© 2016

ANDREW WEHMANN

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

SAD WHITE MAN STORIES:

AND OTHER BANANA FANTASIES

A Thesis

Presented to

The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Fine Arts

Andrew Wehmann

May, 2016

SAD WHITE MAN STORIES:

AND OTHER BANANA FANTASIES

Andrew Wehmann

Thesis

Approved: Accepted:

______Advisor Department Chair David Giffels Sheldon Wrice

______Committee Member Interim Dean of the College Caryl Pagel John Green

______Committee Member Dean of the Graduate School Robert Pope Chand Midha

______Committee Member Date Imad Rahman

______Committee Member Eric Wasserman

ii

ABSTRACT

A collection of unconnected short stories.

iii DEDICATION

To the professors and peers who have kept eyes on these stories.

iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“A Fight” appears in Issue #1 of The New Old Stock. “King Cotton” appears in

Issue #2 of Insomnia&Obsession. “Monarchs” appears in Issue #50 of

SmokeLong Quarterly. “What You Find in the Drink” appears on The New Old

Stock website. “You Are What You Eat” appears in Issue #1 of

Insomnia&Obsession.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

CHAPTER

I. MONARCHS ...... 1

II. CUERNAVACA (21/9/1988) ...... 6

III. DADDY, THE DOG, AND ME ...... 7

IV. UBER TO THE GRAVEYARD ...... 19

V. HAND ...... 21

VI. FLAMINGO TONGUE IS A DELICACY WHERE I COME FROM ...... 26

VII. A DEAD BLIND MAN ...... 27

VIII. SWIMMER ...... 30

IX. FANCY LETTER OPENER ...... 33

X. SOUTHBOUND, PART I ...... 35

XI. QUAUHNAHUAC 2016 ...... 45

XII. COMING HOME ...... 46

XIII. MY BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED BANANA FANTASY ...... 50

XIV. WHAT YOU FIND IN THE DRINK ...... 67

XV. A FIGHT ...... 74

XVI. KING COTTON ...... 80

XVII. MARCELLA NABOB ...... 82

XVIII. CHARLES WINTER ...... 89

vi

XIX. YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT ...... 98

XX. 10/23/1965/CHARLES COUNTY/MD ...... 101

XXI. A.D. 69, ROMA ...... 102

XXII. AT RONCEVAUX PASS ON THE FIFTEENTH OF AUGUST IN THE YEAR SEVEN HUNDRED AND SEVENTY EIGHT ...... 104

XXIII. GOING CLEAR ...... 107

XXIV. I WAS JUST A BOY ...... 108

XXV. DIG MY GRAVE WITH AN ACE OF SPADES ...... 110

XXVI. MEXICO’S WHERE YOU GO ...... 125

XXVII. THE WORLD AIN’T BLACK AND WHITE ...... 129

ii

CHAPTER I

MONARCHS

“…it is a custom of souls to take butterfly-shape in order to announce the fact of

their final departure from the body.” –Lafcadio Hearn

It kills me when I drive my jeep over them. People beneath the jeep’s wheels where lungs burst under tire pressure. Sickly-sweet smells, motor-oil and rot. A long route I’ve been bumping along for years. I don’t want to work here anymore in this jeep, but I’m taking each highway in kind. Rolling along. The road comes fat, black asphalt split-center by yellow lines, thin in the distance. Sides: Spanish moss and trash. Behind: bodies and blood and bone. Ahead stand people, and

I’m going to run them over. No end of the line, they’re all lined up, some a step apart, some a mile. I’m going to run them over.

And then my trainee, who’s a smiler, says from the passenger seat: “We should name them.”

A bone snaps under us.

I say, “You want to name the ones ahead?”

1

My trainee’s feet are out the window, red-painted nails, and she’s leaning back in her seat. Sunglasses. “We should name them.”

“Wouldn’t that make this harder?”

Every bone snap sounds different.

“We have big tires,” she says. “This is a jeep.”

“We do have big tires.”

“Yes, big tires.”

“Is this a good idea? Grab the rulebook from the glovebox. Just pop it open there…hand it here.” Knee-steering, I flip through the contents, find the rules page, read aloud: “#1: Just do your job. #2: You can’t quit. #3: You’re either alive in the jeep or you’re dead on the road.” I set the book on my lap.

“The rules make sense.”

My trainee nods ahead. We’re coming upon a mustachioed gentleman in a button-up. “I’m going to name this one Leo.”

“Why Leo?” I say.

“He can’t hear you.”

“Why did you name him Leo?”

“Just looks like a Leo.”

And then I run him over. It’s not pleasant.

We play this game for several hours. New names. Larry, Louis, Louise, Lyle,

Lyla, Layla, Lola, Lisa, Lynelle, Lamont, Lamar, Lanny—a lot of L’s, I’m aware.

We’re not going alphabetically or anything—it’s just fun finding L names. Fun finding them with her.

2

It’s late-afternoon when we find Levon. He wears a headband: a jogger. I slam the brakes. We hit him and he goes flying.

I say, “We can’t keep doing this. Ahead are thousands and millions of people to run over.”

She turns to me, green eyes, hand on my knee. Butterflies, born in my belly, grow in my throat and flap from my eyes, out the window, wild; in the rearview mirror, I follow them flying fast away. She says, “We can reuse names.”

It makes so much sense to me, but I can’t help feeling it’s wrong. I tell her so.

She gives me one of those looks. Like I’m the crazy one.

I say, “Darling, you’re gaslighting me.”

“You’re acting crazy. We’ve got a job to do. Gas it.”

“I’m not gassing it. We can’t recycle names—that would be wrong.”

“What do you know about wrong?”

Someone’s ahead. The evening’s turned dark; a night where runners look past their shoulders every seven steps. Curled spines and craned necks. I switch on the headlights. An old man with a white beard. We’re stopped here, and he looks a little scared.

I say to my trainee, “How’d you like it if we gave away your name?”

“You don’t even know my name.”

I’m sure I do. “You told me. You must have.”

“No way, José.”

“Don’t call me that. It’s not my name.”

3

The old man ahead crouches. It’s not easy for him. He’s got a hand on his back and an expression of this isn’t easy for me.

She says, “Why shouldn’t we name them?”

“Give me the rulebook again.” She does, and I flip through it. It doesn’t say.

“So, let’s run him over.”

We do.

I say, “Emotionally, is this a good idea? Don’t want to get too attached, you know?”

Ahead, a man in a panama-hat. “Lucas,” she says.

I run over Lucas. In the rearview mirror, his panama-hat faintly floats like a butterfly flapping, coasting in the wind. The hat lands on a dismembered leg.

She says, “How’d that feel? Emotionally.”

We exhaust the L’s then the M-N-O-P’s before dawn (now it is alphabetical). I can barely see the rising sun through the bloody windshield. Wipers don’t help: streaks, and we’re out of wiper-fluid. The jeep can barely roll there’s so many bones caught in the wheelwells. I need a new job.

“So, quit,” she says.

“I’m not going to quit, damn it—that’s against the rules. What do you think would happen if I quit? What do you think would happen? I just want to know—”

I swerve—something in the road. The jeep skids, barrels over and over.

Thank god there’s roll-bars.

4

We land right-side up in the muck on the side of the road. Catch breaths.

Rearrange sunglasses.

I check her. She’s not hurt.

She checks me, “You’re not hurt.”

I search the road. An opossum scurries away. Red eyes, wet mouth. Alive.

She says, “I quit. You nearly killed me over an opossum.”

I turn the key: the engine bubbles a breath, drowns and stalls. That sinking feeling inside me.

She slaps me hard across the face. And again. I catch her wrist en route to the third slap. She tears off her sunglasses. Green-eyed rage. I let go. She kicks open her door. Climbs out. Turns away. I watch her with wonder—wonder if she remembers the rules.

I’ll teach her.

She looks beyond me, wonder glazing over her green eyes. I see it too: on the road behind us, butterflies hover above the bodies. Thousands and millions.

I turn the key. The engine rumbles to life. Whip a U-turn.

“Lily. Get in.”

She does. Smiles and sunglasses on.

5

CHAPTER II

CUERNAVACA (21/9/1988)

Only for gringos do cops in Cuernavaca smile back. On the avenue, a chicken pecks sand, its chipped beak pecks broken Corona glass. Crooked-eyes from passerbys. Wet eyes that jump from the jelly. I dig into ceviche. Briny scallops. A mussel uncannily like a cornea. In tumbler, a pink drink—bitter quinine. At the slate bar, slab stools. Quinquinas and tequilas rest behind a Roman-nosed bartender badly mixing La Palomas with closed eyes (he forgets a punch of sea salt). Left, black-painted toes tapping under a high table. Prison ankles. Legs. Lime-peel eyes. Smiling lips. I want to lay her soul bare. I believe god is a tattooed woman at the helm of holey schooner circumnavigating the world, drunk on smoky mezcal, falling in love with each wave she crests. I tip my so-called panama hat and smile back at this gringo girl.

6

CHAPTER III

DADDY, THE DOG, AND ME

Daddy, the dog, and me were under an umbrella walking past graveyard tombs.

Spring rain, slick grass, wet dog smell. The dog: a fat Chihuahua named José.

We three took walks on Thursday afternoons. A bag of dog shit in my hand.

When we rounded the corner at the family mausoleum—a big stone thing with Wehmann set in bronze on its wrought iron gate—we came upon a funeral in progress. The ceremony about twelve tombstones away. Everybody in black but the priest. Catholic, like the cemetery.

Daddy put out his hand to stop me walking. José heeled too.

He said, “Who’s that there?”

One of those questions ambiguous to an outsider, so well-defined inside a family.

“Sadie,” I said. “She’s in my class.”

We started walking and Daddy took his gaze from Sadie and the funeral.

Daddy was weird like that. He hadn’t been right since my mother had died.

That’s why I spent so much time with him. Thought I could help him. He didn’t have anyone. The oak trees around the graveyard looked to me like crucified thieves.

7

“Cute,” Daddy said.

Sadie and I cut Greek Literature to get high at this quiet spot among the old back- up generators around the backside of the mothballed AT&T building. A block from Hudson High School, halfway to downtown. The rain had stopped about an hour before.

The joint’s cherry glowed yellow hot as I kissed Sadie on her neck from behind. She blew out the smoke, turned her face and kissed me. Worked her hips into my own.

She said, “Did I see you and your dad yesterday?”

I bit her earlobe. “Who died?”

“An aunt. I never met her. Lived in Savannah, I think.”

Her hair smelled good. “Daddy and me were walking José.”

She said, “Walking a dog in a graveyard.”

“The whole family’s there. It’s not weird.”

She turned around and held my hands. Looked like she was holding in a joke. She liked to mess with people. Like a month ago when she’d given me a pot brownie for Valentine’s Day at school. We’d never spoken before. That’s why we started hanging. She blew some smoke past me, said, “I’m sorry.” Red eyes.

Shut them.

I said, “Visine. You need Visine.”

She kept her eyes closed. Smiled.

8

I took a puff and held it. Punched my chest a few times like Tarzan.

Exhaled. Her eyes were closed, but she still laughed. I said, “It’s just Daddy, the dog, and me.”

She took the roach and hit the last of it. Dropped and stepped it out. “You interested in Functions and Trigonom-y…Trigonom-o-ny…”

We laughed. Had fun trying to pronounce “Trigonometry” together.

When the joke was over, we walked another block for spumoni before the final bell.

Daddy was leaning on the kitchen counter uncorking an old bottle of red wine. I was still high.

We’d moved here a few years ago, a few months after they’d burned and interred my mother in the family mausoleum. Daddy had sold the old house and basically everything in it. He’d kept his wine collection though. Stored the wine in the new house’s unfinished basement. I never went down there. I didn’t like the memories either. “To the future,” I’d heard Daddy toast every time he’d opened one of the old bottles. Daddy, the dog, the wine, and me. He didn’t even keep old photographs.

When Daddy pulled the cork from the bottle’s neck, he was saying, “When

Odysseus tours the underworld—that’s my favorite part…”

I grabbed two wine glasses from the cabinet next to the sink. Its door never quite closed all the way. Dead magnets or something.

Daddy said, “No—the Bordeaux glasses.”

I swapped the glasses.

9

He said, “Achilles and all the dead heroes down there, and Odysseus lighting fires to speak to them.” He poured some wine into my glass and then his own. Looked me in the eyes, which was rare for him. I looked away, and he said,

“What’d you think about it? That’s your homework, right?”

I tasted the wine. Tasted like any other old red wine. “I like it.”

“It’s a Barbaresco. Bought it in ’88 about a week before you were born.

The vintage is…let me look…1986.”

“Was it expensive?”

“Happy sixteenth birthday!” he said.

I drank some more of the wine. Daddy checked against the dangling ceiling light for the legs in his glass. He drank. “Got a girlfriend, Andrew?”

I said, “No.”

He drank some more. “Not a faggot, are you?”

I finished my wine, sat at the kitchen table. Daddy joined me, reading aloud the bottle’s label. It was in Italian.

“A little too old,” he said. “More tannins than I expected. Come here, hold your glass out…that’s good. A little more wine won’t kill you. Let’s toast.”

We said, “The future,” then drank.

I watched Daddy huff his glass, long nose all the way inside its big crystal balloon.

He said, “Feed the dog.”

10

Starlit summer evening. Backyard. The trash bins against the back brick of the house. A playset in disrepair from the previous owners (I’d never used it). Two- car garage, closed, on the other side. José leashed to an oak tree.

Daddy had a rule that all dogs had to live outside during the summers. He was drunk when he made this rule, said something about how dogs receive a vitamin from moonlight like how humans get Vitamin D from sunlight. José was my dog and in the winters we slept in the same bed. I’d brought him home from the Humane Society a few months after my mother had died, around the same time Daddy and me moved into this house. I’d never heard of a Chihuahua being an outdoor-dog before. When I asked daddy about this, he’d said, “Everybody’s an outdoor-dog at some point.”

José was a sweet dog except if you messed with him while he was eating.

Chihuahua’s have a hard time actually hurting people, but he was a vicious little shit sometimes. I place the bowl of dry food at the foot of the oak tree next to the water dish, which I filled with the garden hose.

José inhaled the food. He always did this. It made me feel badly sometimes, like he thought there was a chance he might not get fed again. Sure,

I’d messed with the dog before. Poked him when he was trying to sleep. Made him beg for a treat or two. Normal things; I was a kid and a he was a dog. He’d never gone hungry though.

When José was done eating, I approached and he licked my hand then sat in my lap. The grass underneath me was still wet from the morning rain. I scratched behind his ears. His head smelled like oranges. Often smelled like this,

11 and I never knew why. I had an extra dog treat in my pocket, and he was sniffing it through my jeans.

Something cracked me hard on the back of the head. I startled to my feet.

José fell from my lap, growled and searched the perimeter. I found an acorn at my feet. Rubbed the back of my head.

“Andrew—hey.”

Sadie walked out from behind the oak tree.

I said, “Did you throw that nut at me?” I pelted the acorn at me, but she dodged it.

She laughed.

José ran to Sadie. Did one of those toy-breed happy dances all around her ankles and up to her knees.

“Catch this,” I said, tossed her one of the dog treats from my pocket. She caught it, knelt and held the dog treat out in her palm. José wagged his tail, ate the treat from her hand.

We played with José for a little bit when Sadie finally came close, whispered in my ear if I wanted to get high and fuck.

I did.

Daddy walked into the backyard with a wine bottle in each hand. He stumbled a bit. “Who you talking to?”

I told Sadie to wait with José, jogged over to Daddy and took bottles from him (they were empty) and tossed them into the trash bin under the lit kitchen window. I walked Daddy back inside the house to the living room couch and clicked on the television. “It’s Sunday night, how about HBO?”

12

“That that girl?” he said, trying to roll over.

“I go to school with her,” I said, then tossed him a pillow and he caught it.

He hugged the pillow to his chest.

“From the cemetery.”

“Six Feet Under is on.”

He threw the pillow at the heavy box television. “She’s not worth anything. She’ll go.”

“I’ll make coffee.”

“Don’t skip anymore classes.”

He grabbed the remote from me and turned up the television’s volume. I flipped on the coffee maker and headed back outside.

Sadie was lying on the ground, and José was jumping all over her. She kept covering her face with her hands. José would try to get past her hands with his tongue, then she’d pull her hands away. The dog would step back, she’d say boo, and the dog would go back to trying to lick her again. That’s when I fell in love with Sadie.

When me and her made our way into the house, we brought José with us.

I left him on the couch with Daddy, who was passed out with late night HBO playing at full volume. Sadie laughed at this, and I made to mute the television.

She stopped me, whispered I should leave it on. She mouthed a few moans along with the soundtrack. We went upstairs.

Sometime around four in the morning I heard the television go quiet and the backdoor open.

13

I fed José outside around eight in the morning. I snuck Sadie out at the same time. Daddy’s bedroom door was shut. Sadie and me had never had sex in

Daddy’s house before. It was good. We wanted to do it again, we said before I watched her walk away.

I did a normal Saturday. High. PlayStation. Pizza. Jerked-off. More pot,

PlayStation, and Pizza. Didn’t see Daddy until that evening when he asked me if I had a good sixteenth birthday yesterday. I paused Call of Duty and told him that

I did.

“Did you like the wine?” he asked.

“Tasted good.”

He sat next to me on the couch, picked up the second PlayStation controller. He didn’t hold it the right way. “I drank too much,” he said. “The wine was really good. I’m sorry.” His face looked drawn and his jaw hung.

I unpaused the game and started a 2-player match. Daddy ran into corners, so I kept on killing him with a machine gun at point-blank range.

“Fun game,” he said.

I didn’t know if Daddy would be mad if he remembered Sadie was over last night. I didn’t know it was against his rules. I’d never had a girl over to the house before. I don’t think Daddy had ever seen me around a girl before. Daddy was odd around girls.

I killed him again, this time with a knife, and the match ended. I said,

“Tomorrow’s Mom’s birthday.”

He put his controller on his lap, said, “We were just at the cemetery.”

“I want to have a friend over tonight.”

14

“Which friend? Rasheed? Tell him I want to play Hold ‘Em. That’ll be good. We’ll do that.”

“A girl,” I said.

“Just like your daddy, aren’t you, Andrew?”

He looked like he wanted to give me a high-five. I said, “Her name’s Sadie.

We go to school together.”

Daddy nodded his head.

I said, “Is that cool?”

He kept nodding his head, looked like a Jack-in-the-Box swaying its way to stillness. “Does she like wine?”

Daddy was in the shower when Sadie arrived. She looked good: raven hair in a bun. I could tell she was high because the redness around her green corneas. We kissed. And again. We were on the couch, and then I was on top of her. And then Daddy was in the room, and we straightened up. Stood up.

Daddy wore a white oxford with its collar open. Chest hair and gold crucifix around his neck. He’d even slicked back his hair. Grinning, three bottles of red wine tucked under his arm.

Sadie grabbed my hand and whispered in my ear, “Is your dad a swinger?” then pinched me on my side.

I made introductions: “Sadie, this is Daddy. Daddy, Sadie.”

She said, “Nice to meet you, Daddy.”

Daddy blushed then ran a hand through his hair.

15

“I taught the boy everything he knows,” Daddy said, “but not everything I know.”

Sadie laughed. “I suppose I’ve still got a lot to learn.”

“I used to be a teacher,” Daddy said.

I said, “No, you weren’t.”

“What did you teach?” Sadie said.

Daddy motioned at Sadie to follow him. We did, into the kitchen.

Daddy put the three bottles of wine from under his arm onto the kitchen table. He picked up the corkscrew. “I know everything there is to know about wine.”

This thing was getting sick.

Daddy started to open the first bottle, “This is a rare Barolo from…”

“Daddy,” I said, “We’re going to feed José. Come on, Sadie.”

“No,” she said, “I want to learn about wine.” She laughed again.

I whispered, “Don’t mess with him—he gets weird around girls.”

Daddy had poured the wine and already had his own glass at his lips. He gulped deeply.

Daddy said, “Sweetie, do you play poker?” He flicked his wrist and a card slid from his sleeve into his palm. “The Queen of Hearts.”

Sadie laughed, snorted a bit. Stoned laughter.

Daddy threw the card on the ground, shouted at me, “It’s your mother’s birthday tomorrow!”

I didn’t know what was going on. “I know.”

16

Daddy took the open bottle of wine in hand and refilled his glass. Sadie was holding her ribs, couldn’t stop laughing.

“Come on,” I said, led her back into the living room and the couch. We sat, and I said, “Sorry. What do you want to watch? I’ve got Seven Samurai and

Lawrence of Arabia.”

The backdoor slammed, and I peeked into the kitchen. One of the bottles was missing from the table.

“Where’s your Daddy?” Sadie said, still laughing.

“He’s probably feeding the dog.”

“I’d like to see José again,” she said, standing.

I pulled her back onto the couch, licked her face, mumbled into her skin,

“I’ll kiss you like a dog. Let’s just you and me hang out.”

She started laughing, “No, let’s go see Daddy and José.”

It was cold in the backyard. Starlight again lit the world. Daddy was crouched at the foot of the oak tree. I wanted to ask him what he was doing, but it wasn’t worth it. He was pouring wine into José’s bowl. Laughing. Drunk. “I fed the dog,” he yelled, kept repeating: “Food in the bowl, wine in the bowl.”

José was eating.

Sadie wasn’t laughing. “You should help your father.”

I gave her a look.

She said, “Don’t worry, I won’t mess with him anymore. I was just joking before. Come on, it was funny, right?”

“Daddy,” I said, “Did you give wine to the dog?”

17

“Food in the bowl, wine in the bowl.”

I made my way over José to grab the bowl of wine from him, but, before I could, Daddy fell to his knees and smacked away José. Prone on the ground,

Daddy started lapping up the wine in the dog bowl.

José’s neck was scrunched back and he was baring his tiny teeth at Daddy.

“I’m hungry,” Daddy said. His face was drenched and his white shirt was a mixture of mud and red wine. He crawled toward the food bowl.

José attacked.

By the time Sadie left, the empty bottle of wine was red and the dog was dead.

18

CHAPTER IV

UBER TO THE GRAVEYARD

I added an extra zero to the check because no one would ever know. Underwear.

Turtle soup. Orange Hi-C. Nuru massage. Parallel French-English Rimbaud. I bought these things.

My wife’s been dead since Lent began. I eat beer-battered cod at social affairs. Sausages for lunches. She was struck by lightning and survived. Killed by hospital sourced streptococcus contributed to congestive heart failure.

Drowned in herself, for short.

I have to find more money to spend in this life of mine that’s soon to end.

I don’t waste. I don’t give up anything. I don’t believe in Jesus from Nazareth or

I’d say he’s given up on me. I gave up on ghosts.

A green-eyed lady with dark hair and fair skin laughs when I speak. I am funny, people say. My wife always laughed at me, with me, but near the end she’d hesitate just a moment too long.

A Republican Marriage is one where a Jacobin ties husband and wife together and drowns them in the Loire River.

19

I took an Uber to the graveyard and forgot my umbrella. The driver drove me right to the stone. He left in the rain. Water drops glided off his black

Cadillac shell.

A turtle in a puddle. No lakes on this side of town. My wife’s epitaph is from Rimbaud. It’s chiseled in French, but I cannot find it in my parallel text.

20

CHAPTER V

HAND

In winter I lost my right hand when a vagrant smoking a corn cob pipe hacked it off. He had two hands of his own and a weather-worn face that frowned under the cold evening’s stars. He looked like he’d been huffing paint. Dilated eyes.

We loitered outside of the Coliseum where I stood boots-planted on a green trashcan. Inside, the Cavaliers played the Bulls. Outside, the vagrant bought the wolf-tickets I sold. I flipped one bird in each hand and told him judgment day’s coming, which was the truth that a man paid me fifty dollars to yell for the evening. I needed the money because my wife needed a new refrigerator. The vagrant, like me, didn’t believe in god. Unlike me, he didn’t have the decency to sell the idea that the whole damned catechism was true. He chopped at my wrist with a flicked-out switchblade. Then he sawed. The blade scraped among wrist bones like wet chalk on a blackboard. I couldn’t resist the slicing; I think god cut the strings in my legs. The vagrant pried and my hand popped off with an arterial spray out of a samurai film. Then the ribbons came—red and blue victory. But the vagrant turned out decent: he fixed a tourniquet and the bloody celebration ceased. He wiped the gore on a trashcan napkin. Purple skin. Mangled. He

21 tipped the ashes from his corn cob pipe onto my stub. Cauterized wound. That didn’t smell like victory, nor did the vagrant as he sprinted off with my hand.

Without a right hand, I caught points and picked-up stares. In Lent, my wife wanted pepperoni rolls. Every Friday at the grocery she nailed her own ninety- five theses into the drooping ears of our fellow shoppers. Think of it as pepperoni polemics. With pride, she swung a plastic bag of pepperoni rolls among aisles of cartoon character cereals and milquetoast consumers. Can’t wait to devour my meaty treats, she proclaimed. Red-orange grease splattered inside the plastic bag like a Mafioso had borrowed it for a suffocation. However, no one ever shook a fist at my wife. Yet, she persisted. She was a beautiful woman, my wife—I was stubborn on that point. But it was my fault she couldn’t satiate her hunger for attention that night. Grocers couldn’t have shaken their fists at her while they were busy gawking my stub. Stub’s bandaged end always wet-slick like a molting bird. Only the butcher understood: blocked his mustache behind three held-up stubby fingers and a red thumb. I bought a D’Artagnan duck and twelve-ounces of dry-aged steak to make my wife wet.

In summer gnarled bone peeped from my crusty stub. Whole arm throbbed like a whacked funny bone. My wife has green eyes and I compared her to a summer’s day and she laughed. She boiled water in a teapot on our stove. I read her a John

Cheever story about a WASP who swims pool-to-pool with suburban contempt.

The story was a real page-turner, and I had trouble with that. We got through it though. The swimmer in the story drinks gin, so my wife and I wanted to prepare

22

Pegu Clubs to go with our teas. In a Boston shaker I splashed in liquors and liqueurs and bitters and ices and slammed the glass and tin shut with my stub. I cradled the thing in my other arm to try to shake the damn thing. I couldn’t shake it. My wife’s ears reddened and steam blasted from the whistling teapot on the stove. I couldn’t shake it. The shaker split open and the Pegu Clubs mixed on the kitchen’s linoleum floor. I doubted a hot tea and a cold Pegu Club had any complements for each other anyways. That night I slept alone on the couch with the “Stories of John Cheever” as my pillow. Considered whispering fifty Hail

Marys. Pipe-dreamed I had two hands to pray with.

In fall I handed over half-of-everything to my wife. Divorce—her idea. I’d have given an arm and a leg to have her back. Instead, I gave the other half-of- everything to a lawyer who told me that people never get back together. In his office, the lawyer offered me a refreshment and his secretary brought me a

Pellegrino. She placed the green bottle with the fizz on a coaster by my left hand, and I realized she was the only one with a grasp on things in this firm. I wished she ran the meeting. Wanted to give her a round of applause. But she walked out of the office. The lawyer hunched over his fountain pen and his forehead wrinkles cascaded into courthouse steps. He sounded like Nixon when he told me what life’s all about. Life’s about purpose, he said, The saddest people are the ones who drink too much, think too little…play too much bridge. As I left, an awkward moment when I emptied my wallet and the lawyer stubbed his toe on the edge of his cherry desk. I stubbed my toe, he said. I frowned and showed him my stub. He didn’t charge me for the Pellegrino.

23

Around Thanksgiving bills piled-up and I started killing ducks at the local pond to keep my wife in her court-ordered standard-of-living. Hard to strangle a mallard with one hand, so I stomped their necks with my boots. Their necks easily broke because I had heavy boots. Ducks have pink tongues like people. My wife wore black opal earrings like a duck’s eyes. I felt like a loon among the quacking. The thrashing. At the edge of the pond, my wife honked her car horn and I loaded trash bags of mangled bodies, wet feathers, orange flippers, severed tongues into her trunk. I’d been drinking and living under a bridge then. I felt a phantom pain. I thought a phantom lived with me under the bridge. I gave the phantom my boots. Then I couldn’t kill ducks.

In winter I saw something that gave me hope one morning after I spent the night earning nickels under the bridge where I slept. Semi-trucks and sports cars whizzed by as I waddled over to this cardboard box that must have appeared in the night. A big refrigerator box with its this-end-up arrow pointed to the cracked concrete beneath. A crude door drawn on it in permanent marker, so I knocked at its base with my bare-toes. You better not be a big-bad-wolf, came a man’s gruff voice from within the box. I told him that I’m not a big-bad-wolf.

You better not be hocking bibles, the man said. I assured him I’m not here to proselytize him. Alright, the man said, come on in. I didn’t know how to come- on-in because it was a fucking drawn door on a cardboard box. I said, Could you give me a hand? The door swung open and I entered a new world where a vagrant thief drew blood. We huffed paint. The vagrant told me he wanted to fix

24 a smudge on his masterpiece. He poured turpentine on my stub, then a fleshy acrylic. Out of a paint-box, the vagrant retrieved my right hand. Reattached it with fifty brush strokes of surgical painting. I kneeled and brought my two hands together, prayed to god that my wife would take me back.

25

CHAPTER VI

FLAMINGO TONGUE IS A DELICACY

WHERE I COME FROM

you’re dressed down by a flamingo tattoo loitering on your long legs. the flamingo tattoo complains about where it’s been. hostels in hanoi, hamburg, helsinki, everywhere but home. it won’t shut its black skin beak. dry tongue. you decide to imprison the flamingo tattoo in nylon. you come home. you peel off the nylon and discover an unrecognizable pink smudge. like a birth mark.

26

CHAPTER VII

A DEAD BLIND MAN

I dream about it—the ice. It’s there in the distance past fog and ocean. You can’t see it, but I can. The ice is a mirror for the sun, a lighthouse for ships. I think the dead live there where the lights never go out. My two brothers and my favorite whore.

My two brothers Alexander and Pablo were born one year apart from each other and an odd number of months after me. My baby brothers. They were born on the same mountain spot, next to the well by the shed. When each brother was born, my father had a ritual: he placed me in the well’s bucket and lowered me into the darkness. He yelled, I send my blind son, oh Lord, where he cannot see—in this, let my next son see! My mother demanded my father swaddle me first, so I did have a blanket down there as I hovered above the heavy metal water in the mossy abyss. At least that’s the story my mother told to me.

Around the time I became a man, I asked my father about my pair of descents into the well. He was drunk and said everything worked because my brothers can see and it didn’t matter that he sent me into the well because I’m blind and I couldn’t see down there anyways and it’s not as if I remembered it myself—it’s only hearsay from my crazy mother who now lives in a sanitarium

27 among the lepers. But when I smell moss on my mountain hikes, I remember the well.

My two brothers Alexander and Pablo died on the same day a year apart.

Alexander was breaking in a horse on the family farm. The horse bucked, but

Alexander stayed the beast and rode it long that morning. The horse returned by suppertime without its rider. With torches that night, a party looked for

Alexander. My father, the only man in our mountain village with a flashlight, found Alexander with his leaking head among a pile of stones beneath an algarrobo tree. The funeral was sad; my mother’s face was salty and wet.

Pablo died the next year. We came down from the mountain and spent the day together by the ocean, drinking to Alexander who was a year dead. After midnight, we swam in the ocean. We treaded past the breaks where the waves were calm. Pablo called to me, said he was begging with the sea that she carry him away. I didn’t hear him after that and the search boats never found Pablo.

Not even my father’s flashlight could spot Pablo in the dark sea. For the funeral, we released a burning rowboat into the fresh gale sea. No smoke that I could smell returned to shore.

Felina was my favorite whore. Her skin coarse, tasted like brine. I first met her by an orange cart outside my mother’s sanitarium. My father sent my mother there after my brothers died. She was hysterical, he said. Felina was my favorite whore because she led me by hand away from the sanitarium. The citrus smell of the orange cart never left her. We traveled together, and I paid her at each mile south on the dirt road. She bought her own curantos from the hot pits, shared with me. We made love often, and even after she was hit by a speedy car.

28

There was not a funeral. I left it to the local nuns to bury her. I still eat curantos from hot pits.

These are the things I see when I close my eyes.

29

CHAPTER VIII

SWIMMER

I read an ink-smudged cover story about a Russian gangster killed downtown last night. The paper said the gangster washed up in The Flats around 1:30 AM. A vagrant dragged the gangster’s bloated body onto the cement pier, called the cops. In the photograph, the gangster rested where the vagrant left him, on a cement pier under a spotlight-illuminated, blue crime-scene tarp. Stars on his knees.

It’s only been twenty-six laps but I feel like this is my last flip turn. I’ve been swimming lately because I feel dry and old. I’m twenty-six years old, but I’m here to feel young again. I want to be fresh again, feel like when our common ancestors first walked out of the oceans. Like when I snorkeled in the Caribbean as a boy, colorful coral inches from my reach. I’m here because there’s a woman I want to like me, but that’s a different story. The digital clock by the diving board reads 44:01. I’m supposed to do forty-five minutes, but I don’t want that last lap.

I’ll save it for tomorrow. Or maybe I’m lazy.

I spy a new body in the locker room. He’s leaned over nude in front of the mirror rubbing lotion through seventy or eighty years of wrinkles, three-quarters

30 of a century of living. With each rub his liver spotted skin becomes taut only to snap back to its proper age. The man’s hairless except armpits, pubic area, and the top of his head (white, cropped). Stars on his knees. I don’t make eye contact, which is locker room protocol. Not that I could anyways. He’s got his eyes locked on a running sink with one of those faucets that’s on a timer. He must have finished with the stream before I got here. The water stops flowing and the man taps the handle and the water reflows. I think about Ponce de Leon searching Indian Florida for the Fountain of Youth. The explorer never found it.

We’re in a YMCA pool in Cleveland.

I change out of my swim-shorts out of view. Though I don’t feel it, I am a young man, not that kind of old man who can’t wait to parade his nudity. The old man sits across from me on a wooden bench, purple lockers at his back. He’s still nude, but that’s not what I’m noticing. He’s got two tattoos that I see: black and red stars above his drooping knees. But in his wrinkled thighs, the stars no longer point straight out in each of their five directions. The three top points of each star sag just a little like their tips are curved, like a hanging jester’s shoes.

The man’s reading the newspaper on the bench next to him. It’s the sports page and the color photo is streaked with water. I wonder if there are sailors that still navigate by starry nights.

The old man is dressed now. He’s wearing a navy Adidas tracksuit with three white stripes down his sides separating front-side from back. We make eye contact and he says something but I can barely hear him. It’s a muffle. It doesn’t sounds like English. I’ve got water in my right ear as if the pool is calling me back for that last lap. I shake my head to dislodge the water. Crane my neck and slam

31 my head to the right like bad disco. The water’s here to stay. The man nods that he knows what I’m thinking. He cups his right hand to his right ear and turns his head parallel to the ground so his elbow’s like the arch of a gallows. He pushes palm into ear. Suction. Pulls the hand away. I mimic him and the water leaves my ear. A warm drip onto cool cartilage and tight skin. I thank the man and he smiles at me. Sharp, pointed teeth. Black eyes of a shark.

He’s leaving as I’m spinning dry my swim-shorts in the swim-short’s dryer. He answers a call on his cellphone. I only understand the old man’s young laugh and the word vodka. As I hear the locker room’s door shut I decide to return to the pool, swim my last lap. I feel fresh in the water. I choose to swim the butterfly. It’s the hardest stroke I know, but the going is easy. Arms slice the water, kicks crash. Propels me forward. Perfect strokes. Rising to the surface on my flip-turn I see the vast distance of the clear Caribbean ahead.

The next day at the pool, I look for the man but don’t find him. After my laps— one more than yesterday—I return to the locker room, hope to see the man.

Today’s soaked newspaper on a bench.

32

CHAPTER IX

FANCY LETTER OPENER

The day turned out badly. I was fifteen and away at boarding school. Dead winter spread, a foot of snow collected over the greens. Classes still held. Corey and I cut second period history to waste time inside his dorm room. We’d done this often; it’d been fun. Hot inside his room. Our sweaty brows. A foggy plate glass window. We threw our blue blazers onto his unmade bed and loosened our neckties.

The radiator banged every few minutes. Loud metallic bangs. No specific rhythm. Unpredictable. We made up a game where we would try to clap at the exact moment of each radiator bang. Corey was much better at it than me.

Uneasy jumps and giggles. I liked it.

Corey grabbed something from the traveler’s trunk at the foot of his bed.

A ball of burlap. Inside was a Nazi dagger. I’d never seen it before. He held it up, and it seemed to glow. Behind him, the morning sun illuminated the window as if it were golden stained glass. He said it was an officer’s dagger. It looked like a fancy letter opener. He said it belonged to his grandfather who had been, in some way, an S.S. traitor. Whatever terrible or righteous thing the grandfather had done, his family never saw him again. I told Corey that I thought the dagger

33 was pretty darn cool. He let me hold it. The blade still sharp, it left a thin line when I ran it across the back of my hand. The butt of the hilt embossed with a silver swastika set in a red jewel. I held it in both of my hands as if it were much larger, like a bastard sword. Corey asked me how it felt in my hands. Heavy and cold.

Corey clapped and the radiator banged. I dropped the dagger. One thump and the tip of the dagger stuck into the green carpet between my brown boots. Its red bejeweled swastika pommel stared back at me. It looked something like a bloodshot eyeball. I imagined the silver swastika to be shrapnel stuck in a cornea.

Corey kneeled in front of me, the dagger buttressed between his knees. He looked up into my eyes. My own eyes began to sting. He had a squashed nose, some chipped front teeth. He asked me what I wanted to do. I felt weird, so I waited. When the sting in my eyes became too much, I told him I wanted to play with the dagger some more—thanks for showing it to me. Corey cupped my knees in his palms. His hands felt warm even through my slacks, even in the hot room. Drips of sweat rolled down my thighs, stopped at his hands that held the backs of my knees. I kicked away, told him he should go kill himself.

Outside, the sun was so bright it made the snow look like hills of diamonds. I jumped onto a pile of snow. Hard and cold. Had a few snowball fights and then the evening flooded across campus like a navy of souls. It didn’t take long for Corey to go through with it.

34

CHAPTER X

SOUTHBOUND, PART I

Cruising southbound down 77 with a samurai sword in the trunk of his car,

Andrew meant in seven or so hours to reconnect with the father he'd estranged six summers prior. The samurai sword a gift to Andrew from his mother several days ago, passed down from her own father seventy-ish years ago before the man’s Zero lost count in the Pacific gleam of the rising sun. Andrew's mother didn't talk much other than she wanted her ex/Andrew's father, Tom, dead. The sword a Masamune by the legendary master swordsman of the Kakamura

Shogunate. A year after curtains closed on the Pacific Theater, Tojo or somebody gave a Masamune sword to Truman; it's cutting dust in a stale Missouri library.

The swords keep their edge. Andrew’s mother didn't tell him to kill her ex/his father, and that's not why Andrew wound up leaving Ohio winding through West

Virginia mountains and John Denver dreams on his way to Buttfuck, Georgia

(notable resident: Gram Parsons). No, Andrew wanted to reconnect with his father Tom.

To reconnect after all this time might be a feat. After all, Andrew had become a masters’ degree-carrying writer, which is to say bullshitting his way toward

35

Affordable Care at a local state college adjunct-teaching English Composition.

Composition is one of those things that sounds like it could be interesting

(Mozart composed). In reality, composition is shocking bleary-eyed barely-legals with buzz words and phrases (social media, fat shaming, etcetera) while embracing your inner crazy Dennis Hopper from Apocalypse Now (“Don't you know if is the middle word in life?”) To be Brando for a day, sweat dripping down your fat skull to hidden behind black shirt beer boobs, sulking in the shadows reading T.S. Eliot to the specters of your memories–that's a sexy dream and the source of your almost-daily morning wood. But back to the sword and Andrew and the West Virginia rest stop he can't get cellular service at.

Andrew's gut gave him the familiar slow drain gargle. The snack choices sitting in the dual cupholders between gray fabric carseats were Twix and mezcal or mezcal and Twix. The biggest takeaway he'd garnered from a $30k a year swanky private high school experience was how to hide clear spirits in poured out plastic bottles without any authority the wiser. And they're crafting all these sexy artisanal mezcals these days that there's no reason to fuck around with a three- quarter dumped Gatorade for some semblance of flavor in the absence of a chaser. No sir, pure delicious smoky mezcal right in the grocery store brand empty water bottle. If Housemaster Warner hadn't suspected booze in the bottles of the green-blazer clad students strolling the quad, then there’s no way Officer

Dingleberry would suspect something in the cupholder of a bearded approaching

30 white-ish male. Andrew planned to drive this route drunk because that's the only way he could reconnect with Tom his father. But Andrew’s belly wanted

36 more than Twix, so at the reststop he cataloged the vending machine adjacent to the ladies’ room. Snickers. More Twix. Juicy Fruit. Mentos. Cheez-Its.

Combos. One last Twinkie. That looked good and filling to Andrew so he paid for the Twinkie in nickels, and he walked out eating the stale confection half in its wrapper like a Push-Pop.

The seventies-style rest stop was situated in a valley, the interstate winding past it. A lot of greens and browns. A crowd had formed in the empty parking space next to Andrew’s car. A nuclear family with a beagle were huddled around something. They looked like the Griswolds. Andrew pushed his way into the huddle, mumbled “My car,” and heard a crunch under his right foot.

“You done killed it,” a boy yelled.

The boy went all red in the face and ran behind his father who bore a resemblance to Chevy Chase. Andrew lifted his foot; a dead bird underneath. A grackle, he thought. A punching at Andrew’s hip. The boy still red in the face was slamming his fists into Andrew’s thigh like a prepubescent Manny Pacquiao.

“Damnit, kid,” Andrew said. “I broke that hip on a trampoline when I was your age.”

“Fuck you!” the boy said.

The father stepped in, “Boy, you better pray the Lord didn’t hear that.”

“Yeah, kid—pray a little,” Andrew said, retrieving his keys from his pocket.

The boy screamed, and his sister and mother put their pinkies in their ears. The father grabbed Andrew’s wrist, said, “You apologize to my boy right now.”

37

“Relax,” Andrew said. “Just let go…that’s good. Hey, come here, kid…that’s right. Look here,” he held out his keys in his open palm.

The red drained from the boy’s cheeks. He looked ready for a magic show.

In a single motion, Andrew closed his fist and left his middle finger hanging, said, “Here’s your bird.”

The boy punched Andrew in the dick and the keys fell onto the dead grackle. The boy picked up both and headed for the hills. Open mouths on the mother/daughter audience. The father looked puzzled too. Andrew leaned on his car, gave himself a squeeze, saw the boy disappear somewhere round the backside of the latrine.

Andrew and the father exchanged under the breath You cocksucker stares.

The father wore a red sweater with a Nativity scene woven into its front, pleated blue slacks. A cocksucker if there ever was one. Andrew broke off the stare-down and sidled to his trunk running a hand along the space on his sedan where windows met metal. His hand at the latch that opened the trunk, squeezed it.

Locked. The car alarm. Every other second. He wanted the sword even more.

“Go get your fucking kid.”

They looked for seven hours according to Andrew’s watch. He should have been in Buttfuck, Georgia, by now. The state highway patrol had joined the hunt.

They brought dogs with them. The alpha dog, a German Shepherd named Rin-

Tin-Seven, said Lieutenant Knoll, traced his pedigree back to Rin-Tin-Tin.

Andrew believed it: that same long black snout. Lieutenant Knoll pointed at the

38 grackle’s crime-scene blood streak, and Rin-Tin-Seven stuck his nose in it. Big whiff, and he was off. Disappeared around the latrine just like the boy had done.

“You said you killed a bird?” Lieutenant Knoll said. “Why’d you go and do a thing like that?”

“You think the dog will find the boy?” Andrew said.

“We have hunting laws, you know.”

Andrew eyed the mezcal filled water bottle locked away on the passenger seat inside his car.

Lieutenant Knoll said, “You know how boys be, you know how boys be.”

At a picnic table in the grass a few yards away where travelers took their pets to shit, the father was holding hands with his wife and daughter, praying.

Lieutenant Knoll said, “I can call a locksmith if you’d like to get on your way.”

The family on their bodies traced the Sign of the Cross, Amen.

“Kid’s got my house key.”

At 3:46 AM the family had fallen asleep next to the picnic table huddled in a silver emergency blanket. Lieutenant Knoll gave Andrew a Twinkie and ate one himself. They were sitting inside the cop’s Charger, an assault rifle stowed between them.

“Get in the glove box,” Lieutenant Knoll said.

Andrew did. Lots of papers, some Hostess products, and, buried in the left corner three short bottles of golden tequila, one empty.

39

“Snort,” Lieutenant Knoll said. Andrew took a swig of the cheap stuff and passed it over. They did this until the bottle was gone.

“Bears and bobcats out there,” Lieutenant Knoll said.

“You ever shoot anybody with this thing,” Andrew said, hand on the barrel of the assault rifle.

“Rabbits and the like.”

“I’m never having children.”

“I don’t want to have to call it. Dead boys—bad business.”

“That dog seemed sharp.”

“Rin-Tin-Seven? Yeah. Good boy.”

Around sunrise, the empty tequila bottles stashed under the passenger seat,

Andrew and Lieutenant Knoll headed into the mountains. Lieutenant Knoll gave

Andrew his sidearm, a .45, and took the assault rifle for himself.

“M-14,” Lieutenant Knoll said. “Same thing we’re killing sand niggers with.”

Sunrise in a valley seeps like cold molasses. It’s not a sure thing you can follow, nothing you can walk into. It’s just sort of there nowhere and not there somewhere.

Lieutenant Knoll said, “Where you headed?”

Andrew’s foot caught on a root, and he stumbled. “Where’s anybody going.”

“You know, you ain’t a big talker.”

40

Fresh wet air in the forest. Where the sun did seep through the canopy mist hung. Cobwebs too.

Lieutenant Knoll said, “Don’t you owe me some talking on account of the tequila? We could be out here a while.”

“I’m going to a conference. I’m a writer.”

“Watch just there…another root. A writer? My gosh! You write for the movies?”

“Books and stuff. That’s how I make my living.”

“I got all kinds of stories I could tell you. Like the time…”

“If you can speak you write. Do you know where we’re headed? Where’s that dog?”

They walked in silence up the slope of the mountain. Birds with their morning noises.

When Andrew was first calling himself a writer he mailed via Amazon.com the last gift he’d purchased for his father: Garcia Marquez’s one paragraph novel

Autumn of the Patriarch. Andrew found this funny on at least two levels. His father Tom didn’t get the joke nor did the other dozen people to whom Andrew repeated it. Readers either. Lieutenant Knoll liked his stories via Netflix.

They came upon a makeshift mountain cabin. Wooden logs for walls with plenty of gaps, a single glassless window, no door. Howling from inside.

“Think Rin-Tin-Seven’s found him,” Lieutenant Knoll said. “He does that—howls.”

Andrew didn’t like the look of place, and he felt the familiar sinking feeling. Once as a boy Andrew and his father Tom had gone camping in the

41

Pennsylvania wilderness somewhere. There had been a makeshift cabin much like this one. Glassless windows and no door. Earlier in the day, Andrew had watched his father wiff on a shot at a deer; aiming for the deer’s heart he’d accidentally hit its front legs instead. A long blood trail spackled on leaves and ferns leading for a quarter-mile ending at a makeshift cabin. Inside the morning sun illuminated the cold morning mist. Whimpering echoes. Smell of iron. The way his father had raised the shotgun. The lack of antlers on the doe. Legs crumpled beneath it. Still but for the slow steady rise and collapse of the animal’s chest. That perfect jewel of an eye watching. Just watching…

Lieutenant Knoll stepped into the cabin, Andrew behind him. On the damp dirt floor laid the boy, asleep, Rin-Tin-Seven cuddling him close, protector.

The highway slick from a bit of evening rain outside Atlanta. About four hours north of Buttfuck, Georgia. Andrew wondered what his father might be doing at this moment, whether he’d be shocked by his son’s arrival after all these years.

What the new wife, a real winner, might be doing. The father moved to Georgia after he divorced Andrew’s mother, after he asked her for an open marriage and didn’t get one. Andrew remembered his father’s house, this great cubed mansion with porticos. As a surgeon, Andrew’s father Tom could afford one of the biggest houses in the county. He chose to live across the tracks in the mansion among the shacks. Most of the neighbors were black.

The last time Andrew had visited, his father Tom and the new wife had a dog, an Italian greyhound named Marco, that they didn’t treat well. Crated it at home while they took weekends in Savannah. Beat it when it peed inside the

42 house or shit by the plants around the swimming pool. Andrew had never gotten a great night’s sleep in that house for many reasons, one of which was Marco’s midnight howls.

Andrew passed a liquor store when he’d gotten off the highway to fill up on gas.

He decided not to refill his cache of mezcal. At the gas station, he bought a half- liter of bottled water and some licorice. In the bathroom, he put on a fresh set of clothes (he hadn’t changed since the woods). An lime green polo shirt and blue jeans, relatively clean underwear.

He sized himself up in the scuffed mirror. He hadn’t often wanted to see the face looking back at him. Eyes: jagged red veins sliced the pink pith surrounding his lime corneas. Cropped black hair pointed down his thin nose to stop-sign red lips. Skin: tight, somewhere between cut kalamata olives and wet sand. Breath: Altoids, but he could barely tell over the smell emanating from the puddle beside the orange-stained trough-urinal.

In the mirror, he fixed strange faces to himself. There was the fat face with air-full cheeks—the bloated jester. The skinny face with chin extended, hands pulling his hair into short horns—the devil inside. And the face of madness: flipped-up eyelids like half burning suns over black-lashed rays, pulled his lips wide for a gaping mouth hole, waved his tongue in mock quick cunnilingus. In all, Andrew felt something like a vampire, something like he remembered his father.

As he filled up his sedan and topped off the gas tank, he stashed his dirty clothes in the trunk next to the samurai sword.

43

Buttfuck, Georgia, was known for its good old boys, seventy or more daily trains, and its sordid Confederate history. When Sherman marched to the sea, he sent an attachment a few days alone from his main army all the way to Buttfuck just to burn the place to the ground. Sherman’s men never made it back.

Andrew’s father lived at the intersection of Wizard Court and Bedford

Forrest Road…

44

CHATPER XI

QUAUHNAHUAC 2016

Morning after the Day of the Dead. The broken cerveza bottle floor of the hotel room I’ve made my home. Glass crushed to sand. Naked. Hungover. Bad ceviche. Good mezcal. I’m a wealthy man in pesos. I’ve lied for quite a while. A film projector clicks, spins out flickering light. The movie’s been over for a bit, the final strip of celluloid whips past with each revolution. I’ve watched Touch of Evil for the past thousand nights. An extensive collection of mementos mori strewn about: the bottles, films noir, wet slacks, a puddle of sick, and a stack of poems about creatures that live in deep ocean darkness. I reach a trembling hand, read the poems—A squid inks my eyes. Stings. I’m up stomping the dance of death. Bleeding feet. Sweat flicks from my skin. My brain a parched sponge. Tonight I must watch Touch of Evil in my dreams! Movies are just light on a wall. Dreams are real to me. Like the dream I have about a past-lover with shaking hands. She shaves my neck with a straight razor. Like the dream I have about a bullet splitting my blindfolded head. Someone throws a dead dog down the ravine after me. Like the dream I have about drowning in the dream-light of jellyfish deep in the ocean drink.

45

CHAPTER XII

COMING HOME

I’m not war weary—I’m war electric. Been home about three months. Feet adjusted to grassy squish. But I left pieces of me behind: soaked a pint of blood in desert camo, lost steady hands to a Humvee turret, head with CentCom intelligence, heart in Fallujah. When I can sleep, I dance in my dreams: slide and step boots around hidden IED hotspots. The dream always ends with me stuck in quicksand and red plume balloons all around me. Mornings smell like burned oil. I’m in this circus tent at a Tuscaloosa fairgrounds and can smell the black powder smoke. A showdown. Just a show.

She’s putting on a show with a silver revolver in each hand. White cowboy hat, amethyst on her bolo tie, and silver rhinestones down her white leather coat and chaps to match her guns. The guns are big: .357’s. She fires. Two bullets split the air, crack every ear in the tent and then the apple tied to a collie’s head.

The barrels smoke, she blows them out with a tongue pushed puff of breath. I stick two fingers to my bottom teeth and whistle, imagine her mouth tastes like bourbon.

“She’s something, Bud,” Frank says, elbow digging my ribs. We’re in the crowd among folding chairs; we’re on our feet; I don’t remember standing.

46

The woman twirls her guns around her long fingers, painted purple nails.

She holsters her left pistol and holds the other below her lips like a microphone.

“I’m Miss Annie Oakley and I shoot at things,” she says with a twang, leans deeper into the barrel and everybody gets real quiet. “I shot a cigar off’a Sitting

Bull’s lips—he named me Little Sure Shot on account’a that trick.” Now she’s stage-whispering, “Any y’all brave pistoleros out there wanna duel?”

The collie pony-trots to Annie and sits. The dog sizes up the crowd and me. That long faced green-eyed collie is looking at me. I don’t want it looking at me.

“Do it, Bud,” Frank says, another elbow to my ribs. “You shot all kinds of peoples in I-raq, didn’t ya? Killed ‘em even!”

I did.

The collie licks Annie’s hand. The dog’s got a black tongue, and Annie’s hand is slick. She looks at me. It’s that kind of look I get from the TV’s evening news, like the news-lady’s in the room with me. And I turn out the lights and we’re alone in the room, me and the news-lady and my Hungry-Man dinner and my George Dickel. She’s talking to me and my hands are moving.

Annie interrupts and my hand fumbles into cold jelly. Then my hand’s in the air and it’s even colder and Frank’s hand is around my wrist.

“Hoo-rah,” Frank says, “Here’s your volunteer!”

Applause all around, cheers too. Well, I better get up there. The ground is grass. I hit steps and climb them onto the stage. I smell gun smoke.

The whole way here, five-feet from her and the collie, Annie had her eyes on me and her hands over her holstered pistols, each purple tipped finger

47 floating, ready to draw. I’m unarmed though, she wouldn’t shoot a noncombatant.

I did.

Frank and them might still be whistling, but it just got real quiet in my head. Quiet like it hasn’t been in a long time. Annie is walking toward me looking like she’s ready to draw, and it’s so quiet in my head. Quiet enough to write down everything I’m thinking.

“Partner,” Annie says. She looks so pretty. Pretty girl. I want to bite her bolo tie and taste her guns.

She closes the distance, whispers in my ear. “Are you alright?”

I make a fist. Quickly hold the fist to her chin. “Where’d your twang go,

Annie Oakley?” A tooth cracks in my clenched teeth. It’s a molar. I lick the tooth. It’s rough and sharp.

Paws on my belly. I look down, and the collie’s got a wooden-handled steel pistol clamped in his fangs and purple-gums jaw. “This gun for me, puppy?” The dog nods and says the gun’s for me, so I take it—it’s so light and feels just right at the end of my arm. I check the sights as the floorboards blur.

“Ten paces!” Annie says.

We’re back to back, but we’re walking apart, and I miss her. I miss her with everything in my revolving cylinder. The only thought I’m thinking is that if

I keep walking around this damn earth in a straight line, I’ll eventually come back to her.

Three.

I’ve been told the earth is a sphere, which means it’s round.

48

Five.

The collie whispers, “Come on, Bud—it’s almost over.”

Seven.

I breathe a broken tooth’s chip and choke.

Nine.

I must be in Baghdad by now.

49

CHAPTER XIII

MY BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED BANANA FANTASY

“Hadn’t you rather have bananas? Hadn’t you rather?”

—Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

It’s been cloudy for years.

I cannot find my legs underneath me so I take an Uber to the graveyard. We’re traveling streets where no music sucks. My driver who wears a fez wants to know who died. I tell him who died and we get stuck behind a school bus for seven minutes. Seven is the most banana number…

I’ve never been to a graveyard before. The graves remind me of Ancient Roman mile markers dedicated to Mercury. The god that carted souls to the underworld.

Everyone is dressed in black or at least making an effort. Dispersing…

In the rain at the headstone Corinna peels a banana. We’re alone. Her lime peel eyes and cocaine skin. We stroll in the persistent dim overcast. Displaced mud

50 sucks our sneakers. Cold. Her hands wet mine getting there. We search without a map for loving sunlight what we’ve been searching for our entire lives…

We use the word good a lot. You good? I’m good. How’s the weather over there?

Good. It’s good here. Good to hear. I’m thinking of ancient mysteries like why did you dump me? We walk well together…

Bananas turn green to yellow. Corinna’s the one who stuck me with a mezcal drip. I mean I wasn’t happy before but I wasn’t sad I was a steady banana…

She swallows her last banana bit and tosses the peel in front of my feet right ahead where I’m about to step. I stop and say Remember the stories we used to tell to each other. These banana fantasies…

There once was a witchdoctor who lived in Quauhnahuac. The

witchdoctor’s name was Juan. He didn’t have any English. When

my first wife, Tania, became hysterical, I took her to Witchdoctor

Juan. The cause of her hysteria baffled him: was she thrall to a

banana fantasy or was it simply the fact…

Witchdoctor Juan owned several instruments and kept them

in a green velvet pouch. We only had two belts to strap her down.

Luckily, the procedure did not require Witchdoctor Juan or me to

wear pants. One belt we curled around her neck and around the

cherry table we had laid her upon. We tightly strapped her neck. I

51 worried about bruising. Tania wasn’t keen for the experience. But it was vital to restrain her neck. The other belt went around her ankles and, again, the table. She wore green heels the color of limes. What we did with her arms was this: tucked them underneath her, and then I straddled her chest like a cowboy riding bareback. She was a bucking bronco, but more mezcal helped calm her.

Witchdoctor Juan went in through the top of Tania’s head.

She was awake. Are any of us ever really awake? Her eyes were open, in any case. She had lime peel eyes. Witchdoctor Juan made a surgical incision at front of her skull. Just made a small incision, no more than an inch. The instrument he used looked something like a butter knife. He swung it up and down. Cut brain tissue. I asked my wife questions and she gave the correct answers. Things like, Where am I? “Hell,” she said.

Witchdoctor Juan again stuck the instrument inside the incision. Twiddled around in there. I asked my wife to recite things, easy things like T.S. Eliot poems. She would mess up lines, but I told Witchdoctor Juan to keep going until she really butchered something. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas. When she became incoherent,

Witchdoctor Juan removed the instrument. It smelled awful like rotten bananas.

52

There’s a wonderful sanitarium in Oaxaca for invalids. The

residents drink the milk of a goat. Banana crème pie desserts…

Corinna says something about trepanning and the time we’d laid nude under blue lights listening to Andrew Bird whistle. She says Remember when we fucked then you shoved a banana into my mouth and how sexy it happened. I did not remember that I did it until you reminded me…

She asks if this reminiscence counts as her banana fantasy. I say no. We commit to this frame for now one banana fantasy for another. New stories. I don’t know when we’ll quit. Strolling past crocus flowers and fresh laid soil…

My chest was tight. One of those L.A. nights; eucalyptus and orange

blossoms constricting lungs like a boa. The humidity hadn’t helped.

A lingering mist. Sweet suffocation. And I don’t see too well,

especially in the dark. Yes, Andrew, even at twenty-two I didn’t see

well…before this blue ailment. Every streetlamp haloed in the

moist air with a milky glow like an emulsifying Ouzo-effect spilled

in splotches across the sky. I heard the midnight chimes as I

headed toward St. Brendan’s to meet the Banana Man to get what I

needed. How I liked the chimes clanging in the night. I always lost

count by the evening: seven clangs, eight clangs, somewhere around

nine the chimes throbbed. Cathedrals don’t ring their bells like that

anymore—everyone’s too busy in the bustle. When we most need

53 them, the ancient time-telling ways have drifted into the past. Even then, on that dark street, the chimes might have been too much throbbing but for their comfortable familiarity. I was a girl on the streets. L.A.’s a city of drivers, you know; the only footsteps heard are your own clacking heels on asphalt: wondering always if every echo is your own. But in Hollywood, no girl owns her own echoes.

Constantly suspecting the shadows in the dark are specters encroaching on your heels. Specters of bad-intentions and money men—not sure which was worse. Always wishing I had a cowboy’s spurs—like in the movies—to cut and run from imaginary villains— real villains. Snakes, maybe they were, ready to curl and choke.

Cut the head off a snake and turn him into knee-high boots.

When the chimes stopped I saw three vagrants in an adjacent park. Men fighting over an unlit flare. One had his bare arm cuffed around the neck of the one with the flare. The third man had a mane of gray hair and a beard to match. He was biting the flare- holding hand of the man in the middle. They were fighting in silence. When the flare fell so did the man in the middle. Crumpled to the ground. The man with the mane picked up the flare and lit it alive. A flash of fire. A sizzle like an egg on hot cast-iron. I watched them for a while. The three men casting harsh shadows over the nighttime trees. Haunted figures with sharp lines, something out of Murnau. The initial-sizzle sort of turned to a simmer as the flame withered to a glow. The crumpled man was on

54

his feet. The three were holding each other now. I supposed the

whole scuffle was all over a flash in the pan, a bit of light.

St. Brendan’s door ajar, a chilly light emanating from it. I

opened it further. Heavy. Creaks. And then—a black cat! Ha.

Settle yourself, Andrew. There was no cat, but through the waving

light of the church I saw the Banana Man, alone, kneeled at the first

pew. There were so many rows. Heart beating triple for each one I

passed. I’d felt moments in churches before—their architecture is

designed to do precisely that: inspire sacred awe. Yet here, though

a wondrous church in and of it itself, my awe seemed to emanate

from the back of this hulking fruit in a yellow trench coat, slight

bald spot on his dome. Perhaps it was the wrought iron cross

hanging among the golden aura of organ pipes. The cross looked

old, like something Cortez might have sent along with Cabrillo, left

here when it was more important for the mules to carry home

Indian gold than Christian iron. At the edge of his pew…I’m

Catholic, so I knelt.

The Banana Man had yellow eyes and a map in his pocket

that I had to do things for. I did those things…

Cut from a tropical plant when I was still green. Broken from my bunch somewhere along the way. Now, I’m alone on the floor with my peel split-open.

Yellow armor on the ground around me. Baring my potassium fruit soul. A spider monkey’s fingers stealing my banana heart….

55

Still so easy to talk with her about absolutely nothing at all. Tell me what’s wrong with me, Corinna.

I’ll keep you here with me among the dead for a thousand and one nights…

Tania and I were down the coast of Dalmatia on a twenty-foot

boat… ship? What’s the difference, Corinna? Do you want to hear

this story? Anyways: The Dalmatian coast, twenty-foot boat, and

we were newlywed. The nuptials were in Milan—Catholic—and my

father wasn’t there. The lawyers drew up divorce papers before the

plane touched down at LaGuardia. But I loved my wife when I

married her.

We anchored about a mile out from a little town…I don’t

know the name. My ex-wife, Tania—you know her name. Née

Blixen—she was a Dane and liked to remind me of it. She always

observed little tragedies in everything. There was a bleakness about

her. For example, our boat—ship—the ship didn’t carry a gas

reservoir so most of the journey was spent sailing, which is what I

had intended. She couldn’t wait to get to Athens though and always

wanted the motor on. I told her it would happen, and the gas ran

out. Now we could get gas at basically any port or marina, but this

was before the Euro and I had only travelers’ checks and couple

thousand Lire. But I wanted to sail anyways; the wind had other

56 plans. I made a joke that Aeolus packed his bags for China—I did go to Choate, Corinna. Tania didn’t find it funny. Don’t get me wrong: we did have fun together. It’s just she had that whole

Danish bleakness about her during the days. Sunlight, or something.

Night fell and the town across the water seemed to disappear. It was cloudy and the waves were calm, slow pats on the hull. We worked through conversations—something about Patricia

Highsmith, how the Ripley movies are better than her novels. René

Clément, Wim Wenders—real auteurs. Have you seen the films? I know: I’m prone to tangents.

We had been eating oranges, fresh picked that morning. We left the skins next to us where they started to dry. I liked the smell: the citrus zest mixed with the iodine sea air. I’d never experienced it before, and it felt new—forgive me—like our marriage.

The night was warm and we lay on deck together in the nearly pitch darkness, embracing—there was only a small lantern lit beside us. There are some things you like more than fucking, you know what I mean? We were still talking movies when Tania caught sight of something on the water. She asked me what it was and I leaned over her; she tasted like an amaro. This is back when I was still drinking…well, I guess I’m back drinking now.

I leaned over Tania, chest pressed against hers, could make out something on the water. Maybe lobster traps, I thought. Then:

57 are there Mediterranean lobsters? She suggested it was Greek pacifists. At the wedding some cousin of hers had made some double entendre about Balkan cruisers and Greek pacifists. There was a coup in Greece recently. Unfunny though it was, it did put me in mind that we weren’t in Kansas anymore, so to speak.

The thing in the water was steadily gliding toward us. Tania made to put out the lantern, but I stopped her. It’s a boat, I said to her. Looked like small rowboat. I couldn’t make out the passengers except that one rowed with his back to us, the other stood with one foot on the seat, like Captain Bligh set adrift, his sight set on us as if navigating.

“Who are they?” Tania asked.

When she said it, somehow I knew who the big man was. I didn’t say. It would be clear soon enough.

We watched the rowboat make its way in and dock parallel to us. The wooden hulls creaked against each other.

“Rope,” the big man said. His voice was gruff, more severe than I remembered.

Tania looked at me, and I told her that man’s my father.

She was excited, said, “Quick, toss the rope.”

I picked up the lantern and made for the rail. On the rail was a long, slightly frayed, rope. I could barely see it. I tugged at it for a while, and it came loose. I held one end and dropped the tangle overboard into the rowboat. They were about three feet below us. I

58 watched from above as my father fumbled with the rope. He handed it off to the other man. “Pull me up,” my father said.

I gave Tania the lantern. My father held onto the rope, and I pulled. His feet slid on the ship’s slick hull. It was hard work. I felt like a whaler after he’s hooked his catch: the boat too small for the fish, but you’ve got keep it somehow, if you want to eat.

My father wheezed when he stood aboard. Looked to me then Tania, and then leaned over the side to the rowboat. The man in the boat tossed a green bottle to my father who caught it in his left hand. He waved off the man and watched the little boat row away.

The clouds receded; the moon was out and the town came back into view. My father had the green bottle—fifth of gin—in his grasp. Tania and I just sort of stood there watching my father, this big old man looking at the moon, gazing at the rowboat heading back toward the little town.

Well, this is strange thing, isn’t it, Corinna? My wife and I out to sea and my father—a man who never even read me a bedtime story, I might add—shows up in the middle of a dark night on a rowboat? I’m just telling you that I’m aware of the strangeness now, same as I was then. So I asked my father the only logical question: how did he find us? He mumbled something about a banana fantasy he’d had, which is really all he had to say. He

59 wouldn’t look away from the moon. “It’s pretty, isn’t it?” Tania said.

My father looked back at Tania, he grumbled this—I remember it verbatim: “Man landing on the moon is the most blasphemous thing to happen since we cut the Gordian knot.”

Tania looked puzzled, of course. I was starting to get angry— not at her: at my father. The shock of seeing him there, dragging him aboard, the curious distance that he fostered when he was so near—why was he here, I wondered.

I said, “Didn’t Alexander slice the knot with his sword?”

He didn’t respond.

I said, “What are you doing here?”

“I’m your father,” he said. It was a command.

Tania saved me, she reached for the bottle of gin and said that we should all have a drink.

“I don’t think we have any vermouth,” she said. “Lime juice, either.”

We had planned on shopping the next day.

“Do you have bitters?” my father said.

“I don’t think so,” Tania said.

She began to walk toward the cabin muttering something about going to check for bitters when my father told her to stop.

“Andrew,” he said. “You go.”

60

I knew we didn’t have any bitters in the cabin, anywhere on the ship. But it was a command so I grabbed the lantern and went.

As I opened the cabin door, I looked back at them. Tania had this bemused look on her face. It was the same one she wore after we had sex for the first time. My father was looking at the moon again. He looked like a silhouette with his black trench coat back turned in the moonlight.

I shut the door behind me and climbed down the four-step ladder. The bottom right screw was loose and it made the ladder wiggle on the last step.

The cabin smelled slightly of mold—not bad, just the way you’d expect. I turned up the lantern’s flame; we had plenty of oil.

The room was about ten feet long, six feet wide. There was a bed— still made—at the far end, a few chairs and a short table between me and the bed. On the right was a sort of kitchen with a thin wooden counter and a single gas burner. On the left: cabinets, a few open. I knew there weren’t any bitters, but I flipped through the cabinets anyway: baking soda, a few glasses, SPAM (not ours), dishes, silver cutlery, a shriveled black banana, and half-a-bottle of amaro. The amaro was Branca-Menta—the minty one. Tania brought it with us, but she liked the regular Fernet-Branca better, perpetually smelled like it. I never liked the stuff—hot and herbal. I liked a hint of the scent, not a deep snort of it. I grabbed the bottle of Branca-Menta

61 and a glass, drank it all at the table. It started minty sweet, ended bilious.

I drank it fast—what would you have done? I sat there for a while, turning the small dial on the lantern, watching the flame bloom and wither.

As I stood, resigned to returning topside, the boat rocked and I fell. I was drunk. The amaro was next to me and there was a drop on the floor. It occurred to me then that the amaro might have substituted for bitters. I got to my knees and stashed the bottle under the single pillow of the made bed. Why did I hide it? I didn’t want my father to think I was stupid.

I turned the lantern down and left it on the table; the moon was out; we didn’t need it. Up the ladder and onto deck.

They were on the life-vest filled bench by the port railing.

Tania was draped in my father’s black trench coat, sitting on his knee.

“What’s going on?” I said, stumbled with the rock of the boat.

They looked steady.

My father had a glass in one hand, a spoon in the other. He was pressing the orange peels Tania and I had left out to dry into the base of the glass like a pestle and mortar.

“You didn’t find any bitters?” Tania said.

When she didn’t stand I knew our marriage was over. I shook my head no, watched my father pressing the orange peels.

62

“I’m making my own,” he said.

“You can do that?” I said. “I guess you macerate the peels?

Do they have to be dry?”

“If you had bitters on board I wouldn’t have to,” he said.

I caught a bit of the breeze. I was sweating from the alcohol.

I asked Tania if she was cold. My father laughed.

I didn’t know what to do so I sat on the deck. My father

laughed again. It was like a bark; he ended it with a cough.

“It smells great,” Tania said. “The orange peels.”

She was smiling, asked me to sit with them. My father

laughed again. I stumbled to my feet, the amaro was really hitting

me like a…whatever sea simile you want, Corinna…

A bush. A banana. A bush banana. A banana bush. There’s a banana in your bush…

Be still, my banana heart…

Have a mezcal...

Have you seen my father lately, Corinna? She tells me I missed the wake, duh.

She says, Andrew, I have something in my pocket. Andrew, Corinna says. I have something in my pocket. It’s not a banana it’s that silly letter you sent to me once upon a time…

63

Dear Corinna,

I hope this letter finds you well. I’ve been in a right state…absolutely bananas!

Forgive my bluntness, but you’ve no doubt heard the news about my uncle. I shall spare you the details. At any rate, it’s been in all the papers. I know you have a great difficulty in dealing with these sordid affairs, and that we haven’t been on speaking terms, but I don’t know to whom else I might have turned.

As my uncle’s only surviving relation, I was called upon to identify his body down at the station. Due to the circumstances of his death, identification proved difficult. Do not worry, I shan’t pursue that thread any longer in the contents of this letter.

However, this ghastly preamble was necessary to describe how I came to be in possession of his personal effects. I remembered my uncle had a toe removed somehow or another while bravely suppressing the savages in one or another of the Boer wars. I instructed the coroner to remove my uncle’s left boot, and sure enough, where the little toe might have been otherwise wriggling— well, stationary in this case—there was nothing but a purple nub (in fact, the only bit of colour on the foot). But I’m not composing this letter to inform you of my uncle’s captivity heroics or the blood- drained colour of his feet...

The coroner found nestled within the cap of his boot the most curious object. A little brown cube of a thing. At first, I didn’t

64 even realize it’s true nature. It looked more like a confectioner’s caramel than anything else (it was even a bit gooey, no doubt from the foot). But when the object was handed to me I discovered that it was in fact a piece of parchment folded many times over. I, of course, stashed the object in my overcoat to later investigate, the bureaucracy of death to be dealt with in the intermission. I had a great trouble containing my curiosity as I autographed document after document. It became so that I had to demand the captain of the station cease with the whole damned affair—and you know, my dear, how I dread being executive. At home I finally was able to investigate. Well, that is to say after first bathing (I was, like

Aeneas, among the dead for however short a period it may have been) and providing myself with a generous portion of Mr. Walker’s amber restorative.

The parchment folded out into a standard letter sized map of the most fascinating yet bizarre descriptions. In the center, a great snowy mountain split-center by what appeared a sort of rapier of clouds, the lower half of the mountain descending beetling precipices to the fertile banana jungle world beneath, the upper half resting in the violet cosmos buttressed on either side by two opposing crescent moons. On that upper-half was inscribed (in seemingly another hand than the cartographer) a thin red X marking a spot. Though partially obscured beneath this red graffiti,

I could make out a sort of icy temple in the Egyptian tradition (that

65 is to say, the Egyptian tradition if one were to trade sand for ice). A mountain peaking above the clouds where X marks the spot. There, among the stars, an inviolable temple nestled in unclaimed lands.

The numerous things that could be stashed within that temple! The mysteries of creation. New hopes for knowledge and peace. Jewels and gold, perhaps. But the temple appears to be guarded by many keepers for there are several frightful designs inscribed upon the map, each of which I shall presently describe as briefly as possible in the winnowing space afforded me by this letter: A ravenous ghoul. A blind djinn. The old man of the sea.

The collected punishments of Dante’s Inferno.

The map is a colourful work worthy of the great museums of the world. Listed on the opposing side is another curiosity, perhaps more worthy of academe than the museums. In a rather trembling scrawl is written: Desperate persistence. Mortal weariness.

Recognition. The imminent justice of things.

I do not know what the devil to make of this list. Are these perhaps the mental instruments to dispel the creatures impeding the winding path to the temple? A test of wills? Surely, your return letter will chance a guess. It seems to me that this map contains the directions to the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

Eagerly awaiting your reply,

Andrew

66

It’s morning but we wouldn’t know it by the dull sky. I’m not British. The sun sets on me. The voices we use are not always our own…

Corinna and I used to eat bananas for breakfast. Brush our gums with mezcal.

My favorite thing in the world was to fall asleep and wake up next to her. Now I wake with sweat stained pillows. The more stories we tell the more I wonder why we are not together. We speak so easily…

Andrew, tell me another story before the banana dreams take me…I’m sleepy now…

Purple evening, and the stars. Bitter snow down rocky slopes.

Sidling torturous rocks, I could see the whole of the mountain: this

great blue jagged jewel protruding from the world beneath cutting

into cloudy cotton canvas. Me heavily breathing in the high

altitude. Alone except a frosty green glass bottle of mezcal. My lips

fused to the bottle after every sip. Had to lick em off. The trick: get

the smoky spit warm on my palate and drip along down to the tip of

my tongue. Lick. Lick. Lick. Slowly pull the bottle away. Never

quick. Blood seeps on the first try. The alcohol cut the risk of

infection. Mezcal warmed my muscles and eased my bones. Two

more bottles in my sack, various rations. A frozen banana in my

back pocket.

67

I want you to know why I’m scaling this mountain. A woman in a Santorini whorehouse once told to me a story about a blind man who lived on the edge of the world. She said the blind man would walk along the hot shoreline at the edge of the world every day at dawn and then again at dusk. The blind man told her (I believe her story) that he could smell the things that lived over the edge of the world. All sorts of magical beasts beyond the salty breeze. The monsters we’ve all heard tell of: Charybdis and Scylla— the stuff of Homer. To the woman’s friend, who was from Mumbai, the blind man said he could smell over the edge of the world all the demons from Ravana to the Rainbow Fish. When the Mumbai woman asked the blind man how these creatures smelled, the blind man only replied that it would be impossible to articulate into words the immaculate and terrifying sensations which he breathed into his soul twice daily. To even try to explain the smells would be as blasphemous as man walking on the Moon. Of course, I heard this story years ago. Since, not only has man walked on the Moon, but men and women have dined on the bananas planted in Lunar arcologies.

I am climbing the tallest peak on Earth for a very simple reason. I believe god is a tattooed woman, bananas in her holsters, at the helm of a flying schooner circumnavigating the Earth, drunk on smoky mezcal, falling in love with each cloud she crests. High enough to catch a glimpse…

68

Be still, my banana heart…

Corinna, speak! Don’t sleep yet. I can do better. I can tell better stories. Don’t sleep yet…

She speaks with a strained voice muddled banana pulp…

There was a boy who, when incubated within the womb, drank his

mother’s belly-magic. He was inculcated by the belly-magic with a

taste for senseless violence. A thrall to belly-magic. In his

childhood, strange things had happened. One winter, several of the

castle’s dogs roamed the snowy grounds with bloody paws. When

examined, it was discovered that the pads had been sliced off the

dog’s feet. The rumors were of hunger and the cold winds—the

dogs had done it to themselves. The banana rations had gone bad

and the one’s that hadn’t weren’t enough to go around. But the

belly-magic knew better. The belly-magic knew of the razor hidden

beneath the boy’s pillow.

Time passed, and the boy traveled far. Dalmatia and

mystical mountains. Maps and buried treasures. Lived evilly.

Never knew a woman. Never made love. News came to him that

his mother had died (grief, fall from grace). She’d been buried in

the castle graveyard under a crocus. The boy did not cry. Soon,

69 time had it that the boy wanted to become a man. Needed to

become a man. His reputation was at stake. He remembered

something his mother had told him: To become a man you must

leave and then come home. And so the boy returned to the castle.

He searched for the crocus grave. The flowers had faded. With a

mattock he exhumed the familiar tomb and drank its intimate

fluids. Blinded by belly-magic, he fled—smelled warm crocuses and

belly-magic inviting him to become a man. With quaking legs, he

planted uncertain steps, returned toward the scent, wary of

stumbles near his mother’s tender cadaver, lest he should be

brought to his knees and tempted to pluck dead flowers.

While Corinna sleeps Corinna cannot refuse…

I’ll whisper more sweet nothing stories to her. Infect her dreams. Since she left me my own dreams are rotten banana fields…

A mezcal drip might have guided me through this banana fantasy.

There’s life expected, and then there’s the life lived. Quauhnahuac,

where I live, is a monkey-see-monkey-do hellhole. I want to live,

but doom seeps over the twin mountains surrounding this town.

Banana bushes that we call banana trees (horticulture is not my

fancy, but a better career it may have made). A clay pot with

mashed too-ripe bananas and a dusty bottle of smoky mezcal. The

70

cork broke, so I pushed into the bottle. Watch the cork’s pieces

swirl, bubbles forming at a quick shake disappearing at the

meniscus. Time’s steady timpani thump bumping along. Flesh and

sprites in this great whirlpool. There’s magma in the center of the

earth, or so I hope. I hope there’s mezcal there…

I whisper The End in her ear. Did you ever love me or were you asleep the whole time?

I’m not in a position to make requests, but here’s a few:

Keep, sell, burn my stuff.

No funeral or remembrance.

If survived, euthanize.

Conveniently dispose of me.

Swallow what you can and compost my peels.

It didn’t work. Bananas just slide out of nooses.

That’s a lie.

I didn’t go through with it because I’m a yellow-bellied coward.

The note should have been longer. My uncle blew his head off with a rifle over the summer. They say he argued with his girlfriend then he said he was going to kill himself. He grabbed the rifle and ejected a bullet. Threw the bullet at the girlfriend. The barrel in his mouth. Everything on the wall. The kind of banana

71 you squeeze and squeeze until it softens in its peel. Chuck it at a wall and it explodes…

Corinna, why did you end us? There’s something wrong with me…

The time in my car in the parking lot after a dozen banana daiquiris when we kissed and talked until 5 AM. I told you that I want to love someone who loves me back. You left the next day for far away (better banana weather). I thought we ended. But then we kept going. I thought we kept it going because you wanted the same thing. Is that how the living behave?

Tell me what’s wrong with me. When will the clouds recede? Bananas need sunshine my only sunshine…

We talked on the phone and you told me what’s wrong with me. You said you could tell I’m an emotional person. I wasn’t. You’re projecting. Give me the real reason. Don’t feed me this banana fantasy…

I crafted the best Spotify playlist for you: it starts with Al Green and ends with

Sam Cooke. What I intended was clear: reconsider me. I sent you a sexy gift too: a bunch of bananas. I thought when your fingers touched the cool bananas you might moan a bit and then reconsider me…

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On Instagram I can see you’re with a photographer now. He took a photograph of you. The photographs I’ve taken are better. You know photography subjects are easy to find. Are you using the bananas with him? Why isn’t he here with you at my father’s funeral? And you’ll leave and go home and this will just be a banana fantasy I’ll tell my lonely self…

Maybe I’ll dig up a grave and find a life partner. Someone to share an Uber with…

Bananas turn brown and then black. In this graveyard where the stories we tell each other are banana fantasies but you expect truth in this dim dim world…

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CHATPER XIV

WHAT YOU FIND IN THE DRINK

I haven’t always been captain of this vessel. When we left the Thames, I was merely a man tasked with many matters. I polished things. I polished the port cannons, and I polished the starboard cannons. I even polished the chase cannons. I polished the officers’ swords, and I polished off the then Captain’s secret batch of gin. For that, I was beaten on my back in the brig, the lashings polished off with seawater.

You see, other than the Captain’s stash, the ship was dry when we left the

Thames, and dry it remained. “Work, and joy in work,” was the hook-nosed

First-mate’s hourly call, up-tempo to minutes in hard water. As we traveled with the trade winds, we worked, and some joyed in work. I found joy in the juniper daydreams of the Captain’s gin. “Praise the sea, remain on shore,” my brother had told me back in Kirkwall.

We found the seven white casks off the serpentine coast of Martinique, floating there in the aquamarine afternoon, white like ivory. Aboard the ship, the men wondered if the casks had been flung off a fleeing French galley or cast away by an overfull Spanish galleon. The oldest man aboard said the white casks had

74 been set off from the island, sea jewels for mermen and their sea hags. I didn’t care where they came from because I knew they must contain only one thing.

“Bring them up there,” the hook-nosed First-mate said, and we winched the casks up port. The first two were empty, only splintered wood. The final five were our burden. The rope creaked and the net dripped, but we got the barrels on board, set them under the mast, all five like luminescent points of a constellation. It was evening, and we the men gathered around this new star on our ship.

“Move aside, lads,” the First-mate said. He slithered through the encircled men. “Fetch the Captain, Stevens.”

With hammer in hand, the First-mate smashed hard on the nearest cask.

He did it again and two more times. On the fifth bang, the white wood broke and some of the inner libation splashed over his dress. He peeled away a plank from the top of the barrel and peered into the darkness. He sniffed at the hole, wafting the vapors to his hooked-nose. There was something chthonic about the way his hooked-nose crinkled, like he’d smelled his future and it was hell.

“At attention!” an officer called. “Captain on deck.” And so he was. The

Captain, blue robed and fair-skinned, parted the circle of sailors like Moses to the sea. He had sand in his eyes.

“What do we got?” the Captain asked the First-mate.

“Rum.”

The steady splash of waves slapped the hull. Seagulls circled the crow’s nest. Every sailor on board was silent. The captain measured the crew with a

75 single, slow swivel of his stout body. “Throw it overboard. Get it off my ship.”

And he departed the circle.

“You heard the Captain, lads,” the First-mate said. “Toss this mess back into the drink where it came from. Work, and joy in work.”

By dawn, the ship was blood-soaked and sans several sailors. At the helm, I set our course south into Spanish seas. We weren’t even to Trinidad before we polished off that entire batch of tasty tipple.

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CHAPTER XV

A FIGHT

The old man was proud to have a young wife. She had raven hair and a Roman nose. The old man had a white beard. He met her when she was a cheerleader at his grandson’s football game.

They were going to a welterweight fight, stopped at a bar down the street.

He ordered a gin gimlet for himself and a screwdriver for her. He remembered that she liked screwdrivers. She liked orange juice. She wore an orange dress and black heels. It was summer, but she didn’t drink her drink.

“When does it start?” she said.

“Ten o’clock,” he said.

“I like that fighter.”

“We’ve got time for dessert.”

She watched the television over the bar. It played highlights from the weigh-in. “He’s a winner,” she said. “The tall one. He dazzles me.”

“It’s a big menu,” he said. “You’re not drinking your drink.”

“I don’t know if I want dessert.”

“There’s an undercard; we won’t be late.”

“I don’t see the waiter.”

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“Sherbert… cheesecake…”

“I hope it’s a knockout.”

“Cannoli… macaroons…”

“You eat too much sugar,” she said. “You’re not at a fighting weight.”

He closed the menu. There were closed captions on the muted television.

One boxer shoved the other, breaking the stare-down. Some of the words were only white asterisks in a black box.

“He’s going to win,” she said.

“Cannoli,” he said. “That’s what I’m going to have. What do you want?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You didn’t drink your screwdriver. We’re not going to be late.”

“I’m tired.”

“You’ll get an espresso or you’ll fall asleep.”

“I want a cappuccino.”

“Are you going to drink it?”

“His hands are fast,” she said, looked at the television.

“Stop it. We’re not going to be late.”

The waiter arrived and they ordered. The old man told the waiter to make it snappy. “We’re not going to be late, damn it,” the old man told his young wife.

One of the boxers was carried out on a stretcher, knocked out in the championship rounds.

“I told you we wouldn’t be late,” the old man said.

“I’m tired,” his young wife said.

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“You should have drank that espresso.”

“Ernie, we need to talk.”

79

CHAPTER XVI

KING COTTON

King Cotton’s going to win it for us. He’ll have them damn Yankees begging in a month’s time. He’s all we need, King Cotton. Across the Atlantic, they want him there. King Cotton travels the world.

You’re telling me that the old kings of England and France don’t want to parlay with our King Cotton? Are you a damn Yankee fool? King Cotton’s already hugging them in sight and out.

We spend our lives in the fields with King Cotton, working the fields, the fields that the damn Yankees know nothing about. They see it on their tallies that

King Cotton’s come to town. But they don’t know the sweat we shed for King

Cotton, the gifts we give up to King Cotton. Gin never helped a man the way he helped King Cotton.

You think those damn Yankees can go picking in King Cotton’s royal gardens? They’d need damn sight more tooled hands than we’re working in those fields. You think they know how put on a discipline? How to make one of them pick-a-ninny pickers do some picking? They’d teach them something, but I know that something is nothing. You think the ox wants to know his letters? King

Cotton’s even there to wick the sweat off a negro.

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King Cotton, he’s on every back in every Podunk town from here to Cathay.

And just you know, King Cotton’s a light man, and he’s a white man. King

Cotton’s a damned Christian king out there in the open fields. I want King Cotton to meet Prester John and wipe him clean.

That’s it, King Cotton will show them damn Yankees that Georgia’s got her rights and she don’t need no Yankee daddy. We won’t even burn that damn

Yankee flag; it’s out of respect for King Cotton.

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CHAPTER XVII

MARCELLA NABOB

…It was a Sunday and I was a good protestant girl—if you can believe that, Mr.

Bzr—seventeen at the time, living in Savannah but never had a drink in my life.

I’m not from Savannah, nor even the South. I’m from Los Angeles and people in

Georgia always thought that was strange. I thought it was strange that in

Savannah, the so-called Hostess City, people would want to know why I wanted to be there. “Darling, I want’a be in Hollywood, but you came to backwood,” my friend Betty would say. She often said it loudly at parties and my face would turn red and she was in one of those moods to say it this whole Sunday.

But it was a good ride, which is something I couldn’t often say about Betty or trips through Georgia in those days. Only thing to keep me down was the smell of the Chevy, like old oil. Couldn’t take in the fresh country air. That, and the fact that the radio cut out on a fascinating story about the gangster Al

Capone’s secret vault. I wondered what a man like that would hide. Liquor?

Gold? Stolen art? Corpses? He always reminded me of an American Ali Baba with a whole mob of thieves.

The island was about two-hours south of Savannah. Betty drove and I only had to get out to push the old Chevy at the takeoff. The sun was out too, but the

82 car wasn’t sticky. Betty had these flaps that she jury-rigged over the front windows—looked like bicycle wheels cut in half—that let us keep our hair right.

Betty had red hair, but in a good way, and she drank out of a hip-flask and we sang all of Porgy and Bess together. A stage-director we knew in Savannah wanted to do an all-white-cast version and gave us the sheet music. Nothing ever came of it though… probably for the best.

We were going to the island because of Betty. She knew there were rich men there, and she was the kind of girl to try to turn herself into a rich woman in that not-altogether-peculiar way. I was to play the part of her friend, she told me before we left. When she said things like this—and she did, often—it made me wonder whether we were friends. I liked her alright, though.

We came up on the island as the sun was starting to set, and I’m not the sentimental type, but it did look marvelous: the orange glow coming behind us cast over the Spanish moss dripping like molten magma from the pale live oaks lining the drive. Jekyll Island—that’s what it was called. Should have remembered that.

The drive had what the guests later told me were cottages, but they looked like mansions to me on that first foray in. One of them, the Rockefeller’s cottage, was painted pale blue with golden shutters and window frames. It was a place I’d like to have lived. Nobody lived there though, the Rockefellers themselves barely stayed there. The thing about men in business is that they are always busy. I think that’s why Nathaniel liked them: he knew he wouldn’t have to socialize too often.

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When we reached the clubhouse a black boy ran out to us, curtseyed, said a lot of “thank ya misseses,” hopped in, and took the car away. Another black boy offered drinks and Betty took a champagne flute. I didn’t.

The place had a curious smell; I suspected that’s why the club was built there. Salty ocean breeze mixed with the sharp herbal fern of the Spanish moss.

The sky was navy now that the sun had completely receded, but it still felt bright on account of the stars and the yellow rays protruding from the clubhouse. We went in and another black boy took what we carried. I asked the boy if he was going to give us tickets and he said there was no need because he’d never forget my face. Betty told him I was from Hollywood. I remember blushing.

There was a piano and a bass playing ragtime, moving men in tails and women in their best. In all, there were about a hundred people, most held a partner with one hand, an unsteady drink in the other. Betty had replaced her champagne flute.

“Look over there,” she said, pointing at a husky fellow alone at a table. He was squinting through a monocle at what I supposed was a balance sheet. “How much you think he’s worth, Marcella?” I didn’t know and I told her so. She was starting to affect that look she had when she thought I was being unsportly. I pointed across the hall to the right of the piano. There was a card game going with a standing dealer. “Let’s check that out,” I said, hoping to compromise.

As we cut through the crowd, two young men stopped us. Betty never said a word; she put her hand in his and they disappeared into the dance. The other man offered me his hand and I took it. “Champagne?” he said and snapped for a waiter. I said, “No,” and he sent the waiter away.

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The man had thick eyebrows and a straight nose. Handsome, I thought. A saxophone had been added to the band and a fast song picked up. We danced.

The man turned me away from him, and I caught a glimpse of the group playing cards. Back to the man, his eyes were green, and I twirled again. They were playing baccarat, judging by the standing dealer and his wide wooden pallet. The man I was dancing with had that kind of close shave that makes the skin look gray as a shark. He dipped me back and, across the room at the card game, I saw the dealer drop his pallet. I didn’t twist back up but watched everyone at the table abruptly stand at the dealer’s mistake. I came up and held close to my partner. We turned and I saw over his shoulder. There was one man still seated at the game and he was drawing toward him a pile of chips so vast it made me think of Al Capone’s vault. The song ended and my partner slid his hand down my back. “How about a drink now,” he said. I left him there and went to look for

Betty, though I knew I’d be surprised if I found her still in the room. I thought I’d make a show of it and ask around anyways.

I said, “Have you seen a redhead?” and, “Girl named Betty?” to a half- dozen people. I turned around absentmindedly and found myself staring at the man. Piercing azure eyes, like what I’d always imagined the Arabian Sea was like.

“You’ve made a lot of money,” I said.

“Have I seen your friend?” he said. “Which is what you meant to say, I believe.”

I blushed, and he told me he’d seen a redhead wander outside with a young man. I’d figured as much.

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The man, who you’ve guessed by now is Nathaniel, started to walk away, but I grabbed his hand.

“How much gold is in Al Capone’s vault?” I said.

He looked bemused, and I felt embarrassed. I wondered what made me say such an absurd thing to a man I didn’t even know.

“Have a drink with me, and I’ll tell you,” Nathaniel said.

I agreed, and we made our way outside. There were mosquitoes everywhere. Nathaniel lit a cigar and took a deep puff. He blew the smoke all around me, careful to avoid my face. He did this a few more times. A waiter came and he ordered a Gin Pahit for himself and a scotch and soda for me.

Nathaniel blew the cigar smoke again and the waiter returned with our drinks, both in old fashioned glasses.

“Cheers,” Nathaniel said. We clinked and sipped. The scotch burned my throat and I coughed. I remember thinking, so this is why they call it firewater.

Nathaniel watched me over the rim of his glass and I gulped down the rest. He smiled and I coughed again. It was another minute before I caught my breath.

“My Scottish friend Andrew would say that you’re a few drams under par,”

Nathaniel said.

My eyes were watering and I felt like an invisible wind had smacked me across the face.

I didn’t care what drams meant or under par was. “Who’s your friend

Andrew?”

Nathaniel took another sip. “Carnegie,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

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The waiter came back and Nathaniel told him bring another Gin Pahit and scotch and soda and send the valet to fetch the car.

“I have to get my things,” I said.

“I’ll buy you new things.”

“What about Betty?”

“What about Betty?” he said.

Two cars pulled up. One: a silver Rolls-Royce. The other: Betty’s Chevy.

There was laughing behind us and I looked. Betty was falling out of her dress under the arm of the man she’d been dancing with. Nathaniel held my hand and whispered that I should say goodbye.

“Betty,” I said, “Betty!”

She turned around.

“Marcella,” Betty said, “She’s from Hollywood!”

Betty started to sing a tune from Porgy and Bess. She stumbled over her partner.

“Alright, Charles?” Nathaniel said to the man.

“Smashing,” Charles said, letting out a laugh.

“Be seeing you at the house soon,” Nathaniel said to Charles, “just as soon as you’ve disposed of present company.”

Charles stopped laughing. He tightened his grip around Betty and whisked her into her car. The black boy that brought it was asking a number of questions about the half-bicycle tires affixed to the front windows. Charles called him something crude and they drove off.

“You asked me how much is in Al Capone’s vault?” Nathaniel said.

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I stopped watching Betty and Charles drive away. I looked deep into

Nathaniel’s eyes. He had a power over me then. I’d be lying if I said he didn’t still, even dead. But power is a cruel confederate to have.

“How much is there, in the vault,” I said.

“Not a damn cent.”

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CHAPTER XVIII

CHARLES WINTER

…The year was 1939 and we were eating burgoo in sticky May. That’s originally an English dish—how it made its way to Louisville, I don’t know. It’s meat of any kind with a variety of spices—dreadfully inconsistent meal. But the burgoo was good and the Mint Juleps went down with it.

We, in tuxedos, were sitting in this little diner in Louisville. The people had white moon faces and were waiting for all sorts of resting pies. Ridiculous hats everywhere, of course. There we were: the famous Nate Nabob, his wife

Marcella, and me, Charles Winter, at the Kentucky Derby with a horse in it for the first heat of the Triple Crown. Nate told the waitress that Neville Chamberlain had sent me to the United States to bolster our countries’ special relationship. He thought this very funny and it was. I—with much pride, of course—had never met dear old Neville. Churchill—at least he knew what Hitler was. To my delight, I have met the old bulldog on several occasions. Clement Attlee… but I digress.

Marcella, smashing in her yellow frock, was, to Nate’s obvious disgust (the man could wear a scowl), getting smashed. The blasted woman had been a wino ever since I’d met her. I’d seen nearly every manner of drink sucked into her pipes: scotch, bourbon, brandy, etcetera. Rarely anything under eighty-proof,

89 never anything that wasn’t dark. In the diner that day she was drinking Sidecars; the juleps were passé for Mrs. Nabob. I would say that she could be pleasant without the hand of the drink up her dress, but that would suppose that she didn’t wear a hangover until the day’s first sip. But you want to hear about Nate

Nabob, not some silly girl.

I hate to be executive, but I insisted that we check on Nate’s horse before the race. Outside the diner we boarded our carriage. The sheriff had designated several officers to escort important persons about the derby and, naturally, Nate

Nabob and his party fit the bill.

Nate was more laconic than usual and a bit dour at the sight of his smashed wife. He sat in the back of the carriage and stared straight ahead.

Marcella rested under his arm. She seemed to doze off. She always smiled when she did this, as if the world of dreams could be anymore wonderful than spending the day with the great Nate Nabob and yours truly. But it shut her up for a while, long enough for the driver to recount a story. I always like to get the local flavor of a place. Well, I don’t have to tell you that, Bzr—you’re a journalist. And a damned good one… No, it’s not flattery… Well, I don’t recall specific pieces you’ve written… Very well… Yes, some water is in order. Thank you. Anyways, the driver.

The driver—he was a bit of a whippersnapper, a young buck, as you

Americans say. He told us a story about an event which had recently transpired around Louisville. The judge’s cousin had a nephew who had gotten into a bit of a row with a black boy. It seems most of the stories I’ve heard in my life about the inimitable tenants of the southern colonies revolve around some mooncalf-

90 like good ol’ boy getting into a bit of a pickle. Well, Mr. Bzr: you’re not opposed to a story within a story, are you? I thought not.

Apparently the nephew had been passing a stable with his girlfriend. She was some kind of relation to a mayor or county boss, something or other. They’d been in a carriage, “just like the one you’re in now,” said our driver. He thought this was quite the humorous observation.

As the nephew’s carriage approached the stable, a black boy on horseback sped out. The black boy threw a rock at the carriage driver. The driver was knocked from of his seat and the carriage itself.

The black boy lassoed the carriage’s horse, closed the distance, and broke off the reins. As the horse was captured, the carriage crashed onto its side. The nephew climbed out with his mangled girlfriend. Her left arm and leg were broken and she had a nasty gash on her forehead. The nephew was relatively unscathed—a bit of dust is all.

After the nephew was sure his girlfriend was out of any imminent danger, he checked on the driver. But it was for naught. The driver’s skull had been caved in: the result of the black boy’s rock, the fall, or the hoof of a horse—any or a combination. The nephew closed the driver’s eyes and placed his own jacket over the corpse.

The sheriff, always thorough near the colored areas, was passing through on schedule. He helped the nephew and the girlfriend and took the report. It was only a matter of hours before the hunting party caught up with the black boy. He had dumbly returned to the stable with both horses.

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Well, there were many trees in the vicinity and I think you know your own country’s history and needn’t me to explain the ghastly details that followed. Our driver did tell me that it went quick and that torture had been minimal on account of the sheriff’s benevolence.

Nabob had listened to the story in silence and I remember him musing precisely this: “Charles, why do you think I spend my life acquiring capital?” I cracked wise about how it was to keep me on as his friend. But I knew it was something else. With money, Nate could buy isolation. Not racial segregation— he wasn’t particularly racist. He’d never lynched anyone, to my knowledge. But splendid isolation from any sort of troubles or ne’er-do-wells that he might have come in contact.

We arrived at the stable where Nate’s horse was being readied for the race. The place smelled like shit and I remember stepping in some. Marcella had snorted at this—she’d been relubricated by a stableman’s bourbon. Nate laughed too and said that it was good luck for him. “Break a leg,” I quipped as I saw Nate’s colt being led into our hay-and-dirt-floored reception area.

The colt was an onyx black thoroughbred that betrayed a hint of gold when touched by the sun leaking through cracks in the wooden roof. Magnificent beast. Strong and solid.

The rider met us there too. He was a slender thing, waifish, early twenties,

I think. Whether this was the influence of his nickname, Ichabod Crane, he did look rather boney and sallow in his face. His voice was high-pitched and I

92 imagined him singing soprano but with that pronounced drawl that so many

Southern Americans have.

“Hallo, sur,” the jockey said.

Nabob was in a good mood and shook the jockey’s long-palmed hand.

“Is that your horse?” Marcella said. She was loud and Nate nodded at a stableman to escort her outside so as not to spook the horse.

“Two-minutes are too long,” Nate told the jockey who nodded in agreement.

Nate ran his hand along the horse’s shiny mane. The animal stomped its hooves and Nate recoiled.

“Charles,” Nate said. “Go check on Marcella.”

I never liked to be alone with Marcella. I never liked to be given orders by

Nate.

When I left Nate and the jockey they were talking in hushed voices.

Outside, Marcella was drinking with a black boy. At the stable he had the position of—I don’t know what the proper term would be… chamber groom, I suppose. He cleaned up shit, essentially. Don’t we all, Mr. Bzr?

“Charlie,” Marcella said—squawked, is more accurate—“You’re out here with Robbie and me. Falling out of favor?”

She laughed and took another sip. The black boy Robbie didn’t but instead stood up and said, “Sorry, mistah Charlie, sir. We just having some fun out here with the nice lady and all. My ‘pologies.”

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Marcella laughed again. She liked to do that to me. I always thought she tried to lord over me her… well, that’s not important. First wives really come last, don’t they?

I knew getting into a row with Marcella would have reflected poorly on me, and Nate had sent me to check on her, so I turned on the black boy Robbie.

“Have you heard the recent news?” I said.

“Whas that, mistah sir?” he said.

“The one they strung up a few nights ago. From the description I’d heard, he probably looked a bit like you.”

Robbie kicked his feet. He looked at Marcella. She wasn’t laughing anymore.

“Well,” I said. “Did the departed bear a resemblance to you?”

Robbie picked up his shovel and said, “I needs to be getting back to work, sir.”

I grabbed the shovel from his grip and tossed it a few yards away. I could smell the whiskey on his breath. His irises were like his chestnut skin and black hair had been combined into a single pigment.

“He does look like you,” I said. “Bet you two were cousins.”

“Stop it, Charlie,” Marcella said.

I stepped back from Robbie.

“You’re right, Marcella,” I said. “Go about your business, boy.”

Then something happened which I didn’t expect. Robbie began to cry.

“Was my cousin, sir,” Robbie said.

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He covered his face with his big hands. His nails were crusted with brown dirt but the tips of his fingers were pink as swine.

“What do you mean?” I said.

I wanted to put a hand on his shoulder and apologize. I went to retrieve his shovel instead. My loafers were already covered in shit, a bit more wouldn’t matter.

When I picked up the shovel I saw Marcella was comforting Robbie. She had her arm around his shoulders. He was telling her this:

“…horse got out of the stable. My cousin, he didn’t mean for it to happen.

Was that black one in there yous three is here looking at. He tried to get him back and he did. But the horse ran right into that man’s carriage. When my cousin got there it was all he could do to pull them out of the carriage, make sure they wasn’t dead. He climbed on the carriage horse and went after the black one.

Knew it was worth a lot of money; told me when he got back. But they did him in.

He’s still on the tree. I see him every day. We was close.”

I struck the shovel into the ground and let it stand there.

“Come on, Marcella,” I said. “Let’s go. You don’t want Nate to see this.”

She wasn’t drunk enough to refuse to believe that.

“Sorry, Robbie,” I said as I took Marcella by the hand and led her back inside.

Nate and the jockey were huddled together. When they saw us they broke apart.

Nate’s bowtie was undone.

“Marcella, darling,” Nate said, “could you see to this?”

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She stepped in front of Nate, her muddy shoes touching the tips of his own. She fixed his bowtie. He was taller than her and stared into her hair. She focused on the bowtie.

“Looks like we’re in for a win,” Nate said.

Robbie was outside shoveling manure when we left the stable.

The fastest two minutes in sports went just like that.

Nate’s horse broke a leg out of the gate and he threw his Mint Julep to the ground where the silver cup chimed with each bounce on the hard surface.

Marcella told him Robbie’s story.

“The less loose horses around, the safer for all of us,” Nate said.

The mint leaves from the julep were in a straight line leading to the edge of the observation balcony.

“Can’t put that one to stud now,” Nate said.

By the time we had made it down to the track the horse had already been put down. It’s a curious thing to see a horse laying on its side, static. Its muscles don’t just dissolve; they’re still there outlining bones and adding curves to the black sheen of hair. It’s the tongue that betrays the animal to death. That long, pink tongue hanging over a row of teeth and pointing to the ground. Whoever had put the horse down must have given it a handful of grass to eat. There was a trail of mashed grass leading to the animal’s still throat. Maybe a last meal calms a horse’s thrashing. Maybe this one was just ready to go without struggle. It was only when I looked at horse’s mangled leg that I traced my eyes up to fixed my gaze on the bullet hole through the horse’s heart.

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“Is that faster than a shot to the head?” Nate said, eyes wide.

97

CHAPTER XIX

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

For the next two hours I’m going to tell you the sordid tale of the doomed House of Atreus. Our story begins with the lecherous king Tantalus who served his own son Pelops to the gods of Olympus in a feast…

The radio distorted and I shut it off. On the table was a bottle of brandy and its corked top seemed to point at Erin. She had taught me how to drink cognac. You needed a special glass called a snifter. Its fortified wine at about eighty proof, so it can be tight and heady. Turn the snifter, which looks like a short wine glass, on its side. Pour in the cognac. This was Cordon Bleu by Martell, from the

Borderies region in France. It’s only about a hundred-thirty bucks—so it’s nice, but not so nice that it makes you uncomfortable to drink. When the horizontal drink reaches from stem to lip then check the color. It’s supposed to look right.

Erin never adequately defined right—it’s innate, she said. The Cordon Bleu was glowing amber. I could see Erin’s blue eyes through the glass above the cognac.

When we first met outside of a Target it was raining. In a brilliant bit of gallantry I offered her my arm and the shelter of my umbrella. Right? I asked if

98 she’d ever heard that song “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” She said she hadn’t heard it nor had she been crying. We’re just friends though. Right?

I turned the snifter vertical and held it with my palm, the stem between my middle and ring fingers. The drink had legs—this was called viscosity. I swirled it, the amber liquid like a cyclone riding the curved crystal. I didn’t want to sip it yet. The heat from my open palm was good for it, supposed to warm it up.

On the coffee table between us was a bottle of filé powder. We ate gumbo here last night.

“You ever think about cannibalism,” Erin said.

“You mean like the Donner party?”

“I mean for leisure.”

I swirled the cognac then tasted it. The alcohol was overpowering. Erin would have told me to give it some more heat and a few more turns. She knew about a lot of stuff. She must have known something about cannibalism to have brought it up. I guess I had never really thought it about it before.

“How do you feel about cannibalism?” she said.

It made me feel sick, like a troll’s warty fist was clenching my stomach.

My wrist was tiring. I put down the snifter. She told me once that cunnilingus was like a meaty feast to her. I had asked if that wasn’t the name of a

Hemingway novel. She told me the book was called A Moveable Feast.

Cannibalism, to me, seemed unnatural—an affront to God. That’s what I told her.

“But what about transubstantiation?” she said. “You know—ingesting the body and blood of Christ?”

99

I picked up the snifter, gave it a swirl from my wrist, and took a real drink.

I love Erin’s blue eyes.

“I’d eat a person for you,” I said.

She looked at me deep in the eyes like she wanted fuck my brain. I finished the snifter. The cognac still wasn’t ready, and I felt like that was why it burned like embers in my belly. She taught me something.

Erin stood up and grabbed the white and blue labeled bottle. I loved her figure: Greek curves and palm sized tits under blood red lips. She approached me, swaying to a silent song, but I felt like I could hear the music too. There was a zither—I knew that. I was hard—she must have known that.

I reached out with my hand and she put hers into it. She held on tight. I thought she was leaning in for a kiss. She whacked me hard over the head with the bottle of Cordon Bleu.

My vision went blank and I let her hand go.

Tried to stand up.

Grabbed the top of my dome. It felt wet.

Another crash across my face and I was out.

A few hours later I smelled cooking. It smelled curious. Didn’t smell bad, mind you… just curious.

100

CHAPTER XX

10/23/1965/CHARLES COUNTY/MD

You have demons so you stare at that man who killed without reason who just happened to feel that way without warning who yells with anguish then stares straight ahead right into your eyes as the electric chair burns his nerves and bubbles the spit on his lips and you smell the hair on his head incinerated to only a smell as he closes his eyelids but you know his eyes are melting to jelly within their sockets and you wonder how much mercy the chair imparts on the clipped-winged creatures sizzling in his skull.

101

CHAPTER XXI

A.D. 69, ROMA

Your first day on the job. Red dawn lined like lyre strings across the Gemonian

Stairs.

Seventy-three slick steps made of Libyan stone. Straight-shot descending from the Capitoline Hill into the Forum. Untravelled by the living.

Sure, you’ll get a dog on the steps every now and then. Usually at night.

They don’t come here under the watch of day. Emaciated, mangy. Searching for brown bones and putrid delights. A longbow to send the dogs barreling down to the house of death. But you don’t use it unless you’re commanded. Too much too add dead dogs to your insomnia. You’re a poor shot anyways.

From above, at the top of the Stairs, you watch men in tunics bustle about down in the Forum. Morning business, grilled flamingo snacks. Passersby must contemplate the Stairs. Think about the lingering flies that only seem to hover, never touch down in the sticky. But their eyes don’t linger long.

Solider, you’ll learn to love life on the stairs, says Dion. He’s old, speaks like it. A harsh sage. Walks with a limp. Attached to his belt, his weapon: a papyrus-fiber rope. It’s strong enough to tug a trireme, he says. He would know, his tour ended when his ship ran aground in the rocks around Capri. Saved most

102 of his crew, but his leg suffered something in the water. The source of the limp.

A source for stories.

Dawn on the Kalends. They’ve brought you a prisoner. A fat lip, purpled cheeks. You never ask what’d he do. But you always tell yourself a story in your head. For this one, he’d committed the crime in the middle of the afternoon. An hour when only a certain type of premediated deviousness can occur. For days, the man had watched the marble arched entrance to the House of Vestals. Every day, at the same afternoon hour, the youngest virgin travelled barely a foot from the temple. Blue eyes the only color on her white robed, pale-skinned self.

Released a white bird from her tiny hands. You’ve seen these birds flap past the

Stairs every day of the three months you’ve been stationed here. Except yesterday.

Today, the story helps as Dion hands you his papyrus-fiber rope. Burned ends prevent fraying. You think about the fiction in your head as you pull tight the rope around the prisoner’s neck. Concentrate. The fleeting story. You’ve got a wife with blue eyes at home. You can’t meet those eyes anymore. You wonder if her eyes have changed colors. You let go, nearly fall as dead-weight tugs you forward. The Stairs ahead. Kick the body down the Stairs. Wonder if your own eyes have any color left.

103

CHAPTER XXII

AT RONCEVAUX PASS ON THE FIFTEENTH OF AUGUST IN THE YEAR

SEVEN HUNDRED AND SEVENTY EIGHT

Roland blew his horn and brains oozed from his ears and eye sockets. Near death. His sword Durendal at his side.

Primal sounds. Vibrations within his body. Faint echoes across the pitch.

Battle wages. Trample sunflowers, yellow cum red by evening’s blood.

Organs and the stench of emptied bowels. Dead Franks. His friends. Dead

Saracens. His enemies.

Roland, who blew his horn, held off a thousand Muslim warriors, chopping them down in the fields. But now he’s cut down beneath an oak tree, body expiring, expelling all its fluids.

The earth thumps. The remaining men hammering the world with each fall to the house of death.

Or are those Veillantif’s hard hooves breaking stones, coming to carry

Roland to Paradise? Is that Olivier’s ghost astride that noble steed? A mirage in the moonlight. Roland watches the rider dismount, holds Durendal close. His dream. Olivier is dead—impaled; this dream unreal.

104

A Saracen speaks. Roland reads his lips. Perhaps he understands the foreign tongue. Expressions understood.

“I’ll take his sword home,” the Saracen says. “Men will pay to touch it.”

“Durendal,” Roland says.

The Saracen laughs. “He gives it a name.” Others laugh. “I will melt it for harem doorknobs.”

The others stink of horses and sweat-bended leather.

Roland clutches Durendal’s golden hilt. The men could not know the relics that lay within, how their pulse revivifies Roland.

“Hold there,” Roland says

The men laugh again.

An archangel flashes from Paradise. Enters Roland. Bound together, their joined-spirit cuts down the others with Durendal’s sharp edge. Heads roll to

Roland’s feet. Hot blood pooling in the muck. Roland faints, give up the archangel.

It was an archangel that gave the sword to Roland’s uncle, Charlemagne— the King of the Franks. The archangel said that the sword contained a hair from the severed head of Saint Denis. Charlemagne entrusted the sword to Roland.

Durdendal must remain in Christendom or be destroyed, said the Frankish King.

But the sword known as Durendal proves indestructible. Roland hides it beneath his dying body alongside his split olifant horn.

Roland gives up the ghost.

105

Charlemagne, Roland’s uncle, arrives with ten-thousand men. He faints twice at the sight of Roland’s dead body. Then, the ten-thousand strong army of

Franks faint in unison becoming confederates of Charlemagne’s immense grief.

106

CHAPTER XXIII

GOING CLEAR

Sidetracked the evening I planned to Go Clear. My wife and I in our matching white leather sneakers searched along painted-yellow parallel lines on the asphalt. Sequoias along the road like vertical jail bars. Navy sky, handfuls of stars. We were searching for my wife’s iPhone. The device ejected from the car somehow or another. The only pictures we have of the baby are on the phone, my wife said. For a moment, I was a father. A fleeting moment. But that’s behind me now. Behind me with the iPhone. / Before the baby was born, we had a habit of leaving things around the house. Things that shouldn’t be around infants. Plastic grocery bags. BIC lighters with the safety guards pried off. We never thought anything of it. So, when the baby was born, we still didn’t think anything of it. Our baby crawled toward a scissor left on linoleum. Creeped like a taxied space shuttle piece along the road toward its launch pad. Countdown. Exploded shuttle never left its platform. Miscellaneous tubes, freeze-dried strawberry ice cream, the astronauts themselves. Blasted to red-yellow specks. Shrapnel and stardust. / By starlight, we searched for my wife’s iPhone. It had to be somewhere around here. I said, We’ll find it. Checked the road. Scavenged blue blades of grass. Hands and knees. Rocks, blue too. Looked for touchscreen reflected starlight. Just a glint, please. She said, We’ll find it the last place we look. We didn’t. She should have kept the baby photos in The Cloud if she wanted to remember our baby. Night-clouds like old gray fingers crossed the blue. Stars died because clouds consumed them. Take me away, flying saucers.

107

CHAPTER XXIV

I WAS JUST A BOY

Father was gone a week. Mom said he was on business. Across the street they said he sure was on business.

Only by chance we found him. Tabby cat descended into the sewer, wouldn’t stop meowing. Meowed until Mom called city hall.

Noontime, firemen came in street clothes and popped the lid, biggest fireman with biceps like oranges. Told me I’d have some like that in due time.

“Going to get kitty,” the fireman said. Smiled when he slid the lid aside, changed when he saw the frayed knot tied to the grating. “Son, get to your mother and let me work.”

Wind picked up, carried that sewer smell: metallic water and rot.

“Here, son,” Mom said, my face tucked into her palm.

She covered my ears, but I heard the fireman: “Don’t let him look.”

Closed-casket funeral; women I’d never met cried.

St. Paul’s Cemetery wouldn’t take Father; Mom cremated him.

An urn sits in storage next to a cardboard box of laserdisc films.

The tabby cat isn’t housebroken, but I love him.

108

It feels good pouring the hot pot over its flesh.

109 CHAPTER XXV

DIG MY GRAVE WITH AN ACE OF SPADES

Thursday morning at Cask’s Liquor Store, foggy dew on the windows curled edges of advertisements for misters George Dickel and Johnnie Walker. Old friends,

Zbig thought.

Zbig was behind the counter approaching fifty with yellowed nails. His graying blond hair came to sharp point at his widow’s peak. This point was exacerbated on both sides by a deeply receded hairline. The point motif repeated on his long, straight nose and the edges of his thin lips. He had blue eyes. If you had one too many he looked something like a Polish vampire.

He had his blue eyes on a thirty-something woman in leather boots to her knees taking her time in the rum aisle. Cask’s itself was a diagram like a Roman numeral III with serifs: three aisles for rum and tequila, gin and brandy, and whisky. The vodka and a few shelves of liqueurs were placed around the perimeter. The register was up front as was a glass display case for the fancy stuff. The woman bent over and out of sight. She’d done this for nearly a quarter-hour, appeared in and out of sight as her hands glided among bottles of gold and white rums.

The satellite radio tuned to the next song. In the mornings, Zbig usually only served old winos and liked to leave the radio on the old folk station. 110 Thursdays were reserved for murder ballads. The best tin stars chirped through with high treble: Blind Willie McTell, Leadbelly—all the greats. From the yodeling, Zbig knew this was Jimmie Rodgers’ first “Blue Yodel”—the one about shooting poor old Thelma because that woman made a wreck out of him.

The door jingled and two jokers walked in wearing dirty old polo shirts.

Zbig knew the two—Ezzard and Marcus—and the three had rapport. Ezzard nodded at Zbig. Marcus picked at his purple gums between canine and incisor teeth with a red Swiss Army knife. They approached the glass cabinet display and cataloged the contents with mumbled lips.

“He ain’t never got it,” Ezzard said.

“You’re right,” Marcus said, leaned on the cabinet.

“Watch it, boys,” Zbig said. “Tell him to watch it, Ezzard.”

“Ease up, Marcus,” Ezzard said.

Marcus did, resumed picking at his teeth with his pocket knife. He looked down the rum aisle at the lady in black boots, winked at Zbig, leaned on Ezzard.

“You’re right,” he said.

“But it ain’t like you’d be wrecking anything that’s worth it,” Ezzard said.

“You’re right,” Marcus said.

“Zbiggy-boy,” Ezzard said, “you never have any of the good stuff. I want cognac; I want armagnac.”

“How many years have you been coming in here?” Zbig said.

“About ten. But…”

“How many times have we played poker?”

“I can’t even count the times.”

111 “And how many times have I told you how liquor works in this state?”

“Come on, now…”

“Well liquor doesn’t work in this state. The State sends in what they want, when they want. I never know until it gets here. Hell, they even decide which bottle goes on what shelf.”

Ezzard sighed, hands on his hips. “You might have mentioned it.”

Zbig said, “I have no power—barely scratch a dollar myself. Look at the shirt I’m wearing.”

Marcus laughed. “You’re right.”

Ezzard said, “I just want something nice to sip on.”

“Hold up just a minute,” Zbig said. “Now that we’ve established how many years you’ve been coming in here, when have I ever seen you buy anything other than a bottle of E&J? Let me think about that for a moment… no, don’t give me that look—you know it’s true. You come in all the time running lip about how I don’t have Prunier, Gautier—whatever they’re called—and any of the good

Rémy’s. You wouldn’t even know how to sip them.”

“I might know if I had the chance,” Ezzard said.

“You’re right,” Marcus said, puffed his chest.

“Grab a bottle of E&J and be done with it,” Zbig said. “No wait—stay here.

Matter of fact, take this one. Go on, take it. I keep a few back here at the register because I want to get you out my store as fast as I can.”

Ezzard looked around the store; he spotted the woman in the rum aisle.

“You know you got other customers.”

“You’re right,” Marcus said.

112 “Get over here and pay for this,” Zbig said.

Ezzard walked to the counter, Marcus at his heels. “I might learn how to drink something nicer if you didn’t always take my money. We playing poker tonight?”

“Pay for this, and then I’ll answer that,” Zbig said.

“Get this for me, Marcus,” Ezzard said.

Marcus said, “You’re right,” and handed over a few bills.

“You need I.D., Zbig?” Ezzard said.

“Don’t fuck around,” Zbig said. “Game’s at 11:30. I’ll see you boys then.”

The woman from the rum aisle was in line behind them.

“You’re right,” Marcus said.

Ezzard spotted the woman. “Mam,” he said.

They left the store with a few glances back at the woman and a couple winks at Zbig who busied himself with the register. The radio tuned to “Banks of the Ohio,” the Clarence Ashley and Doc Watson version. Zbig heard the bells on the door chime and knew Ezzard and Marcus were gone.

“Are you ready for me?” the woman said, slid an amber bottle of rhum agricole onto the counter.

She had lime-rind eyes and wore her black hair up. This revealed a long neckline that curved into her frame like sandy Caribbean shores disappearing into the horizon. There were a few freckles on her nose.

“Margarita,” she said.

“You’ll want tequila for that, not rum. I can recommend El Tesoro…”

“That’s my name,” she said, slid her passport next to the rhum agricole.

113 Zbig examined the document. The cover was red with two intertwined birds—eagles, maybe. The gold text read Russian Federation. He opened it.

Margarita Gamboa. She was 31—five-and-a-dime younger than him. She was that rare kind of woman that photographed well in the face of bureaucracy. Zbig laughed at himself for thinking it.

“I didn’t need I.D.” he said. “You’re Russian then?”

“Cuban,” she said.

He searched for it in her accent. “All I hear is Cleveland—Shaker Heights.”

“Did you expect Ricky Ricardo?”

She was good about eye contact.

“You’re Polish then, Zbig?” she said. “That’s your name right? Short for

Zbigniew? I heard you talking with the boys.”

“That’s a good bottle of rum you’ve picked out. I’ll tell you the difference between rhum agricole—like this one here—and regular old rhum industriel…”

“Comes from French islands and it’s distilled from sugar cane, not molasses. I know.”

“Because it’s French they can label it…”

“V-SOP, X.O.—I know.”

He picked up the bottle and checked the label: Clément. Rhum Vieux

Agricole from Martinique. V.S.O.P.

“This is the part where I ask if I can help you with anything else,” Zbig said, brown bagged the bottle.

“You got any Havana Club in the back?” she said.

“You of all people know there’s no Cuban rum in the States.”

114 She smiled. Thick lips.

“Everything’s out front?” she said.

“You see it all.”

She paid for the rhum agricole and started toward the door with the brown paper bag under her left arm. Zbig watched her, tried to think of something clever to keep her here, came up with nothing. The bells on the door chimed against each other. She turned back; one black booted leg propped the door open. Honking cars and exhaust drafted Cleveland into the liquor store drowning out the radio’s murder ballads.

“Invite me to your poker game,” she said.

“Okay,” he said.

“11:30, right?”

“It’s here. I set up a table back by the gin.”

He pointed to the spot. When he looked back, she was gone.

Zbig checked the empty closet of his studio apartment, hoped he had something with even a dash class to wear.

He had locked up Cask’s at 8:00 P.M.—early. In the past he would have had his wife, Alice, stay on in the interim between his leaving and poker. She had let him play poker on Thursday nights, said a man needed a night off a woman.

She died two years ago (morning jog, drunk driver) and Zbig kept the game going in memory of her. There used to be more players; Ezzard and Marcus were the only two that stayed. Had his wife’s death turned the tone of the game? Were the others just busy? Was it because he stopped drinking? He hadn’t been with a

115 woman since she died. He loved her from behind the same morning she ran out of his life. Today, Zbig brought home a bottle of Black Label blended scotch and left it by the dirty dish filled sink.

He left the closet and checked the pile of clothes by his unmade bed. He thought about turning on a light but decided the street light peaking in through the bent venetian blinds above the head of his bed might make the clothes seem cleaner. It didn’t. Ezzard and Marcus wore polo shirts today—is that what he should wear? Margarita kicked into his thoughts, her black boots knocking those boys out. She was something else. Zbig picked up an old concert t-shirt—the

Traveling Willburys—and a pair of black jeans. That never goes out of style, right?

He sat on the end of his bed and looked at the clock on the stove: 8:12. He could go through the pile of receipts on his kitchen table. That would give him a headache. He could call some of his old poker buddies, see if he could round up somebody cooler than Ezzard and Marcus. He had some phone numbers in a rolodex somewhere in this apartment. Would Margarita like that? He didn’t even have a phone; he used the one at Cask’s for calls. It was still 8:12 on the clock; he watched it turn to thirteen. He could do the dishes. He saw the bottle of Black Label next to the sink. Why did he bring it home? He’d never been a drunk or anything like that. Never violent, never nothing—fun, people had said.

He hadn’t drank since Alice out of duty: alcohol had killed her. He walked over to the sink and picked up the bottle.

Two-thirds the way up the bottle before the rectangle curved into a triangle to the cap, a diagonal label, black but edged in gold, was affixed across

116 the clear, amber filled bottle. Near the bottom was another black and gold label, this one with the 12-year old age statement. The Johnnie Walker striding man was embossed on the bottle between the labels. He was a top hat and tails wearing, cane swinging man who walked wherever he chose to roam. He’d read the company’s slogan—“Keep Walking”—in the brand sheets that came with bottle shipments. The data in those sheets was supposed to inform whoever was selling the liquor in some of the advertising details. This helped them sell the product. In a way, Zbig thought, he himself was a striding man—or he could be one if he tried. He looked at the clock: 8:15. Keep walking, he thought.

Zbig grabbed a short glass out of the sink, splashed some water inside then tossed the water out. He opened the Black Label bottle and poured a few fingers into the glass. He smelled it: it smelled good. He opened the freezer: no ice. He opened the fridge, found a half of a half-gallon carton of 2% milk. He checked the date: it read yesterday. He squeezed open the folded top, whiffed the milk, then poured it into the glass of scotch just shy of the rim. Zbig put the carton of on the counter and closed the fridge. Her stirred the drink a few revolutions with his index and middle fingers, smelled it again and drank. This was Dizzy Gillespie’s drink, he thought, wished he had a stereo.

Zbig crossed the room and sat on the end of his bed. The clock on the stove read 8:30. Until 11:01, he drank the rest of that glass and poured several more, alternating between sitting and laying on his bed. He thought about

Margarita through most of it.

117 In her long-fingered and azure nailed left hand, she slid a green twenty-five dollar poker chip between index and thumb then clicked it back into the multi-colored stack in her palm. There had to be three-hundred dollars circling in and out of those fingers, quadruple that in the cut rock on her ring finger.

“Margarita,” Zbig said, “are you staying with me?”

She cycled through the chips some more. Red ten-dollar chips, white fives, and a few green twenty-fives. She stopped at a black hundred, tossed it in the pot. The black chip landed on top, king of the mountain.

Around the table, Ezzard and Jim folded—rather, Margarita folded them.

“Baby,” Ezzard said, “you don’t play for fun.”

“You’re right,” Marcus said.

The Hold’em spread started with the Ace of Hearts and ended with the

Queen of Clubs. Between that, a few low cards: clubs and diamonds. Read it like this: you had to have something to play this hand. Zbig had a pair of Jacks.

Ezzard said, “Why you let her wear sunglasses, Zbig? I try to come in here wearing them you throw a fit.”

“You’re right,” Marcus said.

Zbig never did allow sunglasses at his games, but this was first time a woman played.

“Grab some drinks, boys,” Zbig said.

“I know you want some alone time with the lady here,” Ezzard said.

“You’re right,” Marcus said.

118

Ezzard said, “I feel like drinking gin,” and started cataloging nearby bottles as he ran his fingers across the labels. “Tanqueray, Bombay, Nolet… Plymouth.

Marcus, that ain’t London Dry?”

“You’re right,” Marcus said.

“We’re in the middle of a hand here,” Zbig said. “Why don’t you check out the brandies a few aisles over?”

“Now we’re talking,” Ezzard said.

As they left, Zbig heard Marcus say, “You’re right.”

Margarita had removed her sunglasses and set them beside her high stack of chips. In her left hand were two blue bicycle-deck backed cards. In the right: a rocks glass of aged Guyanese rum, neat. She sipped it, set it on the table.

“We’re still playing?” she said.

“I paid to see you,” he said.

She laid her cards on the table. “I fold.”

Zbig took a drink from his Black Label and milk. Ezzard and Marcus laughed in the distance. She smiled at him.

“What do you mean ‘you fold?’” he said.

“Maybe I’m done playing with you?”

“You don’t want to play anymore? I don’t… why are you laughing at me?”

“I have somewhere to be.”

“It’s barely midnight. It’s still light out, look at the windows.”

“Streetlamps sleep in the sun.”

She reached into her pocket and retrieved a black sharpie. On the blue backs of her two cards she wrote something.

119 “Buenas noches,” she said, stood.

Zbig stood, too, and watched her walk past bottles of gin and disappear out the aisle. The door’s bells chimed. He sat and took another sip of Black Label.

Her own chips and the sizable pot laid there on the table. Should he count her winnings for her? Should he take the pot?

“You’re right,” Marcus laughed.

Ezzard laughed, “I am right.”

They both had a bottle of E&J in each hand, one arm around the other having a good old time together.

“Shoot,” Ezzard said. “Where she go?”

Zbig sipped again.

“Well if you ain’t want her, Zbiggy-boy…”

“Shut the fuck up,” Zbig said.

“If she flags my train, I’m gonna let her ride.”

“You’re right,” Marcus said.

“Grab your chips, boys,” Zbig said.

“We ain’t done playing yet are we?”

“It’s getting late.”

“It’s barely midnight.”

“You’re right.”

Zbig snapped his head back, emptied his glass.

Ezzard said, “There’s something written on these cards…”

“You’re right.”

120 “Give them over here,” Zbig said, stood up fast and took them. “Fuck off you two.”

“We ain’t counted our winnings yet!”

“Take all the chips,” Zbig said, pocketed the two cards.

“Alright,” Ezzard said, filled his shirt with chips.

Marcus did the same and Zbig ushered them down the gin aisle, chips clanking.

“You’re right,” Marcus said as the bells on the front door chimed.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Zbig said, turned the lock on the door.

Through the window Zbig locked eyes with Ezzard. The rush settled with the locked door. The banter was over and Ezzard and Marcus had left his world.

Marcus mouthed, “You’re right,” through the glass. Holding their poker chip filled shirts up with one hand each, the two men toasted their bottles of E&J with a silent clink and drank deep. They stumbled off into the lamp lit dirty streets of

Cleveland. He sat on the doormat and then laid onto his back. They would come back tomorrow, Zbig knew that.

His head spun with that old familiar falling vertigo that he hadn’t felt since

Alice died. He rubbed his eyes, then his face. He slid his hands into his pockets.

The two cards were in his clammy right, he held them in front of his eyes. On the blue-backed design, the first read: 8 A.M. Holiday Inn. The second: Room 203.

Margarita. The cards smelled sugary vanilla, just like fine rum. He dropped the cards and passed out.

Zbig awoke at 8:03 the next morning next to the Queens of Hearts and

Spades.

121

The Holiday Inn had all its halogen hall-lights on when Zbig rapped on the yellow door of number 203 at 8:44; cracked eyes stung like dry ice on his lashes. Before he left Cask’s, he had pissed in the waste-basket under the counter, slapped his face several times, and rinsed his mouth with over-proof rum—spit the excess into the same waste-basket. Neck, back, all of it sore from the liquor store floor.

Zbig wondered why he’d bothered to come to this hotel room; he couldn’t get it up, body wrecked like this. He knocked again.

Margarita opened the door. Her lime eyes said hello, but her voice said,

“You look terrible.”

Zbig leaned into the doorway and fell into Margarita’s arms. She held him up.

“Can I kiss you?” he said, slumped his head into the nape of her neck. His head slid to her armpit. He saw she was still wearing knee-high black boots.

She walked backward, carried him, and kicked the door shut with a black booted foot, maneuvered him into the bathroom.

“Give it a minute,” she said, opened the shower curtain and turned the knob to red.

In a minute the water steamed.

“Can you stand?” she said.

Zbig managed an, “affirmative,” and he stripped his clothes and stumbled into the shower stream, lifted one heavy leg into the tub then the next, steadied himself with the metal handicap rod. Meanwhile, Margarita had left the room.

122 It’s strange, Zbig thought, how a wet shower could dry out his hungover body. Zbig poked out his tongue, and water cascaded over it, streamed to his feet.

He lapped some it into his mouth, slowly swallowed.

Sometime along the way he drifted off, leaned on the shower wall, nodded off…

Zbig came to when he felt a hard pressure on his shoulder; a hand squeezed it to the bone. “That’s too much,” he said.

“You’re right,” Marcus said.

Zbig’s feet went out beneath him and he fell into the tub, hit his head hard.

Marcus was on top of him with the blade of his Swiss Army knife pressed into

Zbig’s cheek. He heard Ezzard from the other room yell, “Bring him out here.”

Marcus dragged Zbig out of the shower and dropped him onto the floor.

Zbig tried to stand but his wet feet slid on the linoleum floor. His skin burned when dragged across the carpet. Marcus threw him into the bed next to

Margarita and a black briefcase. Zbig covered his privates with a pillow, but

Marcus grabbed the pillow and threw it away.

Everything seemed to slow down, nobody talked. Morning sunlight blasted through window. Ezzard nodded at the drapes and Marcus shut them.

“What the fuck?” Zbig said when he couldn’t take the silence anymore.

Margarita had her head in her hands. Her black-booted legs were out of sight; they hung over the opposite side of the bed.

Ezzard flung two playing cards at Zbig. Zbig knew without looking which two they were.

“What’s in the briefcase?” Ezzard asked Zbig.

123 Zbig looked over at it. There were dial locks on each brass clasp.

“What’s it to you?” Zbig said.

Marcus walked over to Zbig, slapped him across the face then stabbed him the bicep with the Swiss Army knife.

“Take the fucking the thing; I don’t know what’s in it!”

He didn’t feel the wound so much as the slap.

“What’s the code for the lock?”

Margarita said, “21.”

Ezzard grabbed the case and turned the combination for the left hatch.

“The other?”

“Same.”

He did this one too. The lock clicked open. Ezzard looked at Marcus.

They huddled together, eyed wide. Marcus closed his Swiss Army knife.

Ezzard opened the case. Shut it quick.

For a moment, Ezzard and Marcus looked at Margarita.

“We’re leaving,” Ezzard said.

“You’re right.”

And they did.

Zbig clutched his bleeding arm.

Margarita opened the curtains.

“Can I look?” Zbig asked. “In the case, I mean.”

She glowed standing there at the window.

“No.”

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CHAPTER XVI

MEXICO’S WHERE YOU GO

I’m taking it easy at every stop sign east down Slaughson Street. Tongue on my smooth just-brushed teeth. Red morning sun.

Here’s what’s in the Pepsi-stained, stitched-fabric passenger seat of my olive eighty-five Camry: a crinkled Five Guy’s bag and three burger wrappers, a napkin bleeding mustard, a wood-gripped water pistol that passes for a real forty- five, and a Nike gymsack with a pound and a half or so of rubberbanded twenties inside. On the road: pot holes everywhere, bumps and banging.

When I got the call, the voice called the cash “petty cash.” I don’t know why. Told to weigh it, don’t count it. I’m not good with numbers, but I get things done. Bathroom scale wouldn’t weigh it right. Pressed for time. Couldn’t find a scale that’d weigh a pound-and-half-in-twenties-of-petty-cash. I figured five or six Five Guy’s quarter-pounders to-go would feel about the same. Knees keeping the Camry straight, gym bag in my left hand, bag of burgers in my right. Tossed twenties into the back seat until the weight of the bags felt near enough. Where’d

I get the twenties is another story. It’s hard to keep the car straight with my knees with all the potholes.

125 In the rearview mirror’s two things: a read BMW with a big bumper changing lanes without a signal. Two: my reflected five-o’clock shadow. My sister Tina likes my shadow (I live in hers). On the back seat’s about quarter pound of petty cash of twenties and a red winter window scraper rocking over each pothole. Clock on the dash reads twelve-o’three. I’m a guy that gets stuff done; I don’t want to be late. My parents were late to my fifth birthday, so my sister and I blew out the candles ourselves. They’re still late.

Previous night playing poker and two black queens on the flop touched down on the ashy table. Zachary, only three fingers into his Power’s, brought out the N- word too early in the game. It’s a possible nigga funeral, he announced, anticipated a flush from the Queen of Spades and a seven and deuce of the same suit. The Queen of Clubs looked lonely, three cards separated from the Jack of

Hearts. I don’t remember who won or when the other players left. Thirteen fingers into his whiskey and Zachary’s snoring on the oatmeal-stained couch spooning my sister Tina. I should pry them apart, stick a fork in his teeth. He’s bad news.

A movie’s on the tube. Two bandits, a man and woman. They do bad things. But I’m distracted by three phone rings, a call-pickup click, and a voice on the other end of an invisible cellular phone signal. I can feel the voice in my head, in that blue nerve that runs from pulsing temple, to ear, to jawbone and silver-filled molars. You rang, I say. And the voice tells me to bring the petty cash and a body. We talked all night about everything in my mind as I watched

126 Zachary and Tina toss and turn. She’s too good for him. I did see the end of the movie: the bandits flee to Mexico where salvation tastes like tequila.

When the cock crowed, I found my self-staring at lone snoring Zachary on the couch. I put him in the trunk of my car because the voice in my head told me to.

He didn’t protest too much as he stumbled out into the gravel driveway: too hungover and too bright sun knocked him into my dark trunk. Well, I did kick his legs out.

I dug up the cash hidden beneath a coconut tree (I buried it there in another story) and returned with it inside. This time, it was hard getting out of the apartment. Tina was hogging the bathroom, and I had to weigh the cash. She was singing the radio’s hit-parade. I knocked and I knocked until she opened the door. Orange curlers in her hair the hot curling rod in her left; she was tethered to an electrical socket. She’s pre-law and good news.

In the bathroom, Tina waved the curling rod at me like a camper waves a flashlight at a mad raccoon. I’m cornered. She flicked some water at me from the sink. I yelled, My darling sister—you look like a raccoon! She hissed and spit, so

I put her in the trunk of my car. I returned to the bathroom, again, to weigh the cash on the bathroom scale. Tina left a chipped purple toenail on the scale’s digital readout. As I said before, the scale didn’t work. Pocketed the toenail.

Brushed my teeth, gently.

Now I’m parked in a parking lot pothole at the Dollar Store off Chester Avenue.

The car rocks off its sunken wheel as my sneakers hit asphalt. Pop the trunk.

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Toss in two burgers. Tina is wet and her makeup is streaked and her hair is blown out. Eat that. Zachary convulses. Shut the trunk. Thank god I gagged them.

A purple fifty-seven Chevy flies into the lot. Brakes squeak as the vehicle lightly touches down. The driver’s door swings open. Beige leather interior. The first thing I see of the driver is the white noon sun glinting on the silver spur of a white cowboy boot. Now his heel touches down, and then the other. The full man is in view. This man is what Sam Shepard would call a motherfucking rock’n’roll Jesus. The man is here. It’s one of those midday moments when the ultraviolet rays turn white-and-blue-striped seersucker suits to purple pastels.

The man is old and guess what he’s wearing? It’s a purple pastel seersucker suit, or do my eyes deceive me? I say, I’ve got bodies in the trunk. He says, Hold on huckster, you got the petty cash? I still don’t know what that word “petty” means when connected to cash. If you know, add it in.

You know, the man says, if you don’t want your sister swimming downstream with that scoundrel, then why’d you shove them into a trunk like sardines? Did you gag them? They’re probably dead. I check the trunk and they are dead. My lovely sister and the other guy. I just do what the voice in my head tells me to do. I ask the voice for directions to Mexico. At least if I hide out there,

I’ll have someone to talk to.

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CHAPTER XVII

THE WORLD AIN’T BLACK AND WHITE

Her face might have been chiseled by Leochares or Cellini. Under black bangs, opal eyes set in white marble. Beneath that, the lines were perfect. Take the one from the right of her black lips to her nose. Repeat the motif on the other side.

In all, she looked one of those dames that might have followed Lucifer out of paradise. And she was sitting in my office with three horizontal cuts on the back of her left hand, the one holding the American Spirits cigarette.

She killed a man, she said; let the words hit me through the cigarette’s wispy smoke.

“What do you want me to do about it, darling?” I turned my back on her and interested myself in a blended malt and tumbler.

“Can you turn on the lights?” she said. Last night was another late one, but I flipped on the desk lamp anyways. Returned to the scotch in the low glow.

“I’ll drink something,” she said. “Gin. I’d like gin.”

I dashed a few bitters in a rocks glass and swirled them around. Poured in

Plymouth.

“What is it?” she said.

“The ice is melted.”

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We touched glasses. “Salud,” she said.

Drank mine, crossed the room to the venetian blinds. Put two fingers between the shades to spy the streetlamp below. A man in a gray trench-coat leaned against the streetlamp, fedora dipped low. Dust on my fingers.

She drank the gin, disguised the burn. Could be her friend by the streetlamp. She crossed her legs, long black boots kicking up the moonlight shine. Could be her pimp outside.

“You haven’t asked me why I killed a man,” she said.

Another sip of scotch, wrote a number on a notepad and passed it to her.

“What’s this?”

“Going rate.”

She smiled, and it turned into a laugh. “Didn’t know you were so cheap. I might have another mystery for you.”

She stood and left her glass on the desk on a stack of L.A. Times. A red drop of drink rolled from the lip of the glass to a black and white Friday byline— she could have soaked me below the fold. I watched her peak through the blinds.

“That man out there,” she said. “He’s been following me since Tuesday.”

I set my glass next to the other, peaked out the blinds next to her. The man was checking his watch. She tilted her head back; she didn’t smell like she was on the run.

“Tell him to scram,” she said, held my hand and brushed her cheek on mine. “Do it for me.”

She let go of my hand and moved hers up my side, the other moved a cigarette to my lips. I took a drag and blew it past her.

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“You have everything you need,” she said, “even this.” She pulled the thirty-eight from my shoulder holster and dangled it upside-down by its trigger- guard with a long black-nailed index finger. Took the gun back and shoved it into my belt.

Grabbed her behind her back and pulled her close, could feel the gun between us, kissed her. She dropped the cigarette, and I let her go. Put out the cigarette with my foot and crossed past her to the door.

“Clyde,” she said.

I turned around.

“Your hat.”

I caught it, dipped it over one eye. “Sit tight.”

Down on the street, the sewers hissed plumes of steam that danced among streetlamp orbs. The half-moon was hung in the sky.

Made my way through the fog to the man that dame wanted gone.

“Hey, wise guy,” I said.

He kept reading his paper, head buried in its fold like he was going to mail his face to Ohio.

“I’m talking to you.” Pulled the paper down with my left and sucker punched him with the right. He was out cold just like that.

Turned back to my office window, waved my hat. She flipped the shades back at me.

Must have been past midnight; nobody was out but me and the soon to be black-eyed snoozing wise guy.

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Looked at him. Something glinted on his chest by the light of the streetlamp. Pushed aside his trench-coat and found myself staring into an encircled silver star with an eagle’s profile. Three words embossed in black around the badge: United States Marshal.

I heard black boots clicking on sidewalk, each click echoing back to me but running further away.

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