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.