HALL of FAME by MARK EDWARD PEARSON

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HALL OF FAME

MARK EDWARD PEARSON

(Under the Direction of Judith Ortiz Cofer)

ABSTRACT

“Hall of Fame” is a collection of nine short stories ranging in length from 3,500 words to

14,500 words. The stories include: “Self Defense With Out Weapons,” “Raft on Open Water,”

“Crossing the Rio Grande,” “Hall of Fame,” “Ropes,” “Walking the Till,” “Demon Wrestling,”

“Comrades,” and “Circling Over Ithaca.”

The characters in general are rural as is the landscape. They are “outsiders” struggling to survive in the face of a world that is unreceptive to their dreams, goals and illusions. The struggle each character undertakes ultimately leads to a movement within each character that reflects a change from the character’s original situation. The characters in general are rural as is the landscape. They are “outsiders” struggling to survive in the face of a world that is unreceptive to their dreams, goals and illusions.

The landscape the stories generally take place in is the middle Atlantic region, part of the

Appalachian Mountains that runs up and down the east Coast. Characterized by low rolling green mountains, they are hilly yet steep and rugged. They rise above flat farm fields and valleys. The characters of the stories inhabit this landscape. It is an area strung between the rural, agrarian farm life and the urban one that is slowly invading, forcing a change – movement away from the old life. The characters are often at odds with change and they must cope with it. That is their

struggle - dealing with the movement to a new lifestyle, or movement into adulthood and responsibility. It is a movement out of the self and into the greater world.

The exception to the regional focus is “Raft on Open Water,” which occurs in the

Caribbean, however, as the other stories it’s central character is also involved in a struggle, here it is against nature.

Wrestling functions metaphorically in many of the stories as a representative of this struggle. Wrestling itself is a coping mechanism for many of the characters and as it becomes obsolete they must adapt themselves in order to survive, to learn to deal with the world in a different way.

INDEX WORDS: Hall of Fame, Short Stories, Mark Pearson, Ph.D., The University of Georgia, Demon Wrestling, Self Defense Without Weapons, Circling Over Ithaca, Ropes, Raft on Open Water, Comrades, Crossing the Rio Grande

HALL OF FAME

MARK EDWARD PEARSON

B.G.S., University of Michigan, 1983

M.A., St. John’s College, 1995

M.A., University of California, Davis, 2002

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2005

MARK EDWARD PEARSON

HALL OF FAME

MARK EDWARD PEARSON

Major Professor: Judith Ortiz Cofer

Committee: Reginald McKnight Carl Rapp

Electronic Version Approved:

Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2005

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1

2 SELF DEFENSE WITHOUT WEAPONS...... 16

3 RAFT ON OPEN WATER...... 38

4 CROSSING THE RIO GRANDE ...... 54

5 HALL OF FAME...... 82

6 ROPES ...... 104

7 WALKING THE TILL...... 109

8 DEMON WRESTLING...... 120

9 COMRADES ...... 139

10 CIRCLING OVER ITHACA...... 161

11 THE FIRING LINE ...... 213

12 A VERY OLD STORY WITH ENORMOUS TEETH...... 221

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Part I. Apologia

These stories represent what has been for me a long apprenticeship in the short story. I almost said the culmination of a long apprenticeship, but did not because the process of learning about writing seems as if it will never end or culminate. I’ve learned that much over twenty-plus years of struggling with writing. The short story is a difficult form because of the precision it demands. With each story the process of creation begins again. There are no guarantees for success.

The stories will reflect my experiences growing up in Pennsylvania, and the middle

Atlantic region. But as the saying goes that anything committed to memory is fiction, so it is with these stories. This area has become an island in my imagination like one of those ancient maps of the world, oddly shaped and bearing little resemblance to the geography of the actual place, but rather, distorted, compressed, or enlarged accordingly to fit the needs of the story. It is a place more imaginary than real. The stories often begin here and move west (the American

West). The movement West is an American motif, or perhaps cliché – traditionally the place where Americans go to seek their dreams, their fortunes, from Huck Finn to the present. I’m more interested in the reality of it than the mythology: what happens when the dream runs dry?

Then we see the characters stuck and forced to fight for survival.

I see the West functioning as a shaping force on human lives. The west to me symbolizes a mythical place where people go to seek their dreams. The harshness of the western landscape

and the fragility of human dreams make them at once partners and antagonists. The open spaces of the west create inspiration and illusion giving the impression of infinite possibilities, of escape; but the meanness of the land stands in harsh contrast to those illusions.

The stories deal with characters coping with the end of those illusions when the real world has come crashing in on them, forcing a change. The stories essentially chronicle that change, illustrating a movement within each character, giving a sense of each characters’ ability to adapt, to move on. They illustrate a movement to a greater complexity within each character.

I hope the characters in the stories demonstrate the capacity for greater complexity and greater humanity. I like to look at the movement toward resolution as a movement toward complexity. Stories or fictional narratives contain an inherent conflict. In literature, we are aware of the five-part structure of the story, which is commonly visualized as the inverted check mark: conflict, complication, crisis, falling action, and resolution. Consider a similar five-part sequence in terms of chaos and complexity: the conflict of chaos and order, its ensuing complications, the crisis or the temporary victory of chaos, the resurgence of order and the subsequent movement to a new order, and the resolution or complexity. The resolution of a story seems to readily ally itself with the idea of complexity, especially if we consider the change a main character undergoes throughout a story. When we read a story, we essentially follow the path a character takes as he or she strives to attain a goal. When faced with opposition to the goal the character must adjust his or her course. The subsequent adjustments create the nonlinear movement that can be equated with chaos. The adjustments lead to the character’s success or failure, the resolution. The resolution is a new point of stasis. It is different from the position the character began the story in. The experience the character has gained through the struggle makes him or

her a more complex personality in the end. I hope that this complexity is indicative of a greater capacity for the humanity of each character.

The structure of most of the stories is fairly conventional in that they open with a conflict that needs resolution and they move toward crisis and resolution through a series of complications. I want to leave room in there for some experimentation as well, dealing with narrative structure and other elements of story construction. The stories are inevitably reflective of my growth as a writer, and the process of learning to write a complete story.

The stories should be reflective of my struggles with character and plot development as well as resolution. Short stories are compact, precise works, in which all elements must contribute to the end. For me, the most difficult element of short story writing has been finding satisfactory resolutions to the conflicts in the stories in order to make them compete. Character development and plot development are difficult in their own right, and they hinge on and contribute to the resolution as well. Characters need to be created in full relief through the techniques such as internal and external dialogue, and carefully chosen descriptions of appearances and interaction with other characters and the external world. Likewise, plotting consists of selecting the right scenes to make the story efficient, believable and probably most importantly, enjoyable. These are the things I have worked on most consistently in my efforts to create short stories.

I aim to create a strong sense of place, to make these stories concrete rather than abstract.

It should be as though the reader has entered a recognizable place, distinct in its own right, a separate world, and going from one story to another should be like driving from town to town in a specific region. This notion is similar perhaps to the ideas Richard Hugo talk about in “The

Triggering Town.” That is moving between towns triggers familiarity. He talks about it in the

sense that entering a new town frees up the writer to write about what he knows by presenting the familiar in a different light. The characters and landscape may be similar in mannerisms and geography, but their stories are not the same.

The variation in length represents experimentation with form from the short-short story of

500 words to the short story, more in the mid-range of 2,500-8,000 words to the novella of

15,000 words. Experimenting with different lengths requires mastery of all the elements of plot and character development. It is just used on a different scale for each. The short-short story requires just as much attention to detail as the standard short story or the novella. The novella allows for more room to move than the short-short story or the standard short story, but less than the novel. Working in the slightly longer form gave me a greater understanding of metaphors, rhyming action and storytelling in general. What I like about writing in this form is that it allows the latitude for exploring a subject, but at the same time the territory covered must be directly related to the central idea of the topic.

Novellas can achieve depth and intensity in a relatively short space of time. Strung somewhere along the continuum between a short story and a novel, the novella somehow escapes the structural demands of its shorter and longer cousins. This makes the novella categorically unconventional, but at the same time makes it an insightful vehicle for learning how metaphors can blend at the edges. I like the idea of the novella as a sustained image, or two, or three images run to exhaustion.

Just as the stories represent a variety of lengths and form, they will also be written in different points of view including first, second and third person limited. Each p.o.v. is used because it served the purpose of the individual story best. For example the story “Raft on Open

Water” is written in second person because I believe it best served the purpose of the narration in

telling a story of a character who slipping into a slightly hypothermic state was feeling removed from himself. The second person narrative best served and underscored this sense of removal from self. The majority of the stories are written in the third person limited, the most commonly used point of view in fiction, but “Crossing the Rio Grande” is written in first person, which I believe strengthens the voice of the main character by heightening the immediacy of his situation and his desire to flee the United States to Mexico.

These stories tend to be conventional in construction and in many ways I view them as the culmination of an apprenticeship in the short story. In the same way that many painters receive a classical education before moving on to experimental works, I believe a short story writer needs to study the classical form of the story before experimenting with its elements.

Hall of Fame is the title of the dissertation. I think it aptly catches the sense of the other stories under its umbrella. The characters are of humble circumstances often working in obscurity, hoping for some small break, a glimpse of success that would only be considered fame by the most generous description. Hopefully in the end what will unite these stories is the kind of rhyming action that Charles Baxter speaks about. That is the repetition of thematic and regional elements that will be apparent in the whole work, perhaps as much as in the individual elements.

In the end it will hopefully be the similarities in landscape, character and conflict that resonate throughout the collection that will form a pattern that will unite these stories.

Baxter cautions against a heavy-handed application of rhyming action. These stories hopefully won’t suffer from heavy handedness, but rather will resonate lightly to the ear of the reader because they will not be the product of a plan, but rather will have grown organically out of my experience, the places I have been and from my imagination.

Part II

Why I Abandoned My Belief in the Myth of The Great American Writer and Went to

Writing School

For a long time, I thought that I could make it as a writer on my own, without instruction or guidance, completely outside of any institutional program. After I graduated from college, which I surprised myself by doing, I convinced myself I was finished with school, forever. What

I thought I needed was a dose of the real world. In the spring of 1983, I found a ride out of Ann

Arbor with a friend who owned a faded green Plymouth Fury and I headed for the world of work and experience. There, I was certain, I would experience life and meet the characters who would inhabit the stories and novels that would one day make me famous.

I saw the route writers like Hemingway, London, and Fitzgerald had taken. Hemingway hadn’t gone to college. He’d honed his skills as a newspaperman. London spent a semester or two at UC Berkeley, but got the material for his stories in the Yukon. Fitzgerald went to

Princeton, but he dropped out before graduating. Who needed college? Not me. I was done with it.

My parents gave me an Olivetti typewriter as a graduation gift. It was electric and the keys responded to the slightest touch. I loved typing on it. I loved the sound of struck paper. I loved the hum of the Olivetti as it warmed up. When people asked me what I wanted to do I told them I wanted to be a writer. I found part-time jobs that I thought would give me time to write. I worked as a wrestling coach, a bouncer, in construction, later as a journalist, and still later as a teacher. I sometimes thought about writing school, but considered the thoughts as lapses,

moments of weakness, and I persevered, writing stories, and a novel, with little or no sense of form or craft. I was convinced I could learn all I needed to succeed at writing on my own. I might as well have been residing in a cave like the one in Aristotle’s Republic, and in a sense that’s where I ended up.

Sometime during the winter of 1986, I was standing in the storage room at The

Chameleon, a blues bar in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, just after midnight, when a woman stepped out of the shadows, and moved past me as if I was one of the cardboard boxes stacked against the walk-in cooler. She was focused on the unpainted plasterboard wall at the back of the room. I stood several feet from her with a case of Budweiser in my hands exhaling the frigid air of the cooler. The smell of vomit and Clorox permeated the air. In one corner, water dripped from the ceiling pipes and ran down a wall where it formed a white mark that looked like a one- dimensional stalactite. Customers weren’t allowed in the back room, but somehow they always found their way in. A night didn’t go by without an employee finding a half-naked couple groping each other back in the shadows among the boxes and empty kegs. I knew I would eventually have to kick her out of there before the owner saw her, but for the moment her actions were so deliberate that I found her intriguing. She went to the wall and grabbed a partially hammered-in nail and pulled on it as if it was a doorknob.

Someone had drawn the likeness of a door around the nail. The woman stood there perplexed, pulling on the imaginary door as if she was trying to gain entrance to a dream and then she turned and faced me. "How do I get in there?" She asked.

"It's not a door," I said, but she paid me no attention and kept tugging on the nail.

Beyond the wall men's voices, muffled and raucous, rose in conversation. She listened for a moment and screamed at the wall. "Let me in. I know you're in there. Open this right now!"

She pulled more frantically and asked me again: "How do I get in there? I know he's in there."

"It's not a door," I said. "You have to go around to the other side."

But, she continued pulling on the nail so hard that she dropped her purse. She reached down to pick up her purse and asked me a third time: "How do I get in there?"

"It's not a door," I said and then she looked at the nail and the black lines that simulated a door and she gasped, and then ran out of the storage room.

Her question; “How do I get in there?” remained in my mind for a long time. I wanted to know, more than anything, how to enter the world of writing. I knew it would take a long time to become a writer, but I didn’t really understand how long it would take, or what it would entail. I really wanted to know how to become a writer, a real writer, one who wrote real fiction, literary fiction.

I spent a year and a half working the door at the bar collecting money, listening to the dreams of drunks, drinking too much myself, dreaming of being a writer, cleaning the toilets, taking out the trash, and throwing out the occasional unruly partier. There were times at night when the bar, which had just opened was practically empty and I could sit at the door and read.

When I started at The Chameleon I thought it would be a good job for a writer. I got paid cash. I worked at night, and had my days free to write. I wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and I sent what I wrote to magazines, and got rejection, after rejection, after rejection. I filled a drawer with rejection slips. I lost count at two hundred.

One night after cleaning the toilets, scrubbing down the rubber mats behind the bar, and taking out the trash, I stood in the alley looking up at the stars. It was winter and the air was clear and cold. Six inches of snow covered the ground. The stars were brilliant. I stood there reeking

of Clorox and Mr. Clean. I realized then that I was not training myself to be a writer as much as I was training myself to be a janitor. That is not a bad thing. It’s just that you are what you do to a certain extent. I was cleaning, and bouncing drunks, not writing.

I had bought into this idea that writers, and all artists for that matter, somehow arose from the earth wild, and full of genius. It was purely a romantic idea, but I had not yet realized this. I felt like the woman pulling on the nail. I was either too dense to grasp the reality of the situation, or too stubborn to accept it. I was living fiction rather than writing it. At the heart of this notion was the age-old argument of whether or not writing can be taught. Up to that point it was clear on which side my sentiment lay.

While I was in Lancaster I met Bob Russell, a professor at Franklin and Marshall

College. He had written a book, To Catch An Angel, in the early sixties. He had been blinded in an accident as a boy, but went on to Yale, where he wrestled, and then to Oxford. Bob was a regular at the wrestling matches, and one of my jobs then was as an assistant wrestling coach at the college.

I read him one of my stories. “Sounds abstract,” he said.

When he was done critiquing my story. I felt like I knew nothing about writing. I’d been writing since graduating from college half a dozen years before and was convinced I was on the verge of a break through.

“Why don’t you sit in on my class,” he said.

I hesitated at first because I didn’t feel like sitting in on a class with a bunch of undergraduates. I was older and they were beginners. I had been writing for several years. But, I did it. Everybody sat in assigned seats. He knew everybody’s name. When someone spoke he answered by name. If Alice in the front row dropped her pencil, he would say. “Don’t you want

to pick up your pencil Alice?” One day a pair of students switched seats as a joke. When he took roll they answered for each other. When he finished roll, he said: “Mike and John do you want to take your assigned seats now.” He heard everything that went on students’ stories the way he knew what was happening in his classroom. He measured each sentence, weighed it, and judged it.

I read everything he suggested. I went to his office hours. I monopolized his office hours.

He listened to my stories, gave me advice, encouraged me to be more concrete. There was a

Mennonite woman in the class. She was older and auditing the class like me. She wrote a line about her husband’s “Cream of Wheat existence.” That was a great line, Bob said. I listened to his advice and then I went home and wrote. I tried to create a world that he could see, smell, and touch. I was no longer an indifferent student. I was engaged in my work. We worked on a story about a boy who raised a hawk. We worked on a story about a disaffected wrestler hitchhiking across the country to a national tournament.

I read some of Charles Bukowski’s work. I admired the fact that he had somehow made it outside of the mainstream writing world. He seemed to me to represent artistic freedom, and freedom in general. I asked Bob what he thought of Bukowski’s work.

“Chaotic,” he said.

I quit the bar about a year and a half after I started there and began writing for a newspaper. I thought it would be good training. Hemingway had done it, along with numerous others. But, in the end it turned out to be worse than the job at the bar in terms of allowing me to develop as a fiction writer. Journalists tell, they report. Fiction writers show, they dramatize. I didn’t really know how to do this. I knew that I didn’t know how to do it, and I knew that I

couldn’t learn how to do it by being a journalist, so after a few years I quit. I moved to

Washington, D.C.

My experience with coaching and with working with Bob Russell made me realize the importance of good teaching. I decided to get a teaching job, but the only thing I was really qualified to teach was wrestling. I made some phone calls around town and eventually I got a part-time job coaching wrestling at St. Albans School.

A few moths after I was hired, a long time employee of the school died. They asked me if I wanted his old job. It was kind of an odd job, a hodge-podge of responsibilities that included security for the gymnasium. They gave me a two-room apartment in the gym that had no shower and no kitchen. Security for the gym meant I turned the alarm system on at night. I also had to rent two indoor tennis courts that were converted from the basketball court. My responsibilities didn’t take a great deal of time and I found myself with enough time to write.

From the window of my apartment, I could look up over the roof of the gymnasium that was a labyrinth of new and old buildings that sat in a gully below the National Cathedral, I could see a few spires of one corner of the Cathedral. At night when it was lighted it floated above me like some divine illumination. I felt like a monk in his chamber. When I looked around my little space, I felt more like the janitor-in-residence, or the jock-in-residence.

The school had a writer-in-residence program. They hired a writer, usually newly graduated from writing school, gave him or her a place to live and eat for a year, and had them teach a class. The first year the writer-in-residence was Bernardine Connelley. She read my story about the wrestler hitch-hiking across country and said, you should have him get in a fight with a dog at the end or something like that. I thought it was a good idea, and I rewrote it that way. I sent it off and it sold for a hundred dollars to Stories magazine.

Matt Klam was another writer who I got to know at the school, and he often read my stories and gave me feedback, and encouragement. While I was selling my first story to Stories,

Matt was selling his first story to the New Yorker. It was easy to be humble about my small success.

At the time I was also working on a master’s degree with the idea that it would help me get a teaching job. As it turned out that year a teacher took a leave of absence and the school asked me if I wanted to teach ancient history. I ended up teaching the next year. I’d entered the profession through the back door, the gymnasium door in this case.

While I was living in D.C. a friend asked me: What’s with all this creativity? I was writing and painting at the time, or trying to write and paint, and doing an average job of both, but having a great time none-the-less. My brother and I were sharing an apartment in Adams

Morgan and for about a month and a half after we moved in, my days were spent looking for work, writing stories nobody was buying and painting colorful canvasses that made me happy to look at. We spent every night closing down the bars along 18th Street, drinking cheap pitchers of beer, and trying to meet women who were more interested in the power brokers on Capitol Hill than a pair of brothers from Pennsylvania more interested in aspiring to the Van Goghs than the

Kennedys.

This is what I said: To be creative is to be close to God. My words surprised me because I am a person of limited religious experience, a person who grew up completely outside of the world of organized religion. What I meant, I went on to explain, was that God was best known for creating, creating the world, mankind, animals, etc., etc., etc., and to be engaged in creating things, was, for a human, a kind of prayer, a kind of imitation of the divine.

The next time I spoke about this idea of creativity was some six or seven years later. I was at a writing conference. At the nightly gathering, I got into a conversation with Bob

Olmstead. We were drinking bourbon. I told him my idea of creativity and he said something like, you’ll be glad to know that James Joyce was saying as much in Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man. I was a little disappointed to learn I was not the original thinker I had believed myself to be.

By that time, I was teaching at another school, and had attended the conference because my job wasn’t giving me enough free time to write. I was deciding whether or not to apply to writing schools, or more precisely I was trying to improve my writing enough to get admitted to a good writing school.

I had thought about this frequently in the past and had even applied to one school once and been rejected. At the time, the rejection convinced me of my unrecognized genius and cemented my desire to go it alone. But, it was now more than ten years after that, and I was no longer so sure, in fact I was pretty sure I had been wrong about it all along. I was getting nowhere.

I was almost forty years old. I started thinking that I wasn’t cut out to be a writer. Every great writer I’d ever admired had made it early. I was near the age when some of those talented, prodigious, and prolific writers were dying.

When I thought about Hemingway and Fitzgerald, I realized that they had apprenticed themselves as writers, read voraciously, found good critics and editors, and found the time to practice the craft. They found the time I think by marrying wealthy women. Hemingway, at least, lived in Paris for a while on his first wife’s small trust fund.

I had to find some new role models, writers like Norman Maclean, Annie Proulx, both of whom found success later in their careers. I had to change my way of thinking about writing. I had to learn how to write. I had to continue those lessons I’d begun with Bob Russell almost ten years before.

It occurred to me that the times I’ve made the most progress were when I had a good critic and teacher, some time to write, and other things to do to take my mind off of writing.

When I went to writing school, I found some things I’d been looking for: good teachers, people who wanted to talk about writing, the time to write, time to think, people to critique my work. I got better. I got published, again, after nine years. Then it was over. Two years, just like that.

The real world beckoned again. Time for a job. Time to make money. I decided that every job that I ever had, whether I’d enjoyed it or not, stood in the way of what I wanted to do most. I found out about PhD programs in English that allowed some students to write a creative thesis and I applied to writing schools again, to buy a few more years, or rather, to struggle as an apprentice for a few more years.

When I was trying to figure out what to do I wrote to Matt. I was having a hard time justifying the idea of having a family and spending a few more years in school. He said, I have thought long and hard about what you should do and I have no clue. You have to do whatever is right for you whatever that might be. For some of us writing is like praying. It’s necessary for our sanity. You need to convince the people most important to you of your need to do this and things will work out.

I see now that the route I traveled and that I’m continuing to travel has been necessary. I have gained a measure of that real world experience I wanted to have when I set out to be a

writer after college twenty years ago, and I see too that it is most important to find a place and the time to turn those experiences into literature where ever and whenever that might be.

CHAPTER 2

SELF DEFENSE WITHOUT WEAPONS

Cam Gratz wheeled and pivoted; fighting for a grip, balance. Feigning trips and sweeps, he made several full turns around the mat, before he sensed an opening. He stepped and swept his opponent across his posted foot, pulling on the heavy cotton jacket, gripping so tightly the thick cotton bit into his knuckles, tore calloused skin. The burn would come later, creep across his fingers like blue flames licking kindling. He stood for a fraction of an instant, poised on one foot, back straight, leaning slightly backwards while one arm pulled his opponent’s shoulder to him, and his other arm simultaneously pushed his opponent’s shoulder away, tipping him like a table top. His opponent, wiry, nimble, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu player, good with arm bars and fighting from the mat, but not as good on his feet, stepped and stumbled over Cam’s extended foot. He caught his balance mid-step, adjusting his center of gravity in midair like a human gyroscope. Moving in a half-circle across the mat, Cam stepped deep, this time hooking with his leg, catching his opponent for a second before he slipped back and out, and then a fierce flurry ensued as the men tumbled to the mat, wrapped and rolled out of bounds with elbows and knees flying, the sound of their struggle echoing sharp and high in the rafters of the cold gymnasium.

Cam glanced at the referee. No points scored. Next time, Cam thought. I’ll get him with that sweep. He got lucky. I can beat this guy. I’ll win this thing. He pulled his jacket down snug, retied his belt and walked back to the center of the mat.

A tough draw for a first round match, but the tournament was small and they’d have to meet sooner or later. OK, Cam thought, so it’s now. That’s what he came for anyway. It was a tune-up tournament for the world championships in the middle of Pennsylvania coal country, not

too far from the hundred acres of rolling hillside pastures and muddy ravines he’d grown up on.

Who would have thought the Brazilian would have made the trip to nowheresville, but Sombo tournaments were scarce anywhere and the world championships were only four months away.

They had the same idea and there they were.

It was Cam’s first tournament since tearing up his knee at a tournament in New York and barely a month since he got the word he was on the team for worlds. He’d put his name in to challenge for the world team after nationals. Nobody else challenged, not even the national champ at his weight. He’d been third at nationals, but he got the spot by forfeit. The national

Sombo federation sent him a letter confirming his place on the team. He tucked the letter away in a book. Every once in a while he pulled it out and read over it. It gave him a sense of accomplishment, like the All-American certificate he had stuffed away in one of his boxes. He’d hang it on a wall some day when he settled. The only downside was he had to pay his own way to the worlds. It was fifteen hundred dollars he didn’t have. He had four months to train and raise the money. Working at a bar and a little coaching earned him spare change, enough to live and hit weekend tournaments. Lately, he’d been thinking about raising that money as much as about training.

He usually traveled to tournaments with his buddy Dinkins, but Dinkins had started traveling with his new girl and her daughter. It made Cam uncomfortable. He always thought about his lack of family, his mother gone, his father stubborn, distant, and of what it might be like to have a family with Becky, the girl, now woman, he had seen off and on since high school and sometimes thought he loved. Besides, last time he’d ridden with Dinkins all Dinkins talked about was some pyramid sales scheme that he planned to do when he quit the Marines. He was

going to make a million dollars selling vitamins and soap, blah, blah, blah. Cam got sick of hearing about it.

When Dinkins asked him,“Need a ride?”

Cam said, “I’ll meet you there. I’m stopping by the farm the night before.” In the solitude of his own truck, Cam could get ready. He needed that preparation time to get ready for six minutes alone on the mat.

He woke up in the gravel parking lot of an old high school at sunrise. Walked around puddles rimmed with ice. Weigh-in was routine. Dropping ten pounds to make 163 was easy.

Afterwards, he met up with Dinkins. They ate sliced turkey and oranges in silence and waited.

An official posted draw-sheets. First match, Cam drew the Brazilian.

Cam Gratz was square-jawed and square-shouldered, rugged-looking, kept a few steps from handsome by a dented nose, a false front-tooth he could pop in and out at will, and a pair of ears thick as pork rinds that could have passed for moonscape. He was incorrigibly silent and sullen in a way that made people avoid him. The silence was distilled from years of solitude spent on a dairy farm in the hills of central Pennsylvania, and an unfortunate family history that simmered in his memory.

As an undersized boy Cam had a routine. He was up at six a.m. and running: down the dirt roads that crisscrossed the farm, up the hills, through the valleys: a different route everyday.

He kept moving like that all through high school and into college, lifting weights, pitching hay.

People wondered. Was he crazy? But, a high school counselor said he was all right. His mother was murdered by an itinerant farm hand when he was ten. It was the biggest news of the year in a farm community prone to silence and secrets.

Cam saw a picture of the murderer in the newspaper. The image of the hollow-faced coward stayed with him and filled him with hurt and hatred. It became his fuel, and it burned slowly and brightly inside him.

Late to mature and consumed by his physical routine, he was shy around girls. Growing up a runt without a mother did that to him. He’d grown since and stood almost five-nine. It took him until twenty to wrestle the clothes off of Becky Walsh, with her help, in the cab of his pickup, and then work up the courage to propose to her because he thought that was right. She declined the offer, citing her own youth and inexperience, and a desire to see the world before the responsibilities of marriage and family doomed her to the farm-wife’s life that trapped her mother at eighteen. They kept in touch, got together whenever Cam came back into town.

Just past thirty, his wrestling career mostly behind him except for the occasional tournament, Cam was drinking with a bunch of jar-head high school buddies on leave from the

Marines, at a D.C. dive with a cement floor, and a loud screeching band, when Cooper Branch mentioned a Sombo tournament the next day at some high school in Maryland.

“I heard of it, but what is it exactly?” Cam said.

“Kind of like Judo,” Coop said. “You wear a jacket, try to get the other guy to submit.

Elbow locks, ankle locks, can’t twist fingers, or choke.”

“Sounds crazy,” Cam said.

“It’s a fucking blast,” Coop said. “You ought to see it. We do it in the Marines. Russian

KGB invented it.”

“All right,” Cam said. “I’ll watch.”

Next morning at weigh-in while Coop and his two Marine Corps buddies registered, Cam sat in the bleachers, his eyes closed against the fluorescent gym lights, cheap beer gone sour in his belly, and working a grip on his brain. Coop and company set their bags around Cam.

“What do you weigh?” Coop said to Cam.

“Seventy-five,” Cam said.

“Only two guys at eighty,” Coop said. “Why don’t you weigh-in. You’re already third.

I’ve got some extra shoes, and gear.”

“You crazy?” Cam said. “I’ve never done it before.”

“You can wrestle,” Coop said. “I’ll show you a few things. You’ll be all right. Just get out there and brawl.”

First match was with a bald guy with a beard and a Tasmanian Devil tattoo on his calf. A judo player trying to make the cross-over like the wrestlers. When he stepped on the mat, all the old anger flared up inside him. It was easy to raise. He learned early on to walk onto the mat mad as hell. He taught himself to win that way. Cam head-locked his opponent three times and held him on his back for three points. When Cam walked off the mat, light-headed and ready to heave his guts, Coop and his buddies cracked him on the back.

“Looks like a Sombo man to me,” Coop said. “A damn hurricane. A lion, untamed, fucking wild. What do you see out there man? What are you looking at like that?”

Cam caught his breath. “Shoulder’s killing me,” he said.

“Don’t sweat it,” Coop said. “Elbows and knees are what you got to watch mostly. Let me show you some more stuff.”

He pulled Cam off to the side, showed him how to grip the jacket, set up an arm bar.

“You need a couple submission holds in your repetoire,” he said. “Learn grip fighting.”

Cam won his next match, which amounted to the championship. The tournament director gave him a painted gold medal and shook his hand. Cam’s knuckles stung. The heavy fabric of his opponents’ jackets had chafed them raw.

“Going to nationals?” he asked Cam.

“Haven’t thought about it.”

“You ought to,” he said. “You got some ability and time to learn the sport.”

“You going to nationals?” Cam said to Coop as they threw their bags in the backseat of

Coop’s new red Ford Mustang and climbed in.

“Hell yeah,” Coop said.

Coop’s buddy, Dinkins, a genuine rock head with an authentic military haircut, high and tight, kept talking about going to Japan and doing something called shoot fighting. His scalp shifted as he spoke.

“They pay you to fight,” he said. “No holds barred. Submission. Everything. Like

SOMBO only no rules. It’s a fucking brawl, for real.”

“Sounds like human cock fights,” Cam said.

“Hell yeah,” Dinkins said.

Where’d this guy come from? Cam wondered. What the hell am I getting myself into?

But, he felt good, lungs burning, sore shoulder, bloody knuckles stinging. He was back into the world of competition that he missed and it was something new, this Sombo. As crazy as it seemed, he liked it. He liked walking out onto the mat, waiting for another match to begin, the anticipation, and then the clash. He was focused again, the way he had been during college.

“Hoorah,” Dinkins shouted. A bright red mat-burn blossomed on the side of his face.

“Nothing better than walking around with battle scars. Cuts, bruises, aching muscles. Makes you know you’re alive.”

Cam stared at the road ahead. Dinkins was right.

“You into it?” Coop said.

“I’m into it,” Cam said.

“Nationals here we come,” Dinkins hollered.

Dinkins was a red white and blue box of rocks, courtesy of Uncle Sam and whatever shithole he grew up in back in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, but he was all right somehow. Cam sensed a brawler’s kinship, a mutual dissatisfaction with self and situation, and the desire to beat the shit out of the boredom that life too often presented.

A few weeks after that first tournament, he moved to Virginia to train with the Marines, and rented a trailer near Quantico. He needed a reason to get out of Philadelphia where he’d been working odd jobs, a little coaching, bouncing, driving back at harvest time and planting time to help his father on the farm. He’d been thinking about going back to school, but he wasn’t sure for what. Virginia was hot and humid, air like dripping water. The trailer, a tin can that doubled as a solar collector.

Cam did a hundred pull-ups a day in sets of twenty then ten, and five. He threw his jacket over a pull-up bar and hung on it. The fabric bit into his skin, rubbed it raw until it calloused. His grip got stronger. He could hang on an opponent’s jacket all day. His technique got better. He learned arm bars and leg locks. He ran in the blazing midday heat with his jacket on and heavy

boots. He set his goals: nationals early next March; the worlds a year from August in Japan.

Between then and worlds he’d hit every tournament he could find.

He went home to visit his dad, thought maybe he’d surprise Becky too. He was feeling pretty good about the move, like finally he was going somewhere after a long dry run of just living to pay the bills. It was mid-November, but winter had set in. Becky waitressed at the

Breezeway Truck Stop. He got there at dinnertime, walked in as she hauled a tray of chicken fried steak out of the shiny kitchen doors. He took a seat in her section.

“Doing anything when you get off?” Cam said. He pushed some pale corn into a pile of mashed potatoes topped with yellow gravy.

“Didn’t your mom ever teach you not to play with your food?” Becky said. Her brown hair was tucked under a red cap. She was lean, muscular legs, shaved and glistening.

“Didn’t have a chance,” Cam said.

“We got to talk,” Becky said. “More coffee?” She raised a pot.

“Sure,” Cam said.

He watched the trucks come and go, listened to their air brakes screech. Becky cleared his table.

“I got a date,” she said.

“Who?” Cam said.

“Lyle Clovis.”

“Lyle Clovis?” Cam said. “What the hell?”

“That’s only half of it. I’m pregnant.” She patted her belly.

“What?”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not yours.”

“I thought.”

“You don’t want to get married anyway Cam,” she said and kissed him on the forehead.

“You’re too busy Kung Fu fighting.”

He tried to forget about Becky as he drove out to see his father. It had snowed already.

Low drifts edged the roadsides. Naked fields glistened under a thin, patchy, cover of snow and ice. Severed corn stalks stuck through. Winter was all right, he thought, if you knew how to bundled up against it. He was sure his father would be happy to hear about his success and maybe pitch in a little cash toward his cause. When he pulled in the drive at The Big G Ranch,

Brugman Gratz leaned against the hog pen fence, arms over the top rails. He stood six feet solid with a torso like a packed grain sack, and a neck that sloped outward from his hairy ears. He weighed three hundred pounds

Cam’s old man, Brugman Gratz, owned the Big G Ranch, the only dairy farm in

Pennsylvania to be called a ranch. He ran a couple of steer with the heifers and hogs and figured that gave him the right.

“Missed you at harvest time,” he said.

“I’m trying to earn enough money to go to the SOMBO world championships,” Cam said.

“What the hell is that?” Brugman Gratz said. “Some kind of dance. You got a college degree. You’re wasting you’re time. You need a job.”

“I got a job,” Cam said. “Bouncing at a bar.”

“Like I said you need a job,” he said. “Drinking beer and chasing pussy while you sit on your ass for twenty five bucks a night ain’t work.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Cam said. “I can take care of myself.”

“Don’t come begging for handouts around here,” his old man said.

“I don’t need any handouts,” Cam said.

He turned around and left.

Slow night near closing time at the City Nightclub, the beer joint Cam worked for a few extra bucks on Fridays and Saturdays: Cam sat at the door. He’d picked up some extra hours around the holidays because no one else wanted to work. He thought about his own father, mean as a wounded boar, conflicts as far back as he could remember. He tried to put it out of his mind by running through a sequence of moves, ending with a submission and victory.

After the last drunk straggled out of the bar, Cam grabbed a mop, poured detergent and steaming water in a bucket and swabbed down the bathrooms. The detergent stench clung to his hands as he walked down the darkened alley to his car. It was like the stench of the farm and the images of his boyhood. He couldn’t shake them. Most people his age were sweating over careers and families. Cam thought he was lucky, loose, prepared for whatever life threw at him. He could hang with anything.

A couple of days before New Year’s, Cam was sleeping when the phone rang around midnight. He fumbled it then caught it before it hit the ground.

“Hello,” he said.

“Cameron?”

“Becky?”

“Yeah,” she said. It sounded like she’d been crying.

“Where are you?” Cam said. He was awake now.

“At home,” she said.

“What do you want?” he said.

“Me and Lyle broke up,” she said.

“What do you want?” He said. He was staring out the window, wide awake, shivering in his shorts, his heart racing.

“I want to see you,” she said.

“I can come tomorrow,” he said.

“What about tonight?” she said.

“It’ll take three and a half, maybe four hours,” he said.

“I’ll leave the door open,” she said.

Becky was sleeping when Cam walked in. She wore a big blue football jersey with the number fourteen on it. The sheets were flipped back and the jersey hiked up over her hip. A streetlight cut the room in half, threw a white triangle across the bed and onto the wall, illuminating her milky skin. Cam leaned over her, kissed the side of her face. She stirred, turned toward him. Her breath smelled like sweet wine. A bottle of white and two glasses sat on the bedside table, sweating.

“Lyle,” she said.

“Lyle? Shit,” Cam said. He stepped away, thought about driving back the same route he’d just covered.

“Cam honey. I’m sorry,” Becky said. “I was sleeping.”

She took his hands, pulled him to her. He ran his hands up under her shirt, across her ribs.

She wrapped her arms around his back.

“What took you so long,” she said.

“I went as fast as I could.” He’d driven through the night, up the interstate, surprised at the number of night travelers around him.

He lifted her shirt over her head. She raised her arms to help him. He stood up, looked at her as he slipped off his shirt, and unbuckled his belt.

“You’re still in good shape,” she said.

“You hardly look pregnant,” he said.

“I will soon.”

They lay in bed until late morning. The streetlight faded into daylight. Cam threw back the sheets and stood up.

“Leaving already,” Becky said.

“Got a workout this afternoon and work tonight.”

“You going to move back sometime?” she said.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Why don’t you?” she said.

“You asking?” he said.

“Wondering,” she said.

“I don’t know.”

Becky had her face buried in her pillow. Her back shook as she sobbed.

“You’re going to be a lonely old man,” she said.

The words stung Cam. He thought about his father, spending his days on the farm alone, just goddamn mean. He slammed the door on the way out. He could still smell her on his hands.

He gripped the steering wheel, pressed his face into his hands, and breathed it in. What the hell happened? Who the hell did she think she was? Get knocked up by that dirtball Lyle Clovis and expect him to step in like nothing ever happened. Fuck that.

Working out with Dinkins one day a few weeks before nationals, he caught Dinkins’ arm, straightened it. Dinkins yelled.

“Damn Gratz. You don’t know when to quit.”

Cam let go. Blood pounded in his ears.

“Sorry man.”

“Like hell,” Dinkins said. “What are you thinking? It’s practice.”

They stayed away from each other in practice for a few days.

“Ever think about what you’re going to do when you quit this?” Coop asked him one day.

“Quit?” Cam said. “What the hell for?”

“Can’t do it forever,” Coop said.

“As long as I can,” Cam said.

“You can’t go around beating the shit out of people for the rest of your life,” Coop said.

Cam looked at him like he’d suddenly gone insane.

“What are you telling me this for? You, a fucking Marine.”

“This is a nowhere sport man,” Coop said. “What’s it good for? A few broken bones, torn ligaments maybe? I heard a story about a guy who dislocated his knee. They almost had to amputate. It’s a bum’s sport.”

“What about worlds?”

“Screw it,” Coop said. “I’ll go to freestyle nationals. Then I’m going home. I’m not re- enlisting.”

“Thought you were a lifer,” Cam said.

“Guess not,” Coop said. “Time for something new. Janice and I are getting serious.”

“That what you want?”

Coop shook his head. “Yeah. Don’t you?”

Nationals didn’t turn out as well as Cam had hoped, but third was good enough to get him on the challenge ladder for the world team. He kept getting better each time he competed. He found tournaments up and down the East Coast. At a tournament on Long Island, he was cruising in the final when he took a step and hyper-extended his knee. It was an old injury that kept getting worse. He finished the match, but the knee swelled up bad. A doctor took a look, said it was probably cartilage, to give it three weeks rest. It would be rested in time for a tournament in

Pennsylvania near his father’s farm.

On his way to the Pennsylvania tournament, he stopped to see if his old man had mellowed. It had almost half a year since his last visit to the farm, short as it was. Cam got out of his pickup, walked with a limp. Brugman, at his favorite spot on the hog pen fence, nodded when he saw the boy limping, turned back to the hogs, and spit a stream of brown juice that hit a big boar in the eye. It shrieked and snapped its head, took off on a full run.

Cam stood on the bottom rail, let his hurt leg hang. Brugman offered a drink from a half- pint of whiskey.

“No thanks,” Cam said.

“Good day to be a farmer,” Brugman said. He raised the bottle toward the silo and swallowed.

“Wouldn’t know,” Cam said. He shifted his foot on the rail.

“Guess you wouldn’t.”

“I’m hoping to go to Japan in August,” Cam said.

“Join the service?” Brugman said.

“Not exactly,” Cam said. “Going to the world Sombo championships.”

Brugman put the bottle in his jacket. “You still doing that shit?”

“You ever want something bad?” Cam said.

“Every day I want your mother to come back,” his father said. “Once thought I wanted a hog farm.”

Brugman Gratz took a deep breath.

Cam sensed his hurt. His father filled his massive lungs with sorrow and emptiness. Cam felt it too. All those years, the two of them never talking, and now Cam’s question, and his father’s answer were slipping in to a familiar silence.

“The dismal pastures, she called it,” Brugman said looking out at the muddy hillside he called a pasture.

“Why’d you stay?’ Cam said.

“It’s all I know,” Brugman said. “I’m too stubborn to learn new tricks.”

“Not me,” Cam said. I’m stubborn, but not stupid. When a gig is up, I’ll move on. I know when to stop.”

Cam hopped down from the fence.

“Leaving already,” his father said.

The question surprised Cam. He thought maybe he would stay for a moment.

“Tournament,” he said.

His father pursed his lips, not quite a smile. Eyes cast downward. Was that disappointment Cam wondered.

The pungent stench of manure hung on the cool breeze. The fields fertilized, half plowed.

Ammonia burned into nasal passages, sinuses, stirring brain cells and memory. The land was in the throes of spring thaw, ice then rain. The place that had been dead to him for so long was preparing to come to life again. He drove straight to the tournament and slept in his truck in the parking lot. He woke up warm in an old Army surplus sleeping bag despite frost on the windshield. Probably the last one of the year, he thought.

Dinkins was in his corner screaming at him: “Watch that arm bar. It’s all he’s got. He stinks on his feet”

Tumbling out of bounds, Cam’s head hit the mat hard. Stunned, he tried to stand, but his head felt glued to the mat. The Brazilian broke and rose, returned to the center of the mat. The referee slurred his words as he bent to check on Cam. He looked up, but a halo of sparks surrounded the edges of his vision. He blinked and it cleared. He blinked again and it was gone.

He felt a rush of heat as if the blood had rushed back into his head. He stood, rolled his neck, walked back to the center of the mat. He was fine. On the whistle, Cam grabbed the Brazilian’s jacket. The Brazilian jumped into a standing arm bar. He grabbed Cam’s wrist, wrapped it tight in Cam’s own jacket, and jumped upside down so his feet were planted in Cam’s chest and his shoulders pressed into the mat. He felt his ribs bow, the air kicked from his lungs. The

Brazilian’s hips pressed against Cam’s elbow. The pain shot into Cam’s brain, he dropped to the mat and gripped the Brazilian’s jacket, pulled tight to ease the pressure on his elbow. He stalemated him there. The referee broke them and started them back on their feet. Cam stood up.

His elbow burned and tingled. He could hardly bend it. He took a break, and then returned to the center of the mat. Careful with that reach, he told himself.

Cam turned to Dinkins. “I’ll get him.” He felt good. Sweat flowing, adrenaline pumping.

He knew what he had to do. Fake a sweep, set up an arm throw. Pitch this guy right on his back.

He pictured the perfect throw. The Mongolians had a word for it. They wrestled on straw and dirt, the sweepings from their stables. They called it getting thrown in the shit. That’s what he was going to do: throw his man in the shit. He gave Dinkins a thumbs-up.

The referee started them in the center of the mat. Dinkins was wrong. The Brazilian had an inside reap and he came in fast after the whistle. Cam blocked it at first, but he felt the knee pop, and the pain flashed through his brain like a bright light. He yelled. The next thing he

remembered was staring at the black space behind the lights, watching the rafters come into focus.

The knee felt dislocated like two numb bones rubbing against each other, but it looked all right at first. It wasn’t disfigured. It only felt that way.

A doctor walked onto the mat, tried to straighten his leg and pressed lightly on it. It wouldn’t go all the way down. The doctor shook his head. Cam was flat on his back when the referee raised his opponent’s hand. I had that match, he thought. Right there in my grip. His knuckles burned. Someone reached down, helped Cam to his feet. He was done. Cam hopped off of the mat, his hand on Dinkin’s shoulder. He sat on the bleachers as the doctor torqued his knee, the dull pain crept up his thigh and down his calf.

“Cartilage definitely,” he said. “Probably your ACL too.”

Cam showered in the musty locker room, careful not to slip on the slick concrete floor.

He eased his jeans over his knee. It was swelling badly now, red and puffy like a softball protruding from the side. The swelling spread up his leg. It felt like a spike had been hammered into the bone behind his knee. When he walked the muscles in his hamstring tightened and burned. A charge ran through his elbow when he tried to lift his arm over his head and into the sleeve of his shirt. He sat down, took a breather, and tossed his wet towel, shoes, and sweaty gear into his gym bag. He didn’t zip it. Going up the stairs he gripped the handrail. Half way to his car he sat down on a bench. His good leg was shaking and he couldn’t stand on his bad one.

“You all right to drive?” Dinkins said.

“I’ll make it,” Cam said.

He gripped the steering wheel, hunched forward, trying to keep the weight off his leg, as he started the car. A sharp jab behind his knee made him lose his grip. He leaned back, and the

car shuddered as he released the clutch. He closed his eyes and pictured Becky, but he couldn’t hold the image of her face. His heart raced. Coop was right. It was a sport for bums. What the hell was he doing? He pounded the steering wheel. “God, I’m a fucking ass,” he said. He’d been pissed off since he could remember. He’d held on to so much shit for so long. He thought about the baby. So what if it wasn’t his. There was a little kid going to grow up without a father. The thought just broke him, and he wept as he clutched the steering wheel. Then he opened his eyes and cranked the ignition. It would take two hours to get to Becky’s if he took all the shortcuts.

He couldn’t bend the leg, but he could use it like a post to work the gas and brake. When the pain came, he clenched his teeth, thought about biting down on the steering wheel. At a flashing red light he just stopped and stared, the stoplight pulsed in his brain.

Becky was banging pots and pans around the kitchen sink when Cam walked up to her front door. The old wood porch creaked as he walked across it. Buster, Becky’s mixed blood

Shepherd raised his head and sniffed at Cam, flicked his tail and lay back down. Cam could see her through the dining room window moving around the kitchen. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail with one long strand hanging down in front of her ear. He wanted to nestle his face there. As he pulled himself up to the door, his knee throbbed and he suddenly felt light-headed, sick to his stomach. He leaned against the doorjamb, rang the doorbell and ran his hand across his head. It was caked with dried sweat and felt like rough grass. His knuckles, raw and red and crusted with blood, burned as he moved his fingers over his hair. I must look like a bum, he thought. After the injury, he’d showered then thrown on an old sweatshirt a pair of shorts and some work boots, unlaced, with the tongue awry. His face was pale, swollen, and his knee had blown up so much his leg looked strangely distorted. The cold air felt good on the knee. He was

brushing his hair when Becky opened the door. She just stared at him. She doesn’t even recognize me Cam thought. “Becky,” he said.

“Cam,” she said. “What the hell happened to you? You look like shit.”

The hamstring on Cam’s good leg seized up. He pitched over backwards and landed on his butt on the old wood porch with a bang and a clatter. The old dog lurched up and barked and moved to a new place on the porch. Inside, a baby began to cry, sputtering at first like an engine getting started and then it got rolling full bore. “You woke the baby,” Becky said and turned around, slamming the front door shut, leaving Cam lying on the cold boards clutching at his hamstring. She was back a few moments later, calming the child, who had stopped crying. “You need a doctor?” Becky said.

“Maybe,” Cam said.

Becky shifted the baby in her arms. “I think you do, unless falling on your ass is a normal part of your day.”

Cam rolled to the side and tried to push himself up, but the hamstring cramped up. Becky switched the baby to one arm and reached a hand down to Cam. “Come inside,” she said. “It’s cold out here.” Cam held Becky’s hand and hobbled up to his feet. He walked inside like he had two wooden legs and collapsed onto the couch. “Kung Fu fighting again?” Becky said.

“It’s not Kung Fu.”

“Whatever.” Becky stood in front of him with the baby on her hip.

“I feel kind of sick, lightheaded.” Cam lay back, covered his eyes with a hand, and then closed them. Sparks of light floated in front of him. He felt like dozing off.

“You should eat.”

When he opened his eyes, the baby was staring at him, studying his face.

“She looks like you,” he said.

“That’s what everybody says, but I think she looks like you.”

A charge rushed through him. He suddenly felt awake.

“That’s right,” Becky said.

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“You didn’t seem too interested.”

Cam shifted awkwardly on the couch. His leg tightened up.

“You want to hold her?”

“Can I?”

He reached up, took the baby in his hands. She was so small, fragile. He could feel the little ribs, the tiny heart beating. The baby’s head rolled on her neck.

“Hold her against your chest so she can hear your heart,” Becky said.

Cam pulled the baby onto his chest, and lay back on the couch. The baby’s soft little head tickled his chin. In a moment she was sleeping.

“What now?” he said.

“Looks like she’s got you pinned.”

“I think so,” Cam said. He closed his eyes and felt her tiny breath on his neck. He’d never felt so tired. He thought about being a father and it made him feel warm, happy, in a way he’d never felt before. He thought about his own father, running the farm alone, and walking the fields by himself; there must have been a time when his father felt the same as he did as he lay there holding his own child.

“Do you think my father would want to meet her?” he said.

Becky knelt next to him. Her hair brushed across his face and his skin tingled down across his neck. He closed his eyes.

“I bet he would,” she said.

CHAPTER 3

RAFT ON OPEN WATER

Each time the raft rises, you search the horizon for another boat. You would like to see the Delphine - the seventy-five foot cutter you left that morning and meant to return to by noon, but at this point any boat will do. It is almost evening. The sea is opaque, slate-colored, not the brilliant blue of the day before. It gathers no sun. Night is coming and the outboard has quit. You repeat the words that have become your mantra. A black raft in blue water. And you feel the bruises in your armpits, rimmed by red where the raft has rubbed you raw. You lean out from the prow of the raft and paw at the sea. A line of diminishing blue light, cold and distant, separates the sky from the sea. Your job is to keep the raft pointed into the waves. A splintered oar floats in the wash at the bottom of the raft. Its paddle snapped off and bobbed away with your first dig into the sea. You know nothing about engines. You become a rudder and a rowing machine while the captain fixes the engine.

Your mind is somewhere above your body and you watch yourself crash headlong into the oncoming waves as if you are part porpoise. In the face of the rising sea it seems futile, but you manage. The waves come faster, and the growing darkness reminds you that you are tired, but your body does not register this. It keeps going as if it feels nothing. Your skin glistens like polished stones. A steady wind keeps you cool. You think this is good because you do not know what it is doing to you.

You find ways to entertain yourself while you plow into the waves. You ask yourself:

How far would you go to be with the woman you love? Would you for instance get into a rubber raft with a faulty engine and set off across an ocean channel while a storm moves in above you and the waves rise around you? No problem, you say. It’s only a few miles of open water. There are plenty of boats around. Your captain has experience. He’s taken the Delphine around the

Horn with a crew of one.

You wonder about these things now that you have been drifting in the channel for most of the day. The sun kindles the clouds on the horizon. You can’t feel the heat, but you admire the colors. They are spectacular. You think about colors and the absence of color. You realize the significance of a black boat in blue water beneath a night sky. You are invisible.

“Don’t worry,” the captain says. “We’ll get back to your wife.”

You think he’s read your mind. Are you that predictable? You cannot tell if he is taunting you. Earlier you were sure he ran the raft full speed under a mooring chain as you entered the harbor just to test you, to scare you.

He is seated sideways on the back of the boat. His hands move in and out of engine wires and hoses with the dexterity of a crab. She is not your wife. She is your girlfriend, but you are too tired too speak. Besides, you would like her to be your wife and that is why you are where you are. Taking a one-week cruise on a sailboat, a vacation to convince her that you would do anything for her. You picture her in the cabin the night before, above you with her chin thrown back and her neck exposed in the moonlight that streamed through the porthole. There is solidness to her and you held her at the point where her waist flared to her hips. The ship rose

and fell on a low roller. The beam of the old wood ship groaned and the scent of the sea filled the cabin.

You think about the sarong you bought her. It is a surprise, blue and green with turtles swimming across it. She loves turtles. You had an argument on the Delphine that morning. It had only been a small argument, but it got bigger and was unresolved when the captain asked if you were ready to go ashore.

“Is there a manual for that engine?” you say to the captain.

He shakes his head. No manual. You reach and paw at the ocean. You want to smash him with the broken oar and throw him overboard. You want to watch his lifeless form disappear in the darkening water. What a fucking dumb ass he was. No manual. What a fucking dumb ass you were for getting into the dinghy with him.

Every minute that passes sitting in the boat, smelling the oil and gas spilled by the engine, is a minute you have paid for. This vacation was your idea. You meant to spend every minute of it with her. You scraped the money together for the trip. You are not rich. You are a journalist.

It was a cheap charter. What the hell could you expect? As soon as you arrived she said the boat was shabby – the leather seat cushions in the main cabin were torn and glued. The seventy-five foot cutter had looked good in the brochures. She said that you should think about getting your money back, or report the captain to the better business bureau. “It’s not how I pictured our vacation,” she said.

It wasn’t how you pictured it either. It seemed like the two of you argued every day. It gave you a headache. She spent free moments in the kitchen, talking to Carol, the cook, asking about recipes.

“If Carol is such a good cook why does she look so hungry,” you asked. She scrunched up her eyebrows, and turned her head so her ponytail flipped from shoulder to shoulder.

The first day there had been trouble with the sailboat’s diesel engine. You didn't think much about it. The captain emerged periodically from the engine room covered in grease. You sailed to your first destination because the big diesel engine on the sailboat quit. It was clear that little things weren't being done, that he was just surviving and your money had maybe saved him for another couple of weeks.

She was right. You should have gotten off the boat as soon as there was engine trouble that first night. Why the hell didn’t you listen? You hope you have the chance to tell her she was right. You see her as you left, standing on the teak deck in shorts and a sweatshirt, arms crossed, shaking her head, her hair already a lighter brown from the sun. Her legs are lean and tanned.

You couldn’t tell her you were going to buy the sarong she saw in a shop the day before.

“It’ll be OK,” you said. “He just fixed the outboard on the raft.”

“Nothing on this boat works. The diesel, the outboard. If it’s not one, it’s the other. It’s stupid to go.”

She’ll get over it when she has the sarong, you told yourself.

“It’ll be quick,” you said. “It’s only a couple of miles across the channel. We’ll be right back. Over and back. Just like that.”

“It’s six miles to Bay Town,” she said. “That piece of crap will never make it.”

She wanted to read anyway, talk to Carol, you reminded her. “Now’s your chance,” you said. “It’ll just be the two of you, the whole boat to yourselves. You can talk while she preps dinner.”

Why has everything become an argument? You wonder if her parents have gotten to her.

You are not the type of person they pictured her with. They want a businessman, a doctor, or a lawyer for their daughter. They were concerned you would not provide the things she was used to having. “We’ll make it all right,” you once told her. “I’m a survivor.”

“I don’t want to just survive,” she said.

Remembering her words you feel a space widening between you, you sense the sea sweeping you apart. You fight the feeling, but your optimism sinks. A small stone is lodged in your belly. You have never loved a woman the way you love her. You will do anything to make it work.

She stood on the deck, arms crossed, and watched you go, the outboard spewing heavy blue smoke, the black raft bucking against the side of the sailboat until you cast off the final line and sped into the channel. She waved and said something. Her mouth moved, but her words didn’t reach you. The sound that you heard was muted by the wind, drowned by the engine. Did she say, be careful, or I love you, or neither? You tried to read her lips, counted the cadence of her words.

At dinner the night before you left for the Caribbean, you said it was really the little things that mattered, a special date remembered, favorite flowers delivered. She laughed, happy that you were going on vacation together, and surprised that you had arranged it.

Every couple of minutes the waiter was eager to fill her glasses with wine or water.

“That guy is a pest,” you said.

“He’s just doing his job,” she said.

You touched glasses and she smiled and laughed.

On the way to town the engine stalled but started again. On shore, you helped the captain carry the engine across a sandy lot between two low concrete block buildings. Unwieldy and wet, the motor almost slipped from the captain’s hands, but he caught it before it hit the ground, the dark, loose skin on his biceps suddenly taut. He shook his head as if he marveled at his own quickness and luck. The late-morning sun reflected off the white buildings and in your peripheral vision you saw a skinny yellow island dog lope toward you out of the glare of the buildings. It sniffed the propeller and tickled your calf with its nose before it fell into stride along side of you, fearlessly followed you across a road to the tin-roofed garage where a mechanic clapped his hands and chased it away. For an hour, in the heat of the metal building while the mechanics offered advice, and picked new hoses and filters from storage racks filled with boxes, wires, and spark plugs, the captain tinkered with the throttle and the starter. He cleaned out the carburetor with compressed air. When he finished, you hauled the engine back across the sandy lot to the boat. Going back, there was no dog to escort you. The motor started with a gasp and a cloud of blue smoke, but then it settled into an easy idle. You went into town to buy the sarong, feeling confident.

Even the tourist on the dock who watched you load the raft as you prepared to return to the sailboat had more sense than you did.

“You sure you want to go out in that?” the tourist said. “Pretty rough. Coast Guard has an advisory out.” He cupped a beer can in a fat hand.

The captain looked up at the tourist, shook his head. “The Coast Guard puts an advisory out every time the wind kicks up a little bit,” he said. The first day on the sailboat he told you he had sailed Delphine around Cape Horn to run charters in the Caribbean. It was easy to picture him hoisting sails, doing everything.

The tourist shook his head and took a long draw from his beer as you undid the ropes that lashed the dinghy to the dock.

The captain opened the throttle. He sat on the side of the raft, his weight nimbly shifting forward or side to side, riding the raft as if it were a bull, his jaw thrust forward into the wind.

The raft raced across the flat water of the sheltered harbor. You grabbed a rope tethered to the front of the boat and braced for the open water.

A dark line formed where the harbor ended and the choppy water of the open channel began. When you hit the end of the harbor the boat slammed into a wave and you went momentarily airborne. Four foot swells kept the rubber dinghy pitching and bouncing. You flew from peak to peak. You left your seat and landed hard as you cleared each wave. Your nuts were in your stomach. You were nearly halfway across the channel when the engine sputtered and stopped.

"Keep the bow into the waves," the captain said.

You thrust your upper body over the prow of the boat to obey the captain’s orders.

He pulled the starter cord. The engine spit and gagged, then coughed up a puff of blue smoke.

"Tie that rag to the oar and start waving it," he said. The oar handle was cracked and splintered.

You pulled a weathered red towel from under the front bench in the bow of the boat, straightened it and tied it to the oar.

The sun was high overhead, but a steady breeze chilled your skin. The waves grow larger by the second.

"Forget that for now. Keep the boat headed into the waves," the captain ordered.

The boat kept turning broadside to the oncoming waves. You leaned out over the bow and paddled by putting both hands together. You twisted at the waist and sent the boat headlong into the wave. Water washed over you as you crashed through the crown of the wave. The boat dropped down the other side and then you had to do it again. Your arms ached.

In seconds you were bailing water. A brown apple core washed past your knees amid gas rainbow blooms and scraps of crumpled paper. A steady wind whistled through the rope stays around the boat. The blazing sun held no warmth.

"Wave that oar,” the captain shouts. “There's a boat."

A long white sailboat cuts through the water in the distance, Swedish flag hanging aft.

You lift the oar and move it slowly back and forth until your shoulders hurt too much. When the cramps subside you raise the oar again. The boat grows smaller. There are not as many boats in the channel as you thought there would be.

A small motorboat rises on the crest of a wave and then drops out of sight. It rises again on a subsequent wave, a quarter of a mile away.

"They’re coming right at us," the captain says. He stands in the back of the boat with the cover off of the engine.

The little boat changes its course and chugs slowly out of sight. No other boats are near you.

"Where'd she go?" you say.

The captain shrugs.

"Bail," he says.

The current pushes you seaward, out of the channel, but from where you are it already feels like you are in the open sea. You can barely make out narrow strips of land on both horizons. You stand, and a wave knocks you backward. The Coast Guard will find you if you drift out to sea, you think. But then you look at the black rubber dinghy, the blue water. From the air you will be a cloud shadow on a wave. Why the hell did he have a black dinghy? It must have been a bargain - Navy surplus. A boat designed to camouflage troops on clandestine missions.

"There she is!" you shout.

The little boat has turned back toward you.

"PADDLE!" the captain yells.

A wave bursts over the bow and drenches the boat. You lean and dig at the water with cupped hands. The black water rushes around you, driving you faster than you can move the boat with your two hands. You are slipping from the safety of the channel like the water that pours through and around your fingers.

The captain has the cover back on the engine and pulls the starter. It wheezes. He sits for a moment in frustration and smiles at you. He seems amused at the irony of the situation as if to say: I didn’t sail a ship around the Horn to get lost at sea in a vacation paradise.

"Shit!" he says.

You remember him working on the engine in the shop.

"Try blowing into the air filter," you say.

"The sun's dropping," he says.

He opens the engine, pulls out a tube and blows into it. You paddle. Goose bumps speckle your skin. You dive into the waves with your upper body as if you are an extremity of the boat. Night is setting in. You think about the captain’s words from the night before. "The big fish feed at night." The dark water shoves your little dinghy wherever it pleases. You picture the big fish, rising from the depths - moving upward toward the delicate surface that separates your world from theirs.

The captain seems calm, mildly annoyed that the engine has quit. He yanks the starter cord as if persistence was the clue to solving everything. It doesn't seem to bother him that the waves are getting bigger. He focuses on the engine. The eight-foot boat becomes a seesaw. When you reach the crest, he sinks in the trough and then you are down and he is up.

"That guy on the dock didn't know shit," the captain says as you drift. He pulls the starter and the engine races and idles. "This is nothing,” he says. “Coming around the Horn, the mainsail jammed and I was hanging from Delphine’s mast in a bosun's chair fifty feet up while it rocked back and forth in the wind. The boat raced down waves like a surfboard. Imagine that,

Delphine like a surfboard. Those were waves.”

He smiles as he speaks as if the thought fills him with some manic glee.

“There were two of us in the boat. Me, and my third wife, and she was dying of cancer.

There was no time to think about anything. If something needed to be done I just did it. I stayed awake for forty-eight hours straight. Whatever it took."

Who the hell would take a seventy-five-foot boat around Cape Horn with a cancer patient? By that point you have forgotten your anger. What was the use? There was no time for it

- only time to paddle.

You and your girlfriend had taken sailing lessons before your trip, so you could sail the

Sunfish they rented at the beaches. It was funny to think of the certificate they’d given you for completing the course, as if you could present it to the captain and say: “Hey look, I’m a sailor too.”

The little boat draws closer. It is loaded with island fishermen. Eight or nine of them are packed into the boat. Its rail appears to be at the water line, but then it bobs up and you see multi- colored stripes and a white hull before the rail appears to touch the water line again.

"Hey, over here. Hey," the captain yells.

They turn toward you. It is a pretty little boat, orange, red and yellow stripes in a narrow border below its rail. The white hull reflects in the water. To tow you will probably sink them, you think.

"Can you tow us?" you yell.

"Sure. To Bay Town," the man at the wheel replies. His shoulders slope into thick arms.

"We just left Bay Town,” the captain says. “Can you take us the other way?"

"No. Just to Bay Town."

"Wait a minute,” the captain says. “Let me try the engine again."

He pulls the starter. The engine spits and catches. The captain turns the throttle up and the engine races and settles into an uneasy idle.

"I guess we're all right," the captain says. "Thanks anyway."

“You sure?” the driver says.

“Yeah,” the captain says.

“Why don’t we go back?” you say. “Take the tow.”

“We’re halfway there,” the captain says.

The fishermen smile and wave and shake their heads as if the two of you are crazy. As they chug away, their boat bucks on the waves and bobs barely above the waterline.

"I can't believe they wouldn't take us back to the boat," the captain says. "Those guys go right by Delphine everyday when she’s in the harbor. We'll make it without them. Hell, I could probably swim it."

"What are you nuts? It must be three or four miles to land," you say.

The captain laughs and guns the throttle and you race over the waves. Sea spray pelts your face. It feels like small stones. You hold on to the rope and slam down hard each time you land. It is a jarring ride but it beats the alternative. You speed on for a few hundred meters and then the engine stalls. You and the captain stare at each other for a second.

"Try to clear the tubes again," you say. It is all you know.

You are in the center of the channel and the waves are bigger. They crest above your head. You take your place in the front of the boat and maintain a perpendicular position to the waves. Your belly burns from lying on the hard rubber of the dinghy. The sun drops further and the cools the air even more. You see the gray face of the next wave, its translucent crown, and then for an instant the charcoal clouds, before you tumble to the foot of another wave. You sink into the hollow place between two waves, and the wind is suddenly muted. You think about eating the apple core that drifts in the wash around your knees.

The wind whips foam in your face and tickles your shoulders. It is sticky, soft, and seems to connect you to the air. You lick your lips and taste the salt and you spit into the sea.

The captain opens the engine again. It reminds you of a smashed oyster shell. Clear tubes and black wires loop and curl around his blackened hands. The key hangs uselessly from the ignition. The captain stares at the motor.

He says something but you can’t hear him. He lifts a clear tube and blows into it and then reattaches it and pokes at the carburetor with a screwdriver.

A boat appears in the distance. You wave the broken oar. They don't notice and you sit down with a thump on the hard plywood seat. A wave throws the captain to the side of the boat as he pulls the starter and he almost goes overboard. The engine sputters. He snaps the cord and the engine kicks over. You race off for a few hundred meters, bouncing hard over the waves, and then the engine quits again. The boat rises and drops. The waves have grown to five feet and the sky has turned to slate.

"Time for a new engine," you say. It is a poor attempt at a joke and he does not hear you.

The routine continues. He lifts the engine cover and you paddle. It is almost superstitious.

You don't want to disturb the routine. You paddle. He fiddles with the engine and it starts. You make a few hundred yards and it stops.

You have been out there for hours. Your body is a shell, numb and cut off from your thoughts. There is a delay between your brain’s commands and your body’s reaction.

You look back and the captain is gone.

You rush toward the motor, fall on your hands and knees and slide the rest of the way with the wash on the slick boat floor. The sea undulates beneath you. Foam froths over the edge of the raft. Around you black water boils, and the next wave rises indifferently to meet you. You scramble to the front of the raft and you step on something hard beneath the rubber floor. You touch it. The object beneath the floor moves. You lean over the edge of the raft and see a foot.

You grab it and pull. You wrap both arms around the calf and heave. As the raft crashes over the top of an oncoming wave the captain emerges from beneath the raft, coughing, white, dead- looking. His leg is slick and slips from your grip. For a moment he floats in front of you, like a ghost in the water, wide-eyed. You catch his leg, lock it in your armpit, and pull his knee securely to your chest. You press your feet against the side of the raft and lean backwards. He rises from the water, but his other leg gets caught on the raft. He straddles the side of the raft and slumps back toward the sea, but with one great heave, you haul him into the raft and scramble to right the prow. The captain is puking water. You don’t know CPR, but you’ve seen people do it on TV, so you roll him onto his back and pound on his chest. Water spurts from his mouth and he seems to be conscious. You split your time between him and the front of the boat.

At some point in the night the waves subside. The sky fills with stars. They are brilliant, sparkling like a sun-filled black sea. You tell yourself that if you are ever found you will never get into a boat again. The captain moans and says something, a prayer perhaps, although he doesn’t strike you as a religious man. You sit him against the side of the raft and fall back into the shallow water that sloshes around the boat. It is the last thing you remember of the night.

In the morning the sea is flat. Your skin is so tight it feels like it will rip when you move.

You hear an engine in the sky. Or do you? When you open your eyes you see white birds swimming in a blue sky. You have to squint because the sun hurts your eyes. It stabs your eyes from all angles. The captain lies face down. When you roll him over, he vomits, and sits up. He looks at the placid sea and laughs. “We’ll get back to your wife,” he says. “A little squall. That’s all it was. Nothing like coming around the Horn.” His laughter resonates inside of you and you feel foolish and small.

You drift on the dead sea while the sun tattoos your skin red. You try to hide from it in the paltry shadow of the storage box, but the raft has become a Teflon-coated frying pan. Sweat stings your armpits. Your lips burn. Has it been twenty-four hours? You remember the little boat loaded with islanders, the man at the dock, the sarong, blue and green, docile turtles swimming in a complacent sea. You remember dusk, one night, the stars, little sleep, paddling until your shoulders ached and seemed to freeze. You hear voices and the sound of water slapping. A great white sheet rises above you, and eclipses the sun. Faces peer at you from above a rail.

The smell is what you will remember most. It will stay with you for years as if it had soaked into your sinuses, your skin, and the depth of your being. Your eyes will be damaged and they will require special lenses. You will get into a boat again despite what you said. It will be a rowboat on a pond and you will row your wife on your wedding anniversary – your fifteenth, or perhaps your twentieth. You will step into the boat and you will shiver. She will ask you about your night on the open sea. She will ask you the name of the girl you once loved. You will remember nights in a tight cabin, light brown hair, her voice across the water, the way she stood, arms crossed, concerned for your safety. You will wonder what she said that day when she called

to you as you left. You will recall her name as if the distance between her and you were no longer marked by time and the sea.

CHAPTER 4

CROSSING THE RIO GRANDE

In the pictures she is on a rock at a rest stop somewhere in western New Mexico, long legs braced against the river of wind that swept the landscape. She was laughing, eyes closed, to keep out grit. I squinted into the camera to get the photos. The wind and the barren land fascinated us. Everything seemed to be moving. I joked that the wind was following us. Jolene said it might as well be because everyone else was. The wind had been steadily rising all day and into the night. We watched it blow across the plains, lifting the landscape as it went. We had driven west from Pennsylvania and then south, following the Rocky Mountains on our way to

Mexico. We were going to walk across the bridge at El Paso into Juarez and meet our freedom.

I took the pictures a few weeks after she woke me up back in Pennsylvania and said: "I have something to show you."

She had been scrambling eggs. Bacon was sizzling in the pan. "Over here," she said. She walked to the bathroom where she had a little box sitting next to the sink. "Read the instructions," she said. "And then look at this." She waved a little white plastic stick in front of me.

"There are two lines on here," I said.

"Exactly," she said, flipping a lock of glistening hair over her shoulder. Her hair was so black that when it fell on my face I felt like I was swimming through the night.

"What should we do?"

"It's kind of early," she said. "But I should go to the doctor and get checked."

"Get a second opinion," I said looking into those brown eyes that convinced me she was the one. "That's a smart idea."

"Are you upset?" she asked. We had no plans for children at the time and had wanted to spend a few years traveling the country. We would look at the ratty old Rand McNally maps of

America we’d bought at Wallmart and finger the red and blue lines that marked the routes, tracing destinations from Canada to Mexico, and listing them in an order of preference that changed each time we picked up the atlas.

"No," I said and to tell you the truth some semblance of happiness had begun to stir in me. I knew I had to take care of things. It was going to be three of us.

At the time I was involved in the car business, buying and selling them without a dealer’s license. It was easy work and good money. I used different names to buy the cars. I got the names from the cemetery, or I made them up by using the phone book. It was kind of fun. I figured no body in that town could catch me. I’d buy them and park them around town so they couldn’t get me for having too many cars in my driveway. I had my parking places: the alley behind Red Rooster Fried Chicken; down the street from the Minute Mart; the parking lot at the

YMCA. There must have been twenty places I could ditch a car for a couple of days. Sometimes

I had five cars parked around town. I was making the kind of money a man needs to raise a family on. I paid for my classes at the community college and figured I could finance my way through a four-year college and then apply to the police academy. I’d make a damn good cop seeing how I already knew most of the crooks in town. It was more than Jolene’s old man took home from the mines in two weeks and I didn’t have to worry about coughing up a lung everyday and dying young of the miner’s disease. For a guy a couple years out of high school that was pretty good. It

was more than any of my friends could dream of making at the gas stations, mines, or delivering pizzas. I didn’t tell her where the money was coming from at first, but she got suspicious and then she got nervous. So then I told her and that just made her more nervous, but she liked the money too. She told me to quit when I sold my stock. That lasted a couple of weeks. I’d see a nice car and smell a good profit. I kept saying one more and that’s it. It wasn’t easy to give up money like that. I made a couple thousand more before I decided for sure that I was going to quit.

Sometimes I laugh about it: one more car. That’s all it was going to be. I was going to go legit. Maybe even become a car salesman. What the hell, I had enough experience. I always liked cars and I could picture myself sitting behind a desk at some dealership selling Lincolns to the fat cats and making a good cut. It was the only thing I really knew.

What it came down to was this: I sold one too many cars to Pokey Herbert. It was worse than being busted by Barney Fife. The first one was a Ford pick-up. The second was a vintage

Ranchero he wanted to fix up. I didn’t know it was Pokey when we talked on the phone. When he showed up to buy the Ranchero behind the Red Rooster he was wearing his brown deputy sheriff’s uniform, service revolver and all. I was surprised to see him. He’d parked around the corner and sort of appeared out of the darkness. We stood at the murky edge of light cast by a street lamp. The Ranchero was white and looked like it hand been painted with a roller. It needed some serious restoration.

“Selling a lot of cars lately Sid,” he said.

I’d sold him the pick-up about three weeks before.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.” A plume of oily blue smoke hung above the

Red Rooster. The air smelled like fried chicken and French fries. I started to get a little nervous.

“How about we go down town and talk to the sheriff about your little dealership?”

He was still the same block-headed do-gooder he’d always been. He hadn’t changed since the third grade.

“No chance,” I said.

“Won’t take much to get a warrant.”

I had this vision flash through my mind of me going to jail and not seeing my baby born.

No kid of mine was going to meet its father through a grubby window at the county prison. I swear Pokey started to go for his gun and I panicked. Maybe he just went to adjust his belt.

But, I couldn’t tell, and by then it was too late. I’d already assaulted an officer. It was like we were back in the fourth grade together playing cops and robbers at recess at Kingston

Elementary. Pokey was still playing the cop. He was so slow and easy to get away from that we always made him the cop. It’s how he got the name Pokey. He was never much of a fighter either and the police academy didn’t teach him any better. I bear-hugged him and pinned his arms to his side. Pokey weighed about two twenty and I could barely lock my hands around him. I go about one seventy-five after a good meal and I’m about a head shorter than Pokey. He stumbled backward and fell to the ground. We rolled around in the dirt, the paper cups, newspapers and broken glass that littered the scrub brush lot, and stirred up the dust, until I got his gun. I jumped to my feet.

“Get up,” I said.

“Don’t do nothing stupid Sid.”

“Get in the car.” My mind was going about a thousand miles an hour. One stupid mistake had led to another. I could hardly believe it was me standing there holding a gun on

Pokey.

“What’re you going to do?” he said.

“Shut up and get in the car.” I had no idea what to do. There was some twine and some packing tape in the back seat that I used to tape up “for sale” signs on my cars. I was so nervous I forgot about the handcuffs clipped to his belt.

“Tape your feet together,” I said.

“Aw come on Sid,” he said.

“Just do it,” I said. “Now get your hands.”

When his hands and feet were taped up, I tied the twine around his body and taped his mouth shut. I pushed him down on the seat and covered him with an old blanket. I couldn’t stop sweating as I drove home. I had a situation on my hands. It’s hard to believe how fast things can fall apart. Once you cross the line, I guess anything can happen. It had to be number one on the top-ten list of stupidest things I’d ever done. Come to think of it, five or six things on that list came out of that whole ordeal.

When I got home Jolene was watching reruns of “Beverly Hills 90210.” A blue light flickered around the living room of the apartment when I walked in. She was an actress. She played some parts at the Eagle Tavern dinner theater where she also worked part-time as a waitress.

“I can act better than these people,” Jolene said. “All I need is a break.”

“Not likely in Coaldale,” I said.

“I gotta go to New York.”

“How about Mexico?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Get packed,” I said. “It’s time to go.”

“Where are we going?”

“I told you. Mexico.” I’d worked out a plan during the drive home. I had a pocket full of money that would last us for a while and then we could take up some kind of work in the resorts, maybe a on a cruise ship. Shit, I heard they’d hire anybody on those things. Or maybe we’d keep moving further south where American dollars would go a long way.

“Mexico,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

“Hurry. We’ve got to go now.”

She packed in a whirlwind and when she threw her bag in the back seat of the faded green

Plymouth Fury it hit Pokey so hard he grunted.

“What’s that?” she said and turned to look in the back seat.

“Pokey,” she yelled. “Sid, what the hell is Pokey Herbert doing in the back seat?”

The three of us had been in Mrs. Hefflefinger’s third grade class together at Kingston

Elementary. I still had a class picture somewhere of us all looking earnest and innocent in our

Sunday best. I guess I had a thing for collecting pictures even back then. Pokey was standing in the back because he was bigger than everybody else. Jolene was in the middle with coal-black braids, braces, and a big buck-toothed smile. I was off to the side, eyes cast toward Jolene,

having arrived late, already a little delinquent, cultivating the negligence toward deadlines, rules, and authority that would eventually lead to the desperate run I presently refer to.

“I’ll explain it all in a second.” I could tell she was mad about it.

“I thought it was just you and me.”

“It is,” I said. “We’re going to drop Pokey off along the way. He needs a ride out of town.”

“Why’s he all taped up?” she reached back and pulled the tape off of Pokey’s mouth.”

“Ow,” Pokey yelled. “Jolene, tell this moron to let me go.”

“Put the tape on his mouth,” I said.

“Pokey, where are you going?”

“I’m not going anywhere, but Sid’s going to jail guaranteed,” he said. “Kidnapping is a federal offense.”

“Shut up Pokey,” I said. “No one here is going to prison.

Right then I got the idea to put Pokey in the trunk at least until we got out of town. I wanted to forget he was there. Hearing his voice reminded me of my own stupidity.

“Get up Pokey. You’re going in the back.”

“What are you doing Sid?” Jolene said.

“Putting Pokey in the trunk.”

“The hell you are. You can’t put him back there.”

“Why not?”

“What the hell kind of person are you Sid Grubb? You can’t treat a human being like that.

He’ll suffocate back there. Get back in this car.”

“Well tape his damned mouth shut then.”

The leaves had already begun to fill out the trees in Coaldale that night when we headed toward the Rocky Mountains. Big black-bottomed thunderclouds surrounded the moon. They were getting ready to burst and when they did they would keep the town soaked in a dismal grayness for a month or so. I wasn’t sorry I would miss the ragged edge of winter in that town.

It felt good to be leaving Coaldale regardless of the circumstances. It was something I should have done a long time before that. It’s funny how things suddenly make sense when it’s mostly too late. We drove through the south end of town, past the narrow frame houses, covered with permastone and aluminum siding that hid their rotting frames, toward 61, on our way to the interstate.

I remember every cop car we saw on the way, starting with Coaldale’s finest, sitting in a culvert by the borough sign, and the state cop near the Maryland border that raced up behind us with lights flashing and moved on past. Another one pulled off the side of the road on I-81 in

Virginia as we passed, but turned the other way.

“What are you doing with Pokey?” Jolene said.

“I don’t know yet. We got to get rid of him somewhere.”

“You aren’t going to shoot him are you? She looked blank faced and scared all of a sudden.

Pokey kicked the back of the seat.

“Tape his ears shut,” I said.

She leaned into the backseat and I heard the tape rip. Her denim-clad backside filled the rearview mirror. A patch of white thread showed where the denim had worn through.

“Sorry about this Pokey,” she said. “But, it’s better than the trunk.”

“Don’t mention Mexico anymore,” I said under my breath.

“Mexico, Mexico, Mexico,” she said. “I swear to God Sid. Sometimes you scare me.

Now tell me what happened.”

Embarrassing as it was, I had to tell her about how Pokey and the Mayberry police department stumbled on my scam, and how I panicked at the thought of being arrested.

We kept it steady at the speed limit where ever we were. I thought about buying a plane ticket as we cruised I-40 in Tennessee and passed a wrecked truck. I never saw so many cops in one place. All their lights were spinning in the night. Pokey was quiet for a while and I figured he fell asleep, although he might have just been scared and silent. I didn’t really know because I couldn’t put myself in his position. I was too worried about my own predicament. I switched on an oldies station and it took my mind off of things. For a while we played the expectant parents.

“We need to get some things for the baby when we get settled,” Jolene said. She was painting her toenails with a flashlight in one hand and the bottle of polish in the other. The smell of nail polish filled the car. It reminded me of building plastic model cars when I was a kid.

“Like what?” I said.

“A crib, a stroller, things like that.” She seemed happy in a way and that made me feel good. Although, I don’t think the whole weight of the situation had hit her yet. Not to mention, the closer we got to Mexico, the further we were from New York and her dreams of being a real actress and not just a part-time waitress who did some acting at a dinner theatre.

“We’ll get a little bungalow,” I said. “Down by the beach.” To be honest, I was thinking more about getting my ass across the border than fatherhood and the kind of responsibilities which I had spent most of my life avoiding. But, every time I mentioned Mexico or the border

she clammed up. We hadn’t been on the road more than twelve hours and it was already becoming a sore subject.

“Can’t we find a place somewhere in the states,” she said.

“No way.”

“Mister hard-ass,” she said and then she was quiet about it for a while although I figured I hadn’t heard the last of it.

I never guessed how much a life could change in a couple of hours. Kidnapping a cop will do that. Somewhere east of Nashville we started seeing signs to Graceland. Jolene got all excited about it.

“Hey Pokey,” she said. You want to go to Graceland?”

He was moving around on the backseat and mumbling something. She ripped the tape off his ears and mouth and asked him again.

“Ow,” he yelled. “Graceland. I always wanted to go to Graceland.”

Then I got an idea. I was always getting an idea. The problem was half of them were bad.

I had to get better at sorting them out.

“Pokey you’re going to Graceland,” I said. “With a pocket full of money, and you’re going to stay there for a week and not tell a soul about me, or the cars, or Jolene.”

How stupid was I? I was just hopeful and sorry by that point. I wanted a way out. My mind was like an alternating highway sign that flashed: Run and gun, and Give yourself up.

Jolene put an Elvis cassette in and “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog” started playing.

“We’re going to Graceland,” she said.

“No Jolene,” I said. “Pokey’s going to Graceland. We’re going to Mexico.”

“You said it,” Jolene said.

I clapped my hand over my mouth and glanced in the back seat. I couldn’t tell if he heard us. “Put the tape back over his ears.”

“Come on Sid,” she said. “Let’s go to Graceland. Just for a little while.”

At that point I started thinking in a way that scared me. I wasn’t sure about dropping

Pokey off because I knew it would be a short time before he went to the cops. Besides that, he probably knew where we were going. I figured that I might have to shoot Pokey and going to

Graceland suddenly became another term for it. I also wanted to be alone with Jolene, and the scary thing was how far I was willing to go to do it. At that point Pokey was all that stood between me, and freedom. He was the only one besides Jolene who knew about my business. He was at my mercy. I felt like the fucking devil himself. I looked in the back seat at Pokey and all of a sudden in my head I heard Paul Simon singing “Going to Graceland, Graceland, in Memphis

Tennessee.”

“We’ve got to get rid of him,” I said.

“In Graceland,” Jolene said.

“Before that.”

I wanted him out of the car before I did something else crazy. I couldn’t trust myself. I was like the lead stone in an avalanche. Every time I moved it seemed like a mountain of shit came tumbling after me. I had no control over it. It all started after I made that stupid lunge for

Pokey when I thought he was going for his gun. I’m usually the kind of guy who can’t make a decision to save his life. Go figure. All this badness was just bubbling up out of me and I hated it. I didn’t know where it was coming from.

I panicked again for the second time in my life, and pulled off I-40 at some little town and drove to the bus station. What a lousy fugitive I made. It was pretty clear I wasn’t cut out for a career as a criminal, but regardless, there I was with a kidnapped cop in my backseat and a string of cars registered to phony names back in Coaldale. I still remember the name of the town where we dropped Pokey off. They sold cowboy boots there. There was a town in Pennsylvania by the same name that was famous for boloney.

“Pokey,” I said, but then I remembered his ears were taped so I pulled it off.

“Ow,” he said. “You pulled my hair out.”

“Pokey. I’m giving you five hundred bucks and the Ranchero back in Coaldale. Go to

Graceland. Give me five days and then do what you’ve got to do. You owe me now.”

“OK Sid,” he said.

What else could he say? He was probably afraid I’d shoot him or dump him along the highway somewhere without shoes. I knew he’d go to the first phone he found and call the cops, but I did it anyway. I didn’t care. Something had to stop me. We’d have to keep moving until we crossed the border. I thought I screwed our chances of making it to Mexico right there, but in the end I think it was the smartest thing I did on that trip.

I un-taped his hands and untied the twine around his arms. He was so happy he hugged me.

“Thanks Sid,” he said.

I un-taped his feet and watched him lumber off to the bus station. He turned and waved at us like a kid going away to summer camp for the first time. By the time he stepped inside, I was pulling out of the parking lot, reaching for the speed limit, and trying to drive a straight line. The

car had better pickup without Pokey in the backseat. I felt it right away. It was good to get rid of that extra weight, knowing I wasn’t responsible for him anymore.

I wanted to head straight for Mexico, but Jolene didn’t.

“Let’s go to New Mexico first,” she said, like we were on our honeymoon, and I agreed. I crumbled like that all the time when it came to her. But that’s not the only reason. I was afraid of crossing that border too. It seemed so final like the one I’d crossed when I kidnapped Pokey

Herbert. But, I also knew I didn’t have any choice. I couldn’t put it off forever, only for a little while. All the way to the Southwest I knew that it was a mistake not going straight to Mexico, but I wanted her to be happy. I was a little scared of what might happen to us across the border.

We didn’t know the language. We didn’t know anybody. It would just be the two of us, for a while anyway. I kept telling myself that all this lingering around the border was a bad idea.

We crossed the New Mexico state line around midnight and drove to a campground on a lake. It was so dark we couldn’t see beyond our own headlights. The wind whipped the tent as we set it up. We were the only ones in the campground except for the coyotes that were crying somewhere in the distance.

“Hey,” I said. “Is this the place where they filmed Close Encounters?

“That was Wyoming,” Jolene said. “Devil’s Tower.”

“Right.”

“This place gives me the creeps,” she said.

“Me too.”

It smelled like sand and sagebrush. The wind was at the tent all night, whipping the nylon walls, flaying the unzipped flaps, and flinging sand. We had outrun rain for wind. Everywhere

we went there was some kind of weather chasing us. I was so tired that when I crawled inside I fell immediately asleep. But then, I dreamed that a man with a gun walked up to our tent. He was like an old time sheriff and he pointed a rifle inches from my head. It seemed so real that I yelled and grabbed at the gun.

“What’s wrong,” Jolene said. We were both sitting upright, startled.

“Dream.”

“I’ve got to pee,” she said. “Please come out with me.”

I picked up the flashlight. I was wide-awake then. The sky was clear and the stars were out. The wind bowed the sagebrush. The air was sweet, cool, and so dry it tickled the inside of my nose.

“Over here,” Jolene said. “Shine the light there. Make sure there’s no rattlesnakes or anything.”

She squatted beside some sagebrush.

The coyotes kept it up all night and I listened, wondering how close they were getting. As soon as the sun rose, we crawled out of the tent.

“This place is beautiful,” Jolene said.

We had camped on an overlook near the lake. The shore was strewn with boulders, but there was a little cove with a beach fifty yards or so from our tent. The wind had stopped and the only thing in sight that moved was a hawk, high and distant, that drew tiny circles in the sky. We were the only ones in the campground. Jolene peeled off her shirt and her shorts and ran into the water. Her white ass disappeared into the water and I followed. The water was warm and the bottom was sandy. She washed her hair in the lake and we sat in the suds as they melted away around us. Her skin was slick and the water made sucking sounds when our bodies pressed

together. The water rippled around us and tiny waves broke on the shore. Boulders piled at the water’s edge formed caverns and pillars that floated against the waking sky. We glided into shallow water and ran aground. She sat up so her knees anchored us in the sand and her hips rolled gently with the waves in our wake. Beyond her the sky looked like it had never known a cloud and it felt like we’d never known each other before that moment in that lake in the middle of nowhere. We lay there so long the sky became deep water and then she rose and fell back and drifted away so that her pale breasts buoyed up in the bright water. When she stood, the water ran off of her in sunlit streams. She brushed some sand from the red blotches on her knees and smiled. My back tingled where the sand had rubbed against me.

She stood on the beach and stuck out her stomach. “Hey, can you tell yet?” she said.

We drove in circles around Arizona and New Mexico for three weeks or more. I started losing track of time with that wind howling in my ears all the time. At a rest stop somewhere east of the Arizona state line, I took the pictures of her leaning into the wind. We’d bought a disposable camera at a mini-market along the way. She stood on the rocks and the wind caught her hair. We camped at state parks along the way. Most of them were desolate sand piles next to man-made lakes.

“Can we go to Las Vegas?” she said one day. “Get married.”

“They’ll find us,” I said.

She just stared out the window like she was going to cry. She was getting touchy about everything. It wasn’t easy living on the road like that. It was wearing us ragged. Eating

sometimes. Always worried someone was following us. Clearing out of motels before we got a good night sleep.

“We’ll go to a little church as soon as we get to Mexico,” I said.

She was chewing on her thumbnail.

“Promise,” she said.

“We’ll be a real family,’ I said.

The idea made me happy. We would be like the family I never had.

“What about names?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s get a book,” she said.

“We have plenty of time for that,” I said. “Months.”

We got a book of names and a Spanish phrase book at a mall in Flagstaff, and she read names as I drove.

“What goes good with Grubb?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Mr. And Mrs. Sidney Grubb,” she said. “And Sydney or Sydney, Jr. It works both ways.”

“Find something new,” I said.”

“How about Eunice? It’s a family name.”

“Whose family?” I said.

“Mine,” she said. “A great aunt or something like that.”

She started paging through the book, picking names at random.

“Cameron,” she said.

“What does it mean?”

“Crooked nose,” she said.

“Forget it. A kid with a crooked dad doesn’t need a name like that.

“Jesse,” she said.

“Like Jesse James,” I said. “What’s another one?”

“You can think of something bad, or something good about every name or person there ever was,” Jolene said.

She was right. You couldn’t avoid it.

We were at a rest stop in southern New Mexico somewhere along I-10 on our way to El

Paso. When she went inside the rest room, I read the missing persons posters on the wall. They gave me the creeps. I didn’t like the idea of people disappearing – people something bad has happened to - so I went to the car and waited there. I wondered if Pokey made it back to

Coaldale all right. He must have made a report and there were probably bulletins sent around the country. I tried to think of somebody I could call, but I didn’t have any friends there I could really trust.

I was glad when Jolene returned to the car because I was getting tired of being alone with my own fear. I kept dwelling on what I’d done and how wrong everything had gone. When she got in the car she kept biting her lip and then she started crying. Her eyes were red like she’d been at it for a while.

"Something wrong," I asked her.

"I feel sick," she said. "I've been feeling badly all day."

"What is it?" I asked.

"Bad cramps," she said. "I got my period."

After a silent moment when all we could hear was the awful howl of the wind and the smattering of sand as it whipped against our car she spoke.

"No baby," she said.

I didn't know what to say. It felt like we were in the middle of nowhere as if we were the only two people left on the planet.

We sat in the car for a moment. I had my arms around her and she pressed her face into my shoulder. Inside the car was like a vacuum, quiet, dead air. The wind stirred the world outside.

"We should go now," I said after a while. "It'll be all right."

My words sounded hollow. How could it be all right? It would never be all right. It would just be the way it was and it would be that way forever. At first, I had a hard time thinking of those two pink lines on a plastic stick as evidence of a human being, but after a few days I'd gotten used to the idea, actually liked it, believed it.

“I don’t feel right,” she said.

I didn’t want to take any chances so I drove to a hospital in Las Cruces.

A gasp of wind followed us in through the sliding stainless steel and glass doors and into the sterilized air of the hospital. I sat in the waiting area of the emergency room as Jolene went in to be examined by white-coated doctors.

Ambulances kept arriving and paramedics wheeled victims in one after another. I sat close enough to the front desk to hear the radio crackle every time a paramedic called in to announce their incoming ambulance and the status of their patient: “White female, forty five years old, blood pressure stable at one twenty over eighty; pulse seventy two, administering oxygen with an IV in place, complaining of abdominal pains.” The call would come in and two minutes later they’d arrive. I was surrounded by disasters: a woman, who had sliced her hand with a carving knife, sat with a bloody towel wrapped around her hand; two bloody and dazed survivors of a car crash, a blonde girl staring straight through the wall in front of her and a young man with his head in his hands; a drunk and hysterical man who kept asking "Where am I? What the hell am I doing here? Why don’t these fucking people help me?”

I was invisible to them. Each one of them was wrapped tightly in the details of their own pain, and I bore no outward scars of misadventure, only an unfathomable sadness that only the nurse seemed to detect when she brought Jolene out of the examining room in a wheelchair. It felt like Mike Tyson had whacked me in the gut. I realized how easy it was to be bad in America and disappear into the sameness of it all, the towns with their malls, and stop lights and interstates and to just keep moving, blending in until maybe one day you just went a little too far and all your badness was revealed in the light of day. I kept connecting up the things I done with what was happening and I figured all that restlessness maybe shook the baby loose from her. I couldn’t help blaming myself for that.

"She's going to be fine," said the nurse, a round-faced woman with dark brown skin who wore a white hat and dress. She put a hand on my shoulder and I reached for Jolene's tanned and delicate hand and the three of us were linked for a moment, a human chain, beneath the glaring fluorescent lights.

"We'll try again," I said.

Jolene nodded. "I know," she said.

We found a hotel in El Paso where we decided to stay before we went over into Mexico the next day.

“Does this wind ever stop,” I asked the lady at the front desk.

“It’s unusual this time of year,” she said. She had dyed-black hair that looked wind proof.

Her fingers were covered with silver and turquoise rings. “Usually the windy season is done by now.”

After a month, it felt good to be laying naked on a bed in a hotel in El Paso, resting as the wind whistled through the steel bars of our balcony and moved the landscape outside. The longer we stayed on the road the more it seemed our dreams scattered before us. We stopped to think about our next destination. Jolene had taken a hot bath and she stood with her head down, combing out her long black hair. I came up behind her, ran my hands over the curve of her hips, across the swell of her belly and down through her wet black hair and gently touched her cool, fresh, lips. I’d forgotten for a moment. She moved away from me.

"Don't," she said.

There was a tiny spot of bright red blood on my fingertip. I rinsed my hand off in the sink. The blood stretched into a thin red line and spiraled down the drain.

I sat back on the bed and looked out the window. I understood her reasons. I felt raw too.

But it didn't make it any easier. I just wanted to touch her, be close to her. After a while I got up and I opened the sliding glass door and the persistent wind rushed in. I swear that wind got inside

me somehow and went howling through my soul like it was blowing through the Grand Canyon.

It made an awful, mournful, sound and it came right up from somewhere deep inside me.

Listening to it, I knew I couldn’t go on being the way I was forever. Something started to give way inside me, crumble, the way the wind beats at a rock face and eventually erodes it. I think of that now as the beginning of the last day of who I was.

In the morning Jolene woke up and said: "I want to go home now."

“What about me,” I said. “I can’t just go back.”

“Yes you can,” she said.

“I’m not going to prison,” I said.

“I want to go home,” she said.

“Go then,” I said, and threw a roll of cash on the bed where she lay with her face buried in the pillow, sobbing, her back heaving. I had already started to pay for the things I’d done. I just wanted her to be safe and happy, and where I was headed I wasn’t sure I could do that for her.

That wind never missed a chance to throw dirt in my face. It spit grains of sand that got in my eyes as we walked to the bus station and made me tear up, and then I just wept. Walking behind Jolene watching her go was too much.

“Just stay,” I said. “Please come with me.”

“I can’t Sid,” she said. “It’s all such a mess that I got to get out now.”

I swallowed a mouthful of wind and sand and my throat was so dry it was hard to talk. It felt like I’d eaten a handful of dirt.

“Just come back and go to the police academy like you wanted to before,” she said.

“It’s too late,” I said. “I can’t do that now.”

“You always told me you could do anything you wanted to,’ she said.

I hacked and coughed up all that dust and grit. I closed my eyes and shook my head.

“That was before Jolene,” I said.

I was hungry and sick to my stomach. Bile rose from my belly and burned my throat. I was tired of walking around in my selfish self with that wind beating on me everywhere I turned.

I could feel her wet face against my neck when she hugged me goodbye.

“Call me from Mexico,” she said.

“I will,” I said. I could barely get the words out.

She turned away. The wind had blown her hair to one side and I could see the tiny, downy, hairs on her tanned and slender neck. I wanted to bury my face in that dark hair. She lifted her bag and boarded the bus. I watched her walk down the aisle to the back of the bus.

Mexico seemed so far away then, even though it was a half mile or less from where I stood. I hated thinking about crossing the border by myself. It was lonely as soon as she got on the bus. I wasn’t feeling so smart anymore, or like the wise guy who could get away with anything.

I pictured the bus as it drove through the blistering prairie heat, through dusty southwest towns, into the mid west, past oceans of corn, where heat lingered like fog above a river. There were things between us now that the wind could never blow away.

I sold the car to some crook at a dusty used-car lot for a couple hundred less than I wanted. But, I was in no place to bargain. I forced myself to eat a good breakfast at a little place on the road to Mexico. I knew I would need the energy for where I was going and I wasn’t sure

where it was going to come from. I sat there over my eggs ranchero for a long time, stirring the green chile and drinking the watery coffee. I read the paper about five times. I started to feel bad about the smallest things like when Jolene pulled the tape off of Pokey’s face and yanked out his hair so it hurt him. And about how bad he must have felt tied up in the backseat of my car for twelve hours. I couldn’t believe I was going to put him in the trunk of my car. Taping his ears shut was just downright mean. They might not have been the worst things that ever happened to a person, but they were things a human being shouldn’t have to endure. They were humiliating, and it was my fault he’d suffered them. I don’t even want to mention the murderous ideas that crossed my mind, or what might have happened when I pointed his gun at him. Why would I think of that? Where does that come from? I kept thinking about how proud Pokey was to wear that Sheriff’s uniform around town even though it was brown polyester and must have met him sweat in the middle of winter. I was ashamed of myself, and sat there feeling like a jackass.

The waitress, a sharp-faced girl of about sixteen, who was entertaining a boyfriend between waiting on me, looked like she was getting tired of filling my coffee cup so I left. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. As it was, I must have looked like a fugitive, lingering on the border, and soaking in my last rays of good old U.S. of A sunshine.

A little after noon I walked across the bridge like I was a tourist. I was amazed that the

Rio Grande was little more than a stagnating trickle in a sandy culvert. A dry gap. It was no big deal. People crossed the border there every day, sometimes several times. I caught a gust of hot dry air that tickled the inside of my nose like spent gunpowder. The customs man asked me how long I was going to be in Mexico and I said a couple of hours. It was as easy as that. I didn’t

realize at the time how true that was and I guess that is why he believed me. As soon as I made it to the other side a cab driver pulled up to me and said: “Hey, what you looking for?”

I just looked at him blank.

“You want a senorita? I know a nice girl. Clean. You get a little massage, make you nice and relax.”

“No thanks,” I said, even though a massage sounded good. My neck was tense and it was making my head hurt. But, when I thought about laying in some lonesome room with a Juarez whore I remembered Jolene on that bus driving somewhere through the heart of America and it made me sadder than I’d ever been before in my life.

“You want a dentist,” the cabbie said. “Fix you teeth maybe?”

I shook my head and walked on, grinding my teeth. I didn’t feel like a man who’d crossed the border to freedom. I wondered what it would be like to go back across that bridge and sit in a prison for five or ten years, maybe less if I got a good sentence, or got time off for good behavior.

I didn’t even know how much prison time you could get for running an illegal car dealership and kidnapping a cop even if it was Pokey Herbert who I’d known since third grade. I thought it might be worth a clean conscience and the chance to spend the rest of my life with Jolene. Try to start things over. Do it right this time.

There was some kind of festival going on across the border. People dressed up in costumes in front of an old cathedral. They were dressed like bats and wolves, human skeletons, and vultures. But, it seemed like every third costume was a red devil. A crowd gathered around the courtyard where all the costumed dancers moved around in circles like a big snake. I found a seat on a crumbling stonewall that surrounded the courtyard. There was a little kid in a devil suit

and he was holding onto the tail of his father’s devil costume. The little kid’s costume was too big for him. It was hanging loosely around his legs, and he kept tripping over it. He looked a little scared out there with all those people moving around him like he might cry.

A big spider with cobwebs hanging from it ran by and I lost sight of the little kid and his father for a while, but then I found them again. That little guy was hanging on to that tail like he’d never let go. I thought about how maybe that little kid Jolene and I lost was lucky not to come into the world and have a father like me to tag along behind. But, it would have been something to have a little kid like that: to look up to you, and follow you, and make sure you walked the straight line; to give you a sense that you weren’t the most important person in the world. Sitting there, looking at the vultures, wolves and bats dancing around the courtyard was like remembering every bad idea I’d ever had.

The little kid and his father reappeared on the other side of the courtyard. He was still hanging onto the tail, but when his father lurched forward, the little boy fell down. He was crying and the tears ran down and made lines through the dirt on is face. I couldn’t help myself then. I stood up and walked into the courtyard to help him up and point him in the right direction, but before I got there his father picked him up and carried him off. The dancers moved all around me, and I jumped out of the way of a vulture with a big plastic beak. I got caught up in the motion of the dancers and I stumbled back toward the stone steps where the spectators stood. I almost cleared the dancers when I tripped and fell on my hands. I felt the gravel rip into the skin of my palms. The people on the steps moved to the side as I walked toward them. They stared at the blood that trickled down my fingers. The blood mingled with gravel and grit and burned. I turned to see the little boy, but he was gone. I sat down at the edge of the courtyard and put my face in my hands. I had gone far enough. My face felt raw and my lips were chapped and cracked

from the sun and wind, all that dryness. What was the use of going any farther? I couldn’t outrun myself, or the things I’d done. I couldn’t see living with them alone, carrying that burden, for the rest of my life. It was bad enough that I’d let Jolene go back home alone after what happened. I had the urge to run after her bus and see if I could catch it in Odessa, Midland, Abilene, Dallas, or anywhere on its eastbound route. We could ride it together, all the way back to Coaldale. I was so God damned sick of myself, of being in my own skin that I would have shed it right there if I could have. In a moment I knew I would walk out of the courtyard and go north toward the bridge I had just crossed. I would go back to where I came from to account for the things I’d done. The sun was beating down on me when I rose and began to walk. I was behind some guy in a devil suit as I left the courtyard and stepped into the street. His mask was off and his hair was slick with sweat.

By the time I got back to Coaldale, the spring storms had passed, and the dead heat of summer had set in. A dense, gray, curtain of humidity hung around the green mountains, suffocating everything in a sort of melancholy stupor. Jolene had cleared out of the apartment. It was stale and quiet in there when I opened the door and started the forlorn job of accounting for what was left of our relationship. The stillness of the place is what got to me. I wanted the wind in my ears and Jolene back, but all I got was silence. I didn’t even know where to find her. The silence was enough to drive me crazy. It was like nothing had changed, but the more it seemed that way, the more I realized how different things were, and how badly I’d fucked up.

In the trashcan I found the little plastic stick with two pink lines on it. I reached down and picked it up, set it next to the sink. It was all that was left of what could have been our family. I sat down on the edge of the bathtub. I was shaking inside, not sure of what to do next. I stared at

it for a long time remembering that morning when she showed it to me for the first time. I kept thinking I’d hear her voice, or her footsteps coming up the stairs.

All I wanted to do was find Jolene. I sorted through the mail. There was nothing from her and even stranger, there was nothing from the law, no summons, or notices, or even a parking ticket. I’d returned to face up to the things I’d done, but no one seemed to care. It wasn’t exactly what I expected.

The first thing I did was to phone Jolene’s parents, but I got the answering machine. It was a bad tape and her father’s voice was almost a whisper from living his life underground. You could barely make out what he was saying. Then there was a raspy silence before the beep, and I could almost feel the cold air of the mines exhaling from the bottom of the earth.

I called the police station and asked for officer Herbert, but he was on duty.

“Is this an emergency?” the dispatcher said.

I wanted to say yes it is, but I didn’t. How would I explain it?

“Hello,” the dispatcher said. “Is this an emergency?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it that,” I said.

“Can I take a message?” the dispatcher said.

“I’ll call back,” I said.

I fell asleep on the couch after a while, and I woke up the next morning hungry, and staring out the window at the same old mountains I’d grown up around. The refrigerator was filled with rotten food, and it stunk up the house when I opened it. I went out to grab something for breakfast. It was Saturday. The streets were filling up with early morning traffic. Every thing was moving slow and easy like the town was just waking up. Even the leaves on the trees hung motionless. I could smell coffee and bread from the bakery.

I started to cross the street to the bakery when I saw Pokey drive by in the Ranchero. He hadn’t done any work to it yet. It still needed a paint job, but he’d put on a front plate that said

Graceland in big black letters. It was strange how it made me feel generous in a way that I’d never felt before. Pokey was sporting some mirrored sunglasses and Elvis-style lamb chops, and right then I knew that he had gone to Graceland and hadn’t turned me in. I was a free man. I should have been jumping up and down, laughing, or shouting, but I couldn’t bring myself to celebrate. It was the last thing that I wanted to do.

CHAPTER 5

HALL OF FAME

The dust rose in the wake of each passing car and lingered around Frankie Ramapo as if in a stupor. He blinked as it blew up in his face. It had been almost two hours since his last ride.

He stopped and turned, squinting and shading his eyes with his hand while he searched the desolate highway for oncoming traffic. The cool morning had turned hot and there was little shade on the roadside. Down the highway he saw a glimmer and started walking with his thumb out and his back toward his destination, Las Vegas. In the distance the Rocky Mountains looked like a slash of plum-colored scar tissue above a fighter's eye. They could have been a bank of clouds dancing across the Nevada flats. In front of him was all the country he'd just covered and he stared blankly back at it like a man reviewing his past. Back there somewhere, across the plains, were the hills of Pennsylvania and the home he left behind when he set out to make it as a wrestler. A pickup truck sped by him, stirring up a small storm of desert dirt, and then it stopped.

He coughed and spit, grinding the spittle into the roadside with his shoe as he started toward the truck.

A bronze-faced man with a thinning hair looked across at Frankie through the passenger window. The top of his head was sun-burned and patches of skin peeled off of it. A heavyweight

Frankie thought. But no doughball, more like a bull. He pictured him as an opponent. It was a game he played with himself. What do you do? he asked himself. Get him charging, snap his

head down and spin behind him. Watch his arms on the way down to the mat so he don't catch you. Think like a matador.

"Where you going?" the bullish man asked.

"Vegas."

"Hop in."

Frankie slammed the door behind him and they pulled out onto the highway.

"Doing a little gambling are you?"

"Going to wrestle in the national open freestyle championships."

"No kidding. Hulk Hogan going to be there."

"No. This ain't TV stuff."

"That's good it's all fake ain't it?"

"Pretty much as I can tell."

"I seen a wrestling match once. This big fat guy had another guy on the ropes and then the other guy pulls out a bar of soap and rubbed it in his eyes. You don't do that dirty stuff do you?"

"No that's showbiz stuff. Like I said it ain't the same."

Frankie reached down and picked up a newspaper off the floor.

"Mind if I read this a while."

"Hey, go right ahead."

He turned to the sports page to see if there was anything about the tournament in the paper but there was nothing. The sun beat through the window and the tires hummed to him in a dreamy way as they sped across the hot asphalt highway. He thought about how it was the year he won the state wrestling championships. It had almost been easy for him his senior year. He

won the title by five points. It was something he'd dreamed about doing ever since he started wrestling in the eighth grade. He was a natural. Strong with good leverage for a lightweight. He placed second as a junior. After he won he stood at the center of the mat and looked around at the crowd. It was loud down there on the mat in front of all that applause.

That was something - to be the state champion. To know how to fight like that. It was something he'd always carry with him, inside. Nobody could take it away. He'd fought for it and won it. A guy who couldn't fight for himself was lost.

His home was a quiet contrast to the thunderous arena. The only applause he heard when he entered it was the solitary clap of the door as it shut behind him. His old man was drunk and would fall asleep in the chair in front of the television. There were two televisions in the living room and a rack of stereo equipment. It was his old man's entertainment center. He didn't pay attention to much else when he got home from his job. Sometimes he would sleep there all night and get up in the morning to work at the steel mill. That was when there was a steel mill. When he walked in his old man asked him how he did.

"I won."

"That's good," he said and turned back to the television.

The red-faced man spoke. Hot wind blew in the window. Frankie's back sweated against the vinyl seat.

"Where'd ya come from?" the man asked.

"Hitched out of Stillwater, Oklahoma, yesterday."

"Long way to go ain't it? Couldn't you find no one to wrestle in Oklahoma?"

"They got nationals in Vegas this weekend."

"Ain't you kind of small fer a wrestler?"

"No. You wrestle people your own weight."

"What weight ya go? Flyweight or something?"

"Trying to make One thirty six and a half. I gotta few pounds to go. I ain't ate nothing since yesterday before I left."

"That's crazy."

"Yeah well its what ya gotta do."

Frankie closed his eyes and leaned his head against the back of the cab. He thought about home. It was easier to think about home when he was headed away from it. He remembered the year when the steel mill shut down. Frankie's old man lost his job and then left town. Every now and then he'd show up. There was an occaissional phone call from Pittsburgh and later Cleveland and then Frankie never heard from him again. That was the year Frankie got arrested for stealing some televisions from Carl's TV and Appliance Store. He got off with probation because he'd never done anything like that before. The judge figured college would straighten him out. After he won the states, the coach at Penn State had offered him a scholarship and he took it. But

Frankie didn't care about going to school. He was just going to wrestle. He figured everybody would take care of everything for him. He wanted to be a famous wrestler and get out of that little town.

When he got to college he had some trouble in the wrestling room because he only had one good takedown - a single leg shot - and people learned how to block it. He didn't learn a new one because he thought sooner or later he would get it just by being persistent. He thought all he needed was one good shot. But the more he used it the more people knew it was coming and they stopped it with hard cross faces that split his lip so his mouth welled with hot blood and salty sweat. It was the taste of frustration. Finally he learned a better setup and then he figured out a

change-off with his hands that let him finish his single shot. Learning something like that made him feel good. If he could pick things up like that he could do anything. By the time of the team tryouts he made the first team. The coach took a liking to him and tried to keep an eye on him and steer him in the right direction.

"How are classes going?" the coach would ask him.

"Good, real good, I'll probably get an A, two Bs and a C."

That was all lies because he rarely ever went to class.

During the season, he won a lot of matches but he didn't place in the national collegiate tournament. But he did well enough to see that next year he could place. He didn't get a chance though because he flunked out of school and the only dream he ever had - to be a national champion - was fading away.

After hanging around State College for a year, he got drafted by the Army. He didn't want to go to Vietnam so he started moving.

"I ain't fighting for nobody but myself," he told his mother.

He went to Cleveland and got a job on a loading dock. He was going out with a girl who lived there but things didn't work out and they split up. All the time he was there he had the idea that he might run into his father but it never happened. He started thinking about going back to college and wrestling again because working on a loading dock was no way to get famous. After a while he got the idea to go to Stillwater.

Before he left Cleveland for Stillwater he called his mother.

"I'm going to Oklahoma State," he told her. "I'll be back in school."

"I thought you was in school Frankie."

"I was ma but I ain't no more. I told ya that."

"Yer worse than yer old man. He was a bum. Don't be a bum son."

"I ain't ma I told ya I'm going back to school."

The first thing he did when he got to Stillwater was visit the Wrestling Hall of Fame. His bus arrived in town early and he had to wait outside for it to open. He wandered around for hours looking at the bronze plaques of enshrined wrestlers, old uniforms, pictures and watching movies of famous matches.

He spent a few weeks working out with the Oklahoma State wrestling team. They were the collegiate national champs and he figured he could get good workouts there and get ready for the nationals. They didn't seem to mind him being around. He liked it there. The people talked a little slower than they did back home and the air seemed warmer. But, then he got in a fistfight in the locker room after a practice with Del Watt, the Cowboy's 142 pound national runnerup and the coach told Frankie he should look for a new place to work out. It was only a few days before the nationals and Frankie had been keyed up because the competition was so close. He sometimes lost control like that.

"I don't have time to hang out here anymore," he told himself.

He thought about the Hall Of Fame. "I'm tired of looking at what everybody else won. Its almost time to get out to the nationals anyway. I'll see what I got left then."

He packed his bags and counted his cash. He had enough money for food and a room for one week. On his way out of the state he stopped at a small gas station. Sweating, he walked in and that made him laugh to himself because he thought the more he sweated the quicker he'd lose some weight. He almost stopped at the magazine rack when he passed it - to read some comic books that caught his eye - but he stopped by telling himself: "That stuff's for kids. I ain't a kid

no more." He bought some gum to help him spit. He could drop a few ounces by spitting. The attendant was an old man who shook badly as he handed the money from the cash register across the counter. The old man coughed and blew rotten cigar breath on Frankie. He coughed so bad that he turned his back on the cash register. Frankie reached in and took out a handful of bills. He felt like thanking the old man for paying his way to Las Vegas. After all the money never would have gone for such a good cause. The owner would have spent it on something stupid.

Of all the places he'd ever been he liked Stillwater the most. Even before he got there he thought about the name. He pictured a prairie full of soft grass blowing gently in a breeze and then a lake of motionless water. Nothing would move and everything would be just as he dreamed it, quiet and peaceful. It would be a place where he could rest.

"I had something there," he said to himself. "I got on my way again. It was my dream. I can't never let that go. And the Hall of Fame is there. I belong there."

He pictured his likeness on a bronze plaque side by side with the portraits of the sport's greatest participants.

He was glad the nationals were in Vegas. It had a star quality about it and the fact that he was going to perform there made him feel important. The lights and the gambling, the desolation of the desert - it all added up to a wild west story. It was a great place to end up!

In the pocket of his dusty jeans he clutched a scrap of paper with the phone number of a girl he'd met who lived in Vegas. That was more insurance. Insurance that he would have a good time. She was a dealer at one of the casinos and he thought he would give her a call when it was all over. He would tell her that he was the national champion. He would be a big shot and they would carry on in the casinos all night like big spenders. He was sure that after he won he would get a big sponsor that would give him spending money and whatever else he wanted.

"I got a boy about your age," the bullish man said.

"Yeah."

"He's in Nam."

"Oh."

"He's doing his part. Felt it was the thing he should do.

"What do you do in Oklahoma? If you don't mind me asking."

"Go to college."

"College boy huh?"

"Yeah, Oklahoma State, like I said I just come out of Stillwater that's where the university is. You ever been to Stillwater?"

"No, can't say I have."

"Beautiful place. I'm going to buy me some land there one day."

You ain't one of them protesters are you."

"No, no."

"I think they ought to line all of them protesters up and shoot em."

"Yeah that probably ain't a bad idea."

"My boy's a mechanic. Going to open him up a garage when he comes back. He's been working in a garage ever since he could drive. Always working on his car. Got one of them suped up jobs. It's something to see, really."

"Yeah that sounds nice. I'd like to get me a car like that one day. Maybe after I buy some land in Stillwater and get me a nice little place set up. A guy with a car like that I bet he does alright with the girls."

"Yeah, Bobby, that's my boy. He got hitched before he went over there. They got one on the way already."

The truck eased to a stop at a red light. The city was straight ahead and Frankie stared out the window at all the casinos.

"Where do you want to get out?"

"Along the strip somewhere. I got to get a room."

They pulled over to the curb and stopped.

"This OK?"

"Yeah. Thanks for the ride."

"Sure. Good luck. Don't let nobody rub soap in your eyes."

Some people were just plain stupid, Frankie thought as he watched the truck pull away.

He walked about a block to The Riverboat Hotel and Casino. He could see the convention center where the wrestling would take place at the end of the street. It was as close a place as he could get. He got a room there. He threw his bag on the floor. As soon as he laid down on the bed he fell asleep.

He slept late the next day. The scales didn't open until that evening. In the afternoon he went for a run to take his mind off the hunger and the thirst. Afterward, he laid in his room and waited for the time to pass. When it was time to go, Frankie walked to a building that looked like a spaceship and followed cardboard signs that pointed to the wrestling registration. He signed up and then went to find a locker room and a scale to check his weight.

There were wrestlers all over the place, running, jumping rope and rolling around on the mats, taking off the last few pounds before the weigh-in. He still had some weight to lose so he put on his sweats and went out for a run. He ran all over the town. He rode a stationary bike for a

while and then went into the sauna to take off the last two pounds. He skin was slick and he sat watching the beads of sweat form in rivers between the hairs on his arms and and drip off the tips of his little fingers into a swamp of sweat on the floor. Someone poured water on the rocks and steam hissed and rose in a cloud, stealing oxygen from the inside of the cedar box so he gasped.

He stayed, counting drops of sweat until he reached one hundred and then he burst out of the door into the cooler air. He toweled down and weighed in. He was tall for 136.5 but he still had a lot of muscle. His face was drawn and his cheeks were hollow. His lips were dry and cracked beneath his thin black mustache. He had a vacant look in his eyes. His stomach felt like it was in a vice. He made the weight and then gorged himself on water and juice. The wrestling wouldn't begin for a day so he drank until his stomach was bloated. He laid on the floor naked looking at the ceiling. He was almost too tired to go eat. He stayed on the floor until the last wrestlers made weight an hour later. He pictured pancakes, steaks, and milkshakes. He would eat later. The juice satisfied him for the moment.

He ate so much for dinner that his stomach felt as if it would burst. All he could do that night was lay on his back. He rested in his room and thought about the next day.

He woke early that morning and went to the restaurant on the first floor where he ate some pancakes, eggs and juice. After the food settled he went for an easy run to break a sweat then he headed to the arena. As he passed through the halls he inhaled the heavy air. It stunk.

Wrestling mats and sweat, combined to form a recognizable odor. The restrooms were ripe with the rankness of hundreds of nervously emptied bowels. The smell hung in the hallways.

A charge of electricity seemed to run through him as he walked into the open air of the arena. The competition was close. He felt wide awake. The wrestlers and spectators began to fill

the room as if they were a school of salmon that had traced their way to this place by feint and familiar odors.

Mat judges and referees took their places and soon the whistles started to blow. The grunts and thumps of clashing bodies followed. As a match would end a judge on that mat would wave a small white flag to signal an open mat. It was a momentary oasis of stillness amid the struggling bodies and bustling referees. As quickly as one match finished two wrestlers would take their places across from eachother. Frankie remembered the words of his high school coach.

"Nose to nose and toes to toes. Let's separate the doberman's from the poodles."

Frankie won his first match easily. He opened with a single leg takedown and worked his opponent quickly to his back for a pin. He felt like his old self again. The match lasted a little over one minute. He was hardly out of breath but the adrenaline kick from getting back into competition kept him charged even after he got off of the mat. His heart was pounding and the sweat poured until he appeared to be covered in a shiny translucent sheet.

He won two more matches but they were closer than the first one. He decisioned a guy from Arizona 11-7 and a guy from Ohio 6-5. He felt better about his conditioning as he went and his confidence started to build. He started to picture himself in the finals. The newspapers back home would pick up the story.

It felt good to make it through the first day of competition without a loss. Another day and he would surprise everybody. Maybe he would even be the outstanding wrestler of the tournament. He stood looking at the bracket sheets when wrestling was over for the day figuring out who he would have next. That night he made sure he got to sleep early so he would be rested for the next day.

His next match wasn't so easy. He wrestled Mike Jones from Iowa who'd placed second in the tournament the year before. From the start Frankie felt he was out of sync. Jones didn't give him any time to set up. He kept pulling on Frankie's head and shoving him around. Then

Frankie caught a head butt below his eye. He reached out to grab hold of Jones but he slipped away and ducked in behind him so quickly the crowd gave a collective sigh. Frankie hit the mat hard and he saw stars blinking in front of his eyes and then a hot trickle of blood and sweat filled his mouth. He lost two more back points to Jones and then two more. He was behind by five points one minute and a half into the match. He got back to his feet but Jones scored on him again. He had Frankie's leg bent and was twisting it across Frankie's hips, lifting his foot up toward his shoulder blades and cranking Frankie's head backwards with a crossface trying to bring his head and foot together. Frankie crawled forward on his elbows, fighting to straighten his leg. Then he lunged out of bounds. The referee blew his whistle.

"That's one point here," he said pointing to Jones. "You can't crawl out of bounds like that son. Wrestle in the middle of the mat."

They returned to the center of the mat where they started on their feet. Jones got another quick takedown and then turned Frankie to his back so he was in a high bridge looking up at the lights. He saw spots and Jones had him around his neck so it was hard to breathe. He tried to keep his shoulders off the mat but they were sinking. The mats were soft. The referee blew his whistle and called the pin. Frankie felt disgusted with himself. He hadn't been pinned since the eighth grade. He was humiliated. When he we went to shake Jone's hand. Jones was smiling at him. He had this big stupid grin as though he was the king of the world. If Frankie had a gun he thought he would have shot him right between the eyes. Frankie slapped Jones' hand and walked off the mat to his corner and gathered up his things.

"Tough match," someone said to Frankie as he walked away.

"Ah, he's a punk. If I wouldn't have let him get that first takedown I think I could have beat him. He ain't that good."

He would have more matches because the tournament was double elimination but he didn't want to think about them. He won his next match by forfeit because his opponent tore ligaments in his knee and couldn't go on. The number of wrestlers in his weight was shrinking. If he kept winning, he could place as high as third. In his next match he faced a guy with a taped up knee and Frankie thought if he got ahold of the knee he could give it a good twist and the match would be over but it didn't work out that way.

Frankie never got ahold of the guy's knee. He didn't even score a point. The guy was strong as a rock and swarmed all over Frankie. Frankie lost 10-0 and he was out of the tournament. He ended up in eighth place. After he received his plaque he left the arena. On his way out he threw the plaque in a trash can.

He walked away from the arena. He'd gone a few blocks before he stopped. The town was lit and a stream of cars jammed the streets. He fished around in his pocket and came up with

Doris' phone number. It was scribbled on a scrap of paper. He found a pay phone. He pictured her in his mind. She had blonde hair and she was friendly. He liked the easy way she took to conversation. The phone rang and a woman answered.

"Is Doris there."

"Speaking."

"Oh, hi, it's Frankie Ramapo."

"Who?"

"Frankie, I met you in Oklahoma City when you were just coming out here for a job. You were sitting next to me in the bus station. I asked you about your boots - the ones with the silver tips. Then we started talking - about the way we were always moving around and how it would be nice to settle down sometime. The bus kept stopping in all these little towns and after a while there was hardly anyone on the bus and you got real tired."

He thought about the way she had fallen asleep during the ride with her head on his shoulder. The feeling of her hair resting against his neck stayed with him for a while after he got off the bus. It was the end of a long ride for him. The seats were hard and it was tough to find a comfortable way to sit. She had been the nicest thing about the trip.

"I went as far as Stillwater."

"Yeah, sure, how are you Frankie. Where are you at?" She asked with a voice as soft as a bubbling fountain in a hotel lobby.

"Right here in Vegas."

"No kidding."

"Yeah, I thought maybe we could have dinner together or something."

"I work tonight but I get off about two. That too late for you?"

"No that's fine. Where should I meet you?"

"In the lobby at the Oasis."

"OK. I'll see you then."

He hung up the receiver and searched all of his pockets. They were empty. He shouldered his bag. Well at least he had something now. A date in a new town. He inhaled the hot dry air. It was nearly 95 degrees. He walked into a fried chicken restaurant that had a help wanted sign in front of it.

"You looking for someone? I need work."

"Sure, here you go." A tall boy wearing a shirt that hung loosely off his shoulders handed a piece of paper and a pen to Frankie. "The manager isn't in right now but he'll be back. Leave your phone number."

"I'm staying at the Riverboat right now."

"OK. Put that on there. He'll call you back."

"When does he get in?"

"I'm not sure but he'll call you."

It was late afternoon. He had a lot of time to kill before he met Doris. A convenience store on a corner caught his eye and he went in. He stopped at the magazine rack and picked up a comic book and then he caught himself laughing outloud as he read it. For an instant he felt happy.

"Hey buddy, this ain't a library," the clerk said suddenly. "Pay or get on your way."

Frankie turned to the clerk.

"The name ain't buddy," he paused. "Think you're pretty smart, huh? Since you're so smart, why you working here?" While he spoke Frankie rolled the comic book into the jacket he held in his hand.

"They don't pay you enough swifty. Maybe you oughta ask for a raise. The way you guard them comic books is something to admire."

He walked out into the street with the comic book securely rolled in his hand.

"Jerky clerk, jerky clerk," he said to himself. He smiled.

Back in his room at the Riverboat, he fell asleep on the bed for a while and then the phone rang.

"You applied for a job at Cousin Joe's Chicken Shack?"

"Yeah, yeah that was me."

"When can you start."

"Day after tomorrow."

"6 a.m.?"

"That's good."

"When you come in ask for Ron that's me. I'm the manager."

Frankie hung up the phone. Then he called his mother.

"Hey ma I'm in Vegas can you believe it. I like it here too. I got me a job and a girl I'm thinking about stayin a while. Maybe you could come visit after I get settled. You ought to see it you wouldn't believe all the lights it's beautiful."

"I thought you was going to school son."

"It didn't work out. But I'm still thinking about it."

"Your just like your old man. Never stayin put. Why don't ya stay put for once."

"I gotta go ma. I got a date."

The phone clicked and hummed. The line disconnected from Las Vegas to Buck Ridge,

Pennsylvania, where the last snow was probably just melting off the barren hilltops.

At 2 a.m he met Doris in the lobby of the Oasis. She looked a little different than he remembered. More done up and older. She had dark circles under her eyes and her breath smelled like a strong drink. She flipped her blonde hair back with her hand and he saw the dark roots. When he walked up to her he glanced up across her short red skirt and then down to her chubby thighs. Skin bunched up around her knees. He recalled her voice and how soft it had been. Now, after seeing her, he thought maybe she spoke that way because she was tired.

"Hi," he hesitated for a moment. "I'm Frankie."

"Sure, I remember. How are ya."

"Pretty good. So do you want to eat here?"

"You that hungry?"

"Yeah. I'm starved."

"We could get right to business."

"Yeah."

"You got a room?"

"At the Riverboat."

"Well let's go there. Why don't you call a cab."

The cab smelled like vomit but it was a short ride.

"How do you like Vegas?"

"Does it matter?"

"I was just wondering that's all. Hey, do you ever miss Oklahoma? I mean having grown up there and all."

"You sure ask a lot of questions Frankie."

"Yeah. I guess I'm just curious. I'm thinking maybe saving up some money from here and going back there for some land. I hear you can make good money parking cars for the big shots at the casinos. Maybe I stay around here long enough I can get me some good connections and get a job like that."

"Ain't nothing for me in Oklahoma, honey."

"Well maybe you'll change your mind some day."

"I don't know about that."

"You know I could tell I was going to like you when I met you back in Oklahoma. I said there's a real sharp girl. That's the kind of girl I could go for."

"Thanks, Frankie. That's real sweet of you."

The cab pulled into the driveway of his hotel.

"Well here we are. It ain't exactly the strip but I kind of like it."

Frankie stepped out onto the green astroturf carpet and paid the cab driver. The driver thanked him for the tip. Doris followed him up to his room. As soon as he closed the door she went to the closet and started undoing her blouse. Frankie stared at her breasts. They were squeezed into a red bra that looked like it was a size too small. She had a belly that hung over her belt like a lip.

"You want to pay up now?"

"What do you mean?"

"This ain't no freebee you know. I can't afford no charity cases. A girls got to eat."

"How much?"

"$75 and you get whatever you want. That's a special discount since you're such a sweet guy."

"That's real nice of you but I ain't got it."

"Well that's too bad. I guess I'll see ya later."

She buttonned up her blouse.

"Can I buy you a drink?"

"Sorry I ain't got the time. Don't take it personal or nothing. It's just business."

She walked out and the door clapped shut. He hated that sound.

"OK I'll pay," he yelled. "I'll pay goddamn it. Oh, god, I'm going to have to pay."

He got up from the bed and walked out into the hallway.

"Wait. Give me another chance. I ain't got nobody else. You gotta understand. I don't have that much cash. I was saving it for me. But you can have it if you need it worse."

She was gone. An old couple dragged their luggage down the hallway. They stepped out of Frankie's way and pressed their backs to the wall when he passed. He stopped and turned back to his room where he flopped onto the bed.

"Ah, fuck it. How could I be so stupid? Why don't I ever see these things?"

He put his head down in the pillow. Tears rushed forth and then stopped as quickly as a desert cloudburst. The pillow case was damp. He buried his face in it like a seed in the sand.

Smelled the hotel detergent. He could hear the people and the cars in the street below his window.

"How could I win? I must've been crazy. Out here all by myself."

Frankie laid on his bed for a while and then he got up and stared out the window at the explosion of neon lights on the horizon. The lights and the darkness hid the desert in the distance but it was there, an endless expanse of sand and hot dry wind. Cactus.

He couldn't sleep so he thought about what he would do in the morning. He decided to buy a bus ticket to California. It was hot there too. Palm trees, movie stars. When it started to get light he packed up his things. He put on a cowboy hat he'd bought in Stillwater and looked at himself for a minute in the mirror before he walked out of the room. He still had that lean look in his face from cutting weight. It made him look mean, he thought.

On his way to the bus station a police car drove slowly past. Frankie walked a few more blocks and then he heard someone yell at him.

"Hey you."

100

Frankie turned. It was a cop on foot.

"What?"

"You dropped something."

The cop held up a shirt that had fallen from Frankie's bag.

"Thanks," he started walking back for the shirt.

"You might need that where you're going."

"Where's that?"

"I don't know pal."

"Thanks."

He didn't like talking to the cop. Cops were always trying to figure a guy out.

"Thanks," he said taking the shirt. It was a souvenir from the wrestling championships.

He started to turn away.

"Hey buddy."

"What?"

The cop was starting to bother him. That's all he needed. A friendly cop. The way his luck was going he'd probably get busted for the stolen comic book.

"Did you see the wrestling?" The cop had been looking at the shirt.

"Yeah. I seen some of the wrestling."

Frankie kept walking.

"Good, huh?"

"Yeah."

"Take it easy buddy." the cop's voice trailed off.

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Frankie rounded a corner and walked straight into a big dog. It yelped and stumbled backwards. But instead of going away it fell into an agressive stride along side Frankie. They took a few synchronized steps across a vacant lot.

"Scram mut."

The dog poked its nose into Frankies duffle bag and chomped down on it. It planted its hind legs and stopped.

"Hey let go of that."

Frankie pulled. The dog's jaws clamped tighter. Muscle rippled across the top of its head.

Frankie threw his free arm around the dog's neck and started to choke it. They tumbled forward.

The dog rolled and kicked out of the lock.

"Beat it dog."

It stood and growled. Front feet poised to spring.

"OK bastard. Come on. Shoot. Shoot."

The dog lunged. Frankie stepped to the side by making a quarter turn and guided it by like he was a matador and then snatched its hind legs up in the air. He twisted them up and sent the dog sprawling across the sandlot. It yelped and turned. Lunged again. Frankie batted it by with his forearm and then spun on his planted foot into a full turn and came out behind the dog.

He grabbed it around the waste with a tight gut wrench and rolled across his back. The dog twisted and bit back at its haunches as it sprawled in the dirt. They kicked up a cloud of dust. A big paw grazed Frankie's ear. Skin ripped. A liquid hotter and thicker than sweat ran across his cheek. He wiped his hand over his ear and it came away red.

The dog sat. It's tongue dangled out the side of its mouth. Silver threads of slobber hung in loops from its lips. It looked half shepherd, half wolf. Grey eyes like a mirage.

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"Get lost. I won. You dog."

Frankie kneeled in the sand across from the dog. They exchanged glances barren of fear with eyes that crackled like desert fire. Then the dog let out a howl and loped off. Just like that it was gone. Disappeared into the emptiness that marked the end of town. Scrub-brush and cactus.

Frankie fell back into burnt sand. He put his duffle bag behind his head. God he was tired, more tired than he ever remembered. Everything seemed to add up. The trip across the desert, the wrestling, the heat, the dog. His shoulders ached and his head seemed too heavy for his neck. He kicked his feet out in front of him. Ash-colored dust rose up around him. He pictured himself ascending the highest spot on the winner's platform at the nationals. Blood and dirt seeped into his mouth. He tasted it and spit. Closed his eyes. The desert dust burned in his nostrils. As he breathed he felt like he was drifting back through layers of time. Suspended in this haze of near- sleep, he saw himself back in Pennsylvania. It was the summer before he went away to school and he was in a wrestling room, learning a change-off to finish his only shot.

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CHAPTER 6

ROPES

He, once renowned for murderous right, and devastating jab, a man despised for laughing at his arrest for striking his wife and joking about the way she flew like a rag doll across the room, could not resist the chance to step into the ring one more time despite eroded skills and the passage of time so incomprehensible to him now.

And so, they came to the deteriorated concrete civic arena in a town that never hosted a name as big as his. Laughing, joking, smoking cigars, they paid ten dollars a ticket, twenty-five for ringside, to see the man get what he deserved. All he wanted: the Tennessee state professional heavyweight championship, not the world title he once held. Pathetic, the city newspaper had said: How hard a man can fall. How far! What did they know? He scoffed, he knew he was there because he loved every minute of it, from the sharp sound of the tape ripping as his fists were wrapped to the echoes of the ring announcer booming his name out into the darkness around the ring.

The crowd laughed as he climbed into the ring. He was paunchy, looking like a man who had not trained for months, years perhaps, covered in a sweat they joked about testing for alcohol, and cocaine. He had jowls. They shook when he spit as he entered the ring, hanging a bloody gob on the skirt of the ring. The front row crowd winced, and cursed him for the spit that sprayed them. He stepped through the ropes and entered the ring – a moment he relished, taking

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the stage, and standing above the crowd. Yes, those in the front rows would look up at him, and he loved that. His heels at eye level, black shoes shushing the bright blue and white canvas.

Time entered the ring with him, for there stripped of satin robe – his nickname Assassin embroidered across the back - he stood naked, revealed, a pretender to his former self. Every moment there, now measured. Three-minute rounds, one minute break between rounds. The referee ready, waiting to deliver his count. The lights bright enough to reveal the pores in his skin to the fans in row one.

The opponent in the opposite corner looked like dozens of others. He recognized him as one of them – the two hundred he faced in amateur and pro fights: young, wise cracking, foolish enough to think he had a career ahead of him. This opponent chosen as a walking target, limited in skill, and powerful, but born with the endurance of a trotting wolf on the trail of moose. He knew this one like the rest also desired all that he once had, the world titles and all rights and privileges pertaining thereto. The money, the women. Mostly the women.

The introduction. Ironic. Two men about to beat each other’s brains out introduced to each other as if they were at a party about to converse. He laughed at the thought of it. How many times had he been through the routine and this had not occurred to him? He grinned. His opponent, perhaps thinking it was a mocking leer, shoved at his gloves when they raised them to touch, shouted incomprehensible threats through his mouthpiece. He saw the rabbit eyes, darting, and as the deep sweat pored from his limber body, he knew the kid was scared.

The fans waited for the bell too. He could see them, shifting, yelling. He had the urge to shout back at them like he’d done in the press and on the television: “I am who you all want to be and you hate me for it.”

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When the bell rang to start the opening round, he defied them. Round after round, the skills buried beneath the flab and disuse carried him to a lead on all cards. Moving in flashes as he once had, feet gliding inches above the canvas, in and out of the grasp of his opponent, who stumbling, amateurish, appeared as a gawking kid in the presence of a great artist. A lumbering boy, outmatched except in heart and strength. But, then as the rounds went on they wrestled.

They did not box. He slipped in punches, frustrated the boy.

He grinned at the crowd between rounds as he looked out on their disappointed faces.

They booed him, shouted insults. He taunted them, shaking a fist in the air as he returned to his corner. Using the old man’s tactics, clinching, shoving, he conserved his energy. Oh, they hated him, his magnificent arrogance, and petulant demeanor. They hated him for crashing Rolls-

Royces, Ferraris, wearing fur coats and fucking white women.

The punches came, artless attacks, but steady. They thudded off his forearms, slid off shoulders, and cut the thick air in front of his face. He blocked, slipped, clinched. One got through in the middle rounds, stung him. Lights flickered. The arena went silent. The crowd rose, sensed the moment at hand, but he held on, grabbed an arm for a crucial five seconds until his head cleared. The referee tried to pry them apart, issued a warning. When the bell rang to end the round he waved at the jeering crowd. A box of popcorn skidded across the ring in front of him.

He kicked it into the front row.

Then it came, finally, and just as brutal as they hoped it would be. A slashing left to the body that brought his arms down enough to let in the right. And the right came in quickly, skimming the top of his red eight-ounce gloves, smacking his skin. The gloves hard, padding meant to protect fists, cracked the jawbone on impact, sent his head snapping back as if attached to a bungee cord not neck, bone, and muscle. Neck in arc, body falling backwards, slowly at

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first, as if a redwood crashing in the forest, first shaking free its roots, but gaining speed as it approached the top rope where it hit and then whiplashed.

The vein severed, leaking blood meant for the brain, flooding tissue not nourishing it, like a river that overran its banks. The referee drifted in a pool of light, waving his white-shirted arms as if swimming there. He was swimming too, backward and forward through time, trying to make sense of it. No longer angry but confused, a boy again, running across broken glass and shattered brick in the abandoned lots between ravaged tenements, on his way to the braided river where clear water mixed with mud. There, waiting for his turn to swing on the big rope, out over the merging waters and drop. How long had he waited there on that afternoon, any of them? The river unwound itself from the beginning of time, reached backward into the past and forward into the future. It moved beyond him then and now as if he was standing still, feet anchored in the muddy bank.

Was that his mother’s voice, calling him to dinner, warning him, chastising him? I told you not to enter that ring. That’s no place for a man with brains, unless he wants them beaten out of him, and him made into a mumbling slow-witted gardener, potting plants all day, lost in his dreams and nightmares, not sure of the time of day. But, she didn’t understand what it meant to be a man, to stand in the middle of the ring and have his hand raised. Where else was that going to happen? And so he won and won and won, and each time she smiled and shook her head, and asked when he would have enough. When he said never, she knew he was right and she cried, served him the steak and eggs he’d bought with earnings from the latest fight, and let him eat alone. She would not move into the house he bought her, or drive the silver Cadillac he parked in the drive. I know where that river flows, she said. I know it up and down from source to mouth.

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His turn came and he was out over the river, releasing the rough rope that bit into his palms and fingers, the burning feeling of holding on too long. He was soaring, above it all for those few seconds, free, taunting those landlocked souls standing on the banks. With a half-turn, a wave, and a shout, “sayonara suckers,” he splashed into the river and sank down, the sunlight distorted above him, pouring down into the depths, kaleidoscopic, trees overhead, visible on the periphery of his vision, reduced to gray lines wavering on the watery surface. Breaking surface tension, looking for the muddy banks, the trees, he rose grinning, immortal.

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CHAPTER 7

WALKING THE TILL

Harlan Ellis held his hand up to the dim light of his bedside clock and looked at the yellow calluses, the chapped and cracked red skin. It was four a.m. Motor oil rimmed his fingernails. His hands smelled like the engine of the two-cycle John Deere that had quit on him earlier that day and now after thirty-three years of service was silent, perhaps permanently, in the half-plowed field that bordered Black Horse Pike.

That tractor's been nothing but a curse, he thought. It gave him a strange sense of irreverence to damn a machine older than he was. His father had sworn by its simplicity, its endurance, but now Harlan saw it as a relic, a model thirty years out of date. It's sputtering, popping, exhaust, and the big flywheel, made it a novelty. It was destined to lead 4H parades on the fourth of July. But the tractor was just part of it. Next year’s crops festered in the stunted corn and scorched wheat that filled his fields. Another year like this and his tenure on the land would be done.

All he knew for sure was that come daybreak he'd be elbows-deep in grease trying to get the old tractor started. He'd be out in his field when his neighbors left their new houses - the ones built on retired farmland. They'd get in their Buicks, BMWs, and Cadillacs and drive out of the

Valley, northeast to Allentown or south to Philadelphia and the desk jobs that waited for them there in steel and glass buildings with climate control. They were lawyers, advertising executives, and brokers who'd had an itch for country living, acres of green fields, and clean air,

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and who complained to the township about the stench from the fields whenever they were fertilized. It seemed like a new house went up every week.

He went to the window as his wife, Jessie, slept. Her dark blonde hair spilled onto the pillow. A brown tan line edged with red skin ran across the back of her neck. She'd thrown off the blanket, was half-naked in the moonlight, wearing the white cotton panties she called comfortable and sexy enough. He studied the strong legs that had helped her star for the high school field hockey team. He gently touched the curve of her hip and the soft swell of her belly.

She was tired too and he knew there were things she had to forgo to live on the farm. The old wood frame farmhouse was shabby compared to the new, larger imitations of it that the developers built in the fields around them. Harlan felt good resting next to her. He liked to press his face into the nape of her neck and breath in her scent.

Harlan had applied for a loan that day and he had the sense it hadn’t gone well. At the bank, he sat in the waiting area across from an old Amish woman. The Amish were making it all right, but he knew the rising land prices were squeezing them too and because of it some of them were moving west to Ohio and Indiana. While he tried to read the newspaper she knitted, looping yarn around the needles with such dexterity that she reminded him of a crab. Her canvas tote bag, full of yarn, paper patterns and knitting needles, rested between her feet. She glanced at

Harlan for an instant. Her eyes looked clear, calculating. Her movements measured. She smiled at him when she noticed he was watching her. He’d been thinking about the Amish farm beyond his, with their kerosene lanterns, without tractors to fail, only true horsepower, no electricity - just the energy of the family working in unison in the fields dressed in their simple black clothes.

Finally, a serious looking young man in a dark blue suit called Harlan’s name.

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The loan officer, a guy named Dave Richards who said he’d been working at the bank for a month, went over the application and then Harlan signed in all the places marked with an X.

When he was done he took one last look at the papers and handed them across the desk feeling like he’d passed the rights to the farm to someone he didn’t know.

"Hey, you awake?" Harlan whispered to Jessie.

Jessie kicked at the sheet that had wrapped around her ankle.

"It's hot," she said, half asleep, wrestling free of the sheet.

Harlan looked out at the half-plowed fields that he felt like burning.

Knee-high by the fourth of July, he thought.

Jessie stirred and woke. "What are you doing?" She said.

They'd known each other since their sophomore year in high school, dated through part of college and then got back together a few years after Harlan graduated.

His mouth was dry. "Can't sleep," he said.

"Come back to bed,” she said.

He stood silently at the window with his hands spread against the window frame and peered into the darkness, trying to see beyond the troubles of the farm. His stomach hurt.

"What are you thinking about?" She said, herself still half in a dream.

"How the hell am I going to fix that tractor?"

"Try not to think about it so much, Harlan" she said and sat up in the bed, brushed her long hair out of her face. " You'll fix it tomorrow."

“Sure,” he said. “And then I’ll sleep for a week.

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He stayed at the window for a moment and imagined the hills of his farm on a developer's map, neatly divided into one-acre plots. And then he pictured rows of identical homes filling his fields. The threat of the slowly advancing suburbs compelled him to begin his day’s work.

Jessie was asleep when he turned around. Her breathing had fallen into the gentle rhythm of the weary. He reached into the closet for his boots and knocked something down. He looked at

Jessie. She rested quietly, undisturbed by the clatter. He lifted his father’s bamboo fly rod out of the closet. It was wrapped in a flannel sack that sat inside of a metal tube. He loved this thing,

Harlan thought. His father used to say this fly rod is better medicine than all the heart pills Doc

Hecht can ever prescribe. Thinking about his father made him smile. All he ever wanted was a house by a river.

Then he remembered the day the fields had gone suddenly silent in the heart of planting season. He'd listened for the familiar sputter and pop of the two-cylinder engine but there was nothing, so he moved out from the darkness of the musty barn, where he’d been sharpening plows, toward the field his father had been plowing. Narrow beams of light sliced between the barn boards, illuminating the particles of sweet-smelling straw and dust that hung in the air. He stopped for a moment at the big barn doors, shaded his eyes, and squinted at the fields until his eyes acclimated to the brightness. It must have quit he'd told himself as he made his way across the fields, listening. Grasshoppers fled before him, their legs clicking in the hot, humid air.

When's he going to give up on that old thing? Harlan wondered. His father had been out there all morning, plowing that field. Harlan had offered to plow that morning. He knew his father was tired. "Why don't you take a day, do some fishing, I can handle it," he said. But his father just looked at him like he was crazy. Maybe he was just taking a break Harlan thought. That would

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be OK. Harlan needed one too. He was almost done sharpening the plows anyway. It was a good time for a rest. He could sit and talk with his father for a while, smoke a cigarette. They would speculate about the Phil's chances against the Pirate's and Roberto Clemente.

The first thing Harlan saw when he cleared the grassy rise was the stalled tractor, his eyes automatically drawn to its green paint and yellow lettering. And then he saw his father, muddied with his legs crumpled under him, lying in the wet black earth, mouth gaping as if he was screaming at the sky. Harlan broke into a run. He called to his father, strained to hear a reply, prayed he'd get up grinning as if it was all a joke, tell him the Phils would sweep the series, anything. When he reached him he dropped to his knees, saw the grease that marked his father's faded blue denim work shirt where he'd clutched his chest. His heart had finally given out.

Harlan lifted the fly rod from the floor and took it with him into the yard. He unscrewed the lid of the canister and carefully pulled the pieces of the rod out of the flannel bag. To assemble the rod, he rolled the metal joiners against his nose the way his father had taught him to oil it and fitted the pieces together. Then he attached the reel and ran the line through the eyelets.

When the rod was rigged, he pulled an old fly off the cork handle and tied it onto his line.

Standing in the deep shadows of his house beneath the intermittent moonlight, he let out some line and raised the rod, lifting the line into the air. He waited for a two-count as it sailed behind him and then moved his arm forward sending the line shooting out in front of him toward the mist that drifted across the edge of the lawn. He stood there for a long time concentrating on the four-count and the rhythm of the casting motion slowly returned to him. The line was moving precisely through the night air and it felt good to him. He'd lost track of time when he heard

Jessie.

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"Harlan what are you doing out there?" she said.

He let the tip of the rod drop and turned to her. "Casting," he said.

"Why?" she asked.

"Found it," he said.

She moved toward him in the darkness. "Is there something wrong?"

"I had forgotten about it," he said.

When she reached him, she put both her arms under his, rested her head against his shoulder. He dropped the fly rod in the grass and wrapped his arms around her.

Harlan pressed the silver key into the ignition of the old Chevy truck. It screeched and coughed. He adjusted himself on the torn vinyl seat. He turned the ignition and this time the truck shook to life. He pressed the clutch to the floor and threw his weight into the gearshift. It clunked into first. The truck jerked forward and the fly rod bounced and then rattled to the floor.

He reached down for it, and then driving one-armed he swung the steering wheel hard and pointed the truck down the dirt lane that led out of the farm.

When dawn broke he was cleaning the carburetor on the John Deere, hands black with oil, with a persistent frustration that was slowly becoming a headache. He'd been there an hour or two when a car slowed and stopped along Black Horse Pike. He heard a door slam and got up to see Lester Strunk, wearing a bright green sport coat that made him look like he'd just stepped out of the country club dining room. Lester climbed the embankment to the field as if he was trying to keep his shoes clean. Harlan waited for the inevitable sales pitch. Lester wanted land to sell.

Harlan didn’t want to sell. It was a routine by now.

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At the top of the embankment, Lester pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. "You know Bob Detwiler?" He asked Harlan.

"Everybody knows Bob," Harlan said.

"He’s looking for a couple acres along the Pike. He wants to build an auto body shop,"

Lester said as the wind lifted a few thin strands of hair that he’d combed over top of his balding head.

"Auto body shop?" Harlan asked, perplexed. "What about his farm?"

"Selling it." Lester said.

"Detwiler is a damn good farmer," Harlan said.

"He was a damn good farmer," Lester said, folding his arms across his chest.

If Detwiler couldn't make it, who the hell could? Harlan wondered.

"Sell a couple of acres?" Harlan questioned. "A couple acres would break my back. I hardly have enough land as it is to make much of a profit."

"Think about it," Lester said.

Harlan pictured a farmer without a farm like an amputee. Instead of reaching for a lost limb he'd be sitting at a desk in a coat and tie in one of those steel and glass buildings, grasping for a tractor gearshift every time a whiff of springtime blew in the window.

"Forget it," Harlan said.

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At noon, Jessie stopped by with lunch. Harlan wiped his hands off on a rag but they wouldn't come clean.

He was hungry. "What's for lunch?" he said.

"Liverwurst and onion," Jessie said.

"How'd you know that's what I wanted?" Harlan said.

“It’s all we’ve got, honey,” she said and then waved her hand toward the tractor. “How's it going?”

"Its not," Harlan said abruptly, disappointment evident in his voice. "Everything around here is a three-man job."

"What should we do?" Jesse said, shading her eyes from the noon sun with her hand.

"Lets wait and see about the loan," Harlan said. But the thought of another debt was as disheartening as the promise of a new tractor was encouraging.

“Lester stopped by again,” Harlan said.

“What’d he want?” Jessie asked.

“Same,” Harlan said, studying Jessie’s face for a reaction.

“We’ve been through this a hundred times,” Jessie said.

“I know,” he said.

“Becky called,” Jessie said. “She invited me in to the city tomorrow. I think I’ll go see her. I haven’t had a chance to visit with her for a while.”

“Are you going to leave me here all by myself?” Harlan said half serious.

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“You know I like to visit my sister,” she said. “I’ll leave in the morning and be back tomorrow night.”

When Jessie left the car kicked up gravel and dust. The house would feel empty tomorrow with her gone. How empty the place felt without his family, and without the other families who’d left their farms since he was a boy. He felt like the last thread of a community unraveled like an old quilt. The tractor was looking more and more hopeless. Sometimes Harlan wondered what kept him out on the farm but then he always remembered how much he loved to plow and churn up endless mounds of dirt then walk the fresh till looking for arrowheads. It was a time to turn things over in his mind. He thought about the Lenni-Lenape planting in the same fields, and mining jasper for arrowheads, knives and spearheads. He’d found several jasper pits on the edge of his farm – in the woods that led to the ridge. They were full of the sharp-edged brown and red stones that Indians from up and down the east coast traveled miles to trade. Once he found an arrowhead a professor at the college told him was four thousand years old. Four thousand years! He could scarcely imagine that. It gave him a powerful sense of his own impermanence and an overwhelming sense of the land’s endurance. Harlan felt lucky to be out here – in the fields and woods, roaming the same land where ancient people once walked. He liked thinking about the past; it was speculating about the present and the future that was troublesome.

That night Harlan and Jesse were sitting together in the kitchen drinking coffee after dinner when a sudden downpour had them both rushing around the house closing windows.

Afterward, they stood on their front porch as relentless waves of rain pelted the fields.

The fresh, cool, air that the rain brought was a relief but Harlan knew the ground would

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be soaked and he'd lose more plowing time. His crops were already late because of the tractor.

They watched runoff choke drainage ditches, and race headlong toward the stream in the valley.

Harlan pictured the raging torrent turning itself inside out; its tumultuous chocolate waters fighting the land for a straight path, tearing at its banks, swallowing whole chunks of real estate, and ripping trees right out of the bank by their roots. It would take that kind of merciless force to tear him from the land he thought.

Harlan spent most of the morning beneath a tarp that was draped over the tractor as the sweet-smelling rains continued to fall. Patches of mist lingered in the air like fragments of a shattered dream. By late morning the rain had slowed but big puddles of standing water filled the lowland fields and the stream still raged. It had over run its banks, destroyed an old bridge. The fields would take a day or more to dry. It was time he didn't have. Frustration rose and welled in him like the surging waters. On his way home for lunch he drove along the stream, marveled at its ferocity, its self-determination.

When the phone rang he waited for a moment, thinking Jessie would pick it up but then he remembered that she had gone to see her sister so he went for it.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” Dave Richards began and Harlan barely even heard the rest of it. He wasn’t sure when the man had stopped speaking and the dial tone clicked on. So this is how it ends, he thought, not with a storm, but with a phone call.

For the rest of the day he kept himself busy by working in the barn. He needed time to think, time to make a new plan with Jessie. It would take real mechanics to fix the tractor this time. They could overhaul it, put in a new engine. It would be costly, but not as costly as a new

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tractor. They could afford it if they put the last of their cash into it and then at least he’d have a tractor - for how long he couldn’t know. With a little luck maybe time enough to pay off some debt, and then perhaps qualify for a loan. He knew he could stay there until the very end like his father; but what was the use? Why put Jessie through it too? He was tired of subsisting on hope and the whim of the weather. He would sell some land. There, he said it. In his mind he was already moving to a new place.

By late afternoon long shadows fell across the farm fields and in the half-light that filtered into the barn Harlan put away the tools that were scattered on the workbench. He carefully placed the screwdriver in its designated spot on the wall, and then he hung the broom on a nail next to the bench. He lingered for a moment over an old wood plane, its sides worn smooth by use, oiled and dark from the hands of his grandfather, who used it to shape the farm’s first fences, and the hands of his father, who smoothed boards with it when he built the barn’s addition with help from his Amish neighbors. Then he put that in its place too, next to the other tools used to build the fences and buildings of the farm. These were the tools he would use to build a new life.

A cool breeze chilled Harlan's skin as he headed home. He was hungry and he moved quickly across his half-plowed field, past the broken tractor, brushing the high weeds aside.

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CHAPTER 8

DEMON WRESTLING

Atkins calculated the chances of winning weight by weight. Scratching down wins and losses, point spreads, on the back of an old yellow equipment invoice. Thirty years of coaching and it never got any easier. Foot tapping concrete. “If we don’t get pinned at 19, pick up a win at

25, 30, or 35.” Starched towels stacked on tables and dirty athletic gear heaped in hampers; the air in the cage a combination of earth and detergent. Shoulder pads, football jerseys, cleaned, and pressed hung below racks of polished helmets. The old wood desk, where he sat, hid nearly out of sight in a corner, just visible through a wire mesh wall.

He started at 103 pounds, and ran up through heavyweight, figuring who could win, who would probably lose, who had a chance for an upset. When he was done, he did it again, foot rapping, rubbing his crew cut, adjusting his black rimmed glasses, trying to imagine the possible, the impossible. Kids were so predictable, no they were unpredictable. He loved that, the uncertainty, but it made him crazy too. He had ways to increase their reliability, work them hard, and when they didn’t work hard he let them have it. The whiners, bellyachers, crybabies - they wouldn’t make it with him. He’d break them, send them packing. He knew how to do it.

He’d started in a little high school in the Pennsylvania hills back when kids were tougher, more resolute. They were sons of miners and farmers, not sons and daughters of people who lived in the houses that took over the farmer’s fields and commuted to the cities, or the scions of the unemployed, the disenfranchised, the people who didn’t get out of the town when things

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went from bad to worse. He’d coached all kinds of kids, rich kids, poor kids, city kids, suburban kids.

And now this year’s team, a hodge-podge of the new generation, and a girl, who sued for the right to be on the team and won. He couldn’t cuss at them without the school board busting his chops. He couldn’t run them until they dropped, or crank up the heat in the wrestling room without a haranguing by parents, and he couldn’t even call them pussies. No wins, nine losses, with eight meets left and not a win in sight. He picked up a blank index card and started over. A pin here, a win here, keep it close here and here. Maybe, just maybe.

He thought about the job he’d just lost at a prep school with too much money for its own good – a marble vault for a coach’s locker room with urinals a man could practically stand in. He could have taken it easy, retired there, but he pushed the kids until they complained, and then the parents complained until the administration warned him, told him to lighten up, quit yelling at the kids, but he pushed some more and then they fired him. You can stay and teach, they said.

But, coaching was all he really wanted to do, so he resigned completely and found a coaching job. He’d show them. He’d make a winner out of this team. He’d done it before, produced district, regional and state champions: Battista, Gratz, Barlak, and Reckworth. Their pictures hung in the rooms where he’d coached: chiseled faces, and knotted arms pinned against black and white backgrounds in dim and dank padded rooms.

At home he popped open a beer at the dinner table, did his figuring on a paper napkin.

“It’s dinner time Bobby,” his wife said. “Can you stop that?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Match tomorrow.”

“You’re driving me crazy.”

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“I know, I know. I’m driving myself crazy. These kids are going to do me in. I think this is it for me. I’ll retire maybe.”

“Sure you will.” She sat down next to him.

He was already eating, staring at the napkin.

“Can we say grace,” she said.

“Grace?” Atkins said.

“Yes, grace,” she said.

Atkins set his fork down while she spoke. “When did you get so religious?” he said.

“It’s not even religious,” she said. “It’s just taking a moment to be thankful. Besides, it got you to stop scratching at that damn napkin.”

He took another bite of his chicken, poked at the bean sprouts on his salad. That was another thing. If those kids didn’t give him a heart attack his cholesterol would.

“Lauren is bringing the kids over Sunday. Do you think you could give them some time?”

Sunday, hell, he had two matches between now and then. “Sure, I’ll be here.”

“Yeah, I know you’ll be here, but are you really going to BE here?”

Lauren grown and gone. His only daughter. It went so fast. Winters he spent Saturdays at tournaments. Spring too. Sometimes he regretted it. Missed his little girl grow up. He had a team place second in the state to show for all those Saturdays. He thought about Lauren. She looked like her mother, dark black hair, blue eyes. They would both let him have if he wasn’t there.

“I’ll be here he said.”

There were twelve of them left on the team by mid season, including Barkley who quit and came back. That was two short of a full team. It meant they would forfeit two matches and

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give up twelve points every match. It would be hard to win even against a bad team. And they wanted to win more than anything, as a team, not just as individuals, but as a team.

They each had their quirks, their reasons for remaining. Barkley was the first to get a tattoo- a panther on his back - and a prolific smoker as Atkins later learned. Shelton had a baby daughter. He was seventeen as was his wife, who sat in the first row of the bleachers at every home meet with their baby bundled in blankets to ward off the cold gym air. Clifford was the first to get arrested. He was on juvenile probation, and reported to a probation officer every week. Woyzeck, the heavyweight, was peaceable and agile, and apologized to the first opponent he beat. “I felt bad for him,” he said. Tyrell was the storyteller. He gave ten-minute explanations every time he was late for practice that began with his birth and progressed through the significant events of his life. Then there was Wycliff, who wanted to be a doctor. He carried his books to every meet, and sat with them stacked under his seat on the bench during meets.

Hackman was the philosopher. Stop thinking so much out there, Atkins would tell him. For half the season he wrestled with a bandage around his head to protect stitches above his eye. He looked like a Civil War casualty. Then there were the big three as everybody on the team referred to them, the Stinson brothers and Tommy Mercado. When they won it was as if everybody won.

They had a 103-pounder, Dan Wyatt, who weighed ninety pounds with a pocket full of pebbles. The kids called him fly, and then super fly after he’d won a few matches. He was good and would be successful if puberty ever kicked in and he put on some weight and muscle. To make it worse, the girl thumped him daily in practice. When Superfly lost a match, which he did on a regular basis that year - he finished with a won-loss record of something like 4-15 – he sat on the bench and cried, and not just cried, but wailed like a baby. There was no way to console

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him. When he was done crying he sat there red-eyed, staring straight ahead, surrounded by orange peels, a shopping bag full of food, and jugs of weight-gain drink, and ate and drank, and screamed for his teammates in a voice that sounded like an eleven year-old girl. It was heartbreaking to watch him out there on the mat, trying so hard his eyes looked like they were popping out of his head, only to be squashed by an opponent less gifted, less determined, whose only advantage was weight.

And then there was the girl, Sarah Peyton. She’d been wrestling since she was five, first with her brothers and then in tournaments all around the state. She’d won age-group championships at district, state and national levels. When she got to the high school, officials told her she couldn’t compete on the boy’s team. She sued, and won, and found a vacant spot on the team at 112.

They lost matches by scores like 50-12, 55-9, and 60-10. It was oppressive. Atkins dreamed about retirement. He was five years away from early retirement. He’d had enough.

Every time a kid lost he took it personally. He couldn’t wait until the end of the year. He would reassess his situation, decide whether or not to take early retirement.

Early retirement. His old man would have laughed. He never took a day in his life just dropped dead in the fields one day at sixty-seven. He drank a pint of whiskey every day. Never saw his son wrestle a match, not even the state finals. Atkins was in the barn before sunrise the day after the state finals milking the cows when his old man came in. “How’d you do?” he said.

“I won.” It was the closest thing they had to a father-son moment. When Atkins told him he was going to college to wrestle, his old man scoffed. It wasn’t work to him if you weren’t lifting something. Books meant nothing. School was something that kept a kid from working the farm.

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Thursday afternoon. Meet number ten. The kids lined up in the hall, bags at their feet.

“Load it up,” Atkins said as he stepped out into the frozen air. They all filed out of the gym and boarded the bus.

Cold air poured off the windows. Atkins sat at the front. Curly, the driver, turned to him, bald head glistening and huge cup of soda on the dash in front of him. Curly weighed three hundred fifty pounds and could sweat in arctic weather.

“What’s it look like coach?”

Atkins pulled out his scratch sheet.

“We got a chance,” he said.

“The old optimist,” Curly said, and threw the bus into first.

“Know the way?” Atkins said.

“I know every road in this county,” Curly said. “There’s a little waffle house down the road from the high school. Best waffles around: real whipped cream and wild mountain blueberries when they’re in season.”

“There’s only one season that counts,” Atkins said.

“Coach, you got to lighten up,” Curly said.

“Look who’s talking about lightening up,” Atkins said.

Curly laughed. “You got me there coach.”

“Meet me on the track three days a week. We’ll walk. I’ll get you down to weight.”

“I hear you.”

“Serious.”

They were across town at Suburban. It was a new high school and smelled like it: fresh paint, a carpeted lobby, and a bright new gym floor, covered in the center by a brand new orange

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and black Resilite mat, so soft you could sleep on it. When they were all dressed, Sarah Peyton entered the hallway to the gym from the girls’ locker room. They all lined up behind Wyatt. The door opened and they ran out into the heated air of the gymnasium. A few hoots and jeers whistled by and then Shelton tripped on the edge of the mat and a wave of laughter rolled around the gym. He was up in an instant, his face red and scowling. “They can’t even walk,” someone yelled from the crowd. A big red flag with white letters that spelled WILDCATS was hanging on the wall. As the team was on the mat warming up, the crowd began to restlessly stomp its feet until they found a rhythm. Soon the entire crowd was stomping its feet in unison and chanting:

“We Want The Wildcats, We Want The Wildcats.” The captain, Tommy Mercado waved them in. They gathered in the center of the mat and put their hands together and together shouted: “Go

Demons.” It was barely audible in the din of the gym. By the time they had cleared the mat and the Wildcats had entered the gym, Atkins could barely speak to the team above the roar of the crowd. His ears were ringing.

Are “these guys good or something?” Wyatt said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“No better than us,” Atkins yelled.

“We can beat these guys,” Shelton said. He was still scowling about his fall.

Wyatt was the first match. He had a lanky kid who put on a cocky sneer as soon as he saw how small Wyatt was at the weigh-in. When Wyatt pulled up his uniform it hung loosely from his shoulders. His opponent was grinning at him when he walked onto the mat. He was a head taller than Wyatt. After they shook hands the kid charged across the mat at Wyatt and they tumbled out of bounds in front of the bench. Wyatt ran back to the center of the mat. His opponent was still grinning and he looked around at the crowd as if victory was imminent and they cheered back at him and stomped their feet in approval of his aggressive attack. He hadn’t

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yet figured out that he was in for a match and they hadn’t either. When the whistle blew, he charged again like a half-grown steer, all legs and elbows, but this time in the scramble at the edge of the mat Wyatt ducked behind him and scored a takedown as they careened out of bounds like a knot of rolling, twisting, appendages.

When they started in the center of the mat, Wyatt hung on like bronc-rider while his opponent, red-faced, and grinless, struggled furiously to free himself. He stood, only to be tripped to his knees and then flopped onto his belly. He braced up on his hands to have one pulled from under him. Wyatt clung to him using every ounce of his ninety-two pounds to hold him down. At the end of the first period Wyatt led 2-0. By that point his opponent had lost the cocky demeanor and was frantically looking to his coach for advice. Wyatt started the second period in the top position, but this time his opponent escaped and then scored a quick takedown to take a one-point lead. The crowd was on its feet, clapping, and stomping. Atkins couldn’t hear himself yell. Wyatt stood up and his opponent slammed him down to the mat. The crowd cheered. When he hit the mat he reversed his opponent and threw him on his back. He held him for back points, but his opponent bridged off of his back and threw him on his back. Before the period ended Wyatt escaped. It took a conference at the scoring table between Atkins, the referee and the other coach to sort out the score. It was tied entering the third period.

Wyatt started down, but he didn’t stay there long. He escaped for one and immediately dove in on a leg, but his opponent countered and scored a takedown. Wyatt escaped to tie the score. In a scramble in the center of the mat, Wyatt emerged on top. The other coach was red- faced at the edge of the mat. Just then Wyatt caught an elbow to the nose and a bright crimson stream gushed forth. The referee stopped the match and sent Wyatt to the bench. He looked like he was about to cry. “You’re doing great,” Atkins said. “Thirty seconds to go.” He led by three.

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Atkins wiped off his face with a towel and stuck a cotton plug in his nostril, and sent him back out on the mat.

His opponent reversed him immediately and threw him on his back for two, but he escaped to tie, and then with ten seconds remaining, he shot on his opponent’s legs and scored the winning takedown. The crowd went silent for a moment as Wyatt jumped up, and shook hands with his opponent. The referee raised his hand. He walked off the mat smiling as his teammates piled around him.

When Sarah Peyton walked on the mat, the coach waved his hands, signaling a forfeit.

“We won’t wrestle a girl,” he said.

Wyatt was the first to hear it. He was jumping up and down at the edge of the mat, turned and yelled back. “You fucking pussies.”

Atkins had his hand over his mouth in an instant, but it was too late. The referee had heard it, and walked straight to the scorers’ table to deduct a team point.

“Sit,” Atkins, yelled at Wyatt.

Tyrell was already on the mat, jumping up and down, and stalking around the circle.

Wyatt had taken a seat on the bench and was screaming for Tyrell to keep things going, which he did after a moment of hesitation. He lost the opening takedown, but then as if he’d suddenly woken up, reversed his opponent to his back. One minute and twelve seconds later he was walking off the mat after he pinned his opponent. He walked stoically back to the bench and sat down. “Good job,” Atkins said. Tyrell nodded and then allowed himself a little smile.

Atkins sat back in his chair, looked up and down the bench. The kids were standing, or squatting, or leaning forward out of their seats, yelling, cheering, giving instructions. He put his hands on his head and closed his eyes for an instant. The noise in the gym was deafening. They

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were close the whole meet and then it slipped away. Shelton got reversed at the buzzer to lose, and then Woyzeck was in a scramble and landed on his back and it was over. They lost by one- point. He looked at Wyatt. That little rat, he thought.

Atkins was so tired of losing that next day in practice that he lost it. He wanted to make them angry, angry as he was after the last meet, angry enough that they would turn around and take it out on their next opponents. To make it worse, they had a bad practice, lollygagging and complaining. He got them all together at the end of practice and he let them have it. He said awful things. Things he later regretted saying. “You guys are pathetic. You practice like that and expect to win matches? You got your asses kicked by the worst team in the league. Don’t you care? What’s wrong with you? They were tired and beat, and they slunk out of the room quietly, looking down at the mat, shuffling their feet. Steam from their sweat fogged the windows in the wrestling room.

It did more harm than good. He knew it as soon as he got done talking and the last one of them walked out of the room. The next day Barkley quit. Atkins heard it from the kids on the team. Barkley told his teammates he was sick of getting his ass kicked. Atkins didn’t blame him for not seeing him in person. He shouldn’t have yelled at them like that. There was no excuse.

He would never do that again, he told himself. From then on he would be positive. “Be fucking positive,” he said. He put his head in his hands. Thirty years of thus shit, he said to himself. How come it’s like starting over every day?

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He tried to phone the Barkley’s house but the number wasn’t listed. He found Barkley in the cafeteria a few days later. He was sitting in a corner eating his lunch out of a brown paper bag. Five empty cartons of chocolate milk sat in front of him. “Got a second,” he said.

“I ain’t wrestling no more,” he said. “I hate it.” He squashed an empty milk carton.

“I don’t blame you. I hate it too sometimes.”

“Yeah, but it’s easy for you to say. You were good.”

“I wasn’t that good.”

“Yes you were.”

“No I wasn’t. Believe me. I got my ass kicked more times than you’ll probably ever wrestle.”

“I ain’t ever wrestling again. I’m sick of losing.”

“Winning and losing don’t matter.”

“You don’t believe that. I heard what you said.”

“I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have yelled at you guys,” he caught himself. “And girl.”

Barkley opened a carton of chocolate milk and took a drink.

“I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m getting a job.” He offered Atkins a drink out of the milk carton. “My family needs the money.”

“There are only eleven on the team without you.”

“So what?”

“Think about it. They need you.”

The next day Barkley walked into practice. Atkins was demonstrating a finish to a double leg. “You’ve got to turn the corner,” he said. “Head up, drive with your foot.” The kids clapped,

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slapped Barkley on the back. It was like homecoming. Atkins let them cheer, and then got back to his demonstration.

Saturday morning, midseason, the end of January, they had a meet in Eagle, up in the coal country. They were all supposed to meet at seven a.m. in the gym parking lot at the high school. At seven a.m. everyone was there except Barkley. They stood in the frigid morning air and crunched around on the ice and snow and waited for him. Atkins debated leaving him. How many times had he preached about being on time, responsibility to the team? He’d threatened to leave them behind if they were late, but he just couldn’t do it. True, they had a chance to win the meet and they couldn’t do it without Barkley, but that was only part of it. As much as he talked about discipline and responsibility he knew that for some of them it just didn’t compute. He might as well have been talking about astrophysics, which might have been fine for Hackman and Wycliff, but it was lost on the rest of them. “I’ll be back,” he said to the Curly. Atkins jumped in his car and drove to South Port.

The Barkleys lived in a tall narrow frame house stuck to the side of an abandoned laundry building across the street from one of the only two surviving industries in town, a scrap metal salvage yard and a pie factory. The air either smelled sweet or like burnt grease depending on which way the wind was blowing. He started to knock on the door, but there wasn’t one. A ragged, gray, blanket hung in the place of the door and the frigid winter air blew into the house each time a strong wind blew.

“Shit,” he said and pushed through the blanket. It was freezing in the house. He thought about what he’d said to the kids that day in practice, about Pete quitting, about how much crap

Pete had to deal with without him adding to it. In thirty years of coaching, he never felt as bad as

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he did at that moment. He could never take those words back, and they rung in his ears as he moved through the frigid darkness of the ramshackle old house. His could barely see and he felt like he could have been in the barn of his boyhood in midwinter, rising before dawn to feed and milk the cows, a little late and hoping his father wouldn’t notice, but he always did.

He tripped over something on the floor. His eyes adjusted to the dark, focused on a toy dump truck. Pete had eleven brothers and sisters. He was somewhere in the middle. “Pete,”

Atkins said. His breath frosted the air. No answer. “Pete, it’s coach, let’s go, it’s late, the bus is waiting.” Someone stirred. The floor creaked above him.

“Who is it?” Pete said.

“Coach.”

“Shit! What time is it?”

“It’s after seven, let’s go.”

A door opened and closed. There was a sudden scramble that sounded like a toolbox falling.

“I’ll be right there.”

When he hit the stairs the whole house seemed to shake. Someone in the house yelled.

“Shut up.” A second later Pete was at the bottom of the steps and a moment later his gym bag came bouncing after him.

“Sorry coach,” he said. “No electricity.”

“It’s OK,” Atkins said, “We still have time.” They walked out through the blanket hanging in the doorway, into the morning, squinting at the light reflecting off the snow and ice.

“Everybody there already?” he said.

“Everybody,” Atkins said.

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“You going to kick me off the team,” he said.

“Does it look like it?”

“No,” he said and sat back in his seat and closed his eyes. “I didn’t mean to be late.

Electricity is off. I’ll make it up to you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Atkins said. “Just don’t make it a habit.”

The bus sat in the middle of the frozen parking lot with exhaust pouring out of its tailpipe like visible breath. The rest of the team was warm and waiting inside the bus. Someone let out a cheer when they boarded. “Yeah Barkley.” And then it was quiet. The rest of them were sleeping with their heads on their duffle bags as they leaned against the frosted windows. Atkins took a seat behind Curly, and took roll, checking off eleven names in his head by weight class – the way he tabulated wins and losses: 103, Wyatt; 112, Peyton; 119, Tyrell; 125, forfeit; 130, Barkley;

135, Daryl Stinson; 140 Dwayne Stinson; 145, Mercado; 152, Hackman; 160, Clifford; 171,

Wycliff; 189, Shelton; 215, forfeit, and heavyweight, Woyzeck. They were giving up twelve points, but they still had a chance.

Eagle High School had an old cramped gym with a low row of bleachers that ran along one wall. They squeezed the mat in between a wall and the bleachers with about two feet to spare on either side. An old running track hung from the ceiling and by the time they were ready to go on the mat to warm up, the track had filled with spectators. Fans kept pouring into the gym until they stood three and four deep around the sides of the mat.

“These people are crazy,” Wyatt said as he cracked the locker room door and peeked into the gym. “Do we have to go out there?”

“What did you expect fly?” Hackman said. “There’s nothing else to do around here.”

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“Let’s go,” Clifford said. “It’s better than staying in this stinking locker room. It’s freezing cold. The showers won’t shut off. Guarantee they’re like ice.”

Mercado was sitting on a bench with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled snugly around his face. The Stinsons were arguing as they pummeled, pushing each other around in the tight space between the rusted lockers. Wycliff was reading a book. Barkley had his uniform on and was looking at his tattoo in the mirror. “Hey Tyrell,” he said. “Can you see it?”

“Looks good man,” Tyrell said. “I just can’t see its legs. It looks like its walking through the grass.”

Woyzeck and Shelton were eating a bag of barbecue-flavored potato chips.

“Hey that’s stuff is going to make you sick,” Atkins said. “Don’t eat that now.”

“It’s for good luck,” Shelton said. He was sitting, like most of them, in a blue t-shirt with white letters that said Demon Wrestling.

“Good luck?” Atkins said. “What are you talking about?”

“We eat them before every match,” Woyzeck said.

“No wonder you guys turn green out there. Get rid of them.”

“But they taste good,” Woyzeck said.

“Start thinking about the meet.”

Sarah Peyton was dressing in the girl’s locker room. Atkins knocked on the door to see if she was ready. She came to the door fully dressed in her street clothes, a hooded sweatshirt pulled around her head.

“Sarah, you getting ready?” Atkins crossed and uncrossed his arms.

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“I got a problem,” she said, looking at the polished wood gym floor in front of his white tennis shoes. He always wore sneakers to meets, and a jacket and tie. He usually took the jacket off and hung it on the chair he sat in at the edge of the mat.

“What?” He adjusted his tie, put his hands on is hips.

“I can’t wrestle.” Her hands plunged deep in her jeans pockets. The pants were embroidered with tiny red, yellow and blue flowers. She was a pretty girl with long brown hair that she tucked up under her headgear every time she went out onto the mat to wrestle. A red brush-burn blossomed on her cheek. She had her hair stuffed under a wool cap as she stood in the door to the locker room talking to Atkins.

“Why not?”

“I got my thing.” She looked up at him for an instant and crossed her arms. A strand of brown hair fell out of her hat and crossed her face.

“Your what?” He leaned forward as if he hadn’t heard her.

“My thing.”

“What the . . . ?” Atkins felt his blood pressure start up. Calm, yourself, he said.

Remember, remember.

“You got your thing?”

She shook her head, another strand of hair fell from her cap, and she pushed them back up out of her face.

“Your period,” he said.

“Yes.”

“OK,” he said. “You don’t have to wrestle.”

“No,” she said. “I want to wrestle.”

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“OK,” Atkins said. “Then what’s the problem?”

“I don’t have any things.”

“What things?”

“Things,” she said. “You know.”

“Right,” he said. “Let’s go to the store.”

They had forty-five minutes before match time. The big yellow bus pulled into the parking lot of the only grocery store in town. Curly, Atkins, and Sarah sat there for a moment.

“Well,” Atkins said. “Go on in, get what you need.”

“I don’t have enough money,” she said.

“OK let’s go.”

He stood up and Curly opened the door. “They’ve got a good deli in there,” Curly said.

“I think I’ll go in there and get an Italian sub.”

The bus was warm and when they stepped outside onto the frozen parking lot a cold wind swept over them. The store was drafty, and the air was heavy with smells, meat, old vegetables, damp paper bags. Atkins idled in aisles, checked his watch. They had half an hour. In the hardware aisle he saw a windup clock. He picked it up and wound it then put it to his ear and listened to the clunky, mechanical ticking. For Pete, he thought and took it to the front of the store. As he pulled some cash out of his pocket at the checkout line, he remembered a time, back when he first started, when the coaches, himself included, threatened to buy Kotex for boys they thought were being soft. He laughed at the thought of those old-timers trying to coach now.

They’d die, those old dinosaurs.

“That everything?” he said.

Sarah shook her head.

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“Mr. Atkins,” she said as they walked back out of the store. “Thank you for doing this.

I’ll pay you back.”

“Don’t worry about it.” How many times had he said that tonight?

“I mean thanks for everything. Thanks for letting me wrestle this year. Thanks for being so supportive. It means a lot to me.”

“I know it does.”

“I don’t know if I can do it next year.”

“Why not?”

They were across the parking lot almost to the bus. Ice crunched in tandem beneath their feet.

“My dad said as soon as I got tits I’d have to quit.”

“And?”

“I got ‘em, but I hide them under an elastic tank top.”

“If you want to wrestle next year, I’ll talk to your dad. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”

“Mr. Atkins, thank you so much,” she said. As they came around the front of the bus, she rushed up to him and gave him a hug. It startled him and he stepped back as she clamped a bear hug on him. He smelled raspberry bubble gum. The headlights shined in his eyes. It was freezing but his thick cauliflowered ears flushed with warmth. Another first, he thought. What a night. He felt trembly in his throat all the way down. What a bunch of kids. Where’d they come from?

Thirty years of coaching and he thought he’d seen everything. His eyes welled up, blurred. He stepped on the bus, rubbing his eyes. A strong smell of oil and vinegar emanated from a tall narrow bag next to the driver’s seat.

“What’s it look like coach?” Curly said.

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Atkins couldn’t speak for a moment. What the hell was wrong with him now? He’d really lost it. He fished in his pocket, found the folded index card with all his figuring on it. He crumpled it up in one hand.

“You mean we have a match now,” he said and sent the paper sailing toward the trashcan next to the long gear-shift. It bounced on the lip of the can and dropped in.

Curly took a long draw on his drink. “Nice shot,” he said. “Maybe you ought to coach some hoops.”

“Not in a million years.” He closed his eyes as the bus lurched forward. He sensed it moving through the cold night air. He leaned forward and rested his head on the back of his hands. They’d be back at the drafty old gym in minutes, and the crowd would be there, impatient for a home-team win, and his kids would be there too, waiting for him.

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CHAPTER 9

COMRADES

We called Bently Sarge because he ran the fourth form dorm with a military attitude. It was a nickname he’d earned a long time before Harwell, Lewis, and I ever arrived at Wellington.

He dressed with precision, black wool coat, rimmed hat, white shirt, gray suit, handkerchief in breast pocket, and black tie. Old school all the way. We feared him - his jowly scowl, and voice that rattled bones. His glare could vaporize a lame excuse. To put one over on Sarge was a sign of greatness – at least at Wellington where life was magnified and intense.

The morning after we painted a hammer and sickle on the elevator shaft that stuck up over the top of the dorm, Bently surveyed the broken line of students straggling to breakfast from the porch in front of Main Hall like a general overlooking the retreat of a defeated army. His breath hovered around his head like exhaust from an idling engine. He pulled his collar up against the fall morning cold. Snow had dusted the campus twice already, and the clouds hadn’t broken in a week. The mood at the school was somber. Harwell had been booted from the school a few weeks before. Everybody seemed resigned to winter’s inevitable arrival. Lewis, my roommate, said the school was primed for a prank.

I wanted to turn around and look at our handiwork, but I saw Bently watching us, so I didn’t. I kept my eyes straight ahead and down as if I was concentrating on the brick walkway and the fifteen ancient worn brick steps that led up to Main.

When I passed Bently I said, “Morning Sir.”

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He nodded.

“Morning Wheeler,” he said and he followed me through Main. Main was an old building, and the floorboards creaked under the weight of the crowd that filtered through it.

Glass trophy cases lined the walls and it smelled like an old dusty cabinet. Main was the hub of campus and we passed through it continuously, on our way to the dining hall, to check our mail, and to meet with the Deans if we’d been caught breaking any of the school’s infinite rules. To enter the dining hall, we walked outside and crossed a small slate courtyard.

The dining hall looked like a hotel ballroom, dark oak panels, four massive chandeliers, and long narrow lead-paned windows that allowed streams of morning light to enter its otherwise gloomy interior. Bently’s shoes squeaked behind me as he turned toward his table.

I rushed through breakfast so I could get out and look at our work. The table master served cold toast and scrambled eggs that sat in a puddle of yellow water. I ate my share. Fridays

I had a long morning of classes with no break for a snack, and if I didn’t eat I’d run out of energy by ten. That morning I had to force the food down. My stomach was fluttering. I loaded my eggs up with salt and pepper. When I finished my last mouthful of eggs and toast, I asked to be excused. I didn’t even wait for the raspberry sweet rolls that were served at the end of the meal.

“In a hurry this morning Mr. Wheeler,” Hooper, the table master said.

“Got some reading to finish sir.”

I picked up the empty platter and took it into the kitchen and dropped it off at the dishwashing machine. It coughed up a cloud of stale, warm steam as I walked past it and headed out into the crisp morning air. The smell of bacon and bread lingered in the cold air for a moment and then a gust of cold wind took it away.

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A crowd of students had already gathered on the porch where Bently had stood before breakfast. They were laughing and pointing at the elevator shaft on top of Arden Hall, the gothic stone and brick dormitory where I lived with the rest of the fourth form. The red hammer and sickle in the middle of it looked like a billboard. Lewis had been right to paint the background yellow. It stood in full view above the roof of the dorm, the highest building on campus.

But shortly after nine a.m., the maintenance crew covered all of it with a fresh coat of red paint. By nine thirty it was gone, and just before lunch I had a summons to Bently’s office.

Harwell came to Wellington Academy from Texas. He was six feet tall, but he slouched as if his head and shoulders were a burden to carry. He was the first kid I met after my parents drove through the school’s ancient stone gates. We were the first on our hall. He stuck his head in my door while I was hanging my shirts in the closet, feeling like a tourist in a strange hotel.

“It’s lunch time. You want to go eat?”

“Sure,” I said and set aside the unpacking for later.

“How do we get to the cafeteria?”

“You mean the dining hall,” Harwell said with an affected air. “We don’t eat in a cafeteria at Wellington.”

As we walked to the dining hall, Harwell offered his services as a tour guide. He pointed out the best places to have a smoke, drink, or just plain hide out if I decided to sneak out of the dorm some night. In one day he’d cased the place. He talked like a machine gun fires bullets and spit after every other word.

“There’s the entrance to the tunnel,” he said. “It’s pretty easy to pick the lock with a screwdriver or use a credit card.”

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“I don’t have a credit card,” I said.

“Use your school ID then,” he said. “Or just duck into those bushes over there. There’s enough room inside of them to throw a party.”

He pointed to a row of evergreen bushes that ran along the edge of campus and separated the school from the town. They formed a boundary to the headmaster’s garden.

I nodded as though I’d been given the key to the school. I wasn’t quite sure what to think of Harwell, who had already told me how to break rules I hadn’t even learned yet.

“I’m a newspaper man,” he boasted. “I got recruited to write on the school paper.

Newspapers are in my blood.”

Harwell waved his hands around, pointing here and there, as we walked. His animated narrative ran all the way to the quad. I hardly got a word in. We had barely set foot on the grass of the quad when a voice erupted behind us. It was amplified as if through a bullhorn, a sort of magnified croak, and it sent a charge up my spine that paralyzed me mid-step on the grassy quadrangular. “You There!” it began. I turned to see what the problem was. “What do you think you’re doing? Stay off the grass! What are your names? New boys, eh? Demerits for you.” An irate little man with a horseshoe of white hair around his head and a moon face hurried toward us in a black banker’s suit. He might have passed for somebody’s kindly grandfather, if he wasn’t about to burst every vein in his head over our unwitting violation. “Don’t just stand there. Get off the grass. Are you deaf?”

Speechless, I shrugged, and stepped back on to the worn brick walkway. “We were just going over there,” I said. “We didn’t know.”

I thought telling the truth would vindicate us.

“That’s no excuse,” he snapped. “What’s your name anyway?”

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“Wheeler,” I said.

“Wheeler,” he said. “There are rules here at Wellington.”

He pulled out a small pad of white paper and a stump of a pencil sharpened to a point that snapped as he wrote my name.

“You’ll be hearing from the Deans,” he said, and walked off.

After that, we stuck to the brick walkway and made a full L around the edges of the quad on the way to lunch. All the way, the pressure built in my chest and the water welled in my eyes.

I wanted to go home. A narrow strip of sunlight cut the quad in half. Although the sky was clear, the stark gray and white stone buildings blocked the late morning sun and sent cold shadows sprawling across the over-manicured lawn.

“I guess you call that a baptism by fire,” Harwell said. He had a goofy grin on.

After lunch, Harwell said he was going downtown to get some smokes. I told him I had to buy some books and pens and things like that, and we parted ways near the stone gates I had entered that morning.

The dorm rooms were plain and efficient, monks’ chambers split in two, with matching beds, drawers, closets, and desks built-in to a wall of shelves. I was still smarting from my earlier exchange and I was glad to find my roommate had arrived. Suitcases, some half unpacked, were scattered around the other side of the room. In the middle of it all, easily swinging a large suitcase on to his bed was my new roommate. He was a few inches taller than me and much thicker. He turned when he heard me enter.

“I guess you’re Wheeler,” he said and stuck out his hand. “I’m Lewis Jameson.”

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Lewis was from South Carolina. I’d never met anyone from there. We got along right away. I was going out for the wrestling team and he liked martial arts. He already had a Bruce

Lee poster up on our wall. I was glad to have someone to talk to after getting screamed at earlier.

We were both on scholarship and we figured that’s why they made us roommates.

"Why did you come here," I asked him.

"It was my mom's idea," He said. "After my dad died she thought it would be a good idea if I went to an all-boys boarding school - something about having good male role models. She was reading a lot of psychology books or something.”

After dinner, the entire dorm met in the lounge. As we waited for the dormitory head, we sat on overstuffed chairs with names, dates and profanities carved into their oak arms. When he appeared I held my breath for an instant. It was the old man who’d berated us earlier. He introduced himself as Bently. He said he’d been in the Navy, and he liked to run a tight ship, a cliché my high school English teacher never would have forgiven him for. The other masters had relaxed their dress, taken off their coats and ties, but not Bently. He was a real son-of-a-bitch stickler about the rules and he wanted us all to know it.

“This is my dorm,” he said. “And I won’t tolerate any nonsense.”

I tried to stay hidden in the crowd as best I could, but as he made a point about us reading our school handbooks and learning the rules, his eyes somehow found me. I should have just stayed home. I was suddenly filled with nostalgia for my old high school, which I had chastised pompously in my application essay as inadequate to suit my needs.

At night as we lay in our beds in that drafty old room in Arden Hall, the door creaked and opened and the light from the hallway caught the top of a bald head. The face was hidden by the

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darkness of the room. But a hard, precise voice soon erased any question of who had peered into the room. Bently, still dressed in his black suit, was doing the day’s last room check.

“Wheeler,” he said.

"Yes," I said.

"OK."

"Jameson," he said.

"Yes, sir," Lewis replied, drawing out the syllables of each word.

"Lets keep it quiet in here," he said. "I can hear you talking in the hall."

"OK, sorry," we said almost in unison.

A few minutes later someone rattled my window. I got out of bed and opened it. Harwell crouched behind some bushes.

“Hey, you want to go for a smoke?”

“No,” I said. I was still shaken from my encounter with Bently.

“Not scared are you?” Harwell said.

“No way,” I said. “It’s a long day ahead.”

“How about some liar’s poker?” he said. “Got a buck or two lying around?”

“What about Bently?”

“The old fart went to sleep,” Harwell said. “I heard him lock his door.”

Before we could refuse he had pushed his way into the room and we found ourselves learning the rules of liar’s poker. Harwell was all hands and facial twitches as he explained the

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rules. I was not good at it. It took me several hands to grasp the idea of playing off of other hands and I wasn’t good at bluffing. Harwell kept looking at his watch as if he had somewhere to go.

“That Bently is a royal pain in the ass,” he said. “He could ruin a sunny day. I got a mind to fix him good.”

“How?” Lewis said.

“I don’t know yet, but when I do I’ll tell you.” He jumped up all of a sudden. “I’m going to have a smoke.”

“Aren’t you going to sleep?” I said.

“Hell no. I got too much energy to sleep.”

He had five dollars in hand when he crawled back out our window.

“That guy’s a case of nerves,” Lewis said.

I ended up with Bently for History class. It had been my best subject, but under his tyrannical tutelage my interest waned. I went to class scared everyday, and this state of mind severely fractured my ability to concentrate. Halfway through the semester I barely maintained a

D. I watched the clock, and prayed I wouldn’t be called on. I lived in terror of answering a question incorrectly and being ridiculed by Bently. One day he exploded at Harwell.

Bently had been lecturing about the evils of Communism and Harwell got into an argument with him about it. Harwell said basically that it was a good idea, that the Bolsheviks had screwed it up, but that still didn’t take away from Marx’s original idea.

After class, Harwell was in a state. His face was all red and he shook, stuttered and spat when he spoke. “Just what I figured,” he said. “This place brags about its academics and intellectual climate, but it’s a lot of horseshit.”

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Kids started calling Harwell a commie after that and they wouldn’t let it rest. He was labeled and at that place labels came with a lot of glue.

The fall term passed quickly once we got caught in the frenetic pace of the school. Bells dictated our lives. They signaled every significant activity of the day: sleep, meals, classes, sports, study hall. We responded to them like rats in a psychological study and we moved through the fall toward the winter as if we were riding a conveyor belt to the future. We were sleep deprived a week into school, but we marched on like bleary-eyed boy soldiers, to breakfast in the morning darkness where we ate slimy shirred eggs and cold toast, then on to classes at

7:45 a.m., lunch at noon, sports at 3:30, dinner at 6:15, study hall at 7:30 p.m., and it didn’t stop until lights out at 11 p.m. But, then after the masters went to bed, we crept out and talked clandestinely in our rooms, planned for the weekends, and dreaded the breakfast bell that summoned us from the dead of sleep.

Thanksgiving vacation when I would return home for five days loomed in my mind like judgment day. Part of me was looking forward to getting out of Wellington, but the other half was dreading the task of reporting my grades to my parents. Grades would be out by then and there would be little opportunity to hide from the truth.

It had been a big deal for me to attend the school and it had been all my idea. My parents didn’t have the money to send me and I needed a scholarship. The little money they had to contribute was a sacrifice. My dad was a sculptor. He worked at the foundry designing and

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making industrial fixtures. In his own time he made the sculptures that stood in our backyard.

People in the town thought we were weird.

I grew up a few miles from the school, so when I was old enough I asked my parents if I could apply. They were worried about the cost, but thought it would be a good idea. I called about an application and asked my teachers at the high school for recommendations. They knew about the school and gave me advice that I in my enthusiasm disregarded: “They’ll go much faster there;” “It’s a fine school, and they’ll really work you there.” I nodded, oblivious to what it meant to really work hard. At the time all I cared about was getting the hell out of Shaleton High

School.

Harwell wrote a column for the school paper criticizing the academic environment at the school as stifling, and anti-intellectual. He said it was a place where ideas should prevail instead of bullies and tired old rhetoric. He said the school was a totalitarian state, oppressive and closed-minded, and that he wouldn’t be surprised to wake up one morning and find the Soviet flag flying at full mast over the school. The column angered everybody from the students to the headmaster, a youthful man of fifty with an impressive set of teeth and shiny black hair, who called him into his office and asked him why he was so unhappy. The column made him the victim of an ongoing series of practical jokes involving shaving cream, talcum powder and water buckets. In the sarcastic environment that prevailed at the school his words were resented more than respected. I was a guilty party to his harassment on at least one occasion. I held the surgical tubing on the water cannon when we hit him with the water balloon that knocked him down, and broke his glasses.

He got up shaking his head. “Really funny, guys,” he said. “Really fucking funny.”

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We all got demerits for it and had to spend Saturday night in detention.

Fall Dance weekend was the final open weekend of the fall and the big event of the semester. Harwell had big plans for the weekend. He had arranged a date with a girl he’d met at a high school journalism conference.

When the weekend finally arrived it was like passing through a tunnel break between the mountains and coming into the light of day for an instant before driving back into the next tunnel. It was the weekend of the big sports rivalry with Carver Academy. We were supposed to attend the games all afternoon and then celebrate afterward at the dance. The school made a big deal out of the rivalry with Carver. We had steak sandwiches instead of the usual shepherd’s pie for Wednesday lunch and a steak dinner on Friday night. It was supposed to get us all fired up for the games, but mostly I think it made everybody more homesick.

The girls arrived throughout the day. Many of them made it for the football game and some of them even joined the cheerleaders on the sidelines, but the Dean made them all wear skirts that covered their knees and bulky white sweaters that hid their breasts. Their presence just made us all acutely aware of what we were missing and reminded us of what an unnatural environment we lived in.

Harwell showed up in a new suit that his mother had sent him. He was parading around the hallway when someone got the idea to throw him in the shower. Four or five of us pitched him in and turned on the cold water. He just whimpered like a whipped dog, swore, and threatened us.

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At the dance someone offered Harwell a hit of acid and he took it. The next thing I knew he was calling from the hospital.

I was one step from my room when the phone rang and echoed down the concrete block walls of Arden Hall. It was Sunday afternoon and the dorm was abandoned. Everybody was either sleeping, at church, downtown somewhere, or home for the day. I turned around to get it.

“Who’s this?” Harwell said.

“Wheeler,” I said.

His voice sounded crackly.

“Wheeler,” he said. “It’s me. Harwell. I’m in the fucking Looney bin.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m in the Looney bin. I freaked out. But I’m OK now. I’ve been talking to the doctors, playing some hoops. I think they’re going to let me out soon. I need to get my books and assignments. Do you think someone could bring them down?”

I really didn’t want to do it myself.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll find somebody.”

“Could you do it, buddy?” he said, and I could picture him slumped over the phone, scratching his mop of curly hair and pushing his dirty wire-rimmed glasses back on his nose.

“Yeah, sure. Sure, I’ll do it.”

“Thanks. I knew I could count on you buddy.”

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The psychiatric wing was on the fourth floor at the end of a long corridor. Lewis and I exited the elevator and started down the corridor. When we stepped onto the carpet it hushed our footsteps. We stopped at the nurses’ station and asked about Harwell. A nurse pointed us down the hall to a table.

“There he is,” Lewis said.

Harwell was standing in a doorway smoking a cigarette. When he saw us he waved and dropped his cigarette, ground it into the floor. He hurried over to us, smiling all the way.

“Damn, it’s good to see you guys,” he said. “Am I going home with you?”

“I don’t think so,” Lewis said. “Nobody said anything to us about that.”

“We brought your books and some clothes,” I said.

We sat down at a round table.

“I’m going to have to talk to the doctors,” he said. “They said I could get out of here soon.”

“Listen,” he said. “Do me a favor.”

“Sure,” I said. “What?”

“If the Dean asks what was going on, tell him I broke up with my girl. That’s what I told them here.”

Harwell got up suddenly. “I’m going to grab a smoke,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

He disappeared into the smoking room.

“Are you about ready to get out of here,” I asked Lewis.

“Let’s stay a little longer,” Lewis said. Lewis seemed relaxed like he didn’t mind being there.

“This place gives me the willies,” I said.

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“I guess I’m used to them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I had an uncle we’d visit upstate sometimes. After a while you get used to it. They’re just people.”

A few minutes later, Harwell sat back down at the table.

“How’s the food?” Lewis said.

“Not bad,” Harwell said. “Better than school. They got this green Jell-O with shredded carrots in it and some kind of white fruit. It reminds me of grade school. I could eat that stuff all day.”

“Here’s a couple books,” I said. “And some assignments.”

“Good, good,” he said. “Don’t want to get behind with exams coming. I’ll be back soon, guaranteed. I’ve got a good column or two to write before the terms up. I’ll really shake them up.”

Harwell never came back. The school found out about the acid and that was it. Dean

Dimmerly cleaned out his room one afternoon.

At the end of the fall term we had to sign up for a winter-term sport. I went out for the wrestling team and in the first week, I got my neck twisted up badly enough that I had to wear a neck brace for a month. In the afternoons when everybody else went to athletics, I went to the library. I didn’t have anything else to do but study.

I worked at a desk next to an arched lead-paned picture window that looked out onto the quad, the stone and brick buildings, and the trees that appeared like black and stark sticks scratching the sky. The librarian usually stoked a fire in the old fireplace, and a few students,

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who like me were excused from sports, sat reading magazines and newspapers in overstuffed red leather chairs.

I read my history assignments over and over until they stuck in my mind. I got a B+ on the final test of the fall term. It was enough to give me a C for the term. I had bailed myself out of a failing grade. Nobody looked more pleased than Bently when he handed the test back to me.

Perhaps I was proof to him that his rigidity and harshness were the only ways to cultivate the wildness in boys, to sharpen and strengthen their lazy minds, and to instill the discipline the school boasted about in its glossy brochures.

“I thought you had what it takes,” he said.

Even though my grades were barely average, I felt as if I’d won a small battle against a superior opponent. I could make it there if I wanted to.

Thanksgiving break, the school dispersed in a matter of hours. A flurry of vans and cars descended on the campus, and by late afternoon when my mother arrived after work in our old station wagon, only a few foreign students and others from far away who had to wait a day for planes and trains, remained on campus.

“Are you going to call your friends,” my mother said.

“We’re going to the football game Friday night.”

“I’m sure they’d be glad to see you.”

I spent most of Thanksgiving vacation avoiding inquiries about my academic performance. But, the inevitable finally happened. When my father saw my grades he said if they didn’t improve I wouldn’t return to Wellington the next fall. I had the rest of the year to get things in order. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to go back anyway.

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I thought I would find solace among my friends from the high school, but three months had driven us farther apart than I ever imagined it would. I had entered a world foreign to them, one they felt excluded from, and they let me know it. We went to a football game at the high school where I found myself standing alone in the end zone at half-time, tired of being asked half jokingly: Why do you have to go to a place like that? The high school not good enough for you?

At Wellington, I had portrayed myself as a blue-collar kid, a misplaced high schooler. I went home before the game was over. I crossed a vacant field and went past the high school I had abandoned. The cold ground crunched beneath my feet. When I got home I stood outside for a while looking at the warm glow of lights in the windows.

After we returned from Thanksgiving break, Lewis hatched the scheme to paint the red star on the elevator shaft.

“Let’s do it for Harwell,” he said.

He bought the paint downtown one afternoon and kept it stored in our room.

“Are you in?” he said one day.

“I’m in.”

Friday morning we cracked the door of our dorm room and crept out into the dim lights of the hallway. We jimmied the lock on the attic door, made our way between dusty desks and lamps, and climbed out a window onto the roof. We could see from one end of the school to the other. It was hard to believe our lives had been consumed by such a small place. In the distance I could see the low rolling hills that ran on to the Blue Mountains. On the edge of campus the

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night watchman’s flashlight glanced from building to building as he checked the locks on the gymnasium.

Lewis had made a stencil of a hammer and sickle out of a bed sheet. We taped it to the elevator shaft and spray painted red over the cutout. We wore gloves, long black sweatshirts, old jeans, and shoes we could throw out. The spray paint smelled sweet. Around us in the dark, the campus slept. Lewis concentrated on the details. I painted the background yellow.

“Looks good,” I said. “Let’s get out of here before it gets light.”

We climbed back in through the window, but we couldn’t close it all the way. A cold wind blew inside, stirred some dust and rattled the brittle old yellow shades. Outside, wispy clouds stretched across the moon. We left the window half open and then we crept back to our rooms and waited for the breakfast bells to wake the school.

Bently interrogated Lewis first. I heard about it from Lewis before my turn. Bently hit him with the question right away: “Did you paint the communist flag on Arden Hall last night?”

Lewis sat at the edge of one of the red leather chairs, looking around at black and white photographs of the school in its early days. In the pictures it looked like little more than the cow pasture it began as with buildings that resembled sheds more than classrooms. The only recognizable building was the original farmhouse that had served as a classroom-building, dormitory and now as the alumni relations office. Lewis said he thought about the question, analyzed it for a moment. He had not painted a communist flag on Arden Hall. It was an amalgamation of symbols that pertained in some way to communism, but it wasn’t a flag. It was perhaps a representation of a flag, but it was not a flag. A flag could fly on a pole. He had

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painted a representation of something like a flag that vaguely resembled the Soviet flag, but in truth was neither.

“No,” he said to Bently. “I did not paint the communist flag on Arden Hall.”

Bently looked directly at Lewis. “Why did you turn around this morning and look at the top of Arden Hall as you were walking to breakfast?”

“I must have forgotten something in my room.”

Bently apparently did not care to pursue the incident too far, and probably would have dismissed Lewis with no further questions if the Dean, who had been lurking in the hallway, hadn’t knocked on Bently’s office door.

“Mr Bently,” the Dean said in his stiff formal manner as he stepped into the office.

“Morning Win,” Bently said. “I was just talking with Mr. Jameson about the flag on

Arden Hall.”

“Ah,” the Dean said. He cocked his head back and looked down at Jameson as if he was using his nose as a gunsight.

“Apparently, he knows nothing about it.”

The Dean stood nervously in the doorway for a moment, fumbling with his hands behind his back, and feeling the need to assert his authority as dean.

“Well,” the Dean said. “Would Mr. Jameson be willing to swear to the fact on a stack of

Bibles?”

Bently groaned under his breath.

Lewis was somewhat relieved at the presence of the dean. The Dean would not be as astute of a questioner as Bently although he would be more persistent. He was a man truly in the

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mold of the headmaster. In both of their minds persistence and repetition were the keys to all success.

“Sure,” Lewis said confident the wording of the Dean’s question would allow him to swear on the Bibles and leave with a clear conscience.

“Well OK then, lets get a stack of Bibles,” the Dean said. “Mr. Bently do you have a stack of Bibles?”

“I have one.”

“Where can we get a stack then?” the Dean said.

“The chapel, or the religion department,” Bently said.

Lewis checked his watch. There were twenty-five minutes before the next period began.

“Follow me,” the Dean said, and pivoted on the balls of his feet.

Lewis rose from the red leather chair. The Dean paused at the door and waited for Bently and Jameson to follow. The stairwell echoed with their footsteps. They walked into the hallway at the base of the stairs and down the waxed and polished wood floors, passing classrooms as they went. Teachers’ voices drifted over the transoms of the great oak and glass doors. Jameson picked up fragments of Geometry, Algebra and then French and Spanish lessons before they exited Arden Hall. It was a short walk to the chapel. Lewis squinted at the bright sun. The air was cold, but none of them revealed discomfort. The chapel was empty except for a squirrel that sprinted back and forth across a rafter high above the altar. Its claws produced a muffled scratching on the beam. The Dean reached behind a pew and gathered several Bibles.

“How many?” he said to Bently.

“You said a stack,” Bently said.

“How many Bibles in a stack of Bibles?” The Dean stared blankly at Bently.

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Bently’s eyes widened. “I don’t think there is a specific number,” Bently said.

“Is it listed in the student handbook?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well it should be.”

Bently shrugged, glanced up at the squirrel which was poised motionless watching the action below it.

“Very well then. How about seven?”

“Sounds good.”

“Perhaps ten would be more effective, the Dean said.”

“Ten then,” Bently said.

The Dean stacked ten Bibles on the seat of the pew.

“Place your hand on top,” he said to Lewis.

He put his hand on the Bibles.

“Did you paint the communist flag on Arden Hall?” the Dean said.

Lewis thought for a moment. The word “the” implies a degree of specificity, and I did not paint a specific communist flag on Arden Hall.

“No, I did not.”

“Do you know who did?”

Lewis paused to think. That question in complete form is: Do you know who painted the communist flag on Arden Hall. Since I’ve already determined that a communist flag was not painted on Arden Hall, how could I possibly know who did it?

“No I do not know who did it.”

“I‘ve got a class in a few minutes,” Bently said. “And I’m sure Mr. Jameson does too.”

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The Dean gave him a look. “You are dismissed Mr. Jameson,” the Dean said.

Lewis walked back out the great oak chapel doors. They shook when he opened them. A gust of cold air rushed in. He paused for a minute outside. He could hear their voices inside the cavernous chapel.

“Do you think he did it?” the Dean asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Keep after him,” the dean said. “I think he’ll crack.”

We got a good laugh out of it and it helped me loosen up a little. My mouth was dry and I kept thinking about the time I helped let the hamster out of the cage in third grade and later confessed under the relentless interrogation of Mr. Moyer, the principal.

When I went into Bently’s office, he stood by a window, pipe in hand, appearing to be deep in thought.

“Ah, Mr. Wheeler,” he said as if I had disturbed him. “Come in.”

He motioned me toward a chair and then sat down himself. The pipe clicked on the wood desk when he set it down. The room smelled vaguely of cherry tobacco. He pressed his lips together before he spoke.

“Defacing school property is a very serious offense,” he said.

I nodded as though I agreed wholeheartedly.

“It’s a beautiful campus,” I said. And for an instant I recalled the pastoral advertisement that led me to the school. “It’s a shame to see it destroyed in any way.”

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As I spoke, he leaned back in is chair, and clasped is hands so his forefingers rested against his lips. He appeared to be weighing my words, but I had the sense he was staring out the window at nothing.

“Do you know anything about the flag that mysteriously appeared on Arden Hall last night?”

For a moment I thought about telling the truth, but it didn’t really seem as though he was asking for it.

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CHAPTER 10

CIRCLING OVER ITHACA

As soon as I saw the rattlesnake I knew Moss was going to mess with it. It was big, maybe four or five feet long, and it was coiled in the middle of the trail. We had been following an old fire road up near Bake-Oven Knob for the better part of the afternoon. It was still hot, even though the sun was dropping, and that big old rattler was catching the last fleeting rays of sunshine before crawling off under a rock somewhere for the night. Moss found a stick and pinned it to the ground just behind the head. It writhed, unhitched its jaws, so its head looked smashed, and exposed its needle fangs. Moss pressed the blade of his Bowie knife just behind the snake’s head and worked it back and forth until he severed it. The blade bit a few inches into the dirt before he was done. The snake’s tail wrapped around the stick and then went limp. He cut off the rattles, still clear from a recent molting, and then sliced open its white belly and peeled its skin off with the razor-edge of his knife. He pitched the bloody carcass in the brush along the trail.

“Make a nice belt or a couple of wallets,” Moss said.

“You shouldn’t have killed it,” I said.

“What’s wrong ? You don’t believe that superstitious stuff do you?”

“Maybe. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to kill a rattlesnake.”

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“What the hell does it matter,” he said. He coiled the bloody skin and tucked it in his coat pocket and then he wrapped the head and rattles up in a rag from his backpack. “We got it before it got us, that’s all.”

Blood ran from his hands and he wiped them on the leaves of a low-hanging tree.

It seemed to me that we could have avoided it. But, maybe he was right. What the hell did anything matter? Moss was seventeen and in a year he would be in Vietnam. It was the summer of 1969. I had just turned thirteen, and I spent as much time reading books and newspapers as I did roaming the woods. I’d seen pictures of war in books, and news reports about Vietnam on television, and wasn’t inclined to buy the Hollywood version of war that most of my friends and schoolmates believed. I never read about anybody who came back from a war the same as he left, especially that one.

We had hiked for a day and a half, following the ridge that overlooked the valley and the fields, climbing over the boulder strewn cliffs, watching for the rattlesnakes that sunned themselves on the rocks, eating the blackberries that ripened there and stained our fingers purple- black. When we weren’t following the animal trails that crisscrossed the mountainside in an intricate web, we blazed our own path through the thick green underbrush that ripped our skin and left us burning and itching. The sweat felt good, invigorating, as it trickled through my cuts.

It was different from the sweat from the farm work we had left behind in order to explore the

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wild ridge that abutted our farm. A small canyon separated the cultivated farmlands from the mountain wilderness where our father had first taken us hunting for deer and bear. We were hoping to find signs of the mountain lion that a neighbor claimed had taken one of his sheep, note the latest movements of the deer and search for traces of the black bears that thrived on the same berries we snacked on.

We followed a deer trail past the big oaks where Moss at fifteen had shot a six-pointer, and crossed a little spring that trickled down the slope where the deer stopped to drink and left their split-hoofed footprints in the mud. We were just beyond the spring when the sun was high and its rays filtered through the coolness of the forest and sprinkled the forest floor with bright, warm spots, when Moss found the red-tail chick floundering on the trail. He looked up and saw the nest in the canopy of leaves above us and heard the shrill whistle of the bird’s parents as they circled high above the ridge.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Red tail,” Moss said as he inspected the downy bird.

“What should we do?”

“Put it back,” Moss said, peering up through the trees, searching for a route to the nest.

“Or else it will die for sure.”

“How?”

“I’ll go up,” Moss said, full of confidence that lasted until he hit the rotten branch twenty- five feet up that sent him tumbling back down to the rocky ground. He crashed abruptly in front of me, cupping the frail chick to his chest, and landed in a heap of broken branches, twigs and leaves.

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“Take it,” he winced, holding the bird out in front of him. He closed his eyes, and his face turned a sickly white. His shinbone bulged at the skin, and formed a grotesque, misshapen lump.

He turned and vomited.

“I can’t feel my legs,” he said.

“Try to get up,” I said.

“I can’t,” Moss said, his eyes widening.

Moss was usually the jokester and his sudden seriousness scared me.

I took off my pack, set it next to Moss with some dry fruit, nuts and water. I put the fledgling hawk, miraculously unharmed after its second fall from the trees, next to Moss’s motionless legs. It nestled there and in a moment it fell asleep.

“Drink some water,” I said. I put him against a tree and piled the sweaters and warm clothes we’d brought next to him and then I set off running. The low brush snapped at my boots as I ran toward Harrison’s farm, the nearest home to the ridge and a four hour hike from where

Moss had fallen. Running hard, I could make it there in two hours. Coming up, it had taken us five times as long because we had stopped to explore every curious marking we saw, made and broke camp, eaten, talked about the girls we knew, and planned our route for the day.

Now there was no time for anything but the run. I focused on it, and my destination -

Harrison’s bright red barn and the whitewashed house that sat in a grove of maple trees against the foot of the mountain. When my side cramped up I put my mind somewhere else. I imagined myself somewhere above the trees, soaring with the hawks, watching the ground speed by beneath me. I concentrated on the wind in my ears and the sweet smell of the forest. The ground blurred under my feet and when I thought about Moss, fallen, and hurt badly, I ran faster. Damp leaves hid roots that crossed the path and I stumbled and fell forward. I cut the heels of my hands

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and they throbbed and stung. But, I was back on my feet and running in an instant, shaking my hands, rubbing the black dirt out of the cuts. I had to walk and crawl over the big rocks. I slipped on the lichen and skinned my knee. Blood ran down my shin.

When I reached the farm, lungs aching, face red and shining, slick with sweat, words hardly came out of my parched throat. I turned back toward the mountain where Moss was lying and saw the black flecks in the far distance floating above the ridge, buzzards biding their time.

The way Moss told the story, he was not sure when the black birds landed. It was sometime after the doctors told him shock had set in, a time Moss referred to not as shock but his forest vision - an event he insisted was as real as his own existence. He said the vision was his initiation into the wild.

He said the birds arrived like some giant winged escorts waiting for his soul to exit his body. They crept toward him as his breathing slowed. The feathers at the tips of their dark wings seemed to form fingers that touched the shadows that flickered about him and their featherless heads made them appear almost human like little bald wise men. At first he was alarmed, but then he grew accustomed to their presence. It was almost peaceful he said.

He claimed a red tail broke through the canopy of leaves with a great swooshing sound, followed by a flash of light, and then it sailed around the perimeter of his vision. The buzzards jumped into the low branches around him. He said the hawk was his guardian and it watched him the same way he had watched the little bird that nestled at his side. He fell asleep at some point, but for a long time he remained acutely aware as if he had immersed himself in clear water with the ability to breath and that strange watery atmosphere seemed to connect everything around him.

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Moss spent the rest of the summer and early fall recuperating and raising the red tail.

Before it could fly the bird followed him on foot wherever he went, squawking and flapping its fledgling wings when it needed to be fed. Moss nurtured the hawk like it was his own child. He read books on falconry and when he could walk again without crutches he built a pen for the bird. He became an apprentice falconer and learned to hunt with the bird on his fist, scouring the scrub brush against the mountain for rabbits, and quail. He spoke to the hawk in soft, whispering tones.

Hallie Clayton came by to visit Moss while he was recuperating. She would sit with my mother for a few minutes and talk about whatever my mother was knitting or sewing and then take ice tea, and cookies up to Moss, who was mostly surly except for when Hallie was there. He treated her like a kid sister. Hallie was fifteen, two years too young for Moss, and two years too old for me. I would follow her upstairs just for a chance to brush against her soft skin, and smell the sweet perfume that teenage girls wear. To me she was already a woman. She was a little taller than me, but she had grown up in ways that made it seem like we were separated by something greater than years. When she left, I’d walk her out the dirt lane that led to our farm.

She lived half a mile away in a little bunch of houses nestled in the valley next to a stream.

“Been fishing lately,” she asked me one day.

“Tomorrow,” I said.

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“I’ll meet you at the rock,” she said.

We sat on that rock most of the afternoon in the shade of the big oaks with the cool stream splashing by us. I don’t remember if we caught anything. That was in the time when

Hallie still thought of me as a little brother, when she was still interested in Moss before the war did what it did to him. She told me a joke about a girl who said fuck for fork and farther for father and who was sent to the neighbors to ask for a fork.

When his ankle healed, Moss and I took a walk down by the stream. We resumed our daily explorations of the ridge behind our house. It wasn’t long before Moss wanted to do some night fishing at Nester’s Junkyard.

One night after my parent’s had gone to sleep Moss Came into my room. “Lets take a walk,” he said.

“What for?”

“You’ll see.”

In a minute we were out into the cold spring night, riding our bikes down a dark road, a chill wind cut my face. At the edge of the junkyard we ditched our bikes in high bushes and pressed down a rusty barbed wire fence before climbing over it.

We crawled down along the dry streambed that paralleled the creek and then crossed the twenty yards of high grass to the deep pools hidden in the middle of the junkyard. It was as though we

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were slipping behind enemy lines on a secret mission. Moss was always nimble and dead quiet as he slipped into position to take the prized trout in the pools. It was practice, he said, for the day he would join the Special Services.

After dark, Nester set loose a pack of mongrel hybrids, Dobermans, Rottweilers, and

German Shepherds. During the day he kept them in a wire pen where they frothed at the mouth, and went berserk whenever a customer walked past. Nester would throw a bone in and watch them fight to amuse himself.

Nester’s house – a narrow two-story shack – was seventy-five yards or so from the water.

We weren’t there long before the door opened and the porch light flashed on. A silver beacon shot across the yard to the stream where Moss and I were hunkered down in the high grass. The light touched Moss’s boots. I pressed my fishing rod against my leg and tried to shrink further into the shadows.

A dog howled and a fence rattled

“See the dogs?” I said.

“I think he’s got them locked up.”

“Must have forgotten.”

“Drunk most likely,” Moss said.

I reached for my line, and kneeling, flipped it into the water. Moss let out some line and roll-casted easily to the edge of the fast water. It looped perfectly across the surface like a hoop rolling across the water. In an instant his line was tight and a trout was splashing on top of the water. He held his hands high and walked the edge of the water, stepping carefully on the slick stones and boulders. Before he had a chance to land it, the front door opened and then clapped shut. Moss looked up, his line slackened and the trout slipped back into the black water. Nester

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stumbled and caught himself on his front porch. Once steady he aimed a shotgun at the moon and blasted it at nothing. I held my breath, looked at Moss and then I bolted.

Nester saw us then, and we heard the gun crack again. It sounded like it was right in my ear.

“Go on, git!” Nester yelled.

We ran through the dark with the echoes of the gun reverberating in the hills around us, and the pellets from the shells sprinkling down through the leaves like a light rain.

Winters, Moss set a trap line along the creek. Most mornings I went with him to check the traps. We rose before dawn, and went out into the frozen darkness, breathing icy air, and crunching over frozen ground as we walked. As we approached each trap, we listened for a rustling chain. Moss carried a club he used to kill whatever we caught, muskrats, raccoons, and an occasional fox. If we didn’t catch anything sometimes we crouched, crept and crawled into other trappers lines and took what they caught.

If we took something, Moss always made it look like the animal got away. He killed a muskrat once and cut off its foot and left it in the trap to make it appear as if it had chewed off its own foot. The next time we stole a muskrat, we poked stick holes in the ground to make it appear as though the three-legged bandit had foiled the trap again.

One day as we finished our work, headlights lit the road and then a car door slammed.

The sound echoed across the valley like a gunshot. The trapper was on his way to check his line.

We stumbled across a shallow stretch of the icy stream and crawled over the stream bank. The

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stream ran through a pasture, and afforded little cover, but we found some high brush to hide behind. The trapper scanned the stream’s edge with his flashlight. He moved methodically along the stream, stopping at each trap that we had already checked. Cigar smoke drifted across the stream and passed over us. The rushing stream muffled the sound of the trapper’s footsteps as he tramped across the frozen ground. The cold seeped into the knees of my pants and I shivered.

When he reached the trap we had fixed he shook his head and searched the brush. He knelt down and checked the ground. Brushing his gloved hand across the frosted grass and frozen mud.

“He found the fake tracks,” Moss said.

We pressed our faces into our gloves to contain our laughter.

He reset the trap and continued on his way. We lay there on the cold ground until we heard the car start. The sun was rising. We crouched and hustled out of the pasture. It was late and we had to hurry or we’d miss the school bus.

We had a workshop in the basement of the house where we fixed traps and melted lead for fishing weights in the coal furnace. We spent a lot of time down there in the winter. We’d take apart our fishing reels, and oil the gears, get our fishing lures in order. Sometimes we just shoveled coal. Once when we got bored we wondered what would happen if we pissed in the fire. Nobody was home. The fire was stoked. Moss opened the door and peed on the white-hot

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coals. The coals hissed and a cloud of rancid steam poured out of the furnace. The cloud rose to the ceiling and disappeared into the floorboards above us.

We bolted up the stairs, by the time we got to the kitchen the steam had drifted up to the second floor. A rancid stench permeated the house.

We found two cans of air freshener under the sink and ran through the house spraying everywhere. We finished just as our mother pulled in the driveway with a carload of groceries.

“What’s that smell?” she said as she entered the house.

“Can I help you with those bags?” Moss said.

“That’s funny,” she said. “I don’t remember using the air freshener this morning.”

She looked at Moss and then at me.

“You boys haven’t been smoking in here have you?”

“No way,” Moss said.

The last day I went trapping with Moss we crunched across the frozen fields in the dark until we found a muskrat in one of the traps. The stream was a solid sheet of ice. Even the rapids looked frozen in place as if that cold morning had brought time to a stop – at least on the surface of things. A foot of snow covered the ground. Moss handed me the club.

“Go ahead,” he said.

I took a good grip and raised the club high over my head. I wanted to kill it as quickly as possible. I came down hard, but my aim was off. The club glanced off into the snow and the muskrat coiled into a ball. I felt sick. I raised the club again and struck. It took another blow before I was sure it was dead.

“OK, OK,” Moss said. “That’s enough. You don’t have to get carried away.”

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I handed him the club after I lifted the limp muskrat from the trap. Blood dripped from its nose and mouth. Moss threw it in a burlap bag and then handed it to me. I slung the bag over my back. As I walked it bumped against me like a warm water balloon. I thought about the little furry dead thing in the bag, and I let the bag fall to my side. It kept bumping against my shin as I walked, and the warm place on my back quickly turned cold.

“What are you so quiet about,” Moss said.

“Nothing.”

“It’s brutal cold this morning.”

“Too cold,” I said.

“Something about mornings like this that I like,” he said.

We finished the rounds in silence. It was the only one we got that day. We spent most of the time, breaking traps out of ice and resetting them.

The next morning when the alarm went off I told Moss I wouldn’t be going with him anymore.

“You sure?” he said. The floorboards in the old farmhouse creaked under him.

“Yeah. I’m sure.”

I heard the steps creak as we made his way to the basement. The front door banged shut when he went out into the dark frozen morning.

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The day he left for Parris Island, Moss gave me the belt he’d made from the rattlesnake. I set it on top of the dresser before we went to the train station where he caught the military train that ran down the east coast picking up all the new recruits and draftees.

He had his things packed in a duffle bag, and he’d spent that last morning counting his socks and underwear, wondering how much he needed. “They’ll be giving me a whole new wardrobe I guess,” he said.

He was so matter-of-fact about everything that you would have thought he was packing for a school outing, or a camping trip.

I took our dog Rascal with us to the train station, and when the engine pulled in, the platform rumbled so much, Rascal tried to run behind me, and then he peed on the concrete. It was one of the first hot days of spring. The sun was high and the sky brilliant blue. Moss stepped on the train at the last minute. He stood on the step for a second and waved at me and my mother and father. After the train pulled out of the station, I could feel it rumbling a long way down the track.

When we arrived back in Ithaca, my mother and father drove downtown to Edelson’s Dairy.

“What do you want?” my father said.

“Anything?”

“Sure.”

“Even the Big Pig?” I said.

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“Do you think you can eat it?”

The Big Pig was ten scoops of ice cream with bananas and chocolate sauce. Moss had eaten it once and I thought in his honor I should try. Cold air blew down on me from the air conditioners and goose bumps rose on my arm.

“Go ahead,” my father said. He had taken half the day to drive Moss to the station. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to watch your oldest boy go off to war. He’d been to Korea, but he never talked about it. He didn’t encourage Moss to sign up.

I made it a little more than half way through the Big Pig before I felt like my gut was ready to burst.

“Good try,” my father said.

My mother slipped her arm around my shoulder as we left.

“How’d you get so tall all of a sudden,” she said. She squeezed me tight to her and put her head against mine. She smelled faintly of rosewater.

My belly ached as we drove out of town, past the empty shops and lonely sidewalks.

Ithaca had been a thriving town during the years around World War II. It was a model of the industrial small town, which in Pennsylvania meant steel and all the subsidiary industries that accompanied it. I don’t think that town ever seemed so empty as it did the day Moss took the train.

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I got a letter from Moss a week or so after he arrived at boot camp. It was pure hell, he said, but he could cut it. He had it over his fellow grunts because of his wilderness survival experience, except for a few southern boys who’d grown up somewhere so deep in the Bayou that boot Camp seemed like civilization. These are the people I’ll be shipping overseas with.

Sometimes it scares me, and other times I’m thankful for their craziness. But, nothing matched the stupidity and callousness of Moss’s superiors. One of who, a Sergeant Hardrock or some such, had apparently taken a personal dislike to Moss, took to calling him queer bait, and

Pennsylvania pussy. Moss never had the sense to stay out of the way of trouble. Instead, he went after it, the way he went after that rattlesnake that day on Bake Oven Knob. I could see Moss smirking, or saying things under his breathe about Sergeant Rockhead or whatever his name was

- just enough to get him angry. Moss said he would pay my way to Canada if my number ever came up. That was a long way off, but it seemed a reality to me. Until I was thirteen years old, I ate my cereal in front of the television watching Captain Kangaroo and body counts on the morning news.

How is my bird? Moss asked. He left me in charge of his bird, and I took the job seriously, cut up chicken or beef hearts, livers, and kidneys every day for its meals. Flew it in the fields. I was afraid what might happen to my brother when he got over there. The body count numbers on the news seemed steady and reliable, the men and women who reported them, grim and unforgiving.

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Our house was cold in winter. It’s three-foot thick stonewalls emanated cold, and drafty old windows, kept the chilled air circulating. We had a woodstove in the living room and you could smell the sweet smoke of burning oak throughout the house. Mornings I would stoke it and sit by it before heading off to school.

I got a few letters from Moss after he arrived in “the Nam” as he called it. I’ve been here less than a week and already things seem bad. It’s a strange place. We were headed in country, and spent a night at Da Nang airbase. Sometime during the night a pilot ejected from his plane while he was in the hangar. Went through the roof and killed himself. Weird shit like that happens all the time here. Maybe it’s the heat. I feel like I’m walking around in a nightmare most of the time.

The letters grew darker, and they made me uneasy. It sounded like he’d begun to resign himself to the inevitable. Almost walked into an ambush today. We came under fire patrolling an area where the VC had been busy. The CO sent us into the jungle and right away we see it’s a

VC Camp. The jungle lit up with tracers all of a sudden. We lost two men, one of them our radio operator, and the rest of us barely got out. When the CO found out the radio was still in there, he ordered us back in. All he cared about was his damn equipment and the thought that he might not get promoted because he’d lost Uncle Sam’s property. The place was crawling with VC. We told him it was some kind of VC bivouac. I bet there was a whole battalion in there. What the fuck could we do? Ignorance and incompetence breed like rabbits here. We walked right up the road we’d run out the day before. We were about a quarter mile from where we lost the two guys the day before when a goat jumps into the road from the bushes, and a massive shit storm erupted. The VC unloaded enough lead into that road to pave it. Thank God for goats, at least

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that one, or we wouldn’t have made it back. Sayonara little brother, I hope I can write you again soon, but my life is in the hands of imbeciles. Your brother, Moss.

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One of his letters arrived from a military hospital. He’d caught some shrapnel from a land mine that killed a buddy of his. They’d been on patrol deep in the jungle, following a road believed to be one of a vast network of supply lines running down from the north. The beauty of the jungle, the vastness of it, and the variety of vegetation and wildlife had taken him. It was like hiking deep in the game lands beyond the farm, only on acid, he said. He stopped paying attention to where they were walking, he said. The mine was planted in the trail a few steps ahead of him.

He talked about the omniscient unity he said he experienced after the explosion, and how it was shattered by the harsh pulsating rhythm of the helicopter blades that violently stirred the air above him and threatened to burst his eardrums. He said he was ripped from the fabric of the wilderness by ropes, pulleys and engines and that his exit left a hole there, but he also sensed that he had wholly internalized the wilderness, and carried it with him as he rose, strapped to a stretcher, above the trees that had sheltered him.

Remember that day on the ridge when I fell from the tree, he said. That’s about as close as I can come to explaining it. I don’t know if I’ll ever get out of here little brother. If I don’t, please set the hawk free.

The year Moss got drafted I went out for the wrestling team at the junior high. I liked the idea of learning how to fight, learning how to defend myself. I had only myself to rely on when I

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walked out onto the mat. If I ever went to war I would be ready. I thought Moss would approve of that.

The story of how Moss got started in wrestling achieved near-legendary status around

Ithaca. I first heard the story about Moss from Ray Dixon, the athletic director at the high school, who took full credit for Moss’s transformation from an undersized guard and captain of the eighth grade basketball team to a state finalist in the remarkable space of four years.

When the cuts were made for the ninth grade basketball team, Moss found himself without a spot. The coaches had determined that he was too small. Ray Dixon was the first one to console him, and he did so by directing him to the wrestling room.

I wanted to be good too, and I worked at it. I found the weights Moss had set up in a dusty, cobwebbed corner of the barn and got into a routine. Each morning I woke at six and fed the hawk before I ran the rutted roads that crossed the rolling hills of the farm. I cleared a trail in the woods behind our house where the steepest part of the hill ran abruptly into the fields. I ran

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that too, arms chugging, the incline so steep that the ground was only an arm’s length in front of me. At the top of the hill I could look out across the valleys and fields that spread out like a wrinkled carpet before me. In the distance were the low rolling mountains that hemmed in the countryside. If I looked far and hard enough, I could see to the hills where the coal fires raged beneath the surface of the ground. I had driven there, once with Moss, and hiked the burnt-over hillside that overlooked the abandoned town. We could feel the heat rising from the ground, and see the holes in the earth where the ground had collapsed and swallowed houses whole. The ground smoldered and the air stunk of spent carbon. The country was scarred, strip mining had done to the hillsides what the fires were doing underground. The fires burned, and burned, and no one could stop them.

‘What’s wrong with that boy,” I heard my mother say to my father one night. “He doesn’t say a word, and he won’t stop moving. He’s going to work himself to death.”

“He’s all right,” my father said. “He misses his brother.”

That summer I worked at a wrestling Camp at Pennsylvania Tech where I cleaned the mats so I could attend the Camp for free. One day I was late because I’d overslept. The director was waiting when I got there. He had a wad of chewing tobacco tucked in his cheek, and spoke with a Midwestern twang.

“Where were you?” he said.

“Overslept,” I said.

He handed me a mop. He’d started cleaning the mats, and they were slick and shiny.

“You were circling over Ithaca,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Circling over Ithaca,” he said.

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I shrugged my shoulders, and took a swipe at the mats with my mop. “What’s that?” I said.

“The year nationals were in Ithaca a snow storm blew in and closed the airport,” he said.

“A plane full of wrestlers couldn’t land. They found a scale on the plane and radioed down to ask if they could weigh-in on the plane. But they didn’t let them. Something about a rule that said you had to weigh-in on the same scale.”

“Ithaca, Pennsylvania?” I said.

“Course not. Ithaca, New York. There’s nothing in Ithaca, Pennsylvania.”

I didn’t know. I was a product of the close valleys and patchwork cornfields that ran along the hills. The world beyond that close horizon was baffling to me. I’d never heard of

Ithaca, New York, despite the fact my grandfather almost went to school there. I didn’t even know about the ancient city they were both named for.

“Get here on time,” he said. “We’re paying you.”

I went back to work imagining those wrestlers in that plane with snow beating against the windows, and the propellers churning through the gray murk, hoping for a break so that they could land and compete. I pictured them waiting, peering out into the frozen sky. I drew wide swaths of steaming water on the mats and dreamed of winning a national championship. When my chance came, I would be in the right place, at the right time. I finished the mats just as the bleary-eyed campers wandered in for the morning session. When I dumped the bucket, the sweet-smelling detergent foamed and welled in the drain.

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I kept running through the summer. People waved and shook their heads when I went past. They must have thought I was crazy, running in the dead heat and humidity. I didn’t care. I knew what I wanted and I was sure of how to get there. I wanted three things then: to become a state wrestling champion; for Moss to return and see me win it; and for Hallie Clayton to be there too. I wanted those things in the reverse order of importance that I have listed here. And I knew the contradictions inherent in the possibility of all three ever occurring – for Moss to return alive, for Hallie to forgo Moss for me, and for a skinny runt to win a state title.

I wrote Moss a letter to tell him about my new sport, but he never returned it. A few weeks later, we got a letter from the government that said Moss was missing in action, a week after that, we were told Moss was a Prisoner Of War.

Sometimes when I ran I imagined the plane full of wrestlers circling over Ithaca in a holding pattern, churning through the driving snow. Unable to land, its engine humming steadily with its props a blur as they sliced the gray murk. I pictured myself there, staring out the window into the storm, waiting for news, an air vent hissing above me.

The idea that the season might end with me up there in the clouds shot through my brain like an air horn. I thought about the hours spent in the heat of the wrestling room, breathing the

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humid air, the pounds of sweat lost, the bloody noses, cuts, battered ribs, knees and broken fingers that had been endured.

I imagined I hadn't lost a match all year and had beaten the closest man you'd call a challenger by ten points in the Midwestern Open Championships in December. In fact the only match I'd lost in two years was in the national finals the previous year. The national title would be the culmination of my career.

The plane would be churning through that gray murk as the co-pilot would approach us.

Outside my window, the snow flew heavy and horizontal.

"The storm’s not going to quit," the co-pilot would say.

In my mind I rolled-up an airline magazine, tapped it against the cold, icy window, and stared down into the gray abyss as he spoke.

"They won't let you weigh in," the co-pilot would say. "Something about a rule that everybody has to weigh in on the same scale." Then he would add: "To make sure it's all fair."

"Fair! That's a joke, I would say. "I'll tell them about fair."

I wouldn't even raise my voice to say it and then I would be silent and stare out my window into the storm. As I sat there that calm would creep steadily outward from me until it would consume the entire plane. Everyone would be either too stunned for anger or too deep in thought to react. All we would hear then would be the drone of the engine and the hiss of the air vents.

We would be left circling in the air like a Trojan horse that was never dragged inside.

The plane would bank hard. Its wings would dip into the clouds like great oars as its engines strained against the gray murk. It would turn west toward Pittsburgh, Chicago, and the rest of our lives.

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One day when I was out running, I passed some people, who waved and shook their heads. There goes that crazy boy who won’t talk they seemed to be saying to each other. Beyond them, I saw Hallie standing on the bridge just before she jumped into the swimming hole below.

Her hair sleek, dark and wet, her shirt soaking wet and clinging to her. She called my name and waved at me as she leapt into the air. My heart went with her and for a moment I felt as weightless as she appeared as she hung in the air just above the railing. Then she disappeared as gravity took visible hold. I heard the splash.

She climbed out of the water; her tanned skin glistening, and her hair dark and thick as an otters pelt. I knew I was in love with her then.

We sat on the sun-soaked stones for a long time as she dried in the warm light. She lay on the rocks with her t-shirt rolled up over her belly and snug against the bottom of her breasts. The sweat poured off of me for what seemed like an hour after I stopped running and then it dried in my hair, making it stiff. Listening to her talk with the sun shining down through the leaves and the warm stones below us I fell into something like a hypnotic trance. I watched a rivulet of water well in her navel and gather the sunlight like a precious stone.

When the sun started to fade on that magical afternoon, Raymond Kacklemeister appeared on the bridge with a fishing rod in one hand and a stringer of dead trout swinging from the other. The fish were stiff and had already turned white. Their tails dragged on the ground. He leered down at Hallie.

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Everybody knew Kacklemeister. He’d been in and out of the county jail enough times to know all the cops on a first name basis. He was infamous for getting mixed up with a sixteen- year-old girl and sitting in the pen for a stretch on a statutory rape conviction.

I think Hallie sensed his prolonged gaze and as if to cleanse herself of it, she got up and dove into the water. When she climbed out she stood on the bank for a moment to wring out her hair.

She looked up the embankment in time to see Kacklemeister striding toward her. He scampered across a rock dam, scooped her up in his thick arms and pitched her into the water.

Then he turned and ran back up the bank, climbing through loose dirt and stones, agile as a mountain goat. Swinging his arms for balance.

“Hey,” I yelled. But, my voice got lost in the sounds of the stream and the subsequent splash.

Hallie looked stunned as she climbed out of the water. Kacklemeister’s grin consumed his entire face as he picked up his things and nodded down toward Hallie.

“You OK?” I said.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Know what his name means in German?” I said. I’d taken enough first-year German to make the translation on the spot.

“What?” she said.

“Shit maker,” I said.

“That’s not very nice,” she said. “He’s not that bad a guy.”

I didn’t know what to think of her response, at the hint she might have known more about him than I cared to imagine she did. The spell of the afternoon had been broken and as we

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climbed up the bank to go home I felt a little scared for Hallie and for me too. I sensed that we would never be as close as we had been a few moments before.

1971. Jimmy Hendrix and Janis Joplin overdosed. The war seemed so distant, but it was on my mind every day, and on television every night. It scared me. I thought that if invaders came to this land I would fight them with every thing that I knew, and I knew this land, the stream in the valley, and the hills snug tight to the horizon. I did not envy Moss, a prisoner in that distant land, at war with people who knew their land like Moss and I knew ours.

I waited for the mail each day, hoping for a letter from Moss, coded perhaps with instructions to help him escape, or a letter from the government telling us that Moss was a hero, a recipient of the gold star, but the letters never came, and the days seemed to pass in an interminable stasis like the humidity that hung over the land.

Word finally arrived by phone. My mother answered. She looked like she was holding her breath. We never knew if we’d get good news or bad news. She put her hand to her head, looked at me and smiled. It was the first time I’d seen her smile without the nervous restraint that always accompanied her good moods. It was as though she’d been holding her breath for the years Moss was gone and she’d suddenly exhaled. Some P.O.W.s had been freed. Moss was one of them.

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The first time I saw Moss in the psych ward of the veteran’s hospital, I caught a glimpse of him through the window of a locked door. The window was narrow and made of thick safety glass - the kind with wire in it. He was good looking, athletic, square-jawed with the high forehead of a college professor, but he wore an awful scowl that distorted his face and combined with his dark brown hair and brown eyes to make him look menacing. He skulked across the floor to the nurses station, said something to the nurses, who apparently denied him whatever he had requested, and he stalked away, mumbling words to himself that I could not understand.

All the way through the hospital my footsteps had echoed on hard polished marble floors and now my footsteps were strangely hushed. The whole wing of the hospital was filled with an uncanny quiet that made me want to turn the other way and walk straight out rather than go in there behind that locked door, but I moved forward.

"Hello," I said. "I'm here to see Moss."

A spectacled nurse looked up at me from behind a high counter. "Sign in here, please," she said and pointed to a clipboard. A pen dangled from it by a string.

"How's he doing?" I asked.

"Not a good day," she said.

She rose from behind the desk and lifted a set of keys from a hook on the wall. "I'll let you in," she said.

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The lock-down area had a hallway where the rooms were and an adjacent recreation area with a television bolted to the wall. I was acutely aware of moving through antiseptic air. It smelled sweet, not the sweet air of an orchard, but the artificial sweet air of a dentist office.

Lounge chairs sat between round tables. Nothing had edges in there. My brother approached me.

He looked odd, as if he was pulling his chin back into his neck, as if he had lost his courage.

Stick out your chin, I wanted to say to him. It's a good strong one.

"What are you doing here?" He said abruptly.

"Visiting."

"Are you here to take me home?"

“Just visiting,” I said.

"I'm fine. Thanks," he said. "These fucking doctors don't know a thing. They can't keep me in here. I should be out of here today."

"I don’t know."

"You're nuts," he told me. "What the hell do you know?"

He turned and shouted at the nurses.

“Hey, where’s my cocaine? I ordered some cocaine and some adrenaline.”

“You don’t need any cocaine," a short, stout nurse with black hair said.

“What the hell am I in here for anyway. This place is a prison. Did I break some law? I keep getting locked up. What’s the fucking deal here? Is this America?

His eyes darted around the room like little fish in a tank. "I'm going to have a smoke. I'll be back," he said and walked off down the hallway. In three or four minutes he was back and looked startled at my presence as if I'd just appeared. He leaned toward me as if to reveal a secret.

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“That’s a two-way television up there, watch out. Fucking 1984! Can you believe it?”

Paranoia. A doctor said he had an abundance of free-floating fear. What did that mean? Is that what a year in a Vietnamese prison Camp had done to him?

“Do me a favor,” he asked me, leaning forward furtively. “Don’t talk to the fucking doctors. Whatever you say they just use against me.”

I reached for a paper cup on the table, and ripped the lip off of it. I listened to him ramble for a long time. Then for a moment it was like he was himself again.

“You been fishing?”

“Some.”

“Trap this winter?”

“No.”

“That’s right. You never liked that much.”

I wanted to believe that he would be all right in a week or two, but the quiver in his voice told me otherwise, like small feet retreating across a tin roof.

I thought it would be a good thing to take Moss fishing after his discharge from the hospital. He had spent a turbulent two weeks after his release from the VA that culminated with his arrest for marijuana possession. In his words “things had gone a little haywire.”

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We sat in the basement and prepared our equipment for the day, fitting the reels to the heels of our rods, drawing the line through the eyelets, straightening the tippets and tying on the flies. I was looking forward to getting on the stream. Although I knew the best fishing would come in the evening, I wanted to get out on the water as soon as I could. I looked forward to that

– just standing in the water - as much as anything. It was relaxing.

We decided to meet for lunch by the big rock where Hallie and I used to sit.

Moss was restless when we met for lunch. It was late afternoon. We were hungry and short of tolerance. We ate our sandwiches in silence and then took account of what we had caught. “None,” he said. “This stream stinks. I swear it’s dead. All the development on its headwaters.”

“It just takes time,” I said. “They’re in there.”

“How many did you get,” he asked.

“One,” I said. “A brown about fourteen inches.”

“What did you use?”

“Flashback pheasant tail,” I said. “You want one?”

“Sure,” he said.

“You know the best time is the last fifteen minutes of daylight,” I said him. “It will make the whole day worthwhile.”

He looked at me skeptically.

“So, you’re the fisherman, now,” he said.

I handed him two flies.

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‘I don’t think I’m going to fish any more,” he said.

“Why not?”

“It’s useless. I’m wasting my time.”

“What are you going to do?” I said.

“Nothing.”

We finished our meals as we had begun, in silence. My sandwich was stale and I did not eat the last few bites, instead I crumbled them up and threw them into the water. At the far end of the eddy where the still water reached the current, a fish rose for a floating crumb. I searched my box for a fly with white wings. I found one and I fished with it all afternoon. Beneath the blistering afternoon sun I caught nothing. In the water my imagination ran out in all directions. I did not know how to help my brother.

The running water consumed all sounds as I approached it. I entered the water at the point where a rocky bar reached the edge of the main current. I stopped just before the line that is drawn between the swift and slow water. Just below me the water turned back on itself and formed small circles that dissipated into the giant eddy that I stood in. The water was clear and the bright sun turned its surface into a mirror. I studied the water for signs of feeding fish. An hour before sundown I found myself in mid cast with a hatch of blue winged olives rising around me.

I found a rising fish and cast repeatedly over it. I tried a variety of sizes of blue winged olives, sixteens, eighteens, a fourteen, then I tied on an elk hair caddis, but the fish was indifferent. I watched the water so intently that when I looked at the land it appeared to be moving by like a stream. The fish would swim upstream a few yards then circle back to almost

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the same position. From my stationary position, with the water moving past, I felt like time was standing still until I realized that the last rays of sunlight were fleeing the sky.

In the diminished light of dusk, long shadows fell across the farmland. I rigged my line with a dry fly and a trailer, an emerger that would sink just below the surface of the water, and tossed it in. The flies settled into the current and floated out of the swift water toward slower deeper water but before it reached there it went taut and I set the hook. The rod bent and the line pulled tight.

Got it! I thought, and a charge ran through me until I realized what had happened.

Damn log! I'd hit a snag. I pulled hard and snapped off my line. The blue winged olives were still rising as the sun dropped. They poured off the water in small clouds. The surface of the water filled with the rings of rising trout.

I reeled in the line and then tied on a new leader. It was getting dark and I had to hold my flashlight in my armpit to see what I was doing. I dropped a fly in the grass as I tried to tie it on. I searched in the grass at my feet for a moment then gave up on it. It took me a few minutes to find another fly and fasten it to my tippet.

I walked upstream until I found a large trout, hovering behind a rock, holding its place in the current. I watched it for a moment. The fish rose slowly to the surface and sipped there sending out a tiny ring in the darkening water.

I shot the line out and it landed just in front of the trout. Perfect cast, I thought, but the line drifted uneventfully over the fish. I stared at the trout as it floated just below the surface when I felt a tug on my line and my trance-like state was broken. I'd hooked another fish. It ran upstream and I let it go. When it stopped its run I stripped in the line then began to reel it in. The fish stayed in the current but eventually began to tire and I worked it to the bank. It was a large

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rainbow with a healthy belly. It rolled to its side and it looked up at me. I wet my hands and carefully cradled the fish. I slipped the hook out of its mouth and gently held it upright in the water. The fish moved slowly back and forth, swimming in place, working out the lactic acid that could kill it. The fish flipped its tail suddenly and darted out into the current. I watched it go and then wiped my hands off on my jeans.

I reached for the line. It was dark then. The sudden flurry of activity on the stream had ceased. The cloud of hatching insects had moved away and the surface of the stream was still. I felt calm too as I unscrewed the reel from its seat. I broke down the rod, wrapped it carefully in the flannel before I put it into its case. I didn't know when I would use it again.

Despite the darkness I saw the vague shape of a trout in shallow water as it reflected the moonlight. It swayed in the current like a ribbon waving in the wind. I did not know how long I'd been standing in that river. My sense of time had gone away. Standing in the ceaseless flow of water, morning became afternoon and then evening, the sun followed its track across the sky and as long as I stood in the river I felt oblivious to time. Only the burn of the sun on my skin at the end of the day let me know that time had passed.

Moss was sitting on the bank smoking a cigarette when I walked out of the stream. Blue smoke hovered around his head. He held a soft pack of Camels in one hand, studying the package. As night fell he seemed focused. On what I wasn’t sure.

“Got away?” he said.

“Yeah.” Mud sucked at my boots along the stream’s edge. The sharp smell of smoke couldn’t quite mask the ripe odor of muck and rotting plants.

Moss threw down his cigarette.

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“Let’s do a little night fishing,” he said.

“Where?”

“Nester’s,” he said.

“You nuts?”

He laughed and I could see the intensity crackling in his eyes.

“What do you say?” he said.

“Sure.”

We climbed over the barbed wire fence. Moss moved ahead of me. Walking in the shadows, we made our way between trees and rusted cars. The stream dropped into a ravine then emerged in an open field. Nester’s porch light was on. It shined halfway across the water. We settled on the dark side of the stream.

“Go ahead,” Moss said. “You fish.” He’d lit another cigarette and squinted as if he’d gotten some smoke in his eye.

“What about you?”

“I’m going to have a look around,” he said.

He crouched next to the stream.

“What about the dogs?” I said.

Moss disappeared and left me by the stream. Nobody fished there on a regular basis and the trout were fat and aggressive. I hadn’t fished there since Moss went away.

I didn’t really feel like fishing and I just sat there listening to the water, looking into the darkness, to try to see what Moss was doing. I heard the dogs barking across the water up in a field that in the scant moonlight looked like a ghost field. I sat next to an old pickup with smashed windows. A couple of tires were half submerged in the shallow water. If I closed my

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eyes all I could hear was the running water and it sounded like I might have been sitting in paradise, but when I opened them I saw rusted metal, broken glass, and smashed cars and trucks laying on their sides and stacked in rows.

The water was black and the ground was damp and cold. I could hear the dogs barking, and high up the trees creaked. Their branches clattered in the breeze. I tried to look into the darkness where Moss had gone, but I only saw a jigsaw of shadows.

I closed my eyes and dreamed of a sweltering day, of sun-warmed rocks and a waterfall, of soft water. I would float face-up, ears submerged. I could hear only muffled noises, and the current madly rushing. The water was white and frothy so it was like swimming on air. I loved the feeling of that water tickling my skin.

Boyhood summers came trickling back to me like gold specks in the water, washed from a vein deep inside the earth.

The dogs drove straight and hard to the place where I was sitting. In an instant they were across the stream, snapping and growling. I could see the whites of their teeth flashing. I backed quickly into the high brush away from the stream and stumbled on the marshy, uneven ground, and ran as fast and as hard as I could. I moved into high grass, and suddenly Moss was at my side, running breathlessly, laughing as if it was all a joke. We ran toward our truck, Moss moving further ahead of me with each step. He jumped the barbed wire fence about ten steps ahead of me and then I was over it and then we stopped, safe and out of range of the dogs which had become lost somewhere in the swamp behind us. Moss just laughed and laughed. He couldn’t get over it as if it was the funniest event of his life.

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The only thing Moss was eager to do after his release was to take his hawk out in the fields. I was not looking forward to it because I had not kept up with my offer to fly it every day. This was apparent as soon as we hit the fields. It was late March. Clouds ran high and fast across the sky, and even though the sun was out it was still cold, mostly because of a harsh wind that chapped our cheeks. The red tail took flight, and landed in a tree, and stayed there, surveying the fields around it. Moss waved a furry decoy, but it hardly even noticed. Moss looked at me. I shrugged.

“Not exactly on top of his game,” Moss said.

“I guess not.”

The bird sat high up in the branches, oblivious to our beckoning. We were in a part of a cornfield that ducked into a patch of forest where the land fell away into a gully and a dry creek.

Moss waved a piece of liver at it, and then tossed it on the ground. The hawk swooped down and pounced on the meat. Broken cornstalks littered the ground. Moss put the bird back on his leather-shrouded fist.

The bird took off again and landed in another tree, but this time it did not stay there long.

It dove straight and hard in a direct diagonal to a patch of brush seventy-five yards or so from its perch. It crashed through the brush and we heard the high pitch squeal of a rabbit. Moss rushed over to the brush and grabbed the rabbit from the bird. It’s talons wrapped around the rabbit’s neck like a tightened rope. Moss freed the rabbit’s limp body and through it into a shoulder bag.

“I’d like to get some quail,” Moss said.

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“I saw some in the hedgerow that runs along the other side of the field,” I said.

We crossed the field, crunching over broken cornstalks and dirt clods. When we got to the hedgerow I found a stick and smacked the bushes as we walked. Nothing came out.

The third time the red tail took flight it flew high and far. We followed it for a while, but then we lost sight of it as it circled above us. We walked back across the fields to the hawk’s pen.

Moss opened the red tail’s cage and we went inside for dinner.

In the morning the red tail was on top of its cage, flapping its wings and squawking for a meal. Moss grabbed some liver from the refrigerator and ran outside. He smiled for the first time in a long time. The bird pounced on the liver Moss threw on the ground. It was a happy reunion, and for a little while I had the feeling things might return to the way they had been before Moss went away to the war.

The sign said: Bar-B-Q Chicken. Black letters, a foot high, hand-painted a little off-center on a white board. Moss, Hallie, and I passed it on our way into town where we were going shopping for records, and books. It was raining – a steady gray drizzle. There was a wind too – one of those late March blows that whips the trees and reminds you that winter hasn’t left yet.

“I’m kind of hungry,” Moss said. “How about some chicken?”

It wasn’t really a question because we were pulling into the gravel lot before he finished asking. Two grills spit greasy smoke into the gray sky. Chicken fat flared on the coals. A man in

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a green army camouflage jacket squirted orange barbeque sauce onto the roasting chickens. A tarp kept some rain off the grills and the cook, but gusts of wind blew in from the side. The cook wore a black baseball hat with yellow numbers and letters embroidered on the front. Moss recognized them. He ordered two chickens. “That enough?” he said to us.

“Sure,” Hallie said. “I’m not that hungry.

Moss turned to the cook.

“You there?” he said, nodding at his hat.

“Yeah,” the cook said. He was flipping chickens on the grill. The sauce ran off and hissed on the coals. He didn’t look up.

“Where were you?” Moss said.

I didn’t hear his response.

“That was a hell of a mess,” Moss said.

“Mop up,” the cook said. “A real shit storm.”

Moss patted the cook’s shoulder and he took his hand. It looked like they were shaking hands. I could see then that the cook was crying, staring straight down into the coals and the smoke. The tears smeared with dirt and grease on his face. Hallie and I stood there quietly.

Moss said something to the cook that we couldn’t hear, and then he gave the cook a ten, which was probably twice the cost of the barbecued chickens. We ate the chickens in the pickup at the edge of the gravel lot with the rain pinging on the roof and the steam from the unwrapped chickens fogging the windows. I ate some of the chicken, but I had a lump in my stomach and wasn’t very hungry.

“Go on eat,” Moss said.

“No thanks,” Hallie said. She was looking out the window, sniffling.

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“What’s wrong?” Moss said.

“I’m not hungry,” Hallie said.

“It’s good,” Moss said. “You should eat.”

I took some chicken. The meat was moist, salty. Grease ran down my chin, coated my fingers. I wiped my face with a paper towel.

Moss dropped us off in town.

“Coming with us?” I said.

Moss shook his head.

“What time should I pick you up?” he said. The pick up idled.

“Two hours,” Hallie said. “We’ll meet you right here.”

Moss drove off. Hallie and I stood there for a minute unsure of where to go.

“I thought he was going with us,” I said.

“So did I,” Hallie said.

That night Moss sat up late, drinking whiskey in the living room. My father came in and had a drink with him.

“What do you plan on doing?” My father asked him after a while. “It’s time to start thinking about a job.” He was more talkative than usual. That’s the way he got when he wanted something done.

Moss didn’t say anything.

“You’ve had some time now,” My father said.

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“Can’t say that I want to do anything,” Moss said.

“Don’t see that as an option,” My father said. “At least if you want to stay on here.”

The Ore County Detention Center wasn’t much more than a couple of prefabricated buildings stuck together and surrounded by high razor wire in a weedy vacant lot adjacent to the state police barracks. I’d been to the detention center on Moss’s account enough times that they began to run together in my memory. There was the time he got busted for speeding and possession of a controlled substance, then public drunkenness and disorderly conduct, assaulting an officer.

And then, as if he hadn’t already made a name for himself, Moss became in his own words “an activist.” He said it gave him a little more focus. He protested nuclear power plants, dump sites, any company in the county that got a government military contract, and offered his services on the picket lines of any union walkout he could find. He kept himself busy when he wasn’t working on the farm or getting bailed out of jail. When he got arrested during his activist days he referred to himself as a “political prisoner” which at first made me laugh, but he was so fervent about it that his attitude and his actions took on a more serious, threatening manner. He had evolved beyond the mischievous boy getting busted for a little dope on a Saturday night and

I knew that most everyone’s tolerance was used up and that included most unfortunately the

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authorities of Ore County who frequently held Moss in their custody and would deal with him as they saw fit. A trip to the state penitentiary wasn’t out of the question. Moss knew it.

Talking to Moss through the intercom at the Ore County Detention Center was like ordering burgers through the drive-thru window at the Nittany Lion Drive-In. A series of miscues and misunderstandings. His voice broke up. An inch of greasy safety glass between us.

“Pretty homey place here,” Moss said.

“How long you in for?”

“Fuck if I know.”

Moss’s lips moved. The speaker spit and crackled. His words delayed like a poorly dubbed movie.

“Set the hawk free,” Moss said.

I couldn’t imagine why Moss wanted his hawk set free and that’s what scared me most as

I sat there in the airless gloom of the concrete-block visiting room. I could only recall the day we found the fledgling hawk in the hills beyond our farm.

By the time Moss was released from jail, the hawks had been migrating southward steadily for weeks, hovering above the ridges, riding the last gasps of hot air that poured off of the land. I was at school when he came home, but from what my father told me, in his halting words in the years since, I’ve pictured the scene in my mind a thousand times.

Moss went to the hawk’s cage and opened the door. The red tail leapt up onto the door of its cage without its hood on, looked around, sensed its freedom, and then took off. It caught a

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wind that lifted it high into the autumn sky. He stood there watching it go until he could barely see it in the distance.

My father heard the gun - one sharp report that repeated off of the mountain beyond the fields. When he reached the cages, he saw Moss lying on the glistening crimson grass. When he could no longer bear to look at his son he looked skyward to the hawk, circling high above him, on the warm winds that would carry it to its winter home.

Hallie wore a yellow dress to the funeral. I think some people who knew Moss a lot less than she did didn’t approve. I liked that she wore it. On that autumn day she was all that appeared warm. It was hard for me to believe he was gone. I think I went numb to it all, the minister talking about how Moss was a hero, the hands that clapped on my shoulder. It seemed like half the people there were glad he was gone. They were there out of respect for my parents.

Most people could see the toll it had taken on them. It was no secret. It made my father angry, mean. He hardly mentioned Moss’s name.

My mother wept, and wept. I couldn’t console her. “What’s happened to our family?” she asked over and over. I couldn’t answer her.

Being numb had its benefits. I discovered I had a high tolerance for pain. I could run and lift weights forever. I might not have been the strongest or fastest but I could keep moving longer than anyone and that’s what I did, especially on the wrestling mats. It was the only way I knew

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how to deal with the way I felt which I likened to that hollow space in the earth where the coal had burned away.

When I went away to college, more than anything, I went there with the single-minded notion of winning a national wrestling championship. It was a way to take a hold of the future in some tangible way, to crawl forward in the only way I knew how.

The Vietnam War ended before I was old enough to be drafted. All those years of childhood fearing the draft and what I imagined would be certain death just ended one day with a newscast and pictures of a helicopter evacuating the last Americans from the rooftop of the

American Embassy in Saigon. I was relieved that it ended, but in our family I knew it would never go away. For us it would be like those underground fires that smoldered beneath the hills a few miles from our home. They were all but invisible unless you knew the signs, and I knew what to look for: the barren landscape where trees and grass turned white like standing ash; the absence of wildlife; the occasional gaping hole where the coal had burned away beneath the surface, and the ground collapsed around the vacant place in the earth.

I saw signs in my parents too: the lines on my father’s face became a little more noticeable, his eyes did not seem as bright, and his hair grayer. My mother complained she had lost her stamina, and she seemed to have less to say as if she had begun to devote more time to

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memory than conversation. Both of them became regulars at the church we had sporadically attended throughout my childhood.

I returned home after my years at college not as the national champion I imagined I would be. In fact I never even got close. Somewhere along the way wrestling had lost its all- consuming power over me. I remained involved throughout my years in school, but it was one of those things that demanded one hundred percent of my attention for success. I sometimes think I was only able to give ninety-nine percent and that missing one percent – I’d actually taken a genuine interest in the literature I was studying - is what made the difference between a champion and an also-ran. I confess to a little too much time spent in the bars – research I convinced myself – a little first hand experience of the lifestyles of the Beat writers I was reading. I’d begun to live a little bit – something my previous state of single mindedness had not allowed.

Over the years the one percent of things that began to divert my attention from the sport began to consume more and more of my imagination. While I worked on a teaching certificate at

State I found myself completely uninvolved with the sport. In the end it became a good way to work off the beer I’d drunk the night before. That imaginary plane full of wrestlers of my boyhood had finally landed. Like the real wrestlers from the original story, all of the occupants had deplaned and returned to the lives they were destined to live. It was time for me to get on

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with my life as well. Ironically, it was then that I found myself back in wrestling. My old high school was looking for a coach and I returned to take the job. I told myself it would be for a year, maybe two. My parents were getting older, and I thought I would be good to spend some time with them.

My mother insisted on holding a party in honor of my return. It was August. The trees were flushed with thick green leaves, and the hazy air hung like wreath around everything bound to the earth. People carrying covered dishes started arriving in a steady stream. The food was setup in the back yard on a picnic table. Blue smoke poured off the grill as the hamburgers and hotdogs sizzled in their fat. Conversations turned to the weather, prospects for new industries; the same old concerns that seemed to have plagued Ithaca for fifty years. I sort of slipped into the background, and found a place to sit on the brick steps with my paper plate full of bean salad, potato salad, and hamburger. I think I was aware then for the first time, how hard my parents had tried to give me a normal life.

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That first year was one that should have made me quit coaching forever. We got pounded nearly every meet. We would lose by scores of 50-12, 60-9, or 45-15 if we had a really good night. To make matters worse, we didn’t have enough kids out for the team to fill all of the weight classes. Depending on who showed up, we forfeited anywhere up to three weights each meet. One of the things I remember most about the home meets that season was a light in our gymnasium that buzzed incessantly over my head as the kids endured loss after loss, until the sound seemed to climb into my head and become a pounding headache.

I kept telling myself: It’s only the first year. Things will get better. It took some convincing. Halfway through the season we still hadn’t won a dual meet.

A few months after I returned, I was in the parking lot of the Shop Rite when I saw Hallie pushing a shopping cart full of food with three children trailing after her and one in the cart. It had probably been ten years since I’d seen her last, and almost fifteen from the time we were together down by the stream. She stopped by a beat-up white pickup truck that looked hand- painted.

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“Hallie Clayton,” I said, and she looked up at me like I’d mentioned someone else’s name before she broke into the smile I remembered her for.

“The kids are staying with their dad tomorrow night,” she said. “Why don’t you give me a call?”

We drove to a place outside of town and I listened as she told me about her life in the years I had been gone: a child by Kacklemeister, and then marriage three years later to someone I did not know, followed by two more children and a divorce; work, sometimes, as a waitress in the diners along Black Horse Pike where the truckers gave decent tips, a stint in the mill that made baby clothes. It had not been a happy life, I gathered, although it hadn’t been too bad either. She found joy in her children, and the thought that she might do better some day. She took courses in business and communications at the community college.

While we waited for our table at the bar, she ordered us two shots of Wild Turkey and a pair of Rolling Rocks. For a long time we forgot about ordering dinner as we ran through the list of school friends and childhood companions who had moved away, those who had gone away and returned, and those who left and never came back.

After dinner, when we stepped outside, she took my arm and swung around in front of me and kissed me on the lips.

“I thought that might be nice,” she said.

Hallie lived in a trailer park that sprang up in what had been a pasture when I was a boy.

An old orchard surrounded the trailer park. It was late summer and the sun hung low on the horizon, painting the rim of the sky red.

“Home sweet home,” I said.

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“Not exactly a castle,” she said as she gathered up her purse.

“Home is where the heart is,” I said.

“You’re all about home tonight,” she said.

As we closed the door behind us, we kissed again in the shadows of her cramped and cluttered trailer. Streams of fading light poured in the windows.

“I’ll get you a drink,” she said.

Hallie slid past me and her hair brushed against my face. Her earthy scent lingered in the air for a moment and my face tingled where her hair had touched me. I remembered the day down by the stream, and the feeling of being mesmerized by her.

Hallie took a beer out of the refrigerator. She popped the lid, and handed it to me. Foam spewed. A piece of pink insulation hung out like a lip from a hole in the ceiling.

“I’ve got to get that fixed,” she said. “I guess this place is a mess. Not what you expected

I’m sure.”

“I didn’t really know what to expect,” I said.

We sat on the couch in each other’s arms and watched the sunset.

She said what scared her more than anything was a picture of herself in five years with a couple of half dressed children running around, dirt-smeared on their faces; in ten years, her looks going, carrying a little extra weight. She said she moved through the years of her life by comparing it with the lives of her mother’s friends, a bunch of drunken, broken women, victims of the land, the men they chose.

We talked for a little while and then she stood in front of me and slipped out of her black jeans. I ran my fingertips across her thighs and pressed my face into her belly. Her skin was cool

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and smooth. She lifted my shirt above my head and I raised my arms enough for her to slide it off. I unbuttoned her shirt and pulled her next to me.

Outside, ripening peaches dangled from trees amid thick green leaves. The orchard had been abandoned and overgrown for years. Vines climbed through the branches like fingers tangled in hair. A flock of starlings swam through the air, turning suddenly, sweeping down then up and out of sight. In the distance a truck groaned on the highway as it geared down and chugged up a steep half-mile hill. The truck sounded far away and lonesome, and Hallie let out a sound I had never heard her make before. It was a gasp or a cry that had come up from somewhere inside her.

The linoleum floor was cool, and we lay there until the sun had fled the sky. We fell asleep and woke up a little before midnight. A full moon had risen and lit the clear sky. It obscured the stars and illuminated the trees. The brightness of the moon seemed to erase the years we’d been apart. It seemed to me that we lay there hoping that something permanent might come of our union other than the one night it would turn out to be.

“Stay tonight,” she said.

We rose from the floor and moved toward the bedroom.

“I loved Moss,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“Everything’s such a mess now,” she said. “The way things are going.”

I was quiet and thought about how my own life hadn’t worked out the way I had been so confident it would.

“You got out of here,” she said. “Why’d you come back?”

I didn’t really have an answer for her. Could I tell her it was because of her?

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“What if I told you I loved you?” I said.

“I’d probably laugh,” she said. “Or call you a fool.”

All my life I’ve searched the skies for birds of prey. I supposed it is from being far- sighted. I can see them far into the distance. I watch for them as I drive, and I see them frequently sitting on fence posts, or sweeping over the fields. I’ve seen them chased by flocks of crows, perching peacefully in treetops. One time I saw a red tail flying over a field with a snake in its talons. On the day I married Amelia a bald eagle circled over the church. It seemed like a blessing.

My mother outlived my father by a dozen years. She stayed in the house and leased the fields to local farmers. After she died, and it was time to sell the farm, I returned once again to the hills of Pennsylvania. I came with Amelia, and our son, and daughter, from our home in

Chicago where I had been teaching. While we were rooting around the attic for treasures of my childhood, I found the snakeskin belt that Moss had given me before he left for Vietnam. It was

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neatly coiled in an old trunk in a dusty corner of the attic. The buckle was tarnished and the skin was worn thin, papery, and in need of some oil. I stretched it out, tried it on, and was surprised to find it still fit. I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised since Moss was full grown when he made it.

I wore the belt when I returned alone to the fire trail in the state game lands Moss and I used to hike endlessly after school and on vacations. I still recognized the landmarks that guided us then, the stream, a tumbledown stonewall. I remembered specific trees we had climbed, although the great oaks and maples had thickened and stretched closer to the sky. I even found some carvings we had made in the fresh bark of a maple. Our names were blurred and distorted, but still identifiable as ours. The air was clear and crisp. It had snowed already but it had not remained on the ground, only an early dusting. Even up in the low mountains of the east the air was different, thinner, and colder, than it was in the valleys and lowland fields. The smell of the air gave a feeling of being somewhere higher, more pure. The leaves had turned and the wind swept them from their branches with great gusts that filled the air with spinning debris.

I waited until dusk before I ate some of the things I had brought with me, a sandwich, an apple and some potato chips. The salt tasted good. I was hungry. I had been anxious to get on the trail and had only eaten some cereal and fruit before I left. Hunger had overtaken me on the trail, but I waited to eat. I set up my tent in a clearing obscured from the trail by a thick new growth of saplings. I pushed the stakes in with the sole of my shoe. The soil was loose and moist and the stakes went in easily. I put my sleeping pad, sleeping bag, and backpack inside. When it was dark I stretched out on my sleeping bag and fell asleep. I awoke in the middle of the night, cold and shivering, and poked my head out of the tent. My breath, visible before me, floated in the still night air. The sky was clear and full of stars. I woke again just before dawn and crawled out

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of the tent to build a fire to make some breakfast and coffee, and to keep warm. When the sun broke over the trees I found a spot where the sun shined and propped myself against a tree to drink my coffee, and watch the sun warm the earth.

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CHAPTER 11

THE FIRING LINE

The phones were crazy when I arrived at the newsroom. As soon as I got to my desk,

Anderson, the editor, called me into his office. He had his usual twisted up nervous face that he’d been wearing since the paper had been bought. The new owner had a reputation for buying failing papers and slashing the payroll, firing old-timers and hiring kids right out of college.

Morris Meany, the chief copy editor was sitting in his office too. Morris had been at the paper for a long time. “I guess you’ve heard,” Anderson said as soon as I sat down. “About what?” I said.

“Did you do the A.A.R.P. rewrite yesterday?”

I did rewrites by the dozen. It was part of my job since joining the paper six months before and it was pure tedium. It amounted to editing press releases that ran as briefs. I remembered that one because I had to think about what the letters stood for.

“I’m pretty sure I did.”

“Hear those phones?”

“Hard to miss,” I said.

“Every retired person in the county has been calling since the office opened.”

Two sides of his office were glass. He stood looking out at the newsroom in a white shirt, pressed and starched so much I thought it might crack.

“Does that ring a bell?”

“Retired people?” I said. “Not really.”

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“Here’s a clue,” he said. “The ‘R’ in A.A.R.P. stands for Retired, not Retarded as you wrote yesterday.”

Then I remembered. “Oh,” I said.

“Is that all you have to say?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Why didn’t you ask?” he said. “Journalism is about asking questions in case you’ve forgotten. Who, what, where, when and why.”

I never considered doing rewrites even remotely related to journalism, but that was beside the point. I felt like an imposter who had just been discovered. Most of my colleagues had gotten into the business on the wave of enthusiasm for journalism that followed Watergate. I had no such enthusiasm. It was just a job to me. What I really wanted to do was write fiction. Every writer I knew about had been trained as a journalist. I’d gotten into the paper with the idea of getting writing experience that would help my fiction. But, neither was working out. At my apartment, I had a blue shoebox full of rejections for my fiction and Anderson had spoken to me once already about accuracy in a sewer board meeting story I’d written.

“I guess it sounded right for some reason,” I said.

Anderson was getting really worked up now. His face had come unscrewed and screwed itself back up about ten times.

“Pretty shoddy journalism mister.”

“Yes, sir. I realize that.”

Outside Anderson’s office, the phones were relentless. ‘The Old Gray Lady’ as the paper was known hadn’t had such a response from its readership in years. In a way it was heartening evidence that there was a readership.

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“We can’t afford that kind of mistake around here,” he said.

I was ready to get out of Anderson’s office, but he kept haranguing me. “We’ve got editorial policies around here,” he said. I wished I’d never taken the job in the first place. I started out part-time in sports taking scores over the phone. And then they asked me if I wanted to give news a try. It was full-time, but most of it was doing rewrites. I was basically a news clerk, but I jumped at it because it was a way to work my way into a full-time reporting position.

I thought it would be better than taking bowling scores over the phone Sunday nights. Instead of bowling scores I found a stack of press releases on the city editor’s desk that seemed to rise almost to the ceiling. She’d hand me a pile every morning when I walked in. They were killing me. I’d do rewrites for a week for a chance to cover a sewer board meeting.

“We all make mistakes,” Morris Meany said. He set his foot on his knee and fidgeted with his shoelace. “I mean I should have caught that. It was late. I was distracted. You know with everything going on around here.”

“This is no time for mistakes, especially one like this,” Anderson said.

“We’re human here, aren’t we?” Morris said.

“Of course, of course,” Anderson said. “But, we’ve got standards and people are watching this paper now. Things are going to change around here.”

“There was a time around here when something like this got overlooked,” Morris said.

“People understood.”

Anderson turned blankly to me. His eyes oddly magnified behind thick glasses.

“This is just beyond the pale don’t you think,” he said. “This is egregious. We’re literally on the firing line here. I don’t have much choice here. I’m going to have to let you go. Give me your hours for the week and we’ll send you your final check.”

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“That’s a little harsh don’t you think,” Morris Meany said.

“We’re talking about gross negligence Morris,” Anderson said.

I gathered the remnants of my journalism career, a few pens and notebooks from my desk. Outside, I stopped to look at the idle presses through the big window. One thing I liked doing at the end of the day was watching them roll, great spinning bales of paper, filled with words, and some of them were mine. It was one small sense of satisfaction I had gotten from the job. I’d never been fired from anything before. I wasn’t feeling too good about things.

Anderson’s harsh words kept buzzing around my head: shoddy journalism, and gross negligence.

Not the kind of criticism to build confidence or a career on.

But, in a lot of ways, I was glad to be done with it. I would find something else although I didn’t know what. I was turning away from the presses when Morris Meany came out of the office. He was in a hurry. His hair lifted like a flap as he walked.

“Hey kid,” he said. He always called me kid. He called every new reporter in the place kid. “Can I get you a coffee or something, breakfast maybe?”

“That’s OK,” I said even though I hadn’t eaten breakfast and I was feeling kind of light- headed. I really wanted to get away from the place and everybody in it. I figured the phones were still ringing off their hooks and everybody in the newsroom was probably cursing my name.

What’s worse was later they’d all joke about it. Stories like that never died in a newsroom. They got saved and filed away in every one’s brain like the hundreds of thousands of stories in the morgue. People talked about things reporters had done years ago like the reporters, some dead or retired, were sitting at the other end of the newsroom writing stories.

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“The corner deli’s got some pretty good coffee and doughnuts,” Morris offered. “It’s the least I could do.”

“All right,” I said, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth I wanted to kick myself. I just wanted to clear out. What was there to talk about?

The deli was filled with the smell of coffee, fresh bread and the buzz of conversation.

Morris bought a couple of coffees and we found a table near the front window. There were copies of the paper scattered around the deli.

“I’m sorry,” Morris said. “I’m really sorry about all this.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I screwed it up.”

“Yeah, but I should have caught that I mean, mistakes happen all the time. I read so much copy every night, it just moves by me like a river sometimes.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I don’t know if I’m losing it or what,” he said.

“Like you said. It was it happens all the time. That why they run corrections.”

Morris just kept stirring his coffee.

“Used to be around here, someone made a mistake it wasn’t such a big deal. We had a reporter who quoted a dead guy as if he’d been at a city council meeting. On Anderson’s shift too. He didn’t catch it. Look where it got him. In the end it made for a lot of jokes and a newsroom legend. These days the most important thing around this place is learning to cover your ass.

I poured some sugar in my coffee and then some milk. A little cloud of milk swirled and bloomed in the black coffee.

“I can’t believe. I did that,” Morris said.

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I could believe I’d done it. It was bound to happen sooner or later. I didn’t pay rewrites much attention, doing them as quickly as I could just to get finished. I was only half-conscious of what I was writing most of the time.

“It just floated by and I let it go.”

“You what?”

He blinked his bloodshot and yellow eyes.

“I let it go.” He nodded.

“Why?”

He kept pinching his forehead as if the answer was a palpable thing he could grab.

“I can’t explain it, “ he said. But, I had a sense somewhere in his head there was a reason.

Something, maybe I wouldn’t understand.

“I’ll probably never work in a newspaper again,” I said. Actually, this was no great loss to me, but he took it like it was a tragedy.

“I’ve been at the paper for almost thirty-five years.”

Then it occurred to me that his life had merged with the paper. I couldn’t imagine staying in one place that long. He’d been working in that newsroom since before I was born, listening to the creaky wood floor, writing stories on typewriters. I’d been there six months and it seemed like a lifetime. There were days when one shift felt interminable.

“It’s okay. I’ll get another job doing something else.”

“It’s not okay,” he said. “You know what’s going to happen when the new owner takes over?”

“Not exactly.”

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“I’ll tell you. People who’ve worked at that place practically their whole lives are going to lose their jobs. They’re going to be thrown out in the streets with one year’s pay. One year’s pay. And then what. Their whole lives. Imagine that.”

“It’s not a big deal. I’ll find something else,” I said. “I don’t think I was cut out for it anyway.”

“You think it’s going to be easy for those people to find something else. No it’s not. You think people want to hire sixty-year-old reporters and copy editors. Not around here. What are they going to do? Pull up thirty years of roots and go somewhere else?”

His face was getting red. He hadn’t touched his coffee and each time he brought his hand down on the table he spilled a little bit of it and then wiped it up with a napkin.

“It was a careless mistake,” I said. “I didn’t mean it.”

“That’s the problem. Nobody cares anymore.” He made a dismissive gesture with his right hand that knocked over his coffee and we both jumped up as the coffee poured over the edge of the table and onto the ground.

I just wanted to get out of there. I felt like he was angry at me for being young and ignorant. One of the shop employees came over with a mop. “It’s okay, I’ll clean it up,” he said.

“Thanks for the coffee,” I said. “I’ll be all right, really. I appreciate your concern.” I started backing up toward the door. It was my chance to get out of there.

“What do you want to do?” he said.

“I want to be a writer.”

“So did I,” he said. “I sent a story into The New Yorker once, but it came back. It just didn’t seem practical. You write for a paper you see your words published every day.”

“I’m going to try.”

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“Good luck,” he said.

I left him standing there watching the man mop up the coffee. He swirled the mop in a figure eight. Morris seemed dazed, lost in the motion. Outside, the sun felt good on my face.

Summer was on the way. A band was playing in the park and the music rose up over the din of traffic. I thought I’d go there and listen for a while. I was glad to have the job behind me. I’d take a couple of weeks to look for a job and enjoy the summer in the meantime. I was a couple of blocks away from the park when I remembered the coffee in my hand and took a sip, but it had already gone cold and it tasted too sweet.

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CHAPTER 12

A VERY OLD STORY WITH ENORMOUS TEETH

The allegory lumbered out of the Olangassi River south of the Memorial Highway just after noon. It rose out of the mud, stinking of decay, switching its tail, and climbed onto the banks, where it momentarily paused, appearing to plot its next move, according to witnesses, who had gathered on the banks of the Olangassi for a Flathead catfishing expedition. Strands of vegetable matter dangled from its enormous teeth like ropes of oversized dental floss. “What the?” Weeb Delmar said. “That thing looks ancient, prehistoric,” Ace Handly said. Bo Gillis dropped his Shakespeare and took a few steps back, his heels slipping and sucking at the slick mud. “Easy old fella,” he said. Weeb would be listed as victim number one: white male, age 49, glasses; seized by the leg and shaken until dead, the first in a series of tragic victims that day. He tried to run and the monstrous thing lurched at him, this according to reports filed by Ace and

Bo, whose recollections were hopelessly skewed beyond recognition by a rapid and incomprehensible infusion of facts, editorial indiscretions and adrenaline. They couldn’t get its color right.

“It was definitely green,” said Ace.

“Kind of oily looking,” Bo recalled. “Had a multi-colored sheen to it.”

“Mostly green,” Ace put in.

They both agreed its skin was bumpy.

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Sweating and cursing, they sprinted up the bank while the allegory relentlessly thrashed

Weeb, their old high school chum and regular fishing partner of thirty-plus years.

When Weeb’s pathetic and heart-sickening cries died to a whimper and then silence, the thing leapt up the bank as if it was swimming across the land, switching its tail and moving its stubby arms in a surprisingly rapid synchronized motion. Fluid, Ace described it as

“Its tail suddenly unraveled,” Bo was quoted as saying in the evening edition of the

Memorial City Times-Merchant. “We almost got caught up in it.”

The two men stumbled into the swamp, complicating forward movement in the entangled plot. They ran on and on, tripping over stumps and roots, wading neck deep in murky water.

Eventually they found Weeb’s pickup, lying on its side sith a massive dent running from front to back fender where the tail had apparently struck. Footprints straddling a rut where the creature’s tail had dragged, led down the mud road toward the county seat. They managed to pry open a door and make a call to police on their CBs. Gus Haller at the Times-Merchant, monitoring the police radio, picked up the call and broke for the door. Veteran reporter Haller, born and raised in Memorial City, except for the four years he spent at the university, and knowing the county roads as well as any native, arrived at the scene moments before the police.

“It ain’t a story you want to mess with,” Ace said. “It’ll eat you alive.”

“Monstrous,” Bo said, shaking his head, his words heart-felt and overflowing with remorse.

Gus Haller followed the trail down the road, but at the point where the footprints diverged from the road and entered a stretch of forest that deteriorated into a swamp, he lost it. A few hundred yards later, he picked it up again. This time it crossed the highway. A pick-up truck lay smoldering in the ditch where it landing after swerving to avoid a collision. Haller called in

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the accident, helped a young couple climb from the wreckage of their truck, and set off again in pursuit of the story. The tracks approached a remote Air Force base, but veered sharply before entering it, probably deterred by the sound of screaming jets, and headed into the depths of the swamp. The last print he saw was a deep impression in the rotting stinking earth that gave way a few feet hence to a small lake, filled with cypress trees, mosquito larvae, and blue oily swirls on the water’s surface. Mosquitoes swarmed, covering him in a hazy gray blanket, shortening his fact-finding trip, and driving him slapping and itching to his car. He left reluctantly, knowing he was onto the trail of the biggest story ever to come out of those parts.

He later picked up a paper trail at the MCPD, but lost it when the official files were classified and transferred to the federal government. He was left with second-rate photocopies of records that described the size and depth of its footprints. This is where his troubles began. He wrote up a story for the Times-Merchant using direct quotations from the two eyewitnesses and referred to the photocopied reports. Next morning the story tore through the community with sensational speed, but by mid-afternoon it was being met with skepticism. Within two days the letters-to-the-editor section of the Times-Merchant was filled with voices calling for Haller’s resignation for liberal stretching of the truth. The dispute originated with the witnesses, who after some deliberation and consultation of various zoological reference material and authorities, claimed what they saw was in fact a crocodile. Haller, for his part, maintained it was an allegory and cited powerful backlashes from the story, as directly paralleling the actions of the creature’s tail, and so indicating the possibility of multiple interpretations. He presented Polaroid pictures of Weeb Delmar’s truck and made reference to the damage to his own career and reputation.

Witnesses Handly and Gillis later became tight-lipped, out of fear of ridicule, refusing follow-up interviews from all news sources.

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“Allegory’s ain’t common in this part of the country,” Ace claimed.

“There’s nothing but allegory in this part of the country,” Haller rebutted.

“That’s blasphemy,” Ace gasped. “We’re word-fearing, literal-minded folk here. We don’t need none of your fancified interpretations.”

“Logos,” said Bo.

“Word,” Ace said, raising his callused hand as if taking a solemn oath.

Later, overtaken by an uncharacteristic fit of curiosity, Ace sought higher understanding of allegory, but in search for a clear definition accidentally picked up a thesaurus, mistaking it for a dictionary.

“This ain’t no time to be reading about dinosaurs,” Bo said, and slapped the book out of his hand. “That newsman is ridiculing our county.”

“We need a parade,” Ace said, “To demonstrate our pride and patiotism. Nobody’s going to run down our county.”

They purchased a permit and rallied the town for a patriotic demonstration. Experts were called in to speak. They claimed haller was clearly zoologically uninformed, pathological, a confirmed liberal storyteller, who needed to be confined to the greater Northeast.

Doubts undermined Gus Haller and his story. Further dispersions were cast on his reputation. He scrambled to find evidence of the allegory’s existence while his detractors remained smug in the knowledge that time deteriorates original copies of official records as it does memory.

A spokesman for the Department of Documentation said all available information pertaining to said allegory would be released in a timely fashion. He claimed to have official estimates of the allegory’s length, its verifiable beginning and end, in addition to a report from an

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archeological dental expert who said: “These things existed here at one time.” He also testified to the strength of its biting power. Another unnamed source claimed this allegory to be nothing new. It shows up every four years or so, leaving in its wake a long list of those tragically maimed by trying to capture it and drag it into the light of day. It’s the same old tired story, he said.

People around here with a little common sense know enough to leave it alone.

The Times-Herald, unable to substantiate the allegory after it disappeared into the swamp, was forced to print a retraction, admitting the photocopies of police records were not verifiably authentic, but at the same time not verifiably fake. Haller was demoted to obit man, doing rewrites and research in the morgue.

Haller, his spirit broken, traveled the swamps in an air boat leased with the piddling remains of his reduced salary, parking it for long stretches to wander the dismal landscape on foot, searching for the allegory in an attempt to resurrect his ruined career. One of his trips to the swamp led to a chance encounter with a one-armed Seminole allegory rassler named Eldridge

Drake, who was vacationing in a glass-bottomed boat. The two struck up a conversation and soon they were off in search of Haller’s allegory. They are rumored to have found it, but Drake, after realizing the magnitude of the allegory, balked at the prospect of a one-on-one match. “Too many implications,” he said. “I don’t think I want to be the one who drags it into the light of day.”

“What about heavy equipment,” Haller said.

“Just let it be unless you are a genuine martyr. It’s a job for future generations, archeologists, and historians. Let them sort it out.”

Haller slumped down in the boat, a week’s worth of swamp stuff clinging to his clothes, and wept.

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The allegory remained submerged just below the surface, nearly undetectable to the untrained eye, sunlight refracting around it, switching its tail to maintain its stability in the nebulous waters.

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