Fiction – Page 17 – Philadelphia Stories

Transplant

[img_assist|nid=843|title=Mountains of the Sun by Gregory Dolnikowski © 2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=201]I found the two carbonless message slips on my desk after the last patient. The first was the transplant team wanting me back to consult on Carl Lawson’s fevers. The second was an email address for Bobby Schmidt. When keystrokes failed to pull up any Schmidts I’d seen in medical records, I stared at my partner’s wilting bromeliad and reread the message; some things were as simple as water. This wasn’t Bobby Schmidt, patient, this was Robert Schmidt, old boyfriend.

I pulled on my white coat for the trip to the transplant unit and stuck the message in the pocket with my prescription pad. The late afternoon sunlight made the June day feel young; I’d do the consult tonight. Carl was a frequent flyer on the transplant service with two kidneys under his belt already. My job as infectious disease consultant was straightforward: repeat all the abnormal tests the other doctors had thought to order, spot the ones they hadn’t ordered, and make sense out of it all

Rob hadn’t believed I was going to be a doctor until he had seen The Cell on my bookcase. Before I started medical school, he was cloudy and beautiful with messy black hair and a recent drunk driving acquittal. He wondered how there could be an entire book devoted to the cell. After reading different books devoted to biochemistry, physiology, and pathology, I diagnosed alcoholism.

“Hey, doc,” Carl Lawson called from his hospital bed, “how’s it going today?”

“Same old, same old,” I replied scanning the most recent the chart notes. “What’d they put you in for this time?”

Carl shrugged the same shrug he treated me to every admission. If someone asked me how much longer Carl and I would play this game, I would have shrugged too. The fluorescent lighting did nothing for his stringy hair, nicotine-stained fingers, and the yellow-grey cast of kidney failure on his skin. Carl had a genetic disease that slowly destroyed his kidneys, but his bad boy substance abuse had landed him on dialysis before he turned thirty. For two years he managed to clean up his act and pass blood and urine tests for all sorts of illicit drugs while the transplant doctors hunted for the right donor kidney. As soon as Carl felt well enough after the transplant to start raising hell again, his kidney function deteriorated. It was back to dialysis and a second kidney transplant three years ago.

More recently, Carl developed an abscess from a nasty, resistant bacterium. Despite triple antibiotics that were damaging the transplanted kidney, his fever still raged. I was running out of suggestions. If the fevers persisted, we’d get a CT scan and see if there was anything the surgeons could drain.

I wrote a brief note on Carl and moved the message from Rob to my bag before heading home. He’d been the love of my life, but that monumental memory was a place I no longer visited. I hadn’t heard from him in a long time, and the last time he’d practically crowed about an auto accident in which he’d lost consciousness and teeth. By then, I’d known a lot of patients like Rob. Sometimes they just hurt themselves, but I’d handed out enough tissues to weeping spouses, parents, and children to know that wasn’t true. After residency, I retreated to practice a specialty that examined the dark old corners of childhood vaccinations, travel, and sexual activity. I could usually blame a virus, bacteria, or maybe even a parasite. When infectious led back to anther person, no matter how close, the correct term was vector.

As contributor to his own demise, Carl should never have been given a second kidney after he burned out the first. But a commitment to a patient was a commitment, and the renal team, like forgiving parents, kept crossing their fingers and betting on Carl.

Rob, with his self-destructive habits, was no better than Carl. When we had dated, he was almost as pale and thin as Carl was now, and I could count on one hand the number of times I remembered seeing him eat. He drank in bars, at clubs, and surreptitiously on the steps of the D.C. monuments that blazed against the night sky. In my medical opinion, Rob should have been burnt out, dead, consumed by sadness, anger, and, I might once have been able to believe, by love.

On the drive home, I remembered Rob’s sweet kisses, the result of alcohol dehydrogenase metabolizing alcohol into the fruity acetaldehyde until my pager silenced the thought. The floor nurse reported that Carl had thrown his low protein/no-added salt dinner across the wall nearly hitting the woman who laid the dinner trays. I reminded the nurse that I was the consultant for Mr. Larson’s infection; she would have to call the renal service about his diet order. While she was at it, I told her she should probably call security and social services.

I ate take-out sushi with my family and checked email once more before heading to bed. Carl’s attending was scheduling a group conference to discuss the possibility of a third kidney transplant—a question of medical futility if anyone asked me. I ticked off the names of patients I knew who had died waiting for a kidney in the last five years and made a note to troll the medical literature for the rate of former addicts staying clean after transplant.

For Rob, I typed a doctor’s open question, “What’s it been, ten years?”

I found a delirious Carl on rounds in the morning. Overnight, his temperature had spiked to one-hundred-and-five. I recommended that the team request FDA permission to use an investigational antibiotic. The CT scan was scheduled for 2 o’clock. The nurse noted that Carl had been too sick to throw his breakfast tray or sneak off to the roof garden and smoke.

I didn’t get to my email until lunch. Nothing from Rob. He’d probably been drunk when he called and that would be the end of that. Carl’s transplant team conference wasn’t for another two days—if he lived that long. By dinnertime, his temperature was a little better controlled. He winked and asked why I wasn’t making quick business of this infection they way I’d cleared up “that first little problem.” I had to smile. If Carl felt well enough to bring up his gonorrhea, so be it. I warned him that even that bug was getting harder to kill with the usual antibiotics. He told me he’d keep that in mind and closed his eyes.

The face of this man with oxygen prongs in his blood-crusted nostrils and a central line in his jugular vein read pain, fatigue, anger, and hard use. The odor from his dressings was hard to ignore. Would this be how it finally ended? I’d given Carl up for gone before to spare myself work and pain. Who would be there to mourn him? I scrolled back to the social work consult in the chart that read:

Carl Lawson is a forty-two year old male well known to the transplant service with a history of polycystic kidneys, substance abuse, renal failure, dialysis and renal transplant times two. This most recent hospitalization is for a perirenal abscess with the same multi-drug resistant organism that infected his dialysis graft. Mr. Lawson lived in an apartment downtown until being readmitted. He receives disability and has limited social supports.

Over the years, I’d fleshed out a little more of the framework of Carl’s life—the long-dead disaffected mother, the two years of vocational school, and the long streak of boosting Hondas to support his drug habit. Carl had a sexual history a mile long, and I remembered a girlfriend floating around the hospital during his previous admission for fevers because we HIV tested them both. I couldn’t remember her name. On any given day, it was difficult to keep track of the medical information, let alone the personal.

What I didn’t know still drew me: why and when did Carl start using? How did he manage to stop for two years before the transplant? Where was the rest of his family?

That afternoon, the transplant surgeon who jealously guarded his patient survival data, took Carl back to the OR to open up the old dialysis graft site in his arm and the transplant site to debride infected tissue. We loaded Carl with IV dilantin to prevent seizures, and instead of talking about his third kidney transplant at the meeting the next day, the renal fellow jumped all over the medical student chosen to present Carl’s last electrolytes.

“Has Mr. Lawson died?” the renal fellow said.

The student, who couldn’t see where this was going, blustered, “No.”

“Then these are not his last labs. They are his most recent labs,” snapped the fellow. “You’d do well to make note of the distinction.”

The student sunk into his chair while we discussed Carl’s code status.

I’d had low student days too. I spent the night I got my acceptance letter for medical school drunk on the kitchen floor with Rob. I had worked so hard for so long that I only felt sadness for the mountain of work and abuse I was finally privileged to face.

Carl went on to have another forty-eight hours of lab results and fevers before there was a reply from Rob. “Sorry to call your work number,” he typed. “That’s the only information I could find for you. I saw your story on the web. Are there more? You had a gift.”

Rob was digging into that ancient time when I’d written about a teen with typhoid fever back before the lives I cared for in the hospital seemed so fictional that all fiction froze. Once I’d been as interested in the patient who had the disease as the disease that had the patient, but the last few years with my patients, the cuts from the hospital, and my family’s move, I was barely surviving from one caffeinated drink to the next.

Before any transplant, patients talked with the team psychiatrist about chronic medications and risk of rejection, but no one talked with me about the night I sat next to Rob at the top of the cold marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial and he said he wouldn’t be seeing me again. I went home and would later read medical texts that offered prognoses for risk-taking males. When the pathology professor slapped a cirrhotic liver from the five-gallon canister of formaldehyde onto the lab tray, I touched the hard-knotted tissue and practiced professional distance.

Carl was one hundred-and-three and sweating and didn’t react to my gentle greeting or more robust examination the next day. The transplant team had asked social work to locate next of kin. I changed the protocol medication dose to accommodate Carl’s dwindling kidney function, and put my hand on his unbandaged one before leaving.

“Whatever chips you’ve got, Carl,” I whispered, “it’s time to call them in.”

I skipped the noon conference, went to the office, and shut the door. Dark clouds framed the hospital across the street. A thunderstorm seemed likely. Sometimes I knew when a patient was going to die. Sometimes I didn’t know, and I would go to the floor to follow up on a consult to find the bed empty and the name removed from the census board. Once I attended a morbidity and mortality conference when the disease and the patient’s initials matched a young kid I had really liked. I had rotated off service, and no one thought to tell me he died.

At the start of my residency, I kept track of the deaths. At the hospital memorial service for patients who had died my first year, I listened for names I remembered. By the second year, I sat there wondering, as the familiar names washed over me, what was more painful: watching them die or mourning their life and our failure.

Outside my window, the lightening and raindrops reminded me that summer was flashing by while I was stuck here in the hospital. It would be easier right now with one less noncompliant chronic patient. I chastised myself for being wrong about Rob, but it wasn’t my fault he hadn’t read the textbook.

I wrote Rob that I didn’t write anymore; I was a doctor.

We finally got Carl on the experimental protocol, which meant I was now responsible for assessing him three times a day. The worksheet with his vital signs and labs spilled over the edges of the table that usually held the meal trays. By the next morning, Carl looked a shade less grey. He was down to one hundred and twenty pounds but his fever had dropped below one-hundred and two.

“I’m not leaving in a box you know,” he said.

“I never said you’d be leaving in a box.”

“But you thought it,” he said.

I scanned the flow sheet. “Looks like your temperature is down, so maybe you’re going to luck out with whatever this new wonder drug is. But overall you’re on your third kidney, and I’d say you’re behind in the count.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he waved his hand. “I’m going to walk out of here and find Jacelyn.”

“Who’s that?” I was thinking girl friend, drug dealer.

Carl rummaged in his bedside drawer before pulling out a banged-up photograph. “That’s me and Jace when she was two,” he said pointing to the little girl with corn silk blonde hair and brown eyes who sat on the grass in a rose pink dress. “We had a party at the park, and Sheila even baked a cake. Those were good times,” he gazed out the sunny window, closed his eyes, and dozed off. It was just as well, he needed the rest.

I studied the photo of Carl, smiling and proud with long brown hair and clear eyes, before turning it over. The photograph had been taken almost twenty years ago, well before the kidney failure. After all these years, who knew Carl had a daughter?

In a box somewhere I had a photograph of Rob looking calmly into the camera and affirming he was young and beautiful once, too. I was glad he hadn’t emailed back. I didn’t want to see his words, scars. He was as foreign to me as Washington D.C. had been when I was back there for a conference on emerging pathogens. In the humid July sun, the monuments blazed white hot, and I didn’t have time to sit on the marble and bear distant witness to the pain.

The hospital days traced the storyline of Carl and Sheila, Jace’s mom, who moved across the country with the baby to get away since he wouldn’t stop using. Sheila vanished, never asked for money, or sent photos. Ten years later, Carl got a letter from Jace, who wanted to visit. Carl wanted to see her too, but before she could come out, Carl had the first round of kidney trouble. He told her she’d have to put off their reunion a little longer. Then Jace wrote back that she was afraid of Sheila’s latest boyfriend.

“There I was high while this kid, my kid, was being bothered by some low grade pervert,” Carl said. “I was just about to go on dialysis, and I took the hospital social worker up on an offer to get subsidized housing and pull myself together. It wasn’t perfect, but with the little bit I got from disability and some car repair work on the side, I had us a little place.

“Jace came out, started school here, and we got acquainted,” he said. “She looked so much like her mother, but older than I expected. She got a job answering the phone at the garage after school. Those were two good years.” His voice trailed. The nurse had him up in a chair next to his bed, and he picked at the blanket covering his lap.

I asked what happened.

“She said I wasn’t letting her grow up,” he laughed, “after I made a place for her.” He shook his head and coughed. “She started acting up and hanging out with the wrong crowd. I didn’t want that for her. She was bringing the stuff home. It was too much. I started using and cheating on my drug testing.”

I thought of all the teens who had gotten high and stupid and into trouble. It was a kid’s job to treat their family the absolute worst, but Jace had gone up on flames and taken her father with her. I nodded my sympathies.

“You guys called me for the transplant right then. I was in the hospital for weeks. She never came to visit. When I got back home, she was gone. I called Sheila; she hadn’t seen her and blamed me for her running off. I was sick, and I tried so hard not to die because I wanted to find her again. I didn’t know what else to do. I blamed myself for being a lousy father, and then I blamed myself for caring. I was on so many medications; I figured a few more didn’t matter.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

“You think I wanted you all sitting around talking even more about what a loser I was?” he said. “Besides, Jace was a kid, and I figured someone would take her away.”

Another week went by and Carl was doing much better. I brought a simple wood frame for the picture and wished there was something else we could do. There was buzz from the new set of residents rotating on the service about putting him back on the transplant list. I tried to remember when I had stopped thinking ‘why not?’ with borderline cases.

Labor Day weekend came, and its festivities filled the hospital with trauma patients. I’d changed into scrubs and clogs to stay late for a heart transplant patient in the intensive care unit and logged on to look for the results of a spinal tap. There was another email from Rob.

“I sobered up just enough after the accident to get a construction job,” he wrote. The crew boss handed me a hammer since I looked so good at beating myself up. The lead carpenter gave me a chisel a few weeks later, and I never looked back.

“While I was drying out, I wore out sheets of sandpaper and covered everything in my apartment with this thin layer of dust. At first, they sent me home with bits and pieces: finials, the curled ends of banisters. Then I moved on to fretwork, the odd swag of fruit or roses. It’s better now. I leave the sanding at work. I love wood and want to try marble someday.

“We get hired to do restoration by expert types who can tell if the work is done by hand and not power tools. A lot of it is fire and water damage. Fire damaged the area around the altar at St. Joseph the Worker, and we’re restoring the 1890 woodwork. You can always smell when wood’s been through a fire. I have a wife and two kids. They’ve forced me to be closer to the man I want to be. You always said you were going to be a doctor. I never doubted you.”

I moused to the lab results and logged off to see the patient whose heart had been cut out and placed in a plastic pan before her rib cage was wired shut over the stranger’s heart that beat in her chest. The transplanted heart, severed from its original nerves, now driven by a pacemaker.

I felt enervated. Why tell me now he was alive and not drinking? My clogs clacked along the empty tile corridor. He had walked away from me. I had waited for him to stop. I had lacked faith and energy. I had given him up for dead.

There had been no books to teach hope in medical school, but we were required to attend an AA meeting. I remember a brittle old lady with soda bottle glasses who led me down the steep stairs from her apartment over the dicey market on 13th Street to the smoke-choked meeting room at the church around the corner. She talked about her powerlessness over alcohol, the moral inventory, the admission of flaws, and the desire for amends and improvement.

Did Rob hope to restore our warped past through a 12 step program? I drifted to the other end of the unit and ran my fingers over Carl’s wood frame. Some mind, body, history receptor, long blunted by brutal training, sleep deprivation, and the endless needs of patients, fired again with small hope: someone had made it. Someone I knew. They hadn’t made it with me, but medically, that was of little consequence. As I walked to my car, I felt the warm breeze through my thin scrubs and wondered if a world with Rob could hold Carl and Jacelyn. I would find her and tell her about Carl even if she didn’t care.

It took time to track her down. The phone was disconnected; the house sat in a bombed-out block. The soot from the fire that consumed the building next door still licked its bricks. A street lamp at the end of the block cast the only light. I knocked and explained. A woman pointed toward the basketball court where Jace played with the boys when they’d have her. She shut the door.

I drove. Patients lied, I reminded myself. What if Carl lied? Maybe Jace left because he’d been neglectful or abusive. I wouldn’t know until I heard her story. I parked and watched the local mischief play out on a court surrounded by a carpet of green and amber glass. Shapes flickered in and out of the street lap, I spotted Jace, adolescence burning immortal. With the assembled tough but ready acolytes smoking and drinking, the shadowy beauty from the old photograph wanted for nothing. Eventually she would need to use the ladies.

When she moved for home I called her name. She waved an angry hand. “Jace,” I shouted, “I’m not with the police, or juvenile, I’m one of your dad’s doctors. He’s dying.” I held out a card; she stepped toward the car and took it, her hand and wrist scarred with a homemade design. She ran.

I drove to the diner near home where I often sat to shake off medicine. Once again, I had arrived after closing. I’d done my best by Carl, and other than lying down on the operating table for the transplant surgeon to extract one rose pink kidney from a half moon incision in my flank, I could do no more. I mourned for Carl and the boy and the girl sitting late at night under the back portico of the Lincoln Memorial looking out across the dark Potomac toward the graves of Arlington.

Jace left a message with her number on my voice mail. “He needs another kidney, doesn’t he?” she said.

I called and told her he did.

“I’m too messed up and late to help,” she said.

“Your dad talks about seeing you when he’s well.”

“Could I be a match?”

“I wouldn’t know the answer until we run the tests.”

“Then let’s do them, I want to know.”

Carl’s fever returned along with the odor of his draining wounds. Jace sat at his side and told him she was keeping her kidney warm for him until the doctors took care of the infection.

She and I knew she wasn’t a match.

A few days later, Carl’s blood pressure became unstable and the surgeon took him back to debride the dead tissue, flush away the bacterial putrefaction. He died post-operatively.

I left messages for Jace. She didn’t call. I asked the pathologist to page me when someone came to sign for his remains to be removed after the autopsy.

Jace looked better than I expected. I wanted her to know that the tests showed she’d inherited the gene for her father’s kidney disease but wasn’t showing any signs of kidney failure yet. Get checked regularly, I told her. Carl would have wanted her to. She shrugged.

The colored slip in my department mailbox told me to claim a package in the mailroom. Inside the box I found a block of wood and a pack of sandpaper. Live oak, Rob wrote, was a very hard wood.

L. M. Asta has published fiction in Schuylkill and Lemniscate, and her essays have appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association and Hippocrates. A native of Bucks County, she trained at Temple University School of Medicine and St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. She writes and practices in northern California.

Tributary

“All art is but imitation of nature.” (Seneca)

“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” (Oscar Wilde)

If you asked me ten years ago if I thought my life would be like this, of course I would have said no. Most likely, I’d have shown great disdain toward the idea of playing in what I would have then referred to as a “glorified cover band.”

Life is just a series of little decisions, though, and it goes from just trying to keep the dream alive until you get that legendary big break, to one day waking up and realizing that the only reason you’re still able to get paying gigs is that you’re playing someone else’s songs the exact same way they did three decades before.

It’d be different if the guys in the band we “tribute” were dead. Even if just the lead singer were dead, this whole endeavor would have more gravitas, and less of a cheap Chinese knock-off feel to it. A tribute band is more than just a cover band. But still, I wonder what I would have said about all this ten years ago.

Peeking out from backstage before the intro, I can see it’s a lighter crowd than usual tonight… I wonder why? Still, lots of familiar faces out there, and not just the friends and family, either. We encourage repeat ticket buyers by offering a frequent concertgoer discount. Hey, it’s a business, after all…

It’s easy to linger too long on the few new faces in the audience, those rare non-initiates who don’t already know the entire set list by heart. I always wonder how the new faces come to be here… and how long they’ll keep coming.

Tonight, there’s a lot on my mind, and it’s bleeding through my “tribute” persona.

I’m thinking about how I came to this point. And I’m wondering how much longer I’m going to do this.

Lots of people have Hollywood dreams, but I never did. I never wanted to be an actor—I wanted to be a rock star. And not “rock star” in the stupid way guys in suits use the term these days, referring to great athletes or prominent politicians or the standout salesman of the month, but the way it was in the 1970’s: real rock stars, all-out, admired for musicianship and creative credibility and yeah, maybe sometimes for the way they looked in tight jeans.

That’s what got me started—what would you call it? Envy? Jealousy? I wanted that life. I may not have seen much of the 70’s (born January 8, 1976) but I’ve got plenty of videos (bootleg and legit), plus tons of rock magazines from the era, that pretty much tell me how great it was.

My first attempts at stardom were in high school, singing and writing songs in various amateur rock bands and getting some attention from the girls, which only reinforced the dream. By graduation, I had a good band playing around me, but the Seattle scene had burned itself out and MTV seemed to play nothing but rap videos. The outlook for prospective rock stars was bleak.
[img_assist|nid=148|title=Taking Stock by Suzanne Comer|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=193]

All of the guys in the band went to local colleges except Wes, who became an electrician like his dad. The band trudged on, rehearsing regularly, playing gigs when we could get them. We played in front of talent scouts and agents, some of whom said to keep at it, most of who said we were wasting our time. Then, seemingly overnight, four years had passed and it was time to make a decision.

Here’s some advice: never go into business with musicians if you can avoid it. Unfortunately, it’s a tough path to circumvent when the business you want into is making music. The guys and I made a ten-year pact after college. We said we’d stick it out that long—play anywhere, do anything, shun nine to five jobs, postpone marriage and kids, live together in a van if we had to—to be able to say we gave music our best shot. If it didn’t work out after ten years, we’d be free to move on, no hard feelings. “At least we’ll have tried,” we told ourselves.

Of course, Wes got married a year later, and even though we had specifically addressed the possibility of marriage in our pact, even though we’d all said that if any of us did get married it still wouldn’t change things, it did. It wasn’t a Yoko Ono breaking up the band thing or anything like that, Wes just started caring a lot more about buying a house and having his own car than he did about the music. Being an electrician started as his “temporary career,” then became his “backup career,” and finally just his career. He started to look at us as if we were dumb kids trying too hard to hold on to our childhoods.

Karin left me around that time, too. She wanted a “normal life,” whatever that is. I loved her, but everyone knows pursuing your dream requires sacrifices. So I marked that one down on my list of sacrifices made, having convinced myself that when the list grew long enough, the rock gods would deem me worthy of some serious good fortune to even up the scales.

Wes left the band six months later. We got another drummer, but the number of venues booking live talent was dwindling in favor of DJs and other poor man’s substitutes. At the gigs we did get, the owners would request we not play our own songs. “Nothing against you guys,” they’d say, “it’s just that people want music they know, stuff they’re comfortable with.”

I don’t remember whose idea it was to go from a band that did covers of lots of different groups’ songs, to a tribute band that focused on only one group. It wasn’t my idea, I know that. But after playing covers almost exclusively for six months, the idea of a tribute band no longer seemed repugnant. On the contrary, it seemed like sort of a higher calling. We debated which band we should focus on, based on which bands we liked, their popularity, whether they were still actively touring, who I sounded like, who we looked like, et cetera.

That’s how it started.

That was almost ten years ago.

We take the stage and the show begins, the same way it always does. My mind begins to wander, even as I’m singing. Tonight’s another small club, and normally the size of the venue, or the audience, doesn’t affect me much because it’s never really “me” on stage. Rather, it’s me as Steve Smith, lead singer for the original—some would say real—band, a man with the poise, swagger, and feathered hair of someone who knows he’s on top of the world circa 1976, touring in support of a record that had already gone gold and showed no signs of stopping there. But tonight the transformation is incomplete, and my self-confidence is flagging.

Lack of respect is the bane of a tribute band’s existence, and unless you keep your emotional armor well oiled and polished, it can lead to these occasional crises of confidence. We in the tribute biz catch flak from both sides—the high-minded classical and jazz aficionados who believe the music we play is too unsophisticated to be taken seriously, and the rock fans who feel that if you’re not writing your own stuff, you’re not being “authentic.” A tribute band is nothing if not authentic, from using vintage, precisely tuned instruments to matching just the right colors on the stage backdrop.

Here’s my question—why do people think that being one of seventy orchestra members in black suits and starched collars playing Beethoven or Bach as interpreted through the cracked perceptions of some weird-haired conductor is a noble profession, while being one of five members of a band who play popular music nearly identically to the original performances is cause for career embarrassment? Maybe our music isn’t as intricate, but pick any five members of that orchestra and let them go head to head against us in a crowded bar, and we’ll see who the people like better.

Mine is as disciplined a vocation as any—for two hours, I respond to stimuli not as I, Larry Candela, would, but as Steve Smith did. I say nothing that he did not say to his audience. Every stutter he uttered, every outfit he fit out, it’s all been corroborated, triple-checked for accuracy. Some would call this obsessive, but I call it dedication, what the fans deserve. I’ve rehearsed every move until its part of who I am. I am channeling the being of someone else. I am becoming someone else. And the audience wants me to be Steve Smith so badly that it helps me to forget I’m not really him. It’s a mutual suspension of disbelief.

This, then, is the difference between a tribute band and a band that just does covers. To quote The Who (or one of the major Who tribute bands, The What or Who’s Best or Behind Blue Eyes): “I’m a substitute for another man.”

If I remember correctly from my college philosophy classes, Plato and Aristotle both acknowledged all art as imitation. The difference is that Plato thought this was a bad thing, while Aristotle was a little more open-minded. Sometimes during our performances, I picture Aristotle in the audience, robed and sandaled, rocking out.

“Congratulations to our manager, who just tied the knot recently. In his honor, this is a song called ‘Knotty Problems.’” I hear myself make the introduction—perfectly, spot-on. The marriage in question happened almost thirty years ago, joining two people none of us knew then or now, but the reference was an integral part of that original concert, so it had to be used.

If, for the serious music listener, discovering a new band is like falling in love (and I would say that it is), then joining a tribute band is a lot like getting married. But you’re not marrying the other members of the band—you’re marrying the music. It’s a serious commitment, a decision to focus all your energies on a finite, limited body of work. And if joining a tribute band is like getting married, you could say I’m like the kid you went to school with who got married really young.

Maintaining one band as your favorite for ten, and even twenty years is a difficult thing. You have to sort of delude yourself, put blinders on so as not to fully notice new and undiscovered music that comes across your path. Repetition has to be made comforting instead of sleep inducing. You need to constantly reassess, search for new meaning in the familiar.

Both love and music start with infatuation, when you’ll want nothing but to listen to that one band or be around that one person. Then the sheen starts to fade, and you either discover new layers of interest or you break up and search for something better. Sometimes you’re still in the throes of infatuation when some other band (or woman) will steal your attention. But it’s normal to bounce around like this until, at some point, you become tired of bouncing around. You’re less interested in searching for new music (dating), and the work of staying informed on the latest bands gets crowded out in favor of more practical day-to-day demands. The stuff you’ve been listening to becomes very… comfortable. You can’t imagine anything better, or maybe you just can’t imagine continuing to look for something better. Finally, you settle down with one band designated as your favorite. Like marriage, sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. There are the couples in the newspaper celebrating 50th and 60th wedding anniversaries, their photos positioned (not unintentionally) right between the wedding announcements on one side and the obituaries on the other. Then there are the ugly divorces—the ones that are rarely announced in the newspaper, even though that’s what people really want to read about. You get older and you change, but the music always sounds the same, perfectly recorded, perfectly…static. You grow apart. You split up. It happens all the time.

Ten years can pass in a happy blur, or it can just be the prelude to a bitter parting of the ways. But every person in a tribute band, like every married person, harbors some doubts. Sometimes you can’t help but wonder if you made the right decision. Should you have waited a little longer, seen what other opportunities arose, not settled down just yet—how might things have been different?

To keep the marriage alive, sometimes you have to beat down those doubts till they recede into the dark holes where they hide. But sometimes, like tonight, it seems like a giant game of whack-a- mole, and for every uncertainty you manage to beat down, two more pop up in its place.

I’m off tonight. It’s shaken me, because it’s been so long since I made a mistake, but tonight’s error was so minor it’s likely no one will notice, not even the other guys in the band. See, I told the crowd “thanks,” but Steve Smith never said “thanks,” he always said “thank you.” I wonder, is that just me being lazy? Or could it be something more?

Ten years to become a rock star. The only thing I’ve ever really cared about, the only thing I’ve ever really tried for and failed.

But what’s success or failure? Aren’t those terms subject to interpretation? Does it really have to be all or nothing? Isn’t there room for small successes and minor failures?

Is discipline a bad thing, carried to this extent? Have I stifled my creativity, or simply found a different way to embrace it? Is ten years too much time to give a dream, or not enough? Who’s to decide? What if the person who has to decide doesn’t know the answers?

The keyboard solo, “Friday Night Rondo,” ends, and as we start the next song, “Reflections,” I slip back into my role easily, like a favorite concert tee. A gesture here, a wink there. The fans are eating it up. The weird thing is I really don’t care. I’ve realized I don’t do this for the fans, despite what I said earlier. That was just bravado, false nobility to conceal the truth: I need them. I require an audience, because it’s part of the rock star package—without them, the dream dies.

This all could end at any time. More than likely, it will end soon, since the fans that come to our shows are getting too old to stand at a concert for two hours. They’d rather buy one of the DVD recordings of our shows ($15 apiece) and relax on their couch at home. There are some younger people who come—curiosity seekers, or children (and grandchildren) of fans. But eventually they’ll disappear, too.

I have to make a decision, a big decision—that’s what I’ve decided. I can’t just drift along any more. I’ll either end this now on my terms, or continue, with a new understanding of why I do it.

It’s important that I get this right… and for this, there is no script to memorize, no notes to study, no DVD to reference.

When you stop and look back like this, all of those earlier, seemingly unimportant decisions seem so natural, like this was the way it was all supposed to happen, just one moment flowing into the next, steadily moving you along like a stick in a stream.

The thing about being a stick in a narrow, twisty stream, though, is that you rarely see what’s ahead. You get knocked around, sometimes doing headers off the rocks, but you just keep moving forward. The stream could dry up a mile down the road, leaving you stuck somewhere, or it could open up to whole new, expansive body of water. You just don’t know till you get there.

“Reflections” ends. The mistake I made earlier has my head swirling, but strangely, I feel almost giddy. I grip the microphone tightly, ready to deliver the prescribed between-song banter, and I look out over the audience. No, not over the audience. At the audience.

It’s a different vibe now, a scary one, and I can feel myself tightening up. I’ve never been to an AA meeting, but I suspect this might be pretty similar. Do I really want to do this?

“My name is Larry Candela, and I play in a tribute band.”

Steve Smith never said that, but I just did. It may not be authentic, but it’s real.

I tell them everything, a briefer version of what I’ve said here. Some people in the crowd aren’t happy—I’ve broken the spell, violated the sacred trust between tribute performer and audience.

But soon there comes a connection, a kind I’ve never had before, like I’ve suddenly become transparent right there on stage. It’s terrifying, but at the same time liberating, freeing me of the restrictions I’ve placed on myself these past ten years. It’s a pretty magical experience. I wonder if rock stars ever get to feel something like this. Probably not.

You might think it sad that the major decision of my life thus far is to continue what some would call living someone else’s life. But in the end, it’s my dream. And somewhere between the truth of dreams and the delusion of fantasies, reality lies.

So the dream lives on, albeit in slightly altered form.

Peter Dabbene is a Hamilton, New Jersey-based writer. His poetry has been featured in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Zillah, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, Apple Valley Review, and more. He has also published two story collections, Prime Movements and Glossolalia, as well as a novel, Mister Dreyfus’ Demons. He is currently writing a graphic novel, called Ark, which will be published in 2009.

Allison on New Year’s Day

Brrrrrrrrupt! Brrrrrrrrupt!” A muddled fanfare penetrated Allison Reed’s sleep. She rolled over, hoping she was dreaming. She was pleasantly hot under the heaped up blankets and vaguely aware that she wanted to keep sleeping. But a few moments later the sound repeated – “Brrrrrrrrupt! Brrrrrrrrupt!” – followed by a bellowed “God bless the Mummers!” in the street below and Allison was awake and knew that it was New Year’s Day.

Allison rolled onto her back and lay with her arms flat by her sides, unhappy with her mild hangover. Her head was heavy and her stomach was sour. Still, she felt a deep sense of physical satisfaction, which puzzled Allison for a moment until she remembered not only the two glasses of champagne she drank after midnight, but who she drank them with and how they laughed. She popped open her eyes to confirm what she now recalled quite clearly. She’d had sex with Jim D’Angelo and he was sleeping next to her. Allison closed her eyes and ran her hands down her body. She was naked and this made her uncomfortable. It was one thing to sleep with a man, if you could work up the necessary desire and nerve and you got to turn off the lights, and another thing, not as serious yet still intimate, to share your bed with him. But it was a different category of thing entirely to lay nude next to him all night. Naked was okay for sex, but once it was over, Allison wanted to get up, wash briefly, and dress. She expected the man to know he should do this, too, although experience had taught Allison not to take any chances. When she walked back into the bedroom wearing a nightshirt, modest yet sexy, she would announce, “I’ve brought you a fresh towel and a spare toothbrush,” in the easy tone of a thoughtful host. Only once had these been refused, back in her graduate school days when she was somehow convinced that you were missing experiences of great consequence if you weren’t rutting through a succession of over-serious, over-heated – in retrospect foolish and shallow and inept – affairs. “Nah, I’m okay,” the young academic had told her. Then Allison had cocked her head, briefly considered the enormity of her misjudgment, and invited the fellow to leave. This he did, with a look of confusion and regret that Allison accepted as an apology.

She had not offered Jim D’Angelo a towel or a toothbrush, however, and Allison was reasonably certain she had not offered these because instead she had climbed on top of Jim and encouraged him to “go again” with a hip motion that made Allison wince with embarrassment. She opened her eyes again to see if Jim had caught her wincing. He was still asleep. This was the first time Allison had been with Jim D’Angelo and now he would think she was one of those women that men of his class seemed to particularly desire: accomplished in their profession, elegant in society, but all hell in bed. Once a man got dug into this opinion of a woman, Allison found, he held on to her like she was the Holy Grail – or worse, ecstatically concluded that she thought of sex the way he did, which was pretty much all the time and as the central organizing principle of life. This led to all sorts of tiresome nonsense. Sometimes it meant that the man wanted to have sex in places (the kitchen, parked cars, spare bedrooms at house parties) and in places (her body) where Allison was not interested in having it. Other times, it made him think that she was as fascinated by his penis as he was. The result of this belief was random trouser dropping and witty dingle waving, such as around corners or from opportune angles on the staircase. The first time Allison ran into this, she thought she had entangled herself with a freak. By the third or fourth iteration Allison realized that it was an endemic pathology of the human male, though this realization brought her little comfort. It did, however, provide a friend from college with the topic for her doctoral thesis.

Allison sighed. What had she done? Where would it all lead? And what did she want from this man? It’s not that she regretted having Jim D’Angelo in her bed Eight months had passed since the last time Allison had slept with anyone and he’d delivered the goods quite competently. Jim D’Angelo was pleasant and successful, and Allison liked him. No one could say she’d made a mistake by having sex with him. But Allison had been in this position before, and before that too, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to be. Many of her friends had gotten married, some had started families, but Allison wasn’t afraid of falling behind them. She didn’t worry that they had taken husbands and she hadn’t. She didn’t feel a great aching hole in her life when she held their babies, although their children were lovely. What troubled Allison was the possibility that it didn’t matter.

She was realistically, tolerably, intermittently happy. As happy, at least, as she thought it probable she could be, not possessing a genius for living, but not lacking a capacity for genuine enjoyment either. She had her job and her friends, a trinity house on a comfortable street, dinners and concerts and plays, three weeks in Italy one year, a month in Ireland the next, and all the privacy she desired. And she had men, more or less when she wanted them. This was a sufficient life. It satisfied her. She understood its limitations and endured its deficiencies, but she did so because she believed all lives had limitations and deficiencies. Would a husband and a family be more sufficient? Would they make her more happy? Or only as happy as she was now, just in a different way?

But what about love? Allison admitted the possibility of love and did not deny its attraction, but when asked about it by her friends she always turned the question back on them. Do you love your husband? Of course, they’d answer and then Allison would ask, Why “of course” and not “yes”? A small pause. They knew Allison could be sharp, but she was rarely sharp with them. What’s the distinction? “Yes” is an affirmation, Allison would say, “of course” merely a habit. You’re playing word games with us. Perhaps I am, Allison would agree. And love can’t be all excitement forever, they’d tell her. See if excitement can survive a crying baby at 3 AM. And if it could, would you want it to? I love my husband, but I don’t want to love him like I did when I was twenty-five. That takes too much time, too much energy. I want to feel more settled. I want to grow up and move on. You had a husband once, you know, until you lost your nerve.

I didn’t lose my nerve – I kept it, Allison always thought to herself when this subject was raised. Long ago, she’d learned that it was useless to argue or explain, so she didn’t try. She’d look away, let them think what they wanted about Matt, then talk about something else. Allison had loved Matt. The eight months they were together before their engagement was the happiest of Allison’s life and their engagement made Allison happy too. But sometime after they had selected the inn for the reception and agreed on the Caribbean for their honeymoon, Allison began to change her mind. At first, she didn’t understand she what was happening. She was simply puzzled by a tightness in her stomach whenever she discussed the wedding with Matt or their families. Then Allison found herself resenting Matt when he wanted to talk about how many people they should invite, how much they should spend on the food and music, or where they could find a decent minister. When the face in the mirror looked at her one morning and said, “You don’t want to marry that man,” Allison couldn’t have been more surprised than if a stranger had walked up and told her the same words.

It didn’t make sense. Allison knew her feelings hadn’t changed because she tracked the strength of her attachment to Matt with an exactness she knew wasn’t healthy (I love him less today, by maybe ten percent, but I still love him. I love him much more today!) but which she persisted in all the same. So she tried to think. Allison shaded her eyes from the brightness of her love, looked at her and Matt as they were that day and found nothing, then looked toward the future. They didn’t want the same things, they didn’t like the same things. They never cared. They said it didn’t matter. They said it was a problem other people had. But at some point, Allison considered as she pushed at the knot in her stomach, their life would become about more than love. And when it did, she didn’t see how they could make that life work or how that life would make them happy.

What to do? No one would blamed her if she married Matt – with qualms – and later realized it was a mistake and divorced him. She was young after all. The young were supposed to live by their hearts and not their heads. She might even get credit for believing in love against her better judgment. But that looked like cowardice to Allison. The waste of years, when she saw their marriage crumbling, depressed her. Most of all, Allison was afraid of losing her love for Matt. She might lose him – if that was the necessary outcome and unavoidable – but to lose the bright secret flame that Matt had kindled inside her, that seemed worse to Allison. She tried to avoid making the decision, of course. She hoped that a few weeks, and then a few more, would leave her feeling differently, but they didn’t, and the months before the wedding dwindled from six to four. Soon it would be too late to break the engagement with any decency. Plans would have been made, airline tickets purchased, hotel rooms reserved, new clothes bought, wedding presents ordered and sent. A decision that Matt could gloss over now with a shrug, a brave smile, and the words “she had second thoughts” to his family and friends would turn into an embarrassment and a humiliation with more delay. So Allison asked Matt to come to her apartment and she told him.

At first, Matt thought it was a joke–he didn’t understand. And then he got mad. He walked out of her apartment, slamming the door, but he called early the next morning to apologize and they talked it through all again until Matt understood her. Then he asked if she was sure? Because he saw the problems Allison saw, but he was confident they would solve them. Wasn’t their love enough? Wasn’t their desire to keep loving, even when it wouldn’t be as easy as it was right now, enough? No, Allison said, shaking her head, it wasn’t. They talked like this, around and around and around, for an endless week: Matt trying to coax and convince her by turns, always optimistic, usually sympathetic, sometimes impatient while every conversation left Allison – against everything she honestly wanted – more deeply convinced of her unhappy certainty. She to make herself doubt, but she couldn’t and by the end, all the talking had thrown Allison into a state of such raw animal misery that when she begged Matt to let her go – begged mercy, begged pity – he agreed. He told their families, always used the word “we”, and insisted that their reasons were private. When Allison thanked him afterwards, he nodded once, said “okay,” and walked away. This wounded Allison, but she knew it was a wound of her own making; that the wound hurt most because in it she could feel how she had hurt Matt; and that in the final circumstance, Matt had added to his pain to ease hers. She’d asked far too much of him as it was. She couldn’t expect him to say goodbye with grace. And in truth, she was thankful he hadn’t. It helped Allison feel a little less guilty for what she had done.

For several months, Allison cycled between shock and acute distress. She found the shock easier to handle because she could usually make it look like serenity to people who didn’t know her well. When the distress hit her, by contrast, Allison tended to grab her head and exclaim, “God, oh God, oh God!” regardless of where she was. This made going to work an adventure and Allison had to excuse herself from more than one meeting to seek out the reliably empty women’s room near the museum’s porcelain exhibit, lock herself in a stall, and groan through her hands for fifteen minutes. This same urge struck her on a Friday night at a restaurant where she had been taken by friends hoping to cheer her up for a few hours. Everything had been going fine. She was sitting at the bar, drinking the second cocktail they had ordered for her, and making an adequate display of emotional normality when she looked into the eyes of the bartender, exclaimed, “God, oh God, oh God!” and ran outside. After this, her friends urged her to get an anti-depressant, but Allison preferred to just stay home where she could slip into her bedroom and stick her head under her pillow until the mood passed. She did this frequently enough that the same friends, now transplanted with wine, dinner, and movies to her house, ceased to pay attention to it, particularly since she usually emerged looking refreshed.

During all this time, Allison had one comfort that she kept secret. She had wanted to preserve her love for Matt, even at the cost of their marriage, and she had succeeded. Her love was still there, like a warm coal in her breast and at night, alone in her bed, she would take it out and breathe greedy and grateful life into it again. She never told anyone about this because she could guess at their expressions of horror and disbelief if she did. They would think she was selfish and thoughtless and cruel – and perhaps she was. Allison sometimes worried that she had wrecked Matt’s heart in the service of a monstrous vanity. She didn’t always recognize herself during those hours in the dark. She was strange and dangerous and she couldn’t put the name ‘Allison’ to the person she found. But there was still the fact of her pain and it was only the love that made it bearable.

Neither lasted. Sometime between six and nine months after she broke up with Matt, Allison’s shock melted into equanimity and her distress lessened. The agony of what she had done could still attack her, sharp and sudden, but she was able to master her physical response to its assault enough to return to a public social life with little concern for embarrassment. But as she began to recover, the love grew cool then cold. She could remember it. She knew it had been real, but it was no longer alive. This was the last grief, and it would have been the hardest except that Allison had learned how to carry sorrow over the preceding months. She had become stronger, but also more remote and detached, and she wasn’t sure she liked the exchange. By thirteen or fourteen months, she began to date again, tentatively and infrequently, not because she wanted to begin seeing men again as much as because she wanted to avoid having conversations about why she wasn’t. And after a while, she began to enjoy herself, sometimes. She worried about what she would do if any of these relationships became serious, but that didn’t happen. Allison wasn’t sure she trusted the reason she found to explain why. Maybe it was that these men really weren’t interesting enough and funny enough and sexy enough to keep giving them her Saturday nights. That was true of some, certainly. But for others, perhaps it was her diffidence that ruined their chances. She knew it was there. She could feel it slamming down like a metal storefront grate, when a date was going well, and it puzzled her nearly as much as it puzzled the guy.

“I’ve wrecked myself,” Allison would think after one of the nights that went wrong. “This is my fate.” Then she would sigh and shake her head. That was too dramatic, too absolute. She was much the same as she had always been: intelligent, self-regarding, reserved, modest, over-considerate, and intense. But Allison also knew that she didn’t want love as much as she did before she met Matt. On her worst days, Allison found herself thinking that love was a trivial luxury. “What’s the point of a new boyfriend?” she asked a close friend. “He’d be like a new pair of shoes. He might look good, and he might even feel right, but I have plenty in my closet already that I never bother to wear. And one in particular.”

And yet, and yet. Here was Jim D’Angelo sleeping in her bed. So what does that mean, Allison asked herself. That I haven’t lost all hope? Or that I’ve gotten really good at kidding myself? She raised herself gently on one elbow to study Jim’s face. I’ve certainly fooled you, Allison thought. If you knew what you were getting from me, you’d probably run away. Run before I hurt you. What is it you thought you saw? Allison could have continued pushing her thoughts in this direction, but she didn’t. Instead, she gazed at Jim first with curiosity, then with an emotion that might have been affection. She had known Jim since October, and last night had been their eighth or ninth date, which was quite a lot considering all the holidays, so Allison decided she must fancy him at least. Two glasses of champagne wouldn’t have tricked her into sleeping with a man she didn’t. What was it about this one? Jim’s face was serene. He might have been sleeping in his own bed, Allison considered, for how easy he looked.

On their first date, Allison had mistook Jim’s self-possession for blandness and decided she didn’t want to see him again but he’d convinced her otherwise with a steady application that was confident not assertive. It also took Allison several weeks to realize that Jim was funny. The problem was he had a dry sense of humor, and his occasional jokes were absurd interpretations and implausible inferences, which he slipped into their conversation so unobtrusively – the way a cheat might slip an ace into a deck of cards – that for a little while Allison had thought Jim suffered from an obscure mental-health disorder imperfectly controlled by medication. Jim could still fool her.

Last night, he had made an observation that Allison had been at a complete loss to answer until a faint sparkle in his eyes told her there was no need. Allison laughed and Jim smiled, and she meant to nudge him with her elbow, but half-stumbled and bumped his body instead, and then her lips were pressed on his, Allison holding her glass out to one side and behind her so she wouldn’t spill it down the front of Jim’s suit, and suddenly the party couldn’t be over too soon. Allison raised her head and saw their clothes scattered on the floor. They had been in a hurry.

She studied Jim’s face again. All this mysterious life whirling behind his steady expressions and dependable manners. Who was he? What did he want? He looked kind, but Allison knew how simple it would be to project the feelings she wanted onto Jim and she tried to resist the temptation. “Still, it’s not impossible,” she murmured. Except I don’t know you and you don’t know me. All at once, Allison felt how lonely she had been – for years, it seemed – and how much she didn’t want to be alone anymore. Oh god oh god, what am I doing? Did I kiss you out of despair? When I laughed, I fooled you. When you smiled back, you fooled me. We’ve double-fooled ourselves and each other. It was all an accident and a trick! I don’t want…. “I’m afraid,” Allison whispered. “I was always afraid, but I’m more afraid now.”

Allison watched as Jim exhaled and his eyes blinked open. She had time to cover her breasts with the sheet, but she was caught raised on her elbow, looking down at Jim, and Allison was sure her face expressed her embarrassment. What would he say? How would he seem? Allison didn’t know what she’d do if Jim looked like he thought he had made a mistake or found some excuse to leave quickly. Her hair fell half over her face, but she didn’t have a free hand to brush it back. Jim rubbed his eyes briefly with the tips of his fingers and turned his gaze to Allison. If Jim was surprised to find her staring at him, he didn’t show it. He looked her steadily for a moment and reached up and tucked the loose hair behind her ear. Then he smiled. How Allison’s heart flew out to him! Jim’s smile was neither awkward nor overly familiar. Instead it was comfortable, reserved. She was conquered. All she had left was surrender. But Allison wouldn’t. Not today. I know love’s tricks, she thought. I know all its promises. I know how it works to fools us. I’m going to test it before I call it by name. I’m going to wait before I put our hearts at risk. She smiled at him, then she took a deep breath and said, “Hi.”

Peter McEllhenney lives with his wife and sons in the Queen Village neighborhood of Philadelphia.

Her Bear Husband

“Of course I’ve been in the woods before.”

Lucia glanced around the visitor center to reassure herself that she looked just like everyone else there, then glared back across the counter at the skeptical park ranger. Until encountering him, she’d felt impervious in her new acquisitions: stiff hiking boots with heavy Vibram soles; cargo pants of a slippery, fast-drying fabric that made soft whispering noises as she walked; a rain jacket with a thin fleece lining. In preparation for her excursion, she’d also bought a 20-ounce sleeping bag that would bob atop an unwieldy pack, itself stuffed with a tiny tent – two-and-a-half pounds – a couple of changes of socks and underwear, and foil packets of freeze-dried dinners, their desiccated contents so devoid of texture and smell as to be guaranteed not to attract bears. Alone in the house she’d sublet for her temporary teaching job at a Montana college, she spent hours researching every item, checking off each against a long list of things various guidebooks insisted were essential. Then she went looking for them. Her new town’s business district comprised a scant four blocks. An espresso shop, windows hung hopefully with cheap, root-bound houseplants. Molvar’s Ladies Fashions, chipped mannequins draped in generously cut pantsuits. A newsstand, the daily headlines indecipherable: “Biggest One-Year Drop in Board Feet in Decades.” “Heap-Leach Boom Goes Bust.” “Coyote Depredations on Rise.” The last featuring a photo of a man in a cowboy hat, gesturing angrily toward the mangled body of a sheep at his booted feet, the blood a scarlet shock in the dun-hued scene.

A couple of pawnshops, and a bar – no, two – in each block, most of them along the railroad tracks that divided the town. The Mint, The Stockman, The Gandy Dancer. Red’s. Al’s. Burr Lively’s. And, not one, but three stores offering both hunting and camping gear – heavy on the former, windows a forest of camouflage clothing, including a saucy leaf-patterned bikini dangling from the antlers of a mounted elk head. But, from looks of the little plastic kayaks leaning against the doorframe, to the tents set up along the sidewalk in front of the stores, plenty of the latter, too. She would no more have set foot inside one of those stores than she would have walked through the door of Burr Lively’s, which nightly spilled a contingent of hard-faced men into the empty lot alongside it, where some slept until morning, only to list into the coffee shop at dawn, knocking back double espressos that they dosed from flasks stowed somewhere within their voluminous camouflage jackets that probably had come from the stores just down the street.

Lucia avoided them all, ordering her backpacking gear online, gasping at the total, and endured the quizzical expression of the FedEx man who delivered the outsize boxes for several days in a row.

The park ranger looked at her the same way, eyeballing the pack’s shiny fabric, the boots’ unmarred surface. Before she could even speak, he’d put the question to her.

“First time in the backcountry?”

He was tall, his starched khaki shirt and creased green uniform pants hanging loosely on a rangy frame. His hands, long fingers tapping impatience on the countertop, looked too large for picking at a computer keyboard, and she wondered who he’d pissed off to get stuck on desk duty, dealing with the likes of her. A Smokey the Bear hat sat on his desk, and she refrained from asking him to put it on so that she could take a photo and e-mail it to her friends at home with another sardonic note about her new life. Some of those notes also went to her lover.

Whose reply was always the same: “Come home.”

Home. Her alone in her apartment, him in Westchester County with his wife.

The ranger cleared his throat, awaiting details of her “backcountry” experience. Apparently that was what it was called here. Not – she’d noted his expression at her reply – “woods.” She made a mental note. She thought of long weekends at bed-and-breakfasts in the Adirondacks, youthful summers in Connecticut, strolls through the pleasant groves of elderly oaks and maples encircling sun-dappled glades.

“It’s my first time here,” she told the ranger, intending the words to convey vast experience elsewhere.

“You’re not hiking alone,” he said, not even bothering to make it a question.

“Of course not,” she snapped. Surely, there would be others on the trail.

He took a pamphlet from the holder on the counter, spread it open before her and recited from memory. After each sentence, he glanced up and looked directly into her eyes – his were grey – as if to emphasize the point.

“This is bear country. You don’t want to surprise a bear. Make noise while you hike. Clap, bang a couple of sticks together, sing.”

“Right,” she said, and forced a laugh. “My voice is terrible.”

He waited until she apologized. He resumed:

“If you’re camping in the backcountry –” His gaze traveled to her backpack. “We have campgrounds right here, you know,” he said. He pointed through the window toward a reef of Winnebago roofs visible above low trees. She was silent.

“Hang your food at least ten feet off the ground.”

She was pretty sure that, somewhere in her pack, she had some cord. It was on the checklist. Enough to hang the pack – how high again? And, how was she supposed to get it up there in the first place? Climb a tree? She nodded, trying to look bored.

“Don’t sleep in the clothes you cook in.”

These same instructions were in her books, but she was no more enlightened now as when she’d first read them. Was she supposed to hoist her clothes up into a tree along with the pack? She pictured herself standing naked, tossing her synthetic, fast-drying turtleneck and swishing cargo pants – boots, too? – up into the branches.

She nodded again, quickly.

“Don’t,” he said, and his voice changed, “go into the backcountry if you’ve got your period. Bears…their sense of smell is so keen …”

She couldn’t meet his eyes, but could feel him looking the question at her.

“Jesus,” she muttered. “No.”

“You’ll want to register at the trailhead,” he said, speaking briskly again. “Everyone in your party” – She could look at him again, her level gaze boldly challenging the disbelief in his eyes – “and how many nights you, all of you, expect to be out. How many nights is that, by the way?”

“Three. Maybe four,” she said. She hadn’t come to Montana, she told herself, just to spend her weekends at the same sort of faculty parties that filled her time in New York. Even though they weren’t the same at all. She’d arrived at a barbecue the previous weekend with a chilled falanghina; had dressed carefully, in thin-soled mules, pale capris, and a black knitted-silk shell with a matching cardigan thrown over her shoulders, only to find herself silent and ridiculous among people in roomy cargo pants like the ones she’d since acquired, swigging beer straight from the bottles. Her narrow heels, perfectly suitable for sidewalks, dug into the lawn and she twisted an ankle. Someone steadied her, catching her elbow in a steely grip. Back home, health-club memberships were a given, but these people were lean in a way that differed from the meticulously toned forms hogging the treadmills and ellipticals at her gym. Sinewy, she thought. Muscles hardened and ropy, arms and calves nicked with small scars, tans that shamelessly bisected foreheads and arms, stopped at necklines. Lucia could only listen as they talked about rock-climbing and fly-fishing and float trips, whatever those were, shivering as the sun slipped behind the mountains, deepening the evening chill for which her flimsy sweater proved no match. She was determined to join the next such conversation. Hence, this excursion into the woods. Backcountry. Whatever.

The ranger was talking again, tracing trails on a map – “These get a lot of traffic on weekends, especially this one. You’re best off here. You can read a topo map, can’t you?”

She had such a map, its surface a spiderweb of dashed red trails superimposed atop a mass of thin black lines looping into whorls like so many fingerprints. She pointed to a trace of red somewhat apart from the rest. “What about this one?”

He shook his head.

“Too isolated,” he says. “Too high. Nobody goes up there this early in the summer. There’ll be snow. It’s for experienced hikers.” Again, his gaze swept her. She had left her hair loose that morning, and she knew the effect of the elbow-length russet waves, the luminous skin, the delicate features tiresomely described as pre-Raphaelite. She was used to men staring at her. But this man looked past that, scowling one last time at her obvious inexperience, and so she thanked him abruptly and turned her back and walked toward the door, awkward in her new boots.

He called after her.

“I’ll be heading up that way in a couple of days. Maybe I’ll check on you. What’s your name?”

She called it back over her shoulder and kept walking.

The SUV she rented for the semester had felt over-large in town, but here, when the asphalt road gave way to gravel and began to climb, she appreciated its power. She passed the trailhead he pointed out on the map and, on a whim, pulled into the crowded parking area. Just as he had told her, there was a post with a covered wooden tray containing a hikers’ log protected by a sheet of clear plastic. She added her name in large, bold letters; then, with a tight-lipped smile, that of her lover. Ex-lover, she reminded herself. She got back into the SUV, studied the map, and took a side road, amusing herself on the drive by wondering what would happen if she were to get lost. His name would be reported, too, finally linked publicly with hers. There would be newspaper stories, a brief flurry of publicity before he was revealed to be safe at home with his wife. The reverie, bitter and pleasurable as a citrus sorbet, carried her through the next thirty miles until she turned into another parking area, this one devoid of vehicles.

“Good,” she breathed. The solitude she had sought since leaving New York had eluded her as her new colleagues swarmed around her with invitations to coffee, dinner and more barbecues, trying to prevent the loneliness they insisted she must feel. “Lonely is what I need,” she wanted to say, but cringed at the Garbo-esque melodrama of the words. But it was exactly what she needed, she realized as she set off into the woods – this close to the road, did it count as backcountry? – slowly adjusting to the heavy boots, the unfamiliar weight on her back. The pines stood tall and straight, with segmented orange bark, their branches trailing skeins of dark, fringed moss. Light angled through the trees, glazing a carpet of dried needles. Slowly she found her stride, steps lengthening, arms swinging easily. She inhaled deeply, rounded a bend, and followed the trail onto a ledge that traced a granite wall. To her right, the rockface climbed up and up, nearly vertical. To her left, closer than she would have liked, the ground dropped away into a vast valley. Her gaze swept its breadth, soared to the corrugated peaks on the other side. She forced it downward with difficulty, and was rewarded with the sight of a string of lakes along the valley floor, their waters tinted jade with glacial silt. A turquoise thread of creek connected them with long, crooked stitches. When she let her breath out, she realized how long she had been holding it. She thanked someone, something. Her belief in God was provisional, but the grandeur demanded acknowledgment. Only after she traversed the ledge and followed the trail back into the trees did she realize she hadn’t thought about her lover in some time. A smile stretched her cheeks.

She camped that night by a small stream, its gurgle surprisingly loud. Her pack reposed in a fork in a tree at the far side of the clearing – not ten feet above the ground by any means, but it was the best she could do – her clothes tucked neatly inside. In the end, she had indeed stripped, foolishly looking over her shoulder as though there was anyone to see her, donning for nighttime the soft silk long-underwear pants and pullover that were among the guidebooks’ endless recommendations. It had taken her longer than she’d thought possible to set up the supposedly idiot-proof tent, to start the stove, to boil the scant cup of water necessary for her odd, freeze-dried dinner. Still, she slid into the slick sleeping bag, grateful for the lightweight pad beneath it that had seemed such an annoyance when she’d packed. Throughout the day, though, she’d marveled at the concrete-like consistency of the earth beneath her feet, and was happy for even the thin buffer offered by the pad. She lay awake for a few moments, pulling the tent flap aside to gasp at the nearness of the stars, noting the pleasant ache in her thighs and calves, smiling at her outsize sense of accomplishment for having achieved the simple tasks of the tent, the stove, the meal. She tried to slow her breathing. At home bedtime involved an elaborate ritual of a hot bath, a little cognac, earplugs, an herbal sleep mask. She rationed sleeping pills carefully, cutting them in half, and even as she wondered if she should have brought some with her into the woods, she fell asleep.

Morning brought a cottony grey light and a chill that shocked her. Her breath wreathed around her head as she dipped water from the icy creek for her breakfast. Hands stiff with cold, she repeated the previous evening’s struggles with her tiny backpacking stove, pumping its primer for what seemed like forever before the flame finally caught, too slowly warming the water for a meal that purported to be scrambled eggs, but tasted instead of colored Styrofoam. Already, she was planning for her next trip, thinking longingly how easy it would have been to pack slices of thick brown bread and packets of marmalade to squeeze upon it; maybe a frozen steak that would thaw in its baggie while she hiked, providing an evening meal with actual taste and texture. At least she had thought to bring strong coffee, and, for the evenings, little bottles of wine, and that small bit of foresight cheered her, even as the sun reappeared through the trees, burning away the fog. She felt quite pleased with herself as she fumbled with the collapsed tent and stuffed her sleeping back into its sack and set out upon the trail.

In that first hour, she rediscovered the long, easy stride of the previous day, but then the trail narrowed and began to climb, folding back on itself through a forest thick with spiky underbrush that caught repeatedly at her hair. Lucia stopped and slid the heavy pack from her shoulders, fumbling in it for a bandanna that she twisted around her hair. She tried combing through its snarls with her fingers, dislodging pine needles and bits of leaves, and finally gave up, shrugging into the pack again and stepping grimly back onto a trail quickly growing wearisome. At first, the rise was gradual, but then the switchbacks came more frequently, and Lucia’s calves and lungs competed in fiery protest. The trees grew thick overhead, blotting out the sun, a mercy, she thought, as sweat dampened her shirt. Gnats whined at her ears, fastening themselves to the corners of her eyes and mouth. She breathed noisily through her nose, suppressing the searing gasps that would only draw in the insects. Somewhere deep within the pack was the recommended repellant, but she feared that if she stopped, the bugs would set upon her even more fiercely in the time it would take to unearth it. She saw an opening in the trees and moved more quickly, shoving aside thin, supple branches. She released them too soon, and they lashed back across her face. She touched a finger to her stinging cheek, brought it away bright with a drop of blood. She smeared the back of her hand across her face, then swiped it across her eyes, damp with tears of frustration. It occurred to her that despite the ranger’s warning against hiking alone, she was glad no one was there to see her struggles, and then she barely had time to reflect upon the fact that she had not seen a single person in a day and a half when the bear ambled onto the trail in front of her and stopped.

She had stepped into a clearing, and the sun was high and strong above her. She felt it warm on her back, and a soft breeze bent the tops of the pines and dried the sweat on her shirt and she thought it was far too pretty a morning for what was about to happen. The bear didn’t move, and neither did she and so there was plenty of time for her to register the characteristics the ranger had listed for her – the dished face, the humped shoulders, the gingery fur.

“If you encounter one,” he’d said, “don’t look it in the eye. They see that as a challenge.”

But she couldn’t help it; the bear was looking directly at her, its eyes honeyed and liquid, and when it stood to peer down at her from a better vantage point, she realized it was male and that he was aroused (she would learn about the baculum only later). Oddly, the sight steadied her; she was familiar with this reaction and, unconsciously, she touched her hand to her hair, lifting it from her neck, the movement loosening the inexpertly tied bandanna so that it fell away and her hair flowed over her shoulders.

The bear made a keening noise and fell heavily back down onto his forepaws and took a step toward her. She remembered how the ranger told her to play dead, and she crouched on the ground, wrapping her arms around her head (“Protect your neck, cover those big arteries.”) the way she did in elementary school when she and her classmates bent beneath their insubstantial wooden desks against the vaporizing powers of the atomic bombs.

Through slitted eyes she saw his claws arced against the earth of the trail just inches from her nose; registered the hot breath against her face. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt his snout, cool and dry, against her elbow and she braced for the clamp of jaw, the pierce of fang, but he merely nudged her arm away from her head and put his nose to her cheek. She felt it grow moist and thought she must be crying again, but realized it was his tongue, gently cleaning her face, lapping the length of the scratch, touching carefully to the corners of her eyes and lips, flicking away an errant gnat. Then he pressed his head tightly to hers and held it there a long minute as she breathed in his musky scent, withdrawing so quietly that it was some moments before she realized he was truly gone.

She stood slowly, unfolding her limbs as though they were strange to her. The sun drenched her in warmth, but she found herself shivering, noted the chattering noise that at first she thought was a woodpecker, but turned out to be her teeth. She turned slowly, a full circle, but saw nothing. Even the wind had died, and the trees stood like sculptures against the bowl of sky. She had an impulse to wonder if she’d imagined everything, but could not yield to it; there, heading back down the trail the way she had come, were prints sunk into the crumbly earth, big as soup plates, each preceded by a row of deep holes poked by those claws. She moved her mouth experimentally, touched her tongue to a hair caught in her lips, and when she pulled it away, she found it both shorter and thicker than her own, like a strand of copper wire. So it had happened. She rolled the hair between her fingers, then shoved it deep into one of the pockets of her cargo pants. From another pocket, she withdrew her cell phone, but it told her, as it had nearly from the moment she had entered the park, that she was out of range of any signal. Her legs trembled, but when she shoved one before her, it worked, and so she shoved the other, and eventually she discovered herself walking up the trail again. It seemed insane to head more deeply into the woods, but she didn’t dare return the way she’d come for fear of seeing the bear again. The trail described a twenty-eight-mile loop and she had already hiked nearly ten of those; two more nights would bring her back to the parking area. She wondered if the bear had really gone, or if it would return to stalk her; wondered if there were more bears ahead. She walked and cried, trying to push away the regret swelling within her for choosing such a lightly traveled route. She vowed to hike farther than she had planned each day so as to spend only a single night more on the trail. The thought cheered her, and she moved more quickly, hiking on legs grown rubbery until it was nearly dark, noticing little about her surroundings.

She stopped reluctantly where a beaver dam across a creek formed a small pond and, with hands shaking anew, raised her tent in the middle of the meadow, thinking it less likely that a bear would creep out of the trees toward her. She was hungry, but feared that even the tasteless, strangely textured substances within her freeze-dried packets would prove too much of a temptation, so she crawled into her sleeping bag and listened to her stomach rumbling. Improbably, she fell asleep just as abruptly as the night before, waking to the same grey fog that heralded the previous morning.

She was ravenous, and headachey from going so long without food. She disentangled herself from the sleeping bag, and with some apprehension, unzipped the tent and tentatively put her face to the opening. The first thing she saw were the fish, three trout, water beaded upon scales whose rainbow hues still shone bright, their perfection marred only by the puncture marks of the large claws. The second thing she noticed were the footprints across the dew-glistening meadow, the outsize depressions leading into the trees. The last thing she saw was the large circle of flattened grass not eight feet away. She crawled from the tent, stood slowly, then tiptoed barefoot to its center. The grass beneath her feet was still warm. She curled her toes into it, contemplated the footprints, then turned to the trout. Her stomach lurched demandingly, and within minutes, she had inexpertly gutted them with her Swiss Army knife, scraped away their scales, and sliced them into ragged fillets. She hastily pumped the little stove into life, boiled water for coffee, then sautéed the trout fillets. It was awkward – she had neither butter nor oil and they stuck to the pan, so hot when she scraped them free that they burnt her tongue, but the flesh was moist and delicate and delicious, and she forced herself to slow down and savor it, alternating bites with gulps of coffee as the sun chased off the fog. An indignant beaver surfaced in the pond, saw her, slapped its tail against the glacier-green water and dived deep. In the trees at the edge of the clearing, a raven croaked and another flapped to join it, the pair of them clearly waiting for her scraps, and she rose and stretched and laughed aloud and told herself that she had gone crazy, truly out of her mind, if she what she imagined was happening was any kind of real at all.

Still, that night, her final one on the trail, she ostentatiously lingered overlong beside a creek, stripping off her shirt and bra and splashing icy water on her face and chest and under her arms, and she was not at all surprised to find the still-warm rabbit’s carcass beside the tent when she returned, its neck neatly broken by what appeared to be a single, decisive blow.

Skinning it took some doing, but she managed, and she simmered the pieces in some of her wine, and although she might have wished for some mushrooms, a little thyme and chervil, a quick grind of coarse pepper, and a dusting of flour just to bring the sauce together, still, it was a passable meal, better than passable, and after she ate half the rabbit, and finished most of the wine, she lay back in the grass and let the stars do their slow cartwheel overhead until she was nearly asleep. But before she crept into her tent, she took the uneaten pieces of rabbit, and put them on a rock some distance – but not a great distance – from the tent, and found a good-size stone with a hollow in it, and poured the last of the wine into the depression. Then, standing before her tent as the moon rose, she took off all of her clothes (“Don’t sleep in the clothes you cook in.”) piece by slow piece, and stood a long moment in the moonlight before dropping to her knees and easing into the tent.

Yet again, she slept deeply, but not so soundly that she was unaware of the warmth just on the other side of the tent wall, so close that she knew if she were to put her hand to the flimsy nylon shell and push just the slightest bit, she would feel a mound of muscle and the regular rise and fall of deep, yearning breaths.

In the morning, there was no trace of the wine and rabbit, but there were more trout, beside a heap of purple-black huckleberries. She ate them one by one, bursting them against her palate with her tongue, closing her eyes against the intensity of the flavor. When she opened them, he stood before her, fixing her with the same golden gaze. He waited patiently while she gathered her things, then walked beside her down the trail. At some point, she reached out and rested her hand upon his shoulder, absorbing the heat of the sun-warmed fur, pressing her fingers against him so as to sense the blood coursing just beneath the skin.

He hesitated when they approach the trailhead. But they had already come too far to turn back, and she looked at him and nodded, and so of course he came home with her, and that is how he became her bear husband.

Gwen Florio first worked in the West during the 1990s as a Denver-based national correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer. During her time at the Inquirer, she was also a member of Philadelphia?s Rittenhouse Writers Group. She has received two prose grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a residency from the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. Florio now lives in Missoula, MO, where she is city editor for the Missoulian newspaper. She is afraid of bears.

Broad Street (novel excerpt)

I took the subway to the party in Center City. I walked from the stop down a quiet street in the business district, where merchandise peeked out from behind thick steel gates. As I approached the address of the old brownstone, I heard the muffled sound of voices and the latest Nirvana album. I felt a wash of panic. I could be back home and under my blanket in twenty minutes; but my feet kept moving forward. I found the appropriate apartment number, rang the bell, and was buzzed in without question.

The party was a crowded gathering of hipsters. I scanned the room for familiar faces, feeling stupid. The few I recognized looked at me, then quickly turned away. Finally, I spotted Noelle.

“Hey Kit,” she smiled. Her sandy hair hung neatly around a tiny, plain face. “How are you?”

She gave me a hug. Noelle would be one of many mutual friends walking the tightrope between the fallen couple. I tried to balance her with a forced smile.

“Hi Noelle,” I said. “Thanks for inviting me. Who’s having this party, anyway?”

“Pete and his girlfriend, Margo.” She nodded toward a guy talking to a group of people. “Pete’s in that band, Smarmy.”

“And that’s Margo over there.” Noelle pointed to another corner.

My eyes followed her finger to the corner of the room. Margo was tall and curvy, her long black hair shining with streaks of midnight blue. Her full lips were accented with bright scarlet lipstick; her blue eyes painted with a swish of black eyeliner. She wore a low-cut red satin dress that hugged her figure, and held a martini and cigarette gracefully in one hand as she smiled at a chatting male guest. I felt flat-chested and plain.

“I’ll introduce you.”

My heart thudded noisily as I followed Noelle closer to this intimidating creature.

“Hey Margo,” Noelle said. “This is my friend, Kit.”

Margo moved her cool smile away from the guy to fix her eyes on me. She inhaled deeply from her cigarette; her pool-blue eyes bored through me. I felt like a frog pinned down to a board, a scalpel dangling above me.

“Don’t you go out with Dale?” she asked.

Noelle gasped.

“I used to,” I said, attempting my cheeriest tone.

“Oh. Sorry,” she said, looking over my shoulder at the rest of the crowd.

“It’s all right,” I mumbled.

Margo’s eyes continued to scan the room. I fiddled nervously with the clasp of my purse as I awaited further instructions from our hostess. After a moment, she looked back at Noelle and me.

“So,” she said in a bored tone. “Can I get you guys a drink?”

“I’m going to go grab a beer outside,” Noelle said.

Just as I was about to follow Noelle’s lead, Margo turned her piercing gaze toward me, and smiled with aloof politeness.

“How about you, Kate, would you like a martini?”

“It’s Kit, and… sure.”

I followed Margo to a table that sparkled with a liquor rainbow. She poured with expert precision, first filling a chrome shaker with ice, then using both hands to tip in a clear stream of vodka, then a splash of vermouth. She snapped on the lid, spun the shaker, then filled the triangular glass until the martini almost kissed the rim. Dropping two olives in the drink, she turned and handed it to me.

“You’ve done that before,” I said, trying to sound charming.

She laughed. “A few times.”

We both took long sips of the grown-up drink. Margo continued to smile politely, but kept her eyes moving around the room.

“What do you do, Kit?” she asked indifferently.

“I’m a proofreader.” I took another sip from the smooth glass. The vodka was already massaging my anxiety with its warm fingers. “How about you?”

Margo waved her hand as if shooing an invisible insect.

“Oh, I do PR for an insurance company. It’s selling out, I know, but it’s decent money.” She turned her gaze from the crowd back to me and leaned closer, crowding the air between us with musky perfume. “Sorry about mentioning Dale. I didn’t know.”

“That’s okay.” I took another sip. “We just had a different definition of monogamy.”

Her eyebrow lifted slightly as she smiled.

“So,” Margo began, pulling another cigarette from a silver case. “Last time I saw Dale he was playing at The Barbary with the Electric Love Muffin. I don’t remember meeting you there.”

“I don’t think I was at that show.”

“Probably a good thing.” Margo took a drag from her cigarette. “They were pretty bad that night. I stopped going to Pete’s shows. I thought it was fun for a while, but then I just got tired of being ignored.” She paused to glare in Pete’s direction, then took a sip from her martini.

“I know,” I said. “Dale was really different in college. H wasn’t in a band in college.”

“A band is just their excuse for getting drunk with their buddies. They don’t even know how to write a decent song.”

“What kind of music do you listen to?” I asked.

“Oh, I like the old stuff, like Wanda Jackson, The Collins Kids. It’s real simple, it has a hook, not like the crap these guys play.”

She lifted her glass to her lips, then realized it was empty.

“This is a problem. Looks like you could use one, too.”

She took my glass from my hand and refilled them both from the tall silver shaker she’d left on the table. I didn’t normally drink hard liquor, and could feel myself disappearing a little, but I was immensely grateful for the company. I hadn’t really talked to anyone about Dale. My parents didn’t want to upset me, so they acted like we’d never dated. My kid sister was wrapped up in her own little college clique. I wanted to tell these things to Margo, not just because we had things in common, but I really wanted her to like me. We sat on the couch and smoked cigarettes and swirled martini after martini, my intimidation dwindling with each new glass.

“I never knew what I would find when I came home from work,” I slurred slightly. “Sometimes Dale would just be sitting around smoking with guys from his band, and I’d walk in all corporate and they’d look at me like I was someone’s mother.”

Margo nodded her head sympathetically.

“I never knew where Dale was,” I continued, “and if I asked he’d say I shouldn’t be so paranoid.”

“What an ass,” Margo said. “Pete’s the same way. He’s a bartender, so he sleeps in and stays up late and listens to music when I’m trying to get to sleep so I can get up the next morning and make some decent money to pay our bills. All he cares about is ‘the band’ and his friends.”

“Exactly.”

We both stared at the tattooed people in the room.

“You know,” Margo said, “these people work in comic book stores and coffee shops and they feel so superior to people like us who have the nerve to get a 9-to-5 job.” She shook her head in disgust. “Just because they can wear an eyebrow ring to work they think they’re fucking artists. What gives them the corner on creativity?”

“Don’t forget record stores,” I said, “with their superior fucking attitude. God forbid if you pick up the wrong fucking CD and they look at you like you just voted for George Bush.”

“Please,” Margo rolled her eyes and took a long sip of her drink.

We stared at the clueless gathering, unaware of the invisible daggers we were hurling into their backs.

“I know I could write a better song than most of the people in this room,” Margo said. “I play a little guitar. It’s not that hard.”

“Really? Have you ever played with a band?”

“Nah. I just mess around on one of Pete’s acoustic guitars. How about you — do you play?”

“Actually, I kind of know how to play bass. Dale gave me one, and I took it with me when I moved because I knew he wanted it back, but felt too guilty to ask for it.”

Margo took a drag off her cigarette. “Maybe we should get together. See what happens.”

“I’d like that,” I said.

Margo glanced over at Pete. Two guys who looked just like him stood at his sides. They were passing a joint and laughing. She turned back to me.

“I can definitely get an electric guitar from Pete. He has, like, a dozen of them. I’m sure he can spare one.”

The buzz of the martinis accentuated my enthusiasm. Thoughts of parties and gigs and new friends clouded my blurry vision.

“We can play at my house,” I said. “I have plenty of room.”

“And I’ve got a ton of song ideas. Real simple stuff. I could bring some CDs over.” Margo fell back into the couch and grinned. “This is great. What better way to get back at these guys than to piss on their precious territory? Let’s do it.”

Margo lifted her martini in the air and we clinked glasses, the bond as strong as a blood oath.

Goon

Around the corner he come all panting and wobble-eyed with his little sticks kicking out to the sides, and he slipped because the grass was wet. One of his Velcro shoes flew off and knocked into the siding. He got himself together, picked up his shoe, and bounced inside the house. Willard. I told Angela he’s over-sugared.

The older one, Brian, come sprinting across the yard. “Will!” he’s hollering. “Will!” He dropped his old bat as he flew past me, and the screen door slapped shut, and then everything was quiet again.

I went over to the wall and turned the water off.

I’d moved in a couple months earlier. Angela and I talked about it for a few weeks, and I wasn’t hot on it at first, but she was ready to take a chance again, she said. She said her boys could use someone, too. Okay, I said. When this rental on Blue Ferry Road come available, I packed my stuff and their stuff and moved us all out here.

I got to know the boys pretty well pretty fast. Brian’s
happy to have anybody throw a ball at him. He’s one of those
kids that, if they don’t have a catch partner, you always
see staggering around the yard, chucking balls up in the air to
themself. He’ll do pretty much what you tell him to. Will,
he’s got more of an artistic side. He’ll sit for hours
drawing bloodied-up versions of the cartoons he watches, wearing
out felt tip markers to the point he’s got to lick them to
keep them going. His tongue, it’ll be purple or green whenever
he’s explaining his stories to you. They run for pages, and
he only ever draws on one side, which is a waste, I said, but he’d
throw a fit if you made him save on paper.

I could hear thuds. The two of them were talking in their bedroom.
The light fixture in the hall was rattling.

“Y’all quit dribbling in the house!” I called. “You
heard me now, Brian!”

When I come in, Brian looked up and give me a shrug. He didn’t
have the ball, so I looked to the other side of the room, and,
what it was was, Will was standing against the wall, knocking his
old head against the sheetrock, whump, whump, whump. Brian and
I stood between their twin beds watching him go at it. “Way
too much sugar,” I said.

Brian stared. “Geeze.”

Whump.

“Quit that now,” I said. “You’re going
to get a-“

Whump.

“Melonhead.” I took his shoulder and set him back
on the bed. He was wearing the blue shirt with the old messy looking
monster on it he liked. Brian made to go. “Hang on a minute,
Tex. Stay put.”

“Why?”

“Because I said.”

“Are you still washing the truck?”

“What?”

“Are you . . .” he said, like I was an idiot, “still
washing thetruck?”

“Just stay here,” I told him.

We looked at them. They were pretty sticky.

“What the hell you been doing? Hurry up.”

Will had pulled his knees up to his chin and was rocking back
and forth on his bedspread. He hooked his thumbs into the neck
of his shirt and wiped at his nose so he looked like a bandit.

“You’re an odd one, Mr. Will,” I said.

Brian come back in, drying his hands on his basketball shorts.
They’d been up to something.

“Alright . . .” I sat down on the bed. I had to ask.

A rusty barbed wire fence run through the woods behind the house.
It had been there a long time, and the trees had grown around the
wire in places. Parts of it were all swallowed up in bark. We picked
our way over logs and through the trees, until Brian said, “Here!” and
he ducked under the fence and began to pass through. Will lollygagged
behind us. He swerved through the leaves like his compass was loose,
and when I called his name, he bumped off a tree, made some googly
sound effect, then fell down flat, spazzing with his arms out.

“Ow, mother!” Brian pulled his jersey off a barb.
He took a step back on the other side. “Come on,” he
said. “It’s up the hill!”

“Let’s go, Willard.” I raised the middle wire. “Get
through here now.”

He didn’t want to, but I waited, and so he pushed himself
up and slipped under. The two of them run up the cowpath into the
clearing, and for a second I thought about the way all kids run.
As I come out of the trees, it was like being in the country. Where
Angela’s and I were living was kind of the outer belt of
suburbs, and a lot of folks who lived here drove across the river
and into the city for work. There were gas pumps not more than
three hundred yards away, but you couldn’t see them. You
couldn’t see any manmade stuff at all here. All you could
see was the fence running around the field, and then the hills,
and the grass, and the trees, and that’s it. No wires in
the sky. It was August, a couple weeks before school.

They run through the shadow of a cloud, and I followed them up
the empty hill. They’d told me they’d found something
dead.

[img_assist|nid=828|title=Main Street in Manayunk by Pauline Braun ©2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=149|height=94]
Nights, Angela would go to bed before me so she’d be asleep by when I got there, which, I was learning, was how she preferred it. For a long while, I worked only second shifts with the ovens—we’re the largest processor of canned pet food in the region—and a few of us would always go out after, and I’d be home around one or so. But then they moved me to doing a lot of thirds, emptying tankers of liquid horse meat. I’d have a drink in the kitchen before bed, and when I lay beside her, I tried to sleep, though I’d usually be too wound up with things I wanted to ask her, like where she was all day when she said she only had meetings in the morning. Traffic was always bad, she said. The sun would come up, and we’d go through it all over, and as I lay there, I knew the field mice that chewed holes in my clothes were creeping around, under the boxspring—maybe even in it—or climbing through her shoes in the closet. The traffic racing on the highway was sometimes enough to keep me from thinking too much on them. People use that road to skip the stoplights out of town. They travel too fast on it, and along the shoulder you’ll find possum and deer that didn’t get out of the way. Angela worried the kids would play too close to the ditch or skateboard too far down the asphalt drive. She told me over and over it wasn’t a good home for kids. She didn’t like it out here. She wanted to find, eventually, a better place to live, even if it would be a little smaller, like their apartment before.

The exterminator told us to get a cat, so we did, but it was
a prowler, and one night come home with a gash in its chest. Even
in the house, it took two days to catch it and take it to the vet.
I had to put the medicine on because Angela wouldn’t, it
gave her the willies. Finally one night I come in, it hopped off
the counter and out the screendoor and we never saw it again. It
bothered Will the most. He used to put paper helmets on the thing.
Hero. Hero never caught one mouse I knew of.

The headlights would set the window’s shadow crawling across
the ceiling, and I remember thinking what might have put the hole
in that cat’s chest like that? A claw, maybe. Or teeth. I
pressed my fingers on the tattoo behind her shoulder and felt her
lungs fill. I rubbed the rose like I rubbed the salve on the stitches.
Maybe a barbed wire fence had done it, or some old boy’s
rake.

It was a young red Hereford , and it was lying on its side in the grass. The boys were standing over it. The smell of animal was strong in the heat, and I slowed as I got nearer, and then my stomach just dropped to my hipbones. I felt dizzy. Sticks were poking out of the little cow’s nostrils and mouth—a whole mess of them. Its white face was all stuffed up with them and made it look like some old broom. I hadn’t ever seen anything dead that way before.

Brian studied me. He tried to laugh. “It was dead,” he said.

I pushed him over. Will fell to the ground, too, on his own, and a second later he was crying.

“What were you guys thinking? This is stupid.”

Will stopped just long enough to see how his brother would answer. When Brian didn’t, Will started crying again. He rolled in the grass.

“Do you hear me?” I said. “Knock it off, Willard. Get up.” I squatted down next to it and looked at the sticks jammed up in there. “You a part of this, too?” I asked Will. It was something else. “Both of you, get these sticks out of it, right now.” I stepped back so they could move in.

They began to pull them out of its face one at a time. They seemed
to know just how. Will, he dangled a long twig in front of his
eyes for a sec. Brian was working faster.

“Did you all think it would bite you or something? Huh?”

Will dropped the stick. “It bit Zach. On his fingers.” His
mouth hung open.

Brian glared at him vicious. He turned away.

“You mean it wasn’t dead?” I said. “Brian?”

He stayed crouched there, wiping a slimy stick in the grass.

“Was it or wasn’t it?”

“Not at first,” Will said.

Zach lived across the highway and around the corner from us.
I could hear the TV on, but no one come to the door, so I knocked
again, harder. “Zach!”

“PlayStation,” Brian said.

Their crummy dog started barking.

I poked my head in the door and called again, and the TV snapped
off, and so I went in after him. The dog was jumping all under
my feet. I pushed it away with my boot.

It was the first time I’d ever been in their place. Cereal
bowls on the kitchen table, a cracker box on the floor with crackers
all over. They were keeping the fridge closed with masking tape.
I caught fat Zach by the shirt as he tried to squeeze out the sliding
door, and I hauled him around, and we pulled the screen off its
track. I stepped on the damn dog again, and it yelped and went
flat then scurried across the dirty linoleum to I don’t know
where. I whirled Zach onto the taped-up couch. It let out a slow
hiss as he sank in it.

“You stretched out my shirt!” he said. The dog was
still yipping.

“Yeah, hell, and I broke the door, too. Will!” I
lifted the screen and got the wheels back in the groove. “Goddamn
it. Brian! Get in here.”

They come in slow.

Will raised a hand. “Hi, Zach.” He plopped down on
the couch, wiggled a sec, then pulled the black remote out from
under him. He held it in his hands like he’d never seen one
before.

“No. Put it down,” I told him.

“What?”

“Just put it down,” I said.

“Y’all get off my property,” Zach told us.

“You shut up a minute. Sit on the couch there, too, Brian.”

Three blind monkeys they looked like. They needed a leader, but
there wasn’t any.

“Somebody better start saying something,” I
said. “Now.”

Zach got nervous. Angela’s wouldn’t look at him. “Stupid
cow was eating my pop tart,” he said.

Will’s eyes lit up. “You were feeding it,
Zach. Remember?”

“Remember,” I said. “You better remember.”

“Not all of it! I wasn’t,” Zach said. “I wasn’t.
It just started-“

“So we had to stop it,” Brian explained.

“It wouldn’t stop eating Zach’s food,” Will
cried. He got to his feet, not even knowing he was doing it.

“Sit down. And stay sat down.”

“You seen it,” Zach said to the boys.

Brian was real calm. “That’s the way it happened,
Tim.” He’d get better at this as he got older.

I tried to imagine how they brought it down. Chasing after it.
The whole thing. “Regular heroes. Stopped a cow from eating
a pop tart. How’d you think to start putting the sticks in
it?”

They shrugged.

“Huh? You guys aren’t even supposed to be in that
pasture,” I said.

They tailed me like dogs to the metal shed on our lot. The backyard
was damp, and the shed was situated in its lowest spot—it
was always full of mosquitoes. I brushed a cobweb off my nose and
grabbed the old shovel.

“Ho, mother,” Brian smiled, rubbing his shoulder. “You
gonna bury it, Tim?”

I tossed the thing to him. He spun it in his hands.

“No,” I said.

I let that sink in. We went back into the woods.

None of them was very good. Will, he was about useless. Zach
was probably the best because he was the heaviest, but he wasn’t
into it. In little more than a half hour, they had this uneven
ditch about four feet long, three feet wide, and two feet deep.

“Shovel sucks,” Zach said.

Will showed me his palm. “I got a splinter.”

A horsefly settled just below the calf’s eye and sat there
in the sun like it was waiting for a bus. “The hole’s
not big enough yet,” I told them. “Look at it.”

Zach held his arms out to get the width of the calf, then he
tried to hold his measure as he moved his hands over the hole. “It’s
goddamn close.”

Brian snatched up the shovel. “Why we have to put it in
the ground?” he asked. “Won’t it just-“

“Because y’all killed it.” I looked around
at them. “Aren’t you even embarrassed? I’d be.
Or maybe you’d rather go over there, Brian, and tell the
farmer y’all killed his calf.”

“No.”

“Huh? And for no reason,” I added.

“It wasn’t just me.” Brian put the shovel on
his shoulder and swung for the fence.

“Get serious,” I said.

“Tim, shouldn’t we tell the farmer anyway?” Will
asked.

The barn roof showed just over the hill.

Zach wiped his nose. “Don’t forget it was eating
my food. We said the reason.”

I threw a stick at his head, but it missed.

“That’s right,” Will remembered. “It
was eating his pop tart.”

“So I heard.”

The sun was getting low. Brian was quiet. He tapped the dead
Hereford softly with the shovel.

“Dig,” I said.

“Oh mother . . .”

When we got back, Angela’s car was in the drive behind
my truck. “Aw, hell, your mom’s home,” I said.
It was a joke they never got.

Zach walked home punching a cloud of gnats like he was hacking
through some jungle, and the boys and I went inside.

“Where have you been?” she wanted to know. “No
note. No nothing.”

They escaped for their room.

“Where have you been?” I said. “We went out
on a hike. Wash up!” I called to them. She faced me, waiting
for something better. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll
tell you about it later.”

I squirted Lemon Joy on my hands and knocked the faucet on. I
wanted to say things.

She set two cans on the counter.

I shut the water off.

“You want green beans,” she said, “or baked
beans?”

I don’t know, she and I had met in this strip mall bar
I tried after work once because I was tired of the bullshit at
the regular one. It was called Sidewinders. It was next to a Chinese
take-out, and she was eating a rice thing with her cigarette going
when I come in. Rum and ginger ale. I sat down next to her, and
I asked the sleepy girl behind the counter for a Budweiser, which
took her a whole five minutes to get it, open it, and set it on
the little cardboard. The whole time I’m waiting, Angela’s
stopped eating and is just staring at the side of my face–smoking
at me–because I practically sat on her lunch when there’s
a hundred open seats in the place. That’s my style.

“I bet they call you Apeneck,” she said.

“Who does?”

“Somebody ought to.”

I bought her a drink.

Snoozin Susan brown bagged us a six, and we took it out to my
truck. We drove out to the lake, to that parking lot behind the
parking lot that had a chain up for a while, but the chain was
down and I just pulled back where the weeds grew through the gravel
and stopped beside this tall brush pile somebody cleared. The lake
glittered through the trees.

“You’re making me feel back in high school,” she
said.

“Sorry,” I said, and I cracked another can for her.
I opened the crammed glovebox to get a napkin to wrap around the
can, la-dee-dah.

“Good lord,” she said. “Half Burger King’s
stuffed in there.”

I kissed her.

“Apeneck,” she laughed, pulling at my hairs. “A-a-ape-ne-e-eck.”

I laughed, too. No one had ever called me that before.

She slid closer. “What did you do to your hands?” She
kissed them. Ducks were quacking.

“Nothing,” I said. “Some bullshit.”

When I come downstairs morning after the cow thing, Will was
cross-legged in front of the TV. The volume was turned low, and
he was sucking on a tube of Gogurt.

“Morning, Mr. Will. How’d you sleep?” I had
a headache. “You’re up early,” I tried again.

“Can we go to the grave?”

“The grave. No. I don’t want you guys in the pasture
at all for a while. Why would you want to go to the grave?” I
waggled my fingers at him.

“To put flowers on it.”

“I see. And where would you get flowers, Willard?”

“At Walgreen’s they have some. Fake kind.”

The nearest intersection was about a quarter mile down the highway,
and there was a new little plaza there, built for neighborhoods
creeping this way from town. So far, they had the gas station and
a drugstore and a little pizza place, where I took them once, and
a hair salon. Couple offices, maybe. One place had kung fu classes.
Others had lease signs in the windows.

“And what are you going to buy flowers with?” I asked.

“Money. Duh.”

I went into the kitchen and put the coffee on. Duh. A fresh trail
of mouse droppings run along the counter’s splashguard. During
the night, I had come down for a drink of juice and found a mouse
scrambling in the empty sink. It couldn’t get out. It reminded
me of the kids with their boards at the skate park. I stood there
half-awake, watching it scratch its way up the steel sides only
to slide back down. Then I gripped the roll of paper towels and
set to it with soft, quiet crushes. I barely slept at all.

Will sang along with a commercial for some sort of crap.

“Hey,” I called.

He come to the doorway.

“C’mere, buddy.” I took Angela’s purse
off the chair.

Zach’s mom called and spilled the beans. Old Zach the Sack
complained I made them dig–it give him blisters–and soon it all
come out, and, presto, the bag calls Angela.

“Why didn’t you tell me?

“Why did you bury it?

“Why wouldn’t you tell me?”

She’s a strong arguer, Angela is. She gets energy from
it, though I’m not sure about her reasoning sometimes. She’d
gone on and on and ended her favorite way with, “End of story.” She
called Information.

The farmer was a Carlson or a Carlton , and as soon as she had
the right number she called the old boy up. “I’ve got
to go to work,” she told me. “You’re going to
take care of this.”

“Okay,” I said. “I thought I’d
taken care of it yesterday.”

“I know you do. I know you do . . . Hello,” she said. “Is
this Mr. Carlson?”

His mailbox was a half mile down the road from ours, the opposite
way from the plaza, but then I had to drive my truck another quarter
mile down his old gravel lane, which went around the foot of the
pasture, and then up to his house and barn on the far slope. I
drove slow. A new Chevy sat in the dirt drive. I got out and shut
my door. The house had a cool, settled look to it, and the whole
place, even outside, smelled like a basement. It might have been
the weather. He was waiting just inside the screendoor, and he
let me into the enclosed porch and stepped aside as the door eased
shut against my back.

In an instant, a dog was sniffing my boots. This happens regular
to us who work the floor at the plant. I tried to shake it without
overdoing it, but it growled and started sniffing and licking again.
Carlson spoke to the dog then shut it in the kitchen.

The porch was concrete and covered with a big round rug, and
a pair of stuffed chairs faced each other, and a shelf of magazines
and newspapers. A chain of pop can tabs hung from an empty birdcage,
and this feather dangled at the end of that. It was dyed blue,
like the kind you might win at a carnival or get at a gift shop.

“Where you keep your bird at?” I asked.

“It died from fumes from something I had on the stove,” Carlson
said. “On accident.” He was heavy, and moved and talked
slow, but he had this calmness and confidence about him because
of it—he might have hurried on his own account, but it was
clear you weren’t going to rush him. I never got the impression
he was dumb. He smelled like he had just shaved. “You want
to have a seat here?” He raised the birdcage by its pole
and set it aside. “I was surprised to get your call, but
I was glad you did. I hadn’t realized what happened. Go on.
Sit.”

“That was Angie who called,” I told him.

“So she said.”

“Believe me, we’d love to tell you this was all an
accident.”

He sat down, too. “I know you would. I’d prefer to
believe it.”

“We can pay you for it.”

His big hands rested in his lap. He was looking at the stripe
on my boot where his dog had licked.

“I don’t know it’s the price that worries me
so much,” he said, “though it might’ve at one
time. I can see how it might be some relief to you to pay something
for it.” He smiled sadly. “Her calling, your coming
up here says a bit. I appreciate that part.” He cleared his
throat and looked hard at me. “I just went out there after
lunch. You all buried it?”

I leaned forward, nodding.

“I suppose there’s been some pretty sharp words in
the household over all this,” he said.

“Yes sir, there sure has.”

“Imagine there could be some more yet.”

I wasn’t sure if he meant there should be, or if he was
just guessing there would. I leaned back and found myself not caring
what he meant, exactly. “You bet there will,” I told
him. “What was that calf worth?” I asked. “It’s
important those boys learn the price of things.”

“It’s not just the price.”

“Still.”

A flicker of sun caught his face through the screen. “Did
you notice it was the only one out there?”

I hadn’t. I told him so.

“I haven’t kept my own cows in ten years,” he
said, as if it were something. “That one was my granddaughter’s.”

“She had her own calf?”

“Prizewinner,” he said. “She helped raise it.”

“Then we definitely want to pay her for it.”

His mouth moved slowly as he stared at me. “She’s
moved off with her mother to we don’t know where.” The
dog started barking behind the door. “They’re not really
your boys, are they?”

“No.”

“How they manage to kill it? They got a gun?”

“No,” I said. My voice raised a little. “Sticks.
Rocks. A bat, maybe.”

He studied me, but I didn’t flinch. He looked out the window
of the old porch. “How old are they?” he asked.

I told him.

I called in sick and went and found her in the Sidewinder. She
was sitting with some smiley guy, with her stool turned to face
him, sipping her rum and ginger ale. She saw me but didn’t
say anything as I sat down on the other side of her. Susan waited
her to say yea or nay, but Angela she just kept her back to me.
Maybe she rolled her eyes.

“I went to talk to that old Carlson,” I said.

She turned half around. There was lipstick on her straw. “You
should have,” she said.

“I’m Tim.” I stretched my hand past her. He
didn’t take it. “You all talking business?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” she said.

“Can’t you see I’m sick,” I said.

She lit a fresh one. “There’s no point in prolonging
this. How do you want to play it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just get it over with,” the man told her. He wasn’t
smiling anymore.

I went to my closet and threw all my clothes into my duffel bag.
I had broke my right middle finger on him when it got caught weird
in his collar. I sat going over my checkbook, one-handed, until
they come home.

They had been at their dad’s girlfriend’s place,
and Angela had picked them up, after I guess she had taken Smiley
home or to the hospital. She didn’t explain anything. I was
planning to check into a motel somewhere.

The boys were chewing candy bars and went straight past me to
the TV. Will, he was carrying a plastic package of birthday prizes.
He held it in front of my face as he went by.

“What’s those for?” I asked.

“The grave.”

“I thought you were getting flowers.”

“We didn’t like them,” Angela said. “Get
out of here. I’m serious.”

We stared across my big bag that had the outside pockets chewed
up by mice.

Will came in holding a plastic cup. “This was under the
couch,” he said.

“Well, that’s not where it belongs,” Angela
said. “Go and drop it in the dishwater. I’ll wash it
up.”

He skated to the sink in his socks, dropped it in, then went
to her, and she held him between us while she smoked. “There’s
something wrong with you,” she hissed at me. “How many
chances do you want? You’re messed up.”

“I’m messed up? You spend afternoons with Dudley
Dipshit, and I’m messed up. What, you expect me to hug him?”

“You knew it was going to happen,” she said. “You
wanted it.”

Later, I thought of more things I could have said.

In the pasture, Will opened the birthday prizes one by one. He
was fascinated by them, and I could see him struggling to keep
on task, as Angela put it. The boys insisted I come with them,
and Angela didn’t say no. All she said to me was, “You
don’t ride with us.” I followed them in my truck.

She was slowed down some, done with the insults and the hollering
and just waiting for me to shove off. I was ready to. The boys
could tell something was wrong with us. She talked quietly to them,
almost in a whisper, while to me she spoke a touch louder than
regular. It was as if there were two groups—she and I were
one, and she and the boys were another—and, to be a part
of them both, she had to run two different personalities.

“Aw, hurry up, Will,” Brian said.

Will whipped around. “Be quiet, Brian!” He pulled
a spider ring from his finger and added it to the circle in the
dirt.

Angela tapped Brian, and they walked down to the creek for a
spell, since it seemed Will might be a while. The creek run from
a dirty pond on the hilltop and curled its way to the bigger creek
below Carlson’s house. The banks were steep with switchbacks
where the dirt had caved away. As my eyes followed it, I saw Carlson’s
blue truck driving toward us. For a sec, I wondered what to do,
how we might go without him being the wiser. He pulled up beside
us.

Carlson looked at the little rubber and plastic things scattered
over the dirt. “What you doing, there?” he asked.

Will glanced up at him. “These things are to mark his grave,” he
said, standing up.

Carlson got out of his truck, and his dog waddled over to my
boot.

“You about finished, Will?” I said.

“No. Why’d they leave? They were supposed to stay
for the whole funeral.”

Angela and Brian sat beside the creek, talking. Brian bent to
the mud, pulled something out, and swished it back and forth in
the water.

“Well, I’m not sure they understood exactly what
you’re doing here, Willard. When you’re the master
of ceremonies, it’s important you explain to folks what’s
going on, so they don’t nod off during the service.”

He swept his hand. “These things are to mark its grave,” he
said again.

Carlson opened his wallet and unfolded a little green award ribbon. “You
can put that on there, too.”

“What’s it for?”

“That’s its tag,” Carlson said.

Will flattened it in his palm and tried to read the gold lettering—maybe
Smiley could teach him–then he just put it with the rest.

“They all mark his grave,” Will was saying. “Especially
this one.” He picked up a sparkwheel and pulled its trigger. “I
should keep this one, to remember.”

“I think you better leave it.”

His eyes clouded. “Goon!”

“What?”

“Mommy says you’re a goon, Daddy says you’re
a goon. Everybody thinks you’re a goon.” He
pulled the trigger and turned away to watch it spin in private.

“Aw, that’s not true, Will,” I said.

Carlson waved and went down slowly to introduce himself to Angela.

“What else she say, Will?”

“We’re moving to another place. And you’re
going somewhere else. End of story.”

Angela shook Carlson’s hand, and he walked off like he
had business to do, check his fence, maybe. Brian called out and
come running past Angela up toward Will and me. He held out his
hand when he reached us. They huddled close, like kids will when
they’ve got something new to show. Will took a step back.

“To mark the grave!” Brian grinned. He laid it with
the other things. Some blanched bone. It looked like something
washed up from the sea.

“No!” said Will. “It’s not part of it!”

“Yes,” Brian said.

“No! Mom!” Willard flew down the hill, sticks kicking.
She sat on an old stump, smoking a cigarette, keeping her distance.
He was waving his arms, trying to explain the situation before
he even got there. He clutched her belt loops. The wind blew her
hair. The ground went lighter, then darker. Then lighter.

“She said I could ride back to the house with you,” Brian
told me.

“Then what?” We stood there. “Okay, let’s
go.”

We left without waving. The dog come running down the hill. It
shot out of the weeds when we turned the bend and chased us down
the lane. When I hit the brakes it come out in front of us and
stood with its paws out flat and lowered its head. It fell in to
chasing us along the passenger side, barking wild again. Brian
watched it beneath the window. I slowed a little so it could keep
up. Once it popped up high enough where I could actually see its
ears, and Brian called it a name. I put my right arm out to hold
him as I put on the brakes. My broken finger throbbed on his chest.

There was a yelp.

The wheels skidded in the dust and gravel.

“Oh mother,” Brian said. He looked over at me. “We
hit it!” he said. “You hit it.”

I could see the highway.

He opened his door and leaned to look, then hopped out. The dog
limped off into the high weeds. He didn’t call to it. The
weeds were still. He leaned back in the door. “He be alright?” he
asked.

“He’s still walking,” I said.

Brian stepped away from the cab. He looked down the road. Angela’s
car was coming way behind us. She stopped before they got any closer.
I made out the shape of her head over the steering wheel way back
there. We were staring at each other, backwards and forwards. Just
get it over with. I could still hear the way he said it. I
said it myself.

“What?” Brian asked.

“You go with her now. Tell her about the dog.”

“But she said-“

“Go with her, I said.” I opened the glove
box, and brushed the napkins onto the floor. “Here.”

“What?”

“Here. Take these.”

“Why?”

“You give them to her.” The bundle felt stiff in
my hand. “Just like this.” I wrapped his hand around
the straws. He shut the door and backed away as I pulled onto the
highway.

Chad Willenborg’s work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Believer, CityPaper, and Fugue, and has been nominated for Best American Short Stories. He is working on a new novel set in Philadelphia.

Moleskin

He doesn’t know about her tattoos until they sleep together. After they finish, his eyes adjust enough to the darkness so that he can make out the black ink on her back and stomach. There are three: small, medium, large. The level of grayness and fading indicate that the smallest one was first and the largest one was last. He can’t see that much detail. She prepares homemade mushroom ravioli for dinner. A girl who matches her shoes and her purse, she doesn’t look like the kind who would have tattoos. He tries to decipher their meanings and authors: Maimonides, Cummings, Shakespeare.

She stares at him and tries to determine his ethnicity. He is half Filipino. What are they doing? One-night stand. But what do you call it after the second night? Bistand. Third night? Polystand. She works as a tutor for undereducated kids with overpaid parents. She helps them write papers and do calculus and sometimes gets paid extra to do it for them. He knows she wrote an essay that got a lacrosse player into UPenn. He doesn’t know about her brief career as a model, the breast implants she had inserted and removed during college, or the affair with her Neuroscience professor. The affair had lasted through the final two years of her undergraduate career. It was almost passionate, almost something like love. The professor never really ended it, he just started bringing his wife to more and more campus functions. Heartbroken, she moves to the city after graduation. Rents an apartment with three other girls, near the Domino Sugar Factory. This is where their lives intersect. He works at The Brooklyn Rail. Makes Xeroxes of other people’s writing. He tells her he is a copy editor. She knows this is a lie. They meet when her boyfriend leaves her in front of The Dinner Party. The boyfriend, an actor, goes to buy cigarettes and never comes back. Camel Wide Lights, which she can then no longer stomach. He loans her subway fare, the trust-fund actor boyfriend had always paid for taxis. She makes him gazpacho in exchange. They sleep together once, then once again. It becomes a habit. After a long discussion, they decide to be less frequent with their sexual visits. This plan does not work out. For the next month, they have sex five, six, seven, eight times a week. What would they call a thing like this? There are various terms, all crude and all with somewhat negative, seedy connotations. She considers pushing for a commitment, but he is younger than her and wouldn’t understand. She bakes oatmeal cookies with butterscotch chips. He is two years her junior, on the verge of being born in a different decade. She has an eating disorder that appears to go unnoticed, though he sometimes slides his hand down her hipbones and remarks on their jaggedness. He is leading on a girl in West Hartford. She sees the emails this girl sends him. Where did he meet her? Filled with something resembling jealousy, she googles the WeHa girl. Mentions West Hartford in front of him. Hm…what? He says, looking up from his cereal with a blank face. After the Hartford girl incident has subsided in her mind, he buys her a present. A wooden bookmark, carved like a tree, bought at the Christmas market in the neighborhood. This alters the meaning of everything. Startled by this new action of gift-giving, she decides on something hastily and without too much creativity. He receives a new copy of The Tropic of Cancer and homemade raspberry brownies. She wraps the first in The New York Times Book Review. He appreciates the humor. He tells her he would like to seriously date her in a few years. He’s not ready now. Why does he say this? Perhaps he is genuine. Or maybe, more likely, he wants to pacify her. He goes to visit the girl in West Hartford. He wants to pacify her too. He likes to keep his options open, as he is acutely aware of his youth and attractiveness. In his presence, she feels old and almost sagacious. She is only 23.

They go out to dinner several times a week, sometimes with his
father. She realizes that his parents think they’re dating.
His mother tries to discuss their future together. No, no, your son
has issues with commitment, that’s what she wants to say. Instead
she smiles with her mouth held tightly together and listens to parenting
tips. Goes to Dean & Deluca, prepares lobster risotto. She has
no contact with her own parents. It is a mutual understanding of
inevitable separation. Her parents divorced when she was an infant.
Father is a surgeon whom she has barely seen in twenty years. Mother
is an alcoholic Presbyterian minister who is addicted to crosswords
puzzles and venomous critiques of her daughters. These daughters
inherited their mother’s dark good looks and tendency toward
addiction. Now, in lonely winters, she withholds food as a form of
comfort. He notices this. Her abandonment issues and low self-esteem
combine to form her passionate attachment to him. Pretending to be
aloof, he secretly idolizes her. What are they doing? There is no
word for this. Lovers: implies an ending and an obstacle. Friends:
does not contain room for sexual encounters. Fuck: can’t explain
the dinners and the kissing of her inner wrist. Undefined. This conversation
they avoid. He worries about emotional investment. She is concerned
about her intense—perhaps unhealthy—attachment. A definition
is needed to establish boundaries, and when they have none, the situation
is peculiar and uncomfortably amorphous. A solid, silent, secure
understanding is found only in the liquid fusion of their bare legs
and torsos. The sex between them is: karma-phala, mitzvah, asa. She
makes breakfast. Eggs with cheese he can’t pronounce, French
toast from thick slices of challah, Kona coffee, strawberries. What
are they doing? They go to his brother’s wedding and dance—she
removes her heels and is barefoot. They have had too much champagne
and too few pigs-in-a-blanket. Back in their shared hotel room, they
fall onto the bed, still in their dress clothes. He traces the curves
of her face with his index finger, drunkenly and softly. She starts
to babble about language. It doesn’t mean anything, she says.
Labels can’t confine us and define us and it doesn’t
mean anything at all, she sings. She says that their fucking and
their dancing and their Sunday mornings don’t have to be called
anything. She says they exist outside of a definition. He looks at
her. He brushes her hair off her face. He looks at her. He looks at
her. They have sex, slow motion and wet and warm and sweet. He says,
I love you. What? She asks. How does that feel? He pretends to repeat.
Oh, good, it feels good. What does this mean? Realizing that it doesn’t
have to mean anything, they continue to have it silently mean quite
a great deal. What are they doing? There is no word for this. Back
in the city, she learns how to make Beef Wellington and crème
brûlée. He gets a job as an editorial assistant in Midtown,
earning twice what he was earning at his previous job. Gets a two-bedroom
apartment in Williamsburg. She is thrifty, to a fault, and still
lives in a cramped studio space with college friends whom she would
no longer consider friendly. He asks her to move in with him. Separate
bedrooms. Roommates. It is a faulty attempt at gaining a word for
this. Each night they have sex and then one sleepily retreats back
to his or her own bed. In the morning they share a pot of coffee
and the arts section. She notices that all their friends are getting
married. They get invitations to these weddings. Recycled paper with
organic ink, letterpress with woodcuts, one is even from Pineider in
Florence. Each invitation is addressed to both of them by name. Aching,
she has no word for this. While grocery shopping, they run into the
girl from West Hartford. Girl: blonde, stocky soccer-player figure.
They invite the girl over for dinner. She prepares salmon roulade,
arugula salad, rosemary couscous, and marzipan cookies. After the
girl leaves, she asks if they can share a bedroom. Why? He asks,
genuinely puzzled but not suspicious. She tells him one of the bedrooms
should be made into a study—they both need their space to write—and
maybe they could leave a bed for their crashing friends. He agrees
as he takes his fourth cookie. The merging of bedrooms is swift and
charming. Her female friends are ecstatic; they take it as a promising
sign. At a bar one night with old school chums, he is teased about
his enviable relationship. These statements of friendly jealousy
are met with confusion and raised eyebrows. What relationship? He
asks. His friends laugh and shake their heads. What are you doing?
They ask. That night, for the first time in their history, they fall
asleep without having sex. He pulls her head towards the nook of
his chest and shoulder, as if this act was natural and commonplace.
What is this? They both search for words. He receives a call at work.
His father has died. Heart attack. 67. Smoker. The funeral is in
Brooklyn with echoes of Manila. She learns bits and pieces of Tagalog. Natay:
death: the process of transformation from one state to another. She
likes this definition. His mother, a WASP from Pennington, New Jersey,
throws herself headlong into Filipino rituals. The mirrors and glass
surfaces in the house are covered with black fabric. Are they sitting shivah?
She wonders. He and his mother don’t take baths for a week.
The process seems oddly familiar to her—her father was raised Hasidic.
Searching through his father’s study in the Greenpoint apartment,
he finds three novels by José Rizal, a Welsh love spoon, and
a worn copy of Go Tell It on the Mountain. He takes them all,
dissonant fragments of the man who raised him. Leaving his parents’—his
mother’s—apartment, they travel home together silently. Somewhere
along Bushwick Avenue, she starts to drag him in the direction of
home. He feels heavy and sore, fingers raw in her palm. Back in their
apartment, she fixes kubeh and borekas and spitz cake. This is all
she knows to do. Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba . She
is conveniently chopping onions. Yit’barakh v’yish’tabach v’yit’pa’ar.
They eat in solid quietness. In bed that night, they lie next to
each other, unmoving, unsleeping. A hand wanders over the imaginary
boundary—there are bits of stomach flesh and salty skin slowly
mingling. The sex is silent and mutually understood. She is pink
and soft and cool to the touch, a familiar body to move with. His
eyes are wet and his hands are sweaty against her hips. Is there
an answer to all this? Could there ever be an answer to this? There
is a sybaritic sadness in death. Afterwards, she lets his head rest
on her naked chest. They fall asleep like this. Her: propped up on
pillows, clutching his head and shoulders, one thin leg exposed to
the air. Him: Curled, wrapped, pressed into her, mouth on her collarbone,
hurt and unwashed. He takes weeks to mourn, more than she thinks
is healthy. He recovers slowly—blinking, unstretched. She bakes
dark chocolate cookies and fruit tarts. What are they doing? Neither
knows a word for it. They make a ritual of evening walks in Prospect
Park . He contemplates a trip to the Philippines , visiting relatives, “discovering
his roots.” She tells him it’s a good idea. It will help
your writing, she says. She bites her lip. The end for him. Apartment:
now worn and common. Her body is a shape of divinity that fits into
his hips during nights of quiet taxi noise. The Philippines will
not help his writing, he understands this. New Year’s Day Night.
She is pregnant. Decides to tell him. Decides not to tell him. She
makes homemade mushroom ravioli. Tells him. Eyes wide, there is a
word for this.

Jenna Clark Embrey, a native of Hershey, Pennsylvania, is a 2008 graduate of Dickinson College with a double major in English and Theatre. In addition to writing short stories and plays, Jenna enjoys ice skating and reciting the alphabet backwards.

The Forum

On the screen, a pair of giant breasts rubbed against another pair of giant breasts, each the size of a patio table if you walked right up to them. And a person could have walked right up to them, too, without bothering practically anyone, since only one seat was filled down below. Frank watched the scene from the projection booth: the four breasts mixing it up together, and the man down in the seat, angling for just the right time to jerk off and leave. There, Frank said to himself, is a traditionalist. The man had left home and come all the way here for the show.

In the booth, Frank raised a bottle of beer to toast the back of his lone customer’s head. He’d picked this movie for the theater’s last night because it was a traditionalist kind of movie, too – no amateurs like on the internet, but no big-name, unbelievable surgery people, either. Just a pair of powdered-up women stopping at all the stations of the sex act.

Frank leaned his chin, unshaven, on his hand and watched, the warmth of the projector on his cheek, the noise of it loud in his ear. He had to admit he was pretty sad, knowing this was the last show.

Something clicked for the man down in the seat, and he made his almost-hidden movements. After a half a minute or less, he was done, and he left quickly, head down. But Frank kept the movie going. After all, a lot of people came in the middle, or at least they did when they used to come. Besides, Frank wanted to watch the whole thing. There was something about flesh made so big – less of a thing without the community of men in the seats down there, but still something.

An hour later, he locked the place up, bringing the metal shutter down with a huge crash and feeling the finality of it. The trucks would be by tomorrow to haul away everything he had managed to sell, and the wrecking crews would start in soon after that. Frank fingered the night’s little bit of cash in his pocket, turned to look down the sidewalk toward the river, and saw the edge of 30 th Street Station off in the distance. It was three in the morning, and everything was closed down just about everywhere. The block was cold and yellow with thin streetlight. I should have gotten out a long time ago, Frank thought. He turned back to the theater, the graffiti on the shutter. Fla-Z, it said in two places, big and black spray-painted letters, and off to one side, the word TITTIES in silver marker.

There was one bar you could go to after legal closing time – a place that was supposed to be called Mike’s but was called ike’s because the first letter of the neon sign hadn’t worked in so long. The cops left the place alone, and Frank usually ended his worknights here.

“Hey, Ant’ny,” he said when he went in, waving at the bartender. There were a couple other guys in there, too – Eddie and some other unknown guy drinking individually. The place was small and dark, but with only a few people in it, it seemed bigger.

“Set you up?” Ant’ny said. He was wearing a Flyers jersey, even though the season was over already.

“Set me up,” Frank said, and he took a stool and waited for his beer. This was a good way to reflect after working a night, and an empty apartment wasn’t anything to rush home for.

“How you doing?” Eddie asked from down the bar. He sounded about the regular amount of drunk, and his gray hair was sticking up, like he’d been smashing it that way with his hand.

Frank shrugged. “Tonight was the night,” he said.

Ant’ny put a bottle down in front of him. “Tonight?” he said.

Frank nodded.

“Really? No idea,” Eddie said. He pushed on his hair with his hand.

Frank nodded again. He picked his bottle up and held it near his lips, not really looking at anything in particular.

“How was it?” Eddie said.

The man from down the bar jumped in then, leaning forward to become visible in the conversation. He wore an undershirt and an old sportscoat. “What was tonight?”

“Besides Ash Wednesday?” Frank said with a sort-of chuckle. “Well, I closed my place down for the last time.” He drank a little bit of beer.

“What place?”

“The Forum,” Frank said, pointing his thumb in the general direction of the theater.

The man at the end of the bar let his mouth open up. “The Forum? That old place? Are you kidding me? Why’d you shut down?”

“Th’internet,” Eddie said. He made a jerking-off motion with his hand. “Everybody can do it at home with nobody watching.”

Frank knew that was true. People were chicken about their desires, basically.

Ant’ny, who was following along quietly, wiping out a glass, said, “My brother’s kid’s always on their computer. That thing’s probably sticky from top to bottom.”

Everybody laughed. Frank drank a little more beer. The way he took the sip was like the way you would kiss a woman after you had sex with her, at least in theory.

“You know what that is?” said the man down the bar, his face pink even in the darkness of the room. “That’s a goddamn shame. I would of gone in there one last time if I had known it was going to be one last time. What were you showing tonight?”

Frank smiled. “You know. One of those classic kind of things in a hospital. Nurses.”

They all said “Yeah” or “Mm,” at the same time.

“I sure would of gone in there if I’d of known about it,” the man said, and everybody nodded. Then: “You know what we oughtta do?” he said. “You oughtta open that up one more time for us right tonight, and we can all pay you for one more show, and we can bring over a couple bottles or whatnot and have one last nice time.”

“That’s an idea,” Frank said, dully, not really thinking about it.

“I’m serious,” he said, and he moved over one stool to slap Eddie on the arm. “Don’t you think so? It’s like a celebration.”

Frank looked down at his drink and up at Ant’ny, who shrugged and said, “I ain’t going anywhere.”

“Still,” Eddie said.

The streets were even quieter, like you could hear for blocks, like the sound of a single car could have been coming from a mile off. Philly could get so quiet in the dead hours of night, and the noise of the shutter opening seemed loud enough to break buildings apart. Frank thought about that and thought about the wrecking crews that would be coming. A long time ago this had been a regular movie theater – not a fancy one, but nice enough. And the theater was still nice enough, even if it wasn’t quite regular anymore. It was a shame to tear it down.

“Funny how you never sell popcorn in a place like this,” said the guy from down the bar, whose name turned out to be Larry. It was him and Frank and Eddie there in the lobby. The carpet had been maroon at one time, but it was a lot darker now, like the ceiling was a lot darker, too. Frank put his hands in his pockets and looked around. This was an unexpected extra visit to his place. A bonus.

He set the movie up and then came down to join the other two guys as it rumbled onto the screen. He was supposed to stay up there to make sure the projector didn’t overheat, but if everything burned down it wouldn’t be the end of the world at this point. The guys were drinking from bottles of beer Ant’ny had sold them on their way out the door, a seat separating each of them. As the screen lit up, they clinked bottles.

After the opening credits, there was an interior shot of a room that was supposed to be a hospital room but was really just four white walls and a white-sheeted bed. Two nurses were talking, their shirts half-unbuttoned, their lipstick shiny.

“Here we go,” Larry said.

In another minute, the women were making out and getting naked.

Frank watched just about every show from the projection room, but it was a different thing being down here in the community of men. This was the one place where straight men could sit together and be with sex in the same place. And of course it was ending. Frank felt his mouth twist in a sour way, and he filled it up with some beer to remind him not to hurry into the grief of tomorrow.

“That is beauty-ful,” Larry said.

The blonde woman was going down on the redhead, the wah-wah music going over the speakers.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, not really listening.

“You get ’er, tiger,” Larry said to the movie. And then nobody said anything for a while. Frank was watching the actresses and thinking about who they were and what it meant for them that a place like his was closing. Probably they had something else going. People said there was more money in porn than ever before. He was too old for any of that, though.

When a doctor came in and the two women got on their knees, Frank noticed out of the corner of his eye that Larry was jerking off under the coat on his lap. He would have noticed it even if they were sitting a lot further apart; that was what he was used to seeing in here. Then Eddie started up, both of them trying a little bit to keep it hidden.

Frank had not had sex or touched himself or even had a wet dream in a long time, but he reached into his pants anyway, just to feel human or maybe to be a part of something. Soon, he was jerking off, too – limp at first, for sure, but out in the open, not trying to hide it under a coat or anything. This wasn’t anything to be ashamed of. This was three traditionalists together on the last night of a place. They all came when they came, and nobody said anything about it, but Frank felt good and smiled, briefly, before he got the normal afterward feeling of everything being over.

After, they stood out on the sidewalk, and Frank pulled the shutter down with another huge crash. The funny thing was that nobody was awkward or nervous about anything. Pretty soon it would be morning.

“Anybody going back to ike’s?” Larry said.

Eddie shrugged, his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched up, hair straight in the air. “I bet Ant’ny’s shut it down by now.” He was still about the regular amount of drunk.

“I think I’ll walk by there and see, anyways. What about you?” he said, looking at Frank.

Frank shook his head. “Nah. I’ve got to get home sometime.”

Larry smiled. “Little woman waiting?”

“Nah. Just me and my shadow.”

Larry clapped him on the back. “Well, for a long time you done this city good with this place. I always said it was a pretty clean place. And you done us good tonight, too.”

Eddie smiled, took a fist out of his pocket, smashed his hair back, and they all stood quietly for a minute. Then they said goodbye, and Larry and Eddie walked back toward the bar, and Frank went looking for his car. Still nobody was around. Pretty soon, there would be garbage trucks rumbling around the city, their brakes screaming, and some early morning commuters. But this neighborhood would wake up last, old and beat-up and needing the rest. Probably in a few years it would all be loft apartments or Asian fusion restaurants or something. For now, though, it would sleep in. Frank, too. As he walked along, Frank could feel in his bones that when he finally got into bed, he’d be out for a long time, like a dead man, without a dream in his head.

David Harris Ebenbach’s first book of short stories, Between Camelots ( University of Pittsburgh Press ), won the 2005 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the 2006 GLCA New Writer’s Award. His short fiction has been published in, among other places, the Connecticut Review, the Greensboro Review, and Philadelphia Stories, his poetry has appeared in, among other places, Phoebe, Mudfish, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, and he wrote the chapter, "Plot: A Question of Focus," for Gotham Writers Workshops’ book Writing Fiction (Bloomsbury, USA). A Philadelphia native, he has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College, and teaches Creative Writing at Earlham College. Find out more at davidebenbach.com.

Tug-of-War

[img_assist|nid=825|title=F is For Fox by Kristen Solecki ©2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=198]After he hit our last halfie onto the roof of Perlstein’s Glass, Frankie Wnek stepped over the broomstick we used for a bat and shimmied up a drainpipe to get it. Frankie was my age, fourteen. Since I was pitching and gave up the home run, I was supposed to go, but when he said don’t worry about it, I wasn’t going to argue. Who knew when that pipe was going to snap away from the wall? Who knew that two older kids named Chickenhead and Toot were already up there, just for the hell of it, waiting to take turns punching whoever came up, then grab his ankles and swing him back and forth over the ledge?

Perlstein’s was a four-story building, so I had to look straight up to see what was going on, and I had to squint hard against the sun, which was just then breaking through a stretch of gray clouds. Frankie was screaming, of course, that goes without saying, and he kept trying to bend himself toward the roof like he was doing crunches, like I would have done, if I’d been the one up there. He could only get so far, though, before he dropped again and writhed like a snake, or like Houdini in those old black-and-white movies, hands clenched behind his knees. Frankie had long, straight black hair that hung a good foot below his head and his cheeks were watermelon red and puffy. Chickenhead and Toot laughed with their mouths wide open, looking at each other, then down at Frankie, then at the gathering crowd. They laughed even harder when Frankie pissed himself and the piss ran down his bare chest to his face.

“Oh my God!” I could hear one of them yell. “Holy
fucking shit!” Frankie turned his head to one side and shouted
for someone to get his mom, who was a bartender at Felix’s,
and after he did, about eight people took off to go get her. When
something like that happens, you do the first thing that makes
sense or you just stand there and do nothing. It’s one way
or the other––I learned that a long time
ago––and you don’t know until you’re in
the middle of something like that which way you’ll go. You
might yell for Chickenhead and Toot to pull Frankie up or run to
get Frankie’s mom or go home and call the cops or just stand
there watching the moment unfold like it’s on TV, like I
did.

One thing you don’t do is look away. That’s against
human nature. You can try to turn from the stuff you don’t
want to see, but your mind will force you to look again, the same
way you’d have to turn and face the train you knew was about
to run you down. It’s not that I didn’t want to do
something. I did. Frankie was my friend since fifth grade and we
hung out together just about every day. It’s just that I
was more scared watching Frankie hang there than any time my father
went to town on my mother, which is saying a lot. I was afraid
the guys swinging Frankie would swing me next. Put yourself in
my shoes. You’re fourteen and don’t know what you’d
do even if you could do something. Maybe you talk to someone beside
you. Maybe you don’t or can’t. Maybe you look around
for your mother, even though she won’t be home for hours
yet, and your father, who you just know is going to show up soon
enough to put his two cents in. No matter what, you end up doing
something with your hands. You clasp your fingers together behind
your neck or across your forehead, or you squeeze them into fists
and bury them into your crossed arms, which is what I did. Even
that late in the year, I had a T-shirt on, and after we stopped
playing I got cold.

I watched from our sidewalk across the street, leaning without
thinking about it into the front fender of old man Dangler’s
shiny blue Charger. It all happened so fast––two minutes,
maybe three––but even now it’s still happening.
Frankie is hanging there four years before he enlists in the Army,
launches rockets in Kuwait , then comes home with headaches that
won’t let up and crisped bodies in his dreams that want nothing
to do with war. Chickenhead and Toot are laughing together two
years before they disappear separately, Chickenhead from a baseball
bat outside the Aramingo Diner, Toot from a heroin overdose in
the back bedroom of his sister’s house. Frankie’s mom
is limping up Jasper Street before she moved away without telling
anyone, her voice a shrill string of exclamations, hands over her
head as if she could pluck Frankie like a stray balloon. Then there
was my father, who had followed her out of the bar, quiet as he
always was, running a black pocket comb through his greasy blond
hair as he walked. A month later, already thinning from the cancer
that would kill him before spring, he’d call me from my room
one night to sit with him at the glass dinner table. He’d
have his tall can of Schaefer’s and tiny drinking glass,
and he’d ask me through a Pall Mall haze if I hated him.

It was the day of Halloween, and Perlstein’s Glass was
at the intersection of Huntington and Jasper Streets in Kensington,
a nothing neighborhood in North Philly once alive with mill work
and railroad traffic, but now stifled by El track shadows and the
hulking skeletons of burned-out factory buildings. The leaves on
the few trees were gone for the year with all of the birds except
for the pigeons that walked the roof’s ledge on either side
of Frankie, whose mom, despite her bad foot, got to the corner
fast.

“Frankie!” she yelled. “What the hell are you
two doing? Pull him up. Frankie!”

“Relax,” Chickenhead hollered down. Bob Harv gave
Chickenhead his nickname because of his skinny neck and early baldness. “We’re
just messing around. Right, Frankie?”

But Frankie didn’t say anything. He was crying hard and
trying to keep his head even with the horizon. His head must have
throbbing.

“Pull him up now or so help me God, I’ll kill you
both,” Frankie’s mom said.

Then my dad chimed in. “Let’s go, assholes. Move
it. Then get down here so I can beat some sense into you sons of
bitches.” He looked over his shoulder after he spoke and
saw me standing across the street.

“Hey, Davey,” he shouted. “Get over here.” He
kept staring at me until I started around the car toward him. I
didn’t like where all of this was headed, I’ll tell
you that. Even before I reached my dad, I could smell the stale
Schaefer’s on his breath and the Pall Mall smoke that stunk
up his clothes. I could see him already, wringing his fists in
Perlstein’s back alley, ready to be a tough guy like it’s
Friday night outside Felix’s and he just called someone into
the street because he didn’t like their look or their tone.
I could picture the ring of neighbors, some cheering, some with
crossed arms, in a side lot few cops came through. And I could
see what I guess he couldn’t: there were two of them, and
they would either gang up against him or run right past, laughing
at how drunk and slow and stupid he was. He was going to get killed
some day, my mother always told him.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” said Toot, who got his nickname
from blowing trumpet sounds into his thumb while getting stoned
with Mikey K., Vic Turner, and those guys outside Griffin’s
Deli. “Fucking cry baby.”

With that, Toot started to pull Frankie up without telling Chickenhead,
holding Frankie’s ankle with one hand while grabbing first
the back of Frankie’s knee, then his wrist, with the other.
Frankie’s weight shifted fast, and his ankle slipped so easily
from Chickenhead’s hands it’s amazing he hadn’t
already fallen. Frankie swung like a pendulum into the wall, face
first, and now Toot had Frankie all by himself. Toot had him pinned
against the building, underneath the stone ledge. You could see
he wouldn’t have him for long, though, and you could hear
it, too. Underneath Frankie screaming was Toot straining and grunting.

“Fuck,” Toot pushed out every few breaths. “Fuck,
stay still, man.”

Some people on the street started rushing back toward the sidewalk.
Many were crying, and with any quick move one way or the other,
you could hear the whole crowd suck in a breath. Now Toot was a
big dude––strong as hell, about 6’2” and
250 pounds––so Frankie’s lucky Toot had him and
not Chickenhead, who was about as scrawny as Old Lady Lewis, who
held her Yorkie against her shoulder as she looked up from her
spot next to three other women her age, which would have been around
my grandparents’ age if any of them had lived that long.
They all wore white Skippy tennis sneakers and shirts with pictures
of their dogs.

“Where the fuck are the cops?” someone asked, which
is what we were all wondering. And I was thinking about the bucket
truck they’d need to get Frankie down, along with Chickenhead
and Toot, and about the ambulance you could already imagine on
the sidewalk, with some EMT giving Frankie the once-over inside
the small van awash in yellow light. Someone said something about
getting mattresses, and then people were rushing again, including
my father this time.

“Come on, Davey,” he said, pushing me toward the
house. It was like I’d been stung by something, though. My
legs wouldn’t move. They had no strength in them, no feeling
whatsoever. I remember looking up at my father and saying “I
can’t” before he ran into our house without me.

“Hang on, baby,” Frankie’s mother called up. “Help’s
coming.” She was holding her hands up near her mouth and
squeezing the fingers of her right hand inside the fist of the
left.

Chickenhead reached across Toot to grab Frankie’s other
arm and foot, but they hung too far down the wall, so he grabbed
the arm that Toot already had and pulled. I don’t know how
Frankie’s arm didn’t snap off or come out of its socket,
but Chickenhead and Toot were able to lift that arm enough to make
the other arm swing around, and when it did, on the third or fourth
try, Frankie grabbed onto the ledge and propped his legs stiff
against the wall. The three of them were working together now,
with Frankie’s feet flush against the bricks like he was
about to run up it and Toot tilted back at a forty-five degree
angle, like he was anchoring a tug-of-war, until Chickenhead pulled
so hard he almost threw himself past Frankie and off the roof.
He lurched forward far enough for me to see his whole top hanging
over the edge before something rocked him just as hard backward,
and when it did, Frankie’s feet found enough traction to
let him scale the few feet to the roof’s stone lip, when
he slid his knee over and Chickenhead and Toot pulled him up.

It was like the Phillies won the Series or something, let me
tell you. Everyone clapping and jumping up and down. Frankie’s
mom hugging everybody and saying, “Thank you, Jesus” to
the sky, as if God had been the one to pull Frankie up. Right or
wrong, that’s the version that spread around the neighborhood.
Father Flatley said so at Mass the next Sunday and, for the next
few months, people greeted Frankie on the street as Chosen One or,
more often, Jesus. People who didn’t like Frankie
from before cut him some slack, even if they teased him while they
did it. “Stay off those roofs, Jesus,” Chickie Pell,
who ran Griffin ’s, said one afternoon. “You ain’t
a bouncing ball.” My dad missed the whole thing fighting
with a mattress in our doorway. He didn’t see Frankie go
up, didn’t see all three of them sitting up there so close
they could have been friends. He brought the mattress out anyway,
just in case, and hollered up a few times for Chickenhead and Toot
to jump before some dads tried to calm him down, holding their
hands up to their shoulders, palms out, almost begging him, which
he liked, I think, more than Frankie being safe.

By the time the cops came, Chickenhead and Toot were gone. Frankie
yelled long after the fact that they had run to the back of the
roof, but he didn’t turn to look, which means they either
shot down that drainpipe pretty damn fast or they jumped across
the five-foot alley to a line of row houses and disappeared inside
an abandoned one. It took half an hour for a fire truck with a
bucket to show and get Frankie back to the street. It took the
rest of that week and into the next one for my father to stop talking
about what he would have done to Chickenhead and Toot, those
bastards, if he had gotten his hands on them. Anything could
have set him off, so my mother and I watched what we said and how
we looked at him more than usual. We made sure the front door was
unlocked when he came home from work and that there was a cold
can of Schaefer’s just opened on the table. And in my room
I rehearsed into my mirror what I’d do the next time his
voice boomed at my mother. I bent into the football crouch he taught
me and practiced throwing my shoulder like a punch. I pictured
his hands sliding from my mother’s face or neck to try in
vain to grab me as I charged. Every time I went over it in my head,
my mother got away clean, my shoulder drove through, not into,
him, just like he’d taught me, and took his sorry ass to
the ground.

Daniel Donaghy’s next collection of poems, Start with the Trouble, will be published by the University of Arkansas Press in fall 2009. His first collection, Streetfighting, was published by BkMk Press in 2005 and named a Finalist for the 2006 Paterson Prize. His poems and stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Letters, Image, and many other journals and have been featured on Poetry Daily and on the Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. He grew up in the Kensington section of Philadelphia and attended the High School for Engineering and Science before earning degrees from Kutztown University, Cornell University, and the University of Rochester. He now lives in Connecticut.

Standing Still (Excerpt)

Women who sleep with teenage boys, women who shoplift collectibles, Yes. Their rotten husbands drove them to it.

And that is why, when the kidnapper cracks open our new skylight like an oyster and slithers in, I don’t blame the defective latch, the alarm system, or the thin bronze shell of the new tin roof. The dotted line of fault doesn’t lead to my architect or contractor or engineer.

And oddly, lastly, I do not blame my intruder. And that explains everything that follows, doesn’t it?

I am angrier at my flawed ambitious husband than the man who crouches among my daughter’s stuffed animals.

I stand at the top of our stairs with the portable phone in my hand, my thumb on the button that should produce dial tone, and doesn’t. Now there is no other sound but pounding heart and pouring rain. He is here, and He is smarter than I imagined.

I should have been happy. The renovations were nearly complete. I had what I wanted, my maze of hickory floors and cage of pale earth walls. But in the kitchen, my new French windows rattled in their open frames, as if they knew something foreign was already roaring across the crisp gardens and green backyards.

I walked from room to room. I kept checking the burnished latches in my daughters’ rooms upstairs. Re-locking, re-tucking. A mother or a warden? Jordan, my baby, was curled into her Raggedy Ann, blond silk hair against bright red yarn. Next door, Julia’s mop of curls were almost indistinguishable against our Maine coon cat, Willis. Across the hall, Jamie was asleep with her finger holding her place in her book. I slipped it out of her hand, went back downstairs. I was wearing a path on the new Berber carpet, but couldn’t see it yet. My footprints would appear to me later, with enough time and close attention, like the shape of things only visible from the sky.

As the storm came inland, I gathered candles, matches, flashlights, laundry to fold, old mail to open, and spread it out in the den. I bit my nails in front of movies I knew the endings to. I let myself worry during the commercials. Every flash and boom in the sky was an assumption: that the lightning would find whatever was metallic and brittle in me.

On the television, Hugh Grant carried Sandra Bullock through traffic. I couldn’t find the scissors—art project? School poster?–so I opened a Neiman’s package with my teeth. Inside were three floral bathing suits for the girls and the pink silk nightgown I’d ordered to surprise Sam.

The gown looked impossibly skimpy in my lap. I slipped off my tank top and shorts and pulled it on without bothering to close the shutters. The bodice was as tight as a pair of hands. But the silk brushing against my legs was intoxicating after my cottony week. I fell into it like a hotel bed, allowing myself. I slept.

They’d installed the new skylight the day before, but Sam hadn’t seen it yet; he was off somewhere again, gone three or four days—I couldn’t remember which– to somewhere. Golf outing, conference? I knew all I needed to know: that someone was serving him steak and fetching him towels, and I was home sorting his socks.

At two a.m. something hits the roof and I wake up. Shaking, I go to the kitchen and wrestle with the childproof bottle of Xanax. The wind picks up, flinging small branches on the noisy new tin roof above me. The pill finally gets swallowed through my tears. I’m not the kind of person who can live in a noisy house.

A small but hard noise makes it way through my sniffing. I look up, as if the answer is written on the ceiling. It comes again, and I start to replace negative thoughts with positive ones. People don’t break into houses on nights like this. It’s the wind. It’s squirrels on the new tin roof. As I say the word ‘tin’, something above me snaps, then shatters. Not squirrels, I know in my bones.

The portable phone blinks on the other side of the room. The tongue and groove is silent as I move to it, but my limbs rattle in their sockets.

On the landing, I stare into Jamie’s bedroom across the jungle of stuffed animals against one wall. I smell rain, damp cotton, leather. His boots, I will think later. His wet shirt. I imagine He can hear me shaking in the doorway, molars like maracas in my mouth. Finally I make out the contours of His face and eyes, human skin among the plush bears and nylon-lashed dolls that line Jamie’s floor.

I shake but do not gasp, do not scream. Of course He is there; I expected Him, I heard Him coming for years, each night when Sam left me alone with my obsessions. I conjured Him, fear by fear, bone by bone until He showed himself.

The plush zoo muffles our sharp breathing, my heart pounding. I don’t dare cast my eyes in my daughter’s direction, don’t want to point her out to Him. I feel her sleeping, hear her soft breathing, out of rhythm with His and mine. I look only at Him.

It is beyond intimate: past sharing a bathroom, past putting your child’s bloody finger in your mouth. He stares at me. I stare back. He holds a finger to His lips, a warning, and glides soundlessly, on cat burglar feet, to Jamie’s canopy bed.

“No,” I cry, but it comes out mangled and small. He scoops her up and though she is groggy she looks oddly comfortable draped in His arms.

I drop to my knees and utter the only fearless words I have ever spoken:

“Take me,” I say. “Take me instead.”

I’m ashamed to admit I wasn’t completely relieved when He did

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