RED CEDAR REVIEW 5 Figure without caption. “K. C. Reject” Dennis G. Taylor RED CEDAR REVIEW Volume V, Number I January, 1967 Red Cedar Review is a quarterly magazine of the arts published by students of Michigan State University. Manuscripts may be submitted to 325 Morrill Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan. Include name and address. Second Printing Copyright by Red Cedar Review, January 1967. Permission to reprint any material herein must be obtained from the authors. We request that Red Cedar Review be cited as place of first publication on all reprinted material. RED CEDAR REVIEW Prose 1 Strays Berkley Bettis 23 Brooks Too Broad for Leaping Rick Sterry 35 La Danza Primordial Dennis A. Noyes 49 A Legacy of Silence Theodore Sjogren 73 The Old Mar Shannon King Poetry 19 “the day is yours “I walked through the darker streets William Nagy 31 This is a poem About a girl The Rat Amanda Craig Sterry 42 The Prince of Peace Grant Charles Guimond 44 Upon Visiting An Acquaintance . . . Bruce Spencer James Harkness 46 I Mar-tin Luther Labor Pains . . . Michael D. Eberlein 47 Winter in Provence: Beach at Fos-sur-Mer Jennifer Lee 67 from Leaf Collections from The Degrees of Passing is Age Robert Vander Molen 81 Haven of Rest D. C. Bergmann 82 The Cornfield Elaine Cahill 83 “A widow walks , . Marley Torp-Smith 84 “the steps of my stairs . . M. S. Hohauser "Christian Activity" "Christian Activity" Dennis G. Taylor 1 STRAYS by Berkley Bettis Blue and learning in deep abyssal seas, pinkish-grey and blooming death like a musical sea-chant murmurs, rushing sea-like onward. Soon, knitting-needle soon, razor-blade soon. 1: Morning, early fall Roger was falling out of sleep. Dreamlike he fell, tumbling absurdly in a cosmic vacuum. It closed about him, pinning him tighter as he pounded at the darkness devouring him even as he struck out hopelessly at the honey-wet engulfing nakedness of flesh. He screamed and fell awake. “Mistah Roger. Mistah Roger, you Roger, wake up now, you heah me, wake up. It’s Francine, Mistah Roger. Now what you want to carry on that way for, boy? You momma is gone kill me. You done woke her up jes’ sure ez anything an’ she gone skin us all. You oughta be ashame of yo’self. You know you momma ain’t feelin’ good. Wake up now, an’ you hush, Heah?” Roger threw off the tangled sheets, damp with his own sweat, and raised himself to an elbow. “I’m sorry, Francie. I guess I was having a bad dream. It’s all right now, I won’t go back to sleep. I’m getting up.” “Be good fo’ you to git out of de house fo’ you wake you momma an’ git us all strung up.” “Okay, Francie, you can go on. See, I’m getting up.” Roger could hear the pale disembodied ghost of his mother’s voice coming from her bedroom adjoining his, an insubstantial silver wraith of golden-caged 2 fury and dry, cold, grasping stupidity layered with inescapably sweet fertile dung in great layers all dry and fragile like old roses in the sailors’ museum in New Orleans which must be kept in a glass bell lest they crumble— “Now you done it, boy. Now we all gone ketch heck!” He watched Francine scurrying off in her ragged floppy old slippers, hustling like a great black beetle on an important errand. Her reflection danced for a second in the polished brass of the doorknob and she was gone, leaving him alone. He threw the wadded crazyquilt ball of his pajamas into the chair, ripped them off again as he dug out his belt and billfold from a crevice in the cushion, brushed them across his shoes to buff the gloss with fine particles of dust, and kicked them out of the way as he stood in front of the mirror to adjust his tie. The pajamas lay in a deflated heap in the darkness of the closet floor by the time he was ready to confront his mother. He knocked on the door softly, hoping that some happy accident had sent her back into sleep. Her voice assailed him through the walls, and he went in. She lay propped up in bed, surrounded by a great sea of blue sheets, dotted occasionally with books—the latest bestsellers in hardcover editions. These, he knew, were her refuge, almost her only sustenance, and she clung to them unseeing, knowing well that her husband and son laughed at her intellectual hunger, laughed perhaps because they dared not recognize the pitiful futility of an idea’s effrontery in attempting to penetrate the invincible and unassailable fortress of her infirmity. “Good morning, Mother. I hope I didn’t wake you up. I was having a bad dream.” He had gained the initiative, and now she could hardly reproach him, standing penitent before her. Her voice was soft, clinging, unbearably cold at bottom like the deep slow- moving river outside the town, and it fell around him in much the same way, imprisoning him once again in her being. “Really? What have you been up to, my sweet, that gives you bad dreams?” Congratulations, Mother, on an excellently constructed rhetorical question. Of course I am not expected to answer that one, but only to laugh appreciatively, and so I shall, for there is nothing in the rules which says the hunted can not appreciate the ingenuity of the hunter, nor the captive his captor. It has no effect on the quality of hate involved. Well done, then. Of course you don’t know, you couldn’t know, but you have succeeded in spite of that. You do know that in the hearts of some people there will always he something which must be hidden from the light lest others should think the one who possesses it a monster. That is it, my dear mother. You are able to see the monster which lives in those around you, because you are yourself the greatest monster of all, and so you are able to make us ashamed of that which you have exploited 3 as your source of power, and so you control us all. But beware, O MonsterMother. You have read Nietzsche too, and I think you will remember that he said once, Beware that you do not stare into an abyss too long, lest the abyss stare back. That is not what he meant, perhaps Mother, but it is a good morning for German philosophers and who better than the greatest nihilist of all, eh? “You certainly are quiet this morning. Didn’t you sleep well at all? I really am worried about you sometimes. You don’t take care of yourself, and surely I should have been useful to you as a horrible example of the folly of neglected health, even if I have failed you as a mother.” “Oh Christ Mother, don’t get started on that again. You’ve been a wonderful mother to me, the best anyone could ever hope for.” Mother dear, you really are wearing this routine a little thin. Perhaps you had better read a little Vance Packard, because the hard-sell is definitely outre. “You don’t have to be kind to me. I know I’ve let you down. It breaks my heart to see you sometimes, to see how unhappy you look. I know it hasn’t been easy for you, living in this house with an invalid like me, always having to tiptoe around for fear of disturbing me. Don’t you think I know you haven’t had a normal home life? How many times have I wished that I might not wake up some morning, so that you could be free to live a normal, happy life without the burden of an invalid to hold you down.” The only reason you stay in bed most of the day is that you don’t want to get out of reach of your precious decanter of wine. How many glasses have you already had this morning to fortify you for this little encounter, and how many will you have in the process of fighting the day’s battles? There is a problem in applied logistics which I fear I am not really anxious to solve. And by the way, Mother, it is just like you to wish for a peaceful death, that you might not wake up some morning to be a burden to your family. Well, you might be surprised to know how many times I have wished that you might stumble and fall down those stairs and lie there, dying, until Francine came and found you and put you out with the garbage. “Well, Mistah Roger, it’s about time you got home. Dem neighborhood boys has been pesterin’ the livin’ daylights out of me an’ you better go tell them to git or you gonna call they mommas, an’ you gone have to call the plumber an’ git him to look at this sink, an you momma’s dead out in the garbage can an you ought to go pay yo’ respecks to her, an’ you poppa called an’ he wants you to call him right away, an’ . . .” “Mother, believe me, I have learned more from you than you could possibly know.” “Well, you don’t have to be solicitous with me. I know my own shortcomings well enough, and there will come a day when I will regret them. I do 4 wish you’d go to see Doctor Lieberman though. It hurts me so to see you unhappy.” It isn’t bad enough that you’ve got my sister trapped in that shrink’s clutches, now you want me to throw away what little autonomy I’ve managed to snatch for myself, to sell my soul to that monomaniacal little Jew for the security of having myself wrapped up in a neat little ball of pseudoscientific gibberish, "Mother, I don’t know how you got it into your head that I’m unhappy, but I already know what Dr. Lieberman would say.” “Really? And what do you think he would tell you?” “He would pull his glasses down on his nose and peer over them at me and then he’d say, ‘Vell, mine boy, vot your problem is, is dot you have a unresolved Oedipus complex, undt considering vot a beautiful voman is your mudder, I don’t blame you von bit. You is healthy as a horse, so get out of mine office. Dot vill be fifty dollars please.’ ” When she laughed the circle of her enchantment broke, leaving him free again. “Well, I’ll run along and let you get back to sleep . . “Oh, I won’t be able to get back to sleep now. Besides, I want to read some. Have you ever read any of John Donne’s sermons?” “No, I quit with the poems. I thought he had said everything when he wrote ‘Nowhere lives a woman true and fair.’ ” “Oh, you are hopeless. Well, my cynical son, try to stay out of trouble.” “Not cynical Mother, just misogynistic.” “If you are such a dedicated woman-hater today, what ever is to become of your poor little girl friend—what is her name, Joanne?” “DeAnne, Mother. Who knows indeed. I’m off.” He paused in the doorway. “Take care of yourself.” Sarcasm was wasted on her, but he had to stay in practice. He backed the big blue Buick out of the driveway, screeching the tires loudly down the street. “It should give her hemmorrhoids.” Well, klutz, now that you’ve escaped from durance vile, where do you think you’re escaping to at—omigod—ninethirty on Saturday morning. The world is still sacked out. You can’t go to her house—she’ll get up all right, and make like glad to see you but her hair will be up and she’ll hate you all day for seeing her like—hell, what are you talking about? Mistah Roger, boy, you is done lost yo’ marbles. Mistah Roger has done got his rocks you mean. If you go there her mother will make her get up and she’ll drag in looking like death and mumble hello and as soon as her mother leaves (Well, I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone—I’ve got work to do) she’ll tell me how rotten she feels 5 and how horrible it is and how we’ve got to do something soon. The hell with her! Clayton wouldn’t be up and if he is at this hour it’ll be one of his Milton Berle moods. Hibbs is the only person I can trust, which is strange, because he can be brutal when he wants to. Still, I love him in his own way—crazy. Well, Heigh-Ho, with a rowley, powley, gammon and spinach, it’s off to the apartment we will go cried Roger, doing his best imitation of the condemned hero singing as the tumbril rolled along. The Buick eased to a stop and stood running while Roger ran into the store for a pack of cigarettes. He lit the first one before paying the clerk and wished immediately that he had brushed his teeth before leaving the house. He bought a pack of razor blades on impulse. The car swung around and headed for the decaying downtown area, leaving a wake of dust to settle on the fine-cropped suburban lawns. All too well I know the way to this Gothic house of horrors. Too many times have I opened this, come through this narrow hall—fine old grandmother’s house of a place you are, apartment. Roger lay on the bed of his secret apartment and thought evil thoughts, for surely he is a bad boy. Hell, Roger is just a little screwed up in the head, that’s all. Already Roger was falling back into sleep, falling dream-like, tumbling absurdly in the cosmic vacuum which closed about him. 2: Noon Clayton Hibbs sat with his back to the door staring into the muzzle of the revolver for nearly an hour. He did not move but sat staring into the polished mouth of steel, breathing slowly like one who is in a deep sleep from which he does not want to awaken. Then, after that time had passed, he got quickly to his feet with a shiver of loathing running through his nerves and unloaded the gun before placing it back in its rack on the wall. He looked at himself in the mirror, savoring the grotesqueness of his appearance without appearing amused at what he saw: an old man’s head, high forehead and receding hairline, short stocky youth’s body clad only in undershorts not significantly paler than his own skin. Damn sunlight, damn thin curtains, couldn’t sleep if I wanted to with all that damn sun—noon now, I guess, sun doesn’t come in that window till noon this time of year and not a damn thing to eat. The question then: wait until the effing parents come home bringing food and destroying hunger or fend for myself (you should live so long) I mean about getting food. 6 He rummaged around in his desk, finally producing several quarters which had been concealed in a flat green plastic coin purse shaped like a football and bearing on its reverse side the football schedule which had occupied the University of Texas in 1957. A half-gallon of wine or two hamburgers, no real choice involved. There must be a can of spaghetti at the apartment. I can eat my meager gruel in the kitchen under the stained glass windows—grandmother’s house, I named it, but Roger said we should call it the Let My People A Go-Go. Maybe he’s right. I wonder if he’s there with her now? I’ll feel bad about eating cold spaghetti by myself in the kitchen if they’re in the bedroom. They won’t be, not now. They used to be in the bedroom all the time, during his lunch hour, all night, all weekend. I wonder how many times. I could ask him but he hasn’t kept count. I’m sure she has, but I can’t ask her. Would I envy him if I knew? or hate him? Academic questions. I loved her, I loved her not, I loved him, I loved him not, I loved him more than her, I loved her less than him, I love them, but that’s not right, I love each one separately but I hate them; I don’t know, I don’t care, I don’t have to know one way or the other. Choose two from column A and one from column B. So summer draws to a close, and fall comes early this year, or should I say falls early. Not in public. No, I am like the court jester who was sentenced to be hanged for punning but was offered a reprieve if he would go and pun no more. No noose is good noose he said, and they hanged him. Was it worth it? Sometimes it was, sometimes those nights in the summer just the three of us, smoking out on the screen porch, Roger and I getting drunk and I think she liked to listen to us go into our routines, even if she didn’t understand she was happy to be part of it, even when we were putting her on and she didn’t know it. But mostly it was me, I was the one who wasn’t part of it, three’s a crowd ha ha, and what if I was the one who was being put on all the time. No. That isn’t true, if it were I think I could have, would have shot myself. Roger and I had something, she and Roger had something, and she could be part of us but I could never be part of them. I do hate them together, don’t I? Why don’t they hate me? I am an outsider in a sense, but here’s the weird thing: I loved them both before They ever existed, each one separately, and they individually loved me, but once They came together because of me each one still loved me not only for himself but because the other did too. But now just what happens is out of my hands (Roger, son, I see your friend Clayton shot himself what a terrible thing to do why do you suppose he did a thing like that he wasn’t in any trouble was he no mother of course not what makes you think he was in trouble but why would he want to do such a dread 7 ful thing his poor parents must feel just sick). Out of my hands. I did not cause it, and I cannot cause it to be undone, except indirectly if that’s what they want but God! What will it do to him—I’ve seen him cry, Christ I thought he was going to die, and if he has to keep hiding it and that too he’ll die for sure, God knows he’s not the most stable person around normally. Hell, he’s just neurotic, you can’t survive without some kind of neurosis running interference, a general shit-catcher, that’s what it is and he has it. You are the one who will break, my son. God—I don’t want to think about what it could do to her. I won’t let myself think about what could happen (what was that loathsome flick about the guy who knocks up some chick and discovers he loves her when he sees the abortionist about to hack on her?) Why can’t I make some kind of decision on my own without having to drag in every lousy movie ever made? To see things only as black or white, now that isn’t so bad, but to see things only as black and white or technicolor, now there’s the rub. Off your ass, Hamlet my good fellow, stout lad, and away to the vintner’s for a drop of the crater (that crazy Irishman in Canada was the one who said that)—See! There you go again, dragging in the little dramatic episodes. Your mind works like a Henry James novel, in case you haven’t noticed. Not flattered, are you? A vial of elixer, a goblet of nirvana, a crock of shit. Clayton threw on a sport coat, not bothering with a tie, and scooped the pile of coins off of the desk into his pocket. He looked back at the revolver for a second and slammed the door. He started the car, remembering to fasten the seat belt before roaring out into the street. The wine bottle rolled across the floor of the car and bounced off the door, rolling under the seat out of sight as Clayton shifted gears. “And stay there.” What damn good is a sports car if you can’t take out your aggressions on the world at large with it. I will be damned if I will relinquish my therapy just so you can ride in comfort. The wine bottle responded to the cars latest lurch by rolling forward again. Clayton studiously ignored its agitated movement and took the corner in a calculated slide which took him within inches of the curb and showered gravel on an old woman's lawn. Take my license number, damn you. Take my driver’s license, take my life, only don’t throw me in dat briar patch. Did Ah ever tell you chilluns about Bre’r Rabbit an’ de giant embryo. No, Uncle Remus, tell us de story about Bre’r Rabbit an’ de giant embryo. Well, one day ole Miz Walker she was jes’ walkin’ along, min’in’ her own bizness an’ not botherin’ nobody, when Bre’r Rabbit he jump out de woods alongside de road an’ commence to take liberties with her puhson . . . say, does you chillun know how long the 8 hair is on a rabbit? About thirty seconds—get it, hair, hare, on the rabbit; well, hang me then. I hope Roger is there. I don’t feel like getting drunk by myself. Anyhow, there’s something about Roger and me being drunk together, and one way to look at it is that we’re both so psychologically screwed up that we can’t relate to anybody else without being drunk, but that isn’t really what it is . . . if it weren’t for the fact that getting drunk is prima facie evil, I wouldn’t have to try to figure it out, I could just accept the fact that at least then there is some kind of relationship which is a little better than the sordid half-truths and stupidities that go on the rest of the time with everybody else. It used to be really beautiful, this thing, relationship, drunken camaraderie, call it anything you want to cheapen it my friend, it was still a beautiful thing. Sitting in that booth in the bar in New Orleans by yourself you were somewhat less high-principled as I remember. You couldn’t wait for Roger to get back from the john so you could leave before the guy in the next booth who had no teeth but only a hideous black mange growing out of his gums came over and made a pass. When he came back with a fresh drink and his hair all combed you seemed glad James Hay James Hay “Mellowness of Yellowness” 9 enough, and when he told you to finish your drink because he had two women lined up you would have been glad to go along if you hadn’t been so drunk. —Forget it, I’m too drunk to hustle women, you said, and if it had been anyone besides Roger he would have gotten up and left but he just said they were probably pigs anyway and let the conversation drift. —Where’d you meet two chicks, anyway? —I didn’t. I just called them. —Where’d you get their number? —Saw it in the john, he said, and then you knew that Roger was drunk too. —Are you kidding me? You’re putting me on. —No, I’m serious. Written in one of the stalls, right by the door. —Boy, you must really want to get rolled, don’t you? Let’s clear before we both flash. That was the way it used to be. Why does it sound sordid, cheap, juvenile, stupid, when it was beautiful. It was the sharing that made it different, without both of them it would have been cheap, but in the act of sharing it they divorced it from reality, from what each one separately knew to be reality until the experience of sharing became part of all the experiencing, part of the horrible motel room with the pink walls and pink beds and pink bedspreads and maroon bathroom, the smell like a giant fifty-cent cigar from a county fair which has somehow gotten wet and then been smoked. The morning after is nothing but the same stale joke, but not when the two of you can stumble across the gravel together for the first cup of black burning lousy coffee and tremendous greasy fried eggs. That, my friend, is what makes the difference. He kicked the wine bottle out from under his feet for emphasis. 3: Eve —All right, Miss Priss, you can get up any time now, unless Your Highness feels it’s still too early to arise and face the new day. It’s only two in the afternoon and I’m sure you and your friend Mister Williams had quite a gay old time last night. —We didn’t do anything last night, I just don’t feel good. We just sat around at—at Roger’s house and watched television. —Oh? And how was the late late late show? Don’t feel good, dear? Well if you’d get your lazy ass to bed at a decent hour you might feel a whole lot better, and you might be some help to me around the house too, although God knows I don’t expect you to sully your pretty little hands with common housework. 10 —Mother, please, if you don't mind I'm not feeling well at all and I’d appreciate it if you'd leave me alone. —I’ll leave you alone if you don’t watch your tongue with me young lady. I’ll leave you alone on the street where you belong if you don’t start to act your age and quit acting like a baby every time you don’t want to get out of bed. —What do you mean on the street where I belong? You’re one hell of a fine mother to talk like that. Thanks a lot, I really mean it, thanks, Heaps. —Don’t sass me, DeAnne. I don’t want a hard time out of you, I’ve got enough trouble without . . . Oh, for God’s sake, honey, I didn’t mean anything, don’t cry, I love you, I didn’t mean it. —Oh, Mother, I just don’t see how you can say anything as horrible as that. —Honey, I’m sorry if you really don’t feel good, I didn’t mean a thing, it’s just that God knows I haven’t had an easy lot with your father and your brother and sometimes I just get so aggravated with you when you act so childish . . . Here, now, stop, I’ll tell you what, I’ll call Dr. Klingmann right now and make an appointment to see . . . —No, I don’t want to see a doctor! I’m all right, just leave me alone. —Honey, if you don’t feel well you should see him to find out what’s the matter. —I feel fine, Mother, really, I’ve just got a headache, that’s all. I’ll feel fine as soon as I take one of my pills. —I thought you took one of those this morning. —I did but I need another one now. —I don’t think you should take those pills as often as you do honey. It’s not good for you. —Let me be the judge of that, please Mother, just leave me alone and I’ll be all right. —You don’t have to yell. I’m not hard of hearing yet, although I don’t know why, living in this madhouse day in and day out. —I wasn’t yelling, and you were the one who was yelling at me to start with. You’re the chief looney in this goddamn madhouse anyway. —All right miss, that’s all. You get out of that bed right now and get dressed and help your brother with the dishes and if I hear you talking like that again we’re going to go around and around. DeAnne threw a slipper at the door as it closed violently behind her mother, knowing that the sound would not be loud enough to bring on a renewed attack. —God damn you. God damn you to hell, you bitch, you whore. I hate you, I hate you, you rotten cunt. You’ll see, I’ll show you, when Roger and I are married we’ll let you rot in this dump and you won’t ever get a cent. Oh God, when Roger and I get married. Dear God, please let him marry me, 11 make him marry me, make him want to marry me. Don’t let me be a whore. I’m not, I’ll die, I swear to god I’ll die. —Are you still snivelling? I thought I told you to get up. —All right, I will if you’ll just let me alone. —Excuse me, prima donna. She got out of bed quickly, surprising her mother with her speed, and locked herself in the bathroom. She turned the shower on and let it run so no one could hear her vomiting. —Hey, Ugly, aren’t you through in there yet? —Why don’t you go play in the traffic, Stupid? —Mom! DeAnne’s been in the bathroom for an hour and she won’t get out. —You little bastard, can’t you ever leave me alone. —Mom, did you hear what she said? She said I was a —All right, get in the bathroom. It’s all yours, only try to keep your mouth shut for a change. —Boy do you look rotten. I don’t know how come you spend so much time in there, it sure don’t do nothing for your looks. “November” “November” Bill Hayden 12 —My brilliant brother! Maybe if you tried reading something besides Spiderman for a change you might learn how to talk right. —Oh, why don’t you cram it. —Now look who’s learned to cuss. —Ah, blow off. If you tell on me I’ll tell Mom what you called me and she’ll bust your tail good. —Mother, come listen to your son talk—I think they’re teaching him a lot of new things in junior high. —Why you fink, I oughta bust you one. —Both of you shut up right now. I can’t stand to listen to you two, you make me sick. DeAnne, leave your brother alone, and you young man, when your father gets home he may have a word or two to say about your language around the house. Now both of you, get out in the kitchen and do those dishes. At five o’clock she could not stand to wait any longer for Roger to call and called his house as soon as her mother left the kitchen. The maid answered Roger’s phone. —Naw, honey, he lef’ the house early this mornin’ an’ I ain’t seen him since (I don’t want to hear you say ain’t again you sound just like a nigger maid). He did’n’ say where he wuz goin’ but I speck you might try Mister Clayton’s house. They prob’ly up to some devilment together. There was no answer at Clayton’s house. —Mother, I’m going over to Roger’s. —What’s the matter, doesn’t he feel like slumming tonight? —His car’s in the shop. —What’s wrong with his mother’s Cadillac? Is it in the shop too? I don’t think it’s right for you to —Oh, Mother, don’t make a federal case out of it. I’m just going over there to watch television. —At the rate you’re going you’re liable to come down with a bad case of eyestrain. What’s the matter with our television—not a big enough screen for his nibs? —In the first place he’s got a color set and in the second place you can’t ever hear the set in this insane asylum. —And just where are Mister High-and-Mighty’s parents? Don’t they interfere with your “television watching’’? —They’ve got their own set. —How nice for them, I’m sure. —You don’t have to be jealous just because —I don’t have to envy anybody just because they have more money than we do, if that’s what you mean, and I don’t have any trouble holding my head 13 up in public because we don’t belong to the country club either, but considering the way you talk about his mother I never expected you to stand up for those —Mother, I’d rather not talk about it. —All right, if you want to run off without any dinner, let Mr. Williams start feeding you and see how he likes it. But you’d better get off before your father gets home, and try to make it in in time for breakfast for a change. —Anything you say, dear—the door slammed behind her, shutting off whatever her mother’s reaction had been. The old station wagon groaned and roared, carrying the last of the strays toward the mouldy, sagging hovel which was somehow placed at the center of the earth, the magnetic pole which drew the fragments together into patterns of its own making. 4: Later Roger swished the last of the wine around in the bottle and held it up in the half-light of sunset, letting the redness of sun and wine batter against the green, impenetrable glass. He sat facing Clayton, who was staring out at the traffic below. “The whole point is that I just don’t love her,” said Roger. “You contradict yourself; I’ve heard you talk differently ” “ ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Here’s to little minds: May they die stillborn.” He downed the last sip gravely and swallowed reflectively without laughing at his own joke. Clayton noticed that traffic was slowing down finally after the rush hour, leaving their street almost deserted except for a group of varicolored children throwing pebbles after the retreating cars. “All right, you don’t love her. So you won’t marry her. I presume you aren’t going to ’fess up to your sins and send her off to a home?” “Oh yes, by all means, let’s tell the whole world that I’ve got this stupid bitch pregnant and sit back and wait for the world to excrete upon my head. No, I’m not telling anybody. Do you know what her parents could do to me? They could nail me to the wall, and not one of them would so much as offer me a sponge full of vinegar either.” “Then unless she takes up skydiving and horseback riding it looks like you and I are going to be paying for a little vacation to Mexico.” Roger lurched around, a little drunkenly. “Sometimes you can really be tasteless, goddamn your eyes.” “You drink my wine and insult me; did ever friend suffer more sharply the wrongs and abuses of his comrade. Oh, how sharper than a knitting needle to have a-” 14 "Can it. How the hell do you think I feel now? Nobody asked you to be my conscience. If you don’t like it why don’t you buzz off? Nobody needs your wise ass around here . . . Jesus, I’m really an old woman today. Don’t you have any more wine?” “I think there’s a quart of beer in the refrigerator.” Roger disappeared into the gloomy dustiness of the kitchen and came back with two glasses and the bottle. Clayton took the offered glass and filled it. He put it down without tasting it and looked at Roger. “Listen,” Clayton began, “I didn’t mean to-” “Oh God, I didn’t mean anything and you didn’t mean anything. Nothing means anything. I’m just out of my head, don’t pay me any mind. Let me sit alone in a corner and scream for an hour or so and I’ll be perfectly fine. Do you know what I did this morning? I bought a pack of razor blades, I didn’t even know why I bought them, they were just sitting on the counter and I had to have them, and then when I came over here and went to sleep I dreamed I had slit my wrists and everyone was at my funeral, eulogizing me and saying what a fine young man I was and DeAnne was sitting looking tough as hell in black and bawling her eyes out because I had slashed my way out of her net-” “What do you mean ‘net’?” Clayton’s tone was injured, as if he himself had been insulted. Roger ignored him and continued his attack. “You know goddamn well what I mean, or you would if you weren’t stupid enough to have been drawn in yourself. You love her, do you? Well, she hates you. And me, and everybody else, her parents, my parents, everybody. You’re a tool, you know that? She calls you up and sobs and says ‘Oh Clayton, it’s so horrible,’ and ‘What am I going to do?’ and you get sucked into the great engulfing cunt of the world, the warm comforting earth- mother, and then you think I’m a bastard for not marrying her.” “I never said” “You don’t have to say anything. I’d rather you didn’t, you just confuse the issue because you can twist words. You’re a goddamn intellectual and everything is an abstraction to you: how the consequences of self-gratification may lead to the loss of esteem of one’s reference persons. No, don’t say anything. After ten years I don’t have to hear you talk, I can hear you think. Your sympathy for poor wronged DeAnne stands out all over you, but just screw your sympathy. You don’t know anything. You’re an idealist, you have no conception of what women are really like, and when you get snared by the penultimate pussy, the mother maw, you know nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. You’ve never slept with her, you don’t have any idea what it’s like. She devours you, she paralyzes you with her flesh, it’s poisoned, she 15 numbs you and when you’re warm and comfortable and satisfied she eats you whole, she ingests you and you become a zombie, held to her like a puppet by a wire or by a rod if you want to be gross, and you do. That’s your problem, Jake, you’re a sensualist, a hedonist without the courage of his convictions. You wanted to lay her and you were too afraid to bring your fantasies into being, so you turned her on to me and got your thrills vicariously. But you don’t know, you’ve never felt the claws, you’ve only seen the fire and been drawn to it but you haven’t been burned.” Clayton swallowed the last of his beer and reached for the bottle. “All right, granting for the moment that-” “Don’t condescend to me, Clayton. Granting nothing. You know I’m right, but you don’t care because you’re still happy in her womb. But wait till you get hit in the face with the afterbirth! The whole thing is that she can do it to you and make you beg for more. Why do you think the poor itty thing is pregnant? Because I’m too stupid to know any better? She lied to me, she told me it couldn’t happen, she begged me . . . she wanted to be pregnant, she wanted me so bad she could taste it. You know what her house is like. She’d do anything to get out of it, to get someone with all the material crap she doesn’t have.” Clayton saw his opening, and jumped at it. “Hold on, wait now, it’s pretty easy for you to condemn her for that, baby, but what makes her different from nine-tenths of the women who get married every day? If I remember right, your mother . . .” “There. Stop right there. You’ve got it, she’s no different from my mother. You’re exactly right, but what do you want me to do, congratulate her for it? You know the extent of my filial devotion lies at the level of self-preservation and that’s all. She’s just like my mother, well hurray for her, I hope she winds up as well off but I’ll be double damned if she’s going to do it with me. Clayton, look, she’s a monster, just like my mother, and I’ve been struggling all my life to get out of her womb and just when I get my first glimpse of the light of day you expect me to be frightened and crawl back into the safety and warmth? I’ve still got those razor blades . . .” “Oh, shut up. You’re such a goddamn neurotic, everything that happens becomes a threat to your being. You think I can’t see her for what she is, you must really think I’m stupid. But listen, she is warm, she’s a magnet, and I can’t help it any more than you could. But you’ve made up your mind to get out while you’re still whole, why can’t I do the same?” “You mean why can’t you shack up with her for a while and then split. Because you won’t, that’s why. I know you too well. She’ll destroy you before you can start to abstract what’s happening to you.” 16 I know that, but I don’t care. You know what I thought? I thought if I were to marry her now-” Oh Jesus, Clayton, wake up and see what she’s doing to you!” “I see it, damnit, I see it better than you do because I’m smarter than you are and I’m more objective—” “Oh yes, you’re very objective—” “—but the point is I don’t care! Why can’t you love the beast that is devouring you?” “That’s just it, that’s the whole point. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, you can, and you will, but you still get devoured, and then what good was the loving if you lose everything?” DeAnne’s voice made them both jump. “Who’s lost everything?” They turned, a little guiltily, to look at her in the doorway. Roger got up from the chair reluctantly and went to her, kissing her without emotion, as if she were a stranger, a corpse. “Hello, Hon, we were just discussing Martin Buber’s effect on objectivism.” “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” She looked at them with the scornful envy of a Carrie Nation which resides in all women who feel a “Horses” Julia Trowbridge “Horses” Julia Trowbridge 17 deep sense of exclusion from the world of males. ‘'You’re both drunk.” Roger’s voice was not humorous; "Sorry about that—we really weren't expecting company.” "If you want me to go—” "No, hush, I’m sorry. I’m just drunk. There now, is that better?” He kissed her again, with at least a show of feeling. "Uh huh.” She sat down on the arm of his chair and waited. No one spoke. She looked at Roger. "Have you seen the Bob Dylan album around? "Christ, how should I know where the goddamn Bob Dylan-” "You don’t have to yell. I thought I’d get away from that if I came over here. You don’t have to listen to my mother all day, and if you had any idea how I feel you might have a little more-” Roger’s voice carried no feeling at all. "Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I m really a little nervous and upset myself, you know what I mean, ha ha? "I know damn well what you mean. I have a constant reminder—you know what I mean?” Roger looked at her for a long minute, and his eyes were long sharp points stabbing home deep inside her body. He disappeared into the darkened hallway, and Clayton and DeAnne could hear him slam the door and take the stairs two at a time. DeAnne stood for a minute by herself, next to Roger's empty chair, the last rays of sunlight catching her hair with a diffused halo, the tears starting to form. "Clay—Clay, he’s gone. He’s left me, and he’s not coming back, is he? Clayton looked out at the street below in time to see Roger’s car pull out into the street and away. Good old sensible Roger, already has his headlights on and not even dark out. Always prepared, except sometimes, but a master of the quick recovery anyway. How long has he been planning this well-staged little scene, or does high drama come naturally to him? Low comedy was always my forte. Tragedy is a new medium, but I seem to be the only applicant for the part. To the survivor go the spoils. Clayton rose stiffly and a little drunkenly from his chair and went to her side. They sat down together on the -bed and he stroked her hair softly while she cried, trying to think of the right words to say to her but in no hurry to speak just yet, for he had plenty of time. Figure without caption. “Eye” Dennis G. Taylor “Eye” Dennis G. Taylor WILLIAM NAGY Two Poems I I walked through the darker streets feigning alienation but you followed me up into my room and hung on the wall among the swirling dots and slowly exhaled through your teeth dying for a cigarette The dots were always there at night and where-ever I looked the green swirling lines and the red dots followed my vision staining my wall and the windows snuck up behind me and whispered outside to me with you on the opposite wall telling me that I wanted to stay the movers and the taxmen that I called myself against my will are going to come tomorrow and take you down from the wall where you hang reproachfully I will have to close my window and sit without silent seductions from either side until they come again and take the window for partial payment for their services the dots stay and try to convince me of nothing. 20 tonight and the day before they come and take you the windows and the door where I stand with my back to the wall guarding an empty room . . . The dust is gathering on the empty window while I walk down the streets and the pale faded spot on the wall where you hung follows me an after-image shared with the last time I looked at the sun slashing red-purple across your shape It matches the crack in the wall where I stare at the windowless plaster and wonder why I follow pale and fading images my eyelids cannot cover. II the day is yours screamed- shouted the man with yellowing eyes of decision and cut downward into fading scorecards and newspaper sections stringing out armless and legless dolls and I left the man gnarling over the spotted cardboard cut-outs houses 21 you will be he yelled and I left him disappeared behind his artifice I will be I taunted the blearing thousands down the tunnel out of the eighth street rain into the IND terminal a thousand voices that forged the wheels yelled agony of my ears and I could never make out individual voices I will be I taunted I was floating over the scream wheel sounds echoing from the wall and the tracks I searched back into the long funnel of my consciousness that stretched backward with the tracks and with the walls that watched with quiet eyes the agony of the wheels then glared up at me. I had come and the other thousands rolled back the doors and walked around me crowding “Spirit of Christmas" “Spirit of Christmas" Clifton Ayr 23 BROOKS TOO BROAD FDR LEAPING The garage had always been a place of punishment, and it took several minutes for Ed to realize that his father was not angry with him. Earlier, during the silent supper, Ed had wondered what he had done, sure that now he wouldn’t be allowed to stay over with Danny or go fishing with him. But there had been no punishment. Instead there was only the talk, and finally the loan of the fishing rod. Ed ran happily now, the garage behind him, the sections of the pole rattling inside the slim cardboard tube. He was late. The shadows were almost as tall as he was, and he knew Danny wouldn’t wait much longer with the tent. The Miller’s dog, alarmed by Ed’s speed, broke growling through the hedge, then ran playfully with him for almost a block before realizing that he was unnoticed. But Ed couldn’t stop. There was too much to tell, and there was the fishing pole. He wondered for an instant if he could go for two whole days without telling the secret, then abandoned himself to th? pleasure of knowing that he could not. When Ed rounded the corner of the big house and into the backyard, he saw that the tent was already up. Danny’s shoeless feet protruded from the open pyramid of the front. Ed threw the paper sack down outside and placed by Rick Sterry 24 the tube carefully inside against one of the walls. “Hey!” he said. “I thought we were gonna put it up together.” Huh! ’ Danny sat up sharply, rubbing his eyes. “You weren’t asleep,” Ed said. Sure I was. I was sound asleep!” I thought you were gonna let me help you put it up.” What time is it? I must’a been sleepin’ for about an hour. Man!” “Why didn’t you wait for me?” Ed insisted. Hey! Danny scrambled to his knees on the sleeping bags. “I really got somethin’ to show you.” “About the tent.” Danny shook his head. “What, then?” If you keep yackin’ about the tent, I’m not gonna show you.” Well, why didn't you wait?” Ed put his hand on the limp canvas side, still hot from the afternoon sun. “You did it all wrong. It’s all saggy and the ground is all curvey here.” He peered outside the tent. “You should have put it up over there by the tree. The ground isn’t—” “I guess you don’t wanna see what I’ve got.” Danny lay back on the bags with a sigh, closing his eyes. I think we better take it down and do it again,” Ed said, still poking disdainfully at the tent wall. Danny rolled to his stomach and took something out of his pocket and began to look at it, humming contentedly. Com'on! ’ Ed said. “Don’t be a dope. What d’ya got?” You gonna quit yackin’ about the tent?” He dangled the paper, confident of its powers. I don't wanna see it anyway. You haven’t got anything anyway.” He took the cardboard tube and crawled outside. “I gotta practice.” You’da give a lot to see it too.” Danny returned the paper to his pocket, patting it with great finality. “It’s a picture you’da give a lot to see.” A picture of what, for instance?” Ed unscrewed the tin cap, shaking out the shiny sections of the rod. “Don’t you worry,” Danny said. You got no picture.” Ed began to fit the pieces together until they became a fishing rod, then slashed the air experimentally, hearing the satisfying whoosh as it cut the air. “Where’d you get that thing?” My dad give it to me to use tomorrow.” “Let’s see it.” Ed held it away from the grasping hand. “It’s my dad’s. It cost about 25 fifty dollars, and I can’t let anybody touch it. Even your dad.” He continued to make the casts, his mouth making the sound of line singing from the reel. “Yeah!” Danny said scornfully, “You don’t even know how to use it. Here!” Ed turned away, pretending to struggle with the disassembly of the sections. “Sure is a lousy job of puttin’ up the tent,” he said. “It’s a picture of a . . . girl's thing." The last two words were a whisper. The betrayal of the tent was forgotten for a minute, and Ed allowed the rod to be taken from him. “You don’t have no picture!” “Whoosh!” said Danny, slicing into the air with the rod. “Whooosh!” “Com’on!” Ed grabbed for the rod. “Let’s see the picture, then!” “Whooosh!” said Danny. “I know some stuff I was gonna tell you. Stuff my dad said I couldn’t tell anybody." “What is it?” Danny sensed the truth of this and arrested the pole in midcast. He giggled. “I’ll bet you saw ’em doin’ it.” “I did not!" Ed turned back into the tent. “You watch what you say about my sister.” “Yes, it is,” Danny said, abandoning the pole. “You saw ’em doin’ it.” “I did not! It’s somethin’ my dad told me.” “Ho, Ho, Ho. Your dad didn’t tell you nothing.” “You wanna know what he told me? He told me everything!” “Ho!” said Danny. He watched Ed’s face for a second. “Everything?" “ Everything." Danny was silent, considering this. He pulled the paper again from his pocket and frowned at it. Ed began to pull handsful of grass from around the lip of the tent floor, throwing them languidly into the air. Danny lunged forward suddenly and smoothed the paper out on the canvas. “It’s a girl’s thing, see? Just like they cut her in half.” They both slid farther back into the tent, their heads almost touching the back wall. “See how big it is?” Danny traced with his finger. “That’s where you put it. Right in there.” “Where does the baby go,” Ed said. “There isn’t any place for a baby.” “I thought you said your dad told you all that stuff.” Danny quickly covered the paper with his hand. “He did!" Ed brushed the hand away. “They don’t show it on this thing though.” “What’s the name of the place, then?” “It’s the whoom, but it isn’t on this dumb thing. It should be right here. 26 He circled with his finger in the belly area, blank on the cross-section of the picture. “Where did you get this thing?” “In a box. You know, those firecracker-looking things?” Danny read the brand name from the paper. “Where’d ya find it?” “In my mom’s dresser.” Ed turned to Danny in horror. “Your Mother does this?” He touched the white insertion in the picture, then drew his finger quickly away. “So does your mom.” Danny was suddenly white. “Everybody does. Everybody’s mom does.” “No!” Ed shook his head confidently. “Mine doesn’t.” He turned again half out of the tent, picking at the grass. "You’re a liar!” Behind him Danny’s voice hovered between anger and tears. “It’s all right,” Ed said. “I don’t care. You wanna know what else my dad said?” “No!” “Com’on, Danny. I don’t even care!” He picked up the abandoned pole, disassembling it carefully. “You want me to tell you something about my sister? I promised my dad I wouldn’t tell.” “Your mom does it too,” Danny said softly. “Com’on, Danny.” “What?” “Promise you’ll never tell?” Danny nodded, his eyes still down. “My sister. She’s preg-nant.” He said the word awkwardly, slowly, filling the tent with it, bulging its sagging sides. They were silent for a long time. Danny began to sweep small mounds with the refuse of sand on the exposed canvas floor. “How do you know?” he said finally. “I heard ’em talking last night, and I asked Dad and then this afternoon he told me about everything.” He rattled the sections back into the tube. “Oh.” Danny began to consolidate smaller piles of the sand into larger piles. “How do ya do it?” he whispered. “Just like we thought.” ‘‘How though?” Danny risked a glance at the other boy. “You know—” “Well, tell me!” Ed frowned, pulling grass with both hands now. “You know—” “I don’t think your dad told you anything,” Danny said. 27 “He did too!" “Well, how do you do it then?” He could look directly at Ed now. “Well, you just . . . you know—” He looked at his fingers, making a description with them. “You put it in like this.” “Everybody knows that," Danny said. “You don’t know anything. “That’s not all,” Ed said, remembering suddenly. “There’s a seed inside the girl and some stuff comes out of you and it’s like—” he remembered the word. “It’s like fertilizer, and it makes the seed grow into a baby.” “Is that all?" “No, there’s lots more, but—” he shrugged his shoulders and crawled back into the tent. “I better not tell you everything.” “Com’on!” There was urgency in Danny’s voice. “How many times io ya have to do it? To get, you know . . . preg-nant?” “Th; ” Ed said after a moment. “All at once?” “No, at different times.” Danny followed Ed into the tent, his eyes large. “Three different times,” Ed repeated. “And it takes nine months for the baby to be born. But it’s different for different animals. I mean different animals take different amounts of time.” Danny pulled the paper from his pocket and stared at it for a second. It's called the va-geena,” he said. “And ours is called the pee-nis.” Ed was pleased to have remembered. “Why’d your sister do it three times then, if that’s the way to have a baby?” Danny’s voice softened. He was not sure that he shouldn't know this. “Cause she’s not strong enough.” Everything was coming back now in Ed's mind. “Huh?” “Dad says that it’s hard not to do it. I guess people want to do it all the time. He says you’ve got to be really, really strong. She wasn’t strong, I guess. They were quiet, both scooping the sand, reflecting. Through his trouser pocket Danny’s hand ground and crushed the paper. “Your sister sure is dumb,” Danny said. Ed sucked in his lower lip at this challenge, then released it. “Yeah, but Dad said you shouldn’t be mad at girls if they’re weak. They can’t help it. Or mothers either,” he said after a second. Danny thought for a moment, empty of scorn. “I’m gonna be strong, he said. “I don’t think I wanna do it at all.” “I don’t either.” Danny began to auger a damp hole in the sprinkler-soaked grass with his finger. “People sure are dumb,” he said sadly. 28 “Yeah.” “Who did it to your sister?” The hole was as deep as his finger now. “Her boyfriend?” The word was a dirty word. “Yeah. He’s coming over tonight. So I get to stay over and go fishing and everything.” Danny took the paper out of his pocket and pushed it into the hole, ramming it solidly to the bottom. “Your dad gonna beat him up?” Ed sucked in his lip again. “Uh huh.” “Did he say so?” “Uh huh.” Danny began to stuff grass into the hole, filling it to the top. “Do you wanna move the' tent now?” he asked. “Naw. It’s okay.” He touched the tent side, tighter now in the cooler darkness. “What d’ya wanna do?” “I donno.” “Let’s take a walk.” “Okay.” “Mom!" Danny yelled. They were silent until the back door opened and Danny’s mother stood in the light which fell out of the house. Danny backed into the tent. “Danny?” said the mother. “Can we go over to Ed’s place for a minute?” He spoke loudly, sitting in the back of the tent, his foot grading through the careful mounds of sand. Ed, outside the tent, watched his fingers. “Why?” The mother’s voice narrowed. “He forgot something.” “What did you forget, Eddy?” “My toothbrush,” Ed said. There was silence for a moment. “Don’t you think your father had better drive Eddy over?” “We wanna walk.” Danny scrambled out of the tent. “Com’on, Eddy.” He began to walk quickly across the yard. Ed grabbed the fishing rod tube and followed uncertainly. “Danny? Where are you going. You don’t have a jacket.” Danny began to jog, then to run. “Danny?” said the voice behind them. “Danny? Danny?” The boyfriend’s red car was in the driveway behind his father’s dusty station wagon, gleaming in the light from the house. The boys crept to the window which opened into the side of the living room. Below it, Ed knew, 29 would be a telephone stand and a chair nobody ever sat in. Their heads eased up to eye-level over the sill. Inside, their lips and hands moving silently, sat the four. Ed’s eyes were drawn immediately to the sister, sitting on the couch, sitting right next to the man. She was holding his hand, the knot of fingers moving against each other slowly. Then, as he watched, the hands separated and the sister left the couch to follow the mother out of the room, and at the same time the father moved from his chair to the couch. Ed’s stomach moved in him, but his father only sat. Sat on the other side of the man—his face full toward Ed, talking earnestly, his hands moving in circles, chopping the air like soft white knives. Then the mother and the sister reentered the room carrying coffee cups. Ed recognized the best china. The mother handed one to the man who half stood, the smile on his face leaving Ed weak. Then Ed heard the first sound. Soft and murmurous and warm. Laughter. Ed turned from the window. “I thought you said—” Danny began. Ed struck wildly toward the other boy, catching him somewhere solidly in the chest, and Danny fell, gasping. Ed ran blindly toward the red car, then stood, the violence in his hands and legs dwarfed and impotent before its cold magnificence. The tube was in his hands and he raised it like a club, bringing all his weight down with it. The tin cap flew off and clattered to the concrete. He raised it again, and as it came down pieces of the rod came partially out, splintering as he struck again and again. The tube began to bend in the middle—then bent double and flapped like an empty sleeve against the splendid solidity of the car. The tube broke and he battered the stub briefly against the glass, then moved to the aerial. He dropped the half he held and threw his whole body toward the car. He had managed to bend it double when they came out of the house to stop him. Figure without caption. “Figure #1” “Figure #1” Mary Ann Paskiewicz CRAIG STERRY This is a poem About a girl who used to sleep curled up on my chest like a cat who played with me gently as smoke whose wrists were thin as my thoughts who drank me into her belly as a cat drinks milk— a sharp cautious lapping that left a hint of me around the corners of her mouth who told me once in a cat's spitting rage (when I wouldn't stroke her electric hair) that I had a crooked nose. 32 The Rat With summer dying we saw him more often usually in the corner of the cabin by the stove hunched up cat-like scared as hell thumping a nervous foot before he vanished back into the wall dragging with him a bellyfull of stolen warmth. Marcia said he looked sick said he could very well have the plague in his fur said she wouldn't sleep until I did something but he refused to be baited wouldn't touch the best poison or the finest traps so one night when he stayed too long lazy with the heat I shot him. Marcia kept her face squinched up and her ears plugged until I took it by the tail and flung it spinning into darkness. I cleaned the mess hunched on my knees where the rat had been. Marcia stood behind me splitting my head with a galaxy of hate as quick and confused as the gun's loud moment. The bullet left in the wall a hole the size of a quarter. 33 Amanda Amanda saved and saved and bought a leather coat black and soft with expensive wrinkles now in the morning she steps by me leathered to the knees her naked legs white extensions of the street. In the morning now on her way to work she clicks by fast like a wild metronome catching up on time. Amanda now that you have a leather coat. Amanda with your wrinkles. Post-Thuntack Vision” Dennis G. Taylor Figure without caption. 35 LA DANZA PRIMORDIAL by Dennis A. Noyes Ramos and Kumari, the Hindu, are talking loudly, but their voices blend with the wild Colombian cumbia blaring out from the kaleidoscopic Rock-ola and the laughing and shouting that comes from all around us as we sit here, as usual, at this table beneath the macabre gyrations of the dancers. There are two freighters in port on a Saturday night and La Luna is filled with drunken sailors, and the old Chinaman who manages the bar, and Mama who bosses the whores are making a killing, though they wear their usual pinched and tragic masks, both watching everywhere at once, pouring drinks, adding up the 36 tabs on rum, guairo and womanflesh. I quit trying to listen to Ramos and Kumari and just sit here drinking guairo and giving myself up to the hum of the place and to the vibrations that come to me through the wooden floor, a sound more like labor than dancing, like passing under the docks in a dugout while the muelleros are working a banana boat. Ramos has his shrewd weasel's grin spread over his dark, clean-shaven face and Kumari is leaning toward him, intense, noncommittal. Guairo always tastes like it would be good with just a little more or less soda, but it never tastes really good and it has an aftertaste like a strong, ammonic floor-cleaner, but we keep drinking it, trying to put just a little more or less soda, or Coke, or water, knowing by now that it's going to taste wrong again—but we keep trying without even hoping anymore, never asking why we drink the stuff at all. The Germans are here, all singing together to the German version of an American song called “Beans in my Ears," and they are laughing and slopping beer on their undershirts. Teresa is sitting on the lap of the bosun, a slob with red, dentritic veins showing through his jowls and a nose that looks strangely frost-bitten here in the tropics, at ten degrees North in a rotting waterfront whorehouse surrounded by jungles and sea. Teresa is smiling at me. She's almost beautiful, just like this guairo is almost good, but no matter what I do to her or with her I can't get her beautiful. I took her on that old puddle- jumping LACSA C-47 flight to San Jose and bought her some clothes and sent her to the Palacio de Belleza, but it didn't work; in fact, she comes closer to beautiful sitting there now on the drunken bosun's lap, with her blouse torn open and beer spilled down her bra, running down to her brown, pouting navel, her hair long and wildblack, her skirt up to the garters, sitting there being mauled by that krout, smiling at me. Hell, why try? I wouldn’t like her beautiful anyway, anymore than I'd like this rotgut sugar cane moonshine here if I ever got it mixed just right. It’s that being almost right, almost perfect, that keeps me coming back here, mixing it different everytime, buying Teresa skirts and dresses from the contrabandistas who sell everything from comic books to Spanish fly on those Colombian banana boats. My watch is stopped at 10:30 and I don't know if it just stopped as I glanced at it or if it stopped six hours ago. I wouldn't be surprised if the sun came lazing up over the warehouses. But suddenly I want to know how late it is. It seems late. “Ramos, Ramos! Oye carajo, goddammit, oiga! Que hora is it?" Ramos looks at me with those tiny black eyes, his hair hanging down over his forehead. He grabs Kumari’s wrist and looks at his watch. Kumari’s watch has no minute hand, but the hour hand still works. 37 “Midnight, más o menos," he says, dropping Kumari’s wrist and swigging down a mouthful of guairo and curling his upper lip at the taste—but he still drinks it. I finish mine and feel it burn down into my guts, and I get up and jostle my way through the dancers. They are crazy and wild all around me for an instant, ghastly under the red and green lights. I go in the doorless opening that says Caballeros above. The stench is heavy. Out the tall, narrow and barred window I can see the dingy market deserted under moonlight. The sign painted over the stall says Favor no vomitar en el orinal nt en el lavobo, and I see from the floor that the Germans know enough Spanish to find the only place where it isn't prohibido to puke, except the ceiling; but maybe that’s what they tried for. Back outside under the red and green lights that hang down from the strands stretching between the rafter supports, the six-foot-three waitress, the great Jamaican, María, is walking across the room with her slovenly grace, holding a full tray of beer high above the heads of the frantic dancers. Maria— inviolate, aloof, moving above the futile violence like a bored goddess. The Chinaman is mixing cubas while he watches out the corner of his eye—just watches. Outside in the street the warm air hangs heavy. The broken-down taxis are lined up under the dim streetlights, and the drivers are gathered around the lead cab, sitting all over it, talking loudly and watching the whores go in and out the swinging doors, sometimes alone to get a breath of the stagnant air, sometimes leading a big, listing German across the street and up the creaking back stairs of the Hotel Bella Vista. Not a car moving anywhere and just a few people passing along the Calle Central, staying in the shadows, alone. The palm trees in the market look ruined after the storm last night, like ravaged peacocks. The air is still and hot and the stars are set deep and cold in the night sky. Now and then I hear the shouting of the stevedores working the nightshift, and in the hue of the harbor lights I can see the masts of one of the bananeros rocking almost imperceptibly above the corrugated iron roof of the Standard Fruit Company warehouse. I light a cigarette and then one of the driver’s, I can’t remember his name— some relation of Ramos, like almost everybody else in Puerto Limon—sidles over to ask for one. I give him the pack with the last one in it and he says, “Gracias, macho," and I don’t say anything. The sky is black and beautiful, almost beautiful. Suddenly I just want to get away from the whorehouses and the whole sleazy nightglow of the waterfront, so I open the door of the first cab and 38 get in. The drivers scatter off the hood and fenders like buzzards off a dead horse. The driver, puffing my last cigarette, gets in and slams the door a couple of times trying to get it all the way shut, but it is sprung. It is a green ’51 Chevy with the springs coming up through the front seat. It starts with a sound like frightened poultry. “A dónde, macho?” “No importa, just drive,” I tell him. Then I think of the beach and the sound of night waves and I tell him to drive south. “Por la playa,” And so we rattle through the dark side streets with the grumbling exhaust echoing off the rotting wooden shacks and the leaning warehouses. The driver blows the horn at the kids who throw rocks at us when we almost run them down as we come sliding around blind corners. We have no lights on because of that strange Latin American legend that using the lights, even when the engine is running, runs down the battery. At the edge of town we take the dirt road south along the beach, bouncing and bottoming the shocks in ruts and chuck holes a foot deep. I can see the harbor now where the shore line juts out toward the Isle of Uvita. There are two big ones standing along side the docks, and far out I can see a tanker on the horizon. But she is far out to sea and is just passing the faint Limon glow on her way up from Panama, probably bound for Bluefields, Tampico and New Orleans. There are shacks on both sides of the road, with flickering lanterns set on tables, and I can catch a glimpse now and then of whole families sitting on the porch stoop or around the table. The road gets worse and the driver shifts down into second, grinding the gears, as we slush and fishtail our way through the mud and standing water. I can smell the oil burning. Out the back window I see the haze of smoke that we are leaving in the moonlight. The houses are thinning out now and I can hear the breakers dooming down on the beach to our left. I can see the harbor lights reflected in the black waters of the bay far behind us, and the dull skyglow of the city. That tanker out there in the open sea seems motionless as it inches north. The driver occasionally flips on the lights and the road jumps out straight and long before us with puddles and weaving ruts. He reaches across and opens the glove-compartment and takes out a half bottle of guairo and offers me a drink. It tastes awful with no mix, but I take two gulps. He drinks loudly and shifts back into high when the road gets better. We are far out of town on a narrow, guttering road flanked by cane fields and the pounding Caribbean breakers. The engine whines and the windows rattle. He hands me the bottle and I swallow another acid mouthful. We have no cigarettes. But the guairo 39 burns deep, and I feel a little better. The sky is black and the stars are set deep and cold. Suddenly the driver flips on the beams and two crouched figures leap out of the night thirty yards down the road. They turn wild eyes to us, but they don’t move. We lurch to a stop only a few yards away. One of them is holding a machete and the other is clutching a bleeding gash in his arm, rolling his eyes crazily between our lights and the tall, crouching figure with the machete. I start to speak, but the driver hisses for me to shut up. “No talk! He keel us too. Calláte!" A. Strasser A. Strasser 40 There is a second machete lying in the mud between them, and the wounded man seems to be bending slightly toward it, but the other is raising his blade higher now. The tall one is moving, slowly, not coming closer, only circling. Over the crashing of the waves I can hear the pleading, “No, hombre, por Dios, no! No me matéis.” But the tall one is circling. He raises the blade higher and moves catlike, looming, around the other, who cowers now, bending at the knees and the waist—his eyes flash toward us, toward me, and then are fixed again upon the brutal machete. I can stop this! I can! But the driver’s hand is hard on my shoulder. He whispers harshly. “No hay nada que vos podéis hacer.” He hisses low like a viper. But I can do something! “Nada,” says the driver. Nothing The slow predatory circling is terrifying but fascinating, somehow inevitable, as if this were the enactment—a re-enactment of some vague ritual lost to memory but familiar, alive deep in the obscurity of the soul. But there is something! Nada. Something to stop it! Nada. Nothing The blade is higher now, the tip lost in the darkness above our lights, and the engine and the sound of the sea wash away the words of the other, and then he drops to his knees, no longer holding the wound, no longer looking to us, his blood dark red in our lights, blending black into the mud. I feel dizzy, hot, the guairo burning in my guts. I try to rise but the hand is hard on my shoulder. God! “Nada,” whispers the driver, “No hay nada que puede hacer.” The circling has stopped and he moves closer, towering over the one who is now prostrate, not groveling, not even pleading. There is that inevitability, that awful unwavering deliberation as the blade stands ceremonial and austere in the darkness, the two men intent, not even breathing it seems, looking deep into one another as if into the very souls. The hand falls limp from my shoulder as the blade flashes down and I feel a shout in my throat and I hear the cry of the fallen man just before his skull splits with a rotten, hollow sound—the word, the cry, rising hysterically into the night over the crashing of the waves—“At, Cristianos!” We sit looking into the lean, wild face of the murderer who is crouched before us in the lights, catlike, frozen, but potent, the eyes wild, deep, infinite in depth, somehow knowing and terrible. And then he is gone. In one surge he is out of our field of vision. I hear his footsteps leave the road and pad the high grass; then I hear a rustling in the cane field and then nothing. Nothing except the steady idle of the exhaust, our deep breathing, the sound of the surf, and the cry fading still but not lost amid the cold stars—Ai, Cristianos! We get out and look at the man in the road. The long, wide gash in his skull oozes red. His hair is clotted with dark blood, and his eyes, suddenly I see them, are open and gaping upward. 41 I feel the hand on my shoulder again, but I am still staring into those eyes, hearing the word still, hearing it in the searoar. He jerks me around suddenly and hands me the bottle. I drink, hot, burning, and he leads me back to the car. I don’t look back. We are racing wildly through the mud and ruts again, but the fields and the jungle beyond are on my left now and I am looking down the rows, illumed in moonlight, seeing nothing as the rows fan open, then close, opening again, fanning closed. But it is as if the tall one were just behind, racing us and gaining with each long silent stride, or he may be deep now into the jungle, climbing darkly into the foothills of the mountains that stand tall and stark above the sea. There is so much darkness out there for him to use. The jungle is deep and the mountains are high. We are roaring, fishtailing through the outskirts of Puerto Limon, fleeing toward the puny lights of the harbor that illume only a tiny patch of land and sea, and I see again the families huddled around their flickering lanterns, spectre-like and vulnerable in the peripheries of fading light. We are in front of La Luna again, the lights around and over us, the driver standing in the street shouting, “Policía, policía, asesinato, homocidio!" The bars empty and the police come running from the direction of the docks, one of them blowing a whistle, his pistol, holstered, flapping absurdly against his striped seam. They are around us now, looking into our faces. Ramos and Kumari are beside me now, talking, asking. The captain leans down toward me, but I don’t hear him, only the babble of the voices, the driver gesturing, telling it again. It was not our fault, he says, there was nothing we could have done— nada. “Guairo," I say, “Traígame guairo.” And Ramos is handing me the clear bottle and it burns hot and deep, but it is not strong enough, not enough. I drink and then I see Teresa before me and I drop the bottle and clutch her. I smell her hair and I feel it soft against my face, and she holds me now, but not tightly enough. I can’t hold her tightly enough. They are talking again, their futile voices blending into senselessness, their words meaningless, the German song blaring out from La Luna, and still over these voices I hear the raging sea. But these petty lights are impotent, impotent! against the night, and I clutch Teresa and bury my face against her as the cry roars red and damning through my brain—Ai, Cristianos!—and I sense him moving now, lightly, swiftly through the dark alleys, inhabiting the shadows, circling in on me even now with the blade held high in the night. Figure without caption. GRANT CHARLES GUIMOND The Prince of Peace the day of Judas has begun with a lantern and will end in a carpet womb- the craft of the witch a ventriloquist with a yellow voice that holds the soul by thread- an ivory nail through the death moon will do for warning- and a black shawl on Virginity will lumber down steel tracks to lead to the presence of a canny concentrationHell Gallant sits here and rules all His gray corridor by the wisdom beneath His green hair- and beheaded Old Age at His right in a cloak of maroon and a scythe in hand is His porter- the livid blue infant to left of His throne is called Youth- it is said he was froze at three and is here 43 to hold guard over all disembowelled who come at the bidding of Hell Kind- behind Him are orange willows weeping that hang when Hell Good's at His seal when He's gone the boughs stand erect in anticipation it's said for Death's bringings- the violet Wind of No Air adds it's pallor here too but never does anything blow- and the pink clouds that cover the entire sky of dirt always rain- but never does it touch the earth- the pour stops ten feet overhead and is amber and can never be reached- but such a good host is Hell Gracious thinking only of your comfort asking nothing in this peace but your time- JAMES HARKNESS Bruce Spencer I am asleep while the changeless street is dark. And down that street, Bruce Spencer rides From the world of the skinny boys and The big-eared, the basements full of broken Radios, war comics, and pet mice multiplied to wild, Rides a repaired bicycle, and laughs That terrible trembling laugh of unity-in-childhood. With my eyes I feel the air that is both mine and his, While from my porch I listen as he passes Beneath the sleeping maples of my childhood; Bruce Spencer. My heavy eyes of memory ache To force your legs to turn those wheels, My aching ears of memory strain Just to retain your laugh. Upon Visiting An Acquaintance, the Dying Proprietress of a Strawberry Farm This is a house About which lilacs grow Only to deny The Ivy on the wall; deny That red vines on cement Have grown from soft intentions Of hiding death's dimensions Cut in never-green and never-lavender. 45 Lady in Pink I will not let them think That you are twenty, Or suppose that you are still Substance of a hidden sea Or of a daisied hill. Nor shall we run, Disturb in any way, Jar your mortality. No, Do not even smile, But rest your dying eyes Upon the growing herbs Until; I will not even say the word, I will do nothing madam Nothing to disturb. Is it enough That strawberries send out runners, Enough to comfort you, Set you silently in the rusted arbor-swing Is it enough or is my quart too full Or will it rain Or are we as alone as you Whose nightgown brushes on the grass? You never will be dressed again And I shall never guess again. Nothing so sad I understand, But feel that by inquiring I Have lit a cigarette and Burned the scent of summer. MICHAEL D. EBERLEIN Labor Pains . . . Nasty Nurses . . . German Lessons . . . Burrrr- o crassy peephole Open doors to hum an’ maschines. Dey long (Dey gather) too sprink-ill and squirt blood ’s no fun. Juno Alaskagain 4 u’s less hum- answers. But (d-ey) tube nichts ander- es(s). Dy-your-reancarnathebabatun. My racli(ff) sweat-her out (or he) of your woewonwombbbb. Deliver BenKyraLeeArthurEbThompleinson. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeezz. . . I Mar-tin Luther Here I sit. I cannot do other wise people sit and not (?) “Sitting (est) are out-” “standing in the reign” (of nothingness) people said. “Nice is ’n ice” chunk of cold nothing, I said. Wi- ’s(e) the in-si(gh)tter of nothing- (?) Ness is nothing out standing. JENNIFER LEE Winter in Provence: Beach at Fos-sur-Mer A January hour, Mistral torn and empty of earth life, I closed my rented door and went unnoticed to the Mediterranean. A blue-white nickel sun, veiled in emptiness, Burned coldly on the shadowless beach. The sea wind looped spirals screaming Jeering encouragement to the water's belly roars. The air ripped from around me, I moved In a ragged void of howling silence. Green sea entrails vein-shot black and foam Writhed over boiling grey rocks; Ragged white-nailed fingers clawed Caressingly the hard trembling sand, Then disappeared in momentary scars. Foundered pill-boxes shipwrecked by briney years Pitched and tossed in the foam; Orphaned waves mewed hopefully at their empty doors. On one grey cement wall red rags of paper gaiety Promised clowns and acrobats next Thursday never. I tore the seaweed wind from my shoulders And walked back through quicksand streets. That night on my pillow was salt. C. C. Buchanan “Rising Sun** Figure without caption. A LEGACY OF SILENCE Running, he heard the sound. Gushing from his lips, rumbling and sobbing and pleading, the sound rushed thickly out his open mouth like water out the end of a hose. Then he reached the beach and felt choked by the noise in his throat as he lumbered out across the swelling dunes. Behind him the hoard of boys ran, cursing and yelling and taunting, running hard to keep up with his heavy strides. He heard the laughter among the shouts, and the deep guttural moaning in his throat came up in knots and swelled upward into his brain. Then a rock one of the boys threw struck him. It crunched into his skull just above the ear and he almost fell; but the momentum of his huge body kept him stumbling forward. He reached the ocean but did not stop; he plunged in, running, flailing his arms back like paddlewheels against the water. He ran out as far as he could, then dove, his large shoulders pushing through the breakers, his powerful arms thrusting forward and back. He swam far out into the ocean. The boys did not follow him—a few threw a stone or two—but it was a long time before he stopped or even looked back. Then suddenly it was quiet beyond the breakers, and at last he realized he was alone in the water. When he listened he could not hear anything but the air that hissed out between his lips; his heart was thumping, and his head was bleeding and throbbing with the sting of the salt water. He put his head back, and the moaning sound gushed again from his lips. He could not stop the sound; and a siren was whirling within him, growing louder and louder, until he felt the vibration clouding his sight. Low in the sky the yellow ball of sun blurred, spun, glistened and then died before his eyes. It was almost dark and he came out of his fear completely; the boys were gone and there were no stones, no shouts crashing around him. He was safe and the water had made him safe. He loved the water. He put by Theodore Sjogren 50 his head down face first into the cool salty greenness and let himself sink. He felt it would be lovely to go down and down, down into the softness of the sea. Already he had forgotten his fear of a moment ago. He came up for a breath and went down again. It seemed that he was becoming the sea; he was melting into it; the sea was home. But he saw it was almost dark and suddenly he remembered the boats would be on their way in. Instantly another fear took hold of him: he would be late and Jube would miss him, would be angry and shout. He could not stand to think of Jube angry, of Jube shouting, of all the things Jube would think about him. Jube would make him go away. He would say he was no good and make him go away and wander on the beach and walk and go hungry until he died. He started to swim. The moaning sound came again and bubbled into the water as he reached out for the shore. The beach was deserted when he came out onto it. From beneath the sea a pink whispy glow rose upward into the sky until, above the land, the sky turned deep blue and then almost black with night. He started to run as soon as his feet touched the bottom. Far down the shore he could see the sport fishing pier; and now, as he looked out, he saw the tiny dark speck of a dory nearing the beach. When he saw this, a deeper and more desperate sound came from his thickened and inarticulate throat; and he almost fell trying to outrun himself. He came up panting where the first dory sat already nosed up onto the beach. Jube was there waiting, “Where the hell you been?’’ he said, waiting with his high boots up to his hips shiny and wet, his shirt wet too. “You can’t even get nothin’ right, not even like watchin’ the sun go down to say when. You’re so goddam stupid!’’ said Jube. Silently he ran past Jube to get the planks. “Wait a minute,’’ said Jube, coming behind him, “What you got on your head? That blood? What the hell you do now?’’ Turning, he tried to say it, say something to tell. “Stop that moaning,’’ said Jube. “I don’t know what you did, or what got after you, but don’t try to say it.’’ But the moaning went on. “Stop it. Can’t you hear either? Stop it I say.’’ He ran with the planks down to the dory. Out to sea the pink glow was dropping into the water. He put the first plank against the bow of the dory and then ran to get the roller, came back with the roller and jammed it sideways under the bow. “You ain’t got much sense,’’ said Jube, “but you’re strong. Don’t let no 51 pack of kids put the fear into you." Jonah went around back and started to heave against the stern of the dory, pushing extra hard with his heavy shoulders, wanting to atone for being late. “I know they got after you, or somethin’. You don’t have to say it for me to know. I’ve seen it, too. You twice as big as any, but all anybody’s got to do is look at you.” Looking at Jube, he tried to tell him. “Shut up,” said Jube. “All you got to do is stand up. Don’t hurt them, just stand up to them.” But Jube did not know. He knew Jube did not understand, how you couldn’t when the fear came, how it would come out of nowhere at the sight or even the sound of someone, how they could all think above him. “All right,” said Jube. “I don’t know why I bother with you. All right.” Together they got the boat up, pushing it up over the roller as far as it would go, then putting another roller in front. Jube took him by the arm to the shed that had the medical kit. “Hold still,” he said. The red liquid burned. It made his eyes tear but he did not move. He wanted not to move to show Jube, to show he was all right, that he was worth the trouble. He tried to say it, but it only came out as a noise. “Quit it, now,” said Jube. Jube got up. “You okay now,” he said. “It take more than rocks to hurt that belfry.” “What’s up?” said Blacky. The big Negro had nosed his boat up to the shore, waited for the wash from a breaker to haul it part way in, far enough to be stable, before he came to where he and Jube sat. “They been after him again,” said Jube, “them kids.” “Big as he is?” said Blacky, laughing. “You know it,” said Jube. “You know how he is.” Jube shook his head; it was big and grizzly under his faded captain’s hat. His face was dark with beard. Jonah got up. “Come on,” said Blacky. Jonah followed him. They got the planks and the roller and got the second boat up. By the shed, Jube already was cleaning the fish, slicing with the knife and with the same motion scraping the guts out into the barrel and with the other hand tossing the fish into the tub of cold water. From the pier, people were starting to come down to see the catch, to make offers. “Fine looking bonita and rock cod,” yelled Jube at the gathering on the 52 beach, “any way you want ’em. Whole, filleted, gutted. Come while they still fresh/’ “Get the boat up,” said Blacky. “You can do it yourself." Jonah put his back to it. Blacky went over to the other boat and with another knife began to cut into the fish. “Yes, ma’am,’’ he said, “three pounds filleted, cut ’em and skin ’em.” “Come while they fresh,” yelled Jube. It was night. Jonah could see the stars coming out, brighter in the east, over the land, where the sun would rise. He could smell the heat from the town and the smell of grease and fried fish as a little breeze took it across the beach from the pier restaurant. He took the last roller out and put it in front, went behind and pushed, swung the second boat along side the first. “That’s him,” said a blond boy, holding his mother’s hand. “He can’t talk,” pointing at Jonah. “Hush,” said the woman. “You want something, ma’am?” said Jube, his face stern. “Two pounds of cod.” “Ask him to talk,” said the boy, pointing again to Jonah. “Hush, now,” said the woman, shaking him. “That’s my brother,” said Jube. “You tell your boy that. You tell him that’s my brother.” “I’m sorry,” said the woman. “You hush now.” She shook the boy again. Jonah stood still. He could feel the little boy watching him. There were people all around the two boats. Backing away, he went to where the light from the pier couldn’t reach him, but he felt the eyes of the boy. They were harsh and cruel; and he was afraid to look at the boy. “You, Jonah,” said Blacky, “get over here.” But he couldn’t move, not with the boy there, not feeling how they all noticed him. “These here guts need dumping,” insisted Blacky. “Jonah, where you at?” “Let him be,” said Jube. “The hell,” said Blacky. “He got to work too.” “I said let him be.” Jonah kept backing away. “Just cause he’s your brother,” he heard Blacky say, but he backed off to where he couldn’t hear any more, and he sat down, finding a rock near the sea, so he could watch and see when the crowd went. He sat for a long time on the rock. It took a long time before the fish were all sold, the crowd gone and the two boats, the dorys that caught the fish, cleaned and the scales, where the fish were weighed, cleaned and put away in the shed. He waited until the last of the crowd went off up the beach, most 53 in the direction of the pier, and then he came back and tried without looking at Jube or Blacky to clean the dorys. But Blacky looked at him with that funny smile. He was not afraid of Blacky as he was others, but he was afraid of Blacky in a different way. He was afraid of the way Blacky looked at him sometimes, the way he smiled sometimes. “You,” said Blacky, “you, Jonah, you’re a prize.” But he couldn’t look at him. He got the pail from the shed and filled it and sloshed it into the dory. But Blacky was still there, still like that. “You got arms like elephant’s feet,” he said. “You got shoulders like a bull and a back like a whale. But you’re scared of every damn thing. You, Jonah, why you so scared?” It was like the crowd sometimes, the way they all were, all except his brother Jube; how you had to run and run and there was nowhere to go, and if you got far enough away you could not forget their eyes or their words or the way they all looked; feeling it was because of you they laughed, not understanding but knowing it was you they talked of and looked at and did smilingly say about—idiot, he’s crazy, he ain’t got no sense. The vision of young boys, all shapes and sizes, running, yelling in a group until the din caused his head nearly to crack, rose up before him, seemed to burst suddenly out of the night. He backed away from Blacky, moaning. “What the hell?” said Blacky. He backed away, dropping the pail with a faint clang onto the sand, moaning louder. “What you done now, you black son-of-a-bitch,” yelled Jube. “Nothin’,” said Blacky, his eyes wide with wonder, “nothin’.” He was a big nigger, but Jube shoved him away. “Goddam son-of-a-bitch!” Jube chased him, but the yelling the boys made still throbbed inside his head and his eyes, clouded with lights, saw them running. “Ju—Ju—Ju—” he moaned. “Ohhhh—" Then Jube hit him, slapped him: his eyes cleared and he looked at Jube. “Ohhhh—” he said. “Ohhhh.” “Stop it,” said Jube. “All right, I know. Stop it now!” He held him tight, with his arms around him. Jonah stopped moaning. He looked at Jube, felt his insides uncurl; he looked at Jube and felt all right. His big head began to nod, his eyes glassy and kind of moist; but he felt all right. He touched Jube. “Listen here,” said Jube, “he’s my brother, you hear. He had the same mother I did. You got some kind of black bastard fun in you, you try it on me, you hear.” “I didn’t do nothin’,” said Blacky, “he just started in, just carried on for 54 nothin'.” “It's nothin' to you maybe, but you ain’t him.” “Goddam right I ain’t.” “There’s a lot worse than him,” said Jube, “like having a well brain and not being able to use it.” “Meaning what?” said Blacky. “Meaning you better use it,” said Jube. He said it quiet, but his eyes shone, told how serious he was. Blacky was silent. They looked at each other and then Blacky smiled, seemed to soften. “I didn’t mean it,” he said. “I guess I said something wrong.” He looked at Jonah. “I ain’t so smart either,” he said. “I said it wrong and you ain’t got to be afraid of me.” Jonah stood still, his eyes on Blacky. “There,” said Jube, “you see?” Jonah stood still. “Blacky’s all right,” said Jube. “Sure,” said Blacky. They moved away; Jonah went back slowly and finished cleaning the dory. Blacky and Jube were silent. They walked away from the shore. The shed was locked and everything, the line, the anchors, the scales, the knives, it was all locked inside it. As they walked Jonah felt glad thinking of the cafe and food and all the smells and being with Jube and the talk and how it was when they all got sleepy with drink. He liked it at night after they were all done, when it was late and most of the people, especially the boys, were gone. And it was all right with Jube, whenever it was. “We got to do better,” said Jube, “it ain’t paying like it should.” Jube and Blacky walked in front, past the pier restaurant where all the summer people dined and down the narrow street leading off the pier. Then they turned down another street and it was smaller, darker, the houses close on both sides. Jonah knew the feel of the street under his feet—the rough stones and how the holes were. He felt warm inside thinking of the cafe; and it was at the end of the alley; he could see it. Then they were eating. It was fish and they all ate and Jonah ate but he did not drink like the others. He listened to the talk, and he grew warm, and then he put his head down and started to sleep. All at once he was on the beach again, in the day in the hot sun, and he was just walking along it and then he was running. They came behind, and he ran and ran, but he could not get away. They were yelling and screaming and laughing and throwing stones, but be could not get away, and when he looked around they were all "Bronze and Wood Sculpture" "Bronze and Wood Sculpture" James Hay 56 in a bunch and seemed to rise up over him, swarming up over him with their wide distended mouths, open and screaming. He woke up suddenly and jerked back, knocking over the chair and almost the table. For a moment he looked wild-eyed about the cafe. The girls, the bartender, the two drunken men and Blacky and Jube, all looked at him, surprised. It took a moment for him to recognize the cafe; then he saw Jube, and he started to shake so he couldn’t stop. Jube came over and put him in the chair again, but he couldn’t stop shaking. “Be quiet,’’ said Jube, “you had a dream.’’ “What the hell he dream of?’’ said Blacky. “The poor thing,’’ said one of the girls, the blond one. “Ha, ha,’’ laughed one of the drunken men, “poor thing she says. We’re lucky he don’t murder us all.” “When you don’t know what you’re saying,” said Jube, “it’d be better you didn’t.” “Sure,” said the man. “Ha, ha.” The shaking went on; he couldn’t stop it, not even with Jube there. It was as though something inside him had turned cold and was numbing him all over. He tried to stop. But he couldn’t. “You take him away,” said Jube. “You take him home.” “Uh-uh,” said Blacky. “Sure, now. You take him home.” “I got things to do,” said Blacky. Jube looked at him fierce, “What things you got to do?” “Get me a woman,” said Blacky, “it been more than a week.” “Ain’t no woman white or black look at you.” “S’what you say,” Blacky said. But Jube was through, “Anyway, take him home,” and Blacky saw he’d lost the argument. He took him by the arm. “Come on,” he said, and they got up. They walked back down the alley. Blacky mumbled hotly as he walked on ahead. The night was warm and soft, the sky soft and the stars dull as though with heat. They walked on, and Blacky swore; then he turned around and said, “You and me, we go home he says. While he stays and drinks and plays them women. You and me, we go home. Nigger and idiot, we go home. You ain’t no nigger,” he said. Then he did a whirl right in the street. “And you ain’t no idiot, either. I know you. You ain’t no idiot, at all.” Jonah followed, his head down. Inside he felt the remains of shaking, although the real shaking was over. He felt the night air and his mind cleared; 57 the jumbles stopped. He felt the dark as something cool and moist although it was hot, and the dark made him better, and he couldn’t see himself or see anybody, and it was all secret in the dark, the way it should be. “Not that way,” said Blacky. “Come on, we ain’t for home yet.” And he turned down the alley, toward the bay, instead of toward the beach. “You think we be taken advantage of, by him?” It was hotter as they passed inland. There were no lights on the streets and the buildings were dark and low; the fish smell grew stronger as they neared the bay. They were on the bay and the hoists and cranes of the shipyard rose black against the sky. The canneries were dark and rot-smelling. He followed Blacky with his head down and the street was hard gravel and then dirt, concrete then dirt again and he saw the street and knew. It was dark and they went into the building. “Sut up,” said Blacky. They passed up the wooden stairs. An acrid sweet smell like sweat filled the hall. There were voices and he stopped. “Come on,” said Blacky; he grabbed him. He knew before the door opened. “Shut up, now,” said Blacky. “Jesus Christ.” The room opened out; the voices fell. “It’s big man.” “Yeah, and what else is that you got with you.” “I don’t want no shit,” he said, “now sit.” He sat heavily. A big nigger woman touched him. “Don’t,” said Blacky. “You want to hear him yell?” “He’s god-awful big.” “Sure he’s big. And he ain’t no half-wit neither.” “I never seen more of a half-wit than that,” she said. “Don’t you think,” said Blacky, “he’s crazy but he ain’t dumb.” “You want he get laid too?” she said. “Hell,” said Blacky. He grabbed the big woman and hauled her around. “Don’t fool with him. He belongs to Jube.” They went together through a door. He sat heavily and the other women looked at him; the room crushed in on him. “What do you want?” said one. “Do you want a woman ever?” The room got tighter and tighter. He could feel the heat of black bodies and the woman smell grew stronger until he could not breathe. From a woman he had come and it was him too; the smell was him. Too big he had come into the world cursed, too big he had been torn from woman in a sea of blood, his woman’s body ripped and tortured in the end of love. 58 “Do you want a woman ever?” She was big too and her heavy breasts bulged out over her dress. He felt his head between the mounds of flesh and smelling the sweet acrid stinging smell he opened his mouth and let his tongue loll out over the hot salt-tasting flesh which seethed and bulged against his eyes. “Come to me. You are my love.” She came closer, her soft rhythm warm and moist, dark as the night that held him now as the soft subtle end of what his life had dared not hope. “Mu . . . Mu . . . Mother,” he said, “Mother, Mother.” The sudden shouts of laughter split his skull and his brain spilled out onto the floor where he saw it quivering. “He thinks you’re his mother,” they screamed, laughing and screaming, “his mother! His mother!” They laughed and screamed until he saw them dark and horrible, the image of his brain naked and quivering in the mucous of his afterbirth. “Achhhh . . .” he yelled and burst from the chair in blindness. Throwing himself at the door he crashed out into the hall with the unhinged door skidding and crunching down the narrow stairway in front of him. Shouts now of fright echoed behind him stopping through shock the harsh laughter. He fell out into the street and jumped up quickly and ran. It was over when he reached the cabin. He stumbled in the door and fell down on the cot, moaning. The familiar stale smell of rope and fish slime comforted him. The jumbles passed over his body and the deep choking sound clogged his throat and then left. He lay quietly, his sweat and tears stung eyes open but staring blankly into the coarse wool blanket lumped up under his face. It was much later when Jube came in. The door banged open and he stepped heavily into the room, breathing out hoarsely the smell of cheese and alcohol. The gas lamp flared and he said: “Where’s Blacky?” Jonah lay silently, watching from his cot; then he raised himself up on his elbow. “Ju,” he tried to say, “Ju, Ju . . . Mu, Mo, Mother,” he said finally. “Mother,” he said, “Mother.” “All right,” said Jube, “Mother. All right, Mother.” “Mother,” said Jonah again. “Mother.” “What the goddam,” said Jube. Jonah collapsed his elbow and lay back. His big head rolled back and forth on the blanket and he looked up in the half-light at the roof. “I wish I knew,” said Jube, “but there ain’t no way. Sometimes I think you’d be better off dead.” He kicked one boot off and it thunked against the wall. The other one thunked and he said, “You ain’t had a mother. She died 59 trying to get a thing like you between her legs. It don’t make sense.” Jonah lay still; his eyes stung hotly and he held his head. “Why can’t you say?” said Jube. “What you so goddam scared of? Why’ve you always been scared?” Jube’s voice ended in silence. Jonah held his head and then began to moan softly. The sound came like a soft wind blowing across the beach from the ocean. He closed his eyes and then let it flow freely and it seemed like it would go on and on forever. Then just when it would never stop, it stopped. He looked up and saw Jube’s wide face, talking, his face swelling and clouding and the words flowing. He was still in the cafe. He hadn’t gone anywhere. “And it was better then too without all these damn blood-suckers. And the fishing was better too. You don’t know it if you weren’t here, but it was. Like this cafe,” pointing at the floor, “it was the only one here.” Jube stopped and waited while the blond waitress and the two men and Blacky and the other dark-haired waitress got the full meaning of what he was saying. “It don’t take long,” agreed the blond one. “I came in ’58 but it’s nothing like then.” “Sure,” said Jube, “it’s the tourists. Once they come, then, right after, you get all the blood-suckers.” He could feel it was later but he knew Jube would talk more and drink more, drink more and talk more. His voice went on into a gray sort of halflight that had a smell and a feel and it filled his senses. He knew it was happening again. “It was better then,” Jube repeated, “it was much better then.” He was tired and he thought he was sleeping. Then it was dawn and the new day began to wash over him like the tiny ripples of the incoming tide. It tickled his feet and washed upward bringing a coolness to his legs, his chest and then his head and he was wide awake. He lay quietly, looking at the dim light that sat like a fog outside the cabin door. There was no sound at first, then the gulls were up and he heard them flying, calling, diving and fighting among themselves for the small fish and muscles they dropped on the rocks to break. It was cool and peaceful with only the gulls flying. The breeze was not up yet and the ocean was quiet. He knew without looking the slick gray surge of the ocean before the day’s wind and with only the ghost of old waves to move it. He was glad and quiet. The morning was the best of all the times of the day. It was peaceful and he waited for Jube to wake. “All right,” said Jube finally, “you sons-a-bitches.” 60 Jonah sat up and watched Jube sling his legs from the cot to the floor and then stand up and stretch. His dirty gray underwear sagged at his crotch and belled out at his ankles and wrists. Blacky sat up too and yawned. “By God,’’ he said, “it ain’t day yet?” “Jonah,” said Jube, “where’s that fire?” “Some day I’m going to stay right here and let the day go by,” said Blacky. “I always said niggers is lazy,” said Jube. “I’ll show you lazy,” said Blacky; and then Jonah was outside with some of the wood they kept in the cabin to dry. He knelt down and stacked some small chunks of wood in the rock-lined pit in the sand. The sand was dewy wet and smelled moist and clean. Over his knee he broke some larger pieces of wood and arranged them carefully in the pit. Then he lit a rod of newspaper and stuck it into the pile. Jube stepped out the door and stretched again on the sand. “A hot day,” he said, “a fine, hot, fish-catching day.” Jonah smiled and went about cooking the fish with gladness singing in his head. After the meal, he licked his fingers of the fried fish and jammed them in the sand to clean them. He looked along the stretch of empty beach and felt pleased. Jube and Blacky sat silently, licking their lips and teeth and tasting the last of the fish. “Come on,” said Jube, “the sun’t almost out.” Jonah got the two planks and the roller and the dorys sat finally bow first to the sea. With the fishing gear and tanks of gas Jube and Blacky came down to the water and stored everything in the boats. “All right,” said Jube, “when the sun drops to the water, you be here to help us in. And don’t get in no damn trouble today.” “Hurry up,” said Blacky, “the surf is low.” But Jonah started suddenly. “Ohhh,” he said. “Ohhhh . . .’ He rushed forward to grab the stern of Jube’s boat. “No,” said Jube, “get back. I can’t take you.” “Ohhh . . .” said Jonah. “We go through this damn thing every day,” yelled Jube, Why can't you learn?” He raised the oar and swung it threateningly about Jonah's head. “Push off,” he yelled to Blacky, and just then he leveled the blade of the oar at Jonah’s stomach and lunged. Jonah grabbed his stomach in pain and lost hold of the boat. Then he heard both engines fire and the two dorys burst ahead suddenly, lifted and smacked through the low line of surf squirting spray out in silver sheets from under each bow. “Untitled” “Untitled” K. Schneider 62 He stood knee deep in the foamy wash and watched the boats grow smaller against the blue-gray sea and sky, smaller and smaller and then gone, the sea and sky silent and empty, the boats gone and he alone, the pain in his stomach still sharp but meaningless, the pain nothing to the silent growing thing that was fear. He turned and went slowly up the beach to the cabin. Now the sun was creeping above the low buildings of the town. He tried to walk softly as though the sand was alive and could feel and react. He felt that everything was alive and watching him. It was still quiet but he could see signs of life in the town. The ragged old men who sat around all day in the sun and talked and slept or just looked were already coming out to find a bench. A few huddled forms of fishermen were at the end of the ocean pier waiting patiently. He felt the hot white blinding sun and knew the beach soon would be covered with people lying, playing, screaming, laughing. The thought made him tremble and his mind began to spin erratically. He felt himself growing in size until he stood like a grotesque giant exposed and ridiculed before all the town. He was huge and ugly, distorted and abject, a monster torn from the mother’s womb in a sea of blood and a chaos of bitter destruction. He turned and started to run up the empty beach away from the town. Tears of sweat burst out all over his body and his throat vomited up sound. The white beach glistened and stretched endlessly before him and he ran, harder and harder, pounding with his heavy steps the life he found in himself but which he despised and feared. Dunes rose up before him and dropped, rose up and dropped as his feet churned and drove and lifted in a swift, lung-burning rush of obliteration. His legs were numb and mindless as they ground up the side of a high dune and then suddenly collapsed. Sand and sky whirled briefly and then jarred into aching stillness by the crumpled, falling, lifeless thud of muscle and bone. He rolled over, coughing and choking on the burning sand that clogged his throat and mouth. Spasms of nausea shot through him and his eyes spun back into his head. He lay finally on his back, and the sun rising above the dunes around him burned and throbbed in his skull. He closed his eyes and moaned. He woke up once and the sun was directly above him. Only half aware was he and then in a minute he was far far away again. A memory of his father lying still in the cabin, dying, came to him and turned his mind back. Jube was younger but still able and by then doing most of the fishing while the old man lay still, his dying breath vomit sour and thick with gin. “He killed himself,” the voice said, “ever since she died. He killed him 63 self and she died too and for what? For that freak of a miscarrage? I should say it’s crazy this world.” And when they lowered him in, the earth covered it all but could not undo it. “Killed himself for sure and for what?” Jube ran after him yelling, “Stop it, stop it,” he yelled. “If you ain’t a goddam the way you act.” Moaning and moaning. His fault. Moaning and moaning. “Don’t pay any attention,” said Jube. “They don’t know a good goddam about any of it.” He woke up and tossed around on the sand. His throat ached with the sound and he got up on his knees and putting his head down ground his face into the sand and beat his fists. And when he closed his eyes he saw a giant egg. It began to split open and thousands of deformed and grotesquely huge babies kicked and pushed their way out. They swarmed down the side of the dune and he jumped up howling. Running and running again, never stopping. “There he is! Get him!” The boys yelled and ran after him. “Crazy Joe, Crazy Joe, doesn’t know his own big toe.” He turned and ran away from them towards the woods. His lungs ached again but he didn’t notice the pain. When he reached the thick brush he turned and saw a group of boys running towards him, laughing and yelling. “Crazy Joe, Crazy Joe . . .” He saw one stop and toss a rock that splattered in the sand far behind him. Then he was running again and the beach was far behind. He crashed through the thick brush not knowing any particular direction. Now and then he heard the shouts and yells darting and disappearing around him in various parts of the brush. Not slowing his run any he thrashed crazily forward, broke out suddenly into a clearing and, with all his lumbering weight, crashed solidly into a small, running, blond-headed boy. They fell in a tangle across the clearing and into the thick green brush. The boy’s jeer turned instantly to screams of terror and the sound in Jonah’s head created a blind chaotic panic. He held on to the boy, too afraid to let go or realize anything but his own fear. The howling and screaming split his ear drums and he sobbed and cried in crazy sounds wanting somehow to make the boy stop. Then all at once the boy did stop and Jonah heard only himself gasping and moaning. He stopped the sound in his throat too and the two of them lay still. Jonah breathed heavily and achingly, but the boy did not move. Suddenly Jonah held his breath and in absolute silence lifted his head from the leafy shadows of the vines to look at the boy. He saw his own hand, the large fingers tightly wrapped around the boy's throat. The boy’s eyes were wide open and his mouth was open as though 64 screaming. But there was no sound. The boy was perfectly still. Then the boy was gone and the scream burst out suddenly. Shocked and frightened, he stumbled back off the chair. His own hand was about his throat and he felt the fingers tighten until the pressure behind his eyes drove like needles into his brain. He got up and started to run but Jube grabbed him and put him back in the chair. "You see what a goddam crazy,” said Jube. He grabbed the hand and tried to force it away. “Choking yourself?” he asked. “Choking yourself now?” He yanked and pulled and grunted and the hand came away. But the hand was tense and Jube had to hold it. “If he don’t beat all,” said Blacky. Still holding the hand, Jube turned on him. “I told you before to take him home. You see what happens, he sits around here all night listenin’.” The cafe was quiet and everybody watched the struggle with the hand. Then it began to relax and he felt instead the beginnings of a long deep moan. “Shut up on that too,” said Jube. “Don’t,” said the waitress, “please, you got to be nice.” “Nice, hell,” said Jube. “What the hell do you know?” Without answering, the blond waitress came and led him by the arm behind the bar where she wet a towel in cool water and patted him all over the face. He felt better and he looked at the blond woman whose face was soft and rather kind. “He just said something,” said the waitress. “That’s all right,” said Jube, “you can’t tell what he says hardly ever.” She patted his face gently and poured a coke into a glass and gave it to him. “What’s the matter with him really?” she asked. “I mean what is it really?” Across the top of the bar he saw Jube shrug his shoulders. “It ain’t like he doesn’t think,” he said. “You can see how he thinks at times and he knows things. But he’s scared. Anything you think of he’s scared of—especially people, and sometimes it seems he’s more scared of himself than anything.” Jube raised the glass and the beer disappeared into his mouth and he poured another from the pitcher. Blacky sat leaning back with the glass between his hands and resting on his stomach. The two drunken men were silent, watching, drinking and listening. The waitress said, “It must be awful to live all inside like that.” She put the towel back in the sink and went around to the other side of the bar. “Sure,” said Jube. “He’s scared crazy.” “I wonder what did it?” 65 Jonah felt the voices going away. It was hot in the cafe and the voices were hard to listen to and he felt sometimes other pictures coming before his eyes. “He been that way always/’ said Jube. “That’s just the way he is." “Funny/’ the waitress said thoughtfully. “Yeah/’ said Jube. He filled the glass from the pitcher again. Jonah sat still, a little too far from the conversation to concentrate on the words. He saw boats sailing out across blue water and he imagined he was on one. He thought where he would go but he couldn’t think of places other than the town. His mind kept coming back to the town and then the boats were gone and people all of a sudden came after him with knives. He ran but they caught him and strapped him down. With the knives they cut a hole in his groin and he felt them pulling his insides out. His insides ripped out and he saw a man standing with his arm up holding what looked Ike the belly and intestines of a large fish. But the mass of entrails was really himself. “I’d sure like to know what he’s thinking,” she said. “Who knows,” said Jube. “And whatever it is, he can’t tell.” Jonah was empty, and having nothing inside him the shell of himself floated up high into the sky. He saw the world as a globe with patches of color, and then like a balloon he was deflated and began falling aimlessly through space. He landed with a jar and felt all scrambled and sick inside. “Look at his face now,” said the waitress. “Sure,” said Jube. “That’s the way his face is.” They all looked at him; sitting in the chair, his face was twisted in a confusion of pain, disgust, and fear. “That’s his only face,” said Jube knowingly. But then the knives were gone and Jonah sat all alone. He felt sick and then he felt very sad without knowing why. He was hollow inside and he sat numbly for a long time until his hand began to stiffen. He looked down at his hand and it was large like a piece of red meat. Then the hand jerked upward to cover his face, and he began to moan into it. The hand covered his face, and then he was lost in darkness and there was nothing at all in the world but the sound coming from his own throat and the sound got louder and louder and then all of a sudden he got smaller. He grew smaller and smaller until he was all gone. And then there was only a sound. Figure without caption. “Proxy” “Proxy” Dennis G. Taylor Figure without caption. ROBERT VANDER MOLEN from Leaf Collections I Along the fence Eating handouts Grass shortclipped And horses' eyes Belong to autumn Leaves bury Apples in midnight drifts The skies are low And swift to rip the pastures III The red and yellow and green And such and such leaves Of shades All mixed into one Elephants invade Northern fields Fixed for great battle White and lines Jewelry wrapping down their thick canvas flanks Twinklings red and sharp as tusks in meadow afternoons Stamping stamping The grass is laid flat With milestone piles of dung And campsites And fires And hot seeds In ten years they are gone or twenty or so But they are gone And it's quiet between the trees 68 Leaves are scampered Across the yard The street The dreams The year preserving steps For those Hunters And red and yellow And such and such And green Eddied into dead velocity Until one And dried V The clouds Move from morning in clear stiff bonds That hold formation To complexities as later and later That change the meaning and color And juxtapose altitudes VI The sun is tawny on the spring pool Covered for snow It shoots through the branches Honest and hard It can do that for nothing Because things are completed Horses mill in and out Of the rays A black dog sniffs in the foreground At an excretion A small Canadian bird Becomes a knob 69 In the crisp sky Turning up summer and late days The wind shakes the sun Into children through the wood The leaves laugh Until the mind turns away VII For one song The rain melts the seedings from balls And the ash from leaves Or emitted through ashcan holes At the rear of the yard from chimney gray house Sinks deeper Becoming mud after the first flourish The room hears rain Pelt pelt On the storm window Between the air crack Pelt pelt On the neighbors walk The no color Loneliness of days Becomes leaves burning quickly and willingly Becomes long looks at the orange sun through nested whistle trees The laws are green and brown (air is a concept) (persons are concepts) VIII The sun judges its respective distance As the fruits mature And are dismembered Children ride their bikes Through smoke Barking at boredom The older boys steal field corn To roast and eat At hidden blazes Old songs cling to the walls In cold rain 70 from The Degrees of Passing is Age VIII A rainbow The streetlight around Enveloped the Dalmation sky Oh the evening was nothing but Christmas wandering my feet They skipped on the dry inch snow Slid laughingly Young with kissing clean Oh the kissing teeth White and cold And strong for me Flailing arms were frozen And innocently stilled Oh the streets slid with the sky Somewhere gone into the night Now white and frozen IX December cannot be white It is too pure for this month Stepped in dissonance I deceive The skies And the frozen tailed ponds What is pure Not you XII Rimbaud Pulls up his coat collar Bridge shadow collar As he walks Too little 71 Down the diverging street Who can remember That street When the store faces were changed And sticks all gone away XIV Down by the C & O tracks We used To fly with the yellow Canaries Their yellow yellow Wings flickering Into the creek elders XV Immoral footsteps Awaken the poet On this dripping past And the ceiling shivers its backbone He stares into the glass The dim light of rain Making flesh aware of flesh “Journey of Paul” “Journey of Paul” Robert Clark THE OLD MAN by Shannon King The old man pulled his arm away from the younger man beside him. “I can still see something as big as a house,” he said. He pushed the toe of his heavy shoe against the bottom step and closed his hand around the cold, straight iron railing which led to the door. The younger man, Jim, watched as his father, who had a circulatory disease in his eyes, climbed heavily up the steps and as his wife skipped swiftly around both of them to open the door. “Why don’t city people build houses on the ground where they belong?” The old man thought of his own house, really a cabin, with its solid, smooth path of earth curving under birches and pine to his back door and the hard, rough boards inside where he would stamp the snow off his feet. Then he reached out for the doorknob of his son’s house and touched a gloved hand instead. “Right here, Dad.” It was Ellie. For an instant, he felt his heart pound in his ears. “You’re like to scare a body half to death. How do you get around so fast without making any more noise than a tick in a dog’s ear?” He stepped in on the soft carpet, smelled the warm stale smell of the house, and listened for his grandchildren’s high voices which, from a distance, sounded like birds. In all their lives, the children’s and the grandchildren’s, the old man, until this year, had inhabited some vague region of the past. Like Washington or Lincoln, monumentally solid in their memory, he was fixed in the wild woods of upper Michigan where a blanket of pine needles continually smothered the shoots of time. Once each year, in summer or autumn, his sons, two others besides Jim, and their families would come there and visit. It had become a 74 sort of pilgrimage for the sons, performed more out of reverence for what was now dead in their own lives than for communion with the living old man. Each year they dragged out old, ragged pants, woolen shirts, and sturdy shoes and set out for what they called God’s country. In the early years, they had arrived expectantly and there were times when the wind in trees brought back a moment of the past, but later they only felt the wind and said that it was cold. They hunted and fished absent-mindedly and sometimes reminisced until the visit was over then packed the old clothes away like costumes. The children were always wildly excited about the trip, brought bows and arrows, and ran through rhe woods. Their mothers brought them down from trees and sat in the cabin watching, cooking, gossiping or playing cards. For all of them, the old man had become a romantic fixture in his own home, like the Indian tomahawk and peace-pipe that hung over the fireplace. In his eighty years, he had been trapper, miner, prospector, and guide, and he told eye-bulging stories to the grandchildren. Since he had come to live with Jim and Ellie in downtown Detroit because of his blindness, the children found his stories less hair-raising and more difficult to believe. His son felt vaguely uncomfortable. And Ellie regarded him, with as much charity as she could, as a lonely old man, her husband’s father, who was forced to intrude in her home. Now, after a long ride to the grocery store, he sat down in the big, stuffed chair by the hot-air register. He was a little tired, although he had insisted on going because he wanted to get some fresh air, and he felt chilled. He could see a dull square of light where the children were watching television and a high, irritating voice was making them giggle. He closed his eyes and thought about how the heat from a wood fire sunk into a man’s bones instead of blowing hot air over him like the register. He could hear Jim unfolding the evening paper. There was always plenty of noise around this house, but nobody seemed to talk much as far as he could tell. He opened his eyes again and asked Jim if there was anything interesting in the paper. Jim said that an important man from Africa had just been shot in Paris. Then he started to tell him about a tax bill that was going through Congress. “Doesn’t anything every happen around here?” “Oh. Well, there were a couple of fires last night. And a big robbery over on the South side.” “They catch ’em?” “No, not yet.” “Better lock up tight, tonight.” “Um hmmm.” Jim folded the paper to another page. The old man thought about robberies and about the old rifle he used to 75 keep beside his bed. He remembered how the clean, oiled barrel would glitter in the moonlight in the dark pine-smelling room. When the sun came up and crawled into the corners of the room, he would get up, stir the fire, and make coffee. Then he would take the rifle into the woods. He saw himself walking through snow, looking for tracks in the shadowy whiteness, while minute by minute, the heavy, morning sky stretched to a thin, taut blue overhead. The gun felt light in his hand. He could see a rabbit poised, motionless, by a brush- pile. Now he could feel the gunstock pressed hard against his shoulder and the smooth, worn wood against his cheek. His finger tightened around the trigger. A sharp crack split the hard wintery air, leaving a wake of ringing silence. He jerked in his chair as if he had heard the shot. Then he realized where he was with a familiar sense of pain. He recognized the pain. It had been with him ever since he arrived in Detroit. In the past, when he was hurt, he had always known what to do, but this was different—being ripped away from all that had been his life for so long, he felt helpless. He would learn new ways, he had told himself; but the unfamiliar surroundings had offered little comfort—and even his son was strange to him. “You want a sweater, Dad?” It was Ellie. “No, I’m warmed up now. Even a little too hot.” The warm air blowing over him made him feel the cool drops of perspiration on his forehead. “Are you fixing supper now?” “I’m just about to.” There was a pause. “You want to come into the kitchen?” He said yes, and Ellie took him by the hand. It always embarrassed him when she did that, leading him like a child, and yet he liked her hand. It was soft and strong. She knew that he liked to come into the kitchen when she cooked. It was the only place in the house where he really felt comfortable. The sound of a woman cooking didn’t change. He liked to hear the noises that she made, the soft lapping noise of eggs being beaten, the slippery, wet sound of peeling potatoes, the hard thud of her knife on the cutting board, her apron rustling. There were a few unfamiliar noises, an electric can opener, she said, and a mixer. But the kitchen sounds and the smell of food were a pleasure to him. And feeling the presence of a woman again, after nearly twenty years, was an unexpected comfort. You’re sure I’m no bother now?” “No bother at all. And if you were, you’d be the first to hear about it. You know me.” It was strange, but he did feel like he knew her—even better than Jim, somehow. Jim had changed so much. Nearly every night he would talk to her in 76 the kitchen. It didn't really matter whether she listened or not. He felt close to her. Sometimes he would tell her about Jim when he was a boy. Those were the best times because then it was almost as if he were talking to May and Jim really was just a young boy again instead of a stranger sitting in the next room. “You’re awfully quiet tonight," she said. “Did going to the store tire you out?” “No, I’m all right. I was just thinking.” He tried to stop thinking about the things that were strange to him. “What are we having for supper—bear meat or jack rabbit?” “Just grilled hamburger, I’m afraid. I couldn’t catch that bear. We have to have a quick dinner tonight because Jim has to get down to a Rotary meeting at seven.” “Oh. Say, did I ever tell you about that bear cub that Jim and Henry brought home? Now there’s a story.” He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall, trying to remember. His memory heard the wind whistling outside the cabin and rain hitting against the roof. May was in the kitchen worrying about whether to put supper on or not and he was getting anxious himself, wondering whether he should go out and look for the boys. He told himself that they had just holed up somewhere to keep out of the storm. But it wasn’t like them to stay out after dark. He was just about to take a look out the door again when they heard an awful scream that even drowned the wind. May turned white and he got to the door just as it opened. The two boys slid through the door like a couple of water-logged muskrats. They were laughing and out of breath so they could hardly talk and all of a sudden the whole room was split with another scream. Then Jim straightened up and opened his coat and there was a little brown bear cub. He was crying and wailing like a brand new baby, only ten times louder. May just couldn’t get over it—the way that cub sounded like a baby. “Come on now, dinner’s ready.” May put her hand on his shoulder and they both laughed about the cub. He was laughing so hard he could barely get up from the chair. “Come on now, are you all right?” He bumped into something and everything was dark. He reached out for May. But it wasn’t May’s hand, it was Ellie’s. Then the darkness seemed to stretch inside his mind and he couldn’t find himself. He held Ellie’s hand in the darkness and she led him to the table. When he drank a glass of water, he felt better, but he was frightened. He tried to laugh it away and told them about the confusing half-dream that was so real. He said he must be getting foolish in his old age. Jim and Ellie laughed, too. And the children wanted to know what happened to the bear 77 that their father had brought home. So he told the rest of the story, but his own voice sounded far away and he listened strangely for Jim’s laughter. He couldn’t find an echo of his young Jim’s voice. That was different, too. He tried to eat but the food had no taste and everything he touched seemed cold. Then a hand gripped him by the shoulder and he jerked away in fright. It was only Jim who said goodbye as he left for his meeting. But the word and touch were like some final blow. His mind seemed jarred to a new wakefulness; the dream had tricked him, bringing the dead to life, but now a terrible truth leaped through his fear—this world was dead to him. He stood up from the table and a cup fell to the floor. He turned his head and strained his eyes as if searching for some contradiction, but the dim shape of death drifted in the air like smoke. When Ellie took his arm and led him to the sofa, he felt one scrap of life was left to him, the shadow of a woman and her warm, firm hand. After that night, the old man seldom spoke of memories. He lived with the presence of death and it claimed all his energy. To nurse the old pain by remembering meant turning his back and he was afraid. He nearly forgot the fact of his blindness and felt that the world itself had dropped into darkness. Nervously alert, he moved cautiously as he would in some unfamiliar forest on a moonless night. The dim shapes that hung before his eyes reached out like trees in fog and he felt the presence of some wild thing which followed him A. Strasser A. Strasser 78 and waited. If his rifle had been close at hand, he would have carried it. So he clung to Ellie’s presence for his life. Within the circle of her voice or movements, the world of harmless things came back, and he felt safe. But she couldn’t always be there when he needed her and he knew that there would be a time when she would leave and he would die. One night, when he couldn’t sleep and even his blankets oppressed him, smothering, he heard the sound of her voice and then Jim’s drifting in from some room downstairs. “Well, we’ve got to do something. He’s driving me crazy the way he follows me around. And he’s so depressed. I want to help him, but I just don’t know what to do with him.” “I know.” “Maybe if Henry sent for him, it might be a good change for a few . . . ’ He didn’t want to hear and he covered his ears with his hands, then he heard Jim say something about the cabin. “You know, he misses it so much up there. Maybe that’s most of the trouble. It might not help much, but we could try going up there for the weekend and it might snap him out of it.” The pain he had felt at Ellie’s words disappeared when he realized what Jim was saying. They would take him to the cabin. He smiled in the darkness and felt light and warm. He thought of snow and whiteness. There would be no shadows there. On the day of the trip, he couldn’t stop talking. He sat in the back seat with the children, laughing and joking, and then he told stories. He told them about the coldest winter he could remember, when water froze in buckets in the house. He told them about the man found walking in a storm with frozen eyes. And he retold the old story about his fight with a bobcat which had left the scar they could still see below his ear. Then there were stories of green hunters when he was a guide and how he had saved them, usually, from killing one another accidentally. Most of the stories the children had heard before, but some of them were new and they were all heroic. As the car left the large city far behind and the landscape sprouted with trees and lakes, they became engrossed and thought of him as an old Daniel Boone again. The story they liked best was of his fight with a poacher who had stabbed him with an icicle. The old man himself was feeling fine and exhilarated. He felt as strong and as brave as his youth. When he finally fell asleep, he dreamed of a hunter whose eyes were bright and of a black forest suddenly filled with light. They arrived after midnight. The small cabin looked cold and uninviting. A light snow was falling, catching in the crevices of weathered logs. Some 79 had drifted in front of the door and was blown against the cracks like a huge white cobweb. As if time had finally touched it, the cabin looked much older than they had remembered. Jim and Ellie approached the door uncomfortably, disturbing the softly falling shroud of snow. They wondered if they should have come. To the old man, the cold, fresh air against his cheek was like a welcome from the place itself. The snow squeaked underfoot and as he touched the splintery wood of the door, he knew that he was home. Once they got a fire started with the oil heater and another in the fireplace, Jim and Ellie felt more at ease and the children went to bed. It was restful in the firelight and they talked for a long time. Then they went to bed, leaving the old man to “set awhile.” He walked around the rooms to see that everything was as he’d left it. He felt the soft down of the cushions on May’s chair and the pockmarked surface of a desk that he had made. The wood basket was full of very dry pine and the poker was where it should be by the fire. He reached inside the old clock on the wall and swung the pendulum. He found an old wool shirt he’d left in the closet and put it on. Then he found his rifle and decided that it needed oiling. He got the oil from a cabinet in the kitchen. Later, he fell asleep in a chair beside the fire, his rifle resting on his knees. The weekend passed happily for all of them. Jim and Ellie were relieved that the old man seemed to be himself again and were pleased with one another for curing his depression. On Sunday morning, they gathered things together and packed up to go home. The old man said he wasn’t going. Jim tried to reason with him and then got angry. He reminded him that he was old and said his mind must not be working right. Then Ellie tried to coax him and she cried. The old man faltered. He didn’t want to hear her cry. A woman’s crying didn’t change, he thought. For a moment, he wondered if his mind was tricking him. But he had thought it over carefully. They didn’t understand. I can’t live there, he said. Then Ellie tried to take him by the hand. Her hand felt cold and full of straining muscles. He knew then, he was right. Like a stone, he refused to move. He sat back, restfully, in his chair, rubbing his thumb against the worn wood of its arm. The chair received him like an old friend and he smiled although his heart was beating rapidly, and he heard it throbbing in his ears. There was nothing they could do. Then something seemed to be pulling him far down into the chair. It pulled him down and down and his head jerked just once as he looked up in the distance and saw a clear, blue brightness, like the sky. Figure without caption. “Mosaic in Black and White” “Mosaic in Black and White” Anne Schloemer D. C. BERGMANN Haven of Rest Aging characters In a decrepit play on words Called to me: But I walked away from home, hobo-like, Traditional sacred Polka-dot handkerchief of dreams Slung over my sloping shoulder. But in an impossible moment Mama cried Pleading alligator-wise With glittering tears of gossamer glue. So I retreated: Put down my quilted fabric of thought, Returned: to sit in the rocking chair On the rotting front porch of my mind. ELAINE CAHILL The Cornfield never could parched corn scorched and sere in summer heat grasp for cooling showers as i gasp for thee nor suck from the moist loose earth the reviving powers i would suck from thee o, for thy tongue to bathe mine eyes to cool mine eyes here where i burn mad with fever like the bearded painter days ago staggering through a stubbled cornfield to a rendezvous with secret crows MARLEY TORP-SMITH A widow walks to the empty ship standing by her baron's grave on blocks of stone Where heavy ceilings tower dark above the open door. A high window in the barn flys a pigeon to its light But only he will move While the wind still walks on the bird drop floor Over the scattered straws and rusted iron Inside her dark weathered walls where the breathing creaks And ribbons of day flutter in the hollow dark. M. S. HOHAUSER the steps of my stairs the rain and all alone I am alone to face the bitter-sweetness of your stareful face. wet, the sky is set upon drowning shadows tonight. the clouds jut and pout ike any maddened jaw. burning raindrops echo steam off the streets. I am alone I am alone I am the sole survivor a military drone. wake up Eva. wake her up I say. this plinking, plinking hurts my head wake up Eva, and have her stop the rain. footsteps on my stairs, your stare on my brow, the rain on my pulse: wake up Eva plead her to burn away to wash away resonant footsteps and stares and rain. 85 have her flirt with the moon, chide naughty distant stars; have her shake a boney finger at the memory of sun, the prismic lamppost light. wake up Eva. wake up Eva. her equinol has become my blight; tell her the lightning may flash but the rain the rain must go away tonight. I am alone I am alone I am the sole survivor a military drone. the lawn is lovely white and clear, a misty patron of hot days and asphalt cool rain and night. she will not stir you say? poor Eva, let h er get some sleep; I'll sit and watch the drifting rain and smoke. I am alone I am alone I am the sole survivor a military drone. 86 NOTES WILLIAM NAGY is a freshman at Michigan State majoring in Philosophy. He has had poems published in his high school literary magazine in Stamford, Connecticut. JENNIFER LEE is a graduate student at Michigan State, majoring in Comparative Literature. Her poetry has previously appeared in Red Cedar Review. RICK STERRY is a 1964 recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He took an M.A. in English at Michigan State, and is now teaching at Otaru University, Japan, where he is also finding time to finish his first novel. He has previously published in a University of Montana literary magazine, Venture, and won second prize in the category of fiction, in the 1965-66 Michigan State English Department Creative Writing Contest. THEODORE SJOGREN attended Michigan State, and since his graduation has traveled extensively. He returned to Michigan State in the fall of 1966 and is currently finishing a novel. SHANNON KING is a doctoral candidate at Michigan State, majoring in Comparative Literature. She has taught at Northern Michigan and Central Michigan University. She received her B.A. and M.A. at the University of Michigan where she was the recipient of three Hopwood Awards in essay, drama, and short story. M. S. HOHAUSER is a sophomore at Michigan State, majoring in Philosophy. He has published in Creo, a New Jersey literary magazine, and in Impact, the literary magazine of Fairleigh Dickinson University. He received first prize in Fairleigh Dickinson's 1966 poetry contest. JAMES HARKNESS is a graduate student at Michigan State, majoring in English. His poems have appeared in the University College Quarterly, and Red Cedar Review. He is an Assistant Instructor in American Thought and Language. D. C. BERGMANN is a freshman in Justin Morrill College, Michigan State. He has been writing for two years and has published poems in Cuyahoga Falls High School’s literary magazine, in Ohio. 87 ROBERT VANDER MOLEN is a senior at Michigan State, majoring in English. His poetry has previously appeared in East Lansing’s literary magazine, Zeitgeist. He is currently preparing a book of his poetry scheduled for publication in January, 1967. CRAIG STERRY is the first place winner of the 1965-66 English Department Creative Writing Contest (the poems in this issue represent a selection from his prize winning manuscript). He has published poetry in Caravan, Lamoni, Iowa; Caravel, Palo Alto, California; Promethean Lamp, San Francisco, California, where he won third prize in the Promethean Lamp National College Poetry Contest, in 1965; and published in a Promethean Lamp college poetry anthology. MICHAEL D. EBERLEIN is a graduate student in the College of Education at Michigan State. He is presently employed with the Michigan Highway Department. GRANT GUIMOND is a senior at Michigan State, majoring in Social Science. He will be leaving school to work on a collection of poems. DENNIS A. NOYES is a graduate student in English at Michigan State. He won the 1965-66 Atlantic Monthly College Short Story Contest and attended the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, last fall as the 1966 Atlantic Monthly Breadloaf Scholar. He has published several stories in The Piper, Monmouth College, Monmouth, Illinois. BERKLEY BETTIS is a National Merit Scholar from Waco, Texas. He is a junior at Michigan State, majoring in Psychology. This is his first published story. MARLEY TORP-SMITH is a senior at Michigan State, majoring in Philosophy. This is his first published poem. ELAINE CAHILL, a student at Michigan State for the past four years, has written a great deal of poetry, and has published in The Paper, an off-campus weekly. 88 RED CEDAR REVIEW STAFF EDITOR.........................................................................Peggy Case MANAGING EDITOR Etta C. Abrahams LAYOUT AND DESIGN V. Glen Washburn ART EDITOR...........................................................Cliff Monteith PUBLICITY MANAGER............................................Joel Cooper SECRETARY...........................................................Deborah Dixon POETRY..................................................Craig Sterry, EDITOR Martha Aldenbrand Lee Carson FICTION...................................................Richard Close, EDITOR Dennis A. Noyes, EDITOR Julie Brickman Judith Rodabeck Nina Sowiski Deborah Dixon