Ecstatic

6

Ishkabibble was on a cigarette but still managed to say, — You walk slower than my old Aunt.

I nodded because he was right, but why tell me.

— I’m not trying to down you or nothing, he added.

We were on 147th Avenue, only two lanes but respectably wide. Nabisase’s church was on the corner, one block away. By the third time I’d disappointed my sister she stopped asking me along. Grandma and Mom, too. Nabisase left at 9 on Sunday mornings and stayed longer every week. That first time, on the 8th, it was only for an hour. One month later service lasted three. In half a year she’d be living there in a state of constant worship.

Ishkabibble gave the last of that cigarette such a pull I thought he’d eat the filter.

When I’d gone out that Thursday afternoon, November 9th, for a constitutional, Ishkabibble hadn’t been what I was looking for, but he’s who I met. I was walking by Brookville Park’s half-hearted playground. A place for kids to swing in the afternoon and teenagers to drink at night. The grounds had seemed deserted, but then Ishkabibble stepped out from behind a water fountain. I’d been alone and then I wasn’t. He found me.

At the corner of 230th Street Ishkabibble led me into the Get Right launderette. I was talking, had been for twenty minutes; he didn’t tell me to keep quiet, just to follow him as we spoke. He, for one, didn’t treat me like a dolt.

Behind the counter of the launderette was the matriarch of a Jamaican family who owned the store. She kept watch against people trying to dry their sneakers in the machines. She wasn’t happy to see us, but I blame Ishkabibble. A man whose own mother was probably repaying one of his high-interest home loans.

— Miss Rose.

— Yes, she said, but it wasn’t a question, like Yes may I help you? or even, Yes that’s who I am.

I really think I smelled the small black microwave oven behind her before I saw it. Or it might have been the tasty snack she sold. Alongside washers and dryers, this laundromat had food. So many of the smallest businesses around here had to diversify for profit. The owners of the low-budget cab service next door, Fast Fast Car, sold sneakers at the back of the store.

— Beef patty? Ishkabibble asked me.

Of course there was meat in a beef patty and beef is healthy, right? Forget that herbivore routine. How bad would it be to have just one because beef patties are so good when the meat inside is seasoned spicy and the yellow-brown shell is crisp. Maybe she also had coco bread.

Nineteen days since I’d been to Halfway House and seen Ledric’s extreme dieting technique. I’d been trying to keep myself to a reasonable five thousand calories a day, but faced with a good beef patty I faltered.

The woman rose, shuffled to the microwave. — You’re not eating? I asked Ishkabibble.

— I’m one of those people without much of an appetite.

— Lucky man, I said.

While the microwave carousel rotated for three minutes the Jamaican woman got her checkbook. She set it down; she hadn’t spoken; she didn’t ask Ishkabibble how much was owed. She knew exactly.

After that she went to the tiny black oven where there was, my delight, coco bread. She heated it separately then put bread and patty together. I was going to ask her for my favorite other ingredient, mayonnaise slathered on the patty’s skin, but I didn’t. I count this as marvelous restraint.

— How much? I asked.

She hadn’t looked at me not once and didn’t do it now. She asked Ishkabibble. — How much?

— He’s a friend of mine.

Then she waved her hand. — Take. Take, she said to me.

Outside again I talked to him after I’d finished the food. I ate fast though the meat was hot because Mom might drive down 147th Avenue and see me. Maybe Hillman had a satellite in synchronous orbit over Queens smoking photos of its members when we cheated. At times I felt a power must be keeping track of me.

Ishkabibble was an ideal salesman because he had the knack for listening. Anyone else would’ve rushed me while I explained the shortcomings of We Like Monsters and movies like it. Evening of the Hatchet, Crematorious. I went on for fifteen minutes about how stories of the eerie, August Derleth let’s say, usually let me down. The creatures turned out to be paper dolls and the characters were thin.

— Maybe most people like it when the movie gets all gross, Ishkabibble suggested.

— They can be bloody, but they don’t have to be dumb, I said.

When I talked passionately about this with Mom and Nabisase they politely answered, Oh yes? and Ah-hmm, but nothing more. To be fair I understand that a twenty-three-year-old man getting agitated over B-movies casts a certain dummy-colored glow.

On two occasions we crossed the street when loose dogs threatened us.

As we walked Ishkabibble looked back down the block. He did it every ten feet, but I didn’t think it was only the wild canines he feared.

— You not too popular or something? I asked. Kennedy Airport wasn’t far behind us now. A person could walk to his departure terminal from here if he had a little chipperness in the bones.

I was out of breath. — Can we stop a second?

He laughed, but not as viciously as it seemed to me then. — We only walked five blocks, he said.

— I know what it was!

— Okay. I’m not trying to down you.

I only needed half a minute to get some wind. I tell you it’s exhausting being so big.

— You not too popular? I asked again when he wouldn’t stop glancing around.

— I’m popular when I bring people the money, just not as much when I ask for it back.

— My mother told me you charge nine percent above the prime rate!

— A man comes to me making twenty-nine thousand dollars a year and wants to drive a forty-thousand dollar car, whose fault is that?

— But you’re black and doing this to black people!

— I work with Hispanics, too.

— What’s that on your neck? I asked, to change the subject. There was a large red patch of welts on the nap at the back of his head.

— I fell asleep in a tanning machine.

— You tan?

I wasn’t surprised that a black man would go under bulbs, but that even with the help Ishkabibble was still so yellow. I mean the man made me look like a cloudless night.

— I trusted one of my customers. He promised me a free ten-minute trial. I helped him buy that business! Some Italian over across the park. He turned the alarm off, so I fell asleep in there for half an hour.

— You’re not popular at all, I said.

Ishkabibble was annoyed; when he sighed the breath was a kazoo toot as it filtered through his skewed incisor. — You’ve got a funny way of asking me for a favor.

— Was I trying to get one?

— You just haven’t realized it yet.

I’d thought I was just babbling, but a good peddler hears the plea.

We had breezes blowing gasoline fumes; across the street a harried man uncapped his yellow Freightliner truck, which was parked in the driveway of his home. One of his young daughters was using a hose on the headlights as he pulled a second, muddy girl from getting into the sleeper.

— You want to make a monster movie, he said.

— I don’t think that’s it.

— Why else would you be talking so much about that. And with me?

— No one in my family would listen.

— Big Man, you are not about to act like we’re tight.

— Well what kind of monster would it be? I asked.

— Godzilla movies only cost as much as the rubber suit. I can get you some nice distribution if we make a tape and sell it through barbershops in Queens.

— There’s a great one where Godzilla fights a robot Godzilla and at first you can’t figure out how there could be two, but it’s aliens who created the fake, I said. Some others aliens show up in another Godzilla film controlling Monster Zero, also known as King Ghidrah.

— Anthony. No need to convince me. I believe in your dreams and I can help you finance them. It’s already underway. That’s my business.

7

The next day Mom rented a Dodge Neon for our trip to Maryland.

Brand new. It was a thing. New York was settling into winter so a trip five states south was exciting. I didn’t know my geography as well as I should, so anyplace below New Jersey was Alabama to me.

The trunk of the Dodge was bigger than our Oldsmobile Firenza’s; even when we’d stowed every suitcase there was room for more. This astonished us.

— What else could we bring? Grandma asked as we stood together looking in.

— Let’s pack more clothes, Mom offered.

This makes us sound idiotic, I know, and maybe we were acting like senseless early hominids, but really it was no different than cooing over a baby; we enjoyed a wonderful invention.

A telephone ring woke us from our daze as we stood with hands on varied parts of the car. Just touching. Nabisase went inside as Mom showed Grandma and I the demure — mumm- of the engine even when her foot was pressed to the gas. Nabisase called my name four times. But when I went inside she was talking on the phone and I was angry she called me away from the demonstration. I watched Mom pull out the driveway to take Grandma once around.

Nabisase said to the phone. — I just told you my name. Now tell me yours.

— Who is it? I whispered.

— You just heard me ask didn’t you? No, she told the caller. That was Anthony.

— He wants to talk to you, she said.

— Ishkabibble?

— If you don’t tell me your name I won’t let you talk to him.

I tried to grab the receiver out of her hand. — Is it Lorraine? She has a deep voice, I said.

My sister ignored me. — That’s a stupid name, she said to the caller. Ledric is just not normal.

— No, she corrected him a moment later. Nabisase isn’t crazy, it’s African.

After giving me the device I waited until she’d gone to her own room to finish packing.

— Why didn’t you just ask for me?

He heaved and sighed and spoke. — I heard a girl so I had to know who she was.

— She’s my sister. She’s thirteen, too.

— I only got her name.

— That’s more than you needed.

Mom and Grandma returned; the sound of the Neon’s doors shutting once they stepped out was a soft-shoe routine compared to our Oldsmobile, that rattletrap.

— Is it working? I asked.

— You sound more desperate than me! Ledric laughed.

— Is it?

— No.

— How do you know?

— I had a pizza yesterday and I’m still feeling stuffed today so I know them tapeworms didn’t eat the whole pie inside me.

— That’s not how it works, I said.

— You going to tell me about what you haven’t done?

— You don’t sound good, I told him. He really didn’t, but even before the tapeworms Ledric had to be a heavy breather.

— I got another jar of that fish so I’m going to try one more time, but you got to come over here if something happens to me.

— We’re going away for the weekend though. Wait till we get back.

He cleared his throat. — Where you going? He sounded bewildered. As if he’d never realized I lived a life independent of his own.

— Maryland, I said. A beauty pageant.

— For your mother?

— My sister, I whispered, because I didn’t want to admit this to him.

— Your sister looks that good?

— Don’t ask me that question again, I said.

He forced a laugh, but I wasn’t convinced. — You’re nineteen and she’s thirteen, I reminded him.

— Hey, come on. You’re my boy. I’m not thinking about her. By the time you get back Sunday I’ma be ready for my own modeling show, forget anyone else.

Packing was easy for me; I just folded three suits, changes of underwear into a duffel bag. Moving my mother’s things into the car was even easier for me because she had a manservant.

He walked through the front door as I got off the phone with Ledric. That skinny guy who lived next door.

— Who’s this? I said when he walked inside.

A second man walked in. Much bigger, overwhelmed by muscles. An upper-body so big it looked inconvenient.

The slim one said, — I’m a friend of your mother’s.

— You’re my age.

— She’s young at heart.

This could have been a big fight; what the skinny one said was already enough for me to break his jaw. Theoretically. The last thing I’d snapped was a KitKat bar. Worse than letting him sully my mother’s name though would’ve been to get beat down in my own living room.

— How come you didn’t invite no men to your party last month? the big one asked.

— I don’t even know your names.

But I did know now and had then, it was Pinch. That’s what he was called, but fuck this third-rate Tony Atlas. He was the king of security guards at a high school in Brooklyn; drove an amplified Honda CrX. Sure, I recognized him.

— I didn’t see you, I explained.

My mother’s friend said, — You looked right at us! I waved at you from my stoop.

The skinny guy, Candan, lived in the brick one-story house just to the right of ours. He stayed there with his mother and father. He did air-conditioner repair. Domestic and industrial. Finding a couple of generations at one address was normal; for Rosedale, as for much of the world, the worst thing a child could do was move away.

— When did you meet my mother? I asked. Candan, Pinch and I were the only people here.

Candan said, — We’ve been talking on and off since last year.

— Talking about what?

— We’ve talked about you, he said.

Candan’s ears were as small as quarters. So little I bet he couldn’t wear sunglasses in the summertime. When I noticed them his dominance was subdivided. I even smiled.

Pinch said, — I bet it’s going to be a long ride. You driving, Anthony?

— Yeah. My mother can’t stay awake more than a couple hours at night.

— Oh yes she does, Candan said.

— That’s all! Pinch yelled.

I was relieved to see the man could be tamed. Maybe not by me, but someone.

Candan pointed beyond me, down the hall, to the back. — Anyway, she asked me to get her bags from her room.

— She’s got a lock on the door.

It was my first response; not why you? Or why did she ask you? Or even why the fuck did she fucking ask fucking you, fuck?

— Your mother gave me the key.

He walked by me. Pinch asked for a glass of water. I took him into the kitchen.

Pinch wore a sweatshirt, but the fabric was stretched at the shoulders, along the arms, his back, oh everywhere. I wondered if he was one of those guys who had nothing else, no brains within, or maybe he’d been bullied as a child. I disparaged all physical discipline as the pastime of the witless. I certainly wasn’t going to admit that he looked nice.

— Do you know what my mother told Candan about me? Anything?

Pinch stared earnestly at the bottom of the glass as he drank.

I heard the door to my mother’s room open. As soon as Pinch was done I washed his cup three times, until I heard Candan come out of Mom’s bedroom.

I stepped into the hall and turned on the light so it’d be less gloomy. He locked the door. I heard him. When he turned around, with a small bag in his hand, I asked, — Can I see what she’s hiding in there?

— Tell me why I should?

— I’m her son, I said.

The hallway, the living room, the front door. Candan walked down the front steps, reached my mother and playfully stepped on the toe of her shoe. She brushed him on the shoulder and held him there. He propped the bag between them and they pressed against it from two sides.

Pinch was as ashamed as anyone by the exhibit. He leaned on our gate, looked away, down the block. Nabisase sat in the driver’s seat with Grandma as her passenger. When Mom and Candan started playing my sister pulled the lever near her foot and popped the trunk. Harder to see the couple through the rearview mirror that way.

I walked over and asked, — Did you tell this guy about me?

— I don’t want you getting angry, Anthony, my mother said. She dropped Candan’s hand as if she’d remembered herself. Would you like if I got angry at you for the smallest things?

— You going to answer her? Candan didn’t touch my mother, he touched me. A finger at my chest, pressing.

— C.D.! What are you doing? You know you hear me!

The security doors on all our homes make a pneumatic hiss when opening. The sound came after the call of Candan’s father, an artifact at their front door.

— I told you to stay in the house! Candan yelled back.

Candan’s father was known as the President, though if this was meant respectfully I can’t say; his own son might have started the nickname and Candan wouldn’t mean it kindly. The President and his wife had a tiny retirement fund; Candan was their sponsor. I’d learned this because my folks carried gossip just like all you others. My family thought an unflattering photo of Janet Jackson was the apex of investigative reporting.

— I need you over to the backyard, the President said.

Candan returned the silver key to my mother; she smiled and watched him walk out our yard into his own next door, then to the front door where his father waited.

— What do you need so bad? Candan asked too loudly.

— I don’t want you over there all on that woman, the President said.

Through the leafless hedge separating their house from ours Mom, Pinch, Nabisase, Grandma and I saw Candan push his father back inside their home. One hand against his dad’s back and the other squeezing the President’s neck.

Grandma stepped out the side door of our home carrying her handbag with two hands, so that the straps hung in front of her thighs and the pouch bumped against both knees. Nabisase followed with a duffel bag over one shoulder; her three gowns were already in the trunk. Mom stood next to the Dodge and tapped the roof with her free hand.

Daylight flattered them. They were good-looking women.

I went inside to get my wallet from my bed in the basement. Upstairs again I turned off the hallway light; the kitchen’s, too. Went to the living room to check if anyone had left the iron burning and Ishkabibble was sitting a foot away from me, on our couch.

I screamed his name two times. With such volume that people heard me outside.

— Shhhh! He slapped my leg hard. Shhh! he said again.

— This is breaking and entering, I told him.

— Until the mortgage is paid this house is mine.

— What if it was my grandmother who found you instead of me? She would’ve died.

He stood up. — Ma’am’s tougher than you think. I didn’t know you scared so easily.

— Don’t make fun of me.

Ishkabibble put both hands up, palms facing me. — I’m not trying to down you or nothing.

— Did you climb through one of the windows? I thought the doors were shut.

— I’m in every house on this block.

— How’s your neck? I countered.

— Skin’s still peeling, he said. Your movie is on.

— I haven’t even had an idea yet.

— Make something up over the weekend. When you come back I’ll have a package for you. Very reasonable rates, I swear.

I walked closer to him; maybe my mother had been beeping the car horn a while or maybe it had just started. — It’s that easy?

— As far as I’m concerned, the movie’s already made.

We shook hands. We hugged. Someone was thumping against the side door.

— I heard his name, Mom yelled.

— I heard it too, Nabisase agreed.

— Ishkabibble! My mother screamed.

— You better turn into a bat and get away before my family sees you, I told him. They don’t like to pay you and they sure don’t want you inside.

He smiled as though the threat was minimal, but clearly he’d never seen my sister throw a punch. There were other voices though. Pinch. Candan. The President, too. On the stairs at the side of our house. My mother’s keys unlocked the door.

When Pinch and Candan came in through the side, Ishkabibble opened the front door. Those two were fast, I swore they had him.

— Get that nigga! Candan yelled.

— Anthony, hold that nigga! Pinch came through.

Ishkabibble went down the front stairs and over my four-foot gate gliding. Then up 229th Street in the direction of 147th Avenue where he might get a bus headed toward Far Rockaway.

Pinch pointed at me. — You shouldn’t be talking with him.

— I can talk to whoever I want.

I said it then regretted this. Pinch stood massive in front of me. His breath smelled like menthol cigarettes. That disappointed me. I mean, to work out so much and then be a smoker.

— You’re cool with him now? Candan yelled over Pinch’s shoulder. Maybe you want to try and repossess my car for him?

Pinch exhaled. He tapped my shoulder. — I’m just letting you know you don’t want to mess with him. He tries to take advantage and it really makes me mad when he does it to people who can’t really take care of themselves.

— Who are you talking about? My grandmother?

Pinch wouldn’t look at me. — Ishkabibble just comes in here and feeds off of us. That’s what I’m saying. He’s getting rich while we’re living like slaves.

I nodded. Pinch and Candan ran out. They got in Candan’s car, a burgundy ’95 Toyota Camry that had a spoiler shaped like a shark’s fin on the hood. As the car moved there wasn’t that slow acceleration. Instead it had the gas turbine vim of a jet.

8

My sister was enrolled in a beauty pageant for virgins, a contest I thought she could win. She was cute enough, but also, how many teenage hymens were left in America anymore? Even the emu-faced girls had been initiated by twelve. Fewer contestants fueled better odds.

— You might actually win, I told Nabisase.

— I’m glad that this surprises you, she said.

— Don’t take it like that. I drove away from our block and toward the Belt Parkway.

— How come Ledric said he met you in prison? my sister asked.

— He was telling a joke, I said.

— Where did you meet him really?

— Halfway House.

New Jersey plays the ass too much. There are so many jokes about the industrial cloud hovering inches above the state and it’s true along I-95, where there’s an odor of pancreatic tumor, but not the New Jersey of I-78.

The interstate was bracketed by great umber concrete slats that defended our path between the throngs of elm and red oak, which pressed so close to the road that they leaned over the dividers and wailed terribly when strong winds shook them alive.

I was content though. Mom had given the driving to me. With this vehicle I had possession over one of the four miracles of the modern age: automated destruction. Another was the unapologetic enjoyment of sweet sloppy cunnilingus.

One hour out of New York we passed a farmhouse with a fenced lot holding two brown foals. They dropped their heads into the grass, but were too shaky on their legs to eat. Foal. I knew the word for an unweaned horse but had never seen one. To me horses were like tropical fruit; I thought they couldn’t be grown in the tristate area. It never registered that horses pull those carriages through Central Park; I’d thought those were mules. They might as well have been okapi for what I knew. Even in Ithaca I’d willfully ignored the world beyond my rented room.

We passed a graveyard settled off the highway. Nabisase crossed herself at the four stations, but I didn’t believe in her new faith. It can’t just happen like that. One day she’s hitting our mother with a crockpot the next she’s receiving the Eucharist? This was just another way of aggravating the rest of us. She carried a plastic rosary, but the Apostolic Church of Christ wasn’t nearly Catholic. I’ll bet I knew a Hail Mary better.

My sister and I turned out such heathens I’m surprised we didn’t bubble when baptized. I observed crossing signals with more orthodoxy than the laws God gave unto Moses. Still, if Nabisase knew about my skepticism she didn’t show it. From the front passenger seat she made the sign of the cross watching the bronze and granite grave markers reflect sunlight, a field of gem-stones glittering all day.

On US-22 one sign read, Pennsylvania Welcomes You.

Getting to it felt like an accomplishment. We tapped each other’s shoulders and knees, saying, — We’re in Pennsylvania. We’re in Pennsylvania.

On our right and left fields of corn took the place of vacant grass lots. I actually pulled off the road because I was so confused. I feared that we had traveled one thousand miles in a blink and asked, — Are we still in Pennsylvania?

Mom looked out the window. I looked at her in my rearview. She had been sleeping, but was roused enough to panic.

— We’re in Pennsylvania, Nabisase said. Just look at the markers.

Thirty yards ahead there was a small black-and-white metal marker for US-22 off the shoulder. Grandma wanted to know why we stopped; Mom did too. They both asked if I was feeling sick; they asked me fourteen times. Enough that they sounded more concerned for their own safety than mine.

I drove again and never explained; it was because I thought corn was only grown in the Midwest. That in the East it came out of cans. I was just a simple, small-time city boy. A rube.

We reached Baltimore. — What exit? I asked my mother.

— None.

— I thought we were going to Maryland.

— Virginia. You don’t listen.

I had been to Baltimore once, that bipolar city. On one block was the moderately regal Penn Station, then four blocks over a quadrant of desiccated row houses. The neighborhoods went like mood swings, good to bad, horrendous to opulent, without warning.

I had been to Baltimore when an old friend was getting married.

The night before his wedding his uncles drove us to a small strip club called Eldorado’s. Even with the wonderful nudity I spent that night glum for gaining so much weight and for failing out of school. For wearing the same clothes four days straight and not showering quite as daily as people should.

One of my friends paid a woman to stand on a platform the same level as my chest and shake her ass at me for twenty minutes; a party favor. She was sweaty from working too long and her butt was cold, icy even.

She cheered me up, something she couldn’t have noticed because her back was to me the whole time. I might have started speaking to her if she’d turned around, and I guarantee she wasn’t in the mood for one more vapid compliment.

While she shook I clapped my hands right onto her ass cheeks. I put a five-dollar bill in her stocking, that kept her around. The groom-to-be had a lady upside down on his chest with her pussy dangling inches below his chin; he was so strong that when he stood up he held her there, wearing the stripper as a locket.

Eventually my dancer got wigged out by me because I didn’t caress her butt or smack it lightly or try to reach for her tits or move. I was there with my hands against her backside with my eyes closed so it looked like I was crying. I might have been.

So how bad do you have to act to make a stripper twitch? Well ‘bad’ is the wrong word because ‘bad’ is common. I could have torn her hair and she’d have understood that more; it would be well within the spectrum of a drunken male’s aggression. She got uncomfortable because sad men in strip clubs are always pathetic. It’s just that I’d seen the money in her G-string and mistook it for a collection plate. I thought I knew where I was.

— You were looking in the wrong place for that kind of thing, my mother said glumly.

The oblong sun cast daylight vigorously. I hoped she was speaking to my sister. I tried, surreptitiously, to glance at my family, but they were all watching me.

Quiet car.

Quiet car.

9

We were going to be late for the Miss Innocence pageant because Mom was collecting dog figurines on I-78. This trip was turning her young.

— Rest stop! Mom called.

At a Maryland gas station she bought a yellow scarf to tie around her neck. Twice already we’d watched her flirt with gas station attendants; Grandma sucked her teeth while my sister rested her limp face against the window. In warmer country Mom didn’t have to wear a dumpy coat over her airtight figure.

— Rest stop! Mom yelled again.

I parked the car and Nabisase helped Grandma walk to the bathrooms. In a minute my mother would go foraging through the rest stop gift shop for any statuette with canine features.

In the trunk we already carried a few stuffed toy dogs, a cast iron German Shepherd, a basset hound made of anthracite. Blame me for her newfound interest; I’d made the mistake of going on about how, when I was a child, I wanted a dog so much. I brought it up when the car ride went hush after my Baltimore story. I mentioned the dog idea only to blot out words like ‘stripper,’ ‘backside,’ and ‘me.’ I didn’t expect my mother to get frenzied. But she heard me blaming her for a parenting failure.

Mom stayed in the backseat while Grandma and Nabisase walked away; I touched the steering wheel where it was still cool. My mother and I were in the car looking out through the windshield.

— We’ve got enough by now, I told her gently, diplomatically.

— You said what you wanted, so I’m getting it for you.

— I was just mentioning that. To pass time, not for you to get all serious.

— I heard you. She deepened her voice, Dog! she said.

— How many words do I say in an hour? For you to focus on that one?

— You can’t have me buying you all these nice things and then get angry because I did, she said.

This rest stop was flying three flags: of the United States, Maryland and POW-MIA.

Could there still be Americans in Vietnam? I wondered if I even had the right to wonder. Those black flags with hangdog silhouette were memorials that anyone alive could own, but what good were they doing the phantoms in Cambodian cells. It’s the living who don’t release the dead. My Uncle Isaac might as well have been on this trip with us, there was room; Mom and Grandma left a space between them in the back seat.

— Again? Nabisase cried as she leaned for ward to see the car clock.

My sister had been feigning nonchalance about these stops, but now this was our seventh. Nabisase was nearly hysterical, squirming like she was churning doo-doo butter in the seat.

— I have to register, Nabisase whined. And try on my dresses.

— I know, Mom said.

— And I’ll need sleep, Nabisase continued. I probably should go to church in the morning.

When we parked only my mother left the car.

Grandma, Nabisase and I stayed. I craned my neck to rub the top of my head against the ceiling fabric. The noise it made was soothing.

Grandma reached forward and touched my sister’s neck. — We have all seen Mom acting like this before.

Nabisase slouched, half-alive. — Anthony, if you drove off now we wouldn’t mind.

I nodded to show my kinship, but knew my sister didn’t mean it. How many terrible things do people say.

At 8:30 PM we crossed the Mason-Dixon line. We were the South’s problem now.

10

By the ninth rest stop Grandma, Nabisase and I had been defeated; Mom held control. She saw the exit and directed me off. Up a sloping ramp. We all got out because my mother told us to. Excitable people lead.

But instead of an empty rest area, there was a crowd surrounding the McDonald’s.

College-age kids were throwing rancid meat at the public, protesting chemically treated beef. It was night, but we could see clearly. The rest stop lamps were on and a film crew had set up floodlights too. A small globe of starshine on the hill.

The college students had parked a long yellow school bus across the outgoing truck and car lanes. Drivers arrived, but couldn’t leave. The parking spaces were full. Minivans were up on the grass. I drove as close as possible, but this was still a logjam.

A white banner was tied up against the yellow hide of the bus, it read: Pretty Damn Mad.

Myself, Grandma, Nabisase and Mom walked toward the commotion because they couldn’t walk away. I wanted to get in the Dodge Neon, drive backward down the ramp and try to get onto the interstate again. But my family was raised on tabloids and enjoyed the habit. They wanted to get closer and see.

Inside the McDonald’s restaurant another thirty-odd customers pressed against the glass, looking out. The manager stood at the door opening it to let a few of the normal folks inside, but he couldn’t have us all. That left many middle-aged men and women trapped out here; they wore comfortable slacks and white running shoes.

The college students didn’t run right up to the McDonald’s doors. They wouldn’t go more than ten feet from the bus. It showed their age. They were courageous only in numbers. I’d been like that in school, willing to commit to a sit-in with a hundred other boys and girls, but stridently polite on my own.

— No meat, it’s murder! Don’t eat, that burger!

My family was as close as possible now. A lot of families were watching from their parked cars. While the mass of protestors were a bold ball in front of the McDonald’s individual kids walked around giving out flyers.

I was so close to the front door of the restaurant that I could see the shake machine being used inside and started to salivate. A chubby girl wearing platform sneakers interrupted my strawberrysmoothie reverie to hand my sister and I the facts about beef production. The horrid truth was printed on magenta paper.

Grandma held on to my left arm; she was so light I could have carried her on my head. She might have been safer then.

Besides a gas-station and the McDonald’s under siege there wasn’t much to this rest stop. There was a second parking lot, but the way the protestor’s bus was situated no cars could get to it. The street lamps over there weren’t even on. My only proof that it existed were the faint white parking-space stripes on the ground.

After Nabisase and I threw our flyers on the ground the chubby girl returned, making a round, picking up the many discarded sheets. She didn’t look at us, but her lips were moving.

Mom, Grandma, Nabisase and I were stuck by then. Between McDonald’s and the people behind me. I’m not talking about the protestors, just other families. As more of us walked close to the scene, it emboldened the ones still in their cars.

Even amongst the loud demonstrators one woman distinguished herself. She was long, as in tall, and black, unlike most of the vegan kids. Sometimes she went along with the murder/burger chant. At other times she made less sense. — Anchorage! she cried. Where is Anchorage?

— Alaska, I whispered involuntarily.

The McDonald’s manager came outside yelling, — Police are coming!

The tall woman answered, — You told us already.

— You stay out of this AnnEstelle!

— These kids are just visiting Claude, but I see people eating your poison every day. Where’s Anchorage?!

I didn’t know who she was asking about, but the manager seemed to understand. — Don’t you bring that thing around here again, AnnEstelle.

The film crew was there for the college kids. Four men with cameras, another recording sound and a colossal gentlemen, seven feet I bet. He wore a quality suit and was taking notes.

— I recognize that man, my mother said.

Right now my family was closer than we’d been in years. Four people squeezed into room for two. Nabisase and Grandma had practically climbed on top of me.

Nabisase said, — He’s been on TV. She pointed at the gigantic man, but I couldn’t place him. It was the suit that captivated me. A muted brown number. And he had the vest. Oh my, that was tasteful.

My movie could be about a homicidal mob of vegans.

Yeah, well. I’d have other ideas.

Then AnnEstelle threw animal bones in front of the McDonald’s entrance. Femurs actually. Which are big.

Like she was emptying a laundry sack AnnEstelle turned her bag over. The harsh lights of the film crew made my face warm. Claude, the McDonald’s manager, locked the door again. The bones were still covered in blood; a liquid, like mucus, glowed on them.

I was aware that even the other protestors cooed because they were surprised by the bones. Many of them dropped their handbills. One spindly boy ran back into the yellow bus.

A woman next to me, in her fifties, wearing white jeans and high heels, said, — Well, I’ll be goddamned.

The man with her had too much facial hair. I mean seven helpings of beard and mustache. If he actually had cheeks I couldn’t see them. — I’ve never liked Maryland, he said.

The only sound I remember was a hollow — bloop— as the banner flapped against the yellow bus.

Everyone, everyone, everyone ran.

I couldn’t have kept my family close even if I’d been so inclined. A centrifuge is less effective at separating elements. One hundred and some — odd people went in as many directions. Trampling is a hazard for elephant trainers and anyone in my way. I know Grandma got knocked down, it might even have been by me.

While others tried to get inside McDonald’s and many more went toward the parked cars, I found my way to the back parking lot. I was the only one.

Where the lot lamps were out. An outline of hills listed back to the horizon. A space so remote I thought it had been sacrificed back to the land. And the noise of shouting, car engines, police sirens didn’t follow me. It was replaced by the heavy breath of night. A snorting sound, actually.

In front of me a cow was running toward a parked truck.

— Hey, I said, but the cow kept moving.

— Hey cow.

It stopped, but didn’t look at me. The truck was one hundred yards away, closer to the hills than to us. The cow was even more enormous than me.

— Keep quiet, it whispered.

Talk about making money. If I actually had encountered a cow using human speech I knew we could sell the story. Forget the Enquirer or the Star, those were only celebrity gossip magazines now. The National Examiner or the hearty Globe instead. I wish I didn’t know these distinctions, but I do. Mom and Grandma had subscriptions.

It was a relief though to find a short woman on its other side leading the cow on a leash. I lost the article, but kept my senses. She was five feet tall and wearing duck boots. — That your cow? I asked.

— My family’s, she said.

I had on my suit so I should have seemed authoritative, but she was unintimidated. The small woman shook a hand through her brown hair; she reminded me of a cockatiel, looking at me sideways.

— I’m going to put Anchorage up. If you don’t mind I just need you to be quiet.

— Let me help you and I will. Is this Anchorage? What can I do? Push?

— It’s not a shopping cart, she said.

— I’m just asking you. I don’t know.

— Go open the truck and pull down the ramp.

— What if I yell?

— Then the cops will come here and take my animal from me.

Even as I walked to the rear of the truck’s cabin I looked back at Anchorage. It’s head was as big as my chest.

— I think that other lady was looking for this, I said again.

— Anchorage isn’t hers to have.

— Is she yours?

— She’s our father’s.

— You mean God?

— Mine and AnnEstelle’s.

— AnnEstelle is that loud woman.

— AnnEstelle is my sister. I’m Fane.

She touched the cow near the hind legs to urge it up the ramp. Anchorage walked two feet closer to the truck, which was nearly enough.

Over the top of the McDonald’s I could see that police lights had arrived. They were red and flashing, from the ground and up into the sky.

— I have a family, I said as an excuse to go. We still had two hours of driving till Virginia. It was 9:00 PM. Why’d they hold the rally so late?

— It’s only a stopover for those kids. This isn’t their last destination. But my sister heard they were here, so she had to come on out and get them started.

— Will the cops arrest AnnEstelle?

— They’ll bring her back home to me anyhow. In a few hours.

She went up to the head of the monster. That’s what Anchorage was to me. If I’d seen it on a deserted strip of land I’d have shot the devil down. Fane brushed its ears which made Anchorage pull back. Fane whispered, or more like hummed, into the side of Anchorage’s face. I felt like there was dirt in my nose; so grainy that I squeezed my nostrils together, but that only drove the muddy smell up behind my eyes.

I didn’t actually touch the skin, but held my hand an inch away from it then scanned my palm along the wealthy body. That was pretty close for me. I wouldn’t have bothered for any better, but I noticed this discolored patch, a circle little bigger than my fist, between a pair of ribs. I touched this and when I did yelped so loud I bet the Grand Tetons heard me.

— Shut up! Did she clip you?

— Your cow is made of plastic, I said. Did you know that?

She laughed even before reaching me which made my face flush; I put my hands over my mouth less out of surprise than a need to conceal my shame. I didn’t know what else to say to her; there was a fist-sized black plastic cap in the cow’s side.

— That’s what I mean, I said when she stood next to me. I snapped one knuckle against the little plastic disk. Then Fane unscrewed it.

It came out of the animal like a gas cap from a car. I moved my hands from my mouth to cover my eyes because I thought blood or the acids of four stomachs would shoot out. She said, — Don’t be scared.

With the top pulled out, this eighty thousand pound mammal stood calmly in the parking lot; there was an open tunnel leading inside.

— Did you do that to her? I asked.

— I didn’t, but I would have.

— Don’t you like Anchorage?

— I love our animals.

— How many do you have?

— Six more Holsteins. Two sow.

— Do they all have that plastic tube in them?

— Of course not. The other cows produce milk fine. Anchorage is the one who can’t. It was to help her. We can put a hand in there to make sure she’s digesting her food. We thought that might be the problem.

— Let me put my hand in there?

— What do you think is going to happen?

I felt an urge toward honesty. — Magic?

I should have been wearing a long glove before putting my hand in there, that’s what Fane told me. I took off my jacket, rolled the sleeve. The way this worked was to push my hand through the opening. There were a few inches of plastic like the inside of a straw. When my arm went in to the elbow I’d reached a wet stomach; I rubbed my fingers against the walls. I wanted to find a bar of gold inside.

— AnnEstelle does that as a trick sometimes. When she’s causing a stir in front of restaurants. She pulls a doll’s head the size of a baseball out of Anchorage’s stomach and she waves it at the people watching. It’s to make them think about what they’re eating.

— Does it work?

— It makes people vomit.

— Right into their laps? I asked. Disgusted, but excited to imagine that.

— Then I have to come get Anchorage because the police usually collect my sister.

I tried to reach deeper into the cow. I wanted to touch the other side of her wide stomach just so I’d know it was there. Without grazing that far point my hand only felt like it was floating in humid weather.

— How long have you been cleaning up after her?

— I can’t remember when I didn’t.

When living in Ithaca only I suffered my messes. An unwashed body or the brass-band argument I had with a Wegman’s supermarket manager about sneaking one box of soda crackers down my pants.

— AnnEstelle apologizes all the time, Fane explained.

— Is that good enough for you?

— Depends on what she put me through the day before.

Nabisase was probably waiting at the car with arms crossed and very little confidence in me. I have the keys, I thought. I should go and let her in.

11

Our car entered the city limits of Lumpkin, Virginia, at one in the morning with the four of us asleep inside. I certainly wasn’t driving, just keeping the steering wheel warm. Our seven-hour trip had lasted ten. At least, while our eyes were closed, there were fewer complications to life.

When settlers were first tracking across the American Midwest they’d discard big furniture like dressers or great wooden headboards when their horses were near death. When settlers stopped believing they’d reach their destination the littered frontier trails became furniture showrooms. Other travelers following after must have wondered why’d they leave this here and not twenty yards farther; why not ten miles back? What reason?

This was sort of how we reached Lumpkin. Like many explorers before us we stopped when our vehicle went off the plotted path.

Luckily I was in the slow lane of I-81 so we just listed right onto the grassy shoulder. The new white car was one of those rounded models with no real corners or edges and must have looked like a giant commode from far away. I woke when the bumpy earth shook our car. As I drove over to the actual interstate exit I felt like everyone in the world was asleep but me.

— That was dangerous, my sister whispered.

Lumpkin was an acorn-shaped town of 20,000. The only hotels were just off the interstate at the rounded bottom end. It was the Comfort Inn for the Miss Innocence contestants and two family members. A relaxed, two-story affair shaped like the letter U. While my family registered at the front desk I pack-muled the suitcases and gowns into the lobby.

Pageant rules stipulated that I stay in a different hotel. Fathers were the only men allowed. They were very serious about keeping virtue in the Miss Innocence pageant. So much so that they wanted my sister to sign a contract.

Nabisase might have liked Mom to read it over, but Mom was carrying Grandma to the elevator because she couldn’t walk on her own.

Grandma took a squashing at that McDonald’s riot. Underfoot as my arm was in a cow. Her hip popped audibly when she tried to walk from the car into the Comfort Inn.

I suggested a hospital, but Grandma wanted the pain. Used it.

— If we had not been making stops I would not be harmed, she’d said in the last stretch before Lumpkin.

— Let us reach town so the granddaughter can get to bed.

To atone Mom hefted Grandma from the car into the Comfort Inn and to the elevator and their room. We fastened my grandmother to my mother’s back by using my jacket like a tourniquet; tied together at the middle.

Mom didn’t talk after we had escaped the rest stop chaos. She was so quiet that I kept looking in the rearview and asking, — Are you there? Mom? Still there?

I was kidding, but that only made her fainter. The sound of her breathing even disappeared for the rest of the drive. At the Comfort Inn, even as Mom got into the elevator with Grandma, she didn’t say good-bye.

My sister sat down on one of the brown lobby couches. Late as we were other girls were still arriving.

Nabisase looked most like a thirteen year old as she read the Miss Innocence contract; running a finger under each line; reading aloud.

The Miss Innocence pageant portrayed virginity as something sacred and I don’t feel like mocking them for it. I remember one of my freshman scholarships at Cornell demanded that I remain patriotic all the years until I died. In my own way I was trying.

How were they going to check and see if she was telling the truth about her hymen?

— They would trust me, Nabisase said, too serious for a child.

— I’m not trying to down you, I assured her.

This Comfort Inn was excited to host the pageant hopefuls. There were balloons of ever y color and clipped dogwood flowers in bowls. The lobby smelled like lemon rinds; from another part of the first floor I heard the thrum of a floor buffer on wood.

— Are you actually a virgin?

— Sure I am, she said.

— I thought you’d be insulted.

— No, it’s all right.

— Does it say in the contract that you can’t ever have done anything? Like with your hands on a boy or anything else?

— What could ‘anything else’ mean? she asked coyly. My feet?

— Never mind. Let me look at the paper.

She put it behind her back. — You can’t say that word? I’ll help you. It starts with a B.

— I’m not going to talk to you like that.

— You just asked me if I ever used my hands!

— Come on.

I tried to go around the side, but only managed to nip her elbow. She stood. She walked backward toward the exit doors.

— I’m trying to help here, I said. Just let me read it. Contracts are made to cheat you. They might have fines listed in the small print. $100 dollars for every French kiss you ever gave.

— How would they find that out? She laughed because her older brother was squirming.

— You’re like a nun now, church girl, you’ll probably tell them. Let me see it.

She held the contract up to one of the ceiling lights. — There’s a word you won’t say, but maybe it’s in here. Bl. Blo. Blow.

— Shhhh!

The desk clerk bestowed electronic key cards upon a father and mother as their daughters slapped at the buttons of elevators to make them race.

— Maybe I should ask Ledric to help me? she asked.

— He can only help you plan a big meal.

She said, — ‘Blow job’ isn’t the worst thing you could say to me.

I covered my ears. — If I was a judge and heard you say that word it’d be automatic disqualification.

— You shouldn’t worry about girls acting dirty, she said. That’s not the meaning of Innocence.

12

The Hampton Inn was accepting the other men; brothers, cousins, uncles, pals. For all the stridency about separating us Comfort Inn was on the same street, eighty-five feet away. There wasn’t a fence or even a line of trees. If there had been a natural barrier then at least wickedness would have to be an act of imagination, but boys could look out their windows and see right into any chaste girl’s room.

Besides the American and Virginian flags the blue and white Hampton Inn banner was stuck up on a pole in the parking lot. They charged $49 a night.

I wanted a shower, but first I walked across the street to the large twenty-four-hour convenience mart inside Sheetz gas station, where I found a bag of caramels to lull me through the night. When I went back to the Hampton Inn I found room 603 to be quiet except for the heater in the corner burbling in a deep voice.

There were two handbills under my door. I picked them up. I turned the shower on and took off my shoes; while I sat in the armchair beside the room’s single window the sound of hot water slapped softly against the shower walls.

‘Goodness Girls’ the flyer said. Those were the two biggest words, right across the top. Then there was a picture of a tiara, the diamonds in it badly oversized. A hand-drawing. Under the image there was a question, ‘Haven’t you always wanted to win?’

My love of horror movies, I can’t say how far back it started, but the books came first. I never read fantasy, my personality was more terrestrial. Misty marshes; deserted backwoods; an apartment closet that, whenever opened, exhales a sepulchral breath.

A muffled trumpet woke me at four that morning. Not a genuine instrument, but a children’s toy. The sound was from the hallway outside my room door. This was at four o’clock, the hour of grand regrets. I heard shuffling but was too tired to make sense of it. I looked at the time again. Four-twenty.

My curtains were open; I was sitting in the armchair. I could see there was still a lot of night to go before dawn. Maybe someone’s dumb kid was playing reveille in his sleep. One flyer was in my lap and the other was on the floor. The one that had fallen was water-stained.

My room was much hotter than it should have been even with the heater running through the night. Steam was coming out of my bathroom in bellows. Everywhere the carpet was wet.

Outside the room I heard sticks knocking together. I looked at the bed hoping Lorraine would be there. Still wearing my socks, my green suit, I walked on the wet carpet.

The shower must have been going three hours now; forget puddles, there were pools. I must have passed out sitting up; the bed was made.

Panic less, I told myself. Be calm. Go get more towels from the front desk.

I opened the hallway door. There was the idea of driving back to Queens but I’d given my real name and home phone number when checking in. Why hadn’t I thought ahead and used an alias; I wished I had a criminal mind.

The power was out in the hallway, which really started me shivering because I couldn’t ever work off a debt the size of a hotel-wide electrical failure. I touched the light switch in my room, but current wasn’t running. Had I blown the whole floor? Could I have destroyed an entire town while sleeping? My eyes adjusted in the darkness until I saw clearly that the hallway was full of dead soldiers.

— What?

I just stood in the hall asking, — What? What?

Four-foot-tall Confederate soldiers in those distinct gray uniforms. In the darkness I saw twelve. Shadows were shawls over their faces.

I said, — No thank you.

But they were children, not dead men. And far down the hall stood one grownup.

Just twelve boys dressed as Rebel forces and six more sat on the ground wearing Union blue. Some knocking short thin sticks together. One carrying a play trumpet. Half a dozen of the standing boys turned then shrank from me.

— We’re practicing, said the grown man when he reached me. He was slim, bearded and talked to me dispassionately. I thought, This guy has never been scared in his life. He wore a striped buttoned shirt and Hagar slacks. It wasn’t that he seemed tough, just easy.

— I didn’t know they used kids for wars anymore.

He smiled politely. The kindest way to deal with any stupid tourist’s questions. — We’re in the pageant this weekend.

— Miss Innocence? My sister’s a contestant. I didn’t know they’d have a marching group at the show, I said. Usually it’s just music.

— Yeah. There’s a band, but our boys show out at just about anything. They’d march before every baseball game if we let them.

He had a black baseball cap in his left hand and slapped it patiently against his thigh.

— What are they commemorating? I asked.

The boys were bored already. I think they were ten years old and without a vigilant chaperone they got frisky; punching arms, mushing foreheads.

— We’re up early because they’ve been forgetting their drills. It’s our historical society that sponsors them. I’ve got a newsletter on me. You can take it. Hey now, said the guy to the boys. Hey now!

They stopped, stood calmly.

Through the picture window at the far end of the hall I could see the bright sign for Sheetz gas station still alight. This was more comforting than it should have been; it proved I hadn’t shortcircuited the town. Anyway, a little neon always makes me feel like I’m near people I understand.

The imperturbable man in Hagar slacks, probably a size thirty-two, walked close enough to shake hands. That’s when his shoes made a — squish— noise on the soaked carpet. My leaky shower had made all the way out the room door into the hall.

— I had a problem in the bathroom, I admitted.

He jumped back, yelled, — It’s not piss, damn it?

— It’s just water. His raised voice surprised me so much that I even wondered if it was pee.

He looked at it for some time; I wondered if urine made a different discoloration in cheap carpeting; if he could detect such a thing it was the strangest kind of survival training I could imagine.

— That would have been a lot, he finally decided. He grinned, but stood outside the ring of moisture.

— Go get towels from downstairs, he said to the boys who had stopped bothering with historical accuracy and stood together regardless of uniform.

— How many? two asked in unison.

The coach walked into my room then poked his head back. — Much as you can carry.

The tiny replica war veterans tore off; happy to help, but gladder for the fun of running. After swaddling my floor in blankets they were sent to their rooms by 5:30 AM. I thanked the man another dozen times then put on my shoes. I spent the earliest hours of November 11th reclining in the passenger seat of our Dodge Neon. When I woke up a few hours later a dozen ‘Goodness Girls’ handbills had materialized on the windshield of my car and every other.

13

‘Disheveled’ is a generous adjective to qualify my appearance at the family breakfast in conference room C at the Comfort Inn on Saturday morning. I was early since the insistent sun woke me at eight in the car. Afraid to go to my room at Hampton Inn, even into the lobby, I walked to the Comfort Inn and used their mainfloor’s bathroom to wash my face. My body would have to wait.

In the largest conference room tables were already made. Instead of fifty small round places there were four long rows, cafeteria style. On each was a white table cloth. More dogwoods again, but they’d been left in the palms of small ceramic angel figurines. There were three to each table, twelve altogether in the room. A dozen kneeling baby boys, their wings tucked under rumps, hands held open on the thighs.

The ceilings were twenty feet high and since I was alone in the room I started jumping up and down. Do you ever do that when you’re alone? How high could I get, that was the game and it was miserable. I’d have to count my leaps in millimeters. It was silly to do that in some conference room, but it made my nature rise; circulating blood throughout my body. I felt pretty good.

At the other end of the conference room a microphone and podium were just in front of an enormous white screen hanging from the ceiling. I wondered if they’d show slides of pageants past, diagrams of acceptable hemlines. I walked closer just to see if the microphone was on, but when I tapped the mesh end for feedback it didn’t.

A server leaned out a door way. — I can turn it on for you.

— Thanks, I said, though I wasn’t planning on singing.

The difference between a waiter and a server is that the former gets tipped, but the latter doesn’t have to stand around blithely waiting to take orders.

We misunderstood each other, that server and I; voltage wasn’t funneled to the microphone. It was the colossal hanging screen instead. That thing started speaking so loudly it surprised me. I shuffled down the earth tone carpet to get away. It was playing cable news.

The volume of the news was then turned lower. I sat at a table, halfway between the pictures and the exit. There were remote shots from Bosnia and Newt Gingrich. There was footage of a mouse with a human ear on its back.

The mouse story might have been two weeks old, but I was still hard pressed to turn away. Even without the grotesque accessory the red hairless mouse was grisly. It shivered and limped and its eyes were moist.

The anesthesiologist who’d done this breakthrough work hadn’t simply stuffed a human ear down some rodent’s hole. He’d twisted a polyester fabric into the shape of a human ear then went under the mouse’s skin and attached it to the body. The polyester ear had been dosed with human cartilage cells that survived like a parasite, living off of the mouse. As the polyester decayed the human cartilage cells grew to take its place until a human ear was generated where there had been an artificial one. After that the new human ear could be removed to be used in cosmetic surgery while the mouse lived on unhazed.

Why these games the reporter wanted to know as he interviewed the scientists. Build a better ear? A bigger one? Different colors? Would each have a corporate logo and bar code? Would this turn into another dumb fashion craze? The reporter was snide throughout the interview.

Then those researchers explained that some kids are born without ears; terrible car accidents occur that split faces to bits; a young boy lost his nose to a neighbor’s champing mutt; a girl fell from a fifth floor window and her ear was crushed. Because of this spiny mouse many people could be fixed.

I’d like to tell you about when my Uncle Isaac taught me how to organize Japanese honeysuckle in a basket. He really did. At the time I thought his bouquets made a Thanksgiving day table warmer than any fireplace could. I’m afraid that I’ve never let him go. Purgatory might be the place a soul goes until everyone stops needing him in any way. A second life that penalizes the well-known or loved.

By 9:15 AM the conference room should have been filled; if not then how about 9:30? The television was on, but I’d stopped watching. I wished I was a smoker to pass time. I wanted to ask the server if I’d come to the wrong room, but that guy was gone.

I walked out to the front desk, but the clerk must have been in the bathroom because I heard water running from behind a door marked ‘Employees Only.’ I waited, but after the water stopped going there was nine minutes’ silence and nothing more.

I took a pen from the front and walked back to the conference room; the television screening had been turned off. Breakfast was still warming at the rear. I made a plate of eggs and one banana. A cup of apple juice, too.

Besides the flyer that had survived the f looding in my room I had ten others, taken off my car. They said the same thing, only their colors changed. ‘Goodness Girls.’ ‘Haven’t you always wanted to win?’

Lumpkin wasn’t hosting one beauty pageant, but two. Miss Innocence was regional, but the other was a local show. If the Miss Innocence festivities didn’t start until this evening there was still a place for young ladies to compete. And there was no fee to participate. ‘Come down this afternoon and get involved.’ ‘Reputable Prizes.’

On Braddock St. In downtown Lumpkin. The typewritten instructions at the bottom of the handbill were very easy to understand. I would even have offered to take Nabisase, but I had a movie to write. I used the blank backs of each handout.

I tried to scribble out a screenplay in twenty minutes. Apparently it takes longer than that. Everything I wrote was counterfeit. Just versions of movies I’d already seen, but in mine the characters were black or from Queens. A guy in a hockey mask killing geeks of the Ivy League. A demon possesses a girl in Southeast Queens and a troubled young minister has to cast the evil out. That’s how badly it went.

Eventually I gave up on creating something new and wrote down capsule synopses of monster movies I’d seen. So I’d know what to avoid. Pretty quickly I understood I had no talent for invention, but a decent memory instead. I recalled actors, directors, approximate running times and even the production companies. Soon I had pages of these catalog entries.

Gurgle Freaks

Feldspar Pictures American, 1985; 64 minutes

Director: Herman Shipley

Starring: Veronica Groober, Paige Pelham, Joe Stat

Veronica Groober stars as the villainess, a saleswoman of cosmetics who kills housewives by filling the throats of her victims with a bilious liquid which she regurgitates into their mouths. The special effects are actually quite gruesome. The villainess is on the prowl because she was disfigured in a boating accident and has, ever since, borne a terrible hatred against all fair females upon whom fate has shined.

Jains, Jains, Jains

Montu Films, 1986; 83 minutes

Director: Ezra Washington

Starring: Manfred Owens, Manil Oswati,

Helena and Bascom Hughes

Jains, Jains, Jains, despite the title and subject matter, is an American-made film. A Jain priest’s (a yati’s) dead body is mistakenly delivered to America to a quiet, decent childless family. (Helena and Bascom Huz). The woman pries the box open while her husband is at work and when she removes a shroud from his face the yati is brought back from the dead. The yati grants her one wish. (This has nothing to do with any aspect of the Jain religion.) She wishes her husband would return to the amorous ways of their youth. Then the yati kills her.

He commences slaughtering many of the neighborhood wives as the day continues and as he does he frees their many pets. Dogs, birds, turtles; the yati releases them all. The final murder is of the local cat lady who keeps about a hundred.

At the end of the film the viewer is supposed to understand, accept might be the better word, that this Jain priest has come to America to kill its unrighteous human beings and leave the nation to its holier, more innocent, creatures.

The final shot is of the unnamed yati (who is played by an obvious black American, Owens, who doesn’t even try an accent — this when there is actually an Indian cast member, Oswati, whose sole job is to explain why Jains are a threat to the United States) getting on a Greyhound bus in only his white robe and coming, presumably, to your town next.

This film might have been underwritten by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals or, perhaps, Pakistan.

After two hours I had nine of these on the table, but still no good ideas of my own.

I never saw another diner while I had my head down working, but when I stopped writing there were 199 plates on the tables, the remains of breakfast on most. Fingerprint-smudged glasses of juice beside them. I got lonely, so I left.

At one of the tan in-house phones I tried Mom and Grandma’s room, but there was no answer. My sister was staying on a separate floor for contestants, but that number was blocked. Each time I dialed her room the phone buzzed defensively. A person couldn’t even speak to those girls. Corruption entering through the ear.

As I left the Comfort Inn I passed the front desk, where a clerk’s dark brown blazer had been placed on top of the service bell. I didn’t bother to ring it because I expected no help.

14

The nut-shaped town of Lumpkin was broken into thirds and in ascending order. Starting low, between I-81 and Pleasant Valley Road; near the Hampton and Comfort Inns and Chili’s restaurant; the only movie theater; the Asian eateries. A tourist quadrant. European toilets aren’t like American, did you know that? I didn’t until I read about it. They’re designed so the shit doesn’t fall right in the water, but gets caught on a little shelf until you flush it away. That layout saves gallons of water, but the human surplus just sits there to be seen. Lumpkin’s tourist section resembled a European toilet; we were left there near the bottom to stew until the day we dropped and departed on the rushing interstate.

Four-lane Pleasant Valley Road split the tourists from downtown Lumpkin, the center of local business and historic landmarks. Some of the one-family private homes here suffered leans. Downtown was the fulcrum of this city’s poor, because every agency to feed or clothe the broke was there on Cameron Street.

And at Fairmont Avenue I reached the final checkpoint between downtown and uptown; this third was as nice as Jamaica Estates. The houses were larger than in the poorer section, but not by that much. The real difference was in architectural flourish. Porticos; Doric columns like a bastard.

Walking from my hotel to Fairmont Avenue at the other end of Lumpkin took only thirty minutes, and my pace was tame. There were gates around the homes in the poorer section, but in the nicest part of town there were none.

I spent a while on the sidewalks, but how long I couldn’t say. My armpits and stomach itched because I hadn’t showered yet. Sometimes I stood still in front of a home, but I was only thinking of how to reach my family, who weren’t in their rooms. The forsaken quality of the Comfort Inn had saturated the town; I didn’t pass any human beings.

I walked into a little ripple of a coffee store even though no one was inside. I opened the door and tried the pay phone before I realized the place should’ve been locked up. My calls to Mom’s room went unanswered. It wasn’t that the store was closed: the lights were on and the coffee machine brewed quietly. More like the owner had stepped out the room, maybe quick around the corner.

I poured myself some apple cider from the jug in a fridge behind the counter. To relax I untied my shoes, took them off. My feet appreciated the gesture. I allowed Ahmed Abdel into my life once again.

Even I was mildly worried about how much this guy bothered me. It wasn’t just for Lorraine. My freedom seemed constricted compared to the expansive life offered him through incarceration. On page two of the pamphlet there was a brief question-and-answer conducted by the same windswept young journalist at BU.

Q: What is the greatest threat to freedom today, Mr. Abdel?

A: The elite business oligarchies of the Western World.

Q: What question would you like the people who read this to consider?

A: We know who watches us. The police. The military. The mediacracy. But ask yourself who watches the watchmen?

What a twit. What an ultramaroon. This was the man Lorraine would get arrested for? A guy who quoted comic books? With a pen, notepad and my stationary anger I wrote the guy a letter on my last Goodness Girls flyer.

Mr. Abdel,

How is prison? They call it the gray bar hotel sometimes. A friend gave me the pamphlet with your photo on the back with your interview. You have a lot of admirers.

From your ‘watchmen’ comment I think you have been reading the funnies well into adulthood. Socialism’s overrated anyway. I’ll bet you couldn’t spell Muhammad before starting your prison bid.

I noticed that you wear dreadlocks, but you are Japanese. Is it that you think you’re black? Do you wish that you were black? It’s silly to use the name you do. Why is it that other minorities pretend they’re black to fight the system? You aren’t black.

Yours,

Anthony

I signed only my first name, but put the full return address at the top. Of course I wanted a response; that’s why I wrote it. Short, quick and sure to sting. Cracked my toes and set my feet flat to enjoy the cold store floor through my thin socks.

After resting I looked at the clock, but the time was wrong. — It’s three? I asked myself.

— It took me two hours to do this little bit?

Which made me think of the work I’d done in the conference room. I lay the sheets on my table in the coffee shop. Read the movie entries so quickly that I had time to do it again. Read them out loud. If I compare the feeling with anything it would be to my mother when she was listening to the tapes of our family speaking into a microphone. Both were just a form of preservation.

I touched the pages gently to my fingertips and considered the next month, the next year. They were in my lousy handwriting; that made them more cherishable. I needed to think impartially about my family and myself. Where the others had been stricken, how would I survive. The first time my mother didn’t recognize me I remember I was ten. It lasted a week and the whole time she was trapped on a hospital bed. When Uncle Isaac refused to go to sleep for so many days that he only got rest when he fainted.

In a way it was good luck that I’d sat there so long feeling sorry for myself. If I hadn’t I might have put on my shoes and walked out of the coffee store. If I walked out I might have left Piccadilly Road. And if I left Piccadilly Road I wouldn’t have seen Nabisase and Grandma running away.

They had fashioned a papoose like the one we’d made with my jacket the night before. Theirs was made of bed sheets. My sister carried Grandma on her back. A thirteen-year-old girl tottering down the road holding her ninety-three-year-old grandmother in a satchel.

They went down Piccadilly, past where I could see them from my chair, so I put on my shoes, left four dollars on the register and one dollar in the tip cup. Followed them with my eyes until they reached a big library two blocks down. My sister made a right.

I walked to Braddock Street, where Nabisase had gone. On the corner there was a marble library too flamboyant for this modest town; a man wearing crisp, new overall dungarees and a nice white long-sleeved shirt washed scuff marks off the fronts steps. He looked spiffier than I did and I was wearing my brown suit.

Judging by numbers the town’s missing populace was all on Braddock Street. Though it was a crowd they seemed to take up less space than the same number of people would in New York. Eventually I realized this was because no one was dramatically announcing their hurry with sighs or pushing.

Three circus tents were pitched in the road; each was as tall as the surrounding two-story homes. They were staggered, one tent after the next, and swaying to the right or left depending on the impulse of the wind.

That first tent had teenage girls inside. I saw a few walk in, but not my sister.

Yellow balloons were tied to sedentary objects. To light posts, to trees, car antennas and front gates. A boy in a wheelchair had five tied to his handlebars. This old woman, sitting in a lawn chair on the sidewalk, wore balloons looped around each ear. Her jewelry bobbing up above her hair.

A traveling band was at the far end of the block and when they reached the corner of Braddock, at Louden, turned right to make a circuit through the downtown area. It was brassy music except for one bass drum.

People wandered down the block, mixing around the three tents. Middle-aged women stood together in U-shaped groups, each one’s children visible constantly this way.

Christianity was common. I bet my sister was pretending she fit right in. I watched as a minister and two preachers were greeted sweetly; each one mingling on his own. Old women that I passed sang absently of Jesus.

There were black people and white, but I was confused by both. Being from New York, I was used to telling the difference between the two with only my sense of sound. It was just disconcerting to hear a man drawling sweetly with his wife and when I looked the guy was as likely to be blond as he was a brother. I was disoriented watching so many people act politely across the races. In New York there was no courtesy, only parallel worlds. We worked hard at ignoring each other. But down here black people and white people shook hands, greeted each other, and generally hid their mutual contempt.

Women sold meat they’d prepared at home from folding tables set on the sidewalk; pork and a lot of chicken. Besides the booths others walked around with Tupperware serving trays of Brown Betty’s, pumpkin pie and malapees (warm walnut cookies dipped in honey then powdered with brown sugar; the woman who sold them told me the recipe, belched and apologized many times). I bought ten for three dollars ate four and put the others in my jacket pocket. I needed the energy. Oh, shut up.

I tried to walk into the first tent with the teenage girls inside, but a small woman wouldn’t let me through. She smoked and checked her watch. Since she was shorter than me I looked in, but that was no way to find Nabisase.

At least thirty girls were in there. A Polaroid flashed in the back, many many times.

— You go to the second tent and sit, said the woman in front of me, but I wasn’t listening.

— Nabisase! I yelled.

Maybe four of the girls looked at me, but the rest were too busy. About a third of the girls were in scuffed jeans and boring T-shirts. The rest wore long dresses and makeup. I assumed that I knew which ones were involved in this pageant, but found out later that I was wrong.

— You go to the second tent and sit, the woman said one last time, cigarette out of her mouth. She spoke firmly once her slab of husband had joined us.

I looked him up, down, all around, trying to decide if I should rush past him.

At the entrance of the second tent I ate two more malapees. Undid my jacket to straighten my ocher tie. A small boy was there holding a plastic jar, collecting money for another boy who’d been burned plenty. There was a picture taped to the jar. Talk about veal cutlets. I gave a dollar.

I wasn’t the only one going into the second tent and I sure hadn’t been the first. One hundred folding chairs were filled and many other people already stood along the sides of the tent. But it was still cool inside. Not only because it was November, but a pair of oscillating fans at the far end.

They were propped at both ends of a small elevated stage. In the foreground of the stage there was a standing microphone, but no speaker yet.

I tried to get out of the entranceway, but it was hard. Soon people would have to sneak up under the flaps of the tent, along the sides, if they were going to get a view. If they did who cared? There wasn’t any entry charge.

When a tiny Negro walked onto the stage I knew we had begun. I know the word ‘Negro’ doesn’t fit anymore, but he was transported in from a previous century. Dressed like a buggy driver in weathered tails and white spats. The man even wore a derby. If he’d been holding a tiny lantern he might have found work on many lawns.

He was as light as wheat, but obviously black, and half the people here knew him. A few called out when he appeared, — Hey Uncle! or, Yes now, Uncle!

The ones who yelled were the most enthusiastic. Four guys who stood and clapped.

No one else applauded, not the black or the white, the fat or the chubby. Other than his cheering quartet most people just casually watched.

The little man touched the microphone with his thumb so the first microphone broadcast was of a nail scratched across the equipment. The second was his voice, squeaky as a bee sting.

— Dis is many mo’ folks dan I eber hoped ta see, yes suh.

That made us applaud if only for the vague way he seemed to be saying something positive about us.

I’ll say it, his dialect sure stymied me. Slaves of the antebellum South would have mocked his poor English.

— Why ar we heah? he asked. Why ar we heah?! he repeated.

— For you, Uncle!

— I know that’s right!

Already I’d spotted those four guys as the worst kind of audience plant. If they were in there to get us more excited their outbursts had the opposite effect. He hadn’t actually done anything yet, so why the ecstasy?

— Awlraght, he muttered. At’s enuff a dat.

After a pause the old man began again. — Iss not fo’ me that youse heah. Iss fo yo lertle chilrens. Iss fo yo specel gurls. Yawl brung em roun our way fer de chance ta be a booty queen. Em ah raht? Well? Em ah?

Sure he was, but many of us needed time to translate his sentences. And I’m including most of the good people of Lumpkin. I don’t want to say this man had a Southern accent, this guy’s diction was warped well beyond questions of geography. Backwoods white folks used to be called hill apes by the wealthy planter class; this black man was making hill ape sound refined.

— Gurls. Wimens. Thas whut we talkin about. When ya had ’em dey was but so big, but nah dey is mow grown. An’ ya want ’em ta start laff on de good foot. Ya come ta luvlee Lumpkeen hopin dey win dat Miss Inn-oh-sins booty contess an’ take home scowlarships.

— Now folks fom Lumpkeen gon recanize me, but yawl out-tatownas will nut. Jus’ call me Uncle. Lahk we was blood.

Our Uncle raised his hands jubilantly and I wasn’t the only one to gasp.

He was a small guy, I said that already. Could have been four foot eight; maybe he even had lifts in his shoes. Neither a midget or dwarf; a little person, but not clinically. Shrunk. But when he put his arms up they were as long as ski poles; that doesn’t sound like much but remind yourself how tall he was. It had a freaky effect because when he put his arms straight up it looked as though he’d flung a pair of hands high enough to touch the ceiling, but his body remained in place.

— Now. Now. De reeson I struk up de tens an’ invited yo’ gurls an’ famlees heah is cause I don’ likes dat udda pagint. De Miss Inn-oh-sins. ’Cause ovah der dey’s plannin on tellin yo gurls whut’s wrong wit ’em. Dey gotta be dis tawl an’ dis skinny an’ if dey not, den fo-get it! Am I raht? Yes ah am.

— De peeple of Lumpkeen been seen muh contes’ go on tree yeahs tuhday. But dis yeah we gots fotunate an’ had all yawl famlees fum out-ta town comin fo’ dat otha one an’ I wanned yawl to come ta mine. I’m jus’ glad ta know de flyas was put in yo rooms an’ dat so many parens was willin’ to bring yo gurls. Or was it yo gurls dat browght alla you?

Lots of the parents laughed at that and it was probably true. Some girls go for the enjoyment; Nabisase was one of those, but most were pre-teen professionals. If their parents wouldn’t take them, I swear they’d charter planes.

— We gonna start bringin in dese gurls thas jus so lubbly, sweet an’ fine. We not gon as’ dem ta weah a church dress or bee-keenees in fronna you lahk dey wus sides hung up fah sellin. Dey gonna come up an’ tawk. Tell whey dey frum an what dey been through cause hahd work make fo’ bootiful souls.

I thought the crowd might be insulted, since he was telling them to forget the Miss Innocence format; that they’d feel he was chastising them in raising their daughters for beauty. But really he was making a deeper claim. That despite their splotchy skin or scrawny thighs this man, our Uncle, wanted to reward character.

The first few girls were Miss Innocence transplants and they did badly because they hadn’t learned how to present themselves. Pageants were acting jobs, find the script and play that role. Most of them had the same heroine: pretty, firm, optimistic. That’s what those first girls did wrong.

None were in gowns, but they wore cosmetics, hair made up all darling. Trussed up like this Uncle Arms (I heard others whisper the nickname) complimented the girls; he called them pretty, splendid, hellafine. Terms that earned tens on other judging sheets, but with Uncle Arms the wretched scored highest. The tenth girl was the first local to come along, wearing badly beaten Vans and a polyester sweatshirt.

The parents of Miss Innocence girls stifled laughs, en masse, looking at the pitiful uniform. But she received applause from half the room. Effusive praise from our Uncle when she recounted how her father had been fired from the apple orchard six months ago.

Soon as that act did well every out-of-towner changed strategies. Hair drawn into plain buns, blemishes displayed. And pitiful life stories for everyone. Those girls, the ones who’d traveled, were still in dresses (though not gowns), but they tried to compensate by slouching when they walked on stage.

— And it’s ben hard to stay in school, said the nineteenth girl, because the factry closed and won’t reopin.

— Well bless ya, said Uncle Arms to the teenage girl. Bless ya much. ’At’s whut I say.

The young girl nodded then walked off the stage, out the tent and as the flap fell back I saw her go to the end of the line forming at that third tent, last point in the relay.

Another girl, fatter but more cheerful, walked onto the stage.

— Gi’ yo’ Uncle a peck!

The old man flirted, as old men are allowed to do. She touched his dessicated cheek lightly then pulled back up to smile.

— Now tayl yo’ Uncle ’bout de misfortoon an’ miseries.

— My Daddy and I are here this weekend for the pageant, but my Momma is not.

She paused as the tiny old man touched her hip. — Wha’ couln’ yer Momma be heah on such uh impotant weeken’?

The girl let her shoulders drop lower. — Well, you know we’re just reglar folks from Tennessee.

— Go on an’ tell it gurl, we all jus’ good folks, we unnastan’.

— Well, my Momma was plannin’ to come along, but then she was forced to work on the weekend. She already put in five days, but they told huh she had no choice.

Audience women nodded, familiar with tyranny.

— An’ whut r dey makin her do? Dem people she wuk foh?

The girl dug her nails into her palm which might have been a tactic for producing tears.

— Momma had. . she had. . she had to go to Singapore to meet with the Minister of Trade and Industry.

The girl did cry at least. A third of the room felt compassion based on performance alone, but the rest of us held our applause. Even the old man looked at her crossly. He couldn’t muster up some closing homily so he just pushed her out the tent. — Let’s us git anutha gurl up heah.

You know who stepped out next, so why should I even say her name? It was going to happen, I knew this, but when my sister walked out I covered my face.

Nabisase still had Grandma on her back, but didn’t look exhausted. Grandma weighed little and my sister was probably so excited she was strong. Nabisase could have untied her grandmother before now, but my sister must have wanted to win.

Nabisase undid the sheets from around them then Grandma climbed off her grandchild gingerly. Already the gathered group was sucking the inside of their collective cheek with a curiosity that could be turned to sentimentality with a flick.

— Come ovah ta yer Uncle, said the man.

— Good afternoon everyone, Nabisase said.

Manners were smart.

— An’ who’s dis heah wif ya?

— This is my Grandma. She’s ninety-three.

— R ya heah foe da pagint?

— Yes sir.

Sir! The only sir I’d ever heard Nabisase use before was the first syllable in the word service.

— An’ where’s de res’ of yo kin? Yer Maw and Paw and sech?

— I don’t have no other family, Nabisase whispered into the microphone. It’s just my grandmuvver and me. We’re orphans.

15

Even after Nabisase left the tent under a blush of hearty applause with Grandma hitched on her back again, even while the old man bent to pray for the poor child, I didn’t move except to take the wallet out my pants and check the name on my driver’s license.

The band came and left the block three times while other girls told their woes. Regardless of race, culture or where they’d come from, Ohio, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, the out-of-town girls really exaggerated their local accents, but still ended up using the same pitiful Southern-Fried pitch. As if suffering was in the nature of only one region.

Whereas Miss Innocence demanded beauty and virginity this little carnival was a desolation pageant; in the testifying tent subjugation brought about our rapture.

The winner got a modeling contract.

Girls were in competition for print work in local advertisements. Nothing national, the contest just wasn’t that big. Maybe there’d be some catalogue work for the Grand Prizee.

Uncle Arms would announce the winner on Sunday afternoon to accommodate the many new participants who’d need the night free for that other, bigger pageant.

— Now I’s so prowed tuh help dese gurls cause I know what de bad days is. Am I lyin? I am not. But lemme tell of sumpin good which is dis heah Oonited Stetes dat we lib in.

— I know der ben tubles, look at me an tel who know dat betta. But I ben to Aingland. Iss funny ta tink about, ain’t in? Me. Uncle Allen, in Aingland and Frans too.

— An ova der dey got de rish peeple an po’, but you know dey poor peeple cain’t neva get rish? Not neva? Dey got class ova deah, dat’s whut some peeple say. Well dey got class ova deah awlraght! Po class, workin class an uppa class.

— Den I come back to Amerrca an eben dough I seed us fightin wif eash otha I know dat if one a y’all git money den yous livin rich. We got no classes in de States an I’m prowed of it. We got dem peeple borned rish an dem othas dat becum it, but boff gets ta buy a fahn house. Am I lyin? No I am not.

Even I was feeling proud as Uncle Arms went on. I believed him because I could see him. Uncle Arms was his own billboard for striving.

— We not gonna hab just one oh two winnas an pack up dem otha gurls. Naw. We gonna hab many gurls workin cause I wan plenny of ’em ta git a chans. Dis heah is abou oppoitunitee.

The people applauded happily but nobody gave up their ghost; if you think he sounds like a preacher then you’ve just never met a man who works on commission.

Like most others I left the tent. Those who remained only wanted to speak with Uncle Arms. At first he obliged them from the stage, but even with that extra foot he was shorter than a number of the men and some of the women. When he finally stepped down for handshakes he disappeared.

I walked over to the third tent although I wasn’t looking for my sister anymore. Is it fair for me to have been insulted? I was a wart that been dissolved. Good that I didn’t see Nabisase or Grandma because I would have thrown my last two malapees at those foundlings. I would have screamed that my sister had lied. I would have ruined her chances. That’s how angry I was.

In the third tent blue or yellow tickets had been distributed to the teenage girls, but I’ll bet it didn’t take long for the women with the yellow ones to realize they might as well be in the deli line at a supermarket. When I left the second tent it was five o’clock and the third tent already looked like an OTB at closing, with losing tickets covering the floor.

When he walked outside I tried to bump into old Uncle Arms myself, but kept missing him. Misjudged the angle of his head versus my elbow. When my sister publically crossed me out of her record book it made me wonder why they’d wanted me to come down here at all. I thought I’d be needed during the pageant, but I guess I really was only the driver. And they didn’t want to leave me in their Rosedale home in case I’d rub my dirty, naked buns across their pillows.

After the third try to bump him I just introduced myself. — I’m a reporter, I said.

His first reaction was to recoil. — No no, I promised, I’m here to write three thousand words about the other pageant.

This calmed him. — Where fum? he asked.

— When did they start calling you Uncle Arms?

He made a scouring face. — None eva do, ta ma face.

— I’m sorry.

He smiled showing two gold capped front teeth. — I saw ya in dat suit an’ I taught dat you had mannas, Brass Ankles.

— I do.

— Well whut ye did wit ’um? Et ’um?

— Look, I don’t want to get into an argument. My fault. I’m sorry.

I followed him past the third tent, where a woman swept the yellow tickets away.

— How long ya ben in town?

— Since yesterday night.

— Fine anythin’ ta tern yer nickel yet?

— Only that some of your girls have been lying about their circumstances.

We went off Braddock, right on Louden. A pawnshop one block away advertised a sale on weapons. This meant handguns as much as knives. Rifles more than nun-chucks.

Along the wall of this corner pawnshop there hung a white banner showing Uncle Arms’s grinning picture. Not a painting, but a professionally digitized photograph. The caption read: Your Uncle has got just the place for you. For home loans call.

— Mm hmm, Uncle Arms replied.

— I’ve got proof of one contestant in particular who’s falsified her family history. My editor says it’s a much better story. The depths to which people will sink just to win. I’m very excited about it.

— Wha paypa it wuz you workin wit?

— The New York Observer. We’re mean-spirited.

I expected him to question me. Maybe even yell. Instead old Uncle Arms pushed me into these bushes. He sacked me amid some Canadian Hemlock.

— What you claim to have heard you shall not speak again, he whispered.

He crouched on the balls of his feet. The back of my head was against the shaded earth.

I asked him, — Where’d your accent go?

16

By six o’clock that Saturday evening I was back outside the Hampton Inn next to vomiting from fear as I walked to the front desk. I poured myself coffee from a silver urn on a table.

The clerk was a pencil-shaped woman in green vest with a white long-sleeved shirt underneath. She waited for me to speak but my coffee was so hot that I was concentrating on keeping my mouth shut to keep from spitting it on the floor.

So she finally asked me, — Are you 603?

— 350 at the most!

She hesitated, but I wasn’t trying to be cute.

— Did you leave your bath running when you went out today?

— No?

— Sure?

— I’ll have you know that I haven’t bathed once in twenty-four hours.

She believed me, which solved the problem of my guilt, but she stepped backward and covered her nose with one hand.

— The maid came to take up your sheets, she explained from her distance. The whole room was flooded up in there.

— I’m sorry about that.

She stepped forward quickly. — Why apologize?

— No one likes to see bad things happen to good hotels.

She didn’t step away again, but did keep her hand over her face. I reminded myself to find time for soap this evening.

— You don’t have to worry, the clerk said. The maid put down towels. It was about sixty of them. We’ll find you another room.

Saved; not liable; excused from small-claims court; I should have felt lucky. Instead I stood in the lobby with dirt on the back of my neck and sweat stains darkening the inseam of my slacks, indignant.

— The maid did all that did she?

Room 414 and room 603 were like identical lamps. One lit, one unlit. I stood inside the new room.

Needing that shower I went to the bathroom but found I was scared of the nozzle. I turned the knob, but as soon as the water ran I imagined another mishap. Two ruined rooms would snuff the last of Hampton Inn’s goodwill. I had a panic attack, that’s all. Like a grief counselor I soothed myself, saying, — It’s fine. Take a shower in a little while. Do something else. Not just yet. Soon. Turn off the water.

With the receiver of the hotel phone to my ear I listened to the dial tone stutter: a signal there were messages for me. They were transferred from room 603. Two were Nabisase’s, at nine-thirty and eleven that morning. The first was the sound of annoyance, asking where was I. The second just dejection; —I guess you and Mom are busy.

The third message was from Mom, but hardly recognizable. Her voice was a bouncy trill. I’d have thought it was a teenager, not a middle-aged woman. At three-eighteen PM she said. — I need to get the dogs from the car, but I’ll send them to you later. Don’t worry, Anthony. I will reach you in my own way.

— Walk over there, I said out loud to myself. Get up and find your folks.

I called our answering machine in Queens, but for what? Nabisase had more friends than the rest of us and she only had two. Checking home messages was just a way to avoid getting up.

To my surprise we had five. Five for Anthony. Which, I don’t know why, made me feel handsome.

The first was one of the managers at Sparkle asking again if I’d like some weekend work. The other four were from the same man, one who clearly hadn’t listened when I said we were leaving town:

— Hello, this is a message for Anthony. Give me a call. You know who this is?

— This is Ledric, I’m sorry if it’s late and all.

— Nabisase, could you pick up and let me talk to Anthony?

— (groaning) I am the dumbest motherfucker on two feet.

17

The Dodge Neon’s trunk was broken open. Its lock looked attacked by claws. Chips of white paint on the Hampton Inn parking lot. My duffel bag was still inside, but Mom’s eighteen figurines were gone.

I forgot about Ledric like lickety-split, opened my bag to make sure my clean suits were there. It’s possible that there was a gewgaw thief in Lumpkin, but I doubted it. I unfolded one suit, shook it out and changed in the backseat of the broken car. Though I tried a few times to slam the trunk closed, it wouldn’t shut.

Stepped out then walked the eighty-five feet back to Comfort Inn. A girl in the employee uniform, jacket and smile, walked me back outside and pointed southwest to a huge carnation-red building where ceremonies were to be held.

The Blue Ridge Theatre.

— I think that’s what you’re looking for, sir.

Preliminary events, like casual and athletic wear, were going to run at eight o’clock.

— That’s a half hour, I said.

— We have a bar inside, if you’d like to pass some time.

— I shouldn’t start drinking, I told her. I’ve got to drive somewhere tonight.

— Is your daughter in it?

— My sister. Did you see that other contest this afternoon?

— Uncle Allen’s? Oh sure. A lot bigger this year. My cousins were in it ’93 and ’94.

— Why not you?

— My life’s been pretty good, she said.

I borrowed twine from the clerk to tie the trunk of our Dodge Neon closed. How sad the sight made me. Just a day before, on November 10th, Mom brought this car home; it made the block seem brighter because it was unspoiled. Now with the white string looped through the trunk this car looked like any of the duds double-parked up Hillside Avenue.

I started the car and left Lumpkin, Virginia, at seven-forty-five.

Miser’s Wend was an even smaller town forty miles south of Lumpkin. The two were separated by the larger city of Winchester, Virginia. Miser’s Wend would never have an exit on I-81 today if not for the Quakers who came in 1773. These facts, the year of founding and who did it, were stamped on plaques every eight feet within town limits. Declaring stones, curbs, cigarette butts as historic Quaker landmarks. But by 1995 the Quakers were aged right out of importance. When I drove into Miser’s Wend I entered an extinct society.

Downtown was only four blocks long with one bookstore, a food market, a dry cleaner; their store fronts had all been built before the Civil War. I felt a mix of admiration and aching back. Sleeping in a car seat all morning still hurt me.

A Quaker meeting hall was in a large field, left to itself. Fifty feet by fifty, one story with a gabled roof. I wouldn’t say it looked like a religious building except for the way it seemed to shine under direct focus from the moon. The wood became whiter. There was a porch on the right side of the meeting house with one small chair out there. It faced me; I drove by.

I touched the passenger seat where my sister had been on Friday. When I thought of her on stage with Grandma I regretted the mistakes I’d made today. Missing her phone calls and now, driving forty miles just because she’d hurt my feelings. When we came back to Rosedale from Ithaca on September 3rd, Nabisase helped me clean out the crowded basement so I’d have a neat place to sleep. If I was going to turn around and keep her orphan’s secret there were still a few miles to decide.

Uncle Arms had written the driving directions on the back of a car loan application.

They were too damn specific for me.

Get up. Wipe off the dirt. Walk back to your hotel. Eventually get in your car. East on Jubal Early Drive. Take the on ramp for I-81 South. Merge onto I-81 South. Drive forty-six miles on I-81 South. Reach exit 303—Miser’s Wend. Use exit 303—Miser’s Wend. Follow off ramp to traffic light. Make right at traffic light onto Strop Street. Drive straight.

I entered the saccharine half of this community, where private homes were modest in size if not expense; their walls were limestone; their lights were out. Every house around. Beautiful, but forsaken. By eight o’clock the sun was well under the trees.

Turn right on McCutcheon. The house on the corner has an orange mailbox. Do not knock on any other doors. Drive slowly on this smaller road.

By now the directions were insulting. Maybe Uncle Arms acted the asshole with everyone. Was there a way I spoke or looked that made people think they needed to carry me with tongs? I’d thought I hid my confused state expertly.

After driving McCutcheon for ten minutes there was a private way to my right; thin as typewriter ribbon and it had no sign. His last direction read:

My road is nameless. Watch for lights in the woods. Come to them.

18

Uncle Arms stood on the front steps of his limestone home and waved. Even though it was two-and-a-half stories the house seemed small because it was narrow. There were three small chimney stacks on the long, pitched roof, one at either end of the house and the third in the middle. The place was fixed onto a plain but well-maintained field. In fact it was beautiful. The thin road became a driveway that continued around behind the house.

I wanted to drive back to the rear just so I could see the whole property, but he gestured for me to pull onto the front grass.

There really isn’t any comfort in a rural night for me. I’m happy to see a traffic copter overhead. I decided that the cloudless star-filled sky looked like a busy switchboard, and it relaxed me.

Uncle Arms was still short, but wasn’t wearing the gold teeth. His brown suit was better than the one he’d worn in the tent that afternoon. I touched his shoulder and the fabric felt softer than cold cream.

As we walked into his house through the front door I peeked at the backyard. There was a wooden cabin, much smaller than the main house.

— You’re no newspaper man.

Uncle Arms said this only after we’d climbed into the front hall of his home. It was narrow like the whole house and I thought Quakers must have been some pretty slim people.

— How’d you find out?

— I made one phone call.

There was a seven-foot wooden clock against the hallway wall, but it didn’t seem to work anymore. A sturdy cooling bench, six feet long, sat across from the clock in the hall. Instead of four legs to support it there were ten. There wasn’t much room for me between these heirlooms and the ceiling wasn’t very high either. I touched the bench and the wood was so supple I thought it would bend. None of his furniture had much flash, but it was superb.

— Your family’s been rich a long time, I said.

He walked ahead of me, showing none of that stoop from this afternoon’s carnival. You know what he looked like now? A former dancer. With that mean hoofer’s stride. I didn’t know how old he was, exactly, but his body was used to being limber. He didn’t drag his feet.

A flight of stairs led up to the second floor, but we stayed on the first, walking left at the steps into another narrow room with an upright piano and light blue walls.

As we went through his house the floorboards made a noise, — snap-, -snapsnap-, under me. I was embarrassed. What made it worse was that Uncle Arms weighed about sixteen ounces; the proof was in his soundless footfalls.

We passed through the narrow room, that had the upright piano on one end and a mahogany highboy at the other, into the east end of his home. The only room, thus far, large enough to let me breathe.

There was a dinner table, a dormant fireplace and lots of floor space. I could have camped out right there and still had room to hang my purple suit up to dry. It was wet with sweat already and limp from general exhaustion; it clung to me.

Six framed plaques were on the wall, but I didn’t stop to read them since he’d left a door open to the backyard.

His property slanted downward so that from the back door I saw the small log cabin only fifteen yards away and behind it was the rest of his property, another plain field, one acre at most. I was surprised at how far I could see with only a three-quarter moon, but stars also brightened the room.

At the back end of his land there was a patch of small trees and past them a smaller, detached field. Two dozen tents were pitched in that one. Little domes strewn around in the far grass.

I thought Cub Scouts first, but then those soldier-boys from my hotel came to mind. How seriously would they take their roles? Would their chaperon really have them sleep outside a night and appear at the pageant sore, hungry, deprived? A war-weary approximation.

Past the tents, right behind them, parked and empty, was a giant yellow beast. There were shadows across its back and the nose was brushed up against a tree. Its black tires were camouflaged by the grass so the yellow bus seemed to hover in the distant field. There was a white banner tied to its side. Too dark to read the slogan, but I remembered it from the rest stop ruckus; Pretty Damn Mad was here.

How did they get near Lumpkin?

Had they followed us?

— I invited them, Uncle Arms explained.

But can we forget them for a while because Uncle Arms shut the door. He’d put together a great dinner.

The long pine top table was, like everything else, quiet about its quality. Wearing a table cloth with no frills around the edges and a Mariner’s Compass pattern sewn checkerboard into the cloth. — How old are these? Are they worth a lot?

He asked, — Is that how you think of the past? A numbers game?

— It was just a question. You know what I mean.

— When all the others fail history is the religion of humanity. In which do you believe?

— Can we eat? I said.

— Of course. Sorry. I tried to have some foods you’d recognize, he said.

Uncle Arms spoke to me like I was a foreigner, but I didn’t want to take this North-and-South-two-nations-within-a-nation folderol that seriously. Though he had. By preparing (or probably buying) a variety of Spanish foods.

Rice and pigeon peas, roasted pork, chicken stew and fried meat. The smell of onion, peppers, coriander came up from the pots when he removed their lids. An odor so good I got that high, itchy feeling in my nose like I was about to sneeze.

— Where do you think I’m from? I asked him after looking at it all.

— New York.

— So why Spanish food?

— Because you’re Mexican! He was stymied by my questions.

— No one’s ever thought I was Mexican before, I said. Puerto Rican. Dominican.

— That’s what I meant. Puerto Rican.

— So why didn’t you say Puerto Rican?

— I did.

— You said Mexican.

He put his left and right hand up but far apart in two unaggressive fists. — It’s like saying United States and America. Mexican. Puerto Rican.

— They’re two separate places.

— Oh come on. He acted like making this distinction was the worst kind of oversensitivity.

When eating I’m a silent hillside. Sometimes my hands don’t even seem to move because I heap my fork with a crane’s worth of food, feed myself and chew it slowly.

Uncle Arms was peckish; I could see a lot of the white of his plate because his portions were so small. — You’re no newsman, he said again, but he wasn’t angry.

— I clean houses.

— But you’re really here for the pageant?

— Sure I am.

— I can’t believe anyone would have a girl admitted into that debacle.

Who was this guy?! He had been doing his best Vardaman and Bilbo routine not ten hours ago and now he was some old-money Quaker gentleman with his morals in a high chair.

— My sister’s in it.

— And your father entered her?

— If he had she would have been disqualified.

He let me enjoy my own joke until the room was quiet again. I felt silly; I said, — Our mother paid the entrance fee, but my sister wanted to compete.

— It’s vulgar that the girls qualify because of their chastity.

— Better than pain! I yelled.

Did I mention that I had two beers? Or that I was drunk? Maybe I’ve kept it to myself because I’m ashamed to admit I was a lightweight.

— Haven’t you begun to think that the whole beauty system is archaic? he asked.

— Aww what does it matter, I sighed. No one’s ugly anymore.

What a good feeling when dinner’s over and there’s only the gruel left on the plate. This time it was a mix of gravy, grains of rice, oil and bits of shredded pork. I tilted the dish to my lips. That slop was fine as port wine.

When there were only bones on our plates Uncle Arms served a light green liqueur in a dark green bottle. The taste was paprika and peppermint at once.

He said, — We were Quakers until my great grandfather was read out of meeting. He split with them over the question of servitude. He was for it and they were not.

Servitude was the politest euphemism for slavery I’d heard in a long while.

— He was the first black Quaker ever expelled.

— Were there any others?

— No.

— So he was the only black Quaker ever expelled.

— He’ll be remembered as something else.

— As a slave owner.

— My great-grandfather Otis started three technical colleges. One in Mississippi and two in Tennessee.

Uncle Arms told me the schools used to offer courses in horse grooming, ‘domestic science,’ and had developed into computer engineering, business administration, even paralegal work. Thousands of graduates lived better because of Otis, the black excommunicated Quaker slave owner. Uncle Arms insisted. I listened but with only one eye open at a time. Because of the liqueur my mind wasn’t worth one puka shell right then.

— How come you get up there like Old Remus then? If you’re so proud of your ancestors?

— People can’t imagine a black aristocrat. They’ve invested too much into a past filled with only one narrative. Whites and blacks would believe I was a devil more easily. So I appear as the raggedy, noble cottonpluck. In Colorado I’ve been Uncle Iron, of the Southern Ute Indian tribe. I am the best businessman you ever saw. I promise you that.

Above the fireplace there were those six framed documents. One was a list of furniture either bought or sold in 1884. I did what everyone does, marveling that I could have bought a four-poster bed with the money in my pocket.

Among them was a framed newspaper clipping accounting a man’s purchase of one hundred acres of Frederick County land. I should restate that. One hundred acres more. (Otis Allen, free man, purchases plot, livestock.)

Along with the text was a sketch of the man; he was slim and bald as a monk. The eyes were far apart and his nose drifted to the left; I hoped the illustrator was just untalented.

Uncle Arms walked next to me with two glasses of that green elixir. The top of his head only came up to my sternum. He said, — The Quakers thought Otis would perish without their help, but he flourished.

I’ve read that some of the first English settlers in Jamestown resorted to a sort of cannibalism; so frantic from starvation they dug out fresh graves and ate the dead to survive. I collect those kinds of true stories. They were all just horrible.

— The Quakers said he’d perish, Uncle Arms repeated. But what’s become of them?

— If I had been a reporter what were you going to do?

— See if some of our girls were truly lying about their backgrounds.

— And then?

— If it could be proven I’d have to disqualify them. No luck.

— I need some air, I said. The wine with dinner, the emerald potion now, if we didn’t get outside I’d vomit toward his fireplace. We stood on the back steps of his home with breezes arranged around us.

I wanted to see the cabin, but Uncle Arms walked me past that.

It was empty anyway, or at least the door was closed. We walked through his field; sometimes he was next to me and other times ahead. It wasn’t long. Only ten minutes before we reached the stiff, sparse woods at the rear.

A faint dirt path waited. He was silent and so was I. It was darkest when we were in the middle of the trees. Still too far from the small field with pitched tents. There were leaves and brown thistles underfoot. Even Uncle Arms made noise walking across them. This brief forest trapped the coldest air along its floor. My legs and my head were in different temperate zones; my knees were chilly, but my face started sweating. I was having fun.

When we stepped out into the smaller field I covered my eyes because the nylon tents reflected light back at me. Twenty-five small domes zipped shut. I had a vision of Ledric stumbling, sick, out of each one. Hands on his stomach, phlegm in his hair.

The protestor’s yellow bus wasn’t totally empty. A thin woman was taking down their banner.

— Did you pay them to come? I whispered.

— You can’t pay these kinds of people to act outraged, but they’ll do it for free if the cause is just.

— And what did you tell them?

— That girls are being exploited.

— Do you know a man named Ishkabibble?

The tents weren’t in rows or anything so when we walked through them it was a winding trail. I’d thought they were sleeping, but as Uncle Arms and I walked along I heard people talking inside.

As I moved through I brushed too hard against a tent I guess, it unzipped and a groggy twenty year old looked out to see. His beard was patchy, but already fuller than anything I could grow. Since I’d woken him, he climbed out to smoke.

Portable radios sat outside two different tents, unguarded; their owners must have trusted the elements.

Uncle Arms brought me to the woman folding the sign. She was older than I thought. Not nineteen, but thirty-nine. In jeans and a sweatshirt, but her feet were bare.

— Don’t your toes get cold? I asked her.

She laughed loudly. It surprised me because Uncle Arms and I had been speaking in the quietest tones. She shook hands with Uncle Arms then me.

— Where are Jerry and his cameras?

She pointed at the bus. — They said it was too chilly in the tents.

— That bus can’t be warm, I said.

— I don’t know why they said no. It’s toastier with two people in a tent than one on a vinyl seat.

— Jerry’s inside? Uncle Arms asked and when she nodded he went in.

That left us there. I kicked a tire just to do something.

There were actually a lot of cigarette butts on the ground. Not thrown about, but in a neat pile.

— Take off your shoes, she said.

— What for?

She put one foot in the air. It was long and slim, the toenails were a lively red.

— I thought you people wouldn’t wear makeup.

— Which people?

— You’re with the protestors, right?

— That doesn’t mean I’m dead! Take off your shoes and let me see your feet. Just put them in the dirt.

Uncle Arms stepped off the bus with two videotapes in his hand. He shook them in front of me. There was a diesel smell coming from beneath the truck.

— I’m going to take him back up to the house.

— This is your last chance, she said to me. It’ll feel good.

— I’d feel silly barefoot, I admitted. I’m wearing a suit, I said.

She sighed. — Just once you ought to find out how it feels to be free from all those clothes.

— I’ll consider that, I said.

Uncle Arms led me away, back through the trees and into his yard. Before we had walked five feet of his property, I asked, — Why are you doing all this?

Uncle Arms said, — Those students sleeping there are the descendants of conscientious objectors everywhere. Nowadays the enemy is this way of life that tells young girls they’re beautiful because of their bodies.

— But you’re running a modeling contest!

— My ladies win because of hardships. Fortitude is probably the only way teenagers can show character anymore.

— You’ll never know how it feels to suffer generations of shame, he said. I mean to have your parent’s mistakes continue on and affect you. I don’t like what my great-grandfather did, but I’m not giving the money back.

We weren’t far from the main house, but we were right next to the cabin. Even without lights it gave a ginger glow. The cabin was run through with an animate silence that reached out and cupped my ears. The shingled roof sunk low in the middle like it was being sucked down from the inside.

I still heard Uncle Arms, but from farther away. He said, — If I can try to make the lives of a few girls better now, that’s one way to balance out Otis Allen’s fortune.

I don’t want to say I was scared. I was thrilled.

If not for Uncle Arms my night would have consisted of television and hotel food. Right now Nabisase was probably back in her room, the preliminary night over, polishing the shoes she’d be wearing with a formal gown tomorrow. Muttering about the failures of Mom and me. Why would I rush to hear that? I’d have the rest of my life to get berated. Going to see my sister would have been the right thing to do, but tonight I felt like a little fun.

— I want to help you, I whispered.

— What?

— Uncle Arms, I want to be your friend.

When I was eating dinner in the house the cabin had looked quaint, but now it was much older. I thought it was a replica, the kind they sell in miniature at Home Depot, a pretty place to keep useful things like a lawnmower, rock salt.

— It’s handmade, Anthony. More than two hundred years ago.

There was a window, but were there chairs inside? A bed? An occupant?

— What can I do? I asked.

— This is quite a surprise.

I couldn’t see Uncle Arms because I wouldn’t stop watching the cabin. Tricks of lights against the window; when I tilted my head long shapes squatted.

— You wouldn’t find it hard to open a door, would you?

— I want to do something better than that.

— You don’t understand me, Anthony. This one gesture would help me a lot.

— How much?

He said, — I wouldn’t have to plant any of the protestors inside. I can’t trust them. They won’t wait until the right time. The second one gets in he’ll start chanting and throwing flyers. They’re too energetic.

— Are you going to hurt the people inside?

— I told you I wasn’t a monster.

Fierce loyalty is a boy’s game best played at night when the imagination can transform every shadow into a foe. Uncle Arms went back in the house and returned; he was as thin as a cane. He brought out two small glasses, the green bottle.

— At a certain time during the evening’s pageant you’ll hear a knock at the back of the auditorium. Then you’ll open the emergency door.

Here I’d thought the whole world was telling my story only to find myself stumbled into his.

While he’d gone into the house I hadn’t stepped away from the cabin. We drank five feet away from it. I didn’t want to get closer, but I didn’t run.

Uncle Arms asked, — Does your sister win a lot of these things?

— No, I said. She never has.

— Maybe this would be her year.

— Could you do that?

— Winner’s name means nothing to me. If it assures your cooperation and a few years of silence I’ll give her quite a bit.

— She was the girl with the old woman tied to her back.

— The orphan! Uncle Arms laughed. I like the blood you come from, he said.

I was glad to do something for my sister, but also to feel like a grown man. I entered the cosmos of backroom economies on November 11th. Her professionalism aside, Nabisase’s victory was rigged by an endomoprh and a goblin standing in crabgrass, and she would never know it. There are so many lives decided in this way.

After finishing the bottle of green liqueur I could barely stagger and I fell forward against the cabin walls. Once I was closer the silhouettes inside were easier to recognize. The backs of two wood chairs and iron pots hanging over the fireplace. A low slim bed in the corner. There was a form, wide as an oven and twice as tall, pressed up against the right side of the window pane like it was looking out. When I stumbled closer it moved away.

The door was made of three wide slats of wood joined together. They weren’t decorated. There wasn’t even a handle, only a hole in the door about level with the lower end of my stomach. Hanging through that hole was a leather string, like a bootlace. The hole in the shape of a heart.

Uncle Arms whispered from behind me.

— All the Quakers had to lock this door was a wooden board on the inside of the cabin. That leather string hanging out the hole is tied around it. When visitors are welcome the string dangles out. A visitor pulls on it, the board lifts and you walk inside.

He said, — That’s where the saying comes from. A hole in my heart. When the string wasn’t hanging out it meant that company wasn’t welcome.

— Who’s in there now?

— Open the door.

— What will I find inside?

— The unseen hand, he said.

My whole body was eager to find out. I touched the door and the wood was cold. I grabbed for the string, but it moved without me. Curling away slowly. It disappeared. Pulled backward from within.

19

Nabisase, thirteen years old, not safe, ossified, looked out the window of Grandma’s room; so stiff she might have been there for eighty years and continue for eighty more.

Grandma lay on her back on her bed on her best behavior in the Comfort Inn room.

Nabisase turned away from the low hills outside to sit on the bed and touch Grandma’s hip. Grandma made little gasps not only from pain, but in anticipation of more. She flinched. My sister pressed on Grandma’s thigh, asking, — Does it hurt here? Here? Where?

I’d driven over from Miser’s Wend at ten that morning. A Sunday. November 12th.

Mom’s bed, the one farther from the window, was tucked so professionally that it couldn’t have been slept in.

Rather than call ahead, as I’d tried the day before, I got on the elevator, pressed third floor and nobody stopped me. Walked the hall and right into Grandma’s room. I could’ve done that on Saturday, but I’d assumed there were guards posted.

Grandma skittered, sat up quickly, when she noticed me inside the room. The move made her squint with pain and she yelled, — How did you get in?

— Through the door.

— Wasn’t it locked?

— Mom’s gone. Nabisase spoke to me, but I didn’t recognize the voice. Not frantic or angry, even irate; the tones I was used to.

— Did you hear me? my sister asked.

Grandma rose to her elbows. — We haven’t seen your mother except Friday.

— We should tell the police.

Nabisase only repeated herself. — Mom’s gone.

— I thought she stopped doing this, I said.

Grandma said. — She did. For some time.

I felt fevered, but not them. Now I wondered if her message had sounded more despondent than I recognized. — What did she tell you the last time you saw her?

Grandma said, — She left as my eyes closed.

— We can call the cops from here.

— Forget the police, Nabisase said.

— Why do you sound so grown? I asked her.

My sister sat down next to Grandma. Their postures were the same, but Grandma had reason to hunch over. She was ninety-three and her hip might be broken. While my sister was soon to be awarded Uncle Arms’s gold prize. She didn’t know and I couldn’t tell her because I didn’t think she’d believe me. But soon.

Even as they sat there confused, I was happy. I’d never felt like an oracle before.

— Were there any notes?

Grandma said, — Do you believe she gives a thought as she waves out the door?

Grandma was tired. Uncle Isaac. Mom. Me. How does a parent go on living, really pretty healthy, while watching her children decompose gradually?

— She’ll be back by this afternoon, I said. I was optimistic. Sometimes Mom forgot her life and it lasted for a few weeks, but most often she got confused, wandered for five hours then came back to us.

— I’m not waiting to see, Nabisase said.

— We can’t let her run around town getting in trouble, I pleaded.

— Can’t we?! Grandma yelled.

This isn’t the start of things I’m telling about. It’s not the middle, too.

I stood, surprised that I’d become the paladin of compassion. — I’m going to get her back.

Nabisase and Grandma, both, touched their hands to their eyes.

— You’ll have to take Grandma, Anthony. They have a woman who can help me with my hair backstage, but it’s only me who’s going to steam my dress. And I have to go find some glitter to put on my shoes.

— Will you miss the announcements? Grandma asked her. Of the winner? With the tiny man’s contest?

Nabisase punched her own thigh. — Forget about that. It’s not important. I have to be ready for tonight. Uncle Allen wasn’t looking for pretty girls anyway.

I should have urged her to get the fuck downtown, right now, and collect her prize, but the offhand way she described herself made me angry. More than angry. Just a blubbery bitter boy. Petty because I wasn’t good-looking.

— We may help? Grandma offered her. To prepare yourself.

— I need to get used to doing things on my own, my sister said. I want you both to go.

I felt like the appointed manservant of some young caliph, but did as the young girl commanded. Nabisase tied my grandmother to my back with a few sheets. I carried her that way to the parking lot and put her in the passenger seat.

In the wounded Dodge Neon we drove through Lumpkin, Virginia. There was the chance we’d sight Mom from the car, but not likely. So the new method was to travel, park, tie Grandma on my back and walk around a few blocks looking in stores or driveways.

In 1981 Uncle Isaac tracked Mom to a duck farm in Providence.

Grandma had a recent picture that we showed to clerks, people waiting to cross at red lights. Pedestrians and passengers stared at Grandma and me with patterns of bemusement on their faces as I carried her around. Most were nice enough to listen, but none recognized our dear.

Just like Southeast Queens the city of Lumpkin, away from the phalanx of tourist restaurants and hotels, was the Lord’s territory.

Calvary Baptist, Grace Brethren Church, Sacred Heart Catholic, First Church of Christ Scientist, Mountainview Church of Christ, Christ Episcopal Church, Dormition of the Virgin Mary Greek Orthodox, Grace Lutheran, First Presbyterian, Seventh Day Adventist, Centenary United Church of Christ, Braddock St. United Methodist, Market St. Methodist, St. Paul the Redeemer, Beth El Congregation Synagogue Reform. In a pretty small town. With twenty-five houses of worship what’s the gamble that, on a Sunday, marriage bloomed.

At an A.M.E. church the jubilant congregation stood outside. Women in pink dresses, men in red suits. The front lawn looked like a taffy shop.

The one-story wooden church was just another white house on a residential block, except for the wheelchair ramp leading to the front door.

Soon as I walked onto the lawn a short, wide man approached. He was one of those small guys with a rib cage large enough to store a car engine. — Hey now, he said.

He put his hand out to me.

— Yes, I said.

— Out strolling.

This sounds like a question, but he wasn’t really asking. With his right hand on my shoulder he turned me away from the church so that Grandma and I faced the street once more.

Grandma said, — We are looking for someone.

— Yes, he agreed, but the face showed his unconcern.

He put one hand in his red vest pocket which matched his red shoes, his red jacket and tusk-colored shirt. I tried to show him Mom’s picture, but there wasn’t time.

— You both have a good day now, he said. You go on from here because we’ve got a whole mess of cars about to come up the road for a wedding. It’s going to get crowded. Go on. Go on.

In a pantomime of friendliness he smiled.

A woman, his wife I bet, walked closer to us and she smiled.

The whole hill of people, hell-yeah fifty-five if I counted, walked closer to us and they smiled, too.

The guy pushed me without making it obvious. Maybe he bounced at bars. With his hand against my right arm he sent Grandma and I going. I had to walk because the momentum would’ve tripped me if I didn’t move. I waved cheerfully until Grandma slapped my face.

— Why would you wave? She asked. They were not friendly. When she scowled her eyebrows covered her eyes, so that her face lost its light.

— They were nice. I was indignant for them because they’d smiled.

— They were disgusted.

— By you?

She pinched my ear.

— By me? I asked. They didn’t like me? How?

— Because you are a stinker. One thin, mottled hand waved not across her own nose, but under mine.

— How could they know just by looking at me?

She hooked her thumb into the sheet where it passed under my armpit. — He smelled you.

— It’s that bad?

— Terrible, she admitted.

I unbuttoned two of the buttons on my shirt and put my nose in. — What do I smell like?

Grandma wasn’t going to detail the offense. I really hadn’t noticed. It was three days by now. That is a while.

— I’m sorry, I said to Grandma.

The car was parked downtown; as I walked she reached over my shoulder, rubbed my cheek. Before we got back in the car we stopped in a little pharmacy with aisles so tight that when I tried to slide into the personal hygiene lane I knocked Grandma into a whole display of brightly tinted coolers. I wanted to find some cologne to spritz myself.

CVS was bigger; a chain store with plenty of floor space. There were perfumes in a glass case, but the case only opened with a key. I could’ve cracked it with my elbow, but who becomes a crook for such a dumb reason.

— I’m going to have to buy one, I told Grandma.

— These are too expensive. Try something else. She pulled my face away, to the right, not gently.

Some perfumes were twenty dollars, but I understood what Grandma really meant. It wasn’t that she thought people shouldn’t spend twenty dollars on cologne, but that they should bathe before it became an issue.

Opposite the perfumes there were bath gels so I went along opening many, putting them to Grandma’s nose until she decided which one she liked. As she sniffed she pursed her lips close to the bottle. If I couldn’t be trusted to soap up I didn’t trust myself to choose.

What a finicky woman. On the twenty-third try, a hand lotion, she said, — This.

It didn’t smell like flowers; not candle wax or ocean water. Worst of the lot. It was dank. It smelled like dirt really. Hearth Scented Body Gel by Mennen.

— If you take one that’s too sweet, people will still smell you underneath. This one is strong, but not perfume. It will hide what you have done.

Flipping the plastic tube I squeezed too much on my hands. Rubbed them together until the green paste covered my palms and fingers. First I reached into my shirt to rub up my stomach. I put it on my neck and face then massaged it in long enough that the green color disappeared; only the scent remained. Man of the soil, that’s me.

There was a small glass case near the lotion end of the store. There was jewelry in it; the pieces were pretty but sure to have brief lives. On a few I could see the glue that had been used to affix red or purple stones to the gold-plated rings.

— How about a necklace? I said to Grandma. There was a fine thin one with an orange stone.

— I don’t wear, she said. She scratched behind one ear, gently.

And I realized she was right. Never bracelets, medallions, rope chain or earrings.

— How about a three-finger ring? I offered.

— Not anything.

— Are you allergic?

— I am not.

— Then let me get you one. You can wear it tonight.

I was about to call the man at the counter over to unlock the case, but she slapped my shoulder. I dropped my hand.

— You don’t trust my taste, I said.

— I don’t wear any, Grandma said firmly.

— Is it an African custom?

— African custom? You fool. I stopped wearing them for Isaac when he died.

— Did he wear a lot of jewelry?

— No.

— Was he allergic to jewelry?

— No.

— Then why jewelry?!

— I cannot be pretty since my dear son died.

We found Mom.

But it took two hours.

Sixty minutes of that wasted because Grandma wouldn’t let me ask after Mom in bars. After Grandma did let me Mom’s path lit right on up. Five of them had met her. Dick’s, Dell’s and the Doughboy. Happy Rabbit. Pretty Sue’s.

We had a snapshot of her taken last month, in a department store. Mom stood beside a mannequin at the Macy’s in Roosevelt Field Mall on Long Island. Both wore long coats with fur collars. Both were just trying them on. Mom’s head was back and she looked at the camera with a predatory gaze. Her tongue stuck half-an-inch from one corner of her mouth. My sister had taken the picture.

When I showed this photo to the bartenders they recognized Mom, but not by the name we gave. That’s your mother? each asked, laughed, smiled, winced then answered. She left here but was going to Dell’s. To the Doughboy. And so forth.

Until we got to the sixth bar, Right Not Left. Where the woman serving drinks hopped on one foot, saying, — She just left. Right out the back door. With an Indian.

— Southern Ute? I asked.

— From Uttar Pradesh.

We found her outside holding hands with an Indian guy who had a twiny mustache so thick he could have been a Bollywood porn star; a brown Harry Reems had his arm over her shoulder. The trunk of his car was open so I could see black plastic bags in there piled a foot high. I wondered what was in them; probably just groceries.

It’s true my mother had become magnetic. The Indian looked at her almost as intensely as Grandma and I did. He wouldn’t step more than five inches far. Without seeing her face I’d have thought this whole scene was criminal because he looked fifty, but Mom was a summery sixteen.

She wore tan capri pants to exhibit her calves. Her cotton long-sleeved jersey was vacuum-wrapped around her torso; this made her look sporty. Forget heels or even shoes, she wore plain green sneakers that reduced her feet to snow peas.

— You really won’t say, will you? He had one of those deep voices that make men who have them always need to be talking.

She said, — If I told you I was a bank robber you might turn me in.

— But first I’d let you tie me up at your hideout. He smiled, it wasn’t even lecherous.

Maybe the plastic bags had the dog figurines; why would she need them if not for me? To decorate a new home? They shut the trunk together; a move that looked cute no matter who the couple was. I stepped back to hide, but if Mom was indeed having another episode she wouldn’t recognize us even if I climbed right in their car.

— Doonay, she said to him. Doonay. I like your name, but it’s not the one your parents gave you, is it?

— Doonay is what everyone here calls me. It’s a nickname.

What if he was a serial killer; this is how that kind of things happens, yes? The scene could have come from Murder Makes Me Writhe or a thousand others. The overtly sexual woman in need of riding. Driven off by a stranger who dismembers. They were always doing that, the young women; being punished I mean.

— Hey, you can’t be angry at me, Doonay said lightly. We met two hours ago and you haven’t said your name at all.

— Mine? It’s like yours. Too hard to pronounce, she said. You just call me Yummy.

They made into the car. My fingers smelled like dirt; I’d put my hands to my face.

He drove a black Monte Carlo, a very fast attraction. He might have had the nitrous oxide cannister attachment in the trunk; it makes the car go even faster for short bursts.

Mom laughed with him; the window was down. Grandma and I had been very close to them, but I walked us even closer. Casually Mom looked out at us.

As we stared she showed surprise, but no recognition. Frightened by this ambling creature to her right, Mom rolled her window up halfway. She stopped when we didn’t attack her. Also Doonay was pulling out. After her shock passed she only gawked at us and started to laugh in an uncomfortable way, turning her whole body in the seat.

She looked back at us again. Doonay looked, too. Mom’s life before this moment had been erased. Unaware that she would ever or had ever done anyone wrong, my mother was like a newborn. My mother was innocent.

— I could go stop her, Grandma.

— You could not.

20

The Blue Ridge Theatre was splendid from all sides. Windows scrubbed and its lights on. With skinny young Marines on duty as ushers; they were nervous boys but the uniforms composed them. And toward the back of a large crowd of parents, siblings and friends was a couple; one standing, one sitting; they promenaded.

The man on his feet, washed and oiled, was me; the woman was Grandma in a wheelchair borrowed from the Hampton Inn. I thought the hotel would charge me extra, but as long as I was registered, apparently, I was trustworthy. Pushing my grandmother instead of carrying her on my back made me respectable. Normal. Which is all I hoped to be. Three different people held doors for us.

I wasn’t rancid anymore. Grandma wore a lumber-colored dress with a black cloche that was loose on her small head. Backstage Nabisase was wearing an orange gown and three brass bracelets on her left wrist. I had seen the outfit in the car trunk, but not on her. There were enough black girls in the contest that at least one of the backstage-beauticians would know how to do my sister’s hair.

We were happy. Grandma, Nabisase and even me.

Of course she would come back, maybe even get to Queens before us. Until that time there was relief. An unfortunate word to use when talking about the loss of a family member, but Mom wasn’t deceased, only departed.

Will you feel this way about me? I wondered. I wanted to ask Grandma, but what could she say that wouldn’t sound patronizing. I wouldn’t have wanted her to be honest.

The Blue Ridge Theatre had two grand auditoriums and seven smaller ones on the second floor. It was a strapping building. On the walkway outside there were these fire-hydrant-size lampposts every five feet. The white lights normally in them had been replaced so that there was a multi-colored gumball procession of bulbs.

Who felt better than me? I belonged like an alligator in the Everglades.

My green suit would be a shamrock-shame in tasteful places, but hardly anyone was dressed well. The fine designers at Bugle Boy outfitted most fathers and brothers. The best of them wore boat shoes. Those flat plastic slippers you get with a tuxedo rental would have stood out as much too worldly here.

One man, carrying his baby to his stomach, wore a denim shirt with the masonic symbol stitched on the back. Prince Hall it was huge: the compass, that capital letter G. This was a man in a secret society and he wanted everyone to know it.

Grandma’s wheelchair bestowed influence. Wherever I pushed her the crowd cleared away. I made it a game, seeing how many times people would move, but Grandma stopped me because she wanted to get inside.

The lobby’s walls were yellow. The floor was gray with occasional large maroon painted squares; young kids stood in those boxes playing games of endurance— who could stay inside the lines the longest.

One boy was winning over everyone; a few adults even cheered him on. He had red hair and black jeans tucked into his white boots. His father walked over, ignored the game, touched his son on the back of the head and said, — I’m missing you.

Then led his son away.

There were a pair of potted rubber plants in the lobby eight foot high. Two young Marines stood next to them asking people to walk inside. One was lucky, but his partner wasn’t.

— Ma’am, would you please continue to walk, the unlucky one told an obstinate woman with hairy forearms. She was determined not to move until she’d examined everything in her purse.

— Ma’am, I’ve asked you three times.

— Well then stop, she said.

Grandma gave our tickets to yet another Marine inside the auditorium. They were everywhere. They were dignified.

When the boy who’d taken tickets from Grandma noticed that I wasn’t following, just looking around, he came back and took my arm.

— Hello sir. My name is Ahab. Please let me help you to your seat.

I tried to pull free, but he had an intimidating grip.

Grandma laughed at me when the kid went away. — He was going to strike you, she said.

— I wouldn’t have wanted that.

Grandma agreed. She pressed one thin finger on the very top of my round head. — I don’t think you would.

When Grandma started coughing I went and bought water; when she was ready to move I pulled her soles from the heel loops of the wheelchair then flipped the footrests up. Helped her out of the aisle into the auditorium seat.

There were so many women! I don’t mean that in a horny way. It just seemed like people had stopped having sons.

In the aisle in front of ours five women sat together in different dresses, but the same strange smiles. A few generations of lop-sided grins. The youngest, on the aisle, chewed gum loudly and swallowed it even louder. Making a satisfied, — huhhh-, each time. Then went back into her small handbag, unwrapped another stick from its foil, and smacked again. I only hoped she wouldn’t do it during the show or I wouldn’t be able to hear.

In twenty minutes every row had filled except ours. Grandma was in the aisle seat with her wheelchair folded beside her. Then me next to her.

White masking tape had been pulled across the ten chairs next to me. ‘Reserved’ was written on plain white sheets of paper and left on each place.

It was Grandma, me, ten open seats, and free access to these double doors. An emergency exit. The only one not decorated with servicemen.

I stood up. I went over. I touched the doors expecting to hear an alarm, but none came. They’d open easily. I pressed my hand to one.

— Not yet, a voice whispered from the other side.

It was a big auditorium. This stage wasn’t like the one in the testifying tent. It had red curtains that made a heavy thump when they were pulled together. I heard the noise from my seat and I was seventy-five feet away. A stage crew practiced opening and closing them a few times.

The stage had two sets of red curtains, one in the rear as a backdrop and one to the fore that would part during the show. When both sets were open we could see far back into the lungs of the theater.

Where a band of four boys with longish hair down over their shoulders wore dungarees with black jackets. Kids who’d rather play Bark at the Moon than Some Enchanted Evening.

Perfume floated up from the audience. The air above our heads was a pinkish-purple mist.

The lights went out and I wasn’t prepared. I thought they’d make an announcement. But the show just began without warning. I wondered how Uncle Arms was going to get in touch with my sister. Send her a sceptor in the mail?

For fifty seconds we sank into the gloom. I heard the curtains squeak as they closed in the dark. Hiding musicians and wires. The band, invisible now, dragged into a peppy tune. A doo-wop beat.

Small spotlights appeared, one then the next, each the circumference of a tea cup. A hundred of them twirled against the red curtain.

Our MC entered from the left even while the lights kept mulling around the far right. He cleared his throat, then the unseen techie swung his brights over. Once lit, the MC smiled.

— Family and friends! he said.

He wore a tuxedo and sang some awkward lyrics.

Miss Innocence, Eastern United States, 1995

You darling star

No mere happenstance or perfect chance

Have saved you until tonight.

He was very good, crooning these words so seriously that they seemed to make sense. His talent was like sausage, filling and familiar. A rich, deep voice. Reasonably tall and just barely stocky. Not handsome so much as pleasant.

The MC said, — We are here tonight because of some very talented and wonderful young ladies, aren’t we? Let’s hear it! He was so excited that he hopped.

— Yes folks, we’ve brought ladies from Florida to Nantucket to compete for the chance to represent the Eastern seaboard of the United States in the National Miss Innocence America next year.

He was a motivational speaker with top-shelf bombast. Introduced himself as Maximilian Duvet. — Tonight we’ve got a whole lot going on, don’t we?

The crowd responded, but without vim.

So he asked again. — Come on folks. Don’t we?!

He had no time for passive audiences, so he gave us a certain practiced grin followed by a handful of simple dance moves. He didn’t seem expert, only excited. Giving us license to be happy. When he did that it was as if he’d cracked our atomic bonds. We, and I include myself, whistled, clapped, emitted energy.

He grinned, punched his hand in the air. — Yes! he yelled.

The small spotlights hadn’t stopped fluttering across Maximilian’s face since he’d started speaking. More than a distraction they were making him dizzy. — Okay. He waved his hands. Fellas. Guys. Lights!

The audience laughed.

— They’re more excited than I am!

From the ether a dirgy song began, mostly bass and faint guitar.

— Let’s take a moment to remember, Maximilian said. Never forget, he told us. Never forget.

Here came my battalion of ghosts from Friday night; the boys who’d been so kind to clean up after me. The Confederates dressed and wooden sabers drawn. Serious little toys. One of them walked out of formation to stand at Maximilian’s side.

Maximilian asked, — Who might you be?

— My name is Lewis Tilgham Moore, Colonel of the 31st Virginia Militia of Frederick County.

Max kneeled because the boy looked foolish standing on his toes, off balance with the heavy scabbard at his right hip. — And where are you going?

— We are off to Harper’s Ferry, the boy said.

— And do you think there’s trouble?

— Some trouble, but nothing that can’t be fixed, I expect!

The kid was a natural actor; easy with his lines, serious without being a boob. His voice was high-pitched, but he spoke slowly and that made him seem mature. The boy rejoined the others and they marched slowly to the middle of the stage, where they turned from profile to face the crowd straight.

I wondered about this volunteer militia; not as a force, but the young men who took a rail one October afternoon in 1859 expecting nothing more than a skirmish. I’d read the newsletter their chaperone gave me. The boys went off to Jefferson County then to the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry where John Brown, with a piddling force of eighteen, hoped to spark a slave revolt; within two years there was this Civil War.

It’s only after a hundred years that crusades seem inevitable; after all that time the unjust are easily named. But in the midst of history who knows his role?

— You know folks, I’d like to take a minute to be a bit candid with you.

Maximilian was of the crowd now; he had walked down from the stage. Portable microphone held, he stood at the first row. One big but not bright light rested on his shoulder.

— Lately, he said, there have been terrible things happening to our industry. Little Pepper Miller accusing her father of wrongdoing on that Current A fair TV show.

Hearing the name Pepper Miller the whole crowd swayed backward in their seats. One unwelcome wind had come from behind the curtains to blow across us plains.

— But I want to tell you, he said, all of you. That I’ve been working pageants for thirty-five years. He smiled. That’s right, three-five. I know I don’t look it. At least I hope I don’t. Do I?

Who could resist? I wanted to applaud. We liked him.

— Yes!

— But seriously. I’ve been on this train a very long time and I want you to understand something. Tabloids and television shows come around to film us. They ridicule the efforts these young ladies make. Of the time and expense not just to them, but to the entire family. Some groups even say these young women are being taken advantage of, but let me point out that no privately run organization in the world gives more girls college scholarships than the pageants of this country.

He paused for five seconds of nodding.

— Miss Innocence has been criticized for only accepting girls who have kept their chastity. I was there yesterday, on Braddock Street. And so were a lot of you. These ladies are tired from working twice on Saturday!

Less comfortable now. Even I shifted in my seat.

He scratched his head, pulled on his bow tie.

— I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it. We all go to hundreds of pageants. It’s a good system. I respect that other one. Girls should be applauded for surviving hard times, but what makes Miss Innocence special is that we honor the girls who chose to keep living good lives. Being a virgin is hard. There’s a lot of handsome young men out there. I know, because I used to be one!

He laughed and I did with him. Most of the audience, too.

— But even with the pressure in school and advertisements the forty-two girls backstage have decided not to be indulgent. There are so many things in this world that makes us feel powerless. Tonight we celebrate some young women who’ve proven just how powerful they are. That’s right. You should applaud. I will.

He tucked the black microphone under an armpit and clapped. — Yes! he yelled.

I took off my glasses because I had an itch in my ear like a riot. It was bad enough that I had to use one of the arms of my glasses to dig in there right at the drum.

My glasses back on I looked over at Grandma who was interested, but confused. She might have liked this more if she understood the words.

Maximilian motioned for the first contestant who walked out quickly, lifting her feet. She stood beside him, he put his arm around her and then let her advertise.

— Hello and greetings. My name is Karen Tiffany Haynes and I represent the lovely town of Knuckleswipe, Rhode Island.

I wondered how Ms. Haynes would look sitting next to me. As a couple. Her hand on my thigh. My arm around her shoulders. Later we’d have a lot of sex. I was sure of it.

— Good evening. My name is Barretta Watkins and I’m here from beautiful East Orange, New Jersey. Come see us!

For Barretta I imagined a beach. Her in a thong and me wearing a gray sweat suit. Even in a daydream I was embarrassed by my body. I couldn’t even imagine owning a buffer one.

Barretta coming out of the water, rubbing her eyes and then hugging me. We rolled around together. In my fantasy her little frame could support much weight. When we had sex it was everywhere. In the sand. On a rock. Standing up.

— Greetings and God bless, my name is Sareen Amber Follows. From myself and all of Tennessee, from the Natchez State Parkway to the Fort Donelson National Battlefield, we’d like to welcome you over for dinner anytime!

As each girl finished introducing herself she joined those who’d come out before her in a line at the right end of the stage. My fantasies lost focus as more young women appeared. I couldn’t make up new kinds of sex that quickly and started repeating. Demetria Shavers was also sitting next to me in an empty theater. Tiffany Murdock in the sand.

When nine or ten stood around, smiling, I just started picturing getting them pregnant. The whole row bearing my children. I wasn’t even thinking of the fucking at that point; just that very sexy time, about five months in, when the belly can’t be ignored. A hard hump that precedes her; the skin a pleasure to lick.

After Uncle Arms’s jubilee, to see the same girls on a finer platform was strange. Sareen Follows wore long gold gloves so that her skinny arms were concealed, but on Saturday afternoon she’d exposed them.

Whether or not I heard the knock I won’t know, but I thought I did. As Maximilian awaited the next girl, I crept to the double doors.

I couldn’t just stand up. I didn’t want to be noticed, remembered, described to the police.

To Maximilian’s surprise the lights went out, but not the power. His microphone still worked. In the suddenly dark auditorium, he yelped, — Spit!

Once there, I pressed the long metal bars on the double doors and heard the lock give.

A raiding party was outside, expecting me.

A road flare should be used outdoors.

This seems like practical instruction, like who needs it said, but common sense escapes some folks.

Auditorium illumination had sworn down to nothing, even Maximilian had dimmed. He needed someone else’s cue. — Hello? he asked into the microphone. What part is this?

The audience was largely oblivious. This didn’t take a very long time. One minute of darkness.

Then the road flares.

They have to be snapped before they start burning so first there were half a dozen cracking sounds.

I saw the protestors go in carrying the flares. The hallway, where they’d been waiting, was as dark as the auditorium.

The sallow woman came in first; she still looked nineteen, but she was thirty-nine. I recognized her even with boots on. Wearing a black leotard and a black thermal underwear top, but nothing to cover her face. Did she expect to be seen? Want it? I wondered where the film crew was positioned.

She dashed her flare down the aisles. So did the six that followed her.

They ran past me. I pulled the doors closed. I was still inside. We were in a room, but it felt big as the world.

After flares the protestors pulled can-horns from their coats and pumped them. The honks helped to orient people: Yes, you should be scared.

Some women in the audience screamed and others ducked their heads. The men did just about the same. Less yelling, more tucking.

The middle-aged woman, their leader in here, yelled, — No more beauty, just more art!

They’d been in a group, but then the demonstrators ran the aisles chaotically. Playing their can-horns whenever it seemed the audience might get their bearings enough to get up and slap these kids down.

Every two minutes. Horn! Horn!

This was supposed to have been fun. Except for the flares there was no light and I’d let seven imps in the room.

One problem was getting my eyes to focus.

As if the bleating cans wasn’t enough, there were audience members screaming. Then the rusty ring of auditorium seats flipping up as people stood and slamming down as they sat again.

— Less beauty, more art!

The protestors were yelling, lecturing us, but who was listening? I heard the words, but didn’t understand. It was loud enough in here that even Grandma covered her ears. When I scooted back to her, she’d pulled her cloche down over her eyes.

The rear curtains on stage pulled back, but the band was gone. There was a drum kit, but no one playing it.

With the backstage area exposed there was some light other than the hot-pink road flares. The lamps back there must have been on another circuit. They didn’t do much more than illuminate the contestants, all of them on the stage now. A crowd of forty-two crying girls.

They were confused. So were we. Forty-two of them. I tried to pick my sister out so I could go up there and get her, but I didn’t see Nabisase. A few of the girls climbed off the stage and tried to find their families. Many of them screamed, — Mommy! Mommy!

It sounded like they’d all lost one.

Maximilian started making noise. I wouldn’t even have noticed his voice among so many others, but he was holding that working microphone. He muttered, — I’ll be so glad when I get home.

Somebody should have turned the speakers off but in the commotion they’d spun the dial up to one hundred and thirty.

— I’ll be so glad when I get home.

My eyes remained half in focus, half in the basement.

I saw many more of the Miss Innocence girls climb offstage. A few jumped. You might have thought they were on fire. We were beneath them, but they joined us. A magnanimous act.

Once the stage cleared the thirty-nine-year-old guerrilla hurled balloons up there. She was right at the front, but no one bothered her. Afraid to tackle the saboteur.

Her friends joined. Four throwing balloons and three facing the audience, waving their can-horns threateningly. They didn’t have to. Everyone was scared of them. Even me.

The balloons wobbled heavily. When they hit they splattered greenish grease across the stage. Five balloons. Then fifteen. Great globs of oil stained the boards.

I tried to comfort Grandma, but she didn’t want it. I wondered if she’d seen me open the double doors. It was her hearing, not her sight, that sucked. I touched her shoulder and she pushed my hand away. Head forward, screaming, — Nabisase! into her lap.

Around us whole families stood to run and sat again. They didn’t know what to do.

I wished I had Uncle Arms in my hands so I could squeeze his lying neck. This was monstrous. I regretted helping.

When I went to the door a second time it was because I knew that I heard knocking.

It wasn’t forceful and I thought of Uncle Arms’s rapping from the other side.

My lightest touch made the doors move. I said, — Uncle Arms, I want to talk to you.

But he wouldn’t have heard me over the echoing chorus in the room. I was surprised the can-horns weren’t hoarse by now. If anyone but Maximilian was speaking I couldn’t hear it. All other voices became traffic in the auditorium. A long vowel sound; a cloud of despair; or one ecstatic outburst from the mouths of God.

One door slipped back three inches. A light was on in that service hallway now. 10,000 watts. It was a clear, vivid, luminous, incandescent, flaring flaming fucking corridor now. I covered my eyes. Twenty-five more anarchists ran past me, into the auditorium.

We should have stayed in Rosedale. I could have cheated fate. It was November 12th. I remember.

Nabisase found Grandma.

I heard my sister calling a name, but hardly recognized it as my own.

Grandma and Nabisase were to my left, twenty feet. I held the door open with my hand; I was framed by the hallway light. Easy to see me. And to see them. Grandma in her seat. Nabisase kneeling in the aisle. Both of them looking at me. Misunderstanding.

My eyes began to flutter as I let go of the door. It shut. My family was in the auditorium, but I was stuck outside. Not alone. There was one last figure here, wide as an oven and twice as tall. It wouldn’t let me in its cabin, but had come to take me now. It touched both sides of my face with its very small hands. The taste of salt water was on my tongue from crying. I opened my mouth, tried to talk, but there was a lion’s egg in my throat. Two of us, in the service hall, became entangled.