HAYDEN'S FERRY REVIEW
Managing Editor
Marcia Hamilton

Fiction Editors
Janice Kelly
Kerrie McCaw

Poetry Ecfltors
John Graves Morris
Paul Morris

Faculty Advisor
Alberto Rios

Student Publications
Bruce ltule
Salima Keegan

Hayden's Ferry Review is published annually.

Subscriptions, contributions and correspondence should be
sent to Hayden's Ferry Review, Student Publications, Matthews
Center, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287.
Unsolicited manuscripts are welcomed during our fall reading
period. Manuscripts will be returned only if accompanied by a
self-addressed, stamped envelope. Copyright reverts to author
upon publication with appropriate acknowledgement to
Hayden's Ferry Review.
The views expressed herein are those of the authors, not the
editors or sponsors.
Copyright, 1987, Hayden's Ferry Review.

lssue2
ISSN 0887-5170

Spring 1987

Located on the south bank of the Salt River, the town of
Hayden's Ferry was founded by pioneer merchant Charles
Trumbull Hayden. While crossing the Salt River Valley for the
first time during a business trip, he was detained by a flood for
two days at the site of two buttes. Climbing to the top of the
largest butte, Hayden surveyed a wide stretch of vegetation
consisting of cactus, sagebrush, and mesquite; he foresaw "a
resurrected fertility by the magic touch of water to soil ... parched, baked, and dried from the beating down of the sun."
Hayden returned in 1872, founded the town, and began construction of a flour mill. At the same time, he built the ferry
that gave the new town its name in order to transport supplies
and travelers across the river when spring runoffs and floods
prevented natural fording. The boat, made of heavy lumber,
was large enough to carry a supply wagon, a team of horses,
and several passengers on each trip. It was pulled by rollers at-·
tached to a cable suspended across the river and anchored by
two poles on either side.
On May 5, 1879, Hayden agreed to rename the town for the
lush Vale of Tempe between Mt. Olympia and Mt. Ossa in
Greece. A practical man, he did so because he wanted to save
the postmaster the space and ink needed to mark Hayden's
Ferry on mail. After sixteen years of service, the ferry itself
ceased operation upon the completion of the first bridge
across the Salt River.

HAYDEN'S
Stud,·nt

l'uhli.-atiuns.

FERRY
Mattlll'ws

('t•nt<'r.

Ari~.nna

REVIEW
Stal,•

l'nin•rsit)·.

T,•mp,•.

Ari,nna

!l5:!!!7

CONTENTS
S. Denys Pogue
Michael Hogan
Richard Terr ill

Robert Kipness
Pauline Mortensen
Peggy Shumaker
Edward C. Lynskey
Kathleen Atkins
Dennis Schmitz
Umberto Saba
Rolly Kent
Allan Peterson
K.B. Hwang
Benjamin Goluboff
Catherine Sasanov

Bruce Taylor

Barry Thomson

Thomas M. McNally
Peul Shuttleworth

7 Gewgaw
15 Springtime in the Rockies
16 Variations on Variations on a
Summer Day by Wallace
Stevens
18 The Entrance
19 Conditions in General
27 The Waitress's Kid
29 The Cousin on Holiday
30 H~pital Albert Schweitzer
31 The Night Light
32 Enisled
33 The Text
34 Frontier
35 Cinders
36 The Bluebird
38 Preparing for Loons
39 Two Chairs
40 Faculties
54 Oppenheimer Leaves His
Family for Work Again, Los
Alamos, 1945
55 Kitty Oppenheimer Defends
Her Husband as Not Being a
Communist Conspirator,
1954
56 Oppenheimer Contracts
Throat Cancer, 1967
57 After Ruml
59 At Munsan on the lrryin
River I Think of the Lower
East Bank of the Upper St.
Croix
61 Agave Colorata
62 Props
69 Duet for Lost Highway:
Vengeance, Murder, Cars
Burning in Motel Parking
Lots, Honky Tonks, and
True Love West of the
Missouri
71 And the Dog is Called Lefty

Michael Carrino
Naomi Wallace
Barry Thomson
Ron Carlson
D. Nurkse

Joseph Edward Bolton
Peter Cooley

Yasu Eguchi
Tom Chiarella
Gyorgy Raba

Walter McDonald
Jeannine Savard
Hilary Heyman
Rob Hall

72 Outside the Infirmary
Window
73 Ballad for Gallipoli
74 Agave Parry[
75 The Bermuda Trapezoid
79 Faded Green Card
80 A Southern Capital
81 Air Well
82 The Blue World
84 Van Gogh L 'Arlesienne:
Madame Ginoux
85 An Epiphany
86 To a Willow Waist-high in
the Mississippi
87 Sound of Autumn
88 Jelly in the Pawpaw Tree
101 The Greeks Are Blinding
Polyphemus
102 A Preface to Dying
104 Bait
105 Tintype With Rosebank
107 Shadow
108 An Interview with
T. Coraghessan Boyle
117 Contributors' Notes

S. Denys Pogue

Gewgaw
"I have to tell you something;' she begins. You put down the
fork. She always starts this way.
You wait and stare vacantly at your plate, at two-thirds of a three
bean salad. (You've picked out and eaten all the kidney beans, and
now you sit stupidly grinning with gas like an unburped infant.)
She drags her fingers through her yellow hair - the same vain,
annoying gesture that caught your attention at a Business Owners'
Alliance meeting last year and made you stop taking notes and
begin to fall in love with her.
Last summer, she took a poetry class at the recreation center.
For six weeks, she carried everywhere a pencil and a pad of pastel
note paper. She often paused, mid-sentence, to write down an
"impression:·
"H. D. is my divining rod;' she said four times, to four different
guests at a party in her ranch-style house. The guests listened
politely while scooping onion dip with potato chips. Your lover's
husband leaned against the tile counter in the kitchen and cracked
ice chips between his teeth. He listened and drank a slow martini.
Later, you sat on a bamboo couch in the living room, pandering
to a leggy brunette. Killing time. You looked up too anxiously when
your lover (your hostess) came out of the kitchen. Bare feet and
matted, blonde hair.
"Ice fight," she explained, breathlessly. Avoiding your
outstretched hand and turning to the brunette.
"Have you read Doolittle?" Fierce blue eyes, startling as animal
eyes caught by the beam of a headlight.
The brunette gulped her martini and laughed.
"Oh, Mo! I don't read children's books;· she said. "I don't even
have any nieces or nephews!"
"Only you understand what I mean. It's so hard to explain things
to people."
She had the whitest skin you had ever seen. Especially white
7

across the inside of her wrists. Cotton-white. Unnatural.
"I have something to tell you:·
You watch a forkful of leafy, green things disappear into her
mouth. You spy a tray of sauerbraten carried by a fat waiter with
glossy shoes. You wonder if you can sneak a silent shaft of gas
out at the exact moment the waiter walks by with it and decide
against it. The sauerbraten waiter glides by, and Maureen wrinkles
her nose at the sour smell. You pat a spot of water on the table
with your napkin and feel inexplicably guilty.
Most smells repel her, though she loves to describe them. "It
isn't that it smells sour; it's that it smells so moist:'
She will peel the sheets off the queen-size bed in her oversized
house. She will strip the sheet from under her husband's body
while he reads a spy novel set in Madagascar.
She will shout at the maid and explain the importance of a clean
bed and plunge the linen into a washer of hot water and bleach.
She will wince at the ghost of a semen stain and pour another
cup of bleach into the rinse cycle while the maid shakes her head.
The odor of gasoline makes her vomit. Her husband fills the
car every Tuesday.
"There's something I want to tell you:·
There is a couple eating lunch at the table next to you. The
man's head is bowed over his spinach crepes. The woman makes
little circular motions with her fork, in the air. With a quick pirouette, she jabs the fork into one of the crepes on the man's plate
and carries away a piece of it. The man watches her and laughs.
You have to look away.
It was a blistering Saturday afternoon. Fractured white light cut
across the walls of your bedroom. The jangle of the telephone
made your teeth hurt in your balding head, and you tried to answer
it without waking her - your lover, the only woman who ever
bothered to seduce you - rolled into a ball next to you, the skin
on her face creased by the sheets.
"Hello;· you answered, inevitably.
"Stan?"
You recognized her husband's voice with a thrill of panic in your
belly. The voice of a man who shows up early at a barbecue and
8 S. Denys Pogue

brings his own meat as a gesture of goodwill.
"Stan?"
You realized you had said nothing.
"V,ea h"
.
"Ray here. Glad I caught you at home."
The bundle of sheets and yellow hair moved behind you. You
drew yourself up and prepared not to sound sweaty or small. Some
shameful part of you even wanted Ray to like you. You imagined
him sitting in his ranch house, staring at a row of brass-plated
tennis trophies in the den. Maybe he was watching the maid's·
mean, lank ass sidle to the left as she slapped the dust off the
plaques that bore his name, his company's name, the names of
the best racquet clubs in the valley.
"How goes the jewelry business?" Ray asked.
It was a question he asked every time he saw you - at Alliance
meetings, at parties, in restaurants. A question that seemed to
come from a natural desire to put people at ease, rather than a
real curiosity about silver and turquoise trinkets.
"Fairly well, fairly well. And you? How are you?"
"Up! Sales are up. I'm up. Today, I'm up for racquetball. What
do you say?"
You were silent for a moment, taking in the absurdity of it,
listening to the faint snore of Maureen's dreamless sleep.
"Oh, don't make that face!" she says,pushing the raw vegetables
around on her plate. "This is important!" Her voice, the eyes like
blue sparklers, have the same urgency they had the day she told
you she was giving up red meat forever.
'Tm listening," you say. "This is my listening face:·
Her hand drapes languidly over yours. Her hands are always dry.
The lines deepen around her eyes when she smiles and her smile
(still!) envelops and calms you.
"I know. You're listening:·
"Are you still there, Stan?"
"Right," you answered, knowing there was no noble or even polite
way out. You looked out the window at the olive trees, the palm
trees, the mulberries. The garden that surrounded the complex
where your white condo crouched among the identical condos.
"What do you say?"
"Well, it sounds fine. I, uh, don't think I have a racquet around
the house, though . . . " You walked closer to the window and
9 S. Denys Pogue

looked out, watched a Mexican man with baggy pants cutting a
square of sod from the lawn.
''No problem, Stan. You can rent one at the club;' Ray said.
No way out. Maureen was beginning to stretch, to push the
sheets away from her body with small swimming motions. She
rolled over, and you could see the folds of tired skin under her
eyes. (''My luggage;' she likes to say.)
''OK, then, fine:' You tried to pace; your words ran away with
you. ''What time?''
''Say five?''
''Good. fine. At the new club?'' You threw a smile at Maureen
and felt a thin pain between your ribs like the point of an icepick.
''At the club:'
When you hung up, Maureen was still staring at you with those
feverish, blue eyes. She waited for you to say something, then she
rolled over, reached down to the floor and pulled an unfiltered cigarette out of her handbag. (''It's the chemicals in the filters that
cause cancer.")
''That was a surprise;' you said. ''It was your husband:'
She sat there, smoking, in the rumpled Mojave motif sheets,
a Gorman print looming over her shoulder.. A big blue Indian chief
hunched up in a scratchy blanket, his eyes gazing down into
Maureen's lap.
''Ray.?''
''Yes. Your husband Ray:'
''Oh:'
''Did you exp·ect him to call?'' You asked stupidly, as you clawed
your way through bure.au drawers, looking for shorts, a shirt,
athletic socks.
''No," she said, and shook her head drowsily. A drugged bird.
''No," she said again. ''Why would I?''
''I don't know. I just wondered if he said anything odd re·cently.
You know, suspicious."
She answered in her slow, distracted way, ''Everything Ray does
is odd and suspicious. He's self-made."
''He's a good man;' you replied, too quickly.
''Who said he isn't a good man?'' She wanted to know.
.You dre$ed in front of a full length mirror. You tucked in the
Wi~son sport shirt around your monthly-expanding stomach. The
handful of Chaps cologne you slapped on your chin and neck
made Maureen grimace.
''Well, it doesn't matter. I never said Ray wasn•t a good man. Of
10 S. Denys Pogue

I

course he is."She put out her cigarette and gathered her clothes.
"I have to shower."
"I didn't say you said he wasn't a good man. Your tone just
sounded critical."
"Well. he is a good man."
"Yes, he is."
"I know. Everyone says so.'' And she di_sappeareddown the hall.
"Is it good or bad?" you ask. The man with the spinach crepes
is watching his table partner pay the bill for their meal.
"Oh, you always have to know 'good or bad.' " She laughs
brightly, and shakes her head. There are no circles under her eyes.
She must have slept well. You still wonder if she tells the truth
when she says she doesn't make love with her husband more than
once or twice a month now that she is in love with you.
You waited about ten minutes in the parking lot at the Las
Palmas Racquet Club. You sat with the door of your BMWopen,
your feet propped on the cur~ until a tan, lean girl looked you
up and down as she left the club. Then you sucked in your stomach, locked the car and went in.
The cold air in the club hit you like ice water. The effect was
invigorating, like the contrasting blue tile and white walls in the
lobby. You tried not to shuffle your feet as you stepped up to the
check-in counter and smiled apologetically at the woman behind it.
'Tm meeting Ray Mullins,"you explained.
"Oh, good. Just have a seat, then. Make yourself comfortable,"
she said more pleasantly than you expected. "Would you like a
brochure on respiration to read while you wait?"
When Ray arrived a few minutes later, he was all sheepish grins
and apologies. He shook your hand, lightly clapped your shoulder.
As if he had known you for thirty years.
A little later, rented racquet in hand, you followed Ray to Court
Five. ("Lucky. My favorite;• he confided.) You dosed the door the padded sound of a rubber cell. You warmed up with a few
stretches and reaches.
Ray did some jogging dance steps - you noticed for the first
time how his tniddle-aged body had become thick and soft.
centered. He resembled a circus bear. You thought of his tennis
trophies, collecting a thin skin of yellow dust on a shelf. You
recalled the glass edge in Maureen's voice. Self-made.
"You lag first, Stan," he offered.
11 S. Denys Pogue

You won easily and moved up to the service line. You served
wild and felt a twinge in your right shoulder.
"Short!"
You served again. This time it was good, but it fell directly into
Ray's forehand. The return left you shaking your head and trying
to readjust the eyeguard Ray had insisted on You moved back to
receive his serve, center, and wondered why you had never noticed
he was left-handed.
The first serve caught you off-guard and went whistling past your
right kneecap.The second bounced wide and popped off the back
wall. You hit it in mid-air, but not hard enough to make it all the
way to the front wall.
'Two, zip."
He put enough spin on the next serve to send the ball into orbit,
but missed the angle he wanted and sent it hurling into your
backhand. Like a saving reflex in a slow-motion accident, your wrist
snapped the racquet at the right moment. The next thing you saw
was Ray staring helplessly at a perfect rollout.
"Great one!" Ray shouted. He let his racquet down and walked
back to receive, giving you a tap on the shoulder as he passed.
"Wish Mo could have seen that!"
You stood next to the service line, squeezing the ball between
your thumb and forefinger. The echo of games in other courts
surrounded you. You measured your words.
"Oh? Does she like the game?"
"Hates it. Mo hates sports. But a shot like that - that's almost
poetry:·
"She likes poetry;' you said, bouncing the ball against the floor.
"If it isn't too long;' Ray said. "She loses interest, you see:· He
spread his legs and held the racquet handle with both hands,
waiting for your serve.
You tossed the ball and served it to his backhand. He hit it easily.
It came hissing by your head, within a few inches.
"Sorry!" As he passed you to take over service, Ray asked if you
were all right.
"Fine. Fine:· You wondered how tired you looked.
You played harder, but kept feeling as if you were trying to run
in quicksand. You lost the first game, seven to zero. Then you
began to warm up and played a pretty good, tight second game.
You lost, twenty-one to nineteen.
"One more?" Sweat poured from Ray. He had to take off the
eyeguard and adjust it for the third time.

12 S. Denys Pogue

"Good;' you said. not knowing why, knowing you would never
last another game to twenty-one points. All you wanted was to go
home, take a hot shower, and drink a scotch, neaL And die in the
arms of Ray's skinny, wild-eyed wife.
Three points went by in as many minutes. You wiped your chin
with a sweat-soaked armband and wondered why Ray didn't die
of a heart attack. You decided it was his game strategy. It was all
positioning, expert and unobtrusive. He rarely had to run for the
ball. And when it was clearly out of range. he let it go.
You spread your feet. prepared to give in to another four points,
to get it over with. If Maureen didn't give a damn about sports,
she wouldn't care if you won or losL You imagined her yawning
extravagantly and reaching for a cigarette in her olive green Gucci
bag.
"Oh, ha. Big night out for the boys,'.'she would say when you
recounted the game for her over lunch. "Oh."
Round as the point of a bullet, you saw it coming in the halfsecond of agony that anticipates disaster. In the next half-second
you must have reached down to stop the raw, swelling pain in your
groin, because your hands were still holding your balls when Ray
stumbled over and bent beside you where you writhed in sweaty
misery on the floor. Later, you would also remember the coolness
of the polished wooden floor against your cheek. Later.
Ray moved as efficiently as a registered nurse, gathering
personnel lackeys to help carry you to a cot in the locker room.
An icepack for you. A breasty blonde to check your pulse. You
drifted in and ouL An hour later, you were muttering reassurance
at Ray as he packed you into your BMW and insisted, one more
time, on driving you home.
"No need," you waved him away. "No need. I can drive. I'm on
automatic pilot when I get in my car. I can make it:'
"Well, you know best:' He went on leaning on the car door,
gazing down with an expression of earnest hope for your recovery._
He stepped back, finally. Then he seemed to think better of it and
leaned over again.
When he spoke, his tone was flat All the kindness had gone
out of him, and he became matter-of-fact
"You know, we're not really different:·
"Sorry?" You felt another w<111e
of nausea coming on, and you
longed to vomit in the privacy of your own bathroom.
"Maureen and I have been together almost four years. Married
the last three. Not a long or a short time, I gueSS:'
"Longer than most, Ray;· you said as kindly as possible.
13 S. Denys Pogue

"Longer than her first marriage, yes. But then Mo was bored
by her first husband He's a banker. You probably know him. Ron
Sturges?"
"I think ... :•
"Well, it doesn't matter. He's a good man. Dependable. But not
much fun for a woman like my wife."
"She likes poetry;' you managed to say.
He left you with a wave of the racquet he still had in his left
hand. Then you pulled away from the curb and drove as fast and
recklessly as you could all the way to the private parking lot of
your complex, where you belched and threw up on the seat of your
car.
"/ think it's a good thing;· she tells you. While you wait, she
reaches over to your plate and pinches off a corner of the bread
you haven't touched. "I just want this littJe bit;' she promises.
You reach into the right pocket of your jacket and rub the side
of the small jewelry box there. You jiggle it, but can't hear the
charm inside - a tiny, silver and turquoise bird of paradise.
"Ray and I talked. About a lot of things;· she says. "He's fine,
about us."
"What do you mean, 'fine'?" Without thinking, you withdraw
your hand from the pocket and rest it on the table. Still holding
the jewelry box.
"Oh!"
You follow her eyes to the box. Her hand is on it, before you
can explain. Her eyes are hard as sapphires.
"It's just a little something .... " The words die inside you.
"I wanted to surprise you;· she says, smiling. "Ray wants to divorce me. He brought it up yesterday, out of nowhere. And I had
to tell you I'm moving out. We don't have to sneak around, now.
It's all open, and I don't have to run home after we make love:·
You know you're staring. You make a tight sound, like a growl,
in the front of your throat and nod over her plans.
"And you just sit there with a ring in your pocket and don't even
say anything. You:·She jabs playfully at your sleeve.
You want to say "no" - the way her husband would. You want
!he thing, the foolish, wrapped trinket in your hand to be back
m your pocket. Then you want it to be a diamond as big as the
ice cube floating, melting in your glass of water. Then you want
to kiss her hand, and get up and walk, out the door and down
the street and away.
You decide against it, and when you catch the waiter's eye, you
order a glass of scotch, neat.
14 S. Denys Pogue

---------------

Michael Hogan

Springtime in the Rockies
This is not the first time the season
changed so abruptly it failed to bring us with it.
Spring thaw, and roots crack the pavement,
the dogcatcher's truck moves slowly by.
Sometimes we run out of excuses: a new job,
the baby, pastel colors of summer frocks.
Our life folds in around itself like a dove,
and the world flies, flies.
We live in the wrong places
and survive to find ourselves only a year older.
Once in Colorado a man got through the winter
by eating the flesh of his friends.
By spring he had neither friend nor substance
no~ even explanation beyond survival.
That spring the sky was a pearl gray
and the courtroom entry jammed with the curious.
And what did they expect to see?
Some proof of themselves, men of substance?
And with substance enough, no crime?
One quiet evening in March she tells you
it's never been right for her.
And what brass ring at the edge of a cliff
can you grab for next?
When you awake the following morning
the sky is a pearl gray.
The curious drive by the house in new cars
and you can tell by their look of substance
by their total absence of fear
that they have survived the winter
without eating each other's hearts.

15

Richard Terrill

Variations on Variations
on a Summer Day
by Wallace Stevens
1

Being, for old men, time of their time,
they watch, delicately as women,
while beautiful collies walk with women masters,
cut across the corners of their lawns.
Yes, the old men feel themselves, as sun
shines on the subjects from under a threatening evening
cloud.
2
Say of the house that it was standing
next to the man in plaid pants
who was trying to sell it.
3
Into the sea,
into the belief,
into the hidden vein
the stick divines is there,
into the spaces car windows were
comes the rain.
4
It was not yet the hour to be dauntlessly leaping:
look at
the children's bikes, lying still,
kick stands piercing air,
nd1
ha ebars like the skull of a steer
bike on its ribs, like summer
'
rich with abandoned plans. '
16

5
As a boat feels when it cuts blue water,
at last most perfectly alone.

6
As you improvise on the piano,
the tyrannical effect of a distant rehearsing
marching band,
tin sound of horns like early television,
the random banging of drums,
seems to interfere.

7
In objects as white this, white that,
so the summer colors wish to be left alone
until night, when they can wear their night disguises.

8
In light blue air over dark blue sea
the painter finds a reason for his afternoon.
The wind he can't record ripples his canvas
and children fly like sparks from his schoolhouse
in the last century. Tonight,
my eyelids that close upori your image
are like twin dark skies.

17 Richard Terrill __________________

_

Robert Kipness

"TheEntranc13'.:
Lithograph,22" x 1

18

Pauline Mortenser1

Conditions in General
My mother and I are crouched in this log together, sitting in
charcoal and red mud with a wall of wood and roots around us.
The hailstones drone against the outer bark. We are on my
brother's planting job in the Nez Perce' National Forest in central
Idaho, where forest winds have uprooted isolated trees left over
from the logging operations - the harvest. We are here planting
seedlings for the money, my mother who is sixty-five, in her
hooded-green sweat shirt, making enough to pay for a furnace;
and me, making money for tuition, and thinking about my
husband still in Utah at his regular job. I am here against his wishes,
but after being married ten years, I can get away with that. Then
too, it helps if you don't have children - it's easier to be "liberated."
So I am here inside this rubber raincoat, sweating in the cold.
It was barely light this morning, the distant tree line a mere
shadow picture knuckled against a white wall, when we tied our
lunches and our raincoats around us and began the two-hour hike
to the planting job. Perhaps what made me start thinking about
conditions was falling into the creek as we crossed over on a
slippery log. Being wet, muddy, and miserable is nothing new here
for any of us, but it is not appreciated - especially at six in the
morning on the way to work. The thing is, no one thinks to bring
extra clothes for emergencies, and besides, there isn't enough
room in the Suburban. So with my brother and his crew already
halfway up the mountain, the Suburban locked behind us on the
road, and ramp hours away, my mother and I stood there knowing
that "one of us" was going to be very uncomfortable for several
hours until the sun rame out. But then knowing that the sun will
come out eventually and dry everything stiff by noon is no great
comfort to someone who has just fallen in an icy creek. So it is
the obvious time to start thinking about conditions, conditions in
particular, conditions in general. This is usually what I try to avoid.
"My condition" - the state of being unpregnant. I used to write
letters to anxious relatives about "my condition:· It used to be a
great joke.
19

I slip the tips of my fingers between the charcoaled log and the
small of my back, pushing with my fingers so the knuckles can
massage the tender spot above my hips. My mother looks at me.
She understands the advanced stage of my condition, this topic
that is delicate for us both.
This morning after crossing the creek - and me falling in we crossed the snow drift and loaded up our trees from the tree
cache where the forest service has buried them in the snow. We
packed the trees into our planting bags, and after climbing the
hill to the first road, my legs chafing from the cold and wet, my
mind balked, and we sat down on a log by the bank. Perhaps with
movement and circulation I might have been all right, but there
we were - on a logging road I admit, but one that could have
been passable by four-wheeldrive so that we wouldn't have to walk.
But the forest service does not like tourists in here, in the charred
depths of their forest People write nasty letters to the editor when
they see the slashed and burned areas, and the barren tree
plantations where contractors have dozer-piled the log debris and
where the forest service has fired away the brush, leaving charred
logs, burned-red top soil, and white ash. This is called "soil
preparation," and it scrapes away the top soil into sterilized heaps,
often disturbing the ecological balance, causing ground squirrels
to multiply at infectious rates so that they gnaw away the tree roots
when you plant the trees. Under these conditions it is unlikely that
the forest will be restored.
To keep out the tourists then, the forest service plows up the
roads in six-foot mounds, twenty-five humps to the mile, strung
out like knots on an umbilical cord - plows them up to keep out
the tourists and hunters, though they say it is to save the road from
the spring runoff. These are the conditions.
And I was angry at that, and at other conditions, sitting there
thinking that in spite of everything, when the reports are turned
in and they indicate a low survival ratio for the trees, it will be
recorded as tree-planter error. It will be my brother, the contractor,
who gets the blame. But I will feel the anger too - out of a sense
of family pride - because culpability is a frustrating matter,
something that isn't assessed until all contracts are expired and
chances for recriminations dissolved. Then it only affects your
reputation.
E~eryone hopes that this job will be different, that the fore5t
service h~re will stop trying to lay the blame on the planter, and
st0
P treating us as if we are here to rip off the government. The
20 PaJJJJne
Mortenaen

specifications say that we must dig a twelve-inch hole. But when
the topsoil has been scraped nearly to bedrock. it is impossible
to dig a twelve-inch hole, and they spend all their time digging
up our trees to ensure that we have dug a twelve-inch hole. And
this is in spite of the fact that the specifications also require that
we use the regulation mattock that has only an eight-inch blade
instead of the twelve-inch mattock made by my brother. There is
one exception. In lieu of digging a twelve-inch hole you may select a tree with shorter roots. But the roots are the only things
that are twelve-inches around here. And it is next to treason to
trim these roots or plant them in an "s.. or "f' shape in the hole.
This stunts the tree's growth because it cannot get water. They
watch you for this, but say nothing at all about conditions, about
the rocks, and the lack of topsoil that has been scraped away, or
the ground squirrels. These conditions do not exist in the manual
My mother is still optimistic about this job, but I am
overwhelmed Hiking in this morning, I was struck by the fact that
we can protect the roots, keep them wet, guard them from the air
into the hole, but there is only so much that we can do. It is
recorded as tree-planter error when the trees die, and eaah year
the forest service comes down harder with regulations that make
no sense at all when they give you trees that have broken
dormancy or have molded before you get them and are, therefore,
already dead It is the contractor's reputation in general that is
harmed, and of course the trees. So the forest service watches us
closer f!Neryyear. My brother can say nothing, or he will end up
losing his rontract, possibly his bond, and may have to pay the
government for lost time and dead trees.
There is always the possibility of getting into another kind of
business, but we are all optimistic fools about such things.
This morning I was overwhelmed by these conditions. And a
thirty-year-old girl sitting on a log with a bag of trees strapped
around her waist, crying, is not a pretty sight, I would imagine;
it is a force to be reckoned with. So when it started douding up,
I think that may have had something to do with why my mother
suggested we crawl into this burned-out log instead of staying out
in the hailstorm.
I'd like to stretch out the cramp in my leg, but there is no space.
My back is curved with the arch of the inside of the log. If
conditions had been different, I v.ould not be in here. Perhaps I
would be home in Utah 700 miles away; at the least I would be
in the Suburban five miles down the hill on the main logging road
21 Pauline Mortensen

But the storm caught us by surprise.
I have never seen my mother run from a storm until now. I have.
seen her plant through the snow, fighting frozen ground to get·
the trees in, until my brother comes, and tells her they are quitting
for the day because it is too cold for the trees, because the roots
freeze in the air before you can get them in the ground. (The cold
kills the trees - but only leaves your fingers numb inside your
gloves.) Until my brother comes, she always works on. This is why
I was surprised when she looked up at the darkening sky and said
we'd better find shelter.
I think working indoors has always been a luxury to my mother,
who has always hauled hay, thrashed wheat, and fed cows.Working
inside doesn't require bundling up in men's clothes and straining
against the weight of buckets or bales. She insists that she was
one of the original women's libbers, the ones who protested against
working outside with the men. Now at sixty-five she has given up
her protests, and she pulls her hooded-green sweat shirt closer
around her head and tucks her hands under her arms.
Perhaps she would never admit to wanting to stay in the house
and do "women's work:' What she says is that she expects to recline in heaven beneath the shade of the trees she has planted.
On hot days out on a bare hill, it's an accommodating thought
- when the sun is frying your brains, money doesn't count for
much. But she survives,and football players from the employment
office only last three days up here before they quit.
So in spite of the fact that we usually work through the weather,
here we are inside this log. This is why I suspect that she did this
for me, is still protecting me, even though I am married and living
away from home and she is in her sixties. I am confined here, but
protected.
I never did get used to wearing men's boots, like my mother
sitting cross-legged next to me, her neoprene soles caked with red
mud, her wool socks rolled down over the top to protect her laces.
I wear old Adidas that ooze out the warm water when I push against
the charcoal, old Adidas which suck the water back in - cold.
The men's boots pinch your toes, leave them numb for months.
In the tent I rub my mother's feet, warm them next to the catalytic
~eater. I squeeze the bones of her metatarsal arch, and she says
it feels so good - when I stop. Underneath she has been walking
on a ball of deformed bone that she didn't know should not be
there. I grab her big toe and try to shake it back into feeling, but
she'd rather I left well enough alone, I smooth cream over the
22 PaulineMortensen

calluses, and she pulls on her anklets for the night.
At night we play cards and talk about the forest service, and
this keeps my mind off "conditions."
When I was seven, our Guernsey cow became ill. I found her in
the corral, groaning and rocking back and forth, a slick brown calfback protruding through a large stretched circle beneath her tail.
When my mother came, she wouldn't let me see any more. She
made me stand back behind the railing, and I had to go up the
cattle chute and get glimpses through the bars. The veterinarian
couldn't come right away, so she called my brother Bruce, who
came over because he was the oldest and had done these outdoor
things before. He said it was a breech birth, and from behind the
chute, I watched him put his hand on the calf and push it back
into the mother and then saw him put his arm in up to his st1oulder
to turn the calf around.
From the first I had wanted to see, because it was such a horrible
and intriguing thing and because I wanted the calf to be mine.
I had visions of raising it myself, naming it, and feeding it, teaching
it to drink the formula milk by letting it suck my fingers as I
lowered my hand and its head into a bucket. I wanted to be there
when it first bleated out into the world and when it stumbled to
its feet. It was something you might see on My Friend F1.icka, and
it all seemed like a reasonable expectation.
But the calf was born dead. And seeing the mangled, limp
nothing lying in the ditch my brother dug, the dirt being shoveled
in and bouncing on the bloated belly, there seemed to be an
inconsistency in the promise - a promise that all women secretly
believe in, perhaps.
It starts with mud pies served on cardboard plates, served out
to rubber, lifeless mannequins. Such things start the idea of the
promise, the storing and recording for future use that is all intended
to the one end.
At college, the first time through, I studied children's literature,
children's reading, and children's psychology. I got a degree to
teach children, but that was not the purpose. Most people who
take those courses do not intend to teach strangers. So my files
are obsolete: files of children's books, files of poetry, files of
pictures mounted and laminated for sticky fingers.
There has been a progression in this, cutting out patchwork
squares for baby quilts, piecing them together with sly smiles at
my husband as he watched tv, smiles that dissipated as one by
one I gave away my stockpile of knotted quilts. In those first years.
23 Pauline Mortensen

there were imaginary cravings that would send Roger to the store
laughing to please me, but this too has become a joke that we
punch each other with.
And what are the final stages of this condition? There are
operations for this - operations a woman must go through to save
herself. It is the doctor's desire to restore you to the "function"
for which you were intended, but they do not say this. They say,
"We will fix you up. How long has this condition persisted? I will
arrange for a time with the hospital:' And after that, "Come back
on the twenty-fourth:'
So I come back and back, but eventually discover that the promise itself is conditional, based on patience and long-suffering,
temperature, timing, and time, longevity and hormones,
procrastination, endurance, and chance. The chance is not so great
as it once was.
The doctor says, 'This is a minor operation which involves a
scraping of the uterus." And then at another time, "C.auterization
sometimes increases fertility:· But both forms that I have to sign
say these methods are not always effective and may result in a
worsening of the condition, pain, infection, cancer. But this is the
exceptional condition. I sign anyway.
I sit here now, bent against my own insides, and wait for the rain.
Mother swings her legs out of the end of the log and begins
pressing the hailstones into the mud with the tip of her boot.
I am the last of ten children, the spoiled one. The first one was
born with a stomach defect, one they didn't know how to cure at
the time. They gave it medicine and goat's milk, but it died. Mother
had nine more that lived, nine who grew up to be obnoxious adults
for the most part And now in her sixties, she is through with having
children.
The pelting eases. The rain makes red streams that begin to
course through the white ash forming irregular trails around the
exposed roots of the log. The sun filters through the rain, and my
ears seem to pulse with their own hollow sound in the absence
of hail.
They say that the color of the ash is an indication of the
temperature of the fire. The hotter it gets, the more the soil is ir·
reversibly burned into a white acid powder. When you plant you
are supposed to avoid these hot spots, because nothing will grow
there. I can believe this. When it rains the water collects on the
surface in black and red slime, but underneath it is dry white ash.
At times it seems like my mind has burned into dry white ash.
24 Pauline Mortensen

Some people, like my mother, still see God in nature, in a
beautiful sunset, a quiet pond, a blade of grass. I get sick of that.
My mother, who has raised nine children, fully expects, in the next
life, to raise the one that died. Aher fifty years she still puts flowers
on the grave in anticipation of the resurrection.
But this is nature too, the great Mother Nature, this landscape
that has been logged of life, mangled by dozers so that roots and
trunks lie piled and partially burned together. Where is God in
all of this? Can these people find God in a piece of charcoal? Do
we have to bring him into the discussion?
I remember a story from one of my college classes that does
this. In Losing Battles, set in the middle of the Depression, in the
middle of poverty, Eudora Welty has Jack Renfro sing "Bringing
in the Sheaves" as he treads home with wife and family.
Symbolically, I am told, he is a soft-bodied chimney swift who
nestles down in tne bosom of his family, hundreds of them together
in the sooted walls of their chimney. Now that is optimism. But
pure optimism will never be avant-garde again, so they say. Eudora
Welty thinks God is alive and well and living in a chimney. I think
God sits on the tree line at sunset and stirs our optimistic
imaginations.
Mother begins to sing now, now that there is space for hearing.
"Said the thousand-legged worm/As he gave a little squirm:• How
many times have I heard that? She used to rock me to sleep with
that worm. "Hasn't anybody seen a leg of mine?" Her voice is dry
and cracked. "If it hasn't been found/I'll just have to hop arounc:IOn
the other nine hundred ninety-nine."
The rain begins to stop. We sing another one. "Detour/There's
a muddy road ahead." This was always our traveling song, passed
around just before the cookies. "Detour/Paid no mind to what was
said/Detour:· We'll never make Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour.
"Should have read that detour sign:·
She guesses it's time we went back to work. We crawl out head
first into the warm light drizzle. We straighten ourselves after our
confined condition. I take off my rubber raincoat and massage my
lower back. The clouds are breaking up and moving away with
perceptible speed; the earth is mottled with shade. But even in
this shaded drizzle, the sun begins to warm my back, and already
there is steam rising from wet logs.
On the fire trail above us is my brother and the bedraggled crew.
They have come after us. Compared to them, we are relatively dry.
Mother yells something about not having enough sense to come
25 Pauline Mortensen

in out of the rain, but they are not laughing. We are all going home
before they catch pneumonia. Mother and I pretend we are ready
to go back to work, but secretly we are glad to quit for the day.
On the horizon the standing trees flash tentatively with light as
wreathing clouds dismember. The men trail off down the muddied
slope, and Mother and I follow, winding around logs and roots like
optimistic centipedes. Our boots slide in the ashen mud, but we
keep our balance and slosh down to the pickup on our feet.

26 Pauline Mortensen

------------------

Peggy Shumaker

The Waitress's Kid
Before you left for the Lucky Strike
I ironed your outfit - straight black
indestructible skirt, low-cut ruffles
on the K-Mart blouse. I hated
the chore as you must have the job toting beer to the leagues, Al Ball's
Chevron, Addressograph-Multigraph.
Once, I made you late. You came
when I called, and held me,
fought for me against some pure
and adolescent pain. Most nights
we couldn't afford it.
You'd bring home the best
of a bad lot to dance till they fell,
the crashing bodies payment
against some larger debt.
I'd yel I, then cry most school nights
till exhaustion tucked you. in.
But one night my anger rose past
double-edged blades in the back bathroom,
and I uncapped the little white tube
free from the Avon lady, Furious Passion,
my color, not yours, and wrote in virgin lipstick
three words on the mirror, then opened the window
and left. You held your lipstick smack
against your mouth, one wide pull
in each direction. You'd smear your lips
against each other, then kiss
27

a square of toilet paper, leaving always
surprised, a mouth. Under the oleanders
behind the public pool I waited
for you to miss me. I knew you would yell

J know you can hear me just like you used to
when I was little and you said stay
within hollering distance or else, and you did
yell / know you can
hear me, but I heard in your voice how much
you did not know. When you left, desperate,
to wake up my friends, I walked home up the arroyo,
sure the punishment would be swift.

28 Peggy Shumaker

The Cousin on Holiday
Lise-marie spread boysenberry
preserves on my knees and licked
them. She said she must
till the butterscotch tab
between my back teeth
disappeared completely.
But the parents drove home
a day early from Boston.
Of course, they sacked
poor Lise-m arie
immediately. Papa drew me
off her lap, smoothed my smeared
skirt, then shoved me
into the bath. There was great shouting,
breaking jars, and I longed
to soothe Lise-marie with the tips
of my braids.
Voluntarily, I signed myself in.
The matron allows me
run of the grounds, if only
I'll keep my smock
buttoned. It's coarse,
Lise-marie, and gray, with the poorest
excuse for sleeves. At dusk
I lower a long-handled
dipper into the radium springs.
I empty it in my lap.
Along the path, forced water
splays upward in a silver cone.
They expect snow soon.
No one mentions
my going home.

29 Peggy Shumaker _________________

_

Edward C. Lynskey

Hopital Albert Schweitzer
1
Fulgent moon springs the bocors, the island
witch doctors masquerading in the negro streets
as sapphire wasps whose painterly wings tinge
pestilence in the village with an uncanny voodoo.
Inside their mud huts, tar babies teethe on sticky sorghum,
mothers squat by dung fires to cook rice and red
beans, curse the judas priests promising outright
to heal all the while bleeding you turnip poor.

2
Portered by litter, the lame can cross the quag
God gave C,ain: they assemble to wait out
front the H~pital, pipesmoking sinsemilla
beneath the giant mapou tree. A lightfoot child climbs
far up chalky and spraddled limbs. She
melds candle snubs facing the bark; warm wax
drips down onto the footway like fallen notes,
calling out benevolent ghosts on the inside.

3
The diesel generator turns on, keeping the bulbs
hung in the morning wards alive: here summer's
jaundice festers and dies. The sick sleep
on biafran cots and stumble into dreams: ice water
flumes down the mountains in deep aqueducts,
pungent night orchids seep through the shut louvers.
Baby-green iguanas scurry along volcanic ledges
where a child pelts them with stones that don't break.

30

The Night Light
Fresh breezes in the patchy piedmont dark stir
the cedar spires; the switches scratch the tin roof
like the straw whisks from the mo witch on
broom swooping indoors to fetch all souls.
The youngest girl fills her father's consumptive lungs;
his returning breath bellows in dank wreaths around
her throat, tight as pythons coiled around the sleeping
mongoose. She presses styptic spider webs against
his bleeding bedsores, pours more coal oil on the ingle
sputtering to animate his dim room where electricity
isn't permitted. When slow tobacco fails its office,
she unstoppers his sniffing salts to spell his bad
dreams and broken sleep. The Milky Way becomes a
cowpath
she can drift down with her father, pleasuring to see
him mend fence, mow vetch. Back then he'd been quick
to laugh how he'd wind up in Hell pumping thunder,

by Jezebel, at three cents a clap. She hears his rasping
cough, steps lightly into his room carrying
a coal lamp. She leans over the open mouth, softly
blows out the wick of his tongue; the room goes dark.

31 Edward C. Lynskey ________________

_

Kathleen Atkins

Enisled
It's a test if you can stand apart
from fuss and foam where shells are dropped - so many
empty cases, transitive intentions littering the strand.
I come as others sometime come, to see the forms
of execution force performs on what it tosses out,
its own. On this beach the live, the lost are gone
from slick familiar movement they most likely liked
if they had sense and no continuing ambivalence
but since so many meetings end like these,
grit is no doubt general in the gills. The flounder
we throw back is shocked beyond perfection, even if
it lives, now hybrid with the feat of living on the land.
Thus we cover our own bones with towels, with sand
and granite, silken linings, shrouds, depending on the
weather,
hoping for what seems unlikely all place else; more of
this or better.

32

Dennis Schmitz

The Text
A five-day rain & our 95 yr old cellar
clay exfoliates
clods faster than the pump,
autodidact, can catch the way
the story changed the pump's too-literal thirst
is to pucker dry the dirt walls;
its method is to thread hose into the dark
second meaning its hose's kin,
the roots, already know
as they surrender to text,
to interrupting small rocks,
changing course & changing course to come
out in this version of root-heaven,
this not-quite liquid dark
so derived' the roots
wash phosphorescent in currents
the pump stirs.
I listen like one already wet
to the raining against what's man-madP.,
against roofs, the ping off windows catch the talk of a bad listener,
not the conversation of equals.

33

Frontier
Sizing weeps through
the SP depot mural,
weeps through the wagons & the pioneers
more red-faced from the high fanlight sun
toward which a trapped
real bird beats, screaming
one accurate note against the depot noise,
its wings blurring
with the effort of staying
outside the picture.
Ignoring bird & mural both,
a sweaty woman with a baby
urges a boy to pull
harder at the stuck men's room door
which squeals as it opens
a rectangular cut of painted prairie
grass: the contemporary
renovator's renege or a joke one kneeling pioneer
seems to examine as he plucks
wheatheads or a fugitive
strawflower solitary in the crossed stems.
He won't show the flower to the others,
the artist seems to say as he too keeps focus
on the mural's archaic purity,
the wide women
the mix of men '& draft animals equals in an eden where art leaves them.
34 DennisSchmitz __________________

_

Umberto Saba

Cinders
Cinders
of dead things, of forgotten ills,
of ineffable contacts, of still
desires bright
flames from you envelope me
even while, from care to care, I near the brink
of sleep;
and to sleep,
with those bonds, impassioned and tender,
that bind a child and mother, and to you, cinders,
I yield.
The anguish
ambush at the pass - I disarm it Like
a blest one on the path to paradise,
I climb a staircase, pause by a gate
at which I rang in other times. Time
~uddenly has collapsed.
I feel myself,
with garments and soul of long before,
in a splendor of lightning; a joy
descends on my heart in a whirl
like the end.
But I make no cry.
Mute,
I leave the shadows for the vast imperium.
Translatedfrom the Italian by
Michael L Johnson

35

Rally Kent

The Bluebird
The arrow clutched the purse in his throat,
the bluebird pinwheeled through slush and bushes.
"Another boy shot it!" I wanted to yell.
I dropped my bow and chased after.
Dying, he was so much smaller, tangled up in vines,
juvenile beak wide for food. Except
it was air he craved - through his neck
the arrow plunged, jammed across the gullet ...
It made me sick, I had to run, had to run back again,
scared and furious with tears, each time I touched him
he jerked and flapped, tearing his feathers apart.
So I worked the arrow loose and lifted it free
of the prickers, the bluebird dangling dead, I knew,
when he lunged and struck my face, wings
and arrow rose, the contraption circled, flew!
Then fell. I gathered him from the mud
and made my hands a jar from which an arrow poked
and his blue head flamed. In his eye my own head
fit like a seed which must crack and open.
I closed my eyes and killed him.
I was eight or nine that spring. It was the year
the new boy brought from Texas an unimagined
thing: a bright, green bow made, he swore, of glass!
We watched him string it and turn toward
the windows - in rapid fire arch
one invisible arrow after another
out into the streets, over the houses and clouds.

36

The teacher made him unstrlng It; then share.
It came to my desk like a glazed wave
from a petrified sea - I stroked and turned It oh green edge! That pane held not to the wide
and window-loving world, but on end where
within the glass we regard the harder task
than seeing through: to push back the horizon
where sun and stars cannot go, and whatever
we think ends In a tiny bird, a blue spark
blown where nothing merges again with nothing.

37 RoUyKent __________________

_

Allan Peterson

Preparing For Loons
From the extensive unexplained
mortality of Loons last Summer
here's a skull now cleancooked
under weather to cushionless bone
I stare at its convexities each fossa
inhabit the delicate cloisters of sinus
note which parts cleft or sutured notched
for the passage of nerves through Loonpate
Study access to the brain bulb
where lay under the arachnoid codes
to the marsh nest sequence tables
of constrictions for Loonish vocals
follow tuberosities prepared to interlock
with cradles for spine cord
Fish scissors the unsheathed beakbone
gives a slight gape as if speaking goofily
the rami shrunk to tiny processes
where ligaments restrained the mandible
the head is six parts beak and cheekless
1 scan the fendered orbits of matte calcium
in symmetry & studwork so when I see them sinking
in snap black/white no ripples I will recall
the airless bones and look right through thinking
with my sharp face flying after fishes

38

K. B. Hwang

"Two Chairs."
Mezzotint, 12" x 13 112''

39

Benjamin Goluboff

Faculties
I was twenty-three the first time I was shaved by a barber. All
through college I was one of those guys who persisted in wearing
a beard that just wasn't going to make it. Photographs from that
time make me look like a plainclothes Hasid. It wasn't until my
first year of teaching that I sat, as I had seen my father sit when
I was a little kid, reclined in a mirrored room, and had another
man take off my beard.
The school I work at is a venerable old money outfit Such places
always keep some little vernacular corner amid their grander
precincts. Under the stairs or behind the gym there will always be
an outpost like Bob's barbershop: a clearing house for gossip and
speculation, a treasury of school folklore. The walls of the shop
are decked with photographs, tattered glimpses of a long story.
There is one of Bob grinning out among the half-naked ranks of
last year's swimming team. The boys' expressions are comically
dour; they wear identically V-pointed crew ruts. There is another
one, framed and beginning to yellow, where Bob stands beside
a triumphantly returned alumnus, then freshman senator. The man
tousles Bob's hair. There are yearbook pages and sports clippings
around the place. And on the little ledge by the mirror, just below
the image of yourself throned and bibbed, is a picture of Bob's
daughters. Now they are both grown - gone from campus flirts
to paralegals in the town. In the picture they are little girls with
serious expressions, hanging from parallel rings in the gym.
Having spent the last two decades pruning diplomats' children,
Bob wields an elaborate bedside manner. He sits me down,
removes my glasses and tells me that I must be the young man
that Gleason was so excited about. It's still hard for me to imagine
the head of our Math Department, a sparsely-spoken ascetic type,
as being very excited about anything. But I wanted to play along.
"He likes multiple choice problems. I guess hiring me came
down to something like that:• .
This didn't go over. Bob just looked at my stubble and said, "I
suppose we'll want to do something about that:' He washed his
40

...

hands, pushed a button on a silver machine, and spread warm
lather across my face. As Bob began to work his blade across the
strop, I eased back in the chair, content that I was going to get
the whole show. He made a few strokes about my chin and lips,
then started telling me about my predecessor in the job. I'd never
met the guy; neither had anyone explained why he'd packed up
his slide rule and stolen away.
"Lovely people, the Stimpsons. Van and Kathy. Great teacher,
all the kids say. And she was supposed to be making a tidy salary
at a brokerage house in New York:'
"Why did they leave?"
"It was because of their kid:'
For a moment it seemed as if this settled it. Bob put down his
razor and suddenly, at the touch of a pedal, he leaned me back
to an angle reminiscent of the dentist's chair. My feet were just
above the level of my head. I felt a vertiginous stirring of panic
as I watched the ceiling and heard Bob move across the shop.
"Their kid?"
He came back and placed a steaming towel on my face. It was
corded up in a wet bundle and wrapped so that only my nose came
through. When I opened my eyes,I just saw a white haze.The heat
stung my pupils.
"They called the kid Justin. He was only four when they left.
Cute as the devil. Van used to bring him in here to me. Let me
tell you he was quite a handful in the chair. Used to just howl when
I got started:'
It was getting hard to concentrate on Bob's story. I felt my breath
coming shallow through the heat of the towel - like breathing
in the blast from an oven when you open the door to look in. The
razor's questioning edge made its way cold across my throat. I
drummed my fingers on the arms of the chair.
,
"One day the kid went in for his first vaccinations - measles,
polio, you know. They say it happens in one case out of a thousand.
Justin reacted the wrong way to the serum. Came down with the
measles while the Stimpson's were driving to the Vineyard. They
brought the fever down in a week, but by then the kid had gone
deaf, just stone deaf. Van's hair went grey inside a month. Kathy
started to look like an old woman. They went back out west to
put the kid in a special school. They brought him in here once
before they left. He was just as good and polite in the chair as if
he was grown up. No crying or squirming like he used to. Couldn't
hear the sound of the scissors, you see. That was what always
41 Ber!}amin Golubo{f

scared him. Just sat there like a perfect gentleman. Deaf as a stone.
I felt terrible, terrible."
Bob said all this in bits as he moved the steel along my throat.
Canted backwards in the sweltering towel, I felt dizzy and sick. The
muscles in my legs were clenched for running, and my hands
clamped the arms of the chair. For a moment the thought came
crazily to me that this had all been planned as an elaborate hazing.
You take the new guy, suffocate him in a hot towel and tell him
a horror story at knifepoint. I imagined the rest of the faculty
listening outside the d0or, swallowing their laughter until Bob let
them in to slap me on the back. As it turned out, he only tilted
me up, removed the towel, and sent me off to my morning class
with a single blemish of styptic pencil by my Adam's apple.
Justin's story stayed in my head that fall. It stopped me silent
as I stood before my classes; sometimes it came to me at night
in my little room. And it was not a room where you wanted to
be thinking this sort of thing. As a new guy, I had been given pretty
shabby digs. The homes of the higher-ups are ritzy: framed art,
coffee table literature, and heirloom furniture. Their windows open
onto green campus prospects; they have fieldstone fireplaces or
Franklin stoves tucked under the eaves. I just had two narrow
rooms on the second floor of a large boys' dormitory. My windows
looked out upon a parking lot and tennis c.ourts. The paint was
old and the walls were bare. The last guy who lived there was a
gym teacher, now moved on to a quieter set of rooms above the
field house.
The place he'd abandoned was right in Indian country. Pipes
from the john crossed my ceiling with rust scabbing their paint.
They whooshed and clonked all night. The kid in the room next
to me played L.A. hardcore punk; the kids upstairs played a Van
Halen single again and again all fall. Outside my door the hallway
rumbled with sneakers and adolescent flyting. Basketballs bounced
and typewriters pattered. I got so I could distinguish the sound
a frisbee made when it brushed the corridor wall in its flight.
It was a game we played during the study hours. Two or three
of them would have a bit of silent catch outside my door until I'd
hear the disk and chase them back to their rooms. On the whole,
I liked being there. After the way I'd lived at college, the bustle
of the house seemed refreshing. I was never very strict with the
kids. I took my authority lightly, at least when none of the real
authorities was looking.
st
One evening during study hour - it was still back in the fir
42 BeryaminGolu.bof{

September of my enlistment - I sat at my desk going over a batch
of quizzes. The house was quiet; I had just broken up a game of
handball in the can and watched the players sign out for the library. My window was open, and through it I thought I heard a
small calm voice call my name. I rubbed my eyes, wondered, and
then started on another quiz. "Mr. Greenberg;· came the voice
again, still calm but edged with insistence this time. I went to the
window, stuck my head out, and saw Van Dyke, the Dean of
Students, standing on the grass one flight down.
Our Dean is a dapper little man given to epigram and to a
deprecatory style of humor. We had already clashed once about
my wearing sneakers to teach. ("Greenberg, if you'll put your feet
up on the desk, maybe we can get a yearbook photographer in
here to preserve those things for posterity:') Van Dyke was in the
habit of walking around the houses during study hour to see that
all was serene. He stood below me on the lawn, his demure little
terrier in tow, and said without a glimmer of his usual humor, "Mr.
Greenberg, one of your young men has been urinating out the
window:•
For a moment I thought of saying, "Let's be thankful he at least
opened it first:' Instead, I managed a straight face and said, ''I'll
be right down:·
Van Dyke, his dog and I reached the door of the offender together. I knocked, and a joke-falsetto voice answered, "Who's
there?" We walked in and found the two boys - Adam Berger and
Ben Patton - perfectly strung out with laughter on their beds.
Van Dyke crossed the room, took a couple of sweatshirts off the
armchair and sat down. The terrier followed and settled between
his feet. The kids laughed themselves out; the Dean and the dog
were silent. Apparently I was on.
When I asked which of them had done it, Berger volunteered.
Then, invention all tapped, I fell into the formula and asked if he
usually did this at home. I felt Van Dyke relax; the formula was
probably what he had been waiting for.
"Rarely, Steve. We live too high up;' Adam came back.
"Don't be funny Adam. Not when I've trucked all the way down
here to sit on your verandah and chat. It can't be more than ten
feet down the hall to the bathroom. It wouldn't have been such
a journey. You know we have certain standards here of courtesy,
of adult behavior, of consideration for the other members of the
community .... " On and on in this vein, sounding, I thought with
an inward wince, like every other high school teacher that ever put
43 Benjamin Golubof{

chalk to board. Finally, I suggested that Adam apologize to the
Dean. He complied; Van Dyke and I left.
Outside the dorm he said, "You don't quite sound oonvincing
when you take the strong tone, but you said all the right things.
A little like Jeanette MacDonald reading Nelson Eddy's lines. I did
like the bit about the verandah, though. Goodnight, Greenberg:·
When I went back in the house, Adam was crouching on the
stairs. He stood up, straddled the banister and said, "I don't know
what he's getting all worked up about. That dog of his has peed
in every bush around here:·
,,r
"Travel, Adam. Read a book. Make the lessons:·
"Did you have to say 'Do you do this at home?' We've come to
expect more originality from you'
''I'll be as original as the situation merits, thank you. Now take

off'
"Don't you want to come bounce a quarter off my bed, or check
the shine on my boots?"
"G o.,,
He dismounted the banister and went.
I knew a little more about Adam than about most of my charges.
Back when all the kids first moved in, I had assisted in a Berger
family drama. Adam and his parents had driven up from.
Manhattan in a Cadillac as pure and shiny as a piece of wax fruit.
Somewhere on the campus, one of its tires had gone flat, and it
came limping up to the house. Mr. Berger, a realtor in tennis
clothes, was searching for the jack under Adam's suitcases when
I came down to meet and greet. Mrs. Berger had already
established herself in the common room. She was of a noticeably
later vintage than her husband, and she had a petulant sort of good
looks. She sat by the fireplace in a pastel jumpsuit which matched,
I noticed, the shade of her fingernails.
By the time Adam's bags were upstairs, Mr. Berger had discovered that the jack was nowhere to be found. "Company car:· he
explained as I went off to borrow tools. Eventually we got it boosted
up on a little foreign car jack - looking ludicrously vulnerable.
But the joke had begun to crawl too far. None of the sockets on
the four-way wrench I'd scrounged fit the Cadillac's lugs. Mr. Berger
slapped his brow - suddenly vaudeville in his tennis duds - and
said, "Oh my God, I forgot:' It turned out that the beast was fitted
with coded lugs and needed a coded wrench to remove them. This
way you oould take it slumming arld not wony about your hubcaps.
"We paid extra for this," Berger muttered He kicked a tire, and
44 Benjamin Golubo{f

the car swayed queasily on the little jack. The drama went on well
into the afternoon. Berger called the Auto Club and made their
day with his story. He tried Cadillac dealerships in three states. He
raised no one: it was Sunday. Adam had gone off and lured a
squadron of girls into a volleyball game. Mrs. Berger fumed over
a copy of Sidney Sheldon, saying only that she didn't want to hear
about it. The father sweated and cursed.
Finally, I borrowed a car and put them on a slow-boat local back
to New York. Mr. Berger gave me a crisp twenty dollar bill, as he
put it, for my time. His wife didn't say much to either of us. The
Cadillac they left, hobbled and garish, on my doorstep until some
minion from Berger's office could come up with the magic wrench.
Their goodbyes to Adam had been hurried and it occurred to me,
as I drove home from the station, that neither of them had gone
upstairs to see their son's room.
That night Adam stopped outside my door - he was a copperskinned boy with eyelashes you'd notice - and made a little
apology.
''I'm sorry you had to go through all that. There are always
hassles with them:· I was grateful for his saying this, more grateful
than for the bill his father had slipped me. The kid had a sort of
innate courtesy that I would come to value as the semester moved
along. I worried now that things would be tense between us after
my taking "the strong tone" with him for Van Dyke.
Apparently not, though. The evening after the Dean's and my
balcony scene, Adam came into my room and sat down to study.
I smiled up at him from my papers, and we set to work. After about
ten minutes he came over and sat on my desk.
"Do you have a girlfriend, Steve?"
•
"Yeah, she's hiding in the closet. Don't spread it around:'
"No, seriously:·
"No I don't:·
"But you have?"
"I seem to dimly remember having had one once. That was back
on the farm in Kansas.Before the big storm that brought me here:·
"Was she good looking?"
"I thought so:·
"Did you screw her?"
"What are you, taking a poll?
"Did you?"
"Adam, there's a reason why we call this time study hour. We
can play Truth or Dare later:·
45 Beryamtn Golubo{f

This settled him for a moment, and he went back to his
textbook. I remember thinking that he looked very much like a
child, sitting there in my overstuffed armchair. His hair fell into
his eyes, and his shoes - pricey track shoes - were untied. But
he was all right, this kid. There was definitely a person in there.
He could take the occasional piss out the window, and it would
be all right with me.
"I've got a girlfriend now.'' Clearly Adam was not here to study.
"Splendid. Give me her address, and I'll send a horseshoe of
flowers.''
"Don't you want to know who it is?"
"Do I?"
"It's Melissa Wallace. She's in your geometry section."
I knew her. An indifferent student, a looker of sorts, and one
of those girls trying her best to take on the look of middle-aged
ennui. I had had to reprimand her once for reading the Laura
Ashley catalogue behind her looseleaf in class.
"She's very nice, Adam. I'm pleased for you.''
"Thank you;· he said. It was as if he'd chiselled her out of stone
and was pulling back the sheet to let me compliment his work.
"We haven't done anything yet. Just sort of messed around. That's
what I wanted to talk to you about.''
Oh Lord, I thought, not this. Haven't you had slide shows in
school? Didn't Mr. Company Car sit you down and draw the
pictures in the sand? But Adam's concerns were more practical
than academic. He came right to the point
"You see, we haven't got a place. The Gleasons supervise her
dorm, and I bet they only do it on holidays. Mrs. Gleason makes
them keep their doors open during study hour. Mel says she's
always checking around their rooms. They can't even bring in pizza,
let alone me.''
"So you'd like me to talk with Mrs. Gleason, explain that she
was young once too, and get her to fluff up the pillows for you
guys?"
•
"Actually, I don't think she ever was young once.''
"So where do I fit into the strategy?"
"You know.''
"I think I do, but let's spell it out.''
There was a pause. He was beginning to realize that I wouldn't
tumble.
'Just let us in here."
"'Come on, Adam. You know I can't do that"
46 Beryamin Goluboff

"Why not? We'd be discreet:'
"This isn't a good idea, Adam:·
"There's the free hour after sports. Nobody's around then:·
"No:·
"Sunday morning after chapel. How about that?"
'Tm serious. No:·
"We're serious too. Give us a little credit:'
"I think we should talk about something else now. For example,
how are you coming ·with your homework?"
He stood up, eyes flashing, and drop-kicked his textbook across
the room. I had never seen him angry before. "Shit, Steve. You
know you're getting to be just like the rest of them. Pretty soon
you'll be wearing the goddamned school tie to bed. Youjust can't
wait to be one of those stiff old guys, sitting around the faculty
table and talking about their storm windows. Don't worry, Mr.
Greenberg. You're going to be a pillar of the community:·
All I could manage was, "What do you know about it, Adam?"
"I know you, and I'm getting to know this place:·
It was getting late and there were still another ten quizzes to
do. "If you know so much, why'd you come to me? There's got
to be a dozen places on these historic acres where you can have
all the privacy you want. I'm tired, and I don't want to have this
conversation any more. Take a hike:·
He left without another word.
For the next few days, we passed each other silently. He seemed
to enjoy playing ships in the night, as if his silence advertised the
righteousness of his position. I didn't really regret the line I'd taken,
but his reserve wounded me. It seemed unfair that he had to take
it so hard.
Our argument had been on a Tuesday; by Friday night, the time
of the weekly faculty get-together, Adam still wasn't talking. The
Gleasons' house was the field for that night's exercises. I got there
around nine. It was the second of October, but there was a slick
scent of air conditioning in the rooms. Outside it was perfect
shirtsleeves weather; inside, with twenty of us assaulting the hors
d'oeuvres, it must have started to get warm. Mrs. Gleason loaded
me up with ginger ale and little sandwiches, planted me on the
upholstery, and asked me how I was getting along. She was being
very kind - kidding me about what a coup it was to entertain
a single man for a change, supplying tips about the laundries in
town, the cheap restaurants, the acceptable bars - but all I kept
t_hinking about was her and Gleason only doing it on holidays.
4 7 BeryaminGoluboff

She left me to her husband when a cry of distress went up from
the kitchen. One of the English teachers was mixing a drink in
the blender, and shards of ice had got loose, peppering the walls
with a clatter. Gleason took me up with his usual economy.
"Classes going well?"
"On the whole. Still a little stage fright, and some of them still
don't want to take me seriously:·
He chewed on this for a while, looking me dead in the eyes. The
sounds of the party drifted between us. Then, as if bringing it out
of some long and inward deliberation, he said, "Don't be afraid
to use the blackboard:'
"Thank you. I'll keep that in mind:'
"Help yourself to something else to drink:' Then, his oracle delivered, he followed his wife to the kitchen.
I went and poured myself some bourbon. I had never been an
accomplished drinker, but I'd begun to feel that I'd be willing to
learn. I settled back on the wall, between two fake Audubons, and
took the lay of the land. A couple of History people were talking
heatedly about football. A knot of faculty wives was rehashing the
story of a kid expelled last spring for plagiarism. The Gleasons'
expensive stereo was silent. Van Dyke was not in evidence. No one,
I was thinking, mentioned storm windows.
When I'd made it conscientiously through the better part of the
bourbon, Stephanie Grier came up to my outpost on the wall. She
was the other new recruit that year, an English teacher bound in
a few years for divinity school.
•
"Are you having a good time, Steve?"
"You know me, the life of the party. I'm just sitting back here
deciding which lampshade l want to wear when the dancing startS:'
She laughed, "Good for you:·
Mrs. Gleason glided up, took my glass and brought it back filled
with scotch. I couldn't see how it tasted different than the bourbon.
Stephanie started telling me about her plans for some weekend
in New Yorkwhen the guy from the blender fracas homed in on us.
"Evening, kids. Enjoying the party? Say, Steve, I understand your
kids aren't using the bathrooms anymore. Taken to the great
outdoors instead:'
"That's right, Tom. Think of what it will save in wear and tear
on the pipes:·
Stephanie was looking puzzled; Tom filled her in. He didn't seem
that drunk to me, but he was talking fast and loud. There was a
line of sweat along his upper lip
48 Benjamin Goluboff

"One of Greenberg's kids answered nature's call out of his
window when Van Dyke was walking his dog underneath. Really
Steve, you have all the fun. I wish I could have been there. You
know, there's got to be a word for it." He pretended to hunt for
one, but this was plainly rehearsed. "I've got it - mictofenestration' Van Dyke caught your boy in the act of mictofenestration'' He gave a loud laugh at his own cleverness and
slipped an arm around Stephanie's waist. "How do you like that,
Steph?"
•
Searching for something to cover this awkwardness, I found
myself apologizing for Adam. "He's really an all right kid. He's
pretty articulate, and he has a sense of humor:·
"Don't worry, Steve. I don't think anyone's going to argue that
he hasn't got that:' But he had already closed the subject. Now,
with a look of oily sincerity, he was leading Stephanie eN,Jay.
I went
back to the bar, dispatched another scotch, and thought about how
to make my exit. Mrs. Gleason was presiding over a loud group
of Science teachers around the sofa. "So soon?" she said when
I told her I was off. I tried to say something funny about answering
.the siren song of geometry" homework, but it came out a little
muddled. She walked me to the door and sent me off - a little
unsteadily now - into the fall night It felt good to be outdoors.
The moon was up, and the air was fragrant of the season's turn.
I took the long way home.
Back in my room the assignments were waiting. I sat down,
squinted at the first one, and promptly fell asleep with my head
on the page. I couldn't have been out very long - it felt like the
length of a blink - when I woke to hear someone clearing his
throat Van Dyke stood in the doorway.
"Good Lord, Greenberg. You look like a Norman Rockwell
illustration about burning the midnight oit:'
I jumped in my chair. As the adrenalin began to subside I
realized, with a funny clarity, that I was thoroughly drunk.
"Sorry;' I said, apologizing for nothing very specific.
"Listen, there's a problem. Adam Berger, our friend from the
other night, seems to be missing.
"I don't understand:'
"He signed out with everyone else for the library at eight I just
checked. I'm sure you sa.wto that before you \\ent to the Gleason's."
I wasn't too clear about eight o'clock just then, but said, "Right:'
"His father phoned a little before nine. It doesn't matter how
clearly we spell it out, they always call during study hours. Got
49 BeryaminGolubof{

me at home when no one answered here. He said it was urgent,
so I called the library. Mrs. Hounsley couldn't find him. She said
that knowing looks were exchanged when she asked. I just checked
his room:·
"So do we go look for him or wait to see if he turns up at curfew?
It's twenty after ten now:•
"Thank you, I know what time it is. It's an embarrassment when
something like this happens. You'd better hunt about:·
"How does one go about doing this?"
'There are two classic routes: the strip in town or the woods.
What do you think is the nature of the case?"
"Woods," I said and then thought I shouldn't have seemed so
positive.
But Van Dyke just said, "Off you go. Call when you find him:•
I took my passkey and rummaged through a couple of kids'
rooms until I found a flashlight Then I started out acrossthe green,
by the austere buildings in the drunken moonlight.
You cross the picture-postcard bit of the campus downhill to get
to the road. Across the street is the gym and the football field with
its shadowed bleachers. Beyond this are the track and the lacrosse
field. Then you climb again, through a narrow stand of pines, to
a couple of practice fields laid out in the woods. After that it's just
more pines. I hoped I wouldn't have to go that far tonight.
Out in the air I hoped I'd feel the liquor less.But as I hiked along
there was no shaking what would have been in other circumstances
a very pleasant buzz. The grass took my steps softly. A little wind
came up. The moon let me turn off the flashlight. Crickets, the
last of the season, chattered in chorus. Veined with their song, the
night seemed to pulse at rest like a dreaming heart. It was simply
a lovely night to be a boy and girl in the woods.
A skein of melancholy began to unravel here. The scene was
miscast. Why should Adam get to be the one romancing in the
moonlight while I was the poor schmuck coming to blow the
whistle? There in the fields that hid my quarry I felt a pang of loss.
It was like waking up to realize you've ended a dream that daytime
memory can't recapture. What was lost I couldn't have precisely
said, but out there with my flashlight and my debts to the company
store, I knew that something was gone. There weren't going to be
any trysts in the autumn woods for me.
Another reflection brought me to a halt. What would I see if
I found them, and wouldn't I rather not see it? I suddenly had a
vision of Adam, rapt in his discovery, ass bare to the moon, while
50 BeryaminGolubof{

I crashed in on him. This would be too much. I stood there and
made a drunken review of my options. I could press on and see
what had to be seen. I could just sit down where I was, wait till
eleven thirty, then tell Van Dyke I'd come up empty. I could even
turn around now, tell the Dean to find another bloodhound, and
get on a train back to the private sector.
It was probably just simple momentum that moved me along.
I turned the flashlight back on and searched around the gym and
track. Then I climbed into the first pines. They were thickly dark
after the moonlight in the open I made my footsteps heavy and
abrupt Adam could have avoided me in here easily if he were slick
The crickets were louder in the woods, and they could cover the
sound of movement. I climbed fast through the pines and came
out on the little plain where the practice fields are.
End to end they run, two hundred yards of pampered velvet
grass. They're closed by the woods all around. Between them is
a rise planted with oaks and a commemorative stone. You can't
see one field if you're standing in the other. I climbed the rise and
took a drink from the water fountain there. My watch said ten of
eleven, and I wondered if Adam and Melissa mightn't have called
it a night by now. Maybe they'd already crept back to their dorms
while I had been sleuthing arourid in the woods. Maybe they'd gone
off into the far pines where I could hunt till morning and not find
a thing. But it was here that, in a fine anticlimax, the thing ended.
I went down into the far field and yelled his name. With a
promptness that startled me, a voice came back from the edge
of the woods, "Coming, Mother:· Two figures emerged into the
moonlight and headed toward me. They came quickly, Adam
ahead of Mel. She looked dull and angry. They were unrumpled;
they held no hands. I could see that nothing had happened. Adam,
if anything, seemed happy to see me.
"What are you doing out so late, Steve? You know I worry that
you're not getting enough rest:' He wagged his finger at me.
I didn't say anything, just pointed the way home with my
flashlight. We headed off, the three of us, back to the campus.
Then, as we were looking for the trail back into the pines, a loud
hissing sound came up behind us. We all turned around. The
sprinkler system, timed for this hour, had opened up on the fields.
Tall jets of spray, luminous in the moonlight, wavered across the
grass and probed the night sky. There were dozens of them all
down the length of the field.
"It's beautiful;' said Adam.
S 1 BeryaminGoluboff

agreed.
Melissa
was
silenl
1
"Steve \\Ould you give me a minute before you take us
downto~ and book us?"
.
I knew what he was thinking. "~ure ~dam Go ahead:'
He took off running. When he first hit the spray, he let out a
whoop. He zoomed to the far end and start:<1 back, tu~bling and
rollingand throwing cartwheels through the Jets. As he circled away
from us again, I heard him calling out above the sound of the water, "I Iove't!"
1
Melissa watched him coolly. "Do you want to go too?" I asked.
"No thank you, Mr.Greenberg:· She sat do.vn on the grass while
Adam made one last ~p
through the fountains. I honest to God
felt a throb rising in my throat as I watched him playing. I thought
again of giving up the game, of leaving them out in the fields and
telling some story to Van Dyke. It wouldn't exactly be the
handsome thing to do, but at least it would feel right. But I just
stood there and waited. Adam came back to us smiling, his clothes
soaked and his hair plastered in his eyes. We climbed back down
through the woods, Adam's sneakers squishing in the darkness.
The next day I ran into him when I went to return my tray after
lunch. He was back in the kitchen wearing a white apron and one
of those paper hats you see in hamburger joints. I watched as he
wheeled a rack of trays over to the garbage cans. This is what
happens at our school when you cross the line.
"Howyou doing, Steve. Do you think you could put in a good
\VOrd for me with the warden?"
"No problem'
He started dumping stuff into the cans. I lingered for a moment,
fighting off an impulse to apologize.
"It didn't happen with Melissa, you know:·
"I got that impression."
"She is a very stiff young woman."
"I got that one too."
The kitchen supervisor came in, but turned around again when
he saw it was me.
Adam hadn't stopped clearing the trays. We were quiet a little,
an<.tthen I asked, ..What was it that your father was calling about
anywa.;r
b He _lau~
""W~•~ that great timing? It was just that he's
reaking up with Jube; I didn't put it together for a minute. Then
1
~Oh.
Mr. ~ger's old lady in the jumpsuit
..
Adam. Chnst. Do you mean they're getting divorced?
52 ~ Oolubott

He only smiled the broader. "Shall I get you a Kleenex, Steve?
You look all broken up. Don't worry. They weren't married. She
was just living with him after he stopped with my mother. She's
one of a series really. He sounded pretty bad on the phone - bad
enough to overlook our field trip last night But he always pisses
and moans for a while. Then he makes out fine."
"I see. But listen, I'm sorry the news had to come to you the
way it did:' The apology had finally escaped me.
"I think you're taking this too seriously, Steve. We're all going
to be OK. Honestly. I'll see you around the campuS:'
He went back to get another rack of trays; I headed back to class.
And he was right, we did make out OK Adam did three more
years with us, then vanished into the IvyLeague. Berger, I'm certain,
found himself another helpmeel And I'm still here, growing old
in the service. I've moved to better digs. And I'm no longer the
first person they call to ferret young lovers out of the underbrush.
It's not so bad being a pillar of the community. But I wonder
sometimes if things 'WOUid
be different - if I'd be different - had
I turned off my flashlight that night and retired my number as I
was so tempted then to do. Perhaps I've lost something ~esides
years in coming to a sense of affiliation with this place: a
sympathetic ear, a sensitivity to the cadences of youth - call it
what you will. I stand now before the ranks of kids looking up at
me and the board, tone deaf but curiously effective.

53 BeryamlnOoluboff _______________

_

Catherine Sasanov

Oppenheimer Leaves His
Family For Work Again,
Los Alamos, 1945

In/Out. My not being born in
this house keeps guilt away: not leaving
in the first place, I've always entered
one time more
than I left. My back's closed door
my kids make faces behind,
stab in no bloodshed in paternal absentee,
though stories of burned children
leave my wife scared how small
coordinating hands might fill
with matches and repetitions,
air and flammables. Kitty,
there are years of innocence,
health ahead in the youth of our daughter,
no obscenity in her
skin - that skirt letting out its own hem,
no hiking up the bone.

54

Kitty Oppenheimer
Defends Her Husband As
Not Being A Communist
Conspirator, 1954
It was fucking, not politics
that conceived our child the year Robert
all-nighted that woman.
It never occurred to the prosecution
he might put something other than communism
in a lady's - Jean Tatlock was still a time
lovers could sway slow
to the same music horses
danced their riders on our swords to. But now,
for me, there've been too many gestures
to tell which sound follows what light,
like walking in on a man's hand
on some woman's breast. From how many
second honeymoons back
does his panicked / love you now
confuse his wife backing out the door?
Her run in the direction of first love
falling short of its hotel
and into the house they bought a marriage after.

55 CatherineSasanov

Oppenheimer Contracts
Throat Cancer, 1967
The radiation still given
brings me little relief: it's sorrow
not knowing my last words
or who they'll be said to, only
that they'll voice days before I die.
I'll mouth at the end like the start
of so many trips: enunciating through windows
something almost forgotten,
something simple yet misunderstood I love you
the children
Don't forgel

It may as well be genius.

56 CathertneSasanov ________________

_

Bruce Taylor

After Rumi
Jala al-Din Rumi (1207-1273)
Why are you hiding?
You are gold,
brighter and finer with
each strike of the hammer.
You who have been brought
from here to there,
do you think you'll
be left by the wayside now,
without your eyes
or your shining?
Why do you bite your lip
in the other room
and dwell in garments
of disbelief? There are lights
in these skies these nights,
they are the days
that are yours on earth,
they are diamonds.
Why does the simple miracle
of birds elude you?
The breath is a bird
and it rises when we believe
from its nest of sleep
on pale winds and circles
in the waking world.
A valley is a breath
and clouds of course
and the pond
where the heavy berries
57

tremble for your coming,
and the mountain when it fires,
and the night before it flees.
Do you think love will unself you?
Do you think it will snatch you
with its talons to a thinner air?
You who sought your desire
in water and clay
while all evening in felicity
and glory you might have pastured
among hyacinth and narcissus.
,;I'

You who are repose in pain,
and the spirit's bitter treasure,
do you think your love
will just lie down with you
like a panther in your heart?
Do you think love
will make you drunk?
Will you dance its praises
in the village square,
will you whirl like a dervish
through the guilty city?
Once more the sun draws
a flat blade across
the frozen world
'
once more, beneath
a thin Islamic moon,
th e star is out of its sheath.

58 BruceTaylor

At Munsan on the Imjin
River I Think of The
Lower East Bank of the
Upper St. Croix
And I like to imagine
a delicate red-headed
high school girl of Swedish
dairy farming stock,
nervous but determined
lay down on the mossy bank
and gave over to her youth,
a cool breeze off the river
at his lightly muscled back,
and the drone of a semi
occasionally across the highway
70 bridge two hundred yards away.
Ten years later
she'll bury her father
a mile further down the road
among four monumental oaks
he had planted as a boy.
All the sisters except her
would have husbands to hang on to,
the brothers, single still,
would make fists behind their backs
and stare tearlessly off
into the encircling woods.
Earlier in the dark
vestibule of the sprawling
old farmhouse, many neighbors
would stop and whisper,
bring platters full
of food and leave.
59 Bruce Taylor

During the ceremony
in the small wooden church
the soloist sings "Further Along"
and tin strips with the donors' names
fastened to the rough pine walls
say how much each had given
towards material for the drapes
or towards repairing the furnace.
I would be with her there,
the youngest, the sullen
and unmarried. I would lie down
with her in the pastures of the same
and I would learn to love the land.
I would learn its slow accretion,
the fine, red-headed children
tumbling out of haymows,
and I would learn to walk the path
between her mother's house and ours
on moonless nights, in trackless snow,
perfectly, from memory.

60 Bruce Taylor __________________

_

Barry Thomson

"Agave Colorata. "
Photography.

61

Thomas M. McNal\y

Props
Cotton Mather turned into the shop, Yale's Store for Big Men.
He had been attracted by a pair of Tony Lamas, long and lean with
leather soles and lizard-skin toes.
I'll take that pair, he told a big man with flaccid chins, perhaps
Yale himself, Cotton thought, he wasn't really sure.
What mattered was he had a new pair of boots and a sandy·
brown Stetson, too, and as he left the store he tilted the hat upon
his head so he could tip it to a young woman, twenty or so and
tan, dressed in French sunglasses and a green mini-skirt and a
blue, oversized tank-top which read Party /'laked. She did not tip
her hat in return because she did not wear one, nor did she curtsy;
but as she walked by, Cotton did catch what seemed to be the
shadowed curve of an elliptical breast and it was this salutation
which caused him to turn on his new leather heel, to stop and light
a filtered cigarette and watch her step into a doorway and ascend
a narrow flight of steps, those steps which would lead, ultimately,
to a wonderfully cool and comfortable bar.
Cotton told himself it was still early, only a few hours after no?n,
but still the sun was hot. She had blond hair, he told himself, like
Jennifer, his daughter. She would be twenty-four if her mother g~ve
him her address in Chicago. He'd lived in Chicago before,. l_,ke
.
.
•
'd
ossibiltt1es.
.
Ab 11ene; st, 1I, he preferred the desert with a 11,ts an P
•
·garette
He gave the girl four more thoughtful drags on h is ci
before he followed her up the stairs.
k w
.
d •
\ no
I find you attractive, he'd say, and I was won en~g -:- a be
this might be a bit bold and all - but I was wondering ,f m y n
'd .
.
0 me I mea •
you like to water down your throat with a beer. n
'
Today's payday and I don't work, anyhow.
How 'bout it, he'd say. You're quite a filly, you kn~w.f m her
She'd laugh, of course flick a golden string of hair ro those
f
'
that
oreh ad and pull it back around one of those ears
'd chew
nd
glasse had sat on lik th t m of a flow r, maybe, a h~ecause
?n a toothpick, thoughtfully, the kind h lik d to ch w
,t made his hin look sharp and sometimes cleft.
62

He stopped to scuff his boots and hide the glare of the sun.
He would cross his legs wide like a river so she wouldn't think
he was a dude, and he'd lean on that one elbow of his, cool and
comfortable now that he was in this bar, and he'd say,
You know, you remind me of my daughter; she's about your age.
Brown hair, of course, and she don't drink like her mother. But
still you do resemble her in a curious kind of way.
And she would ask, her eyes aflutter,
What do you do?
I'm the son of a minister, really. That's enough. He used
to give sermons. I'm settled comfortable now.
He'd sit back and think of that tan ellipsis, pert and sure of its
independence; the certitude of glands, perhaps. He'd think of
Jonquil and her own long hair, its color transient as the seasons,
and he'd remember the way she wore it when they first met, when
he was on leave i~ San Diego, before they married the same way
most of his shipmates had married. Get married and raise a family, they said, and don't forget the bonds.
I'd love a beer, she'd say, a tall cold one in a glass.
I don't suppose you go to the University?
Why yes, I do.
No, he thought.
Why yes, I do. Well, actually, I graduated a while back.
No. He just wouldn't ask, that's all. It really wouldn't matter. All
that would matter is that they were in the same place now.
I used to race cars down in Birmingham, Alabama. You were
just a little girl then. Had a cam go right through my carb, though,
sent me into the wall at one-hundred-thirteen miles per hour. That's
why I walk with this limp, he'd say, and then he'd point to his new
boot with the scuffed toe.
She would smile and look at his stump of an arm and
understand, maybe, the way she used to understand.
By the time he reached the top step his knee was grinding itself
into a mechanical tantrum. He was out of breath as well, the cigarette burning in his hand and still wanting more of that breath
in which lingered the flavor of a decaying tooth. He walked through
the doorway and felt a cold draft blowing from a large ceiling fan.
The roof was held in place by large wooden beams. To the east
was a wall of glass which looked out onto the Avenue, over Yale's
Store for Big Men and across from the U.S Post Office.
I rodeoed for a bit, you know. Took third place in calf-roping U.S.
63 Thomas M. McNally

all 'round championship up in Salt Lake. That was in sixty-four.
Then my horse up and hit the rail, God knows why, really, he just
went all gamey and went down and broke both our legs. Had to
shoot him that afternoon and I said to myself, Cotton, that was
a plum good horse and look how you went and killed him. Hung
up my spurs after that, he'd say. Made a lot of money that year,
though. Still got my saddle hanging up in the garage so I can keep
it oiled.
If you don't mind, she'd say, I'd love another.
She would pull her arm over her head and scratch the back of
her neck, slow and gentle so he could see the soft degree of her
breast peering out through the exaggerated armhole of her top,
just wanting to peer like a girl, he'd think. Just like Jennifer, always
wanting to show her Daddy what she's got. He'd chuckle softly,
father-like, and look at his nearly full beer so she wouldn't think
he'd seen anything like the way she wanted him to.
Just oiled these boots, he'd say.That's how come they shine so.
What's your daughter do?
Oh, nothing really, I don't have one. I mean, she's just a kind
of step-daughter, a niece really. Her father died a long time ago,
too much booze, you know. Drank himself into the penitentiary
so - he'd shrug his shoulders - I did what I could. Sent her money
so she could go to college if she wanted. She's so smart, you know,
but she didn't want to. Bought a car instead.
He was thirsty now, sitting alone in this bar with the frigid air
blowing on his head, drying the sweat from outside stiff on his
face. He walked up to the bar, empty like the rest of the place,
the bottl~s hawking their brands and glaring irresolute in the
greasy mirror. He leaned on the bar with his arm and called oul
~he appeared from a back room We're not open yet, she said.
I m awful thirsty, Cotton said.
What do you want?
A beer. If it's all right, 1 mean.
What kind?
th She ~ad bright teeth even if she wouldn't smile; they matched
e white _letterson her top, he thought. He looked at his hand,
I
c enched its fingers, saying
I'
,
1?1
not partial to any special kind. A draft will do.
Right. But what kind.
~~u pick I've been enough trouble
e poured him a draft, golden a~d carbonated; watching it
64 Thomas M. McNaUy

made his mouth sweat. She poured him another.
Happy hour, she said. You get two.
He set a dollar on the bar.
On the house, she said. The register's still closed.
He left the dollar on the bar anyway. He wandered back to his
table upon which sat his new hat, stiff and determined the way
the movies used to be, when Audie Murphy or Jimmy Stewart wore
one over their flattops. While he was away the hats had become
dirty and water-stained and the men wore long trench coats and
the movies were made by Italian fellows starring guys with names
like Clint Eastwood Clint, he thought, he was a mayor now in
California.
•
His father had named him after a famous preacher. Cotton didn't
remember anything the man had preached. His father wrote
sermons and spoke on Sunday and Thursday evenings in
Baltimore; this was before Cotton had enlisted and met Johnny,
before they'd bought all those bonds. Then they had Jennifer, she
lived in Chicago and drove a new car with a stereo imported from
Japan.
He remembered the way they used to watch the old Westerns
on weekday mornings while Johnny, her hair tethered by pink
plastic curlers and a scarf, was off at work in the soap factory. The
way they'd cheer on the good guys and groan at the bad guys and
smile at the pretty damsels, the way Jennifer would curl up under
his arm and nag him about his smoking, the way she'd brush her
hair whenever anyone got killed or any of those damsels got kissed
by a bad guy or an Indian.
I don't like the violent stuff, Daddy.
They'd watch the movies in the basement on the old couch. The
basement was always dark and cool, like this place, he thought.
Except colder, really, and humid from the shower. He had an old
cement shower which was really just a pipe sticking out of the wall
with green paint. No matter how many times he painted those
walls, the green paint would peel and its chips would slide along
the floor until they eventually dogged the drain. Then the water
would settle out here, around the couch and television and Jennifer
would brush her hair when the houses were burned, too, or when
Gary Cooper strode down along the street at high noon in his
brand new boots.
The way she'd play with his stump sometimes and say, did it
hurt? And he'd say of course it didn't hurt, didn't feel a thing, really,
nothing much at all if there was fresh ice in his glass.
65 Thomas M. McNally

Go get Daddy some ice, he'd say. That's a girl.
She came over to his table and asked him if he wanted another
round
Two more?
Yeah, I'd like two more. Thanks.
She brought him four and as she did so he watched her walk,
watched the way her hips swayed underneath the green mini-skirt,
the way the fabric about her chest seemed to undulate with each
step like an ocean at night underneath a pitching flight deck.
One dollar, she said.
You remind me of my daughter, you know. She looked a lot like
you.
The girl smiled. Like me?
Yeah, just like you, 'till she died, I mean.
She flushed and said she was sorry.
So was L
What happened to your arm?
Cotton looked at his stump and drank from the glass. They
alwayswanted to kna-v about the arm, didn't give a hill'a crap about
his leg or wife or daughter or all the years at sea. They just wanted
to know about his stump, about what they couldn't help but see.
You're like her too, he said. She used to ask about it a lot.
She sat down, scooted herself along the bench seat in front of
him. She reached over and touched it with her hand the way she
would a lover's wrist
Here, he said, sliding her a beer.
No, I can't, I'm working.
So am I. Go ahead.
She took the beer and drank a long swallow, so Jong that he
could see it slide down the length of her slender throat.
Carrier Duty, he said, in the Pacific. I walked into a prop when
I was nineteen. Damn thing went flying off into the sea and that
was it, no more arm. Now days they could have found it with ~
helicopter or something and sewed it back on, but back then it
didn't matter.

I'm sorry, she said. I bet she was lovely.
. .
She wasa gem all right A real peach. Had long yellow hair h~e
yours. Weused to watch the Westernstogether when we lived in
Indiana.
1 th ought she was your niece

th10
It doesn't matter, really, she was a lot like you. I used to
k

66

M. McNaJJy

of her as my daughter, I mean.
Is that when they broke your kn,ee?
When?
•
After your little girl died, in Abilene.
Yeah, they do that to a lot, you know. Set everything straight.
I showed them, though. I mean, hey, I'm out of there, aren't I?
She leaned over on her elbow and smiled, saying,
Yeah, you sure are. She was a bitch, right? A real little bitch
anyway. I'm not like that, you know.
Did I tell you you look like her? In a curious kind of way.
Want another?
•
She didn't really die. She lives in Chicago with her mother. Just
bought a new car, too. It's her mother who's dead. She slept around
too much for her own good. Yeah, I want another .
•

He left his booth and went up to the bar and sat across from
the sullied mirror, across from the noisy bottles upon which the
smeared reflection of his head seemed to rest.
Let me guess, she said, you need four more again.
Right, he said.
Beside him a man in blue jeans and an undershirt drank from
a longneck.
Howdy.
The man nodded and passed him the pretzels.
They're stale, he said.
Yup.
The bar filled and the humidity seemed to rise. Many of the
tables grew occupied with tired, sweaty men. A few middle•aged
women sat cross-legged upon various stools. A new bartender had
joined the ranks of his own apparition, a young man of about
twenty-five with bulging arms and white hair.
She set the mugs before him, all four, cold and wet and dripping
with sweat like all the tired men in their undershirts.
We could leave here.
What?
I know a place in the mountains. It would be all right, really.
She'd never have to know.
You're tanked, Cowboy.
Hey Mac, tell her to come with me.
Tell her to come with me.
Dammit, you come with me now.
Drink up and go home.
67 ThomasM. McNally

He didn't go home. He stood i~stead and knocke~ the stool to
the floor above Yale's Store for Big ~en. He took his ~tump and
set it up against a large beam to keep 1tsteady the way 1tdid when
he had to piss.
You don't want to anymore, do you?
He's really looped Maybe you should throw him out.
We can't do that. For Christ's sake, the guy's only got one arm.
That never stopped no one. Had a horse once tried to pity me
'cause of this here stump. Know what I did? Do you know what
I did? I sold him, that's what I did. I took him to the factory and
I got seventy cents a pound and they made him into soap, you
know? I sold the damn thing.
She told me not to, you know. Said don't, don't do that, but then
she'd see my arm, you see, and you know what she'd do? Do you
know? Nothing. That's what she'd do. She'd do nothing. Just lay
there like her mother and twitch.
She was a lot like you, only her hair wasn't so dark, really.
Across the street on a sidewalk parallel to his own she might
have walked on her fine legs.
So what, he cried, you gonna come with me or not?
There was no answer,of course. It seemed that all along the
street, acrossfrom the U.S. Post Office, in front of a window which
advertised boots and hats and double-stitched vests, all along the
world had been mute like a jaundiced memory. He sat sprawled
on the sidewalk, his life quiet as the traffic, a life so shadowed only
the haze of a street lamp bothered to speak. It seemed to hold
the purple sky up above him like a stilt.

68 ThornasM.McNaJLy
______________

_

Paul Shuttleworth

Duet for Lost Highway:
Vengeance, Murder, Cars
Burning in Motel Parking
Lots, Honky Tonks, and
True Love West of the
Missouri
A girl who goes to concerts in a black
tee shirt meets a boy from the darkness
that closes in on campfires. This is
the love story of hacked bull thistles
on a sodbuster'd prairie, its porno
of malls and the priest's unseen face
in the pubic hair of choice lamb.
Soon the girl strolls her own guitar
on a glacier of stage as a crowd
waves Bowie blades in praise.
Her coyote romps around her,
that crazed yipping the same
as when it moved a shootist's hand
gunward beneath a lice-foul pillow.
It's the practice, theology,
of summer's evil temper,
an IV blood bottle attached
to the moon and dripping:
the priest gives it all up
one night at the rectory
for a new sequined name
and four hours every night
playing cowpunk and outlaw
singers on the radio.
69

The frontier narrows and too often
love is a dry wind, but her slight
gold nipples brush across the boy's
yoked snap shirt in tunneled mountains
where Doc Holliday was a hundred pound
god with a shotgun and pus for breath.
A boy fresh from walking his trapline,
from making volcanoes in the heads
of badgers with a barrel-pocked
Smith & Wesson K-22, meets a girl
from where autumn rain falls softly
on spring calves as motherless
as this mushy decade. She slides
up against her coyote and the music
pistol whips its way west and home,
her voice beautiful on his honey fur.

70 PaulShuttleworth

And the Dog is Called
Lefty
The homeplace seems to hover in drizzle
as soft as satin. Like a goofy bodyguard,
the white goat paces the bicycling girl.
Inside the age-rubbled house, houseflies
are stalled in chilled dreams. Big Sister
loosens a belt from around a large doll.
Daddy stumbles outside with two hot bottles
of milk replacer for the calves, drunkenly
singing about a cowboy in Fargo, North Dakota,
and some girl with a knack for barrel racing.
They never imagined how upside down it would
turn out: broccoli pie and ice tea,
calf pneumonia, and porous old skulls
wired to a barn as black as false hope.

71 PaulShuttleworth _________________

_

Michael Carrino

the dying line of Dutch Elm chilled the river.
Another patient, Tom,
grasped at branch shadows
scratching ice-caked windowpane. My fever
under control, I watched him
hide aspirin, magic
white feathers under the pillow. He believed
the letter you wrote me was a bouquet
of glass. Each jagged petal, one she loves me,
she loves me not, that shatter in my voice
imbuing every voice I would ever use.
When the midnight nurse
implied the dance band in town
swayed her free of her bastard children,
I led her under
•
river willow branch, the unwinding red ember
of sunrise- boring holes in the lie: ''I can never be
replaced''
•
on the dangerous blue paper
I fold and refold like a promise.
The river collected itself - the first ice
forming at its edge. Lining matches in a row
Tom set the first one ablaze,
his back turned on a cold skeleton elm.

72

I

Naomi Wallace

The__
battle of G • ., was fought
W. W. L by the ru.&.:: ..
the Turkish coast, by orders of the
British. The battle was disasllotJS for
the Australian r"".e:--· who were clSCd
by the British to distractthe e,ie,11y
from their ou,n troops ~ • ""'
a
nearby beach.
'-1,.1,41

..

#_

.._

•

..__., on

IC'",,

on

But I wasn't there for England. I was there
because my uncle shot the colt he'd promised me.
Its hooves were split, bleeding it died in my arms.
The boy to my left because hi.s father struck him
for falling asleep in the furrows while the others planted,
the grass, green flames between his lips.
The boy to my right won't tell us. Maybe he has
a dark box inside him, maybe he'll break the lock.
Only once I touched the breast of a woman I loved.
She was my youngest sister. She rose from her bath
in a goblet of light, and with shaking hands
I scraped the suds and water from her body.
Her skin was soft as the breath of a coll
She smelled like a warm barn, the sour, the song
of the owl. And the bugles sounded above me.
The bugle sounds for the charge. Not for England
I reach, but for the plum in her mouth.
73

Barry Thomson

07

•

-

-

....
~

•

~

°"'I
,,

•
•

'

,
I

I

:v

t
-

.
"
''Agave Parry,.
Photograpny.

74

Ron Carlson

•

ezo1

Everybody take a deep breath. That's what my father always said
when there was big news, good or bad. Take a deep breath and
see where you are. So do it, because I've got news. I acquired this
news first hand and there is not even the tiniest question in my
mind as to its validity. One night last week between the hours of
2300 and. 2310 my sloop, The Chelsea, went down from under me
on solo fifty-five miles due east of Key West. The weather was fair,
the seas were calm. Visibility was unlimited.
I went down half a mile beyond the boundary of an area known
as the Bermuda Triangle, an area notorious for mysterious ship
disappearances. I am an expert sailor, and I have never believed
in the Bermuda Triangle. And now, after losing my beautiful sloop,
The Chelsea, I still do not believe in it. I was standing on the bow
in the starlight when The Chelsea went out from under me like
a trap door and I now know that it isn't a triangle at all. It's the
Bermuda Trapezoid.
Let me explain.
I steer by the stars. It's something I intuited even before my father showed me a sextant and taught me triangulation. I grew up
in Annapolis where he taught and when we'd drive to the shore,
I would stand on the sand in the twilight and as soon as the second star appeared, I could lay out the compass and postulate the
exact position of the Nail of Heaven, as my father called the North
Star. He used to smile and say, well, at least you'll never be lost.
But he was wrong. I did get lost Only once and for a short time,
but it was enough to give me one principle by which I would live:
I would always know where I was.
By the time I was twelve, my father and I had sailed to Miami,
Jamaica (twice), and Portugal. I did most of the navigation. By then
I knew I had an innate precision. I could turn the sun, stars and
wind into a map in my head; it was easy. I also found I had a strong
stomach and that sleep meant little to me. Both helpful traits for
a sailor. Ironically, the place I was lost, when that time came, was
New York City.
75

was
a
senior
at
Annapolis
Country
Day
School,
I
rnet
When I
d t·
.d h.
one of my father's students, a g_ra ua mg m1 s 1pman, and you
know the rest. His name was Billy Wyeth,_and I remember that
spring as being full of incredible pressure. Billy and I :>'eresneaking
nd like mad, trying not to get caught, and wed have fifteen
arou
.d.
minutes together five times a day. 1t was n 1cu1ous. A Coke with
another couple and Billy and I would g~ope under the table. We
were always ducking into the bushes. Literally. l have to smile at
it all. Anyway, we never had enough time. So we came up with
a plan.
The week after graduation, while he still had family leave,I would
meet him in New York and we would spend a full day in a hotel
room. l told my parents that I was going up to New York with Mimi
Lawder,who was also going to the University of Virginia with me,
to shop for school clothes. l didn't feel too bad about it, because
Mimi was going up with me, but to go to a clinic to see if she
had VD from her boyfriend Clive, a guy who worked on the
landscaping at Annapolis.
There used to be a Walgreens in Times Square, and it was there
at the counter that l met Billy. He looked young in his civilian
clothes and it was a little shock. He was just a kid, and I knew
there in Walgreens, which is now long gone, that I had come up
to New York City because I was in love. On the train I hadn't been
able to tell Mimi how I felt, because I knew she would have no idea
of what I was talking about, and besides she was going on and
on describing in detail the gross symptoms she was suffering. But
I had looked out the windows and felt the earth opening for me,
offering itself, and it was so big and exciting and l was out of high
school and it was all mine. As soon as we climbed off the train,
even though we'd been in tunnels for fifteen minutes, I could tell
we were on an island.
And as soon as I S<N/ young Billy there in Walgreens I knew I
was in love. I told Mimi to meet me there at the counter at sixthirty and she went off. I took Billy's arm and we walked crosstown
three blocks to the Chelsea Hotel, as calm as married people, even
though each footstep seemed printed in gold.
I smile at the day. The clerk who was as nice as he could be.
He looked at the two kids before him, dressed as if for school, no
bags, and he just said, sign here. Our room, 714, looked out on
an air d~ct, gray bricks and sooty windows, and I remember I
th0 ught it was lovely, maybe Gothic, so romantic. It didn't matter.
We pulled the drapes dosed. And all our plans about spending
76 Ron Carlson

the day in bed were kind of funny too. I don't think we ever got
in the bed. I had pictured one of those scenes where I would be
tucked in, with the white sheet under my chin and Billy would be
bringing me a glass of water and sitting by my side. Our day was
not a picture. It was a collision We wrecked the bed We made
love, literally, all day. At one point Billy was going to go out and
get some sandwiches, but we decided even against that When I
went back to Maryland that night, I wouldn't see him for a long
time, and, remember, I was in love.
Late in the day, Billy woke me. He was dressed. He said it was
six o'clock and he would walk me back to Walgreens.You should
have seen him standin·g there in that hotel room. I asked him to
open the curtains, and the new gray light filled the room like water. He handed me my shirt, but I told him to go ahead, catch a
train home, north to Connecticut. I would walk over to meet Mimi
alone. We had a nttle moment there. He was concerned, but all
I needed to do was put my hand on his face,touch it It was enough
for me. I was as happy as you get, and the light helped me know
that I would never ever see him again.
After he left I got lost. I found all my clothes, that wasn't even
sad, and I took a shower, and by the time I hit the street it was
after eight and all the neon lights were on, buzzing like stars. I
wandered downtown, I guess, looking up all the time at the
windows, some dark, some filled with light I hadn't forgotten about
Mimi or going home, but they were not right up front in my mind.
The traffic was fast and bright all night, and so many things
sparkled on that island.
Mimi and I made the last train. She had a disease related to
gonorrhea, and had bought herself four new outfits including a
pink tennis skirt. In the night, our reflections rode in the windows,
and I could feel Manhattan, dislodged, sliding after me. Did you
ever feel that? That part of the world is loose?
It took me a long time to get over that strange feeling. But I did.
And I went on to cross the ocean twice alone. The second time
it wasn't even in the papers. I've been alone a lot. It seems to be
one thing the sea and stars require, but I'm not even sure about
that. I never married. By habit now I do a lot of night sailing, ~nd
one night last week I sailed into the dark and I entered the high
corner of the Bermuda Triangle, heading in a quick tack for th,e
hypotenuse. I never got there because there is no hypotenuse. Its
not a triangle at all.
It's bigger than that. As soon as I breathed easy, my sloop went
77 Ron Carlson

down into a little known segment of the trapezoid. I know it is a
trapezoidbecause I registered where I was and I alwaysknowwhere
I am. I've only been lost once in my entire life.
When I bobbed from the sea like some rejected bottle, I took
a deep breath and saw the Coast Guard cutter. I knew his exact
heading.
And I take a deep breath now.I have news, sure: it's a trapezoid.
But I want to say something else. I've always known where I was
in this world, but it hasn't always been a comfort.

•

•

•

•

D. Nurkse
•

reen

•

If I think I hear my name
or an insult, I no longer turn.
If I imagine a rock thrown
I imagine it misses;
I've learnt to be a foreigner.
I walk upstairs, paper
folded under my arm,
and when the door is locked
I scatter the news on the floor
to save the landlord's varnish.
I say to myself: Seven Years
And One Night. I put on the record
from home and let it play all night
until the sadness seems foreign and cheap
and all that's familiar is the obsessive
loyalty of one deep scratch.

79

'•

After we loved
she lent me her comb.
I lay naked
as she dre~ed for work.
I didn't know anyone
in the city, or speak the language.
When she left I slid the bolt.
I stared out the window
at the place where the smoke
from foundries fused
with the wispy trails of jets:
in a room upstairs, footsteps
were packing in circle after circle.
I waited too, until a door slammed
and the steps ran down:
then I missed them, not knowing
if the hoarse voices in the street
were selling fruit or news.

80 D. Nurkse

•1r

The faces in the lit windows
look so solemn, as if they'd just decided
to marry, or to join the army;
but each night they reappear
like puppets made of articulated flame
and I watch absorbed
trying to read the words trapped
like bees on the verge of their lips,
until my lover comes home from school
and we tum off our light.
We stand for a second naked
watching together as those polished masks
eat and smoke and nod,
then we turn inward, to each other.

•

•

The two figures are lying fully clothed
On separate beds and staring at the ceiling
As if they could see the sky through the five
Stories above them. It is dusk, and, caught
In the blue world Matisse loved, refracted
Bars of sunlight ordering their bodies like
Keyboards, these strangers - this man and woman Have forgotten the name of the city
Outside and can.not think of anything
They want. Fumbling a moment, he begins
To smoke, and imagines he feels the tug
Of gravity inside his throbbing arms,
Which lift inexplicably, as if to
Embrace the absent heavens. The woman,
Who doesn't smoke, watches the tracery
Of his breath rising and lets her mind drift
With it, as after interrupted sleep.
She feels that nothing will ever happen
To her and wonders how for years her life
Has gone on and gone on like somebo·dy
Else's dreaming, how little it has to do
With her anymore. Then quietly, as if
His voice had come back to him suddenly,
Strange with disuse, the man begins speaking just
To hear himself speak, and the woman shifts
Imperceptibly on the cool mattress to listen,
Though the glib words she hears may as well be
Meaningless, or of another language.

•

82

•

She is thinking of music, of how much
Like music this man's voice is - perhaps
Because the sky is emptying itself
Like the chord dying inside a guitar,
Or because the frail notes of the streetlamps
Seem to echo the stars. And it is like
Henri Matisse's The Piano Lesson,
This lopsided duet half-drowned in deep
Blue shade: the boy, bolt upright, practicing
the Bagatelles, perhaps; the stern mother
Tricked into forgetting, for a moment,
Life's cruelty; the city reduced to a source
Of light through the bay window; the pendulum
Of the metronome hung, forever, between beats.

83 Joseph Edward Bolton---------------

•

•
''
r es1enne:
inoux''
Nothing can staunch it. this light within his eyes
racing to catch her, light the odor of his death
and so Madame stares past Vincent, to herself naked.
She recalls herself Mademoiselle, in her first beauty
half a life ago: how the calyx of her sex
yearned to be unfolded; how she ran, aching
in her summer cottons, billowing,
that her flesh be touched by the mistral
at bodice and at crotch; how she unloosed
from her sepals the perfume like ripe camellias
until she divided from their throng
the young men, throbbing, one by one,
how she drew them to her, sapped them,
how she dragged them down her till they dropped.
So long ago . . . What might have drawn her,
she wonders, to this man, laying her down
like a Japanese: black gown, black hair,
black ribbons, he has cut her out,
a silhouette against a bitter yellow ground.
Now he flattens her face, drains it of blood
like a Kabuki mask, the flesh beneath it male.
He knows too much, she thinks, and dresses it
as me, as any woman, of the woman in himself
and has slept with that body as himself
sleeping alone, sleeping· with any woman.
Small wonder the- death mask hurts my eyes
looking into his, small wonder he still lives
this sexlessness in which my sex disappears
with him dead center. Small wonder all my life
I never wanted one this deep.
84

•I

In rain, in January, my southern house is almost dusk
by three o'clock, washed in an old shellac
like a burnished masterpiece. Italian? Flemish?
The question to the oaks is windy, academic.
They wait like their forebearers in a lush calm.
And the neighbor's bungalows, ghost-washed like mine
from steps to mansard, retain the fractured light
shining down everything: teal, amythyst, vermillion
stand at the window they would enter at a word
if I were one of the old masters.
Then let me be one: here in my son·s bedroom
speaking a circle of light around his crib
that I may be a worshipper in this psalm I frame to him,
marveling at the commonplace of his recent birth.
Let me paint his features where the window sends him
beams
a nimbus; let his sleep be surrounded
by a bray, a low, from animals invisible
until I give them breath; let me enter my own vision
one of the Magi, extending myrrh and homage.
Or as the rain shifts, an angel, chartreuse, violet
or a legion, all white, if it lifts. Or if it doesn·t
Joseph, the most benighted of all fathers.
Here I am, flooded with color, assuring myself
the rainbow at the window is a firmament of stars
pointing his way, assured in myself I will not die,
any lie, to keep myself astonished at this happiness.

85 PeterCooley

•
a1
•I

a
e

To take away my pain I come to you.
You, though, being inhuman,
continue to draw music from the evening,
your branches fingering the last light,
the shallows ree,d notes to your breath.
Now the light falls, drowning, on your limbs:
I pour out silence.
•
I draw my comfort from your long unanswering,
the turning of your body to the wind
Dark one, I will leave you this next second
while the water is still slogging your tap root.
Purged, I make you up at home,
nameless, graceless, unbeautiful.
You who never hear me in your dying .

•

•

ID

Yasu Eguchi

-~,

"",.

•• .

:.!

~

"Sound of Autumn . ..
Watercolor, 30" x 30"

87

Tom Chiarella

•

ID

At Golf on the Gulf, the fourth hole was flooded again. Quintl
was plunging it out. Th.e lighthouse at the sixth hole, a long par
two with a roundabout metal ramp, was clicking and humming
irregularly in the morning drizzle. Quinn was cold. He plunged.
He heard his partner Sid yelling to him from the shack, but he
didn't straighten up. He plunged again. The hole gurgled. A car
hissed by.
When it rained the slugs came out from underneath the dino•
saur (the ninth hole, an easy par two, up and down betwe·enthe
legs of the dinosaur, choice of two ramps~ They spread themselves
on the carpets. Quinn g.enerally collected the slugs In e small
plastic beach bucket and threw them in the bushes behind the
tool shed. Somehow they always returned to the thin space
underneath the dinosaur by the next rain. They were e puzzle to
Quinn. They were big, thumb-sized. How did they travel so
efficiently and with such direction? He didn't know. They were
slugs. Not even real anl·mals. But their sticky trails were always
straight when he found them in the early morning, straight for the
safety of the dinosaur. Now there was an animal.
There was a bucket of slugs, perhaps eight Inches deep. et
Quinn's side while he plunged. Sid yelled again. Quinn consld·
ered answering. He plunged. The water in the hole subsided into
the gravel below.
''God damn It, Quinn:• Sid yelled.
Quinn straightened up and turned, letting the plumber's helper
hang et his side. Sid's wide heed was pushed out the small wln~ow
In the back of the scorer's shack. He was chewing gum and smiling.
''God damn it, Quinn:• he sa.id, ''I'm teaching the bird:'
Quinn nodded end reached down for the bucket. His beck
cracked softly. He plunged the hole again for good measure."What
does it SlJ'i?"he a.lied to Sid before turning to the tool shed,
"Keep your hole clean:• Sid yelled. "Keep your hole clean:•
Quinn stopped end turned to Sid, whose big pale face crowded
th e little window. Sid laughed loudly end pounded the wallfrom
88

the inside for emphasis. He leaned back and put his arrn out in
front of him and pumped it up and down stiffly. ''Keep your hole
clean;' he said again, laughing wildly. ''Like a tape recorder she
says it. I'm telling you. Keep your hole clean, Quinn:' He laughed
and pumped his jaws.
Quinn smirked. He could see the top of Sid's dirty undershirt
and his big, round shoulders shaking as he laughed. Quinn heard
the bird squawk loudly somewhere behind Sid. Sid roared again
and withdrew his head stiffly.
''That's the girl;' Sid said loudly. ''Here's a kiss for you:'
Quinn shook his head and walked to the tool shed. It was still
early and the Gulf highway was quiet. As Quinn put away his rakes
he looked out over the course, towards the water, and saw that the
sun was burning off some of the clouds. Quinn threw the plumber's
helper in a corner and pulled out a cigarette. He lit it and leaned
against the shack. His joints were stiff from the rain. His butt was
numb from sciatica. His large hands were cnvered with liver spots,
and his gut hurt. He rubbed under his eyes. Bags. He had bags
there.
After he finished the cigarette, he took the bucket of slugs,
leaned over the fence and tossed them on the pavement next to
Sid's Cadillac. They lay there like turds.

***
The bird irked Quinn. Sid called her Jelly. Jelly shit all the time,
yet Sid refused to keep her in her cage. Instead he cleaned up
after the bird constantly. He called the shit 'Jelly's jelly" and wiped
it up with a towel that he kept behind the counter for just that
purpose. All of this was too much for Quinn. He rarely went in
the scorer's shack anymore; when he did he flicked burning
cigarettes at Jelly.
Once when Quinn did this, Sid said, ''Quinn, that is a sixteenfucking-hundred dollar parrot you're playing with there:'
''Par-RAT, Sid;' Quinn responded. ''The thing is a rat:'
Sid was silent. He shuffled through papers on his. desk. Sid
looked old, although he was only a couple of years older than
Quinn. His head was broad and baJd, fringed by wisps of long grey
hair. His cheeks hung loosely, giving his face a worn-out look when
he wasn't smiling. Quinn could hear the sound of Sid's heavy
breathing from across the room. Sid's forearms were thick and
heavy. They bumped and crushed what they met in his shufflings
in the office. Quinn often wondered where Sid got arms like that
In the Navy, he supposed, or on the docks in Miami.
89 TomChiarella

•

Jelly leapt and fie~ furiously past Quinn. He ducked Sid didn't
to
notice.
Quinn
sneered
m
see"That goddamned b.ir d has go t no manners,'' he said
· to Sid H
d
with
an
eye
on
Jelly,
stretched
his
back.
The
b
•.
e
an
stoo d
,
.
1rd
e.dslowly on the ledge of the window. Outside, a couple
lk
wa
H
..
.d I
h
Was
kissing underneath the awanan 1 o on t e second hole. Sid
i nored Quinn and opened a drawer.

for his glas.5es.
"The bird;' Quinn said, hooking his thumb at Jelly, "The bird's
,,
got no manners.
Sid pushed himself back in the chair. ''That's crap:' he said
standing and walking to the wi.ndow. He produced a cracker fro~
his shirt pocket, speaking to Quinn while staring at the bird. He
was intent, completely absorbed by the bird. To Quinn the bird
looked stiff and mechanical; its smooth, grey feathers gave the
appearance of metal. What was it that Sid found so fascinating
in the bird? Quinn supposed part of it was love. Love and jokes.
The bird was always good for a joke.
Sid leaned close to the bird. Jelly rolled her beak down smoothly
into her breast and then reached for the cracker. Sid gave it to
her and said, ''That's a lot of crap Isn't it? You have good manners.
Don't you?'' He leaned heavily on the counter. Jelly broke the
cracker in half and picked at it Sid smiled. ''Here's a little kiss
for you;' he said loudly. Then he lifted a leg, turned and looked
at Quinn and let out a long, loud fart.
Quinn took a step back. The room resounded with Sid's
laughter. Jelly jumped and said something that Quinn couldn't
hear. Sid pounded on the counter. The telephone rang.
Quinn knew he should have seen Sid preparing to become jolly.
Sid did it all the time; Quinn hated it. Sid was always ready to drop
everything for a bad joke or rude gesture shot in Quinn's direction.
Sid could ex_plo.deat any moment with precision-timed farts and
laughter.
Quinn turned and left the shack. The Gulf highway w·asloud
now with cars. Quinn jumped the short fence in front of the fifteenth hole and ran across the highway to the Kwik Stop, where
he bought a pack of cigarettes. He jogged back across the highway
and went to the tool shed, where he lit up and watched the ~rogress of two plump college girls in tube tops on the back nine.
Soon he took out his drawings and began to sketch out his plans
•

90 TomChiarella
..

for the course.
In the back of the tool shed, Quinn had a stack of plans that
Sid had never seen. He rarely planned new holes. Quinn was
interested in trees. When they spoke of such things, Quinn told
Sid, ''This rourse has already got eighteen holes,"or ''What we need
is trees."
Three years before they had planted ·twomock orange trees near
the windmill hole. The year after that, a summer crab on the
roundabout hole, a hoptree beside the shack and twin sweet gums
near the fence by the road.
Sid moaned when Quinn brought up the subject of trees. ''They
block the sign;· he said. ''They block the goddamned sun. Who
wants to play putt-putt in the shade?''
Quinn looked at Sid and said, ''Golf, Sid. Miniature golf:' The
term putt-putt drove Quinn crazy.
Quinn could not•be stopped from planting trees. Each time they
turned a profit Quinn would order another one. There were now
eleven t·rees on the course, not counting the row of big
rhododendrons along the driveway.He had a three year old pawpaw
that was already flowering, and he was sure he had the only paper
birch growing south of Maryland.
About the pawpaw, Sid once commented, ''Those flowers sure
stink:'
Quinn, who was picking gravel from beneath the turf on the sixth
hole at the time, looked up and said, ''Yeah, in some places they
call it a fetidshrub:'
Sid squinted and rolled his eyes.

***

When it rained the tourists stayed away. Quinn and Sid tried
to occupy the.mselves with bus}"'Ork. Quinn, after taking in all the
scoring stands, more often than not spent his time in the tool

shed, cleaning the hand mower, stacking the rakes, hanging the
clippers, painting the old benches, moving the ladders, smoking
cigarettes,admiring his work. Sid sat at his desk in the shack and
did the books. The course almost always turned a profit and for
Sid, a man who had never had much money, this was a great
pleasure.
Quinn considered Sid a fool with his money. With the first six
hundred dollars he saved, Sid bought Jelly from Pet Heaven on

lay-away.That was four years ago and now he owned a Seville a.nd
was part owner of his son's health food restaurant in KansasCity.
The shack was Sid's domain. It was always neat, save the old
9 1 Tom Chiarella

color tv which was covered with dust in front and bird shit in back
In the mornings Quinn watched Sid line the clubs carefully, count
the balls, sharpen the scoring pencils and stack the scoring sheets.
Sid swept the shack once a day, cleaned the windows with Quinn
twice a week and straightened and adjusted everything until it was
just the way he wanted it. The one thing in the shack which Sid
could not control was Jelly, who was to Quinn's mind a hellion
a terror, and as he often told Sid, ''a complete bitch of a bird::
In the mornings she sat in her cage without moving. Sid had
wired the cage door open, yet Jelly would never come out of the
cage in the morning, 90 matter how he coaxed her. It was at eleven,
when Quinn supposed the sun reached some strange point in the
sky, that Jelly would come out and fly on top of the color tv
•
Once there she was unpredictable. Some days she was playful,
hopping from the tv to Sid's shoulder to the adding machine,
eating corn chips from his fingers, drinking water from the palm
of his hand. On these days Jelly sometimes sat on the counter
and let the little girls who came in scratch her head.
Yet there were mornings when Jelly stared grimly at Sid and
Quinn from the cage. Once out she would flutter and flounce on
the old tv. Often she would leap from this perch, fly down, wings
beating the air meanly as only a parrot's can, and land on some
unlucky child's head. Jelly would squawk and claw at the child's
scalp. The child would scream and Sid would shoo the bird, waving
his hands in the air like some old lady. In four years Jelly had bitten
six children and clawed four. Too often Sid found himself assuring
anxious parents that Jelly's claws were not poisonous, although
he was not at all sure this wa.s true.
One aftern.oon in September, they closed the course up early
because of rain and went out for a drink. They were both sitting,
very drunk, in the lounge at the Surf and Tide Club, when Sid
admitted to Quinn that Jelly was a disappointment to him.
''I wanted a novelty;' he said, ''A gimmick. Some entertainment''
Quinn laughed and drank. Sid had never talked about the bird
this way before. Quinn fought back the urge to defend the bird
in order to make conversation.
''I thought it made business sense to get a parrot," Sid said,
turning to Quinn.
Quinn sighed and sipped his drink. ''You ought to give that thing
a ticket:•
"A what?" Sid asked him.
d
''A ticket;' Quinn repeated. ''A ticket right out the goddamne
.
d
,,
win ow.
92 TomChiarella

Sid stared at Quinn for a moment and then la hed "" h"
"d, "I oug ht to. 8 e,ore
r
ug
.
rea
he sa1
I pay hospital bills, I O ht to
h'
•
d"
ug
wax
t
e
b1r .
They ?°th laughed some more and listened to the bar music.
In the middle of the next drink, Sid stood up and said "Co
'
t
·t
•
h"
Q
.
,
me
on.
L~ts ge I over wit • umn was surprised, but willing to see what
Sid was up to. He drove them in Sid's car back down the highway
to the course.
Quinn was drunker than he thought, and when he got to Golf
on the Gulf, he swung into the parking lot fast and skidded to a
stop on the gravel there. They both lurched forward. Sid's head
smashed into the dashboard. He held his head in his hands. "This
is my car;' he said softly.
"Sorry about that," Quinn said, looking for blood between Sid's
fingers.
"This is my car,'' Sid said again, his hands still wrapped around
his face. "That's my bird."
He straightened up and got out of the car. Quinn got out, ran
around the car and followed Sid inside. Sid was screaming. 'i4i.ll
right! Enough with the fun!" he yelled, picking up a club and
smashing it on the counter. Quinn stood by the door. Jelly was
on the ceiling fan, oblivious to the ruckus below. "Enough!" Sid
smashed the counter again. A bin of blue golf balls tumbled
forward and spilled on the floor at his feet. They rumbled and
settled. Sid turned to Quinn.
"The gimmick has to answer up as an investment,'' he said.
Quinn laughed. Sid reached behind his back with the club and
lashed up at the fan. It hit a blade hard and spun the fan viciously.
Jelly pulled up at the air, hit the ceiling just above the fan and
dropped back down into the spinning blades. A blade smacked
her and spun her in the air. She flipped and fell to the linoleum
and the sea of golf baJJsthere. Flapping wildly, she rose up and
flew at Quinn. He put his arms up, but the bird was on him like
a frantic insect. Her claws tore into his ear. He swung awkwardly.
He heard Sid yell, "God damn it, I own you!"
Sid swung at the bird, but dipped Quinn in the butt. Quinn,
already off balance from the booze and the attack, felt his leg give
out. He fell to the ground. Jelly let go of his head and flew straight
and fast for the window. She smashed into it and tumbled
downward landing once again on Quinn. "Damn!" Sid yelled as
Jelly began to claw and scratch once again on Quinn. Quinn was

93 Tom Chiarella

. st _ ch He could feel the golf ball on the floor digging
on his oma •
f h.• h d J I
·
.into h.1s ri•bs. He covered the back o 1s ea • e ly had hold of
his .d
shirt. hed down and pulle d t h e b.1rd o ff Q u1nn
• 's b ack by its
·
S1 reac
''
h
II
d
Q
•
h
d
•
''L e him the hell alone!
e ye e • u1nn • a given up.
the door. She flapped and protested his hold on her.
''Enough!'' Sid yelled as he fumbled for the door. Jelly began
to squawk loudly. Sid grabbed the knob and pulled the bird towards the door.
Jelly bellowed, ''Awwk! Pete Rose! Pete Rose! Pete Rose! Pete
Rose!''
Sid stopped and let go of the bird in surprise. Jelly flew around
the shack before landing on the tv. She opened her wings in anger and hissed.
Sid was shocked. His hand was bleeding, blue golf balls at his
side, feeling forgotten and drained.
''Charley Hustle?'' Sid asked, quietly.
''Pete Rose:· said the bird.

* * *
It was fine with Sid that after his battle with Jelly the only words
she would utter were ''Pete Rose;· although he had no idea where
she had picked it up Quinn had to have stitches in his ear, and
his back was covered with scratches and claw marks for weeks.
He no longer went in the shack for any reason. He lost all touch
with the everyday routine of the shack. If Sid wanted to speak to
him, he had to come out to the tool shed, even if there were
customers waiting. Sid still let Jelly roam the shack at will.
Within six months Sid had seven pictures of Pete Rose on the
wall behind the door, along with a team picture of the Reds and
a frame containing the first dollar collected at Golf on the Gulf.
When Jelly said ''Pete Rose;' Sid would lean on the counter and
sayto the customers, ''Yep, Good 01' Charley Hustle;' or ''Oh, she's
a _bigfart" The pictures, he told Quinn, were a nice gimmick. The
bird finally worked

***
Early one morning in March, Quinn was crouched next to his
n_e\VeSl
tree, a three-foot tall shadblow. The shadblow was looking
sickly, and Quinn was dropping earthworms gently around its base
th
whe_n e phone rang inside the shack. Quinn raised his head.
. Sid was not in yet. Quinn decided to let the phone ring. He fin·
ished with the worms, and the phone stopped. A minute later he
94 TomChiarella

was mixin_g some paint and the phone rang again. He let it ring
for ten minutes. as he cut up some two-by-twos for supports for
the shadblow. Finally he went into the tool shed to get his keys.
When he opened the door of the shack, Jelly squawked from
her cage. He eyed her for a moment and then reached for the
phone. "What?" he said into the receiver.
"I'm in Clearwater. Why didn't you answer the phone?" a voice
said. It was Sid.
"I did answer the phone," Quinn said. "We're not open yel"
"You still have to answer it. I knew you were there - that's why
I let it ring:·
'That's smart." Quinn said.
':Just answer the phone from now on," Sid said.
Quinn was quiet.
"Listen, I can't get up there until four. The Reds are down here
playing the Mets, and I want Rose to sign the pictureS:'
Quinn looked at the wall and saw that all the frames except the
first dollar were empty.
"So you'll open up then, right?" Sid said
Quinn moaned and rolled his eyes.
"Right?" Sid said again.
"Okay," Quinn said.
"Good;' Sid said, "You know where everything is, and you can
watch tv while you do it."
"Right," said Quinn, looking out over the course towards the
ocean. There were clouds there.
"Okay then," Sid said.
"Okay," said Quinn before he hung up. He lit a cigarette and
stared at Jelly. Then he went to the windows and pulled down all
the shades.
By 2:30 Quinn had painted and staked the supports for the
young tree, swept the entire course down, spackled a crack in the
dinosaur, put a new, stronger bulb in the lighthouse, and retied
the vines to the fenc:e by the Hawaiian idol. He stood by the tool
shed in the sun and looked at the course. Two palms leaned over
the high fence that bordered the parking lot. The dinosaur stood
silently near the mock orange. The fairways were flat and clean.
Every ramp was sloped just right. Even the highway was quiet just
then.
A station wagon pulled into the parking lot and pulled up to
the fence. It was full of children. A man got out of the car and
made a motion for the children to stay put. Quinn began to walk
95 Tom Chiarella

the course towards him, following the many paths.
across
r h
k d
"Are you opening soon. t e man as e ;,
"
. "
Quinn shook his head as he approached. Sorry, he said, not
until four o'clock."
.
The man shaded his eyes and looked past Qumn to the shack.
Quinn could see the front of his shirt was wet with sweat. Quinn
asked him for a cigarette.
"Sorry," the man said. "Don't smoke."
Quinn reached in his pocket as the man turned back to the car.
He wondered why the man didn't haggle with him more. "Do you
have any change?" he yelled as the man was climbing into the
car. "For cigarettes?"
The man shrugged as he dropped himself on the front seat. He
leaned his head out of the window."Nope;· he shouted as he started
the car.
As the car backed up, Quinn was glad the man didn't have the
change since he realized as he asked that he didn't have a cent
on him, let alone a dollar to change. The children in the car looked
back at him as they drove off. One of them blew him a kiss. He
waved back, and the kid flipped him the bird.
Quinn wanted cigarettes badly, so he went to the shack to get
a couple of dollars from the till. Inside the shack it was hot, and
Quinn found the cash drawer locked. He searched through Sid's
desk for the keys. In the bottom drawer he found a beaten-up
envelope with some polaroids of a naked woman inside. She was
spread-eagled on a plaid bean bag chair in one of them. He looked
for a name on the backs of the pictures, but found nothing. Quinn
didn't recognize her. She was small and pale, and she didn't smile.
He put the pictures back in the envelope as he found them and
threw the envelope back in the drawer. "Lonely;· he said.
"Pete Rose;· Jelly said from the ceiling fan.
When he had searched the entire office for the keys without
success, he stood and leaned against the counter. He still wanted
a cigarette. A warm wind blew in the door, filling the dark shack
with moist air from the Gulf. Quinn reached in his pocket and
pulled out his jackknife.
He went around the counter and pulled the frame with the first
dollar in it from the wall. He took his knife and ran it along the
edges of the cardboard in back until he found a loose spot. Then
h~. pushed it in and pried the back off. A photograph, one not
visi~le from the front of the frame, fell out onto the desk. It was
a picture of Quinn and Sid holding the first dollar between them.
96 Tom Chiarella

Both of them were wearing suits and ties, standing in front of the
first hole. In the background was the dinosaur, young and ready,
and the lighthouse was unshaded by the paper birch. On the back
of the photograph Sid had dated it "Me and Q - The first dollar!
2-26-80:'
Quinn put the photograph down and took the first dollar from
the front of the frame. He looked at the photograph, then picked
it up and put it in his pocket. He walked out the open door, across
the course, and jumped the fence. He jogged across the highway
during a lull in the traffic and went in the Kwik Shop on the other
side. He went to the counter and asked for a pack of Luckys. The
. girl at the counter was a tall, skinny teenager whose shoulders
looked hard and pointed. She looked a little like the naked girl
on the bean bag, but she was younger and probably taller. He put
his hand on the photograph in his pocket.
"Dollar-thirty-five;• she said to him, smiling.
"You know me, right?" Quinn asked.
"I do?" said the girl. She squinted a little and put a piece of gum
in her mouth.
"Yeah, I own the miniature golf place across the street;· he said,
pointing out the window.
The girl looked past him. "Oh yeah, I guess I've seen you there;·
she said. She looked at him. "You own it?"
"That's right;· Quinn said. The girl nodded her head and chewed
her gum absently.
"Look;' Quinn said, "you know me, so do me a favor, okay? This
is a special dollar. Will you put it aside until I get back with another one to replace it?"
The girl sighed. "I can't take hundreds you know. It's against the
rules:·
"It's not a hundred;' Quinn said, showing her the bill. "But it's
special. So just keep it as a deposit for me, okay?"
The girl stopped chewing and stared at Quinn. "Are you sure
you own that place?"
Quinn took a deep breath. "Yes."
She took another look over his shoulder and then took the dollar
from his hand. "What is this? One of those silver certificates?"
"No, but I need to get it back;' Quinn said.
.
The girl shrugged and put the dollar on top of the cas~.register. "Okay, I guess. But you still owe me thirty-five cents.
"I'll bring that too;· Quinn said, turning to leave. "When I come
back. I'll give you some free game cards too."
97 Tom Chiarella

"Okay, 1guess," the girl said. "But nobody I know plays putt.
..
th d
putt anymore:·
Quinn shouted, "Save it. I'll be back, as e oor shut behind
him.

•••

At 4:30 Quinn was sitting on a bench behind the tool shed
smoking a cigarette. He had been sitting there since 3:00,
rethinking the fifth hole which would have to be torn up and laid
out north-south to make room for the roots of the pawpaw tree.
The sun broke through the clouds and warmed his shoulders and
face.
What would happen if the roots of the pawpaw broke open the
cement of the maze hole from below? They weren't that strong,
he thought They were only wood. Maybe things could stay the
way they were.
Sid's car rolled onto the driveway and pulled to a stop in front
of the shack. Sid got out. He was wearing a loose white shirt that
sloped outward over his big body. He had on baby blue pants and
his white patent leather shoes. He had a Reds cap on his head and
was wearing a pair of sunglasses that Quinn had never seen before.
There was a swagger in his step. He looked formidable, like he
owned the place.
Quinn pulled the picture of the two of them out. Sid looked older
in the picture than he did now. He was pale and thinner then. His
clothes looked dusty and heavy. Even his forearms looked smaller.
When Quinn looked at himself, he realized he looked older now.
His stomach was flatter in the picture. He put his hand on his belly
and rubbed up to his shoulders. He felt soft. He rubbed his legs.
They were sore and tingly.
He heard Sid opening the shades in the shack, but stayed where
he was. He knew Sid would see that the dollar was missing right
away and would be out soon to raise hell. He took out his pad
and started sketching the fifth hole.
Soon Sid came around the corner of the shed. He stopped when
he saw Quinn on the bench. Quinn looked up.
"Who won?" he said without lifting the pencil from the pad.
Sid was silent for a moment. He had taken off the cap and
sunglasses.His shoulders were slumped. Finally he said, "You didn't
open up."
Quinn sighed and put down the pad. He started to speak, "Yeah,
1 kno::V·It rained a little, and I didn't know where the keys were

... .

98 Tom Chiarella

Sid interrupted him. ''You left the door open:'
Quinn turned and looked at the shack. ''Yeah I guess I d.d
I
1
was right here, though:'
'
•
''You left the door open;' Sid repeated. Now Quinn thought Sid
looked exhausted and at least as soft as he himself felt. Sid was
older too.
''If you're worried about the dollar ... :'
''Money?'' Sid said loudly. He threw his hands in the air. ''Money?''
He shook his head.
''Well it's over in the store;' Quinn said, standing. ''Right in the
till, they're saving it for us:'
Si"d shook his head. He walked past Quinn and sat down on the
bench. Quinn was confused. Sid leaned forward and looked at the
ground.
''I've worked hard on this place;' Sid said ''I know you think t.hat
what I do isn't work, but it is. I work." He looked up at Quinn, who
was silent. He went on.
''I'm sick of hustling. You go in there and hustle now. I'll plant
the goddamned trees from now on. I'll stay out here and read
books. I'll quit this. I don't need this. I don't need much, and I sure
don't need this."
Quinn stared at him. Sid put his head down. ''What the hell is
all this? All this for a dollar?''
''What dollar?'' Sid asked. ''What the hell are you talking about?''
''Or is this about those pictures? Because if it is, I don't care
about that," Quinn said. ':Jesus, Sid:'
Sid looked up. ''What are you? In my drawers too? What is this?
A raid?'' Sid rose and stood very close to Quinn, who could smell
bourbon on his breath.
''I was looking for the keys to the cash drawer;' Quinn said. He
looked up into Sid's face. ''What is this anyway?''
Sid tensed and then backed off. He turned from Quinn and
walked towards the shack. ''I don't need you," Quinn heard him
say. ''This is nothing now."
Unsure of what to do, Quinn lit a cigarette and stared at the
shack. What had he done? Sid slammed the door of the shack.
He was furious. Quinn shook his head. ''Fickle son of a bitch," he
said aloud. ''What the hell did I do?'' he said. He took another drag.
''What the hell have I ever done?'' he said louder so that Sid might
hear him.
A flash of movement in the pawpaw tree caught his eye.
Movement like a branch bending quickly, bending unreasonably.
99 Tom Chiarella

An open and shut. A flutter, like leaves, but not that simple. The
movement slowed as Quinn stopped.
Quinn approached the tree and shaded his eyes from the Suh
which was shining in through the branches. The movemen~
stopped. He came closer. Then he understood. It was wings he had
seen. The movement was flight.

100 TomChiarella
________________

_

Gyorgy Raba

The Greeks Are Blinding
Polyphemus
Because he's one-eyed
because he prefers a different snack for lunch
because he takes an unknown path
because he's a shepherd though born a locksmith
because he hasn't heard a phalakrokorax in days
because he listens to the singing present
because he builds nothing squats in his cave
because he builds a cave garnished with laurel curtains
legs knees falling in line
they lug a fiery pole
like stepping a mast into its socket
they pierce and bore into his eye
because its hole is the house of death
But novelty lives in him too
every living eye shines like the sun
and the death that renders rigid
his rock-ripping muscles
lives in everybody
the form of the present is as clear
as somebody rowing barehanded
and though tomorrow's melody enchants
it rains down enamelled flakes
Many men will sail from here
amazement will never end
the dialogue of but and because
how long will you listen
o lord of eternal waters
Translated from the Hungarian by
Jascha Kessler with Maria Korosy
101

A Preface To Dying
Plato accepted death far differently.
He thanked his Daemon and his
good fortune for having been born
a man and not a dumb brute, a
Hellene and not a barbarian, and
most of all for having lived when
Socrates was alive.
- Plutarch
I have heard about the Indian
who went back twice
to the rolling hills
peeled away the dawn's mist
and like a starling cracked with just a tap
the green husk of the almond that had opened for him
once before
then he rolled about like a happy pup
tailwagging shouting yes or no as he pleased
to the black-and-white world

I'm dying happy with my one life
thanking my star
I was born no barbarian but a free soul
the sun of Hellas and cloudless truth shining in my heart
I lived with human wits and not as a dumb brute
I knew that even salt turns sweet on the tongue
and familiar bitterness milder
Wondertul to soar on youth's wide wings
in the skies of upwelling life
wonderful to find in that panorama the source of the
reed-marsh
the cold water of life amongst slippery stones
Its book opened to me every morning
a pair of swallows chivvying the hawk

I 02 Oyorgy Raba

a forgotten old appletree carrying luscious fruit
wonderful having each day dawn
witnesses to the wisdom of my bones dropped behind
in clearings the years made
I thank my star
I lived when Socrates was alive
b.ut my name's at the summit my pure name
it is given to none but me
to reach it
and what my life has held apart
alpha and omega
crash closed behind me there
Translated from the Hungarian by
Jascha Kessler with Maria Korosy
•

•

Walter McDonald

Bait
We are seining
still waters,
watching the
shimmer of minnows
fold and double
over a seine
rising around them
like dawn.
Darting,
they try to dive
through the net
which lifts
hissing
and flipping
into air and suddenly
hollow light

104

Jeannine Savard

•
I

She wasn't my Aunt
But I called her that
The first day she ran loose
Out of the screenhouse. One
Slipper off and a head of white
Hair under a clear blue sky,
My Roman collie's bark
Like rain swept into the hedges,
The red berries dropping
On her shoulders and inside
Her dress - All of that,
Just her way of having
To touch the prettiest
Beast she had ever seen. His head
And collar under her hand were as
A meeting in shade after battle,
An unwritten law, and she,
In her eyes, younger
Than anyone ever was. I told her
His name but instead, she said
Her own: Aunt Maudie, Aunt Maudie • • •
That's all she said, stroke
After stroke. My mother had said
She lost her tongue to old age,
Lost the words that belong to things.

105

I wanted her to
Listen, maybe with a friend
She could collect her words
As if they were shoes and hats
Strewn across the lawn,
Waiting to be claimed . . . But then
Like the clouds, her eyes had changed,
Filling her head, the ends of her hair,
My hair and my heart lost
For some time with her.

l06 JeannineSavard _______________

_

Hilary Heyman

107

RobHall

An Interview
with T. Coraghessan Boyle
r. Coraghessan Boyle's books include two collections of stories:
Descent of Man and Greasy Lake; and two novels: Water Music
and Budding Prospects. A new novel, World's End, is due out
from Viking in October 198 7.

You teach at the University of Southern California. Are
you from California?
New York.
New York State or the city?
Born and raised in Peekskill, Westchester County.
Is that a small town?
Yeah, I suppose. Pretty much. About thirty, thirty-five thousand
people. In Westchester County. I don't know if you know the city,
but it's right there, a suburb of New York City.
Do you think that growing up there had any specific
effect on your work?
Yes. Very much sn I grew up very close to . . . within a two·
minute walk of a Jewish communist anarchist community called
the Mohican Colony. Most of my good friends grew up there. By
the time I came around it was not so much a colony as it had once
been but there were still a lot of the old Russian Jews and
anarchists there and so on.
The community had a good education system and was very
liberal, to the point of being radical, almost. And I think that that
influenced me as a kid.
The book I've just finished, Worlds End, deals with that area,
and with the Robeson Riots of 1949 which came out of the whole
communist thing.
Westchester is an upper middle class area; although I was not
from an upper middle class family, I was influenced by it. .
1was raised,actually, to be a punk. That's what my parents raised
108

me to be, and my friends, too. We were all punks, and we felt w
were superior intellectually and politically to anyone else in th:
world. We laughed at bou_rgeois conventions and so on, even
though I suppose we were informed by them in some deep way.

Do you ever have any difficulty reconciling the fact that
you are both a writer and a teacher?
I don't think that I have the problem with it that perhaps the
writers of our parents' generation might've had, you know, where
writers weren't necessarily educated, didn't have to be educated.
There was a sense that a writer had to go out and make it in the
world as a writer. Some of those writers are proud of the fact that
they've never taught, and they've made their way doing journalism
and this and that. I think it was quite natural for me and ·the people
of my generation to go and become educated. From the time of
being an undergraduate on - although I was quite a bum at the
time - I thought in the back of my head that a pretty nice
profession would be being a college professor. Now as far as
keeping that separate from my work, maybe less than others, I
have very little problem with it because my deal with USC is that
I only come in two afternoons a week. I don't participate in any
of the campus activities or department meetings or voting for this
or that. I could if I wanted to, but I don't want to and don't choose
to. l don't think there's any danger that I'll become -an academic,
really. It doesn't interest me and USC has been understanding in
that regard and has left me alone.
You mentioned to me when we last talked that you had
an MFA from Iowa and also a Ph.D. As a fiction writer, what
compelled you to pursue the doctorate?
Well, I went to Iowa when I was abou·t twenty-three or twentyfour. I was in New York at the time, being a hippie and hanging
around with a bunch of people and shooting dope, and, ah, doing
all sorts of things that I don't do anymore but that were potentially
fatal. I had gotten an undergraduate degree but I was very
immature and trying to grow up at the same time I was going to
college. And again, you know I had this sort of punk attitude that
I grew up with. I didn't learn anything, didn't know anything, didn't
give a flying shit about anything.
• A few years later I decided I wanted to be a writer and realized
•t would certainly help me if I knew something about my literature
and the English language, which I didn't know. My idea in going
109 RobHall

-to Iowa was twofold from the beginning: to go to a workshop, not
so much . . . I didn't believe then, as I don't believe now, that
personally for me a workshop would really_teach me much about
writing, which it didn't. I had already published by the time I got
there and already knew how to write. I did need the time to sort
of grow up a bit, and that was good. But from the beginning, from
the day I got there, I began to take Ph.D. courses. Now this was
a boon for me because the Iowa Workshop accepted people on
the basis of the work only. As far as my undergraduate record was
concerned, there's no program in the country that would've
accepted me for a Ph.D. But after two years in the workshop I had
concurrently taken twenty-four hours in the English department
or maybe even thirty,,,impressed the professors, and sort of slid
in the back door. I never took the GRE's. I had a grade point in
undergraduate school of around 2.0, l think.

So, it wasn't a particular period of literature that No, I just wanted to go and immerse myself in it. The first semester I took a course in Nineteenth Century British - actually
the period was from 1890 to 1945, but we concentrated a lot on
Oscar Wilde and the Decadents, and that really appealed to me
and was what I ultimately pursued.
Where do your stories come from?
I just jot down little ideas. I'm going through a story-writing
phase right now. I've just finished a long novel and just finished
the first story after it. It's about a restaurant critic and I'd long
wanted to do a story about a restaurant critic because I felt it would
be a way of addressing criticism in general. I know the critics have
been very kind to me, country-wide and, in fact, in Europe too.
So far. (laughter) I understand that they're very arbitrary and that
they're not necessarily of the caliber of the people they assume
to criticize. So I wrote a story that addresses that question, in a
very funny way, through the medium of a restaurant reviewer.
One of my close friends out here is the chief restaurant reviewer
for the Los Angeles Tunes, and I've been to restaurants with her
once or twire. Those experts who say: "We tasted this and we found
it dry;· or whatever. Well you know who that was?That was me•
(laughter) And what the hell do I know about it?
I just got an article from some little quarterly. Some guy had
written about my work, in a kind of incomprehensible way I felt,
but I think his thesis was that a lot of my stories come from current
110 RobHall

topics, like the surrogate mother in "Cavier;· or the survivalists in
"On the Long Haut:· I'll take things from the news that interest
me and use them for stories. I'll take things from past literature
like "The Overcoat II ~·

You also take things from movies and television.
- yes, from movies and television, and science, as well. Descent of Man had a lot of stories with a scientific basis, like "The
Extinction Tales;· and the title story, "The Descent of Man;· which
derived from my amazement over the fact that chimps could use
language. Actually, that's been repudiated now, but then I thought
well, gee, this is marvelous. Here we've been so anthropocentric
all these years and we're the only ones that can use language, and
we're so vastly superior to our fellow animals, well, what about this
proposition? I do a lot of "what if' stories, I guess, too. You know,
what if this happened or what if that happened.
I do very few stories that rely on my own experience. Very few
autobiographical stories like maybe Updike might write. I just don't
feel comfortable with those. Although I do some, I think the
autobiographical elements are hidden deep For instance, "Greasy
Lake" is a story that has a lot of autobiographical elements, but
again, it's purely fiction.

A lot of the fiction that appears in literary quarterlies and
reviews today is concerned with familial relationships,
especially some sort of eighties-style estrangement. You
don't seem to write too much about that.
I don't usually write about relationships. In fact, characters to
me have always been secondary to an idea or a design for a story.
Although, you know, I've had to learn how to do characters since
I began to write novels. You just can't sustain something of five
hundred pages without building characters. So I think I have a
wider palette now than I once had. But to me, stories are joyous;
they are works of the imagination, and they deal with ideas, with
things more than people. And I'm not saying that characters are
not a big element. If there are two major elements in a story, a
character and an idea, probably the idea is the starting point for
me and the character comes next. I guess I'm just not that
interested in the soap opera kind of quality of some of the current
fiction. It seems to me repetitive and dull.
But again, each person has a different way into fiction and the
concerns of others are valid, too. I'm not negating that, although
111 RobHall

h' k we've got our

imitators

ad nauseam

of the

.
odels are people like Calvino and Garcia Marquez and
literary m

RobertCooverand the early Donald Barthelme, J~hn Barth, John
dner.
I
think
that
fiction
can
be
a
great
deal
bigger
than
it
has
.
.
Gar
been reduced to in recent years 1n our magazines.

Again, 1 refer to our conversation last year when you
mentioned the term: ''catatonic realism'' (laughter)

- to refer to the fiction being publishe.d today.
Yeah, I've coined that term, that very disparaging term.

Do you consider yourself a novelist or a short story
writer?
Both. And I hope always to be both. I love the form of the story.
I began as a story writer, exclusively. I think that was my
apprenticeship. I started Water Music to see if I could do it, and
five hundred and forty pages later I had done it with a vengeance.
Then, I didn't want to do it again for a while, and I went back to
stories for six months or eight months. Then I did Budding
Prospects.After another period of stories, which resulted in the
collection Greasy Lake, I have now done a novel that has taken
me two-and-a-half or three years. I've relievedly come back to
stories, although the idea for the next novel is in my head. I hope
to begin the novel, a short one, of course, but like Budding
Prospects,a sort of contemporary one, by the summer, perhaps.
I

Various reviewers have mentioned the humor In your
work, specifically black humor. Where does that humor
come from?
I suppose it's just that my way of conversation and my way of
dealing with the world is to tell sto~ies and to say the offhand or
~d thing. That's just my way of approaching life in conversation
with my fellow human beings. Like most humorists, like good
~umorists, like the early Kingsley Amis, I just can't stand self-

raghteousness,and pomposity, and all of that shit. I guess that I'm
meant to deflate it and that's where my humor comes from.

Blac~ humor is part of my upbringing. We talked about my
educa!aon,and it was wanting until I did my Ph.D.,but in my early
1
years nstead of being burdened with

l 12 RobHall

Dickens and all the rest of

it - which by the way I came to later love - my classical literature
was Ionesco and Samuel Beckett and the absurdist playwrights.
What was happening on the page then in the late sixties. There
was also Joseph Heller and Barth, Berger's first book. There was
a lot of black humor, and that suited me just fine. It was just the
way I saw things.
Most of the things I read, and this may fall under your
term "catatonic realism," in quarterlies and reviews seem
to be mostly humorless. Do you think that contemporary
editors discriminate against humor?

I think that humor has always been regarded as less serious than
a non-comic piece, which is false. But I do think it's regarded in
that way.To be merely a humorist, I think, is to be less than a short
story writer or a novelist, period
I don't know if editors discriminate against humorous pieces.
It seems that during the late sixties and early seventies, in a time
of formal experimentation, a time when you saw more humorous
writing published - I don't mean humorous in a disparaging
sense, I mean comic writing in the best sense, like Thomas
Pynchon - the editors then, the old hard line editors, the guys
who are still in power in the literary world, who are maybe sixty
now, gritted their teeth through that time and they didn't know
what that stuff was all about and they didn't like it And now,thank
God, it's behind them. Now they're happy to publish more and
more stories about three people sitting in the trailer court, talking
folksy about Joe's drinking problem. They're happier than ever
to do that.
You know, Raymond Carver, who's the best story writer in this
country, easily, is such a powerful force, his stories are so brilliant
and so gripping and powerful. He - and there's Ann Beattie, to
a lesser extent - has spawned a host of imitators. I think that's
natural, and that's fine. But I think we come to the end of it
eventually. The ninth-string Carver people aren't very good.
There are some people, well-known, who have gotten a great
deal of praise, and I'm not going to mention names because I don't
want to disparage anyone specifically, but are playing the same
record for us but at a slower speed. I get tired of the fact that the
magazines are just dominated by these people.
I suppose I've spun out my own imitators now, but at this point
in my career I don't think that I'm nearly as well-known as some
of these realists and think that I should be better known than many
113 RobHaU

f
them
and
think
that
I
will
be.
(laughter)
0
hear
a
lot
of
rumbling
in
the
press
lately
about
this
whole
1
hool of realists and minimalists. Everyone's jumped on the band:=agon. I think that fiction is looking for somewhere new to turn.
They can turn to me.
.
.
I think I've been influenced by this penod of the last ten years,
to an extent, but I think I still haven't lost the love I have for other
types of fiction, for the kind of magic that fiction can give you.
In my new book, I mean, I have biza~re coincidence: four hundred
years of family history, ghosts and imps, a man with no feet. It's
got it all. Oaughter)

When is that book expected out?
October. From Viking. It's called Worlds End.
You started publishing in the early seventies, didn't you?
My first story came out in nineteen . . . ah, the fall of 1972 in
the North American Review.
Do you think it was easier then, in any way, for a young,
serious writer to get published?
No. I think actually it was probably a little harder than it is right
now. The rap on first books of stories - my first book of stories
came out in 1979 - was that they didn't sell. It was very rare for
a first book of stories to come out. Now, I think the public has
accepted stories more, and that's a positive trend. I don't think it's
too much different today to get published in a magazine. I think
it's easier now to get a first collection published, though, and get
some attention for it, like David Leavett and Peter Cameron and
other young writers who've come out with first collections.
To go back for a moment to your answer to an earlier
question, you think that this trend In realism is coming to
an end?
Well (laughter}, I don't know. I hope so. I hear rumblings. Yeah,
I hope that we'll open up a bit. Barth wrote a little article on this
in the New York Tunes Book Review a few weeks ago. Very funny,
very witty,very learned - marvelous. Ecumenical, too. Not a total
attack but saying that people reading these minimalists should
not forsake the joys of maximalists, like himself.
I t~!nk we <:8ndo more. People may feel that the American
pubhc s attention span is short and that they don't want to see a
114 RobHall

bag of tricks or that they're not that sophisticated. Well, that may
be the case. Of a population of 250 million, I think there are only
about, oh, fifty or sixty people left in the country who know how
to read, but addressing those fifty or sixty, they might get a little
bored with this shit and might want to have something that opens
it up for them a little more.
Charles Dickens is a good model. He was everything to
everybody. He was funny. He was wild. He was imaginative. He was
at times realistic. He did it all.

What contemporary writers do you read and enjoy?
Don Delillo's White Noise, Louise Erdrich's Love Medi.cine, and
Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro are about the best novels I've read
recently. Just fantastic books. Rich, full of imagination, great
characters.
In creative terms, what is different for you during the
period when you're writing a novel and a period of short
stories?
With the novel you have the difficulty of keeping focused and
keeping the tone steady, and sometimes you get bored. I can only
do one project at once. I would never consider putting something
down and doing something else. Only one thing at once. You do
get bored. You have ideas; things come up that you would like to
express - and some of it does work its way into the novel, of
course - but generally they're things you feel you have to shunt
aside. On the other hand, the reward of the novel is that it is a
sustained effort, and it is something that you're doing each day.
With the stories, you have a flash of inspiration, any idea,
anything that hits you, any day, any time. You can read anybody;
you can be influenced by them. Their voices can squeak through
for a minute or two. It doesn't matter. It's fine. It's only a story and
it's done in a couple of weeks and in the mail. The downside of
stories is that in between you waste some time fooling around
looking for an idea. When I'm really clicking with stories, though,
which I'm not right now, I already know what the next one is going
to be when I'm about half way through the one I'm writing.
I find lately, though, since I've begun writing novels, that I'm only
good for six or eight months of writing stories and then I kind
of get itchy to do something longer. But I think that's good. I think
it's good, for me personally, to work in cycles. So far it has been,
anyway.
115 Rob Hall

What are you happiest about In your own work?
I'm happy if it comes together, if it works, if it's good. It's a hard
question to answer because each story and each novel is differ
and has different aims. I suppos~, you know, if I'm satisfied
I've met the aims of the story, I m happy.

t~:!

ll6RobHa, _________________

_

CONTRIBUTORS

NOTES

Kathleen Atkins is the author of A Physics Problem, published by Blackwells Press. She is also a 1984 winner of an
Academy of American Poets First Prize and has published
work in The Atlantic, Poetry, The Slackwater Review, and many
other journals.
Joseph Edward Bolton's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Cumberland Poetry
Review, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, Plainsong, Quarterly
West, Southern Poetry Review, and Yellow Silk. He is currently
working on an MA in Creative Writing at the University of
Florida at Gainesville.
Ron Carlson's most recent book is The News Of The World.
Michael Carrino has an MFA from Norwich University. He
currently teaches writing courses in the community college
system of South Burlington, Vermont. His work has appeared
in New Letters, Poetry Miscellany, and Glen Falls Review.
Tom Chiarella is an instructor at the University of Alabama.
"Jelly in the Pawpaw Tree" is part of a collection called
Berard's Story. He has published fiction in Mid-American
Review, Florida Review, and other magazines.
Peter Cooley's most recent book is Nightseasons, published
by Carnegie-Mellon in 1983, and his new book, The Van Gogh
Notebook, will be available this spring from the same
publisher. His work has appeared in two anthologies, New
American Poets Of The 80s and The Morrow Anthology Of
Younger American Poets.
Yasu Eguchi, a student of the Bunka Gakuin and Horie Art
Academies in Japan, became the youngest artist ever to
receive the Selective Artist Award at the Yokohama Art
Museum in 1965. His work has been exhibited at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tokyo; Santa Barbara Museum
of Art; and Austin Gallery in Santa Barbara and Scottsdale. He
is listed in Who's Who In American Art.
Benjamin Goluboff was born in Philadelphia and is an Assistant Professor of English at Lake Forest College. This is his
first national publication.
nd
Rob Hall is an MFA candidate at Arizona State University a

a former fiction editor of Hayden's Ferry Review. His fiction
and poetry have appeared in The Fiction Review, The Traveler,
and other journals. He is currently at work on a novel.
117

I

HIiary Heyman received her MF A from Arizona State Univ
sity and has taught in the Phoenix area. She has exhibited ;rart at the Austin Gallery in Scottsdale, the Leslie Levy Gallerer
the Arizona Print _Sho:-v,the_ l~~h Southwestern lnvitation:i:
and the Arizona B1enmal Exh1b1t1onat the Tucson Museum of
Art.
Michael Hogan lives in Tucson, Arizona, and is a consultant
on writing programs in correctional institutions. His latest
book, The Terrace, St. Tropez, is scheduled to appear soon
from the Greenfield Review Press.
K.B. Hwang was born in Korea in 1932. He studied intaglio
printmaking in Paris and moved to New York in 1970. He has
been honored with more than forty one-man and group shows
over the last fifteen years and his prints are featured in such
museum collections as the Museum of Modern Art, New York;
the Musee d' Art Moderne, Paris; the British Museum, London;
and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Michael Johnson is a Professor of English and Chair of the
Department at the University of Kansas. He has published
poetry and poetic translations in many journals and little
magazines; his most recent book of translations is Familiar
Stranger.
Rolly Kent directs several special projects for the Tucson
Public Library: the Writers' Project; the annual Tucson Writers'
Conference; and a new NEH program, America: A Reading. His
first full-length collection, Spirit, Hurry, was published in 1985.
.
Jascha Kessler was born in New York and has been Professor
of English and Modern Literature at UCLA since 1961. His
many prizes include two Senior Fulbright Awards to Italy. He
has published four collections of stories, three books of
poetry, and several works of translation, including The Face Of
Creation: 26 Contemporary Hungarian Poets, which will be
published by the Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, in 1987. He
has also written several plays produced in Los Angeles and
New York, and the libretto for a full-length opera.
Robert Klpness received his MF A in Painting and Art History
from the University of Iowa. In 1980 he was elected to the National Academy of Design, and he has been the recipient of
numerous other awards. His publications include twenty-six

drawings for Poems Of Emily Dickinson, published by Thomas
Y. Crowell, and the cover painting for Collected Poems Of
Robert Graves, published by Doubleday/Anchor. His work is included in many public and corporate collections, selected oneman shows, and group shows.

Marla Korosy has prepared the literal versions of many
Hungarian poets. She has an MA in English from the University
of Budapest and is the English Secretary of the Hungariam
PEN Club.
Edward C. Lynskey's work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, College English,
Prairie Schooner, Arizona Quarterly, and New Mexico
Humanities Review. He is the author of Wrought Iron (Manassas
Press, 1980) and Teeth Of The Hydra (Crop Dust Press, 1986).
He lives in Warrenton, Virginia.

Walter McDonald's first book, The Flying Dutchman, won the
University of Cincinnati's George Elliston Poetry Prize and will
be published by Ohio State University Press this spring. He has
published poems in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, and Kenyon
Review and is currently teaching Creative Writing at Texas
Tech University.
Thomas M. McNally is an MF A candidate at Arizona State
University.
Pauline Mortensen has won awards from the Rocky Mountain Collegiate Press Association, Ann Doty Fiction Contest,
Mayhew Contest, and Sunstone Magazine contest. She is working on a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Utah.
D. Nurkse has recently received an NEA fellowship. He
resides in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Allan Peterson's poems have appeared in Black Bear Review,
Parnassus, Webster Review, and others. He is Chairman of the
Art Department at Pensacola Junior College.
S. Denys Pogue'a work has appeared in Crosscurrents,
Pulpsmith, and New Times, as well as Mallife and other
underground magazines. She recently completed a collection
of short fiction and is now writing a novel entitled Hot Sauce.
Gyorgy Raba is an expert in Italian and French literature and
has translated several books of poetry. He was a member of the

nstitute
for
Literature
of
the
Hungarian
Academy
of
Sc·
I
.
. 984
iences
until he retired m 1
•

Umberto Saba was born i~_Trie~te in 188~ and died in 1957_
In many ways he was a trad1t1onahst, especially in poetic st 1 .
•
I
d
"C'
d
"
Ye,
even in a poem as seeming y mo ern as m ers, the reader
experiences the dominance of the traditional ltali
hendecasyllabic line. Although he was not as experimental :n
contemporaries like Eugenio Montale, he had a considerabl:
critical and popular following. He is now revered both as a
great modern poet and as a consummate stylist.
Catherine Sasanov lives in Massacchusetts and is Assistant
Editor of the Boston Literary Review. Her work has recently
been published in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Connecticut Poetry
Review, and Hubbub.
Jeannine Savard won the 1986 American Poetry Review
Shestack Prize and has recetly published poems in North
American Review, Cutbank, Quarterly West, Antioch Review,
and Poetry Northwest.
Dennis Schmitz is the author of String, Goodwill, Inc., and
Singing, all published by Echo Press. He has won Guggenheim
and NEA fellowships, and he teaches at California State
University, Sacramento.
Arthur Secunda studied in New York and Paris. At over 100
shows internationally, Secunda's exhibits at galleries,
museums, and other public institutions have been distinguished in the mediums of painting, collage, and printmaking. He
works and lives in Los Angeles and Paris.
Peggy Shumaker is the author of Esperanza's Hair(University
of Alabama Press, 1985).She teaches at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.
Paul Shuttleworth'• latest chapbook, Living And Sinning For
Them, won the Signpost Press chapbook competition and has
been recently published. His poems have appeared in Prairie
8
~~~oner, Cutbank, and other journals, and he is currently
visiting writer at Drake University.
Bruce _Taylor's poems have appeared in many small
quarterlies and reviews. He edited Eating The Menu- A Con·

temporary American Poetry 19 70- 74 and is the author of The
Darling Poems. He lives and teaches in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Richard Terrill has recently won a Wisconsin Arts Board
Literary Fellowship and has published his work in Ironwood
and North American Review, among others.
Barry Thomson's photographs are found in the collection
"From Out of the Desert," a portfolio of photographs taken in
the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix, Arizona.
Naomi Wallace is a former MFA candidate in the Writer's
Workshop at the University of Iowa. Her poems have appeared
in New Letters ans! Winters. She lives in Amsterdam, Holland.

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MIS AMIGOS RELEGADOS:
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