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# EIGHT MILE HIGH

JIM RAY DANIELS

MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
 _East Lansing_
Copyright © 2014 by Jim Ray Daniels

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Michigan State University Press
East Lansing, Michigan 48823–5245

Printed and bound in the United States of America.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2013957630
ISBN: 978-1-61186-142-6 (pbk.)
ISBN: 978-1-60917-428-6 (ebook: PDF)
ISBN: 978-1-62895-027-4 (ebook: ePub)
ISBN: 978-1-62896-027-3 (ebook: Mobi/prc)

Book design by Charlie Sharp, Sharp Des!gns, Lansing, MI
Cover design by Shaun Allshouse, www.shaunallshouse.com

_Eight Mile High_ is a work of fiction. All incidents, dialogue, and characters are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Michigan State University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative and is committed to developing and encouraging ecologically responsible publishing practices. For more information about the Green Press Initiative and the use of recycled paper in book publishing, please visit _www.greenpressinitiative.org_.

Visit Michigan State University Press at _www.msupress.org_

## CONTENTS

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Contents
  5. Soul Sacrifice
  6. Survivor's Guilt
  7. Et Tu
  8. 13 Ways of Looking at My Father in His Bathing Suit (Times 2)
  9. Pearl Diving
  10. Our Lady of No Mercy
  11. Bend in the Road
  12. AWOL
  13. Target Practice
  14. 13-Part Story with Mime
  15. My Republican Love Affair
  16. Dream House
  17. Raccoon Heaven
  18. The Tall Tale of the Cowboy Mattress
  19. Acknowledgments

Soul Sacrifice

Survivor's Guilt

Et Tu

13 Ways of Looking at My Father in His Bathing Suit (Times 2)

Pearl Diving

Our Lady of No Mercy

Bend in the Road

AWOL

Target Practice

13-Part Story with Mime

My Republican Love Affair

Dream House

Raccoon Heaven

The Tall Tale of the Cowboy Mattress

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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  1. Cover Page
  2. Begin Reading
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Contents
  5. Acknowledgments

## SOUL SACRIFICE

MIKE KLONOSKI, THE HIPPIE WHO SAT ACROSS FROM ME IN EARTH SCIENCE, did the school's morning announcements once a week, choosing the song that played in the hallways while we changed classes. I'd asked him to play "Soul Sacrifice" by Santana and loaned him my _Woodstock_ album. That ecstatic guitar spoke in tongues down the long echoing halls of Eight Mile High where all 1,256 of us bopped a little, jiggled a little, shook our thangs a little, quicker in spite of wanting to move slower because " _Soul Sacrifice_ ," for crying out loud! Earth Science, for crying out loud—science for those not going to college—did not provide information more useful than biology or chemistry for us future factory rats, but having _earth_ in the title made it sound practical. After all, we _lived_ on earth. Why didn't they just call it _Earth_? They didn't call biology _Biology_ Science. Klonoski arrived late to class when he did announcements. He was a music head and a pothead and just about any kind of head you could name, his wild, frizzy hair parted in the middle, permanently electric. He was one of two hippies at Eight Mile, the other being Jim Terlicki, a freak in every sense of the word, the tallest kid in the school  with another six inches of blond afro on top. He and Klonoski let their freak flags fly, and those flags were glow-in-the-dark, tie-dyed Acapulco Gold. My father still cut my hair—too short, and we fought over it. Beautiful Belinda Spitza sat in front of me, her long hair nearly down to her ass—and her ass that day, the pale, round scoops of it, slightly exposed above hip-hugger jeans as she bent over in her seat. As "Soul Sacrifice" wound down, and we sat waiting for class to begin, Mr. Chubbell, with his bald, skeletal, zombie-like head, smiled at Belinda as he did every single day, though he smiled at no one else ever and resented teaching Earth Science because he was a physicist who should only be teaching the smart kids. Oh, Belinda knew what she knew because, like us, she was no dummy, so she always sort of smiled back, then looked away and got her B, sacrificing a little of her soul, but on that "Soul Sacrifice" day, she squirmed in her seat as if she was ready to rise up and testify, and I was swimming with her ass, neither of us distracted by books—they were so heavy, we were so light—and for ten seconds I knew how hot the earth's core was. When Klonoski showed up, his hair wagging like a happy dog, and plopped down across from me, he handed back my album that gave me all the multiple choices I would ever need, along with a convenient place to roll joints, and I unfolded the cover at my desk to glance at the large photo of blurry naked people, and Chubbell was taking roll and I was _Here!_ and Klonoski was _Here!_ and Belinda turned around, and it looked like she was going to say something, her eyes meeting mine above the album cover, but she didn't, and because Belinda knew what she knew and would've gone to Woodstock, given the chance, she gave me a smile that exploded my head like a cherry bomb, then turned back to say _Here_ with a sneer, and Klonoski looked over at Belinda's ass and then at me and smiled and rolled his enormous eyes like something out of astronomy, like a constellation we all knew but had no name for.

## SURVIVOR'S GUILT

MR. BUCK, THE SCOUT LEADER, SHUFFLED AND DEALT CARDS TO THE OTHER fathers at the picnic table across the large common room from where Al sat. He could hear the suction of their mouths off beer bottles and the click of flipped cards. Through the thin wall of the bunkroom behind him, the other scouts breathed the deep, uncomplicated breaths of the young and exhausted.

"Alvin, get some sleep," Mr. Masch sighed. His own son, already built like the football lineman he was to become, snored loudly behind them. "We'll wake you if your parents make it." He paused. "I mean, they _will_ make it. Just maybe not till morning."

"Yeah, get some sleep, Al," Mr. Buck said. At least he knew better than to call him Alvin. "Snow's really coming down out there." He nodded to the window across from him. Al looked, but from where he sat, it was just a dark square. No moon, no stars. No streetlights, no cars. His parents had promised to drive out and take him home for his championship basketball game tomorrow.

Stony Creek, the Scout camp, was an hour north of Detroit. Al's first  campout with the troop, and he hadn't wanted to miss it _or_ his game. That previous summer, he had emerged from a rare illness that had forced him to miss a third of the school year, and his parents were still cutting him slack for surviving. He was trying not to be the sick kid anymore. Fall had been a failure as he struggled to catch up in school. They'd decided not to make him repeat fifth grade so he could stay with his friends, but his friends back on Rome treated him as if he still had something they could catch. Three months equaled three years in kid time, and his parents and teachers simply did not understand.

"I'm okay," Al said, so softly that it wasn't clear anyone had heard him. A tangled cloud of cigarette smoke hung above the men's table.

HE HAD A FEVER that wouldn't quit. The doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong, eventually settling on viremia—viruses cruising through his bloodstream, stopping wherever they felt like it. He didn't want to eat or move or think. Sometimes Al thought he was willing himself to be sick, holding the thermometer too tight. What was it about the world that had made him sick, even with spring erupting outside the tiny window of his bedroom, trying to intrude, impose its green medicine? He lay sprawled in a daze while the world spun curveballs around him. His mother brought him meals on an old wooden tray that had been in the family forever.

"This tray makes me happy and sad," his mother said. "I don't expect you to understand that." Al's grandparents on his mother's side were both dead. His grandfather had died from cancer—a long, grim illness that wore Al's grandmother out so badly that she died shortly after. At the end, they both had eaten off that tray.

HIS PARENTS HAD NO WAY of contacting the camp. No phones nearby that someone might answer late on a Saturday night. And if his parents were dead...Al  forced himself to stop. His father was a good driver when he wasn't drinking, and he wouldn't be drinking. Al could remember little of the drive up on Friday night—the skies already dark, snow piled up to the roadside reflectors, even before the storm hit.

Al had fired a .22 that afternoon at the rifle range. His foggy glasses clicked against the side of the rifle, which recoiled into his shoulder and tilted them askew. A stray dog had bounded through the snow behind the targets, and they all stopped shooting while it passed. The closest house was miles away. He wanted to call out to the dog, but it quickly disappeared into distant snow.

He retrieved his paper target and examined it closely. All twenty of his shots had missed.

"Not quite ready for your marksman merit badge, Snyder," his patrol leader, Wozniak, said, looking down over his shoulder. "Hell, I could hit that damn target with my eyes closed. With my back to the range, I could still at least hit the fucking thing."

Swearing was something scouts did, Al noticed. And spitting. He'd have to work on spitting if he was going to stick it out and earn some patches to sew on his uniform—or on a red vest like the older scouts wore.

Aside from Mr. Buck, the men on the campout seemed to act as if their wives had tricked them into volunteering with some fairy tale about bonding with their sons. They mostly stood around smoking cigarettes while the boys completed a series of outdoor activities focused on survival skills. How to build a fire in the snow. How to cook in the snow. How to stay warm in the snow. How to pee in the snow—that seemed to be a favorite, though no lessons were necessary. Everybody had their Scout knife and their Scout flashlight and their Scout backpack. Al wished his gear wasn't so new. He tried to scuff his pack with snow.

The older boys snuck cigarettes. Boy Scouts was a Little Man's Club. The fathers had come of age and spent their military years fighting the Korean War. Al's father had spent his military service in Detroit—his friend's father knew a colonel who adjusted his orders so he could stay home with his new  bride. He'd survived by taking the easy way out. He had not volunteered for the campout.

"I don't want to be in Scouts," Al had told his father. "None of my friends joined," he said, unsure who currently counted as a friend.

"You've got to be a leader, not a follower." One of his father's basic tenets, and it had led him to start his own business wholesaling nonperishable grocery items to small mom-and-pop stores in Detroit. Which led him to work sixty-hour weeks and avoid smoking cigarettes and drinking beer in the great outdoors with the other fathers.

"Give it a try," his father said. He had been a scout once, and his old _Scout Handbook_ was among the few items he salvaged from the fire that burned down his childhood home. It still carried smoke in its pages. Al was giving it a try. His father, after a discussion with his mother, had agreed to drive up after work Saturday to bring him home for his game. Al had moved up to starter halfway through the season. If they won the championship, he wanted to be in the team photo—some proof that he was back. He'd counted six photos he should have been in while paging through last year's yearbook.

A bunk creaked behind him, followed by the heavy clunk of someone landing on the floor from the "Willies" side of the cabin. One side was called Jakes and the other side Willies. They'd had a big pillow fight until Mr. Buck let out a piercing whistle and they all retreated to their separate sides to sleep. Al, sitting in the corner of the common room, was stationed in Boy Scout limbo. None of them was named Jake or Willie—Al wondered who thought of calling them that. He'd have to ask his father about it. If he showed up. If he was still alive. If the world was still round, and the sun hadn't given up on them.

Many of his father's customers were Arab store owners from the inner city who loaded up station wagons or pickup trucks with cases of noodles and Spam and candy bars and cigarettes and whatever else was on their lists as they pushed large, open carts through the wide aisles of the warehouse over  on Eight Mile Road, the border with Detroit. Al often helped his father on Saturdays before things like Scouts and basketball came along. He missed those afternoons in the dark, scuffed-up warehouse—his father, relaxed, joking, buying him lunch at a Greek place down the block, letting him order one of their sweet, flaky pastries for dessert. When they returned home after a day at the warehouse, Al often felt a strange, cold pang of not understanding something about his parents.

Chubby little Ralph Morton—the other boys joked that the T was silent—emerged from the Willies' open doorway and slipped outside in his long johns to pee, then hurried back in, rubbing snow off his bare feet. The men glanced up, then returned to their cards. Ralph spotted Al in the dark corner and slipped in next to him on the rough bench.

"You in trouble, Alvin? Did you pee your pants? You want your Mommy?"

Al was afraid to speak for fear of breaking into tears and earning his own cruel nickname, but he was able to hiss out, "Moron," and Ralph, after rubbing away fake tears, trudged back to his bunk.

Was he going to be Alvin to the whole troop? The only Alvin everyone knew was from "Alvin and the Chipmunks," and they mimicked the famous shout of their manager, Dave: "AAAAAAAAALVIN!!!!" He'd heard it the first couple of years at school, but it died out after the other kids got to know him. Here at Scout camp, it was back again.

"There were no chipmunks when we named you, Alvin," his mother explained. "There was just your grandfather Alvin."

His mother. He couldn't think of her being gone, hurt, or even just stranded in the storm in their dark car. He _did_ want his mother. He loved her above all else. She who had nursed him through his illness with patience and tenderness and boundless love.

The men were clearing off the picnic table and stowing their empties. "Al, it's time, buddy," Mr. Buck said, standing above him, hammy fist on Al's shoulder. "In the morning, they'll be here, I promise. Now, go to bed."

"They should make a rule...Look at that kid. Scouting ain't about that,"  Al heard Mr. Masch mutter. Al had the top bunk in the far corner, one that had not been taken in the mad rush of friends grabbing bunks for each other Friday night. Beneath him slept Lenny Kowalski. Lenny the Fatherless. Lenny the Lip. Lenny the Cruel, who no one wanted to share a bunk with. If his own father was gone, would Al end up like Lenny, full of a sickness that would never go away? Lenny's muscled arm draped itself down onto the floor, and Al was careful not to step on it. The troop had a pecking order of coolness, but Lenny, a constant hissing fuse of anger, seemed to be on an entirely different list, a list of one. If scouting was such a social thing, what was a misfit like Lenny doing there? Maybe someone made him join too.

Al carefully climbed up, then began his wait for morning, unimaginable morning. He remained motionless, believing that nothing could happen as long as he lay still and breathed softly. But each breath seemed to stutter its way out straight from his heart. How could Mr. Buck promise him anything? His brain buzzed with doubt.

During his long night on the top bunk, Al twisted and wrung out the idea of his parents being dead, like a cloth that would never dry. He was suddenly at their funeral standing between two coffins while all around him people applauded. He wasn't sure what he'd said to elicit the applause, but it seemed to go on as long as he wanted it to. He'd live with his grandparents. His teachers would hold him up as an example of quiet courage. The girls, oh, the cute girls would all walk home with him. The bullies wouldn't dare touch him. He'd be a superhero with the power to convince people to be nice to each other.

His fantasy was like a big stage—when he stepped out of the bright lights and behind the curtains, a shadow dropped down, darker than even a night without moon or stars. The cold shadow of grief. For a moment, had he wished them dead?

For hours, the electric surge of panic hammered relentlessly against sleep until sleep softened and began to absorb the blows like a thick sponge. Sleep told him he would be safe in its moist cave, in the warm depths of his sleeping bag. Sleep took him.

IN NOVEMBER OF THE PREVIOUS YEAR, before he got sick, Al's dog Butch died. One day he came home from school and took off his wet boots and set them on the steps to the basement, as usual. He walked into the silent kitchen, where his mother sat, smoking, her eyes red, mouth slack.

"Sit down, Al," she said.

She had baked homemade bread, a rare treat. The smell of her delicious, misshapen loaves mingled with cigarette smoke in an odd mix of comfort and strain. Al put his hand on a loaf: still warm.

"Can I have a piece?"

"I have to tell you something first."

Al sat slumped in his chair. His book bag dropped to the floor. He struggled with wanting the bread before it cooled, and with his mother's grim expression.

"I had Butch put to sleep today."

Al glanced frantically around the kitchen. She had removed the bowls, the dog food, the leash. Had she even picked up Butch's last crap in the backyard?

"He was okay yesterday. He—I didn't get to say goodbye. How could you do it? How?" He ran out of the kitchen and into his room. He lay on the rug where Butch had slept just last night. His mother had vacuumed, but the rug still smelled of dog. Al pushed his forehead against it. He grabbed handfuls and held on.

Later, his mother came in and sat on his bed. "He was in so much pain. It didn't seem fair to keep feeding him pills. I wanted to tell you first, but I had to do it before I lost my nerve."

"You should've let me say goodbye. He was my dog."

"Al, we usually don't get the choice to say goodbye." His mother tilted her head back and ran her hands through her hair. She'd had two miscarriages since Al was born. They got him Butch after she lost the last one. "You're stuck with the last stupid things you said to people. You're stuck wishing you had another chance. Wishing you knew it was the last time."

"But you had a choice."

"I said goodbye for you."

AL WOKE TO THE CABIN STIRRING. Exaggerated groans and cursing. From below, Lenny kicked the bottom of his bunk. Al's whole body lifted slightly, and he landed rigid with fear. Life was going on for the other boys, but his was stopped. His was turning blue. Lenny would be sorry. Lenny would seek forgiveness.

He thought of Butch again as the scouts ate cereal and drank cartons of orange drink at the picnic tables while the men swilled coffee and started back in on the cigarettes. Butch was gone, and Al had already forgotten too much—he closed his eyes and tried to picture him, but on the jostling bench, it was impossible. His parents had not arrived at first light like he had imagined. The other fathers would not look at him.

After breakfast, they bundled up and headed out to learn more survival skills. If his parents were dead, none of those skills would help him. He wanted to wait at the cabin for news, but Mr. Buck gave him a tired smile and insisted that he join them. "It'll be good for you," he said.

They were learning how to make a snow shelter. The important thing was not to panic, the young instructor stressed. Keep moving. Stay warm. Focus on the work.

Most of them were using their entrenching tools to dig snow caves into the side of Mount Baldy, the high hill in the center of the camp. They spread out, looking for promising nooks and wind-curled drifts left by last night's blizzard. The sun reflected harsh off the snow, and Al couldn't look anywhere without squinting. His heart jolted and throbbed against his ribs.

A group of older scouts worked together on an igloo. Laughing and boisterous, their deepening voices echoed over to the far end of the hillside where Al was digging, nearly alone. Lenny was closest to him, clawing frantically like a starving dog or squirrel retrieving a remembered bone or nut. Lenny's caves kept collapsing, but he didn't seem to care—he just moved to a different spot and began again.

Al slowly tunneled into a beautiful drift sculpted by wind into a frozen wave until he could squeeze inside—dark, moist, his warm breath steaming  against snow. What had he last said to his parents, besides "goodbye"? His mother had washed his basketball uniform. Had he thanked her? His father had scolded him for leaving the bathroom a mess. His mother was wrong—he couldn't even remember the last things. His silent tears disappeared in the snow. He could hear the instructor telling Lenny he was going to give a blue ribbon to whoever made the best cave.

Al made his opening smaller, packing snow around the edges. "What, are you burying yourself, Alvin?" He heard Wozniak's muffled voice through the thick, dense wall of his cave.

THEY WERE LEARNING winter first aid when Alvin heard the faint whine of his father's station wagon rise up the hillside.

He jerked his head around and squinted to where the road curled in the distance. He spotted the Ford fishtailing, gaining traction, losing it, gaining it again. He turned and ran, tumbling through waist-high snow, tasting it cold in his mouth, against his face.

"Snyder!" he heard Mr. Buck shout behind him, but Al was gone. He angled down to meet the car outside the cluster of cabins. He waved to his mother, and she waved back.

When the car stopped, his father pressed his forehead against the steering wheel. Al pulled at his mother's door with his thick gloves till it opened and she emerged and hugged him to her chest. He was gasping for breath. He didn't care if the whole troop was watching. He squeezed her hard.

"We're so sorry, Al," she said. "Your father tried that hill half a dozen times before we turned around last night. Nobody was getting through."

His father came around the other side and clapped Al's heaving shoulders. "Hey," he said. "What's all this fuss about?" He looked up at Mount Baldy and waved to the other scouts and their fathers. "Geez, Al, grow up a little." He gave him a light shove toward the cabin. "Hurry now, get your gear."

Al tried to pull himself together. He felt a bit like Dorothy at the end of  _The Wizard of Oz_ , all wicked witches dead, the family together again, but it was like the Munchkins had returned to earth with him and were staring, the two worlds at odds with each other forever, no hot-air balloon in the sky, just the threat of flying monkeys.

He gathered up his backpack and sleeping bag, and his parents took him away. All along the road, people were digging out their cars. The chained tires of snowplows and salt trucks rattled like sleigh bells.

The car was warm from both sunlight streaming in and heat churning out the vents. Almost stifling. They all quickly lapsed into silence. Al knew his parents would not always be coming to the rescue. His father breathed out a loud sigh. Al felt poison guilt rising dry in his throat. He wanted to tell them that he'd never been sick. He wanted to tell them that for a moment he'd wished them dead. To ask them if they had wished him dead during the long months when he lay at the end of the couch like an unstuffed pillow and watched dull daytime TV. _Did you wish? Did you wonder?_ He leaned over from the back seat and put his head between theirs. "Did you ever build a snow cave?" he asked. "Did you ever learn how to survive?"

## ET TU

IN THE WAY OF TEENAGERS WORLDWIDE, I BOTH HATED MY PARENTS AND loved my parents. I strode my capital I self-important/conscious/absorbed ass down the gritty rubble of Rome like the star of my own music video when I had yet to write the song.

WE JUST CALLED IT ROME—no street or avenue or road. Its own empire, tucked away behind the zoom and boom of Eight Mile. The acrid stench from the colorless assortment of factories large and small stung in our noses, a daily tattoo that spelled home, and whenever we went somewhere that smelled otherwise, we stopped trusting whoever had taken us there. Broken-glass laughter and the cruel whispers of sewer grates, cracked cement of sidewalk square after sidewalk square. We walked in the street instead, because we were Romans. Taking names, kicking ass. Forgetting the names. Remembering the ass.

THERE'S ME NOW, tossing a cigarette butt against the curb like I'm tomorrow's god, thinking I should've taken one or two more puffs. How far to smoke it? Not down to the filter, but close, right? Fourteen—jean jacket and pimples, stolen matchbooks and fake meanness—I was puffing out smoke like I was my own factory, practicing for the future I had naively disavowed. Jean jacket and pimples.

A girl who said hi to him in the hallways is on his mind. On his dick. His mind is his dick, like male teenagers worldwide. You can try to ignore that dick, but it has a mind of its own. It's the cosmic loop of boy puberty—mind, dick, mind, dick.

And I'm back, because that boy, he can't tell this story without screwing it up. I stop to pick a big fat leaf off of the tree in front of the Novaks'. The Novak Tree, some exotic variety that was not oak or maple. Leaves fuzzy on one side with thick veins. I rub off the fuzz. I strip the green from the veins to make a skeleton. My work is done. I walk on. Johnny Leafstripper, wandering the empire, bringing skeleton leaves to all those who needed to wish on stars. We have no stars. That's why we're the stars of our own videos. Oh, the stars are out there, I'll learn later, when the empire falls and we're left to wander the earth, stumbling over tree roots and dead animals, looking up at the odd, dark skies of the natural world without pollution or streetlights.

I'M WALKING DOWN to Ralph's house. I'm in the present, but I'm grown-up too—I'm moving myself around like the tiny soldiers we used to play with till we got bored and blew them up, or better yet, melted them in a plastic inferno, inhaling the chemical smell like we'd inhale various and sundry chemicals down the line to get us high: glues, paints, anything out of a spray can, any white powder.

"HEY, RALPH."

"Hey."

"Ready?"

"Yeah."

He turns his head. "Goin' out, Ma." Slams the door. His dad ain't home forever. His dad's a dick who got another lady pregnant and bailed on his ma thinking that was the honorable thing to do.

We had a messed-up sense of honor in the empire. Like getting your ass kicked, that was an honorable thing. I never quite bought into that one. That's why I was friends with Ralph. He _didn't quite_ either. Our big little secret. He buttons his jean jacket. November, nasty November. "Fucked-up month, eh Ralph?"

"Yeah, dude. Got a smoke?"

Ralph was a year older than me, though looked younger. His ma had no money and a drinking hobby. Because he looked twelve and perpetually red-cheeked and innocent, he developed his own hobby of stealing and reselling. When Ralph talked, sometimes it was like lightning spilling out his mouth. Like he was coked up before we were ever coked up. I can't really do it justice. It was like projectile vomiting. I don't mean that he talked a lot. He didn't. But when he did.

WE WERE GOING on a reselling trip. Meeting the Big Boys Who Had Cars (BBWHC). Was I his partner in crime? Nobody had partners back in the empire. That was too gay. You couldn't even have a best friend. That ended about second grade. Maybe being best friends was our little big secret.

THE BBWHC NEEDED cassettes for their cassette decks that were replacing eight tracks. Great for Ralph, since cassettes were smaller. Hell, he'd started on albums, which was only a sport in the thick coats of the Winter Olympics  of the empire, and thus cramped his style. And he did have style—the style of invisibility. So pale he could walk right by you, blending into the surface of everything like Casper the Friendly Ghost. Though Casper was suspect—was he a boy ghost? He seemed pretty gay. Don't believe me? Just watch those old cartoons.

RALPH CARRIED A shopping bag full of cassettes under one arm, rattling as we walked. We were meeting the BBWHC in what was left of The Field after they built The Bowling Alley that cut it in half. It was more of a strip now, a narrow plot of unruly weeds and scrub trees that functioned as our wilderness until we were old enough to drive and create our own. It could be where you met The Drug Dealer or the mythical Old Black Guy in a Baseball Hat who bought liquor for you. It could be where you met The Girl Who Said Hi to You in the Hallway to exchange hickies, and, if the invisible stars were aligned, maybe bring each other off. Or to meet the BBWHC to vend your stolen merchandise.

IT SMELLED A LITTLE like cold church on a weekday morning when we were altar boys together down at St. Martin's with Barry and Larry, the Assholeski Twins who between them shared one brain, and a tiny one at that. Before it got light. Only the sparrows winking and blinking and nodding on the wires. Smelled like cold comfort and a suspicious itch.

"MY MOM BOUGHT ME A CAT TOY," Ralph said. "She's wigging out. I take out the trash—she think I can't count her empties? She think I don't see her wrapping herself in aluminum foil because somebody on TV did it? And then lying about it? Three empty rolls of the damn shit in the trash, and she's not  even cooking? When's the last time we had meat? Not since my dad left, and what am I gonna do with a wobbly little stepbrother for the next eighteen years? 'Ralph, look, you got a little brother,' he says, as if that's some fucking gift just for me. They think I give a shit about baby shit? No, I do not, and here I'm doing all the wash and we got no detergent so last week I poured some fucking perfume in instead—"

"A cat toy?"

"—just to make it smell like it was clean, and what's she gonna do when they turn off the lights again? Hey, wanna come over and play flashlight tag? We'll use rotten potatoes for batteries like I did in that stupid science project in sixth grade, the old man laughing and pointing at me like I was in some striptease fun house where he met the whore-lady stepmom—"

"A cat toy?" I repeated, shouting. He took a deep breath, and snapped back into the world.

"A cat _Christmas_ toy," he said, chewing and spitting out the word "Christmas." "A little plastic fucking ball with a bell inside. She called it an early Christmas present...Yeah, for fucking Martian Christmas."

Ralph was once an unlikely star on our Little League baseball team, the Friendly Shells, named for our gas-station sponsor. He was a short, chubby kid, but he'd get up there and smack the hell out of the ball, which he needed to do in order to make it around the bases. He had the eye, the magic hitter's eye. Then, he gets his jaw broken by a fastball in the championship game against the evil Torpedoes who lived outside the empire, in the Comfort Zone beyond the highway out in the distant outer-burbias of Detroit, where Things were Safe and everyone colored inside the lines. While Ralph lay in the dusty pit of the batter's box next to home plate, Coach Kralitz started a brawl, a donnybrook, a brouhaha, a near-riot, and we got banned from the league. After his recovery, Ralph's magic eye became trained on valuable merchandise and bored store clerks. He was applying his skills.

Thus, in the sad alcoholic logic of his mother, the Cat Toy.

WE WERE ROUNDING THE CORNER where the double walls started up. First, the old wooden pre–Bronco Lanes wall, then the cinder-block wall to double up the distance between our houses and the clonk of balls hitting pins and the stink of rented shoes. Mr. Bronco didn't trust us. Just because of a little vandalism. The Legend of the Stolen Holy Roman Fire Extinguisher that put out the flames under the hood of Brian K's car only to be thus confiscated by Authorities who matched serial numbers and busted the ersatz hero-fireman James-Not-Jim Redneckski.

I LOSE MY THREAD. I lose the thin stream of hope that some Iggy noise or Ray Charles singing country western might be appealing to the BBWHC. Lassie Come Home and don't piss on the table leg this time. Help us find Timmy with his bag of toys for the orphans.

RALPH AND I WERE EARLY. Right on time, which meant anywhere up to an hour of waiting.

We stood in the Old Tire Zone of the field, where we could easily see Pearl, the side street the BBWHC always pulled up on, flashing their headlights as a signal as if it mattered to anyone. The thing was, the BBWHC could easily just rip us off, and they half-knew that, so our bargaining power was limited. Neither Ralph nor I had the convenient Older Brother.

"So what is the missionary position, anyway?" Ralph asked, apropos of nearby necking against the bark of the One Big Tree that had somehow survived the construction of the empire and the more recent addition of the arena of bowling—a tree so large we could not reach up and strip its leaves.

"It's when you pray, then fuck," I think I said, but maybe not. Perhaps I was not that clever. I know I did not add, "thus, the sin is forgiven," or "thus, not getting the girl pregnant." The mythological Girl.

"My mom needs someone to fuck," he said. "Just not in our house. She needs to go and have somebody fuck her. Like, with love. Fuck her with love. Living—she don't have no heart in it anymore. I mean, a Cat Toy—"

I broke in before he got revved up again. "Don't be talking about your ma like that. My parents don't fuck at all," I said. "It's no magic bullet." Or maybe I said "magic bullshit." My memory's full of typos and smudged erasers. Erasures.

WE WERE IN ELECTRONICS together down at Eight Mile High, taught by Mr. James, whose words of wisdom consisted of: "No matter how much you shake and dance a few drops end up in your pants. " A goddamn poet, and he was teaching Electronics. Since Ralph was older, we were building a car battery recharger for him under the theory that if we built it, a car would come. That Ralph's dad would see that giving his boy an old clunker to work on in the driveway would _also_ be doing the right thing, and that it might make him less of a "fag sissy." It hurts to write that, but I heard it straight from the cracked, bleeding lips of his father when the cops called him up after we got caught shoplifting and he had to pick up Ralph from the station, and Ralph was crying and hiccupping, which he would not have done if anyone else in the world was picking him up. Hell, he didn't even really mind the police. Ralph was polite and remorseful, as was deemed appropriate to the situation, and put on his old altar-boy innocence like he hadn't been stealing for years. "My first time," he said. "I'm really ashamed." Then his dad shows up, and he's all blubbery because it wasn't gonna be no cat toy once the old man got him in the car.

My parents, on the other hand, said nothing. My father was so tired from working overtime, he could barely say, "Like, whatever," and my mom was the one crying. I had to stay home for a while, but at school I saw Ralph and the result of his father's back-handed slap.

I HOPE I'M NOT making it seem all horrible. We never thought so. We were kind of giddy waiting for the BBWHC.

"They're gonna love these," Ralph said. He who never listened to music. I went to school dances with Slick Roy Redfern, the Roamin' Romeo of Rome. I watched him pick up girls and used my imagination while Ralph stayed home and gorged on stolen candy bars.

Life was good. We were going to buy those metal horseshoe cleats to hammer onto the bottoms of our shit-kicker boots so when we walked the halls of Eight Mile, the Dead Sea of Disdain would part and let us pass and give us admiring glances as homage to the Battery Chargers of the empire.

Stars were out of luck, but the moon was big enough to make it through. It was one of those full-moon nights where it almost looks fake, like you're on stage or something. Almost made me want to tap-dance on those bald, abandoned tires. I wanted to make out with The Girl Who Said Hi. Later that year, I did, and it was sweet, but not as sweet as I imagined it because in my imagination I knew what I was doing with my tongue, not just licking her face like a dog until she took over.

"Does the moon have a middle name?" I asked.

NO, I DIDN'T ASK THAT. I meant to say that we did not know the moon's middle name. We stood on ceremony with the moon. We stood on wobbly tires and stared up through the distance, listening to the muffled clicking of the pin-setting machine from the rear of Bronco Lanes. Could we hear the juicy sucking sounds of the nearby maker-outers? No, we could not.

"Cat toy," Ralph said again. No one in the empire had a cat. If they did, the dogs would eat it. The Dogs of Rome ate birds, rats, mice, squirrels, and random small children.

I MADE THAT LAST PART UP, nervous as we wait for the BBWHC to show up. There they are, flashing their lights to signal the dead in Morse code. Did I tell you I now drink tea specially created to calm you down? No, I did not. That's how low I've stooped. I am a stooper now. Can you believe it, Ralph?

NO, HE CANNOT BELIEVE IT. He's currently on the slow, sad Cancer Boat shedding ballast and mixed metaphors until it either sinks or rises to the heavens, depending on what empire you were raised in, depending on the importance of consistency and reliable narration.

SO THE BBWHC ARRIVED, and we sauntered over to greet them. I pause long and soft over the word _sauntered_ because it was not a word in the Roman language, but when I see those two—nothing but kids, really—leaving the illusory jungle shelter of the field, they walk side by side like two brave imaginary soldiers, battle-tested, slightly jaded, shaking in their cute little shit-kicker boots, overcompensating into a joyful saunter like bad actors on children's television, or in a high school musical our school would have no part of. The disdain for theatre or even theater was legendary on the crudely paved street of Rome. Movies were tolerated as make-out spots—you paid for the dark, uninterrupted back-row seats. Our school banned musicals because. Because? We had no auditorium, no orchestra, no choir, not even a pep band for football games, not even a dwarf pep mascot. We barely had enough for a team because we felt it was demeaning to follow rules and stop hitting each other just because someone blows a whistle.

OKAY—WE _SAUNTERED_ to the rolled-down window, smoke curling out cool into the night air. We should have been smoking ourselves. We forgot. In our moonlit sauntering, we forgot.

"Whaddaya got, punks?" That must've been Rod. Rod who rode shotgun through life, who failed his driver's test because he was under the influence of mental blindness. He had no shotgun, but he was the size of the marshmallow-eating polar bear at the zoo.

Ralph handed over his lunch money. I mean, the bag of tapes. Rod ripped it open, and the colorful plastic cases rattled around the front seat, spilling in the dome light's muted haze. A Plymouth Satellite, dark blue, belonging to Eddie Allen Poe or Eddie Munch or most likely The Dude, he of the Visine and that stuff you sprayed in your mouth that people used in lieu of gum back then when they wanted to make out or fool the assistant principal/executioner smelling breath at the door of the school dance featuring The Spoilers, who attracted thugs like metal slugs to the Polar Opposites, either the name of another band, or the metaphoric anti-equivalent of a safe, peaceful, wholesome dance.

I mention this because in the back seat, Jimmy Ray, the Spoilers' bass player, was reaching forward to examine the cassettes and saying, "I have a bone to pick with youz." He really said _youz_ , and he pointed at Ralph with one of his bass-thumping fingers. "Get in here."

Everybody looked at him. What's-His-Name was sprawled across the other half of the back seat.

"Where?" Ralph asked. The loose cassettes were still rattling around in the car like bowling pins or the odd change abandoned in a washing machine.

"Here, right on my fucking lap, big boy," he said. "Tell Santa what you want for Christmas."

Spoiler alert: this is The Sad Part. Sometimes, you think it's the sad part, but it just gets sadder. Like if I told you one of the four BBWHC died in a DUI accident the week before graduation, and the others were last seen  spray-painting JR, their dead friend's initials, on a freeway overpass on their way out of town to make it big behind bars.

Binaca, that's the name of the spray. Ralph shrugged, then pulled on the door handle and got in. Whatever happened after that made "Cat Toy" a funny joke for the rest of our lives. Me, I ran.

LOOK AT ME, look at that boy run through the ruins.

## 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT MY FATHER IN HIS BATHING SUIT (TIMES 2)

1. A shock the first time and every rare, rarer time after. Shy, shyer, gray, grayer. Unafraid of the cold, cold water. He could not save us, but he did.

2. Never shirtless at home. Yellow stains spread under his arms as he painted white walls in summer heat and called it vacation. We weren't allowed to climb his magic ladder.

3. He held my hand as we waded in Burt Lake. I squinted up, afraid of pale skin exposed. He who never hugged, who shook our hands because his father could not swim and did not love him: _Squeeze. Squeeze harder_.

4. Is that true? My Uncle Jerry became a ghost at age fifteen, and thus, my father leaned against that ghost, hoping to be seen through his parents' grief, to be allowed to swim. They only let him stick his toes in.

5. He had the care and patience and silence of a great chess player, and the poker face of a man with a losing hand.

6. He taught me and my brothers poker at Burt Lake State Park, betting with matchsticks while rain drummed on canvas in a rhythm that stopped time.

7. Cold Michigan lakes can baptize anyone into the religion of paying a price, but coming from Detroit, we already knew.

8. The army taught him how to swim and swear and to guard the tight lid of his heart. The factory offered dark heat and sputtering sparks and the solid brick of a regular check. Thirst like dry syrup for the sweet or alcoholic. The squint into daylight despite the soul's sunglasses.

9. He stubbed his toe trying to balance overtime with a life, a family life. Or he fell off the ledge, or off the high wire and into Niagara Falls, where he emerged at the bottom, putting the finishing touches on his barrel.

10. If he lied, I never caught him. I never caught him as he swam away from me, far out into the lake. Burt Lake, and who was Burt, and did he have an old Plymouth for sale cheap, transportation special?

11. His washed-out green bathing suit sagged with the dried-out elastic of the American dream. His only lesson was to toss me out of the rowboat in the middle of the lake where he'd anchored us. When he jumped in after me, I clutched him. I held on.

12. He didn't have a trucker's tan or a magician's tan or the tan of flaky Hollywood. He had no time for movies or anything that wasn't true. He was tanned by grease and darkness and the red-hot hands of the time clock.

13. He stood gaunt and white with dark swatches of hair, and we saw the mysterious red spots on his chest. Our mother called them wisdom spots. He might have blushed, or else the sun was having a word with him.

14. If you could see him in his pale, crooked suit, hands on hips, forcing a smile, you might pity this 2D man in a 3D world, beach balls exploding around us like fake laughter on the crowded sand. Do not pity him.

15. Methodical executioner, he drowned rats in a garbage can, or pumped exhaust in through the hose.

16. He built cars and greased his hair on Sunday and ushered at church. I loved him as an Act of Faith. Getting ready for school, I smelled his  cigarettes and shaving cream, his shit and his toothpaste, mornings in the bathroom after he was gone, long gone.

17. Summers we cut the grass with the push mower. We took off our shirts. We ran in the sprinkler. We waited through dusk and into darkness for him to come home. _Home_ , we moaned like wind.

18. I point my pointer at the diagram of the nearly naked man. From a distance, he looks like a large rock. Eroded, but rock nonetheless. Raccoon without the hiss. Caged polar bear with dignity intact.

19. Close cover before striking. Strike when there is no choice. Offer no excuses. Shut your trap. Avoid traps. Everything's a trap. Do the smell test. A rat is a rat is a rat.

20. Vacation is a concept passed down from the rich and famous. If you must go on vacation, be wary of maps, fake Indians, and eating out.

21. The birds and the bees, another concept handed down from the rich and famous. Hand-me-downs. Hand-me-downs, and God.

22. Pack light. Don't stare.

23. If you wait long enough, it will stop hurting. If it still hurts, don't tell anyone. Don't wash your hair, and it won't fall out.

24. Fishing is for the dull, the insane, the already caught. Don't drown worms or purchase needless equipment.

25. He showed us the knot in his arm from high school curveballs. My father threw curveballs? I nearly fainted, but fainting was not allowed.

26. He wore his towel like Superman—his only joke.

## PEARL DIVING

NO ONE WHO LIVED ON PEARL WENT TO SUMMER CAMP. WHO HAD THE money to send their kids away? Nobody. If anyone had the money, they'd have sent us far away for as long as possible. The street was our summer camp, and we drove our mothers mad. Someone who didn't grow up on Planet Pearl would perhaps think I was exaggerating. Someone who wasn't there that late summer night in the parking lot of Minski's Funeral Home when Mrs. Wakowski slapped me.

Summers weren't for sissies, though winters were only slightly more accommodating. We broke things, we set things on fire, we blew things up, we killed bugs and rodents, we brawled and we mauled, we cussed and we discussed at the volume of low-flying aircraft. We made trouble. We mass-produced it. Our city block of twenty houses bulged with ninety-three children. Our fathers were working at the factory. Our mothers were working to unmake our trouble.

To keep us out of trouble in the first place—get us on the same team, the same page, the same side of the coin—the city of Warren, Michigan, created  The Wreck (Rec) Center in the old Eight Mile High gym, a gym from back when you tied up your horses outside and gouged the wooden floor with your spurs in pickup basketball games—or so we thought, given the stench of old shit, and the scarred, warped floor. Little kids could make lanyards or eat paste or bounce balls of various types off that floor under the supervision of surly teenagers whose fathers worked for our corrupt city and could pull strings, unlike _our_ fathers, who worked at the Ford plant and could only pull double shifts.

We went exactly twice—we, the esteemed representatives from Pearl Street. The first time, we played a long, tedious session of the imaginatively named "Four Square," a game that seemed to define our existence and our futures—bouncing a ball _bounce_ between the four _bounce_ squares _bounce_ , occasionally changing places _bounce_ when someone missed the ball. _Bounce_. No way to escape those squares, no way to come out on top on that flat, cement landscape.

Then Mark Parkowski—Mark the Park—showed up and led us all into a spirited game of slaughterball, a game more to our liking. He gave me a bloody nose with a well-placed bomb, then took us outside and gave us each a smoke and showed us tricks with his lighter. A wonderful day—blood was shed, laws were broken, fire was abused. We thought maybe we'd start hanging out there.

The next and last time we went, Mark did not show up, and we got so bored that when some little tyke pissed his pants, my brother Steve pissed his pants too, just for the hell of it. Steve had no shame. He'd do anything on a dare. He gave me all of his shame. My pockets bulged with it, with the useless pennies of his cheap tricks, but I held onto them out of superstition or cluelessness. Two years younger, he was the designated family doofus. His pants dried quickly. It was hotter in the gym than outside the gym. Warren did not believe in shade. Shade was old-fashioned and did not help create automobiles.

Down at the Ford plant a mile away, our fathers were given placebo salt tablets for the heat and sent back to work to weld steel hats onto axle housings  or attach flanges or tie brake lines. The parking lot was fenced in and barbed wired for the protection of all concerned. One time, we rode our bikes past the factory, following the vague rumor of some cute girls who liked to kiss living on the other side of it, but it was just somebody's bullshit cousin bragging. As we rode the length of that enormous factory and its equally enormous parking lot, we saw a group of men in identical sweat-and-grease-stained coveralls glumly eating sandwiches on a loading dock. When one of them shouted at us, "Look, here come the new hires," they all laughed and made various obscene gestures.

We trudged down to Free Swim at Eight Mile High on those desperate days of insane heat, days so hot mirages puddled on the black tar of the parking lot while we waited in line against the glowing hieroglyphic graffiti of the brick wall. Free Swim, held each summer day from 10–12 and 2–4, or whenever the punk lifeguards bothered to show up.

At Free Swim, the lifeguards roughly rubbed the inside of your wrist, like an Indian burn, and if dirt came off, they sent you shamed back down to the showers, past all the other pale bodies anxiously shivering on the stairs waiting to get checked. I was often rejected by the surly teenagers who resembled the Wreck Center workers, with their acne and strange, barking laughter, in their sense of privilege and clueless pride. It was my dream to someday become a surly teenager, and I felt I was well on my way until Marlene threw me for the ultimate loop-de-loop by dying, and I lost whatever smugness and attitude I'd been saving up. Marlene's entering a little late—like she's been hiding in the shadows behind a chimney in the narrow gap between houses waiting for me to show up and kiss her, but she's behind the wrong chimney and I'll never find her ever again. She was part of the Pearl Posse, waiting in line with us, her thin, pale wrists smudged like mine with street grit. My friend Artie and his sister Sue, Marlene's best friend, were a core subset of the Posse, close in age, tangled in friendship.

We all had white bellies and brown arms. We never took off our shirts because we never went to any beach anywhere, despite being residents of  The Great Lakes State. Taking your shirt off was a foreign gesture in our neighborhood, like, "Hey, what's the deal with that guy, who's he think he is, taking off his shirt?" Even wearing shorts was considered odd. Cut-off jean shorts were allowed, but anything else was considered pretentious and absurd, so our legs were as white as our bellies. We had brown arms and sunburned noses, but the rest of our bodies lived at the bottom of the chlorinated sea. After Free Swim, we sweated chlorine. Our eyes bled chlorine. Our baggy, sagging bathing suits wept chlorine, dripping on the clothesline with our fathers' old, coarse, green army towels.

One day I almost drowned, getting dunked by "Lenny the Lip" Kowalski in the deep end while the lifeguard chair stood high and empty above me. Some big girl pulled me up and over to the side, where I held on, gasping and retching while Lenny laughed and the mystery girl disappeared into a chlorine haze. After that, I always had a soft spot for big girls, particularly those who shared their Twinkies or Better Made Potato Chips.

One summer, my mother signed my brothers and me up for a Spanish class down at Schofield Elementary. Why she picked Spanish, I'll never know. We had exactly zero Hispanics in Warren, unless they were hiding under the "other" category on the census. Polish would've been easier, but that wasn't an officially recognized language in the district, despite the reign of "skis" on Pearl. I remember the day the taco came to Warren in the form of a bell, and soon after, our mothers learned another use for ground beef besides gwumpkies. Everyone was happy. Oh, we were happy, happy, happy— _¡feliz!_ We glued yarn onto old sheets in Cub Scouts and made serapes to wear while we ate the dry, brittle tacos. _Olé_.

I learned my name was Jaime. Señora Niemasz gave me a c. I didn't even know we were getting grades. It wasn't like it counted for anything. My mother tore up the grade sheets and made us grilled cheese and Kool-Aid for lunch after the last day of class. She'd been happy just to get us out of the house for a few hours that summer—any learning was deemed optional.

Marlene called me Jaime when I told her about my C in Spanish. _Jaime_ , breathing heavy into my ear. It made me want to get more Cs.

HERE, OUR UNTRUSTWORTHY narrator begins at last the tale of Marlene and Mrs. Wakowski: thus, I remember the summer I became a teenager without benefit of a summer job working for the city. Our Monopoly houses surrounded the plant like miniature versions of it, as if they were an extension of the assembly line stretching across Warren's six square miles, from Eight Mile to Fourteen, from Dequindre to Hayes. When he retired, they gave my father an aerial photo of the plant. You can imagine the excitement that ensued when he brought it home and sat down and consumed the majority of a case of sixteen-ounce Stroh's in returnable longneck bottles. _33⅓ percent more_ , the cardboard case said—what a deal. My father valued his bowling trophies more than that photo. He took it out of the frame and pinned it to the dartboard in the basement and had at it, but even that was boring, with no bull's-eye or scoring system. He thought the frame might be useful, but he had nothing to frame.

_Mrs. Wakowski_. Okay, she just opened the door and waltzed into the living room of Marlene's house. Both of Marlene's parents worked, and we took advantage of that. Not that we were having full-blown sex—we were eighth graders and relatively content with hickies and other half-blown signs of affection. And she had to watch her little brother and sister, which put a cramp on everything except my constant erection.

We were sitting on the Durkiches' ratty old couch, smoking cigarettes. I exhaled, gaping at Mrs. W., mother of six, who lived across the street. Knowing no parents were home, she felt free to barge in on the Durkiches. At other houses, she rang doorbells. Everyone else on the street knocked or woo-hooed. When the bell rang, you knew it was her—her or a traveling salesman or the police or missionaries from Mars.

"A Volchek," she sniffed, as if I had a distinct familial odor. "What are you doing here?"

Rita Wakowski was skeletal, her pale skin pulled tight over her bones like it was a hand-me-down from a smaller self. A big smoker, a classic human cigarette. Mrs. Wacko, Old Lady Wakowski, Witch Wakowski—from her corner house, she operated like a toll keeper, monitoring activity, passing along gossip like turnpike tickets. The kids on the block feared her since she'd gotten Kevin Naha busted for breaking an antenna off Kathy Kovacic's father's car because he'd banned Kevin from ever seeing his daughter again. How'd she know? Binoculars? Secret listening devices? Where did she find the time to be nosy with six kids of her own?

Our mothers communicated in code, rolling their eyes toward the corner house whenever her name came up. We guessed our parents hated/feared her too. Nobody socialized with the Wackos. No beers on the porch. No ballgames. The Mysterious Mr. W. wore a suit to whatever job he had, and sometimes ushered in church in that same suit, lunging into each pew with his collection basket like a shell-shocked soldier. Mrs. W. did not belong to the card club, or the D of I (Daughters of Isabella, the women's branch of the K of C). She was the Supreme Leader of her own rogue state with murky borders. Though everyone seemed to hate her, they let her in their homes, took her calls—it was like she had some secret dirt on everyone, a big black book of naughty she was ready to recite from like a street corner preacher. But Marlene—beautiful, sweet, and tangy Marlene—was not afraid.

Mrs. Wakowski's own children were as pale as she was and rarely emerged from the house, and when they did, they just stared at us like the kids in that creepy movie _Village of the Damned_. They never had scabs or scrapes. They sat pasted together in a pew at church, every hair perfect, while their slumped father, the heavy anchor at the end of the row, sat as far from his wife as he could get. Maybe that's why they kept having kids—to put more distance between them in that long row. Though at some point,  he had to be in ultimate proximity to her long enough to create another Wakowski, right?

"Just hanging out," I said, picking at the yellow foam sticking out from the couch's worn armrest, the pattern completely obliterated by the many arms that had rested there, waiting for or creating friction, burning the occasional cigarette hole.

Marlene said it happened often—"Mrs. Wakowski playing Gotcha," she called it. It drove Mrs. W. crazy that Marlene's parents left the kids home alone. It was against the rule book she used to referee our street.

"Your mother know you smoke?" she said to me. "That you're in this house alone—with her?"

I could only stare at dust balls on the scarred wooden floor. I coughed.

"It's okay with my mom," Marlene said.

"Oh, is it? And how about your dad?"

"Hey, aren't you in the wrong house? Don't you live across the street?" Tiny Marlene stood and bent at the waist, leaning in toward Mrs. W. as if trying to put more force behind her voice.

Marlene's dad was an alcoholic or a vampire. Either way, a scary dude infrequently seen on the street. For weeks at a time, he disappeared, then came home clean-shaven, hair slicked back, as if nothing had happened. His eyes always bloodshot, his nose red and veined. You could see his hands trembling from across the street, which was as close as any of us wanted to get to him. He worked with our fathers, and they pronounced him no good, they who drank their share themselves but drew a line that Bruno Durkich crossed. A line that he never even saw because he was already blind drunk when he crossed it. He was handsome in that movie-bad-guy kind of way. When his name came up during card-club nights at our house and I was lying in bed listening, it was followed by either shrieks or loud, low whispers, or a combination thereof.

"You tell my dad. I'd pay money to see that," Marlene said, though she  had no money. Witch Wakowski retreated as if Marlene had threatened her with a water bucket. She took a cigarette out of the pack on the counter that I'd brought over for Marlene and slunk out of the house without another word. Without a light.

Marlene smoked Kools. I smoked anything. When we were together, I smoked Kools too, and Marlene didn't think any less of me. When we kissed, it was all hot, wet tongues. Her tongue packed a mean menthol punch. I secretly liked menthol better, but they were for girls, so out in the world, I did the standard Marlboro thing.

Fred's Friendly Shell Station down on Eight Mile had a cigarette machine. No one named Fred worked there, based on our reading of the circled nametags of the unshaven young men who did. Thus, no one cared who bought smokes, though it was an unwritten rule that you had to offer a cigarette to whoever was working. Fred's was next to the boarded-up building that had housed Skids, the slot car palace, before it went out of business. It had been opened by our old baseball coach, Mr. Kralitz, who recklessly quit the plant, suckered in by the slot car craze. Skids lasted six months and now stood as a visible warning against trying to go out on your own. The golden tit, the golden handcuffs, the golden jockstrap of the factory that kept us blocking on the goal line for the fancy-dancing runners who scored and got the glory and lived in Grosse Pointe or Birmingham or Rochester Hills or...

SO, RITA WAKOWSKI makes her appearance onstage, the villain of the piece. The audience hisses and sneers. "Don't forget your broomstick," they shout. The audience is looking for the hero, but the hero has failed to appear. It's not me. I'm still coughing a little, slouched in the ratty couch that smelled like cats, though the Durkiches had no cat, no pet of any kind.

"She's a bitch," Marlene said.

"She'll tell my mom," I said.

"And what's your ma gonna do, lock you in the house like Old Lady Wakowski does to her kids?"

"Maybe you're right," I said, "What can she do? My ma don't want me hanging around the house all summer. 'Get outta here,' she's always saying." I was slowly stubbing out my butt on either Mackinac Island or Lucky Horseshoe Casino—like many of us on Pearl, the Durkiches had ashtrays from places none of us would ever visit. I think it gave us a certain grim pleasure to cover those places in ash. If there were a coloring book of Warren, you'd only need one crayon—the gray one.

"So here you are," Marlene said.

"Here I am."

"Why don't you give me a kiss," Marlene said. She pointed to her cheek. When I moved toward her, she turned her mouth, and our lips came together, then our tongues.

Her little brother Eddie walked into the room. "Stop that," he said. "I want lunch. Lunch, lunch, lunch." Eddie was the youngest and last of the brood. Infected with the luck of the Durkiches, he got himself incarcerated as the result of a drug deal gone bad over on Rome during the cocaine cowboy years, but back then he was six and cute and spoiled by his siblings. _He_ was their pet. Their force field of good nature and love. The stitch that held together that misshapen ball of a family.

Marlene pulled away. Her summer job was to make sure the younger kids didn't get run over or go hungry. Her mother worked at Stan's, a dingy clothing store over on Eight Mile that she could walk to—which she did, through snow, sleet, etc. Warren had no bus service, following the Detroit tradition that it was sacrilege to help anyone without a car. Mrs. Durkich wore black rubber boy's boots with buckles, and we who wore no winter boots at all took to calling them "Mrs. Durkich boots" when we saw them on the feet of other small children. Stan's boots, bought with her discount. Theirs was the house of Stan's and Goodwill. Marlene wore worn, tight, faded T-shirts and  jeans that she fringed herself as a nervous habit. For Free Swim, she wore her older sister Barb's bathing suit that sagged at the breasts, but she looked great in whatever she wore or didn't wear.

I never saw her in a dress until she was in her casket. A dress! She looked like a schoolgirl, which she was, but younger, foreign, in the clownish makeup job done by Old Man Minski at the funeral home to try and hide her burns. She did not look beautiful. She looked like an insane doll somebody won at the church carnival then tossed in the corner of a room and forgot about.

I get behind myself, then I get ahead of myself, like some nervous kid learning to drive. Handling death is like that. Brakes? Gas? Clutch?

THE OTHER FAMILIES on Pearl managed to get by on one factory income, but Mr. Durkich clearly was not a reliable source—he won the bread, but he didn't often bring it home. Did I say he liked the ponies too? We were always finding losing tickets from Hazel Park Raceway in the street in front of their house—on the sidewalk, the curb, blowing across their weedy yard. He shed them like dandruff. I once saw Eddie and his friends use them as play money in a street game they'd devised that involved a knife and clothespins. The ponies and the bottle and the women too, apparently. His extended absences always brought him home broke. Somebody getting presents, but it wasn't his wife and kids.

MARLENE WAS A BEAUTIFUL wisp of a girl with raccoon eyes and a smile that kept me up nights on the top bunk, sweating in the heat above little brother Steve and across from the bunk bed holding my two older brothers, Rod and Rick, who exuded the nasty teenage funk I was on the verge of myself. Steve wanted to know if we'd done it yet, and what _it_ was all about. He was having his first wet dreams and, fascinated by the eruptions, kept waking the rest of us up in the middle of the night to share the news.

On Pearl, we packed them into our three-bedroom ranches and threw the extras downstairs to fight it out with the spiders and mold. Eventually, Rod and Rick would be happily exiled to the basement, once our father finally finished hooking up a toilet down there. In Marlene's house, it wasn't clear who slept where, or even who was living there at any given moment. I never saw beyond the chaos of the kitchen, living room, and basement, the dirty clothes and dirty dishes that were Marlene's responsibility, as if she was Cinderella without the stepsisters or stepmother. She was on her own, fighting not meanness, but indifference and neglect. You might think we would've just headed straight into one of the bedrooms and gone wild, but I think there was something about those bedrooms she wasn't telling me.

Marlene did not do well in school. From September to June, we didn't hang out much. Because of some fluky test, I'd been tracked into the smarter classes, though Marlene was smart—smarter. She just didn't have anyone at home who cared about grades or imagined anything beyond high school and a job at Stan's and a pack of bratty kids in her future.

"Why don't you go to church?" I asked once.

"We don't have to," she said. "Church and doing homework, they're kind of the same thing in this house."

Barb had moved out when she became pregnant at sixteen and was staying either at an aunt's or her boyfriend's, some older guy who worked at Davy's Eight Mile Brake Service, a notorious rip-off joint. Just about everybody we knew—even Mr. Wakowski—did their own car repairs, so only the lame and aged and stupid went to Davy's and got what they deserved or did not deserve, depending on who was keeping score.

AFTER AT LEAST TWO summers of flirting and hanging out together on street corners, I was in love with Marlene and finally ready to make a move. That summer, despite her thin frame, Marlene developed sizeable breasts beneath those tight T-shirts. She might've even finally fit into Barb's old bathing suit,  but we'd stopped going to Free Swim, preferring to sweat and pour cold water over each other's heads. She used to keep her cigarettes in her breast pocket, but her breasts no longer left room for the odd bulge of Kools, so she took to carrying a small string purse for her cigarettes and lighter. We all used lighters. They were better than matches—the flick and click. Style points galore for a cool lighter. We both had plain silver Zippos. We shared lighter fluid.

I'd abandoned my bicycle, except for when I did my paper route. It had become simply not cool to ride a bike, and despite how it slowed us down, despite the fact that we had a couple more years before we'd be able to drive, despite the fact that we on Pearl wore painfully tight, pointy black shit-kickers, we walked everywhere.

At school and on the street, I operated in the murky middle ground between tough guys and smart guys. If you were smart, you were automatically not tough, no matter what you did. I was one of the dumber kids in the smart classes and managed to get sent to after-school study hall often enough to pass with the tough guys. My older brothers carried the banner for me on that front, and, while at home I had often felt the wrath of their tough-guyness first hand, I was grateful for the invisible buffer it gave me on the street.

Marlene was both cynical and shy. We had those things in common. Those things, and kissing. She was extremely mature, capable, used to being on her own and mothering her younger siblings. One night, she licked her fingers and wiped spaghetti sauce from the corner of my mouth—I'd been in a hurry to see her after dinner. I sat on my Stingray bike in her driveway, and she leaned over and kissed me. It felt almost sinful, her warm spit against my face, and I melted just a little.

We had most afternoons alone together at her house before her mother arrived home. I was long gone before her father showed up. I knew when he changed shifts, when he worked overtime. All you had to do was walk down the block and look at the cars or lack of cars to know who was working when and how much OT our fathers were getting. We all punched the plant's time clocks.

None of the Pearl mothers kept track of us during the summer. We had  to check in at dinnertime and be in by eleven. I think they preferred our complete disappearance, encouraging us to join teams, clubs, church groups, visit friends in distant neighborhoods, run away, get lost, anything. But it was summer, and Pearl Street was our permanent address until we were old enough to get cars and jobs. We stayed put, as our fathers and their fathers had done.

Neither of our houses had garages—one more small thing we had in common. No other house on the street lacked that essential Motor City amenity. My father, an immigrant from Croatia, had old-country ways. He would've put an outhouse in the yard if my mom would've let him. Neither of our houses had a clothes dryer either. Marlene hung up their laundry either on a line downstairs or in the yard. She did the wash while we listened to the radio in her basement. I liked how the tinny rock music echoed off the bare cement walls. Sometimes we danced. I loved how her small laugh...

MRS. WAKOWSKI WAS EVERYWHERE—the only mother with a car. Her mother-in-law had moved in with them, and she came with a car, which was quickly commandeered by Mrs. W., even before the mother-in-law died less than a year later. She got around. She drove slow. She drove fast. She watched and took notes. She got around.

I quit both altar boys and going to church in rapid succession. The paperboys used to gather Sunday morning at The Clock restaurant for pancakes after our deliveries. We called it Our Lady of the Clock. One Sunday, the Wakowskis came in after mass.

We heard her snarl behind us: "What mass did _you boys_ go to?" We were all Catholic.

Red Scott choked on a wad of pancake and had a coughing fit. I slapped him on the back, and that gave us time—some of us—to compute. Four masses—which one did our parents go to? The Wakowskis had obviously been to the 8:00. My parents were going at 9:30.

"I went last night," I said, giving her my angelic altar-boy look—I hadn't lost it yet. The same look I'd given her one morning in church when she yelped after I jabbed her in the neck with the platen during communion. Father Frank gave me a quick glance that looked like disapproving approval. Everybody knew Mrs. W.

The rest of the Wakowskis were seated at the one round table in The Clock big enough to hold all the little elves from Mars sent to destroy us. But Mrs. Wakowski—Rita was her first name, and we took to calling her that as a sign of disrespect. Rita earned it. Rita Rita bo bita banana fanna fo fita...

Rita stood waiting for the others to say what mass they had attended. I folded my hands as if to say grace.

"Last night."

"Yeah, last night."

"Sure, last night," Red chimed in, a second late.

Rita took mental photos of us all and left to join her family. I gave a silent prayer of gratitude that they'd started counting Saturday night mass as fulfilling the Sunday obligation. But then I remembered Red's parents, with their own flaming red hair, _always_ went to Saturday night mass, so it'd be easy to verify. His father insisted on sleeping in on Sunday, the one morning he could, unless they were doing seven-day weeks at the plant. And we all knew, due to the recent slump caused by record gas prices, that no one was working Sundays.

"She's gonna check. You wait and see. She's gonna ask your mom," I told him. He grimaced as if a little worm had crawled out of his pancakes and was swimming in the syrup.

Red got grounded and was forced to dutifully attend Saturday evening mass with his family until he moved out of the house and became a Hare Krishna. But that, as they say, is another story.

Another time, I was standing in the parking lot of Schofield after dark. I don't know how Mrs. Wakowski even saw me from Warner, the closest street. I'd been waiting for Mark the Park to show up with a nickel bag—he'd  graduated into corrupting us with pot. At first I thought it was his car's headlights swerving into the lot, aiming right at me, but it was Mrs. W.

"Are you lost, little boy?" she asked. "Do you need a ride home?"

"I know my way," I said in a surly voice that wavered a little. Why did she care? What was it to her if I was going to smoke some pot, try out my new banana-flavored rolling papers? She appeared at the strangest times in the strangest places, a one-woman citizen's patrol. She kept her brights on me until I started walking back toward Pearl.

One year I soaped her car windows and got away with it. I didn't brag or tell. Two years later—the summer of Marlene—I gleefully told her after one of Mrs. W.'s drop-bys. Marlene laughed, but it came out more like a sneer. "By the way, has anyone ever hit you?" she asked out of nowhere. "Like, an adult, I mean?" I looked away and gave my head a little shake.

MRS. WAKOWSKI DID inform my mother about my unsupervised loitering at the Durkiches. To hear my mother tell it, she came over one morning with charts and graphs mapping out my pattern of juvenile delinquency and guilt by association. I think Mrs. W. missed my older brothers' raucous roaming that had kept her busy in previous years. Rod and Rick were busy with summer jobs spraying toxic weed killer on lawns in Detroit's outer-burbias, where the people didn't have our appreciation for the colorful anarchy of dandelions.

But Marlene was right—my mother couldn't do much. Steve was spending that summer enthralled with illegal fireworks of all shapes, sizes, and explosive capacities, which made her jumpy to begin with—she'd been forced to keep him indoors at night after a visit from Mrs. W. Grounding me would've been as much punishment for her as me in that tiny box house that took in and gave off summer heat like a mysterious overburdened electric appliance or science experiment gone seriously wrong. My hot breath would have made it even more unbearable. At home, I hung out in the cool, damp basement,  which meant my mother had no refuge that didn't involve my sulky presence. My father had installed an exhaust fan in the dining room window, so if you waited until maybe two in the morning, you'd be rewarded by a cool breeze slithering through the house like the invisible smoke from the coolest dude in the world slouching outside under a streetlight, someone Mrs. Wakowski could not touch.

My mother told me to stop hanging out at Marlene's while her parents were at work. Between Mrs. W.'s report and the purple circles on my neck, my mother had more than reasonable suspicion. She had unreasonable suspicion. She also started to smell my breath for booze or smoke when I came home at night, which resulted in near-comic scenes of her chasing me around the house, ostensibly to give me a goodnight kiss. Until the night I fell backward through the cheap plaster and we were both in trouble when my father came home.

MARLENE DIED IN A FREAK FIRE before we changed our minds about being in love. I couldn't change that wind. It smacked me in the face with the sting of something wrong. Smoke drifted past as I sprinted to her house. The day before, I'd held her sweaty hand as we sat in the saddle swings at Schank Park watching the sun set behind Childress, the boarded-up junior high.

Smoke. I threw my Marlboro, and it sparked in the street as I revved into panic. I jolted to a stop in her driveway. Mrs. Wakowski arrived at the same time. We looked at each other. No flames, though black smoke bouldered out the open front door.

"C'mon, Volchek, be a hero," she said, a tight, twisted smile on her face. "If you've got it in you." She was already gasping, but she pushed ahead of me as I stumbled, lunging in behind her, ducking under the smoke. My friend Artie's sister Sue careened into me, her left sleeve on fire. I pushed her outside, then down, rolling her over the grass, swatting at flames while  she screamed. When we hit the cement of Novak's driveway next door, the flames extinguished, her arm was a mess. She couldn't stop screaming. Adults swarmed around us.

When I looked up, I saw Mrs. Wakowski, gasping and sobbing, stagger out the door and collapse on the porch, her arms wrapped around a blanket that held Marlene. "Oh shit, oh shit," I whispered, my grim prayer repeated like breath amid the swirling chaos of fire trucks and ambulances. I crawled away and vomited in Novak's prickly bushes.

Mr. Novak always complained about us messing with his tree. Now, as I staggered to my feet, he embraced me tight so that I could not run to Marlene. A bunch of the guys were standing on the other side of the street either smirking or grimacing. Artie squeezed through the adults, but when he saw his sister Sue, he collapsed in a heap beside her. In the distance, I saw Ted Wozniak sobbing. His house was behind Marlene's over on Rome. His shoulders shook, his arms limp and flopping at his side. He was the only Eagle Scout within a hundred miles, but none of those neat little merit badges had prepared him for this.

I wish I had a picture of Marlene. I've blurred her into a saint, but maybe there's no harm in that. I'm at a loss. Loss, like the name of a dive bar I hung out at for years where they let me run a tab and stay past closing. But you're not going to get a lot of customers at a place called Loss. It was called Eight Miles High (or EMH), riffing off the old Byrds song I guess. Some high-schoolers got educated there instead. Our fathers still called it Leo's, after the previous owner. Regardless of its name, one night, Marlene's father Bruno fell off his barstool there, landing with a clunk that few of us heard, the brash jukebox bragging Motown and country western. The EMS came to the EMH, but it was too late for Bruno.

WHILE I'M DOING OBITS, Mrs. Wakowski—Rita—was the first adult on Pearl  to die, being the championship chimney on a block of smokers. Mr. Wakowski shook his head with a sad smile before he pulled away in the station wagon full of teenaged mutants, a sagging U-Haul trailing behind him.

Her kids all looked the same, though only two of them were twins—the two boys. Or was it a boy and a girl? The same fair hair, pale skin. We sometimes called them the Von Tripps. Tripping with the Von Tripps.

You might think we had nothing better to do than give each other nicknames.

It was something we did to take possession. _Our_ street, _our_ names. Our code, our constellation of saints and sinners. Saintly sinners.

It was briefly rumored that Mrs. Wakowski hung herself in the basement. After Marlene, we assumed every death had to be huge and dramatic. We couldn't understand how people die from the inside out, which is how most of us die.

I was hoping after all these years I could finally write this. Marlene, dead forty years, still fighting Mrs. Wakowski over center stage in this story.

MR. WAKOWSKI TOOK THE Villagers of the Damned somewhere, maybe a smoke-free zone where they could imagine starting over. Here on Pearl, we know we can never start over. Mrs. Durkich still lives in the house where her daughter died. Husband dead, the other kids scattered in the reckless Durkich way throughout the Detroit area. At least one of them still works at the garage, though it's not Davy's anymore.

The plant is still pumping out axles for Ford's at the center of the six square miles. I have worked there for twenty-nine years and live in my parents' old house, despite claiming fiercely that I never would. Soon, I'll get my own aerial view, and what will I do with it? All I remember about my father's photo is the big blank rectangle of the roof, and the surrounding cars lined like crooked teeth in the parking lot. If you pulled back the camera, could you see Pearl Street? Could I aim for Marlene's house with my dull blue darts?

Some Sundays when the weather is bad, I drive Mrs. Durkich to church. We  have, in all these years, never talked about Marlene. I doubt she knows I was different than any of the other Pearl kids. At the funeral, I was blubbering in the Minski parking lot after getting smacked by Mrs. W., while Mrs. Durkich was huddled inside with her swaying husband who looked up at the ceiling like he wished someone would just turn down the lights a little.

MY LIPS AND TONGUE SORE from kissing, I stood on the square of cement behind Marlene's house. She was climbing back in through the narrow, frosted bathroom window when her father emerged from shadow, the red dot of his cigarette dropping to the cement, his sledgehammer punch landing against the side of my head. He didn't know who I was, he who lived on his own dark planet, some alternate universe of bad luck and misery. What brought him back to the grimy house at the end of the block on planet earth? Marlene and I had snuck out of our houses, 3 A.M., to be alone in the quiet hour on Pearl Street where romance reared its ghostly head and all things were possible.

Years later, still oblivious, he bought me drinks at EMH in his hazy fury and mad generosity.

I stumbled around the patio littered with rusty bicycles and car parts, an old washing machine, and cases of empty beer bottles stacked high against the chimney.

I tripped and fell, then got up and ran.

It was the end of the world for two weeks. I couldn't even invent a plausible story, though I had my father's full attention for once. Revenge was something everyone understood. How could I explain, one eye swollen shut, that maybe I deserved it? I told him that in the darkness I couldn't see who jumped me. I couldn't explain what I was doing out at that hour. Even Mrs. W. remained silent, though my mother half expected a phone call or visit—actually wanted one.

"You could've at least gotten me pregnant or something for him to smack you like that," Marlene said when we finally reunited near the Wreck Center,  behind the tennis practice wall where we could have privacy even in the heat of day because no one ever practiced tennis, a game we'd determined was for wimps and foreigners.

He hadn't hit Marlene, and that, she could not explain. He'd hit her before. He never even entered the house that night, but got in his car and drove off, having protected his daughter's virtue. "Blind drunk" gets overused, when actually it's a very specific kind of veteran drunkenness, not the stupid out-of-control teenage kind, but the state of someone so drunk so often he gets used to the blindness and mistakes it for normal, with its own odd logic and moral code.

I loved her that day more than any. Exposed, sweating at the base of the wall, waiting for the sun to cross over and give us shade.

"It was worth it," I said. "Just to be alone with you like that for so long." We had gently and shyly touched each other too, time slowing down to pool in the silent night of our Pearl. "You know."

Her crooked smile beneath bangs said that she did. She leaned her shoulder against mine, our backs to the wall. Her head fell into my lap, and I tried to stroke her hair without tangling it.

"Can we be something back in school?" she asked.

I knew what she meant. "Sure," I said. "Let's walk to school together every day and have lunch together and walk home together...We don't have to do homework together."

She laughed. "That's good."

I bought her a nickel glass of lemonade from a stand set up by bored kids from the Wreck Center. I watched her neck as she swallowed.

I picked up a tennis racket lying on the ground—or maybe badminton—they had a big tub of equipment for kids to destroy. I strummed it like a guitar and sang her a little song I wish I could remember. It made her laugh and laugh, and laugh again in the silly way you laugh when you are fourteen and think you are in love. I held her sweaty palm as we walked home in full view of the world even though holding hands was wimpy.

ONE OF US HAD GOTTEN our names in the paper, and it wasn't me.

Just a one-column news brief, but no one in our neighborhood had ever gotten their name in the paper. The day of the fire, a TV news crew had cruised slowly past, but since the flames had been doused quickly, they drove off. They needed good visuals, and we could not provide them.

One small coffin in front of a packed room—everyone from the neighborhood and everyone from school. Loud wailing, nervous laughter, unbearable silence. The only thing we had to compare it to were those awkward school dances. With the adults somber and bewildered, we did what teenagers did in similar situations and made fun of everyone and everything. My brother Steve stole some smelling salts and walked around sniffing them until his eyebrows disappeared into his forehead.

Though Pearl Street was abandoned, the local tradition of breaking into homes during funerals was suspended out of respect for a dead child. We all had to scrape together some dress-up clothes, with mixed and mismatched results. A run on suit coats and ties at Stan's.

"At least she got her name in the paper," I said, and let out a harsh, overdone laugh before I was twirled around by Mrs. Wakowski and back-handed. Mrs. W., her right hand bandaged, could still give me a good smack with her left.

"Don't you ever talk like that! Respect the dead!"

I looked at my friends' lowered heads. We did not know how to talk about the dead or respect anything. The fire had confirmed all of our parents' fears about leaving us home alone: a gas can spilled and caught on the water-heater pilot. Marlene had slipped and fallen as the flames spread. Sue had tried to save her. Mrs. W. had earned some begrudging respect for going in after Marlene.

I BROKE INTO WAILING sobs with the suddenness of a cheap plastic model plane dashed to the ground in some misguided imagined flight. With the suddenness of a hand grenade exploding on TV, the gore conveniently out  of sight. TV was the only place I'd seen anyone die, and that was fake dying. I didn't care who saw me or who would say what.

Mrs. Wakowski took me in her arms and rocked me as my friends melted away until the two of us were alone on the dark edge of the floodlit parking lot.

"It's okay, Volchek," she rasped. "We can't save them all. We can't protect all of our babies."

I smelled her sickly sweet hair spray and perfume. Her golden brooch poked into my shoulder. I gradually calmed down enough to breathe without gasping.

I KNEW I WAS GOING HERE. It's where I always end up. Some late nights, lying in bed, teetering on the edge of sleep, I find myself in that parking lot. The fuzzy edge of the dim funeral-home floodlights marking our shadows on the lined blacktop, the rows of cars, as if we were shadow puppets miming out some ancient legend of gods and goddesses.

"You think you loved her?" she said. I may have nodded, but did not speak.

She offered me a cigarette. Salem's. It was like she was giving a child a sucker, and I was content to be that child. I took out a slick black lighter that Marlene had stolen for me from her father's jacket.

Together, we smoked one apiece in the parking lot. I listened to her thin lips emit a small kiss of release each time she took a puff. She stubbed hers out, then I stubbed mine out, then we went back inside.

I MAY HAVE TO RETURN once again to repeat this story, as I have over the years on unspoken or unknown anniversaries on Pearl Street, when I feel that I must. But I have to take the long way. The shortcut to the long way. We're never done paying respects with the mismatched currencies of our grieving. Wreck Center. Free Swim. Slaughter Ball. Four Square. Nostalgia. Lust. Fireworks. Brutality. Unhappiness and Happiness. Lighter Fluid and Spaghetti Sauce. All things that are not death.

In all the square symmetry of our world, even now, I still feel the round purple bruise of Marlene's mouth on my neck, blood pulled to the surface. And the quick slap of Mrs. Wakowski's hand across my face, the streak of her fingers lingering. And Mr. Durkich's punch swelling my face into another kind of bruise. They all had a little love in them, punctuation marks on Pearl.

## OUR LADY OF NO MERCY

ARTIE POCKETED THE CHANGE FROM HIS CHURCH ENVELOPE AND TOSSED it to the ground on the narrow alleyway behind the Eight Mile High auto shop. We'd be going to school there in the fall—they'd closed Childress, the junior high, to save money, so they were packing us all in at the high school, and we were nervous about proximity to the big boys.

"Hey, that envelope has your number on it," I said. "Someone could pick it up and take it to the rectory. They could trace it."

"What the _fuck_ are you talking about?" We'd graduated from sixth grade at St. Martin's and were modifying our vocabulary to get ready for the move to public school.

"I tell you, they're gonna be calling your name out in church next weekend, asking about the litter-bugging envelope-money-snitching Artie Ososki."

"What, you think the Envelope Police are gonna hunt me down?"

"I can just see Father Frank bending over to check out every single scrap of paper out here."

Though it was early, heat oozed up off the blacktop and clung to our skins.  We tightroped a large speed bump—blacktop piled up into a ridge to keep all the hot-rodding high schoolers in check. I spotted a dirty, beat-up paperback splayed against the bricks and picked it up—cover ripped, paper yellowed. Instantly, I knew it was porn.

"Whoa." I stopped, teetering on the bump. "Never know what you're gonna find back here." I tumbled forward.

Artie looked over my shoulder, then grabbed the book out of my hands.

_Horny Blondes_ consisted of a series of short stories interspersed with grainy, poorly lit black-and-white photos of nude women. The women—many clearly not blondes—looked disinterested, not gleaming with the porno pout we were familiar with from Ted Wozniak's _Playboy_ s.

Artie and I sat on the auto-shop loading dock, silently flipping the soiled pages, sucking in the hot, wet air of the last Sunday in July—a cookout Sunday in Warren, which meant our parents smoking cigarettes around greasy charcoal grills, popping open beer cans, and laughing too loud because tomorrow was Monday.

Monday didn't mean shit to us then—the last summer before we got jobs cutting grass or dipping cones or sweating burgers or pruning our pink hands over sudsy dishes in The Clock kitchen.

We lingered on the dock with _Horny Blondes_ , skipping church altogether. I pocketed my envelope money too.

WOZNIAK, THE OVERAGED Eagle Scout who still lived at home, was our conduit to cigarettes, porn—even beer. It came as no surprise to learn he'd cheated to get some of those merit badges. He'd finally quit Scouts at sixteen but stubbornly avoided his father's attempts to yank him into the world of real work. He hated his father, an ex-Marine, a factory foreman who'd dragged his only son kicking and screaming up to Eagle Scout. His father hated him back now that Wozniak wouldn't take a summer job at the plant even though he was old enough.

Two weeks after we found the porn book, I was sitting in Artie's garage with the twins Barry and Larry waiting for Artie's mom to finish giving him a haircut down in their basement. Wozniak strolled up the driveway and lowered his huge bulk next to me on the battered, rusty glider where we liked to hang out in the shade and plan the nothing of our days. It rattled a little, then settled. He was always on the heavy side, but he really flabbed out once he left Scouts.

"Well, pussies, what are we up to today?"

"Baseball," Artie said, tossing a ball at Wozniak. He caught it in his meaty hand and looked at it like an apple he might take a bite out of.

"Baseball...hmph." He shook his head. Big guy like Wozniak, you'd think he could hit it a mile. The only time he ever played with us, I was a captain and picked him first. but when he got up, he whiffed three big whiffs, dropped the bat, and went home. "It's not my thing," he'd said in a whiny tone that must have pissed his dad off royally when he heard it at home.

Wozniak took Artie's sister Sue behind the garage that day. Nine years old. Sue was best friends with Marlene, who became my first love, but then died in a fire the summer I turned fourteen.

Okay, it's all on the table now. Or, most of it anyway. I don't blame you if you get up from the table. I don't blame you if you lost your appetite. Me, I'm always hungry. Me, I never get full.

"ANY NEW _P_ _LAYBOY_ S?" Barry asked as Artie emerged, shorn, embarrassed, and a little mad, the screen door smacking behind him. We said nothing to Artie about his buzz job. We all went through the same thing—somebody in the family cut our hair, and we dealt with it.

Except Wozniak, who went to Mr. Vito's at Eight and Van Dyke. He seemed to think that if he just got the right haircut, the girls would be lining up in his driveway to give him his due. Maybe making Eagle Scout got somebody laid somewhere, but not in our neighborhood. We knew it was weird for an  old guy like him to be hanging out with us. Our parents did too, but that whole Eagle Scout thing stopped them from saying much. None of _us_ were ever going to make Eagle Scout.

"Boys," he sighed, "I can't keep sharing my stash with you. One of you weasels is gonna get busted by your folks, then my old man's sure to give me the boot."

Artie gave me a look. We'd stashed _Horny Blondes_ behind his garage between the wooden fence and the newer cinder-block wall Bronco Lanes put up to double the barrier between our houses and their sacred parking lot. Neither of us would hide it in our houses—too filthy in every way, nothing like Wozniak's glossy _Playboy_ s. That book had belonged to someone more desperate than us, I thought, but I didn't know a damn thing about desperation then—its uniforms, disguises.

Wozniak pulled a rolled-up magazine out of his back pocket and tossed it at Artie. It hit him in the head and dropped down, thick pages thumping, then fluttering to the cement floor like a drunk or wounded bird. Barry and Larry dove for it, scrambling over each other to get the first look. I waited my turn to bathe in the slick pages of the soft, dreamlike nudes. We forgot about baseball.

After supper, I returned to Artie's, and as dusk edged over the square, lit boxes of our identical homes, the two of us headed back to have another look at _Horny Blondes_. When we turned the corner and entered the small space between the garage and the double wall, we saw Wozniak's soft, round back. He sat crouched on his massive haunches. Sue stood frozen, facing us, her pants unzipped. She saw us and screamed. Wozniak whirled around, stumbled to his feet. "Okay," he shouted at Sue. "You guys just stay there," he shouted at us, a hand pointed in both directions, his voice hoarse with panic.

Sue yanked up her pants and ran. "Don't tell," he yelled. "Stop crying. Remember what I told you," he hissed as she rounded the corner away from him, her arms flailing like she was drowning, something trying to yank her under.

We started to back away. "Now, you guys," he said to us, rushing forward to grab our skinny arms. "I know _you guys_ won't tell. I could tell your moms and dads a few things." The big, hard acne bumps on his face turned bright red. "Understand?"

"Yes," I said instantly. Artie said nothing. Wozniak grabbed him around the neck. "We won't tell," Artie managed. Wozniak let us go with a shove.

I ran home and hid in my room listening to the Tigers' game on my transistor radio and flipping through old baseball cards.

My insides burned as I lay in bed that night, like when you run down the street on those first cold days, lungs filling with ice. The next morning, I went over Artie's. Neither of us spoke. He led me behind the garage. I feared Wozniak would be there again, or some evidence of what we'd witnessed, but it was just the usual weeds and trash. Artie reached between the double walls, yanked out the book, then hurled it over both walls into the Bronco parking lot, where we heard it plop onto the asphalt. He looked at me. I nodded.

We went back and sat on the glider, hoping something would wash away what we felt. If Wozniak showed his face, what would we do? Larry and Barry showed up later with _Horny Blondes_ , which they'd just found on the way over.

"Get rid of that shit," Artie said, grabbing the book and tearing it in half, its brittle pages easily giving way.

"What's up with you?" Larry asked.

Artie jumped up and rushed into his house, leaving us in the garage. Larry and Barry each picked up half of the torn book and took off. For a long while, I sat alone on the glider, my feet trying to hold it steady, motionless. The slightest movement made my stomach turn. Finally, I too wandered away.

Wozniak never showed up at Artie's again, and we never spoke his name. We heard his father gave him a choice of the army or the factory when he graduated, and he picked the factory.

The twins stopped coming by too. Just me and Artie and the squeak of the glider. Sue stayed in the house for the rest of the summer, even on those beautiful days when the ancient grandmothers would emerge from their  mother-in-law rooms to sit squinting on porches. Sometimes, I'd see Sue rush past the kitchen window, a flurry of curls.

MAYBE SOMEBODY DID say something to somebody, but it wasn't us. Why not? That's the missing paragraph in the narrative. Or page. Or pages. Or book. Maybe we thought we could erase what happened by leaving it alone, like waiting for rain to wash away sidewalk chalk. But that spray-painted graffiti would forever mar the landscape of our lives. The silence between me and Artie—all the change in the world rattling into collection baskets couldn't begin to make up for that silence. The more days that passed, the more impossible it seemed for us to speak up. Shame was holding us by the neck, squeezing tight. We thought...We felt...It is the deep shame of my life, now and forever. Even that _we_ is a lie, for we never spoke of it, to Sue or to each other.

ARTIE AND I HAD paper routes, and on early Sunday mornings, we did them together, and then instead of going to early mass, we rode our bikes to The Clock for pancakes. We called it Our Lady of the Clock. We had wallets then, and money to put in them.

But after doing our routes one Sunday that fall, Artie said, "Let's go to church." I didn't protest or ask why. We yanked our heavy bikes in the air, landing our small wheelies with a rattle that echoed between the high school buildings and into the silence between us. Though we rarely spoke in those days, we stayed close, sharing the burden. We locked our bikes together with Artie's heavy chain and stepped into the cool, dark church.

I think we returned to church hoping to find comfort in the simple structure—sin, punishment. But it offered little relief to sit and stand and kneel when everybody else did. Artie threw a dollar from his wallet into the collection basket, and I did the same. Maybe we were simply retracing our  route from that earlier Sunday, linking _Horny Blondes_ to what happened next. The speed bumps jolted us, our arms tense against the handlebars.

"Well, what'd you think?" he asked on the ride home.

"I like pancakes better," I told him.

"Fucking A," he said. "Everybody likes pancakes better. That's the problem." We didn't know what the "A" stood for, but we'd heard some Eight Milers say it. The next week, it was back to The Clock, where we left dollar tips for the cute waitress we both liked. "Missed you boys last week," she smiled, and we were briefly awarded the grace no saint would give us.

SMOKE DRIFTED PAST ME as I sprinted to Marlene's. I'd held her sweaty hand the day before, sitting in the saddle swings at Schank Park as the sun set behind Childress. I threw my cigarette out, and it sparked in the street as I revved into panic, then jolted to a stop in her driveway. I beat the fire trucks there. No flames, though black smoke bouldered out the open front door. I ran into Mrs. Wakowski from the corner house, arriving at the same moment.

"C'mon, Volchek, be a hero," she said, a tight, twisted smile on her face. "If you've got it in you." Her voice cracked into slivered fear. Together, we ducked under the smoke. Sue careened into me, her mouth a dark circle of pain and terror, her left sleeve on fire. I pushed her outside, then down, rolling her over the grass, swatting at flames while she screamed. When we hit the cement of Novak's driveway next door, the flames extinguished, her arm was a mess. She kept on screaming.

Marlene? Dead. Some of the guys stood on the other side of the street. Barry and Larry looked like they were either smirking or grimacing. Off to the side, I saw Ted Wozniak. His house was behind Marlene's on Rome. His shoulders shook, his arms limp and flopping at his sides. I didn't know why he was sobbing, though I've thought a lot about it since.

THE ONLY VISIBLE REMINDER of the fire was Sue's scarred left arm. She wore long sleeves outside, but at home, with family, she didn't bother, and at Artie's house, I was like family. The bared arm made Sue's smile even sweeter and more precious, yet I always felt the sting of the invisible scar. Some days our eyes met over their kitchen table or during an evening of bad TV, and I'd have to grit my teeth and swallow hard.

Once at a high school dance, when Sue was a freshman and I was a junior, we danced together. Her feet slipped over the dusty tile floor of the cafeteria like she was running in place. Her face glistened with sweat. I wasn't much of a dancer, so I just ran with her.

She had asked me to dance. I was sitting on a radiator against the wall next to Artie and some of the guys. We were nodding our lonely heads to The Spoilers, some lousy local cover band. Sue walked up and stood in front of me, motioning to the dance floor. I smiled. Her pale face scared me, like it might break into tears, or even a scream. She started to back away, and an urgent pull drew me toward her. I quickly got up off my ass and took her hand. It was too loud to talk, and we didn't try. We only said _hi_ to each other when I was over at Artie's.

We didn't touch while we danced, didn't catch up to each other on that dark, treacherous track. After the song ended on a sloppy _kachung_ of guitar, I stood for a second. The next one was going to be a slow song, I could tell by the first sprinkled notes.

"Sue," I said loudly. I looked at her, really looked. I moved closer. One of her friends tugged her arm. She looked back at me, then she turned and was gone. I slouched back to the radiator and Artie's noncommittal grin.

A COUPLE OF YEARS LATER, the guys were hanging out in Artie's garage working on his rust-bucket Fury, drinking beers on a cool, sunny Saturday afternoon in mid-September. We were all wearing T-shirts, refusing to acknowledge the first chill. Larry said something about me saving Sue's life.

Artie turned quickly. "No, he didn't. He didn't save her. She was on her way out. She would've been okay. You didn't save her, did you, Volchek?"

"No." I slid out from under the car. "No, I didn't," I said quietly.

ARTIE AND I ONCE shaped aluminum foil into fake coins and put them in our church envelopes. The Envelope Police never called. I had a lot of things to say to God, but I didn't want the ushers reading them in the rectory while counting up the loot, trading bad jokes with Father Frank.

It was easier talking about that fatal fire than about what happened behind that garage. The closest we got was on the walk home from that dance. January—hard, icy wind, but we didn't give in to hats. Your ears could freeze and fall off, but that was okay. If you wore a hat, you were a doofus. I cupped my ears in my hands against the hard wind at the red light at Eight Mile and Ryan.

"Hey, what's the deal, you dancing with Sue?" Artie asked. Cold smoke exploded out of his mouth.

"Just kidding around," I said.

"Better watch out. I think you gave her a thrill. She's got a thing for you, big boy."

"Shit," I said, and spat. I don't think either me or Sue had a thing for anyone else for a long, long time. "Is this light gonna change or what?"

It was so cold, my eyes were tearing. I wiped them quickly.

"Hey, don't cry," Artie said. "Maybe somebody will dance with you next time." He punched me hard in the shoulder. "My little sister don't count."

"Let's go. It's too fucking cold," I said. Artie didn't dance at all, so what was he talking about? Traffic was thick—11:30, the afternoon shift heading home from the Ford plant—but I rushed across the street anyway. Somebody laid on his horn. I leaped to the curb and kept walking.

Artie hurried across when the light changed, then ran to catch up. "You crazy fuck," he said. We walked on in silence over the snow-rutted sidewalks  in front of Stan's and Warren Guns—places too cheap or smug to pay someone to shovel.

I spotted Wozniak's car in the left-turn lane of the factory stream, and Artie and I bombed it with snowballs, then taunted him when he pulled over to cuss and flip us off. Long hair and a beard. He reminded me of a large, lazy bear—like the ones who begged for marshmallows at the zoo. He seemed harmless, but there's no such thing as a harmless bear.

"REMEMBER—AT THE FIRE—you see Wozniak crying?" I asked.

Artie cringed. "Oh, man." He paused. "No, not that."

"Why?" I kept on. "Why do you think he was crying?"

"I didn't see nothing but smoke," he finally added, "until I found you and Sue. Why you being so weird?"

We stepped hard on the neatly shoveled walk in front of Minski's, where Marlene was laid out after the fire. "Hope we never have to go to another funeral," Artie said. "Ever."

"Oh, man," I said this time.

"Something to do with Sue," Artie said flatly. "Wozniak crying. That fat fuck."

"Fuck me," I said.

It was hard to talk in that cold, walking so fast our heels clopped off the cracked cement like horseshoes. We just had the path through the little strip of trees next to Bronco, then it'd be Artie's house on Rome, then mine on Pearl. We stopped and each lit one more cigarette.

We cut onto the path and through the cluster of trees where we'd guzzled cheap wine on the way to the dance, in anticipation of what—a kiss, a miracle? Our bottles lay abandoned out in the dark, frozen weeds where we used to dig for treasure.

No one would ever forgive us for just standing there, and we weren't going to confess. Not to a priest. Not to each other. Not to Sue.

I heard a shriek and turned around. A large group of girls returning from  the dance were running toward us, dizzy with laughter, stumbling off the path into snowdrifts. In the dark, I could almost imagine Marlene among them. She had a great laugh. Or Sue, though I hadn't heard her laugh in years. I started running too. So did Artie, our lit cigarettes waving in the double darkness of the field, where no streetlights reached.

"I ran right in," I said as Artie trotted beside me, tripping over frozen footprints in the path. Maybe he nodded, maybe he didn't. When we reached the sidewalk in front of Artie's house, he stopped at his driveway and turned.

"Later," he said, flicking his butt into the street.

"Later," I said, turning briefly toward him, running backward, then swinging around to run forward again. _Later_. Though we never said another word about what happened back then, even on clear winter nights like that, the air tinkling with laughter, a few honest stars poking through.

## BEND IN THE ROAD

WE SAT IN MY OLD, DILAPIDATED WOODY STATION WAGON AT THE BEND IN Pearl, the odd, luscious curve in that strict, boxed neighborhood grid—no reason for it except to mimic the curves of Marsha Johansen's body, though technically it was a mistake by the builders—the Bermuda Curve of Warren. Rome and Pearl were supposed to continue past Bruce, the cross street, and dead end at Warner, but they got twisted up because the construction crews started building at each end until they discovered the streets weren't going to meet in the middle. Thus, the Pearl bend at Bruce. Too much info, and your head's already spinning. We loved telling people how to get lost when they asked for directions, but now I will courteously escort you back to the car.

Marsha angled herself away from me, her back wedged hard against the door, and I knew we would not be hopping into the second seat, or the third, for a romantic interlude. I was no longer stoned, and she had never been stoned. Did you ever go out with a girl your older brother the football star had gone out with then dumped the year before? Maybe you would've gotten stoned too. Not that I needed an excuse.

I had served as Marsha's escort in the Homecoming Court, having purchased my first sport coat since First Communion for the occasion, making my first trip to Stan's without my mother—all big firsts, and I'd been hoping to add another with Marsha.

Stan's contained sloppy mountain ranges of clothes purchased from other stores going out of business—clothes labeled irregular; clothes flawed, damaged; clothes too garish to be believed. A store of misfits and mistakes—my mother's favorite. She treasure-hunted in the stacks while Mr. Stan charmed her with fake maps.

Mr. Stan had no charm for me. He flung a few polyester sport coats my way, then left to have a smoke at the register up front. I was smoking myself by then and would've liked to light one up with him and ask, was he really hot on my mother, or did he give the sugar eye to all his female customers? Stan didn't have dressing rooms or mirrors, so you had to rely on your own skewed vision and imagination to decide if something fit. That, or ask Mr. Stan, who always said, "Fantastic" because his eyes were silver dollars. I quickly shrugged into a mud-brown, checkered jacket, walked up to the counter, and paid for it with a careless wad of singles, tips from my job as a busboy at The Clock, a 24-hour joint further down Eight Mile Road from Stan's where I worked after school three or four nights a week.

"Tell your mother I'll have new dresses in Monday—some things she'll just love."

My mother had the occasion to wear a dress maybe twice a year, not counting funerals. Though our neighborhood was high on funerals—funerals and court appearances. Ernie Wormwood, the bail bondsman next to Stan's on the Warren side of Eight Mile, knew many of us on a first-name basis. (I still have his fuzzy red card in my wallet—you never know.) Ernie's tiny, square office was, in turn, next to Warren Guns—a bland enough name, though we knew it meant guns for white people.

The men of Pearl and Rome bought guns there after the '67 riots—in theory to protect us from black people, but then we inevitably started shooting  each other instead, when the Urban Invasion across Eight Mile from Detroit failed to materialize. Then, on a picnic table in the back of Schank Park, some guy opened a portable gun store that required no paperwork, and thus democratized the process for those too young to vote or purchase alcohol, though Warren Guns continued to be a local landmark and institution. Location, location, location: buy your gun, get bailed out, then go to Stan's and get yourself some new irregular duds. For years, I thought there was something wrong with my dick or my balls, but it was the _irregular_ tighty whiteys that were doing me in, squeezing in the wrong places, letting things dangle where they shouldn't be dangling.

MARSHA HAD BEEN a model at the Detroit Auto Show for the past two years, draping those smooth curves over the glossy hoods of the new Fords and Chevys and Plymouths and smiling her tight, stretched smile. The Auto Show in Detroit was like a prom for cars. Everyone went for the celebrities, the live music, the models, the Batmobile—and all the new cars, of course, which were the psychic equivalent of Batmobiles for all grown-up motorheads. To be a model at the Auto Show—that was enough to roil the halls of Eight Mile High with gossip, leers, jealousy, and masturbatory gestures. She was an exotic blonde in a neighborhood full of brunette Polacks. She reminded us of the Swedish goddesses of suntan lotion commercials and the porno films that we lied about having seen.

Marsha had the looks of a Swedish goddess, but according to the notoriously unreliable Guys on the Corner, she also had the brains of a French poodle. She'd miraculously asked me to be her escort for the homecoming game, having been voted a finalist for queen with the entire "hot babe" vote from the guys, though that was ultimately not enough to carry her to victory. Nonspeaking roles seemed to be her specialty—her voice was high-pitched and unintentionally whiny, and she spoke in a hesitant kind of encoded baby talk when she was nervous, which seemed to be whenever she spoke. Just  the kind of inarticulate beauty Jake, my brainless hunk-a-brother, specialized in dating—or simply screwing, without the preliminaries. He had that football-hero thing going big-time, particularly after the team beat Hazel Park, our archrival we called "Hazel-tucky" to distinguish their brand of white trash from our Eastern European variety. Marsha, on the other hand, was as un-cheerleadery as they come, and that may have been what got her struck from The List once the football team's summer workouts began. She seemed to have few friends and walked to school by herself each day. I lived around the bend on Rome Street, the straightaway to school at the other end of Pearl, and often walked alone myself—so, well, there you go.

ONE STONED-OUT MORNING after firing up a quick doobie behind Bronco Lanes on the corner of Eight and Pearl, I began singing the Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar" and got so carried away, I literally bumped into Marsha as she was paused on the tilted sidewalk in front of the one giant, mutant bowling-alley tree that had been spared by the developers. Its roots angled the cement so that her heel caught in a crack.

I didn't really know the lyrics beyond "oooooh Brown Sugar" and "You shoulda seen him just around midnight, that's what the young girls say," and I'm not even sure that's right, though apparently the song refers to sex with a black woman, and maybe I would've picked up on that if all the beautiful black women were not just apparitions on the other side of Eight Mile, since we were afraid to cross over. Eight Mile was eight lanes wide, but it seemed even wider looking across from the parking lot of Warren Guns.

"Oh!" Marsha cried out.

"Oooooh, Brown Sugar," I said, falling back onto a level sidewalk square while Marsha fell forward out of her heel, scraping her hands on the cement.

Lucky neither of us was carrying any books—we had that much in common. I thought she sounded like Marilyn Monroe in _Some Like It Hot_ , a movie that showed up at least once a month on _Barton Benedict's_ _Showtime_ on Channel 9, the Canadian station we picked up on our dusty black-and-white. Barton was the host—an old hack actor who'd had a bit part in that movie. He couldn't get enough of his fifteen seconds. Fifteen more than any of us were going to get, even Marsha. The Auto Show gig had given her 7.4 seconds, but that'd be it for her, and I think she knew it even back then. She knew a few things.

I APOLOGIZED. She apologized. I yanked her shoe out of the crack and returned it to her like a stoned-out Prince Charming or a shoe salesman at Thom McCann's at Universal City—Warren's first and only mall—a job I'd had for ten seconds.

It turned out we both liked brown sugar sprinkled on toast. Marsha had no boyfriend at the time, though Jake never had officially counted himself as fulfilling that role back during the previous spring when he had dated her. He never brought her home. She was in some untouchable caste in the odd system of our high school. Her looks weren't helping any.

From then on, we fell into walking to school together. I envisioned myself as the stoned philosopher of Eight Mile High, though after graduation I would end up joining our fathers at Ford Sterling Gear and Axle, just like everyone else, philosophers or football stars, stoned or sober. My brother Jake, the Great White Hope for a college scholarship, tore his ACL during that particular homecoming game and consequently tore up his sweepstakes ticket for a different future.

Marsha listened to my early-morning rambles and riffs, punctuating them with sounds that resembled a combination of exclamation points and question marks. That was all I needed, lost in the vague, lonely fog of myself. It was like we were sharing some secret, a secret we knew in different languages so that we couldn't communicate it to each other.

The morning she asked me to be her homecoming escort, I'd told her I thought newspapers should be printed on meat.

"Meat?" she said, blushing and laughing as if I'd said something obscene. I loved to get her laughing. When she laughed, she sounded stoned. By that I mean, she was so sincerely and uncomplicatedly happy that it almost seemed too good to be true. But she never did drugs. She never drank. She wasn't religious, except about her appearance. She dressed so differently from everyone else it was like she was in a cult of one. She sewed many of her own clothes, acing her homemaking courses, though she was not a member of the Future Homemakers Club that met after school. Her tint seemed wrong—like on cheap color TVs. Too much makeup, too much color, flair, flourish. She was speaking with her clothes, but no one was listening. She never wore jeans, though the rest of us—boys and girls—wore jeans every day. Black jeans or blue, that was your approved choice of fashion statements. She wore these high-waisted tailored pants made out of some fabric imported from planet Zeptune. Her shoes? No wonder she caught her heel—they weren't meant for our uneven sidewalks, our cracked, rubbled streets.

MARSHA'S HOMECOMING ENSEMBLE included a parasol and a big chiffony hat. Somebody had seen her coming, and it wasn't Stan. Even Stan had his limits—he knew the neighborhood _liked_ our clothes in unruly mountains. Maybe she'd gotten the ensemble through some modeling-school connection. No one seemed to know where the modeling school was located, even Marsha, whose mother drove her there every Saturday. Marsha was also apparently acing modeling school, though I think everyone aced modeling school as long as you were paid in full. Her dad had died of a heart attack behind the wheel of a big rig when we were in grade school, and her mother had worked on the line at Ford Sterling with our fathers ever since.

I was disheartened by how ridiculous she looked doing her modeling-school sashay toward the fifty-yard line to meet me after we were announced over the tinny PA system at halftime. I was glad the football team was in the locker room so I didn't have to see Jake smirk and make the finger gesture again to Monster Masch, his flunky friend the lineman who hiked the ball  to him, who blocked for him, who worshipped him like the ghost of Elvis. I had seen him give Monster the universal gesture for "I fucked her" that summer when they were in the basement lifting weights, getting ready for their senior season.

Jake and I did not talk much, so I didn't ask if it was true. He had rescued me from a couple of drunken scrums over the years, but it was more out of some family obligation, like going to Grandma's house and pretending we still liked the stale Tootsie Rolls in her candy dish. He'd yank me by the back of the neck away from whatever I'd gotten myself into, then shove me in the direction of the woody wagon or home, whichever was closer, then return to whatever party was going on, and that night's object of his affection, as if I was just a pesky fly. He had this aura so that even the hoods let him be: (1) he was big, he was in great shape, and in a fair fight could probably kick anybody's ass, and (2) if not, who wanted to be blamed for putting the star football player out of commission?

"WHAT'S WITH THE UMBRELLA?" Jimmy Ray asked. JR was short, with hippie hair parted in the middle and his eyes slit into a permanent stoned squint. In the parking lot outside the Beef Palace in Grosse Pointe Woods or Farms or maybe just plain Grosse Pointe, where we'd taken the girls after the game for some fancy eats, JR and I were sharing a doobie in the woody—I always got stuck driving because of my big party wagon. JR was the escort for Kym, the night's big winner, our homecoming queen who resembled Olive Oyl in body type and modesty. All the girls voted for her.

"It's a parasol, you dick," I said, smiling to avoid a scrap—who wanted that when we were all dandied up for the big night? We hadn't even had much to drink, so nobody was puking on no sport coats or tuxedos.

"But don't you use those in the summer, like, to keep the sun off your head if you're some Southern babe on one of those old plantations?" JR was sharp as a fox on Quaaludes.

"It's part of the ensemble," I said, pointing to my head like I had the inside  dope. "She's, like, a conceptual artist," I added, though I'd pulled that out of my ass. I _was_ an inside dope.

"You're fucking stoned," he said, as if that was some big revelation that he needed x-ray eyes to see.

My ensemble included my Stan's sport coat, which turned out to be too big, since that asshole had no mirrors. I looked like Olive Oyl in drag, like I should've been Kym's date instead. Jimmy Ray was wearing a ridiculous red tuxedo shirt with frilly shit down the front.

"Are you some kind of bullfighter, dude?" I asked, flipping up the frills with my finger. "Isn't that kind of like calling the kettle metal?"

"Is that jacket from Stan's?" Jimmy asked. "Irregular—just your size. Wow, you went all out," he laughed. Then, "Naw, naw...I almost bought that jacket myself but..." He trailed off. I punched him hard in the shoulder, which was our answer to just about everything.

JR and I had fought in The Clock parking lot two years earlier. Something to do with one of us kissing somebody else's girlfriend, then the other kissing the other's girlfriend, and so on. He was a pesky little dude, but I bloodied his nose, and his heart wasn't in it after that. Apparently, he didn't even like that girl to begin with—the one that I kissed that he kissed.

The girls were in the restaurant. We'd abandoned them a while ago, saying we were going out to powder our noses.

"Ha," we'd laughed, "ha ha ha. Powder our noses." The girls did not laugh. We'd all been staring at the menu like it was a math test and we wanted to copy someone else's answers. Kym and Marsha had said all the right things to each other about Kym winning, then they had nothing else to say. JR and I didn't really care who won. We just thought it was a kick that a couple of stoners like us were homecoming escorts dressed up in clown outfits. Kym was the reformer type, but she had her work cut out for her with JR.

Marsha had left her parasol on the seat, and Jimmy opened it up in the car, pushing it up against the ceiling. I heard a slight tear.

"Mistah Magloo," I said, doing a racist imitation of TV's racist imitation  of an Asian—Charley, the houseboy from the old Mister Magoo cartoon. During the theme song intro, Magoo carried an umbrella that acted as a parachute that landed him on a roller coaster. He was oblivious, just like us.

That sent JR over the edge into mad, stoned laughter, his eyes watering with tears. He stumbled out of the car and was waving that parasol around when Kym wobbled out of the restaurant on her high heels to drag us back in.

"You...assholes!" she yelled, her voice cracking shrill, hands on the hips of her shower-curtain dress that hung like an unbelted toga. She blushed with the effort of cussing.

"Your food's getting cold," she sneered.

"Did we order yet?" JR asked.

"No." She paused, then flung up her arms. "I can smell it all over you. You promised."

She stormed back into the restaurant. I looked at JR.

"Promised?" I repeated.

"She wants to straighten me out," he said, stiffening into a cartoon board. I shrugged, and we went inside. We were lonely losers, and suddenly nothing was funny. We'd be coming down, and there'd be no heading back to the parking lot. The waitress was as pissed off as the girls. We all ordered steak because if you went out to a fancy place, that seemed to be the default choice. Baked potato. Sour cream. How could you go wrong?

"How would you like those steaks?" the waitress asked.

"Cooked," I said. JR laughed too loud.

"MAN, I'M TIRED OF CHEWING," I said. "I ain't had many steaks."

"No shit," Kym said.

I startled. "What's up with her? She wins the big crown, now she's all swearing and shit."

"Can't you see I'm chewing?" JR said. He picked a piece of gristle out of his mouth and daintily laid it on the side of his plate. He wasn't looking up.

"Just stop it," Marsha said. "Please." She excused herself and went to the bathroom.

"You're not supposed to eat them with your hands," Kym said.

"But it's meat," I said. "I eat all meat with my hands—burgers, hot dogs, fried chicken. Why do you think they give you the bone in the first place?" I asked, holding up my steak by the T-bone. "It's like a popsicle stick."

JR started cutting his steak into tiny pieces the size of peas and popping them in his mouth. I guzzled my glass of water and got the hiccups. JR burped. We were having a good old time.

Kym also got up and excused herself.

At this point, if you were there, you also might've excused yourself, then gone looking for my brother to boot my ass out of there, but he was at the hospital getting his knee x-rayed, my worried parents waiting in the ER with the coach, everybody's futures radiating with gloom.

"You shoulda seen him just around midnight, whoa, whooaa..."

JAKE HAD NO INTEREST in my life except to prohibit me from selling drugs out of the basement bedroom we shared—I'd been storing pot in my bean bag chair until he noticed those little white beads sprinkled around the floor from me tapping the stash so often. The college scouts had been invading the house, and my parents had bought a new La-Z-Boy to jazz up the living room, figuring it'd pay off if my brother could get a college scholarship. He was then dating a cheerleader—Kym's sister, Cheryl—as was predestined in the playbook.

"I'm taking Marsha Johansen to the homecoming game," I said. "You got any pointers?"

He rolled his eyes. "You? That's one odd fucking couple."

We sprawled on the ratty basement couch watching a late-night French movie on Channel 9 because I'd heard it had some nudity in it. We lived in a  room our father had 2×4'd into the cold basement, hiding from the madness upstairs where our mother chased our four younger siblings around and our father's absence or presence lingered like stale pot smoke in the air.

"Hey, as long as there's fucking involved, I don't care how odd we are," I said, trying to imitate the way he talked with his friends. He groaned.

"Just keep your shirt tucked in," he said.

I wanted to protest that he'd made the little finger-in-the-hole gesture, wanted to ask, what's that mean, keep your shirt tucked in? Instead, I sharpened the contrast and adjusted the horizontal hold, just in case.

"Who told you this has titties in it, some Canadian?" He got up and went to bed, thus missing the brief flash of flesh that I may have dreamt as I drifted off.

JR AND I ARGUED over the tip. Neither of us had ever eaten anywhere that required a tip. Finally, the waitress came over and took some bills out of our hands and said that should cover it, and told us to get out of there.

When I dropped off JR and Kym at his car in the school parking lot, Jimmy gave me the finger in the hole, while Kym just gave me the finger.

"What a fun couple!" I said to Marsha as we pulled away. "Don't you think?"

The silence in the car made it feel like a Volkswagen bug or some other foreign car that only existed in advertising, not on our American streets.

"So, you want to be a model when you grow up?" I asked just to say something.

"I'm already grown up," she said.

"You're already a model," I said.

"A once-a-year model," she said.

"You can model on my car anytime," I said, but then realized that maybe she already had, since I sometimes shared the woody with Jake.

"What was it like going out with my brother?" I asked, because I was stupid.

Her dress rustled against the seat. "We went to the movies a couple of  times," she said. I glanced across at her as I pulled in front of her house, angling into the bend. Parking the long woody on the odd, luscious curve, I'd ended up leaving a wide gap between the car and the curb.

Her thick makeup was melting after the long night of forced smiles.

"I'm sorry you didn't win," I said.

She almost laughed for the first time that night. "I knew I wouldn't win. I'm not stupid."

Marsha had been in my kindergarten class before I bailed for St. Martin's like all the other Polish Catholics, before rejoining her at Eight Mile, the public high school. I had eaten spumoni ice cream in her kitchen when I was five years old, and never since. We were vanilla or chocolate at home. Orange sherbet for a treat.

"You were my first boyfriend," she said, simple and direct. She twisted a finger in her long hair. It picked up light from the streetlight and reflected it back. Brassy, but she herself was not brassy. "That's why I asked you to...to...this," she said. I had to lean toward her to hear. "Silly, isn't it?"

"What's this, exactly?"

"You know," she said.

We had never talked about kindergarten on our walks to school. For me, those days were like some old black-and-white historical documentary on public TV with the sound off. All I remembered was waiting at the bus stop together, and spumoni ice cream.

"Spumoni," I said, and it came back to me in color, like I'd muttered the magic word I'd been waiting all night to find. I reached across the seat and grabbed her hand. To be going out with her was the craziest damn thing.

"And we held hands at the bus stop," I said. Her hand was on fire. Maybe she'd been sitting on it.

"It's not like that anymore," she said. "All innocent."

I turned on the radio, pushed a couple of buttons, then turned it off again.

"I thought you thought I was funny," I said. "That's why you asked me." I pushed the buttons again, even though the radio was off. Rain began to fall,  and I reached to turn on my wipers, but we weren't going anywhere and there was nothing out there to see.

"Oh, Mike," she said. I never remembered her saying my name aloud before. Maybe I just never shut up long enough.

"My brother...," I began. I was imagining him in the car at this moment. They could've been exactly here at this spot, at this time of night.

"Speaking of innocence," I said. But I could not speak of innocence. That word sounded odd coming out of my mouth, but not hers. I only thought of it in terms of criminal innocence and guilt, not like Adam-and-Eve-apple shit. I urgently wanted to know what they had done together, since we clearly would not be doing it. Anything.

"Shhhh," she said, and kissed my cheek. Then suddenly she nudged open the car door, and all of the air in the world rushed in.

Midnight. Cinderella escaping the pumpkin. Shift change at the plant, and my father and her mother would both be home soon. She was walking up the sidewalk toward her door. Under the glow of the porch light, I could see the tarnished metal J in the center of the storm door. All our houses had our initial on the door—some deal with the builders, I guess. I rushed out to stop her, to give her back the parasol. Cold air raked down my throat, the raw night air that leads to winter.

"Wait," I said softly on that hushed street. She turned. I tried to hand it to her, but she backed away, her arms folded over her chest. She gave a visible shudder. She was claiming sadness—silent, subtle sadness—doubling down with it. On our streets, no one claimed sadness. Anger, or doubling down with anger? Yes. Laughter that scraped off skin? Sure. Sadness? No fucking way.

"We embarrassed each other tonight," she said. Pain was pulling down her cheeks. "I _want_ to look like I'm not from here. Get it?"

I realized I'd said nothing about her dress, nothing about how nice she looked, like you were supposed to do, no matter what. I held the parasol tight like a sword. Marsha was right. The world was irregular. The kindergarten bus was the only bus that would ever be on time.

"Keep it," she said. She was beautiful and did not need a hat or a parasol.

I opened it up and twirled it in the air to try and make her laugh. She did not laugh. JR _had_ torn a hole in it. I saw the black, mottled sky through the rip.

"You'd be a nice guy," Marsha said, "if you weren't so stoned all the time."

When somebody calls you out for being a stoner, somebody you'd imagined having sex with just a couple of hours—or minutes—ago, it can put out your match right quick. But when you're a stoner, lighting another match is the solution to that.

"This isn't about God, is it?" I asked. I closed the parasol, though rain fell steady and relentless. "Hey, I'm keeping it together," I said. "It's not like I'm shooting up." I made an exaggerated needle-in-the-vein gesture with the parasol. Who was she to call me out on smoking dope, she with the parasol and no friends?

"Hey," I said, "by the way," then stopped, fell silent. I ran through a smeared list of lame explanations. "Not all the time," I finally said. "Like now. I'm not stoned now."

"No," she said. "Not now."

Stoners joked with each other about being stoners, but for a non-stoner to do so...Even my brother had never explicitly lectured me about getting high. He'd just shake his head and call me an asshole, like he'd done for our entire lives.

I took off my Stan's jacket and attempted to tear it in half, but it was better made than anything I imagined in those sloppy piles spilling into the narrow aisles. I pulled and yanked, yanked and pulled, growling like a cartoon dog, till I finally ripped off one of the sleeves.

I laugh, thinking of that ridiculous scene now, but she was somewhere inside herself then, a place that swallowed laughter. I wished I was still stoned, for I felt her genuine sadness against my fake sadness. I couldn't explain her sadness because I was an amateur at being sad.

"I sew. You tear apart," she said, softly, almost to herself. It felt like bad movie dubbing, as if the voice wasn't even her own.

JIMMY RAY DIDN'T MAKE IT through senior year, flying out the open window of The Dude's Plymouth Satellite one drunken night right before graduation, then somehow getting run over by the car when it tumbled into a ditch on Warner, one of the few streets in the neighborhood that still had open storm drains. Dude went to jail, and we never saw him again, so it was like he'd been killed too. Kym threw herself against the coffin in church so hard she still had a big welt on her forehead when we marched onstage for our diplomas.

JAKE HAD TAKEN Marsha to the movies a couple of times, then got frustrated, so he stopped seeing her. He was used to sitting back and letting the women roll in. She didn't get it. So _he_ didn't get _it_. I wish I'd known that on homecoming night. He told me all as we lay in our beds in the cold basement on a Sunday morning, hoping to avoid going to church—in our house, with our four other siblings scrambling around upstairs, our parents could just lose track, or give up and leave without us. His crutches leaned against the bare basement wall like they'd been left in church by a child cured by a miracle, but we were both learning there were no easy cures, no miracles.

I wondered if she'd asked me to be her escort to get back at my brother for giving up on her so quickly, but that didn't seem like her. Why would anyone think my brother cared? He cared now. Not enough to go to church, but he cared.

"WHERE DO YOU WANT TO BE FROM?" she asked suddenly. She stood on the stoop, her hand clawed onto the metal J.

"Hey, I'm the idiot philosopher around here," I said, smiling, giving her my best "aw shucks" look. She seemed to be crying, her eyes welling up, though no tears fell.

ALL THOSE DAYS when we walked to school together, we never really looked at each other. We were glancing sideways if at all. Why couldn't I look all that beauty in the eye?

Some mornings, I'd wait to have a cigarette until we were close to school just so I could smell her—I don't know if it was perfume or hair spray or deodorant or fabric softener or innocence, but it stung sweet in my nose, like a cold fire, like flowers melting. I don't know, but she had it.

We may have walked to school together once or twice after that night, but there were many paths, and we both chose different ones—or maybe just I did—or different times. I accumulated late slips and after-school detentions with the casual nonchalance of a future factory rat. Or maybe she started getting rides from her first serious boyfriend, who turned out to be Monster Masch—it was almost too easy to call them Beauty and the Beast, but we did. Barton Benedict got hair transplants, which made him look even more ridiculous as he waxed nostalgic about his nearly imaginary Hollywood days. I tried to grow a moustache and looked equally ridiculous. The next year, I looked for her at the Auto Show down at Cobo Hall, but it's a huge event, so perhaps I missed her. I saw her mother every day at the plant, where she worked in the next department tying brake lines onto axles, but Marsha had escaped. She'd had her 7.4 seconds of fame. I had the parasol.

STAN HAD BEEN SCREWING my mother for years. I guess he just locked up the store and took her into the back room. Or maybe they did it on mountains of clothes. We'd have probably never found out, but my mother didn't have a car. Or even a driver's license. If you have to walk to have an affair, it's a lot harder. Can you imagine how desperately lonely she was for her to be taken in by Stan? To, without pride or shame, walk that quarter mile to get bonked by a slick hustler in a cheap suit?

My father was the opposite of Stan. An un-Stan. What we called a "pudge" in our neighborhood—a guy with a pot belly and rounded shoulders who  was always smiling in this dopey kind of way and talking about the weather and sports like the host of a TV news show for the hard of hearing. But even pudges have their limits.

We had to call Ernie Wormwood after my father bought a new gun at Warren Guns and shot Stan in the leg. He said he was trying to make him dance, like they did in the old Westerns he loved.

Stan got an offer from Big Boy's that he couldn't refuse. He sold the store, limped out of town, and they finally tore his building down after the appropriate bribes were paid. Big Boy's was after The Clock's business. Us? We'd fight in any parking lot.

My father only spent six months in jail. He was temporarily insane. Permanently irregular. He and my mother reconciled. We all lived happily ever after in our modern Stone Age family.

MARSHA WASN'T CRYING on account of me. She was crying on account of herself. That's why I got out of the car to give her the umbrella back. Not because of the rain. It takes a certain amount of smarts to cry for yourself. It means you understand some deep, profound thing about the world and your place in it. It takes a certain amount of smarts to know you're not going to win.

I don't know why, but I left my car parked there for the night. A rigid thing that did not bend at the bend. I walked home in the rain, my leaky parasol a-twirl.

## AWOL

THIS IS MY SECOND START. THE FIRST HAD TOO MANY LIES IN IT. GOING blind, so I'm trying harder to tell the truth. Get it down for my kids for when I'm gone. I don't want them stuck with their mothers' versions of me as someone who couldn't keep a job, who thought he was too good for everything and everybody—though still kept in touch with his high school teachers, which seemed a little creepy to both my exes.

I've been living with my parents for two years, since I started losing my sight and lost my job in a small print shop on the edge of Detroit. My boss was sorry to let me go, but not sorry enough. I get some disability, and with my father's social security, we get by. He's taken up wandering the streets collecting empty cans and bottles in a shopping cart he cadged from Stan's when the store was sold. They're worth a dime apiece in Michigan. He's losing his mind.

My kids live with their mothers. I had one with each wife. I'd be the first to tell you, I was too busy screwing and unscrewing up my own life to give them a father's love. Or maybe my exes would be first, pushing me out of  the way to testify. I think the kids wanted to love me, but I've been a moving target. A rigged carnival game.

My son, Brian Jr., is nineteen. He's going to Macomb, the community college. He buses tables down at The Clock over on Eight Mile, where I once worked. When I told him that, he said, "You worked just about everywhere, Dad. My only hope is nobody at any of those places remembers you." He did call me "Dad" though. He has that anger—I had it at nineteen too. He knows I'm harmless now. He's bigger than me, though that never stopped me from fighting anyone back in the day.

My daughter, Renee, is twelve. Last time she came over, she said the house stinks, and maybe it does. Nobody cleans anymore. Maybe we're hoping the cleaning fairies will come at night. My mother—I don't want us to sound like a bunch of losers, but perhaps it's too late already—is losing her will. She stopped going to church, and she'd always been into the church bigtime. She used to be a Handmaiden of the Altar, one of the ladies who kept the church clean. Now, she can't even vacuum the living room rug. And what do I care, since I can't see the dirt. It smells like old people, Renee said.

My parents used to teach marriage classes at St. Martin's, and my first wife and I were in one of them. When we split up, I doubted my mom and dad for the first time. I should've been doubting myself, but I was doubting them.

I QUIT COLLEGE in the middle of my freshman year. I'd finished fifth in my class at Eight Mile High—everybody'd had high hopes for me. I went away to the University of Michigan, the Big U, best school in the state. High fucking hopes. Thing is, nobody _there_ had those high hopes. I had to earn everything all over again—the respect of classmates, teachers—and I wasn't up to it. My parents took me back, as they always have. _There, there, Brian_. They were devastated, but no one raised a voice to me. My younger sisters pretended I was invisible, and that worked out all right. Nobody called me Brain anymore.

After I'd bailed on college and moved back home, my old friends from the wrestling team didn't bother coming by. They hadn't gone away to school. Most of them were already working at Ford's, so it wasn't like they had time to stop and chit-chat, and what did we have in common anymore? I think they'd put a certain faith in me—that at least one of us was getting out—so why would they want to see me after I'd failed? Why didn't I at least call them to find out what the deal was?

ROUND 1

I did visit two of my old teachers. First, my wrestling coach, Mr. Zeke. I had wrestled at 98 pounds, then 105. I starved myself to make weight. Wearing a rubber suit in the shower room with hot water steaming for hours. Throwing up, enemas—all part of the deal. The little guys at other schools did the same things. Some of the big guys too. When you're still growing, the worst thing you can do is mess with your body like that, I know now. Mr. Zeke, a heavyweight, was built like a truck on steroids. He was Greek, and he looked like a sculpted god. He lifted weights with the team. He roared like a lion when he did the clean and jerk.

When I asked him what I should do, he told me to start over—join the service. He said I'd proved I liked discipline, needed it.

My old history teacher, Mr. Bleach, was quite the stoner. This was back in the seventies when everybody under forty was getting high. Bleach was the advisor for the Outdoors Club, and we'd go on campouts out at Stony Creek and get wasted and talk about God and the stars and pussy. Though when Bleach started talking about being in Vietnam, he got this spur in his voice—like he resented us for being young enough to escape the draft, the war—and we just had to shut up and listen. But he let us drive his purple Barracuda and he had the best dope, so we didn't complain.

Later, I figured out a lot of things, but I still wonder, where were my parents  then, while I was off getting stoned with one of my teachers? How was that in any way okay? Shouldn't they have been paying more attention to me and not to God? Here I am dishing out blame again. I've got large servings for everyone. C'mon, eat up!

My father was big into the church too—one of the first regular guys they let hand out communion. Man, that shit went to his head. Even around the house, he resorted to this low, profound voice he thought must have sounded like God. They both had a thing going with God. I was getting good grades, so it was like, what the hell—they let me do what I wanted.

_It's God's will_ , they used to say all the time. I'm an usher now, believe it or not, though they could be putting IOUs or playing cards in the collection basket, and I wouldn't know. I stand at the end of the pews, touching each one, following them to the back of the church as my basket gets heavier.

Mr. Bleach, the grand leader of the Outdoors Club Adventurers and Potheads, told me to have an adventure—take a year off and hitchhike around the country, then try school again. But I didn't have the money, and my parents had already wasted a semester's worth at the Big U on me.

I told him what Mr. Zeke said about the service, and Bleach said that was the stupidest idea he'd ever heard. Zeke had been a Marine, a volunteer, but he was older—between Korea and Vietnam—and the two of them did not trust each other. I felt like they were fighting over my soul. My parents had their own soul issues. I was the kind of kid who idolized teachers, priests, always trying to please. Just thinking about that rubber suit now makes me want to slice open my skin, let out everything I've held in.

I opted for Plan A and joined the Navy. No war on the horizon. How bad could it be? How could I fail at that, being the obeyer that I was? You might've said the same thing about the Big U—how could I have failed? All I can say is that I felt like somebody changed the speed and everyone was moving twice as fast and I was still doing the Eight Mile High Turtle Walk. I was trying to make weight, but everybody else had already made weight. Everybody else was fifth in their class, or higher.

That can't be true, but it felt true. By Halloween, I was getting dark circles under my eyes that I recognized from when I lost ten pounds in one day. Got pinned in twenty seconds that night. Seems like that's how long college lasted too, even though I managed to stick it out until semester break in December.

I WAS STATIONED in Charleston after basic. I kicked ass in basic because I was a strong little guy with a temper. After I took care of a couple of big, soft bruisers, I had my "high hopes" karma back. I was smarter than most of those bohunks too. So, I thought, a couple years of this and I'll be back in college with some GI benefits and start moving forward again. Got an office job in logistics support, and I thought I was set. Problem was, it was the opposite of college. If you moved _too_ fast, somebody yanked you back and reminded you of some stupid rule you were breaking.

You can torture somebody in the military if you want—I mean your own guys—and get away with it. People say, "I can make you wish you were dead," but I never thought that was possible until I had to deal with Petty Officer (Second Class) Johnson. Johnson was a Southern hick who knew he was never moving forward, so he took pleasure in yanking me back.

I was a good-looking guy and never did put on much weight. I don't know where I got my wacky metabolism, but I'm always pacing, fidgeting, grinding my teeth. I had this curly hair the girls loved, but I also had what people called a "pretty face," and I have to admit, I was vain about my looks. Johnson, a career grinder and an ugly pug, called me his fag-boy college dropout. He was always writing me up for uniform violations, for being a minute late, for mouthing off. Petty. Second class. He was like a mean, bored police officer in a small town with no crime. If there was a war somewhere, he would have gladly sent me there.

Maybe I've been looking for that war ever since. After months of Johnson's bullshit, I did start to break down, but not in the way he wanted me too. Instead of melting into submission, I was shattering. One day, after not  sleeping, I swear, for nearly a week, I went AWOL—caught a Greyhound to Detroit. After a week at my folks'—the house felt like it was sitting on top of a mild earthquake—I knew I had to leave. No one could eat. It was like everyone was trying to make weight for Jesus, or justice, self-punishment or sacrament. They wanted me to turn myself in. If I'd known how little the Navy cared, I would have.

With all the drama I manufactured in my life, it seems like blindness is just part of the deal. I've given up on shrinks and turned my life over to a low-vision specialist who, in my low vision, seems pretty cute. Too young for me—I'm sure they've got some rule. I've got these black spots in the middle of my sight but can still see around the edges a little, and she's not wearing a ring.

Seeing around the edges might have helped me. Seems like I missed all the subtle shit. Living in this musty little house again has made me pretty philosophical. Like I used to be in high school. Oh man, I could lay it on thick. The girls liked that. The ones who could get over me being short. Who didn't pat me on the head like Marsha Johansen did when I was drunk at a high school party. "I'm not your damn dog," I said and shoved her away. She tripped and fell. Then I got in this brawl with Monster Masch, this bruiser who imagined himself her boyfriend. I got the better of him, but he was right—you don't touch a girl like that, and I never have since, as my ex-wives will attest, having nothing to gain by lying about it, given all the other damning evidence against my character as a husband and father.

ROUND 2

"Couldn't break your spirit, could they Roberts?" Bleach said.

I thought about responding, but I wasn't ready to talk. I hadn't contacted Zeke—he might've made a citizen's arrest. He was running for mayor of Hazel Park, the next suburb over from Warren. We called it Hazel-tucky because a ton of Southerners had migrated there to work in the factories. Zeke was  the kind of coach who had his rules, and we all followed them. They hadn't served him well in private life. He had recently married a young blonde from the office at the high school, but there had been other wives, other children before that. Something we ended up having in common—we both come with an expiration date.

After I left my parents' house, I hid out in Bleach's. We were all dramatic about it. He lived in a tiny box on the border of Warren and Detroit near Eight Mile and Van Dyke, home of the oldest bowling alley in metro Detroit, Pastime Lanes, and Wish Bone Books, the only porn palace in Warren, a city of 250,000. They eventually got rid of it by widening the whole damn road so they could use eminent domain or whatever. Man, I wish I could widen a couple of roads—I'd be able to tear down a lot of bad things on the sides. It'd be smooth fucking sailing. Except since I can't drive now, I'd have to have my own private road so I could zigzag all over the place. Maybe they could put up bumpers like they have in the newer bowling alleys to keep me out of the gutters. At the Pastime, you learned the hard way, like I did and continue to do. I'm fifty-one, way too early for this. Maybe if I go completely blind, I'll be able to get a good look at this God dude I've been hearing about for so long.

BLEACH'S GOT THE WHOLE summer off, so he says, "Hey, let's get out of this tiny fucking house in this dull-ass town and see something! On the lam! MPs hot on our trail!" I'd never seen him so jazzed. He'd been pissed off that Zeke got me to enlist, so he was ecstatic to be proven right, and even happier to be with a fugitive. We got in the Barracuda and headed north. We got as far at Carl's Kabins, a group of six shacks on Tea Lake up near Lewiston.

Bleach had lived by himself too long. He claimed he'd been engaged twice. He was a squirrelly little dude. Maybe it was Vietnam, I don't know. I have no authority to go there—I couldn't even handle a Navy desk job.

"It's a mind-body thing with you, Brian," Bleach said. We were sitting at the fire pit at Carl's. "You've never been in balance. You have these two  identities going, and you never figured out how to..." Bleach meshed his fingers together. "Instead, it's always been..." He smashed his fists into each other. I flinched.

"Yeah, well," I said. "In retrospect..."

"No retrospect about it," he said. "Retrospect you right into jail, that's what they'll do. First off, change your name. I did."

"You _picked_ Bleach?"

He shrugged. "I liked the sound. Bleach makes things pure, white, but it can do damage too. Dangerous if swallowed, etcetera...When I came home..." he said, and he didn't have to say from where.

I stirred the fire with a long branch that had blown down in the overnight storm. Carl had burned my fire stick from earlier in the week. Some weird power trip with him. He was Master of the Campfire. But he also looked like the last guy in the world who'd rat out a fugitive. He had some experience with the fugitive life, it turned out.

When he smelled what we were smoking on our screened-in porch during a rainstorm, he came over and offered us a wider range of recreational drugs. He was walking around in the rain like there was no rain, long hair matted to his forehead.

"No campfire tonight," he said. "Nope. No marshmallows and folkyfolksongs." He laughed, moving off toward the lake—to do what, I don't know.

"SO, CHAMPEEN WRESTLER, you want to go at it?" Carl said. We were both drunk. Nobody was staying in the other cabins, and the whole place was bleaker than shit. Carl seemed like he was everywhere, sending off petty officer vibes.

"Don't you have some work to do, man? The cabins are for shit. You should be fixing them up."

I hadn't wrestled since high school, but I knew I could take Carl. He was smiling this wicked little smile that he thought must've scared me.

"Yeah, I guess you're right. All I got here is a couple pervs from the big city."

Carl seemed to assume we were some kind of couple. He always had this little chuckle when he passed us, like we reminded him of some joke. Maybe Bleach was gay, deep on the inside. He had some kind of shit buried inside him, that's for sure.

Me, I was on edge about being a fugitive and ashamed that I hadn't been able to hack college or the Navy. I knew it wasn't because I wasn't smart or tough enough, but it sure looked that way. I've heard of the whole short-man syndrome, that we're hotheads who always have to prove ourselves. I don't think there's a higher percentage of midget psychopaths than any other size group. I'd wager big guys like Carl fit more into the psycho category.

"Yeah," I said. "Let's go at it."

I didn't expect official wrestling rules, but I expected something like the difference between playing hoops on the street versus in a league—a little rougher, but with some basic lines that nobody crossed.

Carl, it became apparent very quickly, had no lines whatsoever. It was Street Fighting 101, which I also knew a few things about, but that took away my advantage in techniques and holds.

First off, he tried to punch me in the face. I managed to duck so he hit the top of my head.

"I thought we were gonna wrestle," I said, circling to his left, in my wrestler's crouch.

"This is how we wrestle around here," he said. "'Wrestle' means no guns, and that's about..."

I dove at his knees and took him down. He landed in the mud with a big thud. I jumped up onto his chest and pinned his shoulders into a puddle.

"Pin," I shouted, thinking that was that.

He spit up into my face, then twisted me off of him and kneed me in the balls. I gasped and curled up in the cold, wet dirt.

"You're a paying customer, so I'll leave it at that," he said. He dusted his hands off in an exaggerated way, like he'd watched too much studio wrestling.  Enraged, in pain, I got up and jumped on his back, then pulled him down in a chokehold while he flailed his arms. I started battering his face with punches while he tried to get back to his feet. He roared like Yosemite Sam, but it did him no good.

His nose was streaming blood, and one of his eyes was swelling shut. He rolled all the way down to the lake, then got to his feet, swaying.

"Should've left it at that." He spat blood.

"You shouldn't have called me out," I said, trying to catch my breath. "You want more, huh, you want more?"

"Should've left it at that," he repeated quietly, then stumbled away up the rutted trail to his cabin near the road where I suspected he had a weapon or two. I hurried back to our place to rouse Bleach, who was asleep in a stoned-out stupor.

We threw our gear in the Barracuda and tried to speed away, but Carl emerged from his screened-in porch with a pipe wrench in his hand and blocked the road. He jumped on the hood and smashed the windshield, tiny pieces of Safe-T-glass sparkling over the front seat. Bleach just sat there. A high school history teacher who got stoned with his students. Pretty pitiful, and I should have seen it.

CARL GOT ME with that wrench.

I've been sitting on that line for a while. This is where I stopped the first time. What part of the story is this? The big climax, the comeuppance? Beneath the blood and pain, what part does it play?

ROUND 3

I lost months to hospitals and rehab, then came out with a permanent flinch. My parents—yes, they took me back then too, for the third time—thought  God was punishing me for going AWOL. Now that I'm going blind from something completely different, they can't figure out a punishment correlation. They're too old to believe this is a test, and I am too old to be tested. My father concerns himself with the nickels and dimes of his sticky bottles and cans.

AWOL from the Navy ended up being a footnote. And when that footnote got cut off the bottom of the page, nobody noticed. I worked a series of factory jobs around Detroit—I couldn't even stick at the Ford plant with my old wrestling buddies and the ghost of my father.

A lot of my friends were guys who just couldn't make it stick with any one woman. After my last marriage, I lived with three different women, all for less than a year—so I'm in that category too. I did find some humility and sincerity, and that was better than finding God when it came to women, so I still did all right in limited doses.

Bleach himself went AWOL, which complicated Carl's trial. I woke up alone in the hospital and never saw him again. He didn't show up back at the school. His house abandoned, foreclosed. For years, I expected him to show up with an ounce of killer weed and an apology. He was a sick man, and I shouldn't have been feeding him.

I flinch.

ZEKE DID SHOW UP eventually. When your parents don't move in fifty years, you're not hard to find. He'd served two terms as mayor of Hazel Park, then resigned. Some hushed-up scandal that he denies. He's retired now and living alone.

"Why'd you come?" I asked. _Blindness leads to bluntness_ —words to live by. I grabbed my blind stick and we headed out for a walk, away from my parents.

"I heard about you," he said. "It's been gnawing at me. I should've come sooner. A lot sooner." He'd shaved his head. No more comb-over.

I didn't ask what he'd heard. I hadn't seen him since going AWOL. We walked in silence. I listed toward his side, nudging him until he had to give me a gentle shove so he didn't end up stumbling off the curb into Eight Mile traffic. We passed the old high school. I saw the gym out of the corner of my eye off to the left.

"Why'd you push us to make weight like that? We were just kids..." I said. We stood at the red light at Eight and Ryan. We had eight lanes to cross. When the light changed, he grabbed my arm and led me across as I waved the stick at hazy shadows.

"Did I push too hard?" he asked as we stepped up the curb on the other side of the road. I shook my head.

"I know I did," he said. "I never learned another way. You don't deserve—" he began, his voice halting, his hand still tight on my elbow. I slumped a little, but cut him off. "C'mon, Coach," I said. "Don't go getting soft on me now. Everybody's getting soft on me, and I can't tell you how sad that makes me. I never learned another way either." I could smell his mint gum, and when he leaned toward me, I could hear his jaws working it. "My problems were all off the mat," I added.

Back at the house, I showed him my expensive magnifier machine. Carl didn't have much money, but I got every cent of it. I just wanted to burn those cabins down, but they had some rules about fires up there.

It took me a long time to realize that people can just find something bigger to hit you with, no matter how strong you are. I suppose that's not the most profound thing in the world, but it sort of went against that whole "survival of the fittest" idea that I'd carried around. Because I thought I was the fittest—the smartest in a school where smarts counted little.

I NEVER WENT BACK to college. I doubt I'll ever work again. Coach had brought some ideas for things I could do written down on a small piece of  paper I couldn't read. My parents wanted him to stay for dinner, though we honestly had nothing in the house to serve him. Luckily, he declined. It was going to be sandwiches and Oreos.

My mother asked me that night, if I had to do it over again, would I have done anything different. We were eating our baloney sandwiches after saying grace. Oh, we still say grace. Wouldn't be the same without grace. Grace—we say it, but how do we find it? We used to say something we were thankful for at the end of the prayer, back when my father was the junior pope and my mother the mother superior.

I had a mouthful of baloney when she asked, and I started laughing till I nearly choked. Everything I wanted to say was mean. I guess I have a ways to go with this blindness thing. A lot of days—and I know this is cruel, wrong—I act like I'm going deaf too, and simply don't answer them. They've stopped repeating their questions. Maybe asking them is enough.

Nobody ever wins a battle for anyone's soul. The soul has its own say.

"FIVE DOLLARS and twenty cents today," my father says, dumping the wadded bills and coins on the table. I kiss him on the forehead. He's keeping track the only way he knows how. He's found his true religion now—everything else just falls away.

Children, I have not forgotten you. I have failed again, glossing over the worst parts. Do not believe that since I've left you out, that you are not part of this story. You are in the blank spaces, in every silence of my daily life.

Believe me, I don't want your pity. Or, don't believe me. Some days I do want pity. Going blind and living with my crazy old parents—crazy enough to still love me. When they're gone, I get the stinky house, my sisters tell me. They'll be a room for you both here, if you ever need it.

Your grandfather handed out communion. Your grandmother cleaned the altar. They taught marriage classes.

Sometimes after a particularly bad day, I sit in the steaming bathtub and close my eyes and pretend I can see again. I remember the simple goal of making weight. The scale did not lie. No doubts, no cheating. The scale said one thing. It gave my weight, the weight of me. I always made weight.

## TARGET PRACTICE

TERRY

I just wanted to shoot somebody, and I did.

Is that true? I didn't know that's what I wanted, but what else could I have wanted?

_Thrill kill_. It's not that simple. At least nobody in this part of prison thinks so. It was a mercy killing, I said once. They all laughed like I was joking, but I'm not sure I was.

Whodunit? I done it. And I didn't so much as get caught as wave my bloody handkerchief at the police so they wouldn't drive on past and miss me.

Those of you hoping for some suspense can relax now, or simply stop reading. Me? I've got all the time in the world. I took a writing class last year. The teacher said, save your best stories for when you get out, write about everything except what got you in here. I asked, what if you ain't getting out? and he said, let 'er rip, my friend.

Anything can be true in here—even innocence. Sometimes, I change the  story to try out a different version that might make more sense—like, hey, I'll turn down this road and see where it goes, as if I could find a way around the gridlock that will forever be my life. Some version that might allow me to walk into a rest stop and order a cheeseburger and eat it without throwing up.

I WAS NOT THE ONE IN Scouts who pulled wings off flies or shot birds with BB guns. That'd be my older brother, Bruce. I watched, and no one cared to comment on my watching. We were supposed to read _Lord of the Flies_ in ninth grade, but I never did. I have read it since. I expected there to be more pages at the end, that it was just the first part of something longer...What if there's no lesson at the end? What if you're stuck on a street corner waiting for a bus, your hands in your pockets—it's winter, and your ears are freezing—and that bus never comes? What if you get rescued from the island but you're still on the island?

I'M BIGGER THAN BRUCE, but I never picked up that way he carried himself, the whiff of menace he gave off in his eyes, in his stance, the instant fuse of his rage. Like our father. Me, I had to kill someone to get that kind of buffer. If I could kill any poor soul, randomly and without motive, then what was I capable of? Even the other killers give me a pass.

EVERYBODY KNEW THE GUY in Schank Park who sold guns. He sat at a bench in the back behind the cracked, netless tennis courts with his posse of neighborhood chumps. They appeared and disappeared through the trees so easily that no one strayed back there without a gun or a desire to purchase one. The city had thinned the trees to provide less cover, but the Gun Man and his friends just got thinner, more elusive, snaking through the grass, hiding behind the few large trees that were left, which had been there since  before Warren was even a city. Before the factories came and sent our fathers into permanent detention.

THE THIRD PERSON

"How about a beer?" the man asked.

"Before I kill you?" Terry said. It hadn't occurred to him that he'd have to shoot the man again. It'd taken everything to pull the trigger the first time. He could use another beer himself. His hands shook, his fingers numb. His breath halting, labored, almost as if he'd shot himself.

The man groaned, and Terry took that as a yes. His 16-ounce PBR cans sat sweating on the hood of the car, three of the circles in the six-pack carrier already empty. The man leaned sideways against a tree trunk, tilted over his wound, his hand pressed against it to stanch the flow of blood or ease the pain or simply to cover it so he did not have to look.

Terry reached over and pulled out two beers, leaving the last one, a twisted plastic veil draped over it. One that became evidence, never drunk by anyone.

The cans were lukewarm. He considered tossing one at the guy but decided that'd be cruel. He walked over and crouched down next to him. He even lifted the pull tab. The can foamed up, and beer dripped over his fingers.

"Here you go," Terry said. He gently handed the can over like he was giving medicine to a patient, or water to a man dying of thirst, when it was really just torture.

"Thanks," the man said. "You're a real pal. A real humane motherfucker."

REWIND

The man began to cry. "Hey, you want a beer? Terry asked. "It can be like in those firing-squad movies. A last cigarette, that kind of thing."

"Thanks," the man said. "You're a real pal. A real humane motherfucker."

Terry started to say something. The gun, stuffed into the back of his pants, formed a hard lump against his lower back, chafing his skin. When he stood, it shifted to the side, and he reached back to grab it, dropping his own beer, then he pulled out the gun and fired another wild shot that missed everything. The man stopped crying.

FLASHBACK

They'd camped in Stony Creek Metropark at the closest Scout camp to the city.

At Terry's first campout, and Bruce's last, their father was a chaperone—the one and only time. Terry joined Scouts right when his family was quitting on him. He remembered his father, slicked-back hair, his eyes webbed with strings of fire, standing outside the tents, smoking, apart from the other fathers. The scoutmaster, Mr. Buck, in his official uniform and red beret, looked like an adult playing Army in a situation comedy where no one got killed, where the situation of war was steadfastly avoided.

A cool May morning, but his father wore a bright white T-shirt and tight jeans— _his_ uniform. His father knew nothing about the woods. A kind of prison to him—bugs, poison ivy, unruly branches, the chaos of overgrown paths.

Terry thought they should've buried his father dressed like that—like a man. Not in some stiff suit Minski's provided for a ridiculous price. His father in a tie? One more humiliation. He'd landed on concrete during a fight in the parking lot outside Leo's—hit his head on just the right spot, like somebody'd pressed a _kill_ button. The guy only got a couple of years—involuntary manslaughter—and was soon back on the street. Somewhere. Terry imagined him bragging in bars, "Yeah, it's true, I killed a man." He wanted to find him, to know who'd taken his father's life. He was sure his father had slipped. No one could kick his father's ass.

BRUCE

Our father wasn't the monster Terry makes him out to be. Blame your father for the crime? _My father didn't love me, so I took it out on the world?_ Butch Howard was no better or worse a father than any other man in Shilo—Shilo Road Estates—the trailer park we grew up in. Don't get me started on the whole trailer park shit. I think we lived there simply because old Butch was too much of a lazy fuck to keep up a house—mow grass, shovel snow, do household repairs. Nah—that'd mess up his perfect hair. Butch was the kind of guy we call a Peacock Rooster. Tough like a rooster, but always fastidious about his appearance. It's not like greasers have immunity to vanity. I say this as a lifelong greaser myself.

The problem with Butch is that he died too young, and that fact—him being dead—that's what fucked up Terry. Not me, but Terry. I tried to be The Man for him, in the Butch Howard style, but it was like Terry took one sip of spoiled milk, and that ruined him for the rest of his life. He never had—what you call it—resiliency.

THE THIRD PERSON

Terry could smell the beer as if he'd been injected with it. He took a quick guzzle from his own can.

The man took a slow sip, like he knew he'd never do anything fast ever again. "Why'd you do it, son?"

"I'm not your son," Terry said.

" _My_ son would never kill a defenseless..." The man stopped and gulped air. He looked at Terry with the dead-on stare he remembered from the teachers at school when he hadn't done his homework.

"You're not dead yet. Drink up, dude." Terry felt like this "last beer" thing  was something from a TV show, a sly stall while waiting for help to come—yet it had been his idea. Maybe _he_ wanted help to come?

No, he had to kill the man. On TV, the stars never died, just the guest stars. He was the star of this show, however briefly it lasted.

"Just leave. Take my car, money, whatever...I won't turn you in."

"You ever see a show where the guy who says he's not gonna tell _doesn't_ tell?"

Terry thought of his pensive mother in the kitchen that morning wanting to know, wasn't he going to be late for work? She'd touched his arm, and he'd flinched. Then, she'd flinched.

HE WAS NINETEEN, and he'd just shot a man. He could have just stolen the guy's car and wallet, let him crawl back to the main road, but robbery wasn't his motive. His motive was an elusive worm inching through his brain, disappearing down some deep crevice. Terry was falling down that crevice, but his motive had a head start.

IN GRADE SCHOOL at St. Martin's, they had to do these worksheets—draw lines between things that went together: mailbox, mailman; dog, leash; cow, milk; rain, umbrella. Terry sat on the hood of the car watching as the slouched man awkwardly slurped his beer. He tried to draw a line between man and gun, but it didn't make sense. He could draw a line between gun and anyone, and all the lines could be right, or all could be wrong.

Where would he be at the end of this story problem? Solve for _x_. It was too late for a solution. Terry laughed, but it felt hollow, fake, like the laugh was costing him something. He was _x_.

"GET A BETTER GUN," the man said. "Real killers don't use toys like what you got."

"So you know all about it?" Terry said. "Guy with a bullet in his gut, and he's giving me advice on fucking guns." The man seemed like he could survive for hours, eventually bleeding to death if nobody found him.

"I do...I do _fucking_ know all about it," the man said.

"So tell me then," Terry said.

"OKAY, I'M GONNA do it now," Terry said, looking away from the man. The cloudy sky was shifting from gray to black.

"I don't give a damn. I drank your cheap beer and listened to your bullshit. Look, it's your funeral, son. You might think—"

Terry fired three shots at the man's head. He was stunned by the piercing sound after all the quiet tension. And the gun's kick. Such a little gun, yet...

TERRY

When we were kids, we used to go to this amusement park with an attraction called Noah's Ark, this big boat that rocked back and forth as you walked through it, knocking you down if you didn't anticipate, if you didn't sway against the motion. Bruce and I loved Noah's Ark. Even after we outgrew it, we'd still go on it just to make ourselves laugh like kids. To have a reason to be unbalanced, to stumble through the exit to safety, firm ground finally beneath us, to catch our breaths.

THE THIRD PERSON

The Gun Man laid out three clean, shiny weapons on an oily cloth on the picnic table.

"Take your pick."

Terry had given him $250 in dirty, wadded bills he'd been stashing in his cigar box of memories.

"WHO TOOK THIS PICTURE?" Terry asked his mother, rifling through the small shopping bag of old snapshots she kept on a shelf above the fridge. He held up a photo of his father blowing smoke rings on the trailer's concrete slab with his Uncle Ralph, a longneck beer dangling from his fingers.

"I did," she said. "Your father didn't like getting his picture taken, but your uncle loves getting his picture taken."

"Can I have it?" he asked, still rummaging through the bag, not looking at her. No one saved much in that tiny trailer.

She was flipping through channels with the remote. "Can I?" he asked again, turning to see her fling out her free hand as if she didn't care.

TERRY'S CIGAR BOX contained ticket stubs from ball games and rock concerts, Scout badges and pins, a steel ball bearing, a certificate from the one year he played football, and that photo.

HE PICKED UP EACH GUN and held it in his hand and pretended to aim it into the woods.

"C'mon, pick one," the Gun Man said. "This ain't like the candy store, kid."

Terry still stood, as if all the guns were loaded, aimed at him. "They all got your fingerprints on them now, just take one. Take that .22 there." He gestured to the first gun, and Terry was grateful, since he didn't know a .22 from a .45 from an elephant rifle.

He picked it up and slipped it into a pocket of his jean jacket. Its weight pulled the jacket down into an awkward twist at his neck.

"Just don't kill anyone with it," the Gun Man said, forcing a laugh. "Man, that joke never gets old..."

"WHAT'S NEW WITH TORTURE TROOP?" Bruce asked. Terry was in his Scout uniform, his red sash dotted with five round merit badges.

"Torture Troop?" Terry asked.

"You've never been to summer camp—you'll find out." Terry had been looking forward to summer camp, the annual week-long campout at Stony Creek. His official canvas Scout backpack had been loaded and ready to go for weeks.

They were digging into a KFC Family Pack—mashed potatoes, gravy, biscuits, and slaw—at the card table where they ate all their meals. Their mother worked as a sales clerk at Stan's over on Eight Mile, the border between Detroit and Warren, a short walk from Shilo.

Shilo was clean and well maintained, not like Beaumont (Bone Mart, Bruce called it, with its rutted roads, weeds, and collective trash), the park a half mile away down on Warner behind Leo's, which was now the Eight Miles High. No matter what they called it, it was still where their father had died.

"Don't go scaring him," their mother said. Coleslaw dressing rimmed her mouth. She looked like a half-mad clown. "Just because it didn't work for you."

"What's that mean, _work_ for me?" Bruce asked. He threw a bone across the room into the open trashcan.

"You've got an answer for everything," their mother said, "but that don't make it the right answer."

Bruce turned to Terry. "Summer camp's not for amateurs—you're getting initiated, and I won't be around to make it all fun and games. Keep your knife on you. It ain't just for whittling. And no crying to the grownups, or it's all over."

"Bruce, it's Scout camp," their mother said, "not your motorcycle gang."

"Ma, first of all, it's a club, not a gang. What I'm saying, it's all the same. They torture crybabies and whiners. They make them eat dirt and piss their pants."

Their mother shoved herself away from the table and slammed the trailer door behind her to have a cigarette out on their slab, her nightly routine.

AFTER GRADUATION, Terry got a landscaping job in Shilo, and they'd kept him on part time to shovel snow and fling salt in the winter. It was spring again, and he was back on full time, trimming bushes, weeding, cleaning up brush. He'd planted tulip bulbs in the fall, and was now half embarrassed at his pride in their blooming. In Scouts, he'd earned a merit badge in gardening.

"You could at least grow some pot and make yourself useful," Bruce had kidded him. "Supplement your income."

"The nicest trailer park in Warren," Cliff, the property manager, told everyone, and when Terry was working to maintain the clean, neat, even lines of the sidewalks with either an edger or a snow shovel, he swelled with an image of a future he could imagine, one of simple order and clarity.

TERRY

I don't like using his name, so I'll just tell you once: Timothy Zelinski. I don't even know who should be telling this story to make it seem real with the emotional stuff. That's the thing with murder. How do you get people to calm down enough to pay attention and listen to something besides the blood dripping?

THE THIRD PERSON

Terry couldn't find the car keys. Now that the man was dead, Terry didn't want to go near him. Weeds and brush grew high and thick where he had pulled the car in after unhooking the chain that barred access to the Scout camp's two-track. He bent down and patted the cold, damp ground, but in the dimming light, he could find nothing but a crushed, rusty Coke can and a cracked, red plastic lighter. A breeze hit his skin, and he shivered.

"FINISH WHAT YOU START," his father told him when Terry had come home crying after a fight with a neighbor boy, Gerard. Terry had teased him about his name, so Gerard punched him.

"You started it. Now go back and finish it."

He returned to Gerard's, but Gerard apologized for hitting him, and they started playing together again.

Terry thought no one would believe he was capable of doing what he did, but even his own mother did not doubt his guilt.

NO CRICKETS OR MOSQUITOES in April, but swarms of gnats buzzed around his head. He approached the dead man, bending down beneath the tree.

"Do you love me?" he asked. He could say anything now, night closing in, as he carefully felt the man's pockets for anything sharp like keys. "You love me now, don't you, dead man?"

SHILO WAS ONE LONG ROAD that looped back and around, and back and around, trailers angled on each side of the street like train cars or Legos. At school, the kids called it the Nice Trailer Park, as opposed to the "Bone Mart."

SINCE HIS MOTHER HAD no car, Terry had learned to drive in his brother's rusty old Grand Prix, a big, roomy ride they called "The Love Boat." He'd borrowed it nearly a year ago to take Evie to the prom. Evie, who'd offered herself to him, who asked what was wrong when he shrugged off her kisses, who got out and walked home when he asked, "Did my brother pay you?"

BRUCE WORKED AT FORD'S, and he was going to try to get Terry in. Terry had been inside the plant once with his father, and he never wanted to go  back. The mad noise and frantic pace, the anonymous men in goggles and earphones and identical coveralls, the darkness and oily filth, left him with a bad sweat and a nauseous tremble. Everyone said you got used to it. Terry preferred living at home in the tiny trailer with the old dust and odors that suggested nothing would ever change.

Bruce had a place of his own now, a tiny apartment he shared with two high school buddies on the Detroit side of Eight Mile where rent was cheap. He had a car and a motorcycle, and he was even dropping a few dollars on his mom to help with the bills.

THAT APRIL FRIDAY was sunny and cool. Perfect. The kind of day to skip school and drive out to Stony Creek and get high, but he wasn't in school anymore, and what friends he had were working at Ford's.

Why couldn't he live forever with his mother in that small trailer? He put on his jean jacket and dropped the pistol in one inside pocket and the box of bullets in the other to balance out the weight. He'd bought a box of fifty rounds at Warren Guns on Eight Mile.

He walked up to Ryan Road and started heading away from Detroit with his thumb out, knowing the further he got from Detroit, the more likely someone would pick him up. Not many people hitchhiked anymore, but Terry was unthreatening—clean-cut, white.

BRUCE

Uncle Ralph disappeared shortly after our father died, then disappeared further after Terry was arrested. He'd been with our father that night, and, drunk himself, offered no assistance. When I visited Terry in prison before the trial, he kept asking, "Where's Uncle Ralph?" As if that would've made a difference. He left no forwarding address. He was real interested in our  father's will until he found out our father had no will and nothing in the bank—a guy living in a trailer park, and his own brother thinks he's going to inherit millions. Ralph was even borrowing money from me until I wised up. The old man wasn't a saver, but he held down a job, and that was more than Ralph ever did.

"Where's Uncle Ralph?" Terry asked again, and I would've smacked him, but I had no interest in joining him in prison.

Uncle Ralph—I can't prove anything, but he should be in jail as some kind of accomplice.

THE THIRD PERSON

It took Terry a month to get up the nerve to buy bullets, and now he was eager to use them. He knew he had to practice shooting somewhere, and he remembered the rifle range at Scout camp where they'd shot at targets under the close supervision of Mr. Buck. Terry had never wanted to be a minister, but he briefly imagined himself as an Eagle Scout, which was seen as the same kind of crazy in their neighborhood.

BRUCE CALLED HIS OWN GUN the Great Equalizer and kept it under the front seat of the Grand Prix. He was on friendly terms with the Gun Man. Those he wasn't on friendly terms with feared him, and for Bruce, it was kind of the same thing. He had frequented the park himself for a time, picking up some postsecondary education, until Ford called his number, as it would for Terry if he stuck around. And what would he do then? The only place to hide was in the woods, and the woods were disappearing.

Sometimes when Bruce let him drive, Terry reached under the seat to feel the gun's smooth, cool weight.

TERRY

I got five merit badges before I quit Scouts: gardening, rifle shooting, wood carving, traffic safety, and plumbing. My Uncle Ralph was an on-again off-again plumber, depending on how much he was drinking. He came over a lot right after my dad died. Bruce said he just wanted to fuck us over, and that disgusted me. I don't think Uncle Ralph wanted to fuck anyone, and that's why he drank so much. He helped me get that plumbing merit badge.

THE THIRD PERSON

Terry felt a numb sadness after graduation. He'd met with his school counselor about his future plans. The counselor handed him a Ford application and asked him if he wanted to buy a class ring.

WOULD THE MAN FALL BACK and disappear completely into the earth? Not any time soon. Terry shooed at the gnats. The only dead person he'd been this close to was his father—in Minski's Funeral Home, where they made it all fake.

He had neither shovel nor the will to bury the man.

HIS PLAN HAD BEEN to practice shooting at the range, then hitch home before dark. The kids who were skipping school to hang out and get high at the small lake had taken him as far as the nearly deserted beach parking lot. Two guys, two girls, passing a joint, almost delirious with what they were doing. They'd let him squeeze in the back seat somewhere between Ten and Eleven Mile.

"Join the party, man," the driver said.

Staring out the window, Terry squinted into the sun, wishing he felt a little of their stupid joy, but it was rushing out the open window away from him. They could have been from Warren Woods or Eight Mile, his old school, but it did not matter—he was from Elsewhere, an alien adrift, floating in between spaceships, hoping somebody might open a hatch and let him in.

TERRY STOOD ON A YELLOW line in the parking lot, trying to remember how to find the Scout camp. Almost nostalgic for the thrill of small-time consequences, of getting caught skipping school, he watched the kids walk away toward the grassy lakeshore. Then he saw the man get out of his car, a white LeBaron sedan. He waved to Terry. "Beautiful day," he said.

Nobody greeted each other like that in the trailer park or in school or on the street. Terry was embarrassed by the man's strange cheer, and even more embarrassed when the man approached him as he shifted uneasily in the middle of the parking lot. Why'd anyone want a white car? Shows every little smudge.

"Got a light?" the man asked.

"No," Terry said. "Don't smoke." He knew he smelled like pot. So what?

TERRY

Some stories write themselves, and other stories erase themselves. This story has been slowly erasing itself. Nine years now. I started erasing it just to make myself appear less of an idiot. _Murder_. That was enough. _I stole a guy's car, robbed him, killed him_. I erased down to the hard nub of that, tearing through the paper, but in prison—well, everyone had holes in their papers.

The news called it a _thrill kill_. They loved the part about the last beer. Something twisted about that—they fed off it, keeping the story going through the brief trial.

"You're a crazy motherfucker," Bruce said, "and that's your best defense." He paid for my lawyer and the psychiatric evaluation. The jury didn't buy the insanity thing, but I do think the report from the shrink helped a little—apparently, while not insane, I was pretty fucked up, according to the smug little dude. With no prior criminal history—hell, I was almost still a minor—I got an indeterminate life sentence. Life, with a chance-in-hell of parole, but still, better than no chance at all. _In theory_ , I could get out, but every chance they get, the man's family shows up and talks about what a great guy he was and what he'd be doing if he were alive. Let's skip all that, okay? I'm not trying to cop a plea here. Never was.

My lawyer, the attorney for my brother's motorcycle club, The Spoilers, made my father look like a loser. He was very convincing. Uncle Ralph was unable to be located, though he'd have made a good character witness for me.

MY FATHER DIES just from falling on cement, and this guy wouldn't die from a clean shot at close range. I thought it'd be like flipping a switch, but the body's more complicated than that.

THE NAMELESS MOTHER

The mother must have her say. The blind soap opera addict who never learned to cook. Who fell in love with a handsome man who died a handsome man and left me to raise two boys.

He should have died sooner. The way I see it, he was already infected. So when Terry did that thing that got him in prison, I just said a prayer and shrugged, or shrugged then said a prayer. It seems forever ago. And now that I can't see, the one face that comes back to me is Terry's the first time I saw him in jail—like a combination of hatred and not caring. He seemed almost  relieved that he'd done something so awful and unforgivable that no one could help him, not even his big brother who spent all that money trying.

Ah, Terry. I wish he could've broken my heart, but his father did that a long time ago, and I'd never been up to mending it. You might think I'd be a bigger part of this story, but all reports suggest otherwise.

When you're blind, you can't see the error of your ways. _God help me_ , that was my prayer. It's still my prayer. No fixing it now. _Me_. God help _me_.

TERRY

Since I've been out of prison, I...

When I get out of prison...

"WHAT'S YOUR NAME, KID?" the man asked.

I laughed. "Even I'm not that stupid. 'What's your name?' Good one, dude."

"GET OUT OF THE CAR," I said.

"The car's all yours," the man said. "And as far as a quarter-tank of gas will get you."

He sounded chipper, as if he was happy to be getting rid of it. "Your wallet too," I said.

He pulled it out and casually tossed it in my direction. "Pick it up and hand it to me," I said. I lifted the gun and waved it at him. The weight made my arm wobble. He walked forward and reached down, handing the wallet to me like I was a dog on a chain and he didn't want to get close enough to get nipped.

"IT'S NOT AS EASY as you think," he said. "Killing a man. An unarmed man."

"I'm not thinking one way or another, mister," I said. "I wouldn't have shot you in the first place if you hadn't tried to run."

"If you were thinking, you would've let me go. Saved a couple of lives...Wouldn't you run if you were me?"

"Are you a school teacher?" I asked. It was the kind of complicated question that teachers asked, in that superior way that teachers have.

"I'm a Vietnam vet," he said. "I shot men for a living. Now, I drive around parks and admire the scenery, not worrying about assholes like you ambushing me."

THE THIRD PERSON

Terry sighed. "Every fucked-up guy says he was in Vietnam. My old man said he was a Vietnam vet, and it turns out the closest he got was Germany."

"Why don't we talk to your dad about what you're doing now?"

"Is that one of those rhetorical questions? Man, you gotta be a teacher, talking shit like that." Terry had played the dead father card in high school, and it sometimes cut him some slack, but he didn't want to go there with the man he just shot. What was the payoff in that?

TIME WAS SAGGING, and the man was sagging. Terry had picked up the six-pack at Jolly Giant Party Store and stuck it in his backpack. He'd even stuck a freezer pack in there before he left the house, one that his mom used to stick in with his school lunch to keep the bologna from turning rancid. He had planned ahead—shoot a gun, drink some beers. He was going on a date with himself, a vacation day from his routine life.

He wanted his brother Bruce the gangster to show him how to shoot a  handgun. But he'd just laugh at Terry. He might try to take the gun away, and what would Terry do but give it up? He'd shot a man now, and the beer had no satisfaction in it. The bubbles unsettled him.

He'd had cornflakes for breakfast. Generic corn flakes, not the rooster flakes, not the tiger flakes. He burped, and the man opened his eyes, then closed them.

TERRY

I knew the guy wasn't no Vietnam vet, and I was glad of it. They would've given me the death penalty for killing a vet. He wasn't a teacher either. He sold fucking car insurance for one of those discount places. Divorced. Had a son.

I WISHED BRUCE AND I were sitting around a campfire somewhere, crickets chirping in the night. I was hungry and not hungry. Hungry, but I felt like puking. I knew I wasn't going to cry, but I might puke. I hadn't cried since summer camp.

THE THIRD PERSON

Terry's chest was hollowing out, something excavating from the inside. He had finally done something. Something horrible and colossal and stupid that made his thirst unquenchable. The beer wasn't cold enough, and the day wasn't warm enough. The man had not moved in a while.

"HOW'S THAT LAST BEER?"

"It's not my last beer. My family will find me. This won't kill me...Say the gun went off accidentally. Lousy shot. If you wanted...to kill me, you would've shot me in the head...Any soldier knows that."

"Maybe I shot you in the gut just to make you suffer. Before I...you know...finish you off." Terry was feeling almost shy around the man, on the verge of apologizing.

"YOU DON'T TALK MUCH, do you?"

"My family's not big on talking..."

"Pretend we're on a plane going down. What would you say? If you're going to kill me, you can tell me anything."

Terry laughed. "Man, your plane's going down, that's for sure. You could tell me anything too, and it wouldn't make no difference."

"There's nobody else here," the man said, suddenly angry. "What's the point?"

AT EIGHT MILES HIGH, Bruce slumped over the bar. He hadn't stopped in since his brother killed a man. He felt like the neighborhood had his back, lashing out at reporters who were calling Terry the "Trailer Park Killer," snooping around, disparaging Shilo as a white-trash haven. He didn't know why people had it in for trailer parks. He'd liked the people there but had moved out because the trailer itself made him claustrophobic, trapped. He felt bad about leaving Terry there with his mom, and he felt even worse now.

People were buying him beers, but no one was talking to him. Seemed like that was the way it had to be. Bruce had seen stories on TV—he told his mother not to read the paper or watch the news or go outside without him, but Bruce could not help himself, and maybe his mother couldn't either. He didn't particularly like stopping by to see her even before the murder, and he liked stopping by afterwards even less, running the frenzied gauntlet, chasing away reporters. Not much shelter in trailer parks—that's why tornadoes love  them. His sniveling Aunt Grace, their mother's sister, had taken charge—drawn by the cheap thrill of it all. Every time Bruce called, she answered. He was trying to figure out her angle—how could she make money off all this pain? Who could she sell her story to? He was happier visiting Terry in prison than visiting his mother at home. Maybe _happy_ 's not the right word.

When he left the bar, three untouched beers were still sitting in front of him, going flat. He couldn't stop thinking about the dead guy drinking his last one. Why did Terry tell that to anyone?

"YOUR BROTHER ALWAYS sounded a little strange, but man, what the fuck?" Bruce's lover, Gina, said. "I mean, what...the...fuck!"

She hadn't said a word while they got undressed and made their usual urgent yet perfunctory love, but now that she was putting her clothes back on, there was no risk in spoiling the mood. She had to leave soon, before her children came home from school.

Bruce was working afternoons, so their affair worked out for them both. She came over a couple of times a week, often waking him up to jump his bones. Her husband Ted worked days, and drank before work, at work, and after work. He was a vague, boring presence in her life who paid the bills. Bruce never drank at work, just afterwards. That was a line in the plant—those who worked stoned or drunk, and those who hit the bar after work, then slept it off. There wasn't much else, though a few religious souls managed to stay sober all the time. Bruce had his doubts about whether Terry could hack the factory. Now, he'd have to hack prison. You couldn't quit prison.

Bruce didn't want anything more than what he had with Gina. It'd been two years, and he liked the casual arrangement, but soon after the arrest, she stopped coming by. She claimed it felt wrong all of a sudden. Bruce doubted her, but didn't bother calling her on it—who knew how many lies she'd told her husband, and if Bruce's brother being a murderer freaked her out, who could blame her?

TERRY

Bruce was my one constant visitor, checking in, making sure the lawyer did his job. He was acting all mature and responsible, trying to work the system to help me. He didn't wear his motorcycle colors to court. In fact, he bought us both suits, and we wore them every day of the trial like we were in the club all the lawyers belonged to, though we didn't fool anyone.

After sentencing, Bruce drifted off. I think he finally had to admit I was guilty and be disgusted like everybody else.

BRUCE

Some people made a big deal about me being in a motorcycle club, when in my experience it's similar to being in Scouts. Immature guys, casual cruelty. Cussing. The drugs were better, sure, and we sometimes got women to ride with us, etc., etc., but most of the time, not much different. Life is pretty simple. I think even Terry understands that.

TERRY

I keep hammering nails, and they keep bending instead of going in. Am I seeing things crooked? I want to hit it clean, knock it in with one hard smash, but life's not like that.

I want to say, this nail is what I did, and it's not going anywhere, that it's flush against the wood, smooth as it's ever going to be, that I'm never going to trip over it, never tear open the raw edges again. I want to say...

_I' LL GIVE YOU A REASON to cry_. The prosecutor said I felt no remorse. I felt  plenty of remorse, but I was nineteen, and my remorse was for myself. Was I missing some crucial element? If I'd just waited a few years, then shot the man, maybe I would've understood. If I had to do it over again, I believe I'd have still shot him, or someone like him. I would've just waited a few years so I'd be able to understand it better. Put it into the context of more of a life. It's like I pulled the curtain down in the middle of a play, then tried to stick my head out and look at the audience, but the curtain was steel.

I SHOULD HAVE SHOT MYSELF INSTEAD. That's the thought I've had more than any other. But I wasn't suicidal—that never occurred to me. I never felt that unhappy. Did I?

I GET OUT OF THE CAR, watching the high school kids walk off—slo-mo, rewind, slo-mo, rewind. I got a six-pack and a gun and some bullets. I put one bullet in the gun in the deserted bathroom by the deserted beach, deserted parking lot. Like somebody warned everybody except those high school kids that some shit was going to go down.

HIGH SCHOOL STONERS

"He seemed cool. Not crazy or nothing. We wouldn't have picked him up if he looked nuts."

"He looked like any other dude in Warren. Wasn't giving off any danger vibes. If anything, he seemed almost wholesome."

"He was quiet. We asked where he was going. He said, 'Stony.' We said, 'Cool. We're going there too.'"

"He said, 'I'm going to the Scout camp.' Somebody said, like a joke, but serious too, 'Dude, aren't you a little old for Scouts?' And he said, 'You're never  too old for Scouts. I'm gonna earn me some merit badges.' Like a joke too, but we thought it was weird. I was kind of relieved when he left at the beach."

THE THIRD PERSON

Terry was exhausted—numb, wobbly. He struggled to keep his head up. He knew he should drive away, but instead he curled up on the front seat of the car. It smelled like the man. He fell into a fast, dreamless sleep and woke to the sound of sirens.

THE SCOUTS WERE supposed to be asleep in the old canvas house tents that smelled like years of teenage-boy funk along with must and mold. Scoutmaster Buck and the other leaders slept in a separate tent at the front of the campsite. Terry wasn't asleep. He knew something was up. So did the other tenderfoots.

"YOUR BIG BROTHER ain't here to protect you, Howard. I'm gonna do you like he did me." It was Big Mike King, of the infamous King brothers who all ended up in prison for first-degree stupidity.

Big Mike was only big in a scout kind of way, smoking cigarettes, cussing, telling lies about girls. He had no imagination—not like Bruce, who others followed like he was a priest for bad behavior. Big Mike was a simulated re-creation of a tough guy like Bruce, not the real thing.

TERRY LIKED RIDING in a car with the windows down—all that wind swirling around his head. On the way to Stony, he was half hanging out the window. He held his hand in the air, and the wind pushed it up as if he were raising  his arm to answer a question the sky had asked. He didn't know the answer. He was just pretending.

Lying in his cell some nights, he missed the wind more than anything.

TERRY LIKED THE MONOPOLY BOARD and all its paraphernalia, but he did not like the game itself, upending the board when Bruce was winning.

Terry liked merit badges, though he knew he wasn't supposed to care. Their Scout troop was like school—anyone who did well, who cared too much, got taken down. His mother sewed the badges on his red sash, the five colorful circles he had earned. He kept a folder of photos of handsome young men, torn from magazines, under his thin mattress, and he'd comb his hair to look like theirs, alone in the mirror, wiping off steam after a shower. He thought he looked like his father.

Terry liked the room he shared with Bruce, and his brother's meticulously built model airplanes that hung from the ceiling on fishing line, and he was quietly pleased that Bruce left them behind when he moved out. His brother worked on motorcycles and cars now. Terry knew Bruce could've done better in school if he'd wanted to—he got Bs and Cs without even trying. Terry had to work for his Cs. He could only focus a few minutes at a time, then he'd be up flipping channels, getting a snack, or just walking the trailer park road, patrolling alone like a bored retiree.

Terry liked Evie, who he met one night while walking—she lived on the other end of the Shilo loop. Evie, his one and only girlfriend. To call her a girlfriend might be stretching things, since Evie was not particular about her displays of affection, but Terry had called her his girlfriend often, and he insistently stopped by her trailer to talk until she refused to come to the door, even just to tell him to get lost. That's why he was so surprised when she agreed to go to the prom.

"OKAY, BOYS," BIG MIKE SAID. Two other older guys grabbed Terry's arms. He knew not to resist. They wrestled him to the ground and gave him a pink belly, Indian burns, titty twisters. Terry stared straight up at the sky and tried to endure, to connect stars to form an outline of a man like his father, but it was useless—they blurred together into searing tears.

Big Mike had disappeared from view, but he came back with a bucket. The others backed away, and he heaved the contents on Terry: rotten food, piss, shit. "Something special for ya, crybaby," Mike said, and the others laughed and ran.

Terry knew he was safe then, that no one would touch him covered in shit. He rolled over in the grass to rid himself of as much as he could. He retched, then rolled over some more. He ran down the dark path to the lake, stepping on something sharp, stumbling, carrying on, till he reached the shore and fell in.

He was done with Scouts forever, stuck on five merit badges, which he later tore off and placed in his cigar box.

HE WONDERED WHERE that path was now. The garbage-and-shit smell had lingered on his skin, in his hair, but finally faded. The blood smell of the man would be with him always.

THEY'D SEEN THEIR FATHER baptized in a river in West Virginia on a trip to visit his grandmother and an uncle who still lived there. His grandma wanted the boys baptized too, but his father said, "The river will be here when they need it. I need it now, not them." Terry knew it had done his father no good, but wondered if it would've made a difference in his own life to have everyone think he was blessed for just one day.

BRUCE

Where does this story end? It never ends. Sometimes I almost wish Terry had shot _me_. Maybe it would've at least made more sense. After all, Cain slew Abel. Or is it the other way around? We never were churchgoers. Not only was it frowned upon, it was not allowed. I think our father saw it as a concession, a sign of weakness, to kneel for anyone or anything. It was a concession he was desperate enough to make just once, and to God. And our mother—after he died, it was easy for her to blame the God none of us believed in. Somebody owed us something for the pain, and if there was a God, he was a welsher.

I know it's Terry's story, but he was never good with the truth. He always believed what he believed, even when the facts were there in firm, dark letters chiseled onto gravestones. He's probably got himself convinced he never even shot the guy, or it was self-defense, or he thought the gun wasn't loaded, or somebody tricked him.

Yeah, somebody tricked him into believing in life without consequences. I truly don't know what he believes now, having abandoned him to his cell over at the federal pen in Milan, about fifty miles away. He's now a goofy, tattooed motherfucker drawing pictures of Jesus and writing fairy tales of parole. I haven't seen him in years. I used to drive our mother out to visit, but she's half-blind and moves with a walker, so phone calls do the job.

TERRY

Have you personally held a gun in your hand? Have you ever shot one? Have you ever loved somebody, and each piece of love was like a bullet?

AFTER WORK ON THURSDAY, Cliff hands me this envelope.

"Who's writing me a love letter?" I ask, kind of joking. It had been a beautiful day, one of those days you want to get your hands dirty.

"Better read it, son," he says.

"I'm not your son," I say.

THEY LET ME GO. The park had been sold to the guy who owned the Bone Mart. So, that Friday, I wasn't really taking a day off. The future had been given to me again—sudden, empty, dull. So dull, I couldn't even cut myself on it.

I loved the smell of cut grass. "Who'll do the mowing then?" I asked.

Cliff couldn't say, but whoever it was, I'd be watching them, sitting in the trailer listening to the roar and spit of the mower. I imagined all the new stuff growing and me having to watch—like I was banished from my own garden. I am _not_ a thrill killer.

MY GOD IS THE GOD of Last Resort. And that's the best God there is. Trust me on that. Or, better yet, don't.

TERRY'S MISSIVE

Dear Brother Bruce,

Remember when they dumped garbage and shit on me at summer camp? No, you don't. You weren't there. You were the avenging angel, and I was sent afterwards to clean up your mess by absorbing it. You weren't there and you're not here and you are my brother. He ain't heavy, he's my brother. Remember that one? What a sick, stupid song. Makes me want to puke just thinking about it. A Fairy Tale song for Fairies. We all got to clean up our own messes, brother. It ain't right that I'm doing this time. For our father,  for you, for all of us. My being in here makes your life possible. I mean that in only the holiest way it can be taken. I remember you once lit a firecracker between your fingers just to see what'd happen. I know your trick now, finally: the trick is not to feel the pain. Like I'd been looking at one of those optical illusions my whole life trying to figure out the secret picture when the secret was that there was no secret.

TERRY

The police and the papers made a big deal about his blood on my face when they found me. If I hadn't kissed him, I might be free now, but what's a letter without a stamp?

BRUCE

Justice. I think about it every day. Not just Terry. Bigger than Terry. What does justice mean? How do we get it? I'm no deep thinker, but I keep getting whapped upside the head by that blind lady swinging around her scales. How much does retribution weigh? Why can't we stop lugging it around like some crazy hunchbacked monster?

Terry killed some random guy. Some random guy killed our father. There's no equal sign there. The numbers melt, drip off the pages. I have a daughter, but she does not replace any dead body—she's part of a whole new equation.

I've helped continue the human race, though I don't live with her or her mother. It wasn't no holy event at the time. Drunk Biker + Drunk Biker Chick = little kid nobody's ready to deal with. But we deal. Goddamn it, we deal, Terry.

Everybody deals. The Gun Man in the park is God, and an imperfect one  at that. He provides a service for a price, but not bullets. The miracle is that he was arrested, then reincarnated as a younger Gun Man at a new location with which I am familiar.

I don't think everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame. I think everyone gets their fifteen minutes of hell.

TERRY

_Justice_. I should've gotten that tattooed on my fist instead of _Jesus_ on one fist and _Saves_ on the other. It was a weak moment. One among many.

I still have that photo of my father. If he could speak, he'd be thanking me. Me, not Bruce. Bruce, the fake son who took the safe way.

My mother says the airplanes still hang on fishing line from the ceiling, but she's blind, so what does she know? Some nights when I close my eyes in my bunk I can see them hanging above me. Suspended in air, safe. I could never have built one myself—not even for a merit badge. I tried once, but I made a mess of glue and plastic that couldn't fly, even in my imagination.

I feel like I went straight from Scouts to prison. Sometimes, they seem like the same thing. The guards are all scoutmasters or Bruces. And the cons? Who are we? Big Mikes, maybe.

Justice is not fair. Justice is another word for revenge. If Justice has a soft spot, I haven't found it yet. I'm betting on Jesus, but everyone here bets on Jesus. I'm looking for a new angle on Jesus for my next hearing.

EVERY NIGHT, I FALL ASLEEP on the front seat of that LeBaron.

THE THIRD PERSON

_Justice_. The man left behind a son and an ex-wife. The wife is Mary, so the son must be Jesus. But the man is also Jesus because he died for our sins.

_J USTICE_. A WOMAN and her son. A son who is starting to forget his father. When he is older, he learns the story of the man who took his father's life. He goes to hearings with his mother. He writes letters so the man will not be released. Justice has not been done. The son is past the age of the man when he took his father's life. When the son thinks of this, he thinks of justice.

"AT LEAST YOU GAVE HIM a last beer," other prisoners say. "At least you were humane."

TERRY

The leaves on the trees had a spring sheen to them, the kind of brightness that came and went quickly in the heat of summer but lingered in spring. The man lay in the shade, though as the sun angled down, he took on some weird glow that I had to turn away from.

THE THIRD PERSON

The man had given him the keys. He backed away from Terry, his hands raised as if he could escape just by pushing at the air.

Then, he turned and ran. Terry ran after him, his jacket flapping hard against his sides. He _could_ have let him go, but Terry did not want to puzzle  out his own getaway. He knew that he was not done with the man. He was running with a loaded gun, and the man would soon be in sight of the spot where the chained-off two-track met the blacktop park road.

TERRY

"Hey, I can just shoot this guy, I realize. Like, why am I huffing and puffing when I got a loaded gun?

"So I stop and brace myself. You know, I got a merit badge in riflery, so I was no amateur potshot. I nailed him, brought him down. I caught up to him and stood watching him bleed."

THE THIRD PERSON

The man writhed in pain beneath him. Terry wanted to tell him not to do that. He wanted to say, "Just lay down and die like you're supposed to." He needed to reload.

"Man, dude, why'd you run?" Terry said. "Now we're both in trouble."

The man clutched his wound, breathing heavily. He said nothing for a long while. Then, he realized he might live.

TERRY

"Then, I gave the dude a last beer."

THE THIRD PERSON

The man seemed creepy-friendly to Terry, but he wanted to get to the rifle range, and Scout camp was at least a mile from the public beach. He got in the man's car. It smelled like wet fur. Stinky fast-food wrappers and old cassette tapes were strewn over the floor and seats. In the back sat a duct-taped booster seat.

Terry wanted to ask the man what the hell he was doing by himself at Stony Creek on a Friday morning. He cradled his backpack with the beer in it. He'd shared a couple with the stoned hooky players on the way up.

"What's happening at the Scout camp?" the man asked.

"I don't know yet," Terry said. "I'm gonna find out."

The man looked in his rearview mirror and pulled over into the gravel at the side of the road next to the chain barring access to the Scout camp.

Terry thought of telling the man to leave him there at the entrance, but he didn't. He got out and unhooked the chain across the road, then motioned for the man to drive through.

Terry reconnected the chain and got back in the car. He thought the man might ask why he'd reattached the chain, but he did not. They drove on toward the rifle range—a clearing with targets pinned to stacks of old, frayed hay bales.

"Stop here," Terry said.

"Are you meeting someone?" the man asked.

Terry pulled out the gun. He'd been wanting to pull it out since getting in the car with the stoners. It was like the gun wanted to be seen. Like it had something to say.

"No," Terry said. "I was wondering, though, are you some kind of weirdo?"

"What the fuck," the man said.

TERRY

He's lying there all twisted up, and I'm feeling kind of bad, you know. It's not like the guy was rich or nothing.

THE THIRD PERSON

"I'm lonely," the man said.

Terry laughed. "What?" he said. "You're fucking lonely? Let me out here." But Terry didn't get out.

TERRY

" _I'm lonely_." Think any judge would buy that defense? Some guys mow down ten or twenty people, and even then they don't seem satisfied or remorseful. I think it must be easier to kill a bunch. Just one makes it more real, everything focused on that one person instead of this big gory spectacle.

TIMOTHY ZELINSKI.

BRUCE

I hit a deer up north with my car last month one night around dusk. It made me think of Terry, and I don't think about him every day. Just me and the dying deer in the road, no traffic.

I still carry a gun in my car, so I got it out and shot the deer right above the temple and dragged its carcass to the side of the road. I looked at my  front end: caved in, but still drivable. I turned off my flashers and kept on driving.

How long did Terry have with the guy? Why didn't he at least shoot him again right away and be done with it?

I guess that's why I stuck with him as long as I did—he couldn't have done it out of cruelty. He would have never gotten the merit badge for that, the stupid fuck.

If I ever hit a deer again, I'll think of Terry. Or maybe now whenever I see a deer anywhere, I'll think of Terry.

I don't know what it takes to make him think of me.

Damn it, he was alone with this guy. Not like some Boy Scout pissing contest where he had to prove something. I know what it's like to feel like you gotta act tough. But when there's no one around? You let it slide. Who gives a shit, right, man?

TIMOTHY ZELINSKI.

TERRY

You come all this way, you think you've got some answers coming. You can squint into the sun until you go blind. That's the only answer I got. I'm just one life. The sun's just one little star. Nobody dies with just one bullet, not really. We all just die over and over again. Ain't no sense to it.

UNTIL I SHOT HIM in the face, he was a nice-looking man.

JESUS, ARE YOU GOING to get me out of here?

JESUS, ARE YOU GOING to drop me off here?

I NEVER DRANK another beer. Imagine that. We had our last beers together. Think of the lives we could have had, eh, Tim?

IF THIS WAS A MOVIE, I would have wiped off my fingerprints, then put the gun in his hand to try and make it look like a suicide. If this was a movie, I would have had a motive, and some clever detective would've figured it out at the end.

I SAT ON THE HOOD of that car in the trees and weeds near the shooting range. The man dead on the ground. The sky thickening with darkness. I tossed the gun in the brush to get lost with the keys. I felt calmer than I had ever felt in my life.

Okay, that's not true. But I can say anything, right?

I LOOKED ACROSS the open field at the hay bales stacked on top of each other in the distance. Two raggedy old targets—curled at the edges like eyelids, heavy, drooping toward sleep—remained, having survived winter, securely attached, steady, their dark, round centers unblinking. They looked at me with their bull's-eyes. I turned away. Who done it? I done it. I turn away. Still, I turn.

## 13-PART STORY WITH MIME

1.

She was an artist, and hadn't I always wanted to fall in love with an artist?

No, not always. But recently, yes. Since I signed on for the college thing to avoid joining my father on the alki shift at Ford.

At Black Swamp U, I quickly noticed the women in their tight, faded, paint-stained jeans, their breasts free and loose beneath their blouses because it was 1977.

But she was a mime. Back home in Toledo, I'd walked the extra block to avoid the mimes outside the art museum until the city council passed Municipal Code Ordinance 757, which states that mimes are not artists, and exiled them to cornfields and empty high school football stadiums. I'd heard that one of the mime buskers had won the coveted position of Muddy Mudhen, the Toledo Mudhens AAA baseball team mascot. Muddy wore these ratty yellow tights with his leg hair poking through. He spent his time in the expensive seats with the children of Toledo's medium-rolling  season-ticket holders. Toledo had no high rollers, at least any that'd show up at Mudhens games.

But then I noticed one particular female mime in tights, and that was a whole different ballgame. And so, I came to love her Big O of Surprise, even when she was out of makeup.

She thought I looked like one of the Doobie Brothers. I didn't like the Doobie Brothers. They were not real brothers, I explained. Then she gave me the O.

2.

They put a moustache on her, and she looked like Hitler. Or Chaplin playing Hitler. The mime troupe (not troop, she corrected me) was called Contra-Diction. The mime director could not shut up offstage. He had a guru complex, and the young, fledgling mimes hovered around him like he was the Swami of Mime. I suspect he had no formal training, but at that small college in the middle of the Black Swamp region of Ohio, he could've said he was Marcel fucking Marceau and nobody would've winked or blinked. He was a French professor, though I'm not sure I even had to tell you that.

3.

We met because you could not help meeting every single person at Black Swamp U, a tiny square of buildings surrounded by cornfields. We were like midgets, and the cornfields were a redwood forest. It was flatter than flat. It was below-sea-level flat. We were all slowly sinking in the muck.

But you could maintain the illusion of staying afloat because the drinking age was eighteen. Lower if you were French. Or Polish. Or Italian. Or Rectangular. Or—well, forget the Irish. I was Irish, and weaned on beer and  cigarettes. Smoking was still good in 1977, or at least semi-okay. Especially with artists. The last smokers on earth will be two poets, three painters, a folksinger, and a mime who stayed alive by pretending to smoke. The student union served beer. Beer, coffee, and cherry Tootsie Roll Pops because the artists pretended to love them. I bought her a beer and a sucker one night and told her I was a poet. An English major, I figured I could fake it. Hell, I'd read enough of the shit. But she wasn't going to sleep with me unless I shared my words with her, so I started writing them down. She would take me to her broom-closet studio. We would smoke cigarettes and think great thoughts and blow great artistic smoke rings. O.

4.

"I think creative expression is everything," she said. She was braless in her leotard. Her breasts were small and pert, like—well, if I was a poet, I could've come up with something.

"I think we have to negate the _it_ ," I ventured. We'd smoked a couple of bowls in the bong my plumber friend back in Toledo had made for me. It was industrial, and it was good.

I thought I might've gone over the top with that comment, but we were stoned and already over the top, so she nodded as if admiring the view. As if she was afraid she might've missed a reference I was making to some great poet everyone should know.

Richard Brautigan was popular then, though he would go on to kill himself like so many of the poets I'd studied. Brautigan once wrote, "All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds." I guess my comment about the "it" was in that ballpark. In the cheap seats, but in that ballpark.

Seemed like poets had to off themselves to get in the textbook. The most recent entry, John Berryman, had done just that in 1972, making the cut just  before the book went to print. He didn't actually cut himself—jumped off a bridge and missed the fucking Mississippi River. That's all I remember about that class—the dude who flubbed his landing.

5.

She was from a small town near Black Swamp U, so who could blame her for wanting to be French/a mime/a painter, three things no one else in her high school would have wanted to be, even in their secret imaginations. Her father was a janitor or a gas-station attendant named Ronnie—he stopped by her room once in his uniform to drop off a pound cake. She introduced me but never said what he did. My father made axles in Toledo. More specifically, he welded on axle housing covers, 600 per shift, at the Ford factory. Only Toledo could have an inferiority complex to Detroit. I can say that, having been born and raised there until I was in eighth grade when my father put in for a transfer to Toledo to try and keep us off the "mean streets" of the Motor City, though there are mean streets everywhere, even in the Black Swamp region of Ohio.

6.

"Only Toledo could have an inferiority complex to Detroit," I said. I was drinking Little King's Cream Ale in their cute little six-ounce bottles—maybe we _were_ midgets. You got thirty-five of them in a case. They were always on sale because—what _was_ cream ale anyway?

She said something about Monet vs. Manet like it was a Big Time Wrestling match, or maybe I was projecting. Neither of us were good listeners. Her paintings were muddy and abstract. I would study them to try to find one thing that was different from the others.

"I like that thing in the corner," was my copout line.

"You mean that streak of orange?"

"Yeah, yeah. That."

But I sell myself short, and her short. I bought my ticket to the ballpark, and I was in love with her. She taught me the difference between peasant blouses and pheasant blouses. She was smarter than I was and at least had some dreams stoking _her_ fire.

"That reminds me of a dream I had," was another one of my lines, though my dreams were pedestrian. Pedestrians run over by alarm clocks and angry foremen.

I liked when she began putting little people in some of her paintings. Little people who looked a little lost in the Black Swamp of Ohio.

7.

We met in an education class, though neither of us wanted to teach. She thought she might have to do it to get by as an artist. Me, I'd heard it was an easy A, which turned out to be true.

After she got me writing poetry, I joined the staff of the _Black Swamp Review_ , a small group of morose stoners who became my friends.

Her name was Felicia, and some of the stoners, thinking they were poets, referred to her as Fellatio. I let them, for I was getting no fellatio and didn't care to discuss it.

We spent our meetings dreaming up new names for the magazine that our studiously dull advisor always rejected. He'd been one of the founders of the magazine back in 1965 and had come up with the name himself.

_Puhtooeee Review_. Should we hyphenate that? Two e's or three? Intellectual debates punctuated by bong hits. _Long Bong Gong King Kong Review_...

8.

The only poems I wrote that were not impenetrable were about her. She had long, swirling black hair down to her sweet ass, and a coy smile that shot my lights out. She was kind and gentle and non-ironic. The last, a required miming trait. She taught me to eat artichokes, and I nearly lost it watching her scrape leaves with her teeth. I think she loved my hunger for her. It embarrassed and surprised and flattered her. I could not keep my hands off of her. I would go down on her, but she would not reciprocate. The _Not Yet Review_.

9.

Nine. Time to turn here. Through the trees, I can begin to see the rest of my life without her. Our junior year ended, and Contra-Diction went on a tiny tour of tiny Ohio towns—their gigs were mostly in nursing homes.

I went back to Toledo for the summer, where my father got me in at Ford's again. As a summer swing man, each week I took the shittiest job of whoever was on vacation, racking up all the overtime I could get, working seven-day weeks to pay for senior year. It was my third summer there, and I quickly fell into the routine—afternoon shift, 3–11. The alki shift. Three hours to drink after work, time to sleep it off the next morning. The challenge was to find bars where I wouldn't run into my old man. Most of the guys from high school worked at Ford's, so half the time it felt like our old gym-class locker room. The other half, it felt like the detention our principal would've given us if he'd been allowed. I reverted. I regressed. Drunk and lonely, I called Felicia from phone booths everywhere. When she asked if I was writing any poetry, I said I was writing Contra-Fiction. She stopped answering. I took a Sunday off—skipping double time—and drove down to Ida, Ohio. The mime troupe was finishing up its tour in an Episcopal church basement to an appreciative audience of screaming children and their shushing parents.

"Why come when they open their mouths no words come out?" I heard one kid shout.

10.

"I'd like to be an astronaut," I once said.

"No, you wouldn't." She playfully punched my arm. I'd say anything to get her to punch my arm.

"Maybe I'd just like to wear the suit—and experience zero gravity, that'd be cool."

"Zero gravity. That's what I'll call my next painting," she said.

"You can't. That's the title of my next poem," I said.

Arm punch. Two arm punches equaled one kiss. Led to many kisses. Tickling was tolerated, then into bed. O. Double O.

11.

I had a short shelf life back then. High maintenance. Whatever you want to call it. And it wasn't because of my artistic temperament. I was wasting my time at school, and it made me a little nauseous to think about it. I could never have handled zero gravity.

My incredulous academic advisor, staring at my transcript, made me repeat "English" three times when I tried to declare my major. Then I said "English _Education_ ," and he finally nodded and wrote that down. 1977. I had missed Vietnam by a couple of years, though my older brother hadn't.

He had died there. I'd promised myself to be mime about that. To wave my arms in the air as if shooing an invisible fly.

Some families make a shrine. Some families move to Toledo and try to make him disappear. I, the son who lived, had my whole life in front  of me, and it looked like one of those muddy paintings, and I was Muddy Mudhen.

12.

Okay, homestretch:

"Just talk to me," my last words to her.

"Grow up," her last words to me.

At least until the fall. At tiny Black Swamp, you could not avoid speaking to someone, could not keep a secret, even if you were a mime. Even if you were two mimes.

Monsieur Contra-Diction got fired. I never wrote her another poem, but I did send her a picture I drew. "Doobie with Beret," I called it. I waited all year for a punch on the arm. I am still waiting.

13.

I knew in advance how stupid it was, but stupidity had never stopped me before. I drove to Ida. They didn't even grow potatoes there. Maybe that's Idaho.

It hadn't occurred to me that she might be screwing around with the Head Mime. I thought he was gay. I had a lot to learn that the factory wasn't teaching me—it was just confirming everything I had always believed.

When she saw me in the audience, the O of Surprise twisted into a grimace. They did this routine where they were all riding a subway—it was supposed to be improv but looked scripted to me. There wasn't a subway for hundreds of miles. The French professor wore a beret during the show and after the show. He'd had a beret surgically implanted. And Felicia wanted so badly to eat good bread and picnic in a field of poppies on an actual hill in France  like in that painting above her bed at Black Swamp U. Deep inside, I felt a little sympathy for both of them.

It doesn't mean I didn't briefly choke him, because I did. Such an un-Doobie thing to do, but I was in musculus axle modus. She tried to wedge herself between us, and despite my rage, I felt one of her breasts poke softly beneath my arm stiff against his neck. I was hopeless.

I slept in my car, then drove back to punch in on time. Even a little early. I stood outside the factory gates having a smoke, the one thing I had in common with artists. Though even I could do the one where the walls are closing in.

## MY REPUBLICAN LOVE AFFAIR

KATY AND I SAT ACROSS FROM EACH OTHER PROOFREADING THE TRANSCRIPT of a roundtable discussion on economic policy to be published by our employer, American Political Enterprise, or APE. Katy's white bra made brief appearances whenever she leaned forward to turn a crisp page, her silky red blouse loosening forward from her shoulders. The distraction had me reading right over typos. With any luck, the booklet would be published long after I was safely back at Alba College with an A for my summer internship.

Six weeks down, four to go. When I'd started in June, Katy had been wearing an engagement ring. I was engaged myself, though had no ring. Newly engaged. Semi-engaged. If an engagement announced the intention to marry, Marilyn and I had whispered it only to the impatient sales clerk at the Universal City Mall jewelry store. On the rebound from each other, we'd gotten back together just weeks earlier, and in a cosmic overreaction, had pledged our eternal love, which had resulted in the cheap ring I assumed she was wearing back in Warren, where she was living at home and spending the summer manning the deep fryers at The Clock.

_SENATOR MITCHELL_ all caps, colon: Capital T _The resources are there_ comma, _but we have to do more than_ then? No. STET. _hand out_ WIN all caps, open parens (capital W _Whip_ capital I _Inflation_ capital N _Now_ close parens) _buttons_ period.

I had been awarded the internship by Professor Combover ( _one word_ ), the Alba College wife-swapping dean, shortly after the swap became public and shortly before all involved parties evaporated in the slimy heat of gossip. Professor Combover had some D.C. connection he'd parlayed into this summer internship for an Alba student. By the end of August, he himself showed up at APE's offices seeking refuge as a consultant until he found another academic job.

At Alba, a small liberal arts college on the outskirts of Detroit's outer suburbs, no one seemed to know that APE was a right-wing "think" tank, or even what a think tank was. Twenty-one years old, I had no business being engaged or working inside any kind of think tank. I had a hard enough time thinking _outside_ the tank. I knew they built real tanks at the Arsenal Tank Plant back in Warren, where many of us at Alba were raised.

The Alba student body consisted largely of Democrats or Independents or bumblers like me who hadn't given it much thought, just grateful to have been young enough to escape the draft and Vietnam. We were the sons and daughters of auto workers, first-generation college students who believed in unions and fast automobiles and equality for all (more or less). Most of us were going to be teachers or accountants, or, despite our superior educations, follow our fathers and/or mothers into the factories—though perhaps, as college graduates, we'd get to boss them around if we hurried up and got our degrees before they retired. We were not going to be politicians or diplomats or bureaucrats. We were not going to leave the great state of Michigan, the "Water-Winter Wonderland." We were going to marry young, though not as young as our parents, and perhaps have one less child than they did, but own a bigger house.

_FORMER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE REYNOLDS_ all caps, colon: capital R _Removing nuclear_ n-u-c-l-e-a-r (nu-clear, just remember that—no extra u) _weapons from_ capital S _South_ capital K _Korea shows_ capital P _President_ capital C _Carter's complete lack of_...

Late in my senior year of high school, Marilyn and I had collided in the back of my father's woody wagon at halftime of a basketball game. She'd been drinking peppermint schnapps, and I was stone-cold stoned out of my mind. A junior then, she joined me at Alba after she graduated, and we immediately began a long, extended breakup that involved so much screaming and tears that the RA in our coed dorm slammed her door shut when she saw one or both of us storming down the hallway toward her. The breakup centered on mismatched hickies and dickies—betrayal and counter-betrayal and stale mates ( _two words_ ). The usual, I'd come to learn, but back then, it was all high drama and low blows.

We'd gone to Eight Mile High back in Warren, so close to Detroit we could see it from our houses, but since the riots in 1967, the border had grown as large and wide as a DMZ, so when it came to college, we looked away from, not toward, Detroit. Things were greener in Alba, Michigan, and the people whiter—the rich were moving out to the distant burbs and making the long commute into the city as they grayed into Republicans.

Marilyn was a good kisser with a low tolerance for boredom or dissent. We'd hopped off the love train when we first broke up, then hopped back on when we reunited, not realizing the train was now and forever in reverse. We forgot that Detroit did not believe in trains of any kind to begin with.

We didn't reveal our engagement, telling ourselves that we'd be waiting until after graduation to get married anyway. As soon as we walked out of the mall, we sobered up, and the old irritants came right back: how I chewed gum, how she finished my sentences, etc., and etc. To keep the secret, she only wore the ring when she left her house, or so she said. I wasn't sure she was wearing it at all, and the truth was that if I'd had a ring, I wouldn't have  worn it either. In D.C., I was ashamed about being engaged at such a young age. I began to understand that we'd done it just to make up for the public embarrassment of our initial breakup. All the snot and tears and carrying on. They had to be worth something. Right?

When I got the internship in Washington, we were both relieved. I later learned that Marilyn was so relieved, she immediately started messing around with Brian, her sleazy manager at The Clock, an old Howard Johnson's that'd been converted into one giant deep fryer, eliminating all 31 flavors.

The steam heat of Washington stirred up lust, no _seemed_ about it. Our relationship had been based mainly on sex, I realized once I was away from her. _That_ , I missed. I was lusting after Katy, the only attractive female at work anywhere near my age. In fact, APE only employed two other women: Ann, the assistant director, an acerbic survivor feared, admired, and mocked by the male APEs, and Cynthia, a matronly secretary with a chocolate addiction. Katy had quickly ascended into the top circle of my lust, and when her ring disappeared, she broke through to a theretofore unknown level of lust heaven.

_heretofore_ one word STET means the same thing as _theretofore_ make consistent.

Every day at five, I walked from the Think Tank back to the Stink Tank of my dorm room at Georgetown, where they stuck all the other D.C. interns. I lived in New North dorm, though it must've been new in the twenties, given the lack of reliable plumbing, the lack of air conditioning, and the genteel _Not gentile, not gentle_ decrepitude of the place. It was a dorm full of polished young men from around the country who all seemed more politically savvy and connected than I would ever be. They even seemed to sweat less.

The bus in from Georgetown cost thirty-five cents, and I spent that summer trying to time my entrance in the long line of commuters so that my nickel fooled the driver in the rush of dropping coins into thinking it was a quarter. The morning driver didn't seem to care. The afternoon driver busted me twice for shortchanging him, so I usually walked the two miles  back to Georgetown, my white shirt transparent with sweat by the time I got back to my room. There was no getting lost in D.C., with its numbered and lettered streets. I Etch-a-Sketched my way through the city—19th and M to 37th and P—ignoring the diagonal streets named for states, though I figured out later that they were shortcuts.

APE had the whole sixth floor of a building across from the National Geographic Society. I imagined their interns peering through binoculars over at us for signs of life there in deepest, darkest D.C. I spent my days wandering through the connected cages of offices and cubicles, my first experience in the stale smoke of the corporate world. The previous two summers, I'd worked at the Ford plant with my father, so I felt like a fraud wearing a white shirt and tie to work every day—the assembly line was one kind of trap, but I quickly realized this was another. The trickiest thing to manage was understanding office-speak, an encoded language in which people rarely said what they meant. You couldn't lose your fingers like at the plant, but you could quickly lose your job, like young Ronald Anderson. Katy said he was let go because he chewed apples too loudly during meetings.

Though I didn't smoke cigarettes myself, everyone else at APE lit up, including Katy, the office a haze of unfiltered disgust with the Carter administration—the first election I'd been able to vote in, and I'd gone for the "hick peanut farmer" from Georgia because I liked that he had an asshole brother just like I did. The word "Republican" was rarely spoken at APE—it made everything redundant. One day Nixon himself came into the office to meet the mysterious guy down the hall who never seemed to enter or leave his office.

First, a Secret Service guy interviewed me and Ellis, the other APE intern—wait, Ellis didn't smoke either. He told me he was saving that for later, like it was his virginity or a savings bond he didn't need to cash yet. Apparently, the Secret Service guys knew everyone else from previous Nixon visits. We were to stay in our offices while Nixon had his meeting, though I did peek out and get a glimpse of one of the famous jowls.

"So, who's that guy down the hall?" I asked Katy.

"Roger Walters," she said, like I should know. I gave her a blank stare. "One of Nixon's speechwriters. He wrote the Ford speech pardoning Nixon? He's here writing his memoirs."

I took a piss next to him in the men's room once, one of those closet-sized bathrooms where you could hear whatever was happening in the urinal next to you. Before and after I peed, I heard nothing from his side. I left him there, his forehead pressed against the tile. He never acknowledged my presence.

"Maybe if Nixon was still president, he wouldn't be having so much trouble taking a leak," I said to Katy.

She frowned. "That's not the kind of joke you tell around here," and I knew then what I should've known all along—that APE was no place for a punk from the sharp edge of Detroit.

"Now, just how did you get this internship?" Katy asked, not for the first time. I never had a good answer. I wanted to work in advertising or PR, and the internship guidelines mentioned writing. Perhaps no one else applied. As Marilyn had asked when I took the damn thing, "Why would anyone want to go to Washington?"

capital T _The United States_ capital U capital S _should not misinterpret the lessons of Vietnam_ period cleavage bra cup.

Katy put down the manuscript and looked up.

"What?" I asked.

"It's your paragraph, Al," she whispered, as if my zipper was down, or a booger was hanging out of my nose. I trusted her to discretely tell me those kinds of things. She was so kind and competent, so soft-spoken and quietly sexy, that I could forget at times that she was indeed a Republican, an unfamiliar species back where I came from, though my sense of politics was not finely honed. Between Marilyn and not Marilyn, between drinking and getting stoned, between escaping Vietnam and escaping the Ford plant, I was still starring in my own life story. Sometimes I lost my place.

"Sorry. I...where were we? Is Nixon still president?"

"Ha. You sound like Roger Dodger."

"Roger?"

She shook her head at me. "Walters," she said. "By the time you leave, you'll learn everyone's nicknames."

"What's yours?"

"I don't have one," she said. "I'm not important enough."

It was "The Virgin Queen," I later learned. The office was full of old letches— _letch, a variant of lech, or lecher_ —who often stood over Katy to look down her blouse and ask her to lunch. Others had noticed the missing ring and likely knew the whole story. I was not privy to office gossip. The only other person who talked to me was Charlie Watson, a witty pundit who bred marijuana on his family farm in Indiana. Charlie frequently provided me with samples, like a kindly neighbor giving out candy to the local children. He was obsessed with cultivating pot and the Soviet Union, but beyond those two topics, he tended to fall silent. He also loved chess. He liked to get stoned and go to chess tournaments.

"Is that a typical Republican stoner activity?" I asked him once.

"A typical Republican stoner activity is to make existential Haldeman-Ehrlichman jokes. They're the Vladimir and Estragon of the Republican Party."

"Huh?"

"In other words," he said, "you've asked me an oxymoronic question."

At least he didn't say moronic. I felt vaguely insulted, but then he slipped me one of his thin, tight joints, and I was as happy as a dog who'd been fooled by his owner into chasing a ball that didn't exist.

capital T _The economy was of great concern during the_ capital F _Ford administation_ WRONG administration.

Despite or because of the numerous invitations, Katy began asking _me_ to lunch, perhaps to provide a buffer between her and the letches, which I  saw as a _capital O Opportunity_. On my budget, I always packed sandwiches, reusing an old plastic bread wrapper as my lunch bag. We often sat in the Burned-Coffee Room at a tiny, wobbly table for two. It stunk permanently of fried coffee and rancid mayonnaise. _Mayonnaise?_ CORRECT.

All the bald, overweight, middle-aged guys went out to lunch every day. They'd poke their heads in on us on their way out, pausing as if to ask Katy, "Are you sure?" or "You kidding me?" but they never said a word.

One day she suggested we brave the heat and eat outside. Someone or something was breathing down her neck. As soon as we hit the street, she uncharacteristically raised her arms in the air and let out a high-pitched scream: "Why are guys such assholes?" She did not look to me for a response. I felt sometimes like I was her imaginary pet that helped her get through the day without throwing up into her mouth.

We sat outside on a bench in the stillness of a D.C. noon in July. Every other office worker seemed to be inside an air-conditioned eatery. The only ones on the street were police officers, and tourists dripping sweat onto their unfolded maps when the damn White House was right in front of them.

"They all look alike," I told Katy. "Those APE guys."

"Those guys," she said, "are going to make or break my career." She'd smoked half a dozen cigarettes and eaten nothing. Her silky blouse blossomed dark stains that quietly spread under her arms. Her official job title was editorial assistant, though she had ambitions. She wanted to get elected. Or just taken seriously.

"They even smell the same. Is there some kind of Republican deodorant they use?"

Katy sighed. "You have so much to learn." She began whistling the Old Spice jingle.

"I never learned how to whistle," I said. "Back in my neighborhood, there was something unmanly about it. We barked instead."

"It's easy," she said. She rounded her thin lips, and her cheeks hollowed into sensual curves.

Though my mouth was full of peanut butter and jelly, I suddenly wanted her with a crazed, urgent lust. I leaned over and quickly kissed her puckered lips.

She jerked back, her cheeks flaming, then laughed. "What the hell," she sputtered. "Peanut butter and jelly—that's a real turn-on...I think we need to keep you inside to cool those cocky jets of yours or you're going to grow up to be one of them."

"No, no," I said. "I never wear cologne," I protested. I swallowed. I ached. And "I'm sorry," though I wasn't quite.

"I was engaged to a senator's son," she said.

"Holy shit," I said. "Which one?"

"Guess." She smiled primly, though also a little sad, I think. Like she was trying to joke about it, wondering if it was too soon. "There's only a hundred of them. It can be your research project."

"Only thirty-nine Republicans," I added, proud of my growing knowledge.

"Don't underestimate..." She didn't finish. I thought she might have wanted to say _love_ or _me_. "You're going to have to strap on your thinking helmet for this one," she added. Katy and I joked about the "tank" idea, though just about everyone else seemed to relish the war metaphor. The Brookings Institute was the enemy. They had their own tank—a sissy tank.

As part of the internship, I was supposed to do a research project for Professor Combover, though when he showed up my last week at APE, he didn't even know who I was. He'd lost out on the swap—his wife stayed with the other guy, but the other guy's wife left him after a month.

all caps _SENATOR HARDNESS_ (HARKNESS—I let that one through—sorry, Katy) colon: capital T _The energy crisis won't be solved by solar panels in the_ capital W _White_ capital H _House_ period.

I was researching how much time the big three networks spent on various types of news stories. APE circulated a summary of the nightly news shows, so it was mostly math. I became obsessed with those end-of-newscast  _human hyphen interest_ stories. The heart-warmers that allowed you to click off the TV and believe for a second that the world wasn't going to hell: the chimp who escaped the Pittsburgh Zoo and made it all the way to Ohio. The small town that elected a teenaged mayor. The world cha-cha champion with the wooden leg. The elementary school class that raised money to send their turtle to the world's turtle racing championship. The guy who drove his car backwards across America. The child rescued from the well—that showed up three or four times that summer, with subtle variations. The people at ABC had a weakness for those well stories. What that bias represented in political terms, I had no idea. In my paper, I classified those stories as: _Awwww, Ha, Hmm_ , or _Wow_. All of them fit into one of those four categories.

_photo ops_ two words _sound bites_ two words

"Who broke off the engagement?" I asked one day in the middle of week seven, the week after I'd kissed her. I never told her I was engaged or disengaged. It never occurred to me to wonder why she never asked about _my_ love life.

"It's a long story," she said.

Capital A _American influence overseas after_ capital V _Vietnam_ one word...She raised her eyes. I had this tick about Vietnam, always wanting to separate it into two words _declined_ period.

Katy had gone to Bryn Mawr and wore her class ring on her other hand, though I never noticed it until the diamond's disappearance. I didn't know anyone who had a class ring from high school or college. Back home, some bored guy sat at a table in our main hallway for a week playing with his cufflinks, then packed up his case and went on to the next school. We weren't buying unless the ring turned into brass knuckles or had a hidden compartment for poison.

"Why'd you get one?" I loved her delicate hands, her long, thin, pale fingers. Holding a pen, lifting her coffee—sometimes even straightening my tie, which both aroused and infuriated me: she was touching me/she was treating me like a kid.

"Everyone got class rings," she said.

"Everyone? That's nuts."

She lifted her hand to study what looked like a shield with three penguins on it. "All the girls got a ring."

"What about the guys?"

"It's an _all-girls_ school." She raised her eyes, keeping her head lowered, as if she was looking over her glasses, though she wore no glasses. When she looked at me like that, with both exasperation and tenderness...I lived for those looks.

"Get Out. Really? I never met anyone who went to an all-girls school," I said truthfully. "Was it like a convent?"

"Only if the nuns were sex-crazed drunks," she said, giving her nervous little sly smile that made me feel like we were the only two people in that office who were alive, cool, wicked.

Marilyn was bored in Warren and had been threatening to come to our nation's capital, but there were logistical issues like: Where would she stay? Should/could she keep from telling her parents? Who could/would cover for her? Should she just tell them we were engaged? We never had enough quarters for the pay phone to work all that out. Hearing her voice melted me into spicy butter, but my fantasies about Katy burned that butter. Why hadn't I told Katy about Marilyn? Or Marilyn about Katy? D.C. was like a foreign country in which I could not translate my own life accurately to anyone.

capital H _Here in our nation's_ apostrophe s _capital_ —A-L— _the unemployment rate_...

Barton, a barrel-chested old blowhard from Georgia, had claimed the role  of APE mentor to Katy, whose father was a friend of his. Barton had been instructed to look after her. Whenever I saw him, he was looking before, at, _and_ after Katy. Because of her father, she could not ignore him. Maybe she kind of liked him. He was a charmer.

She had gone to boarding school. Her father was distant and preoccupied, either in Washington or somewhere on the road, screwing around in an Eisenhower kind of way. I don't even know what that meant, but that's how Katy described it.

When Barton stopped by her desk, he'd lean over to stare down her blouse and talk to her in this low, serious murmur, putting a hand on her shoulder and rubbing it a little. He'd glance up at me and give me the hard stare like he was an assassin and I was a kindergartner who'd just wet his pants.

I wanted to punch his mottled alky nose and throttle his flappy jowls. He had the Old Spice going, just like the rest of them. In my neighborhood, cologne was in the same category as whistling. I did not kick his ass. I had a hard enough time just meeting his eyes.

When he made arrangements to take her to lunch, that left me in the Burned-Coffee Room making small talk with Ellis, a pimply faced geek who'd be attending Princeton in the fall. Ellis had gone to Choate, another school I had to look up. He said "Choate" like it was the flavor of some exotic drink I'd never be worthy of trying. He was interning in the business office, though he treated me like he'd been elected class president and I was his parliamentarian.

_Tip ONeal Tip O'Neal Tip O'Neil Tip Oneill Tip O the hat Tip-a-canoe_ capital T _Tip_ capital O apostrophe capital N _Neill_ double l _O'Neill_ exclamation!

My tiny workspace _one word_ was crammed into the corner of Katy's office. On bad days, I felt like a misbehaving child stuck with his teacher after school while she graded papers—either invisible or in the way, depending. Charlie was the only one who ever came to see me. At the beginning of week nine,  he dropped by Katy's office while I was out taking a leak next to some great Republican mind.

"Your friend was here," Katy said to me when I returned. "He left you a little present."

No one seemed to know what to make of Charlie, and he liked it that way. Apparently, he was one of the smartest people on the planet, and that was his biggest liability. He had little patience, which had led to his interest in pot, which kept him calm in between writing right-wing manifestos for William F. Buckley. He was an old-school intellectual conservative, the kind that wasn't so rare back then.

On my desk sat an APE stationary _WRONG_ , _stationery_ envelope on which he'd drawn a strikingly detailed and well-endowed orangutan. The envelope had no slight bulge to suggest it contained contraband, but Charlie's stuff was ridiculously potent and he rolled them very thin, so I wasn't sure. Charlie loved working for APE. It was part of the world's grand joke on him. I turned away from Katy, ripped open the envelope, and peeked in: two tickets to a chess tournament. I barked out a strong laugh and turned back to her. "Did you ever hear of tickets for a chess tournament? Are there chess scalpers?"

She smiled, raised her eyebrows. "Are they front-row seats with backstage passes?"

Charlie left a note inside: "Come. Bring a date. I'll drive."

I laughed again. "A date? To a chess tournament?"

"It can't be worse than the opera," Katy said, and I smiled. I had never been to an opera, but it represented all the pretense of high culture I'd imagined while melting my ears at rock concerts back in Detroit.

"Who are you going to ask to your hot chess date now that you've scored some primo seats?" she joked—the first time she expressed even passing curiosity about my social life.

"You," I said without hesitation. "I'm going to ask you."

Though we were in AC-ville, I saw the little line of sweat that sometimes settled on her upper lip. She gave me a look that made me feel the years between us, but then her mouth cracked into a full grin.

"You're on," she said.

The day after Katy agreed to be my date, I called Marilyn from the dorm phone at the end of the hall. I'd been getting stoned on the highest quality pot I'd ever come within whiffing distance of, sharing facilities with Nixon's old speechwriter, and now I had a chess date with an older woman. Suddenly, my time at Alba seemed like a dusty, dried flower from a forgotten prom.

I was planning to break up with her but didn't get a chance. Well, I did get a chance—after she told me she was going out with Brian. I quickly jumped in: "That's it. I want my ring back."

"Fine," she said. "I don't even know where it is."

"Fine?" I said.

"Yeah," she said, sounding a little sad. "Fine. I mean, I don't miss you. Isn't that a sign?"

I swallowed. We'd been broken up for six months after being together two years, then we'd been back together for two months before the engagement. The phone pressed hot and sweaty against my ear.

"Just to be clear," I said. "We're breaking up, right?"

"You just asked for the ring back. What's going on with you there?"

We had loved each other for at least the first six months, then we got all tangled up in how we were supposed to act if we were in love, then spent the next two years wrapping ourselves up in duct tape thinking we were making repairs when we were just making a mess that it'd take forever to untangle. It was a Rube Goldberg love that forgot its point.

Marilyn and I talked for another ten minutes about the weather and our classes in the fall and the last remnants of the swapping scandal. I was out of dimes and quarters anyway, and ready to break into tears, when a gigantor intern from, I assumed, the federal wrestling agency demanded the phone.

Capital T _The_ one word _peanut_ word missing? farmer? _from_ capital G _Georgia believes that he can reform_ capital W _Washington_ period. Capital L _Little does he know that_ capital W _Washington re-_ hyphen _forms presidents_ period. Did Charlie write this?

One morning, maybe week eight, Stan, the official APE handyman-gofermail deliverer, slipped while trying to lift a filing cabinet onto his dolly to move it into or out of Roger Walter's office. It fell sideways, knocking Stan down and pinning him to the floor. Everyone rushed into the hallway. Stan lay dazed and moaning.

"Should we call an ambulance?" Charlie asked. He took off the baseball hat he always wore—an accepted eccentricity, as if the hat signaled he was a sorcerer or genius—and scratched his bald head vigorously.

Barton blustered forward, then bent down and asked, "Stan, do you think you need an ambulance?"

"Get...this...fucking...thing...off me!" Stan gasped, sweat pouring off his face as it turned purple.

Barton looked at all of us gathered in a semicircle. "Give him room," he barked, and we retreated, but then he did nothing. "I have a bad back," he mumbled to Stan.

I stood directly in Stan's line of sight, his head wedged away from the cabinet so that his shoulder took the weight. "Kid, you understand English. Get this damn thing off me!"

I lunged forward, braced my feet against the wall, and pushed on the top of the cabinet till it landed upright. I spotted Ellis neatly rolling up his sleeves in preparation to help. For a second, I wanted to push the cabinet over onto his sorry Choate-Princeton ass. Stan still lay curled on the floor. I bent to give him a hand, to see if he could stand.

"Don't touch him," Barton shouted, the lawyer in him taking over. Stan rolled over onto his hands and knees, then slowly stood.

Someone had called the building security guard, Larry, and when he arrived, he led Stan to the elevator and rushed him off to the emergency room.

"Show's over," Barton said. I wondered how much TV he watched—he seemed to have all the lingo down. We dispersed back to our offices. I had forgotten about Katy, a rare occurrence during the workday _one word_ , but she had witnessed everything.

"Why do you think he said that—that you understand English?" she asked as we returned to our usual seats in her office to proof a foreign policy analysis of U.S. trade with China.

I shrugged. Stan and I rarely talked, but he knew I was from Detroit and my father worked at Ford's. I wasn't particularly strong—some might've called me scrawny—so I hadn't been called out for my heft.

"He can tell I'm not a Republican. We have a secret sign," I managed finally.

"I hope he's okay," she said, softly. I was hoping to be her hero, but instead she had genuine concern for someone she'd worked with for years. Go figure.

Stan had a bruised, separated shoulder and was out for a week. Barton assigned me his duties, and while Stan was gone, I delivered mail and supplies and made sure the bathrooms were stocked with toilet paper and hand towels. Charlie gave me extra dope as a way, I imagine, of apologizing for my demotion.

"I didn't sign on for this," I complained to Barton. "What about Ellis?" He gave me his hard right-wing stare. I looked down. "When am I going to get a chance to write something?"

"Want to write your letter of resignation?" he asked, leaning into me. "You don't even know who Ellis is, do you?" Old Spice penetrated my skin like a tattoo needle. "We are paying you, correct?"

Correct. And I needed the measly stipend to help pay for Alba in the fall. Passing out the mail, I realized most APE employees did not even know my name, though I knew all there's _theirs_.

"Sue the bastards," I told Stan when he returned.

He cringed into a crooked smile. "You know how many lawyers they got working here, son?"

Capital S _Spiro_ capital A _Agnew resigned in disgrace after being indicted for receiving_ ei _illegal campaign contributions_ period.

Jimmy Carter, the Washington outsider, was subject to much ridicule at APE. I should confess that it wasn't actually APE. It was APEPR, American Public Enterprise Policy Research, but everyone, even the APErs, just called it APE. As sophisticated intellectuals, they thought it an ironic joke.

"Was it the Senior Senator from the 'Show-Me' State? The Junior Senator from the 'Live Free or Die' state?" A game I played with Katy, though I'd actually found out who her fiancé was from Ellis, who wanted to warn me off, I guess. He seemed to be the only one who noticed my infatuation with Katy. Who _was_ Ellis? He was rich, connected. And decent. I should've been nicer to him, but I never got the hang of D.C. nice.

I stole a chess clock, with the timers you hit after you make your move. I knew it was time to make mine. I left it on Katy's cousin's bedside table. I'm getting ahead of myself, but thinking ahead is good in chess, right?

Charlie picked me up in his green Volvo in front of the student union at noon on Saturday afternoon. He already had Katy in the car, along with a young man who looked to be about her age. I briefly thought the signals had gotten mixed and he was Katy's date, but he was Charlie's son, Abe, from his first marriage. Charlie was in between marriages and girlfriends, so his son was his date. I sighed, then carefully took the joint Abe passed to me, turning around from the front seat and rolling his eyes.

"Welcome to the Magical Mystery Tour," he said. "Buckle up, we've got some hardcore chess action comin'."

Katy startled me with a loud "Ha!" I clearly had some catching up to do, so I took a long hit.

"I was handed these seeds by a notorious South American dictator," Charlie confided. "Then I cross-bred them with seeds from a New Mexican mystic. They create an interesting conversation."

We were incapable of an interesting conversation ourselves, laughing till our eyes watered as Charlie deftly maneuvered D.C. streets, even the confusing diagonal ones named for states.

"Is cross-breeding like wife-swapping?" I asked. Everyone just stared at me.

_Black bishop takes white knight. White pawn to Queen four_.

I can't even get that right. If I described the chess tournament, I'm afraid I might lose you here, so close to the end. Besides, Charlie's dope blurred out a good portion of it.

The tournament was at the U.S. Chess Center on M Street. We had to wait in line, despite arriving an hour early. Everyone wanted to see the Grandmaster exhibition in which this guy played fifty games at once, wandering the room, kicking everybody's asses. Charlie had once played competitively. He had an attic full of trophies and a grudge against somebody, but he still loved the game.

The silence in the Center was stifling, despite the number of people in attendance, the number of games being played simultaneously. Charlie and Abe had disappeared into various matches for some strange kind of father-son bonding.

Katy and I snuck out into the hallway and exploded into laughter so raucous they must have heard us inside the big chess room, perhaps wondering if someone had just told the greatest chess joke ever.

"Let's get...the hell...out of here," Katy said, giggling, gasping for breath. She took my hands in her beautiful ringless hands—no class ring either—and I was suddenly no longer stoned, except on Katy. Away from work, she seemed more animated, and more beautiful—her whole body seemed unshackled, and she moved with a hip sway I had never seen.

I slipped back in where the Grandmaster was strutting his stuff, and I tapped Charlie on the shoulder. Bent at the waist, elbows on knees, he was studying a chessboard _one word_ or dozing in stoned-out bliss. He startled, then nodded sadly when I tilted my head toward the door. He palmed me a joint and gave me his blessing.

_artificial castling epaulette matte trébuchet_ accent on first e capital S _Spanish_ capital O _Opening_ capital S _Sicilian_ capital D _Defense_

On the slick, sweaty street, I leaned into Katy as we slid down the sidewalk and onto a bus, then the subway. I didn't know where we were going, though we ended up at her cousin's apartment in Arlington. Katy, who lived at home with her mother, had a key. The cousin was out and might not be back until the next day.

"How about playing strip chess?" I asked.

Katy was sitting on my lap on her cousin's black leather couch. Struck by her lightness and warmth and beauty, and my own dumb luck, I wrapped my arms around her.

"Oh, Al." She swiveled around and gave me a quick kiss, then lingered, her moist breath against my neck. "What am I going to do with you?"

She suddenly stood and began unbuttoning her blouse. "Chess is not necessary," she said. "Chess is not foreplay. Chess is harmful to your health." She unsnapped her bra, and her small breasts popped out at eye level. "Chess was invented as an anti-aphrodisiac. Chess is sex for the brain, but the brain doesn't need sex. Chess puts libido in a corral and brands all the pieces as untouchable. All they can do is knock each other over."

She pushed me back onto the couch and straddled me, gracefully removing my clothes like an X-rated magician.

"You sure know a lot about chess," I said. "I mean sex. I mean chess. I mean sex."

So much I didn't know. I was like the team mascot for the Wacky Republicans,  a novelty basketball team that shot hoops while riding donkeys for charity events around the country. Or maybe elephants.

_humina humina humina humina itals exclamation point question mark exclamation point_

Around midnight, we heard a key click into the lock.

_expletive deleted_

Katy leaped from her cousin's bed, slipped into a robe from her cousin's closet, and slipped out her cousin's door.

Capital C _Cousin_ colon:

"Why are you still here? And with _him_?"

"Next time, get a hotel."

"Who's going to wash my sheets?"

"How old is he? Recruiting for the Young Republicans again?"

"I'm twenty-one," I wanted to shout. "Legal in every state of the union. And the District of Columbia." But I was thinking about the _again_.

I hadn't heard any of Katy's responses, but then I heard her snuffling, the cousin reluctantly consoling. I got up and quickly dressed. I stripped the sheets and put them in a neat pile. I would've gladly washed them. Or better yet, taken them with me as a souvenir of my first time as a victim of the reverse one-night-stand maneuver.

When Katy came back into the bedroom, though her eyes were red, her cheeks streaked, she had hardened into a college graduate with a healthy start on a career who'd been engaged to a senator's son.

Capital T _The chair recognizes the senior proofreader from_ capital C _Connecticut_ connect-i-cut.

"Listen, Al," she said. I did not like the way she said my name, like it was a punctuation mark. "No one at work can know about this."

"We eat lunch together every day. Charlie knows. I'm sure people are talking."

"Are you? I'm not. All I have to do is put my engagement ring back on for a couple of days. You're leaving in a week." She was furiously picking up her clothes. "I still have it...the ring..." She went into the bathroom and closed the door to dress. We both knew Charlie with his libertarian views and pot smoking did not judge or share what others did outside of work. He was Professor Combover's APE contact. In the office, he barely paid attention to anything besides printed words.

"Who would I tell?" I said through the closed bathroom door. Standing in her cousin's bedroom, I felt that chapter of my life slam shut—or maybe it was just a saddle-stitched pamphlet—a quick gust of wind, and it was over. The suddenness shocked me. I was already halfway back to Alba.

Katy walked out, tucking her wrinkled shirt in tight. "You're right, I'm sorry. I'm just"—she giggled oddly, high-pitched—"losing my mind a little bit right now. Look, go back to college—it's a picnic. Have lots of picnics before you graduate. Whatever you do, don't get engaged..."

I opened my mouth to speak.

"...Picnics where you lay on a blanket with a girl, and after it gets dark, you make love on the blanket. Maybe fireworks...Fireworks, or not. Wrap your arms around her when it cools off. Kiss her hard like you kissed me hard. Learn how to whistle. Learn what it feels like to whistle and no one comes..." she sighed, "and...goodbye. Goodbye goodbye goodbye _no commas_ and see you on Monday but nevertheless goodbye unofficial and unexpurgated _period quotation mark_."

She kissed me, dry and quick on the cheek. Then she shoved me out into  the living room where her cousin stood, arms crossed, holding her high heels in one hand, looking both pissed off and languid.

"Hi," I said. I stopped in front of her, but had nothing more to say. She gestured toward me with her shoes, either _this way to the exit_ or _see-ya-later-alligator_ or both, and I was out the door and Katy was waving frantically, as if fanning away smoke. Then the door closed behind me.

It never cooled off at night in D.C., at least during the summer of 1977. I had no idea where I was or how to get back to Georgetown. In Arlington, I was out of the numbered and alphabetized zone and in an entirely different state. I knew crossing a bridge was involved. I had no choice but to get out my tattered map, worn through at the folds, and open it up like a lost tourist. _stet_

## DREAM HOUSE

"YOU COMING, DAVE," PAUL ASKED—MORE OF A STATEMENT THAN A QUESTION. "Help with the packing, moral support, all that. You and Edwin can carry the light stuff."

I managed to miss almost all family gatherings of any emotional consequence. I ducked, and they passed over my head while I was "out of town" or "ill" or "privately bereaved." But now my parents were moving out of the family home in Warren after forty-four years, and it looked like I had to be there, though I didn't want them moving in the first place. My siblings, Paul and Ruth, were planning to gather to videotape each room, then load up, then cry on the porch with the last few old neighbors still left—the ones who hadn't croaked, quacked, mooed, or moved out to the sub-sub-suburbs of Detroit—then drive away.

Edwin was my partner of ten years. "Partner"—when I started using that term, Edwin immediately mocked it by calling us "pardners" with a Southern twang. At Halloween, he'd had us get dressed up like cowboys with the word "pardners" written in flowing cursive in silver Sharpie marker on the back of  our matching fringed shirts. "Permanent marker for permanent partners," I told everyone, a little too frequently. Edwin attracted both men and women with his effortless charm, his wit, his inclusiveness, and, especially at parties, his smooth, liquid body. "Mine," I wanted to write across his back, his firm, perfect ass, his forehead. His heart.

If Edwin had answered Paul's phone call, he would've come up with some quick rejoinder. I'd picked up the receiver with a slippery balsamic-vinegared hand and tossed the salad of an answer around in my head. I figured Paul's slight on our manhood—we could lift our share, as he well knew—was meant to goad me into volunteering to prove yet again that we didn't fit his stereotype.

"I thought they hired movers," I said finally, twisting the cord around my neck. They were moving into a new condo development in Sterling Heights. My high school friend Amy used to call it Sterling Depths.

"When they found out how much it cost—you know Dad with money. And Ma—she wants to personally pack every single thing that might possibly break or have sentimental value...Look, tell you what, you guys can stay with me and Bev."

No one in the family had ever offered to put us up before. Ruth once said, "As long as it's abstract, I can handle it, but I gotta be honest, thinking of you two in the sack..." Then she jerked her arms tight around her chest and made a noise like a spider had fallen into her lap, or a snake slithered out from under the contoured bricks of her exquisite patio out in Troy, an upscale suburb of bulked-up houses with three-car garages and invisible fences. It was usually the Econo Lodge for us, though we could have afforded better. In the weird logic of my family, they would've been offended if we stayed in a nice hotel, as if they weren't good enough for us, even though we couldn't stay with them in the first place.

"Condo—I just can't get used to that word," I said, not wanting to seem eager or grateful for Paul's offer. The stability the old house offered meant more to me than to the others. It was my rock, while my relationship with Edwin was more of a rolling stone, though nobody in my family recognized it as much  more than an optical illusion. We'd never had one of those "weddings" like some of our friends, administered by renegade Presbyterian ministers who still smoked pot and drew smiley faces under their signatures. Edwin said we didn't need it—which meant _he_ didn't—and I was afraid to contradict him.

"Condo. Get used to it, buddy. Stop thinking about yourself for once." It sounded like his head was bobbing with irritation. "I've got friends like you—straight friends. No kids, so you stay a kid yourself. Ma and Dad need to move on. So do you."

"An invitation and a lecture too. Stop treating me like your little brother, and maybe I will." That sounded like I was conceding. Sounded like a little brother. I needed Edwin to tell me what I meant. He still wasn't home from Power High School where he taught English, though it was past dinnertime—he coached the swim team, and the conference meet was coming up. I once told Edwin that I found the smell of chlorine a turn-on. "It's just another twisted thing about you that I love," he said. "I bet it triggers fantasies about guys in Speedos." That was a line I should have been able to use on him, the Coach, but as usual, he beat me to it. The truth—and maybe the problem—was that I just thought of _him_ in a Speedo.

"Hey, bro, we need you here. It's like a third parent, that house. Help us say goodbye."

Whenever Paul called me "bro," I knew I was in trouble. Edwin called my parents Mr. and Mrs. Mush, and their car the Mushmobile. Paul was a chip off the old pudding, and whenever he gave me a spoonful, it stuck to my face. "Look," I started.

"Don't give me no shit about checking the calendar. Have Eddie call me when he gets in. We can work something out. We're simpatico..."

It was true—he and Edwin always got along in a teasing kind of way. Their verbal sparring was the highlight of the family gatherings we did attend. Safe ones like the Fourth of July, Labor Day...To hear even my own brother favoring Edwin—it was almost too much. I lived much of my life in the shadow of Edwin's vibrant light in Ann Arbor. At least with my own family,  I wanted to be the focus. Paul was tricking me somehow, but I was losing my thread and eager to beg off, so I told him we'd be there, then quickly hung up.

I'VE NEVER BEEN a good phone person. It's just this weird plastic object in my hand. I'll say anything to get off the line, and I often have. I even agreed to marry someone just to end a phone conversation—Amy, who really just wanted to get the hell away from her abusive parents and lead a calm, normal life. Something she has subsequently failed at, she would admit, after three disastrous marriages. I suppose by some definitions of normal, so have I, but marrying her would have been a catastrophe for us both. Agreeing to marry her ended up being the equivalent of a one-night stand. The next time we saw each other, we were both embarrassed and pretended it never happened.

One reason Amy liked me was because I was terrified of physical contact. I sometimes think that if Edwin hadn't come along, I would never have had sex of any type ever. I wasn't attracted to women, I didn't want to admit I was gay, and I was absolutely terrified of AIDS. I just curled into a hard little shell and scuttled safely through my daily life. What enabled my family to handle my being gay reasonably well was that I seemed _normal_ to them, even after I came out. I was just dull little David. Average in nearly every way, from sports to school.

"WE'RE STAYING WITH PAUL? Maybe I can seduce him in the middle of the night," Edwin laughed. I grimaced. "Or not, and say I did," he added, gently mussing my hair.

Helping out was the right thing. Edwin and I would grunt and sweat and lift heavy objects. He was in great shape and competed in the occasional triathlon. I worked in cash management at the National Bank of Detroit branch in Ann Arbor. I carried my laptop back and forth to work. For exercise, I took out the garbage on Thursday nights.

I loved that house. I knew every gouge in the hardwood floors, every scar in the wall—where Paul punched a hole in the bathroom plywood after our father took away his car keys when he came home drunk; where, startled, I fell through the drywall in the hallway when my mother jumped off a chair to try and kiss me.

Maybe they should've known something was up if I was shying from my own mother's kisses, but when my ass stuck in the wall, it just became another funny family story. I respected my parents, never got in trouble at school, didn't go out much. I was Paul's opposite, and for a long time, they thought that was good.

I was a gay Wally Cleaver, Edwin liked to say, and my family probably would've agreed. Except when Wally came home to visit, Ward and June wouldn't let Wally's friend sleep over. This made Wally miss his house even more. Sometimes Wally would dream up some excuse to run back to Warren for a quick overnighter, befuddling my parents who did not like surprises, just so I could sleep in my old bed. My mother always asked if Edwin and I had broken up, and I'd worry about what Edwin might be doing while I was gone, but I needed the fix that old house gave. If it was my rock of comfort, it was also, impossibly, the rock I pushed against, hoping it was really an egg with enough of a crack to let both me and Edwin in.

I SHOULD'VE HAD other lovers before Edwin. I was a virgin freak that Edwin took pity on. Maybe I should've slept with Amy to at least get that out of the way. I was a sick little Wally. Why did Edwin love me? Did he love me _enough_? I bet you can tell I love him.

Our first night together, he says to me—his chest and belly are spotted with strange constellations of red moles, so he points them out right away—"These are my wisdom spots. Here, put your fingers on them and you'll get a wisdom boost." Maybe other people call them that too, but he makes everything seem original.

The week before the move, our friend Lawrence made a joke, saying he needed to touch the spots before he took the bar exam. We'd all had a little wine. It was Lawrence's partner Ned's birthday. I wanted to ask how he knew about the wisdom spots.

"Those wisdom spots are for me," I said. "I need all that wisdom."

"Don't be greedy," Lawrence said. "Everybody knows Edwin likes to share."

"I bring wisdom to the world," Edwin said quickly, and raised his glass in a toast. "Here's to wisdom," he said, and we drank.

WE DROPPED OFF our dog Archie at Bow, Wow! Kennels on our way out of town on a dreary Friday in April, the sky's dark, bulky clouds pressing down on us. They made it hard to breathe, those clouds, but the rain held off.

When we arrived at Paul's, his wife Bev greeted us at the door with an odd leer and a glass of a cloudy beverage that involved some kind of schnapps.

"Where were you boys? We've all been waiting."

She liked her drinks sweet. She had a loud face ripe with makeup, each feature italicized or in boldface. I think she found us cute in a strange, condescending way. Their teenaged girls, Erica and Carmen, clearly had not been waiting for us. They'd reached that age where their ears could no longer register the sound of adult voices. Edwin and I said hello to their stick figures bent over a computer game console. They mumbled back without looking up. Perhaps they hadn't had a vote in the decision to have a sleepover with us.

Paul emerged from the bathroom to shake our hands with his wet one—a man who didn't have time to dry his hands. At thirty-eight, he was starting to harden into sharp angles, his jaw jutting forward to greet us, his black hair and unshaven cheeks already sprinkled with gray. I dyed mine. Bev liked to kid Paul about looking so much older than me (I was only a year younger), though she obviously dyed her hair too and could probably recognize my "Just for Men" job a mile away.

"Ah, the gay blades of Ann Arbor..." Paul liked to put on a show of  acknowledging our sexual preference while mocking it at the same time. I don't think he's ever gotten over his only brother being gay.

"At your service," Edwin said. He winked at Bev, who rounded her mouth into a dental stretch of faux delight.

"Good to see you, Paulie," I said. We'd have to decide how to connect to each other without the glue of our parents' house—and before too much longer, without our parents, period. Perhaps inviting us to stay with him was an opening move toward that hazy future. I dried my now-wet hand on my pant leg and smiled broadly, the wide, unguarded smile that I had only for him. Him, and maybe Amy.

THE OLD HOUSE was on the edge of Detroit, right off of Eight Mile in Warren, a boxy working-class community surrounding a huge Ford plant where my father had worked until his retirement five years ago. I sometimes joke that they had gay detectors at the doors of Eight Mile High to keep us out, though I'm sure many snuck through besides me. Perhaps Betty Quick, nicknamed "The Horse," the star of all the girls' sports teams. Betty had both the teeth and solid bulk of a graceful animal, though that nickname certainly was not intended as a compliment. I admit I called her that too. I'd call anyone anything to deflect attention from myself. I was the Great Agree-er, amiably changing my mind at a moment's notice if it'd get me off the hook. I floated like a thin sheet of cellophane down the long, straight hallways and the long, straight streets. The landscape of Warren was so dull and our futures so predictable—the big graduation question was, "Where you gonna work, Ford's, GM, or Chrysler's?"—that it made everyone seem tough and angry a good part of the time, even the girls. After all, they were supposed to marry us.

Some guys who were not particularly masculine got labeled and picked on, whether they were gay or not. Like "Henry the Homo," a thin, skeletal human tremor who got his skull bashed in outside the auto shop for no discernible  reason except that he refused to fight back. I got left alone—I had the cover of muscular, hot-headed Paul. I was _just shy_ , everyone seemed to agree. I worked as an AV assistant to fulfill my vo-tech requirement, anonymously wandering the halls, efficiently delivering film carts and tape players to teachers desperate for diversion. Amy was my AV pal, and we snuck equipment home and made Super 8 movies that parodied the school's pretentious cliques and ignorant teachers. With Amy, I was elevated, a play-by-play announcer looking down on the school's games, weighing in with deep, sneering insights, finally telling the truth to someone.

Amy invited me to the prom. We bought our formal wear at Stan's, picking out the tackiest duds we could find. I wore a peach leisure suit, and Amy wore a floral print dress from the Hawaii of Mars. At the dance, we sat in a corner and made bitter fun of everyone else. Sweat ran down our flushed faces as we bashed the jocks, the "Brady Bunch" girls, the mugging, posturing hoods.... When we were together, we vented so much hot air at each other, we stunk with it.

THE HOUSE. MOVING DAY. I keep circling it and getting lost. My parents were beautiful and ordinary. My father slicked back his hair every morning and went off without complaint and brought home his check and made sure we were fed and clothed—that was his job. My mother stayed home, cooked and cleaned, and kept her nose in our business—that was her job. She might still jump off a chair to surprise me with a kiss if she could lift herself up on one. We were happy in that house. Paul and I mostly got along, and we both doted on Ruth, years younger, perpetually cute. I quickly learned to steer clear of Paul's temper, and it ended up being a very useful skill—it gave me a sixth sense for when someone or something was ready to blow.

My parents' tiny three-bedroom house was so indistinguishable from others on the block that the first few years I took Edwin home with me, he was unable to pick it out. I had many hiding places in the basement of that  tiny brick box. I hid my beer, drugs, and pornography (straight porn, from Paul) beneath our father's dusty workbench, behind a piece of paneling in the closet, up in the rafters.

Our grandmother lived with us for fifteen years, sharing a room with Ruth. I shared a bunk bed with Paul in the third bedroom, sleeping on the bottom. I loved the womb-like comfort of that small space. Edwin put a low canopy above our own bed to try and give me that same feeling. He liked the challenge of constructing it, and he wanted to make me completely comfortable in bed, where he was my patient, enthusiastic tour guide.

We lived in Edwin's house in Ann Arbor, where no one bothered two guys slowly drifting toward middle age together in a nice old Victorian on a quiet street. Though more and more I felt like I was sinking, and Edwin was floating, and maybe even swimming, swimming away from me. I had no hiding places there, but I spent a lot of time looking for his.

PAUL AND BEV LIVED in Rochester Hills, a suburb that had no hills, but wanted to distinguish itself from Rochester as the more upscale place to live. To get to Rochester Hills from Warren, you had to drive through Center Line, then Warren again (it surrounded Center Line), Sterling Heights, Troy, and Rochester. Paul was a successful builder. He jumped in just as the suburbs began stretching further away from Detroit, filling in the farmland with homes twice the size of the one we grew up in. Along the way, he built one for Ruth in Troy, where she lived with Dull Dan and their daughter Olivia. Then, he kept going, and built one for himself further out. The suburbs were expanding so far from Detroit that the newest ones were now approaching Ann Arbor.

"Pretty soon we're going to be one big glob," Edwin said.

"And I'm gonna have a big glob of money," Paul responded.

Ann Arbor is less than an hour from Detroit, but psychologically, it seems light years away—Ann Arbor, home of the annual Hash Bash, longtime center of counterculture going back to the SDS days, the ultimate university town.  Detroit was, well, Detroit. It had taken the suicidal step of legalizing casino gambling just to hasten its demise.

"I don't know if we're going to like being part of your glob," Edwin said. He was originally from East Detroit, an area now known as East _Pointe_ in an attempt to shed the bad connotations and sound more like Grosse Pointe, the community of old-moneyed mansions along Riverside Drive. Edwin had escaped to Ann Arbor for college. He found a teaching job in Grand Rapids after graduation, but immediately began scheming to get back to Ann Arbor. His parents had both died in a car accident on an icy freeway on their way home from visiting him at college, so he rarely returned to the Detroit area. When I missed family gatherings, I was gathered with Edwin in Ann Arbor.

I WENT TO HOPE COLLEGE in Holland, Michigan, near Grand Rapids, because it was small and safe and no one from Eight Mile High had ever gone there. I liked Hope with a capital H. My father had saved for years, and I'd worked all through high school selling shoes at Thom McCann's in Universal City, Warren's only mall, to put away money for college. I'd resisted my father's pressure to take a summer job in the factory, while Paul gladly took that job and the good money it paid. But Paul didn't use the money for college. He stayed home and bought a Firebird. Then, he got Bev pregnant. She lost that child, but after they married, she had the girls. Paul got himself on a construction crew when they put an addition on at the plant, then went off on his own and hammered his way into the housing boom.

I met Edwin at Century Lanes in Grand Rapids, a fact no one believes. I'd always been a bowler, ever since they built Bronco Lanes in the field behind our street where we used to play baseball. I'd never really liked baseball, but I loved the sleek glide of the bowling ball, the low rumble over the alley, the air conditioning. The only time I ever got my name in the paper was when I bowled a perfect game at age seventeen. "It's been all downhill since then"—that's  one of my jokes. My father still has the tiny newspaper listing—the weekly 300 games and hole-in-ones—and I still have the plaque I received from the U.S. Bowling Congress after the game was certified.

Edwin was bowling with a large group that turned out to be the Gay Men's Chorus of Grand Rapids. They'd been singing at way too many funerals, so someone had the idea of having a bowling party as a kind of joke. I was there by myself; I know that sounds pitiful—college kid bowling alone on a Friday night—but it always helped me unwind. The machines even keep score now, so you don't have to think at all. Everything controlled, precise. The long, smooth, narrow path traversed with grace and power and speed. The explosion of the pins, the quickly restored order of the pin-setting machine.

A mixed-doubles league occupied nearly all the other lanes, so Edwin's group swallowed me up, taking the empty alleys on both sides of mine. He invited me to be his partner because they'd ended up with an odd number of bowlers. I'd never seen so many openly gay guys in one place before—it made me a little giddy, like some hidden fantasy of mine had descended from a cloud, fully realized. Hope was pretty tightly zippered and buttoned, so even though it had been a welcome change for me, less harsh than Warren, it had its own unspoken restrictions on behavior.

With me on board, Edwin and I won the first and only Gay Men's Chorus Bowling Tournament. Although I can't sing worth a damn, and hadn't declared myself gay, Edwin asked me to join the chorus. I quickly fell in love with him, and within a year, I was living in his apartment in Grand Rapids. The next year, he got that prized teaching job in Ann Arbor, and after I graduated from Hope, I hurried down to join him. When I got the job offer from NBD, I took it.

I CAME OUT to my family in a long, fat letter home full of explanation and apology and defense and pleading. I sent it in April before going home for the summer at the end of my sophomore year, giving the fact some time to  sink in before I brought it home like an inconvenient pet everyone wanted to let out in the yard, hoping it'd run away.

"What about Amy?" my mother asked after I'd loaded my clothes back into my old dresser and sat in the living room, alone on the red and black overstuffed couch, my parents in their respective La-Z-Boy chairs. "Amy's the one who talked me _into_ telling you," I whined, anticipating a long night of bitter arguments. My father stared at the TV as if it was on. He had on what we called his "serious face." After a few minutes of silence, he clicked on the remote, and we all watched TV together until drifting off to bed. We never spoke of it again. Perhaps it wasn't exactly breaking news.

Amy had declared herself independent at eighteen. She got a full ride at Dartmouth and took off. "I fucking took off," she tells people, even now, her hands exploding out from her chest and into the air. I love her for that passion, even though it frequently gets her into trouble. Thus, the three ex-husbands she also "fucking took off" on. "Three!" she shouts over the phone in self-amazement.

We still talk a lot—she's the exception to my phone phobia. She asks me for advice on men as if I was an expert. She envies my life with Edwin, and I like being envied. Amy's demons are her weight and her temper. For a long time, we relied on sharing our unhappiness, but then I ended up being mostly happy. I had my Prince Charming, even if I suspected he wasn't charming me exclusively. There were too many empty hours, nights, when the dog and I watched television, waiting for Edwin to come home, and when he did, he'd hold a finger to his lips as if asking me to keep the secret of what he was not telling.

EDWIN AND I SLEPT on a foldout bed in Paul's basement. Bev had made it up with what appeared to be brand-new sheets—tight, neat, with chocolates on the pillows.

"See, this is just like a hotel," Edwin said, sitting up, clicking through the channels on the TV Paul kept down there for watching sports.

"No it isn't," I protested. "It's creepy."

" _You_ think it's creepy—how do you think they feel?" Edwin said.

"I can't sleep," I said. "They'll probably burn these sheets after we leave."

"No, they'll have them bronzed," Edwin laughed.

"Yeah, right," I said. "I just can't relax."

"You're not trying," Edwin said. He turned down the volume on _The Closet of Dr. No_ , a dull horror film that wasn't campy enough to be funny.

"Paul's Sleep Cheap," I said, rolling over. "I'm scared, Edwin."

"Don't worry, the vampire dies at the end," he said.

"Vampires never die," I said. I wanted to talk about losing my parents, how this was like a rehearsal. I wanted to ask him if he was screwing around on me, and would he please, please stop. But all I could do was pick up one of the scratchy couch pillows off the floor and press it tight against my face.

IN THE MORNING, I woke with a stiff back from the metal rod poking through the thin mattress. We were to meet early at my parents' to begin the work, using Paul's pickup and Ruth's minivan. When I walked upstairs, Paul was arguing with the girls, who he'd clearly rousted out of bed against their will.

"Look, it's a big day. We need your help. Your _grandparents_ need your help."

"I hate that house," Erica said.

"Smells like old people," Carmen said.

Paul, bedraggled, furious, shook with anger.

"They _are_ old people. Old people who..."

I quickly stepped into the room.

"Girls," Paul said.

Bev was sitting quietly in the corner, her hands cradled around her coffee mug.

"Hey," I said, "Uncle David, who, as you know, never takes your father's side in anything, thinks you should come too."

"One more reason not to," Erica mumbled.

I wanted to wipe that sneer off her face. I'd always gotten along famously with the girls, and now they were turning on me because—why?

Edwin entered, showered and perfectly groomed, as if he had just stepped out of an old Cary Grant movie. He gave us all an exaggerated Cary Grant frown, twisted and comical. I'd rented _Mr. Blanding's Dream House_ recently—thinking about the move, I guess. Or about the impossibility of the ideal. Or just thinking about Cary Grant. Those old movies made life unpredictable in a predictably satisfying way.

Edwin stood frozen in that pose till we all finally laughed, even the girls, who had no idea who Cary Grant was. Still, they refused to help. Paul ordered them to their rooms, and they were happy to go—all they had to do was wait for us to leave before reemerging. Or else, just go back to sleep. Paul slammed the truck door and squealed out of the driveway like a teenager with a lead foot, a hot date, or a reason to think his parents were stupid.

We followed dutifully, though I knew the way. Anywhere within twenty miles of my boyhood home, I was on automatic pilot. Whatever car I was driving seemed programmed to smell out that stuffy little house that once held everyone I had always loved.

"Little bitches," I said to Edwin.

"As if you weren't a little bitch yourself," he said.

"How would you know?"

"All anybody has to do is read what your friends wrote in your high school yearbook...Or listen to you talk to Amy for five minutes. Your voice changes when you talk to her, you know."

"My voice does not change."

"Right. You sound like a whining engine."

"I like how you're picking up the automotive lingo."

"Happens every time—something in the air here."

Edwin and Amy didn't get along. She unnerved him with her bluntness—he liked to live his life in euphemism and innuendo. Amy lived alone in Louisville, where she worked for General Electric in their appliance division. Despite our high school poses as outsiders, we'd both ended up in dull corporate jobs. "At least we got out of there," Amy often reminded me. I knew working at the bank wasn't any more exciting or lucrative than the factory, but I always agreed with her. "At least we got out of Dodge—or Ford, or Chrysler."

Paul pulled into the driveway, and I parked our car in the street out front, honking the horn frantically despite the early hour, then ran to embrace my parents, who were trembling—not from the joy of having their family together, but from the pure terror of leaving forty-four years of memories behind.

AFTER WE'D UNLOADED the first truckload, Paul and I sat on the perfect grass in front of the condo complex, downing a couple of cold beers. I'd stopped drinking beer long ago, but broke down and had one in honor of the occasion. Beer made me fat and kept me up at nights peeing or simply unable to sleep. I'd have a glass of wine with meals, a civilized habit I picked up in the rarified air of Ann Arbor. But back home, beer was the beverage of choice. My father had uncharacteristically turned one down and had gone off to sit alone in a lawn chair on their tiny new redwood-stained deck.

"Condo-mania already," I said.

"Look at him," Paul said.

"He's either thinking about dying or never having to shovel snow again," I said.

"Kind of the same thing to him," Paul said. "A lost fucking soul."

"Aren't we all," I said.

"Speak for yourself," he said. "I found my soul...Drink up. We got another load to haul." My father never had much to say, and even less when Edwin was around. I felt a pang of guilt for complicating his life.

Edwin was inside, unpacking with my mother, Bev, and Ruth, whose  husband Dull Dan was either invisible or AWOL, and no one mentioned why. Everyone liked Edwin better. I was sure he was regaling the women with enhanced tales of his travels and adventures—trips to New York and Washington, his brief acquaintance with an odd cast of famous characters from the former heavyweight champion Mohammed Ali to the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. I'd heard him trot it all out before. So had my family, but they never seemed to tire of that faint whiff of celebrity when their closest brush had been when Ruth played piano on Rita Bell's _Stairway to the Stars_ talent show on Channel 7. Edwin met Captain Kangaroo once, too. Said he was a bitter, angry man, though I never believed him.

That was my problem with Edwin. While I'd say anything to get by, he'd say anything to impress. Getting by was never enough for him. In Ann Arbor, among his older friends, I still was treated like Edwin's boy—tolerated more than accepted. Even after more than a decade, they seemed to assume it would be only a matter of time before Edwin got bored with me.

"HEY BRO, YOU AND EDDIE got together pretty early on...You were just a pup. Was there anybody before him, like, or was he what made you go queer?"

"Who, not what," I said. "Why are we talking about this?" We never had before. His question could have been offensive coming from someone who wasn't family. Who wasn't casually leaning out the window of his pickup and sighing like all the air was leaking out of him.

"Maybe if you'd let me have the top bunk, I would've turned out differently," I joked.

"You loved that bottom bunk. Your little cave."

"Come on, you can't tell me you didn't suspect. I just didn't do anything about it till Edwin."

"Don't you wonder, what if you hadn't met Ed? I know him, and I know you—he came onto you, no question."

"You and Bev have been together, how long?"

"You know damn well how long."

"How come you never had more kids?"

"Hey, we were talking about Ed. Ed and you. Do you guys have some kind of...of pact or something? To be, you know, faithful? I'm interested in issues of commitment," he said soberly. "I don't give a shit about the gay stuff. You think he cheats on you?"

I turned and stared out at my father on the deck shielding his eyes against the sun.

"Guess I'll have to ask Ed," he said.

"Don't," I said.

"Did he put your name on the deed to his house?"

I squeezed my empty beer can, crinkling it in half. Nowhere to put it. I tossed it into the truck bed. It rattled around all the way back to the half-empty house.

IN THE BASEMENT, we were stuffing trophies and model airplanes and ragged board games and scribbled-on children's books into the last few boxes.

"We going to the curb with this stuff?"

"I wish," Paul said. "Mom's got it all inventoried."

"But this stuff—I'm the sentimental fool, and _I_ don't want it."

"I don't think any of these trophies are yours."

"How can you forget my stellar bowling career? The models are yours though—you and that airplane glue." I inhaled an exaggerated snort.

"Fuck you," Paul said, laughing, zooming a Japanese Zero above my head.

I was weepy over odd things like the grease-encased popcorn maker with the wooden spinner on top and a deck of Ford playing cards my father got for participating in the employee suggestion program. The deck included jokers I'd modified to replace missing cards—two homemade hearts—imagining I was fooling anyone. Late afternoon shadows cut across the casement windows, just like I remembered. I used to sit alone down there and feel sorry for myself.

"I SLEPT WITH AMY ONCE, you know," Paul said out of nowhere. Or, more specifically, the bathroom where he was pissing.

I dropped a box. "Bullshit."

"Why do you care?"

"Why are you telling me now?"

"Because we did it here."

I covered my ears and began to loudly hum. "Too much information!" I shouted.

He flushed the toilet and emerged, shaking his wet hands. "Well, I got some more information for you," he said. "I want to tell—show you—something on the way back."

I immediately believed him about Amy. She had her own philosophy about sex that had carried her through three bad marriages. She seemed attracted to a certain kind of man for sex, and another—like me—for friendship. She had few female friends. But, _Paul_ , who I constantly complained about when we were in high school? And what would he be showing me now?

"Are you building another dream house further out in the sub-outer-burbs?"

"A dream house is a house you're happy in," he said. "I build a lot of houses. Houses can make people crazy."

"That doesn't sound like the Master Builder talking," I said.

"I got some other dreams now," he said.

The combination of the beer and the exertion suddenly exhausted me. I rarely wished Edwin to be elsewhere, but I was glad Edwin wasn't with us. I carried my bowling trophies to the curb in an old beer case and left them. If any old neighbors were still around, they were keeping themselves scarce. No tears on the porch, and no one videotaped anything. We got back in the truck, and I slumped into one corner while Paul slumped into the other.

INSTEAD OF HEADING back to the condo, Paul drove us further toward Detroit,  following Van Dyke from Sterling Heights through Warren and Centerline, and back into Warren again.

"Warren, the Gateway to Centerline"—I repeated the old joke. You'd never know the difference between the cities except for the "You Are Entering" and "You Are Leaving" signs.

"Come back again soon," Paul read in a monotone.

"C'mon, where we going?"

"Just hold your horses."

"Only got one horse, but it's a mean buckaroo."

"Mine's a Clydesdale," Paul said, and clutched at his crotch, his laugh harsh, edgy. He turned onto Republic, a small side street off of the Detroit side of Eight Mile that was packed with even smaller houses than our parents'. He pulled to the curb and turned off the engine.

"Dave..." He paused. "I've got a girlfriend lives in that house there."

I'm not sure which house he indicated because my head was in the process of exploding.

"I had to tell somebody," he said. "I thought you might understand."

"Holy shit, Paul," I said. "What am I supposed to do, give you the papal blessing?" I'd never been a big fan of Bev's, but I was shocked. "Why did you think _I_ might understand?"

"I'm leaving Bev next month."

"Is this, this woman..."

"Shelly," Paul said. He sighed, "Yeah, she's married too. It'll be messy. I don't want Mom and Dad to ever know."

"How the hell you gonna pull that off? Rent Bev for family occasions?"

Paul sighed again. It seemed all he was capable of. "See, it's connected. Mom and Dad moving before it's too late. I gotta move before it's too late too. Bev, man..."

"And the girls—your daughters? Think it's going to be worth it to mess up their lives forever?"

"Whoa. And what makes you the expert? Who appointed you the moral one?"

"What, are we going to get out and peek in the windows now? Just get me out of here."

"I love her. I just—it's like you and Ed, see? Society looks down on you, but you can't help yourself."

"Who looks down on us? Where do you get this shit?"

Paul pulled the truck away from the curb, his fingers brushing the horn as if threatening to beep it. He shaded his eyes and peered up at the house. Oh, he had it bad.

"Don't tell anyone," he said. "Not yet. Not even Edwin."

"What's this, some midlife thing? You're the one who needs to grow up."

"I married Bev when I was eighteen. _Eighteen_. I got the rest of my life. We're going nowhere in that house together. I wanted to put on an addition just to be farther away from her. Isn't that nuts? She's _always there_."

Always there? What could be better than that? I felt a hollow cracking in my chest. All the stable places were crumbling. He and Bev had let us stay there because they either didn't care anymore or welcomed the distraction. It wasn't the big victory I'd imagined. The girls were nasty because they knew something was up. Bev was overly cheery as compensation for their frayed edges, for the betrayal she only suspected but would soon have confirmed. The rest of the ride back to the condo passed in silence. I felt wildly alone.

INSIDE, EDWIN AND THE WOMEN were neatly and precisely re-creating the rooms of our old house, minus the children's—our—rooms. When we walked in, serenity oozed toward us on air-conditioned air. My mother was sitting in her chair watching TV as the others moved around her. My father, screwdriver in hand, was trying to connect the DVD player.

"You boys get lost?" Bev asked.

"Just had to say goodbye to the old place," I said. "Now that it's empty, wasn't  quite so hard." But as I said that, my voice verged on the edge of anguish. I set a box on the floor—the photo albums. "Piece of cake," Paul said, dropping a box of linens next to it.

We'd left the boxes of _Reader's Digest_ Condensed Books on the curb along with mildewed _National Geographics_ that smelled—as the girls said—like old people. Our mother would just have to deal with it. We'd all have to deal with it—all that was to come. My parents were going to die in that condo.

BEFORE WE HEADED back to Ann Arbor early Monday, we had a family breakfast at The Clock down on Eight Mile near the old house, close to the freeway on-ramp. I was following my father there when he rear-ended another car at the red light in front of the restaurant. No injuries or even the slightest damage to either vehicle. He just took his foot off the brake and drifted into the guy.

"It's been so nice having you guys here," Bev whispered in my ear as she hugged me in the parking lot. Paul had left early to go in to work. He'd been quiet and sullen over his coffee, sitting at the end of the table, one foot angled toward the door.

On the road, the threatened rain finally materialized. I put the wipers on intermittent. I liked the proximity to blindness, then the sudden veil lifting, the pattern of approaching disaster and being rescued.

I no longer wanted to ask Edwin if he had been faithful. I didn't want him pulling to the curb on some side street to explain, reveal—for deep inside, I knew he had casual relationships, the blurring of lines between friends and lovers that I wanted no part of.

"A long weekend for everyone," he said. "Maybe I'll buy Paul and Bev a futon."

"They won't be needing it," I said. Then I told him everything, as Paul must have known I would, and what difference could it possibly make? My stiff back throbbed. My fingers numbed on the wheel.

"Let's not ever move," I said. "It's killing me."

Edwin was sorting the change in the cup holders between us. He said nothing.

Somewhere behind us, the unpacking continued, while the sorting through wreckage was only just beginning. I had stashed a box of treasures in the trunk—report cards and grade-school art projects and my collection of rocks and gems and letters from Amy.

"He's ruining his life," I said. "He slept with Amy, can you believe that?"

"You're kidding," Edwin half-laughed. If we were home, he would've gotten up and left the room.

"I'll never forgive him for that," I said forcefully.

"Why not?" Edwin said. "Never?"

"I won't forgive either of them," I said, though I knew it wasn't my role to forgive.

"He shouldn't have told you," Edwin said. "That's not like him. Something like that, it's a burden." Edwin looked out his side window. We had to shout at each other above the sprayed rattle of rain.

"It's a burden," he said again, louder.

I hunched over the wheel and squinted. I flipped the wipers onto high.

## RACCOON HEAVEN

THE SKY PUSHED DOWN ON US WITH THE ACHE OF A BRUISE, A DEEP BLUE-PURPLE with a wispy, orange tint, as if a child had gotten out the wrong crayon to try and create a color that didn't exist, or had combined crayons in an explosive mixture that scientists warned about, or had not read the small print on the side of the box, or all of the above. It hadn't rained in weeks, and Meg and I were hoping it lurked in those thick, alien clouds, ready to break loose and let us have it.

An anticipatory stillness filled the air as we drove with the windows down past the large farm whose runoff ended up in _our_ pond, morphing into neon green slime that reeked of a bad trip on at least three sensory levels. Sometimes the wind herded the algae to one end of the pond so that if we looked the right way, we could almost pretend it was what we'd imagined when we bought the cottage two Octobers ago, the clear lake mirroring the bright changing leaves after the first frost had killed the algae. If we looked the right way, we could imagine our own lives changing for the better.

Our next car would be big enough for children, we told ourselves, children  who would love the cottage, want to bring their friends from the city to—to what? What would our children do there? Fish for mutant algae-covered bluegills? We were torn, depending on the direction of the wind.

We turned onto the dirt road that led to the cottages on our side of the lake. We were like politicians—if we just repeated "lake" often enough, perhaps we could convince the world and ourselves that it was more than a small, slimy, algae-encrusted pond.

We had owned the cottage long enough to survive the previous owner's lingering and snooping, to not feel like the new kids at school when we went to the Cottage Owners Association monthly meetings. There had even been talk of electing me to the board, though half the owners turned out to be conservative Christians, and they wanted to know why Meg and I had different last names when we applied for membership. I was already suspicious of the treasurer, Walt, a man who owned a Dairy Deelite on the outer edge of Detroit's suburbs and was fond of quoting scripture. As part of our application, we had to include the price we'd paid for the cottage, and they all told us we'd paid too much.

The smell hit us before we even turned into the gravel driveway. When we got out of our little Ford Focus, it devoured us. I stopped to retch before I unlocked the cottage. We lunged inside and slammed the door. Dead fish. Dead fish rotting on the rim of the pond. The pond, the algae-infested green-scum _pond_.

At the yellow Formica table in the kitchen, Meg dug a cigarette out of her purse and lit up. Usually, after the two-hour drive, she'd smoke outside at the rotting picnic table on the tiny cement patio, but today she lit up inside without hesitation, and I welcomed the burning sting deep into my lungs.

"What now?" Meg asked, tilting back her head and whistling smoke up toward the bare beams of the ceiling. I held my head in my hands and watched a trail of enormous carpenter ants cross the green linoleum.

On our last visit to the cottage, we'd seen Walt take out his full-sized  canoe—a yacht on that pint-sized pond—and spray poison on all the algae. He wore no protective gear, breathing it in as it wafted back up toward him.

"I inhaled lots worse in Vietnam, and it didn't kill me," he shouted cheerfully as he sprayed the shore in front of our place. We'd been sitting on the screened-in porch and quickly headed inside.

The poison had slowly killed the fish, though the algae was still rimming the shore with its bright madness. _Collateral damage_ stinking in the heat. Most of the twenty-one cottage owners were weekenders from Grand Rapids or Kalamazoo or Lansing. The Association had two year-round residents, the lesbian couple two cottages down who quietly kept to themselves, and the alcoholic hermit who lived in the oldest, tiniest cottage on the grounds, his wife having left him years ago in a scene still occasionally recounted at the Association potluck meetings as a cautionary tale or amusing anecdote, depending on who was telling it. Walt thought it was a hoot. Walt, who would brush off our dead-fish story as a hysterical exaggeration by the wimps from Warren.

I'd recently sprinkled diazinon crystals around the cottage perimeter as a barrier against all crawling creatures. I was not averse to poison.

The Association had voted for Walt to treat the algae with his magic brew at the last meeting, and to reimburse him for expenses. We'd been assured it wouldn't kill fish or wildlife. Karla, Walt's wife, had inherited her father's place. She had grown up swimming in the pond in its pre-algae days, and once every summer got drunk enough to take a dip, keeping her head above water like an enemy submarine or the large, menacing turtle we sometimes spotted cruising through the scum.

Earlier that summer, I'd accidentally snagged one of the giant algae-eating fish. (Ed was waging all-out war. A commando against algae, he smuggled the illegal fish in under cover of darkness.) I managed to pull it close to shore without snapping my rod. Its large, heaving mouth gasped up at me as I ripped out the hook and shoved the fish back in the water. _Algae_ , I hissed,  _eat more algae_. But even the thick, heavy algae-eaters could not keep the pond scum at bay.

The Association had tried everything. Babes Schultz had sold her cottage to us after she'd been outvoted and the dues were raised in a boondoggle of an effort to seal the leaks in the earthen dam that lowered the water level and thus promoted algae growth. They spent thousands on these large rolls of Leak-Kwit, but it was installed backwards or upside down so that it all just slid to the bottom of the pond instead of filling the holes. They'd hired a lawyer. The company agreed to install more Leak-Kwit. It had been delivered, but the company went bankrupt and left its fat rolls sitting like giant turds on the other side of the pond for years, reminding the Association of its folly. But that shit didn't stink. Not like hundreds of dead fish.

We'd owned the cottage six months before anyone explained to us the story behind those strange rolls of what resembled modeling clay and perhaps actually was modeling clay. It'd clearly been a test of wills, and Walt had won. Walt called her Babs. Everyone else knew her as Babes. Babes was Association treasurer and knew a wacky waste of money when she saw it. When I brought the subject up during one of her many surprise visits, she got so upset that she stayed away for weeks, so perhaps it was worth the extra hundred bucks in dues just to keep Babes from dropping in on us uninvited. She'd bring her yappy little dog, Tinkles. That dog was so damned happy to be back at the pond, it nagged at me a bit to be cruel to Babes. Just a bit.

Poison. Cruelty. I considered myself a pragmatist. Relief trumped guilt. Hearing her car in the gravel driveway had ruined many a peaceful afternoon. Babes lived too close—twenty minutes away in Hastings—and it was like her car had a mind of its own. But it didn't. It was Babes with her hands on the steering wheel, tooling down the dusty Association road to reveal some secret about the septic system she'd neglected to tell us.

Meg had been a reluctant participant in the cottage experience. She had taken cottage-owning pass/fail and was looking for some extra credit just to get by. Now, she was ready to drop out entirely.

"WHAT THE FUCK?" Meg was puffing her cigarette down to its filter.

"Let's think this through," I said. "What are our options?"

"Leaving, or getting divorced," she said. No trace of a smile.

"What about leaving _and_ getting divorced," I shot back.

She jammed the butt into Babes's old beanbag ashtray and walked over to the window overlooking the pond.

I hurried to follow. "I didn't mean that," I sputtered, standing at a distance behind her. "We can sell this dump. It was a crazy idea."

She looked dourly at me. No—smoldering. No—determined. No—with an assassin's grace.

THAT NIGHT, I SCRUBBED my hands until they bled, red like chapped winter hands, but still they stunk. I'd smelled dead fish before. But not hundreds that had been baking in August heat, possibly for days. We were tattooed with stink.

"I feel like Lady fucking Macbeth," I shouted.

"You're a MacFucking asshole," she shouted back. I was running the water and could not hear the nuance in her voice I was listening for, the "smile when she said it."

I HAVE NOT MENTIONED the menacing, damaged young monster from across the road yet. I have not mentioned cocaine yet, but that's what paid for the cottage. I've got this big pile of dead fish, and I'm thinking maybe I can leave the cocaine out, but the cocaine wants in. It's got the itchy cocaine trigger finger.

When people say we can either do things the easy way or the hard way, it doesn't seem like the easy way ever wins. I met Meg during the cocaine cowboy years. I'd started out selling pot in high school and worked my way up. A true American bootstrap success story. What the hell is a bootstrap anyway?

It can seem like the easy way for a while, but don't fool yourself. One day, somebody comes knocking on your door with a COD bill, and he's not leaving till he gets it. Whatever it is.

WHERE AM I? In a cottage on a pond named Lake, a shade too close to the Michigan Militia for this city kid, and I'm surrounded by dead fish, trapped in a cave-in of stench with Meg, my wife and former customer.

Meg got a degree in painting that proved so worthless that she quickly went back to school and got another degree in nursing. I paid for it. No health plan for drug dealers, but she got a job at Troy Beaumont Hospital and added me to hers. I started looking for some legitimate work myself.

From behind, Meg looks Asian with her long, black hair hanging straight down, but her face was pure Irish with bright green eyes full of intense wariness. We met at some artsy party—I don't know how, but those folks always seemed to scrape enough money together for a gram or two. Sometimes, they tried to trade me paintings for coke. I'd just laugh. At everyone except Meg, whose paintings sucked, but who _looked_ like she could paint. Like she'd be the actor in a biopic of some famous painter whose real looks were bland, washed out.

Oh, I got her hooked, all right. It got so bad, I had to carry my product in a combination-lock briefcase to keep her from getting at it. One night, she freaked out, sobbing, on her knees, pounding on the case, clawing at it with a hammer, chipping the marble tiles of our kitchen floor. I wrestled the hammer away and took her to rehab.

I think she married me out of some twisted transfer of affection. Any addict or dealer knows that once you get used to the product, you need more just to stay normal, and I didn't have anything more to give her, and I'd already been so stepped on, so cut, so diluted, that I didn't have a lot of kick left to begin with. When she came out of rehab, she clung to me for the first few months, then she got hooked on bad TV.

ONCE MEG WAS CLEAN, we had to find new ways to label ourselves, particularly after I quit dealing. We hung some of her paintings on the walls at the cottage until the dampness turned to mold around the edges of the frames, as if the algae had found a way inside.

I keep talking about the algae when it's the fish. I just don't want to have to go out there and smell them again.

BUYING THE COTTAGE had been my idea. Part of _my_ rehab. My return to normalcy. Normalcy is overrated, it turns out. I, who had spent my adult life wary, had been snookered by appearances—by the autumn movie set of that cottage on a lake, by the illusion that I could be happy there in a world that could not be bought off, marketed, or laundered. The _natural_ world, an escape from the city where too many people still knew me and what I'd been, even if now I was a legit businessman. All a mirage, but a mirage bought into by Detroiters for generations—the myth of The Place Up North. Unlike most of them, I wasn't trying to escape the monotony of the factories, but the chaos of the drug trade.

I remade myself as the owner of Jinx's, a bar and grill down on Eight Mile, the Detroit border. Jinx's, née Eight Miles High, née Leo's. I was taking a neighborhood dive and trying to go upscale. A decent burger joint with a nice lineup of imported beers can do pretty well anywhere—that's what I was banking on, though the bank itself wasn't so sure. Before Jinx's, I'd owned a convenience store and a copy shop, both of which allowed me to launder money. But this time I had to actually _make_ money. Most people who come in think my name is Jinx. "I can't tell you why, I'll jinx it," I tell anyone who asks about the change. Mr. Jinx. A bar owner mopping floors at 3 A.M.—not quite so glamorous.

AS I MOVED UP the chain of command, I reached a point where I rarely even  had to touch the stuff—I had drivers, dealers, all the way down to street level. I'd just fly to Florida every so often and make the connection, sample the product, shake hands. Play golf with the other high rollers. Everything all civilized and shit.

Then one of my drivers _gets spooked_ , he says—claims somebody was following him—and he ditches an entire shipment in a rest-stop dumpster. Next thing I know, an unmarked truck pulls up to my house—a team of _movers_. Big movers. They just take everything—every fucking thing—out of my house in Rochester Hills.

I make a couple of calls, but funny, nobody's answering. I had a little necessary muscle for show, but nobody guarding my house. The last thing they took was the chair they ordered me to sit in. No, the last thing was my car.

"Keys," one of them said, palm open as he jabbed me in the chest. I handed them over, and they drove away—their truck, then my Lexus. I was echoing around, shocked, in that big empty shell, when Meg got home from work.

They didn't rough me up. It was "symbolic," they said. "No hard feelings," they said. But I took it as a more substantive, concrete message to disengage. I had to do a little farewell tour, tap dance on the head of a pin for the Florida boys, but I did as I was told, and they let me go. My lawyer did the rest, and before I knew it, I was Mr. Jinx.

FISH. DEAD FISH. It wasn't the Christians' wrath of God that killed them. The water level hadn't dropped that fast, even with the extreme drought. The muskrats hadn't suddenly drilled more holes in the dam—maybe the poison had taken them out too. Poison, pure and simple. Maybe I had it coming.

I found gloves and a box of large black garbage bags in our shed and started circling the pond, collecting fish—mostly bluegill, with the occasional fat, bloated bass. Lucky the algae eaters survived—the stink of one of those enormous freaks might've done me in. The dead fish rimmed the shore as if they'd crawled out to die, paralyzed by the thought of becoming amphibians,  "as if the creationists had discovered them trying to escape and gunned them down," Meg said later when we could almost joke about it.

We'd nearly destroyed each other, and then we helped each other get well, then we were collecting dead fish. The most intense experience we'd shared apart from the drug life, and we didn't survive it.

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the pond, a slew of raccoons were having a feast, licking their little raccoon paws and digging in at the all-u-can-eat buffet. Maybe they _liked_ the smell. Maybe they slathered it on their punk little necks and had wild raccoon sex.

After I'd bagged about fifty and dry-heaved a couple more times, I heard the door slam, and in the distance I saw Meg go to the garage and come out with her own plastic bag, wearing the cute little green gloves I'd given her after we bought the place from Babes. But the cloth gloves were worthless at stopping the smell. It infected our skin.

I had thought we could garden together. And we did, if gardening meant weeding. No wonder Babes spent all summer there—it was the only way to stay on top of the weeds in her elaborate flower beds and in between the slippery flat stones of the walkway that surrounded the cottage.

IT'S TIME TO BRING in the monster of our story. I can feel his hot, rancid breath on my neck, a rogue athlete with natural ability, and I'm the coach forced by circumstances to put him in the game.

I was so intent on breathing through my mouth and keeping a wary eye on the hissing, voracious raccoons while tracking Meg winding around the other side of the pond toward me—were we having a contest to see who could pick up the most fish?—that I didn't notice the boy from the pink trailer sneak up on me.

I don't want to typecast, or maybe I don't give a shit. The pink trailer  sat up a steep, wobbly two-track across from the Association property. Despite the No Trespassing signs, or because of them, the Children From Up the Road—there were a lot of them, all ages and sizes squeezed into that trailer—were attracted to the pond. Many of them did not resemble each other at all. We didn't know how or if they were related.

Particularly the Monster Boy, a malformed muscular specimen of indeterminate age and limited mental capabilities, and his brother, a short whip of a kid perhaps fourteen or so who looked after him like the manager of an insane, violent boxer or pro wrestler who could easily forget whether he was in the ring or not.

The Monster Boy's distorted face carried both an innate menace and an inscrutability. Whenever I saw him, my forehead turned into a rubber-coated baseball, spongy with hard pain. He was an instant anxiety attack, making Babes's unscheduled appearances seem more like commercial interruptions in a favorite TV show, as opposed to watching a madman shoot the host and take over the broadcast.

"What?" he said.

I startled and shook, nearly tumbling over into my open garbage bag.

_What_ was his favorite word, favorite greeting, his favorite response when I told him he was on private property and would have to leave. I, a semi-notorious coke dealer, citing trespassing statutes.

I ignored him, crouching in silent conversation with the dead bodies of fish. He kneed me in the side, and I looked up. He was like a dog who wanted attention, and if you did not give it, he would bite. I sometimes wished his brother had him on a collar and chain and could drag him away. Where was the brother now?

"Where's your brother?" I asked him. "Brother?"

"Kool." Yes, of course, it was a school day—we'd come up during the week because I could get away from Jinx's and Meg could get away from the hospital, and the pond was quieter without the weekend crowd. Didn't they have some special school to send him to?

"What about you, Professor? Why aren't you in school? Are you too kool for kool?"

Sarcasm went so far above his head that it wouldn't even ruffle his thick, matted hair.

"What?" he said. I flipped two more slimy bluegill into the bag. I'd never imagined so many fish in that tiny pond, lurking down there, waiting to die.

"You and your brother aren't going to be catching our fish anymore," I said. "And look at your buddies the coons—they're in raccoon heaven."

He stood staring at them, breathing heavily through his mouth. I think all the dead fish were finally registering. He picked up a fat bass and kicked it back into the pond like a placekicker in some gross-out reality TV show. He would've cleaned up on one of those shows. They'd have to bar him from competition like the mad geniuses of _Jeopardy_.

"Heaven. You know about heaven, don't you?" I continued moving smooth and quick through the dried muck at the edge of the pond, picking up carcasses like an usher at the stadium, hurrying to clean up the garbage after the game so he could go home. Though no stadium smelled like this—even beer puke mixed with hot dog, a stadium favorite, didn't smell this bad.

"What?"

"As much as I'd like to pass the time with you, Professor—can't you smell the stench? Smell, smell." I mimed inhaling deeply. Nothing. His nose must've been clogged with dead brain cells. I was pretty sure someone was cooking meth up in that pink trailer. Even I stayed away from meth. The people I knew on meth were victims of time-lapse photography, aging at the speed of sound.

"Look." I stood, afraid to touch him, even with my slime-encrusted gloves. "Look," I shouted. "Go home. Fish dead. Go home. Danger," I said, holding up my gloves. "Mr. Jinx say go home."

Across the pond, Meg stopped to watch. I worried about her at the cottage with the bohunks up the hill, told her to stay inside whenever they were sniffing around. Why didn't I sell the place as soon as I felt that fear, I wonder now. We had enough fear in the city, and it wasn't the horror-movie kind I  felt at the cottage. I should have let her bring a phone, though perhaps the satellites didn't reach that wretched place.

She looked tiny and helpless in her green gloves, a black trash bag full of stink clutched in one hand as if it held all her worldly belongings. My heart briefly snagged in my chest, and I wanted it all to disappear: the mutant next to me, the dead fish, the pond itself. I wanted to be holding her in some perfumed spa of white tile and soft, clear water.

Suddenly, the kid bent down and grabbed a fish and bit the head off it in one quick alligator chomp.

I bent over on all fours and retched again. Maybe that freaked him out a little, or perhaps the fish head didn't taste good, even to him, because he wandered back into the woods.

I keep wanting to write, "and I never saw him again," but that's not the way the story goes. Frankenstein throws the little girl in the pond and watches her drown.

WE'D GOTTEN ALL the dead fish except those within striking distance of the raccoons. No scaring off the coons. We took the four heavy plastic bags, weighed down with slippery stink, into the woods, and in the looming and total country darkness, I dug a shallow hole next to a long-abandoned two-seater outhouse and buried them. It had been one of the worst days of my life, and if I'd had some product available, I would've partaken, to be sure. Meg stood in the shower until she'd drained the hot water tank. I waited at Babes's ugly kitchen table watching carpenter ants cart off the carcasses of the ones I'd squished earlier. They ate their own.

EXHAUSTED, WE MUST have forgotten to lock the screen door to the porch. The brother held one of our stolen wedding knives in his hand.

"Kid, put that away. Or better yet, give it back to me," I said.

"Right, man," the punk kid said, Monster Boy behind him. They reminded me of the guys from _Of Mice and Men_ , but these kids had more menace.

He laughed, so the big guy laughed, an odd barking sound so loud and drawn out and garbled it sounded like an old, warped record on the wrong speed.

THE COTTAGE HAD BEEN broken into over the winter. Pam, one of the quiet lesbians, called us at home in Warren, where we'd moved to save money and be close to the bar. They'd seen the glint of glass shards on our cement slab, the smashed window in the front door. "Bring your gun," she said. "Or you can borrow one of ours. Maybe they're still in there."

I'd gotten rid of my guns when I quit the business—my mistake to rely on the proper authorities. I told the state police who met us at the cottage that we suspected the trailer kids, and they nodded. "Oh, we know all about them," one said, and he laughed, and the other one shook his head as if to say, "those darned kids."

All they'd taken were the two very sharp knives my Uncle Jay had given us as a wedding present. I was sure he'd gotten them with his discount at Crowley's, the department store in Birmingham where he worked as a salesman. They were enormous—long, with ornately decorated handles. We never cut anything that big or with that much ceremony, so they'd ended up at the cottage with all of our other duplicate kitchen stuff—plates, glasses, tacky coffee mugs that seemed right at home out there.

"WHAT'D YOU DO with the fish? My brother said you killed all the fish."

"Give me my fucking knife back. I've been burying fish all day, and I don't need any shit from you and the nutty professor."

"What?" he said.

"What?" his lurking brother repeated.

"You heard me. You're holding one of my wedding presents, and if you have any idea what that means, you'll hand it over and get the hell out of here." It was a step down from drug dealer to bar owner, but I was still used to being in charge. People wanted to get high, get drunk. I had something they wanted, so they'd do what I said to get it. Selling drugs, I had muscle. In the bar, I had bouncers. But in that twisted country standoff, I had nothing.

The short guy waved the knife toward me. I lunged at him. The knife sliced my hand, but I still managed to snatch it away, blood spilling onto the redwood-stained porch. I quickly backed into the cottage and yanked the door shut.

The big guy charged but slammed his shoulder against the doorframe instead. These were guys who had crawled in and out of the broken window without even realizing they could've reached in and unlocked the door once the glass was broken.

"Shit," I screamed. Two knives—did the big guy have the other one? I ran around to the front door to lock that too, dripping blood through the cottage. Meg was in the bathroom doing her Lady Macbeth with fish smell while I was truly bleeding.

I SPENT THE NIGHT with my hand wrapped in towels and ice. The cut could have used a few stitches, Meg thought, but we didn't want to risk a dash through darkness to the car. I never did get it sewn up, and a thin white scar marks my palm when I reach out for anything handed to me.

I tell this story now, thinking, didn't we talk more that night, Meg and I? We did not. The sudden shock of the dead fish, their silent accusations, the primitive threat of the two boys looming over us, had all left us mute with some unnamed shame. The pure silence of the cottage caught in our throats, and with nothing to distract us, we both knew we were done talking. Meg wiped up my blood with the last of the paper towels.

THE NEXT MORNING, the sky was thick, dark, roiling, the wind stampeding the clouds overhead as it herded the algae down below, corralled it at one side of the pond. The smell was gone, the algae was gone, the boys were gone, and in its place, the electric air of a storm coming. We quickly packed up the Focus. I spun out in the gravel, but we could not beat the clouds. The rain beat down on us before we were off the Association road. I rolled down my window and let it blow in, fresh and purging against my skin. Meg rolled down her window too. I don't know what she felt.

"Does it still stink?" I asked, holding my cut hand out toward her as I drove. I looked at my wrist, where I used to wear a watch. I followed the blue line of a vein where it snaked down toward my hand, then disappeared.

She was leaning against the other door, her knees bent as she curled into herself.

She said something short. "Just drive." Or "nice try." Or "Get high." Or "No lie." Or "Just die." Or "Goodbye."

I pulled my hand back. "What?" I said.

THE NUMBER OF FISH grows over the years, a perverse twist on the hyperbole of fishermen, the size of the one that got away.

Some of us are algae eaters and some of us are fish eaters and some of us are meat eaters and some of us are leeches or ticks or giant ants. I don't know where drug dealers fit in on that list.

We didn't have a phone because what was the point of having a cottage if you were still connected? Nor did we have the number of anyone on the Association board to report what we'd been through. It'd be a good story to tell Babes, but I never saw her again.

I drove to a beer store/gas station/bait shop near Barry County Park. It had an old phone booth outside that somehow escaped the war on pay phones. They'd been a big part of my business, but now they were mostly gone or converted into unsheltered cubbyholes. Before Meg could ask what I was  doing, I ran out to the booth and closed the folding door behind me. Meg sat in the car, blurry through the rain and scratched plexiglass. I felt almost giddy, surrounded by storm.

I had one phone number memorized, and I dialed it. It rang a long time before someone picked up. "I want back in," I said. Whoever answered hung up on me, but I squeezed the receiver tight in my one good fist and said it again.

## THE TALL TALE OF THE COWBOY MATTRESS

THE SINGLE MATTRESS DECORATED WITH LACONIC COWBOYS TWIRLING graceful lassos on gallant horses under puffy clouds lasted through a lot of stains. The grizzled cowboys with their hands atremble spilled their cowboy coffee. The gray plains were layered with the dust of early grief and random explosions. Sometimes sheets glowed or someone saw stars in big sky country. One sharp spring, exposed beneath a tear, could give a person a rude poke during sexual wandering—sometimes, me. I was twenty-five when the cowboys went out on a cattle drive and never returned. Today I lie on my son's mattress—he's fourteen, a freshman at Eight Mile High. My wife wants to know if it's still big enough, to give my small opinion as he passes me in height. Too soft? Too saggy? It smells like teenager, his room uneasy in random accumulation. I stare at the immaculate white of his ceiling. He's a sullen cowboy these days, a lone dogie out on the prairie. We keep calling him back to the campfire, but he prefers his cool, personal darkness. When my parents sent me on my way with the cowboy mattress, it meant I wasn't coming home. The women I slept with rarely complained, though  sometimes did, and we rolled off onto a thin rug or thick carpet and camped there instead, drunk, sprawled in the dust of a night already galloping off into the recesses of memory. You had to press hard on that one torn spot to hurt yourself, but pressing hard was part of it. The spring rudely announced itself, and there was nothing to be done. I press my ear to my son's mattress. What he hears, I once heard. My parents' voices rumbled in the distance like a posse thinking they could rescue me. Perhaps that spring was a lost badge poking through. Deputized, I drape my arms over the sides of his narrow mattress. Cowboy coffee, the strong stuff. Put hair on your chest. Above your lip. Under your arms and around your balls. Cowboy coffee. My hands dangle in the air. They tremble.

## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

_Conte_ : "Bend in the Road"

_Fat City Review_ : "AWOL"

_Fiction Southeast_ : "Soul Sacrifice," "The Tall Tale of the Cowboy Mattress"

_Gargoyle_ : "13-Part Story with Mime"

_Great Lakes Review:_ "Our Lady of No Mercy," "Pearl Diving"

_Little Fiction_ : "My Republican Love Affair"

_Moon City Review_ : "Survivor's Guilt"

_Pank_ : "Et Tu"

_Superstition Review_ : "13 Ways of Looking at My Father in His Bathing Suit (Times 2)"

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook