock riverbed. The sound struck Tom mute and still. The resultant screech stung him like a syringe. Alan whimpered as the piglet gyrated in an attempt to run, squealing blindly against the rock incline, tiny hooves clattering as if a handful of marbles tossed to the street. The bully grumbled and the pig ran in the most open direction, onto the wet stone bank where the river still reached.

"Son of a bitch pig."

Sliding on the shoulder. Hooves in a side skid on wet stone, head lifting upward with kicking feet. Skittering. Then in. Drops of blood left behind on the bank. The hard lob of weight in liquid. Surface tension broken and the instant soak of sparse hairs. She squealed atop the water and then under. The three boys stared at the surface for a long time. Alan's trust had burst its organs and all expectancy with the day had been torn up like newsprint for a bonfire. George was an awful boy.

Alan was shaken to quiet tears with a wide mouth, face red in the evening. God went inside Alan then and stirred up his brain with a stick. Alan went simple and stuttered at the woods. His voice bounced from the pinyons, which took only what they needed from his sounds and muted the rest. God went in George then and made him think terrible things. George sat down on the smooth stone floor with a tired flump and slowly began chewing on his own arm. The river was asleep. It had eaten a pig. In time, George managed to pull a bite of his forearm loose and gagged, attempting to eat it.

Tom laid down on the river rock and spread out his arms, heart stuttering from the gunshot. Failing to thrive. God left him be. How the heart was spouting his red out in short stumbles to the mud. He caught his breath and then dug inside his chest, grime beneath his nails, tunneling in and finding the punctured heart. Reaching into himself. Finding the pump. Pulling, twisting, each turn riding a gasp and wracking pain his whole body over.

George continued chewing the bit of arm while Alan crept into a harder sadness. A wail of loss and shock reaching fruition. His head expanded and he grew sick. Tom had a difficult time pulling lose the destroyed heart, mining his chest, wrenching apart the pump's bissus and tugging it from mooring. With held breath, he yanked hard and pulled the organ free of his body. The heart fell from his hand to the ground. _Girls are supposed to cry more, and they do, and you're supposed to be tough, because otherwise the girls won't like you and they won't let you be in love or anything._ The rock floor was soft as mud. The dizzy river became still as a lake. There was a hole right through the middle of the heart. He had been shot. Useless and beautiful and bullet-humped. The piglet never came up. God was angry. Tom moved to a different place, had extracted his heart, held it in his hand. It was soft like a girl. Warm. Foreign yet familiar.

As the clouds passed over in columns and sheets, working into the last of the vanishing sunlight and belting one another to the darkening blue, Tom breathed on his back, stretched on the mud bank of Haven Lake. He lifted the organ and tossed it into the lake. The heart swashed into the water behind him. Remote detonation. Bullet popped. Sinking into the black. Better for fish.

Groping at his sides, at the edge of reach, Tom began searching the texture on his bed of mud for a replacement. The hole that gaped in his chest opened like a hungry mouth, lips turned out and shaking. In time he found a stone of the rough size.

George swallowed and gasped, near Tom, opened his jaws and lowered again to his arm. The river was worn and crusted in mud, the evening's slight toes tampering a sting of cold on the stone. Or was it morning? Tom had little time to examine what his hand had found and gently kneaded the fist-sized stone through the wound in his chest, past busted bone and cartilage, into the perch. Alan was a mess and began kicking rocks at hungry, cowering George. The lake stone sat perturbed in Tom's chest, a ringing streak of pain etching up his neck and slantways into his stomach's pit. Settling. Adjusting. The stone would be his heart now. The muddy, cold stone.

"Little whore pig," the bully muttered.

The clouds called the stars. The ground devoured George for his brutality. The moon reached down and tossed weepy Alan over the hills.

"I'm going home," Tom said, an older man laying alone by the lake.

He started his blood again and kept it inside, but then he went tired. An older man. The stone pulsed and began to beat. It was his birthday. The mud had him snug and the cold drank up his breath in a dim purr. He slept how he needed.
**Three**

The lake-chilled oval inside Tom spanked his chest with pains. A frigid, smooth stone. The foreign object. He made his slow way around the bank, his feet in wallets of mud, and with his balance resurging and thoughts beginning to clear, wandered into the woods. He needed to get home. He wanted to leave the lake. The walk was a providential undertaking and an un-tuning interview with will and exhaustion. Haven Lake lapped at the mud and a viscid fog broached the shore in slow roams. Near the narrow, morning-lit road grooves, the greater cleverness of root and bough hilted from soil and jutted wood, a solid from nothing.

He walked into growth and sheets of distorted shade just past the old pavement, his feet through rundles of dimness that shadowed across the moisture softened floor. This dampness found him beneath occasional trips of light. His eyes hazed then sharpened, over and over on the keels of light through the haggard, Summer-riven canopy. Tom was confronted with the unfamiliar, the changing, this new shank of habitat that was old, old life. He had a new heart. A destructive morning. He wished he had been able to drink the beer. Likely his last.

Grand fir with cascara in shade. Near the break of two deer trails, a hookers willow near dead. He was bleeding but the stone had stuttered the leak. The blood came, but slow and painful. The floor stretched before him in ever tilted mounds and deeps. He might make it home before he bled out. He might get to a Meg, to the telephone. Hospital. He passed through sporadic halts of light clotted with blackroot moss, his feet faltering near occasional camas and the horn-tipped gold of bowing fringecup. In forward motion, small breaths taking short steps, his posture invited stark pains in his legs. Each several steps he made were as one lurch. That no step was part of a long walk, but a singular movement that only hoped for another, was a language of blood loss and a stretch of needling time. About the gunshot. The stolen truck. That young man.

It was all right. Tom's father was there. Hickory buttoned to the neck and cap snug around the bud of his gray head. Larry's short chin exposed from a clean shave and his burning squints inborn from a long life of doubt. His fused back tilted his shoulders hard as he walked, but he stayed beside his boy.

"Just keep walkin'. That's all," the father said.

"I'm pretty bad off."

"Cry then."

"I want to wait for help."

"No one's coming for you. Be a man."

"Meghan looks for me. When I'm not home."

"Move your ass, Tom. I don't want to be out here either."

The walk. Townward. South fork. To fake a choice between his own value and the certainty of the injury, a hope that allowed for both to coexist where they could not. The best and most helpful criticism of his injury was forward motion. Therefore he pronounced a left foot step. Then weak right foot plod. Whether one breath left or one million. The slow drops of blood that fell from his heel dotted the route behind, arrogant and lively.

Perhaps remaining alive in such duress was the yield of one's ego. A sort of vanity. A faith that his body to keep on. The trees bent over him, saying as much. The wound through his heart and lung opened more, stringent in need but nonetheless grateful for another trusted intake on bare operation.

"Probably ruined his life back there," Larry said.

"I was helping him. Told him the north fork."

"You were talkin' to shit you stepped in. Doesn't change anything."

"Diplomacy."

"Not against a gun it ain't."

Near the water, tidbits of flagroot being suffocated by encroaching stonecrop, settled in the reek of skunk cabbage, whose yellow purses spread into vulvar haunts. Bits of swamp scattered in the deeper portions of the forest. He found the depth of the woods away from the lake and far from the curving, reciprocal road no one traveled. The woods away from the north fork and an armed young man. He had stared at the choice and moved, ignoring thirty miles of road for just nine miles of woods straight through. Nine miles. A long, injured walk home, if he could.

Meg woke and showered, or Meg woke and made coffee. Tom not present. Had he gone? Maybe she would remember him talking to her. Fishing. Maybe she knew he liked Haven Lake more than Getty. Then the checkbook. The missing check. She could call and see where it was placed. Latimer's Grocery and Bait. If it had posted yet. Accounts and records. An accountable record. An accountable wife.

Meg would not worry. Breakfast and meager sips of coffee. Toast and a restraint from butter. Her body what he wanted. Her talk what he heard. Her heart a pale lamprey latched to his side and drawing the good drink. She would not think to look for him until the day passed, the birthday, but this would likely be a span of time in which he, himself, would pass. Tom kept her in his thoughts, wanting to see her, urging himself home. With his heart gone, replaced by lake stone, they would need to focus everything on her own heart now. She would have enough for both, he thought. Her heart had always accepted the callus rampart that kept his own so steady and restrained over the years.

The drops of blood fell and the hours rubbed sweat from their brow and in time threw their hats to the wind. Walking on. Was it called a death-march, or was that something else? He choked at times on his breathing, which alternated between flits of air and sudden gulps. He was not hungry, nor did he favor to stop moving. The winds were minor through the trees, but when they did come with weight, sporadic and icy, the sting against his chest could not be countered. The small gusts came to ask questions, preferably serious ones about what he was up to and why he was in their woods, or stupid questions about his scent and whether they could have it and show it to the woods. There were animals to fascinate with it, creatures that might not easily pardon his trespass.

The ridge in the distance hurried him. This was a goal. A sort of earthen scab pinched upwards from soft soil. Ideas were made on ridges. Plans and events. You squatted up there and found vantage. Looked out over things. Old movies said so. History was overflowing with people that had learned the world by journeying and reaching for elevation, who saw from there the distant uniformity that seemed to govern over all the specifics.

In britches younger, somewhere made of concrete and settled before youthful eyes, he had seen the flight of a private plane curve as from great fans and wingroll across a dog-shaped cloud into Camas Valley. A small plane. The news had reported on the downed aircraft, on the workers in the night trying to locate the passengers in the woods. He had been a child watching television. Two days of the news and they had finally found the failed aircraft. The image of the plane's resting lurch had shown a wondrous machine, wings still intact but a busted breastbone and tree-clawed tail. No bird but a container for people. Metal room and seats and people no more. A wheel extender had carved its grope through the dirt and year's dense drought. Brackets of Fir on either side. No propeller and a helicopter above. Filming. Lowering uniformed men and a stretcher that would, by night's end, return to the helicopter many times without a living occupant.

The day would present itself with certainty. Spread out like a pinned insect, hairy legs exposed. His absence would call scrutiny. She would surely examine the checkbook then. She would wait for the sound of the truck. This was his birthday and there were visitors coming. She would worry when the length of his absence proved unusual. She would think of him and where he could have gone. Meg would reach afternoon first, but then fret.

His parents would arrive. Happy birthday Tom. Happy birthday Larry. But no Tom. They would look. His mother, Susan, would suspect a bar but say nothing. His father would sit in Tom's chair and ruminate on the necessity of a man's free time. Perhaps they would believe this, that Tom needed time on his own. A birthday vacation or short span alone to collect himself. Perhaps Tom might rot before they truly worried. His father spoke beside him, then.

"Remember when you put on those faggot pants to meet that woman out in Eugene?"

"Everyone wore those, dad. She liked dancing and they made pants for it, so I just bought some."

"Those Italian horny clothes you got... hoo. Joe Bilson saw ya and I hadda tell him you were dressin' up to get some skinny city ass. You know what he said?"

"Dad, he's been dead for twenty years."

"Said: What kind? Boy or girl?"

"It was just dancing. It was okay. Lot of people did that."

"Nigger music. Dick pants and dumb women. Keep walkin'."

Claire Kolski. The silly solo-name of Super Destiny. That's what she called herself. After a drink or so. He was not designed for dance floors or dancing people. Or Super Destiny. Tried. He had been happy about giving the attempt. Twenty-one years old. He had felt to be growing. Doing. Claire drank tea like the English and beer like his father. Wanted to be a singer. Super Destiny. Had a gutter-mouth but a sweet side. You didn't mind being around either. He was annoyed when he met her, at a party in Eugene, but when he was younger, he had somewhat favored being annoyed.

"I like your eyes," she said, holding him down, her hands against his chest.

"..."

"You didn't think I'd do this. When we met earlier. You didn't think we'd fuck."

"No," he lied, leaning forward and lifting at her calves."Okay, but not so deep. That's—"

"Sorry."

"—yeah. Okay, yeah. Let's just go like this for awhile."

She was with him then. He listened to her demo tape out in the vacant Camas woods, heart-shot and treading slow. The surrounding woods were unlike the feel of a human county and unaccustomed to song. It played from his mouth and her voice was nice but only the low notes. The tape inside his head played and frightened off his father. Claire admired him listening. Approached from his youth and then walked beside him through the trees. He was over fifty but she still liked him. He would have rather heard the music alone.

His chest ached around the stone and he kept walking. There was a ridge in the distance he needed to reach. He felt old but was also young. She walked beside him while the itch of bleeding tapped at his side.

"It's everything you want in music. Everyone likes it," she said.

Maybe in Eugene.

There were weeks between steps. In time. He made his way around a cracked fir and slowly lifted his right foot over a fallen length of this. Balance. Then the left foot. Claire had been a girlfriend in the country sense. Had allowed the two of them to be a couple, though in an ancillary way. She had thought of him as a boyfriend in the dancing partner sense. For a time during a part of the song, but then there were other parts to dance with other men, until Tom's section returned. A friend and a boy and someone to be with more often than others. Moves and music. A scene in which you often added someone specific. She had talked much about her use of other men, but she spoke of them more than she had lived them. He did not mention other women. He had no need to uncover any, though he felt his wants often.

He had surprised her once. An impromptu getaway invented on a random Wednesday night, right off the highway.

"Dunes?"

"Yeah, we build a campfire," he said, "It's just campin'. Get some beer and drive out on the dunes. It'll be fun."

"Like sand dunes?"

"Yep. Lots of sand. View looks good, too. It's clear and the sand holds heat so you don't get too cold. You can drive right out on it with a truck. You'll like it; it's pretty."

"No."

"We can blast your demo loud as hell out there, too. Really crank it."

"Tom, no. I got a few more places for sand to get into than you, and I'm not spending my weekend on some dune two hundred miles away from the weekend I _should_ be having."

"Naw, let's do it. You'll have fun," he surmised.

"No. I think we should feel up a club. Have a cocktail or two."

"Or maybe ten, knowing you."

"Yeah, better. And then maybe just play around at my place."

He did not enjoy clubs. He did not like the way she dismissed him for the week when their weekends together were up. He most surely did not like her idea of numerous boyfriends, which had no real walls to hold a relationship's roof up. He had learned to get along with these things, however, because his adoration for Claire Kolski and his agitation with Super Destiny had combined into a potent and viscous substance that his recent months sat in like a marinade. It flavored him and he liked it. Trying to match up with her city life was easier than wanting her to match up with his country life, but he tried, from time to time.

There was no difficulty talking her into the dune outing. She was like his mother in this way. Repetition was what you used. Keep saying what you wanted. Talk it into being, until it seemed as if it had already happened, until acceptance was unavoidable. Repetition. Politicians and children were its masters. Some things were not obscured by a scene or age, by differences in even broad expanses of nature or people, no matter how varied or new. Being coy and repeating yourself to get something out of thin air was one of them.

The woods. He was superfluous and inconsequent. The deer fern witched from the floor in seldom-witnessed bouquets of greenery. He stumbled and the fungus yawned. The wait of hairy manzanita for nutrient shortened. Each trip over root or a shrub loop brought him closer to not getting up. It was death in increments. Trail after trail, one-and-a-half steps to a yard. He wondered if he might come across the plane wreckage. His childhood watching of news revisited in the real. No, people would never leave a plane out here. Not to be devoured. Not people. Television said so. A plane did not belong in this vast beggary any more than they did. But then people forgot things. Sometimes each other.

Mystery plant. Another. In the woods' deep, a flat abyss between miles of trees and patches of undistinguishable thriving. Unbending world of outer life. Genetically arrogant. Cultureless. There. Countries of insentient plants without border. Browns were dismissed and the green was relentless. There were no people here. Only the unrushed, alimentary wait. Tom slowed a moment and sighed, felt the edges of the bullet wound, winced. He had to keep moving. Around him were vessels of soil and nutrient that had yet to lay still, that had the tenacity to wear a form for a bit. He could do as they did. Keep on.

Far from home. Too much time. Meg would be looking for him now. He should have stayed at the lake, despite his father's ushering. Dad and mom, his wife... they would be in his home right then. Or else driving about and searching for him. He could have stayed on the bank, sat up and simply thought, waiting. He might have given up had he stayed at the lake, however. He might have.

By twilight, the woods had expanded into foothills. Upward slopes. Each rock from the soil like a blemish. A stone riverbed that had long ago stood up like a guard and refused to lay down. His stomach cramped from muscular contraction, a mile into his body, and now he began upward. Grassy field punctured with dogwoods in levels. Raising. Angled. This was no tower of height, and was manageable, but the grade lifted into a ridge Tom knew separated the open woods from Camas Valley. The ridge was not mountainous, was low, but the valley on its opposite side was deep. He put this from his thoughts, walking hunched, his feet tiredly making the upward trek into the hills. He could reach the rim. He could walk through the ridge. He would see town from there. Know how far. How much more woods and valley. How many exhausted chest-shot steps.

"I told you I didn't want to do any nature stuff. This is miserable, Tom."

"Just relax, Claire. Enjoy the fire."

"We're out of beer."

"Yeah, but we'll be asleep soon anyway."

"Not if you're doing what I have in mind. Let's go back to the truck."

"There's more room out here."

"Truck."

That he had not bled out was a miracle. The stone or the will. They felt the same. Deep in his chest and lugging downward, a soul-fracturing bruise of ache developed, compelling even short breaths to force his lungs to open an inch larger. Let it hurt when he breathed for a bit more air. A nudge of extension with each step. Just to keep moving. To live some more.

There was God, of course, or Tom's adoption of an Almighty in this troublesome odyssey. God like blood in your hands you could never see, even if you cut through to bone. Tom's faith was like a small, private plane overhead that was captured in a photograph from a satellite even higher. Unknowably high but for astronauts behind pulpits. Spiraling down into the swale. God was watching. Tom wanted this to be so. He hoped God was setting hints for him. Little tips planted here and there. Steering him toward small paths he might take without thought. God's paths. The Lord's hints. When you added a deity into the mix, a word like 'survival' became a word like 'salvation'. Tom wanted that. It came off big.

So he was looking for God. He had followed a deer trail for an empty twenty minutes due to its angle seeming familiar. A red-shouldered flower with ears that drooped left meant maybe go left. He hoped these were somehow signs. The trust was familiar in a place so unfamiliar it haunted him with erasure. He felt he knew the woods from inside. Instinct. But not outside. Not the truth. That was maybe God, were He so. God would make things familiar. Alone familiar. Tom hoped for these hints but did not believe they would present themselves with clarity, if at all.

Light above became dark throughout. The sky had donned her medley of disguises and eaten over the sunlight. Evening panned him toward the ridge. The sounds began. Some certain, some indistinguishable from wind or footfall. Brush shivered around questionable tips of hungry eye lights.

They were animal numerals in the shrubs and sparse trees. Looking at him. Numbers up the climb into the ridge. Hiding here and there. The smallest animals were the smallest number. Ones crowded the air and he heard their flight in quick flits and motorized flybys. No threat. Brushed away by mere thought. Twos mucked through the brush and stuttered berries from chilled vines, hiding their small size in cold leaves. They were many or few but never seen. A flying three called across the hills for sex or the right to meet and show her meaning. Even a five, in the distance behind, howling from a hot throat in the woods and searching for a lightning meal of rabbit or fox or various fours.

The numbers, each being more of a threat than the previous, waited for the man to die, but he was a human, likely a ten, should his imaginary scale go as high, and he was desperate, continuing toward a break in the ridge, exhausted and angry.

The fives were frightening. A five might come for him. He was only a ten so long as he had the tools of his race. He did not. The woods considered him but another five. While the other numbers allowed for chance, a five did not. Not a timber wolf or a hidden cat. Followers of God had seen worse. So had evolution's primates. He merely continued.

"It's cold out here."

"I know, Claire. Won't do any good to keep sayin' it."

"I don't like this place. This isn't the weekend I should be having."

"We're part way home. Almost through it. I went and got myself shot, you know. You want to stop and play around?"

"On these damn rocks? With you being shot up?"

"Yeah."

"Well, maybe. How nice can you ask me?"

"Pretty nice."

"I'm listening."

He made his way into a narrow col between the exposed and upright shells of the ridge, leading Claire behind him. Far above the forest. Soon he would pass through and see the remaining trek before him laid out in detail. The valley. The swale. His survival would have a map. Seen from above would be paths and every wooded meander there was between Tom and town. What God saw from within. What pilots saw from above. Claire would be so pleased.

The small pass was created by natural collapse and was wide enough in its mouth for a large vehicle to sit. This changed quickly and by mere yards. The walls on either side hunched and tilted over as if to touch heads. Tumbled rock dotted the jagged floor, thirty degrees drop from one side to the other. His back painful against the torn rock wall, stone heavy on his eyes and leaden in his chest. Lichenous drifts of blur in the damp crevices where small forms of life had found a perch. The sensation of permanence amid the proof of ruin.

Claire's hair became caught on a small outcropping and he had to stop and free her. This tired him and he sat. She pocketed her hands and hopped to keep warm. When had she arrived? His breath quieted and the stars grew hot. Easier to breath when sitting down. She played her demo tape in his mouth for a spell, then he shook off the weariness and was up. Best not to stay still for too long. Meg would not like that he was out in the woods with an old ex, and certainly not a woman as pretty as Claire. Her company was helpful, however. Without her, he might have been terrified.

Tom turned into the col and again aligned between narrow walls. At times the rock pressed against his back and front in unison as he inched through to the break. Then clear air. Broken through. The other side of the ridge. He stood atop an angled knob with a view of the forested valley below. The animal trail ended here but surely the creatures did not leap. Skulking rocks. Like a vertical jetty in an ocean of air. He leaned against the wall to the knob's back near the exit of the narrow col. Downward climbing... He could barely walk and the presence of sensation in his hands was vague. That he could grip with them was a weak estimation.

He rested his head against the rock and breathed. In time and resigned to move, Tom brought his eyes from the stars and gave a hard examination of the route down. His breath caught and head grew tight, but this passed and he was able to draw in the air of the ridge and even sigh for the predicament. Tom withdrew himself and after several moments of focus, he pissed onto the hard, tilted floor. This was slow going as his body was sore and he could not pull his gut in much. He watched the slow tapering of liquid run to the edge, trickle over. The steam seemed out of place and comforting. Claire had abandoned him, but his father had caught up, sidled out of the col and bent, hands on his knees and mouth open, breathing. Tom was thankful for the companionship, but did not want his father to see him in this condition.

The moon was ingratiating yet bolstered Tom. Time to act. This was his moon. He had pissed on his rock, and now he needed to descend into his valley. Ownership was little but the perseverance of one's life in a place. Not a doctrine, not a contract, but a situation. If you breathed in a place, you owned it for a moment. You had to own it to beat it. Confidence was a bluff in his predicament, but he kept onto this. A safe distance in, this confidence was piloted by his will and stored near the smoldering coals of both despair and ambition. He kept confidence near to his forgotten religion and the love for his wife. Good places that weren't corrupted easily. The things that would burn out last. He began flexing his fingers, blinking repeatedly to keep his eyes clear. Repetition. Attempting to make-believe his confidence into being.

"You gonna do this thing or not?"

"Yeah, dad. I got this."

"Then that's what it is. Let's go."

The father stretched a bit and then moved forward. Tom watched as the old, awkward man jogged to the edge and gave a mild hoot, jumping from the floor into the black. The father's body turned in a plummet to the world below. Shot down and small, wings extended. Then under the dark. Tom leaned over and could see nothing of the bottom. A man did things alone. Okay.

His footing was not precise as he began from the knob and down onto the unsteady, cliff-side rock. The roughness of scraped hands. Each brash hold was abrasive to the soft segments of his fingers. Climbing down. There were birds far off in the sky at his level. Angry sacred reputable birds. Threes and a four. They ignored him for now, scoured the floor with penultimate vision. They roamed and waited for small prey, but would delight upon discovering his battered transformation after a fall. Grip. That was all. Just grip. One rock to the next. Too slow and he might pass out, fall asleep and fall forever. Too fast and he might skip over where his hands needed to be.

He thought of his birthday, several hours of it remaining. Had it been a day? An entire, disorienting day in the woods? He hoped for luck. The rough pain of weight on his tender hands had made them sensitive. He felt the rock well enough. He out-thought the unreliable tremors of confused, shaky feet, for moments at a time, climbing down, until the feet began to shake again. He then stopped and had breaths, cleared his head, re-initiated his descent. Scaling the shifts in the wall's angle. The stone's weight in his ribs. Ground giving away at times. Downward look. Sharp breath. George standing at the top of the ridge above. A pig squealing as it crumpled down into the wooded scar below. Quetching and tumbling and kicking in the black.

The one horrid thought.

**Four**

The descent was his hand torn and scraped white. Pulled callus to the pink beneath. Wedding ring dusty and scratched over. A rich tenderness in the shins with shaky, untrustworthy knees. Down had taken years in the clothing of hours. As the day had begun to loom upward, millions of miles in the distance, Tom had given the hands his feet for bracing, and the feet his hands for balance. He occluded slow into the rock. Rain had come but this was minor in burden and had only fallen for a span of minutes. Droplets quickly ingested by the dusty granite and valley's thirst, boring a mustiness into his nostrils and doubt into his grip on the jagged rock. He had bled down, a vertical trail of droplets he encountered again on the outcrops as he went.

The valley rim was thanked by his damaged feet and sore ankles as he rested at the bottom of the ridge. Dangerous incline behind him. He had reached the bottom of moss and busted rocks, boulders long ago fallen to the floor. These were lit by the slow fitness of the re-emerging Sun. The rocky debris continued for hundreds of feet, but then blended into a damp tract of dogwoods where the valley's forest began. There were many new plants but few of those he had seen previous. The ridge separated one world from another. A border after all. Even the wild had its notions of culture, it seemed. Nations of flora. Tom was an immigrant unwelcome but for what he could provide this place. If he rested too long, he would provide it. He got to his feet after a few moments and moved into the valley. His route had thus far paralleled the south fork back to town, but the valley was the shortcut, a trimming of the curvy road's distance back to town. He would now move as the crow flew, far from the road for a time as he reached the deepest floor of the swale and continued through the broad, mildew hollow.

There was half of a bedroom standing in a glade, facing the rise of the Sun. He stopped upon discovering this predicament of nonsense, stared at a girl's room in the clearing that split apart aisles of timber. These wicks of trees were beamy from the great hydrogen fire so far off, each lit, their fragrances intermingling on lithe air above the grateful grass-fraught clearing. The sensation of wood was in its smell. Scent through bark skins and in the low rushes of breeze through the green blades. The bedroom wall stood alone, erected in the glade's center. Small table beside with a lamp. A movie poster tacked into white with four silver thumb-pressed heads. This dot of civility was both a welcome and worrisome sight. Before finding this, the climb down into morning and valley had drained him much.

A girl's bedroom in the open grass hidden several hundred yards into the dogwoods. A single wall on its own in a clearing, unreal yet present. A door in the wall. Closet door with slats. Bed across from the table. Nitya's bed. Her room. A spot of carpet. Lit with the lamp and the Sun. The dogwoods rose high around the glade, giving the wall an importance of being, of singularity. A girlish monolith with accessories. He approached slowly and thought to go around, to ignore this odd lie, but then the out-of-place always called a person to examine.

He could feel them. George and Alan behind the door giggling and arguing in slight. There was a lectern at the far end of the clearing, past the room, and behind this stood a man. In the way Tom knew his childhood friends were behind the closet door, that the bedroom belonged to Nitya, he knew this man was not like him, but somehow a component of the woods. Had grown there like an ambassador with everything else, living in the stretched interchange of glassy sunlight with the shade of the ridge. The clearing was this unnatural man's dwelling and Tom had perhaps trespassed.

The man wore a gown. What Tom's father would call a preachin' dress. His back was turned to Tom and the room. Bible on the flat of the pulpit's lectern. Then the man turned about. Front. Not a man. Man body. Man head. Equine face. Horse nostrils and wet eyes. A man's face in flesh but bent around a horse's shape. Feral. Dry leaves sliding from the gown around his feet. Tom inhaled sharp and went quiet to his utmost, then crept his foot backward, aghast at the long snout above the holy book, the stone in Tom's chest beating hard and cold. Whatever this haunt was, it belonged to the woods.

The horseman reached him with the eyes, snapped his Bible shut and lifted the book to his chest as he moved, carrying it with a kind of guardianship. Walking over. As the creature of the clearing traveled, he left in his steps a drift of dead leaves. His steps were gentle, giving the sound of cloth rustle and the ruckled crish of leaves as his movement spread them across the floor. He generated these. The leaves came from within the gown, trailing behind him as they fell. When close, the horseman stopped and waved a meaty hand toward the closet. The snout opened on a grunt.

"Weorþaþ, þegen. Wé scolde tweþan abutan ærmorgen bans. This is the beautiful morning," the creature said. Clouds covered up the Sun. Something moved beneath the gown near the horseman's stomach. Tom felt head-lit. A rigid post. The wind picked up.

"Are you its owner?" the horseman asked.

"What?"

"It has an owner."

Tom fled into the woods. Moving fast over the vines and past the dense ferns of the valley. A deer path crossed his direction and he swiveled onto this thin trail. His rafter-straight run. Faster. Then a curve. Rounding several trees before something struck his head and caused him to veer left. A small tree held out its sudden arms and caressed him in, hugging tight and pulling at his hips. Tom's face met bark and scraped. The obscene tree drew up several of its rounded knots and nudged them against Tom's mouth with eager slides. He yelped and slid down, pulling out of the dogwood's knotted arms and reach. Jumping backward from a crouch. Landing on his ass. The tree was no tree but another horseman. No, the same.

Tom got to this feet not wholly himself. The woods had roused from sleep and now had him. There was a rustle of leaves and Tom's head grew hot. Dizziness tipped his skull forward and he was no longer all the way Tom. Tom's body stood in a prayer pose near the bedroom wall, hands clapped together and head lowered. Tom was somewhere inside his newly inoperable body and horrified.

The glade had him. His body snapped into release and was his own again. He began to run but the trees watched. Breast-like knots and lusty mounds of dirt leaning toward him like ugly weedflowers to sunlight. He slowed and looked quick about the clearing for an exit.

"Your seams are nice, Tom. Smart thread. Swiþ. Come sit with me. Talk," the preacher said.

Tom stayed his distance so long as he was himself. There were moments when this self did not seem to be. Disgusting moments where something else had his eyes and arms, moved his thoughts and opened his head to the horrible thing that lived in the glade. Tom's feet stayed his own. He kept a distance but was distressed that he could not make more of it. The horseman returned to his perch atop the woodland pulpit as if preparing to orate. There was a long moment of quiet.

"What do you want?" Tom finally asked.

"Trade."

"What the hell are you?"

"Cwellere. Deað. I'm a good man. Come sit."

Tom approached the horseman, who now stood behind the lectern in a sedate fashion, as if to begin a Sunday's morning service. The Sun shone through a break in the clouds and the grass was flippant for the warmth and valley breeze. Tom glanced to Nitya's bed and discovered she was there, awake and watching him. Young. Pretty but no expression. She looked to have been carved from wood and then set into the bed. Ball-joints and branch-like limbs. Then not, and correct, human and beautiful. Breathing and wonderful. There was an awl and graver, a roughshod carpenter's plane, and a small bowl of stain in the grass beside the bed. This was a person in craft, a human pretense, not true life. This was not Nitya.

The horseman lifted his hand from behind the lectern, held a canteen. Tom was wary but the thirst was overwhelming. He stepped onto the pulpit and drew close enough to take the canteen, uncapped and sniffed the contents. The smell was familiar. He had bathed in this, swam beneath it, dropped into that smell from a swinging rope in the past.

"From the river," Tom muttered. The pastor with the horse face nodded.

"Daegwæter. Yesterday's. Drink all you want. A man can't go without."

Tom lifted the canteen and had a sip. Perhaps nothing so stark and clean had ever reached a tongue. Water. Cool, bracing water. He drank quickly.

"We need to talk, Tom."

Gulps. Then empty. Tom sighed for breath. He felt alive again. Cool running through him and anxiety fleeing from his skin. Body like an overheated engine hit with a bucket of hose water. After wiping his mouth, he nervously handed the canteen back to the pastor.

"I'll fill it again and you can keep it. Woods make a boy thirsty."

"Who are you?"

"A man in the middle. Lots of folks, really."

The horseman looked to the closet and blinked in weariness. The wooden Nitya giggled with a sloshing belly full of soup. The gulps from the canteen entered Tom's head then. Up from the gut. Rejuvenated limbs, sated body, a refreshing chill in his skull. The strong and fulsome spread of wild water.

"He's always watching her," the horseman said then, "Can't leave her. Or anyone like her. I know; I carve each dæl from the whole of 'em all, so you know everyone before you meet. Him, too."

"I didn't like Nitya much," Tom said.

"Na?"

"Well, I did. But it was kid love. Short."

"Felt good, though."

"Yeah."

"Come out here, ox."

The closet door opened and George fell out, panicked and horrified. His clothes were wet and his eyes rushed. Tom was dismayed to see his boyhood friend tangled in such a place. Frightened George in a false assembly that was set up in a liar clearing. This place was a torn mind between trees where a creature lived hidden with a Bible. A nowhere part of the county. George had been crying and the red of his cheeks shook as he begged.

"Jesus Christ... please don't, just-"

Then his eyes fell on his old friend and he brightened.

"Oh god, thank you. Thank you. Tom, get me the hell out of here. This... I woke up and this fuckin' thing has me locked up in a closet, Tom. It's like that girl's room but it's just the woods and it ain't real. We need to get the fuck out of here. Now. Don't let him lock you up, too."

Tom looked at the pastor and felt the blood from the chest wound trip across the hairs of his stomach. The itch and the injury. George let out a whine as the pastor lifted and held the Bible, quiet.

George the bully. The young and squat kid with all the talk. Tom had failed to realize just how much he missed George, and had not thought of this old, childhood friend in a long time. George as a boy who had answers for things one could not wholly trust. George long ago drawing him pictures of girl parts, insides and all, and how the Chinese made rules about how many babies were allowed, and how rockets for bikes were real and he knew a guy who had some, and how "everybody knows Alan is a queer".

"How can you be here?" Tom asked.

"His name's 'Eat'. He did this. And fuck him, because we're leaving. Let's go while we still can."

Tom's eyes met the pastor's. There was a vague kindness there, but the sort that seemed too interconnected with other things, fried out, hiding things. Like a drug smile.

"I used to call him that when he wasn't around. An ox," Tom said. George stuttered into a panic.

"No. Tom, forget that. Leave. We _leave_. NOW."

Eat lifted his head and gently opened the Bible. He found the passage he sought and then set the book on the ground so the air could play with its pages. Ants from the grass drew near to examine. The Sun crept down, close, burning the tops of the trees, listening as if to a quiet secret as the horseman recited to George from the book:

"'When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner of the ox shall not be liable. But if the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past, and its owner has been warned but has not kept it in, and it kills a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.'"

"I ain't religious. Fuck you," George said, stuck on his knees beside the bed, trying to get up. He was not able to reach his feet, held back by something unfriendly and unseen.

Nitya's eyes shuttered open then to their fullest, excited and hungry. Her head shot across the bed toward George, chin lifted and mouth opened wide. George sniveled and looked away from her. Tom's fear bore into confusion and began to drip small actions into his thoughts. The pastor addressed him.

"Are you its owner?"

"You're talking about George?"

"The ox."

Eat motioned toward the bully who then clutched at himself, hands on his belly and squeezing from pain. George groaned. Nitya's legs shot apart and there was the sound of strained wooden rods cracking across their ball-joints.

"Tom, he's hurtin' me," George muttered, breath tight.

"Do I own George? No," Tom said.

Then George had moved. Was atop Nitya, flat as a board with few points of motion, pumping with his chubby hips while she looked off, her gaping mouth jerking to the side with his movements, her eyes conniving and feigning pleasure. George was crying again. He looked over at Tom and blubbered into a rash of vowels. After a moment, his waist rising and dipping atop the wooden, jointed hips of Nitya, the bed gave slightly as a support board within it gave out. Several of his tears dropped into the sheets. George breathed fast through his nose, squinted his eyes and slowly opened his mouth on a long, calming inhale. He had regained some of himself. His puppeted, lewd actions continued as he distanced himself for a brief moment, clearing his throat as he began to speak.

"He- he makes me do this over and over. Says this is his woman. It ain't her. I remember her. This- this ain't that girl we knew. Just more wood. I wish I was dead, Tom."

"You've been dead for thirty years, George."

"I wish I was dead, Tom."

The horseman preacher and his woman. A young girl. Nitya. In her bedroom or the woods. A few dolls or carvings. One wall of her room in a clearing surrounded by the eavesdropping of decumbent trees. Alan had thought the woods were haunted. The ornate and frilly bed jarred as George moved. There was a closet for hiding in. It had once been George and Alan's closet watching Tom hump a girl through the boundaries of clothing and misunderstanding. An innocent treat for beasts while all the satellites passed over and all the earthquakes happened. Tom made a fist the horseman disregarded.

"Be straight with me. What do you want?" he asked.

"Its owner," the horseman replied.

"Nobody owns a person. And besides, George is dead."

"He's been accustomed to gore in the past."

The horseman let out a squeal then. Feral pig against bedrock. Tom understood, thought of the ravine. The river that perpetually carved it down. Three kids and an abandoned pig just beyond Pastor Frank's property.

"He was a kid. It was just a damn pig," Tom said, wary and uncertain.

The horseman screamed. A woman's scream. George moaned and wept, humping the wooden Nitya and shaking atop her. He looked to be sick soon.

"No, George didn't hurt women. He killed that pig, yeah, but he'd never lay his hands on a woman. If you knew him at all you'd know George never thought about anything BUT women."

The horseman pointed to the edge of the clearing with a hand full of meal and the many veins of longstanding, dexterous use. A craftsman's hand. Tom turned and found in view a naked woman on a stone dais, her belly large and swollen, uncharacteristically hairy between the legs. She laid prone and distraught with dirty, red-stained feet. She was bleeding. Muttering. She turned toward Tom and held her stomach in pain.

"That fuckin' ugly bush, goddamn," George muttered, "GET HER OUT OF HERE."

Tom closed his eyes.

"Okay. I- I remember about that," Tom admitted.

"Gore in the past," the horseman repeated, "Blod and gylt."

"His mother told me. It was when he was in Virginia. After the military. George got arrested out there for beating up a girl. They were married, I think. It's... well, it's just what I heard, but you never know and... and that went away because he died that month. His heart gave out. That— that changed everything. It was one time, if it happened. Wasn't a habit. He wasn't like that."

George lifted at the chest and struck Nitya across the face with a clubbed hand, eyes narrow and breathing heavy. He winced then and dragged himself up from the actions he was being made to perform.

"Don't you believe none of that," he called out, "It's him thinkin' it for ya. Ain't your thoughts."

"Ain't your thoughts," Eat repeated, mocking George.

Nitya gasped and jerked her head up, facing him for another strike. George's mouth tightened as he resisted, as he failed and his hand balled, as the fist on the ham forearm cracked against the wooden face. She chirked and grew emphatic at this, lifted her hips against him as if smarting for this portion of her to endure violence, as well. The horseman turned to Tom and waited.

"What do you want out of me?" Tom asked.

"You sick fuck," George whimpered to the pastor, his fat hips battering against the fake wooden girl, their eyes locked, "lemme go and come at me like a man. Do it; see what happens, you chickenshit."

Nitya's arms came up, flesh but then wood, wrapped around George's heated neck atop her. The grain of her arms ran into bracelets of line, rings of age. Log puppet. Little girl. A heart carved in her exposed side. Names illegible. Mouth open. A gasp between thin arms holding George and sliding from his awkward motions.

"Yours is the best," she said.

Tom swallowed and dizzied. A small pig jaunted through the brush at the outskirt of the clearing. George grunted and the horseman asked again.

"Are you its owner?"

A clean swipe of air entertained Tom's skin along the arms. His thoughts grew damp with memories of his friend. A frustrated sourness over everything. There were roots in him that George had planted. Laughs. Arguments and the crouched occasion of a tussle. George talking to him about the military. Talking to him about mail-order rifles only legal in certain countries. Tom swimming with this friend and going out for that first drive up to Getty Lake. Girls. The girls liked George and George always brought Tom. Drinking. Bikes down steep trails and shouts as one of them crashed into the stream. They'd both done it too many times. Alan trailing behind. Alan never sick back then.

The breeze in the clearing gained in say-so, pushing against Tom and into him, ginger motion through his clothes like an oiled key in a new lock. George would have split himself in half if he thought it would make you laugh, but he was the boss. The older one. Always.

"No. Nobody owns George. He'd never let 'em."

"It believes you are."

"He's not an 'it'."

George muttered vagrant cuss words without direction. Fists clenched as he rollicked in the bed atop the groping marionette. George in his church clothes before he stopped going, before his eyes went steel and he started wearing camouflage. _Join up with me_ , he had said. The parties had grown tired. George had become a forceful figure, but Tom would never join the military. That had been an uncertain welt in his friend's future, one they would not share.

"I didn't want to hurt her," George moaned then.

Tom turned back to the woman on the concrete. She was not there. In her place he saw a great pig with a woman's face. Pregnant. Teats exposed and swollen pink. Rash on the belly and laying on her side, front hooves extending up, head nuzzling repeatedly against the ground. Human woman face, hooves painted up like fingernails, the copious bush. The pig but the woman.

Alan stumbled from the closet then, tumor in his head having finally grown to outer visibility. Dry. A fleshy walnut of cancer. He stooped beside the bed. George frowned.

"Get outta here, Alan. You're just more wood."

The horseman approached the bed and stood behind Alan, who smiled. Tom noted the sheen of polished wood. The stain that imitated life. Eat withdrew a paring knife from his gown and gently cut a thin, circular portion from the tumor on Alan's head. Alan raised an eyebrow at George, giddy. George closed his mouth tight and shut up his eyes as the pastor extended his palm, slice of tumor laid flat like a sliver of water chestnut. A blood and black coin before George's chin.

"Eat."

George screamed with a shut mouth but then the mouth shot open. He could not cease this action any more than he could control anything that happened in the clearing. His eyes scrunched tighter and his mind filled with violence. Then George's head dropped and his mouth fell into the horseman's hand like a pet, sucking up the tumor round, chewing with the tears squeezed from his eyes. After a moment, he gagged and swallowed. The smaller, runt pig wobbled up and rubbed against Alan's leg. The pig from the river. Alan gently lifted the animal and cradled her in his arms.

George breathed hard and focused while weeping.

"I- I can't do this anymore— Listen..." Tom's lip shook in disgust at the sight of George eating the wafer of tumor, but he listened.

"We're brothers. He wants to beat me with rocks, Tom. To _death_ , man. _Save_ me. For the love of god, Tom, I didn't want to hurt no woman. Help me."

"Half brothers," Tom said, "And I didn't know about it until after you died."

"Okay. My dad wasn't mine. Your dad was. So what if we didn't know it back then? We're blood, okay? You're all I have. You have to save me."

"Okay, George. It's all right."

Tom slowly faced the horseman, who bent and recovered the Bible and began returning to the pulpit. The great woman pig at the clearing's edge huffed and rolled over. Beside the bed, Alan quietly lifted his shirt and let the small pig attach and draw his milk. Tom let in to barter.

"What do you want to let George go?"

"'If a ransom is imposed on him, then he shall give for the redemption of his life whatever is imposed on him'," the horseman read, "'If it gores a man's son or daughter, he shall be dealt with according to this same rule'."

"Which means?"

"She was havin' a baby, Tom. And- and I hit her and got rid of it," George muttered.

"Modors are the morgen. And this is the new morgen. I want the owner of the ox," the horseman said.

Tom stared at George, who continued to enact the juvenile imitation of sex with the giddy, wooden Nitya. The large pig at the glade's edge gave a throaty sound, staring at this scene of torpor as if watching a great cat drawing near. George had been no good after a certain age. He had grown mean and bitter. Angry. This was a truth Tom knew. Alan had known it before anyone else, but Tom had caught on over the years. A certain relief had found Tom when George left for basic training so long ago. Tom had felt thankful. But no one owned George. Not even the military. He had been dead a year before Tom learned this loss contained more than a bullying childhood friend, but an unknowing half-brother. Worse was that George had known this in those last years while Tom had not, and George had said nothing. Tom addressed Eat in a cautious manner.

"If you're looking for someone to be responsible for George... if you mean to find what made him and you're talking about blood, well, that'd be his father. And that's... well, that's also _my_ father."

George cried out. Tom's vision stirred upon the sight. George was on his back in the bed and Nitya was gone. A rich and wormy, slit-rooted dirt heap had mounted him in the bed and sought to cover him over. He battered upwards with his chunky hands and forearms, screaming as the dirt slid down his arms and over his body. The form of their father's face slowly issued from the dirt, meeting George's in mid-scream and covering the boy's mouth with his own. Tom's father. George's creator. Larry.

A kiss of paternity, death, and soil. The father's head malformed and bent back into the mound, which then descended on the last bit of George still exposed, cutting off his wail as it packed into his mouth and throat. His pleading, horror-struck eyes met Tom's in a final instant of panic before being covered over by the mound and buried.

The father stood in the clearing then. Summoned or crafted. Larry, sadly shaking his head.

"Never cheated on your mother. You know that. It was before."

"Yeah, I know that. You should have taken care of him, though."

"Tried. She wouldn't do it."

"I meant raise him up, dad, not an abortion."

"Different times, son. Whole world watched you back then. Real close."

The horseman removed his gown, let it drop to the floor amid the leaves and grass. He stood nude, legs covered in ants. They appeared to have busied themselves, knew him like a nest, a home.

"Impose a ransom."

Tom debated this. A ransom to keep his father, the owner of the ox, from facing the fate George had. A ransom to keep his father from being taken by Eat. The payment of a fine to keep his old man pure.

"I'll pay. What do you want?"

The pastor pointed at Tom's chest. The stone within this pulsed. Lake water and the bristle of near-dead nerves. The woods crept in and the brush edged about his thoughts. A flux of butterflies darted across the clearing chased by the small feral pig. The larger pig on the dais waddled down and began trotting after her runt. Tom settled himself and then cautiously slid his fingers into the gunshot wound, burrowing in, his wrist twisting to maneuver deep. He found the stone and withdrew it with much pain.

The dirt mound atop the bed stood up. George of soil. A terrible, frightened boy. The horseman indicated him with the broad swipe of a hand. Tom understood.

"I'm sorry, George. But you're already gone."

"I'm not, Tom! Jesus, I'm not!"

Alan, Nitya, George... A bedroom. A few dolls. Goring a daughter. A mother. Being struck with stones. Ransom for the owner. A ransom from a son to keep a father.

Tom hurled his stone into air, a distance of nine yards in a bedroom in a glade in the woods of Camas Swale. The rock struck George's chest and sunk in. A new heart. A dead one. Perhaps Tom had never been meant to keep it. George collapsed into errant, moist dirt. A slump of stony debris and grass. Gone.

"Thank you, son."

The father could not know that his son was no longer heartless. The world had changed. The son now bled and breathed anew. He heated and loved his father. He hated his father, who looked upon him and realized the temperance was gone. The truth of disrespect from your own.

"Well, I ain't sorry about nothin'," the old man defended, "My life. Can do what I want. She didn't even like me, Tom. Was bored and just wantin' somebody. I fucked that woman blind drunk in a damn shed. Didn't want nothin' to do with me after we sobered up."

"Happy birthday, dad."

"Huh. You too."

"Go home."

The horseman lifted the Bible and mused over the page at hand as Tom's father walked from the glade and into the haunted woods. Tom watched the old man go and quieted inside. He had chosen his damned father over a damned friend. Cruelty drifted into and out of people like the common cold. Sometimes it perched in one too long and ate from him. Sometimes others took it off you or sent it over with a smile. His father. So old. So unwilling to admit the past or future. It was a young pang of truth when Tom had first realized that he never wanted to be anything like that man. When the drunkenness of his childhood and gentle loss of adoration for his father had finally culminated in despisal. A sort of endless sobriety, the premier fatigue.

The pastor pointed toward the Sun.

"South forca," he said.

"That's it then? We're done?"

"I'll fill your canteen. You move along."

"Is George in Hell?"

"If you think so."

The mother pig ambled up to Tom and looked about the clearing before settling her thick-headed gaze into the woods that would lead back to the south fork. She aimed to be his companion. Tom knelt and pet behind her ears and she rolled onto her side, her eight teats exposed. The horseman took the canteen and knelt, milked the pig into the hole, slowly filling the keep. An itch in Tom's chest caused him to scratch for the rim of the open wound that led to his heart's butcherly vacant compartment. This, however, was solid. Healed over. Skin and warmth. A whole but heartless man.

"She needs you so take her along," Eat said.

"I don't like pigs."

"She's a modor. Makes it different. A good swin. Here's your canteen."

"I don't like her and I don't want her damn milk."

"Of course not."

**Five**

Once he drove from the swale and his small home and life, the town he was leaving seemed no more. The highway beyond the swale led him to the interstate corridor, and as he drove, the always present world beyond the lanes displayed both its most urban complexes and its long, stretching farmlands in groups, until their edges began to taper into one another. The blitz of fast food structures and endless gas stations. Inconsequential apartments that sidled vast, open parking lots that ended with small, yellow taquerias beside grimy, staring sex shops. He saw each thing approach and pass, noting some and veering his yawns away from others as he made the hours heading north. Day trip. Between the hills, between the fields. Cities and offramps. These were calm miles but inhospitable hours, and they kept him wheeling lanes with a steady foot.

Closer to Portland, the overwhelming sense of what he was doing began to pressurize the cab of his truck. His thoughts. What he expected to encounter in the hospital was in no way as powerful as what Alan likely expected of Tom. The upcoming meet that troubled him matched in potency the ache of his interstate eyes. Too much thought for the inside of a truck to hold. Too much world on the side of the road to see and still remain lucid. He found a tavern just within Portland limits. Parked, sat, rubbed his face. Then cool air outside, dull walk, tapping once at his back pocket to make sure his wallet hadn't fallen out in the cab. Still there. He went inside the foreign tavern. Portland. Had a look and sat down away from the few others. He felt maybe for a beer. One. Something to change his breath a bit.

There were many miles to go, but only those. Not twenty minutes ahead was the hospital. He tried to calm down, had a pint to disentangle himself from the drive. When this proved fruitful, he had a second pint to dispose of himself, something never quite plausible, but easily attempted. That was the trouble; he was in Multnomah county, now, far from the swale and the childhood he and Alan had shared, but Tom was still Tom. He couldn't get rid of himself. When had he developed such selfishness, the inability to suppress his need to consider himself in most things? Alan was in such a bad way, a terrible predicament that had only the one outcome, the worst one, and Tom could only think of himself. The third beer got rid of some of this. He could think more on the person at hand. Poor Alan. He wanted to think about Alan. It was finally time to do so.

Until this year, Alan had been one of three boys now an adult. It was a hearty endeavor to think of him as a singular person. To think of just Alan. Where Tom ended, Alan began. And George. Youth had been an adaptor for three, not one, and Tom had been a portion of that arrangement. It seemed impossible and a lie that Alan would not exist in the coming months. That he would simple cease to be.

Late night. He called the third beer final. Just past one in the morning. The tavern closed and yawned at him exiting to outside rain, the highway near. Portland and a foolish drive half-drunk, in pest weather, but he managed it well enough. More time to not think of himself.

The hospital was of course closed to visitors. He had lost the time before ever reaching the tavern, owing to his later and later start. The plan had not evolved en route, as he thought it might. He was somewhat making this up as he went. There was the notion of a hotel, and then he could sleep, and see Alan in the morning. That had been his fallback. His intoxication slight, he was still altered enough to push off that fallback and try to simply see Alan right then. And so he entered the hospital. Wet clothes. Buzzed. A little tragedy in the air. Tom had come to Portland, to the city, its hospital, to see his old friend. This was, at its crux, despite how long he had tried not to think about Alan, the correct thing to do..

Visiting. People used that word with hospitals: Visitation. Visitor hours. This inferred leaving after a short while. Not staying. Some did not leave, however. The woman in uniform was not looking where Tom entered and did not see him pass. He noticed her and kept walking into the white. He did not attempt to snuff his footsteps, or elude anyone. He simply moved through the hospital and, as it happened, went mostly unseen by anyone. The elevator did not keep time or regulate its service to certain hours, and so carried him in a lull upwards. He kept to himself and thought of his mother. The weeks of sensitivity digging through him. Prodding. What she had said. Which hospital. Which floor. Room 412.

"He should see you before it happens," his mother had said.

The room felt to have been recently inundated with a disinfecting tide of plastic and bleach. Hospitals did not fit the diameter of a being, and they could not accommodate for the standard of one's soul. Sterile by-pass. Decolorized. Rooms identical. One young man in a row of cubes set out to capacitate suffering and the potential of recuperation. This was called healing. It was called a visit. But not for Alan.

Tom woke him. The two friends were lamps switched on. No hesitation. Room 412 was in fashion identical to 411 and 413, and though these other rooms were as antiseptic and shivery as the room in which Tom had entered, they were exanimate, having a clean, preparatory, and entirely lifeless quality. There was life in 412. It was beamed into eyes and pleased talk, and while the surprise this patient had for his friend's sudden presence wore off shortly, the delight he had for the presence did not. They caught up in a few short lines and then let loose the elephant. Alan explained the new prognosis. Tom did not hear it once he had.

Alan had taken on the habit of rashing his side. Incessant scratching. Just below the floating ribs was a rich mash of red skin, tender though he clipped his nails often. Alan nudged his thumb over the rash and tilted his mouth with the small pleasure that sating the itch gave him.

"It's all up here, by the part in my hair. Yeah, under there in my head. Nothin' to do with my side but that's where it itches. It's where Christ was cut, too. When they finished him off? From a spear. I don't know, I've been readin' through the Bible more. Wish I thought it was a sign. Itchin' like this."

"You mean like when somebody gets wounds like Christ. With their hands or whatever. There's a word for it," Tom replied.

"Itches like crazy, I can say that for sure. And weird thoughts when I get tired. Smell things, too."

Sterility and a business-as-usual tone, but only at the top of Alan's voice. Beneath this was Alan in great trouble. Tom tried not to think about the now unavoidable summation of this trouble, the painful and confusing expiry Alan faced. Thinking about this was like looking down a hungry maw. The two men sat and talked and Alan explained the options that had been present until this past month. These were now rescinded. They were no longer applicable. No options. Think about everything. Practice your goodbyes.

The denatured breath of the hospital thinned one's will. You were bits of facts laying down in a healer's bed. Specimen or conglomerate of parts. You were anatomy, an interaction, and less the person you had been outside. Alan exhibited his smile of forget in this strangely open hubbub of misery. That there were deep songs in him that would never be heard seemed tragic. That Tom would not come to understand or encounter Alan in the coming years seemed alien. Futureless was what you became when a doctor talked with other doctors about progression and tenacity. These words bothered Tom. His mother had used the latter in rummaging up her thoughts on Alan's predicament. Tenacity. She had then used the phrase 'no hope'.

The thing was killing him. A thing. Sudden as hail instead of snow. Calling the cancer tenacious was as if a more intriguing manner of calling it lethal. It was the worst thing that could happen. Being earth-damned, and outright. No hope. Forced to lay still until you couldn't get up anymore. Then laying still some more until no one could know you ever again. Until you, yourself were no longer. Deathly, not tenacious. Cancer was coming to kill you, not badger you about a loan.

A quiet spell that was unacceptable to Tom. He said something true.

"I didn't want you to think I wasn't coming."

"Well, I did start to think that," Alan admitted.

"I should have come sooner."

"It's fine, Tom. I know. This stuff's gotta be weird for you. It's a real mess."

That was the unbearable habit Alan had taken to at birth. Empathy. Why he had cried more as a kid than Tom had, how he treated people kind, why the songs he wrote were somewhat emotional, why he loved being religious so much. No hope? He had always been the sort to overflow with it. Empathy and a love of sensation, just behind the traits that George claimed made Alan a pussy. Here, however, tired and balancing on an uncertain span of time, in a deathbed with so few reasons not to think of himself and his condition, Alan was thinking of Tom. Wearing the shoes of others as if they were better than his own. Tom felt a guilt he could not iron out. It stuck in his chest and clumped there.

"Excuse me, are you a visitor?"

His head turned. The nurse stood in the doorway peering in at them. Tom sobered half a beer at this.

"Yes."

"Sir we have dedicated hours for patients and their family. I don't know how you got in here, but you can't stay; you'll have to come back during the proper visiting hours."

"It's fine. I'm already here."

"Sir, you have to leave."

He could do that. This meet with Alan was difficult in a manner Tom had yet to fully comprehend or endure. That would be for later. Rest-of-his-life later. He had a reason to exit now, on good notes, as there were hospital rules. A person needed to follow those rules, of course. Tom wouldn't have to stay here and face any more of what he couldn't handle. Alan would understand. The rules. But she stared at Tom for a moment and he didn't like her eyes and her comprehension of him seemed deeply trivial.

"Let's go," she said, irritated.

So he didn't have to leave, after all. He could stay. Decorate her with profanities, if he wanted. He thought of a few.

The proper time to see a dead friend was while the friend was still alive. Why Tom had waited so long to come here was not a dilemma of timing, or growing up his sense and heading out. The drive to Portland was a sudden conclusion and hard won. He had made no plan to see Alan at all. Not even for the eventual funeral. Until today.

"You don't need to care that I'm in here," Tom said, "Just go on. Mind your business."

When she simply stood, annoyed and designing the manner in which she would explain that he was, in fact, leaving, Tom grew agitated. He waved his wrist at her.

"Go on. You heard me," he said.

The night nurse left them, shaking her head. A walk affronted but with hastening, officious footfalls. Alan sighed.

"She's actually all right. Nicer than the one that's here in the afternoon. That one... well, she's so cold I don't think her breath'd show in Winter."

Cancer and the brain. Two ideas, two things, two names for things that were horrid when combined. He thought of a brain with black pebbles pressed into it. Except the pebbles were bits of more brain, distorted and corrupt. A poison made of yourself. Black pebbles that had no reason to kill you. Just did. An ancient, awful thing carried with people the whole time. The troubles that killed a person always did so by robbing the ticker or the thinker, or through roundabout means that still made their way to the two. Constant ways to die that no one could overcome, the original ways to do it, always present like babies and fights and churches. Someone was always getting into trouble with these things. Having accidental children or getting beat up, being preached over. Someone was always getting sick. Always holding their head or clutching their chest.

" _Alan, it's shot. You're bike's busted."_

" _Can't we just true the rim?"_

" _Not when it's bent like this. It's folded damn near in half."_

" _Well I can't leave it out here."_

" _Just carry it home."_

" _It's two miles!"_

" _What else can you do?"_

" _My dad'll get crazy if I come home without my bike, Tom."_

" _Well, then he gets crazy. You don't need to start cryin' over it."_

" _This is bad... this is bad. It's too heavy. I can't carry it."_

" _Just calm down. We'll—"_

Tom couldn't look at him but for short glances almost in personal dare. Quick darts of the eye at an eclipse one had been warned not to look at. He could feel it in the room: Alan being gone. Just gone. For the moment, however, Alan was still there. And he had a friend. Maybe two. So he asked.

"You talk to George much?"

"Here and there. He's back from Germany now. Lives out in Virginia by the base. Met a girl, he says. Says he's in love, too."

"Pff. He says."

"Yeah."

"Knows about me, right?"

"Yeah, I told him."

"Think I'll get to see him before?"

How to respond. How to think. Turning words around was an ugly art.

"It's just so far away, is all."

Alan slowly nodded and wrinkled the edge of his mouth.

"That's what I thought. He wouldn't come anyway. I know he wouldn't."

"Sure he would. It's just the distance and he's broke."

People said these things. Even when they knew otherwise. Circumstance. White lie. Or making a better person out of a defendant. False statements could be a very human kind of lovely.

" _I'm stuck out here. My stupid bike is broken."_

" _Calm down."_

" _Oh no. Oh no. I'm in such big trouble... He's gonna be so mad."_

" _Okay, stop for a second."_

" _I'll say it was stolen."_

" _What the hell for?"_

" _And- and then we throw it down the ravine so nobody finds it.""Alan. ALAN. Listen: You can ride_ my _bike. Okay? I'll just carry yours."_

" _You will!? To my house?"_

" _Sure, just don't rush off ahead. You gotta calm down is all. Relax."_

The talk between them went from slanted to shallow. In this place not far from the outside world, but interminably away from it, Tom picked up a card beside a small bouquet. From his mother, Susan. He wondered if Alan's own mother had thought to send flowers.

"That's from your mom."

"I know," Tom said, reading it over. The condolences. The hopes for remission. The prayers for Alan that were now available to him.

"Man, you been drinkin'?" Alan asked then.

"Yeah, sorry. Helped me relax, is all. Couple beers, you know?"

"No reason to be sorry for that. You should have brought me a few. For a second I was tryin' to figure out if it was another fake smell. The beer on ya."

"Oh?"

"They're pretty real. It's one of the side-effects. I get 'em a lot, too. You know what I kept smellin' Monday?"

"No, what?"

"Burnt plastic. Like when you burn a milk jug or somethin'. I had two different nurses in here tryin' to find a short. They got the electrician in here and everything. All in my head."

He had no declared value. It was under the surface. Friendship. Skinny Alan out-swimming him, kicking Joe Halle in the ass and running off, writing songs and playing them to girls. Alan with the funny-looking feet. Alan always with George and Tom. The whiny kid. The generous kid. Alan the runt liking that feral runt pig so much.

"That's kind of funny. _All in my head_. You know somethin' else, though?"

"What's that?"

"I've been thinkin' about it the last couple weeks, and I really just don't have anything to leave anybody. You know, like for a last will. I thought about givin' my guitar away, but it's a piece of garbage. Worse off than I am. And it won't stay in tune 'cause the neck's warped."

_Last will_. The words struck into Tom's gut with a blunt, churning sensation. A person's final contract with the Earth and its society. The end of ownership according to a Testament for the dead.

"Now that I'm thinkin' about it," Alan said then, "you know all those comics we collected?"

"Sure. I got a few of those somewhere."

"Maybe those. I got 'em all in a box. Plastic bags so they're mint. Kid stuff, but I mean, you can take 'em. I'll write it down tomorrow."

"Alan, I'm not taking your things."

"Believe me, somebody will. You should get somethin' that reminds you about me."

"I don't need anything like that. I got you up here just fine," Tom said, pointing into his temple and trying to smile.

"Naw, you liked those comics. Remember the ones we stole together? That was crazy. Too much fun. Well, I already prayed on that one so I'm in the clear. But I still got all of it; be good to keep those all in one place. You should get 'em."

Tom's insides stirred and he swallowed, flexed himself back into place. There was not enough in him. No substance for argument or testament logic. This day and now night had been a wavering process of giving in. About most things. He sighed where no one could hear and accepted the state of the hospital. Room 412. Could have cried, had he the nerve to loosen up.

"Okay, Al. I'll get those, sure," he said, effecting a useful tone while the hard work of sadness crept down through his neck and into his chest.

He averted his view, kept Alan out of it for a moment, looking about the hospital room. Each surface was coated in laminate, Formica, plastic, or plain, white sheets. Everything was covered over in a specific sheen for ease of cleaning, the removal of germs left by people once they were no longer present. Most went home and their traces were swabbed from the room with cloth and disinfectant. Sprays and rags. There would come a time in the near future when the only trace of his friend left in the world would be small germs of touch and breath on these flat, smooth surfaces. The last earthly traces of Tom's childhood friend would exist but a washcloth away from nothingness. That would be the end of a person.

Tom held back his dismay. In it. Returned the card to the flowers they accompanied. He had bent its spine absently, toyed it in his hands while trying hard to continue talking. The Portland sky tilted swift and fastened its rain to the windows. This was relieving, as they both turned their attention to the sudden drumming of the now denser water against the panes. The droplets struck and curled into small intersecting streams, straight to the sill. They were jagged, changed shape, branched, changed again. Clear lightning made from water on glass. The two young men stared through this for a long time. Tom felt drifty. From the beer or other things. Alan stirred:

"You been goin' to church?"

"Me? No," Tom answered, "Not in awhile."

Alan rolled his eyes and set his hand on Tom's shoulder. Nothing happened in the room, but something difficult triggered Tom's revulsion. He fought down the urge to jerk away from the contact. Was it awful? It was. Sometimes love did not understand that a man's first reaction to something painful was to get the hell away from it.

"Got a Bible?" Alan asked.

"Honestly, the last time I opened one of those was with you. I think we were ten."

"Ah here, take this one, then. It's the hospital's, but they won't notice. Give it a read. Some of it has a whole different meaning when you think on it as an adult."

Barely an adult. A matter of few years. Alan lifted the Bible from the drawer beside his metal-and-sheets bed. Tom pushed down on his breath as his ears heated. He didn't want to take the book. Wasn't this desert tome Alan's source of promise? Shouldn't he have been clutching onto it as consolation to the great uncertainty sane men had? This ancient assurance of an afterlife wrapped up in sacred words... how could Alan give it away? Wasn't the system outlined in this holy book all he had left? The ache in Tom's jaw contracted and his stomach went numb. In the whole world his friend's ultimate destination was this stupid room in fucking Portland. Tom did not want to accept the book from his friend. A dying and devout man would have far more need of a Bible just then than Tom did. It needed to stay with the sick man. Alan was saddened when Tom lightly shook his head, but he still tried to apologize to Tom for pushing.

"Oh man, I'm sorry. I wasn't tryin' to—"

The cleared throat behind them. Doorway. Interruption. The night nurse had returned with a security guard. The two young men glanced at the interlopers. Tom was pestered, Alan weary. The man in his uniform viewed the scene tired, saw a sick man in a bed and another man crying next to this. The guard chewed at the inside of his cheek. Finally, he and the nurse did what they had come to do.

"I'm sorry, but we can't have you in here at this hour. You can come back tomorrow, no problem," the guard said.

"That's what I told him," the nurse complained, "but he refused to leave and wouldn't listen. Said mind my business."

"Well, maybe that's what you should have done, Patty," the guard replied, agitated.

Tom stood, wiping his eyes. Alan breathed and felt his own upset, so far down and buried it was a bare twitch of recognition. Then it moved, on its way up like hot water filling a bath. Because of empathy.

"It's okay. You should go. Comin' back, though?" Alan choked.

"Yeah. Hang in there, man. I'll see you in a couple days."

Which was untrue.

**Six**

Traffic and the dim of lights down Bell Avenue. Agram's record store for albums he did not care to hear. A feign of interest in a passing moment that had expelled from him over months and now curtailed into brackets of boredom. Her thoughts behind lips lifted the tongue. The tongue cared little for anything, spilled forth from a pit of shrugs that wore pretty eyes. Her head busted in two and there was no Tom in there. He suspected as much. That night, however, this split head was shoved apart hard by her utterance and the offhand, unflattering way it fell from her mouth.

"Not that it matters. It's done."

"Done?" he asked.

"Last week."

Claire's platform shoes with acrylic pads above the heel. Voice too mild to echo off the taller structures along Bell. A turn and a walk signal. He put his arm around her and a truck parked and a young woman passed clearing her throat and Claire didn't mind the arm. He did this automatic. His hand reached her side with a fit that was like flour on the hands. An image in his mind suffused Eugene and formed a toddler. A boy. Holding himself up against a table and edging toward a probable dad. Then a girl. He read to her from a book with pictures. Tom eradicated these thoughts when he realized they were occurring. A boy or girl never to be. Done. Last week.

Every spark and glimmer down Bell was a flaring lucifer of community, but only one such light had found him. She put the thin lighter back in her pocket, inhaled from the white stick with easement.

"You- you didn't even tell me."

"I don't need your permission do to anything, redneck," she said.

This was true and jolted him. Permission was a vague endeavor to attempt causing what you imagined was set out and ought for another. He had no permission to dedicate; she had not vested her cares in him to such extent. Tom's weight of thought was that he had been oblivious, he simply asked to see her that night and she had allowed this. He had expected her to take him out, as she often did. He had only thought they would talk and enjoy Eugene, as she often did.

Redneck. Pet name. They were Super Destiny and the Redneck, except she was neither famous nor could sing well, and he had soft hands. One hand gave a cupping knead of affection against her side. Cozied or not, she inhaled the smoke and exhaled the smoke. They walked. Cars and lights and cigarettes and a woman from Eugene and a man from Camas Swale. There was no reading her.

"How did it work?" he asked, slow.

"Fine."

"No, I mean... what was it? What do they do?"

Morbid fascination. They made a steady, cold march of two through a parking lot, cutting to the next block. Curry met them with a saturating glower on a circling gist of wind. Several tons passed before them and the scent of curry joined with exhaust, entered his nostrils on truck-shoved air. They passed the restaurant front, a place they had mentioned at times but always decided against. His disfavor for spicy food. Her dislike of the Indian music they played from speakers in the awning. She wanted the food but didn't like the sounds. He was fine with the music but resented the tastes. So the bistro and soups. Or the Rail House with the good steak. Maybe the diner for the gravy. Always another place. They would eat after his hour drive, then talk and cocktails and sleep together. In public, maybe dancing. In private, the occasional song from her mouth and shut eyes. _I think I'll record that one._ The sex at times short and narrow. _No, go ahead. It's fine. Just be quick._

"They break the fetus up with a little hook and then take it out," she said. Tom swallowed, perturbed.

"What did it look like?" he asked, guilty for wondering.

"Like nothing."

"Boy or a girl?"

"Nothing."

His good feel nudged over into the street, drove to the light, turned, and was gone.

"Claire, you shouldn't have done that," he said.

"What are you talking about? Of course I should have."

"We could have done somethin' else."

"Like what, keep it? No thanks. I don't need a kid while I'm tryin' to sign. I've seen too many people give up after getting married and having kids. Works for them, not for me. If I'm gonna get a contract and work for a label, I need to do it trim. No gut. I need to do it young and I have to be able to move. No hungry people slowin' me down."

"Maybe we could have adopted out," he offered.

Claire sighed.

"Sure. Okay. That's kind of easy for you to say, but what a nice havoc on my body, Tom. And you might want to keep _that_ in mind, too. _My_ body. Which means you don't get a say in what I do with it."

"Claire, we made a damn baby. Don't you get it? That's- that's beyond just you."

"Listen, you need to get it straight; there's no 'we', Tom. We didn't make anything. I'm single and you're around for now. And I'm not havin' any babies. Not for you or anybody else."

"Huh."

"Be single and sing and look good. It's vain but it's my plan, okay?"

"I really wish you would have told me."

"Well, I just did. Super Destiny doesn't go for stretch marks. And if I'd told you sooner, you would have wanted to come with me. Can you imagine the two of us down at the clinic? That would've been obnoxious."

"Claire, I really should have had a say."

"Go ahead and say whatever you want; I wouldn't have listened. A kid half yours would have looked like a damn hyena."

He laughed at this, a sound like a hyena from a man who now felt like one. How ugly she had made him in aborting their pregnancy. How gross and cold and arrogant they were. Tom's laugh trailed off on relief, however. Claire's crassness made things easier, was an attractive kind of disturbance. So mouthy while feigning such regal tones, as if speaking your mind in this coarse way made you a hot filament the rest of the world was required to bask near. Her attitude blustered at the people around her as if they were to respect her for simply being herself. People somewhat wanted to, Tom had found.

Claire had treated Tom as if knowing her was a privilege. She was cold to him, uncaring, flippant, and self-absorbed, but only when outside and public. Inside and private caused her to play a different sort of dress-up. In a solitary room, she needed him and wanted to hear what he thought of things, made no effort to suppress this. She was upset whenever he was away the week, though also pushed him to leave for this duration. She tried to make him laugh, make him drink with her, get him sleepy. She gave him magnanimous head and pawed him when he thought to pull away. Weekends-only was her rule, not his, and while she enforced it, there had been two occasions when she tried to make him stay with her into Monday, was thankful for the company, even when stating the inverse. These antics caused Tom a certain turmoil. He wanted to ask her things and swear at her and then give her things and then take them back and then screw some more and screw some less. Maybe love.

"Seriously, Tom. That man-in-charge stuff might fly out in the crud, but not with me."

"You know I'm not like that."

"For now. On weekends. But if I'd have told you I was pregnant, you'd have been plenty like that. Would have changed everything," she said.

"Well, bein' pregnant _does_ change everything, and I should have had a say," he repeated.

"If you want to put your foot down on things and say 'yes' and 'no' a lot, you go find yourself some churchy chick. See if she'll play with your dick any."

"You're crude."

"The dark ages, man."

Her bottom moved in a squirrelly manner as the face tilted up an inch. A hint. Rigid walk. Tense inside. There was so much more to her than sex, than her physical appeal, but youth was in both of them, and this state of being always called forth the physical. There were things she did like his mother. That rare, upset walk. He thought to grumble like his father. The scrape of her lower lip with her teeth when she ate, instead of using her tongue. He thought to say something crass. Always the left leg over when she sat. But she was not his mother and he was not his father.

"So where does that leave us?" he asked, cognizant of where.

"Alder street. You want a drink?" Her skirt of answer surprised him but then it was still an indicative response. They were exactly where they had been. No closer together or further apart. They had the present, short as it was. They would find something to do after dinner. _Not that it matters. It's done._ Eugene's night was full of bristles and slid him about like a handbroom skidding a thin, plastic wrapper. Drinks instead of dinner. Okay.

The wind picked up on the moment, drifted into downtown as a dry halitus from outer fields. This swell of Eugene's air hussied through the intersections, smelling as if from a great, opening mouth. Dry from sleep and old from stagnation after expensive beer. The mouth was the floor of the city. You walked on its concrete and walked on its teeth and people passed and the weekends were long enough to tire you.

Claire was not in Eugene any more than Eugene was with Claire. She was unique in portions yet plebeian in whole. Sought a strong thing but suffered herself for it. Tom was enamored with her brand of quick disregard because it hinged upon a deep sense of entitlement. He thought it fun knowing she told others to fuck off so much. Freeing. Seeing her do this made you think she _was_ entitled. That a certain destiny in the world was real. Her own or even yours.

A tall man with a snouty face stepped from a business-front enclosure then. He blocked their route inadvertently, which made them stop when going around seemed too sudden. Tom's nerves startled but then dimmed as the man asked which way to the community center. He had come out of the dark in a float like a strange phantom. This sudden appearance and dead stop before them was disconcerting, but turned out innocent.

"The CC? What for?" she replied.

You never knew with places. Where the bad folks were. What sort. Why. In the swale, the troubled men wore it on their sleeves, sometimes in the eyes. A little more troubled than you. In Eugene, the grounds were unique. The types were broad. The sleeves had more cock and the urban talk made you listen in a way that kept you rummaging for meaning. The eyes of these people averted much, never looked straight at you. Where these people wore their troubles was auxiliary, a trove that was difficult to locate. In the city, even small, you had to know all those differences to spot the filchers and bad hats. Tom did not.

"Oh, there's a concert and I already bought my ticket and everything, but I've only been here a couple weeks and I can't find the community center. I thought it was around here, right?" the man restated.

"Two blocks back, then four toward the trainyard," Claire voiced, not paying him much attention and blitzing out this information quickly. Statement like an usher. Move along.

"The trainyard?" he asked.

"You see that hill over there with the big cross on it?"

"Yeah, I see it."

"Trainyard's at the bottom."

"Okay, so go towards that?"

"Yeah, two blocks back, then go toward that."

"Cool, thanks. I'm gonna see an old style brass band. Trippy, right?"

"Whatever, man."

"Hey, you think I could bum a smoke?"

"No."

The mouth in the street opened and people came out. Looking for things. Places. They had businesses and walked on the teeth and pet the avenues and lips and each other's hair. Tom watched as two hyena girls walked beside an animated man across the street. One of the girls held a birthday cone of ice cream in her hand and looked about much, eager for their next destination. The father pointed down Tenth, spoke about what he saw, and an excitement flowed through the hyena girls, padding them on to their destination. A happy, night-time birthday for a daughter. Tom thought of the stranger who had asked for directions. Thought about the comfort in knowing one's way through even a small city. How the stranger did not know this comfort. How Tom did not.

"Nice to steer that guy over there. He came out so fast it put me off, though," Tom admitted.

"Headin' to a gas station with those directions," she said.

"You gave him false directions?"

"I don't know that guy. Needs to figure his shit out. What's it to me?"

Claire's bottom swayed left as she stopped walking and put her arms up. Her hands met high and she stretched side to side. Middle of a sidewalk. Very Claire. After this, she moved forward again, out of his wrapping arm. He did not try to re-establish holding her. His feet met the pavement with a jarring sensation. Not himself. Off. The hooves clacked on the concrete as she wriggled her way to the next crosswalk with a grunt, ragged neck facing the hard grit of the sidewalk. Claire squealed and dabbled her snout in the air, catching scents and gauging what was near. Cantonese and the recent passed Indian joint. Then a stony burger stop-in. Just ahead.

Crossing the street with her curled tail settled above the rounds. The trees waited for them to cross, their lights on and music playing. On the other side of Alder, he scratched behind her ears but she was bored with him. The signal fluttered green and the trees rumbled, moved forward, crossing through the deer trails en route to every place.

The valley. Deadly camas dotting the clears between dogwood bracts and the coppice offshoots. Busy slick of small noise. Airy hovers and tap-jumps from his path. Insects chattered in flits from retentive boughs while twilight's mild wind hummed through the stomach of the valley. He should have been home by now. This basin was not of a length to take so much time. He had walked longer than the floor yet there he was. The mother pig waddled beside him and just ahead. The same route but each walker in offset timing. The two pulling one another forward and back. The wind and the trails did this. The lay of the trees did this. A matter of nature's lawful drive and what felt correct.

"We've been here too long," he muttered.

"What?" the pig asked.

"We're not going anywhere," he refined. The pig sighed.

"Is this a larger than life thing, Tom? About us, right?"

"What if I said I want kids someday?"

"Well Tom, I'm sure she'll be nice."

"Not you, huh?"

"You gotta _relax_ ," she said, frowning, "Don't mess me up, Tom. Shit, I wanted to have fun tonight."

The mother pig's abortion and how simple her resolve had been. Mother no more. Dead teats. Pork belly shaved clean and smoothed for attention. Just to be alive and herself. She nipped briefly at a stuttering moth that drew near her head. Tom put his useless hands in his pockets and watched the woods of downtown Eugene move. It enjoyed his presence but for all the wrong reasons. He was food for it. Temporary and partly outside always.

"I think I'm gonna pass on drinks tonight. Head back home. This is just too weird for me."

"Duh, too weird," the wood pig mimicked.

He was a family sort and she said so often, fond of trashing. Her creation of those parentheses into which she continued to press him was an act of both greeting and scrutiny. Spectacles and a microscope through which you saw the mesmerizing makeup of shit. A family sort. Redneck. Country. He had nothing in his arms with these ideas. A person was not so rigid raised on simple poles as she supposed. A man was no flag for the ground he popped up on.

Tom and the episodic bout of Super Destiny. The weekending visits, over and over again, drunk on beer and circling about like errant sand fleas at a beach-fire. He thought of a toddler again. He rode the thought into a brief streak of imagination, and thus worthless, short, one thing for one second that was gone. He thought of Claire as a mother. Short. One second. Gone. Maybe he would take family one day, was not much of a redneck, and home but an hour away and just off the interstate was not what some would deem 'country'. She had pegged him wrong. Silly. Pretend deep lyrics or the excited, climactic sex command. Useful if only in asking to feel more. She was not.

There were ones and twos about. A three in the brush. Another on the sidewalk. Tom walked beside his temporary ten, noting her bitchy manner and the terse, entitled way her hooves dotted the floor. A six in the distance, a great cat, caught the sanguinary scent of her abortion, crept low and watched as all the numbers flowed through Eugene, through the Camas woods, through the city and the wild. Just through.

The trees had thinned, meaning he was closer to the valley's rim. The trees passed him on both sides, moving to the next intersection and waiting for each block's fragrant walkers to take the turn through. The lights were on and the world had grown dim. Those in the trees turned down their radios and players and drove onward. Night in Eugene down the off paths dotted in insects. Tom wanted to pet the pig but did not enact. She was unlike him no matter how far into the mouth they were, how long they had moved down a route. She was feral by one generation maybe. Joined and heard and copulated by all the half-wild life.

Their feet were out of sync. They navigated, but in different means. They changed focus and leaned slow down Eleventh into the wood's thicker copse. Lesser bars and cheaper doorways. Darker side paths. Parked cars for loud apartments. The rim of the valley. The edge of her downtown. She would come with him a bit, but not for much longer. A walk for the month, distending and spread into sporadic meets, the hour of driving seeming longer each time. She was gone once he reached his home. Always. Visiting inferred impermanence. He would not stay. He had visited Eugene for the weekends. He had visited Claire for a few parts of a year.

"Well, I still think you're a good pig," he noted, looking for her eyes in the dimness.

"Squeal," she said.

**Seven**

All processes and events in the swale. Every one. Stopped. Bending above the work. Watching from each small recess wherein a bit of life could stabilize. The temporary world that had followed the previous, and would be followed by the next.

Tom followed the incline of busy soil through the receding thick of woods. She stayed near, a companionship welcome as the lift of fours darted behind her in the miles. The hovering insects were out, a night dander that flit at his approach for new coves of dark. From the dense outward came phantasm owls that swooped the floor for scurries. Shrews turning their heads and hole-rushing mice. A firefly blipped over the terrain before setting down behind a long ago fallen bough. Those lives of the upper places that came to know the floor went dead. The dead became mulch. The mulch that was eaten became life. The life lifted into the wondrous upper places again. Tom and the pig walked and met night with their shoulders pressed forward. Hastened pace. Nearing the end of the blanket woods.

The domesticated brush flanged amidst the wild. Occasional rose and rhododendron, once gardened but wind-seeded over the woods. Feral pretties. They took root where they could. Decades of driftdown seed and spore from town. This fringe of humanity's pet plants and where they met the gnarled, raw wallows was an ache of familiarity for him. He felt closer. The signposts of red blooms and occasional imports called him to quicken. These domestic immigrants had wilder counterparts still abundant. Ancient dwellers of the land and swale. Gayfeather. Possum. Lethal camas.

There could be large animal numerals about. A five. A six. A slow, stalking, fresh-sharpened cat. The moonlight engaged with darting motion. Seethe-noises from May bugs flush behind sparse occasions of shut-up dahlia. Cultivated rosemary having long ago run off toward the valley. Into and through this quietly colliding revelry of plant and animal went the sad man and the oblivious pig.

He used his knees and shoes to keep place, his hands and back to rise. Then a length up the tree with the knees, securing with his feet for another catch. Slow vertical. He went tall, climbing the tree above the scattered woods. From near the top, he could see the outlay of houses in the distance. Those welcoming lights of town. About three miles. Nearer to his location, he noted a tract housing project abandoned for the year. This was Applewood. A small, bloodless suburb unfinished and left a ruins before completion.

The feet slid but he did not fall, stayed a moment breathing. Then down. Faster than up. She nudged his ankle as he returned, his leg again within reach.

"Couple hours," he muttered, "but only a mile from Applewood."

The pig yawned. Tom sat beside her at the base of the tree and pet her lightly, his eyes glancing through the brush at nothing specific. He wandered in his head a bit, chewed at his lip and breathed. Sometimes, a person simply needed to look at things that were near, and for no tangible reason beyond proximity. Night had now swallowed the two but could not keep them. He would be home soon. Artificial light and heat. A belligerent slap against the face of the truer elements.

Before the demotion. Before he was made a laborer and no longer a laborer's foreman. Before Applewood was left as wreckage and not housing. Before all of this, Tom's company had provided the wood for contractors both local and distant. Applewood was made mostly with Lee Kanell's wood. The creation, preparation, and even the transfer of this material had been overseen by Tom. Thirty-eight houses and two duplexes. Overtime at Kanell. For nearly a full year. The latter duplexes of Applewood had been finished but for certain, small elaborations. The houses, however, were in a variety of stages. Walled with windows or beamed and skeletal, one to the next. Uninhabited. Pre-code. Starters that no longer had backing and were left to prayer for the year. If things picked up, they could be finished in the next year or so. If there was wood and price and pipe and work.

The entire suburb, two years in, had been demoted. The wood ceased being bought. Contracts bounced back into people's guts and homes. The lumberyard ceased the larger business it had geared to. Overextension to meet the demand of the suburb had added great depth to that water in which Lee's business was now sinking. Debt walked the yard and the workers slept. Debt sang in the afternoon and the town slowed. The once-foreman stood beside his tree climb and thought about the work of it all.

Urged by proximity with a place he knew, Tom stood and began to walk again. The pig followed, obeisant and pleased. After several minutes, they reached the incline's upper level and began across flat terrain. Without trees, this would have been a field. With few trees, this plane of sparse scrub was something else. But flat. More human. The runway to home. Tom could see the Porch in the distance, a natural plateau that time had carved from the hills, a tall landmark atop which kids spraycanned their names during oft-busted parties. Beneath the Porch was the highway, old roads, bird descent, fields and walking trails... there were many ways to get to town and this day's long march was now one of them.

Bones. Torn free and scattered, but some assemblages were intact. Raccoon. Stripped down by a week. No large bites. Not a cat. Likely the slow swelter of insects and the picks of small birds. Other raccoons. It numbed him to see the fresh moss, vibrant in the path blood would have leaked and pooled in the first few hours. A loving and rich feed for moss. How quick this would have occurred. He thought of caskets with slow broken seals. Underground life. Bits encroaching. A timely matter of indigence. The dig of every bug and writhe of every worm to ever need a meal.

She nosed near the carcass and turned her head, hungry. There was nothing to eat here. Remnants. A gutted structure. A wandering suburbia of nutrient now washed away by the flickering commerce of thousands.

He heard a sound, a continuous one, and was slow to realize that it was music in the distance. The music was scarcely there but reached him. Several notes or else a distant din his ear could not at first separate into parts. But music. Clearly a song. The sense of percussion within. The flatwoods opened into broad field. Civilization in a manner. The tract housing ahead. Less than a mile. The moon lit brief flicks of metal and rebar, glancing from windows back at him. The music gained volume in the candid field as he approached. He knelt and pet the pig, held her chin and rubbed her neck.

"You hear that? That's people."

Perhaps the suburb was not abandoned but halted. Had a few homes become occupied? Were they squatters? There were no lights, but there was power if a radio was playing. Or at the least a vehicle with enough juice to play someone's music. He swigged her milk from the canteen and hurried, the mother keeping pace, her large head bobbing as her short feet paddled at the grass and dry dirt. Over the sound of his pulse in heated temples, his ears red at the reception and run, he distinguished a horn, drums, other bits of sound.

Across the long field the houses came into a more just view. Details. He could make out trim outlining windows. The taped apart lay of yards never dug out or covered in unrolled grass. Several horns. A distinct tune. Shingles on some, a chimney every third house, black holes where windows should have been and white flickers where they were.

Faster. Cranked up. Old timey. Someone was having a party where he could not see. No stereo and no lights, but a band. The resonance. Sound of live wind instruments. Many. Over a bass. Mistakes being made out of certain times. Occasional stops for pause, then restarting. A group of people playing a song somewhere in the abandoned suburb. Brass band. And then it stopped.

Tom trudged up over a small berm pursed upward by dozers and then stepped down into short scrub pitted from tread. The pig stumbled here but drew up and continued. Then curb. Paved street. Sidewalks perpendicular to hollowed, unfinished driveways. The world. A person's sense of it. No mailboxes or gardens, no real yards, but the spaces for these things had been prepared. The shape of the world without the substance. Tom sighed and a battening carved upwards from his step against pavement, reached his face and moved it some. He smiled. The pig's hooves gave a dull, weighty racket on this grade and firmness.

The now silent neighborhood lay prostrate on the outskirts, a town's form of scrub. The unfinished streets curved into bends and branched off. Streets and side-streets. Tract housing in increments having been ceased in mid-build due to economic submission and a dying resource supply. Tom knew the resource. Wood. He had just spent two days where this material came from. The source. How strong the notion of a housing project seemed now. Humanity could remove the wild and build itself habitat. How long had it taken for people to learn this? How long had people spent themselves in the woods and deserts and jungles before the first spark of civilization struck and moved them?

There was a sign set up in a front yard, several houses down the first lane. This was a thin, wooden box on a stilt with an acrylic pane screwed over the face. Two white sheets inside. Protected. He approached and squinted. Enough moon to read but in a slow, scan-and-double-check way. It was dated, had been posted almost a year back.

Stefan Schwedler here. The following was sent over this morning from Nicky Parson who runs PR for Boyle. Outlines what Moore said last week and if we have to outsource then we won't be here next week. seems obvious this project is coma. she didn't even get my name right.

Steve Schwedler, Jim Moore

Moore Parks Contractors

Jim and Steve,

Thanks for the kind words about the new site designs. It's shaping up well enough and if anything we've learned that simplicity is best with Applewood. We're going to try to put more actual emphasis on security and landscaping than we planned and Mr. Boyle has been feeling good about all of your posts on the project. Unfortunately, the resources through Q&J are becoming far too difficult to get out of Portland and your local arrangement with Kanell Materials is reliant on it. Q&J has raised every price there is and it seems like everyone is doing that and there's only so far that can go. I'm sure there's more to come, but for now, we're transitioning through this.

'More to come' was the motto of all who were unsure. Tom knew the trouble with Kanell better than anyone. He had been their lead foreman for some time. Without the incoming resources from Portland, Kanell Materials had very little material.

_Every bite they take's got around two or three more hidden in it_ , Tom thought to himself, going over a statement he had heard Lee Kanell make last year, just before Tom's demotion. Lee was a good man with both feet in a snare. Tom sighed and put his hands in his pockets. He knew the reaper of Applewood too well.

Interesting that you're going to focus on the Klamath Mall project. That's a big job and far away. Keep us posted on your progress. We do hope it all goes well out there.

For a time, it must have been ingenious. Structure. From the raw. Anymore, money and dwellings had become too intermingled, and the project sat in its bed, but in a year might begin anew. More to come. He could live here then. Anyone could. So long as money. That was the missing coagulant. Currency. Based on time. That which was most current, however long it needed to cross a gap. The lives of people were so short but surely these deserved warmth and walls. Together or alone. Any and all.

Of course, you would benefit from seeking out a partner on larger contracts like this. We're transitioning and reevaluating our structure, but will likely have room for such a project around the second quarter of next year, if you can get to Klamath by then. A little leeway might help a ton. Just a thought. We know you know your business.

She lumbered into a dirt yard and around one of the roughhewn homes. Tom gave a clap but she did not respond. Slowly, he looked about the suburb and then followed her. The property line of no one met another, each property supporting vacant and as-yet unfit domiciles. Where these lines of division met was marked with small orange flags in a brief corridor between the two houses. Tom passed through following the mother pig.

We all enjoyed our trip to Camas Swale. Mr. Boyle is pretty reserved and it's hard for some to gauge his enthusiasm but he seems to really want to support you guys, and of course, we would love to see Applewood continue.

In the would-be backyard, a pool had been dug out with a backhoe. No concrete. No rim. Mud around a pit filled with rain. A special order now reneged. Clay-stained water had slowly filled this marginal hole. The pig neared with a low head but slid into the water. She squealed and made her way out again with vigor. Tried again and had a drink. Tom poured the pig milk from his canteen and lowered onto his belly, drank from the muddy water. Refreshed but weary, he refilled the canteen and stood. Where had the music come from before it stopped?

Few of our contracts are going well. We're being strangled by Q&J and Kanell isn't able to front the rising price in the supply chain. We can't afford the hauls from California either. No one wants to pay what we have to get for this. We're sympathetic to those involved in the project, but with the troubles of late and the lack of funding, we're all having to reconsider our stake in Applewood and other sites.

They made their way between the houses again and back to the slumbering street. As they moved, he caught sight of a weathered paper sheet tacked against a wall. A materials list. There were similar sheets on all of the houses, some with three or four of them to a wall. So much planning. The contractors needed. The deliveries constantly en route. The unions and those powers beyond that gave the project it's green light and propulsion. Such intricate work, and by so many. He knew it closely, had worked with many contractors and distributors over the years. This business was a mess of papers all talk and names. Numerals. Someone had to pay, always. The beauty of its result was new to him. The wondrous gall of building from the raw. Wood from trees. Stone from pits. Streets of asphalt from Peruvian quarries. Dust and petroleum and blackness in certain proportions. All forms of wild Earth taken and domesticated. Employed. Counted on.

The thinner our schedule gets the more we have to recoup on these contracts, and faster. Of course completing Applewood is out for now. We all know that. We're entering another planning phase for the project and will keep ourselves busy on that end until we have a clear route.

The music struck and the mother pig snorted. Tom glanced up and down the lane. He followed his ear, trailing the rough song to a cross street, which broke off in a convenient, cozy Y. Left was a broad semi-circle that met again with an arterial street. He instead followed to the right, entered a curvier block. Two houses had been started here but with room for many more. Then a right into a dead end. Cul-de-sac. Old basketball hoop set up at the back for the younger workers and the few inmates on their breaks. Past the hoop was the house that held the music. Left out here. The house at the end. A light on. Ground floor. No vehicles out front but the shadows of people inside. Music through the paneless windows of the structure. Brass band.

We have two contracts in southern Oregon that you'll get details on shortly. You'll get in on some of it. Tell your crew! Hopefully, things will turn around and this economy won't starve us and we'll pick up Applewood next year.

The pig veered off toward another house as Tom walked toward the lively music, leaving her behind. She entered a small yard and laid out on her stomach, alert but tired. Tom continued alone into the cul-de-sac, a glade for human residence, to the end of it, up a paved walk encroached on by sand and damp soil. A mustiness aired from the house in a draft. The music rode this. He reached the skeletal porch, looked back at the mother pig who watched with intrigue. Tom nudged his fingers into the hole where a doorknob had yet to be installed, pulled the door open and stepped in, peering into the bare-lit living room.

I'm sure the houses will be fine if left unfinished for a time. Worst case scenario is that we have to scare off some coons and kitties when we come back. As for weather, hopefully not much damage will occur before it gets funding again. Housewrap as much as you can. I know Travis Getty is trying to get the Camas Council to provide a timeline down there. Maybe you could get a hold of him better than we can. More to come.

Best,

Nicky Parson, Public Relations

A.L. Boyle Housing Design and Manufacture

The music stopped. All processes and events in the swale. Every one. Stopped. More to come. Bending above the work. The five men lifted their heads from behind the instruments and were slow to set these aside. Then they stood. Wood dressed as men in a trap dressed as a house. The hidden haunts of the woods having taken up the abandoned woods of people. Faces of animals. Long arms and dexterous hands.

P.S. Have a great Summer.

Tom's breath latched at the abrupt sound of scuffling cloth. He stumbled for the door in a panic as the creatures slid beneath him, hoisting him from the floor, reaching their lanky fingers into his skull and filling it with themselves as if fluid from a spigot. When he shot open his face to scream, the house shook and their horrid whims poured from his lips like a river of lost teeth.

**Eight**

The world ended past the usher of the porch. The house was a trap. His foot in a gin was his soul against the wall, his back pinned to the bare drywall with industrial staples. Dozens. He hung on the wall in the cold house as the band examined him. A growth of moss had overtaken portions of the wall and had inched over his flesh, feeding from it and haunting the suburban project home. Tom was upright and made to watch. Addressed where he could not leave. He bled there and attempted to wrench himself loose. The staples held and the moss crawled over another inch of his arms and sides. Time crawled into his mouth and opened it for speaking, but nothing came out. The pig squealed at the end of the street. Fright from out in the neighborhood. The outside world was near him, but he was not close to it. The thoughts of the house went too far inside. He had been this many times in his life: Far away from what existed just beside him.

They played. In rolling poses and the exercise of breathy rhythm, the brass band ate the air in sound. Timing and collaboration. Moths fucking in the sleeves of an old coat. They struck and tinted their notes in exuberant actions, in a strength of music, allowing themselves in some manner to give way to the song. This excited them from privity and shook their trestles until their very eyes were hollow. The smoke from ashtrays skunked at the ceiling and drifted from unfinished windows, into the forever that night had laid out upon the abandoned suburbia. Tom, pinned to the wall and facing them, forced to listen, was hung against the fix-up spots of paint, bleeding from his shoulders and upper back on the three-inch staples that held him there. The moss ate the blood, his extremities coated in a lively, craving green.

The band leader held his clarinet, nodding with admiration and making the boys play. The percussionist with his deeply dented face illuminated on fills, his mallets staggering against the tightly drawn skins. A musical trap. The lure had been song like a photophore before gaping jaws in the deep sea, music hidden in the cold of the swale. Tom amidst the sticky surface of this brassy flytrap. It was a house to catch men. A trap. A damnable, horrid house made from one he knew. A familiar place. One that could draw him in.

The song tipped and the smoke lingered. The frightened squeal of the mother pig outside hinted at the window frames, but the animal would not approach the house. Tom again tried to remove himself from the wall.

"It's because you've been here," the band leader said. The players ceased on this interruption, halting the music. One gave a slight cough while another lifted a smoldering cigarette from an ashtray and caught up with it. They watched Tom say nothing. The trumpeter leaned back against a wall, perhaps imitating Tom's forced posture, adjusted his balls and blinked slow. He had a service pistol tucked into his belt.

"I'll leave. I won't come back," Tom entreated.

"But you've been here," the band leader repeated. Tom tested his staples again, grimaced and spoke.

"This... this is like my old house." The percussionist grunted and leaned his forearms on the drums, settling.

"Right?" the leader said, "Now, I could be mistaken (and sometimes that's the case), but you took over the payments for your folks. On a house like this. Hell, or maybe it _was_ this house."

"No, this isn't my house."

"Oh, I know all about it. When your folks got out, you went in. It's simple. Someone comes when someone goes, right? That's called keepin' it in the family."

"I shouldn't have walked in. I'm sorry. This- this is your place. And I intruded. I can leave. I'll just go."

"You did finish this house off nice," the band leader commented.

"Please let me leave."

"Except... well, wait. See, this is _my_ house. You're like uh... my guest."

"It's your house. Okay."

"There, you and me agree with one another. That feels good. But see, there's no leavin'. House likes company. I invited you over, so you got in without payin' the cover. Makes me hospitable."

The members of the band exchanged smirks. One of them, a nervous and obese man with thick lips and the habit of digging in his ear, eyed the compressor tank in the corner with zeal. His eyes followed one of its connectors to the staple-gun on the low living room coffee table, idle near the couch. There was a moment where he set his bass aside to fetch, but he was waved to a cease from the band leader. The bassist adopted his instrument again with a light shame, left the staple-gun alone.

They had all enjoyed Tom's distress. He was a meal into which they could burrow and squirm about. Detritivores to forgotten carrion. They knew him the way he knew his job. They peeled up his eyelids like stamps from the ream and made him look. They dug open his ears and trickled themselves at the rims with songs like tongues. The band brought dankness to the room, their mouths open as they breathed the air off his skin. Smell of damp drywall behind human activity. The sense of things from the woods pretending to be people. The band leader examined Tom then like a little boy gave scrutiny to a dead gull.

"Look at that, a thinker," the band leader said, "got us figured out pretty well. We did come out from the woods. You know where, just over that way. It's good you got out of there. Woods liked you. Wanted to keep ya. Didn't like us, though. Too... noisy."

The members of the band gave in to slight chuckles then.

"So we just went for a walk. Real easy. These woods here are better for us."

Wooden frames and crudely cut blocks of hands, grainy heads smoothed from seeing his capture. Timber. Became men. Became wood folk. Men again. Suits with sleeves rolled up. Little grotesques carved from old cedar, animated, given breath and let loose to inhabit a den. The doorway a maw. Walls but the sand of a ghostly ant lion. A terrible house just past the middle of the world and that no one knew was a thriving gut.

The portrait on the wall was of Tom and his mother, in a frame perched beside the smaller portrait of Meg and her bridesmaid. Wedding pictures. No church, but a public park. Outdoor wedding with a grill and a band. Tom knew these pictures well. Planning the ceremony had proven troublesome but at the end of all the work, the wedding had come off with perfection. Though everything had gone awry at first, Tom had managed to get his hands around those problems and nothing went wrong on the day. She had been so happy. The preacher had rambled on for too long about Jesus, which was uncharacteristic and unwanted in their wedding ceremony, but turned out fine in a larger sense. Mostly religious folk listened. Tom had just stood beside her, let himself muse over the notion of becoming part of two. He let in to it. Decided to agree with the word 'union'. Married. Nothing had ever changed his mind about that. Being in a union of two. He had held it the whole way.

Marriage was a good way to live a life. During the wedding, the hired preacher had closed his Bible and recited from memory. It was not so impressive as the preacher thought, a kind of reverence in his eyes as he looked over Purchase Park and adopted a tone he seemed to like when quoting.

"Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh."

The Sun had shone and when the food arrived, everyone was genuine. They were hungry and they smiled and they clapped and waited for dancing and all of it had been genuine. So little ceremony to the ceremony. The band had played in the sunlight and his father had hugged him. What a grand time for all, a spark amidst so few others.

Tom grunted and tried to remove himself from the wall, found the deep staples would not retreat from their burrows. He could tear through his back if he pulled hard enough. He began testing this ability and was ceased by a sudden strike across the bridge of his nose. The band leader's clarinet. Tom's face cinched shut and he groaned.

"One flesh, huh? That's a union, all right. But don't get ahead of yourself. I know you stayed apart some. She certainly did. Wasn't very happy about havin' one flesh with... well, with you. That's... see, that's just fascinating to me."

"You hit me again and I'll cut your damn throat," Tom said, struggling against the wall. The band leader made to swing and Tom jerked hard, pulling an arm from the wall. The moss shrieked and the blood came quick. He put his hand up to block his face. Into his palm spanked the clarinet.

"Ooh, they build you girls mean out here. But all right; let me hear it. Play," the band leader said.

Tom held the clarinet and narrowed his eyes, about to crash it into his aggressor's teeth.

"Hatred stirreth up strifes: but love covereth all sins," the band leader quoted, his finger up as if making a point. Tom tried to free himself from the wall.

"I'm gonna come back with some gasoline and turn this goddamn place into soot, you old fuck."

Tom moved forward, arching his back as the staples drew tight. His free arm smashed backward for leverage and was overtaken by the moss. He was caught again as the staples crawled through, fastening the skin of the arm to the wall. Three sharp inches of authority. He made no ground, staples and moss relishing him, moving deeper and mashing his skin against the wall, twisting him into a yelp. The clarinet dropped from his hand. Wetness against his shoulders became wetness down his back, staining the moss and dusty drywall. Loud white and green over to red.

"You haven't got yourself much favor with the Lord, have you, girl?"

"What the fuck do you want with me?"

"Easy now. We're all good men out here."

"You're just more wood."

"No, we left that place. This ain't the morgen no more, or the ofernón. This is middelniht, and it's beautiful, you follow?"

"Get away from me."

"Hey, let me ask you somethin'. You grew up in here, right? Sat on that couch over there watchin' TV. My place but sort of yours. Maybe I just want to know more about you, girl. Maybe I just want to hear you play with the band."

"I don't want anything to do with you."

"Don't matter. You just play. It's like suckin'."

"Let me go. I don't belong here."

"Now go on, put it to your lips."

"You keep the fuck away from me."

"Come on now. Right up there. Blow in."

"..."

"Aww, you're shy. Okay then. My other girl can show you how it's done. Come on out, baby."

Roughed up and tired. Grey sweatpants and no shirt. Sneakers missing. The boy entered from the side hall and sighed from deep in his knees, trumpet limp in a hand. Alan looked over at Tom and said he was sorry in the eyes. The percussionist struck a skin and Alan began breathing hard. Another strike. Alan's breaths were pressed by a panic. The drums were his breathing. His eyes widened and he shook his head, lifting the trumpet to red lipstick and opening his mouth. The band sputtered into song.

Boys. Running. Alan's breathing emphatic as they sprinted across the small bridge, entering school property. Downtown was eight blocks back and they had cut through Purchase Park at a sprint, Tom's backpack thudding against his lower back, a canvas hold for their recent theft. Shortcut through a hundred yards of trees. School outskirts, then in. Running behind the school and near the woodshop. Alan rounding the corner behind him on an excited laugh. They sat down against the back of the woodshop and withdrew the comics. Let themselves breathe and settle from the sprint and adrenalin. Alan stared in awe until his thoughts culminated a statement.

"That was crazy... there's like fifty!"

"I think so. We got the whole box," Tom said.

"I can't believe you just grabbed it like that."

"Me neither."

"We shouldn't have taken 'em."

"Nope. But we did. Which ones you want?"

"Are you kidding me? All of 'em."

The song's bridge was made and the music spiraled into a chorus. Alan struck his gales on beat, lifting high in four time. Blaring the notes, trumpeting, feet keeping rhythm with taps as he leaned back on the long notes. He was wooden. Or flesh. Tom's face drew long until his chin reached the floor, his cheeks bubbling over into rolls on the hardwood.

Poor Alan. No one had cared much for him, and now this. Carved out grain along his skinny arms. Or else hairs. A boy from cedar. His motions jerky yet controlled. George in the woods had been George off and on. Alan in the house was only Alan so long as all agreed. Weaker. The band leader was excited and shook his head, stomping his foot as Alan reached a breakout point.

"Play that shit, girl! Play that shit!"

Pouring through the comics, not reading in full. A few pages. Next. A few pages. Each boy smoking a lifted cigarette from Tom's father. Admiring cover art behind the school woodshop. The shine of gloss and full color. Action heroes. Smoking. Action villains. Criminal exhilaration and all a young mind could make of it. Pages of secret fights and mysterious interlopers. Dizzying trail of nicotine trickling through their blood. Tom surfaced from a serial chapter about a soaring, costumed man, and he startled. Alan had removed himself from his pants and was wiggling it about. Tom frowned and Alan started laughing then, restored himself back into the pants.

"So what the hell was _that_ all about?" Tom asked with humor. Alan only began cackling. Tom chuckled and it built. Alan laughed more. Then Tom was in it. No-stop humor. The catch had them. Anything would be funny after this. Alan snorted when he could not breathe and the moment was ridiculous and great.

"You should have seen how weird you looked," Alan said once they had settled.

"Pff. I thought you were like, jerking it on the comic or somethin'."

The band leader sauntered over to Alan in an exaggerated way, a bit of dance and a bit of hump, stood beside him, hand reaching over. The hand groped and expanded, gripping and squishing Alan's asscheeks in a harsh way, with appetite. Alan lifted his chin and squatted down, blaring the horn with a long, solitary note. The band leader's hand went between Alan's thighs from the back, a lewd grin pitching his mouth up and eyes narrow. Alan's head wiggled side to side as his fingers fretted over the keys, rounding out the solo with a red, pursed face and pressured lips against the brass mouthpiece.

The schoolgrounds being empty was both familiar and new. To be on the property, among the vacant buildings, knowing quiet classrooms and resting books were just inside, out of reach until Fall, was a strange sensation. Alan glanced out over the campus from around the edge of the woodshop. All clear. He returned to his place near Tom and the comics.

"Okay, it was nothin'. Nobody there."

"Good. Last thing we need is to get caught with these. Jesus, my dad would kick my ass for this."

"Man, there it is again. Tom, you gotta stop takin' the Lord's name in vain."

"Just don't do it yourself and you'll be fine. I don't go to church; I can say what I want."

Alan's head expanded like a blister as the notes hung in the air like figs from a bough. His eyes spent their liquid and his lips screamed with pressure beneath their red coating of waxy lipstick. Tom closed his eyes and tried to think of elsewhere. Anywhere. In a moment of musical bravado, the percussionist started swearing on rhythm, had nothing to say and swore it, which became something. The musicians vultured atop their instruments, all with their stares on Alan, all with the sense of a stage in their eyes.

The afternoon had worn into solitude. A small town that grew smaller for certain durations of day. Dinner approached. Twilight. Night. Sleep. These were gearings of life that needed to be allowed, not simply approached.

"Just don't say 'Jesus' like that. At least not around me. And your dad wouldn't be half as mean as mine."

"That's true; your dad is worse."

"Where we gonna keep these?"

"I don't know," Tom admitted.

"We could bury 'em all. Like treasure."

"They'd get ruined. I bet George would take 'em, though. We could store these in his room."

"No. George would steal 'em all for himself. I know he would."

"That's probably true."

"And that ain't a room he lives in. It's still pretty much a barn."

"Well, yeah."

"It's always cold in there and you can't sleep. I hate that place."

When he finished, Alan stood and let the horn dangle at his side, face flush as he panted, empty of eye. The band leader smirked and gave a rough spank against the back of Alan's thigh.

"Damn. I mean, _damn_ ," the band leader said, giving a sharp nod.

The music had ceased and all muttered. Tom's body snapped to form and the moss engaged another inch. He could feel the small, bare tendrils lapsing onto his earlobes. Birds tore through the house then, striking walls and flapping off, exiting through the paneless windows.

In the subsequent quiet, the band leader sniffed his nose and approached Tom. The musicians settled into positions of boredom, waiting for whatever they knew to be inevitable.

"Put it in your mouth and play it," the leader said. Tom clenched his jaw.

"Come on, now. I already got me a good girl. You can be the bad one."

The comics were settled into Tom's pack again and the two boys stood. They would split up their haul later in the week, try to keep the stolen comics hidden in their own homes. Alan worried more about the theft than Tom. He was the good one and couldn't keep a lie indefinitely. Tom was not often so good with his behavior, and knew how to lie quite well. No good letting George in, however. He had more comics than they did, and there were certain things the older George did not need to know. That they had done something criminal without him was one such thing. Tom would likely keep the comics hidden somewhere in his own room.

"So uh, your turn," Alan said.

"My turn?"

"I did mine. Now yours."

"My— Oh. No way. Forget that."

"Go on, lemme see."

"No. That's dumb."

"George showed me his."

"Well, good for George. Come on, let's get home."

"I think maybe George is a fag," Alan said.

"You're only saying that because it's what he says about you."

"He is. I don't care, though. He's already hellbound, so it doesn't change anything."

Tom wrenched an arm from the wall and threw the clarinet across the room, bright spades of pain digging through the wounds in his arm. The moss at the base of his neck lurched for the holes and drank. The band leader smiled and fetched his instrument with a delayed gait, as if this was common and unimportant, as if Tom's resistance was merely a round of going through motions that were expected. Alan whimpered and sat down on the couch, facing away from Tom. The pig squeal reached the window frames again. Urgent and frightened.

A mood of placidity deepened the room into obedience then. All stilled as a sense of lazy servitude filled the air. The percussionist with the pinched, dented face tossed his mallets aside. This man stepped in front of Alan, standing there with his feet apart. Alan fidgeted with the rim of the man's pants and extracted. Tom tried the staples again. When this proved ineffectual, he settled, conserving himself for the next attempt. Alan's motion was a moving skull to nasal exhales.

"You can stay the night. We'll read comics, girl. But for now, let's see you play," the band leader said, standing in front of Tom with blankness, extending the clarinet.

"You can't get in my head and change things. It's not right," Tom said.

"You got it backwards. You're in _my_ head. Now play. And play it good."

"Let me down. Now."

"You want to ceap my good girl? Marry her?" the band leader asked, indicating Alan.

"That's no girl," Tom said.

"Sure she is. That's my wif. You want to get at her, you gotta get married. To do that, you have to play the Wedding March. You've heard it, right? Sounds good with brass and wood, so come on now, we can cover it just fine. I'll do us some Cristen preachin'. They can play backup."

"That's no friend of mine, that's a damn instrument. A wood puppet. Just because it's goin' along with you doesn't make it real," Tom said, angry. The wooden Alan gagged and found his bearing, continued.

"'Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband'," the band leader quoted.

"Go fuck yourself."

"'Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence and likewise also the wife unto the husband. The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband; and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife'."

"Stop talking from the Bible. It's blasphemy," Tom said.

"Now you sound just like her. Go on. I can share."

"You don't know anything."

"Showed it to him. Up close. Like this."

The band leader lifted the staple-gun and perched it atop the bridge of Tom's nose. There was a moment where Tom thought to say anything, to avoid. A mechanical sturdiness jutted to life and a blazing crick of sharpness entered the world. One of the staple's prongs tore through a sinus and stuck there. Tom's eyes clenched shut and he yelped. The clarinet nudged against his teeth.

"I wasn't no queer, Tom," Alan said, having turned his head to the side, taking pause and speaking over his shoulder.

Tom woke from the pain of the staple and slowly opened his wet eyes. A squelch in his mind abated as he caught his senses. The band leader waited for Tom to address the statement. Tom was old bones between trees, bled out, feeding moss and picked clean. With a sigh, he resigned himself to following through, getting on. His arms fell free of the wall.

"You were, Alan. It's okay."

"You shut your mouth. You can't lie in this place. There's no lies here."

"I'm sorry you liked me. I'm sorry I wouldn't talk to you after that."

"I didn't like nobody. You were all assholes. You showed up at the damn hospital drunk. Fuck you, Tom."

George had been right and George had been wrong. A memory leaped upward and shot back into its recess, present for but a moment: Late night. Room. Mustiness beneath a blanket. Uncertain mannerisms and a torpor of prolonged vividness over notions of right and wrong. Smell of comics and boys. Instant sharpening and a reel of worry.

"Want to go home, wif?" the band leader asked.

Tom raised the clarinet with anger and tried to play, but had no ability. Where to start was nowhere. The clarinet may as well have been quantum. Everything and nothing in one and he had no skill. Alan could play music. Claire could play music.

"Go on now, set that bird loose."

"I'm trying. Go to hell," Tom said. The band leader nodded at this. The irritated percussionist grasped Alan's head and caused the young man continue in a rude and vehement manner.

"I don't belong out here. This isn't my house," Tom said.

"So marry her. Tell her you love her. Yoke and forgive her. Wif and wielan. Play the song."

The notes came. Inexcusable and known. He clutched and his fingers did not move but the notes still came. They entered his mind on a fog of tufted feet across mental drift. He knew them and played. The clarinet allowed this. The Wedding March filled the room when the band struck up and accompanied. Only the drums were missing. Alan shook his head and got free of the percussionist, who gave a slight laugh and turned away, depleted, making his way to the skins and lifting his mallets. Alan spoke in a tone of frustration, the tears in his eyes about to run over.

"You don't get to forgive me. And I won't ever forgive you. You're goin' all the way to Hell, Tom."

Tom tried his weight against the staples again. Alan fell against the couch and wept. Alan the crybaby. Alan the tag-along. The runt. Dead, heartily-missed Alan. Things had occurred was all. Young things. Short and sparse. Awkward. Hardly forgotten but not for want to remember. Minds lifted where bodies fell, no matter the arrangement, and carried on into the future forever. There were events in life that could not be cleaned. Ever. They were your dirty times. You had to have them.

"'Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice'," the band leader quoted, smoking as he governed over his boys with an idle hand.

Tom led himself to the end of the Wedding March. His volatility dissuaded with this close of the oddment. The song ceased and Alan stood. The band leader approached him and, with a slow and quiet motion, reached into Alan's thin chest, digging, spreading out the insides. When he retracted his hand, the band leader held the cold, grey stone from the lake.

"Get out. I'm leaving you," the band leader ordered him. This confused Alan.

"I lied," the band leader clarified, "Get it? I'm the fiond. And I don't share."

Alan started crying as he left the room through the front door, dejected and entering suburbia with his head low. The pig squealed in the distance, noting this passing character and staying hidden, waiting for her companion to return. Outside now had a mother and a runt.

Some people did not want forgiveness, which was a thing of similar construction to being forgotten. Some people required so little. But the woods required more. Suburbia required more. Forgiveness was about incident and place, not people. You forgave a person in a place, a time. You forgave an event. Never the whole person.

He tore his back loose from the wall then. Scattered thought running with his blood like slivers of glass around dots of freed mercury. Tom approached the band leader with menace but the hand of the leader rose, exhibited the cold, lake stone. As Tom cocked back to swing, the leader's hand lunged forward. The stone in the hand reached Tom's face and crashed against his mouth, pressuring and forcing between the lips and teeth. The band leader grasped the back of Tom's neck with one hand and shoved the stone in with the other. Tom gagged and grasped the band leader's wrists as they fell back against the bloody, staple-punctured wall. He tried to pull the hand from his face with a fire of preservation.

There was a moment wherein his blood surged to the head, heating it and groping for oxygen before the large stone lugged down into his throat and began its slow, painful descent. Tom slid down against the wall, to the floor, fingers splayed as the stone inched into his cavity and slowly usurped its perch from his heart, crawling into this with a heave of cold and the insentient pangs of numbness. He had once been rid of the heart, in the woods, but was granted its return. He had also been rid of the stone, but this too, had now been returned. The stone and the heart in the same place. It seemed he would now have both.

"'Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the Lord'," the band leader said.

"Stop it," Tom choked, "I know what this was. This was for me, not Alan. So enough with all the religion."

The moss crawled back on itself and ate away to nothing. The members of the band infixed with the walls then, fading shapes and shadows, brief as the breeze amidst scrapes of brush, painted on the dim surface until they too, were gone. White. Drywall. An abandoned trap. The band leader following in a relaxed walk. Spent.

The tangles of thought and mood dissolved from the space in which Tom had come to exist. His blood was warm and itched his back, seeping from the dozens of tears across his shoulders, arms, and middle back. The regret was eaten and diluted. With the house empty, the mother pig waddled in and grunted about, wary, catching scents within the rooms of the neglected home. Tom stood in the house that was not his, an unfinished man in an unfinished place.

He walked outside, covering his face with his hands. Dawn approached, a day's burnishing time, and would soon cock up tall shadows over the suburb through the excitement of the far off Sun. Tom was a caught man with a sad heart, and a free man with a stone in his chest. The break of day opened to the sunny yolk within. He left the suburb and woods behind, walking to the highway, a man who had reached the next day and was resigned to going home.

**Nine**

In the lesser shade of morning, a broad romp of light against the growth aside the road, peeks of George and Alan were sudden. These ghosts gave him waves and brief hellos of recognition and then were gone with as much emphasis. Alan's head leaning from behind a rare spruce, watching Tom and the mother pig's progress down Vogel road. George crawling from straphylea, looking over their direction, then scurrying back into his hide in the brush. They were two of one, a predicament of Tom that had come to roost within his trek home. They were sudden antics. Alan in a rude pose as the sunlight scattered him from view. George beating his chest into the shade. Vogel, which for portions of its length doubled as the highway, passed Applewood and met with either the interstate or the town of Camas Swale. Vogel pressed Tom onward as he left the abandoned suburb project. He was a mile from Brecke road, his road, from Meg and his life, his house at the edge of the swale.

Applewood had been a straggle propped up in nowhere, an exhibit of failed public vision and economic decay. The commencement of housing there had become an empty-bellied haunting grounds. Homes unfolded from their packaging and tacked down. Rebar and pin-nails, drywall and joists. Uninhabited. An anti-oasis. This abandoned flit of life between town and woods was as if a civilized vagrancy. Run-down and dilapidated even before being built-up. Failure before install. Because of money. Not people's money, itches of it in small bins across the world, in banks and jars and mattresses, in minuscule accounts and hands, but money's people, who were of a different shape than Tom or Meg. Than even Lee. Tom had met them many times, money's people. They slapped their keen insight over the wares of his yard. They kept their money with the money of others. Their financial standing did things to improve itself even while they slept. They ordered their wood and solvents, their necessities from Kanell Materials. They made arrangements and created worth.

Money's people were as if haunts, themselves. Folded into their outfits and drizzled into depots and yards and institutions of value. Men with routines, men whose ideas were built with numerical terra cotta and other men. Their talk was constructed. Designed. Professional. Checks and liens and drywall and joists.

Tom had been a foreman, kept the lines straight and the workers on task. Now he was a worker again, with himself as foreman. The lines were no longer straight. The work was no longer so visible. The nights saw him exit the yard in relief, not service. He had no people money. He was a worker by day, but not position. Lee Kanell had no formal title for what Tom had become. A spirit that carried wood from one area of a business to another. That went over what needed to be done and then burned his arms doing it.

Tom had learned after demotion that the penalty for having but eighty dollars in a bank was fifty more dollars. This charge met his blank face and Meg's irate eyes. The fees for not paying invisible and meaningless services were endless. They would not stop, and were designed to keep going even without people. The services charged you for using them. The services charged you for leaving them be. For not knowing about them. Even for the file of complaint. And so he had but pennies in his stomach, a hungry rat on a ship heading deep. These were pennies of great size, yes, with such weight and well-discussed value, but so little worth.

Applewood was but a scab that had crawled over a tremendous, financial wound in the swale, which was but a fault line in a much more vigorous, worldly shatter of bone. Applewood, Kanell Materials... these were like Tom in a way, though as he left the pock-marked suburb behind, the balks and stock no longer important, Tom could walk steady and was still inhabited. The caves crumbled and the roofs fell in, but the people remained.

The day lifted shoots of simple passing over the hills. The light was an upward grove wherein bird might twist for insect and devour these lithe sparks in the air. The warmth began day, but not solely with rays. The slow rise in temperature came from each panel of the world that had felt light, that spun open and bred for it, keeping onto that distant fire that bathed the Earth in liveliness.

An old road. His nape warmed and the long view down the busted back of Vogel was cozy to Tom. The mother pig's hooves scattered aside the gravel that lined the road as Tom walked the shoulder, his hands in his pockets and his head up. The Summer air smelled of lilting bladdernut and fields thick with insects in the fleeting green. The stone in his chest warmed like the pavement. Sun and chirping, the farm lulls and wooded breeze leaving night behind for a fine young day.

George came to him again, walked the other side of Vogel for a time, saying nothing. Too much to say, too much to be. That his widow had likely moved on, like Tom, like the world, was a dire anesthetic. You had to numb to the loss of things. You had to expect to lose them, to keep yourself going. Even people. You expected the difficult vanishings to come, and when they did, you saw them and you felt all your goodbyes, then you struck up forgetfulness to ease the wound back. The memories were tucked away and dismissed to backup with all the brain's symbols and cellarage. This was the tragic stipend for having lived out a certain time. The penalty beyond death was that those closest to whoever was lost moved on. Forgot a piece here and there. Then more. When a family could forget so much, what memory for a man remained in those acquaintances and tertiary folk he had known so slight? Perhaps with these people you never were.

George kicked aside a litter cup, thrown from a passing car some day previous. He had been gone a long time and would be gone the more with each minute. The mother pig acknowledged him in brief glances and snorts, wary but accepting. George had a flunked heart. Took him in Virginia after he exited the military. Young. He had always been a bully. He had walked most of his life by himself with too much to say and a bad heart, even beside those he cared most for.

Tom began around the large curve in the road that labialized the old dairy. This place had been out of function for two decades, having long ago been gutted by time and the other two dairies that worked the other end of the swale. Anymore an underframe in portions, the dairy remained otherwise as heaps atop flatness that leaned against age-infirmed walls. He had worked there when young. His first job. Second if one counted the dog-feeding he had done at the kennel for some of a Summer during high school. The dairy had been taxable, however. Atop the table. Timecards. A real job where he spent his hours affixing teat cups to udders and adjusting pulsation with a small beige dial.

Alan sprinted through the tall, tawny grass that had overtaken the great field between the road and dairy. Cows had once ranged here, eating and standing and jawing their re-chewed grass, oblivious to schedule, being animals until it was time to go inside again for Tom and his cups. Until it was time to become, for a short while, resources. Then they were of worth greater than animals in a field. Human worth. Alan ran in large strides through the now wild grass and weeds, his skinny frame whipped by the light brown blades as he carved back and forth, free amidst the field and fervor.

Then Alan found a way and got onto the road. Through the mother pig, who stood up and became him. He walked with Tom and they were young.

"We can divide 'em up at your house then," Tom said.

"All right, just don't stay in a room with my dad for too long. If you've done somethin' wrong, he can smell it on ya," Alan said beside him.

"Maybe I'll just stay over. It's Saturday and the Sun's goin' down anyway."

"Yeah, that's fine. My mom might make lasagna if you stay over. She likes you."

"Yeah, you're mom's nice," Tom lied.

"You can call your folks when we get there, then."

"Sure."

The comics weighed against his back as they rounded the large bend. The scent of the dairy a blend of shit, cow, grass, machines. The road's low sound of inconvenienced wind between fields was punctuated in the industrial clamor of Baker's Dairy and all the lowing, stilt-legged mother cows. The few bulls were kept inside. They were silent and waited for their pens to open. Waiting to walk and sidle and mount and breed.

Alan left the road beside Tom and entered the field again. Sprinting and running free. Tom grew up and walked with his companion, her hooves in an ongoing chatter with the starkness of old road.

The mother pig stood up then, walked on two hocked legs beside him as an old friend. George had found his way to the road, as well. Crew cut. Military fatigues. Frustration. In time he spoke and Tom listened.

"Well, what do you expect me to do, Tom? You tell me somethin' like this and then expect me to do somethin' about it? What can _I_ do? Get him a better doctor."

"Thing is, he's gonna die, George. It's for sure now."

"Fuck... what a mess. Well, I'm sorry for him. I am. That's... that's a shame. But I ain't comin' back to Camas Swale, Tom. Not to see somebody die. Christ no."

George frowned as his young wife caught up with him in the road, limping up behind, pregnant and weary, ragged of eye where the lids went dark. Her nudity and swollen belly disturbed George to the instant he noticed her.

"Go on. Get out of here," he told her. Tom continued walking ahead of them.

"Boys don't go to Hell for humpin'. Only girls," she said.

"Ah, leave me alone. Go on," he repeated, swatting his hand about in her face. She faltered back at this but only caught up again in a moment. She would not leave.

"I'll tell him you don't have the money to come," Tom concluded.

"Fine. Do that," George said.

"You should be here, though. It's the right thing."

"Yours is the best," the woman said then.

"Oh, goddamn it."

George turned and shoved his weight to the forearm as he drove his martial fist deep into her stomach.

"You keep your damn mouth shut! Don't be messin' with me. I ain't havin' no kid," he shouted, standing over her as she lay bleeding in the road.

"I don't want to see him die, either," Tom said, "But we're friends. We grew up together. I owe it to him to see things through. You do, too."

George stopped walking then and slowly kneaded his hand over his chest, puzzled. Tom continued on, staring ahead, not looking back at the beaten woman in the road, at George grimacing from the pains in his chest.

"Jesus, I don't feel good," George said, confused.

"From your mother's side," Tom commented, "give it time."

"Tom, I- I think somethin's wrong."

"I know, George," he said, leaving his old friend to the road.

Past troubles that held his hand and then let go. Summer things, behind him like the fading, distant hills of the swale. Tom and the pig made their way to Brecke. The street that began his neighborhood and the slideway to home. Each second was the latest appeasement. Tom was not young but the world was, so long as the Sun kept rising.

He had taken the road home so many times. It had been three decades since he did so without a vehicle, but the route was the same. He walked long, weathered Vogel, past the Porch lookout, all the way to Baker's Dairy, the bend. In a truck, a person could take this mild bend at a high speed with but a slight tilt of the hands. On foot, it seemed to curve for far too long. The road turned but eighty degrees, but it felt to take an hour.

The man and his pig made their way three hundred yards beyond the bend before reaching the left turn. Tom's left turn. Brecke road. His eager legs lost their weariness and he sped up. A quarter mile walk of familiarity so honed he felt he owned all he saw on this perch of the planet. It was in him and he belonged to it. Then his driveway. The front yard. Up the four steps and to the door.

Tom knelt on his front porch and met the pig's shoulders with his hands. Petting and a gentle nudge beneath her chin. What served for a smile.

"Thank you," he said, giving her a last pat and standing. The mother pig turned and began waddling back through the yard and up Brecke. Tom sighed and stood on his porch alone. While he did not think it, his hand knew that the doorknob only worked when turned clockwise anymore. There were certain things the hands, and the feet and the tongue, certain things the body could remember on its own, without having to ask much of the mind. It was a symptom of his station and a comfortable knowledge manifest in routine. He strained behind his face to keep the pleasing view of his life from galling out in tears. It was done. His hand turned the doorknob. He was home.

He entered when the door opened. His father in a chair, mother on the couch. Meg stepping from the kitchen and smiling. Tom shut the door behind him. He had missed his birthday, but this was no trouble; he could simply have it today. A day late was simply another day away from never.

"There he is," Larry said, a touch accusive.

"Hi dad."

Tom stepped with relief through the threshold of his home and closed the door behind him. He made quickly for the arms of Meg. So small and inconsequent when you were away from them, but so warm and finicky when they found you. The stone in his chest pulsed and the heart shivered from the pressure. Meg would grow up to be a wonderful woman, quiet but kind in a regimental way, forgiving yet the sort to do so in secret. For now, she watched his approach and held out her little girl arms. His wife. His caring, ever-certain wife. There was a scratching at the door behind him. He hugged her, so sorry, so thankful. His fine young day was full of fine young people. The scratching happened again. His mother left her place on the couch and stood near him. His father approached as well, somehow both pleased and annoyed. Tom held the little girl Meg and as the family began to sing him his song.

"Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear To-ommmm..."

But Tom let her go. Backed up. The song ceased and the scratches at the door became thumps. His father was so tall. Years of pulling greenchain fusing his back into a jittery mess of bends and resilient mass. His mother in her cornflower dress, muted but young. Meg the little girl. Tom the little boy.

The front door shoved open then and the mother pig scrambled inside, squealing in panic.

"Happy birthday to you," Meg finished, awkward. His father grunted and his mother clapped.

The dizziness whelmed and swelled as Tom turned within it. The Buick out front and the pictures on the wall. Baby Tom picture. Larry and Susan getting married picture. Great grandparents not yet dead picture.

"Well, what do you want for your birthday?" his mother asked. Everyone bent forward to listen.

Tom began crying.

His mother's concern and his father's disgust. Meg's small hand slid into his own.

"Tom?" his mother asked, "What's wrong? Is it something you can't have for your birthday?"

"I want it to stop," he muttered.

"Oh honey... no, no. Nothing stops anymore."

The mother pig skittered across the wooden floor and collided with Tom, shaking and frightened. She gave a slight squeal and tried to press him back toward the front door. To get him out of the house.

"Damn animals," Larry said, withdrawing his service pistol from his belt.

The room tilted. Air thinned. Sun became fake. Tom turned his head in the moment's inebriation and watched his father fire the pistol into the head of the pig. She jerked and had a startle backward, falling to her side. Her legs kicked and cycled until the squeals became lulls of the throat. The legs slowed. Small revolutions as Tom's sight spun.

"Oh, put that thing outside," Meg advised.

"Disgusting animals," his mother commented.

Tom watched his father waft a hand over the pistol's pipe, smelling the discharge and flag of smoke. Larry then admired Tom's head. Spots to see. Soft ones. Where the bone met the muscle and where the brain was. Larry held the handgun in an authoritative way. He could speak with the instrument, dole panic with it. Good man to know when trouble was afoot, or needed, so long as you never called him Lawrence.

The mother pig's hooves lifted and drew back, as if she were running at an eighth her speed, on her side, going nowhere. Running in the air, then walking, then nothing. Laying on the floor as the color ran from her head.

The smell of smoke from his father's cigarette mingled with powder from the pistol's byplay. The old house. Larry's boy was a level one, kept clear of most trouble, managed himself. A good boy. Tom was a good boy.

"Well, school's out," Larry said then, "So you'd better figure out what you want to do with your Summer." This was more a warning than a comment.

Tom's mother nodded and quietly retreated to their bedroom. Once inside, she said goodbye and the door shut her in. Meg smiled and her feet lifted from beneath her. She struck the ground on her back and the tainted air of the house dragged her by the arms into Tom's room.

"I love you," she said fast as the door sealed her in, just like Tom's mother.

Larry circled his boy in the living room, holding the M1911 service pistol. He had long ago ceased his story of having shot Germans with it, but only because this bothered his wife too much to hear. Lawrence the infantryman had come back from the war and become Larry the greenchain puller. He had been a young man from Washington flown to Europe, given the right to kill there, and then was brought back and let loose again. He had settled in Oregon. The injuries from years of greenchain had attached to his age like step-fungus around a tree. He cleared his throat then and slid the pistol back into his belt, cracked his neck and winced.

"Mind your manners in this house, Tom. No actin' up."

"Yes, sir," Tom submitted, holding still and looking at the floor. The weight of the air was oppressive. The pig on the floor started moving again but her size had diminished. She was no longer the mother pig, but the runt. The feral sort boys might find in the woods. In the past. She nudged her way slowly to her feet and tried to steady, a strange sound emanating from her throat. The runt pig took a loose, confused step and propped her side against the coffee table.

The door to the den opened as if a great yawn. Into this room Larry backed, eyeing his boy with scrutiny. Tom was a good boy because Larry watched. Always. Once the father was in the den, he gave a light nod and narrowed his eyes.

"You find yourself a job for the Summer, Tom."

"Yes, sir. I will."

"Better be hard work, too. But just the same, don't you go bein' nobody's nigger, either."

"No, sir."

"Good. Now go get rid of that goddamn wood pig."

The door shut. The den would be his dwelling place. His cote. Tom's family had been digested by the house, which would now keep them in the cages of rooms.

It had been close to Fall, but now Summer was just beginning again. For a child. Tom. He was home and the house knew him and its seams held his weave, hungered for his loved ones and his feared one. The rooms had eaten now, would keep their occupants and give them perches from which to dangle. The house had glutted and the studs were his own. The woods and the things within that place had liked him, wanted to keep him. It seemed this was also true of the house. The walk had been arduous, but he had made it home. He was finally here, and the house wanted to keep him. Maybe give him a room, too. Summer forever.

Ten years old, Tom laid down on the floor of the living room and wept. The day was unending and it was no good day. The mother pig was gone but her runt remained. The sound of a hyena's chortle trickled from outside. The small pig looked torn in places. A strange abortion or else something hurt by neglect. Thrown against rock, shot through the head, taken into the river on a metal hook. Abandoned or forgotten. Blood branching down the neck and chest, circling the hooves. The runt was not cognizant in the way a pig should have been. Head-shot like its mother, half gone. Mentally stunted from the injury. A little girl pig. She made a gagging sound and surveyed her surroundings, one eye wet, trailing where she glanced and seeing little. She then lurched and shot across the hardwood in urgency, smashing her head against the front door several times, terrified and wanting out. He watched as the muscles in her neck tensed, relaxed, hardened again, the bullet in her skull spanking out waves of ache and then lapse.

"I want it to stop," Tom repeated.

The roof lifted and night poured in. May bugs and damp warmth. Screen doors and empty sky. Summer.

## Part Two

Ten

The orange car careened into the violet truck. Miniatures he had grown bored with. Drive them. From point A. Then culmination in a dull wreck when his interests disbanded with point B. These scale vehicles, remnants of his kindergarten life, were then left on the hardwood floor of the living room where his bare feet might discover them again in time. His thoughts had begun to curl with boredom and this stasis had lifted him to pacing and talking to himself. He would now maybe try again with the book his teacher had assigned to read over the Summer, but that Tom had given up on. Maybe make a poster with cardboard and copious drags of black marker. Build something for his stomach out of bread and give the air some noise from the radio or television.

The few playthings in the house were for his younger self, baby toys and toddler toys. A few books. There were no real articles of fun in the home, none present that fit his age. Not in Larry's house. Not that his father would have ever bought or permitted Susan to buy. Larry and money and the upbringing years were a father and grumbles and a time of staying quiet.

" _Get this through your head, Tom: I go to work to keep you and your mother fed and clothed under my roof. You understand that? It's mine; and so long as you live here, you'll get whatever I feel like givin'."_

" _It's just one, though. I only wanted the one."_

" _Well, you'll be eighteen one of these days, and after that, if there ain't no damn war goin' on, you can do whatever the hell you want. Listen, I don't jerk timber all day to pay for you to be entertained, Tom. If you want a dog so bad, go get a job and buy it yourself."_

" _They're free. Don't cost anything. There's a whole litter."_

" _There's nothin' free about it. Not after the second day there ain't."_

" _But I can't get a job. I'm not old enough."_

" _Then you're too damn young for luxury. Handle it."_

Having so few articles with which to play was a forced criticism. Larry had cooked him into a certain form, ten years old, and his toys were now people. These could not come out, however. Hid in rooms, in homes, within parents, in the times. These were friends but a bike ride into town, through a span in nature full of enemies.

Tom returned to the living room window and peered through the damp pane, his previous days molted off by a night's sleep. _Gulliver's Travels_ was odd and he did not feel to read it any more. The spine was roughed from other hands. The text was small and needle-like. Ants lined the outer sill. They moved like text, searched as a living mesh of reconnaissance.

He could see the woods in the distance and the Ogilvie house where the neighbor kids lived. That house would later be abandoned, and eventually bought from Jimmy Ogilvie and restored to a sharper state. It would become Maro Pasquel's house. That future was Tom's past, but Tom's deeper past was now immingled. Present. All around him.

Tom could see Brecke where it met Vogel and vanished. In the thick brush that lined this road were people, he thought. They moved about and waited. An ambush or staging ground. There were enemies waiting for him to come outside, and a house that wanted him in. Tom watched through the glass. The brush moved and the creatures within it quieted.

He heard a drip of water, one that occurred at times from the kitchen. He was resigning himself to locating and fixing this when a pebble struck the window before him and he startled. Somewhere in Tom's mind, a notion of confusion was ground hard and then poured into a sieve of shock. This in turn called worry. The runt pig gave her brief glint of alarm and backed from the window. Tom felt to go outside, but there was no one to have thrown the pebble. Nothing to see but the day.

School had lately stirred him some. There were all the swalers to know, some you were keen about, some you stayed away from. But with the good parts of school there was also reading. And history. Things Tom was not good at. His Summer catch-up sat on the coffee table wanting to be read, an assignment, but he had no interest. The mysterious land in which Gulliver chronicled did not enjoy being read about.

"Well, it's harder to catch-up later, so do it now and it's easy," Mrs. Ross had explained, "You don't want to start off behind like you are now."

"All of these?"

"It's three books and a paper, Tom. You can do that over Summer with ease."

"Summer's when I'm supposed to _not_ do school."

"Now, don't talk back. You'll be a sixth-grader next year, but only because I'm allowing it. This is how you make it right for me letting you pass the fifth grade, understand?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"You take these home and give 'em to your folks with my note. Don't forget, because I'll call your mother about it."

Bread, pastes, butter knife, sandwich. He set this on one of the small saucers his mother had collected for the tea she never made. Glass of milk. Two sheets of lined paper to his right on the table. A bite of the sandwich. Thinking. Another bite.

He wrote _What I Did Over Summer Vacation_ at the top and added his name in the right margin. In fourth grade, he had used large, bulky pencils and set his name in the left margin, but in fifth grade Mrs. Ross had preferred the right margin, and normal pencils. This was more certain to Tom. Fit his hand better. Next year would be Mr. Kemp, months away waiting for Tom's Summer assignments, these given in collaboration with Mrs. Ross, as make-up work from the previous year. While she taught fifth grade, Mrs. Ross spent a lot of time talking to Mr. Kemp outside the sixth grade classroom. She liked Mr. Kemp. There were rumors.

Tom had heard high-schoolers were allowed to use pens. Ink. This seemed a wondrous thing. Ink was certain where streaks of lead were childish. But first sixth grade. Then junior high. Seven more years of school before he was done, each beginning at the snuff of a Summer. Maybe sixth grade would have better pencils, ones that did not break so often.

"Hey Tom, my eraser fell off. You still got one?"

"Yeah, but don't chew on it, George."

He had no ideas. Where to start. The slowed pig lowered her head on the table and attempted more sleep. He reached over and lightly tugged one of her forelegs a couple of times in play and she yawned. Tom had done nothing over Summer thus far but avoid his nonsensical homework and compliment his boredom with vague thoughts of elsewhere.

" _First thing I did was I went to the moon,"_ he wrote, smiling, " _but those moon people up there eat rocks and are assholes._ "

After a moment and a bite of his sandwich, he flipped his pencil over and erased what he had written. Smudges of grey now fogged the line in which he would need to scrawl a new beginning. He wondered what his friends were doing. Probably not writing a paper. Not having to read _Gulliver's Travels_. Probably biking around George's neighborhood and having fun. This got Tom thinking about the phone number. Tucked into the pocket of his school folder. Been there for a year without coming out.

At a clash with the unmoving hour, Tom opened the tan folder and viewed the assignments and take-home projects he had completed over the school year. Fifth grade civil war paper: _Bull Run, Shiloh, the Confederacy, repeating rifle._ All the fifes and dates and names and past. Then a sheet hashing out the insides of a spider, as a drawing with offshot diagonals leading to descriptions that sounded creepier and sharper than the crawlers themselves: _Chelicerae, pedipalps, spinnerets, cephalothorax_. Common beasties with remarkable parts. Then a scrap of yellow paper with a poem on it. Someone famous for poems. Tom's handwriting beside it: _Introduction, stanza, ABAB, Conclusion._ A boring affair to all but Mrs. Ross.

School was about taking things apart and looking at their insides. Wars and spiders and writing and places. He had heard that high schoolers did this with real animals. Right there on their desks. They cut the animals up and pulled out all the pieces, then stuck little flags with names on each part. It was called anatomy. He imagined a labeled flag stabbed into his hand, through the bone, into the table beside his sandwich, pinning him there: _Hand_.

The number was in her rotund and yet minuscule handwriting. Written on the back of a vocabulary sheet. On one side were the words he had memorized for school: _Gaucho. Nettlesome. Mesmerize._ And on the other were but the seven numerals, separated near mid-point by a dash. She had turned around in her desk and written them on his paper one afternoon, with no talk or even looking at him. Tom went over the numbers and made his way to the telephone. The thought of chicken soup, the smell of saturated carrot and yellow broth on her lips, the sensation of being atop her in that awkward moment of young scrutiny. It had been exciting at first, but ultimately nothing at all. Kind of a chore.

He lifted the phone and entered the numbers. Waited while the other end pulsed. He thought about what he wanted to do over Summer, what would make a good paper. Being in a house on fire would be good. Getting out and being okay. Swimming all the way upriver through the swale, like a fish. Maybe jumping his bike an extraordinary distance. Going hunting with his father and bringing down a six-point. Or maybe even incurring a girlfriend.

"Hello?"

"Uh, hi sir. Is Nitya there?"

"Yes. Who's this?"

"It's Tom. I used to come over with—"

"Oh, I know, I know. Okay. Larry's boy."

"Yeah."

"So, you're calling pretty girls now, huh?"

Tom had no response to this. The ensuing pause of conversation grew uncomfortable.

"I'm only teasing, is all. I'll get her."

The father shouted for his daughter and after a moment, a round of Indian banter began between the two. Whatever Mr. Baruah said caused Nitya to laugh as her voice gained ground on the receiver.

"Uh, hello?"

"Hi, it's Tom."

"I know. I can't believe you called me."

"No?"

"I don't know. I just can't believe you called me."

"Oh. Well, I figured it was Summer, and we're out of school, so maybe we could do something."

"Like what?"

"I didn't really decide yet. Uh, what do you want to do?"

"Together?"

"If you want."

"Well, I don't know what there is to do."

"That's funny. Me neither."

Stillwater talk. Not even weather. Her breaths came through the earpiece and tongued against his drum, burrowing in the wax and carrying her vitality into his thoughts. A person engaged to talk but with nothing being said. This silence crushed Tom into a shy fret of words. Which to say. The conversation moved then, was reinitiated when Nitya actuated his ear with her habit of repeating things.

"I can't believe you called me."

"Well, maybe do you have a bike?" he inquired.

"Uh huh. An old one, but I think it still works."

"Okay. Just come over to my house."

"No, my dad wouldn't like that."

"How come?"

"And besides, Yama is in the woods now with his dogs. You can't go anywhere if he's hunting."

"Okay. But I'm tired of being in this house."

"Well, you'll just have to stay in there. Go play in your room, maybe."

"I can't. It was taken away. It's a place for someone else right now. She can't come out, either. And I can't go in."

"That's sad."

"Who's Yama?"

"A Hindu demon. His two dogs drag people away. He lives near where you live and nobody can go around there."

"That sounds bad," Tom said, looking through the window at his neighborhood. Flits of moving brush then stillness.

"Well, he's been looking at you, Tom. He's been watching you all morning. And that's not good. Are you trying to be my boyfriend now?"

"Yes."

"I thought you grew up and got married."

"Well, sometimes I did."

The call ended with no resolve, no plan or outcome. They had said hello. The pencil met the white and scurried in small snares and rabbit-eared letters. What he did over Summer vacation. The sandwich but crumbs and the milk poured out for lack of preference or thirst. He had never much liked milk. Ear hot from the phone and lungs tired from the stale air of the house. His father's smoke had entered from beneath the door to the den.

What Larry did in there was no one's business, especially not Tom's. Smoking and cursing, mumbling and the occasional laugh. His arms dense from the years of sorting just-cut lumber into stacks, from pulling, lifting and stacking all day, twists that had culled his back over time, made it stiff from incessant injury, busted up, meaty.

Tom raised his pencil and gave it things.

What I did over Summer vacation was say goodbye to George (he sat behind me in class last year) because he joined the ARMY and went to a base in Germany. They don't call it Germany though. They call it Deutschland. The second thing I did was have a girlfriend for a little while. Then I met Claire and she became my girlfriend. Claire got rid of her baby though so then I left her because I didn't want to spend my Summer with her anymore. My friend Alan (front row in my class last year) got sick and then he died and I went to his funeral and his mom was crying. It made everyone cry because no one thought she would. George didn't come to Alan's funeral then George had a heart problem but I didn't cry and his funeral happened and I didn't go. I feel bad about that. It was a sad summer and I lost both of my friends.

After that I had some more girlfriends but they didn't like me much. One was even mean about it. Then I met a girl and she was nice and she liked me lots so I decided to spend my Summer with her and got married. I got my folks house for us to live in so we're doing good that way and we don't want any kids either because we're like that and want to be just us. So I've got a Summer job at Kanell Materials where I get to be in charge of other people and they do what I say because I used to do it all the time. But I don't have any friends anymore and Kanell is going to close I think. And Meg is not herself lately because of money. I don't get an allowance anymore so Summer has been hard for us. Sometimes I think about selling the house and giving her the money and then leaving her so she can find a better person. I know that's silly.

The new problem is that I messed everything up and I got shot at Haven Lake and I don't ever feel right anymore. I look forward to high school but I don't know if I'm smart enough to do it. Right now I'm buried inside the house. I think it wants to pick a room and keep me in there forever. Maybe the shed.

And I'm sorry but I still haven't read that Gulliver's Travels.

Growing up was about taking things apart and looking at their insides. All the problems he knew of seemed to be outside of the objects people trusted, but people kept looking inside. Put the medicine inside you, change your view, think over things until they seemed like different things. A sandwich was a snack, or maybe a meal, or not. You had to conclude which thing it was. The phone number he had been given was a bit of technology, or a part of what and where someone lived, or a gift from a girl who liked him. It was supposed to be all of these things, but people preferred to dedicate one or two things for something to be. The rest was outside. Where everything you did not want ended up waiting.

Tom stood at the kitchen window, watching the brief passes of light through the tall brush and trees. Meghan was locked away in his room and his parents were trapped behind their doors. There was Tom and there was the house, but which owned the other had now become ponderable. The structure was established by the materials used to build it, was inertia made of walls, a certain wooden limbo. The house was a suspension taking up Tom's enfeebled pieces and thinking about what to write on all the little flags. The house had taken his past and now used it as the subject of anatomy. He was so young, so small. He felt like nothing Summer wanted.

Something enormous shook the upper boughs of a tree up the road. He watched as the intermittent breaks in foliage gave up its shadow, massive and quickly gone. Perhaps a plane silently crashing, or a moon in the woods turned crescent, or a Hindu demon with dogs. There were further sparks of movement in his periphery, but never right where he looked. Whatever lived out there was many, and they knew he was inside. He felt their presence like one could feel moisture in the air.

Tom was locked in a place. Sometimes a living room or else a hardwood cell. Sometimes his youth or else a crippled series of memories. He was trapped in a kitchen, before an opened refrigerator. He was made to stand before windows and watch. A room wherever he went. But outside was where everything waited for him. All the things he did not know or grasp. It was the wild, the one vast room, the grand board on which life and innervation could be waged. It was the place of feral boys and pigs, where nothing stood still, even when it did. God lived out there, where the rules were unclear, not in a home with books and milk and phone numbers. Summer was so long in a house, a sinking into deep lag, and insoluble.

He picked up the runt pig and held her. Pet the injured head and got her to a point of lounging.

"How about we get out of here? Just you and me," he offered. This was more conclusion than notion. The runt nuzzled his arm with her flat, damp snout.

They made for the front door. The house did nothing. The pig grunted and leaned her head against his chest as he grasped the knob. Tom felt the stone against his young heart warm and he opened the old door, stepping out onto the porch. The neighborhood was quiet and peaceable as he made his way down the steps. He breathed the fresh air in his front yard and spoke.

"It's okay. No more school and no more Summer. See? We can leave."

The pig jerked in his arms and he fought to keep hold of her. The sudden animation of the animal in his arms surprised him and a slow sense of alarm rose in his mind. He held her tightly so she would not fall, looking about his neighborhood to discern what had startled her so. All of Brecke shook loose its mooring then.

The winds picked up and a chill overcame him. A terrible hum encompassed his thoughts as the anger of the house, of all the houses, filled the very air with their invective. He was not to leave the house, he was to be Summer's boy and stay the rooms. He stood in the yard, trying to maintain his grip on the runt pig. The world was disgusted with him and stared. When he did not turn back for the house, the road lifted at the shoulders, the shoddy sidewalk, pursing into a great and stony maw before him. A mouth of asphalt full of movement and things. Tom held both the pig and his breath, made a decision in the shape of panic, and began running from the house, up Brecke, moving as fast as he could.

The beasts in the copse that lined this hungry place bristled into motion.

**Eleven**

The good manners of Brecke road had stirred into a calamitous opus of haunts and wood folk. Tom had left the yard. This eruption of activity down Brecke was as water dashed apart with a stick, crests of which spilled over into further expanse and waves against cornerstones. Each terrible thing woke the next. This rippling road of devils and beasts opened up each place of hiding it had, and all came out for Tom. The brush and the ground, hillocks and wind, the sky and low underpainting of Camas Swale.

Tom moved away from his home, holding the runt tight, up Brecke and away from the cursed house of his youth. The maw in the road widened. Ahead, from the junction where the road met Vogel, Tom saw the giant move. Gaining ground quickly and moving down Brecke, Yama loped with his bull snout and tremendous girth, shaking the earth beneath him, his two leashed dogs a crash of disasters and lustfulness. These hungry beasts worked hard against their restraints and the demon let them forward. Tom changed direction as they made the distance in ever increasing, bounding increments. Air full of barks and the gnashing twists of heads. They were boys. Massive dogs of boys. One smashed and cursed while the other wept and prayed, but both were hungry. Both used their notched, vile teeth.

In another youth, Susan had angled the scissors beside his head, moved in, drawn the hair tight, and cut. Flickers of itch had crept down his arm as the hair fell in small clumps and points. Just that day, that morning, but the other day and morning, the first one before he grew up.

"You like that Jimmy Ogilvie?" she had asked.

"He's okay."

"Shouldn't play with those kids, Tom. Any of 'em from that house."

"Why not?"

"Because they're dirty. That Ed Ogilvie is a convict and his wife beats up on those two old dogs they got."

"Jimmy's not dirty, mom."

"He most certainly is. Has that awful grime behind his ears. He'll get you into trouble someday."

"No, he's nice. Likes bikes, too."

"Tom, people are judged by the company they keep. That's why certain folks don't mix. Bad folks always want to look good, so they try to spend time with good folks, but good folks never want to look bad, see? It's lopsided."

"But he's the only kid close by."

"Be that as it may, I don't want you spending time with those kids. There's another reason, too. Your father and Ed are gonna have words, Tom. Later on today. About how Ed's been havin' those kids throw all their garbage out in the woods lately."

"They do that?"

"Bags of it. Your father went out last night and found the spot."

"Why would they?"

"Because they're dirty people. And they're low about things. You don't play with those kids anymore, understand?"

Yama stamped the cement in his approach. People left their homes at this noise of happening. At times these people were the Ogilvie kids, ripped shirts and messy hair, grime on their hands from eating and playing in the dirt. At times, these people were Maro and Jan, confused, scouting up the road and shouting to one another. The Ogilvie kids swore and pointed, then became Maro and Jan, who left their home at the approach of Yama, sprinting along the shoulder as George and Alan bounded behind, nude boys, dogs on their leashes and the devil guiding them in coarse, bullheaded shouts.

Maro shouted huya to his wife several times as they ran. When Jan turned, however, Maro did not. They separated in the consequence of hurry. Maro went left toward the dairy field while Jan swiveled toward Tom's house, a bucket of eggs in tow. Each boy with eight dragging breasts full of milk, leaving behind thin spatters of white as they loped after Maro, eyes swarming with a savor for his panic. Then they got him, tore him down and bit in, jerking their heads to widen the wounds. Pulling their kill from him. Feral boys. Wood animals. Somebody's devils in caught up people. Then Maro was never made.

Tom ran, eleven years old, avoiding the woods, aside the street, lungs full of weight and the stone in his chest beating against its foundation. He passed the Ogilvie house, it's rooms occupied with runny children. These had vanished in a sweep of time and degree. The Ogilvie house had been empty and abandoned long before being purchased by Maro. The tree line receded from the street as Tom traveled up Brecke. The line drew back further each moment, then lunged forward and usurped a place behind the houses. Small and inconsequent woods. Hiding so he might not find them.

Beyond his street was the forest's skirt under which the world scurried and had out its breeding and impermanence, allowing the brief, breathy course. In time. Points of creatures born into an unavoidable devastation, misery that wore happiness, statues that walked and held up their times with as much heart as the world could endure. Demoniacs. Where civilization twisted, its boughs cricking off in each direction, fed from the shaft, watered from the wild, was civilization's rim. Into this world came all the people, the eras and ages, the generations and days. The second wave born to eat the first, a third wave born to eat the second. His father's enemies were his grandfather's suspicions. The wars and philosophies were recorded and soon designed the next wars and philosophies. Forepersons passed their arrogance or naivety down the generational line, and down that line's line, and built a world from the past in which the future's babies could be born. Tom's enemies had been given to him. They had fallen from the raised eyebrows of people like his father.

His mother's hand on his shoulder. Long ago or just that day, in the kitchen while waiting for bacon.

"Don't you dare go into that mess over there. If they aren't asking, you don't go, Tom. Everybody's dying over there."

"Don't worry about that. I don't want to go to any war."

"Well, just so you know. That George Vick isn't very smart. If he wants to join the service, that's his business, but you're smarter than him. Remember that. I know he's trying to get you to join up with him. You don't listen to that boy, understand?"

"It's okay, mom. No one listens to George."

The Vietcong behind his home, startling from their small, brushy keeps and taking station behind anything. They were old men, no longer cognizant of strategy, ambling in dilapidated gaits and sundering thoughts. One behind the telephone pole, covered but for the shoulders and balls of the hip. One with his back against the old Buick. Tom's mother used to dust it free of spiders in the Spring.

Hyena children, Claire's children, clung to the throat in the road. With quick motions they ascended onto the teeth of the great maw. Things of a sort from the gut. They reached from the mouth and grabbed at anything near, any person, any leg. They were the life of mouths and stomachs, those riders on the hearts of forgotten things, lit with grey cloud light, blood on their heads and painful screams of transition. Never hyenas. Never boys or girls. Aborted or never to be. Breaches in the world that held their bellies in discomfort, stones and beasts and emotion in constant collision and wrapped up in bodies with saliva-wet hair. The broad tongue swept them from one side of the mouth to the other and their reaches caught Jan's ankles and feet. They dragged her in, fucking and chewing. Tearing her open at the back and rendering. Deconstruction in short, pained swipes. The eggs spattered into the street, breaking their yolks on the pavement and scattering shell to the curb.

The hyena children drew back in a hush and the thin lips closed. Lifted. Swallowed. When they opened wide again, Jan Pasquel had never been made. The hyena children perched on the teeth like sharks in a pool, snarls in jerking snouts, edging as Tom moved, keeping close and waiting for Tom to come too near.

Little Meghan beat against the inner window of Tom's bedroom, shouting for him to return, her face a meal of emphasis and disarray. She was the hand-holding little girl, then the middle-aged wife who would not kiss him much. Which one of those girls had married him? Which did he cherish when atop his love in the nights? Which had been let down by his slow anemia of income? Perhaps both.

He reached the coops behind Maro's house and hit the soil, crawled beneath them as the runt pig sidled up next to him in fright. The air was bursting with activity, sunlight gone but replaced with animosity. The chickens above made squalor sound, moved about in tips and jerks, snapping their small beaks at bits of feed and one another. A femininity tufted and settled with beaks and talons, strutted wicks of distended avian life.

Behind Tom, the whisper rose. Atop his back, toward the base of his skull. Weight forming, inching, quietly speaking up his nape and into his hair and ears.

"They were alone so I moved into them. Like this. I was alone when I did it. Some looked away but some looked right at me."

Tom turned over as the ancient soldier humped, laid out like a girder atop him, looking away but speaking to Tom, entreating, one face at another. He held a thrice circled length of cord in his hand and clutched this as all important.

"I did it with this. Sometimes the night said no, but I lived on the ground. The ground always said yes, and I choked one, and his mother. But it was only the start."

The cord unraveled and draped down between the soldier's hands, his foreign medals jangling as the thin length dropped and was drawn under, snaring at the back of Tom's neck. The soldier drew up hard and Tom's face lifted into the medals. Smell of cloth and gunpowder. Soil and sweat and intention. A man so old as to be decrepit, alive in his bones only. The runt pig scurried from beneath the chicken coop and squealed at Tom to follow. Tom pushed the weary soldier loose and kicked against the elevated floor of the coop, worming his way backward from beneath it. The Nazi stayed, peering out at him. Muttering in regret and need and volatility.

"Kommen zurück," the erstwhile man said quietly, wrapping the length of cord around his own neck and drawing it tight. He gagged and waited. Above him, the chickens staggered and fell to their sides in the small cages, rolled slowly into final probity amidst dust clouds of disease and virus. Moss waiting to happen amidst feathers.

The mists of disease had come, infecting the neighborhood. Each teeming drift palsied the air like the brawny note of a great horn. These vapors were chicken kill air, swine kill spread, cow disease poison... All the animal blood-stunting that had found in its appetite a space for humans.

Around the house and a leap over the small hedge into the front yard, the abandoned house the Ogilvie's had once occupied. Particles rising over the home and saturating the air, spreading into boughs, riding drops of rain as if small deaths in watery cells. Ever falling transport through the enemy, circling and sniffing the past of Tom's heavy sprint, his far apart footprints through the yards. The disease filled these prints and kept forward for the source.

His mother's hands in his hair as she picked through, examining. Glass of water on the table beside his arm as she lifted small creatures and drowned them behind the glass.

"I told you not to play with those kids."

"I'm sorry."

"You can get all sorts of things from folks like that. Lice. Mono. Scabies. That damn chicken flu over in Eugene. I've seen kids spitting snot all over town lately. It's that flu."

"Okay."

"You know what to do if you see someone coughing, right?"

"Hold my breath."

"Hold your breath. Wait 'til they pass by, then get out of the trail they might have left behind and get clean air. Don't step where they just walked. You go to the side."

"It's just the flu, mom."

"For now."

Tom ran through the yard of the Ogilvie house, the children he was not supposed to play with laying on the ground, muttering as they clutched their stomachs and sides. It was then that Old Tom came for him. Old Tom with Old Meg. The adult Tom grabbed from the brush near the Ogilvie's side-yard and shook him. These haunts of his life now aged and angry. The adult Meg kicked the runt pig aside and the adult Tom drew his hand back. Then fist against the head, beating and swearing down on his boyhood. On young Tom. Lumping the boy up. The self. The runt pig nipped at Old Meg's heel and was sent back from a stomp as Old Tom grappled his youth, horrified and wanting to be young Tom, to start out and not end up. Young Tom tore loose on a panic and ran from them down the sidewalk, pig in a manic sprint beside him as the neighborhood swiveled over and began to enclose.

"Happy birthday," Old Tom said, tired, following his youth in a salivary way. His wooden face had aged and was coated in grit from the lake. His hands shook and his jaw gasped open for air again and again. Young Tom reached his yard crying, young Meghan behind the bedroom window beating against the glass, begging Tom to come back inside. The damned house. The inescapable rooms that devoured his loves.

A dead-leaves rush of money began surging past his feet, scraping across the ground and into the aching mouth. Bills fluttered past and coins scraped across the cement, drawn to the mouth in the road as if it were a maelstrom. The Claire's children moved aside as the currency flowed down over the tongue into the Earth's neck, as the disease in the ground and the disease in the air met and became soil. As satellites hurtled across the sky and the Earth shook.

Massive Yama, steersman or a staunch manifestation of early civilization's fear, stood on his bull-stilt legs with his horrible boys, his dogs, hunger dripping from his snout at the yard's edge. The boys were on his leashes, heaving, eyes judging. Claire's children pulled the fur from one another's faces, ripping and crying, madly counteracting their worth with their need. It was torpor without Tom. They were revolted with being his haunts. The runt pig backed away from the billows of sickness that spun from the brush. These began surrounding the yard and house.

Tom leaving the house had been hubris to them. He neared his porch and everything began gathering at the yard's edge, the house surrounded by the terrible dream. This gathering reactor of supergestation and a carrier of bloodswarm and fever, these animals and specters and soldiers and expiry... they would not enter the property. The state of these world eaters, these destroyers of men, was that they kept the outside where he thought to have so much space. The truth was that he had none. He would follow himself wherever he went, and in himself was the rest, the others, the world taken with him in all manners and monsters.

His mother pet his neck and frisked her hand through his hair. The past in his mind on his body in the present Her eye was bruised and she had stopped talking much. The air of the year was haunted over and under.

"I have demons outside, mom. They won't leave.

"Stay inside, then."

"I don't like inside. It goes on forever. I'll go crazy in that house."

"You know how it is, Tom. Easier to go down than up. "

"Mom, I just... I want you to know—"

"Hmm?"

"—that I know it's wrong what dad does to you."

"You look just like him."

"No, I don't. I don't look anything like that man."

"Nonsense. Every mother's child is handsome."

The day shocked and then lilted as Tom stood in his yard, surrounded by the impatience of his fright and the impermanence of the known world. As he backed up the porch with the runt at his side, Meghan ceased her pleading and disappeared into the confines of the room. The sight of Old Meg and the Old Tom had bothered the little girl. These were glimpses of a turnout so unlike them. The world at times coughed into its hand and spat up an ample, yellow truth. The times were full. The house opened for him. The enemies breathed hard and waited. The heavens were said to declare the glory of God.

Tom quietly opened the door and went back inside. The soldiers and beasts kept their heads and would wait for their sad witness. The great mouth closed and inurned itself beneath the pavement. A road.

In time, with Tom in the house, the neighborhood was pacified. The street became unperturbed. A nativity of general life and quiet domestication. Folk and fine. Just a neighborhood. Then the past, a perimeter for Tom's probationary spar with the present, wove on. He knew his place. He knew not to leave the house again. The walls creaked and he heard the water dripping in the kitchen. He was alone. An only. Inside the house or out, there was little for him but penitence and punishment. Such was his state inside the house, and such was the hell affair outside, and he knew that all of this would come for him soon enough.

Tom sat on the couch and brought himself back from the fright that had overtaken him. He pet the pig and thought about his time and listened to the sounds of the house. Perhaps he was simply to enjoy Summer while he could.

**Twelve**

Each day was his birthday and every hour made two weeks. He had turned twelve. He had spent two years in the house, in the guise of two days. He seemed older. A bit taller. He felt to know more. Would he be of more emphasis now with the new year? The tail of this thought was bobbed in Tom's mood. Another year with shaking hands and another unfinished, assigned book. Another year, and an increment in the advancement of his form and thought. Twelve. The book was _Of Mice and Men._ There was no concentration to be had. All was distracting. His studies were harder. The house cricked at times from isolation and wear, and in this vacancy the Summer bore on and on.

The book's first chapter set aside by nervous hands, the boy's mind tilted on the repugnancies beyond his foundation. Tom watched from a window. They were out there. Honest demons. Ghastly bits of wood that woke for the function of taking the world back to sleep, each seeking in his eyes a languid home. He was not to leave. At least the new book was not so confounding as _Gulliver's Travels_ had been (he never finished it). This year's book had a funny retarded man Tom somewhat liked.

The walls reminded him of valley trees. The floor a breeding ground for invisible moss. The air came in breezes that could not be felt through the occluding surface of windows, through the brambles of doors and floorvines of hardwood. How long had he walked out in those woods before getting here? All the way was not enough, it seemed. He was still in the woods and bleeding out, just not the kind of woods a man was accustomed to, and not the sort of blood one knew to miss at first. The valley rim was the perimeter of Camas Swale, and Tom's neighborhood was a single, wet lap against the shore of a great and deep lake. He sat on his couch in the house in the nowhere. The traps and lurches of people lay here and there like bags of garbage left in the woods.

A pit inverted. The house. Upright but in all ways a hole. Strangely parental. Rooms had been sealed, having drawn in their resource, taken Tom's loved ones as filaments to surge through and keep the lights on. What Tom did over Summer vacation was perhaps nothing at all. He did as was required, and even in this subservience was not asked much. His allowance had been clipped for some time, and with this he could take care of so little. Barely himself. The house yawned and scratched at its roof with a thick hand while Tom stared at the cold barrow stove and thought about all the wood in the world.

People lived in balks and panels. Someone sought out a tree and cut it down. Another dragged the tree to the outskirts of people, to factories and floatlines. One carved it to bits and planks and boards. The next drove wooden loads with trucks. Some procured the wood, treated and sold it. Others bought, displayed the wood in craft arrangements, as chairs and studs and bed frames and floors. And people lived inside it all.

Tom had done each of these things. He knew the production of wood better than most, even more than his father who had pulled greenchain a long life, by the end nearly crippled and rigid with a fused spine. But now Tom had no allowance. He had lost this. Money. Income as outcome. The beams and panels of his nation. There were agencies made of people but without the soul of a person or culpability of a tribe, and these had sought him as a tree and cut him down with ease. He was a material then. Estimated and dedicated a certain value. Talked about in the way one spoke of parts, or weighed a resource. With little flags stabbed through and names exhibited. Inutile and part of a crash.

His bedroom door moved on a quiet screak and he watched as the runt pig nosed and opened the door, entering that room. Tom stood, surprised that the door had opened, as this had been resistant to his previous attempts. He worried over the nature of the now open door. This had been sealed from him, locked, but had now a slat of light between the frame and door.

He stepped toward the entrance and heard the sudden squeals and cracking sounds. The fress of lips over wetness and the dull scope of wrenched beams. Bones. He nudged open the door in a deep upset and saw her. Pigtails and pretty dress. Little Meghan in his room with the lively eyes and upsmile. Always an arrangement of subtleties and the ever-fetching novelty of cute mannerisms. How he missed her. An investigation of the floor found the bones and gristle. He thought of anatomy. Little flags and parts. Meghan had eaten the wood pig and left but a carcass on the hardwood floor. The pig had seen him through much, in different forms, survived like him, with him and his own changes of form, and now she was gone. Tom sat down with his hands in his hair. How much of him was left? Was there no end to trouble? To selfishness and need?

"Oink," she said in humor.

"That... that was my companion."

She swayed her head to the side and let the pigtails flick from her small shoulders. Her outfit tilted but kept its bell form, a youth-enervated morning dress on an ancient sort of love.

"Maybe I'm part curly-tail."

The room was twain. In places but an adult's storage for boxes, while in other aspects so young, his few toys scattered across the floor and his collected artifacts knocked from the shelf: Comics and a figure, his pellet gun and the ball cap from Autzen. A few small cars scattered about. His desk had been overturned and the thick pencils spread across the room. The fish tank was empty; puddle and pebbles and the thick of unwanted green. Papers here and there, dirty prints of feet on some. The runt pig had been picked clean on the floor beside Meghan's feet. Behind her was a poster torn halfway down from two tacks.

Tom read what she had written in his absence. With all the time she had been snared as an inmate of the house. Trapped in his room. A little girl with a grown-up inside her. Blue crayon scrawl across the white of walls and closet door: _Ugly girl. The quiet boy. For my hole._ Her little face purported at him, smudged with hairs and blood, the recent meal of feral pig. He saddened on seeing her joy with him. He was not worth her. His room was trashed and her precocious revelry with life had done it.

"You did all this?"

"Are you ever gonna love me, Tom?"

"I love you more than anything, Meg."

"In the future."

"Or right now."

"You know, you really don't have enough toys, Tom."

His face mowed on the scent. A pile of childish feces in the corner. She had tried to cover this with a small, overturned box, but the muddle had become too copious to hide. Tom forgave her. It was okay. She had no other place. Stuck in a single room. And she was right about the toys. He had too few.

His father's fashion of living was more order than allowance. Less things meant more man. Tom was dismayed to have so few toys in the presence of Meg. She was sweetly the feel. She was Meg and hello. Made little hints that always felt to end in dot dot dot. He could save up, perhaps. Make certain the toys kept coming and cause the room to fill over time. Expand. Fix the house with more artifacts. The absence of his allowance sneered at this, however. Money was a gourd with crooked teeth and a big eye watching a poor sort of man. More order than allowance.

"Maybe I need a Summer job," he said.

"Your dad could get you on in the woods."

"No. Not that. I'll do somethin' different. I like wood and I know the way it gets done, but I think I'd rather work a yard or maybe short haul it."

"I can wait on that for now. Okay."

Toys. More small cars that crashed into one another. A white Buick replica that became the vehicle in the driveway. Books he did not read. These became books with stories and recipes and numerals all about him, all about accounts and checks and meals. Filling the house with themselves and record. He had a child's fishing rod, and this lengthened, wound with line, an expensive reel put on for Christmas, and the tackle... but these were not toys. Tools. So were all the books, for that matter. Tools with specific uses, if even for the simple casting off of the slower times. There were two stages to the house. One young, one old. Tom in this place was the child of his adulthood. A grown man reverted. His toys were no more, but he bought their counterparts and fulfilled them, each new thing to settle the previous, the overused taken to the curb and the unused settled in nooks.

Over time, talk of unwon toys with friends had been arrogated by discussions of girls young. The girls seemed to ask for this in uncertain ways. Money was involved, somewhere. Always and with everything. The cows made milk but a person always got it and asked for money. Not like Jan, who gave eggs away for free. To be kind. Jan was better than money.

"I hate her," Meg said.

"Only for a little while. You'll be friends after that. It was one time. Long before you and I met."

"She's a slut."

"No, not that. Been around less than either of us."

Meg with Tom was once Meg with others. Her first in high school while she lived in Bandon. Another boy after graduation that she left when her family moved to the swale. A man later that year who helped start her parents' car on the side of Vogel. Ben Gantry. Carl Borfalt. Travis Getty. Maybe another but Tom never cared to ask. Then Tom. Before her, there had been Tom with others, as well. His first on graduation night. A short time with a young woman in the Fall after high school. A woman in Eugene. Several in Camas. They were Nitya Baruah. Claire Kolski. Jan Schwedler. Emily Tagget. Maybe another with a forgettable name, but Meg had no sense to fret this. Then there was Meg.

"I'm no slut, Tom."

"Neither am I."

"You watch your mouth around me."

"I surely will, Meg."

"Meghan. I'm wearin' a girl dress."

"Okay."

There were Lincoln Logs on the floor of his bedroom in a small, disjointed heap. Notched ends and the shade of deep stain. Tom smiled and bent, began arranging them into a square, an order, then he placed several to the side, adding green panels atop them.

"Whatcha buildin'?" Meghan asked.

"Another storage room for the sawmill. Fella came in and ordered the subroofing."

"That's not a very easy job, Tom."

"No, the wood interlocks in places. Makes stackin' it easy. I could do it all day."

"I can't guess if Kanell Materials is good for us."

"It is. Good enough, at least."

"Summer's gonna last a long time. You need a better job."

"This one's fine. And I can go up," he said, placing flat panels of painted wood against an angle atop the sawmill's new storage room. The roof. After this, he stood and reached into his pocket, drawing out the two dangling pretties. She smiled at the small gems and silver, these bits of shine and birthstone blue, put them through her ears with a sleepiness. A blush.

" _Well, you're on top so if the thing happens I'll give it to you, but I won't be able to raise your pay much."_

" _I know, Lee. It'd be better for my wife and I, though. We're taking over my parent's house and money's tight."_

" _The truck is all right for a wage, if that's what you're needin'. And I know you're a loyal guy. Can-do, and all."_

" _Thanks, Lee. I'll handle whatever you can get me."_

" _Well, Hutchins is movin' off to Salem after his honeymoon and he won't be comin' back, so I'm givin' that over to Greg Means. What I'll do is give you Greg's job with the maxi. That'll pay a little better."_

" _That'd be just fine."_

" _Then get that license up, Tom. I'll put it in the works and we'll come out the other side soon enough. But get your license up. Even short haul, you can't be drivin' truck with a Class C."_

She would be relieved, and in turn, the new days would float simple, slow like dry, green needles atop the sap. Easier. More material. Unfortunate shifts, and long, but more money. She took a job at the Riter's downtown. They were married. They were a union. She handled some things and so he handled some things. The two of them could make do well enough, especially now that they had taken over his parents house. He had ins at Kanell; he could remodel the home. He could keep handling things.

Meghan readjusted in the bedroom, toyed her finger at one of the earrings. She sighed and would not look at him. Perhaps a decade in that room. Short haul had slowly talked him into long haul. Days at a time gone. She no longer worked at Riter's. Stayed home and did some of the remodeling and undertook many hobbies and fell to the vast boredom. He spent too many days in a truck. Away. He suspected there was man in Bandon. Meg's visits there to see her sister while Tom was gone. Too many visits. Too little said about those trips. Tom thought he knew what had happened, and chose to say nothing. He chose to handle things. One at a time. His life was but a cordon of moments that each had no real end.

"I miss you," he said.

"I know. And I don't like you being gone all day. You're room is boring. I played with everything in here and ate your fish and all you do in here is sleep."

"I've been thinkin' about that a lot lately. We're never together, and when we are, we get to fightin'."

"It isn't a good life for us. And you're tired all the time."

"Well, I know about a job comin' up down at the yard. I could stop drivin' truck and stay here in Camas. I'll talk to Lee about it."

"You've said that before. Don't let him push you off again. You driving long haul is killing us."

"I know."

"You don't even put it to me anymore."

"Don't say it like that."

"I thought you liked me talkin' that way. And worse."

"Not during regular time. Just when."

"Well, there ain't no when anymore."

"I'll talk to Lee."

She nodded and looked at her hands, then pestered the window with her eyes, staring through with a face that held things back.

" _All right, Tom. The timing is off, but I can work somethin' out. I got a position comin' up soon; everybody knows it. But I'm not sayin' anything about which one until it's time."_

" _Understood. I wouldn't ask, but things have to change at home, is all. I can't be gone weeks at a time like this anymore. Short haul became long haul and... Listen, I know why. And that's fine. I'm not disgruntled or anything, it's just that I need to get some things in order at home and I can't do that while I'm on the road in the 5-rig a week at a time."_

" _Wives never like the long haul much. I know all about it."_

" _Yeah."_

" _Okay Tom, you take the truck some more, just for a bit while I move some things around. I'll give you something else when I got it. Besides, Albers wants to drive truck and he could take the 5-rig if you moved over."_

" _That sounds great. Thanks, Lee."_

" _Like I said, timing's off. Not by too much, though. You know you won't make as much, right?"_

" _Yeah. We'll make do."_

" _Drivin' truck is the better pay out here, but that ain't everything, I know."_

Little Meghan beside the chair and her pigtails curt and her vivid eyes a streak of admiration. Meghan who liked little dolls and cute noises and was herself a bevy of cute dolls and little noises. Her smooth arms protruding from the sleeves like cleared damp branches of dogwood and settled at the ends with staring, articulate hands. The way he saw her in his room was love-you and everything else and thank-you-so-much. It was time to take her from the room. The loneliness inherent in him was a peculiar singularity that wanted her to never be so alone inside as him. He had made amends. He had handled enough. It was time to be together again.

"Can you come out and play?" he asked. His childhood bedroom leaned in to listen.

"Your folks won't like that," she said.

"They're in rooms now. Won't come out. I need you."

"Then you have to take care of me, Tom. I could run off if you don't hold hands enough. I ain't right."

A couple months of it. The not right. Bandon. While Tom rubbed his eyes behind the big wheel on unending highways, through states and lanes through counties he never caught the name of. He was weeks at a time on the road while she kept the isolated home. Eventually, she started staying in Bandon longer, was no longer home when he finally pulled in. He began to sleep alone in a bed unlike him. No holding hands. The not right was maybe in Bandon, her trips away, another man. Tom never wanted to ask, and in time fell to acceptance. Perhaps _sometimes_ was enough for love. Maybe love didn't have to be all the time. He moved up, though. Foreman. Got rid of the roads and the 5-rig. He was home more and she was with him then. She handled things once she knew he was doing the same.

"Come out and play with me," he repeated.

"Okay. But you're the one for me, and you'll have to buy me a ring. You know it's important to me."

"I'm only twelve. I can't afford one. Spent it all on those earrings."

"Then use an old family ring. Everybody's got one. Your mother won't mind."

There was a thud from a wall of the living room, from the door to his parents' bedroom. His mother was in there somewhere. Doing whatever the house had prepared her for. She was alone. Like Tom had been. Like Larry. Like the outside of the house. She was shut away because Tom and Larry ignored her, and now she had been placed inside a pumpkin shell, bedroom-broke, kept with white paint and blankets. Shelves.

"She's in a woman-cote. A pig-run for ladies," he said.

"I know. Like I was until you came in here."

"House keeps her."

"Just sweet-talk her. You're a good boy, right?"

A good boy. Twelve years old. Out of junior high for the Summer. What the good boy did over Summer vacation was discover in his heart a great stone that he wished to destroy. What he did over Summer vacation was note girls and attempt to approach them. He was a man. He was a boy. His talk was bravado or weak. As a boy, he was admonished by women. As a man, his cock and neck's apple stunk to them. Not to Meghan, though. She bent and lifted a plush cunt from the small chair, little tag hanging off to the side with a brand and wash instructions.

"It's ugly. I don't even like this thing," she said.

"I do. It's what it is. I'm sorry you don't' like it any."

"It's ugly. And yours ain't any better."

"I know it."

In the minutes of solace between the two children, Tom settled the Lincoln Logs in new arrangements, dashed them apart, began again while Meghan reaffixed the small bow at the neckline of her morning dress and started down a particular habit of cleaning the room. He thought to help her but he was too much with work. She thought to love him but was too much without him. They were a long way from their first strange meet in the abandoned dairy building, when he was stumbled across while eating from a can of cocktail fruit with a pocket-knife fork, when he was embarrassed but then offered some with mischief. She had some, and for lack of other subjects, started talking about caterpillars. She liked them much. Then talked about when they become adults. She ate the fruit and talked about the caterpillars. They continued in the following days to see one another. She had called him Huck Finn for a time. Thought him cute until the first clutches and semen. No Huck Finn after that. Not cute or quiet boy. Less. Then more.

They left the bedroom and entered the living room. The house kept these children. There were times when they met again, once to the minute, hugging and being the union, being the house and their ages and looks. In these sparse trips of time the two had the best thoughts and talks, alone and alone, dressed for the day and undressed for the duration.

Meghan approached the living room window and looked out at the neighborhood. Her morning dress bitten with a specific gloom from lesser light, an overcast sky. The dead end. Brecke's use was as a valve into Vogel, its other end but a knob against the tired, hoof-trod field. She was worried when she spoke.

"There's nothing out there, you know. You'd better not leave."

"I went outside once," Tom said, "I won't do it again."

"I saw. It's the end."

"Not in here, though."

"No, not in here."

The Vietcong could be seen in the glimpses, then gone, but the brush trembled at times with culmination. There were more mutations now and their presence was not in the yips of child hyenas or those shattering fishes of wind through the boughs, but in a quiet, a mapping, in some ways honest. They were simply the bad end for all the Toms and Megs and pigs and Gullivers, all the days and nights. The drips of water from the kitchen seemed to have moved, as well. He now heard them in various rooms, sparse and occasional, but clear. A busted pipe above somewhere.

The opposition outside his false manor was neither cunning nor reasonable, but wore these garments as if to impress the world against such traits. At times he saw them in brief sprints for cover, crawling from beneath the houses and flitting behind the tree line. The Vietcong were soon replaced by desert folk. The old Tom and Meg in the weedy Ogilvie yard had become an ancient Tom and Meg. The soldier beneath the coop was young and had his head shaved, wore his A-shirt and stared cold. The disease was new disease and the occasional bills on the wind were ever newly minted.

Joining these horrors was a new enemy. A thing from Vogel inching down Brecke to the dead end. This organic disarray was a fleshy mass with a lace of red bulbs, expanding and coupling with itself relentlessly. The resulting froth around its lowest girth was as lubricant for the scabrous shell that rode over the street, toward the house, limbic tufts traveling in pooched, fattened rolls, ever closer in the spread.

Beneath the road the mouth still hungered. Within the house the couple kissed and smiled. Meghan left the room with Tom and they committed to the couch for television. She could not go far, and admitted the room's want of her, but the couch could be made, Tom could be with her for a time. A day, a year, simple drips off the spigot of time. The day progressed and the shows came and went. Volume up, volume down, her head against his shoulder and his eyes burning hot as the Sun.

**Thirteen**

They were changing. His appetite had altered and no bare sandwich was enough. Two. Or a sturdier meal. One with floorboards and subroofing. He was a teenager. He grew taller and ate much and she thought about him with more intercedence. Where her eyes had softened and gained a skylarking glimmer of percipience, his own had deepened, coated with an integument of black and revolt. Each eyelid a carapace that gave his gaze discrepancy. There was more to the change than eyes. Shock.

"Look what you did to me," she blamed.

"I didn't do that. You must have."

"You fed me the wrong food, Tom. Or too much. I've never been like this."

Her shirt on her lap, trim shoulders slumped. She examined the onset of breasts, the headland of these being met by her chin as she stared downward and lifted them, horrified. Each was a quote of forced growth. They were now her slang and she would have to adjust. Tom only stared at them, a deserter in the room that did not mind her troubles. He enjoyed them. A certain plexus untethered in his mind and the slack shot through him, down into the barrows of his very posture. Nothing could be the same after this. The barest sight had him contriving.

While she bothered, he was neither skeptic nor germane. Part of him knew to see these tits. Over the course of the Summer, he had changed, as well. His black-wreathed cock now hung from his groin like a noose from the gallows. She began crying.

"I hate you. You made these things happen. You did this to me."

"It's not me. You're a girl; it happens like that."

"Get away from me. I won't be like this."

"I'll let you be for a bit. Come out when you're feelin' better."

He was guilty of course. Of fondness. Of breathing hard from the vent-hole where all the men crouched and breathed. The perfume and sweat came across. The odor and pitch. Tom made his way through the living room flushed with complicity. A certain filth in his mind that desired summation. Finish. She shouted at him from the bedroom, beside her drawings of caterpillars, as he vanished.

"I hate you!"

What he did over Summer vacation was fetch himself and let his mind set plates, and then feast. The ants worked outside the sill, methodical and in a constant confederation with nature's dropped meals and edicts. Tom was no different. A dreary sleepwalker at times when she sat nude within his skill, her bottom atop his brain, driving the pictures in. But he was also a logistical thinker that designed bouts of whelming, muddy rhapsody.

Tom removed himself to isolation, the bathroom, and opened his face in the mirror, digging about for traces of anything. There was a brain in there, dark eyes then blue, his father's, his mother's. Neither of these statues of people weighed so much as he felt them to and he was aware of it, but even a glimpse of his father stuttered him to an accountable conceding. The mirror was a dead thing. Tinted by one's own appearance, in private and woven with nothing but the dreamlike quality of judging oneself by the memories of interactions with others. This feed changed to the day. The face did not.

Interactions with others. There were so many to remember. So many to forget. There had been trouble in the past. In some of the present. A day before a planned road trip when anger stood up and stared. Tom had been eager, was all. Let his language slip a nudge and mistakenly said a quick-witted and opportune thing that belittled his father. Tom had wanted to take the statement back the moment it reached his old man's ear. There was no taking of something back with Larry, and Larry often took things outside.

"All right. You want it your way?"

"Dad, let's go back inside. This doesn't make any sense."

"Goddamn it, I put it down and you'd better get in here."

Tom remembered the circle. Quickly jerked onto the concrete with charcoal from the wood stove. Middle of the street at the dead end. Ed Ogilvie down the road taking interest in an approving way, minding his business but minding Larry's too. Tom sighed and ignored his father. He hadn't the initiative to vacate, but he did have enough in him to disregard the man. This was not the same as disrespect, which meant something different to each of them. To Larry, it was pressing when you were told to shut your mouth.

"Get in here, chickenshit. See what happens."

"Dad—"

Building. Over time. He was thirteen and had a friend that drove. He was an ant in the swale that wanted to leave the sill and see the deeper woods. Eugene. Bandon. Portland. Maybe north enough to enter the next state. George had deified this road trip. Talked it up since Summer began. Tom had dreaded the implausible endeavor of gaining his father's permission, and this expectancy of failure caused a choler in him that could reproduce. Doubt begat frustration, which begat bitterness, which begat anger. He fretted the weeks and this anger grew. All the way into backtalk. Then there was his father's anger. Faster. Older. Brick-eyed and always confrontational. A circle in the concrete.

"You listen to me, Tom, and don't forget what I'm gonna say: I'm the man of this house. You understand? Ain't no room for two."

"It's just a road trip with George and his girlfriend. You like George. You know his dad."

"Yeah, I know Cliff. And he's all right, but that don't change the fact his kid's a fuck-up. An' he is. Mother's a damn loony toon. You want to do what you want? Drive off with that boy and whatever ass he's got himself into? It'd better be worth it, Tom. You'd better be a man about it and get in here."

"Dad, it's only a day. That's all."

"All right, then. You wanna go that bad, you stand yourself up and get in here. Come on. Step in, Tom. When you can beat me outta this circle, you can do things your way."

"I'm not doin' that. You're my dad."

"Oh I am?"

"Yes."

"Yes what?"

Tom sighed inward and frowned outward.

"...Yes sir."

Larry did not enjoy repeating himself but held a fondness for making others do so, and certainly when he felt it would seep up how slow he felt they were. Larry was beams and planks and layers of mortar. He stood in the circle, rigid, arms at his side, legs bowed and cap on the ground. The damp, unmoving hair had matted to his aggravated head as if ink spilled atop baldness. Head nodding. Cross tone.

"Go on. Say that shit again, Tom."

"I'm not gettin' in there with you. You're my dad. I don't want to fight."

"No?"

"No _._ "

"How about you keep that in mind next time you wanna be a smartass and start mouthin' off."

"Dad, I don't see why I can't-"

"Get in the house, Tom. Ya ain't goin' nowhere with your dumb friend. And sure as hell not outta the damn county. Just shut your mouth and go inside."

"But it's just a roadtrip."

"Not at thirteen it ain't. We're done with this. Now get in the fuckin' house, Tom. I ain't gonna say it again."

"Fine. Whatever you say. _Sir_."

Meghan huffed in irritation, filling the bedroom with her troubles while Tom stood in the bathroom. He had circles beneath his eyes like charcoal. In the mirror, his features were more Larry than Susan, but this inverted every few years. He left his image, then. Sat down and became diminutive. Exposed. A dilation had reaved apart his thought and his moods had grown episodic over the days and nights. Digression. A new and young kind. Drifty ignominy and all the quiet performance. His outsides. At odds with his insides. He was far in where the very nest of urge had become a great racket with an overpowering reach. There was no solution for this impasse but to dilapidate at times. He used the hand. He had grown fond of this.

Nitya's smooth skin and dark hair. Her lips and the manner she looked at him. A cultural difference. It was diffuse and vague, but never idle and hardly meek. She thought a touch different, just a touch. So did her parents, but far more pronounced. He was atop her like a board and nudging his hips. Her little mutters of boredom and the occasional glance at his body. Seeming put off when his hands fell on her in any arrangement, so he balanced on the mattress, not looking at her for the duration, eyes closed and breathing. The porcelain below, the air warm. The hand. Too low to see himself in the mirror. Two boys in the closet watching, but he got rid of these. Too resonant a moment to allow himself distress over else. He breathed with shut eyes and kept a pace. Orotund sensation of anesthetic roiling up his back and into his scalp and chest. Nitya looked at him in want. That was better.

He met her halfway to take, rough but fair, and she changed. Older. Seconds of commotion until she had a new form. Alan's mother, Estelle. Ugly. Gangly and with that strange nose, her speech so offhand and southern that her voice cricketed at your ears like a busted melodeon. Tom squinted. Seconds and she was gone, but while it had felt wrong to use her image, her sudden presence in his thoughts was also imbrued with novelty and unfamiliar fare, so the menagerie of cycling images brought her back as his hand's vigorous motion kept her in mind, just off to the side. Meghan was in there, too, but did not show herself much. She had told him about her menstruation so he kept her away some.

Held breath. A tussled quiet. Drips of water from the rooms. His wrist with a system of movement worthy of memorizing. Then the end. Okay. A sensation so strong as could be menacing. Then it ejected him and left him there, a sad and hunched boy feeling dazedly menial and disgusted with himself. He unrolled a small length of toilet paper. Alan's mother? Disturbing.

A spider had made way across the sink-basin, noting him but more concerned with its trajectory toward the shower curtain. It would frighten Meghan if she went in to shower and discovered this small, eight-legged beastie. He brought his fist down, nudged the crushed wanderer to the drain. Twisted on the cold water. After his appropriate cleaning, which was sparse and little to do with him, Tom exited the bathroom and entered the living room again.

Meghan was there eating a butterfly, powdery wings jutting from her mouth as she chewed, holding the teddy cunt and looking it over, eating the insect with distant eyes. She saw his notice and quickly drew the rest of the butterfly into her mouth with her tongue, wiped her lips with her sleeve as she chewed and swallowed, embarrassed. He thought of nudging her into the sink and twisting on the cold water.

"I'm sorry... that was awful."

"If you're hungry, you're hungry," he resigned, tired.

"Everything is different now."

"I know."

"But maybe now I don't mind," she admitted.

"Okay."

Her nervousness and shame did not abate, however, and it was while sifting through the television channels, each a scapegrace parcel of character and predictability, that she removed the object from her pants and wiggled it back and forth. Tom thought of Alan, then his mind geared into fright. She held the service pistol and lowered her head in guilt.

"Where did you get that?" he asked.

"I think from your father. While you were in the bathroom. It was outside the door to the den."

"He got out?"

"I don't know. I didn't see him but the gun was outside the door. There was a note."

Tom swallowed and thought of the den, the beast in there, the smoke and anger and billowy racism. The rigid back and popeyed arms, a man who had long ago been to a war and likely had killed. A worker in the woods and an autocratic bust of the formidable in men. Larry was a husband that had often struck his wife, and a father that had slowly molded a quiet, blurred boy. He was a force that had held inviolable sway over his boy's upbringing, and then some.

"I- I'm the man of this house, Meg," Tom muttered in worry, "And he'd better stay away from us because... because there ain't room for another one."

She ignored this and reached beneath the couch cushion, procured the note and a single, copper-sheen round. His father's juvenile handwriting on a square of cornflower blue. Words surrounded in a black circle. Angry whorls from his snub of patience. Short, curt stabs of the pen:

FOR YOUR MOTHER. GOES IN THE HEAD.

Tom branded back the sadness with a scarce-used semblance of defeat. Nothing was fair. Not even mothers and fathers. He looked at the bullet and thought of his mother's knickknacks. If this round had not been designed to kill something, she might have liked the look of a bullet. Shine. Symmetry. Diminutive form. A wordless mutter left his throat and he lifted his shirt. Meghan saw the new hairs that had grown across his stomach and chest. Thick. Dark lines curving from his skin. An odor entered the room from the tussled up shirt. This development was new and pungent, sifted through her in a foreign way. Meghan caught the scent and grimaced, but not inside.

"Look at it. Black. Curly. I hate it," he said.

"It's not so bad."

The hair was just like his father's. The smell. The turn of his temper and the shortage of patience. In a daydream that shirked the couch and present world, Tom stepped into the circle and beat his father out. Dirty old man. Sooty from charcoal on his face. Tom was thirteen years old and clean-handed, but not for long. Paint-thinner to his father's blood. Sterling on the hunk of shit his old man called respect. But what a trick... Tom was only his father then. Just like him. Was there no solvable enemy where fathers and sons were concerned? Did jolting either one merely make the other more like the first?

He breathed and scowled and thought of hauling wood, of cutting down the forest for material. Did he pull greenchain? Did he work a yard? When he was irritated with Meghan, was he only stung with Susan? Tom was jostled then. Meghan had set the plush cunt aside, as well as the pistol. The eager maneuvering of the articulate hands. A loving graft atop his idiocy. Opened fly, opened face, nothing inside, everything inside. Meghan made a bobbing heyday on what had lain fallow until recent days. He leaned back while she scrounged around it, a hurricane in his blood that was his horrid father's blood. It had happened, and he closed his eyes on the couch and let the world stupidly honor him.

**Fourteen**

Unable to reach a place far from the bedroom door, Meghan was remaindered most of the living room. Couch, television, Tom. He brought lunch to her but made these sparse, per her demand. They ate and talked on youth and he confessed a wondrous many things he had wanted to tell her. Not bad things, but things that had gone unsaid for too long. Her perch in the house had been expanded but would fall back in time, and now that he was fourteen, the necessity of being a man had expounded in rollicking waves of pressure. He fetched. Talked. The stone in his chest purring from behind the scattered cage of his ribs. He was fourteen years old and youth's immunity had begun to rot with the onset of his teenage years. Meghan held the plush cunt and watched television and Tom rubbed his brow and failingly tried to imagine a world without her.

He set up the Lincoln Logs and built her a small house, reinitiating the beams and adjusting a wall, building a bathroom from what once was a closet. The house was the job and some portions moved. A mistake here and there but he was good with his hands. Not confident. Competent. There was a difference. She read _Gulliver's Travels_ and told him a little about it. She talked about his new allowance. She made him feel right by a word or two. She was effective with her care, which to him nearly felt to be a commodity, and a reliable one. They met up at times to play and he explained the comics to her. How these had been stolen with Alan and that the act had been a great rush. She both condemned this and admired it much. The clock spun and retched, the clock stopped and lapped. The phone in the living room was set down at times, but not for long. They were both fourteen.

"I'm not tellin' you that! Well, because it's private, that's why. Oh. Well, I don't know. Uh huh. Yeah, I wouldn't know about that. Huh! If you say so. No, so... not yet. Yeah, that's what I thought at first but I've learned otherwise. No. Yeah. Well, not the way _you_ make it sound, just in his own way, is all."

She glanced at Tom on the other end of the couch. Watched as he struggled with a chapter in the new book, his scan of the words confused and irritated. Her voice bent and slid through all the lines of Camas wire.

"Oh, maybe. I never thought to check. Big enough, though, I bet. Who? Oh no, no. I'm sure it's better than that. I had my eyes closed during, and it wasn't up at first."

Tom glanced up from his book and took her in, eyebrow raised.

"I think he's listenin'. Gettin' mad. I'll call you back, Amanda. Yeah. Probably later. I don't know. Okay. Sure. Okay, bye."

Meghan hung up the phone with a smirk and leaned back in the couch, reaching for the large remote to the television. A creak from the house gave notice of settling and his interest lifted smooth as the whims of birds. She was aware of Tom watching her and finally offered him her own stare. This became a slight game wherein one would have to turn away first. That was Meghan.

"All right, so what were you talking about?" he asked, playing at agitation, but more intrigued.

"Just whatever."

"At the end."

She smiled and laughed out her statement.

"Your willy."

"Jesus, what the hell for?"

"I don't know. Cuz it's funny, I guess."

The day wore into a servitude between light and the various shapes within the house. The windows augmented this by refracting sunlight across their heads, creating lanky shadows on the old white walls. Bored with television and its ongoing attempt at her laughter, she slowly maneuvered her hand beneath her dress and sought out a center between the thighs. She was in this particular search for a moment before sighing and removing the hand.

"Not yet, I guess. But close," she said of the unwilling place. Tom nodded and understood. Growing up was slow, and it often tricked you into thinking it had happened.

Girls and boys were dissimilar, according to the answers for most things someone thought to ask regarding developing gender. She wanted to be a grown up and had more drive than Tom. Adolescence was a strange and ringing scene. Height. Depth. An egression of attributes behind sparks of want. Inward and outward. Tom enjoyed his new form, shaky as it was. The fractalized lay of the brain's cants gained in complexity and more was made of them, intricate associations so close they seemed to be alive in the very air. Some called it metamorphosis, but this made Tom think of moths. Some said change. This brought to mind old songs and political catch-phrasing. Some said puberty. What a horrid, deadened word.

"I'll have to go back to the bedroom soon," she said.

"I know. Maybe I can go with you this time. We'll just stay in that room from now on. House can keep us both in there."

"You know better. You're fourteen, now. Ain't no good goin' down a hole just to catch a rabbit. Because then you're in a hole. You need to keep me with you. Out here."

"You're a lot more to me than a rabbit, Meg."

Tom thought of his mother, his parents' bedroom where the woman was kept. What a hushed place. A chrysalis for ugliness and the nature you did not want to adopt, but that took you no matter. Meghan knew his worries and sought to balance them with plays at his encroaching adulthood.

"You should know what to do by now," she said.

"I know. But she won't let me in."

"You're becoming an adult, Tom. Part of that is showin' your folks what they're not allowed to be anymore. You ain't no kid."

"I'm still part kid."

"Maybe a man would bust that door down and handle things."

"Well, that man is caught in the den. _Your_ man is the one out here, and he doesn't care about his damn mother."

"I still need a ring, Tom. Take me up."

The Summer's lien drilled small amounts of rain into the soil which extracted sinewy worms that stretched before the beaks of immediate birds. These were annelids, according to homework he had half-done in the previous year. School was out again, and Summer reading was no longer required. Neither was the rainy weather, but this still came.

What Tom did over Summer vacation was become a teenager and see some dirty pictures and watch television and hold hands. He learned to make meals and set up wooden supports. He learned to protect things and hurt other things. To keep himself clean. He forgot about pigs and thought about girls. He changed with his companion and adjusted his balls. Somewhere in the house, the shrill harp of his insides murmured to the dumpy portions of his body and made him cull his genitals to sleep. Meghan at first admonished this behavior, then usurped it.

The window cracked behind them and Tom leaned his head over, turned for view. The crack lurched from one side to the other, branches of pinyons through clear pane, thin as typewriter ribbon. At the epicenter of this damage was the wriggling bee, wedged in the glass and trying to remove itself. More came. Battering the windows of the home, trying to break in. Behind this swarm of insects, Tom could see the ancient Tom and Meg, on the front lawn, but twenty feet out and waiting for an entrance. These two counterparts, like the youth within the house, were aging and undergoing change.

Everything was close. The yard now belonged to the outside. The young soldiers and belligerents had formed a perimeter, owned the neighborhood and waited only for the house to spread itself wet. The children inside. The young Tom and Meghan. Drinks of slight water that were growing up. A property of the world, and thus decided for their turn in the final gut. Tom heard movement on the porch as he rose to his feet. The enemies outside had captured the yard, stood just on the other side of the front door. The window was battered again, and looked to soon break.

"We have to block up these windows," he said.

He pulled the cushions from the couch and leveled one against the cracked glass, careful not to use too much force. Meghan did the same with the next window. How long could they hold out in the house? How long before Hell got in and divided them up on the scales? The beasts of his mind were the beasts of Brecke, spilling across one another in a violent cascade of forces and whims. They posed in the street, then the yard, then the window, right there before him with their eyes locked straight and Tom in mind. A rump of thick flesh, the newest enemy, slapped against the walls and windows, nudging for weakness, leaving spatters of white froth on the paneling and clear panes. This mass of organic tissue had sparked small hairs and its rolls had grown dexterous, red bulbs thinning like clear bags of juice, near adult, near the time of pursing open.

There was a shatter. An entrance into the house. Tom turned toward his bedroom and listened as the druzz of bees filled the room. They would be mingling with airborne disease, tenanting the room and seeking a way into the rest of the house. He removed his shirt quickly and, reaching his closed bedroom door, padded his shirt into the inch of space between the wood and floor. It would be but the pass of days, or hours, before something larger entered. One of Yama's dogs or a soldier. Something that could turn a doorknob.

Of certainty was that Tom could not allow Meghan to return to his bedroom. That room was now gone. Taken by the outside. To keep her free, he would need to insure her place with him. The enemy had caught on, knew where the house was weak and where the seams of his relationship were stretched thinnest. They had already taken the shed and driveway. The beasts would get in soon and turn them into just more dead wood folk.

He had seen the band leader outside, dancing with a knife and Claire Kolski. New recruits. The steersman, Yama, was at times the horseman, Eat. That this creature knew the two boys was obvious, having created them and punished them, judged and sentenced. Claire was one of them anymore. Would Nitya be outside soon? On her old bike, stomach full of soup and eyes estimating the barricade of the house? How long? George up the road mounting Alan, his bully eyes loping on the horizon as he thudded and gagged on the air. The yard was filling up, and beside the mailbox Lee Kanell tipped his hat.

The minor assault ended, having made ground. Tom breathed and glanced at Meghan as she held up the couch cushions against the two windows, her arms stretched wide. His vision left her, moved about the living room and settled on his parents' bedroom door. His mother was necessary. Whatever had become of her was unimportant, and she was no longer to be prohibited and treated as a sanctity or whipping post. She was sadly to be rid of in the most fiery sense. He was a not a good boy. None were.

"I'll take care of you," he said.

"You'd better," Meg answered, "You need me, not that witch in there."

"Don't talk like that. I love my mother."

"Such a boy. Just take the gun and get me a ring. I don't care what it looks like much."

The two loves looked at the door to the bedroom that had imprisoned Tom's mother. What was she in there? A wooden figure? A dog? A meal? A haggard reactor to feed the devices of the house?

"So long as we have a ring," she repeated.

"Okay, Meg. I'll find one."

"Well, do you know where she'd keep something like that? Some old wedding ring we could use?"

"Yes, I know where. You do, too. We did some of this in the past."

"The first one."

"I love you."

There were pictures in the headboard. Dirty ones. Larry's. _I won't tell your father._ Looking at the uncomely photographs. He had gone in once to sneak a look at his confiscated comics. Likely hidden in the headboard. Found something else. A shoebox containing a stack of exposures. Hairy privates of grown women. _What are you doing in here?_ Mortification. Caught. His mother while he held the mess of candid, snapped-up crotches. It did not seem so long ago.

Tom held Meghan's hand and the door to Susan's room cracked open. Tom stepped forward but Meghan pulled him back.

"Not yet. We should sleep first. Together. I'm ready, and we'll be better by it in the morning. Let her know we need the ring. For you and me gettin' married."

"That sounds nice."

"Then come to bed with me. We're old enough now. And after, you'll be grown up, and know how to talk to her the right way."

Susan was behind the wood, or something that wanted Tom to approach. The room he was never allowed to enter. The pungent dismay the one time he had. Pictures in the box in the headboard. Family ring in a small myrtlewood case beside a shoebox of anonymous snapshot sex hair. His father the purveyor of lurid ladies. In time, Tom understood fine. But when caught, when first discovering these, his stomach had churned and his brain had lit like a midnight moth in lamplight.

"You in there, mom?" he called.

The godawful howl came from the den. Pain and belligerence, vehemence and animal thought. Larry's smoke leaked from beneath the door to the den. Tom and Meghan returned to the couch quickly, upset and frightened. Caught in the act of plotting. Kids and all around them, the rest of it. Meghan clutched Tom's hand and whimpered as Larry clubbed against the door and shouted them down, wanting out and full of coarse abuse.

**Fifteen**

Morning. The matured children had a quiet breakfast together and then it was time. They reached the door and she hugged him, and then Tom left Meghan behind. The door moved on groaning hinges and he entered his parents' bedroom. The uncomfortable and off-limits place that kept his mother. Once in, he closed the door behind him and was a part of the room.

There were no strings or control bar but his hands moved and he was not in them. There was no possession but he was not himself. Else. Some manipulator had untethered his chassis from his will and there was no truth to him but puppetry. He had lost a strong portion of himself when he entered the room, and now it would use him to fulfill itself, just as the bedroom in the woods had done, and the unfinished house in the forgotten suburb.

The room's foul odor stilted the air and his nostrils flared from the smirched strands of shit that had been dragged through the thick carpeting. Her old feet tracking through. Bare instep, cracked and stained in weak smudges, old but at times young. She was not herself, but the house's woman and the room's mother. Homes, persons, materials, rights, religions... ownership.

Tom had become a son to the house. He muttered and forgot how he had entered this room. A physical quandary. There was once a door but this was gone. Had he walked through one? Had he given up Meghan to the living room for good... or was he coming back to her? His memory had been busted open like a crushed lip and all the red jam was leaking out. The breeze of recent minutes or hours was felt through a warped screen of his self. He knew the room. Feared it. His mother with her ratty hair, babbling nonsense in the last stages of being eaten by the house. Nude and invalid on his parents' rickety, slump-formed bed.

"Mom? You okay?" he asked. His feet were like his hands. Forward. Without him. He approached the form in the bed.

"Oh Larry, don't talk like that," she said.

He was not his father. He was barely Tom. He stepped on a ragged patch of the bedroom carpet, ripped from the floor as if torn up with haste and then tossed aside. She had tried to eat this. She was hungry. He stepped around one of the sporadic daubs of excrement and the air from the open window tore the outside through his hair. How long had the window been open? Had anything entered the room before him from the terrible outside? A Yama boy, an enemy or vagrant disease? Her pubic hair tufted near the top, beginning to gray, and from this small divot in her body seeped a conversation of viscosity and sinewy matter. Hunks of her coming out from the inside, through the bush, onto the blankets of the bed, swanning and goading the air with her odor.

"It isn't dad, mom. It's me. Tom."

"I just don't like that kind of talk," Susan said.

Perhaps he had opened the door and entered with pistol in hand. This seemed to have happened. Meg on the other side of the door. Waiting for a ring. Perhaps he was no longer himself in the room. This also seemed true. The pistol on the floor was useless with no hand to take it up. Tom cried some as he unfastened his belt. He remembered to be Tom but could not make this happen. Was it years back or moments? She had discarded carelessly, to the carpet, her mind but a catacomb anymore. How long had he been in his mother's room? The house had crawled inside him and changed these things. Changed time and who he was. The house ate from his mind and perched in his movements. The house.

The closet chuckled. Something within it. Spoke on a swill of air as the closet door opened. George and Alan... no, the maker in the woods. The horseman, Eat, stepping from the door now wide, his equine face bulged at the nose and the dry leaves beneath him. The crish of his two steps out. His arms wide and then hugging, pulling Tom's head in and holding it. A long, personal instant. Then this preacher released and backed away.

"þu begann hider. It's your morgen," Eat said.

"What's happening to me?"

"You've been accustomed to gore in the past, Tom."

"I can't move."

"Why should you? There's nowhere to go. You're still just a baby inside her. She'll tear some when you come out. You'll be alive then."

His father's shoes on his feet. Same size. His father's hat on his head. Larry in him. Outside of him. Tom or Larry. Which was for what? The house knew but said nothing. Eat knew and only waved an arm over Susan in the old, stained bed. The covers had grown ragged at the edges, worn over the years by the dampness of the swale and the movement of sleepy bodies. Time and use had dunned it to the threads. Like his mother. Like Larry. Like everything that was able to live for a spell.

Tom surveyed his mother's state. Moss had crept atop her legs and sat in places, slowly eating and owning each particular spot. Fleas on the pillow waiting for more flecked scalp, her lichenous arms kinked in places, ending with decrepit hands clutched hard like scrawny oarlocks. A dew worm had curled between the small ridges of her ungulated feet. She was a property for many things. A shambles. And now Larry had come. Or was he Tom? His mother watched him from the bed, breathing deep and resigned in a mode akin to that near sleep.

"Go on, Susan. Show me that ugly pussy," Tom said, horrified with himself.

"No, we don't do like that every time, Larry. You stop that talk."

This was Tom's voice, but these were not his words. This was his body stepping forward, a wood puppet, but these were not his actions. Made to be Larry. Cruel and rigid and impossible to evade for long. Had Larry found a way out of the den? Had he crawled into his son to elude the room the house had placed him in?

His pants fell at the appropriate time. Straight. Shot down to the feet where he stepped free of the jeans and musty drawers. Images in the shoebox were pornography in the headboard. Images bored deep into his skull and shaking the concrete loose. Standing up like dirty flags. Turning his senses to liquid. What ring? Pictures.

"You brought her home, which was right, Tom. Did a good job. Took good care of her, this pig," Eat said, indicating Susan.

"Let me loose. Please," Tom begged.

"That doesn't sound right."

Tom's head lurched aside and forced him to look at his sprawled mother.

"My house, Susan. Talk any way I damn please. Now spread your legs, woman. Shut your eyes," Tom said, retreating, unable to cease these statements from leaving his mouth. He had not thought them. They were still said. He had not meant them. They meant much.

"That's better," Eat said.

How long had the room kept him, changing him, putting Larry in his brainpan and tilting the walls, pushing until Tom had tumbled down a deep and shaming ravine into his father? Was Larry in the den still? Tom rummaged thoughts to keep himself, Meghan and marriage, life as a husband. Meghan was to be his wife... but then maybe Meghan was to be his son's wife.

He crawled onto the bed, breath thick as wet oats, cold ass in the air as he settled between the outstretched legs of his mother. She was his wife when he put it in. His face drew into disgust and his brows dipped to the nose. Anger. Atop a woman. Brick between his legs lurching to the point of battered hips. The prods that slipped to the middle, the rough bends when he missed. Bush stuck apart with no longer narrow lines, pursed and swollen red, every shape and condition, her tired eyes staring a hole in his own from the old bed.

She did not put her busted arms around him. She only looked at her husband as he turned his mind on pictures and treated her crux like exhausted soil beneath a dull shovel. An overwhelming twist behind his parts made the inevitable and she was soon pregnant. He bent over the enlarged belly and continued, stabbing and stinging. Grunting in long, closed-mouth noise, crying to himself from a magnanimity that was inconsequent to those nearest him. He was a penny of great size. A demoted soul. He watched himself from a satellite far above or from an earthquake in India.

She had been young for a time. Tom could remember this. Put together with youth and her skin like fresh-painted walls. Her breasts had been hidden by culture, but not shame. Not then. Her talk was fair enough and there were ideas in her. Larry had begun pacing on these things however, dominating their marriage with threats and volume, folding up her mind like steel for a spear-blade through all the ages of the house. When Larry bedded Susan, he filled her with guilt and little fires. Battery and thrown britches. Saliva and urine and semen behind his eyes. She was young beneath him. Tom in her belly. She was old beneath him. Tom atop her, his lips against her breast in both haste and revulsion.

The bedroom door returned. Simply there for walking through. She ran her fingers through his hair.

"What should we name the baby?" Susan asked.

"Edward or Jean or Lawrence Jr.," Eat commented, "but then later it was just Tom or Jean. Then a boy. It was your first morning. They went with Tom."

The bedroom door was there so it could open. That was all the door was good for. Opening to let people in. Closing to keep people present. The wood swung and Larry and Meghan stood in the doorway gauging him. His wife and his father. Eat rigged Tom up and made him the sort of Larry that Larry wanted to see. Made Tom into the father the son wanted to kill.

Larry in the doorway held Meghan's small hand and spoke.

"My great, great granddad had him three buck niggers. He used to fight those sons of bitches like chickens."

"Don't talk like that, Tom," Meghan replied.

"My house. Talk any way I damn please," Larry replied.

"I thought your family came here in the Depression. From Poland."

"You watch your mouth. We ain't no damn Polish."

"Tom, your grandfather's name was Kasper. You're makin' up stories."

"Well, you ain't no Susan, but you'll know your place quick enough. Now spread your legs, woman. Shut your eyes," Larry said.

"Okay Tom."

Young man atop Susan in the tussled, musty bed, knees in leakage and face contorted in worry. Turned his head, got himself back. Only for a moment.

"Meghan don't... That ain't me. It's him."

"Hush up, old man," she replied from the doorway, no longer clothed, jaw clenching tight as she turned away from his father, lifting one leg up and out, foot at waist-height against the doorframe. Larry stepped in close behind her and brought his gnarled arm tight around her neck. He smiled and drew back his forearm quick, giving her a brief choke with this sudden hold.

The world stopped. No cloud moved or flea bit. In the brink that slept apart dream from the physical world, from which all harmony fled and every weave tightened, Tom in time was alone. Stillness and the cease of properties. The pause of each thing but Tom and the pastor. The halt of wind and insect in mid-breath, creak of bedsprings and utterance of shock terminated at their apex. Tom was thankful for this. For the end of a nightmare. Eat knelt down and put his hand on Tom's arm while the world looked away.

"You've been accustomed to gore in the past," he said.

"Stop this, please. It's wrong. What do you want from me?"

"Not me, Tom. Mother pig. I made her pretty good, to keep you company. So you could bring her home from the woods. And then finally part ways. Sometimes, you two were almost the same."

"My dad shot that pig and Meghan ate it. I didn't do that."

"Ah, she's still around, Tom. Heo resta. Always. Resta æghwær soþ. The taste of her milk is on your tongue even now."

"Make this stop. I'm not my father. You can't make me be like him."

"Sure I can. I eat. It's all I do. And I had me a taste of you, Tom. When I finish up my plate, and you're all gone, I'll know just how your father's gonna taste."

"I ain't him."

"Look like him."

"That ain't my fault. You look how you're born. You come from certain people, but you don't have to be what they are."

"So the sins of a father aren't reborn in his boy, huh?"

"No," Tom said.

"All born equal?"

"That's right."

"It's a shame folks don't die that way."

"Please end this."

"Did that already. Now we have to begin. I want my ransom."

"I gave you that. In the woods, when I forgave him. I made amends. With you, with him. And George and Alan. I've done all that."

"No, you just opened those folks up to see 'em. And let 'em see you."

"I ain't my dad."

"'For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?'"

"I don't know what that means."

"Of course not. How can a boy forgive a beaten mother if he doesn't take to heart his father's violence?"

Meg moved in the doorway alone, free as Tom or just as caught. Where had Larry gone? She set her bare leg down and foot flat. Eyes up and a path into the room. His mother's eyes closed like a doll and the damp enveloping his indecency grew rigid and tight. She was hurt with the pregnancy, the muddy pain that came with life. Meghan crouched beside Eat and began stroking Susan's arm.

"I feel bad for her," Meg said.

Larry had snuck off and the day had begun anew. Morning. The swollen belly of his mother held a liability to Larry. This offspring would one day be a circle-dodging son who was not enough man and too caught up with the sadness of things. This son would be like the father in some ways, similar to the cold clockwork with which that man set his days, but not enough. Tom would hold himself too far back.

"She thought it was her place to take it. To do whatever he said. Especially in front of me. Sometimes I could tell she hated me," Tom muttered.

"There's no mother that hates her boy," Meghan replied.

"No, she needed a boy and I was like my father."

"Said it yourself: You're not him," Meghan countered.

"I'm a terrible son."

"You're a good man."

Time had no legs in the headlong, crawled on a torso with arms, like life, forward slow in ropes and small clutches, reaching its grave pace and setting each of Susan's minutes closer to her husband's hook, her eyes thickly turned with agate, glancing Tom in her cote, the bed. The young man pet this hoofed impermanence in a thought of fats and resignation. He was fifteen years old. Susan loved her son but he was like his father.

Eat stood on the rustling scrape of leaves beside his callused feet. His ransoms were forgiveness. He was a middle man who existed for the purpose of settling things. The horseman disrobed and exhibited his nude frame, as he had in the woods, leaves falling to the carpet. The ants. The breeze from the window. Eat made his way back into the closet, stood in this vertical compartment with his low shoulders and tired eyes.

"She can head off now, Tom. If you let her. No reason to stay."

"I'm sorry for what happened to her. I didn't know what to do," Tom conceded.

"Let that go. It's what you do at the end of Summer vacation."

"Is it almost Fall?"

"Oh yes, Tom. Almost. I keep these dead leaves to remind me."

"Sometimes I forget when it is. When it's... when I'm young or where I am."

"That's why I'm here. Now get his pistol and let her go, Tom. It's your pistol now. Tell her about it and watch her slink off."

"I have to kill her?"

"Gea. 'The law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.'"

Tom looked over the frail, maddened body of his mother, her breathing sparse and the moss on her legs disturbed from his motions atop her.

"I'm sorry. I didn't do anything," he told her, "He just kept hitting you, and after awhile, I didn't even think to do anything. I ignored you, to get away from him, and it wasn't right. I wasn't him, but I guess I did like him. You just got quieter until you weren't really there anymore. He'd put his hand to you and I just didn't look. I- I'm so sorry, mom."

Susan let a gasp part her lips and her hands clutched at the egg-belly. A trickling sound emanated from her thighs and met the bed's blankets. The pregnancy had broken. She lifted her knees, eyes wild with stricture and strain, began to push the baby out.

Tom found the service pistol amid the leaves on the floor. Bullet in the chamber where he had set it. How long had he been in the room? Perhaps time stopped as it felt to. Decades. It had been years since he met with Eat in the woods. Hours.

In the instance of a single thought, privacy. In a life of innumerable privacies, a person's mind. The way it walled around time like a clay bowl to soup. The manner of a keep. Susan reached into the headboard while moaning in contraction, retrieving the myrtlewood box.

The birth crowned in a distension of her orifice, the small egress of a head coated in her material, eyes shut up tight. This was a small thing. A runt being born from its mother. She dropped the myrtlewood box as the pig wriggled free, reached down and brought the cord to her teeth, began to chew at the umbilicus, the advantageous moment of a new creature's life declared by the croak of air from its just-opened throat.

Down on one knee. Tom had retrieved the box and opened it. The proper way to propose was with a knee on the ground, set like to beg, or else the only way he knew. Maybe both and one due to the other. One knee in the leaves and carpet, one mind looking upward. Would Meg marry him? He had asked that question so long ago. Or right then. These were the same. At the end of this proposal, Meg chuckled and grew up tall. An adult. A woman approached by a man with his hands full of permanency. A woman who carried acceptance in her nod and talk. There was love.

"Well, I will Tom. Yes."

The engagement ring. Family ring. Left hand. The service pistol. Expiry. Right hand. Tom stood, a man now engaged to his love, and used one hand to adopt his wife, readying the other to remove his mother. Misdelivery and compatibility were at times the same. Mothers and wives and daughters. The old and the young. The difference from Tom. The difference.

His arm lifted and the sights were straight, heart to forearm to grip to muzzle, empty space to the wet, straining face. A lift and sway. Sighting the pistol to her temple. Tom mouthed his apology to himself and looked upon his lost, house-eaten mother. Susan who had done so much and said so little, Susan who sighed with the removal of the feral pig from her womb, a magnificent, ugly, lovely sacrifice. She had loved him, of course, but love had always been was a far away thing to Susan. It existed and it was true, but rarely did it need to be in front of you.

"Isn't she gonna say anything, first?" Meg asked. Tom's eyes softened.

"No."

There was an ache to the moment and he did not fire. Eat and Meg stared at Susan, judging or waiting, curious, but Tom could not fire the weapon he held. After the moment, he lowered his arm. Weak or only a thing that hadn't the function to push someone that far off the world. Someone he was supposed to carry in his thoughts and defend.

"I can't do this," he concluded. Eat shut the closet door and was gone.

The house opened up its throat and let out its awful wind. Larry. His anger insoluble and veins thrust up. He was out. Stood at the window. Young Larry outside, shouting into the bedroom. Mouth apart and knives protruding from his jaws.

"Go on, howl. You're next," Tom said, cold.

Then the father's arms were in. Larry at the window, his eyes and head reaching into the bedroom with a distorted grope for the wife. He grabbed her waist with his callused hands and wrapped his long neck and face around her legs, drew back, yanking her from the bed, her chin striking the frame as she shot from the room, through the window, outside. Larry had taken his wife away. Tom held Meghan's hand as time began again. Then this, too, was removed from him.

"A good man," she repeated, letting go of him, crawling over the bed to the window.

"You're leaving?" he asked in a panic.

"No, Tom. You are."

He closed his mouth tight and watched her descend from the window, stone in his heart like a stove-burner between his lungs. Searing against the ribs. Heart lurching away from this. Anywhere, everywhere.

"Thank you for our life together," she said then, a grown up outside, walking away, removed from him and his trapped state. Away from what he had done. Gone. Pushed to an end.

The breeze from the window was cool and pure, Sun-warmed from the hills on down. Only Tom and the runt pig remained in the clean bedroom. The curtains aside the frames ushered light wind inside and gave it form.

"I didn't know," he said to the wet, newly born pig. This animal left the bedding, fell awkward to the floor and then shook the mucous from its thin hairs. The runt noted its surroundings and then stood at his feet. Nuzzled his ankle.

"I guess you're me, then."

The pig gave a small squeal. From beyond the house, through the open window and scissures of ever familiar hills, Tom heard his name called. Many people saying. Things with wings and things with paws. Tom. Tom. Down the trees, from the brush, in the lay of each yard and flats of sidewalked road. His name on the very breezes that sidled his thought, calling from the woods of the Camas wilderness. Tom.

The sound of a muffled cough passed low through the wall; Larry in the den. All that was left of Tom's young nightmare, the house's most precious meal. The drop of instruments at the end of a symphony.

Tom retrieved his pants and dressed himself, tucked the loaded pistol into his belt. His eyes were ashamed as he exited the bedroom, closing the door, alone with but his pig self at his feet. All had been forgiven or lost but the one man.

**Sixteen**

The wood pig grunted affirmative at Tom's touch, a scratch behind the ears, on the couch with the window's interrupted sunlight at the back of Tom's head. The two boys sat and thought, designing one another's future, being one another's past. Tom was sixteen, had surpassed the age of cowering from his father, but was not sturdy enough in years to be rid of him. Tom had been born into the world around him, presented to it, was expected to become whatever piece his kind craved, if any. The wood that formed his life had a strong grain but many knots. The price of a person being taken up by the world, being consented and recognized, was adopting it in return. To not use care with this was to shirk a natural responsibility to thrive. Snuffing down one's emotion was forgetting to grow right, disallowing one's beams to expand and fill with the years of coarse grain one needed to admire life, and in time, cause a person to wither the wrong way: Outward from the inside.

Life was no gift but a predicament. He was born equal in his land and said free. Contrary to the message that so often rode into radios and traveled the wires to his television screen, freedom was indeed free; it was coercion that cost. There was a fine and weak separation between the free and the directionless. They were, at times, the same. An awful din arose when the direction of one intersected the freedom of another. Those most free would always use their vanity to re-imagine the world, to affect it's change and with great need to know it, but this freeing of others, despite grand intention, would always occur with ballasts of hallucination and misdirection. With talk that went around talk. The world did this to boys and girls. Coerced them into the woods that had no end, the woods with infinite direction, and at great cost, for they paid a fare in bits of themselves, small parcels scattered like birdseed and endlessly pecked up. Free.

He thought about the ignorance he had played with his mother. The manner that he had left her to the beatings and distanced himself. Though Larry had at times struck Tom, there was an unconscious limiter in Larry for hurting his boy. It was rare, and never exceeded some warped formation of a lesson. What Larry did to Susan was the same, though at times dipped into a resentful and diaphanous bullying. More frequent.

Behind these forces of resentment and dominance, Larry made up stories about lineage, about his own past, about fights he got in and smart replies he had made back in previous phases of his life. Few of these things were true, however. Larry had a taste for the little lies, those he felt made him what he wanted to be, which was an owner of himself and all around him, a hearth about which everything should serve and respect. That there was little of this for him only churned the bees in his blood and set them loose odd nights.

Tom did not want to oppose his father, but the time had come. He demonstrated his nervousness in the fidgeting of his hands on the runt, his eyes distant as he turned over the mummified fits of his memory, his childhood with the old man. There was no prospect with Larry. Tom had done as told, but was only told when it was concluded he had fallen to error. Tom had learned to fend for himself, until a mistake was made, then he would face his old man. This man was as if a tree in the denser woods. A ragged, bear-marked pinyon. He was a taker of trees and was himself a tall, dry, bitter one. That Tom did not want to confront him only called the importance of the meet into greater scrutiny.

Tom did not enter the den. He did not need to. While sitting in recollection on the couch with the pig, he heard the knob turn and the door to the den opened. Larry simply entered the living room. The man in the den had left it and come to Tom. Perhaps this confrontation was slated by the house anymore. Puppeted. Tom looked about at all the uses for wood.

"Hi dad."

"Tom."

Larry sat on the couch and watched with irritation as the runt pig squealed and wriggled free of Tom's hands, running into the kitchen and out of view, likely to hide in a cupboard. Tom sighed and rubbed his temples as Larry lit a cigarette and leaned back into the couch. The two sat and were quiet for a time, Larry frustrated, trying with his eye-teeth to chew a callus from his palm between drags from the cigarette. He was like a dog sporadically nipping at a flea in the fur.

The first to speak was the father, his palm wet from the small bites, cigarette unsteady between two fingers.

"Happy birthday, Tom."

"It's not our birthday."

"Yes it is. Always is. Over and over again. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you."

The father stopped then, agitated with all. The drip of water from the den. The grunts of the runt in the kitchen. Larry stirred and adjusted his hat. He sighed and made small-talk.

"Fourth birthday. You remember that one?"

"I think I do. You would have turned... what, twenty-eight?"

"Somethin' like that. I was lean, too. Man, it felt good. Remember what you got?"

"You and mom bought me a bike."

"We said. That was all me, though. Bike was blue. You liked blue."

"I guess."

"First bike. Took the training wheels off before we gave it to you."

"I know. I lost two teeth because of it."

"Well, sink or swim. It's a good way."

"You should have left 'em on."

"They were baby teeth, anyway."

"They make training wheels for a reason. Being four is one of them."

It had been the curb swinging up into his periphery, little hands coming out as the abrasive sheet of sidewalk crackled against his cheek and mouth. Rolling over, tangled in the bicycle frame. White arms crooked through blue steel, red streaks on gray stone.

"Fine, you had a couple wrecks. What's there to cry about? Rode better than your friends after that, didn't ya?"

"Yeah. I was good at bikes."

"That's rhyme an' reason. A man learns his things better if he gets right in the middle of 'em."

"Unless he sinks and can't swim."

"Well yeah, unless that. Hey, whatever happened to that bike? I can't quite remember."

"Outgrew it, gave it to this little kid lived out by George."

Both were frustrated, angry, both deflecting their purpose for a spell. Boys. Men. Nearly talk. They at times left the past and entered the present. Only short durations, however. One was ancient and well-despised and one was a boy in torpor. The old man's nose shone on his son and their eyes were the same, their earliest builds before different routes to income. Greenchain. Driving truck until a foreman. Different bodies from the auxiliaries, the time in their bones full of all the various this-and-thats. Larry sat stiff, his fused back disallowing true laxity. Tom also sat rigid, his revulsion an unbending rail through his body.

"Mexican fella up the road," Larry said after a bit.

"That's Maro."

"No good leavin' your woman here all day with that spic up there. End up raisin' mutts."

"You disgust me."

"Well, not at first. It's when I get older."

"You don't like anyone. That's why no one likes _you_."

"Son, people reckon hard on a man who says what he thinks. Might not like what he thinks, might hate him for it, but they'll regard him enough to leave him be. No sense pretending to be what you're not. It's fake. And nobody should live fake. You though... you never respected me at all."

"No."

"Thought you were better than me."

"Was. Still am."

"Good. I was better than my old man, too. That's how it works. You shoulda had kids, Tom. They'd have been halfway to right."

The lights flickered and Tom heard a tapping at the window behind him. He craned his head around and caught sight of George peering in at Larry. It was a brief effort and failed. Sad. Larry was not for George. That boy had another sort of father, a quiet one. No matter who created him, George was not Larry's son. Tom ignored his old friend then, turning back to the couch. His father was oblivious to these small taps at the window. He simply did not allow them to exist.

"You kept puttin' your hand to her," Tom muttered.

"I know I did."

"You weren't even mad half the time. It was wrong."

"You're sixteen years old, Tom. That ain't much for knowin' anything."

"I know enough. You don't hit people you watch over. You don't beat on your family. I know you didn't love her. Or me."

"Oh no, Tom. You two... son, you and your mother are everything to me. Always were."

"I keep waiting for you to die."

"Well, if that's what you're waitin' on, you're gonna have to give me some time. I'll get around to it soon enough."

The doors in the house unlatched, swayed open on old hinges. Wooden yawns in walls. A frightened squeal from the kitchen woke Tom from the awkward drift of his unfocused ire and set him to task.

"I need you out of this house; I can't get out with you still in here."

"I know that, son"

"So I need to do a ransom. That's how it works. I'm fixed with everyone except you, so how do we do this?"

"Son, that's up to the water."

"The water?"

"Out back, there's a hole full of water. Oldest kind there is. It ain't no good and knows your name."

"..."

"You can hear the water, right? You got the ears for it."

"I've been hearing drips."

"Yeah, water's in the house, too. In the walls. In the ceiling. Some of it probably got inside ya already. Lookin' around in there."

"I don't understand."

"You've heard it. Knows your name. Says it sometimes. Drips. Maybe a splash here or there. It's cold water, right beneath the southerly wind. Thing is, it needs a heart, son, and it's been eyein' yours."

"Outside?"

"Yup. Way out back. You want to go free, you pull out that weak little thing and feed that hole."

"There's a stone with my heart. It keeps me weighted in there. I've worked hard to keep it where it is. I'm not losing my heart again."

"Yeah, we've come around to that. It's why I'm here."

"I can't go outside."

"Nope. Not until I do."

"Go on, then."

"Can't. You said it yourself, there's a ransom. You ain't fed me, yet."

Larry nibbled at the callus again, this time gaining ground. After working his lower teeth in, he pulled to the side and the callus was torn from his palm. Blood began to seep up from this raw and exposed rough of skin, dribbled down the ball of his squarish, marred hand.

"There we go. Thing's been crusty for a week."

"What do you want?" Tom asked.

"Same thing you want. Everything to stop. Not much time left, so let's get it goin'."

"I want you gone."

"You just try and make me leave."

"What?"

"Smart man knows you respect him when you challenge him. I know you want to take a shot at me. Let's see you try it, pussy."

"This is my Summer, dad, not yours, and I want you out of my fuckin' house. It's mine."

"Then I guess we know the way."

Larry stood and stepped into the living room's middle, knelt and dragged his bloody palm over the ground. A smudge of blood, then a wide-arc, crescent, then one end met the other. A broad red circle. He stood and cracked his neck. Narrow eyes.

"Let's get it over with. You got this comin'."

"I don't want to fight you, dad. I just want you to leave."

"Fine. When you can beat me outta this circle, you can have it your way. I'll go. Until then, I'm the man of this house."

Tom grew loud inside, felt the anger culminate and begin to work. If this was the way to an end, he could wage it fair enough. His father's eyes were terrible things. Tom wanted to be past the terrible things.

"No, sir. Man of this house is me. And I'm finished with you."

"Think so? I got me some doubts, Tom. You're gonna have to show me."

"Yes, sir."

The floor creaked as Tom stood, rotating his shoulders to clear them, running his mind into gasoline. The old man was decades of atrocious skin. His meaty arms and stiff back. That dull head and the last of his hair on the verge of slithering out. An old, feeble man who had been granite in the past. Impenetrable.

You went around. You climbed across him like a col, over the top, never through, never civil. Diplomacy was tread scuff and bits of candy to Larry. No grain to it. A red film where real fire was needed. His knuckles had long back been compressed and flattened. He had beaten his wife at times, and on very rare occasions, his son, but these had not been the sole recipients of his anger. There were other angry men he had hit. Men in the woods, on the crew. Most hit him back. Tom stepped into the circle.

A right into Tom's chin rocked his head back on the pivot. Flash of orange and a shake of confusion. Another. The anvil heavy fist into Tom's gut and the coarse words colliding with his ear.

"Boy, your woman fucked another man and you didn't do nothin'. You're the weakest sort there is."

"I deserved it for being gone like that."

"You put your great-grandma's ring on a damned whore."

Two quick jabs into Tom's eyes and the world was covered by his own forearms, lifted to protect his face. Unable to see. Clubs against his head as Larry beat him downward, shoving Tom to the floor where the stomps would begin.

"What a fuckin' letdown. I expected more, Tom."

"No one cares what you expect. No one cares about you."

"I know about you goin' faggot with your little friend."

"Kids these days, huh? Keep your hands up, old man."

And then the tide. Up against the shores of the Earth, drawing in, drawing out, exposing Tom's sand. It was the water against the edges of a pool, a lake, a world, and it always moved, always contained far more than what was outwardly visible. Tom struck him low, a cheap shot between the legs.

"Oh, you little chickenshit."

Then upward, hitting and beating his father out of anger, out of dismay, out of himself. Larry clubbed Tom's neck as the young man shoved his father from the circle. The old man grunted, stumbling backward, aging, his hands up as his back collided with the wall. Tom continued, outside the circle, kicking and stomping, swearing, hearing his name and being the demon called for as Larry curled on the floor.

"Stop. It's done, Tom."

The foot into the old man's chin lurched the weathered head hard against the wall. Drawing back. Another kick and Larry's ribs bent from the impact. Tom's cold carry-through was an intent to break them. Stomping on the old man's legs, kicking the hands aside again and again. Then it slowed. Ceased. A stare downward at a monster that looked like him. The two breathed, exasperated.

Larry sat up with squinting eyes, rolled his head against the wall in a pained frown. Tom had solved his father in a manner the father understood, and in so doing, Larry had won the grander skirmish. He had a son more like him. His influence had been the stronger, and had out its way.

"Get out," Tom said.

"I'm a good man, goddamn it," he wheezed.

"On what account? The man part is only half of what you need to be a damn person. That's bigger. It's better than you. It's other people, too. You're a shitty dad and a cruel fuckin' husband."

"Go on, finish up."

"I _am_ finished. You're done. You might be a man, pop, but there ain't much good involved."

"Never respected me."

"Didn't deserve it. You're a terrible person."

Susan stood behind the glass pane looking in. She watched her husband with a sense of guilt. Her trait of exhibiting fault, even fictitious, shone candid in her furtive, depleted eyes. Tom looked to her and nodded, saw her belly was torn, blood leaking down her leg. She frowned and thought badly of Tom, waited for Larry to come outside. The father's disturbing and aggressive circumstance of passing down his sense of manhood was done. Ugly but unified, the longstanding bruise of their kinship was ended.

Larry held his hand up and Tom grasped this, got the old man to his feet. Breathing heavy, Larry worked a shaky hand into his pocket and found his pack. Tried in vain to strike a match. In the end he simply dropped the matchbook and cigarettes and made his way to the door, outcast and rejected yet somehow wearing a slight pride. Tom watched as his father opened the front door and vacated the house. The enemies beyond the threshold of the door, who had stood in the yard waiting to take Tom as feed, instead circled Larry. Susan was among them. Meg. All putting their arms around him.

This was a vanishing love, as they were dissipating creatures. When all were gone, the outside was returned to Tom. The house opened up its chest and Tom sat in its roost, rocking and thinking and able. The fields gagged on their life and the result was a glimmer of wondrous proclivity. Even the birds had returned to the air.

As the spites in Tom's memory healed over and gauged him, the house a melody of his young years and times, the evening acceded the swale and dimmed the world to ash. The runt pig returned to him and he lifted. Scratched and pet. The runt had always been a girl because everyone thought it was like one. Now a boy. Could grow up different. Be himself.

Tom could hear his name being uttered from the hills and houses, a stony T into the round of a vowel which then halted the breath into a terminal M. Tom. Tom. Calling as if hello. From the street and from each yard, the pitching voice of each blade of grass and every hovering insect. Beneath this sound of familiarity and beckoning, behind his name and deep in as the meaning, he could hear the quiet laps of water against an ever-present shore.

**Seventeen**

The auditorium had not accomplished its capacity but the roving murmur was still a great admixture of voices. A gaggle of local folk. Some few visitors from outside. Grandparents. Uncles and aunts. The procession was two-by-two, student with student, up the rows slow and somber toward the small stage and podium where each was handed the symbolic placard. Sheet of thin paper perched on stained balsa. The diploma and the entrance to a higher, propulsive school for some, a final and relieving end of school for others.

Nitya's hand was sweaty but this was fine and Tom's focus was not on the uncomfortable, damp heat of her palm, nervous as she was, but in finishing the long procession. Across the auditorium and winding between the seats. Kid after kid across the years and weaving between one another, around each post, grade by grade, not with adventure or the amassing of a certain knowledge, but in the requisite probation of society's want for adults. The students had taken unwitting part in the national promenade, the legal installation of individuals by age. They would fend and wage their own welfare soon. More exodus than exile. More flutter than flight. Growing up. How decorous and American and on time they were.

He was seventeen and the end of school meant more than a release from study or the particular classrooms he had come to dislike. While the graduation rite made him somewhat of a man, which felt to be a small and pride-centered matter, this was not the more intense meaning he had placed on the diploma. The certification of general study held another outcome, a pressure point at which he could twist a valve and release all that pestered him. With the granting of his high school diploma, he had also earned the ability to leave. His birthday would come. He would be eighteen, and on this day of parental discorporation, he would be gone. Perhaps Eugene. The future was soon but the elsewhere could have been anywhere. Graduating high school was his self-imposed prerequisite for abandoning the swale and its occupants for good.

"Congratulations, Nitya," the principal stated, handing her the diploma. A few moments passed and the rudimentary applause subsided.

"Congratulations, Tom."

The clapping occurred in a compulsory way. Students in twos, names announced as if commendations and read from a sometimes incorrect list. First names to be informal. Pleased parents holding rare hands. Grandparents looking fondly on the new adulthood and the folk they had helped create. Friends nodding. Instructors exchanging small remarks with one another on particular students as these reached the podium to short, reticent congratulations.

Tom's ovation was less than others, but his father's eyes from the lower rows were slight and proud. This bore achievement to the son. This more than many things. When the Tom and Nitya had passed to the other side of the stage, as if having breached a strange and symbolic membrane into societal adulthood, Tom let go of his walking partner's moist hand. She was quick to readopt, however. Behind them, the principal repeated with endless monotony.

"Congratulations, Paul," then a breathy yawn and hands banging together, "Congratulations, Sharon." Again and again.

Tom and Nitya left the stage holding their diplomas in their free hands and one another with their taken hands. He had not spoken to her much in the last several years, but she had chosen him as walking partner. George had walked with his new girlfriend, Wendy. Alan had chosen not to take part in the ceremony.

Nitya stood on her toes then and whispered in his ear. Tom thought a moment and a certain kind of laugh lifted into his eyes.

"Yes. I still am," he answered. She only smiled, impressed with her boldness.

"You?" he asked. She shook her head. The auditorium faded in power to him. Lights dimmed. She did not look at him when she spoke.

"If you want to," she said, pausing for a moment, "We could hang out later, just us." Tom's daze became a nervousness that quickly gained in amplitude.

"Okay, yes," he said, "I'd love to." Cheers and ovation. Lights in full bloom and an auditorium for miles.

What he did over Summer vacation was graduate high school and hang his diploma on the wall. Of greater, inner accolade to him was the demolition of his virginity, which had occurred in a sneaky and almost celebratory way.

The wall was the same dull white as ever, but in the middle was the small placard. His father and mother were gone. Meghan was gone. His friends were no more and the runt pig sat on his lap, staying warm in a moment of comfort and quiet as Tom sat on the couch, staring at the diploma he had received so long ago, and just that day.

The house was waking up around him. At times people entered rimmed in an odd and short-lived cheer, these making their way through the rooms and talking about their new cessation of classes and teachers. Little spans for things in passing. Tom found himself navigating the small groups throughout the night. He was nearly eighteen and so were the visitors.

The all night party after graduation. Muffled sex and a bout of drunkenness. First times for things. One by one the visitors left, home to hang their selfsame diplomas on identical walls. The recreation center had hosted the small graduation party and when the party ended, so expired each previous in-group these young people had been part of. Tom was there like Tom was in his home, but these sorts of events could not last long. Homes were parties and the Sun would always dispel one to truth in the morning.

He would be eighteen when he woke. His birthday. The walls of his surroundings were concrete. He moved across the long, waxed floor between basketball hoops.

"Why didn't we ever go out?" Nitya asked, the two having returned to the all-night graduation party from their awkward meet in her car.

"I don't know. We still could, though."

"What I'm doing over summer vacation is moving to Massachusetts and going to school. Then moving to Berlin, where my husband will be from. I think right now I'm going to be an oceanographer, but in truth, I end up going back to school and then teaching biology to kids. He'll have affairs but I'll pretend I don't know. I'll have one too, but it won't last very long."

Tom nodded.

"I see. I don't have an interest in college. I'm moving to Eugene to be with a woman who won't like me much, then I guess I'm coming back here. I won't want to but... it's just what happens. But I'll meet Meg after a bit, which is good, and we'll get married. No kids or anything. What I'm doing over Summer vacation is starting my whole life, really. Even though I'll love Meg, well... it's sad. Things turn out bad for me. Her, too."

After graduation, Alan stayed in the swale and acquired a job, played his guitar in a small apartment, but Tom had no sense of this. No interest in music. The two friends forgot to be. George joined into military service, but Tom did not see himself in the soldier way. These friends were simple to move away from. Guitars and infantry. No, not for Tom.

Alan got sick until dead. This had not made much sense to Tom, for while he could comprehend the reason for Alan's death, there was no answer to the question of why. Everything had quick-talk about what, who, when, how, or where. Very little in the world knew anything about why. Then George got himself into the grave. Dead. Tom had never really understood. Something to do with a suspect heart that went awry young. Why? Eat was hungry, maybe. Or this was Tom's welcome to the dread lottery of life and a soul was but tawdry currency.

The runt pig stayed beside him and the two stayed up the Summer. Associating with those around them, real or not. The house had been opened and Tom was no longer needed. He gutted his mood to create better ones, entreated himself through the rooms of the town having wondrous conversations with whoever the swale saw fit to offer him. Then he decided it was time to leave.

He would move on. He would find a new day. Tom sat on the couch, stroking the runt pig and designing the future he already knew. The long day was many that wore a mask of one. He had stayed up all night. He became eighteen. The windows made the song and he blew out the candles. The past. Oil-based dreams under acetone nights.

At the rise of the Sun, in the hour still dark and drowsy, an hour approaching new breath and the next time, the house cupped his skull warmly and whispered into it.

"Yes. I still am," he replied to the empty living room. The house only smiled, impressed with its boldness.

"You?" he asked. The house shook its fixtures and beams. The world faded in power to him. The air thinned. Drips of water.

"Do you want to go now?" the house asked then, not looking at him.

"Okay," Tom said, "I'd love to."

About working in Baker's Dairy. One of three dairies in the county. Bail-style shed work. Boring and hard work. A portion of him that thought to try more school. A portion not. The cows had cups affixed to the udders and Tom gathered the milk and drank milk from the refrigerator and affixed his mouth to breasts and gathered her up and affixed himself to Kanell Materials.

"You got any kids?" Lee had asked.

"No, sir. None for me."

Broke open the eggs. Westinghouse oven. Hot nonstick pan and element quick from gray to orange. Tom thought of Maro and Jan. Thought of Meg. This meal rummaged in his thoughts a talk with Claire, talks with Nitya, with his wife and many others. They were the same soul and spoke in the same voice.

"You're a good person. Just a weak man," they said.

"I know. I didn't hold out. Should have."

"You hear that water?"

"I broke up like wet pressboard."

"Follow it. That sound."

"I will. But it feels bad to leave."

He had graduated. His mother and father, Meghan, Claire, George and Alan, the past and the future... all of these things had set. They were all behind him. It was reason to move on. The woods maybe. Elsewhere could have been anywhere.

Tom retrieved his father's service pistol from the kitchen table and walked out back, leaving the house and the last bits of the past. He would not be returning home. The runt pig sat on the back porch, watching him. Approval. The span of life in an instant and a day, a blink and a being. The runt pig was all the people, all tame. All Tom. This animal stayed on the porch and watched him leave. Tom was feral at the end. He could go and he understood now.

His mother drove through the fields and swayed the old Buick ahead and behind him. Larry towered in the woods, beckoning his boy to enter the final circle. Meg walked beside him at times, flashing him with eight breasts, pig-teats, a snout. Commentary on what had happened, who Tom had become and all the bad news there was. How terrible it had been to leave her like this. How selfish of him.

It was time to take care of himself. For the past to be gone and the future to set down. Time to end all of the things he had deplumed and unseated, each certainty he had twisted into question. The Sun would no longer rise or set. This birthday would not end. He walked through the dairy field. It was time to find himself.

"Out for a walk?" Eat asked from within his bones.

"Off to find myself."

"You know where you are, then?"

"I'll be there shortly. It's just a walk through the woods."

"To the water's edge."

"Happy birthday to me."

The weedy fields of Camas Swale were but the tufts of space on which his feet could pass. He continued into the woods. No longer a boy. Not yet a man. He listened to the cool water in his blood and walked on lively feet. In time he found the road and followed, just off sight, into the woods and the edge of all things alone.

**Eighteen**

He entered the woods where the fragrant limbs of dogwoods became the twisted vest of a trail. As Tom passed through, his presence lit these tall barons as from a human lamp. He made the way, an animal sated from foraging and headed for drink. The road was a millipede unending, held onto the ground with its strong legs at the side, shoulders that carved through Camas County soil and stone, making arcs, crook-lines, tilted elbows, and curtly passing the fork. He walked the south side of this. Stayed shy of the road, ninety feet out, in the woods and following the line. This walk was one step for a dozen.

The wind lifted his hair as he shot through, walking his pace but the ground scrolling beneath him at great speed. For a time he followed the old Buick and hand signals of his mother. She led him quietly until the valley. She had married the road, and this did not descend where Tom could, and so his mother stayed behind. He then watched the stretch of his father's shadow over the woods, the black across the valley as reference, let the Sun guide him through. His father led the miles and moved in a broad gait, heavy between the trees. Head above the canopy.

When the father laid to rest, it was George in fatigues, rifle in one arm, that ushered Tom on. George did reconnaissance and flagged him by as the stricture of pinyons overtook the lower plane of eager brush. George led him upwards and through the col and rock, brought him over in time. Then they came across a deep grave and George had to climb down. He had no more in him than this. The Earth covered him over and George would have to stay beneath. Tom continued without his old friend, following strums of music in the air.

Alan was guitar until Tom found him. Sat in the clearing, playing the song and frowning from deep in. Alan could not talk, could only point. With a pat against Tom's shoulder, he was left behind as Tom made the direction he had been given, into the damp rot of nature and down into its furthest bowers. He had come so far. Was so close. The smell of the lake reached into him, air gravid with moisture. He was eighteen years old and ready to finish all that he had begun. The stone in his chest heated and the heart beside it strummed.

It would be so kind. So easy. He would drive and not look back to the dim banks in that fog of all the yesterdays. He would be forward. Moving. The terminal, inner fame. Never to run out of gas or food, his fond memories in the passenger seat and himself behind the wheel. This would have no need to end until it did.

Haven Lake was a deep hole into which things vanished. Hooks and bait. Stones and else. A grave. Still as a rodent catching scent of a hungry spy.

There was an older man kneeling down on the bank, cutting off the head of a herring. The buck-knife in his hand squeezed down and severed the portion. Hook through the eyes and bait set. The man sat back on a log and cleared his throat, looked at the head, emotionless. Still. A frigid water surface. Tom exited the woods into the open end of the gravel road, watching the old man sit and think to fish. He could wait for the old man to see him, or make his presence known right then. However he wanted.

The truck was parked just off the gravel, rusted and stuck in its age, but an accountable friend. Tom breathed and ran his hand through his hair, a shake in his hands and a certainty on his mind.

"I see you there. Don't move," he said after a bit.

The old man turned and saw him, said nothing. Had no words. "I mean for your keys. Give 'em here."

Tom lifted his sharp eyes and stared a hollow in the old man. The pistol's sights had aligned loosely near the older man's chin. He felt silly standing so still. The woods in the forgotten life behind him. His young head a bauble on the post of a body. So meaningless and small. Important where it stood but of little worth to those with no connection to it. A satellite passed over. There was an earthquake in India. Drips of water filled the air. He settled eye on the old man's sadness and gathered up the significance.

"You go away," the old man said then.

"Can't. Need that truck," Tom replied, "Give me your keys."

"Go away."

"You toss me the keys."

"Go on. Get out of here."

"I already know it's gonna happen, old man," Tom said.

"Well, you don't know me."

This last statement meant everything and was entirely wrong. Tom knew him in the truest way, had left the woods and the world and finally come to the lake, entering into an isolation that held none but he and this old man. One person. There were only two men on Earth that existed. One. They stared at each other. Living masters of so little.

Tom glanced off toward the road. This streak of pavement went on forever. The pistol lost some elevation. He swallowed the thickness of his mouth and fought down a cough. The air was swimming the way a strong moment distorts truth or discovers it. He began crying.

"Keys, you old shit."

"Go on," the old man said.

The glances at the woods and road quickened. Time was almost ended. The old man was a fool. What had happened? All the grandness of life, all the breaching wails of trouble and yet every spark of goodness one could know. What a mistake it was to lose these. To kill oneself. Tom brought his forearm down with the pistol. Exhale and frustration. Fear and anxious eyes. The world had crowded the old man, pushed him to a certain destruction. How sad Meg would be when her husband did not return.

There was a span of inconsequence then, a moment in which Tom felt more human than he had in years, more temporary and inane. The dead town. The slit veins of the latest economy. Ugly family and no one to think of you for what you were. Men did not matter. Women did not matter. The times were everything and the times were not made of people, just by them. The people ignored egos and used them, ignored one another and gripped at wares. They were reflexive and critical. They struck with brands and told you to go to church if you wanted security. Maybe he was about to die. Maybe he needed to say something or stay quiet. He chose quiet.

A moment passed between the two, a short spell of stillness that fed from weariness, fright. This was a balance of seconds fraught with the sound of water.

"Take the north fork," the old man finally said.

"They're all the same way," Tom replied.

"Nobody out there. Gets you to town after a bit."

"I'm not going back to town."

"North fork. Go on. Maybe stay off the road but follow it."

Tom stood still, names carved in him, little hearts, holes through him. His wood was damp and weak inside, strong outside. Time working away on the whole span of life. He backed several steps and spit badly, having to wipe away a strand from his young lips. He flicked his wrist then and sniffed his nose, nodding, his father's pistol at his side with a limp wrist.

"Know what happened?" Tom asked then.

"Something bad."

Tom nodded again. Something bad. He thought about fishing. Thought about spilled beer and his father's service pistol tucked in a belt. Thought about when he had been an old man fishing at Haven Lake, days back or right then. About being past fifty. Being a boy. Thought of Meg and all the troubles in the few decades. He remembered what he had done at the lake. He knew.

"Yeah. Something bad," he said.

Then Tom fed the lake. The debt of the heart it so wanted. Shot the old man. Looked on the body shutting down before him.

"Why'd you do this? Things aren't so bad. Just the times, is all. Why'd you have to do like this?" he asked. The old man wasn't listening and did not respond, laying there on the bank of Haven and clutching at his chest, jaw continually tugging downward in a silent, automatic struggle for air.

The truck started on the second attempt. Then the north fork. Through the woods and into the farmlands. Tom was with velocity that way. Pulled or compelled. Being in his truck became laying on his back. He was salted in sweat, or damp from the lively sense of the lake. The road. Tom's bed was muck and belonged to insects and the dimpled footprints of birds. He rested, then tried to sit up. Drove a spell. Rested more. He heard the soft laps of the lake as he drove off through the bright dairy fields of Camas Swale, his momentum building within and the fog from the hills drawing close to meet him.

Tom remained. Continued. Something left after all other parts had been taken away. Today was his birthday and the fish had bitten and he had tasted a bit of beer and Meghan was a light in his eyes for that one good, strong breath on the bank. Now it could end.

The Sun shone through and the truck sat idle. There was a song in the lake for a moment, a short needling of sound that moved forward, somewhere vast and pure, numbing and indistinct. He drove through the fields without moving, past the upset and into the loving creep of his mind's languish. He might catch some sleep in the hills and the cities. He might wake forever and be as he was. He felt the fading dream of day and the end. Ever still and ever cold. A great hole.

The Summer carried him a spell, past himself and off the ream. The day moved and the lake calmed, fish in the dark and birds in the light, and in time, he was no more.

### About the Author

Ray Succre lives on the southern Oregon coast, U.S., with his wife and son. He has been writing for fifteen years, his work having appeared in numerous journals and magazines spanning many countries. He began writing novels in 2007. _A Fine Young Day_ is his fourth published book.

Also by the Author:

Novels

_Amphisbaena_ (Cauliay)

_Tatterdemalion_ (Cauliay)

_Thank You and Good Night_ (Capacity Press)

Poetry

_Other Cruel Things_ (Differentia Press)
