The Anarchist's Convention and Other Stories

Home for Wayfarers

HEY ALWAYS HAVE the Career Girls sit together. At least they do at New England Life and at Hub Mail usually and at the First Boston Savings and Trust and here at the Home for Wayfarers.

"Maybe it's so we don't infect the regular help," says Chickie da Costa. "Or maybe it's so we don't find out what they're gettin paid for the same jawb."

Nina has a desk by the window, looking down on the parking lot and the grounds beyond it.

The Home for Wayfarers

Sincerely Thanks

For the Gift of Dollars

Nina writes the name from the donation letter and fills in the amount given. The thank-you card has an owl on it, a drawing by one of the children. She addresses an envelope by hand, stuffs the card in, puts it on the pile for Deke to pick up.

Nina listens to the others talk as she works. The Home is one of the best jobs Career Girls has sent her on. The supervisor is nice and the food is supposed to be good in the cafeteria. Most of the others have worked together here and there, and the two South Boston girls, Mary and Kathleen, are best friends.

"You do your work here," says Chickie da Costa, "there's no prawblems. Some places they're breathin down your neck the whole day."

"Like banks," says Barbara, squiggling improvements onto the picture of the owl. "Banks they're always on your fuckin case. Scared you'll mess up their precious computer cods."

Gwen clears her throat. Gwen clears her throat whenever someone swears, but they don't seem to notice. Gwen is in some kind of religious group.

Nina pulls another letter from her pile. Mr. and Mrs. George C. Papanicholau. There is barely room on the card.

"You're pretty fast," says Chickie da Costa. "The other girl we had, she couldn't write."

"She could write," says Kathleen, "only you couldn't read it. Not even the numbers."

"That's okay for filin, or if they got you on a machine, but for this stuff, where it's goin out for public scrutiny and all — no way. They had to send her back to Career Girls." Chickie looks over Nina's shoulder. "But you, you got nice handwriting."

"Thank you." It's the first she's said since she introduced herself. "It isn't that hard."

"For you it's not hod, but for some people, you'd be surprised."

Deke comes to collect another batch of letters. He wears a body shirt open four buttons and has a nice tan. He's dark, with white white teeth. He smiles at them, flashing all thirtytwo as he approaches.

"Hi girls," he says. "Got some more work for me?"

Kathleen pushes forward her stack of completed letters.

"Kind of pokey this morning."

He wears turquoise rings on all the fingers of his left hand.

"He wore his pants any tighter," says Chickie when he's gone, "he'd be bleedin out the ears."

"He thinks we're gettin all agitated over here," says Barbara. "He thinks we're over here creamin in our draws."

Kathleen and Mary giggle and Nina smiles. Gwen clears her throat.

"He joins Career Girls he thinks he's gonna clean up," says Barbara. "I worked with him over to this clearinghouse, they sent out all this stuff — electric bidet kits, whir-pool attachments for your tub, plastic bedpans — all this medical stuff. Deke was there packing boxes. You said two kind words to him he's on your case the rest of the day, hangin around."

"I sawr him over to Lucifer the other night."

"You're kiddin."

"Tryin to put the moves on every girl in the place."

"So'd you go home with him?"

Kathleen gives Mary a knuckle-punch in the shoulder. "Wise guy."

"Did you see him dance?"

"Yeah, he shakes his ass a lot. Thinks he's Gawd's gift to women."

"Some gift," says Chickie. "Tell Gawd he shouldn't of bawthered."

Barbara is in the bathroom when the supervisor comes over.

"How's it going, girls?"

"Just fine, Miss McCurdy. We're cuttin it down to size."

"Is Barbara okay?" Miss McCurdy is in her fifties. She wears glasses hung by a ribbon around her neck.

"She'll be fine, Miss McCurdy. It's her period or something."

Miss McCurdy frowns. "She doesn't look well. She doesn't look like she gets her rest."

"She gets loaded in there, Bobra," whispers Chickie when the supervisor is gone. "Every morning she goes in there, smokes a joint. Then after lunch another one. You want to see handwriting, catch hers by the end of the day."

"So how'd the interview go?" asked Robin. "Was she nice?'V

Nina looked at the print on the wall, trying to remember who had bought it. "Uhm, there was a note downstairs that said she'd already found a roommate. So I didn't meet her."

the room, watching Nina collect her belongings. di Oh." Robin was sitting on the footstool in the center of

"Do you remember," asked Nina, "which of us this belongs to?"

"The Cassatt? I think we bought it together when we were setting up here. At the Coop. Why, do you want it?"

"Well — "

"The only thing is, since we painted over the wallpaper, it gets a lot of sun there — there'll be a patch left."

Nina lifted the corner of the print, saw the different shade underneath.

"Didn't take long, did it?"

"No. It wasn't up that long. But take it if you want it, I can get something else that size, or maybe bigger — "

"No, no — "

Hummer came back from the Square with more beer. He said hi to Nina and went into Robin's room.

That was how it had started, Hummer going into Robin's room, Robin joining him, hushed voices. Nina sitting alone on the couch, waiting a bit, then finding something to do. Hummer moving in. The tension always there, spilling over now and then into something overt. Confrontations.

"The M. C. Eschers are mine," said Robin. "Both of them, I'm pretty sure. And that one with all the animals, the lion and the lamb and all that, that one's yours. You had it at school I remember."

Nina picked up the throw pillows she'd made, then put them back down.

"No sense in taking these," she said. "They're meant to go with this couch."

"When you find where you're going to be, maybe you'll need them."

"Wherever that is."

"I told Mrs. Malaparte about the change in the lease."

"What did she say?"

Robin shrugged. "She didn't seem to care. As long as Hummer doesn't keep his bike on the landing."

"And what's it called again?"

"The Family of God." Gwen is very mysterious about her group. She doesn't volunteer anything, but Chickie keeps after her.

"I never heard of it."

"We don't prostyletize."

"I should hope not. And they do everything for you?"

"We do everything for each other."

"You give them all your money?"

"We don't have property separate from each other."

"Not even a toothbrush?"

Gwen doesn't answer.

"I know a guy went into the Moonies," says Barbara. "He doesn't get to have any prawperty either. But then he never had any in the first place."

"Is that where you shave your head?" asks Kathleen.

"Those are the Hare Krishnas," says Nina.

Chickie looks at her. "You know about that stuff?"

"No. Not much."

"I worked with a girl," says Mary, "was a Scientologist."

"That's right, she was," says Kathleen. "Over at the brewery where we were filing."

"And what do they believe in? Besides plasterin the trolley with their pamphlets?"

"I don't know, but she used to give them a regular pot of her paycheck."

"And I thought the Catholics were bad," says Chickie, "with the collection plate under your nose every time you turn around. You don't keep anything for yourself, to buy yourself clothes or something?"

Gwen shakes her head. "The Family buys our clothes for us."

"You're kiddin. They pick them out and all?"

"Clothes aren't important."

Chickie laughs. "Tell that to the gang in Filene's Basement. Clothes ont impawtant."

"At the house we all wear plain white robes."

"Like in a choir."

"Sort of."

"You all live together?"

"There's more than one house."

"And you all eat together?"

"Yes. And when I go out working they pack me a lunch."

"Jeez."

"My mother packs my lunch," says Mary, "on the jawbs where the food is lousy." Mary and Kathleen both live with their mothers.

"And is there somebody who's like, you know, the big cheese? The center of the whole outfit?"

"We believe in God — "

"No, not Him, I mean somebody real, somebody living."

"The Family is the center of everything. We do things as a Family."

"And you pray together I bet. I seen you with your eyes closed here — "

"I'm meditating."

"Oh. You're into that too." Chickie shakes her head, skeptical. "I don't know, Gwen. The living together I could handle, if you got enough room, and the eating and the singing and all that. But I'd never let them pick my clothes out. Never."

Rummaging through her desk for another pen, Nina finds an old photograph. A large, very old photograph lining one of the drawers. Three rows of girls in baggy middy blouses and ankle-length skirts. It has a sepia cast to it but hasn't faded much. The girls are in their early teens, and many of them are pregnant. A bunch in the back row are trying to hold in laughter, covering their faces, turning their heads to the side. Somebody made a wisecrack.

What a nice way, thinks Nina. Surrounded by friends in the same situation. She shows it to the others and puts it up on the wall by her desk.

"Unwed mothers," says Kathleen. "They told us how after the Civil War there were all these kids walking around with no place to go, and a lot of the girls got into trouble. So the society ladies in Boston stotted this place up. At least that's what they told us."

"They got all kinds now," says Mary. "Little boys and girls. You'll see in the cafeteria."

"Now that's what you get," says Chickie da Costa studying the photograph, "you let other people pick your clothes out."

Deke comes over and smiles at them.

"Hey girls," he says. "You're falling behind."

Deke's job is to take the stuffed envelopes, seal them and run them through the postage meter. Somehow he barely manages to stay ahead of them.

Barbara has drawn teeth on an owl, is writing a name in the blank, letter by letter, taking her time.

Deke looks at Nina. "You're new here."

"That's right."

Deke smiles at her, stands looking down at her work.

"You're pretty."

Chickie snorts. Mary and Kathleen giggle.

Nina fills out a card. Mr. and Mrs. Frank Capadilupo.

"My name's Deke. I don't think we've met."

"I'm Nina," she says without looking up. Chickie groans.

"Would you like to have lunch with me?"

He's sitting on her desk now, blocking the light from the window.

"Look," says Nina, sighing, staring up at him, "don't waste your time. You're not half as sharp as you like to think you are. Forget it, okay?"

Chickie snorts and the Southie girls cover their faces.

Deke fingers the medallion that hangs against his chest. He shrugs, stands.

"You girls got more work for me?"

2F DESIRE SRD F, SPACIOUS ROOM, BACK BAY, NONSMOKER, MUST LIKE CATS, $80 MO. PLUS UTIL. CALL FOR INTERVIEW.

It was a very nice apartment. It was on Commonwealth, on the top floor, and the living room got a lot of sun late in the day. One of the cats played with an old tennis ball in a square patch of sun broken by the outline of the hanging coleus plants.

"What's that like," asked Melanie, "temporary work?"

Nina shrugged. "Mostly filing, some typing if you're fast enough. They send you around to different offices that have some big job they need out in a hurry. Or else it's just cheaper for them to hire temps. They don't have to pay any benefits."

"I worked for a while in an office," says Alissa. Alissa had long, straight blond hair. Melanie had black hair just growing out from a frizzy permanent. "It was the pits."

Alissa was still in school, and Melanie was out but taking classes.

"I take one at joy of Movement," she said. "And an acting workshop and then there's this woman I do Tai Chi with."

"It gets pretty low-key around here," said Alissa. "I think you can always tell by the cats in a house. If the cats are all hyper, running around chewing things and not using their box, then you've got problems in the house."

"Where have you been living?"

"In Cambridge," said Nina. There were drawings from Lewis Carroll up on the walls. There were bayberry candles — Nina could smell them though they weren't lit. "My roommate's boyfriend moved in and there just wasn't enough space."

"All my classes are at night," said Melanie, "and a lot of the time Alissa stays over with this guy Greg. We wouldn't be in each other's way much of the time."

"We don't do any big number with eating," said Alissa. "The refrigerator and the oven work fine. We leave notes to make sure the cats get fed."

"You'd probably have to have a phone, wouldn't you? For them to tell you where to go in the morning."

"You don't have one?" Nina had noticed the jack sticking out of the wall when she came in.

"You could have it in your room."

"We're not here a lot of the time, but it's good to have a sort of base of operations. You'd usually have the nights to yourself." Another cat was sleeping in Alissa's lap. "If you wanted to have somebody stay over that's fine, as long as things stay pretty low-key."

"I may be moving to Vermont," said Melanie. "But I don't know. I've got friends up there. They've got this farm, and it's you know, like a group effort but people come and go. I don't know, I've heard it's real cold up there."

"If Melanie was to move," said Alissa, stroking the cat's head, "I'd take her room and you could move into mine. You'd have a window then."

There is a small table in the cafeteria set aside for the Career Girls. Miss McCurdy takes her lunch at her desk back up in the office. At the long tables there are counselors with bunches of grade-school kids. Eating, laughing, playing with each other.

"I thought of going to secretarial school," says Mary, "but it costs an om and a leg." Mary and Kathleen want to be hired for permanent jobs at one of the big insurance companies.

"I could get up fifty more words a minute, they'd send me out for typing and I'd get hired in no time. That's what most of the girls do, they find a place they like and do a good jawb and get asked to stay on permanent."

"Yeah, that's prawbly the smottest way," says Chickie. "Why should Career Girls make all the money and we do all the work?"

"Did you ever think of getting together," says Nina, "and trying to get a bigger cut of what the employer pays out?"

"What, like a union? Never work. The regular employees, the secretaries, they don't even have one. How you gonna get temps, they don't know each other, they don't work the same place from day to day, how you gonna get them together?"

"We have a lot in common."

"Sure, we're all stupid, workin for peanuts. We should get on regular, like Mary says."

"In the Family," says Gwen, "we aren't allowed to have full-time jobs."

"That figures."

"If you got more schooling," says Kathleen, "they give you a better jawb. Whether your typing's good or not. My cousin, she went to Boston State two years, she walked into a haws- pital looking for a receptionist jawb and they made her head clerk in accounting. She gets holidays, paid vacation, health insurance — "

"I went to Nawtheastern one semester," says Barbara. "But I quit. I couldn't see it, out on the fuckin Green Line every day to sit in a classroom. My girlfriend dropped out and then I quit."

"Where'd you go to college?" Chickie is looking at Nina. Nina hadn't said anything about going to school. "BU?"

"No."

"Where then?"

"Bard."

"Sod, what's Bod? I never heard of it."

"It's in New York."

"You from there?"

"Connecticut."

"From Connecticut and went to school in New York. What, you moved? What'd you take there, what'd you major in?"

"English."

"You should be a teacher."

"I tried it. Substituting. I didn't like it."

Chickie snorts. "Substituting isn't the same thing. Substitutes, it was tawture what we used to put them through. They know about that at Career Girls? The English?"

"I suppose."

"Prawbly doesn't cut a whole lot in office work, does it? Well, you got nice handwriting, anyway."

Nina eats and watches the kids. They are crowded around the tables, arms brushing, spearing forkfuls of cake from each other's trays, jostling, teasing. She spots a couple she'd like to take home with her, little curlyheads with bright eyes. The counselors talk among themselves over the children's heads.

"I think it's a bad jawb," says Chickie da Costa. "The minute I heard it on the radio I smelled a rat. Somebody bought em that podden."

The big item in the morning news is Governor Dukakis officially pardoning Sacco and Vanzetti, clearing their names in the record books.

"How do you know?"

"Hey, those Mafia, they get in trouble, the big cheeses down in Prawvidence bail em out."

"They aren't Mafias," says Barbara. "It said they're political."

"Mafia, politicians, it's the same bunch. Dukawkis is in the bag."

"They're dead," says Nina. "They were anarchists who were accused of a robbery. The evidence wasn't any good but they were electrocuted anyway."

"They're dead already?"

"They died in nineteen twenty. But they weren't cleared officially till today."

"Huh." Chickie shakes her head. "Lotta good it does em now."

"What's that?" Kathleen is looking at Gwen's lunch.

"Pork."

"Oh."

"You ought to try some of this," says Chickie. "It's real good. And they don't chodge us for seconds."

"No thank you."

"They packed that for you, the Family?"

"Food isn't important."

"Right." Chickie nudges Nina under the table, rolls her eyes. "Food's not impawtant. I hope my stomach's listening. And you, you're not eatin Bobra?"

"I don't have much of an appetite today."

Barbara excuses herself to go to the bathroom.

"She doesn't look good," says Mary.

"She suppawts her boyfriend," says Chickie. "A real loser. I seen them together she comes to Career Girls for her check."

"She looks tired."

"She's wrecked so much of the time, she can't hold a jawb. That's why she does this stuff. Idiot work."

"And he doesn't have a jawb?"

"Not that you'd notice. I asked her. I was thinkin of moving in with my boyfriend. But both of us would be bringin it home, we'd split the rent. We want to go to the Bahamas."

"What's there, the Bahamas?"

"Real nice beaches, hotels, trawpical forests. He's been once before."

"With somebody else?"

"Won't tell me." Chickie makes a face. "That's one of the reasons I'm not movin in, there's too much stuff he doesn't tell me."

"You think she's smoking a joint in there?"

"I wouldn't be surprised, Mary. Personally, I can't see it. Makes the time drag, makes the day go longer."

"Speaking of which, here comes Lover-Boy."

"Spare me. Are you guys done?"

Deke walks toward them with his lunch, flashing his smile, singing. He sings along with his radio all day. As he sits the Career Girls all stand and take their trays to the waste barrel.

The houses were set hundreds of feet back from the meandering road, some of them completely out of sight behind stone walls and giant elms. The lawns were left shaggy but not overgrown. The stone walls were carved into flat planes, into long rectangles and rounded pillars, as if the Yankee masons wanted to do in stone what Europeans did in shrubbery.

Two granite statues had once flanked the entrance to the driveway, a lion and a lioness looking haughtily across the gravel to each other. The lion's paw had rested on a small globe which disappeared one night, neatly separated as if it had spun away under its own power. The lion disappeared soon after, leaving only the marble base. Mother supposed it was fraternity boys back from Easter vacation, that it had turned up in some New Haven dormitory, painted and scrawled with graffiti. When Nina was little she imagined that it had risen of its own and run off to search for the missing ball. That it had made itself mortal by sheer willpower, every day growing warmer to the touch, thawing from the inside out, till it had walked away one night, stiffly, proudly, leaving little piles of rock dust for tracks.

The lioness stayed, but didn't look as sure of itself.

Redboy was sleeping on the empty pedestal when Nina drove in, the big Irish setter Mr. Worth had brought when he moved in with Mother. Redboy had an enormous head and snored when he slept.

It was a large colonial house, white with black shutters and shingles. Only the name on the box had changed since Nina lived there.

Nina ate shrimp salad with her mother in the sun-room.

"You're moving out?"

"We decided it was best. There isn't room enough for three."

"Do you like him?"

"Hummer? No, not much."

"Robin's parents won't be happy."

"They're never happy."

"And how is your friend Meredith?"

Nina hadn't heard from Meredith for over a year.

"Okay, I guess. Still in med school."

"And little Sara?"

"She went back to California."

"And the one I thought was so lovely, the Jewish girl — "

"She got married."

"Oh."

Mr. Worth wasn't there. Nina usually managed to time it so he'd be off on business.

"They were such nice girls. Do you see any of your other friends in Boston?"

"Most of them are down in the City. Boston is a two-year town, three at most. They do their time and then move to New York."

"Oh."

Her mother nodded for a long moment.

"Gloria Fortner died."

Nina tried to remember which one she was.

"The second this year. One of our most faithful classmates."

Mother devoted herself to reunions. Smith, class of '43. It was an obsession, getting the girls together. Mother bombarded them with newsletters, with old pictures, with birth and death announcements, with arrangements for the next get-together. She made tours of the East, New York to Philadelphia to Boston, catching old classmates at home and staying on for a few days.

"I'm trying to get a contingent together for the service. It's in Branford."

"People are busy, Mother — "

"It seems they have less and less time as they get older. With me it's the opposite."

"Maybe if you left a little more time between reunions, Mother, people would have a chance to recover, to get nostalgic again."

"It isn't nostalgia," said Mother. "It's friendship."

Mr. Worth was converting Nina's old room into an office.

"Your father felt I needed a better environment for my work. I have so much correspondence." Mother touched her arm. "I hope you don't mind."

"I don't live here anymore," said Nina. "Mr. Worth does."

"I'm sorry. Your stepfather."

"I think it will make a nice office. The light is good in the morning."

"Every year there seems to be more paperwork," said Mother. "And every year fewer of the girls seem to have the time."

Redboy had been digging up the garden again. Nina helped her mother replant the oxalis.

"Muffy Chandler's daughter just moved to Boston."

Mother always knew someone, some classmate, whose daughter was moving to Boston.

"It sounds like she's having her troubles. Drifting."

"You mean like me."

"I didn't say that. I didn't say you were drifting." Mother frowned under her sun hat. "I meant that she doesn't know what she wants to do with her life either. And she's very independent."

They worked quietly for a while.

"Your stepfather wants to dig a swimming pool back here."

"Uh-huh."

"More for entertaining than for swimming. With a patio. He doesn't swim."

Redboy was there, snuffling over the dirt clods they'd piled. Mother shook her head.

"They're so sweet-tempered and handsome," she said. "But so stupid."

"Do you shoot guns?"

"Everything but. The whole basic-training thing."

"My oldest sister was in," says Kathleen. "She had a great time there for a while."

Chickie makes a face. "The service? How can you have a good time, the service, they're always givin you awders all the time?"

"It's not so bad. You just don't take it serious. And there's all the other girls there. There was times, my sister, her barracks was just like a slumber potty."

"And they pay for your education," says Mary.

"So what rank did your sister get to be?"

"Oh, she got tired of it so she got pregnant."

"They let you out for that?"

"If you're not married they do."

Chickie snorts. "Beats a note from your mother."

Whenever Miss McCurdy passes she eyes the photograph Nina put up on the wall. Whenever Nina looks to the back of the room Deke is watching her, smiling.

Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Rivkin. Two hundred dollars.

Nina is the fastest, along with Chickie. Then Mary and Kathleen, then Gwen, who seems to be meditating more often as the day wears on, and then Barbara. Barbara isn't drawing anymore. She goes to the bathroom.

"She's not gonna work like the rest of us," says Kathleen, "she should go home."

"She's got prawblems." Chickie can talk and work steadily at the same time. "Hey, it's like that gospel lesson in church, where the guys who worked all day got paid the same as the guys who only came for the last hour. I mean, she's not makin you work any hodder. It's beween her and the employer."

Nina tries to wait till Barbara comes back but can't hold out.

Barbara is leaning over the sink, her face drained pale.

"It isn't gonna come. It's over a week now."

"Your period?"

"My stomach feels like shit but there's no dischodge."

"It might be something else."

"I'll kill the fucker," says Barbara. "I'll break his fuckin head."

If it was Chickie or one of the South Boston girls Nina would have put her arm around her. But Barbara stands there with her fists clenched, cursing into the sink.

"Don't tell nobody, okay?" she says. "They find out they'll send me home. I need the hours."

Nina comes back to her desk alone.

"Get a couple good hits in there?" asks Chickie, and nudges her in the ribs.

Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Dahlhart, twenty-five dollars.

Deke comes over to ask Barbara if she's all right. She tells him to fuck off. He says she should get more sleep.

Mr. and Mrs. Warren Friedrich, ten dollars.

Miss McCurdy finally comes over and just stands looking at the photograph on the wall.

"I'm sorry," says Nina, "does that bother you?"

"I'm not used to having something up there. And that picture — "

"It looks really old."

Miss McCurdy sits back on Nina's desk, upset, shaking her head. "Times have certainly changed."

"They look like my yearbook field-hawkey picture," says Chickie da Costa, "only puffier."

"When I was a little girl in Philadelphia," says Miss McCurdy, "the sisters used to march us all over to this place, a home for unwed mothers. Wayward girls, they called them then. And we had this poem we'd recite about Saint Catherine. She must have been the patron saint of wayward girls."

Miss McCurdy strains to remember.

Saint Catherine, Saint Catherine,

she says,

O lend me your aid, And grant that I may never Be an old maid.

A husband, Saint Catherine. A good one, Saint Catherine. But anyone better than No one, Saint Catherine.

A husband, Saint Catherine. Good, Saint Catherine. Handsome, Saint Catherine. Soon, Saint Catherine.

Miss McCurdy shakes her head, wipes her glasses.

"You must of been real pawpular with that," says Chickie da Costa. "Must of brung the house down."

Nina takes the picture off the wall and slips it under her pile of letters.

"Thank you," says Miss McCurdy. "I don't know what bothers me about it. Just fussy about the office, I guess, like to keep things in place."

"Personally," says Chickie after she's gone, "I was in that condition, I would of told em to go piss up a rope. Sisters and all."

Gwen clears her throat. Barbara goes to the bathroom.

Nina addresses letters, fills out thank-you cards. It's better work than cross-checking figures at a bank, or personalizing form letters for an insurance company or filing financial aid at BU. It's better than folding electric blankets for newaccount bonuses. It's better than being a receptionist for anybody. And the food is good in the cafeteria.

Deke plays his radio in the rear of the office, relentless topforty disco, and Chickie and Mary and Kathleen talk on.

Every time Nina finishes a letter from the pile she uncovers more of the girls in the picture. Some of them have their arms around each other, some hold hands. There are some real beauties with clear, sharp eyes. Their hair is long, braided. Nina thinks of them putting each other's hair in braids every morning.

Ms. Colleen Walsh. Ten dollars.

A few minutes before quitting time, Nina sees Deke hugging a woman in the parking lot. A woman in her forties, with a tan and a trim, tennis-player's body. Deke hugs her, kisses her on the lips. They walk away hand in hand.

"So," says Nina, "Deke's got himself a sponsor. No wonder he's so cocky."

Chickie looks out the window. "That's his mother. She picks him up."

"Every day?"

"Uh-huh."

"His mother."

"Whatta you want?" says Chickie, shrugging. "He's a retod."

"Oh."

"What, we'd give him all that gas he was nawmal? She has him go out on simple jawbs. She's friends with the big cheese at Career Girls."

Miss McCurdy lets them go a little early, signing their time slips. They all take the Green Line back toward the city, but only Mary and Kathleen end up in the same seat.

Nina takes the photograph with her. She plans to put it up on the wall in her bedroom, wherever that turns out to be. Nina looks at the photograph in her lap as they rattle through Brookline. She wonders what the girls in the back row were laughing about.

At the Anarchists' Convention

OPHIE CALLS To ASK am I going by the Anarchists' Convention this year. The year before last I'm missing because Brickman, may he rest in peace, was on the Committee and we were feuding. I think about the Soviet dissidents, but there was always something so it's hard to say. Then last year he was just cooling in the grave and it would have looked bad.

"There's Leo Gold," they would have said, "come to gloat over Brickman."

So I tell Sophie maybe, depending on my hip. Rainy days it's torture, there isn't a position it doesn't throb. Rainy days and Election Nights.

But Sophie won't hear no, she's still got the iron, Sophie. Knows I won't be caught dead on the Senior Shuttle so she arranges a cab and says, "But Leo, don't you want to see me?"

Been using that one for over fifty years.

Worked again.

We used to have it at the New Yorker Hotel before the Korean and his Jesus children moved in. You see them on the streets peddling flowers, big smiles, cheeks glowing like Hitler Youth. High on the Opiate of the People. Used to be the New Yorker had its dopers, its musicians, its sad sacks and marginal types. We felt at home there.

So this year the Committee books us with the chain that our religious friends from Utah own, their showpiece there on Central Park South. Which kicks off the annual difficulties.

"That's the bunch killed Joe Hill," comes the cry.

"Corporate holdings to rival the Pope," they say, and we're off to the races.

Personally, I think we should have it where we did the year the doormen were on strike, should rent the Union Hall in Brooklyn. But who listens to me?

So right off the bat there's Pinkstaff working up a petition and Weiss organizing a counter-Committee. Always with the factions and splinter groups those two, whatever drove man to split the atom is the engine that rules their lives. Not divide and conquer but divide and subdivide.

First thing in the lobby we've got Weiss passing a handout on Brigham Young and the Mountain Meadow Massacre.

"Leo Gold! I thought you were dead!"

"It's a matter of days. You never learned to spell, Weiss."

"What, spelling?"

I point to the handout. "Who's this Norman? 'Norman Hierarchy,' 'Norman Elders.' And all this capitalization, it's cheap theatrics."

Weiss has to put on his glasses. "That's not spelling," he says, "that's typing. Spelling I'm fine, but these new machines — my granddaughter bought an electric."

"It's nice she lets you use it."

"She doesn't know. I sneak when she's at school."

Next there's the placard in the lobby — WELCOME ANARCHISTS and the caricature of Bakunin, complete with sizzling bomb in hand. That Gross can still hold a pen is such a miracle we have to indulge his alleged sense of humor every year. A malicious man, Gross, like all cartoonists. Grinning, watching the hotel lackeys stew in their little brown uni forms, wondering is it a joke or not. Personally, I think it's in bad taste, the bomb-throwing bit. It's the enemy's job to ridicule, not ours. But who asks me?

They've set us loose in something called the Elizabethan Room and it's a sorry sight. A half-hundred old crackpots tiptoeing across the carpet, wondering how they got past the velvet ropes and into the exhibit. That old fascination with the enemy's lair, they fit like fresh kishke on a silk sheet. Some woman I don't know is pinning everyone with name tags. Immediately the ashtrays are full of them, pins bent by palsied fingers. Name tags at the Anarchists' Convention.

Pearl is here, and Bill Kinney in a fog and Lou Randolph and Pinkstaff and Fine, and Diamond tottering around flashing his new store-boughts at everyone. Personally, wearing dentures I would try to keep my mouth shut. But then I always did.

"Leo, we thought we'd lost you," they say.

"Not a word, it's two years."

"Thought you went just after Brickman, rest his soul."

"So you haven't quit yet, Leo."

I tell them it's a matter of hours and look for Sophie. She's by Baker, the Committee Chairman this year. Always the Committee Chairman, he's the only one with such a streak of masochism. Sophie's by Baker and there's no sign of her Mr. Gillis.

There's another one makes the hip act up. Two or three times I've seen the man since he set up housekeeping with Sophie, and every time I'm in pain. Like an allergy, only bone-deep. It's not just he's CP from the word go — we all had our fling with the Party, and they have their point of view. But Gillis is the sort that didn't hop off of Joe Stalin's bandwagon till after it nose-dived into the sewer. The deal with Berlin wasn't enough for Gillis, or the Purges, no, nor any of the other tidbits that started coming out from reliable sources. Not till the Party announced officially that Joe was off the Sainted list did Gillis catch a whiff. And him with Sophie now.

Maybe he's a good cook.

She lights up when she sees me. That smile, after all these years, that smile and my knees are water. She hasn't gone the Mother Jones route, Sophie, no shawls and spectacles, she's nobody's granny on a candy box. She's thin, a strong thin, not like Diamond, and her eyes, they still stop your breath from across the room. Always there was such a crowd, such a crowd around Sophie. And always she made each one think he was at the head of the line.

"Leo, you came! I was afraid you'd be shy again." She hugs me, tells Baker I'm like a brother.

Sophie who always rallied us after a beating, who bound our wounds, who built our pride back up from shambles and never faltered a step. The iron she hadl In Portland they're shaving her head, but no wig for Sophie, she wore it like a badge. And the fire! Toe-to-toe with a fat Biloxi deputy, headto-head with a Hoboken wharf boss, starting a near-riot from her soapbox in Columbus Circle, but shaping it, turning it, stampeding all that anger and energy in the right direction.

Still the iron, still the fire, and still it's Leo you're like a brother.

Baker is smiling his little pained smile, looking for someone to apologize to, Blum is telling jokes, Vic Lewis has an aluminum walker after his stroke and old Mrs. Axelrod, who knew Emma Goldman from the Garment Workers, is dozing in her chair. Somebody must be in charge of bringing the old woman, with her mind the way it is, because she never misses. She's our museum piece, our link to the past.

Not that the rest of us qualify for the New Left.

Bud Odum is in one corner trying to work up a singalong. Fifteen years younger than most here, a celebrity, still with the denim open at the chest and the Greek sailor cap. The voice is shot though. With Harriet Foote and old Lieber join ing they sound like the look-for-the-Union-label folks on television. Determined but slightly off-key. The younger kids aren't so big on Bud anymore, and the Hootenanny Generation is grown, with other fish to fry.

Kids. The room is crawling with little Barnard girls and their tape recorders, pestering people for "oral history." A pair camp by Mrs. Axelrod, clicking on whenever she starts awake and mutters some Yiddish. Sophie, who speaks, says she's raving about the harness-eyes breaking and shackles bouncing on the floor, some shirt-factory tangle in her mind. Gems, they think they're getting, oral-history gems.

There are starting to be Rebeccas again, the little Barnard girls, and Sarahs and Esthers, after decades of Carol, Sally and Debbie. The one who tapes me is a Raisele, which was my mother's name.

"We're trying to preserve it," she says with a sweet smile for an old man.

"What, Yiddish? Idon't speak."

"No," she says. "Anarchism. The memories of anarchism. Now that it's served its dialectical purpose."

"You're a determinist."

She gives me a look. They think we never opened a book. I don't tell her I've written a few, it wouldn't make an impression. If it isn't on tape or film it doesn't register. Put my name in the computer, you'll draw a blank.

"Raisele," I say. "That's a pretty name."

"I learned it from an exchange student. I used to be Jody."

Dinner is called and there's confusion, there's jostling, everyone wants near the platform. The ears aren't what they used to be. There is a seating plan, with place cards set out, but nobody looks. Place cards at the Anarchists' Convention? I manage to squeeze in next to Sophie.

First on the agenda is fruit cup, then speeches, then dinner, then more speeches. Carmen Marcovicci wants us to go get our own fruit cup. It makes her uneasy, she says, being waited on. People want, they should get up and get it themselves.

A couple minutes of mumble-grumble, then someone points out that we'd be putting the two hotel lackeys in charge of the meal out of a job. It's agreed, they'll serve. You could always reason with Carmen.

Then Harriet Foote questions the grapes in the fruit cup. The boycott is over, we tell her, grapes are fine. In fact grapes were always fine — it was the labor situation that was no good, not the fruit.

"Well I'm not eating mine," she says, blood pressure climbing toward the danger point, "it would be disloyal."

The Wrath of the People. That's what Brickman used to call it in his articles, in his harangues, in his three-hour walking diatribes. Harriet still has it, and Carmen and Weiss and Sophie and Bill Kinney on his clear days and Brickman had it to the end. It's a wonderful quality, but when you're over seventy and haven't eaten since breakfast it has its drawbacks.

Baker speaks first, apologizing for the site and the hour and the weather and the Hundred Years' War. He congratulates the long travelers — Odum from L.A., Kinney from Montana, Pappas from Chicago, Mrs. Axelrod all the way in from Yonkers. He apologizes that our next scheduled speaker, Mikey Dolan, won't be with us. He apologizes for not having time to prepare a eulogy, but it was so sudden -

More mumble-grumble, this being the first we've heard about Mikey. Sophie is crying, but she's not the sort you offer your shoulder or reach for the Kleenex. If steel had tears, Brickman used to say. They had their battles, Brickman and Sophie, those two years together. '37 and '38. Neither of them known as a compromiser, both with healthy throwing arms, once a month there's a knock and it's Sophie come to borrow more plates. I worked for money at the moviehouse, I always had plates.

The worst was when you wouldn't see either of them for a week. Phil Rapf was living below them then and you'd see him in Washington Square, eight o'clock in the morning. Phil who'd sleep through the Revolution itself if it came before noon.

"I can't take it," he'd say. "They're at it already. In the morning, in the noontime, at night. At least when they're fighting the plaster doesn't fall."

Less than two years it lasted. But of all of them, before and after, it was Brickman left his mark on her. That hurts.

Bud Odum is up next, his Wisconsin accent creeping toward Oklahoma, twanging on about "good red-blooded American men and women" and I get a terrible feeling he's going to break into "The Ballad of Bob LaFollette," when war breaks out at the far end of the table. In the initial shuffle Allie Zaitz was sitting down next to Fritz Groh and it's fifteen minutes before the shock of recognition. Allie has lost all his hair from the X-ray treatments, and Fritz never had any. More than ever they're looking like twins.

"You," says Allie, "you from the Dockworkersl"

"And you from that yellow rag. They haven't put you away from civilized people?"

"They let you in here? You an anarchist?"

"In the fullest definition of the word. Which you wouldn't know. What was that coloring book you wrote for?"

At the top of their voices, in the manner of old Lefties. What, old — in the manner we've always had, damn the decibels and full speed ahead. Baker would apologize but he's not near enough to the microphone, and Bud Odum is just laughing. There's still something genuine about the boy, Greek sailor cap and all.

"Who let this crank in here? We've been infiltratedl"

"Point of order! Point of order!"

What Allie is thinking with point of order I don't know, but the lady from the name tags gets them separated, gives each a Barnard girl to record their spewings about the other. Something Fritz said at a meeting, something Allie wrote about it, centuries ago. We don't forget.

Bud gets going again and it seems that last year they weren't prepared with Brickman's eulogy, so Bud will do the honors now. I feel eyes swiveling, a little muttered chorus of "Leoleoleo" goes through the room. Sophie knew, of course, and conned me into what she thought would be good for me. Once again.

First Bud goes into what a fighter Brickman was, tells how he took on Union City, New Jersey, single-handed, about the time he organized an entire truckload of scabs with one speech, turning them around right under the company's nose. He can still rouse an audience, Bud, even with the pipes gone, and soon they're popping up around the table with memories. Little Pappas, who we never thought would survive the beating he took one May Day scuffle, little oneeyed, broken-nosed Pappas stands and tells of Brickman saving the mimeograph machine when they burned our office on 27th Street. And Sam Karnes, ghost-pale, like the years in prison bleached even his blood, is standing, shaky, with the word on Brickman's last days. Tubes running out of him, fluids dripping into him, still Brickman agitates with the hospital orderlies, organizes with the cleaning staff. Then Sophie takes the floor, talking about spirit, how Brickman had it, how Brickman was it, spirit of our cause, more spirit sometimes than judgment, and again I feel the eyes, hear the Leoleoleo and there I am on my feet.

"We had our troubles," I say, "Brickman and I. But always I knew his heart was in the right place."

Applause, tears, and I sit down. It's a sentimental moment. Of course, it isn't true. If Brickman had a heart it was a wellkept secret. He was a machine, an express train flying the black flag. But it's a sentimental moment, the words come out.

Everybody is making nice then, the old friendly juices flowing, and Baker has to bring up business. A master of tact, a genius of timing. A vote — do we elect next year's Committee before dinner or after?

"Why spoil dinner?" says one camp.

"Nobody will be left awake after," says the other. "Let's get it out of the way."

They always started small, the rifts. A title, a phrase, a point of procedure. The Chicago Fire began with a spark.

It pulls the scab off, the old animosities, the bickerings, come back to the surface. One whole section of the table splits off into a violent debate over the merits of syndicalism, another forms a faction for elections during dinner, Weiss wrestles Baker for the microphone and Sophie shakes her head sadly.

"Why, why, why? Always they argue," she says, "always they fight." -

I could answer, I devoted half of one of my studies to it, but who asks?

While the argument heats another little girl comes over with used-to-be-Jody.

"She says you're Leo Gold."

"I confess."

"The Leo Gold?"

"There's another?"

"I read Anarchism and the Will to Love."

My one turkey, and she's read it. "So you're the one."

"I didn't realize you were still alive."

"It's a matter of seconds."

I'm feeling low. Veins are standing out in temples, old hearts straining, distemper epidemic. And the sound, familiar, but with a new, futile edge.

I've never been detached enough to recognize the sound so exactly before. It's a raw-throated sound, a grating, insistent sound, a sound born out of all the insults swallowed, the battles lost, out of all the smothered dreams and desires. Three thousand collective years of frustration in the room, turning inward, a cancer of frustration. It's the sound of parents brawling each other because they can't feed their kids, the sound of prisoners preying on each other because the guards are out of reach, the sound of a terribly deep despair. No quiet desperation for us, not while we have a voice left. Over an hour it lasts, the sniping, the shouting, the accusations and countercharges. I want to eat. I want to go home. I want to cry.

And then the hotel manager walks in.

Brown blazer, twenty-dollar haircut and a smile from here to Salt Lake City. A huddle at the platform. Baker and Mr. Manager bowing and scraping at each other, Bud Odum looking grim, Weiss turning colors. Sophie and I go up, followed by half the congregation. Nobody trusts to hear it secondhand. I can sense the sweat breaking under that blazer when he sees us coming, toothless, gnarled, suspicious by habit. Ringing around him, the Anarchists' Convention.

"A terrible mistake," he says.

"All my fault," he says.

"I'm awfully sorry," he says, "but you'll have to move."

Seems the Rotary Club, the Rotary Club from Sioux Falls, had booked this room before us. Someone misread the calendar. They're out in the lobby, eyeballing Bakunin, impatient, full of gin and boosterism.

"We have a nice room, a smaller room," coos the manager, "we can set you up there in a jiffy. Much less drafty than this room, I'm sure the older folks would feel more comfortable."

"I think it stinks," says Rosenthal, every year the Committee Treasurer. "We paid cash, the room is ours."

Rosenthal doesn't believe in checks. "The less the Wall Street Boys handle your money," he says, "the cleaner it is." Who better to be Treasurer than a man who thinks gold is filth?

"That must be it," says Sophie to the manager. "You've got your cash from us, money in the bank, you don't have to worry. The Rotary, they can cancel a check, so you're scared. And maybe there's a little extra on the side they give you, a little folding green to clear out the riffraff?"

Sophie has him blushing, but he's going to the wire anyhow. Like Frick in the Homestead Strike, shot, stomped and stabbed by Alexander Berkman, they patch him up and he finishes his day at the office. A gold star from Carnegie. Capitalism's finest hour.

"You'll have to move," says the manager, dreams of corporate glory in his eyes, the smile hanging on to his face by its fingernails, "it's the only way."

"Never," says Weiss.

"Out of the question," says Sophie.

"Fuck off," says Pappas.

Pappas saw his father lynched. Pappas did three hard ones in Leavenworth. Pappas lost an eye, a lung and his profile to a mob in Chicago. He says it with conviction.

"Pardon?" A note of warning from Mr. Manager.

"He says to fuck off," says Fritz Groh.

"You heard him," echoes Allie Zaitz.

"If you people won't cooperate," huffs the manager, condescension rolling down like a thick mist, "I'll have to call in the police."

It zings through the room like the twinge of a single nerve.

"Police! They're sending the police!" cries Pinkstaff.

"Go limp!" cries Vic Lewis, knuckles white with excitement on his walker. "Make em drag us out!"

"Mind the shuttles, mind the shuttlesl" cries old Mrs. Axelrod in Yiddish, sitting straight up in her chair.

Allie Zaitz is on the phone to a newspaper friend, the Barnard girls are taping everything in sight, Sophie is organizing us into squads and only Baker holding Weiss bodily allows Mr. Manager to escape the room in one piece. We're the Anarchists' Convention!

Nobody bickers, nobody stalls or debates or splinters. We manage to turn the long table around by the door as a kind of barricade, stack the chairs together in a second line of defense and crate Mrs. Axelrod back out of harm's way. I stay close by Sophie, and once, lugging the table, she turns and gives me that smile. Like a shot of adrenaline, I feel fifty again. Sophie, Sophie, it was always so good, just to be at your side!

And when the manager returns with his two befuddled street cops to find us standing together, arms linked, the lame held up out of their wheelchairs, the deaf joining from memory as Bud Odum leads us in "We Shall Not Be Moved," my hand in Sophie's, sweaty-palmed at her touch like the old days, I look at him in his brown blazer and think Brickman, I think, my God if Brickman was here we'd show this bastard the Wrath of the People!

Schiffman's Ape

I HE GIBBONS CONTINUE to feed while the leopard shakes the young pig to death. The leopard is in its black phase, it holds the pig's haunch in its jaws, patient, giving it an occasional violent jerk, then resting. The muscles in its neck and shoulders are bunched tightly, it breathes in steady rhythm. Gibbons swarm the trees for the climbing vines of purple grape, small, bright yellow birds flit after insects under the forest canopy, and on a branch directly above the leopard, a male Schiffman's ape sits picking lice from its chest. Even the pig, in shock, seems to stare at some distant objective.

Squatting in the underbrush some thirty yards downwind, a bearded man watches breathlessly, taking notes.

"I've seen it."

Lisa is boiling river water on the little cooking fire when Warden reaches the clearing. His eyes are wide with excitement, the Bolex bounces and twists on its strap around his neck as he rushes to her.

"I've seen it!"

"Oh my God. Where?"

"Other side of the river, just down from the ford."

"How many?"

"Just one. That leopard we heard last night had a pig, I stopped to shoot some film, and there it was. Just sitting there, in a tree. Schiffman's ape. Hurry, let's pack it up and get back over there."

"You're sure, honey?"

"Positive. We've found it. Hurry now."

They hug quickly and begin stuffing equipment into their backpacks. Twice Warden repacks an item Lisa has put in at a bad angle. The water is dumped, fire doused and spread, and they are off ducking low branches and hanging vines, stumbling along the overgrown path to the river. Lisa is beaming, chattering questions, and Warden reminds her to keep her voice down. When the path is wide enough to permit it they hold hands.

June 3 — First sighting of ape. Full-grown male on west bank of river. No sign of others. Ape is almost as large as a chimpanzee, with the chimp's large, expressive facial area, but is extremely woolly and long-armed like the gibbon. Re-sighted ape further north of ford. L. is beside herself, like a schoolgirl. Followed ape till dark when it settled high in a lodge tree.

Schiffman was a public-relations man hired by an oil company to put out a line on their new drilling offshore from the island. He came on location to film a commercial about the environmental-impact study the company had paid for, but the terrain around the Holiday Inn where the drillers stayed wasn't wild enough for his purposes. He took his crew inland to the old temple in the forest and it was near there that the first footage of the ape was shot. It was just another monkey to them, some nice local color, but a New York editor who'd worked on the Jane Goodall specials for the net work picked up on it and screened the film for a primates man at Columbia. A new species, possibly an addition to the select club of the great apes. Schiffman exploited the hell out of it for the oil company and the inevitable scientific controversy arose. Various experts and skeptics studied the film, the Bigfoot and Loch Ness legends were resurrected, and Schiffman was linked forever with the new primate in the popular imagination.

Warden and Lisa were on the island, at the Holiday Inn, when the story broke, just off a plane from the States. They were funded and equipped for a three-month field study of the island's dominant gibbon population, the Hylobates lar. A telegram from Warden's department caught them just in time with their new objective. They had a jump on the rest of the scientific world.

Schiffman's ape (eremites hirsutus): a large, tailless Old World primate of the family Pongidae (disputed), found only in the Indonesian rain forests.

They had a departmental romance, Warden an associate professor and Lisa a graduate student. Part of her grant was met by caring for the laboratory animals, and their first meetings were in between cages by the night monkeys. Warden was doing three hours of behavioral observation a day and often Lisa would come and talk to him by the one-way glass as he watched the monkeys and scribbled onto his clipboard. She was very shy and at first they talked only monkeys. She had a tendency to humanize the animals' behavior, to anthropomorphize, that both annoyed and amused him. Lisa had nicknames for all the animals, even the lower forms, the rabbits and hamsters and white rats. She called all the crickets Jiminy. She talked softly to the animals as she handled them, as she fed them and watered them and injected them with massive doses of carcinogens. She thought the night monkeys were cute, especially the babies.

Warden had her in both his graduate-level courses. She was quiet but a very good student. He had noticed her right away, not so much for her face, plain and pale, but for her bottom. She had the most fantastic bottom, the kind Warden liked best, with a pronounced lordosis like the! Ko tribeswomen of the African bush that made it ride high and stick out invitingly. A black behind on a blond girl. Once or twice she had walked ahead of him on the campus and he had followed, past his destination, watching her bottom move in her pants. When Warden daydreamed about the girls in his classes, Lisa and her bottom were well up on his list.

Their first personal talks by the cages were about a boy she was seeing, an undergraduate, a star soccer player. It came out that the boy had problems with impotence, that Lisa held herself at fault. Warden drew on his experience to advise her. He advised her and his advice became reassurance and his reassurance, late one night on the floor between the rhesus and the scurrying lemurs, became demonstration.

It was an incredible semester. Warden and Lisa were at each other in between classes, before and after his observation periods, overnight and all weekend long. More than once the janitor found him asleep by the night monkeys, notes spilling from his lap. Warden lost so much sleep his boundaries began to blur, he would find himself reaching to squeeze Lisa's bottom out in public or when she came up at the end of class. She slept on her stomach, and he loved to pull the covers up so her cheeks were exposed, loved to knead and jiggle them while she mumbled nonsense through her dreams. She loved sleeping with him, he could tell, loved that he knew what to do and did it, loved just listening to him talk in class or in bed, hearing all the things he knew. It was an incredible semester and somehow his work didn't suffer.

Behavioral Observation — Platyrrhine (night) monkey (Aotes trivirgatus)

Lab study — Adult male C and adult female P in 6'x4' cage.

2:03 a.m. Male and female approach each other at center of cage. Social sniffing. Female lifts tail slightly as male sniffs her genital area.

2:05 Mutual grooming behavior, highly agitated.

2:07 Male mounts female from rear. Copulation, apparently successful. Three or four pelvic thrusts, ejaculation occurring on the last, long thrust, the lower part of the male's body quivering for a moment. Male dismounts.

2:10 Resume mutual grooming.

2:12 Male mounts female from rear, copulation, apparently successful. Dismounts.

2:14 Male and female run to opposite ends of cage. Male licks his genitals.

2:16 Male, uttering kiss-squeaks, approaches female. Mounts from side. Unsuccessful copulation. Dismounts.

2:19 Male climbs side of cage, uttering short barks. Drops behind female, who assumes submissive posture. Male mounts from rear, copulation, apparently successful. Dismounts. Mounts again immediately, copulation, apparently successful.

2:23 Mutual grooming behavior.

2:25-4:0o Repeated mountings and copulations, all apparently successful. Female remained receptive throughout. Mutual grooming behavior grew more and more perfunctory.

The ape is feeding on grapes in a vine-clogged tree. It eats slowly, methodically working its way from cluster to cluster. Suddenly the tree is alive with a group of gibbons. It is a family unit — adult male, mother with infant, two subadult females. The smaller gibbons try to scare the Schiff man's away. They feed in an exaggerated frenzy, swinging from branch to branch with breakneck speed, jamming grapes into their mouths, making extraloud chomping noises. Schiffman's ape ignores them. The gibbons swing faster, wilder, there seems to be a dozen of them buzzing through the tree.

"Look at him. He's not budging." Distant whispering, trading looks through the binoculars.

"It's only a display. This must be part of their usual range."

"Do you think it travels alone?"

"Seems like it. Could be like the orangutan, lone males are fairly common. Or maybe something has driven it a lot closer to the temple."

"Or maybe," says Lisa, "he just got lonely."

Warden shoots her a hard look.

"Sorry."

"Hopefully he'll lead us to others. We've got to figure out the bonding patterns."

"He's so woolly. More than the gibbons even. And those arms — "

"Travels mostly by brachiation, we can assume that right now. Glad I packed all those lens filters, we'll be shooting directly against the sky most of the time."

"What shall we name him?"

"Alpha. It's our first subject."

"No, I mean a real name."

Warden smiles indulgently. "Sure. Why not. Uhm — how about Esau?"

"Esau?"

"From the Old Testament. `Esau was an hairy man.' "

"I like it."

The gibbons slow, begin to feed regularly. Esau isn't moving.

There is a story that the people of the Indonesian lowlands tell about the orangutan, the 'man of the forest.' It takes place when all creatures, including men, had just been formed and sat in the forest waiting for the Creator to give them their natures. The Creator came down from the mountain and told them to gather round. To the bird He gave flight and song, to the leopard He gave strength and savagery, to the python stealth and cold-bloodedness. There were two men at that time, twin brothers named Simang and Jaru. By the time the Creator got to them He had run out of natures. So He said to them, "You will be complex creatures, I will let you choose one aspect from the natures of each of the other creatures. But you must choose together and agree on everything."

At first Simang and Jaru were in close agreement. They chose stealth from the python, strength from the leopard, quickness from the lizard, hot-bloodedness from the boar, and caution from the rodent. But when they considered the bird, Simang wanted its flight and Jaru wanted its song.

"With flight," said Simang, "I will soar in the air above all the other creatures, even the birds, and with my strength and cunning I will rule over them."

"But with song," said Jaru, "all the other creatures will hear what we have in our hearts and minds, and we will be understood."

They argued, and suddenly, with the strength of the leopard, Simang attacked Jaru and spilled his hot blood. The Creator intervened just in time to prevent a murder. He was very angry.

"For this act," he said to Simang, "you and your race will part from Jaru and his race, and you will be outcasts. You will soar in the air but never really fly, and will rule over only what you can reach with your long, grasping arms."

"Jaru, you and your race will be masters of 'the earth, but whenever you meet the descendants of Simang or the other creatures, you will sing, but none will understand."

From that day Simang and his race dwelt in the forest, separate from other men, and were the loneliest of creatures.

Lisa wakes first and crawls out from the little pup-tent. She is naked, a shocking white against the rich, rich green of the rain-forest vegetation. Lisa has never seen such greens; being surrounded by them makes her feel a bit surreal, like she is living in a painting by Gauguin. She stands and stretches her body, sweat evaporating beneath her arms and breasts in the cool morning air. A gray mist hangs close to the ground, the insects aren't flying yet. Early sunlight filters through the canopy in visible rays, it splashes off the tree bark, dapples the leaves. Lisa smiles just looking at it, feeling it — the rich green ferns, the mist, the slanting rays, drinkable air, small yellow birds flitting silently, like butterflies, under the canopy. She hugs herself, runs her hands through her hair. She looks to the top of Esau's lodge tree, fifty yards distant, but can't see him.

Lisa pulls on her still-damp underpants, tugs on the two pairs of thick hiking socks, all the while scanning the trees for the ape. She pulls a sleeveless undershirt over her head, struggles into her fatigue pants and jacket. The cloth is dry but stiff with sweat, her skin begins to itch immediately. She works the leather of her heavy waterproof boots till she can jam her feet into them, fingers aching as she pulls the laces tight. Lisa wraps her thick utility belt around her waist, straps on her watch. She smears bug repellant on her face, neck and arms. She uncases the binoculars and looks into the treetops through them.

Warden crawls out of the tent, sleepy-eyed, and makes a passing grab at her bottom. He feels only the extra notepads in her back pocket. He is spotted with dried, grayish dabs of zinc-oxide ointment covering his skin eruptions. He squats and begins to tinker with the backpacks. Lisa moves away from the tent, searching above with the glasses.

Flummmph!

A stream of urine and loose, yellowish feces cascades onto Lisa from above. Esau hoots, shakes the branch he hangs from violently, then swings off with the sun at his back.

"Oh. Oh shit. Oh my God. Oh — "

Lisa is splattered, the binoculars dripping, she grimaces and looks down her front.

"Oh my God. Oh look, it's, look, all in my hair — "

Warden pokes at a splat of feces with a stick. "Mostly fructivorous," he says. "But probably some insects and birds' eggs. Got to get his protein somewhere."

June ro — Subject ape's reaction to the presence of L. and me is what we expected. Since we began following him night and day, ape has remained in trees, traveling by brachiation and feeding on fruit and bark in the treetops. Ape expresses aggression towards us in various manners of display:

i. Staring — Ape will cease brachiation and stare at us, body rigid.

s. Hitting away — Fanning the air in a shooing gesture towards us.

3. Attacking — Directed rush falling just short of contact with us, hair erect, movement exaggerated and jerky.

4. Threat sounds — These often accompany the other three displays:

a. Kiss-squeaks

b. Raspberry

c. Loud and repetitive'lork' noises

d. Exaggerated chomping

e. 'Ahoor' howls

f. Barks

g. Grumphs

h. Combinations of these

So far subject is the only Schiffman's we've come in contact with. Ape travels and feeds within a range bordered by the river that is overlapped by the ranges of at least two bands of gibbons. Ape begins feeding around 7 a.m., continues for roughly two hours, then rests for two to three hours in a tree. Feeding and brachiation then resume until sundown. Ape does not travel at night, sleeps high in a favored lodge tree. Covers 4,000 to 20,000 feet in a day. Hopefully ape will soon be fully habituated to our presence, and our observation will have no effect on his behavior.

The ape is swinging away, silhouetted in the sun, zigging and zagging rapidly through the forest canopy. Warden struggles below, hacking wearily with the machete, now and then switching it to his left hand for a few strokes. Lisa offers to take the point for a bit, but no, he says, she can't cut fast enough, they'd lose him. Sweat stinging his eyes, tramping over the swampy, root-tangled section of forest, Warden grinds his teeth and tries to keep the ape in sight, tries to transfer all his resentment for it into his machete stroke. It won't keep still. Warden is sucking wind through his ears, the vegetation glows phosphorescent green before him, throbbing in and out of focus, a bright scarlet edge outlining its form. He is dizzy, he can't feel his legs. He glances back at Lisa. Her GI shirt is soaked, she moves in his wake with solemn concentration. Warden stumbles, stops.

"What's the matter?"

"You've got to rest, Lisa. I don't like your color."

"I'm all right. I can go on."

"I can't have you collapsing on me." Warden tries to gulp air as silently as possible. "He's not going to come down and help me carry you back to camp."

"I can go on."

"We can catch up with him later. If you could see the way your eyes look, all — "

"Honey, what's that on your arm?"

It is a green leech, fat as a little finger. A shudder runs through Warden, he fights not to cry out.

"Get it off me, quick! The grease, where's the grease, dammit!"

Lisa pulls the tube of thick grease from her back pocket, looking at the pulsing leech as if it were a specimen on a glass slide. She seems to be taking her time.

"Come on, come on!"

Lisa squeezes the tube till the leech is completely covered. She scans the treetops, waiting. The ape has stopped and is feeding just up ahead.

"He sure likes his privacy."

"Privacy is a human concept, Lisa. Only a human concept. He's afraid. When he stops being afraid he'll stop running. How are you doing?"

"Huh?"

"Have you got your wind back yet?"

"I said I was all right. You sure you don't want me to do the machete for a while?"

Warden realizes he is still gripping the machete tightly, his knuckles squeezed white. "Is that thing ready yet?"

Lisa flicks the glob of grease and insect off his arm with her finger. "Maybe," she says, "the less we press him the less he'll run. He's got to eat sometime."

Warden begins to contradict her, then holds still. Eating wasn't only a human concept.

By the second semester they were together Lisa was comfortable with her position in between the faculty and the student body. It was all right for Warden to bring her to get- togethers among the younger faculty, and the men would gather around her whenever she came. But Warden decided he didn't like parties much anymore. Lisa refused to give up her student friends, which put him in an awkward position, and she had grown a little too familiar with the department staff. Not that Warden wanted her creeping around in awe of his colleagues, it was just — appearances, maybe, just an un easy feeling he got about how quickly she had adapted to the role of faculty girlfriend.

There were some rough moments. Over spring break Lisa went home and while she was there slept with an old highschool friend. Nothing important, she told Warden, just one of those things. He didn't like to see her acting so coldblooded about it when he knew something must be disturbing her pretty badly to pull a stunt like that on him. And shortly after that he got involved in a thing with a woman in the Psych Department, nothing really, nothing worth telling Lisa about.

Psych was feuding with Biology again and the Environmentalists wanted their own department. There was pressure from every direction, and Warden felt vaguely irritated much of the time. He had to get tough with Lisa in her studies, she'd been slipping. "If you're ever going to amount to anything," he told her, "anything more than just another good-looking lab assistant, you'd better get on the stick right now." She worked hard, he had to admit that, it left her very little time for parties or her other friends and she wasn't able to go home for midsemester break. The time with just each other was good, Warden felt, they needed it.

Some rough times. He had a long article to write, two survey courses to hold down, plus the strain of having to truck out to the zoo three times a week to do observation for his department head's book on the group dynamics of baboons. It wore at his patience and there were a lot of arguments with Lisa. He had her soccer star in class, her exboyfriend, who was something of a bust academically. Once, grading a really awful paper the boy had done on sexual dysfunction in captive animals, Warden very nearly wrote "You should talk" on it. That was the kind of mood he was usually in. It was a wonder he and Lisa survived the semester intact.

Behavioral Observation HamadryasBaboon (Papio hamadryas)

Municipal zoo population of twenty-two animals in free-ranging enclosure.

1:12 p.m. Dominant male, Rufus, approaches estrous female Nini with stiff-legged display, canines bared. Nini presents genitals in submissive posture. Rufus mounts, copulatory thrusts.

1:14 Subadult male, Dobbs, approaches estrous female Cocoa, sniffs genital area. Attempts to mount. Dominant male Rufus dismounts from Nini, rushes at Dobbs with attack display. Dobbs crouches in submissive posture, Rufus makes brief mounting display on Dobbs, then mounts Cocoa. Pelvic thrusts.

1:18 Subadult male Dobbs approaches estrous female Sheena, genital sniffing. Sheena presents, Dobbs mounts. Copulatory behavior till Rufus rushes over from Cocoa, toppling Dobbs from Sheena's back and driving him away with bites to the neck and shoulder. Sheena remains frozen in submissive posture, back arched and genitals presented. Dobbs climbs to top of tire apparatus, screaming, and sits with year-old males. Rufus returns, stiff-legged, and mounts Sheena. Violent copulatory thrusting, watching Dobbs all the while.

Esau climbs a tree that hangs out over the rushing water very close to camp. Half the tree's roots are exposed, river current pulling it farther from the bank each day. The branches stretch far out over the middle of the river. Esau climbs out on the farthest and thinnest of these for a thick cluster of grapes that hangs on its end. He feeds suspended over the churning white water, a fall would sweep him over jagged rocks and a ten-foot drop-off just downstream. The branch groans under his weight, sags, supported mainly by the climbing grapevines that tie it in with higher, sturdier branches.

Warden and Lisa watch from a spot on the bank several yards upriver. Warden catches his breath silently each time the ape shifts its grip. He thinks of how difficult it was to find the subject, of the uncertainty of finding others in the area. He thinks about the limits of their grant provisions, of their time, thinks of all the data they've already collected. To intervene would be directly contrary to their purpose and methodology, but still — the ape hangs by one arm over the torrent, pulling handfuls of grapes loose.

This was an opportunity to be more than a footnote in some other professor's research, a chance for Warden to be listed in the tables of contents with all the great field pioneers, with Yerkes and Schaller and DeVore and C. R. Carpenter. Weren't scientists always interfering with marginal species, helping to preserve them so they might be studied? What could be more marginal than Schiffman's ape, its only known specimen currently hanging on the brink of extinction? It wouldn't really be interfering, it would be — preservation, yes, preservation in the interests of science, it would be -

A vine pops and the branch sinks down a notch.

"Esaul" calls Lisa, up and waving her arms, "Esau watch out!"

The ape immediately swings back up the branch and takes off away from them, soaring from tree to tree. Warden gives Lisa a stern look.

"I'm sorry, honey," she says. "The river's so high, that branch, it scared me. I was afraid for him."

Warden sighs wearily.

"I couldn't help it."

Warden gives her a little pat on the cheek, smiles forgivingly. "I understand, baby."

June z8 — Subject, Esau, descended to the ground for the first time in our presence today, to drink from the river. He drinks by dipping his hand in the water and then sucking from the thick hairs on the back of it. Subject, Esau, remained on ground after that and L. and I were careful to keep a good distance away. He is becoming habituated, and apparently Schiffman's ape does a good deal of his traveling and feeding on the ground. Contrary to my first impression, he does exhibit knuckle-walking when not in an agitated state. Esau has not yet crossed the river to the temple side, indicating that the original sighting by the film crew was either a stroke of luck or of a different member of the species.

Darkness.

"Careful, honey, the tent pole."

"Don't worry about the tent pole. Are you wet enough?"

"I don't know. It hurt a little the last time."

"Do you think he's watching?"

"Jesus, Lisa, we're inside the tent, it's pitch-black outside, what could he see?"

"He can hear."

"I'll try to be quiet."

"Honey, I'm so sticky. This heat — "

"You'll get used to it. It doesn't bother me that you're sticky."

"Oh God."

"What now?"

"I can't remember if I took my pill."

"Take an extra tomorrow. That works with your kind, doesn't it?"

"I get it mixed up with the Atabrine and all the salt tablets."

"Take an extra tomorrow, it'll be fine."

"Careful."

"I think something's biting me."

"Oh Christ."

"Well it's not my fault. What's wrong, honey?"

"Forget it. Just forget it."

"Please, don't turn your b-"

"Forget it."

Darkness, and silence.

Summer vacation proved to be a watershed in their relationship. The application to have Lisa hired as a research assistant didn't come through — there was no pretense she could use to stay at the university, no way she could afford it alone. Lisa didn't seem as disappointed as Warden expected. He'd never realized she could hide her feelings so well. She said she thought she could survive three months at home, without him. One summer apart wouldn't change things between them if they were really good for each other. The day before exams started Warden asked her to marry him.

Lisa was stunned. She had never considered it. None of the people they knew were getting married, it seemed such a gesture of — of commitment for somebody to make to her. She had never thought in terms of marriage, the idea excited her. She said yes and for a period they were back to humping like rabbits whenever they met.

Her parents were ecstatic. "We'd given up on her," said her beaming dad to Warden at the reception. "We'd given her up to science." He nudged Warden and nodded to where Lisa and her mother were weeping and hugging. "I should have known nature would come through. Girls will be girls."

"They tell me you work with animals," said an uncle, a very red-faced and liquid uncle.

"Primates."

"What's that?"

"Monkeys."

"Oh."

"And man. Right now I'm running experiments on chimpanzees."

"I see. Now which are they? I know King Kong was a gorilla."

"Like in Tarzan. Cheetah was a chimpanzee."

"Hah! Right, old Cheetah. Me Tarzan, you Jane. So," he clapped Warden on the back, "you gonna carry our little girl off into the jungle?"

Behavioral Observation — Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) Subject — Young male, Zipperdee

Experiment Zipperdee was placed in a large room barren except for a 08'x8' steel cage in the center of the floor. Inside the cage was a small box painted bright blue, with bright chrome handles on the closed lid. Opening the lid triggered a mechanism that shut the cage door, trapping the animal in the cramped quarters. The box was empty. The animal was left in the cage for fifteen minutes after trapping himself, then taken to a neutral room for five minutes while a box of a different color was installed. The experiment was then repeated, eight trials in all.

Results Zipperdee continued to trap himself by opening the lid to look in the box, despite his obvious dis like for being closely confined. Learning did take place — with each successive trial he took longer to approach the painted box, often trying to reach through the bars to lift the lid. But when this failed his curiosity always prevailed and he ended up entering the cage. Once trapped he shook the bars and made characteristic distress noises, and repeatedly turned to open the lid as if to be reassured there was still nothing within the box. As Zipperdee was known to retain complex maze and machine-operation procedures for as long as a week, this was surely not a failure of memory. The experiment was repeated with Tom-Tom, another young male, this time without changing the color of the box between trials. Again the subject trapped himself repeatedly.

Esau is traveling on the ground, walking unhurriedly, with Warden and Lisa following. He appears to be constantly sulking, his head hanging down from his shoulder blades as he moves. He stops, lifts his nose in the air. His hair fluffs a bit, half-erect. The muscles in his arms tense.

Three apes, Schiffman's apes, appear in the clearing ahead.

Warden and Lisa grab hands, holding tight.

There is an adult male, same size as Esau, an adult female, and a younger, smaller female. Esau's hair is standing up straight. The three walk toward him warily. The adult male sniffs at Esau's hindquarters loudly, almost snorting. The two females stand in front of him, rigid, their faces inches from his. Esau is so stiff he is trembling slightly.

The male begins to hoot, tears a hunk of fern from the underbrush and shakes it. Esau turns to face him and the females both begin to throw bits of ground-debris at him. Esau lowers his head and bolts up a tree, the other Schiffman's all chattering and making empty-handed throwing ges tures at him. The male sees Warden then, gives out a high yip, and they are all swinging away through the trees.

Warden and Lisa watch until the three disappear. They look at each other, turn, and trudge after Esau.

July 5 — Esau's social behavior may or may not tell us much about the bonding patterns of Schiffman's ape. From the behavior observed so far I would postulate that the species travels singly or in extremely small groups, much like the orangutan. Their favored food materials are widely dispersed. Intraspecies contacts have been much more tense than those with the gibbons or smaller monkeys in the area. L. thinks Esau might be an isolated case. More data, based on a wider variety of subjects, are needed.

"Well, you're in a wonderful mood."

"Don't start, Lisa."

"I didn't start a damn thing. You started it when you banged out of the tent this morning."

"I should feel like a million dollars? I'm hot, I'm wet, I'm dirty and I'm going to stay that way for a long time. I've got crotch rot halfway down to my knees, I can't spread my legs without it burning — "

"So do I."

"I hadn't noticed the difference."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Warden turns away from her. Esau is on the ground about a hundred feet away, poking under the bark of a fallen log for grubs.

"I wish you'd walk further from the tent before you do your business," he said.

"I can't always make it that far, I told you that. I can't control it."

"Stop eating the damn grapes, then. That's what's doing it, you're up in the tree eating grapes with Esau. Going native on me."

"I'm not up in the tree with Esau. And I get sick of dried food."

"We're here to watch the animal, not to empathize with him. It's not very objective."

"What's not objective?"

"Your whole attitude. Just look at your half of the observation notes, it's obvious. We'll have to go over it all when we get back."

"And what about yours?"

"Mine is fine. If you want me to give you a refresher course I'd be happy to."

"Oh Christ."

"Where are you going?"

She keeps walking, away from Warden and Esau.

"Lisa." She doesn't respond. He calls. "Not near the tent, Lisa."

Lisa stops, takes a huge breath, then screams at the top of her lungs. Screams over and over. Warden looks to see if Esau has been scared off. The ape stands looking back at him, and their eyes meet, thinks Warden, with some measure of understanding.

Behavioral Observation — Schiffman's ape (eremites hirsutus) Field study — Adult male Esau, adult female with dependent infant.

Warden writes frantically, pad against thigh, not taking his eyes off the scene before him. He's glad Lisa is back at the tent. He flicks a glance at his watch -

5:48 p.m. Esau encounters female Schiffman's carrying infant on her back, feeding on ground. She stiffens, hair erect, as he descends and sits several feet to the left of her.

5:49 Female exhibits staring threat-display. Esau approaches slowly. Female emits warning squeaks. They stare at each other, bodies rigid, for a full minute. Esau stands bipedally, extends arms to full width and utters booming 'grumph' sound. Female exhibits 'waving away' display.

5:51 Esau rushes female, who bites at him, then flees uttering distress shrieks, the infant clinging to her back scream. ing. Esau chases, nipping at her haunches, catching her after several yards. The infant is knocked to the ground. Esau, penis erect, attempts to mount the female from the side. She claws and bites him off, turns and faces him in attack display, teeth bared. Esau picks the infant up and waves it over his head in threat display, apparently unaware it is not a branch. Female jumps at him, grappling and biting, and infant is dropped again, still screaming. Esau holds female's head under arm and mounts her from side again, pelvis half over her shoulders, and begins thrusting. Female breaks free, grabs infant, and scurries up a tree. Esau follows and female swings away. He pursues, but lighter female, even with infant clinging to her, outdistances him.

5:54 Esau gives up pursuit. It begins to rain, a steady, heavy downpour typical of this time of day. Esau sits hunched on a low branch in the rain and begins to masturbate, manual stroking method, a mournful look on his

Warden pauses, breathing excitedly, shielding the pad from the rain with his body, and tries to think of a more scientific word than mournful.

July 20 — Esau seems more depressed lately, something weighing on him. He spends more time sleeping in the daytime, staring off into space, going through the motions of feeding near the boundaries of the other Schiffman's' range. I now have his total confidence; my presence, rather than an irritant, often seems to have a calming effect on him.

The rainy season is on us and we are slowed by the humidity.

Warden empties the backpacks, dropping each item heavily onto the ground directly behind Lisa. Lisa sits and writes in her logbook, frowning in concentration. Neither speaks. Warden gathers the canteens, letting them clatter together loudly. He kicks through the equipment spread on the ground till he finds the compass. Lisa writes. Warden struggles to load himself up, then pauses and watches her from behind. He blinks sweat from his eyes. He squats down beside her.

"Lisa?"

She doesn't look up from her log.

"I've been thinking. Maybe when we get back, when this is under control, it would be a good time to have that baby we talked about."

Lisa looks up and stares, stares at Warden as if he's the strangest thing she's ever seen. He sighs, rises to go.

"I should be back from the temple by six," he says, voice flat now. "Remember what I said about your observation notes. Objectivity."

She doesn't watch him walk away.

Everything was the same, being married, and everything was different. That was what Lisa always said to her friends and it drove Warden up the wall. He'd make a disgusted face and she'd turn to him and say that she knew what she meant, she just couldn't put it in words. Which was even worse. Warden was at her constantly for her irrational thinking, though he liked it that she relied on him to make most of the decisions. And when Lisa did make a hard choice by herself, she did it with a coldness and finality that scared him.

But it was her stubbornness when she was being irrational that bothered him the most, her stubbornness when they dis agreed about something. Her irrationality seemed to surface most often in disagreements.

It was the same as before they were married, but with something added, something more at stake.

Being a faculty wife was hard on her, Warden could tell that. It prompted him to apply for the field study. They both invested a lot of hope in the possibility of being funded, and the first year of their marriage came to seem like a lingering disease that only the grant could cure.

Somehow living together was more expensive than living separately had been, and Lisa had to go back to her job caring for the lab animals. They spent long, silent evenings at home, reading, studying, just sitting. Lisa called Warden at his office every day after the department's mail had arrived, to check if there was any word. Gibbons were Lisa's favorite primate, she was thrilled at the prospect of studying them in the field. Gibbons formed long-lasting pair bonds, they were affectionate and peaceful with each other, there were few differences in secondary sex characteristics and the females generally shared leadership and guarding roles with the males. They hadn't been studied at all thoroughly, the research would be important. Often Warden and Lisa would catch each other staring into space, and they would sigh, and one or the other would say, "If only the grant would come through."

Lisa came home one night upset by the gerbils. The gerbils had started eating each other, they had been put in smaller cages usually reserved for the white rats, in order to make room for a new shipment of specimens. There had been seven incidences of cannibalism in one week. Lisa came home upset and there sat Warden clutching the letter of approval from the Foundation. She cried for an hour.

Warden is returning on the temple side of the river, walking upstream to the ford. He sees Lisa first, sitting on the far bank by the overhanging tree, writing in her log book. He shades his eye and squints up at the grape-laden branch for Esau. The branch is gone.

Esau clings to it in the middle of the river, the remnants snagged on a rock, rapidly breaking away. Clusters of grapes tear loose and churn downstream, bursting apart against shoals. Warden looks to his wife.

The rope is in their camp, only a few yards behind her, the bamboo pole is there, she has the machete to cut branches or vines. Esau is only six feet from the bank. The water roars past him. Warden could call and ask her to intervene, to stop her observation and save the ape. He could ask her.

Lisa looks across the water at Warden, looks at him without expression. She goes back to her writing.

Gibbons feed from the trees along the bank, swinging by their long arms. Small, bright yellow birds flit after insects beneath the forest canopy. A wild pig roots along the side of the pathway just upstream. The bearded man stands motionless and watches the woman across the river. The woman writes slowly, in a flowing script. Schiffman's ape grimaces, lips drawn back over his gums as he strains to lift his chin above the rushing water. The branch shifts.

The 7-10 Split

F YOU DON'T HAVE your own shoes they rent you a pair for fifty cents. None of us are any big athletes, we meet at the lanes once a week, Thursday night. But some of us have our own shoes. Bobbi for instance, she got a pair cause the rented shoes have their size on the heel in a red leather number and Bobbi doesn't want everybody seeing how big her feet are. She's real conscious of things like that, real conscious of her appearance, like you'd expect a hairdresser to be.

We play two teams, four girls each, and take up a pair of lanes. It's Bobbi and Janey and Blanche and me against Rose Teta, Pat and Vi, and Evelyn Chambers. We've worked it out over the years so the sides are pretty even. A lot of the time the result comes down to whether I been on days at the Home or if Blanche is having problems with her corns. She's on her feet all day at the State Office Building cafeteria and sometimes the corns act up. I figure that I roll around 175 if I'm on graveyard but drop down to 140 if I already done my shift in the morning. Janey works with me at the Home and doesn't seem to mind either which way, but she's the youngest of us.

"Mae," she always says to me, "it's all in your head. If you let yourself think you're tired, you'll be tired. All in your head."

That might be so for her, but you get my age and a lot of what used to be in your head goes directly to your legs.

And Janey is just one of those people was born with a lot of pep. Night shift at the Home, in between bed checks when all the aides and nurses are sitting around the station moaning about how little sleep they got during the day, Janey is always working like crazy on her macrame plant-hangers. She sells them to some hippie store downtown for the extra income. She's a regular little Christmas elf, Janey, her hands never stop moving. It's a wonder to me how she keeps her looks, what with the lack of rest and the load she's been saddled with, the hand she's been dealt in life. She's both mother and father to her little retarded boy, Scooter, and still she keeps her sweet disposition. We always send her up to the desk when the pinspotter jams, cause Al, who runs the lanes and is real slow to fix things, is sweet on her. You can tell because he takes his earplugs out when she talks to him. Al won't do that for just anybody. Of course he's married and kind of greasy-looking, but you take your compliments where you can.

It's a real good bunch though, and we have a lot of fun. Rose Teta and Vi work together at the Woolworth's and are like sisters, always borrowing each other's clothes and kidding around. They ought to be on TV, those two. The other night, the last time we played, they started in on Bobbi before we even got on the boards. Bobbi owns a real heavy ball, a sixteen-pounder. It's this milky-blue marbled thing, real feminine-looking like everything Bobbi has. Only last week it's at the shop having the finger holes redrilled, so she has to find one off the rack at the lanes. At Al's the lighter ones, for women and children, are red, and the heavier ones the men men use are black. Bobbie is over checking on the black ones when Rose and Vi start up about there she goes handling the men's balls again, and when she blushes and pretends she doesn't hear they go on about her having her holes drilled. Bobbi hates anything vulgar, or at least she makes like she does, so she always keeps Pat in between her and the Woolworth's girls when we sit on the bench. Pat is a real serious Catholic, and though she laughs at Rose and Vi she never does it out loud. Pat's gonna pop a seam some day, laughing so hard with her hand clapped over her mouth.

It was just after the men's-balls business with Bobbi that Evelyn walked in and give us the news. We could tell right off something was wrong — she wasn't carrying her ball bag and she looked real tired, didn't have any makeup on. She walks in and says, "I'm sorry I didn't call you, girls, but I just now come to my decision. I won't be playing Thursdays anymore, I'm joining the Seniors' League."

You could of heard a pin drop. Evelyn is the oldest of us, true, and her hair has mostly gone gray, but she's one of the liveliest women I know. She and Janey always used to make fun of the Seniors' League, all the little kids' games they do and how they give out a trophy every time you turn around. Used to say the Seniors' was for people who had given up, that they set the handicaps so high all you had to do to average 200 was to write your name on the scorecard.

Well, we all wanted to know her reasons and tried to talk her out of it. Since she retired from the State last year, bowling was the only time any of us got to see Evelyn and we didn't want to lose her. She's one of those women makes you feel all right about getting older, at least till this Seniors' business come up. We tried every argument we could think of but she'd made up her mind. She nodded down the alley at the AMF machine clacking the pins into place and she says, "I'm the only one here remembers when they used to be a boy behind there, setting them up by hand. You give him a tip at the end of the night, like a golf caddy. I remember when Al had all his teeth, when the hot dogs here had beef in them. I'm the only one here remembers a lot of things and it's time I quit kidding myself and act my age. You girls can get on without me."

Then she said her good-byes to each of us and walked out, tired-looking and smaller than I'd remembered her. Wasn't a dry eye in the house.

But, like they say, life must go on. We evened the sides up by having either me or Blanche sit out every other game and keep score. While we were putting on our shoes we tried to figure out who we could get to replace Evelyn and even up the teams again. June Hundley's name was mentioned, and Edie McIntyre and Lorraine DeFillippo. Of course Bobbi had some objection to each of them, but that's just how she is so we didn't listen. Janey didn't say a word all the while, she seemed real depressed.

Janey and Evelyn were really tight. In one way it's hard to figure since there's so much age difference between them, but then again it makes sense. They've both had a real hard row to hoe, Evelyn's husband dying and Janey's running off. And they both had a child with mental problems. Evelyn had her Buddy, who was Mongoloid and lived till he was twentyseven. She kept him at home the whole while, even when he got big and hard to manage, and loved him like she would a normal child. Never gave up on him. To his dying day Evelyn was trying to teach Buddy to read, used to sit with him for hours with travel brochures. Buddy liked all the color pictures.

And Janey always puts me in mind of that poor Terry on General Hospital, or any of the nice ones on the daytime stories who are always going blind or having their men stolen or losing their memories. Just one thing after another — as if having Scooter wasn't enough trouble in one lifetime. Janey has to bring Scooter on Thursdays cause there isn't a babysitter who could handle him. Al allows it cause like I said, he's sweet on her. There's no keeping Scooter still, he's ten years old, real stocky and wild-eyed, like a little animal out of control. At the Home they'd keep him full of Valium and he'd be in a fog all day, but Janey won't let the school use drugs on him. Says he's at least entitled to his own sensations, and from what I seen from my patients I agree with her. Scooter is all over the lanes, dancing down the gutters, picking the balls up, drawing on score sheets, playing all the pinball and safari-shoot games in the back even when there's no coin in them. Scooter moves faster than those flippers and bumpers ever could, even pinball must seem like a slow game to him. The only thing he does that Al won't stand for is when he goes to the popcorn machine and laps his tongue on the chute where it comes out. He likes the salt and doesn't understand how he might be putting people off their appetite.

Anyhow, you could just look at Janey and tell she was feeling low. She's usually got a lot of color in her cheeks, it glows when she smiles and sets off nice against her hair. Natural blond, not bottled like Bobbi's is. Well, after Evelyn left she was all pale, no color to her at all, and when we started bowling she didn't have the little bounce in her approach like she usually does. One of the things that's fun is watching the different styles the girls bowl. Like I said, Janey usually comes up to the line really bouncy, up on her toes, and lays the ball down so smooth it's almost silent. You're surprised when you hear the pins crash. Rose and Vi both muscle it down the alley, they're as hard on the boards as they are on the pins, and when they miss a spare clean the ball cracks against the back wall so hard it makes you wince. But when they're in the pocket you should see those pins fly, like an explosion. Bobbi uses that heavy ball and can let it go a lot slower — she always freezes in a picture pose on her followthrough, her arm pointing at the headpin, her back leg up in the air, and her head cocked to the side. She looks like a bowling trophy — sometime we'll have her bronzed while she's waiting for her ball to connect. Pat plays by those little arrows on the boards behind the foul line, she doesn't even look at the pins. She's like a machine — same starting spot, same four-and-a-half steps, same little kneeling dip as she lets go, like she's genuflecting. Blanche has this awful hook to her ball, some kind of funny hitch she does with her elbow on her backswing. She has to stand way over to the right to have a shot at the pocket and sometimes when she's tired she'll lay one right in the gutter on her first ball. She gets a lot of action when she connects with that spin, though she leaves the io-pin over on the right corner a lot and it's hard for her to pick up.

I'm a lefty, so the lanes are grooved in my favor, but I don't know what I look like. The girls say I charge the line too fast and foul sometimes but I'm not really aware of it.

The other thing with Janey's style is the 7-10 split. It's the hardest to pick up, the two pins standing on opposite sides of the lane, and because Janey throws a real straight ball she sees it a lot. Most people settle for an open frame, hit one or the other of the pins solid and forget about trying to convert, but Janey always tries to pick it up. You have to shade the outside of one of the pins perfectly so it either slides directly over to take out the other or bangs off the back wall and nails it on the rebound. Even the pros don't make it very often and there's always a good chance you'll throw a gutter ball and end up missing both pins. But Janey always goes for it, even if we're in a tight game and that one sure pin could make the difference. That's just how she plays it. It drives Bobbi nuts, whenever Janey leaves a 7-io Bobbi moans and rolls her eyes.

Of course Bobbi is a little competitive with Janey, they're the closest in age and both still on the market. Bobbi is always saying in that high breathy voice of hers that's so surprising coming from such a — well, such a big woman — she's always saying, "I just can't understand why Janey doesn't have a man after her. What with all her nice qualities." Like it's some fault of Janey's — like working split shifts at a nursing home and taking care of a kid who makes motorcycle sounds and bounces off the walls all day leaves you much time to go looking for a husband.

Not that Janey doesn't try. She gets herself out to functions at the PNA and the Sons of Italy Hall and Ladies' Nite at Barney's when they let you in free to dance. The trouble is, she's got standards, Janey. Nothing unreasonable, but considering what's available in the way of unattached men, having any standards at all seems crazy. Janey won't have any truck with the married ones or the drinkers, which cuts the field in half to start with. And what's left isn't nothing to set your heart going pitter-pat. When I think of what Janey's up against it makes me appreciate my Earl and the boys, though they're no bargain most of the time. Janey's not getting any younger, of course, and any man interested in her has got to buy Scooter in the same package and that's a lot to ask. But Janey hasn't given up. "There's always an outside chance, Mae," she says. "And even if nothing works out, look at Evelyn. All that she's been through, and she hasn't let it beat her. Nope, you got to keep trying, there's always an outside chance." Like with her 7-10 splits, always trying to pick them up.

But she never made a one of them. All the times she's tried, she's never hit it just right, never got the 7-10 spare. Not a one.

Anyhow, last Thursday after Evelyn left we got into our first string and Janey started out awful. Honey, it was just pitiful to see. None of the girls were really up to form, but Janey was the worst, no bounce in her approach, just walked up flat-footed and dropped the ball with a big thud onto the boards. Turned away from the pins almost before she seen what the ball left, with this pinched look on her face that showed up all the wrinkles she's starting to get. Leaving three, four pins in a cluster on her first ball, then missing the spares. The teams were all out of balance without Evelyn, we were all out of balance. Blanche's hook was even worse than usual and Pat couldn't seem to find the right arrows on the boards and I couldn't for the life of me keep behind that foul line. Everyone was real quiet, Rose and Vi weren't joking like always, and the noise of the lanes took over.

Usually I like it, the girls all talking and laughing, that strange bright light all around you, the rumbling and crashing. It reminds me of the Rip Van Winkle story they told in school when I was a girl, how the dwarfs bowling on the green were the cause of thunder and lightning. It's exciting, kind of. But that night with Evelyn gone and the girls so quiet it scared me. The pins sounded real hollow when they were hit, the sound of the bowling balls on the wood was hollow too, sounded like we were the only people left in the lanes. It gave me the creeps and I tried to concentrate on keeping score.

Scooter was drawing all over the score sheet like he always does, making his motorcycle revving noise, but we've gotten used to reading through his scribble and I didn't pay it no mind. All of a sudden Janey reaches over and smacks his hand, real hard. It was like a gunshot, Pat near jumped out of her seat. Usually Janey is the most patient person in the world, she'll explain to Scooter for the millionth time why he shouldn't lick the popcorn chute while she steers him away from it real gentle. I remember how upset she got when she first come to the Home and saw how some of the girls would slap a patient who was mean or just difficult. She always offered to take those patients off their hands, and found some calmer way to deal with them.

But here she'd just smacked Scooter like she really meant it and for once his engine stalled, and he just stood and stared at her like the rest of us did. Then Bobbi's ball finally reached the pocket and broke the spell, Scooter zoomed away and we all found something else to look at.

It put me in mind of when Evelyn's husband Boyd had his stroke and come to the Home for his last days. It was right when they'd moved Janey to the men's ward to help me with the heavy lifting cause the orderlies were so useless. Evelyn would come every night after work and sit by Boyd, and in between checks Janey would go in to keep her company. Boyd was awake a lot of the time but wasn't much company, as he'd had the kind where your motor control goes and all he could say was "ob-bob-bob-bob" or something like that. What impressed Janey most was how Evelyn kept planning this trip to Florida they'd set up before the stroke, as if the rehabilitation was going to make a miracle and Boyd would ever get to leave the Home. She'd ask him questions about what they'd bring or where they'd visit and he'd answer by nodding. Kept him alive for a good six months, planning that trip. "How bout this Parrot Jungle, Boyd," I'd hear when I'd walk by the room to answer a bell, "would you like to stop there?" Then she'd wait for a nod. Janey would come out of that room with a light in her eyes, it was something to see. And honey, three weeks after Boyd went out, didn't Evelyn go and take her Buddy down to Florida all by herself, stopped in every place they'd planned together and sent us all postcards.

Anyhow, the night went on. Sometimes it can get to be work, the bowling, and by the fourth string everybody was looking half dead. Dropping the ball instead of rolling it, bumping it against their legs on the backswing, waving their thumb blisters over the little air vent on the return rack — a real bunch of stiffs. Almost no one was talking and Bobbi had taken out her little mirror and was playing with her hair, a sure sign that she's in a nasty mood. We'd had a few lucky strikes but no one had hit for a double or a turkey and there were open frames all over the place. Everybody was down twenty to forty points from their average and we'd only ordered one round of Cokes and beers. Usually we keep Al hopping cause talking and yelling gets us so thirsty. When I felt how heavy my legs were I remembered I still had to pull my eleven-to-seven shift, had to get urine samples from all the diabetics on the ward and help with old Sipperly's tubefeeding, I started feeling very old, like I should be joining the Seniors', not Evelyn.

Then in the eighth frame Janey laid one right on the nose of the headpin, first time she hit the pocket square all night, and there it stood. The 7-10 split. Sort of taunting, like a gaptoothed grin staring at her. It was real quiet in the lanes then, the way it goes sometimes, like a break in the storm. Janey stood looking at it with her hands on her hips while her ball came back in slow motion. She picked it up and got her feet set and then held still for the longest time, concentrating. She was going for it, we could tell she was going to try to make it and we all held our breaths.

Janey stepped to the line with a little bounce and rolled the ball smooth and light, rolled it on the very edge of the right-hand gutter with just the slightest bit of reverse English on it and it teetered on the edge all the way down, then faded at the end just barely nipping the io, sliding it across to tip the 7-pin as it went down, tilting that 7 on its edge and if we'd had the breath we'd of blown it over but then the bastard righted itself, righted and began to wobble, wobbled a little Charlie Chaplin walk across the wood and plopped flat on its back into the gutter.

Well, we all set up a whoop and Janey turned to us with this little hopeful smile on her face, cheeks all glowing again like a little girl who just done her First Communion coming back down the aisle looking to her folks for approval and even Bobbi, who was up next, even Bobbi give her a big hug while little Scooter drew X's all over the score sheet.

The Cabinetmaker

— AURA'S WINDOW HELD a three-bridge view, but only a section of the Bay, jutting out from Oakland, was visible. You couldn't see San Francisco at all.

Michael had his plans spread on the living-room rug, he knelt studying them. He heard voices under the window, then the cans banging.

"Tyronel Ty-rone! Gotta be gentle wif them thangs. You wake the princess up."

"An she turn me into a hoptoad?"

"Naw, man, you that already. All cover wif warts."

"Then why I want to be quiet for?"

The banging of the cans as they took them down the driveway to the truck. Two huge black men with long underwear showing under their shirts. When they turned back, cans booming louder, empty now, one caught sight of Michael. The man flashed his teeth and waved up to the window.

"Say hey, little white-fokes. Hope you warm an cozy up there."

Thinking Michael couldn't hear through the glass. Or maybe knowing that he could.

"Ax him to bring the princess down," said the other. "So's we can look at her nice little boodie."

"Bite your tongue, Tyrone. They hear you talk like that they stick you in the com-pactor. They use you for landfill, chump."

They went under his sight then, whanging the cans back into place. Michael wanted to shout to them, to tell them he only worked there. Just the hired help. He lived on the Flats like they did.

Or maybe they were from Oakland.

There was a little plaster burro by the side of the driveway that one of them managed to knock over as they left.

"Oooops. I trompled the donkey."

"Dammit, Tyrone, caint you do nothin but de-stroy?"

Michael brought his plans into the kitchen, laid them on his workbench. He always kept two sets, one for himself and a simplified version to show the clients. They liked to think they knew what you were going to do.

The framework of the base and wall cabinets was up. One section of counter top was finished, a big slab of butcher block. A friend of Laura's who was into crafts was going to do the rest. After Michael was gone.

She can hear him rustling paper downstairs while she looks at the prints from last night. Still under the covers, taking them one by one from the night table. It isn't him. Not yet. Something hasn't emerged, though she's sure that it's there on the film. She'll have to do some more printing, fiddle with the exposure, the contrast. To make him come out.

Laura pulls herself out of bed, tired. She waited till midnight to go down to the darkroom, not knowing if he would come over or not.

He was on his knees measuring when Laura came down, padding over the newspapers that covered the floor. She was wearing what the garbage men had wanted to see her in.

"Good morning, Michael."

"Morning."

Laura came down nowadays without putting her little bit of makeup on, came down with sleep in her eyes and pillow creases still on her face. In the beginning Michael had heard her fiddling in the upstairs bathroom for a good half hour before she made an appearance yawning and stretching as if she'd just tumbled out of bed.

Laura put a pot of coffee on the hot plate he'd rigged for her till they brought the gas stove, came over and kissed the back of his neck.

"You sleep okay?" she asked.

"Fine."

"I missed you."

"Mmn." Michael measured the drawer slots front and rear in case they weren't square. He'd already fastened the shelf standards. He accounted for the thickness of the metal guide and wrote a figure down.

"How's it coming?"

"It's coming fine. Gonna look really nice."

"How long do you think you'll be on it?"

She asked that almost every morning lately.

"Oh — four, five days."

Laura yawned for real. "Gotta get the kids up," she said, and crinkled out over the newspaper.

Aaron is up already, bouncing on his mattress.

"Is Mike here, is Mike here?"

It's always such a treat for them when he comes. Boys. She never figured on having boys.

"It's Michael, not Mike," says Laura. "He's downstairs working."

"When did he come?"

So nosey lately, even with all the precautions.

"Early this morning, like always. Now get your brother up and help him find his clothes. It's getting late."

There is a big glossy print of David on the wall between their beds. The one she blew up and retouched *for grain. His Daddy face.

"And what are you smirking at?" she mutters to it as she leaves the room.

The first morning Michael put her up against the bare wall. The kitchen was stripped but for the old linoleum. The linoleum showed where everything had been. The breakfast nook, the pegboard wall, the cantilevered peninsula with the built-in electric range — all that early-sixties plastic and Formica the former owner had gone in for. The kitchen was empty.

"Face the wall," he said.

"Now reach up, slowly, very slowly, as high as you can. Hold it there. Don't go up on your toes. Okay, relax. Now flex your elbow and reach, slowly, as high as it's comfortable. Don't stretch."

She was wearing a tie-dyed sleeveless undershirt. Michael watched the muscles in her back move.

"Drop your hands and make like you're mixing something in a bowl on the counter. Put some muscle into it. Drop to where they're most comfortable."

She was tall. He'd make the counter height forty inches, maybe forty-two. He'd drop a section lower for her to work with long-handled spoons and mixers.

"Now turn and face me, Laura. Spread your arms out to your sides. Wide. Wider. That's nice."

He could tell she was trying to move gracefully. She tensed some when he measured her, when he laid the cloth tape softly on the inside of her arm, when he moved behind and ran it up her back. It was the right kind of tension. He could have asked her height and figured it all from that, but it was nice to see them move. To make them move for you that way.

"Aaaaaron! Isaaaac! Hurry up and get dressed, it's time to go! And don't flush the toilet!"

Laura poured herself coffee. She knew not to offer any. Michael had given up telling her how bad the caffeine was for her. Something she held on to from back East.

"Damn." Laura kicked at the plastic trash-baskets, half of them full of wood scrap. "They came, didn't they?"

"With the morning serenade."

"I always forget about it Wednesday night."

She separated the organic from the trash from the bottles and cans and lugged them all out to the metal cans.

They came from back East mostly, or the Midwest. Laura was from New'Jersey and the last one, Diana, was from Kansas City. Kansas or Missouri, he forgot which. They came and bought houses and did things to them.

"Fog again," she said, shivering when she came in. "All they have here is fog. It's supposed to be sunny."

Michael shrugged. "It's different in Redondo. The fog burns off around noon and then it's real nice. It doesn't get clammy like up here."

"I'd like to see it sometime."

He could stretch the work to the full five, maybe six days if he wanted. Laura had lost track, she'd already paid him for the job. He busted a clutch on his van trying to go straight up Marin and had asked for an advance.

Aaron and Isaac came down, Isaac carrying his clothes, tottering to keep up with his older brother. Michael put the clothes on while Laura made lunches. The kids liked Michael, he brought a hunk of four-by-four and times when Laura wasn't having one of her migraines he'd give them each a hammer and let them bang nails into it. Just whale away. That way he didn't have to talk to them so much.

"Aaron," said Laura, "have you been trading lunches?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Uh-huh."

"Then how come I find cake crumbs in your lunch box? I don't give you cake."

Aaron thought hard for a possible explanation, then gave up and shrugged. "I don't know."

"Don't be trading lunches. I want you to have what I give you and I don't want you getting anything else on the side."

Aaron mumbled something about nobody wanting to trade for his lunches anyway.

Laura ignored him and chopped an apple in half. The vein in her temple was starting up.

Tad had put Michael on to the job. He knew Tad from Redondo, from when he was heavy into surfing and went as Mike. Tad still called him Mike.

"Got a new lady on the table, Mike. She needs some cabinetwork." Tad did massage, acupressure and rolfing. Laura went to him for her migraines.

"Lives in the Hills, just divorced."

"Nice?"

"Very nice. Lady has a lot of tension in her abdomen, lower back, back of her neck. You know how that is."

Tad claimed to be able to tell the amount of a person's sexual activity from where their muscle tension lay.

"Yeah, I know."

"I'd take a whack at her myself, but I got my hands full right now. Lotsa ladies on the table. You know how that is."

Michael got his jobs through the Berkeley grapevine. He knew Tad, he knew a guy who had a gardening service, knew a guy worked in a day-care outfit, knew a guy who remodeled bathrooms. If someone needed cabinetwork they'd recommend Michael. Satisfied customers passed him on to friends.

"What'd I tell you?" said Tad the next time they met.

"Very nice."

"I'11 soften her up for you in our sessions. Old Magic Fingers."

"You're a sport."

"Go for it, buddy."

Laura cleans up the lunch makings. He's good with them, Michael, but not obsessive. David was obsessive. They would have turned out just like him — spoiled, hypersensitive to criticism, insensitive to others. He's good with them, Michael, not on their case all the time. And for them to see him at his work, that steady, quiet crafting…

Michael went into the living room, sat on the couch to check his measurements against his stock list. He saw Aaron and Isaac leaving. Isaac bent to right the plaster burro, it was nearly as heavy as he was. Aaron opened his lunch box and unwrapped his sandwich. He pulled the sprouts from it and threw them into the jungle of succulents around the mailbox. The day-care panel truck came, and then the little bus to take Aaron to first grade.

When the bus had pulled away Laura sat by him and kissed him. Lots of tongue in it this time, a kiss that made Michael want to pull her down on the couch or floor with him. But Laura bounced away, reassured, muttering about errands she had to take care of.

She always did that when they'd spent a night apart, waited till the kids were gone then jumped on him. Sometimes it would be several times in a day, every time she came back from an outing. Like a nervous base runner, Michael thought, tagging up and leading off, tagging up and leading off. She didn't like to make it in the morning anymore, though, so Michael didn't let it get him excited.

Laura shivers in the darkroom. She holds strips of negative up to the light. It was a long time learning before she could tell anything from a negative, could see potential before it was laid on paper. He's there, she can see him in the pictures from the day at the beach. It's only a matter of bringing him out, separating him from the sand and sea a little more. More detail, more definition. Add some exposure time, maybe a moment longer in the solution. She looks again at the prints from last night. They look like him, but there's something indistinct. Something missing. Maybe a little burning-in around the face, and then get the brushes out — but no. Try a few more prints before you start retouching things.

The first time they had to take a shower, to brush sawdust from their hair and scrub the newsprint off each other. It was a huge old house, and when the kids had gone they would chase each other around it, stopping to make love wherever they made a catch.

Leading to that were a lot of carpentry lessons. She would come down and watch him work, silent, playing the mouse.

"You want to see how I do this?"

"Sure. I mean if I'm not in your way. I'd love to."

"Here, take hold of this."

She acted afraid of the tools. He knew she'd hung the plants and pictures in the living room, had gotten the yard back under control herself, had put the bird feeders up. But she acted afraid of the tools.

"I clamp this in tight here and you just lay it on that notch and draw it back to you. Nice and easy."

He'd come around her then, pressing lightly against her back, breathing hot on her neck, guiding her arm.

"Nice and easy. Back and forth. That's it."

It always reminded him of planing rough wood. You take your time, you don't push. Each thin layer would slice away clean, the grain exposed, the wood taking shape. Don't push. Let the tool do the work.

After the first time, the very next morning, she wasn't interested anymore. No more lessons, no more lengthy explanations on the couch about the relative costs and qualities of wood, plywood and hardboard.

"Oh," she said that morning, and from then on, "whatever you think will look best."

Laura hurries up the stairs to beat Michael to the phone. Sometimes he forgets and answers. Her mother, God, her mother would grill her for an hour.

Laura was on the phone when Michael came back into the kitchen. There was a phone in the living room and one in her bedroom upstairs but since he had worked there Laura always used the one in the kitchen. Except to talk to her shrink.

Michael looked in a catalog for hinges. She wanted the hinges visible, wanted brass.

"No, David, I'm not a kidnapper. When you signed the papers it said nothing about limiting where I could live. They like it out here, the schools are wonderful. No, I'm not warping their minds, David. If anything's warped it's genetic."

She was talking to her husband. She always ended up yelling at him. It was the only time she could show anger, she said — over the phone. In the waning days of their marriage she used to run from the dinner table to a pay booth down the block and call to express anger at her husband. The counselor had suggested it.

"What? The- what? Jumper cables? I think they're in the trunk. What? No, I won't send them. No, I won't, that's ridiculous. Buy yourself a new set, David. They're not a West Coast phenomenon, they sell them in New Jersey. What? No, I don't drive the kids around on the freeways. That's Los Angeles, freeways. Here we have hills. And fog. Yes, they dress warm, they dress as warm as necessary. I'm not an idiot, you know. I'm not retarded. I fix them meals, keep them warm, pay bills, all on my own. What? If you start talking money, David, I'm gonna bang the phone in your ear."

She was yelling now. It took less time to get her yelling at David lately. A lot was coming out. Tad said the tension in her neck was breaking up. She had finally taken everything with Laura Feingold-Muntz written on it and blacked out the Muntz.

"You do that, David, you do that. And don't forget to tell the lawyer about the jumper cables."

Michael picked out a swaged-butt hinge from the catalog. He started marking where the doorframes would have to be mortised. Laura banged the receiver down and swore at David. She couldn't yet bring herself to swear at him on the phone. She dialed another number, waited. That would be her mother. Laura called her mother in New Jersey every other week, usually right after a call with David. They would talk for an hour. Laura called a sister in Boston and one in Miami. She had a thing about her family, Laura, but Michael never pressed her on it.

The mother wasn't home. Laura dialed another number.

Michael decided he'd cut the mortises right then. They looked like intricate work, made a good impression. He might be able to stretch the job a whole week. He dug through his tools looking for his wood chisel.

"Yes, she explained the different kinds for me. She gave me a booklet."

Laura had asked for some doctor Michael hadn't heard her talk to before.

"I've decided on the Copper-7. No, I've never had one before."

Michael stopped rooting through the toolbox.

"I discussed that with the nurse. Yes. Yes, as soon as possible."

When Laura got off the phone she sat and watched while Michael found the wood chisel. He turned to face the doorframe of one of the base cabinets.

"Those are really dangerous," he said.

"Huh?"

"IUD's. They're bad news."

"The pill makes me sick."

"Oh."

"I get all swollen around my neck. Same thing with my sister. It's an allergy. And you remember the smell I get when I react with the diaphragm jelly."

"Uh-huh."

"And I know how you hate putting those things on."

"Yuh." Actually he didn't mind those things at all, Laura did. She got goose bumps looking at them. In the waning days of their marriage David had gotten heavy into rubber goods.

"I mean I know the dangers. I'll keep having it checked once it's in."

Michael tapped the butt of the chisel with his mallet.

"It's your body."

"That's right. It's my choice. And I really want something permanent."

She went upstairs and Michael could hear her faintly, talking with her shrink.

"He's somebody — he's — really special. That's all I can say."

Dr. Meyer is suspicious. He always hits you with a halfminute of dead air when he's suspicious. "Special?"

"For instance, I'm changing my birth control. Most guys would just be thinking of themselves, of their own pleasure. Michael is really concerned about me, though. I'm not used to that."

Almost a full minute of dead air. Laura jerks a knot in the cord, begins to pull it apart.

"Let's talk about David," says Dr. Meyer.

If he cut the mortises and stained all the framework this morning…

It was still warm in Redondo. And Big Sur. He knew a guy ran a store in Big Sur.

And a lady who had a house in Carmel.

Laura came down. She borrowed one of his heavy wrenches to smash garden snails on the sidewalk. Often after talking to David or her shrink Laura went out after snails.

She was in the garden a long time. Michael finished the mortises, put on his dust goggles and hooked the power sander up. He liked the buzz of the sander, he could get inside it and think.

The last one, Diana, had been a major hassle. Phone calls, nighttime visits, holding his check up so he'd have to come in person. Wanting to hash everything over again and again. She could talk a thing to death, talk it past death, Diana. She was an analyzer. She had a collection of every stuffed animal she'd ever owned, dozens and dozens of them, and she still remembered all their names.

The van would make it fine if he skipped the coast road and stuck on ioi. And if he decided on Big Sur or Carmel he could cut over before Salinas. The sanding went smoothly, he switched to a finer-grained paper.

"You're sanding already," said Laura through her nose when she came back in. Sawdust was another thing she was allergic to. She had only told him that yesterday, when he tried to wrestle her onto the floor again. "Doesn't that mean you're almost done?"

"Not really. There's a lot left to do."

She heated soup she had made for their lunch. She had put too much barley in it. Michael ate slowly, quietly. Laura finished quick and watched him. It was how she made love.

"Do you know what you'll do after this job?"

Nope.

"Nothing lined up?"

"Uh-uhn."

He pressed the back of his spoon against the barley to squeeze some liquid out.

"Are you ahead of your rent and all?"

She had offered before to put him up for a while, to move his stuff in. He'd been having a landlord hassle.

"No, I'm all set. Something will turn up when this is finished."

"Listen, have you ever done any big remodeling? I mean like knocking out walls?"

She had talked about letting each of the boys have his own room. It was a big job, a long job.

"No."

"You think you'd like to try it?"

"Maybe. Someday."

Laura made him a cheese-and-sprout sandwich to go with his soup. He didn't ask but she got impatient watching and had to do something with her hands. She was a nervous lady. All that caffeine.

"Are you going to come over tonight? The kids will be in bed by eight."

The doctor had given her an appointment for Monday. He had a cancellation, so she wouldn't have to wait so long.

Michael told her maybe, that he had a little side-job he might have to check on.

Laura sits on her bed changing her shirt. When the walls are being knocked out she'll fix up their beds in the playroom downstairs. Yes, they'd like that. And it will be good for Michael to have a major job. To design it himself, to have the whole upstairs to play with. And maybe then he could put the darkroom in shape, maybe build a little studio like she had in New York for her retouching work.

And they could use her bed. No more making it on the couch downstairs in hushed tones like high-school kids. Aaron and Isaac could get used to having Michael stay over, but they wouldn't be able to hear.

When she left, Michael dumped the rest of his lunch in the organic-trash basket and covered it with coffee grounds from her Melitta. Laura took a half-hour to dress for the Co-op. She wore jeans and a white-cotton Indian shirt. She looked great.

The front right tire on his van was looking pretty bald. And the spare wasn't much better.

"I'm gonna buy everything on my list," she announced, "no matter what their damn signs say. They're always warning you off the lettuce or the mangoes or whatever it is you want. I wish they'd sell it or not sell it and shut up about whether it's good for you or not."

She hugged Michael before she left. Rubbed herself up against him, more like a promise than a good-bye.

"I've got to stop by the butcher. But we should have an hour before they bring Isaac home."

Michael watched from the living room as she wound her old Fiat down the hill and into the fog.

Laura downshifts, leans into the corners. The driving is more fun out here. And having a yard, even with all the fog. She likes the way the houses hang on to the hills, the way the plants grow whether you fuss with them or not. The way everything seems to take care of itself. Berkeley is easy. Like Michael. Like Michael compared to David. David with his intensity, his hang-ups, his world view.

"You got to float with the current," Michael always says. "Just float with it and you're bound to stay on the surface."

You had to watch out for the undertow. Michael went up to her room. She had made the bed with two pillows. That was new, she used to keep the other in the bathroom linen closet. There was a picture of him, wedged into the frame of her dresser mirror, an Instamatic she'd taken when he dropped by for Isaac's birthday. A picture of him and Aaron and Isaac. That was new, too.

The van wasn't that bad. He'd just put on new shocks. He knew a guy ran a car clinic, let him use the tools and bay for free.

He could pick up the hardware on his way home, bring the stain along. If he worked late…

Michael dusted the cabinet frames and swept up. He laid fresh newspaper around them. He got the bucket of special stain from his van, the one-coat penetrating stuff from his last job. Diana had asked for it. He'd have to pick up more to do the drawers and doors at home. It cost an arm and a leg but it was quicker than two days of shellacking and one for satin varnish.

He got his brushes out, started laying it on.

If he worked late tonight he could stain the doors and drawers too, and put the hardware on. All but the hinges. Laura was getting a permanent filling in her root canal tomorrow morning, then seeing her bankers in the afternoon. The move out had left a lot of financial loose ends. If Michael could hustle his butt…

The lady in Carmel ran a pretty loose ship. He had built her a studio. And he knew a lot of people in Big Sur. It would be good to get down there, lay low for a while. Coast.

Laura picks through the avocados, trying to find a perfect one. She smiles. Tomorrow morning she'll get him. Catch him poring over the plans in the kitchen, thinking he's the only one up. She loves to see his face that way, all serious, like a boy pretending to build a rocket ship. Tiptoe down the stairs, across the living room. It won't need retouching. No, it will be him, there in the kitchen with their plans. She'll lean slowly into the kitchen doorway and snap! She'll have him.

She'd come in tomorrow and it would be finished. He'd leave a note. She'd already paid him, that was good. He'd put the drawers together at home tonight, with lip fronts so he wouldn't have to cut rabbet joints. He'd pick the hardware up and put that on. It would look really good, she'd come in and there it would be, all done. It was a nice set, one of the best he'd ever built. And he wouldn't bill her for the stain.

Old Spanish Days

F A PATROL cAR or the Immigration came along there would be no one to look at but him. Amado hurries up State Street to work. It's always so empty, the shops not open yet, nothing moving. Jesus has been stopped, just walking, twice in the last month. But Jesus tries to look tough. And Jesus has his Green Card.

There are banners stretched across State for the Old Spanish Days parade. The other lavaplatos say that on Cinco de Mayo only the Mexicans celebrate, but for Old Spanish Days the whole town comes out.

Amado crosses the street to avoid the Fremont House. The old Anglos gone to drink are up and out at dawn, and sometimes they follow him and say crazy things he can't understand. They have their own tongue, the drunks, just like the ones in Durango.

The Fremont is the only brick building left on State. An earthquake took the others long ago, and when the Anglos rebuilt they decided to copy the original Californio settlement. Everything is adobe, or made to look like it. Stein's Drugstore, The Meating Place, the Great Lengths beauty parlor, Fat's Chow Mein, all the real-estate and travel agencies, the surf-and-turf restaurants. There aren't any Mexican restaurants on State, they're mostly wooden buildings across the freeway, on the East Side.

OLD SPANISH DAYS 1978

says the huge green-white-and-red banner above Amado -

jVIVA LA FIESTAI

A patrol car eases up the deserted street. Amado makes a tunnel with his eyes, walks stiffly into it.

Beginning at eight o'clock at the Sambo's restaurant downtown, comes the squawk from the sound truck cruising the West Side, the Old Spanish Days Fiesta Costume Breakfast. Enjoy huevos rancheros, hot chorizo and other authentic favorites. Costume competition commences in the parking lot starting at ten-thirty. Viva la Fiesta!

"Que pasa, nano?"

Luis stands outside the Golden Calf waiting for him, smiling and holding the brooms. Luis is younger than Amado, maybe seventeen, but has been up for three years and tries to act older. They sweep the empty parking lot.

"You hear what happen to Ortega?" Luis always sweeps too fast, raising a lot of dust. He does everything too fast, Luis.

"La Placa. They got him."

Amado had been there, waiting in the back of the car in front of the liquor store when the fight started. If the cop hadn't been right around the corner it would have been nothing. Amado saw him first and yelled, and the driver, who was illegal too, screeched away.

"I hear they pull him in," says Luis.

"That's right."

"I wonder what they do to him?"

Amado shrugs. "We should have gone to Rubio's. I told them we should." He wants to remind Luis that he was there.

"Rubio charges more."

"Maybe. But you go down lower State at night, you just ask for trouble."

When the parking lot is done they vacuum the dining rooms and the bar. It's Amado's favorite time at work, the restaurant all to themselves like they own it, like the soft, red carpet and cane furniture and leather bar-counter belong to them. The liquor and food are kept locked till Mr. Charles comes, so all they can do is pretend. Luis sits at a corner table in the bar and snaps his fingers for service till Amado comes over and gooses him under the arm with the vacuum. Sometimes they find money customers have dropped, but the night shift gets most of that.

… La Misa del Presidente, at the Old Mission at eleven o'clock. Benediction by the Mission padres and the finals of the Miss Spirit of the Old Spanish Days contest. Admission free. Viva la Fiesta!

"Put lettuce in box," says Mr. Charles. "Put box in walkin."

He always talks that way to them, Mr. Charles, even to Jesus, who can sound like an Anglo.

"Then do chicken. Then do eggs," says Mr. Charles. He stands checking the produce off as it comes in from the delivery vans. "Armando do too. Armando help."

After correcting him the first dozen times, Amado has given up. It's like he's deaf to whatever they say, blind to the fact that they know where all the produce goes already. He calls Luis "Ruiz" and Ramiro "Ramirez."

"Your shift forgot to put the roast beef in yesterday," he says to Motown, the black cook. "We had to eighty-six the French dip."

"I'll have Ross put one in this morning."

"See that you do," says Mr. Charles. He talks regular English to Motown but never looks at him.

Amado and Luis transfers heads of lettuce from bags into plastic containers and lug them into the walk-in. Mr. Charles comes in the early morning to check the deliveries and then leaves till dinner. The night people get him all shift. Mr. Charles gets nervous if he sees anyone standing still and can invent new jobs on the spot.

"Take meat to freezer," he says when the butcher's truck arrives. "Then get old bottles, put in box, we send back. Mucho work today, hurry, hurry, mucho work!"

… at the Beef and Brew, 1631 State Street, the annual Lions' Club Enchilada Luncheon. Guests in costume admitted half price. And on Embarcadero del Mar this afternoon, do your Old Spanish Days shopping at El Mercado, the Old World open market. All items are muy autentico and the price is right. Viva la Fiesta!

"Estoy rendidol"

Jesus blows in a little after eight. He's the senior lavaplato and Motown is in charge of the time cards so it's all right.

"All last night I'm out with mi ruca," Jesus says. "Too much bullshit. Din get any sleep."

"Which one was it?" Luis always wants to hear.

"Patty. The blond. She gonna wear me out, put me in the grave before my time. Good mornin, campesinol" He ruffles Amado's hair.

Amado tries to ignore him.

"I see you wearin shoes today, man. That's real progress. They not gonna believe it when you go home, tell em about paved roads and hot water an evrythin."

Amado has been up almost a year, used to live right in the city of Durango, can order a meal and read his pay slips in English, but still Jesus picks on him. Of course Parrando is newer and Jesus picks on him too, and he picks on Luis for being nervous and on Rudy for being fat and Motown for being black and Chow for being Chinese and old and on Ross for being stupid. Jesus picks on everybody he's bigger or louder than, which is just about everybody.

Jesus sings with a mariachi group in town, sings high and piercing and full of emotion. Even in rush times, with the radio on full blast and the dishwasher going and the disposal grinding and the cooks and waiters shouting threats at each other, Jesus can make you wince with his voice.

"I'm singin tonight," he says. "First at the courthouse and then at the Steak-and-Grape and then at the Museum for the Daughters of the Golden West."

"Bunch of old ladies."

"Hey, they pay us good, Luis. You come by an see how it's done."

"When you at the courthouse," says Amado, "sing a song for Ortega."

Jesus makes a face. "That's true, then, huh? They got him up there?"

"That's true," says Amado. "I saw him catch."

"Pendejo. He should of known better. You can fight over on Castillo or Monte Perdido and they don bother you. But lower State, watch out man. Too much bullshit, this town."

"Well they got him."

Jesus scowls.

"How come you not singin at the Park?" asks Luis. "That's where evrybody gonna be. "

"Cause they got some shitkickers from down South, Luis, that's why. Probly some neighbors of Amado's."

"Charles say Luis got to stay late today," says Amado. "Cause of Ortega's not here. Cause of Old Spanish Day."

"Old Spanish Days," says Jesus. "Too much bullshit."

… Women's Club announces La Merienda, their annual Old Spanish Days party. And for your evenings, don't forget El Baile del Mar, nightly dancing under the stars in the El Encanto Restaurant parking lot. Viva la Fiesta!

"Platos!"

Steam, clatter and curses, the cry goes up and Amado hustles plates across the line to Motown. Lunchtime. Motown grilling a ham-and-cheese, old Chow scowling over an omelette and Ross, the big, slow Anglo, making a mess of the prep work.

"Platosl Mis platos! Let's go!"

Motown whipping his spatula in, under, flip! onto the plate and under the lights.

"Skip!" he yells out to the floor. "Yours!"

Jesus peeling and de-veining shrimp, telling what the smell reminds him of just loud enough so the two Anglo salad girls can hear as they shred coleslaw nearby. Luis wrestling pots clean at the deep sink, Whitney, Skip and Ernesto careening in with loads of plates and silverware, shouting out their orders, sweating, and Ross's radio nasal, blasting -

Drivin southbound out of Oxnard, Now how can I explain The vision of sweet loveliness Out in the passing lane? She has a four-speed stickshift, A set of radial tires, And all the specs and extras That every man desires -

"Ham-and-swiss omelette, hold the peppers, side of fries!"

Whitney, the black maricbn, glides in with a trayful. Amado at the wash counter — separate the silver and the plates, soak the silver, scrape the plates, then spray — he wears a layer of trash liner under his shirt against the wet, bounces the spray off into the long sink. He loads plates onto the rack, slides it into the washer, flicks it on with a buzz -

And as we pass Tarzana, It's settled in my mind, The way she drives it's clear that she's Romantically inclined.

"Dumb fucker!" screams Motown at Ross. "Where's the cheese? I'm all out herel"

They all tease Ross, it's hard not to, but only Motown screams at him. And Ross is the only one he screams at.

"Idiot, grate some up, hurryl"

"Saut6 pant" shouts Chow to Luis. "Gimme saute pant"

The old, sour Chinese watching the eggs in front of him, holding his hand out for a clean pan -

"Mi mariquita!" Jesus gooses Whitney on his way through, then makes a move for one of the salad girls -

"Avo-bacon burger, side of fries, BLT on toasted whole wheat, Garden Harvest," starts Skip from the window -

"Hands offs" cries Jennifer, swatting by reflex -

"and one side of mayo!"

"— guajira, one-sida-mayo," sings Jesus to "Guantana- mera." "One-sida-maaaaaaaayo!"

"The bacon, Ross, the bacon!"

Her ruby lips, her slender hips, Her long and golden hair. Her velvet-lined interior, Equipped with fact-ry air.

The hungry look she gives me, The seed of lust has sowed. My Vega and her GTO, A romance of the road.

Amado dumping the silver, sorting it, knives, spoons, forks, into the plastic drainers, onto the rack, pushing the silver in, the plates out, hot wash of steam billowing. Steam, clatter, curses and smells — egg-sulfur, garlic, charcoal, grease, sizzling deep fat, even, shouts Jesus in his crude L.A. Spanish, Chow's middle-aged alky breath -

I have the inclination, And boys, I've got the time, But I also have three little kids And a wife in Anaheim.

Meat sizzling on the grill, eggs sliding in the pan, vegetables chopped and torn, fries bubbling, orders thrown together, snatched away, then hurtling back at Amado, scraping the plates, meat, egg, vegetable, grease, into the barrel with the side of his hand. Steam, clatter, cursing, smells -

Yes the exit ramp's approaching now, And so we have to part. The San Diego Freeway Is stealing my heart.

"Platos! Let's go! PLATOS!"

… for the kiddies, La Fiesta Pequena, followed by Carnivdl! The popular Old Spanish Days extravaganza tomorrow at noon at La Playa Stadium. Viva la Fiesta!

In the lull after lunch-rush they eat. Jesus and Motown have their hamburguesas, Jesus drinking a raw-egg chaser for virility. Ross just picks, not hungry after eating his mistakes all morning, and Chow drinks a beer. Amado, Luis and Ernesto heat up a panful of beef and peppers, warming their tortillas over a burner. Skip orders a vegetarian omelette that Chow cooks extra greasy for spite and the salad girls take some carrots to chew out at the bar. Jesus turns Ross's radio off.

"Too much bullshit, that station," he says. "Too much cuacha."

Parrando and Rudy Pena look in, dressed sharp, already a little high on their day off.

"Viva la Fiesta!" calls Rudy. "Viva la nalga!"

"Estoy bombo," grins Parrando, and blushes, pleased with himself. Parrando is up only a month, they call him El Canon because he has such a big one.

"They got the floats all line up," says Rudy. "All them little girls ready to march. Ay de mil" He smacks his lips.

"We decorate Parrando's chile," says Jesus, "put it in the parade, it wins first prize. All the ladies want to ride on it."

Parrando blushes again.

"At the Park they have Los Babies playin tonight," says Rudy. "They do it for real at the Park. All the women be there, get all hot. Even Luis get laid."

"I got to work tonight, double shill."

"Why for?"

"Cause they get Ortega."

Rudy stops smiling.

"I heard that," says Motown from the other side of the line. "Got his ass busted. That's too bad."

"I thin they send him back." Luis eats so fast the meat squirts out of his tortilla onto the floor. "They check his paper, give him to La Migra. La Migra take him back down."

"Gachos gavachos," mutters Jesus.

"If Mr. Charles would put in a word he might be okay," says Motown. "Or even the boss, if he found out. Aint no chance of that, though."

"Pinche jefe," says Jesus. "Pinche Mr. Charles."

"Old Ortega, up in the slammer. That's too bad."

"It's okay maybe, he goes back," says Amado. "He don like it here, is too fast. Ortega belong down South, nice an slow. Like Parrando." Parrando giggles, not understanding but hearing his name.

"An not like you, huh?" Jesus flicks a cherry tomato at Amado. "Half here an half there. Ni aqui ni All."

"Just the same, it can't be any picnic," says Motown, up to start the soup for dinner, "sittin up in the slammer."

Rudy and Parrando leave, quiet now, and the salad girls return from the bar. Motown is bummed out, starts to sing -

The high sheriff said to Stagolee,

— staring moody into the pot -

"Boy, why don't you run?" "Well I don't run, white fokes, When I got my forty-one."

And the rest of the verses while they ease back into work, putting things into shape for the dinner shift. The way Motown tells it, Stagolee is so tough the noose can't crack his neck, so the sheriff has to get Billy Lyons's widow to poison him to death. Amado likes it when Motown sings. He does the glasses that have piled up -

Motown singing sets Jesus off, wailing, serenading the salad girls with the tragedy of the outlaw Heraclio Bernal -

High and sweet, trying to catch their eyes. Jennifer scowls, thinking the verses must be something dirty, and Sheri deals with Jesus the way she always does, pretending he's not there -

High and sweet he sings, slicing mushrooms for the Veal Bonne Femme. And Ross, thinking he's been challenged, blurts out with

Twas a dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard And laid Jesse James in his grave -

but can't remember the rest.

… all you wranglers out there, the Competicidn de Vaqueros Rodeo and Stock Horse Exhibition at the Earl War ren Showgrounds Arena. Three nights of rumble-tumble action! And today at five, the Mayor's La Fiesta Hour, by invitation only. Viva la Fiesta!

Amado rubs his teeth clean with a slice of lime and salt. Jesus tells him it's time to clean the bathrooms.

"I do it yesterday. Is for Luis."

"Cabr6n, Luis is busy. Go on an do it."

"No. I do it yesterday. We take turn." Every day Amado tries to win a little ground back from Jesus. He'll glare back at an insult or not laugh at a joke. If his English was better it would be much easier. Jesus always teases in English.

"Shoot fingers for it," calls Motown from the range. "I don't want to hear you bitchin at each other again."

Amado loses. He always does. It's an American game, the fingers, he doesn't have a talent for it yet.

Amado is in a stall in the men's room, scouring the bowl, when Luis ducks his head in to whisper.

"Stay in there, nano! The cops come, they askin bout Ortega. They checkin for Green Card."

Amado locks the stall door, squats upon the lid so his feet don't show under, tries to breathe silently.

If only they had waited till quitting time, till his paycheck, he could have sent another money order home.

If only he had started the ladies' room first, he'd be safe.

If only Mr. Charles or the jefe would put in for him, he could get his Green Card.

If only Ortega had listened and gone to Rubio's.

Amado squats, listening hard for five long minutes. His knees ache. Someone comes in, uses the sink. Amado waits till the hand dryer is blowing to gasp for breath. The person leaves. More minutes. Then Luis, quietly -

"Come out, Amado. They go now."

… come all, to the El Des file Historico, Old Spanish Days historic parade! Better find a place early, you won't want to miss a moment. Viva la Fiesta!

Mrs. Lopert hands the pay slips out. They always fantasize about what she does in her little office alone all day. When Parrando punched the wrong time card and had to spend ten minutes in with her straightening it out, Jesus greeted him back in the kitchen with fire extinguisher in hand.

"We were comin in after you, nano, and use this to get her off. Those old ones, they grab on, sometimes they don't wanna let go."

Amado thinks that she drinks all day and it makes him sad to look at her.

"What you gonna do with your pay, man?"

Amado shrugs. If he says he sends it home they laugh.

"Some I save. Some I spen."

He saves to visit at Christmas. He misses his mother and father, his little sisters. It costs two hundred to be smuggled back through La Migra. It costs nothing but the bus fare to go down.

… MacEvoy, please report to the reviewing stand. Will Donald MacEvoy please report to the reviewing stand, your mother is looking for you. Viva la Fiesta!

They stand in front of the Peaches Bargain Boutique, Rudy, Parrando, Amado, Rafael Torres and Angel from the busboys, stand together on the curb watching the parade, surrounded by Anglos. Anglos in sun hats and sunglasses, with nose cream and Kodaks and folding chairs. They stand apart with their arms folded across their chests, joking in Spanish, running down all the floats, all the tourists and marchers, and no one around them knows, no one understands.

First there are Marines, hard-heeling down the center of State, eyes front, each supporting a flag. Then a little girl in a white linen dress, like for First Communion, tossing flower petals from a basket.

Ladies and gentlemen, our lovely Little Miss Spirit of the Old Spanish Days, Cynthia Louise Bottoms! Viva la Fiesta!

An Old Spanish Days powder wagon, with four outriders in shining black-and-silver charro uniforms. Angel recognizes Mr. Lomax from the liquor store, who called the police about the fight. He looks younger on horseback, bald-patch under a broad, black hat.

Ladies and gentlemen, El Presidente de la Fiesta and his family, Mayor Thomas J. Kelso! Let's have an Old Spanish Days round of applause! Viva la Fiesta!

A group of families comes next on horse and mule, dressed as Anglo pioneers escorting a covered wagon. Then more local ranchers on their horses, leathery husbands and wives in matching spangled outfits.

"Roys Roger!" cries Parrando. "Hopsalong Cossity!"

The marching bands come then, and Rudy leads the hissing and clucking at the baton girls in their sparkling pink tights, leads in teasing Parrando when the littlest ones, with their spit curls and spots of rouge and their mothers trailing on the sidelines, pass by.

"That's your speed, Parrando," they say in Spanish. "You have to start small and work your way up."

"Parrando's stick is taller than the girls," says Angel. "He'd scare them away."

"A gift like that to such a baby," says Rudy, shaking his head sadly. "If I had one like his I'd retire and let the women take care of me."

"How bout two inches for an amigo, Parrando? You got plenty to spare."

Parrando blushes, and Amado envies him a little. He never has to act hard, Parrando, the others accepted him after the first time he changed his pants in the laundry room.

A drum corps of black boys, whaling away in perfect time, marching tight and sharp, and then a float with a flamenco dancer, a Chicana. They cheer.

A colorful member of our Old Spanish Days celebration, Margarita Estrada will appear nightly at the Noches de los Estrellas pageant, under the stars on the Long Pier.

The County Sheriff's posse follows, and the Old Spanish Days Fire-Hose Cart and Engine Crew Bucket Brigade, the German Club float, the Town Assessor dressed as a Chumash Indian chief, the Elks Drum and Bugle Corps, and then, three flatbeds long, hung with paper lanterns, aglow with bougainvillea, camellias and hibiscus, fluttering with black lace fans, rustling with red and orange and yellow petticoats, comes the Native Daughters of the Golden West float and Mounted Honor Guard.

"Chingaol" says Angel.

The women offer bare, white shoulders to the sun, their hair piled high with combs, they smile and wave and click their castanets at the crowds lining State Street -

Old Spanish Days would not be complete without an evocation of the grace and splendor the Castilian Dons and Doilas preserved in their journey to the New World. This foundation of European culture has survived through the years to become our treasured heritage. Viva la Fiesta! Long live the Old Spanish Days!

— across Pedregosa, across Cota and Gutierrez and Sal- sipuedes, across Sabado Tarde Street to slow for pictures in front of the Peaches Bargain Boutique. Amado sees Mrs. Winters, who taught the night-school English class he was too tired to keep up with, dressed in scarlet. Little blond boys in white peon suits hold the trains of the longer dresses, while high-school boys in red sashes and bolero jackets mime playing instruments to a tape of a mariachi band. The women work their fans, click their castanets and wave to the flashing cameras, a beauty mark on every cheek.

At the very end come the low-riders.

After the last Spanish couple, the last pioneer family, the last child in pinned organdy strapped sidesaddle on a burro, come the low-riders.

"Chingao!" cries Angel. "Low-riders!"

The Bronze Eagles rolling down the center of State, four abreast, dozens of them, looking bad. Jacking their front ends up and down, Chevys, Dodges, old shiny Fords, pumping their lifts in violent spurts, whushl whushl whush! flashing axle then letting it drop, nose to the pavement. Amado cheers with the others, whistles, stomps, and they hear their countrymen scattered up and down the street. The Anglos have started to leave, chairs folded, cameras capped — they look back uncertainly, check their parade lists.

The Bronze Eagles rolling slow on State, four abreast, hissing, jerking, followed by a pair of poker-faced motorcycle cops wearing mirror-lensed shades.

"Viva la Fiestal" cries Rudy. "Viva los low-riders!"

Twas there that I met her, my dark Senorita, Black silken hair hanging down to her waist. Her name was Lupita, she danced in a tavern, A flash of her eyes and my youthful heart raced.

They have to pass by the Anglo block parties to get to Murieta Park. Lanterns strung, warm red light, people sit ting or standing to the sides of the dance area, politely clapping time for the fast numbers. At one the old Anglos, the pensioners and retirees, are milling about to "Spanish Eyes." At the next middle-aged Anglos hop to a swing band playing "Rose of San Antone," and at the next, slightly younger Anglos slow-dance to an Italian singing "There is a Rose in Spanish Harlem." Amado, Rudy and Parrando skirt the parties, look for friends beneath the streetlights. They try to keep their bottle out of sight.

"Estoy bombo," grins Parrando. Parrando is weaving, smiling at everything, liquid. Rudy wants to ditch him and find girls but Amado is afraid he'll pass out somewhere and be arrested.

"Take it easy, hijo," he says to Parrando in Spanish. "In this town if you lay down on the walk, there isn't a neighbor to throw a blanket on you."

Parrando weaves.

They hear it way back on Milpitas Street, carrying in the night air, welcoming. When they're a block away they see the banks of field lights beaming over the rooftops. Murieta Park, and everybody is there. The warm-up group for Los Babies is set up on the pitcher's mound, guitars, woodblock, congas throbbing, amplifiers cranked up full letting the whole town know about it. Dancers dance wherever they are, children chase across the infield, groups of boys and groups of girls cluster on opposite foul lines, then break off in twos and threes to cruise by each other. Farmworkers in straw Stetsons, already loaded, wander happily through it all while others huddle around bottles, getting there. People sing along with the music in the key that suits them, while others sing totally different songs, shouting out to the black beyond the field lights. There are booths for food and drink, tables for this cause and that, a blanket spread by home plate for sleepy kids too heavy for their parents' arms.

A patrol car glides along the four sides of the Park, never leaving, never stopping.

"Viva la Fiestal" cries Rudy. "Viva la Razal"

Amado, wine-high, gives a whoop. For the first time in so long he feels at home outside of the kitchen. He stretches his arms out wide, throws his head back and yelps to the sky. Parrando joins him, howling like a pair of coyotes, howling at the top of their lungs.

"Tas lucas," says Rudy, smiling but looking at them warily.

They meet Jesus and his Anglo girl. She isn't as pretty as Jesus has described, but she's just as blond, sun-and-seawater blond like Skip at work. When she smiles in greeting her gums show. Jesus rolls his eyes and tells them in Spanish what he's going to do to her, and how he'll come back later and find another, a Chicana.

"One for the belly," he says in Spanish, "and one for the soul."

Jesus sees Ramiro and Mendez and some others he knows who work at the Country Club and he takes his girl to show her off.

Rudy sees a girl he knows from the junior high school, walking with two friends. They wear high-waisted, bottomhugging pants, long sweater-coats. Rudy's girl has streaks of red in her hair.

"This is my friend Amado Cruz," he says. "And that is Parrando."

Parrando waves in their direction.

Rudy is very smooth, Amado is glad to be with him. He pairs them up right away. Amado gets Celia, who is pretty. With a good shape at thirteen, brown and thin like Nalda Perez back home. Nalda a mother already. Parrando is left with the heavy, Indian-looking one. She doesn't seem pleased.

Celia has her black hair in a braid for the Fiesta, and a flower behind one ear. Under her sweater-coat she wears a white camisole top, with a small golden cross around her neck. When Amado talks to her in Spanish she doesn't understand.

"I used to know some," she says. "From my grandmother."

Amado struggles with the words as they walk, his stomach tight now.

"Is like Cinco de Mayo," he says, "like Cinco de Mayo down South."

"Yeah, we have that up here too, Cinco de Mayo. The Chicano Caucus puts it on. We have that and the Fourth of July. Lots of fireworks."

"Que?"

"Fireworks. Boom-boom-boom," she mimes an explosion in the sky.

There is a rumbling, a roar, and a pair of low-riders screech onto the street beside them, front hubs running inches from the ground. They hop the curb, drop even lower — Skreeeeeeekl a shower of sparks from their plated bottoms, a cheer from the crowd in the Park, and then they cut hard and thunder away with the patrol car yowling after them.

Amado watches after, their sound fading slowly. "I save my pay," he says to Celia. "I buy one. A low-rider. I give you a drive."

Celia says that would be nice.

The wine finished, Rudy gone off with his girl, Celia and the little one home to their mothers and the field lights shut down for the night. Amado steering Parrando, lost, but somewhere near the ocean. He hears the surf. He hears others still loose in the night, distant shouts, curses, glass shattering. The night hot, still charged with Fiesta but scary now. Amado thinks they're still on the West Side, he looks out for the train tracks — "If you ever get lost, campesino," Jesus always says, "go find the ocean, take a left turn, an just keep walkin."

"Estoy bombo." Parrando's eyes are nearly shut now, he moves in a daze. "Stoy muy borracho."

"You ever drin before this, Parrando?"

"Nunca," smiles Parrando. "De ningi n modo."

Surf breaking close by, the backs of hotels rising, then -

"Viva la Fiesta!" cries Parrando when he sees the floats.

"Chist!" hisses Amado. Parrando covers his mouth, giggling.

The floats are unattended, moonlit in the beach parking lot. Crowded together they seem like a small amusement park, towers and banners and platforms, pennants flapping in the night air. Parrando darts in among them, tearing at crepe and flowers, tosses the bits over his head.

"Viva la Fiesta! Viva 01 Hispanish Day!" he yips.

Amado catches him on the Native Daughters of the Golden West float, tackling him in a tangle of hibiscus, bowling over a trellis. Parrando giggles, agrees to come along quietly, but first he has to pee. Amado has to also, they turn back to back, count five and let go, like duelists.

Amado is tapped and tucked when Parrando is just getting going. Amado stares, it really is huge. Parrando irrigates the bougainvillea, the hibiscus, the camellias, splatters the papier- mache wall of the Old Spanish Days hacienda and is baptizing the throne of La Reina de la Fiesta when a strobe light flashes across his back and a loudspeaker crackles -

"STAY RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE."

Amado is off, sprinting into the dark, hurdling driftwood, the beach-sand slowing his flight like a bad dream, and dreamlike, the thought keeps touching his mind — wait till I tell them in the kitchen. Parrando startled in the light, fumbling to stuff it all back in, reeling away with it still out, flapping — Even Jesus, who never laughs at the jokes of others, even Jesus would be laughing.

Amado sprawls into a runoff ditch behind the bathhouse, legs rubbery, wind sucking in through his ears. He swallows his wheezing, tries to hear them. Surf breaking. Others still loose in the night, cursing, crying, shattering glass. Amado will get overtime for a few days if they catch Parrando, both he and Luis doing double shift till someone's brother or cousin just up comes to fill the opening. Parrando will be better off down South.

A spotlight plays across the sand, catches the breaking tips of waves. Amado squats in the ditch, presses tight to the wall. Maybe he'll see his family before Christmas.