When My Father Was a Son

When my

father was a

son, he wrote letters to

my children. I have read

those letters, they

are drawn

and discarded

in every word he speaks.

All conversation is correspondence.

If I

could give you some

thing, I would bury and

seal my father’s letter to you

from me.

The Flapping Thing

It was a flapping thing.

Under the bright, full moon, he’d not switched on the outdoor light nor had he lit lamp or candle and somehow from the shadows, the thing flapped across the wooden, upper-story deck.

It was a black thing. It was a black, round thing shot through with glittering flashes of metallic yellow. It was a round thing, no more than three inches thick in its middle and thinned considerably out to the edges of its round body, a foot wide, two feet wide. Maybe less. Its rectangular body. Its ovoid body. It seemed to be changing as it flapped itself across the boards.

‘What is that?’ David thought, and he rose from his deck chair to get closer though he didn't light a lamp or use the flashlight.

“What is that?” David asked aloud though no one inside, not Janet in the kitchen finishing the dishes, not Andy in his room “on his computer,” not Sarah gone so far, it seemed, she had become past tense even when present.

“What is that?” he again asked again knowing no one would hear him.

David reached down and with his right forefinger, touched its glittering blackness, its sandpapery, shark-skinned, slimy, slick, dry, and scaly wing and the pain was instantaneous and of a kind he could only describe as “exquisite,” a precise and high-pitched pain that pierced him completely from that small contact with his fingertip to the farthest limits of his being, each nerve in his body whining the same razor needled song, each synapse in his brain snapping down with a clearly audible and synchronized click. As he snatched his fingertip away from the flapping black thing’s horrible skin, David knew he’d been poisoned, that the rot and suppuration of first his finger, then his hand, then his arm, then his heart and his head would not kill him, but it would, instead, change him and he sat back in his deck chair.

He reached for his glass with his left hand and took a small swallow of bourbon and melted ice water. He felt the infection, the invasion, the transformation of his physical self moving methodically through the flesh of his right arm. He felt the poisonous thoughts begin to well up inside his envenomed brain.

David leaned his head back and looked at the sky, at the night sky, at the few stars that penetrated the thick layer of suburban light pollution, and he wondered at the sudden clarity with which he could perceive the anti-constellations formed not from the stars or planets themselves, the few that he could see, but from the emptiness between them.

The black flapping thing paused and became just a black thing. If it had eyes, it, too, may have been looking at the sky.

‘Maybe,” David thought, ‘it sees with something different than eyes.’

He could clearly see the shapes in the sky, wondered how he’d never seen them before, the negative space between the heavenly bodies patterned and embodied. The Leech, The Nailed Pig, The Hungry Man, The Flayed Swan, The Wound—all new constellations seemed to step forward from the background of the sky, from behind the stars and planets scattered there, to become a new kind of zodiac, one that David could clearly understand and read.

It didn’t look good.

The black thing became like a starfish or an anemone or a chrysanthemum and it stood itself up on the points of pseudopodia, but the exact number of legs is extended was unclear. It was better not to look at it directly, David decided, but instead to watch it through his peripheral vision where it seemed to gel something with into a more understandable image. It legs, its pseudopodia, its fingers, whatever they were, pushed the black thing’s thicker middle up and up until it stood as high as David sitting down.

“What is that thing?” he asked again just as the first wave of corruption hit his chest, strangled his heart, pushed the air from his lungs, and possessed him. David’s mind folded into itself many times as his body ratcheted into a new form until what was left was not really David at all anymore in any conventional sense. Whatever it was whatever David had become and extended and at least one and probably no more that six glittering black phalanges to first envelope and then bring to David’s glittering black pseudo-mouth the last swallow of bourbon and water.

The other black flapping stretching thing began to sing and David instantly understood the meaning of that song, could feel the click as its meaning fell into new shape of his new brain and he wondered what and for how long Janet and Andy and Sarah would think as events unfolded, as his pseudo-voice began to harmonize with the other black thing, with the new formations in the sky, with his black glittering future.

My Christmas Monkey

“Do you remember Boys' Life?” he asked Chris.

"The movie with DiCaprio and Dinero?”

“No,” he answered. “That was This Boy’s Life and it was a play before it was a movie. I mean the magazine Boys’ Life, the official Boy Scout magazine.”

“Oh, sure…’The Tracey Twins’…’Mark Trail.’ Get it? Mark Trail? Mark trail?” Chris recalled.

“Right. Those were the comics in the middle of the magazine. Do you remember all the ads for mail-order animals in the back?”

“Mail-order what?”

“Mail-order animals. You could mail-order a raccoon or a box turtle or a half dozen fertilized quail eggs with an incubator like an E-Z-Bake oven.”

“You could?”

"Absolutely. Baby alligators, boa constrictors, chinchillas, skunks, armadillos, and flying squirrels. You could also order a ‘life-size nuclear submarine’ but the rumor was that it was cardboard, a cardboard diagram of a nuclear submarine. Anyway, one Christmas, my best friend in second grade, a kid named Marty Bruno, no lie, Marty Bruno, and he’d saved up for like 10 months to pay the $10 they charged to ship a squirrel monkey to any address in the world and Marty, my best friend, had them ship it to me.”

“They shipped you a monkey?”

“Yeah, a monkey in a toilet-paper tube, you know, the cardboard tube that’s left over when all the toilet paper is gone. Christmas Eve, last day of mail until after Christmas weekend or something and my mom thought it was a good idea to just slip the package under the tree with the rest of the presents and I would open it on Christmas morning with all the rest of my presents and I guess that monkey was just perfectly still and just waiting.”

“Waiting?”

“Waiting.”

“Waiting for what”

“Waiting for someone to open the tube.”

“Waiting for you to open the tube.”

“Waiting for me to open the tube. Christmas morning, hot chocolate and banana nut bread, some parade on the TV with the sound turned down and guns and robot astronauts and cowboys and binoculars and who can remember what else until I was pretty much down to it and my mom said, ‘Here, open this’ and handed me this cardboard toilet paper tube with a mailing label stuck around it and I took it and I opened it up and something like nine ounces of insane squirrel monkey from the Amazon River regions of South America just came boiling out the end of that tube screaming this insane monkey scream with these tiny white scary monkey teeth and it started jumping and clambering and climbing with its slick black little monkey hands and the whole time it was screaming but it was also pretty much emaciated and weak from postal starvation and dehydrated from lack of water and my mom was screaming and, let’s face it, I was screaming and my sister was screaming and I guess my dad was probably screaming at us to shut the goddamn hell up while this monkey was looking for a place to perch and have diarrhea and the dry-heaves and glare at us all, the screaming family, and blame us all for everything, for being caught in the Amazon River regions in South America and for being sold to an animal wholesaler and for being advertised in Boys' Life magazine and for Marty Bruno saving up his allowances and most of all for the international postal service in which it had passed nearly a week of close confinement inside what was later confirmed as an actual cardboard toilet paper tube.”

“Merry Fucking Exmas.”

“Merry Fucking Exmas for the monkey.”

“Merry Fucking Exmas for you.”

“Merry Fucking Exmas for everyone. My Christmas monkey story has a sad ending.”

“They usually do.”

“Yeah, I guess. Like, really, any Christmas monkey story, mine has a sad ending involving the father, a paper bag from the Piggly Wiggly, and a garden spade.”

“Ouch.”

“Merry Fucking Exmas monkey. Living in the Amazon jungle, spend two weeks in a cage at some reeking dockside trading outpost, spend another week in parcel post and travel thousands of miles for the Christmas surprise of being beaten to death with a shovel on the garage floor of a house in the mountains of Colorado where it’s fucking freezing.”

“It’s a fucking Hallmark special, man.”

“So, when school started up again and Marty Bruno asks me if I like my Christmas present, I just say, ‘Which one?’ and when he says, ‘You know, the monkey,’ I just say, ‘What monkey?’ and he’s pretty disappointed thinking I didn’t get the monkey he’d saved up for almost a whole year to buy me for Christmas.”

Riding the Number Three Bus on a Late Wednesday Afternoon

(Appearing in Ingo Village premier issue, March 2012; http://www.mscottcraig.com/p/ingo-village-review.html)

Xian, Shaanxi Province, The People’s Republic of China, late winter 1986

The kid is a drooler. It looks like he might have something like Downs Syndrome, maybe not so terribly severe but bad enough. He seems to be around 35 or 40 but that doesn’t mean much and the old man who sits next to him, who regularly holds a white cotton handkerchief to his son’s or maybe his grandson’s lips, that old man looks 60 or maybe 90. Again, hard to tell.

They get off the bus at the Bell Tower stop just inside the city’s ancient wall. As the rest of us pull away on the Number Three bus, a flash of white cotton marks their path across the crowded avenue toward what I hope is their home.\

We pass a pack of Rider Fellows, the guys with the hand tractors (like a rotor-tiller with wheels instead of earth shredding blades) attached to wagons piled with cabbages or bricks or Japanese cassette players, and their bandanas and goggles are little protection against the poisonous air of the Number Five Road, but the Rider Fellows are a tough crew. The black and yellow satin jackets they all seem to wear are silk-screened with a distorted photo of Dennis Hopper riding his chopper to flaming death by the side of a Florida road and the words “Rider Fellow” as a rocker beneath the image. I wanted one of those jackets very badly but could never find the hand-tractor driver store that sold them. It was a secret store just for hand-tractor drivers.

It’s easy to spot the country people, the farmers, the peasants, the migratory workers, on the Number Three bus; they stick their tissue paper bus tickets onto their lower lips so the conductress can easily see their destinations and tell them when to get off. They chew raw garlic to kill the city germs and the delicate bus tickets flutter with each slack-jawed grind on each clove they pop.

The ladies next to me are talking about me.

“This one looks crazy,” the one in the blue Mao suit says.

“Is it a boy or a girl? I can’t tell these foreigners apart. It has long hair and earrings, but it has no breasts and all foreign women have enormous breasts,” says the one in brown Mao suit.

“Is he a movie star?” Blue asks.

“I think so,” Brown answers. “He was the bad guy in the movie about explosions.”

“All foreign movies are about explosions,” Blue patiently reminds her companion.

“The one with explosions and kissing,” Brown clarifies.

“Oh, yes!” Blue exclaims. “My husband loves that movie. He watches it every chance he gets.”

“I hope he doesn’t watch it too much,” Blue says and the air of betrayal suddenly hangs in the air of the Number Three bus as it lumbers down the Number Five road.

“Well, not every chance,” Brown amends.

“I should hope not,” Blue answers.

Other passengers have begun to listen. Soon, they join the conversation.

“All those foreigners eat is meat and milk,” a man with long, lucky eyebrows adds.
“It’s true,” says another woman holding a bag of onions. “I saw one of those foreigners once before, and he was drinking milk and he was eating meat.”

“I saw a foreigner last year, and he yelled at my sister-in-law for spitting on his shoes,” Eyebrows contributed.

“He had too much hot blood,” Onions agreed. “Too much thick blood. All that meat makes them hot and the heat makes them angry all the time.”

I’m holding on to the steel pole and rocking as the bus driver hits every pothole on the Number Five Road. We pass a bicycle towing a locked screen box full of little Chinese toddlers. The cyclist is taking them someplace or he is taking them back home after taking them some place. I wonder where they had been and where they were going. I supposed it might be a school bus, a locked screen box school bus.

“What is that thing?” I ask Blue.

Her eyes widened wider then they have probably ever widened since the Great Helmsman died.

“What…What…What did you say?” she stuttered and, believe me, stuttering in Chinese is not easy.

“I was just wondering where that locked screen box of toddlers is going,” I answered.
Everyone became very quiet on the Number Three bus and all we all could hear was the bus engine groaning and the bus body creaking as its cheap steel bent and twisted with each bend and twist of the roadbed.

“Do that again,” Onions told me.

“Do what again?”

“That thing you just did.”

“What thing?”

“Speaking,” Onions explained. “It sounded like you spoke like a person, like a human being.”

“I did,” I told her.

“Do it again.”

“I just did. I’m doing it now.”

“That is so strange,” Eyebrows chimed in. “I wonder how he does it?”

“I just talk, that’s all,” I say.

“It must be like a parrot or a trained monkey,” Blue offered.

“That’s right,” I responded. “You may think of me as you would think of a parrot or a trained monkey. I am a badly trained monkey. Sometimes, I bite people.”

They fell silent again, each deciphering the meaning of my human words and whether I knew the meaning what I was saying or if some clever Chinese person taught me to say the words without me understanding what they meant.

“What. Is. Your. Name. ?” asked Brown.

“My. Name. Is. Keith. Richards.”

“Kee-if Risher Duhs?” she rolled the syllables through her rotten-toothed mouth.

“Exactly. You’ve said it exactly correct. You must by very good at speaking English.”

“English?” Brown exclaims. “I’ve learned to speak English?”

“I think so,” I answer. “We’re speaking English right now.”

“We are? It sounds just like Chinese!”

“Yes, it does,” I confirm. “English sounds exactly like Chinese.”

“Do we all speak English?” ventures Onions.

“Yes,” I answer. “Everyone on this bus speaks English like a professional English speaker. You could all be tour guides and make a lot of money speaking English to foreigners.”

The excitement was fevered in our section of the Number Three bus as it lumbered its way down the Number Five Road. My circle of passengers all contemplated a lucrative career change. I could practically see the TV sets and brand new electric fans and self-winding wristwatches swirling around their heads. I watched the screen box of toddlers disappear behind us in the cloud of bus dust and smoke.

“Perhaps you know where we could find this kind of work?” Blue asked me.

“I recommend you present yourself at the American consulate in the heart of the city and tell them very loudly how well you now speak English.”

I could see them turning such a plan over inside their heads. The advantages of a new kind of job with plenty of foreign capital streaming into their threadbare pockets weighed against the dangers of being seen visiting the local headquarters of an imperialist nation.

“Don’t be afraid,” I told them. “Be brave. Be strong. Show them that the Chinese people can master any task and surmount any problem. Do it for the Motherland.”

They remained silent.

“Remember that risk is its own reward,” I continued and they didn’t understand me at all.

The Number Three bus stopped with a jerk and we were all thrown forward to mash against each other awkwardly. I looked out the filthy window to see what had happened.
We had stopped on the bridge over the Wei He River that ran outside the city. A man hung from the high tension electrical cables strong from tall steel pylons and he emitted sparks. I still now as I did then wonder what it must have looked like to him incandescent, eyeballs ribboned with blue fire and below him spreading all horizons, the city slowly pulsing, hot and dusty for this late in the year, everyone says so.
Who knows, who will ever know what caused the fatal spark, the brilliant arc that clenched him tight, convulsed in one long spasm when everything inside him jammed up with electricity rampant and when he began to smolder. I wondered then as I still do now if he even noticed he was on fire. One of his feet fell slowly tumbling over and over to the riverbed with gray smoke trailing.

The river bridge was jammed both ways, typical post-revolutionary rush hour and a quarter of a million people stopped their bicycles and put one leg on the pavement so they could safely stare up goggle-eyed and open-mouthed at something different, at a man two hundred feet in the air who twitched and blackened and was never coming down.
The wrongness of this all was overwhelming, and still now as I did then I consider what it must have seemed to him there among the wires thrumming harsh, the river silver and thin along the wide sandy bottom, a half a million eyes toward him and just diesel smoke from idle bus and hand tractor engines like mist in a scroll painting one thousand years old, this same river and this same city, now hanging in a temple in the mountains far to the west.

“Look at the man,” I told my companions. “Look at the man on fire up in those wires.”

“It is a terrible thing,” Brown declared. “It is not a good thing to see.”

“But when will I ever see such a thing again?” I asked.

Blue reached her callused hand to touch my arm.

“Never,” she said. “Never in all your life.”

And she was quite right.

*

After an hour or so, traffic began to move across the bridge again. Below us on the sandy, exposed river bottom was the place where they executed criminals in the springtime and, in a few more weeks, one of my Chinese friends would come to my dormitory and tell me the story of that year’s killings.

“The people run forward to dip their money in the dead person’s blood,” Mr. Zhang told me.

“Why do they do that?” I asked him.

“Because it makes the money lucky,” he explained.

“That sounds very strange,” I said. “Why would a dead criminal’s blood make money lucky?”

Mr. Zhang paused to form his answer.

“It is a tradition,” he finally said.

“It sure doesn’t seem lucky for the criminal,” I replied.

“It is a tradition,” he repeated. “It is an old tradition from feudal times and it is very backward and ignorant.”

There was a lot I could have said to him on that subject, but I remained silent until something else occurred to me.

“Hey,” I said. “Have you ever seen an old guy on a bicycle pulling a big, locked screen box full of little Chinese kids down the Number Five Road?”

“Hmmm,” Mr. Zhang pondered. “Perhaps I have seen that man.”

“Why is he doing that?”

“Hmmm,” he again pondered. “I think maybe he is taking them to a place or bringing them back from a place.”

“That makes sense. I wonder what kind of place.”

“It must be a place for children.”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “That must be it.”

“Yes,” Mr. Zhang said. “That is probably the answer.”

“I once saw a man get electrocuted down there by the river.”

“What a terrible thing to see!” he exclaimed.

“Is it worse than watching people be shot?”

“Of course,” he explained. “What you saw was an awful accident.”

“And what you saw was planned out.”

“Yes. Accidents are much worse than things that are planned.”

And he was quite right.

Late Afternoon, Late July, Late 1960s

“There’s one of those old wives’ tales we had as kids, one of those things that kids tell each other on a hot day like this when they live way out on a farm and they say a dragonfly is the Devil’s Darning Needle and those dragonflies’ll zip by and stitch up your lips quick as that,” and she did a little juggling with her plastic tumbler of vodka tonic, her partially smoked 100 centimeter menthol cigarette, and her fingers so she could almost snap them when she said the work “that.”

She looked at her fingers as if they were in some way defective, unsnappable for a heretofore unsuspected reason. She sighed a gray cloud of minted smoke. And she made more of the same finger snapping though mostly silent gestures at the children tumbled in the flowers along the driveway in the backyard, children in their bathing suits of striped and dotted elastic fabric and playing with the garden hose, children of whom some were hers, and her fingers made a gesture to simulate the erratic and precise flight of a dragonfly as it flew to sew these children’s mouths quite shut.

“Zzzzzz,” she mimicked the sound of a flying sewing machine. “Good Lord, but do I wish that old wives’ tale was true? I sure do.”

And the ice in her drink didn’t so much rattle or ring but rather clunked it’s way around when it shifted within the thick walls of the faded orange plastic. The cigarette gave an extra puff as smoke as a small pocket of an accelerant added to the tobacco caught fire.

It was like she was just waiting for someone to get hurt. The backyard was a wasteland with a thousand yards of burned and glassy dunes between her and the children clustered around the water tap. She could barely see them across the blasted sands’ glare, shapes first bloated and then minuscule, body parts all out of context and seen merely as “foot” or “sternum” or “vertebrae.” She winced against the sun, took a long drink from her orange plastic tumbler, took a long drag of her long menthol cigarette, and sort of whisper-yelled across the desert toward her own and other people’s kids.

“Be. Careful,” she whisper-yelled. “It’s. All. Fun. Until. Some. One. Gets. Hurt.”

And, then, as she whisper-yelled it, some child did get hurt and headed toward the shape she made in that child’s eyes, and she quickly dropped her orange plastic tumbler and her 100 centimeter long menthol cigarette into the sink to splash and sizzle out and mix there in the bottom of the kitchen sink, and she quickly wiped her hands on her apron, already saying, “Oh, honey, what happened?” before she knew whose child it was, if it was one of her own or another mother’s, before she knew its gender, its name, its stumbling odor. The mewling sound it made could have been one of hers, but it was still too far out in the dunes struggling against the burned sand, its arms akimbo and its breath in short gasps, for her to properly identify it as anything other than a child hurt and shocked by being hurt and she would wait at the edge of this great basin of children’s play and children’s pain until the poor creature could work its way close enough to be comforted.

Painting the Golden Gate Bridge

I think of him every day,
my father,
and always on my drive to work,
and I think of his,
my father’s,
work painting the Golden Gate Bridge.

It was the only job he,
my father,
ever had;
27 years in the rigging with brush and buckets of
Golden Gate paint
(orange vermilion called "International Orange"),
enough Golden Gate paint
to float an aircraft carrier or
an armada of small sailboats
each with a happy family aboard,
enough Golden Gate paint
to raise a family and buy a house,
to send two kids to college
and another to art school,
enough Golden Gate paint
to start three families
who bought three houses
to fill with grandchildren
and a divorce or two
and dogs barking in the yards
and barbeque grills for Saturday cookouts
with the whole family.

He,
my father,
painted every day, all day,
the endless job of painting the Golden Gate Bridge;
from north to south on the bay side
and then from south to north on the ocean side
and always to begin again,
north to south,
every day in all weather and never finished,
a möbius strip of painting
that kept him,
my father,
smelling of acetone and benzene and Golden Gate paint
until the day the knot slipped,
until the day the link snapped,
and he,
my father,
toppled backward into the sea
accompanied by a smooth, gliding arc of Golden Gate paint,

And so, yes, today, like every other day,
I tie the knot and snap the link,
take my bucket of Golden Gate paint and my brush
and lower myself down to
pick up the job where he,
my father,
left it.

excerpted from the much longer “Suicide Girlfriends” (2010)

Sunday was the main day for families to get new cars or even just new used cars because, I guess, the dads were rested up enough after a long week at work and the kids were semi-etherized upon the table of tomorrow being Monday and all with classes and stuff. It was a strategic day, the day of the good deal with low money down, no money down, tug it, tow it, lug it, or push it in for fantastic deals Sunday, man, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. And whole families left in the old and came back in the new or almost new station wagons or sport coupes or god maybe mustangs or cougars and it was days of standing in a short line to enjoy the new car smell, rides around the block with somebody else's Dad at the wheel until he said, “Enough. Go home now.;” it was “power windows” this, and “automatic wiper fluid” that, it was “Danny’s new daddy’s new El Camino can lay a patch in third” until the thrill of a new car was long long left in the road and the old car just heaved itself up into the driveway at night, glad to have made it home, glad to have made it all, and just sat there with the brake lights first on and then off just ticking cooler in the carport.

Summer Gets Kind of Hot Around Here

‘Is this what it’s like to go crazy?’ he wonders. In the broadest of broad summer sunlight, the asphalt of the road soft beneath his feet, heat shimmers warp his dim visions. The street tar soft enough so his bare, burning feet sink within it. His fingers woven into the nylon mane of a Malibu Barbie with fully pose-able extremities, her soft and evenly tanned vinyl skin brushing his own pale legs, pale legs spattered with suppurating sores, and his painless descent into the smoldering macadam a metaphor for something only dimly visioned.

“This must be what it’s like to go crazy,” he stated with only Malibu Barbie to hear his whispers.

And he was right.

When the Sun Shines Even Though It’s Raining

It was Saturday morning about 9 o’clock and Pop came in off the porch.

"Any of you kids ever see the ocean?” he asked us. We were still in our pajamas watching some Saturday cartoons on the beat-up old black-and-white with the coat hanger for an antenna. Nobody said a word and, instead, watched the poorly drawn animals beat each other up on the screen.

“I said,” Pop continued, raising his voice to the “someone better answer me” level. “I said, ‘Any of you kids ever see the ocean?’”

“No, sir,” I answered, assuming my role as eldest and spokesman. “I don’t think any of us ever seen the ocean.”

The ocean was actually the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico was about 25 miles south or maybe west of us and where we were living. I’d heard about it and plenty of kids at school had seen it and told about it but I was pretty sure I’d never been there. I was pretty sure that none of us had been more than five miles from that house in our lives and I was 9 at the time and WalMart was, I estimated, about five miles away from our house because it had taken me about two hours to walk back from WalMart last year when Pop said I was acting like an asshole in auto parts and just left me there.

“Then we’re going to see the ocean today,” Pop announced. “Marie! Marie! Where the hell are you, Marie?”

We all just stared at the television knowing full well that Mom was still laid up in bed after the Friday night they’d had. I was trying to imagine what it would feel like to walk back and forth from WalMart five times. I figured it would take me ten or eleven hours and that was how far away the Gulf of Mexico was, ten or eleven hours of walking and it might as well have been Ding Dang Dong in China.

“Goddammit, Marie,” Pop muttered as he went off to look for her as if he had no idea where she was. “We got us a car to pack up.”

It took the family three hours to get ready to go to the ocean. We had to find all the things Pop said we’d need—towels, bug spray, shorts and t-shirts because none of us had a bathing suit, the old Polaroid to take photos to document our trip and paste into an album we didn’t have, peanut butter sandwiches for lunch in the sun, toys so we could play in the sugar sand Pop said the ocean was beached up with. Mom sat at the kitchen table drinking cup after cup of instant coffee and smoking Virginia Slim Menthol 100s one after the other. Pop was in charge of his refreshments and us kids did everything else under his direction. Connie started crying which wasn’t unusual since Connie cried at least once every day and that day she cried twice. The first time was for I don’t know what and the second time was when Pop smacked her face to get her to stop crying the first time.

“Get you a little shovel and a pail for digging in that sugar sand,” he said and off we went looking for such things.

“Can’t find no little shovels or a pail,” one of us told him.

“Goddammit,” he answered and ended up shoving a broken up garden spade and a plastic flowerpot into the trunk of the Ford. “Gotta do every little goddamn thing myself.”

“Get you one of those blow-up rings for swimming,” he told us.

Later, one of us came up and told him the bad news.

“Can’t find no blow-up ring thing for swimming.”

“Goddammit,” he answered and ended up shoving some black plastic garbage bags into the growing tangle of beach gear filling the Ford’s trunk. “Kids got no sense at all. Garbage bag’s like a big balloon anyhow. Blow one up and paddle around all day.”

It took us about three hours to fill up the trunk with all the stuff Pop said we should take to have fun at the ocean and then it took another half an hour to get Mom in travel shape. She got herself dressed, filled up one of those convenience store plastic mugs with about half-a-gallon of instant coffee, and shoved an extra pack of cigarettes into her purse. We all climbed into the Ford, kids in the back and grown-ups in the front with a mug of coffee between her legs and a can of beer between his, and Pop started driving us to the ocean.

By my reckoning, we’d gone about seven and a half miles or about a 90-minute walk when the left rear tire blew out. Everybody stayed real quiet and then Pop got out of the car and slammed the driver’s side door so hard the rearview mirror cracked. It was just one more thing.

About that time and even though the sun was still beating down sort of smoky hot and fierce, it started to rain a bit and the drops that hit him made little dark circles on his t-shirt. Pop just stood there in front of the Ford getting wet and saying “goddammit” over and over again.

“When I was a little girl, you know what we used to say when it would rain like this when the sun was still shining?” Mom finally said.

“No’m,” I answered. Connie was sniffling beside me.

“Us kids used to say that the devil was beating his wife.”

Laundry Day

It was July and all us kids were home or at least near home when the cleaning started. I was in the back yard playing Hot Wheels with Jeffery and the girls were in the attic snooping through the trunks up there from who ever knew how long ago.

Mom started in the kitchen with all the pots and pans and plates and glasses left over from the night before. We could hear her banging things around and opening and shutting the cabinet drawers.

Next, she started vacuuming and over the next hour or so we could hear her hoovering the carpets and the wood floors from one end of the house to another.

Then the washing machine started and, after a while, the dryer.

“Blam,” Jeffery said when he sent one of his Hot Wheels into mine.

Jeffery was only four so I let him smash into me all the time.

The washer and the dryer were basically going the whole time.

The girls wandered down from the attic; they all were dusty and smudged.

“What’s Mom doing?” they asked.

“Cleaning?” I asked them

“That’s what it looks like,” they answered. “Sort of.”

We could see Mom struggling to get the curtains off the rods in each of the rooms facing the backyard. One at a time, she pulled them down and the washer sounded strained and forced as we supposed she fed them into it.

“She’s cleaning everything,” I proposed.

“Everything,” the girls agreed.

After about three or four or five hours, after about the time it would take to wash every single curtain, sheet, and towel in the house, to dry each item, and to fold them all or hang them all back up, things inside the house quited down. In many ways, it appeared ominous.

The girls made themselves apparent without interfering with the Hot Wheels in the dirt.

“Blam,” Jeffery said. “Blam blam blam.”

Sooner than we expected, Mom was at the back door.

“All you kids get inside right now,” she told us.

We got inside.

“Everybody go to their rooms right now,” she told us.

We went to our rooms.

One by one, she came to each of us.

“Take off your clothes. All of them. Right now,” she said.

It must have been about four o’clock in the afternoon by that time. Our beds were bare, nothing but mattress ticking showing. We had curtains, but they were clean and ironed and smelled like bleach or something.

We shucked our clothes, t-shirts, pants, shorts, socks, underwear, everything, into the big hamper Mom held in her hands and sat on our naked beds naked. We could hear the washing machine and the dryer growling away from the other side of the house.

“For once,” we could hear Mom say, “For once in my life, everything in this house is going to be clean.”

It made a kind of sense and, since it was summer and we weren’t cold or anything, it seemed like a good time to do it.

We sat there in our rooms naked on our naked beds and waited until Mom came back and gave us clean clothes and told us to get dressed or something.

We sat there a long time.

It must have been about five thirty when we heard the front door open and Dad came home from work.

We could hear Mom meet him at the door.

“Take your clothes off,” she told him. “Take them off right now.”

We could hear Dad make some noises, sort of confused and blustering.

“Where are the kids?” he asked.

“Never mind the kids. Forget the kids. I’m serious,” Mom said. “Take all your clothes off right now.”

The noises Dad made changed tone.

“It’s not what you think,” one of the girls yelled from their room.

After Falling Down. Again.

A passerby,
that is to say a person passing by,
might have wondered at me
on my back
in the ditch
with my mouth open
in the rain,
but, since no one was,
that is to say passing by,
no one did,
that is to say wonder.

And, really,
it was not so much
a rain that fell
as it was a mist
that drifted
and my mouth
was not so much open
as it was ajar.

Still, I was not comfortable
alone
in a ditch
in the mist
on my back
with my mouth ajar,
but the company I longed for
was long fled.

She had not so much fled
as she did just turn her back upon me
and move in one of the infinite number of
directions that led her away from the place
where I lay
on my back
in a ditch
in the mist
with my mouth ajar,
but to say she left slowly
would be a lie.
That is to say not true.

There is comfort, though,
that is to say a kind of consolation,
in knowing that when I
finally close my mouth
and rise from this ditch
and wipe the moisture from my face
and choose one of the infinite number of
directions that lead away from this place,
the chances are quite good
that I shall find her.
That is to say,
she will find me.

A Funny Story From a Former Soviet State

A man was working late one dark winter night. His boss comes up and says, ‘I’m sorry, but we’re closing the factory. Don’t come back.’ and the boss gives him some tires (that’s what they made at the factory) instead of severance pay.

The man takes his two tires and leaves the factory. Sadly, outside, there is a power outage and the streets are dark. Recently, thieves have begun to steal all sorts of metal to sell for scrap and have removed all sorts of metal objects from the public landscape toward that end. Soon, the man stumbling through the darkness stumbles into an open manhole that, once upon a more prosperous time, had been covered by a thick metal disc now purloined and sold to a dealer in such dubious items. And the man breaks his leg. Attracted by his screams, local ruffians from the adjacent apartment block pour forth to kick the man in the face, break his nose, laugh at him, spit and piss on him, steal his hat, and roll his tires away down the ink-black street (careful to avoid similarly gaping holes in the street).

Eventually, a taxi comes and the driver takes the last few crumpled hvrina the man had secreted about his person, his belt, his shoes, and his watch. The driver then actually takes the man to a clinic and, driving back into the pitch-blackness with his headlights off, wishes him well and good luck.

There are many sick and wounded people at the hospital waiting to see the one doctor visible who seems content to merely sit and smoke cigarettes while picking at the crusts formed upon his white coat, ignoring the low moans from those waiting to see him. After several hours, a woman who seems like a nurse gives the man a pill, a cold cloth for washing, and tells him it might be best to return at another time.

The man begins to limp home. Finally, he arrives at his apartment block and, since the elevator has not worked since the mid-1990s, he crawls up the ten flights of stairs to his apartment.

Inside, he finds his best friend and his wife waiting for him.

“We love each other,” they tell him. “We have taken everything and we are leaving. We are going to live in the mountains and chop wood together.”

And they leave the man, broken-legged, broken-nosed, beaten, pissed upon, robbed, and drugged in an empty apartment. The man crawls into the kitchen, takes off his belt, climbs up onto the small refrigerator and loops his belt over a pipe in the ceiling. He slips his head into the loop and tries to jump off the refrigerator to hang himself. Instead, the pipe breaks, he tumbles to the floor, the refrigerator falls on top of him, breaks several of his ribs, and ice-cold water begins to pour from the broken pipe to soak him.

However, when the door of the refrigerator pops open during the fall, a half-full bottle of vodka that the wife had forgotten to take comes rolling across the filthy, rotten floor to within inches of his snot-filled, blood-crusted nose. The man lay there with his broken ribs, broken leg, broke, in an empty apartment covered in ice-cold water. He reaches for the bottle.

“Hey,” he says to no one in particular. “Today turned out to be a pretty good day.”

Some Q. and Some A.

Though not necessarily surprised at finding the toilet full of debris--copies of my books, the jewelry I had given her, and some of her feces--I was shocked at the vulgarity of the note that had been scotch-taped to its handle.

I am giving you everything you ever gave me back to you. I wish there was more. Enjoy it, it’s all you have left because I am gone forever and am never, ever, ever coming back. I wish there was more.

Love always Denise

XOXOXOXOXO

you stupid fucker

“XOXOXOXOXO” means “hugs & kisses” and I still don’t know what “Love always Denise” means. Was she trying to tell me that, despite the anger and the bitterness that prompted her to leave my books, her jewelry, and (presumably) her shit in such a sodden arrangement, she would still love me in absentia? Or, was I being instructed to continue (or, perhaps, to really start) to “love always Denise” (Love Denise Always)? And did “stupid fucker” mean that she didn’t like me or that I had sex like an idiot? Boy, that girl sure could be confusing. I had already started to look for her to ask for a clarification, an explanation, of those confusing portions of her note before I remembered that it all meant that she wasn’t around to answer my questions anymore.

When I heard the back door open and then close, I remembered, guiltily, that I had forgotten about Ariel, Denise’s 11-year-old daughter. I was then surprised that A) Denise had not taken Ariel with her when she left and B) that since Denise had not taken Ariel, that she had not somehow arranged for her daughter to be in the bathroom, if not actually in the toilet, with the rest of her message.

“Hello?” I heard Ariel’s thin, 11-year-old voice from the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door open and the corresponding rattle, of the jars of condiments stored in the racks. “Hel-lo-oh?”

“I’m in the bathroom,” I called back to her.

*

Several hours later, Ariel and I sat side by side on a couch in the living room (there were three, three couches; one living room) looking together at the place where a television had once been. Three couches, one living room, and zero televisions seemed somewhat imbalanced to me but we usually sat thusly on more normal evenings watching a television that was no longer there and I did not wish to upset Ariel any more than I thought she should be normally.

“We’ll have to go shopping,” Ariel said eventually.

‘Good,’ I thought.

“And get some new stuff,” she continued.

‘Excellent,’ I continued thinking. ‘She’s adjusting.’

“Like a TV,” Ariel attempted.

“We’ll see,” I replied, not wanting to step too far out of my normal character, not wanting to upset her anymore than I thought she should be.

“She does this all the time,” Ariel said.

“Who?” I answered. “Does what? When?"

I returned to the house with plastic grocery bags full of things that I had been certain Ariel would love. Though I knew that food could never replace her mother, I felt that the child should somehow be comforted, should know that someone cared enough for her to bring her delicious snacks.

As I began to unload boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinners, Cherry Cokes, Count Chocula breakfast cereal, Hostess Sno-Balls, beef jerky, Butterfinger candy bars, and Strawberry Quik, Ariel came into the kitchen.

“What is all this?” she asked me.

“It’s all for you!” I crowed. “It’s all your favorite things!”

She looked at me for a moment before she again spoke.

“How long have you known me?”

I did a quick count in my head. “Almost eleven months.”

“Have you ever seen any of this kind of stuff in this house before?”

“No, sweetie. That’s why I got it for you.”

She looked at me for a moment before she left the kitchen.

I was positive that it was not possible to return groceries for a refund and I didn’t want to try to explain how these had been accidental purchases anyway. I set the brightly colored boxes and packages in a long row outside the house along the edge of the sidewalk. By morning, every single item was gone.

*

On the way home from work that next evening, I realized that I was cashless and, quite rightly, assumed that Denise had taken the checkbook and its corresponding money when she left. I pulled into a convenience store, removed the water pistol from the glove box where I kept it, and went inside. I walked to the register and pointed the pistol at the clerk. Without a word, she opened her drawer and handed me 63 dollars. I refused the change she offered and she returned it to the drawer. She smiled as I left through the door marked with feet and inches. The water pistol is made of lime green plastic and has the words BIG SQUIRT embossed in gold along the barrel. I have “robbed” stores like this many times and have never had any trouble, have never seen these “robberies” mentioned in any newspaper, have never seen my description or height in feet and inches on the television show “Crimestoppers,” have never been approached by any member of any law enforcement agency, and stopped feeling regretful over 10 months ago.

*

When I arrived home, Ariel was sitting on the porch reading an old textbook. I had no idea what textbook it was and did not remember keeping any textbooks but there she was reading one. I gave her twenty dollars.

“Oh. Great,” she said. “Now my friends will love me.”

“What?” I asked her.

“Nothing,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” I told her on my way into the house.

I dialed a number I got from the business personals section of the classified ads of the newspaper in our town.

“Deja vu hotline,” a voice said but, before I could begin talking, it also said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ve had this conversation before.”

*

Ariel came in the door with a new hairstyle.

“Isn’t that a new hairstyle?” I asked her.

She looked at me a moment before she answered.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she said and she looked at me for a moment before she left me sitting on the couch. I could hear her pick up the telephone in the other room and dial a number. It seemed like something like this had happened before. At least once before. Before.

*

Something had hit me and I had tried to become conscious but it was difficult because I had been asleep. It was Ariel hitting me and saying, “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.”

When I was awake enough, I said, “What is it, honey?”

“Earthquakes,” she said. “There’s earthquakes on the TV. You come and watch them.”

“Honey,” I told her, “we don’t have a TV anymore. Remember?”

“Oh,” she said and let me go back to sleep. Again.

*

The next time I remember I was asleep and Ariel woke me up was when I was sleeping on one of the couches in the living room and she slammed the door walking in. I woke up and she threw my BIG SQUIRT water pistol into my lap.

“Here,” she said, holding a twenty dollar bill at me. “Now your friends will love you.”

“Thank you, honey,” I told her when I took it.

She just looked at me for a moment before she went back outside.

“You’re welcome,” I called after her.

When I answered the ringing telephone I discovered it was Denise calling us. After I said “hello” I listened to her voice for what seemed like the longest time.

“Yeah, yeah,” I was finally able to say. “I’m sure we’ve had this conversation before.” And hung up.

“Who was that on the phone?” Ariel asked from the other room.

“When?” I answered.

*

I began to disobey traffic laws. At first, I would merely slow down at the stop signs, look both ways, and proceed. I began to do the same at stoplights. I began not to yield, began not to look both ways. Soon, I drove without obeying a single symbolic directive, as if I was the only driver on the roads, as if the rules did not apply to me, as if all the obvious signs weren’t there at all.

Not one single bad thing happened.

*

I began to wonder why Ariel was apparently not going to school and approached her about it.

“Why are you apparently not going to school?” I asked her.

“I go to school,” she answered. “I go to school every single day. Except Saturday and Sunday. I go to Horace Mann Elementary School and am in Mrs. Whalen’s sixth grade class. I bring home notebooks and textbooks and can often be found at the kitchen table doing homework in the early evenings. Jeez.”

“And why, then,” I asked her, “have I not noticed this?”

“Because,” she answered, “you leave before I do in the morning and return after I am already home.”

I had to admire her because it was really that simple and easy to understand the way she explained it.

*

One night I was awakened by someone hitting me and it was Ariel. Again.

“Wake up,” she said. “Wake up. Wake up.”

“Haven’t we had this conversation before?” I asked her.

“There’s mudslides and tornadoes on TV,” she said. “Get up and watch them with me.”

“Honey,” I tried to tell her again, “we don’t have a TV anymore.”

“We do now,” she answered. “Get up.”

I was glad to hear we had a TV and, after I watched it, glad she’d gotten me awake. Those were some good disasters we watched that night.

*

One day, I approached Ariel with the intent to confront her.

“Okay,” I said. “If you go to school, what did you learn today?”

She just looked at me for a moment over the top of what I had only at that instant recognized as a textbook.

“In school. Today,” she answered. “We learned how telephones work.”

*

I was in the bedroom listening to the call-in program on the clock radio. It was 3:47 pm. The call-in program was coming from a (clock) radio station that played tapes that had been made in Los Angeles, California. They said it was a beautiful day “in the city” and that the topic was “protectionism.” All in all, I found that great. I heard the front door open and, a second later, I heard the front door close.

“How was school? Today,” I called out. “What did you learn? Today.”

“What?” I heard Denise, not my little Ariel, reply.

“Jeez,” I answered. “Where did you come from?”

(Originally published in Triage, Boulder, Colorado, 1990)

Manuscript Found in a Mad Dog Bottle

This is one of the stories I heard told under an overpass when I was, for a variety of reasons, listening to stories told under overpasses. And, even though I, for other and equally various reasons, no longer listen to stories told around garbage fires, fires fueled with cardboard and plastic smoldering under cement pylons, fat tires thrumming overhead, some of those stories that I did hear bear repeating.

In such environments—underpasses, crack houses, abandoned cars, cheap motels and the like—the usual denizen possesses but a limited repertoire of stories and repeated haunting of such environments and repeated interaction with the usual denizen and, perhaps, even becoming a usual denizen oneself soon exhausts all shallow wells of anecdote. Despite the varied backgrounds one will find represented, despite the varying degrees of social, economic or educational history, the stories tend to the deadenly familiar.

When one day is pretty much like any other, when all days are pretty much just one big blurry today, when not a lot different happens from big blurry day to big blurry day, amusing stories do not usually spring to mind. Despite popularized imagery, the occupants of this particular segment of the underworld actually see very little of it, entrenched as they are in the niche of addiction. They tend not to have their ears to the ground except for a single word: “dope.” They tend not to be tapped into the grapevine save where it concerns their own habits. They tend to be unreliable, capricious sources of information, eager to please but woefully lacking in both judgment and memory retention ability. They tend to lack the inclination or perspective required for anything remotely resembling an objective overview, to lack access to any kind of big picture. The same weary tales of violence and sex and some kind of pathetic, trivial triumph clung to all these passing years conveyed in a could-have/should-have/would-have mode of discourse; the same wearisome explanations and justifications and self-flagellations comprise the usual and expected gamut of street derelict cocktail conversation.

Most stories are truly in-one-ear-and-out-the-other oratory, ethanol or methamphetamine inspired rambles that start with tearful childhood reverie, veer off into social injustice and end with the tellers face down in their own white froth. It's hard to keep an audience when one's stories continually begin, "Last night, as I lay huddled in my filthy clothes and felt the tangible hand of my own self-loathing and shame spread it's long fingers into my freezing entrails...." People will tend to drift away from the fire when one begins one's narrative in such fashion.

But if one collects and sifts, if one listens long enough and closely enough, one will hear the truth of the world in the drunken whispers uttered by the lame, the broken, the insane and the outcast.

If one is to hear a story that begins, "Last night, I watched this woman and her dog save this blind guy's soul...," one tends to draw closer to the toxic flame, to carefully eye the speaker for clues as to where such a statement might lead, as fervently, Christianly evangelistic it may be.

"I have a talking cat in this here bag, but it's day-ed," while a suspect claim, carries enough intrigue and promises enough novelty to provoke a willing suspension of what's left of tattered disbelief.

"I used to be in NASA," will, of course, be greeted with derision but, more often than not, the speaker will be encouraged to elaborate for the sake of the yarn itself.

And if on one early November evening with gloaming still crisp and not heavy somehow on the western horizon, that kind of sky that makes a razor swipe of every telephone line, each troop of river-bound ravens dragging the night sky with them, if on that kind of night with the trash just catching flame within the barrel, with a jug of alcohol extracted from two cans of AquaNet® hairspray still two-thirds full, with no one yet hurt or in tears or screaming hollow noises against the sound of the interstate that shelters all...if on that kind of night a fellow draws into the circle and holds his cracked and bleeding hands toward the fire as if they could be warmed in that way or as if warmth was what they needed and that man says "I seen me how come people do so many bad things" well, that is indeed the kind of story that has a good chance of making a lasting impression.

And when he continues to speak, one can’t really help but listen.

“They’s like this worm, see?” he would mumble through filth-encrusted lips. “An’ that worm jes’ digs isself inside they heads and puts some bad, bad thoughts in theyah.”

And if one thinks about a “bad-thought worm,” it won’t make any sense at all, but if one just listens as his mumble draws one’s eyes into the fire where he stares himself while, unbroken, a stream of words falls out of his mouth and into the air beneath the highway.

“You can see them worms almost any bad place you care to go…I seen ‘em in Vietnam feasting in ’72 and it had got so bad by then that they’s come right into the cities and sometimes right inside our camps…and you better believe they was ever’where in the boonies…couldn’t hardly find a clear spot in the whole damn country.”

This is a point where some will ask for clarification, offer feedback if you will.

“What the fuck are you taking about?” might come the query.

“You weren’t ever in no Vee-yet-nam,” another might suggest.

“Why don’ ya shut yer fuckin’ mouth?” another of one’s company might suggest in a particularly vehement fashion. “Ya don’ know wha’ tha’ fuck yer talkin’ about.”

“I seen ‘em when I got back, too,” the narrator would continue, undeterred by his audience. “I started lookin’ for ‘em and then I started seein’ ‘em. They was inside the heads of the worst sort of folk, the sort of folk you see in the crazy house or the penitentiary. But I’d see ‘em on the street and know they was doin’ all sorts of bad things.”

“Anybody else see your worms, old man?” would come the inevitable question.

“Some do, some don’t,” he would reply. “Some can and some don’t want to.”

“What? Are these magic worms? Only magic guys like you can see ‘em?”

“I don’t think magic has a goddamn thing to do with it,” he would reply. “Magic is rabbits in hats, card tricks and sawing girls in half. These worms is part of somethin’ bigger’n any magic act. I don’t know what it is and, man, I don’t think I want to know. I just try and squash ‘em when I see ‘em.

“They’s bad and they make folk do real bad things. I watched one of ‘em dig it’s way into my sergeant when we was LURPing the Central Highlands an’ I still don’t like to think about what he done to some people after that, how long it took us to finally kill him and what that worm done after. Took us more’n six weeks to find that lil’ fucker and we tracked it from bush pig to VC sympathizer to a whore in Da Nang what liked to suck G.I cock with a mouth fulla broken glass.”

“You are so full of bullshit,” the same vehement soul would rejoin. “What the fuck are you trying? Who the fuck are you trying to scare?”

“Mebbe I’m talking about the fucked up worm inside your head that gives you the ideas to do the things you do to those kids,” the wrecked storyteller would conclude. “An’ mebbe I know the way to dig it outta theyah.”

And, with that, this underpass oracle would produce a rather impressive blade and begin to thrust it rapidly into the throat of one of the assembled company.

Now, these things happen in the course of this kind of life and no one is really terribly shocked when it does, but, still, to be standing in such close proximity to both victim and killer, to feel the warm spray of life pumped from a dying throat, to taste the rusty sweetness of another’s blood on one’s lips and to wipe it from one’s eyes in revulsion is quite another matter.

And, should one observe what appeared to be lavender gray, throbbing muscle, oily and wet and gasping, issue from the dying ragman’s wounds, uncoiling into firelight and poisonous air before flopping to earth, one might reconsider one’s earlier assessment of the storyteller’s veracity.

“I really hates them things,” the man with the gore-dripping knife would say. And placing his boot across the squirming, squealing thing’s back, he would skewer what could possibly have been its head and all the assembled would involuntarily take one step back to watch it writhe, twist and arch itself in futile agony against the blade which pinned it to the ground, the body of their one-time drinking pal forgotten in their fascination with the slimy knot of muscle convulsing in the dirt.

“God-damn,” someone might interject but it might also remain deathly quiet until long after the thing stopped twitching.

“Where’s that jug?” someone will eventually ask and agreement will be unanimous that it will be time for another series of drinks.





(Originally published in Cthulhu Sex Magazine, December 2005)

Straw Man

There is something fascinating about watching one’s home and possessions burn. There is grief and panic and fear and horror, to be sure, but there can also be a frightening, overwhelming sense of relief and release.

One can see it on the television news when watching other people watch their houses burn down, when the screen shows the faces of families huddled on sidewalks wrapped in blankets, ignored by working firefighters, just standing there while everything they thought was important disappears. Mostly, one sees confusion and sadness and loss flowing across those faces, but if one looks closely, one will often see subtle smiles and dancing eyes as people watch themselves reduced to absolute freedom. Especially the ones without insurance; those folk can be hysterical.

*

There’s a noise that cars make when power steering starts to wear out; it’s a shrill, squeaking kind of noise that sounds like a cage full of screaming monkeys or millions of steroid-addled crickets in chorus. Anthony was amazed sometimes that he’d gotten used to it.

“Fucking piece of shit car,” he said.

The car shrieked in reply.

That was the kind of relationship they had, Anthony and his car. Sort of like the one his parents had shared for almost thirty years, though he and the car had only been together five. He loved hating his ride just about as much as his parents had loved to hate each other. Anthony had never known a girl well enough to hate her, so the car just had to do.

“Goddamn miserable cocksucking piece of whore-shit,” Anthony continued, thinking fondly of his dad.

The car squealed back just like mom.

*

It looked like a scarecrow. Or a crucifixion. But neither definition could explain its presence one hundred yards from lakeshore. They had to row out in a small boat to examine it. It was just a life-size facsimile of a person made of straw and crucified on a post sunk into the water with his straw back turned to the shore and his straw face turned toward the eastern horizon. Chief Margery sat in a boat that was rowed out for a closer look at the straw man. She was the head of local law enforcement after all (even if she was the only law enforcement officer on the force), and an investigation seemed clearly an official duty.

It was straw and skillfully made. Each stalk of straw had been carefully placed into each bundle then carefully woven into a near perfect, albeit straw-colored, simulacrum of a man in extreme pain. The detail of his straw face was extraordinary. The straw seemed molded, the parallel stalks shaping contours of cheek and brow blending to form a straw face, and the twisted rictus of his straw mouth drew back from meticulous straw teeth clenched in what appeared to be straw agony. Straw muscles strained against binding wires cruelly biting into straw flesh and straw tendons stood corded under straw skin along a straw neck. He shone golden in the bright summer sun.

Margery reached out from the boat to grasp the wooden pole supporting the effigy. A ring of rainbow oil haloed the spot where it entered the water’s surface. Looking up at the straw man, she marveled at the skill and effort it must have taken to create him.

“What the hell?” boat owner Mel asked no one particularly.

“It’s a man made of straw,” replied Tom, one of the many homeowners whose property now boasted lakefront views of this torture tableaux. “He’s crucified in the lake.”

And because Tom had said it out loud, they all had to believe it.

“What’s it for?”

“Who made it?”

“That’s fucking weird.”

“What should we do?”

The recognition of what they’d all been looking at released a tumble of words from their mouths. No one listened to what anyone else said; they all needed to speak a moment for release.

“Okay, okay, okay everybody,” Margery interjected and brought them back to quiet.

They waited, sitting in little rows in the small outboard boat that rocked in the slight motion of the lake’s currents. Since she had demanded their attention, they were giving it to her.

“Let’s just go back to shore for now,” she told them and Mel turned the boat and they returned to land. “I need to figure out how to cut this thing down and get it to shore.”

The impromptu reports delivered to those on shore did nothing to assuage the general unease. That it wasn’t a real man crucified there offshore was only slight comfort; for some, a real man crucified would have been less disturbing than this strange artifact. A real man would have been somehow more understandable. The unanswerable questions flew about Margery’s head and she was searching her own knowledge for some procedure or protocol to guide her through what was quickly becoming a “situation.”

“Chief Gold,” one of the assembled spoke. “What are you going to do about this?”

Margery was stumped. She couldn’t see any crime that had been committed, but that didn’t mean a straw man in the lake shouldn’t be investigated.

“Teenagers,” someone said. “Just kids fucking around.”

Based on what Margery had seen of the local youth since moving to the area 12 years ago, something as complex and even artful as this straw man was completely beyond their abilities. They were a mouth-breathing bunch, much like their parents, and Margery knew them from their drunkenness, their violence, their auto accidents, and their vandalism. She did not know them for their artistic abilities.

“Devil worshippers,” another offered. “It’s the fucking Manson family or something.”

“It’s blasphemy, for sure,” still another contributed.

“People! People!” Margery raised her voice above the lakeshore chatter. Again, all eyes were on her, waiting for her to speak.

“There’s nothing we can do right now, right here,” she told them. “Let’s all go home now and let me do my job.”

And she wondered what “job” she was going to do.

*

He was a man made of straw wired to a pole with a crosspiece and he was tortured in the water one hundred yards from the shore and someone must have put him there but she already knew no one would admit it and no one knew why he had been placed there in their lake, so they just left him there for the time being. They were too confused to do anything else and there he stood where everyone could see him and no one would take him down, similar in that way as well to the original.

“Does someone want to help me get this thing out of the water?” she asked and went to her car to see if she had some tools that would be useful.

*

Anthony had flooded the car. Again. The starter danced on the verge of accomplishing its mission but the car itself seemed determined to remain asleep, only midly disturbed in its mechanical repose and certainly not to rousing.

“Muh. Thuh. Fuckah,” Anthony swore as he twisted the key, as he tried to physically hurt the car for not starting. If he could have, Anthony would have stepped outside and whipped the car bloody.

When it did finally catch and sputter to life, Anthony was not grateful. He was irritated because it had taken so long.

Gears ground when he yanked the shifter and the squeal began as he pulled into the avenue. If the radio had worked, he would have turned it on very very loudly but it didn’t so he didn’t. The one working headlight, angled off into the night and away from the roadway, burned dull yellow.

*

Long after her workday was supposedly ended, Margery sat at her office desk and pondering the results of her internet search. She had entered the words “straw” and “man” and “straw man” and “strawman” and every other combination and tangent she could think of trying to find something, anything, which would be useful. What she found was right out of her college freshman English class:

“The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person’s actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of ‘reasoning’ has the following pattern:
1. Person A has position X.
2. Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).
3. Person B attacks position Y.
4. Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.
This sort of ‘reasoning’ is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not constitute an attack on the position itself. One might as well expect an attack on a poor drawing of a person to hurt the person.”

Following a tangent on the web-threads her search revealed, Margery also found reference to the Devil, to Satan, to Lucifer the Father of Lies as the originator of this particular fallacy: “Now we come to the heart of the matter. Having set up his straw man arguments, Lucifer knocks them down with one swift stroke. After vilifying the corporate church and predicting awful judgments from God to come upon her, he gleefully declares, ‘The church age has come to an end.'"

This disturbed Margery. The lakefront crowd had murmured of devil-worship and sacrilege, but she had dismissed it from her mind until reading the words on her computer screen.

“One might as well expect an attack on a poor drawing of a person to hurt the person,” she spoke aloud. Looking up from the computer screen, leaning back in her chair, squeezing shut her tired and burning eyes, Margery asked, “Whose bad drawing are you?”

The straw man, propped in a corner of her office and filling her air with its clean stable smell, declined comment.

*

Anthony flooded the car. Again. It was 9:00 o’clock in the evening and Anthony was going to work. If such a thing were possible, Anthony hated his job more than he hated his car; in fact, Anthony often blamed his job for his car, reasoning that if it were a better job that paid him more money, his car would then logically be a better one and more inclined to get him to his better-paying employment.

As it was, working in an all-night convenience store, sitting behind smeared and grimy bulletproof glass, selling disposable lighters, lottery tickets, copper scrubbing pads, and disposable diapers to the crackheads and meth-tweakers who patronized his little corner of hell, was certainly not lucrative. None but crackheads and tweakers and crackhead mommies and tweaker mommies needed such things as he sold in the middle of a series of rotten nights and he hated them, his customers, while they counted out their dirty little coins and filthy bills into his steel tray. Of course, his customers hated Anthony as well. It was like family like that.

So, it was with a modicum of curiosity that Anthony watched the unfamiliar face (and body) enter the store. Squeezing between racks of pork rinds and Inca Cola, Chore-Boy copper scrubbing pads, macaroni and cheese, dog food, and diapers, was the most beautiful woman Anthony had ever seen in this or any other store. She wore little clothing, a micro-something around her hips and what looked like a band of rubber across her breasts. Her feet were bare and beautiful. She wore no jewelry. She was incandescent. Anthony hated her instantly and his rage burned whitely behind his darkened eyes.

She floated to the bulletproof cage protecting Anthony from the store. The closer she came, the more dazzled and enamored he became and the bile that rose to answer his infatuation, the red fury growing with each step she took, his rising wrath at her perfection flushed through his bloodstream like burning acid. She stood before him, languid eyes searching for his, long legs pushing her pelvis against his station, her long arms laid like a gift upon the counter.

“Cigarettes?” she purred.

Anthony just stared at her.

“Cigarettes?” she again spoke, moist lips barely moving, eyes hooded but hungry.

“Whaddya want?” he answered her finally.

“Something good,” she replied. “Something really good.”

Anthony just stared at her. If such a thing were possible, he would have reached through the thickly smeared glass and smashed her pretty face into an ugliness to match the ugliness he felt inside himself when he looked at her pretty face.

“Ferchrissake, lady,” he snapped. “Jus’ tell me watcha want, wouldja?”

“For Christ’s sake,” she murmured. “Yes. For Christ’s sake.”

Anthony fumed. And waited.

“Tell me, Anthony,” she eventually broke their silence. “Are you happy?”

And he wasn’t even surprised that she knew his name.

*

Chief Margery stood with the rest of them on the shore waiting for sunrise and looked at the new straw man standing there on the new cross sunk there in the waters in the lake shallows where the first straw man had appeared. Dawn light silhouetted this new straw man and then, when the sun’s first direct rays burned across the water and touched its straw head, there was sudden illumination, a burst of straw-gold light released holy fire and the new straw man was truly radiant in the morning light, the dawn of another holy day.

As the rising sun warmed his limbs, what used to be Anthony was feeling more and more happy. Things were finally going his way and the loss of hatred and rage lightened him as the sun’s rays lit him. As glow and heat grew, as the burning globe before him lifted itself from the watery horizon, Anthony smiled to greet what was looking to be the best day of his life.