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“= REVIEW

volume 33
 

 

 

 

THE RED
CEDAR REVIEW

The Red Cedar Review is an
annual literary magazine,
published on the campus
of Michigan State
University for over thirty
years. Subscriptions are
available for $10 (2 issues);
sample copies are $2.50.
Manuscripts are read year-
round. For submission
guidelines send a self-
addressed-stamped-
envelope. For additional
information write to The
Red Cedar Review, 17c
Morrill Hall, Department
of English, Michigan State
University, East Lansing,
Michigan 48823.

Text is set in Garamond 10
pt. Titles are in Garamond
22 pt. Authors are in
Lucida Sans 14 pt. The
issue was designed in
Adobe PageMaker 6.5 and
printed at Insty Prints in
Lansing, Michigan.

 

POETRY EDITOR
laura klynstra

FICTION EDITORS
tom bissell
phil dekane

david sheridan

CONSULTING EDITORS
kierstyn lamour
kristin knippenberg
ellen moll
carrie preston
mark sawicke
joe sheltran
matthew thorburn
josh woods

ADVISOR
diane wakoski

BUSINESS MANAGER
leslie rose

BOOK DESIGN
laura klynstra
CONTENTS

POEMS
Notes I’ve Collected for my Dead Mother Kierstyn G. Lamour - 7
A Forties Photograph L.£. Bryan . 9
Hawks Laura Albrecht . 10
The Baker’s Wife Diane Wakoski . 11
How to Carve Wild Fowl Renée Sedliar - 12
For my Wife, Sunday Morning after the Sixth Day of Snow Todd Davis . 14
Wild Cherries Todd Davis. 16
The Cello Music Ghazal Ethan Gilsdorf. 18
The Night Arm Ethan Gilsdorf. 19
Andras Hair Gwendolen Gross . 20
Canvas Alan K. Newton . 22

STORIES
Susan’s Week Cezarija Abartis » 26
Light of his Life Karl Harshbarger . 33
Progress Steve Almond - 40
The Jungle George Kuttner . 45
Ed is on no Side Eric Gregg - 64

INTERVIEW
with Philip Caputo - 74
 
 
a

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kierstyn lamour = 7

Winner of the Richard Benvenuto Poetry Prize

NOTES VE COLLECTED
FOR MY DEAD MOTHER

kierstyn g. lamour

My mother wanted

children

when she was 34

the same year that she was born
in Detroit

and my grandmother told me
she had 41 skirts

to wear to school

she was never decorated the same
twice

in one month

So she had these children
three two one
and they were not so pressed
or pleated
they grew out of new wrinkles
slower than
_ the malignant ones she grew into

And when she turned 52

her children were not older than

her wedding ring

so she divided her jewelry among them
giving them something

unreligous

arranging her funeral

around a church they did not know

And people came to her with
baggy faces

and moist hairlines

wiping and nodding

wearing something mournful
8 kierstyn lamour

and someone thought I looked
appropriate

in my black skirt french braid
peering into the coffin

to look at the paper bag colored skin
in a wig

and a fuchsia dress

A good job, they told me

yes a fine job

someone over said

And they saw her ring

attached uneasily

touching my dried hands

telling me they wouldn't burn her
jewelry and I

haven't worn any since
Le. bryan 9

A FORTIES
PHOTOGRAPH

l.e. bryan

Standing against an iron fence somewhere in south Jersey,
a couple, colored they were called back then,

stare out at the world through young eyes,

she, a statuesque, honey-hued Venus in a smart suit,
leather purse tucked tightly under one arm,

a picture of containment, gloved hands clasped,
wearing a cool, enigmatic smile,

he, a dark, dapper man in a pork pie hat,

sportscoat cut to mid-thigh, baggy pants,

dressed for style, stylin’ he is,

the heel of his shoe hooked on the bottom rail,
nonchalant.

Both been stompin’ at the Savoy Ballroom,

or about to be, maybe,

doing “The Hucklebuck,” jitterbuggin’, truckin’,
cuttin’ a rug all night to Jimmy Lunceford’s all-Negro band.
They stand there, shoulders touching, lightly,
newlyweds staring straight into the camera,

in a photograph from the early forties,

momentary youth captured forever,

this picture of man and wife,

a portrait of my mother and father

still life in black and white.
10 ~— laura albrecht

HAWKS

laura albrecht

We sit behind our vague
Cold faces, arms crooked
On the counter top, fingers
Rolling cigarettes up, down.
Fluorescent lights line

The low paneled ceiling,
Bleaching until our faces
Blur, take on the round,
Dulled reflection of ten

Year old dimes heads up.
We don’t look like much

In our dark creased jackets
And scuffed up shoes,
Mumbling back and forth
Into each other’s ears,
Slouched over steamy cups.
The tail end of the night
Presses in against

The restaurant’s pane

Glass windows, temperature
Falling off a few degrees
Anticipating the split

White warmth of morning.
Between breaths, we hear
Neon buzz, frost spread.
The few people scattered
Close, the jouncing waitress,
The unseen cook, none hear
The choppy stories we tell
Over each other’s shoulders.
No one notices how
Aluminum sometimes flashes
Up, tinny and high,

In your dark eyes,

How ink, between blinks,
Occasionally splatters in mine.
diane wakoski 11

THE BAKER'S WIFE

diane wakoski .

She is tiny as a butter knife

and as if she were some dainty pastry, she

often wears lace or hugs silver

next to her cheek.

No children, but in the kitchen, a big red and blue Macaw,
a living room full of yellow and blue parakeets

which she claims all talk to her while she reads poetry

and drinks coffee from a doll-sized cup.

If I met her in the library, I’d

never think she were married to a dough

man. And in fact if I saw her husband on the street,
with his torso slim as a French baguette,

and his long-fingered hands which don’t seem like paddles
or even hooks, but more like those

of a man on a tropical terrace drinking rum,

I wouldn't guess

that either of them go fishing

in the Rocky Mountains on their vacations,

or that they avidly read a Star Trek

fanzine.
12 _ renée sedliar

HOW TO CARVE
WILD FOWL

renée sedliar
for KG

It's like leaning

on a wooden table indented
with trails from coffee
spoons, toast knives—proof
we were here:

such hearts & tales, incisions
delicate as cutting
ourselves on paper, comforting

as key to palm.

Take care

in hand: a bird

frozen live to the sidewalk, spill
warm water & coax

it from the ground

like the imperative molding
to perfect replica: diagram
the beaks and wings of these
stories, how we trust

to sculpt them true.

Later we will shrug

our days into air—

mail envelopes, filigreed post—
cards—a bird—

cages frantic grillework.

I will lean

with your letters, a breakfast
to feed anything huddling,
flex its wings, let them flutter
through long fingers

of fog spilling a road,

a commune of travellers in foul
weather—our faith

in safety that carves

the way home.

renée sedliar

13
14 todd davis

FOR MY WIFE, SUNDAY
MORNING AFTER THE
SIXTH DAY OF SNOW

todd davis

I. We have fought,
too long together in this house,
while out in the cold,
in the broad dark of the Sabbath’s earliest hours,
snow falls for a seventh day,
ribbons of white
sifting down over earth,
quilted layers,
three months of snow and no thaw,
so my steps, if I were without snowshoes,

would sink to midthigh.

Il. White tumbling, no heavier than moonlight,
clings to me,
to meadow floor, crown of trees,
to the backs of deer
who in the night
have been blanketed under hemlock boughs,
and | shoe along the edge of the forest,
bringing corn to deer,
my anger into the open,
where above there is only gossamer,
the odd constancy of movement,
the dark filled with rags of light,
soft, muted, evanescent:

falling, falling.

III. In the house
you are already in bed,
and what has come between us
is now diminished by sleep,
by dreams of winter falling into the creek,
todd davis 15

only to push from its banks

with spring’s rich harvest,

silt for summer's garden.

And I know this season will end,
give way to cone flowers and fleabane,
yarrow and chicory,

whose lace,

not unlike the lace

that has fallen this night,

will cover the spots of the fawn
now curled inside this doe

who makes her way

out from under green boughs,

eats this corn

at the edge of our meadow,

feeds the life that lives between us.
16 todd davis

WILD CHERRIES

todd davis

In the heat of July

when I was a boy,

I scraped shit from

the sweating floors

of the kennels

(sick dogs’ offal

always the most pungent),

played with boarders

whose owners had headed

north from Indiana to some

harbor town off Lake Michigan,

and imagined black cherry orchards
just over the Michigan line,
heavy-layden, bending beet-red,

until my father called me outside

to the courtyard where an Irish Setter
lay beneath the sun like death's silent stone.

The owners, having asked for an autopsy,

waited out front while we cut open the dog’s side:

an aperture through which we could see all that had perished,
listen to the blood sloshing against the walls like some inland sea.

Covered by pale, rubber gloves,

my father’s hands fished for parasites and defects,
the normal abnormalities that wither the flesh,
and every so often he would push aside an organ,
offer a lesson in anatomy or pathology,

then resume his rummaging.

In the end, it was the heart,

grown old and pithy

like a peach or plum.
But how does one say this?

I don’t know what my father said,
todd davis 17

never saw their faces

when they received the news.
Instead, I took the dog,
careful not to spill any blood,
and buried him in the field
out near the railroad tracks
where we buried all the pets
for owners who had no other
way of disposing of their love.

And there, at the corner of the plot,
a wild cherry draped itself:

its fruit ripe, ready to fall,

but always so bitter in my mouth.
18 — ethan gilsdorf

THE CELLO MUSIC
GHAZAL

ethan gilsdorf

From the cello in the center

of the chest, up muscles

the music of sinews, collar bones
and empty vessels where

a mother’s lungs play catch up.

The sawing motion of the bow

opens the wood, the wallpaper

fuzzy and obsolete, the thousand oranges
repeating their little wedges

across the room.

The music undermines even you,
Ethan, and despite the pain

of abandoning your frail mood,

the music soon sinks to your pelvis,
and even you are humming.
ethan gilsdorf 19

THE NIGHT ARM

ethan gilsdorf
The slammed door, the green vase.

The hammer of thought that talk has lost

its way. Lipstick worried to the mirror.

Revealing as a kind of science,
emotion pulled back cell after cell,
the saying one is forever open

and nothing is not known.

The belief that the mouth
has saving powers. That deities
and demigods swim in the veins.

The idea that pencils aren't needed,
that childhood equals dread,

and endful ruin is fun.

The assumption of the ordinary,

the empty bird cage, the open closet
the gaggle of shoes, the whistling kettle
caked white by chemistry and time.

The stubbed toe, the ribbon of blood,

the sharp and inferior taste of love.

All redeemed by her night arm across my heart.
20 = gwendolen gross

ANDRAS HAIR

gwendolen gross

When I noticed how long
her braids were and brown
like birds who don’t
deserve elaborate names—
I knew we were sparrows.
We were grackles, shiny but
loud with angry yellow
eyes like shadeless lamps
or pigeons old, and gray
but hardly birds;

meant instead for scattering with running
steps and a hoot.

Once | saw her

open them, though,

at a birthday party

at the lake. I

watched them glide

and spread across

the warm lap of the
roped-off end for

children. We stopped
being sparrows.

We became

sea animals instead,

with wild names like
anemone, like hydra

and urchin. Her hair

was longer than her

legs or arms or voice,

and it reached into our
game of Marco Polo

and around ankles—
seagrass. It stretched
across our bodies

like a giant tropical
jellyfish— like silky cloth
it stung us, shaping the
small beginnings of breasts,
which we denied.

Still we shrieked as

we bumped into each
other— feigning blindness.

gwendolen gross

21
22  alank. newton
Winner of the Jim Cash Poetry Contest

CANVAS

alan k. newton

When I was a child we lived in Mexico,
and memory lays a collage:

fat, brown boys named Luis,

dogs peeing in crinkly fountain shade,
hunks of octopi at outdoor markets,

my sister's sneakers skipping down Chapultepec.
Once we drove in green mountain drizzle,
passing an aftermath

when Mother whimpered, hovered,
covered our eyes with her hands.

“It was a donkey,” she told us,

killed by the headlong vanity

of a macho bus driver

on a deadly curve.

My sister cried, but donkeys

dead or live to me were funny.

Last year mother came to visit,

saw on my wall Picasso’s Guernica;
strangely, she turned her eyes.

I pointed out

the famous bull, its hairpin craning,
the equine carnage sprawled across canvas,
the forlorn woman hovering over
dead children,

braying not just for loss

but for her frailty as shelter.

After coffee, inexplicably,

mother wept.

Today my sister and I

talked of Mexico,

of her souvenir dolls and

my collage,

and she betrayed

what mother keeps from me
alan k. newton

still: that the donkey
cut in two by a fender,
tossed in a cotton field
was really a child,
loosely shrouded,
likely buried and»

long forgotten.

os
 
26 —cezarija abartis

SUSAN’S WEEK

cezarija abartis

SUNDAY

keep a sanitary pad in my purse wherever I go. I can feel the paper
wrapper getting tatty and splitting open.

Tomorrow or very soon I will go to Kmart and buy a pregnancy
kit, read the instructions, and do the test. I haven’t tried it before
because I hoped my period would start, because it's embarrassing,
because the weather has been muggy, because I’ve been busy, because
I haven't had the time, because I’ve been afraid.

Even if I do the test and I’m not pregnant, I won't believe it. I
wont believe it unless it gives bad news.

I will go up to Wallace as he’s reading some anthropology text
about the kinship relations of the Trobrianders and say, “Wallace,
I’m pregnant.” He'll say, “Shit.” I'll tell Nora over a bowl of soup and
she'll say, in one of her very rational, schoolmarm pronouncements,
“Of course the most important thing is to figure out what you want
to do and how to control the situation.” I'll tell Jeff, and he'll be
solicitous and self-sacrificing. I won't tell Mother.

Wallace will say in a generous and matter-of-fact voice, “I'll pay
for the abortion.” His fine, kind eyes will be focused on the faraway.
I wish I could imagine him saying something beautiful and
transforming. We cannot make each other fit our separate dreams.

He represents the effortless perfection of America—or what I
think that is—smooth skin, straight bones, regular teeth, the heritage
of good nutrition and of the affordability of medical miracles. My
own mother, the daughter of two Polish engineers, has broad hands
and a mole on her forehead. She told me she was relieved that I
favored my small-boned American father.

Wallace said once he believed in ecstacy but not happiness. I
replied that his arrogant expecations were due to his privileged
upbringing, that people who were not children of corporate lawyers
did not expect ecstacy. “You misunderstand me,” he said, not even
raising his voice. “I meant that happiness does not exist except as an
occasional spurt of dopamine.” I felt sorry for the poor little rich boy
then.

Wallace plays tennis well. That’s a game which, when I was
growing up, was a bus ticket and a transfer away. He wears Ralph
cezarija abartis = 27

Lauren eyeglasses, not the discount-store contact lenses that Jeff wears.
What is most shameful about me is that I like Jeff’s adoration. |
should just tell him to leave. Nora said, “Your problem, Susan, is
you want it both ways—you'll have to let one go.” Easy for Nora,
who is radical, not divided. Wallace knows that Jeff carries a torch
for me, and he feels sorry for Jeff. Sublime lack of jealousy or self-
confidence or trust of me or something. Not indifference, | think.
Not that.

Yesterday Wallace wore the sky-blue shirt I had given him. He
stood against the square of my window, with the light and melting
humidity behind him. The July heat had softened the six candles on
the sill into arcs that bowed toward him. He gleamed as if he came
out of the sun-soaked sea, a halo surrounding him, spangling him
with dew drops, pearl drops, tear drops. Oh, Wallace, Wallace,
Wallace. I want you to be my knight in shining armor, my lover who
cancels Time and Space, my prince of men who promises eternity
and delivers, who strides through this world untouched and always
excellent, but I don’t think it’s the you of wry speculation and Armani
socks with holes in them, of surprised eyes and sweaty palms on
airplane flights I’m attached to, I doubt that I love you, I don’t think
I love you, I know I don’t love you.

You so obviously jump off that pedestal ’ constructed. Even
that is graceful, though.

MONDAY

eff was making calf-eyes at me during the Ethics of Newsreporting
seminar, and when he saw I noticed him, he quickly put on a
neutral face, and that sweetness cut me, his concern for my comfort.
I kept running my fingertips over the initials and lopsided hearts
incised on the old oak table while Schultzie droned on about
participatory journalism. I could not concentrate on the oral reports,
but listened to the whine of the lawnmowers outside and, farther
off, the sawing down of a diseased elm. Jeff struggled to open a
jammed window; the clover smelled dense and green on the stagnant
air.
Right after the seminar, Nora and I walked over to the cafeteria.
We had salty chicken soup, which I gulped down. She wanted to
talk, to tell me she loves the new TV she bought with the money she
got for housesitting, to tell me she received the packet of information
about the Peace Corps, to tell me her father is okay. I wanted to wail
28 = cezarija abartis

at her that my problem is much worse and I don’t have sympathy to
spare.

Nora's father does not have prostate cancer. She was still wound
up, happy and intense. “I don’t know which is worse, the waiting or
the cancer.”

Yeah, I said.

Nora chattered away about her housesitting job, that she had to
do some final house cleaning before her professor returns from Europe
next week. “I'll miss working in the garden,” she said. “I never realized
how much I'd enjoy planting flowers.”

Nora mocks my bourgeois triangle. She has no use for Wallace
and no affection for Jeff. I told her I was trying to recruit for her
cause. Laughing, she patted my back and said, “Come the revolution,
I'll put in a good word for you.”

My birthday is next week. I’m worried that my graduate
assistantship won't be renewed after this year. I’m embarrassed about
having to ask Schultz for an extension to complete my seminar paper.
I’m behind on grading the exams for my professor. And I’m deathly
afraid I’m pregnant.

I'm not superstitious, but I thought to myself, I'll wear my
expensive white linen shorts, that will make my period happen.

What would I offer to reverse this? Money? An earlobe? A finger’
A memory of Wallace? Eventually I’ll have to give a clot. I’m stingy.
Even now I'm unwilling to give very much. I want to extricate myself
lightly, glide through this easily.

The news was on the radio in the lobby as Nora and I left the
student center. Locally, Melissa Hanson reported that there was a
trend toward threes in window signs—earrings! earrings! earrings!
hats! hats! hats!

“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” Nora said, as she stopped to light a
cigarette in front of the No Smoking sign. Then she shook her head.
“Nothing about community involvement and social issues. I’m
disgusted. I’d even rather listen to soft rock.” After a singing
commercial for home insurance, the news came on with the reminder
of the national debt, the conflict in Bosnia, a story about the pollution
of a river in New York State.

In a world of torture, death, betrayal, where people disguise
their faces, where the valve in my father’s heart was defective, and
my cousin was born with an unconnected nervous system, I hope
and imagine to get off scot-free.

Why do I imagine I’m special, that I'll escape?
cezarija abartis 29

TUESDAY

allace prepared Eggs Benedict for breakfast. Neither of us had

another bite after I told him I might be pregnant. As I tipped
my cup, the coffee grounds slid into the shape of a uterus. With the
slightest swirl it disappeared.

Now when we run into each other in the graduate office or the
Snack Shop or the library, I can see the intensity on Wallace’s face as
if there were stones beneath his stretched skin. I want to calm him in
my most maternal fashion, to lie to him, to tell him I’m not pregnant.

I told Wallace I just needed to put clean sheets on the bed for
my period to start. He made a stiff smile. We saw each other a hundred
times after classes and he tried not to ask, I could tell.

I feel anxious and edgy. I am a timid person. I worry if there's
somebody behind the telephone pole or in the alley when I walk
home from the library. I’m afraid of breast cancer—one in nine odds.
I worry about shelling in Bosnia, child abuse in California, flooding
in Iowa. But I don’t do anything about any of it. And most of all I'm
worried I’m pregnant. And then | don’t worry about anything.

The Operation Rescue organization will be picketing clinics in
Cleveland next week and here after that. I don’t even hate them, but
I’m afraid of a scene. Nora despises them, calls them Nazis. I just
don't want to be embarrassed.

WEDNESDAY

should call my mother because I haven't called her in two weeks,
but I cannot bear to hear her loving, tyrannical voice asking me
what I want for my birthday. She will be falsely jolly. She will insist
that I’m not eating enough, will interrogate and praise me for my
few good grades, ask about the Incompletes on my transcript, hector
me about deadlines, will not say how much she still misses Dad.
When I was alone in the Office Trailer, Jeff sidled in clutching a
bouquet of daisies wrapped in a cone of newspaper limp from the
humidity. “An early birthday present,” he said. The air conditioner
burbled noisily and I was feeling sorry for myself, listlessly leafing
through the papers and exams on my desk. It had been exactly a year
since we met in Griffin's seminar on Mass Media and Social
Institutions and Jeff transferred into the class late. He extended the
bouquet toward me. “I’m not asking you for a date,” he said. “I'm
happy to see you, that’s all.”
30 cezarija abartis

I had tears in my eyes, and he started singing in his thin tenor,
“Oh, Susannah, now don’t you cry for me. . . The sun so hot I froze
to death, the weather it was fine.” I laughed and said that was wrong,
he'd gotten it wrong.

His devotion makes it worse. He’s not even asking me out
anymore. He stares at me and smiles. Last month he said he wouldn't
ask me to marry him if I would just let him be around me. We can't
control our desires. If I could, I would love Jeff for his sappy
admiration.

Outside the trailer the train roared by and rattled the tin roof.
We didn’t have anything to talk about, so we talked about the three
kittens in his garage. One is a white male and deaf. What a bad
mother she was to abandon them, I joke lamely. Jeff doesn’t know
what to do because the landlady does not allow pets. He’s handfeeding
them and sitting perfectly still on the cement floor as they come to
sniff him. They romp around him, chasing leaves, pouncing on his
toes, mewing at him in their treble tones, demanding and dispensing
affection.

THURSDAY

bought a pregnancy detection kit. This one had two tests in it.

Do I expect to get pregnant again? Why did I do that? It’s called
First Response (“Easy,” “1-step,” “three minutes”), as if it were baby’s
first words, or a missile launch. There were five or six different kinds
at Walgreen’s, in monochrome narrow boxes with serious words on
them and no pictures of fluffy-haired happy blondes.

The checkout clerk, a lady with bifocals, was arthritically putting
into a white plastic bag the candy bars, balloons, card, and birthday
candles of the grandmother in front of me.

“I can take care of someone here,” the high-school kid said behind
me from the counter where you leave off film to be developed. I’m
thinking if I should pretend I haven't heard. I could see out of the
corner of my eye that he'd leaned forward. He'd say it again, I knew,
only louder.

I turned away from the grandmother and her shopping cart full
of presents for children.

His skinny neck and short hair and big ears made him look
even younger. As soon as I handed him the package, he hurriedly
dropped it into a bag and didn’t meet my eyes. I felt sorry for
embarrassing him.
cezarija abartis = 31

At home I read the instructions a hundred times. The detector
was a rectangular plastic rod the thickness of a few popsicle sticks,
with a pair of windows smaller than fingernails cut into it. | was
supposed to pee on this, hold it in the urine stream five seconds,
hold it vertically and not splash on the windows. My heart hammered
as I tried to manage all this.

I blinked and two lines appeared in the windows. It wasn’t even,
the stipulated three minutes.

Shit. I was pregnant.

FRIDAY
] told Wallace about the test. He took a breath. His eyes scooted
away. And finally he asked what did I want to do. (I know what I
want, but not what to do. I want time to run backwards, that's what
I want. I want the sun to stand still, the wind to be soft, people to be
kind, me to be kind.)

I will call my doctor, make an appointment. I’m glad it’s the
weekend and | don’t have to do anything. I’m heavy, lethargic, as if I
were deeply pregnant. It’s my mind playing tricks. I feel nauseated,
hot, woozy. A sharp, cutting pain in my stomach rises and arcs acutely;
my stomach is having sympathy pains with my uterus. What a good
buddy. The Tummy, your friend. Back at Saint Casimir’s Grade School
everything from collarbone down was Your Tummy. | have learned
better since.

And of course I endlessly analyze the future: I could get married;
I could have the baby; I could give it up for adoption; I could not
have the baby; I could drop out of school; I could marry Wallace; |
could marry Jeff. . . That’s as far as my imagination stretches. No—
be imaginative. I could go to the moon; I could buy leopard-print
tights and become a rock star. | have an infinite world of choices. I
could kill myself.

Not funny, Susan.

This is not the year to become a mother.

I’m a modern woman. I don’t have a pinpoint of guilt about it.
What is this malaise? That I am making a decision for forever? That
I will never have a son or daughter? That this decision will be like
every other: little by little, forever. But it’s not true. I can always have
a baby later.

Wallace and I have talked about marriage obliquely, but we don’t

really love each other. We are both clear on this, which is miraculous:
32  cezarija abartis

1) that we should be certain (when we're uncertain about advisors,
about dissertations and prelims, about where to live and so many

other things) and 2) that we should both agree.

FRIDAY EVENING |
A’ I was getting ready for bed, I had a cramp that seemed to start
in the root of my scalp and shoot out of me to the walls of the
room.

The spasm passed, I put on my nightgown, I finished getting
ready for bed. There was a warm, stringy blood clot, for a moment in
the shape of a thorn in the toilet. I knew what it was. My womb
expelled the zygote. This wretched tissue, my exhausting, humiliating
interior self has finally been extruded and expelled. But I don't feel
celebratory.

I’m very tired.

SATURDAY

ora is sleeping in my bedroom, and I’m sleeping on the couch.

While she was staying at her advisor’s house, on the night before
he came home from Switzerland, a burglar broke into Nora's empty
apartment and took her Sears TV, her CD player, even her cheap
Japanese guitar. When I drove over to pick her up, her skin felt
clammy and she looked flat, the way a frightened animal will collapse,
hoping the predator will have mercy this time. She's afraid to go
back to her apartment. “Just superstition,” she said. “And normal
terror.”

SUNDAY
n the middle of the night, I woke up with the heavy thought on

my tongue—I will die in twenty years. I don’t believe it, of course,
but I’m drawn to analyze it. My subconscious is perhaps guilty about
the spontaneous abortion because I wished it; or my life feels chaotic
and I’m depressed; or I’m ill and tomorrow is my birthday and |
don’t want to telephone my mother or wait for her call. The rational
part of me is not superstitious and does not believe in this message
from the dark, the knotted sleepy self. This is not guilt, just normal

terror.
karl harshbarger 33

LIGHT OF HIS LIFE

karl harshbarger

c¢ a

His wife's voice caught Harry Pickering even before he reached
the sidewalk.

“Harry, stop!”

So, it was over. Probably she'd known for several days now. Or
the phone had just rung. An anonymous caller. His marriage in
ruins.

So keep walking, keep on going, never stop again.

“Yes,” he said.

He even turned to face her. Claire stood leaning against the
railing of the porch holding a list in one hand, part of her hair falling
down over her forehead, not a bad looking woman in her housecoat,
quite attractive, as a matter of fact.

“Harry, you won't forget to pick up the wine? White wine.
Remember, a good lable. Really good. We can’t afford to disappoint
the president.”

“T've got it all right here in my head,” said Harry, and he found
himself throwing her kisses, pumping his handout towards her.

“Harry,” she said, now smiling.

“Dll be home by five,” he said, swinging his arm around.

“Four-thirty would be better”, she said. “I'll need help.”

“Right,” he said, “four-thirty.”

So, she still didn’t know. Of course, she didn’t know. How
could she? Nobody knew.

Because look at it this way. The absolutely beautiful day, green
grass, leafy trees, balmy air, the birds singing, all that, everything
conspiring for him, not against him.

So down Elm Street and Oak Street and waiting at Highway 6
for several trucks before he could cross, and then up on the sidewalk
cutting through the maple trees of the campus. A glance at his
watch. Too early. Five minutes too early. He had been too eager.

Probably the best thing to do was set his briefcase down on the
sidewalk, kneel down over it and pretend to look for something inside,
maybe something he'd forgotten at home, all the time imagining
eight-fifty sharp, it hadn’t failed yet, her bouncing down the steps of
34 karl harshbarger

the women’s dorm, books at her side, the flounce of her hair, the
light of his.

“Morning, Harry.”

Todd Towsan from Mathematics came up from behind Harry
on the sidewalk.

“Morning, Todd,” said Harry, kneeling over his brief case.

Towsan stopped right beside Harry.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yes, incredible,” said Harry, making a show of lifting the top
flap of his briefcase and looking down inside.

Towsan started to pull out that pipe of his.

“You know,” Towsan said, now knocking the mouth of the pipe
against his hand, “people back East wouldn't believe weather like
this. They just wouldn't.”

“No, probably not,” said Harry.

“Although I’m certainly not playing down the scenery in New,
England.”

“Oh, no, not at all,” said Harry.

“Still, don’t tell me an Iowa spring isn’t first-rate.”

Harry couldn't keep kneeling forever. Towsan was clearly intent
on talking while he lit up his pipe.

But what did Harry see as he stood up? A white police car, one
of those big Ford sedans with blue and red light turrets, bristling
with radio antennas, turning off Highway 6, slowly passing Harry
and Towsan along Oak Street and stopping in front of Old Main.

“Well, well,” said Towsan, who now had his tobacco pouch out,
“will you look at that.” |

The door of the Police car opened and a policeman, overweight,
dark-blue uniform, gun, handcuffs, mace, nightstick, all that hanging
from his wide leather belt, emerged into view, dug his thumbs into
his belt and swung his gaze the College buildings.

If Harry hadn't been standing right there next to Towsan now,
sucking flame into his pipe, he might have run. Really bolted. The
parents, outraged, demanded action. Calls to the dean of students,
the president, members of the board, anyone. The parents came last
night, dragged her home, back to Chicago—Evanston really—ordered
her not to leave the house, use the phone, and if you ever so much as
talk to that monster again... . And now this policeman slowly
hitched up his belt, stepped onto the curb and crossed the grass
towards the steps of Old Main.

“Maybe he wants to take a book out of the library,” said Towsan
karl harshbarger 35

smiling at this little joke as he puffed on his pipe.

“Oh, sure,” said Harry.

“Harry, see you,” said Towsan, “Tonight at your place? At seven?”

“Right,” said Harry.

“And the president and his wife are really coming?”

“That's what Claire tells me.”

“Big time, Harry, big time.”

Towsan started on down the sidewalk, trails of smoke coming
from around head.

Harry looked at his watch, saw that it was still two minutes
before eight-fifty, breathed in the balmy air, the birds singing, the
leafy campus—recently violated by a policeman, true, overweight
with an absurd arsenal of weapons hanging off his waist—but at
least that puff of insanity about running away had passed. Perhaps
someone had refused to pay a parking ticket. And now two more
incredible minutes until she came down the steps of the women’s
dorm, books at her side, the turn of her head.

But just as Harry reached down to pick up his briefcase he saw
students, lots of them, backing out of the entrance of Old Main. In
the middle of all those students the policeman. And what was this?
Wasn't that the new faculty member in religion or philosophy, Rodney
Carter, next to the policeman? And what did that mean that Rodney
Carter was under arrest? But that was impossible. Here at this leafy
place. |

The students around the policeman saw Harry, ran towards him,
got him by the arms and propelled him forward toward the policeman.
Suddenly it was the sixties, jeering crowds, lines of cops, bull horns,
himself right in there, desperate meetings, student committees, four
o'clock in the morning, proclamations, madness.

“Excuse me, I’m Dr. Harry Pickering and I think I have the
right to know what's going on here.”

The overweight policeman reached for the back door of the
police car and opened it for Rodney Carter. On each side the crowd
of students grew.

“You work here?” said the policeman to Harry.

“I'm a professor here,” said Harry. “And my name is Dr. Harry
Pickering.”

“It’s all right, everybody,” said Rodney Carter in that nice way
of his. In his jeans and cotton shirt he hardly looked older than the
students. “This gentlemen,” he indicated the policeman, “is only
doing his duty, just what he’s told.”
36 = karl harshbarger

“That's bullshit!” called out one of the students.

“Now, now,” said Rodney Carter. “When one takes a meaningful
position against the government's nuclear policies and refuses to pay
taxes, One must expect certain consequences.”

“But on campus?” called out another student.

“Yes,” Harry found himself saying, “why on our campus?”

“Now, now, everybody,” said Rodney Carter. “You can’t expect
the government to act rationally.”

eggy had poked her head into his office at nine-fifty three, right

after his first class, rather loudly said, “Good morning, Dr.
Pickering,” handed him a small note folded over many times and
ducked back out of the door.

Sweet one, the note read when he had unfolded it about eight
times and eased out the creases with his hand, where were you this
morning? I looked everywhere for you. Now I am sitting on this
bench in front of Smith Hall writing this note and know I will see
you in your office between 9:50 and 10:00. Today I have physics at
11:00 and history at 12:00. Ugh!!! When do I see you again??? Iam
always, always yours. XXX

That was when the students knocked, and as they came in,
taking all the available chairs and even sitting on the floor, Harry
stuffed the note as deeply as he could into the pocket of his pants.

“Professor Pickering, we represent the Ad Hoc Student Action
Committee.” That was the gangly, tall boy, Bob Novotney. So he
had emerged as their leader. “If you don’t mind, we'd like to speak to
you.

Harry saw at once that they had reached the next stage, the
more organized stage. Of course, none of them had been to their
nine o’clocks and none of them were likely to go to any classes today,
or even for the next week. They would now try and organize the
whole campus.

“We appreciated your taking a stand this morning,” Bob
Novotney was saying.

“Not too many professors would do that,” said a girl he had
never seen before wearing granny glasses.

“It’s good to know you care,” said Bob Novotney.

“Well,” said Harry, “I thought it was the least I could do.”

“We really appreciate it,” said the girl in granny glasses.
karl harshbarger = 37

“Sir, we were just wondering,” said Bob Novotney, and then the
rest of it. Would he serve as the committee's faculty representative?
Surely the faculty wanted to be involved, show support. No one
could stand idly by while the United States Government, through
the military and large corporations, oppressed third-world countries.
The faculty and the students must stand in solidarity behind those
who were willing to put themselves in the front lines, like Mr. Carter.

“Oppresses third-world countries?” asked Harry.

“Through large corporations,” said Bob Novotney.

“I thought Rodney Carter was an anti-nuclear activist.”

“Well, yes, that, of course, too.”

“You should try and keep that sort of thing straight,” said Harry.

“We respect Mr. Carter's position,” said the girl in granny glasses.

“But,” said Bob Novotney to Harry, “can we count on you?”

“Of course we can count on him,” said the girl in granny glasses.

“Can we?” asked Bob Novotney.

“Well,” said Harry, “I certainly want to keep abreast, help if I
can.”

“Solidarity,” said the girl in granny glasses.

“Faculty and students together,” said Bob Novotney.

After the students left, Bob Novotney giving him a thumbs-up
sign at the door, Harry looked around his office. Somehow his glance
caught the photograph of his smiling wife which sat at the far edge
of his desk. The photograph had been taken around five years ago.
He and Claire had gone downtown to a regular studio to have it
done, and later they'd taken the proofs home and he'd selected the
one of her he wanted for his desk and she'd selected one of him for
the bedroom.

Harry moved across his office to his other desk where he was
supposed to do his writing and research and looked down at the
arrangement of notes all laid out by color code for his long proposed
book on Moby Dick. Over the winter the arrangement of those
colors had made sense, but as he stared at them now he wasn’t quite
so sure about the reds and the greens and the blues.

Instead of sitting down he went over to his office window and
looked out at the trees and the grass of the campus. Because the
thing was, what he couldn’t quite figure out: Had he agreed to help
the students in their campus-wide protest or hadn't he? He supposed
he had. On the other hand, he hadn’t quite said so. Although on
the other hand, he hadn’t really said, no, either. Well. Maybe the

whole thing would blow over. And besides which, when you thought
38 = karl harshbarger

about it, he didn’t even know this Rodney Carter. He was new this
year, wasn't he? Or was it last year? Even that wasn't clear. It could
have been last year. He used to keep all that straight. Who came
when. Janus and Brenten and Sullivan and Michaud and he had all
come in together. And Towsan and McCormick had come the
following year. But what about Anderson and Gorman? And after
that, all the people who had come and lots who had gone, too. What
about them? Probably his forgetting had to do with his easing into
it. And now this Rodney Carter, a nice young man by all accounts,
either in religion or philosophy, taking a stand against the nuclear
threat to civilization, refusing to pay his taxes. Quite unusual, of
course, in this day and age. Rather surprising. This was the nineties.
The sixties had been different. Then it had been all right. Somehow
it had made sense to be together at the barricades, solidarity, lots of
talk of sacrificing themselves to restore justice in the world. That's
what they had promised each other then.

Harry backed away from the window, passed by the reds and
greens and blues of the color codes for his notes on his proposed
book on Moby Dick, sat down at his regular desk and pulled Peggy's
note from deep out of his pocket. Sweet one the note began in that
orderly and neatly curved handwriting of hers! where were you this
morning?

Well, thought Harry, after school today, before four-thirty for
sure, he had to go downtown and pick up white wine, ten bottles, a
good lable, because his wife had organized a little dinner party. Quite
a little coup, that, getting the president and his wife to come over.

The phone rang. Harry reached over and picked it up. It was
Mrs. Smith, the president's elderly secretary.

“Dr. Pickering, can you hold for just a second? The president
wants to speak with you.”

Again, run, keep going, never come back. His career in ruins.

“Harry!” The sharp, snappy voice of the president.

“Hello,” said Harry.

“Harry, I’ve got an office full of students here protesting
something or other regarding Rodney Carter. You know anything
about this?”

“A little,” said Harry.

“There's a fellow named Novotney here who says you're the
faculty representative for this protest. You're giving them your
support. That true, Harry?”

“No,” said Harry, “that’s not entirely true.”
karl harshbarger 39

“Well Harry, are you the faculty representative or not?”

“Of course, not,” said Harry. “I never agreed to anything like
that.”

“Just wondering, Harry, just wondering. See you tonight? About
seven? Your place? Maybe a bit later?”

“Right,” said Harry.

“Nice talking to you, Harry.”

And the phone went dead.

Harry kept sitting at his desk until his gaze happened on the
picture of his smiling wife again. Then he felt Peggy’s note deep in
his pocket and pulled it out.
40 — steve almond

PROGRESS

steve almond

am, as a Texan, deeply affected by traffic. When bumpers snake

for miles across innocent asphalt and the horns of a thousand cars
erupt, I draw into a state of limbic paralysis. Tongs pinch and pull at
my temples. Knives flicker at the weakest parts of my anatomy.
Drowning seems a real possibility. It is at this juncture — and, I
should emphasize, this juncture om/y — that I am wont to recall my
ex-wife, Arlene, and the words spoken before she disappeared, at
last, from my rearview mirror.

“Robert Ray,” she said, enunciating. “To hell if you aren't a
traffic jam yourself.”

Those who knew us as a dashing young partnership, the crown
couple of new El Paso, still ask me why I let her go. I cannot say
exactly. I can only explain the experiences around which our
disappointments circled, the gnashing of gears, the false starts and
yellow lights, the gradual loss of that weightless force which signals
the passing of one thing into another.

I am not claiming I was easy, that she didn’t have the right to
complain. I had my foibles, as any man. I would not, for instance,
permit her to drive. Not during daylight hours, at least. My reasoning
was plain: there were decisions to be made, and these she did not
make well. She struggled with complex scenarios. How one must
exit before the busiest of interchanges, onto frontage roads that
circumvent these dangerous funnels. How a sudden, but well-
reasoned, transgression of the law — a foray onto soft shoulder, say,
with hazards on — can preserve precious minutes. The subtleties
that must be mastered, if traffic is to be avoided.

Arlene, I will say, was not without her own peculiar potential.
She proved capable, during the early years, of executing gas station
cut-throughs and emergency U-turns with stirring efficiency. Her
observations of lane protocol, delivered in a sultry growl over candlelit
dinners, moved in me the deep lust for a willing apprentice. But as
she faded, our conversations followed suit:

“Adding a lane on old 52.”

“Sale at Byron’s.”

“Rerouting onto Trowbridge, if you can believe that.”

“Thirty percent off the new spring line.”

Together we surrendered to the lie of compromise, as couples
steve almond 41

mostly do, and coasted until our unraveling. Soon there were frequent
spats. Over the fact that I refused to leave the house during rush
hour. That I pumped the clutch in my sleep. That I refused to take
part in funeral or wedding processions, for fear that such behavior
would lead me, inevitably, into traffic.

Arlene began blaming my “phobia” on work. It was a simple
diagnosis, a shortcut through my circuitry. “Bobby Ray’s an engineah
for the Department of Transpo'tation,” she explained to strangers, in
merciless Houstonian. “He’s a little funny about traffic.”

She had it all backwards, of course — the notion that my joining
the department led me to this dark concern. I do not drool over the
charts and scale models, like some of my colleagues. I derive no glee
from folding demographics into the combine of modern
transportation. I do not gloat. I know we are talking about people.

Sometimes, on trips across town, I will pull off the road to watch.
I enjoy noting the decisions drivers make, and the decisions made
beneath these decisions. Pedestrian overpasses, I have found, allow
for a view of facial contours, without the undue distraction of tending
to your own vehicle. Here, the tension of a three-lane swoop can be
read in a bitten lower lip, the commendable fury directed at left-lane
crawlers evoked in a snarling squint. At times I have waited a full
hour, and risked scoldings from my boss, to catch the historic
pleadings of a woman trapped, left blinker on, in the midst of an
intersection.

Professors at Oxford have studied all this, the behavior of
automobile drivers. They have concluded, not wrongly in my opinion,
that people become feline in cars. They mark territory, hiss and puff
their tails, paw at lane dividers. They emulate low-key predators,
stalking voices on the radio. (I myself have no radio in my car. I find
the jingles demeaning.)

Occasionally I will be at a party where some fellow — usually
dressed in fashionable clothes, invariably from one of the coasts —
begins blathering the merits of public transportation. I tend to think
favorably on such proposals, because they foretell an alleviation of
traffic. Often, though, these gentlemen go too far. One entertained
a small circle of admirers by announcing, with implied disapproval,
that if aliens landed on earth they would probably mistake cars for
an alternate civilization, an observation greeted with titters of
recognition. I believe he was right to assume this. But I have thought
this out from the aliens’ perspective. The aliens would not be wrong.

The aliens would be dead-on.
42 steve almond

As to my work, I do not deny that I have, on occasion, used
department statistics to my own purposes. That access to upcoming
projects, certain repair schedules, allows me to map superior
contingent routes. Who among us wouldn't take advantage of such
privileged data? We all want the same thing, after all: to get ahead
with the least delay. This is what separates us from the apes, what
keeps us from just escaping into the rest stops, with their plastic
comforts. We are trying to make progress. At least, I am.

But how do you explain all this to your wife, to your marriage
counselor?

The insomnia was a problem. Yes, that too. But then, I did not
fault Arlene her unwillingness to cook, her faithful plundering of
our credit rating. I forgave her failed liposuction. She should have
realized the night sweats were not my choice. Besides, I felt my
solution was feasible.

Ladies, I ask you, if your husband rose haggard from a sleepless,
bed and asked you, softly, to drive him to Las Cruces and back — no
more than an hour round-trip — would you scoff?

No, I believe you would do it, and willingly.

“This is craziness,” is what Arlene would mutter, slamming the
car door on her bathrobe. These excursions (which her lawyer defined
as “abuse” during divorce proceedings) remain among my fondest
memories. The amniotic sway of the vehicle, the smell of creosote
through the vents. Maybe you had to grow up in East Texas to
understand the meaning of empty road at night. The gradations of
light that fool the eye into seeing only darkness. Had she chosen,
Arlene might have looked upon my request as a profound expression
of trust. I had, after all, turned the wheel over to her, and slept like a
child, soft and soundless.

I will concede that there were perversions at the end, surely,
activities that sparked the guardrails of normalcy. But again, these
were not purposeless actions. Arlene had refused to lull my bouts of
insomnia. I had taken to driving alone at night.

I never planned to survey the accidents. Their tug simply became
urgent. I would stop, at first indiscriminately, to see if everyone was
all right and so forth. But slowly, deceptively, I became more selective.
I grew tired of cracked tail lights and dimpled rear panels, the bickering
that envelopes such scenes like radiator steam. I gravitated to those
areas where the serious business of blunt trauma transpires.

It's funny how people behave at such events. Everyone walks
with purpose. There is a heightened sense of awareness, a prickling
steve alnond 43

of the skin. Nobody questions your presence if you walk with purpose.
I barely had to present ID.

How many of you, I wonder, have ever looked at the expression,
of a human killed in an auto collision? The offended mouth, robbed
of its last shriek. The woozy eyes, lids dragged down by forward
thrust. The face of progress gored. I was hypnotized to my core.

This was hard to explain to people after my arrest. My interview
at the police station shed little light on these truths. The officers
demanded only pedestrian facts. Yes, I had purchased a short-wave
radio. No, I was not a member of the Dixon County Coroner's office.
Yes, I knew it was illegal to gaze at the unauthorized dead. Yes. No.
Yes. Yes. Yes.

The news items hurt Arlene. Of course they did. She was a
former cheerleader, for God’s sake. And so I apologized, tried to
explain. I lied, if poorly, to spare her. Still, I never anticipated such
heartfelt retribution; such precise cruelty.

It was, in some respects, my fault. It was foolish to allow her to
drive at such an early hour. But we had talked for hours. Hashed out
our limitations. The time had come for a gesture of fidelity.

“Bobby Ray, why don'tcha let me drive,” she purred. “That old
boat of yours makes me nervous.”

“Oh, what the hay?” said I.

Her parents’ ranch was just past Marathon, a straight shot down
I-10. The news forecast little congestion, owing to rain. I was
genuinely touched at her restraint in not making reference to the
suspended license.

And so I strapped myself into the passenger seat, calmly, sleepily,
Insomnia had returned of late, and without my soothing predawn
excursions, I had little defense against slumber. The last sound I
heard, as we pushed forward onto the freeway, was Arlene humming
“Truckin” — the theme song of our long ago courtship.

Will anyone understand the emotions that took hold when I
awoke to what she had done? That my wife had guided us onto
Route 128 just in time to ensnare me in a miles-long procession.
That she had shrewdly gauged the simultaneous eastward migration
of fans fixing to attend a country music festival, and a college football
contest, then coldly factored in three miles of construction. That she
had divined — from studying my own charts! — how the three-lane
expressway would bottleneck to one, broiled to bitter licorice under
an adamant Texas sun.

Can you fathom the very real sense of death that gripped my
44 steve almond

body during those three hours? The fear that punched at my heart,
and constricted any sense of a future? I had spent a reasonable portion
of my life engaged in the making of deft adjustments designed to
assure me a clear path to my destiny. The duty of all sane men in a
time of progress.

And now it had all been reduced to this: absolute zero on Route
128. Not a wheel in motion. Through the windows of other vehicles
I saw a thousand offended mouths, still as corpses. Then horns landed
like artillery. Strangers glared at one another through bug-smeared
windshields. Fathers smashed at their children, while mothers
rummaged pointlessly for snacks.

When it was over, when the road had unclotted sufficiently to
permit escape, Arlene looked at me, almost sheepishly, and pulled
into a drive thru outside Ellis. She spoke of tough love, of trials by
fire, and personal demons. As my body slowly uncurled from itself,
she asked forgiveness.

I remained quiet long enough to convince her I had not yet
made up my mind. “Robert Ray,” she said. “To hell if you aren't a
traffic jam yourself.” She paused, hoping to appear contrite, then
walked inside to buy a chicken sandwich.

As I mentioned, people still ask why I left her. And though I
don’t expect them to understand, sometimes | tell them about that
open stretch of road outside Ellis, how Arlene’s words, her very being,
dopplered to a thankful silence as she disappeared from the rearview
mirror. And how, for the first time in a very long while, I felt the
wind-swept onset of progress.
george kuttner 45

THE JUNGLE

george kuttner

n a letter forwarded to me on my last full day in the hospital,

Tommy's kid sister, Mary, wrote that Tommy had been listed as
Missing In Action. They'd received word in a special-delivery letter
from the Department of the Navy. There were no real details, just
that his squad had been in the field, had been ambushed, had not
returned and could not be found. “Jackie,” she'd written, finally,
“please try and find out what happened to Tommy. We're so far away
and they won’ tell us anything. They're so far away, too, the people
we write to and talk to on the phone, I don’t think they know
anything, either. I know you have rules and maybe can’t go around
away from your company, but Jackie, can you find out anything?
Please try.”

She wrote, “I feel like I’m waiting all the time for you to come
home.”

I was recovering from the effects of “concussion trauma combined
with severe battery, without penetration, of the upper right arm by
explosive debris of a blunt, heavy sort;” I'd been blown up—by a
rocket that exploded outside the wide open warehouse doors I'd been
standing just inside of. Something struck me on the arm, a stone or
shell fragment, that didn’t break the bone but did turn my arm from
shoulder to elbow into a blackened, swollen mass of pain—which I
wouldn't feel until much later; the huge electric blast rolled on for
what seemed like hours, unraveling me at the edges, tearing me loose
from my body, so that somehow the light seemed held to the dark
only by strands of stretchy stringy glue that sang like too-tight guitar
strings wound higher and higher. For days after I came to in the
sudden silence of the hospital I moved and walked through the halls
and grounds with slow, deliberate motions, trying to hold myself
tightly together and allow the glue that I knew held me to the earth
to re-adhere.

When they let me out of the hospital, with my arm supported
in a cloth sling, I decided I wouldn't be missed for a few more days
and went South and West instead of back North to my own unit. It
wasnt hard to get around, I was always able to get a ride. I rode in
jeeps and trucks—mostly trucks, and even slept in the back of a
parked truck one night—through dusty villages as full of dogs and

chickens as people, where if we'd stop crowds of skinny children
46 george kuttner

would surround us with bottles of Pepsi and Tiger Piss beer and
chunks of sugarcane to sell or trade. But the drivers would rarely
stop, and the people in the villages knew better than to get in front
of us as we passed. We rode through open flat country shining with
young rice rising from sunny water—water | knew stank like a mile
of shit if we were to stop and get near it.

Gradually the country began to rise into hills thick with trees,
the hazy mountains came closer, until, almost suddenly, we were
driving through forest, and the roads grew rough and often unpaved.
When I was close to my destination—at least the right part of the
country—lI got directions and was able to hop a flight to an inland
helicopter staging area that serviced Tommy’s unit in the bush. There
I had a few drinks with a sergeant who agreed to take me along on
the next scheduled supply run, two days later. Meanwhile, he showed
me to an empty rack in his hootch, which was in a compound set off
a ways from the busy landing pads and the small strip for light aircraft,
but from which I could hear the engine-whine and the loud tooka-
tooka-tooka of the choppers coming and going all night.

Sergeant Crowley drank like a movie cowboy, constantly, like
liquor was water. He kept me half in the bag, if not completely drunk,
the whole two days, and then, after what he called an eye-opener-
half a coffee cup of bourbon at seven a.m.—he led me out to his
chopper and over the noise of the engine introduced me to the warrant
officer whod be our pilot. Gunner Gridley looked like he might
have been flying choppers since they'd been invented, and that
morning he looked at least as bleary-eyed as me. His purplish-brown
sagging face was set off by a small, perfectly trimmed gray moustache.
The chopper itself, a small cargo carrier, inspired no confidence;
battered and beaten looking, it rattled like a bag of bolts beneath its
coughing prop. You could have played connect-the-dots with the
bullet holes on the fuselage. When the chopper was loaded, Gunner
showed me exactly where he wanted me to sit among the crates and
bags, and we lifted off.

After more than an hour of flying away from the morning sun
we landed at a big camp made up almost entirely of huge corrugated
tin-roofed warehouses. Some items were off-loaded and others were
put on board. Before we took off again, Crowley and Gunner Gridley
and I sat inside a little air conditioned wood-frame office built onto
the outside of a hangar that housed a few spotter planes and ate
lunch—sandwiches that had been packed for us back at the chopper
base. The sun was getting high and the day outside was quickly
george kuttner 47

growing very hot.

Gunner Gridley said, “You're lookin’ for a friend of yours, is
that right?”

Crowley said, “A guy who's missing.”

“Missing,” said Gridley. “You mean like, missing in action?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I heard.”

“Why?” asked Gridley. “I mean, this is a war. What else are you
gonna find out?” He looked at me like he thought I should know
better. I didn’t understand his attitude and I didn’t know what to say.

I shrugged my shoulders, and said, “I want to find out what
happened to him.”

“What happened to him is he’s missing.” The gunner spoke to
me now like a man who felt the need of patience. “I mean, you seen
what we been flying over—it’s not like he went to the corner to buy
a pack of cigarettes and never came back. That would be a mystery.
But this—” he spread his arms as if he was showing me the world
from his cockpit, instead of the paneled walls of the little office—
"this here is Vietnam, son.”

“We grew up together.” I said, “I promised his sister.”

“Oh,” said Gunner Gridley. Just, “Oh,” but the way he said it,
his tone, seemed all at once to say that he understood how a woman
might want answers from a war, and how a boy like me could be
made to ask for them.

“I know that camp,” he said. “Crowley and me been in there a
hundred times. The Crow used to go in there in gunships, didn’t
ya?” The old man smiled fondly at his partner, then said to me with
something like compassion, “If your friend is one of those boys awhile
back went missing from there, there’s nothing to know about it.
He’s gone, son, and that’s all.”

“It's a bad place,” Crowley agreed.

“You tell that sister something pretty,” Gunner said. “Tell her
he died for his country. Tell it to yourself, too, and then leave it be,
son. That’s the kind of scab you can pick at and pick at for a long
time.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess I’ve come this far.”

We took off and flew Southwest, Crowley pointing at the
instruments every now and then and leaning over to say something
into Gridley’s ear; I never saw either of them look at a map, though
for most of the trip we traveled over canopy so thick that I only saw
through it for the time we followed a green vein of river. After an
hour or so, we set down in the center of a small base camp in a
48 george kuttner

clearing surrounded by heavily jungled mountains. It had seemed so
pleasantly breezy, almost cool, in the air, but on the ground the heat
was unbelievable. It was like a sauna inside an oven. Your body baked,
basted by your soul while it sweat right out of you. You got used to
it, | suppose; | saw men walking around, though not many—some
even briskly. I felt the urge to lay down—some instinct about heat
rising—and crawl until I found water, or air conditioning. Crowley
motioned to me to head for a long low shed about forty yards away.
There we walked up to a man wearing a camouflage cap and cut-off
utility trousers and pink flip-flops that had a blue plastic daisy attached
over each toe thong. The man said, “Yo, Crow,” and held out a
clipboard. Crowley signed something without looking at it, and said,
“This here's Jack Terry. He’s asking after a friend of his.”

“Who's that?” the man asked.

I said, “Thomas Tuohy?”

“He's dead.”

Crowley said, “Jack, I'll see you tomorrow. Eleven AM,” and
walked back to his chopper.

“Okay. Thanks.” I looked back at the man. I couldn't think for
a moment. I said, “I know that. I came to find out what I could
about that.” | reminded myself, Tommy’s not dead, he’s missing.

The man said, “Dead is dead.”

“Did you know him?”

“Sure. But not real well.”

“Who did know him real well?”

“Over there,” he said, waving at a row of hootches with a narrow
boardwalk stretched in front of them.

I looked back at him. “Over there where?”

“Someone over there can help you,” he said, waving at the row
of hootches again. “Nice talkin’ to ya.”

I left the shade of the shed and walked through sunlight that
dropped down around me like molten lead. I crossed to the hootches
and walked up and down the boardwalk. None of the buildings had
signs on them, but all of them but one were only partly enclosed,
having instead walls that halfway up were just wire screening—the
kind of hootches that normally housed troops. I went inside the one
building that had two dripping air conditioners stuck into windows.
A man sat at a desk with his feet up on an apen file drawer. Between
his toes sprouted the same blue daisies as the guy in the shed, only
his flop-flops were green.

“Hey, dude,” he said. “You come in on the chopper? Got your
george kuttner 49

orders?” He held out a hand.

“No, I’m not... I came to ask about a friend.”

“Someone with us? What's his name?”

“Tuohy,” I said, “Thomas Tuohy.”

“Oh. He’s dead.”

“Is that sure? I thought he was MIA?”

“No. He’s dead, all right.” After a pause he said, “I’m sorry about

that.”
An officer walked up from behind a partition. He wore no
insignia of rank but I could tell he was an officer, almost certainly a
lieutenant. He was obviously someone with authority, and he wore
it like a lieutenant—he was too young and too bright-looking for a
staff NCO. He was like my own Lieutenant Silver, bushy-tailed—
but with a difference. It was something I’d noticed in the clerk, too,
and in the guy in the shed. Something hard to pin down—a kind of
wildness, or potential for wildness. It was in their nervous eyes, and
in their voices a little. I just got the feeling talking to them, and just
looking at them, that they, this lieutenant especially, could be
dangerous men. The lieutenant also wore flip-flops with plastic
daisies.

The clerk said, “This guy’s here about Tuohy.”

“Tuohy?-”

“I know, he’s dead.” I felt strange saying that. It felt unreal
somehow, impossible. In the pause then, with the clerk and the
lieutenant in front of me, looking at me, I had the strong feeling that
I could turn around and Tommy‘d be there, he'd have that tight grin
on his skinny face, like this was all the stupidest kind of mistake. I
thought that if I walked out of the hootch door, I’d find myself on
the stoop of our building back in the Bronx.

“Come with me,” the lieutenant said, and grabbed a wide-
brimmed floppy hat from a hook by the door and led me outside.
We walked through that mean sunlight. He said, “Tuohy was a pretty
good man. A hard motherfucker.” He stopped suddenly and turned
to face me. “He was a friend of yours?”

“We grew up together.”

He nodded at me and started walking again. “He was a good
man. A mean motherfucker.”

If | was meant to, I felt no pride at hearing these things, took no
comfort. “It’s for sure he’s dead? You got his body?”

“No, no body. He’s dead, though. Whole fuckin’ squad’s dead.”

He stopped again, looked at me. “I didn’t like losing a whole
50 george kuttner

squad. I didn’t like it at all.” He looked hard into my eyes in that way
that forces you to look right back, so you'll know that what's being
said needs to be understood. “Losing them. I did not like that. They
walked out, right there,” he pointed off toward the perimeter, but
neither of us looked away from the other, “and they didn’t walk back.”
He pointed again, hard, as if they'd done this to him personally, as if
they'd used death as a means of desertion.

We walked to a hootch on the far side of the camp. We went
inside and the lieutenant stopped at a rack on which a long-boned,
very skinny kid was asleep. He said, “Cleary, wake up. Here's a
friend of Tuohy’s.”

Cleary’s eyes snapped open and he caught his breath like a man
waking suddenly out of a nightmare. “Tuohy?” he said, jerking his
head between our two faces, as if he expected Tommy to be with us.

“A friend of Tuohy’s is here,” the lieutenant repeated. “Cleary
here was in Tuohy’s squad.”

I looked from one to the other.

“T didn’t go out that day,” Cleary explained. “I had the perimeter
duty.” He looked at the lieutenant, then at me. “We keep people
back from every squad,” he said. “As reinforcement for the perimeter
security.” Looking at me, I saw Cleary had that same vague wildness
about him. “We always do that,” he said. He stood up. “It was my
fucking turn.”

I didn’t know what I was there for anymore. I felt helpless. It
was like they kept telling me, Tommy was dead. But was he? The
lieutenant said he'd walked away and not walked back. He was as
much lost as dead; Missing in Action: the words sounded like a kind
of hope. “Maybe they were captured,” I said. I could hear the appeal
in my voice, and standing with these men it sounded like weakness.

“Out there?” said Cleary. “Out there you don’t get captured.
You get gone. It’s just sometimes there's something left over to doggy
bag for home, and sometimes there aint.”

This was, I figured, turning into the kind of routine these guys
must pull on their FNGs. Not that I doubted the jungle that enclosed
us like a solid maze, or that other unsympathetic wilderness | sensed
inside these men. But I had to know what made them so sure—I
mean, this was there AO, they understood it, but still, I had to
understand for myself—and for Mary—why it was that when Tommy
hadn't walked back out of the jungle he, and his whole squad, were
so certainly dead.

“Take him out,” said the lieutenant.
george kuttner 51

“For real?” Cleary turned to me. “You up for it?” He pointed at
the sling on my arm.

I pulled my arm gently from the sling. It was tender and sore,
but it felt good to straighten it and to flex it slowly. “Yeah,” I said,
“T’m okay.” |

“Tell the Gargoyle I okayed it,” the lieutenant said, then to me,
“You be careful. You do what these guys tell you—”

“T will, sir,” I said.

He stared at me for about five beats, “because if you get dusted,
my friend, you are somebody else’s thin air forever. I aint doing the
paperwork it would take to explain you.” He walked out of the hootch.

“Rest awhile,” Cleary said, and pointed at the rack next to his.
“We get ready to go out in an hour.”

In that heat I could think of nothing else I wanted to do, so |
stretched out and held my sore arm across my chest. Out of its sling,
the arm throbbed something awful, and the pain there seemed to
trigger the headache I'd been able to forget about on the chopper. I
fished the big bottle of Darvon they'd given me at the hospital out of
my pocket and swallowed a couple, knowing they wouldn't make the
pain go away, but could only push it back a little. I thought it would
be all right. I'd gotten accustomed to the pain and had learned to
comfort myself imagining a time when it would be gone. Now,
though, in this extraordinary heat—even just lying here I could feel
my sweat drenching the naked mattress beneath me—I found it
impossible to project my mind ahead to a time when the pain in my
head and arm would be gone, impossible to imagine a time, or even
the possibility of a time of no pain. Boozing with Crowley had helped
make me numb to the pain, turned it for a while into an
uncomfortable nuisance, like an irritating companion constantly
clinging to my arm, but now I regretted the excess of the past two
days—I felt weak and dull and feverish, and had the kind of gassy
nausea that was like a mouse had got down into my belly and died.
But I'd be all right once I got up and started moving, once I had
things to do.

I must have slept. Cleary was shaking my boot. I sat up on the
edge of the rack and felt a shiver of actual coolness as the hot drenching
sweat on my back adjusted to the air temperature. He'd found me
some gear: A helmet and flak jacket—that smelled of God knew
how many men before me—a haversack, into which he'd packed c-
rats and extra socks, and a cartridge belt with first-aid pouch and
sheathed K-bar hanging from it, and three canteens, which he‘ filled.
52 george kuttner

I drank a third of one canteen off and refilled it from a water can he
pointed out by the door of the hootch. Cleary was already in his gear
and J put mine on now. He had to help me get my sore arm through
the pack strap.

“You sure you can do this?” he asked. He was looking at my
face. “It’s a serious hump.”

“Yes,” I said, and forced a grin. “Absolutely.” I felt butterflies in
my stomach, flitting over the nausea. I reminded myself that we
were going where Tommy had gone and not come back.

We stepped out of the hootch. There was a small patch of shade
in front this time of the afternoon, which gave a respite from the sun
but not much from the heat. The squad was gathered there, smoking
and checking their gear. Cleary took me over to a big, oily man,
uglier than any man I'd ever seen—he looked like Quasimoto in the
old movie, only without the hunch, and with less fat and a lot more
muscle than Charles Laughton. Cleary said, “This is Sergeant Gar.”

“T’'m Jack Terry.”

Gar said, “Yes, you were a friend of Tuohy’s. I was a friend of
Tuohy’s. A crazy little fucker, but a good man.” He had a voice that
matched his bulk, booming, and yet with a mincing quality to it, as
if he felt the effort of making each word intelligible. “I hear we're
going to show you the big bad woods.” He looked over my gear.
“Well, let’s get you a rifle.”

“He’s got a bad arm,” Cleary said. “We should give him a
sidearm.”

Gar asked, “Wound?”

“Concussion,” I said. “I’m just sore.”

“T’ve got a weapon for you,” Gar said, and went into the hootch.
He came back out with a forty-five in a scuffed and battered brown
holster, and three full clips. “Check it,” he said, and handed me the
gun. I drew the forty-five, ejected the clip and pulled back the slide
to check the breach, put the hammer home and reinserted a full clip.
I attached the holster to my cartridge belt. “Okay,” Gar said, loudly,
“let’s go.” To me he said, “You follow Cleary.”

Each man knew his place and one by one they joined the column
led by Sergeant Gar. We walked into and out of the shade in front of
the hootches tucked alongside one edge of the perimeter, and filed
past a heavily sandbagged, steel-doored magazine, outside of which
a man in only skivvy drawers, dogtags, and aviator sunglasses—and
daisy flip-flops—stood beside an open crate of fragmentation
grenades. The men knelt as they passed and took out at least two
george kuttner 53

grenades. Most hooked them to the straps of their packs or to their
belts. I took two and stuck them into the big side pockets of my
fatigues. We paused at a break in the concertina wire surrounding
the base. Gar said, “Roach. Go on.” A husky man came forward,
spoke with Gar for a moment, and moved out on point. We walked
into the woods, and as we climbed a little rise maybe thirty yards
out, I caught a backward glimpse of a steel water tower and a stretch
of the perimeter fence, and then it was as if a heavy green curtain
had come down between us and the base.

At first we walked on a narrow path bordered by thick bushes
and locked tangles of leaf and palm-up ahead I heard someone using
a machete to cut back the re-growth from the path. After a while we
left the path and began to climb, and shortly after that the ground
growth thinned a little under a shadowy, tiered canopy—enough so
that I always had Cleary in sight, and usually saw beyond him to the
man with the heavy radio on his back, whip antenna extended, who
walked behind Gar. Most of the time the grade was no more than
about fifteen degrees, and my legs got used to the climb pretty quickly.
Where the daylight had been blinding in camp, now it was as dark as
dusk, though if anything, the heat was worse. If it had been like
standing too near a fire in the sun, in the jungle it was like being
locked too long in a sauna. Everything dripped, and seemed coated
with a sheen of oil, the way we coated our weapons against rust. |
quickly felt the oiliness on my own skin. After almost an hour, Gar
called the first break. I collapsed against the bole of a tree, and
Cleary went to his knees beside me. We shook out of our packs and
half out of our flak jackets and felt that momentary touch of coolness
on our soaked backs.

“How far we going?” I asked when I got my breath. I hadn't
realized how short of breath I was until I stopped walking.

“A couple hours or more. Gar said maybe three hours out. But
he’s always an optimistic son of a bitch.” Cleary lay down using his
pack as a pillow and lita smoke. “Shit, I hate this part. You holding
up?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m good.” But I wasn’t so sure. The weary
routine of walking had deadened the pain in my arm, but I felt light-
headed—the headache now a fragile thing held carefully at bay by
not allowing my head to move too suddenly or letting my eyes look
at anything other than head-on. | was feeling distant, somehow—
distant and muffled and achy in the joints. It occurred to me that, if
I'd let myself, I could easily fall deeply asleep right there on the jungle
54 george kuttner

floor.

Gar got us going again. My legs and back had stiffened up
during the break, but soon I was moving along surprisingly easily—
I began to feel in a strange way disconnected from my body. Tired
and pained in my mind, it was with surprise that I observed my legs
stepping strongly along the jungle floor. We walked for forty-five
minutes before Gar called another full break. Up ahead, I saw him
and the point man and another man crouched over a map and
compass. | lay panting, leaning against my pack. I drank deep from
my canteen, and no water had ever tasted as necessary, or as good—
I could feel it seep sweetly into every parched cell. A corpsman came
up the line and handed Cleary and me two salt tablets each, which I
swallowed, drinking some more water.

“Take what you need, but don’t go too hard on the water,” Cleary
said. “It’s gotta last.”

We moved out, and it was harder this time to get back into the
rhythm of walking up the soft black jungle floor. I thought for a
moment I might not be able to keep up, but then, again I found the
pace, and followed after Cleary, suddenly surprised that I was there,
allowing myself to plod blindly through that dark jungle with men |
didn’t know. I didn’t even know where we were going—hell, I didn’t
know where the place was we'd started from. Sometimes we'd stop
at a signal passed down the line from the point, and wed crouch
facing out to the side, each man turning the opposite way from the
man ahead, while the point man and first fire team checked out the
ground in front of us. Cleary and the man behind me held their
rifles at loose port arms, to be ready, and I'd draw Gar’s forty-five and
hold it between my thighs, muzzle toward the ground. Like the
others, I watched the thick woods, I listened—but what was I looking
for? What was I waiting to recognize? Was I supposed to understand
something about Tommy by sweating through the miserable wet air
of that hard place? Then the word would pass down for us to move
on.

During those stops, watching the deep still gloom of the woods,
I began to see they were not so still, really. Birds swept between
trees, in fact, I noticed how just below the canopy bright birds
crisscrossed the shadowy air constantly. They'd disappear sometimes
up into the deep green ceiling, and I thought how they must have
access to the sky above. I began to feel a touch claustrophobic,
though my memory of the furnace outside the woods was still vivid
enough to keep me from feeling too uncomfortably closed in. The
george kuttner 55

jungle wasn’t as quiet, either, as | had at first seemed to think. I
heard the cries of animals, birds, | suppose, sounding sometimes like
the sound track of a Tarzan picture, though once in a while some
creature would call out so strangely—half human and echoing eerily—
that it made me shiver. The sounds, the animal cries that had that
human quality, were, if you thought of them as coming from animals,
free-sounding, almost happy; but if you thought of the sounds as
human, they suddenly seemed filled with pain—long drawn-out pain
cried out to us sadly, but without the least tone of hope. I remembered
hearing there were tigers as big as bears in these jungles, and vipers
with poison so potent, it was said, that if bitten, you might just have
time to light a last cigarette. Then I smelled again what my nose had
gotten used to: the dank, lush woods held, tucked into the rich mixed
scents of vegetation, the permanent under-odor of death and decay.

After a stop that left us waiting a good fifteen minutes, everyone
watching the woods, panting to catch the breath that we only seemed
to miss when we stopped walking, we moved forward again and
behind Cleary I walked into an enormous glade where the squad was
loosely gathering together, dropping their packs and cartridge belts,
stretching and sitting down tiredly on the soft black ground. As we
came in, Sergeant Gar sent men out into the jungle ahead and to
either side to keep watch. The rest dug into their packs for c-rats, or
lit cigarettes, the smoke forming blue clouds that hung in the air
above their heads. The high canopy over the glade let in sunlight
here and there in hard bright slanting spikes driven without diffusion
straight down into the ground. Where it burned through the narrow
sun-spikes, the clear gloom of air suddenly seemed filled with dusty
debris. Birds flashed in and out of the sun with wings like burning
paper. I dropped my pack and flak jacket, my helmet and cartridge
belt, and feeling light and even a little cool I sat on the ground and
hugged a rock the size and color of a watermelon. The lightness of
my body, now that I was sitting still and unencumbered, only seemed
to exaggerate the throbbing in my arm and, now again, in my head—
but it was less of a hurting, somehow, as if the pain existed separately
from, or was too great to be experienced by my suddenly weightless
body. I still had that distant, feverish sense, but where before I'd felt
sunk down into myself, now I seemed to wear myself like a shell, my
body too light and airy to contain me. Still, I popped two more
Darvon, just to be safe.

Cleary sat beside me, nudged my knee and said, “You should
eat.” I lay there trying to assess myself, not sure I could eat. The
56 george kuttner

sounds of men talking and fussing with cans and mess gear sounded
far away. Even Cleary, right beside me, seemed to be talking from a
distance. I thought about Tommy, lost somehow in all of this—
missing or dead in this place where no one seemed to see the
difference.

Cleary pulled a c-rats box out of my pack, opened a can of peaches
and handed it to me. I asked him how he'd known they were my
favorite—they weren't in every box of c-rats, and he'd packed them
for me. He said, “Peaches are everyone’s favorite.” I sat up against
the rock and sucked down sliced peaches, and once I started I couldn't
stop and finished them all, and opened a canned pound cake, dropped
it in a canteen cup and poured the rest of the syrup over it, and ate
that.

Big Sergeant Gar came and squatted on his heels beside us.
The ugly man’s oily skin was shining, and his large, crooked white
teeth showed when he smiled. “Are we having fun?” he asked. And
then, “How about these woods, boy? Are they hell on earth, or are
they not?”

“What happened to Tuohy?” I asked. “Were they on a patrol
like this when you lost them?”

“I didn’t lose them.” Gar raised his bony eyebrows looking at
Cleary. “Did you lose them, Cleary?” Then to me he said, “No.
This is a stroll in the park. They got caught in something. We got
that much on the radio. Then nothing.”

“You didn’t know where to look for them?”

“Yes, more or less, we did. But we never found them, not a
sign. They were a good squad, too, which is why they were out
there—some said they were our best squad, but we can see now that
wasn't so. Hell, we even had gunships on station, and your friend
and the rest of them still managed to disappear.”

Another man had come up behind Gar, handed him a canteen
cup of steaming coffee and stood listening. He said, “It was gook
voodoo, man. They just disappeared them, man, turned them into
zombies and shit.”

Gar stood up, and asked me, “How’s your arm? Youre all right?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m fine.”

“Good. Relax. We'll stay here for a bit, then the long way
home,” he said, looking at me hard, then smiling that big white
smile. Gar walked off, and the other man followed, walking
backwards, saying, “Zombies in the jungle. Or maybe zombies in
Hanoi unloading Soviet tankers and shit. You ever think of that,
george kuttner = 57

Cleary?”

When they were gone, I asked Cleary, “He said they were ‘out
there —out where?”

Cleary sat up cross-legged and lit another cigarette. “They were
sent out on an op—all of us were, the Gargoyle’s squad, too. Except
me.” He looked down, then up, and blew a stream of blue smoke
straight up into the dead air. I thought I knew what Cleary was
feeling, but I was surprised when he said it: “I don’t want to be dead,
but I can't stop wanting to have gone out that day. I should have
been with the squad.”

Suddenly angry, Cleary said, “Some fucking recon listening post
out in the middle of fucking nowhere heard something moving on
some fucking trail on a mountain. The whole company went out to
intersect branches of the trail down here, by chopper for a ways,
then they humped for a day and a half.” He looked straight at my
eyes and his voice took on the tone of someone needing to convince
you they've been competent, as if what happened to Tommy could
have been his fault. “They set up a series of mostly squad size
ambushes. They were all linked by radio and they had gunships in
the air, hanging off a ways but ready to come in shooting. Tuohy’s
squad—my squad—was furthest out, anchoring the line on the far
end. They hadn't even got in position yet, nobody really knew where
they were when they radioed they'd made contact. Then nothing
else. We never found them, and we searched for days, and choppers
searched every day for weeks, but they were just gone.”

Bitterly, he said, “Like the asshole says, gook voodoo disappeared
them.”

I saw that Cleary was as uncomfortable about saying that last as
I was hearing it. “It can happen,” he said. “look around you—and
I been up where they were, and it’s even worse.”

“They were captured,” | said.

“I told you, man, out here you don’t get captured.”

“Yeah. You said it!” I still clung to the notion that Tommy was
missing, but I'd begun to understand the faith these men had that
remaining in this jungle, walking in and not walking out, was
equivalent to death.

“Okay,” Cleary said. “For instance.” He paused to look over at
Gar where he sat grinning, talking with three others. “I’m in the
Gargoyle’s squad now, and we were out a while back, after the thing
with Tuohy—after Tuohy and the others died. We were in jungle
like this, only up higher, gook country, and we took fire and returned
58 george kuttner

it. The fight didn’t last long—we had the fire power and we responded
fast. I gotta give the Gargoyle credit—he knows his shit, and he
keeps his people ready. We dislodged the gooks quickly and chased
them a ways, not far—it’s their jungle up there more than ours.”

Cleary paused and looked around. “See that guy?” he said.
“Reading?” I saw a man leaning against his pack where a spike of
sunlight fell through the ceiling and splashed onto the pages of his
open book. “We call him Professor, and you believe the dude humps
books in his pack? The Gargoyle always checks him to make sure
he’s carrying maximum ammo. Which is unnecessary—Professor’s
no slacker.

“When the shooting’s over Professor steps out of the trees and
says, ‘I got prisoners.’ Like he’s a goddamn cop. I got fucking
prisoners.” Cleary shook his head, smiling. “Professor's pointing
his rifle into the trees, and he motions for these two slopes to come
out. One of them’s got his arms out at his sides, and his eyes are
popping like he’s scared shitless. The other one’s shot in the foot
and he tries to hop out on the one foot and he falls down howling,
holding his bloody stump of a foot in two hands. Professor picks
him up by the arm and half carries him in and drops him by his
partner.”

Cleary paused to light a cigarette, leaned in toward me and went
on, his words coming out now in an eager rush. “The one’s howling
and the other’s laughing and jabbering something in gook over and
over, and the Gargoyle, ugly motherfucker that he is he’s even uglier
when he’s mad—gets all red, you know?—he steps up close to
Professor,” Cleary shifted around and brought his face in close to
mine, “and says right in his face, ‘Fuck you, book reader, and fuck
your prisoners.’ Then he calls one of his boys over—the one
scratching his feet there—and tells him to take the jabbering gook
back into the woods, and Gar grabs the guy with the shot foot by the
collar and drags him out, too, and he kills them. Two short bursts. |
think it was the Gargoyle did them both himself.”

Cleary looked surprised he'd come to the end of his story, looked
like he wanted to say more, but there was no more. | said, “Did you
tell anyone? I mean, not you, but do you report that kind of thing?
You can't, can you?” Hearing myself, I stopped and said, “Hell, I do
mean you. Didn't you tell anyone? Didn't the Professor?”

Cleary looked at me the way his lieutenant had looked at me
back at the camp, like here was a thing he had to see I understood,
and he said, “Listen, my friend, and hear me straight. I don’t like
george kuttner 59

the Gargoyle much, but I don’t think the Gargoyle’s wrong. And
neither did your buddy Tuohy. Me,” he nodded back at where the
Professor lay reading, “and Professor now, and all of us,” Cleary spread
his arms, “when we fight we fight to kill what’s in front of us while
it’s still in front of us. We erase our enemies, we want it known out
here not to fuck with us in our part of the jungle, to leave us alone
because we are badder than the bad guys, the baddest shit out here,
bad, bad news. Because that’s our best bet—we stay tight and we
stay mean, and we get home.”

Something screamed from the woods, something that sounded
close and, to my ears, terrified—some strange beast seeking its mate,
maybe, or challenging a rival; or maybe it was screaming at us, we
made it nervous, it wanted us gone from so close to its home. For a
moment we sat looking in the direction of the scream, then Cleary
stuck a cigarette in his mouth, said, “I gotta pee,” and walked to the
edge of the glade.

I lay against my rock and felt relaxed in the sense that I felt
overwhelmed, as if I were floating down inside my once again weighty,
muffled self. I had begun to shiver occasionally, short fits of jittery
shivers that set my teeth chattering and made my skin tighten
suddenly. Then the shivering would stop and instantly I became
drenched again with sweat. But I was down, down inside, away
from all that. My rock felt as comfortable as a pillow, and my eyes
wanted to shut against the dull ache in my head but I made them
watch the woods, and I thought about Tommy, out there somewhere,
certainly dead. I thought about Tommy, how when we‘ been kids
we used to swim in the Harlem River from off the blocky stone base
of a huge old, unused bridge built for carriage and foot traffic,
spanning the Bronx and Manhattan. Our part of the Bronx had
been named after the bridge: Highbridge. But we always called the
beautiful, decaying old structure just “the footbridge.” We'd swim
sometimes for hours on hot days, jumping or diving from the base
of the bridge or from the rusty steel girders arching above. We
assigned reputations for daring to one another according to how far
out over the river the girder was from which we would jump, and
Tommy was a fifth-girder man, jumping from almost as far out as
the Circle Lines cruise boats would pass, giving the passengers a
thrill. First girder was my limit, and I'd jump from there only rarely—
I'd mostly stick to cannon balls from the base. Tommy was always
braver than me or almost anyone we knew—once he actually swam
all the way across to Manhattan. Most of us wouldn't venture beyond
60 george kuttner

the shit-line, a kind of natural, narrow off-shore stream of garbage
that floated on the current—scum dotted with turds, wrappers, cans,
cigar butts and condoms. But we watched Tommy swim beyond
that—-slipping underwater to pass beneath the shit-line—and decide
to keep going. I don’t think anything up to then had ever worried
me so much as watching Tommy slowly go away and away, losing
him finally in the bright sunlight on the water and being frantic
until I watched his skinny body crawl out onto the rocks and wave
to me from far, far over on the other side.

I came back from remembering to a fit of shivering, I watched
how the jungle surrounded me, covered me, and | began again to
sweat. I thought about Tommy alive—almost dreaming of him,
remembering with the displacing, near-tactile force of hallucination:
how sometimes we'd swim at night, a transistor radio spinning music
out over the black water, the only light from a streetlamp back across
the railroad tracks that ran along the river. How one summer wed
hung a long rope from the girders and would leap out over the water
and try to catch the rope from the air, or with a stick pull the rope in
to the base and, with a running start along the edge swing out in a
long arc through space, letting go and flying down into the sun-
danced water. How some days the tidal current would be running
strong, and we'd leap off one end of the base and be carried back by
the current to the rope hanging just above the surface, and grab the
rope as the water pulled us past and, holding it, kick toward the
rocks near the shore. How one hot night the river current was strong
when Tommy and I went down to the footbridge, and let little Mary—
who shouldn't have been out so late so far from our street-tag along
with us, and she sat on the bridge base in charge of the transistor
radio, singing along with the music, sitting barefoot and her thin
legs bare beneath her shorts and stretched out on the stone so we'd
step over them in our running starts off the end of the base. I ran
and stepped off flying into dark air and knew as I struck the water
that I'd jumped out too far, then stayed under too long, and when |
popped up I saw the rope and struggled in the current to pass close
enough to grab it. As the water dragged me by I stopped stroking to
stretch out my arm and fingers and still stretching them beyond the
moment I should have felt the rope I saw as in a vision what would
happen to me, how Id be drawn along in the current, pulled out to
sea where I'd drown in the dark. It was as if it had happened already,
I began, even in the moment, to believe in the vision, I felt almost
calm—and then | felt Tommy’s fingers with my own, locked onto
george kuttner 61

them, our curled fingers hooked together, Tommy hanging onto the
rope and hanging onto me, and he held on and I held on until he
could draw me toward him and I could grab his wrist with my other
hand and with our four legs we could kick together toward frightened
Mary standing above the rocks at the river-edge.

The spikes of sunlight flashing down through the canopy had
shifted in their angles of slant, were shifting as I watched, and
beginning to spread, diffuse, even as they slowly disappeared. I was
listening to Cleary’s voice, but not making out the words. I came
back from a half-dreaming state to the sounds from the jungle, and
to a slight, relieving coolness of the air as evening came on. Cleary
said, “We're gonna saddle up in a few minutes, start back.” “Okay,”
I said, nodding firmly, trying to show I was alert, I was with the
program. I saw the Gargoyle standing—in his chiseled ugliness like
something from the jungle—back a ways behind Cleary, watching
me. Cleary asked if I was all right, would I make it all right—as if
there was a choice. But I was fine, and I’d be better once we started
walking. Still, I didn’t flinch when Cleary poured, gently and a little
at a time, cool water onto my head from his canteen cup.

Getting to my feet I stood for a moment gathering myself, then,
walked to the edge of the woods and peed. Buttoned up, I stood
watching the green gloom of the woods. The jungle was a living
thing—looking, listening carefully into it I saw and heard a concert
of movement and sound, and recognized, finally, what I'd been sensing
all day: how carefully the jungle watched and listened to me, to all of
us. Feeling myself watched, I couldn't help thinking, wanting, some
part of the watching to be Tommy, as if his consciousness had become
part of the consciousness of the woods staring back at me. For one
stunning moment I felt certain I could reach in behind the leaves
and bushes and trees and find Tommy’s hand and hold on, not letting
go, not for anything, and draw Tommy out and take him home.
Then the moment passed, and it was like I’d had my chance, and
failed.

I got into my gear and fell into line behind Cleary as we left the
glade. Walking out was easier than walking in had been—the ground
sloped downward a few degrees, the air was cooler, though after a
few minutes we were sweating as much as ever and the coolness was
only noticeable on the breaks. There were fewer breaks than on the
walk in, and we stopped less often to listen or to check out the woods
ahead, but I grew stronger as I walked and my arm felt pretty good,
62 george kuttner

though I'd taken to cradling the sore right arm with my good left
forearm. The long dusk seemed nearly complete and darkness about
to fall on us when we stepped out into a cleared field within sight of
the camp, and I was startled by the brightness left in the day outside
the woods. Sergeant Gar put out yellow smoke as a signal and we
walked across the field and into the camp.

Later in the hootch, showered and wearing skivvies Cleary had
loaned me while my own rinsed-out clothes hung out to dry, Cleary
showed me photographs of himself with people from his dead squad.
In two of the pictures a too-thin, tired-looking Tommy was grinning
at the camera. One of those pictures is of Tommy and Cleary and
another man in a place that could be the glade we'd walked to earlier,
sitting around a sterno fire waiting for coffee to boil, and Tommy, in
the middle, is making devil horns, or peace signs, behind the heads
of the others. Even in the photo, faded now and looking almost
antique, the presence of the jungle was, is, at least to me, a palpable
thing.

Sergeant Gar came and knelt beside us by Cleary’s rack, handed
us canteen cups, and poured us out a few ounces each of Black Label
from a bottle he drank from directly. Gar looked at Cleary’s pictures.

He said, “What did you think of my woods, Jack?”

I told him I'd never seen anything like them, and wouldn't mind
if I never did again. I wasn’t sure that was true, though. Bad as the
jungle was, it was also oddly compelling. By the time I'd come out
of its woods that evening I'd gotten something of it inside me, some
part of it that had to do with the quality of its light, or with an echo
of its hidden beasts that screamed so nervously.

“Are you convinced Mr. Tuohy is dead?” Gar had a way of
turning on the smile in his ugly face that made you want to shudder
with distrust. “You know he is, don’t you. Deader than shit.”

“Listen—” I started, but he cut me off with his deep voice and
its precise manner, saying, without the smile, “Your Thomas Tuohy
was a good man.” He held up Tommy’s picture so that I was looking
at it, and said, “I’d have had the man in my squad anytime.” He
kept watching me and holding the picture up for me to see. My
head had begun to throb again with pain that seemed connected to
my blood-pulse. Gar said, “I think I'd have you, too, Jack. I’m not
sure, but I do think I would.” If I'd have spoken, I didn’t know if I’d
have said Fuck you or Thank you to the Gargoyle. He put the
picture down on the rack and stood up. “Instead, I got Mr. Cleary
here. That makes me lucky, I suppose. A real survivor, Cleary is.
george kuttner 63

Smiling down at Cleary, then winking at me, Gar turned and walked
away.

I looked at Cleary, trying to read his face. He said, “Fuck him,
Jack. When he does that I wish the asshole good health. The worst
thing that can happen to him is he'll live to get home and be the
ugliest civilian in America.” We sipped Gar’s whiskey in a silent
toast. Cleary leaned over and reached between his legs to pull a
footlocker out from under his rack. He opened it, and I saw that
half of the top tray was filled with worn and dirty flip-flops with blue
daisies, like the ones Cleary had on, and even Gar had been wearing.
He plucked out a pair held together with a rubber band, and said,
“These were Tuohy’s, if you want them.” I took them—orange flip-
flops with blue daisies—I held them, and it didn’t seem at all strange
to me, then, that they were what there was of Tommy that I could
carry away with me.

The next day started off viciously hot, too hot to eat, too hot to
move or do anything but lay still and wait for my ride. When I'd get
back to Danang I'd find in a letter from Mary that Tommy’s official
status had been upped to Missing, Presumed Dead. I decided to
take Gunner Gridley’s advice and tell Mary that Tommy was certainly
dead—lI'd write that he had died for his country. Late in the morning
Crowley and Gridley swooped down to pick up outgoing mail sacks,
and lifted me away from the camp, up into the clean cool moving air
above the jungle that spread out on all sides like a sea. In the letter
I'd write to Mary I'd say that I, too, felt like I was waiting all the time
to come home.
64 eric gregg

Winner of the Jim Cash Fiction Contest

ED IS ON NO SIDE

eric gregg

We he first came to Kesey Home for the Elderly, I was just
starting a new puzzle. It was a 2000 piecer with a tomato-red
bridge, a snow-white windmill, and pretty trees Mom would have
loved. I was facing the door, but it wasn’t so that I could watch
people walk in. It was so I wouldn’t have to look at all the old folks
behind me watching Oprah. Not only may that be the most
Godawfullest show ever created, but they talk to the set as if they
was little kids watching Sesame Street.

I didn’t even look up when he walked in. Heck, you seen one
old person with his face falling off, you've seen ‘em all. As he was
walking by, I could see that he was wearing white Converse tennis
shoes, a little muddy from the dirt I spread on the icy walkway that
morning. After he walked by, the sneakers stopped squeaking, which
meant he was standing right behind me.

If you ever spent any time at an old folks home, you'd know that
it smells just like a nursery. Everybody smells like lotion, baby powder,
and sometimes you get a whiff of someone’s dirty diapers. But the
man standing behind me smelled like coffee and cigarette smoke,
like my father had. In fact, when I looked up, I was expecting to see
my dad for the first time since my parents got divorced thirty years
before. What I saw was Edde Fry.

His face was starting to slide, but I wouldn't say it was quite
falling yet. His cheekbones were still high and hard and his lips were
smooth and more pink than purple and I would swore he had all his
teeth. His eyes were shaded under his hat brim, but I could tell they
were big. Not sunken in or bugged out, but just big, like when a
man first sees his newborn child.

He put a hand on my shoulder and I could feel his bony fingers
dig in to my flesh; he must've found the miracle cure for arthritis.
He smiled down at me and says, “You could save a whole hell of a lot
of money if you bought the picture.”

“But that would take all the fun out of it, wouldn’t it sir,” I says
to him and returned his smile.

“Fun. Shit, puzzles are for little snot-nosed brats learning shapes.
For a young buck like you, they can’t be anything more than a bore
or an insult, am I right?”

Well, I guess he had a point. It wasn’t the most exciting thing in,
eric gregg 65

the world to do. But I knew one thing, it sure beat watching Oprah.

“It does at that, my friend. The name’s Edde Fry. That’s E-D-D-
E.”

I told him my name was Ed and that it was nice to meet him.
Then he gave me a handshake so strong I wondered again how a
man that was at least thirty-five years older than me could have missed
getting arthritis.

I wasn’t very far into my puzzle yet (I only had the three easy
pieces done: MILT connected to TON BRAD connected to LEY),
so when Edde walked on over to the TV room, I swiveled my chair
around so as I could see what the old folks was going to say.

He introduced himself the same way, except after he was done
spelling his name, he says, “Never odd or even.” Everyone but Katie
looked at Edde like he was from Mars. Katie said, “Isn’t that nice,”
but that’s all she ever said. It probably would have done her some
good to watch Grover and Big Bird teaching new words.

Billy looked up at Edde and says, “Never odd or even? What in
tarnation is that supposed to mean?”

Edde says, “It’s a Palindrome. The same thing spelled forward
and backward, like ‘party trap.’ Or maybe ‘yawn a more Roman way.”
He said this last one like he was some big-time actor, his head raised
up and a hand in the air with his fingers spread apart.

All the old folks looked up at the ceiling, to where Edde was
looking. They were trying as hard as they could to make the letters
appear there so as they could read ‘em backwards. Some of them was
even pointing their fingers at where each letter would be and then
pointing them the other way. I tried the same, but it was no use. My
letters kept getting mixed up and I can’t spell very good anyways. I
just took Edde’s word for it that they was palydomes.

After they all got done pointing their fingers and squinting their
eyes and looking at Edde as if he still hadn’t left Mars, Billy asked
Edde to get out of Oprah’s way and they all went back to talking to
her as if nothing happened. They didn’t seem to care that a new guy
moved in at all, let alone what a palydome was.

Edde stepped out of the circle, took a cigarette from behind his
ear and lit it with a wooden match he pulled out of his pocket.
Before he got more than three puffs, Mrs. Swender came running as
if he just committed a capital crime. And let me tell you, she scared
the living crap out of him. She grabbed him by the elbow and he
jumped a good three feet, bumping into Billy and dropping his
cigarette right into the poor guys’ lap.
66 eric gregg

Billy leaped out of his seat and started screaming like a little kid
having a temper-tantrum. Edde gave him a queer look, picked up
his cigarette, which had found it’s way to Billy’s chair, and says to
Mrs. Swender, “What the hell are you doing?”

Mrs. Swender explained to him that all smoking has to be done
outside and the butts put into a coffee can. Edde laughed, took a
drag off his cigarette and walked out the same door he walked in.

I swiveled my chair back around toward the door to see if he
was just obeying rules or if he was going to leave and never come
back. He turned the corner towards the parking lot as I heard Mrs.
Swender telling Billy that everything was going to be okay.

He walked back in about five minutes later and this time I looked
up. He sat across from me and started fumbling with the puzzle
pieces, separating the only three I had put together. He says to me,
“You know what, Ed? We’re not like them. We don’t fart dust and we
don’t need to soak our teeth in prune juice.”

I looked behind me and would swore | saw a big puff of dust
come out of Katie’s rear end. I looked back at Edde and I says, “Edde,
you got to be just as old as the rest of them.”

“It’s true Ed, I am an old man. But I’m still too young to be ere.
Too young feeling, that is.”

“Why are you here then?”

He started looking down at the puzzle pieces again. I felt bad
for prying, but I just couldn’t understand why he would insist that
he didn’t belong at Kesey. I mean, he was there. He walked out to
smoke his cigarette, but he came right back in.

He looks up at me and says, “I’m too old to work. You see, most
of the people over there were sent here by their ungrateful kids. |
never had any kids to be ungrateful and use their money to send
their old man off to bingo heaven. I have enough saved up to last me
a while, but I plan on kicking around for a lot longer than that. In
here, my money can last.” He paused for a few seconds and then
added, “So why are you here? You're definitely not old enough to
make it a necessity.”

“T guess I’m sorta like a groundskeeper. I plow the driveway and
spread dirt on the walkway in the winter and | tend the garden in
the spring.”

“C’mon, a young guy like you can find a more exciting job than
taking care of a retirement home. Shit, having to hang around all the
old folks should be enough to make you want to run out that door
right now.”
eric gregg 67

I had never thought of leaving Kesey before. It was more than
just a retirement home, it was my home. I got along with the old
folks and they treated me like I was one of them. And I had things to
do there. Besides my everyday chores, when someone needed
something done, they came to me. And when I was sick or hurt or
just plain down in the dumps, Mrs. Swender took care of me. She
was good that way.

I had only had one other home in my entire life, at Baker Street
with my mom. And that had been pretty much the same situation.
Minus the old folks.

Of course, I couldn’t tell him all that. I just says, “This is my
home.”

He laughed hard for a long time, until he started coughing up
whatever it is that smokers cough up when they laugh too hard. He
says, “When was the last time you looked at that sign? It says ‘Kesey
Home for the Elderly.’ It’s a home all right, but not for you.”

I couldn’ tell for sure whether he had misunderstood my meaning
or if he was purposely making fun of me, but I didn’t know what to
say about it either way. The only thing I could think to say at all was,
“Tell me how you think up one of them palydomes.”

“What? Oh, you mean a palindrome. I can try, but I’ve never
taught anyone before.”

“Well, how do you do it?”

“First I write down a simple word,” he says to me and then
brings out a pencil that had been hidden in the breast pocket of his
flannel shirt, where the match had been. “Lets start with ‘wall.””
Then Edde grabbed the puzzle box and started writing on it like he
was helping me with my homework or something.

He made “wall” into “wallaw” and then put the pencil in his
mouth like I’ve seen actors put knives in their mouths in movies.
Then he started tapping the eraser with his thumb like he was
speaking in Morse code. I was happy to see him having troubles,
‘cause I didn’t even know what the heck he was doing. But then he
took the pencil out of his mouth and says, “It doesn’t have to be a
sentence that you would ever say. You see, if you put ‘K’ in there, we
got ‘walk law.””

He wrote this down on the puzzle box and then turned it toward
me so as I could read it. | thought it was the neatest thing since Mrs.
Swender taught me how to play ‘cat’s cradle’ with yarn. I looked up
at him and asked him if he could do another one for me. He says,
“Ed, if you want to learn, you'll have to start doing them yourself. I'll
68 eric gregg

tell you what. Tell me when you get your first one and then I'll teach
you how to make the bigger ones. It shouldn't take you more than a
couple of days before you start coming up with shorties like “Sue
us.

It ended up taking me a week and a half and a pad of paper. It
wasn't very good, but I ran into Edde’s room as soon as I got it. I ran
in and I says, “Go Dog!”

He looked at me like I’s from Mars, but then I guess he figured
out what I was talking about ‘cause he says to me, “Great Ed. You're
getting the hang of it. Go dog! That’s right, ‘go dog’ and ‘stack cats.”

After having spent over a week thinking about them, I was
actually able to see the letters in my head and then read ‘em backwards.
‘Stack cats’ was a good one and I gave him a big smile and he says,
“Go dog, stack cats, but ‘step on no pets.”

I wasn’t sure if that one was a palindrome or not, but I laughed
so hard my stomach hurt like when my old gym coach used to make
me run The Mile.

“You ever play cards?” he asked me as I was getting myself under
control.

“My dad used to tell me he was going to teach me how to play
poker soon as I got old enough. I guess ten isn’t old enough because
that’s when he left and I still don’t know how to play. And Mrs.
Swender once tried to teach me a game called ‘auction pee-knuckle, ’
but I never caught on. I've really never been any good at that kind of
thing.”

“Tl make you a deal. If you can come up with another
palindrome by ten o'clock tonight, I’ll teach you how to play rummy,
a good game for two people. And I'll try to think of a new one too.”

“Edde, you know ten o'clock is lights out.”

“We'll be quiet and if it makes you feel better, I'll shove a towel
under the door to stop my smoke and any light from sneaking out.”

“What if Mrs. Swender catches us anyway?”

“What, is she your mama?”

“Just about.”

“Well, she’s not and we're not her little kids. We can stay up as
late as we want.”

“But what if I can’t think of one?”

“Tl teach you anyway, but you still have to try.”

It took me over a week for ‘go dog,’ and now he wanted me to
get one in a day. Can you imagine that? Since Edde said I could
come anyway, I stopped trying after a couple of hours. But when |
eric gregg 69

was done taking my shower and I was cleaning my ears, | got one.

When I got to his room, he looked like he was fixin’ to play
without me. He had the cards all dealt out and a bottle of Jack Daniel's
on the table between him and the ghost player.

I sat down across from him and he held his hands out, palms
up, to ask me if I got one. “I got one,” I says. “Spit Q-tips.”

“Very good. Rise to vote, sir.”

I stood up. I didn’t know what the heck he wanted me to vote
on and I never did vote before. I just figured he was taking some
kind of survey of the home or something, but I was excited anyhow.
Edde laughed so hard I thought he was going to stop breathing.

“No. ‘Rise to vote, sir.’ It’s a palindrome.”

I sat down and stared at the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and prayed
that he wouldn’t make fun of me. I didn’t mind the laughing, but I
didn’t want him to call me no names. | think I would have left and
never talked to him again. He didn’t. He grabbed two Dixie cups
that he must've stole from the bathroom and put one in front of
each of us. He took two ice cubes from his bedpan, which he was
using as an ice bucket, and dropped one in each cup, telling me not
to worry, he hadn’t used the bedpan. Then he filled each cup full of
whisky.

“Ed, I’m sorry I laughed. I'll make you a deal. From now on,
when either of us think of a new palindrome, we'll wink at the other
one when we say it. That way we'll never have to worry about
confusing each other. How’s that sound?”

I thought that sounded just great. I could see us talking to each
other all day, winking. We could say things like “That’s a nice car”
and “I like pistachio ice cream” and no one in the whole building
would know what we were talking about. Neither of those are
palindromes, of course, but you can see what I'm saying.

It took me a week to get good enough at rummy to be a challenge
to Edde. Then we started playing every day. I’d come in from plowing
the drive and walk over to the TV circle and there Edde’d be, outside
the circle like a buck-toothed kid in first grade. You know the kind,
the kid that was always picked last for dodgeball. Or even worse, a
trade would be made for you and a girl for a different buck-toothed
kid who just happened to be a little better than you.

Edde never seemed to mind being excluded. He'd just say, “Ready
for rummy?” and I'd tell him okay and we'd play. By the time night
came, we were always rummied out, so Edde started to teach me
other games. He taught me blackjack, auction pee-knuckle, and he
70 eric gregg

even taught me poker, though he said it wasn’t no fun with only two
people and nothing but pennies.

Mrs. Swender seemed to exclude Edde even more than the old
folks did. Well, I guess she ignored him more than she excluded
him. But either way, I thought it was pretty funny. Edded put a
cigarette in his mouth and ask her for a light and she wouldn't even
look up at him. When he actually lit it himself, she'd look up, but it
was only to shake her head and point toward the door. I'd always
laugh and follow him out so as we could practice our palindromes.

When spring came, we had so many we really could walk around
the place winking all day. I just loved saying things like “pots nonstop, ”
and then Edde‘d say, “we panic in a pew,” and I'd say, “desserts, |
stressed,” and he‘ say, “pull up, Bob, pull up,” and sometimes Katie
would say, “Isn’t that nice,” and all three of us would laugh.

I think it was about that time, when I started to plant the
marigolds, that I noticed Mrs. Swender starting to ignore me too. |
think she thought me and Edde were in cahoots together or
something. But it wasn’t like that at all. I'll admit I thought it was
funny to watch them fighting, but I thought she thought it was
funny too. I never knew that there was any real problems between
them. I wanted Edde and Mrs. Swender to get along. I really did.
But I guess some people just aren’t meant to live together.

That's why I knew what was coming when Edde asked me to sit
on the couch one night instead of pouring drinks into Dixie cups
and telling me to shove the towel under the door. I’ve never seen
anyone faint or fall over when they hear bad news, but that never
stops the news-teller from asking you to sit on a couch. It was like a
place of doom. It was my grandma's death and my parents divorce
and I knew that very soon it would be Edde leaving Kesey.

“When are you leaving, Edde?” I ask him after I sat down.

“As soon as I sign these papers,” he tells me and holds them up.
I knew that they must have said something like “LETTER OF
DEPARTURE?” or some other mumbo-jumbo, but to me, they said
“DIVORCE PAPERS.”

He put his pencil in his mouth and started giving me Morse
code. He waited about the same time as my dad had before actually
signing. Only a minute or so. But if you were to ask me what were
the two most important minutes of my life, I would have to say that
they were both spent on couches, one at nvy first home, one at my
second. He took the pencil out of his mouth, signed the papers, and
said, “Ed, I don’t have a car. How would you like to go with me? We
eric gregg = /1

can throw our stuff in the back of your truck and leave the plow
attachment here if they want.”

Almost everything was right. Edde was there. The papers were
there. The couch of doom was there and I was there on it. But Mrs.
Swender wasn't there like Mom had been. I guess it was because she
really wasn’t my mom. But I couldn't stop from making the
connection, not even then. Everything else was just too perfect.

It’s like being on a train. When you're with your parents, you
can have one at each side, telling you which window to look out of.
But my mom could only tell me what was outside hers. And Mrs.
Swender was looking out that same one. Now I had a chance to take
the train the other way and have Edde tell me what’s on his side.

I watered the rose bushes one last time and I left the plow
attachment there for whoever was going to take my place. Mrs.
Swender wasn't mad, not like I thought she'd be. I think she
understood why I had to leave with Edde. She helped me pack and
even gave me and Edde some sandwiches for the trip.

All the old folks told me how sad it was that I was leaving,
except for Katie, who told me how nice it was. I was sad too, and I
think Edde could see that. When we walked out, he looked down at
the walkway and says, “Don’t worry, Ed. They'll find someone else to
(wink) dump mud here so that the old folks won't fall.”

Edde always knew how to show me the funny side of things and
he knew that palindromes always made me laugh. I looked up at
him and says, “Yep, and I bet they'll find someone to tend the garden
and dig their hands down into (wink) worm row.”

Despite my laughing, I was worried about where we were going.
All our stuff was packed and we had already left the home. We were
almost to the truck and I didn’t even know where we were driving to.

“Where are we going, Edde?”

“Tulsa.”

“Why Tulsa?”

“Because, a slut nixes sex in Tulsa.” I didn’t even have to look at
his face to laugh at that. Some palindromes were just too obvious to
need winking.

I got in the truck, started it up, and then realized | still didn't
know where in the heck we were going. I looked over at him and I
says, “Are we really going to Tulsa, Edde?”

I was hoping that he didn’t think it was just another obvious
one, but he didn’t even blink when he looked back at me and says,
“No, son.”
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 

 

 

AN INTERVIEW WITH

PHILIP CAPUTO

interviewed by phil dekane
philip caputo 75

hilip Caputo is one of America’s most prominent writers. His

memoir, A Rumor of War, remains a standard text on the Vietnam
War, and his novels (Horn of Africa, Delcorsos Gallery, Indian Country,
and Equation for Evil) have solidified his reputation as an important
and perceptive commentator on what can happen when human beings
struggle, as Caputo puts it, “to navigate through ethical wastelands
stripped bare of landmarks that guide human actions.” Caputo was
born in Illinois, served in Vietnam in the Marine Corps, and for
several years worked as a journalist, most notably for the Chicago
Tribune, where as part of an investigative team he was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize. Today he contributes journalism to Esquire, among
other magazines. His other book, a memoir of his days as a foreign
correspondent, is Means of Escape, and May of 1997 will see
publication of his new book, Exiles (Knopf), a collection of novellas.

Red Cedar Review: To start out with the most basic question, why
do you write? What drives you?

Philip Caputo: I don’t know what drives me to write, only that [am
driven. It’s probably not a good idea for a writer to try to uncover his
motives. Naming the angels and demons that drives him to write
risks destroying them. I don’t think that the practice of literature is
a career, much less a job; it’s a vocation, in the old sense of the term;
that is, a calling. (Obviously, I’m speaking of literature as art, not
the literary crack cocaine that fills the best-seller lists).

RCR: Many aspiring writers today pursue MFAs or attend various
workshops in order to “learn” to write. I know that you gained your
experience through journalism. How do you think this route differs
from the “academic” route?

PC: Journalism, especially newspaper or wire-service journalism, is
a very good way for the aspiring novelist or short-story writer to
learn his or her craft— provided he or she doesn’t stay in it too long.
It teaches brevity, clarity, and accuracy in the use of language, and it
certainly teaches you about life. Its downside is that it requires you
to tell rather than show stories, and with its emphasis on immediacy,
it attenuates your memory. That’s why no would-be fiction writer
should stay in it for longer than, say, three to five years. I was a
newspaperman for ten years, and my fiction sometimes suffers because
of it— often I find myself imparting information rather than letting
76 philip caputo

a story unfold or allowing a character to reveal himself or herself.
That said, I would still urge a young man or woman to spend
sometime in a city room rather than four years in an MFA program.
MFA programs—and | think there now are hundreds across the
country—are not incubators for latent literary talent but artificial
biospheres wherein tenure, retirement plans, and health plans insulate
novelists, poets, and proliferation of these programs hasn't been good
for American writing. A lot of it is workshop, union-made stuff, full
of too-cute-by-half po-mo novels written by author-teachers, not to
be read by the public but to be studied by other graduate students

and professors.

RCR: In the end, do you think anyone can really be “taught” how to
write? What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

PC: When I was researching my third novel, Indian Country, | met
an old Ojibwa who made birchbark canoes. When I asked him how
he learned his trade, he told me that he’d watched his father build
canoes and then started building them himself. There's a lesson here
for the young fiction writer. Writing can only be learned by
observation and experience. So my advice to the aspiring writer is to
read all the good literature he or she can and to write, write, write.

RCR: It can be said that your novels are often about very troubled
characters struggling in an amoral universe. Horn of Africa is the
epitome of this. Do you think your work is not as popular as it
could be because of your refusal to allow your reader to look at the
world through rose-colored glasses?

PC: Well, Horn of Africa wasn’t as unpopular as you might think. It
sold 40,000 copies in hard cover, 200,000 in paperback, and is still
in print. No, I’m not a kind of optometrist, offering rose-colored
glasses to the reader; neither do I delight in rubbing the reader’s face
in the dirt. In that novel, I simply tried to be true to my vision of the
contemporary world as amoral, or, at best, as morally ambiguous.
This popularity business can be tricky. The serious writer shouldn't
whore after commercial success, but the writer also has to be careful
of being deliberately difficult, obscure, inaccessible, or harsh in an
effort to avoid popularity, which many consider as the prima facie
evidence of second-ratism.
philip caputo 77

RCR: What was it about your experience in Vietnam that led you to
write about it in A Rumor of War

PC: I’m not sure what compelled me to write A Rumor of War; all I
recall is an obsession to write it. I started it when I was only twenty-
five and didn’t finish till I was thirty-four. I guess what drove me was
my discovery, through my own actions, that even good men can do
evil things in places or circumstances where the ethical guardrails
have been torn down. At one point, I and four other marines were
charged with murder, for killing two suspected Viet Cong who turned
out not to be the enemy. As the saying went in those days, “We have
met the enemy, and he is us.” The charges against us were eventually
dropped. We were legally innocent of homicide, but I felt morally
culpable; moreover, I was shocked that I did not feel guilty about
shedding innocent blood for days afterward. I even laughed when
the soldiers brought one of the dead men in, with the side of his
head blown out by rifle bullets. Perhaps there was nothing new in
that, nothing peculiar to Vietnam about such incidents or cruelty.
The great World War One poet, Wilfred Owen, once wrote: Merry
it was to laugh there / Where death becomes absurd and life absurder./
For power was on us as we slashed bones bare / Not to feel sickness
or remorse of murder.” But there are certain similarities between
Vietnam and World War One: the latter shattered the certitudes of
Victorian Europe; the former shattered the certitudes of 1950s
America, the America I grew up in. I sensed that Vietnam—a most
morally ambiguous enterprise—was a metaphor for our times.

RCR: Do you feel that, in some way, you are still writing about that
experience in novels like Horn of Africa or Equation for Evil?

PC: Yes, Horn of Africa is set in Ethiopia during the Cold War,
Equation for Evil in 1990s California, but Vietnam is the moral and
psychological landscape. Some of the fictional characters (Charlie
Gage of Horn; Gabriel Chin and Lee Heartwood in Equation), like
the real-life me in A Rumor of War, are struggling to navigate through
ethical wastelands stripped bare of landmarks that guide human
actions. Other characters, e.g. Jeremy Nordstrand, Mace Weathers,
aren't interested in navigating, but find themselves quite at home in
the wilderness indeed find there the license to do whatever their
demons prompt them to. They prefer to be lost.
78 philip caputo

RCR: With the United States still practicing a sort of “big brother”
foreign policy, what do you believe we've really learned from our
experience in Vietnam?

PC: IJ think our government and military did learn lessons from
Vietnam—lessons about the limits of power, about the need to gain
the consent of the Congress and the people before committing military
forces to a conflict. History seems to have assigned us the role of
global cop, and I hope we act it out wisely. Playing peace-keeper in
Bosnia or Haiti is fine, up to a point, and we do need to keep Hussein
in check, since no one else seems able or willing to do it. The danger,
of course, is getting involved in one of these post Cold War ethnic
conflicts, with roots that go back centuries. Our leaders should
remember something Wellington said: “Great nations should not

fight small wars.”

RCR: To paraphrase an English professor of mine, Bill Vincent, our
society has “digged” violence like no other since the Romans. If they
held gladiator matches at Spartan Stadium, the first weekend everyone
would be shocked, but the second weekend theyd be lining up to
get in, screaming for blood once inside. When it gets down to it, do
people /ike violence?

PC: I agree with Professor Vincent. In the electronic, information
age, cable TV is the circus maximus. I am appalled that gladiatorial
contests like “ultimate fighting” have gained a kind of acceptance
among the viewing public and that networks like Fox show people
burning to death or getting shot in real-life disasters and crimes. |
guess our people do like violence, so long as it doesn't affect them
and is presented as entertainment. Livy tells us that Rome was born
in violence (just as America was), and that much of its early history
was violent (as our was); but the Romans’ penchant for bloodshed
was checked by the Roman virtue of piety during the days of the
Republic. As Rome grew into a decadent empire, its citizens indulged
themselves in the vicarious violence of the circus—and became
numbed to it. Our capacity for outrage has also been numbed. We
now accept as more or less normal horrors that would have brought
howls of indignation when I was young. The nihilism of A Clockwork
Orange has become a reality. Art imitates life imitates are. Shakur
raps about gangstas killing people, and Shakur is killed by a gangsta's
bullet, and the record company’s execs make millions. What swill.
philip caputo 79

It’s things like that that make me, a lifelong liberal Democrat, want
to sign up with Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition.

RCR: Some critics say that in Equation for Evil, your attempt to
explain evil through various psychological or neurobiological theories
fall short. Is it your goal in that novel, or in any other for that
matter, to explain evil?

PC: My goal in Equation for Evil was not to explain evil. The point
of Lee Heartwood’s monologue to Mace, in which he expresses various
theories about why Mace did what he did, was that evil cannon be
explained by psychology or neuro-biology. There is no “equation”
for evil. Evil is a mystery beyond the ken of science. In my fiction,
I try to tell stories about people and themes that concern me, and to
avoid making points. But if I havea point is that the darkness in the
human heart will prevail when we lose the light of grace. We no
longer see ourselves as moral beings, responsible for our actions; we
seem to have forgotten that we, and our fellow men and women are

children of God.

RCR: In your memoir, Means of Escape, you mourn the coming of
the Global Village because it would mean “the end of all variety in
the world.” However, do you believe that it is this very variety that
promotes conflict?

PC: Conflict is promoted by the two emotions that drive the stock-
market—greed and fear. The world is a “global village” only
superficially. The terrorist who wears Nikes and Chicago Bulls T-
shirts while he plants a bomb in an airliner has the soul of a naked,
ravening savage. Who knows, homogonousness may breed more
hatred than diversity. In the Balkans, people who had been neighbors
for decades butchered each other with glee.

RCR: Which writers have most influenced you?
PC: Conrad, Melville, Hemingway.
RCR: Which writers writing today most impress you?

PC: I enjoy reading the Latin Americans—Marquez, Llosa, Fuentes,
etc. I thought Lloa’s The War at the End of the Worlds was one of the
80 philip caputo

grandest novels written in this century. Would that some of we
Norteamericanos write such a book. Among “older” U.S. writers, I
like Bellow, Styron and Updike most. Among my contemporaries
I’m fondest of Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich, Jim
Harrison, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas McGuane, Larry McMurtry
(thought Lonesome Dove was a great epic, an American Icelandic
saga), Tim O’Brien, and Thomas Sanchez. I’m not as current as I'd
like to be on upcoming writers in their 20s and 30s—I simply don't
have the time to read everything I should.

RCR: I understand you recently changed publishers. Do the politics
of the literary world bother you?

PC: No. What bothers me about the modern literary world is the
dearth of editors who actually edit, who help a writer shape and
polish a manuscript into a finished work. Most editors today, taking
their cue from the visual and electronic arts, are “acquisition” people;
i.e. they sign up a writer and that’s the last the writer will see of him
or her until it’s time for the promotion tour. Some editors today
don’t even read their authors’ work—they just send it off for a cursory
copy-editing, slap it between covers, and ship it out to the chains—
those consumer-society emporiums that sell books like toothpaste or
detergent. The days of a Maxwell Perkins working page by page
with a Scott Fitzgerald or a Thomas Wolfe are as dead and gone as
quill pens and parchment paper.

RCR: Lastly, what's next for you? Do you have any novels in the
works?

PC: I’ve recently finished a collection of novellas, Exiles, which Knopf
will publish next Spring. I’m now working on a couple of novels
about the relationship between an AmerAsian young man (the
illegitimate son of a former CIA agent) and his biological father’s
big, dysfunctional New England family. As for going places, I would

like to see Africa—the Serengetti, Tanzania, or Botswana.

Thanks for giving me a chance to babble.
 

 

 

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biographies 83

BIOGRAPHIES

Cezarija Abartis teaches Freshman Composition, Creative Writing,
and Shakespeare in the English Department of St. Cloud State
University. She has published fiction in Twilight Zone Magazine,
Manoa, and Whetstone. “Susan’s Week” is one story in a collection
she is working on, tentatively titled Nice Girls and Other Stories.

 

Steven Almond is Fiction Editor of the Greensboro Review. His work
has appeared most recently in Rio Grande Review, The Lyricist, and

The Georgia Review.

Poet and writer, L.E. Bryan, a New Jersey native, currently resides in
Bellingham, Washington. His work has appeared in The Crisis, New
Mexico Humanities Review, Hayden’ Ferry Review, and others. He
has received awards from the Seattle Arts Commission and the
Vogelstein Foundation and PEN/American Center, in New York for
poetry and stories exploring both the African American experience
and the universal, human condition. He is now working on a novel
and a new collection of poems.

Todd Davis is assistant professor of English at Goshen College in
Goshen, Indiana. His poems have appeared or will appear in Yankee,
Image, Aethlon, The Wolf Head Quarterly, The Journal of Kentucky

Studies, Blueline, and other small literary reviews.

Ethan Gilsdorf was awarded the Esmé Bradberry Contemporary Poets
Prize and was an Academy of American Poets Prize finalist. His
poems have been selected by The Anthology of Magazine Verse and
Yearbook of American Poetry, and will be forthcoming in Outsiders,
an anthology to be published by Milkweed Editions. His poems
have appeared in Yankee, Pivot, CutBank, Permafrost, Poets On:, Green
Mountains Review, Poetry Motel, Pacific Review, New York Quarterly,
Descant, The Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, and Exquisite Corpse.
His essays and reviews have been published in Poets & Writers,
American Bookseller, The Baton Rouge Advocate, and Beijing’s China
Film Weekly. Gilsdorf received an MFA from Louisiana State
University, where he was poetry editor of the Pushcart Prize-winning
New Delta Review. He now directs public relations for Marlboro
College in Vermont.
84 biographies

Eric Gregg is a student at Michigan State University and the winner
of the Jim Cash Fiction Contest.

Gwendolen Gross worked as an editor for six years in California
before returning east to pursue an MFA. She taught at San Diego's
Writing Center and was selected to participate in the inagural program
of the PEN West Mentorship Project. Ms. Gross’s poems have recently
been published in magazines including Southern Humanities Review,
Amelia, Santa Barbra Review, and The Madison Review. She has an
essay forthcoming in Hemisphere Magazine. She lives in New York
with her husband and dog.

Karl Harshbarger lives and writes in Germany. His fiction has
appeared in Yellow Silk and Oasis. One of his stories was nominated
for the 1995 Pushcart Prize.

George Kuttner is a graduate of Western Michigan University’s writers
program and is a proud new father. His stories have appeared in the
Alaska Quarterly Review and the Pre-Press anthology.

Kierstyn Lamour received her BA in English this spring from
Michigan State University. She was this year’s winner of the Richard
Benvenuto Poetry Prize.

Alan Newton is a student at Michigan State University and the winner
of the Jim Cash Poetry Contest.

Renée Sedliar recieved her MFA in creative writing from The
University of Michigan. She currently works for Harper Collins of

San Francisco.

Diane Wakoski is Writer-in-Residence at Michigan State University.
A new collection of her poems will appear this fall titled The Argonaut
Rose from Black Sparrow Press.
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ethan gilsdorf * gwendolen gross * kierstyn lamour °
alan newton * renee sediiar * diane wakoski »

STORIES BY ¢ cezarija abartis steve almond *

eric grege * karl harshbarger * george kuctner °
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