Twelve stories rshajj july 2014

Come Back, Sit Down Twelve and One Stories By Ramzi S. Hajj July 2014

Word Count: 36,325 961 E. California Blvd. #327 Pasadena, CA 91106 [email protected] 626.676.4142

Come Back, Sit Down: Twelve and One Stories Ramzi S. Hajj * 626.676.4142 2

Contents Saint Tiller 03 Up at the Window 10 The Fifth in Muqdadiya 15 Cruelty 20 A Mother’s Son 27 Send-off 35 Panic 42 The Sh*t-end of the Stick 47 A Fracas. At the Farkuses 54 Juicy, Doucement 61 Russians 74 What the Old Man Knew 81 An Epilogue 90


Saint Tiller

Tiller melted into the crowd, just another among so many others. But I stood watching after him,

almost perplexed at how easily, how quickly, he slipped and bled away, even as my eyes

remained focused, attentive. I didn’t want to believe it – not really – and I stood on my tip-toes

trying to re-catch a sighting, a glimpse of the top of his head. Maybe. Nothing. I lowered my

heals to the ground. I looked around for something familiar. And it was all so. The fair grounds.

The game stalls. The sounds. The smells. My parents nearby laughing at something Mr. Jenkins

might or might not have said. A strange sight, really. The laughter. But Mr. Jenkins was funny,

either way. And puny Jonesy Fuller standing at a distance, staring at me. Blankly. Not as

strange. He didn’t like girls too much. And the blue July sky that framed and contained us all. I

hoisted again onto the tip of my toes and looked out. This time slowly, patiently. But Tiller

stayed gone.

By the time Tiller returned home, we had had our supper, I had bathed, dressed in cotton

shorties, sitting on my heals on the chair at the table playing cards with Dad in the kitchen. Mom

stood at the sink, watching us. The screen door opened, and just as quickly snapped shut, the

sharp sound like a rifle shot, then reverberation. Mom jumped, her eyes wild, searching for a

moment. Then calmness. She wiped her hands on the apron. I looked up and over my shoulder,

waiting for my brother to walk down the hallway and into the kitchen.

He did.

And everyone smiled.

Tiller stood in the doorway. A silence – a soothing silence – froze us in place for the

briefest of moments, like a ceremonial moment of appreciation, impromptu, not forced, before

Mom’s voice refocused my attention away from the door.

“I can warm you up a little something if you’re still hungry.”

Tiller walked across the intricate linoleum mosaics towards Mom – as if he wanted to

hand-deliver his answer to her question. He leaned against the sink. “No thanks, Mom. I really

am full. But tomorrow … breakfast and lunch.”

Mom reached her hand out, extending her index finger, and let it tap the tip of Tiller’s

nose. “Okay. All your favorites.”

That’s how she was.

“All my favorites.”

Saint Tiller


Dad dragged the chair from under the table, wiping the seat briskly. “Come on, here.

Join us for a game or two.”

Tiller looked at the table and the piles of cards we’d formed. “War?”

Dad nudged the edges of the down-turned cards by his hand. “Mmm hmm. But we can

play anything you’d like.”

Tiller looked at me and winked, the right side of his mouth curling up. “I’ll referee the

two of you. Keep everyone honest.”

Tiller eased into the chair, as Mom stepped behind him, resting her hands in one another,

tightly against her chest. They watched as Dad and I played card after card onto the discard pile,

with me trying to avoid war, and Dad playing through the war-inducing matched cards. I didn’t

mind. I wasn’t thinking of winning or losing. I think we wanted to sit there in our own small

silence.

I was in my bed, turned on my side, watching the open and empty case at the end of

Tiller’s bed, waiting for him to come in. Outside, there were sounds in the distance, always

transitory and fading, as if moving on their own in the dark, fireworks maybe, car horns blowing,

the sounds joyous people make. Inside the room I stared unblinkingly at the closed door, until I

heard the door to Mom and Dad’s room open, some whispered, indistinct words, then the door

closing. Footsteps, in no particular rush, along the floorboards. My eyes relaxed, closed for a

moment, then opened as the door opened.

Tiller in his nightshirt walked in. “Hey! Am I keeping you up?” He was whispering,

slowly closing the door behind him.

“No. Just waiting on you.”

He walked around to the bureau and opened the top drawer. He removed one pair of

knotted socks. And stopped, looking at the remainder, as if he didn’t have the heart to remove

anymore. I watched him from the pillow. He removed a leather-bound journal, placing it next to

the sock.

“Are you scared?”

He put the sock back in the drawer. Then the journal. He closed the drawer. “No, not

any more.”

“How come?”

Tiller moved to the end of his bed, pushing the case away, sitting down. “Because I’ve

stopped trying to imagine bad things.”

Saint Tiller


“Like what?”

Like what.

Tiller remained quiet for a moment – sad – as if my question had made him imagine

again that which he didn’t want to imagine. Which was true, I think, because he said: “I’ve sort

of trained myself, you know, practicing to put it out of my head. Think of this room, maybe. Or

Mom and Dad … the guys and the ball field … our bicycles. You know … just anything so not

to … “ Tiller was looking at me.

“I know …”

“I knew you’d know. You’re too smart.”

I smiled at him, not really believing him, but wishing it were true. I didn’t know. And I

knew I didn’t know.

“So you’re not scared.”

“No.”

I paused, wondering if I should say what I really wanted to say. I think it might have

been the brave thing to do, not to say what I wanted to say. But I don’t think I wanted to hide

from my brother. Not at that moment.

“But I’m scared, Till.”

He stood and moved over to my bed, sitting at my side. And without a word, he adjusted

the pillow, then eased his head into its softness, stretching his long, thin frame along the edge of

the small bed. “Come on.”

I, too, eased my head back onto the vacant corner of the crowded pillow. I stared-off at

the ceiling, the two of us probably looking at the same spot. I closed my eyes. For a moment.

“I promise to be here.”

“Me, too,” he said.

How much time had passed? The electric ceiling light hummed, the darkness past the

window remained a calm, deep pool. The curtain. A barely perceptible sway. Quiet. Hush.

Peace. Tiller stirred, his hand moving quickly, violently, precisely against an imagined pest

resting on his check. He swept the phantom away, his calm undisturbed. His arm retreated,

resting across his stomach. It rose and fell slowly. I watched, my mind recalling Sunday School

lessons resting inertly behind a dense fog borne of boredom and inattention of wasted Sunday

mornings. I reached and reached, thought and thought.

Saint Christopher. Maybe.

Saint Tiller


But I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember.

“Dear God, now I lay me down …” No. I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember. Tiller

stirred again, made sleep sounds. I froze. Waiting. Melting. Then whispered: “Good night,

Till.” I turned my head again and watched the ceiling. I wanted to see something crawling up

there, something to keep me company, something to count, but I couldn’t imagine that, either.

It was a nice day. Sun and warmth and the train’s idling sounds. Tiller’s smiling face

was among the five or six or seven soldiers jostling for one final glimpse from the train window

onto the platform. Where Mom, Dad and I stood in a row, waving. Other parents and children

waved. And waved. And the train jolted, hesitated, and our heads turned in anticipation. And

my mother buried her face in my father’s shoulder. And the train moved, and Tiller’s face moved

with it, smiling still, and my Sunday School memories came back from the night before, St.

Christopher wanting to speak, if that was him, and I not having any words to place in his mouth,

there in my head. The train found its rhythm, moving faster now, Tiller gone down the track with

it, and Dad pulled me around the shoulders into his stomach. And it felt so, so good.

The news came in dribs and drabs. Radio, newspapers, rumors. Dad had his map. Mom

had her silent and patient worry. Then a letter! A letter!! “And tell Daisy I miss her. Tell her I

think about her all the time. I’ve got a few neat things for her.” Where was he? Dad showed me

on the map. “He was here and now I think he’s maybe over here somewhere.” It was a long way

from where he’d been. And the only place I’d been since was to school and back. But it added

up.

As did the days and weeks and months. All the same, really, except I knew more. The

war was all about us, like a years-long fair no one attended. In school. At home. At play.

Falling asleep. And in Jonsey Fuller’s older brother coming home for burial. He died fighting

Germans for the Dutch in Holland. Also called The Netherlands. We learned that in school.

And I had come to know of the seriousness of the world at hand. Jonsey now stood even further

away from all the others. He may even have liked girls by then. I didn’t know. I didn’t ask. Or

maybe I didn’t want to know. And in church, more than once a week, I found the missing voice

in my head. A prayer to keep our Tiller safe. A prayer for the war to end. All in my voice. And

a St. Christopher pendant in my pocket, an identical one we had sent Tiller in a package with

gums and socks and letters and a few books he could carry around in his pockets.

Saint Tiller


More boys … died out there as 1944 gave way to 1945. They returned here in wood

boxes. I sat in the same class room with some of their sisters. I didn’t want to be in there. With

them. Or anyplace else. I didn’t want to live in that town anymore, imagining life near an ocean

with boats to sail out on, I saw the pictures, but Dad told me there would be no place for us to go.

No place could be any different. They’d all be the same. And Mom agreed, still silent, still with

the patient, patient, patient waiting in her eyes. “We’ll be here for when Tiller gets back.” We

would stay in place, the days quiet, but only just so. I could see beyond the moving pictures of

the picture shows, the ones that showed people of all ages and shapes in donkey and horse carts

going places. They never showed-up where we were, so they must have still been out there on the

move. But I knew what drove them away. I did. I knew it was the same thing that sent those

poor dead boys back home to their parents. Dead for a long time. I didn’t feel like playing,

really. I read, though. I read about all the places Dad told me Tiller must have been. France in

1914 had had another war. So had Belgium. And Germany. And America, too. The library had

these books. I scribbled numbers on a piece of paper. It didn’t seem like thirty one years was

such a long time to wait. Memories must have been short.

Our memories were about to be shortened, too. Victory in Europe led to a similar one in

Japan. And a parade. And free ice cream sundaes at the pharmacy. And firecrackers almost

every day, as boys returned and returned. And one day, just like that, the front screen door

opened and snapped shut, still like the rifle’s shot. Mom’s “Jesus Mary” was barely audible over

Tiller’s “Mom. Dad. Daisy.” I don’t know nor remember how I got to the front door. I don’t.

But I did. And had to wait in the short line to grab at Tiller, my brother. I hugged him for a very

long time.

It could have been two nights later, maybe more. I lay in bed waiting for Tiller. Mom

had turned down the covers of his bed and had placed a few salty crackers there – “to settle his

stomach.” He finally walked in, closing the door behind him. He was already in his pajamas. He

came around to the end of my bed and sat down. I sat up.

“Were you scared, Daisy?”

“I don’t know.”

He placed his hands in his lap, rubbing them together. “I thought of you every day.”

“Me too!”

Saint Tiller


“Whenever I had a chance, I said a prayer for you, Daisy. And Mom and Dad, too.” He

paused, and I thought he smiled at something. I looked out after his dim smile, then back at him.

“To get you through, to get you across.”

“We’re here.”

“We are. We got across. We’re back.”

Tiller stood, then bent to kiss my forehead. “Good night, Daisy.”

“Good night, Till.”

He moved across the way, gently placed the crackers on the table between the beds, got

under the covers, and was asleep before I could find anything more to say. I watched him sleep.

Then I slid the crackers off the table, one at a time, and chewed as quietly as I could.

*

That was long ago. And it feels like long ago. On nights like these, tonight, after dinner’s been

had and the kitchen put away, I like to be in the sitting room with my brother. He’s asleep and

the house is quiet. We’ve been here together for a long while now, this house, everything is

where it should be, comfortable and familiar. A nice place to be. A nice place to remember the

things that keep me company in the late hours. I have to concentrate harder these days for the

things I want to remember. It helps sometimes to close my eyes. But sometimes I fall asleep and

have to start again the next time. It is late, time almost for me, but I don’t have the heart to wake

him for bed. Not yet. I’ll let him rest. He likes his chair. It’s an old chair, from our parents’

house. It used to be upstairs, in their bedroom. I’ve had it reupholstered a few times, but it’s still

the same old chair. It’s still good for sitting in.

Tiller moves in his chair, opening his eyes for a moment. I watch him as he settles back

down, closing his eyes. He wasn’t really awake. Maybe he was having a dream. He’s at rest

again, breathing through his mouth this time. I’m thinking how his face hasn’t changed in the

slightest. Or his expressions when he sleeps. I would still recognize him anyplace, even if all the

time in the world had come between us. Which it hasn’t.

Time is no thing to itself, I don’t think, playing itself out all the while starting anew. But

I have to remember from a beginning for the both of us now because Tiller can no longer

remember for himself. Not any more. I remember the prayer I had in my mind then, the one in

my voice, the one I had first written with ink on paper to memorize, repeated daily, then came to

Saint Tiller


believe – to know - would come true like an answer. And it did come true. And I am very

grateful. I can still breathe my prayer just as easily as I did then:

“God? Please take me along with my brother. Take me to when he needs me most of all.

Take me along to the places he never thought he would go. Please take me to where we can be

together. I may not be much help, I may not know what to say, I may not want to be there, I may

not be able to keep up, but please let me go. Please let him know I’m there, even though I will

wait for him over here as well. Just as I promised.

“If that is too much to ask, then please end this war. Please make my mother and father

and everyone else you can imagine happy by ending the war. Nobody would miss it. Nobody

would wish it to come back. There’s no sense in keeping people apart. There would only be

happy people who’d thank you in their prayers and in their songs at church. I would be there, too.

I’ve been paying a lot more attention, in Sunday School, too. I think this would make me the

happiest person there is. Amen.”

But mostly, I remember that Tiller went and came back. And maybe we all went, and we

all came back. I liked being back, Tiller there in our room with me even after we, one by one,

grew older and moved to houses down the street from one another. Mom and Dad went, just as

we’re going. It was their time. But there is still more time for us, still more time for memory and

places to go. There is no missing in time, not time done fairly, time as it ought to be, the going

away and coming back until that last and final time. I think it is in the coming back that we do

the best by one another. We allow time to do its thing, and we do our best to do ours together.

I fed him his favorite minestrone soup tonight and settled in to watch him sleep. He had

asked me again what this thing in his sweater pocket was for. I moved to his chair and took the

St. Christopher pendant in my hand. “This is what you are to me.”

He nodded. I placed the pendant back in his shirt pocket. “You keep that there, okay?”

And like he always does, he smiled faintly, kindly at something that really wasn’t there,

maybe smiling at something from our long, long ago.

I will try to remember that as well.


Up at the Window

His right index finger is buried not quite up to the first joint of his left nostril. It might seem

awkward to not use a digit on the left hand to pick at the left nostril. Or vice versa. But it isn’t,

not in the privacy of one’s own world - away from the glare of discretion - where comfort trumps

judgment at every turn. Dreamily.

The room he sits in is uninspired – cramped, messy, indifference and laziness long-settled

in for the duration. Carpeting of indeterminate coloring. Piles and stacks of paper, here, there,

perhaps aesthetically situated were they not in this particular enclosure. Lighting fixtures with

faded, fancy shadings. Old glass windows, in old wood frames, keep out some noises, some

dusts, doing their best at keeping the days at bay. An old telephone of dubious technology. A

tall, cluttered bookshelf each lined with long-ago consumed books. Discarded, but there. A

bolted crucifix on the wall, un-observed, an immovable conviction of someone’s abandoned

superstition. Across the room, an enclosed alcove, in it a table, a worn wicker kitchen chair,

angled outward through the lens of old framed windows.

But the chair he sits in is plush, comfortable, grooved, familiar, reclinable, his still.

And that’s all that could ever matter.

His eyes are closed as he digs and trolls-around the nostril, strip-mining for any morning

residuals, and at gentler moments, like a dutiful spring cleaning. His finger emerges, his eyes

open, his right thumb meets his right index finger, meeting to create friction through a purposeful

rolling motion. The prize is formed. Then reformed. He brings it to his face, inspecting,

admiring. Then, with terrible suddenness and callousness, the right index fingernail is deployed

to flick the mined prize away. It arches for a moment, perhaps glinting in the sun, its fleeting

moment of triumphant glory – like all glory, transient. Then is gone.

He’s already reached for an open, napkin-enshrouded can on the table running alongside

the comfortable chair. He peers through the opening. All clear. He brings the can to his mouth,

tilting head and liquid simultaneously into a parched esophagus. The liquid isn’t too, too warm –

still refreshing, or the memory of it still refreshing. He replaces the can on the table, taking a

moment to center it on a square cork coaster. It’s a deliberate touch, the type that keeps a man

sane. And who would bother to argue against sanity?

He stretches as a prelude to an early-morning nap. But suddenly he is alert, the

afterthought becoming the forethought, the cold of sudden fear, his body upright, his eyes

Up at the Window


methodically scanning the room, puzzled, searching. He slowly rises from the chair and moves –

with an unnatural immediacy - towards the front door. He opens the door, the outside hallway’s

light fixture monotonously buzzing and popping, its sickly yellowish sodium light lethargic

against the wall. He looks down at where a welcome mat might find a welcome, then to his right,

then to his left. Save for the morning newspaper leaning against a neighbor’s door and long-dead

cigarette butts in scatter-plot formations, nothing - not a damned thing. He stares down again at

his feet. Somewhere down the hallway, a door open, then closes. Footsteps moving away. He

continues staring at the empty space at his bare feet. The distant footsteps disappear behind

another opening and closing of a heavy door. Then nothing again. He nods several times in lost

and deep thought, then leaves his own door to close.

Behind the closing door, he haphazardly toes a stack of old newspapers stacked against

the wall, interested but uninterested. The top few cascade and flutter to the carpet. He moves the

sheets about in a circular motion with his bare foot, the toe as investigative arm, spreading the

sections about, a torn envelope emerging from among the pages, then another. Ignoring stale

headlines that beckon attention from the floor, he ill-temperedly moves back into the living room.

To a small writing table. He shifts and shuffles piles of opened envelopes across its surface. He

moves on to the next flat surface, the deep bookshelves, one tier after another, moving stacks of

papers and envelopes again, a hidden panic peeking from behind underbrush, mockingly, taking

him to the coffee table, bending, where he methodically filters through those papers and

envelopes, haltingly getting on his knees to look beneath the table through the magazines there,

nothing … still nothing. He rises. Winded. He looks around the room pleadingly, the strategist

abandoned to the role of the tactician, unable to reclaim mastery over his situation. He stands

there achingly, his torso turning aimlessly, his legs tired, his knees no longer the cartilage springs

of youth. He moves to the stand holding the scuffed rotary telephone. He lifts the contraption.

Sudden relief, welcomed. He gingerly brings a light purple envelope to his face. The telephone

is replaced. Contentment restored.

He retires to his chair, envelope in hand. From within a rectangular piece of paper, a

check, of Treasury Department issue. He allows the empty envelope to flutter to the floor. His

fingers fumble at the entrances to his nostrils with no strategy settled upon, yet another

afterthought, the process distracted by the sum represented in the three digit figure of the check in

hand, his fingers feverishly harassing his nostrils for any remaining holdouts to be found.

Huzzah!

Up at the Window


He balances his victory decidedly on the edge of the government paper, leaning forward

and slowly … returns it to the coffee table. He reclines in the chair and eases into that well-

earned nap, initially struggling for position and comfort, then, in an few instants, building into a

soul-deep sleep, dreamless, motionless and undisturbed, a sleep one could imagine of a combat

marine on Peleliu, his day’s work done.

Early afternoon traffic sounds have enveloped the room, all the world having come alive

in the absence of his consciousness, the sounds of machine and man vying for prominence in the

pantheon of urban noise, soothing because its familiar, a reverse-lullaby to awaken to. He stirs.

His hand washes across his face leaving open eyes in its wake. He reaches for the can –

unexamined – taking a sip. The day can finally begin. Behind the chair, the clock’s hands rest

around the one and the four – accurate twice a day, for years immemorial.

The reclined chair is snapped to its upright position. He stands and moves to the kitchen,

a mass of scratching and stretching. Hunched over the sink, he releases a torrent of water from

the faucet into his cupped hands. He sloshes the water to his face, the counter, his undershirt, the

floor at his bare feet, his cupped hands back under the faucet, then to his under arms, then back to

his face. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat. He extinguishes the water. A dishtowel dries him. He

opens the refrigerator door, bending, angling into the dim interior light, and at the tightly packed

cooling machine. Pausing. Conundrum. And like an expert and learned surgeon, a decision

under pressure, he extracts an oblong-shaped paper bag from the second shelf. He stands, dimly

lit by the machine’s obscured interior light, pulling back on the paper bag. A hoagie. Lovingly

designed. Earth-tone in layered colors. The refrigerator door is bumped close, his feet taking

him back … back into the living room. He brushes past the comfortable chair, his hand reaching

for the can, his momentum easing him towards the enclosed, sunlit alcove. The wicker chair

creeks under his weight and adjustments. He nudges the window open with his big toe, the

anticipation like drawing the curtain on an opening act, the day no longer at bay. He looks at the

hoagie mischievously, masterfully taking a bite, chewing, savoring, relieved, ready … to look out

into what the afternoon has wrought.

There’s no fatigue to be had in this tired part of the city. Everything surveyed is older,

more used: the buildings, the machines, the ideas, what’s bought, what’s sold, the assets and the

currency, the graft, the dodge, the excuses, the people. More horns are blown – the remnants of

long, sinewy cultural threads that attach people to distant habits, shredding as their operators yield

to jaywalking pedestrians, then accelerating violently, only to stop over thick white lines at

Up at the Window


reddened traffic lights. Despite its fissures, the rule of law remaining in force as far as the eye’s

purview. The sidewalk channels the possessed and dispossessed along non-linear paths, people

upon people, indistinct, from anytime at any place, everyone’s everyday, another’s last.

Impossible to know. Rarely asked about. Not out there. Unfathomable.

Storefronts where the fruit is more fresh. Dustier in their open crates angled at 45°, well

on into their season of ripeness. And the vine-ripened vegetables are there, too. Merchants that

sell flowers and breads, imports from distant places, trinkets and knick-knacks of the most

dubious need and quality, red meats and yellow fowl of comparable description. He bites into the

hoagie, a mouthful of cured meat, mozzarella, lettuce, tomatoes, mayonnaise, ground mustard,

pepperoncini, and vinegar. He doesn’t look further down the street – in either direction – nor can

he see around corners, but they are all there, the men of commerce, hidden among their wares,

duplicated and replicated, defying the laws of innovation and competition, somehow survivors

all. He chews rhythmically.

Down below, along the sidewalk, across the street, cater-corner from his perch, two

whores. Not the movie and fantasy type whores, but the real type, the type that applies make-up

in close approximation of emotional constitution. He bites into the hoagie again, ruminating,

watching the two antsy women move in place, an aura of nervous energy and cold about them,

even at distances and amidst constant motion, a yearning to be set free from their peculiar spot on

the earth. The day moves about them, according them neither scorn nor praise. Or they it. They

tread in place. He chews. A car slows, angling, insinuating itself, nosing towards the curb.

Stopping awkwardly. One of women glides forward, genteelly off the curb and on into the street,

bending, head disappearing into the machine. The other watching calmly. He chews faster. The

bent one straightens. Turns to return. The car starts, stops, starts, stops, then drives off. There’d

be no love. Or comfort. Not connected to this corner, at least. The women are back to their

nervous twitching and adjusting, a mouth moving as if readying itself for an utterance, then

another mouth moving as if in concert. And still no symphony of conversation. Silence. A hand

to the lips, roughly, then a smoothing action along a short skirt, repeatedly.

The day is still noisy.

Up and away, from the old window among many, he bites again.

And an invisible sigh escapes one of the two. A glance down the street, then the other

way. A man – tall, agile, colorfully dressed, intricately coiffed, long-gaited - walks along the

sidewalk, towards them, arching roasted nuts from a paper bag in his mouth, dropping shells

where they may, approaching, the two of them, nor anyone else, of any significance to him, a

Up at the Window


perfect day for a crowded constitutional and salty hard-shelled dry fruit. The jaunty man

approaches, passes closely behind, and is gone, shell detritus his marker. They look out after

him, not quite longingly, just another something to do.

Above it all, he reaches for his drink, his entire frame tilting the tepid fluid back, his eyes

resting on a very blue sky high above, stopping abruptly to conserve the can’s remains. He takes

another bite. Chewing.

Another car has arrived. They are both squatting now, resting against the car’s door,

mouths moving. He leans forward, closer to the open window, a mustard-flecked, vinegar-soaked

thumb guided into his mouth. The conversation below has been lean, crisp – they are standing

again as the car inches away. The two are moving back to their roost. The car stops. A man’s

arm emerges, gesticulating, pointing. Their two heads nod in angled unison. The car starts

inching forward again. The two are back at their anointed spots. The car is merged and gone.

He leans back into the chair, looking at the hoagie’s end – the crusty pointy part. He

delicately puts the remaining piece in his mouth. The chewing is deliberate. Focused. One of

the two women below looks up at his window. Smiles. Waves. He swallows. The other woman

below is now looking up. Smiling, too. Motioning with her arm. Mouthing words to him.

Come. Come. He reaches for his can. One fluid motion drains the remains down his gullet.

He relieves the wicker chair of his weight and moves away from the sunlit alcove. He

moves across the room, past the comfortable chair, to the front door, opening it, the same

yellowish light lazing against the wall, the same buzzing and popping filling the hallway’s world.

He takes the few required steps across the narrow hallway, bends to retrieve the newspaper

perched against a neighboring door.

His door … shuts as he eases into the chair. He reclines. He snaps open the newspaper

like an important man, licking his index finger, folding, creasing, smoothing, scanning, muttering

to himself as if anticipating extreme disappointment:

“Now … what’s been going on in this here world of ours?”


The Fifth in Muqdadiya

“Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.” That’s the only sentiment, multiplied. He squats against the wall

of someone’s abandoned sitting room. A carbine resting at his side. Not much comfort remains

intact in that room. Dust and soot and a harsh sunlight cover the dirtied and degraded upholstery.

A high ceiling. No pictures hang on the wall, no glass on tables to hold a cup of tea. Human

excrement in corners. Nouns and verbs sprayed onto walls, too convoluted to make lasting sense.

A squat room. In a squat town. The afternoon bakes the room like a kiln, despite windowless

windows and a door long blown off its hinges, the wood shattered, its cold embers scattered along

the floor, mingling with long-coagulated blood, streaked along a once shiny tiled floor, dragged

out of the room and on into the interior of the house, his eyes following, but a place his aching

legs could never go. A place his mind would never take him.

He listens to the gunfire outside, gauging caliber, direction and proximity as best he can.

He could sense it close, when it was there, but not much else. His head is against the wall. He

breathes normally, his mouth mouthing the sequential numbers that are now coming from his

thoughts:

“ … forty six, forty seven, forty eight, forty nine …”

Then an explosion in the near-distance. His head whips reflexively. And freezes. An

animal unsure of its status as the hunter or the hunted.

But nothing more. No more close, jolting sounds. Still only sporadic gunfire, and shouts,

invective and unclear. “It’s time to go. It’s time to go.” His mind could form such linear

thoughts. “I’ll kill one. I’ll only need one.” He raises his hands as if in prayer, but the glistening

moisture of filthy young palm-lines distress him. He bends his head into his chest, firmly

gripping his taut thighs. He whispers his mother’s name and rubs savagely along the length of his

khaki pants. He is counting again, reaching twenty three and stopping. He raises his hands. Dry.

And cleaner. He pushes upwards from his crouch, his legs lifting and aching, his hand taking the

carbine by the barrel, all rising in unison. There is pride in standing. “I’ll only need one. Just

one. Then no more. Then home. Go, for lunch and a rest. To say I got one. Just one.” This he

could believe.

He checks his implement, readying it for the inevitable. Profanity and the coward’s

comforts give way to incantation, the certainty of the spiritual: “Oh, Prophet! Oh, Prophet! Oh,

Prophet! Oh, Prophet! Oh, Prophet!” A deep, abiding concentration. Slow, brutal breathing.

Conviction as convection. Repeated. They will be one. “Oh, Prophet! Oh, Prophet! Oh,



Prophet! Oh, Prophet! Oh, Prophet!” Until they are one. There is a modicum of merriment

now, raw joy, growing, hope as reality. Such things of daydreams are possible again if acted

upon with rapidity. Now. Now. Now. No more of the past. Hope lies forward, gloried and

splendid, salvation and redemption for sins and blasphemies already committed and forgotten,

and those to be committed. “Forgive these my sins of weakness in the face of Your enemies.”

Man and his conviction. Still one and ready. Man and conviction, the two of them slide along

the wall towards the deformed doorway, pivoting to their right, spilling out into the day.

It’s bright. Hot. But they’re nonplussed. They move along an uneven sidewalk framed

against battered walls, shattered widows, empty doorways, the rifle their guide. A high tide of

urban fighting has receded leaving behind its detritus, things broken and unusable, cracking

underfoot as the foot would tread, the wide boulevard like a flood plain. It’s still a living, fluid

world. Their senses follow his head in vigilant, concentrated movements, anticipatory, awed of

potentials. For the moment, it seems a soundless and lifeless world, but they know that to be

untrue, things hidden and to be feared. They move steadily forward, forward, always forward,

along the sidewalk quickly now, towards an intersection, a wide opening, a place of caution to the

cautious. A corpse is drained along their path, tight against the soon-to-curve wall. They slow, in

small steps onward, around the grotesqueness of the dead, a foot descending on outstretched,

unfeeling fingers, then pushing off. They peer around the corner. A glimpse of unwelcoming

men. Big men. One, two … Violence slams against the concrete above his head, its pulverized

sand dusting his hair. He stumbles backwards, against the corpse, falling, but gaining an

awkward balance with his left hand brushing the wall, his left foot against the dead man’s face,

the carbine heavenward in his right hand, steady now, upright again. He has seen them and his

heart sees them still. He takes another step back to where he had been, regaining the feel for the

rifle, his voice emerging from his throat to beckon back his Prophet, an intonation in vicious

cadence, “into Your hands,” thrice, newfound legs regaining lost composure, “thy will be done,”

now propelling hastened steps, despite his ache, diagonally out into the street, moving, toward the

intersection, reaching it, turning in the direction of his heart’s remembrance, crouching on faith in

the childlike manner of the unaccustomed, exactly as he had been taught, glorious and dimly

understood incantations leaving his lips, “be true to thee”, eyes nearly shut, pulling rote back at

the mechanical lever, pointing the barrel of the rifle down the street of his recollection, ready, but

instead is hit once, twice, three times by fleeing metal in the flank and upper arm. He falls back,

now sitting in the street, shocked, looking out but not seeing. No pain, no Prophet, just the oddest

of sensations. A moment to recompose. He scratches for his glistening rifle, as if it were all a



mere misunderstanding, to try again, the wet and sticky rifle coming into his hand now, but

heavier somehow, and alien, when more bullets arrive in his space and tear into and dislodge

whatever it was he had hoped to become – in the neck, directly through the liver, in the eye, and

nearly directly into the bellybutton. All as one. He pitches back with brutal force onto the hot

asphalt, reverberates, then stills, a statistic, his warm blood cooling the black tar. The hunter the

hunted.

The man who killed him moves forward along the street at a precise and quickened pace.

Now looming, shadowless. The men behind disperse in choreographed movements. The

inspection of the fresh corpse is recorded as no more than a distracted glance, a quirky facial

twitch, and a respectful sideways kick at the torso. Then slow movements away, on along the

street, a gait with purpose. A glance backwards. Then nothing more.

A straight, good kill with no heroism or legal repercussions. A deed best done in silence,

away from meaningfulness. Something for nothing, that nothing being a convoluted,

disingenuous greater whole. For this kill, there’d be no entries in history books, no West Point

courses with charts and movement maps, no idyllic instructional afternoons with the proverbial

grandson on the proverbial knee many years hence. A killing for killing’s sake. Nothing to be

said once home is found again.

He slows, looking up at a slight angle at the not so tall buildings releasing themselves to

high empty blueness. The air is too heavy to breathe deeply.

How does one regale a home audience sated on the stuff of overindulgence and

indifference that the fifth has been taken in Muqdadiya? In one day, so many worlds away, with

nine hours to go. And then tomorrow and the days after. In the same place, on the same streets,

nearly at the same time, like a physical certainty. What would the tone of that conversation be?

How is the subject broached? What words used? What would the value of the discourse be?

Cautionary? Accusatory? Therapeutic? And how does it end, the conversation, what is left over

for the next time? Could it be that he is to spend time after time in a place like this only to have it

reduced to a solitary conversation?

He turns again to watch like-uniformed men now moving back into view. The protected

and the protecting. They converse in hand signals, conscious of the dead that sprinkle the street,

leery of the hiding living, warning and waving forward, moving again, weary of openings that

look down on them from heights, black guns rotating in counter-unison, elevated, covering angles

on learned instincts. He moves onto the sidewalk, pausing at the corpse pooled against the wall,



killed at some other time by other men, moving again now, retracing dead steps. Gunfire in the

near distance, nary a trained flinch, too far away for relevance, moving, still accounting for the

movements of comrades, still signaling intentions, still moving, aware, always aware.

He reaches an opening, turning to his comrades, hand motions in rapid sequence. He

waits as two cross the street. He enters the building through the doorless doorway with the

caution of the hunted, tense, surveying, moving to his left along the inside wall, cataloguing the

squalid room with its broken furniture and blood-streaked floor, relaxing for the moment, leaning

and lowering himself along the wall, squatting to its base, removing a fierce bronze bristle brush

from his vest.

What common language deconstructs the senses that have been dulled to the point of

terrible, merciless, swift, efficient bluntness, a wider surface area replacing the sharp, pointed tip?

The part enveloping the whole. Very few words would be spoken of his sanctioned killing,

regardless, a blessed event of bombastic contemplation for those far removed from its

consequences, bellicose but for their chattering cowardice – safety in numbers, safety at

distances. Not even words spoken to himself, those things ignored for as long as need be, would

he allow himself. It may surface in the future, as would any reminisce, but its surface would be

distorted, uglier, and unwanted. But those are the demons of some far-off, distant battle, to be

waged by a very different man than the one squatting here, using far different implements. But

like now, like here, it would be fought alone, despite the company, one man responsible for

another’s death, blameless and heroic in the judgment of the distant adoring. No guilt. No

blame.

He’s still squatting, still leaning against the wall. He brushes at his black rifle, cleaning

the burnt residue that lines the barrel, a man of certain compulsions, pausing and glancing to his

right towards the door’s scorched opening, keen to the perceived shifting of light, wind and

smells.

Such are the ways of survival.

There is an earnestness and urgency to his mechanical movements, the applications of

theoretical lessons to practical situations, brush to metal, time of the essence. This is what needs

to be done at this moment in time. Save for the rightward glances, his movements are

undisturbed by the seemingly increasing and urgent commotions outside – now gunfire near, now

shouts, then small, sequential explosions – nor the smells - of cordite, stale cooking, and human

flesh decomposing mixing into a mélange of home, work and death.

Cleaning.



Then quiet again. And forgotten.

His mind could easily rest on the cooking of foods, of taste, of things distant and

comfortable, of his growing daughter in her myriad ways and long, diligent, desperately

articulated letters, imagining how it is she came to think in her ways, a pause at a simple idyllic

wonder if only for a manufactured moment, but his business is in the supplying of human flesh

for decomposition. And that he could never explain his ways to her, in his unanswered letters,

despite her myriad ways. There is no time now. None at all. The saner course, the course he is

on, is to take his fifth here in Muqdadiya, hope not in a sixth, and trust in a faith now nearly

depleted.

His rifle has been restored to remembered specification. Clean. Accurate. Reliable. He

stands with strength and suddenness, his next series of movement visualized. Rifle at eye level,

arms taut and inflexible, he moves along the dried, streaked blood across the sitting room floor as

if it were a path through a wood, on through a doorway, entering, pausing for his sight to adjust,

then stepping further into the hot, artificial dusk that is the house’s interior, his heart beating at a

steady pace, his mind long reconciled to what might await in the dimness.


Cruelty

It’s tricky, but in the end, when it comes, the only thing that’ll have mattered will probably be

love, reciprocating love, given as much as received. Or as close an approximation as possible, an

equation comfortable in momentary flux, but in a tight band, always trending towards

equilibrium. It has to be as close to equilibrium as often as possible to avoid an encounter with

someone like me. I’m not a bad man, not in the strictest definition of the word, not in my mind,

not in the mind of those who are left to me, not by the actions that precede me. I’m a bad man

because I know what I do is not the right thing. The wrong thing. There are no redeeming virtues

to my labors. I judge other people’s actions, document their lack of fealty, destroy whatever

shred of civility that may remain between two people, collect my money, go home. I have no

unnatural attachment to money, it’s a comfortable subsistence-plus arrangement. My expenses

are meticulously documented, my time valued with a reasonable markup, with no room for an

inflated sense of importance. My clients tell me they appreciate that. And I tell them I appreciate

prompt payments. They have the luxury of being late with my money exactly one time. I tell

them that, too. There are no problems here. The problems are out there.

This is my introduction, my calling card, as they pass through my door into the shadows

they think I live in. Sit down, please. You may call me Lance, or Mr. Boyle, or nothing at all.

Your choice. Then an attentive silence from me. The unraveling of a life unfolds before me –

duplicity, depravity, avarice, retribution, punishment, humiliation, … weakness. There is very,

very little variation. I’ve taken my notes, gauged the complexity and time commitment, quoted a

minimum fee. There can be no further action on my part prior to a twenty percent retainer fee

hitting my till. I can wait no longer than midweek next week. My apologies. I answer questions

patiently - and they have many - then ease them out of the office and on into a damp San

Francisco morning to be alone with their reflections. We are then each alone with our reflections.

I swivel into my solitude, the chair creaking under my reclined weight, gazing out the

window through a fast-moving mist onto the bay and its gray bridge, living the cliché happily,

wondering about other men in other times, real and fictional. There is no mystery, nor romance,

nor glory to the grayscale world of operatives, maybe the second oldest profession, maybe

developed to keep the ledgers on the oldest. I try not to waste time abstracting my reality unduly,

although I’d like to believe I have all the time in the world.

Most prospects return on their own impatient volitions, re-darken the doorway with less

hesitancy, ease themselves back into the chair opposite me, place the cash retainer reverently on

Cruelty


the desk, wait for a physical accounting which doesn’t come, ready themselves to further

elaborate on their injustices upon request. It’s a one-sided prompted conversation of love worn

and done. I have nothing to add or subtract. I take what’s given. It’s what I work with.

Movements, habits, tastes, weaknesses, suspicions, missing money, misplaced trust, the list could

continue - the human condition is embedded in the strains of our relationships, what had once

been hoped for, what it had become. Decisions made and regretted, abandoned and resuscitated,

only to be abandoned again, never reaching me in their flowering. It’s the only way I’ve come to

imagine it. For the most part, we seem incapable of divining poor character from good for

reasons that perpetually defy. Maybe hopefulness, maybe ignorance, maybe naïveté. Have I

been jilted of fees and good graces? Most certainly. Lied to, manipulated, duped? Without a

doubt. There is no lasting shame attached, a lesson learned, repeated later in a different

incarnation. A piece of the whole. The connection between any two people may just as easily be

wedded to fallacy and avarice as to truth and honor. It is as natural as the connection itself.

There is no point in justifying yourself and your actions to me, just as there is no sanity in

vilifying the other. I have already taken sides, and here is your receipt. It is a part of the original

parcel, you getting to me before the other. What you want from me, I say, is the anecdotal of

what you allege. Correct?

Yes.

Thank you for your time. I’ll be in touch with regular updates and invoices.

We move in the open, most of us observed, but not remembered. I am paid to watch and

remember. To be found and recorded is simplicity personified. There are no secret places, there

have never been any secret places. Even your thoughts are betrayed by your actions. You are

nowhere at any time, just as surely as you are somewhere at all times. This is neither abstraction,

nor empty words. This is what a man like me does, at the behest of someone who may have once

loved you.

I look out the window. Blankly.

A container ship may seemingly inch along the surface of the bay, away from Oakland

and its monstrous cranes, angling north by northwest, taking all the time it needs to pass through

the golden gate, when the telephone rings. I answer. And listen. It’s one of my operatives in the

field, down the coast past Pacifica, calling to check in. He’s taken a lead into a dead end. People

lie, it’s to be expected, I say, but with considerable less couth. Come on home.

“She should be here. He told me she’d be here,” he continues, pleadingly. He’s young,

been on the job for a year and some, still assigned the follow and sniff stuff. He lost her. There’ll

Cruelty


be another day. He’d find her again. What more could I say to him? We learn not by being told,

not really. Besides, he’ll get paid regardless.

“Lance, I’m telling you. She should be here.”

“We’ll get her tomorrow. Come on home.” Tomorrow’s always an another glorious day.

I hang-up the phone and look out the window again, lost leads and dead-ends easy

thoughts to have. We’ve gotten too familiar with it all, comfortable with what’s come to be

expected, an unassailable sign of professional proficiency - the pilot reacting to a wicked shimmy

while climbing his craft in a thunder storm, the center fielder nonplussed by the tight inside

fastball, the cop facing down his fourth flailing drunk of the night. But to what end? We race to

where? And at what price?

The kid down there in Pacifica has the easiest of jobs, an obvious and almost gratuitous

infidelity, the kind the young ones always sharpen their teeth on. The husband had come in,

distraught in moderation to his anger, a vengeance unmodified from any that may be found in

ancient scriptures, an unforgiving sort I could tell. A straight line narrative. The kid down there

will come to learn what we’ve all come to learn, with little discernable variation, no matter what

he thinks he knows. In his due time.

The container ship is passing from view, starting its Pacific journey on rough seas. Fare

thee well.

People lie. It’s to be expected. And it can’t be shaken. The world of lies is a pragmatic

one, and a lazy one, face value of limited value, theatrical in its machinations, all the world its

stage, the bit parts barely noticed. It’s easy enough, a symptom of a putrid, gangrenous disease,

rotting – literally rotting – the character to points of raw bone and hardness, a Petrie dish to test

for the postulation that one’s character is one’s destiny. It’s a game of consumption, every

deception devouring, the belly swelling from the gluttony of the feast. For what? For delusional

gratification in the instant, an addiction no different from the stiff drink or the cigarette or

anything else foisted on the endocrine system.

Or for a taste of the narcotic that is bad decisions.

The bay is empty and seemingly placid. But it’s not, I know. The phone rings. I answer.

“Lance, it’s set. We’re good on Helms. In, out, easy.” The voice is Hiram’s, my friend

and most experienced hand. We go back. He’s a religious man, righteous of other men, devoid

of personal scruples. Piously indifferent. A good Jesuit. Men like him are useful in the world.

“Swing by at seven. It’s shaping to be a short night.”

“Yeah, but we’ll have some good streaming to keep us.”

Cruelty


“Amen.”

The line goes silent. I hold the phone for a moment, a dramatic pause for no effect. Then

bring the receiver down. Arrogance is blinding. Weak, foolish, arrogant people convinced of

their opaqueness and superiority. In this case, a Mr. John Helms has piqued the interest of his

wife of years with his peculiar behavior. Dull to the point of sadness. It’s taken us less than a

month to bring it out. He thought it best to hide his dealings in the open. We record tonight. At

the near empty rental he and his wife have been remodeling. Mrs. Helms will not be pleased. We

meet with her on Monday. Her sister will be there in the footage. Silly, foolish, hurtful people.

It’s impossible to walk the proverbial mile in someone else’s proverbial shoes. Feigned

empathy is the best we’ve got. I can imagine tonight’s images. They’re clear enough in the

imagination. Hiram and I will watch remotely, insuring the quality, angling in on faces, body

parts, the graphics playing equally well in the sticky seats of smut theaters and the county

courthouse. Mrs. Helms paid for thirty minutes of infidelity footage. I’ll give her an hour’s

worth. She’ll need it for emphasis. And tomorrow’s conversation is already scripted, like an old

favorite movie that’s more familiar than good. We know what’s to be done – the high, inside

fastball, the wicked shimmy, the drunk in our faces.

Let it go.

There’s an ignorance that pervades, shockingly obtuse in its pervasiveness, a sense that if

the thing is not thought through in its entirety it gradually ceases to exist. Avoidable

consequences. So smart we are in the detailed work, the task-oriented drudgery in moment-to-

moment specifics that pays for wanted things and rationalizes unconstructive debt in an instant.

Continuously. And it’s the same play list with relations, the task-oriented work that leads to the

hypocrisy of cruelty and betrayal, none of us amused or immune. It’s a cheapness of spirit,

ironic, really, in a reality awash in the mass of borrowed abundance. But this is what we’ve

learned – what we’ve taught ourselves. A culture of so much built on the foundations of the

utilitarianism of so little.

But this gratuitous self-awareness, this petulant bitterness leads to no thing. I’m just

marking my time with observations until it’s my time.

So be it.

The phone rings again. I answer. It’s Pacifica again.

“Lance, she’s dead.”

There’s a long silence along the visible and invisible wires.

Cruelty


“Dead how?”

“Dead as in shot in the head. Twice. Maybe. I don’t know. Small caliber.”

“Where are you?”

“I came ‘round to the backyard. She’s back there, against the shed …”

My lips feel chapped, my mouth dry. My fingers move to the base of my nose, thinking.

“Retrace your steps out of there.”

“I’m outta there already. I’m on the sidewalk. Out front.”

“Good boy. I’ll call Hutchinson, he’ll get Pacifica in there. Wait for them in the car.”

I hang up the phone.

“Goddamn it!” These are my words into an empty room.

My client will prove to be a killer of the most ordinary variety, grossly unsympathetic

despite legal angling, with no hope of extricating himself from himself despite delusions and

anxieties. Where is he to go? And how long does he think it will take to get there? If this thing

had gone down the way it could’ve gone down, the way we agreed it would, two people would

have found themselves settled-up and divorced. Maybe poorer. But alive. And the living have a

way of surviving, obstinate in their relish for survival. Passionate. Indignities be damned. The

dead don’t. The dead don’t, and there must be blame attached. And I will become part of the

attachment.

I don’t wait. I pick-up the phone and dial Hutchinson. He’s the law. And the law is

spoken to with different types of words. I articulate those words carefully, thoughtfully, taking

my turn in answering questions, and hang up the phone. I’ll be seeing him and theirs often

enough in the coming weeks and months. They’ll have ready access to my meticulousness. It’s

in the nature of these things.

I’ve turned the chair back out towards the bay. It seems more comfortable, somehow.

The chair. More mindful, yet unreal. I’m thinking of Marlowe, of Chandler’s disposition to

resignation, as hard as this city – or as any city may be. I don’t have the perspective of the post-

trench, newly nihilist interwar life. It transcends the hardboiled callousness where deserving

death came snappily and conveniently. A frame of mind. There’s no convenience to this thing, a

world grown weary of causal and ideological death. I can make no truck with this thing, this

suddenness of violence, this option forever on the corner of the table, so easily reached for, so

banal as to make it invisible, despite its potency and permanence.

My hand is at my face, masking, grateful for no witnesses.

Cruelty


Who are these people who keep themselves tethered to the past? What are we to make of

them? Why do I say these people? How is any of this different than bringing forth in our

collective name men of charlatan faith to wage savage wars of buffoonery, to allow black cities to

drown, to reduce the infinitely complex to the child’s parable of monsters under the bed, to lull us

to sleep with on full stomach of disinterest. What are we to expect? The culture that rears us,

buries us. And our markers are betrayal, callous cruelty, murder, and a warped sense of

excusable righteousness. A fucked sense of certainty. We are wrong. I am wrong. How far will

I go to absolve myself of blame? Am I the wicked man who has wrought wrong? Am I the man

who has shed daylight on an under shadow of wickedness? Am I the bullshit righteous man I

belittle?

“Jesus!” My spoken word is startling, shocking. Weirdly, I wait, but the room remains

quiet. I can’t think of another word to say.

I am that man. And tomorrow is another day.

The day slips away, and I watch it.

But for only so long. There is composure again. And work to be done. I do it, like I’ll

always do it. It flows easily, like the river that erodes its banks into canyon. After a certain

depth, it doesn’t matter much. It becomes the natural order of things.

The early night has come, and Hiram drives slowly through the city. Neither of us speaks

because there’s nothing to say. Left, right, straight, right, left and we’re there, someplace, like

any other in a maze of a city, merely a Thursday night. We park. The monitor in my lap is small,

the controls delicate and acutely responsive. We wait. In time, Mr. Helms enters the frame,

tipping playfully onto the bed, removing his shoes. A woman’s voice coos off-screen, teasingly

as if by rote exercise, and Hiram looks out his window uninterested, not wanting to be kept,

maybe off someplace pleasant for the duration. But we are here, in this thing together, and there

is no turning back for us. I tell myself it’s just what we do. I watch intermittently, maintaining

proper angles, focus, and professional integrity. And we do what it is we do for the allotted. As

planned. Fifteen would have sufficed, thirty paid for, but we get sixty. It’s digitized and stored

now for posterity and legal proceedings. I pack the machine back into its case.

“Done?”

“Yeah, done.”

Cruelty


Hiram starts the car and pulls out into the near-empty street. People with no place to go

must be staying home tonight.

Hiram and I drive the city in silence.

It is quarter past nine when I walk through the front door. I ease it shut and draw the

lock. The living room is dark. Eva is on the poorly-lit balcony, a bottle of scotch, two empty

glasses, and a sweating silver bucket of ice on the glass top table. I walk out to her.

I sit.

“How was it?”

I nod. “It was.”

Eva leans across the table for a kiss. I meet her. We kiss for a nice while, he mouth

tasting of the things the day lacked. She pulls back, pours the scotch, dropping two ice cubes in,

lifting and tipping the ice bucket, draining melted water into my glass. She pours her scotch

straight. Our glasses touch. We drink, looking at each other familiarly.

“They asleep.”

She smiles. “Probably not.”

We drink once more, swallowing slowly.

I stand and replace the glass. Eva does the same with hers. “Be back.”

“Okay,” she says and looks off into the night.

I walk back into the dark living room, then down a dimly lit hallway towards where our

children should be sleeping, but are almost certainly not.


A Mother’s Son

It was the ninety fourth straight day of sunshine. The sun beat down on the Los Angeles basin,

hot, but not oppressive. Mrs. Elsa Glavine was in her yard, behind a mid-century Hancock Park

bungalow with two years worth of mortgage left. Twenty four more payments, mostly equity

now. She wanted to be in fine spirits in her summer linens, the garden was looking good, great,

actually, the walk had been weeded, ready for another summer, a summer that was proving to be

nearly indistinguishable from the spring just passed. The lemon trees smelled forth like nectar,

the flowering hedges along the walls framing the yard abuzz with honey bees working in a

pulsating unison, heaving and breathing as if constituting external lungs. The geraniums had

been clipped, their chalky detritus in neat piles at their base. The lilacs, succulents, gardenias …

tended-to and in bloom. The jacarandas swayed minutely overhead, not completely succeeding,

but not failing entirely in keeping Mrs. Glavine cool and contented. She knelt on a soft bed of

grass, shortly cut, but lush and comfortable against the knees. She worked the herbs, her hands

covered in flecks of her dirt, her earth, alternating snips with sniffs of her worn yellow gloves – of

parsley, thyme, cilantro, mint. She worked in silence, not even her thoughts loud or beyond her

immediate line-of-sight, her head bent beneath an ancient straw hat given her by her child when

he was, in fact, a child, back when she and the mortgage were younger, when time was faster, and

the garden not as beautiful.

It had been a good life, and Mrs. Glavine was glad of it.

By mid-afternoon, Mrs. Glavine was reclined along the length of a wooden chaise

lounge, not asleep, not tired, resting, eyes open skyward. The iron gate by the azaleas creaked

open and a sunny older woman entered. Mrs. Ruthann Snowden. Careful to bring the gate back

to rest with thoughtful ease, she strolled the walkway, looking about the familiar grounds,

walking towards her friend.

“Beautiful day, beautiful day.”

Mrs. Glavine nodded slowly, a vagueness attached.

Ruthann Snowden slid into the Adirondack beside the chaise lounge and removed her

cotton gloves. She reached for the pitcher of vodka and lemonade waiting on the table, and

poured into a tall glass. Remnants of floating ice tolled their last. She drank slowly, the vodka

stronger than usual. Her eyes watered as they wandered the garden in the lazy delight of

admiration.

“A wonderfully beautiful day.”

A Mother’s Son


The two women prepared as if for a mid-afternoon sojourn. Mrs. Ruthann Snowden

brought her hat lower on her brow. She took another sip of her drink, a smaller one, still

refreshing. Mrs. Glavine’s eyes remained closed until she spoke, then she opened them onto the

garden:

“Roy died last week.”

A pause to absorb such words, extended to allow Ruthann Snowden to recollect who Roy

may be.

“How do you mean?”

“Car accident. He was … forty four.”

“Oh, Elsa …”

Then no more.

“Forty two. Dead at forty two.”

Mrs. Glavine wasn’t speaking to her friend, not in that voice she wasn’t, that secret voice

of thought, struggling as she was through tangles of vagueness, memories distant but returning,

unsure as to their meeting point, far too many of them to allow for monolithic thought. Her dead

son Roy was in there somewhere, the hard hidden truth of it the son untended to in fact and in

memory of a fluid life. Compulsion’s magnetic qualities had had their effects on Mrs. Glavine,

too tormenting to deny, too intoxicating to ration, the inconvenience of introspection a perfectly

repellant charge.

She peered into her tilted glass with a distinct pause laden with expectations and

conditions, an implied quid pro quo with only one reliable, but forgiving counterparty. Mrs.

Glavine was procrastinating, wishing time away, her friend watching her reluctantly, unsure of

what to say about a son she’d heard about intermittently, seen a few times maybe, them having

never met.

Mrs. Glavine drank.

“I feel I should say something, tell someone something.”

Ruthann Snowden nodded, absently, almost obediently.

“About Roy. Say something about him.”

Mrs. Glavine despised her tenuous position, the nexus between a mother’s innateness and

the appropriateness of eulogistic redemption. She didn’t want to have to talk about this, a

conviction she felt in the spasms of an angry hand, the hardness of pressed lips. It didn’t seem

just, seemingly a random event, this death, this taking away. Something wanted out from Elsa

A Mother’s Son


Glavine, and Ruthann Snowden, bless her heart, was a good listener. She’d listen to anything.

For a long time. They’d become good friends, after all.

“This one’s his fault.”

Words will come out like that.

“No, I don’t mean it like that. Not like that at all.”

Mrs. Glavine tilted the glass again.

“We’d had our misunderstandings. In the past. Things were very different. I at times

may not have been the best of mothers to him. But understand, you know, Richard left me all

those years ago, with that girl. Left me alone with Roy in that miserable desert town. It just

wasn’t right.”

Mrs. Glavine unclenched her hand.

“Oh, look at me, I’m not composed.”

Ruthann Snowden shook her head, in deep patient commiseration, willing her friend

onward through silence. Mrs. Glavine had long-grown comfortable with taking her time.

The garden she burned with her gaze finally brought the modicum of calm she sought.

“We only had each other. Roy and me. For a long time before I said enough is enough.

We packed it up and left. Just drove out of there one afternoon. It was a Wednesday. And hot,

hot. I drove as far as I could. I drove until Saturday.”

Mrs. Glavine was quiet for a moment. Then:

“Roy was so helpful. Helped me pack. Load-up the car. There wasn’t much worth

anything in that place. Believe me. A few boxes. A few things. And so quiet in the car. No

fussing at all. I can’t remember him even asking for the bathroom. It’s funny what you

remember.”

Ruthann Snowden smiled faintly.

“But we made it to Los Angeles. We made it. That’s as far as I could drive. I didn’t

know what we’d do, where we’d go next. But here we were.”

Mrs. Glavine was looking at her lemon tree.

“And it wasn’t too much after that Bud Long offered me that job, the one … Just dumb

luck, really. Met him in that bar … it’s gone now. So strange … and …

Ruthann Snowden leaned forward in the chair.

“… he … well, we all had to do whatever it took back then. Bud helped me save a little

to buy this house. Put something down. Roy would get his own room. You should have seen

how happy he was up there in that room of his, baseball cards, radio. And some while after, Bud

A Mother’s Son


moved in with us. It seemed to be the best thing for Roy, give him something – someone – to

look up to. Something more than just the two of us. And they were fun times, oh my.”

Mrs. Glavine adjusted her hat, taking a sip of the drink, noticing the melting ice cubes,

taking a longer one.

“That was the first time Roy left the house. Just slipped out. Not a word. Bud brought

him back for me. He found him over there at Union Station. Maybe an hour or two later. He

didn’t have a ticket. He was just there, on a bench with his bag, looking at his cards. Just a little

boy’s silliness, really, where was he going? He and Bud never learned to get along. I knew that.

Very different, those two. It’s too bad. Life’s quick. It’ll pass you. Bud had some good

qualities about him. Generous. Hard working. We had our differences. Bud and me. It could

have been something. Then Bud himself up and left. Just gone one day. Probably for the best.

I’d grown used to these things. Roy was grown by then. Almost out of school, seventeen maybe.

Working over at Millard’s, the butchers. Remember them?”

Ruthann Snowden did.

“Oh, he’d come home a piece. Ohhh! I can’t tell you how foul … that smell was. His

room always had that smell, that … sweet metal smell of blood. Poor Roy. I could tell he wasn’t

too happy there. It was just something to do before something else.”

Mrs. Glavine’s eyes narrowed.

“That must have been around the time I met Bobby Stempenato. That Bobby Stempenato

… Funny, his name wasn’t even Bobby. It was something different, I think Angelo. Bobby, he

thought it gave him more of an American-sounding name. He was a charmer. It was like living

in a cliché, the wine and dance, like something from a different time. We were out almost every

night, anyplace you could think of, in that car of his. He was loud. I’ll tell you, it would be two

in the morning, and he’d be carrying-on as if it were noon. You know the type. Full of love for

living. Roy ... He left the house again and moved to a hotel near work. The rental ones. He was

older. He could do what he wanted to do. It gave him more freedom, more time to his own.

That’s what he wanted, he told me. I don’t know what he did. After work, I mean. He needed

his space. I understood. I stopped by once.”

Mrs. Glavine’s face brightened.

“It’s funny, I can still see that place of his clearly, him in that small room. You know

how that can be. The memories.”

Ruthann Snowden nodded again. She herself had three grown and gone children.

A Mother’s Son


The sun blazed in its way, closer because of the season. Mrs. Glavine’s thoughts

remained motionless and silent in the tiny rented room with her son. Was it summer? Were the

windows open? Why had she gone? Had she been there before? What did they say to one

another? She removed a shirt draped over the back of chair, folded it neatly against her chest, and

replaced it on the seat. And left. That was what she could remember on sudden notice.

“I sometimes wish I hadn’t let him go to that place so easily. A boy should be with his

mother. I don’t know if I was holding on very tightly at the time.” It was that voice again.

Silence. All the time in the world. And a refocusing.

“Bobby and I didn’t last, in spite the good times. We could’ve. But we didn’t. And I’m

not ashamed to say that there were other men after Bobby. There were. I still thought we needed

a good man around the house, a father for him, a husband for me. A family to come back to.

And Roy didn’t approve. He wouldn’t. Of any of them. And there’s only so much a mother can

do. But it was too late by then, anyway. Roy was already living out there on his own, and maybe

he had his friends, and we went about our business. Los Angeles is a big city, you don’t just

chance across each other in a big city like this. It has to be intentional. And there was a period of

time, there, when I may not have seen Roy for a stretch. A good long time. I’m not going to

keep this from you Ruthie, there were a great many distractions. It’s just what we did, how it

played out. It was too much … too much of a good many things. My money got took, taken, I

had an accident, took a fall. I lost my job, and … Roy was grown now, had finished his college

term, and I had no one else to ask. He came back home. Instead of paying his rent he paid the

mortgage. It made more sense.”

Mrs. Glavine waved her hand in a wide arc in the direction of the garden and the house.

“Part of this is his.”

Then more silence.

“He took good care of me. He surely did. Bobby and I got reacquainted, he came back

to the house, but briefly. And Roy left again. I’d found another job by then. I didn’t want Roy to

leave. I asked him to stay, I did, but he and Bobby … He left without saying a word. Just one

afternoon, we woke up and he was gone. And gone he stayed. A few years at least. A whir and

a blur. Everything racing at once. The oddest time, believe me Ruthie when I tell you ...”

Ruthann Snowden nodded her head again, physical punctuation validating sentiment.

“… long nights that melted with the days. As did the job. Or jobs. In Las Vegas, before

it gets hot out there, I married Carl. This was some time after Bobby had left again. This time for

good. And in Memphis, on our way to Atlantic City, Carl and I divorced. Or I think we did. He

A Mother’s Son


left me someplace off Beale Street. You can’t know shame until something like that happens. I

had to borrow the money to call the operator in Los Angeles to connect me to Roy. And he was

asleep, it must have been four in the morning. He couldn’t understand me at first through the

tears and shortness of breath. ‘Slow down, Ma. Slow down,’ he kept saying. I can still hear his

voice. We spoke on the telephone a long while. He just listened and listened. He wired what he

could for food and the motel, and six days later I met his bus at the station. I don’t know why he

came all the way out there. I told him I’d make it back on my own. But he came on out anyway.

We rode back mostly quietly, sleeping against his arm for mile after mile, wanting to say

something but shame getting the better part of me, all the while Roy watching the road passing

under the window. I watched him. Six days of this. Six sober days.

“We stepped off the bus in downtown to a blinding glare. It actually hurt, like God

wanting to tell me something urgently and directly. I remember that well. I looked over at Roy

to see if his eyes were having the same … revelation to the light as mine. But I didn’t see

anything different. He had the same undisturbed eyes, my bags filling his hands, leading me to

the cab stand. We were going home.”

Home.

“It was going to be different. I promised myself.”

The women were quiet for a moment before Ruthann Snowden spoke.

“Elsa. All these years …”

“That was before our time.

“Yes …”

“We were home again. And it felt like a home, just the two of us for as long as Roy

could stay. Just the both of us. And I wanted him to stay, the way a mother wants her son to

stay. But living gets in the way – it just does, Ruthie. He took a place in Long Beach,” and Mrs.

Glavine waved her hand before her face, dismissively. “He knew I didn’t have a car anymore.”

She looked at her hands, then placed them carefully in her lap, an elegant woman of

manners. In a whisper, finally looking at Ruthann Snowden, she said: “I asked him, before he

left that one time, why he keeps doing what he does for me. I didn’t want him to think I didn’t

know. But he couldn’t say just then. He was in a hurry. A letter arrived in the mail sometime

later, after he’d left.”

Mrs. Glavine removed a folded envelope from her hip pocket, removing its single sheet

content, white and creased. “I read it again this morning.”

A Mother’s Son


She unfolded the letter and read Roy’s words aloud: “‘The Mother is the soil. At her

cruelest, she can be barren and the taker of life, but she gave original life and hope keeps us

rooted to her. How’s that, Ma? I know how much you’ve come to love your garden. We give

what we may have and take what is given. That’s all there could ever be. I guess we have no

right to expect anything more. I hope this answers your question.’”

Mrs. Glavine refolded the paper, replacing it in its envelope, and let it drop into the folds

of her dress that formed in her lap.

“That’s how he’d become, good with his words. He’d never written me a letter before.”

There was neither pride, nor hurt, nor resignation in her latest words. Only words-as-narrative, a

woman with a story to be tell. “Nothing came of it. There was nothing to change. We still spent

our time apart. An occasional visit like before. He found his way up into Santa Barbara. A nice

little house up in the hills. His son had come. And better weather besides. I understood.”

Ruthann Snowden nodded again.

“There’s always things to be done, always a next thing …”

“Always the next thing,” Ruthann Snowden said in rumination.

“But Ruthie, I didn’t think it would be like this. I never would have imagined an ending,

if it were up to me. A mother shouldn’t have to let go of her son.”

Ruthann Snowden wanted to stand, wanted to take her friend’s hand in hers, wanted to

act. She didn’t stir.

“No, she shouldn’t.”

A silence became two, one for each.

Then:

“We let go of each other to live in two different worlds. He came back to mine many

more times than I went to his. I know this. It’s how we were. That’s the people we were. I

imagine him as that little boy, out there becoming the man, I imagine him out on that road alone

… “

A fattening tear gestated delicately where the eye’s softness ends and the high cheekbone

begins. Ruthann Snowden watched it, almost holding her breath, waiting for it to cascade. It

glistened in place instead.

“Why are we the people we are, Ruthie? How does it come out this way? How come we

don’t have no say in it, like we’re just along for the ride? I’ve come to want to know. It only

seems right to want to know.”

A Mother’s Son


Mrs. Glavine picked up the glass, the ice melted, the liquid tepid, useless to her, returning

it.

“I don’t know how to end it. I don’t know what to do. I’m no one’s mother now. Who

does that make me? Who do I become, Ruthie?”

Ruthann Snowden couldn’t know.

Mrs. Glavine stood with a shocking quickness, taking steps away, all as if one movement.

She walked down her weeded path, stopping suddenly, returning. She stood above her friend.

“I imagine him out on that road alone, up in those hills at night. Don’t think I don’t.

That long way he had to come and go back. I’d asked him to come back here, to come get me, to

go see that little boy of his, my grandson. He said he’d come. But I couldn’t go. Something

came up at the very last minute. There was no way for me to reach him. I left him a note on the

door. I left the backdoor unlocked. Food in the fridge. Told him I’d be back as soon as I could.

I thought he’d wait. I said I was sorry. But he left, went back away.”

Mrs. Glavine turned back down the path, fondling the leaves of a wilting flowering bush

that lined the walk. “You know, Ruthie, I wish it would rain in this goddamned place once in a

while. It would save me some time watering these things.”

She crossed the lawn and knelt at a newly planted hydrangea. She dug at the earth

around it, pouring water from a plastic jug, patting at the roots. Ruthann Snowden looked out

after her, before leaning forward to retrieve the fallen envelope from the ground. She placed it on

the table, and started to rise to excuse herself.


Send-off I went [to war] because I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want the glory or the pay; I wanted the right thing done. -- Louisa May Alcott, 1863.

*

It had been raining like it always rained in this part of the country, at that time of year, and Jessup

Bingham had been standing in the doorway for a while, in a thought, breathing in the shifting

smells of summer’s wet earth. He pushed the screen door open, stepped out on to the porch, and

eased the door shut. The rain made a familiar pooling sound against the gravel driveway, and

Jessup looked at his watch. He was already behind schedule. Somewhere over the magnolia

trees a drape of thunder unfurled, and Jessup looked at his watch again. His wrist dropped and

his worn, tan boots looked up. He took a step forward, then several more to the edge of the

porch. His covered feet now jutted out from under the protective eave, the spill-off breaking its

fall against impervious leather. He took the stairs, exposing himself in full, the water drumming

and rolling along thick cotton shirt, his sleeves rolled-up along his forearms, the rain forming

droplets on exposed hairs. His bare head felt the sting of falling water. And the symphony of

rain against gravel, flesh and skull colluded to cacophony, as he took that final step-off the step

onto the wet, crunchy gravel. Another step. Then more, into a trot.

Then he began to run. The first lengths were heavy and fraught with a wet cold

descending. But the loose gravel and warmth rising propelled him forward. A forward that took

him under the canopy of magnolias, magnificent for their sheltering summer repose, and out past

the foliage, out towards the street, for a right onto pavement, and on into an opening that

drenched his face. A running in full. There were no longer any distorting sounds like the ones

that escorted him this short distance. There were only rising coherent ones and the things he saw.

He saw things familiar. Mrs. Redwood’s porch swing empty, but swaying. And the

Lapham twins’ tricycles angled sadly and unused on a neglected lawn, waiting for play’s return.

Liza Firth’s ‘For Sale Sign’, there for years upon years, in stubborn defiance of her home’s

untended to wood rot. The Detmer house, grand beyond proportion, a sea captain’s house with a

widow’s walk looking out in all directions over rolling land, and to the east, the sea just beyond.

Julian and Patty Strobe’s Gold Star centered in the living room window, Charlie’s ’89 Caprice

resting where they had both last worked on it.

When was that? How long ago had it been since he was last here? He counted

backwards, subtracting months from the present, a tangle of seasons, a figure elusive. There was

Send-off


no then and now for a man alone in the world, no sentimentality of seasons, just as there was no

then and now for a man running through a drenching rain, only a vague recollection of a

yesterday, not so indiscriminate from today. A run through the rain like any other day, if it were

also raining, only the jolting marking the difference, the old familiars remaining where they’d

always be. Nothing more. He had stopped counting.

He ran.

He looked up to see the Patterson Middle School playground resting empty, lying fallow

until the fall season, a kernel from an old harvest running by it on a rainy August morning, so

many years after an earnest children’s convocation. And Jessie Bowman’s place passed in the

way it has always been remembered, neat and hopeful, like her parents, like her, like them

patiently together. And Amanda Tillman’s, next over, not as neat, not as hopeful, a father long

deserted, leaving behind a daughter of good gratitude for the things she had regardless. Gone so

quickly, in the past now, a fleeting desire to glance back defeated by willful concentration.

The concentration came naturally.

Jessup Bingham was paced now. His legs were feeling fire, the pavement almost soft

against the weight his body brought to bear. His lungs pumped in discordant rhythm against a

rain that continued to fall. His hesitancy passed, his time behind the screen door a quaint

reminisce. Not willful, simply more expedient. He was gaining on his schedule. He could feel

it.

His hand wiped against his face. His palms were pooling wetness now, wetness

measured in the visceral tension of water forming, holding but for a moment, then sloshing off his

finger tips. A wetness akin to plenty, a sensation he might have felt as a child, at the dinner table,

full and not wanting any more. His concentration reeled, faltered, missed a beat. He thought of

the desert. It was a different wetness than a desert wetness. Jessup Bingham had been to the

desert, cities and towns in the desert, where the killing takes place. Mostly not by his own

volition, but killing just the same. And the heat that makes the body wet, the living and the dead

alike. In heavy gear, a heavy sweat from water consumed by the gallon, now salty, drenching and

dripping along every curved extremity and flat surface and making hairs glisten as would an

August rain shower, except for the relief. An internal heat escaping, but not relieved. And he

would be returning.

But there was no time for that. Not at that moment. The road passed still beneath his

feet, his head again down, watching the peculiarities and imperfections of a well-worn road, the

Send-off


familiar and comforting places passing unnoticed, his legs exhorting exertion, his feet ignoring

the dull pains developing, the mind concentrating on the things at hand. The running, the

breathing, the rain that still fell.

But he must look up, and he did look up. And the Huff acreage passed to the right, row

after row after row of controlled nature, corn for livestock, utilitarian fields with secrets held for

generations of impatient youth, there sniffing around the garden of adult impersonations. Proving

grounds of a life imagined. The memories brightened Jessup Bingham’s face, immediate in their

effects, his feet still hard against the pavement, the man running past the child, nonetheless a boy

running, his face returning to determination, his eyes back to the passing pavement.

He knew he had gone from smallness to the infinite, a world really only seen his way by

the very few - not the adventurer, nor the humanitarian, nor the archeologist sifting through time,

and certainly not the avenger or marauder taking at will. He was something else entirely, aware,

but hesitant, rueful and protective, to a great extent rule-bound, heavily armed, but at times

improbably helpless, helpless, not so unlike his long moments unarmed in the rain. There was no

searing anger to this helplessness, nor the tautness of frustration. Neither was there fear, or

regret. The war could not be lost, despite the dead and disfigured who continued in their sorrows

work. No, it was none of these.

Jessup Bingham ran, his silent words keeping pace.

He had become too big for this place, a bigness measured not in condescending or

invective ways. It was in the bigness of words, those words applied judiciously to the violent

sights and touches absorbed deep into the memories of the life being led away from here, this

place. And those memories instructed the life being led. The instruction unforgiving, a root in

the dark that grows itself downwards and outwards, all the while pushing all else upwards. It was

not a common earth into and out of which they all grew, these people he’d known in this familiar

place. Not anymore. And there was no shame to one way or another. This growing. They were

but different ways, reconcilable with neither ease, nor good intentions. And there was no shame

in that either. The different ways. But there was shame. There must always be the potential for

shame in any individual or collective decision rendered. It’s what gives the decision its quality,

its very weight. Absent certainty – and there could be so little – it’s the collective that ought to

keep the individual straight and true, even in the distant muck of barbarity and the weakness of

solitude. It was true! It was true! The individual will act heedlessly to preserve sanity; the

collective rule-bound and composed. In the collective, there are options. This was what he

Send-off


wanted to believe. There could be no other. In its absence … Jessup Bingham? This man

running? He’d shot dead men no more than boys with seasoned guns in their grips.

He ran still. The rain was no thing. Nor were the places and remembrances that sidled

by. There was no here, just as readily as there was no there. He told himself this again. There’d

be what will be and what could’ve been – the could’ve-been that could happen again. And it was

infuriating, the could’ve-been. And his feet hit the pavement harder, punishing, a warmth rising

faster against the cold of the wet felt again, thoughts of the could’ve-been forming and jettisoning

from a harbor long in disorder, a sailing of anger that could lead to nowhere known.

A long moment of recompose, a running to distill ration from resignation.

Then his silent words crept in the form of the oratory as deathbed soliloquy, before a

mass of people where he’d seen himself, where free men are haunted, but free nations are not:

I – we who shall go – will hold close the same unanswered questions for as long as we

stay alive. They’ll be the only questions of import to our lives. They’ll seed the next generation’s

understanding of what ought to have been possible. Because within possibility is life. Resist the

expedient, the ephemeral, the balm to life’s fears. It’s a moral imperative to lead this here very

life correctly, aware of the consequences of decisions. To say, unequivocally, ten, twenty, thirty

years hence that what we did then is right still now. That we fought the right fight. That we knew

right from wrong. Take courage like courage can only be taken – with the certainty that else is

false. Send us to do the certain thing, send us to a common haunting, you and I, when the

haunting comes, for it will, where death and violence awaits. But upon our return – and surely

some of us are to return – we can say in monuments, and street signs, and common lore that the

right thing had been done, a lighting of those beacons that we knew right from wrong, before it

passes from common memory, to push-up what might be next.

Mere words in the thoughts of a lone man in the rain.

There was a hesitancy to Jessup Bingham’s running, a slowing of the legs that propelled.

No thoughts any more. A concerted respite from that. Just fatigue, hips that ached, a thirsty

throat despite the rain that came. But briefly. Time was of the essence. He stepped harder into

his run again, his head still down, his right foot fast replacing his left one in quickening

succession. There were people waiting for him in the very same rain, just a distance away.

Almost there, almost together again.

Send-off


Jessup Bingham’s legs took him up a mild grade, working harder against the expectation

of an accustomed habit of flatness, his heart anxious at the sight of the town center just within his

eyesight, becoming clearer with every effort, every hastened step, a place he’d always been to, a

town tired but there. He crested the hill and gravity relieved the tensions against his muscles and

feet, running down an equally mild decline now, the rain angled impossibly against his neck,

water seeping again down the valley of his spine, like an overtaxed creek at its critical moment,

his hand swiping against his back, damming with wet cloth that which cannot be denied flow.

The town was closer, the outlines of milling people taking shape. He’d wanted it that

way, the waiting. He’d asked for it this way. His mother, its people’s mayor, had resisted.

Initially: “I’m afraid it would be inappropriate, unbecoming of this family.” His father agreed.

But the mind is an intransigent place, thought its lubricant. Jessup Bingham had seen too much in

the desert. He felt to be in a position to demand. That, and devoted political indifference. His

father fell first, to the simplest of arguments: “Dad, what are you afraid of?” Then his mother to

the savaging of an oft-repeated sentimentality: “Do I go the way of dulce et decorum est pro

patria mori wordlessly? Is that all we have left?” She slapped his face hard. Very hard. But he

watched her still, ever the young officer. Then she retracted and cried, like she knew, his hands

forcing the tangled mangrove of her hands in her lap, to be held there together for a long while.

Then she acquiesced, with the boldest of hopes: “You won’t fall.”

His mother made good on her promise, creating her son’s audience, sending him out into

the world he wanted.

And Jessup Bingham spoke his words to those who’d listen, at churches, at the high

school, at the Rotary and Kiwanis clubs. He spoke to the editor of the gazette, then reread his

own words in silence and resignation. He’d spoken a similar thing in familiar tones:

“Killing is effort, sometimes a group one, sometimes a solitary one. I have been trained

to kill and I have killed. I kill on your behalf. I am your killer. Yours to do with as you may.

And we have made our decisions through our voting and subsequent silence. Those who

disapprove do not remain silent. This is what I believe. You have asked me to degrade another

people because that is the primary definition of war. And we have decided on war. The

secondary and tertiary definitions of war? It’s filth and wallow, sadness and savagery. It’s

tension and regret, alleviated through hard compassion. It is everything you think you know.

And it’s nothing you can know. No words and no images can enhance comprehension. Nor me

standing here before you with these words. There’s very limited empathy in war. You have not

been to war it until you are war. This is not simplification, nor the sympathetic plea of the

Send-off


coward wanting home again. I am preordained by my profession to my fate. And there’s no

honor to my present fate, not in this fashion, but only in the kinship of the soldiers’ love borne of

understanding, just like any family undertaking a common journey. Look around you … your

family is right here for you, too. And you could never countenance abandonment. And as a

nation, are we not on a common journey? Did we not all – collectively – cry on that violent day

in September in what seems ages and eons ago? Did we not resolve to a common response,

predicated on – rooted in – our notion of justice? There is no shame in defending ourselves. No

people incapable of defense can ever hope for posterity. But you have allowed our respective

breadth of understanding to part ways. What I know and what you know are no longer part of a

common journey. We are all off somewhere else. And my mind tells me neither of us will get to

where it is we want to go. And that is a tragedy … because we will be a lesser people for it. All

of us haunted in our own separate ways, with nowhere and no one to return to.”

No applause. No recriminations. He’d walk away to silence.

And it was quiet again running through the rain, the town’s main street drawing closer.

Jessup Bingham was drawing it closer. The outlines became crisper. He imagined the muffled

thoughts that awaited him down the line. He had tried earnestly to avoid a tone of sanctimony.

He wasn’t there to present sermon to an ultimate truth, nor to cajole. He had wanted to keep his

words to a few, maybe like Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, or something from Pericles gleaned from

his academic days. But he had thought himself ridiculous attempting to mingle the mortal with

the immortal. He spoke the best he could, practicing the cadence of his words with his uncertain

inner voice as he lay in bed at night, sleepless: Was it the height of temerity to chastise a people

for holding fast to a belief, an opinion, even the absence of one, to beg them to come with you or

not send you at all? He would be there, regardless. And coming back in one form or another,

regardless. And they would be here, regardless. Jessup Bingham wanted them to know. That

was all.

He was there, at the edge of the commercial district. People lined the sidewalk under

umbrellas and hats. A few held signs, others raised their arms as if to wave hello or good-bye,

but seemed to be holding them there against the rain. And still others stood nearly expressionless,

as if by respectful obligation. He started to pass them, and a shout emerged: “We’re with you …”

Then another: “Godspeed …” A guttural: “Give ‘em hell!” His mother and father stood under

two umbrellas midway through, black and heavy with wetness, his mother smiling, her hand

waving at her cheek, his father in solemn salute. And childhood friends – now grown and gaining

Send-off


contentment – looked-on knowingly, maybe their years together episodically playing through

their memories. A smile left his face for them. And Jessie and Amanda standing side-by-side,

like always, Jessie holding a tiny flag against her breast. She was holding on to something he

knew could not be. She did, too, probably, but the conveying words hadn’t yet been formulated.

Too much lay between the now and then, and no words seemed adequate. They loved each other

in the old ways, still as sensual because he missed those things. Once this war had ended, once he

could walk these streets again, they would try to exchange those words. They would be better

understood words then than the ones he could have used now. They would have a different

quality by then. He told himself this.

He ran onward.

The crowd thinned. He could see empty spaces along the sidewalk. Main Street was

ending. Interest waning. The marginal people of town were there, mostly lethargic men and

misunderstood women. Jessup Bingham watched them watching him, both momentary

spectacles, fleeting in their novelty, soon to be passed. And he did pass them, and they him, and

the street was empty again, of people, but not the of the places they’d return to. Jessup Bingham

didn’t look behind him because he didn’t want to know. He ran on, the rain letting-up, talking a

right on Nimitz Avenue and disappearing from any views that may have remained.

By the time Jessup Bingham reached the armory, the rain had stopped. The clouds

remained, chaotic and ominous, but the rain was no more. The Sergeant-Major that greeted him

greeted an exhausted man. There was nothing more than silence as the two stood at an informal

attention.

Jessup Bingham looked at his watch.

Then the Sergeant-Major spoke:

“You have your say, sir?”

“I did. Yes.”

Then more silence.

“Your dry gear’s inside. We load in ten.”

Jessup Bingham breathed deeply, turned and walked toward the massive concrete

building. The Sergeant-Major looked out after him, then he himself turned and walked toward an

empty and idling bus. The first fat drops of a new old rain began to fall, but the Sergeant-Major

couldn’t be bothered with breaking his stride.


What sets man apart from the beasts is that humans have the option not to panic.

Victor Serge, Unforgiving Years

Panic

Umm Quassem awoke with the dawn. A bit afterwards, actually. She was getting older. Her

husband wouldn’t stir despite great noise, she knew as much, but she slipped out from under the

covers as quietly as she could. Abu Quassem didn’t stir. She found her matted plush slippers

where she’d left them the night before, slipping into them, and from the bedroom door, along her

route to the kitchen.

It was hot already, the cool of the night a memory, every window in the little house

remaining open to receive any breeze the jealous Tigris deemed ready to exhale to the new day.

If it would, this would be the time of day. Thin kitchen drapes moved imperceptibly along either

side of the barred window, above the kitchen sink. Umm Quassem was at the sink.

She took plump oranges from the hanging mesh bag and placed them on the counter. She

washed and rinsed one after the other under a surprisingly powerful torrent of water from the

gushing faucet. She dried the oranges with a soft blue towel of Egyptian cotton. She opened a

drawer to the left of the sink and removed a sharp knife with a glossy wooden handle. She wiped

the knife absently with the towel, and effortlessly cut each orange nearly symmetrically in half.

She reached to her right for the white plastic juicer, placing it fittingly atop a large glass

container, and brought the orange halves to its pointed summit, and with remarkable upper-arm

and wrist strength squeezed, and squeezed, and squeezed, and squeezed juice and pulp into the

receptacle. She placed the spent fruit to one side.

She repeated her squeezing actions eight more times, filling the glass container. She

lifted it, moved across the kitchen to the standing icebox, opened it, and placed it in the darkened

interior. She removed four eggs from a flat ceramic dish. She tapped the door close.

She moved to the iron stove and moved a frying pan from one burner to another. She

reached for a bottle of olive oil, opening it, tilting its contents into the base of the pan. Replacing

the bottle, she turned a metal switch, gave the hissing gas some time, turned a knob on the stove-

front, and struck a wooden match. Circular fire.

She waited in place.

The oil in the pan snapped – a light snap. She stepped forward, reaching for the eggs,

cracking each one in turn against the steel lip, easing their contents in the hot oil. Snap. Pop.

Panic


Snap. Pop. The cracked shells, she placed in a plastic bowl. From a small glass jar, she

sprinkled sumac on the frying eggs, each in their turn.

In the distance, a thump. Followed in quick succession by several more. Then silence

again. She poked at the eggs, moving them clockwise. She moved back to the sink, removing a

oval pink sponge, wetting it under a trickle of water from the faucet. Her gaze wandered out

through the dancing drapes. She moved back across the kitchen floor to a square plastic table

against the wall. Three wood and straw chairs. She chased around a full fruit bowl as she

vigorously wiped the tabletop, the streaks of water glinting in the light that had finally penetrated

the window, the bowl finding its final resting place in the corner.

Back at the sink, she rinsed the sponge and drew the thin cloth across the window. She

removed two stone plates form the drying rack and moved back to the stove. She extinguished

the flames, cutting the gas. She removed a spatula from its holder and deftly lifted two eggs to

each plate. She retraced her steps back to the table, placing the plates on opposite sides. She

moved back near the stove, taking two forks, two paper napkins, the salt and pepper shakers. She

placed the collection in the center of the table. From atop the icebox, she retrieved a basket of

flat bread and a small, thin glass bowl of green olives floating in thyme-flecked olive oil. She

placed these on the table, against the wall. She turned and opened the icebox, removing two

chilled glasses and the container of squeezed orange juice. She placed the glasses along side each

plate, and the orange juice in the middle.

She turned and walked back towards the kitchen door, peering out into the hallway and

bellowed:

“Quassem! Abu Quassem! Where are you?”

She moved back toward the stove, removing the pan to the sink. Soap suds were

forming, collecting under the running water when her two men – one young, one older – entered

the kitchen and moved directly to the table.

“Morning,” muttered the older man.

Umm Quassem didn’t turn to look.

“Come here so I can look at you.”

The young man rose off his chair and went to his mother’s side. She wiped her hands on

the towel draped over the sink’s edge, and grabbed her son by the back of his neck, driving her

lips into his cheek. Then, just as forcefully, released him.

“You’ll see me through this life, Inshallah. Go eat.”

Panic


The young man returned to the table and eased into the chair. His father, hunched over

his plate, didn’t look up. He slowly dipped a torn piece of bread in the yolk of the egg. The son

tore his bread in half, placed his elbows on the table, leaned in, and gingerly poked at his yoke

until it ruptured. A viscous yellow streamed onto the plate. Father and son ate in hunched

silence, serenaded by the scrubbing sounds of metal brush against metal pan.

By the time Umm Quassem had finished cleaning her cooking area and returned to sit on

the middle chair at the table, the men were picking at the green olives. Their cleaned plates were

speckled with coarse pits. Umm Quassem wiped at the corners of her mouth watching her son.

The old man pushed his chair back, standing, lifting his plate, moving to the sink, placing it on

the counter. He turned the faucet on, washed his hands and washed his lips. He reached for a

towel, his wife now watching him.

“Not that one. The other one.”

Abu Quassem dried his mouth and hands. His son rose and followed suit, reaching for

the anointed towel. A military helicopter, then two more, fluttered into view in the near distance.

The young man peered through the translucent drapes at them until they were gone, their sounds

quickly fading in distance to silence.

“Let’s go.” Abu Quassem was at the kitchen’s doorway. Umm Quassem remained

hunched over the table, picking at the remaining olives. Her son moved to her from the sink and

kissed her lightly atop her head.

“What’s for dinner?”

“Chicken and rice.”

Quassem moved towards his father.

“God be with you,” she said, her voice carrying over her shoulder.

There was no response, just slow footsteps down the hallway. The creaking of a heavy

metal door opened, then gently clicked shut. Umm Quassem reached into the fruit bowl and

removed an orange. She cut the fruit along near symmetrical lines from top to navel, six cuts,

peeling back the skin, sectioning, bring each wedge in turn to her nose before eating, inhaling

deeply each time.

The morning had found its midpoint. The city baked, the little house with the heavy

metal door baked, and Umm Quassem moved slowly about her work. The beds had been made,

the laundry placed in the agitating machine, the kitchen and hall swept, when the explosion

Panic


happened. It had been in the distance, poorly muffled against interspersed concrete and space

found across distance and neighborhoods, its reverberations rattling the windows, and it may have

been a Baghdad commonplace, but there was a proximity to it, an instinctive closeness. She had

been in the kitchen again, holding a knife, preparing to prepare an onion. She replaced the knife

on the counter and moved towards the hallway, then towards the living room, the room where the

heavy metal door kept the world out. She stood at the window, its heavy fabric curtains drawn,

the glass panels pushed outwards. She drew the curtains back. She looked through the wrought

iron bars to watch a dreamy scene unfold – women emerging uncertainly from doorways,

congregating and congealing in clumps along the sidewalk, methodically, body language

betraying initial whispers that lead to loud talking, then bodies turning to gaze in the direction of

the vanished sound now replaced by discordant sirens. More women emptied out into the street,

from doorways unseen, the congregations growing larger, louder, Umm Quassem watching,

unmoving, then wails and individual departure: “Hurry! Hurry! Something has happened!”

Then mass movement. Umm Quassem moved to the heavy metal door, unlocking it, opening it,

taking her first tentative steps into her new day. She looked out after the women, and the more

that came streaming by, then more and more. The smell of burning diesel hung in the still air of

the fluid neighborhood, not so uncommon, yet different, sweeter somehow. She took the two

steps off the stoop and looked to her right – black, unnatural smoke rose and rose, then dissipated

high, high among the blue of a cloudless sky. She was on the sidewalk when a young woman in a

thick mesh bathrobe brushed by her, wordless, her heavy panting as audible as her heavy

barefooted steps. Umm Quassem began walking quickly in the direction of the migrating women.

Her legs were no longer controlled by her brain, her eyes usurping all neural energy to focus on

the billowing smoke on the near and imminently reachable horizon. Something else moved her

legs forward in seemingly shocking rapid succession.

Umm Quassem wasn’t designed to run. She had never run in her adult life, the

wonderment of the childhood frolic not part of her remembrance. But she ran, her light blue

‘abaya restricting, constricting, but she ran. Silently and directly. She ran. Her lungs hurt. Her

ankles hurt. Her head hurt, her eyes tearing, her brow glistening, then beading with a heavy

sweat. There were women in front of her, behind her, along parallel and perpendicular streets she

could not see, coming from all directions, a convergence of women because they all knew where

their men would be.

Panic


How far does a body run to meet its destiny? An hour? A day? A fortnight? A lifetime?

There could be no preparation for what awaited Umm Quassem, only the slowing of the body, the

heavy breathing, and the racing of the heart, a wading through proverbial chaos, a languid

movement among the seemingly immovable, both living and torn apart, the mind filtering and

sorting, filtering and sorting, searching for guidance and sanity …

Oh … who are we? Who are we that do such things to one another? What wellhead of

hatred have we tapped to return us to such a state? What pitiless plague has been unleashed at the

dawn of the harvest? What are we, so alone on the banks of a rising river? Why do we not

move? Why can we not move? Umm Quassem waded through other people’s tragedy looking

for her own. The sounds of modern machines and primitive wailing colluding to usher in a new

reality, a new life, a darkened brooding one where hopelessness triumphs at its brutal whim.

Umm Quassem’s now bare feet were smeared in the blood of generations, the soles of her feet cut

and rutted by sharp objects beneath the flotsam of blood and debris, and desperate voices rising:

“Umm Quassem! Umm Quassem! They have killed these good men. Killed them for

wanting for work. They have killed them all. Where are you, God?”

It was the voice of a neighbor, a friend, a woman her age with two boys and a husband.

But only the voice reached her as she plodded forth, lurching and stumbling forth on unthinking

instinct, tearless, looking down at the right exact moment to find her men in a godless state,

nearly side-by-side, twisted and contorted, pain and gasping melded to their faces, flesh bared to

an unremitting past noon sun. She knelt, her ‘abaya settling into pooled blood, soaking it

upwards into thirsty cotton fabric. She touched her son’s still-warm face, then her husband’s

hand, his wedding band shiny. Then she gently eased herself atop them both.


The Sh*t-end of the Stick

The school day ended with rocks being thrown at him, a routine of sorts that occurred nearly

every day for no defensible reason, just one of those things. He stood steady there in the wood

that led to his house. He’d tried running, hiding, throwing the thrown rocks back, but still they

came, the rocks and childish invectives. This day’d involve the improvised stick defense, the one

where he’d take the biggest, most scarily knotted stick he could find and run at them. They’d run

away as they had before; he’d go home. They’d meet again tomorrow, or the day after.

It was still drizzling rocks, the muffled laughter and snorting insidious in its effects, as he

readied himself for his defense, his gaze outward, bending at the knees for a three foot long stick,

thick and sturdy, heavy among the autumn leaves and unruly blades of grass. Rising. But

something wasn’t right. The stick didn’t feel barky, it felt more … chewy, viscous, alive. That’s

what he thought. He looked down at his clenched hand as it rose up, wincing, the stench reaching

his nostrils, his physical body and immortal soul recoiling, all in near simultaneous, unitary

motion. He wanted to say goddamn it, wanted to bellow it, the way he’d heard his father say it,

violently, but he didn’t know what it meant. Not really. He dropped the foul-smelling stick and

repulsively, instinctively wiped his hand along the length of his trousers, desperately, repeatedly.

A rock hit him in the chest. A hooting erupted in the distance, a chorus of joyous disbelief. He

looked out again, then down at the discarded stick, rubbing the impact point with his clean hand.

It hurt. No more rocks came his way. He turned and walked away.

When he got home, trailing the stink smeared along the wrinkled seam of those trousers,

he got – as his mother would later recount to his father – “his ass beat raw” as prelude, then, as

dénouement, his nose shoved and rubbed and held into the trousers his father had fished out of the

hamper.

“That’ll learn ya, goddamn it.”

And there it was again.

He was in the bathroom for a long thirty minutes rubbing the tip of his nose and bathing

the inside of his nostrils. They remained unscrubbed in his memory. Later, he lay in bed

consciously breathing through his mouth, his eyes attached to a single spot on the ceiling. By the

time sleep came, or just before, he was breathing through his nose again. He knew by morning, it

wouldn’t matter anymore anyway.

The first heavy rains came through that night, the vanguard of massive systems that

would form and ready themselves along the plains to the east, coming first in torrents of water,



cold and wet, then later, as the temperature dropped, cajoled by higher altitudes, into snow. But

on that night, he slept through the rains.

The snows of these high foothills have a wet, heavy quality, sticking to bare branches like

a doughy paste sweeping away appendages past their prime, the ground trading its pastels for a

soothing monochrome, tucking their spent wards into a winter-long slumber. Word would go

forth from before dawn that roads had become impassable, schools had been canceled, telephone

wires downed, an accident on Rural Route 12A, a cat still unaccounted for. Snow fall and

accumulation brought with it a brutal division of labor, the young to play, the able to toil, the

hardened to carry on, the idle dreamers to dream, the old to fret. In a long life’s memory, all

could be interchangeable. One had to be patient. And lucky.

The first such snow fall came in the early hours of late November. He was awakened

soon after day’s break by a harried mother:

“No school. Your father wants you dressed and outside.”

He felt hungry as he opened the door to face the out of doors. An uneven whiteness

stretched across the field and into the trees. The mountains beyond looked shorter, yet more

imposing, jutting as they did into the seemingly stagnant storm cloud cover. Black birds still

flew. Two boys tugged at two toboggans, the rope over their shoulder, trudging in high snow

towards a hill not so distant. His father’s voice broke the dreamy hypnotic spell:

“Get those shovels from the shed and clear the walk. Then start on the drive.”

He did as he was told, the shovel pressed against his stomach, pushing, a reasonably

cleared path in his wake. The warmth built-up beneath his layers, and the pain came as the shovel

hit uneven portions of the long walk, then the driveway, driving the handle into his gut.

Goddamn it, he thought, adjusting to the unevenness, pushing forth again. The handle would

drive into his belly another half dozen times before his labors were through. And later – much

later – he would poke at the perfectly circled bruise just above his navel. But before that, still out

in the elements, his father called out from the idling car:

“I can get out now. I want this drive looking like spring when I get back.”

His father drove forward slowly. He watched the exhaust climb, linger, then dissipate

along his deformed piles of snow.

The sky had darkened early. The corned beef stew tasted good. He slurped quietly from

a spoon, watching caged pepper grains through a clear glass shaker. His mother, in the other



room, talked into the telephone: “I been trying to get a hold of him since three hours ago. He’s

yours during the day, so you tell me where’s he at. It’s ridiculous you can’t tell me something as

simple as that.”

They found his father the next afternoon. He’d wrecked the car in a shallow ravine and

probably survived. But then froze to death at night. The sheriff had seen such things before

along that very same stretch.

They buried him as best they could in the hardening earth. His mother took the money

from his sock drawer. It paid for the flowers. Such was his contribution to mourning.

His mother continued on at the filling station. But those were not living wages. He left

school for work at the meat cutting plant, a red brick-faced relic from a gone age still relevant to

those who needed it. Arcane laws from another time had long since attached themselves to the

place, in their original form, more or less impervious to technology’s evolutionary impulses, still

managing to make the place reasonably clean, reasonably safe, a reasonably promising place for a

young man of eighteen to be. No one complained. It was good enough.

Brooms, mops, and brushes are easily manipulated. And he worked hard, on his hands

and knees, scrubbing the tiled floor like an anachronism, in the chilled, cavernous interior, an

immigrant charwoman as native man in some distant fin-de-some-siècle scenario. Dickens

updated. If such a thing were possible. He returned home smelling of piney disinfectants and

entrails. He bathed slowly, meticulously, every square inch of skin attended to. He ate lightly

and slept easily. The dawn took him back out again, six out of the seven days.

The diligent worker who doesn’t grouse rarely goes unnoticed, not the one using his

fingernails to remove calcified blood from the grout between tiles, at least.

“How’d you like to move on up to meat cutter? We can show you how, not a problem.

Nothing to it. Pays more, too. Then on to wrapping. And packaging. It’s unlimited out there.”

They showed him how to cut, where to cut and how often, a few easy lessons quickly

absorbed, and placed him along an assembly line of other like-minded workers, quiet in the rote

contemplation of their noisy labors, mechanical knives cutting through flesh and bone with

industrial ease. Rest breaks disrupted the tedium of work, but his rhythm prevailed in his

thoughts over the break, a mind in motion tending to remain as such. At times, he’d stand in

place over the work to be done throughout his fifteen minute break. It didn’t matter to him. He

wasn’t tired. He saw the angles of the grains, knew the force required for harmonious and



efficient movement - depending on the cut - anticipating the woman standing to his left, aware of

the pace of the other woman standing to his right, his force calibrated just so.

But no man is a machine, flesh slippery in its raw state. A misapplication of force in his

focused state sent his right hand into the path of vibrating teeth. At first there was a viscous,

translucent silence and disbelief, suspended for a strange eternity, his voice gurgling through a

miasma of stinging silence in his head – oh, goddamn, goddamn, goddamn it …

Nothing to it.

He staggered back from his position in the line, his left cupping his right, stanching the

flow of blood from the three shorn knuckles, his pinky finger and thumb jutting out like saplings

after a wildfire, turning to walk away, only to collapse on the floor a few steps away, his left hand

giving way, his right slapping incomplete against the floor, his dulling eyes watching as blood

pulsed as if from three parallel drain pipes at the knuckles’ openings, flowing along the subtly

inclined floor towards the drain beneath the steel table, mingling with bovine blood, becoming

indistinguishable, disappearing.

Then welcomed darkness.

“There was never any realistic hope for reattachment. Not really. I’m sorry. Just too

much nerve and tissue damage.” This was the doctor to his mother. He was awake now, after

three of being out, but fatigued, fatigued. His mother sat in a chair opposite the bed, smiling

intermittently, inquiring as to his pain levels. He felt a palpable heartbeat in a void.

“You’ll have to learn to use the left one like you did the right one,” she said once. And

gave him a soft rubber ball.

He squeezed the soft rubber ball gently with his left hand, his mind nowhere in particular.

The bed was comfortable, the physicians occasional, the nurses considerate. His mother’d step

outside the building to smoke a cigarette and something about seeing to a few things. He

wouldn’t see her for the rest of the afternoon. She’d return in the morning before work, then in

the afternoon after it. They each had their lives to lead.

For the better part of a month, he was prayed for, whispered about with deep, tsk-tsking

sympathy, the profile on the evening news showing a young man in his prime, cut down by

outmoded machinery and a callous indifference to established norms of industry safety.

Mountain Credit Union established a savings account for him – essentially a large container to

drop change into - a human interest series in the morning daily, an interview with a sympathetic

labor relations official, legal minds of varying motivations and skills paid courtesy calls, leaving



behind brochures and promises of brave new worlds. The lingering could only last for so long.

Collective memory ached to move forward. A population still needed its meat cut, wrapped,

packaged.

The better part of his month gave way to the cold winter of another, where the shoots of

memory fade, wither, die. He had left the hospital. The meat cutting limited liability proprietors

settled with him for an undisclosed amount. He bought a reclining chair and a television, and

reclined and watched television. Mountain Credit Union collected $114.25 and sent him a

cashier’s check. He, in turn, sent a thank you note inside a colorful cardboard card written in a

near indecipherable scrawl. The thrift mounted it behind a glass frame in their lobby.

A young man can lull himself to many points of pointless distraction, his days becoming

identical days. A young woman of some enterprise can bring him back, refocus his purpose. A

spring Tuesday proved a different day. She watched him before he saw her. She liked his

calmness, sitting there patiently in the waiting room chair, holding a traumatized hand with the

care of a new father, his face placid under unruly, wavy brown hair, an absent stare out of heavy

lids of blue eyes, as if he were in some other place where, say, pain and worry and regret were

quaint notions to be dramatized for affect, the slow, deliberate breathing, his chest rising and

falling rhythmically.

She limped over to where he sat.

“Hello. I’ve heard about you. And read about you, too.”

With that she sat down. The talking came easy, an attachment to detachments that had

been slowly evolving to define them each. She limped because her mother’s dog’s incisors and

jaws had severed gastrocnemius nerves, if she was pronouncing that correctly. She didn’t know

much more than that, but he could sympathize, he told her, very much so, showing her his still-

bandaged hand. She touched it gently, suspending her finger tips to where his could have been,

waiting, almost expecting to make it all better.

That day – their first day – they waited for one another in the waiting room, then spent

the afternoon in the backyard of his house, searching out similarities, glossing over differences,

drinking beer from tall, sweating cans. The sun gloried through the wordy afternoon, an air of

fate drifting through, peculiar in its light scent, convinced of its inevitability, the time before the

dusk glinting across the cans playfully arranged in the tall grass, leaning haphazardly against

blades a fraction their weight.



The talking moved to inside the house, and the talking merged into silence, a hot,

desperate silence that found them on the floor, under a blanket and asleep as midnight came and

went. In the morning, not far removed from the light’s first break, she awoke, dressed and limped

out of the house. An inglorious start to the day, she knew, but there were no alternatives. Jobs

for her were hard to come by. Later, she wished she had left him a note. She’d written it many

times over in her head.

The September day she knocked on his door and called through the screen door, he

instinctively thought her there to spend another afternoon together, a pleasant surprise that never

failed to surprise. There could be no retracting the smile elicited by her voice calling to him. He

pushed the screen door, inviting her in, but she didn’t move as she told him of her pregnancy.

Probably by another. She couldn’t be sure, but was pretty sure, and that she didn’t know of any

shameless way to tell him. She was sorry. Then she turned and ran unevenly to her car, idling

roughly in the driveway. He stood watching out after her long after she has was no longer there.

He wasn’t thinking sad thoughts as much as he was thinking about her. He had hoped it would

end differently, somehow, end with them together, the way they’d seen it, old and together, with

many more afternoons in the backyard emptying tall beer cans. Instead, she’d be having someone

else’s child.

His mother set wandering roots down two towns over to be with Frank, some older man

he didn’t know, leaving a few squirreled belongings in the house. She returned at haphazard

intervals for odds and ends, a living ghost with reasonably friendly words coming in and going

out the door. The days were spent as slowly as the settlement money, the late fall and early

winter months returning yet again to prove their solidarity with his short days and long nights. A

morning after a snowy night, he found himself looking out over the undisturbed expanse of

uneven white in remembrance of his days not so far removed. He didn’t much miss the shoveling

of the driveway, nor the pain of the shovel pressing against his stomach, nor his father. It was a

general missing, as if something had been misplaced. He missed his fingers, he knew. He missed

her, too. But an overarching thought never crystallized, never came into focus, a melancholy

without an understanding of the melancholic, only a wistful weariness, unarticulated, that lived

with him.

Until the thaws of the spring returned. And a new job came to him at a small church,

poor and shabby, a large room reserved for the needs of needful and hurt children. There was to



be no proselytizing, no magical myth-making, no warnings of damnation or conditions, or

hypocrisies for the children to ponder, only doing the best that could be done, and a meager pay

that he hardly ever took at all. But he knew himself to be lucky, comfortable at home and full,

able to give until there was no more to give, and the children, too, understood, and looked upon

his two-fifths hand as they would upon their own ailments and trepidations, unconsciously and

unspoken of. It was a good way to spend the long days and into the early night, he didn’t mind it

at all, the grass in his backyard growing taller still from neglect and disuse, his nights at home

spent asleep from a good fatigue, until the small morning hours that took him back.

And Sunday’s were ice cream days.

It was another Tuesday morning when she limped across the church parking lot with a

small child in her arms. He watched her from the window drawing closer, expressionless. Then

he went out to meet her. He can’t see and he can’t hear, she told him. He looked at the tiny boy

in her arms, his eyes open, but not there, his fiery red hair alive and jumping. He looked at her,

still the same despite the missed time.

“He’s not yours,” she said. “He’s not yours, but I wished he was.”

She freed a hand to touch his hurt hand.

“Goddamn. I’ll be goddamned.” He could smile at such clear words.

He gently drew the child from her arms to hold him in his and led her inside to where his

many happy children were playing, a space filled with movement and sound, to a place where

they could be together for a while.


A Fracas. At the Farkuses

Normally, I wouldn’t have been so elated to see the house’s front door. But I was. I groped

around the darkness, fitting key into lock. The door fell open. I stepped in, closing it behind me.

A modicum of safety from insanity. My back was against the door, my eyes having just shut

momentarily, before:

“Tom? Is that you?”

It was Doris. From upstairs.

“Yeah, it’s me,” I responded.

“What time is it?” She called down.

I had no idea. “4:30,” I called up. That seemed fair enough.

“Goodness,” was the muted response.

I mounted the carpeted stairs. Slowly. My legs ached, maybe from hunger, maybe from

fatigue. I walked down the hallway towards our room, meanly-lit, probably from the bedside

lamp. I couldn’t remember. The door was three-quarters the way open. I pushed it further and

stepped in.

Doris lay in bed, in the same position I had left her earlier that night. The intricate

traction machine suspended her cocooned limbs like a futuristic puppeteer. All four limbs were

cast in graffitied plaster. Doris had many friends. In kinder moments, I thought of her as my fair

marionette.

“What happened to you?” She asked, surprisingly lucid, all things considered.

I thought better of just coming-out and saying it. There are always countless ways of

saying the same thing. Short and to the point. Long and drawn out. Or something in between.

And with Doris, there could be no certainty the question and answer session would ever come to

an end. I craved sleep. It would have been something else entirely if Doris were nicely asleep.

“There’s been a … ah … fracas …,” I relented.

An open door is an open door.

“At the Farkuses?” I could tell she wanted to sit-up, to lurch forward. Her voice with a

distinct hunger at its core.

“Yes. Fracas. At the Farkuses.” I thought how absurd, or even trivial, those few words

all together sounded.

“Really?”

“Really.”



I may have rubbed an eye. I may have leaned my head back and sighed. Those things of

habit seldom imprint themselves.

“Well?” Doris. Patience. Virtue. Words never uttered in the same sentence. Not by

me, nor anyone I could imagine.

I studied my words, thought through my options. I would do this for myself, an act of

preemptive selflessness to the self, resignation the better part of valor, coming out with it all to

conserve on heartache.

“… And?”

Unto the breach.

“Well … I show-up for our Scrabble night … they of course sent their love. We said

another prayer for you …”

“Tom!”

“Fine. Fine. It was a nice prayer, though. Just wanted you to know. Anyway, we’re

playing Scrabble. And it’s the usual. They don’t know what the heck their talking about when it

comes to vocabulary. The dictionary is out, getting thumbed to pieces. And Mary had prepared

her famous dip to go with the finger foods. Bob had some new wine he’d wanted us …”

A grunt, as the machine’s tentacles jangled over the weight of her impatience. She was

trying to adjust herself.

“So we’re eating, drinking, playing …”

“Jesus-God, Tom!”

“… and Mary, out of absolutely nowhere, she wasn’t even tipsy, we’d had, I don’t know,

a glass and a half each so far, stands and yells, like some crazed, homeless bag lady, ‘Bob fucked

my cousin,’ pointing at Bob. ‘You cousin-fucker, you!’”

Doris sucked wind through her teeth, the bed moving as if sideways, as she tried with the

conviction of an ancient god to move the immovable, herself, momentarily forgetting her

condition. She arrested herself.

“Which one?”

“Which one what?”

“Which cousin?”

“I don’t know. How’m I supposed to know? Marissa. Melina. Something …”

“Oh … well, she’s not overly attractive …”

“What the … ”

“Well, I’m just …”



I turned to walk-out of the room. I wasn’t feeling up to the task of the storyteller, despite

my fleeting conviction. Doris can do that to you. That and she doesn’t readily lend herself to the

role of the story-listener. I was back in the hallway, thinking maybe a snack before bed, when:

“You’d better get back in here, Mister.”

Every neuron synapse in my brain was telling me to keep on walking, to go to the

kitchen, to go to sleep, to tell her some other time, something. Except for one. That lone neuron

holdout forced me to turn, to retrace the half-dozen or so steps already taken. I was back to

where I had started, starring at my immovable feast.

“It’s Marina, by the way.”

I can’t remember if I massaged my temples at that very moment, but I am now, thinking

about it.

“So …” But I had forgotten where I’d left off.

“So Bob and Marina …”

“Right, right … so at this point Mary’s standing, and she’s doing this finger-wagging-

jutting motion at Bob, pretty much screaming: ‘You’re a motherfucking cousin-fucker, you

cocksucker!’ And Bob is sitting there, with his hand quite literally suspended in the tile bag,

maybe even with food still wedged in his cheeks. I wouldn’t know. I just wanted to get the heck

out of there.”

“I can imagine …

I think I smiled at her sympathy …

“Well, come on. Get on with it.”

… However fleeting that has always been.

“At this … that point, Bob did what anyone would do, if you can remember. He denied it

…”

“Now …”

“ … saying, ‘you’re crazy, woman. For all I know, you’ve been fucking my cousin,’ at

which point Mary says, indignantly I may add, ‘yeah, right, I’ve been fucking Bernie.’ At which

Bob may have leapt out of his chair, his voice surely did, saying something like, ‘See! Ha! You

just said you’ve been fucking Bernie. You’re the cousin-fucker, cousin-fucker.’ This was

probably the wrong approach to take, believe me …”

“Oh, I’m believing …”

“… because at this point Mary is digging through the finger food platter, looking for one

of those little sausages to throw at Bob. Which she did. And I’m just sitting there …”



“Holy Goodness!”

“No shit!”

She looked at me, and I at her.

“Yes … so, and this part is fuzzy, because I don’t remember looking away, as much as I

wanted to look away, but Bob’s voice was what refocused my attentions on the matters at hand:

‘Now you put that fucking thing away before there’s real hell to pay.’ I looked from Bob to

Mary, in that slow-motion way, you know when time seems to be standing still, as if …”

“Tom, I’m about a moment away from calling Mary myself …”

“… and Mary’s holding this gun. I don’t know anything about guns, but there is this

black monster in her hands. And she’s not trembling in the slightest. Not a movement, like she’s

done this a million times before. And Bob is quiet now, just sitting there, like me, maybe out of

deference to the size of that thing, or maybe because I guess he realized that she now had some

sort of upper hand. Me? I wasn’t even breathing. So Mary, she draws this deep, fine breath, and

she’s calm now, well, calmer, and she says something like: ‘Bob, what have I been to you all

these years?’ It was rhetorical, that much was obvious, but Bob goes to answer something, and

Mary thrusts that black conversation killer at him, and he shuts up right-quick-like. ‘What is it

that you’re always telling me, Bob? What is that thing about the Lord and His Good Ways, and

us having to work our way back into His Graces after such long time in our wilderness.’ And

Bob says something not very bright like: ‘I meant that mostly in an illustrative way,’ but Mary

was having none of that in her moment, saying, ‘Shut the fuck up, you cousin-fucker…’”

“Where’d she get that gun … and those words …”

“… so Bob shut the fuck up. Again. And Mary is deep, deep in her moment here,

saying: ‘Who is it that gets treated this way, Bob? I don’t think you’d treat a dog you didn’t like

so well this way. Would you?’ I thought maybe she’d have a tear in her eye, but then I thought

maybe she’d thought about this so much all reactions had been drained away. And only actions

remained. She wasn’t done: ‘You don’t treat your stupid friends this way, do you? Not even

Tom over there.’ She waved the gun my way. I think I just smiled, maybe nodded. I can’t

remember. ‘Did you think you’d be saved with good words and occasional good thoughts, Bob?

I’m pretty sure that’s not the way it works. I’m pretty sure it starts with treating those people who

love with you with the respect and dignity they deserve. And fairly, too. But that ought to go

without saying, shouldn’t it, Bob? Don’t you think the Good Lord would expect if nothing at all,

at least He could expect that from you. But you managed to reduce it down to memorizing words

and refrains and telling everyone how holy you always feel. Maybe there’s no goodness, and this



is your way of showing me, right Tom?’ She looked me again, but not with the gun this time, and

this time I know I nodded.”

Doris was blinking furiously now, manically, like she had something in her eyes.

“You okay?”

“Yes, I …”

“I think she was trying to get to the heart of some matter, Mary was, to an answer of

some sort. But I don’t think she knew how to ask it. ‘My cousin, Bob? More of a sister than my

own sister. Of all the people you could’ve … and probably did, you had to pick on her? What

did I do to deserve this? Where does all this come from? Are things so bad? Are you so …? Do

you want me to start listing out all those things you want me to do upstairs, in here, on this table,

in that chair Tom is sitting in …’ I think I moved uneasily in that chair. All I could think about

was getting out of there. Anyway, Bob was shaking his head, probably not even listening to her.

‘And I don’t even want to do it most of the times. Sometimes, but not all the times … What else

is there? What other things are lurking around, just waiting for me to discover? I don’t want to

know. I don’t want to know …’ She paused, I don’t know, maybe to think things through.

Then: ‘I want them back to the way they were before. What happened to the before?’”

I stopped to make sure I’d gotten everything so far.

“And then silence. It was a nice silence. Just the three of us. I think I’ll remember that

silence for a while.”

Doris’s blinking had slowed. I watched her watching me.

“Then Bob says: ‘There’s a lot of overreaction now. We need to all calm down. I don’t

know, maybe you’re in the midst of some sort of demon possession. We need to trust that the

Lord will guide our …’ At that point, Mary’s gun goes off, just a huge, deafening blast. You

haven’t heard something like that. I fell off the chair. I looked up, but Bob was still sitting in that

chair of his, dazed, I’ll give you that. Mary, she’s still holding that gun, its barrel smoking like

the nostril of a stuffed-up dragon, Bob looking at the hole in the wall behind him, probably a bit

shell-shocked then, turning, saying: ‘Ha! Missed. The Lord protects those He …’ And I’ll be

goddamned if that gun didn’t go off again, louder, more angry somehow, and Bob and that chair

went flying back, blood everywhere, oh, what a mess, what a mess, and I’m on the floor, crawling

and crawling to the couch, because I couldn’t stand, and I climbed onto that couch like a small

child, and Mary was still standing there, and Bob was still looking a dead mess on the floor, and

I’m thinking I need to get out of there.”

I paused for a breath.



Doris’s blinking episode had subsided. She stared at me with her mouth open, kind of

how Bob’s mouth was wide open, in shock, but Doris was still alive.

“Bob? Dead?”

“Bob is dead. Just dead.”

Doris may have been cast white.

There was very little more for me to say.

“Do you want me to continue?”

Doris didn’t respond.

I pushed ahead.

“I’m on the couch, sitting now, and Mary is slowly regaining whatever it was that was

just lost. Maybe thirty seconds had passed. Maybe a minute. I don’t know. And she steps

around the table, over Bob, and on-over towards the couch where I’m sitting. You know, that

two-seater against the window …”

Doris nodded.

“’You’d better call the police now,’ she says in a very calm way. I don’t move an inch.

Just sitting there. Trying to be as small as possible. ‘Go on,’ she says. Make that call. I’m done

now.’ But she’s still holding that smoking thing, but in her left hand now. So that was a bit of a

relief. I stand and walk to the telephone. And from behind me, Mary says: ‘What do they say?

Cap? Pop-a-cap? Tell them I also popped a cap into that husband-fucking bitch, too. Two,

actually. I didn’t miss the first time. Have them go there first, I’m not going anywhere. It’s a

twofer. That’s right.’ At this point, she’s sitting on that two-seater, leafing through a magazine.”

Doris stared through me with that universal look of speechless disbelief. I didn’t care. I

was done. I was beyond snack-tired at that point. I imagined a warm bed and sleep. It might

have been around five by that point. I turned, again, to walk out of the room.

And from behind me: “What you do?”

I turned back. “What do you mean, ‘what you do?’”

“What did you do then?”

“I dialed that phone. I called the police. What’d you think I was gonna do?”

“Okay.”

I turned and walked into the hallway, walking towards the guest bedroom. I could hear

the clanging of metal from the traction machine. “Tom?” It was not quite a whisper.

I was losing patience. I tromped back to the room’s doorway.

“You’re not mad again, are you? We’re still okay, right?”



“Yeah, we’re still okay.”

“At least I had the courtesy to fuck someone from work. Someone you didn’t know.”

Doris’s strengths never lay in word selection. It’s what made her such a lousy Scrabble

partner. I took a moment to find my calm place, just as I had promised myself. Then: “I

wouldn’t call that a courtesy … but yes, better than a cousin.”

“Okay, just checking. Good night.”

“Good night.”

And with that, sleep could finally be had.

And Doris could have her nightmares, and I my fantasies of what-ifs.


Juicy, Doucement

“Hey Juicy, wait up.” That would be Amy Zahn, waving crazily, running like a little brunette

lunatic across the grass. I keep walking. Besides, I no longer answer to that nickname.

“Ohhh jay … Come on. Slow up.” Those little legs are sure moving now. But I have to

get home, so I don’t have time for Amy Zahn. Although she is a very nice person. We’ve been

friends since the first grade.

I keep walking.

“Odessa Jean. Hey!”

I stop and turn. She’s still running, in full sprint, getting closer and noisier. She just

might run through me or right on by. I find myself wondering how many feet it will take her to

come to a complete stop. And in an instant, she’s there. Panting.

“Don’t call me that,” I say and start walking again.

“Call you,” she says huffing, “what?” she concludes puffing, following closely behind.

“Odessa Jean.”

“Well, you weren’t hearing Juicy or O.J.” She’s at my side now.

“I heard you.”

“Oh.”

I’m back up to my pre-Amy pace.

“Did you want to come over later?”

“Not today. I can’t.”

We walk along in silence. It’s a nice day. I like the fall, but not as much as I love the

spring, when everything seems so new.

“Are you excited?” Amy again.

“About what?”

“Your Dad.”

“Of course.”

Some questions are more stupid than others. But my father is coming home tonight. So I

don’t mind. We keep walking at my pace.

“Well, okay. I guess I’ll take-off home, too.”

“Okay, Amy. I’ll see you on Monday.”

“Want to do homework together this weekend?”

“I’ll see you on Monday.”

Juicy, Doucement


And with that, Amy stops along the sidewalk.

“Bye, Juicy.”

I wave to her, but she only sees the back of my hand. I wasn’t trying to be rude. I really

do like Amy. It’s just that I really need to be home. I’ll make it up to her next week.

The door is open and the house smells like cooking. I can hear the hissing of the pressure

cooker from the kitchen.

“Hi Mom!”

I place my bag on the chair in the hallway. My mother walks in from the kitchen. She

looks cute in her apron, sandals and bandana.

“You look cute.”

“Aren’t you sweet.”

She’s looking around the hallway. I can tell her mind is preoccupied, her thoughts

probably ticking-off the list of things she has yet to do.

“Is there anything you need me to do down here?”

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so.”

I pick the bag up. “I’ll be upstairs.”

“You don’t want your father to see your room a mess, do you?”

I climb the stairs as my mother returns to the kitchen.

By any honest measure, my room is a mess – an unmade bed, piles of newspapers, books,

magazines, color pencils, pens, scissors, clipping shreds, empty bags, stuffed bags of ripped-up

paper, cloths, cloths, cloths. Stuff. I’ve been made aware of the mess on several occasions. I

keep one area clutter-free, over by the desk, but there are plates with crumbs there, too. I pile

them up and take them downstairs every few days. But that’s still a day off yet. The book bag

slips off my shoulder and thumps against the carpeted floor. Poor books. I tiptoe through the

junk and ease right on into the desk chair. It’s a big desk. I could sleep on it, even, and not have

to worry about rolling off. The computer’s on, like it’s always on, and the printer hums or

buzzes, like it always does. I’ve been waiting for them to die since forever. They just won’t.

I move the keyboard out of the way and drag a big handmade cardboard-bound scrapbook

across the tabletop. I open to the first page. It’s pink, the page. There’s Dad smiling as he does

when he forgets someone’s watching him. And Mom, too, is there. I’ve stenciled flowers all

along the edges of the paper. It’s a nice opening page, I think.

Juicy, Doucement


I turn pages. At the Winter Break play last year, lots of empty beach scenes, calm waters,

but the stenciling on these aren’t as good, the lines aren’t straight and the colors are all wrong.

But once it’s on, it’s on. Here’s Dad alone at the front door, ready. I had cut and pasted the black

and white insignia of his 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit from a military website. I think it’s the

right one. I forgot to ask him before he left. We took a family picture outside the house before

we got in the car to say goodbye. That’s there, too. We didn’t take any more pictures after that.

We drove in silence, said one more goodbye, and drove back home.

I didn’t have to be told where he was going. Or what it meant. I already knew all that.

He came up to the room anyway, knocked, came in, and sat on the bed. I was at the desk. He

told me about Iraq, its importance to this country, how sometimes its better to think ahead than to

regret later.

“You don’t like to regret things, do you Odessa Jean?”

“I don’t think so.”

Of course I didn’t, he said, nobody does. And it’s true, nobody does.

It wouldn’t take long because it couldn’t take long. There were too many other things to

do afterwards. It’s best to do one thing at a time. Straight down the line. I wouldn’t do my

French homework and my math one at the same time, would I? I’d never thought about it, so I

said non, jamais. So there’d be nothing to worry about. It would be a memory soon, something

we could remember together. I can do, and you can start the remembering part. I liked that idea.

And you can send me letters with any questions you can come up with. Just in case something

doesn’t want to make sense. Okay, I can do that. And I could. I liked writing letters. And, the

more I think about it, maybe the best way for us to remember together is for you to keep track of

it for us. There’ll be stories coming back in magazines and newspapers and on the Internet about

what we’re doing. It’ll be hard to hide out there in the desert. It’ll be like you there, too. You

keep a diary of the news for us. And when I come back, we’ll go through it together. Like a

yearbook? Something like that, lots of pictures, some words. Whatever you want to make of it.

But save that last page for the two of us. We’ll put just the right pictures and words on that last

page together. Then we’ll put it on the bookshelf. I could see it up there on the bookshelf in the

living room. Then we won’t have to worry about those types of things again.

I wondered how I’d make the binding and what title I’d put on the cover. I would need

lots of colored paper and specialty pens for this project. That much I did know.

Dad took me to the hobby store and got me what we needed. I punched holes in the

papers wide enough for pieces of red yarn to flow through them. The cover and back were thick

Juicy, Doucement


cardboard, the front with a protective plastic covering. I stacked the blank papers and cardboard

and threaded the yarn through. I tied a tight bow in the back. And waited.

That was before he left eighteen months ago. And even after he left, nothing much

happened. I started to fill the blank pink pages of the book with pictures I’d taken with the

camera I’d gotten for Christmas. I had one of Mom coming out of the shower, but she made me

delete it before I could paste it in the book. Then she took the camera away for a while. But after

the war had started, I didn’t need the camera so much anymore. It was March and it was dark

out. And I got ready to get busy.

We were told the war had started. There were cameras there. And an email to make the

war ours came the same night: “I won’t be able to send anything for a while. I’ll see you at the

other end.” I cut and pasted his short note on the very last pink page.

The newspapers came big and bold and stuffed with what I needed daily from Los

Angeles right to the door, and two weekly magazines came by mail on Monday. Sometimes

Tuesday. The newspapers I could cut up that evening, but I had to wait for the end of the week

before I could have my way with the magazines. I liked the shiny magazine paper better, but the

newspapers had better and bigger headlines and maps with arrows. The scrapbook would end up

having tons of inky fingerprints all over the place. They looked to me artsy, though, so I stopped

trying to erase them or draw over them. Inky thumbprints are a good starting point for paisley

prints. I learned that from a scrapping book. So some pages have colonies of colorful amoebae-

looking things slithering about. It adds more than it takes away.

There was too much information, too many maps and arrows; diagrams and illustrations;

history and opinions; cartoons and letters; newspapers and magazine; the evening news and the

afternoon news; the internet and links that went further and deeper; pictures and videos. I

followed the arrows across the maps, read long and interesting articles, knew when sandstorms

swept across the desert’s floor, looked at dead people in ditches, saw things burning and people

running, sad and crying.

I didn’t know what to include, what he’d like for us to remember. Nothing said it neatly.

Or clearly. The big headlines in the newspapers made the most sense, the biggest news piece of

the day. In Los Angeles, at least. And pictures from there on the front page, they seemed

important. But it doesn’t tell a whole story, not really. There were other things I couldn’t

include. I cut and saved, always with the idea of coming back later and adding what seemed to be

missing. But more kept coming in. I couldn’t keep up. I had my routine, after school and on the

weekends. One day, one page.

Juicy, Doucement


I have five hundred and sixteen pages in all, each numbered in the bottom right hand

corner. The five hundred and seventeenth page is blank.

I turn past the pink pages to the first of the blue war pages, where the stories I’d chosen

for us to remember are, a few from many, many, for the umpteenth time, a daily ritual it seemed,

every day remembered in its way.

I turn the blue pages to see where I’ll be today:

March 20 U.S. Attacks Iraq: War to Oust Hussein Begins with Airstrikes

Orange pictures of their city at night with flames and smoke. And a map of the country. I had

added notes at the bottom wondering who puts out fires in a war. Wondering if their houses are

made of wood, too.

*

March 21 Ground Attack Begins: 16 killed in Helicopter Crash are First Allied Deaths of War.

I couldn’t find a picture of the helicopter crash. And I didn’t want to, either. There are a few

pictures of tanks and trucks lined up and a map diagramed with movement arrows. I wondered

how the mothers of those dead soldiers felt, how sad they must have felt. I drew sixteen daisies at

the bottom of the page.

*

March 23 Resistance Slows Troops as They Head Towards a Battered Baghdad

There seems to be a lot of walking in war. I have several pictures of people – old, young, soldiers

– walking somewhere. Everywhere.

*

March 30 – Suicide Blast Kills 4 GIs at Checkpoint

I didn’t know what this meant. I do now. I pasted a very sweet picture of a soldier holding a girl.

She looks very young, three or four, maybe. I don’t think she was hurt.

*

April 1 – Allies Pound Iraqi Guard Near Capital

Juicy, Doucement


I have a picture of a woman on a bridge. She is sitting on the pavement, looking at a soldier.

She’s old. She looks scared. The caption says she had been caught in a crossfire on the bridge in

Hindiyah. The town in right on the Euphrates, midway between Al Hillah and Karbala. I marked

it on my wall map.

*

April 2 – U.S. Troops Break Through Iraqi Lines; POW is Rescued. As Combat Escalates,

Sparing Civilians Gets Harder, Too

An American girl-soldier had been captured, but she was rescued. I think the country was

relieved. I also have a picture of a 155-millimeter self-propelled howitzer firing on enemy

positions. In the distance.

*

April 4 – U.S. Tightens Noose on Baghdad

I didn’t like the imagery of this headline. I still don’t.

*

April 7 – U.S. Seizes Presidential Palaces: ‘We Own Baghdad,’ a Colonel Says as Iraqi

Resistance Dwindles

I have a picture of a long line of trucks along a canal, or stream, on fire. The canal, that is. Water

burning!

*

April 10 – Baghdad in U.S. Hands: Symbols of Regime Fall as Troops Take Control

And sure enough, there is a picture of a statue being pulled to the ground. I also have a picture of

people going crazy in the streets in what the newspaper says was “a spree of celebration and

looting.” I think I have a pictures of the looters. But they could be both. It’s still hard to tell.

*

April 12 – To Wary Baghdad Shopkeepers, ‘Liberation’ Looks Like a Jungle

This one was very true. I couldn’t find a happy picture of anyone, anywhere over there. Not on

that particular day, at least. I tried. So I have those pictures of wary-looking Baghdad

shopkeepers.

Juicy, Doucement


*

April 13 – Ancient Wonders Are History as Mob Plunders Iraq Museum

I think they even took the sinks from the bathrooms. That’s what the newspaper said. Can you

imagine?

*

April 21 – In the Wake of War, Sorting Out the Dead: Many Iraqi bodies were hastily buried

in shallow ditches after fighting ended. Volunteers are helping families identify their missing

relatives.

I don’t know why I cut this story out. I think I pasted it in before I really thought about it. I

could’ve removed it. I still could. But I didn’t. And I won’t. There’s a picture of two men

looking into the back of a pickup truck with high walls, like an open-air hearse stacked with

bodies. They’re crying.

*

May 2 – Bush Hails Victory in Iraq

I don’t think this was true.

*

May 2 – Hospitals Gutted, Medical Care Takes to Streets

The only day in which I have two pages. I cut this story out because I’d started volunteering

twice a week after school at Mom’s hospital. I have a picture of soldiers treating injured or sick

people. I could imagine myself there, helping. I’d stick to what I know. I’d help children.

Although I didn’t cut out any of the pictures of wounded kids I saw.

*

May 3 – Home at Last

This one is one of my favorites. It’s a very simple and clean page. In the center of the page,

there’s a picture of two sailors on an aircraft carrier in their dress whites. One of the sailors has a

huge smile on his face. The caption says that he’s smiling because one of them has just spotted

his wife and four children.

*

Juicy, Doucement


July 21 – Marriage Missing in Action: Jennifer Bowers makes do at home as Scott, her

husband, soldiers on in Iraq. After 10 months, there’s still no light at the end of their tunnel.

I showed Mom this article before I pasted it in the book. She didn’t say anything about it. I

didn’t ask. At least we weren’t alone in how we were feeling.

*

November 13 – Deadly Iraqi Blast Targets Italian Police

This was in Nasiriyah, south of the capital along one of the rivers. A real mess. Italy was starting

to wonder what it was doing over there in the first place. I found an English language Italian

website and read about it. I have a picture of the Italian prime minister with his hands formed as

if ready for prayer.

*

December 26 – Antiwar Family’s Conflict Fervent peace activists sort through complex

emotions as they mourn son killed in Iraq. He died a hero, they say – a parents’ contradiction

“I know it seems like a contradiction. How can your son be a hero in an unjust war?” This is

what the father asked in the article. I thought about him and just war, wondering if anyone has

ever said they want to start an unjust war. How do wars start? Where do they come from? That

was the better question, I thought, the one on my mind.

*

February 10 - With Rotation, Troops in Iraq to Get Grayer A greater proportion of the

replacements forces are older than 40. The military hopes their experience and maturity will be

assets

They looked tired, too. I thought of my father, his birthday would be in two days, wondering if

anyone out there with him would remember. Maybe wish him a happy birthday. I sent him a

card with my letter that week.

*

March 11 – U.S. Combat Fatalities in Iraq Surge Suddenly After a recent lull, nine troops die

in five days. Officials say it’s too early to discern a trend

Juicy, Doucement


When I leaf back through the scrapbook, day by day, I definitely see a discernable trend. It’s

more like a constant.

*

April 14 – Slain Soldier’s Two Sisters Grieve The woman’s military siblings weigh whether to

return to Iraq or stay home in Wisconsin

Their option came too late. I wished all three sisters had stayed home, there in Brookfield,

Wisconsin. I found some pictures of the town on the Internet. It looks very nice, even with all

that snow in winter.

*

May 10 – Another Tour of Anxiety for Troops’ Kin Families struggle to cope as soldiers in a

New England Army reserve unit have their stays in Iraq extended for a second time

May is my favorite month. I always hope for good things in May.

*

May 11 – Iraqi Women Describe Abuse in Custody, Stigma Afterward

“I hope it’s not true, because were it to be true, it is just too horrible to imagine.” That’s what a

woman politician in Baghdad said. I hoped it wasn’t true, either.

*

May 12 – U.S. Businessman Beheaded in Iraq as Militants’ Videotape Rolls

I pasted a still-image from the video, grainy and very scary. A moment from right before. The

video was posted on the Internet. I found the link. But that’s all I did.

*

July 20 - A Father Mourns in Baghdad

This day, only a photograph, a father bent over a stretcher in a hospital. His twenty year old son

had been killed in a suicide truck bombing. He died with lots of others. That’s what the caption

says.

*

August 23 – No End to the Violence in Najaf

Juicy, Doucement


I have a pink pushpin on the map where Najaf is. It’s a Holy city. Dad is there.

*

September 16 – Many Faces, One Heartache From coast to coast, families are torn over love

and patriotism as the list of Iraq war dead grows

The picture I have is a woman holding her baby, born a few days after her husband died. The

baby is a boy. Very cute, sleeping there in her arms. “I just don’t know what to think. Part of

me wants to support the war, but part of me doesn’t.” I can imagine which thought will win out.

*

And that’s it, maybe thirty days of five hundred and sixteen, the next and last page blank.

Our eighteen months had found themselves whole. I didn’t want to stop. It would have been a

story without an end, hanging out there by itself. I did, finally, the day after Dad told us he’s on

his way home. An early morning phone call. That was a week ago. It was over now. For us.

And our book complete. As much as the temptation to go back and make changes was there, like

today, I didn’t do it. And I really, really wanted to do it. I had a great many ideas, so many other

ways to make it different. But it had been Dad’s idea. And we’d been doing it together, really,

him there and me here. I couldn’t go back and change things. Just like he couldn’t. I didn’t

think memories ought to be edited.

I could’ve asked him about it, but I didn’t. Besides, Dad hadn’t written me as many

letters as he said he would. They came, but not that often. I got many more short emails. It was

easy enough to understand, him not writing in longhand. When I wrote him my letters, and I did

do it once a week, every Friday night, I had mostly questions on my mind, and I tried to put them

into context for him, in the same way I’d been thinking about them. I wrote him long letters. I

was once up until Saturday dawn writing the same letter. And they got longer the longer he was

away, the way thoughts get longer -

“Odessa, come down quick!” Mom’s voice comes straight down the hallway and takes a

right into the room.

I know!

I quickly slide off the chair and am down those stairs in no time. The banister acts the

fulcrum, and I’m on the double-quick down the hallway to the kitchen. I go from the hallway’s

dim lighting to the kitchen’s florescent one to see my mother beaming like a fool and my father

leaning against the sink. And stop.

Juicy, Doucement


A moment tossed into the air, waiting to come back again.

“Odessa Jean? Come here!”

I don’t think I think, I just go. I can’t even remember moving along the white speckled

tile, only his arms around my head pressing against his neck. Goodly, tightly. For the longest

time. Then away and a kiss to the forehead. Then back in again, his hand going against the grain

of my hairs. Then out again, at a long arm’s length, then release and a smile.

We three stand there on the speckled tile floor in silence.

“I have something for you,” I say.

“Okay!”

I turn and ran from bright to dim, the fulcrum again, up the stairs two-at-a-time, to the

room, to the desk, our book slammed shut and off the desk, and on down again.

In the kitchen, they’re at the breakfast table. The book goes between them, pushed

leftward towards Dad.

“It’s done. It’s for you. The last page is blank.”

Dad opens the book and turns the pages.

“I tried to get every story from every day. But there were too many. So I slowed down a

little bit, around here,” turning the pages to an almost random page. “Or someplace. Do you

remember this here?”

I turn the page.

“Each page has a different design on its frame, see?”

I turn more pages.

“And these paisley things are from my thumbprints. But some pages are from magazines,

so there isn’t any paisley drawing,” turning more pages until a glossy and clean image looks out

at us. “These were always better ones to work with, but I couldn’t find enough of them. See

here, I put a newspaper one and a magazine one on the same page. See the difference?”

“Juicy, doucement. Doucement. I know you know what that means. Just … Not right

now.” My father closes the book.

I look at him as he looks away, wait, but he isn’t looking at me. I slide the book off the

table and leave the kitchen.

Dad is up in my room. I knew he was regretting how he said what he’d said. He didn’t

need to, but he did. He sits on the end of the bed again and looks around the room. I sit at the

desk and watch his eyes wander.

Juicy, Doucement


“On pardonne tant que l'on aime. Do you know that one?”

I sort of do, but I nod like I know. I’ll piece it together later with the French-English.

“I should’ve said things differently. And I’m sorry. I’m a little tired, that’s all. We’ll get

to all those things. Just not tonight.”

“I know.”

“Good.”

His eyes wander the room again.

“I see you’ve gotten yourself a pretty detailed map.” He stands and walks to the wall,

leaning in for a closer look.

“I did.”

“Najaf in pink. I like that.”

“I got it online. I borrowed Mom’s credit card. I know all about geography now.”

“Did it come in one of those thick cardboard tubes?”

“It did. I saved it just in case I ever had to mail a map or something like that.”

“You never know.”

He turns and comes back from the wall. He sits on the bed again.

“There’ll be time later for all the hard work you did. We’ll look through it together. I

promise. You’re older now, you understand better. You can imagine someone not wanting to

think about something right just yet.”

“Yes.”

He looks back at the wall map for a time.

“You really did put yourself there, didn’t you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I’m sorry, Odessa Jean. For me … It doesn’t feel like we had anything to do with any

of that, the green river that flows the way its shown. Easy, right on up. Not even during the war

part early on, on the move along those highways. The part that’s the easiest to understand. The

parts there on your map. It’s none of that. We ended up in places not on your map, reacting to

things that kept happening to us, like being inside a giant paper bag with someone on the outside

hitting it with a stick. Just sudden and always. Not knowing when, but the swinging stick ready

at any time. We wanted to get on with it, have a real war, terrible to say I know, and get out of

that paper bag. Finish it. Go home. Do something else.”

He’s quiet for the longest time, a little happy smile on his face, like he’s trying to

remember an old joke that probably wasn’t all that funny. I didn’t want to say anything.

Juicy, Doucement


“It was like doing chores on a Saturday morning. Being there. If you can imagine. It’s

funny. The afternoon couldn’t come soon enough. But can you also imagine the afternoon

ruined by rain? Always ruined by the rain. It rained all the time. In torrents and sheets. And this

sticky, gloopy mud formed. Everyplace and everywhere. All the time. Our afternoon sun just

wouldn’t come. We tried to keep each other as safe and dry as best we could. Inside the bag.

The inside of that bag was all we had to look forward to, coming out of the rain as we did. That’s

where I read your letters. And I loved your letters, Odessa Jean. I’m sorry for being so slow in

writing back. I wrote back when I could. I wrote when the pen felt just right against the paper.

Just right. I loved writing those letters. I hope you liked them, too.”

I nod. I loved his letters, too.

“Sometimes – just sometimes – there’s very little to say. You’ve had times like that.

You know. Something wants to come out, but something else knows better. Keeps it quiet

instead. So I was quiet for a lot of the time. Whenever I could. I missed you for every moment.

It was the hardest thing to do. And the easiest thing to do. If that makes sense.”

It made sense. I missed him as well.

He’s left the room. We’d talked a bit longer, about me, about little things. But I could

tell he was tired.

I stand and walk to the map on the wall. I, too, lean in for a closer look at the brown and

beige tones and the ribbons of green along the flat river valley. I did know my geography. It

hadn’t occurred to me that it rained that much in that part of the world. It just hadn’t.

Now I know.


Russians

Russians seem like a peeved-off people. In iold books, at least. Angry characters populate angry

cities, in angry seasons, regardless of the temperature. A man’s movement down a sidewalk is

anything but a man’s movement down a sidewalk. Each step is heavy, and laden, and

consequential. The world is small and crowded and living in the man’s mind. It is deafening in

there, a concert of wails and moans from the tortures of injustice. Heavy stuff. And those heavy

and hungry steps along the sidewalk invariably lead to a dingy apartment, small and smelly, an

anonymous toadstool from which to think. And maybe yearn. And plot.

And these are from the shorter stories I’ve read. I’m not afraid of much, but I am afraid

of an eight hundred page book about Russians. I’ve seen them.

I live in Los Angeles. Technically just outside of Los Angeles County, but still close

enough. Regardless, I spend most of my time there, in downtown Los Angeles, in the heart of it

all, where people collide at an American end-of-the-road, a back leaning against the sea. There is

no better way to see it all, the people, the things that propel them, the things that eat at them, the

things that bounce their step, the things that give them pause. I watch them very carefully, almost

to the point where I could reasonably predict movements and reactions. Maybe even life-stories.

It isn’t hard to do, it may even come naturally, but it does take practice and patience. And

probably being wrong an awful lot of times.

But I can’t always get away. Gas is expensive and my car isn’t always the machine I’d

hoped it would be. For those days – and there are many – there are books and videos. But today

there is gas in the machine, which has left that much less money in my wallet. These are the

trade-offs that make sense to me.

It’s August and the house is freezing. Earlier, I had paced the living room as I read a part

of an intriguing paragraph in a story from an anthology of short stories – Dostoevsky in a

happy/gloomy state of dreaming. I read out loud, nothing dramatic, just straight reading, twice,

then had to sit down to make sense of just one small piece in the big puzzle:

That there always was a sharp pang of anguish in my hatred of the men of our earth; why could I not hate them without loving them too? Why could I not forgive them? And in my love for them, too, there was a sharp pang of anguish: why could I not love them without hating them? They listened to me, and I could tell that they did not know what I was talking about. But I was not sorry to have spoken to them of it, for I knew that they appreciated how much and how anxiously I yearned for those I had forsaken. Oh yes, when they looked at me with dear eyes full of love, when I realized that in their presence my heart, too,

Russians


became as innocent and truthful as theirs, I did not regret my inability to understand them, either. The sensation of the fullness of life left me breathless, and I worshiped them in silence.

I may not have gotten it completely, and that’s fine, but I can imagine it. I can appreciate

the lonely existence of the solitary person in the crowded city, the confusion and the hesitancy it

engenders. Even in a dream. Sure I can see it. That person wouldn’t be alone, that’s the rub.

Not in a big city. And it’s the same rub in the Russian stories, too. That all these solitary and

lonely people make up a huge and crowded city, off on their own. And in silence, the mind gets

to thinking. And the mind is capable of any and many things. And sometimes an act of kindness

emerges and it’s treated like a delicate flower in bloom. And those are the ones that ought to be

built on, the ones that set happy thoughts merrily along their way towards possibilities.

But more often than not – so far as I can tell – it is the self-destructive impulse that wins

out the day to isolation, alcohol, madness, violence, suicide, murder.

Okay.

But I don’t always read morose Russian stories. There are others, closer to home, that

open equally interesting places for me. It just takes saving enough time to find them, to take them

in, and to think about them. Books, I mean. They come together, I think, to create a certain self-

consciousness. A sort of understanding with myself, that the things I do, or say, or see have

weight or consequences. A self-awareness, like I said. It just takes a bit of concentration.

Even in the cone of noise I live in, in this Los Angeles, it’s always possible to find the

thinking silence. Even if there are loud sounds intruding from the outside, it is still possible to

focus on the thoughts at hand. I feel things change there. Things becoming more certain. Or at

least uncertainty becoming less uncertain. Or something like that. But I sometimes get antsy in

the house alone. Dad will come home later in the evening, but there are a lot of hours between

now and then. And the world is wide open.

A small lunch, but I’m still feeling hungry.

A quick shower.

A … Raymond Chandler paperback is shoved in my back pocket. Maybe for later.

Me and Marlowe. Out the door.

And on the driveway. My hair dries in an annoying heat. The tarred driveway seems

moist and darkly inviting. California’s San Fernando Valley can … mess with you in countless

ways. A stinky hazy heat that makes you wish you were someplace else. Los Angeles is cooler.

And brighter. It will take me some time to go the distance I want to go. Dad’s car and

Russians


motorcycles are in the garage. My two door coupe bakes in the heat. I can already smell the

smoke-sautéed leather seats. It’s inviting because I’m the chef. Although I’m out of cigarettes at

the moment. I open the door and feel like a mound of sourdough yeast self-shoving itself into its

oven. I close the door. I start the machine. Today it comes to life. I nose it in the direction I’d

like to go, and hope for the best.

The rule in this town is don’t drive this town between two and seven. Nobody likes rules.

It’s two now. I inch along. It’s hotter than hell, the air conditioner is a busted relic from the

previous owner’s deep past, and I wouldn’t use it even it did work. And I haven’t gotten around

to fixing the radio yet. I drive with the windows rolled-up. I can stand it. There are more terrible

things in the world than this heat. And weaker people than I have done more courageous things

than this.

The freeways are packed. I’d forgotten that it’s Friday.

Freedom! The streets of Los Angeles are relatively empty. I roll the windows down and

something cooler than what’s been trapped inside with me greets me. I drive along slowly for a

while, alternating rights and lefts, looking and being looked at, as anonymous in here as they are

out there. But it’s not quite the same, not the same as being out there, more free to watch and

think, more free to get a sense of proportion. That and a cold drink - a soda maybe - and a

cigarette, if I can find someone kind enough to give me one.

I park. But don’t feed the meter. And walk down Fifth Street towards Main, looking up

while everyone else could care less. It is magnificent and cavernous down here, like walking

through old pictures of Los Angeles, but in color. What was once noticeable is no longer. Near

empty stone buildings with ornate and colorful façades jut from the sidewalk and rise up into the

sky. The upper stories don’t seem to have anyone in them at all. So many different types, these

structures. It’s easy to imagine a different life for them, the one I’ve seen in pictures, a one very

different from its current one where, at ground level, lethargic men gather in vestibules, and large

women lean against the shaded part of walls. Grubby shops behind large framed windows,

poorly lit, entered into through grand revolving doors, the glass scratched and foggy, the brass

handles worn from use. Really, that is all there is – anything for sale for anyone willing to buy.

There doesn’t seem to be any thought to it, the selling or the buying, the lowest common

denominator the prevailing price.

And more people. Everywhere and constantly. Nothing to distinguish us from one

another, anonymously coming in and out of those same revolving doors, or strolling by as I

Russians


happen to be doing, or standing in place eating something from a paper bag. We have nothing to

say to one another, who would start such a conversation anyway, all with someplace to go and

then return to, all our lives led to be at this very place at this particular moment. Then we’re gone

elsewhere. I walk on because there’ll be more, the same but different, the city a reliable and

familiar character that way.

But I’m getting thirsty.

I find a nice enough sandwich shop and enter.

My dollar gets me a soda with ice and some change. I sit at a circular metal table outside.

The chair is uncomfortable, but I’m not here for comfort. From this vantage point, I’m probably

no different than anyone else, save – maybe, again – for my thoughts. But that’s arrogant, and

difficult enough to admit to myself, even in silence. But I am different. And I know I’m

different. I watch and they are watched. Pick one, anyone. The woman with the exposed

bellybutton. And acres of flesh. She walks heavily, lurching, like a medium-sized man walking

downhill, grateful for gravity. I’m not being mean. There would be no point to meanness. She

wants to be noticed, no differently than anyone wants to be noticed. That is what she wants,

maybe the sum of all she is ever capable of becoming. Or not. I don’t know. I read it

somewhere. But thought through, it makes sense. She walks by without the faintest

acknowledgement of my sitting there. I don’t mind. I draw the soda in through the straw.

The eyes are not fast enough to capture it all, all these little moments in time, the mother

pulling the daughter down the sidewalk as if the mother were not a mother, and the daughter

someone else’s, the car coming to a rest at a stop light, its driver and passenger staring ahead

intently as if watching a movie, the light turning green and they’re gone, the man with the pursed

lips whistling but not whistling, the tune probably in perfect harmony in his head, the crazy and

not-so-well, the staple, like the bread of any city, sad and undeniable, the slick ones, the average

ones, and the sexy-as-hell ones, the ones drawn to Los Angeles as would the dreamer, grifter and

malcontent, the artsy one with the uniform to prove it, the migrant woman no longer migrating,

out spending untaxed wages on something nice, a little treat, the man, in a tie, like from an old,

hard movie, the girls that look at me looking at them, making me blush and look away as if

something more pressing has caught my attention, at the old man holding the old woman’s hand,

sweetly, but I look back at the swaying girls, receding for now until others stroll by, the couple at

another table at another place not doing anything particularly interesting, the woman with the

dog, but they oddly don’t look alike, and somewhere, anywhere there could be that Russian I’ve

Russians


read about so much, out walking his street, as heavy-handed with himself as he is with others, but

here everything is normal, as it ought to be, today like last week.

Everything is like something else, and the city is the place to find them. I come here with

the intention of reading, but never seem to have the time. And good reading requires time. Lots

of it. And distractions are too many. I’ve given up on writing, too. In this setting. I can’t keep

my head down to finish the sentence. Any sentence. Or make them make sense. Black people,

white people, Asian people, Mexican people moving in forward and opposite ways but really in

and around and into one another, no building, or store, or car, or wallet really belonging to any

one person. That’s what it seems like. If I were to describe it to someone else, that’s what I

would say.

I take out the Raymond Chandler book and place it on the table. It looks good there. I

pick it up and bring it to my face, fan the pages, breathing, but I quickly put it down. I love

Marlowe. I really do. I don’t get it, though. Not completely. I’ll be honest. But I like the words

he uses – short and tough. Maybe Raymond Chandler had a concentration problem, too, a busy

Los Angeles buzzing around him, Marlowe made too busy to stay in one place, people coming in,

people going out, getting bonked on the head, slapped around, dragged about, drinking way too

much, avoiding tall women up to no good. Or just avoiding getting killed.

But there’s something to it. Just like there’s something to that Russian stuff. The

wandering, maybe. The conversations that take place in the head. The freedom. The wanting to

do the right thing, make a better difference, against impossible odds. But then again, that’s part

of the wandering. The taking of time to look at people and places and things and wonder about

them, to size them up, know them even though you don’t know them. But not in a mocking way,

just in a familiar way, like I said. I get to thinking that it must be hard to make a difference if

you’re always on the move.

I could stand up and go someplace else. Anyplace else, for that matter. The soda is

almost gone. The sidewalks are still busy. It’s still early. I have some more money left. I could

walk as far as I wanted, go down towards Pershing Square where the winos and bums usually are,

or I could go to where the newer tall building are and see those people, too, or I could stay here

and watch that man across the street standing against the corner wall of the building who is

looking at me. I look up the street, then the other way, then back at the man at the corner, and he

is still looking at me. He’s tallish, not too old, dressed all right, and he’s just looking at me. Or

in my direction. I can’t tell exactly where his eyes are directed, but it sure as hell looks like he’s

looking at me. If he had sunglasses on, it wouldn’t be half bad, I couldn’t tell if he was looking at

Russians


me or not, and the not knowing for sure if he was or not would tilt in favor of him not looking at

me, and I would forget about it. But I’m pretty sure he’s looking at me. I reach for my soda,

tilting my head down a bit over the straw, but not taking my eyes off the man on the corner. He

sure is patient. I never stare that way – too much else going on. I straighten back up. I don’t

even remember swallowing that last sip of soda. I look around casually, but I’m not seeing what I

normally see. The street seems emptier, less hectic. And more quiet. I look back at the corner,

and he’s still at it. I’m half-tempted to get into a staring contest with him, I could do that, but I

don’t know what he’s thinking. And he’s bigger than me. And for all I know hates me for

whatever reason. I look around at the other people sitting around me. The man behind me

doesn’t seem disturbed, or the two women behind him, or the ones on the other side of the store

entrance. I look back at the corner man, and still he looks at me. Unmoving, and I’d say

unblinking if I could see his eyes well enough. I’ll just assume that for now. I sip from my soda.

I draw loud air.

I could walk straight up this sidewalk, jaywalk gruffly across the street and say: “What

seems to be the trouble, Mac? You’re giving me the creeps.” He’d have to respond to that, or

walk away even. This thing can be taken care of in a matter of minutes. Unless, maybe, he’s

disturbed, sick, down-on-his-luck mad, drunk, or not all there. What if he did come over to me,

just jaywalked across the street and came straight up to me? What would I do? What would he

say to me? What would I say? I’m just sitting here. I’m not doing anything. Where could I go,

anyway? How could I get away?

I think about that cigarette.

I don’t want to be here anymore.

I stand-up suddenly, even before I knew I would be standing up so suddenly. I look off

to my right, then just as quickly turn to my left and start walking. Man, I must look so foolish

right about now to him. I bend my head and watch the splotchy sidewalk pavement as I keep

walking away. It doesn’t seem right, this kind of walking. I feel weird and alone and anxious to

be anywhere else. I can easily admit this much. I would run, I could run, but these darned flip-

flops couldn’t take to much of the running. They’re worn and ratty. I reach the end of the block,

look up and both ways, and take a right against the crosswalk signal. I want to look down the

length of the sidewalk, to see if maybe he’s coming my way. But I don’t think so. And I don’t

want to know. He can’t follow me forever. And I doubt he parked his car behind mine. If he has

a car. My troubles will end at the car. I’ll lock the doors and drive away into the afternoon rush

hour. That and nothing bad happens in the afternoons in the city.

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I reach another crosswalk. Traffic and people are congregated, waiting to cross. I look

around. Nobody looks too strange. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. I look down again. The

signal turns, and we move as one. I’m looking up now again. The car’s getting closer, around

the corner two blocks away, then halfway down another. No one’s minding me any attention,

although the woman behind me seems to be breathing down my neck. She’s so darned close. I

quicken my pace. My flip-flops slap against my heel, the rhythm keeping time, maybe another

seven hundred steps to the car, even if I can’t see it yet. I start counting, but just as quickly stop

because it seems so absurd. A kid on a bike comes rolling past. A dog at the end of a leash looks

up at me looking down at him. A car door slams shut. Someone calls out something to someone.

A woman in a very short dress, or a skirt, waits to cross the street. A shop door opens and a small

bell tinkles, then tinkles again, but more muffled. Someone’s wedged a beer bottle between a

fence and a wall. There’s altogether too much garbage strewn about.

I reach my corner and turn right. I can see the car. Five, ten, fifteen steps, but now my

legs are in a jog. I breathe in deeply and exhale. Several times. I dart off the sidewalk, my hands

in my pockets, the keys out, and I’m at the car door. I’m in, the door’s locked, the ignition fired,

and I’m pulling out of the space as I bring the seatbelt over my shoulder.

I drive. It’s hot in here.

On Main I take a right. On Sixth, a left.

I roll the window down.

I take a right onto Figueroa to get to the Harbor Freeway onramp. Suddenly I hesitate in

a panicky way, unsure, slow and pull the car to the right and stop along a red lined sidewalk. The

car behind me blares its horn as it whisk by. I extend my arm out the window, waving, mouthing

sorry. I look back over my right shoulder at a wide busy street of other cars feeling so stupid.

I’ve left Chandler and Marlowe behind on the table.

Damn it!

But that’s all I’ll allow myself.

I look forward again, composed, activating the left turn signal, checking for oncoming

traffic in the side view mirror, merging into traffic.


What the Old Man Knew

“The world will little note, nor long remember …”

*

I pulled the car to the end the driveway and cut the engine. The place was neatly the same,

unchanged through time, the way grandchildren need their grandparents’ place to be, a fixture in

the pulsating accumulations of life’s on-rushing memories. It had been a busy fourteen months

since my last visit, and this one had to be equally short, a detour along my road to bid my

farewells. The old man was up on his porch, asleep in a wicker chair from another time. He was

still no less an imposing figure than U.S. Grant after the glory, scandal, swindle and resurrection.

He, himself, was old grandeur in the waning days of a life, a leader, still a big man of disciplined

mind, impatient of formalities and trivialities, despite the heat a thin blanket draped over his lap,

his interpretations already written and out of print, a country no longer interested in the bloody

and complex lessons of his contrition. A book rested in his lap, his hands shiny and steady at rest,

rising and falling with his breathing.

I opened the door and stepped out into a hazy Georgetown afternoon heat. I walked the

brick path off the driveway like I always had – side-stepping the seals and emblems of the United

States Department of Defense, geometrically embedded. It was superstition as much as impulsive

respect, just as no moss would ever encroach from the crevices. Not as long as the old man was

alive, at least. He did it himself.

I stood at the base of the steps for a moment.

I watched him sleep.

“Sir!”

He didn’t stir.

I stood a while longer.

“Mr. Secretary!”

The old man stirred with a familiar start, his eyes opening and focusing as if they had

been awake all along. He looked down at me, the recognition immediate.

“Major. Welcome. Come on up here.” He cleared the chair next to him of books,

notepads, newspapers and magazines, dropping them off the other side. He slipped his pen into

his breast pocket. I mounted the stairs and walked the short distance.

“It is … good to see you.” He extended his hand from his seat.



“And you sir, as always.”

We shook firmly.

I sat down and looked out across a high grass field that ended abruptly at the pond’s edge,

water standing stagnant and bored, mature oaks leafed on the far shore. It was cooler on the

porch.

The old man patted the armrests of his chair. He looked off through narrow eyes into the

same distance I had found.

Something came off the pond’s surface upward and upward.

“They tell me you’re off soon.”

“Indeed we are, sir. Yes.”

He nodded. “Fine. Very good.”

The old man didn’t break his gaze.

“I’ve been thinking about you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Been thinking about what needs to get done.”

“Sir?”

The old man lifted his head, then lowered it. He awkwardly adjusted himself in his seat,

bringing himself forward. I knew it hurt him. It was obvious enough. I looked back out. He was

coming to his ease. Like always. His moments would come. Like always. A voice still clear to

deliver them.

“Have I told you this before?”

“I’m not sure yet, sir.”

“They made me Secretary of Defense once.”

I smiled. “Yes sir, they sure did.”

“Hell of a thing.”

It had been a hell of a time.

“It wasn’t a much different time then now. Back in my day. Not by a long shot.”

I nodded slowly, rhythmically.

“Not much different at all.”

I could agree no more.

“But they want to think it different. Always do. A helluva an uninteresting difference.”

“I take my men where we have to go,” I said with respectful presumptiveness.

“You’ll go, yes.”



The old man rubbed his forehead and eyes with wide sweeps of his palm and fingers. His

hand came to rest adjacent his other hand in his lap. He’d probably made his notes, prepared

remarks, habits from podium days of old. It wouldn’t be long now.

“We don’t have the … a … thought to think it through. Not before hand. Those things

come later. After-action. Read the Greeks … Thucydides”

“Yes, sir.”

The old man angled his head into his chest. “He had smart things to say about cause and

effect.”

“He did that, yes sir.”

I looked back out at what I’d seen before, the pond reflecting the sky.

“I know now what he knew, known it for a while. Thought it straight through. Brought

it down to a few truths.”

“It can be a tricky business, sir.”

“Yes, but not this time around. We’ll get this right sooner or later. You listen to me.”

It was now the old man looking at me for the long moment.

Suddenly:

“This thing we have here, this republic of ours, the one we each took an oath to defend …

awash in arbitrary power, reckless and mendacious. Oligarchy and privilege. Too brave few to

return it to its rightful owners. Power is simply too tempting to ignore. Truly great men use it

within its confines. Then return it safely after, to start again on its perilous journey. Far too

many chances for the egregious, too many handles to be groped at by men like me. Too many

demands the few make on the many. And plenty of men to do the few’s bidding. The foreign

and domestic intertwined. That’s what sends you. Do you understand?”

His thoughts were clearing, resetting. He knew where he wanted to go. The old man

waited for me to respond.

I nodded instead, seriously. Knowingly. I wanted to give him his time.

“That has been the state of the republic for which you fight. They tell me we’re a self-

governing people. Fine sentiments, all. I’ll tell you the son of American republican virtue has

come down to you orphaned, misshapen and awkward, like an ancient artifact behind bullet-proof

glass. A museum piece to puzzle over. There’s rarely consensus out there for a fight, the

Constitution an occasional inconvenience, circumvented with fear and whim. It only takes a

handful of people. It took me and mine less than three months. Terrible complexity can be

reduced to an overt or covert fight for freedom and rarely anything more subtle. No need to.



Keeps things simple, familiar. Our republican ideals were designed to bring much more to bear

than arms, but it’s arms we bring to bear. The arrow at the expense of the olive branch whenever

we can. It’s how we’ve decided to define our manhood, like the Europeans before they devoured

themselves. And don’t go thinking I didn’t help orphan this republic. I helped … – yes –

impurely, to get what I thought was our due. In my time. In this time, there’s no difference.”

There was nothing for me to do.

“Come, go. Shuffle on and get the hell off this planet without making too much of an

ado. And that goes for everyone, not just us. It’s bad enough as it is without attempts to, what …

foist personal visions of perfection on others using machines that burn things down. That’s what

I would have told myself if I had any sense back in my time. But I didn’t. This now isn’t my

time, and I think I have all the sense in the world. That’s irony. And hypocrisy, too. A real

crying shame. It’s alright to be self-conscious when thinking about your own past. I’ve already

forgiven myself for that.”

He laughed through his nose. Maybe in disgust. I couldn’t tell. He drew an audible

breath.

“This life here by coffee cup aphorism and patriotism is no way to go about living. I’ve

seen them. I’ve put my coffee into them. Sure, there’s quite a bit to be learned from what went

before, but out of their context, they’ve nowhere to go, nice words to make you sound smarter

than you are. Country. Duty. Honor? Sure. Sure. Sure. Why not? Couldn’t have it any other

way. Something nice for a rainy day. But in the wrong hands, for the wrong fight, meaningless,

wrong very time. Cheapens it. Bywords for something else entirely. Which is too bad. There

are times when a fight’s needed. And it doesn’t always have to be with guns and machines. But

we’ve been lulled and bullied into thinking so. Think of that for a moment. McKinley and

Wilson made sure they taught us how, early on. With no happy endings, not what’d been

promised. Not even close. You get lazy in thought, and there’s going to be someone there to

steal the hair off your ass. Every time. Or worse. Send you out to get shot so that he doesn’t

have to. Or his boy.”

The old man paused, as if out of professional courtesy and good manners, in case I were

inclined to retort. Or maybe he’d wished he’d chosen different words. I remained silent.

“That martial fool Roosevelt wanted that war of his pretty bad. 1917. His boy went off

to it and got himself killed. Quentin was his name. Shot out of the sky. Teddy died shortly there

after. That kind of mistake wasn’t repeated too many times.”

The old man’s eyes wanted to mist. I could tell. They shined.



“Selling our war? Nothing but a sale. I believed in it, of course. I thought it inviolable,

right for all time. Had it drawn out cleverly, pitch perfect, ready for any possibility, except for

the endless ones we came across. But that’s a slow process, the realizations that come along,

reversible for a time with assuring words people keep on buying, enemy degradations fatuous and

shifting barometers, always the dark before the dawn. In the bowels of it all, down there in the

numbers and feelings, I knew something wasn’t quite right. We all did. But you hold on. You

work harder. This wasn’t North Africa of the ‘forties. We were fighting illusions we’d created.

Our illusions, our fight. You double, quadruple down. Good men can never be allowed to die in

vain. The original idea was right, you see … that’s what abided us. A faith in ourselves.”

The old man’s eyes were wide now, the shine still there, maybe gazing lovingly upon the

sea of words at his disposal.

“There’s no finesse or fancy talk to death. None. Don’t let them get you to that place.

You do, you’re done. If a crazy man’s beating down the door hell-bent on sticking his unwashed

finger up your grandmother’s ass, hell yes I’d shoot that son of a bitch dead. Twice. Short of

that, bullshit.”

The word hung in the air expectantly, as if its very terseness and unexpectedness were a

gateway to something else. Nothing changed.

“This time, your time now, like my time then, there was no desperation to keep a peace,

no lion voices asking the difficult questions, nowhere the men who should know better. War’s

easy, has been, like passing a municipal bond, getting some money to get a bridge fixed. Too

many entanglements to weed through, too easy to say the right thing to get the wrong thing going.

We’ve made it too easy. Too many foreign troubles to borrow from, the bank always open. Us

too willing to debit. We’re always fighting for peace. Someone else’s honor, freedom, dignity.

So many good thoughts dredged into dragging the disinterested into something interesting.

Flashing lights far from our shores, boggling and distracting. The same every time.”

Quiet.

I took the old man’s silence as a moment to order, or reorder, his thoughts. He was trying

to get it all out.

“Sometimes the world comes to you. Sometimes you go to the world. And this isn’t

figurative speak, you have to be prepared either way. Just common sense. There’s no returning

to an isolationist path, either way. So you’re there, somewhere else. Now what? You can’t show

up on another man’s front lawn as a surprise to him and act like it’s yours. He may treat you with

some deference ‘cause you’ve got a gun, but don’t get to thinking you’re doing the man any



favors by being there. You’re not. And when you up-and-shit on his prized begonias and wipe

your ass with the leaves, I’d say you now have problems. Gun or no gun. And that’s just how it

is, just as it was, simple as I can put it for you.”

The old man wiped his mouth of spittle.

“Justice isn’t abstract. People sense when something’s fair, when it’s not. Even the

thickest people out there, anyplace in the world, can smell the stink of injustice, not so different

than the stink of the singed and blistered flesh of shot-dead young men. I had the privilege of

seeing them in the field, where they’d fallen. Got myself a tour. Hell of a thing.”

He may have been back there for a moment, walking with his hands clasped behind his

back, deadly earnestness on his face. I’d seen the footage.

“Let me ask you, Major, what did we do there in Cuba and the black Caribbean, down in

the Latin south we called our own backyard, the Philippines, Paris in ’nineteen, my Asia, out

there in the Arab East back then, now? What keeps taking us? How have we come to own it?”

I couldn’t respond.

“What did I bring to the world aside from narrowness and the tyranny of my task-

oriented politics? Let’s not kid ourselves. I’m not saying every man a beacon of light unto the

world, but maybe a garden’s path that leads somewhere surprising. That would’ve been nice.

But don’t go off and drag things back here for yourself unexamined, calling them your own.

There are junk ideas and cultures out there – arrogant, superstitious, misogynistic, willfully

ignorant, easily rattled. What, exactly, are we hoping to learn? What are we trying to teach

ourselves? What are we building to pass along? That’s the question that should remain with us.”

The old man was in a different place. He’d been gone for a while.

“What more can I tell you? Do you want to hear about the import of geopolitics? Bunk.

Rational thoughts and words backed by strength of conviction brings that around. Every time.

Interest is interest. Fair is fair, and people come to know that down deep in the marrow. Give

them some credit. You show up in your fancy duds, talking weird and high-minded whatnot that

even you don’t believe, I’ll come and tell you there aren’t enough words out there to convince

rabbit of its own courage. It won’t fly. It can’t fly. There’s no air to keep it. And I … I’ll tell

you, we spun it - as we liked to say – spun it six ways to hell and back, only to get more of the

same, more toughness from those little bastards. But we were pretty tough ourselves, weren’t we.

Who could stand in our way? Ours to lose. That’s what we told ourselves. Not a word breathed

about retreat or reassessment. Never doubted the quality of the fight. Political opportunists in the

wings would have eaten us alive.”



The old man looked around, as if needing something to drink.

“And at home, on the domestic field, all’s quiet. Made it so for as long as we could.

Easy. Dissent can never be tolerated in time of peril. Never. Men run around with their

megaphones and rope. Hush people up. Consolidate. Get rich. Buy things and other men.

Reform for a more perfect union? Squirreled away into hibernation. For safe keeping. For some

other time.”

Nothing for a moment.

Then:

“War is politics by other means.”

“Yes …,” but I wasn’t there, too late anyway, time having run out.

“I’m still not sure who won our thing. It depends on too many things. Who you ask.

How you look at it. I argued that myself. Were we entitled to win anything in the first place?

That’s maybe the better question. And I’ll tell you as straight as I can say anything, we put many

boys in that sad, lonely place in Virginia. Arlington. We took their immortality, you know.

They didn’t know a goddamned thing about death. Not a damned thing. That’s why they did

what they did for us. We knew better, but we took it anyway and planted it there. They get a flag

every November, and I get to say what I’m saying today.”

The old man’s chin was cradled in his palm, his elbow on the armrest.

“But most came back, didn’t they, maybe not in the ways they remembered themselves,

but they came back.”

“I’ll bring mine back,” I said, the terrain of battles yet unseen.

The old man himself was coming back. The pitch of his voice was changing.

“I got to thinking about prayer. Forgiveness. Years ago. Kept me up at night, making

me sweat it out. Tried it out for myself. I figured every man needs himself some prayer,

something bigger than himself, some answers, someone to talk to when things aren’t going so

great. What’s out there after this? How do you get to that place that soothes what we’d done

here? What a place that must be! But I couldn’t pin it down. I couldn’t see it. Gave up on it.

Prayer and war don’t go together, not the ones you shepherd.”

The old man looked at me for a moment, faithless.

“They sacked me, brought fresh blood in. Said I’d lost control. All that work. Good for

them. I was at home when the word came, right here in this chair. It just ended for me. One day.

And the days after … a relief, a weight lifted off my sleep. It took some time, but they finally

closed that rotten thing down. There’s only so much people will take, sale or no sale, an old blue



flicker of the old republic. And I started to write. Just took pen to paper. I’d done my bit part for

history.”

A good mind, once had. I imagined he was thinking of history’s retelling, out past where

he’d come to be. I knew him well enough. There was sadness and solitude there. And no truths,

not really.

“I’ve read it. All of it,” I offered.

“What I’m telling you won’t resonate. Not now. You’ll go. No choice. This here’ll be

something you’ll some day say your old and doddering grandfather told you from a rickety chair.

When you’ve finally formed your own opinions. And you will. It’s the stuff of lore, this, an old

man in a self-pitying moment. To no effect. And history herself will prove even harsher after

he’s gone. Justly.”

I couldn’t see the opinion, but I could see the self-pity.

“You’ll have a good place there,” I said, as if willing it so could alter history’s verdict. It

rang false.

He was beyond verdicts.

“It’s relentless. You’ll go again and again. Even had I stood up, even if I had done the

different thing.”

The different thing was lost in his thoughts someplace. He’d been looking for it. I’d

always been sure of this.

“It’s not the place I should’ve had … Not a good place at all.”

He joined me at the pond’s distance before placing his hand on my knee. It felt light and

familiar there.

“There’s no goodness, Major, only men’s desires. Only us. That’s my aphorism for you.

You hold on to it.”

The old man withdrew his hand, leaning back in his chair, done.

“Not a good place at all.” Thought that escaped into spoken words.

We sat in silence for a while, both knowing it was the only place he’d ever have.

We rested there for a long while after with nothing more particular to say. Two men on

an afternoon of no lasting consequence. All the world before them.

Nothing more.

I went off to do what I had to do, what we’d set ourselves up to do. And when I finally

came back an intermittent six years later, replaced by younger men - maybe less tired, maybe



with better perspectives - the old man was gone. I bought his books again from used bookstores,

hoping that something bought could be something new again, but they remained dusty and tired

words from a dusty and tired past, as if I’d gone because the younger old man had still sent me in

the first place. And I was too tired to argue.


An Epilogue

Come back, sit down: Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come,

In your and my discharge. Don’t you remember? We read it together.

And we’re not done yet.

Documents

Twelve stories rshajj july 2014