Category: Fictions

Part 2 of Elements

This story first written 1989.
Rewrites 1996 and 2018.
Exclusive to bobjudeferrante.com

---

It is morning. A morning like any other. Like any other in 1989. To be more precise.

It is important to be precise if you plan to sign your name to your statement. Which I plan to do. Sometime before I complete it. If you work with numbers and scan the elegant crests of growth distribution waves and leading drag effects on value-at-risk. If you are doing things of that ilk. You have to be somewhat tentative. Perhaps squirrely. Perhaps so.

Broken. Broken wood. Broken wood on the green door. And spotty. Spots. A rusty panel. I push it. It gives. Today it waves me in, and keeps swinging, and in swinging waving, and wailing, as it waves, still swinging. The door weeps in its age, but continues in service. As we all do. It weeps for itself. It weeps for me.

Now the glass of the booth. The token booth. It is a token booth and a token for token booths. Not clean glass. Fingerprints. But now I see in the glass a most revealing self-portrait. In the glass is reflected a half-formed shade of a man. That is me.

Behind the glass, the blue wizard hands out talismans, the gold-and-silver coins that are the keys to the underworld. I talk to the blue man in the booth,

– Two. Two, please.

The blue man does not answer. I consistently have a moment of wrenching doubt after he takes my ten dollar bill. You see, when I was seven, my father, the late Mr. Patrick Shawnessee, warned me some clerks pocket the money and refuse to hand over tokens, or change. They take and do not give. Although I myself cannot provide an example of that actually occurring. Still I remain watchful. Wary.

There’s a picture of Dad cached securely in my mind: Walking down Park Ave, one hand gripping mine, the other covering on the pants pocket that holds his wallet.

And now I realize my naming my father, narrows the possible number of people this could be speaking to three, unless you happen know the gender of the person speaking, in which case, it’s just one. Nonetheless, I persevere.

But the tokens come, Dad is wrong again. And the bills and silvery coins of change and the dull bronze tokens break through the picture of Dad, at least break through where the grey slot is under the glass. So that now I must continue my journey.

I have the tokens again. I rub the tokens to send sparks of their force ahead of me. For protection.

I never count the change, Dad. Just shove it in my pocket. Nine? Eight? What does it matter. No, it just went up, the fare, it’d be seven-seventy now, the change. Precision. They expect it of you.

With great care I slide one and only one token from my new cache and place it carefully, gently into the turnstile slot. A few times I was rather careless in the placing and it jammed. When that happens the rotor won’t turn. It clamps up and you get it, a big silver battering ram right in the… in the… man parts. I’ve learned my lesson. Now I am gentle and cautious with the mechanism. The coin slides in. I go through, bump the turnstile just so with my hip. Easy hard. Like that. It spins. I’m in, go down.

And now I realize I have revealed my gender as well. So my continued reticence to sign my name is even more a gesture of futility.

Regular observation works wonders. Really, you should try it. For example, if you stand in the correct place the train door opens right in front of you. Everyone should have a spot by a door. I don’t even have to search to find mine. It’s a chocolate-colored smudge of old gum and God-knows-what. The star that guides me where to stand. Fourteen inches west of the spot. I wait, a magus, the morning star my guide.

When you stand here, voices come from out of the air—they always do. I know somewhere in the rear of my mind there’s a metal speaker overhead, but I also forget. I give it an ear, hoping this time to make out what the voice is trying to say.

– … again. Your attention, ladies and gentlemen. This is the New York City Transit Authority. We have all of your linen. If you want to see it again here is what you must do…

The threat always begins the same. But the guy (always a guy) from the Metropolitan Transit Authority never says what he wants you to do to get your linen back. Strangely, this part of the announcement gets lost in sudden bursts of static. Actually, I have a theory. The “static” is actually caused by another person, specially hired by the Metropolitan Transit Authority, who drops metal scraps, five-penny nails onto the microphone.

It is a fantasy. I skirt its edges, wondering how they figure the correct proportion of five-penny nails to tiny bits. Did the MTA have to hire a static consultant to determine the correct mix? I’ll bet they did. Wouldn’t be a surprise. Your tax dollars at work.

Is that a good field, static consulting? Is it better than banking? Dad, do you know? You know everything. Dad?

Now the train. It always comes half through a fantasy. Inside, through the smudged glass, are the ghost faces.

I haven’t been able to muse out all the details, but someone told me once that the electric lines are long dead. It’s not hard to believe, it’s a well-known fact, almost a bit of folklore: the Subway system is fueled by the power of dreams. The third rail, the one they tell you not to touch, is for show only.

It’s the dreams. Alone.

The doors gulp open and the ghost faces turn into people. A wall of people crowd the vestibule. I shoehorn in. The warning chime rings, two notes, a major third.

(I took Introduction to Harmony 112 at Fordham University, thinking that by ‘harmony’ they meant ‘serenity.’  Later I became embarrassed at my obvious mistake. But it was a useful class — how else could I recognize the interval of the chime? The tone on the elevator? The 1-6-4-5 of the pop song blaring through the earphones of the woman standing next to me?).

Through the glass of the closing door I see a young man, his brown skin shines. He thrusts himself through the door. It closes on him but he presses against it, a sudden warrior, mighty, grinning. They grapple three or four seconds. Then the door, vanquished, retracts; the victor joins us, pushing into an old man who mutters. I can’t hear what the old pushed man is saying. I can tell only that it’s not nice.

The train moves on. The shadows whirl in the tunnel, taking their shapes. Look. Here are salamanders about to burst into flames, there Golems rise from dead matter. Here Loki and the Trickster compare their skills at Three-card Monte. The tunnels are filled with these shades. They don’t usually interfere with our lives, we who are from the light lands. But today? Fingers close around the remaining coin, safe in pocket.

The train slows, then stops.

–  Seventh Avenue, says the speaker earnestly and almost clearly.

The doors open. There’s no possible way another person can fit on the train, but somehow four more people get on, haggle for territory like pups in a litter nipping at their mother… their poor mother.

– Hey, can’t you wait?

– Inhale and make room. I got to get to work too.

Behind them the metal speaker again,

– Atlantic Avenue next. Change for the B, the Q, the IRT, and the Long Island Railroad. Careful of the closing doors.

Atlantic Avenue passes. The tunnel again. At DeKalb a few people get off and we huddled masses breathe free. It does not last. Many people get on. I have to inhale, set my jaw for the trip across the bridge.

The train climbs the approach ramp to the bridge, vibrates with traffic, skims a lake of noise. The traffic sings a song. The chorus of the song goes: It is morning. A morning like any other. The song is a big hit around here.

I hold the strap, thick like a steel sausage. It keeps me standing. The pressure of strap against hand balances against numb legs.

A high whine drones from the overhead speaker. Broken. Behind the whine, I can just make out, faintly, the voice:

– There’s a stalled train due to the observance of religious practices at Grand Street. We apologize for this inconvenience. We thank you for your penance and cooperation.

It’s OK. They have a right to their beliefs and their practices. Everyone, everyone. And we are the penitents, the co-operative. This morning we have piled into a steel box on our way to visit steel cathedrals; we supplicate, aching bodies pressed into the steel box, though passionless. religious practices.

What do you mean? Sure it is religious. We are going to work. As Dad would say, work is a form of worship, of service. Everything is. This is a service economy, right Dad?

And Dad comes back, footage looping, older and gradually older versions of him, a thousand of them, ten thousand of them, standing on the D train morning after morning, the same jerky walk, bent forward at the hip, but slowing down more and more until it is I who stand in his place, I who walk with that bent jerky tread…

I’m sorry, I’m almost ready to tell you who I am. But wait. Here I am, getting not older but maybe a little fatter, but continuing the ritual. We shove against hundreds of other bodies, they thrum with the rhythm of the dream current that pulses through the train. Yet no-one looks into the eyes of a fellow worshipper, into these eyes for example.

I look down, and down, and he falls again, falls all the way into the hospital bed. Tiny cells, his own, invisible and ravenous, gnaw at his lungs and liver. His face forever turning away from me, turning so that I know eventually it must come around again to face me. There are only after all three-hundred sixty degrees of rotation. But it never returns.

I know why he turned his face away. I keep saying that. I know why. Why he wouldn’t look. It was death. He was ashamed to look at me. Ashamed of his death.

It goes away. I lurch with the train.

This is what we call Civilization. To touch another person without knowing, or caring. Not even dogs could be so indifferent. Could they? Okay, well probably they could.

My chest and hips are pressed against a woman’s back. I peek at her face. For some reason I can’t make it out. Strands of her coarse black hair touch my right shoulder. The train lurches again, and I try to withdraw. I mean she probably already thinks I’m trying to rub myself against her back on purpose. Have to be careful. That would seem reckless. Mustn’t seem reckless. Or be reckless.

But listen. If she wants to move her hips, she can move her hips. I can leave mine right here. She doesn’t move.

She grunts and twists her body around. I adjust. But, oh no. Now it is the front of her body pressed against me. Right there.

But she won’t look. She does not want to know me. She must be a civilized woman. Her hips she doesn’t care about. She will just throw those things around. Right around.

I feel warm in the legs. I can’t show it. The music would come. The music will not be allowed.

I require a distraction. Something on which to focus. The faces of the other people in the car. The faces will do. I can examine them. They have heads, they have cheeks, they have eyes. What is in the eyes. What is in the eyes.

Nothing. Nothing. I pretend to study the faces. Nothing What am I looking for? Nothing. This opens a space up in my mind. This will work. All will be well.

A man looks up. I stare back. He looks away. I’m always ready to snap the eyes, pretend to study the seat they’re sitting on, or that ad for a new some kind of cream. A woman looks up. Her eyes now look at the hips. It is not my fault. She might think it is my fault. But it is not. But Snap. The benches on this train are of some polymer or other. A hard, unyielding, new formulation polymer. But look, a piece is broken off from a corner, there, beneath that woman’s green skirt. She has to shift, then you can see it. Give it a moment.

Up the wall, behind the face-and-bench barricade, is a pitted, smoky window, criss-crossed by scratches. Someone has shaved their name in the Plexiglas with a knife or a pen. Eired loves Arrow? Eired, it’s good to love if you have the time.

Damn. It’s the music again. Look up, out the window.

One moment the milky scratches are all I see. Then eyes unfocus. Out to the river, that strange music is pulling. Another damn vision. I can hear it. It starts, droning like a what like a a a tanpura.

The shadow of a bridge girder blows across my face. I look away. Not today, I whisper, go away, come again and thanks and have a nice another day.

Hand slippery. I wave it in the air, furiously trying to dry it. And of course that is when the train lurches again. I fall. Almost knock the hips-woman over. Hand grabs the strap and I’m fixing me. Now I look at her face to face. I have to say something. What do I say. What do I say.

– Sorry.

She glares; the limit of her hostility, then she turns away and a smile flickers. I don’t know how to do this. Our heads are arguing and our hips are still good friends.

When I was 10 I learned to stop the music by disconnecting my ears from inside. I should try that. I disconnect. But that opens me up to the other angle. Now the screen shows Dad’s face. Everything is all wrinkled up, and not just because he’s 41. He is mid-lecture, lips moving, no sound radiates. But another man is speaking. He says, “Hard work.” He says,  “Land of opportunity.” He says, “It’s the performance not the dress rehearsal…”

I’m trying to get the look, the city look, to seal things off. It’s coming. Eyes, still open, pore over the surfaces inside the car, to cool my mind down. Now I have it. A cynic’s practiced murmur of a gaze. And the curtain closes. Worked. Worked.

Distract. I check the watch but really look at her again. Reading a book. What book? I look over the edge (not easy to do without being seen, but I am a veteran subway magus). With one hand she holds the book. She looks up at me. I do another quick watch check. Eight thirty-four.

Over the edge of the book, the words dance. In and out. Hebrew. That’s Hebrew. She reads feverishly. Worshipfully. Eyes ticking, right, left, right, across the page, lips dance words out and they curve like candle smoke.

Her eyes are closed tight shut now. She is whispering the words. I can’t make out what she is doing. Her words, strange to me, are inhales and exhales in a rhythm, a specific rhythm.

It is called chanting. The words have a meter. Sometimes they drag the beat and sometimes they rush the beat.

She is deliberately pressing. Her hips. To mine. I am measuring and every increase in pressure corresponds to a beat of my heart. She has… dark hair. A warm warm and and clammy warm feeling, small of the back. Release the strap and wave the hand, thumb still hooked. I won’t fall again. Dry it off. Dry it off.

I try a dry stare. Nothing. Now my throat is dry. I’m a rock on dry sand, pounded by sun, baked by sun.

Look at the water. Out the window. I have to look. I’m dry and there is noplace left to look but there where it is water and it is not dry.

The rhythm begins to take me. The music again. It’s out the window. I can’t look out the window. I must fight, like the black man did against the subway door. But it’s strong.

Beginning at the far shore, a lake of orange fire seethes. It pulses, potent with the energy of life, of morning. It laps at the city’s shores, burning away the coals of night, of dark. We hang in the air, high above.

It is a hungry sea, full of longing. But angry. It wants to draw me in, sucking with fire’s hunger. It wants to to swallow, to consume me. I want to let go, to fly. Can’t resist. If I give in, even for a moment, I will be lost. I tighten the grip on the steel strap and swing with the train as it lurches.

The music. It is the raging thoughts of ten million dreamers, all dreaming the same. It is the heat of a winter morning, not overt, lost in icy wanderings. It is the pent-up lust perhaps in the body of a young woman reading Hebrew. Of perhaps my own body. Of a car full such bodies. What am I against a tide of bodies? It licks up, into the train, inside a silver metal box suspended above a river of fire, to pluck me out. It crystallizes, it is a mandala, a circle of earth above four horses of fire above eight turtles of water above 16 cranes of sky.

It picks me up delicately. It sucks me in. It swallows. Almost lovingly. And my body bursts, shattered like the dream it always was, crushed by wind, rock, pressure, like a dry leaf.

Where am I now? Now? Now? I am fragments, waves, suspended in fixed space. The song is deafening, silent. It spans every possible pitch and timbre. It is an instant in which nothing has happened, yet everything is possible.

What I am, will be, is bounded by the water, the burning water. Left behind is only space, a field occupied by quarks, protons, whirling, churning, agitated. It will look the same only in form, but be ever shifting, like the shadows in the deep tunnel.

The words are the whispered words mouthed by the woman, they are the lyrics of the song the fire sings me. Slow, cadenced with silence, they fall like slow drops off a tree bough after a storm into the swirling storm of fire that I am. Atom by atom the words fall into place, drops of red-hot liquid glass that fill the space I occupied. I am built up slowly, block by block, cooling…

Conscious again now. I hear the hiss of the speaker and feel the thick metal strap. How long was I gone? The metal speaker clicks:

– Grand Street Chinatown. Please step in and stand clear of the closing doors.

Swarms, hundreds of gnomes clutching long black and blue coats pour out onto the Grand Street platform, up the steps, out the exit. The warning chime rings, two notes, a major third.

I look at the hand, flex the fingers. It looks strange. I never noticed before what an odd thing a hand was. Why these four fingers? Why this opposable thumb?

I look around. Suddenly self-conscious. But it is a day like any other. Isn’t it? Nobody is paying any mind.

Where is she? I am alone now. The train lurches into motion. She has gone.

Out the flashing window, saw shadows battle. Soon I would be in the bank, among my fellow parishioners, struggling, praying for a hold. Like my father before me. Information Society. Service Economy. Would you like to open a NOW account, ma’am? Yes, sign at the ‘X.’ Your new checks will arrive in four to six weeks.

It slows, stops. The metal speaker says:

– Broadway Lafayette, change here for the F and the downtown number 6 train. Please step in and watch out for the closing doors.

I can’t go there, not any more. I am different now. I was taken apart, reassembled by fire, water, chant. I look the same outwardly, weird four fingers that can tap keys. Inside? I am transparent, glistening, different.

Not long to decide. My stop is next. I check for my wallet, keep a hand on it, glance at the watch. I slip from wrist to faces again, the faces of the parishioners, lined up on the grey plastic pews.

They know. Every one of them. Why didn’t I ever notice it? They had heard the music before, seen the lake of fire, felt the drops of molten glass. How could I miss it? When I saw nothing in them, what I saw was inner glass. Transparent, like me.

– West 4th street. Change here for the F and for the A, B, C, on the upper level.

It’s the warning chime, two notes, major third. I am still standing in the car. This is the stop! As the doors close, I thrust through them, press against them, battle them. And win, grin.

Up the stairs, out the exit, onto the street of light and noise, leaving the dream river to flow on beneath the feet.

Until tonight.

I, Darin Patrick Shawnesee, do approve the heretofore.

Copyright © 2018 Bob Jude Ferrante

Part 1 of Elements

Written 1988
Revised and published 2016
Exclusive to bobjudeferrante.com.

• Today’s lesson is water, the universal solvent…

Diana’s voice reverberated off the wall, off the students’ faces, mostly brown and framed by shiny black hair. They whispered as she turned her back to check the thermostat. She was a “trailer teacher,” assigned to a different classroom every period. Without fail, every room they gave her was always too cold, or too hot.

She squinted, but couldn’t read the numbers through the thermostat’s tiny scratched window. With a thumb she wiped away a limn of grey dust, balled it up, dropped it. It fell like a spider ball. She looked again at the dial. It read seventy-three degrees.

• “Hell, she mumbled. Seventy-three. Feels more like fifty.”

Diana gripped her forearms and shivered to conclude her point. A strong urge came to smack the thermostat, but she resisted. If she was superstitious about anything, it was devices. She moved the tiny lever a fraction of an inch, almost prayerful. From somewhere behind the wall, the air conditioning unit clanked, shut down. She heard the liquid Freon swish in the tubes. Seconds later, the room was filled with the nose-wrinkling tang of fresh ozone.

Among other things, Diana knew about Freon. It was a registered trademark for a liquid refrigerant product made mostly of fluorine. Fluorine is an inert element, called a ‘noble gas’ by chemists, who should know. That means it resists combining chemically with other elements. It has a very low boiling-point. It is gaseous and expansive at room temperature, unlike water, which is liquid at room temperature but boils to gas and expands at two-hundred twelve degrees Fahrenheit, one hundred degrees Celsius.

Diana could tell you how Freon made air conditioning possible. Inside an air conditioning unit:

1. A pump compresses gaseous Freon to liquification, then forces it through sealed aluminum tubes.
2. A fan draws air from outside and pushes it around the tube surfaces.
3. Liquid Freon in the tubes steals warmth from the air, turns to gas and expands.
4. The Freon is then pumped back through the compressor to liquify again. The air that blows out the vents, its warmth stolen, is icy cool.

“…Air conditioning was one of the many innovations that brought humanity massing to Imperial County, a strip of land (mostly light yellow on the map shown) sitting atop the Mexican border half-way between Yuma, Arizona, and San Diego, California. In 1900, the Valley was all desert, too hot for most people: one hundred thirty degrees Fahrenheit in the shade summer days. People riding the dusty highway along the Mexican border between San Diego and Yuma at one PM could be struck down by the heat as they drove their horses, carriages, automobiles down the snaky canyon road. The Imperial Valley wasn’t a fit place for the slow or dull-witted.

“The soil was also condemned as barren, impossible, home only to the hardiest of scrub plants. A farmer’s nightmare. Luckily no farmers were interested in it. For the reason why, let’s ask a geologist:

“Millions of years ago the Valley was the bed of a salty inland sea. Then the climate changed.  The sea evaporated, leaving the salt behind. The result—desert.”

“All this would soon change. In 1927, William Holt, an entrepreneur, had a new idea. He lobbied for and got Federal tax dollars for a project to divert a portion of the waters of the Colorado river, which flowed sixty miles to the east through Arizona and Mexico, into the Valley.

“Once the canals were dug and the water began to flow, teams of men with tractors broke through millions of acres of rock-hard sand, leached the deadly salt out of the earth, transforming the Valley (at a cost of millions) into a farmer’s paradise.

“In the 1930’s, the Oklahoma dust-bowl scourge drove people to the Imperial Valley by the truck-load. They sought work on the new corporate farms. And work there was, for BUD in lettuce and broccoli, Bunny-Luv in carrots.

“Today, nearly every type of fruit or vegetable eaten in the United States grows in the Imperial Valley: dates, cantaloupes, carrots, broccoli, lettuce. Over one-half of the nation’s carrot crop now grows in the perfectly sandy soil of the Imperial Valley.

“It’s still hot during summer days, but even in that inhuman season air conditioning makes things more liveable. On the other hand, winter weather in the Valley is excellent: eighty degrees Fahrenheit at noon, between fifty and sixty at night. By nineteen-eighty-five, over a hundred thousand people had come to live here in the Imperial Valley—’America’s Paradise on the Border’”

And just one of the hundred thousand was Diana Shawnesee, ninth grade science teacher at El Loci High School. She had only yesterday shown the filmstrip that told the story of air conditioning, tractors, and how they changed the Valley to her thirty-one Intro to Science students. Amazed their home was the subject of a filmstrip, they listened intently. Now Diana was about to impart something she hoped they would find equally amazing.

• Did you know that the human body, that’s your body…

She picked a chance to glance over Armando Palenque’s shoulder. He was taking notes. There was a blue squiggle of a doodle there also, writhing in the margin, looking like captured ozone.

• … Is made of almost eighty-seven percent water. Which is interesting, because the Earth—you remember the Earth, don’t you… Mister Gutierrez?

Mario Gutierrez looked up. “Damn,” he thought. “Picked. She don’t miss nothing.” He tried to palm the note he was passing, but still held it out, hoping Helena Vargas would see.

“Hey, Helena. Look. Take it before teacher gets it. Damn, she’s coming.”

• The surface of the Earth is actually less water than you, proportionally, being only approximately seventy-six percent water…

Thirty-one pairs of eyes, most of them chocolate brown, swung toward the back of the room, following the teacher’s neatly tan-cotton-skirted and orange-silk-bloused body, to watch Mario Gutierrez and Diana Shawnesee square off again. Before he could drop the note, she was there, deftly nabbing the folded paper.

• Thanks, Mr. Gutierrez. What say we discuss your literary proclivities after school, three p.m., room 276? Hm?
• Ah, Mrs. Shawnesee…
• Miss Shawnesee! At least get the marital status right before you submit your appeal! The case is closed, as they say in court. A place you are no doubt familiar with?
• No, Mrs. Shawnesse, I ain’t never been there.
• You’re just lucky then. If you have more to say, say it to Mr. Alvarez in his office.
• She indicated the door, her expression flat, mentally counted five, then softened her voice beckoningly.
• But if you’d like to stay…

Mario nodded his head vigorously.

“Okay,” he thought, “so what if the others think I am kissing ass? I went to Alvarez’s office four times this week. I go again it means suspension. Suspension and I can’t come to school, don’t get to see Helena… Helena…”

Who gave a damn if everybody in the class knew about him and Helena Vargas? She had these green eyes. It hurt his chest just to look at them. Some day he would marry her. He only had to prove himself. Which was hard when… what?

• Wake up, Mario! You know the rules. Now open your notebook. At least pretend to pay attention.

He nodded, a mock serious grin on his face, did an exaggerated search for a pencil. He looked in his pockets, his sleeve, under his notebook, under his fingernails, removed his shoe, looked there. Evangelina Avila laughed boldly. She was Mario’s accomplice in deceit, and liked it that way. He leaned over to ask Helena Vargas for a pencil. As he leaned he palmed her another note. This time she took it before Diana saw. Helena slipped the paper quickly into her jeans pocket.

• I’m borrowing a pencil, Mrs. Shawnesee. See? No pencil.

He held up his empty hands to her. Diana was deskside almost instantly, like Florence Nightingale with a pencil instead of a compress. Mario took it silently. She turned back and addressed the class.

• Anyway, what I was trying to say about you was: compared to the Earth, you are all wet.

The kids laughed. Even Mario did a little, more out of relief than anything else. He looked at the clock. It was twenty minutes before the bell.

---

“Time is it? Shit. Nine fifty-eight AM.”

“My name’s Jorge Gargas. That’s pronounced George, not hor-hay, got it? Goddamn tractor! Umph. Good thing these work gloves, else I’d a bruised my damn hand. I know, no sense beatin’ a dead tractor, but this whole morning don’t have much to do with sense, does it?”

“‘N overhead the big bleak sky. Blue. Not a cloud. About to crash down on me. Feel dizzy ever’ time I look at the big bleak sky. Immense, right? Immense.”

“Winter. Suppose a’ be the best broccoli season of the year. Now the damn tractor won’t start, ‘n the other one out in the yard idn’ even good for parts or nothin’. What’s it take to get a rigger out here ‘n give this field even one discing, never mind the two it really is going to need? ‘N I got three hundred in the bank? That changes things real quick, thinking about just three hundred ‘tween me and the shithouse.”

“Shoulda got out this pit I had the chance. Shoulda took that offer from BUD Inc. two years back. Offered me a middling price, but, no, not me, couldn’t sell Pop’s land, had to tell the guys in suits ‘no,’ so what do they do? Buy the Ryers, next door a this. ‘N now the Ryers live in El Centro Estates in a nice new tract home all paid for with that fine money from BUD. What I get? I get nothin’. ‘N sooner or later BUD’ll take this piece land for a song and whistle. They know it, too. Bank gonna foreclose me on that FHA second I got to finance this damn dead tractor some seed some hands to help out last year the year the frost hit. Frost, right? Here, in the Valley. Could you believe it, ice crystals on the green peppers and lettuce. Wrecked me good. Won’t be long ‘til BUD gets all ‘n everthang.”

• Shit, he said aloud, breaking the reverie.

He went into the house, shaking his head. La casita (the little house) was a four-room shack his father had built forty years ago. Place for his mama, Jorge’s abuela, to live ever since el padrone, the grandfather, died. Wasn’t too bad; the shack had electricity, running water from the canal, a roof that only barely leaked. Next to the casita was the old farm house, the real farm house. It had been empty for two years, since the people from the State of California came and stuck that red sign up on it, ‘unsuitable for human habitation.’  Now even the sign was pocked with holes, ready to be condemned itself, he thought with an ironic laugh. He couldn’t even go in there to look at the ruin any more, not since the second floor collapsed onto the first a while back.

His father was a farmer, singer, drinker, not an architect. Jorge knew it every time the casita wall creaked and buckled beneath his weight. “Good wind,” he thought, “whole thing blow over like a damned tumbleweed.”

He stepped over the concrete drainpipe that served as the front step, went through the door, kicked aside boots, books, dirty jeans, socks, paper plates, phonograph records. He didn’t know where they came from. He didn’t own a phonograph.

Now in the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator. As he did the metal strip fell off from inside the door freeing an economy-size container of mustard. The heavy jar landed hard on his booted foot.

He screamed, more from shock than pain, kicked the container away. It slid across the room, hit the wall below the counter and broke, splattered mustard and glass up the wall. He turned back to the refrigerator, found a can of Old Milwaukee. It was his second this morning.

“Well,” he thought, “hot for a winter day, near to eighty degrees. Beer goes down better than canal water; cleaner than canal water too. Least I think so. Them barnstormers fly over couple times a week spraying; I heard the stuff—di-meth—gets in the water. Kills ya outright. Faster’n beer killed dad.”

The room reeked of vinegar from the mustard. He fortified himself with another can of Old Milwaukee and went back to the living room. It would take at least a couple of hours for the smell to go away. He would need the other beer before then.

• Forgot to… close the door.

He went back into the kitchen, in time to hear the refrigerator sputter and go out. He smacked it, and again.

What was that? He heard a noise in the backyard and ran to the back window in time to see the Imperial Irrigation District truck peel down the ditch-bank road.

He ran to the front door, pushed the screen aside, and screamed after the truck,

• Son bitch! You took my power! You damn son bitch!

Muttering, his boots scraping the sand on the floor, he went to the couch, pushed the switch on the TV remote control, dropped himself down. He took a long pull on the beer, finished it. Where was the other one he just had? Oh yeah—in his other hand. He popped it open, looked at the TV.

Black screen. Damn. That broken too? He squinted, then remembered. Yeah. The power.

• Son bitch.

The last came out whispered, prayer-like. How long for things to be right again?

“Hell,” he thought. “Garbage to pile up to burn. No, tomorrow.

He went to the backyard, opened the grey Imperial Irrigation District box, snapped off the lead seal, found the orange plug that kept current out of his wires, and pulled it out.

“IID can’t keep electricity outa my house, not long as I got tools. once the TV set’s back to life, catch me forty. Tonight, hit El Pobrecito for a nightcap.”

---

• Hell. What am I doing in this dive? she asked herself, her lips moving silently. The ice in her drink rattled, thumping against her hand, and she realized gratefully that she could hear at last.

Then the ranchero music started again, up so high she squinted at David, face crunched in pain.

• Great place, isn’t it? he hollered.
• Great place to practice projection, she bellowed back.
• Oh yeah. You’re right. Sometimes my monsters get this loud, too. It’s like practice, kinda handy. I told you you’d like El Pobrecito. It’s my official hang-out. We two must be the only gringos here. You want another drink?
• No, thanks, I’m still finishing this one.
• I’m going up if you don’t mind.
• No, go right ahead.

“Why did I ever let myself get roped into a date with this red-bearded biker schoolteacher?” she thought. “At least he’s friendly. My first year in the Valley on an emergency teaching credential after all, and David is one of the few teachers at El Loci under fifty. Not bad-looking either, for all the strutting.”

She gave her drink one last swish, then set it down on a nearby table.

David came back toward her, a fresh bottle of cerveza Sol in his hand, with a wedge of yellow-green Mexican lime jammed in the lip. She pointed at the chunk of fruit.

• People say that stuff makes you sick. Is that true?
• What? The lime? Babe, what the beer don’t kill, my stomach does the rest. I’m not worried, he slurred.

She swallowed hard, trying to steady herself.

• Okay, but I feel crappy. This music is driving a hole right through my old head. Mind if I take a breather?
• Listen, I’ll walk out with you, cool?
• Lead on, MacDavid. MacDuffid.

Her giggle sounded choked as they pushed through the crowd, mostly Mexican migrant laborers in neat indigo jeans and cotton hooded shirts with stripes, running jackets, a few jeans jackets from the VIM store in Calexico. “This is definitely their place, not mine,” she thought, imagining how cool the air outside would be compared to the fetid swelter that reeked of corn fired in hot oil. They reached the door and thrust outside. Diana breathed in the dry night air, her head swimming back to the surface.

• God, I needed this.
• Yeah, the air is great in the winter. You know what I’d love you to try?
• Tell me.
• When we go on a call, you know, the volunteers, I’d like you to ride out with us. Just one time. Then you feel it rushing past, the wind. Like the hurricanes come. Charlie, the driver, really opens it up when we get out on Comacho. We go tooling past El Pobrecito, just there, have to be doing a hundred. That old truck can really move. Want to try it?
• Wouldn’t the other firemen mind?
• Normally yes. But in the case of pretty ladies, they tend to look the other way. Actually, they tend to not look the other way.
• I hear you.

Privately, she grimaced. Then there was a twinge in her gut, and the grimace became public.

• David, I feel really sick.

What’s the matter?

• I don’t know… bug? The lemon? Listen, can you take me home? I don’t want you to think I’m having a bad time or anything. It’s not your fault I feel this way. Also I really have to get into grading some tests. Would you mind?
• Sure.

He grinned, but it looked forced, and his boots scraped hard against the ground as he started toward the car. “Damn,” she thought. She didn’t want to mess this up, but she really did have to get home.

• Maybe we can pick up where we left off. Some other time. Right?
• Right, she said, relieved.
• Like maybe you could come ridin’ in the truck?
• Well, maybe we could go out for dinner? Say next week? Sound okay?
• Sure. Dinner’s cool. I’ll stop in to your room fifth period and we can set it up.

She breathed an inner sigh of relief.

A Mexican man, very drunk, staggered into Melcher, knocking him sideways. He was stunned for a moment, then snapped into action, shoved the man backward.

• Hey! Watch out where you’re going, you clumsy… !

Jorge Gargas reeled back from the impact of the gringo’s shove and insensate tirade. He fell down on his behind. Too drunk to shout at the gringo, too tired to get up and fight, all he could do was squint. So squint he did, his intense brown eyes boring into his red-haired adversary, twin pinpoints of brown fire.

• Who you looking at? Wetback? Snarled Melcher, wiping the thread of spit from his mouth.

Jorge did not answer. Sat on the ground, glaring up. “You stupid-ass gringo,” he thought. But he said nothing. Melcher, paling at the intensity of the Mexican’s stare, backed off. But when he saw that the man couldn’t get up, that there wasn’t going to be anything more dangerous than a stare-down contest, he turned and spoke to Diana, smugly and loud enough for the Mexican to hear him.

• What an asshole. You see him bump into me? Did it on purpose.

She saw.

Later, after the harrowing ride home with the drunken red giant, after refusing four times his protestations (he only wanted to come in for ‘one more drink, goddamnit, that’s all’), after he peeled his old sun-weathered Camaro out of her driveway with a rip of rubber and gravel, grading papers, the Mexican’s face hung in her mind. There was something, something relentless, that… What? Impossible.

---

“Ah,” she thought, “Morning periods the best. Before classes, before the others wander in lazy and befuddled, alone with a hot mug of coffee, you can get lots done. It’s a magic time, something lyric gets into your blood, your bones.”

“So?” she thought. “I’m teaching school in a noplace town. Better than New York, land of Dad, the Bank, Terry my spacy brother. Poor Terry. That letter I got from him last week. Something about seeing a vision on the train. Jesus, he rides that train across the water every morning, back every night. Just like Dad did for forty-two years, until the heart attack, until the blood stopped, frozen like air in an air conditioner pipe. No wonder the visions. Not how I want to die, alone in that frozen city nowhere. Someday I’ll leave these bones and blood here, in this warm desert nowhere. This is my nowhere.”

Reaching for the coffee mug, she looked down at her hand. Somewhere in her mind the tunnel to the past opened. It wasn’t the first time, wouldn’t be the last.

Her father’s hand lay yellowed against the white hospital bedsheet. “Dad, you damn cold scaly fish,” came the voice in her head, “and too bad, too bad everything, too bad mom died when Christine was born. Was he different, warmer, before then? I couldn’t tell. I was too young to tell, I suppose. How many times do you tell a man you love him and get no response? Except for his hand, that last time, on the bed. Damn him, he knew he was dying. He wouldn’t speak. He could but wouldn’t. Just lay there, drawing long, slow breaths, the exhales like sighs punctuated by the click of the respirator.”

She remembered leaning over the bed, in front of the whole family, doing what Dad would never let anyone do when he was strong: hugged him. She crushed the sheets and dad and the plastic things sticking out of him to her chest. He didn’t speak. But his hand moved, slow, as if it could think on its own; it slid up her arm, then across, then rested in the middle of her back. Damn him, she thought. He could have said it too just one time, that one last time.

She took a hard gulp of coffee, plunked the mug down, let fingers bang over the keyboard. “That’s right. The coffee is good,” she thought. “That’s the main problem. The coffee is always good. It’s deception, one more seduction, one more thing to keep me trapped here where I am.”

“What a non-place,” she thought. “If I stay here, I’ll pass like wind over this hard patch of land called home. It’s an accidental home, true, but home’s home. Dad died, it was like being fired from a gun. Washing dishes, waiting tables. Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Montana, like a big piece of road with motels and EATS signs. Nevada, Arizona. Then I was here, pounding the pavement, pleading with district after district, give me a chance I asked them. How long was it? Three months? I found this place. It’s a job. Been worse.”

She stayed with it first because she thought the ground was too hard to spread roots into. But the sandy soil fooled her at first. Nobody told her broccoli big as her head came out of it, all anybody had to do was add water, fertilizer. Sun, too. There was plenty of sun.

“Those are the basics,” she thought. “Coffee, dirt, sun. Why not stay? The house in El Centro Estates is good, the mortgage payment’s low. Only one neighbor; a vacant lot on the other side only a bookmark for another. Nice high fence all around the yard in back so I can swim naked in the pool any time.” She always had a tan. And everywhere was the clank of air conditioning machines, keeping her happy. Everywhere Freon; it was a second kind of wind there in the valley, lyric wind. Even Sappho could have dug it.

She leaned back in the chair, looked over at the bulletin board. There was a new sign pasted there.

HEAD JANITOR WANTED
$11.50 per hour to start.
Inquire at Principal’s Office

“What a place this is!” she thought, and laughed, “Isn’t this the third time this year they’re looking for a janitor? Each time they offer more money. God!” she realized with a shock, “it’s up to eleven-fifty an hour, pays almost as much as I get! Maybe I should have been a janitor.”

“Hell, was dad right? Should I have majored in financial management? Right now I could still be in Manhattan, staring out the forty-fifth story at the river, or eating power breakfasts and trading junk bonds. Or working in the Bank at least, with Terry, sitting in dad’s old chair and seeing visions on the D train and staring at the sun. Like a mad dog.”

She was laughing to herself as the door to the teacher’s lounge opened. It was David Melcher, looking like a taciturn boy wandering down to a bleary-eyed breakfast in footie pajamas. He held the door with his booted foot and squeezed through, growling.

• Don’t laugh at me. What kind of bonehead leaves a TV cart blocking a door like this? Other people have to get in and out, you know.

She muzzled her laughter and went back to typing, keeping her voice flat when she answered him.

• Don’t look at me. I’ve been sitting here for an hour. It wasn’t there when I came in.

He glared at her.

• Well you saw Why didn’t you move it?
• Didn’t notice it. Probably somebody returned it while I was working.
• Oh yeah, you’re impervious when you’re working. I forgot.

He moved the cart and let the door close. David was always bitching about this or that, but usually cooled off quickly.

• You made fresh.
• Washed the pot out too.
• And there’s real milk.
• I stopped at Cook’s Market on my way in this morning.
• Now this is a cup of coffee.
• A factual statement.

He came and sat facing her, leaning into the desk. She typed a sentence and didn’t look up. She could smell his breath. He had gone on partying after dropping her off last night. She reserved comment; too busy.

• What you up to?
• Lesson plans.
• You do more lesson plans than anyone else I know. How many classes do you teach again?
• Seven periods. They offered me extra money to give up my break, so I took it. Now let me work, please. Classes start in what, five, ten minutes?
• Okay, okay. Sorry I said anything.

By the sink, there was a tiny desk. He got up and hunched at it. She wanted to apologize, but she did have to get these plans done.

David finished the cup of coffee, took the beeper off his belt, pressed the battery-check button. A burst of pings. David grunted, clipped it to the belt, sighed, left the lounge, the door slammed.

She wasn’t sure if he was pissed or not. A few moments later the faculty toilet flushed across the hall.

• Too much coffee, Melcher! she yelled and laughed.

She selected ‘print’ from the menu and made sure the paper was lined up right. The printer whined. Something outside the window drew her eyes. She squinted, turned toward the door again. How much could it hurt, just for fun?

• Hey, Melcher! You promised to take me along!

He stuck his head back in the door.

• What, you want to go on a call?
• Figure the volunteer firemen could show a lady a good time. What else is there to do around here?

David laughed. She added, solemnly,

• But you have to behave, okay?

David nodded with equal sobriety, a little boy, serious now in footie pajamas. The first bell started ringing.

• Hey, he said. Don’t be late to class.

He shut the door again, gently this time. Diana gathered her printouts, stuffed them into the folder marked PERIOD ONE. As she turned to leave the office, the window once again drew her gaze.

“Hey. Is that a cloud? No, couldn’t be.”

---

Stiff, Jorge took a slug of beer, swore quietly, piled doors, beams, empty paint cans, rotting cloths. He had been cleaning up the wreck of the old farmhouse for what? Three months? Garbage was the only thing left of a life, their life.

“No sense crying”, he thought. “Used to cry a lot. Alcohol been helping it stop. Funny. Time was I hated beer. Used to get mad when I drove out on the highway and saw all them migrants sitting around in the cantaloupes, taking a siesta con el Bud-weiser and talking. Yes, time was I wanted to yell at ‘em, ‘Assholes! Stop wasting your life! Stuff rots your brain out from the inside!’”

“That was all back when things was different, when it was Gargas padre y nino. Hard-working farmers, nice acreage, good crop coming in, big melons, new cherry-red Ford pickup. And my novia, little brown Carmela. Full-blooded Yaqui Indian, beautiful women, those Yaquis, hoo, and Pop’s strong arms and knowledge of the ground to get us through. Never thought he’d die, he was tough like a dry mango with no juice, just meat, never thought he’d die. It was like he was preserved.”

“Three years ago the night the Ford pick-up turned over in that ditch with Dad and Carmelita in it. Three years ago I put ‘em in the ground, in the church-yard behind De Los Santos, Now I got nothing else to turn to. So what the hell I wake up ever morning with a head big as that damn empty blue falling sky? What’s your brand, amigo? Whatever is cheap, amigo. Here’s one: twelve pack for dollar ninety five. Looks good.”

“Look this shit. Got doors, beams, empty paint cans, rotting cloths, all pieces of a life gone. Goes to show what they say’s true, you can go on living after you’re dead. Living in stuff.”

He polished off his fourth beer. The gasoline hit him with an acerbic tang as he unscrewed the cap and sloshed it over the pile. This one going to go up good, he thought, and lit the match. He threw it on, watched the fire start to gnaw at the corner of the pile. “Definite one-matcher,” he thought, “know it just from watching the way it starts.”

The flame grew stronger. He pressed his face into the wall of mounting heat. His shirt stuck to his body, but the heat felt solid, on his skin, real. If it would make a difference, in that moment he would splash gasoline on himself, thrown on a match, if only it would burn away the bad memories, clear away all the faces of the neighbors looking at his sordid house and fields, pained, pity or scorn brimming in their yellowing eyes.

The mounting heat blasted his face, dried his eyes. He blinked at the intensity of it, eyelids scraping painfully—too close!—then backed off a few feet. Now the flames reached high as he was tall. The voice in his head said “good fire. He stared into the blaze and drained the Lite.

He rubbed his eyes. His drunk mind drifted. “Yeah, Eye Bank. Frank the Cop said it’s ‘Cause of the Devil’s Runway, just outside Ocotillo coming deep off the San Diego mountains out of Jacumba where the freeway takes them sharp curves. City folks go flying, off the freeway, pitch to death in the ravine. Cars go fender-deep in the scrub. Frank said Ocotillo cops keep a look-out to find ‘em while they’re fresh. Ever’ time they haul some dead guy in with the organ donor section filled in on the back of his license, Eye Bank kicks a donation the police way. So many eyes in the El Centro Eye Bank. Frank said it got so they had to ship blind people in from out of town to have the operation, otherwise they’d waste ‘em—eyes only stay fresh couple weeks.”

A shortage of blindness. Jorge chuckled. Only in the Valley.

Hell. Time for a beer.

---

Mario Gutierrez watched the clouds roll and slide in the sky. It wasn’t really going to rain, was it? He pictured the sheets of water falling, fantasy-like, from the swollen sky. Then he pictured Helena Vargas and himself walking in that rain, the wetness making their black hair twist and curl, her long braids whipping in the wind. In his vision his hand surrounding hers, protecting her. “Don’t worry, Helena, I won’t let the rain gods get you…”

• Mario?!
• Sorry Miss Shawnesee. I was just looking… it’s the clouds, they are…

Diana walked to the window slowly and looked out. She stared a long time. After a few moments, some other students stood and edged up behind her, trying to get a peek at the strange sight.

• It’s a bit unusual isn’t it? she asked.
• Will they close school? asked Mario.
• They might, Mario.

Diana smirked. In New York City they occasionally closed school on account of bad weather. In fact, planners of school calendars added extra days to each year’s calendar, with the assumption schools would be shut two or three days per year due to heavy snow. But here, in the Valley, they actually closed school on account of rain! Ludicrous and wimpy, she thought. But if you thought about it, there was some sense behind it: A large number of roads in the area were unpaved. A good rainstorm could flood them out so thoroughly that no schoolbuses could traverse them. Hence there were rain days.

• Do you know what makes rain clouds form? she asked her class, pointing at the dark sky.

Ignoring her question, they continued to gaze mutely out the window, eyes open with curiosity. Like children. “What the hell,” Diana sighed.

• Look, Mrs. Shawnessee. Smoke!
• No, that’s got to be fog, Mario. When warm moist air meets a mass of cold air…
• No, it’s definitely a fire. No, over there. On the other side of Heber. Must be a big one.
• Where?

Mario pointed the billowing plume out to his teacher. She put her hand above her eyes as a bolt of sun slipped from behind a cloud. Yes. There it was, enormous and black, rising up.

• Isn’t that near where the gas refinery is?
• It’s near there, answered Hector Carrerra. My dad works for them. If it gets too close…

Suddenly shocked from her reverie, Diana bolted out of the classroom, down the dark hall, two doors, three… There was Melcher’s room. She knocked, then stuck her head in before he answered. His classroom was empty. Free period.

• Diana? asked David, in the middle of writing homework assignments on the board.
• You get a beep yet?
• No, why?
• There’s a fire out by Comacho road. Near the gas refinery. You better get the volunteers out there.

Before she finished the sentence he was past her, running out the door. Diana’s kids, who had run out of the class with her, followed, trying to stay in single-file, like Mr. Melcher taught them to. Mario and Helena Vargas walked hand-in-hand, Helena looking at Mario proudly.

• He spotted a big fire, she whispered to Evangelina Avila. He is a hero.

Paul Bering, Diana’s next-door neighbor, said he’d be glad to watch her class while she and David went out on the call.

• But since when do you go on calls with the volunteers? Paul asked.

David stepped in quickly, putting an arm protectively around Diana’s shoulder.

• She’s our first woman volunteer. Just joined the squad. It’s kinda like Affirmative Action. We’re all proud of her.

Diana nodded, officious, broke free of David’s hold and ran ahead, out the building, to his car.

---

• Dios Mio! screamed Jorge Gargas.

He rushed back from the canal ditch with a leaky bucket full of water. The fire swallowed the water and hissed but kept growing, the flames crackling gleefully, as if they were laughing at him. The old farm house was going up now, its dry beams sucked into the ball of heat and light; soon it would spread to the casita and he would he legitimately homeless.

• Dios mio! Dios mio!

He wept, helpless and lowered slowly to the ground. Facing the obtuse dark churning sky, he began to moan like a lost animal there on the grit, as what was left of his present and past was consumed. He rolled face down, rolled his arms around his head and wailed, louder now, for lost father, lost love, lost home. And dammit, swore the relentless voice in his head that condemned him for his sins even now, he also wailed for the unopened six-pack in the casita fridge he would never get to drink. Into his wail merged the sound of distant fire trucks, growing slowly louder.

As the two Imperial Valley Volunteer Fire Brigade units pulled into the dusty ditch-bank road, the first drops of rain began to fall. The firemen (and woman), as they unravelled their hoses and stoked their pumps and plugged their intake hose into the canal, turned their faces to the sky to receive the drops as they fell.

“It was amazing, as if God Himself was helping us put the fire out,” the Imperial Valley Press would quote Bill McKenna, one of the firemen, in tomorrow’s page-four feature about the fire.

The men hoisted the hoses and began to flood the blaze. Diana stood back. She didn’t know very much about putting out fires, but she did have a First Aid certification, so she decided to make a quick scan of the grounds, looking for injured. As she rounded the corner and went behind the ruined casita, she saw a crumpled man in soiled, greasy clothing. She ran to him, stood over him. He was not moving. As she bent over to take his shoulder, a wave of fear rolled up her arm. It was a memory, of Patrick Shawnessee, lying in a bed at St. Vincent’s Hospital, drawing long, last breaths, his hand moving up her arm…

• You okay? You okay? she shouted.

She nudged his shoulder gently. He rolled onto his back and she saw his face. She stared for a long time.

• You? she asked.

Jorge Gargas opened his eyes. Now it was his turn to stare.

• You? he asked, eyes widening.
• You okay?

He looked back at the burning house, as ripples of rain and streams of water from the hoses gradually did their work.

• Yes, he said. I’m okay.

They stared at each other then. Did Diana or Jorge begin to laugh first? The rain fell in blinding sheets (which would quench the blaze in minutes). She helped him up, verified, he wasn’t injured. The rain on his face looked like tears. Suddenly, a tug of impulse—she grabbed Jorge’s hand and led them to a shock of oleander on the far side of the casita.

---

• I don’t know how to say it. What I’m trying to do is apologize for what my friend said to you last night. It was really his fault. He had no right to treat you that way. He is a fool.

Jorge shrugged. He hadn’t even given her friend or the incident last night much thought.

• It ain’t my business, he said. Yeah, he’s rude, your boyfriend. But it ain’t my concern. You got to live with that, not me.

Diana took his hand again, raising her voice for emphasis.

• He is not my boyfriend. I have no boyfriend.
• No? he asked.
• No, she said.

Jorge looked into her eyes. Green eyes. He reached out and touched her hair. Red hair. Something about that, he was not sure what made him do it (no, Carmela’s eyes were brown as xochotl like mine, no, her hair was black as coal like mine), but still he shrugged, then shivered, as the cold rain penetrated his skin, and began to cry anyway, despite the iron in his stomach, into this strange gringita’s hair. His hands twisted helplessly at his sides as it all came out, all of it, lost in the rain.

Diana’s hand began at her side. It raised itself (no, get down) slowly, went up his arm, his shoulder, then coiled, serpentine, around his shoulder (please, I’m not ready!) to his back, flattened, pressed his sobbing body to her.

She thought of her father, turning to sand in a coffin three thousand miles away. Her hand thought of other things.

---

Jorge looked up. “Look that bastard,” he thought. “Wish I could do that.” The shadow of the crop-duster blew across his face. He recoiled as if struck. The shadow seemed to have substance, could reveal substance to him. The duster, oblivious to his musings, turned and began to spray its load of di-meth onto his newly-disced and planted fields.

He looked at the husks of his farmhouses, let his mind wander back to last week: the firemen finished killing the fire and put their tools away. They gave him the Red Cross phone number and drove off. He stood around, staring, kicking through ashes, blackened wood, glass. Two hours later, Diana came back in her beat-up Pinto. School’s closed for the rest of the day, she said, maybe tomorrow. Want to go have something to eat at El Pobrecito and talk? Sure.

They had an early dinner, carne asada y arroz amarilla, talked for hours over beer, coffee, more beer. Toward the end, she took his hand simply, matter-of-factly, and asked if he needed a place to stay. He nodded. Yes.

They went back in twilight with flashlights, dug through the remains of the casita, found all his clothing was burned beyond use. He told her, “don’t worry, Red Cross will give me money to buy a couple pairs of jeans and some shirts.” They left the house empty-handed, stopped to buy a six-pack of Bud tall-boys at the Circle K. Back at her house they sat by the pool, talking and laughing and sometimes crying together. Hours went by. The rain began to slow. Drunk, they swam naked, their bodies made ghostly by the smoky yellow light of the Holly Sugar refinery.

That was a beginning.

He kicked a clod of hardening mud. Now it would begin again. This time he had met a woman who understood about shadows, ghosts. She was haunted by the dead, like he was. It did not matter. This was about now and later, not the past. There would be a new little casita. It would be cheap to build, because they would hire laborers from Mexico to do most of the work. A little migrant family could rent it and tend the farm. Hard-working people. They’d be very happy to have a fridge, he’d stock it with food, install a shiny new washing machine. Seduced by aplliances, they’d work hard to keep the land going.

He thought of his new job. So I’m gonna be a janitor. Something I can do, pay be good. Then he thought about the house in El Centro Estates. A goddamn pool! Never thought I would get a place with a pool. And this beautiful woman with red hair to swim with.

He rubbed his hands over his new jeans, sighed. He looked up at the huge sky. It didn’t look to him like it would fall any time soon.

• Diana! he called and waved to her as she walked up the puddle-strewn ditch-bank road.

She looked over at him, small brown man in blue in the distance. She thought, What the hell am I doing, am I actually shacking up with this guy? Getting stuck in this nowhere now. Just a breeze.

But in answer to her own confusion, she remembered what she saw the day of the fire last week. Jorge’s eyes were filled with mystery, pain, need’s intensity. She sighed. Is there any use trying to explain how hearts work? she asked herself. It’s not like air conditioning. You can’t send away for the schematics. It just works.

“And so what?” she thought, “if there are rumors of problems with the school board, fueled no doubt by a jealous Mr. David Melcher! If I want to shack up with a destitute ex-farmer-turned-janitor, that is my business, isn’t it? Is it still a free country?” A chill went through her as she asked that.

• Forget them! she said aloud.

“This is what it’s all about. That’s why I am a teacher, Dad, not a goddamn arbitrageur eating power breakfasts. It’s no crime to bring some light into a dark world.”

“No,” she thought. “Tell the dead to shut up and go psychoanalyze themselves. But if the living want to talk some sense to me, they’re welcome to try. They can find me in my pool out back, getting a tan.”

Then she turned and walked the rest of the way to where Jorge waited, in his new jeans.

Copyright © 2017 Bob Jude Ferrante

Written 1990
Revised 2002
Exclusive to bobjudeferrante.com.

In Esar they call on me whenever leatherwork is needed. Any kind of leather. It does not matter. A thick winter coat for a twenty-stone farmer, fifteen years ago. It was handed down to his twenty-stone son just last year. A fine necklace with inlaid silver and road pearls. She still wears it, my wife. And many pairs of boots, to dampen the road, but keep you dry. Many pairs of boots.

The villagers in Esar are poor. They pay with a dressed duck, a basket of apples, a cord of firewood. It is not a lot. But it is enough. Our house is small. But we all have fine leather to hold and use. And look how the work makes everyone live a little better. So I am rich.

Yes, the Guild makes offers.

• Come, they say, supervise a room filled with craftsmen, where we make not one pair of boots, but one hundred.

The Guild is persistent.

• Come, they say, give thousands of boots your mark. Build your wife and daughter a big house.

But how much more there is in knowing every detail; to kill the animal, as I killed its mother before. Tan the hides, soften, cure them slow.

True, the young buy Guild products, since the prices are a few dismes lower and the quality medium but consistent. I cannot stop progress. So most of my customers are aging with me. But they remain faithful. I have continued this way for forty years.

A good run.

This happened some time ago.  I was twenty-nine! At the time, an event of little consequence. A trip to town, to buy a small tool.

It started because of bad luck. Has bad luck ever followed you? Some days it destroys everything. Other days it is a friend.

I was working on edge pieces, tooling designs and crests into boot cuffs. Warm-up work, to precede serious tooling. Four-year old Leda’s first pair of dress boots waited on the table.

A fine detail needed a three-fourths inch awl. But the awl slipped, fell, struck the iron table-top and dropped to the floor. I bent to retrieve it. In pieces.

There are to this day no toolmakers in Esar. A half day’s journey by coach to Sed, our nearby city. But I needed a three-fourths awl and nothing else would do. I went in to prepare for the journey, pulled down the bag my mother gave me when I went away to study with my mentor, and put by food, water, a shirt, sandals for the heat.

There were three toolmakers in Sed. I had never been there. Father gave me tools when I first set up shop. But I knew eventually my craft would need the service of a toolmaker. So I kept a list of them handy.

I set out, boarded the mid-morning coach to Sed, en route ate some bread and dry cheese, looked through the coach window as the road bounced, coughing out clouds of dust. Eleven miles is a lot of dust. We reached Sed just past noon. The driver stopped near the first shop.

This was the district near the Gymnasium for children of wealthy parents. The tools were lined up on tables, makeshift. Cards under each tool, painstakingly lettered, stated its price.

I called for the owner.

He emerged; a fat man in his early thirties. Making boots, you become a good judge of age and weight. And his clothes: slept in; his pants: patched sloppily. But on his leather jacket, a beautifully-sketched ivy curled across the bottom. His hobby? Leather.

His tools? I tested a mallet. My test brads broke when tapped into a piece of wood. What was it? It was poor balance. It looked perfectly fine. But what matters is how it works.

He proffered and awl. It handled fine. It passed the classic test: if you spin it with a finger just behind the ferrule, does the handle drop into your palm? But working sample calfskin I’d brought, there it was. Unpredictable. It was an awl with no insight. The student followed the recipe but did not taste the spirit of the dish. Pity.

I bought a mallet. It would be good for beating hide. And left.

The second shop was in a wealthy part of town. All around, luxuries and pleasures were for sale: painted women and roving boys in dandy dress, wines, pungent cheeses, hallucinogenic mushrooms, tobacco. The townsfolk here were content and well-fed. But on the street, they jostled me without apology.

The shop was called Tools of Time.

Inside it was dusky and ornate. Pillars of mahogany wood and carved putti. Frescoes danced over the plaster ceiling with almonds, reds, blues. And: bellows, anvils, molds, and carving blocks on display. But as decor. Ah. Less a toolmaker’s shop than a tool-broker’s. No fire, though. No-one working.

First I asked the gentleman (for he was, if one judges by elegant clothing and I must say a foppish mien) where he kept his tool-making equipment. He gestured wordlessly to a curtain festooned with Persian embroidery hanging behind him.

Behind lay a small chamber. Three men, stood at bare-chested work. The first worked the bellows. The second tempered an iron bar in the smelter, yawned as he handled the carbon-caked tongs.

The third was bent over a work-table, a magnifying glass in hand. I moved in closer to observe. He carved a name into the handle of a tack puller—an ornate signature. He devoted to its formal perfection ten times more care than the others. I paid him brief compliment, then left the stuffy, hot antechamber and rejoined the tool-broker. The third workman’s labor had impressed me. I asked to sample a leather awl kit.

He was most courteous. From the glass case, he handed me a beautiful instrument with the same elegant signature on its handle. Admiring its lines and lovely markings, I asked the price. The answer was three times my budget. Yet the awl seemed perfect. Despite its high price, I was about to hand the money to the tool-broker when the curtain opened and the first workman entered the show-room, wiping his face with a soiled rag. There I stood with money in hand, poised to give it to the tool-broker, when I remembered that this first workman was the one who ran the bellows in the back.

I asked (casually) why he left his post at the bellows. Though I am no expert at making tools (else I would make my own) I know that in the tempering process, if rhythmic pressure is not applied to the bellows, the temperature changes unpredictably, the metal does not crystallize properly, and two years later will shatter at any pressure.

There was an awkward moment during which the tool-broker glared at the workman (most distastefully), the workman glared at me (most distastefully), and I admired the wonderful carvings and signature on the handle of the awl.

I did not touch the awl to my leather, merely handed the beautiful instrument back to the tool-broker, apologized, shut the string on the purse, and removed to the street. There was no doubt this seemingly perfect awl hid dozens of invisible flaws, any one of which could destroy it. Beautiful handles are pleasant to see and touch. I needed a superlative awl.

The last shop was on a back street. A long walk through the poor districts of Sed. There roamed the street cut-purses who would steal not only with money but also my good leather boots. Artists, if you can call thieves artists. I kept a hand to the grip of my hunting knife and carefully checked addresses. I was there.

Entering, I smelled something even stronger than the harsh sting of hardening brass. Sausages. They smelled spicy. And fresh. I scanned the selection of tools and inhaled the aroma. But there were no three-quarter inch awls in the counter display. Hammers, chisels, punches. Blocks for bolt-drivers and for planes also. No awls.

A bell-rope dangled above the counter, I pulled it. There was no sound, which was only confusing when the old man burst through the curtains anyway, with a chunk of dark bread in his claw, the end of a sausage sticking out of the bread. It was difficult to ignore the gurgling sounds of my stomach. I had not eaten since mid-morning.

I asked the man if he stocked any awls. He clutched his bread, appeared to be staring at my leather vest. I repeated the question, louder this time. He kept staring.

Ah, he was hard of hearing. I reached for his hand and touched it. Instantly he smiled and nodded. I took the broken awl from a pocket and showed it to him. There was no response. I waved it. Still he did not move his head or even blink. Was he blind, too?

I released his hand. Making ready to leave, it struck me—how could he detect the bell? I stood still, neither spoke nor moved. He could no longer know I was there.

The oddest shop. The man paused, then turned his back, eating his sandwich. He had few teeth, so he was less biting than gnawing feverishly at the tough bread. Then I saw, attached to the bottom of his coat, the other end of the bell-rope. So that was it!

I left the shop.

Back on the filthy street, I found a street stand selling local fruit and dry beef. I sat at the curb, slowly chewing the jerky. How the name of God was I to find the awl? The highest quality kid-skins were saved for Leda’s boots. They had to be perfect. I needed a perfect 3/4 awl for the fine work required. It was inconceivable the trip eleven miles to the only large town in the district would be fruitless. The problem was unsolvable.

I tore into a ripe peach; it had a firm texture and a sublime balance of sweet and sour. Sitting there I came close to tears. If nature could make such a perfectly balanced creation, why was there no toolmaker with the same equilibrium? I took a second bite, then bitter, threw the peach to the ground.

For a few minutes I rested. After this long and frustrating day, what lay ahead was the trip home, empty-handed. I rose and began the hike back to the coach station.

I trudged five minutes or so. I was planning how to complete Leda’s boots without a three-quarter. Three toolmakers! Two not capable at their trade. The last one?

• Ludicrous, I said.

At that exact moment, a leather-gloved hand grabbed my shoulder and jerked me back, nearly knocking me off my feet. I reached for the butt of the hunting knife, regained balance, and whirled about-face to meet the cut-purse. He would not get my money or my leather handiwork without a fight.

It was not a cut-purse. It was the blind, deaf, old toolmaker. With my peach in his hand.

• A shame to toss one of nature’s most perfect creations into the street. Sure you don’t want it?

I could not respond. After a few more moments, he took a bite of it. He was obviously enjoying it. I remembered its taste. My mouth moistened. He bit the last chunk off, a drop of juice ran down the corner of his mouth. Licking his fingers, he put the pit into his pocket.

• Can’t let this one get away. Too perfect. He patted his mouth with his sleeve.

I tried to speak. It was difficult.

He put his hands to my face. They were warm and had their own intelligence, it seemed, as they wandered lightly over cheek and chin.

• Don’t bother speaking unless my hand is on your throat, like this. Unless I can feel your words, they won’t do either of us any good.
• How did you follow me all this way?
• Do you want to ask me stupid questions, or do you want to buy an awl?

He grabbed my hand, turned, and led me like a blind man back to his shop.

Neither of us spoke en route. Passers-by saw us; a man of thirty years, a blind man dragging him through the slum. The bell-rope was still attached to his coat back. It dragged in the dust. I stepped over it three times, just missing it.

Finally we arrived. He showed me to a stool. I sat; he sat himself down.

He took my hand and examined it with his sentient fingers, touched each callused part, pressed the fingers back to measure the strength of their grip, bent the wrist a few times, measuring its strength and speed. After a few minutes of scrutiny, he disappeared into his workroom.

No clock ticked. The light faded in the shop. Only a glow from under the workroom curtain. I saw his worn cloth boots under the curtain.

As it got dark, he paused from his work to come out into the shop and light its single lamp, also pulling down the shade in the front doorway. He returned to his work. This time he left the curtain open slightly. Through the opening I watched him work.

It was dim. Watching the old man, I could not intuit what he was doing. His blind eyes were closed and he had a piece of wood in his hands. Every once in a while he caressed the wood, made a mark in it with a tiny knife from his work-table.

It was late. The last coach would leave soon. It would leave without me. The next was mid-morning. My wife and daughter would miss me.

• It’s getting cooler out. Please go into the trunk in the sleeping room and take out two blankets. Bring one to me, take one for yourself.

He went back to his wood. I brought the blanket. He grunted to thank me. I dropped to the chair and wrapped the coarse cloth tightly around me.

I am patient. A leather worker must be willing to sit tending a curing fire for seven hours to give a boot upper the right degree of seasoning, the perfect color, degree of wear, suppleness. But to watch a man hold a piece of wood two fingers across for hours… Restless, I again threw the blanket off, and stood.

The old man said nothing. Did nothing. I paced the shop, stopping occasionally to release an exasperated sigh. Which of course only I heard.

I begged the old man to finish, pleaded, reasoned, cajoled. He focused all his sightless attention on the piece of wood, as deaf as he. He didn’t speak, but seemed to be talking with it, making agreements, discussing philosophy, arguing politics. Anything but making it into an awl handle. Time passed, each new second a taunt.

I was half asleep when he broke from his trance and spoke. The words penetrated the stupor like a bell’s radiant clang.

• Thanks. Now may I see one piece of your work, so I may see how you intend to use this tool?

Relieved, I removed one boot. I must admit, I had special pride in these boots, and had kept them for myself to wear. The fine tooling had taken a month to complete; they had worn without a crack or sag for five years, needing only one good soaping per month. They were a masterpiece.

He accepted the precious boot in silence, touched it for a brief time, probing it, then held it at arm’s length. After two minutes he was done, and laid it aside.

That stung. This blind man made such a fuss over a little piece of wood, but gave the most perfunctory once-over to an elegant piece of work, worthy of kings, which had taken all-told over two hundred hours of labor to produce (counting the curing.) Who was this fool? I grabbed the boot and thrust it back on.

• Yes, and if he was a fool, am I not an absolute imbecile, watching him do nothing for hours, when I should be home with wife and daughter?

After some minutes, after working myself into a frenzy of self-recrimination, convinced I had to forget everything and leave the shop immediately. But how to do it without insulting the old toolmaker?

Then he moved. Quickly his hands guided the knife into the block. Within three minutes it was a finished handle. Why had he taken so long? I was hot with anger and impatience, felt the rising sun through the window shine red. Stormy today. I held myself in check. Despite the absurdity of the situation, I still wanted the awl. At least the handle was finished.

The old man rose and approached me calmly.

• Now I want to ask you a question or two, he said, reaching warm hand to throat.
• Ask away, I said.
• You love your trade passionately, don’t you?

After a pause, I answered.

• Yes, certainly.
• Of course I love the trade! said the inner voice. If I didn’t love it, I would have bought the first awl at the first shop and right now would be home in bed asleep!
• I have another question.

Another pause.

• Go ahead, ask, I replied, impatience leaking through.
• You have a lot of pride attached to your work. Is that correct?

This time I was silent for a minute or two. The old man waited. Finally I spoke.

• I suppose I do, sir.

He didn’t answer, only nodded.

• Why that question? I asked him.

The toolmaker answered immediately, matter-of-factly.

• When a tradesman has no pride attached to his work, he treats his tools as his friends, his working companions. His work is joyous, and is of himself and God. He gives credit equally to his tools and to God as to himself when he does superlative work.

I shifted in the chair.

• But when a tradesman has pride invested, sewn into his work, then he places much weight on his tools. They are not his friends. They are his servants, his slaves. He is hard on them, beats them when they do not perform according to his desires. Thus his tools will live a shorter life and must be of a thickness which will withstand a severe beating. This subtracts from their delicacy and decreases the fineness of the work which they are capable of performing.

I tensed my neck to speak, but stopped.

• That is why I ask. Pride is an emotion very important to one who makes tools.

What could be said? Never had I heard such words. They hurt deeply. They were all true. The broken awl had taken many an angry beating. Even the delicate work on the masterpiece, my “pride,” had suffered because of that. I looked down at the boots, then up at the toolmaker’s face, into the eyes that did not see.

He removed his hand and rose, no doubt to return to his workroom to finish the awl. I pushed his shoulder,placed his hand back on my throat.

• Wait.

The toolmaker stared at me through broken eyes.

• You were right. I have been prideful of this work, and impatient with yours. I am a disgrace to the dignity of the trade. I am sorry.
• Please, said the toolmaker, there is no need…
• I swear all that will change beginning with this moment. I have seen how much this attitude costs me, costs the quality of my work. I can no longer let this happen. I swear to you.

He shook his head.

• There is no need for this. Any tradesman with integrity abandons such things when they no longer serve him. It is to be expected. What is more, friend, I am sure you are already far more critical of yourself than you need be.

He smiled.

• No, one does not need to examine excellent workmanship for long to recognize it. Your boots, obviously your finest work, are flawless and quite beautiful. As one man of integrity speaking to another, I admire your work.

He paused. I waited.

• It is much easier to give unexpected praise. It seems like a real gift then. Too many give praise for nothing, or withhold it when it would simplify things.

Simplify things. I understood. Many times had I accepted praise. Every time I thought it something earned, for deeds, for plying a trade. Praise was salary. Now I understood a new use, a better use, for praise.

He rose and went to check on the temperature of the metal in his smelter. Pulling tongs from his kit he extracted an awl bit, white-hot. With a few motions, during which I and every insect in the room shared his focus, he finished shaping it, stroked it with the tongs, and plunged it sizzling into the bucket.

Throughout the operation, his manner was paradoxical. He was totally focused on the bit, but worked in such a casual way a person might mistakenly believe he was thinking of something else. He touched the metal with the confidence of a man who could coax incredible feats from it, yet his touch remained light, as if he were handling hot metal for the first time. He rolled it up and pulled it to a point so quickly that I gasped as at the final stroke in a bullfight.

It was done. The toolmaker laid the awl on an oilcloth, wrapped it three times around, carried it to the counter. Then he sat.

I glanced at the little parcel once, then at him, greeted his eyes. They saw nothing, but gave off the same red light as the rising sun had. Twice, three times, I alternated glances between the parcel and his face.

• Open it, please.

I uncoiled the oilcloth; three, two one. There was my tool. No mistaking it.

• Will it do? he asked.

I lifted it, balanced it in right hand. It was light, but the sharpness of its point bespoke heaviness. I searched for the fragment of kidskin, found it, laid it on the counter.

When I touched the awl to the skin, the leather drew it in. A few scratches. A design emerged. It came from the leather’s own distinctive natural patterns; from the tool; from me. In moments, we three created something.

The man watched. When he felt I was done, he came to me and put hand to throat.

• It is done!
• Good, was all he said.
• But there is no signature. A fine piece of work such as this must credit the skilled hands of its maker. Will you sign it?

He smiled, shifting his weight on the stool.

• No. There is no need. I made the awl for you. Now it has been born, I have no hold on it.

I looked at it one more time, then re-wrapped it in the cloth.

• Here, I said, keep this kidskin. I have not put my name to it, either.

Wrought into the leather were mountains, a sunrise red as fire, a stream, and the lights of the village Esar. He accepted the gift, running his hands over the leather lightly, reverently, then he nodded.

• Thank you, he said, it is a beautiful sketch.

I looked into his eyes one more time, knowing I would have to hurry to catch the mid-morning coach back to shop, wife, and daughter.

• How much do I owe you?
• Seventeen pesos, please.

I paid him. A very reasonable price for any superlative awl.

• I will tell the others of the village of your skill in making tools. There are other toolmakers in Sed, but none whose tools are of this quality.

He thanked me again. I bade farewell.

Plans for Leda’s boots were turning in mind. Walking through the slums back to the coach station, I passed a beggar. He put a hand out. I glanced down. His feet were bare.

I reached into the sack and took out the leather sandals. Today would be too hot for boots. I doffed the boots, placed them on the ground in front of the beggar.

In the light sandals, I suddenly felt light, very light. And I flew home, the leather wings on my sandals catching the light of the sun and shining.

Written 1976
Published: HIKA 1977
Revisions 1994, 2002

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ONE

It hit him again as he took the box of cornflakes off the shelf. With a cry he jumped off the stepstool and raced out of the kitchen. Halfway to the den, just past the living room, it struck a third time.

He was there.

But the feeling sensed the pen was in his hand. It flew quickly, fearfully away.

There was a sullen expression on his face as he returned to the kitchen where his cornflakes awaited him.

The cornflakes box promised him a miniature model of the Lusitania if he sent in three boxtops and two dollars. Made of one hundred percent high-quality plastic. Red plastic. He turned the box around. Gaudy advertisements. He read them and smiled. He had read them before, in the store, before he bought the cereal. The company put a picture of a boy on the front of the box. The boy was fishing and smiling in the picture. He smiled when he looked at the box.

They crunch in your mouth. But then they get soggy. Yech. A mouthful of sugar at the end. You spit it out.

Too much sugar is no good for you.

As the toothbrush shoonshed over his teeth, he looked in the mirror. Dark circles under his eyes, hair in disarray, needs a shave. White foam in mouth. Foam looks like ocean foam, spewed out hundreds of times daily, with tides ebbing, every day the same.

It hit the fourth time and he swallowed a little. He felt it going down, but he was already at the desk, scribbling funny marks on a page. Wiping a blob of ocean foam off, when it dropped on.

• What are you doing?

He spluttered on the page.

• Are you writing again?

He swallowed three dixie cups of water. It was cold and fell down on his cornflakes, chilled his stomach.

• It’s five o’clock in the morning, for Chrissake!

Into the kitchen, put the bowl into the dishwasher. Clean up the mess before she sees it.

• Look at this kitchen!

Too late.

TWO

• Honey—

Mumble. You don’t know why. Just mumble.

He scratched his stomach and burped loudly. “Like a frog,” they used to say in school. He was the living national treasure of the second grade class a long time ago. He could burp real loud. They even got him to do it in Emily Markowitt’s face, just for spite. He was a standup guy. He did it.

Like a frog.

• Honey—

With a death grip on his kleenex, he blew his nose. Threw the kleenex away, into the trashcan. Garbage. Maybe the whole world will be covered with garbage.

• Honey, answer me…

She was coming into the room. He heard the thunkbathunk of her spike heels on the linoleum. Then the sound became muted, turning to thudbathud. She was on the carpet. It came closer.

She was in the doorway behind him!

• Honey, hurry up. We should be at the Pirelli’s by seven-thirty.

Mumble.

• We’ll miss the crudite.

Pants pulled on the usual way. Shirt slipped into. Tie tied.

Wash the nasty bacteria off your face. Swish. Shoonsh. Shoonsh. Now you’re clean.

THREE

What?

• I said, do you believe in God?

Why? Why do you want to know?

• I was just interested, that’s all.

The man in the brown suit with the blonde hair and a Bloody Mary in his hand turned on his heel and started a conversation with a passing redhead in a yellow suit holding a mint julep. The two walked away.

He ran his hand through his brown hair, threw his eyes wifeward. She was in the midst of a crowd of people, discussing the availability of summer tickets to the People’s Republic of China. She was a travel agent.

Find a chair. Legs feel like rubber.

He heard a karunch as he sat down. He stood up and brushed the potato chips off the seat of his pants. He looked around. No one had seen him.

Get up, get up.

He was outside in the cold. His teeth chattered, the stars twinkled in rhythm. His legs, his feet beat the concrete out of rhythm. Syncopated.

He looked down at his feet.

How ridiculous they look. Two things I call feet. Pretty flimsy looking. Perhaps I’ll topple.

He walked toward the corner, doubts notwithstanding.

There was a traffic light, green, waiting for a car to come. It turned yellow, red. He stood, watching.

Now it’s green again.
Doesn’t it care
no one’s there to see it change?

He breathed a goodbye to the traffic light. The words turned into wispy smoke and rose. He watched as they rose, vanished in the air.

The stars were there, beating.

Why are they there? he asked himself.

Maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re dead, all dead, just little bits of beating light.

Now a pattern of blue and red, pulsing across the little beating dots. A plane, carrying people to Fort Lauderdale for the winter; to France; to the People’s Republic of China.

His back fell against the lamp-post, cold lamp-post. The cold went through his silk shirt, on into his back.

Across the street, a man carrying groceries out of the Associated Supermarket, his cane making steady toktok noises on the concrete.

Now a blue convertible sails toward the red light, stops. The driver of the convertible and the man with the cane speak to each other, a few quick words, then the man opens the rear door and sits down, closing the door as the light turns green and the convertible slides into the night, swallowed whole, leaving only the wisps of breath, rising and fading.

He smiled. The cold lamp-post had numbed his back.

This is the place.

He reached into his right rear trouser pocket, removed a piece of paper. Without reading it, without looking at it, he walked over to the cracked concrete wall, slipped the paper into a crack.

He turned his head to the right, then the left. No one had seen him.

He turned his heel, his ridiculous fragile feet walked so syncopated back to the Pirelli’s house. Once there, he looked in the window, warm people standing sipping Bloody Marys and mint juleps.

Perhaps no one finds it. It will stay in the wall forever, the rain will sog it and blur the ink.

Perhaps someone finds it.

FOUR

On the corner of Mace Avenue and Eastchester Road, imbedded in the concrete, I found a piece of paper. On it were these words:

HELLO.
LISTEN.
GOD IS HERE
GOD IS THERE
GOD IS NOT.
YET—
THE STARS BEAT ON.
LOVE ALL
PLEASE.
I LOVE YOU.

Copyright © 2002 Bob Jude Ferrante