Seeing Eye

Highlights

This is my office. The clock on the wall is mine. It is in the shape of a black cat. Its tail hangs down. When the tail moves one way with each tick, the cat’s eyes move the other way. Usually, I am home by now. This is my salt tank and those are my fish. Those are my couches. Those are my chairs. This table is for the kids and their little chairs. This cigar box full of broken and dull crayons is mine. I am waiting for Mrs. Gustafson to bring Bobby in after football practice so I can fit him with a plastic mouth guard. The Formica tabletop and the waxy scribbles are mine. The stack of magazines is mine. This Highlights is mine, and no one has circled the hidden pictures in the Hidden Pictures. I have already found the comb in her bonnet and the bird in the elbow wrinkles of the man. I have yet to find the spoon, the lightbulb, the banana, the pencil, the loaf of bread, the carrot, the ball, the vase, the mitten, the umbrella, the ladder, the iron, and the flashlight. It is a picture of the gingerbread man running away. They hide everyday things in a picture of a fairy tale.

I treat kids, mostly, and the roller skaters who wander in from the boardwalk with a chipped tooth from a fall. A bloody incisor in the palm of my hand. I wear a smock with bunnies sometimes or bees. Bright colors, never white. I keep rubber spiders in the light wells to cast shadows overhead. Mobiles twist in the salt breeze. I warm the explorer in my hand. Have three flavors of fluoride from which to choose. I let the children use the hand mirror and look at my teeth. I keep a treasure chest behind the desk filled with plastic dinosaurs, airplanes, and toy soldiers. They bring me their baby teeth. They think I am the tooth fairy. I give them quarters and take the teeth home to Suzy, who says one day she will think of something to do with them. But I find the teeth everywhere, little bits of bone. They will last longer than anything else in the world. The smiles I see here in the chair are all spotty, only temporary. What future do I see in it but braces, orthodontia? All my work gone when the kid’s eleven. The baby teeth just hold open a space in the head. Washing out a mouth I tell its owner to rinse and say my name into the funny sink next to the chair.

I have very large hands. My paddles. A hand going through the water has the same amount of surface area whether the fingers are open or closed. They proved that in wind tunnel tests. They were always proving things about the water in the air.

It’s all the same. Thicker and thinner.

I could feel the water. Get its feel. I could feel the water splashing into the gutter on the other side of the pool. I could touch the wall before I touched it. I could feel feeling going out of my fingers and spreading through the pool like dye. I could feel the molecules slamming into each other.

But my hands are too big for a dentist. My hands make my patients gag. My fingers can’t tell between a premolar and a molar. When I wash my hands with the green soap before I touch a patient, for a second I feel the old feeling. I leave my hands wet. “Open up,” I say. Underwater, my hands are two fishes. I watch them through the milky light.

I think Suzy was happiest when she was being saved. The books I did on swimming always had a section on lifesaving. She was always the victim. She has pictures Leifer did. The close-up of the carry where I have pinned her arm behind her. Her other arm is thrown up over my shoulder. Floating dead, her eyes are closed. It is quite tender, actually, the way I am looking down at her, my head cocked to the side, my other arm riding above her breasts. Her makeup perfect even wet. The longer shot as I drag her along. Our bodies all broken into lines by the water I am sculling. My head and her face above the water. Her hair is trailing into the ripples of water. In one, I am carrying her by the chin as I would someone unconscious, but her eyes are open, her eyelashes wet. What was I saying to her? My double-jointed thumb was pulling her mouth down and tight. Then there is the series where I am lifting her out of the pool. Holding her hands on the edge with my own as I climb out. Then bending down to pull her up and over. Pictures are what marriage is all about.

On the boardwalk, the men and women grind by on roller skates. In dry swimsuits, they swim along, arms paddling backward. They float down sidewalks. It is another liquid, a thinner medium. There was a dance once called the swim. They dance it with their eyes closed as they slide past. Antennae grow from their ears, little backpack radios, earplugs, headphones.

“All I want to know is can you do it?” he said from the chair. I’d told him what I was going to do.

“Do what?” I asked.

“You know, man, with the filling. You hear about it.”

“Those are accidents,” I said, mixing the cement.

“Well, make one happen. I want my molar to pick up KABC. But it doesn’t have to be that station. I just thought it would be the easiest. All those watts.”

When I was swimming, I couldn’t hear a thing. But maybe the ocean. Like the one in the seashell. A sound like metal. You can hear the tide sizzle on the beach. The skaters hiss along. Their eyes closed, their mouths working.

Swimming laps, I would imagine a woman walking on the water a few steps beyond the reach of my stroke. Sometimes, she would trip on a wave and, if she stumbled completely, look at her elbow as if she had scraped it. Sometimes, she would drop pieces of her clothes as she walked. Around her feet would be circles that would expand and disappear when she walked. As I was about to touch the wall, she would step out of the pool as if she were stepping ashore from some boat.

She was not the most interesting thing to think about. So I would begin thinking about the women the other swimmers were thinking about.

I am worried about tooth dust. I can see it floating in the air, in the rays of sunlight coming through the window. It is fine and fluid. What will happen after years of breathing it? The mouth is a filthy place. But the dust. I can see it as I walk through it. Feel it eddying around me, closing in behind me. You can write your name in it on the tray; the instruments are grainy with it. It is getting thicker. When I use the highspeed drill, the patient gripping the armrests from the pitch, I can see little puffs of dust from the tooth.

It smells awful.

Worse than burning hair.

No one thought I would make it when I went back to school. I had done nothing for four years between the Olympics. I went up to Canada, but it was the last time I wanted to talk about swimming. The records wouldn’t hold. And they kept asking me, “Do you think your records will hold?” I went back home and flew my radio-controlled glider up and down the coast. I would spiral it up and stall it out, tip the nose over and bring it to me like a hunting hawk.

I watched videotapes with Suzy of all the races in Munich, and finally ran out of things to notice. My right elbow bent when it should be extended on the recovery stroke of the two-hundred fly. Suzy would watch Carson, and I would look past the TV at my poster on the wall.

Before a meet you shave down. Some guys do it quietly, others loudly in the shower. The chest, the tops of the feet, the insides of the thighs, the small of the back, even the crotch. Everything is shaved. Doc had boxes of blades and razors. There was a wall of mirrors, and the guys leaned over the sinks toward them, plucking eyebrows, earlobes, and nostrils, then giving in and shaving the eyebrows.

Some would use Neet. Some would use only a razor. It was like peeling off skin when you did it right. You felt faster, seamless, streamlined. The team from Tennessee shaved their heads and held up their feet to show us the soles with the nicks from where they’d shaved. Well, well. They dared us to touch their scalps. I walked over and poked a finger at someone’s bald temple.

“It’s in your head,” I said.

That is when I started my mustache.

I had a little comb I would use before taking my mark. But I still shaved everything else. I got used to my body that way. When I stopped racing, it was like becoming a man all over again. I grew old in a couple of weeks.

I have dark hair. Sometimes, still, I am surprised by the hand I see working in a mouth. This is my hand. I’ll watch Suzy bathing and shaving her legs, raising one out above the soap bubbles like a commercial. She lets me shave the other, knowing how good I am with a razor. Her skin is very soft. When we shower together, I make her lift both arms at the same time, and I shave both her underarms at once.

I cannot remember learning to swim. I like to think that my father threw me in someplace and, as he waited for me to come to the surface, turned to my mother and said, “We have a fish on our hands.” If I were a fish I would want to be the kind that has a migrating eye. The eye itself turns the body flat as it comes loose and wanders over the head to the other side of the face. I would think about that while swimming laps. Growing gills, webs, flukes. Evolving backwards. Or maybe the mouth would migrate to the side of the head so I wouldn’t have to turn to breathe. Better yet, a hole in the middle of the shoulder blades. No teeth at all.

While I swam, parts came loose and floated free. My nipples slid down my chest. My chin sheered away. My toenails shed like scales. There were fingers in my wake.

I was always thinking of something else. Of one more thing. When I talk to a patient in the chair, before an answer, the mouth is going open, and I can see the tongue still working back in the mouth. The patient makes funny sounds. The teeth, never quite right, float in the gums, washed forward like plastic bottles in the surf.

Suzy got the idea from a television commercial.

It was a floor wax commercial, but in it they machinegun the glass cockpit of a jet. You can see the white bullets bouncing off. The ingredient that protects the cockpit is in the floor wax. Suzy thought we could make a clear plastic wall out of the same stuff and embed the medals in it. That way you could be sitting in the breakfast area and look out to the living room to watch the television through the clear plastic wall. The medals, she said, would seem to float in the air. I looked into it since I couldn’t think of any other way to display them. All the time I was thinking about burglars machine-gunning the wall, the gold suspended in front of them. You could knock on the air in front of you. But they told me the plastic would turn green with age. And what would I do when I moved?

I started swimming every morning when I was five. I turned from the window and picked up my rolled towel to go with my father to the pool before dinner too. Outside my friends were walking away. My mother had turned them away at the door. He is going to the pool. He is going to the pool. Our parents would be on the decks sunning or in the empty stands reading summer books in the middle of winter. It was always summer. And the light was always reflected from below, aqua and turquoise. It was always summer. My hair was always wet or had those furrows the comb left after I combed it wet. And I thought I was lucky I wasn’t blond, I mean, so the chlorine wouldn’t tint and shine my hair. At college, there were no children. So I would walk off the campus into the neighborhoods or go to the playground and watch the children. There were lots of children in Bloomington. A teacher shooed me away once.

These were the children who had been the test groups for toothpastes. Crest was invented in Bloomington. The unmarked tubes, the new brush, the special tablets that stained the teeth where you missed. All of them brushing together in the school cafeteria after lunch. Those children had been the ones to rush in and say, “Mother, mother, only one cavity!”

We carved teeth in dent school from blocks of clay the size of sugar cubes. When I dream, I dream of two things — teeth that are as large as my head and drowning.

When Suzy yawns, I can see the fillings in her back teeth. I’ll tell her to hold it and take a look in the light the lamp on the end table puts out. She will go right on watching television. I can see it reflected in her glasses.

“When are you going to file my teeth again?” she asks.

She asks me about striped toothpaste and how they get the stripes in it to come out right.

I do recommend sugarless gum.

If you watch television in the right light you can see yourself watching in the glass. I think television is not so much like an eye as like a mouth. I look and look at it, and I don’t know why others see it looking back at them. It’s a mouth, all right. When we go out Suzy turns off the television and brushes her hair while looking at the green glass. Her long straight hair begins to float away from her, drawn by the static of the screen. I like to watch her.

Under the water, as I would go into my turn, I would see Doc’s face, green, in the window. There was a window in the pool wall so he could watch us underwater. Pushing off, you planted your feet on the glass. He watched us and took our pictures. Around the pool, on the walls, are still pictures of me swimming different strokes — the same strokes stopped at the same point or a series of one stroke instances apart, from all angles. My head coming out of the water as my arms pull on the fly, head-on. What am I looking at? Doc’s book was called The Science of Swimming. He developed interval training and hypoxic training. He defined the two-beat crawl stoke and the principles of fluid mechanics. He saw Bernoulli’s principle in my stroke. I developed my stroke on my own by trial and error. When I came to Indiana as a freshman, Doc asked me how I pulled my hands through a crawl. I told him: a straight-arm pull down the middle line of my body. When I saw the first movies, I saw myself using a zigzag pull with my elbows at ninety degrees. How did I develop such good mechanics when I didn’t even know how I swam? Doc said I was a motor genius, and he strapped lights on my fingers and toes that flashed as I swam and made light tracings of my stroke on film.

What I did all at once, swimmers now watch in pieces.

Doc could never get the pieces fine enough. Two pictures that looked identical to me looked years apart to him. They were a slice of a second apart. Like that puzzle in children’s magazines where the quintuplets are really twins and three are impostors.

He no longer recognizes me now that I am not in college.

They say one day Doc was surprised by his own picture in a recent team portrait.

I remember the lights on my fingers and toes. I remember the batteries on my back.

There is this bar in Bloomington, Nick’s, we would go to after practice in the morning. After telling Doc that we had a class to go to. We’d make our way down Kirkwood against the flow of students heading toward the old campus and their first class of the day. As they would close in behind us we would hear them say, “Swimmers.”

Swimmers.

Nobody ever called me by name.

Sitting at the bar, we could look out to the street and the students heading east. Across the street they were building a little mall on the corner of Dunn. Bloomington looked like Indiana then. It probably looks like California now. The stone replaced by redwood, outdoor cafes where the bars with neon signs had been. And roller skaters gliding to school instead of townies leaning into the wind.

The windows at Nick’s were painted over with diagonal panes to make it look English. So we saw all this through diamonds.

You drank your beer from old jars.

They sold beer by the pound at Nick’s.

She misses the interviews.

Plimpton was the last, four years after all the wins.

We showed him around, ran the tapes and films.

He was interested in what I was going to do now. I told him I was going to be a dentist, and he didn’t believe me. I could live on the razor money, he said, sell goggles.

“You could pretend to be a dentist, George,” she said, “and come to the office.” On the televised interviews she sees now, she watches the wives and girlfriends, how they kiss and hold on to the men who are talking. She likes the ones who never look at the camera but stare up at the men.

I ask my patients questions while we wait for the blocks to take. If their mouths aren’t full of cotton, they try to answer. It is hard to talk when half your face is numb. Lips and tongue and jaw are disappearing. I answer the questions for them as they nod their heads.

I keep them in a lockbox at the bank. What can you do with them? I read somewhere in my textbooks about the place in the body that stores gold salts. Like the thyroid and iodine. If you suspect a lesion, you administer some radioactive salts and watch the iodine coat the throat. You need just a little bit of iodine. The same with gold. There is always a bit in the brain. That is where it concentrates, in the thalamus, the seat of emotion. I think about this when I am flushing out a filling, filing it down. There are shavings on the back of the tongue. In the brain, too, a little cavity, a missing piece. If the iodine is not there, you go all puffy. I don’t remember what happens if you are deficient of gold. Sad, I guess.

I think of the medals on my chest, pure and heavy. You could bend them and rub off a mark like the crayon color of gold. Not like the metals I mix now — the silver amalgam. Silver expanding, the tin contracting, the copper’s strength, and the zinc for flow. All mixed with mercury. Not like gold. Gold is perfect. Gold does not discolor if kept clean. It resists crushing stress. It keeps an edge. It will not fracture.

I think about my medals in the bank vault. Perhaps, if times get tough, I will have them flattened into foil and rolled for the pellets I need.

Could I ever drown? Could I ever forget that much? Is it really like breathing? I am like the cartoon character who has walked over a cliff and hasn’t looked down yet.

I watch all the cartoons on Saturday so I can discuss them with my patients. To drown would be the only death that would make sense. The thing that makes you, kills you. The thing that serves you right. The hunting accident for the hunter. But I wonder if I could let myself or if the water wouldn’t toss me back. No, it won’t be the water that I’ll drown in, it will be the swimming.

Someone has colored in Goofus and Gallant. Blue and red faces. You should hold the gate open for your little brother. You should help him find his shoe.

I have found all the hidden pictures in the Hidden Pictures and have circled them all with purple Crayola.

Bobby has yet to show up.

This is a nice life — being here, the crayons, the teeth in my pocket, Suzy home.

It’s Time

I remember the time each year when my husband cut back the raspberry bushes. I always thought he took too much, afterwards a row of whittled spikes where once a tangled mass of brambles boiled along the fence. He ripped out the dead canes altogether, brittle straws, pruned the branches down to nothing. He dug up the newly rooted tips where last year’s growth had bowed over to the ground and took hold, the first long stride into the garden. Every spring, I believed they would never grow back, but in a few weeks, with the days lengthening, the stubby canes streaked with red, budded, shot up overnight.

Does it count as a first word? The other raspberry, the sound my daughter made, her tongue melting into slobber between her lips, stirring before dawn in the tiny bedroom down the hall. It was dark, and the wet blasts helped me navigate, the floors covered with her blocks and toys. Her room was pitch black, the only light the daubs of radium I swiped from the factory outlining the rails and bars of her crib. At night it looked like a bridge lit up, suspended over the varnished surface of a wide, still river. The paint had dripped on the floor, formed a tiny drifting phosphorescent slick. My daughter tottered about. I could see only her shadow, her shape blotting out the dew of pulsing light behind her. She sprayed her one-note greeting. When I picked her up, her tongue rasped next to my ear. I felt her whole body going into the sound, her breath dying down, her spit a mist on my cheek.

“Don’t go,” my husband had said. “Stay in bed. She’s not crying. Ten minutes more. Let her go.”

I could see he was looking at the time. I watched the luminous dial of his watch float up off the nightstand. The little wedge the hands made rotated as he fumbled to right the face. From eleven o’clock the time spun to a little past five thirty. “She’s up early,” I heard him say. The little constellation spiraled back to the table.

Often there were flecks of paint in my hair. He said he could always find me in the dark. He’d kiss me through a cloud of stars. I’d shake my head and the sparks would spill down onto the pillow, sprinkling his face. My fingertips too lit up, stained where I held the brush and the tiny pot. I became distracted with my own caresses, streaks of light tracing his back, neck, hips. Flakes of light caught in the hairs on his chest and eyebrows, blinked on and off as he opened and closed his eyes. Where I kissed him I left welts of throbbing light. His lips grew brighter. It seemed like the fire should die out but it didn’t, would only disappear with the dawn in the windows. We could see everything then and still hear our daughter down the hall cooing to herself, inventing a language to call me to her.

This was in Orange right after the war. They used women at the factory there to paint the clocks. Our hands were steady. We were patient, perfect for the delicate trimming, outlining the numerals with the radium, down to the marks on the sweep face, sketching hairlines on the minute hand. I had sable brushes I rolled on my tongue to hone a point sharp enough to jewel each second. The paint was sweet and thick like a frosting laced with a fruity essence. We’d thin it with our spit. Rich and heavy like the loam in the garden. It was piecework. At the long tables we’d race through the piles of parts, my hands brushing the other hands, reaching in for the next face or stem. The room was noisy. Alvina sang to herself. Blanche reeled off recipes. Marcella clucked. We talked with our eyes crossed over our work, “She had to get married. They went to Havre de Grace by train and were back by noon the next day.” We paused after each sentence or verse as we dabbed the brushes to our lips. It was as if our voices came from somewhere else. I’d look away, out the huge windows to the brilliant sky. I can still hear the buzz above the table as something separate from the people there, another kind of radiation in the room that never seemed to burn out. The stories and the songs blend into one ache.

What more is there to tell? Our bones began to break under the slightest pressure — getting out of bed, climbing stairs. Our hair rinsed out of our scalps. Our fingertips turned black and the black spread along the fingers by the first knuckle while the skin held a wet sheen. Our hands were negatives of hands. The brittle black fingernails were etched with bone white.

But this was after so many of those afternoons at the Undark plant with its steady northern light. I remember cursing an eyelash that fluttered onto a face and smeared my work, how I damned my body for the few pennies I had lost, the several wasted minutes of work. “I’ll race you, Myrna!” There were many factories in Orange, and their quitting whistles at the end of the day were all pitched differently. The white tables emptied, the heaps of silver parts, like ashes, at each place. Another shift, the night one, would collect the glowing work and ship it somewhere else to be assembled. We ran to the gates, to the streetcars waiting, to the movies that never stopped running. It was all about time, this life, and we couldn’t see it.

At the trial, not one of us would speak, and the newspapers said how happy we were considering the sentences already imposed. We sat there with our smiles painted over our lips to hide our teeth. During recess in the ladies, we powdered over the bruises again. We couldn’t blot the lipstick since our skin was so tender. Four clowns in the mirror, mouths like targets, stared back at us. We couldn’t cry. It would ruin our work. In court, we listened to the evidence and covered our faces when we laughed at what was being said. I watched the clerk who recorded everything, his pencil stirring down the page. Sometimes he would be called upon to read testimony back, and I was taken by the accuracy of his words. I remembered the speeches that way. It seemed right, right down to some of the sounds he noted, pausing to insert laughter or unintelligible. I liked these moments best when the words were the only solid things left in court. The lawyers, the witnesses, the gallery, the jury were all poised, listening to the clerk. They might have been an audience from another time. The only thing left of us was that cursive string of knots on paper, the one sound in the room.

My daughter loved the fresh raspberries in milk. The white milk coated the scoring between the tiny globes on each berry in the bowl. It looked like the milk drying on her tongue. The berries as they steeped turned the milk pink. She grabbed at the fruit, crushing it into her fist and then sliding the pulp into her mouth.

I haven’t been able to speak since soon after the trial, and eating now, even the raspberries so ripe they liquefied when I picked them, is painful. The berries have seeds that shouldn’t hurt the way they do. I can’t explain this to my husband, who sits reading the newspaper on the other side of the table, his fingers smudged with ink. I make the same sounds now the baby made, little whines and grunts. He’s already used to it. I feel I am being whittled away like the nub of the pencil I write this with then sharpen with the paring knife. Why do people lick the lead point? Perhaps it is just a gesture of thought, a habit, hoping that the sound of a voice will rub off.

I’m not afraid. I know this now. It happened this morning when I was picking the berries. The bees were in the late blossoms on the canes above me. The canes trembled, about ready to bow over. Sweat scalded the skin of my arms and neck. The berries hung in clusters everywhere among the thorns and sharp leaves. I have no feeling left in the tops of my fingers, and as I watched my black hand close on each berry, the fruit seemed to leap from the stem into the numb folds on my palm. So little had held the berry in place, a shriveled ball and socket. The berry, a dusty matte red that soaked up the light, bled a little, a pool in my palm. I thought about sucking the raspberry into my mouth, straining it through what was left of my teeth. Instead, I reached out for another berry and then another, dumped them into the pint baskets squashed and ruptured, and rushed them into the house. I found a pencil and a piece of paper to write this down. Each word fell on the page, a burning tongue.

Fidel

My husband, I’ll call him David, left me for my best friend. I’ll call her Linda. Since then, I have found it difficult to sleep.

I have taken to listening to the radio through the night. The radio is next to the bed, an old floor model filled with tubes that heat up and glow through the joints in the wood frame. My father gave it to me when I left home to live with my husband, I’m calling David. I used it then only as an end table next to the bed. I painted it a gloss red and covered it with house and garden magazines, the bottom one’s back cover still sticks to the tacky enamel surface. I live in a city I’ll call Fort Wayne.

I listen to a local station, I’ll call WOWO. It is the oldest station in town. It’s been on the air since the beginning of radio. My father listened to the same station ever since he bought the radio console on time. I have seen the payment schedule. He kept it in the drawer beneath the sad face of the staring dials and the frowning window scaled with AM numbers. He penciled in 37¢ each week after he walked downtown to a store I’ll call The Grand Leader to turn over the installment.

One night, when I couldn’t sleep, I rolled over in bed and noticed for the first time since I had painted the radio red the two clunky knobs the size and shape of cherry cordials, one to tune and the other the power switch that also controls the volume. Without touching the tuning knob, I turned the radio on, but nothing happened. Nothing happened even after I waited the amount of time I thought it would need to warm up. I turned on the brass table lamp perched atop the pile of wrinkled magazines. I had never plugged in the old radio. I rolled out of bed and onto the floor. Behind the radio was an outlet where the table lamp and the modern clock radio were connected. I had the old radio’s plug in hand as I pulled out what I thought would be the plug for the clock radio. It was the plug for the lamp instead. In the dark, I scraped the walls of the bedroom with the prongs of the radio’s plug looking for the outlet never thinking to reinsert the plug of the lamp. I had painted the walls a linen white about the same time I had painted the radio red. When I found the outlet the radio lit up inside, green light leaking out of every seam and joint. I was sitting on the floor when WOWO faded in, the station my father listened to years ago when he listened to this radio before I was even born.

The next few weeks I listened through the nights and into the morning. I left the radio on during the day for the cats who I’ll call Amber, Silky, and Scooter, as I stumbled off to work. They liked the purring box. In the evenings when I staggered back in I d find them attached like furry limpets to the shiny skin of the radio. The paint, constantly baked by the glowing tubes, gave off the stink of drying paint again and steeped the bedroom in that hopeful new smell it had when I first moved here with the man I am calling David.

The later it got at night the further back in time WOWO seemed to go with the music it played. After midnight scratchy recordings of big bands were introduced by Listo Fisher, who pretended the broadcast still came from the ballrooms of the Hotel Indiana. Alfonse Bott, Tyrone Denig and the Draft Sisters, the brothers Melvin and Merv LeClair and their orchestras, Smoke Sessions and his Round Sound, the crooner Dick jergens, who sang with Bernard “Fudge” Royal and his band or with Whitney Pratt’s Whirlwinds, and Bliss James singing the old standards. It was as if I had tuned into my father’s era, the music slow, unamplified, and breathy. Toward morning the sound was like a syrup with wind instruments scored in octave steps, the brass all muted, the snares sanded, and the bass dripping.

Bob Sievers, who had been the morning farm show host at WOWO for as long as I could remember, came on at five. I had first seen him, though I had heard him for a long time before that, when I was in high school. On television, he was selling prepaid funerals to old people. He didn’t look like his voice. And now I heard that voice again thanking Listo Fisher for standing watch at night and then cuing the Red Birds, a local quartet, to sing “Little Red Barn” as he dialed the first of ten Highway Patrol barracks to ask what the night had been like in the state I am calling Indiana.

The sputtering ring of the telephones on the radio sounded swaddled in cotton. It was five in the morning. My head melted into the flannel of the pillow slip. The only sound was the mumble of the connection as a desk sergeant answered in a place called Evansville. He whispered a sleepy monaural hello encased in the heavy Bakelite of an ancient telephone. Bob Sievers, his bass voice lowered a register, identified himself and asked about the weather down there in the southern part of the state. The flat accents of the trooper reported snow had fallen overnight but that the major roads were salted and plowed.

I waited for the next question, lifting my head from the pillow. Bob Sievers’s voice dove even lower. “And Sergeant, were there any fatals overnight?” For a second I listened to the snow of static, the voltage of the phone picked up by the sensitive studio microphones. “No, Bob,” the trooper answered, “a quiet night.” Instantly I would hear the ratchet of the next number being dialed, the drowsy cop, the weather outside Vincennes, then South Bend, Terre Haute, Jasper, then on the toll road in Gary, Indianapolis, Mount Vernon, Monon, and finally Peru. At each post, the search for casualties, the crumbs of accidents. Every now and then someone would have died in a crash. The trooper sketched in the details. The road, its conditions, the stationary objects, the vehicles involved, and the units dispatched, withholding the identities of the deceased until the notification of the next of kin.

There were nights I waited for such notification. I saw my husband behind the wheel of my best friend’s car, his face stained by the dash light of the radio. He is listening to WOWO, the big bands of the early morning, when the car begins to pirouette on the parquet of black ice. I know that the radio is still playing, a miracle, after the car buries itself in a ditch of clattering cattails sprouting from the crusted snow. The last thing he hears, the car battery dying, is the quick, muffled dialing of Bob Sievers, his morning round of calls, and the hoarse, routine replies. I think to myself I am still some kind of kin. Those nights, I practiced my responses to the news brought to me by men in blue wool serge huddled on my stoop.

WOWO is a clear channel station, 50,000 watts. At sunset smaller stations on nearby interfering frequencies stop broadcasting and the signal can be picked up as far south as Florida and out west to the Rockies. Just north the iron in the soil damps the power, soaking up the magnetic waves before they spread into Canada. Listening, I felt connected to the truck drivers in Texas and the night auditors on the Outer Banks who called in to Listo Fisher and told him they were listening. Often they would ask, “Where is Fort Wayne?” as if they had tuned in to a strange new part of the planet. Listo Fisher would take requests, explain patiently the physics and the atmospheric quirks that allowed the callers to hear themselves on the radio they were listening to broadcast by a station days of travel away from where they were. “It’s a miracle,” some yahoo in a swamp would yodel.

One night in the middle of a beguine, a voice came on the radio speaking what I found out later was Spanish. For a moment in my sandbag state, I thought it must be part of the song, a conductor or an announcer turning to a ballroom full of people in a hotel, both the people and the hotel now long turned to dust and the evening just charged molecules on magnetic tape, saying to them good night and good-bye. Thank you for the lovely evening. We’ve been brought to you by United Fruit and now are returning you to your local studios. But the voice kept talking, rising and falling, the r’s rolling and the k’s clotting together. Every once and again I would recognize a word, its syllables all bitten through and the whole thing rounded out by a vowel that seemed endless, howling or whispered.

The telephone rang. It was three in the morning.

“What the hell is that?” my father asked. The words were in both my ears now. I could hear the speech in peaks playing on his radio across town, like a range of mountains floating above clouds.

“Dad, what are you doing up?”

“Listening to the radio when this blather came over it.”

I asked him why he wasn’t asleep instead. The radios continued to emit the speech, a rhythm had begun to emerge beneath the words not unlike the beguine it had preempted. Just then there was a huge crash of static. I heard my father say, “What the —” but it wasn’t static it was applause, and as it trailed off, I heard the voice say the same phrase over again a few times, starting up again, as the cheering subsided.

“Oh,” my father said, “you’re awake then.”

“Of course, I’m awake,” I lied to him. “You woke me up.” I asked him again why he was awake.

“I haven’t slept in years.”

“Well, go to sleep, Dad.”

“You go to sleep then.”

“I am asleep. I’ve been asleep,” I said.

“What’s that crap on the radio?”

“Change the station, Dad. Maybe it’s the station.”

“But I always listen to WOWO.”

I hung up and listened to WOWO. The speech continued for two more hours, punctuated by bursts of applause, the sound then breaking into a chirping chant, steady at first then going out of phase, melting back into itself and the rising hiss of more applause. The voice would be there again. It seemed to plead or joke. It warned, begged. It egged on. It blamed and denied, sniffed its nose. It sneered. It promised. I could hear it tell a story. It explained what it had meant. It revised. It wooed. Toward the morning it grew hoarse. It grew hoarse and dried up. It wound up repeating a word, which seemed too long to me, again and again until that word was picked up by the listeners on the radio, who amplified it into a cloud of noise that this time was static. Then Bob Sievers was on the radio and his theme song was playing.

There are so many secrets in this world. About the time my husband, who I’ll call David, and my best friend, who I’ll call Linda, started sleeping together, two silver blimps were launched in a swamp south of a city I’ll call Miami. They were tethered there to slabs of freshly cured concrete a thousand feet below. I think of those balloons floating there, drifting toward each other, perhaps bumping together finally, and rebounding in excruciating slow motion. The wires connecting them to the ground shored them up, I imagine, so their nuzzling was reigned in, the arc of rotation proscribed. They moved hugely, deliberately, like whales in a tropic bay. Their shadows shifted on the spongy ground below. I am almost asleep, dreaming, when the nodding blimps turn into the slick bodies of my husband and my best friend sliding beneath a skin of sheets, moving as deliberately and as coyly until they are tangled up in each other’s embrace and then that zeppelin in New Jersey bursts into flames and melts into itself, the fire spilling from the night sky. There is a voice on the radio crying how horrible, how horrible to see the skeleton of the airship support, for an instant, a white skin of flames.

The curious in south Florida were told that the bobbing balloons were part of a weather experiment, a lie. Their real purpose was to hold aloft a radio antenna aimed at Cuba. It was propaganda radio. The voice I had heard was Castro’s, Cuban radio’s response, jamming the signal spilling south from the balloons, overflowing on the clear channel all the way north.

For a long time our government denied what was going on and the speeches continued through the night. I bought a Spanish to English dictionary and translated one word I’d catch out of the one thousand perhaps that flashed by, leafing through the book until I found something I thought sounded like what I had heard. He’s talking about a ship, I’d think. And he is sitting or he sat once. Overlooking the sea specked with ships. Now there are roosters. Ships, the holds filled with roosters, who crow out the watch. Mothers waiting for the ships, I thought, at the clocks, shielding their eyes in the sun, empty baskets balanced on their heads.

WOWO’s ratings went up as people stayed awake late into the night to listen to the interruptions, the speeches with the static of applause. And, as if they realized they now had an audience, the programmers in Havana began to salt the broadcast with cuts of Latin music, bossa novas and sambas, anthems and pretty folk songs plucked out on guitars with squeaky strings. Downtown, during the day, I began to see people napping at their desks, sleepwalking to the copying rooms and the coffee machines. More men smoked cigars. High school Spanish classes were assigned to listen to the station at night, meeting at their teachers’ houses for slumber parties. So tired, we were infected by our dreams. The days grew warmer. I had been unable to sleep for so long the measured pace of the people around me matched my own endless daily swim through the thick sunlit air. We moved like my cats, lounged and yawned, stared at each other with half-closed eyes.

I listened for Fidel at night. Over time, I counted on him. I translated his rambling monologues in my own dreamy way as he talked about his island with its green unpronounceable trees, the blooming pampas where butterflies from the north nested in the fall, lazy games of catch performed by children in starchy white uniforms chattering in a dialect that predates Columbus. You see, I was ready for someone to talk to me, to explain everything to me. How I looked like a movie star in those sunglasses I wore continually. How fires smell in the cane fields as the sugar caramelizes. I thought I understood romance for once and martyrdom, maybe even revolution. This ropy language, the syrup of its sound, an elixir, was on the air now all the time, crept into my bed each night.

What would my father say? It filled me up, crowding out the mortgaged furniture, the old sad music, the phone calls to the police, and all the names, especially the names I’ve now forgotten were ever attached to those other frequencies through which I drifted.

Seeing Eye

The kids on the stoops with the dogs are still confused. They tackle the overgrown puppies, tangling themselves in the harnesses and leads as the whining dogs lunge and stumble. Panting. Lots of panting.

“It’s the mailman lady,” the kids shout. I kind of throw the mail their way with just enough velocity for the postcards to strip away from the bundle, startling the dogs, who soundlessly bark at the spinning envelopes. The kids hang on, use their sweaty faces to spear an animal back, grope for a purchase of fur and skin.

“Letter carrier,” I say over my shoulder. Each stride a sidewalk square. The next stoop of the row house has another dog, another kid already mixing it up. The dog’s ears are pointing my way. It’s stepping all over the kid. And now the whole block of children and animals senses me. “The mailman lady,” they howl. The dogs bob and focus, then snap and tumble with the kids, slough them off, cock themselves again. The dogs know. The kids are still confused, don’t know what to make of me. Never seen one of me before. The dogs are attentive to ancient messages. The uniform. The territory. I smell just as sweet.

I’m a letter carrier in a town whose main industry is raising dogs. Guide dogs for the blind. Shepherds and retrievers mostly. Big brains and bones. Steady mutts with substantial paws, plodding beasts. Slobberingly loyal. Obedient, of course. Easy to clean. It’s still a mystery to me just how the training works. The school is on another route, but I’ve seen the Quonset huts, the kennels, the field of stripped obstacles at the school. Every year the newspaper does a feature story with a page of pictures of the graduating dogs staring into the calm faces of their new masters. I only know the puppies come here to this bedroom community and are parceled out to families who keep them just like pets. After a while you’ll see the dog in the station wagon. A mom is driving, dropping her husband off at the train platform, the kids at school. The dog commutes to work also, comes home for the night, a pillow to a pile of kids in front of the TV.

I run into the older dogs, already on the special lead, as volunteers walk them around the town. There isn’t a street where you won’t see a couple of pairs plowing the sidewalks. The sighted volunteers, waving to each other, nudge their dogs around a corner. They slug their way through a cul-de-sac. At the corners, there are patient instructions. They wait for the light to change and for the scramble bell to sound. The dogs walk through the aisles of the stores downtown. They wait in packs for the special bus that distributes them in the neighborhoods. In fact, the town is overly complicated for its size, presenting to the dogs every possible distraction. Too many cats. Dummy fire hydrants. Revolving doors in the butcher shop. The park has been landscaped in levels. Stairs lead by fountains and reflecting pools. I see the dogs taking cab rides. There is an escalator leading down to a subway station with turnstiles but no trains. They take the elevator back to the surface, where there are flower carts, news kiosks, street singers, three-card monte games, people selling watches spread out on towels, and other volunteers who pretend to be drunk and passed out on benches. Everywhere there are trees. Lots of trees. And people who have signed up to be people today walk their dogs and eat ice cream, read newspapers they then throw in the white wire trash bins scattered everywhere on the avenues. The dogs slog through it all as a car, slow enough to chase, cruises by blowing its horn. I’m part of this too, I know, though the mail I deliver is real. My satchel is strapped to the back of this tricycle cart, and I slalom through the plodding dogs and trainers on the street. The dogs sniff the wheels of the cart. The walkers, for a second tense, lose the strange connection with their animals. My cart speeds up, pulls me along. Up ahead, a wailing fire truck skids around the corner on its way to an imaginary fire.

Along with the letters, we all carry a repellent. It comes in a canister with a pump action like a purse-sized cologne. It is standard issue with the uniform and fits neatly in a leather holster. At Brateman’s, the store that carries all the uniforms, I attracted a crowd of men — cops and firefighters, other postal workers, meter readers — as I tried on the new uniforms. The skirt, the shorts, the dusty blue acrylic cardigan still patchless but with stamped buttons. The baseball cap, the pith helmet. I stepped out from the dark dressing room, wire hangers jingling, and the men stopped talking with the clerk who was sucking on pins. They leaned on the glass cases of badges, whistles, and utility belts and watched me look at myself in the mirrors. There were piles of canvas coveralls on the floor, boxes of steel-toed shoes. I tried on a yellow slicker. “How does that feel?” the clerk asked, his mouth full of pins. It felt slick already with sweat. A sheriff’s deputy twirled through a stand of string ties. They talked under their breath, examined a handcuff key. A dog and trainer glided through the racks of khaki shirts. I came out in pants that I had rolled up. I have always liked the stripe, that darker shade of blue, and the permanent crease that lets me fold everything back into the shape it started with. The clerk soaped the altered cuffs. In the dressing room, I stood there in the dark, my new clothes folding themselves into neat piles. I listened to the damped voices of the men outside, the dog whining, then yawning, and scratching, panting outside the door. The clerk made out the bill, punched the register. I had clothes for every weather and season, a week of shirts and calf-length socks. Shoes. At last he handed on the key chain and the repellent in its shiny case. “To keep the boys away,” he said. I smiled and thanked him, poised over the charge slip ready for the total. I knew it would take at least two trips out and back to the car to load the uniforms.

The mural above the postmaster’s door in the lobby is being restored to the way it looked when it was painted during the Depression. Scaffolding hides most of it now. The painters move deliberately in the rigging, scooting on their backs or stomachs. It seems to me they are too close to the work. The mural is about the guide dogs. The dogs are marching, leading a parade of blind workers. In the background are ghostly Saint Bernards, Border collies, and bloodhounds, all the working dogs working. The sky rolls with clouds, the rolling hills gesture like a cursive hand. The road they walk is like a signature, too. The painter signed his name in braille, the code of bumps shaded to make it look raised on the flat wall.

In the lobby, the county association for the blind runs the news concession selling candy bars and newspapers, stationery supplies and maps of the city’s streets. They let Mabel, who mans the stand, smoke behind the counter. Her dog, a black Lab, curls around the stool, the stiff lead angling upward like a harpoon. Mabel’s eyes are a kind of nougat. She never wears glasses. Smoking artlessly, she picks the tobacco off her tongue. It stays on her moist fingers.

My final job of the day is to clear sidewalk boxes outside the station in time to make the last dispatch. She hears me blowing through the lobby with the carton filled mainly with the metered mail in bundles.

“I always know it’s you,” she says. “You walk on your toes. I can’t smell you.” She feels her watch on her wrist. “Same time every day, too.” I run through the lobby to the back with the mail. On my way out again, I stand by her stand untucking my shirt, letting myself cool down.

After weeks of this routine I say to her without thinking, “You’re the only blind person I know.” It isn’t that she looks at me, of course. The dog on the floor does look up. She pauses and cocks her head.

“You can see, can’t you?” She waits for me to answer yes, begins the elaborate ritual of lighting another cigarette. “I don’t know too many blind people either. It’s not like we run in packs.”

The Postal Service has a secret. There is only one key that opens everything. It only makes sense. We can’t be walking around with a ring of keys for all we have to open. The banks of boxes in apartment lobbies open at once with the key. The corner collection boxes. The green relay boxes. The padlocks we use. The box at the end of the glass chute between the elevators in the old hotels. Same key. In that way a substitute on the route already has all the keys needed. One key.

I guess it is not much of a secret. If you worked for the post office you know, or if you even thought about it some, you could guess. There it is at the end of that long chain. One key.

They make a big deal about the key at the office. Do Not Duplicate is stamped on it twice. I find I am always fingering the key, my hand in the pocket with it as I walk. In cross section it has an S shape. It has several deepening grooves and bristles with teeth. I want it not only to open up the boxes of the post office but to turn in every lock, a true skeleton key, opening all the houses on my route. Inside I could arrange the mail further, piles for each family member, on the marble mantel or the little table by the door. As it is, I find myself looking into houses through the mail slot, holding up the brass flap to see the slice of floor and the envelopes and flyers splayed out randomly there. I feel the cool air rush out in the summer. Adjusting my line of sight, I can see walls of framed pictures of grown children who send the postcards I’ve read from all the islands, the color envelopes thick with pictures of grandkids. Clocks hang on the walls. Coats on racks. And sometimes one of the dogs — I’ve heard it bark in the back of the house — will come clicking on the linoleum. Huffing around the corner of the entry hall, he is ready to blow the door down from the inside. A snarl and chomp. The flap on the mail slot is already back in place. That’s when that black nose points through the door, the nostrils blinking, opening and closing, trying to take in all the smells of me. The fear, the loneliness, my own secret combination of nerves.

Years after the trained dogs leave this city, after they’ve grown old and blind, their owners bring them back. They trade them in and leave with new dogs.

I’m out at the airport picking up the orange bags of overnight mail when a dog and its owner will come limping across the tarmac. One of the props of the plane they flew in on still revs while the little trucks, run on propane, weave around with baggage and fuel. The dog and the man were the last down the metal stairway, led by an attendant to the terminal. The dog’s muzzle is white. Its tongue is out, slipping off to the side of its mouth. There is no color left in the clog’s eyes. The clog’s almost blind. Its head is down. The shoulders roll. Someone from the school meets them. They wait in the van as the luggage is stowed. I can see the dog’s head for a second next to its owner. It shakes itself and collapses beneath the window.

And I sometimes read the notes on the postcards they write home while they are waiting for their new dogs, postcards of the school, a color photograph of a German shepherd at attention rigged out and ready to go. The notes are about Spike or Lady, how the dog took the flight, how the dog is off its food, how the dog seems to remember this place. The writing is little and cramped or big as if magnified. The ink smears on the coated glossy stock of the card. They always love the town, the children on the street. The new dog will take some getting used to. “Buster is making new friends with all the retired pooches.” On and on. It’s too much to bear. I read these cards and think of losing them someplace or sending them out on the wrong dispatch. They are so sad, I don’t want them sent. By the time they make it home, the writer will have returned to his or her life. “Oh that. I’d forgotten I’d sent it. It’s just what I told you.”

I read these cards in the new white trucks with the right-handed drive and no windows in the back. You have to use the mirrors to see, and everything is distorted.

My family never write but call. My mail is window mail, stamped with the odd denominations of the definitive issues, the transportation series. Each stamp is a special class. Every one’s soliciting. The stamps depict all these obsolete forms of movement. Canal boats, milk wagons, stagecoaches, pushcarts, carretas, railroad mail cars, a wheelchair with hand-cranked transmission. Bulk rates, presorted, ZIP-plus-4 discounting, carrier route sorting. When it isn’t bills, it is charity, nonprofit dunning. Tandem bicycles, steamships, dogsleds. I read my name through the plastic window on the envelope. I try not to imagine what lists I am on, what those lists say about me. My family call when they have to with important family news. “The mail takes too long to get there,” they say. I am too far away to do anything with the news I get. I sign a sympathy note or write a check during the commercials on TV.

I get other calls in the evening or in the morning as I am dressing for work. I answer, and there is silence on the line for a second or two, then the disconnection. This happens often. I shout hello, hello into the static. I can’t seem to not answer the telephone. You never know. It could be news. For a while I just picked up the phone without saying a word, listened hard to the silence and then the line going dead. I have to sort my route first thing in the morning. I go to bed early. In the dark the phone rings. I let it ring for a long time. When I answer it, there is that moment of silence and that soft click. Just checking. Just checking. There is nothing to be done. I leave the phone off the hook and wait through the warning alarms of the phone company, the recorded message telling me to replace the phone in its cradle. And then even that gives up.

I have a screened-in porch, and in the summer I sit on the swing as the neighborhood gets dark. With the light out, the kids who come through collecting for newspapers, cookies, band uniforms, birth defects can’t see me through the gray mesh. I stop rocking. They rattle the screen door and peer in. Their dogs are circling in the quiet street. Positioning themselves at the foot of the dying oak trees, they crane to look up at the roosting starlings. I let the kids wonder for a bit if I am home, then I go to answer the door. It gets darker. The streetlights come on. The wheezing birds wind down, and the locusts begin to saw. Across the street the lawn sprinklers start up, and the water pools in the street, a syrup on the blacktop. The bug traps sizzle, the blue light breaking into a cloud of sparks. Mosquitoes aren’t attracted to the light. I know at least one is on the porch hanging in the still air, sniffing out the heat I’m giving off. Shadows of cats shoot under a parked car. A blind man comes up the street with a new dog. He is talking to the dog. Commands, encouragements, suggestions all below my hearing. I can just make out the gist of things, the cooing and the nicker. A few paces back a trainer from the school walks in the wet grass, skips over the concrete walks. He turns all the way around as he tags along, making sure no one is following.

Once a month the magazines arrive and the clerks will break into a few copies, never from the same address, leaving them scattered on the tables in the break room. After a few days they put the handled magazines in shrink-wrapped bags labeled with a form. Checked explanations for the condition of the enclosed: Destroyed on conveyor. Fire damaged. Automatic equipment error. And sometimes someone will go the extra distance, tear a few pages, pour on some liquid smoke. Customers suspect. They always suspect. I am stopped on the street, asked about the handling codes stamped on the back of the envelope. A C6 floats in the sky of a sunset on a card from Florida. And NB in red tumbles into it. What’s this? The bar code embossed beneath the address like stitches closing an incision. “You read the mail, don’t you?” I’m told. “I don’t have time.” I try to explain. “Things get lost. Overlooked,” I tell them.

The men at the station like to think they are the first in town to see the pictures in the magazines. One will turn the pages when the other two have said they are through. Their free hands are wrapped around the steaming coffee cups, as their heads float from one cluster of pictures to the other. I’m stuck with the cover girl. I look for the hidden rabbit’s head. This time a tattoo. It could be the run in her stocking. The inky smell of the aftershave ads leaks into the room. Business return cards collect on the floor by their feet. They’ll forget after a while that I am watching them. Forget to whoop and point. They’ll forget to turn the magazine my way, holding it like grade school teachers do when they read to the class. They’ll forget, and their eyes will skip and flutter over the pages, the beams crossing and focusing. At last their eyes will be the only movement.

The dogs who don’t guide, the pets, the ones too friendly, who can’t refrain from jumping up and licking your face, the surly ones broken when they were puppies. We all have our routes. The dogs shuffling through each stop read the streets and hedges and utility poles. These dogs know when something is new. The trash can, the parked car, breaks up the picture in their heads. River pilots and the river. Their noses scour out a new channel, revise the map they carry in their bones. They pull their owners along the cluttered streets. These dogs see through their memory.

I hate to surprise an unleashed dog while he’s intent on his rounds. I turn down an alley. A mutt is snapping at a pair of cabbage butterflies. His muzzle draws little circles in the air, tracking the flitting white wings. His eyes are crossed. I can hear his teeth snip. The butterflies are like a whirlwind, scraps of alley paper. Now they tumble around the dog’s body, and the dog begins to turn back on his tail, his wagging, until he dives into his own fur on his flanks, collapses and rolls, barks and paws at the insects hovering above his belly. Then, upside down, he sees me watching him. Instantly he is on his feet, pivoting on his nose. His eyes never leave mine. He is growling but backing up. His embarrassment is human, shuffling his feet, clearing his throat. He shrugs his shoulders, scratches his ear, then changes the subject, woofing right at me. I have the repellent out of its case. My arm is straight out, and I am aiming for the eyes. The dog circles, barking, trying to convince the backyards that he knew all along I was there. He takes a few steps closer, the skin on his face tight and his body rigid. It frightens me that I can read him so easily, how the gestures of people inform his every move. But still, I don’t know dogs. There is no way for me to enter into his thinking, foolish of me for even thinking, at this moment, that there is a way to explain everything, a way to connect. I think of the spritz of chemical, its sting. I think of the one cord of muscle in my forearm used only when I squeeze the trigger or beat an egg. And just then the dog’s eyebrows arch and his jaw relaxes and he starts to pant, a kind of laugh.

Now that the mural in the lobby of the office has been restored, it is much harder to see the dogs, the blind workers. It’s as if they bleached the images away. The phantom working dogs have disappeared into the background of sky and clouds now all blended into a hazy yellow soup. Perhaps the paints were cheap during the Depression, unstable out of the tube. Or maybe the restorers didn’t know when to quit stripping off age and went under into the rough sketch, the outlines, the patches of mixed paint. The workers seem less uniform but more tubercular. They find their own way. The dogs they hold on to now look hairless. I think it’s a shame, but that’s just because I knew the mural before. If I’m here long enough, I’ll have to get used to it the way it is. I’ll forget the old painting, the gray dust the marching kicked up in the picture and the dust itself layered on the painting like shellac.

I almost tell Mabel about the new painting, but I think better of it. Her booth was built in the fifties. It looks like a wrecked spaceship in the marble lobby. Blond wood, goose-necked metal lamps, streamlined steel cash register. The aluminum dashboard candy rack is enamel-plated with the names of extinct brands. I hear the physical plant people talk on break about her concession. What to do with Mabel is the problem. She sits behind the counter touching piles of different things, tightening stacks of bubble gum, riffling town maps. After a while she’ll reach down and touch her dog on the floor.

During the Depression drifters would scrawl messages on light poles indicating what houses to touch for lunch. There would be arrows on the sidewalks, a soaped Xon the brick by the mailbox. So I’ve heard. Now I just see the kids’ games boxed out in colored chalk or maybe a name scraped on the sidewalk with a quartz rock from a gravel drive. I never walk on them and they last.

It’s a sad town. The kids are always giving up their dogs. Their mothers give them Popsicles, and they sit quietly together on the porch gliders, pick at the unraveling strands of the wicker furniture.

“Hey, Mailman Lady,” one of them says. “My dog left.” What can you say?

I say, “I don’t know too much about dogs.”

The kid says almost at the same time, “He went to help a blind person.”

“Well, you’ve got to be happy about that, right?”

“I guess.”

It goes on this way, a cycle of mourning visiting most houses on my route. In the summer, the child, collapsed on the lawn, stares up at the sky. In the winter, he is chewing snow. The kids get new dogs soon, but it is a chronic ache like a stone in my shoes.

On the corner I take out the one key to open a relay box. Inside, the bundles of mail have been delivered to me for the last leg of my route. I try not to think about the messages I am delivering. I file the mail into my cart, stand in a forest of telephone poles, streetlights, fire alarms, police call boxes. The square is crawling with dogs.

The dogs find ways through the crowded streets. They don’t stop when children pet them. They ignore each other. They don’t see me. They don’t bark. They keep going.

Outside Peru

I was cutting the alfalfa with the H when two A-IOS skimmed over my head low enough for me to feel the heat from the exhaust.

The H is a tractor. It’s red and the first one McCormick streamlined so that the radiator hood looks like a melting ice cube, a charging locomotive, a bullet. The A-10 is an attack aircraft with stubby square wings, a forked tail, and two huge fan-jets stuck on the rear of the fuselage. That day, they were painted five shades of green, a northern European camouflage of pine and lichens. Over the years I’ve watched the patterns and the colors on the planes mutate — the iridescent splashes of tropic jungles to Near Eastern sand studded with yellow rock, a white tundra splotched with brown. The designs advertise the way trouble grazes around the globe. My cows are always spooked by the flybys. I saw them scatter off the rise in the clover field next to the one I was cutting, angling for the electric fence it took me that morning to string.

The jets are pretty quiet to begin with, and the H chugs a bit when I use the power takeoff. The breeze I was heading into stripped the sound away. The jets cracked over my head at the same time the air they pushed in front of them slammed against my back. And then the fans whined. The engines reared back like they were hawking spit. I had been a target. The planes are weapons platforms built to kill tanks. They are slow, haul a huge payload of ordnance, can hang over a battlefield like a kite. The pilots wobbled their wings. I could see the control surfaces, the rudders flex, the flaps and the leading edges extended on the blunt wings. They were on the threshold of stalling. Then they broke apart from each other, one going left, the other right, and banked around the cornfield in front of me, meeting up again at the grove of trees near the section road. Without climbing, they tucked in together, the wing of one notched into the waist of the other, nosed over the horizon heading back to Grissom. I let the clutch out again on the tractor, and the sickle mower, a long wing sweeping off to my right, bit into the alfalfa collapsing it into windrows. I nudged the throttle. The engine gulped and caught up with itself. The first cutting, rich, green, and leafy. I settled back to work. Soon, I felt like I was flying myself, sailing at treetop level.

The first calf since I came back to the farm, I named Amelia. With another chance to farm, I was going to do everything right this time. Mom dug out the herd book they kept when I was a boy, the records skidding to a stop around the time all of us kids were in high school. I remember some of those cows. They clouded the barn. Those winters in high school I came home late and stayed up for the milking in the steaming barn. I sat there in the dark, smoking, the radio tuned to WOWO. The cows, heaps in each stanchion, waited for my father to come into the milk house and turn on the vacuum. The herd book has silhouettes of cows, outlines of heads, all scored over with a grid to map the markings. We’ve always raised Holsteins. The black and white looks best on new grass. I looked at the sketches my mom had made back then. There was Amy with the blob on her shoulder. The crooked man spilling down Apple’s flank. As I looked at the old book, I sat down next to the hutch I had just made for the new calves. I flipped through the spiral book to an unmarked silhouette. The new calf’s tongue wrapped around the woven fence. She was mostly white except for a spray of black dime-sized spots along the ridge of her right hip and dwindling back down her thigh. Ringing her neck, another chain of black islands aimed toward her eye. There was this ocean of pure milk, white between the black markings. And I stared at her for a long time after charting those few patches. I thought Amelia would be a good name. An A since she was Apple’s calf. And an A for Amelia Earhart, the flyer, lost between archipelagos, at sea.

We had just moved to this farm, I was eight, when the plane buried itself in the big field next to the road. The field was planted to corn that year, and the corn had tasseled. A silver F-86 flamed out on takeoff, the pilot ejected, and the plane arched over and swooped down onto our farm. It disintegrated as it plowed up the field, scorching the ground, flattening the corn, and spraying fragments of the airframe along its path. It came to rest in the ditch looking like an exploded cigar, the engine ashy beneath the peeled aluminum skin. The swath it had cut through the corn was a precise vector pointing back to the base. Disking the field this spring I turned over more pieces from the crash, a bit of fused Plexiglas, part of a shock absorber, the casing of a running light. I threw them in the toolbox of the 20 we use to plow and brought the finds back to the shed, to my dad, who keeps all his scrap. The pile in the back corner looks like a reconstruction of a dinosaur, the whole imagined from a few bits. The wingtip, dented and discolored, resting on the floor far away from the main wreckage of bones, implies the missing wing. Dad has suspended a panel of the vertical stabilizer from the beam of the shed. It twists there, unconnected, could prove the rotation of the earth. The first time we went into Peru after the crash I found a plastic model of the jet at the hobby store. I put it together quickly, then with a soldering iron melted off the wings and canopy, trying to sculpt the ruin in the field. For a long while the whole incident felt heroic. The pilot had chosen our farm to ditch into. I reasoned that from the air our dusty road must have looked like an emergency runway. Later I realized that the pilot hadn’t thought twice about it. As he pulled the shield over his face triggering the ejection seat, he believed that no one was down there, his ship would fall into the green uninhabited place on his charts.

Early in the morning, waiting to milk, I’ve always looked up at the night sky. There are no city lights washing out the view. I watch the falling stars and the meteor showers. I can see a few satellites streak by and below them the puttering airliners. I think to myself, a kind of homing beacon. Here I am, here I am, come and get me.

My father has offered money for a tractor tire someone was using for a sandbox. He scavenges. It’s the only way we could farm these eighty acres. We are surrounded by corn this year. To the west and north, the land is owned by an Italian industrialist. To the east and south an insurance company, a thousand acres each. Beyond that, I’m not sure anymore, an incorporated family, rented parcels, more insurance companies. From the air our little grove of trees and the spread of buildings and the strips of grass and small grain stitched together with threads of muddy lanes must look like the center of a dartboard encircled by the alternating eight-row stripes of corn. The bull’s-eye would be Wilbur, our bull, lolling in the pen next to the red barn. We can keep this place because my dad never throws anything away and never buys anything new. “You never know,” he says, “you never know.” Under the old cottonwood trees he has parked the remains of 20s and H’s we’ve cannibalized, and there are all the implements we’ll ever need — the manure spreaders, the balers with crates of twine, the Deere two-row planters and the corn picker that fits like fake glasses and a nose on the brow of the tractor. Wagons with bang boards, disks and harrows, a rusting mower conditioner, even a sulky plow, though Dad says he never liked horses. People pay him to haul the stuff away. Now that I am home he has more time to scout around. I do both the milkings. His knees are shot. He walks like he’s been dropped from altitude, and his legs look shoved up into his body. They fall straight from his shoulders. We make do with this junk we’ve got. They can’t touch us as long as we don’t long for things we don’t need. As long as we don’t desire to live in the outside world.

I told my mother about the jets zeroing in on me because I knew it would remind her of the summer the red-winged blackbirds buzzed her as she mowed the alleys in her orchard. She wears a baseball hat now while tracing compulsory figures around the apple trees on the Toro. She hates to see my dad go into town because each way has its own junkyard or flea market. Once he came back in a new old pickup hauling a new trailer carrying the old Continental he was driving when he left.

I went to Purdue and majored in ice cream. The food labs I worked in were vast expanses of tooth-colored tile with eruptions of sparkling stainless and nickel chrome appliances spaced about the room. I wore white smocks and paper hats and wrote papers on stabilizing fruit ribbons and fudge swirls. In the gleaming kitchens, I was a long way from the wreckage of our farm. The milk too had been transformed into something else. I thought of ice cream as milk raised up to a pure art form. There was quarried butter fat to dabble on a palette of ingredients — exotic nuts and berries, fragrances shipped to us in plastic tubs, extracts of roots and seedpods, raisins soaked in rum so they wouldn’t freeze. I worked in the Union’s snack bar too, waiting for pharmacy students to sample all the flavors. They stood there, deep in thought, licking the wooden spoons. I scooped up double scoops for couples who couldn’t decide and crossed their cones like they were interviewing each other about the taste. Professors’ kids ordered bubble gum, embarrassing their parents, who predicted the disasters just as the first dips cascaded to the floor.

Every spring, back on the farm, the barn swallows build their nests in the same places in the rafters. About the time we turned the cows out after a winter inside the barn, the swallows swooped through the top of the Dutch door, jinking around the post and leveling out just under the mow floor, stirring the cirrus clouds of cobwebs. Then they peel off, flapping their wings once, back out the door. I am scraping the shit into the gutters and plowing it toward the far door to shovel into the spreader. The yard is already mud, the cows mired, moo, their skins twitching and ears flapping. The swallows shoot in and out, daubing the beams with mud and straw. There will be one nest right over the stanchion of Jean, whose black back weathers the summer of droppings from above as if her coat is wearing away.

My parents thought I’d never come home.

If you farm a dairy, you can never get away. That is, if you are milking cows, you have to be on the farm all the time. Milking is twice a day. When I first came back to the farm after quitting school, I tried milking three times a day to increase the yield. Slowly, I broke the herd’s habits. The production fell way off. That’s to be expected. There was nothing scientific in my methods. I weighed the cans before I poured the milk into the holding tank and marked a piece of scrap paper with the pounds of each. If I had the time between the milkings, I’d draw a line to connect the dots on my rude chart. It looked like a cardiograph. Molly came on in the afternoon, when Clover was falling off. Amy made a sawtooth pattern, like she was singing scales. The vacuum pumps breathed all the time. I was inside the heartbeat of the barn. And I’d hear the cows’ big heartbeats through their sides as I rested my head against them, hooking up the claws. Over time, the weight came back up. I could feel it in the cans as I lugged them up the alley. They got used to the new routine, the extra scoop of sweet oats. But I gave it up. I was milking all the time. When I had a chance to sleep, I dreamed of the purple iodine dip I used to disinfect the teats. My whole body was stained. I fell asleep twitching, dreaming about the wet warm muck of the brown paper towels I used to massage the bags to get them to let down.

Now that I am on the farm working, I don’t like to ask my dad to do the chores. His knees are bad from the stooping he did all his life. But sometimes I have to get away. I like to take the Continental into Peru. It is the same blue-black topless model that Kennedy was riding in when he was shot. It has the backward-opening suicide doors. I nose into the line of hot rods cruising in downtown Peru and imagine those rear doors popped out, scooping up a bystander off the street into the backseat, surprised but ready to go. Instead, the high school kids always say my car turns the loop into a funeral procession. Watching from the parking lot of the Come N Go, they see the Zapruder film. A creepy car. I am too old for this anyway. I end up buying some cigarettes for my dad and then point the endless hood of the car back to the farm and get home in time to muck out the stalls.

Those nights after I’ve come back home from those silly trips to town, I hear my parents worrying about me. Their whispers come up to my bedroom through a floor grate there to conduct the heat. I never heard words but sighs that have nothing to do with passion. My mother never changed my room when I went away to school. All the silver model airplanes are still tethered to the light fixture on the ceiling with yellow, rotting string. I never had enough patience to paint them. The glue on my fingers had fogged the clear plastic canopies. The decals are dry and peeling. The planes twist above me, in that rising updraft of worry, like compass needles looking for a true north. On the walls are posters of prize-winning 4-H cows. Behind the planes, they look like a backdrop of clouds, billowing thunderheads, dappled skies. In those pictures, the cows are posed with their front legs resting on little hills that are covered over with turf. They are supposed to look more beautiful elevated slightly like that. But I always think the step-up hill takes away from the picture no matter how artfully it is hidden. I hung up my sketches of the new calves. I ripped them from the herd book. In the shadows, they could be mechanical drawings of camouflaged transport planes. My mother taped up the drawing Annie did when she visited the farm, the butt ends of the herd in a row of stalls at milking time, their pinbones forming a range of snowcapped mountains.

That night after the planes buzzed me in the alfalfa field, I asked my parents if I could go into town. I called them from Peru, from the phone booth in the parking lot of the Come N Go. Pilots from the base still in their green nylon flight suits, perhaps the ones who flew over me that day, got into the midnight blue van. A National Guard unit on maneuvers. The four of them had Popsicles. I told my mom I thought I’d head on down to Purdue, maybe stay a night.

“Whatever,” she said. She wrote down the feeding instructions I gave her for Dad to use. I told her who the vet had treated for mastitis. Her milk would go to the calves and cats.

I said, “I hope this isn’t too much trouble.” Moths were batting at the light in the booth, so I opened the door to turn it off. I heard the sound of jets taking off over at the base, a sound like ripping cloth.

“You know your father likes to keep his hand in. I’ll keep him company.” I could see her that night. She would tune the radio to one of those magic stations where the songs have no words and then spread the lime thicker than I do in the alleyway. When I got back it would look like it had snowed inside the barn.

“Say hello to Annie for us,” she said.

I brought Annie home to the farm once for a weekend when we were both in school. She was from the Region, in northern Indiana, and had never been on a farm. I went up to Hobart once with her, back then, and she took me to the dunes. We stared at Lake Michigan. I remember it looked like it could be farmed, flat and dusty. We huddled on some riprap and saw the lights of Chicago flare up where the sun set. It is the only body of water I’ve been to where I couldn’t see the shore on the other side, and it scared me. Annie said she felt the same way walking the lanes around the farm. The land just seemed to go on forever.

“When I was a kid my mother told me to not go near the corn,” I told her. In the late summer you can get lost in it and panic. It swallows you up.

The weekend she visited the farm, I helped Dad clear out some scrap wood piled next to the barn. We all stood around while he decided what to move where. My mother teased Annie about the rats that would be hiding underneath the lumber.

“Stick your pant legs inside your boots, Annie,” she said. “They’ll go right up your leg. It looks like a burrow to them.”

Dad jiggled a two-by-four. I stood back a ways with a pitchfork. Annie curled over and stuffed her jeans inside her boots neatly. She did this straight-legged like she was stretching before a morning jog, her hair falling over her head. The rat broke out from beneath some barn wood and window frames, parting the dried grass, faking first toward my father, who tried to club it with a stick, then me, then my mother, who was stomping, but then it angled straight toward Annie as if it had heard my mother’s prediction. Annie stood perfectly still, her legs pressed together. I saw her shiver. The rat spun around toward me, standing between it and the woodpile. I pulled the fork back above my shoulders aiming at it as it sliced through the grass. I hesitated because I didn’t really want to kill it in front of Annie. The rat should have been killed. Its burrow was beneath the grain bin. I just couldn’t be gleeful about it. My mother was squealing. I sensed Dad lumbering toward me, thrilled by the chase. Annie stood like a post, as if she had rammed her boots into the ground when she had taken care of her cuffs. Her face was pale and blank. At my feet, I could see how fat the rat was, how sleek and brown, like a bubble of earth was squeezing along under the dead grass. Then, surrounded, the rat stopped dead still. And then, it jumped. It took off straight up, reaching the peak of its climb at my eye level, where we looked at each other. It hung there it seemed for a long time. The rat’s little legs were stretched out as if they were wings. It flashed its teeth then ducked its head and dove through my hands. I was twirling the pitchfork like a propeller, trying to find a way to bring the tines or the handle around to defend myself. I yelled. The rat disappeared again in the junk by the barn. We all stood there panting, clouds of dust wound round our faces. Our eyes were fixed on the spot in the air where the rat had hovered between us. I couldn’t get Annie to come into focus again. She was a blur a few paces beyond the clear empty space.

That night, Annie and I sat on the couch pretending to watch television. I turned the sound down low so I could hear my dad snoring, the sound drifting through the registers from the room next door. The lights were off. Annie’s white shirt turned blue in the flicker of the television. I tugged at her shirt, untucking it from her pants the way she had pulled her pant legs from her boots after the rat had disappeared and we all walked back to the house for dinner. As we kissed, I slid my hand up inside her shirt and covered her left breast. Then, my hands weren’t as hard as they were when I lived and worked at home. The only callus left was on my thumb, worn there by the trigger of the ice cream scoop. I rolled the nipple between my fingers and thumb. Even then I couldn’t help but think what she was thinking. Just that day she had watched me strip the milk from the cow’s tits. I’d wrapped my hand around her hands as she squeezed and pulled on the udders. Self-conscious, I traced a circle around her nipple a few times not to seem abrupt, then ran my hand over her ribs and let it fall on the flair of her hip. She shivered and turned her head away.

“What?’ I said.

“Your nails,” she said. “That rat.”

This all happened a while ago. It has been two years now since I’ve seen her.

The road to Purdue follows the remains of the old Wabash Canal. In some places the ditch is dry and leafy. In other places, black water has pooled, steeping logs slick with green slime. The towpath bristles with saplings and a ground fog of wild berry canes. Through the sycamores, sometimes, you can see the river itself, green from the tea of rotting leaves. Once, it had been important to hook the Great Lakes up with the Ohio and the Mississippi. The state went broke doing it. To the north is good farmland, a flat table leveled by the glaciers, but along the river the road rolls over the rubble of what they have left behind.

In the low-slung Continental, I was flying. The car leapt off the crests of the rolling hills, then settled again, the mushy shocks lunging with the revving engine. It was still early, though most people were already in bed. The security lamps in the farmyards and small towns draped streaks of light along the long hood like straps of wet paper. In fields beside the road, I saw the hulks of lulling cattle, the debris of herds scattered around like boulders in the glacial till these pastures are built on. The car couldn’t go fast enough to escape the gravity of the farm. I thought of my own herd drifting through the clover after Dad had turned them out. All their markings bleed together in the dark so that they become these lunky shadows, blotting out the stars rising behind them. I had raked the alfalfa in the neighboring field into wiggling windrows. The stink of the drying leaves hugs the ground and levels it again with a thick mist, the lightning bugs rising to its surface. For a second, my hands are on the yoke in the cockpit of the matte jet buzzing that field. The cows shimmer in the infrared goggles like hot coals in a pool of oil. The mown field pulses, smoldering with the heat of its own curing. The insects bubble through the haze to sparkle in the air. And I am looking down at myself sitting on the molten tractor, smoking, inhaling the fire of my fingertips, my sweat turning to light. I snapped out of the barrel roll, honked the horn twice, and coasted down the hill into Lafayette.

I got lost in the court of tin shacks where Annie lives, turned around on the rutted, dusty roads in the dark. Somewhere, she rented a half of one of the Quonset huts the university put up during the war and never tore down. Any effort to remove them brings howls of protest from sentimental alumni who remember conceiving their first children in one barrack or another, and the university administration loses interest in renovation. It is cheap housing, a place to store the international students who grow strange grains and vegetables in the empty plots that open up randomly in the court. The spaces mark where a shack has blown up, a yearly occurrence, torched by a malfunctioning gas heater, furnace, or range. The shacks all look alike, though some are decorated with flower boxes rigged by this term’s inmate. Bikes nose together in the long grass up against the corrugated siding of the houses. The galvanized metal of the buildings has oxidized over time, so now it has a finish akin to leather, grained and dull. I crept through the rows of shacks looking for the right number.

I had called her too. Her directions were highly detailed but useless to me since I didn’t know this place intimately enough to see the details. They were camouflaged by the repetition of forms. I was lost in a neighborhood of Monopoly houses. I only found her because she was sitting on the stoop outside her house watching for the car. When she saw me skittering along the cross street, she stood up and waved her arms over her head and whistled.

“The house is like an oven,” she told me. “I was an idiot to cook.” She had put on macaroni and cheese when she heard I was coming, and we ate sitting on the front stoop, our bowls balanced on our squeezed together knees. I could feel the heat on my back as it poured out the screen door. There were clouds of bugs shading the streetlights. Every once in a while another car, looking lost, would shuffle down the street dragging the dust behind it.

We talked. I did say hello from my parents. Annie had been working this summer as an illustrator for the veterinary college, rendering organs, muscles, and bones of various domesticated animals. We set our bowls aside, and she brought out several drawings, turning on the porch light as she stepped through the door. She handed me a bone the size of a rolled up Sunday’s newspaper.

“A cow’s femur,” she said. I was never much for the insides of things. I was raised on a farm and should be comfortable with the guts of animals. My father delights in eating the brains and hearts and tongues. I have watched my mother wring the water from kidneys and roll the shiny liver in her hands. I think to myself that I should love, to the point of consuming, the whole animals I tend. Still, something sticks in my throat. When I moved back to the farm, I castrated the first bull calf born. I wanted to raise a steer and slaughter it myself. I named him Orville. He was docile and fat. He did dress out nicely when the time came, but I let the locker do it. I can’t get used to it. Sometimes during calving, a cow’s uterus will prolapse. I’ll find it spreading in the gutter behind her. I can tell myself I know what it is, I know what to do, but when I see guts it’s as if my guts are doing the thinking. I stop seeing the animal as a kind of a machine to scrap or fix. Even dairymen need a distance. Maybe especially dairymen.

“Do they still have the cow at the vet school with the window in her side?” I asked her. I would go over there between classes and make myself watch the regurgitating stomachs squeeze and stretch. The cow was alive, chewing her cud. A flap had been cut in her side for studying. I always admired her patience, the way she stood in the special stall letting the technician dab antiseptic around the opening.

“I don’t know if it is the same one you saw,” Annie said, “but they still have one. The elementary school science classes still are herded in to take a look. They want to not look but can’t help themselves.”

I could feel my stomach working under my skin, wrapping itself around the stringy elbow noodles, plumbing within plumbing. The bone was in the grass at our feet, weighing down the newsprint sheet with its unfinished sketch. She used a kind of stippling style, all points of ink that clustered into shadow for depth, so that the bone on paper looked worn and smooth as paper, porous as bone, chipped like the china bowls. The dots looked like a chain of volcanic islands on a map of a huge sea tracing the fault hidden under the water.

I told her about my own drawing, the sketches in the herd book. “I wish I had your eye,” I told her. Even with the coordinate grid, it was still so awkward transferring the markings to paper. “It’s just a mess. There are gray smears where I’ve erased. It looks like they have some kind of mange.”

“You like cows a lot though, don’t you?” she said then.

“Yeah, I guess I do. I guess I’d have to to do what I am doing.”

“But don’t you miss,” she said, “don’t you miss the noise of other people? I remember the farm being so quiet and how you never talked. I never knew what you were thinking.”

I sat there on the stoop in the yellow light of the bug bulb thinking about the farm and how I missed the cows, the green fields, and the piles of junk when I was here at school. I thought of the chatter of my own thoughts, how when I work I am always telling myself what I am doing. I am opening the gate now. I am walking into the barnyard. I am driving the cows into the lower field. My boots sinking into the kneaded mud of the yard.

“I love cows too,” she said. “The big eyes. The way they just stand there. You look away and then look back and they look like they haven’t moved but they have. The arrangement is all different.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s true.”

“It’s like drawing waves in a lake. The calm motion.” She shivered. “Spooky after a while.”

That night I slept in the front room on a couch that came with the place. The apartment had aired out with the windows and the doors propped open. Annie had tucked in white sheets around the cushions. The vault of the Quonset hut created a kind of organic cavity, and the ribbed walls were papered with her washes of organs and glands. The sink on the dividing wall between the two apartments gurgled when the neighbors came home. I stayed awake, listening to the rattle of their language that seemed pitched just right to start the sheet metal of the building buzzing. They played strange music that ratcheted up and down the walls like a thumbnail on a washboard. Later still, when they had disappeared deeper into their side of the building, I tried to imagine them. I gave them a family life, a routine, classes to take, diplomas they would haul back to the other side of the world, where they would wade in paddies, follow cattle along a packed earth road. And I thought of Annie too, on the other side of the inside wall. I hovered over her bed and watched her slowly rearrange herself, articulating arms, the white rollers breaking along the shore as she stretched a leg beneath the sheet, the tide of her breathing. How she used up every inch of space in her bed, asleep but constantly moving.

Before I left the next day, I wandered over to the Union and had some ice cream, chocolate, in a dish. Students were cutting through the building for a bit of air-conditioning before dashing on to the next classroom. Some would stop and buy a cone, stand and lick the ice cream smooth on all sides, manageable, before they rushed off. The Union is camouflaged with Tudor beams of darkly stained wood and stuccoed walls. I hadn’t remembered it being this much like a barn. Lumps of students sleeping in leather club chairs or single ones swaying in study carrels, reading, tucked in nooks behind squat square columns. I knew where the milk had come from to make the ice cream, but no longer remembered the origin of chocolate. South America? Peru? The other Peru? Which was the more exotic ingredient, the stranger place?

I drifted over to the library across the street from the Union. It was hot out, and I promised myself I would hang around the campus till the sun went down, then drive back home in the dark. When I was a student, I liked to look at the special collections the library had on flyers and airplanes. Neil Armstrong went to Purdue. A lot of astronauts did. I don’t know why. And the plane Amelia Earhart disappeared in was owned partly by the school. At the time she was a professor of aviation or something. There are pictures of her in her flying jacket and slacks having tea with women students. They crowd around her. I love the pictures of her posed with the silver Electra, poring over maps of the world in this very room of the library. The room seemed even more crowded now with trophy cases, photos, charts, and models. There were navigation instruments and facsimiles of her notes and letters. I looked at a milky white scarf arranged as if casually flung along the black velvet shelf encased in glass.

A librarian was typing labels in an office off the main room. Behind her there was a picture of the librarian receiving the school flag from two astronauts. It looked like the ceremony was taking place during the halfitime of a basketball game.

“The flag had just come back from the moon,” she told me. “I have it here someplace.”

I told her I was interested in Amelia Earhart’s time at Purdue. I like to think of her circling above the countryside, perhaps looking down on our farm. It isn’t that far away. I sat down at a polished table where she brought me an album stuffed with local news clippings, brittle and yellowed, pasted to the black pages.

“They found her, you know,” the librarian said. “They think they found her.”

“What?” I said.

“Or what remains of her,” she said, “on an island in the middle of nowhere. They found a navigators aluminum case washed up on an atoll. They’re going back this summer to find the plane and what’s left of the bones. They came here to look at the photos, to see if they could see that same case in one of the pictures.”

That night, I drove home with the top down on the Continental. I climbed and stalled and dove through the hills along the Wabash. The metal skin of the car was the color of the night and the road. I let myself lose track of what was what. All that was left was this little ellipse of upholstered light I sat in, gliding through space, adhering to the twisting white rails emitted by the low beams. Annie had sent her love to my parents, and I thought of it, her love, as a slick, gleaming, and, as yet, undocumented organ I was keeping right here in my silver navigator’s case. It had been easy, the librarian had said, to find the little island in the middle of the Pacific once the searchers guessed the slight miscalculation that led Amelia Earhart off her course. They followed the string of physics into the sea. As I drove, my cows drifted from the light of the barn, sifting through the gates and alleys to the highest part of the farm, the rise in the clover field, there to catch the slight stirring breeze. In their own way, they tell themselves what comes next. Wait, they say, and the next moment they say wait again. Me, I wanted right then to get lost on my way home in the middle of Indiana, but I knew, deep in my heart, that that was next to impossible.

Turning the Constellation

I try to see the stars through the rigging and the old reefed sails. The lights from Pratt Street bounce off the edge of the still water in the Inner Harbor. Beyond the pavilions of Harbor Place, downtown Baltimore steps back in terraced, floodlit cliffs with outcroppings of red neon logos. The light seems to steam off the buildings.

The soft pools of light from the paper Japanese lanterns strung above the deck spot the polished fir. Couples shuffle around the masts and hatches, keeping time with the brushed snare of the combo set up in the stern. Once, boys they called the powder monkeys smothered this deck with sand right before a battle so the bare feet of the crew could gain a purchase on the planking. It mentions this in the souvenir program of the evening. The old wood frigate must be turned each year so that she’ll last longer as a static display. They’ve made the maintenance into an event. Half of Baltimore is on the docks to see us shove off. We party on the deck while the crew casts away the lines. The tugs nose up against the sides of the ship. The launches taxi back and forth over the black water.

In the still water of the Inner Harbor, I think I see a sky full of stars. Then I remember that the bay is saltier this year, and the sea nettles and the Portuguese man-of-wars have been drawn into the estuary. Tonight, they give off their own phosphorescent light in a frequency below the sodium vapors coating the downtown. Shading my eyes, I can almost see into that sky of water as those stars wheel with us and turn on the high tide.

They shipped Nelson’s body home from Trafalgar in a cask of brandy. You say, “Byron’s too!” I wonder how it worked. Were the barrels big enough for the bodies to float? Or were they doubled over, embryos again, ingeniously folded as grape leaves in a jar? Our brandy sloshes around the sides of the snifters. We glide by the dark hulks of the submarine and the lightship at their slips. More museum ships. The water churns white from the bite of the tugs’ screws. The pilot boats sweep the deck with floodlight. The liquor catches and then shatters it. Bright jewels bob above your cupped hand.

It is close below on the gun deck. A few naked bulbs patch together some light. In the shadows the sleeping hammocks strung between the beams look like ancient cobwebs. The rose odor of gasoline drifts up from a few decks below, where the generators rasp away, and beneath that the bilge pumps pant. We dance a step or two. We’re not supposed to be here, but the empty deck looks like an old ballroom. Only the masts break up the space. Above our heads the upright bass sends a beat into the timber, and the whole ship seems to resonate. We are dancing in the guts of a guitar, the sound, all around us. “What a fine coffin,” you say.

A soggy breeze laps at us as we look out of an open gun port. We’re closing on the Domino Sugars sign, which, from this angle, looks like a city burning on a hill. Sliding my hand along the lip of the loop, I lodge a splinter in my finger. “Some sailor you are,” you say and hold my hand to your face. Your eyes cross, and you catch the tip of your tongue in your teeth. “It will wait until we get home,” you say. “I’ll have to use a needle.” The light from the burning sugar sign polishes the dollop of blood you’ve squeezed from the wound.

I am in retirement from retirement. I hope to forget what I did at Social Security all those years. I wrote letters. I listened to stories, a fiduciary chandler outfitting final voyages. I tended all those sputtering candles, a bank of votive lights. I reassigned the numbers when the checks came back unsigned. The computers there were as big as ships. And you teach composition to midshipmen down the bay. The literature of salt and Odysseus returning home each spring term. I imagine you looking out your office window, watching the sculls cut through the Severn and, out farther, the little sunfish stagger around a buoy in yet another race. This is our shipboard romance, not very important people among the other invited guests: the crooked politicians, the tarnished Navy brass, the Rouse Company execs and the doctors from Hopkins Hospital, the flush philanthropists, the car salesmen and restaurateurs, Evening Magazine, the odd Oriole signing starched white shirtfronts.

Imagine the wounds from the wood when it splintered in those broadsides. The double shot leaving the muzzle was slow enough to see, the trajectory as flat as a throw to the plate. The wood, elastic, shrugged off the balls but not before they chewed off a slice of pine or pulverized the oak, turning it into a kind of atmosphere the gun crews breathed in with the black ignited powder. You say this as you dig into my wounded finger with your nails. All this wood. England cut down every oak to smash them up at sea. You read about the endless voyages of wooden ships bound in books so thick they could stop a bullet. And there was the pulp my department floated on: the tractor-fed girdle of paper run through the printers, the newsprint barked with chips, and the legal pads laced with a dust of fibers as fine as the motes that float in the fluid inside your eyes.

I bought you a star. I used my Visa when the call came during dinner from a boiler room scam in Ohio. Thirty-five bucks. They sent a certificate and sky charts with the star, a speck of puny magnitude, highlighted with a yellow marker. I thought once out in the harbor away from the lights of the city we’d be able to see it ground beneath the heel of a twin. The charts are in my pocket. The zodiac all stitched together. I never was any good at seeing the tacked up hides of the old stories in the night sky, took other people’s word that they exist at all. Even the single drip of the North Star can’t lead me back to the Dipper. Or is it the jewel in the handle’s crook? I’ve always liked the shooting stars, the showers of sparks struck off the dome of heaven I can only catch in the corner of my eye. By the time I turn to look, the streak’s extinguished, so I’m not even sure it was there, a kind of memo that’s sent to the shredder. Look, there’s one now.

There. A red navigation light strobes on top of the old shot tower. The rest of the red brick is black in the night. It blots out the skyline behind it, a gap in a grin. We’ll have time now for all this history. I can see us climbing the spiral staircase like smoke in a chimney, up to the platform where they dropped the boiling lead, letting it fall into the vat of water six stories below, the hot rain freezing into hail. The cove and creek bottoms of the Eastern Shore are silted with shot that falls back to earth. The ducks scoop up the pellets for their gizzards. The lead that missed them on the wing kills them finally. And we’ll go next door to the Flag House, where the Star-Spangled Banner was pieced together. The ensign, big enough to wrap the little row house, clouded the rooms with bunting. The woman picked through the cloth as it crept over her lap. One white star dwarfed the whole front parlor. We’ll have to see it, the way the flag was folded into the house, another miracle of packing, like the whole sky tucked into my pocket or those bodies steeping in their kegs.

“What are you doing down here?” the Marine says. He jogs toward us, skipping over cables. He wears a bowler hat and a short green jacket. We’re not supposed to be below but up above with the party. We hear them hailing the little sailboats and inboards swarming alongside. The branch has widened here, and the channel is newly dredged. The boats wallow in the wake of the tugs. We follow the volunteer aft along the gun deck. He’s from Highlandtown, a jarhead in Korea. He draws a pension from Bethlehem. Now he mends his uniforms for the summer of reenactments. “The Civil War’s the war,” he says. “The encampment down at Manassas is near as big as the battle was.” He slips in and out of character. There is so much to save now, he thinks. He’s part of the industry of preservation. We watch you climb the open ladder up into the night. I remember you climbing back into the upper berth of the Pullman we took to Chicago. That silly ladder hooked into the loft. With the overhead lights off, we had slid the shade up and left on the one pale blue light near my bed. There was no way for you to be graceful, each rung forced you to splay your knees apart. The train rocked. You threw your body into the bed above me. Below, my vantage all screwy, you foreshortened, and your toes turned white on the last step. You floated into a heaven of webbed luggage while the porter felt for our shoes in the locker by the door. I don’t tell the Marine this, but follow you up to the main deck, my face in your skirts.

The traffic helicopters from the television stations seem to be caught in the yards of the foremost tops. The pennants there begin to stir as if the light from the helicopters’ swivel-ing spots drove the air. The choppers pivot on the beams shining down. Their long, tapering tails stir around. Miss Ethel Ennis is singing a jazzed up version of the national anthem with the fort just off the starboard, and the guests can’t make up their minds if this rendition counts enough to settle down and salute. There is champagne with cold soft crab sandwiches. The Governor takes a turn at the helm, spinning the unconnected wheel after a brief toast. The cameras in the helicopters never stop moving. The lights on the deck spin beneath them. Watching the news tomorrow, we’ll be hungover enough to forget how to see, how to make the cameras pan. Instead the ship will roll and yaw, the masts raking at us dodging the streams of light.

Most of the dignitaries have been piped off the ship, sailing away in a fleet of speedboats toward Fells Point. We’ve talked the crew into letting us stow away to wait with them for the morning tide and the ride back to port. The band is packing up on the quarterdeck. The bass player, in shadow, wrestles the body of his instrument into the case. We watch the caterers break down the tables, snitch swipes of crab salad on crackers before it turns in the heat. The Constellation will ride the night out here in the bay with its skeleton crew. She’ll head in tomorrow with the tide, to her berth, her bowsprit now poking in toward the upper windows of the shopping mall she poses next to. She’ll weather more evenly, the Marine had said, the weather hitting her like a slower broadside. We watch the divers in the dark water. Their heads tip forward. They disappear together. They are inspecting the hull. Blind, they feel along the keel and try to imagine what has cemented itself to the old copper sheets below the waterline. We wait for the divers to surface, their black rubber suits shedding the light of the full moon, an oily sheen. We try to guess where they’ll appear in the black water, but they never do.

I say, “A friend of mine died, and he had always wanted to be buried from his boat, wrapped in a sail and tipped overboard into the bay. His will charged a group of us with handling the details. So we looked into it. We thought it would be simple, a few pieces of paper. But the state of Maryland requires a crypt with the coffin, a big concrete vault that would have sunk his little boat if we even could have gotten it onboard. We thought of hiring a dredge with enough room for the casket and its casket, and we realized the estate would be eaten up by the costs. The body still had to be embalmed, permits obtained for dumping chemicals into the water. So, on a night like this, we wrapped the body up in canvas and lead sinkers and sailed out to the ship channel, where the tankers rode at anchor as they waited for a chance to dock, and dropped him in the deepest water we could find inside the Bay Bridge. We buried the empty casket in a crypt in a cemetery on Belair Road.”

You say, “You are such a liar. Who was this friend who died? Who were the friends who helped you? Did you buy off the undertaker to look the other way when you loaded the body into the trunk of your car? Wouldn’t the body be tonged up by some startled waterman sooner or later? I know you too well. I’ve heard you tell the story at too many barbecues with a glass of champagne you use as a model of the little ketch heeling in the bay and in the lobbies of funeral homes where your real dead friends are being shown. After you’ve taken a glance at the body, you say, A ghastly business, this viewing.’ And in some versions, it isn’t even you at the tiller on that moonlit night. Another friend of yours has done the deed. He has told you the story at a wake of a mutual buddy as you stand by the body. A cold nose, like a luffing sail, just shows above the open hatch of the casket with its spray of taffeta. But I love the story because it is the story you tell over and over. It’s a spell, another form with carbons, to ward off the bureaucracy of time. It is a bribe to get around the rules. You’ve lived through another night. You’ve buried your stand-in at sea. You whisper the story in the parlors of funeral homes while, kneeling near the body in the next room, the old women race through the rosary, the sorrowful and the joyful mysteries. Listen, the last stitch the sailmaker made when he made the shroud at sea went through the stiff’s nose. A detail from a book I read. Its pages sewn together too, that ancient repetitive gesture of time and storytelling.”

The moon is so fat it can’t lift itself much higher than the Key Bridge, a fresh suture in the sky. Its mealy face is ready to blister like paint on a balloon. The old skin will slough off. This has been going on a long time, this moon turning old. There is enough light to wash out the stars after all. Mars, always heading toward us, follows the moon toward Virginia. The very old light from the biggest stars happens to reach our eyes at this moment. We are stretched out on the deck looking up through the nets in the rigging. The live oak in her frame is decaying in measurable amounts, an ambient rot. The souvenir program says the wood is original, America’s secret weapon. It gets harder in brine. They couldn’t work it two hundred years ago. When they pulled it from the swamps and bogs of the Carolinas, their saws and chisels blunted. My tux is rented, has its own history of sweat. Along my back, I feel the splinters of radiation prickle my body with its own stores of carbon, its rings of skin. I say that sliver of wood in my hand will fester, the infection will streak toward my heart. “Baby,” you say, “it will work its way out.”

The telescope they sent up into space was supposed to prove there are other planets around the suns we see as stars. It is floating above us now, a blind hulk, its perfect mirror ground to the wrong formula. All that preserved junk of fabricated senses spirals around us as we spin. I would have aimed the thing back down at us, a civil spy satellite, with a bank of scientists interpreting the semaphore of, say, two human bodies in a bed, reading them like letters on a page.

Getting ready for the day, the crew is hoisting signal flags, pennants, ensigns, and Perry’s battle flag quoting the dying Lawrence on the Chesapeake. There are no poems for this ship. Who remembers the quasi-war with France, Truxtun, the hostages held by the beys of the Middle East? Here we are, drowsy, on watch on the poop of an old ship. The moon has gone, and the breeze has freshened, blowing the swamp away toward the Eastern Shore. There the stars are finally opening their eyes, and nobody can see us.

The fireboats have come out to greet our return voyage, and the light is breaking up in the arching water of their cannons. The mist on the water smolders. The sun behind us chisels from the haze the row houses climbing Broadway. Everything is new or ancient. We can just see the piers crowded with people. The cranes and the gantries of the city’s construction could be the rigging of tall ships. I am getting too old for this. My archaic joints are ungreased wood, creaking like the frigate, her spars rattling in the headway she is making. But I unfold myself and stand into the wind. On the wind is the smell of Baltimore, the spices from the factories on Light Street that survive near the shopping malls, offices, and hotels. The spices mask the frightening stench of sluggish water, suggest the Orient, a new port opening to trade. The dried fruits and crushed leaves of another season preserve us all, home after a long passage, anoint our memories at the same time they come flooding back before us.