MJCwriting.htm

DEATH OF A LIBERAL

A Collection of Short Stories

Michael J. Clark

mclark7@mindspring.com

THE KILLING OF KENNEDY

PART ONE. The Murder of Tom Kennedy

I.

It is a dry season, a dry day. And I am dry as well, dry almost to the point of breaking. Dry in the face and dry in the heart, like a dry river bed with huge cracks in a once-muddy foundation. Waiting for the rain to come. Waiting for something to come. To alleviate the alluvial nature of the bones and the complex mechanisms of the soul: dirt combined with the mathematical insistencies of understanding. The dry nature of nature and the wet calculations of the emotional soup, clarifying by distorting, indoctrinating by extinguishing. The calorie of thought. The ingredients of the supernormal specialties of love and anger and prejudice and all the other non-rational embodiments. They come flying out of the natural world, as the mind seeks to classify all the bronze elements of logic. It does not work. The premise of a sane world only is dry and not tuned to the gathering of power in the rivers of the higher spheres. They will break the bonding circuits and come flushing away the grim hypotenuse of reason. It is all well known. My town knows it. They do not know it in my language perhaps. My language drives me, for I am its puppet. My language is the engine and I am merely the husk, protecting the insentient god, the vocalizer of motif and apparencies of thought, as a shell protects the mental nut.

I live alone in my town. I live near the church and in the net of the bell tower, a web of sounds that rounds all rude complexions of day, all broken metaphors of common life, edging off the dross, sculpting down the roughest notes, the most callous tones, warping the insidious quality into a deep brassy pitch, a medieval brown-grey profundity, sending it into my home, twice daily, by which I set my clock and through which I honor my own existence in my town. I never feel so wonderfully alone as when the bell tones come pouring over my roof and into my living room. It reminds me of my childhood, when I was a boy and a Catholic boy and a Catholic boy on a playground near the Church in Rawlins, closer to God somehow, because I was young and not yet maneuvered out of grace by sophistications.

There was a murder once. It was done to a man down the street from where my family lived. There was a shot in the night. Two shots. I was sleeping near the pine trees and the shot came into the night like a great feat, a mechanical void masquerading as action. I awoke. I was a boy, with other boys; and the moon was a white franchise, a bold heritage of deduction, under which we all presided as silent worshippers at the feast. For we were young then, and still capable of belief. We were sleeping in our sleeping bags. It was Wyoming in the summer of 1963.

Some people speak of presage as though it were a nature weaving history in and out, weaving in an out of history, compromising freedom with its intimation of necessity. It is a poetic conception surely, much more active in a poetic culture, one capable of sensing shadow and shadow’s precocious alignments to Time. We are not such a poetic culture. We sense, instead, Time’s precious alignments to God’s geometry and forms. And that is poetry of a much different nature.

The man who was shot was Tom Kennedy. Is there presage in that?

Tom Kennedy worked at the refinery, had a wife named Aileen, had a son who worked for Colorado Interstate Gas and lived in Rawlins. I did not know that much about the man. I knew that he lived across the street from my Uncle Carl who live with my Aunt Ginger whose youngest son had married my mother’s youngest sister. Tom Kennedy and Uncle Carl were apparently friends. I remember seeing them once, when we visited Uncle Carl, standing together in my uncle’s back yard. The grass was always too long in my uncle’s back yard. There was always a smell of gasoline nearby. I sensed that my uncle had, moments earlier, removed the lawn-mower from his garage, intending to cut his grass: but there was something wrong with his mower. So he had kneeled next to the machine, turned it on its side. And, as he peered into the bowels of the silent metallic artifice, gasoline had run from the machine out on the ground. A gallon or so spilled, soaking the grass and the brassy earth with the pungent medicine of man.

No wonder Uncle Carl drank. His life had become fixed, around that pole of frustration, that empty ritual of good intentions.

We all loved gasoline in Sinclair. It was our lifeblood, as farmers love wheat, as coal-miners love coal, even though they declaim it. We were born and bred on gasoline, and on the smell of gas products: alkylate, road oil, ammonia, distillate. The scent would come over the town, when the wind shifted, and it would settle on everything like a fine oily dust. We did not see it—this shroud—but we knew it, as one might know a ghost who shared one’s habitation on occasion. The short-wave particulars of thoughts were never spoken. Yet we knew it was true: without gasoline, there was nothing.

When I heard the shot, in fact, which must have been the second shot, for I did not hear a shot after I awoke—had I heard the first shot then I would have also heard the second shot—I even remarked to myself that the petroleum dust which lay like grey linen on everything in the town had exploded from its state of rest, pulsating with the disturbing volley: I awoke to see it weeping in the air like invisible tears, smearing the translucent wall of matter, as it returned in smoky anguish to the earth, streaking everything, streaking even my eyes.

It was, in fact, about 1:50 AM when the murder occurred. Gasoline was everywhere—awaiting a match. Awaiting some instruction. To turn the night into day.

Our sheriff was Clayton Jones, a large man, obese really, with an egg-shaped head which had feeble threads of red-grey hair edging about in late middle-age chaos. He wore glasses with black rims, bifocals, with nose-pieces deeply embedded into his full, wrinkled skin. Clayton had the gout—he was a prolific drinker, as were many in our town. The knuckles of his hands looked like golf-balls hidden beneath flesh; the knuckles of his feet were so proud and prolific that the unfortunate man had to cut, with his pocketknife, large moons in his leather shoes to let the swollen knuckles find relief from the strangulation of his footwear. Big puffs of sock stuck out in a chaotic order. His knees were the size of muskmelons and seemed to have been stuck up his pantlegs by someone seeking to ridicule him. It took him nearly an age to rise out of the swivel chair in his office: he struggled and wheezed and joints popped and he became precariously erect, flesh sent into motion, heart and lungs extorted by activity.

He was a good man, a coach of our elementary school basketball team. He was usually in good humor (he drank to make himself happy)—but on the day of the murder of Tom Kennedy he was not quiet or content. The Carbon County Sheriff had come down to investigate. Apparently there was a report that Kennedy had owed money to Joe Horner, who ran the Green Mill Tavern in Rawlins. There was gambling in the back of the bar. The Kennedys apparently frequented the bar, drank, gambled. Someone had seen Tom Kennedy and Joe Horner have words the night of the murder, with Horner giving Kennedy a deadline to re-pay his debts.

There was a lot of talk in town, especially after the shooting, about Joe Horner being connected to the mob. No one was really sure who the mob was in Rawlins. There was few Italian families: the Capozolli’s, who ran the Venice Cafe. The Martinelli’s who ran Al’s Cleaners. But not much more. There was a chorus of Italians in Rock Springs, a hundred miles away. They could be involved here too. But the real mob, everyone knew, in our town, was white, not Italian, and probably Protestant and Methodist.

II.

How did I come to be like this? It is hard to re-trace the steps of a life, to find the points of accent, the several (and I believe them to be very few) nadir-apex points which together determine the fate of a man. Some will say I changed when I went to war. Some will say that Vietnam changed me. That is partly true. That is as true as to say that Shakespeare changed me. That Ecclesiastes changed me. That is all true too. High School changed me. My first car changed me. My broken nose, which I sustained in a fight at a dance at the Rawlins Armory, changed me—not that the broken nose changed me, the twisted marrow, the fluted swollen flesh: my vulnerability to the rude moments, the bruited beings who inhabit this globe, living almost in the same orbit as the decent people, occasionally flipping in a circuit, either through speed or anger or karmic grace, into proximity with the living, inflicting pain on someone before escaping back to their hellish zone, their dark gratuity, their penchant for death. The right hand that broke the nose that broke the young man’s virginity that made the man a man and made the man able to strike back and to tell the difference between good and evil, between earth and heaven, between solitary ideals and the rough complement of women and men, opposites, and oppositely craning: the right hand that felled belief also felled me. But that was only one deed. That was only a single tear in me.

My father’s death changed me. My mother’s death was expected.

My brother and sister and I buried our parents, buried them in the frozen ground in Rawlins. I became old the day I buried my father. I had still been a child, even though I was almost twenty-eight. When he died, I grew my hair grey and set about to exile my own innocence, whatever of it was intact, after my broken nose, my failed heart, my year in hell, and my methods of addiction.

My brother sells life insurance and lives on Easy Street in Green River, Wyoming. That is a fact. 827 Easy Street. He has a good woman for a wife, and two children he haunts mercilessly to become great athletes. My sister is a nurse in Rawlins, is married to a man who weighs 300 pounds and drives earth movers for their family construction company. She has two children, a girl she named after my father, and a boy she named after me. She says she pulled Little Mike out of the sky, through sheer will, emptying some southern constellation to fill her womb with the image of her brother. When I think of it, sometimes alone at night, it makes me cry, to remember what small wonders we were.

The killing of Tom Kennedy had the entire town manufacturing dread. The killer was still loose. Perhaps it had been a random killing. Perhaps someone the entire town knew had done it, snapped, given in to some demon of vengeance, or disorder, or jealousy. Tom Kennedy’s wife was a pretty women—that’s what people said. Perhaps she had been discovered in some embrace with a neighbor: perhaps they had killed Tom Kennedy out of lust or out of guilt. Joe Horner had not been arrested. Sheriff Ogburn had questioned him, but there had been no arrest. Joe had an alibi. Of course, Joe would not have done the killing anyway. He would have sent one of his thugs. But where was Tom Kennedy’s wife? Where was Aileen at the time of the shooting?

It was a great mystery. We rode our bikes down to my uncle’s house—my brother and myself and our friends, Ralph Vasey and Gary Eaton. We watched it all from the front lawn across the street, lying in the shade of the great cottonwoods in my uncle’s parking. When the cars would all leave, we would race down to Clayton Jones’s office, in the post office building, and sit with Clayton as he went about his business. He called us his “little deputies”—we would flip through the wanted posters and pretend that we had seen some of the murderers and kidnappers the FBI wished to apprehend. Now, however, with the murder of Tom Kennedy, the office was no longer sedate. Clayton Jones was under pressure. He told us to run along. He had work to do. We would leave the building, mill outside for a few minutes, then wander back inside his office and sit quietly on the floor or in the large wooden chairs he had lined up near his desk. He said nothing to us this second time. It was a sort of ritual. He had to tell us to leave. We had to leave. But once we had left, once we had done as he asked, then he would not insist that we vanish. He liked to have us around. He would talk to us, tell us what he thought: we made him feel like a father again.

Aileen Kennedy had discovered her husband’s body about 2:00 AM that night of the shooting. They had been drinking in Rawlins. They had gambled a bit. Tom had lost some money, as he always seemed to do. Tom was living on borrowed time: he owned Joe Horner nearly a thousand dollars. He thought he could win enough to cover his loan—but the more he played, the more he lost. He was a dry hole. Tom and Aileen had argued. Tom had hit her. (This was all corroborated by witnesses.) When they finally left the Green Mill, Horner confronted Kennedy and told him he wanted his money. Kennedy had pushed Horner aside—Kennedy was drunk. They started home, driving the six miles from Rawlins to Sinclair. Aileen Kennedy had been so irritated, and drunk herself. She started on Tom again, and henned him so long that he stopped the car and told her to get out and walk. She had refused. He hit her in the nose with the back of his hand, opened her door, and pushed her out on the side of the road. It was near the bridge over Sugar Creek, so it was about two miles from town. Tom drove away. That was the last she had seen him.

Her nose had been broken. It had bled all over her dress.

When she finally got home, she saw the back door open. It was a warm evening—but they never left the back door open, only the front door. When she came into the kitchen, she saw Tom lying on his face, blood on the wall and in a pool by his head. She called Jack Stanton (the night policeman) and held her husband in her lap until the police came.

III.

Clayton Jones had wished to interrogate Joe Horner but he was short-circuited by Sheriff Ogburn, who claimed authority over the case now. Sheriff Ogburn had interrogated Joe. Joe had an alibi. It was a county matter now. Ogburn didn’t want Sinclair getting in his way.

But Clayton felt it his duty to investigate the killing; so he called Joe Horner, and asked for an appointment to see him. Horner had no intention of driving to Sinclair during a work day, so Clayton agreed to drive to Rawlins to interrogate him. We asked if we could ride to town with him. He said ok, as long as we stayed in the car when he went in to the Green Mill.

It is a short drive from Sinclair to Rawlins on Interstate 80. We asked Clayton to turn on the siren. We begged and clamored until he did turn on the siren, after looking both directions and noticing little traffic. We, of course—my brother and I and our friends—went into loud fits of ecstasy whenever the siren came on. He ran it for about ten seconds and then said: “Ok, that’s enough. I’ve got serious business to do now. So you boys need to behave yourselves.”

The Green Mill was a bar on Front Street in Rawlins. Front Street was a legendary quarter of Rawlins, famous mostly for its brothels and gambling dens. Rawlins was built originally as a supply depot for the Union Pacific Railroad. It grew, and continued to be nourished by the UP. The Ruby Rooms, the Paris Hotel, the Cozy Rooms, the Annex had become famous as the best whorehouses in the state. One could also gamble and probably fight at Sharkey’s Pool Hall, and drink and lose money at Horner’s Green Mill or any one of the ten other bars in a two block radius.

During late summer, Front Street was inevitably filled with drunken Indians who worked as section gangs on the UP and had nothing to do with their money but drink. That lasted a couple of weeks, Indians passed out on the sidewalks, stumbling up the street. I remember my father parking his car on front street, needing to do some business in the Luxus Cafe. I remember worrying about him when he disappeared, as there was a febrile, violent air on the street, an air of knives and clubs and racism and despair. When he re-appeared I felt such relief. We drove away, and I felt released from a kind of hell.

When we arrived with Clayton Jones on Front Street that day, there were no Indians and no whores; there was a high sun, and it was beginning to turn hot.

Of course, we could not remain in the police car that morning, as we had promised Clayton Jones we would. Afterall, we were involved in our grandest adventure. We needed to catch a glimpse of the man who was in all likelihood a killer, a mobster, a perpetrator of evil. My brother and I and Gary Eaton slipped from the car and through the front door of the bar. Our friend Ralph Vasey stayed behind, refusing to dishonor the request of the Sheriff.

We went into the darkened bar. Clayton was sitting at a table with a pudgy balding man of about forty-five. I looked at his hands and saw thick fingers and hairy forearms. He wore a long white shirt but he had rolled up his sleeves. He looked up at us, and yelled: “You kids get the hell out of here. It’s against the law for you to be in here.”

Clayton turned and said: “You guys told me you’d stay in the car. Go on now, get back where you belong.”

Everything looked brown and grey in the room. The bar had been wiped clean; chairs were overturned on the tops of the tables. Someone was working behind the bar, filling bottles, cleaning the mirror.

We retreated back outside. The sun was so bright on the outside. We waited a few minutes and then entered the bar again. This time Horner looked up, noticed us for a moment, but then turned back to Clayton, continuing his story. We approached the two men and sat quietly near them. Horner was talking:

“The last thing I’d do is to kill a man who owed me money. Even if I was guilty of threatening him, which is true, I’d be cutting my own throat, Clayton, to take him out like that. I might have roughed him up a bit, at some point...”

“It could have started as a roughing up,” Clayton said, “but then got out of hand. Maybe he didn’t want to take it, fought back, and someone had to kill him.”

“Maybe,” Horner said. “But it wasn’t me. And it wasn’t anyone working for me. Kennedy was a problem, that’s true. But he wasn’t going anywhere. I could wait for the money. He had been paying me back anyway. He owed me about nine hundred dollars. But he was paying me off about fifty bucks a month. I wanted it all, but I could live with fifty bucks for awhile.”

Horner was drinking a highball and a Coors. There was a large bottle of Polish sausages near his beer, with the lid off. He was obviously having his lunch. There were dark bags under his eyes, which were reddish, like an Irishman’s. He looked like he hadn’t slept for awhile. He was shorter than I had expected. He looked strong, physically thick. But his face did not seem to be that of a killer. He looked more like the kind of man who lived with a woman he couldn’t control. He seemed more sad than deadly; more pathetic really than dangerous.

“So, who did it?” Clayton asked.

“I’d start with his wife if I were you,” Horner said. “He punched her in here that night. Called her a whore, in front of everyone. He seemed real mean that night. He usually was alright. But he seemed pretty steamed when he left here.”

“Did he owe anyone else money?” Clayton asked.

“Not that I know of,” Horner replied.

“What about his wife?” Clayton asked. “Was she running around at all?”

“Hell, how do I know. She lives in your town. Shouldn’t you know about that kind of thing?”

He offered Clayton a sausage.

“Better not,” Clayton said. “I’m trying to watch what I eat.”

“How’s Norma doing?” Horner asked. Norma was Clayton’s youngest girl. She and Horner and been classmates in high school.

“Oh, fine. She’s in Colorado Springs now. Her husband’s working in military technology I guess.”

Horner shrugged.

“Well, anything else you want to ask, Clayton?”

“No, not really,” Clayton said. “You’ll let me know if you hear anything.”

“Sure, no problem.”

“How’s Ogburn been treating you?” Clayton inquired.

“Oh, you know that Marine bastard,” Horner laughed. “He told me he was going to take me out of town and whip my ass until I talked. I told him to talk with Bates. I wasn’t talking to anyone without a lawyer. Then he quieted down. I could tell he wanted to punch out my lights, but he kept himself together alright. He’s a catastrophe waiting to happen. I never did trust that bastard.”

“Did he threaten to close you down?” Clayton asked.

“Oh, yeah. He said I better put a lid on my card games, because if he came in and busted us we’d all be spending time at the jail.”

“You’d better be careful with him,” Clayton said. “He’s a loose canon.”

Clayton shook and wheezed, pushing himself up from the chair.

“It’ll be better for all of us when you find out what happened,” Horner said.

“I couldn’t agree more,” Clayton said. “I haven’t had my afternoon nap since the murder. My phone’s been ringing all day.”

Both men laughed.

After we left the bar I asked Clayton: “Did he do it, Clayton, did he kill Mr. Kennedy?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Clayton said. “He had no reason to kill him really. I don’t think Joe’s a killer.”

And then: “I thought I told you boys to stay in the car. What would your parents say if they knew you were all running around Front Street like that?”

“They’d probably think that we were getting a little big for our britches I guess,” my brother said.

“And they’d probably be right. At least Vase did what I asked him. At least Vase was a responsible young man today.”

Our friend, Ralph Vasey, was allowed to sit in the front seat next to Clayton on the way home, and to turn on the siren, as a reward for his obedience.

Clayton Jones got a call from Sheriff Ogburn that afternoon. We were sitting in the office with Clayton, but we could hear Ogburn’s voice through the phone: “What the hell’s the idea of talking with Horner, after I gave you explicit orders to stay out of the way, Clayton...!”

“Dammit, Chuck, this murder happened in my town,” Clayton answered. “And I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to be pushed off my wagon just because you want to hog the limelight here. I won’t be told what to do on this one. The whole town is up in arms. Everyone wants an answer. I’m not going to just sit on my butt and do nothing.”

“The county has authority on this one, Jones,” Ogburn began.

“And the state has authority over the county,” Clayton replied. “And if you keep pushing I’ll pick up the phone and call Stan and ask him to let the state take over the investigation. Stan and I are hunting buddies, you know. He owes me a few favors. And you don’t have the best reputation around this state, you know.” Stan was the Governor of Wyoming, Stan Hathaway.

Ogburn was quiet for a moment. We could no longer hear his voice on the line—which meant he was no longer threatening Clayton. Clayton took a pack of unfiltered Camels from his shirt picket, put a cigarette in his mouth, and lit it with a metal-jacket lighter. He puffed deeply and blew rings of smoke above his head, smiling. Clayton had won. Ogburn was talking with him in a civil manner now. Clayton answered:

“Oh, there’s no problem, Chuck. We’re all aiming for the same target. What, oh, hell no, I don’t think Horner did it. No, I promise, I won’t arrest no one without talking to you first. Yes, I need to talk with Mrs. Kennedy. Do I consider her a suspect? Well, she’s the one who found Tom. She probably has reason to be considered a suspect....”

Finally: “Ok, I’ll be keeping in touch with you, Chuck.” Clayton hung up the phone.

“Haa!” Clayton laughed. “That arrogant bastard!” He smiled at his crew of unsophisticated deputies, leaning back in his chair. He felt like a king, smoking his cigarette, glorying in the memory of his deft outflanking of his adversary. He was old, fat and slow, crippled by the gout, but he could still hold his own against a bully in a subtle combat. Clayton was an expert shot, with either a rifle or a pistol. He had been a salty fighter in his younger days too. Now he seemed like a comic figure, with his love of liquor, his orbular body and gnarled joints. There was a time when he was handsome and trim, and young girls wished that they were walking beside him.

IV.

Sometimes a man must give up his problems to become a man. Sometimes a man must give up his youth, give up his role as a son, give up psychology and causality and accusations of imperfect parents, imperfect childhoods.

Our country has become obsessed with imperfect childhoods. Of course, the imperfect childhood explains everything, rescinds all responsibility, allows the child to ever remain a child, to never confront the imperfect nature of nature, both of parents and of self, and, through that confrontation, to forgive imperfection, in his parents, yes, but primarily in himself, freeing him from his childhood, freeing him from his fear of living.

It is a ploy of the workshop generation, the generation which believes that talking is doing, that touching is healing, that the language must be castrated, that enlightenment belongs exclusively to itself: the world which began in 1950.

I watch Bill Clinton, our new president, speak of a “new generation” taking over. I wonder if any other “generation”, if such a beast were to exist, would ever speak with such egotism about a natural ascendancy to middle age. He speaks as if we, the Vietnam Generation, a nation groomed on failure, were especially carved by God’s blessed handmaidens to generate some world, pristine and Platonic, by far superior to and detached from the creation of our fathers. I look at my own handmaiden, Youth, Ideal Imagery: I see that “free love” has become an epidemic of aids; I see that the “Drug Culture” has become a nation of addicts; I see that the abdication of responsibility in Southeast Asia has led to genocide in Cambodia and economic slavery in Vietnam. I see American men trying to claim they are women; and American women claiming they are men. We are riding on a train called Spiritual Chaos. To the liberal mind the train is Progress and Justice. To the conservative mind the train is surely Self-Destruction.

I am clearly not a man of my own generation.

My father’s generation would never call itself great, but it would help its neighbor. My generation calls itself moral, enlightened, intelligent, special: but it will not help its next-door neighbor. In that there is something which makes me quite concerned.

And so, being neither this nor that, being neither new nor old, I have married myself to the bells in the church tower. I have married myself to sounds, and to the round understanding that Time is a wheel of eternities. I have given up drugs. After I returned home from Vietnam I became addicted to drugs, psychologically that is. I needed marijuana to return to a normal level, for I had a permanent residence in hell; and, by becoming high, I rose toward Limbo.

I had been drafted in 1969 and I served two years in Vietnam, specializing in reconnaissance. The intensity of living so close to death was actually riveting. It was addictive, for I became fused to adrenaline, married to the need for exquisite fear. Fear ceased being fear, and actually became lust: a desire for near-extinction. Every moment seemed alive. One made no plans, certainly not plans for the next few years—perhaps plans for the evening, that was the largest horizon of the future. I came to recognize that those dwelling on long-range plans were the ones on their way out of the jungle in a bag. Those who lived close to time, close to concentration, survived.

I did not receive a scratch in Vietnam, although I was involved in intense combat, and I killed and helped kill many enemy soldiers.

It was hard to come back to a city of peace, after having trained all my nerves and my senses for comprehension. Every sound mattered. Every scent carried with it a message of nuance. Every face was a vessel of paradox, duplicity, not just among the Vietnamese but also among the Americans. Nothing was clear, but everything mattered. Now, everything is clear, but nothing seems to matter.

I returned home, became a drug addict, went to the university in Laramie to study Shakespeare and John Dunne. I received my degree. When my father died in 1978, I returned to Sinclair to be close to my mother. I gave up drugs. I made a killing in the stock market, bought my house, and began to write and remember.

V.

Clayton Jones allowed us to visit Aileen Kennedy with him the following day. We were surprised when he said: “Yeah, get in the car, come on along.” He didn’t even add: “But you’ll have to stay in the car this time”—because he knew that charade was now parenthetically understood.

He would later tell me that he not only enjoyed having us along with him for company, but that he felt our presence actually gave him the advantage of presenting himself to a suspect as a bit of a buffoon. If the suspect did not take his interrogator seriously, and how could one take a lawman seriously who was surrounded by a herd of boys and who was himself fat and slow, then he might inspire the suspect to some imprecision of expression. Inconsistencies might arise. One is never at his best when one does not respect an adversary.

Aileen Kennedy opened the door in her bathrobe, smoking a cigarette. Her neighbor, Patsy Smith, was keeping her company. She let us in, Clayton first, then, after a quizzical look at the sheriff, his four mischievous deputies.

“I’ve been wanting to come by and offer you my sympathies, Aileen,” Clayton said, taking her hand lightly. “It was a shock to all of us.”

Aileen had been hospitalized after the shooting, for shock and fatigue, and had only been released the evening before our visit.

“Thank you, Clayton,” Aileen replied, her face drawn, pale, almost shapeless. “Would you like some coffee?”

“Sure,” Clayton replied. “That would be great.”

“Would you like something in it?”

“No,” Clayton laughed. “I’d better not while I’m working.”

The two women laughed.

Patsy Smith was younger than Aileen Kennedy, late-thirties, shapely, wearing tight blue jeans and a madras shirt. Her husband worked at the refinery. They were the Kennedys’ next-door neighbor.

“What do you got here?” Patsy asked, pointing toward us.

“Oh, they’re my deputies,” Clayton answered. “The two Clarks, Gary Eaton, and George Vasey’s son Ralph.”

We nodded to Patsy, smiling.

She was very pretty to us; she would soon approach mythic proportions as a local goddess of beauty. She smiled back at us, making us quietly crazy.

“Does that mean you’re here on business, Clayton?” Aileen asked.

“Business and sympathies both, Aileen,” Clayton replied. “I have to ask you some questions. You know how it is. That’s my job afterall.”

“Yes, of course,” Aileen said. “I’ve told my story about ten times. I thought you’d have a copy of it by now.”

“No, I haven’t seen a copy of your testimony,” Clayton said. “Who took your statement? Ogburn?”

Clayton was lying. He had read Jack Stanton’s, the night cop’s, report.

“Stanton and Ogburn both,” Aileen replied. He handed Clayton a cup of coffee. “Do your deputies need anything.”

We shook our heads “no,” sitting stiffly on the sofa.

The drapes were still pulled. Everything seemed dusty, dark, like a light had been turned off and may never again be turned on. Then I remembered that a man I had known, had seen with my uncle, had been killed in that very house, in the kitchen. I looked into the kitchen. There was a table, a stove, a refrigerator. A large yellow plastic garbage can. Summer coats hanging on the backdoor. A night light in a wall socket. A sugar jar on the table. A pair of boots near an unopened storage closet. There must be blood in there too. Somewhere. Uncleaned. Where it splattered behind the stove or on the ceiling. And the burning smell of gunpowder. A ghost. A last word.

“So, what do you want to know, Clayton?” Aileen asked.

“I’d better be going,” Patsy said, trying to excuse herself.

“No, don’t go Patsy,” Aileen said. “They won’t be here that long. I don’t really want to be alone in the house.”

There was a tremor in her voice. She was still not strong.

She drew in smoke from her cigarette and said: “I’ll start at the beginning of that night. It was a Thursday night. We always go the Mill on Thursday night. Tom liked to gamble there. I liked it too. We went to town about 8:30. We went to Jim’s Place first, because Tom wanted to talk some business with Booby Komus. At about 10:00 or so we went to the Green Mill. We stayed there until about 1:00. Joe Horner made a scene with Tom and so we left.”

“What kind of scene did Horner make?” Clayton asked.

“Tom owed him some money,” Aileen replied. “Horner let him know that he was going to hurt him if he didn’t pay him back. He owned him almost two thousand dollars. He pushed Tom, and so Tom got up and left the bar.”

“Horner told me that Tom was drunk,” Clayton said. “And that Tom shoved him that night when he was leaving the bar.”

“Is that what Horner told you?” Aileen said, smoking her cigarette. “That lying bastard. He pushed Tom. And he threatened him.”

“What did he say?” Clayton asked.

“I don’t remember exactly,” Aileen said. “He said: ‘You’re running out of time, Tom. I need that money now’—something like that.”

“You heard it? Clayton asked.

“Sure I heard it,” Aileen said. “Tom and I had been talking about it for weeks. We knew Tom was in trouble. Tom thought he could make a killing that night and pay off Horner. Tom seemed a little desperate, like he was running out of time. Although he didn’t say anything about a deadline or anything.”

“Even though you talked about it?” Clayton asked.

“We didn’t talk about no deadline,” Aileen repeated. “We talked about the trouble he was in and how he might get out of it.”

“You say Tom seemed desperate,” Clayton recalled. “What do you mean? How did he seem desperate?”

“He was drinking pretty savagely that night,” Aileen recalled. “More than he usually did.”

“Was he losing at cards?”

“Oh, yeah. He was losing alright. The more he drank the more he lost.”

“And you were trying to stop him? Is that right?”

“Yeah, he was in enough trouble. We didn’t need to go further in debt.”

“Was that why he hit you?” Clayton asked.

“What?”

“Was that why he hit you?” Clayton asked again.

“He hit me later, on our way home.”

“Oh, I thought he hit you in the bar too,” Clayton said. “I got the impression from somewhere—maybe Horner told me—that he hit you at the bar.”

“No, he never hit me at the bar,” Aileen said. “He hit me on the way home, while we were in the car.”

“He broke your nose, didn’t he?” Clayton asked.

“Yeah, he did,” she admitted. “He hit me pretty hard.”

Aileen got up and went to the kitchen. She fixed another cup of coffee for herself, pouring whiskey or rum into the cup. “Does anyone want more coffee?” she called from the kitchen.

No. Clayton and Patsy were fine.

Patsy asked Clayton: “Are you going to arrest Joe Horner, Clayton?”

“Well, not yet,” Clayton replied. “We don’t have any evidence that Joe was ever out here that night. We don’t have a murder weapon. Joe has witnesses that put him in the Green Mill until after 3:00 that night.”

Aileen returned from the kitchen.

“Joe wouldn’t have done the killing himself anyway,” she said to Clayton. “He’d make sure he had an alibi. What about the two Sullivan boys? Did you find out where they were that night?”

“I haven’t talked to them yet?” Clayton admitted.

“Talk to them,” Aileen said. “It seems to be that that’s where this all points.”

“Yes, I will talk to them, Aileen,” Clayton said, scratching his chin. “Anyway, let’s get back to your story. You left the bar at about 12:30.”

“No, we left the bar at about 1:00, Clayton,” Aileen corrected. “Tom was pretty drunk, so I told him to take the old road so we wouldn’t see any police.”

“Oh, you took the old road,” Clayton said, seeming surprised.

“Yes,” Aileen replied. “That’s what I told everyone. And out by the old Sugar Creek Bridge, Tom pulled over the car and told me to get out. I had been harping at his losing money and going deeper into debt. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore, so he told me to get out. I thought he was kidding. So he let me have one across the nose with the back of his hand. It stunned me. He hit me pretty good. He leaned over, opened the door, and pushed me out on the road. He drove on without me. I waited there. I thought he’d come back. It was a pleasant night, and I didn’t feel like walking. I never thought he’d just leave me out there. Maybe he would have come back to get me too, if someone hadn’t been waiting there for him.”

“You think someone was waiting here for him?” Clayton asked.

“Well, I don’t know how it happened really,” Aileen admitted. “Someone might have been waiting in the house for him. We never lock our house.”

“What about Tom’s guns, Aileen?” Clayton asked. “Were any of them missing?”

“What? I don’t know, Clayton,” Aileen replied. “What do you mean?”

“Someone could have killed Tom with his own gun, Aileen,” Clayton answered. “Someone could have been robbing the house. Tom came in. The burglar had already stolen Tom’s gun, so he just killed Tom with his own gun.”

Aileen went to the hallway closet, where Tom had kept his weapons. She stood in the door, counting Tom’s guns. “I don’t know, Clayton,” she said. “Everything seems here. But he was always buying a gun here and there. I’m not even sure how many guns Tom owned.”

“It was just a thought,” Clayton admitted. “I didn’t mean to distract you from your story.”

“Oh, that’s no problem,” Aileen said, returning to her chair.

She was sitting at the dining room table, next to Patsy. Clayton was sitting in a large leather swivel chair he’d turned toward Aileen. A sequined embroidery of a clown on blue cloth hung on the south wall of the living room, a sad face with tears. An end table beneath the embroidery held about seven Reader’s Digest magazines and a couple issues of Argosy. There was a jar of jelly beans on the table. My brother was sneaking them one at a time.

Aileen Kennedy did not seem to be grieving to me. Not the way I’d seen my own grandmother grieve the death of my grandfather. She seemed tired, edgy. But she did not seem truly sad. She seemed to have an alcoholic’s face and hands: weak, irritated, distracted, moving in the direction of a silent panic, living in desperation. I had the sense that she could hardly wait for us to leave.

“So he never came back for you,” Clayton continued. “How long did you wait before you started to walk in?”

“I don’t know really,” Aileen answered. “It must have been twenty minutes or so. I kept waiting to see car lights, but nothing came. Finally, at about twenty minutes to one, I started to walk toward town. I couldn’t believe that he’d left me out there.”

“And it took you how long to reach town?” Clayton asked.

“It was about ten after two when I found Tom lying on the floor in the kitchen,” Aileen answered.

“I see,” Clayton responded. “So, you left the Green Mill about 1:00. You drove straight home...”

“No,” Aileen stopped Clayton. “We drove from the Green Mill to Al’s liquor. Tom wanted to pick up a bottle for home.”

“Oh, you hadn’t mentioned that,” Clayton said.

“I’d forgotten about it, I guess,” Aileen said. “You could get the kid at Al’s to corroborate it, Clayton. It was the Forney boy, the one at the university. I went in with Tom to get the bottle.”

“Ok,” Clayton continued. “You left the Green Mill at about 1:00. It probably took ten minutes to get the bottle. Another five minutes to get across town. So, you probably left Rawlins about 1:20 or so—does that seem right?”

“Yeah, that’s about right,” Aileen said.

“You decided to take the old road. Was Tom driving slowly?”

“Yes, he was, Clayton. I insisted on it.”

“Why didn’t you just drive?” Clayton asked.

“Well, I was drunk too, Clayton,” Aileen replied. “I was too drunk to drive too.”

“Ok,” Clayton continued. “So you left Rawlins and took the old road home. Let’s say you’re driving forty. You argue in the car. What did you say to him?”

“I told him I’d leave him if he didn’t straighten up,” Aileen replied.

“Really,” Clayton responded. “And how did he take that?”

“He told me to shut up,” Aileen said. “He told me I was the cause of all his troubles anyway. I always threatened to leave him. He knew I’d never do it.”

“It must have been about one thirty when you reached the old bridge,” Clayton concluded. “Tom stopped the car, ordered you out, and hit you. How many times did he hit you?”

“Once, good,” Aileen responded. “Then a bunch of times, about five or six. But I was covered up by then. The first one broke my nose. The next few didn’t hurt. One got through and cut my eyebrow.” She touched her right eyebrow. There was a thin bandage about four inches long.

“You ducked and turned away from him, or toward him?” Clayton asked.

“Away from him. He stunned me with the first punch. I turned away from him and covered up. Then he leaned over me, opened the door, and pushed me out.”

“Did he beat you often?” Clayton asked.

“Sometimes,” Aileen replied. “When he was drinking.”

“So, you arrived at the bridge at about one thirty,” Clayton continued. “He pushed you out of the car and drove away at about one thirty-five. You waited about twenty or twenty-five minutes before you started walking. That is, you started to walk at about five minutes to two. And you arrived two miles later at ten after two to find the body. Is that right?”

“That’s about right,” Aileen said. “I wasn’t wearing a watch, but that’s about right.”

“And when you found him,” Clayton asked, “was he alive? Was he still breathing?”

“No, he was dead,” Aileen said. “I came through the backyard and the backdoor was open. We never left our backdoor open. But he was drunk, so I really didn’t think much of it. I came inside the door and he was lying face down and there was blood on the floor and on the stove and on the wall.”

She looked up at us, wondering if we should be hearing all this.

“Yes, why don’t you boys go on outside now,” Clayton suggested. We rose from the couch unwillingly, but did as Clayton told us. In a few minutes he joined us outside. We went around the house to the backyard. The backyard was covered with junk: parts of cars, metal, cinder blocks. There was a gate, closed and locked from the inside, elevated on one hinge. The ground was uneven, pocked with holes. Any passage through the backyard at night, especially for someone drunk, if one were able to unlock the gate locked on the inside, would be an adventure in itself. There was a sidewalk from the garage to the backdoor. Clayton looked for an outdoor light in the backyard but could not find one.

VI.

My Uncle Carl Kohler was a man with a robust, dark appearance, a deep voice. My brother used to say his voice was the color of bourbon; in speech and laughter, it was alternately a tuba and a French horn. He had a sort of laughing quality in his eyes, which I learned later was apparently almost always induced by an imbibement in the brown brew. His bourbon voice, the tone of his speech, apparently also produced a reflecting skin in his taste for spirits.

He had not always been a drinker. He had met Ginger Holmes when they were in high school in Greeley, Colorado. They had fallen in love. After school Carl had hired on with the railroad. Ginger was two years younger than Carl, so, after her graduation, the two were married. In the late 1920’s, Carl transferred to Rawlins, Wyoming. He and Ginger had tired of Greeley, and felt a change of scenery would do them good.

A few years later, the Sinclair Refinery had an opening, so Carl applied and was hired as a boilermaker. He and Ginger moved to Sinclair, inhabiting their company house on South Eighth Street, where they still lived in 1963.

Uncle Carl and Aunt Ginger wished to have children. Ginger had trouble conceiving; and when she finally did, in 1932, she had a miscarriage. It was a great disappointment to the couple. The following year, Ginger gave birth to a son. The couple named him Theodore, after Theodore Roosevelt. They called him Teddy of course. He brought great joy into their lives. Two years later, a second son was born, Eugene. Uncle Carl taught the boys to hunt, fish, play sports. The two boys were natural athletes. Both were sports stars in Sinclair grade school, and, later, in Rawlins High School.

In 1951, after graduating from high school, Teddy joined the army, volunteering to fight in the Korean War. He was very patriotic, as was his family. Teddy had always been a lucky boy. He was handsome, well liked, did well in school, was graceful in every way. No one dreamt that anything bad would ever happen to him.

It did however. In December of that same year, Carl and Ginger were notified that their son had been killed in action in Korea. That was the end of their lives in many ways. The joy was gone. The candle which had lit the family hearth had been put out. There was still Gene, of course. Gene was a very special boy, athletic too, disciplined, a hard-worker, a great sense of humor. He too was a very good student. But the family had been built, in some mysterious way, upon the shrine of Teddy. He was the oldest, the first light, the carrier of the family name.

Uncle Carl and Aunt Ginger had always enjoyed life, enjoyed a good party. They had sometimes drank too much, even then. Teddy sometimes would chastise them. This would lead to words, angry explosions. Teddy would take his younger brother out of the house on long walks, or to the recreation hall to play basketball. He did not feel comfortable with his parents’ drinking; and he did not want his brother to witness what seemed to him to be gross irresponsibility. So, yes, the disease did exist prior to 1952. It was flickering under the skin, like something shadowy and timed to become epidemic. With Teddy’s death, it became epidemic. Drink became everything. Drink in the morning; drink at night.

Gene somehow managed to survive, taking care of himself, raising himself up with strong Germanic purpose. He met my sister’s sister in high school. She was a pretty, popular cheer-leader. They fell in love. They met as sophomores in high school; they fell in love; they married in 1950. And they have been together ever since.

Uncle Carl and Aunt Ginger became more and more alike, like two cells fused. They would spend every night at the Sinclair Bar. After the bar closed, they would get a bottle from Francis at the liquor store on the west end of town. They would drive home, drink until late at night. Carl would go to work in the morning, somehow, showing an amazing endurance to be able to carry such a life around with him. He did not become mean. His world, their world, continued to close up around them, continued to narrow, becoming an exhaustive tumor. I could always smell something—gasoline I had assumed—when I visited their house. But they were always gracious and friendly. They always were kind to my brother, my sister and myself.

They day we visited Aileen Kennedy, after studying her back yard, I had noticed Uncle Carl mowing the grass in his back yard. I told my brother that we should say hello to Uncle Carl. He did not want to. He wanted to go back to the police station with Clayton. So I went alone across the street to see Uncle Carl. Aunt Ginger had just started working as a waitress at the Golden Spur, a restaurant in Rawlins, so she wasn’t around that morning. Carl had taken a day off from work. He had some sick days coming and he had decided to take one, to cut the lawn.

He was watering the grass when I approached, having finished with the mowing. He was holding a green garden hose with a slim bronze nozzle fixture. The fixture was loose; water was dripping on his shoes. He put the hose down on the ground and went inside to get me a coke. When he came back we sat on the steps of his back porch. He was sweating and kept combing his jet black hair back, trying to keep the sweat off his face. It wasn’t really that hot yet, but he was probably not in good shape, so the exertion made his body fluids flood. He seemed glad to see me.

“How’s your family, Mike?” he asked.

“Everyone’s fine.”

“What are you doing down here anyway? Don’t tell me you came all the way down here to see me.”

“No, not really,” I admitted. “We came over to the Kennedys with Clayton. He wanted to ask Mrs. Kennedy some questions about the shooting.”

His face became gloomy. He had a dark complexion anyway, and a large face. But when I mentioned Tom Kennedy a storm began gathering about his head.

“The whole world’s going to hell, kid,” he said. “The whole world is a mess. The killing of Tom Kennedy makes me sick, boy. He was a friend of mine. The whole thing makes me sick.”

“Who did it?” I asked.

“His wife, of course,” Uncle Carl said. “Who else?”

“Why did she kill him?” I asked.

“Oh, I suppose she had her reasons,” Uncle Carl said. He was drinking a coke with me. He downed more than half of it with one swig. “Tom could be a difficult man. But she should be arrested. It’s clear she killed him. She’ll probably get away with it. There ain’t no justice in this world anyway. What would you expect.”

“Did you see anything that night?”

“Nobody’s come to ask me that, Michael,” he said, laughing. “No, I didn’t see anything. I did hear something though. I heard two shots. I didn’t know where they came from. But I heard them alright. Small caliber: I’d say a twenty-two pistol.”

“What time was it?” I asked.

“It was one thirty,” Uncle Carl said. “I know that because the tv movie had just ended. The tv movie runs from 11:30 to 1:30 every night.”

“Did Aunt Ginger hear it too?” I asked.

“No, your Aunt Ginger didn’t hear it. She was asleep on the couch. The shots didn’t wake her.”

“Sheriff Ogburn didn’t question you?” I asked.

“Nobody questioned me,” Uncle Carl said. “You’re the first one to ask me anything, right now.”

Uncle Carl went in to get another coke. He came back with some Oreo cookies on a small plate.

“Here, have a cookie,” he said.

“Did you see anything else?” I asked. “That night I mean.”

“No,” Uncle Carl responded. “Not until the police showed up. Then I went across the street to see what was going on. Jack Stanton was there. He wanted us to all back off. I couldn’t believe it was Tom lying there. People gathering in the yard started talking about his gambling debts. But that wasn’t it. I don’t believe that was it.”

“Do you think she did it because Tom Kennedy beat her?” I asked.

“I don’t know, son,” he responded. “I don’t know why people do what they do. I’ve never been able to figure that out.”

I didn’t see Uncle Carl again until the funeral. He was a pall bearer. He and seven other men carried the mahogany coffin from the hearse parked on Main Street up the sidewalk and into the church. I was on my bike with my friends. A crowd of people dressed in black were standing outside the church, slowly finding their way inside. The bell was ringing. The bell rang and I could feel it entering me somewhere, someplace holy and eternal and very scary and making me small. I liked it even then.

Uncle Carl did not see me. Aunt Ginger was in the congregation. Uncle Carl struggled with the coffin, and I could see that he was crying.

VII.

I told Clayton Jones what my uncle had said, about the time of the shots. A smile spread across his face, as if I had just informed him he had inherited someone’s horse. Clayton went to visit Uncle Carl, this time by himself. When he returned Clayton told us that we were going to spend the day outside of town, looking for the murder weapon.

Clayton had a theory. Clayton believed that Aileen had killed her husband, had shot him at one thirty, had then fled the house by the back door, leaving the back door open, passing through the cluttered back yard, unlocking the gate and, of course, leaving it unlocked. She had walked out of town, along the old road and toward the Sugar Creek bridge. She had carried the murder weapon with her, which, of course, was one of Tom’s pistols, probably a twenty-two caliber. She had probably carried it in a purse, so, if she were noticed, no one would see it. She had most-likely discarded the pistol along the way, perhaps even in Sugar Creek. Sugar Creek was not a creek at all, but an open sewer creek, meandering through the bluffs west of town. It reeked of processed waste and sulfur and salt. Clayton wanted us to get some friends, to begin walking from the Kennedy back yard out toward the Sugar Creek bridge, looking everywhere for freshly-dug ground where the pistol might have been buried.

We collected almost twenty friends and began our two-mile walk out toward the bridge. Clayton had warned all of us to wear hats and to carry canteens. He would follow us from the road, as he was too old to make the walk himself. We spread out. We took our time, stopping to inspect anything suspicious. Of course, nearly everything was suspicious to our minds, given the circumstances. We unearthed old half-buried boots, cans, pieces of rubber hose. We had been warned to watch out for cyanide guns, pipe bombs the ranchers used to kill coyotes. We knew of course, amid the ridges and the sagebrush, that the great killer rattlesnake made his home. We saw many snake holes, each of which sent a shudder into my soul which must have been archetypal, carrying me back to Saint Michael and the greatest snake of all, Lucifer, with his rattling concubines.

The day was becoming hot. Afternoons were dry and hot in the summer, sometimes punctuated by violent thunderstorms in late evening, stretching into night.

We found nothing. We walked on both sides of the old road, Clayton edging along in his police car, stopping sometimes, coming out to investigate with us. But nothing.

When we reached the old bridge, Clayton had us gather at his car and he gave us all pop cycles and coke he had packed into a cooler.

When we were sufficiently rested, Clayton explained that there was a good chance that the murderer had actually thrown the murder weapon into Sugar Creek. As I have said, Sugar Creek was a winding listless storage canal for processed waste. It stank. It was mixed with sulfur which bleached out of the landscape. The canal had been cut through the bluffs by years of use, so one usually had to slide down a rather steep wall just to get to the water. The canal was not filled with waste water, but the bed was often muddy. We had heard stories of quicksand at Sugar Creek; so no one approached it, except with a sense of dread. It was diseased water harboring quicksand and inhabited by snakes smelling of sulfur.

We walked along the upper walls of the canal, on both sides, moving toward Rattlesnake Butte to the north. Clayton was with us. No one was to actually go down to the water unless there was some evidence of a recent disturbance, or something sticking out of the water. If the killer had actually descended the wall of the bluff, to bury the pistol in the water, marks in the chalky earth would still show evidence of such a descent. We walked slowly, eyeing the creek closely. Clayton even had binoculars, to look at things closely. He carried a shotgun, in case he discovered a snake. Her also was carrying a pair of overshoes, which were worn in winter to protect one’s shoes from the snow.

We found the gun about a mile from the road. As Clayton had predicted, the dusty earth had been disturbed at one point as if a heavy weight had slid down toward the water. The crust of the wall had been broken. Clayton took a pair of rubber gloves from his pocket, yellow rubber gloves that were used for washing dishes.

“I need someone to volunteer to go down and search the water,” Clayton said.

My brother raised his hand first.

“Ok, Bill,” Clayton said. “I need you to put these overshoes on so you won’t ruin your shoes. And put these gloves on for when you reach into the water.”

My brother did as instructed.

The wall of the bluff showed a great deal of scars and tears and disturbed earth. Clayton said, pointing at the wall of marks: “I think our suspect may have had some trouble getting up from the creek.”

We made a chain of arms to help my brother down the bluff, to the water. He went in eagerly, feeling with both hands into the processed slime.

“Jesus, it stinks!” he cried.

He stepped further out into the water, edging toward the midpoint of the creek. He dug deeper in the mud. A brightness came into his face. He pulled up the pistol. Everyone cheered.

Aileen Kennedy was arrested later that night. Clayton Jones arrested her before informing Sheriff Ogburn of his intentions. He did drive her to Rawlins, to house her in Sheriff Ogburns’ Carbon County Jail—but he had outmaneuvered Ogburn who now could not take credit for the arrest. That had given Clayton a great feeling of satisfaction.

Everyone felt pity for Aileen Kennedy. Tom Kennedy had drank and gambled the couple into the poorhouse. The spectre of physical retribution was being raised toward her husband, for his debts. He was becoming desperate. He had begun to beat his wife.

Clayton Jones had driven over to the Kennedy house that evening, after we had found the murder weapon. He had explained to Aileen what had happened, that he was prepared to arrest her. She was drinking that night too, by herself. She was alone. Sad. Desperate and guilty and remorseful yet somehow relieved.

They had left the Green Mill at one o’clock, driven to the liquor store for a bottle, taken the old road toward Sinclair. She had been driving. Clayton said that he thought she had been. The cut over her right eye did not make sense from her description. If she had not been driving, and had turned away from her husband, it did not seem possible for him to damage her right eye with a blow. She said, yes, she had been driving. She had been complaining to her husband about his losing their money. He reached over and grabbed the wheel, tried to turn the car off the road. She hit the brakes and they came to a stop on the side of the road. Then he hit her, a full punch in the face, breaking her nose. She tried to cover up, but he got another punch through, cutting her above the right eye. She rolled up into a ball to protect herself. He pushed open the door and rolled her out on the road, drove up the road about thirty feet, and stopped. He backed the car down the road, and told her to get in. They drove home together, parked the car in the garage and went inside.

Aileen was bleeding badly from the nose. There was blood all over her dress. She asked him why he had hit her that way. He exploded again, striking her in the stomach. The blow sent her to the floor. She writhed in pain for several minutes. She could not breathe. Tom said nothing. He merely drank whiskey at the kitchen table. When Aileen finally got her breath back, and could sit up, Tom went to the closet and got his twenty-two pistol. He took all the bullets out of the gun, put one back in, spun the chamber, aimed it at his wife, and pulled the trigger.

“You don’t know how that felt, Clayton,” Aileen said. “All my adult life I’d been with Tom. Sometimes he had hit me. I had accepted that. Sometimes he even cheated on me. I accepted that. I accepted his debts. I even accepted his alcoholism. I drank with him because I loved him, and because he wanted to drink. I accepted everything. But when he did that, when he aimed that gun at me and told me he didn’t care if I lived or died, then everything was over. I had thought he loved me, and that he just couldn’t control his temper or his bad habits. But when he tried to kill me, then I knew he didn’t love me and, even worse, he didn’t need me. I thought he needed me, that I was his refuge in a harsh world. Instead he blamed me for his problems. He even told me that his life would be better if he got rid of me, if I wasn’t always hanging around him.

“He hurt my pride as much as anything, I guess. He hurt my feelings too. I felt like I’d sacrificed my whole life—and there was nothing wrong in that, if the sacrifice was appreciated. But then I knew that I’d wasted my life on someone who didn’t even appreciate my sacrifice.

“He put the gun on the kitchen table and staggered off to the bathroom. I got up and took the gun off the table. I put all the bullets in the chamber. And when he came back into the kitchen, I told him I was sorry any of this had happened and I fired one shot into his chest. He fell on to the table, and on to the floor. He was on his chest, lying on his face, but he kept telling me to call an ambulance. It was only then that I realized that I had been preparing for his murder subconsciously all along. I had not been thinking about it. I had not been aware of any thoughts of murdering my husband. But, after the first shot, an entire plan leaped into my brain, a plan of how Joe Horner had killed him for his debt. I had watched a tv show about how the Mafia execute people, and how they make sure they kill a man with one clean shot into the brain from short-range. So I stood over Tom and shot a second bullet into his brain.”

She was not crying. She seemed tired.

“I did what you said. I left by the back gate, I walked out along the old road, I tried to hide the gun in Sugar Creek. I thought it was a good plan. I don’t feel sad about it, Clayton, not really. I didn’t realize how bad my life had become with Tom. Everything was rotten. Even now, I feel relieved that it’s done. If they hang me, that’s alright. And I’d rather be in prison than have to return to my life with Tom again.”

PART TWO. The Murder of John Francis Kennedy

I.

That August, before school began again, Sinclair had a town picnic down at the golf course. Town picnics were held several times every summer. People brought food and drink, filled large metal tubs with ice and coke and beer. The fire pits were all smoking; and men in long aprons, drinking Bud or Coors beer, stood about the fires cooking steaks, chicken, sausage and fish. All the kids in town were there: flashing through the picnic grounds, flying on the swings, the see-saws, the slides.

Everyone in town came. The picnic lasted all day. Games were held: horseshoes, three-legged races, pie-eating contests.

I was almost thirteen that year—would be thirteen in December. People were still talking about Aileen Kennedy, but much of the excitement was gone. Now people merely spoke about the tragedy of the event. I remember that I was interested in girls that year. Shelley Musgrave, a pretty blonde girl who lived down the street, in a family of pretty girls, was already sporting very round breasts. She had a sensitive smile, and a warm heart, and my best friend, Ralph Vasey, was in love with her. Barbara Hollins was the prettiest girl in town, brown hair, slim, lively. I remember following her around for at least a half-hour, before my mother called me over to eat something and she vanished into the woods near the river, very much like the archetypal wood-nymph I believed her to be. Dody Frazier was about eighteen, very sexy; and, so we had heard, she was doing it with her boyfriend, Rex Baker. I watched her with her friends, as I ate my hamburger, overseen by my mother who was coaxing me to eat some of her potato salad—I imagined her naked in the back seat of a car, locked in struggle with her friend, savage, unrelenting. I must have imagined her a bit too intensely, for she turned toward me with a look of indignant superiority. I quickly looked away, careful not to catch her eye, and the full throttle of her disdain.

The air was full of repressed sex—but that was myself, of course. The repressed part was me. I was still young and shy, and very much a Catholic boy.

The golf course is set against the western edge of the Platte River, about six miles north of Sinclair. The Platte is a broad mud-bottomed river which, at the point of its embrace with the golf course at least, gives life to cottonwoods and scrub brush, deer, elk, and assorted smaller forms of life.

That August afternoon, after eating a hamburger, potato chips and a few bits of potato salad, and chasing it all with a coke, I sought to continue my distant pursuit of Barbara Hollins, which had been interrupted and possibly slain by the crying out of authority. I had watched her travel with her friends down the road toward the river. I walked up that road, cautious, leaving the safe perimeter of the picnic grounds.

The Platte River had the reputation of being a killer. Each year at least one person I knew would drown in the Platte. That was usually in the spring, when the run-off of melting snow in the mountains made the river a churning beast. The dark undertow. The burdening grave explicitness of force. I fished the Platte in the spring and watched cows, trees, mobile homes, old cars passing by in the currents. There was also the presence of snakes, the ever-present guardians of the fears of children. I had seen rattlesnakes often down by the river. I had no patience for humorless reptiles.

The river was also the place the older boys took their girlfriends to have sex. They also drank there, the high school boys. We would sometimes hear stories of parties at night, great bonfires at the river’s edge, fist fights: the foundations of myth. For teenage, clearly, was the mythological era.

I did not find Barbara Hollins down at the river’s edge. I found instead my Uncle Carl, sitting alone on the river bank, drinking whiskey from a silver flask. I tried to slip away before he noticed me; but I stepped on some dry wood; he turned and told me to join him.

He had been watching a hawk, on the other side of the river. He handed me his binoculars, and told me where to look. There was a large grey hawk camouflaged on the branch of a cottonwood. He seemed so noble, sitting there motionless. His eyes were narrowed and almost frightening to look at. His face was sharp, dignified, intense.

“That’s a grand bird, isn’t it?” Uncle Carl said.

“It sure is beautiful,” I replied.

“I’ve been watching him all afternoon,” Carl said. “He’s been watching me too. He hears all this craziness around him. Kids shouting, parents laughing, cars, firecrackers. But nothing can touch him up there. He just remains silent. Eventually everything will be gone. And this will be his world again.”

A fish jumped in the water before us. I heard the water break. The evening sun was just beginning to lie upon the water; the heat was breaking. I would soon be able to visualize the gauze of bugs that assembled each evening above the water, tempting German browns and rainbows to leap.

It was very peaceful at that moment. I had forgotten about Barbara Hollins. I had found my spot. There was silence for awhile, but it was a pleasant silence, one almost of a trance.

“Life’s never really made much sense to me, son, not since my boy Teddy died,” Uncle Carl said. “You’ve heard about your Uncle Ted, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I have,” I said. “He was killed in the Korean War.”

“He died trying to save another man’s life,” Carl said. “He was awarded a Distinguished Service Medal. I still have it at home tacked on my mirror.”

He was silent again for a while. He watched the hawk through his binoculars again.

“Sometimes I feel like that hawk, Mike,” Uncle Carl began again. “I feel like I’m alone on a high branch. I can’t go down, because the noisemakers on the earth don’t understand me, and could never be my friend. I try to hide in my branch, hoping the world might go away so that I can be alone in peace.”

“Is that why you drink so much?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose it is. I suppose booze to me is like some magic serum which makes me invisible. It’s not very noble, is it? Something happened somewhere. I don’t know if it was Teddy, or if it happened even before then. There were several roads to take. I chose one. It may have been the wrong one. I don’t know.”

He poured the whiskey from his flask into the river. Slowly. He watched it disappear, seeming to take pleasure in watching the dissipation of his burden. Then he threw the flask into the river. We watched it bobbing on the currents, until it filled with water and then slowly sank out of view.

“Drinking’s the worse thing a man can do with his life, Michael,” Uncle Carl said. “It justifies everything. It justifies failure, remorse, guilt, anger, self-hatred. A man should never give up. It doesn’t matter if a man wins, Michael. What matters is that he doesn’t give up. If a man continues to struggle, then he is still a man. A man who retreats inside the bottle is no man. He is just a boy in a man’s clothes. Worse than that: he is a spoiled boy. A boy who refused to grow up. That’s me, Michael. I’m a boy who refused to grow up.”

I said nothing.

Finally I said: “Do you believe in God, Uncle Carl?”

“Well, now I don’t know, Mike,” he said. He thought awhile. “Yes, I believe in God,” he said. His voice choked up when he said this. I knew he was thinking of something which caused him pain. “A wasted life is the worse thing, Michael. God does not tolerate a wasted life. I know that. Life is really quite valuable. There are souls waiting in line for a chance to be given life. So the thing the souls hate most in a man is when a man doesn’t realize the gift he’s been given.”

“Do you believe in hell, Uncle Carl?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, Michael,” he said. “I’ve been living in hell for the past twelve years. I believe in hell.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t judge yourself so harshly,” I said. “You seem like a good man to me. You’ve just had some bad things happen to you.”

“No, Michael,” Carl said. “It’s more than that. Every man gets tested. If a man has faith, he passes the test. If he has no faith, then he gets sent to hell. It’s as simple as that.”

“I like you, Uncle Carl,” I replied. “You’ve always been nice to me.”

I could see that he had tears in his eyes. He tried to hide the tears, rubbing them on the back of his hands.

He got up to leave. He said: “There’s one thing you should remember, Michael. Learn from my life. Don’t do as I’ve done.”

He leaned down and handed me his binoculars.

“Go ahead and keep these,” he said. “I can always get another pair.”

II.

It was November. I think it was All-Souls Day. My brother and I were at Joe Vestal’s barbershop waiting to get haircuts. We were Catholics. Catholic school was closed. It was early afternoon. We were sitting on a black maple shoeshine console which Joe Vestal kept in his shop as a sort of relic. No one shined shoes in his shop anymore. Joe Bedford was having his hair cut, so we had to wait. Don McCann came in from the bar. Both the bar and the barbershop were in the hotel building, connected by a hallway. Don McCann said: “Joe, just heard on the tv: the president’s been shot!”

“What?” Joe Vestal replied. He was hard of hearing. He tried to cup his ear to hear better.

“Someone’s shot President Kennedy!”

“Oh, good,” Joe Vestal replied. Again he had not heard; but this time he pretended that he had.

My brother and I ran home without getting our haircuts. Our television was on. John Francis Kennedy had been shot. Dan Rather was reporting. He said that the president was dead.

The death of John Francis Kennedy was especially painful to Catholics. He had been a prince, rising up to lead our nation. I had discovered in 1960 that some people hated Catholics. One of my best friends, during the election, had announced his intention to “vote” for Nixon.

“You’re going to vote for Nixon against Kennedy?” I asked, incredulous.

“Oh, yeah. Kennedy’s a Catholic. My family hates Catholics!” Jack Argyle said.

I had known that we were different somehow. I just didn’t realize that people hated us.

I did not leave the tv for days. I watched each report. I was stunned. I did not believe that such stupid cruelty was possible. And I believed that Dan Rather had become the voice of the Truth.

Two days later, after church on Sunday, we drove to my grandmother’s house. She always baked cinnamon rolls for us on Sunday. As we pulled up in front of her house, she came running out into her yard. “Someone has shot Oswald!” she cried. “Someone has shot Oswald right on tv!”

St. Joseph’s School, the Catholic School in Rawlins, borrowed three television sets from Mullin Furniture and placed them in the school gymnasium. The janitors set up folding chairs. Everyone in the school watched the funeral entourage of the president. We watched as John Jr. saluted his father’s passing casket, the riderless horse, the eternal flame. Everyone was crying. The nuns were weeping. Father Sullivan could not watch.

When I came home that night, with my brother and sister, my mother seemed edgy and pale. She had us take off our coats, put down our books, and follow her into the kitchen. We sat at the kitchen table. Our dad wasn’t home from work yet. But mom said:

“Another bad thing happened today, kids.”

“What happened, mom?” we asked.

“Your Uncle Carl died this afternoon,” she said. She started to say something, but then stopped.

“How did he die?” my brother asked.

“He took his own life, children,” my mother replied. “He was so troubled by the killing of the president, that he drove down to the river, hooked up a hose to his exhaust pipe, and let the car run until he died of asphyxiation.”

III.

We buried Uncle Carl that Sunday at the Sinclair Church. He was not a Catholic. Catholics were not supposed to enter a non-Catholic church; but our parents told us it was alright since this was a special occasion. We dressed up in our dark clothes. I wore a suit and a black tie. I used Brylcream on my hair to try to soothe my cowlick.

The church was filled with people I knew. Uncle Carl’s coffin was open. He looked peaceful, the way I had seen him that day in August by the river. I thought of the hawk. The hawk was dead. I did not feel sorrow really. Uncle Carl had seemed so sad, so lost, so helpless. Death did not seem so bad. I heard the wind blowing against the windows. A storm was coming in. It had already snowed once. The sky was dark; the ghosts in the air had begun their winter howling.

The minister was saying something about Carl, about how difficult life sometimes was. I could hear people sobbing. I wondered if Carl had realized he had so many friends. Aunt Ginger was stiff and solitary and grieving. She was a hawk too. I felt sorry for her. It seemed like she had been abandoned. That was the real tragedy, her loneliness. She was a hawk too. But I wondered if she really wanted to be one.

When the minister finished speaking, the bells began to toll. The congregation slowly filtered out of the building. It was getting cold now. I saw Barbara Hollins up the street, getting into the family car. She was saying something to my brother. My brother was in love with her. She had on a dark coat; but her legs were exposed beneath the hem. I looked at her face. She was smiling; her brown hair seemed to be caught by the wind. She ducked, trying to free her hair. She laughed softly; and I noticed how delicate and smooth was the skin of her neck. Her teeth seemed so straight and white. I remembered everything.

THE AWAKENING

I. The Appearance of the Man in Drag

The constant entity of faith is found in the land with too much shadow. In the land of no shadow no faith is needed, for everyone is beyond God, already saved, incapable of despair, that fact of emotion from which faith is certainly born. It is in strife that peace is found. It is in spite of hatred that love appears. It is out of famine that bounty arises; out of plenty comes discord. Such is the round, the round livelihood of the tapering man, the harpooning man, chasing the beast, not wanting the beast so much as wanting the beauty that is found beyond the horror of the beast. Wanting it all, truly: beast and man and beauty and horror. Wanting the round itself: day and night, love and dishonor, anger and soft friendship. It is all a part of his life, and he must know it all, for a life with one side of the rule is not enough. He does not wish to be merely an anecdote, with a sense of right, but with no experience to placate him. So he must experience life, in all its fashions, from all its angles. That is what makes him human, beyond angels and directly beneath God. He has the power of experience, learning from tribulations, learning also from his tributes. He is capable of growth surely; but even more he is hungry for word and deed and manufacturing of destinies, not so much for the learning as it is, rather, from the fear of satiety.

I remember when I first saw the man with long white hair who was dressed like a woman. It was a winter day in January 1993. He was wearing a white dress; and he was doing push-ups in front of the Student Union building at the University of Oregon. Strange sights are common in Eugene, so I was not really surprised. He was unique in appearance, however, because of his ferociously white hair and pink skin: he was almost an albino. His eyes did not have the pink tint usually associated with the albino, however. But he was a great white spectacle at the very least. He emerged from the stationary grid of his environment like a mismatched sock or like a run in a woman’s dark stocking.

His hair was long and stringy. His body was thin but wiry. He appeared to be athletic in a way, like a runner might be athletic, not thickly muscled, but with a graceful energy of movement, and an inner concentration which was trancelike, brimming with intensity.

When he finished his push-ups, aware all the while that eyes were fixed upon him, many faces laughing at his bizarre appearance and performance, for it was certainly a performance—I would learn later that my reading of the crowd, “laughing at his bizarre appearance,” he had concluded as portraying “animation and amusement,” almost, in fact, admiration—he brushed his stringy, wet hair from his face, exaggerating the feminine waft of the hand, then charged through the crowd of students and faculty, his eyes fixed upon and caressing some imaginary eden. There was a hint of a smile on his face, as if he were an actor whom, upon exiting the stage, had been moved to a shy facial recognition of the world by applause which was, to the suspect objective world at least, silent or imaginary or spiritual or severely muted.

As I say, I made very little of this phantasm: Eugene has a whole host of “street celebrities”, so it is really not surprising when an alien lands and begins to scatter fantastic dust among the mostly middle class denizens of this cultural harbor set in the pit of the Willamette Valley. Eugene is one of those islands of tolerance positioned in the west like lily-pads on a pond: Boulder, Eugene, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Santa Fe. University towns. Towns with deep roots in the psychedelic era, tie-died, pony-tailed, politically correct, gratefully dead. Liberal towns apparently governed by the philosophy that excess is acceptable; and that society is largely responsible for any aberrant behavior, even criminal behavior, perpetrated by society’s victim, the individual citizen.

Manfred, as I later came to learn he was named, was like many other creatures from the deep who made their way to Eugene, either as disciples of Ken Kesey’s well-chronicled odysseys on the magic bus, or primitive shadows cast off by the Rainbow Family in their trek against time, perhaps as mere sojourners on the Grey Tortoise, the counter-culture version of the Greyhound Bus, which claimed value, free love, stops at local hot springs, marijuana and general “spiritual wellness” as a part of its travel menu. Ghosts from the Beats and reverberations from Jerry Garcia’s guitar strings: ultimate reactionary romantics, anti-modern, anti-American, idealizers of past eras, especially primitive eras of “natural” ascendancies: man eating flowers surely more than man being eaten by bears.

Manfred was different, however. Manfred was, in his tenor at least, his desperation, and in his self-recognized profundity of vision, which truth he could not share or communicate with others and which truth could not save him from a deadening isolation, much like the others, the dark figures who appeared out of cracks of trees to spread either light or hate about the town, until vanishing again, either to prison or to some hobo camp outside of town, or perhaps to Seattle or Berkeley. He was different in that he had very little connection to the beats or the hippies, to the thieves or the addicts with whom he shared his drastic orbit. He was fixed upon his own spiritual axis, his emotional orbit, which was, in fact, a desire for harmony combined with an ignorance of destination. He would later document this thesis in writing, which epistle he left upon all the tables in the student union, propounding that his “ultimate goal (concurrent with the envisionment of a utopian society) would be to create a bridge between men and women, to cast aside the divisiveness of gender roles, and to create a more compassionate, empathic (sp), and sharing interrelationship between them.”

Manfred was a child of the eighties and nineties, a child living in the eddies of confused gender: Vietnam had passed; drugs or alcohol were of no interest to him; politics did not matter, not traditional politics at any rate; ecology did not even matter to him, although he was always on the right side when contemplating or occasionally uttering opinions on such issues: what mattered to him was the politics of the groin, the ecology of sex, the apocalypse of gender.

In the eighties and nineties, political ideology gave way to the cult of personal power. No one cared about Marx or about Mao or about John Maynard Keynes. There was no Eldredge Cleaver or George Wallace or Lyndon Baines Johnson. The issue of the times centered on the self, and centered even further on the sex organs, not so much as elements of love or pleasure, as they had in the legendary 1960’s, but as symbols of power and, conversely, as symbols of personal enslavement and the struggle to avoid such.

Manfred Starr was a symbol of his time, an era during which men seemed desperate to become women and women seemed desperate to become men. It was an age of confusion surely, and still is, continuing to shred its clothing. It is an age of chaos. An age of the perversion of light. The mind can justify anything, any extreme document, any insidious personality or parched condition. And to Manfred Starr, this perversion of light, this shredding of the clothes of traditional standards, was the springboard from which he intended to fly and to discover his godliness.

II. Born Under A Barnhouse Star

Life was not easy for Manfred Starr. He was an only child, and he came to his parents, Dedalus and Mildred Starr, when Dedalus was fifty-three years old. Mildred was forty-three. Her pregnancy was a miracle really; she and Dedalus had sex about twice a year; she had never been pregnant in her life. Both she and Dedalus assumed that God did not wish them to be bountiful, for some reason. Then, the miracle: God had given them a very special blessing. They called the boy Manfred. He was born in October 1960.

Manfred was strange in appearance the very moment he stuck his head out into the world. His hair was white and his skin was pink, almost as pink as a grapefruit. His eyes were light blue, and seemed almost frightened, as if he had experienced a nightmare prior to birth (or perhaps during birth) which became a permanent expression. His eyes always seemed to be cowering, as if he were preparing to duck, expecting to be hit.

His father or mother never hit him. The boy was naturally recessive, naturally shy, and seemed from birth to live inside a shell of secret natures. It was as if he never had been born—or, at least, had moved from one zone of protection in his mother’s womb to another zone of protection within his concealing mind, without ever being touched by or touching a world contaminated by complexity and too often lacking his own spiritual gravity. Something had been engraved on his forehead. It was invisible but immediately recognizable to those who made his acquaintance. He was an angel fallen, by some mistake, to the Earth.

His parents loved him, but they were not effusive people. They loved him stoically, as they loved one another, as they lived their lives.

The family lived between Eugene and Cottage Grove, in a house in the woods at the end of Hidden Road. Dedalus was active in the local church, had even been a minister when he was younger, caring for the church grounds and speaking every Sunday. There had been a coup, however, in 1966. A younger man from Cottage Grove had believed the church too rigid. He had led a revolt of younger parishioners, had successfully unseated Dedalus Starr, and had begun a liberalization of the church and the congregation. After the revolt, sermons never mentioned the words “damnation” or “pernicious” or “corruption,” all favorite motifs of Dedalus Starr. Now the words were “love” and “forgiveness” and “healing” and “potential”. The congregation now seemed soft where its predecessor had been hard; the congregation no longer believed in the “fear of God,” but spoke instead, with rosy annunciations, of the powers of positive thinking and “self-actualization”. Guitars were brought in to accompany the new theorem. The new minister spoke of how each human soul, each man and woman, was a god inside the body of a man, waiting to blossom, waiting to become God Himself.

Dedalus took his family out of the church, during one sermon, muttering “Blasphemy! Utter blasphemy!” when he heard those words. The utter stupidity and gall: man pretending to be a God! A curse was coming on the land, of this Dedalus was certain. Pride in the intellect would bring man down in some great catastrophe.

The only social life Dedalus and Mildred had had was through the life of the church. Dedalus worked at home, repairing watches and machinery, selling firewood from his land, in order to stay alive. Mildred kept a huge garden during the summer, and canned in the Autumn, so the family’s cost for food was minimal. The house and land had been paid off through Mildred’s inheritance, so a great deal of money was not needed in order to survive. Dedalus and Mildred liked it that way: simple, close to nature, close to death and to death’s spiritual organization.

They had sent Manfred to school in town for the first grade; but as Dedalus became more convinced that the world was going to end, after the shocking betrayal of Dedalus by his congregation, the family drew even more inside itself, pushing the ignoble world further and further from their small kingdom. They did not allow Manfred to attend school in Cottage Grove the next year. Dedalus and Mildred would teach their son themselves, from the Good Book, and all the fundamentals of math and science and literature.

Manfred was not deprived of ideas as a result of his increasing isolation. Dedalus and Mildred both loved to read, and their range of interests was fairly substantial. Education at home was not, of itself, a killing experiment. Manfred read, wrote, learned to draw, paint with oils and watercolors. His father even taught him the basics of Latin; and engaged his imagination with lessons on astronomy, which Dedalus aided through his acquisition of a fairly sophisticated telescope mounted by Manfred and his father in a treehouse far beyond the lights of the house. Mildred taught Manfred gardening, and recognition of herbs, plants, and trees. They would walk, the three Starrs, together in the woods and discover animals, birds, fish, mushrooms, spiders—all of which made little Manfred amazed at the depth and beauty of the world.

What was missing in Manfred’s development was the social side of nature, the emotional importance of the tribe or the nation. He had no friends. He had no one to love.

Dedalus became more moody and withdrawn, and he discouraged visitors from disturbing his meditations. Manfred, himself, was much like his father. He could spend a whole day sitting quietly out by the pond; or actively building a structure in the woods that he would use to house squirrels or rabbits. He was self-absorbed. And, to Dedalus and Mildred, this seemed natural and even positive. Their son was living in the glow of his own soul, living close to his God. He was not being corrupted by the sinful natures of the modern world, or by the liberalizing influences which were ruining their country.

Dedalus and Mildred hardly noticed that Manfred was growing older. In their minds, their son would always be small, vulnerable, not needing to know too much about the world.

Dedalus and Mildred grew old together, rarely touching, respectful of one another, but feeling that physical contact was meant for private moments after dark.

Once, Manfred heard a strange, unrecognizable sound coming from his parents’ bedroom. It was late, after 2:00 AM. He had been in bed, but had heard a noise and had come forward in the house to the front porch to try to understand the sound. He had heard nothing outside, but, upon returning to his room, he heard a deep moaning sound coming from his parents’ door. Some instinctual fire flared up inside his belly. He did not know what it was. But he knew it was something dark. And he wanted to know more.

He slipped outside soundlessly, moved quickly to his parents’ window. It was a summer night, warm; and his parents had left their window open an inch or so. Manfred pushed a wheelbarrow under the window, straining to be quiet, and climbed up in the wheelbarrow’s bucket, pulling himself against the house close to his parents’ window. There was a ledge beneath the window on which he placed his feet, finding stability.

There was very little moonlight. There was no light in the room. Manfred peered in. He could hear moaning, and he could hear his father saying something to his mother in a small but husky voice. His father’s voice seemed excited. His mother was moaning very deep moans, begging his father not to stop, telling his father how good it felt. Manfred could see a sheet moving wildly on the bed. What little light there was that night fell upon the sheet and almost turned it blue.

The moving continued. His mother was showing an excitement she had never shown to her son. Manfred could hear the bed squeaking. It was as if they were bouncing on the bed together, almost shouting. Dedalus said: “Shhh, don’t let the boy hear!” And so they whispered their ecstasy, until something broke: there was a low, hard thrashing, hesitation, bouncing, both his father and his mother wheezing and moaning and vibrating into silence. Then they didn’t move at all.

Manfred carefully descended from the window, stepping back into the wheelbarrow, to the ground, moving the wheelbarrow back away from the scene of the mystery.

Manfred tiptoed back inside the house, back to his bed. He lay in his bed for almost an hour, wide awake. He was thirteen. Something inside him was alive. He had been getting white pubic hair on his crotch lately. He wasn’t sure what it meant. His penis now was white, hard and throbbing. He masturbated wildly. He felt a lunatic passion for something equally wild, equally blind with energy. There was no one. There was someone in his mind though. He did not know her. He had seen her once in town, he thought. It did not matter. It could not last. He exploded in a fiery collision of forces. His body sent out silent white sparks into the heavens. He let out a small inaudible scream. And spent that night in an ocean of sheets and dreams of freedom and in an urgency to walk amid the living.

III. Entering the World of Sound

Manfred first went to his mother and told her he wanted to go to school in town. He could not imagine spending his entire life living on the farm, remaining for ever a social infant. His mother understood.

Mildred actually felt great pain in watching her son live alone on their property. She knew that this forced isolation, which was her husband’s idea, and which suited him, and Mildred also, now that they had essentially given up their worldly lives, was not good for a child. Still, whenever she discussed the subject with her husband, he would take it as a personal attack, a familial rebellion akin to the blasphemous revolution he had experienced in his church. He would walk away from his wife, disappear for a whole day into the woods, return in a somber mood, say nothing, eat nothing, sit near the fire in his blanket, reading his book, a huge shadow in the world, unappreciated, uncomfortable, unconditioned by human needs and seeing only his ideas of virtue, oblivious to competing rituals or catastrophes. Until she gave in to him. Then he would uncoil again, opening his spirit like a great snake casting off skins. Inside, there would be a golden child, a cultured knowing soul who could love and create a home with a word. And so she learned to keep her thoughts unspoken. She did not want to drive him away. She knew he loved his son. He was not an evil man; and the fact that he was twisting his son unto something sweet but unrecognizable, as a solitary and cold wind might twist a tree into something grotesque, stunted and thick, was an effect of which Dedalus was not even aware. He looked at his son and he saw himself. And Dedalus, it was true, did not realize that he too had become a tree twisted and forged by his isolations into something hard with knots and complications, unlovely to look at, accept to her, his wife.

But Dedalus was sixty-six and ready for death. Manfred was only thirteen. And he had not yet begun to live.

Life in the complex world was not easy for Manfred Starr. He was marked, a Cain trudging in a field of Abels, the white whale swimming in a school of nascent virtues. He was slow mentally; he was not used to the speed of the world. He had been living in the middle ages for nearly all of his life. Then, all at once, he had been jerked into the world of Time, as if God had grabbed him by the hair and jerked him up, out into normal, healthy existence. Out into a social whirlwind.

Where everything had been monochrome and trance-like at his family haven on Hidden Road, here, at school, and in Cottage Grove, all the colors of the world and all the noises imaginable paraded in complex tartan patterns, making the world less a symphony really than a tempest of tones: Jackson Pollock set to music.

There was something primal and perverse about the boy: his white hair, stringy, appearing sickly, his skin slightly mottled. He was thin, seemed to stagger when he ran. He had freckles everywhere. Sometimes it seemed as if his inner skin had been turned inside out, so that the soft inside, the pink condition of the soul, was left exposed to the world, unsupported by scale or hard skin or emotional armor. Children found him repellant. He was awkward; and too intense. He had not mastered an appropriate response to the world. He became an outcaste. There was something dangerous in him too, that primal side I mentioned, which led the boys, who responded often to weakness or lack of beauty or timidity in another child with the vengeance of wolves, to back away from him, not seeking to make of him their indefensible victim. Manfred was communicating with something powerful, even in those days, some spirits which did not take kindly to ridicule. Manfred was physically strong than he seemed, so any attempt to physically bully the boy was often met with unexpectedly significant retribution.

Manfred was actually a good student. His mind was not quick, but it was accurate. He had been taught to write, and he paid attention to his ideas and his diction. His math was impeccable, as far as it went. His love of nature was evident through his study of biology and botany; and, of course, through his converse with the stars. He had trouble verbalizing ideas. He had not talked much in his early life, his extended gestation on Hidden Road. He stuttered somewhat, when excited. Others would laugh when he tried to speak; some of the older boys would mimic him: “I ex-ex-ex-expected to re-re-re-receive an A in the class....!” But they would become quiet when he turned and stared coldly at them, threatening them with his personal demons. It was clear he carried his demons in his collar and in his coat.

Life went on. Manfred did not make friends. He sat alone, watching the world, or, more often, ignoring it. He did see things that moved him: his seventh-grade teacher was a tall, pretty blonde named Miss Petty. She was just out of college, seemed quite sweet. She tried to be gentle with Manfred; when she spoke to him, he could tell that she cared for him, wanted him to come out of his hiding, break free of the psychic manacles which he had forged himself and now attended with concentrated vigor, the means by which he protected himself from the world, sometimes believing, even himself, that these “bonds” of shyness were a prison rather than a guardian structure. Miss Petty tried to include him with the other children; but the other children pulled away from him, instinctively, understanding that in Manfred there was something untamed and uncultivated and some heady perversion.

Manfred never considered himself perverse. His response to the world had been natural. He had not chosen to live in isolation; isolation, instead, some goddess of repose or tyranny perhaps, had chosen Manfred, and had put a mark on him. That was all. It was not such a tragic thing. Life went on, afterall.

High school was some strange creation, psychedelic, mythological, fashioned by hormones into some monstrous challenge for survival. Some did not survive, of course. Three of Manfred’s classmates died in car wrecks before they became seventeen. In each case, drinking was involved.

There were fights quite regularly: rituals of manhood. Manfred watched fights in the high school parking lot, with hundreds of others, who were cheering, chanting, evoking the spirits of blood and dismemberment. Manfred was seized with a horror at the naked violence; and with a converse sense of excitement, votive adrenalin. He took up the chant with the other students. He cried out for the execution of his isolation. He imagined himself fighting another man, a man responsible for his strange hair, his eyes fueled by a volcanic, hidden nature.

He still had no friends. He was part of the tribe when the fighting was on: chanting, clenching his body, giving support to the crowd and to the boy in the blue shirt, who was fighting the older, bigger boy in a red t-shirt. When the fight ended, however, the crowd’s unified mentality melted; and individuals evaporated back to their nuclear existences. Manfred stood on the outside again. He had pimples now. He had an oversupply of sexual energy, which, with his acne, his stringy white hair, his cat blue eyes, his pink flesh and discomfited features, gave impetus to the world to sweep him into the background again, with the trees and the handicapped virtues of solitude.

One day, after school, when Manfred returned home on the bus, which dropped him on the highway, requiring that he walk two miles back into the woods to his home, Manfred discovered his mother sitting silently on the front porch of the house. His father had had a pain in his chest, had fallen. Mildred had driven him to the hospital. He had been dead when they arrived at the hospital. They put shocks on his chest and tried to bring him back. He had gone far away and would not come back. His body was still at the hospital. She didn’t know what to do.

They drove into town together in the family pick-up. Manfred did not know what to feel or think. His father had always been this huge presence in his life, both a protector and a force of steel, cold and helpful, intimidating and capable of kindness. He wept; and his mother realized, when she saw him cry, that she had never before seen her son cry, except as a baby. Even as a baby, however, he had been quiet, rarely emotive.

Manfred wept uncontrollably, his body shaking, letting out tortured cries and sobs which made his mother break down and weep again herself. She pulled the pick-up over on the side of the road, hugged her son, feeling that she had no one in the world now, no one but her strange young son, who seemed to her like glass, on the verge of shattering, after which she would have nothing.

They buried Dedalus in the field across from the house, on a small rise, below the telescope in the treehouse. They did it themselves. No one came to the funeral. It was not announced. A few cars appeared at the house that week, people offering condolences after having read about the death in the newspaper. These visitors did not stay long. They drank a cup of tea with Mildred, talked in circles around the tragedy, then excused themselves to escape back to town.

Manfred said nothing. He just sat stiffly on the piano stool. Occasionally he would reach out and strike a key on the piano, always a bass key, which would send a dark tone rustling through the house, pouring like brackish water into the hallway, rumbling toward the door. This made the guests uncomfortable. They tried to talk with the boy, but he looked at them blankly, as if to ask: “What are you doing here? We don’t know you. Why have you come to trouble us today?”

A heavy silence settled on the house. Manfred could not express himself. He did not know how. Nor did he cry again. The major weeping had been done, the hard grieving had been replaced by something permanent and hard, some knowledge in his soul which closed the door a bit more, removed Manfred one more step from his fellow men. He was now the man of the house. This made him stronger in one sense, less carefree. It made him recognize his own fallibilities however, his own malformations, for he was not strong like his father, had no great sense of himself which might winnow a path out of the wilderness toward some positive destiny for him and his mother.

He could not really assume the role of his father. He tried for a time. Then he receded again, evaporated, like water from a glass being poured into the ocean, the ocean being his real self, the hidden, expansive soul of himself, the real Manfred, frightened, twisted, weak, silent. He returned inside himself, fading away from his attempted emergence out of hiding.

Manfred did not go to school for a week. When he returned, a boy from his math class said: “I’m sorry about your father.” It was a sincere statement and Manfred was thrilled. Personal contact had been so rare for him. He began to think of this boy as his friend. He would imagine them together, walking in the woods, riding horses, perhaps even opening some business together. They were best friends. He also noticed other people watching him, wanting to be friends. Something had changed in him. He was not the withered, misshapen boy without words: now he was suave, capable of making speeches and moving people to tears or cheers. Everyone wanted to be his friend. He saw people smiling, laughing at him. Everyone wanted to be his friend—but there was some invisible wall which kept him separated from the world. A membrane, a sort of hymen: he stood in the womb, protected by some gauzy presence, protecting his virtue, preserving his innocence.

Reality was such a devilish conception. He cared for it little, for it seemed to have a very sharp edge, like it was a knife, always intent on drawing his blood.

One afternoon after school, some of the popular older boys asked Manfred if he wanted a ride home with them. They were athletes, handsome, desired by all the girls in the school. “Come on, Manfred—take a ride with us! We’ll take you home!”

Manfred could not refuse. He quietly entered the car, smiled feebly, feeling fear but also joy, so close to glory here, so near to those he wanted to be but could not.

They did not take him home directly. They drove to the Southwell District in Cottage Grove and picked up Cheryl Raymond. She was a homely girl with glasses but with a prematurely developed body. She liked the boys and she got in the car. They drove into the woods out near Manfred’s house, but on Dillard Road, by the river. Manfred was sitting in the back with two other boys. Cheryl Raymond was sitting in the front seat and the boy next to here, Carl Barger, had his hands inside her blouse. She was giggling. The boys were saying: “We’ve got a treat for you today, Cheryl!” “Look who’s in the car with us!” “Guess who’s gonna make you happy today!”

Cheryl turned back and saw Manfred sitting meekly by the window.

“Oh, no!” Cheryl said. “Not Moby Dick!”

The boys laughed wildly.

That was the first time Manfred heard his nickname, Moby Dick. Apparently many people called him that behind his back. In fact, he had heard people yell: “Hey, Moby!” across the street, or in the halls of school, but he had not realized that it was he whom the other kids associated with the great mythological beast of Melville’s novel.

“He’s got a dick the size of a tree!” one of the boys said.

“You can suck it then, Todd!” Cheryl said. “I’m not doing it with him—no way!”

“You’ve done it with everyone else in school, Cheryl,” Brett Anderson said. He was the captain of the high school football team. All the girls were crazy about Brett. “Why won’t you take on Moby? It’d probably be the thrill of his life.”

“Yeah, come on, Cheryl,” Todd Frazier agreed. “What’s it going to hurt you?”

“He’s probably got some kind of disease,” Cheryl said. “Look at him! He gives me the willies!”

Manfred was frightened. He did not really resent Cheryl’s refusal. He even felt somewhat delighted that he had merited a nickname in the school. He had always thought that no one had noticed him. But the thought of having sex with this girl, and being in this car full of boys, the most admired boys in the town, made him feel like something bad was going to happen. He didn’t have the courage to ask to be let out; but he surveyed the landscape and began planning his escape from the crowd.

The boys passed around a bottle of cherry vodka. Everyone drank, including Cheryl. It came to Manfred. “Go ahead,” Todd Frazier said. “Take a shot!”

Manfred drank the sweet syrup. It started out sweet, but then became sharp, burning his throat and stomach. His heart started to pound and his eyes started to sweat.

Todd leaned over and said: “We’ll get her drunk. She’ll do anything when she gets drunk. She used to refuse to give us any; then we’d get her drunk and she’d give us anything we wanted.”

Manfred was not used to being in situations he could not control. He had learned from his father that it is better to be alone, and in control of one’s environment, than to be controlled by others. He had let down his guard now. He was in a car with wild boys who were drinking. Brett was driving too fast. The car was kicking up dust, and the back wheels were slipping as the car banked on the curves. Cheryl was drinking a lot of the vodka; she understood, too, that she could lose all responsibility if she drank enough; apparently she liked giving up responsibility.

Manfred was as curious about Cheryl as he was dreadful of the situation. He knew something bad was going to happen. He understood that some shadow had come up and cast itself over him and this experience. Still, he did not wish to run. He wanted to see Cheryl with no clothes on. He wanted to be able to touch her naked body; and perhaps do what before he had only imagined.

They came to an open meadow near Willow Creek. Brett pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road. Everyone got out. There was a walking bridge over the creek, and a trail back into the woods, south of the meadow. Everyone hurried over the bridge. Manfred trailed behind, fearful, but curious. Todd encouraged him to follow.

“You’re going to see something to remember, Moby!” he said.

Manfred felt proud that he finally had an identity. He was Moby Dick. Perhaps everyone in school had been calling him Moby Dick. He couldn’t help smiling. He felt that, finally, he was part of a collection.

There was a run-down shack back in the woods. The boys used it as a kind of clubhouse. They had a radio there, a kerosene lamp, a tattered couch and an old bed. Cheryl had obviously been there before with the boys.

As soon as they entered the house, Brett picked Cheryl up and dropped her on the bed, falling on top of her. He began to undress her. Cheryl didn’t resist him. He had her naked in a matter of minutes. A second bottle of vodka was being opened. Rick Perkins turned on the radio and found some music. He had brought more batteries, in case the radio needed them. He set them on the table next to the radio.

Everyone took another drink.

“Let’s start a fire,” Rick said and hurried outside. He began to collect wood.

“Todd, help me get some firewood!” he cried. Matt Clark and Todd followed Rick away from the shack, looking for firewood. Manfred did not follow them. He went back into the house. Brett and Cheryl were having sex; and Manfred stood in the door, watching. Matt had a strong, athletic body, hairy legs, big thighs. He was using all of his strength to thrust himself into Cheryl. Manfred could hear her moaning, as he had heard his own mother moan years earlier. He felt himself become excited, almost desperate with excitement. The other boys were returning.

Todd yelled: “Moby, get your ass out here! Help us start this fire! You’re the caboose on this train, buster! And don’t try crowding!”

Each of the boys had sex with Cheryl. They brought the radio outside, next to the fire they had built in a pit south of the shack. Matt had brought hotdogs; each boy roasted a hotdog on the end of a willow stick, waiting his turn with Cheryl. Rick brought a six-pack of beer from the car. Manfred ate a hotdog and then drank a beer with the boys. He said nothing. He tried to listen to the house, but the radio was too loud for him to hear anything. Occasionally, one of the popular boys would say something to “ole Moby”. He would not know what to answer. They would laugh together. He could not tell if they were trying to be mean to him. He did not know what to think. He felt funny. He was nervous; and the alcohol was starting to make him feel faint.

When Brett finished, Matt went in.

Manfred noticed that Brett had a camera with him. He put it in his jacket pocket, picked up a beer and sat with his friends, telling them about how he had driven Cheryl crazy. “I moistened her up for you guys!” he said, gloating. He looked at Manfred with a look that had nothing friendly in it. “Drink up, Moby!” he said. “This is the night you might become a man!”

Matt finished, Rick went in.

Rick finished, Todd went in.

Manfred felt sick, but the boys kept telling him to drink more. He drank more cherry vodka. Each drink made him want to vomit. He couldn’t stand without weaving. Part of him was happy; even though he was not a part of this group, still he was there with him. He was afraid of Todd finishing. He dreaded it. But he desired it too. He wanted to see what she looked like, what she felt like.

When Todd finished, and came out on the porch, Brett turned to Manfred and said: “Ok, Moby, it’s your turn.” They all rose from around the fire and led Manfred into the shack. Cheryl was not modest. She lay on the bed fully exposed, her legs parted slightly. She had large round breasts, and her lips looked swollen. She looked up at Manfred and said: “I hear your dick’s as big as a tree. Let’s see how big it is!”

“Get undressed, Moby,” Brett said, almost with anger in his voice. “The woman wants to climb your tree!”

Manfred felt ashamed to undress in front of these older boys. He was shy about his body. He wanted to be alone with Cheryl.

“Can’t I be alone with her, like you guys were?” he asked.

“No way,” Brett said. “You wouldn’t know where to put it, Moby. We’re going to show you where to put it.”

Brett grabbed Manfred’s shirt, jerked it, and tore off two of the buttons. “Come on,” he said. “Go get it!”

Manfred undressed quickly. There was something in Brett which frightened him. His intensity, accelerated by drink, seemed now to be chaotic, unprincipled.

Manfred positioned himself on top of Cheryl. He didn’t know what to do. She kissed him on the lips, passionately. She stuck her tongue deep into his mouth, almost making him gag. She reached down and guided his penis inside of her. She moaned and said: “God, it is big, it’s huge, stroke it in to me, Moby! Make it hurt me!”

Manfred could feel Brett’s hands on his back, pushing him down on Cheryl. He felt someone’s hands on his butt, trying to push him harder into Cheryl. “You heard her, Moby! Hurt her! Hurt her!”

The boys were laughing. Cheryl felt warm, and made his body feel slippery and extended. His brain was numb. She was clutching at his back, digging into his back with her fingers. He felt something striking his back, a strap or something. The pain felt good to him. He could not turn back. He kept going. He seemed to sink deeper into Cheryl with each thrust. Her eyes were closed. Something popped like a small gun. He glanced to his left. Brett was taking pictures of them with his camera. The flashbulbs were popping, casting prisms on the darkened walls.

“Smile,” he said. “Just taking a few pictures for your mother.”

“You bastard, Brett,” Cheryl said, not opening her eyes. She had no strength to stop now.

Manfred sank deeper and deeper into Cheryl. He felt his whole body straining to get inside her. She was boiling and he was melting. He felt a tingling in his brain, in his feet, running through his body, meeting in his groin. He had the longest, deepest orgasm he had ever had, twisting, straining, trying to jet each drop into the full, beautiful woman beneath him.

And then it was done. He wanted to rest.

But there was not much beauty when it ended.

The boys were cheering Manfred. Brett was still taking pictures of them: lights popping. Cheryl was too satisfied to move or to try to cover herself.

They pulled Manfred off the bed and handed him the second pint of vodka. It was still about half-full. Brett said: “You have to chug it now. That was your first piece of ass!”

“Drink it down!” Matt said. “All of it!”

Manfred did as he was told. He drank the rest of the vodka: the boys chanted with each gulp he took. He laid down on the bed next to Cheryl. He could smell the smoke from the fire and the wood burning. He could hear the camera popping. He knew he would vomit. He wanted only to sleep.

When Manfred awoke that night he was still in the shack and he was alone, naked. It was dark. He couldn’t see anything. He had thrown up. There was vomit on his chest and in the bed. The mattress was wet with vomit. He noted that the blankets had all been taken off the bed. He leaned over the side of the bed and vomited again, on the floor. He was nearly dead. He knew that this was hell. He knew that he had entered the place his father had called “perdition”.

He thought of his mother. He knew that she would be worried about him. He looked at his watch. The face glowed in the dark, reminding him of the popping flashbulbs. It was nearly ten o’clock. He had to get home. He got up from the bed, but his legs were unsteady, and he feared that he might faint. He kneeled down on the floor, feeling for his clothes. There was nothing. He reached further. He felt a sharp pain in his knee. He felt with his hand: broken glass. He could feel blood surging from the wound. He remembered chugging the bottle of vodka; then he must have dropped the bottle. Apparently it had broken. He needed to get some light in the room to look for his clothes; so he want outside to the fire to make a torch. The fire was nearly out; but he noticed in the top ashes of the fire his tennis shoes and the buckle of his belt. There was also a piece of the blanket from the bed.

He hadn’t really understood why the boys had left him. Perhaps he had been so drunk that they could not move him, and were afraid to take him home in such a condition. Perhaps they would come back. Those thoughts had entered his mind, as he had been on his knees searching for his clothes.

Now it was clear. They had got him drunk. They had taken pictures of him naked and would show the pictures to their friends. The whole scene had been staged to make him a fool, for the entertainment of the older boys. Then they had burned his clothes. They had even burned the blankets from the bed, so he could not wrap himself in the blankets as he walked home.

They wanted him to have to walk home naked, without shoes, to face his mother.

There was not much hostility in Manfred’s nature. He was many parts saint, very few parts demon. He did not know why he had been chosen for humiliation. He knew that he was not well-liked, that others tended to view him as a freak. But why this? Why such cruelty? Why such a low nature? He wanted to cry, but he had given up tears. He had cried for his father, but he never would cry again.

His father had been right about people. His father had understood, and had tried to protect him from people. But he had insisted on going out into the world.

Manfred re-kindled the dying fire, so he could see well enough to fashion a pine-bough girdle. He cut the pine boughs from nearby trees using a rusty piece of metal he had found near the shack. It took him about ten minutes to cut each branch. He cut four. The girdle did not hide much; and it was painful, pricking his most sensitive parts. But it made him feel better to not be totally naked. The cut in his knee was bleeding badly so he packed it with mud he gathered down at the creek.

As he thought about what had happened a sort of abstract fury came over him. He did not really hate the people involved in this prank. They seemed almost faceless. It was Life, some abstract genius, some God or Devil or principle or invisible force of nature, which had tricked him. His angels had told him to get out of the car. He sensed a shadow coming over him: whenever he sensed that shadow, as he had on occasion in the past, once when confronted by a bear in the woods, another time when he had hiked up high on Mount Jefferson right before a spring snowstorm struck, it had warned him of some approaching event which would endanger his life. He had ignored the warning this time. He had gone too far, sinned, and now he was perishing for his sin.

He did not really hate the boys involved in this. But he was angry. He had to do something to strike back, to let them know that they had not won, that he, Manfred Starr, had landed the final blow.

He returned from the creek to the shack. In the shack was a kerosene lamp. The radio was still there. He used a lighted rag on a stick as a torch to find his way to the lamp.

He opened the lamp and poured the kerosene on the floor of the old shack. He dropped his torch into the kerosene track. The kerosene ignited; the clubhouse started to burn.

He stood back and watched the fire for a few minutes. He felt better. It gave him a sense of gratification to be able to strike back, to speak his rage in the form of a destructive act. That was the only language the boys knew: destruction. Manfred had spoken. And they would understand that he had finally broken his silence.

He slipped away from the burning shack, back into the cool night air. He was, again, invisible. That was the way he liked it. It was better to see than to be seen. It was better to know than it was to be known.

Manfred staggered home that night, falling many times, still drunk and sick to his stomach, his knee bleeding, caked in mud, his waist, groin and thighs pricked by the pine-needle girdle without which inadequate covering he would not have had the courage to journey homeward. He walked along the road so he would not get lost in the woods. He did not know this side of the forest like he knew his own side. When cars came along the road he would slip into the trees or lie down out of view so no one would see him in this condition.

Several cars came by. One was a police car. The fire was burning brighter and he could see it reflected in the sky as he walked along the road. He worried that it might start a larger fire—but he did not care. He would blame it on the other boys if it did. He would say that the fire had spread to the shack. And he had barely escaped with his life. He planned it all out, in case the police tried to arrest him for arson.

Manfred walked for more than an hour. He had no shoes, so, by the time he saw the lights of his house, the bottoms of his feet were tender and bleeding. He had stepped on rocks and he had stepped on glass. People had thrown beer bottles from their car windows on the side of the road. The jagged glass was lying in the dark, waiting for Manfred, waiting to magnify his humiliation. Manfred thought of Brett and Rick and Cheryl, and he wondered if they were responsible for the glass too, if they had predicted his path of return and laughingly added one more jagged obstacle to his shame. He was limping badly when he came into the yard.

The family dog, Leo, an English Collie, first saw Manfred and hurried up to him, whining greetings. Manfred noticed a police car parked near the garage, and then he heard voices in the night.

Sheriff Reed and his mother had been sitting in the dark, in front of the house.

“There he is!” he heard his mother cry out. “Manfred! Where have you been!”

Manfred’s first thought was of being arrested for arson. “Oh, I’m sorry, mom!” he replied. “I went swimming. And then I fell asleep. And when I woke up all my clothes were gone!”

His mother looked at him with a confused expression. “You’ve been drinking, Manfred! I can smell liquor on you!”

Sheriff Reed came into view, approaching Manfred more slowly than Mrs. Starr.

“It looks like he’s a bit the worse for wear, Mrs. Starr,” Sheriff Reed said. “But I don’t suppose it’ll kill him. Every kid gets drunk at his age. Everyone has to try it out.” He turned to Manfred: “Who stole your clothes, son?”

“I don’t know,” Manfred said.

“Who were you drinking with?”

“No one,” Manfred said. “I was by myself.”

“Drinking by yourself?” the sheriff asked. “Where’d you go?”

“I don’t remember,” Manfred replied.

“You weren’t with Brett Anderson and Matt Clark today, were you?” the sheriff asked.

“No. Why?” Manfred replied.

Mrs. Starr seemed to be in shock. A look of horror had spread across her face. She brought both hands up to her mouth; in the dark she seemed to be chewing her knuckles.

“You’re lucky,” Sheriff Reed responded. “Brett and Matt and a few of their friends were driving over on Harlow Road and they went off the road. Brett and Matt were killed. The other three are in serious condition in the hospital. They had been drinking. Brett was driving too fast.”

IV. First Aftermath

No one ever spoke of Manfred’s experience in the shack. It was like a bad dream. Manfred sometimes doubted it had ever occurred. The only clue suggesting to him that that night had actually happened was an occasional muttering of a schoolmate, almost out of hearing: “Look at ole Moby!” “There goes ole Moby!”

One afternoon the following summer, after Manfred’s junior year in high school, he walked out on the old road and surveyed the ashes on the shack, the remnants of shoes in the nearby fire-pit. Everything seemed small, looking at it in the daylight, looking at it from a distance.

Manfred felt a sense of loss, standing near the ashes. He felt that Brett and Matt had, even though they had betrayed him and humiliated him, at least recognized his existence. He felt close to them because, through them, he had had a real experience, he had gone outside himself, contacted flesh and bone and pain and fear. He had been alive for a moment, because of them. Their deaths had been his death in a way. He felt it very sharply. They had at least felt enough for him, be it loathing or anger or hatred or whatever, to recognize him as a human life—and, in doing this, they had raised him out of nothingness, raised him out of the darkness of isolation.

But it was like it had never happened, because of the accident. They died carrying a secret, Manfred’s secret, a secret which might have carried him permanently out into the light, given him a full existence, giving full credence to “Moby” as a living, feeling entity, not what he was now, a freak, a frozen moment of flesh, without contour. The camera: he thought of the camera. The pictures of himself with Cheryl Raymond: they would have made him notorious. They would have been circulated around the school. He would have been famous. Yes, fame. That was something he desired. Even humiliation was a kind of fame. Those photographs would have changed his life for ever. Such was the trump card of destiny. Had there been no accident, he would have been recognized by his world. He longed to stand naked before the world. He longed to have the world conceive of him as something complex, something sexual and capable of love.

Todd and Rick came back to school during Manfred’s senior year; but they seemed to have no memory of the night of their tragedy. When they saw Manfred they betrayed no memory of the sorrow they had, first, perpetrated, and then experienced themselves. It was like that night had been wiped from their minds.

Cheryl Raymond had damaged her spinal cord in the accident. She was not able to walk. Manfred saw Cheryl’s mother pushing her in a wheelchair one Saturday, her head wobbling, her mouth open, struggling for coherence. Manfred said hello to Cheryl. Cheryl did not understand. She looked at Manfred blankly. Mrs. Raymond smiled at Manfred and said: “She’s getting better every day. She’s really getting better every day.”

Cheryl had been as bright as a sun, as physically flush as a garden of roses. Now she was a small candle held in her mother’s hand in a large dark room. She had no memory of Manfred’s loving her that night.

V. Answering the Call

Everything ends. Torment ends. Pleasure ends. Beatitude ends. Even high school ends.

Manfred graduated from high school in March 1978. He did not go to his graduation ceremonies because he was afraid no one would approach him and ask him about his plans and wish him the best of luck. No one had signed his yearbook that spring. He told his mother that he was sick. He asked her to pick up his diploma for him.

Manfred had no plans after high school. He did not even think about college. He had intelligence, and did fairly well in school. But his personal horizon seemed to end where it began: there was no perspective; everything was flat, without extension. He had no access to Time. He could not plan. He lived each day in a rote sort of ritual of movement, taking small strides, ruled by pattern and concentrating on survival.

There was no military draft, so he would not be called to service. He was not interested in working. He had never had much patience for being inside, taking instructions, focussing on things which did not matter to him.

He decided that he would simply live with his mother, take care of his mother, and live his life as he had always lived it. There was no reason for him to change. Life had dealt him a bad hand. He was a strange boy and there was nothing he could do about it. The best he could do was to live as quietly as possible. He would be safe with his mother. He could help her grow food and cut wood and he could continue his studies of nature and the stars.

It was not always that clear, that easy, however. There was a force inside Manfred which rose up on occasion, insisting that he take steps to create his personal destiny in the world. Fame, again. He wanted to be famous.

He would hear voices often, voices instructing him most upon the nature of his own feelings, but occasionally directing him to establish himself in the world of men. It was hard to control the voices, so he did not even attempt to control them. He would drift with them. He would sometimes go a day or two without even speaking to his mother. He would not hear her, being so deeply embedded in conversation with his invisible companions, spirits from the inner world, who instructed him, cajoled him, cursed him, consoled him. In this way fourteen years passed as though they were but a moment.

One morning in the Summer of 1992, Manfred awoke in a panic. He was sweating, feverish with anxiety. He needed to do something with his life. Manfred’s mother had had an attack of angina. It had not been serious. But Manfred’s mother was old now. She was seventy-five. Manfred realized, all at once, that eventually his mother would die and he would be left alone in the world. The thought was terrifying. He had never thought of it before.

That morning he announced to his mother that he was changing his life. He was going to live in the city. He was being driven by dread. He had awakened and the voice now was a chilling, dark missive, a demon with no collateral but with a whining undeniable and intolerable logic.

“I will go to Eugene,” Manfred said. “I will take the bus to Eugene today. I don’t have any money, mother. Will it be ok for you to help me with rent and food for awhile?”

Manfred Starr was thirty-two years old when he finally left home, ascended into a Greyhound bus in Cottage Grove, to take the twenty mile ride into Eugene. His mother saw him off at the station. Mildred Starr did not have much money. Her husband had not exactly taken care of her. He had saved very little. He had bought no life insurance for her—he did not believe in it. He called it “the deception of financiers”. She had some social security coming in. She might have to sell some of the land if Manfred wasn’t able to acquire a job in the city.

She watched him climb into the bus. He did not look back. He did not kiss her before he left. He was in a trance of some kind. His mother had seen it often. She knew that he would be back. He had been seized by some panic, some sense of his own mortality, and it had driven him into action. But he would be back.

VI. The New Man

Manfred’s life in Eugene was nondescript in the beginning. He found an apartment not far from the University. He walked every day, sometimes many miles, as far as the Valley River Center Mall, along the Willamette River, at least ten miles from his apartment. He felt free in this new life, free but not complete. Still, he was alone. He did not believe that he desired to be alone. He thought that he desired to have companionship, someone close to love him and share his life.

What someone wants and what someone says he wants are often not the same.

One day Manfred read a poster on one of the telephone posts in town: “ARE YOU DEPRESSED? ARE YOU TIRED OF BEING ALONE? DO YOU WANT TO SHARE YOUR FEELINGS WITH OTHERS WHO UNDERSTAND YOUR SUFFERING? IF YOU CONCERNED WITH PHYSICAL AND SPIRITUAL WELLNESS AND IF YOU’RE HAVING TROUBLE COPING WITH LIFE, CALL 683-1127. WHITE DOVE PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNSELING. 372 E. 13TH STREET.”

A slender, graceful dove had been drawn on the poster. Manfred immediately began to think of himself as a dove. He visualized himself soaring above the world, a dove with a mind and with the capacity to share his feelings. A feeling of peace and understanding overwhelmed him.

He walked to the clinic. It was a large blue house, built in the 1930’s, which had been transformed into a safety net for indigent, drug addicts, the city’s poor and mentally disturbed. The clinic was funded by federal money. There was a man at the front desk, inside the door, who had long greying hair which he wore in a pony-tail. He seemed hurried.

“Yes,” he said. “Are you having problems with something.”

“I saw your poster about sharing feelings,” Manfred said.

“Would you like to see a counselor?” the man asked. “Just a minute.” He picked up the phone, pressed a button: “Hello, Krishna. Are you with someone? Yes, we have someone here who’d like to talk with a counselor. Ok.”

He said to Manfred: “She’ll be just a minute.”

Manfred waited.

Krishna appeared a moment later: about thirty-five or forty, long dirty-blonde hair, blue jeans, an imported white cotton shirt from Pakistan (she was wearing no bra: Manfred noticed her nipples inside the white cotton).

“Hello,” she said. She seemed soft to Manfred (“mellow” was how she described herself later), like part of her nature had been melted by something, perhaps through some collision with an immovable spiritual object. “Do you need to talk with someone?”

“Yes,” Manfred said. “I’d like to talk about my feelings.”

“Ok,” Krishna said. She was wearing a strange counter-culture perfume that reminded Manfred of human sweat, burned and then rolled in some kind of spice, broken into powder and scattered on the body. It made his eyes water. “Follow me,” she said.

Krishna took Manfred through a series of hallways, past offices and sub-offices, until they reached a closed door which was labeled the “Nirvana Room”. Krishna and Manfred sat together on soft-patterned floor pillows and Krishna asked Manfred to “open up” and tell her everything about him she wanted to. It was like the biblical rock had been struck: Manfred began to speak every thought and memory which rolled into his head, a true stream of consciousness with little punctuation and even less structure. Manfred had placed his finger in the dike at the moment of conception and had been holding back a tidal wave ever since, holding it back through will power and because of fear. Krishna encouraged him to take his finger out of the dike.

“There is nothing to fear,” Krishna explained to him. “Everything is ok, every thought you have is ok, anything you want is ok. We are here to help nourish you. You are like a flower which needs water, needs careful nurturing. What I am here to do is to facilitate your self-discovery, your self-generation. Your spirit needs to be encouraged to be free, to express itself as the loving, caring child within, the flower of God.”

Manfred had never felt so electrified with freedom. He said: “I have come here to talk about my feelings. They are feelings which I have had for a long time. I have been quiet for so long. My father was a good man. I once had friends who cared about me, but they were killed and injured in a car crash. Yes, it happened many years ago. I was on the verge of escaping myself, but something happened. I am a lonely man. I am a lonely woman too. I am a lonely child of God and sometimes I walk and find nothing except walking and it makes me feel that the whole world may be like me...I mean, walking, seeking to be free, but finding nothing. Men and women are separated by the way they think about each other. Loneliness is a way we have of checking ourselves against our prospects. I know that it’s getting late. My mother had heart trouble and I’m terrified of losing her and being alone in the world. I had sex once with a girl, but she was hurt in a car wreck and then everything was lost, almost as if she’d died. I did not cry this time. I cried when I buried my father, but that was different. That was the last time I cried. I do not like to cry. It seems pointless to cry, unless there’s some reason for crying. I mean, why do people cry...?”

“Don’t you think people cry as a way of expressing themselves?” Krishna asked.

Manfred was like a child; and Krishna had journeyed great expanses of the spiritual kingdom. It was like talking to a small child. His soul had not been allowed to grow, to fly. He was bound up in some small kingdom of the mind, laced up and bound like a Chinese foot. Krishna already blamed his parents, and so she interrupted his discussion.

“Did your parents ever harm you? What were your parents like?”

Of course, Manfred said that he loved his parents, that his parents were good people.

“You have a right to a happy, fulfilling life, Manfred,” Krishna said. “A loving, supportive existence. Often, our parents are not able, for one reason or another, to gives us this, as children. They leave us lacking something essential because they cannot give us unconditional love. Most families in America are dysfunctional families. We spend the rest of our lives trying to make up for what our parents, especially our fathers, did not know how to give us....”

Manfred tried to explain that his parents had been good people; his father had been a good man, although clearly eccentric.

“His eccentricity has left a scar on his son apparently,” Krishna said with finality. Manfred understood that this was going to be the official policy statement, and it was not his place to try to contradict it. From that point on Manfred’s parents became the cause of the problems he was trying to overcome.

Manfred went to the White Dove clinic twice a week. He also called often: they had a crisis-line which was manned twenty-four hours. He would call up and speak about his desires and his fears. He especially liked talking with Maureen, a soft voice who worked the late shift on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She was warm and encouraged him to try to “work things out” by “opening up” and “letting his feelings flow.”

Manfred talked about his life, about his past experiences, what he wanted from life. At some point in those first few months, Manfred expressed his interest in being a woman. He was not sure when it first became apparent to him, or when he had first uttered such a desire. It must have been with Maureen on the telephone, something like: “I’ve always felt trapped in my body, I’ve never really felt complete as a man.” “What are you trying to tell me?” “I don’t know. I guess what I’m saying is that I’d like to be a woman.”

Manfred, since his move to Eugene, had become a student of perversions. Each week, while shopping at Safeway, he bought copies of the Midnight Express and National Enquirer. He sought out television shows which accentuated the perverse nature of reality: shows on murder, crime, homosexuality, transvestitism. People talked on television as though aberrant behavior was a choice someone made, an individual matter, without respect to morality or social incentive, cohesion or health. In a universe where everything was relative, perversion was only someone’s cup of coffee: depending upon one’s viewpoint or placement, anything could be justified, for everything was relative; there was nothing absolute.

“It’s all relative” became a generational misrepresentation of the world view consecrated by Alfred Einstein in his theory of relativity. Of course, in Einstein’s view there was an absolute: the Speed of Light. However, the translation of the new physical structure of the universe, and its concomitant spiritual shadow, when taken down to the masses, emphasized that one body/mass/energy force could not be spoken of as an isolated entity without reference to the body/mass/energy force which was observing the primary. Every existence could be spoken of, not as it existed “in truth,” but only as it existed in relation to something else. Of course, atheists took this to be evidence of the non-existence of God. Einstein, on the other hand, saw God everywhere in the manifestations of nature, God being the mind of nature, the organizing force, the inherently intelligent spirit in the matter of the cosmos.

To assume that Truth does not exist because individuals, in their relation to that Truth, are guided, not by their relation to that Truth, but by their relation to one another, the series of small, mortal truths, those truths with life cycles, deteriorations, crucifixions, is like assuming that there is no human being because the cells which compose the human being are unaware of the existence of the body they collectively compose.

The more Manfred read about the “joys” of transvestitism and transsexuality, the more he became convinced that he was actually a woman living in the body of a man. And the more he talked with the counselors and his fellow counseled at the clinic, the more he became convinced that his parents had abused him through a lack of support, a lack of communication, a lack of shared feeling and touching. In fact, as he was assured by Krishna and others, he had been victimized his entire life, often in subtle ways, because of his bizarre appearance and because of his family’s repressive behavior. His father was especially responsible for this. His mother had also been a victim of his father’s patriarchal tyranny. There had been no real “bonding”. The “child within” had not been allowed to become a butterfly.

He was encouraged, during group meetings at the White Dove, to “explore his options” as a human being, to “express his nurturing female side,” to let his soul unfold in whatever direction his desires were taking him. For there was nothing wrong in his desire to be a woman—in fact, there was nothing wrong in the universe at all. There was no moral truth. There were only styles and opinions. And it was only the opinions of the majority which kept sensitive souls like Manfred from discovering their true identity. His desire to be a woman was nothing more than an impulse of self-bonding. He was only trying to find his true supportive nature, and to express it.

“You are what you think you are,” Krishna told him. “Go for it! Find your true self! Let your energy move ever upward and recreate your existence through creativity and love! Goddess loves you. And She’ll protect you as long as you are true to yourself!”

This all made Manfred feel quite empowered and uninhibited. He began to see that he was indeed a victim, that he had a right to happiness, that he had a right to be who he was. He could be whatever he wanted to be. There were no restrictions now. Everything was acceptable. Morality was merely the regulations of the ignorant majority. Those who ruled the world always ruled it badly. And persecuted the most creative and especial.

VII. The New Man Speaks

I first became aware of the existence of Manfred Starr, as I have said, in the winter of 1993. He was dressed as a woman, exercising in public, striding through a crowd of students like Greta Garbo seeking air.

Several days later, while eating lunch at the Student Union, I noticed a blur of a man/woman in white hurrying through the building, leaving paper on each table. I found a copy on a vacant table. It read:

3 February 1993

My name is Manfred Starr....I’m the person with long white hair whom you’ve seen roaming around the campus in women’s clothing. I’m 28 years old, born in Eugene, and have spent all of my life within 100 miles of Eugene. I have had to contend with and endure what I consider to be an extremely lonely, painful psychological/emotional existence... I come from a dysfunctional/non-communicative and oftentimes abusive family; I have been victimized and abused by people all my life because I look different than others; I have had very little (if any) real intimacy or closeness with anyone in my life; I have had no true, meaningful or long-lasting friendships since childhood; and have suffered from extreme loneliness and depression most of my teenage and adult life.

Until I moved to Eugene (about eight months ago) I had never wore women’s clothes in public. It is a wonderful and special thing for me, and until last summer I had never shared it with anyone. Soon, I began to derive great satisfaction from parading around and hearing people’s responses to it. This is something I never dreamed I would do and could never have imagined such an overwhelming, empowering response. I have become more and more courageous in these endeavors and have found the overall series of events to be somewhat of a metamorphoses (sp): an extremely fulfilling, encouraging, and transforming experience, unlike anything I’ve ever known. It is now unbelievable to hear seemingly everyone in the school talking about me. This kind of recognition—i.e., animation and amusement—and acceptance is wonderful, but I feel completely left out. I know there are a lot of pictures/videos that have been taken of me...but not one has been shared with me. Nor has anyone ever really approached me in any way about any of this. I’ve felt as though everyone’s throwing a party for me, but I’m not invited. So all this time I’ve been walking around feeling very confused and distraught at how I am the center of conversation and the focus of attention, and yet no one will talk to me, or have anything to do with me. I came home today saying over and over to myself that I would rather be dead than to go through one more day of walking alone, eating alone, dealing with all of life’s difficulties, and always being alone. So, by writing this letter, I am basically on my hands and knees, begging for you all to open up to me. Because I’ve been so abused by people in general, it’s very hard for me to open up and to trust people. However, if any of you were to approach me with sincerity and understanding I think you would find me to be a very intelligent, compassionate, and wonderful person. I would give anything in the world to see any and all of the pictures you have taken of me. I behoove you to take all of them you want, and would be more than happy to pose or do a series of pictures for anyone who might be interested. Again, I have felt somewhat violated that no one has shared any of the pictures with me. If you want to see the biggest smile in the world, come up to me and show me whatever pictures you may have or share with me some of this overwhelming enthusiasm that I hear reverberating amongst you whenever I walk by. I would love to answer any and all questions any of you might have, and would love more than anything to walk, talk, eat, and share myself with you all. If any of you would take the initiative to come to me and talk to me you would find an unstoppable river of conversation and sharing come gushing forth. My ultimate goal (concurrent with the envisionment of utopian society) would be to create a bridge between men and women, to cast aside the divisiveness of gender roles, and to create a more compassionate, empathic (sp), and sharing interrelationship between them. And in a time when it can be very difficult to find reasons to smile or be happy, I would love to be someone who could make you all smile and laugh. Again, this is my way of telling you all that I am in desperate need of friendship and understanding and I behoove any or all of you to come to me and talk to me. I think you all would find me to be a warm and wonderful person to be with and to know.

Several weeks later, I found a second epistle lying on the tables of the student union:

PLEASE READ February 19, 1993

My name is Manfred Starr...I’m the person with long, white hair whom you’ve seen roaming around the campus in women’s clothing... I want to thank all of you who read my letter, and especially those who came to me and shared your feelings...

I still am very hurt that no one has come to me and mentioned anything about the pictures/videotape that have been taken of me. I.E.: pictures of me in lingerie, parading around and swinging in my backyard and around my house; pictures of me parading up and down the block in front of my house on Halloween night in swimsuits and lingerie; and pictures of me around the campus. I’ve seen people taking pictures of me in these situations and still hear numerous references to them. Let it be known that I willingly posed for these pictures and have no remorse or regret in having done so. But I feel quite dejected and hurt that no one has felt they could share this with me. Why not bring all the pictures/videotapes together and do an exhibit or presentation for everyone to see? Those who have taken pictures, come to me and let’s do some projects together... Please come to me and share these things with me. It hurts me that you have not... No guilt, no shame, come to me!!!

Please call: Manfred Starr, 344-3827.

Of course, what a man says he wants and what he wants are often not the same thing. Manfred gave no indication in his bearing of seeking to attract companionship. He was rigid, possessed by some internal machinery which wound him like a clock, governing his movements, driving him through oceans of faces like he were a full ship passing other islands in the night.

His pleas seemed like rhetoric. His fantasy, clearly, was directed more toward elusive small-town fame than it was toward felicity or intimacy or conversation. His fantasy had exploded like a supernova: his delusion that people everywhere were photographing him, that people everywhere were celebrating his unique charm, that he alone was being excluded from the great festival emerging from the recognition by the world of his own brilliance, of course, had no basis in fact.

His pleas for emotional contact, seeming to be a blatant invitations to sexual adventure, were mere words on a page. Perhaps the words were enunciating the true self hidden in a fortress of a cold stoney expression. And perhaps the words were just emotional fluff, a gauze spun out of flabby beliefs, conditional inventions and conventions of poetic exaggeration and self-infatuation.

Which was the real Manfred Starr? The one desperate to escape his isolation or the one fighting to keep the world from his door? Manfred was a paradox, of course. Manfred had two natures: one loved pain, and the other desired a return vacation on the grounds of heaven.

The transformation of Manfred Starr from an isolated, constricted man of fear and shyness into an isolated, constricted woman of fear and shyness would probably not have been possible had it not been for the encouragement of the professional counselors at the White Dove Clinic, specifically, and, generally, the flourishing of the “feel good” I’m Alright, You’re Alright Movement which had begun as an upper middle class spiritual masturbation cult in the 1970’s and had taken hold of the country through a very subtle feminization of thought which, by the 1990’s, had infiltrated the structural establishment of the country, indeed, had become institutionalized.

This movement was essentially anti-man, specifically anti-white man. The ideology of the movement, having moved through Marxism, had become groinal in nature. Lesbianism was its highest form—indeed, Manfred became involved in group counseling at the White Dove later which was run by three lesbian “facilitators”, each with a crew-cut, muscle-shirt, weight-lifter shoulders, jaw of granite, and an abiding hatred of men. Of course, they encouraged men to become women because their own search for power required, should it prove successful, the transformation of men into something submissive, trite and without distinction. The Lesbians honored gay men partly because of their shared inversion, but even more because the gay man was like a younger brother, concerned with and evaporating as a result of his greed for pleasure; and also incapable of resisting his older sister’s desire to rule the family.

When Manfred first wore women’s clothing to the White Dove for a group counseling meeting, the personnel at the White Dove applauded his “courage” to “come out” and express himself. His lesbian group counselors had Manfred talk about his conversion to the cause, about his feelings as a woman. He waltzed through the room, raising the hem of his red skirt flirtatiously, moving as if dreaming, holding his head back and hearing applause.

Manfred slowly came to believe that he was special as a woman, as he had been only invisible or repulsive as a man. In truth, heads did turn for him as a woman. Strangers might stop to turn and watch him walking on the street, less in admiration surely than in shock or disbelief. He read the responses as acts of admiration however. Once, when he was out walking, a man with a camera took his picture. He smiled willingly at the man, proud of his new-found beauty and grace. The camera had become a very important object to Manfred. He often thought of the camera which had been destroyed in Brett Anderson’s car the night of the wreck. That camera had held his future. The road out of obscurity existed in the film which had documented his existence that night, bellowed his arrival as a man on the scene of life. A trick of fate had stolen from him that moment of fame as a man. Now, he understood why. It was not as a man that he was to achieve his fame, but as a woman, perhaps a woman in film. He grasped the destiny of his name: Starr. He was going to be a movie star. He was going to achieve some kind of cinematic greatness.

Everywhere he went, now that he was a woman, people were taking his picture. Sometimes he would even see the lightbulb flash again, reminding him of his past glory. Video cameras were trained on him. Yes, people found him beautiful. There was no question about it. The counselors at the White Dove all told him he was beautiful. He felt it now: beauty, grace, the real Manfred. He wondered if he should take a woman’s name. He thought of Marilyn. He began to think of himself as a reincarnated Marilyn Monroe.

Manfred’s mother sent Manfred a check each month, to pay for rent and clothing and food. Mildred Starr was doing work as a seamstress now, to try to make enough money to survive. She also cleaned the church. She had applied for food stamps also. She wrote letters to Manfred, but he never wrote her back. When she called him, he seemed reticent to talk with her. He told his mother that he had started a new life now. He needed some freedom to discover who he was.

No one really approached Manfred after the first statement of intent he had left at the student union. Manfred looked more bizarre than ever now, dressed in women’s clothing, clearly a man, clearly a man being persecuted by some demon, pursued by some formation of chaos.

Manfred spent his mother’s money on a new wardrobe, purchased, to be sure, at the Salvation Army, not at Nordstrom’s. Still, the money ran out. He called his mother for more.

One day he walked out to Valley River Center, the sprawling Eugene Shopping Mall, and spent almost $50.00 at Victoria’s Secret on a bra, panties and nightgown. That night, with the drapes of his living open, with the lights all turned on, he lounged on his couch in his bra and panties. He dreamed of some lover, someone who might take him to Los Angeles, where he would be offered a chance to appear in the movies, to finally gain the fame and the happiness he deserved. He liked life as a woman. He felt infinitely beautiful.

IX. The Death of Happiness

He wasn’t sure when the shadow came back again. He was so involved in his own thoughts that he did not wish to be disturbed by any guilt or misgivings or sensings of dread. Yes, he sensed something. But his new friends at the White Dove had told him that fear was not to be allowed to control his life any longer. He was in control now. He would direct his life, from a position of authority.

The shadow came back in a manner he could not deny on Saturday morning, the 20th of February. There was a knock on the door. Manfred was eating his breakfast. No one ever visited him. He was not dressed. He pulled on his female bathrobe and brushed his hair with his hands. When he had heard the knock he thought: should I answer the door as a man or as a woman? He had chosen to be a woman on this occasion, trying to learn to be comfortable enough to be a woman all the time.

As he approached the door he sensed a dark power on the other side. The feeling swept into his apartment like a storm, and he felt a giddiness in his stomach, like what he had felt that day in the car with the boys and with Cheryl Raymond. He felt fear combined with excitement. Something evil was on the other side. He could have refused to answer the door. But he wanted something to happen, even if it was bad.

He opened the door. There was a man standing before him, a small man, short, although thick in the chest and legs, with thick black hair and a thick black mustache. He seemed like a Mexican. His hands were thick and hairy.

“I’ve been wanting to meet you,” he said. “You have intrigued me. I have read your letters on campus. I would like to talk with you, if that’s ok.”

He stepped into Manfred’s life. Manfred did not really want a stranger in his apartment, but he could not resist it. He had no power to resist the man. Everything began to happen so fast. The man took off his coat and sat on the couch and told Manfred to sit beside him. He told Manfred that his name was Fausto Cruz, and that he was from Mexico. He had an eagle tattooed on his left arm. Manfred found it both frightening and thrilling. He told Manfred that he had known men who were really women. He had been in prison and he had known men there who were really women. Manfred tried to explain that he was not sure about his own nature, that he was trying to discover himself. But Fausto Cruz was not interested in such declarations.

“I like men who think they are women,” Fausto Cruz said. “They’re almost as good as women themselves. They’ll certainly do when you have nothing else....”

He embraced Manfred and kissed him on the mouth. Manfred tried to resist him. The man was strong. He crushed the breath out of Manfred. He said under his breath to Manfred: “I’m not going to hurt you, Manfred. I’m just going to give you what you really want.”

He pushed Manfred’s robe up, pulled down his underwear, and shoved his erect penis into Manfred’s rectum.

“Yes,” he said. “It hurts, doesn’t it. It’s almost as good as a woman, my friend!”

It hurt Manfred horribly. It terrified him. The man had total power over him. The pain was excruciating. He did not call out. If there was anything Manfred had perfected in his life, it was the power to hide his pain, the power to mute himself, to make himself disappear.

Manfred tried to make himself disappear. He could not. The man controlled him like Manfred was a bird on a string. He pounded away at Manfred. There was no pleasure in this for Manfred. The pain seemed like an eternity. Everything lasted. He wanted to pass out. It felt like he was being stabbed by a knife.

Finally it all stopped. He felt the strong sweaty man squirt warm liquid into his body, quiver, then go limp, muttering something in Spanish.

Manfred just laid on the couch, hoping the man would go away. Manfred could not move. The Mexican was lying on top of him, breathing heavily. He said: “You’ll never be the same again, Manfred. I’ve just made a real woman out of you.”

Manfred said nothing. He tried to close his eyes so hard, to make the man disappear. He could smell his sweat. Everything was bad.

Fausto eventually got off Manfred, showered, ate some food from Manfred’s refrigerator. Manfred pretended to be sleeping. But he was listening intently to every sound. He didn’t know what to do. His house had been invaded. His privacy had been violated. Once the man left, Manfred would lock his door and never open it again. He could hear the man in his bedroom, looking through drawers.

Fausto came out of the bedroom and said: “I needed some money, Manfred. Is it ok if I come back later with some friends? We need a place to stay. I have your key, so don’t go anywhere, or you won’t be able to get back in.”

Fausto was gone.

Manfred struggled to get to the bathroom. There was so much pain in his body. He felt dirty. He had just been raped. Now he knew what it was like. There was blood on his leg.

He took a shower, trying to get clean again. Nothing helped. He had been soiled, jerked awake by something obscene, unexpected. His fantasy had been ruptured. His life had been brutalized, as it never had been before.

He felt as though his innocence was gone. The world looked ugly and frightening.

When Manfred got out of the shower, he went into the livingroom and pressed a chair against the door handle, to try to keep Fausto out. He dressed quickly, in a man’s clothing. He hid all his women’s clothes in a suitcase under his bed. Lipstick, perfume, anything feminine, went into the suitcase.

He didn’t know what to do. He sat there all day, debating going home to his mother, calling the police, talking to his landlady. He did nothing. He was paralyzed.

Late that night, Fausto returned with two more Mexican men. They tried the key, felt the leverage against the door. They all threw their weight against the door and the chair broke. They were in, laughing, drunk.

“You try to keep your lover out!” Fausto said, wiggling his finger in Manfred’s face. “Just for that, I’m going to have to punish you tonight!”

His friends laughed and Fausto said something to them in Spanish. He introduced them to Manfred: the tall one with a pocked face was Raymond; the other one, short like Fausto, but with a mean face, was Hector. They would be staying with Manfred for awhile. They had no money and they had no place to go.

Manfred tried to escape to his bedroom. Fausto followed him in: “Don’t try to lock me out again, friend!” he said angrily. “You make me look bad in front of my friends and I’ll have to break your nose and knock out your teeth! Do you understand me!” He glared at Manfred.

Manfred had entered hell. Satan had come into his room. Manfred had invited Satan into his room. And now he was a slave to the devil. He could always go to the White Dove, to talk to his friends at the White Dove. He should have called them. He was in trouble. They would help. He would have called them, but his brain froze up, hoping that it was all a nightmare, that the man would not return.

They were drinking in the living room. They were loud, watching television. Late, after three in the morning, Fausto came into to the bedroom. He was naked. He climbed into bed, and forced himself on Manfred again.

When he was finished, he whispered in Manfred’s ear: “If you try to do anything against me, go to the police, or try to do anything to get away from me, I’ll turn you over to my friends and let them have a piece of you too!”

Then he went to sleep.

Manfred wept silently. He did not move. He did not want to wake the man in his bed. Manfred began to think about suicide.

X. Flight

Manfred slept a deep sleep. He felt himself drift into a zone of comfort far from his bodily and psychic discomforts. He dreamed of his father. Manfred was standing on a beach with his mother. His father had apparently died. He was lying naked in his casket near a stream which fed the ocean. His pall-bearers tipped the coffin at one end. His father slid out of the coffin, feet first, into the stream, and floated out into the ocean. Manfred and his mother watched the corpse bob up and down in the water until it vanished in the waves toward the horizon. Manfred’s mother was weeping into a handkerchief which had a large blue letter “C” embroidered in a corner. Manfred wondered what the “C” represented. Manfred looked up and saw the sun had taken the shape of a triangle and was casting golden light onto the beach. He tried to tell his mother that the sun was now a triangle; but his mother did not understand. Then his mother stopped crying and pointed out to the ocean. Manfred looked out into the waves to see his father, standing in a blue suit, with a dark blue tie, walking in from the sea. He was strong and proud; and Manfred noticed a large white “C” embroidered on his father’s tie.

Manfred heard the front door of his apartment close and this jarred him awake. He realized, then, that he had not been sleeping deeply at all. In fact, he had slept very little. He had been waiting for his captors to leave; and he had refused to wake, refused to even recognize the potential of waking, until the sour hairy body lying next to him and the bulky dark demons in the next room had evaporated from his life.

When the front door closed, Manfred jerked awake, certain that he was again alone in his apartment. He had only one thing to do: to get on the bus and ride back to his home outside of Cottage Grove. He would leave everything behind. He cared for nothing really. Everything had been soiled. He would have like to set his apartment on fire, as he had the old shack years ago, after that other humiliation.

He could not go to the White Dove with this story. He felt shamed. He would never tell anyone what had happened to him. He did not hate his old life. He remembered what his mother had told him several years earlier, something he had barely heard and which he had not considered deeply at the time, assuming it to be mere mutterings of an old woman. His mother had said: “If you got all of the people of the world together, and had them throw all their problems into a ring at the same time, they’d fight like crazy to get their own problems back. We spend our own life creating and cultivating our problems. Sometimes that’s all we have: our problems. At least they’re ours, our own special creations.”

Manfred wanted his own problems back now, not these new problems, these insidious problems of deviance and crime. It was no one’s fault but his own. He had succumbed to the dark impulses, and so he had been wed to the devil.

He had no money. Fausto had taken all of his money. He would need to borrow enough money for the bus. He would be able to ask his friends at the White Dove for twenty dollars. He would mail their money back from his house.

He dressed rapidly. He did not even bother to wash up. He hurried into the living room.

Hector was sitting on the couch, drinking from a bottle of tequila. He was dressed only in his boxer shorts. He had a hairy thick chest, with tattoos on his arms. He had a long scar on his right cheek. It looked like a knife wound. His teeth were slightly bucked; and he smiled at Manfred and said:

“Hey, little girl, you’re up finally. You must have had a long night, to sleep until eleven o’clock.”

Manfred was shocked to find himself alone with Hector. There was a very palpable violence in Hector, something mean. Manfred had feared him since he first appeared, but felt somehow protected when Fausto was around. Now, Hector looked into him with a certain savage domination.

“You’re not allowed to leave the house, little girl!” he said.

“I must leave the house,” Manfred replied. “I must go to work. I have a job....”

“You have no job!” Hector replied, laughing. “We read the letters from your mother last night. We know she sends you money each month to pay your rent. You have no job.”

“I have friends,” Manfred said. “They expect to see me...”

Hector stood up. His face turned angry. “You won’t go out!” he said. “It is not a matter to discuss, little girl. Go into the kitchen and fix me some breakfast.”

Manfred turned back to the kitchen. He looked toward the phone. Perhaps he could call someone.

“You won’t use the phone either, little girl!” Hector said, having followed his eyes. “You’ll stay home like a nice little girl. You’ll take care of your husbands until we feel like leaving.”

Manfred heard the plural form of husband and it made him go weak in his stomach. He could not have Hector molest him. Hector was mean. He would probably hurt him. Manfred was scared.

Hector followed him into the kitchen.

“I’ll have bacon and eggs,” he said. “Do you have any salsa? Potatoes? Yes, with potatoes. And toast.”

Manfred avoided his eyes, and began gathering pans and eggs and potatoes.

“You know,” Hector said. “Fausto killed two women in California on the way up here. He’s killed people in Mexico too. He just gets crazy and kills people. We all met in prison in Mexico. We’ve all been there. Fausto looks smooth. But he likes to strangle women....”

Hector took another drink from the bottle of tequila. He waited for Manfred to respond; but when Manfred said nothing, Hector shrugged and returned to the living room.

Manfred fixed his breakfast. Hector ate it like a savage, attacking it as if he had not eaten in weeks. When he finished he said: “Very good, little girl. Very good. Now, how about some desert?”

Manfred said: “I have some ice cream, if you want.”

Hector laughed. His laugh was cruel: “No, I have some ice cream, if you want?”

Manfred did not understand.

Hector pulled down his underwear. He had a leather belt under his underwear, on his waist. It was a holster, and it held a small-bladed knife. “Come here!” Hector said. “Do as I say! Come get some ice cream!”

Hector took out his knife.

Manfred froze.

Hector walked over to him. He said: “Get on your knees!”

He held the knife point under Manfred’s ear and said: “Blow me, sweetie!”

When it was over Manfred rushed into the bathroom and vomited into the toilet. Hector laughed. “What’s the matter: too big a load for you, little thing?” he asked. Manfred closed the bathroom door, and locked it. Hector laughed his cruel laugh, and then retreated back into the living room, satisfied, ready to drink more tequila.

Manfred’s whole body was quivering from rage, disgust and fear. He could not stop shaking. He tried to clean his mouth of every particle of that filthy man. He poured Listerine into his mouth, gargled desperately, trying to wash away the act itself. He felt so small. He thought only of escape. There was a window in the bathroom. He opened the window as quietly as possible. He flushed the toilet to cover the noise as he cut the screen of the outside window with a razor blade. The passage was small, but he was a thin man. He stood on the toilet and pushed himself out the window. It was about an eight foot drop to the ground, but he made the jump successfully, landing quietly, and slipped through the back yard, into the neighbor’s yard, and down the street, almost running, feeling as much fear as relief.

He hurried two blocks to the south, three blocks to the west, before doubling back toward the White Dove. He would borrow money, and then take a bus back to his home. Then everything would be fine.

When Manfred arrived at the White Dove, and asked his friends for twenty dollars, no one seemed to know him. Harmony looked in his pockets, hesitated, said: “I don’t have anything on me, man. You’d better try Krishna or Freedom.” Freedom didn’t have any money to spare. He was sorry. Krishna was busy in a bonding session. He could wait for her if he wanted.

No, he could not wait.

Harmony asked him: “What are you doing, man, I mean, you’re dressing like a man again...?”

Manfred did not have time to talk. He was being pursued by Death. He felt the dark shadow everywhere, running. He could almost hear its breath, coming up behind him. He looked around, panicked. He looked in every direction, expecting to see Fausto and Raymond running him down. There was no one. He left the White Dove, walking in the direction of the Greyhound Bus Station, downtown. He had no money. Where would he get it? He had no idea.

When he arrived at the bus station he looked inside, fearing he might see Fausto or Raymond. He could feel them everywhere, skulking down every alley, wandering in a senseless mission of destruction. They should all be hanged, Manfred thought. They should all be put to death, tortured like they tortured others. When he thought of Hector he felt dirty, sinful, disgusting. Manfred wanted him dead too.

There were two older women eating in the bus station cafeteria. Manfred had never seen them before. But they reminded Manfred of his mother, and of friends of his mother. He approached them, told them that his mother was ill, and that he needed twenty dollars to buy a bus ticket to visit her. If they could lend him the money, he would take their address and pay them back through the mail.

Manfred had not combed his hair. He had a little stubble of a beard that needed shaving. His teeth were yellowed and seemed to need brushing. His shirt was coming out of his pants and his tennis shoes weren’t tied. He was a mess. But he did not look dishonest. The women could see that he was not a liar. So one of the women opened her purse and said:

“Here, go home and see your mother.”

She gave him the twenty dollars.

He asked for her address.

“No,” she said. “It’s a gift. Go home and see your mother. But clean yourself up first. Wash you face and comb your hair.”

Manfred waited two hours for the bus to Cottage Grove. He sat in the waiting room for the first ten minutes; then a sense of dread, the shadow, came hovering over him. So he went into the men’s bathroom, slid under a pay stall, and sat on the toilet for the next two hours or so. Whenever anyone came in to the bathroom, he would pull up his feet so no one could see his legs under the stall.

Finally, he heard the announcement: “Bus leaving for Cottage Grove, Roseburg, Medford, Eureka now boarding at Gate Two.”

He slipped out of the bathroom, looking around the terminal, afraid to see the faces of his tormentors. He saw no one he recognized. He stood in line with about ten other travelers. It was the longest wait of his life. If Fausto or Hector came through the door, they would see him in a second. Then, what would he do? He would not go back. He would force them to kill him, with their knives, right there in the station house.

Manfred finally boarded the bus, settled into a seat by the window, and watched the Eugene cityscape slowly spool itself out of view. He arrived home about 4:00 pm. He had never felt such happiness to be home again. He knew where he belonged. He felt complete and safe, as if he’d just awakened from a nightmare. He was a boy again. Nothing really had changed—at least that was what he tried to explain to himself.

XI. Regeneration Through Violence: The Awakening of a Moral Authority

Manfred’s mother understood that something terrible had happened in her son’s life. Of course, he was a strange boy. He had always been strange. But he had always been consistently strange, so no one thought much about it. Now, however, he had walked home with no luggage, no possessions, a haunted look on his face, haunted in a different way, a new haunting, a new set of horrors which his mother could not read. He had said he was home to stay. What about his belongings? His clothes, his books, his life in Eugene? He would pick up his things some time. He was not concerned about them for the moment.

Of course, in his own mind, Manfred knew he would never return to Eugene. He did not care about his belongings. Let the Mexicans have them, or his landlady. It did not matter who collected his things. He was free again. He was released from a bad fantasy which had exploded and become slavery and degradation.

The first few days home were not easy for Manfred. He sensed darkness all around him. He felt the shadow appear again, heard the voice of Fausto, the panting voice, moaning, as he violated Manfred. He wished to cast off those dark memories, to put on an old skin of images which did not include the recent demons he had barely survived. But it was difficult. Something had changed in him.

Each day the shadows became less intense, less troubling, to Manfred. Fausto and his friends would stay in the apartment until the end of the month. Then, without rent, they would move on; and he would never have to think about them again.

Manfred began to feel free again. He took long walks in the woods with his dog, trying to recreate his youth, trying to free himself truly from the deeds which had made him old and wounded on the inside.

One night, Manfred dreamed again of his father. Fausto Cruz had come to get Manfred. Somehow they were all back in the apartment again. Fausto had screamed at Manfred: “You lousy bastard! How dare you walk out on me!” He had slapped Manfred’s face. He had slugged him with his fist. Manfred had fallen to the floor. Fausto had turned to his friends and said: “Alright, you two can have him!”

Hector and Raymond undressed, bent Manfred over the bed and violated him, taking turns.

When it was done, Manfred crawled into the bathroom. He locked the door. The window was still open; the screen had been cut away. Manfred did not even think about escaping through the window. He took out the razor and sliced both of his wrists.

As Manfred was soaking his wounds in warm water in the sink, to facilitate the bleeding, his father’s face appeared in the bathroom mirror. He looked strong and angry. He said: “What are you doing, Manfred? When someone invades your country, and violates your spirit, you do not kill yourself, you kill the intruder!”

Manfred turned to see his father. Dedalus Starr handed Manfred an axe.

He said: “I have died, son. It is time for you to take my place here. It is time for you to become a man! The time for your self-infatuation is over!”

One day in late March—spring had come in, wildflowers were blooming, the sun was golden and warm—Manfred returned home from a walk in the woods. He came in to the house and saw his mother sitting in the living room talking with someone.

“Oh, son,” she cried. “Your friend has come to visit.”

Manfred looked into the living room. A face came around the large armchair. It was Fausto Cruz. He was well-dressed. His hair was wet, and combed back. His face was clean.

“Hello, friend!” Fausto said to Manfred. “How have you been?”

Manfred froze, could not respond. The image of himself lying naked beneath this man, receiving his brutalizations, made Manfred want to vomit. Bile rose up in his mouth. He could not let his mother know about this, however. His mother could never be informed of her son’s shame.

“I’ve been fine,” Manfred said, trying to control his voice. He felt anger, hatred, betrayal, and, again, helplessness.

“Your mom and I have just been talking,” Fausto continued. “I told her about the little trouble you had in Eugene, about the man you borrowed money from. Your mother has given me two hundred dollars to pay off your debt, buddy.” He showed Manfred the bills. “Everything will be fine. We can go back this afternoon.”

Manfred thought about running.

“Let me get you a coke or something,” Manfred’s mother said. She rose from her chair and went into the kitchen, touching Manfred’s shoulder gently as she passed, smiling at her son.

“Manfred,” Fausto said, almost whispering. “If you make the wrong move, I’ll kill both you and your mother.” He showed Manfred a pistol he carried in his belt. Manfred remembered Hector’s story of how Fausto Cruz enjoyed killing women.

Manfred sat meekly beside his mother’s chair. She returned with cokes for Fausto and Manfred. Fausto and his mother talked for about twenty minutes. Fausto was very charming. He made Manfred’s mother laugh. He seemed like a nice friend for Manfred. Then Fausto reminded Manfred that they needed to catch the bus to Eugene.

Manfred excused himself from the living room: “I need to get a few things,” he said.

He went toward his bedroom. He could not calm his mind. He obviously could not go back to Eugene with this man. He would be killed in Eugene. He knew they would kill him. But he could not refuse to go. Fausto would kill his mother. He loved his mother so, at that instant. He remembered the dream of his father a few nights before. He could not get the image out of his mind. His father had given him a vision. Manfred was not a victim any longer. There was only one thing he could do. He had to kill the intruder.

From his bedroom, Manfred went through the kitchen out to the back porch. The family kept an axe on the back porch which they used for cutting wood. Manfred took the axe. He held it with one arm, down his leg, behind his back. Manfred was wiry, strong, even though he was thin. He had often chopped wood for the family—the axe felt comfortable in his hand, like an old friend. Manfred felt strong. He knew what to do.

He walked back in to the living room. His mother was still talking with Fausto, laughing, charmed. She looked up at Manfred, smiling. Manfred smiled back. He loved his mother. He loved his own life.

Fausto was sitting with his back to Manfred. Manfred knew that if his mother saw the axe, her face would betray his intention to the Mexican. So he hid the axe also from the view of his mother. Then, standing beside Fausto, smiling down at him, as though he were a true friend, he pivoted on his left leg, raised the axe in one swift movement, and drove the blade down into Fausto’s brain.

Fausto did not die easily. The first blow split his skull and blood spurted against the wall of the living room. He gave out a ghastly groan, muttered: “You fucker....!” Blood gushed from his mouth.

Manfred thought it was done. His mother was screaming: “Manfred! Manfred! What have you done! What have you done!” She was not moving, frozen in her chair.

Manfred noticed Fausto’s hand reaching toward his belt, for his gun. Fausto was slumped over in the chair, badly injured, but still, instinctively, desiring to strike back at Manfred.

Manfred’s second blow hit Fausto in the neck, severing his head. Fausto’s head flew across the room, slapping up against the near wall. His body collapsed onto the floor.

It was done.

Manfred turned to his mother and said calmly: “Mother, this man did terrible things to me. This man is a murderer. If I had gone back to Eugene with him, he would have killed me.”

His mother said nothing, her hands covering her mouth, her eyes closed, frozen on the edge of her chair. She was shaking, wheezing, not wanting to see.

Manfred reached into the pocket of Fausto’s pants. He took out the two hundred dollars and placed the bills on a nearby table. Manfred gathered Fausto’s body into his arms and carried it out onto the back porch. He returned for the axe and for Fausto’s head. He then put Fausto’s body on the chopping block in the back yard. And, with the axe, he split Fausto’s body into smaller pieces, which he placed in a gunny sack, along with Fausto’s head. He washed down the chopping block and the axe to get rid of the blood.

Manfred’s mother, saying nothing, shaking, weeping, took a bucket of water and a brush into the living room. She was still in shock. She was not sure what had happened. She would support her son through anything. She washed the walls and the floor. She took the cushions off the chair to wash them in the washing machine. She scrubbed the chair.

Together, Manfred and his mother, accompanied by Leo, the family dog, walked into the woods. Manfred carried the gunny sack and a shovel. They walked a long way from the house. Manfred said: “This man has an evil spirit. We don’t want to bury him close to our house.”

They found a place on the edge of a meadow. Manfred dug the grave. His mother sat on the ground, saying nothing. Manfred lowered the gunny sack into the earth, and covered it with dirt.

Manfred said: “This man did bad things to me, mother. He and two other men. We will never speak of it again. This man belongs in hell, mother. God has sent him where he deserves to go.”

XII. Second Aftermath

Manfred was not sure it was over. For two weeks he guarded the house with his father’s shotgun, fearing that Hector and Raymond might appear. Manfred insisted that his mother carry Fausto’s pistol in her apron for protection. Manfred did not sleep at night. He guarded the front path. When he did sleep, during the day, he insisted that his mother drive into Cottage Grove, keeping her away from the house. He slept in the treehouse, overlooking the house. This went on for two weeks.

Manfred prepared himself mentally for a war. He would not be victimized again. He would strike the first blow. He would destroy his destroyers.

On April 15, Manfred drove the family pickup to Eugene. Manfred had learned to drive when he was young, but he had not liked to drive. Now he drove, alone, to his apartment. He needed to make arrangements with his landlady, for any damage and back rent due. He wanted to take his belongings home.

He carried Fausto’s pistol in his jacket pocket when he returned. The apartment was locked. He called his landlady from a nearby pay phone and told her he had been away, had lost his key, and needed access to the apartment. She arrived ten minutes later.

“I was called away on an emergency,” he told his landlady.

“When you didn’t pay the rent,” the landlady informed him. “I came by and found two people here. They said they were friends of yours. I told them they had to get out or I’d call the police. I cleaned up the apartment. I have your things in storage.”

“I want to pay you for any damages,” Manfred said. Manfred’s mother had given him money to cover his costs.

“I’d like one month’s rent to cover the damages,” the landlady said.

“Fine,” Manfred said. He counted out the money.

“I knew they weren’t friends of yours,” the landlady said. “I knew you wouldn’t have lived the way they were living.”

Manfred collected his belongings from a storage locker. He loaded everything into the pickup and drove back to his home in Cottage Grove.

That night, following dinner, after having read the Bible for about two hours, sitting in the living room with his mother, Manfred announced: “I’ll take you to church on Sunday, mother. Would you like to go back to church with me?”

“Yes, I would, son,” Mildred Starr replied. “I’ve missed going to church with you.”

“Good. I’ll take you.”

Manfred then disappeared into the bathroom. He was gone for about 15 minutes. When he returned, he had cut his hair short, and he was wearing a tie.

“How do I look?” he asked.

“You look fine, son,” she replied. “You look very handsome.”

“Tomorrow I go to town to look for work,” Manfred said. “I feel ashamed to have let you work for me for so long, at your age. I think it’s time I started to pay you back for all the things you’ve done for me. I think it’s time I grew up. Would you like another cup of tea?”

“Yes, I woud love another cup of tea,” his mother replied.

When Manfred returned from the kitchen with the tea for his mother, he said: “I intend to pay you back for all the money you lent me. Then, when I can save enough, I’d love to buy a good camera. I’ve developed a very strong interest in photography. I think it’s me, mother. I think it’s really me.”

NOTE TO THE EDITOR: The texts included in this story were actually left on tables at the University of Oregon Student Union by a man with an appearance similar to the man in this story. All the rest of the story is fictional.

DINNER IN A HOUSE OF RUDE WOMEN

I.

I don’t know why I went to dinner at the Ansley house that night. No, that is not true. I went to dinner at the Ansley’s because it was the appropriate thing to do, in terms of furthering my career. It was also my frail attempt to assuage my own swollen curiosity (akin to dread) about the nature of my new social and intellectual surroundings.

Claire Ansley is a professor in the English Department at the University. She is my...what shall we call it, my superior, my instructress. My overseer, perhaps. I had recently been hired to teach creative writing and courses on James Joyce, Herman Melville, and on the mythology of the American Frontier as presented in literature. I was a new man in town, a new face in the Department, new dough seeking a well-baked oven to aid in expanding myself into something finished, palatable, and nourishing even to the most discriminating tastes. No small task, I understand.

I went to the Ansley’s with my wife of two years, Hoa-Lan, a beautiful orchid of a woman from Viet-Nam. She did not want to go as we are primarily “home bodies,” more comfortable with books, music, the much-vilified television, and, of course, with one another, than we are with all of the other, lesser joys of the world, especially those resulting in some form of intimate association with intellectual colleagues, which association, so experience had taught us, too often leads into subtle forms of tyranny, serious distaste, or, if one is especially unfortunate, attempts to instill mental or emotional slavery. I did persuade my wife to attend however. “One never knows,” I said. “Perhaps you’ll meet someone there who might become a worthy subject for one of your paintings.”

Hoa-Lan is an artist.

She smiled at me as if to say: “Good try. I’ll go with you anyway. You don’t need to patronize me.”

I had met Claire Ansley earlier in the week, the week before advising and Fall Term registration began. I was getting settled in my office, 633 Prince Lucien Campbell Hall, a huge awkward building on the west end of the campus, 18 stories high, glass and steel, famous, I had heard, for being the local mecca for students wishing to end their lives because of personal trauma or academic grief. I was warned that there were ghosts of students in the hallways, especially late at night, students failed by my new colleagues who had taken a certain revenge upon their instructors by leaping from the eighteenth floor onto the unforgiving pavement below, thereby ending their known and magnified traumas and perhaps embarking on unimaginable other traumas, something about which one can never be certain, at least not until one strikes the slab and starts the journey into the new dimension.

Claire Ansley was an intelligent-looking woman, in her late forties, with short graying hair, and reading glasses which dangling on silver chains at her breast. She wore an air of experience and competence which might have driven a shy man into silence or even utter obedience. I had been teaching for more than ten years and no longer qualified as being shy however; and I was still young enough that I was not always even obedient. She stuck her head through the open door of my office: “Michael Charles? I wasn’t here last year when you lectured. I was in England, doing research on Virginia Wolfe. Welcome to the staff.”

She reached into the room with a long, thin hand. I rose from my chair to shake it.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know your name.”

“I’m Claire Ansley,” she said, intoning importance. “I should say that you will come to know me quite well, as I have been assigned to be your mentor.”

“Really,” I replied. “I know what mentor means, but I’m not sure what it means in this context.”

“We always assign current faculty to assist new faculty in getting settled,” she replied. “To inform them about resources, places to eat, good books to read—you know. We’re having dinner Saturday night at my place—just a few of the faculty and friends—we would like to see you there....”

There it was, then. How could I say no? Not that I really even felt that I should say no. She did not seem especially gaunt or tragic or hideous. A bit strong, perhaps. Her face was sharp, with bones stretching the skin, eyes hardened by some idea and perhaps fatigue. She had the thin, bodiless quality which you often find in intellectual women. She seemed fine, in fact. Exactly what I would have expected her to be.

“Of course,” I said. “We’d be delighted.”

“You’re married, then?” she asked. “Or are you gay?”

I laughed slightly at the bluntness of her question. “No, I’m not gay,” I said. “I am, in fact, married.”

“I’m married also,” she replied. “But we have a great many lesbians and homosexuals on our faculty. We’re very supportive of them. In many ways, they seem a lot healthier than the heteros here, if you know what I mean.”

I did not know what she meant. I had known gay couples in academic circles from my teaching days at the University of Wyoming. They certainly did not strike me as “healthy” couples. Of course, the heterosexual couples were not always healthy either, often mired in frustration, alcoholism, infidelity. To me it seemed that true “healthiness” in a relationship was the exception and not the rule. Love was in fact something unique, not something abiding in each heart, flowering in each unity.

But I shook my head discretely in each direction, indicating both that I did not understand her but agreed with her, or that I understood her perfectly but did not think she was correct. She did not seem to notice my ambivalence, which pleased me greatly.

She wrote something on a piece of paper. She handed it to me: “1440 Emerald Drive. 9 pm.” Then, appearing to be an afterthought, under the “9 pm,” she had written: “Sharp!” I felt as though I had been ordered to attend my own christening. I smiled, as she disappeared, wondering if she was merely demonstrating her best behavior.

II.

I always feel like a midget when I approach a house for the first time. It is as though I’m a child again. The door is large; I am small; and the spirits inhabiting the house, behind the large doors, deep within the wood or stone, the dark surfaces, are impenetrable, dangerous, giants in capability. Nothing can be known about them. They might be kind and generous; they might be horrible, cruel, linked to death and to death’s periodical mannerliness. They might be furious for blood; or as gentle as a child and as wise as Plato’s grandmother.

I looked at my watch before I knocked on the door. Nine o’clock pm. Sharp.

I knocked, feeling as though I were a good boy, punctual, ready to learn.

“You look nice,” my wife said. She looked beautiful, of course. I kissed her on the cheek.

I said: “We won’t stay too long. Just long enough to make our appearance.”

The woman who answered the door was not really a woman at all—that is, she was a girl. A college girl. A co-ed. But, since it was no longer politically correct to call a girl a girl, since that seemed to denote a quality of delicateness, sweetness, perhaps a lack of power, an evidence of weakness, I caught myself trying to not think of her as a girl and to try, instead, to see her as a young woman. In fact, she was probably about nineteen or twenty. She had a fresh face, but also the requisite bristle cut and square jaw, with wire-framed glasses, informing myself, my wife and the world that she was a convert to the Truth, that is, that she had no need for men and that she was devoted to the empowerment of the female and to female virtues.

She seemed disappointed when she saw my wife and myself. I could read the thought flickering over the apse of her brain-waves: “Oh, oh: normals!” But she tried to be pleasant, showing us inside.

She called to Claire Ansley across the room: “Claire. Some friends of yours have arrived.”

Claire smiled, tipped her head in recognition. But she was too pleasantly involved in a substantive conversation to play the hostess and personally welcome us. She was standing with two other women; they were talking animatedly, gesturing, smiling, apparently agreeing upon some thesis. Claire’s look toward myself and my wife was one of recognition only, as one might recognize the wind in a bed-sheet on the clothes line, might recognize a leaf stuck to a shoe.

We were new. We had not proven our importance on this new ground. We were unknown commodities, perhaps flat and weak and undeserving of her consideration. That was always possible.

There was a coat closet near the door, so I took my wife’s and my own coat to the closet.

I recognized a few faces from the Departmental faculty meeting on Friday. Owen Webb, clearly one of the gay members of the department, standing near his black lover—a man of about twenty-six, smooth-faced, educated. Owen Webb waved to me and mouthed: “Hello, Michael! Welcome to the world!”

Webb was almost forty, quite acerbic in conversation, often seeking to twist a cliché into something new and unexpected. He delighted in his use of language. I was familiar with his work. He wrote bizarre, homosexual poetry which drew comparisons between love and an animal’s devouring of his prey. He had approached me after the faculty meeting, eviscerating the distance with: “You would have thought the cow died, and that the early worm was actually the lonely-hearted hunter, the way Blaine hurried through that welcome.” Otto Blaine, of course, was the Department Head.

Owen Webb had laughed at his own wit. He had continued: “I hear you’re teaching a class on Joyce. Wonderful. We need a true classicist here at long last!” I could not tell if he was continuing his joust. I asked him what he was teaching. “I teach a focus course on Gertrude Stein. I just love that woman. We’re going to look at some of her small gems. Do you know Blood on the Dining Room Floor?” he had asked. “Oh, what a gem! What a gem!”

Rachel Philips had also introduced herself after the meeting. She was thirty-five, quiet, serious, almost too serious. She taught a course on women’s autobiography. “Central to the course,” she had said, “will be a discussion of the ways that race, class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality intersect within women’s autobiographies. This will be the second year I’ve taught the course. It was a huge success last year. I’m very excited about it.”

I saw her at the party, sitting with a female friend, smiling to the woman, holding the woman’s hand.

I made my way back to my wife. Hoa-Lan asked: “Are there any normal people here?”

I looked around. There were almost no men, except Owen Webb and his lover Frederick, who, we later learned, was a dancer in San Francisco.

“I’ve never seen so many amphibians in one room,” Hoa-Lan whispered to me. “Amphibians” was my wife’s not always affectionate description of homosexuals: not totally this, not totally that either. One foot on land, one foot in sea-water. Not a water creature truly; still vulnerable to the beasts that dominated land.

The only other man was an obese fellow in a battery-powered wheel-chair, probably early to mid-sixties, with white hair and jowls and sagging skin beneath his eyes. His name was Rudyard Ford. He wore large black-framed glasses which almost seemed like goggles, set against his blotchy skin and shock of white hair. He was married to a petite Italian woman, Rosie Pettinari, who specialized in Renaissance Literature. I could hear him arguing with Owen Webb, his voice pitched to project through the din of music and conversation: “Where we went wrong as a nation was in our notions of democracy. Democracy doesn’t work. Aristotle understood that. The country doesn’t need to be run by those who are popular with the masses. The country needs to be run by the intellectuals, those who understand philosophy. Plato’s republic was not a government of and by and for the masses. That’s a truly modern idea. And, like most modern ideas, one that does not work and one that benefits only the low-minded and the feeble, not the aristocrats, the intellectuals...”

Rosie Pettinari admired her husband’s mind. She was smiling with pride at her husband’s incisiveness.

“You’ll get no argument from me,” Owen Webb agreed. “The masses are crude, and, being crude, and rude also, to be sure, they exude hatred for truth and their only love is football and garbage music and cars. But how is one certain that a dictatorship will be kindly, Rudyard? I mean, I’m not married to the democrats. But I’d rather date a democrat, or at least be joined to one, than to be fucked by a republican.” He laughed at his own humor.

A blonde woman in tight black pants, Leta Barnes, a graduate student in the program, leaned over to Owen and said: “I’d bet a hundred dollars you’ve not only been fucked by a republican, Owen, but I’d bet you loved it and you fucked him back, asking for more....”

Rudyard Ford and his wife were disgusted by this turn in the conversation. Rudyard wheeled away with his wife toward the dinner table muttering to Rosie something about the decadence of the younger generation.

“I’d bet a few republicans have fucked your silly ass blue, too, sweet Ophelia,” Webb retorted, angry at the smiling Leta.

“Of course,” Leta replied. “Some of my best fucks have been republicans....”

It was a sign that a woman was liberated, as I understood it, rather than that she was vulgar, when she could be verbally crude. Most of the women standing and sitting around Leta were laughing at her boldness. Only Rosie and Rudyard showed disgust at the degeneration of the conversation. To everyone else the by-play was merely an indication of the wild nature of Leta, which the women all recognized as being a very positive attribute.

Someone turned the music up. It was a woman singing, playing an acoustic guitar. The vocals were weak and the lyrics were very strained, trying to be political and socially aware. Listening to the music was like being slapped across the face by someone holding a Birkenstock sandal. The singer was trying to be influenced by Tracy Chapman, but was failing; yet no one in the room seemed to recognize her flailing, except for myself and my wife. Many women were singing along. The words were embarrassingly stilted. But, because they were sentimentally “correct”, no one seemed to notice that they were aesthetically appalling. One of the women in the room whooped at the end of the song, when the woman sang: “...One of these days we will rule, and they’ll beg us to eat the food they cook...!”

III.

I realized fairly quickly that I was going to need a special ointment to endure the logic and the style of the evening. The air was thick with self-satisfaction. Ideas were superficial, but no one seemed to understand or admit that they were. I felt like my wife and myself were the only ones seeing that the emperor, in this case, Claire Ansley, was not really clothed, that prospect being less than pleasing to at least some of us; so, rather than point out the obvious, I merely asked for a drink, and followed it with a second.

My wife whispered in my ear: “Have we stayed long enough?”

And I replied: “I think we’re going to have to look at this night as being a dream, without any real significance and no thread which might tie all the fragments together.”

“That means we’re going to say for dinner?” Hoa-Lan asked.

I nodded seriously; and she laughed, pointing at the drink, saying: “You’d better get me one of those. I need a pair of dream-glasses too if we’re going to survive this crowd.”

She didn’t drink, however; she was only making a joke.

Beatrice Lidz appeared to my left, another faculty in the English Department. Her appearance was so sudden: it was as if she had been raised up magically through the floor. She had been eyeing my wife from across the room. I had watched her for some time. I had tried to make eye-contact with her, to let her know that I recognized her fascination. She did not bother to recognize my existence. I was not sure if she was madly in love with my wife, enchanted by her Asian mystery, battered by desire, or merely intrigued by the intelligent face of my wife. She blocked me out of the picture, as if I were bad lemon which had flies consuming its skin.

Then she had disappeared. I had scanned the room to find her; but there was not even a trace.

Now she stood before me, before my wife, as if risen from some dungeon. She was fat, or should I say full-bodied, triple-tiered, horizontally-challenged? She wore loose clothing to try to appear a bit more airy. But it did not work. Her clothing seemed dusty, old, like a library which received no air and little light. She appeared to be a middle-aged hippie woman, with intellectual tastes, overcome by girth; she wore a silk brown headband around her head. Her smile seemed insincere, coveted by doubt.

“Professor Charles, I’m Beatrice Lidz,” she said, offering her hand. I felt a lizard alive in her hand, something moving in from the primeval era, moving backward, back toward the water. Her eyes never left my wife’s face.

“Well, I’m glad to meet you, Ms. Lidz.”

“Please, call me Beatrice,” she said. “And this must be your wife. From the Philippines, I presume.”

“No,” I said. “Though many people do confuse her with a Philippino....”

“I have traveled in the Orient,” she responded. “I have an eye for such features: Indonesian?”

“No,” I said. “Wrong again! But you are getting closer!”

I was beginning to feel pleasantly intoxicated, the stage of the creeping buzz, numbness moving down into my legs, and beginning to deaden my hair.

“I’m from Viet Nam,” Hoa-Lan said. “Many people confuse me for an islander. But I was born and raised in Saigon.”

“Oh,” Beatrice Lidz replied, surprised. “I often think of Vietnamese differently, thin, energetic, having large teeth and very straight hair. I didn’t know Vietnamese were as beautiful as you....”

That was her way of complimenting Hoa-Lan I guess, of trying to charm her. Hoa-Lan, however, did not think of her fellow countrywomen as large-teethed and unattractive by nature. Many could not afford the luxuries of orthodontists, it was true. But there were a great many beautiful women in Viet Nam.

“Not all Vietnamese are buck-teethed,” Hoa-Lan replied. “And I had a permanent a few weeks ago.”

“I did not mean to suggest that all Vietnamese were,” Professor Lidz stammered. “I really... I mean: I’ve just been shocked by your beauty. I haven’t been able to keep my eyes off you!”

“Thank you for the compliment,” Hoa-Lan replied. She was becoming uncomfortable with the woman’s uncompromising gaze. “Are all the women here lesbians?” Hoa-Lan asked.

Beatrice Lidz swallowed hard, turning her head quizzically. “I don’t know,” she replied. “Many are. Why do you ask?”

“I’m just curious,” Hoa-Lan replied.

“Are you lesbian?” Professor Lidz asked, her eyes showing light.

“Oh, no,” Hoa-Lan responded. “I’m very conservative. I don’t believe in undisciplined behavior.”

Hoa-Lan excused herself, and went to look for a bathroom.

Professor Lidz watched her disappear through the crowd, her mouth slightly open. her features seeming somewhat stunned, but ethically challenged.

“Your wife is quite spunky,” Professor Lidz said to me. “I like a spunky woman. I like a woman with fire.”

“What are you teaching this term?” I asked, eager to change the subject.

“I’m offering an advanced seminar on theory and the representation of a middle class body,” she replied, looking at me really for the first time, excited to talk about herself. “I’ll focus on the intersection between the historical rise of the middle class in Europe and North America and the construction of certain idealized representations of normality and decency in relation to the body, to sexuality, to concepts of nation and to ideas about race. We’ll be reading George Mosse’s Nationalism and Sexuality, Michael Foucault’s The History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punishment, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s The Epistemology of the Closet: How Do I Look, and Roy Harvey Pearce’s Savagism and Civilization. Have you read them?”

“No,” I admitted. “My interests are generally more traditional.”

“Oh, white, male and middle-class, I guess,” she replied, with disdain.

“Well, Shakespeare, Melville, Faulkner, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, James Joyce: I guess they are white, male and predominantly middle-class.”

“I never was so angry in my life when my male teacher at Columbia insisted we read Moby Dick but required no Sylvia Plath.”

“It’s understandable I think,” I replied. “Are you suggesting that Sylvia Plath has written something which remotely approximates the depth, breadth and consequence of Moby Dick? What work is that?”

“Oh,” she responded, “poofing” and waving her hand, as if to brush aside a flatulence for which I was responsible, “I could never read Moby Dick. I found it dreadfully dull.”

She shrank, in my eyes, from a loud brown sound, tinged with misplaced fashion, to something much less, an ideologue, a oversized mouthpiece for chic feminine radicalism. She could not get through Moby Dick! Had she even bothered with Shakespeare?

“Things are changing a great deal, Mr. Charles,” she said. “Traditionalists, like yourself, are becoming pretty rare birds in academia now. Our goal is to change the world through literature. Anyone who is not on the boat surely will be left behind.”

She turned and thrashed away, all fabric and headband and cellulite and air, certain of herself, certain that I could be dismissed with another wave of her hand, for it was clear, I was nothing but another dinosaur inside a tie. Much as she had expected. How had I ever been hired?

Dinner was served at ten o’clock sharp. I glanced at my watch when Claire Ansley, not surprisingly, announced, in an overly dramatic voice: “Dinner is served!”

Hoa-Lan and I filed to the furthest table in the dining room (there were two tables, set parallel to one another, seating twenty-eight people, seven at each). I avoided the table with Beatrice Lidz. She had been the first one to take a seat, obviously taking a seat of honor near the hostess herself, Claire Ansley. I whispered to my wife: “Avoid the horse who eats with her eyes!” Hoa-Lan looked up, recognized the large face of the sweet Beatrice, her impeccably invasive eyes, and turned the opposite direction, passing to the second table. Everyone found a seat. Apparently twenty-eight people had been invited; there was not an empty seat. And I was led to understand that this social event was highly selective. Many people wished to be invited to one of Claire’s evenings of thought. Two more men appeared, from out of the kitchen, taking a seat near us. Both wore mustaches and ear-rings and seemed to be thin, almost ill. My first thought was that they might have AIDS, but I fought down that thought as irrational and productive of almost no peace of mind.

The younger of the two, Steven Lance, was a professor in English. His friend, Terence Shankman, was a professor in Environmental Studies. Their thin appearance, as we learned quite early in our dinner, may have been the result of a diet which eschewed fat and meat and all dairy products, and an addiction to running, which they did together each morning at five o’clock, down on Pre’s Trail, a running path by the Willamette River named after Olympic runner Steve Prefontaine who had been killed in Eugene when he was struck by a car one morning. Terence explained to a dinner guest: “We believe that eating meat is immoral, for the grain which is used to fatten cattle could be used to feed all the hungry people in the world!”

“Yes, of course,” echoed another voice, a black woman wearing African clothing, bright red flowers on black, with a green lion standing under a tree, his teeth exposed; and long black earrings, two demons with long tongues curling out of their mouths and large aroused penises pointing toward the sky. “I haven’t eaten meat in two years,” she said. “We could feed all the starving people in Somalia with what we waste on the pigs and the cows in this country.”

One woman yelled “amen” and another showed a clenched fist to the black woman, who was named Eulalia Mangrove and was studying on a Fulbright scholarship the language of racism and the apocalyptic mythology of the tribes of southern Africa.

I looked at the table and saw only vegetables and broth, bread sticks, tofu and pasta: no meat and no dairy products. I did not think I could actually fill my stomach with such puff; then someone brought out fish and potatoes and I began to feel relieved.

White wine, locally produced, was brought out to fill each glass.

Claire Ansley tapped her knife on a glass, after some of the graduate students had filled all the wine glasses. “Our two guests of honor tonight,” Professor Ansley began, “our readers for the evening, are Petra Govinka, a graduate student in our Department, and Beatrice Lidz, you all know Bea, who teaches courses on sexism and body politics in the Department. I have asked them to present for us, in contradistinction to the traditional grace before a meal, current poetry they have been writing. Petra is working on her dissertation. But she is also a very polished poet and essayist.”

Petra was the girlish looking young woman who had opened the door to us. Professor Ansley had reached down to caress Petra’s shoulder as she spoke, announcing to the gathering that she was, indeed, intimate with the ripe young poet. Petra had looked up at her mistress, smiled with deer eyes of deep devotion, stood, and began to read:

The Roaring Inside Her (Inspired by Claire Ansley)

1

I heard it as a faint whisper

when I learned what boys and girls do

and what little girls are missing

When I learned to cross the street at intersections

watching how cars maneuvered for space

and that candy was a treat

not to be overindulged in

2.

It grew in volume when

I hated to play with boys

because they took things

and broke things

my things

When I was last to be picked in sports

and the first to cry alone

when touched in bad ways

3

It was a rumble of an avalanche

waiting to happen

when I dated boys

who practiced the art of manipulation

and I felt guilty for not

doing them favors

4

But when I made love to her

the roaring inside her was the roaring inside me

and the walls shook with the fierceness of desire

and we kept coming back for more

to feed fire to the roar.

There was an awkward silence—no one was sure if the reading was completed. Then, when Petra raised her eyes and smiled shyly, applause exploded throughout the living room. I saw a few more clenched fists. Someone was whistling. Steven Lance yelled out: “Straight from the heart! I love it, Petra! Straight from the heart!”

When Claire Ansley kissed Petra on the cheek, the guests seemed to swell with satisfaction. I heard: “Oh, how wonderful!” from the black dancer from San Francisco. And: “Tell it like it is!” from Rachel Philips.

Rudyard Ford looked quite shocked, as though he had been wheeled into some strange century, through the wrong door, onto some unholy planet. It was obviously his first time with the group. His wife, a classicist by nature, looked about the table, her features frozen in a structure of disgust, looking for some sane and allied face which might re-assure her that the whole world had not gone waxy. Her eyes lit upon my own. We exchanged a knowing look, touching minds with our gaze, like two foreign travelers caught in an Islamic rally in a town square in Tehran, looking at one another as if to say: “Is this a bad dream? Shall we even survive this twisted manifestation of fear...?” Rosie’s face seemed to cry: “Jesus, we’ve got to get out of here!”

But my own temper was much less fearful than it was amused. I had consumed enough alcohol to make me comfortable with almost any bizarre proliferation of thought. I smiled at my wife, and said: “Are you ready for the next one: Bessie Sings the Blues...?”

She smiled back to me and whispered: “Don’t forget, Apocalypse Now starts at 11:00!”

This made me smile. I ate more fish, and heard Beatrice Lidz rustle up from her chair. Someone yelled: “Tell it like it is, Bea!”

Aunt Bea bowed, became quite serious, seemed to shake dust from her clothing, and read:

Today I realized the beauty of difference

in women’s bodies

for so long I have wanted to be

like all those others whose shapes I coveted

but today I realize that I am part

of the patchwork of sizes, colors, and forms

that I have a part in their mesh of beauty

We sit in a circle

under tall windows with bare branches peeking through

beside the two-toned wall, next to square corners

marking the distinction from out of roundness.

We sit in a circle,

no lines of fleshless rows

but a sphere of space

which grows and fills out these four walls

Everywhere I look, my eyes defy societies ideal

our hair grows in curves encircling our scalps

our voices breathe words

which round into being

creating circular definitions

of our differences inscribed in accents,

language

meanings

these differences wrap around us

embracing us

celebrating our gray hair, brown skin and blue eyes

forming a thread of solidarity and acceptance

based in birkenstocks and combat boots

It’s all about empowerment, I think.

We sit in a circle

a charged circle

weaving ideas and understanding

a benediction of emergence

as we depart from our cocoon of contemplation.

There was the requisite applause and cheers of “right on” from the guests, a verbal relic from an era now gone, an era framed in Birkenstock sandals and power salutes and tie-died dresses and heavy-breasted braless matrons. Their “modern” counterparts being the breastless gray-haired crew-cut muscle-shirted weightlifters and mental hatcheters who thrived on a curriculum of women’s studies and group support sessions teaching life without men and sexual completion with the emotional surcharge and the artificial penis.

I looked at my wife and said: “Better guard your carrot. It won’t last long in this crowd!”

Hoa-Lan whispered: “Stays hard for weeks. A vegetarian’s delight: and then dinner and desert!”

I laughed. But then Claire Ansley’s voice seemed pointed more directly, with more frost in it. It was pointed in my direction. “We have a new member of the faculty with us tonight,” she said. “Michael Charles, who was hired to replace Dean Fossil in the areas of Twentieth Century literature and Classical American literature.”

The grumbling coming from the guests was audible.

“Oh, god, archaic stuff!” “Who wants to read that tripe, anyway?” “Patriarchal propaganda!”

“His lovely wife, from the Philippines, is also with him,” Claire continued.

“She’s from Vietnam,” Aunt Bea corrected Claire.

“Really?,” Claire answered. “Oh, dear, I’m so sorry.”

“Really?” Terence Shankman asked. “What part of Vietnam?”

“Saigon,” Hoa-Lan replied.

“Please forgive us,” Eulalia Mangrove invoked, in her black pearly mangrove voice. “For we did not know what we did, child! To your country I mean! Some of us fought to stop that war...!”

“Amen,” a woman said again, a nondescript face with glasses and flat brown hair. She insisted on saying “amen” to everything Eulalia Mangrove said. It made me very uncomfortable—I wanted to wake the woman up, and inform her we were not in church. She did not need to feign devotion.

“We hope that your dedication to the classic male texts,” Claire continued, “will be supplemented by a spirit to uncover and include the great women writers of the era, to give them fair treatment, as Stephen Lance, beside you, is doing only this term. Tell us what you’re doing this term, Stephen.”

Stephen rose from the table. He became very loose, his limbs drooping, his green silk shirt running over his body like waves. There was a fan behind him, blowing on his back. He liked being on stage. He even liked having a large fan behind him. “I’m offering a course called ‘Topics in 18th Century Literature: Augustan Poetry: New Canons and Old.’ This course will focus on women poets of the eighteenth century—we will read carefully through all of Lonsdale’s Oxford anthology—and upon the poetic career of Alexander Pope. Students will be required to work up the emerging bibliographies on women poets as well as to familiarize themselves with scholarship on Pope. We will explore the issue of how the unearthing of this new body of poetry by women changes our sense of the nature of “Augustan Poetry.” Is Bates’ notion of ‘the burden of the past’ relevant to women poets? And what of Bogel’s literature of insubstantiality’? Just how representative a poet may Pope now be seen to be?”

“Not very,” Petra cried out, no longer the flower being preened under her new lover’s eye, her muscular rowdy nature beginning to emerge again, much to Claire’s fascination.

“What women writers do you like?” Aunt Bea cried out, her chubby harmony becoming a harpoon, her eyes fixed on my wife, trying to judge her reaction to the spears she hurled at my wife’s husband.

“What a bitch!” my wife said, behind her hand.

“I like Virginia Wolf, Iris Murdoch, Flannery O’Connor, Ho Xuan Huong, Simone de Beauvoir, Eudora Welty, Willa Cather.”

Petra called from her petite throne: “What about Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, Octavia Butler or Michelle Cliff?”

“I don’t know their work,” I admitted.

“And why not?” Aunt Bea cried. “Don’t you think they are important enough for you to read?”

“I generally find the fiction being written today to be,” I said, “only in rare cases, literature. So much of it is merely fast food for the mind. You read it once, then you throw it away.”

“Who are the exceptions to this?” Claire asked.

“Gunter Grass is an exception,” I replied. “Some early William Styron is an exception. William Gass...”

“All men!” Petra canted. “You traditionalists are all racist patriarchs in sheep’s clothing...!”

“Petra,” Owen Webb re-appeared from the void. “I mean, the man has his opinions. Is this a matter of damn him if he doesn’t agree with us? Afterall, he’s just begun here.”

Rudyard Ford leaned up over his half-eaten fish, intoning: “Plato wrote about the extremism of the Amazons...!”

Stephen Lance leaned over and whispered to Terence Shankman: “I believe he wrote about their extremities as well!”

“There is something very tyrannical about this whole discussion!” Rudyard Ford continued. “Are you saying that the man is required to share the opinion of this tribunal...?”

“Don’t get your Harvard collar in an uproar,” Claire said. “We know you’re a fascist, Rudyard. We’re only trying to find out if our new colleague is in your camp. Well, Mr. Charles: are you? What camp are you in?”

“I don’t believe I’m in anyone’s camp,” I replied. “I’m certainly not in the camp that says that anything a woman does is, by its very definition, worthwhile and profound. I’m not in the camp that says political correctness is the measuring rod by which literature is to be judged. Ezra Pound was at least as great a poet as Sylvia Plath; Alexander Solzhenitsyn was probably the most influential and important writer in the last fifty years. Those two conservative writers are greater than all the Marxist writers the world has produced. There is something profoundly individual in artistic endeavor. Those who dismiss individualism are not able to create art. They merely create propaganda. That is why communism fell. Because it could create only propaganda—the collective utopia. And that is why art survives. Because it creates dreams—countless individual utopias. Too much of the politically correct writers of today are consumed with the goal of re-shaping the world into some politically correct utopia—or forcing people to think the right way: that is not art, that is repression, that is tyranny.”

“Spoken like a true man of thought!” Rudyard Ford called out, clapping his hands. Rosie Pettinari, his wife, also applauded.

“We, too, believe in freedom of speech!” Owen Webb agreed.

“Who?” Aunt Bea asked. “You and your weekend squeeze?”

“Here, here!” Claire commanded. “Let’s behave like civilized adults here! Where have your manners disappeared to, Beatrice?” Claire felt bad that Aunt Bea had insulted a black man.

But there seemed to be a pretty vicious animosity between the hard, leatherized lesbians and the gay perfumed men. It was as though Beatrice and Petra, and another Graduate Student named Roxy, who wore a red and black flannel shirt, suspenders, requisite crew-cut and optional combat boots, were ready to kick the asses of the little flower boys, Stevie Lance and Terry Shankman. Of course, once they’d kicked the asses of these two boys who had dared defend the old world view, spoken by myself, which Stevie and Terry believed to be merely an acceptable effect of freedom of speech, and which Bea and Petra and Roxy perceived as an immoral and incorrect vision of the world, they would converge on the foci generating their disgust, that is, myself, to pulverize that foci with the glorious new world ideology: “It is the woman’s decade! We are taking back the streets!”

I noticed, through all of this, that Leta Barnes, the sexual panther in the gathering, long blonde hair, a tight black sweater, showing swollen breasts, could not take her eyes off me. She smiled a seductive smile, and licked her thick lips and drank more wine. I had known women like Leta Barnes before, during my tenure at the University of Wyoming. They are students, often graduate students, with intelligence, beauty, charm, not much originality, capable students but not special, whose singular specialty lies in faculty offices with lights turned low and pants pulled down, bent over a desk or over a faculty couch. They leave their scent on nearly every faculty member, collecting them as one might collect guns, coming to own them, the faculty member, through the power of flesh and from their willingness either to give it or to withhold it. If the woman, as Leta appeared to be, was bisexual, then she could create nearly as much chaos in a building, evoking the brutal stings of jealousy and gluttony, as could an Arab terrorist primed with Allah and an AK-47 in an overcrowded parlor.

Leta Barnes, in her look, did everything but open her blouse, fondle her breasts, and stroke her private parts. She venerated her own ability to overwhelm human souls with the promise of a hot ride into heaven. She looked deeply at me; she looked at me so deeply, in fact, I thought I felt her hand, extending across the room, touching my crotch.

I turned to my wife: “This is more fun than the carnival,” I said.

She was not so pleased. “These are the rudest women I have ever seen!” she said. “Have they no respect for people!”

“They’re being politically correct!” I responded. “What do you expect? When you’re politically correct, you’re allowed to be rude.”

“Stalin was politically correct too!” my wife said. “So were the communists in Vietnam!”

She also had seen Leta Barnes looking at me in much the same manner that Aunt Bea had been looking at her all night. She was not amused.

Chaos seemed to take over. Arguments were whirling around the room. The themes were freedom of thought, correct thought, the tyranny of the majority, women’s subjugation by men, historical necessity, sexual religion, the ultimate honor of the orgasm, the penis as an instrument of psychological and physical torture.

I barely heard the doorbell ring, almost hidden within the coiling contention. One of the graduate students, upon the direction of Claire, rose from the secondary table to open the door. There were three women, each with short hair-cuts, levi coats, hard angular faces showing much bone-stretched flesh. Hard on the outside; trying to be hard on the inside also.

Owen Webb turned to see who was calling so late. His face went ashen. He turned and said to his lover, the dancer from San Francisco: “Oh, shit! Here’s trouble!”

I thought: can there be more trouble than this? But then I looked closely at the face of the woman at the door. She was tough, intellectual, and she was informing the graduate student that she was there for a reason. She pushed the graduate student out of the way, came across the room to the head table, looking down at Petra, who did not stand, staring daggers of ice into the eyes of our mistress, sweet Claire Ansley.

“Who is it?” I heard Frederick ask Owen.

“It’s Hedra Frost, from Women’s Studies” Owen replied. “She and Petra have been lovers for two years.”

I turned to my wife and said: “This should be interesting.”

I felt like I was at the theater, one of those cathartic theaters from the 1960’s, where everyone, the audience and the actors and the directors, even the ushers, were all involved in the making of a living theater, a spontaneous artistic expression akin to life itself. There was no script. Anything could happen. I felt that we might see anything: a shooting, a fist fight; Leta Barnes might even rise to dance naked on the table.

Slowly, however, the chaos ebbed—that is, became focused, one-pointed. The attention of the entire room turned toward the confrontation at the head table. Hedra was talking quietly with Claire, but there was a high level of tension evident in the faces of both women. The two women who had arrived with Hedra stood like bodyguards a few feet away. They seemed like two pulling guards who had opened a hole for their running back, Hedra Frost. For Hedra was clearly the leader, though smaller than her two associates. In fact, everyone in the room seemed to respond to Hedra with awe, even a portion of fear.

Hedra, as I learned later, had come to the university two years prior and had almost immediately begun to revolutionize the institution in terms of how it viewed and responded to women. She was thin, petite even, though with incredibly large breasts, the impact of which she tried to dilute by wearing no bra and opting for loose shirts and sweaters. Her manner almost seemed to apologize for her large breasts, as if breasts too large indicated some exaggerated femininity, a sign that she may be somehow soft on the question of feminism. She even had a pleasant face, which was probably even girlish at odd moments. However, she was rarely girlish in public, choosing to project a certain intellectual and even physical ferocity, never backing down, never allowing herself to appear weak in front of others.

She gathered about herself a coterie of young feminists. Petra, whom she had met in her woman’s studies class, and whom she had taught, in the class, with other young women, to masturbate, to provide herself pleasure without the disturbing presence of a man, became her lover. Looking at Petra, I could not really believe that she did not know how to masturbate prior to her mentor’s appearance. There was something in her swollen lips, her tight, rounded body which made me think that Petra had been sexual since about the age of twelve. Hedra and Petra became the “first couple” of the women’s movement on campus, both attractive, both active for change, both revolutionaries against the domination of the world by the corrupt gang of white men, the mythic old boys’ network, which controlled thoughts and oppressed the majority.

Hedra’s major theme, philosophically and academically, was that a matriarchal system, the world governed by women, would provide heart and soul to the world, save the world from racism, technological extremism, and capitalistic waste which was threatening to destroy mother earth. She saw herself as a guardian angel of the earth; and men as the enemy of the mother . She took her students out into the woods and held sacred festivities around pulsing fires. She offered a course investigating the meaning of death, visited a graveyard, led a dance of frenzy which culminated in an orgy, a May Pole ritual, men and women included, her entire class. She did significant damage to the cemetery; and she was called in by the College Dean to explain herself. She responded that the university was sexist and was persecuting her because of her beliefs in soul, spirit, body, feminism and the occult. The university quietly paid to have the damage at the graveyard repaired.

She led a successful movement in the University Senate to have the words “mankind”, “freshman”, and “mandatory” stricken from the language. “Mankind” became “humankind”, “freshman” became “first-year” and “mandatory” became “required”. She aligned herself with the Black Student Alliance and helped push through a general University policy requiring that each student complete at least one course focusing on non-white, non-European culture. She helped institute a university level administrative department of Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Concerns. She led an unsuccessful movement to have all sports banned from the university. Her proposal requiring a freeze of faculty hiring of all male faculty until a 50% balance of men and women was defeated by the University Senate.

Hedra was a hero to many women on the campus. Although she had many friends, she did not seek to have friends among academia, preferring, instead, friendships with young female students whom she considered to be the “foot soldiers” of the revolution. She also had an affinity for black-leather women, those she found hanging out in bars or in pool halls, the more rough contingent of feminist/lesbians, the Nazi element, who excited her with their roughness and their unfaltering alienation from men.

Hedra was never unfaithful to Petra however. When she gave herself as a lover, she gave herself in entirety, body, soul, and mind. Petra, however, was more promiscuous than Hedra. She was younger: Hedra was thirty-four; Petra was twenty-five, although, as I noted, she looked more like nineteen, her face was fresh and she seemed untouched by life. Even Petra’s anger, when it did appear, seemed to be surrounded by a light, less real than the light itself. Petra was energetic for experience, believed in love and in the freedom of sexual expression. Petra would allow herself the pleasure of occasional one-night stands. Hedra would wait for her to come home. She would wait up all night. Petra would appear late in the morning, wasted, needing sleep.

“Who was it this time?” Hedra would ask.

“I don’t know,” Petra replied. “I didn’t bother to ask her name.”

She tortured Hedra. She took delight in making Hedra squirm. Once, after they had quarreled, they stopped in a gas station in town to fill up the car. They were going to take a weekend trip to the coast. Hedra left the car to use the bathroom. She was gone for quite a time. Hedra went looking for her in the restroom, but could hear Petra moaning her very familiar pleasure-moan in the garage. Hedra went into the garage. Petra was standing behind a car in the back of the garage, her pants around her ankles. One of the men who worked at the garage was tucked in between her legs, pounding his body into her, making her moan. Petra’s eyes were closed, taking in each sensation; then she sensed Hedra’s presence. She opened her eyes, met Hedra’s gaze, and smiled a devilish smile, as if to say: “This is my life! I am free to do anything I want!”

It was Petra who introduced Hedra to the Nazi element of the movement, the black leather and chains crowd. Petra would take Hedra to The Hammer Bar on River Road; and while Hedra talked to the women about the movement and the rights of women, Petra would disappear with some bulky body into the back room, open her legs, and let the woman (sometimes there were more than one) stroke her body into some hyper-feminine cataclysm.

Petra, seeming so innocent and young, had a demonic temperament, a dual nature. She drove Hedra crazy. Still, Hedra could not walk away from her. Hedra threw herself into her work. She did not let anyone understand the pain she felt because of Petra. She became the undisputed leader of the feminist movement on campus. She gained that position almost from the moment she first stepped on to university property; her fame spread, and her status expanded, when she gave a rousing introductory speech at the annual Women’s Day Festival on campus that first year.

“I dream of a day when women will walk together, hand-in-hand, through this world as primary stewards of the earth,” she had said, “loving the earth first, loving each other, loving their children, no more war, no more poverty, no more enmity between humans, that false and irrational enmity ever-present and ever-virulent in a male-dominated society. Love shall replace power. Greed shall be replaced by compassion and good sense. People shall be freed from fear. People, men, women and children, of all races and heritages, will be allowed to express fully the good nature inside of them, the creativity which can heal them. I dream of the day when all races shall walk in harmony, because the wise, feminine nature shall have ascended to its rightful place of power in this world. The heavens shall come down to the earth, and the mantle to rule shall be given to women of will, wisdom, love, and generosity. I dream of the day, not too distant, when there shall be no more violence against women, no more rape, no more persecution, no more suppression of women, blacks, Chicanos, American Indians, all the people of color among whom women are the empowered majority. And this majority is telling the white, male elite of this country, and of the western world, that was are not going to take it any more. The revolutionary bell has been rung. I am ringing it now. The war for liberation has begun. And we will not accept anything less than total victory, total actualization of our destiny as a people...!”

Hedra had given that speech, in the student union courtyard, in October of her first year on campus. Hundreds of women had gathered for the festivities. Petra had been there, a young feminist entering the last year of her joint bachelor’s degree program in English and Sociology. Petra was inspired by this new face. She could not take her eyes off Hedra’s large breasts, which moved like a pent-up sea beneath Hedra’s shirt whenever she became animated and gestured. Petra approached Hedra after the speech. Before long they were lovers; then Petra was enrolling in Hedra’s courses, and taking her to The Hammer Bar, introducing her to Petra’s friends.

Hedra accepted Petra’s infidelity; it infuriated her, made her weep in private; but she accepted it. The two women had an unstated agreement, however. Petra would never shame Hedra in the intellectual community. That is, Petra could sleep with students, or women who lived in town, who had no affiliation with the university. Petra could not become involved with university faculty, for that kind of public shame, that kind of cruel humiliation Hedra would consider an unpardonable breech of their partnership. “Don’t shit where you eat!” Hedra had said to her. “And don’t shit where I eat! If you do, that will be the end of us.”

That night, after working at school, Hedra had gone home. Petra had left her a note: “Gone for the night. Don’t wait up.” Hedra assumed Petra had repaired to The Hammer Bar for a weekly fix of sleazy sex. She followed her there. Amanda, a tough woman who managed the Star Flower Co-op in town, a lesbian shipping business, who regularly explored Petra in the back room of the bar, told Hedra: “Wise up, sweetie. She’s over at some English teacher’s house. She’s fucking her now. She’s been fucking her for more than a month. The woman’s old man sits there and watches them do it, jacking off. Sometimes they even tape it!”

Hedra knew it wasn’t a lie. It was the kind of thing Petra did.

“What’s the woman’s name?” Hedra asked, although she knew who it was. Claire Ansley was the leading lady of the English Department. Petra had mentioned her several times to Hedra, as a woman on the rise, a woman gaining power in the movement. She had even said once to Hedra: “I’d like to get my fingers in her. Drive the woman crazy.” Petra liked to sleep with married women too, to try to lure them away from their husbands.

“I don’t remember,” Amanda said. “Something like Claire, I think. Claire something. Or Clara, maybe...”

Hedra was furious. Petra had done what they had agreed she should not do. Hedra took two friends with her and drove to Claire Ansley’s house. Hedra had been there quite often herself, for Saturday night dinners and sometimes for sub-committee meetings of the Women Against Rape campus branch organization.

When she knocked on the door, heard all the noise and the shouting, Hedra knew something bad was going to happen. She had taken enough. Petra was now shaming her before her colleagues. Petra had gone too far.

The graduate student who answered the door seemed shocked by Hedra’s appearance—for she knew that Claire Ansley, her advisor, was engaged in an illicit affair with Hedra’s “wife”. She tried to screen Hedra’s vision from the main table, where Claire sat next to Petra, was probably holding her hand. She tried to block Hedra’s entry into the living room. “Let me tell Claire that you’re here, Ms. Frost,” she said. Hedra pushed her out of the way. She strode across the room to the head table.

She saw Claire quickly pull her hand away from Petra, flushed, showing fear of Hedra.

“What are you trying to do here, Claire?” Hedra said.

“Why, nothing, Hedra. We’re only having a Saturday dinner for a few people.”

“I know you’re fucking this little slut,” Hedra said. It made her feel good to utter those words, finally calling Petra in public what she’d so often called her in private, and in her silent, raging mind.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Hedra,” Claire insisted.

“I hope you don’t get AIDS from her, Claire,” Hedra replied. “She fucks anything that moves: men, women, dogs!”

The room had become silent by now, focusing on the two women, and the third, who sat angelically with her back to Hedra. We all heard the words, as the room became hushed: “She fucks anything that moves: men, women, dogs!”

This shot through Petra, and removed her calm demeanor. “You fucking whore,” Petra shot back at Hedra, standing to face her. “You’re a lifeless fuck, and you always have been!”

“Girls!” Claire tried to interject, trying to act as a peace-maker.

“Don’t ‘girl’ me,” Hedra shot back, “you fucking cow! You’re the phoniest bitch I’ve ever seen. Your bourgeois ‘Saturday Nights’ make me want to puke. I hear your fat husband jacks off while you and this whore of yours suck each other off....!”

It was as if Claire had been shot. “You fucking bitch, get out of my house!” Claire replied, her face going deep purple, the color of a plum, losing her breath, reaching her right hand up toward her throat, tensing her body, like she was trying to protect herself.

“Gladly,” Hedra responded, taking Claire’s wine glass from the table, turning to the dinner guests. Hedra raised the wine glass, toasting the crowd. “To your splendid, phony, hypocritical asses!” Hedra said. Then she put the glass to her lips, had a second thought, then threw the wine into Petra’s face.

Petra exploded, grabbed Hedra by her head with her left hand, picked up her own wine glass with her right hand, and smashed the glass into Hedra’s face, around Hedra’s left eye.

Hedra screamed in pain.

“Petra, what have you done?” Claire cried.

A communal gasp came from the guests. Everything became serious all at once. The living theater had become tragic; and there was blood all over Hedra, all over the head table cloth, and all over Claire Ansley’s dress.

I rose from my chair and ran to the head table. Petra had pulled away from Hedra, standing away from her. Hedra was going into shock. Blood was in her eye and on her hands and she could not see clearly. She thought that Petra had cut out her eye.

I helped to lay Hedra on the floor, and told Claire to go get a wet washcloth. I told the graduate student to call an ambulance.

Petra knelt next to Hedra, after a moment, and said: “I’m sorry, Hedra. I didn’t mean to do this...!”

I picked the fragments of glass out of Hedra’s cheek. I extracted the large pieces; but there were slivers deep in the skin that I could not reach. Blood kept gushing from the wound, making my hands sticky with her warm blood, and making it impossible to fully investigate the wound. I dabbed Hedra’s cuts with the washcloth. Claire Ansley had vomited into her plate. Several people had helped to carry her to her bed.

I wrung the washcloth soaked with Hedra’s blood into an empty soup dish and waited for the ambulance.

Petra was crying, saying: “I’m sorry, pumpkin! I didn’t mean to do it...!”

Hedra was in shock. She kept saying: “What if I lose my eye! What if I lose my eye...!”

The ambulance arrived about five minutes after the incident. Hedra was loaded on to a stretcher. She had lost a lot of blood. Petra went with her in the ambulance to the hospital. We could hear the siren as it wobbled down the street and finally out of hearing.

There was a profound emptiness in the room after all the sounds were gone. Everyone stood about the room, sheepish, feeling stupid. Everyone felt guilty too, like we had all been an accomplice to something savage and unnecessary. It was as though we had all gone beyond some boundary, some order or discipline, without which there was no rational succession of events, only explosive moments, emotional cataclysms. We were all guilty somehow of letting things reach the point of an explosion.

People began to leave, quietly, not knowing what to say.

I washed the blood from my hands in the bathroom.

I could hear Claire Ansley blubbering to the graduate student, who sat with her on her bed: “Where is Petra? Did Petra leave me? I need her here with me. Does this mean she doesn’t really love me...?”

I retrieved our coats from the closet. My wife seemed shocked and disgusted. There was disbelief in her eyes. There was no one to thank for a lovely dinner, so we quietly left the house and stood for a moment out in the fresh air, beyond the front porch.

We stood together for several minutes, not moving toward the car, not knowing what to say.

“Jesus,” I said finally, looking up. “Look at the stars. You can see every star.”

Hoa-Lan looked up with me. The sky seemed so still and so orderly, so trustworthy and complete. I felt better, looking up at the stars. Everything changed, but the heavens didn’t seem to change.

Hoa-Lan looked at me, smiled, looked at her watch, and said: “If we hurry we can still see Apocalypse Now.”

NOTE TO THE EDITOR: The poem “The Roaring Inside Her (Inspired by Susan Griffin)” was written by Shoshanah Elaina Oppenheim—I have modified it for use here in my story. The poem “Today I Realized” was written by Sarah Kerr. Both were published in Avenu, a journal of the School of Architecture & Allied Arts at the University of Oregon, Winter Issue 1993. Much of the dialogue associated with courses taught by individual faculty in the English Department was taken from a statement of actual class offerings at the English Department, University of Oregon, Winter Term 1993.

THE PROFESSIONAL

Part One. The Enduring Obsession

I. A Foundation of Stone

Jeff Simms had always been an eccentric. When he was young his parents worried about him because of his obsessive nature. He would grab on to some subject or skill—say, mountain-climbing or sketching—and he would pursue it for months or even years at the expense of everything else. He was almost always alone, in the family library, or in the backyard, reading, drawing, perhaps merely sitting staring into space. His family worried because he did not seem socially skilled; he was not necessarily awkward; he had friends, and people seemed to like him; but he did not seem to value the pleasures of society.

Jeff passed through many obsessions: horses, mountain-climbing, art, chess, German language and culture, Celtic mythology, early American literature, architecture. When he was seventeen, Jeff became fixated with the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. He worshipped the artistic nature of Wright: his genius seemed to Jeff like the great artists of history, like Shakespeare, Beethoven, Rembrandt, and Tolstoy. He seemed so far above other architects that others did not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath with Wright. His “Falling Water” house was as sublime as Nature itself. His Imperial Hotel in Japan was so rich in texture and deep with feeling—Jeff would never forgive the Japanese for tearing it down; he never could remove it from his mind that the Japanese had destroyed a work of art, much as the Nazis had burned books and desecrated paintings. In his mind the Japanese and the Nazis would always be connected. In fact, his fascination with German culture, which had been inspired by reading Henrich Heine one afternoon when he was fourteen, and which had led to a study of German for three years, ended when his obsession with German greatness merged into a new obsession, that of Hitler and the Nazis. He stopped reading and speaking German; from that time on he spoke of the Germans only with disgust.

When he was seventeen, Jeff received a present from his uncle Stephen, who was an architect in Seattle. It was a book of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, in color, very expensive, quite wonderful really. Soon thereafter, Jeff decided he wanted to be an architect. He taught himself how to draw, paint, build models. He took the few courses offered in his senior year at high school on drafting, becoming the best student in his class. He designed buildings for every imaginable landscape, of every imaginable type. He studied architectural history. He loved the classicism of the Greeks, the grandeur of the Medicis: but, most of all, he loved Frank Lloyd Wright.

When he was 18 years old he applied for the architecture program at the University of Oregon, one of the best architecture schools in the country, generally recognized as the best “design” school in the western United States.

Jeff had been born and raised in Seaside, Oregon, a tourist center on the Pacific coast, situated in the northwest corner of the state, sixty miles west of Portland. Eugene was a little more than 100 miles to the south. His family had no doubts that he would be accepted to the architecture school. Jeff never consider failure as a possibility. So, when the admission letter came to the house, the whole family read of Jeff’s admission to the program as something which they had all taken for granted.

II. Higher Education

In the first year of Jeff’s academic program, he began to make a name for himself in Eugene. In his first studio, an addition to a house designed by Professor Thom Hacker, one of the “star” faculty of the Department, Jeff continued the oriental motif of the original structure, designing a “tail” to the house which wound gracefully down into the back yard. The house took on an almost dragon-like quality; but it was subtle, with a delicate use of a raw wood texture and tasteful detailing. He elaborated an already existing garden in the backyard into something remotely Japanese, with stands of bamboo and a small creek culminating in an unpretentious stone pond. He was clearly a force to be reckoned with, even in the beginning stages of his career as an architect.

The laurels did not stop there.

In his third year, Jeff won an national competition sponsored by the American Masonry Institute, designing a waterfront gallery and restaurant situated on the banks of the Willamette River in Portland. The work was exquisitely detailed; the building almost seemed to rise up from the earth, like an animal emerging from its sanctuary. Jeff had learned several things from Master Wright: the building is a part of its environment, grows out of its environment as do the trees and the rivers and the mountains; and the architect must use the elements of his site as the elements of his design.

Jeff used the colors of leaves in his design, the color of the Willamette River. The red tone of the bricks came from the red tone of the madrona trees surrounding the building. One did not even see the building until one walked up on it, so well did it fit into the landscape of the riverside.

The Architecture Department, at the time, the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, was undergoing similar philosophical undulations as was the nation at large. The 1960’s has been an era of social change. All philosophies pointed toward social responsibility. Architecture was not immune from these demands. A new architecture emerged, one less concerned with the design of buildings, as a primary function of the architect, than with the creation of a just society.

Faculty members were hired who felt the primary obligation of an architect, and of the student of architecture, was the pursuit of truth, in the largest sense. This implied a social involvement in an attempt to bring a more just society, in some minds a Utopia, into being in America.

With the passing of the Vietnam war, the fall from power of Richard Nixon, the recession of the late 1970’s, the polarization of the society along racial, class and political lines began to become muted. Cries for revolution began to die out. A period of healing began. And it was during this period of healing that Jeff Simms made his entrance into the Architecture Department.

This “period of healing” was not merely a period of resting however. Many of the older faculty in the Department of Architecture had been raised and educated with the understanding that architecture was a specialized field of study, a unique pursuit which had a language of its own. The primary responsibility of the architect had been to design buildings, spaces, landscapes which added utility, beauty and meaning to the world. The architect was not primarily a revolutionary. Buildings did not need to be “politically conscious”; they needed to be “good architecture”. That is, they needed to work well as buildings; they needed to be concerned with beauty, proportion, efficiency, durability and structure. They did not need to further the proletarian struggle.

Everyone understood that architecture had always been a handservant of the monied class. The greatest architecture of the world had been funded either by the state, the church, or by a society’s aristocracy. To insist that the profession work only for the underprivileged classes implied that the profession had no more legitimacy in the modern world.

Many of the faculty, those who had been founded on the principles of “architecture as architecture”, who had been largely silenced on these issues during the social turmoil of the earlier era, most of whom agreed with the movement for a change in foreign policy and social equality, began to weary with what they saw as the “soft” instruction of the younger, socially-active faculty members.

One of the older group, Earl Morrison, the dean of the design teachers, a white hair wizard, tiny, but with incredible energy for design and design thinking, argued with a younger faculty member: “Architecture is not sociology. And sociology is not architecture.”

Camps rose up in the Department. There were the “formalists,” those faculty less convinced that social progress was the primary goal of the architect, who believed in architecture as a specialized discipline, requiring of students a specialized knowledge and a devotion to the language of design. These were generally older faculty, but not entirely. This group also included the best young designers on the faculty.

The faculty who preached social justice, social architecture, human architecture, a diminishment of the importanct of technology—the architectural offspring of the 1960’s generation of rebellion—found as their master Christopher Alexander, an English mathematician-become-architect who now taught at the University of California at Berkeley, and who had taught and worked with more than eight of these younger faculty. Alexander had written a book The Pattern Language, which was a kind of I Ching of architecture. Alexander was profundly anti-modern; he was bewitched by Eastern philosophy, enamored by third-world construction processes, dedicated to the architecture of forced community, and to the dethroning of the profession of architecture from one of God’s chosen to that of consultant of the people.

A third group had also developed, the philosophy of which lay somewhere between the “formalists” and the “anti-formalists” (the “user-participationists”): these were the “ecologists”, those who felt that environmental issues were paramount, that issues of solar energy, climate design, and energy-efficiency were, as social and economic necessities, to be the primary design criteria. This was shorty after the Arab oil embargo had sent the price of oil gushing toward the $100 a barrel level, and had sent American society into a chaotic downspiral. Prognosis in the academic circle was that an energy deficit was the wave of the future. We were in a crisis situation; and positive action on all fronts was needed to avoid the certain disintegration of the society.

(The ecologist position was fanatical and terminal by nature. In the 1970’s the leading minds of the coming apocalypse predicted the arrival of a new ice age, brought on by excessive burning of fossil fuels. It was just a matter of time before the earth would again become a ball of ice, threatening the existence of all human life. That academic position was replaced twenty years later by the “fire” argument in the fire and ice dilemma. The greenhouse effect became the new ecological vision explaining the coming terminus of human life. The ecologists, perhaps unaware of it themselves, seemed to want nothing so much as the extinction of humanity. It was a kind of self-hate they expressed in their analysis. They idealized nature for its beauty and bounty, despised humanity for its basest natures, seeing these natures, instead of natural (as all things must be, by definition), as unnatural, not pristine or pure or harmonious. Harmony was the basic principle for their philosophy. They did not understand, however, that harmony was a balance of harmony and unharmony, animal, man, vegetable, mineral, elemental atom, star, planets all in a holy alliance or an unholy misalliance, evolving the life of the universe together, using one another, ineluctably. They were trying to save what was unsavable and not needing salvation. They were trying to restrict change, for they were uncomfortable with paradox, with ambiguity, and with the future generally. They were like children crying for childhood to return.)

Jeff Simms was not interested in “ecological” architecture, which he saw as a sort of euphemism for “efficient” scientific design, little more than climatic civil engineering. Neither was Jeff interested in joining the crucifixion of the architect for the sake of the society: a sort of communism of design in which the architect took notes and the untrained masses built their own society, by trial and error, with judgment ever superior to the specialist. It would have been as ridiculous to suggest that the brain surgeon should allow the ill man’s family, who, through the virtue they inherited from their social membership in the “masses”, perform the operation while the surgeon supervised, giving advice when needed. Jeff felt that the “anti-architects” were merely afraid of responsibility, and had built up a philosophy which justified this fear, even glorified it, while still allowing them to retain their professional standing.

Jeff and Earl Morrison became like father and son. They even looked alike: each was small of body, energetic, ightning rods of ideas, with blondish hair curling manically toward the heavens. When Earl spoke Jeff understood. When Jeff designed Earl beamed. They were from the same planet. They were spiritual prodigy: it was not always clear who was leading and who was following: they folded within one another like Time within Space.

In fact, Earl Morrison built up a following of disciples among whom Jeff Simms was one of the leaders. In those days, students preferenced design instructors; then the instructors chose students from the preference lists. Faculty tended to choose the same students over and over again. This enabled them to by-pass the very fundamental discussions which might be required were students merely being introduced to a design process. By cultivating disciples, faculty could carry investigations much deeper much more quickly. In effect, a design investigation continued from one term to another. The project changed, but the issues being investigated were merely a continuation of earlier discoveries.

In much the same way, all the popular faculty built up followings. There were the environmental control instructors, whose design process stressed climate design, energy-efficiency, and energy technology. Students who followed this cult were generally more “new age” in their disposition. They were environmentalists, distrusted “big” architecture, favored the “Green Party,” felt the “formalists” to be merely remnants of the old age approach to architecture.

There were the disciples of Christopher Alexander of Berkeley, whose “Pattern Language” had linked a generation of social activists, linking design with political activity. At least ten faculty members at the University of Oregon had studied with Alexander at Berkeley, and were fully committed to his radical approach to architecture and life. These were the “anti-architect” architects, those who felt the West was on the wrong track, that the modern world needed to learn the secrets of life from the Third World, that architecture of the ego, of capitalism, of technology, was self-destructive. The faculty who followed Alexander also had followings. But the problem with Alexander, and with his disciples, was that they began the design process knowing everything. They already had all the answers. The formalists, on the other hand, began knowing very little. Design was a discovery process; the deeper one went into the process, that is, into oneself, the more one discovered about the true nature of architecture. One group began large, and could become no larger. They had all the answers, and merely applied those answers to the new sets of questions, as if architecture was mathematics. The other group began small, fearfully small. But they grew through their examination; their understanding was constantly expanding.

And, so, a sense of disparity became clearer and clearer in the Department. One group, the students of the different “formalists”, were becoming much better designers, with a much deeper knowledge of the history of the language of architecture. The other groups of students were becoming more skilled at handling projects in a formulaic manner.

What was happening in the Architecture Department was also happening in America. The radicalism of the 1960’s had passed. The truths which nearly all academics had assumed, given the context of racial and political struggles for freedoms and against the Vietnam war, were now merely appearing to be part-truths, historical truths. The country moved through its radicalism, and was now becoming more conservative, more self-reflective.

The architecture of Jeff Simms and Earl Morrison was self-reflective architecture. The deeper one went inside oneself, the more deep one’s architecture became. For depth in architecture was, indeed, depth within oneself.

“Genius is not a social movement!” Jeff Simms once told a group of students challenging his conceptions about design. “Great architecture comes only from the great soul seeking itself. Beethoven did not compose by committee! He composed through instruction by the soul!”

The belief in the individual was strongest in Jeff. He did not believe in group meetings, touch and feel intellectual therapy, “sharing” of one’s experiences, cult responses to design questions, politicially correct ways of looking at the discipline. He believed in facing the abyss of failure alone, not without guides, for Earl Morrison was a guide, as was Frank Lloyd Wright and the other great thinkers and artists. But the ultimate descent into the abyss of design was a descent one must take alone. There was a fear of failing, a fear of drowning. But the more one dived into that great ocean of ideas, images, complexities, the more one developed one’s confidence that he could swim.

The formalist movement finally won out in the Department. When the licensing exam results began to indicate that Oregon students were graduating without sufficient specific knowledge about architecture, results which threatened the program’s accreditation, a return to traditional and highly specific architectural education followed. The architecture-as-sociology view lost credence, among students and most faculty. Students began to turn against it, condemning it as too soft and irresponsible.

When Jeff Simms graduated from the program, clearly one of the bright lights of the program, he and Earl Morrison spent a summer traveling in Europe, sharing the delights of Italian architecture, especially the work of Palladio. They traveled throughout England, France, Germany and Spain.

When they returned to the US, Jeff went to work for Blumley Architects in Portland.

III. Life as a Professional

The profession of architecture was not what Jeff had assumed it would be. For Jeff, there was something religious about architecture. It was not a job, not even a profession: for Jeff it was a calling. He intended to dedicate his life to it.

Not everyone was moved to such giddy heights of devotion as was Jeff. To many of Jeff’s co-workers, architecture was simply a job. Perhaps they had once felt a passion similar to Jeff’s. But, after years of working at Blumley Architects, they had become jaded. They no longer believed that they could improve life through their work. They no longer even believed, if they ever had, that they would become rich and famous through architecture. It had become a job, sometimes challenging, sometimes dismal and trying. Often the clients one worked for were impossible. At other times the financial limitations stripped the design of all its unique and interesting elements. Boredom drifted in. Passing time is capable of damming the senses.

Jeff Simms did not settle for such a fate. He quickly became one of the primary designers at Blumleys. No other designer had his intensity about design. He tended to work alone. He would work until late at night, sometimes until midnight. Then he would walk home. Jeff didn’t drive. He would be back at the office before anyone else, getting up at 6:00 and walking back to the office. He had usually put in two hours when the other architects began arriving in the morning.

Jeff’s talent was recognized by the profession almost from the beginning. He received a Progressive Architecture prize in 1985 for a mixed-use commercial-residential building he completed in downtown Portland. Jeff loved using oriental elements in his design, much as Wright had. In his prize-winning design, he created an elevated atrium as a courtyard for the three stories of residential units, using oriental screens to give each unit the impression of having a luxurious private garden. The balcony of each unit was also situated at angles which did not disclose the presence of neighbors. The building hovered above the Willamette River, pivoted away from the larger buildings to the north.

But he had only begun.

The following year, Jeff won a design competition sponsored by the American Institute of Architects. There were more than 800 entries from sixteen countries. The project was the revitalization of a waterfront district in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Jeff brought in low-cost housing and created significant green-space; he also provided a small-scale industrial park which would provide employment for the residents.

After two years at Blumleys, Jeff moved on to ZFG, one of the largest and most noted firms in Portland. Blumleys had been a mid-range firm of seventeen people. Jeff had liked the scale; but he did not feel that Blumley was doing enough to bring in interesting work. ZFG had a staff of 130 when Jeff went to work for them in 1987. They had offered him a substantial raise. And they had hired him as a chief designer, meaning that he would be given ultimate design authority in all his projects. He had a reputation in Portland as a young genius; and all the larger firms had made a play for him in the past six months.

Jeff did not like ZFG. It was too much like a business. Everything was too stiff, too formalized and compartmentalized. There was a drafting department, an interiors department, the engineers, the designers. The departments rarely communicated with each other. He liked a more relaxed interaction of all the elements of the office. What he really wanted was to have his own firm. But he had no head for business. He did not like chasing work. He had no talent for all the peripheral, public relations parts of the profession. So he accepted, at least for the time being, his place at ZFG, which was a position much envied, but not an environment much to his liking.

He continued to win awards. In 1989, his residence for Doctor Owen Briggs of Portland won awards from the Oregon AIA, the National AIA, Architecture magazine, Progressive Architecture. The German design council gave it a first prize. And the British Architectural Society called it the best housing design in America in 1989. Jeff was given a substantial raise; the principals even began to talk about a partnership. This for a boy who had just turned twenty-seven.

He gave an interview in Progressive Architecture in September 1989 which resulted in over 200 job offers through the mail or by phone. Twenty-seven firms in New York offered him a job. Offers came from nearly all the major cities in America, London, Madrid, Munich and Athens. He was astonished.

The partnership offer came after the interview appeared. Jeff was growing weary of Portland and ZFG however. He applied for a visiting teaching position at Taliesen West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s former haunt and brain-child in Arizona. Wright had conceived Taliesen West as the model architectural learning center. After his death, the school and community had continued on in the Wright tradition.

Jeff Simms taught at the center in the spring and summer of 1990. The experience was very positive. Jeff found students there eager to learn, passionate about architecture, and founded in the principles of FLW. Jeff also appreciated a respite from the daily chaos of urban life. Jeff was a small-town boy. He did not really like the city. He lived in it; he endured it; he bundled himself in his work. He did not really need the niceties of the city, the culture, the museums, the theatres. He did appreciate those blessings: he went often to the opera, the museums, the galleries. But he could live without them. He was more a philosopher than a businessman or cultural hobnob. So, removed from the city, he found the quiet life of Arizona pleasing and quite fulfilling. He did not miss the noise and the bustle and the crazy energy of the city.

When Jeff returned to Portland in the fall of 1990, he received a call from his uncle Stephen in Seattle. His uncle’s firm was looking for a partner. Jeff had been recommended. Was he interested?

Seattle had always been a bit mystical to Jeff. He had experienced love for the first time in Seattle. He had been on a site visit in college as a part of his terminal studio. The site was near the University of Washington. He was to design an urban monastery and Catholic church. He met a girl that weekend, a philosophy student named Lucy. She had auburn hair, a small mouth, a petitie body. She was quite confident in her manner. She approached Jeff as he was eating piza and drinking beer with the other Oregon students. She told him that she wanted to take a walk with him. He spent the night with her. It was the first time he had made love to a woman. It lasted one night.

He wrote Lucy, and called her, after he returned to Eugene. But she was not interested in developing a relationship. She had wanted to have fun with him. That was all.

Jeff loved Lucy. And the more he realized that it was over the more he loved her. He carried a torch for her for more than three years, convincing himself that the love would somehow be rekindled, that fate had brought them together for some reason, not for mere temporal pleasure. Then, finally, he forgot her. He had had a few sexual experiences after that. His notoriety in the professional world brought him opportunities with women, even though he was not handsome or gallant or powerfully masculine. There were groupies in the architecture world too. The more status he gained in the profession, the more the women he met indicated their curiosity. Sometimes he would take them up on their offers. Usually he did not. He did not like waking up next to a stranger. It somehow afflicted his life-style. He was married to his work; and anything that came between Jeff and his work became an inexcusable burden.

Jeff said yes to his uncle Stephen. He was not even sure why. He felt he needed to escape ZFG. He also wanted to leave Portland. The city was beginning to become too tight. He knew too many people. He needed some excitement, some change. And he also thought of Lucy for the first time in years.

The firm, TRE, Tremont-Reynolds-Evans, was a mid-range firm that did a lot of hospital work, but also had an account for James Nason, one of the richest men in Seattle. Nason did everything from telecommunications centers, to real estate, to expensive single-family homes. Jeff was to handle the Nason account. It was really quite an opportunity, because Nason was not only rich, he also desired high-quality architecture, and took special pride in being recognized by the architecture publications as a patron of the arts, in the old and high sense. When he was informed that Stephen Evans was an uncle to Jeff Simms, he asked that Jeff be offered an opportunity to work for his account. Nason admired Jeff Simms’s work very much.

Jeff packed quickly. He did not have much in the way of belongings. He did not have many friends in Portland—many acquaintances, few friends. He called Earl Morrison to inform him of his decision. They talked for two hours. Earl was still probably Jeff’s best friend. Jeff spent a week with his family, in Seaside, spending most of his time walking on the beach. He loved the silence, the space, the wind and the water. He felt as if he wanted to retire. Something in him wanted only peace. He felt very old sometimes. He moved to Seattle with a sense of unease.

IV. The Wrong Move

Jeff Simms lived by patterns, and he dedicated himself to those patterns. Life in Seattle, for him, was really no different than it had been in Portland, except that his professional life was more rich in Seattle. James Nason was the ideal client. He was wealthy, cared not for squeezing projects to save tiny amounts of precious capital. Once he had made a decision to do something, he was committed to doing it excellently. Jeff and James Nason did not always agree aesthetically. But Jeff’s word was final on such matters. Nason supported him fully as his personal architect and artist.

Jeff did try to find Lucy. Friends told him that Lucy was living in New York, and had married a Puerto Rican. That was the end of that.

Work was again everything for Jeff. Earl Morrison visited Jeff in Seattle and wondered how Jeff could live such a haphazard, obsessive life. Jeff was over thirty now; but he still lived like a teenager. His apartment was a mess. He ate badly: peanut butter, cereal, ice cream, canned soup. He had no girl friend, did not seem interested in marriage. Earl worried about Jeff, as a man would about his son. He tried to talk with Jeff about balancing his life: “There’s room in your life for more than work, Jeff.” But Jeff didn’t listen. He smiled; and said: “I know. I just haven’t met the right person.” Jeff had told Earl about Lucy. But Earl had grown weary listening to this story. It was clear that Lucy had been no more than a one-night-stand which Jeff had exaggerated into a tragic romance.

Jeff did not change. He still rose every morning at 5:30, and walked to work. He ate donuts and drank coffee and worked on his projects. Nason had him working on as many as five projects at once. Jeff loved that. He could leap from one to the other fluidly. In 1991, Jeff had 13 staff members working under him.

He would ususally work until about 10:00 pm, long after everyone else had left. Then he would walk home. He went to work late on Saturdays, about 10:00 in the morning, and usually only worked until about four or five in the evening. He always took Sunday off.

Jeff liked to live close to his business. He did not drive, as I have said. He did not like taking the bus. The bus seemed to transform all human beings who entered the dual doors either to catatonic morons or psychotic borderlanders. He loved walking on the street, early or late, because he did not have to concentrate while he walked: everything was automatic. Jeff did some of his best thinking while he walked to and from work. He always kept a small notebook in his shirt pocket. Sometimes he would have to stop and take out his notebook and sketch an idea quickly or write a philosophical note. To Jeff, philosopy and architecture were the same thing. The deeper one’s philosophy, the deeper one’s architecture.

One morning, while walking to work, Jeff was accosted by three young men who threatened to “break his face.” Jeff, shocked, as if plunged into a nightmare, reached into his pocket, grabbed his wallet, and threw it into the street. The three young men raced after the wallet, and Jeff sprinted down the sidewalk away from harm.

Jeff walked each day and night through a pretty tough part of the city. His office was downtown, on Third Avenue, not far from the waterfront. He lived about fifteen blocks away, in a stylish apartment house, on Grant Avenue. Between Grant and Third, Jeff passed through some low-income housing which had become a sort of clubhouse for skinheads and neo-Nazis. On the fringe of downtown, the black ghetto spread in from the north. Jeff had to pass through the skinhead zone and then through a part of the black zone just to get to the homeless haunts from downtown to the waterfront. There was more violence being reported every day. People in the office couldn’t believe that Jeff walked everywhere. Uncle Stephen tried to get Jeff to take the bus. He did, for awhile, after the attack by the three men. But the buses were not safe either. Jeff felt constrained on the bus, locked shoulder-to-shoulder with escapees from the mental ward. Perhaps he should learn to drive, move out of the city to a nicer environment. He could certainly afford it. He had made almost $100,000 the year before. He spent no money really. He saved everything. He was not sure what he really wanted to buy.

He had taken the bus for about a week. Then he had gone back to his old pattern, assuming that his brush with violence had occurred. It had been statistically inevitable he believed. But he had passed through that trial relatively unscathed. He did not wish to think about it any longer. He had larger fish to fry.

His work was more exciting than ever. He received a second prize in an international competition, designing a historical museum in Rome. Nearly every design with Nason was published. He was invited to speak at a gathering of the AIA in New York City. He accepted the invitation, and spoke on the importance of the use of the square to transform modern architecture.

One morning, when walking to work, at about 6:00, Jeff was deeply invovled in analyzing problems created by his design of a commuter airport terminal in Seattle. The whole seating arrangement seemed wrong. Why should he devote space to seating when space was so precious here? How much seating was required? People did not go to the airport to wait for a commuter airplane. They came and went. They did not have family members waiting to pick them up....

A change in the concept of what a commuter airplane terminal was would change the design dramatically. It might not be popular, because people were comfortable with the standard approach to an airline terminal....but if the seating could be changed, then the whole design could be more conceptual and spacious.

Jeff did not know what happened next. He sensed a shadow. Something cold and fast coming in from his left.

Jeff awoke two days later in the Seattle Municipal Hospital. He had been struck in the face by someone swinging a baseball bat. The man had stolen his wallet. The blow had fractured his jaw. All the teeth on the left side of his face had been shattered, and a wound above his left ear had taken thirty-two stitches to close.

Part Two. It Was the End of the World

I. The Nature of Evil

When Jeff Simms awakened from the attack, he understood that he had died. His head was swollen. He could feel the side of his face had been caved in. He had no teeth. His lips were split and bruised. His nose was broken. He had no hair on the left side of his head. The doctors feared that there had been brain damage. It took Jeff more than a week just to reconstruct his past to the moment before the lightning had struck. He awoke and vividly remembered a meeting he and James Nason had had two weeks before. But it was as if he had just come out of the meeting. His mind slowly unpeeled each day, like the skin of an onion, leading back toward the day that he had been attacked. Shock and terror had sent him shuddering into the past, like a small puppy curled up against his mother, fearing strange movement. He had to creep forward in his mind, bit by bit, as if he were assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Finally, after days of reconstruction, he found himself again on that sidewalk, walking to work, considering the merits of limited seating in the commuter airline terminal. Then everything had stopped.

Earl Morrison went to visit Jeff in the hospital in Seattle. He could not believe what had happened. Jeff seemed like a small damaged boy. He could barely speak. His teeth were gone. He tried to smile at Earl, tried to make a joke. Then Earl began to cry. He could not really be strong, looking at Jeff all wrapped in bandages, his eye blackened, his nose smashed. He hugged the boy, his former student, his good friend, and wept deeply.

Earl understood hatred at that moment. He hated the man who had done this to Jeff Simms. Jeff had never harmed anyone. Jeff always lived in his own world. He was sweet and civilized. He had a great creative talent. Some criminal had reached out of the sewer to crush him. Justice required that the criminal also be crushed.

Jeff underwent seven different operations on his head, neck and mouth. His ear was permanently disfigured. His eye was permanently discolored. His jaw was rebuilt, but it took months for him to learn to speak clearly after the accident. The doctors had assumed brain damage, partly because of Jeff’s extended loss of memory. But there was no brain damage. There was nerve damage on his left side, a twitching in his hand which ran up into his shoulder.

Jeff left Seattle and went to live at home with his parents. He spent six months recovering, being nursed by his mother and father, walking alone on the beach, sitting in the sun.

He could not understand why someone had attacked him so cruelly. The police found a baseball bat near the scene, with Jeff’s blood, hair and skin cells pressed into the wood. The attacker had hit Jeff so hard that the concussion had actually broken the bat, cracked the wood. The police had responded to two other attacks that year by a person weilding a baseball bat. One man had been killed by a blow from a bat one late night in downtown Seattle. Another person had escaped with a blow to the shoulder. He had seen it coming, ducked, deflected the blow, and ran.

Jeff’s world had been obliterated. He tried to remember what he had been like before the attack. His memory of that person was very thin, almost like smoke hanging in the air, distorted by the wind, frayed into nothing. He could not really recognize that other person, the Jeff Simms who had been so confident with life, who had moved the architectural world with his subtlety and his grace as a designer. That life was gone. There was only the moment, the attack, the man who wanted to kill him for the seven dollars he had in his wallet.

Jeff recovered slowly. One autumn afternoon, standing out in his parent’s yard, an acorn fell out of the tree above him, plunking him lightly on the head. A flash of pain and fear exploded. Jeff saw the man’s face for an instant, the baseball bat being swung. Something cold and fast coming in from the left.

Jeff passed out, collapsed to the ground, overwhelmed by remembering.

Jeff was no longer interested in architecture. He had no memory of his interest. His nature had always been obsessive. He began to obsess on crime in America: his own personal crime, and the more general crime which was destroying his country. He became angry. He thought of how his ancestors would feel, surveying the criminal society which now stalked the streets of America. There had been too much liberalism in America, Jeff concluded. Liberalism saw the criminal as a victim of society. It did not recognize the presence of evil in the world. It did not recognize that there must be a responsibility for one’s actions. Liberal white guilt chose self-punishment over punishment of crime. As such, it provided the criminal class an opportunity to prey on decent victims. There was only meager retribution for those convicted of crimes.

Jeff began to watch television, especially news and documentaries on crime. He saw that grandmothers were being raped and murder by intruders in their houses. He saw that children were being kidnapped and sold into pornography rings. Ministers were raping young girls and boys. Gangs were killing total strangers as part of an initiation ritual. Rape, murder, kidnapping. Jeff felt that anyone convicted of rape, murder, or kidnapping or child sexual abuse should be executed. “We don’t need criminals in our society,” Jeff said to his mother. “We don’t need to tolerate criminals. Merely put them to death!”

Jeff moved back to his apartment in Seattle. Much of the fear was gone now. He occasionally dreamed of the attack. He even dreamed of the attacker. He could see his face. He was a young black man about eighteen years old. He was wearing a red coat with the Chicago Bulls enblem on the back. He wore a black stocking cap. He carried the baseball bat along his right leg, holding it with his right hand, out of view. He had a scar under his right eye. He looked dangerous to Jeff. He was muscular too, athletic. He was wearing high-top white tennis shoes and a gold chain around his neck.

Jeff told the principals of TRE that he was not ready to return to work, but that he could work out of his home on projects for James Nason. Jeff set up a studio in his apartment, with drafting and light tables, a computer, a fax machine, a modem, and printer. He set up an office for himself so that he wouldn’t have to leave the apartment.

There was a gun shop on Fifth Avenue. Jeff had passed it daily for about two years hardly noticing it. The store had remained subtley in his mind however. One day, after finishing lunch, Jeff left his apartment, walked down Fifth Avenue, entered the store and bought a gun, a 45-caliber automatic pistol with a clip holding fifteen bullets. Jeff had never shot a gun before. He paid his money, loaded his pistol, put it in the pocket of his trench coat, and walked back out of the street. He felt good.

Jeff could have moved. He could have bought a car, could have taken driving lessons. He did not. He was a victim of his patterns. He liked his apartment. He liked his view of the ocean.

He joined a pistol club and spent several afternoons a week learning to shoot. He was surprised by the people he met there. Most were middle-class women. Most had been victimized by crime, personally or through a member of their family.

The nerves in Jeff’s left side had been permanently damaged. The iregular tremors in his hand did not allow Jeff to use that arm to help steady his pistol shooting. He had to learn to shoot with one hand. It was much more difficult to shoot one-handed. But Jeff mastered it. As he had mastered everything in life on which he had chosen to focus his energy.

Jeff did not think about architecture now. It seemed remote to him. He did his design work almost automatically. He still did interesting work. It came out almost in spite of Jeff. When he finished his work at four or five o’clock in the evening, in his apartment, he did not think about it again. He had purchased the first television of his life. He watched the news every night. He watched all the crime shows.

He was more political now. He cared who was running for office. He cared about their position on crime. He favored capital punishment. He favored life prison without parole for anyone showing a history of violent crime. He believed that juveniles committing felonies should be taken away from their environment. He favored the creation of “boot camps,” run on a model of military camps, where offenders would be taught discipline and perhaps given a job skill and an education. He believed that one generation of capital punishment would wipe out the epidemic of crime which was destroying America. He read with satisfaction a report that the crime rate actually decreased during the Great Depression. It was not poverty which caused crime. Criminals caused crime.

Jeff read the Seattle Post Intelligencer every day. He had a city map on the wall, and he marked crimes by location with small flags: red for murder; blue for rape; orange for assault; green for prostitution; gold for drug arrests. He began to understand the city in terms of its crime patterns.

He was not afraid to walk the streets of Seattle. But he did not daydream when he walked. He understood that his mission on the streets was to be alert, to see everything. Of course, he carried his pistol in the pocket of his coat, a bullet in the chamber, the safety pressed on.

Jeff’s new obsession was with justice, as abstract ideal and as practical necessity. He felt he had been seriously wronged. It was an insult to him. He felt shamed for not being able to protect himself. His manhood had been violated. He also thought of his country. His ancestors had come to America centuries before. It was his responsibility to safeguard the dream which they had begun building years before.

One day in August of 1993, Jeff read in the newspaper of an attack by a man carrying a baseball bat. It had happened near the park six blocks north of Fifth Avenue where Jeff had been attacked. A man had been walking early in the morning, had been struck six times by a young black man wearing a ski cap and wearing a red jacket. The man’s arm and jaw had been broken. The attacker left the baseball bat lying in the gutter. He took $27 from the man’s wallet and then left the wallet near the man on the sidewalk.

When Jeff read this story he became sick to his stomach. The response was similar to the time the falling acorn had hit him on the head. All the fears and the shadows came back, a hidden memory of the event, rushing in powerfully. The ugly sounds. The sense of humiliation. The blackening of all sensation into a thick white cloud. Jeff ran to the bathroom and vomited into the toilet.

That afternoon Jeff walked down to the park along 13th and Roosevelt. This was a black neighborhood and had a feeling of danger for Jeff. He had been told not to go into that area. He did anyway. He wanted to look around. He didn’t expect to see his attacker on the street. But like some hound-dog trying for a scent, he felt his proximity to the crime would somehow stimulate his imagination, and perhaps create a psychic link between himself and the man who had harmed him.

It did not. Nothing happened. He walked by the spot where the man had been beaten. There was still blood on the sidewalk. Someone had tried to wash it away. Jeff could sense the ghost of violence on that sidewalk: the cries, the impact, bones breaking, the unclean soul and the pathetic victim, with no one to help him. Some older black men eyed Jeff with suspicion. No words were exchanged. Jeff touched the pistol in his pocket.

Jeff felt he was now at war. He was not a racist. He did not hate blacks. He did not feel that any race was good or bad. There were criminal whites. There were criminal Asians and Mexicans. There were criminal blacks. They were all the same in his eyes. It was not a racial issue. It was an issue of souls: some were possessed of evil; some were not. Some were violent and angry; some were not. Yet the blacks that afternoon all looked at him as if he were an enemy.

He had never really ever been cognizant of racial tensions. He was always been too involved in his own work to pay much attention to such things.

Now, however, he felt that the races were at war. He was not comfortable with that discovery. He demanded justice for this one man only, a man who happened to be black. He was not at war with a race. That man did not represent the black race when he attacked people with a baseball bat. He acted as an individual soul, intent upon destruction. The black race should not defend the black demon any more than the white race should defend a white demon. A nazi was a nazi. A murder was a murderer. The survival of the society depended upon the decent people of all races standing together to defeat the destructive elements of all races.

Some stood before God with blood on their hands. They were not to be rewarded. Those who would take life, who would spill the blood of the innocents, must surely have their own blood spilled. The understanding of this unwavering law of reciprocation was the basis of human civilization. If that understanding was lost, then civilization was lost.

II. A Man Is His Name

How does one pursue a murderer?

Jeff’s disinterest in his profession was becoming clear to his client and to the principals of TRE. His uncle Stephen visited him to see if he intended to return to the firm. James Nason was unhappy with the current arrangement. He wanted an architect who was a partner in the firm. He was sorry about Jeff’s tragedy. Everyone was sorry about it. But business was business. And there were things that needed to be done. It was generally assumed in the office that Jeff’s lapses of concentration were a result of his brain damage. They began to think of him as slightly retarded, someone to be pitied.

Stephen told Jeff that there was still a place at TRE for Jeff; and there was still James Nason’s account. But Jeff must return to the firm in order to keep the Nason account.

Jeff told his uncle that he would offer them his resignation. He had no desire to return to TRE.

Jeff’s life had changed. When a river overruns its bank and changes course, there is no way for the river to go back being what it was before the change.

Jeff’s life had definitely overrun its bank.

His habits were changing. Work did not impel him through time; so he would rise at about 9:00 am and walk down to the waterfront, drink coffee at the Sterling Cafe, near the Fish Market, read newspapers, write notes in his notebook on philosophy and moral law. He began to consider himself retired. He had saved much money over the past few years. He could live quite a long time in his semi-retired state.

He read extensively about the trial of Reginald Denny, the white truck-driver who had been pulled from his truck during the Los Angeles riots and beaten by several angry blacks. One man smashed a cinderblock on his head. Another man shot a shotgun at his prone body. The attack had been filmed by a local television crew. The men on trial could be clearly seen in the video attacking Reginald Denny, striking him, knocking him unconscious, stealing his wallet, then discharging a shotgun at him as he lay in a pool of blood.

Jeff naturally identified with Reginald Denny, at least with Denny as a victim. Denny subsequently embraced his attackers, called for their acquittal, hugged their mothers, performing what was apparently a very Christian act in the true sense of the word, forgiving those who endeavored to crucify him. Jeff did not identify with that god, the god of forgiveness. If that was the Son, then Jeff felt a sympathy, instead, with the Father, the Old God Jehovah of the Jews, who sought an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But it was not out of vengenace that Jeff sought retribution. Jeff was concerned with justice, as I have said. Justice, to Jeff, was some virtue, as was Beauty or Truth. Justice was not retribution. Justice was a balancing of nature’s forces. As Jeff had always sought balance and order in his design work, so he now sought the same in his society.

And if the court could not provide the society with Justice, then it was the responsibility of the individual citizen to see that Justice was carried out. If the court had become too weak morally, or too enamored with legal subtleties, to protect the innocent in the society, then the society itself must take that role of protector upon itself. The courts, in Jeff’s mind, had loss track of their purpose. The whole justice profession had become a society of opinion makers. The Constitution provided a background motif only to the foreground drama of lawyers’ language and legal shadings. The law was actually very simple. The lawyers had helped to complicate it so that the society would need lawyers to interpret these vast complexities, much as priests in the old cultures complicated the life of the soul so that the citizenry would need to treat the clergy as God’s own appointed mediators of the truth. So the lawyers had become mediators of the truth. And the lawyers and judges fought for political supremacy through the medium of the court.

The acquittal of the men who attacked Reginald Denny was another sign to Jeff that the courts had broken down. He read that black men from the community had organized to attend the trial each day and to attempt to “negotiate” with the jurors, silently, through looks of intimidation, letting the jurors understand that conviction of the black men of their neighborhood would be met with retaliation against the jurors themselves. Some of these men were quoted as saying they would do anything they needed to do to protect their own. Black leaders around the country sang praises that finally blacks were gettting some semblance of a fair deal in racist America. No where did Jeff read in the newspapers or see on television a black man express disgust that men who had brutally beat a man nearly to death had been set free.

Jeff had been equally disgusted a year earlier when a jury had found four California policemen innocent of the beating of Rodney King, a black motorist in Los Angeles. The beating had been videotaped. The policemen were shown repeatedly beating King with their nightsticks. Jeff had been sickened when he watched the beating. He had been outraged when the policemen had originally been acquitted. The FBI, however, quickly stepped into the void, announced the arrest of the policemen on federal charges of violating Rodney King’s civil rights. Two policemen were then convicted and sentenced to terms in a federal penitentiary. Jeff had felt satisfaction with this. Even if Rodney King had been breaking the law when arrested by the police, driving over 100 miles-an-hour through a residential area, driving recklessly, resisting arrest by refusing to stop when directed to by police, leading police on a high-speed chase, being intoxicated with drugs when finally stopped by the police....even with this, the police had no right to inflict such brutal, inhumane punishment on a man.

Yet, when the attackers of Reginald Denny were acquitted, no one called for an FBI investigation to ascertain if the attackers had violated the civil rights of Reginald Denny, although they obviously had. The jury seemed to be saying that it was acceptable for black men to attack a white man, since the men who had attacked Denny were part of a righteous riot of citizens protesting the acquittal of the Los Angeles policmen. What else could have been the logic of the jury? Were the men protecting themselves against Denny and his truck? In a riot, is it legally acceptable for individuals to commit crimes and to claim innocence on the basis that they were swept away by the emotion of the hour? Of course, any murderer could claim that. Murder, quite often, is an act committed when a murderer is swept away by the emotion of the hour. The man who had hit Jeff Simms, himself, could claim that he was under severe emotional stress caused by his being black in a racist society dominated by white men. Was that any different than the men who had attacked Reginald Denny?

Was there a message in this for the white men? Was the message the same as the message of the Old West? That each man must carry a gun and protect himself from the rage of injured emotion?

Jeff Simms was angered by the acquittal of Reginald Denny. He took it personally. To him it was the same as if his own attacker had been acquitted.

He began working on an essay entitled The Humiliation of Justice. He would attempt to publish it as his answer to the Reginald Denny acquittal.

One Saturday in late October Jeff was working on his essay at the Sterling Cafe, drinking his coffee, meditating quietly. A group of about six black male teenagers had just come out of the fish market. They were loud, jiving, and they were all dressed in red coats, mostly Chicago Bulls jackets. Jeff eyed them suspiciously. He would not have noticed them a year ago, would have been involved with his world of thought. But now, because they were loud, black, dressed in red, a sense of alarm overtook him. Then, the man in the lead, a short, stocky man with a shaved head yelled out: “Hey, Batman! My man...!”

Something clicked in Jeff. He was watching the men through a window in the cafe. Batman! The man slid by the window gracefully, coming into view. Red coat! He greeted his friends, his back to Jeff. Batman! He gave the soul handshake to his friends: a slow-motion tapping of fist on fist. A Man With a Bat! This Batman also wore a red Chicago Bulls jacket.

Batman turned inexplicably, looked into the glass toward Jeff. Jeff saw the scar under the right eye. He saw the face; the hardened, antagonistic nature. Jeff froze. He could not move. Batman seemed to be looking deeply into him, as if he recognize Jeff. He looked back a second time toward Jeff. A look of confusion came across his features. Everything had slowed down for Jeff. His left arm had become paralyzed. He watched the burly man through the window turn and stare at him quizzically, as if he were trying to place where he had seen Jeff before. There was no sound, no movment, for what seemed like an eternity. Everyone moved in a great hesitation rhythm. Jeff was trying to reach for his coat, but he could not control his body, his hand seemed to flail helplessly in the air, slowed down by some psychic force of nature.

Then everything returned to normal speed. The sounds of the cafe returned: the banging of plates, voices raised, popular music in the background. Jeff could move his arm again; he looked away from the window, reached into his coat pocket, reassuring himself that the pistol was still there. When he looked back out the window, all the men were gone. It was as if they were ghosts. He wondered if they had ever been there—or whether they were a trick of his imagination. Everything was so silent now in front of the market.

Jeff pulled on his coat, grabbed his notebook and paper. He hurried from the restaurant and looked both ways up the waterfront walkway. He saw nothing: no gang of youths all wearing red. Nothing sinister or loud. He hurried to the south, walking as quickly as he could. He wondered if he could catch them, watch them from a distance, follow Batman back through the ghetto to his home. He ran up the boardwalk, avoiding people, straining to see something red in the early afternoon light. There was nothing.

Jeff ran back to the north. He ran for several blocks, trying to glimpse the young men he had seen through the window. He began to wonder if he had been sleeping perhaps. Perhaps it had been a dream. Perhaps it was a vision. He did not know. He began to doubt that the young men had ever come near him.

Jeff never fully understood what had happened that Saturday. But he had been given a clue, a secret, perhaps the final piece of the puzzle, from which all the other confusing pieces might begin to fall into place. The picture was becoming clearer. He had a name. And a name was everything. There was power in a name. There was great power on the side of a hidden name. As there was great power on the side of a discovered name.

Jeff thought of calling Detective Grady, who had long ago been assigned to Jeff’s assault case. Grady was a decent man; but Jeff had serious questions about his effectiveness. He had told Jeff that he would stay in touch, after visiting him often at the hospital after the assault. But Jeff had not heard from him at all since leaving the hospital. Jeff assumed that the case had been filed away. Were Jeff to give Grady the name of the man who assaulted him, yes, perhaps the police would arrest Batman. But he would never do time. Chances were good that he would either be acquitted or be sentenced to a short term in prison followed by parole. The Regianld Denny case offered ample evidence of that.

Jeff decided against calling the police. He had nothing against the police. They tried to do their job. It was the courts that had become twisted, unable to perceive the world.

III. The Final Piece of the Puzzle

Jeff began a new ritual. Each morning at dusk he would walk through the ghetto neighborhood where the most recent attack by Batman had occurred. Each night, around midnight, he would also walk in the neighborhood. He was looking for Batman. He was armed. He knew that eventually he would meet his attacker and he would render him harmless, or he would die trying.

Every day Jeff passed by the spot where Batman had attacked his latest victim, the place where Jeff had seen blood on the sidewalk. That spot was in front of a grocery store: Jake’s Groceries. Jake was apparently an old black man, about 65 years old. He had been one of the men to give him a look of antagonism when Jeff had first walked in the neighborhood. Jake often sat on a bench in front of his store. Jake would watch Jeff pass by his store, looking at the young white man as if to say: “What are you doing here? You have no right to be here!”

Jeff felt only hostility from the old black man. He did not feel threatened by the old man. The more he saw the old man’s face, the less true the hostility felt. It was more that the old man felt threatened by his presence, and reacted to him with a surly face.

As time passed, however, and as Jake began to see Jeff each morning walking through the neighborhood, the hostility began to change to an emotion more closely related to curiosity. One morning in November Jeff passed the store to find Jake sitting on his bench with a young boy, perhaps a grandson. As Jeff passed, the boy said to Jeff: “What happened to you, mister? What happened to your face...?”

Jeff sometimes forgot that his face had been smashed and that he had hair missing over his ear. He had stopped looking in mirrors. He had become accustomed to his new face.

“Sssh,” old Jake said, shaking his head at the boy, trying not to make contact with Jeff.

“Someone attacked me with a baseball bat,” Jeff said to the boy. “I was walking down the street one morning, and a man hit me in the face with a baseball bat, and then stole my wallet.”

The boy looked sympathetically at Jeff.

“Why’d he do that?” the boy asked.

“I don’t know,” Jeff said. “He’s mean, I guess. His name is Batman. Do you know anyone named Batman?”

“No we don’t know anyone named Batman!” Jake interjected. “You don’t have no place in this neighborhood, son. Why do you keep coming around here every morning? It’s a good way to get hurt, being where you’re not wanted...”

“I’m looking for Batman,” Jeff replied. “I don’t intend to leave until I find him.”

The boy said nothing.

Jake said: “Sshh. Don’t say nothing more. Don’t tell this man anything about anything. He’s not one of us.”

The boy looked down at his shoes, saying nothing more.

Jeff didn’t give up. He performed his new ritual aggressively, becoming, in his own mind, a citizen policeman. People in the ghetto didn’t both him. They probably sensed that he was armed, perhaps with a weapon and more obviously with a rage, and so they kept their distance.

Jeff went into Jake’s store each morning, when he had finished his patrol. He tried to get the old man to talk with him. The old man took his money, said nothing. Jeff usually left with donuts and coffee.

One day Jeff showed up in the middle of the afternoon. It was almost Thanksgiving. Three old men, including Jake, were sitting together near the back of a store, near a wood-stove. They were talking and laughing. Jake was surprised to see Jeff so late in the day. He didn’t like seeing the white man come into his store.

Jeff bought a coke. Then he followed Jake back to the wood-stove and pulled up a folding chair to sit with the men.

Jake said: “I didn’t hear anyone invite you to this party, mister.”

Jeff said nothing. He sat down with the old men. He warmed his hands at the stove. Smiled. And said: “Any of you men know a young black man named Batman?”

The three old men bacame silent.

“Batman hit me in the face with a baseball bat a few months ago,” Jeff said. “I was walking down the street on my way to work. He smashed me in the face, so he could take my wallet. I don’t have my job anymore. I had to give it up. I have pain all the time in my head now. I want to find the man who did it to me. Do you people condone what this man does? Is it alright with you if he hits people in the face with a baseball bat? Are you so filled with hatred that you tolerate such behavior...?”

“Wait a minute,” replied Jake. “What do you think? You think we support such behavior...?”

“As long as it’s a white man he’s hitting, I suppose you do,” Jeff said.

“Maybe that’s just the payback you get, after so many years of brutalizing the black man....” another man, Gerald, said. He wore blue coveralls, and wore a Los Angeles Dodger baseball cap.

“I didn’t brualize any black man,” Jeff replied.

“Yeah, but your relatives probably did,” Gerald said.

“I don’t know about that,” Jeff said. “I know that I had relatives who died in the Civil War fighting against slavery. Whites didn’t create black slavery, you know. Black Africans enslaved other black Africans and sold them throughout north Africa long before the whites ever came along. There’s always someone to blame for your problems. That’s an easy way out. Just blame the whites and accept your role as a victim in this world. In fact, black people have been victimized by other black people for centuries. Do you think Batman harms only white people? If he harms white people, then he probably harms black people too. In fact, the last person he attacked was a black man, not a white man. He’s a gang member. Gang members prey on their own race. Why do you feel that you have to protect a murderer? If a white man is a murderer, I don’t have any allegiance to him because he’s white. If a white man is a murderer, then let’s put him to death, and get rid of him, so the rest of us won’t have to live without the pollution of his presence. If a white man had hit me in the face with a baseball bat, then I’d be hunting him down too. We have to get rid of the criminals, so that the rest of us can live decent lives...!”

“Those are just words,” Jake replied. “You want to do away with black criminals. Why are black people criminals? Because they’re poor...!”

“Not everyone who is poor is a criminal,” Jeff replied. “During the Great Depression, crime went down. Criminals make life in your neighborhood even worse than it is in my neighborhood. You protect thugs and killers because they have black skin. To hell with them. If they are criminals, then they pay for their crimes, no matter what color they are!”

“You think there’s no such thing as persecution of the black man...!” Otis said, the third man. He looked as if he had been an athlete, still trim, wearing a Seattle Seahawk jersey.

“Racism comes from thinking of a man as being part of a race instead of as an individual,” Jeff replied. “The black race will never be raised as a race out of poverty. Individual black people will have to raise themselves up, through education, against bigotry. The blacks seem to believe that the government will use a magic wand and create equality through some special law. But equality is something that is achieved through the efforts of individuals. No race is raised magically into the heavens. There are poor whites and ill-educated whites and criminal whites too. Each race has good and bad. So, when we understand that, then we move to the point where the individual is what matters. We judge a tree by its fruit, not by its bark. If an evil black man is punished, that is not to say that all black people are punished. Individuals commit crimes; and individuals must be punished for their crimes. You should be less concerned with the color of a man’s external skin than with the color of his internal skin. The quality of his soul. “

“I’m asking you to leave my store,” Jake replied. “We did not ask you to come here. We really don’t want you being here with us...”

Jeff had nothing more to say. But he wrote out his phone number and left it with Jake. “If you want to tell me anything about this Batman, just call me and leave a message.”

Then Jeff left the store and stepped back into the cold wind, moving toward home.

Jeff continued to perform his patrol twice daily. One Tuesday in December, having returned home after a day out, Jeff turned on the television to see a special news report: a disgruntled black man, Colin Ferguson, had turned a handgun on a group of commuters in a train outside of New York City. The man calmly shot 23 people before being overpowered by three men on the train. He carried over 100 rounds of ammunition and bits of a journal in his pocket in which he described his hatred for whites, Asians, and conservative blacks. The report showed a young woman being carried on a stretcher from the train. She was beautiful, in her mid-twenties. She had worked as an interior designer in New York. Colin Ferguson had shot her through the neck, muttering “You’re all going to die! You’re all going to die!” Only whites and Asians had been shot.

Jeff was furious. It seemed to him that acts of brutality were occurring daily. Racially motivated brutality. It was the end of the world. The criminal race had rose up from the dead and had found no resistance. The courts had failed. Justice for crime must be quick and exacting. Murder could not be tolerated, or civilization would die. Each citizen should be carrying a gun, Jeff decided. He considered buying a six-gun and holster, similar to the old west, as a visible sign that he had armed himself and would not be taken without a fight. His head began to throb. He had headaches almost every day, whenever he became agitated. He looked at himself in the mirror. His jaw was now permanently twisted to the right of center. His hair seemed frail and frightened into old age. The structure above his left eye was dented visibly in toward his brain. He had become ugly. Yes, he was ugly. He rarely thought about his appearance. But his beauty had been stolen from him, his charm, his glow. He had a dark soul now. The night had descended upon him. Nothing was illuminated. Nothing was alive, except his anger, and his desire to be liberated through retribution.

The phone rang.

“Jeff Simms?” the voice asked. The voice was deep and old and sounded like a black man’s voice.

“Yes,” Jeff replied.

“1307 Jefferson Street, in the back.”

The phone went dead.

Jeff slipped into his coat. He put on a hat. He checked his gun. There was a full clip in the chamber. He put two more clips in his pocket.

Jeff was going to war. He felt both exhilarated and sad. He thought of his mother and father. He thought of Earl Morrison. He had never been one for friends. His life seemed to pass before his eyes. For the first time really he began to understand that he might die now, that any attempt to take another life might unleash a beast which might devour him. He was not a professional killer. Batman was a professional killer. He had never aimed a gun at any human being. Yet he knew he could kill a man. It was logical for him. He understood the philosophy of warfare. And, in this case, he was justified, because his own life, and the life of his society, required such determination.

He left his apartment and stepped out into the night. The wind was cold. It was raining, and the wind was blowing the rain in slants across the sky. Jeff did not care. He did not really feel the cold. There was a fire in his belly which kept him warm. He walked downtown and then up into the ghetto. There were fewer lights in the poor neighborhood. Shadows seemed to be lurking everywhere. Jeff clutched his pistol in his coat pocket. The night seemed especially menacing. The wind buffeted Jeff as he walked. The street lights weaved and flickered. Jeff was not sure how he would do the deed. He did not know if he would enter Batman’s home. He did not know if he could just shoot Batman down. But he knew he must strike. Too much had occurred. Batman had caused too much sorrow.

He found Jefferson Street at Eighth. He turned up: five blocks to go. He felt himself going dead inside, becoming hollow. His mind was turned off. There was no internal dialogue. There was only one foot placed before the next. He made his eyes keen, cutting through the darkness. Two forms were moving toward him on the street. They were ragged forms, middle-aged black men with beards, parkas.

“What the hell you doin’ here, honkey?” one man cried. He was drunk.

“Fucking runt!” the other man yelled. “We’re going to kick your ass, mother-fucker!”

Jeff pulled his gun and put in the the second man’s face. He slipped the safety off with his finger.

“I’ll blow your fucking brains out!” Jeff said calmly.

The man backed up. He was drunk too.

“Hey, slow down, man! What’s your problem....!”

Jeff continued walking and the men did not try to follow him.

“Fucking white dog!” one man yelled after him.

The other man laughed. “Fucking crazy honkey mother-fucker!” he called out into the darkness. “We would have kicked his ass something awful....!”

But they were just noises now, ghosts without substance. They probably would have beat Jeff up if he hadn’t had the gun. He continued on his walk. The streets were mostly abandoned. People were inside, keeping out of the rain.

Jeff came to Thirteen and Jefferson. The street was very dark. Jeff tried to read the addresses on the old houses on the street. It was just too dark. He saw an old house in the back of a larger house. There was a light outside. Then he heard a voice.

“Over here!”

He had not seen the young boy standing in the bushes to the left of the large house. If the boy had been armed he could have shot Jeff and walked away. But the boy was not armed. He was the boy from the store, old Jake’s grandson.

“He’s not home. He went out with some friends, in a blue car,” the boy said. “He’ll be home later. You can wait for him here.”

“Why did your grandfather call me?” Jeff asked.

“I don’t know,” the boy said. “He told me to wait for you here, to show you where Batman lived, and then to come home.”

“What do you know about Batman?” Jeff asked.

“He went bad, I guess,” the boy said. “He was a great athlete, a great baseball player. Then he joined the Bloods. Now all he does is bad stuff.”

“You’d better go,” Jeff said.

“Ok.”

“Wait,” Jeff said. “I don’t know your name.”

“Martin,” the boy replied.

“Thank you, Martin,” Jeff responded. “And thank your grandfather for me.”

“I will,” Martin said. “Bye.”

He ran down the street. His footsteps grew weaker and then were gone.

Jeff sat for hours in the bushes waiting for Batman. He did not bother to look at his watch. The little house in back had a light on. Batman’s mother probably had left it on for her son. He knew there was a human side to all of this. But it didn’t matter. Jeff had a job to do. Until it was done he would not be able to return to life. He would not be able to go forward. The spot where Jeff sat was situated under a roof, so he did not get wet. But it continued to rain. It was cold.

Jeff sat for several hours. He heard movement around him. The sound of cloth rustling, like pant legs rubbing against each other. Cars came up the street, did not stop, vanished. People walked on the street, talking, complaining about the weather. It became darker, colder. Jeff’s hands began to stiffen. He rubbed them together. He wished he had brought some gloves.

Finally, late, after midnight, a car stopped in the street in front of Batman’s house. Jeff heard voices, a friendly exchange. The slamming of the door. The engine being revved. The car moving down the street. A figure walked up the driveway in the dark. The man was big. His shadow was even bigger, reflecting on the side of the large house across from Jeff. The man passed Jeff, walking toward the light. The man was carrying a baseball bat in his right hand. Jeff’s terror came back to him when he saw the bat. A memory of the attack: the man smiling as he swung. The hard wood coming toward Jeff. There had been so many ideas alive in Jeff’s brain before the concussion. The collision had killed Jeff’s ideas. They had killed Jeff, because Jeff had been his ideas.

He slipped out of the bushes, afraid that the man might reach his house.

“Batman!” he cried. There was probably fear in his voice. Jeff could not help it.

The man with the bat turned slowly around. He was standing in the light being cast from his own house.

“Yeah,” Batman replied, fully confident. “Who the fuck are you?”

Jeff moved slowly out of the shadows down toward the light. His face finally came into view.

“Don’t you remember me?” Jeff said.

“Fucking white boy!” Batman said. “What are you doing down here!”

“I came looking for you, Batman!” Jeff said, his voice choked with both fear and anger.

Batman laughed. “What the hell for, boy!”

“Remember downtown a few months ago?” Jeff asked. “I was walking to work and you hit me in the face with your bat and stole my wallet!”

Batman peered toward Jeff. “Shit, man,” he said. “I didn’t do no such thing. What the fuck you talking about, man?”

“Why did you hit me, you prick?” Jeff asked.

Batman finally recognized the seriousness in Jeff’s voice. It was sobering to him. “Hell, man, I don’t remember who I hit. I just hit and run. That’s all.”

“Why?” Jeff asked.

“Why?” Batman said. “Because that’s my job, mother-fucker.”

“Well,” Jeff said, gaining strength. “You’re fired, mother-fucker!”

“You fucking cock-sucker!” Batman said, raising the bat to his shoulder, stepping toward Jeff.

Jeff pulled his pistol and raised it at Batman. Batman stopped, lowered the bat.

“I could have turned you over to the police,” Jeff said. “But the courts would have let you go. Have you ever been to jail, Batman?”

“Yeah, I’ve been to jail, man.”

“How many times.”

“Three times.”

“What for?” Jeff asked.

“What the hell difference is it, man,” Batman asked, fear coming in to his voice. “What are you doing here, man? What do you want?”

“What for?” Jeff repeated.

“Car theft. Assault.”

“You like to beat people up?” Jeff asked.

“What are you going to do, man? Are you going to shoot me?”

He tried to raise his voice, to alert his family in the small house.

“If you raise your voice again I will,” Jeff said. “Don’t talk so loud. Be a man about it.”

“What the fuck do you want, man? Ok, I hit you. It wasn’t nothing personal. It was just business, man.”

“It was very personal to me,” Jeff said. “You fucked up my face and my head. You almost killed me. And you did kill other people you hit. Don’t you have any fucking decency? Don’t you realize that the people you hit with your bat have families and lives they are living? And that you just wipe all that away? Do you know how much sorrow you’re causing...?”

A voice came out of the shadows back toward the street: “Ok, put your gun down.”

Jeff turned back over his shoulder.

A man was standing behind Jeff, and he was holding a pistol.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” the man said. “Put the gun back in your pocket.”

Jeff thought about shooting Batman. Nothing else really mattered to him. Batman had become the demon. And the demon must be stopped. That was it. But when the other man stepped into the light, and when Jeff saw that it was Jake, the old man from the store, he did not know what to do.

“Jake, my man!” Batman cried. “I thank you much for showing up like this. This boy was going to kill me, Jake.”

“What was he going to kill you for, Reggie?” Jake asked.

“I don’t know. I guess he just hates black men, Jake. You know how whites are....”

“It didn’t have anything to do with you hitting him in the face with your baseball bat, did it?” Jake asked.

“I don’t know what you mean, Jake,” Batman replied.

“There. In your hand. You’re got a bat in your hand right now,” Jake said. “Do you always carry that bat for protection?”

“Have to, Jake,” Batman said. “This is a tough town, man. You know how it is.”

“Remember the man you beat in front of my store, Reggie?” Jake asked. “That was my brother-in-law. He was coming over to help me with my store. My wife was in the hospital and I was visiting her. Tommy came over early so I could have the morning off to visit my wife.”

“I didn’t know that, Jake,” Batman replied. “Hell, I didn’t know who the fucker was. I just needed some money. To help feed my family.”

“Don’t give me that shit, Reggie,” Jake replied. “You aint got no family. And your mother has money. Hell, you have more money than anyone else in this neighborhood....”

“So, what you gonna do, Jake?” Reggie asked.

“We’ve put up with this too long, Reggie,” Jake replied. “It’s got to stop. It’s got to stop.”

Jake turned to Jeff: “You go home. This is not your fight.”

“It is my fight,” Jeff said.

“Yes, it is your fight, that’s true,” the old man agreed. “But you go home anyway. I’ll take care of it from here.”

Jeff did not know what to do.

“Killing somebody isn’t going to set you free, son,” Old Jake said. “You may think it will, but it won’t. You just go home. Go back to your life.”

Jeff wasn’t sure why he left. It made no sense to stay. The old man had been right. The old man had been so strong that Jeff could not resist him. Jeff showed his respect for the old man by leaving.

Jeff had walked about a block away from Batman’s house when he heard the shot. There was only one shot, sounding more like a firecracker than a gun discharging. Then there was the most profound silence Jeff had ever experienced. He walked home relieved. Everything had been done that needed to be done.

The next morning he heard on the radio that Reggie Towers, a nineteen year old man, had been found dead in his driveway at Thirteenth and Jefferson. A single shot in the heart. Police were investigating. So far there were no witnesses and no leads. Police had found a baseball bat near the young man. Police were investigating whether Reggie Towers may have been the involved in several baseball-bat beatings which had occurred in Seattle over a period of about one and a half years.

Earl Morrison heard from Jeff Simms near Christmas that year. Jeff was leaving Seattle. Things just hadn’t worked out. Jeff had lost interest in architecture. He planned to go to New York. He was going to take a bus. He wanted to see what Lucy was doing. Something told him that their flame really hadn’t died. Jeff told Earl that he wanted to be a writer. He would live in New York and try to write a novel.

THE ARTIST

I.

Damion Johnson was an artist. He had studied art since he was six years old, first with his uncle, Elliot Bresser, who achieved some fame in the Rocky Mountains as an illustrator, and who taught his nephew the classical methods of representation; later he studied in high school from the local art teacher, Herman Brock, an accomplished portrait painter and practitioner of oil painting. He attended the University of Wyoming, where he took a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. He was not from a wealthy family; he attended the state university because that was all he could afford. He took his master of fine arts degree in painting from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1975. He married his high school sweetheart, Rebecca Clause, and moved to Denver where he began his career as an artist.

In fact, to speak of art as a career did not sit well with Damion Johnson. To him, art was something sacred, a form of prayer. He could not think of it as a career, as a way to pay rent and buy food. His understanding of art was that it was an elevated meditation with the highest self within the individual. A communication with the highest nature in each human soul. To drag it down into the streets and alleys, into the banks and the auction houses, stole from art the very soul and meaning of the process.

II.

Damion’s life as an artist was not tremendously successful. He had several shows in Denver galleries the year after his graduation. But his “style” of art was not popular. He was too “realistic” and concentrated too much on the human figure. In fact, his style had not been appreciated much at the university either, especially at Boulder. The professors felt his work not narrative or personal enough. “Where are you in all of this?” Professor Graves had often asked him, a strong-shouldered woman with graying brown hair and eyes which seemed to swim through the world. She was independent and revolutionary; she had little respect for traditional art forms. “Yes, it is good. It is good as Wyeth is good. But it’s not....profound. It does not illuminate you as the artist.”

Damion idolized the work of Andrew Wyeth. Wyeth was pure to him, as Michelangelo had been pure. As Frank Lloyd Wright had been pure. Not that they were pure as men. That did not matter to him. In fact, Damion believed that the artist did not matter at all. The artist was a mere medium of the creation. The artist was inconsequential; the art mattered; the creation; the product. Mozart did not live for centuries. Mozart’s work lived, work which poured through him, was given through him to the world by some force of intelligence beyond even Mozart himself. It was a mystical process. The gods revealed themselves in such a manner.

Damion understood the artistic (and the social) movement of process over product. This theory essentially viewed art as a vehicle through which the artist, as a human soul, discovered himself; the emphasis was on the growth in understanding and the development of the moral nature of the man or the woman. That is, the artist mattered; the work mattered in only a secondary way. Art was a process of psychology by and through which the human soul sought salvation.

Yes, he understood all this. He had once appreciated it; he no longer did.

The ultimate tone and lesson of this movement was that there was no success or failure, no good or bad, no requirement for the artist to grow up, to leave the womb, to confront his limitations of talent or vision. Damion believed that this movement was the brainchild of the women of his generation—the “Mother impulse,” he called it—women, many lesbian women, who were now seeking to take control of the culture’s academic circle. This phemonenon was the dark manifestion of the 1960’s generation, his own generation, an admixture of psychosexual imposition of will and a misguided neo-moralism which sought to protect in perpetuity the hidden and easily wounded “inner child”, the delicate psyche of the society which, if bruised by a negative gust of criticism, might shatter into a million unrecognizable psyches. No one would ever have to hear again those destructive words: “Your work is failing. You are not good.” Now it would be: “Your work is self-sustaining. Your work is interesting. And it is utterly meaningful for you.” And the goal of this art lay precisely in that: in the protection of the practitioner.

Abstract art was the ultimate expression of this subjective “truth” in art. There was no objective truth any longer There was no “good” art. Everything was opinion. He saw it all over the university. His literature teacher, a woman, had claimed that Herman Melville was a mediocre writer; that Sylvia Plath was superior to Melville. He had argued against it, rather furiously, and she and responded with a condescending: “Well, that’s your opinion, Mr. Johnson.”

Damion viewed his betters (that is, his educators) as being part of a conspiracy dedicated to the propagation of mediocrity. It had begun in Europe years earlier, when “abstract” art had gained ascendancy over realism, and it had been exported to America. Feeling and subjective “statement” had triumphed over reason and order. The dream, eternally subjective, gained power over waking reality. Formlessness (the inner world) had castrated form. And only the great minds of the culture could truly appreciate the genius of such formlessness. A great chasm of understanding grew up between those who knew, the intelligentsia, and those who could not know by definition, the common people, the uninitiated.

The intelligentsia, ever fearful of appearing ignorant of a new trend, a new movement or genius, slavishly followed the increasingly ludicrous gods of the modern art movement. When the art circle, after initially embracing Andrew Wyeth as a great American genius, began to realize that Wyeth was loved as well by the common and unknowing masses, the uneducated many, they dropped him like a hot potato. His work was common, uninspired; lacking in vision, imprisoned by realism, which was the realm now of the photographer, not the painter.

III.

Damion found a job in the Denver library. He worked days, painted mornings, nights and weekends. He was tremendously disciplined and productive. In his first three years after graduation he produced over one hundred paintings, oils and watercolors. He sketched daily, often at work. He sold a few canvases, but his style was not in fashion. He cared little about fashion. Critics would often try to convince him to change his style. His technique was obviously well developed. He needed to present more emotion, more personality in his work, however, more abstract meaning.

His agent, a portly civilized fellow named Ralph Banks, a Denver native, was totally supportive of Damion’s work. But he reported to Damion that dealers were not interested in his formal realism. “Figurative art is not accepted now,” he said. “I wish it was. Your work is better than any of my artists. But some of them—Rita Medina for instance—have very little talent but are politically correct. Culturally correct. Primitive. Yes, primitive is in. You should tie your hands behind your back, blindfold yourself, and put your brush in your mouth to paint. Then, maybe, you could approach the insignificance of many artists whose work is selling today. Rita couldn’t draw a flower or a tree or even a cloud to save her ass. She began by throwing paint at a canvas. Big clumps. Emotion is everything, she tells me. She paints with the sleeve of her smock. She doesn’t even bother to use a brush. Now the rage is “installation pieces”. That is, mediocre minds come up with gimmicks to try to hide their lack of ability. Concepts—everything is concept now. The last time I was in New York I saw an installation of a closet: these three people brought in folding chairs and tables, old tires, broken antiques, and placed everything in a huge closet space in the gallery. The audience went wild. I heard one woman say: ‘This is true culture.’ I guess the artists were gay and the meaning of the closet should have been painfully obvious. At least that’s what I was told. It wasn’t obvious to me of course even though it was painful....”

Ralph Banks told Damion that he was proud to work as Damion’s agent because Damion was one of the few artists he managed who actually had talent, even if he couldn’t make a living producing art. “Some day,” Ralph Banks told Damion, “the world will turn. It will be when the culture awakens from a long powerful nightmare. And the obvious quality of things, which had so long been hidden during the sleep, will be illuminated and obvious to everyone. We are living through a kind of cultural nightmare now. It is like everyone is sleepwalking. Nobody knows what is good. Because no one has values today. It’s Einstein’s fault. He made us believe that nothing was true—at least nothing was absolute...”

Damion did not care about success really. He cared about his own talent, the growth of his talent; and he cared about his family.

He had a son named Arthur, a daughter named Christina (named after Wyeth of course), and another son named Ethan. Arthur would spend hours with Damion in his studio, often sleeping with him on the old couch well into the night, as Damion worked. Rebecca, his wife, would come in around midnight and sweep little Arthur up in her arms and stumble off toward bed. Damion would usually work until about 2:00, then retire to bed until 6:30 when he would rise again and paint for several hours before leaving for work. His life was dedicated to his art and to his family.

One day Damion came home from work to find little Arthur seated on the floor above one of his father’s prepared canvases. Arthur had scattered paint in broad strokes on the canvas, alternately using a brush, his hands, even his bare feet.

Damion was at first angry that his son had been allowed to enter the studio unsupervised by his father. Then, however, looking at his son covered with pain, smiling at his father, seeking some form of recognition by Damion that he had done well mimicking his father, Damion smiled, laughed, and called his wife in to view the chaos.

Damion later became so proud of his son’s first brush with creation, he framed Arthur’s painting and hung it on the walls of the studio, next to his own work. Damion and Rebecca would laugh together about the genius of their young son.

One day, however, Ralph Banks brought a potential buyer to Damion’s studio. The buyer was a man named Thomas Roth. His family had made money in banking in Denver. They fancied themselves the foremost collectors in the Rocky Mountains. Thomas Roth had agreed to visit Damion’s studio as a favor to Ralph Banks who had often directed him to profitable investments.

Mr. Roth was a man of about fifty-five, with a thin gray mustache and tinted glasses, dressed in an elegant blue suit. He exhibited little interest in Damion’s work, speaking somewhat condescendingly about “the coloring is really quite remarkable” and “there’s something very noble in your figures”—but Damion could tell that his kindness was more a formality directed toward Ralph Banks and that his interest in Damion’s paintings was minimal.

“Not a good investment vehicle,” he finally said under his breath to Banks. “He’s old-fashioned. He’s almost reactionary. Who does he think he is, Rembrandt?”

Then he saw the painting which little Arthur had done. “Now, this is something more to my taste,” he said, lighting up like a candle. Damion began to laugh, but Rebecca tugged at his sleeve and warned him silently to be still. “Yes, I see something in this. Something of genius.”

He studied the painting.

“Do you have a title for this painting?”

“The child’s mind,” Damion replied, forcing back a smile.

“Is this a recent work?” Roth asked.

“Yes, my most recent work. I believe I’m moving in a new direction.”

“Why isn’t it signed?” Roth asked.

“Isn’t it?” Damion replied. “No, it isn’t. I guess I wasn’t sure it was finished.”

“It’s definitely finished,” Roth said. “I’ll give you $5,000 for it now, once you sign it.”

Damion calmly signed the painting in black paint.

Thomas Roth looked delighted. He shook hands with Ralph Banks, muttering: “You’ve done it again, Ralphy. You have done it again.”

Roth did not stay long. He wrote a check and said he would send his “man” back for the painting. He shook hands with Damion and his wife and left the studio, turning back to say: “I’ll show this to Lucy Gainer. Maybe we can have a show of your new work. The figurative stuff doesn’t work, Damion. It’s stiff and uninteresting. But this one is pure genius. Pure genius.”

Damion did not know whether to laugh or cry. He was $5,000 richer; but he felt shamed, insulted.

He and his wife discussed it at length. There might be a great deal of money waiting at the end of this mistake. But would they be selling out their ideals by taking the money? And what about Arthur? Would he be victimized by the greed and by the duplicity?

The next morning, Rebecca took Arthur back into the studio, gave him a prepared canvas, and turned him loose. She watched him work, without restraint, with natural energy and joy. He painted five paintings that day.

When Damion returned from work at the library, he framed the five paintings, signed them with his own name and hung them on the walls of his studio. Almost as a second thought, he took down his own paintings and put them in a closet, out of sight.

In his quiet moments, Damion came to view this hoax as an appropriate mockery of an art world which had lost its sense of proportion and decency. It was not his shame, Damion’s shame, that such deception could occur. A coterie of “experts” willing to view a baby’s chaos as art, and willing to pay exhorbitantly for such unskilled creation, deserved what it got. Damion would take the money; blood money it was, but it would not be his blood. The money would allow him to concentrate on his own work, perhaps even to quit his job at the library. He thought of his family; and he thought of a life of leisure this money could bring them, supporting his own dedication to his art.

IV.

Damion Johnson soon was the hit of Denver. His work was showing in four galleries, including the prime establishment, Lucy Gainer’s The Higher Nature. Lucy Gainer was a thin energetic woman whose family had been in Colorado for seven generations. She came from ranching stock. She rode a horse, laughed with a wide open face; yet she was tough and loyal to any artist she embraced. She came to Damion through Thomas Roth. She liked Damion and his family almost immediately. She adored Damion’s chaotic abstractions, bold in color and conception, innocent yet powerful in their accusations against society. She asked Damion to write about his work.

Damion wrote an impressive treatise on his work, that is, on Arthur’s work. He used all the right words to give the treatise a place in today’s establishment: “empowerment,” “proactive”, even “an agent of wellness”. His work expressed a “desire to achieve in color and form some meaning for the experience of life in the 1990’s”. He was also socially committed. This made him even more palatable.

Damion began to sell his work by the handful. In the first two months of his enhanced status, Damion was paid more than $35,000 for his work. Ralph Banks was working with contacts in New York City and in Los Angeles to have a Damion Johnson show in those two cities.

Damion’s work, with excerpts from his treatise, “Art and Life: An Investigation of Abstract Form and Color as a Vehicle of Life’s Experience”, was published in the American Artist. Never had Damion dreamed that his life as an artist could be so dense with reward, so profound with adulation. Then, again, perhaps Damion’s own work would never have been received with such admiration.

Damion received a call from Herman Brock, his high-school art teacher, who chided him on his conversion to the abstract. “What has happened to your real talent?” he asked Damion. “Have you betrayed your origins, Damion? You are not one of them. You never have been. You have real talent. Don’t squander yourself on this child’s play art. You have real talent. Show them your real talent.”

Damion wanted to explain to his master that he had not really changed his style to please the talking heads of the art world, that is was, instead, his own toddler who was winning praises from coast-to-coast—but he could not. He felt that such an admission would carry with it at least as much shame as would Herman Brock’s assumption that he had sold out his own talent for the highest payer. So he remained silent, biting his lip. Some day he would explain himself to Hermann Brock. Some day he would explain what had happened.

V.

The Johnson’s became rich and famous in the two years following their “discovery” by Thomas Roth. Damion had had shows in Paris, Vienna, London, Florence, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Moscow, Budapest, Prague. He had been written up in nearly all the art journals of the world. He was universally hailed as one of the great voices of his generation.

One night, in December 1994, in Denver, little Arthur Johnson, the tiny artist, fell sick with a fever. Damion took him to the doctor the next morning. Damion and Rebecca understood that their eldest child, and not his father, was actually the generator of their good fortune. They loved him as a son—and, as much, they valued him as their provider. But Arthur was sick with some form of pneumonia. He was placed in the hospital; through some mysterious powerful degeneration of health, he grew weaker and weaker and then died about a week after his confinement.

The doctor did not know what had made the child sick. All the tests had been negative.

Damion and Rebecca and the other children, Christina and Ethan, grieved the loss of their precious Arthur. There was a horrible void in the family now. Rebecca blamed Damion, Damion blamed Rebecca, then himself: he tried to paint to relieve his pain—but he had no feel for it now. Everything he painted seemed flat and lifeless. Perhaps the truth was that he had had no talent. Perhaps the critics had been correct. Perhaps he had only technique, but no soul, no story to tell.

Word spread through the artistic communities: the death of his son had left Damion Johnson a hollow man, a man without spirit; grief had consumed his ability. Damion now was a failure as an artist.

Damion tried to pain abstract art. He threw color on the canvas; he painted with his shoes; he listened to loud rock music when he painted and worked only with a large house-painting brush. But it did not work.

As fast as his star had risen, through the discovery of Arthur’s work, so had it fallen. Damion’s own abstract work was shown at a few local shows, but received negative reviews.

“He has lost his touch. The energy is still there. But the skill has evaporated.”

“Johnson has sunk to a new low with his hopeless show at the Golden Skull.. His work is drab, visionless, without content and without constraint. It is like a small child painted this instead of a one-time master. It seems as if the tragic death of his son has, indeed, rendered the man both impotent and hollow.”

Damion began to drink. He had never enjoyed the effect of liquor before. But he was feeling true sorrow now, grief and guilt that his son had died, estrangement from his wife, for she blamed him for her son’s death, even though she had also urged Arthur to paint; Damion also missed the public adulation he had received, albeit fraudulently, claiming Arthur’s work as his own. Damion missed the limelight, the magazine articles, the star treatment. Now he really felt like a failure, as he had never felt like a failure when he had been pursuing his own painting, oblivious to the critical world’s lack of appreciation. Yes, now he was a failure: not only could he no longer paint; but he had fallen from a great height, into a great hole. He could no longer see. He could no longer understand himself. He was empty, without hope, and without the love of his family, the foundation of his life, which he had violated through his greed.

One afternoon, when Rebecca was away at work (she was now working in a local gallery to support the family), Damion came home from an afternoon at the neighborhood tavern and carried Christina into his drafty studio, placed a clear canvas before her, paints and brushes, and said: “Christina, it’s up to you now. We need you go give us a few paintings. Just have fun with it. See how it comes out.”

But Christina had no feel for art. She was cold. She made a few marks on the canvas, artless marks, as if intimidated by the color. She wanted to go back to her room.

VI.

All Damion thought about now was divorce from his wife. He knew that she wanted it. They both lived with a great shadow over their heads . They both knew too much. Neither could move away from the truth, that their greed had somehow killed their beloved son. God had punished them. They had been evil, using their child in a game of deception, soiling him through their own sin. God had been the only one who could save him from their lies. So He had reached down from heaven and plucked the little artist from out of their midst.

Damion spent that next Saturday at the bar, watching football and drinking beer. He felt ready for death himself. He had nothing left. He was no painter; he was no father; he was no husband; he was no worker. He was nothing. He had nothing left to offer anyone.

He decided that he would make one last noble gesture to Rebecca: he would free her, offer her a divorce, so that she could go on with life, find a better man, someone she could respect, not the murderer of her own son.

His heart was heavy as he walked home in the snow. His apartment seemed darker and quieter than usual. There was no noise. He could not hear the children. For a moment he believed that his wife may have taken the children and fled. But, no...he could hear a sound coming out of the studio.

As Damion entered the studio he noticed the broad smile on Rebecca’s face: her eyes were glowing. She looked up at her husband and said: “Hello, dear. Come see what Ethan is doing.”

Ethan, only four years old, was wildly splashing colors on one of Damion’s unused canvases. It took only a glance at the chaotic work of young Ethan for Damion to understand that this young son, like his late brother, had the gift of abstract composition, had the gift of color. The painting was good; it was fine; it would be loved. Rebecca was beaming her love at Damion.

“Welcome back,” Rebecca said.

Damion awakened, coming to his senses again, as if waking from a bad dream.

He reached down and took the canvas away from his son, holding it in front of his eyes, seeming caught in some moral dilemma.

“It is finished, Rebecca,” Damion said.

Rebecca looked at her husband deeply, confused.

Damion said: “Get him another canvas. I’ll let this dry, and then frame it.”

Just then, Ethan, sitting on the floor of the cool studio, sneezed. Both Damion and Rebecca stopped and looked down at the tiny creature at their feet.

Damion and Rebecca looked at each other.

Finally, Rebecca said: “I’ll get his sweater. Get Banks on the line and tell him we have something we want Roth to look at. Everything is good again, Damion. Everything is going to be good again.”

THE DEATH OF LIBERALISM

PART ONE.

The Artist Is Born

I.

Michael Meggs had always been a liberal. He had been “born artistic,” as he liked to say—and, “as an artist”, he had always sided with the underdog, always aligned himself with the poor and the outcast, the troubled, the insane, the politically powerless.

When Michael’s father, Oliver Meggs, had been shot and killed while walking in his neighborhood in 1983 by a black junkie in Gary, Indiana, Michael had been the lone family member to defend the murderer, even shouting at his family during the wake: “What do you expect the blacks to do! They’ve been persecuted for so many centuries! They have a right to kill white men, for all that they’ve done to the black race...!”

It made him feel good to stand alone on the side of justice.

Michael Meggs lived in Eugene, Oregon. Eugene was a small cultural hamlet—if, in fact, any small American town could be called either cultural or a hamlet—situated in west-central Oregon in the Willamette Valley. Michael Meggs loved to decry the lack of “true culture” in America. He idolized Europe; and, like many American intellectuals, had a severe inferiority complex when confronted by his betters, the citizens of any and all European countries, who were obviously much more advanced spiritually and artistically than any American could ever hope to be. It was as simple as the fact of citizenship—a kind of pedigree. Americans were, by nature, rude, uncultured and “bourgeois”. Europeans were elegant, artistic, aristocratic, descendants of Bach and Mozart and Proust.

Michael hated his own country. He felt it was false, materialistic, and violent. He hated capitalism, which pitted individual against individual in a struggle for economic survival. The world should be kinder; there should be love between individuals. There should not be the ruthless economic conflict that made of each saint an animal, of each artist a politician or a businessman.

Man was essentially an artist: Michael believed this. Each human being had a soul which longed to perform and perfect a creative destiny. Each man was a musician trapped inside the body of a businessman. America did not nurture the artist within; American vitalized and rewarded only the businessman without.

So Michael hated his own country, placed himself always in a position of superiority to his nation, the judge of a lower entity created by a lower god or demon, a god without judgment, without a knowledge of beauty or proportion. He always sided with foreigners against his country; he especially echoed European criticisms of American society. He felt as if he must always apologize for his country: it was as if he were standing before a saintly audience of elegant souls who unanimously condemned his own people as crass and without value. Before long, unable to defend his culture against these voices, for the culture did not value what all good souls knew to be worthy, he began, himself, to condemn his country in a voice even more boisterous than the saints’ and angels’ own round harangues, seeking to indicate to the Europeans that he was on their side, not on the side of his own banal society.

Michael defended Arab terrorists, Asian communists, even Idi Amin. He defended blacks, women, Mexicans, homosexuals, lesbians, drug addicts, murderers, and thieves as a matter of course—anyone, in effect, dwelling on the fringe of the corrupt society created and administered by the white American man. He considered each of these, each fringe-dweller, a political prisoner; and any act of violence against the oppressor was justified and a positive act toward the liberation of the world.

As one might expect from all this, Michael Meggs had had a very strained relationship with his father, Oliver Meggs, a trial lawyer of some note in Indiana, before giving up the law for early retirement and a successful stock investment pastime.

Oliver Meggs had been an all-conference athlete in both basketball and football while attending Miami University at Oxford, Ohio. Everything had come easily to him. Doors opened naturally for him. He was handsome, intelligent, well-liked. He married, not for wealth, but for love, a petite Rosemarie Standard, whose parents both were teachers at the University. They had four children, the last of whom was Michael.

For some reason, Michael and his father never really became close. Michael had been sick often in the first few years of his life. Michael’s mother became his constant companion, nursing him, encouraging him. Michael was a delicate soul, attuned more to music, dreams, and books than was his father.

Lawrence Meggs was two years older than his brother Michael. He was more active than his brother, more athletic, more healthy. Lawrence and his father became very close; Michael watched them from a distance. He did not hate Lawrence or his father. In truth, Oliver Meggs loved Michael, made an extra effort to find time for his youngest son, took walks with him, even took Michael and his mother to concerts, because he knew of Michael’s passion for music even at an early age. But there was a chasm they could never fill or cross. It is hard to say who rejected whom. Certainly, Michael felt dwarfed in that he could not compete athletically, did not have an acumen for business or law. He was awkward, socially and physically, and prone to isolation. He watched his father move with grace in the world. He could never match his father in this way; his brother, Lawrence, did match his father to some extent, was popular, a sports player of some skill, a good student. He would go on to study political science at the University of Chicago and law at Yale University.

Michael was good with languages, particularly German. He was passionate about the German philosophers, especially Nietzsche; and he loved the romantic poets, especially Heinrich Heine and Novalis. His mother encouraged his pursuit of ideas; Michael’s father also supported his son. Oliver Meggs had a passion for the English poets: Shakespeare, Milton, John Donne. He wrote poetry himself, when he was younger. In fact, he had won the heart of Rosemarie Standard at college largely because of the poetry he wrote her each day for more than a year. He had even had some poems published in the Miami University literary journal; and, later, in the Sewanee Review.

Michael showed musical ability at an early age. His mother had encouraged him, by giving him piano lessons, herself, until he reached the age of seven, at which time the family hired a private tutor to continue Michael’s development.

So, it was not that Michael had been shunned or discouraged as a child from finding his true nature; nor had his true nature (that of “the artist”) been minimized by his parents. Still, when it came to the chemical reactions of familial love, Michael’s father had a natural affinity for Michael’s brother, one which Michael never could breach, even though he tried, seeking to do so through music, first, and in education generally.

The truth of it was, Michael had an unreachable soul. He was most comfortable when reading or playing music—that is, when alone—as his mother worked in the background, quietly doing housework or baking. His father seemed to seek something Michael did not have, whether we name it charm, or grace or humor or a love of life. Michael was dour. He was often lethargic with depression, a somber soul, capable of joy but not driven to it; experiencing his joy, usually, when alone, and unwilling, perhaps unable, to share his occasional ecstasies, his artistic euphorias.

Father and son, never really close, grew further apart when Michael began high school. Michael did not participate in sports. He had no physical prowess, was weak, awkward. His father did not require him to be athletic. But Lawrence, Michael’s brother, was a star in football and basketball, the very image of his father. Michael imagined a damning slight by his father, believed his father did not love him, transferred his own sense of guilt at failing in his father’s imagined aspirations for his son to his father through a concept of rejection of Michael.

The chasm became impassable.

Michael focused on music and European despondent philosophies: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus. He became part of the school’s “intellectual” rebels: grew his hair long, wore love-beads and took drugs.

The Vietnam war became another wedge between Michael and his family. Oliver Meggs supported the war. Lawrence Meggs, Michael’s older brother, joined the marines when he graduated from high school. Michael, n his speech class, indicted America for crimes against the Vietnamese people to support economic ends. Michael became somewhat active in the peace movement; although, even in this Michael felt abashed. He was a loner by nature. As soon as someone agreed with his opinion, Michael began to squirm and sought in his mind some rationale to negate his earlier opinion, which would leave him free of this new-found disciple.

Michael attended the university and studied music and comparative literature. He had begun as a fanatic for Beethoven; but, over time, his allegiance began to drift to Bach, whom he began to view as a Buddha or a Jesus Christ figure. Why this was so was not so clear. He admired most in Bach the very clear cosmologies which existed in his musical structures. As Michael would tell associates: “Bach is painting constructions of the universe, much as Einstein did with numbers.”

When he moved to Eugene, Michael ordered a harpsichord from Germany and placed a large portrait of Bach in a beautiful cherry frame in the center of his living room, below the harpsichord. It was a shrine to his Buddha. He even had two palm branches tucked beneath the portrait; he had seen such palm branches in a friend’s house tucked beneath a picture of Jesus. In his mind, the two were manifestations of the same perfect soul.

II.

Michael had come to Eugene to study a double masters program in music and German literature at the University of Oregon. He taught in the German Department, and continued his studies of Bach and Nietzsche. At least in Michael’s mind, Back and Nietzsche were the two sides of Michael’s own nature: the healthy, creative, generative nature of Bach, the day life; and the sickly, philosophic nature of Nietzsche, the night soul, the acute mortician of the western world, performing his autopsy on a dead society with angular concepts bearing a scapular precision.

In Michael’s mind, it was not Germany or Europe which Nietzsche was eviscerating; it was America. Everything that Nietzsche seemed to say was most true of America—and Michael absorbed the master’s indictments of Christianity and the West and used it as his own justification for avoiding contact with his own society, a diseased entity which killed everything it touched.

Michael had used LSD in high school and at Miami University. LSD peeled away all the falseness of the world, turning life itself into a psychotic adventure which very closely approximated the mind of Friedrich Nietzsche. When Michael took LSD, he understood precisely all the concepts of the master German. It did not trouble him that he needed to approximate psychosis to understand Nietzsche, because, to Michael, the psychotic was always closer to the truth than was the normal, dull, and deadened mind of the mass of humanity. Psychosis was nearer to death; and those nearer to death always envisioned life the more clearly. That was the condition of the prophet, the shaman: he lived close to death, generated and endured visions, which were a kind of death-dance, and then carried those visions back to the world as the messenger of the gods, bringing secrets of the spirit back to humanity.

Michael was special. He was the mind of his society; part of the soul of the world. The vast majority of human beings were unconscious cells working in a greater beast, like souls in our own bodies which compose the tissues and organs but are unaware of the larger intelligence—Michael, and a few others, were those rare cells in the Earth’s body who were “soul cells” if you will, who were working with the invisible intelligences of the world, leading the more limited humans through the power of the word and through the power of numbers—that is, through music, the highest of the arts.

If the world often crucified its soul, its special leaders, the artists, those more advanced spiritually than the masses who dwelled in the lower mind, then that was the sacrifice one must pay for carrying a larger vision, for seeking to articulate the life of the spirit. It had happened to Christ, to Aristotle, and to countless other mystics who lived in a society not advanced enough to understand them.

Michael became increasingly addicted to the sensations of psychedelics and marijuana. Wild mushrooms grew on the Oregon coast which, when ingested, since they were poisonous, triggered in the consumer near-death experiences of varying degrees of intensity. Michael often ate such mushrooms, received the message from the brain that he had just been poisoned, and then began his vision quest with an eye turned toward the writing of Nietzsche and toward his own thesis: “Nietzsche: the Modern Christ” which he had begun in 1976 and had been working on for almost two years. He often carried a tape recorder with him to capture the flashes of genius which overcame him when in such a condition; he was physically and emotionally incapable of writing during such trips into chaos, for his body often shook, and his mind often crashed about the room, out into space, over centuries and into heavens and hells unimaginable to the uninitiated. He was incapacitated, overflowing with genius and light, evil and convolutions of logic.

He discovered Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and considered it a masterpiece.

He smoked marijuana about four times a day, in order to reduce his tension with life to a pace more amenable to his needs. It goes without saying, Michael spent a great deal of time alone, indoors, ingesting hashish or marijuana, putting on head-phones, listening to music, convincing himself that he was, indeed, living life to the fullest—although, he knew, others would never understand this.

His music slipped into the background, as his pursuit of truth through hallucinogens took precedence over everything else.

In the summer of 1978, Michael traveled to Germany to meet a fellow scholar and to research Nietzsche in the good country of Germany itself. He had met Professor Richard Horey at a conference that Spring in Seattle. Horey taught philosophy at the University of Wyoming and was generally considered one of the acknowledged “Nietzsche masters” in American education. They exchanged ideas. Each found the other quite interesting; and Horey informed Michael that he had received permission from Nietzsche’s family to study the master and to live for several months in the basement of Nietzsche’s own house. He asked Michael to accompany him. Michael agreed.

The summer in ????????Naumberg On the Salle was both exhilarating and troubling for Michael. He met many Germans with whom he spent many enjoyable hours. In many ways, Michael felt more at home in Germany than he ever had in America. He even found the German working class admirable; he spent time in the pubs, drinking beer with German workers who talked philosophy, music, politics and the “problems of life” with the American scholar. They treated him with respect—for German society respected scholarship. And German workers were more noble than Americans. The fact that they spoke German was proof of this.

German life in the cities was chaotic—too modern for Michael. He took automobile trips to the quaint small towns of Bavaria but sought to escape the technological character of the German cities.

Michael was not sure if he got closer to Nietzsche that summer. He was able to purchase LSD and marijuana in Munich (he had been terrified of spending a summer without his herbal companions, but the idea of trying to smuggle illegal pharmaceuticals into Germany filled him with horror—he could imagine being arrested, tried, imprisoned for a term of 15-20 years—he almost called Professor Horey to cancel his plans to travel to Germany; then a friend reminded him that Germany was as modern as America: that drugs would be easily purchased in Munich or Berlin). He and Professor Horey, in the basement of the old master’s home, ingested drugs quite freely and sought the ghost of Nietzsche, in old German writings and in the dust and patterns on the walls.

It was not the most productive situation for scholarship. Professor Horey was a tyrant. And when Michael would offer angles on Nietzchean thought which did not comply with Professor Horey’s own treatises, the elder professor would snap Michael off which a demeaning: “Mystic garbage!” or “Romantic tripe!” He did not respect Michael’s process of scholarship.

He did find Michael attractive however; and, one night, after a pleasant dinner and a tab of LSD, Professor Horey finally made known his romantic attraction to Michael. Michael was physically disabled, as he often was after ingesting LSD. He could not move. He did not know what was occurring really, since the room was dark, and his mind was flying freely through some spacious prism.

Michael barely realized that Professor Horey had slipped Michael’s pants down around his ankles and currently had Michael’s penis stuffed deep into his mouth. It was almost comic. But it became clear to Michael that the whole purpose of this trip, in Professor Horey’s mind at least, had been to have a summer of pleasure with Michael in a holy, romantic basement, surrounded by scents of Nietzsche and Germanic stillness.

That was the beginning of Michael’s first love affair. It wasn’t love—Michael knew it. It was just pleasure—one of the things that Michael most abhorred, for it indicated a giving in to life, a surrender of will to some mediocre craving.

Still, Richard Horey would not be stopped. After he finished Michael in his mouth, he took him to bed and violate him from behind. There was nothing gentle or warm in it. Michael was physically paralyzed from the drug he had taken. Professor Horey pounded at him from behind; but Michael’s mind was far away, soaring with the doves he saw far above Berlin.

Michael had always supported homosexuality, in theory. Many of the world’s great artists had been homosexual. He believed there was nothing wrong with it.

Still, he wept that night as Professor Horey snored beside him. He had been violated. Michael was a great soul; he was above all this bestiality. A great sorrow descended on him. He could not move. He saw an image of a great cross cast upon the mirror in their room, a confluence of beams of light, on which he thought he saw himself suspended.

So began Michael’s summer of love.

Richard Horey was an egotistical tyrant. He found ways to humiliate Michael, demeaning his scholarship, chiding his writing, assailing his manhood, seeking to render him helpless, very much the unworthy student in the presence of the master educator. Then, at night, Horey would soften toward Michael. He would encourage their drug ritual, after which he would initiate sexual contact, which Michael would endure, not always certain if it was out of respect for the professor, out of addiction to pain, or out of fear of resisting the professor’s will.

Michael had planned to stay a month. Richard Horey pleaded with him to remain an extra two weeks, giving Michael money to extend his stay. Michael agreed. There was some perverse pleasure in all this for Michael, not that he enjoyed the sexuality much; what he enjoyed was the outlaw behavior, which he could romanticize in his mind, when distanced from the experience itself. He dreaded contact each night with the old professor, who was fat and had a thick, unruly blond beard and hair. He smelled badly at night, after sex made him sweat profusely. He would fart at night, in his sleep, leaving a smell in the air of dark contamination.

Michael understood the perversity in this life. He could have stopped it. He could have refused to take the drugs, which was a trigger to the indecency, without which the descent into darkness would not occur. He could have fled the old fraudulent professor, whose tyranny over Nietzschean scholarship betrayed an insecure soul, roiling in mid-life panic. But he did not. He endured it. It made him feel more of an artist, to endure this bohemian experience. He had so often idealized the dark, romantic underworld character. Now he was experiencing it. It was the first real experience he had had in many years, the first real pain and revulsion he felt he had ever really experienced.

When his time came to leave, that morning, having packed his bags, Professor Horey had stood above him, unmoved, twisting his beard absent-mindedly, saying: “I guess you can take a cab to the airport by yourself. You’re not a great scholar, Meggs. But I did enjoy the summer with you. You’re not the best student I’ve ever had. But you’re not the worst either. I’ll be willing to write you a letter of support should you need one in the future. Only don’t apply for a job at the University of Wyoming, please. We have had a summer fling. There was nothing more serious to it than that. It has ended at this moment. I wish you well in your career, Michael.”

He left by the back door and did not look back.

Michael felt humiliated. He had begun the summer as an equal with the famous professor in a very serious philosophical quest and he had ended it by being no better than a whore, and not even a good whore at that, something to be used and then cast away without a futher concern.

Michael was not hurt really, for he felt nothing for the professor; yet he desired revenge. He was afraid of Horey. He had not been able to stand up to him—for the professor had forged a will (in the heritage of their master, the willful German) which did not recognize second place. Michael could not out shout him, could not defeat him physically, could not outmaneuver him in his mind, for, when he did, he was merely shouted down by Horey. Michael had been a slave all summer, to the man’s intellectual tyranny, and to the man’s bestial cravings. That made Michael almost proud, to have been a slave, for it aligned him with the great slaves of human history, the black race and the Jews.

But he was not above a quiet sort of retaliation.

He knew where Richard Horey kept his money: in a long wallet in the top pocket of his valise. Michael looked inside the wallet. He counted the money. There was a little less than seven hundred dollars in US bills. Michael had wanted to visit East Germany but felt he did not have enough time or money to do so. He could stay another month, and visit East Germany, with the seven hundred dollars. Horey had treated him badly, without respect. He felt Michael need not be taken seriously. If Michael took the money, he could never count on Horey’s support for a teaching position—but that did not seem significant to Michael. He could not really count on it anyway. Horey would not go to the police. He was too conscious of his reputation in academia to drag some unseemly seduction of a male student out into the light for seven hundred dollars.

Michael felt exhilaration as he pocketed the money. He took a cab to the train station and caught a train to Berlin.

III.

West Berlin was everything Michael abhorred about the West: lights, noise, chaos, turbulence, motion, technology, cold humanity, competition for existence, traffic congestion, prostitution. But when Michael passed into East Berlin, he felt like he had entered heaven.

He had entered Tranquillity. There was no one on the streets, except a few armed guards, protecting the silence. When he did encounter citizens, they all seemed to whisper, as if afraid they might awaken someone. That was the way Michael liked it. Silent. Neither did he wish to awaken the giant being, Life, which did not respect the dreamer, did not respect the life of the mind, respected only action, material acquisition, the drive of ego toward the satisfaction of desires.

It is true that Michael had been forced to pass by the Berlin Wall, and he had been forced to at least recognize a gigantic contradiction in the dialogue of East with West: a huge emblem of negation of the Eastern claim of freedom and enlightened government. However, Michael chose not to view it in such a way.

Clearly, the West had to put up legal barriers, immigration quotas, to keep people out. The East—and every communist country had experienced this—had been forced to put up very material, very real borders, walls of concrete and barbed wire, to try to keep their own people from leaving.

There was something absolute and real in this Wall, symbolic as it was; it was so clear as an image of truth that Michael had to look away quickly, shield his eyes with his hand, as if struck by unexpected burst of sunlight, lest he be damaged, in his philosophy of life, by the naked truth of what he saw. He argued with himself that the Wall was needed to keep the evil, chaotic influence of the West from penetrating the East. He forced the clear understanding of what the Wall really was far down into his hidden mind, pushing it down as if it were a monster belonging only in the mud, far down below the clear surface of the pond. To recognize the Wall for what it was would have been the same as to experience a spiritual death, to recognize that one’s values and one’s beliefs were built on a profound falsehood, as nakedly shameful and mean as were the lies of the arch-demon German monster, the child of Nietzsche’s pessimism, Adolf Hitler.

In his mind, Michael could not equate Lenin and Stalin and Mao with Hitler. The communist leaders were enlightened, educated men, who sought only to eliminate the criminal classes of society, who sought to elevate the poor and the working class to a level from which they had been deprived by the ruling class, the merchants of death, the spearheads of decay. The communist leaders sought to eliminate racism, not to promote it—in this they were much different than Hitler.

Yet the Wall did bother Michael. He argued with himself for nearly a day, before his mind was once again calmed. He fought every sort of logic which defined the Wall as a ball and chain, a symbol of slavery—choosing to fashion the image mentally, instead, into a gate into heaven, a passageway into spiritual existence.

The streets of East Berlin were silent. Everything seemed gray, as if a dream had descended by some proclamation. Occasionally he caught a glimpse of someone, dressed in gray clothes, usually carrying a shopping sack, moving quietly, speaking to no one. He heard Beethoven coming out of one window. He paused, looking into an apartment through a window which opened out on the street. There was a small bust of Beethoven on a desk; behind the bust was a mirror; and somehow, through some prismatic quirk, Michael’s own image and that of Beethoven’s bust merged in a very metaphysical image, a kind of double exposure marrying Michael to the German master: the bust was riding on Michael’s shoulders.

Michael took that as a sign from the gods. This place was good. He was supposed to come here; he was supposed to steal the money from the old queer (Michael did not consider himself a homosexual, rather a slave of some corrupted system of behavior). This was where the spirit of the German genius lived, in the silence, in the graveyard mood which seemed to abound in this city. Michael loved the graveyard mood. The somber quality was the quality of the soul, he told himself. These were the real Germans. The Germans of Goethe and Heine. The Germany prior to becoming an American colony.

Michael spent almost a week in East Berlin. He stayed in the a fairly well kept-up seven-story hotel along the river. Mostly foreigners stayed there, he was told. Of course, who else would stay there? he thought. It was not full. In fact he saw only about ten other residents the entire time he was in Berlin. Three Swedes, a man, his wife, and his wife’s sister: the man was there on business. They all wandered about the city, commenting on how drab the existence was. When they troubled Michael with their view of the city, Michael quickly dismissed himself. The last thing he needed was someone raining on his funeral, afterall.

Michael laughed at that image. “Raining on his funeral”: yes, he was a depressive. Yes, the city did feel as if it had been transformed into a gigantic lunatic asylum. But it was so orderly, so safe. Michael had lived his entire life in fear; fear of confrontation with dangerous beings, with bullies, with the vicious elements of life. Here, he felt no fear. Here, he could walk anywhere he wished, within the times of curfew of course. Michael did not need to take drugs in East Berlin. He did not even think about drugs. Life in East Berlin was itself a kind of drug.

One afternoon, he met a man in a park along the river. The man was about his age, mid-thirties. He wore a black beret, working clothes; he seemed friendly, smoked a cigarette, offered one to Michael. Michael smoked with him, even though he did not ordinarily smoke tobacco. He did not want to seem unfriendly.

“Why have you come here?” the man asked.

“To study,” Michael replied. “To study the writings of Nietzsche and to hear the music of Bach.”

The man tilted his heard quizzically. “You’ve come to East Berlin for that?” he asked. “There is more of Nietzsche and Bach in New York than there is here I would assume.”

“No, quite the contrary,” Michael replied. “I came here to find the soul of Nietzsche, the spirit of Bach.”

“You forget,” the man replied, smiling a wicked smile. “We do not believe in either the soul or the spirit here any longer, friend. Bach is not played here because his music invokes the spirit of religious idolatry, which leads to the oppression of the working class. Nietzsche is a decadent spokesman of the jaded bourgeois class.”

“You read Marx then?” Michael asked.

“Hell no,” the man replied. “I am no red. I read Solzhenitsin before Marx. I read Shakespeare. I read Margaret Mitchell.” He pointed at his head: “I read anything that can take me in here away from all this.”

“I like it here,” Michael said, after an awkward silence. “I can’t remember when I’ve felt so peaceful.”

The man looked at him in a confused way. He shook his head. “It is peaceful, yes. Death is peaceful,” he said. “The only thing missing here is life itself. Our leaders are morticians. And we are the corpse. We have been in a coffin for more than thirty years.”

The man walked away, slowly. It seemed that he had nothing to do, no where to go. He seemed to be disgusted with Michael. He looked back and shook his head.

Michael did not look at the Wall upon his return journey to the West. He pretended to sleep, closing his eyes until he arrived on the western side at the terminal. He spent one more day in West Berlin. Then he flew back to the United States, feeling like one forced from a womb, back into an avuncular world, a reality which was not primary, which had not the age nor the dignity of the giants of the Old World.

PART TWO.

The Alien Agenda

I.

Michael’s return to teaching in the Fall of 1978 was a disaster. Upon his return to Eugene, Michael began a serious binge of hallucinogens and marijuana. He felt like a fallen angel, one cast out of his true home, one cursed to wander for ever among the philistines.

No one understood his nature. No one cared a damn for his soul.

He took mushrooms to try to deny his life, for he felt useless now, as a Nietzschean scholar and as a lover of Bach.

He taught a course on Nietzsche that fall term which was funded partially by the German Department and partially by the Philosophy Department. The course had been a success the previous year, when Michael had had a passion for the German. Now, however, Michael’s passion was more inward and self-destructive, fueling his feeling of alienation and betrayal.

Michael spoke only peripherally about Nietzsche. He spoke more personally about alienation, the self-destruction inherent in Western Society, the wonder of drugs, the power of the shaman in primitive societies, the poet as a shaman in modern society. But his lectures were poorly structured; he often came late and left early; he lectured students on the poverty of middle-class existence, often breaking into a rage, but not talking to the students, seeming to be thinking aloud.

Students began to lodge complaints to both departments.

One day in late October, Michael took hallucinogenic mushrooms prior to teaching his course. He was overwrought. He did not respect academia. He did not respect his peers. There was so much politics involved in the careerism of the department, so much ass-kissing, that he did not wish to be a part of it. He took the bus to school but realized he was having a bad time with the mushrooms. Fear was creeping in. Fear was rattling a metal sheet inside his brain, making his body quake; it was as if his body were breaking into pieces.

He began his lecture in a usual way: a quote from Nietzsche. Referring to his own academic colleagues, Michael quoted Nietzsche: “The whole molish business, the full cheek paunches and blind eyes, the delight at having caught a worm, and utter indifference toward the true and urgent problems of life.”

But then he stopped: he was gone. He flew away, gaping into the distance. He stood still for about ten minutes. Some students left the room, disgusted. One woman, infuriated that her tuition was being thus misappropriated, charged into the office of the German Department demanding that the chairman accompany her back to the classroom to witness the abomination.

There was nothing Michael could do. His mind had been fixed upon the “problem” of having colleagues at all, and then his mind had caught upon the image of Richard Horey, and the extent to which Michael had been abused the summer before fully became clarified in his mind: he became frozen with disgust. He became physically paralyzed again. He saw himself murder Professor Horey: as the sweaty old man stood behind Michael with his pants pulled down around his ankles, Michael turned and drove a stake into his heart; sweat-matted beard and the fluffed hair fell. Richard Horey, lying on the pavement, became a white horse puffing on cobblestone. Michael could not believe his eyes. Then a butterfly floated down from the top of a skyscraper and swept Michael away in a gust of weightlessness. He smelled lilac everywhere. And then he saw his grandfather, his mother’s father, whom Michael had loved so dearly, perhaps more than anyone in life, excluding Michael’s mother; he was standing on a cliff overlooking the sea. The grandfather said: “What are you doing to yourself, Michael? Why don’t you learn that to forgive is to live...?” Michael did not understand what his grandfather meant. A tear rolled down each cheek. And the grandfather said: “There are two trees and two fruit. One is the knowledge of good and evil. And if you eat that fruit you will be right all the time, but you will not live. The other is the Tree of Life. And if you eat that fruit, the fruit which is based upon making peace with your past, then you shall finally know life. You have to forgive your father, Michael. He does not know what he did to you, what wronged you so greatly...!”

That was all that Michael remembered.

When he awakened, he was lying in bed in the Johnson Unit, the Psychiatric Ward, at Sacred Heart Hospital. He had nearly died from mushroom poisoning.

That was the end of Michael’s teaching career. That was the end of his academic life.

Michael apparently had not merely floated in some benign paralysis to the ambulance and then on to his place of rest in the Johnson Unit. When Department Head Roberts had approached Michael, encouraged by Bridget Reed, the indignant student, Michael had emerged from the frozen condition long enough to accuse the Department Head of Nazi tactics, of trying to suppress free speech, and of an intent to bugger all the young instructors and students. Michael had cried out to those remaining from the class: “Watch out for Roberts! He’ll get you drunk and try to cornhole you! He did it to me—he’ll do it to you...!”

Department Head Roberts was, of course, aghast.

Michael was forced into a straight jacket and was forcibly extracted from his classroom, took a long needle in his arm, and then vanished again into a system of sleep.

When he awakened he had no idea that his entire life had been destroyed.

II.

In fact, Michael walked away from academia without much regret. He had seen enough. He did not wish to be involved in the ruthless occupation of social climbing and intellectual brigandage required to be successful in the realm of teaching at a university level. Nor was he often impressed by the quality of minds in academia. He felt that many faculty in the German Department (and this was true also of the Music Department and the Philosophy Department) had become experts in analyzing the great artists whose work resided within their domain and in criticizing the lesser modern artists who had not as yet been inducted by critics into the circle of greatness; however, they seemed so far removed from creation themselves, so removed from artistic production. Many of the music instructors could not compose to save their lives. They would talk endlessly about composition, about genius, but it was all something they only studied; they did not have an intimate acquaintance with either.

None of the German instructors could write an interesting short-story or poem; they wrote hackneyed articles to be published in journals created by academics for other academics, as a way of ensuring that colleagues and friends could meet the publishing requirement laid down by universities as a part of promotion and tenure considerations. The articles had become so specialized and so cramped in such journals that no one outside of their small circle could ever find them interesting. Michael knew a faculty member who devoted his entire creative life to constructing bibliographies or compendiums listing how often words such as “vater” or “mater” were used by Goethe, listing each occurrence from each work the German master had attempted or completed, even from published letters.

Such striving seemed of such a secondary value to Michael, at least once removed from life, from struggle, madness, creation.

When Michael recovered from his “nervous breakdown” (that euphemism intended to cover a vast array of symptoms and behaviors which Michael himself later came to view as a spiritual disintegration of an old personality-form, the mystic shattering experienced by all shaman as they gained access to the “other” world, the world of dreams, the mighty hierarchy of naked energies), he secured a state job working as a file clerk for the Children’s Services Division in Eugene. That office investigated child abuse and provided help for indigent families, all of which Michael felt to be a socially positive endeavor, and something very real, something which could actually help improve people’s lives. It made Michael feel better to consider his job politically correct, for he was the type of person who felt it necessary to justify to himself his behavior and his profession in terms of a world ethic.

He determined that, unlike his academic colleagues who spent all their energies chasing small promotions, notations in rigid journals, endowments which would allow them to feign research in Florence, Italy or Madagascar and have the public pay for it, Michael would devote himself entirely to the pursuit of music, through worship of the master himself, Johannes Sebastian Bach. This was the time he created his shrine. And ordered the German harpsichord. Michael felt he had been reborn into a world of pure spirit; and he considered music to be the art which was closest to that phenomena, pure spirit. He would work at his socially progressive job, make enough money to pay his rent, retain time and energy for his own pursuits; and seek the master, as old Ahab himself had sought the great white whale.

Michael admired madness, in a way. He admired life on the fringe, where nearly all artists lived, where they found, through their desperation, the gems of truth that became the foundation of their thought, the flame which lit their genius.

Michael admired the hippies who lived in and around Eugene because they chose to live on the fringe, indeed, were the fringe, rejecting middle class values of order, discipline, and sobriety. Michael was not a hippie. He was all that he despised: order, discipline, sobriety, even though he often sought to escape that final quality through his heavy preoccupation with drugs.

Michael was not a hippie, and would never be one. He did let his hair grow long on occasion, and took great pride in that, feeling as if he were tweaking the nose of the “establishment” by choosing that individual act as a statement of independence. He admired the naturalness of the hippies, their living close to wildness, their self-declared “spirituality”, their enthusiasm for drugs and for drug-visions. He felt that he was too bound up in the constraints of bourgeois living, that he could never be really “free” like the hippies were free. They were the great spirits of the age; he was a minor spirit only—that is, until he rose up, at his shrine, sitting before his German harpsichord, and embraced the spirit of the Buddha of the West. Then he was one of the truly great spirits of his age: when he was penetrated by Bach’s genius, when he lost himself, when he became totally free of himself.

III.

In March of 1983, Michael received a phone call from his mother. His father had been killed. “Please come home quickly!” his mother said.

Michael caught a flight to his parents’ home in Gary, Indiana. It always depressed Michael to come home. Gary was such a gray place, industrial, with too much poverty and racial strife, too many dark, uneducated faces, too much desperation. Michael’s mother had told him over the phone that his father had been shot and robbed. It was not until he arrived at his house that he learned that it had been a black teen-ager, a junkie, who had walked up behind his father while Oliver Meggs was taking his traditional evening walk, shot his father in the back one time, stood over the fallen man, shot him again in the head, and took his wallet, racing away into the dusk.

Michael’s knee-jerk reaction was to defend the black man. Guilt for centuries of crimes committed by white men against black men weighed deeply upon Michael’s conscience. The only way he could free himself from such guilt, apparently, was to find, in his mind, each white man guilty of oppression and each black man innocent of all crime or shame, ad infinitum. He could not think of the world as a composition of individuals, some of whom were good, some bad, most mixtures of the antagonist qualities. Blacks could be guilty of no crime, really, in his mind, because blacks were victims of a social outrage which had rendered them incapable of being judged a criminal by the white man. They were lambs. Should the lamb rise up on occasion to slaughter the lion, then so much the better, with regard, at least, to a quest for justice.

Of course, the outcome of this line of thought was, inevitably, chaos and social disintegration. If individuals were not responsible for their actions, were instead flotsam from historical cataclysms, unfree vibrations cast off by earlier infidelities and travesties, vibrating back to Cain and Abel, then one could not really justify law, or even punish criminality. No one was responsible; each entity was a link in an unbroken explosion which occurred billions of years hence, generating unfree echoes, which were neutral moral invectives, victims of that first echo. By definition, to Michael, the white man could not be innocent and the black man could not be guilty. If a black man killed his father, then, whether he loved his own father or not was not the issue; some grand karma was being played out for all the centuries of slavery and brutality imposed on the black man by his apparently eternal enemy, the white man.

The fact that the black man had enslaved other black men on the continent of Africa for centuries prior to the appearance of the white man did not enter Michael’s head. The fact that the black man had sold slaves to the northern Africans, and had done a heady trade in black flesh, prisoners of war and of tribal hatred, did not appear to be the issue to Michael. Nor was it an issue that white men had fought and killed one another by the thousands in a war which, in name at least, abolished black slavery as a legal institution, even if it did not successful abolish slavery’s emotional and religious insistence.

When Michael looked upon the racial injustices of the world he saw only the white man in white hoods near a burning cross beneath a black man swinging in a cottonwood tree.

There was more to race than that, of course. But that image had the strongest emotional appeal for Michael.

So when Michael heard Lawrence Meggs, his older brother, uttered the blasphemy: “Id like to take that bastard out and shoot him! If I was given the opportunity, I would personally execute that bastard!”, Michael exploded: “What do you expect the blacks to do! They’ve been persecuted for so many centuries! They have a right to kill white men, for all that they’ve done to the black race...!”

There was a stunned silence in the room. No one, family members or friends, could believe that Michael was actually defending the nineteen-year-old murderer.

“Michael!” his mother cried. “That man shot your father down in the street! Your father had done nothing to that boy! Would you allow that boy to go on killing men, fathers and husbands?”

“I don’t know what I would allow!” Michael replied. “But I certainly wouldn’t judge him. I certainly wouldn’t condemn him! It’s all more complicated than that!”

“It’s not complicated at all!” Lawrence Meggs rejoined. “That boy is a murderer. He is a junkie. He needed a fix. And so he shot dad and stole his wallet. He should be hanged or shot or he should have his head cut off! A society won’t survive if it has no moral structure, if it has no moral will!”

“If it won’t survive, then it won’t survive,” Michael replied, feeling great satisfaction in his conclusion.

Michael desired to have America die. He hated his country. He would have liked to see a revolution, a collapse of all order, the murder of middle-class families who seemed to him to represent all that was bland and without genius. He would have liked to see an alliance of all the poor countries of the world in opposition to America, an invasion of his own land, his own family brought down with fire and metal and bayonets, for his self-hatred ran deep; and his desire for self-sacrifice was his abiding concern.

Michael, himself, wished to die of course. He hated life, found it too much a burden, without greatness, without depth. He wished to be martyred, wished to be brutally beaten, tortured, killed, perhaps by a black man.

Having imbibed in his nightly pipe of marijuana, he would often imagine himself being taken prisoner by some eerie force, often without shape, name or identity. Sometimes it was a black man, someone seeking justice. Other times it was the “American police state.” It didn’t matter really who the oppressor was. This force would torture Michael, brutalize him, murder him; and Michael would offer himself up for the sins of his family. He did not love life so much as he did his desire to be noted for being virtuous.

Once Michael even saw himself, in a drug image which seemed to bleed out of his apartment wall, hung up on a cross, bearded, naked but for a loincloth. A group of black men and women stood below the cross, jeering him. Yes: he felt justified. He felt as if only now, after his own crucifixion, could he begin to really find himself, and face himself, naked, in his soul. Only now, having given everything, could he begin to forgive himself, now that he had been scourged and crashed into the direst form of poverty.

Then he would awaken from his dream, troubled, unsatisfied, for it had only been a dream.

IV.

The burial of Oliver Meggs brought out hundreds of residents of Gary, Indiana, of every color, rich and poor. In his years as a lawyer, Oliver Meggs had made many friendships which had endured for all his life. Oliver Meggs, while not a politically liberal, had been a man of humanitarian strengths. He judged people as individuals, not as members of a race. Not all blacks were victims of crime nor were all blacks criminals. All whites were not respectable; some were killers; some were thieves. The same was true of all other races, Asians, Indians, Hispanics. It was the individual soul which mattered. There were good and bad in all races. He tried to judge each man as an individual being, not as a symbol or a representative of some generic truth about a race.

So, he had white and black friends; and, most probably, he had adversaries of both races. And of every other race as well.

One thing impressed Michael greatly and troubled him also about his father: Oliver Meggs had obviously touched people of all races and from each economic strata. Rich and poor attended his funeral. Young and old. Men and women. Michael looked upon all of this with surprise; and it occurred to him that, perhaps, he had never really known his father. This realization made him uncomfortable. In fact, it made him so uncomfortable he did not accept that it was true. He had known his father. Perhaps those others attending the funeral had not.

Michael had always harbored a feeling of resentment against his father. When he had been told by his mother, over the telephone, that his father had been killed, a small thrill of excitement run up Michael’s spine. He was not saddened. He felt as if justice had been done somehow. Afterall, his father represented something evil, something ignorant, some force of decay. His death was inevitable; each culture had the myth of the assassinated king, overthrown by his son who represented a new day, a new idea of the world. Michael’s father had been the old king, the old way, the establishment. His death was necessary so that the world might go on living. The earth demanded it. The world would be better for it.

That was Michael’s generalized view of the meaning of the killing of his father. The personal view was more real however, more immediate. Michael had always resented his father, accusing him, in his mind, for not loving Michael enough. Oliver Meggs had never been close to Michael; and Michael had seemed to gladly take that as a sign of personal rejection. He hated his father for not being the perfect father, for not showing Michael enough affection, for not understanding Michael’s delicate nature and his love of art and philosophy.

As Michael sat in St. Joseph’s Cathedral at his father’s burial mass (an act which, itself, was against Michael’s principles, for he, in the spirit of Nietzsche, despised Christianity), the sense, the self-accusation really, that Michael had never known his father became stronger and stronger, seeming to speak an indictment inside his brain, an indictment which grew louder and more insistent as the burial mass developed. Michael had always supported the weak, the lame, the black, the poor, in his words, in his philosophy; yet, if he were to die at this very moment, no weak, lame, black or poor would attend his funeral. In fact, he did not know if anyone, except his own mother and brother, would attend his funeral. He had touched no one in his life, he had moved no one, he had changed no one’s life for the better.

True, there was his music. But he was no Bach—that was evident. He could work and work to master Bach’s masterpieces, but he would never be like Bach. In fact, he was not creative. That was all a lie. He was a technician; he could strive to master a technique, learning to perform music, perhaps even well. And it’s true, there was a creativity involved in interpreting music, even music that one did not, himself, create. But there was a lie in all of this too. He had been good and right and generous in his mind; but, in fact, he had lived a selfish life. He had no children; he had not real friends; he had helped no one. Michael had spent his life protecting himself from the world. His moral philosophy was really a vacuous posing, for it was attached to nothing concrete. It was like a shirt he wore. The shirt was always clean. But it said nothing about the world he lived in.

Michael’s father, on the other hand, had never claimed a moral superiority for the way he viewed the world. Yet he was loved by hundreds of diverse faces who wished to show him respect by attending his funeral. He was loved by many. Michael, in fact, loved no one, and was loved by none.

PART THREE.

The Ghost of the Father

I.

It is almost always easier to lie to oneself than it is to change the destructive patterns of one’s life.

Michael returned from his father’s funeral with a keen understanding that he was living a selfish life. He was not really an artist, creating something new and of value; he only claimed to be one; he was a technician, a dilettante. Of course, that understanding might have forced him into some crisis of identity, some middle-aged panic. It did not however.

Michael, instead, slipped rather pathetically back into his habits: work, marijuana, Bach, “transformational” meditation (that is, thought which regularly transformed itself, without affecting the molecules of phenomena). Truth was often a wicked thing afterall. Sometimes it mattered; sometimes it did not. Sometimes it, too, was an illusion. Afterall, didn’t everyone live a meaningless life? Didn’t everyone live a lie? Wasn’t, inevitably, this lie eventually true, as was that truth eventually a lie?

Words were a subtle suit of clothes, in which one might hide from a naked epiphany. The more subtle was one’s management of words, the more subtly one might build the bars of one’s prison.

Michael tried to fit back into his patterns as if nothing had changed. But things were not as comfortable as they had been before the death of his father. Work was now more difficult. He had worked for the past few years in a kind of unconscious round in the Children’s Services Division. He filed files, carried mail, typed memorandums, helped with paperwork. He was not sure what he really did; but it was not difficult, the people were largely liberal and decent; he did not have to concentrate too hard in order to accomplish his tasks; this left his mind free to wander relentlessly through the stratospheres.

All that changed when he returned from Gary, Indiana. Betty Niles had been promoted to the position of supervisor in Michael’s division. Betty Niles was a drab woman in her late forties, overweight, mentally sloppy, not well-liked really, although not disliked; she was not evil or cruel, clearly selfish or ultra-professional. She was just....amorphous, tacky: the kind of woman who preached her love of PBS, to placate the culture-gods in the office, but who, in reality, and everyone knew it, was addicted to Dallas and to rumors about the stars. She had worked in the office for years. People had hardly noticed her. Mel Collins had left the department; and when the issue of a replacement came up, Betty insisted on the promotion, based on her seniority, on her knowledge of the operation, and on the fact that she was a woman: she demanded affirmative action. She even suggested the possibility of a lawsuit if she was passed over for the promotion.

When it was announced that Betty Niles would be the new divisional supervisor, people in the office were shocked. Betty was nice enough; but she had never really seemed interested in authority; and she had never really seemed equipped for such responsibility. Everyone took it fairly painlessly however, after the initial surprise. It certainly could have been worse. There were people in other divisions with whom it would have been impossible to work.

A few weeks into Betty Niles’ tenure, however, Michael began to notice a hostile tone entering his relations with his new boss. Betty had recently been divorced. Her husband had left her for a younger woman—that was the story Betty told; another version had it that Betty had become so cranky and impossible, in her menopausal transfiguration, that her husband of twenty-seven years merely left her seeking a quieter life. Whatever the reason for their divorce, Betty had been undergoing severe personal stress. Perhaps her insistence on the promotion had been connected with her new-found marital status: she was alone, middle-aged; there was a huge void to fill; meaning in her life was now not clear to her. Betty looked at her new job as a salvation from her other confusions. She would take the job by storm, and wring from it something true and lasting to replace the old truth which had been taken away from her so cruelly.

Betty Niles blamed her husband for the pain she now experienced. And she began to blame men universally, seeing in her husband’s impulse for self-protection something small, ignoble, and pathetic. She cut her hair short, in a sort of crew-cut fashion. She began to read women’s books rabidly, those which professed men to be the cause of all the ills of the world. She attended women’s support groups; spent weekends at Breitenbush, living with other women, taking off her clothes in the woods, wandering naked with her “sisters” in the primordial state.

Betty’s hatred of men found a very accessible target in the office: Michael Meggs. Michael also hated men. He agreed with the feminists: men were beasts, mechanical, brutal, militaristic and materialistic. They were thugs who appreciated only sport and drink. And lust. Yes, Michael agreed with the feminist line entirely. But that did not matter to Betty. In fact, it was Michael’s weakness toward her which made him irresistible as a target for Betty.

Betty did not respect weak men. She did not respect men who were on her side. She wanted a man to be strong, fashion his own opinions, have no need of her; to treat her with respect, but not to treat her like a mother, always fearful and willess, conceding to her rule.

The war between Michael and Betty began with small slights: they would be at a division meeting, sitting around the conference table; Betty would delight in sending Michael back to her desk to pick up something she had forgotten. Or she would have Michael go get coffee for herself and her assistant. Betty became fond of having Michael do filing for a growing coterie of followers. They would sit and talk together; and Betty would tell Michael that Polly was too busy to keep up with all of her filing; that Michael should do it for her that afternoon.

It became clear to everyone in the office that Betty Niles had conceived of Michael Meggs as her whipping boy. He would be the brunt of Betty’s jokes to her friends; if he tried to fight back, Betty would snap and spark, threatening Michael. She could be very ferocious when she was alone with Michael. She was manufacturing venom from the bitterness in her heart. She would train it all on Michael; then strike him, like a rattlesnake springing from a bush. He began to fear her; to try to avoid her. The weaker he became, the more Betty despised him. She secretly longed for Michael to defeat her, even as she struggled to try to keep him down.

II.

Michael made a new friend, a student at the music department. His name was Robin Cox. Michael was walking by the First Congregational Church one Sunday morning and heard the most blessed organ music pouring out of the tower and down on the town. It was Bach. He had never heard the master played so wonderfully.

He entered the church. He expected to see an old gentleman, perhaps a German, seated in the loft, absorbed with the magic of the master; instead, he saw a wiry twenty-two year old man-child, his features proud and intelligent, autocratic really, his sharp face framed by a pair of thick black-framed eyeglasses.

The boy was a genius, Michael thought. He had all the alertness of a boy in first discovery. He would never be a man. He would for ever remain a boy.

Michael sat in the church to listen to his powerful interpretations. Michael was moved; moved almost to love. His life did not seem to make sense now. His father had died. He had a sense of loss which he did not want to admit. His work-life was now almost unbearable: being brow-beaten by a menopausal woman, who had a small cult of followers who seemed to enjoy most in life Michael’s oppression by his boss. He did not know what his next move would be. He dreaded going to work each morning. He felt trapped. He was old now; he felt old. He did not know what doors were still open to him.

That is why the beauty of Bach, in the hands of this intense young music student, moved him so. It had been so long since he had experienced something truly beautiful. He wept listening to the music cascade through the church, touching each muscle in his body, caressing his weary mind with such masterful logic, such swift order and passion.

Michael became friends with Robin. He approached the young musician after his performance in the church and told him how much he admired his talent. He admitted his own passion for Bach. They went out for coffee.

This was the beginning of Michael’s second love affair. It became much like the first, with the exception that Michael really believed he loved Robin. He admired his talent. When he gave himself up to him, he told himself that he was wedded with some form of genius, a modern version of Bach himself.

But their affair was much like every other relationship Michael had ever had: he was dominated by Robin. Part of the problem was that Robin, too, believed himself to be a genius. He held himself above Michael, who, by Michael’s own admission, was but a middle-aged dilettante.

Michael’s opinions about Bach did not count. Michael’s feelings did not count. Robin used Michael for his own pleasure; when he didn’t want Michael around, he caustically dismissed him: “I have serious work to do. Be gone. I’ll call you sometime.”

He would refer to Michael as the “college dropout”. Michael made the mistake of admitting to Robin his episode of nerves and drugs which led him to the Johnson Unit. Robin never let go of that information. He referred to Michael as having “weak nerves” and of not being strong enough for the world. Robin prided himself in his strength, especially the power of his will for success. Michael introduced the German philosophers to Robin. Within weeks, Robin was more an expert on Nietzsche than was Michael himself. Robin was always better than Michael, in whatever they did. Robin refused to give Michael credit.

Then he would roll him over at night and take Michael vigorously. Michael became addicted to this, because this was the only time that Robin was not putting on airs. This was the only time that Robin seemed to need Michael.

Michael did not think of himself as a homosexual, as I have said. Yes, he was involved with this young man, this man who did not treat him with respect. And there was something wrong with it: he knew that, felt it deep in his soul. He did not warm to the idea of homosexuality. He even told Robin one morning: “I’m not a homosexual!” And Robin said: “Oh, yeah, what do you think you were doing last night?”

But it wasn’t love. Michael felt guilty about it. He wished he’d never descended into lust and emotion. He felt dirty—and when Robin mistreated him, he began to feel trapped in his private life much as he also felt trapped in his work life.

Michael wanted something new. He was afraid he was losing his soul. He was becoming panicky again; his private life usually offered him sedation. Now, with this arrogant young man disturbing him regularly, he had no sanctuary from the tensions of the world.

Something was not right in all of this. He was living his life in the wrong way. Now, when he smoked marijuana, it brought him no peace, it merely electrified his mind, and shook his body as if it were trying to shake something out of him. His conscience was guilty. He was not living correctly.

One day he met an old friend, William Clark, at the local market. He was having coffee. William had worked at Children’s Services for about a year; and they had become friends. He told William of some of his problems, with Betty Niles and with marijuana, saying nothing about Robin. William said: “It’s time to give up drugs, Mike. They’re not creative for you any longer. They’re destructive. You need to strengthen yourself so that people won’t be able to take advantage of you.”

III.

Michael went home from this meeting and flushed his marijuana down the toilet. What William had said made the utmost sense to him. He did need to change his life. He felt as if he were experiencing a spiritual death. His relationship with Robin was wrong. It made him feel ill.

His position at work continued to further disintegrate. Betty Niles saw Michael and Robin together at the County Fair. She immediately understood that they were lovers. Her estimation of Michael sank even further. She told her friends at work that Michael was gay.

One evening Michael was walking home from work. He saw the light on in his living room; and he could hear the music of his harpsichord coming through the window. Robin was there. He did not want to see Robin. So he walked up Eleventh Street toward downtown. He passed by the Catholic Church, St. Mark’s. He stopped, looked back at the solid edifice, sensing its power, sensing the power of the citadel. He wished to be good, wished to be clean, with a clear heart and vision. He went inside.

He sat in the church for more than two hours. He felt peace, for the first time in months. He did not want to leave. It was dark outside. He prayed that God might grant him strength to gain control of his life again.

When he went home, his apartment was dark and quiet: Robin was gone.

He went to the church each night after work. He did not wish to see Robin again. He did not return Robin’s calls. Work continued to be stressful. He did not know what to do about work. He had saved no money. He thought about leaving Eugene and returning to live with his mother. He was forty-eight years old. He did not know what to do.

One evening, when walking toward St. Mark’s, a vagabond emerged from the bushes and walked directly toward him. He was a huge man, with long matted hair. Michael had seen him before, for years in fact: he was one of those dark spirits which inhabited the shadows and alleys, living on Pluto perhaps; he had a long history of threatening people on the street. The man had been a soldier in Vietnam; had been mentally damaged; returned to the U.S. a demon, without a future. He was skilled in martial arts; and he carried a hunting knife in his boot.

The demon walked up to Michael and said, in a voice as deep as Michael had ever heard, making Michael nearly sick with fear: “I’m going to bust those white teeth right down your throat, white man. I’m going to smash you to pieces with my bare hands.”

Michael began to shake. The voice, itself, was enough to make Michael shake. It was the voice of the devil—Michael was certain of it. Michael could not explain it to others, this understanding. Had he tried, they would have considered him mad. Did Michael really believe in the Devil? How medieval? Had Michael gone mad again? Did he need to return to the Johnson Unit?

But Michael was as sure of this as he was sure of anything. The demon did not touch Michael. But he stood in his path, glowering, threatening, speaking words that did not make sense, that seemed to be a chaotic rendering of madness too. But the voice was the devil. And so was his smell. The man was possessed. He was the personification of darkness.

“The next time I see you,” he said, “I’m going to break every tooth in your mouth and drive them down your throat!”

He was gone.

Michael reported the incident to the police. Of course the police knew about the man. He had threatened many people. But he had never broken the law. He would actually need to strike Michael to break the law. Words were not enough. Words were protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Michael went to Robin to tell him what had happened. Robin wanted nothing to do with him. He had also seen the man, the demon. He scoffed at Michael when he suggested the man was possessed by the Devil. Robin shook his head as if to say: “Mystical Michael: the man is psychotic! The devil has nothing to do with it!” Then he tried to coax Michael into his bed.

Michael left Robin’s apartment angrily. He had wanted help, not patronization. Certainly not seduction. That was why he was in such trouble now, surely. He had given in to evil. He had lived a selfish life, choosing personal pleasure instead of choosing a disciplined life.

Michael had a demon at work: Betty Niles was surely possessed by some dark force, some bitterness which transformed itself into hostility toward Michael. He had a demon circling his home: Robin, the boy-wonder, the boy-temptress. And, now, he had a demon blocking his path to his sanctuary, the church, wherein Michael had finally found some sense of salvation.

Michael began to devour the Old Testament. He took it with him to work. He read during his coffee-breaks and during lunch. He became convinced that the solution to his troubles lay hidden in the symbols and the histories of the old book. There was a power in the book. Michael needed power to organize his life.

Michael’s dreams became very vivid at this time. Michael came to realize that there was some intelligent force trying to reach him through his dreams. It was his father. His father was trying to reach him, trying to help him.

In one dream, he saw his father and his brother doing calisthenics, push ups, sit ups. They were athletes. Michael’s father beckoned to him: “Come on, Michael. Join us. We’re trying to get in better shape.” Then everything faded out.

The next day, Michael began exercising in his small little apartment.

Death was close to him. Everything was dark. He realized that something was trying to take his life. The only time and place he felt safe was in the church.

He either had to let the darkness take him, utterly destroy him; or he had to fight against it, defeat it. Michael began to realize that he had been choosing Death for too long, choosing darkness, disease, spiritual suffocation. He had called Death into his own house; now he stood before Death, Death with a devil’s voice, the smell of putrefaction, telling Michael that his intent was to kill him.

Michael continued to work out in his apartment. Once in the morning, before work; then in the evening, after his visit to church. He felt better. He felt as if he were awakening some part of himself which had for ever slumbered. His desire for life perhaps. He understood, now, that he did desire Life. He had never really lived; he had pretended at being alive; but he had never really lived.

After a while, the darkness seemed to recede from his life a bit. Betty Niles went on vacation. Robin returned to his home in Ohio when summer school ended. And neither had the Street Demon appeared for more than a week. Michael began to feel a sense of relief. Perhaps it had all been a bad dream. Perhaps things would be better now, now that the Autumn was coming on, now that he was exercising and reading the bible.

It was early September. Michael again went to St. Mark’s after work. He did not stay as long, because his life seemed to be stabilizing again. But when he left St. Mark’s and began to walk toward home, the Street Demon emerged from an alley and walked toward him shouting, shaking his fist at Michael. There was no one else in the world. Just Michael and his Death. Just Michael and Satan. At the end and at the beginning of the world. As it was and ever shall be.

The Voice came out at Michael again: the voice so deep with evil and moss and twisted vibrations, and caked with dung and with spears and rattling shields. The Voice made Michael shake and sent fear deep into his soul. The Demon believed himself black. He said: “All you whites are finished! I’m going to wipe you out and cut out your heart! Those pearly white teeth are going to come flying out of your mouth!” He doubled up his fist as if to strike Michael.

Michael did not run. He could not speak. The Demon gave off the odor of pestilence. His clothes were filthy and torn. His matted hair, in the twilight, seemed to contain snakes and rats; Michael tried to look into his eyes, but the Demon was too powerful. Michael could not look into his face.

“I’m your Death, white boy!” the Demon said. “I’m your Death! There’s no way you can escape me!”

The demon lurched down the street, looking back to shout threats at Michael. Michael looked around to find any witnesses on the street. There were none. The street was totally deserted.

That night, Michael’s father appeared to him in a dream. Michael was near the ocean. There was an animal in the brush. So Michael was crouching near a cliff, trying to hide. Michael’s father walked through the woods up to his son.

“Why are you crouching here?” he asked. “What are you afraid of?”

“There’s a lion in the brush!” Michael replied. “I’m trying to hide from him!”

“You’re the lion, Michael!” his father replied. “Arm yourself! Meet the beast on your own ground! Make yourself his image be as powerful as he; be as light as he is dark. If he would kill you, then kill him first. That is what it is to choose life. Strike him out of your life. That’s what it means to become a man. When you kill him you also kill the child in yourself. And then you finally become a man in this world.”

Michael’s father handed Michael a sword and a shield and said: “He cannot harm you, Michael. It is your own fears which threaten you. If you have the courage to die, then there is no reason that you must die.”

IV.

There was no one to help Michael. Nothing seemed to exist in his life but this battle which lay before him. He would follow his father’s directive. He knew that if it came to a physical battle, then he could not win. He had never fought with anyone in his life. He had very little physical strength. He could not see without his glasses. The Demon was strong, physically terrifying. But he could not run from the Demon. He must face him. He must go through the Demon to find his life.

Michael went shopping that next morning. He bought a hunting knife at the sporting goods store downtown. He would make himself a mirror-image of the Demon. There was a small shop across from St. Mark’s Church which sold religious articles. Michael entered the shop without any clear understanding of what he wanted to buy. He needed a shield. There was a medal of St. Michael: on this medal, Michael was driving Satan out of heaven, protecting the earth, holding in one hand a sword and in the other hand the balanced scale. Michael bought the medal; he took it across the street, sank it into a holy water fount located in the front of St. Mark’s, and then placed it around his neck.

Michael continued to exercise. He placed the hunting knife in his back-pack. If he was attacked by the Demon, he would have to kill him. He must be willing to strike the blow to save his own life: there was no one to protect him now, except himself. Since his father had died, Michael had become more and more aware of the obvious: he must rely on himself now.

It was more than a week later when Michael again met the Demon again on the street. He seemed to appear out of the mist, insubstantial; he began shouting again at Michael again. Michael approached the Demon. Somehow he had the strength to approach him. He was not afraid of dying. He remembered his father’s words; and he sensed somehow that the Demon was trapped inside his own prison, could not really reach out and touch another; that was part of the reason that the Demon was so terrible, because he had been cursed to such an isolation.

As Michael approached the Demon, the Voice lunged out of the giant’s body to surround Michael, making him almost sick with dread. The smell was there again too, as thick as gravy. Michael reached back into his back-pack, found the hunting knife. He unsnapped the knife from its sheath. The Demon sensed some aggressiveness on Michael’s part, drew his own knife from his left boot. Michael grabbed the demon’s coat with his left hand and he drove his knife deep into the Demon’s chest. There was a horrible screaming sound; the Demon went limp; Michael felt the Demon actually give up his strength entirely; and felt blood splash up on his face and on his shirt.

Then everything went dark.

Michael was paralyzed for several moments. He could see nothing, smell nothing, feel nothing. He looked at his hands. There was no knife; there was no blood.

He turned and looked down the street, behind him.

The Demon seemed like a man only, becoming smaller and smaller, making no noise, hurrying down the street, a balloon filled with air, punctured, vanishing in a puff.

Michael reached into his back-pack; he felt the hunting knife still in its sheath.

V.

Something had happened to Michael Meggs with the death of his father. Something in him had changed. It had been easy for him to judge his father for his imperfections while his father had still been living. With his father’s death, however, Michael had felt a void, psychological, spiritual, even philosophical. He began to realize that to hate his father was, indeed, to hate himself. And that self-hate, ultimately, led into impoverishment, into slavery, into suicide. Michael Meggs realized that he did not wish to die. Some force was awakened within him which began to say yes to life. He did not really wish his nation to be destroyed, invaded, pillaged. He looked at everything from some archetypal level now: the pristine first condition of elements. His fascination with the foreign and the distant were leaving him. His recent struggle for survival had brought him back toward the earth, back toward his own nation, back to his own region and town, back to himself.

When Michael returned to work the following Monday, he entered the Director’s Office and informed the Director, Ellery Jones, that he wished to file a formal complaint of sexual harassment against Betty Niles. Ellery Jones questioned him for about an hour, taking notes. He then dismissed Michael; and called Betty Niles into his office.

Michael had always liked one woman in the office, Rebecca Stipe, a shy, private young woman who had worked in Michael’s same division for about a year. She always kept to herself, did her job, was pleasant with Michael, did not join in the Niles’ Circle in seeking to belittle Michael.

Michael had never really talked with Rebecca Stipe. But that morning he went up to her and told her that he had filed a complain against their supervisor. Rebecca was astonished.

“I wondered how long you would put up with that treatment,” she said. “The way she’s treated you has been an embarrassment to everyone.”

Michael said nothing more to her about it. Her support made him feel much stronger. He smiled and turned away.

“If you need me to act as a witness,” Rebecca Stipe said, “I’d be pleased to help you.”

Michael’s heart almost jumped out of his chest. He stammered his thanks, smiled, and returned to his desk. Later in that morning, having watched Rebecca Stipe out of the corner of his eye all morning, Michael returned to her desk and asked her if she’d like to have lunch with Michael. She agreed.

They walked together at noon down the street toward the Cafe Central. It was a very pleasant day. Michael felt as if he had finally awakened from some strange nightmare. He felt strong, for the first time in his life really. Something new had been born in him. He could feel the sun running down his shoulder. Life might be good afterall. He brushed his arm against Rebecca’s arm. He felt a thrill. It was almost as if he had finally become a teenager.

THE BALLAD OF HARLAN AND MARY

I.

When Mary first met Harlan she was fascinated by his intensity. He was a small man, in his early thirties, powerful-looking in his short limbs, with a sturdy neck, short blond hair, and a face that seemed fashioned into a permanent quizzical expression. He had dirt under his finger-nails—in fact, he seemed a bit dirty everywhere. But Mary liked that. She liked a man who lived close to the earth. You could trust a man who lived close to his roots.

Looking at him from a distance, Mary had expected Harlan to be quiet and deep, a mysterious man of few words and of much inner strength. But Harlan was not quiet. When he first talked with Mary he became a cauldron of words. Stories, lively energies, came pouring out of his being, slightly overwhelming the young woman with his passion and his intense manner. They talked for more than an hour. It seemed like only minutes. Mary could not remember if she had said anything. She had merely asked the first question—”What is your name?”—and, an hour later, she knew more about Harlan Quayle than she would have ever considered possible in such a public fragment of time.

Mary was only twenty-four years old at the time. It was back in March of 1985. Mary had been divorced from her husband for about two months. She had already undertaken two quick love affairs in those two months, one with a man who drove trucks along the coast for a living, another who was a student at the university. She was still seeing those two men, off and on, free now that her marriage had been dissolved, eager to plant within her body the tree of liberation, the shrubbery of meaning.

When she first began to talk with Harlan, Mary understood that she wanted to have sex with him. She had a profound itch. He had an enormous energy. She could see it in his rapid movements, in his nervous traits. She began to picture his sexual organ in her mind, thinking it thick and full of energy.

Mary wanted to have every man she met now. She realized that she loved men, loved sex, loved intimacy: there was no reason for her to ever again turn away from her true nature. She was the Lover. That was her tarot card.

She gave Harlan her telephone number, and told him that he should call her.

II.

Harlan called Mary that same night after they had talked. Mary was in bed with Stuart, the architecture student at the university. Mary talked with Harlan for about three hours on the telephone, until about four o’clock in the morning. Stuart was sleeping contentedly, having enjoyed Mary’s fruits to his fullest before sinking into a sweet oblivion. He had not even heard the phone ring, so complete were his delectations.

When Mary finally returned to bed, having finally demanded that Harlan hang up and go to bed, she roused Stuart from his sleep and insisted on a second round of pleasure. She had become so sexually aroused while talking to Harlan that she needed immediate satisfaction. Mary pictured Harlan straddling her, driving his swollen heritage so deeply into her that she screamed and begged for more and more. Poor Stuart little understood that his own frenzied gyrations were not the primary source of his lover’s journey into bliss. Her mind was alive with the scents of another man, a man with soil on his cheeks, dirt under his fingernails, and with arms as thick as small trees.

III.

In less than two weeks, Mary had moved in with Harlan. It was very quick—yes, it was. Mary realized this. She explained to her two-year old daughter, Eliza, that mommy had fallen in love and they were moving in with her new daddy. Eliza didn’t seem to mind.

Of course, she knew nothing about Harlan. He was fairly prosperous. He owned his own landscaping company, The Aladdin Nursery. In fact, he had worked for a landscaper named Harvey Lawrence for about two years, studying the business, making connections through his boss, learning about accounting and advertising, techniques of trimming and of choosing plants. Harvey Lawrence looked upon Harlan as a sort of protégé, almost a son. Harlan paid him back by opening his own business, approaching Harvey Lawrence’s clientele one-by-one, offering them his own services for about two-thirds of what they currently paid Harvey Lawrence.

Yes, there was that side to Harlan too. But that was just business. Mary didn’t care about that.

There was the heavenly sex for Mary with Harlan, the long nights of repeated and intoxicating bruisings. Sometimes Harlan would become violent with Mary, violent in a way that excited her to orgasm. Of course, when Harlan understood that this rough sex drove Mary to their mutual goal he undertook it with calculation and zeal. But he was also gentle with her. Sometimes they made love in the most peaceful way, innocent lovers, tender friends.

Sometimes the violent side of Harlan frightened her. Sometimes, especially after having taken LSD or cocaine, Harlan would become almost psychotic. His eyes would begin to wander, he would enter some complex trance, nearly foaming at the mouth, uttering something about aliens and spacecrafts and an attempt they once had made to castrate him. This frightened Mary. She would cringe in the corner of the room, candle-lights flickering, demonic images running across the room, the sweet thick man with dirt under his finger-nails stumbling wildly in the fire-light like a crazed bug.

She would comfort him; he would weep in her arms, and then sleep.

Harlan took a great deal of drugs. He smoked marijuana while he worked. He took LSD at least three times each week. He ate wild mushrooms whenever he could get them. Sometimes, motivated by a desire to spend money, he would treat Mary and himself to a wild ride on cocaine. Mary liked drugs too, especially with sex, for they intensified her pleasures.

One night, after dinner, Mary having put Eliza to bed, Harlan admitted to Mary that he had once been taken aboard a UFO. They were sitting in the living room, listening to New Age synthesizer music on the “Hearts of Space” radio show, candles flickering and incense burning. They were love-children in fact. Even Harlan, with his short hair and his taut muscles, considered himself a hippie, a love child born out of time, from the corpse of the hallowed Nineteen Sixties. Mary liked sex and being “natural”; she liked ethnic clothing, liked to talk the lazy slang of the counter culture, disliked work and enjoyed the stretched warm sensation of drugs. Yes, she was a hippie too; although there were not many hippies anymore, not real ones anyway.

Harlan said: “I’ve never told you about the night I was picked up by a star-ship. They took me away. I felt I was away for years, but when I came back I had only been gone a few minutes.”

“What was it like?” Mary asked, her voice all gooey inside, so sweet with identification with Harlan. “Was it...like...awesome, or what? What did you do? What did they do to you...?”

“They studied me,” Harlan said. “It was like I was a mouse or a rabbit or something. And they ran some tiny machine across my body. It was like a microphone or something, with a long stem.”

“Wow,” Mary said. “That’s too much. That’s incredible, Harlan. What else did they do...?”

“They told me they had chose me to be their leader here on earth,” Harlan said. “They said they would come back and instruct me some day as to what my task would be. They were going to use me for some good deed, to try to bring some sanity back to the earth.” Harlan concluded: “I’m waiting for them to come back and give me my instructions.”

“Wow!” Mary said. “That’s too much! No wonder you have so much sexual energy. They probably electrified you with that microphone. Maybe they filled your penis with electricity...”

It always excited Harlan when Mary mentioned his penis. Seeing this was so, whenever she wanted to divert his attention back to what she most enjoyed, Mary would cleverly find some way to insert some discussion of Harlan’s penis into the conversation. It worked every time.

Harlan was on top of Mary in a matter of minutes. Mary was moaning and moving; and thanking God for the subtle fusion of lives which brought to her such joy. Mary thanked God for showing her the power of words.

IV.

Mary had lived with Harlan for about six months when it happened. It had not always been good with Harlan. Some days he would sit in the bedroom and refuse to come out. He would sit cross-legged on the floor and weep and sink into deep rummaging trances. He would sometimes utter chants which he later told Mary were songs given to him by the dead American Indian chiefs, many of whom he had met during his journey into the land of the dead.

“I regularly travel into the land of the dead,” Harlan told Mary. “I know how to turn myself into a hawk or an owl and travel into worlds that none of the rest of you can imagine.”

Mary shook her head with amazement; but, inside, she began to worry about Harlan. He seemed to be changing. He seemed more explosive every day.

Their love-making also became more bizarre. He began to torture Mary during their lovemaking. He once strangled her during sex so hard that she passed out. Mary did not complain, because the sex was most intense for her when accompanied by violence. Again, however, she began to fear Harlan; and began to think of escaping from him. She began to feel trapped with him, by his intensity, and through his sexual power over her.

One morning, over the breakfast table, he told her: “If you ever try to leave me, I would probably have to kill you and Eliza. And then kill myself.”

There was a look of sad resignation on Harlan’s face. This made Mary feel both terrified of Harlan and compassionate for him, that he could need Mary so badly.

One of the things that terrified Mary about Harlan was his ability to read her mind. She thought about leaving him; he warned her not to leave him. She thought about going to work; he advised her that he didn’t want her to work. She thought about taking Eliza to live with her grandmother, until Harlan was feeling better; he told her that he considered Eliza his own daughter, and would not tolerate any attempt to take her away from him.

Harlan was alternately terrible and a saint.

Once he made Mary violate him. He had bought a dildo at the sex-shop in town. He ordered her to strap it on and take him from behind. She tried to refuse. But he looked her in the eye and said: “If you don’t do it, I’ll kill you and Eliza and then I’ll kill myself. I’ll do it tonight!” The look in his eyes was totally committed. She could not deny him; she could not look into his eyes. His aspect was frightening.

He helped her to do it to him; he cried out in pain; insisted that she continue; then he told her afterward: “I needed to know what it is like to be a woman. The aliens came to me last night; and they instructed me to do this.”

Then he was sweet with her for days, sweet to both Mary and Eliza.

V.

Harlan owned a home on the northwest end of Eugene, on a large lot not far from the Willamette River. Each house was set on its lot like a monk’s cloister, far removed from the edge, at the furthest point from each other house. Inhabitants of this part of town tended to be eccentrics, solitary beings who had no time for friends and no need of neighborliness. Most houses were surrounded by junk, parts of old machines, several cars on blocks, rusting iron and rotting wood. Most houses also were home to many dogs, ragged and savage-looking dogs, mirroring their owners in their dislike of strangers. Some of these dogs ran free. Others were kept behind chain-link fences; or were tethered to poles in yards.

The house closest to Harlan’s was owned by an old man named Billy Collins. He was over seventy years old, lived with his wife, and kept three dogs behind a fence in his back yard. The dogs often howled at night. This developed into a serious problem for Harlan, as he could not sleep because of the noise of the dogs. He warned Billy Collins several times. Collins was not receptive to Harlan’s complaints. It was his yard. What he did with his yard was his business.

Harlan finally called the police. Billy Collins was warned that he was responsible for noise made by his dogs; that if he could not control them, then the animal agency would be forced to come to his home and take his dogs away.

A feud developed between Harlan and Billy Collins.

One night Harlan woke up in a sweat, breathing heavily.

Mary was frightened by the look in his eye.

“Are you alright?” Mary asked.

“They’ve come back to me,” Harlan said, his face resolute. “The star ship’s returned to bring me my task. I have my calling. I’m not allowed to talk about it.”

It took Mary almost an hour to return to sleep. Harlan’s psychotic intensity again had disturbed her. And Billy Collins’ dogs were barking relentlessly in the distance.

VI.

Harlan had become so strange that Mary did not pay much attention to his vision that night. He had visions every day now. Mary wondered how he could keep his business running, considering his mental state. But Harlan had a way of hiding his psychosis behind an affable nature. She wondered if anyone understood how extreme he was.

The next day was a Saturday. Harlan usually worked in the morning and early afternoon on Saturdays; then he would join Mary and Eliza in town at the Saturday Market, a weekly gathering of counter-culturists living around Eugene. There was music, and trinkets for sale. The air was festive. It was a sort of small Woodstock Nation: love was everywhere; community was rampant.

When Mary awoke that morning Harlan was gone. She made nothing of it—he was no doubt at work. Mary dressed herself and Eliza and drove into town. She met with friends, passed the day, and then began looking for Harlan at about 3:00, his usual time of appearance.

On this day, however, Harlan never appeared.

At first, Mary was worried when Harlan failed to appear. What if something had happened to him! What if he had been hurt! Mary did love Harlan, in a strange way: she loved his good nature, even as she feared his irrational outbursts. By 5:00, with Harlan not appearing, Mary began to feel free. It was like she had been holding here breath for several months. She had not been aware of this, of course. Now she let herself breathe. Something had happened to free her from his power.

At 6:00, Mary drove home with Eliza.

As she was driving home on River Road she was passed by two police cars, sirens pulsing, lights turning. She pulled to the edge of the road to let them pass. She made nothing of it.

She drove on. As she approached her home, Mary was shocked to see that the police cars parked near her own house. As she drove closer, then up to the house, she could see as many as four police cars, two other cars being parked in front of Billy Collins’ house.

She told Eliza to stay in the car. She hurried over toward the group of policemen, fear turning her stomach into queasy light sensations. She remember clearly now Harlan’s words the night before: “I have my calling. I’m not allowed to talk about it.”

As she approached the group of policeman, Mary saw Harlan sitting on a tree stump in their back yard, handcuffed, a stupid lifeless grin on his face. Behind Harlan, several policemen and ambulance attendants were working near Harlan’s branch shredder machine. A man’s legs, dressed in faded blue overalls, protruded from the shredder. Mary could not believe her eyes. She knew that the half-eaten man was old Billy Collins.

VII.

No one who knew Harlan could believe what he had done. Even Mary, who had seen Harlan in his most extreme moods, concurred with friends: “Harlan was not like that. I don’t know what could have happened. I can’t believe that he’s done this. Billy Collins must have done something to Harlan to set him off.”

Mary cried and Eliza cried. Through some subtle instinct of the mind, Mary washed away memories of Harlan’s madness with her, the wild rites of sexual torture, the warnings that Harlan might kill everyone in the family. She remembered only his sweet nature. She remembered only his tender love for Eliza.

Mary tried to visit Harlan in jail, but Harlan was being kept in the mental ward of the jail and was considered not stable enough to receive visitors.

Each week, Mary tried to see Harlan. Each week she was told the same thing: he was not capable of receiving visitors. Finally, Mary talked with Harlan’s court-appointed lawyer. The lawyer arranged for Mary to meet with Harlan. The meeting took place on a Saturday morning in early October. The meeting place was in a basement room lit by harsh exposed light bulbs. There were green benches on each side of a protective grid. The walls were also painted green.

Mary was the only person in the room for about ten minutes. Then Harlan, dressed in a white canvas straight-jacket, was led in by a uniformed guard. The guard helped to settle him on the bench, and then stood near the door, watching the prisoner from a few feet away.

Mary could hardly recognize Harlan. Everything about him had changed: physically, he seemed to be smaller. He had lost his thick limbs and he lost his livid intensity. He was scattered now, his energy was exploded. The permanent quizzical look on Harlan’s face, which Mary had found so disarming, had been replaced by a sort of leering giggle. He looked at Mary as if she were his mother. He tried to hide his eyes from her, as if feeling shame for having been caught doing something wrong.

“Harlan, what has happened to you?” Mary finally asked.

Harlan giggled.

“Mary,” he started. But he could not go on. He began to giggle again, and he could not stop. “I had to do it!” he cried. “I had to do it, Mary! It was my job!”

Harlan did not speak again. He merely laughed a small private laugh, his eyes rolling about the room as if following a clown riding on a merry-go-round.

Finally, unable to reach Harlan, Mary left the jail. She felt free again as she stepped out into the fresh air, as she had when she had first been divorced. She looked at her watch. It was only 11:00. She needed to pick up Eliza; then they would spend the rest of the day at the Saturday Market.

All in all, life was good. She had a place to live—Harlan’s house was now her own house. She had managed to save a little money. She might have to go to work, but she could manage that.

Across the street a man with long stringy brown hair and a beard was giving Mary a long look. He was about to mount his bicycle. Instead, he walked over toward Mary. He greeted her with hippie jive, shallow greetings in long stretched syllables, lots of “oh”s and “wow’s. He gushed a bit, telling her that his name was Karma and that he thought she was pretty hot looking. He had the tattoo of an eagle on the inside of his left arm.

“Are you going to the Saturday Market?” he asked.

“Sure, I’ll be there,” Mary replied.

“You want to fool around with me there?” Karma asked. “I’ve got some hash. We could get high together...”

“Sure,” Mary said. There was something about Karma, something about his voice, which made her feel young and desirable. He wasn’t handsome really. But he seemed gentle. The tattoo did look like a prison-house tattoo. So what. He had probably been sent away for possession of grass. He seemed alright. And he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. He kept looking at her breasts, and smiling shyly. That made her feel good. Afterall, she didn’t have a man any longer. Harlan was gone. She might even ask Karma home for dinner that night.

VIII.

Several weeks before Harlan was to go to trial, he retreated from his abstraction long enough to confess to his lawyer what had happened.

Harlan explained that he had been chosen by the higher intelligences to lead his nation toward a greater destiny, one which was inclusive, and based on love. The earth was in danger, because it was dominated by selfish egos, driven by power and a lust for money.

He had been taken away in a star-ship. He had been examined by these higher intelligences. They told him he had been chosen for the next life. And they promised him they would return near the great apocalypse, to explain to him his role in the new world.

The night before the deed was done, the higher intelligences returned again to Harlan. They came to him while he slept. They drew him back into their star-ship; and they told him: “We have prepared you to take over the world, to be the next king of the earth, to lead your planet to its greatest development of compassion. But there are others, sent by other planets, who wish to destroy our plan. They have a desire to castrate and kill you. They want to steal your power, and leave the earth unfilled, sterile and abandoned.”

Isis appeared to Harlan, dressed in red silk, her black hair piled on her head. She handed Harlan a knife, saying: “It is the element of power. It is the power of electricity.”

Harlan wondered how he would recognize these enemies. “They will be the ones who oppose you. They have dogs from hell protecting their castles.”

When Harlan returned from his travels in the heavens, awakening in his bed, he heard the barking of dogs and his mission became clear.

Billy Collins was not an old man at all. He was an alien dressed in an old man’s body, as a disguise. He wanted to castrate Harlan, to steal his power, to keep the new and better world from being born. He had been sent by a dark planet in order to destroy Harlan’s ascent to power. He was protected by the dogs of hell who surrounded his castle. Why else was Billy Collins living near Harlan, if not to keep an eye on him and eventually to strike him down? Harlan had been warned by the higher intelligences because Billy was preparing to kill Harlan and his family. Harlan must act to protect his destiny and the sweet women in his life.

Harlan rose that Saturday morning around 5:30, dressed quietly, went to his work shed, and fashioned a thick wire noose with which he might execute Billy Collins’ dogs. He climbed the Collins’ fence and crept down through the bushes toward the Collins’ garden. The dogs were kept in a fenced sub-yard which also included a storage shed where the dogs were often kept. All three dogs were Doberman pincers. Harlan walked up to the fence; the dogs barked and snapped at the intruder, their teeth bared, their eyes rabid. When the first dog leaped against the fence at Harlan, he caught the dog by the scruff of the neck, lowered the thick wire noose over the dog’s head and pulled it closed and began to strangle the dog. It took almost five minutes to kill the powerful dog; it seemed like hours to Harlan. He used every ounce of his muscle to pull the dog up on the fence and to suffocate him. When he was sure the dog was dead, he undid the noose and let the dog’s body fall back to earth.

The other dogs grew wary of Harlan and his noose. They stopped barking, and began to slink around the fenced-in lot, anxious to escape their prison. They sensed that he was more powerful than they. The first dog lay crumpled in the dust, unmoving.

Harlan tried to lure a second attack by offering the dogs his sleeved arm over the fence. A second dog attacked. Harlan grabbed his collar, affixed the noose, and began the slow strangulation of his second animal enemy.

The gods were protecting Harlan. No one could stop him now.

When the second dog was dead, and cut loose, Harlan entered the small pen and attacked the third dog, who was crouching in the far corner, spiritless, filled with fear. When cornered, this dog finally attacked, and Harlan, with the strength of ten dogs, lifted the terrified animal into his wire noose, then slung the dog over the fence. The dog thrashed against the fence, gurgling wildly as he suffocated. Then the third dog was dead. It was not yet 6:00.

Harlan dragged the three carcasses into the shed. Then he sat in the shed, resting, regaining his breath. Harlan needed to work today too. So he needed to complete his work here quickly and efficiently.

He waited in the shed for almost an hour, surrounded by the carcasses of the three dogs. Finally, he heard a sound in the house: the door opening. He peeked out from the shed. Billy Collins had been curious about the silence of the dogs. He had come out to look.

Harlan looked around the shed for something to use against Billy. He grabbed a shovel. Billy had entered the fenced area and noticed fur stuck to the fence in two places. He saw blood on the ground, and then the marks of dogs having been dragged. He charged toward the work shed. He should have been more cautious; but he was angry.

As he came around the corner, Harlan struck him in the face with the shovel. It was like Harlan was hitting a baseball, only the baseball, in this case, was the head of Billy Collins.

Billy fell to the ground with his jaw and nose broken, his dentures shattered, blood running from a forehead gash into his eyes. He was not unconscious. He muttered: “You son-of-a-bitch, Quayle!” But Harlan needed to get to work, so he did not return a greeting—he merely said: “I know who you are Collins. I know you’re an alien. I know you planned to kill me.”

He unzipped Billy Collins overalls, pulled out the old man’s penis, and began cutting it off with a pair of grass clippers. Billy Collins screamed, tried to resist, to rise; but he was paralyzed from the first blow. He looked up at Harlan, saw him put Billy’s own penis in his pants pocket, then saw him raise the shovel again. Harlan struck Billy seven more times. Then he dragged the old man into the work shed.

Harlan entered the Collins house with the grass clippers, closed and deadly, which he held like a dagger. He needed to also kill Collins’ wife. But Mrs. Collins was not in the house. She was visiting her sister in Seattle. When Harlan did not find the old woman, assuming that she was gone, he returned to his own house, washed his hands and face, then drove to his nursery to do his Saturday morning work.

Harlan returned home about 3:00 that afternoon. He wanted to meet Mary and Eliza at the Saturday Market; first, however, he needed to dispose of the bodies next door. He started up the branch shredder in his backyard, a noisy brutal machine designed to snap thick tree stems into sawdust and mulch. He carried the bodies of the dogs, one by one, in a gunny sack into his back yard. He threw each into the shredder. The machine snapped and wheezed, gnawing each bone into a fractional submission, spewing fur and blood into the air, a fountain of gore. He started to laugh. This was all too funny.

He dispatched of each dog in the same manner, one at a time.

Finally, he dragged Billy Collins’ body in the same gunny sack over to the shredder. He lifted the old man on to his shoulder, and drove the man’s head down into the shredder. The crackle and pop and shower of bone and blood continued. Harlan was covered with scarlet-colored marrow-bone. He pushed the old man’s body deeper into the machine. Then the machine stopped. It broke. It just died. Harlan could not believe it. Everything had gone so smoothly up to then. The gods had been with him. Now, what had happened? Had the gods tricked him? Would they now desert him?

He could not fix the machine with the old man’s body pinned inside it. He tried to pull Billy Collins out of the shredder. But the teeth of the machine had bit so deeply into the old man’s bones that they would not let go. He could not get the body out of the shredder. It was frozen; Billy Collins legs were sticking up in the air.

Harlan did not know what to do. So he sat down and began to laugh. He could not look at the absurd image without laughing. He laughed for almost an hour, sitting on the ground, beside the shredder. He laughed until his eyes were clouded with tears.

A neighbor had been driving by the Quayle house and noticed the body of a man upside down in the Quayle branch shredder. The neighbor had called the police.

When the police arrived, Harlan was still laughing. He could not stop laughing.

When the police searched Harlan for a weapon, they found Billy Collins’ severed penis still in the pocket of Harlan’s work pants.

NOT AN ORDINARY STORY

This is not an ordinary story.

So he said; and I, not being one to doubt him, since he seemed reasonable and effectively sensitive, proceeded with the understanding that he was someone special and his story would be the kind of revelation that would, if not change my life, then, at least, produce in myself a fathom or two of awe.

Part One:

It Was a Black Night

It was a black night, he said, as all nights can be black, wrapped in some insuperable shade, the moral edge of that shade being a manufactured dread coming out of myself, which, in this case, in my case, I understood to be primarily the forms of the doubts I was harboring, those Doubts which were haunting me, concerning the fidelity of my wife and the direction of my life, Doubts which helped to add a darker hue to an already somber world. But there was more to it than that, more than a projection of despair on a neutral neural screen. There was a darkness, too, in my immediate environment, once a small careless town with families and many languages, an ethnic brew of Italian, Czech, Polish, Basque, Irish, some little Spanish, but which had become, almost overnight, with the energy boom, and the influx of desperate men and families built on quick gain and life in the mobile home complex, a frontier town, a town of money and drugs and prostitution and gambling.

This was my home town, Rock Springs, Wyoming. You can count the trees in town on one hand. The summer comes in and lays a hard frown on a dry village, baking it to a crisp. Then the winter billows in, soiling the brown land with snow and with wind and with a frozen vengeance that drives most to a bottle or to some other form of rage or infidelity. There is not much left. There is occasional neon. There is the flash of metal, and the wonderful smell of gasoline, the fragmentary joy of that full tank of gas, the blackened pavement, a place to proceed to even if there is no place to actually go. There is the rifle, the flash of fire, the tomahawking impact. There is the long day down at the reservoir, with beer and nothing to say. Sometimes there are high school girls in brief suits for swimming, with their boyfriends who are tough and strutting over false sand like the world is an easy oyster.

I was there once. I was one of them. In a way.

Then I left, moving to college, moving into the brain, out of the body, out of myth, into critique. That is part of my story. Walking on glass. Afraid that something will break and then everything will break (everything is built on everything else, with a very frail structure, like toothpicks holding together a forest of see-through granite) and then something will fall out of the sky. That is my story: something falling out of the sky.

One day at school, at the University in Laramie, I entered a party of friends in a dormitory room. The beer had been opened and the marijuana was being circulated. There were pretty women, all dressed for seduction, a night of throbbing, for they wanted sexual entry as much or more than the men did, who were all my friends, as I have said, the men; and the women were silk creatures I had always hoped to be exposed to. I entered the room, and all eyes turned to measure the intruding figure, to gauge his worth, to examine his style and character and perhaps even his grace, for these were querying eyes. I opened my arms, as if to instruct some invisible orchestra to open up with strains of introduction, with an ample dose of heroism mixed into something jazz velvet and sexually inviting. It was more than a Ta-Da I believe. But it was certainly a Ta-Da, if nothing more. My arms were open, I was stage-bound, the eyes were upon me, and, as I stood frozen in the spotlight of judgment, a ceiling tile became unloosed, fell from the sky, and struck my head, dazing me for a moment. Laughter exploded throughout the room.

There was no damage of course. The tile was relatively soft. The laughter was not a permanent scar. But it was an indication of something, in terms of my own destiny, I came to believe. There had always been something. There had always been an awkwardness, something to keep me from reaching my full potential.

I have a bad star, that is what I’m trying to say, a star that does not allow me to move the world by grace, but which moves the world, instead, through me, to laughter, a kind of pillorying laughter which is often, to the observing world, more a release of anxiety than it is a pillaging riotous humor, an exultation founded upon my comic genius.

One day, still in Laramie, I was walking across the campus. It was a beautiful spring day, the sidewalks and grass quadrangles were filled with sun-seekers and others seeking to show off their long-hidden beauty (winter lasts about eight months in Wyoming). I was feeling cool, yes, that was the word for it. I was a senior in college; I felt strong; I felt good; I felt like the world was finally smaller than myself, and I was astride it, walking with confidence and understanding the nature of power, as I took a healthy drag on my Marlboro cigarette. I reached back to get a comb from my back pocket. I pulled the comb out with a flourish, gave my hair a couple of short strokes, brushing it back from my forehead. I knew that the girls on the street were watching my movements: they understood power in a man. They knew that they wanted a man who could conquer fear. But then something broke; again, it was a glass structure, held together by something fragile. It began to tumble down. I heard girls laughing; a young man yelled: Look at that! My God, he’s on fire!

It was true: I was on fire. How could it be? I had smelled smoke. But it had been very distant. I had been larger than anything so rude and unrelated to me as fire. Then I felt heat on my backside, something burning against my buttock. I had lit my cigarette with a pack of matches; then I had put the matches in my back pocket. I had put on some weight, and it was hard to get my hand in the fronts pockets, for the skin of the jeans was so tightly welded to my flesh. Somehow, in some unimaginable way, again the production of a spirited and mischievous guardian angel, I had lit this book of matches as I withdrew the comb from my pocket. The matches must have smoldered for a while, then lit the entire pack. The next I knew, my levis were on fire and I was bouncing across the grass on my butt, trying to put out an unordinary brushfire. I could imagine the cute girls telling friends and lovers that night: “You should have seen this dork today. He was walking down the street, and his pants caught on fire, and he had to bounce across the quad on his butt to try to put the fire out.”

Yes, there had no doubt been much enjoyment that night riding on the wings of my own bird of shame.

Armageddon was near. That much was clear.

I was being punished because I was young, and because I had some fear which I was not able to face. Perhaps. In truth, there was no way to understand it, this mawkish flaw, other than in considering it the result of some impish order, the imp being, as I have suggested, some force akin to destiny, but destiny without grandeur, destiny with a mocking mood, a humor directed against the human by the eternal.

But that is not the story, surely. That is not the whole story. Humor is not even a major element of the story. The story turns black, and boiling, like some doubly troubled toiling cauldron of causality. One piece moved; another piece retorting. An even darker message. Intuition. Love turning to stone. It is my life, but a life so removed from itself that it no longer seems to even belong to myself; rather, it seems to belong to some author who has penned something obscure and bizarre from a nasty nightmare which is only fragmental but is too true to not be cogent. Somehow it belongs to me—this life.

I finished college in 1974 and returned to Rock Springs with a degree in English literature, with nowhere to go, no calling really, no desire to teach, no work awaiting me. My head had been expanded, and my love of language had been nursed to oblivion. I had read and learned to love the likes of Melville, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Poe, Whitman, Faulkner, Tolstoy, and even Dante and Chaucer. But I had not developed any real job skills. My father had decided to sink his life-savings in an old cement plant that had been closed for years. The sand had grown up around the wind-pocked walls of the old fortress, located about six miles to the west of town. The machinery had not been hauled away. Nothing worked of course. But my father reasoned that, with all the expansion in the region, the mining, the government resource projects, all the new demand for housing which inevitably accompanied the energy boom up-cycle, that the family could make a fortune in cement if we could just get the old plant up and running again. My brother was helping him in this project. My dad was working full-time as a carpenter at the trona mine. He would go home at night, eat dinner with my mom and sisters, then drive out to the plant at about eight o’clock and work on re-wiring the plant until about one o’clock. He would drive home, sleep for about four hours, and then drive out to the trona plant for his regular eight to ten hours. He was making big money, and his profit was being poured into the cement plant, which I considered an empty hole, but which the family considered a chance at wealth and early retirement. My brother also had a full time job, at West Vaco; he would meet my dad at the plant every night, helping him to construct his dream. Each weekend was devoted to the plant. When I graduated I was informed that the family expected me to return home and help the family with the cement plant.

Rock Springs, and a few other Wyoming towns, had been eviscerated by energy speculation in the mid-1970’s. I could not even recognize my hometown when I returned from college. There were new faces, new buildings, a new but darker energy; the only positive factor in all the change was that people were making more money and there was plenty of work. Everything else was negative. And, since everyone was being paid more, the cost of everything went up. There was not enough housing. There was not enough police. There was at least one shooting death a week in Rock Springs now. The town was filled with desperate, lonely faces. Everyone had money, but no one had a life, no one but the old town residents, who, for the most part, felt betrayed and forgotten as this new tide of immigrants swept over the landscape, furious with longing but apparently without ability to raise order out of the chaos, achieve calm from their current killing despair. Prostitutes were brought in. Gambling. There had always been talk about the Mafia running Rock Springs; in fact, there were many Italian families in town, and there may have been some truth to the portrayal of Rock Springs as a stopping point for Italian Mafia between Chicago and Las Vegas.

Rock Springs, in effect, became a very ugly town. It became more ugly physically, although it had been ugly before: dry, treeless, dusty, bleached out. There had always been something brutal about Rock Springs, and all of southern Wyoming for that matter, reflecting the landscape no doubt, which was dry and not especially friendly to life in the summer months and outrightly vengeful in the winter when snows and winds came in and froze everything and everyone solid for about seven months, leaving people dry and hollow, cold and individualized, each face fighting for survival in a climate and a history which did not care a fig for the continued survival of a species let alone some individual speck upon the plain. Flat mobile home parks now further discolored the bleak landscape. There was not enough housing. The culture of the mobile home came sweeping over the town, holding it hostage. The ugliness was not just a physical ugliness. There was the moral ugliness of prostitution, narcotics, the magnified presence of pornography. Child molestation began to occur, almost unknown prior to the influx of the strangers. Assaults occurred every day and night. One could not go to a bar without seeing a fight or a knifing. Guns appeared everywhere, some men even wearing sidearms as in the days of our ancestors. It was like living in an old west town again. There was no safe place. Each man and each woman needed to be armed.

I learned this the hard way, of course. I somehow felt myself free to roam about my hometown as if it belonged to me still through some birth right. I had returned in 1974, as I have said, after taking a bachelor’s degree in English. I worked for my family trying to make the cement plant productive again. I worked full-time at the plant, and received evening and weekend help from my father and brother. It was a sink-hole, the plant. It was a dream that was bleeding my family to death, sucking up my fathers salary and retirement money, as we;; as my brother’s savings....it was like an old hose that springs a new leak as each old one is repaired. The entire hose needed to be replaced. But we had no money to buy a whole new hose: so we labored for nothing. The dream of wealth became larger and larger, something to be taken, even as that dream became more and more unreachable.

My family considered me “negative” about the plant. I argued that it was an impossible situation. We did not have the money required to make the plant work. We should sell it to someone who did. My father became angry with me, shook his hand in my face, and said: “Joe, you have become such a quitter since you went to college! I don’t understand what has happened to you! You have read too many books perhaps! Life is not books alone! Life is the will to meet challenges head-on! And to defeat difficult odds to make your dreams come to life...!”

I loved my father. I admired his tenacity. His unwillingness to recognize the obvious. My brother had dreams of becoming very rich, and being one of the leading citizens of the town. Power: that was his goal, one from which he never blanched, one that he never denied. “Money rules,” he used to say. “If you have no money you have nothing to rule, no kingdom, nothing!” My mother was Italian, plump, black-haired, with a loud and happy nature, an argumentative spirit, like so many Italians. She felt, as a wife, that it was her duty in life to support her husband. And she felt that, as a son, it was my duty, too, to support my father’s dream. All else being equal, I should keep my mouth shut and do what my father wanted.

I understood the virtue of my mother’s ethic. But I was twenty-four years old. I had my own ideas. I could not just quietly watch this bad dream publicly execute my father, not without at least speaking my mind. A family did not just rotely follow the instructions of the father. A family was like a family of nations. It did not always get along. Sometimes it fought against itself. Sometimes it even hated itself. But it never did lose its blood connection as a family.

Anyway, one night I had argued with my father, and then with my mother, who pleaded: “Just do what your father says, Joe. Just let your father be the boss on this one. You never know, he might be right!”

I left the house and walked downtown. It was a warm summer night. August, 1974. I had ten dollars in my pocket and I wanted to drink a few beers, to try to cool off, maybe look at the prostitutes down at the bars. I went to the Cowboy Bar, an old conservative establishment down on Neely Street, frequented mostly by the old faces of the real residents of the town. Prostitutes worked this bar too; but there was none of the topless dancing or sex shows that were featured in the new bars down on Paramount Avenue.

There was not much going on. It was a Thursday night. The back of the bar was full. The pool tables were taken. I really didn’t want to see anyone, so I sat at the bar. In fact, I was the only one sitting at the bar. The tables behind me were filled, and people were laughing and telling stories. I drank several beers. I tried to loosen up—but it was no use. My nerves were on edge. The beer did not relax me but, instead, made me depressed. I felt like a stone in a chair. My body became anchored to my stool (my heart had become so heavy) and I did not know if I would be able to rise again. I sat there quietly drinking beer, my mind full of accusations, bitterness, not so much directed against my father’s folly, but more against myself, for I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, no sense of what my direction should be.

I did not notice the people behind me coming and going. There was a lot of movement. The bar was situated in darkness. The only real light was behind the bar, above the large mirrors, illuminating the alcohol on display, the bar-tender and those sitting at the bar. There were small red atmosphere lamps mounted on the walls behind me, but I could not look into the bright mirror and see any human movement back in the shadows. Not that I wanted to. I really didn’t want to see anyone. I didn’t think I could handle any human interruption of my despondency.

The human interruption I did not seek appeared in the form of a deep, intense voice. The voice was cold and rigid, angry, and it came pouring out of the darkness behind me, rushing up to me and awakening me from my troubled isolation. I heard the words very clearly, the only words I had heard all night: “See that guy at the bar! I think he’s a fucking queer! I think I’m going to kick the shit out of him tonight...!”

The man’s voice seemed criminal; even more than criminal, it seemed demonic. There was some sort of steady energy coming out of the voice, edged with a tension which seemed psychotic to me, some force of darkness which could not be opposed, which always had its way.

I looked down the bar to see who he was talking about, expecting to find a homosexual sitting on a stool. But there was still no one at the bar—except myself. He was talking about me!

He said: “I wonder how many bones in his face I can break with one punch? Anyone want to make a bet?” There were other men sitting with him. They laughed nervously, not encouraging him really. I looked in the mirror, trying to see the faces behind me. I could see nothing. I was beginning to shake. My nerves were already on edge, because of my depression. Now I began to shake uncontrollably, violently, shaken awake by fear with an energy too large for my body. I looked at myself in the mirror. I could not see any shaking. I seemed calm in the mirror. But I knew then that I was not that man in the mirror I was watching. I was somehow removing myself from that man in the mirror, trying to become invisible perhaps, trying to rise out of terror and vanish in the vapors.

It did not work. “I might just go up and smash his face into the bar!” the voice continued. “No. I’m gonna wait until he leaves the bar. Then I’ll follow him out, and kick his ass in the parking lot!”

I could not turn and look back at the man. In fact, I could not move. I felt as though, should I be forced to move out of my stool, I would collapse into a hopeless gelatin pool, without backbone, without shape, like a cartoon figure, perhaps with only my cap resting on a mass of fluid. My legs were numb. I felt as though I could not protect myself, and that I could not even speak my concern. When the bar-tender came to ask me how I was doing, I only grunted, asking for another beer with an awkward shake of my head.

I remembered the story of how a Mexican man, an illegal alien, had been in a bar in town, had been accosted by two men and taken outside the bar. When the Mexican man, who could not speak English, refused to remove an expensive watch from his wrist, a watch he had most likely stolen, the two men had used a chain-saw to cut off the man’s arm above the elbow, leaving him screaming in the parking lot, running to their car with his severed arm. The arm was found several blocks away, lying in the gutter, minus the expensive watch. That was the kind of town it had become.

I looked at my own watch. It was 11:15. The bar would close at 2:00. I would stay until closing. No, then there would be no witnesses. I could not rise. I could always call my brother, tell him what was happening, have him arrive at the bar with some friends. But I could not get out of my chair: I was becoming totally numb, my entire body was going to sleep. Fear was making my entire nature numb.

Maybe he would leave. I listened to hear if he was still behind me. I did not hear his voice for about twenty minutes. Feeling began to return to my limbs, as I came to believe he was gone. My heart had been the loudest noise in the bar. I had had trouble hearing the voices around me, my pounding heart being the profoundest of anthems. But the noise inside me began to slacken; my heart-beat began to return to normal. Then I heard his demonic spirit again: “Look at that fucking queer! I swear, if he turns to look back at me, I’ll hit him right in the face with this bottle...!”

I can’t explain the extent of spiritual pain I experienced with the re-awakening of his voice. I began to think about God very clearly. I felt as though I might die that night. I became denser and denser with despair. A stone again, my heart shouting for help, my lips trembling, but my tongue frozen. I wondered if I had had a stroke.

I went into a dream, a fantasy, which was really my mind cut loose from reality, swirling, spinning away from whatever was painful, toward some kind of liberation from this black moment. I don’t remember what my thoughts were. I remember flying, striking out every sound in the room. I flew a long way from the bar, soaring high out into some lighter zone of comfort, wherein I heard voices, soothing natures, all of whom seemed to draw my energy away from the bar, away from confrontation. My body began to grow light. Feeling began to return to me. My fear began to flow.

I heard only vaguely the man say: “I’m going to wait for him in my car. When he comes out I’ll tear him a new asshole! Any you guys want to watch?

He was gone. I felt his dark presence pass out of the room; I could breathe again. I didn’t realize that I had been holding my breath. It was like I had awakened from a nightmare. I turned and looked back at the guilty table: there was no one there. “How you doing, Joe?” the bartender asked. “Care for another? “Sure. I’ll take another. I need to go to the bathroom first.” I went back to the bathroom. Some people spoke to me as I passed by the pool tables, kids I’d grown up with, classmates from high school. I smiled. The police might find me beaten to death in the parking lot that next morning; and my former classmates would say: “Jesus, we saw him last night at the Cowboy. I wonder who could have done that to Joe? He was a good guy. He never bothered anyone. Our town has turned to shit, man. What a shame!”

I waited until 2:00 before I left. I had moved from the bar, after having used the bathroom. I sat at a table behind the bar, under the red lamps, near to where the man’s voice had been manifested. I spent about twenty minutes slowly removing a leg from the table, propping a chair underneath the table top for support. I might still need something to defend myself when I left the bar. The leg screwed out. I was careful not to let anyone notice. I put the table leg on the floor and waited until 2:00 to leave. I thought that the man might get tired of waiting for me. He might either fall asleep or drive away. So I waited.

Finally, when the bartender told me it was time to leave, I nodded to him: “No problem,” I said. When he went into the back of the bar to collect dirty glasses, I hustled toward the door with my weapon. I threw open the door and ran through the parking lot down the sidewalk, hiding the table-leg against my own leg. My body was alive. I began to run. I did not look to see if anyone was following me. Before long I was running at a full pace, racing down the street, holding the table-leg in my hand like it was a baton I would pass off to some other potential victim in our victims’ race to avoid extinction.

I never saw the man who had caused me such distress. I began to doubt if he ever existed, except in my mind. It had seemed like a disembodied spirit, a voice only. But to believe that would be to take a serious step into dementia. So, instead, I believed that the man had existed, had attached some special hatred to myself, for what reason I did not know. I might meet the man again on the street and he probably would not recognize me. Perhaps he had been drunk. Perhaps he had been jilted by his wife, who may have left him for some man who wore glasses. Anything was possible.

The next day, Friday, I took a break from work around noon. I drove into town to get lunch. After lunch at Speedie’s Drive-In, I drove over to Eddie’s Barn. I had three hundred and fifty dollars in my pocket. I had been saving the money for something special. My town had become so reckless and so cruel that I knew I must either leave town or develop some way to protect myself. I told Eddie what had happened the night before. He shook his head, and took out a .38 caliber pistol. I did not feel good about buying a gun; but neither did I like feeling helpless in a world of bullies. So I bought the gun and put it under the seat in my car. I never spoke to anyone about this gun. And I did not touch it for almost four years.

Part Two:

The Need For Love

I worked, without pay, for nearly a year at my father’s cement plant, 7:30 am to 6:00 pm every day, and also on Saturday, trying to get the plant up and running. It was a total loss. After the year I became disgusted, took a job in the trona mines, and moved out of my family’s house, taking an apartment on Rosetti Street. I became divorced from my family, avoiding them as much as possible, as I had become, in their eyes, a black-sheep, a traitor to the just cause. I could not stomach the mythology any longer, the huge gap between that which I saw clearly to be the truth and the mythology of success in which my father and brother seemed fatally trapped.

I also could no longer endure the poverty to which I was subjecting myself. I owed money for my education. I was in danger of defaulting on my loans; so I told my family I was taking a real job. A pall of mourning fell over the house, as if I had announced my own death instead of my own liberation. I told my father that I would help him over the weekends if he wanted me to, but that I needed to get on with my life, that I was suffocating in his dream which I believed to be still-born at best, incapable of becoming true.

I worked at the trona mines for nearly a year. I hated it. Trona is a vitreous gray-white mineral used as a source of sodium compounds. It is like gypsum, used as a fluxing agent, in fertilizers, paper and textile products, and as a retarder of cement. I don’t wish to say much about the trona mines. However, an image that stands out in my memory when I turn a light on that year of my life is a that of a group of men all dressed in coarse dark suits and work boots turned white as ghosts with trona dust. Silent. Moving as if in a dream, listless, without merit, without emotion, ghosts truly, at war with Time and with Time’s savage compartmentalizations.

We all wore masks, so the trona wouldn’t sift into our lungs and render us lifeless clumps of breathless marrow-bone. The money was good. I made more than $20 per hour. But the work was painfully dull, and my associations equally uneventful.

My greatest desire at the time was to live a normal life. My family referred to me as the black sheep partly because I was not married, had no girl-friend, seemed to be more of a priest than a man, inclined more to books than the ordinary man. It was a source of pride to my father that I loved learning. He constantly referred to me, when he spoke to friends, as my educated son, my son who loves to read, my son who knows the classics. My mother longed for me to be normal, to be married, a father, to have someone who could care for me when I grew older. I longed for that also; but I had not been especially resourceful as a lover at any time in my life. Oh, I was romantic. I could fall in love with a pretty face in a matter of minutes, fawn over that face, make of myself an embarrassing cur for the love I felt. But the ecstatic love I often felt in my heart, inspired by the idea of some lovely thing bathed in crinoline gliding over some epic stage, I had never experienced in flesh. The flesh seemed so weak and so fallible when confronted with the perfections of the imagination.

I had never met a woman who inspired me to love except through my own mind’s intercession and gentrification of that woman. I either loved a woman of great beauty who would have nothing to do with me—and this occurred quite often—or I loved a woman of middling grace but loved her only when apart from her. In her presence, I noted too quickly the uncharming gulf between what I expected and wanted and what I, in her behavior, discovered. I either seemed to want a woman who was too good for me (the reflection of that is that I wanted a woman for whom I was not good enough), or I met a woman who was not good enough for me.

And I was awkward, as I have indicated. I had an angel with a sense of humor who seemed to thoroughly enjoy presenting me in a posture quite embarrassing to myself. A woman must be able to take her lover seriously. And a lover who tends to set himself on fire or on whose head ceiling tiles fall is not the kind of serious fellow on whom most desirable women were willing to invest their time.

I was not a homosexual. I engaged in sexual relations with women as often as I could. I had sex with women I did not love. I did not tell them I loved them. I did not lie to justify my craft. I found that women came to me more often than I did to them for the purposes of sexual gratification. As I have said, the women I chased ran away; the women who chased me and whom I sometimes let catch me, becoming sexual with them, often expressed disappointment or even rage when, upon pressuring me to enunciate my feelings for them, became informed that lust more than love had moved my spine into activity.

I wanted love; and, during the two years of working at the cement plant and, later, standing knee-deep in trona, I dated women quite frequently. It often resulted in sex; but never in love. Sometimes the sex would last for several months. We might even pretend that it was love, if neither dared to state it, if we could just skirt the issue like a soldier would a mine field.

I wanted marriage, and children. I was twenty-six. All my friends from high school were married, with children; and, although I had little in common with them at this point in my life, I had a longing to again be a part of something, some community of something, even of sufferers if that was the calling, a small town of businessmen and husbands and fathers. There was something heroic in all of that. Something good in standing up for tradition and natural living. There was nothing heroic in my solitary life, living for myself, cut off from real and deep human experience.

I had known Pauline Kaminsky nearly all of my life. She was a pleasant girl who had a sense of humor. Intelligent, with a pleasant face. I suppose I use the word pleasant twice because that is the word which best describes her. She was slightly overweight, did not have a svelte figure, but was not unattractive. We had been friends in high school. I had dated her best friend, a woman with whom I had relations, on and off, for the next seven years or so, through high school and then through college. Margaret Mencius, Pauline’s friend, and I would not see each other for several months. Then we would meet by accident, proposition each other, hurry to bed, annihilate ourselves for several weeks at a time, and then struggle to find the strength to physically detach our bodies from one another and retreat into a satisfying distance from our sin. It happened over and over again. It was not love. It was a sort of physical craving, the same kind of behavior one exhibits or witnesses at the Thanksgiving ritual, eating until one is sick and feels like dying. The only remorse was that one felt bloated.

Pauline Kaminsky knew all about this. She was Margaret’s best friend. Margaret told her everything. Pauline and Margaret were part of a group of women in college who were, for lack of a better term, feminists, independent women. Although neither Pauline nor Margaret were really independent women, each liked to think of herself that way. Pauline and Margaret and the other women in their little group were, in fact, angry at men because the men they desired did not call them on the phone, did not take them out on Friday nights, did not dance them into the ground, and then fulfill their romantic and sexual fantasies in a thousand culminating strokes. They were mad at men because men did not pursue them; and so they expressed their building frustration through the dogma of women’s rights, women’s superiority, feminism, lesbianism, the crimes of man against woman. I say lesbianism: I don’t know if they were really lesbians. I would not doubt it, because their behavior was not ordinary. They seemed driven by ideology, and their ideology celebrated lesbian behavior. Perhaps they had either the lack of courage or the good sense, however one views it, to not follow their dogma to its climactic zenith or nadir. I do not know about that. I do know, as events eventually unfolded, that lesbianism was a theme in their lives however.

My life, during my period of isolation from my family, and my occupation with the white dust, was, to say the least, dismal, isolate, unfriendly. Somehow Pauline Kaminsky entered my life and seemed to enrich it. Her friend, and my some time lover, Margaret Mencius, had met a man from Seattle, Washington. He was spending time in Rock Springs the Summer of 1976, supervising work at West Vaco. They met and had a passionate love affair. He asked her to move to Seattle and live with him. She did. I think she would have done anything to escape Rock Springs. It was her ticket out—and she jumped at his proposal like a German brown at a hammered brass with a fire stripe. Pauline and I looked up and all we could see was Margaret’s shadow racing in the wind. I’d never seen her move so fast.

To say that there was envy in both myself and Pauline is probably true, but for different reasons. I felt envy because Margaret, in leaving Rock Springs, was doing what I really wanted to do—however, I had not sufficient courage. I did not love Margaret. I even despised my periodic submersions into her body, mainly because I felt I was soiling my own conscience somehow, making love without feeling love, gratifying myself (perhaps herself as well, that is always a question for men) without feeling something special about her or about the act of love. I felt the animal in myself become dominant when we rushed together, seeking orgasms together. It made me feel dirty, as though I were corrupting the values of my youth. It was too much like masturbation. Finish and roll over, and have nothing to say to one another. Look forward to sleep as a way of escaping one another. For this reason, I was glad to see Margaret leave town, for a temptation to make myself smaller and less dignified than I really was would be leaving along with her shadow.

Pauline, apparently, and this became apparent only much later, was envious of Margaret’s departing not because of the freedom Margaret displayed by leaving; rather, Pauline was envious of Henry Rose, the man who had stolen her best friend away from her. She went into a period of mourning that lasted many months. I learned about this extended trauma from Paula because it, the trauma, was the chief reason Paula and I eventually came to a new level of understanding and closeness.

We met quite accidentally that Christmas season at the shopping mall. I was trying to re-approach my family, hoping the Christmas season and a binge of generous gift-giving might erase reproach and slack the cords of alienation we all felt toward each other. Paula had lost a lot of weight. I hardly recognized her. She looked ill. She was wearing sunglasses and seemed to be seeking anonymity. She tried to avoid my look, and slip away. But, because I am socially awkward, I did not allow her to escape. I called out her name. We had a cup of coffee together. She seemed to appreciate our conversation. She did not bring up Margaret; but when I did, she informed me that Margaret was getting married in the spring, loved Seattle, was quite happy, had encouraged her to visit. I could see that there was something tearing at Pauline’s soul, that she wanted to cry when she spoke Margaret’s name. That should have been a clue to me that there had been something more to the friendship of these two women that I had understood at the time.

She asked me if we could meet again some time, for coffee or a movie. In fact, we were both lonely, living empty lives. Life after college, for both of us, had become increasingly dreary. We later admitted to one another that there seemed to be nothing, at this point in our lives, except marriage and perhaps a family. Fate had somehow brought us together. I did like Pauline. I could talk with her quite easily. She had a sense of humor. I did not desire her sexually really. I did not love her. I had begun to doubt the existence of love, feeling that love, as a romantic creation, was something reserved for the young mind, the poetic culture, and had little in common with everyday life in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Perhaps one had to be rich to fall in love. Or young. Or retarded. Or enfeebled by sentiment. I did not know. Love had never really happened to me. Perhaps life was more practical than that. Perhaps one lived, and learned to love through trial and through experience. Perhaps love was more like a friendship that became deeper and deeper in time.

Whatever the case, and because both Pauline and I were lost, we soon came to an agreement that it would be good for both of us if we married and had a family. I noticed that Pauline was less enthusiastic about having a family than I. When I spoke of marriage her eyes lit up; when I talked of children her head tilted slightly down, avoiding my gaze. I did not think it important. I felt that a family was a part of marriage and would just grow gradually, like a flower, out of the soil of married life.

We were married that May. I found it somewhat odd that Pauline insisted that we be married on 14 May, a Saturday; it was not odd by itself; but my knowledge that Margaret intended to marry Henry Rose on 15 May made me somewhat suspicious about the deep-seated rationale of my fiancee. I did not push the issue. May 14 was fine with me. I did not wish to pursue a deep understanding of the psyche of Pauline for several reasons. I did not really believe much in psychology, as a discipline. It seemed to me that the intellectual analysis of patterns which resulted from entrapment in intellectual processes was thoroughly suspect, true only in its own realm, which was not a real (eternal) realm, but merely a location for analysis. It is much like one trying to help someone who is being held hostage but focusing on a discussion of the kind of material being used to bind his hands and feet instead of cutting the cords and opening the door, an act which would allow him to walk away from his captors. The mind is a labyrinth. It is very interesting, and it is a seat of deep power, to be sure. But it is not an eternal abode. It disintegrates, becomes nothing, merely fossils and ruins. The heart, the soul, is the only eternal palace, that world form which embraces and explains Time as a production of eternity, instead of as a manifestation of something which needs to be completed.

Perhaps this seems like no more than philosophical digression. But I believe the distinction to be important. For this distinction, between mind and soul, between Time-Space and Space-Time (if you will allow such modern terms, which seem even to me to be more jargon than descriptions of something real), between intellect and the powers of rationalization and religion, faith, the powers of the soul, became powerful distinctions which seemed to separate myself and my wife, we being a strange inversion of the traditional alignment, with man representing Time and woman representing Soul: we were the reverse. I believed in poetry and in religious truth; she believed in intellect, the power to know through analysis. She felt that she knew; I understood that I did not know, but even suspected that one could never know, that the accumulation of knowledge might not be the end of life, but that life, in fact, might be the end of knowledge. I wanted to annihilate my isolation from the living; whereas, she wanted to deify it, for it gave her strength and greatness, and made her superior to nearly everyone she met. Of course, this all became clear much later, after we were wed, when it was too late.

The other reason I did not wish to descend into the depths of Pauline’s mind was that I did not wish to understand the real nature of the monsters that lived there. I understood, and had seen strong evidences of the fact, that monsters did live inside her. It was not just the ordinary monsters, the fears and memories distorted, magnified and projected during each moon cycle, there was something even more, some bitterness which I did not want to recognize as being a part of her nature. Afterall, I was marrying this woman. I had oriented my mind to make the best of the situation, to proceed into the future with a clean slate, freshly born, with a new belief and a commitment to a style of life which might free me from my sense of isolation. I hoped that Pauline’s demons might be the kind which would evaporate over time, as the security of a family life gave her a new sense of hope and a new alignment of thought, a fuller system of values.

We were married. My family was happy to see me wed. The two families got along fine, carried the same working-class values. Pauline’s family paid for us to honeymoon in Hawaii. I suggested we visit Margaret during our stop-over in Seattle. Pauline was adamant: she would not visit Margaret. She did not explain why. I wondered if it might be because of my own former relationship with Margaret. I hoped that that was the explanation; I hoped it was not her own relation with Margaret which drove her to veto my suggestion. She said finally, after a long silence which followed her insistence that we not contact Margaret: “I don’t want her involved with us any longer. You and I belong to each other now. She has nothing more to do with us.”

That should have made me feel better. It was an explanation afterall, describing her alienation from her one-time best friend. But the language was ambiguous enough that it did not ease my mind, it did not answer all my questions. Again, I did not wish to be submerged in my wife’s former life, drowned in her frustrations and her embitterments. I just tried to avoid it. I said: “Ok.” It did not matter to me really. I might have felt uncomfortable meeting Margaret again, given the circumstances.

We went to Hawaii, enjoyed our honeymoon together. There was no pretense at romantic motivations or impulses. We had sex, but it was not fluid lovemaking. Neither of us was annihilated by the pleasure of the marriage bed. It was not unlike my lovemaking with Margaret, although Pauline was more yielding and soft in her pleasure, less alert, or even rigid; sometimes Margaret had even been defensive, almost angry, when we made love, responding to me as if I were sticking knives into her secrets instead of coalescing with her nutritive energies (that line, pardon me for using it, was a description actually uttered to myself and Pauline when, two years after our marriage, we attended marriage counseling with a new age professional who was bald, pot-bellied, wore a tie-dyed t-shirt and tried to get us to make love in front of he and his wife). Pauline enjoyed her body, sometimes even lost consciousness during our lovemaking. Usually, however, it was during oral sex that she was most pleased. When I penetrated her with my body, often, she moaned almost with displeasure, and seemed to move in such a way as to hurry my ejaculation. Then she would roll away in silence. Again, we would have very little to say after a climax.

Married life was good for the first year or so. We did not love each other. She had her own life. I had my life. Somewhere in the middle our two lives met, and we lived together and shared our experiences. She encouraged me to leave the trona mines. Her uncle had influence with the school board. She talked with her uncle about my teaching English at the high school. I applied for the job and was hired. It was a tremendous relief to me. I had never really considered teaching. I don’t understand why I had not. I loved it. I loved introducing young minds to literature, to self-expression through writing. I began that fall teaching sophomore composition and junior introduction to English literature.

I almost loved Pauline after my first day at the high school. I felt toward her about as much warmth as I had ever felt toward another person. She had helped to free me, had pushed me through my lethargy, my resignation that life was fatalistically established, that I could thrash and turn but that nothing would change unless it was so dictated by forces greater than my own will. She showed me that that was not the case. A little influence. A little corruption perhaps. Knowing the right person. That was how the world worked. I wanted to kiss her and hold her and whisper my gratitude into her ear when she returned from her job that night (she worked in the town library), but she pushed me away, seeming confused, uncomfortable with my emotive intent. I was reminded, as if awakened from a dream, that the intimacy that I wished to share was not an element in our mutual behavior. We could make love at night, in the dark. We almost never kissed in public, never held hands, never hugged. That was just the way it was with us.

Our life went on together. Pauline did not wish to be pregnant yet. She took birth control pills. The time would come; but she wanted to be financially stable before she brought a child into the world. Timing was everything; I should know that. Besides, didn’t we like our life together? Didn’t we appreciate our freedom and our lack of complications?

In fact, I wanted children. I agreed to wait; but the realization that we, in fact, wanted different lives, wanted to proceed in different directions, harbored conflicting values, began to creep into my own mind, creating disturbing patterns of suspicion. Pauline had never been clear to me that she did not want children. She always avoided speaking about the issue directly, often changing the subject, or turning away from me with an enigmatic smile. One day we argued about it. I told her that I had married her with the understanding that we shared certain needs and desires, primary of which was the longing for a family, that is, children. She replied: “Men have been enslaving women for centuries, since the beginning of time. And the way that a man gains power over a woman is to impregnate her, and send her back into the house. I won’t allow you to enslave me that way!”

To say that this response shocked me would not be totally honest. I knew, even if I did not want to recognize it, that we viewed life differently. There was a large territory in our life together, sacred ground if you will, on which neither of us would tread. We kept such a large secret, not uttering the words which might open the door to illuminate that secret, an unspoken perspective which might render us to our own minds incompatible. We both feared incompatibility, because there was in each of us a need that called out for family, security, belonging to a group; perhaps it was a fear of isolation. So neither of us spoke about the things which were dangerous to each of us. We tried to bury those thoughts. We did not kill them. And, because we did not kill them or recognize them or fight them or resign ourselves to them, they grew uncontrollably. Soon, we became so cautious around one another that we stopped talking altogether, except about trite issues in which we were in general agreement—the weather, poetics, sports (how she hated them and I loved them), the cinema. The monster grew. Before long it was larger than both of us together.

Pauline was gone quite often. Perhaps this was her response to the gulf in communication which had grown up around us. Several weekends a month she would attend feminist seminars or workshops in Jackson Hole or in Cody, Salt Lake City, or Denver. She had a new friend. Her name was Beth Rivers. She was about twenty-four, handsome, and just out of college. She had short brown hair, that square-jaw look of modern independent women; she wore colorful muscle-shirts, offering proof of her dedication to weight-training, and almost always baggy pants, as she tried to hide her blocky trunk. Most of all, Beth was a rabid feminist. She responded to me as if I were one of the diseased cells of the world; and she inspired in Pauline a gender-based radicalism that Pauline had espoused superficially in college and after, with Margaret, but which had seemed to move her very little during the months preceding our marriage. Beth brought her new books every week, all with a feminist ideology. She also brought Pauline popular novels, but, of course, only those written by women authors.

Pauline had been a dilettante Marxist in college, as many middle-class intellectuals were, applauding a theoretical world-view which seemed to guarantee social equality through the reduction of an entire society to a state of hopeless virtue and generous poverty. I, too, had been infatuated with communism when at the university. Idealists, by definition, consider the world to be a showplace of absolute values. To the idealist, if one system of life is imperfect, then its opposite, by definition, is required to be perfect. That was how the mind worked, the intellect, which, as I have surmised, was not so much a description of reality as it was a description of itself. The world turns, is never finished, is never a fixed photograph. However, a philosophical system, such as Marxism, which portrays the world as something knowable, fixed, and finished—that is, which claims to possess and embody Truth—does not comprehend the eternal and changeling nature of phenomenon.

Marxist revolutions around the world have come apart because the communist leaders were prepared to take societies only to that place where there was no class, where all members of society had been reduced to the common denominator of poverty, had become essentially children of the State. Marxism did not allow for the next stage, the separation of elements from that great cauldron of chaos, insisting that the world of death, the reduction of all elements to the one element, forced commonality, was a final stage, and not a mere passing season, like winter, at which time everything turns to grey and to cold and returns into the soil. When the elements separate—that is, when the middle class returns—individuality re-appears, class identities take on shape again; thus, the creative process generates movement and change. That is, the children grow up, leave home, become adults. Then, of course, the Marxists vanish, or at least recede into the background, re-assuming their traditional role as social critic, complaining that the imperfect World is not acceptable to their Idea of the World.

With the advent of Beth Rivers into her life, Pauline’s slumbering Marxism reawakened and was married to feminism in a creed which became stridently anti-man, especially anti-white man, and which pitted women, blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, Asians, third-world nations, and all the world’s poor, in a never-ending historical war for justice against the oppressors of the world, generally white men and their ruling class lackeys around the world.

Of course, Pauline’s new-found religion, based on hatred of men, tended to expand exponentially that sacred ground between us on which neither she nor I would set foot. Often she would not come home at night. It was all very strange. I had a most bizarre dream during this period: I was standing on a stage delivering my message to the masses about tradition and the importance of community values and as I began to speak a tile fell out of the ceiling and knocked me out. When I awoke I discovered that I had not been a tile at all. It had been a book written by Betty Freidan: The Feminine Mystique. I laughed about the dream for weeks. I felt so pathetic—I had heard of a man’s wife leaving him for another man, but this was ridiculous.

When I did see Pauline, when we were home together, we had nothing to say really. I began to plan my exit from a failed marriage. I worried that she might try to sabotage me at my work—afterall, it was her connection who had helped me get the job. Perhaps I would just move out, let everything go. I could not go on like this. It was not only ridiculous, it was the kind of situation which might become very ugly, should either of us, in some moment of brazenness or carelessness, uncover the great untouchable sore. There was a great deal of bitterness and frustration in each of us. We were both recessive by nature, non-confrontational. But there was a great deal of kindling built up around that sacred ground. A spark might ignite it; and all our care to avoid confrontation might disappear in a moment.

Pauline came home one weekend from a seminar in Jackson Hole. It was late Sunday night, and she was limping noticeably. She told me that she had fallen from a horse. I told her that she should see a doctor, and she said that she had consulted a doctor in Jackson. Everything was fine. She was just a bit sore. She would just need to take it easy for a while. She seemed almost glad to see me.

That Monday was Memorial Day. Pauline was out shopping. I stayed home, drinking coffee, reading a wonderful book by William Gass, Omensetter”s Luck. I received a call that morning from the Justin Women’s Clinic in Jackson Hole. Nurse Miriam Nolan asked for Pauline Kaminsky. I told her I was Pauline’s husband. She told me that she had contacted Buschetto’s Drug Store: Pauline would be able to renew her prescription, if necessary, at Buschetto’s.

“Is there anything to be concerned about?” I asked, assuming, of course, that Nurse Nolan had seen my wife after her accident over the weekend.

“No, not really,” Nurse Nolan replied. “The kind of surgery your wife had is pretty routine. There will be some soreness for a few days. She will probably need some analgesic; and that’s the prescription we’ve transferred down to Boschetto’s. You should, of course, refrain from sex for a few days.”

“There’s no chance that there might be some serious aftereffect, is there?” I asked.

“No. A tubal lugation is a pretty common surgery, as I say. There should be no repercussions at all.”

And, so, our marriage ended. At that moment I realized that there was no returning to a dream which had been cut so cleanly and so finally. The dream was not a shared dream. It had never been a shared dream.

I wish the story could end there. If it did, then this story would be just another ordinary story. An ordinary ending to a story of modern love, a love without commitment, in a society which had lost its moral foundation, a society in which self-discipline has come to be seen as something smacking of political reaction, or, at the very least, not fun enough to be taken seriously. But the story did not end there.

I said nothing to Pauline about the telephone call. I did not know what to say. I had already begun to plan my exit from her life. Isolation might be difficult, an evil of sorts; but the life of silence and duplicity and betrayal was even worse. I felt nothing for her. I did not hate her. I did not really feel anger toward her. I felt her anger and frustration toward me however. She had come to hate men as a principle. She fed her hatred with food for the intellect which sought always a villain, a cause for the frustrations that Pauline was feeling.

There is a major flaw in any philosophy which seeks to portray existence in a series of sweeping generalities. The cause of women’s problems: God and man. All women had been persecuted by God and man. God was the enemy and man was His instrument. Of course, there was no such thing as “all women”. Each woman was different. Each woman experienced different forms of exultation in life, and different forms of despair, as did each man. The illusion that all women were of one united cause or condition, that all blacks were one, or Asians or anyone else....that was the fundamental fallacy of Pauline’s argument against men. And it was a fatal flaw, rendering her entire argument disingenuous. Of course, Pauline and Beth refused to even consider the singular nature of atoms, since it is much cleaner and much easier to speak of classes of things and to avoid blurred condition caused by examining paradox and contradiction.

The human soul needs a faith. If it is not God, not tradition, not history, not the future, not science, not art...what then? The religion of womanhood is as empty and as full as any other belief, founded on a similar desert of logic. The unnatural assumption that womanhood does not include motherhood, as the unnatural assumption by men that pleasure is the end of life, does not last, for it is self-destructive, self-annihilating, and the kind of faith which does not renew itself, which ends in negation, amnesia, and ultimately suicide.

About two weeks after the telephone call, and my determination to leave Pauline, I was forced to return to my home during the morning to retrieve some notes I had left at home. It was during the second week of June. I almost never came home during the day. I noted that Pauline’s car was in front of the house; and Beth’s red jeep was parked across the street. I entered the house feeling a sense of dread mixed with excitement. I knew something sinister was occurring, for the air was thick and dark, my own body was intensified by the electrical rigidity of my nerves. I was sexually excited, as I was also excited by an understanding that I was about the catch my wife committing a sin, an unpardonable sin: it would be my way out of this fiasco.

I walked quietly into the back bedroom of our house. I could hear moans of pleasure coming from the room. I opened the door without making a sound. Beth and Pauline were lying naked on the bed. Beth’s mouth was fixed on Pauline’s private parts and Pauline was moaning, telling Beth that she loved her.

It all seemed rather comical to me. Perhaps I had, again, merely detached myself from my own shame. The woman on the bed was not really my wife. We had nothing in common now. She was lost. She had sunk into a selfish cult of pleasure and denial. There was nothing that could be done for her. She would live her life. She would not reproduce life. She would die a lonely death, judging herself for having taken the illusory path. There was no way I could help her.

I almost left the room as quietly as I had entered it, saying nothing. But I did not. I wanted them to feel something, some guilt, some dishonor, if that were possible. I took off my wedding ring. I said: “I hope you’re having fun, Pauline. I hope you know what it is you really want.”

She opened her eyes, pushed Beth’s head away from her for a moment, looking at me with startled, even guilty eyes. “Joe!” she said. “What are you doing here?”

I threw the ring on to Pauline’s stomach, saying: “I’ll be home later to pack my things. I’d appreciate it if you weren’t around tonight. I’ll talk to a lawyer about working things out for us.”

Part Three:

The Second Ending

And that was how it should have ended. But it did not. This is not an ordinary story, afterall.

I did move out. I talked with a lawyer, Jack Gunyan, one of my friends from high school. He went to talk with Pauline. Pauline told him that she was sorry what had happened, that she did not want to divorce, that she wanted to meet with me and talk things over.

I refused to meet with her. I wanted it ended. There was nothing left for me in our relationship.

One night she came to my apartment, wept at my door, begged me to let her enter.

I relented. She came in to the apartment, begged me to come home to her. She said she had broken off her friendship with Beth, that she was disgusted with what she had done, that she wanted to be a wife to me again.

Then she undressed me; and we had the wildest sex we had ever had. She had many orgasms, and scratched my back until it bled.

Why did I move back in? I don’t know. Loneliness. Sex. Stupidity. I wanted to believe in something. Perhaps it was because I was weak-willed and feared isolation even more than humiliation.

The sex continued to be good; and she never mentioned Beth’s name. She stopped reading feminist literature. We seemed to be growing closer.

She stopped attending feminist workshops on the weekends. We did things together: camping, movies, even candlelight dinner. It seemed as if the previous year had all been a nightmare, something from which Pauline had now awakened, with very little memory of her descent into the maelstrom.

It seemed like our marriage had experienced a re-birth. I wanted to trust it. I did. But I had not lost my memory of Hades. I did not fully believe her when she said that the perverse period of her life was over. She said that all she wanted now was to be my wife and to have a healthy love together again. But there was something still not right. We were more sexually compatible now. But there was something which was not true. I wasn’t sure if it was the surgery, my knowledge of which I had never mentioned to my wife, and the fact that it rendered us incapable of ever being a true family. Perhaps that knowledge had twisted my feelings for my wife beyond recovery. She also was different. She seemed more energetic, as if she were being driven through our experience not by the experience itself but by something she wished to achieve on the other side of the experience.

I did not fully trust her. But sex with her now was the best I had known with a woman, and the most regular. It seems that Beth had helped break a dam inside of her, the water now flowing whenever Pauline was touched.

About two months after our reunion, in September, I met an old friend, Marty Dirst, who was an insurance agent in Green River. I was eating a sandwich at Arby’s on Frontier Drive one Saturday afternoon. He was there with his wife. He excused himself and came over to speak to me.

“Joseph,” he said, shaking my hand. “I haven’t seen you in some time.”

“Hi, Marty,” I replied. “How are you doing?”

“Fine, fine.”

“How’s business?” I asked.

“That’s fine too,” Marty replied. “I’ve been meaning to call you and ask if you have any questions about your new policy.”

“What policy?” I asked.

“You know, your new life insurance policy,” Marty responded.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Really?” Marty was puzzled. “Pauline came in a few weeks ago. She opened a $500,000 mutual life policy on you and herself.”

“Huh,” I said. “She didn’t mention it to me.”

“Well, you were out of town when she opened the policy,” Marty explained. “You were in Denver for a teachers’ conference. She said she was staying with her sister until you returned. She just must have forgotten to mention it to you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure that’s it. I’ll mention it to her tonight.”

“Strange that she wouldn’t mention it to you,” Marty added, scratching his head.

Monday morning, during my study hall period, I called Willie Dirst’s office in Green River, talked with the receptionist, told her we had not received any information about the policy and wanted to check the address on file. She told me 1447 Oakmont Road. She wondered if that was the correct address. I said yes. She asked if I would like her to send another copy of the policy. No, I said. I’ll ask my wife—perhaps she received it without telling me.

I had said nothing to my wife about the insurance policy. She had no sister living in Rock Springs. I sensed that something dreadful was unfolding. I did not want to believe my own thoughts.

I drove to 1447 Oakmont Road during my lunch break. A red jeep was parked in the driveway of the house. I knew the jeep. It belonged to Beth Rivers.

I must admit that a certain panic entered my mind regularly that afternoon and evening, and continued for several days. I could not fathom what was occurring, other than the obvious: that Pauline and Beth had taken out a lucrative policy on my life, upon which they could collect only in the event of my death.

I responded in much the same way as I did that night at the Cowboy Bar when the invisible force of nature with a voice informed me that he intended to break every bone in my body. I sought to flee reality, seeking some inward expansion which might render me invisible or which might at least result in the evaporation of the idea which was igniting fear in my system. I would fight off the fear: there must be some reasonable explanation. But there was none. Pauline did not have a sister living in Rock Springs; her sister did not live at 1447 Oakmont Road, Beth Rivers did; why would Pauline take out such a valuable policy on my life and not tell me about it? And why would she have information on the policy mailed to Beth Rivers’ house? Of course, it was so I would not know the policy existed.

I did not want it to be true. But what else could it be?

I had almost been taken in by Pauline’s new passion for me. In fact, I had been taken in. I had almost forgiven her the fact that she had taken irreversible steps to ensure that she would never bear a child with me, or with anyone for that matter. I had still said nothing to Pauline about that. She was like a new creature in bed. And sex tended to make many other doubts I had about our marriage disappear. But there had been a clue of something untrue even in our new-found pleasure: I had made vigorous love to Pauline one night several weeks before; and, as she approached orgasm, she let out a short, strong scream, demanding: “Yes, Beth, yes! Don’t stop!”

I had buried that phrase almost as quickly as I unearthed it, telling myself that she had yelled: “Yes, yes, yes! Don’t stop!” Now, however, as I sat alone, drinking a beer at the Three Horn Mule, I knew that she had indeed called out to her lover. Her new moist, passionate condition in bed was the product of an imagination which substituted Beth Rivers for myself, which, in fact, substituted Beth in an even more wondrous condition, one which bestowed upon this imaginary Beth an actual cross of flesh with which Pauline could be penetrated and anointed.

I felt sick. I felt like vomiting. I was a gullible man. I was a fool.

Not only was I a fool. I was an endangered species. I was a man being hunted, as sure as was the man seated at the bar stool more than a year before, hunted by some demon whose only motive was to inflict evil on a total stranger. Only this time it was worse: I was being hunted by my own wife and her lesbian lover.

I told you this was not an ordinary story. I had not touched the pistol I had bought from Eddie Talboom several years earlier. It was still in its holster, still in the box wrapped in Eddie’s Barn butcher paper.

I began to spend my lunch hours at the pistol range. The .38 felt small but comfortable in my hand. I was surprised how difficult it was to shoot accurately with a pistol. I had hunted with a rifle before, and considered myself an excellent shot. But shooting with a hand-gun was different. Any kind of movement magnified the range of error. One could not pull the trigger. One must ease the trigger, like a soft breath. Any movement resulted in pathetic results. It took me many afternoons at the gun range to begin to master the technique of pistol-shooting. I eventually taught myself to shoot accurately with both hands.

In fact, I could not believe what was happening. I had slipped into a totally irrational condition. It was very much like a dream state, occasionally peaceful, punctuated by long periods of anxiety, perhaps even paranoia. Sometimes I doubted my own perceptions. I came to conclude that none of this was happening. On the last afternoon of teaching, before summer break, I went home for lunch, something I almost never did. I entered the house quietly. I always entered the house quietly now, conscious that someone might be waiting to kill me. This time I could hear Pauline on the phone in the bedroom. I was careful to make no noise. I put my ear to the door, and heard her say: “Yes, you’re right. It won’t be much longer now. Yes, you’re right. Ok. Good bye.”

I left the house quietly; and drove again to the shooting range.

Of course, I considered going to the police for help. I considered asking my family for help. I even considered confronting Pauline and Beth. I could have done that, to try to short-circuit the momentum of the coming catastrophe. But I did not. I felt as though some dark angel had cast a stone into the sea; and the stone was sinking; there was nothing to be done until the stone finally sank to the ocean floor. That was what Destiny was. And I was the floating stone.

There was no help. This was to be my moment to help myself, to prepare myself for war, and either to succeed against Fatality, thereby gaining my freedom again, or to be swallowed by Evil, to let her take me far from a world which no longer tasted especially pleasant to me.

Perhaps it was a death-wish. I wrote a long letter to my family, explaining the elements of what I considered to be a very clear plot against my life. I placed it in my safety deposit box at the bank. It contained my collection of baseball cards from the 1950’s and early 1960’s. My brother and I both had keys to the box, but we had taken an oath to not touch the box until we both agreed to liquidate the collection, or until one of us died.

If I were to die, I did not want Pauline and Beth to succeed in their plot.

My mind was not always steady. I began to slip into long phases of depression, or into giddy manic flights of energy. I either could not move from my chair, pinned, as it were, by my despair to my seat. Or I could not sit down, fear-energy electrifying my body and vibrating me into motion.

My relationship with Pauline was also distorted, as one might it expect it to be. I spent as much time away from her as possible. We would spend nights together. Our sexual intensity continued, even increased. I found myself excited as never before, as we made love. And I found myself more aggressive to her, trying to punish her with my body for the complicity I suspected in her. It was the wildest sex I had ever had. She, too, was moved to exclamations. She could not get enough. I did not want her to suspect that I knew her intentions, but, during our love-making, or hate-making, or sexual aggressions, a new energy sprang out of me, one which was often furious at her, and which sought to kill her, to exact retribution, through the spine.

My energy would knock her out. But I could not sleep. I expected her to rise up from bed and strike me with an axe.

How would she do it? It would have to look like an accident if she expected to collect the insurance. I wondered if she would have the strength to commit a murder. Perhaps Beth would do it for her. Beth could come in through an open window or door and murder me in our bed. Pauline could say that she had been raped and her husband killed. Or perhaps I had been killed by an intruder while she slept. Perhaps they would try to kill me away from home. Perhaps it was all some bizarre fantasy, some form of mental illness. Still, the lie to Willie Durst and the life insurance policy always came back to my attention, convincing me that, indeed, I had been marked.

I noticed that Pauline was announcing to all our friends that her friendship with Beth Rivers had ended. They had disagreed over serious matters and were no longer speaking. It seemed that Pauline was planting evidence which would free herself and Beth from suspected complicity in any killing. They were not accomplices any longer. They were not even speaking to one another.

She was planting her evidence too conspicuously however, at least to my mind. Others did not seem to find it odd that Pauline would interject her admission at what seemed a wholly inappropriate moment. But my learned ear and eye found instruction with every nuance.

I must state that I understood quite clearly that my only safety existed in Pauline’s belief that I was ignorant of her plans. Any indication I might give of my suspicions would lead either to panic in Pauline or abandonment of her plan. Of course, I could have confronted her with my evidence, demanded a divorce, talked to the police. Perhaps I should have pursued this course. But I did not. I was driven by some perversion myself apparently. Some desire for darkness. I did not think about killing Pauline and Beth, although that, it now seems, was the inherent result of my course of action: either to be killed by them, or to kill them instead. Or to arrest them myself, and to present them to the police with unmistakable evidence of their plot. In all honesty, I really didn’t think about the final scene much. I thought about preparedness. I thought about self-defense. There was still a part of me which did not believe that this was all happening. It was like a nightmare, during the experiencing of which I was still partly awake, knowing that I was terrified but also knowing that it was not real, not permanent; it was something from which I would eventually awaken. Perhaps that is why I told no one.

Of course I was mad. Who would not be mad during such an occurrence?

Pauline did not leave town on the weekends. I did not see her again with Beth Rivers, for weeks. Beth Rivers did not call our house, at least while I was home. I explained to my wife that I was suffering from insomnia, something to which I had been prone since I was a boy. She believed me. I would leave my bed and sleep in the attic some nights. I would sleep on the couch in our study. Pauline did not seem to mind. She did not seem to notice my agitated state. She did not, apparently, recognize in it a suspicion that I understood her duplicity.

Summer came. The weather turned warm. I did not work in the summer, choosing to read and write and live quietly for three months. I was not living quietly of course. My insides were alive: I no longer needed much sleep.

One evening, after work, Pauline returned home from work and undressed to take a shower. Some voice within me instructed that I search her purse. Perhaps it was my angel’s voice. Perhaps the same angel who had had so much fun at my expense earlier in my life had now assumed the mantle of the guardian, and was seeking to preserve me. Perhaps the thought of my vanishing from the earth, stealing from him the vehicle of his pranks, did not please him at the moment. Perhaps he enjoyed my awkwardness so much that he could not bear to see me go.

A voice insisted I search my wife’s purse. I could hear the shower running. I found her black purse, the one she had taken to work that day. I searched it, not knowing what I sought. There seemed to be nothing special. Women’s things: lotion, keys, a comb, a pair of gloves, a billfold. I looked inside the billfold. Money, change, cards, driver’s license: nothing special. But there was a receipt: Pauline had paid $250 to buy a Ruger automatic pistol, purchased that same day, 27 June 1977.

So, we had had enough foreplay. I knew that I was in danger. I knew that my wife had purchased a lucrative policy on my life; I knew that she had hid that fact from me; I knew that she had been involved in a lesbian love affair which may or may not have ended; I knew that she had just purchased a pistol.

What I did not know is how and when it would be done.

That Thursday, June 30, after work, Pauline asked if we could go out to eat that night. I often cooked; but she said she wanted to have seafood. We went to dinner at the Seashell Inn on Williams Road. After dinner, at Pauline’s request, we went to the Cowboy Bar to play pool and drink a few beers.

There was nothing odd in Pauline’s desire to spend the night out. We often went out for dinner or to drink a few beers. Usually we did not stay out late on Thursday nights however. Pauline was usually tired by the end of the week. She usually went to bed early on Thursday night.

But there was some feeling I had; it was a voice again, similar to that which had instructed me to look in Pauline’s purse. The voice, this time, told me that this was the night for which we had all been waiting.

We stayed at the Cowboy Bar until about 11:00 o’clock. Pauline said she wanted to drive out toward the reservoir, that she was feeling romantic and wanted to be alone with me outside. She would call in sick for work the next day. She felt like being young again.

I agreed, of course. There was a momentum here which was a relief to me also. I was ready for it to end, one way or another.

On the way Pauline asked to stop at Willie Munoz’s liquor store. She told me to park on the street; she’d be back in a minute. She wanted to go in by herself. I took that to mean that she wanted to establish the fact that she was in Rock Springs, alone, at 11:15 pm on the night of the murder. Perhaps she would even call Beth to tell her that everything was proceeding as planned.

I did what I was told. I checked my gun during her absence. It was below the car seat. It was loaded. I took the safety lock off.

We drove out toward the reservoir. It was a black night. I tried to keep a clear head. Pauline was babbling uncontrollably. This and that: she could not stop talking. I could see that the realization of what was occurring, combined with the alcohol she had consumed that night, had led her into a giddy state of mind. She seemed happy, relieved. She seemed almost euphoric.

This made me hate her, that she could be so happy to be approaching my destruction. How she must hate me to go to such a length. She could have just walked away from me. I would not have stopped her. But she was greedy. She made a plan to enrich herself and her lover by killing me. This part I could not accept.

I had not really hated her before. My nature was not to hate things, to accept things as being good and bad mixed, each a complication of angels and demons. I had been concentrating more on myself of late than on my feelings for my wife. Fear had been guiding me more than any other emotion. Now, however, a crystallization of thought was occurring. I could see everything quite clearly. Yes, I hated Pauline and Beth. I was angry at them. They were seeking to destroy me. And I was seeking to destroy them.

And I had the advantage. I knew what they were doing. And they believed they were merely leading the lamb into the slaughterhouse.

As I drove out toward the dam, I reached down with my left hand to touch my pistol. I had placed it in its holster; but I had removed the cross strap so that I could raise the gun up easily. Pauline continued to talk incessantly. She had opened the bottle of whiskey she had bought in town and was drinking from the bottle. A craziness in her was seeping out like fumes from a sewer. I could smell her crazy ecstasy. It was lurid and seemed as ripe as rotten fruit.

As we neared the reservoir junction, Pauline pointed to a dirt road off to the right.

“Is that the Miller Ranch road?” she asked.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Let’s take that!” she said. “I want to have sex with you in the grass, under the stars!”

There was no grass on the Miller Ranch road. There was sand, sagebrush, wind and a few rattlesnakes. Pauline was whipping herself into a frenzy. She seemed obsessed and dazed, as she sometimes appeared when we made love, having entered a trance-state. Desire was fueling her, driving her mind to heights of abandon.

I drove slowly. The sand was deep on either side, and the brush grew up high, taller than the car. It was eerie driving in the dark, knowing what I knew. I expected to see Beth’s jeep somewhere on the road. I had a suspicion that Pauline had not the courage to pull a trigger to end my life; and that she might call on Beth to perform the deed.

We approached a grove of cottonwood trees to our right.

“Pull over there!” Pauline said, her voice almost gruff. She turned on the inside light and pulled her panties off, under her skirt. She pulled her skirt up, exposing herself, and said:

“Do you like this stuff, Joey? Why don’t you have a drink of this.”

She handed me the whiskey bottle.

I said: “What’s this all about, Pauline? What are we doing here?”

“What do you think we’re doing here?” she responded.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think it’s crazy to be out here like this. I think we should go back to town.”

“You do, do you?” she asked. There was a surliness in her voice. “Don’t you want to screw me? Isn’t that what you like best about me?”

I said nothing.

“Sometimes I loathe you, Joey,” she said, quite drunk, slurring her words a bit. “You’ll never understand how much I loathe you. Except when you screw me. And then I pretend you’re someone else.”

I said nothing. I looked out the windshield for Beth. I had kept the headlights on, hoping, at the very least, to illuminate the foreground. The fact that the inside light was on disturbed me greatly, as it provided a very clear target for someone approaching from the outside.

“Do you have any idea how much I loath this lie we’re living, Joey?” she asked. “How much I despise this fake institution you and I are supporting?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I think I do know, Pauline.”

“You don’t know anything, Joey,” she said. “Joey, Joey, Joey!” Her voice was full of spite. “You don’t know anything. Tell me what you know! Tell me!”

I was becoming jumpy, and I was sweating profusely. I did not want to make a first move; but it was becoming clear to me that if I made the second move I might be dead.

“I know that you had yourself sterilized in Jackson,” I said. “I know that you’re still sleeping with Beth, that you’re filled with hatred for me and for men.”

Pauline was stunned. Her head tilted as she tried to consider how I could have known so much. She was shocked into silence for a moment. My response seemed to sober her instantly.

“What else do you know?” Pauline asked.

“I know that you’ve taken out a $500,000 life insurance policy on me,” I answered, turning off the inside light. “And that you brought me out here to kill me so that you could collect the insurance.”

Pauline was speechless. She immediately looked behind the car into the darkness. There was panic on her face.

I put the car in drive and began moving up the road toward the Miller Ranch.

“It’s not too early to end things quietly, Pauline,” I said. “You and Beth can live together. If you want a divorce, that’s fine. I’m ready to file for a divorce, no questions asked.”

Pauline pulled a pistol from her handbag. “Stop the car,” she said. “Stop the goddamned car!”

I stopped the car. She leaned across, turned the key off, and took the keys.

She rolled down her window, and yelled: “Beth, where are you?”

I reached down and drew my pistol up with my left hand.

Pauline was panicking. She pushed her head out the window, crying: “Beth! Beth!”

I heard Beth’s voice answer in the darkness: “I’m coming, Polly! I’m coming! What’s wrong?”

“He knows!” my wife responded. “He knows!”

I shifted my pistol from my left to my right hand, aimed it at Pauline’s heart. I wanted to give her another chance to drop her gun; but I knew I must act before her eyes returned to me. I squeezed the trigger.

It was the loudest explosion I have ever heard. Something popped in both of my ears and blood flew all over the car. I had blood in my mouth and on my glasses.

Pauline had bounced hard against the door, and now slumped back on the seat, oblivious, murmuring something. I took the pistol out of her hand and noted, with a detached clarity, that the gun was not the Ruger automatic pistol she had purchased, but a .38 caliber like my own.

My sense of hearing was dead. The loud pop had rendered me deaf. I strained to hear and I imagined hearing the wind, and hearing Beth thrashing in the sand, moving toward the car. I turned off the inside light and receded back into darkness.

“Did you waste him?” Beth cried. “Did you waste him?” Her voice sounded as if she were shouting in a bottle.

Beth had a flashlight. She put the light on me. I pretended to be shot, slumped against the door. She shifted the light to Pauline.

“Polly, you got him!” she said. “You did it!”

I raised my gun slowly and fired four shots through the window at the flashlight. I heard Beth scream but I was not sure I had hit her. I rolled out of the car, on to the road, then pulled myself into the thick brush. I only had one bullet left in the gun. I did not move for about five minutes. They were the longest five minutes of my life.

I was shaking. I was trying to listen to every sound: but there was still a loud ringing in my ears and I was shaking so hard I could not hear anything. I was shivering, as if I were lying naked in a snowstorm. But I was hot, sweating, sick. Then I began to vomit. I tried to hold it back, because any sound I might make threatened my existence. I wasn’t sure that I hat hit Beth. I knew that if I hadn’t hit her, she would hear me vomiting and could approach me and kill me. But I could not hold back the vomit. It came out bitter and burning. It came out for what seemed like an eternity. Everything smelled like whiskey and firecrackers. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to sleep. Months of fear had exacted a toll. I wanted to sleep for ever. I wanted to die right there, in the brush. I closed me eyes. Perhaps it was all a dream. Everything was ringing.

I don’t know how long I slept. I was awakened by the sound of Beth’s voice, within the ringing: “I’m hit! Polly, I’m hit! You’ve got to help me, Polly! You’ve got to help me!”

Everything may have happened in a matter of seconds. I did not know.

I felt very weak. I remembered I had only one bullet left. But I had bullets in my coat. So I re-loaded the gun quietly and then rose from the brush and circled back into the darkness, behind the car. I crossed the road and approached the car from the far side of the brush. I tried not to make noise but everything seemed magnified: the brush crackled under my feet, my jacked whipped in the breeze, sending out wrinkles of sound.

Beth was lying on her back near the car. I had to see if she still had a gun. She was crying out to Pauline: “Polly? Are you hit, Polly? How’d he know? Did you tell him...?” But her voice had a gurgling sound, which I assumed was blood filling her lungs.

The moon was up, but I could not see well enough to tell if she still held a gun.

I waited in the brush. I was tired. I fell asleep again.

I didn’t awaken until dawn. The light woke me. I had hoped that it was a dream, but I knew it was not. I felt some relief when I slept; but when I jerked awake finally, lying in the brush, I knew that something irreversible had happened, that a nightmare had occurred and that my life was for ever changed.

I looked out toward my car. Beth was lying motionless in the sand of the road. There was an old automatic pistol lying near her feet.

I approached the car. Beth was dead. I had hit her once in the forehead and once in the chest. She seemed so small and harmless lying in the road that I felt guilty and sad that I had hurt her.

I looked in at Pauline. She had not moved. She must have died instantly.

I felt sick. There was no relief in this. I felt a need to sleep. I felt a great burden in my conscience. What had I done?

I walked two miles up the road to the Miller Ranch. I had known Rod Miller since grade school. He was shocked to see me. I was still holding my gun. I told him to call the police and an ambulance.

His wife fixed me breakfast. I could not eat. I told Rod and Ruth the story. They were stunned. We walked down toward the car. We could see Beth’s red jeep parked down below where the shooting occurred. She had apparently followed us out of town, turned with us up the road.

The police arrived about a half-hour after the call. The ambulance got stuck in the sand, and everyone had to help push them up the road to the bodies. I could not help push. I went into the bushes and threw up again.

The police did not handcuff me, but they put me in their car and drove me in to town. I spent the morning and afternoon talking with investigators, telling them about the chance lunch with Willie Durst, the receipt I had found in Pauline’s purse, the letter for my brother I had left in the deposit box at the bank. The police detectives asked the same question over and over: why hadn’t I said something to someone, why hadn’t I contacted the police?

I don’t know, I answered. I guess I couldn’t believe that it was true. It seemed so much like a dream that I didn’t know who I could tell without appearing absurd.

There was an inquest about a week after the shooting. Witnesses were called. I spent about two hours on the stand. Eventually, my actions were deemed “justifiable homicide”. No charges were filed against me. In a subsequent court hearing, State Farm Insurance of Green River argued that, since my signature on the insurance policy initiated by my wife had been forged, all claims I might make on the policy were without merit and the policy itself was void. My attorney argued that, since my deceased wife had been covered by the policy, and her signature was not challenged for its authenticity, and, since I had been declared the beneficiary in case of her death, that the legitimacy of my signature was not relevant. Had I been killed, then my forged signature would be reason to void the policy. However, the reverse did not hold. The judge ruled in my favor and I was awarded the $500,000 settlement.

Less than a week after the insurance settlement, I received a call from Bertrand Kaminsky, Pauline’s father. He spoke to me in an agitated voice, saying: “I know you killed my daughter for the insurance money, you prick! I know you’re tricky. Pauline used to tell us what a slick character you are. We didn’t believe her. We thought you were a good kid. Now we know better. But you won’t get away with killing my daughter! We’ll get you! Brock is coming back to town! When he gets here, your party is over, you bastard....!”

Brock Kaminsky was Pauline’s older brother. He had spent time in the penitentiary for manslaughter. He had fought a man in a downtown bar and , when the man had tried to escape, Brock had run him down in his car, killing him.

I packed my bags that afternoon. I didn’t need to take much. I had always wanted to leave Rock Springs. There was nothing keeping me from leaving now. My father had a scheme to use the insurance money to buy back the cement plant which he had sold to Mercury Construction for almost nothing. Mercury had turned it into a profitable enterprise. Now my father wanted to buy it back. “All we had need is a little capital,” he had said. “Now, we have that. There’s nothing to stop us now from finally reaching our dream, Joe.”

I put my bags in my car and drove over to my parents’ house. I told them both good bye, that I was going away for a while. I would stay in touch, I said. I drove out of town. Everything was dusty and dry and so lonely. I would never come back, I knew. I would drive and I would drive. There was no reason for me to stop driving. I had seen everything.

I’ve been driving ever since.

THE NICE GIRL

I.

The manners of the boys are rude; and then the girls begin to appear. The boys are wild like goats that have come down out of the mountains and are placed among the flowers and given tequila to drink. They begin to run wildly over the pretty things, the pretty plants; and they do not understand why it is that the women hide. Exuberance is not everything apparently. The corpse of exuberance is as notorious as clay, but not nearly so well known; it certainly is not without apologies.

I feel the wind embrace me, feel it run up my arm and run into my blood. While it is true that the wind represents something notorious in the way of ghostly gatherings, it is also true that the impressions of chaos are sometimes friendly when the exaggerations are run. It is true that the chaos of men is not always mine own enemy, for, at times, it can give to me a sense of direction, when I am lacking such a thing. It can give me a sense of portent, when I am calling out to have it, longing to see that I am not alone. The wind racks my window; the house creaks; the wind moans. I know that there is something fully hurting in the whining; yet I know it cannot hurt, cannot really hurt, and that is why the wind is crying.

There is a celebration in town. Everything is made easy by the looking and by the easy liquor that is flowing. The girls are like the clouds dressed in fine gauze and waves. Some are easy to read, easy to see through. Others are dense and filled with emotion. A winery of fears. Clouds pressed into opinions. Fury given over to ecstatic dread. Perhaps even snow, when their ices form and their own sequences mirror storms, warm air rising and cold pointed elements sinking. Now, however, on this night, the fury is far away. Color has been put on, in spirited patterns, hair tucked up and made shining. Lips painted and hips rolling to a music that is part love, part imagination, part an escape from boredom, and some part a memory of music that once mattered in the girlhood. I am there also, my hair up, my colors on, my boys full of beer and excess nature. One boy wants me more than the others. I don’t know him. He has hands on my body, and he runs his hand up along my arm, making my skin blush. I have a hatred in me that is furious and righteous. I hate all of this. I hate my life in my town, the small movements, the wind brushing against my skin, taunting me, making me alone. The boy says he wants to fill up my bones, the emptiness of my heritage. I know that it is an empty bug he carries, a cane with no sword, a swelling which lasts for moments only, before it descends back into the cold country of disbelief.

But he is offering something. I will go with him, in his cattle truck, along the golf-course road. I will let him put his fingers into the soft craziness of the world, the vast absorber of sorrow. I will take his seed, I know, for it is better to have lightning in a cage for one moment than it is to count the lines on the faces of one’s friends, quietly, understanding that energetic youth has poured out its passion in private existential longings.

II.

There is a dream. It is a black dream, a dream with hands and fingers coming out to instruct some decency in the soul. Instructing it to leave, to open the dreamer to the catalytic nature of dreams, evil instruction, the coiling of apparencies. There is a dream within a dream. I am the subject of this dream. It is not nice. I do not even remember when the dream began. It has been many seasons, many centuries even, since I was who I am no longer. I can look at pictures of that other being, with her long blonde hair in braids, the innocent smile on her face, an innocence both genuine and even frightening to me now, because of its genuineness. I no longer understand the genuine: it is like a belief I once had, like a belief in Christmas, Santa Claus, the good fairy. It seems that life is one door being opened and one door being closed. One leading out and an inner door being sealed. I see pictures of my parents now and wonder why I came to hate them so. Was it because of their stuffed appearances, their minds like velvet paintings, their values combed from the pages of a damned literature?

There is a dream, a black dream, and there is an old man standing at the door of his house, standing in his pajamas in his wire-frame eyeglasses, his thin white hair puffed in frail clouds atop his generous sloping cranium. What was his name? I remember it from the indictment: Richard Paul. Two first names. Richard Paul. And his wife Marjorie Paul. She wore a blue suit, with white dots. When I looked into her face I wanted to cry, for she reminded me of my first-grade teacher, Mrs. McQuarter, after she passed into old age and senility. She seemed like the last golden leaf lying on the grass in a huge park. By some miracle all the other leaves had vanished. And she lay alone, inspected by many, a unique thing, almost a freak thing. Lying dry and alone on a cold cushion of earth. Dead, except in terms of motion. Killed by the ailing nature of the ailing thing which also killed me.

III.

I was once a good girl. I made my parents proud.

That was in the past century, back in the small town of Sinclair, Wyoming. There was an oil refinery there. My father worked in the refinery. My mother was the post-mistress of the town. That does not mean that she was every man’s dried flower. She posted mail in the town’s post office.

I had a sister then, a small arid crust of a girl, with a yellowish hue, and the texture of puffed wheat. She died of leukemia when I was only nine-years-old. She had been sick all of her life, always leaning against things, always breathing weakly, always being carried by my father. He carried her in to church every Sunday for many years. Then, suddenly—it was really a sudden shock, as if her illness had not been an illness at all, but a character trait or a condition of thought—Lisa was gone, carried away by the haunted wind, the wind that pounded against our house, pouring curses, slurs, fists of sod and bits of imprecation as thick and as sour as dung, filling the night entity with ghosts as indiscriminate as dead children. Indiscriminate. That was it. Her death was indiscriminate. It had no logic. It had many precursors, but it had no moral reason. As my life later became indiscriminate, after nights out on the golf-course road stole away my sense of mystery and closed some door on my brilliant but dour purity.

We buried Lisa. Many people were there from the church, the minister and the minister’s wife, all the flat faces of those burdened with a theology of pain, living, themselves, an aeon or two upon the well-oiled crescent, my parents not the least of whom, steady as they both were, pale, drawn like a shade to keep the truth out, two houses formed into one house, a temple with tear-stained windows, stained-glass faces and dusty authorities designed by the wind to deflect understanding, rendering it void.

I did not cry for Lisa. I cried for my own sad nativity. I cried for the dust gathering under my shoes, the plain remorse and guilt which began to accumulate on the faces of my parents, lines cut in low relief, weight gathering beneath the eyes, inharmonious age in the eyes which was sorrow multiplied by the loss of faith and youth forged by the early death of a child. One might as well have hung a shroud on our house, covering each window and door, eliminating light and sanctifying only the memories of life before the occasion of our grief. Survivors cry for themselves afterall. Lisa was free, free to float in the wind, free to become the cloud she had always been, in her heart, always imagined herself to be, carried no longer by her father on the earth but by her more eternal elemental father now, light itself, space without gravity, soul without the link to time, the clock rummaging in the skin, the flesh turning on the spire.

I was once a good girl, as I have said. I was excellent in school. I made the honor role each year. I edged into that class of student noted for precision of brain and disingenuity of body. Socially retarded; academically gifted, or if not gifted at least gifted with either boundless determination or a photographic memory. I worked hard. I was good at math. My parents expressed endless pride in my scholastic accomplishments. I was religious also. We were Baptists. We did not believe in gaudy or lively clothes, in dating until eighteen, in modern music. I played the piano and organ. We had an organ in our house and I used to spend hours playing Bach as my mother knitted and my father read the Bible. We were dull. The shroud that had been hung on our house was as much to keep outsiders from approaching us as it was to keep us dark and surrounded by a sense of dread, implicit fear, for fear makes one dependent on fatality. And we were dependent upon fatality. There was not much laughter in our house. To laugh heartily was either a sign of impending insanity or evidence of an obscene nature. I laughed very rarely, believing it proof that my heart was clean and life-giving.

IV.

It was not that I did not have private longings. I was not a saint. I had shameful fantasies; but they were never translated into public manifestations, unveiling my hidden nature. Not, at least, until much later, when my old self died and was replaced by a spirit given to public indiscretions.

There was a boy who lived next door. He was an athlete. He used to play basketball in our shared driveway. He used to play without a shirt. He was well-muscled and handsome. He had black hair, and a sort of shy look. He wore black-framed glasses. He usually played alone, sometimes for hours. I used to watch him from my bedroom window. I would become aroused while watching him. I don’t know if it was love. I felt him in my heart and occasionally in my conscience. But, most of all, I felt him in my blood.

I would sometimes touch myself as I watched him. I knew it was wrong. But it felt good when I went wandering over my taut body: high hills and lush valleys, touching points which tightened me into hard balls of sensitivity. Several times I even went out to ask if I could play with him. Basketball, I meant. Who knows what I meant. He understood me to mean basketball. And he let me. I shot the ball with him, making some baskets, hoping to impress him with my skill. I was athletic too, for a girl. And he seemed to enjoy being with me. But he was shy. He did not realize I was asking him to tighten me into hard balls of sensitivity. We would part; and then he would not call me. Of course he would not call me. He did not care for me or desire me in that way. But I pretended he did. I waited for the phone to ring. Each time it did ring my heart rose, half expecting my mother to turn to me, after answering the phone, and to say, a look of confusion on her face: “It’s for you, Patricia. It’s Mike Jones calling. What do you think he wants with you...!”

Of course, my mother knew what men wanted. If Mike Jones was calling me, then there was only one thing he was after. All men were the same: the small head thinking for the big head. A woman had to be careful, Patricia. For men didn’t care what damage they might do to a woman’s reputation.

But it was not Mike Jones. Mike Jones was a dream, a bright dream, not the black dream with hands and fingers probing into obscene places, into brains and souls and later into the veins with a blue-black needle. Mike Jones was a dream of light, with strong legs and muscled arms and chest, sweat streaking his tanned skin, disappearing into his cutoffs. That was youth. Unsatisfied longings. The black dream was after youth. Unsatisfied completions. Unsatisfied satisfactions. Longings on the verge of stumbling into graceless dread or at least resignation, acceptance of the shroud.

I did not like being the good student who did not have a boyfriend, who could not date, who wore a skirt to mid-calf when all the other girls were showing their thighs. Yet it was my destiny. It was my road. Boys in high school did not look at me as a potential lover. They hardly looked at me at all. And I was not ugly. I was just remote, I think. I wore a shroud too, a particle of death, serious consequences: an old religion drawn up from the deep south. I was dusty. I never shined. Even when I made the National Honor Society it was not such an honor, because it reminded me more of what I was not, what I did not have, than it did celebrate what I was and what I might be.

When I stood before the mirror, naked, after a bath or when I undressed, I knew I had what boys would want. I had enough beauty. I was not graceful socially perhaps. I was not fluid and perky. But I was pretty and young; my body was forming into a woman’s body. I had all the parts which could make a man happy. I just needed a chance to prove it.

V.

I was not allowed to date until I reached the age of eighteen. I could attend church parties or gatherings of other church youth. But there were always chaperons. I did not care for the boys at church any way. They seemed cut out of cardboard, stiff and generic, without imagination. They seemed to be what I appeared to be but was not. Was, on the surface. Yes, that is true. No one knew the real me, embedded deep in the clay part of me like a fossil or one of the dead awaiting Josiah’s trumpet. There was a ghost in me, the dark ghost, the one who thought foul night thoughts and who rose occasionally in my dreams, demanding that I do hard and calculated things, hurting myself, offering myself to criminal natures, beastly dragons who sought violent acts as a bee seeks out blood saturated with sugar.

Dreams, the dark dreams, began when I was about seventeen. Nightmares: both female natures. The horse that carries the bad part of Day into shadow. Those of the apocalypse and those of the centaur. Mainly the dreams were sexual; but they were also occasionally violent. Once I dreamed of humiliating my father into having sex with his own sister. I never forgot that dream. Once I killed our French Poodle with a knife, drove it deep into her belly, and watched her bleed on the living room sofa, while I watched the Newlywed Game on television, laughing wildly as my dog suffocated in her blood.

There was something perverse in me, something self-destructive waiting to get out. It was far from the surface, a monster on a chain, the chain being short, and the water hiding the monster being deep and muddied, so that no one could gaze into my eyes, over my chilly smooth features, and suspect that I harbored a demon in my flesh, as bold as brass and as cold as a brassy fantasy. But it was true.

I would sometimes become very cruel. In fact, I was rather often cruel to my sister, when she had been living. I believe I resented her because of my father’s doting on her. She seemed so weak and insignificant, so pale and absolutely abused by nature. It sometimes brought out the bully in me. I would pull her hair, hard; or I would push her down to the floor or on to the couch. I would only do it when my parents were gone, or not watching. I understood, at the time, that this was a perverse act. That there was some huge frustration inside of me which, when it was able to express itself, often came out in the form of symptoms which were grotesque and insupportable. I knew this.

Through high school I continued to fight against this beast, this demon, and I would often enter religious ecstasies when I could truly comprehend that the dark nature in me was, in fact, a demon, and my true self, as opposed to it, was angelic and built by light. Then I would fight it, drive it deeper inside of me, deeper into the swamp and into the curlews of midnight. But the fight was never complete. In fact, the more I fought this darkness the stronger it became.

I do not blame my parents for what happened. Less still do I blame the society. I do not follow the feminists who claim that my tragedy stemmed from the repression of my senses, the corruption of my good nature by the values of the male-dominated society. My tragedy is my own. My tragedy is in my character. I am a free woman, free to choose. I am not a victim except of my own choice, my own decision to give myself up to my obsessions. It was a choice I made. I knew what was right. I knew what my path was, that I had a choice, between the dour and the dangerous, between dust and glitter, between discipline or abandonment. And I chose abandonment.

VI.

My life changed at eighteen. As I have said, that is when I was allowed to date. Not that there were boys lined up at my door to experience my frail and virginal femininity. It takes only one however. And that one was Rob Collins. He was eight years older than I. He worked at the refinery, as a boilermaker. He was not handsome, was not gentle, was not polished. He was somewhat rough, could be a bully. But he could also be a pretty decent man.

He first asked me to go horseback riding with him out on Ernie Arnold’s ranch. We probably rode together about five times before he began to press for sexual experiences. He was a muscular man, shorter than I, with red hair and freckles. He chewed tobacco, and smelled of both hay and masculine sweat. His shirts were always wet with sweat. We were in the barn, having finished riding. Up to that point there had been no physical contact. He had kept his distance, treated me with respect, even deference. But I could sense in him a build-up of steam, a tightening of the iron rod of nerves, as if he were holding something in, holding his breath.

Finally, that day, both of us wet with perspiration from our ride, he came up from behind and grabbed me, turned me, kissed me a wild, desperate kiss. He was twenty-six, unmarried, working at a job which was not especially important to him. He was drinking a lot. He didn’t know where his life was leading. His kiss was so desperate, so untempered, so lacking in romance, that I was taken aback. I did not find him especially attractive. But I was wildly curious about sex. I did not like being a virgin. I wanted to experience life. I even wanted the rude part of life, anything but the shroud, the protecting dust, which had enveloped the life of my family, cocooning us into a trance which we called life but which, in fact, was a living death. I don’t know what happened next. I did not really like his mouth on me. His tongue went into me, sparking in me some fire of excitement. His tongue was like a penis entering me. I had dreamed of that male part for many years now, imagined it, as I caressed myself into a private ecstasy. His tongue entered my mouth and I became almost limp, unable to protest. The next thing I knew I was lying in the hay in the barn, and Rob was on top of me, kissing me, pulling open my shirt. I knew, at that moment, that I needed to make a choice. I had been trained and educated by my family and church to believe that a man and woman should consummate their love only in marriage. I did not love Rob Collins. I needed to tell him to stop, that we had gone far enough. He was a bit of a brute; but the animal part of him excited me too. I was turning to a hot porridge and my choice, although clear in terms of its philosophy, was not clear in terms of import. I had to decide whether to serve my desire to fulfill my private longings, which were, at long last, to become a woman, or to honor my fear of public shame should I not.

I did nothing. I had no will to resist. For some reason Rob stopped, pulled away. He did not want to go to fast, he said. He intended to get to know me, and, if everything went well, to ask me to marry him.

I was lying in the dirt and the hay, on the floor of the barn, unable to speak or move, and he sat above me telling me he thought he loved me. I don’t know whether I should be honored or angry. I did not wish to marry Rob Collins. I did not love him. He was not graceful, urbane; he did not excite my mind. I did not think of him as being a part of my future. I uncoiled in the hay, no longer hearing what he was saying.

The next time we went riding I insisted he lay me down in the hay and penetrate me with his manhood. I did not care about anything but the sensation of love, to find out what it was, to see if the fire which was burning inside of me could be put out or might even burn brighter. He was awkward. He bruised me. But I did not care. I was like a boa constrictor swallowing its prey. I wanted it all. Even when it hurt, burned. Even when something snapped and blood ran down my thigh and into dirt and hay, and something huge came to riot inside of me, I wanted more, and more. I wanted what I had not had for so long. Pain perhaps. I wanted more pain. Pain was so close to pleasure for me. I told him to hurt me more. To hurt me more. And when he finished, when he collapse on me, uttering deep concussions of release, I almost cried because the pain had stopped so abruptly.

Life, as I had known it, life in the shroud, had ended. Rod and I rode horses every evening that whole summer. My parents expressed surprise that I had suddenly become so fond of horses.

I had graduated from high school and made plans to attend the community college in Casper. My grades were strong enough to allow me to attend any school I wanted, but my parents feared that a large university might overwhelm me, and might offer too many temptations. We settled on Casper CC. I would attend that school for two years and then decide about my future at that point.

I felt very proud and very dangerous now, so sexually liberated. I purchased birth control pills from a doctor in town, thereby dulling the oldest fear of public shame, that of pregnancy. I was wild with Rob, seeking more pain from him all the time, challenging him to hurt me and to heal me with all of his power. It was good for each of us, good in terms of pleasure.

I had no intention of marrying Rob. When he asked me, I deflected him, telling him I needed more time to think about it, that I didn’t intend to marry anyone until I finished my education. I told him to enjoy himself this summer. I told him to relax and not worry so much about making of me an honest woman.

VII.

I went to college in the fall. The year was 1972.

I did not do well in school. My focus had been broken. My focus now was trained only on naked aggressions. I slept with three different men in the first week of my schooling at Casper. A few kisses, a bit of whiskey, and I was flat on my back, waiting for the sensations to start. It was overpowering. It was all I could think of. I liked to drink with men and then give in to their passions. I became addicted to it. I did not study at all. Somehow, I passed the basic courses in the first semester of study. But I didn’t do well. I received “C” grades in all my classes, except for calculus in which I received a “B”. My parents understood that it was just the difficult adjustment of being away from home for the first time, coming to terms with a new, larger and more complex environment.

I could go through each experience and elaborate my “liberation”. It was not really liberation to me, any more than a roller-coaster is liberated when it flies off its track. I was out of control most of the time. Chaos, punctuated by moments of rest and relief. I did not like myself, generally speaking. As I had not really liked myself before, in my virginal robe, in my religious dust: I did not like or respect myself as a slut either. The men I wished to meet, those I might love, never did show an interest in me. Most rude men, cowboys, or those with brutal natures, seemed most attracted to me. They looked right in to my venal side, my obsessive nature, sensing that I would be easy to distract, fired by the rub, contagious in my own longing. And they were right. I developed a reputation at college. Men would call me and ask me out, men I did not know, had never seen. I wondered if my name had been written in stalls in public restrooms.

I wanted to calmly reply: “No. Afterall, I don’t know you. What kind of lady would go out on a date with a man she doesn’t know.” But I was not a lady. I had no control. So I said yes, come by and pick me up. And before long, at his apartment or even in his car, whoever the man was, it did not matter, I was soon drunk and without clothes, pulling myself against some sweaty man who may be nice or may not be, who may be decent or a total scoundrel, might stink, might vomit, might be fat and might be a midget: it did not matter. I had become a slave.

When I flunked out of college, I returned home to live with my parents. It was not the same at home, however. They knew I had changed. Perhaps they could smell it. When I looked in the mirror, under the harsh light, looking past the skin and into the heart, the soul, I could smell it too. I could smell decay.

As I have said, I do not blame anyone. I had no strength. I rejected the values of my parents—that is, my blood rejected it. And I had no will, no strength of character, to resist temptation. It seemed that there were two roads: one of salvation, my parents’ road, a dusty, dry, incapacitating slow crawl into death’s magnet; and the road of sin, the road of color, red satin, auburn drink, hard entry, love which was a form of self-hatred. Perhaps I chose the second road. Perhaps it chose me. Destiny has a very hard sword. And the choices we make is often more a matter of the one causing the least pain, the least exposure to despair.

One night, during the next summer, it was hot and I was watching television, lying alone on my couch. I was lying in my black nightie. It was after midnight. I had the door open, hoping for a cool breeze. I had no sense of the outside. I was watching Johnnie Carson.

There was a faint knock on the door. It was Mike Jones. He later told me he had been watching me for some time, my legs exposed beneath my nightie.

I walked to the door, not bothering to cover my body with a robe.

“Mike, what are you doing here so late?” I asked.

“Do you have a key to the trailer?” he asked.

“What?”

“Do you have a key to your trailer?” he repeated. “We can go in there if you want.”

His meaning was clear. He wanted me to sneak out with him to the small house trailer we kept beside out house, near the driveway. It was as if his suggestion were a blow against the side of my head. I became almost drunk from the suggestion. Everything became dull on the edges. Blurred. My heart began to pound.

I said: “Yes, wait out there for me.”

I knew that I was committing a crime against my family; still, I found the key to the trailer, put on a thin robe, and left the house, walking in the dark to the trailer. Neither of us said anything. I was careful not to make noise when I opened and closed the door to the trailer. My parents’ bedroom window was open; it was only a few feet from the trailer.

Once inside, everything began to unravel. I remember making noise. And I remember Mike Jones making noise. He was very passionate, kissing me, pulling off my robe, ripping my nightie off. It was heaven to be with him finally. I remember crying out. He entered me and I wrapped myself around him as tight as I could. I didn’t want it to end. Perhaps this was love. Perhaps this was love.

It was not love. I did not hear from him for two days. I waited for the phone to ring, for him to ask me out to the movies and to a dance. He did not. Two nights later he knocked on my door again after midnight. This time he was with three other friends. They wondered if I might want to visit the trailer with them. Everything seemed ruined. Everything seemed crude.

But I could not say no to them. I had no pride now. I had only a craving for sensation now.

This went on all summer. I don’t know how my parents didn’t find out. Each day I would wash the sheets when my parents were away at work, looking forward to the re-appearance of the hard bodies each night, disappointed when they did not come, knowing that I was becoming lower and lower, unable to resist, not respecting myself, respecting only my desire for excitement.

At the end of the summer, they all went back to college. Mike said nothing to me about leaving, did not thank me, did not say he enjoyed himself, his summer of pleasure. One night he climbed off of me, dressed, muttering something inane, embarrassed too, then gone, never to return.

That was my life then. Bodies moving over the stage that I was.

I worked for almost two years at Bailey’s Drugstore in Rawlins. Nothing changed. I had dates with men I didn’t especially care for. We usually went out for a few months, until we grew weary of one another. Nothing important happened. I had an affair with Ralph Bailey during this time. He was married. He was a pharmacist, owned the drugstore where I worked. His wife was pretty and lively. She suspected nothing. He would take me for a drive after work, taking me home. Sometimes we even drove down by the river, on the golf-course road. I would do it with him, then wipe him clean and send him home. It was not important.

Then I met Eric Lindeman again for the first time since high school. He had been president of the Key Club in school, of which I had also been a member. We had been good friends. He was a wimp in those days, flabby, with glasses, a good student but awkward. And that’s what I had been like too. That’s why I had liked him. He had been a good moral man with a sense of decency and decor.

He had gone off to Colorado and then to California, studying to be a pharmacist. One day in the fall of 1975 he visited Bailey’s Drugstore. He was working as a pharmaceutical distributor. He traveled a lot. He talked with Ralph Bailey about the line of products he was representing. Apparently something had happened and he had not finished pharmacy school. But he knew enough about drugs to find work in the field, as a salesman.

He asked me out to dinner. He was only in town for a few days. Then he was on his way again to Denver. But he would like to buy me dinner.

He bought me dinner and I gave him desert. He had never been very successful with women. He must have known nothing about my reputation. We ate at Adam’s Restaurant, drinking a fair amount of wine, reminiscing about the wonderful days of youth. He had never been married. He was looking to get out of sales, to settle down and have a family.

We drove around town, laughing about memories of high school. Then I told him to take me to his hotel. I could not spend the night with him, because of my parents; but I did undress him and unveiled to him my own transformations.

Two months later we were married and living in Rawlins.

VII.

Nothing happens by accident. I believe that. Rudy Means was no accident. Richard Bailey was no accident. He hired me because he had heard from his son’s friend that I was a slut and could be had for the price of a beer. Eric Lindeman was no accident. He was the last grace offered me by the gods, my last opportunity to live by the law.

I was true to Eric for almost two years. And it was not easy. He was not a physical man, and not sexual by nature. He was an intellectual, excited by ideas and by knowledge. I had once been like that. No, I had not been excited by knowledge. I had been excited by the recognition of doing well in school, the blue ribbon, the pat on the head, the knowledge that I stood at the head of the class. Now, something else motivated me. I feared it. I knew that this new thing, this demonic impulse, which was not really new, which had taken possession of me when I first became a woman, this power of the black drive, was my master, my god now. Try as I might to keep it on a leash, on a thick chain of good intentions: it carried me and I only pretended to carry it. My two years of good behavior, of wifely virtue, were motivated by my desire, it’s true, to correct my way of life; even more, however, it was motivated by the inexplicable absence of my shadower.

The beast had moved from the surface in an ever-deeper descent, plunging into the deepest, muddiest waters of my soul, searching, gliding, a beast of the deep, into my complex, attenuated nature. It was gone for almost two years, rarely raising its head, rarely letting out its cry. I knew it was still there. I could feel it when a man looked at me. When a man looked right through me, and sent a fire skidding through my bones, marking me with his ambition.

But I resisted the beast for about two years. I thought of other things. I tried to satisfy myself with the occasional love of my husband and my own unconstrained imagination.

But it didn’t last. Roger Baker was a forty-five year old bachelor who ran the Sinclair Garage. He was handsome, charming, and irresistible to the women of Sinclair. He had slept with many of the women in town, often during the day, while their husbands were working at the refinery. He moved from one woman to the next, pleasing many women and developing a reputation as the great lover of the town.

He eventually moved to me. I wasn’t working. I had quit my job at the pharmacy when Eric and I were married. I wanted to be away from Ralph Bailey, away from all the memories which reminded me of my own lack of virtue. Afterall, my life had begun anew when I was wed. I had been absolved of my sins, cleansed by the power of the sacrament of marriage.

But Roger Baker changed that.

Eric had him work on our car. We were having trouble with the transmission. Roger called me one afternoon, saying the car was ready: should he drive it over? Yes, I said. I knew about his reputation. I did not think really about it at the time. I did not feel especially attractive to men, and had not since my marriage. I had successfully submerged my sexual nature beneath my new role of wife. I did not think about it much any more.

Roger Baker came to the door to give me the car keys. The next thing I knew he had invited himself in for a cup of coffee. He had a way of talking to a woman that was completely disarming. He knew how to wind himself inside of a woman, to get into her private thoughts and frustrations without seeming to be prying. He was a snake. I could see him winding himself around me, touching me with the skin of his words. I could feel it happening. But it felt good. I let him do it.

He came back a couple of times each week. At first it was just talk. Then it became more. We had sex in my husband’s bed several times a week. I felt the humiliation of deceiving my husband. I felt it acutely. But Eric was so lifeless compared to Roger, who seemed so deft in love and so excited to be with me. So I gave him everything I had. Then I washed the sheets and made up the bed so that all the evidence of my infidelity was gone. Except in my heart of course, where it ate away at me, reminding me that I was again worthless, incapable of commitment, incapable of nobility.

It went on for almost a year. I’m sure that everyone in town knew about it, because Roger liked to talk about his conquests. He was proud of his reputation. And he would tell the younger men who worked with him at the garage. Before long it would be spread through the town: another conquest for old Roger. In fact, he was seeing six different women when he was seeing me. He told me about them. He told me how Lavina Roberts would beg him to do her from behind. He called her his “plump lovely mutt” because of her predilection. He was also involved with Rita Baker, Evelyn Morris, Clara Pederson and Lynn Smith, the wife of Lawrence Smith, the Mormon chief engineer at the refinery. Lynn Smith was a beautiful woman. Roger said that her husband was married to his work, spent almost fourteen hours a day at the refinery. It had taken Roger almost a year to conjugate with Lynn Smith. Now he had her at least once a week. Sometimes she came over to his house.

He told me these stories as he smoked a cigarette after having satisfied himself with me. I had asked him not to smoke, but he did anyway, giving me a charming “Oh, I forgot” smile, but knowing he could have his way simply by insisting on it.

I took up smoking cigarettes about this time, as a way to cover up the fact that Roger was smoking in our bedroom.

One summer afternoon Roger called and asked me if I’d like to take a ride down to the river, on the old golf course road. He had a bottle of wine and a twinkle in his eye. It was a beautiful day, sunny but not too hot. I was bored at home, and I thought a drive might be nice. I said yes. I told him I’d meet him at McCulloch Park. I didn’t want our neighbors to see that I was taking a ride with him.

We drove down past the golf course down to the Platte River. Roger took the river road deep into the woods. We were both drinking wine; Roger was singing and laughing. I noticed a green pickup along the road parked under some shady cottonwoods. I recognized three younger men who worked with Roger. They were drinking beer, sitting near the pickup.

Roger turned to me and said: “I brought some friends, I hope you don’t mind.”

I didn’t know what to make of it.

“I thought we’d all have a party together,” he said.

We got out of his car and I walked toward the truck, nervous about what this conspiracy meant. I noticed a mattress in the bed of the pickup. I turned to Roger and said: “What do you think I am?”

And he said: “It’s up to you, baby. If you want to party with us you can. We’re not going to try to force you to do anything. I thought you might like to experience something new.”

I should have insisted that he take me home. He would have. He was not a rapist. But he prided himself in his ability to read people. He looked at me quietly, almost shyly, and said: “These boys would like to find out for themselves how sweet you are. I’ve told them about you. How you’re one of the best I’ve ever had...”

I began to melt. I looked at the boys. They were all about eighteen. They were not especially attractive: one was very fat, almost slobbery. Another had a face full of pimples and red hair that was terribly mismanaged. The other seemed alright. All of them were drunk. But I had no will. It was such a beautiful day. I had been drinking wine, feeling the warm pulse of the drink in my belly. What did I have to go back to? A lonely home. A quiet house filled with my plants and my books and my soap operas. Oh, well. What’s it going to hurt?

They did not hurry me. We drank together for about an hour. They were all respectful, there was nothing rough or insistent. Finally, Roger picked me up and placed me on the mattress. I looked up and saw the blue sky, could hear the water of the Platte coursing by. I felt good. I felt desired, abundant. I let him undress me. I don’t remember how many times I was penetrated that day. It seemed to go on for ever. We didn’t leave until it was dark. The boys were gentle with me and I with them. I know I made a lot of noise. I know I abandoned myself to the powers of sin again. Pleasure made me numb. I had no private existence in that pickup, no fear, no alienation. And the boys seemed to appreciate me.

That afternoon ended my marriage to Eric Lindeman. Ruth Merritt and Ethel Burke had been golfing and then had taken a walk along the river road. They had happened upon the truck. They watched from a distance. They climbed a slight incline to look down inside the pickup. They saw me lying with some boy, naked, thoroughly exposed. Ethel Burke was friends with the Lindeman family. She called Roberta Lindeman, Eric’s mother. She told Roberta what she had seen. I understood everyone’s disgust.

Eric told me that he could not accept such humiliation. How long had I been sleeping with Roger Baker? I told him for about a year. His spirit seemed to collapse right there in front of me.

“Patricia,” he said. “I loved you. I really wanted to give you a good life. Why did you pay me back with such selfishness?”

“It wasn’t selfishness,” I told him, really feeling love for him. He seemed like such a frail boy, so easily hurt, not a man really, almost angelic. “It wasn’t selfishness. It was desperation. There is something in me which cannot be satisfied. There is a demon in me which cannot be silenced.”

We were divorced and Eric moved back to Denver. I was never the same again. I loved Eric. I loved him as a husband, as a good man, as a friend. Because I couldn’t control myself (and it wasn’t even passion, not love for Roger—it was, in some measure, a desire for pain, a longing to be hurt) I forfeited my life with Eric, not a life of adventure but potentially a life of trust. When he left I truly understood what I had lost. He was my friend. Now he could no longer be my friend. I was alone again. I insisted that Roger Baker never call me again.

IX.

I no longer feel joy in the morning when I awaken. Something heavy has come to weigh on my chest, something moribund. It is the void perhaps, the crushing, through compacting, of each element back into the primordial mass. The void inherits all and remakes all and accepts the prayers of none and prays for no one. It circulates and re-manages, re-edits and re-compresses, ad infinitum.

Beware lest you be caught in this eddy, this maelstrom. There is an escape from this for some. But many are caught here for ever, ever churning, undiscovered, unable to find footing, whirling endlessly inside the stew, capable only of chaos, capable only of crime.

The crime against faith, the crime against hope, the crime against living. Can you believe that some would choose this satisfaction, churning in the sea, frothing up some canine fallacy of reason? It is so. Some choose despair, some choose self-deceit, the hatred of Sun, the cosmopolitan disgrace of fair-value.

The frenzy calculates itself but becomes nothing over time. All is said and done, and nothing trumps only more nothing, in the way of quaint phrases. Trepidation achieves nothing but constant self-recrimination. Attitudes vary; congenial attendancies do not prevaricate, in the actual sense. Letting the broken vow break itself and become globular. That is the essence of wisdom, but, being an essence, is unknown really, cannot be known. One twists chance into pieces of Ezekiel’s rainbow, a beard of thought, color, precise knowing: then casting pieces of clay at the sun and making a being who can walk tall and proud and who also creates controversy with his brain.

I cannot look back so far any longer. There is a bridge over the continent of my youth leading to a night in my town which was a moment of celebration. It was 1983. My town was 60 years old. We celebrated the birth of my town every ten years, honoring its transition from dust and Indian bones to an industrial giant squeezed out of dinosaur bones. Tent city into brick foundry into city streets and school and stucco homes. A smile on everyone’s face. Amelia Earhart in the wind. Lucky Lindy on a last cloud, his heart frozen in a star. Flying above the Great Divide. As below him the children of the dust dreamed in soliloquy.

There were displays and games and barbecue and music. I had gone back to work, secretarial duties at Colorado Interstate Gas. I rented a house in Sinclair now, by myself. I lived with my cat and plants and bad memories of my recent past. I had not dated for several years. I was a dried date myself, out of shape, curiously turned. I did not care.

I did not expect to find anyone again. I had no need for more humiliation. But nothing happens by accident.

When I first saw Rudy Means he was standing near the barbecue pit, eating ribs and drinking a beer. I had trouble looking at him because there was something very dark IN him. He was a half-breed, part Irish, part Shoshoni Indian. He had long black hair, a sturdy body, a kind of defiance in his eyes. I looked away quickly. I felt he was evil.

And he was evil. He was a bad man. I knew it. Yet I chose him. That first look told me that destruction awaited me should I look again. I wanted to walk away. I did not.

I looked again.

His eyes were trained on me like a hawk’s eyes on a frightened rabbit. He looked right through me. With that one look, he possessed me. The demonic in him, truly potent, drew from me my own demonic nature. He slammed into me with the force of a death.

He was charming when he talked to me, with his thumbs hooked in his jeans pockets, understanding that he was cool and that women loved him and men feared him. He was picturing rough sex with me as he talked to me. I could see this. I didn’t like it. But I surrendered to him.

He took me down on the golf course road, down by the dugway, where he kept a trailer. He slapped me and pinched me and pulled my hair and made me cry. He made me smoke some marijuana with him. Then he took me sexually, very aggressively; and I broke into a thousand pieces.

I cannot look back so far any longer. I was three people. I was the angel, the virgin girl, in a long dress with long blond hair. I was the untamed child of surrender, the fleshpot looking to be filled by a magic hormone, a slut incapable of honoring tradition. Then I was a slave of a brute, an ugly creature, vicious too, addicted to pain, and eventually addicted to heroin. It is hard for me to look back on that third person, now that I am the fourth person, a person of peace, a person who has achieved something remote.

I lived with Rudy Means for more than five years. He beat me often. He sometimes let his friends have sex with me, while he watched. He turned me into a heroine addict, and laughed when I begged him to have pity on me.

I had never taken drugs before I met Rudy. I believed them evil, a certain death for the spirit. Even my desire for new experiences did not include the introduction of drugs. Roger offered me marijuana. Eric even asked if I wanted to get high with him. I had refused.

Now, with Rudy, there were no limits. He lost his job on the railroad and we moved to New Mexico. He just told me to pack a few things and took me away. I had no will. I called my mom and told her I was leaving and asked her and my dad to clean out my apartment and store my possessions. My mom said: “Where are you going, Patricia?” I said: “I don’t know.”

I never saw my mother again.

We drove to New Mexico is his broken down Dodge Monaco. He had Indian friends there who lived in a run-down house on the outskirts of Albuquerque. We lived with them for over a year, seven adults and thirteen children, all living together in a four bedroom house. Our bedroom was in the basement. There was never any peace. There were always fights in the neighborhood, shootings, stabbings. Rudy was almost always either drunk or stoned on marijuana or cocaine. Everything smelled bad. Rudy’s flesh smelled bad too. But he would give me cocaine and make love to me and I would realize that I was on an adventure that would probably end badly—but I could not go home to Sinclair again.

I liked being with Rudy because he made me feel alive, truly alive, because he made me feel so close to death. I wondered how I became white trash so fast. I understood that I had sunk into another level of living. Some would call it more “natural” than my parents’ isolate life style, more “spiritual” than my parents’ religion of chalk and stoic prayer. But, to me, and I understood it that way when I was in the midst of it, my life with Rudy was a nightmare punctuated by moments of sanity and decency. It was a storm, a riot of nature, where the wind and the lightning and the bellicose rain overtake all other concerns, whip all poise to shreds, harass silence and persecute grace.

He beat me often, with both fists. He was angry at the world, so he kept himself filled with poisonous brew and hallucinatory admixtures for the blood. He gave me both. I especially liked marijuana and cocaine, because they magnified the pleasures of sex. So, whenever he sensed that I was dissatisfied with my life, he would re-introduce me to our favorite distractions.

The first time I took heroin with Rudy, he had to pin me to the floor, filling my veins with white heat against my will. He wanted me to be his slave, as he was, himself, a slave to the magic horse of such transfixion. I thrashed on the floor by myself for some time, and then laid there quietly, magnetically dissolved.

How did I come to all this?

I have tried to determine this through my story I suppose. I have tried to understand how I became so degraded, and did nothing to stop it. Had I become so fatalistic? Did I desire death? Did I desire humiliation and pain so much that nothing else in life mattered in comparison? I don’t remember who I was really, now that I am another person again. Something had been turned off inside my mind. That is, I turned something off inside my mind. I did not wish to be a moral being. I could not tell what was right and what was wrong—that is, I had not the will to choose what I knew to be right.

Rudy moved from job to job. He worked on the railroad on the section crew much of the time. We moved from Albuquerque to Sacramento. Then to Oakland. Then to Pendleton, Oregon. We never married. Rudy did not want me to work, feared that other men might make a pass at me. He was cruelly possessive. He would sometimes lock me inside our bedroom, handcuffed to the bed, while he was away at work. That he did only occasionally, when his paranoia became apocalyptic.

In 1990, we moved to Eugene, Oregon. Rudy found work at one of the mills on the west side of town. We lived there in a small house with a small yard and a small white picket fence. Our drug habit was excessive. Rudy did not make enough money to support our needs. So he became a burglar too. He would disappear at night, often for hours. Then he would show up with a smile on his face, letting me know that he had successfully stolen goods from someone’s house, fenced the booty, and purchased more heroine or cocaine for our enjoyment.

One night in July of 1990, Rudy let me ride with him on one of his “round-ups”. He had never let me before, but this time he said: “Sure, come along for the ride. I’ve never had a problem yet.” I had secretly hoped that he would be arrested some time, that he would be sent to prison and perhaps, through the intercession of the law, I might be freed of him. We stopped to pick up one of his friends, Justin Garcia, an illegal alien from Mexico. We drove around Eugene for more than an hour. It was late, after 1:00 am. The plan was to break into a car for a stereo or something else valuable. We stopped many times, having Justin get out to look into cars.

We finally found a car with a stereo in a quiet neighborhood. We raised up the hood on our own car, indicating car trouble should anyone approach us. I stayed in the car. Justin pretended to work on our car, while Rudy engineered the theft.

As I said, it was a quiet neighborhood. There was a light on in the house, but it seemed like a night light, small and harmless. The rest of the house was dark.

Rudy worked quickly. He could not open the window to get at the lock, so he broke the lock with a crow-bar. There was a loud pop. Then everything was quiet. It was exciting for me. My stomach felt weak with anticipation, fear, even enjoyment. Then the porch light came on at the house.

An old man, dressed in a crimson robe, his white hair looking like puffs of blown cotton. He looked angelic really. He called out toward Justin, not seeing Rudy in his car: “What’s going on out there?”

Justin called back: “Car trouble, sir.”

The old man replied: “Do you need some help?”

“No, sir,” Justin called back. “I think everything’s ok.”

But a few minutes later, the old man appeared at the door with a set of jumper cables. I found out later that his name was Richard Paul. He seemed like the quintessential grandfather. He came across the grass eagerly to help us. He was tall and thin, old, but he moved with agility.

“Having trouble with your battery, son?” he asked.

I noticed Rudy moving in the shadows down along the far side of the old man’s car. I saw his face freeze for an instant in the moonlight. Rudy had entered his paranoid state, a condition of high anxiety. I had seen it often before. At such times he became absolutely wild, reduced to an animal by fear. I saw a tire-iron in his hand.

At that moment, a realization of dread ran through me. I understood that this would be the climax of my suffering, that my life would stop here, at this moment. I was seized with both terror and satisfaction, strangely mixed, resulting in a kind of sad resignation. I rolled down the window and said to Richard Paul: “Thank you very much for coming out here to help us.”

I could have said: “Watch out! There’s a man near your car who wants to kill you!”

But I did not. I charmed the old man. He came up close to say hello through the window. I smiled at him. He smiled back, and I could tell that he was a warm, kind man, the warmest man I had seen in some time. Rudy was sneaking up behind him. Rudy seemed like a shadow, a demon moving out of hell.

I did nothing to warn Richard Paul. I smiled at him. I even reach out of the window to shake his hand.

He was smiling and telling me something about having heard a loud pop as he was reading. I saw Rudy’s arm go up into the night. I heard the front door to the house opening. A women was stepping out to check on her husband. Rudy’s arm was coming down. Everything moved slowly. I remember saying something like: “You’re a very good man, and I’m glad to have met you....”

Then Richard Paul’s head exploded. He didn’t know what hit him. He had a smile on his face—and then he was nothing. He was split apart, like an atom, scattering his energy at the moon.

Something hit me in the face, a warm and wet something. It was the old man’s blood. If flew in through the open window and embraced me in one final ecstasy.

Richard Paul’s body had crumpled out of sight.

Richard Paul’s wife let out a hideous scream.

“Let’s get out of here,” Rudy cried. “You drive!” he said to Justin.

I knew that all of my suffering was over.

The police arrested us the next day. A neighbor of the Paul’s had been painting in his studio, had heard the conversation and had come out to investigate. He had seen the murder, and he had taken down the license plate.

Rudy had done nothing to leave Eugene. He said: “No one knows who we are. We become suspects if we run. Otherwise, nothing changes.”

The stolen stereo was still on our table when the police came to arrest us.

X.

And now everything is completed. My life is completed, not as a good thing, not as a moral vessel. Still, I feel at peace.

Rudy was convicted of second degree murder. Because of his police record, the court had no leniency. He was sentenced to thirty years in prison, without possibility of parole. Justin and I were convicted as accomplices to murder. He was sentenced to twenty years. I was sentenced to ten years in a federal prison.

I did not ask for mercy. I did not want mercy. I wanted to go to prison. I wanted to be removed from the world. I desired my old life back, my apartment with flowers and cats, my single room, even my cell; something that was mine alone.

I was given a physical examination when I was arrested. I was later informed that I had tested positive for the AIDS virus. I assumed it was from sharing a needle with Rudy. Rudy and Justin also tested positive. Rudy later admitted to me that he and Justin had been sexually involved, off-and-on, for years. Rudy would rape me with drugs, and then he would go over to Justin’s house and rape him with drugs also. Everything he had touched had been corrupted.

I wrote a long letter to Mrs. Paul. I tried to apologize to her, to tell her how sorry I was for causing her so much pain. I told her how my own life had disintegrated, how I had been swept away by selfish desire and how that selfishness had poisoned my own family and then everything else I touched. I did not ask her to forgive me. In a way, I thought that she should not forgive me, that she should never allow us to escape her judgment. We did not deserve mercy. We deserved the worst possible punishment from our society because we had acted to destroy the society. We had become inhuman, worse than savage animals. A society could not tolerate crime and inhumanity or it would became soulless and without principle.

I do not believe that society owes me a debt. I do not believe that society has failed me. I am not a victim of society. I am a victim of myself. I have failed society. What is even worse, I have failed myself. No one forced me to take the path I took. I made a series of choices. I had the ability to say no to my own selfish cravings. And I did not. I had not the spiritual will to say no to chaos and destruction. I did not have the maturity to submerge my own interest into that of my world. One is not free merely because one tells the world the world is wrong. One is only free when one understands that responsibility is more elevated than is the quest for self-satisfaction.

It seems to me, in looking back, that women determine the morals of a society. If the women demand that the men be up-right and honorable, they will be so. If the women, on the other hand, become lawless or selfish, without dignity, or base their lives on the desire for pleasure, no better than a whore, even if the society now cleanses the reality by celebrating this self-adoration as “liberation”, then the men will be no better than they need to be. They will treat their women without respect and without love, because the women are no longer deserving of respect and are jaded from their excesses, incapable of real love because their souls are not clean. The power of women is not to control men or to dominate men—this is an attempt to kill what is good in both men and women. Men will always be better men than women are. As women will always be better women than men can be. Rather, the real power of women lies in their ability to lead men toward their better natures. To do this, of course, women must seek their own best nature. Without this guidance from the woman, the man is lost and prone to decay; and the society degenerates into crime and brutality.

And that is the end. That is the end.

Achievements are rare in this world. There is the magic place, the place of great dealings and great thoughts (all men are great in their dreams, Freud says)--then it is lost; there is a fall; man becomes only man, becomes only a feature of his one-time greatness, a fragment of his once-heroic nature. That fall is a very real thing. He becomes a man, beneath the angels, something finite and fixed, fat and growing toward decay. That is the fall of man, into denser and denser matter, into blindness, away from God and infinity and the ecstacy of near-death; for death and spirit are forever linked. Yet the fallen one shall also return. The fallen one will achieve something great again, shall become light and unlinked to matter, to earth, to the sky, to the emergencies of gold. That will happen too, a levitation back to the primal core.

DEATH IS IN A FIELD NEAR ME

PART ONE.

I.

Death is in the field near me, walking with iron legs and blessing the land with crumbs and lye. Sprinkling prayers all across the dust, cursing with the willful irony of an orphan, blessing myself with his hand of weeds by saying: “You shall live very long! Yes, you shall live very long indeed...!” As if to really say: “I shall tantalize you very much before taking you! I will let you think that you have some magic power to exist! Then, I will take this power away from you, when you have come to actually believe that your longevity is due to something you have done, rather than from mine own will!”

Death is always in the field, contemplative, wry, capable of a whole series of horrors, capable of dishonor and brutal nativity, throwing a cape above land and doctoring the skies with an emergency of fatalities, moving in time to the wind and to the drudging hammer of Thor and to the anvil’s resounding coalitions. He does not blink when he finds a girl of eligible surfaces, a blonde woman in her early twenties. I know that there is a palpable darkness in him, a fiendish joy, as he prepares for some act of violence by adjusting his mental breastplate, his psychic codpiece, preparing himself for innocence even as he prepares himself to commit murder.

II.

Elizabeth Bible was a thin girl, frail, with a tentative nature. Her smile was tentative. Her body even seemed tentative: thin arms and legs going too many places at once, hesitating movements, quizzical expressions. She was not assertive or self-contained. She would start to speak, stop, shift, begin again, smile an alarmed smile, worried, as she spoke, that she was either not being understood or, worse still, speaking some opinion not shared by those she considered her mental superiors.

Elizabeth Bible was twenty-four years old. It was a May day in 1993, spring, a lovely morning with a golden mist lying on it like a gauzy scarf worn by the future lover of a king. Everything was fresh, new, ordered. Elizabeth Bible lived on the outskirts of Gresham, Oregon. Her house was actually out in the rural outskirts, amidst farmers and other rural dwellers on the fringe. Elizabeth’s father and mother both worked in Portland. Her father taught English at Portland Community College. Her mother was a pharmacist. Elizabeth was a student in the architecture program at the University of Oregon. The school was offering an urban design studio set in Portland. Elizabeth was living with her parents, taking the bus each day into Portland to pursue her education. She was in the last year of a five-year program. Two more terms and she would be graduated.

Elizabeth Bible helped to feed her younger sister, Irene, that morning; then she ate a muffin with coffee. She put her architecture materials in a backpack, her drawings in a long black plastic roll. She said goodbye to her sister. Both her parents had already driven together into Portland. She left the house and walked up to the road where a city bus would pick her up at 7:50.

The Bible house was set back from the road about eighty yards. There was a dirt road off to the right of the house that led back into the farmland south of their house. A car was parked at the head of that dirt road. Elizabeth noticed it as she walked toward the highway. A white four-door. It looked like an old Dodge. It had a dent in the passenger door on the driver’s side. There was a rise at the end of the property, a small hill. To the right of the ascent was a stand of small bushes contesting for space with a prolific blackberry thicket. Elizabeth climbed over the small rise and then stood along the highway near the bus stop sign waiting for the 7:50 bus.

Later she would try to remember what she had seen, what she had heard: she remembered the mist mostly. She remembered seeing Mary Haynes drive by with her children; she was driving them to school. Elizabeth had waved to her as she drove past. Mary Haynes had waved back and smiled. Elizabeth had looked at her watch. Seven forty-eight. She could remember a sound in the brush down behind her, in the thicket. There were possums and cats and dogs everywhere. She did not even bother to look back at the sound. She remembered looking down the highway and seeing nothing. A quiet morning. Everything was as it should be.

III.

When Elizabeth awakened she was lying in a dark container, her hands tied behind her back, her jaw swollen and aching. The taste of blood was in her mouth. Pain was in her neck and in here face. Her jaw felt broken. She could not move it. There was blood on her face too. Her hands felt scraped, as did her chin and her knees. It felt like her nose was broken.

She bounced irregularly in the dark container, sometimes hitting her head against a hard edge. She could hear a motor, smell gasoline. She remembered the car: the white Dodge with the dent in the passenger door. It was clear: she was in the trunk of someone’s car. She could not believe it. She almost convinced herself that it was a dream. But it was not a dream. It was something horrible. Her mind was not clear. Someone must have hit her from behind. Someone must have been hiding in the brush, near her house. There was that noise. Something scratching. She had not bothered to look back at it. She had not been afraid. There had never been any reason for her to fear anything.

She worried what her professor would think. Her studio class met that afternoon at 1:30. She had planned to work that morning to try to prepare for the crit with Professor Genasci. All of that was gone now. It was all unreal. Was her life really in danger? She wanted to deny it, to pretend that none of this was happening. The car was moving fast—she could almost feel the cold friction of the pavement passing below her prone body.

What was this all about! She struggled to get her hands free. She was tied with what felt like a plastic cord. She thought of the telephone wires she had seen on coils, the ones wrapped in thick yellow plastic. She could not free herself. Her hips were getting sore from banging against the metal floor. Something sharp and hard was poking her in the back. It felt like a tire jack.

Elizabeth tried not to let herself realize the horror of the situation. She tried to remain positive. It was clear that someone had hit her and knocked her out. This person meant to harm her. He had kidnapped her, afterall. She tried not to think of rape. But if it was rape only, she would probably recover from that. She did not think of death. She would not die this way. There was some power in her that would not recognize the presence of death. She felt suffocated in the dark black cylinder in which she found herself—but she would not be wiped out this way. Her candle would not go out. It was not as bad as it seemed. It was not as bad as it seemed.

IV.

She felt the car slow and she even thought she heard the blinker as the car turned right on to a side road. She knew it was a side road because it was not paved. Her own ride became even rougher now, as she banged her head and back, shoulder and knees against the metal boundaries, rocking back and forth, speeding and slowing. She could not balance herself to protect herself. She tried to position herself at the rear of the trunk, against the spare tire. But she had no leverage. She would be thrown forward, then back again. The worst thought, however, was that the car would eventually stop. She would rather it traveled for ever, with her being jarred and bruised by the unseen protruding elements: she could endure that for ever. When the car stopped, if it did stop, then the real horror would begin, because the distance between herself and her adversary would be nullified.

She prayed that the car would never stop. She could endure that for an eternity. The pains in her body were unimportant. They were something she could absorb, complaining not at all. If only the car would not stop. If only the car would not stop.

The car did stop finally. Then everything grew still.

V.

Elizabeth had never before felt the kind of despair that she felt when she saw the face of her abductor. Perhaps in the back of her mind she had hoped that there might have been some mistake, that her captor might open the trunk and look down at her with warm eyes and a confused face, mumbling: “There must have been some mistake. You’re not the woman I was looking for. I’m terribly sorry. Let me take you home right away.”

When the trunk opened, light poured in and blinded Elizabeth for a moment, taking away her breath. A man stood above her. She could not see his face because her eyes were too sensitized to look into the light. She felt the man’s hands on her body, his large strong hands circling both shoulders. There was nothing kind in his movements, nothing hesitating or shamed. He pulled her up out of the trunk well roughly. It was only then that Elizabeth realized that her mouth was also bound, shut with a piece of cloth that was circled with tape.

The man pulled her up against his body.

She heard him give a low sigh of enjoyment as her body pushed up against his: “Ummm.”

She opened her eyes and looked into his face.

He was young, about Elizabeth’s age. That surprised Elizabeth. She had assumed the man would be older. He was clean-shaven, had a crooked nose (she wondered if it had been broken, perhaps in a fight), and cold eyes, pale blue. He looked at her without feeling. She had always been able to reach people. She had never been especially graceful, but she had always been personable. She had always been able to reach out and find the humanity in a person. But looking at this man, so close to her, pressing himself against her, she shuddered with fear, distaste, despair; the hopelessness she had been battling so rigorously while strung up like a mummy in the black cylinder of the trunk came rushing over her like a disease, touching her everywhere, rendering her weak and exposing her to the most unmentionable invasions of darkness. It was the man’s face, so remorseless, so unmoved: he had broken her jaw, tied her up, stuffed her in a car, driven miles to some isolated spot in the woods. And, through all that, neither guilt nor shame nor uncertainty had not moved him at all. He felt nothing for her. It was as if she were baggage to him, a slab of meat he intended to consume. There was nothing alive in his face, nothing which could be charmed, reasoned with—there was no place in him where generosity might by drawn out.

This was the other world for Elizabeth, a world from which she had been shielded all her life. The other world was a place of dark shame, a world of brutality, sin, crime, inhumanity. It was hell. It was a place where some humans lived, a state of mind and body which was bound by anti-laws, as the world of matter is bound by a world of anti-matter. It was a world where cruelty was good, violence was logic, destruction was creation. The man who stood before her was an angel of this world, as perfectly cruel as the archangels were perfectly balanced and the generators of law.

There would be no pity in him, no soft surface, no ability to recede.

He carried Elizabeth into a cabin in the woods. He dropped her on the floor. Her back banged against the hardwood surface. Then he took out a knife and began to cut off her clothes.

VI.

There is nothing that can prepare a person for utter physical violation. Elizabeth had sometimes imagined rape, imagined herself being brutalized, penetrated by some strange violent being. It was always just a thought, a cloud, a soiled moment she was always able to vanquish from her mind.

The man took his time cutting away Elizabeth’s clothing. He used a thick-bladed hunting knife—and, to let Elizabeth know how serious he was, and how sharp was the blade of his knife, he cut the upper part of her left arm, a three-inch razor slice that bled immediately all over her arm. He smiled after he had cut Elizabeth, not a warm smile, but a smile of authority, as if he was attempting to accent the obvious, that he was completely in control of Elizabeth, that it would be his decision whether Elizabeth was allowed to live or would have to die.

Elizabeth did not resist him. He did not bother to cut either the cord binding Elizabeth’s hands together or the rag taped across her mouth. He cut away all her clothing, unzipped his own pants, applied some lubicant to his erect penis, pressed it into Elizabeth’s stiffened body, gyrating on top of her until he found satisfaction.

When he had finished, he gathered up the shreds of Elizabeth’s clothes and left the cabin, leaving her to lie naked on the cabin floor for about an hour. Elizabeth had never been treated so roughly in her life. She thought of her fiancee, Robert Owens, a business student at the university, whom she had met two years earlier. He did not even know that she had been abducted. No one knew. Everyone, if they considered it at all, would assume that she was at school, that everything was normal. No one realized what she was going through. Thinking of Robert Owens made Elizabeth want to cry. She did cry. Finally, she did cry, thinking of Robert Owens and the gentle way they made love together. Just thinking of this squat man in his stained t-shirt, applying lubricant to his penis, looking down at her with a lurid eye, smiling as he penetrated her. The man moaned and grunted with his eyes closed, spittle once escaping from his mouth and falling on her neck. The man called her Mona Lisa as he raped her. He even tried to kiss her lips, trying to make it love. Elizabeth’s lips were, of course, cased in cloth and tape. Her whole body was rigid, as if trying to fight off an infection. The man called her Mona Lisa, but there was something savage in his voice, something cynical, which frightened Elizabeth. The man’s voice was especially frightening. His voice reminded her of a piece of cut glass. It was sharp, clear, but it was detached and she felt that each word cut her open deeper and deeper, making her more and more vulnerable.

The man howled when he had his orgasm inside of Elizabeth. The howling seemed like an animal, something demonic, a beast inside a pale white skin. The man had very little hair on his chest, and seemed almost pathetic to Elizabeth, thrusting above her, clenching his eyes shut, panting, moaning “Oh, Mona Lisa! Mona Lisa!”—except that his voice was so real, so angular, so ruthless. And when he howled, expressing pleasure and release, Elizabeth understood that she was in the presence of a killer.

Elizabeth knew that the man intended to kill her. It was not something he had said or did. It was his coldness, his reptilian nature. Elizabeth wondered if he had killed other women. She believed that he had. There was something numb inside of him. He had no soul. She was reminded of her minister’s sermon on the previous Sunday. Elliot Gray had said to the congregation: “There are some in this world who are possessed of the evil one. They have no soul for it has been apportioned by the world of sin.”

Elizabeth’s own arms were numb, from lying on them. She rolled over on her side, and tried to look about the cabin for something she might be able to use to free her arms. The cabin was bare, no furniture, no possessions. There was blood all over her body, from the cut on her arm. Her face was numb but her broken jaw was beginning to ache.

She thought of her mother and father: all she wanted was to be home again, home with her family. She could not believe what had happened to her. Why had this happened to her? What had she done to deserve such an intrusion, such an invasion? She wondered if she may have been sinful in an earlier life.

VII.

When the man returned he was holding Elizabeth’s wallet. He knelt down beside her, raised his hunting knife to her face, and cut the tape loose from around her mouth. The knife did not cut cleanly. And the back side of the knife pressed against Elizabeth’s already-damaged jaw, causing her to call out in pain.

“Did that hurt?” the man asked. “I didn’t cut you.”

The tape finally was came loose and the man quickly tore it from around Elizabeth’s mouth, pulling out blonde hair from her head and soft down from her cheek and lip. He jarred her jaw again, whipping the tape off her skin. Elizabeth cried out again in pain.

“What’s your problem?” the man asked. “I mean, what did I do to you that time? I’m just taking the tape off so you can talk to me.”

Elizabeth tried to speak: “What are you going to do with me?” but it came out jarbled. Her tongue was swollen and her jaw and lips could not move.

“What’d you say?” the man asked. “You gotta speak a little clearer, my lady, if you want me to talk back to you.”

He held up her bank card and said: “I’m going to need your personal access number, my dear. Otherwise I won’t be able to get money out for us.”

Elizabeth thought of her dream to travel with her finace to Europe. She had saved almost $10,000, working evenings and summers. She had been planning her trip for four years. She and Robert planned to travel after she graduated from architecture school. She said nothing.

“I said I need your access number,” the man repeated.

Elizabeth said nothing. This bastard was not going to get her money, she decided.

The man punched her in the face, one short quick blow with his right hand. The punch broke Elizabeth’s nose, if it had not already been broken, and blood shot out on her mouth and down her breasts. The punch drove the back of her head into the log wall behind her, cutting and bruising her scalp.

“I’m not someone to take lightly, Elizabeth,” he said. “I’m the kind of man you don’t want to take lightly.”

He knew her name. How did he know her name? From the bank-card? Did he know her name before?

Elizabeth tried to speak: “Howwwwww did yune o mine aim?”

“Jesus, girl, can’t you talk any better than that?” he laughed. “What are you trying to say?”

Elizabeth repeated: “Howwwwww did yune no mine aim?”

He laughed and shook his head. “Stupid girl. I got your name off your bank card. But I knew your name anyway. I’ve been watching your for more than a year, pretty thing. I saw you in Gresham and I followed you in my car. I got mail out of your mailbox until I found out your name. I’d been planning for months to take you away with me.”

The madness in him made Elizabeth want to vomit.

He looked at her again with a cold heat in his eyes. “I want some more,” he said. He pulled down his pants, used more lubricant, and entered Elizabeth again. This time the rape went on longer. He resisted his orgasm, trying to make the assault last, trying to make Elizabeth break down, enjoy his body, quiver and cry. She felt nothing, only a hard invasion. She did not warm to him. Finally, in a series of wild thrusts, he gave off a whining howling throbbing ecstatic squeal, drove himself harder and harder into her, then rolled off Elizabeth and breathed short hard breaths on the floor for about five minutes.

When he had recovered, he untied the cords around Elizabeth’s hands. He handed her a pencil and a piece of paper. He said: “Write your access code number.” He looked at Elizabeth indicating a warning to her: if you resist me again I’ll hit you again in your face.

Elizabeth wrote the numbers down, although with difficulty, for her hands were numb: 7 2 2 9. Her handwriting was clumsy, tortured, like a child’s in the nascence of penmanship. The man laughed. “You’re supposed to be an educated girl. Hell, I can write better than that. You write like you’re illiterate or something.”

Elizabeth studied the young man’s face. His short blond hair was cut very close to the skull. He seemed deformed, morally deformed, which impressed on his outer body signs of that deformation. His head seemed too big. His ears were small, as if trying to hide. She could not look him in the eye, for there was death in his eye, something evil and unmoving, something even harder than the man himself. His body was stocky. He seemed strong, unyielding.

He sat on the floor across from Elizabeth, staring into space. He was in a trance-state for what seemed like at least fifteen minutes. (Elizabeth had lost contact with time. What seemed like fifteen minutes may have been two minutes; or it may have been an hour.)

Finally the man awoke from his trance, and said, not looking at Elizabeth: “I fell in love with you because of your blonde hair. I knew I had to have you. I thought of you all the time, for days, for months. I would drive by here every morning, back and forth, back and forth, trying to see you when you walked to the highway from your house. I never thought I’d have the courage to do it. I was always a bit shy with girls. Not that you’re my first. You’re not. You’re my seventh now. But I’m still a bit shy. I never thought I’d be able to go through with it, right there, right out in the open, in front of your house. It was the small hill that made it possible, the rise up from your property to the highway. I knew if I could get you down off the highway quickly, not one would see you. And the bushes behind us would protect us from the view from your house. Yes, it was genius. A plan of genius. Do you know what I hit you with? I was waiting in the bushes, crouched in the bushes, with a tire iron. I walked up behind you so quietly. I saw that there were no cars on the road. Then I hit you with the tire iron. You never even saw it. You went out like a light. I pulled you down into the bushes, tied your hands, and gagged you. I may have broken your jaw. I didn’t mean to break your jaw, but I didn’t know any other way to quiet you. I just had to have you. You were driving me crazy, moving so gracefully, with your long blonde hair swaying in the wind.

“I don’t plan to hurt you,” he continued. “The others I hurt. I had to hurt them. I didn’t know what else to do. I’m just a victim of love, I guess. When I love a woman so much, I guess there’s nothing I can do until I have them.”

“Ddd you ill emmm?” Elizabeth asked.

“I had to,” the man replied. “I had no choice. They’re buried out back. No one knows about this place. It belongs to my uncle. My names’ Todd, by the way. Todd Lawrence. I really enjoyed your body. It really felt good for me.”

His smile was almost innocent. But it was betrayed by madness. Madness is never innocent.

“I’m going to put you back in the trunk, and take you to your bank, to the teller machine,” he said. “If your code works and I get your money, then I’ll let you go. If it doesn’t work however, then I’ll kill you too, like I killed the other girls.”

He rose from the floor, took Elizabeth by the arm, pulled her up: “Let’s go!”

“I nee clos,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, yeah. Just a minute.”

He took an old pink silk robe out of the closet and threw it at Elizabeth. “I stole this from my mother,” he said, laughing. “Put it on!”

When Elizabeth had slipped into the robe, buttoning the buttons awkwardly, for her figers still were numb, Todd bound her hands again, behind her back, using the yellow wire as before.

Elizabeth tried to beg him to not gag her, but her words were badly slurred, and Todd just laughed and pushed her roughly toward the table in the corner of the room. He used an old sock, stuffing it into Elizabeth’s mouth. He took a roll of red electrical tape from his coat pocket and strapped her mouth closed with several turns, pinning her hair beneath the tap, hurting Elizabeth.

VIII.

Elizabeth listened to the crunching of stone beneath tires. They were still on the unpaved road. When they turned they would be driving toward Gresham, toward her bank. She had to get out. She had to get her hands free. She bounced roughly in the trunk, against her shoulder, against her hip. Occasionally her head would bounce and crash against the metal above. She tried to find the tire jack behind her. It was sharp, poking her in the back. She tried to position her hands at the jack. But there was too much bouncing. She would have to wait until they hit the pavement. A smoother ride might enable her to move about in the trunk.

She stopped being afraid. She knew she could no longer be afraid. She would be dead, once he got the money. She had given him the correct access code. He would get her money. Then he would drive her back to the cabin, molest her again, perhaps all day and night. But then he would kill her, and bury her in back with the other women.

They traveled on the rough road for what seemed like an eternity. Elizabeth began to worry that there was a back road into Gresham, that they would arrive at the back without her realizing it. Then there would be no time for her to try to free her hands. And once she freed her hands, if she did: what then? How could she get out of the trunk?

She didn’t think about the state of her body, bruised and beaten, violated. She thought only a moment about the man’s secretions in her body: what kind of disease might the man have? She felt dirty, having the man’s sperm in her. It had been seeping out of her and she felt disgraced and disgusted by it. But there was only one thing to consider now: getting out of the trunk.

They finally slowed and stopped. Then they turned right, onto the pavement leading to Gresham. The driver was smoother now, but much faster. Elizabeth needed to raise herself up and pivot upward to reach her bound hands to the tire jack. It was awkward—but she was thin and flexible. After several tries she was able to guide her hands on to the corner of the tire jack. She looked for something sharp, touching the metal jack with her numb fingers. She found a hook on the jack, which, when in use, hooked the jack to the slot in the bumper. It was not sharp, but if she could hook the cord knot into the hook she might be able to pull the knot loose. She could see nothing. She needed to do everything by feel. And she had little feel in her hands, because the tight cords had reduced circulation all throughout her arms. But she tried, hooking and pulling, hooking and pulling.

Once, the car jerked wildly as the breaks were applied and Elizabeth was thrown away from the tire well against the hood of the trunk. She hit her face on the top of the skull, and she almost passed out. She faintly heard the car horn in a long angry burst. The man had almost had an accident, she surmised. He had hit the breaks, swerved to miss a car, and then hit his horn in retaliation. The car slowed markedly. Apparently the man understood that an accident would be very dangerous to him now, given the nature of his baggage.

Elizabeth had no time to waste. She pushed her way back against the tire jack, and began the laborious task of locating the small hook on the jack in the dark.

Elizabeth knew that she could not panic. She found the hook again and began plying it against the cords which bound her hands. The car was slowing and easing off to the right, Elizabeth assumed this was the Gresham exit. The hook was not sharp enough to cut the cord. She could not saw it open. She tried to find the primary knot, fasten it to the hook, and pull with all her strength. It first began with a steady pull, then became a thrashing movement as she let all her weight fall in an attempt to open the yellow cord. Nothing happened. She worried for a moment that she might actually tighten the cord—but that worry was obviously ridiculous. She would either be freed by her movment or, if not freed, she would be murdered back at the cabin. The thought of him entering her body again made her want to vomit. She felt so frail, so abused. She pulled harder against the jack.

The car was stopping. Perhaps it was a stop light. She used all her minimal weight to pull against the jack. Nothing happened. She started to panic. The car began to move again but it did not travel far before turning right and parking. Elizabeth heard the car door open, then slam. She could hear Todd walk back behind the car. He was singing something: “Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you....”

Elizabeth shuddered at the sound of his voice. Perhaps in death she would at least be freed of him.

IX.

Elizabeth began to pray. She began to pray furiously, silently. The cord was caught in the hook and she could not get it loose. She was dangling by her hands, her knees touching the floor of the trunk, her shoulders straining and about to break. She was having trouble breathing.

She heard someone approaching the trunk, then two knocks on the hood: “If I were a rich man, do be do be do be do be do be do....” His voice was very happy. He was $10,000 richer. No wonder he was so happy.

The car engine ignited again. They backed up, eased out onto the street. Then were on their way.

On the way toward more rape, more torture, then death. That was the fact. That was the truth.

But something happened.

Elizabeth fell down to the floor of the trunk. Had the cord slipped out of the hook? How could it? It had been embedded in the hook.

Elizabeth pulled herself up to the hook again, and placed the cord inside the hook. The cord was looser than before. Elizabeth pulled again, using all her weight. The cord came loose. Her hands were freed.

She was astonished. She had never felt so happy.

She tore away the gag that had been taped to her mouth. She could breathe easily again.

But that was not enough. She was still locked in the trunk. She had to find a way to force open the trunk. She used her hands to search the floor of the trunk for something small to try to pick the lock. She found nothing. She reached her hand into the lock. There was the actual lock, and a long metal bar hooked by a spring. She had once broke her own trunk lock by tying a rope to the metal bar. She could not get into her trunk. She had to call a locksmith to open the trunk.

If nothing else she would break the lock so he could not get in. Yes, that was it. She might die of starvation, but he would not be able to get her out, to abuse her, to torture her any longer. She grabbed the long metal bar, pulled until it came loose from the spring. There. She had disabled the lock at least. But that did not make her safe. She would suffocate and die in the trunk if she could not pick the lock. She continued to search for a thin piece of metal she might use as a shimmy.

There was a box of tools near the back of the trunk. The car was picking up speed and the sounds of the city were beginning to recede. The tools felt strange, like ice picks, hooked at the end, some thick, some very thin. Her hands were still wounded, so it was hard for her to distinguish the exact shape and nature of the tools. But she was reminded of tools she had used in a printmaking course, etching tools.

She took the one with the smallest head, and began jabbing it into the inside of the lock. She knew nothing about locks, and there was a certain panic in her movements: she was rough, using force instead of subtlety. She heard a snap and pushed on the lid of the trunk. It opened. It was a miracle. The car was traveling at a high speed on the freeway. The closest car behind was several hundred feet away. Elizabeth did not think about anything. She rolled out of the trunk and fell to the pavement, bouncing and rolling toward the edge of the highway, feeling nothing really, feeling free, feeling alive again. She had never been so happy as when she hit the pavement and began to roll.

PART TWO.

I.

Justin Bible did not see what Winnie and Ed Martinville saw. The Martinville’s were driving home from Gresham when they saw the trunk lid of the white car in front of them open and something roll out of the trunk, crashing along the pavement, bouncing and skidding, finally coming to rest near a guard-rail on the edge of the highway. Ed Martinville slowed his own car. “What’s that?” he asked.

“My God, I don’t know,” Winnie replied.

“Is it a dummy?” Ed asked.

“I think it’s a human being, Ed.”

When Ed first reached Elizabeth he was convinced that she was dead. Her face looked like one huge bruise. She was unconscious. There was blood on her legs. Her nose was bleeding. Her lips were bleeding. Her knee was swollen and bent back under her body.

Ed looked up the road some two hundred yards, toward the white car from which the young woman had fallen. The driver had pulled the car over to the side of the road. He was looking back toward Ed. He slammed the trunk and hurried back to the car, entered traffic again, and was gone.

Ed had somehow expected the driver to turn back and to reclaim the young woman who had fallen from his trunk.

Ed looked back at his wife: “There’s been some kind of crime here, Winnie. There’s been some kind of crime committed here.”

Justin Bible did not see what Winnie and Ed Martinville saw. Justin Bible had just delivered what he had considered to be a quite lively and enlightening lecture on the poem “Manfred” written by Lord Byron. It’s true, the class had not participated much. But he had felt good about his lecture, especially his insights into the nature of Manfred, the anti-social hero.

Justin Bible was quietly congratulating himself. He lived a good life, he thought, as he looked out of his office window on a sun-baked quadrangle transecting the heart of the campus. Spring was coming on. He felt his life force reawakening. He noticed from his window a pretty coed in a short blue skirt walking up the sidewalk toward Heath Hall. Maybe she was coming to see him. Her bare legs made him feel like a young man again.

Then the phone rang.

It was Officer Charles Bailey, Gresham Police Department. Officer Bailey notified Justin Bible that his daughter, Elizabeth Bible, had been found unconscious lying on the side of the highway. She had been rushed to the Gresham Hospital. She was seriously injured and was undergoing surgery.

It was as if Justin Bible had been shot. He hung up the phone and then fell back into his black leather chair. What had happened! What possibly could have happened? The sun, which had been baking his office window, suddenly darkened and became cloudy. The office became cold almost instantly. Justin Bible’s mind began to quiver, his thoughts began to spin. He did not know what to do, where to start.

He called his wife, beginning to weep as he told her of Officer Bailey’s call. He would pick her up from work. They needed to get to the hospital as soon as possible.

II.

Elizabeth would live. That was the verdict of the doctor. Doctor Levy was impressed with their daughter’s grit. She had been badly beaten, her jaw broken, her nose broken, her shoulder dislocated, her knee ligaments torn. She had suffered damage to her eye, to her ear-drum and, yes, she had been raped.

Justin Bible’s heart sank when he heard this. His baby girl raped. He thought of Elizabeth. He did not picture her as she would have appeared to the world that morning, as a young woman, an attractive, tentative sexual being, capable of love and of the pleasures of romance. To Justin Bible, Elizabeth was the small girl who often had pulled herself up on his lap and slept in his arms at night as he read. She was the sweet little angel who had been tiny and vulnerable, whom he had protected from the world for so many days and nights.

The words “and, yes, she had been raped” was like a knife in his stomach. Pain raced inside him. He felt his weaknesses exposed and gaping. He needed to sit down.

Emily Bible, Justin’s wife, Elizabeth’s mother, generally took things in stride. She was not overly emotional. It was possible, indeed, almost easy, for her to experience trouble, even tragedy, without losing her balance. Even now, as the doctor spoke the icy judgment, Emily was shielding herself from pain with her practical understanding: “Yes, but she is alive. That is what counts. She is alive.”

Emily was already making plans to see Elizabeth and give her daughter the support which would lead to a quick and permanent recovery from her brutal experience. The past was the past. What had been done had been done. Now there would be only a healing period, followed by a return to a smooth living process. Emily would not be derailed or even detoured. She would not let her family succumb to sorrow and lose its positive poise.

Justin was different than Emily. His daughter had been brutalized. He needed to understand this, to absorb it, to put himself in Elizabeth’s shoes, to feel rage, to feel humiliation, to feel some of the terror that his daughter must have felt, some of the sickness she must be feeling now. He wanted, even needed, to feel his daughter’s pain. He also needed to feel his own pain. He had been Elizabeth’s father, her protector. It had been his job, his duty, to protect his daughter, until she married and her husband took over that responsibility. Yes, that was an old-fashioned notion. And Justin had always been a very liberal man, very much a supporter of the feminist causes of women’s “liberation”. But there was some understanding in him which was primordial, as old as the mud of Ilus, as deep and as unrelenting as chromosomes, an understanding which had been buried beneath his modern conceptions and his vanities of progressiveness, for ever unearthed until his daughter was damaged by an evil man, a perpretator of darkness. Now, many priordial movements rose up in him, like a wave carrying relics from some burial ground in a lost continent up to his very doorstep.

A man was supposed to protect his family. A man who could not protect his family was not a man at all. The government of a society was supposed to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. If it did not, then it was failing the decent people of the society. If someone hurt his family, and if the society refused or was unable to punish the perpetrator, then he had the right to punish the principle of evil: as the Old Testament concluded, there shall be an eye for an eye and there shall be a tooth for a tooth.

The religious soul rose up in Justin, a wave carrying primordial understandings to the man, now on his knees, staring up from the foot of the mountain, unforgiven.

It did not help when Justin saw Elizabeth, finally, in the hospital. Emily saw only the bright side, refused to touch the wounds of her daughter, to enter the primitive terrors which Elizabeth had gathered just below her skin. “You’ll be better in no time, baby,” Emily told her daughter. “At least you didn’t get your drawing hand hurt,” she laughed. “You’ll be able to finish your architecture project in a few months. Everything will be ok.”

But Justin saw and felt the demons in his daughter. Her memories, although she fought to keep them at bay, circled about her, within her, passing in and out of her like breaths with horrible tensions, black and gnarled and angry prophets of discord. Personal discord. Justin saw all of this, read the faces of the demons when he looked into his daughter’s eyes. He cried when he touched his daughter’s hand; he held her in his arms and they both cried together. This all made Emily very uncomfortable. She tried to urge her husband to act like a man, to be strong, to be a support for Emily instead of a quagmire.

But Justin understood that Elizabeth needed to confront her experience. The suburban way was to hide from all pain, to pretend it didn’t exist. The human need was to confront pain, to disarm it by recognizing it and stealing from the cause of pain its authority.

Justin and Elizabeth cried together for many minutes. Emily sat beside the bed, shifting, clearly perterbed. She had trouble breathing. Justin and Emily stayed with their daughter into the night. Elizabeth was not in danger of dying, so the head nurse finally suggested they go home to sleep and return in the morning.

III.

Justin began to change. He began to harden into a man in a more primitive skin, a man closer to the animals or to the dark tensions of the angels. He stood at the fire and the forge of Vulcan. He saw himself, in a dream, standing before an open fire and being handed a sword and a suit of armor by a deformed dwarf.

His career began to mean little to him. He suspended his discussion of the romantic poets in his first class after the attack on his daughter. Instead he spoke of violence, of the attack on Emily, and asked the students to speak to him about society and crime. It was the best class he had ever held. Everyone became involved, most speaking animately about the perverse turn the society had taken sometime after the 1960’s. The courts now seemed to encourage criminality by protecting it so. The courts were no longer concerned with justice, with punishing the guilty, with protecting the innocent. The courts had seemed to take the position that the police were the criminals and that the criminals were victims of an unjust society. Somewhere, in between these struggling forces, decency was being crucified.

Justin Bible’s liberalism died a very fierce quick death. His progressivism had been theoretical. He had believed in the rights of the accused, in the persecution of the poor by police and the disinterest of the society in the unfortunate. He had justified the rage of the outcast against the unjust society. It was easy to understand the crimes of the weak and the hopeless, the unemployed, the damaged, the homeless.

Now, driving through Portland, Justin began to see, wherever he looked, the dark images of rapists and brutes who had nothing to live for, who skulked about the trash-lined streets on Burnside Avenue, looking for victims in their own dwindling circle of motivations. He saw them on Burnside, the derelict orbit. But he saw them elsewhere too, nearly everywhere. He saw them on the PSU campus, begging for change, threatening people, in a small-time extortion, their clothes torn, their faces dirty, their minds complicated by their torments and their pain.

Justin saw black gangs, teenagers wandering the streets, dressed in colors of blood and black irony. Some had killed for their sneakers and their coats. Children would kill another man for his shoes, not because they needed shoes, but because they desired the prestige associated with a certain style of shoe. A man had recently taken his girl-friend to see a movie at Lloyd’s Center, a shopping center in southeast Portland. The man had come out of the theater and had been confronted by a mass of black teenagers, both men and women, surging down the city streets. One man yelled: “Get whitey!” A group of young blacks surrounded the man and beat him nearly to death, while a crowd of passersby merely watched in shock, unable or unwilling to help.

Yes, Justin had moved to the other side. He had been transported by some mysterious ferryman to the other side of perceptions. He had passed from ease and irresponsibility to tension, fear, gut reaction, and into war with his demons.

Everywhere he looked he saw the man who had raped and beaten his daughter. The man was white, stocky, clean-shaven, with a crooked nose and pale blue eyes. He was white-trash, psychotic, a drifter. Elizabeth had described him to the police. The police, upon further investigation, had produced a picture of the man: his picture had been taken as he withdrew Elizabeth’s money from the automatic teller machine. The picture was published in the Gresham and Portland newspapers, and on television. The police believed that, with the picture, it was only a matter of time before they identified the assailant.

Justin began to think of himself as a victim. He had been victimized, as much, if not as brutally, as had his daughter. He had been alseep for centuries. He hadn’t even noticed that his society had disintegrated.

He drove around Portland, through the rougher neighborhoods, on Killingsworth and Martin Luther King Boulevard, into North Portland. He drove out toward the airport where the neo-Nazi gangs congealed, blood creatures of the dark, massing on the fringe like a bad tattoo on mottled flesh. Black and white did not matter now. Evil nature and the law now mattered, qualities which were not essentially racial, but were individual and fueled by choice. The law and the anti-law. Gods of order and gods of chaos. A war was on. Where had Justin been for so long?

IV.

Time moved; May became June. Elizabeth began to recover, still unable to speak clearly however, her jaw wired shut, and moving unsteadily with the help of crutches, a thick athletic brace over her left knee. She had had six surgeries. The plastic surgery would come later. The Bibles were not a wealthy family. The had lived comfortably before the attack on Elizabeth. They had some insurance but it would not cover the cost of the treatments. They would be ruined financially. All that they had saved over the years, all their investments, the equity of their home: it was all lost. Justin and Emily were too old to start over again.

Elizabeth was interviewed in early June by The Oregonian, the Portland newspaper. The story appeared on the third page of the paper, a long story, strongly supportive but, at times, sensationally curious. The story pried into the sexual aspect of the attack: what did it feel like to be brutally assaulted; what would have happened if Elizabeth had not managed to unlock the trunk...?

Justaposed pictures of his daughter and of his daughter’s rapist struck Justin as being sacrilegious. He winced when he read the story, felt naked and wounded, again, for his daughter.

The tone of the article struck Justin as voyeuristic and crude, insensitive to his daughter’s need for privacy and protection. He was disgusted with the newspaper. He called the editor and lectured him on the responsibility of the press to unhold honor and dignity and the right of the individual for privacy. The editor replied that the world had the right to be informed. Perhaps the article would save other young women from Justin’s daughter’s suffering.

Justin cancelled his class that afternoon. He said he was sick. He sat alone in his office. He did not look out his window at the sunlit quad. His curtains were pulled. He sat in the dark, and listened to the music of Leonard Cohen on his casette player.

Justin was dead. There was something in him which was dead, no longer capable of a shallow good-humor, a careless recognition of the noisy water, the talkative nature, the pretty-skirted girls, the fluff of the suburban morality. Something profound had happened to him. He understood his father for the first time in his life. His father had been in World War II, was a muscled man without much need for articulateness. Justin had always felt alienated from him, drawn more to his mother. Now, however, in the dark office, listening to the nocturnal and haunted images of Leonard Cohen, Justin saw that his father had merely been a soldier in the war with darkness, a martian really, with a martian’s responsibility for order. And for the protection of the female race. For the protection of his wife and daughter. Justin finally understood what his father had comprehended many years before.

V.

While Justin was driving home that evening he was struck by the clear understanding that his daughter was still in danger from her attacker. Elizabeth was the only human being who could connect him to the crime. She was the only person who could put him in prison. Should something happen to Elizabeth, then there would be no witness. It all seemed clear. The man knew where Elizabeth lived. Why should they assume that the ordeal was completed. The man would have no choice but to try to take out the only witness who could link him to the crime.

Justin stopped in Gresham that evening at Uncle Ted’s Gun Shoppe. He purchased an automatic pistol and a shotgun. His father had taught him to shoot many years before, something he had never really enjoyed. He was a capable marksman, with a rifle. He had shot ducks with a shotgun before. He had never been especially skilled with a pistol, but he felt that a pistol would be the most effective instrument considering his need.

That night, after dinner, he practiced shooting for two hours in his large backyard. His wife was horrified that he had brought guns into the house. She could not comprehend his impulse, did not understand his logic that the lunatic would strike again. She could not believe that Justin was resurrecting fear in their daughter. The crime had been committed. It was done. There would be no further contact with the man. She wondered if Justin was being driven mad by his grief.

Justin did not sleep that night. He sat in the living room, the lights off, making no sound, the shotgun on his lap and the pistol in his right hand. He smoked cigarettes all night, straining to hear sounds. He walked the periphery of the house several times. He checked on his daughter and his wife regularly.

Justin had gone to war. He did not judge it. He did not think about it. Justin had gone to war and he could not return until there was order again in his society.

PART THREE.

I.

Kathy Marvin could not really remember when her son had turned bad. It had been after the death of his father some time. His father had died in a train accident when George was eleven. He had worked for Burlington Northern for years. Of course, there was a chance that George had always been bad, and his bad traits had only begun to appear when George had become a teenager. Then, George having no father, no positive steadying influence to help provide him with encouragement or direction, merely followed the line of least resistance. Perhaps having a father would not have mattered anyway. Perhaps George was merely an evil child. Perhaps he had been born with an evil gene. Perhaps that was his destiny.

It didn’t really matter.

The fact was, George was evil, capable of almost anything. And his mother knew it, had guessed it for some years; she actually knew it now.

Kathy had been watching television one evening in June. She often left the room during the commercials, to get food from the kitchen, something to drink, or to use the bathroom. That night, however, perhaps because of the dramatic music accompanying the clip, deep horns which caught her attention, she had watched the local Portland station’s Crime Minute, which detailed a crime committed in the Portland area during the week. She had looked up from her crossword puzzle—she was addicted to crossword puzzles—to see the face of her son, somewhat blurred, distorted, but still recognizable. He was getting money from a local bank ATM machine. The narrator had said he had brutally beaten and raped a young Gresham woman. Anyone providing information which resulted in his arrest would be rewarded financially.

George Marvin had threatened to kill his mother on more than one occasion. There was the morning when he had come home, bruised about his eye, his lip split, with blood on his grey torn t-shirt. His mother, working in the kitchen, had seen him enter the house and had approached him with a worried greeting. She was concerned by his battered appearance: “What’s all that blood doing on your shirt? Are you hurt....?”

“It’s none of your goddamn business, that’s what it is!” her son had replied. “Don’t you pry into my life! That’s your first lesson!” He had raised his hand, threatening to strike his mother. Then he had turned and stormed off to the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. His mother could hear the water running. She guessed that he was washing the blood off his face.

His mother had wandered out toward George’s car. There was something about the car—his mother could feel it. Some dark energy. Kathy Marvin was a sensitive, a psychic, who could feel energy fields, who could sense qualities of light, good and evil. She loved to talk about her psychic gifts, but no one seemed interested, especially not her son, so she rarely talked about it. But it was almost always at the forefront of her thinking.

They lived together in their remote house outside of Forest Grove. George had come to controll her fully. He rarely let her use the car. He did most of the shopping. Only occasionally did he let her leave the property, when he was ill or when he was obsessed with the music he was writing.

Kathy wandered out toward the car, an old run-down white Dodge. There was something troubling about the car, something dark. She thought she saw blood on the side of the car; but when she moved closer, into a different light, the blood was gone and only a sense of horror, a kind of white shadow, remained. She felt something vibrating in the trunk of the car. It made her stomach churn, made her feel weak and frightened in the belly.

“What are you doing, old woman!” George had bellowed from the porch. She backed away from the car.

“Is that your car?” George asked sarcastically. “Did I say you could go up to look at my car? What are you looking for? Do you think there’s a body in the car or something...?”

George had come down from the porch and was now hovering above his mother. She felt an unharnessed rage in her son. She felt it again in her stomach. It almost doubled her up, she had become so sensitive there.

George raised his hand again. But he did not strike her. He said: “If you ever look in my car again, I’ll have to kill you, mother. And I’ll do it too. There are certain rules about privacy that you’re going to have to learn. And if you don’t learn them, well, then you’ll be pushing up daisies pretty quickly, woman. And that’s a fact!”

Kathy slunk away from the house down toward the creek. She did not return to the house until late that evening.

That had happened in October of 1992.

II.

Kathy Marvin had first seen her son’s evil nature in her dreams. And she trusted her dreams: she always had. George had only been six years old then; and Kathy had vividly dreamt of him cutting up his younger sister, Ruth, and placing her in a trunk and pushing the trunk into the river. She had tried to stop him in the dream. She had tried to scream. But she was mute. She could not move to save her daughter. She only watched in silent horror as George, using a carving knife, cut his sister into bloody pieces, boxed her up, and sent her coursing downstream.

Kathy Marvin had never forgotten that dream.

When Ruth had died of an accident before her eleventh birthday, dying of a broken neck, having fallen from a cliff near their home, Kathy remembered the dream. There was something dark and unanswered about that afternoon. Ruth and George had left the house together. George had returned alone. He had said nothing about his sister. When his mother asked where Ruth was, George had answered that he saw her walking along Bear Tooth Ridge. When she didn’t come home, Ruth called the Sheriff. Her body was found late that night by a county search party.

It is hard to say when evil takes possession of a soul. Evil had taken possession of George Marvin—that much was certain.

After his father had died, George had turned his room into a shrine dedicated to the worship of heavy-metal music. He painted the walls of his room black with silver trim. He hung posters of violent acts, especially acts in which women were being brutalized. The harsh metallic tones of his music ripped through the house. His mother could not stand it, for, to her, it was the manifestation of black magic. So, when the music began, she would walk down to the creek, taking her Bible with her, to try to quiet her mind.

When George completed high school his behavior became even more violent and self-destructive. He worked nights at the mill. He slept most days until late in the afternoon. Occasionally, he would not come home until late afternoon. His mother assumed that he had a girl-friend, and that he spent the day at her house.

When George’s father had been alive, George had treated his mother with a gentle love and respect. George seemed to love his father. They were fairly close. They hunted and fished together. George had seemed normal in almost every way. Although he was not close to his mother, he did not display behavior which would indicate a perverse hostility toward her.

After the death of his father, George began to treat his mother with a rudeness which threatened to become a full-fledged war. And it would have become a full-fledged war had Kathy Marvin agreed to make it one. It was a war with only one participant. Kathy Marvin bore her son’s bitter madness as best a mother could, trying to remember that her son had once been sweet and innocent, a baby she had fed, nursed, and bathed, long before he had been cursed by darkness.

One day Geoge had come home in the late afternoon. Kathy had assumed her son had been with his girl-friend. Kathy was not troubled by this thought. Perhaps this unseen woman could raise George back into life, divert him from his passionate love of the death idea.

When George entered the house, Kathy saw her son covered with blood. She began to tremble, and could not speak. Her mouth was open, but she could not speak. She thought she heard a young woman’s voice crying out: “Please don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!”

But it was coming out of George somehow, coming from the light around his head, a silver-red light, metallic, without gold or anything soft in it.

The woman’s voice made Kathy immediately think of her daughter, Ruth. But the voice was not Ruth’s voice. It was older. And it was terrified, in a way that Ruth’s voice had never been terrified.

But it was all a trick of light and sound. George was not covered with blood. It had been an illusion. When he stepped into the kitchen light, Kathy Marvin could see that his clothes were clean, relatively clean at least, without a sign of violent death or struggle. The voice must have also been an illusion.

But when George passed by his mother, snarling something in a low voice about having dinner ready and how much he hated his job, she heard again the frightened woman’s voice: “Please don’t hurt me! You don’t have to kill me! I won’t tell anyone...!”

III.

George Marvin had chosen a path of darkness. Perhaps a scientist might be able to study him and pronounce an imbalance of chemicals, a lack of some subtle hormone, which had transformed him into something bestial. The fact, however, was that each human being built himself, through choices, through heroes and models for his behavior. Hormones follow those choices, those images. A lack of chemical balance indicates a lack of mental balance triggering the condition. A man might be mad when committing a crime. But madness was not, itself, an absolution of authority or responsibility. Anger was a form of madness. Obsession was a form of madness. Drug addiction was a form of madness. Infatuation with evil, too, was a form of madness. But it did not follow that a man who was angry, obsessive, or addicted to drugs, or a follower of black magic, was, by definition, not responsible for his actions.

The liberalism of the 1960’s in America, and liberalism in general, assumed that the society was guilty, the state was guilty, and individuals were merely victims of that soulless organism, whether that organism be government, corporate culture or the society at large. Madness was a condition imposed on individuals by the larger entities. The individual was not responsible. The responsibility of the society was not to punish the individual, whose illegal actions were motivated in reaction to a corrupt culture, but to find help for the wronged citizen who had been driven to madness by the society. The fact that the damaged victim, the criminal, harmed other apparently innocent citizens did not seem to matter so much as did the “innocence” of the true victim, that is, the innocence of the person committing the crime.

Volumes were written by the intellectuals of the society justifying criminality, excusing anarchism and disrespect for society and order. Wherever the values of the society were not perfect—that is, were not in line with the values of those intellectuals—then violence against the society was a form of heroism, or at least a form of understandable outrage. The criminal became a kind of anti-hero, often admired, certainly not condemned.

The society was guilty; and, in being guilty, it deserved what it got. If the mosnters it had created now were turning on their creator, raping and killing and maiming...afterall, wasn’t that the law of retribution?

When George Marvin came home from work that morning he knew something was wrong. His mother was not in the kitchen, preparing breakfast for him. In fact his mother was not in the house at all. His mother had not slept in her bed. His mother’s Bible was gone. His mother’s shawl was gone. His mother had taken a flashlight with her. She had left the house at night with a shawl and her Bible. What could have triggered such a response in her?

George decided at that moment that his mother must die. She knew too much. She could betray him, could turn him in to the police. He got his hunting rifle from his room and hurried down to the creek to try to find her trail. His mother always went down to the creek when she was feeling overwhelmed. He even hoped to find her there, sleeping in a meadow. Perhaps then he would not have to kill her.

But she was not there. There were tracks along the creek. Broken grasses; her small foot marking the clay. A feeling of panic swept over George. He raised his rifle and pointed it at a tree, sighting it in and imagining his mother at the other end.

Yes, he knew that she had betrayed him. He knew it like he knew many things, directly, not through thought and reason, but distinctly, as if he were touching reality directly, a web of connected occurrences, instead of perceiving the translations of his mind.

George became furious at himself. He should have killed her long ago, the first time he saw her hovering near his car, looking at the door as if some stain of sin had been left on the paint. He knew that his mother was psychic. He believed he had received his own psychic gifts from his mother. But he never felt that she would betray him. His anger grew: why had he let her live? She was the only witness, the only one who could send him to prison. She; and, of course, the girl who had escaped him, Elizabeth Bible. He had considered killing Elizabeth Bible too. He had considered stationing himself on their property some night, with his rifle and its high-powered scope, waiting for her to stand before her bedroom window, planting a round in her tender brain. He hadn’t gotten around to it. He had been so busy with his job. And, whenever he drove by the Bible house, surveying the scene, all the window shades had been pulled and there had always been men and neighbors in the yard.

He followed his mother’s tracks along the creek. If one followed the creek it would lead one eventually to the highway. His mother might catch a bus from there into town. She might be talking with the police right now. He cursed his mother. He aimed the rifle at another tree; and he fired this time. The report was loud and set his nerves on edge. Before him, in the morning light, he could almost see Elizabeth Bible, made of gauze, hovering in the sunlight. He thought he heard her voice: “Turn yourself in! Be a man about it! God will forgive you if you admit your sins and atone for them!”

“Fuck you!” George growled. “I should have chopped off your head when I had the chance!”

Three other girls appeared in the woods, near Elizabeth. They were speaking to George also, in low seductive voices. They were dressed in light too. And they seemed to be taunting George. “Are you a man, George?” “You don’t prove your a man because you can kill young girls, George.” “What do you think God will do when he gets you inside His church, George?”

“Go to hell!” George growled. “You just go to hell!”

George knew he had to get back to his car, to try to find his mother along the highway. But he was losing his strength. He felt weak, nauseous. He stopped and knelt on his left knee, trying to recover his equilibrium. He was sweating and he felt hot. He had never felt so tired. He knew that his mother had betrayed him and that the police were on the way. He could even hear a siren in the distance. But he was beginning to pass away, into a faint condition, removed from his body, thin, stretched into something remote and vulnerable.

“George—what are you doing here?” It was his mother. “Did you kill your sister, Ruth?” “No, I did not!” George proclaimed. “I saw her fall. I did not know what to do. She cried for me to help her but I could not reach her. She fell. And she was laying there so limp and so exposed. I went home and said nothing. I did not know what to say.” A huge bird swept out of the trees and appeared to be carrying a corpse in his talons, climbing into the sky away from George. “George,” his mother asked. “Did you rape and kill this little girl?” There is a small black and white photo of Elizabeth Bible. “No, I did not kill her,” George responds. There is laughter everywhere: young girls in white dresses and white gloves. Some cover their mouths when they laugh. George feels bad; he tries to raise his rifle up to his mouth to take his own life. But the judge laughs and kicks the gun away from George. A man picks up the gun and puts it against George’s head and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. George smells corruption in his pants. The girls all laugh; one cries: “He soiled his pants! He shit in his pants!” An organ begins to play: “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”. But the words have been changed to: “That man has shit his pa-ants....!” And everyone is laughing. Bells are ringing in the church, carrying through the city park. There are sirens and there are animals grazing around George’s head. He is lying in the grass and cannot move. A horse paws at the ground. He digs up something: an arm flops out of the ground, a decaying face. Laurel Henderson: the first girl he killed, two years earlier, knocking her out while she was jogging. He took her to the old cabin and raped her. Then he killed her with a shovel and set her body on fire. Then he buried her remains in the meadow.

But she is not dead now. She rises from the ground and she is in health again, dressed in a gown of light. “He’s the one!” she says. “He did it!”

George sees men building a gallows in the center of town, near the park. His own father is alive again; and he is helping to build the structure. “If he committed this deed,” his father says, “then he must pay. It’s as simple as that. It doesn’t mean I don’t love him. Of course I love him. That’s not the point. The point is he broke the law. And without law we can’t survive as a people....”

George awakens. He begins to vomit. He has never been so hot. He is soaking wet. He vomits into fallen leaves and tree roots. His gun is about ten feet away from him. He must have lost it in his fall. He feels paralyzed. He does hear sirens coming closer. He should run. But he cannot move. He wants to get his rifle. He feels exposed without his rifle. But he can’t move. He lies down again, looking up at the sky.

Elizabeth Bible and Laurel Henderson and Rebecca Chance and Stephanie Lott appear again, this time in the sky. “You’d better run, George,” Laurel Henderson calls down. “I can see the police from here. Your mother has told them where you are. I see four police cars turning off the highway up toward your house.”

“Fuck you!” George calls back. “You’re all dead! You’re all dead!”

The girls laugh. Then everything turns black.

IV.

When Kathy Marvin saw the Police Beat crime report on television and saw her own son on the screen, being accused of rape and attempted murder, she understood that her own life was in danger, for she was a witness against her son, as was the whole world now. He would have to kill everyone. Because he had chosen the path which hated life, he now had no choice. He must kill everyone.

At first, she froze in her chair, unable to move, unable to think clearly. It was as if she had been informed by her doctor of her own cancer, of something terminal in her system, some cluster of bad ideas which she, in fact, intuitively knew had been slowly torturing her to death, but which fact she had refused to recognize. Even now, her first impulse was to deny the truth, to tell herself that the police were mistaken, that her son would never resort to crime, to such brutality. They did not know her son the way she did. They had not known him as a child, a graceful boy, with dreams and ambitions for good. Sure, seeing him now one might get the impression that he was ill, that he had taken the wrong road. But then, when he was a child, a saint, one could have not been more wrong than to accuse her sweet George of anything wrong.

Yes, but that was then. Now, yes, George was a bully, a thief, a murderer. Yes, he was a racist. Perhaps he had also raped and killed the girl whose ghost had followed him into the room that evening, whose voice Kathy had heard, as sure as she heard the sound of her own thoughts.

Kathy grabbed her shawl and Bible, and the long-handled flashlight, and hurried out of the house down the path to the creek in the woods. It was her sanctuary. It had taken all here effort to move from her chair, to overcome the spiritual lethargy which had possessed her for many years now. The words: “My son is a rapist and a murderer,” kept playing in her head. And she denied it: “No, it is not so!”

At least she had been able to escape the house, which now had such a stench of moral decay associated with it, in Kathy’s own mind at least, that it made her feel weak just to think about it. Her son had raped and murdered women for two years now. Kathy knew it was true. That had been the blood she had seen on the car, the strange vibrations in the trunk of the car, the torn shirt George wore, the bruises on his face.

Kathy feared her son; and she knew that some magic membrane of knowledge had been shattered that night, never to be fixed, a shattering which released in her or at least magnified in her brain the image of her son brutalizing and killing strangers. She would never again be able to look at him without betraying this new understanding. There was something psychic between them. As long as Kathy kept herself ignorant of George’s real nature, then somehow they could exist, side-by-side, occasionally even in good humor. But now, with this new evidence of horror, Kathy could not be in the same room with her son for fear that he would read her eyes, her forehead; then raise his hand, or perhaps a shovel, and strike her into oblivion.

Kathy sat by the creek for most of the night. George would be home at 8:00 the next morning. Kathy could not be there when George returned from work

At about 6:00 that morning, Kathy moved along the creek out to the highway. She waited about ten minutes for a bus which took her into town. The bus stopped about a half block from the Gresham Police Department building. Kathy entered the police station at about 7:00 o’clock. She sat on a bench for nearly an hour before a policeman noticed her presence—she was seated in an empty hallway and she made no attempt to contact an officer. She was in a state of shock, unable to focus on her surroundings. Her mind was full of self-accusations, imaginings of her son’s evil deeds, her daughter’s death, her hushand’s abandonment of his family.

Officer James Piney first noticed Mrs. Marvin sitting silently in the unlit hall.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said. “How long have you been sitting there? You should have come in.”

It didn’t matter to Kathy. It was a great labor to raise her head toward the sound of the voice coming off from such a distance. It was as if her whole body now was heavy and cold. It was as if she had become stone.

She met the young officer’s gaze.

“What?”

“How long have you been there? I’m sorry I didn’t hear you. I hope you haven’t been waiting too long...”

Kathy was then seized with the profound understanding that she was on the verge of betraying her son to the police. What kind of mother would do such a thing, to her own son, to her own blood-child?

“No, I haven’t been waiting long,” Kathy said. Her voice sounded distracted, approaching from far away.

“Well, what can we do for you, ma’am?” Officer Piney asked.

“My son, George Marvin, is the man you want in connection with the rape and attempted murder of that blonde girl this week. I was watching the Crime Beat Report last night. It was my son’s face that came up on the tv screen. He gets home from work at 8 am. You’d better send some officers out to our house to arrest him. We live out on Barger Road, south of the Little Brush Creek....”

PART FOUR.

I.

When Elizabeth Bible heard on the news that George Marvin had been arrested, she called her father at the university and shouted joyously: “They caught him, dad! They caught him...!”

Justin Bible could not remember ever feeling such happiness as he did that morning. He felt his daughter was finally safe. He felt that something divine had just happened, that God had intervened on the side of the innocents, delivering up evil for the sake of the world’s salvation.

Justin felt the tension which had been building in him for weeks quietly exhale and dissipate as he sank into his patent leather chair in his office. He wept quietly, tears of relief.

His life had been a nightmare for many weeks now, surrealistic, twisted by fear. What did this mean really, this arrest? Did it mean that his life would return to normal? Would his family be safe from attack now by outsiders? Could his life ever return to the placid condition it had assumed prior to Elizabeth’s tragedy?

Justin stood up from the chair and moved to a wall mirror near his bookcase. He looked at himself. He looked old now, for the first time in his life really. He looked old to himself. The lines in his face seemed to weave a face he did not know, he could no longer recognize. He was changed now. He was not the callow playful fellow in formal English he had once been. He was no longer a professor, because he had peeled off so many civilized skins from his character to reach the hard core, the nut, which was primally true, the parent of vengeance. He could not put the skins back so easily, for they were gone, discarded, given up like a treasure of innocence. He could not remember where he placed them, these personalities of a time of light, these angles of himself which had been shattered by his confrontation with the thoroughly naked.

II.

The police called Elizabeth that evening at her home and asked her to come in the following morning to identify the suspect. She drove in to town with her father. The police assembled a line-up of potential suspects: Elizabeth needed to pick the guilty man from among seven men. There was no problem in this. When Elizabeth saw George Marvin her stomach began to scream and memories of panic spread inside of her like a web of nerves.

Her father comforted her.

“It’s the man in the blue shirt,” Elizabeth said. “The man with the hole in his pants.” She was pointing at George Marvin.

"Which number?" the officer asked.

"Number six.)

“Are you positive?” Officer Bailey asked.

“Yes, I am,” Elizabeth replied.

And that was it.

Justin and Elizabeth drove home in silence. Justin did not know what to say. He felt worn and incapable of reaching his daughter at that moment. He looked at her. She did not seem sad really. She seemed stunned, as if she had been struck by some force of nature which had changed her too: a beautiful sculpture broken by a vandal. The sculpture could never be repaired or replaced. It was merely something, now, which had been damaged and was now more tragic than it was fine, although fine surely in the grace with which it bore its tragedy. Something was missing. Much like the skins of Justin’s innocence, separating the hard interior from the cultured personality, something was gone and would never be recovered.

Elizabeth and Justin drove home in silence.

Justin eased the Volvo up the driveway toward the garage. He stopped the car a few feet before the closed garage doors. Then, for a second only, out of the corner of his eye, Justin thought he saw the shadow of a man stumble out from behind the garage toward the car. He reached down instinctively and grabbed the flashlight as weapon to protect himself from the attacker. But there was no one, just the wind blowing, and the shadows of the trees moving across the hood of the Volvo.

"Dad, are you alright?" Elizabeth asked, stunned by her father's action.

"Yes, I'm fine, dear. I'm fine."

Justin took a deep breath, trying to right himself again, embarassed by his reaction. Nothing had really changed, Justin understood. Justin's war still had not ended.

DOUBTING THOMAS

PART I. The Ride

“How far to the main road?”

Thomas was capable of almost anything at that moment, capable perhaps of even killing the man who had stopped, at whom Thomas was looking through the half-open window. The man was about thirty-five. He appeared to be a traveling salesman of some kind: he had the look. He was jovial; he had a laughing face that told Thomas that he was so bored with his own company that he would rather risk his life stopping for a stranger than have to endure his own company for another half-minute.

“I’m not sure,” the man answered. “Where are you headed?”

“Sinclair.”

“Hop in. I’m headed for Lander.”

Thomas Eaton had become a desperate man; yet he really couldn’t tell when it had happened. As he looked back on his life, he could not target a specific moment when he had passed from a normal to a desperate person. There did not seem to be a break in the chain, an eruption on the surface of his history; the desperation had always been there, not even hidden, always there, bobbing on the surface. But a desperate child is merely one with too much energy or will. A desperate adult, on the other hand, is one with too much darkness or too little conscience.

To Thomas’s own inner eye, he had not changed since the day he had been born. The world had changed however. The world had become a darker place for Thomas.

Thomas touched the pistol in his coat pocket, reminding himself of his own desperation. He had about six dollars in his pocket. He had no where to go

“It’s a hot day to be out humping it,” Dick Nelson, said, wiping his forehead with an imaginary handkerchief. “How did you get stuck out here with no place to hide?”

“My last ride was a bit miffed at me, I think,” Thomas Eaton replied.

“Why, what’d you do?”

“I asked about her breast size,” Thomas Eaton said, lying with a serious face. The whole story was a lie. Thomas was good at making up lies on the spot.

“Really, you asked her that?”

“I did. She had a big set. I’ll bet they were 42’s.”

“Hell, you don’t ask a woman that, straight out.” Dick Nelson held out his cupped hand. “You don’t ask. You try out the old hand-mold method, to see how well they fit.”

Both men laughed at this. Strange how the subject of sex created a bond between men. Thomas noted that. Maybe it was the thing about a common enemy, Thomas thought. An alliance against the common fear. For sexuality and fear were common travelers in men. Thomas knew this well. He had been married twice before, twice in less than ten years.

“So, what’d she do?” Dick asked.

“She gasped a bit. She looked at me like I was either an idiot or trying to be funny. When she decided that I wasn’t a comedian, she pulled over and told me to get out.”

“Just like that?” Dick asked.

“Yeah, just like that.”

“So what’d you do?”

“Well, I thought to myself: you either have to push her out her door and steal her car, or you have to get out.”

Dick seemed a bit troubled by the answer.

“You wouldn’t have really stolen her car, would you?” Dick asked.

“No, of course not,” Thomas Eaton replied. “Those were my choices. There really wasn’t a choice. I would never steal someone’s car—at least not while they were in it. So I got out of the car.”

A sort of chill fell over the car.

Thomas Eaton could see that his driver was beginning to chastise himself for having picked up a stranger. Dick was beginning to freeze up. He was beginning to realize that he had made a mistake and better find a way out of his predicament.

Thomas tried to lighten the atmosphere in the car. He knew just the way to do it.

“I’m on my way home. I haven’t seen my kids in more than 3 months.”

Dick Nelson softened. “Oh, you have kids?”

“Oh, yeah, four of them.” It was a lie. A softening lie.

“How old?”

“The oldest one’s eleven. Louise. A sweet girl. Then there’s Tramp, Elizabeth. She’s eight. Richard is six and Maggie is three.”

“I’ve got two myself. Oscar is six and Rita is four.”

“Are you going to stop at two?”

“I don’t know. I try to make a baby every chance I can...”

Dick was smiling at this. Thomas thought: how much we reflect our names. Dick here is a dick. And I am, without a doubt, a Doubting Thomas. Definitely a doubter.

You might have gauged from this that Thomas was a catholic. And that’s true. He had been raised a catholic, even attended catholic school. He had been one of the best students at St Joseph’s school in Rawlins. He even won the Carbon County Spelling Bee for his grade (seventh grade). Then something had happened to him. He wasn’t sure what it was. The world had begun to change. Thomas hadn’t changed. He was still a good speller. But the world had changed somehow.

“What do you do for a living?” Dick asked. Everything was back on track again. Dick had forgotten his fears.

Thomas knew that could send Dick into tremors again, with just the right response. It could say: “Well, I haven’t really been working much, not since I got out of the penitentiary.” Or: “I’ve been straight for the last year, drilling oil out near Baroil. The cops got so close before that. I had to shut down the meth lab...”

There was something precious in this humor, the vicious kind of humor, designed to trigger fear in another. It was a bully’s kind of humor. Thomas did not wish to be a bully.

“I’ve been working in Gillette. Driving a truck for the Sullivan boys.”

Dick acted like he knew the Sullivan boys, nodding his head up and down slightly.

“Did the job end?”

“Yep,” Thomas replied. He did not say that the job had ended for him only. That the Sullivan boys, Edward Sullivan to be exact, had fired Thomas for sleeping with his brother’s wife. Dick didn’t need to know all the details.

Thomas had stolen the gun from Edward Sullivan’s desk drawer after Edward had fired him and then walked out of his office. Thomas stole the pistol out of desperation. He did a lot of things now out of desperation.

Thomas looked out the window at the hot flat landscape. Sagebrush running for ever. The hills off to the north looking almost blue, under the clouds.

“Rainstorm coming in,” Thomas said aloud, although he meant it more for himself than for Dick the dick. “It’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”

“How can you tell?”

“I can taste it.”

Dick gave Thomas a funny look. “Taste it?”

“You ain’t from here, are you, Dick?”

“No, not really.”

“Where you from, Dick?”

“I grew up in Iowa. But I’m situated in Salt Lake City now...”

“Jesus....Mormon Town.”

“Yes,” Dick admitted. “Mormon Town.” He said it with an exaggerated accent, trying to ape Thomas’s accent. “I aint a mormon myself though.”

The “ain’t” rolled off Dick’s lips as if it was natural—but it didn’t feel right to Thomas. He liked Dick even less as it became clear that he had affected a manner of speach to impress Thomas with his...naturalness. His down-home-ness. Or something of the sort.

“What are you? A presbyterian?”

“How’d you guess. Yes, I’m a presbyterian. How’d you know?”

“You don’t want to know,” Thomas replied.

“Yes, I do,” Dick insisted.

“Well, my first wife was a presbyterian. You’ve got some of her traits.” Thomas was lying again. His first wife had been a catholic. He knew Dick was a presbyterian because of Dick’s sallow skin, his lack of imagination: he was like flour before it became something. That’s the way all presbyterians were: like the unborn.

“What traits?”

“Curiosity,” Thomas answered. “You’re curious. That’s a very presbyterian trait. And innocence. I bet you haven’t had a bad thought all day, Dick. Presbyterians don’t have bad thoughts. The only bad thoughts presbyterians have is when they condemn other people for not living right. Other than that, presbyterians are ok.”

“What are you then?” Dick asked, slightly put off by Thomas’s characterization.

“What do you think I am?”

“Are you a Jew?” Dick asked, serious, penchant, as if he were asking Thomas the size of his penis, although not out of desire but because he needed the information for a science project—that Presbyterian curiosity again.

Thomas laughed.

“Not exactly,” Thomas replied.

“What are you then?” Dick insisted.

“I’m one of the damned,” Thomas said. “I’m one of the soulless. The forgotten.”

“Oh, I see,” Dick responded, becoming serious again. “You’re a Catholic.”

Thomas slept a bit after they passed through Laramie. He dreamt of a midget sneaking snakes into the milk processing plant, carrying them in empty milk cans, and dropping them one-by-one into the processor. He awakened. It was raining, then hailing. It hailed very hard for about ten minutes. Visibility dropped to only ten feet or so. The road became a blizzard of white icy stones falling in a grey hazy atmosphere. The traffic slowed to a creep.

“I told you it was going to rain,” Thomas said dryly.

“You didn’t say anything about hail,” Dick responded.

“Well, you didn’t ask about hail.”

Dick laughed.

“Did you have a good sleep?”

“Not really. Just a catnap.”

“You were out for twenty minutes at least. That’s a long cat-nap.”

“Really. At what point does a cat-nap become something else? Eleven minutes?”

“I’m not sure,” Dick replied. “I don’t know. I haven’t done any research on it.”

Thomas told Dick about his dream.

“What do you think it means?” Dick asked.

“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I’ll have to think about it a while.”

Thomas then sank into a deep circle of privacy, somber, brooding, looking out the window.

The rain continued to fall. But the storm was moving fast. There was lightning on the hills, coming down at the road, ripping open the sky. Thomas looked up, turned quietly to Dick.

“The snake is the force of Evil, and the white milk is the white race,” Thomas said. “The snakes are carried by a midget. That means the perpetrator of evil is actually not imposing, not magnificent; in fact, he is a dwarf. The snakes are carried in empty milk cans. Those empty of milk are the white races who are either dead or who have no souls.”

Dick did not know what to say. The explanation of the dream came out of left field, confusing Dick. He looked across the car at Thomas.

“That’s horse-shit if I’ve ever heard it, friend.”

Thomas had to agree with Dick. It was horse-shit. Thomas seemed to be a manufacturer of horse-shit.

PART TWO. Eating Dinner

“You ought to try the chicken friend steak,” Dick said. “I love chicken fried steak.”

“I don’t like chicken friend steak,” Thomas replied.

“Why not?”

“It’s Presbyterian food.”

Dick chuckled at this.

“You’re a strange man, Mr. Tom,” Dick said, loosening up with his friend now. He had been driving all day. He cracked his knuckles. A loud series of pops echoed through the restaurant. The waitress, a fifty-five year old with wide hips and a crusty smile, dirty, lecherous, and with the name of Margaret looked at Dick and laughed, an obscene laugh, as if she were saying: “Show it to me and I’ll hide it for you.”

Thomas was watching the old waitress. A sick feeling came over him as he watched Margaret laugh, unable to take her eyes off Dick. There was a pathetic leer in her eye that made Thomas feel guilty for being human.

“You have a following, Dick,” Thomas said, pointing at the laughing woman.

“Jesus. She looks like my mother.”

Thomas hadn’t thought about his mother in years. The last he had heard she had been at a nursing home in Albuquerque. She had had a stroke. His sister was there to take care of her, visit her twice a week. Their mom didn’t really know who they were anymore. The thought of his mother made Thomas sad. He had never really done enough for his mother. He should have gone to see her before the stroke. He wasn’t sure if he’d told his mother he loved her before the stroke. That was something he wished he’d done: told his mother he loved her.

“Jesus. You seem so serious now. What’s wrong?” Dick was jazzed for the chicken friend steak.

Not only that—Margaret was bringing them water and she was approaching like an ocean in a bucket.

“Nice to see you, boys” she began, looking especially at Dick.

Dick wasn’t a bad looking man. He had appeared to be made of cottage cheese when Thomas had first looked at him through that half-open window, so sick of his own company that he had stopped to talk with a dangrous stranger. Yes, cottage cheese, the Presbyterian tone. Now, however, as Thomas looked at his companion, Dick seemed stronger, more lean than Thomas had thought. His jaw was a bit stronger and longer than Thomas remembered. He could see how Margaret found Dick interesting to look at.

Margaret smiled at Dick: “You want something on or off the menu?” she asked, winking shamelessly at her customer.

“I think I’ll start with the chicken friend steak,” Dick answered. “I think my friend’s leaning toward the rare Porterhouse however.”

Margaret turned to Thomas. She was not unattractive, although now she was fat, wet and round, and somehow stuffed into her dress, all thigh and ass in uncompromising chaos. Her breasts were heaving and she breathed heavily, a bit out of breath from walking across the room.

“Yes, the rare Porterhouse, with coffee.”

“Soup or salad?” she asked.

“Soup and salad, “ Thomas replied.

“It doesn’t come with soup and salad,” Margaret said, snooty with Thomas. She wanted to talk with Dick.

“Which costs more as a side order, soup or salad?”

“A bowl of soup is $1.25. A cup of soup is $.85. A salad is $1.50.”

“How big is the cup of soup?”

Margaret didn’t like Thomas. She turned and look toward the back of the counter. There was a row of cups on a shelf.

“There. On the second shelf.”

“Ok,” Thomas said. “I’ll have the Porthouse, rare, with salad, and coffee. I’ll have a side order of soup.... What is the soup of the day?”

“Clam chowder.”

“Yes, a cup of clam chowder...”

“What do you say you get him a bowl of chowder and just charge him for the cup of chowder,” Dick said in a kind slighly seductive voice.

“I don’t know if I can do that. You see Jim’s the owner, and Jim says I shouldn’t....”

“Ok, ok,” Dick said, a bit ruffled. “I thought you wanted to be friendly to us.”

“Oh, I do,” Margaret said. “Ok. What about you? Would you like a bowl too?”

Dick shook his head “no”. “I don’t eat clams,” Dick said. “They give me gas.”

Margaret said: “Oh, clams are ok with me, but those red beans, have you tried those red beans you sometimes get in chili...?”

Margaret rubbed the palm of her hand across her left breast as she laughed, pushing the flesh up above the bra and up outside the opening of her blouse. Thomas thought of the parting of the Red Sea. There must be something religious in the act he surmised. But the swell was gone in an instant and Margaret was oaring herself back to Jim who was doing the cooking back in the kitchen.

“If I wasn’t married I met get me some of that, my friend,” Dick said, smiling at Thomas.

“You’re not such a Presbyterian afterall,” Thomas replied.

“No, not really,” Dick said. “Oh, I’m a Presbyterian when I’m Dick; but when I’m John it’s a whole other story.”

“What?”

“And when I’m Ted—well, when I’m Ted I do my very best Ted Kennedy impersonation.”

“Really. You mean you swell to 300 pounds and take your pants off at a public bar?” Thomas asked.

“No, I kill you women in cars and throw them in the water.”

Then Dick was laughing his quick impish little laugh, obviously Dick again.

“I got you that time,” he said.

“Yes, you certainly did,” Thomas admitted.

“You think you’re the only one in the world with a perverse sense of humor....?”

“No. I thought you were the only one in the world who didn’t have a perverse sense of humor,” Thomas replied.

“I hope I didn’t disappoint you,” Dick said, laughing.

“I don’t know. The jury’s still out.”

Dick bought Thomas’s dinner, insisting that he was working, while Thomas was in-between jobs and must be low on “jack”.

Dick looked back at the restaurant as they walked out to the car in the parking lot. Margaret was standing above their table, already having pocketed the tip. She was watching Dick as he walked away.

“What do you think?” Dick asked, with a small smile. “Do you want to wait until her shift is over tonight and take her out and fuck her from both sides until she passes out from pleasure...?”

Dick did not look like the same Dick Thomas had known during the drive. There was something dark in him, something emerging in the night.

“Are you serious?” Thomas asked.

“Hell, yeah. She probably gets off at ten o’clock. Take her for a drive. Tear into that fat body of hers for an hour or two. I’ll get you home before three. That’s a promise.”

III. Rendezvous

Thomas wasn’t sure why he said yes. In fact he didn’t say yes, he just shrugged his shoulders a bit. Then he bit his lip.

“Ok, you’re on,’ Dick had said.

But it was a new Dick. It was not the Presbyterian Dick. It was the slightly spooky Dick, a personality that was emerging up from somewhere.

Thomas did not like this new Dick. But he couldn’t very well insist on Dick’s driving away at that moment. It wasn’t Thomas’s car . Thomas had no leverage here. If he didn’t want to have some fun with Dick and Margaret he could merely walk away. But Thomas had no where to go. He had almost no money in his pocket. All he had in his pocket was a gun.

Dick went inside the restaurant to talk with Margaret. He nodded and smiled to Thomas when he came out, then turned up the street, walking. He came back with a grin on his face. He had a bottle in a brown paper bag.

“Let’s get down to some serious drinking,” Dick said.

Thomas wanted to leave. He did not. He drank with Dick.

Thomas liked sex too. He would enjoy having sex with Margaret. Why not? He had no where to go, no friends; nothing was calling him.

But something was nagging at Thomas, a shadow, perhaps a guardian angel, making him restless.

It didn’t help when Dick asked Thomas, after they had drank almost half a fifth of whiskey: “Have you ever killed anyone, Thomas?”

Dick was drunk. His clean Presbyterian face had now changed levels; Dick now appeared, to Thomas’s enebriated vision, something diabolical.

Thomas did not answer.

Dick took Thomas’s silence to be an admission of guilt, which it was not. Thomas had killed no one. Thomas had never even been in a fight. People seemed to like Thomas, except Edward Sullivan, who had caught him diddling his brother’s wife.

“Me too,” Dick said.

“Me too what?” Thomas asked.

“Me too. I’ve killed someone too.”

“I haven’t killed anyone,” Thomas responded.

“Oh, don’t worry. I won’t go to the cops,” Dick said. “I can tell by your face. There’s something cold about you, Thomas. You have the face of a killer. I knew it when I picked you up.”

“You would pick up a killer?” Thomas asked.

“Oh, yeah, why not?” Dick asked.

“Wouldn’t you be afraid to pick up a killer?”

“No. Not really. I’m not afraid of you, Thomas. You may be a killer; but you’re not going to kill me.”

“How do you know that?” Thomas asked.

“You don’t kill men. You kill women,” Dick replied. “I can see it in your eye. You’ve probably killed at least five women in your life. You have sex with them. You rape them; you beat them. And then you kill them.”

Thomas looked him in the eye, as if to say: “Are you for real?”

“You don’t have to deny it, Thomas. I know what makes you tick.”

They sat in silence for nearly ten minutes. Thomas’s mind was racing. The man was a lunatic, that was clear. Perhaps he intended to murder Margaret. Perhaps he would frame Thomas for the murder.

Dick sat staring into Thomas, smiling, diabolical.

Thomas said nothing. Sometimes he would laugh quietly, an idiot understanding a second idiot’s mental process.

Finally Dick said: “Don’t think about going anywhere, Thomas. You’re with me in this. If you don’t go along with me, you might regret it.”

He said this very coldly. It was enough to make Thomas swallow hard. Thomas still had the pistol in his coat pocket. He had never killed anyone, never hurt anyone. He thought he had been desperate when he met Dick. But that had been nothing. Now he was entering hell.

It was dark when Margaret came out. Dick was sitting in the front seat of his car, with the door open, its light coming out on the sidewalk where Thomas sat.

Margaret made noise when she walked, a lot of fat muscles and body parts dancing up against clothing. Cotton pulling and making exclamations.

Dick was all charm when Margaret arrived:

“Hello, beautiful. We couldn’t wait for you so we had a couple of shots. You can catch up with us if you get a good start...”

Then: “Thomas, you drive. You’ll be our chauffeur. We’ll keep an eye on you from the back seat.”

Margaret suggested they drive down by the river. Dick had asked where they could go for some privacy. Margaret pointed to Thomas where to go. Thomas drove slowly, sick with dread; and sick with a picture of blood and a coming darkness.

But there was nothing he could do. It was fate. Fate drawing him into the car, drawing him down the road, drawing him into this pattern here. Nothing he could do. Nothing he could do.

It was as if he were dreaming.

He listened to Dick and Margaret kissing and swilling whiskey. He could smell the whiskey. He could smell Margaret’s perfume, almost stark it was so sweet. He could smell her sweat. He could hear Dick’s energetic voice saying lightly: “I’ve got a present for you, big Maggy. Something that’s going to drive you crazy.”

Margaret replied: “Oh, yes! Oh, yes!”

Thomas could hear clothes rustling. It started to make him excited.

Maybe nothing bad would happen. Maybe they would just take turns with Margaret, have fun with her, leave her at her car; then drive away. That might happen. Perhaps it was his imagination. He had always been a bit strange, Thomas. Always had a strange imagination.

The road to the river was lonely. There were moans and grunts and thrashing coming out of the back seat now. Thomas could see nothing through the rear view mirror. Everything was dark.

Margaret began to murmur: “Oh, yes, baby, yes!”

Thomas assumed from this that he had entered Margaret.

“Do you like my cock, you fat whore?” Dick asked, a line of anger in his voice.

“Yes, yes, I like it,” Margaret replied, ignoring Dick’s nasty tone.

“You want it in both holes at once?” Dick asked.

“Oh, yes, baby, yes.”

“Find a place to pull over, Tom!” Dick ordered.

Thomas eased the car off the main road when he found a side road leading down to the water.

There was no more talking in the back seat, just moans and awkward movements, a sound of liquid and a smell of sweat and sex.

Thomas was excited too. Listening to Dick and Margaret have sex (one couldn’t call it making love, except as a euphemism) made him also want to participate. He wasn’t interested in anal intercourse. He had never done that before—and had no wish to start now. But he found Margaret exiciting to his senses, especially in the darkness.

He eased the car down to the river’s edge; and turned off the engine.

IV. Destiny

Dick wanted the headlights left on. He wanted to see what he was doing.

He pulled Margaret with him down near the river.

“Slow down,” she cried, laughing. “I don’t want to fall down.”

Thomas watched them move into the light.

Margaret was laughing. She still had her dress on, but it was open in back and she had no panties. Dick was helf-carrying, half-dragging her toward the water.

“Get out of the car!” Dick cried to Thomas. “You get a piece of this too.”

“Do you have a blanket?” Margaret called. “I don’t want to lie down in the dirt.”

“Get the blanket out of the back seat,” Dick called.

Thomas turned and felt in the dark for a blanket. There was nothing. He turned on the inside light. There was an old yellow blanket tucked on the floor. Dick apparently had been sleeping in the car.

Thomas grabbed the blanket, opened the car door, and felt in his jacket for the pistol—just in case. Then he got out of the car.

“Give us the blanket!” Dick ordered, his voice becoming strained with desire, hurried.

Dick pulled off Margaret’s dress. She was a big woman, middle-aged, with sagging breasts and a fat roll that overwhelmed her pubic region. Thomas looked instinctively to see her pubic hair. He was becoming aroused too.

Dick had his pants down; and he laid on his back on the yellow blanket. Margaret got on top of Dick. Dick entered Margaret and she screamed in pleasure, laughing.

“Get over here, Thomas!” Dick ordered. “You take the other hole!”

Margaret laughed excitedly.

“I don’t think so,” Thomas said. “I’m not into that kind of thing.”

The real Thomas was coming out, the decent kid inside the desperate body.

“What!” Dick said. He had trouble concentrating on Thomas because of his first interest.

“You do what I say!” Dick said.

“No. I don’t like this. I think I’ll be leaving!”

“No,” Margaret said. “I want you to. Come over and take me real hard. I love it that way.”

“I’m not interested in...”

Dick was getting angry. He cried: “You take the love hole then. I’ll take her ass.”

“Yes, come get my pussy,” Margaret purred.

“Fucking baby!” Dick muttered to Thomas. “Get your pants off and lay down!”

Thomas did what he was told. He did feel desire for Margaret, especially in the half-light with the river making noise and the cricketts and the human fury. He knew that there was some dark sentence beyond the pleasure. He should have run. He knew Dick was no good. But he did what he was told.

He lay down on the blanket; and he felt Margaret sink on top of him, almost squashing him.

“What’s that?” Margaret said. “That hurts. Take your jacket off.”

Thomas pulled his jacket away from his body so that Margaret wasn’t laying against his pistol. Then he closed his eyes. He felt himself being swallowed by something hideous and enjoyable. Margaret began to squirm and moan wildly, and then tell Dick how much she loved it.

Thomas felt every inch of himself covered up. Margaret was big. Dick was pounding her from behind. Margaret was sweating and the sweat begin to fall on Thomas. But the pleasure was there too. Her body was suffocating, pain and pleasure mixed. But Thomas began to move with her, with fate, with the strange triplicate rhythm.

It seemed to last for ever.

Then his own passion rose to a furious finish. He twisted and wrenched himself under her heaving body, coming to a stiff and still completion.

Dick must have finished too, because the weight lessened and Margaret’s moaning seemed to soften.

Thomas’s eyes were closed. He felt completed.

“Get up bitch!” Dick said. “Now the real fun starts!”

“What?” Margaret asked rolling off of Thomas.

Dick stood above Margaret and struck her with a pistol he held in his right hand, bringing the handle down across her forehead. Margaret rolled off the blanked like a plastic doll, shocked, suddenly light.

“Get up, partner!” Dick said to Thomas. “Here’s the knife.”

Dick held a large hunting knife with a long blade in his left hand.

“What’s this?” Thomas asked.

“It’s a fucking knife. What are you, a moron?”

“I know it’s a knife. What’s it for?”

“You’re going to stick that fat pig. You’re going to stick here 100 times and then you’re going to cut her throat. And then we’re going to throw her in the river.”

Margaret was stirring, beginning to moan in pain and fear.

Dick straddled her: “This is a hell of a way to die, isn’t it, baby cakes. Sorry. I haven’t tasted blood in two weeks. Sorry you have to be the next meal.”

Dick rolled Margaret over on her back. She looked helpless, not a sexual being now, like a large helpless baby with pubic hair and breasts. Her lipstick was smeared. She was bleeding above her right eye.

“This isn’t funny,” Thomas said.

“Then don’t laugh—just do it.” Dick held the gun on Thomas, warning him.

Thomas was on his knees, pulling up his pants. He took the knife from Dick. Margaret looked at Thomas with panic, her eyes pleading with him.

Thomas looked up toward the car, as if hearing something.

Thomas’s entire life had been pointing in this direction. All of his desperations, his alienations, his failures, seemed to point to this spot in this circle, which he recognized now like an old friend, as if he’d dreamed about this, been prepared for it by some silent, invisible mentor.

“Someone’s out there, Dick” Thomas said. “I heard something.”

Dick grabbed the hunting knife back from Thomas and turned to look out beyond the car.

Dick took a step toward the car, concerned.

“No,” Dick said. “I didn’t hear nothing.”

Thomas reached into his jacket pocket. The gun was there. He pulled it out of his pocket smoothly. Time was slowing down. Dick’s back was to Thomas. He was peering into the darkness, holding his gun behind his back, trying to hide it from the illusory intruder’s view.

Thomas raised the pistol and held it about three feet from the middle of Dick’s back. There was no morality now. Thomas had no doubts. He was not a doubting Thomas.

He pulled the trigger.

All hell broke loose.

Dick was thrown about a foot through the air, landing off the blanket on his face.

Thomas rose from the blanket to stand above Dick; but Dick was moving, trying to turn. Thomas didn’t see Dick’s gun but he did see Dick trying to rise and turn.

The picture almost made Thomas laugh, Dick lying in the dust, turning, a spot of blood on the back of his shirt.

Thomas heard words coming from Dick.

“You God damn son-of-a-bitch...”

But there was a gurgling sound in Dick’s voice; and he had lost his tone of authority. There was fear in his voice also.

Thomas shot again, this time hitting Dick in the back of the head. Thomas heard a ping from the car. Then he understood that the bullet had entered Dick’s skull and exited into the car somewhere.

The lights were still on.

Dick was lying on top of a sagebrush.

The sound of the river began to fill up Thomas’s ears. Margaret was saying something to Thomas. But all Thomas could hear was the massive rushing of the river.

Thomas felt a sense of tranquility.

V. Aftermath

Thomas sat in the darkness for at least an hour, saying nothing. Margaret had put on her dress, turned the lights of the car off, and washed her face down at the river. She had a nasty laceration on her face, and a bruise. But the bleeding seemed to be stopped.

Margaret moved around with the authority of a mother. She found the car keys in the pocket of Dick’s pants. She appeared with a shovel she had found in the trunk. She began to dig a grave down by the water.

The moon was full. It seemed so beautiful to Thomas. He sat in its glow, as Margaret dug out of sight. The only sound was the shovel slicing earth rhythmically, mixed with the eternal chorus of the waves, the moaning voices of the river, singing “Oh, no, now you are done. Oh, no, you are undone.”

Thomas expected Margaret to turn him in to the police. But when she began to move about resolutely in the dark, shouldering a shovel and straightening her clothes, he understood that her intent was also denial.

Finally, once he had tasted the pleasure of his action to surfeit, Thomas rose and moved back into the darkness, where the noise was being made. Margaret was a large ghost working in a white dress, a spirit of love and life who had escaped death by only a fraction of a second.

Thomas didn’t know what to say.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I didn’t know what he was like. I only met him this afternoon. I hitched a ride from him near Wheatland.”

Margaret was crying, finding it hard to control herself.

“Let’s not talk,” Margaret said. “I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you.”

Thomas helped with the digging. Margaret sat down in the moonlight and cried.

“Dig it deep enough so the coyotes can’t smell him,” she said finally.

Then: “You can have his car. Just give me a ride home. I’ll tell my husband that I was drinking and slipped and hit my head.”

Thomas and Margaret carried Dick’s body over to the grave.

“Don’t drag it,” Margaret said. “It’ll leave a trace if we drag it.” It was like Margaret was an old hand at this. Of course, when she would again break into tears it was clear that she was not accustomed to this; she merely had moments of clarity that she would speak abruptly, between the sobs.

Thomas looked at his watch. They had picked up Margaret at about 10:30. It was now almost 11:15. Margaret took Dick’s wallet out of his pocket, throwing all the papers and cards into the river. She handed Thomas a wad of bills.

“You take it,” she said. “You need it more than I do.”

Before they rolled Dick into the grave, Margaret said: “What if they find him?”

“No one knows him,” Thomas replied.

“They’ll have his fingerprints,” Margaret said. “And people at the restaurant saw him with both of us.”

“We could go to the police and tell them what happened,” Thomas said.

“No.”

Margaret disappeared back up toward the car for a few minutes. She returned with the hunting knife. She cut off each one of Dick’s fingers, throwing each into the river. She took off his shoes and socks, and cut off his toes.

She disappeared again. She had a tire iron and a flashlight.

“Hold the light for me,” she said. “Shine it on his face.”

Thomas held the light on Dick’s face.

Margaret struck Dick’s face with the tire iron, over and over again, disfiguring him beyond recognition. It was eery to watch her strike, not filled with anger, which one might expect or understand, but with precise thought. Then she took care to knock out his teeth with the nut end of the tire iron first, the front teeth; then she knocked out the back teeth with the slim end of the instrument.

Then they buried him. They buried the yellow blanket with Dick.

When they were finished it was about midnight.

They turned on the car lights again to police the area of the crime.

When Thomas was putting the shovel and the tire-iron back into the trunk, both of which he had washed thoroughly in the Platte River, he noticed a gym bag stuffed on one side of the trunk. It had a flimsy metal catch acting as a lock. Thomas tried to open it; but he needed a key.

He closed the trunk again.

He drove Margaret home. The town was sleeping. They didn’t see anyone on the streets.

There was a light at Margaret’s house.

She started to cry.

“I’m sorry this happened,” Thomas started.

“No. It’s not your fault. I shouldn’t have gone with you. It was my choice to go with you. I’ve been married for thirty-two years to a wonderful man. I’ve been a little weird lately I’m afraid of getting old, I guess. He’s in there waiting for me, sleeping on his recliner. I almost didn’t come home to him. I almost diappeared. He would have never known what happened to me. I’m ashamed of myself, that’s why I’m crying. Because I love him. And because I’m so happy that God spared me. He wouldn’t know what to do without me....”

She left the car and walked up the lawn to the house, not looking back.

Thomas watched her walk away, saw her open the unlocked door.

There was something sweet about it.

Thomas got back on I-80, driving west. He had gas. He had money in his pocket—he didn’t know how much. He still had a gun in his pocket. What about the bag in back? It might contain personal items of the dead man. He wanted to get rid of it. He pulled over on the shoulder of the road.

There must be a key on the key ring.

He got out and opened the trunk. Cars passed by. Lights came and went.

He found the small key to the flimsy lock. He opened the gym bag.

The bag was full of money. One hundred dollar bills. Thousands of dollars.

Thomas lost his breath. Shocked. Pleased. Full of wonder.

He locked the bag again.

He pulled the wad of bills out of his pocket. He counted the money: more than $600 in his pocket. He had never carried six hundred dollars in his pocket in his life.

This morning he had six dollars and change to his name.

He had been desperate.

Now, he was certain there was a God.

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