DANCING in the MOONLIGHT by CHARLES F STERCHI IV a THESIS

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DANCING IN THE MOONLIGHT

CHARLES F STERCHI IV

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2018

To my family

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Foremost, I would like to thank the members of my thesis committee, Jill Ciment, David Leavitt, and Ange Mlinko. I’d also like to thank Padgett Powell and Amy Hempel, and, of course,

Michael Hofmann, who taught me how to pronounce my name correctly. Finally, I am grateful for the editorial generosity I have received from Madison Jones, Wynne Hungerford, Jacob

Guajardo, Neal Hammons, Janna Moretti, and Alex Ender.

TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4 DANCING IN THE MOONLIGHT...... 7 FALLING FOR FLORENCE GREENE ...... 9 THE DUD PLEDGE ...... 18 DOUGH BOY TAKES YOU DOWN ...... 21 IN THE GRAVEL LOT AT WILL SHAKESPEARE’S HOUSE ...... 24 FAKE ORANGES ...... 27 HOSPITAL, MEMPHIS ...... 34 RIVER OF WOMEN ...... 35 THE RIVERBOAT EXPLOSION ...... 37 CASUAL AMERICA...... 40 ORPHEUS AND DALE ...... 42 MORE THAN ANIMALS ...... 44 JESUS’ PIMENTO CHEESE SANDWICH ...... 47 INEPTITUDE ...... 49 JOHN O. AND THE SQUID...... 51 THE BANG BANG LADY ...... 64 A BRIEF ENCOUNTER WITH GARRISON KEILLOR ...... 70 BELLTOWER WITHOUT BELLS ...... 72 SECOND HONEYMOON ...... 86 PICKETT MOON AND THE MYSTERY OF ANTS ...... 89 A TENDERNESS AT THE WHARF ...... 100 THE REDEMPTION OF CHARLIE GORDON STOUT (NOVEL EXCERPT) ...... 105 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 117

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts

DANCING IN THE MOONLIGHT

CHARLES F STERCHI IV

May 2018

Chair: Jill Ciment Major: Creative Writing

This thesis is a short story collection. It is set in Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama. The people in the stories are members of the United Methodist Church. The collection is influenced by jazz-age jazz musicians, and by the Gautama Buddha, who appears in several of the stories.

DANCING IN THE MOONLIGHT

Everybody, all across the countryside, was dancing in the moonlight. They danced upon brightly tiled platforms among the trees and the bonfires and the torches. They danced in gazebos and on porches, verandas, rooftops, piazzas, landings, driveways, docks, and lawns. They danced in pairs. The pairs danced all together, synchronized like lightning bugs, or like Christmas lights, blinking.

Two of the dancers were Gary and Martha. They danced in the moonlight alone upon their platform, which was on the patio behind their blue colonial-style home. They held one another and did their pirouettes. They wore bandages beneath their clothes. They had had more work done, to their bodies. They found that having work done helped them stay together. There was always something new that way. One did not become bored.

As the moon passed behind a cloud, Martha led Gary inside, up the stairs, and to the bedroom. Martha unbuttoned her blouse. Then Gary unhooked Martha’s brassiere, which was black, and unwrapped her gauze. Dozens of rose petals spilled from beneath the gauze and across the floor. She had had breasts the day before, but now the breasts were gone. Where nipples would have been, Gary found his own indigo eyes, or copies of them, gazing back at him. The eyes blinked several times, and the pupils began to adjust to the light of the room.

“What do you think?” Martha said.

“It’s marvelous work.”

Martha blushed. No matter how much work she had done, Gary insisted she keep her original face, so that she could still blush. He loved her most when she was blushing.

“Dr. Parker has really outdone himself this time. Just wait till you see, dear Martha, what he’s done to me.”

Gary undressed then, and unwrapped his gauze, revealing his latest augmentation. His penis had been replaced by a very noble Roman nose with distinctly American accents. It suggested, say, George Washington, and honesty. Martha and Gary embraced, and they turned off the light. The night seeped through the window screens and swallowed them, the way spilled motor oil might swallow two worms.

The moon passed from behind the cloud then, revealing the countryside once more. The countryside was empty of people now. Everyone had gone inside to make love. Deer grazed among the trees, eating berries, leaves, and grass. The bucks locked antlers, making faint scraping noises in the night. The torches and bonfires burned on. Then slowly, one by one, they went out, and all that was left was moonlight.

FALLING FOR FLORENCE GREENE

Everybody at the railroad trestle is jazzed up on speed and light beer. It’s seven guys and

Florence Greene. All the guys except Pinky and I are diving into the Holston River, that shallow tributary of the Tennessee. They’re having a competition to see who gets to do the dog with

Florence. They started off with cannonballs and jackknives, but in the fading light they have graduated to the swan dive and the back flip. They’re risking their necks out there for tail, but just try to stop them. You can’t.

Pinky is depressed because his father has just died from flying a Cessna into the side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I have told the other boys I have stayed in the boat to be here for

Pinky in his time of need. I am playing the good and thoughtful friend, but the truth is I’m not so crazy about jumping from that trestle. Florence is here, and she is growling, which I have to admit is a little exciting, but I am bad afraid of heights. Further, this whole deal with Florence and the boys and the sex makes me sad. I’m glad to sit here in the pontoon boat with sad Pinky and be close to Florence, but not too close. I tell myself I am superior and smoke Pinky’s dead father’s cigars.

Florence Greene is thirty-nine and a junior member of my mother’s book club. The book club reads mostly Western sex novels starring lapsed Mormons. Under those limited circumstances, Florence raises not an eyebrow among her peers. They do not know she’s out here with the boys. They do not know she does this as a pattern. She was married once when she was very young, to an organ tuner who was just as young as she, and this young husband traveled to many distant churches and chapels and naves to fix the peoples’ organ pipes. Inside of one of these churches, somewhere in southern Illinois, he was discovered with his trousers

around his ankles and the reverend’s juvenile daughter just kneeling there, going down on him.

He subsequently leveled accusations of frigidity against Florence, publicly, which did not keep him from being prosecuted, but which humiliated young Florence. A divorce followed, and now

Florence seems to the town a fine enough lady who tried a normal life on and was unlucky in it by no fault of her own.

In conservative dress, she is a vision, such that as a young boy, I maintained my own crush on Florence Greene. Those turtleneck sweaters of pale violet and the lavender scent of her book-club perfume set me on chemical fire. I remember watching her eat a Bartlett pear during a book club meeting my mother hosted. I watched from the stair. She got pear juice all over her hands and became embarrassed and excused herself to the powder room to wash off. That is where I first met Florence Greene, where the stairs come into the front hall and face the powder room. She found me on the landing and thought I could not sleep, that I was frightened, and so she carried me up to bed and tucked me in. My bedtime was not for another hour and a half, but I let her do it. When she left me, I heard the water running in the powder room, and I licked my hands and my arms and wherever I tasted Bartlett pear.

But out here on the river with the high-school boys, Florence is wearing a skimpy hot- pink two-piece swimming suit, and she resembles a wrinkled old bag, if you were going to ask me. Gone is the good lavender smell, and stripped are the vestments of modesty and the motherly comportment. Beneath these all along were tanning oil and the palpable shame, at having been betrayed by the organ tuner, at the accusations of frigidity, at who knows what, I am not

Sigmund Freud. These things are complex and go back, I have learned from my History and

Psychology teacher and soccer coach, Mr. Carpenter, to childhood.

Florence Greene has spent the years since her divorce out here on the Tennessee River, courting the high-school seniors and ruining her complexion, supporting herself first as an interior decorator and then as an accountant. She has not found a replacement for her organ tuner, and that is fine with these randy friends of mine, who aren’t looking to replace anything.

They are only sniffing for poon.

I say to Florence, “What criteria have you got for a winner?”

“Red,” she says, for I am ginger of hair, “I have no criteria.”

Pinky shivers and lets out a deep and spiritual whimper.

The sun goes down finally, and the sky’s a blown violet with shifting silver clouds. I wriggle back into my Steely Dan t-shirt, and Florence removes her two-piece, exposing her breasts and her sex.

This is the first time I have seen Florence in the nude. I am shocked to see her pale groin.

The skin there is twenty years younger than the skin on her browned hands, for instance, and the hair on her organ is gray and wispy, as if it were the last tendril of cotton candy in the cotton candy machine.

Florence stretches out on a bench seat next to Pinky and commences to moan a moan that from close range is phony and almost vulgar. Out on the trestle, I guess the boys hear her, and I guess they can’t tell or they don’t care that she’s faking it. They are jumping violently now. They come up with vicious grins and with fornication in their eyes. They carve through the brown water to the trestle ladder, and they climb back up to jump again.

It isn’t long before Patrick Mulligan tries a double back flip and fails to surface. A soapy aroma hangs heavily across the water.

“Pat!” everyone yells. “Patty!”

When the paramedics show up with their scuba gear, Florence is in her sundress, weeping. She is her modest self again. She is playing the part and wearing the mask, and I know she is full of shit, but I want to believe she is now sincere. I want this even more than I want

Patrick not to be dead. I want the Florence of my memory, the Florence eating the Bartlett pear.

“I wish they had listened to me,” says Florence Greene. “I wish they had stopped jumping and come back to the boat. What a tragedy. What a God damned tragedy.”

The sun has gone, and there is no moon. The sky has a bright black infinite depth. It is darker than dark. There is lightning up there, and there is the shrieking of birds, and above everything else there are satellites, and maybe there is God somewhere, letting things play out as they will.

A year and a half later I was home for the Christmas holiday. Pinky and I were sophomores at Ole Miss. I had grown tired of Tennessee. I wanted a new place with a strange history. I sought a history I could feel in my bones, not yet knowing every place has that, and it is only up to the feeler to let it be felt. Pinky sought the opposite. He wanted to get away from the Blue Ridge Mountains where his father had died in a ball of Cessna fire.

By Christmas, Pinky had set his mind on becoming a nondenominational Christian missionary in China, and he stayed home evenings to practice virtue. The following April, Pinky went down to Tuscaloosa for a revival show. A tornado came and took him up with the rest of the revival tent. He never did get to see China.

But I have digressed. That first winter of my time in college, my girlfriend, Catherine, a rare Catholic from Meridian, Mississippi, came home with me to meet my family and to see the

way Christmas is done by Methodists. She was a Kappa Delta like my mother and my older sister. The three of them hit it off in a spectacular way. Just out of sight.

I took Catherine out to Barry’s Backdoor Tavern two nights before Christmas, on a

Tuesday night. Tuesday nights, Barry is there himself, giving out free hot dogs. These dogs are not all-beef. These are stinkola dogs, white of hue with a briny aroma, swimming in the crock pot at the end of the bar. They want yellow mustard.

That night Catherine wore a crucifix around her white neck beneath a navy scarf, and her nose was firm and red from the cold. Catherine is a person whose gestures hold consequence.

Further, she has a knack for mastering a new skill in only one afternoon. She is a pilot now, and she hunts dove. She would come to my dorm that first semester and I would enter a fugue state previous to sleeping, and I would just lie there and talk. I would tell her, I imagine, everything.

True fact, true falsehood, false falsehood. She would lie awake and listen to it, stroking me as if I were a lap animal.

Well, Catherine and I were outside Bill’s Backdoor Tavern, necking and locking our cold noses when who but Florence Greene walked up with a few tennis pros. The pros were smoking

Kools and wearing sunglasses in spite of the dark. They were a sporty frame with reflective lenses.

We made introductions, and I asked Florence how it had been for her of late. She was revving hard on cocaine and grinding her clinically whitened teeth. There was a new raptorial hardness to her eyes, and there was nothing behind the hardness, or if there was it was deep and sunken.

“I’ve been ejected, Red, from the book club.”

I had already known that. She had had a somewhat public breakdown following the incident at the railroad trestle, and there had been a somewhat public backlash against her, though everyone was sorry.

The tennis pros just stood by not speaking.

“Red,” Florence said. “Screw me with these jocks, baby.”

Catherine became flushed, and she put her arm around me, her hand in my jacket pocket.

“Not tonight,” I said, trying to be polite.

“At least let me talk to you, baby.”

“Us,” said Catherine.

“What’s I meant.”

Florence sent the tennis pros inside to get a round of beers, and we ditched them. She led us to the back alley by a grease can, but all she could do was yell, “Where is it, that trestle?” She would not stop yelling about it by the grease can. “Take me to the river,” she kept shouting.

Just then I was pretty tanked, but everyone else but slick-looking tennis pros had written her off, and so Catherine drove us to give Florence Greene some peace at the trestle. We pulled up on the service road where it butts up against the bank and the railroad track goes on. There was a little monument for Patrick meant to scare kids from jumping off and breaking their necks as he had done.

It was cold out, but that did not stop Florence from flinging herself out across the rotten railroad ties on the trestle. Soon she began to strip off her clothing and was naked again. There was mist everywhere from her wild breath against the cold. She made a big scene, humping the railroad ties and screaming

The boys are falling for Florence Greene

The boys out here are seventeen

They are lithe and fresh and lean

They are buoyant in the water, like beautiful human snakes a-swimming

The boys are falling for Florence Greene

She is so young, so young, so young and green

“I suppose we ought to help her, oughtn’t we?”

“Yes,” I said. “I imagine there are people around here who are trying to sleep.”

I had never been up on the trestle before. I had always stayed put in the boat or on the bank and watched. But I walked out there toward Florence and her raving. Catherine and the weak beams of the headlights faded behind the fog. Standing up there and looking down, the trestle seemed to me higher than even I thought it would seem, and I felt the dizzying sigh roll through me. It came up from the river through the stone and the wrought iron and the rotten railroad ties. It creaked and crumbled beneath my boots and came up through my bones and made me cold. I smelled it, and I shivered from it. I heard a howling, too. The howling did not begin as much as I tuned into it. This was the feeling I had hoped to feel in my bones in

Mississippi. I was feeling it out here on the trestle.

I reflected that I was standing right in the spot where Tony had stood, the spot from which he had jumped and had broken his neck and had sunk into the mud and the garbage of the riverbed. And there was Florence, suddenly silent, and she was looking at me with eyes that seemed to be pleading, but the pleading was not for health. It was not to be dragged back into

town or back to the book club or back to any kind of being at all. We were there at the edge of her life, and we both knew it.

“Florence,” I said, “I believe this is it.”

I picked her up from the frozen old railroad ties, and I cradled her as if I were putting her to bed. Her weight did not seem to exceed that of a few sacks of concrete – it was probably less – but she was hardened under her flesh as though it was concrete and not blood that flowed through her veins. I had meant to drop her in the river when I took her up – I could not tell you why, I was affected – but now we saw each other, and we breathed the same air, and I realized that while a maniac or a psychotic might throw a sick woman in a river in the first hours of

Christmas Eve, I was just me, and even if it was what she wanted, which I could not be entirely sure it was, I could not do it.

“A wicked place, a wicked woman,” Florence muttered.

“No,” I said. “Now go to sleep. Catherine and I will take you home.”

“Oh, Red.” She did not say anything after that.

I began to rock Florence in my arms, as Florence had once rocked me when I was a child, but I didn’t know what I was doing, and I suppose I upset her stomach, for Florence spat up a little on my jacket. I reached for the handkerchief in my pants pocket to wipe away what had been deposited on my clothes, and as I did, Florence Greene rolled from my arms and fell twenty-five feet into the Holston River.

This woke her. I am lucky it did not break her neck, for she was in no condition to make herself land correctly on water. She did not fall for what seemed like forever. There was only a small splash, and when I looked down from the trestle, she was there, treading water.

I looked over to Catherine by the car, and she said, “Do something, babe.”

I did not think about jumping so much as I just jumped. It turns out that is the secret to jumping. Abandoning the self, allowing yourself to abandon yourself, is central to jumping. It is maybe the most important element.

In the river, I took Florence under my arm and began to side-crawl to the bank, but

Florence broke away from me and began to doggy paddle. She didn’t need me. She had never needed me.

I swam to the bank and dragged myself onto solid ground. I tried to pick her up again, but again she would not let me. She took my hand, though, and she looked me in the eye. Then she kissed me on the cheek, and said, “You were always such a nice boy.” Something in her had changed.

We drove her home, and changed is how Florence Greene remained. She stays away from the river and the high school now. She wears skirts that reach down to her ankles. Meek and quiet and mild, she is staking her claim to inherit the earth after all. But there is something about her, about the way she used to be, that I miss. It is her badness. I feel it in my bones.

THE DUD PLEDGE

What we’re doing here tonight is we’re burying a dud pledge. We located a good pine casket, and we had him dig a hole in the courtyard beneath the dogwood tree. No, we have not killed him. He’s still alive. We want him to drop out of the fraternity is all, and because he has somehow found encouragement in every other method in the hazing handbook, our only remaining option is to bury him alive. Maybe he will cave at the threat, and maybe he will not.

Why don’t we just tell him we want him to quit? We tried, several times. That was the first resort. “Dud Pledge,” we said, giving him the standard routine for his condition, “we do not find you socially or otherwise redeemable, and we regret having given you a pledge pin. Hatred is not the word. We do not hate you. We only want to save you and ourselves from a doomed association. If you would kindly drop out of the program, we, the men of the Sigma Chi

Fraternity, Beta Sigma Chapter, would be ever so much obliged.” The dud pledge gave a sly wink each time we tried this method, as if to say he knew we were only fucking with him, but we were not only fucking with him. He once went so far in his display of false knowingness as to ask us for a good paddling, bending over and pulling his pants down, chortling, and of course we could not paddle him after that. He would have enjoyed it too much, and we don’t want him to have enjoyment. We only want him to go away. And so what we’re doing here tonight is we’re burying the dud pledge alive.

Of course we’ve considered that there might be a place in the social fabric for a dud.

There are duds among us now. A dud can sometimes perform the social duties of the traditional court jester, whether on purpose or inadvertently. A dud can bring the other members of the social group closer together as they ridicule him. But if that is cruel in the general sense, and I

submit that it is, then it’s especially cruel in this dud pledge’s case. His jestertude is to so weird a degree, his oblivitude to so high a degree, that we really feel like we’re using a salt lick here, you know, to draw deer to the stand. We have to get rid of him, and so what we’re doing here is we’re burying the dud pledge alive.

What about possible future gains for the group at large? Are his offerings favorable on that front? Yes and no. He comes from Texas oil money, but rich Texas boys come a dime a dozen. We have a surplus in our ranks as it is. Maybe he has beautiful sisters, you suggest. In fact, he does. There isn’t a one of us here who hasn’t thought of making a future with those girls: four Tri-Deltas, of whom three are identical brunette triplets, and of whom one is their elder blonde bookish sister. We think about the denim clothing and piebald horses on the plains, going to the country church house and sitting in the walnut pew and putting an arm around the wife’s shoulder, feeling those sturdy Texas triceps. Happy Tennessee-Texan offspring run in diapers through the sprinkler of our waking dreams. But then Christmas comes around, and there’s the dud uncle née dud pledge in the parlor, wearing a sweater vest and drinking eggnog, grinning with his fuzzy, brown teeth and creeping everybody out. The dud pledge ruins even his perfect sisters, and so what we’re doing here is we’re burying the dud pledge alive.

The dud pledge is ruinous to such an extent that we’re quaking in our very boots over here, quaking badly with the anxious dread. Our greatest fear, perhaps, is that the dud pledge is, in fact, an apt representation of this fraternity and its members, that we are one big congregation of duds. But that could not possibly be true – for we throw such buoyant balls for philanthropy, and such lauded themed parties otherwise – that could not be true unless the dud pledge is in fact a composite of all men, and our species entire is a dud affair. That’s the only damn way. It may be the influence of the dud pledge, but darkly we have begun to suspect that this is so. The dud

pledge slouches toward us in our nightmares and our daytime visions as eight billion persons’ worth of shit in the flesh, asking us if we don’t want to give him a swirly, and then he puts his own grimy head in the toilet. We cannot focus in class. We have the collective shakes. Every face we see is the face of the dud pledge. There he always is, a smile on his infernal cracked lips.

Look at the poor bastard. Just now he’s spitting tobacco juice into a plastic cup. He’s lounging in the casket, as if it were his throne. He’s tied a noose around his own neck, and he’s pretending to masturbate, as if this were all a joke, and he spreads his mouth into a brittle mock death rictus. “Don’t yuh’all want to kill me first?” We tell him we’d rather not. We tell him that this means something, damn it. We mean something. Why does he refuse to understand? What is this deficiency? Looking into his eyes, we see the water of his life draining slowly into the cosmos’ dry mouth. We know that our own eyes are not so different from his, for we are each of the human kind here, and this rattles us to no end.

DOUGH BOY TAKES YOU DOWN

At dusk a Mercedes-Benz will pull up, and there will be some raunchy blues music by

John Lee Hooker pouring from the speakers. There will like as not be buzzards overhead. There will like as not be gulls, shrieking.

The Mercedes-Benz belongs to Marlowe, who will be driving it, but who only drives it because Dough Boy, the proper driver of Marlowe’s Mercedes-Benz, who functions too as

Marlowe’s doofus confidant, has broken legs. Dough Boy got his legs broken in a bar fight that sent him over the side of a red and white riverboat and into the green and brown river in broad daylight with a tour of schoolchildren among the three-hundred-and-seventeen witnesses. Dough

Boy is always getting into bar fights and losing them badly. He has a face like a potato dumpling that’s been abused by an errant child’s spoon.

Marlowe told you the other day how he’s grown to enjoy sitting behind the wheel. “Be careful on the curves,” you told him, and then he went off and took a hard curve going just about seven-hundred miles per hour. Marlowe has discovered, late in life, the pleasure of kissing death with an open mouth.

Once they’ve pulled up and given the parking lot a taste of John Lee Hooker’s raunchy boogie-assness, Marlowe will put you in the back seat, where there will be no mechanism for locking and unlocking the door. They’ll turn down the music to tell you not to try anything funny, and then they will laugh, and Dough Boy will laugh for just a moment longer than

Marlowe, and Dough Boy will become sullen after the laughing too long. This will confuse you, and you’ll begin to question the gravity of your situation, the intentions of the men in the front of the car, your own wits. Why did Dough Boy laugh too long? Why is he now sullen? Why should

you be unable to unlock your own door? Why did you and how did you let yourself become involved in this business of getting locked in a car with people named Marlowe and Dough Boy in the first place? Was there a moment, perhaps as far back as childhood, at which choosing to do one seemingly innocuous thing would have resulted in your becoming a well-adjusted young professional, and doing a different seemingly innocuous thing would have resulted in your becoming a poorly adjusted not-professional and being in this car, and you did the different thing? Is this interior real leather?

You will experience the sensation of not remembering whether you’ve fed the dog, or whether you’ve turned off the electrical stove eye, or whether you’ve left the bath running, or when the last time was that you extruded a good, a truly good, fecal hotdog. You will recall that a fecal hotdog comes into the world when a boy, proficient in trick-shitting, squats behind a tree on the outskirts of a classic, true-blue American cookout, hooks his arm under a leg, holding a hotdog bun so that the back end of the bun is situated two to three inches directly below the anus, and the boy edges the bun out backward past the anus while carefully laying a turd in the cleft of the bun in a motion similar to, but slower than, wiping, so as to avoid getting fecal matter on the taint and scrotum. The boy applies mustard and ketchup, and if he is bitter enough early enough in life, he might also apply chili, shredded cheese, and Fritos, totally obscuring the turd and thereby increasing the probability that some unsuspecting victim will take a bite of it. Then the boy places the fecal hotdog on a paper plate with a handful of sour-cream-and-onion-flavored potato chips, and he places the plate on a picnic table to be discovered by whoever, but hopefully by an uncle who lies about line calls in badminton and not by a girl cousin wearing a nice blue dress. The boy absconds to his spot behind the tree, where he watches the unfolding of whatever unfolds.

The boy will undoubtedly regret having made the fecal hotdog in the first place, just as the boy—who, to be sure, is not properly still a boy in the sense of halcyon or not-halcyon pre- pubescence, but whose definitively not-halcyon improprieties, beginning in proper boyhood and not letting up after, have kept him placed in the boy arena, as it were—will regret having gotten himself locked in the back seat of Marlowe’s Mercedes-Benz. A boy’s actions cannot be reversed, and they hurl him toward the hard curves at incalculable speeds.

IN THE GRAVEL LOT AT WILL SHAKESPEARE’S HOUSE

This was several years ago, on the seventh day or thereabouts of our trip to England. We had done the London thing to good effect, and so we drove Mother up to Stratford-Upon-Avon so that she could see the flowers at Shakespeare’s old house. She had heard the flowers were beautiful and further that the house itself had a thatched roof, which appealed to her, and because the site was in connection with William Shakespeare, an important person from history, Mother wanted very much to see it. We took the long way through the country and saw a great many sheep and bad weather and old stone walls. The typical English things abounded, and it was not altogether unpleasant.

Well, finally we were at Will Shakespeare’s house. We dropped Mother off at a semblance of an entrance in some overgrowth with plans to meet her in the house. Then we pulled into the parking lot. It was about a hundred yards or so from the house. From there, you can see the big thatched roof rising out of the thick, good, green English creeping vines and oaks.

There were other people standing around the parking lot reading to each other from leather- bound books, as if anyone cared whether they were literate or were not literate. All of them in their brand-new woolen scarves from one of twelve thousand gift shops across the United

Kingdom. You know how people are.

Father got out of the driver’s seat and started pissing himself right there on the gravel, pretending he was only interested in the trees. Right away I knew I was in trouble, or we were in trouble, or rather that I was not in so much trouble, that it was only Father who needed helping, on account of the wet, but that it was my help he was going to need. Changing of the guard, you know.

“Let’s get you in some new pants,” I said, coming around the hood of the car to him. The words came out naturally, as if I’d said them a thousand times before, but this was only the first time. We got him in the back seat of the car and in a new pair of khakis. We threw the old pair in an old steel garbage drum. I remembered a time from back home in Memphis when Father had helped me similarly in the parking lot of an abandoned Chinese restaurant. This new occasion was more picturesque.

Well, after that, Father and I went into Will Shakespeare’s house and met Mother and looked at the plastic food on Will Shakespeare’s table, and we saw where Will Shakespeare had slept, where Will Shakespeare had done it with his wife, and where he died—you know, these things everybody does, the humanizing activities, they want you to see that this god of Western letters was a person, was a dude, who shat like the rest of us—and Father said to me, keeping his voice low and speaking from the side of his mouth, almost smirking, “I don’t suppose little Willy

Shakespeare ever wet himself in yon parking lot.”

“You’re one up on him.”

“Yes, in a funny way I suppose I am.”

“What?” Mother said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just some plastic bread there. I doubt William Shakespeare would have eaten plastic bread.”

Mother looked at me queerly, then at Father. Then she went out to look at the flowers.

Father and I hung back in the house before we, too, went out to stroll the grounds. We walked slowly and watched the sky and enjoyed the cool, quiet air. I told you he was almost smirking, but now there was a subtle change in his eyes that looked something like defeat. His posture was different, too, not worse exactly, but different. It had never occurred to me that

Father could look that way, the same way it never occurs to some people that William

Shakespeare had to eat sometimes.

Father has not wet himself again that I am aware of, and we have not spoken of the incident since, but he still carries this new look in his eyes and this new weight on his shoulders.

He carries these everywhere he goes. Sometimes, when I happen to see myself in a mirror, I see that I look a little different, too. I’m looking more different all the time.

FAKE ORANGES

I used to go to the creek with a friend of mine, and we’d fish for trout. This friend of mine proved in the end to be a tiresome boor, but for a time he was a good fishing companion.

The way we did our fishing felt more like hunting than it did fishing. We used bows and arrows.

The arrows had fishing line tied to the ends of their shafts so that we could reel the trout in once we caught them. We would sit in tree branches hanging over the brown water. Through our polarized sunglasses lenses we could see right through the water to the creek bed. When trout came, we drew our arrows back and shot. It was important to adjust for light refraction, lest we miss our mark. A trout is always a few degrees off from where he looks to be.

At day’s end, we would walk back to my house and fry up the fish in my back yard.

There is an orange tree in my backyard from which my friend refused to eat. Because they were not from the grocery, he felt the oranges had not properly been vetted.

“They are not real,” he said, “unless they have been through the process, unless they have been touched by human industry.”

He would then sink into his plastic chair and smoke his menthols and pout.

If it was winter, when orange trees give fruit, I would sit in my own plastic chair, and I would eat the oranges for dessert as the sun sank finally behind the trees to the west. I threw the orange skins into the pine trees and the weird purple dusk. I did not agree with my friend about the oranges being fake. They were real enough when I ate them. They still are, I think.

In retrospect, it is easy to identify this as the beginning of something going corrupt in my friend’s mind, but it was impossible to see that at the time, and I thought him merely eccentric, and a little annoying.

The pattern of his pouting continued, until one day, my friend decided the trout were not real, either, even though he had pierced them with arrows and held them in his hand as the life drained out of them. Once I had seen him take a trout by the tail and dash its brains against a rock. How could he think the trout were not real after with his own hands he had dashed their brains against a rock? It was as if his logic had a secret machinery I could not see.

For a time, my friend continued bow fishing with me at the creek, but he always gave me his catch. He could not bring himself to eat the trout after he decided they were fake. He came back to the yard and smoked his menthols and pouted while I ate my fake trout and my fake oranges.

My friend finally insisted that I join him at a new fishing spot.

“The fish here are real,” he said. “And we still get to shoot them, not like at the grocery store, where they don’t let you shoot anything.”

We got into his truck, and he drove me to a tilapia farm ten minutes out of town. At the tilapia farm, thousands of fish swam in rows of long troths. A series of catwalks crossed above the troths at right angles, and it was on one of these catwalks that we parked our small outfit.

Looking into the troths, it seemed as if there was no water. The fish were their own water. We did not need our polarized lenses, and we did not need to adjust our aim for refraction of light.

“We’re like pigs at the slop,” I said.

“Yes,” my friend said, his eyes glinting in the winter sunlight. I had never noticed before how much his eyes were like computer screens.

“There’s no sport.”

“Sport?”

“Yes, sport. The thing that hunting is and fishing is and, say, basketball is. You want a degree of fairness.”

“Sport my ass, friendo.”

Then my friend drew an arrow back and speared a few tilapia right through their gills without even aiming, the arrow acting as a kebab skewer. The arrow went on through the water of tilapia and made a loud booming against the side of the steel troth. He reeled his line in, put the fish in his Rural King bucket, and did it all over again. Fish after fish after fish. I did not join him. His behavior had breached a boundary, and now it was my turn to pout. I sank into my camping chair, I felt the December sun warming my face, I clenched my anus against the onslaught of eccentricity turned insane.

Before long, an extremely heavyset security guard mounted the catwalk on the other side of the farm. He looked from a distance like a large rotten pear. My friend and I watched him approach us. It took some time. We did not take him seriously. We did not flee. When he got close we could see that his gun was drawn. He had enormous sweat stains beneath his armpits and on his torso and between his legs, and he was out of breath.

“This is private property,” the security guard managed to say. “Drop your weapon.”

“What kind of gun is that?” my friend said.

“Magnum,” he said, panting.

“What kind of security guard carries a magnum?”

“That security guard,” I said, pointing at the gun. “He does.”

“I think it’s an air gun. He just painted the tip black to fool people.”

Then he drew his arrow back, aiming for – or rather not aiming for, just pointing in the general direction of – a troth.

“This is private property,” the security guard said. “I will shoot.”

“I don’t think you will, fat boy. Why on earth would you shoot, unless you’re retarded or something? You’re retarded, aren’t you? I don’t believe anyone in his right mind would hire a retarded, morbidly obese person to be a security guard at a tilapia farm and give him – the retarded person, mind you – a fucking magnum. I don’t think you’re even a real security guard.”

“Security guard or not, the gentleman has a magnum pointed at you.”

My friend ignored me and took a few more tilapia with the same loud booming from the troth. Now the security guard was shaking. You would have thought he was in a remarkably complex Mexican standoff, the way he was holding the gun and shaking like a frightened child.

My friend drew the arrow back again.

“I will shoot.”

“Oh, put the damn bow down,” I said.

“I’m starting to think you aren’t real, friendo.”

“Listen to your friend. I will shoot you dead.”

My friend drew the arrow back farther.

Then the security guard put a bullet right in my friend’s shoulder, about five inches from his heart. My friend howled and fell backwards. I have never been shot with a magnum, but I thought my friend was hamming it up a little. He fell as if he were acting in a Sergio Leone film, letting his arrow fly off toward the sun, the clear fishing line streaming behind it, before dropping the bow to the catwalk. Then he kicked the bow into a fish troth. The look on his face suggested he could not believe he had been shot. Imagine a close-up angle on the gunslinger’s death rictus.

But my friend was not dying. After a moment my friend realized this, that he was not dying, and he looked the security guard squarely in the face.

“You shot me, you fat son of a bitch.”

“I told you I’d shoot.”

“He did tell you he was going to shoot.”

“For what it’s worth, it probably would have been better for me if I hadn’t shot you.”

“Great. That means the world to me.”

We commenced to get my friend to the hospital. My friend did not want to get blood all over the interior of his truck, because it was upholstered in real leather, and the security guard was too big to fit in the cab. And so they both reclined in the bed of the truck with the fish bucket while I sat alone in the cab and drove down the highway through the fading afternoon. The angle of the sunlight coming in behind and above the trees lent the whole scene the quality of a studio set. The trees seemed two-dimensional. The lighting seemed professional. I felt of a sudden as if

I were a sock puppet driving a toy truck.

Through the back window I could faintly hear my friend making fun of the security guard’s weight, but before long they began to laugh together. I couldn’t imagine what was so funny. You wouldn’t think they’d have anything to laugh about, given what had passed between them, but laughing they were.

We dropped my friend off at the hospital, where he told the receptionist he had accidentally shot himself while handing the loaded gun to “our heavyset friend here.” He winked at the security guard as he said this, as if he were getting away with something, and I guess he was getting away with something. He had trespassed, and he had been shot. He was not getting charged with trespassing, and the doctor said the wound was mostly superficial. The bullet had

missed bone and muscle and passed on through. Still, he had lost enough blood that they wanted him to stay overnight.

As I was leaving the hospital with the security guard, a few orderlies came by rolling a gurney. On the gurney was a man whose entire face was made of smooth plastic. Through the slit that apparently served as his mouth, he was smoking an electronic cigarette, or, more accurately, inhaling vapor from an electronic cigarette.

“I’ve heard of fake titties,” said the security guard, “but it’s this guy’s face.”

I did not know what to say about that. Nor did I know how to follow up the events of the day. What do you do with the guy who has shot, though not fatally, a friend of yours who has proven himself a tiresome boor, and who has subsequently become friendly with that same tiresome boor? The only thing that made sense at the time, or rather, the thing that came closest to making sense, or rather, the thing that I did was I invited the security guard over to the house to fry the fish my friend had shot and to eat oranges. He accepted my invitation, and I loaded him into the bed of the truck, and we headed home.

Back at my house, in the back yard, I had to bring out my dead grandmother’s old armchair for the security guard to sit in because he weighed too much to sit in any of the plastic deck chairs or canvas camping chairs. They would collapse beneath him, he told me. Similar chairs had collapsed before.

I fried the tilapia in a pan over the fire, but when I offered the security guard his helping, he refused.

“I’ve seen what they feed those little turds. Dump those chemicals and shit right in those troths like they some kind of chemistry experiment. Not really a good fish for frying, anyway.

More of a pan-roast situation.”

The security guard pointed to my orange tree then. “I’ll take some of those oranges, though.”

I went to the orange tree and picked a few off.

“I’ll need more than that,” he said. “Get me a bucketful.”

I gave the security guard a bucketful of oranges. As I ate my fish, I watched him eat the oranges in the weird purple dusk. He had a spay-blade knife that he used expertly to peel the oranges. Once he had peeled an orange, he would pull it apart, such that juice dribbled down his fingers, down his wrists, down his forearms.

As he ate, he began rubbing his large belly and chuckling. I could not discern exactly what was funny, if anything was funny, but it didn’t matter. It was enough to watch and to listen to him. Warmth emanated from him. He was like one of those laughing Buddha statues, but he wasn’t a statue, he was alive. He was alive, and further, a light was beaming forth from his eyes.

This light was in no way metaphysical. It was simply a human light, but a human light of rare quality. Watching him eat, I forgot about my friend’s boorish tiresomeness and his being shot. I forgot about my friend, period. I forgot about everything else in my life and in the world, and the forgetting felt good.

HOSPITAL, MEMPHIS

I spent some hours in a Memphis hospital this weekend. I had thought, what with all the talk about Memphis crime, that there would be a good deal of guts and gruesome in the emergency room, but here Memphis failed to live up. There were just a handful of quiet, sad- faced people like you find in any town, a man in a windbreaker coughing up black phlegm, and a prisoner in shackles with his two guards. This prisoner had some of those teardrops tattooed on his face, muscles in his arms that were like to crush a man’s skull, and two kind, merciful eyes of

Sinatra blue. He, the prisoner, did gracefully all what was asked of him. He seemed reformed to me, and yet there were his shackles, and there were his guards looking bored. Me, I was bleeding from the gash across my forearm.

The nurses took me to the back rooms and sewed me, and I walked home to the hotel in the brisk dark Memphis night. I poured a drink and went up to the hotel roof, where I watched the Mississippi River moving by. After the nothing at the hospital, it was good to look at something happening—something big with force behind it, miles and miles of American mud coming on down through the night. You throw a knife in the river and the river swallows it up, not like the arm of a man, which is delicate and will need sewing. You throw a man in the river and the river eats that, too. A river has no Methodist hospital. A river has no mind, and that helps make it strong. A river keeps moving along not knowing to give a damn, and this works out for it fine.

RIVER OF WOMEN

We’re dealing with a river of women here. The river is roughly 350 women wide and 20 women deep, flanked in the valley by green meadows and forests of poplars, maples, oaks, and beeches. It flows steadily, flesh over flesh, the women eddying like water, steadily southwest with an average discharge of 793 cubic women per second.

Are the women in the river of women beautiful? Sure, but “beautiful” is not very specific.

We have all kinds of women rolling around down there. We have women with the beehive hairdo, with bodies like Mack Trucks, that is, they are hard. Women who sing madrigal and perform magic tricks at tender moments. At least one woman who’s a doctoral candidate in museum studies and has lost her Schnauzer and needs help putting up posters to find her

Schnauzer. Cocktail waitresses, pharmaceutical executives, mail carriers, bankers, aerospace engineers with facial moles. Mussolini’s great-granddaughters, Jews, Gypsies, Muslims,

Presbyterians, Unitarians, Agnostics, Hindus, women, women, women.

Men line up along the riverbank with large wicker baskets and horsehair nets, big wooden buckets and elaborate systems of ropes and pulleys, each trying to catch the woman he thinks will make him whole. The riverbank is lined with signs that read, No Swimming! and

Beware of Women! Back in ’95, Frank Arnett thought he was some kind of Casanova Jacque

Cousteau and jumped right in despite the warnings. He got sucked into the current and the women started smacking him, shouting, “Creep!” “Bastard!” “Pervert!” “Snake!” As he slowly sank, they say you could see his eyeballs blow out of their sockets from the crush of the bodies.

The women manage to survive the crush, but there is evidently ennui among them, for sometimes a woman will leave the river of her own accord and just walk away, peeling bobby pins from her flesh, saying, “I’ve had about enough of this shit, this being a river.”

When a walker departs, the men tend to loaf around, kicking dirt, scratching their heads and their groins, wondering what is happening, and what they should do, and what it is they done did wrong. Fundamentally the men know not much at all.

THE RIVERBOAT EXPLOSION

There’s an electrical storm outside, and the cantina band plays loud bossa nova. The few lights are trained on a felt painting of the Virgin Mary hanging behind the bar, such that she, the

Virgin, seems shepherdess of the whiskey bottles. A Tennessee Mexicano named Guillermo runs this place. Guillermo is a very pious fellow with a twenty-year-old hernia. The hernia is

Guillermo’s best friend. He’s over there wiping tables and talking to it, under his breath.

Guillermo is doing well for himself here in Knoxville. He’s tapped into the trend pulse.

He serves hot chicken in waffled tortillas. He serves a cocktail called The Paper Airplaine #9, which is something like a gin fizz, and a different cocktail called Stonewall’s Revenge, which is something like whiskey.

I’ve just passed my board exams for medical school in Memphis, and I have no good reason to be back in my hometown, except that I am lonely, which is not a reason to do anything or be anywhere, and so I’ve come out to Guillermo’s to find a good reason, for something, in a general sense. Mostly I am trolling for women.

At the other end of the bar, a woman in a black dress and purple wig and blue pillbox hat is chewing on a cheroot. She winks at me in the manner of the spaghetti-western gunslinger just before he slings his guns. I don’t remember where I put my car keys. It strikes me that I may be behooved romantically, if not in the pursuit of the car keys, to speak to the spaghetti-western woman.

“We’re dealing with a river of car keys here,” I say at her end of the bar. “The river is roughly 350,000 car keys wide, and 20,000 car keys deep, flanked in the valley of car keys by

trees made of car keys. A horrible geology of brass on brass, some plastic and electrical wiring thrown in there for your remote-control option.”

“Darlin’, what?” she says.

I had thought she was Turkish, but this is an Alabama girl. I can tell by the sound of her voice, and by her powerful Alabama musk.

“Harlan,” I say, extending my hand, for my name is Harlan Tyrannous Buttress.

She removes the hat and the wig, and she takes my hand. “Mary Maude Meacham.”

“Under what circumstances are you alone this evening, Miss Meacham?”

“Daddy’s in the hospital,” she says. “We were out hunting, and I swear by God he looked just like a deer.”

We have seven Paper Airplane #9s and talk football.

And now Miss Meacham is dancing, lithe and buoyant, to what sounds like Stan Getz, and I am dancing with her, if what I am doing can rightly be called dancing. I put one foot in front of the other on the old planks of the dancing platform, and then I move the second foot back two steps and twist my hips a la Chubby Checker, and I spin my partner round and round.

In theory this is dancing, but my back… I am trying.

I am trying, and I am a-tangle with love thoughts, and I am about to venture a kiss on

Miss Meacham’s mouth, when a Benedictine monk crashes into the place with a crowbar driven through his chest.

He indicates that there has been a riverboat explosion, of the river boat Volunteer

Princess. He does this without calm. He is not calm. He is frantic. He is foaming at the mouth and shouting, “Riverboat explosion!” and dispatching other pertinent information.

This tragedy, tragic though it is, is wonderful news for me. Things were going well with

Miss Meacham, yes, but not that well. Things can always go better. To truly prosper and really

“do the damn thing,” as my grandfather might have said, in matters of the heart, it is often necessary to have an event, such as a riverboat explosion, and a messenger, such as a hooded monk with a crowbar driven through his chest, to deliver news of the event. There is nothing like the suffering of others to solder two hearts together.

Down at the landing the rain has stopped, but a heavy fog hangs over the river, and the flames on the water roar through the mist.

Maybe I will have to resuscitate a few crusty and badly scalded members of the crew, or passengers – I’m a doctor, nearly, after all, I have responsibilities. There will be blood and the gnashing of teeth, and maybe I won’t save anyone. Maybe it is already a total loss, but at the end of the affair, I will look into Miss Meacham’s eyes, and she will look into mine, and it will be like V-Day in Europe between us. I don’t even care about my car keys any more. We will have a

Mercedes and three Volvos someday, and a flaxen son called Fats who will play well on the baby grand.

CASUAL AMERICA

“America’s gone casual,” she says, and now she’s refusing furs. She turns up her nose at mink. She will not wear weasel. She won’t allow me the coonskin cap, either. It’s all about collegiate dress, she tells me, and one doesn’t wear furs to lecture.

She’s chained herself to the dead dogwood out back. The tree will fall any day, maybe on the house, maybe in some other direction, I care less all the time. I care only that she’s chained to it. I tramp down the driveway beneath mockingbirds’ harmonizing with the gibbons. The gibbons are coming over the neighbor’s outdoor sound system. I bring a platter of triangular club sandwiches and a bottle of Bourgogne.

“How do you define yourself?” she says, sweating through a corduroy oxford. Light splashes her face through the spotty canopy.

I say, “I’m a man who is no longer allowed his coonskin cap.”

She urges me to define myself in positive terms.

I say, “I’m betrothed to a microfascist.”

“No.”

I say, “I’m the tom cat.”

“Ask me who I am,” she says.

When I do, she says, “I’ve gone casual.”

Next door, the neighbors switch their disc from gibbons to a recording of crashing wave- sound from their pilgrimage to Big Sur, we have heard it before, and the mockingbirds go on gibbon-warbling through the tide.

She tells me about her yogi, whose buns and whose strenuous spiritual regimen are bound in a state of perpetual tautening.

From the television, through my open window up the hill, I hear something about riot squads. From next door, I hear vintage Big Sur wave-crash in crescendo.

“Dearest,” I say, “I’m multitudinous in here.” I rub the belly. “Microbe strong, kitten.”

We knock the Bourgogne back to nothing.

I say, “Casual dress has sown fascism across the amber waves.”

“No.”

I say, “Unchain yourself from this dead tree. Come inside and cloak yourself in furs.

Cloak yourself in me.”

She says, “I’ve gone casual, sweet.”

Stadium applause floods the Pacific coast, and our mockingbirds fall silent. I think they’ve put on a live Joan Baez album or something, but the applause just keeps on coming, no music.

Inside, I open another bottle of Bourgogne, sit by the window, and watch my wife hugging the dead tree. She’s ruining her chinos’ creases. She used to wear furs even to the First

Manassas reenactments. I have pictures in a shoebox. I don’t understand these fads, but that’s all they are. Yoga, casual dress, chaining oneself to dead trees: fads and lost causes all.

In a week’s time, my wife will slip into the bedroom wearing my coonskin cap and a cape of powder-blue velvet. We’ll set the house on fire, bid the rotten dogwood and ambient neighbors a solid farewell. We’ll find bliss among the gibbons, swallow sunlight through the trees like it’s box wine, revert to the source, slap the bag, spank the monkey, run amok in the arboreal dusk and be not naked no longer – if only I don’t pull too hard.

ORPHEUS AND DALE

The old poet Orpheus by now had made a habit of walking his dim-witted Labrador along the Tennessee River at night. It had been his cardiologist’s idea that he go and get himself a dog to walk. She, the cardiologist, had indicated his, Orpheus’s, gut by poking him in it with a purple felt pen, meanwhile biting her supple nether lip with something like revulsion. While he had not grown to like the dog, who could not even fetch well, the old poet Orpheus liked very much to walk the dog by the river at night. He liked the brokenness of the moon falling through the trees, and he liked the tender tactile pulse of the crickets’ chirruping, and he liked the cool river breeze cutting down the heat of the gone day.

One evening, as he strolled along the river with the daft Labrador, Orpheus spied a beautiful youth reclining on the bank. The youth was done up in lemon-colored jeans and bare feet. He had a mane of red hair, a fishing rod, tackle, and stones for skimming. His torso was bare, and it was masculine in a classic sense. His muscles, that is, were not over-worked to the point that he looked like an insect. He had a classic, casual aura about him, too. Presently, he stood up and skimmed a stone. As it sank into the water, he watched it, and he was left staring after it into the depths of the river.

“Oh, tragic, over-sweet Narcissus,” muttered Orpheus, but this youth was called Dale.

Orpheus thought to sing for the youth, and he thought to play his harmonica, but, remembering his lost Eurydice, suffered a crisis of confidence. He was old and too unhealthy for intercourse anyway, if that was what he wanted. Further, maybe it was too late for him to switch teams, as it were, from not gay to gay, or to the on-the-fence team he had heard about. What’s more, he had this dog with no name to handle, and the dog did not like his singing voice.

Orpheus saw no point in serenading, he wasn’t up to it, and so he crept on along the river, avoiding the beautiful youth altogether. He stepped softly so as not to raise a sound, holding the dog’s chain so that it would not rattle, and the boy did not notice him. The old poet Orpheus disappeared into a grove of cedars that hugged the bank, he did not look back, and the night carried on in a series of small silences.

MORE THAN ANIMALS

Mr. Neap did not know how to ride a bicycle, but right there beneath a dogwood tree on the sidewalk was a Raleigh that looked, Mr. Neap thought, as if it badly wanted to be stolen. It was spring outside, and the dogwoods were blooming and dropping pink and white petals on the ground, such that the whole town looked like someone’s birthday cake. The bicycle itself, which wasn’t even locked up, had a frame of red, white, and blue, and Mr. Neap thought it looked charming against the colors of the town. It was Mr. Neap’s fortieth birthday, and he thought this machine must be some kind of cosmic gift. Well, no one saw him take the bicycle, because no one was there to see him take the bicycle, and no one saw him fall three times, ripping his white chinos and getting pink dogwood petal stains on them and getting dog shit on them, and no one saw him on his fourth try wobble into sustained forward motion and ride off down the street.

On the bicycle, Mr. Neap felt good and free and rather like a bird. The tail of his green tweed jacket flapped behind him. He had just that morning lost his job at the bank, where he was an incompetent teller, and this made him feel good and free, too, being unemployed. His colleagues at the bank had always teased and abused him because of his incompetence, and his customers had always glared at him with and impatience he could feel in his vital organs as he fucked up and took too long, and now he would never have to see any of them, neither colleagues nor customers, again. “Wheee,” he said, just trying it on for size.

But where does one go on a bicycle, thought Mr. Neap, to the park? He couldn’t think of anywhere else to go, and so Mr. Neap went to the park on his bicycle. This park was one that attached to a schoolyard, and out there against the pink and the white of the trees and of the ground, children ran at each other, beasts, as they were, upon the earth. Mr. Neap came to a slow

stop at a bench in the park, and he watched the children playing. He noticed that only one child, a little fat girl, was using the swing set. How strange, thought Mr. Neap, for as a boy he had always loved the swing set most of all, and to see the set in such disuse disturbed him. Then the rubber seat of the swing snapped in half with an absurd smacking noise, and the little fat girl fell on her large bottom in the woodchips. Luckily, thought Mr. Neap, she wasn’t swinging very high. The other children paid the fall of the little fat girl no regard. This seemed worse than if they had mocked her. It was as if she was not worth the derision of her peers. Not even the adults on the grounds paid her attention as she tried and failed to get up. Perhaps she had broken her tailbone. Mr. Neap felt a kinship to the little girl, and he pitied her. At the bank he had at least been the butt of derision. They had not ignored him. Here was this tragic little girl being completely ignored.

Still, in situations such as this, Mr. Neap never knew quite what to do. Did he play it like a wildlife photographer and leave things well enough alone? If this were a songbird, say, being eaten by a large spider, it would be his duty to take pictures and to let it happen. Should he interfere with nature? Was a child something more than an animal? Was he himself a part of nature? If he was a part of nature, could anything he did possibly be an interference with nature?

He elected not to help the fat girl. He rode instead on his stolen bicycle into the pink and white birthday afternoon and into the sun setting in the west, and he put the fat girl out of his mind.

Out there beyond the playground he found new work that he rather enjoyed, and a wife, and together they made several children, who swung on swings without snapping them and of whom Mr. Neap came to think, these children are more than animals. And he thought, our happy

existence transcends that which can be found in the wild. Meanwhile the Raleigh sat in the garage, and seldom did the bicycle or his theft of it cross Mr. Neap’s mind.

Years passed, and during a cruise in celebration of his sixtieth birthday, Mr. Neap went cage diving to see great white sharks. What a wonderful slice of nature, he thought. But the cage was evidently defective. It came open underwater, and Mr. Neap and his daughter Grace were devoured by sharks.

As he was being torn to pieces, Mr. Neap’s life did not pass before his eyes, as is said sometimes happens in situations such as this. All he could see were bubbles and the chum and blood that had attracted the sharks and his blood and his daughter Grace’s blood and the teeth of the sharks. All he could smell was the rubber of his mask.

He thought, What, Good Lord, have I done to deserve this? Am I not entitled to something a little better vis a vis death than to be devoured like some animal by wild water beasts? Why is no one doing anything to save me? Grace, where is Grace? What of my other daughters, Valerie and Jane? What of the sons I do not have? I would have given them strong names. What of Grace, where is she?

Later, the South African Navy tracked down and killed the sharks that had eaten the

Neaps. The sailors who did it didn’t want to do it – they thought the sharks had every right to eat what was brought to them, no one had made these tourists present themselves – but they had been given their orders, and so do it they did.

JESUS’ PIMENTO CHEESE SANDWICH

One day, Jesus pulled up to a gas station, went inside, and bought a pimento cheese sandwich from the attendant, who was there all alone. Jesus sat on the tailgate of his Chevrolet pickup truck and ate the sandwich. He enjoyed it very much.

He said to the empty street, “Maybe I’ll come here for a pimento cheese sandwich again sometime, when the fancy strikes to eat one.”

Just then, a plague of locusts descended upon Jesus and ate him alive – skin, guts, bones, his whole person, yes – in seven seconds flat. The locusts continued on their way, and they were satisfied, such that they were no longer, strictly speaking, much of a plague. They were really just a whole bunch of locusts.

Nothing was left of Jesus. Not one drop of blood, not one strand of genetic material.

Further, not a single set of human eyes had seen the locusts devour him. The local authorities tried to figure out what had become of Jesus, but they found nothing. The state authorities and the federal authorities gave it a go, but they didn’t find anything either. Jesus’ family wept, and

Jesus’ dog gnashed its teeth until its teeth all fell out. The animal began to starve, until it finally had to be euthanized, and it was incinerated with the county’s other dead dogs.

There was not much evidence regarding Jesus’ death, or disappearance, no one could be sure which it had been, but the authorities felt they had to pin it on someone, and so, for the crime of murder, the gas station attendant was sentenced to death. After a while, at which point the gas station attendant was no longer employed as a gas station attendant, because he was in prison, but at which point the gas station attendant still identified as a gas station attendant, the gas station attendant was killed in much the same fashion as Jesus’ dog. Not much else could be

done. The world continued its journey through space, and Jesus’ disappearance became no more than fodder for local lore.

In the end, all of the people who had ever known Jesus died, and there was no one around who remembered him or his strange disappearance, not to mention his pimento cheese sandwich.

But the dogs kept on gnashing their teeth, and they’re still gnashing them today.

INEPTITUDE

I used to know a fellow. I can’t remember his name. I’d like to tell you he was bold and man-of-war-like, a glimmering spark in the spectral waste of blackness, but he was really more like a morbidly obese donkey. He was his own great load to bear, and then he became so great a load that he burdened all who met him.

He wore moth-eaten clothing from second-hand stores, trying to save the children in

Burma from labor. He swept the ground before him with a broom, like the Jainists he’d read about, trying not to step on bugs, trying to brush them from his path and let them live, trying for misapprehended nirvana, just trying all over the damned place and accomplishing not much. He shuffled his heavy feet, sweeping, moving slowly, hardly moving at all among the dust that rose around him.

Crossing streets, he angered motorists, and his slowness caused traffic events among them. He left mild injuries and badly bent fenders in his wake. Likewise, at the apartment house where he lived, where I, too, lived, the moths from his second-hand garments multiplied and destroyed his neighbors’ clothes and their upholstered furniture. Everywhere he went he roused loathing and foul language.

One afternoon, while crossing the highway, just sweeping along, he was run over by a woman driving a minivan packed with children in their bathing suits. Before she realized what was happening to her, the woman had driven a good seventy feet, dragging him and his broom along the pavement, his leg wedged in the undercarriage, the broomstick driven nicely though his navel and out his mouth.

He died, of course. It was in the papers. His obituary was tastefully brief.

What I’m trying to illustrate here is that this fellow wanted only to do good in the world, but he could not manage it. I’m trying to illustrate this thing I know about salvation. This fellow went around trying so hard to get himself saved, but all he did was muss up the already mussed- up world around him. He looked for salvation everywhere but inside his own mind, and he tripped right over himself.

Meanwhile the children labor on. The insects are crushed under other feet – my feet, your feet. The earth turns.

JOHN O. AND THE SQUID

Out beyond him, upon the gulf, John Overton Thetford saw what he thought was a large merchant vessel cleaning itself. He was wrong. It was not a large merchant vessel cleaning itself.

It was a giant squid. Early the next morning, around the hour of the dawn, the squid was going to suck him into its belly, but John O. did not know this, and furthermore it was hard for him to tell exactly what was going on out on the horizon from his beach chair. Despite his sunglasses and his panama hat and his beach umbrella, the heat and the brightness of the afternoon were great enough that John O. questioned his very senses. The best he could do was to surmise that his ship out there had released hoses from itself. And now the hoses were flailing about as if, he thought, they were the tentacles of a large squid in a state of crisis, or that was hunting, spraying water everywhere. The ship was either washing itself in preparation for port, or washing itself clean of port, John O. could not say which. The nearest port was over 100 miles away, but John O. did not let that bother him. It didn’t even cross his mind.

What did cross his mind was that he felt the presence of his wife, Emily, sitting next to him in her beach chair. She was reading, actually reading, not just pretending to read, from behind her black sunglasses that had large circular rims. John O. had trained himself, or fancied he had trained himself, so that he could tell whether his wife was reading or only pretending to read without so much as looking at her, based on a barely perceptible loosening of the tension between them when she honestly was reading. This distinction between reading and pretending to read was important to John O. because he imagined he could gauge the state and the quality of his marriage based on it without having to communicate in the traditional ways. If his wife was honestly reading, he thought, it meant that she had a clear mind and the marriage was going on

nicely. If she was sitting with a book and staring at its pages but not actually focusing on the words, well, this meant she had something on her mind that she was not telling him, and he needed to be attentive, or to give her space, or to do some sit-ups and some push-ups to improve his figure, or something. John O. thought his wife had lately been mostly honestly reading, and this made him glad.

Beyond his wife, his daughter, Anne, 12, sat cross-legged on a towel, reading. Lately, there had been a problem with Anne. She would scour the free bin at the used bookstore for objectionable material, bring it home, and insist on reading nothing else. The child’s psychiatrist had recommended Anne be allowed to read what she would. She was in a phase that would work itself out, and then she would get back to reading literature more appropriate for her age group.

For a week or so, she had been reading a book called Batting Lashes: On the Art of Feminine

Counter-Seduction. Anne had recently been practicing batting her eyelashes and knotting cherry stems with her tongue. During the drive to the beach, he had watched her in the rearview mirror as she batted her eyelashes and bit her lower lip and her index finger at passing vehicles.

John O.’s nine-year-old son was somewhere, probably directly behind him, not reading or pretending to read, busy at being spastic of mind and of body. The boy was on a rigorous course of Ritalin that held his brain, the children’s psychiatrist had told them, like invisible loving arms.

Lately, the boy had been playing with a set of croquet balls, tossing them, catching them, even juggling them. It at least had kept him mostly quiet, but the croquet balls were hard and somewhat heavy, and when he dropped one it made a tremendous sound, and this irritated John

O. to no end.

Having finished this brief rundown of his family, John O. drank some daiquiri from his thermos and wiped sweat from his brow, wondering why anyone would think it was a good idea

to visit the state of Florida during the summer months, wondering why his father had, so many years ago, bought the condo in the first place. Why couldn’t he have bought a condo, or better a beach house, in Maine or northern California? In Maine, the weather was pleasant in the summer. In northern California, he understood the weather was always pleasant. Presently the merchant vessel seemed to sprout a new tentacle. Something that resembled from the distance a small boat seemed to fly into the air and disappear into the bow of the merchant vessel.

Obviously, thought John O., that was a shadow from above, an optical illusion. Boats aren’t out here eating other boats.

“That thing must be as big as a department store.” It was typical that John O.’s son would perceive the object of his father’s attention and make a basically asinine comment on it. The boy, whom John O. had wanted to call Overton, for which stood the “O” in his own name and by which he himself had always wanted to be called, was called Johnny Jr. at Emily’s behest.

Calling the boy Johnny Jr. was objectionable on at least three fronts: the boy was the fifth John

Overton Thetford in his line, and so Jr. made no sense in terms of his formal name; John O. himself had never been called Johnny, and so Jr. made no sense in terms of his nickname; finally, the diminutive Johnny joined to the diminutive Jr. he thought would make a permanent child and, perhaps worse, a Nancy of his son.

John O. had tried calling the boy by Overton anyway, behind his wife’s back, but she had found him out and had, for some reason, cared. “Don’t confuse our baby,” she had cried, “our bay-bee.” John O. decided then that the fight was not worth it. He had already lost. He had lost long before he knew there would be a fight, and there was nothing he could do about it but surrender and move on. This surrendering was illustrative of what John O.’s father had called “a fundamental cowardice,” which John O. believed in his heart was not cowardice at all, but

simply good sense. One must choose one’s battles, and one must choose them wisely. This is not especially original wisdom, but not much wisdom is especially original. I could also use the phrase, thought John O. “This is not the hill I want to die on.” That one is in possession of a higher quotient of gravitas. If I have to die, I want it to be on a hill, but with Emily, and we are holding hands at that magic hour between day and night, and the moon has been painted pink or orange by the setting sun and by the multiple nuclear explosions nearby. And we aren’t old. It is the nuclear apocalypse, and we will die quickly exposed so on that hill, and we won’t miss anything we wouldn’t want to miss visa vis the lives of our children or good television, on account of there never anymore being anything to miss on those fronts. But arguing with Emily over the name of his son was not the hill he wanted to die on.

“It’s cleaning itself like a cat,” Johnny Jr. added.

“What?” John O. had forgotten his son had spoken.

“Is it a pirate ship?”

Without looking up from her book, Emily said, “Yes, honey, like kitties on a cruise.”

“Son, you –”

“You mean as if it was a cat,” his daughter said, “but it’s nothing like a cat at all, and that’s not a pirate ship. There aren’t any fucking pirates.”

“You’re almost correct, Anne, but not quite, and young ladies your age shouldn’t say fuck.”

“I know there aren’t real pirates,” said Johnny Jr. “I meant is it one of those tour boats that comes by the beach with cannons and people dressed like pirates.”

“Shut up, children.”

The children shut up.

“Anne is almost correct in her syntax. You want to say, ‘as if it were a cat,’ because the situation is not literal, nor is it in the past tense. Your sister is totally correct that there are no pirates and that the vessel, which is neither a pirate ship nor a boat full of people dressed as pirates, but, I’d wager, a merchant ship, is nothing like a cat. If it had to be likened to something from the animal kingdom, it would properly be likened to a sea creature, one with tentacles. See how the hoses and the water coming from them give the impression of tentacles?”

“Darling, they’re children.”

“And?”

“Let’s dispense with the grammar lessons. They don’t understand it yet.”

“That is precisely why it’s so important, dear, that they hear these things. They don’t understand them yet.”

“But what if the cat has a bunch of really long tongues, and it swims?”

“Son, if you’re going to use metaphor at all, it’s because you want to illuminate something that is unclear, or to add depth to the meaning of something that otherwise might be or seem innocuous. You want the figurative element, in this case a sea creature, to come from the same palate, in this case the ocean, as the literal element, in this case that which is obviously a ship but just as obviously not a pirate ship. If you take a ship and tell me it is like an animal that does not exist on the same palate as a ship, for instance, a cat, and subsequently you have to modify the cat with, as you put it, ‘a bunch of really long tongues,’ then you’re only muddying the water.”

“Muddying the water?”

Emily, still not looking up from her reading, said, “The ocean doesn’t get muddy, darling.

‘Muddying the water’ is more of a fresh-water device.”

“I thought we were disposing with grammar lessons, dear.”

“That wasn’t a grammar concern, it was syntax, and if we’re going to do it, we might as well do it properly.”

“Forget the muddying, then. The point is that a cat with ‘a bunch of really long tongues’ only serves to mystify us, because it hails neither from reality nor from the aquatic palate.”

“I’m confused,” said Johnny Jr.

“It’s because you’re stupid,” Anne said.

“Sometimes, son,” and here John O. paused and pointed out toward the gulf with an exasperated movement of the right arm, “a ship is only a ship.”

John O. took a long drink from his thermos. The lesson had parched him. It was true, he thought. Sometimes a ship is only a ship. I need not compare it to a squid. Tentacles be damned.

State of crisis be damned. Is the ship coming or going? It shouldn’t matter to me. It doesn’t matter to me. It isn’t a matter of life and death. I’m on vacation.

He listened to the sound of his children arguing about stupidity and cats and pirate tour boats, but he did not listen to their words, and the voices became indistinct. They became one with the gentle waves and the breeze. He took another long drink, and he closed his eyes. The heat of the sand and the heat of the air and the gentle washing noise of the small gulf waves made him feel as though he were in a different time – a time before his own life, a time before high-rise condominiums, a time before men or beasts or even single-celled organisms.

With his eyes still closed, a cool glow appeared before him, and the glowing seemed to pulsate. For a moment, he felt peaceful. He thought of absolutely nothing at all. But then he focused on the glowing light, and it disappeared. Still, it was pleasant. This is why people go to

beaches, he thought, but there are beaches in places that are not Florida. Florida with its heat and its unbearable kitsch. Which bastard gave us unto kitsch?

Then he was sleeping.

John O. woke to the gulf nipping at his toes. The tide had risen, and there was a black, inky substance washing up on the sand. His family was gone. Not gone gone, he knew, just not present. They wouldn’t, or couldn’t, do that, leave him for good as he slept peacefully on a beach. Still, he felt a rush of panic before he saw that they had left their towels and books and chairs. They would not leave those if they were set to be gone gone. Then he felt another rush of panic as he realized their beach affects were about to be swept into the sea. That was like them, leaving their garbage for him to deal with as the tide rose. He tried to remain cool, but he was annoyed almost to the point of outrage that he had been left alone to deal with the beach equipment.

Judging by the position of the sun, John O. thought it was near four in the afternoon. He would be sunburned, he knew. He’d been asleep for nearly two hours. This only compounded his annoyance with his family, for they had not woken him. They were content to let him burn.

As he picked up the family’s debris, he grabbed a book just before it was swept up by the surf. It was Batting Lashes.

“Oh, God, why?”

It was at this moment that a nearby foghorn sounded. The foghorn was followed immediately by the blasts of cannons. John O. spun on his heels. Because of the give of the sand, he lost his balance and fell on his backside in the surf, flinging the book into the tide. He landed facing, as he had intended, the gulf. Just beyond the sand bar, where people might well have

been swimming, a forty-foot boat decked out as a pirate ship was passing. The noises had come from the boat. The boat was full of tourists. The tourists wore black paper hats. Printed on the paper hats were skulls and crossbones.

He pushed himself up from the surf and stood. He cupped his hands around his mouth to amplify his voice, and he yelled, “Go home, you bunch of phonies! You tourists! Let us vacationers vacation in peace!”

He noticed then that some of the tourists were laughing at him. They had seen him fall in the surf. He turned quickly from the boat and finished packing up the beach equipment.

“Physical comedy appeals to the feeble mind,” he said to no one.

Out beyond him, upon the gulf, the giant sea squid sat blackly against the horizon. The sky began to blush with the coming sunset. It was the magic hour, and his wife had left him alone on the hill.

When John O. lumbered back into the condo, he was sopping wet, and he was not relieved to find that the situation was tense. Anne could not find her book.

“Thank God. Where is Anne’s reading?” said Emily.

John O. didn’t know why he had expected a welcome back or an apology of any stripe.

He regarded his wife blankly and dropped the beach chairs in the entryway, where they gave a lame clatter. They were cheap: plastic, aluminum, nylon.

“Darling, Anne is going crazy for her book right now.”

There was something peculiar about Anne’s behavior and mental development that the psychiatrist was reluctant to diagnose. She was very intelligent, but she was given to dark emotional episodes. The psychiatrist would only go as far as to call it “distress entitlement with a

penchant for melodrama,” which was not in the DSM5, and which was, John O. thought, deliberately vague. Both Emily and Anne got along with the psychiatrist very well. When Anne referred to him, she called him “my friend and doctor, Leroy Jenkins.” It was a ridiculous name for a psychiatrist to have, Leroy Jenkins. The name would better suit a clown or a sanitation engineer at a small-town museum.

Presently Anne was standing at the sliding door to the eighth-story balcony, her face and fingers against the glass.

“I’ve lost my book, Daddy. Let me out, I’m going to jump.”

“See? The book, darling.”

“It’s fish food,” John O. said, low, so that only Emily could hear it.

“Darling, you know about her penchant for –”

“Yes, I know about her penchant for melodrama.”

John O. pushed past his wife and approached his daughter, dripping saltwater across the floor. She had maintained her position at the sliding door, but now she had made fists with her small white hands. “We’ll get you a new book, Annie girl. I’m afraid the surf took your book.”

“I don’t want to know the details. All I want now is my sedative.”

Anne’s “sedative” was one mg aspirin affixed to a sugar pill. She was to take one pill orally at bedtime, or as needed, with a glass of milk. John O. maintained a high degree of ceremony in administering his daughter’s sedative, and the ceremony was always the same. He would tuck her into bed, go to the kitchen, and return with a tray. On the center of the tray he placed a saucer, on the center of the saucer, the tiny blue pill. Three inches up from and to the right of the saucer, he placed a tall glass of milk. Each night his daughter would admonish him for placing the milk on the upper right of the tray, for Anne was left-handed. Although this

admonishing was typically playful, and although it was an integral part of the ceremony, John O. sometimes got deep enough into his role as servant that he would feel a pang of inadequacy at this admonishing. Sometimes he even felt a sadness manifest in his chest. But then his daughter would swallow her pill and drink half of the glass of milk, and say, “You’re a good boy, Senior,” and he would kiss his daughter on the forehead and bid her goodnight. Then he would return to the kitchen with the tray and the empty saucer and the half-glass of milk, and he would drink the rest of the milk himself, concluding his favorite part of each day.

Tonight, the ceremony was complicated by the fact that Anne was sleeping in a waterbed.

There was more give beneath his daughter than they were used to at home, and a little milk was spilled, but she swallowed the pill, and she drank half of what was left of the milk, and he kissed her on the forehead.

The condo was designed so that the guest bedroom had two twin-sized beds in it, one a waterbed and one a normal spring bed, and the children both slept in the same room. As John O. left the room and shut off the light, he bid both children good night.

When he almost had the door shut, Johnny Jr. said, “Dad, can I be sedated, too?”

“I don’t know son, can you? Ask me again, and this time say ‘may.’”

There was a pause, and he thought he heard his son practicing in the dark, or maybe Anne was helping him.

Then something very hard struck the doorframe.

“What the hell was that?”

Then something round and very hard struck John O. in the face. He fell and lay on his back, and he could hear something rolling on the floor. He felt blood flowing from his nose.

And then his son was on him, holding a red croquet ball in his hand.

“I’m tired of your bullshit, Dad.”

“Language, son.”

Then Johnny Jr. hit his father in the nose again with the croquet ball.

“Johnny Jr., stop hitting Daddy.”

“I don’t want to be Johnny Jr. I don’t want to speak good English, or speak English good, or whatever the fucking shit you faggots want me to say.”

“Good English was correct. A lot of people don’t think it sounds quite right, and maybe it doesn’t, but it is nevertheless -”

Again, Johnny Jr. smashed the croquet ball against his father’s face.

“You fucking fart. You fart fucker. You farting fucking fuck.”

John O. blacked out for a moment, and when he came to, Johnny Jr. was still on top of him, bashing his face in with the croquet ball.

“Oh, you’ve decided to wake up, you farty fuck? You want more?”

Then John O. remembered his own size relative to his son’s, and he simply stood up, and as he did, he took hold of his son beneath the underarms and lifted him toward the ceiling. He thought of lifting his son’s head into the ceiling fan. He thought that if he stayed at the edge of the circumference of the fan blades and did not hold the boy too close to the hub of the machine, he could let the fan clip his son all night. But if he did not want to die on the hill of what he was going to call his son, he certainly did not want to die on the hill of physically abusing his son.

That was not a hill on which he would meet Emily. She would be on a different hill. She would be the one firing the cannon into his belly.

And so, John O. carried his son to the kitchen, and he gave him a real sedative from

Emily’s purse, and he tucked the boy into bed. Then he fixed himself a drink and he sat on the

back balcony. After a while, he decided to drive to the convenience store to buy a pack of cigarettes, although he had never been a smoker. At the convenience store, he chose a brand of cigarettes that had the word “natural” printed on the box, because if he was going to smoke a cigarette, he wanted it to be one of the healthier ones. For a moment, he considered becoming one of those men who go out for a pack of cigarettes and never come back, but he knew he didn’t have it in him. Then he didn’t very much want even to smoke a cigarette anymore. That was a can of worms he did not want to open. He threw the pack away, and he drove back to the condo, and fixed himself a drink, and he sat on the balcony listening to the surf, which seemed eerie and muffled. There was a strange glowing on the horizon, and the sound of a large growling beast echoed through the night. He thought he heard screaming from the waves.

The hill I want to die on is not my son’s name, and it isn’t beating my son, and I’ll be god damned, but it isn’t grammar either. I want to die on that hill with Emily during the magic hour with the pink or orange moon and the children grown, or not grown, I don’t care, and maybe the children are on the hill, too, and we all know we will not miss anything because of the immanence, nay, presence, of the end of the world, because of nuclear fallout, which is something we used to, say, forty years ago, be more afraid of than we are now, but which, it seems to me, remains just as serious a threat as it was then, and the four horsemen are riding in from the clouds, and the frogs are geese, the first are last – and he kept drinking rum and following this line of thought well into the darkest hour of the early morning.

Just before dawn, John O. went inside to make coffee. When he came back out, it was light enough to see, and it seemed the merchant vessel had come much closer. In fact, it was right up near the beach, just beyond where people swam and failed at surfing, where people rode jet skis in the afternoon. It stood on the sand beneath the waves and stood at six stories high.

“That boat really does look like a squid,” he said, “but of course it can’t be.”

Then the squid reached a tentacle into the balcony where John O. stood, and it took John

O. into its tentacle, and it carried him screaming into its mouth and sucked him into its belly.

In his final moments, John O. thought, I have come to certain appropriate realizations.

For instance, I have realized that grammar is not a hill I want to die on, and I have realized that the merchant vessel I thought looked very much like a squid was actually all along a squid that looked somewhat like a merchant vessel. But I came to these realizations too late, and now I cannot do anything about them.

Then John O. wished the world might die with him, because he did not want to die alone, and he bellowed the names of his wife and children into the belly of the squid. It occurred to him that of course the world would die with him, and of course his family would come to join him, but of course it did not, and of course they did not. The world kept on living, and the squid pushed itself out to sea and disappeared into the depths, and when they woke later that morning,

John O.’s family called for him, and they searched for him on the beach, but they could not find him anywhere.

THE BANG BANG LADY

The Bang Bang Lady was 45 years old, six feet and three inches tall, and weighed 250 pounds. She was married to Big Daddy Jones, proprietor of Big Daddy’s Fireworks in Dawson,

Georgia. On July 4th, 1997, Big Daddy had humiliated himself, the Bang Bang Lady, and the entire Big Daddy’s Fireworks family. He had blown off his right hand with a new explosive he had designed himself called the whizzbangpopgoboom XIII at the Dawson Community Fourth of

July Celebration, in front of a crowd of some three or four hundred celebrants. On the following

Sunday, Big Daddy decided he could no longer take the embarrassment of being the fireworks professional who had blown off his own mama-freakin’ hand (his words). He would not take the embarrassment. With what I done, he reasoned, making a laughing stock of myself and my woman and my employees, I ain’t fit for living.

Big Daddy went to the basement and cleaned the old Mauser as best he could with his one hand. His father, as a private in the United States Army, had stolen the Mauser from a dead

British officer in a medical tent during World War Two. Before that, the British officer had stolen the Mauser from a dead Nazi officer in a cellar in France. Big Daddy’s father had thought possession of the weapon might get him court martialed, say, for looting, if the wrong person found it tucked in his underpants where he kept it hidden. But no one did find the Mauser, they only thought he had a persistent and strangely angled erection, and everyone tried to kind of give him his space, and he brought the Mauser home to Georgia, where it became a talking piece for visitors to the home. Big Daddy figured that if he was going to kill himself he should do it with a weapon that was loaded not only with bullets but also with family history.

He loaded the gun and put the barrel in his mouth. This was, incidentally, how the Nazi officer, the British officer, and Big Daddy’s daddy, Private Jones, had died, too. But at the last

second, Big Daddy had a change of heart. He removed the barrel from his mouth and instead fired a shot into the basement wall. The shot hit the Knight Rider poster that was hanging there right in the bulge in David Hasselhoff’s britches.

“I’m nothin’ but a God danged coward and a good for nothin’ sack of it. Can’t even kill myself right. I got the how,” and here he lifted the Mauser in his hand, as if he were a preacher and the Mauser were a loaf of communion bread that had gone stale, “and I got the why,” and here he lifted the stump where his other hand had used to be, “but I ain’t got the cajones.”

Then Big Daddy took a pill bottle from his breast pocket, popped a few Percocet, and stared at the hole he had made in David Hasselhoff’s crotch for the rest of the afternoon, wishing he had had the gumption to put the hole in his mouth and not ruin good Knight Rider memorabilia.

Big Daddy’s basement was only a partial basement. The house was built into the side of a hill so that on the backside of the house, a glass sliding door looked from the basement into the back yard, which had some tires in it, and a pepper garden that had more wisteria growing in it than peppers. Beyond the pepper garden, a row of trees divided Big Daddy’s yard from the neighbors’ yards. When he fired the Mauser, the report carried across the tires and the peppers and wisteria and through the trees and into the neighborhood.

“Got damn,” said the boy next door, Billy Jenkins, “what’s that husbander yours blown up now?”

“Sounds like a M-80,” said the Bang Bang Lady. Billy Jenkins was throwing his effort into her as she lay under him on his creaking and buckling futon.

“Some hell of a M-80.”

“Shut up and keep it comin’, little man.”

“I like it when you call me little man.”

The couple continued abusing the futon and dampening the bed sheets, which bed sheets did not quite fit the futon mattress and were stained yellow from Billy Jenkins’s bed-wetting days, not so long past.

After coitus, Billy Jenkins had to go practice singing as a tenor in the youth choir at the

Methodist church. The Bang Bang Lady lay on Billy Jenkins’s futon for a long time, watching the light outside fading and wondering when or whether someone might come in and find her naked and full and supine and not unlike a mammoth peach in what now was moonlight. She wondered what the talkers in town would say about her if she were caught in the bed of a member of the Methodist youth choir. Maybe they would take pity on Big Daddy, she thought, and quit talking such shit about him and his whizzbangpop and his blown-up hand. Lord knows he could use a break. But the Bang Bang Lady knew they wouldn’t give him one. She knew that talk takes pity on no man, and she could only make talk worse. She got up and dressed and squeezed herself impossibly through Billy Jenkins’s window into the night.

Big Daddy was on his knees in the pepper garden, digging a hole for the Mauser. It would be better, he had decided, to put the sucker underground. He had taken more Percocet and had gotten rid of the plastic pill bottle, and the pills were swimming around in his breast pocket.

Wisteria tickled his ankles and his feet, and he felt as though he had been there trying to dig his hole for so long that the wisteria would swallow him and he would be happily forgotten by the world and all he would have to eat would be the meager showing of peppers. He would have to ration them, which was fricked because he didn’t even like peppers. They were easy to grow was the only reason he was growing them.

He wanted just to bury the Mauser and get out of the wisteria before it ate him. He was working on digging the hole with his one good hand and no gardening tools. He had his stump driven into the soil and was supporting his weight with it as he scratched at the earth with his good hand. This hurt his stump, even with the Percocet running through him, but he didn’t care.

He didn’t even care that his bandages were coming loose or that his stump was putting blood into the soil. He didn’t care, and he wasn’t making much progress.

He sat up on his haunches then, which took a good deal of energy, and the world around him spun for a moment. Through the pines, by the light of the moon, he thought he saw a large woman fall from a first-story window on the back of the Jenkins’s house, and he thought he saw the woman roll down the hill until he couldn’t see her anymore. It was about the least elegant window hopping Big Daddy had ever seen. He sat in the dirt on his haunches, stupefied, and he forgot about the Mauser and the wisteria and the pepper garden.

He stared at the Jenkins’s house, which seemed to be throwing out a light and calling to him, which he did not want, he did not want the Jenkins’s house calling to him. The Jenkins boy creeped him out with all his hymn singing and his small body that looked like it was going to break but you knew it wasn’t going to break and his big brown eyes that made him look as if he were a fawn but also somehow, like, sexy, and Big Daddy didn’t like that, either. It was wrong on more levels than he wanted to count or was capable of, at that moment, counting, and so he stopped looking at the Jenkins’s weird house that wanted him in it. He fell from his haunches onto his back. He lay upon the earth and looked at the moon, and he thought the moon was a place he might like to go someday.

That’s how the Bang Bang Lady found him, lying on his back in the pepper garden and staring at the moon, the stupid old Kraut pistol stuck barrel-first in the dirt. His stump bandages had come off, and the stump was all purple and green like a tornado sky. It was leaking like and it smelled like old tomatoes.

The night was a strange purple, too, and the earth in the garden was brown, and the peppers and the wisteria were green, and she felt as if she were a woman in a painting. Not a famous painting, but a good one done by an old woman who lived alone in a ranch-style house at the bottom of a hill and kept rabbits for pets. Yes, that sort of painting, done by that sort of painter.

The Bang Bang Lady looked at the moon, and the moon put sorrow into her and stirred the sorrow that had already been in her, which she did not like, the sorrow being added to and stirred, but then she did like it. It was correct. Sorrow is what the moon is good for. Sorrow is what the moon is all about.

She said, “Put it in me, moon.”

“Mama?”

She looked from the moon to the reflected moon in Big Daddy’s white eyes.

“It’s Mama Bang Bang, honey.”

Big Daddy still stared at the moon.

“You on your drug, honey?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The Bang Bang Lady took Big Daddy under his arms and tried dragging him, thinking she could take him inside and clean and dress the stump, or maybe get him back to the hospital if he seemed to need that, but she had twisted her ankle falling from Billy Jenkins’s window, and

Big Daddy was a big man, and she couldn’t handle it. She lay instead beside him in the garden, and she held his stump in her hand and went to sleep.

A BRIEF ENCOUNTER WITH GARRISON KEILLOR

“Of the musics you have ever heard,” Keillor asked himself, “which have you found the sweetest to the canyon-deep craters of your ears?”

We were sitting there, lounging by the pool with our retired Greyhound racing dogs and our dirty martinis and our great red buckets of chocolate milk, watching Keillor as he pranced up and down the pool deck, from the bar to his piano under its piano canopy, back to the bar, back to the piano, etc.

“Hmm,” Keillor said, exhaling deeply with the wind-force of a northwesterly gust coming across the sunny prairies of Minnesota, through the recycled-glass-bottle wind chimes of the various small and generic towns to be found there, “I will relate.”

Keillor stumbled through a blues progression on the piano and said, “I like that doo-wop music. I like that sweet, sweet doo-wop sound.”

Keillor quit the piano and let loose a burst of air from his diaphragm that caused no fewer than four and twenty tornados across the Midwest. He continued, “When the geriatrics assemble on the vast blacktop of the theatre parking lot and tinker with the pills in their plastic prescription bottles, sweet is the sound. I like that Chubby Checker doo-wop music. When the Montessori school parents join the geriatrics on the blacktop and open their car doors and close their car doors and open their car doors again, forgetting their sweaters and deciding they will not need their sweaters after all and changing their minds over and again until they’re late for Keillor’s show, sweet is the sound. Sweet is the spoon into sauerkraut and the subsequent dolloping of sauerkraut onto rye. Sweet is the whizz and pop of a bottle rocket through the neighbor’s parlor window and the good-natured chuckling of children in the yard, for Keillor is those children and

Keillor is that neighbor. When Keillor lets flow his generous bladder into porcelain, the resulting melodious clatter is as fine a sound as, if not finer a sound than, that of the Episcopal Boys’

Choir of Minneapolis taking a crack at ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ Above all else, sweet is that doo-wop music. Sweet, like the fermented vegetables of the goodly Minnesota of my youth, for which youth, Minnesota, and fermented vegetables I am deeply and infinitely nostalgic, such that my nostalgia has formed a wormhole consuming the United States entire, as well as large portions of Mexico and Canada, so sweet is that doo-wop sound.”

Keillor produced a piano riff reminiscent of the doo-wop sound, if the doo-wop sound were the surging of the Colorado River through a dynamite-blasted Hoover Dam with Chubby

Checker riding the flood’s crest in the husk of a Steinway baby grand.

“Sweet is that doo-wop sound, and sweet, sweet is that great heaving sigh of the world, turning.”

Then Keillor removed his bathrobe and showed his penis to all of us lounging here by the pool. It, Garrison Keillor’s penis, was the exact size and shape of a piano key. It hung there between his legs, swinging slightly in the wind from his blowing on it. We did not much like seeing it. It disturbed the retired Greyhound racing dogs. Martinis were spilled. Chocolate milk was upset. We asked him to please put it away. He did not exactly put it away. He did not, in fact, put it away at all, as much as he simply disappeared into thin air. None of us have seen or heard from him since. That is fine with us. We had been getting cold, anyway, what with all of his heavy breathing stirring up drafts and such. It is a shame from one perspective, but we suppose he had it coming, didn’t he, showing everyone his piano key that way and disturbing the

Greyhounds.

BELLTOWER WITHOUT BELLS

One morning, some years ago, after a night of cosmic juvenilia with my college friends – and when I say “cosmic juvenilia” I am talking about those heady good times that leave young people of certain proclivities fancying themselves “closer to nature” and “one with the universe” and “experienced” and et cetera, I am talking about those heady good times that make some young people believe the hula-hoop is an interesting phenomenon and they will tell you about it,

I am talking about those heady good times that made my friend Sarah devote herself to Snake

Jesus and to sign her father’s pick-up truck over to snake-handling people in the foothills, it is all very childish, or undergraduate, and maybe it is even passé, but if you are young enough it is appropriate and a heady good time, and you enjoy this elevated game of peekaboo, I am talking about tripping on LSD – well, one morning, after a night of the above, I left my friends to sleep in the Victorian boarding house we lived in, and I walked east down the steep hill of Highland

Avenue toward the old candy factory to get myself some breakfast.

It is important to note, before I go any further, for the sake of clarity regarding the candy factory but also to make an attempt at illustrating a small part of the nature of our town, that this candy factory no longer functioned as a candy factory. It had not functioned as a candy factory for at least seventy years, but it is one of several old buildings in our old town that has maintained the designation associated with its original use. The building has never been more itself, you might say, than when it was a candy factory.

Now, for a number of years the candy factory sat empty by the railroad tracks, like so many of our other old buildings, but sometime in the early eighties, around the time our town hosted its ill-begotten World’s Fair, a new commercial breath was blown into it. Now, during the

time in which this story takes place, the spring of 2007, the candy factory housed a good diner on the ground floor, a used-book store on the second floor, and condos on the seven floors above.

Today, of course, the diner has been replaced by a fancy restaurant that serves uninspired meals to the well-to-do set. The uninspired meals I am talking about are things like mashed potatoes that are pulverized nearly into a broth and added to an equal part of sorghum, and the well-to-do-set swoons, because sorghum is new to them. Or hot chicken, which is not bad in theory, but here it is not hot but mild and called hot because the people who eat at this restaurant, even the ones who like to talk about their love for spicy and hot foods, have bowel conditions that can hardly even handle mild foods, which should disqualify them from affecting to enjoy food at all but apparently doesn’t. They will swoon over mild chicken called hot because they are told hot chicken is hip, and they would like to be hip.

And so, the hypocrite cafeteria is going strong, but the used book store has gone out of business, and so has the art gallery that opened when the book store closed. The second floor of the candy factory is once again vacant. The commercial history of the candy factory is representative of a general pattern in our town. I am of the opinion that vacant buildings should remain vacant. That is the way they belong. They provide homes for rats and the homeless.

In any case, I was walking down Highland Avenue. I had not slept the night before, but I was nonetheless giddy, and not at all tired, and I tread with light foot upon the mossy old buckled concrete of the sidewalk. I felt zippy and grand. I snapped my fingers and whistled the second part of “Dixie” a few times, excluding the first part because the second part, if I begin with the first part, is out of my whistling register, and I prefer to whistle the second part of “Dixie.” It was early spring, and the dogwoods that flanked the road were beginning to bloom in pink and white.

From these trees, through the crisp, cool air, I heard the various songbirds at their singing. I

heard the mocking birds at their mocking. There were also, I remember, the weird vibrations of an electric lawnmower and the odd engine turning over. Behind this all, beneath it really, from the east, through the cool air and the trees and the birdsong and the weird vibrations, came the heavy tolling of church bells.

It was a very pleasant morning.

I was walking through it, not reflecting on anything, simply enjoying the morning and anticipating my breakfast, for I had not eaten since lunch on the previous day, when I came upon the intersection of Highland Avenue and James Agee Street, which is where I crossed paths with

Randy.

No one that I am aware of knew Randy’s family name or where he had come from, but everyone knew him. He was one of our neighborhood’s several human fixtures. It does not escape me that saying it this way might seem without tact, but saying it this way is nonetheless accurate. Any day of the week, in any part of the neighborhood, you were liable to see Randy at some point, collecting cans from the recycling bins and the garbage bins, the dumpsters and the gutters, the bushes and the branches of trees. Wherever cans could be found, Randy found them.

This is how he made what living he made: he sold the cans for scrap. He took the enterprise very seriously. This seriousness was evident in his black, hawk-like eyes and in his furrowed brow, and it was evident when he said things like, “Fuck with my cans, motherfucker, and, motherfucker, I’ll fuck you and your mother ten times with a box-cutter.”

No one wanted to fuck with Randy’s cans.

Randy had a dancer’s build, such that you would, at first glance, think he was malnourished, but if you looked more closely, you would notice the sinews and cords of muscle that clung to his limbs like thick vines to, well, tree limbs. He walked on his toes, and walked

lightly, such that it often appeared that he was prancing through the neighborhood to flute music.

As a result, his calves were the size of bread loaves and as hard as hickory. His quadriceps bulged and buckled like shifting rock, threatening to burst through his short green swimming trunks.

Over the trunks he wore a soiled pink tutu, or the lace frills of one. Under the tutu, but outside of the swimming trunks, he wore an old black fanny pack in which he kept his entire life.

On his torso he wore a pink, ladies’ (I suspect youth-sized) tank top, to which in the winter he added a vinyl vest with down stuffing. I do not know where he kept the down vest in warmer months, but each winter he appeared to be wearing the same one. A mess of thick brown hair grew from his head, and he wore a beard.

The above is to acquaint you with the singular figure that was Randy. He could not be mistaken for any other resident of the neighborhood or of the town, nor could any other resident be mistaken for him. Randy alone was Randy.

When I saw Randy that morning, I was on the west side of James Agee, and he on the east. He was poking around in a garbage bin, allowing refuse to spill into the sidewalk. Several dozen soiled envelopes piled at his feet. Suddenly, or it seemed sudden, there were several dozen more soiled envelopes at his feet.

I waited for an SUV to pass before I approached him. As it happened, Paul Barnes was driving the SUV. Paul was a classmate of mine who I think became a dentist, and who has recently, just in the past year or so, gone to prison for having sex with his German Shepherds.

Well, I waved to him, and he to me. He was a quiet, pleasant fellow. Some people will surprise you if you stay in touch with them for long enough. He went on his way, then, over the ridge into

the morning and into the sequence of events that would lead to his cornholing the family pets. I crossed the street and approached Randy.

“Morning, Randy, would you like to join me for breakfast?”

I had never spoken to Randy before, and I was surprised at myself. Further, I remember feeling embarrassed by the formal tone of my invitation (or was it too informal?). I was uncomfortable and regretted somewhat pulling Randy into my life, but I could not bring myself to walk away. The cosmic juvenilia had had its effect on me, and it had not worn all the way off, and I felt a strong, vague notion of fraternity and a stronger vague notion that I should spread it around. I guess I thought I could help him out by buying him a meal.

Several dozen more soiled envelopes settled at Randy’s feet before he pulled his head from the garbage bin and stared at me staring at him. I could not bring myself or it did not occur to me, as it had not occurred to me to just walk away, to not stare at him.

“I won’t fuck with your cans,” I said.

Randy’s black eyes dilated then, and then they de-dilated, or they did whatever the opposite of dilating is called, as if they, Randy’s eyes, belonged to a robotic turkey vulture.

“Motherfucker, go jump in a lake and get fucked in it.”

He looked back into the garbage bin, and a few dozen more soiled envelopes sank into the pile, and then three more soiled envelopes, and then he removed himself from the garbage bin again.

“Well,” he said, fondling his crotch, “they are only envelopes in this waste. Where you going to eat?”

“Candy factory.”

He scratched his chin and his crotch for a while, in rhythm with his tapping his foot on the pavement.

“Good bacon at the candy factory.”

“Candy factory has good bacon,” I said. It has always been my habit when I do not know what to say to repeat what my interlocutor has said before me.

This is how it came to pass that I was walking east down Highland Avenue in the morning time with Randy, whose cans I nor anyone else wanted to fuck with, listening to the tolling of church bells. The morning held a quality that was not all the way real. The morning was real, obviously, but our proceedings had a virtual element that is difficult to articulate. The world around me was crisp, looked crisp, as if I had not known I was near-sighted and now was wearing glasses for the first time. But I wasn’t near-sighted, and I wasn’t wearing glasses.

At the same time, it was impossible to focus on any one thing. My surroundings had no depth. I was just walking down the buckled concrete of the sidewalk, stepping over and around shattered glass and shredded envelopes and puddles of urine and puddles of dog shit and of human shit and busted condoms and pools of feral cats and pools of spent lighters and peoples’ ears that had been bitten off or otherwise removed and hypodermic needles and pieces of yachts and kitchen sinks and pink wigs, and orange irises grew from the cracks and from the craters in the pavement and from between the garbage, orange bell irises in various stages of being crushed from people stepping too near them. It was disorienting, but the steady deep tolling of church bells, the hunger, the tightening of my stomach all brought me through.

Meanwhile, Randy pranced beside me, a solemn look on his face. His face was caked with a mud formed by dirt and sweat, and it glistened. His brow was furrowed such that it formed a geography of canyons and, with the sweat, rivers. He had a deeply religious

appearance, as if poverty were a choice he had made and not an injustice done to him. He muttered underneath his breath as if he were praying. The prayer, if that’s what it was, was irreverent for its language, what language I could hear of it, but the prayer, if, again, it was a prayer, seemed most reverent in its tone. This was a timeless man with a timeless face. He could just as easily have been John the Baptist as he could have been Jimmy Buffett.

As we came out from under a dripping oak tree, dripping with water because a lawn sprinkler was making it wet, I could make out the silhouette of the candy factory against the backdrop of the sunrise and the low skyline beyond the railroad tracks. I noticed I was very hungry, and my stomach began to growl.

“What’s that fucking noise?” said Randy.

“Those are bells.”

“No, not the bells, which, they aren’t bells in the first place.”

“Maybe you mean my stomach growling.”

“Stomach! No, it’s like someone, like, screaming. Like if they were underwater.”

“All I hear is the bells, man.”

“I told you they aren’t bells.” Then Randy pointed south, where, down the hill, across the train tracks and across Cumberland Avenue, and up the side of a ridge, sat the Methodist church.

“That tower, motherfucker.”

“That’s a bell tower.”

“The shit is a bell tower without bells. The shit is coming from a loudspeaker. The shit is coming from a loudspeaker in a bell tower without bells. The shit is automated, motherfucker, digitized. I don’t know how you can hear it over the screaming.”

Here, I opened the door to the candy factory for Randy, for we had arrived there, and he looked at me in my eyes with a dark and chilling expression, and his pupils did that thing again.

He went in, and I went in, and we sat at a booth by the front window, facing each other.

“Reapeat after me: the shit is a bell tower without bells, motherfucker.”

“Fuck. Ok, man.”

“Repeat.”

“The shit is a fucking bell tower without bells.”

“I like when you repeat for me, boy.”

The other patrons stared at us, but not as if the thing, our being there at the diner, Randy the homeless can collector and I the wet-nosed college dude, both of us saying “fuck” and “shit” on a Sunday morning, was going to result in expulsion. The table cloth was in the old wax-cloth style and was printed with a red and white picnic pattern. It reminded me of the picnics my family had enjoyed in the mountains when I was a child.

Even then I thought this reverie was odd. It was and still is odd because my family had never used the red and white cloths, ever. We had used a tattered yellow quilt an ancestor on my mother’s side had made. I had the feeling, back there at the candy factory with Randy, and I get the feeling sometimes now, of being plugged into something. I felt as if I were an electrical appliance not unrelated to, say, a toaster, or a boom box, or a loudspeaker in a bell tower playing a recording of bells tolling somewhere and sometime else.

Our coffee came, and our eggs, and our bacon, one after the other. Our waitress smiled all the time. Things were happening, and I was very tired all of a sudden. As I chewed, I stared at the back of someone’s head. The person was sitting on the opposite side of Randy’s bench. The head was situated such that it seemed to have no body to go with it. It was a normal head, and

then it just stopped. The body the head belonged to was moving it, the head, in such a way – I guess the woman was chewing and talking but I think she must have also had hemorrhoids or something – that made it seem as if someone had it, the head, severed and on the end of a pole, and it was affixed only loosely to the end of the pole, and the person holding the pole was hoisting it and shaking it as if he were parading with it or doing some taunting of enemy troops with it.

“Look at me when I talk to you, motherfucker.”

Randy had been talking. I looked at him.

Randy said, “Buddy Lars caught damn on fire last night.”

“Who did what?”

“Caught on fire, man. Lars.”

“On fire.”

“Who is Lars?”

“Yes, motherfucker, on fire. No surprise, man. Happens all the time down here. He just burned up under, like, Henly Street Bridge. Lars was always going to burn up.” Randy’s mouth was full of hash browns. “Nothing I nor nobody else could have done about it. God willed it, the motherfucker.”

“The motherfucker.”

“He’s in Hell now. They are in Hell. Lars and God and everybody.”

“Everybody.”

Randy took some egg upon his fork and pointed it at me and toward the ceiling and toward the window, just in every which direction did he point the fork with the egg on it, as if he were conducting a choir into all-out bewilderment.

“Listen, motherfucker. I am going to Hell, and so are you and your mother, motherfucker.

You aren’t special, your mother ain’t special, and neither is nobody else nor their mothers.”

“Um, their mothers.”

“Repeat after me, motherfucker. Nobody is not going to Hell, motherfucker.”

“Um.”

“Repeat.”

“Nobody is not going to hell.”

“Motherfucker.”

“Right.”

I was pretty worn out by then, and I was caught in reverie and thinking about picnics and bell towers without bells, and also those toothpicks with colorful plastic fronds at their ends and how wasteful they are. Why not just have toothpicks dyed various colors with both ends available for picking teeth? Was I already in Hell? I wanted to go home. When the check came I took it and made to go to the register, but Randy would not let me. He snatched the ticket from my hand.

I told him breakfast was on me.

“The Hell it is.”

I told him, no, I had it.

“You think this is a charity, you son of a bitch? What did I just finish saying? You aren’t special. You aren’t helping anybody do anything. Everything that was going to happen is going to happen, motherfucker. Go jump in a lake and get fucked in it. That is going to happen. You are going to get fucked in a lake. In your ass. Don’t pray for a reach-around, because a reach- around is not in your stars, little mister money bags monkey faggot.”

Randy pulled a thick wad of cash from his fanny pack then. There was probably around a thousand dollars in the wad. It was a big thick wad. He threw some bills on the table and left the building.

I was alone then, and the diner’s other patrons stared at me for a moment. Then they lost interest, I guess, and they went back to their meals. I did some accounting and found that after

Randy’s contribution, we were still about three dollars short. I paid the rest, and I left an appropriate tip. Then I walked home and went to sleep.

I hadn’t thought the bell tower without bells would bother me – why would it? – but it did. Some days later, not the next day and not the next week but some day in between, maybe it was Wednesday, I woke and realized I had been having the same dream every night, in which dream I was following Randy through large cavernous homes that became other large cavernous homes as I progressed through them. There were maids and mistresses and large-breasted

Bavarian women in revealing lederhosen. There were doormen and dinners and drinks and dogs.

Never the same drinks, never the same dogs, everything always new and strange. The homes gradually turned from the Victorian style of the house I lived in to deep-forest lodges, which is where the Bavarians entered the picture. Thousands of caverns in these homes, and suddenly the caverns were properly caverns of an enormous cave, and in this cave, bells tolled ceaselessly and deafeningly, and you could also hear the splintering of wooden beams, as if the bells the beams held were swinging too wildly. But no bells could be located for to stop their swinging. In this dream Randy was dropping a trail of soiled envelopes and bitching about there being no cans anywhere in the entire dream.

That Wednesday evening, I went to church and broke into the bell tower. It’s easier to break into a church’s bell tower than you might think. Once you are in the church, the janitors don’t care about you, as long as you don’t look like a vandal or someone who otherwise might make a mess, and the clergy are happy enough that someone new and under the age of 60 is there that they just smile and don’t bother you lest they turn you off from Jesus by being overeager.

If you go on a Wednesday night, it is easier still. On Wednesdays, the church is bustling with the various mid-week prayer meetings, and when everyone is down in the parish hall for their potluck dinner, you can slip right into the sanctuary and behind the pipes of the organ which stand on one side of the alter in the faint reds and purples coming through the stained-glass windows from the sunset. No one is in the sanctuary to hear your feet click against the brown and gray stones of the floor on up the steps. No one is there to hear you fall when you trip over a pile of soiled envelopes. You get up and you climb slip right up the wrought-iron spiral staircase, which is painted black but whose paint is chipping and there is exposed iron and red rust, that goes up into the ceiling toward great Heaven itself.

It is easy to step into the little room above and behind the organ pipes, which is carpeted with blue, shoddy carpeting and does not have flooring of stone or wood as you might have expected, which room is an antechamber to both the bell tower and the catwalk you go on through the organ pipes to tune them if you’re the organ tuner. In the antechamber it is easy to find the key that is labeled “bell tower” hanging next to the key that is labelled “pipes.” You will think, or rather I thought, “This seems too easy. I mean, it shouldn’t be this easy. This has got to be an insurance liability or something.”

But it is that easy.

I continued to climb the spiral staircase until I reached a landing where a heavy wooden door stood with a piece of paper nailed to it that read, “Bells.” When I stepped through the door,

I mistook the large room at first for a yoga studio. Then, I saw the bells. They were enormous, three of them, roughly the size of Subaru Foresters. Seven smaller bells up high, the size of city- issued recycling bins. I don’t know how I ever missed them.

I walked among the bells, and a struck them with my knuckles, as if I were knocking on a door, and they emitted not much noise. It was a little disappointing. I should have brought a mallet, but how was I to know?

I went to an eave to watch what was left of the sunset, and I hit upon something with my toe. It was a soiled envelope. Where were all of these soiled envelopes coming from, I wondered.

I opened the envelope, and I found a sheet of paper inside, but it came apart as I withdrew it. It was just as soiled as the envelope, and for all I could tell it had nothing written on it. It smelled of fish spray.

I tossed the envelope and the paper through the eave, and I watched them sail separately through the spring air toward the street. As I watched the soiled paper and the soiled envelope, a pink figure below caught my eye. It was Randy, prancing. He pranced across the cracked and mossy pavement on the opposite side of the street, by a commercial development project. He had a bag that looked full of cans. The soiled envelope sailed finally into his face, and he went down.

He went down, I imagine, more because of surprise than because of the brute impact the soiled envelope made against his face. Cans spilled all over the road. He hoisted himself up and looked around, and I ducked back into the bell tower away from the eave so that he would not see me.

I walked home and went to sleep. I slept well knowing there were bells in the bell tower.

I was just beginning to appreciate, as I do very much these days, things being precisely as they seem.

SECOND HONEYMOON

“Let’s drive down to the panhandle and contribute to the rape of the landscape that is being performed there,” said my wife.

I’d been staring at a puff of cat fur on the breakfast table. I blew at it and said, “Okay. It will be our second honeymoon.”

We loaded the hatchback with towels and toiletries, binoculars and fishing tackle, swimwear and fuzzy zebra-print handcuffs, and we edged onto Interstate 75.

The air grew salty, and we stopped for complimentary orange juice at the Florida border.

We wrote our names in a guest book no one will ever look at except maybe a marketing intern or a temp or a raccoon rooting through a dumpster somewhere.

“It’s our second honeymoon,” we told the juice attendant.

“It’s our second honeymoon,” we told the juice security guard.

Before we saw clapping oil-black waves, enormous bleached condominium towers engulfed us in shadows shaped like penises. We parked the car and climbed seven stories to our air-conditioned love quarters.

The sun purred upon the balcony as might a massive, overheated jungle cat, and my wife said, “Let’s go down and join the orgy.” I’d been looking at a large, rubber sand-dredging pipe that was stretched along the beach pumping sand against the pull of waves to where the sand had once been. The idea, I think, was to interrupt the course of geology and not let the beach get too far away from where good money was being made.

I finished my daiquiri, and I said, “Okay. It’s our second honeymoon after all.”

Well, no sooner did we go down there than I lost my bride in that shimmering mass of oiled human flesh and the sand and the oil-dark waves. There were so many men and so many women. Skin just everywhere: arm, leg, buttock, vagina, asshole, penis.

I walked along the white beach until the crowd thinned out. I walked past the cordoned- off burial sites of sea turtle eggs, away from the long shadows of the condo cluster, until I spotted balloon after latex balloon rising against the coppery sunset from the end of a pier.

I walked along the pier and got splinters all in my feet. I walked past the nude fat and meat of men and their sunglasses and their fishing poles and their reeking fish buckets and said to the boy at the end of the pier, “Do you realize we’re on the verge of a helium shortage, son?”

The boy said, “Don’t son me, you great fag.”

Then I joined the boy in his balloon releasing. Just one after another through the evening time.

When we ran out of helium it was dark, and three flaccid balloons were left over, red, yellow, and baby blue.

The boy said, “So long, you old queer creep,” and he leapt from the pier into the oblivion of the black water.

“What on God’s green?” I said, for there were rumored to be sharks in those shallows.

The boy did not surface that I could see.

I wished I had the juice security guard to lead me home and to say something homespun- sounding. But I found myself alone on the pier with a motion-activated streetlamp, several dead white perch, and a small bird that was jumping around tangled in fishing line.

In the dark morning hours, I followed the dredging pipe back to the condo, high and white against the sky. I thought I saw my wife laying eggs in the parking lot, but it was just a few raccoons struggling in a trashcan.

On the other side of the parking lot, a man engaged a jackhammer, and he began tearing up the pavement with it. Daylight suggested itself from behind the towers of the condominium complex. I was on my second honeymoon.

PICKETT MOON AND THE MYSTERY OF ANTS

Pickett Moon was fatty. He was not a fatty. He was not fat. Rather, he was somewhat greasy, and somewhat blubbery, and he was bloated most of the time. He had a baby face, and his breath smelled, in spite of his best efforts, of stool. He was half Korean and half redneck. He had grown up in La Grange, Georgia, where his father was an engineer at the Kia plant and his mother baked biscuits at a fast-food restaurant. On his mother’s side, he was supposed to have descended from General George Pickett of the Confederacy, who, along with Generals

Longstreet, Pettigrew, Wilcox, and Trimble, had been responsible for the infamous and disastrous infantry assault known as “Pickett’s Charge” during the Battle of Gettysburg, leading over 6,000 men to their deaths in the course of an hour. Pickett Moon neither knew nor cared whether this detail of his ancestry was accurate. He had forgotten it altogether, and to his mother’s vexation, he could not have told you who General George Pickett even was.

In addition to his other characteristics, Pickett Moon was lonesome, although he was not quite aware that he was lonesome. That is, he had not articulated what he felt as lonesomeness.

He was only aware of a feeling that his vital organs were made of a thick black putty which stretched and pulled him toward a greater depth of spirit each day. He was aware, too, that he wanted companionship, but he had never been good with women. He had never been good with men, for that matter. He was no good with anyone but his mother, and she was busy baking biscuits in La Grange. He was in Tennessee now. His mother followed, or tried to follow the latest trends in men’s fashion, and from time to time she sent him outlet-store clothing that she thought would help him to impress women, or at least make a few friends. She called them “hip

packages.” These packages also contained electronic toothbrushes and the latest high-strength toothpastes and antiseptic mouth washes.

But Moon’s mother’s packages didn’t do much good. He often forgot to open them, or he lost their contents, or accidentally ruined them. On occasion, he had failed to notice the packages had been left at his doorstep, and the packages had been stolen after several days. Further, Moon was hard to talk to, and he had a tendency to make a mess of his appearance – he was, in a general sense, oblivious. But obliviousness did not keep him from excelling in the academic theater. He was a graduate student in biochemical engineering, and presently he was on his way to the lab, cycling up “The Hill,” which is a steep hill on the campus of the University of

Tennessee in Knoxville. He wore green chinos, tan boat shoes that had gone brown from exposure to rainwater, and a blue, V-neck t-shirt which featured on its front a large grease stain from the lasagna he had had for lunch. The back tire of his bicycle was flat.

Halfway up “The Hill,” Moon dismounted his Raleigh, having finally detected his flat tire. He kneeled and removed the bent nail that protruded from it. As he did so, he noticed what seemed an endless column of ants moving across the sidewalk. He had crushed maybe a dozen of them with his bicycle, and these crushed ants were being carried away by the advance of the endless column. Moon, being as he was a young man of scientific curiosity, became transfixed, such that he forgot where he’d been going in the first place, before the flat tire, and he forgot the tire, too, and he only wanted to watch these ants crossing the sidewalk from the street into the wilderness of pine needles and fallen yellow-brown leaves.

Where were the ants from? Where were they going? How did they know how to get there? He asked these questions of the ants, but they did not answer him. They only kept flowing, like horse shampoo, in rivulets across the broken earth.

Other students were staring at Moon. He and his Raleigh were blocking the entire sidewalk, and to pass, pedestrians had to walk into the street, where buses were hurtling up and down the blind curve of the incline. Several people directed expletives at Moon, but he did not notice them. He began to follow the ants, leaving the Raleigh behind, into the woods, down a mossy ravine, across a mossy footbridge which spanned a wet-weather stream, which was also mossy, and up out of the mossy ravine on the other side.

Before he knew it, Pickett Moon had followed the ants across the railroad tracks, through a parking lot, up another hill, and into the courtyard of a church. The ants were swarming a dead crow in an azalea bush on the perimeter of the courtyard. Other crows danced around the azalea bush. The crows seemed to be taking stock of their dead friend, trying to glean sense from his passing, sense that might help them better live their own lives. A clergyman, who was for some reason wearing his cassock, was brandishing a damp mop at them.

On the other side of the courtyard, nearer the church itself, cake was being served on blue card tables to a group of sorority women wearing white sundresses, or white muumuus, and wide-brimmed beaver-felt hats. There was a hand-painted sign that read Welcome to Church

Street, Sisters of Chi Omega! The sign was red with yellow writing, and it matched the cake. The cake and the women eating it seemed to Moon to produce a tender, welcoming light such as he had never known before. He felt something firm budding in his chinos. He breathed heavily his stool-smelling breath and approached the tender light and the cake and the girls.

Where had he been all of this time, he wondered. Where had he been going? And why had it not been here?

Where Moon had been going before he saw the ants was the Dougherty Building, where his lab was located in the basement. For months, he’d been isolating proteins in e coli samples,

and his team was making great progress in determining that e coli was not a more efficient fuel source than ethanol, and that it, e coli, would not, just as they had supposed it would not, “make a splash” in the energy industry.

Moon had taken the project very seriously, but now, among the tender light of the sorority women, and the cake, and the Methodist clergy with their cassocks and their mops in the church courtyard, he could not imagine going back to the lab and spending long hours with his shoulders hunched, staring through a microscope at vague shapes. He could not imagine taking the time to separate those vague shapes and to isolate them and to monitor them, all to prove something which was already evident about e coli, or energy, or protein, or whatever. He had transcended e coli. He was ready for something else. He was ready for something with a little soul in it, a little gumption, and a little get-up-and-go.

It struck him that perhaps all of his life he had been going here. Perhaps a force beyond him had brought him to the blue card tables and the cake and the girls. Providence. He had read about it in an American Literature survey course. The Will of God. Perhaps e coli was merely an agent of Providence, an agent put on the earth to lead him whither God would have him go.

Perhaps it was Providence which had led him from his home in La Grange, Georgia, to Atlanta for college, and now to Tennessee and the company of women. Perhaps the final agent of

Providence had been those ants, devouring that dead crow.

Women had shunned Pickett Moon all his life, some on account of his being half Korean, some on account of his being a redneck, some on account of his being an atheist, and some on account of his being just plain weird, but now, as soon as he had approached the blue card tables, they were fawning over him and touching him all over his fatty torso. They giggled at him. They doubled over with delight. They haw-hawed. One of the women was trying to clean the lasagna

stain from his shirt. She was stabbing him in the ribs with what she called a “bleach pen,” and when he howled with pain, she had him take his shirt off so she could get the shirt clean and not hurt him.

Pickett Moon could not believe it. Now he was shirtless among this cluster of beautiful women. They studied him. They touched him. He was their subject, and it made him feel bubbly inside. He could not help himself from bubbling. He bubbled. He had been raised a fervent atheist, and he had never questioned his nonbelief, but if this was religion, then religion was what he wanted.

Presently a man with a bad goiter on his neck was trying to talk to him. This interrupted the fawning. Moon did not appreciate that. The girls had scattered when the man came near. The man introduced himself as Reverend K. Alfred Beetle. Reverend Beetle was the man who had been swinging at crows with the mop. He was sweating a little, and he was out of breath, and his goiter throbbed.

“Have you ever heard of anxiety, Mr. Moon?”

“Anxiety?”

“Yeah, son, you seem a little anxious, nervous, and et cetera.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I’d be a little anxious, too, if these pretty ladies had taken my shirt.”

The comment struck Moon as a little accusatory. He gathered what he could of his torso in his one hand, and in his other hand he tried to the bulge in his chinos.

The reverend said, “Tell me, son, what do you do for a living?”

“Um. I used to look at e coli, but now I am following ants.” He pointed at the azalea bush with the dead crow in it.

“And you follow ants for a living?”

The reverend seemed ready to accept any answer, as if he just wanted to get on with the program and enter the next phase of his pitch.

“I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t a living in it. Maybe I mean it is how I am living.”

“Very good, very good. Do you know what I follow for a living, Mr. …”

“What?”

“Mr. …”

“Mr. what?”

“What’s your name, son?”

“Pickett Moon.”

“Do you know what I follow for a living, Mr. Moon? Or rather who I follow?”

“No.”

“I follow a man, and that man has been followed by everyone from Constantine to

Napoleon Bonaparte to John Coltrane. We’ve even converted some of you Chinese.”

“I’m not Chinese. I’m half Korean.”

“This man’s name is Jesus Christ of Nazareth, and he wants to be your friend.”

Moon looked at the throbbing goiter on Beetle’s neck and decided that he was perhaps not ready for religion after all. He excused himself from the reverend to get more cake, and he went back to enjoying the exaggerated fawning, which he did not realize was exaggerated, he only knew it was fawning, of the women in the white sundresses and the white muumuus and the wide-brimmed beaver-felt hats.

“He’s so cute,” they said, pinching his flabby arms and putting his damp, wrinkled t-shirt back over his head, giggling as he squirmed back into it, touching him pretty much everywhere.

This all upset his erection further and caused it to rub the inside of his chinos in a most satisfying way.

A few hours later, after night had fallen, Moon was riding in the passenger seat of a pleasant-smelling Lexus, whose driver was a pleasant-smelling young Chi Omega sister named

Maggie. The idea had been that Maggie would drive Moon to his bicycle, but they could not find it. Either Moon had forgotten where he had left it, or someone had stolen it. But he did not care.

He was in a girl’s car, and now that girl was driving him home. He had never been in a car driven by a woman who was not his mother. Raleigh be damned, he was going to enjoy this.

Maggie pulled out a pouch of Big League Chew bubble gum and offered him a pinch.

“Shit, take a whole wad,” she said.

“No thanks,” Moon said. “I don’t usually chew gum.”

“Please take some. You’re cute, but your breath smells like cat turds, babe.”

“Um.”

Moon considered that in her wide-brimmed hat Maggie looked a little like the American poet Walt Whitman, whose poetry he had read in that same American Literature survey course that had had him read about Providence, and whose poetry and general approach to being Moon liked quite a lot, and in the spirit of Walt Whitman he shoved a wad of gum in his mouth.

“Thank you,” he said.

“No, thank you.”

They rode in silence for a time down Highland Avenue, beneath the yellow moon and the black branches of the trees. A song Moon liked rather a lot came on the radio. It was Jackie

Wilson’s “Your Love Keeps Taking Me Higher.” When Moon took Maggie’s hand she laughed

at him, loudly, but she did not remove her hand from his until she pulled up to his apartment. She turned off the engine then, but she kept the music playing, and she unzipped his chinos.

“You’ve been trying to keep this little boy down all afternoon, huh?”

Moon’s faculty of speech failed him.

Maggie spat into her hand and began tugging at him. She was smooth and tender at first.

Then she began to tug with vigor. She blew large bubbles with her Big League Chew, and she popped the bubbles loudly. She stared at his member, and she sometimes looked up at Moon’s face to gauge his reaction. She was concentrating. She was working. She was, Moon thought, a machine.

Moon gripped his armrests and stared from behind the windshield into the blue and black night. His mind staggered. The black-blueness beyond the car became a landscape of cake. A multitude of women who looked like Walt Whitman, who were more correctly somewhere between Chi Omega and Walt Whitman, line-danced arm-in-arm across the cake. Among the women, crows pranced. Ants marched endlessly across the red and yellow earth, carrying the dead upon their backs. The living and the dead bled the same black blood, and the blood flooded his thoughts.

As suddenly as she had begun, Maggie sat up, pinched his cheek, and said, “Okay, babe.

You’re good to go.”

She was right. He was good to go.

Moon climbed out of the Lexus. He had forgotten to zip up his chinos. They fell to his knees, and he fell over them into the pavement. He rolled onto his back and wrangled the chinos back up to his hips as Maggie backed into the street. He waved goodbye to her from the ground, and then she was gone.

. . .

Pickett Moon would not hear from Maggie or the other Chi Omegas again. He would not know it, but the other girls would scold Maggie for having taken the whole Pickett Moon thing too far. Maggie was always taking things too far, as if there were something, like, inherently wrong with her brain chemistry. But the scolding was facetious. They loved her for her taking things too far. It was part of her charm. Further, someone had to fill that particular station in the social matrix, and they were glad it was Maggie and not them.

But Maggie did not quite understand that they loved her, and their scolding made her unhappy. She couldn’t help her behavior. It was as if someone else were making her do the things she did. She had not, for instance, set out to service Pickett Moon in her Lexus. It was something she had simply found herself doing. She did not, in a general sense, want to do any of the things she did. Likewise, she didn’t want to say the things she said. She did not want to occupy her particular station in the social matrix. She had no idea how she had gotten there, but she was there all right, and there was no getting out of it. She was stuck.

Meanwhile, Moon’s was chiefly the problem of wanting and needing more of what he had gotten in the Lexus. He had left his known planet and entered a new, wide orbit from which he was ill-prepared to reenter the atmosphere. He would phone home to La Grange, Georgia, but he would not be able to breach any subject beyond e coli, a subject about which he had less and less to say.

Days went by, and then weeks went by. Everywhere he went he saw ants, marching. He followed them to many distant dead animals, but he found nothing. He chewed bubble gum. He checked out Leaves of Grass from the library, and with a pencil he carefully drew fuller lips on

the portrait of Walt Whitman in the back, so that Whitman, with his supple lips and his wide- brimmed hat, looked almost exactly like Maggie, and this was his pornography for a time.

Before long, however, the doctored Walt Whitman portrait proved insufficient, and so he bought a pair of night-vision goggles, and he climbed a magnolia tree behind the Chi Omega sorority house. He watched the sisters, but there was nothing in the realm of fantasy to see. They were regular people, eating food and watching television. He couldn’t make out which one of them was Maggie. From a distance, even through the night-vision goggles, they all looked the same. What was he doing there in the first place, he wondered. What did he hope to gain? Was this really the best way to achieve an audience with a woman?

He decided that no, there were better ways to gain a woman’s attentions. He threw away his night-vision goggles and began attending Sunday services at the Methodist church, where he had first encountered Maggie. He hoped he would run into her there, perhaps before the service, or after the service, when everyone in the sanctuary exchanged hugs, handshakes, and other greetings. He attended the Sunday school class intended specifically for college students, in case she might show up there, but she never did.

After six weeks of going to the church, he had not seen Maggie a single time. But he enjoyed the community the church offered. Maybe the congregation did not fawn over Pickett

Moon to quite the extent that the Chi Omega sisters had, but they were very civil toward him.

They were warm, and they treated him well for a sustained period of time. He liked it. Further, there was often something called a “Sunday potluck,” which was free lunch, and so Pickett

Moon continued his attendance.

For several months, he stood when the congregation stood, he bowed his head when the congregation bowed their heads, and he prayed when the congregation prayed, until finally, one

Sunday, Pickett Moon realized that he believed in the power of his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ of Nazareth to save his soul. It amazed him how millions of people flocked around this one dead gentleman every week to learn how better to live their lives. He followed them into the sanctuary and did as they did. It made him happy. The church, in a broad sense, made him happy. He even grew to appreciate Reverend K. Alfred Beetle’s neck goiter. When the reverend was up there in the pulpit and his goiter began to throb, Moon knew he was in for an impassioned sermon. He braced himself for the coming inspiration. To that end, worship felt not entirely unlike what

Maggie had done to him in her Lexus. If this was religion, feeling good, unlonesome, full, and satisfied, then religion was what Moon wanted.

Soon, Pickett Moon was baptized and introduced to a kindly middle-aged couple, Bob and Nancy Wilson, who served as his spiritual mentors. With Bob and Nancy’s guidance, Moon quit his graduate program to pursue a degree in pharmacology, married a nice, meek blonde from

Ohio who enjoyed foreplay, and lived for the rest of his life in the presence of the Lord.

A TENDERNESS AT THE WHARF

Arthur would look after Miss Crabtree when Miss Crabtree retired from the Metro, as fate dictated, but for now he would whore around as he pleased. To hell with fate until fate came knocking. That is the way Arthur considered the matter.

Arthur lived with Miss Crabtree in an old blue and maroon Victorian house. The house was in a prominent location in a neighborhood which had at one time been prominent in the city.

But now the city itself was shabby, and the neighborhood was shabbier than the city was in aggregate, and most of the houses in the neighborhood had long ago been converted from family homes into boarding houses. Miss Crabtree’s house was an exception. Arthur was her only boarder, and he was not required to pay rent. He was really more like the groundskeeper than he was a boarder.

He had lived in the house since he was seven years old, when child services, because his parents had inflicted several unprintable fears and revulsions upon him, had given him over to his great aunt, Miss Crabtree. For ten years he had taken care of the lawn, the garden, and the old, mossy dogwood trees whose long, nearly serpentine branches gleamed in the sunlight after a springtime rain shower, as if they were carpeted in green gold. It was this very sight that kept

Arthur from sometimes wanting to skip out on Miss Crabtree altogether. It was the most beautiful scene he had seen in his life, and it lifted the neighborhood out of its shabbiness, if only once in a while, for half an hour. The truth was that Arthur wouldn’t leave Miss Crabtree even if he wanted to. She was the only person he had known who had treated him well. She had given him quite a lot. Food, board, the beauty of the grounds. Further, her home was the only place he knew.

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But now it was autumn, and he was 17. He had begun to feel trapped at Miss Crabtree’s house, as if he were her prisoner, which sentiment hurt him in having it, because she was so kind, and because she had, in a sense, saved him. To counteract his feeling of being trapped, he had begun exploring the city at night and whoring. He had bought a pair of fucking boots especially for this purpose, whoring. He kept the fucking boots in the large, nearly empty bureau drawer where he put his special things. He had also moved into the carriage house behind the main building, in an attempt to establish an illusion of freedom. The move had made it possible for him leave the house at night without disturbing Miss Crabtree.

The whoring gave Arthur an even more intense rush than the gleaming of the dogwoods did. It was tactile. So he had two things going for him: the cherished visual memory of dogwoods glimmering in the rain, and the tactile sensations that came with whoring.

Unfortunately, Miss Crabtree was getting older, and it looked as if she would be leaving her job at the Metro soon. She had been taking tickets at the gate for thirty years. She had never needed the job, for her mother had been some order of Russian princess, and had been wealthy, and so

Miss Crabtree was some order of Russian princess, and was wealthy, but she claimed working at the Metro kept her mind sharp. That effect was evidently beginning to wear off. It seemed her mind was making a mess of things at the Metro.

Arthur knew that when Miss Crabtree stopped working, his responsibilities would switch from keeping the grounds to keeping Miss Crabtree. He would have to move back into the main building and be available to her. The garden and the lawn and the fragile old dogwoods would go to seed and, who knew, perhaps they would die, rot, return to the earth, and not gleam anymore.

And so, Arthur, watching the dreary autumn rain from the sill of his upstairs carriage-house window, watching the rain as it painted the tree branches a dull leaden color, decided he would

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look after Miss Crabtree when Miss Crabtree retired from the Metro, as fate surely had dictated, but for now, while he still could, he would whore around as he pleased. To hell with fate until fate came knocking. And it looked as though fate was on the highway coming over.

That night, Arthur strapped on his fucking boots and went out into the wet streets of the city, and he headed for the wharf, where he had always done his finest whoring. He came to a labyrinth of vividly colored shipping containers stacked three high. The shipping containers were wet, and the spotlights that lit the wharf made them gleam against the black of the night. Arthur strutted in his fucking boots among the stacks of gleaming shipping containers until a deep voice beckoned to him.

“You in the fucking boots, come to the fat fuck.”

Arthur followed the echoes of the beckoning into some shadows where the shipping containers did not gleam, to a rusted orange shipping container whose end was open. Inside, a gruesomely obese bald man was eating cheeseburgers from a greasy paper sack, lounging in a

Hover-Round scooter, warming himself by an oil drum in which a small fire burned. The man breathed through tubes from an oxygen tank and smelled strongly of white vinegar. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses and a long, loose-fitting robe of orange. It was the sort of robe that

Buddhist monks wear. Arthur had seen pictures of them in Miss Crabtree’s old National

Geographics magazines. He thought, that right there is at least 700 pounds of human meat.

Those scooter tires are wont to explode.

Then the fat man said to him, “You in the fucking boots, what is your name?”

“Arthur.”

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“What a beautiful name. Arthur, I am too substantial to reach my own toenails, and they are bad in need of trimming. How much would you charge me for a toenail trim, Arthur?”

“Forty dollars.”

“I’m good for it. I’m good for that and much more. The scissors are in my satchel, on the back of my scooter.”

Arthur took the scissors, which were large and solid gold, knelt before the fat man, removed the black sandals, and massaged the feet. The feet were malformed. Bones jutted in every direction, as if they had been shattered at some time in the past, but the man’s toenails were thick and long and beautiful, like elephants’ tusks. Arthur stroked and fingered the toenails for a long time, because he wanted to. Then he got to work.

He clipped the toes on the left foot first, slowly, taking his time, and then he began clipping the toes on the right foot. When finally Arthur came to the last toe, the big toe of the right foot, the nail was so thick that he had a hard time cutting it. He struggled against the nail, and he lost his focus, and he cut the nail too short, and the fat man began to bleed from his toe.

“Do you have any, um, sanitary wipes?”

“You don’t need them,” said the fat man.

“What?”

“Suck the toe. It is a beautiful toe, is it not? And the blood. The blood is the blood of life.”

Arthur nearly protested. He thought, “What the ever-loving shit is going on here?” But the longer he looked at the toe, the more he realized the fat man was right. It was beautiful, the red of the blood against the white of the ivory nails and the white of the skin of the fat man’s

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malformed feet, and he began sucking the fat man’s toe, slowly at first, and then with great vigor.

He thought, perhaps I am in love with this toe. I have never known love. I have only ever known fear, revulsion, and subsequently an appreciation for the absence of fear and revulsion, and I have known gratitude in the extreme, but not love. I do not love Miss Crabtree. I am only devoted to her. I have also learned to appreciate beautiful things. That is my favorite thing to do,

I like to aestheticize my surroundings. But what I feel now is different and new. It is something like what I have read complete and total freedom is like, or, say, heaven. It must be love. Perhaps

I will take this toe home and keep it in the large, nearly empty bureau drawer where I keep my special things, and soon, when Miss Crabtree retires from the Metro and I am bound to look after her all day and all night and I can no longer whore as I please, because fate has dictated that this will be so, and I will be subject to her every beckoning, and she will need me as for years I have needed her, and when, perhaps, the dogwoods will be dead from neglect and the grounds are as shabby as the rest of the shabby neighborhood and the shabby city and this whole shabby life I am living in this shabby world, at least there will be this love and this fat man’s toe to suck on.

At least perhaps there will be those things.

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THE REDEMPTION OF CHARLIE GORDON STOUT (NOVEL EXCERPT)

Charlie Gordon Stout, known most commonly as El Gordo, but known also as

Bloodstream, Ender of Bloodstreams, The Fat Devastation, and Big Queer Mr. Death Hisself, sat alone in his secret and perfect agony. He was cross-legged in the bathtub, weeping, the brown water sloshing against the hairy corpulence of his torso. He had not wanted to become a villain, but he had become one. In his home of Gatlinburg, he was the most bad and the nastiest hit man in all of East Tennessee. If not for the ultimate savagery of Memphis in the west, the dreadful beastlidome of Nashville in the middle part of the state, and the high bloodsomeness of

Chattanooga to the south, he’d have had no rival for badness in the state. Even the Klan feared and loathed his villainy. The fearsome and loathsome villainy he regarded as the fault of his mother.

The mother of El Gordo smoked and used bad language and had been a lady pimp in town. She had preferred lady pimp to madam. She could not abide madam. She would not tolerate it. She refused madam the way some children refuse vegetables. Violently, with vehemence. She had raised El Gordo right up through the Civil War in the big woods in her big wooden brothel with the tobacco fumes and the booze fumes and the cursing girls.

“Gordito,” she’d say, “say good morning to the guls.” And the whores would all line up to pinch his cheek, their breasts bouncing in the morning light. At night it was the same. “Say good night to the guls.” And for long hours, as the house creaked and rattled and moaned in the mountain night, he’d lie awake, the taut bed sheets rubbing against his member until he could no longer hold himself in.

The young El Gordo could not believe his mother’s treachery, turning against her own sex the way she had, for a profit. He was appalled at the beatings and paddlings, the briberies and

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extortions, the broad deceits and the lies she told the girls. The terrible pornography of her enterprise dismayed him. At the age of 13, when his mother was hanged by the Union for espionage, he vowed celibacy. Now, beyond 60, he had kept his vow. The whole town of

Gatlinburg thought him queer, but they were wrong. He was merely adamant. He didn’t even think of women when he was alone with himself. He feared it would set a fire in his loins that would only go out once he had known a woman carnally. And so, when Gordo was alone with himself, he had come into the habit of thinking of his horse, a hermaphrodite palomino named

Hal. Lately, however, Madeline “Wunderhorn” Agasse, his new friend, would creep into his thoughts. He had not been able to masturbate since the day he met her. It had been a month, and he was in a state of torment.

Presently, Gordo splashed the bathwater against his face and was visited by a vision of salmon leaping up waterfalls and being surprised to find themselves in the boiling waters of Hell.

This was a recurring image that came to him. He thought it part of the penance he owed for killing. He thought he was likely one of the salmon.

“How has this happened? What terrible cosmicry has put me in this body?” He was asking a bar of castile soap.

“I, Charlie Gordon Stout, am the ultimate in pathos.”

He always bathed before he killed, and he always wept while bathing before he killed, because he felt trapped in his occupation, but he always put his weeping behind him, throwing out tears and ambivalence both with the bath water.

French Maloney, the midget bootlegger and El Gordo’s boss, was eating a ham and cheese sandwich at the hotel bar. He thought, “I sure do love a good ham and cheese sandwich. I take it on good, unmoldy rye bread, with mustard. Another of my favorite things is strange

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pussy. Strange-to-me pussy, that is. Wet, hot, strange-to-me pussy. Seven at a time. Bring it on.

Bring them seven strange ones on. I also enjoy killing people, and I enjoy having Gordo kill people for me when I am busy, say, playing croquet, or sleeping off a hangover, or killing a different person in a different place. I can’t kill two different people in two different places at the same time. The technology just isn’t there yet. I mean, I can, holding two pistols, shoot two different men if they are both within shooting range. Or, firing two canons, I could, theoretically, kill two men in opposite directions within canon-firing range. But I am talking about killing two men in two different cities, or towns, or hollows, etc. I suppose dynamite could do it, but the logistics of such long trails of gunpowder, using that much gunpowder, what is the price per ounce these days, shit, gun powder doesn’t grow on trees… Today, I will have the delight of playing a croquet match while Charlie Gordon Stout murders the new minister of the Methodist

Church below Patterson’s Ridge. This, my having the new minister killed, this is basically because I find the Methodists annoying. But there is also the trouble of their sending temperance preachers to the hollow below Patterson’s Ridge. And there is the trouble of those same temperance preachers trying to teach the trash what lives up there how to read. There is nothing worse than trash that can read. I want that trash dumb, and I want that trash illiterate. Of course, it would be a mistake to equate literacy to intelligence, or not-dumbness, which is not, strictly speaking intelligence, per se. For instance, I taught a boy to read several years ago, he had been my valet, he drove the horses, and he carried my drugs in his satchel, and he carried my drug accoutrements in his satchel, and after he learned to read he was dumber than he had been before he could read. Granted, he could not read very well. In any case, the skill of reading poorly, or rather the task of reading poorly, seemed to weigh too heavily on his mind, and his mind seemed to break, and thenceforth the boy stumbled around town reading bulletins and shop signs aloud,

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and he foamed at the mouth for want of the ability to keep his mouth closed. This is an extreme instance, but because it is extreme, it illustrates nicely what I have observed to be the trend when trash learns to read. They think they are smarter, but in fact they know even less than they did before. They start quoting the Bible, because now they can read it, but they are still dumb enough to believe it. And they learn industry, because they think what they do has a purpose, because of the Gospel. They don’t realize that, on a geological timescale, they are already dead, or they might as well be, and so they might also just as well drink my moon until on a human timescale they are dead. But when they have words, they don’t want French Maloney around anymore.

They think their literacy is ushering in an era of progress for them, but their progress is a fake not-progress. They don’t have the means to real progress. They only, if they are literate, have the means to discovering that they live in a pool of shit. I want them to remain ignorant and happy. I care about their feelings. I care about their quality of emotional life. No reading for them. No not-progress for them. No strange for them. Reading and progress and strange for French

Maloney. That is how I want it. And so, Gordo will kill the new minister, good boy Gordo. I would like to give Gordo some strange. He needs it, he won’t take it. He won’t take strange, he won’t take not-strange, he won’t even speak to a woman. I think he is getting ass from that deformed horse of his. All he will take or has taken in the sex-with-humans department is his vow to take nothing. I introduced him to that Madeline. A nice, human girl. He didn’t know what to do. Oh, well. More killing for Gordo, more strange for French. French will take that goodly

Madeline in her plaid, pleated skirts. We will suck on chili dogs. What is a chili dog? Don’t know, don’t care, don’t matter. Dandy, dandy, dandy. Kill, kill, kill. Strange, strange, strange.

Here comes French. Wee little French.

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That afternoon, Gordo went out with his double-barreled .410 shotgun pistol to blow out the brains of the new preacher at the Methodist chapel below Patterson’s Ridge. The haul from

Gatlinburg was a rough one, but a good-looking one that he knew well. The light played in through the canopy of the trees. There was no wind. As he approached the chapel, piano music came from the structure and into the woods as if from a music box into the still air of a bedroom.

Gordo remembered his childhood room and the whores who would come visit him between tricks and play with him and give him trinkets and small leaden soldiers to paint and to play with. He had a music box that did “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and one that did

“Dixie,” which two different brothel-goers wearing blue and blue-gray uniforms, respectively, had given him, and he played at war and killing with the figurines and trinkets the whores had given him while the music played. His small false struggles on the bedroom floor were a way to block out the real ones unfolding outside the brothel. He still kept these items in his manhood.

They were more than relics. They were more than residues of his past. They were, roughly, talismans of his soul, though he had not touched them or thought of them for years. He was out of touch.

Now, approaching the chapel with its tiny music, Gordo felt suddenly as if he himself were an item of some child’s menagerie, not a true human being at all. He felt as dense and as void of the human element as a leaden toy soldier. He looked around him, and for a moment he swore he saw the enormous and chubby arm of a child withdrawing from the canopy and into the sky, a bear pressed between the thumb and forefinger, but then there was nothing but light, and birds in the trees, and squirrels, and the smell of timber, and from beyond the timber, not so far off, came the smell of cold water running over boulders. Still, he felt as if a malevolent invisible hand were guiding him to the chapel to destroy all the quiet and the gentle, and he did not have a

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reason why to do it. Madeline did not want him to kill anymore. That was a concrete reason why not to do it. She was so quiet and gentle, and so good at playing the horns.

He did it anyway. He had his orders. He had his function.

Gordo ejected his smoking spent shell and looked at the upright piano. Pieces of skull and flesh and brain were splattered on the keyboard. The preacher and his pool of blood were on the floor. Gordo nudged the dead body with his toe and flipped him over. He wore a wooden placard on his breast on which was written, “This is Reverend Garth Hudson. Please don’t kill him, he’s illiterate. – Bishop Peoples”

Gordo said, “What the shit is that all about?” Gordo couldn’t say why, but he felt worse about killing an illiterate preacher than he felt about killing a literate preacher.

The piano still echoed with the last notes the preacher had played, as if it were a music box finished with its tune. Faint light came through the trees outside and through the west windows and lay barely across the pews and the altar, as if it, the light, struggled to come through at all, but it did come.

Gordo’s feet fell against the hard-packed clay of the corral outside the church, and his hermaphrodite palomino gave a whinny as he mounted it and rode away back to town.

The supposedly illiterate Reverend Garth Hudson had been sent by Bishop Peoples to replace the last preacher, whom Gordo had also killed. Gordo had killed, in fact, the last three

Methodist preachers, and he was frankly starting to wonder why. As a rule, he never asked why the targets needed to become dead. He took his orders from French and affected a stolid air of not caring, for French years ago had told him that this was the best way to do it, staying oblivious and affecting that stolid not-caring air. Maloney was a Cajun-Irish dwarf who had some education, or seemed to, and who rode his mule with the dignity and calculation of

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Napoleon on the Alps. Gordo did know that most of his jobs were concerned with Maloney’s bootlegging and against the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan had attempted to destroy Maloney’s small body with fire and explosives and ropes and switches and swords and pitchforks and hot fire pokers and poison and the bodies of enormous women sitting on his face and baseball bats and tar and musketry and dogs and riled bees and other implements of death. And yet the dwarf’s primary irritation was the Klan’s stance against whiskey. Whiskey was the dwarf’s livelihood.

He also very much liked to drink whisky, and to use opium. Other things he seemed to enjoy were abject cruelty toward animals and his fellow man, and he loved a good ham and cheese sandwich.

Gordo found the dwarf in the garden behind the Farragut Hotel injecting himself with opium and playing croquet with a few drunken Melungeons and an inbred Huguenot. The

Huguenot was a Fugate, Jacques Henri Fugate, of Kentucky origin, whose skin, as a result of the inbreeding, had a blue hue to it.

“I am happy to report, Gordo, that the ground this day is uh… ripe for ball.” French removed the needle from his arm and turned from Gordo. He took up his mallet and put his blue ball through a wicket, where it came to rest against an opponent’s yellow ball. “Is the Reverend, uh…”

“Illiterate?” said Gordo.

“Well, if he’s dead, I sure hope he is.” French rested his left foot on the blue ball.

“Well, I guess every dead man is illiterate.”

French drew his mallet back high over his head, and he brought it swinging back toward the earth. He smacked his ball against the yellow ball of his opponent, sending it sailing into the woods. He faced Gordo and rested his weight against his croquet mallet.

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“Well, is he?”

“Dead?”

“Yes, is he dead?”

“He’s dead.”

“Good, good, good,” said the dwarf. “Dead, dead, dead.”

“But the thing is, he had this placard on him that said he was illiterate.”

“If he was illiterate, how did he write on the placard?”

“It was signed by a Bishop Peoples.”

French paused.

“Well, the important thing is you killed him.”

“Blew his brains out.”

“Christ, Gordo, you didn’t have to blow his brains out. All you had to do was kill him.”

“Well, that’s, you know, a sure way to do it.”

“Fine.”

Gordo looked at French Maloney’s shape against the garden as the dwarf set himself for his next shot. He beheld the dwarf’s small frame and considered how much like a child he looked, though in his eighties he was the oldest dwarf he had ever heard of. He had been a presence all of Gordo’s life. He had been a butler at the brothel when Gordo was a boy, and when his mother was hanged, French had taken him in and trained him to kill. French had been like a father to Gordo, in spite of his infantile voice and child’s build. But when Gordo looked into French’s eyes now, he saw the gray of the smoky night skies of the war years, the burned imperfect lawn of hope. He saw the years life had put into him. The roving cruelty compacted in his spirit was seeping out all the time.

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“Has the idea ever come to you, French, that you’re the only real man on the planet? The only person of the persons around who is a real person? Or, has the notion ever visited you,

French, that maybe you aren’t even real? Or that you’re the only one not real among the real persons of the earth?”

“Gordo, Gordo, Gordo. Beware of ideas, and beware of notions. What have I told you?

Stay oblivious and affect that stolid air.”

“Or that this,” and here Gordo swept his arm in such a way as to indicate the entire landscape, “none of this is real beyond its existence in a child’s playroom?”

“Playroom?”

“Playroom, French. I saw the arm of a child today in the trees.”

French Maloney set up for his next shot and thought back to the days when Charlie

Gordon Stout was a bright young kid. In the past few years he had begun to lose touch. He had gotten screwy. He wept in the bathtub, he spoke to himself, he was indiscreet in his killing.

Under normal circumstances indiscreet killing was not a problem, but killing preachers required a little…respect at least, or tact. If you’re going to kill three preachers in a row, show some tact or something. Don’t blow their brains out. And now Gordo thought he was not real, or was the only real thing, or some bullshit. Good fucking Christ. I’m going to have to kill myself if this gets any worse, thought French, or kill him, one, put him out of his misery and me out of mine in one motion. I’d like to minimize my liabilities here. I’ll need to think about replacing the kid, though. French touched a finger to his nether lip, considered the retarded Huguenot and the bumbling Melungeons, and he wished he kept more adept company.

“You’ll be ok, Gordo. You’ll be ok for now.”

Then he wished he had a sandwich.

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“Jacques Henri.”

“Yes, sir, sir.”

“Go inside and get me a ham and cheese.”

Madeline was shaving her legs. Her pleated plaid skirt was pulled up around her torso, and she sat on the edge of her bathtub with her womanhood flung out for no one to see. She was, in her mind, playing through her trumpet part for the horn orchestra.

Madeline had a mole on the left side of her face beside her nose which made her look more beautiful than she felt, although she did feel that she was somewhat beautiful. She had another mole to the left of her outer labia which she would sometimes press, as if it were a trumpet valve, rhythmically. She had a third mole on the inside of her left knee which she would often forget while shaving her legs, and she would often slice it open. This time she was being careful not to slice it open. Just as she was easing her razor around it, someone began banging at her front door, and the banging startled her, and she sliced the mole off entirely.

“God damn. God damn. God damn.”

She dabbed at her knee with a wet towel, and she pulled her skirt back down to the middle of her calves, and she went to open the door.

It was Charlie Gordon Stout. She could tell by looking into his eyes that he had killed.

That night, in Madeline “Wunderhorn” Agasse’s room, Charlie Gordon Stout brought out an old box. Inside the box were dozens of leaden toy soldiers coated with the same brown dust.

They were soldiers not of the Union or of the Confederacy, but soldiers of the doomed army of

American mud. Some rode horses or carried battle flags also coated in dust. There was a drummer who’d lost an arm. Some soldiers were poised with their bayonets. Others fired rifles

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and cannons. Some were splotched with red paint that shone through the dust, such that they were perpetually bleeding out.

“What is this stuff?”

“This stuff is my soul.”

Next, Gordo brought out the music boxes. He wound them up, and at first they only whirred and sputtered and coughed, but with a little time, faint music churned out, the old songs of the Union and Confederacy squeaking with reluctance into the quiet room, as if they had limped across the lapsed years since the war, and though they were fatigued they remained unvanquished. As the music played, Gordo wiped the soldiers down with a handkerchief and began to play at killing and war, and he taught Madeline “Wunderhorn” Agasse to play at killing and war, but she became fixated on the one-armed drummer.

“Why have you chosen the drummer? He can’t kill anything, and he has lost his arm, one of them.”

“I like the drummer because he can’t kill anything, and I like him because of his brokenness.”

Madeline was onto something. The drummer’s brokenness attracted Gordo and puzzled him. He rummaged in the dust and tubes of paint and detritus at the bottom of the box and found the drummer’s missing arm with the tiny drumstick in his hand. Neither the drummer himself nor his detached arm was splotched with red. Of all the injured figurines, the drummer was the only one whose wound had not been designed. The amputation had happened of its own volition.

The one-armed drummer gave Gordo a brand of hope that had lately been foreign to him.

He could not articulate the hope, nor did he wish to, lest he find it misplaced or unwarranted or

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absurd. All he knew was that his heart felt dislodged as from a hard, tight place, or maybe it was his spirit that felt dislodged, he did not care. He would dislodge himself.

“I would like to be this drummer, Madeline ‘Wunderhorn’ Agasse.”

“Then be the drummer, Charlie Gordon Stout.”

“It isn’t as easy as that.”

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Charles F Sterchi IV is originally from Knoxville, Tennessee. He earned a BA in English from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and an MA in English from Auburn University in

Auburn, Alabama. He now lives in Gainesville.

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