Tideland

1

On my first evening in the back country, I skipped down the porch steps of the farmhouse-leaving my father inside and the radio playing and my small suitcase decorated with neon flower stickers unpacked-and wandered toward the upside-down school bus I’d spied from an upstairs window. Flanked on either side by Johnsongrass taller than my head, I followed a narrow and crooked cattle trail, extending my arms straight out for a while so my palms could reach into the grass and brush against the sorghum.

"You bend so you don’t break," I whispered as the Johnsongrass slapped across my hands, half-singing the song my father had written about me: "You bend so you don’t break, you give and you give, but you can’t take, Jeliza-Rose, so I don’t know what to do for you.”

And I continued along the trail for some time-winding left, then right, then left again-until it ended at a grazing pasture sprinkled with foxtails and the last bluebonnets of late spring. A breeze shuffled through the humidity, and the sky was already dimming. But the low-growing bluebonnets were still radiant, so I carefully stepped over them while moving further into the pasture.

Behind me swayed the Johnsongrass.

Before me rested the upside-down bus in a heap-the hull a mess of flaking paint and seared metal-with most of the windows busted out, except a few which remained black and sooty. It seemed bluebonnets had sprouted everywhere, even from under the squashed bus roof, where they drooped like bullied children. And the air was so rich with the scent of lupine that I sniffed my fingertips as I came to stand beside the bus, inhaling instead an earthy odor which belonged to my filthy dress.

The bus door was ajar, an inauspicious entryway. Peering within, I spotted the melted steering wheel, the upholstery on the driver’s seat bursting fuzz and springs. A smoky scent filled my nostrils, bubbled plastic and corrosion. And even though I was eleven, I had never been in a school bus. I had never been to school. So I squeezed past the inverted door, glancing at the stairwell overhead, and delighted in the glass chunks crunching beneath my sneakers.

Looking through the topsy-turvy windows, I shook a hand at the Johnsongrass outside, pretending they were my parents waving from a sidewalk somewhere. Then I put myself below a seat in the rear, imagining a busload of fresh-faced kids filling the other charred seats, all smiles and chatter, smacking gum, spinning paper airplanes down the aisle, and I was leaving with them.

From where I sat, the second floor of the farmhouse was visible, jutting behind the high Johnsongrass. The upstairs lamp was on, glowing in the third gable’s window. At dusk, the old place no longer appeared weathered and gray, but brownish and almost golden-the eaves of the corrugated steel lean-to reflected sunlight, the thumbnail moon hung alongside the chimney.

And soon the grazing pasture erupted in places with bright soft intermittent flashes, a lemon phosphorescence. The fireflies had arrived, just as my father said they would, and I watched them with my dry lips parted in wonder, my palms sliding expectantly on the lap of my dress. I felt like running from the bus and greeting them, but they joined me instead. Dozens of tiny blinks materialized, floating through the smashed windows, illuminating the grim bus.

"I’m Jeliza-Rose,” I said, bouncing on my crossed legs. "Hello.”

Their flickers indicated understanding: The more I spoke, the more they blinked-or so I believed.

"You’re going to school. I’m going to school today too."

In vain I reached out, attempting to snatch the nearest one, but when I unclenched my fist there was nothing to be seen. After several failed captures, I made myself content by simply naming the fireflies as they flashed.

"You’re Michael. You’re Ann. Are you Michael again? No, wait, you’re Barbie. And that’s Chris. There’s Michael."

The bus was suddenly populated by children of my own creation.

"We’re going on a great trip today," I told them. "I’m as excited as you are."

The sun had almost disappeared. And if the train hadn’t startled me so, I might have stayed in the bus all night, lost in conversation with the fireflies. But the train flew by without warning, rattling the ground, and making me scream. I had no idea that tracks were concealed in thick weeds beyond the pasture, perhaps fifty feet away, or that each evening at 7:05 a passenger train tore past the property.

For a moment it seemed as if the world had started spinning faster. A vagrant wind pushed into the bus, mussing my oily hair. Squinting my eyes, I noticed blurs of silver and fluorescence outside, glimpses of people riding in the coaches and dining car, followed by freight cars--and then the caboose, where a lone figure seemed to be waving from the cupola.

Then the train was gone-so were the fireflies, having been whisked afield by the wind. I was alone again, still screaming, terrified. I bit my bottom lip without thinking, felt the skin crack, and tasted the blood as it swam onto my tongue. And everything became quiet, just the faint breeze whooshing the tall reeds, three or four solitary crickets tuning up for the night.

I glanced in the direction of the old house, knowing my father was in the living room, quiet and awaiting my return. Then I studied the rows of Johnsongrass, which had grown darker during dusk. That’s where the Bog Man is, I thought, wiping blood from my lip. And I knew I’d better leave the bus before it got too late. I had to be with my father before the Bog Man stirred.

I needed to unpack.

2

When I entered the living room, my father was exactly how I’d left him earlier -- consumed in an opiate trance, shoulders straight, hands gripping both knees, boot heels flat and even on the floorboards. In a high-backed leather chair, he sat facing a wall, wearing his big sunglasses, which always reminded me of the Lone Ranger’s mask.

"That’d make you Tonto,” he often told me at home in L.A. "My little girl’s a Hollywood Injun."

"I’m not Tonto," I’d say.

"So who are you then?”

"Don’t know, but not Tonto.”

And that would make him laugh. He’d grin, maybe pat his fingertips back and forth over his mouth, going, "Woo woo woo,” like a TV Indian.

Sometimes I joined him, dancing around the apartment and hooting until the cranky woman downstairs banged a broomstick on her ceiling.

But that night at the farmhouse, my father’s jaw was set, his face firm with two wizened lines incapable of producing a smile. So I didn’t bother mentioning the Lone Ranger, or the school bus, or how the train had frightened me. I didn’t say anything, preferring instead to stand quietly beside the chair and scrape my front teeth across my cracked lip, a pleasing discomfort.

Nighttime had shaped the living room, making it shadowy and strange. Without sunlight coming from the windows, fixing bright angles along the floor, climbing up nooks, the place no longer felt welcoming. Even after flicking the overhead light switch-bringing on a hazy bulb that hummed with electricity -- I’d sensed some change in the surroundings when tip-toeing toward the chair, like moving through a gauze-like mesh but not quite seeing or feeling it.

And the sight of my father gazing at the wall, where his tattered map of Denmark was tacked, brought to mind the Bog Man photograph he once showed me at the apartment. It was past midnight, and he shook me in my bed, saying, "Listen, you should know this before I forget. Bog water has weird powers. These bodies get lain in bogs for thousands of years and don’t decay. I mean, they get a little brown and shrunk and stuff, but not much else."

Then he held open a library book and pointed at a black-and-white photo: an Iron Age man in the course of excavation, my father explained, removed from nine feet of peat, his head covered by a pointed skin cap, around his waist a hide belt.

"The book says he got murdered two thousand years ago," he said, exhaling bourbon-breath.

So I propped on an elbow, blinking tiredly, and studied the well-preserved remains of the boney Bog Man, who was stretched on damp soil as though sleeping, the arms and legs curved, his chin inclined. His face displayed a benign expression-the eyes gently shut, the mouth puckered.

"They killed him?" I said.

"Hanged him and stuck him in some bog in Denmark. You’re looking at someone deader than dirt."

"Who killed him?”

"Who knows," he said, slapping the book shut. "But let’s hope we’re in that kind of shape in two thousand years. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

Then he gave me a sloppy kiss on the forehead, saying I’d better go back to sleep, otherwise my mother and all the bog men in the world might get upset. And as he reeled from the room, I asked for the light to stay on.

"Sure, baby,” he said, "you got it.”

But the light didn’t help much. The picture had spooked me, and I couldn’t rest for hours. .

Several nights later, I dreamt the Bog Man materialized in my bedroom and tried suffocating me with a pillow. A noose encircled his neck, drawn at the windpipe, coiling like a snake on his chest. And as he bent forward with the pillow, his wrinkled brow and pursed mouth carried a look of affliction. I suppose the nightmare made me shout out, because when I stirred, my father was stooping over me, brushing hair off my face, a length of which I’d somehow sucked back into my throat.

"What’s all this?” he said, half-whispering. "Got the creepers?"

Then he lifted me from the sheets.

I wrapped my arms about his collar line, buried my head against his T-shirt, and he carried me to where my mother slept. And I remember thinking there wasn’t a bog man alive who could mess with my father.

But at the farmhouse, the map wasn’t the only thing that recalled the Bog Man -- it was my father’s stoic face, all creased and furrowed, unflinching, as if preserved from antiquity in a jar. His long black ponytail, fastened by a rubber band, draped across his right shoulder and hung down the front of his tank top. At sixty-seven, almost forty years older than my mother, his body was lean, his arms brawny and taut. In the stillness of the living room, it was easy to conjure an Iron Age man in his image: frozen in a leather chair, excavated intact, the pupils behind those big sunglasses locked forever on a map of Denmark’s geognostic conditions.

"Let me tell you two something,” he said one morning during breakfast, speaking in his slow Southern drawl.

My mother and I were sitting with him at the dining table, a rare occasion when the three of us were awake at the same hour.

"A secluded and private life in Denmark is where we’re headed. I’ve got it into my head."

After performing all night, playing two different clubs in West Hollywood with his band The Black Coats, he had arrived at the apartment holding a bag of bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits from McDonald’s.

With a grimace, my mother lowered her biscuit, saying, "What’s in Denmark? When you ever been there anyway?" She glanced at me and said grumpily, "Where does he get

these crappy ideas?"

It was a question not meant to be answered, so I kept eating in silence.

Half-frowning, he said, "I’m just thinking we could move and get a place without a phone. Nobody would know we was there, so if somebody wants to hound me, they won’t find me or you or Jeliza-Rose."

"I won’t go," she said, swallowing her last bite, "so don’t bother trying. It’s stupid.”

"Hey, whatever you want,” he replied. He didn’t look at her, or at the uneaten biscuit on his plate, but stared straight at me and winked. "Guess me and Jeliza-Rose will make the trip. How’s that, huh?"

I shrugged and smiled with my mouth full.

She pushed her chair back.

"Noah, you and the shit-critter can go whenever you like. I don’t care."

Her robe fell open as she stood, so she shrugged it off, letting it drop to her feet. And the chunky whiteness of her naked body quivered when she left the table.

My father leaned forward and whispered, "Your mother is the Norse Queen Gunhild, King Eric Bloodaxe’s widow. And King Harald promised to marry her, enticing her to Denmark, and so she went-but on her arrival she got drowned in a bog instead. Not very nice."

"No,” I said, "not very nice."

"Think she deserved it?"

"No."

"No," he said, considering his biscuit, "I suppose she didn’t."

His shoulders went slack and his stubbled chin wavered above his plate.

The day my father and I finally escaped the city, he said we were headed for Jutland soil. In his backpack was the map, which he’d torn from a library book. And as we began traveling east on a Greyhound bus, watching palm trees and apartment complexes skim by our tinted window, my father produced the map and flattened it on his legs. With a shaky finger, he pointed out our aim -- the western jutland, where bog men slept under great, unbroken plains.

Then he carefully folded the map, returning it to his backpack, and said in an abstracted murmur, "I see before me these dark banks, decorated with the creator’s most beautiful flowers, Danish men and women, greeting the May sun as it rises to the east. I hear them greet it with songs, with freedom’s folksongs. The Danish beech, the Danish waves echo the jubilant tones.”

And I knew he was about to fade out, as he usually did after taking his Fortral tablets, a painkiller that kept him walking -- or so he liked to say. But I didn’t care. I was glad to be going somewhere else. I was happy Queen Gunhild couldn’t make the journey, even if Texas, not Denmark, was our final destination.

On the first evening at the farmhouse, I put myself between my father and the map on the wall, asking, "Daddy, is Jutland like Texas?"

But he was gone, so talking became pointless. His breathing had grown shallow. And I was sleepy.

Going from the living room, I pictured myself as Alice, growing tired as she dropped down, down, down the rabbit-hole. It was my favorite part of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

After such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! Haw brave they’ll all think me at home!

I often asked my father to read that section again and again, and he’d make his voice higher, sounding somewhat like a girl, saying, "Dinah’ll miss me very much tonight, I

should think!”

"Dinah was her cat,” I told him.

"I hope they’ll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah, my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I’m afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that’s very much like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?"

"And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way-"

"Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?"

"And sometimes-"

"Do bats eat cats?"

"For, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question,” I said, having memorized every word, "it didn’t matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and was saying to her, very earnestly-"

"Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?”

And that night in the farmhouse, I headed upstairs with Alice on my mind.

She wondered if she’d fall right through the earth, imagining how funny it’d be to come out among the people with their heads downwards. She’d have to ask them the name of their country -- New Zealand? Or Australia? Of course, it wouldn’t be Denmark, because that wasn’t on the other side of the rabbit-hole.

3

My single mattress lacked sheets. So did the double-bed where my father had tossed his backpack. Our upstairs rooms were separated by the only bathroom in the house, though there was no running water. And the empty toilet bowl released an acrid stench when the lid was lifted, as if rotten eggs festered somewhere deep within the plumbing.

My father said the place needed a new well. He said there was plenty of work to be done.

"The yard wants some tending,” he mentioned during our second afternoon of Greyhound travel. "Mother had this boy mow and weed when she was living, but I suppose that fellow is all grown by now. And there’s nails coming up on the porch, so I guess we can hammer them. Squirrels lived in the a attic, but I got rid of them because they kept chewing the wiring and everything. They made a real racket in the morning, and I hated knowing they were there. But Mother liked them. She said the place didn’t feel so lonesome that way.”

It’s true, the farmhouse seemed imbued with a lonely quality -- no doubt due to its isolated location. And I often wondered why my father let his mother live on the property by herself. He had purchased the land for her in 1958, right after his third guitar-instrumental single "Jungle Runner” reached the Top Ten. The house was built several years later, and Grandmother remained there until 1967, when she tripped down the porch steps, breaking her hip, and died in a nursing home soon afterwards.

"Thought about putting the place on the market then," my father told me on the bus, "but my second wife talked me out of it. And now I’m glad she did.”

For him, the farmhouse became a retreat, somewhere to hide and make music. He had the phone disconnected, got rid of Grandmother’s television. By the time I turned eleven,

it was common for my father to leave the city for a few months, taking his Rickenbacker guitar and driving east in his Buick Riviera. Only once did he invite my mother and me, but my mother said, "Fuck that, Noah. Texas is the armpit of the universe. We’ll be here when you decide What Rocks can exist without you.”

It was Grandmother who named the farmhouse What Rocks, but I’m not sure why. She was dead before I was born, so I never had a chance to ask her. Perhaps it was a joke of some sort, considering the nearby quarry existed as a constant nuisance; every other day or so there was dynamite blasting, which disrupted the sense of isolation, booming like thunder and rattling the windows.

"When I bought it for her,” my father explained, "I told her she could sell it off someday to that quarry if she wanted. I’m thinking she could’ve made a little dough, you know, selling the limestone under that property. But I don’t think she ever considered doing that. I mean, the house and land were a gift, so that’d have been rude in her mind. She was a pretty proper old woman sometimes, wouldn’t even drive this baby-blue Cadillac I got her because she thought it looked too showy. I tell you what, we could sure use that car today.”

Riding in the Greyhound made my father restless. The seat aggravated his spine, which was damaged when he slipped headlong from a stage in Chicago, landing squarely on his back. But being on the run, he couldn’t afford anyother mode of transportation. His prized Buick Riviera with white sidewalls was traded for a sandwich bag of mixed pills - Pamergan, Dextromoramide, Diconal, DF-118, Fortral, and Methadone, my mother’s favorite. And when we finally arrived in the small town of Florence, some ten miles from the farmhouse, he uttered a low groan while putting on his backpack.

Then he handed me my neon suitcase, saying, "Suppose you’re ready for a picnic.”

"Pizza,” I said, earnestly.

"Can’t eat pizza on a picnic," he said. "You should know that."

"We don’t have to have a picnic,” I said, following behind him as we moved along the passageway.

"Got to eat sandwiches. That’s what you eat. That’s what it’s going to be.”

At the Main Street grocery store, whatever cash remained went toward saltines, Wonder Bread, peanut butter, and two gallon jugs of water. And even though some minor celebrity status was attached to his name, my father’s face was far from well-known. It was like a black-and-white Western where the gunslinger saunters into the saloon; soon as we stepped through the doors -- a grubby little girl and a pale, long-haired man wearing huge sunglasses -- all heads turned toward us, all mouths stopped talking.

It wasn’t as if the store was crowded. In fact, I recall just a chubby bagger boy with a crew cut and two high school-looking checkout girls, one Hispanic, the other white, both sporting hair-sprayed bangs that curled upward like a wave.

"What time is it?” my father asked.

"S-s-s-orry, not wearing a w-w-watch,” the boy replied, stuttering painfully, his lips and jaw twisting spasmodically as he spoke. "Around four, I-I-I think.”

"It’s about four-thirty,” the Hispanic girl said.

"Then you’re still open.”

"Until five. Six on Saturday."

"That’s good,” my father said, taking my hand. "Where’s the peanut butter?”

"Center aisle, near the marshmallows, to the left.”

And when we returned to the front with our groceries, my father asked the bagger boy if he knew someone who might give us a lift.

The checkout girls glanced at each other, their grins verging on laughter.

"Where you-you-you g-going?”

"East of town, out toward the microwave tower on Saturn Road."

"Guess I-I-I could t-t-t-ake you," the boy said, unfolding a paper sack. "It’s on my w-w-ay home, if you don’t mind waiting till I-I-I’m off.”

"Not at all,” my father said. "I appreciate it, friend.”

The afternoon sun had colored the asphalt golden, and as the bagger boy drove us from Florence in his Nissan pickup, he put on a pair of dark convex glasses -- less against the bright rays spilling across the county road, I suspected, than against my father’s menacing eyewear. His name was Patrick.

"I live with my g-g-g-grandfa-fa-father,” he explained, accelerating the vehicle. "We’re going fishing to-to-to-tonight, so I-I-I'm in a bit of a h-h-h-urry."

Then he asked if we were visiting family, wondered where we were traveling from.

"Going to see my parents,” my father lied. "My girl and I live in Austin.”

I was sandwiched between them in the cab, my knees on either side of the gear shift.

"Th-th-that right," Patrick said. "Austin’s gr-gr-great! Haven’t had much of a ch-ch-chance to know people a-around here. just moved from D-D-Dallas. Not from Florence. My grandfather’s b-b-b-been here for-e-e-ever."

"Forever’s a pretty long time,” my father said.

"You bet-bet-bet-cha,” Patrick sputtered. "I-I-I think I-I-I-I’d go nuts if I-I-I stayed here as long as he-he-he has."

And while Patrick struggled in conversation with my father, I tucked my shins underneath my butt, pushing myself up, and gazed over the dashboard at the hilly landscape ahead. Cedar and mesquite trees grew along the road, in pastures lush from spring thunderstorms. This was farming country. In the distance, the microwave tower my father had mentioned loomed like a futuristic obelisk, reddish girders criss-crossing, an infrequent strobe flaring at its top.

My father told Patrick to turn on Saturn Road, and soon the pickup was bouncing across a winding dirt road. "How f-f-far?"

"A mile or so, maybe two. First gate you come to is good enough. That’s pretty much it.”

The microwave tower was now in the rearview.

To the left, dense groupings of cedar.

To the right, a clear meadow under a canopy of low-lying clouds.

Then we passed empty sidelots parceled by barbwire fences, each with a real estate marker advertising new concepts in family living, reasonable financing available. The wild grass had been grazed or chopped down, but was still thick enough for snakes and armadillos to hide in.

"Tons of d-d-deer out here,” Patrick mentioned. "Rain has g-g-g-given them e-e-e-nough to eat.”

The pickup flew past longhorns sunning themselves beneath a windmill.

"An hour or two before the sun’s gone,” my father uttered, turning to stare as we zoomed by.

When Patrick pulled off at a long frame gate, he asked, "This it?”

"Yep,” my father replied. "Awfully kind of you."

"No p-p-problem.”

We climbed from the truck and began organizing ourselves. With his backpack hanging off a shoulder, my father clutched the grocery sack against his chest. I was slightly lop-sided, gripping a gallon jug in one hand, my suitcase in the other. Chalky road dust, stirred up behind Patrick’s Nissan, caught us and then billowed on.

Patrick mentioned that once a week he did a delivery run near What Rocks -- to let him know if we needed anything - and, leaning across the cab to close the passenger door, he said, "H-h-have a nice one.”

My father gave him a nod, and I smiled but he didn’t seem to notice. He was already shutting the door. Then he had the pickup bumping around in the opposite direction, sending more sandy dust to the air, and sped away.

The purr of cicadas rattled among the mesquite and cedar trees. From the road, What Rocks wasn’t visible, only the thick Johnsongrass which grew wild on the property. "Go on," my father said, planting a boot against the bottom cord of barbwire alongside the frame gate. He pressed the cord to the ground, creating a wide gap.

So I crossed under the range fence, and he followed, grunting with exasperation as he bent. Then the two of us walked to the washed-out driveway, each occupying a gravelly rut.

"Weeds get the better of everything,” he said, mumbling to himself.

He glanced at me, elaborating, "When there’s no cattle on the land, the weeds grow greedy,”

About a half-mile in, where the driveway forked between two cedars, the farmhouse came into view.

"Wow," I said, trudging toward my father, who had stopped near one of the trees, "is that What Rocks?"

"That’s her," he said, wiping his brow with the heel of his palm. His backpack was at his feet, the grocery sack crumpled and torn beside it.

I set my suitcase and the jug on the ground, keeping my eyes on the old place.

A flagless flagpole stood in close proximity to the wrap- around porch. There was a copper-colored weather vain on the lean-to, but shaped as a grasshopper instead of a rooster. And while it appeared no different than most two-story farmhouses in Texas -- pitched roof and an open plan -- its weathered planks, gray and stark and splintering, gave it a decidedly forlorn facade. Even before stepping through the doorway, I sensed the layers of grime, frayed spiderwebs, crumbs,and mice droppings that were eventually found within.

"Home at last,” my father said, sounding somewhat relieved. He hoisted his pack, unzipped the top, and rifled inside, producing a shoelace with a key tied at the end.

And in less than three minutes, I was already upstairs in What Rocks, staring from my bedroom window at the upturned school bus, while my father was downstairs tacking up the map of Denmark.

Night arrived.

I had been to the bus and returned. Now I was upstairs again, having left my father in the living room. On the edge of the single mattress, where a faded brown stain filled the middle, my suitcase sat open. Carefully, I removed what few items I’d managed to pack-my mother’s satin nightgown, and an armful of Barbie doll parts (four heads, two arms, onetorso, six legs, each dismembered piece unearthed in a thrift shop bin). Aside from the contents of the suitcase, another thrift shop purchase, my dress, panties, socks, and sneakers were all I had.

Biting my sore bottom lip, I took a moment ordering my possessions. The nightgown, which had been folded haphazardly, was given rest on the mattress pillow, a regal flourish in my imagination. The doll parts were then arranged in a line beside the pillow: heads first, then arms, then legs, then torso.

Finally, I zipped the suitcase, noticing with some sadness that its neon-colored flower stickers were coming unstuck, and shoved it underneath the bed anyway. And while crouching, a tiny drop of blood spattered on the floorboard. So I drooled into a palm, watching as a red string of saliva formed in my cupped hand.

"I’m dying,” I said in mock-horror, affecting the voice of a soap opera actress. "I can’t go on, I must go on."

I went to look in the bathroom mirror. Puffing my bottom lip, I spotted the sliver of split flesh oozing blood, but was disappointed it wasn’t any worse. So I spat at the sink, hoping my spit would suddenly turn crimson and profuse. It didn’t. In fact, it seemed mostly clear.

"You will survive,” my reflection told me, aping a TV doctor. "A complete recovery is expected."

"Thank you, thank you," I replied. "Now there’s hope."

Then I twisted the sink knobs, praying a little water might spurt out so I could brush my teeth. But nothing happened. It didn’t matter anyway, I reasoned, because I’d forgotten a toothbrush and toothpaste. And when I brought a finger to my clenched teeth, sliding it back and forth like I was brush- ing, more blood bubbled from my lip.

My reflection grinned, showing me how the blood had discolored the crowns.

"You’re red all over," I said, noting my orangish hair and freckles, the hyacinths on my dress.

"Simply ghastly,” my reflection exclaimed in an English accent, just then catching music playing faintly in my father's bedroom. "A ghastly noise, Jeliza-Rose."

"Yes, we must put an end to it,” I replied, turning from the mirror.

Then I crossed to the other bathroom door, which opened into the adjoining sleeping quarters.

When I entered, the hinges creaked like in some monster film, so I stood near the doorway for a bit, sucking my bottom lip and taking everything in the backpack on the bed, the lamp glowing on the night table, the ratty throw rug on the floor. My father’s room was almost identical to mine, except he had a double mattress with a larger stain. On the windowsill above the headboard, a hand-held radio transmitted music -- girl, you really got me going, you got me so I don’t know what I'm doing -- and I remembered how my father kept the radio pressed against an ear as the Greyhound journeyed through the desert, listening with his eyes shut, sometimes sleeping for hours while music or news or static droned.

"You really got me, you really got me,” I sang, going to the mattress.

The contents of his backpack were in a small pile on the bed, unwashed clothes topped by a depleted Peach Schnapps bottle. The sandwich bag once containing the mixed pills had been emptied, and was now stuck over the bottle neck like a makeshift prophylactic. And I pictured my father swallowing and swallowing and swallowing, then exhaling relief as he waited for the hallucinations and thought disturbances to begin. "Thought disturbances-” that was what he called them, "sweeping clean the little messes in my brain.”

I climbed across the mattress toward the windowsill. Parting the curtains, I saw the strobe flutter from the distant microwave tower.

Then I saw nothing.

The world outside was darker than I ever knew it could be. And aside from the strobe and several moths trying to thump past the pane, it seemed as if all else had fallen into a vast hole. There was just me and my father and What Rocks and the radio. The Johnsongrass had disappeared. So had the horizon.

Imitating Patrick the Bagger Boy, I stammered, "I-I-I think I-I-I-I'd go nuts if I-I-I stayed here as long as he-he-he has.”

Then I took the radio from the windowsill and carried it from my father’s room.

4

I was naked with my arms stretched over my head. My dress was on the floor, covering my sneakers and socks, and the hand-held radio sang the blues on my night table. My mother’s nightgown, all shimmery pink and smooth, sank around me. And I could smell her, the persistent body odor she often had. The gown was so massive over me that for a moment I was lost underneath it -- my hands searched for the sleeve openings, my head rummaged against the silk in an effort to reach the neckline.

The headless housewife, I imagined, flapping her arms like a chicken.

When I finally poked through the collar, my hair stood on end with electrostatic. Then I scrunched the sleeves past my wrists, and tried twirling in a circle like a dervish. But the gown was too long, so I had to stop.

"You’re crazy,” I told myself, grabbing the radio. "You’re insane.”

"That’s right, looks like any chance we had for rain has all but disappeared,” a throaty-sounding DJ said, speaking over the fade-out of a song. "Well now, instead of thunderclaps here’s Mr. John Lee Hooker -- as requested by Jimmy in Salado-going boom boom boom for everyone on the Stillhouse Hollow Lake marina."

Ah-boom boom boom, I wanna shoot ya right down!

With John Lee Hooker vibrating in my hand, I headed downstairs. The gown dragged at my feet, and it was a precarious trip from one squeaky step to the next. Still, I managed without trouble, envisioning myself as a graceful ghost while descending into the murky dining room. At the bottom of the stairs, the gown hem swept across the floorboards, stirring dust in my wake. But it didn’t matter much. Everything was dusty anyway -- the long dining room table, the oak sideboard, the air I inhaled.

"Aaaa-choo!” I faked a sneeze, hoping to summon my father’s attention.

To the right of the stairs was the kitchen, and to the left was the dining room and then the living room, separated by only a wood-burning stove. Because the entire downstairs lacked interior walls, it was fairly easy to gaze from room-to-room -- especially when standing at the foot of the stairs.

"Aaaa-choo!" I went again, but my father remained as before in the living room, so I about-faced and glided into the kitchen.

Leaving the radio near the stove, I dug in the grocery sack and placed the goods on the counter. Then I turned ravenous.

A saltine dabbed into the peanut butter jar, breaking the glossy surface.

More saltines followed.

John Lee Hooker had long since finished, and now bluegrass music entertained the kitchen. Wild fiddles and stomping feet kept time with my smacking.

I drank from a gallon jug, spilling water on the gown.

Then my index finger became a knife, squishing peanut butter across a slice of Wonder Bread. And I continued eating and drinking, waiting for my stomach to feel satisfied.

By the time I was full, my eyes had grown tired. There was peanut butter on the roof of my mouth, along the ridges of my gums, and I was content, half-awake and nourished, listening to "K-V-R-P, eclectic music for eclectic minds-”

Fatigue pushed me downward.

With the gown bunched over me like a blanket, I was aware for the first time how very warm What Rocks was -- as if the entire place was holding a stifled breath. But the floor seemed cooler than anywhere else in the house. And the radio was now playing Tumbleweed, one of my father’s slower songs, so it was okay to rest for a little while.

In the ethereal moments before sleep, I imagined my father on a stage in some L.A. dive, where a beam of indigo light shone on him, glistening in the creases of his black leather pants and jacket. With his legs apart, his guitar held in front of him like a weapon, he curled his top lip, saying, "This is for the loves of my life, my baby girl and my beautiful wife.”

An Elvis moment, he called it. Every performance needs one.

Tumbleweed, tumbleweed blowin 'cross the yard

Wonder where you’re goin', wonder how far

Tumbleweed, tumbleweed rollin’ in my mind

Wonder what she's doin’, wonder who she’ll find

My mother bragged that the lyrics were written about her, and I never heard my father say otherwise. He wrote them while touring England during the early ‘70s. That’s where they met. My mother, a runaway from Brooklyn, was a wafer-thin eighteen-year-old, who had an Asian guru named Sanjuro. She also had The Who, or, to be exact, the drummer, Keith Moon. By then, my father was a guitar-twang icon, known for his string of instrumental hits in the 50’s, and an emotive, ferocious style of playing that had influenced a young Pete Townshend. Evidently though, when Pete saw my father perform in London, he was quite disappointed. lt was an acoustic performance of country standards, mostly Hank Williams and johnny Cash covers. Following the show, Pete went backstage long enough to shake my father’s hand, then he sulked away by himself.

"I’m sure he made a song about that night,” my father once remarked, digressing from how my mother was introduced to him. "‘The Punk Meets The Godfather’- I’m positive that one’s about me. Not a nice tribute."

But Moon the Loon was delighted.

"I won’t say I don’t like country," he exclaimed, "because I do!"

He had arrived in my father’s dressing room disguised as an orthodox Jew, reeking of brandy and hyperbole.

"Musical innovation, a step forward backwards," he cheered maniacally. "Just like Mozart, except different! A

Gordian Knot in a shoelace!”

And as a gift, he ushered forth my mother -- "an insane bint for your pleasure and gratuity” -- who waltzed into the dressing room costumed as Pippi Longstocking. She looked tomboyish, tall and slender, with the cheeks of her face freckled and her blue eyes shining.

"Don’t know if it was love at first sight,” my father had said on the Greyhound, "but pretty darn close, I think. And it was good to begin with, and it stayed good for a long time because she made me feel like a kid-and I still had some money then. And she knew where to get diamorphine cheap, so I saved some dough because by the time we met I’d been buying expensive Chinese heroin. But she could get me brown and medical heroin for much less than what I’d been paying for the Number 4 type. Your mother was connected, Jeliza-Rose. Even when we moved to LA, she knew who to call and where to go. And before she got lazy and fat she could cook us up a storm. She made burritos and pizza and all kinds of greasy nice stuff. I miss that about her. I wish you’d known her then. She really was a treat.”

But he might as well have been talking about someone else. My mother slept all day and ate Crunch bars for dinner and talked to herself until dawn. And she wasn’t a treat.

I can’t say when it was exactly that I began to hate her, but I suppose it started after I turned nine. By that point, my parents were full-time junkies. My father was incapable of touring, and he had grown emaciated and weak. My mother, on the other hand, had ballooned in weight -- so much so that on the rare occasions when she managed to climb from bed, the springs creaked as if groaning relief, and the mattress continued to sag with the impression of her body.

At nine, I was given two chores -- massaging my mother’s legs, sanitizing and preparing the syringe. And while I became conscientious at both, there was only enjoyment to be had in making sure the needle was ready. Because my father believed public education bred dumb children, I was schooled at home, which amounted to little more than stolen library books (literary classics picked by my father, way beyond my reading ability), and afternoons of PBS.

Soon as I awoke in the mornings, my first class began in the kitchen -- where concentrated bleach was drawn into the syringe from a coffee cup, then squirted away in the sink. After the process was repeated, I flushed the syringe and needle through with cold water. Next, I scooped some junk from its hiding place in a sugar tin, dissolving the brown dust in a teaspoon with hot water and vitamin C powder. Then using a dining table chair for a perch, I stood at the gas stove, holding the spoon over a burner, feeling the stainless steel warm as the flame helped bubble clean the remaining particles.

Once the solution was safely sucked up into the syringe, I carried my homework to the living room. My father would either be sitting on the floor with his guitar or stretched across the couch gazing blankly at the television.

Sometimes he’d say, "Good morning,” while taking the syringe from my hand. But usually he said nothing.

He just targeted the large vein running the length of his inner arm, injecting himself, then -- in the brief moments before the rush seized him -- brought the remaining amount to my mother in their bedroom.

After the morning ritual, I was pretty much done until evening. My recess lasted hours. I was free to watch TV, and -- by organizing the dining table chairs, collecting the dirty clothes and sheets strewn around the apartment -- I erected an elaborate tent home in the living room. There I ate quiet meals in the company of my Barbie heads.

For breakfast it was two Eskimo Pies from the freezer. For lunch I alternated between Pop Tarts and Nutter Butters. Dinner consisted of Dr. Pepper, a Milky Way, cinnamon toast.

But, if all the Milky Ways were gone, I’d substitute one of my mother’s Crunch bars, which were supposed to be off limits. And even though she spent weeks in the bedroom, somehow she sensed when I’d been at her candy; while rubbing her feet at night, I always paid for the transgression by receiving an abrupt kick on the chin.

"What have I told you before?” she’d say again and again. "You miserable creep, you never learn! I can’t teach you anything about what’s mine!”

But I had learned something: heroin gave my father neutrality, serving as an antidote for a mind too difficult to manage. For my mother, having lived a short life lacking much meaning at all, heroin offered nothing. The drug had run away with her as a teenager, and the experience was ultimately a mediocre one. Her warm, dreamy, carefree bubble had become a void. So, when going to her bedside, I knew who the real miserable creep was. And I knew she would eventually kick out, or throw the wet rag she used to wipe the sweat from her puffy face. Still, she never struck hard enough to make me cry. Mostly, she just ranted. Sometimes making sense, often not.

While massaging the fatness of her pale legs, pushing my fingertips along the lumpy skin, my mother’s mouth seemed to function independently of her brain. "Lip-smacking junkie baby,” she called me, and I understood a verbal barrage was about to follow. It seemed scripted, differing slightly with each performance: "Withdrawal is what I went through -- that way you wouldn’t get born hooked. Irritable and hyperactive baby too, nothing but a high-pitched cry and twitching and spasms and convulsions. Your daddy blew smoke in your mouth to keep you quiet, you know that? Think you got damaged by that, but don’t blame me. Because I breast-fed you forever -- and they’re all wrong, dear, because drugs don’t mess with breast milk in a major way. It’s your daddy’s fault you’re like you are. Not mine. I loved you.”

Taking a labored breath, she dabbed the rag to her forehead and then propped up on her elbows, the bedsprings squeaking as she did. Her voice suddenly changed, becoming softer.

"Jeliza-Rose, do you know I love you? Honey, I’m sorry. If you'd just fix me a hit and something to eat, I'll do something nice for you soon. I promise, baby.”

I always played my part too, nodding, fully aware of the lie -- she would never do anything nice for me soon. But leaving her bedside, I’d manage a smile anyway, tormented by the thought of ever entering that bedroom again, or of touching her swollen calves.

So on the afternoon she turned blue and died of respiratory failure, I skipped around the living room whistling the theme from Sesame Street, the happiest song in the world.

"The methadone killed her,” my father said, looking haggard and confused on the couch. "I should’ve kept her on junk -- just cut her daily dose and kept her on it.”

Junky logic: with the hope of finally getting clean, he had traded the Buick for pills -- though he understood that methadone was more addictive, more dangerous, and more deadly than heroin.

Bringing his hands to his face, he said, "Now she's dead, and I don’t have a car.”

A week earlier, he and my mother had decided to quit mainlining. The tough decision came after our apartment was robbed late one night. I remember waking to the sounds of the front door splintering and breaking open, my father shouting, "Get the fuck out of here! I said I’d get the dough Thursday! Talk to Leo, that’s what I told him!” There were other voices, men with calm and threatening tones, saying, "Listen, Noah, we’ve been through this,” and, "No more screwing around, all right?"

But in my bed, I pretended it was all a spooky dream.

When I stirred the next morning, I found my father in the kitchen. He was pouring the contents of the sugar tin into the sink. His hands were shaking, and his teeth chattered, even as he said, "Howdy, sweetheart."

The microwave was missing. So was the toaster.

In the living room, the TV and VCR and stereo were gone.

"Bog men paid us visit,” he told me. "But now we’re okay. I’ve talked with your mother. It’s all good. You’ll see.”

And I started crying -- not because I was glad or relieved, but because the very idea of bog men dragging themselves into the apartment filled me with horror.

My father set the tin aside. "Oh, no,” he said, "everything’s fine." Then he tried lifting me, but couldn’t gather the strength. So he hugged me instead, patting my neck, saying, "See, when was the last time Daddy did this? It’s getting better already.” I felt his fingers trembling, the sweat on his palms. "Not a thing to worry about, my little girl." And I almost believed him.

But on the day my mother’s corpse rested in their bedroom, it was my turn to be the comforter. Her overdose had taken about twelve hours to run its course. What began as irregular breathing, concluded with blue skin and pupils reduced to a pinpoint, but all the while my father expected her to pull through. In a last effort to revive her, he poured cold water on her face, but it didn’t help.

"Please don’t be sad," I told him in the living room, putting my head against his shoulder. "We can go to Jutland if you want.”

For a moment he grinned. "Wouldn’t that be wonderful.”

"Yes," I said, "and we can eat her Crunch bars too.”

Then he held me close, saying, "No one’s taking you from me. That’s not happening here. We’re leaving, okay?”

"Okay.”

While I quickly packed, my father swaddled my mother from head to toe in the bedding. Then he called me to join him in their bedroom.

"If she was a Viking ship,” he announced, "we’d have to bury her with horses and food and gold plates.”

He wore his backpack and seemed anxious to get going. I stood beside him with my suitcase, staring at the shrouded corpse. Even in death, her body odor was potent. "Anything you want to say?”

I shrugged. "I don’t know. She’s like a mummy.”

He sighed.

"Well, I’ve pretty much said what I wanted when she was alive, so no point wasting time.”

He dug his Bic lighter from a pocket, clicked on the flame, and attempted to ignite the mattress. But it wouldn’t catch, so eventually he gave up, saying, "Bad idea anyways. It might burn the whole building and everyone else."

And as we hurried from the bedroom, I paused to take a final glance at my mother, imagining her congested breathing while dying. Her pulmonary arteries had become clogged with blood, forcing the fluid through the capillaries and into the lungs. In the violent throes near the end, she kicked her chubby legs wildly, shaking the bedsprings to the limit.

"Come on,” my father said. He was waiting at the end of the hallway. "Don’t stare, it’s bad luck.”

"Mom’s dead all right,” I said, turning to face him.

Gripping my suitcase, I thought, Poor Queen Gunhild -- drowning in a bog like that.

5

It was still night when the mystery train appeared. The whistle entered my dreams, manifesting itself as a doorbell buzzing.

Waking on the kitchen floor, I listened while the freight cars flurried alongside Grandmother’s property, picturing the school bus shaking in the pasture. Soon the whistle grew fainter until the only sound came from the portable radio, a female DJ reading the news: "A mixed message from the White House, conflicting with earlier statements-”

I rubbed my eyes and yawned. Then I sat up, squinting around the kitchen.

The jug was on the counter without its cap. Cracker crumbs dotted the floor. The gown remained damp in spots from my reckless guzzling. But my throat was dry, and while licking at the sore lip, I tasted peanut butter instead of blood.

"A miracle,” I whispered, sensing the creamy substance coursing in my veins. And if I hadn’t felt so suddenly alone, I would’ve laughed at the thought of being a Peanut Butter Girl, just flesh and bone and crushed edible seeds.

Climbing from the floor, I called out, "Daddy-? I’m in the kitchen!”

The gown hem lagged under my feet, so I pretended it was the soles of satin slippers and shuffled to the stove. Then taking the radio in hand, I shuffled out of the kitchen, through the dining room, and into the living room.

"Daddy-? I was in the kitchen. Daddy-?”

As if roused by a rooster’s crow, I was hoping my father would be awakened by my voice. The vacuousness of his face, head, and posture would vanish. He would quickly rise from the chair. But standing before him with the radio, I noticed only a small difference in his appearance. In the dreary light of the living room, his lips had grown purple, his breathing had ceased. Lifting the big sunglasses, I was met with an icy stare- two pupils reduced to almost nothing -- so I lowered the sunglasses back over his eyes.

"I brought you this," I told him, putting the radio in his lap. Then I crouched before his boots, bending my legs inside the gown, and gazed up the expanse of his stiff body.

"Three are dead in a college motor coach crash,” the DJ reported. "The motor coach, packed with college cheerleaders from the University of Texas in Austin, flipped over near Georgetown yesterday, killing the coach and two cheerleaders. Seven others were injured, four critically. The accident is under investigation."

Just then I recalled my father on the Greyhound, holding the radio against an ear, listening to similar news broadcasts. "They’ll be searching for me,” he told me. "I need to monitor the information as it develops." But during our trip, there was no mention made of him or my mother’s corpse, a fact which somehow disappointed him. "Seems I don’t matter much anymore, Jeliza-Rose,” he later said. "Not worth a lousy headline.”

And squatting there by his boots, I wanted to tell him how much he mattered to me-how it was good being at What Rocks with just him, even if it wasn’t really Denmark. Then tears welled uncontrollably under my tired, heavy eyelids.

"It’s not your fault she’s dead,” I said. "She wasn’t very nice anyways.”

"Now don’t get all weepy,” I pictured him saying. "Everything’s fine."

But it wasn’t fine, and I told him that.

"It’s awful!”

I crumpled across his boots, my chest heaving.

"It’s all right," he’d tell me. "You’re safe as houses."

I imagined his hands stroking my neckline, soothing. Exhausted again, I began to drift off. And before sleep overtook me, I conjured the Bog Man in his bed of peat. His bones gnashing as he dug himself from the earth. But on my first night in the back country, the idea of him was no longer so frightening.

"He survived thousands of years," my father once said. "He just lay there waiting to come back to life."

"Please, come back to life,” I pled, dimly aware of the radio wavering on my father’s lap, the batteries loosing power as my eyes closed. "Please-"

The wind was now blowing around What Rocks, sweeping along the porch, clanking the hoist rope against the metal flagpole. The old place shuddered. In the pasture, the school bus rocked gently, the high Johnsongrass wavered. Thunder rumbled in the distance. But inside I slept once more, the wind droning in my dream like a horn -- and somewhere the mystery train whistled for no one as it chugged through barren and forbidding terrain, weaving further and further away from us.

6

I yawned with the feeling that dawn was just beginning, but the sunbeams descending through the windows, slanting crosswise on the floorboards, told me otherwise. The living room was warm, full of radiance and shadow. Rays had already fallen across the lower half of my gown, where my toes fidgeted in the dusty light. "Morning, morning," I muttered to myself, lifting my head from the boot tips, an uncomfortable pillow.

Then I stood quickly, pivoting on bare heels to my father.

"Good-morning.”

Skin that had grown pale was now completely pallid. But his earlobes, chin, forearms, and fingertips were discolored with a reddish-purple stain. It seemed that overnight the stiffness had left his body. The rigor around his lips and nose had vanished, giving him a sagging, almost benign expression. In the daylight, he was limp, his muscles no longer controlled anything. For a moment I held his hand, cautiously peering at his sunglasses. He wasn't cold. In fact, his temperature was equal to the warmth of the room. And a stubble had begun growing on his cheeks.

But I wasn’t too worried. He’d done this before: back at the apartment, he’d sometimes sit in front of the TV for days, statuelike, or he’d curl up on the couch and sleep and sleep and sleep. Then he’d suddenly stir. He’d climb from the couch, make himself coffee and something to eat, and be all smiles again. So once I asked, "Were you dead?”

And he replied, "Sugar, nothing can kill me. Daddy was only on vacation. That’s what I do, your momma too. We’re playin’ possum, you know?"

Playing possum for days, while I waited with my toys and watched TV and wondered when they’d return. And they always did. Except now Mom was really dead; I knew that for certain. But not my father -- he was playing possum again, vacationing in Denmark or somewhere else. Anyway, people didn’t just sit down and die. They rolled around sweating and screaming and dying. Like on TV, they gasped a lot while bleeding, or they fell to the ground in pain. They held their sides and kept their eyes open until, at last, they were gone. On TV, I’d seen people die a million times, and they never just sat down and stopped. They didn’t play possum or go on vacation. They died -- like Mom.

"Are you on vacation?"

Instead of waiting for an answer, I grabbed the silent radio from his lap, bringing it to my ear. I turned the volume dial back and forth, moved the station meter from one end to the other and back. Nothing worked. So I returned it to him with a sigh.

"Because if you’re not,” I said, "then it’s not funny then."

I wanted to rage around the living room, pounding the floorboards in frustration. But the urge to pee was so bad that my insides hurt.

"Won’t talk to you too,” I told him. "It’s not nice, you know. You won’t like it too.”

Then I left indignantly, pausing only to struggle from the gown, and hurried naked out the front door.

Beyond the porch, a clear sky stretched above the Johnsongrass. And while maneuvering past corroded nail caps that jutted from the planks, I squinted in the sunlight, which landed hot on my legs and stomach. Going down into the yard, I squatted beside the bottom porch step, and began urinating in the weeds. The piss came in a gush, spattering my ankles. Eventually, a small puddle formed underneath me, and I had to move my feet further out so they wouldn’t get wet.

When the pee dwindled, I glanced up with intense relief - and to my astonishment, a doe stood no more than twenty feet from where I hunched. She had wandered from the Johnsongrass with her long neck crooked, grazing at the nettles on the ground. At first I was so startled by the sight of her that I couldn’t think what to do. But finally I took a deep breath, pushed upright, and said, "Hi, are you hungry?"

Her head shot up, ears twitching, and her big eyes fixed on me. Keeping my gaze locked on her, I stooped and yanked at the stems of several weeds, all having been wetted by my urine. Then I went forward, carefully putting one foot in front of the other, offering the uprooted weeds in an open palm. But as I approached, she bolted. That’s when I spotted her left hind leg dangling at the joint, as if the bone had somehow been snapped at the femur.

"Don’t go!” I yelled, watching as she sprang into the Johnsongrass, the bad leg straggling, and disappeared on the cattle trail. "Come back! " I shut my palm, crushing the weeds, then threw them at the ground. "Stupid, I got you food!”

I considered bounding after her. If she knew how fast I can run, I thought, she’d be my friend. Then I could feed her and pet her and bring her into the farmhouse so she could sleep. I imagined hugging her in the kitchen, where she’d heal with the gown tied on her leg like a silky bandage. But when I heard the scampering, jabbering racket coming from behind, the idea of pursuit faded.

As I spun around, the noise stopped abruptly. Putting my hands above my brow, I scanned the porch. But nothing unusual presented itself. So I tilted my chin back, looked at the awning of roof that hung over the porch, and found myself eye-to-eye with a gray squirrel; he was frozen in place with a bushy tail curling near his head, studying this naked child in the yard below: "I see you," I said, grinning. "I know you’re there. You can’t hide.”

With his tail darting, the squirrel chattered at me briefly, an incomprehensible and irritated sound. On the edge of the awning, he made skirting movements left and right, freezing each time to give me an askance stare, then ran nimbly across the roof, scurrying to the east end of What Rocks. I followed in the yard, scratching my thighs on the overgrown buckthorn that had sprouted from under the porch.

"What were you saying?” I asked.

Reminding me of Spiderman, the squirrel sprinted along the exterior wall, traversing the wooden siding with tentative stops and starts. He halted beside the upstairs window of my father’s room, where a wide knothole existed. And even though the hole appeared too narrow, the squirrel squeezed halfway in, chattered some more with his rear section and tail sticking out, then slipped through with no effort.

"You better wait," I said, hoping he might hear me and return. "I didn’t understand you.”

Because the knothole was by the window, I pictured the squirrel exploring my father’s room, rummaging in the backpack on the mattress, sniffing at the empty Schnapps bottle. And I recalled a documentary my father and I once saw on PBS, which showed how clever squirrels could be -- hanging upside down from branches and stealing bird-feeder seeds, sailing between trees in order to avoid elaborate lawn traps set by angry homeowners.

"Pigeons without wings,” was what my father called them.

Sometimes the two of us took long walks alongside the L.A. River. When we reached Webster Park, he delighted in chasing pigeons from our path, kicking at them with his boots. But if my father hated pigeons, he hated squirrels even more.

"They’re like rats," he explained. "They’ll chew on any- thing, practically eat metal. Not worth shit. At least you know where you stand with a rat."

"I don’t think I like rats," I told him.

"Well, I don’t like squirrels,” he said.

As a boy, a squirrel he’d captured in a milk crate bit him.

"Broke the skin on my thumb so bad I could’ve bled to death. Me and my cousin beat it dead with a bat, but not before it tried climbing my pants leg, all crazy and mad. I swear that sucker meant to do me harm. Then for months afterwards I kept getting these really horrible dreams -- squirrels all over my bedroom, in my bed, gone totally nuts, tangling themselves in my hair, sinking those big yellow teeth deep in my scalp, tearing at everything. It was awful."

And on those afternoon walks, my father often picked a nice-sized rock from the ground. Then we’d leave the path and go behind a bush, huddling in anticipation. Soon as a squirrel wandered into view, he’d leap forward, pitching the rock like a baseball player. Usually he missed, but on at least three occasions a squirrel was struck, sending it rolling over in the grass.

"Gotcha," he said, almost laughing as the stunned rodent struggled to its feet. "Look at the poor dumb thing!"

Standing directly beneath the upstairs window, I knew my father would hate the idea of a squirrel lurking somewhere in the farmhouse.

"You’ll get in trouble,” I shouted at the knothole, "so you shouldn’t be in there!” It became apparent that the squirrel wasn’t listening, so I rushed onto the porch, once again minding the nail caps, and went inside.

While passing the living room, I said to my father, "I’m not telling you a secret because you won’t like it. "

Then I skipped to the stairs, thinking that if the squirrel was hiding in What Rocks, I’d need some serious help. In my bedroom, I wondered which Barbie head would join me. Contemplating each piece on the mattress, the decision was easy. Magic Curl Barbie head, with her thick blond hair, lacked guts. Both Fashion Jeans Barbie head and Cut ’N Style Barbie head were damaged -- someone had stabbed a hole in Fashion Jeans’ right eye, Cut ’N Style’s forehead and eyes had been colored black with a pen. My choice was Classique Benefit Ball Barbie head, my favorite, and the only one to have real rooted eyelashes.

Planting Classique’s head on my index finger, I said, "Are you ready?”

"Of course," she replied, "I was born ready."

"Good, because this could get pretty dangerous.”

"How wonderful.”

Creeping into the bathroom, we hesitated by the door to my father’s room. "I’m scared,” I whispered. "What if he tries to bite me?”

"Nonsense. You’re a big girl. A squirrel is only a squirrel."

"I know,” I said, turning the knob. "But you go first."

The hinges squealed as I pushed the door open. And before going in, I made certain the squirrel wasn’t hanging above the doorway, ready to drop on my head. Then I extended my arm, entering with Classique leading the way.

"See there," she said. "Safe as houses."

Everything was as before -- the dirty clothes and Schnapps bottle, the backpack, the lamp on the night table, the throw rug on the floor.

"But I’m sure he’s here," I said, walking forward.

I had expected to find the squirrel waiting on the mattress, upright on his hind legs, teeth flared, paws punching in my direction.

"Don’t be so sure, dear."

We leaned, peeking under the box spring, spotting dust balls, a folded section of newspaper, the exoskeletons of several June bugs. Then we crawled across the mattress, where I examined the windowsill, searching for the other side of the knothole.

"Where does it come out?"

"Beats me," Classique said. "Maybe he’s magic. Maybe he isn’ t really a squirrel at all but a fairy.”

I pressed my nose against the wood paneling, sniffing like a bloodhound for any sign of the squirrel. A strong butternut smell filled my nostrils, almost producing a sneeze.

So I turned my head, easing an ear against the paneling, and listened.

"Not even as good as a pigeon," I said.

"Unless he’s magical. That’s what he was telling you, I think.”

"Maybe,” I said, catching a bustling patter within the inner wall. "Do you hear that?”

"I think so."

"He’s in the wall," I said, tapping an area left of the windowsill. "Classique, he’s right in here." And as I tapped harder, the stirring quit.

Then I heard chattering.

Then silence.

"What do we do now?”

"If you want my opinion,” Classique said, "I think you should get dressed. If you put clothes on, you won’t frighten the animals away.”

"You’re right,” I said, suddenly self-conscious.

"I know," she replied.

Returning to my bedroom, I put Classique with the other Barbie heads, then scooped my dress from the floor, saying, "I don’t believe in fairies. Only lightning bugs are like fairies anyway, not squirrels. Squirrel butts don’t glow, just lightning bug and fairy butts.”

Once the dress was on, I sat at the edge of the mattress, cradling the socks and sneakers in my lap. The socks stank, so did my feet.

"Frito feet,” I called them, inspecting the brown undersurface of my right foot. Then, before pulling on the sneakers, I whiffed the frayed insoles, recoiling from the sharp aroma.

"Gross,” I said, snorting a laugh. "Spaghetti cheese.”

And suddenly my stomach rumbled. The Peanut Butter Girl needs breakfast, I thought. Then I remembered my lip. I searched for the slit with my tongue, but couldn’t locate it. So dragging my shoelaces across the floor, I headed into the bathroom for a better look.

In the mirror above the sink, I turned my lip down.

"Stop pouting,” I told myself, trying to sound like my mother.

The cut had all but healed, so I crossed my eyes for a second, growling at my reflection: "You’re hopeless, Jeliza-Rose. What are you good for? You can’t even keep bleeding?"

Then I knelt to tie my sneakers. And while knotting the laces, I noticed a small hatch below the sink, fashioned from the same wood as the wall panels. It was kept shut by a night latch which had become speckled with rust.

In my imagination, the hatch was the door Alice unlocked in the rabbit-hole, opening to reveal a corridor that ended at a garden, where beds of bright flowers and cool fountains existed. And because the entry was bigger than what Alice had discovered, a DRINK ME potion wasn’t needed for shrinking.

"Classique,” I shouted, using both hands to pivot the bolt from its notch, "there’s a way in!” The other end of the knot- hole, I thought. Squirrel, you can’t hide from me.

As the hatch swung ajar, a humid draft rushed out, bringing the scent of sawdust into the bathroom. From where I crouched, it was impossible to tell what lay beyond the hatch, except a murky space illuminated by an insubstantial amount of natural light. There was no passageway to be seen, no garden, no squirrels drinking from fountains.

So I went and got Classique, who said, "Bring Magic Curl with us. She can help."

"Are we going in?" I asked, sticking Magic Curl on my pinky.

"I think so, dear. I don’t see why not.”

"I don’t want to go,” Magic Curl said. "This isn’t a good idea.”

"Shut up, you baby,” Classique snapped at her. "You’re not going in with us, you’re just keeping guard.”

"Why can’t Fashion Jeans or Cut ’N Style do it?"

"Believe me, I wish they could,” Classique said. "But both your eyeballs work good, so it’s your job, okay? And if you keep on complaining -- then me and Jeliza-Rose will cut off all your hair.”

"Please don’t," Magic Curl whimpered. "I’ll behave."

"You better," I said. "You’d better just watch it."

In the bathroom, I left Magic Curl in front of the hatch.

"Please be careful," she said.

"We will,” I replied.

"If we’re not back in an hour," Classique told Magic Curl, "then come after us because it means we’re being pulverized."

Then Classique and I crossed through the hatchway, where we soon found ourselves standing among the exposed fiberglass insulation of the farmhouse attic.

"It’s a little cave,” I said, blinking while my sight adjusted.

With daylight slanting in from a side vent, the attic was less dim than it had seemed.

Plumbing curved out of the wall behind us.

Electrical wiring, red and black and yellow, ran overhead.

Before us sat three cardboard boxes and a large trunk.

"Those boxes,” Classique said, "let’s take a look.”

"I don't know.”

"Are you scared again?”

"I don’t know.”

"Don’t be. What’s so spooky about a box?”

"It’s the treasure chest that’s spooky."

"But I bet there’s only slippers and maybe gold in it.”

"Or a killed thing,” I said, thrusting Classique ahead as we ducked spiderwebs and a length of insulation that drooped from the sloped ceiling.

"It’s Grandmother’s stuff,” said Classique.

"Yeah," I said, brushing a fine layer of dust off the cardboard tops.

All three boxes had been written on with a marker, each with a different word (LPs. PICTURE BOOKS. CHRISTMAS). In the first box were old 78s, haphazardly packed, the plain wrappers just a bit more brittle than the records. The second box contained six photo albums, but we didn’t recognize any of the faces in the black-and-white shots -- children riding a scooter and a tricycle and a horse, men and women at a picnic in a field, a fishing trip, a wedding, an oblong brick home surrounded by other oblong brick homes.

"Strangers,” Classique said. "Nobodies.”

The third box offered broken Christmas ornaments, shatered in shards of green, silver, and red, with the hook attachments still intact.

"Worthless junk."

"Totally worthless. We need gold -- and slippers. Gold slippers are good too."

The chest reeked of mothballs. Inside were three blond wigs, all tangled in a clump, which frightened me.

"It’s a head.” I said, stepping backwards.

"No,” said Classique. "See, there’s clothes."

I looked again, realizing the wigs belonged to a larger design: two long fluffy boas stretched alongside a baggy chemise. And there were hats. A bonnet, a pillbox, and a torn cloche. Deeper in the chest, sandwiched between the wrap-arounds and embroidered quilts, was a large mason jar containing a black cosmetic bag -- as if the items within the bag were meant to be preserved forever, sealed away from the heat and dusty air of the attic.

"She wanted to be beautiful," I told Classique, picturing Grandmother at the front door of What Rocks, one of the boas wound about her neck, fluttering a gloved hand at someone; her crimson lips pursed, her blond wig styled and capped by the cloche.

"She wasn’t beautiful," Classique said. "She was old.”

"She was my grandmother?

"She was ugly with boxes of junk.”

"You’re lying,” I said. "If you don’t shut up, we’re leaving.”

But we stayed in the attic until I remembered Magic Curl. Then I turned and gazed at the hatchway. Classique nodded on my fingertip, but we didn’t move. From our perspective, the hatch seemed almost as tiny as the knothole.

"We’re squirrels," I finally said. "That’s what we are."

But Classique couldn’t say anything. I didn’t want her to.

"Jeliza-Rose and Classique are outside looking for us," I said. "But they can’t find where we’re hiding.”

And as we headed toward the bathroom, I removed her from my finger, clutched her in a fist, and pretended my footsteps left pawprints on the dirty floorboards.

7

I was planning on visiting the grazing pasture at dusk, where I’d wait in the bus for the fireflies. And I wouldn’t let the train catch me off guard. That’s why I dug Grandmother’s cloth bonnet from the attic chest -- when the train approached that evening, the bonnet would be on, tied securely under my chin, shielding my ears.

But after retrieving the bonnet, my shins began itching; I’d brushed against fiberglass as I crawled through the hatchway.

"It’s awful," I told Classique in my bedroom.

"You’ll make yourself bleed," she said, watching from my finger as I scratched at my shins. "Do it any harder and you’ll cut yourself. "

I kept scraping like mad until the pain became greater than the itchiness. Then I sighed with relief and flopped onto my bed.

"That’s good,” I said, my shins burning. "That’s better.”

"I’m bored. This is boring. Let's spin on the porch.”

Classique hovered in front of my face like a fly, so I twirled my finger, rotating her in a circular motion.

"Stop it," she said. "I’ll get dizzy and barf."

"No you won’t. You can’t. Your mouth doesn’t work." I quit jiggling my finger, just in case.

My mother warned me about spinning in circles, not to do it in the apartment, especially following a meal. She said gyrating caused vomiting. But I never got sick. I spun during commercial breaks, arms outstretched. And I loved doing it in the living room -- the carpet scrunching and the TV whizzing by -- while my mother was unconscious, and my father slept on the couch. The wall pictures turned blurry with streaking colors and the shag carpet burned underfoot and snagged between my toes and the TV shot past as an eruption of static. Overhead, the bumpy ceiling swirled like a milk-white whirlpool and the plaster bumps were smoothed as the spinning increased, flattening everything, the edges all dissolved. Another spin in the opposite direction, the shag roots tugging and gritting, the living room easily shifting gears.

When my mother was awake, she could hear the sounds of my twirling from her bedroom. And she’d yell; I was only allowed to do splits in the living room, and handstands on my bed. The mattress was close to the floor, firm and wide. My neck wouldn’t get broken if I fell. Still, handstands were tedious, so I usually did a couple before quitting. The splits were okay. Sometimes she had me do them in her bedroom, smiling as I brought my nose to the carpet. But spinning in the living room was what I loved, and the dizziness afterwards.

And on the farmhouse porch, I spun with itchy ankles, the wood slats groaning. It was the first time since leaving the apartment, though I considered having a whirl in the aisle of the Greyhound. With Classique and Magic Curl and Fashion jeans on my fingertips, we went round and round, all four of us. Cut ’N Style stayed upstairs. She was just too blind.

"Eyes that can’t see don’t enjoy twirling,” Classique concluded when I began gathering the heads. We never played with Cut ’N Style anyway, unless we had a tea party -- then she became the guest of honor.

Our corner of the front porch was shaded. It felt cool and pleasant. Sunlight shined further on, landing across the steps leading to the yard. But our corner had fallen under siege: army ants traveled in three long lines, back and forth along the slats, up and down the newels. They came and went from the thin crack beneath the front door, carrying crumbs in their pincers; some had dust balls or what looked like bits of straw. I suspected that if one of the Barbies dropped in their midst, she’d quickly be hoisted and dumped off the porch, disappearing forever in the overgrowth below. So I spun in defense, performing pirouettes on the ants. Then I stomped all three ant lines, squashing the invaders, scrambling their ranks, chanting, "Save Cut ’N Style from the monsters! Save Cut ’N Style from the monsters!”

Cut ’N Style was unprotected on my pillow, surrounded by the torso, dismembered arms and legs. At Kmart, I once studied a brand new Cut ’N Style in her box. With hoop earrings, hands poised for clapping, red hair hanging to her butt, she was a stunning doll. Her baby-blue eyes glowed, and her Astronaut Fashion dress with matching go-go boots was an inspired touch. Years ago, my Cut ’N Style’s head had been even more stylish than Classique-and that’s why Classique hated her. In an effort to clean the black ink from Cut ’N Style’s forehead and eyes, I poured nail polish remover over her face, just a few drops. But it smeared the red paint on her lips, blemished her plastic cheeks, and didn’t put a dent in the ink.

"Now she’s a complete freak," Classique said. "Get rid of her."

"I can’t," I said. "What if it happened to you?"

"Then you should kill me."

The lines re-formed. The slats were overrun again.

For every crushed ant, at least two more arrived and began picking at the remains, the splat, the parts that hadn't been mashed into nothing. I was too dizzy to continue spinning, so I leaned against a newel and followed the lines with my wobbly vision. The army ants looked enormous and ancient, like runty dirt dobbers -- except they didn’t have wings.

On the soles of my sneakers, when I checked for bug parts, there were wet stains, dark and fresh, not unlike the chewing tobacco juice my father sometimes spit into a Coke bottle. And there was an ant head squirming in a tread, pincers still moving; the mangled body somewhere onthe porch, or between the pincers of some other ant.

"Help me,” it was trying to say. "I don’t want to die. No, please-”

I brought my sneaker down, grinding the sole, then pounded it on the slats, making certain that the ant head was atomized.

"No mercy."

I singled out the biggest ants. I smushed their rear sections, allowing the front and middle sections to scramble away. Or I leveled the heads so only the rear and middle parts continued moving.

Then I watched.

The separated rear sections went astray, often slipping between the slats. But the head sections dragged themselves forward, showing no pain. So I picked them from the line and flicked them past the edge of the porch. To serve as a warning for the others, I didn’t bother the rear parts. Sometimes a dumb ant explored one of the cleaved sections, but it couldn’t understand what had happened. So it clambered on without a worry. But it didn’t matter. I was tired of killing. These ants lacked intelligence anyway; they couldn’t care any less about getting stomped -- they weren’t even interested in revenge. Squirrels were different. A squirrel would squish a person if given the opportunity.

"What do we do?" asked Classique.

Tugging Magic Curl and Fashion Jeans from my fingers, I said, "Wait, I got an idea.”

Now I had a mission. So did Classique. Fashion Jeans and Magic Curl were hostages held by guerrilla forces; their heads sat on nail butts and the army ants roamed nearby. It was a desperate situation. But we could free only one, otherwise we might get noticed. Fashion Jeans was the obvious choice. She wasn’t a whiney ass, so we’d save her.

I leapt across the porch, clearing enemy lines. Classique swooped down, almost sliding from my fingertip, and rescued Fashion Jeans before an ant reached her neck. But the mission hadn’t been completed. We needed to get back. I sprinted over the ants -- swinging my arms -- and Classique went sailing. And when I picked her up from the porch, she said, "It’s a stupid game. Let’s do something else.”

So we abandoned Fashion Jeans, and went searching for squirrels. But while skipping to the steps, I tripped. It was a mess. I tried getting hold of the railing, except I was stum- bling and couldn’t manage. My tailbone hit the top step; I sprang up. Then I fell. I couldn’t stop myself, I was going too fast. My legs, my hands, elbows -- they went crazy. I landed crosswise on the bottom step, clutching Classique. And for a moment I remained crumpled by the yard, like a monstrous foot had squashed me there. When I stood, splinters poked from the redness of my shins, thin slivers of wood sticking under the skin. I yanked them and then scratched. The itching was beginning again.

"l could’ve mashed you,” I told Classique. "I could’ve fallen on you and you’d be dead.”

Like that woman in Poland: she became suicidal after her husband said he was leaving. He told her that he was going to live with another woman. Then he left their apartment, which was on the tenth floor of a building. While he was exiting the lobby, his wife jumped from the balcony. She soared downward, hoping to collide with the sidewalk, and dropped smack-dab on her wanton husband’s skull. Killing him. And she survived. I heard all about it during this TV show. Stranger Than Fiction, Amazing Stories of Life and Death. But my mother thought I was lying.

"A man tumbled into a coleslaw blender and got mixed to death."

"No he didn’t.”

"And another man tumbled into melted chocolate and died, and it happened to another man but it was gravy instead of chocolate. They died in vats."

"Jeliza-Rose, your stories aren’t interesting.”

"Do you know what this woman in New Zealand was stabbed to death with?”

"I don’t care. That’s enough.”

"A frozen sausage. Can you believe it? And this man was in a coffin--”

"Enough. Seal it!"

But my father believed me. And when I explained about the workmen in Houston who tried freeing a squirrel from an irrigation pipe, he listened carefully.

"They lifted the pipe and it bumped a power wire, and they got zapped dead. But the squirrel was okay."

"Horrible," he said. "That’s really awful."

And that second day at What Rocks, I spied a ghost lady near the railroad tracks, and wondered if she’d died horribly - if something like a frozen yogurt machine had electrocuted her, or a vat of molten lipstick was accidentally spilled on her. Or maybe she was lured to a wedding and murdered.

I wouldn’t have seen the ghost if Classique hadn’t asked to visit the bus. We’d been among the weeds, creeping around the farmhouse yard in hopes of spotting another squirrel, when she said, "Jeliza-Rose, show me that upside-down place."

"Okay,” I told her, "but only you and me can go, and you can’t tell anyone else because it’s secret.”

Then we snuck away toward the Johnsongrass, careful not to arouse Magic Curl and Fashion Jeans; their hollow necks stuck over nail butts on the front porch, hostages once more.

Stepping along the cattle trail, Classique and I quietly sang, "I’m a little tea pot, short and stout-" And as we reached the grazing pasture, I mentioned how the fireflies had materialized from nowhere.

"So now we can’t sing or talk now,” I said, dropping my voice, "or we’ll spook the lightning bugs and they won’t come tonight.”

And when she said, "We must see the light bugs tonight,” I put her against my lips and shushed her.

"You’ll scare them," I said. "They probably won’t be out tonight anyway.”

I didn’t want her returning with me that evening. The fireflies were my extra secret friends. Classique wouldn’t understand their blinks.

Minding the bluebonnets that lurked in the high foxtails, we walked the length of the wreck. Then I bowed at a busted window, where the foxtail spikes tickled my chin. In midday, the upturned bus was smaller, less ominous than I remembered. And gazing straight through the gloomy interior, I caught sight of the Johnsongrass parting in the adjacent field -- the ghost moving out into pasture, partially obscured by the rise of railroad tracks.

"It’s a lady,” I said, noting her black dress.

Her head was covered by a mesh hood, the kind beekeepers use for protection; she stooped-she didn’t notice us. And the idea of running never crossed my mind. My heart didn’t beat any faster, my hands didn’t shake.

For a better view, Classique and I crept to the rear of the bus, my steps swooshing in the foxtails. And peeping around the side, we saw the ghost grabbing nettles, effortlessly, like pulling one Kleenex and then another from the box.

Ghost, I thought. Big fat ghost.

With the hood on, her housedress bunching as she crouched, the ghost appeared larger than any woman I’d ever encountered, including my mother. And while observing her at work, Classique and I were all whispers.

"She comes from a cave somewhere in that field,” I said.

"Because she was killed in this very bus,” said Classique, "all burned bad and that’s why her face is covered.”

"She boils what she pulls in a pot and makes weed soup. That’s what she does.”

"That’s how ghosts get fat. There’s so many weeds it’d be easy to get fat that way.”

No other explanation presented itself.

On Halloween, I asked my father if ghosts haunted L.A., and he said just a few, mostly dead movie stars, like Marilyn Monroe and Fatty Arbuckle.

"But in Texas,” he explained, "there’s a ton. Bluesmen like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Leadbelly wander Dallas streets at night. Woody Guthrie too. Then there’s the Alamo -- that joint is rich with spooks. And where Mother lived, way out in nowhere, she’d spot ghosts coming and going right outside her windows, right in the middle of the day.”

"Bullshit," my mother said. "Noah, you’ll be up with her tonight when she’s scared to sleep."

"No I won’t," my father told her, "‘cause I’m saying now that most spooks are harmless. They just want to be seen but don’t want to be bothered.” Then he gave me one of his winks, saying, "As long as Mother was alive, them ghosts didn’t bug her. In fact, she enjoyed knowing they was there. They kept an eye on her place, made her feel all safe."

And I was going to tell Classique what my father had said, but then my ankles were itching again, and my legs felt like needles were pricking at the skin but not quite sinking in.

"She got killed in the fire," whispered Classique.

Wrenching nettles from the ground and throwing them aside, the ghost paused to wipe dirt on her white apron. And even though it was warm outside, she wore gray mittens.

"No, she didn’t get burned in the bus,” I said. "She got strangled.”

"And drowned."

"She’s Queen Gunhild and she didn’t want to stay in the bog so she decided not to be dead anymore."

Bog men rose from their peat graves, so did Gunhild. After all, she was a bog woman. And perhaps my father had become a ghost. He could be in the kitchen eating crackers, or upstairs searching for that squirrel. He might be on the porch, waiting.

"We have to go."

"Right now."

"We have to hurry.”

But I couldn’t run because my shins were sore. So we took our time.

The ghost was busy with her mittens, whistling a pretty song. The railroad tracks and the foxtails made it impossible to see what exactly her mittens were doing.

"He won’t be on the porch,” Classique said. "He won’t be upstairs. He’s not a ghost yet.”

"But he will be."

"I know," she said. "I know everything?

I looked at her face, her long eyelashes. I wondered who removed her head. I wondered who did that kind of thing to dolls.

8

Classique said, "Quit scratching and it’ll stop itching."

That’s what my mother would tell me when I pinched at a scab or rubbed a bug bite.

"Just let it be and it’ll heal quicker. You’re making it worse.”

So upstairs in the bathroom, I resisted the urge to rake my shins with my fingernails. Instead, I donned one of Grandmother’s blond wigs. And standing at the mirror, I put on lipstick, trying my best to apply it evenly. If the lipstick ended up crooked or smeared, then it became poisonous. My tongue would swell, and I’d choke.

Grandmother’s cosmetic bag had six different lipsticks, various shades of red, the scarlet being my favorite because it reminded me of apples. It also reminded me of blood. And it felt waxy like an apple peel but didn’t dry like blood. I wondered if each lipstick had its own flavor and smell. I wondered if scarlet tasted good. I’d know when I finished; I’d bring the stick to my tongue and lick it. Then I could slide it between my lips -- I’d study my reflection, how the stick went in and out -- and see what flavor it had. I could bite into the stick if I wanted; I could chew it in my mouth like gum. But that was too risky. I didn’t want my tongue swelling -- microscopic syringes hid in the lipstick.

I spread it carefully. If I went any quicker my hand might get shaky and the lipstick would end up all over my chin; it might redden my nose. Then the poison would be released. A gradual application was the safest bet, stay within the borders, no hurry -- like drawing in my Barbie Coloring Book. It was easy coloring the dresses or hair. But the heads and arms and legs were difficult to get right; they were so thin, my crayons always scooted past the borders if I hurried. When I wasn’t meticulous, the picture got ruined, and Barbie had to be ripped from the pages. And I cursed myself.

Careful. Almost done. Deadly lips as delicious as an apple. Dream Date Jeliza-Rose doll. When the lipstick reached the nooks of my mouth I had to pause; it was hard getting the scarlet neatly in the corners.

My reflection glowered. She suddenly resembled my mother and it frightened me. She said, "Get on with it. You little bitch, l’m hungry.” She was staring into my eyes, gazing through me.

I glanced down. The lipstick moved. I felt it smear and looked up. The scarlet had smudged across my upper lip, daubed between my nostrils. Doomed. My reflection smiled with her crazy wig and messy lips. Murderer. I’d been poisoned.

Grasping my throat, I ran into my bedroom.

"Classique, I’m dying. My tongue is filling my head. I can’t talk anymore because I'm really dying now."

"Dear, you’re already dead,” she told me. "You’re a ghost!”

"Already?”

"A spook.”

I touched the blond coils hanging on my forehead.

"And so beautiful too. I’m a vision.”

"Very beautiful," she said. "More beautiful than -- I don’t know.”

"More beautiful than-"

Scampering, rapid light-sounding steps came from behind. I turned. I couldn’t believe it.

The squirrel was at the bathroom door, puffy tail curled - he sniffed the floor; I watched him. That twitching muzzle. He was almost motionless, hunched in the doorway. I wondered what to do, but I couIdn’t think -- I could only watch. It was as if he didn’t see me, and I wasn’t afraid of him. I just didn’t know what to do.

Then he cocked his head to one side, considering me. His paws flexed on the floorboards. I waited to see if he seemed fearful; then I worried that other squirrels were coming, a hit squad. When I took a deep breath, he swung around, facing me, went up on his hind legs, sniffing. He wasn’t scared.

"What do you want? How’d you get in?"

I knew the squirrel was fast. And he was mean. He could spring through the air. He might bite me. He might steal Classique, eat her hair, and gnaw her into nothing with those nasty teeth. It was creepy, an animal always chewing on wood or wires or plastic things. He did it because he was a pig and couldn’t hunt food like a lion. He was also stupid. But his teeth were huge, tusks, worse than claws. While attacking, he could sink into a skull as easy as someone crunching into an apple.

"You better leave,” I said, a warning for good measure, but it didn’t rattle him. "You go!”

His tail swooshed. He couldn’t quit sniffing. His ears quivered.

I threw the wig at him. But it missed; he was already scrambling, tearing through the room.

So I hurdled onto my bed, screaming, "Go away!"

The squirrel was confused and chirping like a bird; his knothole was somewhere else. He sprang from one end of the room to the other, desperate for a good climbing place -- a wall without a ceiling overhead, just sky. Back and forth across the throw rug. Chattering and angry. That was the worst part. Squirrel babble near my bed and me and the dolls. Then under the bed, then out, across the throw rug again, to the wall -- to the other wall. Hesitate, sniff, stand, down, run. Chatter, chirp. Back under the bed, out. Across the throw rug. Wall to wall.

I hobbled on the mattress, yelling, bouncing the doll parts. Doll heads leaping. Some of them mashed by my feet, like ants. Toes on Classique, toes on Fashion Jeans. Jumping and shouting.

Then he froze, no good climbing place, no knothole.

I couldn't scream anymore; the breath had abandoned me. My shins were itching. The wig sat in a clump. The room smelled like skunk.

"Just go-"

He shot into the bathroom, skidding on the floor. Claws scratching; he was frantic, irate. Hopping about in there, making a racket -- then he was gone.

"You don’t come back!" I yelled, stepping to the floor.

But I knew he wouldn’t return; that was why I left the bed. I was going to discover how he got inside What Rocks; it didn’t make sense. I stood at the bathroom doorway. I glanced over a shoulder, like a paratrooper on the verge of plunging. I was alone. Classique and the others had been bounced into unconsciousness. They probably wouldn’t join me anyway, not on this mission. So I entered the bathroom, tip-toeing, with eyes alert and ready.

I noticed the hatch at once; it was slightly open, wide enough for a squirrel. When I brought the wig and cosmetic bag from the attic, I’d forgotten to shut the night latch. And peeking through the opening I spotted him. He was near the chest. He was nibbling on scrap wood, holding it in his paws. I didn’t yell or call for Classique. I didn’t want the squirrel to know I’d found him. This was how it should be -- me spying on him while he did squirrel stuff, like nibble and then clean his face by wetting his paws. I wasn’t mad that the squirrel got in the attic. This was better than stalking him outside.

Also, I liked the idea of doing something without Classique, but she often became jealous if I ignored her. So I’d make certain she wouldn’t know about the squirrel, how I could see his busy paws, his head between them as he rubbed at his snout, cleaning. I could see him scratching his side with a hind leg. I was thrilled. I could have clapped my hands with delight. But I was scared to make a sound, or everything might get ruined.

I could hear Classique stirring, whispering my name. But I didn’t answer. I’d wait by the hatch until the squirrel went away, then I’d leave the bathroom before Classique panicked. But she kept saying my name; she’d whisper it all day, thinking the squirrel had punctured my brain and dragged me into the attic for a chew.

I wanted to scratch my shins. It was humid here, heat pushing from the attic. It was hot. The squirrel sniffed and glanced my way.

Caught.

He bit the air with his teeth. He tried to bluster me, to bully my eyes, to keep me from looking.

We were gazing at each other now, waiting for one another to bolt. It’d be finished soon; Classique would know I was in the bathroom and bellow. These were the final seconds of just me and the squirrel. Next thing, he was scampering toward the vent. He was squeezing between the slants, gone again.

"The wig needs help! It’s in trouble! Where are you?"

It was Classique.

"Don’t rush me,” I said, pushing the night latch. "I’m in here minding my own business.”

And as I exited the bathroom, my right foot landed on the wig and I almost slipped.

"See there," said Classique. "That wig is trouble."

"That’s not what you said,” I told her.

"That’s exactly what I said."

I put the wig on. Then Classique.

"I’m hungry,” I said. "Are you?”

"Silly,” she said, "I don’t have a stomach. It goes in my mouth and drops on the floor like pooh.”

"Gross.” I laughed. "You’re gross. Now I’m not hungry."

But I was lying; nothing could prevent me from eating. Not even army ants. They were in the kitchen, raiding the saltines. They crawled around the rim of the peanut butter jar, explored the water jug. They’d stolen chunks from a Wonder Bread slice. It bothered me. But I should’ve sealed everything up the night before. Then all the ants could scavenge were crumbs, and the peanut butter smeared on the counter -- I’d been sloppy -- and the bread crust I’d removed like a scab, tossing it aside. They were welcome to the crust. I hated it more than them.

So I ate without destroying any ants. I just thumped them from the jar, from the cracker box.

"Pulverize them," said Classique. "Make them die."

She was annoyed. She was pouting. She’d got peanut butter in her hair when I’d scooped some with a finger. I was always getting junk in her hair, glue or toothpaste. She worried her hair would fall out. Aside from her rooted eyelashes, it was all she had, and she had lots of it -- but baldness still tormented her. I was concerned too, so at home I bathed her and washed her hair. I never used a lot of shampoo and I always combed it afterwards. Every time. Her red hair was thick. If I didn’t comb it, she’d go frizzy and look stupid.

"These ants are evil,” said Classique. "They’re poisoning everything. It isn’t funny.”

"But it’s my fault." I’d finished my peanut butter crackers and was licking my finger-knife. "They’d go somewhere else if l didn’t make messes."

It was dumb, not putting the food away. Bread slices left out overnight were hard and withering; I sprinkled water on them but it didn’t help. Now I was going to have to let the ants finish them. Dozens of pincers clamping and ripping. Piranhas. They’d get so fat they’d pop.

Wonder Bread bombs, I thought. Ants exploding on the porch.

Serves them right, thought Classique.

We could suddenly read each other’s minds. We were psychic. Like those people on TV.

In the 1500’s, Nostradamus predicted the rise of Hitler and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He was a physician and an astrologer. He was also French. The Loch Ness monster, via extrasensory perception, communicated with an elderly Scottish woman every Friday. She refused to say what it told her. The Bible foretold the disaster in Chernobyl. Dion Warwick relied on psychic friends for picking her hit singles. Ghosts appreciated receiving gifts, like cookies or toys; it was a way of acknowledging their presence, of befriending them. Six out of ten twins could read each other’s minds. It was all true. It was on TV.

The ghost is sending us a message.

What is it?

I’rn not sure.

If we go upstairs we can see her, I think.

We can look out the window and see her.

Yes. Come on-

We raced upstairs, vaulting every other step. And going to my bedroom window, short of breath, we looked hopefully for the ghost -- but even if she was haunting the field, the Johnsongrass and bus blocked our view.

I sighed. There were moth bodies outside, near the window ledge, dotting the roof. I didn’t feel like being psychic anymore; my brain hurt.

"I don’t see her."

"She wanted something. Ghosts appreciate gifts."

I nodded and sucked the peanut butter from Classique’s hair. Then I asked, "What can we give her?”

"Not just anything," she told me. "It’s got to be useful. A good gift."

"Like cookies."

"Except we don’t have cookies anyway."

I would have killed for some cookies, Oreos or Nutter Butters. I loved them almost as much as Crunch bars.

"It doesn’t need to be food,” she said.

"I could draw a picture of you and me.”

"Or give her Cut ’N Style."

"Or Magic Curl.”

I imagined Magic Curl squirming in the ghost’s palm and blubbering like a baby; she’d wet herself, if she could.

"Something else."

There was lipstick on Classique’s hair. I closed my eyes. On TV, a little boy in Germany shut his eyes and foresaw the future. He predicted that dark clouds would gather above his village and rain toads. The next day, after a violent thunderstorm, thousands of dying toads flopped on the village streets.

"What can only a dead person use?” she said. "Think."

"I can’t think. Crackers?”

"Or the radio. It’s dead too."

I opened my eyes. "Yes. She can listen to ghost voices then.”

"And ghost music.”

"But Daddy likes it.”

"He’s not a ghost yet. He doesn’t need it.”

"That’s right. I forgot."

In the living room, I reached for the radio without glimpsing my father’s face. I lifted it from his lap. I knew he was staring behind the sunglasses. And as Classique and I ran outside, I fiddled with the dial. I listened; no music, no static. KVRP, eclectic music for eclectic minds. That was the station I wanted. But it wouldn’t come in. I couldn’t hear anything, where one station ended and another began.

"It’s the perfect gift," I concluded. "It really is.”

"I think so too."

The ghost was nowhere to be seen, so we struggled through the high weeds, up the rise, across the railroad tracks, but not before I made certain a train wasn’t approaching. Then we slinked down the embankment, and crept into the field -- a portion of which had been cleared, the earth brown and bumpy from uprooting. Pulled nettles were discarded in a pile.

"She’s not making soup."

"Not even for potions.”

She’d trampled foxtails to the ground, yanked and tossed nettles. She’d stacked stones and rocks -- just to save bluebonnets. That’s what her mittens had been tending. The field was littered with the spring flowers, and the ghost was protecting them.

"She doesn’t like us here," Classique said. "Be quick.”

So I set the radio on the ground and began encircling it with the biggest of the stacked rocks, careful not to disturb any flowers. I told myself that the ghost would welcome the courtesy, but I wasn’t sure. After all, I was returning rocks to the field, creating a jagged circle among her flowers.

"That’s good."

"Let’s go.”

As we clamored up the embankment, Classique sent me a thought -- she’ll know what to do with the radio.

I saw it on TV. A man in New Mexico could turn his radio dial and tune in the raspy voices of deceased loved ones. Sometimes his television broadcast his dead son playing soccer in a foggy meadow; he had proof, he had a videotape.

Of course, I thought. She’ll understand. She’s a ghost.

And moving over the tracks, we heard the quarry boom, a faint explosion, like a distant thunderclap.

"It’s magic," I said, gazing at the clear sky. "They’re making thunder. That’s what they do.”

9

I hypnotized myself by swinging a Barbie arm in front of my face.

I said, "Your legs won’t itch anymore. And you won’t scratch them for four years.”

Then I hypnotized Classique and the others.

"You are sleepy," I told them. "You are so sleepy and you are sleeping. You are dreaming of trains, of Eskimo Pies and old men dancing with bears. Cut ’N Style, my voice is knocking you out. And you too Fashion Jeans. And Magic Curl. Classique, you’re sleeping. You won’t wake up until I say. You won’t know where I’m going, ever.” The arm worked like a charm.

They were snoring. They were snuggled on the blond wig. I stepped backwards from the room, watching them, thinking -- sleep, sleep, little dear ones, sleep. Then I turned and went downstairs.

Now it was almost dusk. I sat in the bus, on the ceiling, wearing the bonnet. Everything smelled of smoke, even my dress. A breeze roamed all around, blowing away some of the humidity; the air had become cooler. I looked for fireflies. But it wasn’t quite time. The sun still poked above the Johnsongrass. And the light inside the bus was slowly shifting, the sharp edges of the broken windows shimmered -- the springs, fluff, and burnt upholstery on the overhead seats radiated, orange and white.

Someone had carved into the metal wall, a corroded scrawl I hadn’t noticed before. The words were upside- down -- etched higher than I could reach -- but easy to read: LOIS YOU SUCK BUTT!

"Suck butt," I said. "You suck butt.” What a crazy thing to do. I didn’t want to think about it. "That’s dumb,” I told myself.

When my father and I walked toward the L.A. River, we often stopped to read graffiti. Whole sides of buildings were decorated with slang, sprayed symbols and designs, red and blue and silver and black, like pictures from a comic book.

"It’s all beautiful,” my father said. "People hate it.”

"What’s it mean?”

"Names, mostly. Gang stuff. I’m not sure."

Framing an entire doorway was a Valentine’s heart, full and perfect, pierced by a stiletto.

"You know what that is.”

"Love," I said.

"Yep."

We’d come back to the same building a week later, but the graffiti wouldn’t be there, just whitewashed patches hiding names and colors and massive hearts. It was gross. "They should leave it alone," I said.

"Don’t worry, whitewash doesn’t last long, not in this neighborhood."

There was a tunnel in the middle of Webster Park -- cutting underneath a pathway -- where bums slept and teenagers drank beer and smoked. Instead of crossing over the tunnel, my father and I usually strolled through it, dodging broken bottles and the occasional vagrant zipped up in a sleeping bag. And once we found a spray paint can. Silver Lustre. So my father shook the can, then painted a smiley face on the cement. "That’s you,” he said. "That’s how you look today."

"No it’s not. That’s not me today.”

"Well, it must be you tomorrow.”

He handed me the can.

"Give it a try.”

I was going to make a smiley face too, but I had the valve aimed wrong and sprayed my right hand.

"Oh no,” I said, dropping the can.

There was wet Silver Lustre in my palm; I dabbed it off on my pink shirt. I wanted to cry, but my father was laughing. He was laughing so much he started coughing. I thought he was getting sick.

My mother was waiting when we arrived home. She saw my shirt first, two silver handprints where a pink pony and a balloon should be. "What the hell happened to you?" She grasped my wrists, flipping my hands.

"I’m a robot,” I said.

Then she slapped me.

"You’ve ruined that shirt! Your hands!”

But the worst part was my father. He didn’t do anything. He just stood by the front door and said nothing. And I wanted to yell at him for laughing in the tunnel. I wanted him to explain that it was all his fault, that it was his idea to play with the can.

MOM YOU SUCK BUTT! That’s what I should’ve sprayed on the cement. That’s what I should’ve told her after she slapped me.

I scanned the walls for more carvings, but the sun had dipped below the Johnsongrass, making my search difficult. So I gazed at the pasture, where a few fireflies were already flashing.

"I’m here," I shouted. "In here! It’s me!"

Then I covered my mouth, shutting myself up. I’d been too loud. The ghost could’ve heard me. She might think I was calling her.

Glancing across the passageway, through the windows, I saw her meadow. But, because of the railroad tracks and weeds, I couldn’t see the bluebonnets or the rocks encircling the radio. Or the ghost, if she was there. And beyond the meadow, glowing among a cluster of mesquite trees, was a yellow light, a thousand times the size of a firefly blink; the queen mother of all fireflies -- I thought -- lurking in the distance, at least a mile from me and the bus. On the other side of the tracks, everything seemed bigger -- the flowers, the rocks, the rows of Johnsongrass. And the ghost.

"She can destroy Tokyo like Godzilla,” I’d told Classique. "She’d make Mom’s bed go crash.”

"She’s Queen Gunhild. Queens are always fatter than everyone. That’s how they become queens. Everyone gives her gold and food to eat and she gets fat and sits on scales in her court, so then everyone has to give her more food and gold -- it has to be the same as how fat she is."

"Queens are monsters. They need to be strangled and drowned in bogs."

I imagined my mother in the meadow, killing nettles and hurling rocks. And she knew I was inside the bus. And she was hungry. Soon she’d climb over the rise and onto the tracks. She’d be coming after me: "You miserable creep!”

The fireflies were here, floating through the windows. They flashed everywhere, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I looked back and forth, from one window to another, in case someone was sneaking outside. I tried sending psychic messages to Classique -- wake up now, wake up, I’m in trouble -- but she was dreaming of Eskimo Pies. I was on my own. And my father relaxed in Denmark. He wouldn’t help even if my mother was choking me, even if she was ripping my head off.

So I waited.

When the train came I’d run. I was near the bus door, the escape exit. My father said a person could easily outrun a ghost or a bog man or any monster.

"They only get you when you aren’t expecting them. If you’re expecting them, you can always get away."

"But they’re fast.”

"No, they aren’t fast. Dead things are slow.`You have to be alive to run. Your heart has to be pumping."

"Why?"

"Because if your heart ain’t pumping then you’re dead. And if you’re dead, you can’t run.”

"How do you move, if you’re dead?"

"You don’t. You just flutter, I guess. Like a leaf in the wind. Energy or something takes you from one place and puts you somewhere else. It’s like magic. If your dead, you need a ton of magic -- a lot more than a living person does."

I couldn’t figure it. But I believed him anyway.

"So you run when you see a monster?"

"Or before you see it. When you sense it. When you know it’s about to pop up and grab you. Not like in movies. People are always idiots in movies. They wait to get caught. They fall and look back and scream._Iust run. Then you’re safe.”

No more waiting. The train was late. There were bog men in the sorghum; I heard them rustling. And Queen Gunhild wanted food. But I was alive, so I ran.

My sneakers mashed foxtails and bluebonnets. Sorry, I thought, sorry. I didn’t look back or scream.

I just sent messages: Classique, hear me. You are awake and not sleeping anymore. You are awake and not sleeping anymore. You are awake-

Fireflies flashed on the cattle trail, so I kept my mouth closed. I didn’t want to swallow one. If I swallowed one, my stomach might start blinking. Then if I had to hide in the tall weeds, it’d be a cinch seeing me; I’d be like Bugs Bunny, strolling in front of Elmer Fudd with a target pattern on his butt, saying, "Say, doc, what makes you think there’s a rabbit in these woods?"

"Oh, I doughn’t know. Just a wittle hunch."

Racing toward the front yard, I caught the sound of the train. The earth trembled with its passing. I paused beside the flag pole, panting, and felt the steel vibrate against my shoulder. The Johnsongrass trembled under the breeze, and goose bumps rose on my arms. There was no one following along the cattle trail, not yet. I tried peering through the rows of sorghum, but it was impossible. I knew what was happening though -- in the grazing pasture, fireflies were being buffeted from the bus. Chunks of glass clattered in the burnt-out passageway, some fell like hail from the windows. And, for a while at least, Queen Gunhild couldn’t cross the tracks.

Classique was communicating, a faint transmission: It’s okay. I’rn awake. Come get me-

Then no noise, no train, no breeze. My palms were sweating like crazy. But I was safe. I walked onto the porch and entered the house.

My father was in the chair. I could see the back of his head. And the map of Denmark was sagging, drooping over; a top corner had come unstuck. For a moment I considered fixing the map, but that meant getting close to him. He’d probably changed colors again, and the thought of his skin spooked me -- especially now that the farmhouse had grown darker. He was like the Mood Ring in my rnother’s jewelry box; sometimes turning blue, sometimes black. That ring never worked right.

The dressing gown lay in the entryway, at the front door, so I picked it up. The satin was so soft. I pressed it against my cheek.

"Smooth as a baby’s butt," I said, calmed by my own voice.

I have an idea, Classique was thinking.

What?

Come get me and I’ll tell you.

I cradled the dressing gown like a baby. There wasn’t a light for the stairs; it was pitchy, the steps were invisible. But I pretended a baby’s butt rested in the nook of my arms, and that made me happy.

"I love you so much,” I told the dressing gown. "You’re my dear sweet one."

And when I showed Classique my baby, she said, "It’s dead. It doesn’t have bones."

She was the only one awake on the wig.

"I don’t care. It’s smooth."

"It doesn’t have a pumping heart.”

"But you don’t too.”

"How do you know?” she said. "I might.”

"I’m sorry.”

I didn’t want to argue. She could be stubborn. If I argued with her, she wouldn’t explain her idea -- although I already understood what it was. So I gently laid the dressing gown on the pillow, then I slipped Classique onto my finger.

"Get the wig,” she said.

I grabbed the wig, tumbling Fashion Jeans and Magic Curl and Cut ’N Style across the mattress. Then I went into the bathroom and got the cosmetic bag. And before going, I noticed that the hatch was ajar, beyond which existed murkiness, outer space, a void where the Bog Man could hibernate. The attic wasn’t the same as in the daytime; it was another world, the black hole of What Rocks. I tried setting the latch, but the bolt wouldn’t stay in its notch. I pressed hard with my palm. When I let off, the bolt sprang back. So I removed a tiny toothbrush from the bag -- its bristles stained with mascara -- and wedged the hilt in the gap between the hatch and the baseboard.

"You don’t move,” I ordered the brush, "or you’ll die."

Sometimes toothbrushes died. The bristles dulled and that was that. Sneakers died too. And buildings. So did Moms and Dads. The planet was full of the dying, the dead, the gone. But if someone was beautiful, like Classique, they could go on forever. Death was ugly.

In the living room I whispered, "You’re a vision.”

The wig fit my father well, the blond coils almost concealed his ponytail.

"You’re a sensation.”

His face remained pallid. He hadn’t changed much during the day. And I was relieved. There was a compact of rouge in the cosmetic bag -- so I dabbed color on his cheeks, on his chin, on his earlobes, brightening the purple blotches. Then I removed the bonnet and put it on him.

He was pretty now. So I kissed his mouth. The skin felt fake and rubbery. I kissed him more than once, until the scarlet reddened his lips. Then I sat at his boots with Classique and admired him.

"We’re very proud of you,” I told him. "You’re Miss America."

And that night I slept in his room with the door locked. Just me and Classique. For a while, from the window, I watched the tower strobe flicker. But I didn’t stare too long. I didn’t want to get hypnotized. Then I lay on his mattress, very quietly. I shut my eyes, transmitting messages downstairs.

Daddy-? This is me. Am I coming in loud and clear? Daddy-? If you can hear me, say something. It’s me. Radio Jeliza-Rose, broadcasting from your bedroom. Are you there?

10

Sitting on the porch steps, I sipped from the gallon jug and then dribbled into Classique’s hair. There wasn’t any shampoo in What Rocks, so I pretended. I scrubbed her scalp like it was soapy. The water made her red hair look brown.

I called her Miss.

"How would you like it today, Miss?" And, "Miss, could I possibly interest you in some of our exclusive hair-care products?"

But she told me to just shampoo, to not talk.

"Yes, Miss."

The customer was always right, even when she was wrong. So I combed my fingers through Classique’s hair, pushed at her plastic skull, and shut up. And if she was my mother, I’d be tapping my fist on her head, like knocking on a door -- but softer. Then I'd uncoil my fist, letting my fingertips spread slowly out. It gave my mother the chills.

"Cracking an egg.”

"Do me now."

We took turns. My mother and I. Cracking eggs on each other’s heads. Often we rapped with both hands, two fists crumbling, and the fingertips would then drip all over, an oily feeling, trickling toward the neck, around the ears, the forehead. Gooseflesh. I loved that game.

Spider, Pinch, Blow -- another chill game.

"Spider crawling up your spine-"

Fingertips creeping along the back to the shoulders.

"Tight squeeze-"

Pinching the shoulder blades.

"Cold breeze-”

Blowing on the neck while dragging nails down the spine.

"Now you’ve got the chills."

It never failed. The bumps grew, rough and pimply. I’d rub my arms and neck so they’d go away. "Do it again," I’d tell my mother, once the bumps disappeared. "Just one more.”

"That’s what you said before.”

"But I promise._Just one more."

And sometimes we shampooed each other’s hair. But we didn’t use water or shampoo. We did it in her bedroom. It was all make-believe.

My mother always said, "Could I interest you in some of our exclusive hair-care products, miss?"

"No thank you,” I replied. "Not today.”

I wanted her to stroke my scalp without saying anything. I closed my eyes, knowing the massage wouldn’t last long, wishing she’d never stop. She could’ve put me asleep, easily; I would’ve liked that.

But Classique wasn’t growing sleepy. As I rinsed her hair, she was wide awake, gazing beyond the yard, studying the gray clouds that stretched overhead. The sun was hiding; I couldn’t see where.

That morning, fog hugged the ground, obscuring every- thing. In my father’s bedroom, I parted the curtains above the bed. "We’re flying,” I told Classique, imagining What Rocks adrift in some cloud. By the time I dressed and went outside with the jug, the fog had lifted. The farmhouse had descended through the grim sky, returning safely to Grandmother’s property.

Now I wrung Classique's hair, shaking the water from my hand, saying, "It’ll lightning. It’ll flood and What Rocks will float off with us.”

Then, in order to prevent frizziness, I smoothed her hair between my palms.

"You’re shiny," I told her. "You’re cleaner than soap.”

Classique ignored me. She was angry because I didn’t use shampoo. She thought I was spitting in her hair. And spit stunk. I explained that the water came from the jug, that I was only dribbling so she wouldn’t get too wet.

"What can I do?" I asked. "I’ll help you get happy."

"Do you want to check the radio? If it’s still there-”

"Do you?”

"Yes.”

We were of the same mind.

I ran as fast as possible toward the railroad tracks, holding Classique aloft; that way her hair would dry quicker. When we climbed the rise, I crouched in the weeds by the tracks, but the ghost wasn’t there. So I walked down into her meadow, which had an earthy, moist smell like after rain. Stormy clouds swirled over the sorghum and behind them a hazy sun, round as the moon, hiding out.

Classique and I went to where we left the gift.

"She’s been here,” I said, squatting by the rocks.

The radio was gone.

"She found it.”

"And look what she did-”

The rocks were rearranged, spaced evenly, making a figure eight; in each loop a freshly planted bluebonnet. I saw it as a sign, an acknowledgment, a thank you. And a response was expected. So I set Classique in a loop, under a bluebonnet, and began shifting rocks. But I couldn’t think what to do. Another circle was pointless. A square or an arrow seemed dumb.

A smiley face then.

"The universal mark of friendship," was how my father described smiley faces. "In Japan or Holland or Mexico, it always means the same thing." He never gave autographs, just smiley faces with his initials jotted underneath the grin.

In my Big Chief sketch book, my father and I sat for hours at the dining table, drawing pictures with crayons. I made sunflowers or Barbies or stick figures parachuting. And he colored black grins, black-dot eyes, black-dot noses, of various shapes and sizes -- but unmistakable. He’d fill page after page with them. Once he made an American flag with nothing but red, white, and blue smiley faces.

Then there was the song he sometimes sang while tucking me in bed.

Don’t be wonderin’ if I love you

‘Cause I’m a lecherous so-and-so

Just take a hard look at my face

And my smile will let you know

All you think you need to know

And I hummed that song as my hands upheaved the rocks. The ghost would find my universal sign of friendship, and she’d probably laugh or smile. She’d probably whistle her pretty tune, fully aware that someone cared about her. The next day, I planned on returning -- then I could see what she created with the rocks.

But it didn’t happen like that.

I should’ve noticed Classique because she was looking past me, too horrified to speak; her blue eyes were huge and unblinking. But I wasn’t paying attention. I was busy working, pressing a rock into the soil with both hands.

The clouds parted. The sun suddenly shone behind me. A great shadow swept across my back and onto the half-finished rock grin -- the ghost’s broad silhouette, the beekeeper’s hood cast at an angle. I froze; my heart almost burst from my chest, my hands trembled.

"Child," her low voice said, "what are you doing?" She sounded like a man, like my father in the morning, his throat gravelly and hoarse.

I couldn’t answer. My legs couldn’t run. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

The shadow moved. I heard her footsteps clomping, , coming toward me. From the corners of my eyes, I saw the hem of her housedress swish by, the muddy brown high boots she wore.

Then she stood in front of me, nudging at the rocks with a boot tip, saying, "This won’t do, you know. You’ve ruined my cat eyes.”

Cat eyes? Not a figure eight then. But cat eyes, with bluebonnets for pupils.

I raised my head slowly, scanning the length of her; the white apron, the gray mittens, the pith helmet draped on all sides by the hood. Her arms were crossed. I could see her features in the mesh -- big nose, big jaw, gold-rimmed glasses.

Ghost, I thought, please leave. You’re scaring me.

"Are you mute, vandal?" she asked. "You can’t speak?

I shook my head.

"What’s that mean? No or yes?"

"I’m scared,” I muttered.

"Vandal is scared,” she said. "As you should be, I think.”

She had me confused with someone else.

"I’m not Vandal," I told her.

"What?”

"I’m not Vandal. I'm Jeliza-Rose."

"What kind of rose?”

"Jeliza-”

"Uh-huh,” she said, nodding. She repeated my name to her- self, rolling it around in her mouth like a marble. Then she went, "Well, a vandal by any other name -- do you understand?"

"No.”

She unfolded her arms, saying, "It doesn’t matter, I suppose."

Then she sighed, poking at the rocks again for a moment.

In the brooding sunlight, transfixed by the ghost, touching the ground with my fingertips, the fear that had seized me was now settling. I didn’t need to runaway just yet; I could wait a little longer.

"Any bees?"

I managed a shrug.

"One sting and I’m paralyzed,” she said. "One sting and I’m most likely dead."

"You’re dead,” I told her.

The ghost gasped as if I’d startled her. "What a thing to say," she said. "`What kind of child are you?”

I shrugged.

"Well then, if you see a bee -- or hear a bee -- you’ll say so, right?"

I nodded.

"If I’m stung and die, it’ll be your fault."

Her mittens were at the hood, turning up the mesh, bringing the net-like fabric over the helmet. The hair hanging on her forehead seemed unnaturally yellow, recalling the discolored corners of the brittle newspaper my father kept in his closet -- KING OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL DEAD.

A ghost’s face?

Nope, thought Classique.

But she was white. She had a pinkish color, a jowly, abstracted appearance -- a weathered countenance that was also unforgiving, wrinkled, graceful. Her glasses lacked a left lens, the right lens was shaded and impenetrable.

"They’ll stay far," she was saying to herself, drawing a circle in the air. "They’ll mess elsewhere."

I wasn’t sure if she was referring to me and Classique, or the bees.

She clapped her hands together, once. She pivoted her head and spit. "That’ll keep them gone for a bit," she told me. "It usually works. You’d be surprised."

Then she knelt, scrutinizing the disrepair at her feet. And like a parachute sinking to the earth, the hem of her house- dress billowed and ruffled outward. She reached for the rocks I’d rearranged -- shaking her head some -- and began fixing her cat eyes.

"See, everything has a place,” she said, moving the rocks. "Even the smallest thing. If you tamper with something -- take it from its place -- there’s no order. And then there’s no light. Everything is chaos."

She paused and regarded Classique sitting under the bluebonnet.

"And is this for me?”

"It’s Classique. She’s my friend.”

She extracted Classique, pinching her between a forefinger and thumb, thrusting her out and away like a stinky sock.

"You should consider the company you keep, I think. Take it."

I leaned forward, gingerly accepting Classique. And I watched as the mittens patted dirt, adjusted the stems of the bluebonnet-pupils, hoisted rocks.

"Can I help you?”

"Certainly not. In fact, you’ll be going. I’ve nothing more to say. You’ve blinded a cat eye."

"But I can help.”

"Uh-huh, well, go and help me. Go, I mean. That’ll help me. You belong somewhere else.”

She squinted -- one eye showing, the other concealed behind that dark lens -- reminding me of a pirate. Then she grabbed the mesh, pulling it past her face, a door slamming shut.

It wasn’t fair; I could help with her garden. And now she was ignoring me. "You’re not a real ghost,” I said, standing.

"I should think not -- not yet.”

Rotten old woman, I thought.

And I regretted giving her the radio. She didn’t thank me -- and she was mean to Classique. So I left her. I turned and ran. But as I climbed the rise, she called after me.

"Rose-Jeliza," she said, "what else can you do?”

I played deaf. And scrambling onto the tracks, I stood upright, frowning, and gazed back down into the meadow. She was dusting the mittens on her apron, giving me a sideways glance.

"Child, what is it you like to do,” she pointed at the cat eyes, "besides messing with this?”

I couldn’t think, so I said what sprang first to mind: "I fight squirrels -- and I eat too."

She was quiet for a while. She scratched her chin through the mesh.

"Very well," she finally said. "If you come here around noon tomorrow we’ll eat, how’s that? But go now, go to where you came from, where you belong. I’ve nothing more to say. just come tomorrow then -- and forget your friend, she’s trouble.”

My frown straightened. "Okay," I said.

And heading toward the farmhouse, I forced a laugh, a cackle. I threw Classique in the air and caught her. If the ghost wasn’t really a ghost, at least she was friendly, almost. And tomorrow we’d eat together, maybe even crack eggs on each other.

But Classique was miserable. She sulked all the way home.

"She doesn’t hate you," I reassured her. "She doesn’t."

But Classique didn’t care what I had to say to her. And neither did I. She was trouble, after all.