Some Hands

It was a Spring long on rain, short on flowers, mud everywhere, and one morning I started to shave and a bright red mole had sprouted overnight on my left cheek. No warning, no sensation, just there like a puffball arisen from the driveway. It was the size of a piece of confetti, and I touched it dumbly two or three times to confirm the obvious: it existed, it hurt when pushed hard into my jaw, it was in the way of a razor blade. Other than that it might be cancerous, it did not bother me much, but I called to my wife for a second opinion.

“Well,” she said, “at least something has decided to spring forth. That was definitely not there yesterday.”

She too confirmed its existence by poking at it with the nail of her forefinger, then stuck her face up close to mine, too close so her face was a blur, and I could smell the peppermint shampoo in her hair. “Big sucker,” she said.

I went to the doctor and he sent me to a dermatologist who said it was not cancerous but that its sudden appearance was unusual to say the least. She asked me what I wanted to do.
“Nothing."

I returned from the dermatologist and Clara was unhappy with me. “What do you mean nothing? You cannot just let it stay there and do nothing.”

It had not occurred to me that it would offend her and yet something about the sudden ugliness upon my face made my wife irritable, nervous, and for the next several days she could hardly take her eye from it. In turn, I decided the strange eruption did not bother me and I took a perverse delight in her dislike of it. It was the kind of small battle an old couple sometimes fights when their senses of individual vanity become too inextricable, when it must be recaptured in petty skirmishes. In the same way, my wife had recently asked whether I cared for a particular pair of turquoise earrings. I did not, and thereafter she wore them constantly. We had entered that portion of a long marriage where to retain our own identity we fought small, suffocated attempts at rebellion from the other. My face was not otherwise particularly ugly nor was it very attractive. At least that was how I thought of it, but who can say?

The next day I found myself having to shave around the mole with an inordinate amount of dexterity and decided to acquiesce. The thing was taking up too much energy and if I had derived some childish satisfaction in flaunting a disinterest in my own appearance in front of my wife, it was time grow up a little.

The procedure took all of half an hour, and when it was over I left the office with a thick wadding of gauze on my cheek. The doctor, a woman with the plain spokenness and humor of a plank of oak, explained it had bled a little more than expected but not to worry. My wife was relieved and despite having been a persistent irritant over the blemish, insisted on changing the bandage herself. She took a cotton ball full of alcohol and rubbed around the crater. I asked her why this had been so important to her. “You don't take care of yourself,” she said. “You've got to take care of yourself better.”

A week later she was driving across the train tracks towards St. Johns when an oncoming truck lost control and hit her little red car so hard that it spun around twice and landed in the ditch along the tracks. The first person who stopped said she extracted herself from the rear door, appeared to be okay, and then simply dropped dead. The car was full of bags of compost, spilled everywhere, and I cannot imagine the scene without black dirt arising like a cloud and crushing the wind from her lungs.

What followed was an long swim through waves of shock and grief. Our friends and family gathered around me for a month or so then slowly receded away. In the second month I contemplated suing the delivery company who the other driver worked for, as my in-laws suggested, then forgot about it. And then time was a flat, dull weight passing very slowly until I felt like going back to work.

It is my occupation to restore old trucks, mostly Dodge Power Wagons, and work means opening the door to my garage and picking up a wrench or a grinder. When Clara died I had been in the process of replicating a well-drilling apparatus that once came from the factory and fitted onto a winch driven by the engine. It is a remarkable contraption, a giant auger affixed to the front of a vehicle and capable of drilling shallow water wells, setting power poles, and so on. A remnant from a rural past.

One day I opened the garage and felt like bangin and welding on it again and so I did.

As I came back to the use of my hands, I found myself shaving in the mirror one morning and realized that the hole in my cheek was not healing. I removed the bandage and where there should have been a slight scar, according to the dermatologist, two parallel welts came together but did not close. Pressing them apart with my fingers, I could actually see the moisture from the inner skin of my mouth. In my grief I had not noticed this occurrence, had simply kept replacing the bandage day after day out of habit. But where a minor thing should have been was now a major thing, a hole in my face.

I was reminded of a man I had met years before in the mountains of Nicaragua. He was standing at a tienda holding a chicken in a string bag and wearing a Yankees hat. When he saw me he started talking in a thick east coast accent and telling me how he had lived for many years in Pennsylvania. There was a rather enormous hole in his throat, big enough to see a shocking red cave of flesh and sinew beneath the skin. As he babbled excitedly, declaiming upon the depth of snow in Pittsburgh, he lit a cigarette. Small whiffs of smoke puffed from the hole in his neck as he talked. This did not embarrass him and when he was done I left with a carton of beer and the perverse awe one feels after visiting a circus side show.

I called my dermatologist and explained the situation. She was as baffled as I was and told me to go to the doctor straight away. If it turned out to not be a sign of anything medically serious, she could provide a referral to a good plastic surgeon. But it did not hurt and I was happy to be amongst my tools again with no one to notice the scar. Eventually I stopped wearing a bandage.

As the work on the old Dodge progressed, I became happier. Several floor panels had rusted out of the cab over time and once I had cut them out and replaced them, the project was past its apogee. From there on out it was a matter of refining the outline of the whole rather than of solving its puzzle. I found myself spending more time sipping coffee in the morning and making forays into rehabilitating my wife's overgrown garden. The idea of picking up some compost no longer had the morbid overtones it had had six months before.

She had died in the spring and over time the vegetable beds had become filled with mummified tomato plants, bean stalks, corn grass that had died at six inches of height. As I pitched their dead bodies out of the ground with a spade, I wondered if perhaps I was doing this too soon. If while her clothes still hung in the closet and credit card bills still came in the mail I should be taking on metaphorical tasks of this kind. Yet it was irresistible and when the morning was slow or a parts order had not arrived yet, I cleared a different bed and scattered clover seed to sprout in the coming rains.

That she remained most alive to me in the garden was testimony to how strange and gentle a transformation she had made in the second half of her life. Prior to moving to Portland, she had been a rocket scientist, a physicist specializing in highly theoretical examinations of gas dynamics which were applied more concretely by others to the construction of booster rockets at a NASA facility in San Jose. It was demanding and lucrative work though it meant living in an expensive and stressful place. As her work progressed, so did the ephemeral nature of her physical life, making six figures but spending much of it on an apartment, vacations, and vehicles. It was, she said, the very embodiment of the rat wheel cliché.

Before she attempted to completely jump ship, she came to a method for ameliorating her disjointed life. One weekend, a friend invited her for a long road trip to go camping in the desert. It quickly became apparent that the friend wished to seduce her and that the camping trip was to be amongst a group of people indulging in what they called The Lifestyle. The Lifestyle was a coded term—one which I have always imagined capitalized— for people who were swingers in the 70s sense of that word. A loose affiliation of mostly couples who spent time together in various silly forms of recreation which arced, over the course of a night or a weekend, toward a sexual free for all. When she would tell me of this time in her life, I pictured an endless succession of naked people manning barbecue grills, playing volleyball, planting petunias.

It was impressed upon my wife that she was free to join or not join, by means of telling others whether she was On or Not On (Yet again, I imagine the terms in capital letters, as one imagines the terms of any cult. You're probably just going to have to get used to it.). But of course, after a long day of romping around in the sun, or drinking gin besides some high Sierra lake, it was assumed everyone would be softened into the state of On-ness which was the only real point of the excursion.

The idea struck her as more silly than anything else, but then she realized silly was what she wanted. The shape of her life—paying $2500 a month for a small apartment, chasing hydrogen molecules across computer screens, running to make busses, was in need of some bending. What could be sillier than a puppy pile of lawyers, human relations directors, language scholars, rolling around the Ikea tones of some Cupertino mansion?

When she first told me of this year of her life, obviously, it was more interesting to me as a kind of appetizer to our own coitus than anything else. She was an adventurer and I was not and each remembered day of bike riding or berry picking that became a night of sweat and laughter, ended with picking pubic hair from her teeth, was recounted in the before and after of our own rutting.

Such stale titillations came back to me as I tossed the dirt to and fro trying to fix in my mind the point where she had become my wife. Not the calendar date where we had been married. But the point where such exotica was no longer proximal to the heart of our life, was packed away in a trunk belonging to that other person, the pre-wife.

When finally she had wrested herself and moved to Portland for something completely different, Clara mostly left The Lifestylers behind. But one weekend before she had made many friends here, she attended a Gathering put on by a friend who had also just moved from San Jose. Clara told the people at the dinner that she was Off for the time being and left after dessert as the others retired to the host's bedroom. Before she left, her old friend pressed a business card into her hand and said, “You have to meet The Doctor, even if only for one of his massages.”

Why was all of this old history coming back to me as I dug out vegetable carcasses and turned in never eaten peas? I was remembering what I had loved in my wife. It was that long dormant sense of what a fearless and frenetic presence she had once been and the way in which I had admired her. Some of it, yes, was a carnal counting of coup in which a rather naïve, shy young man felt himself to have struck gold by wooing a beautiful, self-contained woman with a rich past. But that had long ago husked away, and it was remembering that she had had a past, rather than the particulars of it, which I now savored.

We had met about six months after she had come to Portland and I was still repairing Subarus and Toyotas for the outdoorsy and liberal people of southeast Portland. I had saved her a bundle by correcting a bad diagnosis of a slipped timing belt and charged her only to advance her distributor. I explained that the first mechanic she had been to had only been trying to scam her for an expensive repair, during which he would have simply fixed the ignition timing and she would have been none the wiser. This struck her as somehow indicative of the honest, no-nonsense character of her new city and she invited me to dinner in return.

As I spent more time wandering her garden, my Power Wagon project hit a snag. In attempting to fit a new front axle, I realized that I had welded the frame up out of square. An inexplicably stupid and fatal mistake, it robbed the project of life for me. The garage door stayed closed on mornings and the compost flew into the vegetable beds instead, turned it in with the stainless pitch fork I had bought for her birthday last year. When I ran out of beds to clear, I started a new one, and then there was nothing more to undue, I planted autumn crops; kale and cilantro, red lettuces, broccoli.

A week after receiving his card, my wife found herself lying naked atop a massage table in the house of The Doctor, who was in fact a well known and popular local Naturopathic MD. She said the room was dedicated to nothing but his massage table, the tiny sounds of gamelan gongs floating out unseen from a corner. The doctor himself was a tall, gregarious man who had fixed a delicious dinner for Indian curry for her and then offered her the expertise of his hands. She had the distinct sensation of a medical consultation and was not aroused. The Doctor told her there was no need for anything other than to receive a massage.

But after giving just that, he had cleared his throat and asked, “Would you like to sample some of my toys?” She was in that relaxed state after a good rub down where even the voice feels becalmed of speech and she felt drugged by her own visceral pleasure. The air smelled of lavender and mineral oil. The Doctor set a plain hardwood box on the table next to her and unclasped the hinges.

Inside was a velvet swaddled collection of blown glass dildos and vibrators arranged in relative length. The most elaborate was of two pieces with the head gasketed to the shaft by a piece of dense latex. In the clear crystal she could see a battery and wires, some mechanism for vibration, in the see-through style of an iMac computer. He explained that they were made by another Lifestyler whose day job was crafting elaborate pot smoking apparatus for medical marijuana users. They were quite expensive and sought after for their aesthetic beauty alone. The box even had a wire protruding from it to warm the otherwise cold glass to body temperature.

She took pains to try and explain to me that there was something kindly and deferential about the doctor, though he was quite handsome and by no means forlorn or dispossessed of charm. He really did seem to be offering up a medicinal technique with no sense of his own participation in the event. And so she said yes.

Yes. She said yes and he proceeded to slowly and expertly stimulate her in all sorts of pleasure producing ways. I could not help, upon hearing the story, but imagine gleaming chromatic stirrups arising mechanically from the table. Such was the weird, high priest imagery of the whole story.

Afterwards they drank cold Chardonnay on his porch and he explained, his jocularity regained, that he was part of a subset of Lifestylers who thought of themselves as something like worker bees. “I realized long ago that the whole point of all this sucking and fucking was the mystery and power of the female orgasm. Everything else is just frivolous, just selfishness.” I picture my wife, you see how memory reaches back and makes her my wife even then, quivering in post-coital pleasure watching the sun set toward the Coast Range. He told her that she was welcome for “worship”, that's what he called it, any time she wished.

But by the next day she had become creeped out. Whereas everything leading to that point had been a kind of frolic, a dangerous intoxication, the doctor and his friends had perfected a methodology, had extracted and reduced pleasure to a boring mechanical operation. She had found the limitation of separating herself into more than one person and wished to leave any destination that led to unvisited.

Standing in the back yard, poking at the fresh pile of black dirt with nothing on my mind, it was time to do something about the whole in my mouth. Clara had been right—you can't go around with a pointless problem hoping it will just manifest itself as some kind of character, some slight incidence of rebellion. I was not a peasant with no health care and a rooster in a bag. Yet what was there to do? It did not hurt and I could not conceive of my appearance mattering in any way other than attracting a mate, something of no interest to me at the moment.

So I stood there worrying the back of the hole with my tongue and realized what troubled me was only the notion that there might be something more deeply wrong. A small, discrete mole on one's face does not turn into a major health problem for no reason. Perhaps I had AIDS from all those vicarious partners of hers, perhaps my fundamental immune system was trying to send me a message. Was it not from similar puzzling complaints that eventually AIDS had been discovered?

“No,” said my doctor, when I finally made it in. “It's unusual, yes, but it is not cancer and it is not AIDS. Trust me, it was just a really, really well-rooted something or other like a patch of bamboo. When it came out its roots went further than were first apparent.”

My regular doctor is an amiable Jewish guy with a flop of longish hair and a habit of clicking his pen or thumbing his stethoscope as he talks. “My advice though is that you see a plastic surgeon and figure out some way to cover it up before you start drooling out of it. Or worse yet get a carrot stuck there.” He found this greatly amusing and was still chuckling when he left the room.

And this is where my wife's old pillow talk stories and my present predicament start to relate to one another. Though the Doctor had quickly dulled as an enhancer of sexual chemistry, he lived on for many years as a running joke. He had become well known for his success in treating immunity disorders and other marginal ailments through alternative means. It was hard not to see his face every now and then in local weekly papers. And when one of us would do so, it would be enough set in motion running gags about pony-tailed orgasmic therapy healers. We suspected that perhaps he had figured out how to capture female orgasm in his wooden box and apply it later for the banishment of lethargy, fibro-myalgia, depression, and so forth.

In retrospect, I wanted this small thing, this hole in my mouth where little wisps of spit met tiny zephyrs of air, to mean something more than it did because I had not let my wife let it mean anything. That is as clear as I can put it, and I know it is not very clear.

His office was on a quiet street in southeast Portland. The yard was landscaped with bamboo, there were white kids with dreadlocks at the corner coffee shop down the street. Somewhere chickens clucked in an invisible yard. The receptionist handed me a very long questionnaire which started with age and weight, proceeded through self-assessment of my bowel movements, ran through significant life stresses, and ended with a few blank lines for stating my desired health outcome. I had not used a pen for so long my wrist was cramped by the time I was ushered into the back room.

After taking my vitals in the Chinese way, recording the multiple wrist pulses, the doctor finally peered at the whole in my mouth with a small flashlight, then sat back on his stool. He was not who I had expected, this pale-skinned, tall man with dark eyes and a white lab coat like a regular doctor. He did not have the bland, unworried smile I associate with the term “alternative practitioner”. He asked specific questions, did not have a ponytail, there was nothing condescending about him. He was profoundly likable, though I did have to stop myself from looking for his wooden box. “I don't think there is anything I can really do for you,” he said at last.

“No?”

“No. It's just a little hole there for some reason. If there is some systemic reason why it healed in such an atypical fashion, it does not seem to indicate anything worth worrying about. You could look at it like your body is trying to tell you to pay more attention to it. Not much bad could come from starting there and proceeding outward. Eat real food, sleep well, don't let anything get stuck in there.”

I left with a sensation of contentment. He had told me nothing I did not know, but I knew why I had gone there. It was to make some kind of contact with someone linked to my wife from before she was really my wife. I wanted to make some random connection to her by letting the doctor's once infamous hands pronounce upon me in some way. I don't know why that should have comforted me but it did. I felt I could go back to digging in the garden then and be assured of mourning my wife, the person, rather than my wife, the habit.

On my way to the car I stopped and got a tall cup of coffee. The counter was covered by cases of pies— apple rhubarb, peach cobbler, ginger apple. The sounds of laughing boys, music like aqueous, pulsing starfish on the stereo. In the midst of handing over my credit card, I stopped to look at the person taking it. I had not watched a woman closely in a good long while. The epicanthic folds of her eyes said Asian, and the slouchy green tee shirt with a faded duck on it said Oregon. She tossed a pen on the counter for me to sign the chit rather than handing it over. Beneath the minor details of this woman standing across from me, down through the stratifications of whatever might be settled underneath, was someone who existed without role or reason. What a vast and improbable multitude of persons. 

An Overheard Story

“I love you,” she said, handing me the plastic handles of a grocery bag. I was thinking about the beer I had bought and how maybe it was time to chose bottles without expensive looking animals on them anymore; trout, retrievers, bears.

“Say what?” “I love you.” We had met a couple of weeks ago, before I had lost my job and the pale ale was not a problem.

I was going through the line and told her I liked the tattoo on her wrist, a blue outline of an old dial telephone.

“Thanks,” she said. “I used to work at a coffee shop where every year at the Christmas party they had three tattoo artists.”

“They made you get tattoos?”

“I wanted to get one anyway.” She reached for the next items on the conveyor belt and waved them past the laser.

I didn't care about the tattoo one way or another. “Thanks. I mean for the groceries.” “I didn't buy them for you. Have a good day.” The next time I went to Savmor, I picked out the most expensive bottle on the shelf, something full of hops and a label with a devil holding a staff and I chose her line. When my groceries were bagged I asked, “What about if I asked you to share that beer with me when you get off work?”

“I'm more a fan of vodka tonics.” “What about one of those then, Lisa?” Name tag. “What about at least two or three of them?” Her hair was black and straight like a black broom and out of her work uniform she dressed like a scarecrow. Denim pants frayed at the bottom and a straw hat. We walked down the street from Savmor to a place with really tall tables and what looked like a lot of lawyers at the bar. She sat down, removed her hat and looked around the room. “This doesn't look like the kind of place that will card me.”

“You're not 21?” “Sure. I just don't have my wallet with me.” My temp jobs were so boring I tried not to tell anyone else about them. I didn't do much else.

She drank really fast, and after three vodka tonics said, “You're really sweet. But I have a boyfriend.” “Serious one?”

“Yeah, very serious. We moved here from Wishram and he's just waiting on his settlement before we can move up to Seattle.”

“Settlement?”

“Got hit by a car the first week in town. Just walking across Broadway and some guy plowed into him and broke his leg.”

She got up and grabbed her coat. “You're really sweet,” she said. Before she wobbled out the door she turned back to me, “But did you know that everything you say is a question?”

“Really, I mean no I didn't.” I drank another beer and watched the lawyers drink. They watched the bartender pour drinksand he watched all of us. Behind the bar there was a big swirly painting of a guy playing a guitar. He had a handlebar mustache and reminded me of Rolly Fingers, the relief pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers.

That was all that happened, all of it. Me and Lisa. Then I am walking through the line thinking about dogs and fish, blue herons, and she says, “I love you.” You could say it was unexpected. Apparently the serious boyfriend was not so serious after all.

A couple of weeks later she moved into my apartment carrying only one duffle bag. “That's it? everything you own?”

“No, my old boyfriend he won't give me back my other stuff. He sort of kicked me out.” “Do you want me to go get it for you? I could do that.” “If you wouldn't mind. That'd be great. You're still talking in questions, you know.” “Really? I mean no I had not thought of that.”

He was short and wide and his lower leg was wrapped in a dirty cast. He paid no attention to me and told her to make it quick. He had a knife, just held it in his hand closed to make sure we saw it. It was a big hunting knife, not really scary or anything. It caught my attention.

We hauled her clothes down in garbage bags, then a coffee table and some pots and pans. She told him to keep the bed, but he was eating some top ramen in the kitchen and paid no attention. We were walking down the hall with bags full of clothes when another woman turned the corner also with a bag of clothes.

“You bitch!” Lisa screamed. “I can't believe it. You really are moving in.” She set the bag down. “What do you care? I don't want to see you here again.” “You won't. You won't see me again. Get out of our way.” When we were past, Lisa turned around and swung a bag full of boots as hard as she could at the back of the other woman's head and would have clocked her a second time if she had not run into the apartment and grabbed the knife. She ran into the hall after us and sliced a garbage bag spilling shoes all over the corridor.

They stood there yelling at one another, flip-flops and Converse, one high heel, surrounding them. “Just get out of there said the other woman. It's mine now.”

When we got to the street, Lisa says, “Let's go get a drink to celebrate.” “Just a second. Was that his new girlfriend?” “Oh no. That was my sister.” “Your sister? Seriously, your sister is moving in with your boyfriend?” “Yes. There's nothing going on with them though. She's a dyke.”

I waited for more explanation but she gave none. “Let's go get a drink. I'm so glad to have all my shoes back.”

We bought a bottle of Stolichnaya and bag of ice and went back to our apartment with all the shoes.

She made a couple of vodka tonics in big mason jars and we sat on the bed talking about how we would decorate the place. “We need to get an iron for your shirts,” she said, “and a good frying pan for making quesadillas. Do you like apples in your quesadillas?

“I've never thought of it before.” “It's the best. You wouldn't think so but it is delicious. Here I'll make you one.” She downed her drink and began to root around in her bags for a frying pan. She threw books and shoes, pans all over the kitchen until she found what she wanted. She rooted around in the fridge for some yellow cheese and an apple, sliced everything up and threw it in the pan. While the stove heated she poured us more vodka and tonic.

The quesadilla was not very good but my head was spinning half way through it and she was watching me eat. “It's, um, interesting,” I tried.

“Interesting? That's all.” She took the other half and ate it big bites, smacking her lips and when she finished lay back on the bed and patted her stomache. I was pretty drunk but it looked like tonight would be the night she would let me make love to her. We hadn't done that yet, but when I reached out to her she was asleep.

I lay down beside her and woke up later to the sound of a loud crash and when I opened my eyes it was dark. I didn't see her but there was a light in the bathroom.

“Are you okay in there? What was that noise?” “Yeah, I'm ahh good.” I could hear her breathing in with a little gasp.

“Well okay, as long as you are alright.” I lay back on the bed rubbing my throbbing brain and the next thing I knew she knocked the door open and was holding her leg. It was gushing blood and she limped to the kitchen and got a towel. The bathroom was a mess of red and broken vodka bottle. She tied the dish towel tight around her bleeding thigh and lay down on the bed with a smile on her face. “Go back to bed baby. We can sleep now.”

I woke up the next morning with a headache and ran around the apartment putting on the cleanest clothes I could find. It was the third day of a temp job, and the manager had been emphatic that I was to wear a clean white shirt at all times. I couldn't see why I needed to look like anything to answer phones and staple together reports on mortgage statistics. I got myself together and down to the bus, she had not stirred.

That was my first mistake, getting drunk like that. I'm not myself when I drink vodka and I should have seen that she needed more than a drunk boyfriend at that moment.

I like temp work, the smell of white out and hi-liter. I like how the regular people think you must do something more interesting with the rest of your life. I like telling small lies to give them something to talk about. I like wearing white shirts and having to keep them clean, even when I don't understand why.

At lunch i went to the bento place with Bill, the other temp, and he asked me what I was going to do next.

“My brother programs educational software. I want to learn computer programming,” I said. “There must be good money in that. I don't know what I want to do. I'm thinking about getting a car.”

“A car?” “For the winter. It really gets me down and I think that if I could drive around I wouldn't feel so bad.”

“I've got a car. I don't think it makes me feel any better. You could borrow it sometime.”

What a dork. The rest of the afternoon I kept spacing out looking at the stapler and thinking my future should have more oomph to it than a beater car. But it was just a phase, something I was doing since I had gotten fired from my last job. I didn't think it would last.

When i got home, the apartment was spotless. I had not really noticed before that the walls were a nice yellowy color instead of the usual white or beige. She had made the bed and done the dishes, mopped the floor even, and left me a note.

hey! I get off late tonight. I cleaned, how bout you cook something nice?

I made sure there was nothing to drink in the fridge and went down the street to get stuff for cooking a chicken. Rosemary and fresh tarragon. I like to cook when I get the chance. Over the next week or so I cooked:

roast chicken

beef stroganoff

bread

a cherry pie

She never said anything about drinking and kept a rag around her lower leg. As long as I made a big meal and she washed the dishes we didn't drink. As long as we did not drink nothing bad happened. She even ironed my shirts at night, hung them on the door with little funny notes in them for me to find on my way out the door.

On Friday my temp gig was out and the other guy invited me out for a drink afterward. We had a beer, a really yellow one that smelled like coriander or cloves or something. Bill had a black looking stout and toasted our week together.

“My brother is going to give me a job. No more paper clips, at least for awhile.” “I like paper clips. Maybe I should go into office supplies.”

“That's not a bad idea. No seriously, delivering office supplies to these places that are too busy to go get their own.”

I pictured myself wearing my white shirt and pushing a cart full of reams of paper, boxes of paper clips, hi-liters. I am pushing it down the hall and the sound of the wheels on carpet, pictures of oceanscapes on the wall. It looked pretty good in there, like a good way to spend the day.

“To paper clips!” Clink. After a second beer we were old friends and I called Lisa to meet us at another place down the street.

I could not find a good way to tell Bill how Lisa and I had met until we started into our third beer waiting for her.

“That's amazing. She just told you she loves you out of the blue?” “It was unexpected but then she can be pretty unexpected.” “But just like that, you guys move in together a week later. That's really crazy.” “It was the right thing to do. She said she loves me and at first I just needed a roommate, with my work situation and all.” “Still, that's just, wow. Bold.”

I convinced her to have a beer, something not too strong. It didn't work, she just drank faster. Every time I would turn to her, another half pint would have disappeared. Bill tried to keep up but it was no use and he pulled out his wallet and settled up. “So long man, it's been good working with you. “And you,” he turned to her, “you two take care of each other.”

We drank our beers slower and she asked me, “So what do you really want to do? You can't like being a temp all that much.”

“Actually I do. What I want to do now is buy a car and drive around a lot. There are a lot of places I have never been.”

“I want to move to Europe. Paris maybe. As far from Wishram as I can get.” “That's really brave. I suppose Wishram is a good place to get away from.” “Oh yeah. I'm not going back there. Not ever.” She was wearing a pair of what my mom would have called hog washers, faded overalls, and it was the only thing about her that could have come from a small town. But Wishram is just a rail side town; I don't imagine they raise any hogs there. We were both feeling relaxed from the beer, and she was not drifting into anger. She put her arm in mine and when we got to the apartment finally let me kiss her.

It's a little prickly, having sex with someone with so many fresh scars. There is a lot of real estate to avoid, if you catch my drift. But she was very eager and we were soon sweaty and laughing.

Afterwards, I told her I needed to walk to the store and get some tortilla chips. “Some what?” “It's something I have to do after sex. I can't help it. “That' s pretty rude, don't you think. You're going to just walk out on me for some corn chips?” “It's not personal.”

The Savmor had just expanded into a bigger health food section and I bought a bag of those blue corn chips that were dusted with red pepper. I ate them all before I got back to the apartment and felt bad I had not gotten anything for her. I should go back and get some beer but I just kept eating the chips. I really should have something better to say about my future than that I like temping and I want to buy a car.

I do want bigger things, but for now I cannot really remember what they are. When I got home I did not see her. “Lisa?” No answer and then I saw the broken beer bottle on the table. I knocked on the bathroom door and her stir in there but no response. “Lisa I know you're in there. What are you doing?” “Leave me alone. I need some time to myself.”

“I don't think that is such a good idea. I'm coming in there. Open the door. Please.”

There was a sound like she had fallen in the tub. I shouted her name and got no response so I took a step back and shoved the door open with my shoulder. The door busted and then bumped hard against her. She was squatting on the floor and when the door hit her she fell forward bumped her head on the toilet.

“What the hell?” she said and then fell on the linoleum. There were deep bloody gashes on her legs and a broken beer bottle. She groaned on the floor and then pushed up, sprang at me with the shard of glass.

“You tried to kill me! Get out of here, get out of here now!” She was yelling, her forehead bloody, and she swiped at my arm with the shard of glass. She looked terrible and I managed to bear hug her before she could swing again. After awhile she quit struggling.

“Look I'm going to let you go now and get a towel to clean you up.” She groaned again. “Just take it easy, are you going to cut me again? She said no and when I let her go she went and slumped on the bed. “I can't believe you tried to kill me. I should never have left him for you. I can't believe you would do this.” I wiped up the blood as best I could and looked in the bathroom for bandages. All we had was half box of band aids so I wrapped a towel around my own arm and waited for her to fall asleep. When I thought she looked safe, I ran out to get some gauze and tape at the Savmor.

When I returned the door to the apartment was open and there was big cop standing in the room with a note pad. “What's going on? I have bandages.”

The cop said, “ She needs to go to the hospital. And you are going to take a ride with me.' He handcuffed me and pushed me down the hall to his cruiser. “Is this really necessary? What did she tell you? I didn't do anything. Anything.”

“Let's just wait until the ambulance comes and gets her and then you can tell me what you think happened here tonight.”

“Let me talk to her. She is just confused, I was trying to help and she thought I was trying to kill her. She needs some help, she's just not well.”

“Calm down and sit in the car for awhile. I'll be back when the ambulance comes.”

I spent the next three days in jail on a charge of assault II. Fingerprints, mug shot, the whole nine yards.

Jail was a big round room where all of the cells faced into the center. It was not as grim as I would have thought, there was sunlight and it was not too dirty. There were lots of paintings on the wall, like at a grade school. My cell mate was a crackhead who mumbled a lot but was otherwise harmless.

During the day I sat and watched teevee or played cards with some of the other guys. My partner was mild mannered junky named Ruby whose skin was an orangey yellow, like a carrot almost. When I knew him a little bit, I asked if it was from heroin.

“No it's from all the carrot juice I drink.” “Now that is not what I would expect a junky to drink.” “Beta carotene is very important. The more so for people like us. What kind of supplements do

you take?”

“Does aspirin count?”

Ruby was concerned about my welfare and in between games of gin he would make me go over and over the details of how I had arrived in county jail. “This is very important. Keep repeating the whole thing until you can find where you did something wrong.”

“I think it was the drinking. I really should not have let us both drink so much.” “Didn't you say you tried no to let her get into the booze?”

“Yes.”

“Well then that can't have been the real problem. Try again—anything you can remember like suspicious phone calls or weird omens. Maybe you weren't getting enough sleep. Pay...very..close...attention...now.”

But Ruby was no help. I did as he told me to, put the pieces together in different orders and ways. There was 1) her saying she loved me 2) us moving in together, which Ruby pointed out had to be the most random 3) the drinking 4) the cutting 5) Jail.

It made no more sense the more I looked at it. I think it was just too much drinking and I sat in the quad when the sun would come over the wall and wondered where she was, whether she was okay. I could not help but feel that I had let her down somehow, that she was out there and needed my support.

After a few days I went to my arraignment and Bill showed up to bail me out. I pleaded not guilty and was given a couple of weeks to get my shit together. My lawyer told me my best bet was to talk to her, try to smooth everything out. But when I called the apartment, she yelled at me never to bother her again and that she had a restraining order. “You so much as think about calling me again and I will call the cops!” She hung up. It was good to hear her voice.

I told Bill what she said. “Isn't it your apartment?” “Yes. But I cannot go over there.” “Look at you, you don't even have a change of clothes. What do you mean you're not going over there?' “Well what should I do?”

That is why I am in the hallway of my apartment building with a big yellow screwdriver. It's not to hurt her obviously, it's just to pry the door open so I can get some pants and socks, maybe some of my books. But what if, after I break in, something has happened to her? What if she is all cut up on the bathroom floor and I am standing there with a sharp object and a broken door? I sure will have some explaining to do.

The Yukon and Fiji

I go into the Yukon Tavern to play some pool. I start up a game with a housepainter and a man called Ram with an enormous curly black moustache. We set up a game of nine ball and the housepainter goes first. Before he shoots, he walks over to me and says, “You think you can kick my ass?” then laughs until he stumbles. His breath smells like old French fry grease and beer.

We trade shots for awhile, Ram carefully balancing his bottle of beer when he is not shooting, and the housepainter taunting anyone who will listen. No one is any good, but everyone is very drunk, so who knows where lack of skill ends and drunk begins?

When it is Ram’s turn, the housepainter says, “I love tamales!’ and bangs on the table’s bumper.

Ram sets down his stick and, looking uncertainly toward the housepainter, says, “I am from Fiji.” Then he sets up his shot, pulls the stick back slowly and stabs it past the cue ball. The housepainter laughs. In the corner, a jukebox plays a Ricky Martin song, the chorus of which sounds like this:

By the balls! Let the rhythm of the blah blah blah by the balls!

After awhile, two women in tight sweaters take anchor at the jukebox and shout “By the balls!” in time with the chorus. The carpet is covered with stains but is somehow still bright red.

I make a few shots then miss. The housepainter puts the four ball in the pocket, strutting around the table toward his next shot. No one points out that the three ball is still on the table. The housepainter misses, and Ram spills his beer trying to pick up his cue and hold a bottle at the same time. As he is gliding the stick back and forth over his thumb and index finger, the housepainter stands right behind him and shouts, “Do they make good tamales where you come from?”

Ram puts down his cue and turns slowly around, his eyes not quite tracking with his head, and says, “I am from Fiji.”

The housepainter says, “Right. They have good tamales there?” Ram turns slowly back around strikes the cue ball on the side, sending it slowly toward a bumper, where it stops.

At the other end of the table, another housepainter, waiting to get in the game says, “Wow! I sure have been doing a lot of cocaine in the bathroom!”

I say nothing. The second housepainter puts his arm around me, says, “Do you know who Kris Kristofferson is?” just as the first housepainter sinks the five ball.

“Sure, a star is born.”

“Well,” he says, “Me and him used to be real good drinking buddies down in Texas. You know that song Lord Wont’cha Buy me a Mercedes Benz? I wrote that, and he stole it from me. That’s right, I wrote that song! Now look at me, doing cocaine in the bathroom of this very bar!”

The first housepainter misses, sits down. His girlfriend comes in the door wearing a Slayer tee shirt. She sits on his lap and says, “I been looking for you honey,” rubs his shoulders.

“What do you want?” he asks, “I been here since 3:00.” He looks at Ram and they laugh at the same moment. “We’ve been drinking since 3:00!” The girlfriend whispers something in his ear, nibbles on it for good measure. “I ain’t got any money,” he says.

I make a few shots, miss an easy one. Ram stares into space for a few minutes until I say, “It’s your turn.” Ram smiles and takes aim on the eight ball.

The housepainter’s girlfriend walks happily to the bar with two twenties in her hand. The housepainter rises and asks Ram, “Do they have that mo-lay sauce where you come from?”

Ram raises his head and throws down the cue stick. He grabs the housepainter by the shoulder. They struggle toward the shuffleboard table like sailors on the deck of a gale-wracked ship. They push their feet through the red carpet, not lifting them too high for fear of being blown over. They concentrate on each foot movement, clinging to each other for support. They have been drinking since 3:00. They arrive.

Ram waves his empty bottle at a map hanging over the shuffleboard table. The brightly colored countries of the world have all been stained a hazy nicotine beige. “Right there!” he shouts,

“I…..AM…..FROM…..FIJI!”

The bar is silent except for basketball noises on the television. The girls at the jukebox turn from selecting a new song. Ram stares murderously into the housepainter’s face, gripping his empty bottle like a belaying pin.

The second housepainter says, “I sure had some good burritos when I was down on the beach in Mexico!” Everyone laughs, including Ram. A quarter falls in the jukebox and the first strains of the Doors L.A. Woman fill the room. 

The Roof

The first thing I want to say is this: I did not mean to fall from the roof. I had done a lot of talking that winter about doing bad things to myself. But that was all just talk. Besides, I was feeling better by then. It was just a patch of moss that I slipped on. An ordinary, grassy pile of green things growing on the roof. I didn’t think hard enough about stepping on the patch of moss that was growing on the north side of our house and I did and I slipped and fell. The last thought that went through my head was that I really should have moved the wheelbarrow from the side of the house. I had meant to do it all winter long. Then, poof, it was over.

I was on the roof looking for birds. Yes birds. It was the kind of thing that made sense during the brief time between rain storms. All that winter weather in the bones would just burst out in ways like that. It is easy to do dangerous things when the sun shines.

I went up there to sit in the sun, no trees blocking the way, and maybe see some geese. Even a few stray gulls would have sufficed. Instead, a young bald eagle was flying up from over the slough. I got careless watching it glide up over the oak trees across the street. That’s when I stepped on the moss. I'd like to say the sun got in my eyes but like I said I as on the north side of the house so that wouldn't make any sense.

Being dead is not what I expected. I never gave it any thought at all so I shouldn’t say that really. Sometimes I think that before I had just been dreaming and this is being awake. Remembering what I was is the only vivid sensation I have. It is like waking up and being disturbed by how real an absurd dream has been.

All that Jesus stuff turns out to be fake, at least I haven’t run into him. I think he is just dead.

At my funeral, many people asked my wife if she thought I had jumped. She would shrug and say, “Who knows?” and walk away with my son’s hand in hers. Then people started to move on and forget me. I was glad for them.

I wandered at first among my family and friends. I could hear them only distantly but I found that sound was the one sensation I did not miss. I lay at night next to my son trying to the feel his warm feet on my stomach. I watched my wife undress and tried to feel the taste of her mouth. I snuck into the house of a friend, a potter, and watched him intently throwing clay pots on a wheel.

I was never tempted to intrude upon others I had not known. No hiding in the bedrooms of beautiful strangers or peeking into the stalls of women's bathrooms. Somehow I resisted invasion though I knew that no one could be invaded by my presence.

I don't need to eat anymore. I miss the crunch of a good pear, chewing a piece of gum and all that. I don’t miss sweating or pissing. On the other hand I don’t have much else to do so it wouldn't bother me to have little things like that to do. I miss smelling, not the obvious things like flowers in bloom or fresh bread in the oven. I miss the smell of grass and the random things on the air like diesel fumes or someone's too strong perfume. It's not that I miss beautiful things, rather that I miss the ability to absorb things. It's hard to explain. Everything now is bouncy, just bounces off of everything else, never really comes into me or me into it.

Some of the other things I miss in no particular order:

the bright red of a stop sign

the crunchy salt taste of potato chips

the white white of a full moon

the smell of rain

wood smoke from a chimney

new pairs of wool socks

the stink of the ocean

Pretty simple things really. Like I said, I don't really much miss the sound of anything. The quiet is good.

Eventually I became aware of the others in my condition. We all shuffle down the streets, pretending not to see one another. The sounds of our passing are louder than anything else, the dragging of feet on pavement, the dry coughing of the old.

The first person I met was an old man with thick glasses. His teeth were gone and his words were gummy, choked, impossible to understand. He waved his hands around, pointed at the sky. I ran away.

Then I met DeLinda. She came walking down the street with her eyes rolled into the back of her head. She was short, a little girl really, so at least you don’t have to look straight into the whites of her eyes. I found out later she had had epilepsy, died during a seizure and had never really figured out how to unroll her eyes.

“Have you noticed,” she asked me, “how few of us are around here?”

I hadn’t.

“You mean it never occurred to you that of all the bazillions of people died on the planet that the streets ain’t stuffed with bodies? You really haven’t thought about this?

Or what about this...where are all those other people? The ones who died but ain’t here? Hmm?”

It was a lot to think about. I had not considered much besides the pale watery condition of everything. DeLinda, though, had obviously put some effort into the metaphysics of the situation. She planted her idea in me and it stuck.

“These other people. These people who died but aren’t here. What do you think happened to them?”

“I got no idea,” she said, “but it has to be better than this.”

It turned out though, that she did have an idea about how to get there, wherever there was. A pretty good idea too. She had met a man who knew a man who saw a man make the transition. She called it The Transition in capital letters like that. It made me uncomfortable, like the way Bible-thumpers refer to Him. Him this, Him that; DeLinda's Transition had that sound too. A little too full of something.

What had done it, she said, was that you had to die again.

“Die again? But we’re already dead.”

“Exactly. Say, you’re not too bright are you? We got to die again. Because we didn't do it right the first time. Guy I met said it generally takes a very long time.”



“So this guy. The one who knew someone who did this..”



“Knew a man who saw a man.”

“Right. Well the obvious thing is. How did he do it?”

“Didn’t say. He just didn’t tell me.”

“Hmm.”



“Yes indeed, hmm.”

Her solution was that we try to kill each other. We had only our bodies to work with so it would take some ingenuity. When I think back on it, I can't really see how someone who died by choking on her own tongue could have done something wrong. I just don't get it.

First we tried fists, swinging at each other but it was like smacking bean bag chairs. I could almost feel her face but it just stretched around my hands. We would beat each other as hard as we could, stumbling around like drunken boxers. We parried and pummeled around the park while kids played basketball, dodge ball. We banged on each other's heads while derelicts sucked on malt liquor bottles. While snow fell, while sun shined, while dogs ran right passed us barking and yapping. Somehow, we kept at it. Futility was a concept that just did not really come into it.

It went on like this for a long time. We tried shoving. We tried kicking. We tried tackling. It went on and on. If there was some kind of Olympics for dead people we would have qualified.

We tried throwing and jumping. We tried bridges and buildings, houses, boats, power poles, antenna towers. It was a thing to see; DeLinda falling off of bridges, arms flailing, the muffled sound of shouting. Then she would hit something and just stick there the way gum thrown at an acoustic ceiling does.

We jumped into cement mixers, vats of roofing tar. We stuck our heads in boiling pots of soup, gasoline tanks.

I jumped into the Columbia and started to sink. But instead of water filling my lungs, it just kind of made way for me until I fell to the bottom. I looked for sturgeon. Didn’t see any and got bored.

Cars and trains were promising for awhile. DeLinda managed to get stuck under the wheels of a Freightliner and dragged for miles. She said that she could almost feel her legs getting worn off. It was an exciting discovery. “What we need is a train!” she yelled.

But when we tied ourselves to cattle catchers we just got dragged from town to town without anything more happening. We crisscrossed the country towed along in front of or behind anything that would move. Come to think of it, I can't explain why the trains pushed us along instead of just passing through us or leaving us behind. Hmm.

One day we both crawled out from a slow moving freight train and there was a man wearing a straw hat and suspenders, a pair of green pants, and carrying a suitcase. A dark stain covered his white shirt. Where did he get a suitcase, and what did he need with it?

“You must have heard about the dying trick,” he said. He smiled and stuck out his hand. “My name is Jeremy Tate. Just like Sharon Tate, except we’re not related.

“It won’t work you know. Think about it: you’re already dead. Trying to die again, it’s like adding a negative number to another negative number. It will never equal anything positive.”

“Then what’s your suggestion, Mr. Tate?” asked DeLinda.

“Well let me redact what I just said. It can be done, I have seen it. But it’s not really worth it and besides it’s got nothing to do with what you’re up to here. It’s a little more subtle.”

“If you saw it, how come you haven’t done it yourself?”

“Do you know where they go? The ones who manage to get out of here?”


We shook our heads.

“They just get shoved back into that other place. Re-in-car-nation, like the Buddhists said. Guy I saw who did it, he just ended up in another womb spit back into the world wailing and bleeding. No thanks.”

“What else is there?” I asked. “What else can we do?”

“It’s a beautiful world with or without you.” He laughed and started walking toward the moving train with suitcase in hand. “Take care.”

“Did you notice....” I asked.

“Yeah. He had more color than we do. He looked almost...I don’t know.”

The man with the suitcase waved goodbye from the ladder of the box car. Happy, I thought. He looked almost happy.

We went our separate ways after that, DeLinda and me. We could not really agree on what the man had meant or whether he had been right about the consequences of rebirth. Perhaps it is my natural laziness but something about doing nothing instead of something was a better idea to me. Years later I passed back through Portland and heard she was up to the same old tricks. She had a promising new idea involving gears and levers, rotors.

I hit the road. I travelled all over the place, north, south, east, west. I went round and round the world. Motion settled the uneasy feeling I had about being dead. Moving blindly was better than striving.

Then one day in South Dakota I really saw something. I was standing outside the train station and a huge lightning storm was moving north over the prairie. I could see for hundreds of miles all around. The lightning flashed like bombs, more strikes at once than I had ever seen. It came right toward me, passed over and striking so hard that the ground rumbled and the station, an old brick building, shook to its foundation. In the brief flashes of light I could see patches of grass, brick, clouds, all frozen for a moment and then gone. I’d like to think the air stank of ozone but I don’t know. It was like muscle memory, the senses coming back a little after so long of remembering their importance without having them. I stood there for days but the feeling subsided, the storm passed. Poof.

The world is beautiful with or without you.

I keep moving now, and I have come to kind of like this existence. I think I am learning to smell again. The other day it was the faint odor of a fir tree on the air. Just a little bit. It reminded me of Pavlov's dog, how you can train yourself to react to the idea of something that you know is not really there.

The truth is there was no eagle that day, on the roof, just four circling gulls. Under rated birds, gulls. Resilient, adaptable, stoic, with that ugly little patch of red on their beaks. The eagle is majestic but really quite dense. I saw one almost drown once. When it finally reached dry land, it shook its feathers and looked around to make sure nothing else had seen its stupidity. Four gulls gliding from tree to tree, steam coming off the ground and a big orange sun. It had nothing to do with a patch of moss or anything else. I had always wanted to die.

Sun Dust Blood

The sun rules July, flattens, withers, blasts everything in sight. It chases the adults inside to reemerge in the evening with the bats and the crickets. They sit in the shade, barbecue skirt steaks and drink beer, play Scrabble on lawn chairs. Pools of black water covered with skeeters are all that remain of the Cachagua creek. Cars, bike, dogs—anything moving among the trailers kicks the dirt up into little puffs of dust. Someone is trying to tune his car horn to play Dixie, he never gets it right and the off notes blow all over the camps.

In the afternoon Randy and I sit on our bikes under the sycamore in front of his mom’s trailer to watch the Mexicans play soccer in the flat open center of the trailer park. They come down the hill laughing and throwing the ball at one another, some wearing cleats, some in sandals, some in work boots, one in ostrich skin Tony Lamas. The oldest, Hector, waves at us and twists his fist as if throttling a motorcycle and yells “Vroom! Vroom!”

Randy lifts his hand and says, “Hey Hector.”

Hector sets a cooler of Tecate under the leaning basketball hoop and splits the group into teams of four and three. Oaxaca versus Michoacan. One of the goals is a chained off fence leading towards the reservoir, the other the side of an oak tree where we sometimes see the eyes of an owl at night. Across the flat, Randy’s grandmother’s blue heeler has woken and noticed the commotion. She wails her ridiculous warning howl, teeth all gone and the sound like a broken siren. One of the Oaxacans shouts, “Muerte! Muerte!”

Randy says, “Mexicans don’t like dogs.”

A door slams and Eric gets on his banana seat bike and pedals twice before coasting down the hill toward the soccer game. He pedals straight through the players, trying to kick the ball from his bike. He pulls a brake slide in front of me, kicking up dirt all over my Mongoose. He nods at Randy, “Beaners.”

“Eric,” Randy asks, “Why do you always smell like piss?”

It is true, he really does smell like piss.

“Maybe it’s my nose. Can't tell the difference between piss and you,” says Randy. “The difference between piss and you.”

He turns back to the game. “The Mexicans are cool,” he says.

Eric watches me, his eyes are dark and small and he wants to know if I will laugh at him. A Oaxacan makes a run for the oak tree, moving fast down through the dirt with the ball out in front of him. As he reaches the goal, a Michoacan catches him by the shirt tail and pulls him off balance. They tumble to the ground and get up laughing at one another as the ball rolls under a parked Chevy. Someone else retrieves it. Oaxaca uno.

When they finish the game they will sit in the shade finishing the Tecate. Then they will climb back up the hill. No one knows where they come from, how they got here, when they will go again. They don't mind the heat.

“I got something to show you,” Eric says turning to Randy as if he has just thought of it.

“What?”

“Your momma's underwear.”

“Like you've never said that before.”

Eric pedals off toward the creek and turns back toward us. “You coming or what?”

We ride off behind him, reach the turn off to the store and Eric says, “You want to go get a coke?”

“No,” says Randy, “I want to see whatever it is your supposed to show us.”

“Let's get a coke first. Come on.”

“Later.”

Past the turn off the trailers are sparser and we ride down along the dry creek bed where weeds are wrapped around the granite boulders and the willow thickets are dense around the banks. Here and there a few stagnant puddles with small flies, moss dried out to the texture of seaweed. The creek is a sort of highway when it goes dry, kids and coyotes and stray dogs covering the ground with footprints, trash.

As we ride into the soft sand and bumpy cobbles, Randy comes into his natural habitat, wheelie-ing his Torker right up along Eric's rear tire. His hair, the perforated fabric of his football jersey are as yellow as the nylon pads on the frame of his bike. When we go to Hollister Randy wins trophies at the races, won this bike in fact, but hates to wear a helmet of any kind.

The creek bed becomes pure sand and Eric tells us to get off our bikes and push them along through the weeds. “Shh,” he says over and over again. “Shh!”

We prop our bikes along the bank and climb up through the willows. Eric tells us to wait and he peeks out from the bushes, standing tall, holding us back with his hand.

“Okay,” he says. We follow him into a clearing where an Indian Chief trailer is parked next to a car without wheels and an old hand-crank washing ringer. Grant Peterson's house.

“Like I've never seen Grant's house,” says Randy.

Grant is his sister's boyfriend but she makes me blush when I come to her house and she kisses my cheek and calls me her other boyfriend. She is deaf and her words are frighteningly loud, emphatic, impossible to understand. I have no idea what she means by BAH FAH until Randy tells me. She has a big machine in the trailer hooked to the phone and it spits out dot matrix records of her typed conversations. Records of people asking how are you, what are you doing tomorrow, nothing, is your mom going to be out, I wish I had an Appaloosa. Sometimes at night we all watch teevee, the screen black on the bottom with the broken translation of the spoken words. When music plays, little musical notes float across the black bar.

Jaylee cleans stalls at the Swanson ranch after school. Her face is freckled, her eyes watch everything. She is lean and will spend her life with horses.

Grant is a big hick, wears too tight Wranglers with chaw rings in the back and lays tile for Jimmy Randazzo.

Eric tells us to wait again, runs out with a sheetrock bucket that comes from nowhere, sets it upside down next to a window at the back of the trailer. He runs back. “We got to wait awhile.”

That means listening to Eric talk some more about Fresno and all the great things there. A couple of times Randy tells him to shut up but we are both curious about what we will see and so we are captive. I get tired of trying to pretend I don't care what is in the trailer and ask Eric what we are waiting for. He snickers,“Something you don’t know nothing about.”

Waiting, and then the sound of a truck in the distance. We lay on the ground as it comes up to the trailer and then poke out our heads when we hear the door shut. Eric rubs his hands. “Just a few minutes now.”

Gary and Jaylee are laughing in the trailer but then it is quiet. “Just about time,” says Eric.

We sneak to the trailer, my heart pounding and my feet dragging until we are next to the window with the bucket. There is no noise but the slight squeaking of the trailer rolling against its stanchions. Eric puts his finger to his lips and climbs up on the bucket. The trailer starts to squeak faster and the sound of low moaning comes from within. Eric rubs his dirty Toughskins, sticks his face against the screen. Then he climbs off the bucket and whispers, “Your turn.”

Randy climbs the bucket, says nothing, and walks back to his bike. Eric pretends to grab his mouth to stop from guffawing. He gets up and walks back into the willows. I want to walk away but climb the bucket anyhow. I stick my head up just enough to see inside. The trailer is moving fast now, Jaylee's cries louder.

Red curtains with little cactuses on them flap in the window. Angling my head to the right I can see into the bedroom. She is naked and on her knees, Gary kneeling behind her, his white butt flexing in the dark. He makes little grunting sounds with each thrust, Jaylee's back shines with sweat, her mouth open.

Summer drags on, heat shimmers on the roads, curled fly paper in the eaves, Lipton's ice tea at the store hard to come by. It is so hot we sit in the shade watching lizards doing pushups in the sun. We smoke weed that I steal from my stepfather in a little tin foil pipe. We shoot hoops in the powder dust, the ball brown after awhile. Under the maples by the dry creek, Eric and Randy catch flies and pull their wings off. Then they shake the flies in their hands and throw them at the ground where they stumble around witless. Eric squashes them with his heel. I laugh with them.

Eric goes to Fresno and when he returns tells us, “They got these bikes there called Peppershrees.”

“Peppershrees? What kind of a name for a bike is that?” asks Randy.

“You're a liar,” I say.

We lock eyes. It is ugly in there. There's pimple on the side of his nose.

“It's a thing they got in Fresno.”

We build bike jumps in the oaks, each one steeper than the last. We make one straight down the side of a hill too steep even to hold leaf litter on the bare soil. Only Randy goes down it, first dragging his Torker to the top. He points down and doesn't hesitate at all, dropping fast and hitting the jump in the middle. He catches air and turns his handlebars sideways. He lands and Eric and I watch him turn a doughnut, transfixed, joined for once by our awe at the impossible.

“I gotta learn to table top,” says Randy.

Sometimes I come by myself and haul my Mongoose to the top of the drop. I grip the bars, knuckles white, not able to even point the front tire downward. One day I will let go of the brakes, drop so fast that the world goes blurry, land perfectly. Then I will ride slowly to Randy's and tell him what I can do.

“Cool,” he will say and we will go to the store for iced teas and Abba Zabbas.

We go back and watch Jaylee and Gary a couple more times. Randy tells us his sister doesn't care as long as we keep quiet and don't tell her mom. Afterwards I hear her muffled moans in my head. Deep animal cries, choked and abandoned like the toothless alarm wail of her grandmother's dog. We sit in the oak trees lying to each other about what we have seen.

Eric says, “After he rubs his thing long enough, he gets this thing called an orgasm. It's like a little balloon that comes out of his thing and if he were just beating his meat it would float away. It feels rad.” Randy and I say nothing, unable to embarrass him without embarrassing ourselves.

Nothing floats away, it sticks and stains and dries up.

Randy comes by one day with a big red bump on his arm. My mom asks him what it is, whether his mom has looked at it. “It doesn't hurt,” Randy says.

My mom soaks his arm in warm saline and when it is good and soft squeezes it at the very middle. A small capsule of necrotic flesh bursts forth, as it dissipates we can see the clear impression of two fangs.

“Spider bite? I didn't even know. It didn't even hurt.”

My mom puts a bandage on it and tells me when Randy leaves that his mother is an alcoholic. “If it's not a wine bottle she doesn't notice it.”

Randy's family is large and complicated, relatives almost everywhere in the valley. Once upon a time his family was this valley, owning most of the land not owned by a few other families. They drank and fiddled it away, lost it for back taxes. They live now in trailers and run down houses, mostly broke and landless, driving backhoes and cutting hay. Sometimes his father lets Randy work, learning how to dig septic tanks, grade roads. They are all drunk by noon, and some day Randy will be too. It is inevitable. The descendants of pioneers are doomed.

By August, the guys who own the trailer next door should have been driving down for the weekend. They should be falling out of their enormous cadillacs in a flurry of flannel shirts, mustaches, straw hats, running shorts. They should be setting up the tiki bar in the shade under a live oak and pouring drinks. My stepfather should be bringing them a bag of weed and my mom cooing when they call her honeypie. Why have they not closed up The Back Door and come down from the city to pass me warm cans of Coors when my mom is not looking? Where is their shouting and whooping in the middle of the night, scaring the neighbors with glowing tiki torches in late summer drought?

A plague has come to the city, annihilating them, shuttering The Back Door. All is quiet next door, pine needles cover the yard.

Their absence makes the school year come on faster, evaporates the distance between summer and the return to captivity. Fresh packs of sharpened pencils, new corduroy pants, smelly vinyl binders and PeecChee folders, another pair of Hush Puppy shoes. Another year of riding the bus with the hicks who all smell of weed in the morning. They hate us in public, come to our backdoors in the autumn to buy bags for the winter. I hate them back, their skinny legs and baseball hats, their dumb love of anything violent and loud, their hypocrisies, their fists.

September arrives and the heat becomes bearable again. Warm and dry and it will not rain for awhile yet, sometimes doesn't rain at all. In a few months the weed will be harvested, the adults in curtained rooms with Fiskar scissors manicuring the buds. Our house will stink like a bag of skunks, the seal-a-meal running all day. Then it will be packaged up and shipped off, the sheriff's deputies and postmen looking the other way at box after box bound for New York, L.A., reeking of the coffee wrapped around the quarter pounds of green buds inside.

Then it is here, the first day of schooI. I walk to the bus stop in the morning, dragging my feet, willing the clock to run backwards. Past the neighbors' fence of painted cobblestones hoping there will be a lot of frost this year. When the frost comes the bus cannot risk the turns and turns and turns over the grade into town. When I get to the store, I am the first one there and walk back and forth along the only parking block. At least I am going into 8^th grade; that means a crop of bullies above me shaved off and sent to high school. It means Hannah and Shilo, who torment me with Valentine's cards and pinches on the ass will be gone. Small consolation for the coming year when weighed against the bus ride, the dorky shoes my mom has bought for me. Who the hell wears Hush Puppies, what are they anyway?

“My block.”

Eric has come from nowhere, is in front of me, his face suddenly next to mine. I can hear him breathing, his breath like sewage. “Get off.”

Before I can think of anything to say, his fists are in my face, his head down and butting against my stomach. I fall to the ground, wind gone, gasping. He grabs my head and rubs it in the dirt. I can feel my lip opening up, dirt and blood mixing and sticking to each other. And then he is gone. Randy is holding him by the neck. Eric pushes him off and gets up on the curb. “My block, fucker.”

Randy laughs. He laughs with Eric.

Down the creek and running hard past Dave's house, Dave the enormous black guy who collects cans by the side of the road and has polaroids of naked women on his coffee table. Past Randy's trailer and the one next door. Past the blue heeler on a leash. Hush Puppies slipping in the loose soil, backpack swinging, sweating into my cheap windbreaker. Too fast to think of some lie to tell my mom about my lip, too fast to think about missing the first day of school.

The next afternoon Randy rides into my yard on an old beaten Honda Trail 80, roaring like a chainsaw. He turns a doughnut in front of the rock wall where we are growing corn and leaves the engine idling. It is a sound like a dying animal, shrill and whining, ready to bite something nearby.

“Let's go for a ride.”

The bike is too small for both of us but I grab him around the stomache and we fly along over the dirt road, the rear fender bottoming out and the air smelling like oil. We go farther up the road to the dam than I have ever been. Past the pack station and past the spring in the side of the hill. To where the road emerges beneath the spillway and hits a short stretch of pavement that climbs to the reservoir. Randy shuts the bike off.

The reservoir is brackish and still, the tops of twenty year old drowned oak trees visible under the brown surface. The spillway is dry, moss and plants drying on the concrete.

“You can bring a chicken up here, throw it in the water and come back later and pick crawdads off it.”

“Cool.”

Crawdads are cool, Trail 80s are cool, everything is cool. Randy says that someone once died walking across the spillway. “He slipped in the middle and you could see his blood all down the spillway for a long time.”

“Really?”

“My cousin is a volunteer. He came up first and saw the body. Nobody knew who he was.

“Someday, when I am good, I'm going to ride this 80 right across there. Shouldn't be too hard.”

I pull some weed from my pocket and a small rosewood pipe I have stolen from my stepfather. We get baked and stare at the water for a while, giggling and stupefied by the sight of so much water. The mountains above are steeper than I have ever seen them, the hillsides dark in the afternoon sun.

Randy gets up and walks toward the fence at the spillway. My heart is beating too loud and I have the urge to run away. Whether into the hills or back to my house, the only real house between two trailer camps I can't decide. I will never have my own motorcycle or be the offspring of the people who once owned this place. I will always play second base while Randy hits the winning triple.

He is over the fence and starting across the spillway. His hand-me-down motorcycle boots shuffling quickly on the concrete. His arms are stretched out flat in the sun, not moving an inch, his balance is perfect. His shoulders are strong from whatever he has been doing all summer, his shirt worn to threads, arms sunburnt, the small of his back white as a fish belly. I look for a long time at the back of his neck, his blonde hair straight as broom straw. When he reaches the middle, Randy jumps around and flexes his arms like body builder, a calm smile on his face. He is a god, he will make it across. He will make it.

I will make it too. All I need is a broom handle or a rock, then the back of Eric's head, black and greasy, his mind filled with stupid ideas about Fresno. He won't see me coming and then there will be blood and he will lay on the ground infecting the dirt. He will lay on the ground and Randy, with no loyalty to anything, will laugh. He will laugh with me.