Archives

The city roars outside the window. She grows tired of the perpetual noise: cars honking for no reason, buses lurching along, and occasional yelling. She usually runs a fan to drown out the cacophony; but this summer she’s found a sound that she likes. 

***

The ice cream truck drives by every night around 10:15. Like an old tire, the music sounds like it could deflate and go out of tune at any moment. I wonder if whoever is driving the truck can turn the music off, or if the music turns on as soon as the keys are in the ignition. These are the things I think about.

I’m doing the dishes when Vinny gets home. Every night is the same, and I wonder if other couples repeat their conversations night after night, too.

"Hey hon. how was your day?"

"It was good, no big sales, just another day, you know" Vinny shouts, as if I’m standing across the street.

He walks into the kitchen, wiping sweat off of his face, kisses my forehead and then gives my belly a quick rub.

"How’s my girls?" he opens the fridge, pawing at the contents.

"We’re fine, heard the ice cream truck again"…I’m dying to talk about it with someone.

"I dunno what’s so damn interesting about that," he cracks open a beer.

"I have a feeling there’s a story behind it."

"Nah sweetie, it’s just some creep, out lookin’ for some tail." He thinks all of my ideas are worthless.

He sits down in front of the television, and I look down to see my hands ragged and red from leaving them under the hot water too long, again. 

***

It was the fourth of July. The air reeked of hot dogs and burnt hamburgers. The smoke from the vendor’s grills rose up and quickly rushed into my eyes. My belly was big now, and I wished that someone could help me carry the weight. Vinny dragged me to the fireworks, despite my reservations.

"What if the noises scare the baby?" I worried.

"That won’t happen, sweet cheeks. We’re gonna have a good time, you’ll see" and patted my knee.

Now I was drenched in sweat. It was nearing nighttime but the heat had yet to subside. Vinny and the boys from work were having the good time he’d promised, only they were chugging beers and I was contemplating standing all night, fearing that sitting down may leave me in the same spot until a tow truck could come. 

"Hey, VINNY!" I yelled, "I’m thirsty, you got anything other than beer?"

"No, doll. C’mere."

I made my way over.

"Now you take this five dollars and go get yourself something to cool you down. Alright?"

He obviously thought he was doing me a big favor. 

"Thanks.." I murmured, but he was already gone, yelling at the guys.

I started walking towards the vendors. There were ice cream trucks everywhere. My heart was beating fast now. I wanted to rush every truck, looking for the driver from my neighborhood. I wanted to escape, but I knew that Vinny would find me. Things weren’t so bad, were they? He took care of me and would take care of the baby. I got in line for a drink. A bottled water would do fine. I even got nachos for myself. Processed cheese would surely make me feel better. This nonsense about the ice cream man was all in my head.

I knew I was wrong. I would be better off if I wandered away from Vinny and out of this city, but it didn’t matter anymore.

I fell asleep during the fireworks. 

***

I’ve still been thinking about meeting the ice cream man one of these nights. Now I pace nightly by the window, sometimes standing so long in waiting that the baby kicks until I sit down. The truck was probably white, but is now cloaked in grime. Pictures of the ice creams being sold are on the side, typical, and the packing tape which holds the pictures to the truck has dirt underneath it too. I couldn’t call this an obsession, no, but a distraction. Simply an event to look forward to at the end of the day.

I like to think that the ice cream man and I have isolation in common, perhaps a sort of shared desolation. Only he voiced it with his nightly musical interlude, cutting through the darkness and entering through people’s open windows, hoping to grope them and finally get some attention.
A Pennsylvania native, Christina Snyder studied literature at the University of South Carolina. She currently works for F.A. Davis Company, a Philadelphia-based publisher. Christina is currently at work on a teen novel. This is her first published story.

Drew’s phone vibrated off the top of the nightstand and fell to the floor. Before his buddy Fred had introduced him to the recreational potential of the anesthesia cart, Drew’s on-call dreams had revolved around forgetting to check on a patient and ordering the wrong medications, but now he was trimming delicate mucosa with Metzenbaum scissors on one of Dr. Eric Xavier’s complicated vulvoplasty cases. The phone started its St. Vitus dance again and Drew cursed the helpful intern who was calling to remind him they were starting morning report. He could have sworn he’d set an alarm when he’d crawled into the narrow call bed forty-five minutes ago. The Old Bastard would be pissed.

Drew rooted around for a clean set of scrubs and settled for a top one size too small. At St. Basil’s Medical Center, a few miles from the watchful gaze of William Penn atop City Hall, the solution to linen theft was to consistently fail to provide anything worth stealing. He brushed his teeth with the spit-flavored toothpaste the hospital inflicted on patients who hadn’t time to pack their own and ran a wet, ward-issue comb through his hair.

Drew apologized to the Old Bastard for being late, and fearing certain retribution, kept his head down through rounds and clinic. While he rushed to sign out his team and crawl home, the call came from the surgical scheduling desk: the Old Bastard needed him to assist on a case.

Dr. Xavier who’d finished his residency three years ago, wanted Drew’s help too. He’d opened his own surgicenter and had offered Drew a job as soon as he finished. “You tighten this, you tighten that, and the best thing of all,” Xavier typed, “it’s all self pay.” Drew was in the process of getting licensed to practice medicine in California: he’d filled out the forms, submitted photographs and fingerprints. The confirmation email from the medical board had included their most recent newsletter, and Drew had been bored enough one night on call to read through the roll of physicians variously reprimanded, their licenses suspended and some revoked. A familiar name caught his eye: Dr. Eric Xavier was on probation.

Two hours after reporting to operating room nine, Drew stood, gowned, gloved and angry, across the table from Dr. Owen Bates. Patients and the medical board called him Dr. Bates, but everyone else called him the Old Bastard, or OB for short. He’d been at St. Basil’s since before Hippocrates and claimed he’d been too close to retirement to jump ship when the head of obstetrics and gynecology had moved the department’s talent to the medical Mecca across town. Rumor had it the OB hadn’t been asked to go.

“Ever see anything like it, Dr. Spight?” the Old Bastard said.

Drew tensed his hold on the retractor. “No, Dr. Bates, I haven’t,” he said for at least the tenth time while the OB trained the CO₂ laser on a vulva the size of a cauliflower.

Drew shook his head and wondered when he was ever going to get out. The OB had started by sawing at the worst case of condyloma acuminatum any of them had ever seen with scalpel and cauterization before switching to the laser to annihilate the widespread lesions.

Drew flexed his right trapezius until the seventh cervical vertebrae cracked. Dr. Frederick Yee, the anesthesiologist, shot him a sly look that seemed to say he had something for that. Fred Yee had something for just about anything in his pharmacopoeia including something to help him forget the last thirty-six hours.

The Old Bastard poked the wart-encrusted labia majora with a gloved finger and waved the hand with the laser to get the anesthesiologist’s attention.

“How many babies did you say again, Fred?” the Old Bastard said.

Fred looked up from the Friday crossword puzzle. He liked to do them in red pen. “G6P5,” he said. Six pregnancies, five births. Fred took the opportunity to glance at his watch and survey the patient’s solid vital signs before he ticked off the box for another fifteen minutes of high risk anesthesia time.

Drew watched Fred crack open another vial of fentanyl, and he inclined his surgical mask ever so slightly in that direction. Researchers sampling OR air claimed they had found minute amounts of aerosolized narcotics, enough, they postulated, to prime some surgeons and anesthesiologists so inclined to seek more of the same.

“Don’t see how anyone got his pecker past this once let alone six times,” the OB said.

Drew averted his eyes. He remembered examining the patient in clinic the day he’d confirmed she was pregnant again. Her vulva had only grown stiffer with the thick, warty growths, and there was no way she was going to deliver a baby through the rock-hard concretions that surrounded her vagina. Even worse, any infant delivered through genital warts could inhale the virus and develop lesions on the vocal cords that could occlude the airway.

“Better exposure,” the OB barked.

Drew repositioned and the Old Bastard wielded the laser again. “Set phasers for stun,” the OB said.

Drew held the retractor, his arm motionless, his breathing even and perfectly measured behind his surgical mask. He wasn’t about to talk and risk breathing in any more of the fried stench than he had to. The aerosolized live virus was a risk to every airway in the operating room.

The OB sliced at the tissue and wisps of infected smoke rose from the surgical site. “Not likely to see this in a fancy-pants private practice,” he said. “But you won’t be working on the pretty pussies next year, will you?”

The scrub nurse discreetly pointed the suction catheter in the direction of the effluent. Drew breathed slowly, controlling his anger. He wasn’t going to let the Old Bastard bait him today. It was Friday, and this was the last case. He was post-call and had the rest of the weekend off.

The OB laughed. For any other case, they would have scrubbed in with an intern and a pair of medical students. But as soon as Fred had anesthetized the patient, the OB kicked them out along with everyone else who’d seen the cauliflower case on the OR schedule and wanted to observe. Drew knew the OB didn’t care enough to worry about exposing the entire department to the virus, and he wondered why he’d been called in since the OB wasn’t even pimping him with petty questions about anatomy and physiology.

Still, it was nice without the medical students tripping over themselves trying to be helpful and cheerful while doing everything absolutely wrong. Their grades, their futures, depended on it, and that was the first place Drew had gone bad. He’d never been bright eyed and bushy tailed, and trying to suck up bullshit never did much for his mood. Private practice could be like this: one surgeon, one assistant, an anesthesiologist, and two nurses: one to scrub, one to circulate. A very private party.

“You’ll be leaving us after this year,” the OB said.

Drew couldn’t decide if it was a question or a statement.

“I wanted to tell you that I’ll be writing your recommendation letter,” the OB said, his voice low.

Mirroring his own reaction, Drew felt the patient’s abdominal muscles tense against his hands.

“I’m not getting muscle relaxation” the OB said.

Fred connected the patient to the anesthesia bag and demonstrated that the patient had so much medication on board that she made no spontaneous respiratory effort.

“Relax her,” the OB barked.

Fred injected something into the IV and flushed the line.

The air conditioning kicked on and Drew shivered, glad for his surgical gown. The nurses kept the OR cold so no one melted under the intense overhead lights. During deliveries and most surgeries, Drew kept warm wielding instruments and sweating a few technical decisions, but the Old Bastard was having too much fun decimating the warty nooks and crannies to hand Drew the laser. At the head of the table, Fred pushed up the sleeves of his scrub jacket before putting red pen to paper again.

Conventional wisdom held that anesthesiologists who never showed their arms had something to hide. In Fred’s case, that was true, but he was careful to stock fine gauge needles and never reuse them. Why should he? He’d shown Drew scanning electron microscope pictures of needles, the tips of their beveled ends barbed like a fish hook after a single trip through skin and vein. Trained to rotate their injection sites like good diabetic patients administering insulin multiple times a day, neither of them left tell-tale needle marks.

Drew had been tracking how many days the new circulating nurse wore her scrub jacket with the knitted cuffs. Most nurses, hot to show their tits or tattoos or whatever else it was they thought they had, didn’t. Drew hadn’t decided if the new nurse was in the club or just cold.

The OB put down the laser and manually retracted the labia majora and minora to expose the introitus. “Open, Sesame,” he said. “Bet it won’t be long before she gives it a spin.”

Drew didn’t want to look anymore. The raw vulvar tissue looked like it had been pressed onto a heated waffle iron. He stripped off the surgical drape and grudgingly admitted to himself that the OB was right: a significant proportion of St. Basil’s patients were loathe to obey the edict of six weeks’ pelvic rest after surgery and childbirth.

The circulating nurse elbowed past him to reinforce the cloth tape that held the catheter tubing to the patient’s thigh: she’d had a bitch of a time spreading the gnarled, inflexible labia to catheterize the patient’s urethra, and she wasn’t about to lose her prize. After she’d affixed a thick sterile pad to the vulva with more tape, the anesthesiologist extracted the endotracheal tube from the groggy woman’s throat. She gave a weak cough then mumbled something, her voice hoarse and low.

It was after seven o’clock and the last case was finally over. In a proper hospital, the doctors walked to recovery, wrote orders, and retired to their lounge. But this, Drew was fond of telling the medical students, was St. Basil’s. And at St. Basil’s, they practiced a different kind of medicine. He grabbed the sides of his gown, popped the paper ties across his neck and back, and pulled off gown and gloves in one smooth motion before snapping on another clean pair of gloves from the box on the wall. He left his mask on.

Here there were no orderlies and no cushy lift team. Drew rolled the gurney in from the hallway and parked it beside the operating table. The medical students had been smart enough to bolt when the OB banished them, so he stood on the far side of the gurney with Fred and they pulled the white sheet beneath the patient towards them to slide her from OR table to gurney.

The patient’s head lolled to one side, but Fred brought her chin back to midline and repositioned the mask of one hundred percent oxygen that was washing all the good drugs out of her system. Her breath would reek of the chemicals while her liver worked to break the bonds that had held her, immobile and insensate, during the procedure to raze the field of warts.

Fred lifted the patient’s one arm, then the other and rolled her side to side, checking for pressure marks or redness that might have been caused by improper positioning or padding of her generous hips and ass during the procedure. He documented that there were none; the nurse initialed his sheet.

“Getting out?” Fred said. He’d already written his orders for post-operative pain medications.

“Yeah,” Drew said, “pretty soon.”

Getting out was important, but timing was everything lest he cross paths with the OB again. Drew looked at his watch. The OB would still be holed up in the single stall of the doctor’s lounge. He didn’t want to hear the Old Bastard bearing down into the Valsalva maneuver, willing his stream past a prostate engorged with age.

Drew punched orders into the computer system’s ancient amber monitor in recovery. He picked up the phone and dictated the case. He’d learned not to obsess. The OB would criticize and correct it and make him dictate it again. But that would be later. He padded to the lounge and dialed the combination on his locker quietly. He wanted out of the contaminated scrubs, but when he heard OB’s clogs scuff toward the bathroom door, he grabbed his clothes and bolted. He didn’t want to hear about sticks or pricks or holes or whores for the next sixty hours.

Drew was out. It didn’t feel like autumn, but then every patch of dirt that had once fronted the row houses on his block had been replaced with cement decades ago and not a single tree or bush grew. He returned to his ground floor room in the three story row house he shared with Fred and a social worker to shower. The envelope to pay for his California medical license was on top of the pile on his desk. A thousand dollars was a lot of money. Upstairs, Fred had left the deadbolts for the second floor door unlocked. Drew entered the narrow kitchen and heard his housemate call from the small front room that overlooked the street.

“I already ordered,” Fred called. “Come help yourself.”

Drew slumped onto the couch. The walls were covered with printed pages of school ID pictures that dated back to Drew’s first year of medical school. Some of the names beneath the indistinct black and white faces had been underlined in red.

“Long day,” Fred said pushing the pizza box at Drew. “I’d been doing pediatric cases up until the OB pulled me for your papilloma party,” he said working his second slice. “I love kids. I had all my drugs drawn up for a tonsillectomy, but when someone wasn’t watching, the kid grabbed a handful of jelly beans in pre-op.”

Drew chalked up one cancelled case and waited for Fred to swallow.

“Then another kid wouldn’t go for the rectal Valium his local doc had prescribed as a sedative, and I assured the mother I’d dispose of the medication safely,” Fred said. “We can’t have kids getting their hands on drugs that depress the respiratory system.” He bit into his third slice thoughtfully.

“Great cases,” Drew nodded. He tallied Fred’s take for one day: a little ketamine, the Valium, some fentanyl, maybe even some propofol, and grinned.

Fred toasted the air with his beer bottle. “Fuck the days of the giants.”

After the pizza was gone, they prepared to pleasure themselves with Fred’s private crash cart, and Drew reminded Dr. Yee he that he wanted to remember some of his weekend. Fred pulled open the bottom drawer of his red tackle box and removed a handful of thirty gauge needles, two tourniquets, and a well-worn cardboard box that contained a prefilled syringe of naloxone, the antidote in case of an overdose.

While Fred laid everything out, Drew quizzed himself on the naloxone dose and found he still remembered 0.4 to 2 milligrams every two to three minutes as needed. Then he got up and closed the window. Winter was coming, and if Fred left next summer, so would the drug supply. Drew would have to be enterprising. He stood and stretched before the wall of photos until Fred signaled he was ready for his last case of the day. Drew took the syringe of fentanyl Fred handed him and decided he’d have to make notes before Fred took the ID photos down. Some of the people on the wall still had to be at St. Basil’s or at least in the city. They would have contacts.

No stranger to difficult IV starts, Drew had no trouble injecting a plump, healthy vein inside his ankle. Then he leaned back to appreciate all the pharmacology he’d learned: how synthetic opiates bound to the brain’s receptors, concentrated deep in the area of pain and emotion. How the dopamine levels rose in the reward center to create euphoria and relaxation.

Fred tossed both syringes into a sharps container. “I got my letter,” he said. “Penn’s taking me for a cardiothoracic fellowship.”

“Choice,” Drew said. “Congrats.” He’d never had any doubt that Fred would rectify the great injustice done when he’d been matched to St. Basil’s for residency. Fred had attended a swank college on a scholarship and attended the University of Pennsylvania for medical school but then his luck ran out. Fred’s mother said it stemmed from his refusal to wear the red outfit she’d bought him for the new year when he was sixteen. 

“It’ll be a shame to leave all this,” Fred said waving an arm at the stalactites of damaged plaster hanging from the ceiling, “but I’m looking to trade up to something in west Philly that hasn’t been condemned.”

Fred could have bought himself a house on the Main Line selling the narcotics he’d appropriated with his various waste scams, but he’d been careful not to draw attention to himself while atoning for the shame his residency had caused his family. Even Drew was tired of hearing Fred’s father tell the story of how he’d eaten tree bark to survive after escaping his village to emigrate to the United States.

“You weren’t planning on renewing the lease, were you?” Fred said.

“Don’t know where I’ll be,” Drew said. “You’re coming out of anesthesia, a great department. All those excellent trauma cases, gunshot wounds to the chest, the head, the abdomen, not to mention all the bread and butter appendectomies on the garden variety poly-substance abusers. Everyone wanted you because every case you’ve ever done is high risk.”

“St. Basil’s Ob-Gyn department still has a great reputation outside of Philadelphia,” Fred said. “Only the attentive know the best attendings left.”

Drew knew he’d damaged his marketability last year when they’d called him in to cover for someone stuck in traffic on the Tacony-Palmyra bridge before he was capable of remaining vertical, but any recommendation letter from the OB would be carefully worded to decimate whatever status he might have enjoyed having trained at St. Basil’s. Their former department chair hadn’t been stupid enough to damage her program by exposing a resident with a drug problem before her grand exit: it reflected as badly on her as it did on Dr. Andrew Spight. She’d put him in the medical staff’s diversion program that forced him to submit to random drug tests. So far he’d aced them, but stealing urine samples from the basket of outgoing labs on pediatrics was getting to be a real pain in the ass.

Fred slapped Drew’s arm above the red line left by the tourniquet. “You show the Old Bastard!” he said. “Put your head down, work hard. Get out of here. Plenty of places looking for young docs with a broad experience base.”

Drew snorted. Broad experience base. Sometimes Fred cracked him up. He watched the anesthesiologist prepare two new syringes. Pity the poor losers stuck sucking fentanyl patches.

St. Basil’s hadn’t been Drew’s first choice for residency either, but unlike Yee, his father had only escaped Philadelphia for the suburbs where he serviced fire extinguishers. Four years of state school and four years of mediocre performance in medical school had left Drew little chance of trading up.

Drew injected again and slipped to the floor where he stared up at the pattern of the thumb-print sized faces, the unsullied slurpers and ass-kissers interspersed with the users of marijuana, methamphetamine, ecstasy, and more whose names Fred had tricked out with a thin, red line. Sure, recreational drugs were illegal. But it was even more risky to use drugs and practice medicine. Never mind the patients, they could lose their licenses. With that in mind, Fred had carefully cataloged the users. They were deemed safe to speak and party with: they all had something to lose. 

“With your indulgence,” Fred said, “I think my fellowship warrants something special.”

Drew nodded, his gaze fixed on Fred’s hand as it disappeared into the hinged box. The fifty milliliter bottle he withdrew had the coveted baby blue label. Propofol. Fred held the glass vial to the light between thumb and forefinger. The liquid, ten milligrams per milliliter, was cloudy white like the diluted formula some patients fed their babies to make it go farther when they sold their WIC vouchers to support their own habits.

Fred dealt and they pushed the plungers on their respective syringes. Drew felt warm and safe and happy. The textbooks barely scratched the surface when they enumerated propofol’s effects: a sense of well being, hallucinations, and sexual fantasies. With the first flush of dopamine bathing his brain, Drew felt a sense of purpose. He would ask the OB about writing up the nasty condyloma case, get it published, and find himself a decent job. Maybe even do his own fellowship.

As he slowly exhaled, the blurry face of Dr. Eric Xavier smiled down at him. The room darkened and the presentation on reconstructive gynecology that Dr. Xavier had sent him commenced with Netter’s famous illustrations of the perineum with its anterior and posterior triangles. Photographs of the vulva followed: the labia majora and minora, the introitus with and without hymeneal remnants, the clitoris. There were testimonials from women who said they lacked confidence to wear string bikinis, tight pants, and skimpy thongs. Women who required pubic liposuction and lift, labia majora remodeling, labia minora reduction, clitoral hood reduction, and clitoropexy. The pursuit of the aesthetic pussy was everything. And for the women who regretted pushing babies the size of bowling balls out through their vagina, there was vaginal rejuvenation. Dr. Xavier guaranteed that his technique could make a woman tight as a virgin again, and the accompanying photo showed him holding a ruler beside one of his newly post-operative creations. Drew clapped twice before blacking out.

The next morning Drew woke and scratched before padding to the bathroom to stand on the crusty hexagon tile in front of the toilet and piss away the degradation products of the previous night. He was still fascinated by science and the mysteries of the human body. He hadn’t meant to be a horrible, drug-addled obstetrician-gynecologist; there was just so much he hadn’t anticipated: delivering a woman with a toxicology screen that had come back positive for everything, coning a cervix riddled with cancer, watching 300 grams of red, gelatinous miscarried fetus expire. As fast as he learned, he wanted to forget, and now, just months from finishing, he was afraid.

Fred knocked hard on the door.

“If you don’t get out, they’re going to start calling you the new bastard,” Fred said.

 

The following June, on his last night on call at St. Basil’s, Drew sat, feet up in the nurse’s station, reading the latest report from the medical board. One physician had diverted controlled substances for personal use. Another, who practiced in southern California like Dr. Xavier, had been on probation for lewd conduct. Drew pictured a consultation room with palm trees waving outside the window. He imagined patients with smooth, shaved vulvas, too beautiful to have genital warts. While on probation, this doctor had been found guilty of having sexual relations with patients: license revoked.

Fred had moved out the week before, and maybe that was a good thing. Drew, broke as usual, found himself limited to alcohol.

The charge nurse blew by and knocked his clogged feet off the counter.

“Delivery,” she ordered.

The cracked vinyl pinched the back of his thighs through the thin scrub pants. Drew pushed himself up. Next week the new interns would arrive and he’d get no rest until they demonstrated basic proficiency. He still couldn’t believe that after writing him a crappy recommendation letter the OB had offered him a position at St. Basil’s providing obstetrical and gynecological care to the tsunami of patients on public assistance. Why they were going to let him near residents and medical students was anyone’s guess, but then again, what choice did the skeleton department have? Last year’s exodus had left bitter, overworked attendings desperate to fill the ranks. Drew had been too embarrassed to tell Fred about the job or that he’d renewed the lease.

The pregnant patient had been moved to the surgical delivery room because her blood pressure was elevated. Drew reviewed the chart and chatted up a new nurse who was wearing a scrub jacket covered with red roses.

Drew gowned and gloved then asked the nurse to adjust the light. He examined the patient’s vulva and checked the pelvic proportions. Her pendulous labia majora was already swollen and her labia minora were as thin and wide as bat wings. No, the OB was right, he didn’t practice among the pretty pussies.

The patient bore down and the baby’s head crowned against the pitted, scarred skin. Drew ticked off the months on his fingers and glanced at the name on the nurse’s handwritten notes. It had to be her, the patient whose genital warts the OB had burned off. He remembered talking with Fred that night. What had he done about getting out?

The head delivered easily, and the next contraction propelled the rest of the baby into the world. G6P6. Drew leaned in to secure the baby in the crook of his right arm and pinned its slippery movements against the texture of the disposable gown. He looked at the bawling baby. Another girl. Someone he’d be delivering in thirteen or fourteen years. God, let him not be here. Let him get out.

L. M. Asta has published fiction in The Battered Suitcase, Inkwell, and Schuylkill, as well as having been previously published in Philadelphia Stories. Her essays have appeared in Hippocrates and the Journal of the American Medical Association. "Getting Out" is from Report From the Medical Board, a novel that tracks the physicians who come to the attention of their state medical board and are variously reprimanded, put on probation, have their licenses suspended, and sometimes revoked. She is a graduate  of Temple University School of Medicine and did her residency at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. www.lmasta.com.

 

Because I no longer have a yard, at least not a yard that suits me (not like the one we had back in Wyndmoor), and because I am not the type, yard or no yard, to stay cooped up indoors—not on an evening where the summer heat has mellowed and the sun is orangeing—because of these things, I’ve been sitting out on the stoop these days, making it the place where I can undo my belt, slouch, and let my belly unfurl onto my knees. Where I can drink Bacardi and Diet Coke from the tiki glass that Lana abhors. Where I can stare down the cars creeping past, looking for precious street-parking while my station wagon sits in the middle of two perfectly good spots.

[img_assist|nid=9839|title=Philadelphia Skyline at Dusk by Megan Grugan|desc=|link=node|align=none|width=400|height=538]

At this time of day, little things happen all on their own: dirty rain water drips through a sagging awning, and the breeze scatters glass, wrappers, and other detritus to reveal skeletal forms in the filth. And the stray cat, the longest, thinnest cat I’ve ever seen, comes out from under my station wagon to rub shyly against my back before I let it climb into my lap.

“Hey you,” I say to the cat, rubbing my hand across it. “Hey cat. Hey puss. Hey kitty.”

The cat isn’t all that grimy for a stray. I’m not sure what to call it: it has that quality between an it and a she.

“Are you a Catrina or a Catherine?” I ask it. “Or do you prefer to be called Mrs. Cat? Or even maybe Dr. Cat?”

The cat meows. I like to imagine she was once gainfully employed in the cat world, as a college professor or a medical doctor. When she fell on hard times, she became depressed, and rightfully so. Given how introverted a cat is to begin with, she must have been real unpleasant, so her family put her out on the street. But she’s ready to turn a new leaf, so I give her the respect she needs to get back on her feet. I tell her about what I’m reading. We converse. After all, isn’t this why people keep cats in the first place?

“Tough times, huh? You want a snack?” I ask. “Wait here.”

Inside, Lana is preparing dinner. There aren’t enough hallways, not enough alternate routes in this townhouse; to get to the kitchen, I have to walk through the living room where the three dogs lounge like a plague. Why even have a sofa? Why not just spread some hay in front of the television and let whoever wants lay in it?

I rattle the ice remaining in my cup until Charlie, the pit bull, shoots his head up and begins to whimper.

“Is that you, King of The Street?” Lana calls. “How does everything look out there?”
I answer her question with one of my own. It’s not that I don’t hear her. That’s just how we talk nowadays.

“What’s cooking, Lan?”

“Don’t you want to guess?

“Steak?”

“Quinoa salad and baked fish,” she replies.

“Aha.”

I step into the kitchen, grab her bony hips, and watch her denude a ratty carrot over the compost bin. Then I go into the fridge and reach into the back corner for a slice of turkey.
“You’re not feeding that cat, are you?” she asks.
“Nope,” I say, putting the lunchmeat in my pocket and filling my glass with ice.
“Good. I don’t want it to think it can come inside. We’re dog people, now.”

Lana likes to say that. But we aren’t dog people by nature, and had never been when we lived in Wyndmoor. Dogs have conquered our new house, bit by bit. It all started when Lana adopted Charlie as a young pit bull from the animal shelter, where they’d told her that Charlie was the sweetest, most friendly dog, but good for protection too. And for the most part he was. But the day he was brought home, Charlie killed our cat, Bootsy, just killed her like there was nothing to it. He bee-lined for her, grabbed her in his jaws, and shook the life out of her like a plush toy. It was horrible. I had to wrestle Charlie to the ground, which got Charlie even more excited, and he started to lick my face with his bloody tongue.

“On second thought, there’s no point in us losing two pets,” Lana had said, after I had loaded Charlie into the trunk of the station wagon. The animal was circling around back there like an excited particle, pausing once in a while to look at us gleefully, his tail whacking alternately between seatback and windowpane. Not only did I blame Charlie for killing Bootsy, but somehow I blamed him for the fact that Lana, visibly, was not nearly as upset as I was. I started to hate Charlie that very day.

Charlie was soon followed by Megan the Weimaraner (a yuppie dog, grey, athletic, vacant—in other words, a yuppie herself) and George St. George, a shih tzu that I was allowed to name. I named him that way because he walked into the house the first day and stared down the bigger dogs into submission. George St. George is the one I dislike the least.

After dinner, we go for a walk. It’s dark now, and the breeze is refreshing. Lana walks all three dogs at once, pulled along like a warrior on a chariot, driving through the night. She gets ahead of me instantly, so I sneak a glance under the station wagon. A pair of marbly eyes tells me that the cat is there.
“More turkey when I get back,” I reassure it.

Lana pauses now and again to let one of the dogs shit. It’s a shameless show that they take turns stoically performing while Lana and the other two dogs watch on. Once the dog has finished, everybody is reanimated, and while Lana stoops to clean up, the dogs gambol about as if nothing has happened.

“Good doggie,” Lana says.

I lag behind on purpose, because I don’t want to get caught up in these chores of being a dog person. The upkeep of my own life is hard enough. Lana is good at it though—taking care of things, that is. We moved into the city because she wanted to be closer to the yoga studio, the farmers market, and the animal shelter, and because she was tired of taking care of our big old house. She wanted something cozier, cuter; wanted to be more active in a community. She said being active might do me some good too. But the only thing I was ever good at taking care of was the yard.

Thinking about our old house, I get uneasy. My buzz is wearing off and my belly starts to feel hollow.. I start to look around and see the cat slinking ten paces behind me (you see, if dogs gambol, cats slink). I want to tell it to shoo, but I like the idea of this unlikely parade making its way to the park. Besides, I know that it won’t follow us around the corner.

We cross through the park. Up ahead, Charlie and Megan are barking at a Rottweiler that belongs to some vagrant kids who smoke cigarette butts off the ground. George St. George starts to bark at the whole lot of them and Lana has to drag them away. I take this moment to turn around and see if the cat is still there, but it’s not.

“That’s right, fuck off, lady,” one of the kids says.

When I get up to where they are, the same kid asks, “Hey man, spare some change?”
I reach into my wallet and pull out a five-dollar bill.

“Sorry,” I say. I don’t know why.

The next morning, while Lana is out at yoga, I make a pot of coffee and go out onto the stoop. But the cat is nowhere in sight. So I go back inside, lift George St. George from the couch, and leash him up, relishing the look of disappointment on Charlie’s face.
“I’ll outlive you,” I promise him. “You too,” I say to Megan, who’s done nothing other than to watch dumbly with a plush toy in her mouth. It’s her failure to understand me that I can’t stand. In Charlie, it’s the opposite.

I walk George St. George to the park, where we throw the ball around. This is my attempt at being active. The other morning dog walkers are there and another shih tzu runs up to George St. George. They start to sniff each other.

“How old is he?” its owner asks me. “Is it a he or a she?”

“A he,” I say. “And I don’t know at all how old he is. I have no idea.”

She smiles behind her oversized sunglasses. She’s in her twenties and very fit, yoga-fit, but not yet all ropey like Lana.

“They seem to be getting along,” she remarks.

“Us or the dogs?”

She titters (women titter), and walks over to fetch her dog. Her pants cleave her ass like the cleft on a large peach, and while I know that I should find this arousing, I don’t. Through my pocket, I check to make sure my testicles are intact.

Suddenly a big boxer comes running across the lawn and starts bouncing around the shih tzus in a circle, barking. The shih tzus start barking back and backing up a little bit. I see the owner of the other shih tzu swoop in to break it all up, and at the same time I see myself standing by doing nothing, George St. George’s leash dangling in my fist like a lasso. What kind of dog-person am I? I wonder. Do I rescue my dog or let him fend for himself? Isn’t part of owning a dog having something that can fight and kill and die on your behalf? I decide then that I’m really a cat person—that what dogs do is none of my business.

The young woman shoots a stern smile at the boxer owner, and one at me too. She picks her shih tzu up and cradles it. I try to apologize with my eyes, whatever that looks like. Then I walk over to George St. George and put his leash back on.

We stop off at the grocery store so I can pick up some breakfast, and I tie George St. George up as loosely as I can.

“Don’t go anywhere,” I dare him.

When I come out balancing milk and eggs and bread in my arms (Lana’s on an eco-friendly kick, so I’m afraid to come back with a plastic bag), I see that George St. George’s leash has come undone, though he doesn’t seem to notice.

“Why didn’t you run for it, son?” I say. “That ingrate Charlie would run. He would run and never look back.”

There’s no point in taking the leash – George St. George leads the way back to the house and I follow ten paces behind. Back home, Lana’s just come out of the shower, and when she sees me with all the groceries she says:

“How come you didn’t bring a tote? It would have simplified your life.”
“Sometimes I forget to do the things that simplify my life,” I say, and head for the sputtering old shower, to let it lurch invectives of host rust-tinged water on me.

[img_assist|nid=9857|title=Untitled (Shadows and Bones Series) by Kim Mehler © 2012|desc=|link=node|align=none|width=400|height=573]

That night, after Lana and the dogs have gone to bed, I lure the cat inside with lunchmeat. We go into the living room where I’ve set up a little spot for it under the bookcase with Bootsy’s old food bowl and litter box. The dogs are all upstairs—sometimes they take my place in bed and I don’t even bother to kick them out.
I sit down on the couch and watch the cat eating as if this food and being in this house were the most unremarkable thing, as if it were expected even. I’m reminded of Bootsy, and the way she stalked about the old house in Wyndmoor with utter nonchalance. Indifferent to the infestation we had, Bootsy used to stare blankly as we chased mice and roaches ourselves. It wasn’t for a lack of eyesight, because she would chase a ball or well-aimed point of light. I once went so far as to capture a mouse and dangle it live and wriggling in front of Bootsy’s face, only to prompt a lazy bath.

“Ok, kitty,” I say, kicking off my shoes and laying down now on the couch. “Time for bed.”

I tap my belly, inviting the cat to come sit on me. But it just looks at me from across the room. I close my eyes and try to sleep. Ten minutes go by. Still the cat has not come to sleep with me. When I open my eyes, I’ve lost it.

I get up and walk the perimeter of the living room, and suddenly there it is in the corner, quietly watching. I’m getting frustrated now and hot at the same time, and I’m remembering a Poe story or two where the narrator is spooked again and again by the indifferent gaze of his cat. They can scare the hell out of you when they want to. And once they’ve done it, you can’t help but think that, even when they’re friendly, there’s something removed and awful about them. Maybe that’s what Lana was glad to be rid of the day Charlie mauled Bootsy. Maybe that’s what she was glad to be rid of when she sold the big old lonely house in Wyndmoor. That indifference. Maybe I should have been glad to be rid of it too.

I sit back on the couch and silently will the cat to come over, maybe I even murmur a prayer. And finally it does, but only to the edge—it doesn’t jump up. I desperately want to take off my shirt and pants and sleep now, with or without the cat, but I don’t dare undress as long as it is in the house, watching.

I wake up the next morning, fully dressed. The cat has gone; I don’t know where. I spend the day out on the stoop and it doesn’t show up, not once. Evening comes and Lana charges out of the house with the herd and I watch them disappear down the street to go perform their shitting and playing spectacles in a more public place. The cars still creep by and the ice melting in my tiki glass gives off a pop. And I think, somebody is making these nice things for me. Somebody is composing this world in a way that it hasn’t been all year, for my enjoyment and my enjoyment alone.

Max
McKenna’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Apiary,
Cartographer: A Literary Review, and First Stop Fiction, and he has
contributed essays to The Millions, Full Stop, the Journal of Modern
Literature, and Filament, among others. He works at the Kelly Writers
House in Philadelphia.

 

Two weekends after Myra’s old neighbors vacated the trailer next to hers, this man and his bony brown Lab pulled in with all his furniture tied down in the bed of his pickup. His and Myra’s two trailers sat on either side of a broad driveway, fronting a small thicket of trees nested deep by hills of rolling corn. Myra introduced herself, and he shook her hand with a big grin and eyeballed her breasts.

“Very pleased to meet you,” he said. His name was Booker.

[img_assist|nid=9854|title=Winter Sun by Janice Hayes-Cha © 2012|desc=|link=node|align=none|width=400|height=565]

A day after moving in he tacked a confederate flag beside his front door, and after a week of waking early to his truck revving and revving, Myra gave up on sleeping as late as she used to. She slid from under her covers. When her feet touched the cold bathroom floor she tucked her hands under her arms, sat on the tub’s rim, and squeaked the hot water faucet. She was accustomed to men looking at her the way Booker had; she was twenty-five and waitressed at Hildebrand’s where Nancy, another server, had once told her, “Myra, you could land any man you wanted.”

But Myra had never wanted men, and since last year, when Tracy left, she hadn’t wanted many women either.

After breakfast the air hung blue and misty when she locked the trailer behind her. In Booker’s back yard his Lab pined at her over its shoulder. In the past week she’d once seen Booker out there threatening his dog with a stick, charging then hiding the stick behind his back and calling sweetly again. She smiled at the pooch and ducked into her Chevette.

She followed the line of telephone poles that ran with the road into town. As a kid she had often seen her father working the tops of poles like these. Standing way up there in the unfolded arm of his cherry picker, he’d salute her in his hard hat as she walked to school. Now she drove this route five days a week, past barns and silos and the tree-covered mountains she never tired of looking at. She pictured herself as an old woman still living in this valley in the middle of Pennsylvania. She climbed the mountains often, whether alone or with a girlfriend, and had found the hidden cliffs, ridges, and pockets, secrets between her and the landscape. The view of it had been what sold her on the trailer, besides her limited means.

When she moved in four years ago, the Levis, a retired couple, invited her to dinner in the other trailer. During the summer she helped with their yard work and sat outside with them, their two trailers quiet. They’d been good neighbors.

As she neared downtown, the scenery turned to brick row houses, sidewalks, and stoplights. She parked behind Hildebrand’s and walked in under the second story porch in the back. The hot kitchen smelled like hash and coffee.

“Happy Tuesday,” said Norma, the owner, as Myra tied on an apron. Norma had freckles and a hint of crow’s feet, and a red braid that swung between her shoulder blades when she walked. “That neighbor still waking you up early?”

“He says he revs the truck to warm it now that it’s getting chilly,” Myra said. She breathed in the steam and warmth from the stove, and watched Norma crouch in front of the counter until she was eye-level with a dish, adjusting the garnishes until it looked just so.

“Baloney,” Norma said. “He likes to hear that engine roar.”

Myra checked her apron pockets for her pen and pad. Though she mostly waited tables, Norma talked to her over many lunches about refining recipes and developing new ones, and Myra helped cook sometimes now too. Not long after meeting Norma, her enthusiasm catching and charming, Myra brought garlic and olive oil home to her trailer and tried things she’d never made before. She moved on from the canned soups and boxed macaroni she’d habitually made for dinner, staples from when she lived alone with her father, growing up.

Myra pushed open the wobbly door from the kitchen and went out serving her breakfast patrons a wide and trusting smile. They were all regulars, happy to be up, people she would see and say hi to when she went shopping. Dr. Kingsboro started his practice at eight sharp, and Gracie Stoltzfus opened the thrift across the street at eight-thirty. Myra laughed and traded news of the valley while bringing them their sausage and orange juice, and the morning was over before she bothered to look at her watch.

At lunch, tables and booths grew crowded. Guests barked over each other and forks clinked on plates. Myra sweated as she bustled with meals from the steaming kitchen and cleared piles of napkins and morsels left behind.  Her neighbor walked in today, wearing coveralls, thumbs hooked in his pockets. He sat in a booth and looked around at the vintage advertisements and postcards on the walls. When Myra went to him he grinned.

“I’ll have a black coffee.” The skin on either side of his moustache crinkled. “And Myra’s a pretty name.”

“Thanks. My mother thought of it.” She gave him the imitation smile she gave all the men who looked long at her nametag. “I’ll have your coffee right out.” Mentioning her mother to him felt bitter, like the dregs he’d leave in his mug. Her mother had been dead since Myra was six, her father now single and full of stories. She put the coffee down in front of Booker.

He ordered a burger too, and took his time eating. When he finished, Myra found the tip wedged under his plate. She stood there and held the folded five in her hand. Fifty percent.

That night she stood at the counter dicing potatoes when she heard a knock at the door. She cracked it open partway, the chain still in place, and held the paring knife in her apron pocket. “Can I help you?”

“Howdy.” Booker had put a denim jacket on over his coveralls. His Lab sat on a leash beside him. “Thinking about taking my grill out this weekend, having a few beers. I thought since you’re alone out here you might want to come over awhile.”

She gave him the same waitress smile from before. “I can’t. I’m visiting my father this weekend.” That was a lie. She looked down. “Handsome dog you have.”

“Thanks. I keep her trained pretty good.” He ruffled the dog’s neck. It blinked at him, licked its lips. Myra still stood behind the chain. Booker said, “Feel free to stop over. There’ll be plenty of food on Saturday.” He turned and crunched across the gravel, unleashed his dog into his back yard.

Myra closed the door and slid the deadbolt into place. Leaving town for a day or two didn’t sound bad. If she called her father and asked if he’d like her over, of course he’d say yes.

*

Two days later in Hildebrand’s, after helping a pair of wrinkled women in hats, she turned and almost smacked into Booker’s chest. She had to look up at him, that grin growing repellent the closer it got. “Hi,” she said. “Just pick whichever seat you like. Nancy will be over to take your order in a second, okay?” She carried her load of dishes to the kitchen, and the door swung shut behind her. She stayed out of sight of the little window and waited for him to sit down or leave.

Norma looked over her shoulder from cooking. “You all right?”

Myra smiled her waitress smile. “Catching my breath a second,” she said. Booker left without ordering.

After work she drove home as the sun set behind the mountains. The slope of them on either side rose gentle but firm, cradling the valley. Their green turned to warm gold in the light. Soon she walked behind her trailer, through the thicket to the edge of the corn. The stalks were brown and would be harvested soon, but for now they stood shielding and tall. On summer days she would get lost in them, the green leaves brushing her arms until she found a hollow and shade to sit in.

She held herself in the wind and watched the shadows creep up the hill. The last tip of sun sank out of sight, and she was cold. She went inside and called her father, said she’d drive up on Saturday for lunch. He said her old room was always ready.

On Friday, after stopping at the supermarket, Myra saw Booker in his yard in a lawn chair, Bud in hand, wearing a white tank top and baseball cap. He faced her trailer like he was lounging at the beach, waiting for a wave to roll in.

“Afternoon,” he called, raising his beer can.

“Hello,” Myra said. She carried two paper bags of groceries, and felt him watching her backside as she turned and climbed the steps. Inside, she put the chicken in the freezer so it wouldn’t spoil on the road tomorrow. She made dinner standing by the sink, and kept glancing out the window above it to see if Booker had gone. After eating she packed clothes into a shoulder bag. Booker finally went inside when it got dark, and his windows glowed.

She shut the curtains and sat in the easy chair her father gave her when she moved into the trailer. The cushion had a hollow in it six inches deep now, and the snugness made her think of when she’d still been with Tracy. Of the comfort in a woman holding her, of curling against a smooth back before sleep. On the weekends, they had sat at a patio table in Myra’s back yard, thicket on three sides, trailer along the fourth. It gave her the feeling of  safety she’d had in the clearings in the woods and on the slopes where she’d taken girls in community college. Back then she still lived with her father, and none of those girlfriends ever saw her house. Once, her father twisted his face at two women holding hands on the street, and she’d never forgotten it. After two years full of brief relationships, she finished her Associate’s in history and decided she needed space. With what she made in tips, the trailer was all she could afford.

*

Myra’s father waited on the porch where they’d read and talked and on warm nights listened to frogs and crickets when she was a girl. As always his gut stuck out, and she’d forgotten how gray his hair had gone. A grin cracked his face, and the boards creaked as he treaded down the stairs to meet her. He gave Myra a bear hug as she stepped from the Chevette. It was good to be in his arms. When he let go he left his big hands cupping her shoulders.

“It’s good to see you,” he said.

She walked to the house with him. “Want to see what I’ve been cooking?”

Her father sat at the table while she put together a chicken sandwich with sautéed mushrooms and peppers. He told her about preparing to retire from the phone company after thirty-three years. It was hard for her to picture him without his gloves and tools, the driveway next to the house empty of his cherry picker. She asked him what he would do.

“Bill next door’s getting a group together to fix old hiking trails,” he said. “It might take all next year. They say being outdoors helps you live longer, and now’s no time to stop.”

Myra tried never to spend a day all indoors either. She had hiked with her father a lot, and he’d even taken her shooting once or twice. “You should tell me when you start,” she said. “I could go along.”

“You bet.” He watched her cook, got quiet, and looked at his lap. “I was also thinking I’d get more involved at church. I always felt it’d be right to give a bit more.”

She thought of the chair back at her place, the silverware set, and other furnishings he’d bought for her when she paid for the trailer. For most of her childhood she’d gone with him to the Baptist church three blocks down, though when high school and weekend homework rolled around, she stayed home. On the Sundays when she was free she slept late. Readings like Paul’s letter to the Romans talked about women lusting for women, and she felt like whoever read them looked straight at her, small in the pew, even though she hadn’t told anyone she liked girls. On the way out of worship it unnerved her to shake the pastor’s hand and see him smile back when maybe he wouldn’t if he knew the truth.

“How about you? Anything new and exciting?” her father asked.

She put the finished sandwich in front of him, open faced with the bread toasted and every layer visible, a pickle wedge by the side. “Still talking to Norma. She’s sharing tips and tricks.”

Her father started eating, and she sat down with half a sandwich herself. He frowned and nodded at the taste as he chewed. “You thinking about doing something with this?”

“There isn’t a culinary school around.”

“You could make more as a chef than a waitress.”

“I know.”

He took a pause and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “And no one’s holding you back?”

She looked at her food, then picked it up and bit in. Her father had met Tracy once or twice when they’d been together, had seen the picture of her next to Myra’s bed, framed, the picture that was gone now. He must have figured out she loved Tracy, though she never told him the whole story. How New Hampshire was where Tracy always wanted to be. When they first met at the one local gay club she’d told Myra over a beer that she was saving money to go north, leave Pennsylvania behind. And if people here ever closed in on her, she’d be gone, money or not. Body toned taut and carried in combat boots, Tracy needed to be visible.

Myra looked up at her father eating his chicken. She’d never had a heart to heart with him about loving women, and supposed she might never do so. She had accepted that between them there would long lie certain silences.

*

The next day Myra smelled bacon and buttered toast when she sat up in bed. The sun broke through the curtains. Her father had been to church and back by now, and she pictured him closing the front door as he left, gently so as not to wake her. When they’d lived together she was always excited for her father’s cooking on Sundays, the one day of the week he took his time and made the food his own. Afterward they used to walk to the river.

He never spoke to her the way the pastor preached, as if she’d wasted her chance at heaven. Myra doubted her father could imagine that for her. She’d wavered for a while about believing in heaven, but there’d been times, when she sat outdoors alone or with a girlfriend, that had forced her to reconsider. Once she’d sat with Tracy in a pair of folding chairs in her yard, and next to a table torch they talked long into the night, moving inside only when they realized how late it got. Hours when she was happy enough to forget her yard was a hiding place, hours when she was simply Myra.

After dressing she headed downstairs and in the kitchen found her father reading the Sunday edition. He smiled big when he saw her and folded the newspaper up. “Let me get you something,” he said. She sat at the table. He brought her a plate of breakfast just as always. She ate, looked at his eyes, shared the silence with him. “Can we go for a walk?” she finally said.

They finished eating and put on jackets and followed the sidewalk to the river bank. She told him about her neighbor. His lonely dog, his noisy truck.

“He seem nice?” her father asked. He watched her as they walked, and she wondered how much to tell him. “Everything okay?”

“He’s just not like the Levis is all.”

“You give me a call if he bothers you.” He put his hand on her shoulder, close to her neck. “I mean it. You don’t have to be by yourself all the time.” She looked up at him and touched his cheek with the back of her hand and smiled. She didn’t tell him how alone she often felt.

That afternoon, she put her travel bag in the back seat of her Chevette. Her father stood next to her. She shut the rear door and turned to him. Gave him one more hug.

“Take care of yourself, Myra.”

“You too.” She let go and got into the car, and they shared a wave.

Making to turn off the road in front of her trailer, she saw a red compact sitting where she usually parked the Chevette. She left her car on the shoulder. Brown bottles lay strewn about in Booker’s yard, and a black barbeque stood next to some plastic chairs and a cooler. She opened her door and Booker’s back gate squeaked. Over her shoulder she saw a short blonde with a mop of bobbing curls, cigarette pack in her hand. The woman walked sideways between the vehicles and got into the compact.

Good, Myra thought. She closed the door behind her and put her bag in the bedroom. She heard Booker’s gate whine again and touched the curtains open a sliver. Booker was out in his yard in just cutoff jeans, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. His pale belly hung over his belt as he bent over and plucked the bottles one by one from the grass. He dropped them clattering into his trash can and banged down the lid. The Lab bounded out of its doghouse, but he swung his hand at it and said, “Back.” He went in, leaving the dog in the yard.

Myra put some veggies on to steam, and sat in her easy chair holding her arms, watching the news while she waited. When Tracy had stayed over, Myra felt the peace of waking to hear someone in the shower, the security in knowing the trailer wasn’t empty. She’d had that as a girl sharing the house with her father. Though right after her mother died, Myra would find him sitting alone in dark rooms, sometimes with his head in his hands, and he would squeeze her tight. She wondered if he still got that lonely, and tucked her legs under her in the chair, curling close.

*

That Friday, after work, Myra put on heels, a halter, and earrings. She let her hair down. She hadn’t been out to the bar in months, and hadn’t dated at all in the year since the night Tracy came home bruised and almost in tears, talking only of leaving town the next day. Myra held her until she fell asleep, and then sat outside in the moonlight. She had put down roots here, and Tracy hadn’t.

The sky got dark early, the night clear as Myra’s car passed through acres of farms, the stars so close like she was out in the middle of them. She opened the window a little and let the cold whip in. Driving in the middle of nowhere could some days feel like freedom. Nothing but land and trees and dark houses where no one would ever know her name.

She crested the next hill, and there stood the sign. Purple and blue neon, a lone building at the intersection, the traffic light yellow and blinking. Inside the club only the bar was lit. There were tables, dancing poles, and a jukebox. Myra slid onto a stool, and ordered a beer from a spiky-haired man in mascara and hoop earrings. She looked around. Lots of couples tonight, mostly men, and some older pairs of women in sweatshirts. A woman closer to Myra’s age with an afro and high-heeled boots massaged a pole with her hips while a girl in a leather jacket waited her turn. Men sat around the tables, some young enough to be teenagers, some older than her father.

The barman handed Myra her beer, and she took a cold swallow. She noticed a trim blonde wearing thick glasses, sitting alone with a red laptop. Brown leather boots poked from under her long skirt. Myra watched her, then walked to her table, carrying the beer.

“Like some company?”

She looked Myra up and down. “I’d love it.”

Myra sat and introduced herself. The woman said, “My name’s Carolyn.”

“You writing something?”

“Senior presentation. I’m at Shippensburg.” She stopped herself and smiled. Shut her laptop. “Get this. You hear about that homophobe governor who came out?”

“Which one?”

“Exactly.”

They laughed. Talked politics awhile and then went to a cozy corner. It brought Myra back to the days she first found the bar after moving out of her father’s house. More than once she’d wound up outside in a woman’s back seat. After she met Tracy, the swing life lost its appeal. But she’d always been attracted to intelligence, and the thought of this pretty woman giving a talk on some academic topic or other was alluring. She was on the verge of making an offer, it had been so long since she’d been with anyone.

They shared a lingering moment.

“What are you thinking?” Carolyn said.

Myra glanced at their empty glasses. “Trying not to.”

“Interested in going outside?”

She smiled. “I live nearby.” They got up.

Carolyn followed Myra’s Chevette in her Civic. On the drive home Myra felt five years younger, at college and taking a girl to the woods. By the trailers, Carolyn left her Civic parked on the roadside. Faded stickers covered the back bumper, like “if you didn’t vote, don’t complain” and “gay marriage won’t affect your straight divorce.”

As the women walked down the driveway, Carolyn stopped. “Damn.”

She was looking at Booker’s confederate flag.

Myra grimaced. “Sorry, I should have warned you.”

They went inside and sat with each other in the bedroom and kissed, a long one Myra held. They lay down and touched each other’s hips, and Myra let the moment carry her where it chose. Their legs laced together, and she imagined the hills and mountains outside rolling hers and Carolyn’s bodies into one anther.

Half past midnight they put on clothes, smiling when they glanced up and reaching to fix each other’s hair. They traded numbers. Myra went with Carolyn to the door, took her hand and in gratitude kissed her again, watched her walk to the shoulder. When Myra went back to bed she held a pillow to her chest, the blankets warm as she waited for sleep.

*

Monday morning the first frost of the year tingled white in the sun and mist. The squeak of Myra’s screen door echoed off the trees. The air stung her nose, sunlit clouds of her breath rising, the gravel slippery. Usually Booker’s truck was gone by this time of day, and Myra stared at it. She’d heard the echo of a gunshot while eating breakfast and now made the connection.

A bark behind Myra made her jolt. She turned expecting the dog to be on her heels, but it stood behind Booker’s fence, eyeing her through the slats. She hesitated, then started back up the driveway toward it. It watched her and wagged its tail, tags jingling. Myra stood at the fence, its rim to her waist. The dog whined. She reached down and ruffled the stiff fur on its neck, cold and wet from sleeping outdoors. A silver water bowl sat empty in a corner. She wished she could help the animal get warm, though she’d be late if she didn’t leave now.

“Finally decide to come over, then?”

Myra spun and saw Booker standing in front of the thicket, a shotgun crooked under one arm, a lot like the gun her father taught her to use. Booker’s other hand held a brown rabbit hanging by the feet, a neon cap above his eyes blazing orange in the sun.

“She looked cold,” Myra said. “I was seeing if I could help.”

He walked up to her. “Why don’t you run along?”

He stood there until she moved away from his yard, watched her step back to her half of the driveway. Before going to his door, he spit once on the ground. He left the water bowl empty. Myra got into her Chevette, cleared the windshield frost with her wipers, and drove.

The frozen ground was steaming. The wood of the telephone poles looked like masts of old ships rising out of the fog, the sun glowing yellow as the wires rose and fell outside her window.

She got to work late. Norma was waiting on customers but said nothing about it, so Myra walked past her and took orders. Four years now she’d worked for Norma, but she was young. The arc of her life was still climbing, and maybe one day Norma would help her open a place of her own. Back when Tracy had left, Myra had told herself she ought to sell her trailer and leave Hildebrand’s behind, but in the end she never called the newspaper up to place an ad in the classifieds, and never wrote the “home for sale” sign to put inside her window. The valley hadn’t loosed its hold.

*

With her mail the next day Myra found a sheet of paper, handwritten in blue. It said DYKE. She imagined Booker peering from inside his window now that it was cold, as she and Carloyn walked up to her trailer. Maybe he’d wandered out for a smoke, read Carolyn’s bumper stickers. Smiled to himself as he finally got it.

Outside, Booker’s driveway sat empty. The confederate flag’s corner curled up in the wind, faded red and coming unstrung. She wrinkled the paper in her hand and considered calling her father. Somehow she could see Booker facing him down, demanding evidence of guilt, thinking up more potshots for when her father left.

Still holding the sheet, Myra opened the door and stepped down. It clapped behind her, and she walked around her trailer to the trees, meaning to throw the paper away. It felt like a dead animal in her hand. She blocked branches from her face with an arm until she stood where the corn used to be. Prickles of sharp tan broken stalk ran downhill, splinters shifting in the breeze. The harvest had skinned the landscape. Myra could see clear to the bottom of the rise, where the field crept into the darkness cast by the mountains.

Tracy and Carolyn had refused to hide.

She walked back to Booker’s trailer, climbed the stairs, and rapped on his door. It stayed shut. The peeling doghouse stood vacant in his yard. After a minute she stepped to the gravel and looked out at the street, hoping he’d pull in right then so she could hold the note at his face, ask him if she should wear it as a nametag. Or tack it above her door. She kept the crumpled paper and sat on her steps waiting, watching the shadows of their trailers lengthen in the sun.

James Dunham’s fiction has appeared in Necessary Fiction, Glossolalia, and Plain China. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Bowling Green State University and a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University. He acknowledges the contributions of many a friend and mentor throughout the writing of "Two Trailers."