Imagine my hands, the buck
fever I would have felt (countryside
echoing rifle-blast) if we had shadowed
that day like Monacan hunters—their bows taut,
tracking under cover of corngrass, deer wheeling
from misfired arrows whistling overhead—

but instead, around noon, we simply headed
back to his pickup. I made sure he buckled
his seatbelt as the trucks’ bald wheels
hauled us further from Pungo county,
further from the memory, how we spoke tautologically
on the ride home, gesturing in the shallow

language of men. Tonight—with five o’clock shadow,
callused palms, hair renouncing my head,
and whiskey tongue—I am a man, maneuver tight
corners of another pastoral road. When I clip the buck—
sovereign mass of muscle and antler, countenance
to twilight—the way it pinwheels,

this grotesque ballet, is almost beautiful, and its welted
forelimb prolongs the pirouette until shadowland
swathes the stag in nocturne once more. I count
my blessings, wonder if Pawpaw would shake his head
at my first inadvertent attempt at hunting. Not buckshot
but car bumper. Would he break out the old rifle, teach

me how to look down its sights? Would he tout
its accuracy, tracing carbon steel? We’ll
take her out tomorrow. Reach into the bucket
and grab Pawpaw a cold one, his wallpapered shadow
might say, kitchen bulb a swollen pear, headlines
refracted off reading glasses. Beyond, a countervail

of cricket wings overcomes this futile shadowbox;
questions recede, and I dream of fog ghosting up headland
from the bay like smoky snouts through a dark country.

Chris Joyner had previously spent the bulk of his life in Virginia Beach, VA, where he played in the woods as a child, then worked in marketing out of college.  Now an MFA candidate at the University of Miami, he was recipient of the 2011 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize, and his pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in the Barely South Review, CaKe, and Fickle Muses.  He tends to bastardize traditional forms.  Please forgive him.

Later when I learned that my coal valley city
lay above a catacomb of tunnels and shafts
I thought too much of those abandoned
tracks. I felt in my first-teen bones
the rotting of those timbers in the stream of damp
air down there and dreamt one night
of something coming, of a demon living beneath
the city streets.

The dream turned black and I awoke to first menses
but I did not know what it was but thought a cursed
thing had lain near me and left behind his rusty smirch
a red that partly dried to coal upon my bed and gown.
Then from month to month I lived in the gush
and cramp of dread that one day walking
in a clean pink dress a huge anthracite hand
might grope up suddenly through a curb grating
or drain and grab me by the leg and drag me down
to the mine in his need for gore.

I am grown now and have left that place
and childhood terrors but sometimes late
before the first bleeding of the sky
when the sound of a train’s far off whistle
starts that old flow of fear, the child in me still
waits for that damned smeared hand.

Sarah Brown Weitzman [sbwpoet@aol.com] has had work in numerous journals including THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, AMERICAN WRITING, POTOMAC REVIEW, AMERICA, MID-AMERICAN REVIEW, THE BELLINGHAM REVIEW. Her second chapbook, THE FORBIDDEN (2003, Pudding House) was followed by NEVER FAR FROM FLESH, a full-length volume of poems (Pure Heart/Main Street Rag, 2005). In 1984 Weitzman received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She was a finalist in the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award twice, and more recently was a finalist for The Foley Prize in 2003. A former New York academic, Weitzman is retired and lives in Florida.

grease-stained coverall

retired lo lo nine point

three years now.

On the shortest day

of the year

shimmed down

to a decimal

electric fires spark,

smolder,

the trailer fills

with creosote smoke;

a bird’s nest ignites

into a crown of thorns.

The whipped cur of oily dawn

slinks around this trailer park

as Orion disappears into white,

girding his rusty belt.

The gunning of a motor,

the shriek of a shivering girl

five point two bared,

legs shimmying

as the finned leviathan

inches toward the marsh,

creeping….

On the flaccid wire

rides the blackbird,

the decimal of its eye

unseen

except by the coonhound

pissing its load

against the trailer

so laboriously,

the way it happens

with old dogs.

But the blackbird,

having naught to do

with any of this,

subtracts itself

from the wire.

The cloacal marsh,

rimmed with tires

rusted parts

reechy weeds

gallantly

cleanses itself

of rot and reek.

Woman gone,

girl blind

son in the field,

wired and mined:

zero to do

with any of this.

The old man

on the shortest day

of the year

cleans his gun–

but it’s not

what you think,

he’s miles to go–

whistles up the hound

shivers and slips

on slivers of ice

but rights himself

and it’s off

into the marsh

to shoot something

lovely.

The frogs under ice

don’t mutter a croak.

There’s a stubborn persistence

in flesh and fowl:

why some don’t leave

but linger

in the blast of wind

the frozen shallows

the absence of

berry or worm.

Placeholders,

like us.

One of them today

will meet

its natural enemy.

A good old fellow

for all of that.

Teasels grow around

the marsh.

Lone blackbird

unheralded,

the hissing of dried grass

unheralded,

the veins

in his gnarled muscles

burled, lathed,

flesh subtracted–

first two blackbirds,

now, none.

Carol Alexander is a New York City-based author and editor. A writer for trade and educational publishing, she has authored numerous children’s books, served as a ghostwriter for radio and trade publishing, and taught at colleges around the metropolitan area. In 2011–2012, her poetry appears in literary journals and anthologies published by Chiron Review, Cave Moon Press, The Canary, Danse Macabre, Earthspeak ,Fade Poetry Journal, Fat Daddy’s Farm Press, Mobius, Numinous, OVS, Red Poppy Review, and The Whistling Fire.

I knew one guy who had extracted all of his teeth himself, except for those punched or stomped out. He would sit against a smooth tree, usually a wide beech, and after sufficiently lowering a bottle of whiskey would clamp onto the gray aching tooth with pliers and yank. Yet here in the Alleghenies of southwestern New York, our own teeth are the least of our worries.

The banks have their incisors into most of the homes, but foreclosure is only one fear. People have a thousand little fears that amount to a giant gnawing worry—like the spreading forest that has been gradually swallowing pasture for sixty years because the family dairy farms can’t compete with the corporate farms out west. House trailers now far outnumber farmhouses.

Arguing that they depress the value of all surrounding property, a previous supervisor of my town proposed a ban on trailers, as if the working-poor should just scamper up the mountains and move into hollow trees. The trailer dwellers—the janitors and sales clerks and receptionists and loggers and hospital aides and highway laborers and the line workers at the factories that have been cutting shifts, some of these folks limping on damaged hips or backs or knees—crowded into the next town meeting and heated the hall with so much angry hurt that I thought I might get to see the supervisor model an outfit of sticky feathers.

The landscape can seem to be emptying of charity, as if the people are chased by predators and must defend themselves with sticks and stones and their remaining teeth.

As I hike the Alleghenies, I often come upon the remains of homesteads—the collapsing shale and sandstone ring of a hand-dug well, a drywall cellar wall still holding back the earth although two white ash have risen from the leafy floor, a knurled and dead apple tree mossy in the shade of a young forest, the scene of decay suggesting that a farm or any other business has little more substance than an American dream.

Active factories are disappearing almost as fast as the farms. A manufacturer of electrical components had constructed a new plant on the outskirts of a small town near my home but abandoned it a few years after production began. Set back from the highway on a large expanse of grass at the foot of a forested mountain, the cavernous plant is still vacant.

Like an end zone.

The home team scoreless for four long seasons.

Trees thrive, though. Drive Interstate 86 from Hornell to Jamestown during the lush months and you will see one of the more beautiful landscapes in the country. Some people crossing the state make a sixty-mile detour to take 86 instead of the New York State Thruway, just to view the steep mountains and hills and narrow, pastured valleys. In places you can believe you are driving along the coast of a stormy green sea.

Trees and wildlife didn’t always have it this good.

Despite the unwelcoming nature of the place—much of the soil is acidic hardpan, and people up in Buffalo refer to this region as “the snow belt”—80 percent of the land would be cleared for farming by 1910. The white pines, some of them four feet thick and 200 feet tall, were the first to be felled, driven down the Allegheny River to mills in Pittsburgh; then the hemlock for the tannin-rich bark. The hardwoods were too heavy to float far and were chopped down and burned for potash, crop-seed sowed around the stumps until the pioneers had time to dig and pull them out with the aid of oxen.

The wolves, mountain lions, bobcats and bears were shot, trapped and poisoned; the whitetail deer—and the now extinct eastern elk—were commoditized by market hunters.

In his memoir Pioneer Life, Philip Tome recounts an 1823 trip in a bateau that leaves to our imagination the natural beauty lining the Allegheny as he and two other market hunters haul in seines glutted with flopping fish and peer down the barrels of their flintlocks: Tome limits his description to business, the profitable killing of thousands of fish and 67 deer on a single trip.

Before long, a person was far more likely to encounter a hog than a deer in what little woods remained.

Yet today wildlife thrives and two-thirds of the land is forested.

There are even places where you can fancy that the ax and saw were never invented. In 1998, an 82-year-old man drove here from California to unearth a can of coins he had buried as a boy in a farming community known as Little Ireland—and learned that Little Ireland has become a ghost town of drywall foundations in the belly of a large and wild state park.

Charles Sheets entered the woods carrying a metal detector and shovel, and before he lost his bearings on land that was once cultivated, he must have recalled the whitewashed planks of his cramped rough home, his mother’s meticulous vegetable garden, the laundry on the line, the boasting rooster and muttering hens, his father in the dusty distance striding behind a one-bottom plow and two draft horses circled by birds dipping to pluck up earthworms, the little boy with a shiny can of rattling coins.

More than a hundred rangers and police and volunteers searched the forest for a week before they found the body.

One might suppose the beautiful landscape that my neighbors and I share or the long and deep recession in our local economy would encourage kinship, a warm diffusion of the community values which supposedly exist in rural America. It hasn’t happened. Two of my young neighbors have done prison time for getting wasted on booze and who knows what else, hot-wiring the pickup of the town justice and setting it aflame at an abandoned county landfill. Could have inspired a heck of a Norman Rockwell painting: Boys Roasting Weenies Up at the Dump.

Instead we’re united by our awe and fear of mountain lions.

As we peer out at the increasingly wild land rolling through the decades and centuries, we perceive that, by God, a damn big mountain lion is out there. We’re eating a fried breakfast or downing a beer after a shift at the cheese plant or changing the baby’s diaper green with Gerber’s peas when we spot it on the back hillside: a lanky and long-toothed and curve-clawed and man-eating feline that can leap nearly 40 feet and run 45 miles per hour. We quick call in the pets, rush to the phone, spread the alarm to even the drunks and felons among us.

The strange thing is that unlike the arsonists and bankers, the big cats leave behind no sign. No tracks in the snow and zilch deer-kills, eventhough a mountain lion will take a deer every few days. And our lions never get hit by cars or captured by the automatic trail cameras which are now so ubiquitous that I look around before peeing in the woods —worried I’ll end up on YouTube.

What’s more, state wildlife biologists assert that despite the many calls they receive about sightings—each caller insisting on the veracity of his vision and making passionate avowals of sobriety—no mountain lion has roamed here for a century and a half.

Yet it’s not that our lions aren’t real or there’s some highly contagious insanity in these parts. It’s just that, unlike the bald eagle and osprey and wild turkey and wood duck and black bear and bobcat and beaver and fisher and river otter and brook trout that have indeed returned to our loping forest and clearing waters, our mountain lions are not physical.

Our lions are spirits: disguised banshees haunting us from the past, warning of the future, yowling at now.

As Archibald MacLeish read it, “The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever.”

I was reminded of the poet’s cartography of an infinite and sacred nation when a neighbor bristled at the news that I had spent my weekend planting 1,000 spruce seedlings on my property, the first of 8,000 conifers I would set out in five years. “All you people planting trees,” the farmer barked, “soon there won’t be anyplace left for farming.”

American dreams of forever—our totemic notion that the New World graces us with eternal economic and cultural growth—can lift and dissipate like fog when I hike the land.

I step over the stone-polishing freshwater spring that offers my drinking water as it did to Horace Guild, the pioneer who kept corporeal mountain lions at bay while he cleared what are now my forty acres with a double bit ax; cross the oily hard-road that until recent years was gravel; pass the overgrown foundation of the Mallory place, home to a pioneer family that eventually lost a son in the Civil War.

And I make the long climb up Seward Hill, which was forest and then pasture and now—several wars later—is becoming forest again.

Resting against a lightning-burnt sugar maple that shaded heifers when the Seward brothers still farmed, I see, beneath the shaggy green of the glacier-sculpted mountains and hills, the winding valleys threaded black with narrow macadam roads and the house trailers and satellite dishes and junked cars winking in the sunlight and the splotched brown and gray of barns in various states of collapse.

I can also see that I needn’t have planted those spruce and fir on my acres. Plenty of native hardwoods have come up of their own accord, already choking the aliens. If I could rest long and still enough against the scarred maple, it would heal and grow around my flesh, sealing Rip Van Winkle in a mausoleum. In the bright breeze atop Seward Hill —even though I love the woods, even though my soul would dry up and blow away like an old leaf if I had to live in a city—I can sympathize with the hardscrabble farmer I angered by planting trees.

Sometimes when I hike the conifer stand I planted in sunshine and youth, each of my steps now in shade and a bit arthritic, I can even understand why the Puritans believed the dim forest floor to be the haunt of the Devil, the calls of lions and wolves to be demonic.

And why to a lot of struggling Americans, trees are meant to be cut —not planted.

And yet with its 23 million acres of new forest on land abandoned by agriculture, the Northeast is now wilder than when Thoreau lived on Walden Pond. Isn’t that verdant fact a cause for celebration in a time of unprecedented worldwide environmental damage and destruction?

Yes—but if the land your pioneer ancestor cleared tree by tree and your granddad and dad farmed by the sweat of their brows from sunrise to sunset is now home to the wolf-coyote hybrid known as the eastern coyote, the howling is seriously haunting.

Even worse is the feline yowling.

They say the lions lie in wait out on a tree limb, tails twitching, and with long claws and glinting teeth spring down on their prey. A friend tells me he hears them calling to each other in the woods up beyond a little cemetery where the chiseled names of pioneers have been weathered clear off some of the gravestones—and that the sound causes the hair on the back of his neck to stand up.

I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of a mountain lion, but last winter, snowshoeing up behind the house, I came upon the frozen and diminished carcass of a small deer. I could see from the tracks that three eastern coyotes had caught it in an opening in the spruce stand the previous night, one of them probably clamping its jaws on the deer’s neck as is their wont, strangling it.

Can you imagine its terror as it suffocated in the snowy darkness?

They eviscerated their kill, gulped down the liver and heart and lungs and left the stomach and intestines behind as they dragged the lightened carcass into thick cover, where they consumed all of the

flesh except for that of one hindquarter. They finished eating their kill the next night, leaving a scattering of hair and disjointed bones and the hollow rib cage and the frozen gut pile that remained until it disintegrated with the spring thaw.

They must have been very hungry.

Lately, walking my land, I find myself wondering as I pass the weathered rib cage of that unfortunate deer.

Do the unemployed of Detroit hear the sirens as howls?

Do the foreclosed of California hear the pronouncements of bankers as yowls?

Why did I seem to snort with mockery as I wrote about the boys who stole and burned the truck? What hungry rage caused them to destroy the hard-earned property of a good man and neighbor? What wild fear caused us to incarcerate one of them, hard-bitten almost since birth, for eight years—longer than some investment bankers and securities traders who stole the savings and retirements of thousands of Americans?

Why did one of my kin—while receiving care in a Buffalo hospital —become livid about proposals for national health insurance that would cover the less fortunate? It would make his taxes go up, he howled.

He had earned his insurance through hard work, he snarled.

How did we become as hollow as that gnawed rib cage?

As I settled here 30 years ago, I came to know my neighbors a mile around. We spent many winter evenings together in wood-heated parlors, snow scratching at the windows, conversing about our families and jobs and other neighbors and hunting and the weather or whatever was on the television, but never about mountain lions.

I don’t mean to suggest that we ever resided in the middle of heaven’s acres: that we didn’t always have some hate and hardness and despair. A neighbor who had custody of his grandson regularly lashed the boy with profane vitriol that I could hear a quarter-mile away when they were outside. And I recall well that each morning a farmwife with an icy spouse would wait in the woods at the lonely top of my road until the milk truck stopped so she could spend some time up in the warm cab before hiking back home through the woods and fields.

But neighbors also shared cups of flour; neighbors fed the livestock and poultry of other neighbors who managed to get away for a shortvacation; neighbors looked in on the sick and elderly.

That’s what it meant to be a neighbor.

Now that the farms have been parceled and sold, I have several new neighbors I don’t know, in part because I’ve never knocked on their doors to welcome them to this neck of the woods and in part because if I did they probably would wonder why I was bothering them and what it was I wanted from them. I don’t even know the names and faces of some.

I’m not sure why we’ve become a community of strangers, but I do sense that something in the greater civic and religious mood has been changing and drifting over even the most remote hills and hollows of America.

The wind didn’t always blow in the direction it does today. Two decades ago, 27 people gathered at the home of Francis Brown after he was imploded by a stroke; a few were his relatives but most were his neighbors, some who lived miles away. We were there to finish the job he had started—to provide firewood for his wife, May.

Terry Hurlburt and I felled and limbed beech and ash, and with his green, coughing tractor he dragged the bolls from the forest into a weedy field near the house where men with chainsaws cut 18-inch chunks or operated hydraulic splitters and swung wedges. Men and women heaved the pieces damp with sap into a dump trailer and each time it was heaped full Terry pulled the load with his John Deere and emptied it on May’s front yard where women and children were stacking a two-winter supply of warmth in long rows.

At noon we took a break to meet on the Swift farm, where at two long folding tables borrowed from a church and set up in the yard far below the black-and-white Holsteins on an iridescently green hillside, we passed around homemade cider, we broke bread.

The small prefabricated house where Francis and May lived is several hundred yards above mine on a gravely bench, and just beyond the narrow yard the land resumes its steep ascent into forest. On a clear windless morning several weeks after the funeral, the eastern horizon spun gradually into orange and the sun began to float, the maples crimson, a crunchy frost clutching the grass, and I saw that the lights were on in May’s house and knew she had risen at the time when she used to cook him breakfast.

From her crumbling chimney rose a steamy offering of burnt wood.

copyright 2010 by Mark Phillips
first published in Notre Dame Magazine

Mark Phillips, who lives near Cuba, NY, is the author of the memoir My Father's Cabin.

I was 6 years old when I saw my first cockfight. It must have been a gray day, because even though I was very young, I remember clearly the bright color of the roosters’ feathers – white, black and blood red, even before any damage was done – and of the coat I wore back then, pink faux fur that made me feel like a Barbie doll.

It happened on a patch of dirt in front of a wooden stable where a man my brothers and I called “Uncle” Larry kept chickens and a few hogs, including a mated pair named Samson and Delilah. Larry wasn’t actually my uncle – just my dad’s best friend – and his place wasn’t a fully functioning farm, just a small ranch house on several acres of land on the outskirts of Fort Wayne, Ind., but it might as well have been another planet to my brother and me. Our parents allowed us to keep a dog and an occasional fish or turtle. Larry’s sons and stepsons, on the other hand, grew up wild, BB guns in their closets, mud on their boots. A trip to Uncle Larry’s always meant adventure, and sometimes, like the night my dad helped Larry ring and castrate the pigs, blood.

I blinked at the striped light like refractions from twin prisms and the knife slipped from my hand and I swiveled and the men behind me parted.

In a trance I retraced my steps and sat down in the sun with my back against the barn’s hot wall.

“Delmus, you all right?” someone asked, it sounded like Aaron Winters, and I heard myself answer, “I need to think a minute—”

An hour ago I had awakened under a grapevine, the empty fifth of whiskey rolling from my chest as I jumped up and was running drunk through the vineyard toward the frantic barnyard.

I remembered the pickups arriving for the harvest party, honking horns and shouted greetings, bottles passed in a wide circle, gunfire as the men took turns shooting Woody’s rifle, the blast at my ear when Aaron Winters rested the barrel on my shoulder and the running horse weathervane skated down the barn’s tin roof—

Then the shout that the horse had escaped the corral, Silva’s hired man had let it loose, and I hurried for the lasso and swung it wide over my head—the way Endicott had taught me 60 years ago—

I approached Kate’s terrified pony that had run up onto the lawn by the house, under the kitchen window where Kyla was having her morning coffee and Kate ate her cereal.

“Nice throw,” someone said and I was leading Sox from the barnyard, saying, “Easy boy, easy,” now stepping into the young orchard to quiet it, to get away from the gun­ and from Baylor Clark who’d been nipping at my heels, insisting that Aaron Winters had struck oil west of New Lund, that if I didn’t fill him in he’d tell everyone about Kyla’s mother—

I’d heard someone coming through the dirt, with my hangover the footsteps loud as a dinosaur’s tread.

“Aaron?” I said. “You alone?” I sat out of sight, under the young Suncrest peach, Sox’s rope tied to the branch.

“Just me.” Aaron was plodding through the deep white-ash soil without his hat, his short shadow thrown behind him like a stunted wing.

“I followed your tracks— Figured you were hiding— Or getting ready to ride off—”

He was breathing hard, it was work for him walking through the plowed ground. Aaron put out a speckled hand, grasping the peach limb above my head. He blinked, his washed-out blue eyes gazing down at me through the shade.

“You’re not sore, about the weathervane?”

“Forget it. You get rid of Baylor?”

“How’d he find out about the oil lease?” Aaron put his other hand on the branch.

“He knows everything. He’s a spy.”

“Your mother’s brother. Can’t do much, not with family.”

“Baby Brother Is Watching You,” said a voice among the silent leaves and I remembered I was drunk.

“I was ready to wring his neck.”

It should have been funny, coming from old Aaron, who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

“Join the club,” I said, picking up a dirt clod.

“I got hold of myself,” Aaron said. “He’s spreading some pretty nasty stuff—”

I threw the clod over my shoulder. Sox snorted.

“Kyla’s mother?” I touched a fallen crescent leaf, like the moon last night. “He’s full of shit.”

“Old news,” Aaron said.

With my finger I traced a circle in the blonde dirt. The narrow peach leaves stirred, casting shadows like fingerlings in a stream.

“Larry Jones knew something about Baylor—” I drew a line through the circle, then a second line, making a cross. “What was it, anyway?”

“Aprons,” Aaron said, “lambskins.”

I looked up at Aaron’s white face.

“Big profit. Sold them to the different lodges. That’s why Baylor joined the Masons.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“That’s what I thought it was, anyway—” Aaron’s voice trailed off.

“What do you mean?”

“Something Hazel told me. After Larry’s funeral. Something I’ve never told anyone. Something Larry never told me—”

Aaron stared off across the orchard.

“Looking back, I can see he hinted at it, in ‘Raisin in the Dust,’ that part about the Johnson Grass choking the fields and ditches. About the seeds of something evil here.”

My head hurt. When I looked up at the flickering leaves, the splintered light stung my eyes.

“You shouldn’t have got drunk the night before your party,” someone said at my right ear, it sounded like my dead mother’s voice. “All the Wild Turkey the Butterfly lowered on the string, after you dropped the Early Times—”

“Do I want to know?” My temples hurt.

“No,” Aaron said.

“Tell me,” I said.

“It’s painful.”

“What isn’t?”

“I want to tell you, Delmus.” Aaron looked down at me. “For your mother’s sake—”

“What’s she got to do with it?” I felt the old irritation spark and rise like an orange flame.

“I know you and Florence didn’t get along, after your dad died. I think maybe you blamed her a little for Walt’s death.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t. It just went that way.” But I did, I always had. “I’m going to get me a switch,” she’d say when I wouldn’t mind.

“It’s got to stay here, between you and me.”

“All right,” I said. I slashed another line across the circle in the dirt, so it looked like a pie.

“You were overseas. It was when Baylor decided he was going to write a book about Joaquin Murrietta and the buried treasure. Said if Larry Jones could write a book about Murrietta, he could too, only ten times better. He wouldn’t fall for an old wives’ tale about some ‘fancy lady’ finding the gold, using a crystal ball. He didn’t have to be a ‘damned professor.’”

“Yes,” I said. I made a furrow in the dust with my fingertip. “That sounds like Baylor.”

I’d just been talking about Murrietta— With who? Now the sectioned circle looked like a puzzle.

“Well, Baylor bought a great big new desk, set up an office. He had an old desk, real old. Real cheap. He tried to sell it to Larry, then to me. It was just good for kindling. Plus it was his. Nobody wanted it. Baylor began to bother Florence about it. He’d call and come over nearly every day. Said he’d never given her a gift, always meant to and never had.”

“Shit.”

“He wouldn’t let up. Said it was ungrateful if she didn’t take it, a present from her only brother. So finally, to shut him up, Walt went over in the truck. Baylor helped him load it, all the time bragging what a great desk it was, how happy Florence would be when she saw it. Baylor said he’d be over later to help them decide where to put it. They should put it somewhere important, so people could see it.”

“Aaron—”

“I’m coming to it. When Walt got home, Larry Jones was there. He’d had a hunch on a site and wanted Walt to dowse it on the map. Oil. Larry waved hello and pointed to the desk. ‘Baylor finally find a buyer?’ Larry said.

“‘No,’ Walt said, ‘a goddamned gift. Would you help me unload it?’                      “‘Christmas comes early,’ Larry joked, and Walt laughed, said what a bother Baylor was. So Larry and Walt got it down.

“Walt had started to dust it off, Baylor’d had it in the barn, when Larry said, ‘You know, these were pretty common once, mail order stuff. Just a cut-rate piece. But there was one thing. They all had a hidden compartment. I wonder if Baylor remembered to clean out all his secrets.’

“Larry was that way. He found Murrietta’s ivory-handled pistols in the cave.”

“Yeah.” Larry had brought one over. I’d held the heavy silver pistol in my hand, grasped the white grips carved with screeching eagles.

“Treasure,” said a different voice. “Under a flat stone .… These aren’t rhinestones but diamonds in my dress—”

“Larry leaned over, reached way underneath. Sure enough, there was a button, it worked a spring release. A secret drawer came open and Larry reached in.

“‘What do we have here?’ Larry said. ‘Baylor’s treasure map?’

“Larry handed Walt the piece of paper. Walt unfolded it.”

I looked up. Aaron took a breath, both hands on the limb, his white brows raised.

“That’s the moment that killed your father—”

“What?”

“Walt turned white, took one step and collapsed. Just like that.” Aaron lifted a hand and snapped his fingers. “Like a hammer’d hit him.”

“I never heard that—”

“No one has,” Aaron said, “I never did, not till Hazel told me. I guess Larry got Walt into the car and he and Florence took him to town, to the hospital. No use.

“When Larry brought Florence home, Florence asked Larry to put the drawer back in the desk. She asked him to drag the desk out in the barnyard and pour gasoline on it. She set it on fire herself, with a kitchen match. Larry and Florence were standing in the yard, watching it burn, when Baylor drove in.”

And Bob Brawley died that same day, of fire, over Nagoya, 100 yards off my silver wing—

“‘What the hell’s going on?’ Baylor yelled. ‘What the hell?’

“Florence never answered him. She never spoke to him again. Remember, when you got home from overseas and he’d come visit, for coffee? She would sit there, staring at the wall, at Walt’s picture of the grazing horses. ‘Florence—Florence, look at me when I’m talking!’ Baylor would say. She never turned. And later, when she was in the hospital? Baylor came to see her every day. She wouldn’t speak, she wouldn’t look at him, even when he begged her, as his sister, his last blood relative.”

“What was in the drawer?” I stared up at Aaron.

“A diagram. A map.”

“What map?”

“Gates,” Aaron said. “Each gate had a number.”

“What gates? The ditch?”

“At the bottom of the page each number had a name. Each gate.”

Aaron looked down at me. His eyes were sad, watery.

“I don’t understand.” Gate. Number.

“The Klan,” Aaron said. “They killed Endicott Lowell.”

I watched the ground tilt and rise. I put a hand down for balance.

“Jesus!”

The dirt glittered with grains of quartz and pyrite, threatening to ignite as a roar started in my ears. Each second was like an arrow going in. Each minute. I could die now, turn to dust.

The case was finally closed:

Negro Rodeo Clown Killed in Mysterious Stampede!

It was Baylor and his “friends” who put chili powder under the bulls’ tails, between shows while Walt and I and Endicott had the picnic in the pasture under the oak, Endicott in his purple pants and shirt and his face still painted with white paste, the orange wig beside him on the blanket before everything was torn and soaked red .…

“You all right?” Aaron asked after a while.

“No,” I said. “Real tired.”

In the barnyard a radio was playing, where earlier the men had taken turns firing Woody’s .22, where once Endicott had shown me how to throw a rope:

“Just like this, Delmus,” Endicott said, guiding my hand. “Thatta boy!”

“You’re wearing your dad’s boots.”

“Yeah,” I said to the sandy ground, “my Red Wings wore out.” I touched another fallen yellow leaf and again remembered the moon. “Like everything else.”

“I want to talk to you,” Aaron said, “while we’re still sober.”

“I’m not sober. I’ve been drunk since last night.”

Wild Turkey or Early Times? The bottle rolled from my chest when I woke under the grapevine. I thought it had fallen and shattered by the elm.

I ran a hand through my hair, what was left of it.

“I’ve been drunk all my life. Jesus—”

“I figured it was like that, when I saw you in town yesterday.”

“Odd cycle.” I glanced down the row of young peach trees. “Strange weather.”

“The wind is part of the process, the rain is part of the process .…  Like the phases of the moon—” Who said that? When?

“I can feel it,” Aaron said. “Everywhere I go. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I was going to wait until everybody left, but I don’t know if I can stick it out.”

“You going?” I looked up. I didn’t want him to go. Aaron was the only one I wanted to see.

“No, not yet,” Aaron said. “I’ll stay a while.”

“I appreciate it, Aaron.”

“Let me sit with you a minute.”

I lifted my hand and gripped Aaron’s as he squatted down beside me.

“There,” Aaron said, “that’s better.”

How slender his wrist was. Almost bone.

“Remember the meteorite, Delmus?” Aaron asked. “The one that hit the milkhouse?”

“Walt’s shooting star.” I nodded. “Rock of Ages.”

After the war a swarm of bees lived inside the thick walls and when I tore it down honey flowed like liquid gold from a spigot and Kyla and I skimmed the pool with buckets and poured it into milk cans.

“They saw it up in Fresno,” Aaron said. “Been tracking it. Some teacher at the college.”

“‘Someone’s vandalized it,’ he said, when Dad gave it to him. ‘This isn’t a natural break.’

“‘No,’ Dad said, ‘I guess God fiddled with it.’”

It was summer, hot July, I was 11. We’d been sitting on the screen porch drinking homemade root beer when we saw the sudden blinding streak that lit up the barn and then an explosion, a tin roof boomed, sparks flying up.

“What is it?” Florence cried.

“A meteor!” Walt said.

Walt and I ran out across the barnyard. I saw stars through the hole in the milkhouse roof. A black silverish rock sat on the concrete floor with the full milk cans. It was smoking, spirals going up toward the lit overhead bulb.

“Don’t touch it—It’s still hot.”

Walt sent me back to the house to call Aaron.

“The guy growled,” Aaron said, “but he took it.”

“It’s still up there, at the college museum.”

“Made of nickel. I figured you’d remember—”

“All the days of my life,” I said, dropping my hand in the dirt as I heard another sudden buzzing voice in my head:

            “And the third angel sounded his trumpet, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood .…”

Aaron set his hand on my shoulder. With a sigh he got to his feet and stood in the deep earth, then reached around to his pants pocket.

“Have a drink?”

He dropped a half-pint so I had to reach to catch it.

“Thanks—”

Old Granddad. I drank the burning whiskey, throwing back my head, and handed it back.

Aaron took a dainty drink, coughed, took a better one. He screwed on the cap and backhand threw the flat bottle in the air beyond the peach tree.

I started to rise, to make a failed effort to grab it in time, and eased back down as I saw the glass fall safely in the soft plowed ground, not like last night when I tripped and the Early Times floated from my hand and broke in a thousand wet pieces in the crescent moonlight .… “Damn it to hell,” I said on hands and knees before I heard the creak of a window sash—

“Wealthy man,” I said, looking up. “You must have found oil.”

“Not yet,” Aaron said, “maybe never. Maybe—”

He made a strange jerking motion with his arm.

“Aaron?” I thought he’d had a stroke, Aaron’s eyes were blank, empty looking—

Then I recognized the signal. I was tired, but I got to my feet. I gripped Aaron’s hand.

“By the level.”

“By the square.”

“Widow’s Son.”

“King Solomon’s Temple.”

Aaron stared steadily at me. Now his eyes were clear, intent, blue.

“Look at this,” Aaron said.

He was opening his shirt, showing his thin t-shirt and bony chest, then reaching in, as if to grasp his kidney.

Aaron pulled out a varnished peach fork.

“Gave up the L’s?”

“This is better.” Aaron held the V with two hands. “It’s Larry’s. Hazel gave it to me.”

I recalled it dimly. It had lain on the kitchen table as Walt and Larry had coffee. But it was different, there was something bright fastened on the end with electrician’s tape.

“What’s that thing?”

“A piece of the meteor.” Aaron smiled. “Walt fiddled with it.”

“You found oil with that?”

“After years of dry wells. Lots of shale, tar sand. Bentonite that time. Never oil. Then bingo, first try with this and up it came.”

“I didn’t even know you were drilling—”

Things were coming too fast. First Endicott, Florence and Walt, Larry. Now this.

“When?”

“At night. Secret. Capped it off. It wanted to gush. Right under the surface. It’s been on the move. Migrating.”

“You really hit?”

“Real pure, no sulfur. I meant to bring a little for you to taste, sweet, but I forgot—”

Aaron let one arm of the rod swing down, raising a hand to scratch his forehead.

“Lots on my mind. A big pool, it looks like, a lake of oil, the way it came up. Lot of pressure.”

No wonder Baylor—the murderer!—was antsy. He smelled oil. Everyone had looked for 70 years—Standard, Shell, geologists from Arabia and Iran. There was a fault, but no one could locate the deposit.

Understandably, Aaron was excited.

“It’s on the Island,” Aaron said.

“Jesus— The Island?”

Aaron nodded. “Where the Kings’ two forks split apart for a mile.”

“Jones always said it was on the Island—”

“He didn’t have a shooting star,” Aaron said.

Again he held it out with both hands, the rock shining at the end of the V.

“Let me see it,” I said.

“Here.”

I gripped the peach fork that once had been Larry Jones’. The Professor. It dropped straight down, the piece of star pulling heavily.

“You sitting on oil?” Aaron frowned.

“Naw, I’m rusty. The ditch line runs through here.”

I threw the stick back up, held it out lightly in my palms, but again, with a will of its own, the shiny star shot down.

“Pretty strong,” Aaron said, “give it here.” He took the rod, balancing it belt high, level with the ground, and I saw it plunge.

“It’s not here.” Aaron tilted his head to the side, feeling the pull through his hands. “It’s over there, real strong, right under the barnyard. Or no,” Aaron said, swinging the branch up again, “it’s farther on, by the house.”

“It’s the pump. Metal magnetism.”

“You sure?”

“Either that or Kyla’s mother. The rhinestones in her dress.”

“Shall I play a record?” said a voice.

“Unless it’s the old still,” I said. “In the cellar.” Suddenly, I was thirsty again. “The raisin whiskey. The barrel of bootleg wine.”

“Or the book, behind the loose brick—”

“What?” I turned. I’d been about to wade out into the dirt to retrieve the thrown bottle.

“Ford’s book,” Aaron said, holding the fork level again. He squinted, looking at me. “Remember the book?”

“The book is gone,” I said.

The slender peach leaves fluttered, casting shadows across my father’s boots, and suddenly I heard singing:

“I’m next of kin / To the wayward wind—”

“Wayward Song”, Larry’s book about Murrietta, the treasure.

“No,” Aaron said. “It’s in the car.”

“What’s that?”

“Ford’s book—”

“Whose car? Where?”

“Mine. In the trunk, locked up. I got it started. It was worth chancing a ticket, don’t you think, Delmus?”

“You sure it’s safe?”

“It’s in the tin box. Wrapped in the Ghost Shirt.”

I stared into Aaron’s blue eyes.

“I’ve been looking for it.”

“I figured you had.”

“Where’d you find it?”

“I had it. Walt gave it to me. He was worried you’d get killed in the war.”

From Ford to Walt to Aaron.

“You didn’t throw it in Walker Lake?”

Ford had told them to, when he was dying in 1932 and read from the book and stopped the rain and then Raymond sang “Rock of Ages” and my grandfather gripped my hand—“My hand is a stone in a river. Now the river’s in you—”

“Nope.” Aaron shook his head.

“Why not?”

I wanted to drive up today and drop it in Walker, weight the box with stones and watch it sink and disappear through the clear water, so the sky wouldn’t rain and ruin the raisins.

But the book was Aaron’s now, and the Ghost Shirt sewn with the colored hawk like a butterfly. Once it had belonged to Fall Moon, Ford’s first wife who knew the Ghost Dance—

“The whole Valley’s a lake,” Aaron said. “A sea. At least it was at one time.”

Like Atlantis in reverse, I thought or remembered. “Edgar Cayce believed in Atlantis—” I’d told somebody, in a dream, maybe the woman who held the end of the string .…

“You can lose something anywhere,” Aaron said. “Or find it.”

“I’ve lost the touch,” I said, looking away, at Kate’s horse.

Now I wanted to ride away, like Silva’s hired man. He’d tried to throw on the saddle blanket and Woody’s rifle spooked Sox.

“Depends what you’re looking for. Gold. Oil. Water. Something else.”

“You were looking for oil.”

Remember Ride Away? You and she won the Raisin Day Race, before the Baptists late for church ran her down, came back at night with the bloody front end and tried to pay 20 dollars?

“I found oil,” Aaron said, “on the Island. Enough to float a battleship. You’re in, of course, if you want to be. Anyway, you’re in my will. You know that. There’s something else.”

“What else?” I couldn’t take much more.

“Delmus,” Aaron asked, “what’s that?”

“What’s what?”

With the divining rod Aaron was pointing at the horse.

“I think it’s a horse,” I said. “I’m not sure anymore.”

“Or a donkey?”

“Horse,” I said.

“Good. Now remember the burros, with the black crosses on their backs?”

“Jerusalem donkey, jack and jenny.” JJJ.

“When did Jesus ride a donkey?”

“On Palm Sunday.”

“Who told the disciples to meet at the house with the white horse?” Aaron asked.

“Jesus did.”

“What is Al-Buraq?”

“A white animal with wings.”

“How big?”

“Smaller than a mule, bigger than a donkey.”

“How far can it stride?”

“As far as its eye can see.”

“Who rode it to heaven and back?”

“Muhammad.”

“What happened at the Dome of the Rock?”

“The angel Gabriel took Mohammed to heaven.”

“What will the Mahdi, the 12th Caliph, ride when he returns at the end of the world?”

“The Moslems keep a black stallion in a stable.”

“Is it ready?”

“It’s saddled night and day.”

“Who is the Mahdi, Delmus?”

“Jesus.”

“You’ve done your homework,” Aaron said. “And a horse and donkey are brothers, aren’t they?”

“I guess so.”

“You know the poem about the donkey?”

“No.”

“‘The Donkey,’” Aaron began, he cleared his throat and lifted his chin.

It was a strange world. Aaron had just given a history lesson, now he was going to recite a poem in the middle of the orchard:

“‘When fishes flew and forests walked

And figs grew upon thorn,

Some moment when the moon was blood

Then surely I was born.’”

But why not? Aaron had a voice strong and sure as Raymond’s was when Raymond sang—

“‘With monstrous head and sickening cry

And ears like errant wings,

The Devil’s walking parody

Of all four-footed things.’”

Aaron had been a lay preacher now and then, but no steady church would tolerate his gospel—

“‘The tattered outlaw of the Earth,

Of ancient crooked will;

Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb.

I keep my secret still.’”

            Aaron had initiated me into the Masons. “If a tree falls,” Aaron used to say, “the other trees hear it. So do the stones in the Petrified Forest.”

Lots of times Aaron addressed Larry’s classes at Fresno State—about pioneer days, geology, Indians, even religion and his perpetual motion machine—

“‘Fools! For I also had my hour;

One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

And palms before my feet.’”

I remembered now, I knew “The Donkey,” it was one of my favorites.

“What’s it mean?”

Now Aaron was waiting.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Think hard,” Aaron said.

“My memory’s no good anymore.” It was true, I had a bad headache. The sun made me squint.

If I’d dropped the bottle by the elm, how’d I get drunk and wake up in the vineyard Sunday morning?

“There’s only one thing to remember.”

“Who wrote it?” I asked. “A Mason?”

“Catholic,” Aaron said. “Chesterton. A drinker. He wrote ‘The Man Who Was Thursday.’ About Sunday, which is all the days—”

“I don’t think I’ve read it.”

“Remember that book Jones had, with the drawings the drunken Roman soldiers carved on the wall of the guardroom? After the Crucifixion? After they threw dice for Christ’s purple robe?”

“I’m with the Master now,” I thought suddenly, watching Aaron’s bright eyes. “He washes his read hair in the blue bowl.”

            Who said that? Edgar Cayce, the Sleeping Prophet, in the book, “There Is A River”—

“It was a man, on a cross, with the head of a donkey.”

“Awful,” I said, “that’s awful.”

“Yes, but you can learn from fools, even criminals.”

I could see Baylor’s head, on the body of a bull.

“And from good things,” Aaron said. “The mountain dogwood, four white petals, each one with a notch. The cross on the sand dollar. It’s the same one on the burro’s back. The monarch’s chrysalis on a blue gum leaf, hanging upside down in a ‘J’ above the milkweed pods.”

“Have you ever read about butterflies?” asked the woman who lowered the bottle on the shining cord. “Ever seen the king of them all?”

“All of nature was crucified?”

“It’s all a broken mirror of one thing,” Aaron answered, holding the branch. “The red bud, Judas Tree, first to flower in the spring? The blooming limb, where Iscariot hung? Christ’s profile in the line of the continents, the continental plates? On and on, all pieces of one puzzle.”

“‘Out of many, one,’” I answered.

“That’s right! And not just once! Many times!”

“You found it,” I said, watching Aaron’s excited face.

The Knight’s Grail, the Brimming Cup. The Philosopher’s Stone and Key. Aaron’s Rod. Oil, the formula to make lead into gold­, Murrietta’s gold turned to diamonds disguised as rhinestones in a dress—

“You can’t find it alone,” Aaron said, blinking his eyes as if he woke from a dream. “Jones couldn’t find it. But I have a hunch. I can feel it, straight as a line, deep.”

Aaron cocked one eye, aiming down his pointing arm past my shoulder.

“It’s a long vein, sleeping, untapped—”

“What is it?”

Aaron turned, dropping his hand.

“What are you looking for?”

In the gusting breeze, Aaron’s thin hair blew back, white, like a prophet’s in a storm.

In late August of ’84 you stood west of Lemas with Aaron Winters who kept the book and star and with his peach-fork found the lake of oil on the Island, between the Kings River’s blue channels—

My hand is a stone in a river. Now the river’s in you .…

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

“But you’ve been looking.”

“I’ve got a map,” I admitted, glancing at Aaron. “A kind of map. Found it in a magazine.”

“Oil?”

“No— Something else.”

“What?”

“I’m not sure.”

I’d laid it out on the bench in the barn, drunk, under the orange bug light, the night the Olympics opened in L.A. and Pearl Bailey led the crowd in “When the Saints Come Marching In.”

“Masons?” Aaron said.

“Mason Valley,” I answered.

“Walker Lake?”

“Jack Wilson.”

“Wovoka?”

“Ghost Dance. Mormon Trail.”

“San Bernadino?”

“Valley of Smoke,” I said, watching Aaron’s face.

“Then where?” Aaron asked quickly.

I hesitated

“Tell me if you know!”

“Ciudad de Nuestra Señora, Reina de Los Angeles— The end of the trail.”

“City of Our Lady,” Aaron said. “Queen of the Angels.”

“Or Fresno. Lemas,” I said. “New Lund.”

Aaron wiped at his eye.

“I always told your dad, I said, ‘Walt, it’s right here where we stand. I can feel it, right under my boot, like a heartbeat, like a fountain ready to spout up!’”

I bent down, scooping a handful of dirt. I stood, letting the grains sift like gold dust through my fingers onto my father’s boots.

“It’s the Garden,” Aaron said, one hand gripping the limb of the peach tree. “Right here. Right here where we stand!”

“It’s everywhere,” I said, opening my hand and dropping the white ash soil. “And nowhere. When you reach out it turns to dust.”

I’d forgotten to wear my cap. Where was it? The sun was burning, straight up. High noon.

“No,” Aaron said. “Not dust.”

“Why not? Everyone’s going broke, Reagan’s getting ready to blow up the world and they’ve got his picture in every store in town. Everybody’s asleep. We’re way east of Eden, past Goshen in the Land of Nod.”

“It’s the weather,” Aaron said, staring up through the leaves. “Clouds and wind. Salt breeze. Sea.”

“It’s going to rain,” I said. “Three years in a row.” No weather song of Wovoka’s, the Ghost Dancer, would stop the clouds soaking the drying grapes laid out down the vine rows.

“A rain that’s rain and isn’t, a rain like light that’s light but more than light. I’ve had dreams of a woman. A beautiful woman. She speaks to me, tells me things. Things if I told you, you’d think I was crazy.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” I said. “Last night I dreamed a woman lowered me a bottle of Wild Turkey on a string.”

Or was it a woman with a veil? Mystic smile .… “Mona Lisa men have named you—”
Who played the record and lifted the sparkling dress?

“I’ve seen them,” Aaron went on, not hearing. “Every one of them.”

“Seen who?”

“All of them.”

“All of who?”

“Everybody— Jones. Your dad. Raymond. Endicott. Ford. They’re here, all around, like candles burning.”

“Ghosts,” I said, looking at Aaron. “They’re all ghosts.”

“No,” Aaron said. “Not ghosts.”

He slipped the forked rod over the limb and put out both hands, palms up. Now he flung them in the air.

“Like a phoenix, a fire rushing from the ashes. I’ve seen your friend Brawley.”

“Bob was blown to pieces. Over Japan. Forty-five years ago.”

Aaron bent toward me. “In Necis Renascor Integer,” he said softly. “INRI.”

“‘Reborn, intact and pure—’”

“All of them. Every one. Your mother too. That’s why I had to talk to you.” He waved his arm sideways. “They’re all here, waiting.”

“For what?”

“For the right time.”

“Delmus? Where’s the Big D?”

I heard the men calling from the barnyard.

Where was Delmus? The wind blew, moving the clustered peach leaves like fingers.

“I don’t know what to say—”

“What did Chesterton say?” Aaron asked.

“I don’t know.”

“‘The Tavern doesn’t lead to the open road. The open road leads to the Tavern.’”

Aaron slipped the divining rod back into his shirt and fumbled with a button. “Come on,” he said, “they’ll be out here in a minute.”

I untied Kate’s horse, then hesitated. I turned, looking into Aaron’s eyes.

“Roma,” I said.

“Amor,” Aaron answered.

We stood for a moment, looking at one another, and through one another, at the long ranks of doubles, of men and women lined up behind each of us for a thousand years.

Now the orchard seemed crowded, there were whispers among the trees, the crackle of silent, invisible fires, as if an army were encamped.

“Everybody is alive again, I don’t know when they will be here, maybe this fall or in the spring, by the sprouting tree when the green grass is knee high,” Wovoka said when he woke from the trance, when the white eagle brought him back from heaven to Walker Lake.

“Ready?”

Aaron touched me on the shoulder and we started back to the barnyard, through the young orchard and deep ground, me leading the horse, Aaron walking slowly behind me, his arm leaning on the horse’s back, the three of us 10,000 miles from Jerusalem.

“Delmus! Where you been?”

“Taking a breather.”

The barnyard was strewn with trash, beer cans and paper plates, watermelon rinds, empty .22 shells. The derrick for the hog stood to the right of the barn door, where Silva’s hired man waited, hands at his sides.

Aaron held the horse while I went into the barn, past the men in chairs drinking, a circle playing poker around the bale of hay. I could hear the forklift’s motor, Briggs unloading the raisin bins south of the barn.

“You going to shoot that hog?” Will asked.

“Just as soon as I saddle this horse,” I said.

“Going somewhere?” said Baylor, looking up from his cards.

“No,” I said.

I took the saddle from its peg, the bridle and Indian blanket, stepped back into the light.

The hired man positioned the striped blanket and I threw on the saddle, lifted the stirrup, tied the cinch. Aaron adjusted the bridle.

“Okay,” I said, dropping the stirrup. “Amigo.”

“Gracias, Señor.”

“Por nada.”

Silva’s man swung up smoothly into the saddle. He touched the horse’s flanks lightly with his heels and he was off, trotting down a vine row.

He held himself a little like Celestino Rodriguez, the tail gunner on the Beau Geste. Head back, neck straight, chin square and level.

“Cada cabeza es un mundo,” Celestino used to say. “Every head is a world.”

“He going to pick grapes from a horse?” Baylor asked.

Someone laughed, drunkenly. I ignored Baylor.

“Who’s going to help me?” I asked.

“Right here,” said Bill Woody, striding forward. “I got the gun.”

“Here.” Earl could hardly stand. “Have a drink.”

“Okay—” I turned, put a hand on Aaron’s shoulder. “For the road.”

“For the tavern,” Aaron said, nodding seriously.

I took a drink, a small one, and handed the bottle back to Earl.

“Let’s go.”

With the other men behind me, the sitters up from their chairs, we marched around the barn to the poor pig’s pen—past the A-frames and the pulley and ropes, the swinging hook—

and I remembered the yellow crescent moon above the roof and Kyla’s ageless attractive mother at the upstairs window—

“Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa?” sang Nat King Cole. “Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?”

“Ever seen the king of them all?” she asked as I sat beneath the elm.

Smiling, in blue velvet spangled with Murrietta’s diamonds—“I found the gold with a crystal ball,” she’d said, the swinging bottle of Wild Turkey safely lowered on the string—Dolly Mable dipped her head and lifted the shining dress to reveal the striped span of the butterfly’s amazing seven-colored wings—

“Delmus? You all right?”

It was Aaron’s voice. He was leaning over me as I sat against the barn wall. The men were behind him, looking down at me with 20 worried faces.

“Yes, Aaron,” I said. “I’m okay.”

“What happened to you?”

“I remembered something.”

“What did you remember?”

The circle of drunk faces leaned closer to hear, waiting.

“That I was happy—”

That was it. It was like déjà vu and now my friends were laughing in agreement as Bill Woody lifted his rifle and fired five times in the air and the flock of purple pigeons flew from the loft.

Nels Hanson has worked as a farmer, teacher, and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and his stories have appeared in Antioch Review, Texas Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, Montreal Review, and other journals. He lives with his wife, Vicki, on the Central Coast of California.

I let the sun warm my hands
as I wait for my soup and bread.
This morning I found a nest
of your hair in the upstairs drain.

I scooped it out with a wad
of tissue and flushed it down
the toilet. It’s still your bathroom,
your curlers unmoved, my shaver

in the bath near the kitchen. How long
will you keep up with this haunting?
You’re the one I wish I could tell,
even if it would break your heart,

that my waitress has eyes so icy
blue they seem silver. Looking
into them is to watch the dawn
break through a forest in winter.

Joshua Michael Stewart has had poems published in Massachusetts Review, Euphony, Rattle, Cold Mountain Review, William and Mary Review, Pedestal Magazine, Evansville Review and Blueline. Pudding House Publications published his chapbook Vintage Gray in 2007. Finishing Line Press will publish his next chapbook Sink Your Teeth into the Light in 2012 He lives in Ware, Massachusetts. Visit him at www.joshuamichaelstewart.yolasite.com

“You know I like to go fishing,” Ten said, “at least once a week.  I do not like to work indoors.  I won’t make much money.”

“Well, but I like to have nice things.”

“And I understand that, Joley, and you’ll have as good as I can provide you with, but you’ll also just have to be reasonable.”

Joley sipped her beer.  The night felt oily, cold and good, on her bare arms.

“Where’ll we live?”

Ten dug a thumbnail into the pop tab of a Busch can.  The white spray flew up at Joley.  She receded, blinking in outrage her eyelashes now dewed with shattered foam; Ten snickered.

“You turd!”

“What’s wrong with my place, the one I got now?” Ten asked.

Joley bugged her eyes and slumped accusingly.

“Ten,” she said.  “It’s a dirty, single-wide trailerhouse.  It’s falling apart.  There’s a big hole right in the middle of the living room floor.  Nuh–uh.”

Ten shrugged.  “All right.  We’ll move.”

“Okay, when?”

“As soon’s you get moved in with me, we’ll move.”

“Why do we have to wait until then to move?  That’s moving twice.”

“Because,” Ten said.  “Married people move together.”

The real truth was that in his heart, and for years, Ten had imagined the entry into his marriage house as a romantic thing.  Drinking beer all day, hauling boxes with his shirt off.  Cussing and farting around, laughing with his friends, who’d help him out.  Taking breaks to eat delivery pizza—standing up, no napkins—while his pretty wife stayed in the house, unloading and organizing the marital estate.  She’d wear a sundress, order the pizza, go on the beer runs–and when they were done for the day, she’d sit on his lap on a chair in the lawn and listen to his buddies’ stories and laugh at his jokes, at his own stories.  Laugh when he and his friends started play-wrestling late at night, when the beer got ahold of them.  Then she’d drag him into the house by the buckle of his belt while the boys hollered and catcalled from the circle of lawn chairs.  Tickling his belly with her fingers, kissing him, loving him, holding him, sending fire through his brains–and she’d fall asleep and he’d go back outside to continue drinking beer, and the boys would roll their eyes and make their bawdy comments, and she’d be waiting in bed for him when he returned at dawn.  That’s how he’d always seen it.

“But I’ll have to move once,” Joley said, “then move again.”

“Hon, we can’t get married and you still be living with your parents.  Not even for a little while.”

“Why not?”

“Dammit Joley, there’s just a way things are.”

***

Joley’s mother, Larissa, encouraged the marriage.

“He’s just so good-lookin’,” she said.

“He is.”

“You two’d have such good-lookin’ babies.”

“Mama!  Do you like Ten, Daddy?”

“Sure I do,” her father said.  He was reading a Playboy magazine at the kitchen table.  He was happy at the prospect of getting Joley out of his house:  the grocery bill, the phone bill, the gas bill, her car payments, insurance, her clothes …

***

Ten’s full name was Brandon Mustang Bass.  He was the tenth child of Penelope Ruth Bass and Chason Bass, Jr.

The bobber hit the pond and made a thwock sound like a tennis ball.

“Good lay,” Jason said.

“That’s what they tell me,” Ten said.

They sat in Jason’s dad’s motorboat on swivelchairs that went the full three-sixty, on seat-cushions that wheezed and dripped old water.  The pond’s surface was peaceful and reflected the sun and the image of the boat.  They drank beer for three hours without saying hardly a word, without catching a fish, each silently withdrawing his line from the water and replacing the dead or mangled or escaped minnows out of the tin bucket sitting between them at their feet.

Beery, contemplative, half-jubilant from a day of rest and perfected desire, Jason opened the talks.

“You gonna marry Joley Scudder?”

There came a long pause while Ten cleared out his throat.

“Yeah I believe I will.”

“You love her?”

“Yep I think I do.”

“Well.  I see that.”

“Nn.”

Jason now paused.  He watched the pond face shudder.

“She’s got her that sweet little rear-end now.”

“Fabulous.”

The night fell and they returned to the shore and became like wild hogs:  snorting, barking, pounding the earth in search of what fueled them.

***

There was a rickety church in Red Oak, Oklahoma where Joley’s mother had learned the manners of Christian living.  The crowd who gathered inside its wood-paneled walls to serve as witnesses to the Scudder-Bass Wedding were, by and large, sunburnt, for they were a youthful crowd, and there had been a joint bachelor-bachelorette party held on the beach at Sardis Lake twenty-four hours earlier.  They did things to each other at that party you’d never believe.  There were seventeen girls there, and four of them got pregnant.  That party had a pregnancy rate.

So everyone was sunburnt and hanged over—all with nagging senses of shame at being in church after what they’d done the day before—and the fabric of rented tuxedos and rented dresses scratched at the burned and waterless flesh of the young.  The wedding went by in a shout.  The principals blew all the big lines.

When it was done, the kids stripped out into play clothes, gobbled up barbecue brisket and wedding cake, got drunk, and resumed the fornicative spirit.

***

Joley woke the next morning in a hotel near Fort Smith, Arkansas, her new husband naked beside her under the stiff hotel sheets.  She explored his bones and cartilage until he waked up.  They showered together, dressed, and went out to the mall.  He bought her a bottle of perfume and a pair of sandals, a cassette tape of Garth Brooks’s Ropin’ the Wind, a Mexican food lunch, two dresses, and a ticket to see A League of their Own.  She cried and cried against his shoulder during the last fifteen minutes of the show.

***

Ten Bass had four hundred dollars hidden in the only book he owned, a copy of The Book of Mormon he’d ordered free from the LDS church when he was sixteen, understanding it to be a kind of western starring Jesus Christ and featuring Indians.

Joley Bass had no idea this was the extent of her new marital estate.  She carried into Ten’s decrepit trailerhouse a set of pink luggage filled up with dresses, panties, trinkets, County Fair ribbons, stuffed animals, a denim-jacketed Bible, all of her makeup, and one large magnification mirror.  She never even unpacked all the way.  They were there together four months when she ran out one night, after a fight over how to slice onions.

“What the fuckin’ hell does it matter?”

“You’re stupid as shit, just stupid as shit.”

“You’re a dumb bitch.  God!”

“Why wouldn’t you do it that way?”

“Because it DOESN’T MATTER!”

“YES IT DOES!”

“NO IT DOESN’T!”

“YES IT DOES!”

Ten had severed the ends, peeled the skin, and set the onion on the flat side for bisection.

“That’s against the grain,” Joley had pointed out

“Huh?”

“You don’t need to cut it against the grain like that.  You need to cut it with the grain.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Yes it does.”

“Nah.”

“Yes, it does.”

“It really doesn’t.”

And so on.  And so forth.

***

Joley was bawling when she slammed the trailer door and bawled as she walked the half-mile through town, from the bare lot of scrub grasses where Ten kept his trailer, to the home shared by her high school friend Margie Diller and Margie’s husband, Phil.

Phil stirred a pot of pinto beans while Margie sat on the couch, holding Joley around the shoulders.

“I just want to go out tonight and have fun and FORGET him,” Joley said.

Margie sneaked a look back at Phil.

“It’s all right with me,” Phil said.  He just wanted to eat his beans and watch his TV in peace for once.

They got ready using Margie’s makeup and left the house at eight-thirty in a wake of hairspray fumes.  They bought a bottle of Everclear from the liquor store and two extra-large fountain drink Dr. Peppers from the convenience store.  They drove back and forth through town.  They rolled the windows down and sang along with the radio.

***

Casey Green and Shane Lawson were two young men who’d grown up in Talihina but had left for the oil fields.  They were just home that night to get laundry done and visit their folks.  They were sitting in the grocery store parking lot with a pint of rye whisky on shares when they noticed Phil and Margie’s car.  They saw the women through the rolled-down window, singing their lungs out and bouncing in the seats.

“Casey?”

“Yup.”

Casey started up the motor and handed over the whisky.

***

They trailed the girls to the north end of town.  Margie hooked Phil’s car around the marquee-stand of the Circle H Restaurant.  They were idling there when Shane and Casey pulled up beside them.

“Hey!” Casey yelled out, elbow on the door.

Shane leaned over from the shotgun seat, to let the girls appreciate their numbers.

***

Ten heated up a can of black beans and a can of Ranch Style pinto beans and ate them using slices of white onion like spooning chips.  He didn’t know where Joley was, and he didn’t give three shits on a slaughterhouse floor.  He listened to baseball on the radio and went to bed.

***

Joley stank of curdled hairspray, liquor, beer, sweat, smoke, dirt (from a fall on her ass in a watershed pasture), dry, mingled venereal fluids and fading perfume; her breath was chunky from all of the above, and from having not brushed her teeth after three hours of sleep in the cab of Casey’s pickup truck, and then from having eaten a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos for breakfast.  She had chewed up all her lipstick.  She’d wrinkled her clothes.  She could not have answered with definitiveness which of the two men had put her arms and legs akimbo with hasty leverage in the pickup truck’s front seat.  Margie dropped her at the curb near Ten’s trailerhouse and pulled away, off to give her own dark accountings.

Joley limped up the rusty stairs (she’d twisted her ankle somehow) and went inside.

The living room air was stale, the morning sun gray and broken.  She stood there a second, letting all the lights adjust.

Suddenly, she heard a brief whistle and a loud thunk.  She flinched and saw an arrow in the wall behind her.  It thrummed at the fletching, like a shook pencil.

Ten sat on a footstool in the corner—his face pale, his body shivering.  He was holding a crossbow.

“Get right the fuck out of here,” he said.

“Ten—”

He stood and reached for the pile of arrows at his feet.

“Get out,” he said.  His voice lifted and rolled, mad and grave.

“Ten!”

He squatted and fumbled for an arrow and Joley was out the door, screaming like an ambulance.

***

Ten paid a three hundred dollar fine and moved to Ada, Oklahoma.  He lived there for the next four years, working construction.  Joley went back to her parents, and her father watched his monthly overhead rise like a mercury thermometer on a hot afternoon.

***

There was almost no sun left in the day, just a little orange leafing out by the horizon, reflected in the water like night’s afterthought, a burn of color to set off the vast and glasslike darkness of the lake.

Ten and Jason sat in the boat.  They kicked a beer can every time they moved their feet, they were that drunk.

“Herrnnh!” Ten said, before a loud and difficult fart plopped out his backside.

“I second that ee-motion,” Jason said, and copied Ten.

The grass on the bank sizzled with the mating calls, conversation, gossip and war cries of the wetland insects.  The air was so clean, so cool and aromatic, it touched their nostrils and lips like fingers made of camphor.  Fireflies were starting up.  The balding sky laid bare a crown of stars, hitched together by purple space.

“You ever feel,” Ten asked, “like there’s jus’ somethin’ wrong with bein’ a man these days?”

“If you’re gonna ask me,” Jason said, “to do that thing, the … the what’s it called … that … choppin’ off people’s dicks thing … what’s it called?”

“Castration.”

“If you’re gonna ask me to castrate you, so you can live out your lifelong dream of bein’ a woman, with a vagina and all—well then, you know I’d do it for you, man.  I’d do anything for you.”

Jason stretched out his leg and reached for his pocketknife.

“Give me a second here.”

Brian Ted Jones was born in 1984 and raised in Oklahoma. He is a graduate of St. John's College. He lives with his wife, Jenne, and their sons, Oscar and GuyJack.

Decades & dues before Hank III
cometh with his thermo-chemical
cow punk, Jason & the Scorchers
rolled onto Rock City like a barrel
keg cooler brandishing neon notes
to Nashville’s conservative music
establishment stomping Punk’s
Liberty Bell hell into the plastered
beer torn psyche’s of unfuturistic
fans who would transform the
audience of battleground cowboys
into plum tart gladiators and the
rest of the good timin’ globe going
forward with early colony cocktails
and the best new nuclear chemistry
a hot cocktail waitress could carry

Off The Farm

The computer
became the global
moneychanger’s
milking stool, but
grandpa still
transported his
customer’s early
colony cocktails
down moss
mountain in a
'47 Studebaker
pickup on a
stretch of dark–
primitive dirt,
a fireplace tool,
and a .45 riding
bitch and shotgun

David S. Pointer currently lives in Murfreesboro, TN. He has a chapbook forthcoming from Writing Knights Press entitled MPs, Snipers and Crime. Growing up, David was the son of a piano-playing bank robber who died when David was 3 years old. David later served in the Marine military police.