State of Grace

1

There is no warning of daylight here. It is strange to know that it is only twenty miles to the Gulf of Mexico and all that dizzying impossible white light, for here there is such darkness. Here when one can see the sky, it is almost always blue, but the trees are so thick nothing can make its way through them. Not the sun or the wind. And the ground never dries. The yard is rich mud with no definition between it and the riverbank. Tiny fish swim in the marks our feet make. The trees are tall and always look wet as though they’d been dipped in grease. Many of them are magnolias and oaks. Pods, nuts and Spanish moss hang in wide festoons. The river is the perfect representation of a southern river, thin and blond, swampy, sloppy and warm. It is in everyone’s geography book. I was not shocked at all when I saw it. I was not pleased, although it is quite pretty.

The moss is smoky and dreamy-looking. We can thank the Indians for that. It’s the hair of a girl who killed herself after her father murdered her lover.

The moss feels like Father’s hands, which were always very rough although there wasn’t any reason for their being so. So many textures are the same. So many views. Almost all arms and noons and lips and anger are the same and love. It’s no wonder we’re all testy and exhausted, trying to show delight or even a polite interest.

This silence is beautiful but it makes my head ring. If I awake at the proper time, I can sometimes see the mist rising from the ground and floating down through the trees to the river. I sometimes feel I live in a dangerous place. The river is only the mist moving down it.

I wake early, as a rule. I try to remember what I’ve told him. There’s no way of being sure how much he knows. Sometimes, when we are walking through the woods together, I am quite at peace and even believe that any terror I previously felt is merely an aspect of my parturient condition. I know that he is thinking. I know that he is trying to decide what to do. I wait for his decision as nothing can proceed without it. It is the choice between life or death, between renewal or resumption. I have no fear of him. We are in love. Of course I could only hope that he would kill us, that is, Daddy and me, because I have a feeling, though I know it’s mad, that we are going to go on forever. But it’s too late for that now. I must be realistic. Even if he traveled there, he would not find Daddy. Even if he did, even if Daddy made himself available, he would not be able to deal with him. God and the Devil are the whole religion and Daddy has both on his side.

I have not offered to leave but he does not think of this. Several times he has suggested traveling together far away. I would agree to anything but he dismisses his suggestions instantly, almost before they are uttered, as though he was not the one who made them. No possibilities are open to me. As I say, I wait. What is going to happen waits with me. We have always been reluctant companions.

And in the meanwhile, time, as always, passes or fails to. To the eye, we have proceeded with it. We have our little willfulnesses and quirks. For example, I have terrible eating habits. He eats almost nothing now. He used to saw away at a huge side of pork that he brought down himself and prepare that in a variety of ways. But the hog is gone now, as is the reason for his killing it. Or at least we have always liked to believe that the hog was the same that butchered our hound, though the woods are full of hogs, shaking the land with their mean rooting and rutting. But the hog is gone now and the dog and our hopes for living simply, on the land and on our love. Once he liked grits with syrup and pecans that we’d shake down from the trees but now he cannot even be comforted by memories. I, on the other hand, have a terrible hunger. I love awful foods. Children’s cereals, cupcakes and store pies, that wonderful gluey bread Dixie Darling, yes, two long loaves for only 21 cents. Once, before I moved out here, I ate nothing for three weeks but Froot Loops. It became hallucinogenic after a few days. Anything will. If you breathe in too much basil, a scorpion will be born inside your head. If you eat too much roe, you’ll probably die. Why not? I had to stop the Froot Loops. Everything was so enormous and I was becoming so small. My gums bled. The girls became lecherous and outraged even though I was curious about them as well. Everything smelled rancid in that big house even though the girls washed themselves constantly and all the food was kept in jars. They were so boring about their hygiene, their hair and fingernails. They were healthy enough I suppose. The lint-free pussy plombs employed! The cases of disposable M’Lady Tru-Touch Hand-Savers.…

Once, for an infraction of the rules, I was forced to clean the shower drains. I also had to change all the beds.…

I do little here in the woods. I assimilate the soundlessness. We pursue the meager life with a few garish exceptions. I have my Dixie Darling products, which, I might add, have never disappointed me, and he has his Jaguar. An old faithless and irrational roadster, black, and in perfect running condition. It is so fast and inside it is a warm cave and smells delicious. It is parked beside the trailer and often, in the afternoon, I go out and sit in it and have a drink there. It calms me. The leather is a soft dusky yellow from all the saddle soap he works into it. It smells like lemons and good tack.

After that singular Fourth of July, Daddy never had a car, although there once were two. Daddy and I walked everywhere. On Sundays, we would skate across the pond to church — two sweethearts, my hand in his, in the other glove, ten pennies for the offering plate. Slivers of ice flew up beneath my skirt, my eyes wept. We skated quickly, seriously, lightly on Sunday mornings, barely leaving a mark behind us.…

He loves the Jaguar — the skill and appreciation it takes to enjoy it. He is Grady. I shall make myself clear. Grady, my husband, a country boy with brown face and hands and blond matted hair low on his brow. The rest of him is long, white and skinny. He knows a great deal about hunting, fishing and engines. He loves the Jaguar and he also takes an abashed pleasure in this dank trailer which is his. It cost $10. He bought it from Sweet Tit Sue who now lives farther upriver. She wrote out a bill of sale which we keep in Rimbaud’s Illuminations. At the moment, it happens to mark the spot you know, Andthenwhenyouarehungryandthirstythereissome-

onewhodrivesyouaway. It is not always there. We move it about for amusement, to tell our fortune. He used to enjoy that. All those words with their imminence and no significance. He always saw luck in these woods.

He gets angry at me often now. I’m afraid it’s the way I keep house. I don’t keep house. His face becomes rigid and he speaks so softly I can barely hear him. The place is so soiled that nothing can be found. It smells. It doesn’t bother me. What is the purpose of order?

Each morning I am ravenous. I eat with a lamp on and my feet in a pair of his socks. The mice have left their turds all over everything, in the sink and in our shoes and in the dog’s dish. It doesn’t bother me.

I am chewing on this bread.… I must admit I eat this garbage because I want to insult myself. We think as we eat. Our brains take on flavor and scope. What I want is to slow down my head and eventually stop it. I strive for a brain friendly and homogenized as sweet potato pie.

In the early morning, alone, eating, I push back the curtains and watch the birds. The curtains are old and streaked with the sun. They must have been brought here from another place. The cloth is rotten. It seems to come off on my hands. I use our binocular. I recognize the osprey naturally, the little blue heron, the flicker, titmouse and kingfisher. I have difficulty with ducks and hawks. I have a guide book. I have lists and charts and know proper terminology and range. Nonetheless, I am able to identify very little. The birds I often see can never be found in the book. The eye ring is incomplete or the shading of the primaries is wrong or the pattern of flight. Everything might be in order except for the silhouette. It is annoying but not surprising. Perhaps the artist who drew all these colorful pictures that appear in my book is untalented or anarchistic.

I like birds although I realize that they are dull-witted. That is part of the reason. Birds are uncompromised by their surroundings and never react differently, an ideal, I believe. I am like them with my inflexible set of instincts. It seems I cannot improvise. For I have been through this before. I have seen these things.…

… The important thing is to consider the significance of things and not to worry about their authenticity. This is the way I have lived my life but I really cannot comment about the efficacy of the method. It’s difficult to tell at the end of the day whether it was theory or need that got you through it. I try not to judge or feel responsible for events. I try not to make decisions. This often causes problems. For example, I’m five months pregnant. It’s only as big as a man’s palm, it’s true, but it turns and feeds inexorably. I don’t look at all pregnant and never would have thought of it myself, but I’ve been told firmly that it’s so. I peed into a paper cup and now I know.

I would like to go off with Grady, to be with him while he is going but I lack the courage or even the ability. He has a journey to make as does the baby. I will not accompany either of them. I remain, as I will say, still. I try not to be intrusive. And I conduct myself not only carefully but hardly at all. Who could prove the life of such a creature? And who would think it necessary to deny it?

Yes, Grady and the baby, all those people with things to do, moving through their landscapes, victimized by their sceneries. Even Daddy once took a trip. Even I years ago made a trip, which it is difficult for me to reconstruct as I was quite sick, I believe, at the time. It was on the bus. I slept for forty-seven hours on the bus. Abandoned in the seat beside me was a plastic orange, filled with disgusting perfume, purchased at a roadside rest. Also a complimentary three-inch bale of cotton. I changed seats several times, usually to free myself from unpleasant companions. One was a man with a tan reading aloud from his Bible. A real doppelgänger though cruddy and with a speech defect. “Oh remember that my life is wind,” he kept bringing up like yesterday’s breakfast. Wind, wind — we’ve all heard that line before. Well, I want to tell you something.

Here there is not even wind. There is scarcely any air at all in these woods where Grady and I live. There is no wind or sound and nothing moves. My boy husband lies flat and prim beneath the sheets. He looks two-dimensional. When he opens his eyes, I may find that they are painted on his head. Perhaps I can dress him myself, cutting out paper trousers, shirt and Levi jacket, bending the cardboard tabs to pass and cling to his ankles, hips, waist and shoulders. Perhaps I can press some tea down his throat or drive to the coast and place him in the sun. I don’t care to watch him sleeping and always leave the room immediately. It confuses me, his lying there, his mouth dry at the corners, foam from a punctured pillow gathered round his damp cheek.

Time does not move here. I do not change. Only the baby changes. I want to be rid of them all. I want to be rid of this terrible imposition of recall.

One wants and wants … I used to lie constantly, but now, I assure you, I’ve stopped.

2

I listen to the radio. I sleep only a few hours every night and spend the rest of the time listening to the airwaves. It is very tiny, a transistor, and rather weak. I can only get one station. From midnight until six, I listen to “Action Line.” People call the station and make comments on the world and their community and they ask questions. Music is played and a brand of beef and beans is advertised. A woman calls up and says in a strangled voice, “Could you tell me why the filling in my lemon meringue pie is runny?” These people have obscene materials in their mailboxes. They want to know where they can purchase small flags suitable for waving on Armed Forces Day.

There is a man there that answers the question, almost always right away and right on the air.

A woman calls. Yes. She asks, “Can you get us a report on the progress of the collection of Betty Crocker coupons for the kidney machine?” The man can and does. He answers the lady’s question. He complies with her request. Astonishing.

I think sometimes that this man can help me.

3

And I live by the airport, what is this that hits my house, that showers my roof on takeoff? We can hear it. What crap is this, I demand to know. My plants are green, my television reception is fine but something is going on without my consent and I am not well, my wife’s had a stroke and someone stole my stamp collection and twenty silver dollars.

Yes, well, each piece of earth is bad for something. Something is going to get it on it and the land itself is no longer safe. It’s weakening. If you dig deep enough to dip your seed, beneath the crust you’ll find an emptiness like the sky. No, nothing’s compatible to living in the long run.

Next caller, pulease.

See, look, I begin, we can see it all. I want to flatter him. It’s all prerecorded. They can cut it out but now I have his ear, he’s mine. I can’t make you out, he says. I speak more firmly. See, look. There’s the chamois running, the cutlet nursing, the sandwich cropping grass. The bleeding baby seal capes. And the smells are overwhelming as we know. The limbs adrift in hospital incinerators. The race horse pies at the yearling auction swept up by those men in tuxedos.

Right, he says.

All those trees being made into publishable lies, I say. The mucus under the leaves …

I must correct you there, he says. That’s humus. Essential to the fertility of the earth. Humus.

I know I don’t have much time left with him. He’s getting off the track. Listen, I say, the spinal tap was only a partial success, leaving me dead from the knee to the foot and the waist to the bridge of the nose. There’s no recourse for they never made me any promises, although they spoke frequently and in depth.

You’ll acclimate, he says.

But the death I thought I’d died is back now for a slight correction and they’ve given me a cornea injection and now I’m only useless in the eyes and the loving parts. I’m perfectly able to do all the things I couldn’t do before. I can eat and drink, bite my nails, take a walk and bend for prayers and toilet. They’re pleased.

I can well see that, he says.

I was immediately released, I say hurriedly. Not for one day was I in Intensive Care which is reserved for outpatients, ordinary seamen, phronemaphobiacs and the like.

Un-huh, he says. There is static and humming. On the radio, while he is listening to me, he is playing the mystery tune which I can tell him is “Sapphire” and win myself two free tickets to the drive-in movie. But I don’t want admission. I want to know my hour! When is the fatal hour and when will the truth come to me?

Why it went when you were sleeping, he says. It come and saw you dreaming and it went back to where it was.

4

Some memories have no past. This town for example, this setting. I have mentioned the frame that held Grady and I. There, goats were often seen climbing in the trees. They preferred live oaks because of the low sturdy branches. This is not peculiar. It is an invisible landscape. Everything, more or less, is invisible upon it.

Don’t sulk. Everything is over. Here is the place. There are Grady’s woods and river. Then there is the logging road. Rattlers slide down the colored gullies. Great cattails rise from clear yellow pools. There is the blacktop that meets the coast. Black people live here in low and fragile houses with tile roofs. Sea grape shields the windows from the sun. They farm. There are a few calves and chickens. Some of the livestock are hobbled to the docks at low tide. The cormorants rest on the pilings, drying their wings. Everywhere there are glistening unnatural mountains of oyster shells. They spill into the road, cracking beneath the car’s wheels, shining like oil. Then there are palmists, bars and spaghetti houses. There is a sign that points the way to BRYANT’S BEASTS. There is a sign that points the way to the college. It is futile and oppressive — the entry to a southern town. It is hot. The streets are empty. Huge fans move the air in restaurants. You watch the blades turning as you pass. The town is irreconcilable to its space. Dismiss it. If you must, think of the cheap motels, the drugstore luncheonettes, the hospital. Once there were more cats in the corridors than doctors. Think of the bars, the empty De Chirico train station, the grassy subtle tracks that fade to the north. Think of the highway that moves to other places.

Don’t become impatient. Here is the time. It is late in the year but summer will soon follow. My friend Corinthian Brown comes out of a small café. He is digesting their weekday special which is pizza, chicken, roll and potato. The time is shown in a clock set in an electric waterfall on a wall beside the pies. The water is a shiny neon blue falling from shadow-box mountains. The scene clicks and hums from the current that keeps it operating. Corinthian patronizes this café because of the waterfall clock. It is popular with others as well and a source of speculation. “It’s the Adironeracks,” someone is saying. “I been in that area in 1953. It’s the Adironeracks for sure. Water’d freeze your pecker off.”

It is early morning. The pizza is still cold from the day before. Corinthian carries a book, Heart of Darkness. I will have given it to him. He walks toward his job at Al Glick’s Automobile Junk Yard. Now the job of guarding objects that people no longer feel the need to molest is far too much for any one man. Corinthian realizes this. He realizes that, in particular, guarding junk should be the job of presidents, of congressmen, of those with far more power and influence than himself. It is not the task for one with no resources, no persuasive menace, no continuing stake in the eventual outcome. Nonetheless, those who could perform the function best are not called. Or do not answer. So Corinthian serves. In return, Al Glick allows him to sleep anyplace he wants to and to use his hot plate. Corinthian hardly ever takes advantage of the last benefit because he doesn’t want to be pushy. Some of the wrecked cars are quite well-appointed and it is a joy for him to sit in the plush seats, particularly on a rainy day, and read a good book or two. Corinthian has become attached to some of these cars. He is broken, after all, and these machines are as well, although he realizes that he is still using himself up whereas someone has finished them long ago. This is not to say that he deals in endings. Who could claim that? He simply protects the things whose defeat and destruction have already occurred. Like us, he keeps a feckless guard, one with the resting objects.

But objects need not detain you. Forget them. Remember instead the picture of Corinthian Brown. He is running now, he is late. His mind is on the menagerie that he has just left. Corinthian labors continually. He works at Bryant’s Beasts as well. It is a terrible job that affects and grieves him. He worries that he has not given the ostrich enough water. He loves the bird’s eyes which have long thick lashes. He loves its poor wings. Think of lovers. That’s where stories lie.

It is morning in the South, on the Gulf Coast. On the empty beach there are two girls. They are eating powdered donuts. One is bare chested and pretty. She is lying on her back and eating. The sugar crumbs fall on her chest. The other girl removes the crumbs, sometimes with her moistened finger, sometimes with her mouth. It is an obvious attempt at an unspeakable practice. The pretty girl has a dogged and sincere expression. The other girl is charmed. Her name is Cords. She kisses her friend’s hair wryly. A helicopter beats toward the coast from inland. It flies low over the girls, turns, hovers. They can see the Navy men inside it. Cords raises her middle finger and waves it stiffly. The chopper clatters angrily above them.

To the north, a train is moving toward the town. Everything is amiss on southern trains. There is no ice water. There is no meat, no flowers. There is no service at all. The train does not speed but it’s never not arrived. There’s no timetable available but it is never late. The train bears doom and Daddy through a swamp. Part of the swamp is burning. There’s a smell of toast. People are filing into the dining car.

The sun moves up a mite, startling no one. Tradesmen sit on the curbs outside convenience stores and eat their snacks of raisins. In the hospital, the new babies are wheeled out of the nurseries for their feedings. They are like fancy pastries offered in their aluminum cart. The mothers in the wards try to be clever with one another but what is there to think? Down in the basement, in the emergency room, a few college students are being given tetanus shots by a moody intern. The intern is brooding because he is monorchid. The college girl that he had had a date with the evening before had been discomfited when he had pulled off his boxer shorts. She had been coolly disapproving throughout, but her surprise had not curbed her speech. “Well, that’s really interesting,” she had said. “At school, they’re always putting the vegetables on my plate that look like a man’s parts and everyone teases me about this, but never in my life have I ever seen anything that could be construed to look like that.” He had bought her all the shrimp she could eat and then he had bought her five brandy alexanders and listened to her ballad of interminable immutable opinions. She was a girl with a great deal of gorgeous wavy hair and she wore expensive clothes. Her aunt owned the controlling interest in the country’s most popular baking soda. He learned that her aunt had sent her to Venice in, as luck would have it, the year of the flood. “It was beyond belief,” she had told him, “I couldn’t buy Tampax. No one anywhere had Tampax.” She was so beautiful and he had taken her back to his apartment and pulled off his boxer shorts. “Well, that’s really amazing,” she had said, but not in a special way.

The intern angrily inoculates another student and entertains grisly notions. His patients have punctured and scraped themselves with nails and chicken wire while building the floats for the college’s big Homecoming parade. The injured are predominantly waffle-thighed energetic girls with dazzling and insincere smiles. The floats are lined up in a dead-end street, covered with parachutes, waiting for tomorrow.

The sun is getting white and old. Grady double-clutches as he rounds a corner on the woods road. He slows still further and the Jaguar thuds across an old wooden bridge. A boy about his age is fishing with a drop line. The river is purple with water hyacinths. The boy’s car, a broken-down Ford with a smashed rear fender, is parked on the bank. OUCH is painted on the fender. Grady chews on the sweet end of a blade of grass. He enters the town and finds a parking space before a movie theatre. There are no pictures on the poster advertising the film. There are black stars painted on the sidewalk. The day yawns before Grady. He might go to a movie, perhaps not today but soon. He feels aimless and wasteful and anthropomorphic. The theatre seems a greater orphan than he. The walls are mildewed. The entranceway smells like a recent excavation. Grady moves off, combing his hair with his hands.

The morning’s almost behind us and loss is the less to notice. A group of 4-H children are sitting on a bench outside a supermarket, drinking chocolate milk. One of the little girls raised the steer that brought top price at the county fair. They have just returned from a packing plant. One of the children says, “There was your old Scoobie-Doo hanging there.” “There he was.” The little girl giggles.

Noon is opening to your touch. Two ladies in Day-glo housedresses are driven into the Garden of Repose by a small man whose smooth head is barely visible over the car’s seat. The Garden has no headstones or vain statuary. It is a deep and grassy reprieve on Main Street, dotted with handsome trees. The car stops. Its occupants scan the impressive acreage. The women get slowly out. One holds a piece of paper but its information seems useless. The traffic files by on the street. The living are kept at bay from the dead by a hedge of oleander. It is highly toxic but attractive. Children have been poisoned by carrying the flowers around in their mouths at play. It makes an efficient hedge. Behind it there is almost silence. The women wobble on their high-heeled shoes. One sings a few words of an old gospel hymn:

“But none of the ransomed ever knew

How deep were the waters crossed,

Nor how dark was the night that the Lord passed through

Ere he found his sheep that was lost.”

She coughs. They are Baptists come with a pot of geraniums for a distant relation. An attendant floats by, seated on a purring motor. They extend the paper to him. He studies it and turns around in the seat of his mower, pointing in the direction of a tree that’s been pruned to a profile of an agonized prayer. The women wobble off and place their plant on the ground. Its color is lost in the brilliance of the grass.

Be grateful that everyone’s accounted for. Intentions are being pursued although nothing is being presently instigated. Everything began a long time ago.

5

… Imagine the happiness of voyaging there to spend our lives together. That’s not mine. I’m doing my lessons. Translating. Poorly, but pretty all the same. Actually, I’m considered quite good at this re-rendering, a talent that grows in direct proportion to one’s life. You can imagine how troubled I was to discover, and only recently, that Father’s scripture is based on consonants, the vowels in the original Hebrew not being clearly indicated. It’s clear the problem there, although in itself, it explains almost everything. To love to our hearts content, to love and die in the land which is the image of you. My ear, however, is terrible. As is my tongue. In France, I would sound cretinous. I would be misunderstood. My simplest request would be denied through fear and puzzlement.

You know the old joke — a gentleman goes into a store and wants to buy une capote noire out of respect for his recently departed wife. Oh, they still laugh at that one, you bet. I first heard it at the age of nine, a little darling with a bottle of valve oil and a coloring book in her trumpet case, the only girl in the band. We were playing patriotic songs and the story was rendered interminably at the time by the Exalted Ruler of Sebago Lake Lodge of Elks, B.P.O.E. No. 614. It was not intended for our ears of course. Even if it was, how could we have understood it? I’m just recollecting the moment is all.

I played second and almost never had the melody. The boy who played first later blew off his lap on the Fourth of July.

Aimer à loisir. Lovely, isn’t it. I’m dawdling on the porch swing of the sorority house. A sister lies folded messily on the other end, reading a volume on necessary proteins and table settings. She has pimples on her upended thighs but her face is as smooth as a waxed car bonnet. Under her blouse, she has rigged a complex padded harness to her bra so that the sweat won’t show. The sun’s like lemon juice, splashed across the sky. It’s so prevalent, it’s really nowhere to be seen.

The sister is eating maraschino cherries from a jar. I have told her many times that they’ll be the end of her. They’re our only words with one another. I tell her that because of them, someday, someone will sadly have to cut it all out — sphincter, kidney and ovaries. Inside, she’ll be all smushy like a pear. She disagrees. She likes them because they have no pits. The porch is littered with ants and stems.

I’m having difficulty ton souvenir en moi luit comme un otensoir. I close the book and idly watch the avenue that winds up into the college buildings. I am content here, warm and dopey from the sun. Inside the house, the fans are turned on and small balls of dust and hair float out the open door. The light pours through the leaves of the orange trees. The mail is delivered. The housemother appears, collects the letters and sorts them. She turns her head carefully and then swivels her shoulders around after it. It is as though she had bones webbed in her throat. I get no mail. No one knows where I am. The housemother has received a tiny box of detergent and a Corn Flakes coupon. She’s enormous. Which brings to mind, “Inside every fat man is a thin man trying to get out” … which I’ve never understood. Not only that, I would go so far as to say that it isn’t even true. It’s not a question of getting out at all. One’s true nature must be considered. It’s a question of performing one’s role.

The housemother’s dog is eating ants. She pries him away with her foot and they re-enter the house side by side. Her dress is as big as a bedsheet. As Father said, it is not we who live but the god who lives within us. The housemother and her skinny god retire.

I swing on the swing. I’m a little bored but that’s acceptable enough. It’s my second season here. I’m a fugitive, you might say. A vacationer from the future. I’m taking time off and may never take it on again. I’m getting my strength back and don’t want to discuss it. I’m in an awkward position, you see. The first thought I had as a child was not an enlightened one, thus all my subsequent thoughts have been untrue. I’m doing very well now though, thank you. I’m getting back my sense of reality. In the sorority house, the girls wash one another’s hair and play cards. Bridge, which is supposed to be good for the mind. We have parties and dances and so on, and we have meetings in the cellar which are conducted according to parliamentary procedure. Our colors are maroon and white, our pin an inverted triangle, a sliver of diamond at each tip — moral, social, intellectual, good deeds, femininity, order — a plastic pubis, respected by none. Our motto is

THAT WE MAY BE PURE ENOUGH FOR HIM

All the sisters fuck like bunnies.

They work out after supper, splashing and panting. Trying to find themselves. I’ve tripped across them many a night, practicing. A rolling eye, a shaking wrist, a tapping foot … It’s enough to scare the pure yell out of you, the earnestness with which they go about it.

They tried once to bring a boy in, to service us all. The first of every month, along with the bills and the grocery order. A pleasant enough boy, though his nostrils were overlarge. The hairs blew like wheat as he’d come down for a kiss. Distracting. And there was a whistling noise, a sound like plumbing. I don’t know. The sisters complained and soon ceased to use him altogether. It just didn’t work out. These girls have to be in love, after all. They kept him on but he grew surly. This was before my time. Now he’s gone. And we’re back to the old mitt and hiss.

I’ve been away for a year and a day, just like in the fairy tales. That first month, the heat was marvelous. I was fainting constantly. My soul cringed before it, my heart sweated and shrunk in my chest. I became all matter, lush and blameless, turning into the sun. I had been the perfect child — motherless — and now I was the ideal young woman. All tanned meat, carefree and compliant. Yet I find myself performing as he would want me to, though I hardly ever dwell on Father any more. I use the doggerel, of course, which can’t be helped. But he is so constant! His pursuit in my head and my heart stops only long enough to show me that it is going on still.

Yes, I’m going into my second year. Like the alcoholic, I’ll age myself through abstinence. I’ve even learned a harmless thing or two. In the summer, I worked in the dirtiest little Dairi-Whip in the South. The practices that went on there! My God. I left to become a cocktail waitress in one of the town’s finest restaurants. Where even more terrible things occurred. Why, I’ve heard them pissing in the Rhine wine. Jizz in the béchamel. Running sores in the cherry flan. I let it all ride. Who am I to bubble the globe of the ordinary life? My only concern was that Father would enter and demand to be served. He sent his surrogates, I know, but never himself. What’s a girl like you doing in a nice place like this, they’d say. Actually, I’ve never seen a man who resembles him in any way, but if Father’s the Shepherd, then we’re all his willing lambs.

You’ve a nice face, dear, they’d say. You bring to mind a girl I loved once and lost, and what are you doing after this place closes and you’ve washed your lovely hands?

When you think of life’s routine … They’d always have to make a remark about Entree Six: Red Snapper, Hush Puppy and Cole Slaw, our luncheon special all for only $1.35. They’d have the same attire — seersucker jacket, black pants, white shirt — and the same amusements in their linty pockets. Comb, nail clip and a roll of Life Savers in assorted flavors. I believe that 98 per cent, if not more, of all Life Savers in America are sold to middle-aged men out to turn a trick. I can’t understand why God made every tiny snowflake different and all these men the same.

Yet I’d attend to them for I’m passing the time while I recover. I’m just taking this opportunity to get better. Yes, we’d go out, these patrons, these consumers, and myself. Down to the race track and a bottle of Mums. Scratching at me beneath the clubhouse table as though I were a flea. Each time they got up they shot their cuffs and grazed me while passing. Father sees all this. He imagines that I’m doing it. I must confess, I used to see him everywhere. On the phone and in my sorority sisters’ heartshaped lockets. On some mornings when the air is very clear, windless muggy mornings when I feel my head earnestly trying to repair itself, I can hear him tracking me. It’s a sound like a hymn. Pale. Full of rectitude. And I’m distressed because I see that even when I cheat, I’m losing.

But the summer vanished and now it’s the fall. I’m rocking on the swing as though in my dotage, watching the students leave their classes and spill across the lawns, a pretty amoeba washing up the walks, cutting across the grass, which is cut out like cookies in the shape of Greek letters.

It’s accurate grass, not a single Weed, all the roots and rhizome stacked in the gutters. This whole estate, this college acreage, once belonged to a madman. He had a circus quartered here. You can still see the lions’ paw prints on the concrete rim of the swimming pool, and stranger things still and some not so strange. What acts! Elephants, bears and Siamese twins truly from Siam. Silhouette artists and palmists. A man with a tattooed eye and another with an organ growing directly from his ear. Actually it looked more like an infant’s pacifer, but who would come to see that? They billed it as his organ.

He’s around still, a soldier of fortune.

Many of the old performers return. Dwarfs and gorgeous ladies. Noodle Man came back before leaving for Fez forever. Nine feet tall and one hundred and three pounds. He went into the Student Union and had a cup of tea. I missed seeing him, however. Oh yes, they love the returning, even though it breaks their hearts. The place is a tomb. The menagerie is buried everywhere. Even so, all the structures are in gay colors. You can see it glowing beneath the fresh cheap paint that the maintenance men have applied.

Now I see an aerialist, walking his Doberman bitch. The bitch is in heat, flagging everything in sight. The aerialist is old, bald and handsome. Perhaps he is a juggler, he has a sequined groin. He passes very closely to the house. He has pierced ears but no earrings. The dog pulls him along enthusiastically. She’ll outlast him. I wonder what will become of her.

There’s quite a mob in the streets now. Boys with bright bandanas like apaches. Girls in tennis skirts. The noon siren on the firehouse begins to blow. Everything is drenched in sun. It’s like a festival! In the air are chemical experiments and kites and tennis balls. And in the middle of it all walks Father. He’s walking slowly, as though for amusement. I’m not startled for I knew he’d come. Redoubtable Father, it’s him all right. Ablepharous Daddy. There’s no need to ask anyone whether my recognition is true. I leave the porch and run up to my room, and come back down again with my camera. No more than half a minute has gone by. I’m not a year old now, no, I haven’t gained a day. I’m just a tiny thought now, rocking in his sperm and then I go back even further than that. I’m nothing but bloodless warmth like the hot yellow beak of a bird.

He’s looking at the porch, at the still trembling swing. There’s a red claim check tied to his small and battered leather bag. His coat is rumpled. He turns his lidless eye on me.

Le temps gagne sans tricher. C’est la loi.

I go to him once more, coyly as a bride.

6

In by seven and out by eleven, as the laundress says, and we have to be out of here by noon or we’ll be charged for another day. From the window there is a view of the street. This is the parade route when there are parades, which there is about to be. It is not a fashionable place. It is lodging for those who seek relief and not amusement. It is a way station for those who haven’t traveled for quite some time. It’s in a different class entirely from the motels on the beaches with their Hawaiian bars and their swimming pools. Off to one side of the courtyard is a ping-pong table. Over the door to the office is a sign, WE ENCOURAGE YOUR INSPECTION. Which is curious, for surely, many times over in America, there are those good people who check out before in, but they do not come here. This place is inhabited by men who lay tile, newspaper reporters nightly eating chicken and drinking wine on the tufted bedspread, the boys who bait the hooks on party boats. This is no place for gifted lovers like ourselves.

All the lights are orange to keep away the insects. Father doesn’t unpack his suitcase. He draws things out of it secretively. I never had a secret of my own. They were all Father’s and he kept them for both of us.

Where is Grady? I am not acquainted with him yet. He is down in Artifact I, on the campus, studying. Soon he will want to love me. His hands will grip my waist, his lips move across my stomach.…

Pardon me, I am so inept at identity. Why is this girl here? Was she a foundling? Had she been ill? She sat on the edge of the bed. Father stood by the coin TV. Was he a visitor? Was she? The veins in her eye pits were white, her cuticles colorless. She’d been sick. Not blood enough to even hemorrhage. Presuppurative puberty. Spreading decline like a citrus tree. Would take years to run its course.

And Father says, “You come on home where you belong and stop this crazy dreaming. You’re from me and of me.”

“Yes, Daddy,” I say, “you know me better than God himself.”

“I do,” Father says. “You’re my pretty darling dreaming girl and I was with you at your hour of birth and know all about you.” And he looks at me so sadly disappointed, with a bleak cheer and a meek look. He brushes his long fingers against my cheek, removing, he intimates by gesture, a bit of sleep from my eyelashes. “What’s your liberty worth, bringing us both to sorrow?”

I look hungrily at the basket of fruit which is, for some reason, in the motel room on the window sill, crowding the Venetian blinds. Father brought it. The sort of thing you give to dim relations or people in sick chambers. Bananas, apples, grapes, pears, oranges, all injected with coloring, lying dumpled in their bed of paper grass.

Also included is a bottle of champagne. Father doesn’t drink himself, but he will open it for me.

We are sitting in Fred’s Sunnyside Motel. Outside, Fred is examining his collection of air plants, which are hanging everywhere.

Father says, “The truth removes the need for freedom.”

“Oh yes, Daddy, I agree.”

“What could you be looking for, darling, to go away from me?”

I’m brief. “I’ll tell you, Daddy, I was looking for love.”

He’s looking at me so kindly, but he’s weary from the long train ride. One eye closes, but the severed one remains and wanders over me with a vague and sleepy touch. If only I knew now what I knew so long ago … And what could one expect from one’s own father’s gazing? It’s the touch of a shadow on the papered walls of the mind. He shakes his head so slowly, I know that I could capture it on film and I fumble for the camera which is all I’ve brought along. Just me and my broken camera for I’ve come into this room ownerless as a newborn babe. I had to brush my teeth with mine own finger, I had to trim my nails on the concrete wall, and I’m sitting here in my underwear, for all my little washables are hanging to dry on the shower rod.

Oh, he looks at me so generously. If I could only get this on film! The development of trysts. One could make a fortune, once the processes were perfected. I have my camera but there’s fungus in the lens — parabolas of muttony fur both hidden and revealed — which comes from living in the damp, too close to the sea. I still carry it about with me, hoping helplessly that it might correct itself. Even the film in it is no good. It’s dated. I was duped. BUY ME FIRST, I’M RIPE. I always do. I have a conscience. I bought it from a failing store, from a failing little man, all blond in the face and the head from his liver, shaking like an aspic as he bagged my purchases. Six rolls and a 35mm used Yashika and all of it useless. The moment I walked out of the store, that film was past its prime and wouldn’t print a buttered muffin. And from what I haven’t heard, this happens all the time.

Next door, a toilet flushes and there’s a giggle and a rustle. We’ve seen them both, from Number 6, two grinning teens, wearing the same outfits, goofy Geminis. What a job in these places, just to keep the plumbing in repair!

Father steps up very close to me. I feel the chill from his frozen eye and he says, “You’ll only do harm here, sweet. This is a terrible town, a town of waste and hate. I saw it immediately. Something is going to go wrong here. I can see the expectation on their faces. Why did you stop here?”

“I was going to go on.”

“You were waiting for me.” Father puts his hand on my hair. “I took care of you. You were such a lovely child. I used to wash and brush your hair. You always asked me to brush your hair. Would you like me to do that now?”

“I was waiting to go on,” I say.

“You come back with me. There’s no place to go on to. It’s all happened. They’re all dead, our little family, all gone.” He strokes my hair. He wraps it around his fist. “We only have one life,” he says tonelessly.

“I haven’t had mine yet.”

“You’re my sweet little girl,” Father says.

I push away from him. My hair runs out between his fingers. My clothes are dripping in the shower. I had hung them up and they were dry but then I’d taken a shower with them hanging on the rod and now they were soaked. I look through the Venetian blinds at Fred. He is an old man, beating on a mourning dove with a garden rake.

“Come over here and sit beside me,” Father says. I do. I lie between the bedspread and the blanket. He takes a brush from his suitcase and begins to brush my hair. “When you were born,” he says, “I brought you phlox in a white china mug.”

“There aren’t any phlox down here,” I tell him. “The climate’s not right for them.”

A clock is ticking on the dresser. It lies face down and works only when it is placed like that. I dropped it myself as a child and it broke in that manner. In Spain, I hear, there’s a place full of old, expensive clocks. A palace and a room in the palace where they bring all the clocks of value that don’t work. The room is zealously guarded. They have guns. They’d kill you if you tried to steal one of those clocks. Father always used to say that keeping time was an affront to God. I am surprised that he has brought this with him.

“What are those flowers outside the door?” he asks.

“Bird of Paradise. Century plants,” I say. It is an erotic desert flush against these rooms. A little joke.

“You’ve been here before, haven’t you,” he says convincingly.

“Oh no, Daddy.”

“Yes. You’re one with the art of harlotry and self-deception. You came all the way down here just to prove that you were common as any of them.”

My head bobs with the pull of the brush. His hands are long and cold, with a tumble of veins visible. He is ageless. Once I was young but I am growing so quickly now … soon I will be of his time and then hardly linger there until I am beyond it.

“Haven’t you,” he says.

“No, not this one.”

“You don’t know anything about love. I’ve tried to teach you but you don’t know. What do you think you can give to a man? Or woman? Your mother was … the only thing your mother gave me was you.”

“There’s nothing I can give, Daddy. I was just hoping that I could take a little. A little warmth for a little while.”

“You’re everything to me,” he says. “You’re everything short of dying.”

“Dying’s not so much,” I say.

“To those that don’t do it. You killed your mother.”

My hair is snapping and curling around his fingers. He raises his hand. It follows him.

“Why of course you did, sweet,” he says. “She died because she had an evil heart, a vicious jealous eye. We’re all weak, I won’t deny it, but it was the Devil himself who gave your mother strength to curse me the way she did. I won’t accuse you of it, really. She died of rage.”

“I think she died by her own hand, Daddy.”

“No, love,” he says, “she died giving birth. She died by God’s own felon’s fist. She was always wanting to have children. Can you imagine, she wanted to start them in accordance with the planets. She wanted someone to avenge her, but your mother got no relief and why should we, darling? No relief and no release.”

Beside me on a little table is my gum from the night before. I put it in my mouth. In moments it’s soft again. Quite usable. With this and a stick I could muster a quarter out of any grate. Were there a grate. Were there a quarter. What would I do with so vast a sum? My thoughts are a child’s thoughts. I am a child, lowered into Daddy’s lap.

My head rocks backward with the brushing. Lips brush my ear anonymously. I cannot see him. I see instead the open bathroom door where my clothes drip wine-red drops onto the concrete block of the shower stall. The dye gathers in unsightly puddling. I have arrived in this place. All my eclectic studying, worthless. All my babbling with the girls, the bleaching of my black-sheep ways. After my year of earnest infidelity, after scooting my body under the chassis of strangers, under the cologne, the Camel and Lavoris flavor of their case, I have been restored to the death that is all mine, to Daddy in this place. After all those strangers …

All those men. Bloodless little charmer aren’t you, they’d say. Yes, I’m deep as the Styx. Think you’re for special occasions don’t you, they’d go on. By any means deliver me from special occasions. I must say they never took me to a place like Fred’s. The bedposts did not have the taste of Pine-Sol. Nonetheless, how did it go? they’d ask. They’d kiss with all embellishments. I thought for a moment you’d chipped my tooth, I said, but I was mistaken. It was fortifying, thank you. It was peachy. Never did they offer compensation as far as I could see. Now once a boy had given me a silk tassel of his hair. It was blue. I counted the strands. Thirty-one. I wanted no mistake. The next time there were twenty-nine. I showed the curl to Daddy. He lost it though he wasn’t angry. He simply lost it. The wind swept it onto the rocks. You mustn’t mention this to anyone, the blue-haired boy had said. I’ll send you a can of syrup from the store, he had said. You can make all the Coca-Cola you want. We didn’t do anything but play but you mustn’t mention any of it …

The men were never so poetic. Never a hank of hair. Just a piece of their bone. Oh, later they offered food, it’s true. They were always starving afterward. Steak! they’d cry. Oh, steak and beer and hash-brown potatoes! One mentioned blintzes but he didn’t mean it. You’d think a man who mentioned blintzes would be an honorable person but he was simply idealistic. Besides his ideas of a gracious life, he had in his pocket the broken part to a piece of his wife’s washing machine. Bolts Breach Blintzes. One of Life’s Drab Laws. If I treated you supper, he was reduced to say, I’d have to break a fifty-dollar bill to buy the speed nut for the washer. And when a bill is broken it’s shot as far as I’m concerned. Same time tomorrow?? At the sign of the sleepy bear with his nightshirt and candle?? I’m so afraid not, I’d said. Tomorrow it’s my turn to close the windows and take in the flag in case of possible showers.

But this was the exception. Oh meat! my night companions would shout. Onions and gravy! A man must satisfy stomach and sex and for the time being the last is a happy fellow. So gracious. The time being what, I’d said. You’re peculiar, they’d tell me gravely, but you’re not as bad as some. My wife irons my underwear, for instance, but she’d be the last to know what’s in there. What about the soul, I’d say then. I want satisfaction for my soul. The what? they’d say. What a live one. Come off of it, you’re peculiar, but I’ll try to be of assistance, you just tell me where it is. We have to get into a state of grace, I’d speak not quite hysterically but with a nervous edge, I’d speak honestly for I was not selfish. I wanted to arrive there. What matter did it make who the driver was or what the vehicle. Why sure, they’d say, having their little joke, it’s just west of Corpus Christi, but you’re confused, you’re a mixed-up girl not knowing her geography, it’s right here inside you and we’ve been through there before. They’d push their hands inside my panties. They’d put their own scrubbed knuckles on top. And what’s a funny girl like you doing asking for more.…

Father, I am far from home.

“Your mother …,” Daddy is saying.

My voice rattles. I begin again. “We haven’t spoken of Mother for eleven years.”

“But, darling, she’s beside us. She ages with us. Can’t you bring her to mind?”

My clothes will never dry. How can we leave this place? If we should open the door, we would simply find this room again. A bed and a man in black brushing a young girl’s hair. And in that room there’d be no door. Just a bed and a man in black brushing his broken lover’s hair. I put my hand behind me. Trompe l’oeil. Daddy’s face. Never had I seen him take her in his arms.

“She’s passed the years with us. No, death never saves us, darling. It would be unnatural for it to save us.” His voice is halting, the voice of a fortuneteller, groping.

I reach for a pear. I swallow my gum. The clothes are still dripping mercilessly. Water enough to irrigate a steer. Why did I ever shower after the night? Once my hands were stained with blueberries. Once my hands were brown and wound round with the long pattern of reins. Mother had always bathed me, locking the door. She scoured me, so small and unrepentant. You are a sick and dangerous little animal, she had said. The tub kept filling. The water ran onto the floor, over her slippers. I joggled beneath the washcloth, the clear water turning brown. You should be treated like an animal, put in a stall, in a barn like your filthy horses … Strange impassive child. My skin pink with her rubbing. My riding clothes lying in a sour heap. I was so innocent with my pure and perfect love but Mother was weeping. The water dimpled with her tears. You know what you’re doing, she had said. It’s hideous, unspeakable. She plucked me from the water. She wept and wept, smelling of linen. Then she scoured the tub, down on her hands and knees. Again and again, after sister died, the door was locked, the water drawn. Mother had washed me so many times, so long ago, why would I shower here? I woke up here. Daddy was watching me sleep. And I remember. It was the first evening of the day that Daddy came to get me. We were celebrants. Daddy had found his little girl again and he’s begun to bring me home. The champagne was opened. The cork flew into the ceiling. It flew into the rotting roof of the sad motel, and the soft roof split, just enough for an eye to see it, to hold the ball of an eye, and my protection from the starless night sifted down around us.

“And yet still her eyes would be flooded with darkness,” Daddy says. “Her knowledge would still be empty knowledge because it was corrupt. She continues beside us, still in the error of her ways.” He puts down the brush.

“Live without a suspect, sweet. There are no criminals. Only God’s largesse and plan.” His voice stirs, rises. “When you were a child, I would hold your hand while you were sleeping. You never had bad dreams when I watched over you. Your tiny curved hand. A baby rabbit. Such a blessing. You were my child.”

Mother had dried me with a thin striped towel. Her hands were brief upon me. The water went down the drain sluggishly, as though there were truly substance to it, as though she had actually washed off some of my sin.

HOW LONG WILT THOU FORGET ME O LORD? FOREVER?

I do not interrupt. Daddy is addressing me.

“Such a sweet deep sleep with never any dreams at all when I was beside you, but I couldn’t stay there forever. Each night I had to leave and then there was no way of knowing, there was no way I could tell, what rose up to trouble you, what words you heard, what wicked lies came to seem real in the dark.”

Yes, Mother had spoken then. I would creep through the house. I would watch them together under the modest glow of a single lamp. They would be in bed side by side. I am ransomed to that vision of comfort, of safety. Mother faced the door behind which I was concealed. I have forgiven her that which I accused her of, she had said. I have no courage left. I have nothing. Once I wanted to save her, to take her away from you, but it doesn’t matter any more. I don’t even want to save myself any more. I want to suffer. There’s nothing else I can do. I want to suffer terribly. I have forgiven her that which I accused her of, she had said, the words hardly words at all but some endless redeemless anguish falling, saying, Why is my child so far away? how did I go into such a different land … but he did not reply. And never had I seen him take her in his arms.

“I’m going to buy you some new clothes. Nice clothes to travel in. We’ll stay today and go back tomorrow morning.” His voice is bored, uxorial. He goes into the wretched bathroom, takes my things from the rod and stuffs them into the wastebasket. He opens the door and puts the wastebasket outside. I am surprised to see the daylight, the street, folding chairs set up in a rigid row in the distance. In the distance also is a singular fellow standing beneath a light pole. He looks like the gentleman on the Beefeater’s bottle. Flowered red jerkin, hammerhead shoes and a kindly self-conscious beard. He carries a staff. It is all totally reasonable. He is a float marshal, waiting for his float. I have always wanted to go off with the fellow on that bottle but this was not my chance. Daddy shuts the door.

“We have so much to talk about,” he says. “Up home, the herbs from your mother’s garden are still growing. The mint is particularly strong. I think that even now, my shoes smell of mint.” He does not look at his shoes. “Who gave you that camera?”

“I bought it myself.”

“You must come back with me, sweet. I’ll absorb the harm you’d bring to others.”

“I never hurt anything,” I beg. “I would take the moths out of the house in my hands, remember? I was a simple child.” The room seems all the darker since he shut the door on the street. Everything is black. He is in black as he sits beside me once again. I can almost smell the chemicals, hear a hose draining in the soapstone basin. Where my clothes had been, there are now curling photographs, still wet, dangling from wooden pins. Everything has been recorded.

“How can you forget, darling?” he says. “Why should you ever want to forget?”

7

I protest, don’t I? “Daddy, let me be. There’s no one I can hurt.” I want a new clear picture so badly I could cry but there is no light in this dingy room. All the pictures there are going to be have been taken.

… When I was a child, I also had a camera which I had sent away for and which came directly to me. What a thrill when Mr. Bolt the postman stepped off his red white and blue bicycle and waded through the damaged daisies to our door. I was a darling dangerous child then with my little crazes and habits. Oh, she adores her father, Mother would say as I scampered down the street in his shadow. And only the obtuse would fail to detect the note of sadness there though perhaps I erred on hearing an entire symphony. But what if I should have fallen from Father’s silhouette? The sunshine was a pit to me. And even though it was a game, my mouth would fill with drool, my chest would ache as though I’d dropped my heart if Father strode away from me. Daddy’s little girl, Mother would say, though it was just words that she was using. As Father would use the holy writ and I, my too literal love, and poor sister her sweet adjustment. Oh poor sister, she never heard the coded humming of the world …

Yes, the day of the postman. The sea was all white and furious that morning from a storm the day before and was beating up the rocks and filling the air with a fine spray … I accepted the package reverently. It was almost consumed in Mr. Bolt’s huge hands. His fingernails were tan and thick as hoofs, shiny and smooth but at the same time a bit maimed, as though they’d all been crushed. His thumbnail leapt into an orbit all its own, his one significant feature. It was half again as long as his thumb. A lovely ocher and shiny as a writing slate. Perhaps there was something engraved thereon. And doubtless from the Scripture, I WILL MAKE THEE A TERROR AND THOU SHALT BE NO MORE? It’s really not for me to say. Etched with a pin? A reminder of something that hadn’t happened yet. For why else such a coarse and local epidermis? But then, perhaps it was he who had the hidden vice. Perhaps he worked with crayons or played the guitar. Of his face, nothing remains today. Just the impossible hand bringing me my plastic camera from Battle Creek, Michigan. And down by the water, on a folding chair beneath the salt blasted pines, sat Daddy.

Mother was absent then and sister was gone. Just me and Daddy, like it was and like it would be in a little while, forever.

And I am running in my hand-me-down dress, a dress that contained far more incident than myself, having belonged to two town girls and then sister before being passed on to me. A drunk exposed himself when it was worn by little Lola Roebuck. We had the longest winter in fifty-seven years when it adorned Jackie Fucillo’s ratty frame. And I am running with my new possession which is shooting out cartoon images on cardboard the size of a movie ticket.

The moment was mine, I knew, because I grew up all intuition and no curiosity. There’s not a curious bone in my body. Like clockwork, I grew up with an innate sense of the proper order of things. I left it to the others to discover their egotistical sexuality. They were programed for impulse but lacked true desire. I recall my own schoolmates professing to enjoy the dopey pleasures of the Tip-O-Whirl in the bleached grassless playground of kindergarten as they wrapped their little thighs around the banana seats. I was not affronted by such behavior. How could I be? I was up to Jeremiah in my insatiable quest for order. THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS AND DESPERATELY WICKED: WHO CAN KNOW IT?

But I was a child and I was running and I’ve never been prettier than I was that day as I ran so sincerely thrilled, on my long white legs, to Daddy. The world reflected me, the symptom and the disease, as I ran so childishly simple toward him. The sea smoked with its foam and the sunlight fell bone white on his head as he sat beside the leaping water, all rumpled and harangued as he always seemed when he was by himself, wrestling with the Lord. “Daddy!” I said, “Let me take your picture.” And of course it is so innocent. An incorruptible request. He shields his lame eye from the wind with a piece of scarf, for it couldn’t help itself that eye, it lay open continually, gaping at the world. It has never rested but has only watched, tireless and constant, blazing and cerulean, thick like a muscle.

“Daddy,” I cried so adorably.

And he kissed me then, didn’t he, he drew me to him as guilelessly as he does now in Fred’s Sunnyside?

8

Everyone that has ever loved has loved this way.

There is no other way.

9

Father and I are eating in Woolworth’s. I am in my new clothes. There is still tissue paper in one of the sleeves. I pull it out.

“We are not going to return to Fred’s. We are going to a beach-front hotel. This is our first vacation,” Daddy says. “I am not a worldly man, as you know, but I want you to enjoy yourself. We’ll take a small vacation every year if you’d like. You look very nice. I remember that you often wore that color. Your mother dressed you in that color because she said it did so much for you. That was her term, but she was quite right. You look lovely.”

“Thank you,” I say. We are eating a turkey plate. The cranberries come in a microscopic fluted paper cup. They taste like peas. It is not Thanksgiving but it seems that the meal is a return to that sacred gala occasion of home — a perversion of it, a transubstantiation. Father blesses the food, then he gets up and puts the plate on a tray of dirty dishes. He is gaunt and elegant. The hollows of his cheeks had thrilled me.

“In the year when you were gone from me, there were frequent periods when I went without eating for days simply because it did not occur to me.”

“Speaking for myself,” I say, my mouth full of fowl, “I am hungry all the time.”

“You have a very slim and attractive figure.”

“Thank you,” I say.

Someone knocks my arm and launches my fork against my molar. It’s very crowded. We’re crammed like mullet in a net. Beside us is a couple with a baby. The baby has a I SLEPT ON HOLMES BEACH FLORIDA T-shirt on and is waving his legs, firing off his legs as though he’d like to be rid of them. He farts. It’s long and bubbling, very satisfactory. The baby crosses his eyes. All motion ceases. The first sound in the universe and this baby has made it. “For chrissakes,” the father says, “get him away from the butter.” The young mother does nothing. She picks up a french fry and puts it in her mouth.

“You know what I want,” she says. “You know what I really want?” The father pushes the seat board away from him, to the very end of the table. The baby regards us all furrily and falls asleep, mustard on his knee. “I want one of them deluxe facial beauty mist saunas and one of them O’Nite cases. You owe it to me at least for what you’ve done.”

“Where you going overnight,” her husband grumbles.

“I intend to do some traveling. You and me are going to travel right on out of this town.”

“Set thine heart toward the highway,” Father says dryly. “Find grace in the wilderness.”

“Philemon,” I say too quickly.

“No.” He is cheerful. “You are trying to be exotic, aren’t you? My little grown-up girl.” He pats my hand. Our fingers make a little bridge. The counter girl sails a rancid rag beneath it. “Nothing will ever be Philemon,” he says.

“A dull letter.”

“I suppose you found my letters dull.”

“I wouldn’t imagine so,” I say.

We leave the counter and walk through the store. The floor is wooden and warped. I feel that I am nailed to a set of wheels and am careening across it. Father strolls easily. We pass notions. A fat child bumps into me. “Could you tell me if I have a stamp on this postcard,” he says, “I’m blind.” His friend is bent double over the nougatines. “I’ll sell it to you for a quarter,” the chubby says. “Give to the blind.” I careen along. “Hey, blackhead,” he hisses, “are you a boy or a girl!”

We reach the door, the sidewalk. The sheriff’s posse prances by, leaving shit all over the street. They are followed by an enormous paper and paste alligator. His eyes are telephone spools. The crowd roars.

“What is this,” Father asks, realizing the unlikelihood of a satisfactory answer. There is a marching band, composed, it seems, of dandruff. The parade is sad and ambitious and extravagant and mean. There is a dangerous and desirous mentality at work on both the viewed and the viewers but it is so heavy-witted and humorous that no one feels subject to it.

“It’s Homecoming.” We squint up the street into the sunlight, into the traffic of gargoyles and beasts and athletes. “They march to the bay and they have a ski show and a slave auction and a gourmet booth. They have a barbecue and a bloodless bull fight and a calliope. Then they release twenty-four hundred balloons into the sky.”

“We can walk to the hotel,” Father says. “I was told it wasn’t far.” We turn down a side street and, after several blocks, turn again. There’s not a soul visible. Some of the shops’ doors have been left open. A telephone rings and rings. “It seems as though the trumpets have sounded,” he says, “and everyone has answered but ourselves.”

“This event is not as popular as the Crowning of the Queen in summer,” I volunteer. I see the town suddenly as feckless and sweet, generous and hopeful, wanting only a little spectacle and a sauced pork rib. Nothing’s going to happen here. “Last year a national magazine sent several photographers down to cover the Queen pageantry. It was said that they took over one thousand photographs. It was said that they drank over five hundred pineapple gimlets. Nothing was printed, however.”

We walk and walk. We can hear the Gulf of Mexico plopping and smashing, bringing frantic things in with the tide. I am hot. I roll up the sleeves of my blouse, extracting another piece of tissue. Father holds the camera. My hands are damp from holding it. The camera looks unsafe. He is holding it distastefully. It turns its foggy eye. The setting’s wrong for sunlight. Everything is wrong. My lungs seem frozen and I am hot.

“Race disappeared, you know,” Father says. “He was old and had arthritis so badly. He’d have to be helped to his feet and when the poor dog was up, he’d stay standing until someone laid him down again.”

“That happened when I was there, Daddy. It’s been a long time since Race died.”

“I think he was down by the water. He was probably following a bird and went into the water and the current took him down.”

“Well, Daddy,” I say uneasily, “that seems as good a way as any other. Actually it could be considered nicer than most.”

“You invested in this camera, did you? You’ve become interested in such things?”

“I know the terms,” I confess modestly. He puts his arm around my waist and ushers me forward. The hotel is ahead of us. Decorative boulders. Restful sago palms. Three men are playing bocce on the beach. They wear snug stretch trousers in Easter-egg colors.

THE VOICE SAID CRY. WHAT SHALL I CRY? ALL FLESH IS GRASS.

“It’s all a question of chemicals,” I say. “Potassium hydroxide, sodium sulphite, phenidone. It’s a matter of accelerators, preservatives, restrainers and water.”

“I can’t imagine why you waste your time on such things,” Father says. “I find it most depressing. I have heard that film can be developed naturally in certain highly polluted bodies of water. I have seen the results. The eye of God enraged. A camera is simply not relevant.”

“No,” I say sadly, AND WHEN THEY AROSE EARLY IN THE MORNING BEHOLD THEY WERE ALL DEAD CORPSES. My Camera teeters on his fingertips but he doesn’t let it go.

“Let’s dispose of it,” he says, “this poor substitution of resurrection.” He puts it in a planter of succulents. There is a red wasp in one of the yellow flowers of a succulent. The camera appears all pocked with scale. It is a piece of junk.

“Yes,” I say. I seem somewhat heavier than before and my hands are uncertain as to how they should handle themselves. We enter the lobby of the hotel. It is spacious and cool. The desk clerk gives a key to Father. Beside him is an extravagant bird chained to a perch. Below the bird is a drink tray with a circle of newpaper cut to fit. On the newspaper are flashy compotes of half-digested fruit.

“If you get too close to Thalassophilia and she bites you, which she may,” the clerk begins in a bored voice, “don’t …”

“Thalassophilia, that’s wonderful,” I say, rousing myself. I must make the attempt to keep witness. Daddy and I are here and that’s all there is to it. Tomorrow will be different but as for yesterday we have been other places and as for now we are here. My womb turns to face its star.

“How can it be wonderful?” the clerk says without surprise. “It is part of the hotel’s policy. The owner has other properties in Puerto Rico and Nassau and they too include birds named Thalassophilia. Now if I may continue? If you get too close to her and she bites you, pretend you haven’t noticed. Then she will stop.”

The clerk and I look at each other with distaste. “Shall we go up to our room and freshen up?” I ask Father primly.

We ascend to our room. It is on the third floor and soars out over the beach, which is empty except for the men playing bocce. All three seem to have achieved an identical degree of skill at the game. No one is winning. They yell at each other without passion in Spanish. There’s a knock at the door and Father opens it. “Would you care for luncheon or a beverage?” The tone is intense, funereal. An old man stands in the hall in dyed black hair and milkman-white.

“Yes,” Father says. “A bottle of gin and a bottle of lime juice. Water biscuits, paté and a good Brie.” He closes the door. “Do you find those young men attractive?” He walks out to the balcony.

“I was watching the porpoises.” I point to the water. Between the long sandbar and the shore, shadows move in a complex rhythm. Two rise, rolling their wise sweet heads.

“I wish I had been a very young man for you. I wish you had known me then.”

“I have known you always, Daddy,” I say dully.

“Why don’t you go for a swim? The water looks so inviting. I’ll watch you from here. When you were small, I would watch you enjoying yourself and it gave me great pleasure. The water looks so refreshing.”

“I don’t have a bathing suit.” One of the bocce players paws at the beach with his foot like a horse. He throws the dark ball beautifully and it lands dead in the sand.

“You go for a swim and when you come back our refreshments will be here. The towels here are extraordinary. Did you notice them? Like rugs. Do you remember the poor towels we had at home? Your mother was always mending them. And the sheets as well. Tiny stitches. Starbursts of thread. Roses and faces of colored thread. You made up a story for each one and you would tell them to me. But these towels look brand new. And so white. No stories there.”

I go out of the room and down the stairs into the lobby. The clerk is standing beside his desk, bouncing on the balls of his feet. The bird is sleeping, folded up on its purple talons. I walk onto the beach, past the young men. Two are standing close together. One is standing farther away, measuring distances with a cloth ruler. I hear a voice, speaking in perfect, musical English.

“John, I saw a muscle of yours on that last shot that I swear I have never seen before.”

I walk into the water and continue until the sandbar. I walk over the sandbar and instantly into water up to my neck. My clothes expire. I turn and face the hotel but do not try to find Daddy on the balcony. I stand there for a while. The nice porpoises have vanished. I wallow back to shore. The young men never glance at me. I take a turn around the desk.

“We prefer that swimmers use the service elevator at the rear,” the clerk says. I go to the rear. The elevator obediently exposes itself.

“Hey,” the clerk says. He has a borrowed, uneasy face as though he chose it off the television. “This bird can shit seven feet flat across the room.”

I return to Daddy. Our snack is laid out nicely. Daddy is fixing the drinks.

“That’s fine,” he says, “that’s fine. I want you to have a good time.” He calls for someone to pick up my clothes for cleaning and pressing. He rubs me dry and wraps me in one of the sumptuous towels.

“You certainly have developed a way about you, Daddy,” I say.

“I want everything to be pleasant for you, darling. I can control it all if you allow me to.” He hands me a drink, expertly prepared, gorgeous with crushed ice.

“Drinketh damage,” he says, smiling. His jaw twitches. His jaw is clenched. He wears a handsome, expensive jersey. His face and thin arms are hard and white like marble. “It’s pleasant here but not for us. You can see that, darling. The sun is bright with malice.”

We sit on the balcony. The sun sprawls scarlet across the Gulf. The sea birds are going home. The plovers, the pelicans, sanderlings, terns and ibis stream across the sky. He slips his hand inside the towel. It falls from my shoulders. A breeze swims across me and stops.

“This is not my favorite time of day,” I say. “Speaking only for myself, I prefer dawn. Birds drop their eggs at dawn. It is generally more a time of hope and promise.”

“All the promises have been kept,” Daddy says.

10

I am swinging in the dreadful hammock of a dream. Whatever woke me has stopped but it will come back again if I am still. It is the sound of birds, beyond the board and metal, in the woods. And my foot aches terribly. In the dark, I reach beneath the blanket and touch it. It is hot and spavined, the toes spread out in a cramp. For some reason, the baby needs something that is in that foot. The baby makes strange demands. It is stronger than I am. I am being housed by it. I am being fashioned in the nights that will bring it to term. And it is I who feel the exhaustion of journey. Not it. What would it know? It is myself who lives in darkness, slowly becoming aware, and it is the child who moves resplendent in the sunlight, beyond restitution in the sunlight.

The child is my dream of life. I harbor its progress and am victim to its whims. Gestating is like being witness to a crime. And I am furtive, I must admit. We all look furtive. My suggestion is to confess to everything. Once, on the street here, shortly after I arrived, the FBI spotted me in a laundromat. I thought the manager was giving me the eye because his machine was acting oddly. Clanging and banging and taxiing around its filthy slot. I tried to ignore his mean and greedy eye. He thought the reward was his. I maintained my poise by reading an agricultural bulletin that was available for patrons. The article I was engrossed in concerned the rat

Eat — hide — gnaw — scatter filth — start fires — gnaw — eat — breed — hide! THAT’S THE LIFE OF A RAT!

And then these fellows slipped around me, crisp as pudding. Smith their names were, and Smith. When Smith showed me his card, he exposed the weighted exercise belt around his middle. Smith, on the other hand, was not a vain man. He conducted the questioning. “Howdjew find Jessup the last time you was there,” he said. “They sure changed that town some.”

“Jessup?” I say.

“You let your hair grow out,” he said. “I gotta say it ain’t becoming. But a girl like you. I can’t imagine you traveling alone. Where’d your boy friend be? The boy what done the carving? I’m sure a little thing like yourself wouldn’t have done that carving.”

“Sheeit,” Smith said, “I bet a little girl like you can’t be aware even of the enormity of her crime.”

Unfortunately, something or other had run in SOAK. My clothes were the color of gasoline.

“Whyn’t we just check up on your little niceties here,” Smith said. “Blood’s harder’n tar to get off your clothes.”

Smith tugs a bit at his crotch. “We might add that your boy’s caught now. It was him that told us where you was. He’s up there in Tampa spilling the beans and he don’t give a pig’s piss for you at this point.”

“Wrong girl,” I say. And of course I was. They wandered away. The manager said that he wasn’t responsible for clothes left in the machine and if I didn’t get them away he wouldn’t be responsible. Of course I knew what Smith had been referring to. A dreadful story. Chopped up someone’s lover and sent him to Coconut Grove in a casserole dish.

But that was when I first arrived. I am sought after, accosted, but never found. Is that not how you find it?

In any case, now I am here rubbing my foot, twisting my toes and wearing a spotted nightie. I can see nothing in the room, but outside the birds are singing and so it must be morning. Or perhaps it is the afternoon of the day before for I can’t place falling asleep. I can make out shadows in the room. There’s a small window over an easy chair but it is stuffed across with webs, hives, cocoons and silky sacks. There is also a large X taped on the window with adhesive as though the window were condemned. Almost no light enters, but there is enough, for the moment, for me to see Grady in the easy chair, sitting with both feet on the floor, his knees apart. I like seeing him there and perhaps the knowledge of Grady being there is what woke me. The first time we met, I woke up and he was there. Most people that later one discovers are significant to one’s living are met through glimpse and carelessness, through stumbling brush and grope. They expose themselves gradually in serial form. Not so with Grady, my groom. He rose beyond reproach in the stink of the old movie house, his voice in my ear an overcurrent to the thud and pound of repair within the walls (for they were renovating the old movie house, redesigning it for a more sophisticated and lucid audience) and his hand on my shoulder was strong …

I want to have him love me. The fact that he does already troubles both of us. I prop the pillow behind my back and begin a conversation. The room is close. I’ve spilled some scent and it’s in the carpet. I open my lips and the words enter my furred mouth.

I begin to tell him a story. Many times I have talked but I have never finished what I wanted to say. To be frank, I have never begun what I wanted to say. I have discussed something else. But now it is as though my whole life has fashioned itself for this moment which is, of course, true. It is as though my whole life is dependent upon the reply to this moment, upon the recognition of it, its application and success. When I complete not telling this story, my life will begin.

“An annal of crime,” I say and curl up within my stained nightgown, comforting myself as though it is I who am being told the tale rather than being the taleteller. There is a glass of cold coffee on the floor. I hear it fall as the bed, on its casters, grinds against it. The child redistributes itself, opening and closing itself like a butterfly. I say,

“In the French mountains in the sixteenth century, an eleven-year-old girl was married and some years later the wedding was consummated and she had a baby boy. She was very much in love …” I stop and inquire about the hound, whether there are any indications that it’s returned. I fall asleep but in no time I am up, pummeling my foot. I mention a party we went to at the home of one of Grady’s friends. There were twenty people there, the same little band that are always present at the parties we attend. Expecting little from these gatherings, it nevertheless gives us no pleasure when our suspicions continually prove correct. Some of the people are students at the college but they do not recognize me for I’ve removed my sorority pin. All that remain are two tiny holes on the right side of every blouse. They don’t know that I am pregnant and they don’t know that I am married to Grady. At one of the parties, a man fell against me and knocked me flat. I had hoped that something might come of it, that the baby would be expelled. Nothing came of it except that now the man comes to me at every party and speaks to me earnestly. He wears tight jerseys with alligators on them. Tiny alligators like jewels. At the party most recently, he came to me in the kitchen where I was drinking gin and eating from a shallow dish of hamburger relish. He was an older man from the college, possibly even an instructor. He had sweat on his hairline, above his lip. He embraced me and I turned rigid. A camouflage. I became part of the sink and tiles. He pressed his mouth against me and wedged the plastic glass of martini between. Beyond his head, on rough drawing paper, I saw crayon renditions of a child’s moon, house and railroad train. I pushed him fretfully away. He was the host. He pushed me back, slightly.

“Well, kiss my coccyx,” he said. He left with dignity, his ass high up his back, like many basketball players I have seen, playing in their prime.

I tell Grady this and slump down in the bed again, turning on my side. The sheet’s pulled back and I rest my cheek on mattress ticking. My mouth moves against a small cloth tag attached with a safety pin. Contents Unknown. Well.

At the window, tiny dots of light shine through the mess. A spider pushes a leaf out of its web. Grady’s told her that there’s something in a spider’s web that mends a cut. Something in the spinning juice. If I should smash one of my limbs through this window, there’d be nothing that wasn’t fine. Damage and repair would be simultaneous. The healing is working out there before any wound that needs it. This is the way it’s always been, I suppose, but never, before Grady, has it been true for me.

I move raptly on the bed. I am an impediment to our lives together. I want to tell him. The moments pass. None of them are correct. The baby goes about its mysterious business. It has formed eyebrows, a lung, certainly a sex. I want to tell him. I will say, “Perhaps the baby isn’t yours.” That is nothing. He suspects this, I know, and yet he has said nothing. My womb is a disease, a benign tumor. I despise my womanliness which carries its sickness about with it, inherent and innate, as though it were success. How can a man know such dyscrasia? I move back against the pillows. The light is so bad that it obscures my speech.

If I begin the story and do not finish it or if I begin it and do not tell it properly in the way it happened, in the time and the place and the circumstance, in the correct sequence of results, will it not then persist like a drowned man, going on to haunt the sea?

I am trapped within this monstrous child. Each day I become precisely less what the unborn has become. If I tell Grady, will I release myself like a virus upon his loving world? The child is not Grady’s. That is nothing. That will cause no conclusion. He assumes responsibility after the movie house, not before. I know this. His pride lies in acceptance, renewal and life.

I am shivering for now I am fully awake and it is cold here. I reach down and turn the dial of our small electric heater. Its red grille and smell and clatter give the impression of warmth. I am only a nest and so cold. The child rocks in its sunlight, warm and breathing in its egg.

“I almost died the other day,” I say.

“That’s ridiculous,” Grady says.

“No, I had some bullets in my pocket and I forgot about them and I was baking chicken and the oven was very hot. I was working around the oven and the bullets were in my pocket.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he says, “they never would have gone off.”

I get out of bed and limp toward him on my aching foot. Grady does not sit in the chair at all. It is his jeans, his sweater scattered realistically in the chair. I pull on his jeans, retaining the nightgown over them, and limp into the kitchen, skirting the dog’s dish. I heat a pan of water, making some coffee with part of it and using the rest to soak my foot. The dog hasn’t been at the trailer for days. He sits a mile away, at the juncture of an overgrown logging rut and the blacktop that goes into town. He sits beneath an enormous tree. When we slow the car for him, he regards us pleasantly enough but he does not get into the car, nor does he look after us as we drive away. The hound is waiting for his owner to come pick him up because he is a good redbone. And good redbones are trained to return to where they were released and to stay there forever.

I miss the dog. Only yesterday or so, I walked to the blacktop and brought him some food — fatty ribs and mash that we feed the ducks. He sits in the shade beneath the tree. In front of him is a deep ditch that catches and holds the afternoon rains. He had been very happy at seeing me and he’d eaten the food like a fellow of means and leisure and he had taken time out to watch me as I sat watching him. But he didn’t follow me home. And I know he never is about to. He has his own fidelities and they don’t include us.

I dry my foot, and go outside. Grady has built a fire in an old washtub and is sitting before it, throwing straw and dead branches on it from time to time. Beside him are four ducks, rearranging themselves continually on a patch of straw. They are dull barnyard ducks of unstable numbers for some wander off across the river and are eaten. At times, I collect their down which is bleakly sensual and useless in quantity. They set up a terrific racket as I approach and fly off into short trees.

It’s cold and the fire burns cleanly in the air, without smoke. Sometimes, sharks come up this river by mistake. I lumber toward Grady, awkward as a cub, bumping against him remotely, an unburnt branch on a cant from the fire, snagging my nightgown. Some things cannot be forgiven. Grady is not the one to forgive.

I crouch behind him and put my arms around his chest. Grady stirs the fire and the flames snapping in the weak sunshine are blond as his eyes. “How are you two this morning?” he asks.

“We’re fine,” I decide to say. “We’re coming along nicely.”

He shares a piece of bread with me. I take it and push it into the shape of a pony. Just as I crimp its mane, it trots away.

11

Don’t look, Father says.

I struggle for effect but my intention never lay in looking.

12

I say to the ducks, “Weather cold enough for you?” My life is prudent, recessive and dark. Every day is Christmas Eve. I talk to the animals but they do not talk to me.

“It’s going to warm up,” Grady replies instead “Move up twenty more degrees by noon.”

Noon. The threat of another pretty day with my Grady. He speaks with joy of little things. He tosses his head and laughs.

“Cold’s what makes the orange orange,” I say positively. I can learn anything.

Grady’s hands are warm from the fire. He turns. He unzips the jeans I am wearing and rubs his hands across my stomach. “Little fish,” he says.

I smile. For a moment there are just the two of us. For a moment, this is the way it is going to be. Daddy dies with our happiness. The baby dies. Poor baby. Rather he curls up like a flower, he goes back into his impossible night.

We are smiling. This was before the accident. Before he was corrupted and our life together lost. He did not want to touch upon my past. He did not want to know if my favors had been freely given. He was not interested in the life I had before him. Instead, he tried to take me with him, through each day. He used time masterfully. It minded his whims. He spent it conscientiously, for both of us. We never returned to the movies after we met. I dislike movies, he told me that very night. Everything takes so long, he told me. He wasted nothing. Nothing was spent on him without ample reimbursement. I see him as a little boy watching fireworks. Oh, they are stunning, grand. He approves of each one. He gives all his blessing. He does not allow a single one to bloom and fire without his breath of praise. He never allows his attention to wander. He sees through to the finish. I see him as a little boy, very grave, tireless in his respect.

No, nothing escapes his notice and he studies, in great detail, everything but me. He is in love with me. I am beyond his code.

Look at the deer, he’d say. We would be soaring in the Jaguar under a cathedral of trees. It would be night. The lights would find everything, but not for me, never for me. Look, he’d say and slow, but they’d be gone. They love cigarettes, he’d say. They’re after the stubs that travelers throw out.

Look, he’d say. Look. He squeezes my shoulders. His tongue darts lightly down my neck. His eyes burned with happiness. He is proud of his wide smooth sex. It is fragrant with soap. He is assured of the sweetness of life. It sings to him.

Look, he’d turn my head gently. An old man drifts down the river in a white wooden boat. He wears a big flat straw hat and three sweaters, buttoned to different levels. He has a deep canvas bag for the fish hanging from his shoulder. He moves regally by. The line flicks lightly through the water flowers, into the deep pockets of the ancient river.

Everything is pleasing. There is a Ferrari. There is a mule. There is a tiny Mennonite girl at a Whopper-Burger. She has been picking fruit. She wears a bonnet and a long brown dress and she smells of citrus. She eats her hamburger with a knife and fork. It takes forever. There is a woman wetting the stones that ring her flower garden. That is the most satisfactory chore, watering the stones. There is a drumfish, pounding on the water each night. We go out in the boat. The fish rises beside us. It sounds like a gigantic frog. He follows the boat, he nudges it. It is a magical fish, an enchanted fish that will grant your wish. Grady wishes for nothing. I always wish that he had taken me that night after the movie house and never looked for me again. We were silent. More so than I’d ever been with the strangers. I thought that I would never see him again. We drove, we drank, we stopped. We drove again. He lay me down gently in the darkness beneath some sweet smelling pines. His hands trembled. We drove by water, I could smell it. We heard the chuck-will’s-widow. We went back through the town. Tomorrow, he said. I was startled. Tomorrow, he said. Tomorrow, next week. But I was so weary, so lost. I did nothing to prevent him from saying … it’s true I wasn’t paying attention. My mind was going home with Daddy …

Just hours before, Daddy had boarded the train. Behind the coach he’d entered was a snow-white refrigerator car bearing orange juice for the rickety North. He was the only one departing. I was the only one left behind. Now, once this station had been one of the busiest in the state. There were huge crowds coming to see the circus. And an elephant was killed right here on these tracks though there is no plaque, for it was not Jumbo who was killed in Ontario but another elephant.

But there are no crowds at the station any more. It was early but the heat was rising. You could smell the fertilizer they’d packed around the sidewalk lily plantings. The town was dirty and had a milky cast. The street was trashy from the parade of the day before and as we waited, Daddy and me, the work crews were making their way toward us slowly, cleaning up, the prisoners of the county in their gray trousers and shirts with the wide blue stripe down the side. Daddy was holding my hand in his. My hand was empty. Or rather, I was not holding his hand in mine. He brought it to his lips but did not kiss it. I could see our image in the locked windows of the station. I was in a position to notice this. Come with me, he’d said. There’s nothing here for you to leave behind, he’d said. Come with me while it’s still that way … the image of my hand moved back. The train wound through buildings and appeared abruptly and then wound through buildings and departed abruptly as well. The train didn’t even come to a full stop. Daddy glided on. The train sank dreamily away. The crews came sweeping and bagging up the street, nice boys, fresh faces, up for stealing copper wire or beating on their women’s fellows.

“Yo,” the captain said to me. He smacked his shotgun against his thigh. The boys phalanged by, leaving everything pretty behind them. I could hear birds beginning their day. The street lights went off simultaneously and the morning became a healthier color. Opposite me, the proprietor of a U-Rent-It-All put out his wares on the sidewalk. Mowers and beds and automatic nailers and hoists. And then he brought out an aluminum ladder that he would rent you too and he climped up on it and put a new combination of letters in place on his glass marquee, a new message on his fresh new day. RENT YOUR CONVALESCENT NEEDS. His little boy came out and voiced some easily accomplished desire in a piping screech and the man descended, folded up the ladder and leaned it against the storefront.

And the letters there you know, the portable letters there so ominous and … took me home again. Yes, I was home, waiting for Daddy. It would take him two days and three nights to return but I was there already. Years ago. I am a darling toddler assisting him with the slate letters on the church bulletin board. I choose from a sturdy box that still smells faintly of apples. A remarkable box. It can make any word that anyone can think of. It is limited only by me. I slide the letters along the rusting runners, following Daddy’s directions. He is my only consideration. It is summer, it is spring. Daddy and I seduce the mornings. I weigh forty-one pounds. Fifty-seven. The earth shimmers with the yearnings of God. Daddy guides my hand. I LAID ME DOWN AND SLEPT I AWAKED. My thoughts were his thoughts. Psalms, I would say. Yes, darling. It is raining. It is a day of high cool sun fading my hair. Song of Solomons, I say, Genesis. Yes, sweet, he would say. Life’s simple as it seems for we love but once, darling. The rest is dissolution.

I walk across the street and into the rental place. Something clicks as I cross the threshold. Something’s counting me. The little boy sits on a rental hide-a-bed. What time is it? I ask. His mouth is full of jelly. Ten till, he says eventually. That’s wonderful, I exclaim. And what’s your name? Rutt, he says peacefully after a long pause. The proprietor emerges. Ambrose, he says, what does this lady want. The time, I intercede. He jerks his head in the direction of a big wall clock. Feast your eyes, he says. I go out onto the street again. I walk a little. I buy some coffee. For lunch I buy some wine. I know the time. I spent the day in darkness. And at the end of it, I met my Grady. But as I say, I wasn’t paying attention.

Look, he said to me then, I’d like for you to stay with me awhile. I have a place. He talks to me in darkness. My hips rub on grass. I have everything for you, he says, or I can get is tomorrow. Tomorrow. Next month.

Grady.

I did not demur. I entered his life. Coma calling. Now Grady sits on the riverbank. The fire sparkles. He gives my belly one more caress. It’s sculpted and heavy as a wooden pear.

“Come to school with me today and at noon we’ll go to the beach,” he says. “We’ll swim. We’ll buy some bread and cheese. We’ll swim and eat and sleep.”

“At noon. Juste milieu. When the sun is up.”

“And so am I,” he says.

The fire burns. So do all of God’s children.

13

Grady enjoys going to classes. He wants to make a fine life for us. He works very hard. There is going to be the baby. He sees other babies. He sees a fantastic tree house on his beloved river. He will design it himself. He will build it himself. Inside it will be leather and wicker and aluminum and wood. We will have pet otters that will bring us fish. We will have lime and lemon and grapefruit and orange trees and ladybugs to eat the aphids. We will have a telescope and study the stars. We will have an herb garden. We will have a Land Rover and a De Tomaso Mangusta. We will live in our fantastic house. Then we will travel. We will get a motor sailer. Go to Greece. The Pacific. Go everywhere. Then we will return. Our children will be loving and handsome. The orchids will grow on the trees. Everything will always grow around us beautifully. We will always be in love.

Of course this is in the future.

I tell him, “Love, love, I have no future.” I say this. I say, “When they were casting the Weird of my life, that third sister was out on an apéritif.”

Naturally, he does not agree. There is the future of this day, for instance. I’ve promised him I’ll go to school today and I’ve dressed and I have. We are in town, going to school, but first we stop in a hardware store, for he has to buy a tool or two, for his Jaguar, for his class. I wander off to the seed bins. They’re lovely. St. Augustine, Argentine bahia, centipede, zoysia, Tiflawn bermuda. I plunge my hands into the bins. It’s wonderful. I worm my hands around, up to my elbows. Tiny slippery busy beads. A clerk comes up. He points to a sign. “They’ll have to be baked now,” he says angrily. “You’ve contaminated them.” Insulted, I buy fifteen pounds. I turn out my pockets. I give him every cent. “A good choice,” he says, handing me a sack. “Low maintenance. Will survive total neglect.” Grady’s at my side. He’s bought a picnic basket. He puts my sack inside it.

“It’s pasture grass,” he tells me as we leave.

“Let’s make a pasture!” I am so enthusiastic. Where will we plant it? Who will come to watch it grow? I imagine already friendly beasts following us down the street, birds and bees and grazing things. But I become weary. My feet lag. What a responsibility, this grass! What a burden! I have poisoned it. The man said so. I am so destructive. My hands are hatchets. Daddy had told me this. He’d said, AND WHERE THE SLAIN ARE THERE IS SHE. Job. He’d said, It’s happened and it’s ahead of you, forever and ever.

We enter the college grounds.

I sit down beneath a banyan tree though I only want to be back in the trailer or sitting in the Jaguar, at rest, resting. Grady kisses me good-by and enters the chemistry building. He turns before he opens the door, his hair all smacked askew with water, heartbreaking as a grebe, and waves at me. I wave back, grateful for his familiarity. He drops from sight into forestry and mathematics.

He has a theory for the animals, with which by equation the earth can be saved.

I have a malapropism or two.

The leaves on this tree are long as baseball bats. Many of the roots haven’t rooted yet but stick out stiff as wires, at eye-level, from the trunk. Everything’s so colorful and fecund. A bellowing order and thoughtful rhyme. Noah’s Ark. A path for every foot to trod. A trot for any taste. Students move heartily by with the faces of winning contestants. Everyone’s a winner here! The South is Cracker-Jax!

“Hello!” they cry. I blink.

“Hiyew,” a girl says cutely as a comic book. “Why we haven’t seen you for quite some time. My boyfriend’s sleeping in your bed.”

“O.K.!” I cry cheerfully. I am speaking too loudly. I know this girl. Debbie Dow. Before I’d gone off with Father five months ago and then immediately with Grady, five months ago, I had known this girl. A sister. With a pin and a barrette of hammered silver weighing down her head.

“Those your sheets?” the girl asks. “Or are they from the service? Better get yourself some new sheets when you come back. Are you coming back? Jean’s wearing your clothes. Half of them are in her closet now.”

Her teeth do not grow out of the gums but are perched there as though in afterthought. Other than this, the girl’s face is wealthy.

So many questions, so much news. “OK.!” I cry joyously.

“Those sheets certainly have had their lives,” the girl says. “Those pussycat sheets.”

I know this girl. I’ve seen her squatting for the soap. Rump bumpy as an ugly lemon. I know the boy as well. A baseball player on a scholarship. A pitcher with big ears. What’s all this talk about boys and beds? A whore is a deep ditch and a strange woman is a narrow pit. A youth’s a rictus and an aging man is ruinous. There’s no turnpike to love. Just snares and snaffles. I want to go back, back. But to what?

I will tell this girl instead. I will whisper in her ear’s veranda. The girl’s head tips expensively, from the barrette. She speaks first.

“There’s been some mail for you. One or two letters. I saw them just the other day but they were gone this morning. I suppose you picked them up?”

The girl seems to be shouting at me. From a distance. I look down at the ground, expecting to see a cheeping creek separating us, an unfordable crinkle in the earth. It’s almost there. There’s a plastic straw on the ground. I pick it up and put it in the new picnic basket. A straw’s as good as a cup. One never knows what the day will bring.

“Was that your daddy I saw you with? Down for Homecoming? Down for the water show?”

“Oh, but that was a long time ago,” I shout.

“Yes, but that was the last time I saw you,” the girl says confidently. “Why wasn’t that the Homecoming though? With our float winning and all? What a time Cloyd and I had! We fell asleep and the tide just about took us out.”

I think of replies. I discard them all.

“We had champagne in the House after the parade,” Debbie persists. “Why weren’t you there?”

“That certainly would have been the time to be there,” I agree.

“You bet!” squeals Debbie.

“We saw the parade,” I say.

“You and your daddy?”

“Pardon me?” I say.

“I find older men sort of frantic myself,” dimpled Deb confides.

“What a parade!” I exclaim.

Thousands and thousands of tissues stuffed into chicken wire.

“Better than the Rose Bowl,” Debbie ventures.

All that paper! Three thousand trees vanish from Big Cypress Swamp.

“The Toilet Bowl!”

The girl’s face is smooth and silly and kind. I am so exhausted now with all this conversation. I want to lie down and put my mouth on the grass. It is a beautiful day. Grady was right. Blue pours through the trees. And it is so still. I wear my bathing suit beneath my clothes. They are wrinkled and old, clothes that Daddy bought me, things I wore years ago when I was with him, walking across the brown crisp ground in the springtime. I try to blink my eyes. Someone’s rolled a stone across them. Why is this girl talking to me? Why does anyone ever begin anything when none of it can ever end?

“It’s really mostly crepe,” Debbie is saying. Of course she does not care for weird stringy me. But she is a sister and the sisters are bound in the solemn ceremony of Omega Omega Omega, linked one to one by their knowledge of the secrets of Catherine who was not only a virgin and perfect in every way but also had her paps burnt away and her head smote off.

Debbie is being gracious. She is exercising her southern self — that is, she does not see rag-tag unpleasant me. She sees no object specifically. She works utterly on a set of principles.

The stone rolls back across my eyes. I open them and then I close them firmly. I would like a glass full of gin and cold orange juice and a few drops of Angostura bitters and I would like to be under the sun on the beach, getting hot and clean. The thought of gin makes me sick but I persist in its conjuring. My stomach turns for I am really afraid. My stomach is no longer my own. It is the baby that my thought of gin repels. I think of Sweet Tit Sue. I am deliberate in restoring her. She didn’t touch me. She smelled of shade and wild tarragon growing. She wouldn’t touch me. She stood with her arms crossed over her enormous chest. There were plants everywhere, growing in red dirt out of potato chip cans. You’re Grady’s girl, she said. I’m not about to do anything to mess him up. If you’re messing him up it’s best he be shut of you, she said. She wouldn’t put her hand on me. Where did he touch you, Mother had said. She was weeping, she had lost her mind. Was it here? Here? Something flew from her mouth and dropped wetly on my knee. Mother was crying. God. She shook me. A bubble of sickness rose in my throat. I knows that good boy Grady, Sweet Sue said. It’s him I’ll do the favors to. You come back here with Grady if you want. The baby was twisting and clawing inside of me. His fear took up the oxygen. Her cabin has one room. Someone drops an egg — a brown one with a tiny fluff of feather stuck to it. It falls and falls. It’s not for me, I said. I don’t care what happens to me. I sat down on a corner of her beautiful brass bed. Sue made a small rude sound. The sheets smelled of onions. She made me go away. Tell me, Mother had said. Tell me what he did.

“I must be off,” Debbie is saying. “See you round like a donut.”

The swollen banyan bloats out around me. I sniff my absent repulsive and wonderful gin. One can feel only so sick after all and I am not really sick. If anyone ever leaves this world alive it will be me, or someone like me, a woman and a lover, bearing a bad beginning in my womb. Kate fecit. When will the bottom be? What joy, the bottom of the pit. BUT HE BEING FULL OF COMPASSION DESTROYED THEM NOT … FOR HE REMEMBERED THAT THEY WERE BUT … words, words. I must only be silent as Daddy said. I must not tell. And what is the pain of this moment? I am a young thing gripping a picnic basket, waiting for my man. All is sequence and little is substance …

“Hullo, Kate.” The voice is too familiar. I would know it anywhere, as though I had never had to relate it to a form. “Come back, have you? Had an adventure?” Cords stands over me as though it was she who laid me low. Doreen stands behind her, a pretty little doll with glassy eyes. Cords has bitten her nails down to stubs and wears gloves, trying to break the habit. They are black vinyl gloves and their presence, so close to me seems apocalyptic. A BAD ANGEL. AN ANGEL OF DEATH.

“Well, Cords,” I say, “you’re cutting an impressive shape this morning.”

Doreen looks empty-headedly down. Her hair swings around her hips. She passes her hand across her neck in a precise gesture of languor. She smiles at me. Then she smiles more anxiously at Cords.

Cords says, “You definitely look peaked. Think a picnic lunch will really perk you up? Picnics aren’t for you, Kate. They’re for those with lighter hearts.”

“I am waiting for someone,” I say.

“So are we all,” Cords sighs, “but you do it so drably. You’ve dropped out of our sights for months and now that you’re back, you’re the same.”

“More of the same,” I correct her wittily. Oh, Grady, I cannot right myself.

“Yes indeed, you’ve got all those things you keep thinking about. All in the past. And you keep chewing on them. You’re choking on them.”

“You’re right,” I say. “I had a bird once. He was a toucan and extraordinary looking but everything about him was forgettable.”

“We are speaking of your problem,” Cords says, putting her little finger in the corner of her mouth. She immediately jerks it away. There is a look that is almost pain on her face. “These goddamn hands of mine. I’ve abused them too long and now they’re just blood waiting to spill.”

“Icchhh,” Doreen says.

“Tender as hell,” Cords complains. “Like some of those poor mammals born without skin.”

“Icchhh,” Doreen cries.

Vivid Cords. Today she wears a black suit, a mauve linen shirt with huge soft cuffs. She is striking. The heat has made tight ringlets of her hair. She is the leader of our sisterhood. As in most things, the real leader is not the acknowledged head. Our head is a girl with a slight mustache whose mother sends a torte from Cleveland monthly. When motorists scream dimyerlights at her while she is driving she thinks that they are from Ohio too and acknowledges them with a cheery thump on her horn. She is seldom heeded, even on her own terms, and has a continual expression of candid disappointment. No, it is Cords who’s in the saddle, as it were. It is she who plays big brother to all the little sisters. They run around her thither and there, cooing in their Italian underwear. One size fits all. They do not discuss her with each other. They want her to themselves. She is fashionable. She is smart. The sources and supply of her insults and praise are inexhaustible. The girls clamor for her attention and authority. When she leaves them they feel lovelier and luckier than they had before. They feel relieved and knowledgeable without being wise, like bunnies escaping from a snare.

She exhibits her profile to me. It is as cold and inarguable as a knife. She has never been touched by a man and makes no attempt to conceal her success. Each year she chooses a girl for herself. The choice is never questioned by the chosen. They are without exception beautiful girls. They are usually rich. It was apparent that the moment Doreen walked on campus, Cords would want her. And she got her. Which was not to say that Doreen didn’t enjoy the boys. Cords urged her to, for Cords was out to make her the Golden Rain Tree Queen, queen of the town, of the state, of the country.

Doreen is looking up into the branches of the banyan, alternately tossing her hair and twisting her fingers around her necklace. It is a mustard seed in heavy-duty plastic, crouched in the dimple of her throat. It really is.

“I have a notion that we are akin in many ways,” Cords says to me.

“Don’t be forward.” I try to rise in one long and confident motion to my feet, but fail.

“Where have you been?” Cords muses softly. “Canceling issue?”

“Ahh,” breathes Doreen.

Cords shakes her head. Her skin is eerily matte flat, lacking blemish or shadow or curve. “No, I don’t think so. You’re the one with one foot in religion. Think all the little babies are stars in heaven waiting to be plucked out to bless earth.”

“That’s not me. I’m partial to the thinking that they’re glowing wee embers in hell.”

“My poppa always used to tell me that I was the brightest whitest star in the Milky Way,” Doreen exclaimed sweetly.

“It hasn’t ever been the same since and that’s a fact,” Cords says, but doesn’t take her eyes off me.

“I thought it was a real pretty thing for Poppa to say, him being such a busy man and all,” Doreen says. “I think …”

“Don’t try to think now, sugar,” Cords says smoothly. “It causes a hardening ‘round the mouth. Besides it’s not the time. I’m just talking to our lost Kate here.” She raises one of her gloved hands and pats Doreen’s mouth with it. “I’ll hear your thinking later, sugar.” Doreen’s mouth is generous and a little slack. She smiles again at me, faintly and dismissively, in the way that Cords has taught her.

“I don’t know why you’re troubling yourself with me,” I say, looking over at the forestry building for Grady.

“I take an interest in you,” Cords says. “Seeing you is useful to me. It musters out my most helpful and endearing qualities. I have seen you riding about in a discontinued but very impressive car with a blond young man. I gather that you are looking for peace and safety in his company but he looks a bit frail to me. You have a clumsy way about you, Kate. I’d be careful that I didn’t press too hard. My single memory as a child was of my own clumsiness. It all seemed collected in my hands. They continually broke or worried things. They were very strong and big as well and should have belonged to one of my brothers. But they didn’t, they belonged to me. They were my protective mantling, I believe. A tool of survival, you might say. I was the last of thirteen children. My family insisted that I was the fourteenth. There was no thirteenth. They wouldn’t think of having had a thirteenth. I have heard that they’ve done that with the floors of hotels, the knowledge of which was not a consolation to me at the time.”

“You do go on,” I say.

“I apologize,” Cords says airily. “I meant only to make myself conducive to your distress. And, of course, I want to welcome you back.”

“I don’t live here any more,” I say. “I come back to classes only occasionally. We probably will never bump into each other again.”

Cords looks amused. “But that’s just not the way the world works,” she says cheerfully. “The same people are forever cropping up in our lives. Besides, we can be of assistance to each other. I’m sure we could have some nice talks that would make you feel better. As for myself, I can be easily obliged. I’ve heard that you know that black boy that does something or other in the menagerie on the bay. We need one of their animals, a cat of some sort, for Doreen’s Queen Serenade. It will be spectacular. I have it all planned. They have a leopard there, I’m told. I would like that. That would be best.”

“I wouldn’t be able to help you there,” I say worriedly. Trouble. Daddy had said, The snare and the pit will follow all the days of man. It always will. I see the darkness of Bryant’s Beasts. Dim. Brackish moist. The surface of the fish tanks breaks and glints and moves in silver circles across the animals. Their shadows are swollen on the walls. The leopard does not pace. He waits.

“We’ll see,” Cords says. “But it troubles me the way you drift off. You were looking back then again, weren’t you? A terrible weakness, memory. Memory’s just a hole that fills a lack.”

“I wasn’t remembering anything,” I say,

“I can see your problem, Kate. Really, I’m very sympathetic to it. You were born nicely, weren’t you, and were christened like Doreen here and you wore a little frock and you had white sturdy shoes. Your daddy told your mama to raise you so that you would love that which was good and hate that which was evil and you grew up hating and loving all the right things in all the right places and that’s dandy but it doesn’t seem to work out in the long run. Now it’s easier for me because my mama was nothing but a tumblebug. Rolled up a little ball of dung and laid her egg. And I hatched right there — surrounded by shit.”

“Icchhh!” Doreen is insistent this time. “You’re gonna make me sick, Cords. You’re gonna make it impossible for me to eat any lunch.”

“At the very least,” I say. “I’m going now,” I say. My simple statement sounds much too aggressive as though I didn’t know I didn’t mean it.

“I think you unsettled her even more than me,” Doreen whispers as I stride away.

“Don’t be stupid,” Cords says.

14

“I think I changed my mind about the beach,” I tell Grady. We are in an eddy of boys with slide rules slapping from their belts in holsters. Part of the wall in the first hall of this building supports a piece of redwood the size of our trailer. It is dirty and stained, with a tragic and breathless presence. THIS SLAB IS OLDER THAN CHRIST, a sign says. In part.

“Do you want to go anywhere?” Grady asks.

“No, nowhere.” Our legs seem trembling in a pool of pink from the redwood.

A POISONED HOST PREVENTED HER FROM DYING. I shake my head to try and clear it. Grady, leave me. I cling to him, forcing a smile. We walk back to the Jaguar.

Had Cords always appeared to be wearing a nylon stocking on most of her face? There is no assurance. Had Father ever bought me a sugar cone? And was it sherbet or a cream? Daddy never did. Had Daddy bought my napkins? Who else would I have asked? I was shy but he proceeded. Shameful tactics not of my invention. All grown up, he said. Before, Mother had always told us, Carry two safety pins and a dime for a telephone call at all times and in case.

The baby turns his big remora head and fastens on my heart. Grady has one hand on the wheel. He clutches his chest with his other. I cannot tear my eyes away. He gathers up the cloth of his shirt embarrassedly over the hole in his chest. I can see his quiet lungs …

“Look here,” he says, taking out a piece of paper from his pocket and handing it to me. “Would you like to go out Friday night for dinner?” There is a name on the paper and a number and an address. I can see the letters. “You remember them,” he says. “You’ve met them before.”

“Dinner? Of course,” I say ambitiously. “I’ll make a salad!” I am so grateful that Grady’s chest is not open, that he is speaking.

“They are a pleasant couple although he sometimes becomes tedious on the subject of ferns.”

“The Fern Fellow,” I exclaim, remembering. “Very agreeable.”

Right,! he would say to anything and then pursue his own dichotomous course. Right! We haggled all night. Small silky hairs grew from the palms of his hands.

We are on the road now, heading home. There is a truck ahead of us, moving slow. The road is narrow and winding. It is a small truck, hauling mirrors. They hang from all sides in glinting sheafs. “Oh, pass him!” I cry. Grady noses around his bumper, but pulls back in. Seconds later, a logging rig hurtles by from the other direction.

“I can’t for a minute,” he says. “We have to wait until the road straightens out.”

THAT WHICH HAS BEEN IS NOW AND THAT WHICH IS TO BE HATH ALREADY BEEN AND GOD REQUIRETH THAT WHICH IS PAST. The eye’s our totem but mine’s snapping and popping like a jacked deer’s eye. There is nothing in the glass but ourselves. We are pinned like butterflies to the worn seats. Even the trees have been banished.

“Then stop,” I beg. “Pull over and let him go on, past our road.” My voice is weak. All my strength is in my feet, pushed against the floor boards. The Jaguar struggles to a halt. The truck sways skittishly around a curve and is gone. Before us is the world again, sounds settling in the void of the engine’s silence. Grady’s parked in a burnt-out pocket of woods. And it’s then we can heard the sound of singing, very frail but determined, and see the sign of a penciled arrow on a butter box nailed to a tree.

“Revival,” Grady grins. “See the tent?”

The black tree trunks seem to sparkle. The tent is brown like the dead forest we remain in and is strung up somehow between the trees like a poor umbrella. There are no sides. We sit in the car. Grady cocks his head.

“There were ninety and nine that safely lay

In the shelter of the fold,

But one was out on the hills away,

Far off from the gates of gold—

Away on the mountains wild and bare,

Away from the tender Shepherd’s care …”

“It’s always that hymn,” Grady says. “They have always been singing that hymn and if you came back here in twenty years, they’ll be singing it still. When I was little and living with my cousins we would go to church on Sunday morning in a drive-in theatre and they would be shouting out that hymn. It was never my maiden cousins’ favorite as it seemed too generous. They preferred texts that put the fear in a boy because they were certain I was going to turn out troublesome. But every Sunday we would sit in that ugly little pasture with the billboard advertising the week’s movie, which was always something like The Day Gongola Ate the World or the like, and we would be forever singing that hymn.”

He stops, thinking about his orphaned days, his cousins whom he has never discussed with me. They gave him nothing but the care they could and he’s obliged.

He backs the Jaguar onto the road. The singing follows us. It slides over us and gets behind us and it stops us dead. Then Grady shoots down the road. There’s only the snick of the gears. We do not see the truck again. We come to the trailer. Something crashes through the brush as we get out. In those mirrors I had seen my Grady tumbling headlong toward the light beyond their frames. Don’t be afraid it will work this car can still go ninety-five miles an hour it can work sometimes at ten miles an hour there won’t be anything left of us there’s hardly anything left now just enough to bury. He was missing, then he was gone. I cannot stop myself. I tell him my story at last. The hounds are yammering in the woods. The hounds are tracking. No one’s fired. We have a drink or two. I cannot stop. At last I say, “I must tell you about Father.”

15

The class is already in progress. I come in late and must sit in the very first row. I find that I am wringing my hands softly, softly, as though I am washing a pair of socks. Grady is in the room. He does not look at me. There are thirty or so students here in French class. It is held in what was once the kitchen of the mansion. Of course now all the stoves and sinks have been removed and the room is equipped with the furniture of learning. All that remains of its former use are the big black and white floor tiles and the white pressed tin ceiling, dimped in a flower design, creamy and faint and deranged, like a wedding cake had blown up on it.

I watch Grady but he does not look at me. He ignores me without rancor. He is just not looking at anything. I am called upon to recite. A tick is crawling across my neck and up into my hair. I can feel it moving, even when I feel it stop.

I read—

And then I read,

“Cet aveu que je te viens de faire

Cet aveu si honteux, le crois-tu volontaire?”

The instructor shakes his head despairingly. “This is a terrible moment in Racine,” he says. “Should there be a court order protecting him from sophomores?” There is a respectful titter. He sighs. “Go on,” he tells me.

I say,

“You think that this vile confession that

I have made is what I meant to say?”

16

I have waited for Grady for nights. He is here but he does not come to me. I wait naked in the midnights. I know I am not attractive. My stomach has taken on crooked dimensions. My breasts have become all flat nipple. Nevertheless, one night he comes to me. He has made our decision. My phantom lover. I can see his outlines clearly. He sits beside me for a long time and then I feel the first touch of his hand. He wraps his legs around mine and enters quickly. His hands hold my hips without ambition, his mouth rests on my own without words. He takes me again and again with him into his new darkness. He is trying to wrest something from me. We understand this. I tremble like a branch. It does not stop. He probes deeper and deeper, cool like metal, like an instrument. We are drenched. We continue. Soon it will be the last time. The morning comes down.

17

I try to explain to the sheriff’s deputy, but I don’t understand it too well myself. I am walking along the shoulder of the road and he travels beside me in his striped Ford. I feel that it is up to him to speak first. At last, the car shoots forward and stops ahead of me. He opens the door and gets out. There is an enormous white light on the roof of his car, twisting hysterically. He’s reluctant to turn it off. He’s young and heavy-chested, his hair is cut so short you can see the white skull skin. His shirt strains and gapes across his stomach. Underneath, he wears a T-shirt. I sit in the front seat and we drive very slowly. Along the road, the eyes of dogs are blue in the dark and the houses are careless and painted in garish colors. We have not reached the town. Every time I touch my head, sand falls out of it, and there are a few pine needles caught in the weave of my sweater, where, I suppose, I might have been lying on the ground. He talks quickly and slyly as though there were a secret between us. His jaw is long and his face is thin. The stomach sprawling heavily above his belt is merely a part of his law-enforcement equipment.

I am trying to think. Mistrust all evidence. We were going to someone’s house for dinner. I am still holding a bottle of wine in a paper bag. Grady is very conscientious — always the perfect guest. He remembers the name of everyone he meets and always brings a little gift, wherever he is invited. If he was about to be hung, he would bring the nooseman a stick of gum. It was he who insisted we continue on to our friends’. He said that they would consider us rude, that they would think something had happened to us. It wasn’t far, a few miles, so we set out, leaving the beautiful Jaguar on the curve, all smashed and broken like a flower.

I am sure that this is how it was happening. I was following him in another car — I can’t recall the make, such a tiring car, round and slow with great patched tires that someone had painted white — an enormous wallowing car with bad suspension and a compass bolted to the dashboard. He crashed right before my eyes. The car turned slowly in the air like something at the movies. He was thrown clear, landed on his feet and running. The lights were still on, the radio was playing a very popular country and Western song about love and subterfuge. In this song, the lovers have an arrangement by which the woman will raise the flag on the mailbox when the husband is out of the house. I stop talking to the deputy and swallow a few times. My head seems full of penny candy, garnished with a Melba peach. I realize that my problem is lack of discrimination. My head fills achingly, like a poisoned lung. I cannot stop thinking about the song.

The radio is playing and the engine is running still, in perfect tune.

Grady runs raggedly, crouched, as though he is in a war. Something disquieting has caught in his hair. He turns the ignition off and stands beside the Jaguar. He looks fierce and sad and lopsided. Perhaps the engine can be salvaged. Everything else is a ruin. The frame is bent. The pretty metal pocked like a waffle.

He loved his car. He loved the language of it and the feel of its oily gloamy parts. Once he took the engine out and apart, only for his edification. It fluttered from a tree for days in a canvas sling. The dirty jargon would make me laugh. Camshaft sprocket setscrews. Cotter pins and slotted nuts. Idler sprockets fitting to eccentric shafts. Starter jaws retaining with locking washers. Some madman went and named them all and expected me to follow along. It made me angry in a way. I refused to be educated to it. However, he did teach me how to adjust the carburetors — there were three — and I could also correct valve clearance for he bought me a feeler gauge..006 inches for the intake, 008 inches for the exhaust. It is so depressing to know that this knowledge will stay with me always.

He knew the Jaguar perfectly. It was his only inconsistency. Stalls and shelters dotted the yard, housing soaking parts, tools, fluids and hoses. I remember him working on it on beautiful nights, the trees impossible ash, the river fat and white beneath the moon …

I remember him working on it the last time. I called to him but he only pressed deeper into the engine. His only movement was when he exchanged one wrench for another. When he was finished at last, he came in, smelling of soap and kerosene. He went to bed. We did not kiss the last time. We gripped our bodies as one learns to. Feeding cutlery.

But why do I speak so myopically? There has been an accident. The deputy looks at me as though he would like to hit me. He lights a cigarette that seems absurdly long. I wrap my fingers more tightly around the paper bag that rests in my lap. “Let me rectumfy something …” I begin and know I have made another mistake. “Rectify,” I say. There is a big star painted on the hood of the Ford as though we were part of a circus train. The deputy seems not to be listening. He pulls up to a White Tower and glares angrily inside for a few minutes at the people bent around the counter, eating fries and eggs. He puts the car in gear again. He seems displeased with everything.

He says, “There was only one accident and you left it. You wasn’t about to report it. There was only one accident and only one car.”

I agree with him as much as possible. “I saw the whole thing.” It was true. It wasn’t happening to me for, after all, it was Grady’s accident. I can’t be expected to assimilate everyone else’s events. A suppository of junky remembrances is pressed upon me by them all and I can’t forget a bit of it. I can remember everything and no one fact complements the other. It feels the same whether you’ve pretended it or not.

“You’re lucky,” the deputy says. “I seen accidents where nothing on the vehicle is broke save the headlight but the people inside is deader than bricks.”

He is so bewildering, this angry man. He is driving with prideful slowness through the town. He lingers particularly outside Mr. Porky, Mahalia Jackson Fried Chicken and John’s Bar-Bee-Q. We cruise in and out of the parking lots. The deputy breathes through his teeth and taps his fingers against the steering wheel.

Why am I lucky? I don’t understand. I am unable to make inferences, but nothing ever seems to come to a conclusion and that isn’t my fault. The deputy doesn’t mention Grady. I try to think of him, once and for all.

It is warm and the top of the Jaguar is down. I am following him in the other car, passing and falling back again on the thin blacktop road. I feel like a little girl and happy. The night is warm and smells so good and we are going out for dinner. The Jaguar rockets down the road, the wind puffing out his shirt like a sail. He moves his head up and down to the music that he hears.

He has washed in the river. His chest and arms shine like a fish but the parts of his body that are covered with the river are yellow and dented like a chewed pipestem. I interrupt him and he drops the soap. It floats down into the mud and is lost. He hoists himself up onto the dock and walks naked to the trailer. Water splashes from his hair onto my hands. It feels like nothing — the same temperature as my skin — but it smells nicely of weeds. The woods in the dusk are dappled like an appaloosa. There are shadows everywhere and splinters in my hand. I try to work them out with my teeth. Everything I touch hurts.

On the road, he is driving very fast and well. We travel for miles and see no one. The Jaguar flows tightly around corners. The air is cool and damp on my face but our hips and thighs, pressed against the transmission tunnel, are warm. The engine throbs so heavily and the wind noise is so high that we would not be able to speak to each other even if we wished to. There are so many dials and needles, all telling him that he is progressing well.

… I will admit I’m not stylish, but I want to tell you something further. Intimacy brings its own alleviations. It substitutes for a great deal that would otherwise have to be carefully worked out. We are young and secret newlyweds, cutely expecting a baby. I am allotted a certain recklessness of feeling in such circumstances and I might as well use it. The wreck was spectacular and I enjoyed it. I know it’s not stylish but I refuse to chastise myself for this as I might have at a more impressionable age. I felt a sort of sick exultation, as in making love. Now I feel merely sickish for it’s quite apparent that I am in some frame that is in process after the accident, that the accident did not include. The wreck was interesting while it was going on because of its promise of finality — graceful, very honest and so soundless, for Grady did not once touch the brakes, which was commendable, I see it all now — flying, turning, settling — in black and white stills. As though taken from an exhibition. But now I realize … that is, it seems apparent …

He tries to shield it from me, although this is quite impossible for the car lies in several sections on the curve. The top half of the steering wheel has disappeared into the ground. The exhaust system lies in the road but one tailpipe has become embedded by its pointed end in a tree. It falls as I approach. I touch Grady’s face. He tries to assure me that what has just happened doesn’t matter. Of course I know this but he is so insistent that I have to pretend to disagree so that he can convince me. I touch his face and it moves oddly across his jaw …

The deputy drives faster and faster as we approach the courthouse. We tear around a corner with two wheels in the air and lunge into an underground parking lot. He strikes the brakes and the tail of the Ford leaps up into the air and settles with a grind. There are prisoners down there, working on motorcycles and sweeping the concrete floor. They do not even look up as we roar in. One has only one eye and is drinking an Orange Crush. The deputy leans across me and opens my door. I step out with my paper bag of wine.

We walk to an elevator and soar softly upward. Everything is very new. Modernization begins here and tramps southward along the coast. South of the courthouse is the college, the pretty bay, yachts, condominiums and dazzling subdivisions where no tree grows. North of the courthouse, the country shifts and simplifies. It is noisy and brackish, the shoreline messy with skiffs and abandoned appliances and pickup trucks. We arrive on the second floor but nothing happens. In the elevator is a picture of the Governor and a small rotating fan, mixing the air. I smell like a cheese for I didn’t have time to bathe once Grady was through in the river. The deputy kicks the door with his boot and it slides back and we step out into the sheriff’s department. Three young boys shivering in plastic chairs look up. They are all rib and muscle and long bleached hair. Each has a generous cluster of pimples on his cheek in an ornate and purple curve, like a tattoo.

I sit down in a chair by the window and look out onto the street. My deputy is talking with some other men, all in uniform, and writing something down in a notebook. They talk very softly except when they are calling each other by name, then their voices boom and roll toward the surfers and me. My deputy is named Ruttkin. There is Tinker the jailer and Darryl at the desk. They call out their names and laugh and answer to them. They are solid presences in the room, more solid than the soft drink machine, certainly more solid than me sitting by the window and watching the wide white street. Ruttkin brings me a form to fill out and a folded newspaper to write on.

I want to say, “Besides I’m true, so why do I need an alibi.” I would like to tell them that good-humoredly but they would never know that it came from Mae West and it would be wasted. Besides, they don’t ask me for an alibi. They ask me if I would like a glass of water.

I fill in the blanks the best I can. The questions seem extraordinary even though I have seen them many times before. The ink from the pen soaks in a widening dot as I hesitate. Age Blood Address Kin Make and Model, numbers intentions past employments and explanations. All of these forms insist upon excuses as though life were only a succession of apologies, an aftermath of error. I would like to depend upon memory rather than instinct at times like these, but if thoughts are acts, as so many maintain, my answers would be just as useless. I am true but guilty, ready to admit everything. I grip the pen fiercely. I am misspelling words and wrinkling the paper. It’s gone all damp beneath my fist. I am unable to recall my birthday. They were in the winter months. Snow, blizzards blue in the morning … and I making myself sick each year with restraint and decorum. Once Mother ordered magicians but Father barred them at the door …

I suck in my breath and try to co-operate. The point of the pen sinks wetly through the paper. I concentrate. I simplify.

… I see myself barefoot in a short cotton dress, carrying my food stored in my cheek, abroad at dawn and afield in winter, and …

I discard and reject. There are hundreds of reasons for the wreck, even more for Grady’s absence in the county courthouse. If he were here, he would reply imaginatively, taking into account what happened, but I am trapped by the immobility of events. I cannot shuffle them about or alter them. That’s not up to me. The answers remain the same when the reasons for them being true are gone. If Grady were here, the pen would move determinedly and fill this form up with signs. Somewhere, Grady is being polite and respectful. His mouth is wet and sweet and his hair the color of sea oats. He said that before he met me, it was true that he had kissed other girls.

Outside, a Trailways pulls up to the curb. The driver jumps out and runs into the building. Underneath CAUSE OF ACCIDENT I write, The rubber grommet on the steering column was not replaced, causing the wheels to lock. The box was not topped with oil the track rod was loose the curve banked improperly the road greased with the fat of a wild animal struck down before we came. A clear case of metal fatigue of misadventure driver passivity and a choked fuel line.

We are young marrieds, wed almost yesterday. Grady looks at me lovingly and I strike him down with my fabulous eyes. Like the basilisk. The Jaguar soars off the road and into the scenery.

I am writing faster and faster, blushing and panting with relief. I am thinking as Grady would, abandoning myself to possibilities. A deputy that I have not seen before walks out of the building and into the bus below me, reappearing a few moments later with his arm locked around a black man’s neck. The man is small and slight and wears tight bright clothes. He seems to be strutting with his spine arched and his head flung back against the deputy’s chest. His sneakered feet paddle slowly in the air and he strikes awkwardly at the deputy’s hip with a pillowcase. I halfway get out of my chair and watch them as they cakewalk beneath me and out of view.

I resume. Refitting is the reverse of the removal procedure and perhaps Grady left something out of the car when he was putting it together. Why not? Someone left something out of Grady. His face is a bit out of focus. He fell too soon from his mother’s womb, being born beside a gas station on a Labor Day jaunt to Key West. The family had planned nothing more than a picnic lunch and some bonefishing, but there came my husband, perfectly formed and scarcely breathing but smarter than they knew. For if he had waited six more weeks as he was supposed to have done, his mother would have already been dead for two. It cannot be surprising that he is obsessed with time and chance and orphanage and fell in love with me. Such thoughts make him gentle and grateful. He thinks of Time as his chum and accomplice. He is a swimmer swimming in his element. While I … It is a black and steel diving bell anchored to the bottom of the sea.

I am feeling a little giddy and would like to raise my hand and ask to be excused. The Jaguar turned on its nose and Grady popped up like bread from a toaster. In the trailer, the sheets are damp where Grady wraps his mouth, the thin cotton full of holes where he has punched his feet.

Under ADDRESS, I write Hemo Globin Rho House 122 5th St. That is a good joke I think on the sheriff’s department even though they will never be able to puzzle out my wretched penmanship. Everything asks pretentiously Where Can You Be Reached? I see Hemo Globin Rho, which I have made, and I feel my mouth widening in a rubbery grin. I look around for someone to smile at. The surfers could be smiling but they are not looking at me but at the elevator. They look wolfish, flat and opaque. The arrangement of their lips could foggily evaporate should circumstances allow. Tinker the jailer cocks his head and sniffs like a deerhound and the elevator door is open, the deputy that I do not know is wading across the room with the black man from the bus. His wide red arm is squeezed tightly across the man’s neck and he steps on the heels of the man’s sneakers and raises his knees high as he walks so that they punch the man’s buttocks. I cannot see his face. The pillow case that he carries is dirty on the bottom and heavy with pointed objects.

Sweat drips from my armpits and falls down my sides. The air is full of ozone, like it was before the accident. I could smell it then — something about to let go — and it has come back. My eyes float and bump against the scene, trying to organize it, for I am afraid that freakily this is my friend, Corinthian Brown. I cannot see his face. I get up from the chair and step solidly on my paper bag of wine, our party gift. I drag my foot up quickly but the wine is gone, the bag flat, a hole in the bottom and the brown paper stained. Beneath my sandal straps, my toenails are broken and my feet ache. I sit back down again. This cannot be my friend, Corinthian Brown. Though his arms beneath the plum blue jersey are a honeycomb of scabs, though his hands windmill wistfully in space, it is not him at all.

“John here has been messing around all the way since Chiefland,” the deputy says. “Ain’t you?” and he jiggles the black man, rearranging him to face us like a sack of feed. The man’s face is round and middle-aged, his chin and eye pouches pale, two stringy lines of white descending from his mouth and his lips jammed shut as though he were holding a jawful of milk. “Drunk and stinking up that pretty bus. Bothering them nice people.”

He looks serene and amused and grips the pillowcase like a strangled hen. He is not Corinthian. My friend is young and morose, lovely with his nervousness. He is sick, Corinthian. He would never be traveling on a bus.

I should be relieved but I’m not. Something flutters in my stomach. The baby moves and jabs my spleen with his watery head. I touch myself there. My belly is crooked and there is a hard ball on the left where it has settled for a while. At night, I lie with my stomach against Grady’s flank. It beats against him and makes him dream. Sleeping, Grady moans and trembles like a dog, ill from the straw and dust he has eaten under the impression that it was marvelously delicate food. No one mentions him here.

“You nothing but a bother to us all, John,” the deputy says and drops his arm. He walks over to where Darryl is sitting, reading the Sunday comics. The black man looks around the room, swallowing. Swallowing, it seems, once for each thing his busy eyes rest upon. There is an open door and behind it the cells. The windows are single high plates of glass. There are filing cabinets, a tree in a pot bearing real oranges. The floor is a set of different colored tiles, like a game, and the man sets one sneaker down lightly on a new tile and then brings it back again. He spits between his feet. He shifts the pillowcase from his left hand to his right and swings it around like a bat, hitting the departing deputy in the ass.

Darryl drops the funnies in the paper plate of food he’s eating from and my man Ruttkin’s face turns gray as a sheep on the spot.

No one makes a sound and no one moves except the surfers who back their shanks deeper into the bucket seats. They stare and look adventurous, as though they’d been brave, squinting and hunching their shoulders like gangsters. I would like to say a few words or make a noise of some sort, a cough, hiss or clap, but something seems to jam me up. The thing slips membranous over my head and my mouth fills up with air. It is too late, it is ritualized. The moment turns from chance to rite and the four deputies are together now, for Darryl has run from behind the desk. He has an enormous torso but tiny sick legs and there is a stain on the fly of his pants. But they are all together now and circling the black man who still looks distant and bemused, who swings lightly the guilty pillowcase. He isn’t even watching them — he is an audience like me, watching this in some far-off balcony — and they walk around him in a tight circle, walking faster and faster and I think perhaps that they might turn to butter like the tigers did and we will sit down to stacks of pancakes. We will swallow them up and later void them in the scrubbed latrine, over the scented bulb that is wired to the bowl, and flush them into the holes beneath the town … I smell a small smell of whiskey now and flame and the black man smiles and gives a happy growl.

“Mother,” he says.

And the deputies fall on him, softly and without noise like dogs on a barnyard duck. There’s a dull splash and smack and the man’s ear begins to bleed, the pillowcase slides across the floor and out of it falls a clock,

a comb

and a can of pears.

I can’t even see their hands moving, they’re jammed so close, but I see the two white sneakers planted in the thicket of professional country blue and Tinker’s thighs churning up and down as though he’s peddling a bicycle. I tell you, I can’t feel a thing. I’m a wastebasket, and if you were honest, you’d admit it too.

18

PHOENIX, ARIZ. (AP)

A collision with a horse as he drove home from the race track left L. J. Durousseau, the nation’s leading jockey, in critical condition today.

Deputies said the horse bolted into the path of Durousseau’s car during a rain storm. He swerved sharply, according to authorities, but was unable to miss the animal.

I am reading the newspaper and I start to cry. They have taken the man away now. His face was red, sealed and shimmering as though with the cellophane on a box of Valentine candy. The surfers are gone too, leaving a puddle of sea water behind them. Across the room are small signs. A piece of tooth flew through the air and struck my hair, I thought, but I have not been able to find it. And the tiles seemed trampled and discolored where they beat him, but I know that this is just a function of the surface of my eye.

The deputies have sent out for french fries and 7-Ups and I am crying on the newspaper sports section. I have not cried for so long, for so many years, that there seems something wrong with the way I am doing it. I used to think that loving and breathing and crying were things that you never lost the method of but this is just not so. There is nothing that cannot be forgotten and learned in a different way or never learned again.

Ruttkin, too, seems to think that I am not crying but am in the process of something else. He stands beside me and runs the tip of his finger around the neck of my sweater, picks up my wrists and regards my dirty ankles. He has learned this maybe by heeding Dick Tracy’s Crimestopper Notebook. He is looking for a chain, a disc, a tag.

“You ain’t an epileptic? You ain’t a diabetic?” Ruttkin is relaxed. On his knuckles are teeth marks. His shirt is wet where the black man has drooled. “The hospital,” he says, “says there ain’t a bit of change. You aren’t wanting to go over there, are you? If you want, I’ll take you but I’ll tell you about them hospitals, they don’t tell you a thing. You ask and they answer something that don’t make sense. Or they answer you something you never asked.”

I flap my hand vaguely at him. I want nothing in common with this man who is happy as though after a meal, who is showing his teeth at me in a commiserating grimace. I feel uneasily that his discoveries are the same as mine, that the methods he has chosen to get through the days, the weeks and into the years that he can put behind him are no different from my methods. The result’s the same — we trample people in the eagerness to get on with our dying. Yes. I know what he says is true. I cross my legs and kick him in the knee, still crying. He crazily apologizes. I don’t quite understand your question but whatever it is the answer is no. Yes. That’s the attitude. That’s the way of this world. The answers are all to something you’ve never even asked. Now Grady balked at this. Like some, he was more fortunate than most. When he wanted to know how to tune an engine, there were instructions for doing it. When he was young and wanted to shoot and sight and track, there were rules for that too and all he had to do was listen and learn them. He grew up trusting in the sanctity of the right reply. He was confident and hopeful and bright. And not without imagination. And honor. For when he found that I was going to have a baby, he kissed me gravely and married me in the afternoon. The ring was made of wood and too large for me. I packed blue tissue beneath it to keep it on my finger and when the tissue rotted, the ring fell away. I don’t know when but now it’s gone. Grady wouldn’t mind. He traced my thighs and the sockets of my eyes, he was so in love.

Every girl remembers her wedding day. Excuse me … I have a cold and my tongue is green from flavored throat lozenges. It is raining, the sky is almost black. There may be a tornado. As I run from the car, I slip on wet pine needles and fall, catching my hand on the barbed wire fence that separates the chapel from a field. It is auspicious for my hand doesn’t bleed. It lies snagged there as Grady helps me up but there is no blood and Grady laughs and kisses it and folds it up gently in his own hand. Gently, as though the hand had been severed, the ring, the marrying hand, and he were saving it, gently as though it were a wounded bird. There are big friendly mules in the field behind the fence and beside the chapel is the preacher’s pickup truck with a brace of shotguns hanging in the window rack. For everyone is a hunter here, even the meek; everyone is prepared here for something terrible coming out of the black hot southern afternoon that they will have to protect themselves against.

Yes, every girl remembers, but as for the ceremony itself … The words, I suppose, would be the same that Father used although Father would first teach that loving is good preparation for dying. I was the only one who learned this. Everyone else seemed uncomfortable at the thought. Perhaps they believed that loving was what made a happy life. And I often wonder what became of those who Father blessed …?

My eyes are breaking from this crying. Poor jockey Durousseau. I cry and cry. I sizzle and choke. A long time before this, in the time when I wept, I cried never for grief but from frustration. That had a pattern to it, a rise and fall, a stretch and slack, an end in sight, but this crying now can go on forever, like this day that goes on into continuing night. The land revenges itself upon us all, for I passed through that time as though through a dream, with no knowledge in my flesh of snowfall or handstroke, knowing nothing but dreaming those days in my head.

… We are going out for dinner. The Jaguar moves like a ghost through the dusk. A graven image, a negative, and us inside, leaning into the turns. Grady, my young man, all blond like wheat, takes the corner and falls out of love with me … love in his watchtower darkling and in ambush is stretching his deadly bow.

For it was clearly love, make no mistake, that met my yearning Grady on the curve. The falling hatchet loves the lamb and when bones ache, they ache for the breaking. It’s love that starves and makes us murderous. And it’s Father who is in the watchtower, watching from his steeple study through the snowy nights, with his hands folded across his eyes. I was so frozen, so embalmed then … I left, a pioneer with no tools for discovery, and not the sense to know that this made all the difference, traveling from the ice and cold and his abstraction into the South, the sun and reality. I was surprised at how easy it was at first. I developed a miming manner and was accepted everywhere. But all the while, he was knowing my life before I lived it, knowing that each step I took would only bring me home again. Oh yes, it was dark and obscure Father who struck my Grady down.

Grady was taken completely by surprise … His face didn’t change, nor the muscles in his throat or arms. He is a good boy. I could see his mind beating, like a yolk dropped too soon in formaldehyde. And now I keep answering but he never asks any more. If I had told him a lie, we could have lived it better than any truth, but he had made me feel so hopeful … He wasn’t afraid of anything. He was so ambitious then, and proud and confident. He thought that life was infinite and incredible and that for every question he might have, there would be an answer and the answer would be right.

Yes, Grady thought that there were only as many answers as there were questions in the world. He believed that, in the end, everything would come out in an implacable and just balance and pairing. Some things existed and some didn’t and he told me he could tell them apart. He couldn’t imagine there were people like me who had answers to questions no one would ever ask, that there were those who lived without a life, like moths without stomachs, lived for years with their lives beyond them someplace, dangling useless on a gallows.

In love, Grady wrapped himself around me like a twining vine. He didn’t know that I had an answer for which there was no question. And that one day I’d give it to him. Yes. The very worst kind.

I cry aloud. Poor Durousseau. The tears splash on the newspaper and on my hip-hugger pants. They are of some cheap shiny fabric and there are marks all over them … a perfect paw print from the dog, quite old, coffee and candle wax and now these stains. Nothing washes out, I’ve found. I do not follow racing any more, although as a child, I had memorized the names of every Derby winner. The jockeys never interested me. In the photographs, they had the smooth faces of dwarfs, tiny waists and wardrobes. I was a child. They reminded me of evil playmates with terrible knowledge. I dismissed them and dwelt on the horses. I kept their pictures, tracing them out of magazines onto tissue paper. I knew their lineage, records and running times and could recite these statistics without error. Memorization then took the place of something else, something deep, deep, which I did not want to touch. I wanted order and it was everywhere. I memorized everything. There was nothing I could not talk about with vacuity. It was a masterpiece, my childhood.

Tragic Durousseau. Nothing unusual about it. Doom is accurate and vengeance is all the Lord’s. Picture the horse galloping since a colt toward Durousseau … The thing that waits for all of us doesn’t even bother to hide its identity or kid the survivors into thinking it was something else. In the Middle Ages, for example, I know for a fact that when dragons preferred to wear a human shape, there were certain discernible idiosyncrasies. They had wide mouths and flowing red beards and sometimes retained their horns. If you were paying the slightest bit of attention, you could avoid the dragon but this isn’t the case today. No quarter is given. Endings never come outside our experience and there’s no attempt at gamesmanship or artifice. Luck is not involved and wit or caution is useless. You catch up with it even when you’re dragging your feet.

Father is right. Treatment is of little value except to prolong the illness.

Ruttkin kneels beside me. He has missed great swatches of his face in shaving. He hands me his bottle of 7-Up, trying to be friends. I accept it and tilt the neck deep into my mouth, trying to drool in it as much as possible. I would love to give him a bad disease. Hepatitis would be nice, but I’ve never had it myself, and anyone can see that such a sickness would be outlandish for him. I’m sure he’s very clean, never puts his fingers in his mouth and drinks only beer. His distant end lies smugly on his face. In fifty years, he’ll fall asleep behind the filigreed flamingo on the door of a concrete cottage and be buried two days later. He moves at a comfy pace toward death for he knows that he has time to satisfy his needs. God will send him niggers and the discovery of unnatural acts. Each day as deputy brings its own rewards.

He says, “You don’t have to stay here any longer. I’ll take you home.” He goes into the men’s room and returns with a square of paper toweling. I hate him so much, I think I am going to be sick. It smells chloroformed. Cloaca, my dirty mind says. God only knows where Ruttkin found the toweling. Perhaps he is trying to kill me. I think of my friend, Corinthian Brown. It was only for a moment that I thought he was the black man, taken from the bus. This proves how tired I am, how wearying and confusing this continual watching and seeing and translating become. Corinthian does not travel. He has no pretty clothes. He wears shower clogs and the baggy gray khaki of the world’s inmates. All night he works and he spends the days in the gutted cars of Al Glick’s Junk Yard. He waits for beatings, I think, but no beatings come. Even the terrible Glick does not acknowledge him.

Tourists might notice him and exclaim, but the junk yard is off the highway and there would be no reason for them to be there. When I first saw him, he was sitting in the carcass of an elegant Buick convertible with a burnt-out engine. The Buick’s canvas top was down and Corinthian sat in the sun, eating an apple and reading Billy Budd. Yes. He sat in the back seat as though he were being transported somewhere, his arms bare and scruffy in the sun, still as a giant discarded doll. The heat was extraordinary, coming in waves of rubber and battery acid. The sun bounced exotically off the metal and chrome. And no one noticed. Not the terrible behemoth Glick nor Grady who was looking only for a speedometer cable nor the half-breed shepherds who patrolled the junky pasturage. No one but me noticed Corinthian, my friend.

If the deputies have ever seen Corinthian, they have relegated him to the invisible. Corinthian could never be arrested. He would accept punishment gladly but it is not his to receive. You can see how confused I am, to have thought that the drunken victim beaten here was Corinthian.

Ruttkin says, “I’ll take you home. Back to …,” he takes a piece of paper from his pocket, “… the sorority house. If you hadn’t of been walking away from the scene of the accident like you was, if you hadn’t have told me …,” he hesitates, looking for the right word, not wanting to be indiscreet, for he likes me now, he pities me and feels friendly, for I have been quiet this night, and then patient and finally crying, all the right things … “that thing, that shaggy-dog story about you not being in the wreck, about you being in another car, I never would of had to bring you here at all. It was suspicious, you know, you leaving your boy friend there and all.”

I don’t know what he’s talking about. He is going to take me home, not back to the trailer, to the mobile home that never moves, but to the sorority house. No one knows about the trailer. No one has seen it except for the hunters tramping after turkey or pigs.

“That’s right,” Ruttkin says, “don’t cry no more.” I am looking at him wonderingly. He is going to take me back to the sorority house. It is incredible. I am going backward, the returning has begun. “C’mon,” he says. And I stand up and step again on the paper bag that I thought held our bottle of wine. I pat my eyes and press my hair against the sides of my head like any girl and follow Ruttkin to the elevator. The picture of the Governor hangs inside. He looks the same as he did before. He has half-mad eyes and a space between his teeth.

We are back in the Ford, traveling across town toward the college campus. Ruttkin turns off the sheriff’s radio. He is off duty. After he drops me off, he is going home. He says, “You know when I was called to the phone back there, after we corrected that problem with the nigger?” I am shivering. The night has turned cold and I can’t find the handle on the door to roll up the window. “You know the time? Well that was the hospital and I’m a new daddy.” He slurs the word hospital. I don’t care. How can words hurt me now? There are too many goddamn words in this world. As for the hospital, I have never even been inside one.

“It ain’t the first time,” he says, “but it’s like the first time. It’s a boy.” He sets his hand between us on the seat. “I got three boys.” He counts them off on his fingers.

I nod. I would like to ask him if his wife has a problem with caked breasts. I read a cure for it. The cure had something to do with warm pancakes. I think that was what it was, but I may be mistaken so I don’t mention it. I am very hungry. I haven’t eaten in more than twelve hours.

Ruttkin is so proud of himself. Smiling, he shakes his head slowly and chews on his lip. I am bored. I do not even wonder what his wife looks like or how sow-bellied Ruttkin makes love to her, I am so bored. We pass a drive-in movie. An enormous plastic sign on the roadway says

TONIGHT! BLOOD-O-RAMA!!

Four Fiendish Features

Blood Fiend

Blood Creatures

Brides of Blood

Blood Drinkers

Both of us bend forward to peer at the screen which is momentarily visible. Two women in evening gowns are sitting on a floor throwing letters into a fireplace.

“My wife wanted a little girl,” Ruttkin says, “but I wanted a boy.”

“That’s good,” I say.

“Name of Ronald,” he says. “Already his name is Ronald and he ain’t but half an hour old.”

“Did your wife eat a lot of iodine before she had Ronald?” Ruttkin turns his face toward me and drops his jaw. “Iodine,” he says.

“If she didn’t get enough iodine, Ronald will be a cretin.”

“Oh? Yeah, well,” Ruttkin asks, “where would she be getting this iodine?”

“Fish.” I don’t know why I’ve begun this. If I had the strength, I would punch Ruttkin in the mouth, push him out the door and run over him with his sheriff’s deputy’s car. First and reverse, first and reverse, back and forward. Ironing him.

“Ugh,” he says. “Fish.”

I don’t know why I’ve begun this and try to pretend that I haven’t.

“She may have been eating fish, I don’t know. I work nights and take my meals in town. She should know the right things to do.”

It must be very late. Everything is quiet and there’s very little traffic. The moon is small and high in the sky. On one side of the road is a long deep park and on the other, all-night convenience stores and empty shopping centers. We have almost come to the college. Near here, I remember, is a place that has one million baskets for sale. Another store sells towels and another, sixty-nine different kinds of sandwiches. It does not seem possible that I am being returned to the sorority house, but I realize that it’s my own fault. I want to go back to the trailer and smell the good smell of Grady’s clothes. I would fix the place up for him right away. He’d be pleased. I’d burn the brush that blocks the door, empty the wastebaskets, tidy and clean. I’d let the air come through. I’d wash the blankets and make him a nice breakfast.

Ruttkin is saying, “Iodine is a crazy thing to have to eat.”

I close my eyes and fold my hands across my stomach. I would like to ask him to turn the car around and take me to the trailer, but I can no more ask him this than I can anyone anything. Change is beyond my range. I am in my black and steel diving bell anchored to the bottom of the sea. With my eyes closed, I can smell the oil heaters burning in distant orange groves. It must be close to freezing. The temperature has fallen by half since Grady and I began tonight. The wind blows coldly in my ear. My throat is sore.

The car slows and turns and stops. I feel that I have to remember all this. I am being kidnapped. I must be able to give instructions to those who will want to come after me. The car moves forward, turns and stops for good. He cuts the engine and opens his door. I do not open my eyes and he does not open my door. I sit in the dark for a moment and then my eyes flap open of their own accord. We are not outside the sorority house but in front of a little store. Everything is bright and clean. Ruttkin walks out with a paper bag.

“This here is milk,” he says, and puts the paper bag in my lap. “When you get to your place, you heat it up and drink some. I seen people in shock before and you don’t want any part of that. You drink this and go to sleep and tomorrow you’ll be all right.” We get back on the highway and almost immediately, off of it again, turning through fancy gates onto a gravel road. It is a small, smug and elegant college.

“He ain’t dead,” Ruttkin snarls, “and you ain’t dead.” He seems to be getting angry again. He accelerates. Gravel spins up from beneath the tires and across the hood.

“You don’t understand,” I say. “I don’t appreciate this.”

“They took the wreck to Glick’s yard. You know where that is? North of town?”

“O.K.,” I say. “Yes.” The milk is cold in my lap. My thighs are cold.

“You’ll probably have to pay the towing fee,” Ruttkin says. “Ten bucks it is.”

He pulls in front of a large stucco house, three stories high. It’s faded pink and heavy with turrets and balconies. A rich man’s nightmare, reeling in space. Once it was a mansion, then a bank, museum, church, rest home and dancing studio. Descending like Dante’s circles. All gone, all failed. Now, at this moment, it is the sorority house.

Ruttkin watches it with great distaste, watching it as though it might start to move toward him and he will have to shoot it. He is puzzled, he is exasperated. The house seems to float, to sway before us, breathing with the bodies of all the sleeping girls.

I am so tired. I concentrate on pulling up the door handle, pushing my feet over the ledge and onto the ground.

“Take the milk,” Ruttkin insists. Childishly, I treat the carton roughly, knocking it against the door. He doesn’t drive away until I am inside the house.

The main hallway is lined with mirrors. A clock ticks and the old house creaks and pings like a cooling engine. The clock is on a mantel in another room, a white and fading face set between the flailing hoofs of two bronze horses. Poor Durousseau. The horses are rendered in perfect detail, pricks, eyelashes, teeth, and the clock, they say, keeps perfect time. I don’t see this but am remembering it. It is as though I have never left that tocking clock which really I have not been familiar with for very long. Grady had a watch with a black face and numbers and hands that shone in the dark. It might be comforting to some … so many nights I watched the watch on Grady’s wrist. When he moved, it wound itself; while he reached for me in sleep, curling his hand between my legs, it fed off Grady. Yes, a succubus. Even when he removed the watch, the mark was there, a broad band of white that the sun hadn’t touched.

The clock tocks. One can even hear it in the kitchen, where I go immediately. The refrigerator is full of remains — fatted, wilted, jellied and iced. Dishes covered with waxed paper and cinched with a rubber band. I quickly remove some and start spooning the contents into my mouth. The food seems harmless enough and bland. I drink Ruttkin’s quart of milk too even though it would not be irrational of me to dump it down the sink or commit some terrible crime on it … as a gesture.

But I eat and I drink Ruttkin’s milk, for I’ve been taught it’s a sin to waste the food that prolongs life. What with all the starving bodies, I’ve learned to use everything up.

19

My radio is in its ordered corner beside my bed but someone has been using it. There’s wax on the plugs. I turn it on right away. There is my old chum, my answer man on “Action Line,” with the voice I’ve left him with. He is saying, “I am sorry, we do not accept solicitations. We only take questions offered in good faith and taste.” I cradle the radio to my cheek. There is nothing for me to think about and I’ll tell you, even when I could, I would never think about those woods we’ve left now. I couldn’t understand them and I couldn’t understand the people and the animals that came into them. When Grady was away at school, I spent hours in utter solitude and didn’t learn a thing. At first I was alarmed, but then I realized that it was what I wanted all the time. My life was slowing down. Nothing was feeding it any more. It was draining like a wound and there was a possibility that soon I might experience true freedom.

Indeed, even now I have hopes that my only opportunities will be those I’ll miss. I want to stall my life like a train on a track, perfectly midway, between what has happened and what is happening. First emission, then omission, that’s the key to life and our success can be measured by the purity and bleakness of the bone of our existence. As someone said, no one is going to kill you. No, no one’s going to kill you or even loathe or love you. Though this is not quite true, for we’re told it has happened to some. Not us certainly but to some, people that we know.

Omit, omit and one day you will be down to a funny, white and quite lifeless seed. I see it as a sort of heart of palm myself. In the groceries, they sell them in tins at outrageous prices. In New York restaurants, I hear, they do the same. Actually the stuff is swamp cabbage, easily hacked from an ugly and useless weed that covers the ground of the South, common as pennies. But we’re all game and gullible as tourists in this life. No one is able to tell us anything. The soul is a heart of palm and living is a messy salad with everything in it being similar but less interesting, less necessary as you proceed. The trick is not ignoring this discovery after you’ve made it. Do not be a polite guest.