“Too bad your wife couldn’t come,” the Old Man says, piling slices of salami onto a buttered roll and then adding hot red peppers and lettuce.

I notice Jade and her old man give each other a quick look. “You know Didi,” Uncle Joe says “Busy getting the house ready for the baby.” He’s bald, like my Old Man, only doesn’t make an elaborate attempt to hide it via a comb-over. He’s building a sandwich of prosciutto and olives and onions and cheese. It’ll turn into an eating contest between the two of them before the night is out. That’s how it works with dagos.“The work’s never done,” Ma says, and she knows, having squeezed out nine of us. “I haven’t talked to her in so long. Not since . . .” her voice trails off.

Jade’s wearing a wrinkled black dress with no stockings, her feet bare and folded up under her on the couch. Her eyes are blue, a rarity in our family, and perfectly round and hollow. “You got big,” I say.

“So did you,” she says. “Not as big as me. Remember the last time I was here?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I remember that.” Joey and Jade’s brother, Max, are outside somewhere, I’m assuming getting stoned, I don’t know what else they’d be doing, it’s all there is to do in this town though I have a feeling it’s all there is to do in most places, and some of the Old Man’s other brothers come by the house and pretty soon the place is filled with loud voices and cigarette smoke and ladies with too much make-up, and I take Jade’s wrist and lead her upstairs to me and Joey’s room.

“Who’s the kid’s old man?” I say. I’m lying back on my bed and instead of taking Joey’s, she’s laying right next to me. She smells of a long flight but also like flowers, flowers that have been crumpled and thrown away and just have a hint of scent left.

“I’m not saying,” she says. “I haven’t told anybody and that’s my policy.”

“Your old man let you get away with that?”

“What can he do? Beat me?”

“My Old Man sure as hell would beat it out of you; he’ll beat anything out of anybody. You know who the father is?”

“I’m not a slut,” she says. “There’s only the one. He knows it’s his.”

I light a joint and she’s miffed when I don’t offer her any. “You’re not allowed to smoke,” I say.

“Everybody treats me like I’m walking around with the crown fucking jewels,” she says. “It’s a baby. Women were having them in caves. It isn’t that big of a deal. Give me that. Jesus, your mother had nine. Just because my mother lost one they think I’m prone, like it runs in the family.” She takes a long and deep hit, holds it in for far longer than I ever manage to do, and blows it out in a thick rope of pure gray. I like getting high with girls; it’s different than smoking with guys. “You gonna still go to school when it comes? It being the baby,” I say.

“Of course. It’s not like I have to drop out. We’ll figure out a schedule. My dad thinks my mom will be home by then and she can carry the load but it isn’t gonna work like that.”

“Your mom home? Where’s your ma?”

“My father will fucking kill me if he knows I said anything. My mom’s back in the hospital. Do not say anything. He’s all ashamed, figures everybody will think it’s his fault he drove her crazy and not understand that she was actually crazy all on her own. The thing is, it is his fault. He’s an asshole.”

“My Ma’s come close twice now to ending up in Gowanda, our version of the nuthouse,” I say. “You don’t know what asshole is until you live with my Old Man. You’re living on easy street. Your old man is the runt of that litter.”

“Fuck you, Frankie,” she says, and shoves her body over and playfully pushes at me. “Fuck you.” I like when pretty girls swear. “I don’t think my mom’s coming home anytime soon,” she says. “She’s pretty much full-on crazy. Don’t even ask me what she did. It’s like not having a mom anymore.” She suddenly has a handful of stray tears running down her cheeks and instead of pretending not to notice, like I usually do when a girl cries, I grab her a few tissues from the box on my nightstand.

“You sure you’re gonna have enough to clean up after you play with yourself?” she says. “Please don’t do it when I’m in the next bed. Or if you do, at least tell me you’re doing it, so I won’t have to wonder,” she says. We’re sharing a room for the next four nights, me and Jade. Joey and Max are gonna be sleeping on couches downstairs and Jade’s getting Joey’s bed.

She won’t tell me who it was she fucked. Instead she wants to know all about everything I’ve been doing. Am I still all in love with Lena Gustafson? No, I say. Have I ever taken acid? Yes. What was it like? Like peeling back the world and discovering what’s underneath, the control room, all the switches and buttons and colorful wires. I open the windows next to my bed and the smoke drifts out.

There’s a whole ruckus going on downstairs and I assume the uncles will head out to The Hideaway soon enough. It belongs to Uncle Sammy, another brother, and it’s where they always end up while the aunts clean the mess left behind. “You’re lucky,” she says, “to have so much family here. We have nobody near us. Everybody seems so happy here.”

I’m speechless. Happy we’re not. Ma teeters on the brink of hearing voices and earning herself a trip to the Shock Room like her two sisters did before her. That doesn’t seem bad compared to having a mother already actually in the Shock Room, but that’s just the surface of what we have going on here.

Then next day Jade insists I take her to Caruso’s for an Italian beef. She has a craving and remembers it from her other trips here. There’s no talking a pretty girl out of anything when it comes to me. She brought some weed with her, actually hid it up inside herself for the plane ride, rightly thinking nobody wants to give a gynecological exam to a pregnant teen just in the name of national security. The bud is bomb bomb, as Jade calls it. Another difference between here and out West. Not only is the weather better there, the people more relaxed, the girls prettier, the smoke is much better, way fucking better, and I’m baked to the gills when we push the double glass doors in and grab a front booth, sitting right under a massive vintage poster advertising a visit to Chautauqua by the great tenor himself. Not that it matters but my Nana saw both Carsuo and Mario Lanza in her lifetime and said Caruso was a piker compared to Lanza. Thought I’d throw that in just in case you had any interest. It’s all I know about opera. I already got a bellyful of fat Italians screeching anytime I step out of my bedroom so it’s not like I’d pay any money to see or listen to it. The Old Man and the crew are golfing so there’s no way I’ll run into him here, though most times there’s a good chance he’ll be holding court in a back booth, his jesters paying fealty by laughing when nothing he says is actually funny.

We get the pretty waitress. She remembers me from the last time we saw each other. She doesn’t say anything but I can tell. She borders on icy but it might also be I’m so stoned I’m getting paranoid.

“You gonna marry the guy?” I ask, just trying to start some conversation. I’m getting nervous. Hearing her breathe in the bed next to me all night. Girls breathe deeper than guys when they sleep. They give off warmth that fills the entire room. It just comes off their bodies. It isn’t anything they can help. This morning when she came back from the shower I pretended to still be asleep, but I doubt it mattered to her whether I was or wasn’t. She just went ahead and took her towel off and went prancing about putting her panties and bra on, and throwing another wrinkled dress over the top of her like I wasn’t even there. I kept my eyes closed for most of it, but only for most.

“Do I look Mormon or Mexican to you? Maybe when I’m eighteen but I’m not getting married before then. He said he will, that he’ll marry me then.”

“People change their minds.”

“It’s not up to him,” she says. “He’ll marry me if I want.” She tells me the whole story, even tells me who it is. Josh, which is a douche name. “You’re the only person other than him in the whole world who knows,” she says. “I don’t even have any friends left because I won’t tell any of them.” He’s one of her teachers at school. Her English teacher. She goes over to babysit his kid or to get tutoring and they fuck. She threatens to tell anytime he loses any interest.

“You’re blackmailing him?” I say.

“I’m protecting my interests,” she says.

“I don’t get wanting to be with someone you have to blackmail to get to stay. That you have to blackmail to be with you. I can still fuck Lena,” I say, “but I have no interest because she’s fucking another dozen guys too,” I say.

“That’s not the only reason he stays, moron. He stays because he likes fucking me. He’s in it too deep to just stop so he might as well enjoy it. As far as letting him go, who else would have me? He’s the only person outside of my mom who’s ever even come close to making me feel a little loved. Who would have a person like me, with a baby?”

I remember what she looked like when my eyes were open this morning, wet black hair hanging half-way down her bare back, the curve of her womanly ass, cheeks still bright red from the hot shower, like she just got spanked, what I could see of her front peering back at me when she bent over, how she stood looking at herself in the mirror, legs hip length’s apart, applying lipstick before getting dressed. “Pretty much anybody,” I say. “Anybody would want to have you.”

“It’s pretty cute still having somebody trying to get into my panties when I’m this pregnant,” she says. “Even if they are my relative. It’s really sweet how nice you keep being to me.”

She catches me with a mouth full of sandwich otherwise I might protest. It’s just easier to say the right things to girls who look and act like Jade. Her teacher friend must be powerless around her. He’s in his late 20’s, married but separated, his wife a fat blob maybe ten years older than him. Then along comes Jade. She’s the kind of girl who if she was in one of my classes I’d stare at while teasing my dick with the end of a ruler. I wouldn’t care if anybody saw. With some food in me and a cherry shake, I’m feeling a little more relaxed and so I tell her, I tell her the kind of girl I think she is.

“You’d play with yourself looking at me? That’s creepy. But a little hot. I think I just got a little wet.” She actually reaches under the table and checks herself with a finger. “I am,” she says. “You’re a bad cousin.”

“I’ll tell you my secret now,” I say. “One of them. You know how I said I was staying here for college? I lied. My Ma doesn’t know it yet but I’m coming to your part of the country. One state over. The Old Man says we should wait until the very last minute to tell her so she doesn’t start the worrying yet. I can visit you.”

She’s lost in a trail of thought and I’m not sure she even heard me. Girls have a way of doing that, suddenly not being there right in the middle of a conversation, leaving me alone with just their bodies and none of the rest of them. Then she comes back again when I’m not expecting it. “You really think I’m worthwhile?” she says. “I’d rather be with someone who doesn’t want to be with me than be alone. I’m terrified of being alone.”

“That’s where you and me are different. I got eight siblings. Alone is my desired location.”

“You and me can be alone together,” she says.

“The baby too,” I say.

“Oh,” she says. “That.”

The pretty waitress slaps the bill on the table, doesn’t even ask how the food was. “She’s in a snit,” I say.

“That’s because she’s preggers,” Jade says. “She’s in that really tired first part, where all you ever want to do is sleep. I wanted to die then. If you wanted to look at me, she says, if you wanted to look at me while, you know, you did it, I’d let you.”

“What’d you say?”

“You know,” she says. “I’ll take my clothes off for you. If you wanted.”

“No,” I say. “About the waitress? She’s pregnant?”

“Why do you care about her so much? Yeah, it’s easy to tell. She’s probably closing in on three months. I feel embarrassed now. I thought you’d be excited by what I said, what I offered. Now I feel like an idiot.”

The pretty waitress is pregnant. I feel very sober. Not clearheaded but sober. Jade is pregnant, the pretty waitress is pregnant. Thanks be to god Ma isn’t pregnant again. “We’re cousins,” I say. “Is there something wrong with you? We’re blood. Plus, Jesus, you’re knocked up. Like I can jack off looking at someone pregnant. Big pregnant like you, not like her.” I point over at the waitress who scowls at me. “I’m not a pervert. Jesus, we’re fucking cousins. Leave the tip and let’s get out of here.”

Joey’s back in his bed that night and the next. Jade refuses to talk to me or even look at me, for that matter. She spends a lot of the time on the phone and even more time sitting in a chair out back, staring off at something only she can see. It must be mighty interesting because she hardly ever looks away. “Don’t worry about her,” Uncle Joe says. “She gets moody like this. It’s the hormones. She was always moody to start with.” He launches off into a story about how the best thing about the pregnancy is that she doesn’t look fat anymore and that when he told her that she didn’t talk to him for two days. “I complimented her, for crissakes, and she was still pissed off at me.”

The night before they leave, after dinner I’m in my room when there’s a knock. “I need to pack up my stuff,” Jade says. “I can come back later.” She’s wearing her white dress.

“Stay,” I say. “Close the door. Just close the door. You wanna get high?”

“You don’t expect me to pretend you didn’t say those things to me, I hope. You looked like my father when you said it. If I closed my eyes I’d have sworn it was him.”

“No,” I say. “No. I don’t expect that. I just talk easier when I’m smoking.”

“You’ll have to do without your little crutch,” she says.

“Come one.”

“Nope.” She’s smiling, enjoying her little power over me. “You’ll have to relax some other way.”

“The only other way I have is jerking off.”

“You’ll have to do that with my clothes on,” she says. “Oh, alright,” she says, and pulls a baggy out of her purse. “Just because I’m smoking with you doesn’t mean I forgive you. I just don’t want to have to shove this inside my pussy again tomorrow and it’s either that or let it go to waste. I was going to give it to my cousin but then he acted like a douchebag to me.”

“That was the baggy that was inside of you?” I say.

“You wanna sniff it, go ahead.”

“Jade,” I say. “I’m gonna tell you something. Just like I’m the only person who knows about that teacher who, I think, is using you and you should fucking dump and have arrested, by the way, you’re the only one with this.”

“Frankie, are you gonna cry? You look like you might cry.” She hands me the tissues but I don’t need them. My eyes are watering from the smoke.

“I’m not gonna cry,” I say.

“Oh,” she says. “You’re one of them. No tears. They’re unmanly.”

The weed has brought us back to where we should have been all along. I pick up the baggie and draw in deeply through my nose. It smells more like pot and plastic than it does of her. “Women cry more than enough to make up for guys who don’t cry,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “Usually the women with those very guys.”

“My Ma was convinced my Old Man was up to no good,” I tell her.

“Isn’t that how he makes his living?” she says.

“Not that kind of no good. I think she must have thought he had a girlfriend.”

“He is very good looking,” she says.

I picture my Old Man, his intricate comb-over and big nose. “Whatever,” I say. “I personally think she’s bazzo. Me and Joey both do. But I go along and I follow him. He goes where he goes. The Hideaway, Caruso’s, home, back to The Hideaway.”

“People are boring,” she says. “Everybody could have so much fun if they just made an effort.”

“Oh, he’s efforting,” I say. “The Old Man is efforting.” I tell her the story, leaving out the unimportant details. How I saw him leave The Hideaway and get into a car and I followed it. How the pretty waitress from Caruso’s got out of the car, followed by the Old Man. How I watched as they kissed and then it looked like he fingered her, and then he took his cock out and she got on her knees and he put it into her mouth. Held her by the head. I told her how big it was, the size of it when he was trying to put it away in a hurry when they noticed the car. How in a panic trying to leave, I ran over the waitress’s cat three separate times. How they surely saw and recognized me. How while my college tuition may or may not be a bribe, it sure feels like one. And how if the pretty waitress from the place we had lunch is pregnant then I’m gonna have yet another brother or sister, this one most unwelcome. “I’m really sorry I said those things to you. None of them were true.”

“Holy fuck,” she says. “You killed her cat?”

“Splat,” I say.

“Was it really that big?”

“It looked like he was wrestling with an electric eel,” I say. “I must take after Ma’s side of the family, I think. You gonna let me see you naked? I did a little already, the other morning.”

“I fucking knew it!” she says. “I took forever getting dressed just so you’d wake up. I wanted you to wake up. You had a boner the entire night. I could see your sheets lifted. It’s not that bad, Frankie. Things are gonna happen no matter what. I’m gonna have a baby whether I want it or not; not that I ever considered not having and keeping it. I never considered anything but what I’m doing. But still, it’s out of my hands now. And all this is out of yours. Let’s be kissing cousins. That’s what you said to me when I was like twelve, you fucking perv.”

“You were fourteen,” I say.

“I might as well have been twelve,” she says. “I’d have done it then too. I had a crush on you then, too. Come here.”

Her mouth is softer than I remembered. Richer and deeper, as if pregnancy has expanded her entire invisible self and I’m licking at the entrance, plunging my tongue into the ever-expanding depths of this new space.

I’m not gonna give you the details. She’s my cousin and that’s different from another kind of girl. Not a sister. Definitely not a sister, but there’s still got to be some protective edge. Or only a couple of details. She’s not wearing any panties under her dress. She feels the need to breathe down there. Her breasts are no longer globs of fat but are fully formed, swollen to the point of veiny, the pink crowns strained and stretching, preparing themselves for their primary duty. When I slide into her the first time, her lying on her side and me behind her, it feels like suddenly rediscovering a piece of information I never even knew I had in the first place. I kiss the back of her white, white neck, nibble on her tiny ears and neck and my hands explore the slope of her belly, the rock hard solidity of it. It’s sudden and not very subtle and I put my hands on it, wrap one arm under her and the other over the top, envelop her, and my hands meet at the highest point, only it’s more like it’s holding me than me holding it, this place inside of her where I can feel the baby shift and kick, small dings against my hands.

“He’s happy,” she whispers.

“So am I,” I whisper back. It’s slow and gentle, the first time, I treat her like she’s something that can be broken, but the times after that are much more theatrical, like a performance involving gymnasts and contortionists. She greedily takes in every last drop I have to offer and I greedily give every last that I have.
The bedroom door’s unlocked. Anybody can walk in at anytime. In a house with nine kids and an Italian mother, you’re lucky if you can take a shit without someone hanging all over you, asking for help with a homework problem or being told to surrender your underwear for a load of whites that she’s just starting. What would they say if they walked in, saw me and Jade naked, the only light in the room coming from the streetlight outside my window, me inside of her, the way we’re kissing and tearing at each other, like there’s some big obstacle other than her belly standing in our way and we’re determined to tear it down and finally get to the truth of the matter, uncover the one goddamn secret that keeps us all bumping into each other every day?
If Ma walked in she would faint or start praying. Joey would storm away pissed that he got stuck playing nursemaid to the younger brother. The Old Man catching us would be ripe. He’s very big on respecting women and in his mind, or at least how he talks, not how he acts, fucking them is disrespectful, unless you’re trying to crank out babies, of course. Then fuck away.

“I love you, Frankie,” Jade says. I tell her I love her back. Neither of us believes it but it sure feels good to pretend we do.

Respect for women is the topic of a popular speech of his, of the Old Man’s. It’s a story about his parents, my Nana who died a couple of years ago and the Old Man’s old man. He died when Nana was still pregnant with the Old Man and none of us obviously ever met him and we don’t really even have a name for him. They owned a small grocery store and a bakery. This was when she was carrying the Old Man around in her, seven other kids at home in various stages of growth. They’d get to the store early together every morning, by four am, leaving the older ones in charge, and she’d fire up the stoves for the fresh bread they sold every day, and he’d lug barrels of olive oil around and unwrap the meats and cheeses and sweep, even though he probably swept six hours earlier when they closed.

One morning she was sick, Nana was. She had a rattling cough. A fever. Her tossing and turning kept the Old Man’s old man from sleeping. You stay home today, he told her, in Italian of course.

I make the bread, she said. Apparently she was the only one capable of operating the ovens.

We’ll use day old bread, he grunted. I assume he grunted. The men in this family grunt.

The story goes that he left her there in bed and walked to the store and was behind the meat counter when he heard a familiar noise, a hissing sound, the gas of the ovens. He stormed into the kitchen and there she was, holding an already wet tissue in her hand, wet from her constant cough, standing on a stool and peering into the highest oven, like she forgot something in there. She turned and looked at him. Fresh bread, is what she said. Fresh bread today. The Old Man’s old man, obviously now I know where the Old Man gets it, shut off the gas, took an axe from a wall in the back and began to hammer at the fronts of the stoves. He ripped their doors off. He pulled one clean out of the wall. At the end of it, covered in sweat, out of breath, he looked at her, she was standing there with her hands on her hips, giving him the evil eye, and he said, No fresh bread today. I personally think the old guy comes off as a slightly more psychotic version of the Old Man himself, but apparently the point is that the damage caused was a small price to pay to keep his wife well. A lot of good it did, being that he caught her cold and died three months later of pneumonia.

Jade’s hovering over me, her belly threatening to come tumbling down and crushing me in an avalanche. Her hair drapes my face. She moves her head and swishes it back and forth against my cheeks. I can’t say enough about the way she kisses, what she tastes like. I don’t know what respect is, but cheating on my Ma is not respect. He can tell all his little stories but the facts remain what they are. I’m not sure where in that tale he found the dispensation to knock up the pretty waitress at Caruso’s but then again, he never even did know his old man, he wasn’t even born yet, so he must have heard the story second hand and here I am giving it one more step removed from the original. For all that I know, there may very well have been fresh bread on that day.

To his credit, Alvarez Réspito distinguished himself amongst his fellow captives by learning basket weaving from a native woman whose name has been lost forever to the oversight of history.  That being said, his motives for taking up that craft may be called into question by some, for Réspito had not, until then, been known as a noble man, nor was he at all open-minded, nor especially crafty.  It was assumed by his captors that Réspito was building a bridge between himself and the native woman, that when she was in his confidence, she would provide him his liberty.  But the two never spoke.  Silently she passed pine needles and dried strips of reed through the thick wooden bars, and Réspito watched and mimicked her every wrap and twine.  There was no conspiracy in this.

Outside of the small garret were other natives:  men, women and children daily living, taking from the earth, drawing water from the deep, churning river.  Their homes, like the garret, were made of timber and deer hide, and the use of stone and steel to them was little known, except in fairy tales they told their children late at night about their fathers’ fathers who traveled far and arrived home safely, speaking of giant stone monsters that gobbled up villagers after sunset and birthed them anew in the morning, fresh and dry.  These became Réspito’s lullabies, arriving at his ears muffled and distant, as organ music heard from outside a church.

By the end of the first year he had grown accustomed to their dialect—the glottal stops indicative of questions; the reversed and sometimes redoubled syntax; the singsong nature of it all—so that he could have spoken with them unhindered, except that he’d vowed to not speak until his release, the terms of his captivity having not been explained to him and, had they been, Réspito would have found the terms unjust.

And so Réspito resigned himself to muteness and, later, even the pleasure of listening. He soon forgot all language, finding a new tongue in weaving.  In this he discovered the conveyance of pure thought, uncorrupted by the cumbersome contrivance called speech.

Although his captors did not take notice of his woven philosophies; nor of his mathematics writ out in twine and webbing, of numbers conceived and understood by Réspito alone; nor of his Treatise Upon Peace wherein the Greater Brethern appeared as upended bolts of lightning and the Lesser Few as dissembled pebbles, the native woman realized full well that something deep and brave was brewing in him, and her love for Réspito grew.

She learned his language of weaving, not through him, but through her own diligent study, and when she felt she had the grasp of it she wove him a vessel with the encrypted message, “We will go together,” which he received with some consternation, and some ambivalence.

When the woman unlocked Réspito’s cell and gave him his freedom, he spoke for the first time in nearly a decade, and with a shaky “Thank you,” he ceased to be the man he’d become, and again became the man he’d been before, a man of customs and words the woman could not love.  She fled and he followed, realizing too late the love she’d inspired in him.

Sarah sits at a restaurant with her boyfriend Chad. They are at a chain restaurant, the kind with colorful commercials boasting authentic food preparation and being home or among family when you eat in their restaurant. Sarah has not eaten many meals with her family. Both her parents were lawyers, worked really late, so she and her younger sister often ate frozen dinners standing at the kitchen counter, watching the small television next to the KitchenAid mixer. When she sees commercials for the restaurant she is sitting in, she thinks, “These commercials were directed by someone who has never been part of a family.” Then she feels sad for that person, imagines him or her to be an orphan who has idealized family life through television commercials that air during primetime reality programming, often involving dance competitions of some kind.

Chad smiles across the table and says, “I love coming here.” He studies the menu carefully as if the options have changed during two weeks since their last visit. Chad believes in treating every day as a new experience. Each morning when he wakes up and sees Sarah lying next to him, on her side, facing away, her hand reaching back for his thigh, he holds his breath until she turns to look at him and when he sees her face and her face is still beautiful and he knows he has one more day with the woman next to him, he smiles. He exhales. He kisses her bare shoulder, brushes the hair from her face and because she is not yet fully awake, she allows him these affections, moves even closer to him, into the void of his chest and warm breath.

“You are one pretty whore,” Lupe said.

“Go to hell,” said the woman.

It was not every day a gringa offered herself at the camps. Most Fridays, regardless of the state they were working in, it was Mexican women. Two at a time, three at time—once they even got four Mexicans and a Dominican. Manny was the only guy who would not take his turn. Lupe could hardly tolerate Manny anymore: all the Catholic talk, all the sermons. Fairytales about love and his wife back in Jalisco. “Keep sending your money,” Lupe said once. “She can buy lace panties for your brother to sink his fingers into.” Manny shrugged him off. “You’re just a little boy raised by the camps instead of a mother,” he said.

The woman’s tank top was cheap and thin—the kind purchased in packages of three—and it clung to the film of sweat glazing her freckled chest. Lupe wanted to pry her pallid thighs open, to wedge his hand into her clammy warmth, to cup his palm between her legs and squeeze until she yelped.

The woman kept the car in drive, unpainted toes putting pressure on the brake, sandals on the floor beneath razor-nicked calves. Her feet seemed twice the age of her face, stained green around the soles, as if they just trudged through a recently mowed lawn. Lupe inched closer to her window so she could see the erection in his shorts.

“I know what’s there,” she said.  “Now back away from my car.”

“Why, sweetie? I got money.”

“Get that thing out of my face.”

She exhaled with practiced exaggeration and pulled a wisp of hair behind her ears.  Lupe backed away. She was thin, almost gaunt, but why should he care? Lupe crossed his arms and massaged his shoulders where the straps of his picking bag would dig into his skin. “How much?” he said.

“One hundred.”

“A hundred dollars?”

“That’s right.”

“How about fifty? Fifty and we can—”

The woman tapped the accelerator and the front tires spit dirt and stones at Lupe’s legs. He sprinted toward her. The car had only one working brake light.

The earth is starting to sink beneath their feet.  Lara tries to tell Otto, but he won’t listen. We’ve taken too much out of the earth, she says, with our mines, digging down deep and then turning what we find into Ford cars, into trains and railway ties, into big buildings, rifles and bullets. We’ve taken all the weight out of the inside of the earth and put it on top, and it’s pressing down on the soil. The earth is getting soggier, sinking and sinking. I swear I’m walking an inch deeper than I was yesterday, you don’t feel it, Otto?

No, he doesn’t feel it, he thinks she’s a freak, he says those words, fucked up freak. He hits her, but she doesn’t fall; she blinks and shakes her head, but she stays standing. He stands in front of the open door of the boxcar, close to the swamps tumbling by. Lara sees dead swamp trees through the open door, their gnarled fingers reaching out against a gray sky. She knows these trees weren’t always ruined. She imagines them with green leaves, rooted in dark, rich soil. Now they are bare and lifeless, their roots drowned in what once nourished them.

* * * * *

Lara is the fattest woman in the world, the signs say, though they have no way of proving that. Otto puts her on a big scale, the kind that’s used to weigh cows, and he has people guess her weight. Closest guess gets a candy apple. It’s always the country women who guess the closest, women who know weight, who have measured out pounds of flour and pork fatback, have carried the warm heavy weight of babies on their hips. This is the women’s weekend, the county fair.

Where do all these country women come from, Lara wonders, how do so many country women exist? Lara knows they look the way they do because they live in isolation, because they only come together like this once a year at the county fair. But to Lara, as she moved from county to county, every night they come together. To Lara, they are always gathered in tight gaggles, night after night. To Lara, they have no excuse for looking the way they do. They all look so out of date, wearing what look like their grandmothers’ dresses and floppy bonnets that tie underneath their chins.

it’s morning.  i’m home visiting.  my parents are out.  charlie comes by.  he wants to go on a walk with my dad.  my dad is out.  do i wanna go?  i put on my shoes.  charlie has wobby, a dog, along.  we take charlie’s green ford ranger.  charlie has a round face and a round nose and messy white hair and a big, shabby white beard and smiling eyes, sometimes gray, as i recall them, sometimes green.  he’s a big man with pain in one shoulder due to years of handball.  we stop at some place downtown he and my dad go to for coffee, and he gets a red-eye, and i get coffee black.  and we go to the waterfront.

a dreary, gorgeous, stinking and sweet-smelling thing, it used to be busy docks and train yard.  but the fishing industry went under and the only fishing happening off the docks was families going out on the weekends and casting lines, hanging out and eating lunch and such on those heavy, tar-smelling structures, little kids putting fish in buckets of bay water and watching them swim in circles.  and maybe that’s what got somebody thinking to convert the docks to a nice place for doing fun things at, like basketball.  so they tore down a warehouse or whatever and built a teen recreation center.  i was a teen, and it scared me.  the train stopped running and the tracks are grown over with and buried under things and dust.  and they put in a little parking lot and a nicely paved path and this outdoor amphitheater, and they got some big plans worked up for the huge dirty plot of weedy land the path is on today. but, as anyone can see, it all fell through and the weeds and shrubs took over like they are, and the homeless moved in and made camps—til a week ago the eureka police and a crew went through with bushwhackers and took out all the bushes for camping in unseen.

in the amphitheater now are some homeless people smoking pot.  on the bay in matching wood kayaks is an elderly couple.  the path is of smooth concrete, but you have to be very careful where you step because there’s the shit of dogs all over everywhere.  we weave and jump and circumvent and sip our coffee, and wobby takes a dump and charlie gets out a plastic bag and picks it up and ties a knot in it, and i hold his coffee for him.

it was the dream of his generation, he says, that this new society was coming on, and everyone was going, it’s about time, to understand that it was good to care about each other. and how everything was going to be fair, like how people with great jobs like doctors would work four hours a day, and people with crappy jobs like garbage collectors would work two hours a day, and everyone would be paid the same, and all this utopia was on its way like history.  but now, he says, it’s his generation controls congress.  and all of them bought up by corporations.  you want to understand the laws in this country, he tells me, follow the money.

a ways down from the amphitheatre, under the bridge that over the bay joins eureka and manila, is an unkempt cinderblock restroom, gravel lot for parking in, a floating dock with room for three small boats, and a washboard loading ramp.  charlie dumps the plastic bag in the trash.  beyond the restroom we take a path of rocks and rubble through a homeless encampment.  a man asks us for change.  he says something about how times are really hard and something about his wife and child and groceries.  i don’t have a cent on me.  charlie has forty-three cents and gives it to him and says there are free lunches at st. paul’s.  and as we’re walking away, the man says, fuck you.  and then he says it louder.  and then he hurls the money at us and says, fuck you, i don’t want your fuckin’ money.  fuck you.  and he keeps shouting that as we walk away.

and charlie says he just can’t tell, is obama letting us down, or is he just so smart and playing his cards so really close to his chest?  i hope it’s the latter, he says.  i really do.  he says that ted kennedy has dedicated his entire political career to national healthcare—thirty years—and still it hasn’t happened.  every month 3,000 people lose healthcare.  in the world, he says, the united states ranks thirty-seventh in its healthcare system, and the country that’s thirty-sixth is something like ukakistan or some-like name, some country nobody has heard of.  how can we say, he asks me, that 50 million people in our nation without healthcare is . . . okay?  he gestures to an expanse upon the dirt of what appears to be wads of stuffing and says it’s where the bushwhacker hit someone’s sleeping bag.

By the time they drove out to the theater, the building, along with the closet full of rare film prints they had collected over the past seven years, was engulfed in an enormous blaze.  As they held each other and watched the bulbous black smoke rise, Han-soo and Caroline could think only in titles. Chan Is Missing, gone. Better Luck Tomorrow, obliterated. Ang Lee’s films all in one molten clump, Wedding Banquet dissolving into Crouching Tiger.

They agreed that the man to blame was Sean McLendon, the hairy, loud-bellied man who lived a few blocks down.  This was on account of several pieces of evidence that they had gathered:

This, however, didn’t quite cut it for the Houston Police Department, and while the insurance covered the destroyed building, the Kangs learned that there would be no way to replace all the films, which prompted a series of arguments in which they said things such as:

“But they were priceless artifacts of ethnic-American art history!”

“No, Idylls of the Deep South is a priceless artifact of ethnic-American art history.”

And:

“Those honky-ass cops aren’t going to help us.  We need to take shit into our own hands.”

“Since when do you use the word ‘honky’?”

And:

“Amy Tan can go screw herself.”

“Exactly— that’s why ‘The Joy Fuck Club’ is such a good name for a porno.”

Finally, they resorted to

“Let me get this straight,” said Han-soo’s brother Young-soo on the phone.  “You’re going from screening and archiving quality films made by serious Asian American directors… to making porn?”

“Okay, first of all, they weren’t all Asian-directed,” said Han-soo as he walked into the kitchen.

“Who’s that?” said Caroline, looking up from her crossword.

“A lot of times we just ended up screening some bullshit B-movie because an Asian guy played the sidekick,” Han-soo continued. He dropped an armful of grocery bags onto the table.

“Who are you talking to?” repeated Caroline.

“Second of all— It’s Young-soo— Second of all—”

“Tell him I say hi.”

“Caroline says hi.  Second of all, Asian American porn!”

“So?  Every other video online is some fucking geisha-lady rape fantasy.”

“Exactly,” said Han-soo.  “There are

Anyway, can we keep the kid at your place or not?”

After Han-soo hung up, he looked up to see Caroline holding up the US Weekly he’d just purchased.

“Catching up on your Lindsay gossip?” she said.

“It’s to cut letters out of,” he explained.  “For, you know–”

“What— a ransom note?  Oh, honey, that’s such a cliché.” Caroline poked through the bags.  “Is— is this a ski mask?  What are we, bank robbers in an eighties comedy?”

“Christ, you know, we’d get this job done sooner if you weren’t always bitching about how unfashionable our criminal activities were,” said Han-soo.

Upon seeing the look on Caroline’s face, Han-soo realized that they were four steps towards one of their fights, which usually started when

“I’m sorry,” said Han-soo.  “That was an asshole thing to say.”

“It’s okay,” said Caroline.  She fingered the hem of her shirt.

“Am I really being cliché?” said Han-soo.

“Just a little.”

“Well, if it helps, I really did buy the magazine for the celeb gossip,” said Han-soo.  Caroline smiled despite herself. “Did you know that Cameron Diaz was not wearing makeup coming back from yogarobics?”

Caroline laughed. Han-soo put his arms around her, and she kissed him.

“Hey,” he said, running his thumb along her jaw.  “I have a surprise for you.”

“A surprise?” she said, a smile winking from the corner of her mouth.  Han-soo rummaged through a bag on the table behind him, pulled something out, and turned around.

“Holy fuck!” said Caroline, leaping back and throwing her hands in the air.  “You bought a gun?”

Han-soo weighed the gun limply in his hands. “You said we should do this right…”

“I meant write out an itinerary, not buy a gun!” said Caroline, gawking at the thing.

“It’ll help when we—”

“Do you know how to shoot it?”

“Yes!  I mean, I’ve— yeah.”

“Where’s the safety?”

“Um—hold on.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Okay, sweetie, we really need to move past the whole gun thing,” said Han-soo. “Because, like, bottom line, we have a gun now.”  He turned around and aimed it at the fridge.

Caroline dropped to the floor, hands over her head.

***

At 3:30 in the afternoon of the following Tuesday (about three weeks after the night that the movie theater on the West Side of Houston was burned to the ground), Han-soo and Caroline sat in their clunky sedan behind Sean McLendon’s house and waited for his daughter Julie to emerge.  Caroline had chosen this spot because of the clear line of sight it provided through the hedges to the tire swing in the backyard (

) and Han-soo had agreed, though only on the condition that he could wear one of the fake mustaches that Caroline had vetoed the night before (

), which Caroline was fine with as long as the trench coat stayed at home.  They sat, waiting, wondering what Julie looked like and what they were doing sitting in a car in cheap disguises, waiting to steal a little girl they’d never seen and sell her back to her parents, most likely for much more than she was worth.

“Oh god,” said Caroline.  “I’m a slave trader.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Han-soo replied, peeking over his sunglasses through the gate.  “We aren’t asking for anything unreasonable.  Look at that house— it’s a goddamn castle.”

“This is a human life we’re profiting off of,” said Caroline.  “A human body, Han-soo.”

“Think of all the black and brown and yellow bodies that whites have profited from over the centuries.”

“I’d rather not.  It makes me sick.”

“A lot more good than bad is going to come out of this.  What we’re going to put into the world…”

“I know, I know.”

They looked back at the house just in time to see the back door open.

“Shit, there she is!” Han-soo whispered furiously, ducking low behind the steering wheel.

Julie McLendon was young, slender-limbed, with stringy camel-colored hair hanging almost to her waist.  It swung from hip to hip as she walked to the tire swing and sat down, dragging her bare toes in the dirt below.  She leaned back, the fabric of her yellow dress falling lazily around her.

“Ready?” said Han-soo.

Caroline just stared back, wide-eyed.

“How do you feel?” he asked, looking carefully into her face.

HOW DID CAROLINE FEEL?

“Good,” said Han-soo, and nodded toward the passenger door.  Caroline took a deep breath, checked her reflection in the mirror, and opened it.

***

Julie McLendon threw herself at the back window of Han-soo and Caroline’s sedan, tearing at the locked door handle and wailing in a language that occasionally sounded like English but seemed to consist mostly of wet vowels.

“Okay!  Okay!” Caroline shouted, half to herself, from the passenger seat.  “Calm down!”

Julie turned up the volume on the hysterics and began to attack Han-soo’s face, scratching with her dirty nails. The car swerved, just barely missing a brick mailbox.

“Fucking— fuck!” yelled Han-soo.  It didn’t make sense, but it was the best he could come up with, what with the ninety pounds of pre-pubescent fury that had latched onto his face like a giant bat.

“Stop it!” said Caroline.  The car swerved again, this time into the road.  She tore open the glove box, pulled out the gun, and held it above her head as squarely as she could.  “OKAY. THAT’S ENOUGH.”

Julie released her grip on Han-soo, her face dirty with tears.  Caroline gasped heavily.

“Put on your seatbelt,” she managed to say.

Julie just sat, her legs tucked up under her, sobbing.  Clumsily, she smoothed her hair from her face and pressed herself into the corner of the car, against the thin line of chill whipping past the crack of the door, willing herself to flatten and seep back out into her neighborhood, into Julie as she had always been.  She felt as if she’d been lifted out of a trajectory:

“Who are you?” Julie demanded, still crying.  “What are you going to do to me?”

Han-soo and Caroline exchanged a glance.  Han-soo removed his fake mustache and sunglasses.

“We’re not going to hurt you, dear,” said Caroline, turning around in her seat.

“WHO ARE YOU?” Julie wailed.  “HOO-AHH- HAHHH-HRR-HRRRR…”

“Oh, dear lord,” said Caroline, lowering the gun to massage her forehead.  Julie took the opportunity to launch herself back onto Han-soo’s face.

“FUCKING—”  Han-soo yelled, riding up onto the curb.  “씨팔!”

Over the next hour and a half,

Finally, with the car speeding west on a darkening highway toward Laredo, Julie received the first answer to her almost continuous barrage of questions.

“We’re kidnapping you,” said Caroline, “because your father destroyed everything important to us.”

“What’d he do to you?” said Julie.

“He burned down our theater,” said Han-soo.

“Oh, y’all the ones who own that Chinese movie place?”

“It’s an Asian and Asian American movie theater,” said Han-soo, “and we’re not Chinese.”

“What are you, Japanese?”

“No.”

“Vietnamese?”

“Jesus, why is that always the order?” said Han-soo. “Here, I’ll show you.  Give me one more guess.”

“I don’t know, Korean?” said Julie.

“Exactly,” said Han-soo.  “Everyone guesses

“Jeez,” said Julie.  “I was just curious.”

“Everyone’s fucking curious!” insisted Han-soo.  “Everyone wants to know what species I am!”

The three traveled on in silence for a while, each one’s head spinning with the story they’d landed in.   They thought about

A few hours later, a sign advertising the word “FOOD” rose up out of the blue flatness ahead. Julie’s stomach growled, and Han-soo took this as a sign to pull off the interstate.  After the couple discussed strategy briefly in hushed Korean, Caroline turned around in her seat to face Julie, gun back in her hand

“Okay, sweetie,” she said.  “Here’s what’s going to happen–”

“Listen, if you try anything really stupid, Caroline’s not afraid to use that gun.” said Han-soo.

Caroline blanched.  “Well,” she said.

“So if you don’t want anyone to get hurt—”

“No one’s going to get hurt, dear,” Caroline told Julie reassuringly.

“Honey,” Han-soo said to Caroline, low.

“Well, just behave yourself, and everything will be all right,” Caroline conceded.  As they pulled into the fast-food restaurant, she tried a smile at Julie and got nothing in return.  Caroline wondered (not for the first time) what it was about this girl’s body that made her think about

but somehow it made her sad.

When they pulled up to the window, Julie tried to tell the cashier with her eyes that she did not know these two strange yellow people, to notify the police immediately.  The cashier, for her part, didn’t look at Julie at all, just passed Han-soo the bags of food with a sullen “Seventeen ninety-six.”

Caroline passed Julie her burger with a smile.

“Help!” she shouted, banging at the window.  Han-soo and Caroline froze.  “I’ve been kidnapped!  I’ve been kidnapped!  My name is Julie McLendon and I live on 89—”

“HA! HA!” said Han-soo.  “Julie— honey— don’t BOTHER the nice LADY!”

The cashier eyed the family, finally interested.

“She’s adopted!” said Caroline, her voice pitched a little too high.  “She loves to JOKE!“ She tightened her grip on the gun under her jacket.  The cashier noticed and opened her mouth.

“그냥 가!” said Caroline.  Han-soo gunned it, and they ripped out of the parking lot, over the curb.

“씨팔! 씨팔!” Han-soo swore. He turned around dangerously to look at Julie, his knuckles white-hot on the steering wheel.  “What the hell is wrong with you?! You could have gotten us all killed!”

Julie pressed her face against the window, gasping emptily at the restaurant as it shrank into the distance, the cashier still staring out at them.

Caroline was crying messily, holding the gun in her fingers like a piece of raw meat.  “Oh— god— ” she said.  “What are we doing?”  She tried to shove the gun out of sight, but her shaking hands sent a flurry of insurance papers and emergency manuals flying out of the glove compartment.

“Han-soo—” Caroline sobbed as all the just-in-cases drifted to the floor around her.  “Han-soo, what are we doing?”

]]> http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/fiction/bodyparagraph/feed/ 0 http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/fiction/modern-powers/ http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/fiction/modern-powers/#comments Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:00:45 +0000 Dave Duhr http://www.fringemagazine.org/?p=6599 1.

Amy excuses herself from the brunch table to use the ladies’, and no one volunteers to go with her, so she goes alone. She has gotten paler, they say. They are not sure whether to say since Scoundrel died or, since Scoundrel was murdered or, since Amy invited us to Scoundrel’s funeral and nobody went.

“Since that cat thing happened,” they settle on, “Amy’s near translucent.”

“You can see blue veins through her skin.”

“Do you think we should have gone to her little cat funeral?”

“Morbid.”

“Not my idea of a Saturday.”

“Was it open casket, do you think?”

“Mary!” That practiced scandalized expression.

“What, is she coming?”

“That’s not funny, Mary.”

“It’s a little funny.”

Amy walks into the bathroom and looks at her skin in the mirror. She too has noticed how pale it’s gotten—and just two weeks ago she was tan as tree bark. But what has she done, this last week, but cry about Scoundrel? It leeches the color out of you, she supposes. She pees in the stall and can’t see herself in the mirror when she comes out. All that’s there is her nail polish, otherwise she’s disappeared. As she watches, all the nails blink out at once, like a miniature row of antique TVs.

Her brunch group is alarmed when her chair scoots out and back in seemingly on its own. “Don’t be startled, it’s just me,” Amy says.

“Amy?”

“Something happened in the bathroom. I can’t see myself anymore.”

“Well.”

“But I can still talk and hear you.”

They haven’t talked about anything but Amy’s dead cat since she left for the bathroom, so they have to go back to what they were talking about before. Sheila’s husband doesn’t want yellow tile in the bathroom. Donna’s kids are trying to quit lacrosse. Ashleigh has had a string of rotten days at work.

“That’s what I loved about Scoundrel,” Amy says. “He’d ignore me all the time, but after a bad day he’d always come out and snuggle me.”

My friend cuts herself, and tells me a story about the end of the world.

When the world was created, it had all the love there was ever going to be. Love was tangled up in everything. It stuck in the trees, littered the ground like leaves, clogged people’s drains. There was so much love that it became a nuisance. People would burn it, bury it, spray for it. They would shovel great big buckets of it to the side of the road. Love was like bad weather to them. At the beginning of time, love was heavy snow.

As people burned and ate and buried love, there became less of it. It faded with time, and so people grew apart. Some people saw it fading, and hoarded it, and they had more love than others. When it was finally almost gone, everyone had gotten so used to it that no one wanted to be without it, so they began to kill each other. Less people would mean more love left for those still alive. This was why love was created in the first place: to kill everyone.

My friend cuts herself and tells me that there’s barely any real love left today, and her blood drips into the salty sea. She tells me that there is plenty of sex and stumbles and meaningless comfortable relationships, but true love is a rare and unusual and dangerous thing, eager to destroy us all with our hunger for it. Sometimes the love is locked in a vault. Sometimes it is buried in a cave. Sometimes it is high above the earth, frozen in a mountain glacier and guarded by a troupe of opera-singing yetis who wear bowties. She says the love that’s left won’t last forever, and that we could run out of it any day now. When the last of the love fades away, then it is Judgment Day.

The End is Near.

Here’s what you would see if I demonstrated her to you: The neck is hinged to allow the operator to adjust the horizontal and vertical tilt of the head. The springs in each eye orbit adjust with screws to allow the operator to affix and position separately each of the two ex vivo bovine globes (calves’ eyeballs)—in order to simulate as closely as possible the tenuously connected rolling of the human eye in its socket.

Here’s what you would see if you looked at her: A life-sized model of a human face and neck mounted on an iron base. No body. (Remember that!) Made of a newish thermosetting resin called Bakelite: lightweight and smooth. Features androgynously idealized in a vague Roman way; straight nose and small, intelligent mouth. Modeled hair short and choppy, fringed across the forehead and in front of the exposed ears in the “Titus” style of the French Revolution. The back of the head open, the inside hollow to allow access to the operator. The eye orbits empty except that each one contains a large metal spring with tiny prongs along the coil.

Here’s what I see when I look at her: My wife, Eulalia. She who transformed my loneliness to joy. My confidante, the receptacle of my passion. My raison d’être. The love of my life.

“Squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse! Roar like a lion! Comment on the nature and the direction of literature!”

The students obey his commands. For $17.50 they can purchase a videotape of the things they did while hypnotized: Dancing on tables, making out wildly with strangers.  They can watch the manifestations of their subconscious, ego removed.

Winning the Nobel Prize in Literature has done something to Steinbeck. He has become bored with writing, as if there are no new heights he can reach. In the world of hypnotism, he is considered a hack. This gives him a unique satisfaction.

The auditorium at Indiana University looks like a cut-rate ski lodge. Wood- paneled walls and electronic fireplaces. Video games from the 1980s.

Sometimes a student will not close her eyes. She will believe herself too strong to participate. Other times students will pretend they are hypnotized when they aren’t, as if they’ve been waiting to act this way, to be someone they’re not, or to be who they see as their true selves, uncensored.

Steinbeck has instructed the hypnotized students to reenact last year’s Super Bowl, the one he lost money on.  “Be cowardly and stupid. Leave the field on the eve of our greatest potential victory!”

Still, there’s no mention of Pablo’s in the Visitor Bureau’s list of Places to Visit in Platinum, Georgia.

“21st-century American detritus,” explains my man William Fitzhugh III. “It’s not for everyone.”

Pablo’s is home away from home for local boozehounds, crackheads and bullshitters: unlicensed physicians, defrocked priests, disbarred lawyers and the like. It’s where the homeless, disgraced and delusional, convene to swill whiskey and swap tales.  This is where I spend my days now, the place I gravitated to when my career at the library got jerked out from under me.  Sooner or later – one way or another – gravity is going to grab you, too.  In this age of economic uncertainty, gravity is one thing you can count on.

Two months ago, shortly before the stock market, as the Bistro’s leading economists say, “bit the schlong,” I was a run-of-the mill librarian: long sleeves, button down shirt, power tie, sharply pressed slacks, lips never more than a pucker away from kissing administrative butt.  Another single-minded male librarian on the rise, answering questions dispassionately, winding my way towards promotion, retirement and death.

Two months ago, I was putting in time at the telephone reference desk on the other side of Brite Street.

*

“Platinum Public Library, may I help you?”

“Weren’t it Jesus say ‘the meek gone embarrass the earth’?”

I repeat the question verbatim for the benefit of my reference partner, Ophelia Frankel, hoping she’ll appreciate the civility with which I’m handling this idiot.

I suppose finding me wasn’t all that hard, since most of the people who still worked at Our Lady of Charity came in to lunch at the diner where I had been working since graduation almost every day. I don’t ask Miriam if that’s how she found me.

“I knew all my life, of course,” she says, still talking about this lesbian thing. “Only you remember what it was like going to that school. Lord, having the wrong color eyeshadow was enough to get you excommunicated.”

She lifts her carefully drawn eyebrow at me, as if I knew. I wonder if she ever had the hots for me and remember a pair of red plastic earrings she gave me once for Christmas. I still have them.

“Going to college was just the most incredible experience for me,” she continues. “I just needed to get away . . .” here she trails off. “So. Do you know what’s become of any of these people?” she asks with a smile. Her smile is quite dazzling, bright Colgate and Maybelline.

I adjust my little white cap. The diner has a fifties theme and we have to wear little caps with nylon mesh hair nets and pink-and-white checkered uniforms with lace-trimmed aprons. “No one but Tony,” I say.

Tess wants to bring our son along to see the leeches in action – a suggestion I may have considered if I were in better spirits – but I’m certain that whatever memories he might have formed in his three years prior would be blanched out in favor of this, and I don’t exactly want his first recollection of me to be in a hospital bed as these brown, writhing creatures fill up with my blood.

A nurse enters the room just as Doug falls off my hand.  Tess picks him up with large, square gauze and holds him out with a frown.  “A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others,” she says, and then hands Doug over to the nurse.

“That was nice,” the nurse says as she drops him into a cup otherwise used for urine collection.

“It’s from the Wizard of Oz,” Tess says with a shrug.

“One more and we’ll call it a day?”  The nurse fishes out another leech from a cup on the bedside table, this one a third the size of the satiated Doug, and guides it toward my fingers with her gloved hands.  Its body flails and arches away.

“Maybe she’s not hungry,” Tess says.

“This one’s a she?”  I say, although I’m not sure why.  I couldn’t care less which gender she assigns.

“Betsy,” she says.  The alcoholic sister she disowned two years ago after Betsy stole and crashed our car for not the first, but the second time.

The nurse covers my hand with clear dressing, leaving a hole on my ring finger just large enough for the leech to attach, then drops the leech onto my hand.  We watch as it slithers uncertainly over my thumb, then back toward the hole.

“We’ve got contact,” the nurse says.

Tess lets out a puff of air.  “God, I hated breastfeeding.”

The nurse gives her a strange look and I think about explaining but decide to remain silent.  “We’ve got contact” is Tess’s saying, or it was when Ryan was an infant.  He had what they call “poor latch-on skills” and “contact” would sometimes take up to thirty minutes.  Eventually she gave up the cat and mouse game and switched to formula.  She said it wasn’t normal that a child would refuse his own mother’s nipple.  Said it made her feel like less of a woman.

“Are you on the grid?” he asks, and it takes a few moments for me to understand.

“There’s a full bathroom,” I say. “A television with some DVDs. A coffeemaker on the kitchen counter.”

“The wives will like that,” he says, and I imagine these women who tag along on their husbands’ hunting trips, staying in all day while the men are out stalking animals and waiting for them to come home with coolers full of raw meat.

The lake house came with my house. I once used it as a studio, but that was back when I was painting and back when we could afford it. Now I rent it to tourists in the summer and to whoever I can in the winter. I clean it between guests, change the sheets, vacuum the floors. The tourists leave half-empty bottles of wine and socks under the beds and sometimes a note for me on the kitchen counter to let me know they had a wonderful time.

There’s a stretch of woods between the lake house and my house, but voices travel easy, especially over the water. Some summer nights I sit on my deck, hidden by trees, and listen to them—happy, laughing families.

In the winter, of course, it’s different. It is cold and isolated and no one takes vacations up here except people who are unhappy and want to be alone. My old friends ask me why I don’t move and I say that it’s peaceful and beautiful here, and that I like living somewhere that hardly anyone else can stand to live. That it makes me feel like I’m doing something incredible all the time.

The Maine Guide comes by, dressed entirely in hunter’s camouflage even though it’s Sunday. The hunters from New Jersey are all moved in and he pays me rent. They’re going moose hunting starting tomorrow. The hunters from New Jersey waited all year for this; they entered and won a lottery for the chance to hunt an animal that moves at the pace of a cow. In December they’ll come back to hunt bobcats. They do that with dogs: baying beagles that tear through the snow and scare the cat up a tree until the hunters come and shoot it down.

Later that afternoon I go for a walk wearing bright orange and without my dogs, who are all different shades of fawny brown and, with bursts of gangly speed, would run too far ahead of me on the road.

The Maine Guide doesn’t hunt anymore, not like he used to. He tells me this after he’s been out with the people from New Jersey all day. They didn’t get their moose yet, but it was only the first day. They couldn’t stay quiet, he says. There’s three men and two boys. The boys were both soft. That’s the word he uses: soft. They couldn’t handle the hours and the cold.

We’re standing in my driveway, he next to his truck and me on the front steps. The dogs are outside, running back and forth between us. They love him the way they love anyone who will give them attention, but when I clap my hands they listen because I am the one who gives them food.