Figure without caption. RED CEDAR REVIEW VOL.5 N0.2 RED CEDAR REVIEW 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 48823. Include return address. Contributions are not restricted to students of Michigan State. The deadline for the next issue is June 10. RCR STAFF Editor...................................Peggy Case Managing Editor . . Etta C. Abrahams Graphic Design . . V. Glen Washburn Art Editor............................Cliff Monteith Prose..................................Will Albert, Editor Dennis A. Noyes Poetry .... Craig Sterry, Editor Peter Lungren Martha Aldenbrand Francisco Llaguno Michael Cronan Frontpiece—“I wonder” by Jewell Lawton, age 8, Australia; from Miracles, collected by Richard Lewis. Copyright © 1966 by Richard Lewis. Published by Simon & Schuster. Copyright by RED CEDAR REVIEW, April, 1967. Permission to reprint material herein must be obtained from the authors. We request that RED CEDAR REVIEW be cited as place of first publication on any reprinted material. cover — Thoughts Diane Laitala Volume V, Number 2 April, 1967 CONTENTS Prose 5 from A Life in Progress Mark Kupperman 19 The Valley of the Blind Winthrop Rowe 37 The Departure Brian Slaymaker 45 four pieces from Journeys Peter Fiore 53 Everybody Else in Free Theodore Sjogren 87 Mother Goosed Mark Kupperman Poetry 14 Strangers to Touch M. F. Jones 16 Sandwich Man 17 Distrust the Door Gelacio Y. Guillermo, Jr. 34 untitled poem Craig Sterry 35 After-Dinner Memo: To Marcia 43 three a.m. Michael Cronan 49 Great Men Will Have to Go Melvyn S. Bucholtz 50 untitled poem 51 Woman at Summer’s Door 82 Prehistoric: Circa 1960 A.D. Ruth Lechlitner 83 Directions for a Contemporary Composition in Mixed Media 84 two untitled poems M. S. Hohauser 93 Halloween William Nagy 94 His Taxidermist’s Yellow Glass Eyes Daniel Olmstead 96 Dutchboy Alice Lee Carson 97 Recollection of a Chilly Afternoon Peter Lungren Painting Painting Erin McKinney from A LIFE IN PROGRESS by Mark Kupperman Potter made the baby die. It was his wish and his brother died that night. When the light went on, the baby was choking blue. The . . . No. once again 1 My double bed is a sea and I float its derelict. I read an article by an official that tish-pished those concerned about the conservation of forests. No national parks in fifty years? this agent asked. Preposterous? There are enough parks to last a century. I give the oaf his hundred years to come awake in a third generation. Time ends. Forests vanish in concrete and he sucks plastic flowers—a ghost rummaging in the rapid premise of his greatgreat- grandchildren. Man made the deserts. 5 Steve didn’t come. I read some poems I couldn’t understand in Evergreen. There are several photographs of cancers in my pathology book. I pulled the Bible from the top shelf and read about the flood. And wanted it to rain. The thirty-first psalm. Genesis. 2 It is either early morning or evening. Someone’s radio performs an act of national economy below me. I’m only waiting for the time. The volume is better by a window. More like morning. The streets are abandoned between random lost cabs. A plane could land on the asphalt and not be noticed. An invading army could empty out without resistance. There are rules against being alive here anyway. The soldiers won’t arrive with no chance of conquest. I have seen a thousand faces lacking stories. I watch a world of uncle fred’s dead from the neck up. And I know its not unique. And I know I’m not unique. And I want the phone to ring or someone to drop by and fill this room. I want to smell someone else’s sweat. I want the snow to let me see the grass and bring back the way the ground should feel. And I want or more need the story to come out. 3 It’s a pulitzer prize pathetic story and I can’t make it fiction. The fault bases me sitting. Walker Evans and I perhaps making it strict journalism. Simplified, but the decision would negate my own singular purpose. I am frightened that my affinity to Steve is merely a means of keeping close to the story. He’s only told me it once. The walls burned, and I could have moaned. Instead, I twisted our voices from reality. The records and music. And I could have moaned. I’ve never moaned or let someone 6 cry on me. I’ve thought about his father. A man, balding, pushing the headlines that scream at him away, turning back the story, avoiding repeated evidence that he is a sad fool, a lost man with the rarity of past faith. No, faith isn’t rare, not as rare as soothing illusions. They all have faith. Once upon a week I see them pulling their children behind them. Into the healing ablution of sin, deep in the bowels of sanctity, a saving donation to nursery fund. In the name of the lord, those who are not about to die dedicate this, cleanse this do-not earth. Sharing a common Bible, still facing me from the floor, as a motion picture, not moving. David singing three days, frequent coke intermission, condensed psalms. A demanded sequel. 4 Cathy dropped in, but I didn’t want her. No sorrow to be soothed. It was too cold, and her skin isn’t soft in daylight. She drank my wine. Three hours and several hundred sentences later she left. She fears silence, and I have no sounds. When the downstairs door slammed shut, I followed the same steps outside. And it was night. I sat down on the snow and waited for the sky to change. I cheered the stars forming their animal acts. Things to do in this little city when the darkness scares the people to sleep: One can walk. The hardy can run. Search for lights in friend’s apartment. Watch your feet from the swing in the park. Take a bus to the third shift at the auto plant. Break the ice on the river with bricks. Smell the drunks waking up at the Grill. Talk til morning just by lifting the telephone and dialing number. Fill the night with assorted bothered voices. Or with one you used to love. 7 When I got back to the house my fingers couldn’t move and I heard the phone ringing in my room. It was Steve. Drunk. Happy. Said he’d be over later. 5 I fell asleep waiting and missed another morning. I decided Steve passed out in some more comfortable place. Somebody knocked on the door and I thought it was him. Up to my waist, it was a little Mexican kid playing his eyes. My name is Marteen Omeara and I'm selling introduction offers to the Detroit Free Press and they're having a contest now and the boy who sells the most papers wins an all expense free trip to Washington D. C. the Free Press has the largest sports section in Michigan and on Sunday they have a magazine section tv guide and full color comics and won’t you please help me win the chance of a life to see the FBI building, the capitol, the white house and Kennedy's grave it only cost seventy-five cents a week. I signed a subscription card and sent him away—engrossed in his methods, hours spent in memorization, he turned and left. The rest of the afternoon I worked consumed with the joy of giving, humored by my future response to paying for the papers. I sorted unfinished myriads of stories into categories of possible or not. I called Steve’s number and no answer. 6 Courting my own Muse Soiled- white gown Invocation by a rocking chant-Drain by these crystals: Having seen the war black and white on television. Censored sing hell. Having seen red white and blue pubic hair. A thousand lies. Every lost day an epic. My brother’s 18 inch bicep. Plaster cathedrals. A man. Steve’s face trying to build a beard from translucent blond hair. 8 His father’s separate folly. The silence between them. Our Father In Heaven Committing suicide in the last chapter. Found by a farmer in Montana. Times black-bordered headline. Stock Market Crash. Announcement—In the death of his father, the Son will take over His business. Catholic joy. No chance for Exodus and a defeated Muse. Selah. 7 I know every word. Steve’s father was a ground mechanic in the army air force during the war. The epic built around him. In the Pacific—I saw the palm trees in a photograph—he serviced and loaded the planes for take-off. He told his son it was a warm day. He told the story three times according to Steve. He woke early with the entire base. A military secret, an ethical concern, all knew what the different- shaped bombs were. Bigger and charcoal black, they took extra care attaching them. The ceremony mixed holiness and fear. They were all told about the horror of the atom bomb. They were all told the war would last a million more lives and at least another year. They were all filled with the belief that this would end all war. Steve’s father had his life’s inspiration. He found a piece of chalk and ran to the plane while its engines whined warming. In powered letters he wrote on the bomb NO WHITE CROSS FOR STEVIE. All war was ending and he blessed the reason. Steve thrives in the hypocrisy. I want his father’s grief. Steadied destruction of a most necessary fantasy. One hand chalking the constantly glowing white burning bodies. Drunk when he told me and does his father cry and I couldn’t moan. 9 8 My hands are freezing to the keys. Watching my breath cloud the paper. The radiator is stone. It is too easy to stop trying. In this cold the story teases me. Just one satisfying sentence would be enough. My mind would stop feeling gray. Instant mashed potatoes and the fins of the tuna fish can. I tried smoking another green pepper. A myth perpetrated by the American Truck Farmers Association. If Steve comes, he may bring beer. Maybe he didn’t call and a stray pepper worked. I gave his face twenty years and placed the rounder head on his father’s frame but I couldn’t fashion the eyes. 9 You’re an ass for waiting for the rebirth of wonder and I wait for this silver dust unfelt sliding in my throat to reach my fingertips, yes. No one else has called and another day. The wind blows streetlamp reflection on my wall. Cars move their lights across the ceiling. I wanted to know why he called and I couldn’t feel my arms. Nobody loves my body and my body don’t love nobody but me If I sang a guitar with strings. Bluest taketh our. The story started too many times protects the carpet from my feet. Each sheet mocks, do I hear, mocks mocks me inside this whale. No inside an elephant and noone can reach. The beast 10 swallows waste that crowds beside me. Soaking hearts, brave pink sensation melting in the stomach acid and I feel my cigarette smoke pushing gray through my lungs. Pouring gray. The electric clock spins one luminous hand and hummmmmms. The walls vibrate trembling response in pitch. I have tried to write I have tried to write And while I watch the keys, singular steel beams immovable, I did feel the Cross and it was white. Not so much of me, but of him, what he could have done to protect the fable but used to warm his first person singular. Rows faded to a flat series of nameless shafts, weaving pattern of white crossed white and each hero a fool and each tool a mother's one time sorrow sagging on a single nail of marble torque. Army ants Cocks fighting First drawn blood ceasing nothing Wild Polish Rose I saw your termulating hair in neon light And your eyes nothing like the sun or sonnets and chewed your breasts. 10 I only woke for the moment. The breeze combing in my mind. Where a sound darkness. 11 I felt him before my senses opened. With one painted red bulb refracting the density of the room his breath heaved. The cigarette staled the air. He must have been the waking noise I heard. Walking to him and he didn't move. His head bent over the floor rocking but I knew his face. The smoke hung gassy layers around him, bounding emblooded lamplit. I knew it was him and just wanted to wake. To discount the capsule. He must have been sitting there too long. 11 He sat too heavy. Long eyelashes and I saw them. He lifted his head to me and spoke stretched words. Do you remember the story about my father. yes. I told it to you. yes. Do you remember it. yes. No White Cross For Stevie yes. oh, yes. My father. (The walls ached) The story. yes. He handed me the folded letter. I knew the blue government seals. I said yes. 12 Figure without caption. A Woman and the Night Burglar Pat Devine M. F. JONES Strangers to Touch We sat smoking and drinking coffee, this girl and I. We talked. (not beautiful, but uncommonly pleasant I watched the signs of intelligence play with her rabbit features. the strong and silent expression of her face made for intense conversation on things philosophic) As she was expounding, “. . . An inane Nietzsche-critic had pointed out that Kierkegaard and Sartre were, in fact, not . . . not . . .” (she sought the correct word; first with silence, then with more talk; hoping it would eventually come out) 14 I had a powerful and horribly unfounded urge to lean across the table and kiss her on the lips. Nothing more. Unfounded because the “we” relationship had not reached a level of physical contact. Strangers to touch. (she rummaged her vocabulary: “... nihilistic — no, debased — no, decadent — no . . . I’ve had it twice in front of my mouth, and lost it . . . MORBID — that’s it! — they were not morbid.” My secret urge had gone by that time, replaced by a slightly humorous guilt. Humorous for had I given in and kissed her, (on the lips, nothing more), my mouth would have been filled with “MORBID”; and who can swallow that, let alone imagine the after-taste it might produce. 15 Sandwich Man I by flo flit flack red and orange black and dented cross-town traffic unclutched lively dung-bugs carrying Man bearing gifts they travel so far hey stop unlicensed meter-down cabbies without teeth enameled gums with cracks for light lead stained lips spurting tar and nicotine between sunburned rubberbands snapping ‘bout fambily and thieves among thieves and honesty in politicks without tears shifting carnal gears hey stop spreading sootsmog bitching for a louzey quarter dollar for a corkless fifth-o-mile tipping nothing expecting change in solid silver hey stop I am not going farther going not am I 16 GELACIO Y. GUILLERMO, JR. Distrust the Door Distrust the door you open in late evening. Left to itself all day, your room has bred Thick cobwebs conspiring to be the murderer’s Dark shroud and the victim’s grim nightgown. Nobody and nothing cries welcome or beware. After the ruins of your desperate years, Under the blinding sun, among wayward friends and true, Homecomings prove your final homelessness. What horoscope foretold your walls’ condemning face, The letters from the dead, your bed’s grave vacancy? The hanged light swells and bleeds like a blinded eye Of one so struck by night, and fallen. While your room, stern as oracle, stood outside and aloof, Memorizing as prophecy your ancestral crime. 17 Figure without caption. Indecision Mary Rogers THE VALLEY OF THE BLIND by Winthrop Rowe 1. “I don’t think, Mrs. Neal, that Catholic Action should do anything about it. We haven’t after all, even heard anything from the Bish . . “Father,” she seemed particularly severe this morning, “we can’t just sit around and wait for some kind of condemnation from the Bishop. Is this what all your talk of the lay apostolate comes to then? Is this all? We got to sit around and wait for some condemnation from the Bishop? Hah.” “But in matters of faith and morals, Mrs. Neal . . “Faith and Morals!!! I suppose the Bishop is going to have the faith for all of us, huh? This is what I mean, this is what Monsignor was talking about.” “The Monsignor didn’t mean . . “Well that’s what he said, that’s what he said. The lay apostolate means that the church is giving the gospel into the hands of the laymen, that’s what he said! I tell you Father, you people just don’t mean what you say. I mean this is just the same old thing, work on the Altar Society, and raise money for the Parochial School. This is just the same old thing.” “But I’m sure the Monsignor didn’t intend to leave you with the impression that...” “Oh yes he DID, I’m sorry, I’m just sorry that’s all; but he did, he most certainly DID mean to leave us with that impression Father. Oh he did. Here they are bringing a terrible movie, a dirty, dirty, shocking movie right into this parish.” “I know, but some of his other movies, Mrs. Neal, have displayed great sensitivity to spiritual problems. Many catholic intellectuals consider him . . .” 19 A snort worthy of a war-horse, "Catholic intellectuals indeed; they’re as corrupted as any other intellectuals, Father. I tell you we should picket this filthy movie. I’m going to bring it up at the next meeting, we should picket this movie.” ‘‘But none of us has seen it, Mrs. Neal.” ‘‘Look at THIS,” she triumphed, waving a magazine. ‘‘Look at this, read this, the things this woman DOES. I don’t want MY daughter to see them . . . the things she DOES ... all alone, on the bed. Well if you want our young people to see THAT!!!” ‘‘But many of Bergman’s movies . . .” “I’ve never liked any of them.” “I myself found The Seventh Seal a very moving experience.” She sniffed, ‘‘I wouldn’t know.” ‘‘In the scene where the parents are fleeing with the young child, in a wagon through the driving rain and storm . . . the scene where Death, with a mighty rush, passes over, in that scene I . . .” ‘‘Look Father, I have a family to feed. I . . . I’m sorry if I seem abrupt, but I’d like to know before noon, whether you’ll . . .” ‘‘I can’t act without some indication of Diocesan policy on this Mrs. Neal. Such matters are not in my hands. I’m only a simple Priest.” ‘‘Huh . . . simple Priest, garbage. Father Ryan never hesitated in this sort of situation, let me tell you. I’m sure the Bishop would rather you used your initiative Father, and not go running to him with every little thing. Initiative, that’s the quality the laymen have and the clergy lack.” She gave a final flip of the magazine, and then hitched herself into the station wagon by a complicated series of maneuvers seemingly aimed at never turning her back to him. He wondered if she thought of him as like the Blessed Sacrament in this? Or if she were just afraid of a knife in the ribs? ‘‘Bye Father.” She waved curtly, idling the powerful engine, then abruptly letting the clutch slide in, jerked away from the curb, nearly catching the hem of his cassock. He nodded vaguely, and turned into the church. It was reassuringly dark inside at first. He preferred most churches dark, because one could see less of the furnishings that way. The candles flickered before the blessed Mother, in the corner, and a few for Saint Joseph were ensconced safely on the other side, in obedience to the sentiment of the Ecumenical Council. The light before the altar beckoned to him. (A voice from seminary days intruded in his memory. The assistant Dean’s in a conducted meditation before the Blessed Sacrament . . . ‘‘You’ll not find it easy, but you must make time every day for a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, even for as long as an hour. You cannot preach and teach devotion to our Lord in his sacra 20 mental presence if you do not practice it yourself/") There was, however, a danger of withdrawal there also, he knew. He paced slowly, meditatively along the aisle, his eyes adjusting to the murk, noticing that there were none of the usual casual worshippers there at the moment. Even the Altar Society lady had gone home. A perfect chance for a solitary visit to the Sacrament. He frowned, and ascended the few steps into the sacristy. There on the vestment table was a scattered pile of mail, left no doubt by the helpful Altar Society lady. Of course it didn't belong on the vestment table at all, indeed was there in violation of strict orders to the contrary, but it was intended to be helpful. He sighed and bent over it. A bill from the Water and Light . . . well that couldn't be helped. He paused, but rejected opening it. Time enough later. He mentally composed a brief exordium to a plea for turned-out-lights for the benefit of the assembled altar-boys, and flipped it over with his thumb and forefinger. Beneath, in a familiar brown paper half wrapper, was a magazine, that had all the earmarks of being the monthly Diocesan Sentinel, and which would contain, of course, the monthly listings from the Catholic League of Decency. He was suddenly filled with an absolute conviction that within this particular brown paper wrapper was a condemnation, official and unavoidable, of the Bergman movie. There was no good reason for this feeling, except perhaps long and dreadful experience with the Diocesan Sentinel. Then it occurred to him that it might be Commonweal. This thought cherred him, and he lifted an edge of the brown paper wrapper trying to peek. It didn't look enough like Commonweal to him. He ran down a list of his subscriptions in his mind. Too large to be Worship, too small to be Liturgical Arts, indubitably a Commonweal size and shape, but alas, due to the efforts of Father Kornitski who had had a make up course once somewhere in secular life, also the size and shape of the Diocesan Sentinel. He ruffled his fingers against it for a moment, but no significant information seemed to be forthcoming. He decided to pay his visit to the Blessed Sacrament. 2. The darkness was no longer profound enough for Father Eliot. The garish stations of the cross, the fat fawning candy angels, the saccarin placidity of the Holy Mother were all visible, and highly offensive to him. He genuflected perfunctorily, and slid into a pew, burying his head in his hands, letting the feelings and emotions of the moment recede into this more pervasive and satisfying blankness. He smelled the incense of last Sunday's High Mass lingering faintly, a mere suggestion of acridity and richness. (Frankincense and myrrh to offer have we.) 21 His palms were sweating. He wiped them on his cassock, and placed them over his eyes again. Empty the mind of all particular forms. Prayer, seen as petition, was inappropriate for the solitary soul before the Sacrament. That was for the ordered cycle of the Offices, the moment of sharing concerns within the body of believers, and with God . . . the prayer cards, and the long lists . . . our sister Mary, in mental darkness . . . Charles, in his sorrow . . . Timothy, for his vocation . . . Timothy, Priest. Now he strove not to strive, to quiet each twitching muscle without becoming unduly aware of it; to pour, without moving the mind, the content of the mind out into the emptiness of the church, and leave the instrument ready, waiting. His mind filled, however, with a memory of his last retreat, in the dog days of August, the monastic chapel richer with incense than his church, from the daily Masses, and the community, black, cowled, hooded, in their rows before him. He had had then a tremendous sense of presence, of the presence of something other, toward which (WHOM) all these inner eyes were turned in the opaque silence, so that even the rustle of occasional leg movements, the whirr of the fans, the nature sounds of birds and insects beyond the walls, had not forced a distraction. It had been a moment of joy for him, a rare prize that glittered like a jewel in the dark mosaic of memory. It was toward this that he now strove, but alone, in this church, it seemed unapproachable. There is nothing essentially social in the experience, he thought, nothing esthetic. Simply the emptying of the mind and turning it toward the otherness miraculously concentrated on the altar. He cursed himself for a fop, and beat down even these memories, which were, in their own way, blocking his efforts at silence and interior rest. His palms were wet again, and he mechanically wiped them again, stabbing angrily at the flitting concern over laundry bills with the naked bluntness of his will. Cogito ergo sum. Not a truth, but a collosal inconvenience. Cogito, cogito, cogito ergo, there is no room for anything else but I...I. ..I. ..I. ..I... I ... I ... I ... In that direction lies hell. (Madness) An echo from an early reading of C. S. Lewis flickered through his mind, of Napoleon sliding slowly from Purgatory toward Hell repeating endlessly through a vast echoing palace, “It was Ney’s fault, it was Soult’s fault, it was Josephine’s fault.” He recognized, now that he was a Catholic and a Priest, the superficiality of this; one did not slide from Purgatory into Hell. (As the tree falls.) In any case the analogy was imperfect in relation to Descartes, or was it? Damn . . . shouldn’t be thinking this way, shouldn’t be thinking at all . . . Emptiness, emptiness . . . emptiness. The word filled his mind. Damn! 22 Dream of Reason—Lithograph M. E. Boyer Dream of Reason—Lithograph M. E. Boyer If God would only speak? (Thou shalt not tempt the Lord Thy God.) Bergman . . . that was the essence of it then. He remembered the Lutheran pastor of Winter Light, God’s silence. Seeing the picture had been a nerve wracking experience for him, for he had recognized himself in the pastor. The irrelevant intellectualizing, the inability to give or accept love, and, he suspected, in the background the mother. The religious mother who was perhaps figured by the first wife whom the pastor had adored. He had known intensely as he listened to the pastor’s extravagant praise of his first wife, that it masked a great hatred during their lives together ... as the pastor at the moment, hated the school teacher. He thanked God for celibacy, but knew even as he did so, that it was a lie, an abomination of him, a flight ... a flight, and a flight into what? For God would not answer. And that fool Mrs. Neal, not unattractive really, rather like the pastor’s mistress, attractive underneath the outer layers, Mrs. Neal wanted to picket Bergman’s latest. He knew that it dealt once again with the silence of God. He had read all of the reviews in fact. Suddenly, disconcertingly, he was filled with a great desire for Mrs. Neal, his mind totally occupied, here on his knees before the Blessed Sacrament, with the impossible picture of her nakedness, of her angry eyes filled with an inexpressible joy, release . . . tears of painful happiness as he rose and fell, thrusting the instrument of her punishment and sanctification into her. He wrenched himself back, the muscles of his jaw flexing dangerously, tightly. Later on, the jaw, when relaxed would slip out of joint, as it had once during a sermon. He was covered with a gross sweat which had seeped through the shirt and discolored even the cassock. He cast about wildly toward the God on the Altar. Mental prayer, infused contemplation could never be forced ... a temptation, a vision like this last showed him the folly of this. Pride ... he was such a beginner. Always the convert, always the convert. Even the old women of the Altar Society knew this of him . . . that it was not ethnic with him, it was not somehow real. He turned back doggedly to the beginners methodology, to the systematic meditations of Ignatius and Francis de Salles, and raised his eyes to the crucifix on the Altar. First fix in the mind a picture, in this case, for the convert, the beginner, the esthete, a real representation of some sacred scene . . . and what more sacred than this meeting place of time and eternity in the agony of the cross, the figure before which he daily re-enacted the awful drama . . . (this is my body . . . this is my blood.) He felt the panic, the stiffening in the loins, relax into peace, even as he turned his mind to the crucifix, taking in all of its details. The Spanish pain of the bearded face, the body wracked and twisted with incomprehensible, 24 infinite, magnitudes of pain . . . physical, emotional, spiritual, the pain of God in the face of the stubbornness of his creation. He had always felt that the Baroque, even in the real examples of it, had been a mistake. The grim realism, the gouts of dripping blood, steaming blood almost, that gushed from the slit in the Saviour’s side drew his attention to them like magnets. The emotional experience was too great, too absurdly magnified, too unbalanced to allow the mind to move on from it into the mysteries of divinity. And this particular example was far from authentic Baroque . . . plaster, something in him sneered, and so badly painted that the crimson mouth seemed to speak its wordless cries of agony out of the center of the gaunt orange cheek. So much for Ignatius Loyola and the system, it had never worked for him anyway. He had wanted to leap over it into the higher forms of contemplation, and had, he feared, fallen into the ditch instead. He had raised Jesuit eyebrows among the faculty, attacking the Baroque age, in piety, in art, liturgical and otherwise, everything. It had, he now realized, been dangerously close to an idée fixe. The thought of seminary, however, completed the process of relaxation, for it had been a golden period, recreated now only in the too infrequent retreats, and quiet days. Concentration had been so much easier there, although it hadn’t seemed so at the time. He remembered with deep longing the hours that had slipped by in the Library, hours of digging deep into abstract theological tomes. (Patrologia series graeca . . . thirty pound books in folio, smelling of dust, and must, and still, as they had been seldom used, faintly of good nineteenth century printer’s ink: the print blurred badly because Migne had run them off by the thousands until the plates were as flat as bathroom tiles.) He had always loved reading, and detached speculation, even as a boy, and it had welled up in him strongly there in the research and the papers. He smiled to recall studying late at night with a flashlight under the blanket after lights out, or writing there on yellow legal pads his sister had smuggled to him. And then there was the discussion group that had drawn disapproving frowns from the superior because it had tended to lapse over onto the cloister, undermining the silence, and the detachment. His own voice, ". . . the trouble with all of these modernists, the protestants I mean, is that they continue the absolute identification of God with perfect being, while rejecting the notion of the perfect rationality of that being, so that their God has no essence other than himself. He has not even his own will, as Luther and Calvin claimed, but is an essential being entirely beyond the possibility of definition. Why sometimes you get the feeling that Tillich’s God is so naked as to be beyond existence itself.” How far this was from the water and light bill, and even from the problems of a meditation before the 25 Blessed Sacrament. And how pleasant. He knew the danger of this. He knew how far it was from a catholic devotional life. He knew that the life of the spirit grew out of a personal relationship with God, rather than an understanding of speculation about his nature . . . “Unto the least of these . . . the little children.” But there was no use denying the pleasure that such speculation gave him. God’s silence. Perhaps there was a relation between the nakedness of Tillich’s God, and the silence of Bergman’s, for how could such a God speak? What would he have to say? The notion, that there existed somewhere, somehow an anti-God . . . not a devil, but an anti-God, whose essence was in his absence, came back to haunt him. This was an old bogey with him, that had been suppressed, and rooted at in the confessional, time and time again. Such a God would provide an explanation for the silence, for his silence would be a hallmark of his nature, a proof of his glorious lack of existence. “God,” cried that remarkable fellow Nietzsche, “is dead,” which is much the same thing as saying that there is a non-God, an absence of both light and darkness, an underground of negation beneath the physics and metaphysics that have so consumed the mental energies of mankind. Earl. He had to meet Earl Manners at ten-forty-five. He glanced quickly at his watch. Good, plenty of time. He flicked his eyes once more at the offending crucifix, mumbled “Some meditation” to himself between clenched teeth, then slid out into the aisle, and stood hesitantly upright, stiff from the kneeling. 3. Earl stood sideways to the door, tossing an imitation alpine hat, with a brim much too small for it, tentatively in his hand. He was lean as ever, though he had shaved, and the few blackheads in his ears, and at the back of his neck were as prominent as before. Father Eliot forced himself to look into Earl’s eyes. “Well Earl, you haven’t been around in a long time.” Looking at the dusty tops of his shoes, “Yeah . . . yeah ... a long time.” adding apprehensively, “But I ain’t been in trouble Father, not this time. I got me a job.” Real pride, or something that would hopefully pass for it shadowed the almost pupilless eyes. Is he on the stuff? Or doesn’t he have very large pupils? “A job?” the suspicion must never show, “Do come in Earl. What kind of a job?” Father Eliot gestured him into the musty, womanless, dark, lace-curtained, interior of the priest’s house. He looked grimly at the massive sacred heart, which hung framed in gold in the hallway. Earl nodded piously to it. (Tugging the 26 forelock) “Well it’s been quite some time.’’ Damn, said that once, estheticism leading astray again, Cardinal Newman had been right on that score. “Yeah," Earl was even more nervous, but hung on to his ritual response, “But I ain’t been in no trouble." The understanding smile, “I know, we’ve been through this once.’’ A blank frightened look, a desperate look. It was not too bad apparently to repeat oneself, but this must never be brought out into the open. “Huh?" Gently, trying to get things back on the track again, “It was my fault Earl, I repeated myself." There was no diminution of Earl’s anguish and confusion, a scowl tucked up into the corners of his eyes, “Huh?” (You must try Eliot, to keep this honesty of yours in hand. It can be a formidable barrier to communication. Thirteen Hail Mary’s) Bluff, hearty, remember the success of the Y. M. C. A. “Well now, about this job?” “Yeah,” with vast relief, “It’s a good job Father. You can make a hundred a week, maybe; or even more if you’ve got a car . . . for travel, you know.” “For travel?” “Yeah. We just all pile in the ol’ Dodge, and we’re off to the next city, and I get five cents a mile. It’s great Father.” “To the next city Earl? What next city?” “Why the next city we’re going to work, you know.” “Not quite Earl, not quite.” The schoolmasterish finger. “An, that ol’ Dodge, I got a new engine in it. It don’t cost me no five cents a mile ... it never did, not even with the ol’ engine. It’s a good job Father. I had a new, practically new Chivvy engine in it for a while, but it just didn’t have the pickup, you know? Just didn’t have the pickup for those superhighways. Couldn’t take a Caddy on the straightaway . . . Jeez, though, on the trip to Toledo Father we had a sign in the back, you know, and it said ‘You have just been passed by a ol’ Dodge with a Chivvy engine.’ Wasn’t that great? And didn’t their eyes bug, I’ll bet.” a knowing nod, “I wish I could have seen them, I sure do.” The mysteries of the automobile always moved Earl deeply. He lost his shambling manner, the perky motions of the hands slowed, and the light of faith, it had to be faith, the light of the evidence of things unseen shone in his eyes, his voice became soft, caressing, and sure. “They always have us take the superhighways, and we stay in the best hotels. Why in New York, I’ll bet it cost them ten dollars a day for them rooms.” “Oh you’ve been to New York City?” “Sure we were there two weeks, and Charlie and me . . .** “So Charlie O’Malley’s with you is he?” 27 Figure without caption. Untitled Drawing Don Beason “Yeah. Didn’t his mother tell you? We wrote, on a big post card we got in Times Square . . . Jeez, that was the biggest post card I ever seen, and we wrote and told her to tell you, ’cause you was always square with us Father.” “Just what is it you DO on this job Earl? You haven’t told me.” He wagged his head emphatically, “Oh it’s a good job Father, it’s like the Church, kinda, you know, helping people.” “You travel around from city to city helping people?” “Yeah, helping the blind, you know?” His face slipped into a new mask, helpful, bland, friendly, tightly screwed on; only at the corners of the eyes, and the mouth, and at the hairline could Father see where it met his skin. “We’re just doing this as a service to the blind. Don’t you want to help the blind? They make these things, these beautiful things, towels, aprons, potholders, and other household wares, and we sell them for them. All made by the blind. Everything.” Father Eliot was startled. “We just retail them for them. They come direct from the blind to you. Everything we sell is guaranteed to have been made or packaged by blind workers. We just do this as a service for them.” Father Eliot blinked, at a total loss for words. Earl nodded emphatically again. “That’s what we tell them, Father. That’s what it says on the card they give us, and we had to learn it by heart. I learnt it twice as fast as Charlie . . . he’s not doing so well Father, two days he didn’t sell his quota, and Alice . . . that’s the boss’s wife, she keeps the books, Alice says she won’t buy them back from him next time . . . next time when he comes in with merchandise, she’s not going to buy it back. It ain’t easy Father. There’s a lot to this selling business. You have to develop your personality ... I mean you just can’t go into a woman’s house lookin like a bum, you know? You have to develop your personality. You have to know just what to say. You have to be scientific about it.” “I’m sure.” “Gus, that’s the boss, a little guy, he’s a head shorter than Alice . . . they’re so funny together . . . they look after us guys you know, Alice she takes care of us just as though she were our own mother. Gus, he’s been in the sellin’ game a long time. He’s sold all kinds of things, encyclopedias, all kinds of stuff. He says they’ve got it all figured out. All we have to do is dress like he says, and be real quiet like, a woman don’t want to let no loud character into her house you know, be real quiet like, and use the spiel . . . that’s a German word he says, the spiel on the card. I learned it quicker than Charlie, Father. Lots of times I finish first too, maybe about nine o’clock at night, maybe even eight thirty.” 29 “What time do you start work, Earl?” “Oh you have to be up and goin’ early, have to be on the busses or subways about seven in the morning, Father. You want to get to where you’re going to sell that day, about the same time as the women get back from takin’ their kids to school, and such.” “And you work till nine at night?” “Lotsa days ten.” Father felt as though he stood at the brink of an abyss, alien and unfathomable as eskimo love. Thrashing around for a solid spear of ground, he tossed out, “And were you long in New York? Where did you go, while you were there?” “We was there two weeks.” “TWO WEEKS to ‘work’ New York City?” “Gus says you only work over little bits of a city at a time. He says you can wear out your welcome. It’s better to hit it hard, work maybe two, three weeks in really good places, and then pull out and come back in maybe six months. But we seen a lot of the city Father, Charlie and me, like I told you we seen Times Square, just like in the movies, and the Statue of Liberty, and we spit off the Empire State Building . . . ha . . . ha,” then with a guilty start “and we went to Mass at St. Patrick’s Father.” Father Eliot winced at the memory of that mish-mash cathedral, “Jeez, boy that’s some buildin ain’t it Father, that’s some buildin’.” Earl paused a suitable time in honor of the Gothic, and still faintly uneasy, full of a vague sense of spiritual alienation in Father Eliot, forged ahead on uplifting topics. “And Alice, she really looks after us good, you know Father? She keeps care of us good, you know, there’s some girls you meet, I mean, Alice . . . she . . . she keeps a track of us. She told Charlie them girls is dirty, and she told him he better be careful.” Father smiled gently, if sadly, to himself. At last a familiar landmark, “Did you want to make a confession Earl?” Earl slid around in surprise, in apparent surprise, and hastily . . . "no Father. No.” He assumed an air of injured innocence, “I just come over to see you . . . that’s all . . . just to say hello, you know?” Father nodded. “Of course Earl.” There was to be no help from the collar then. Earl frowned slightly, and avoided the priest’s eyes, “It sure is a long way from the old days, hey Father? Me and Charlie in the sellin’ game, I mean. Boy was my mother surprised when we pulled in, with new clothes and all; she thought we stole them somewhere, you know? People don’t give you a chance, that’s what Alice says, she says you’ve gotta be careful, because people 30 don’t give people like us a chance, after we’ve made our mistake. It sure is a long ways from Boys Training School.” “I thought you liked it there, Earl, sort of?” “I did, kind of Father, then ... I did. But I didn’t know no better. Trouble with B. T. S. is they don’t know nothin’ about developin’ the personality. They should have Gus come and teach the fellas. You think you could set that up Father? He’d be great, Gus would. He knows how to talk to you, you know? He knows how to show you how to improve your personality . . . he’d be great. He’s just what the school needs, really Father.” “I’m afraid I don’t have too much influence down there, Earl, not too much influence.” He fought to keep the weariness, and the sadness out of his voice. "Well Father, guess I better be goin’ now. Gotta go see lotsa the old gang yet. Boy will they be surprised at the changes in my personality, hey? Dontcha think they will Father?” “Very likely Earl, very likely. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a coke, or something?” “No Father, I gotta go, really.” “Well I . . . I’m glad, ah, about your new life Earl. As you say it’s a big change from the way things were for you, I . . .” “Sure is Father . . . Mother, she always wanted me to be an undertaker, you know? But I don’t know ... to tell you the truth I’m kinda scared of dead people . . . and sellin’, that’s more practical. You have to go to school to be an undertaker. Anyhow I like practical stuff, helping people, like you Father, you know?” Very gently, “Yes Earl, I know.” “Well I guess that’s that huh? Unless you want to buy somethin’ Father? Sure you don’t need somethin’ for the priest’s house? A nice dish towel maybe? They’re real pretty, beautiful merchandise, all of it up to the very highest standards, just like the big name merchandise you see advertised in nationally circulated magazines, or in the chain stores, and each and every piece is either made or packaged by the blind. Think of that Father, dontcha want to help the blind?” 4. He held the breviary in his hand, almost reverently, for it was a well made book, and he reverenced well made books, William Morris and all that. He flipped the pages against his thumb to look at the ordered juxtaposition of chaste black type, and the red of the rubrics, and the occasional half-illustrated letter at the head of a psalm. The most expensive breviary, perhaps a self in 31 dulgence, perhaps an occasion of sin. Sometimes he buried his face in it, and smelt the ink and expensive paper, but not today. Today he noted with more satisfaction that it was no longer new, the binding was broken, the daily office now finger worn here and there, especially at the magnificat in vespers, and the final antiphons of compline. It established an identity to have a worn breviary. Old priests, old Irish doddering priests, smelling of cabbage, who spatted with their crabbed housekeepers, old solid unesthetic priests, who lived successfully in the midst of their people, and scolded them about money, and loved God simply and never resented the Monsignor’s manicure, nor the chairman of the finance committee’s manner (Father you just can’t leave the finances of this parish to the Bishop’s Committee, not in America you can’t, you can’t hold yourself above this sort of thing.) old worthy priests who grew like fungus in the corners of priests houses, and were never offended at the sacred bull’s heart in the hall, all of these myriad old priests had worn breviaries, and rosaries blessed in Rome. So it was comforting to have a worn breviary, a little worn, more comforting than to smell the ink and the expensive paper, and the leather of the cover ... an occasion of sin, no doubt. Thirteen Hail Mary’s. (I confess to God Almighty, to Blessed Mary ever Virgin, to Blessed Michael the Archangel, to Blessed John Baptist, to the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and to all the Saints . . .) He opened it from the back, and removed the cluster of prayer cards, with their lists of names inked in under the typed petitions at the top, and fingered through them until he came to the one for Guidance. He laid it on the prie dieu before him, and carefully, slowly, wetting the end of the pen quite needlessly, he wrote the name EARL on it. “Oh Lord God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, look down upon this thy child . . .” Is it just to address the dumb floor beneath the night? “Lead him into all truth, and the light of faith . . Is it just? “Lead him through the darkness and perplexity of this mortal life ...” Is it just to cry out into the deaf absence? And the other voices, rising from the thousands of altars perpetually, the brothers and sisters bent in the solemn ballet of prayer, were they joined truly with the holy angels? Or by the unfulfillable widows of the light? He turned his hand so that it lay open on the prayer desk, and then viciously jammed the gold pen point into the fleshy meat of the palm. The ink spilled on to the desk, and some on the white cuff that projected slightly beyond the black coat sleeve. It spread on the surface of the flesh like a dye, and some penetrated under the skin, as though he had been inoculated with darkness. 32 Figure Figure Christopher E. Gabel Christopher E. Gabel CRAIG STERRY When I am not yet asleep, my body nailed to the bed, my mind falls loose from the walls of my skull like a bat, skids and jerks from the cave of my head to the black world of this room, beats its thin wings through the heavy air, bruising itself on metaphors of window and chair. And when my mind is back, clinging to its moist ceiling, when I wake to find it back again, I greet it as I would a smiling dog who tells me what he knows only by the dust on his paws. 34 After-Dinner Memo: To Marcia Listen—I’d like to meet you all over again, this time at night coming back from somewhere on a crowded train. I’d be Greek this time, and my hair would curl madly down my forehead and we’d joke of foreign affairs while old men and mothers pushed themselves to sleep in the crippled seats. Then, smoking the last of my American cigarettes, we’d watch the lights of impossible villages stroke the window. Today, while you saved the pieces of another meal, I picked my teeth with a match-book and thought about old friends. 35 Figure without caption. Untitled Drawing M. E. Boyer THE DEPARTURE by Brian Slaymaker The day had been long for Martha. Days are always long when they hang about in idle confusion. Martha had wondered if she should tell Jim. The day had brought her to her wit’s end, and made it all the more necessary for her to tell someone. And besides, Jim had to be told. It was Jim who had commissioned him. The artist was to beautify the new home. ‘The large house was really quite bare,’ she had thought, ‘and a big landscape would help out the front room.’ But now in the small room where he had done his work there was only uncertainty. “Don’t be ridiculous!” Jim said. “He couldn’t have; it’s not possible. You’d think we were living in the dark ages, the way you’re carrying on . . . Now once more, if we go through it very carefully and slowly, we can find out how he tricked you.” “He didn’t trick me,” Martha said. “He wouldn’t—” “Will you stop that! He did trick you! There’s no way of getting around it. They’re all alike, the goddamn self-centered artists—all they wanna do is . . . Oh, damn it! They’re just self-centered.” He stopped abruptly and gritted his teeth and then started again somewhat more composed. “Now please, let’s start again slowly . . . right from the time I commissioned him.” He turned and looked at the painting. The paint was still tacky. “Right up until now,” he said, frowning—grimacing with disbelief. 37 Martha gripped the arms of her chair. She looked around the tiny room that she had spent so much time in for the past couple of months. It now seemed vacant, despite its clutter of paint tubes and stained rags. Everything was just as it was yesterday when he was there with his back to her and the big easel before him. But now it was different somehow, and he was gone. The easel was still there, and the painting. 'The painting—so beautiful,’ she thought. ‘Why couldn’t Jim have been satisfied with it? Then it never would have happened . . . It . . . That thing did happen though.’ She began to tremble again. ‘Oh why, why did it happen?’ she thought. ‘He was so . . . so . . “Remember,” Jim said, “that day I was showing him this room? When I told him that this was where he’d work he seemed a bit disappointed.” “No he didn’t,” Martha said. “I mean it didn’t seem that way to me.” “Martha, if we’re gonna find anything out, we’re gonna have to agree on something?” Martha didn’t respond; she was still thinking about it. It had just happened last night—so short a time, but already it seemed unclear. “Okay, Jim, okay . . . We gotta figure this out. Where do you want me to start?” “Well . . . like I said, when I commissioned him. What did he say after I went upstairs?” “He didn’t say much of anything . . . You had to push him into talking. I asked him if he only did landscapes. He looked at me and . . . Do you remember how his eyes were? . . . Well, anyway he just looked at me . . . but it seemed like he wasn’t. I mean it seemed like he was looking past me. He was thinking or something and he didn’t answer right away. It made me feel kind of funny. He said that he did other things sometimes. I asked him what, but maybe he didn’t want to tell me. Anyway, he was pretty vague about it. He said that he painted reality. I told him that that was good because you wanted it to look real. But then he kinda frowned and he looked at me real hard and said, ‘We’ll see.’ “He confused me then. I didn’t understand him at all. It was just that he didn’t seem to make much sense—not at first, anyway. After a while, I think I began to understand him a little. You see, when he spoke, some of the words didn’t mean exactly what you thought they did. Do you know what I mean?” “Semantics,” Jim said. “But go on.” “Well, in all of those days that I sat down here we didn’t say much of anything. But I still got to know him. It was like you couldn’t say much to know him. I mean, I had to watch him; that was the only way. That’s why you never got to know him, Jim. You never watched him; all you did was talk to him.” 38 “You can’t expect me to sit here day after day and watch a crazy artist/’ Jim said. “I got a business to take care of. I got you to take care of. That’s a real world out there, Martha. It’s not a world of artists. It’s the real thing, not a pretty picture." He turned and looked again at the picture. Frowning, he said. “Not a pretty picture, Martha.” Martha said nothing; she couldn’t. She wished he was here. He could explain it to him—whatever it was that she was trying to think of. ‘But he wouldn’t, would he?’ she thought. ‘He wouldn’t say a thing; he would just stare.’ “Come on, Martha,” Jim said. “If you don’t quit sulking, this thing will never come to light. You gotta be pragmatic. That’s the only way anybody will ever get to the bottom of anything.” Martha didn’t know what Jim meant, but she sensed an urgency in his voice. Something in him was demanding satisfaction. “If you could have seen him working . . . you’d know. The way he tried so hard to make everything right. He was so determined, and he just went on forever ... It looked like nothing at first . . . and then it kind of grew, and I began to see it . . . Oh, you should have seen it grow, Jim, you should have seen it grow!” She stopped for a moment and began again very quietly. Melvyn S. Bucholtz Figure without caption. “I never watched a picture being painted before; I never knew. There is so much that goes into it, isn’t there, Jim.” Jim was caught off guard and he momentarily stumbled for words, but she continued without a reply. “When he first began painting, it didn’t . . . Oh, I already said that. But I never asked him many questions—he didn’t like that. You did though, didn’t you? You didn’t like the painting, did you?” “It’s not that I didn’t like the painting. It’s just that it wasn’t what I asked him to do. I asked him to paint a real picture, none of that ‘pop’ or ‘op’ stuff. I just wanted a nice pretty landscape. But I wanted it to look real. I told him that. I told him that over and over . . . and, Christ, Martha, he gives me this. I mean, green snow and a purple sky . . . Why? . . . That’s what I ask myself. Why?—deliberately against my orders. I give him a job and he slights me . . . The man makes no sense.” ‘Purple sky,’ she thought. She had stopped listening with those words; her eyes had turned to the painting. The violet sky drifted into a pale turquoise blue halo around the moon. It seemed far away, a ‘never-never’ land behind the dark and somber pines. The pines rose piercing the sky like thin black icicles, turned upside down. ‘A dark enchanted forest,’ she thought. ‘It divided the heavens from the earth—the earth in its green velvet cloak.’ A cool soft green, she could feel it on her bare toes. ‘Snow is green,’ she thought, ‘sometimes.' The artist’s words came drifting back from somewhere. He said so few she wondered why they were so hard to remember. ‘That’s it,’ he had said when she warned him of what Jim would say. ‘That’s it—stark and bare and beautiful ... It is beautiful, isn’t it?’ Martha had nodded. ‘That’s what it is before human eyes and human mind. That’s what it is before the night.’ ‘His eyes were so fierce,’ she thought, ‘I wanted him to cry or something. I wanted to help him . . . But I felt so insignificant. I almost cried myself . . . and I didn’t know why. And then still . . . the whole thing scared me a little.’ “So, it all goes to show what a bunch of egotists they are,” Jim continued. “Somehow they seem to disregard everything the civilized world has taught them. They’re like a bunch of children. That’s what they are, a sniveling bunch of children. They run away when they can’t face reality . . . Well? Isn’t that what he did?” “What?” said Martha. “Isn’t that what he did? . . . Run away?” “Oh . . . yes, I suppose he did ... Yes, he even told me that, I guess . . . He said that his life had been one long struggle . . . like a war without battles. Every time there might have been a battle, he said, it got rained out . . . 40 and there was never any rain-check. And that now it was time to give up since he could never meet his enemy face to face.” “Is that all he ever said? Pitying himself? Crying on your shoulder? He was less than a child. He was an infant. Artists must think they’re indispensable. They forget what makes this country run. It takes men, real men! Not infants and women. And that’s why you’re siding with him. Women are no better; they sit home and never know what the real world is like . . . And I can’t understand them either: women, artists, poets, none of them. But I tell you, he’s not going to pull the wool over my eyes. You can’t see him for what he really is because you’re one of them.” “I ... I couldn’t understand him either, Jim. I . . .” “That’s exactly it, Martha. He’s pulled the wool over your eyes, but he’s not fooling me with any of his stunts. You can figure out anything if you take all the facts into consideration. That’s what I’m gonna have to teach you. You can’t go around letting everybody fool you ... It isn’t healthy. “Now, last night, that’s what we’re really concerned with. I want you to tell me everything that you can remember, down to the last detail.” Martha began to grasp the arms of the chair. She felt frightened again. But Jim recognized this and reached for her hand. “Relax, honey. Just relax and remember.” “I can’t!” “Nonsense. You can. Just relax.” She gripped his hand tightly and looked at him. ‘It’s all right,’ she thought. ‘Jim’s here.’ She drove through his eyes with a searching stare, like jumping into a bathtub naked and finding the water cold. The artist appeared in her mind, a warm coal in a dreary forest. She wanted to be close to him she thought. Jim turned his head away. She withdrew her hand. “Yes, I can go on,” she said. “That’s the girl,” Jim said. “I knew you were a brave one.” “He was already there,” she began, “when I came in. He didn’t even turn when I opened the door. I could see beads of sweat on his forehead . . . He must have been working a long time.” “Was there anything unusual about the . . .” “Jim! If you want to hear this, you’ll just have to listen . . .” She almost glared at him. Her eyes seemed to push through him and fix on an object just a little farther on. He was confused and didn’t want to look at her. He was almost frightened, but not quite. He didn’t answer. “He turned after a few moments,” she went on, “and said, ‘It’s almost finished, you know.’ I remember that it looked quite a bit different from the last time I saw it. You would have liked it then. You see, the room 41 was dim and it looked quite real—it looked more the way you wanted it. I told him I’d just sit back here and wait. He smiled at me then, Jim. He seemed to like me more than when he started—maybe it was just the painting, but anyway he was much happier. He said, ‘Fine, you just sit there and wait.’ And that’s just what I did. I sat right here in this chair. “He was bending over the painting at the bottom of the picture, so naturally I couldn’t see what he was doing, since I was behind him. But I didn’t want to really. I didn’t want to see it until it was done so I started looking around the room. I didn’t much care at what, just so it wasn’t at the picture. There wasn’t much to look at though, just paint tubes and rags, and such. So I picked up some of his pencil sketches and started looking at them—these right here. That kept me busy for a while, but I got kind of sleepy—not really sleepy, just sort of relaxed. So I just closed my eyes and leaned back in the chair. “I could hear his brush rubbing on the canvas. It was kind of a smooth sliding sound; it sounded good. I could just imagine the snow he was painting— long wisps of pale green. I listened and got kind of excited because somehow I could tell that he was almost done. It seemed like it would be just a few more strokes. And then it was; he quit painting and there wasn’t a sound. I couldn’t open my eyes I was so excited; and he didn’t say anything. There was just a long silence. I was waiting for him to say it was finished, but he didn’t. So I opened my eyes kind of slowly—one at a time I think ... He wasn’t there, Jim, I swear it. He just wasn’t anywhere. He was gone. “I’m not sure what I did. I was scared. I remember at first I didn’t want to get up, but I did. When I opened the door and looked down the hall it was vacant. The whole place was dead quiet. I turned and looked back in the room. I don’t know, I guess it was foolish but I expected him to be standing there. The place was dim but I could see. “When I looked where I thought he’d be, the painting was there. The little overhead light made it stand out, almost like it was glowing a little. It seemed like a window . . . looking out on a moon-lit winter night. When I got close I could see how really beautiful it was. It was better than I had thought. Look at it, Jim; the moon caught my attention first, and those puffy little clouds seemed to be moving across it. It seemed bright as the real one . . . I looked at everything . . . the pines, that little frozen brook, and the snow . . . the snow . . . That’s when I saw it Jim—right down there in the corner— those tracks leading off toward the forest.” 42 MICHAEL CRONAN three a.m. yes, blow your hollow note your black note that rattles in my rambling thought you bring a word? a vision perhaps? yes, blow your cold note and the silence that it brings stills the vision and chills my mind you hide her perhaps in your angry gut and now blow your rattling note thru your dying note as my mythodical glow in your haunting soul hurts you for an instant and shows me awake you hide her perhaps? but no, it is only me and my thoughts of you and already you choke on your dying note as I feel her tremble and move near 43 Figure without caption. City at Night Walt Bischoff JOURNEYS & OTHER THINGS by Peter Fiore THE PILGRIMS One of the Italian novelists was describing the search lights crawling in the sky over Milan and I was thinking of the time I had seen DiMaggio make that great catch out by the Monuments against the St. Louis Browns, and then faintly I heard the drone of airplanes and felt my stomach drop out. I had to look up at the buildings across the street. They died off and I went back to my book. But all I could think of was the time he had locked me out of the house and when I had climbed in the window he locked himself in the bathroom and I got him out by reading one of his girlfriend’s letters out loud and then hit him so hard he landed in the bathtub. Listen, after they blew him apart there wasn’t even enough to put in a box so they gave my mother a flag. She wanted us to come home to be there when the plane came in. But we drove to the store and stole three Rock Cornish Hens for our Thanksgiving dinner. The stealing was easy as long as you wore enough clothing and when we bought the wine I put a can of sardines and some gruyere cheese in my pocket. 45 from SLIDES That was one of those weird things: the time Al and I drank the gin that Friday night and looked out the long narrow living room windows at the els passing North to Evanston and South to Jackson Park. There wasn’t much furniture and we sat with the gin and the ice and vermouth on the table between us and the light from the floorlamp in the corner made everything grey. The kind of grey a Chicago sky has in November when it’s like living inside a light bulb. I think a guy named Dwyer said that and Al and I had Thanksgiving dinner with his family my first year there and after dinner we drank tequila in the small front room cluttered with overstuffed chairs and lamps with huge flowered shades and an old upright radio with all the tuning knobs and the green light in the middle. But the tequila was bitter and sharp and it wasn’t worth putting the salt between your thumb and forefinger and then the lemon and drinking the tequila swilling it around in your mouth and letting it go down, and we went to see Cathie and rode the el downtown sitting in the front of the first car looking down the long dark corridors with the lights all in a line like in cathedrals. Then all the Christmas windows at Marshall Field’s and Carson’s and later singing up on Michigan Avenue and how the wind roared through our coats and snapped our scarfs. Cathie the color of yellow and Al the sound of Gregorian Chant and we had a good time that fall but then we all got drunk one night at Cathie’s after we had come back from Christmas vacation and it had been so good seeing each other again. Nothing made sense that night and finally Al wanted to stay there with Cathie and she locked herself in her room and I could hear her crying behind the door. After I got Al home I went back and the lights were still on and Cathie’s face was all blotched and pale like if she had fallen asleep on her hand, and she let me kiss her because she knew I loved her and I knew the months to come would be hopeless. Like watching the snow melt as it hits the pavement. The next morning we ate breakfast together in a little place that had good waffles but Al wore sunglasses and Cathie didn’t say much and I couldn’t eat and you could feel things being hammered apart. 46 ROUND MIDNIGHT You lay awake and tried not to think about it. And sometimes, if you were lucky, you could read yourself to sleep. The reading didn’t make much sense afterwards but it got your eyes working and pretty soon you tricked yourself into feeling tired. But most of the time you lay there, trying other tricks. Keeping your eyes fixed on one object in the room, trying to make it move until you got weary blinking. And then thinking of all the women you had had. And maybe masturbating and wishing you had someone there holding on to you. But that wouldn’t work because it was inside. Finally you got up and had a cigarette and some liquor if there was any. Sometimes you thought of the old guys back in Chicago and staying up all night talking about Bergson and T. S. Eliot and Ravel, drinking wine out of bottles and passing them around the room and when they were empty putting them up on the shelf with the others, drinking till someone had fallen asleep and then walking home in the snow with your coat open and not bothering about the wind. And you wondered if they had made it. Dybek who would lock himself in his room with candy bars and 98 cent wine to work on a poem, which began with “My prick is like a wilted moonbeam.” And Lund, but he had wanted too much to be a professor. And Dooley who would ring your bell at two in the morning wanting a place to sleep and always with a story he had just written. Most of the time he was drunk and unshaven and his clothes were stained and hung like used rubbers on his sagging body. And once he stood there smiling and had a hardon. He didn’t even try to hide it and he was little embarrassed and kept on smiling. And you wanted to pack up then and go back and find them, even Lund, but especially Moonbeam because he’d be awake no matter what time you got there and would want to talk. But you would have nothing to show him and besides you didn’t have the money for gas. So you tried something else but now you were back in it again and began to think all over again of the things you wanted to write about and even how they would look on paper. But you didn’t get up and try it, fearing what might not come out and remembering how horrible and blinding typing paper was when there weren’t any marks on it. And then when everything had been written out and even put in a book you could fall asleep or rather sleep knocked you out and you woke with a pounding in your head the next morning. 47 CHICAGO EAST You couldn’t see the leaves straight because the glass waved, and the leaves whirlpooled. The only things I had seen clearly were in the room, and even then they were mixed with the martinis in your eyes, not one or two but five and six when they become hot and boiling in the glass, ice and all. And I knew your hands would smell of cigarettes and if I touched them they’d be hot too and maybe that’s what made the gin boil. But the restaurant had quotations from Dr. Johnson hung on the walls and the food was good and lights danced on the oak beams of the walls and ceiling. Outside it was cold. The lights from the street sent glancing shadows from the trees onto the pavement and the dry leaves whisked and crinkled along the curbs. We walked for a long time—past a house that had golden hands for door-knockers—and when it got cold we started home. And I would always pretend I was asleep when you came to bed like that. I could hear you undress and get your pajamas from the closet and get into the other bed, afraid you’d wake me up. And when I heard you breathing I would lie there, listening to the wind rattle the windows and waiting for the el to go by. 48 MELVYN S. BUCHOLTZ Great Men Will Have To Go Great men will go poorly dressed She was assuming; Through her well folded gaze: I’m here to show a vapor Of perfume Cutting the meandering of ideas, Notice the palor of ivory! Poorly dressed She was assuming To fold great men into the flat vapor Of still ivory, notice the meandering Of the palor of the ideas! Noticing the assuming fold Of poor dressed men She meandered as the flat palor Of greatness, still ivory Meandering perfume as a cutting idea. The meandering show of greatness Was assumed that if folded, Palor would turn to greatness While poorly dressed men would have Only ivory as perfume For still gazing. 49 We fit into winter Like a hand numbly Working loose from sleep Like a stunned bee Feels slivers of frozen sky Pin its humming nerve waking it To clean Attention. 50 Woman at Summer's Door Her innocent fingers stare Numb as mushrooms Dressing the skin Over the boned grasp She prays To flocking leaves reddening The bristling light Taking the eyes’ hope far Onto the clearing Pearl shell of winter, Stunning the smooth ache To stillness within the clacking Of crickets warbling against Trees. Looking fingers dumb to the Maples’ laughter Muse the swirls scored by Kissing cold air, She swoons in the breathless rustle Before winter In the press of skin 51 W. J. Sharbach W. J. Sharbach Blue Nude EVERYBODY by Theodore Sjogren Because it was dark, be could not help thinking about the trees. In the book the trees had been people—people who for some reason had died and become trees. It was a book for kids, that was how dumb it was, and it was the only fairy tale he’d ever read. Still it bothered him until he remembered his gun. He put his hand on the air pistol and felt better. He wondered where Guinea was. It was so dark in the trees you couldn’t see. And Fats was a good shot, so you had to pretty much watch out. He got closer to the ground and looked across the clearing. The trees on the other side were thick and dark. The whole woods was quiet. The quiet was bad: it made you jumpy and let you think. He moved forward to creep around the edge of the clearing. His heart thump-thumped and his breathing seemed awfully loud. It was a good thing 53 ELSE IN FREE the others didn’t know. What would they think if they knew about the book and how he felt about the trees? He’d have to keep quiet about it. He was glad there was no way they could find out. If you acted plenty tough, they could never know about such things. He put his hand on the zipper of the leather jacket to see if it was zipped all the way up. Under the jacket he was sweating, but the pellets didn’t hurt if they hit the leather. His hand was hot and sweaty on the gun, and he wished something would happen to break the quiet. Suddenly Guinea jumped up and ran yelling across the clearing. On the other side the air guns popped, and he followed Guinea in the charge, keeping his head down as he crossed the open space. Several pellets whapped his jacket and one grazed his leg. The one on the leg stung. He kept his head down and ran into the woods. He saw Guinea behind a tree, shooting; then he saw someone and his own gun started popping. A pellet burned across his cheek, and he yelled, “Not at the head, dammit, not at the head,” and his gun kept going until Fats cried out. At last they gave up, the game was over. Guinea came from behind the tree and slapped him on the leather jacket. “Great work!” he said. “Some bastard shot high.” He put his hand to his face, and it came away warm. “Jesus,” said Guinea, “who the hell?” The others came from behind trees and bushes. “Listen,” said Fats, “you got to take chances. There ain’t no guarantee or nothin’ in this game.” “Aw, I’ll shoot your belly full of holes.” “Shut up,” said Guinea, “car on the road.” They all dropped. He fell in a pricker bush, but he lay still as the car came closer on the road. Pretty soon they could see the car. “It’s cops,” said Guinea. “Listen,” said Fats, “how about we all shoot at once?” “All right.” The sudden pop of the air guns swelled the night, and he felt the blood rush up to his head and gush in his ears. Before they had to run he got off four quick shots. It felt good to have the quiet of the woods smashed all to pieces. The trees and the darkness didn’t bother him any more. It was plenty good to be with a bunch of guys and have plenty of action to keep out the dark. And it felt good to be dealing with cops again. That was action you could not miss: it kept out everything. He aimed and shot, aimed and shot until the glass tinkled out of one headlight and the light dimmed, and then died. The pellets rap-rapped the side of the patrol car. But before the car stopped they were up and running. —He held her close to him as they danced. She had hard little breasts that 54 pushed against him, and he let his hand rest on her buttocks, feeling the rhythm of her steps. It was like that first time in bed, alone, waking to find he was choking—wanting to scream to release it but not being able to. It was like something inside trying to burst out. He wanted to run or scream or hit something hard with his fists. But instead he held her hand tighter until she gasped in pain. “Stop it! What are you doing?” She tried to free her hand. “Come outside. I want to get out.” “But I came with Joey, and he’s around still.” “The hell with Joey.” “I guess he’ll come looking for you,” she said, “I guess he will all right.” But they went out together. They walked along the beach, under the pavilion. “You see this scab?” He pointed at his cheek. “Yeah, I see it,” she said. “Got it the other night, couple of cops shooting at me.” “Oh, hell,” she said, and she looked at him critically. “What’s the matter?” “You’re always the big man. Cops always shootin’ at you or something.” “Listen, don’t be so smart,” he said. He stared at her dark face, with the dark curly hair surrounding it. “Don’t be so damn smart,” he repeated. “I mean it,” she said, “always something big. Always the big deal.” As he watched her, the dark began to make her face change. It was because of the light from the pavilion, the light and the dark from the bay, mixing together. He saw the shadows under her eyes and the shadows under her mouth and chin. It was a battle of light and dark, and soon the dark would completely swallow the light. He remembered Ina saying it was always light after the dark. But Ina was wrong. Ina was his sister, but she was wrong because she didn’t know. He remembered sitting up in bed and being paralyzed because the dark was solid. That proved Ina was wrong. “You got nice dark hair,” he said. “Now don’t start that stuff,” said she, tossing her hair. “Remember Joey.” “Joey hell,” he said and he grabbed her with both hands and wrestled her down to the sand. “Joey hell,” he said again. He rolled over with her twice, until his head hit the water. Then he jumped up and pushed her away from him. The bay water was completely black, and it looked solid, as though if you once got in it you’d never get out. He hated the look of the water. “Get out of here,” he said suddenly, feeling the wet in his hair, his insides all shaky. “Go on. Get out.” 55 “You stupid queer/’ she said as she got off the sand, brushing the grit from her skirt. “You don’t know what you’re doing, not ever. You’re always something big and stupid.’’ “Go on,’’ he said louder, “get out of here!” He watched her walk quickly away toward the pavilion. Then he looked out across the bay. When he felt something pulling him toward the dark water he began to tremble and sweat. And then he shook his head and with a low cry ran back up the beach to the road and continued to run and run. —It was the middle of the night and he woke up screaming. They’d been after him again, once more it happened in the same way. It was night, late, with the streets deserted, and he was walking home. As he passed the high school the doors opened and they started to file out—teachers, students, janitors, everybody—and they followed him down the road, silent, but getting closer and closer. He walked faster but could not get away from them. As he passed the nigger section the door of every shack flew open and each one of the niggers came out to join the procession. The same happened in the Puerto Rican and the Polish sections. Soon the mass of people behind him jammed the street for blocks. He began to hear the rumbling in their throats. But when he ran they stayed close behind him. Wherever he went and however fast, they were always right there, at his back, and ready to slaughter him. In the bed he lay sweating, and inside he was frozen and white with fear. Needles of fright flashed up and down him for a few minutes. The dark in the room was almost too thick to see through; and the open window, alongside his bed, was like a gaping hole in his side. When he saw the first light of morning he turned on his side and pulled the blanket closer to his chin. Then he closed his eyes and fell immediately asleep. After what seemed only a minute or two, Ina was shaking him. “Wake up, Bucky. Wake up, Bucky.” He tried to cover his head with the blanket. It was impossible to get up now. “No,” he said, “get the hell away.” He tugged on the blanket, but Ina pulled it off him. Then she pushed him onto the floor and he swore loudly at her. “I ain’t going,” he yelled, “cut out the crap.” “Ma,” yelled Ina, “he says he’s not going.” “So he thinks,” he heard from the next room. “As if it ain’t bad enough he’s two years behind every other idiot his age.” “Tell her to lump it,” he said. “You shut up,” said Ina, “you don’t know what’s good for you. You never do.” 56 He stood up naked and threw the blanket back on the bed. “I don’t need you or her to tell me,” he said. ”I don’t need a couple faggy women to tell me.” “Sure, sure,” said Ina, taking his clothes from the busted chest of drawers, “the big man again.” “Listen, cut out that big man stuff. What the hell do you know?” “I know you’ll be late,” said Ina, throwing his pants and shirt and underwear across the room at him. She was already dressed for school. “Hurry up and get in those.” Then she left the room. On the bed he sat down and began slowly to pull on his pants. It was Friday, the day before the weekend. He could skip school and not have to bother with it for another three days. The sun was out and he could go down to the shipyard and watch the tugs go in and out of the inlet and then go for a swim and come home and sleep while the old lady was at work. That would take care of Friday all right. “Listen,” said Ina from the next room, “you hurry now.” “Go the hell on,” he said as he smashed his foot into one of his old shoes. The old lady yelled, “Shut up that swearing.” Then lower, to Ina she said, “Some crude kid. How’d he get that way?” “I’ll wait and go with him to school,” said Ina. Jesus, he thought, lousy women, and the way they think they know it all. He got his shirt on and threw water on his hair and combed it high and let some of it fall low on his forehead. Then he got his jacket and left the room. “Comb your hair right,” said Ina. “Listen, don’t bother me.” “What a hoodlum,” the old lady said, “ain’t you got no books?” “No. I ain’t got no books.” He opened the door and went out into the sun. Ina ran out, “Goodbye Ma,” and followed him down the hill, struggling with her books. “If you were any kind of a gentleman you’d help me,” she said. “So I ain’t a gentleman,” he said. “Aren’t. You aren’t a gentleman.” “Why don’t you tell that to Ma?” “She never went to school,” said Ina. “She never had a chance to learn like you.” “Lucky me,” he said, and at the bottom of the hill he passed the shipyard, because of Ina, and he walked silently toward school. Ina followed him, for a while without saying anything. Then she caught up with him and matched his fast stride for a block. She carried her books in both arms across her breasts. He concentrated on not looking at her. “Look, Bucky,” she said at last, “try to be good, huh.” 57 “What do you mean?” But he knew what she meant. It was always that way: she could read his thoughts, sometimes even before he had them. But it was all right. He didn’t mind the inconvenience any. She was the only one he liked, even if she was a bore. “Go to school. Don’t waste your time.” “I’m going,” he said, “didn’t you come to see I did?” “No.” She turned her face into a pout. “I can’t make you. Nobody can. It’s all up to you.” “Then leave me alone,” he said. “I’ll get along all right.” “You won’t get anywhere. You’ll be a waste.” “So I’m a waste. I like being a waste. You think everybody in the world wants to go to college?” He took a side look at her and saw the moisture beginning in her eyes. Then he realized they’d slowed down, and he started to walk fast again. To keep up she almost had to run. “Bucky, listen; I won’t be here next year. I’ll be away to school and you’ll still be here, in this stinking place.” “You always wanted college, didn’t you? It’s what you want, ain’t it?” “Yes,” she said. Then it seemed she didn’t know what else to say. They were at the school yard, and he saw Guinea and Fats lounging against the fence at the corner. Then he saw her watching them. “It’s what you call friends, that Guinea and Fatty, or whatever they are. You’ll hang around with them the next three years and never even make it out of high school.” She stopped and bit her lip with her large upper teeth. Her look said, please, Bucky, come in with me now; don’t go to them—please! But all he felt was sorry. It was no use doing anything. “I’ll see you later,” he said. With her arms full of books and that look on her face, she stood and looked at him. “I said I’ll see you later,” he said. “Big sister, I’ll see you later.” When she was through the gate he went over and joined Guinea and Fats. They stood along the fence and smoked. Then the bell rang and everyone in the yard started to go inside. From the steps he saw Ina looking at him, but he turned away until she was inside. Then he crushed his cigarette on the sidewalk, and he said, “Well, I guess we’re late again.” —There was no doubt of it, you could tell a banana without even peeling the skin. He walked down the hallway full of bananas, and he looked disdainfully at them. He hated them all. You could see the superior look they had, all of them a little superior because of the faggy clothes they wore or because of the car the old man let them have to lay the girl in biology class. Biology class, he thought: animals, plants, fruit—bananas, all of them 58 Figure without caption. Tudor Argezhi—Serigraph V. Glen Washburn bananas. He opened the door and walked in. A class full of bananas was quietly seated, waiting for the banana-king to begin. With a bang he closed the door and went noisily to his seat. All the bananas kept their heads forward, showing what nice, good bananas they were. He wouldn’t hack such crap. No, he thought, not hack—condone; he wouldn’t condone such crap. That was a nice, soft, banana word. He’d have to use it in front of all these bananas, maybe cut up a fruity phrase or two, especially made for the banana- king. With a loud clap he let the biology book fall to the desk top. That, of course, would upset the king; he’d not condone it, without doubt. “Mr. Carratello,” said the king, “there shall be less noise when you enter, unless of course you wish to leave.’’ “I’ll not condone it, sir,’’ he said regally. “You’ll what?” “I’ll not condone it, sir, unless of course you’ve not heard of that banana word.” “Mr. Carratello,” said the king leaning forward over his desk, “I don’t understand you, and for that reason you’ll remain silent.” “At your orders, king, sir,” he said. “And that goes for your sarcasm.” “Most assuredly, sir,” he said and opened the book in mock obedience. Disgusted, the king of bananas continued taking role by the seating chart. It was a bore, the whole thing, and to show he was not affected by it he sat and looked absently out the window. Well, he’d shown them what he thought of it. That was the first thing to do, to keep the bananas in line; let them know you were not a bit for it— he wouldn’t be touched by it. They could play their little games, all the smart crew cuts and their baby-faced sluts, let them play. He leaned back in the chair and watched. The king was writing on the blackboard, but he didn’t bother to read what was there. Instead he looked over at Carol Reece; she was wearing that tight blue sweater, and he watched her breasts expand and contract with her breathing. A sick empty feeling came to his stomach—she was beautiful, her blond hair shiny and long, her skin smooth and white. All the girls he knew had oily skin and dark hair, and they all smelled like dirty underwear. He’d never had a girl with such smooth skin. The sick feeling in his stomach was almost too much to stand. Then he looked away angrily: she’s a banana girl, he thought, one of the crew cut crowd. The bastards, he thought, the silly fops. He could imagine some well dressed banana driving up to Carol Reece’s 60 door for a Friday night at the movies: most likely some guy like Jim Collins, big Jim Collins, banana president and football star. He looked over at Jim Collins. Big deal Collins, he thought, the kind of fruit that Carol'd go for. Once more he looked over at Carol Reece. He imagined her without any clothes on. Then he began to get angry again. The blood rose to his head until his temples seemed to be swelling like balloons and his face to be on fire. Why couldn’t he ask her out? Why’d he never think of that? The thought gave him a chill and a pang of fright shot right through the bottom of his stomach. Drops of sweat ran off his forehead into his eyes and he felt he was suffocating. He saw himself walking in his jeans and leather jacket to Carol’s door and knocking on it. The thought made him suffocate and the anger rose in his head until he thought he’d fly apart and smash the first thing he saw. As he looked again at Jim Collins, tears of hate burned in his eyes. From Carol Reece to Jim Collins he looked back and forth and one by one his nerves began to strain until they snapped like rusty cables. As the last one snapped he felt himself rise up and grip the desk top between his hands; for a moment he stood frozen, and then everything let go within him and in sone smooth motion he hoisted the desk over his head and sent it crashing through the window. It fell two stories to the pavement below. The glass tinkled on the cement long after the desk was shattered. One last sliver of glass hit the yard, and then it was perfectly quiet. Before anyone could move or say anything, he was out of the room. —‘‘That’s right,” he said, ‘‘get me another and one for yourself.” The Guinea went out of the circle of light, and then he came back with two cans of beer, the cans wet and cold from the bay water. The fire hissed as he opened the can and some foam escaped into it. After one long drink, the beer felt heavy in his stomach, and he took another to help prime the pump. It was too early to have more than just begun. ‘‘I’m going to bust out tonight,” he said, ‘‘I feel a charge in my bones.” With the can balanced on his stomach, he lay back and put his head in the sand. So tonight it was going to be spicks. Well, that was all right. It was fine, just so long as they cooperate. ‘‘Where the hell’s Fats?” he said. Guinea threw a rock at the fire. ‘‘We should of gone with him.” ‘‘Car only holds four—him and the girls.” ‘‘And those spicks better be all right.” ‘‘What do you care how they are? Just so they come.” He sat up to take a sip, and he saw the lights of the pavilion across the bay. ‘‘It makes a difference,” said Guinea. 61 “What does?” “How a girl looks. It makes it nicer.” “Hell.” “Sure it does.” He lay quiet in the sand, and he thought about making it nicer. What did it mean to do it with love? He wondered if he’d ever done it that way. But he didn’t think so. Sometimes it was nicer, but it didn’t seem like love was supposed to be. He wondered if with Carol Reece there’d be any love. But still he didn’t think so; it just seemed like the same thing only nicer, as Guinea said. Maybe that love business was only a farce. “I’d like to do one thing,” he said, “that Carol Reece. Listen, you ever notice that Carol Reece?” “I notice her all the time,” said Guinea. “Sometime maybe I’ll do something about it.” “Ha!” said Guinea, “you?” “Why not?” “That’s high class. They’d send you up.” “I don’t mean that way. I mean ask her out and all.” “Sure—and go through all that politics.” “Why not?” “You must be crazy. What do you think, she’s gonna go out with you, a lousy wop?” That was true. Again he pictured himself walking up and knocking on Carol Reece’s door. The crazy fear and hot flashes came back to him, and he shivered at what Guinea’d called politics. It was not worth it, the waste of time and money; it was better to take spicks and wops and polacks and not have to worry. “Here they come,” he said. The headlights flashed across the beach, and then went out. After a minute he saw Fats and three smaller shapes come away from the trees and start down the beach towards the fire. “This here’s Doris, Zena, and Pinky,” said Fats. “That’s Guinea and Rube.” “Greetings,” said Guinea, saluting with his can of beer, “you dames is come not a moment too soon; and I trust, Fats, you did not neglect the peanuts.” “You owe me a quarter,” said Fats, and he took four nickle bags of peanuts from bis pocket and threw them on Guinea’s stomach. “That’s only four.” 62 “I ate one on the way—commission/’ “You lousy spick,” said Guinea. “So listen to him," said Doris, “Guinea-boy calls names.” “I call them as I see them,” said Guinea, resting back on his elbows. Guinea and Fats were not angry, but Doris was. He got up and adjusted his pants. “Look,” he said, “can the crap. There’s plenty beer cooling in the bay and we ain’t going to waste it with argument.” Then he went to the shore, felt around in the shallow water, and brought back two cans. Both Zena and Pinky were thin and boney, but Doris was hefty with a tremendous bust. All three were rather ugly. He opened the two cans and gave one to Doris. “Here,” he said, “sit down and cool off. Guinea, spick, wop, polack, so what the hell?” He took Doris by the arm and pulled her down beside him. For a while they drank in silence. Then he tried to make conversation. “How come you never at the pavilion?” “What’s it to you?” she answered. “So that’s the way you want it, huh?” “Sure,” she said, “why not?” Taking a last drink, he threw the almost empty beer can out over the bay. “All right,” he said, “if that’s the way, let’s get at it then,” and he took her by the arm and led her back up into the trees. “Sit down,” he said. “Like hell.” “Look,” he said, “how much did Fats pay you?” “Too little for you.” “A real tough one, huh, a real tough baby.” “Sure,” she said. Then he grabbed the front of her blouse and pulled it right off her. Before he could duck she swung side-arm and deadened his ear with her fist, but he dove at her legs and knocked her down. She fought him all the way, until he finally made it, and then all of a sudden she went limp. He lay stupidly on top of her, but she was limp and cold. He rolled over and lay on his back on the ground. “You stupid bitch,” he said. She didn’t say anything, but she started to laugh. “You goddam stupid bitch!” Her laughing got louder and louder. He stood up and buttoned his pants. She just stayed flat on her back on the ground and laughed. As he walked away through the woods he could hear the laughter for a long time. It seemed to go on for ever and ever, never stopping—the whole 63 Figure without caption. Untitled Woodcut ' Jane Schneider world shook with laughter, laughing at him, at his stupidity. —With a crash he threw open the door and ran inside. When she saw his arm, Ina screamed. The blood was running down it onto the floor. “Shut the hell up,” he said. “Can’t you shut the hell up for once?” He hurried past her into the bathroom and took off his shirt. As he did so, the pain shot up from his elbow and echoed in his head until he couldn’t see. He sat down on the toilet just as Ina came in, and she caught him before he hit the floor. “Put your head down,” she said, “oh, Bucky, put your head between your knees.” Far in the distance he heard her crying. She was doing something to his arm, then all of a sudden the pain made him wake and he jerked his arm back. “Stop that,” she said, “I’ve got to wash it.” It’s the elbow. The cut ain’t nothin’. It’s the elbow that hurts.” “I’ve got to wash it,” she said, “it’s so deep.” “Aw, shit,” he said. “I’m sorry, Bucky.” “It’s all right, you go on. I don’t know what I’m saying. Go on and do what you think.” She washed and dried and wrapped the wound on his arm. The elbow was already swollen, and he was beginning to feel a new pain below his eye. He looked in the mirror and the eye was almost closed. “I’ve got to get in bed,” he said. He could hardly think or see. “I’ve got to lie down.” She helped him into the next room to lie on the bed and took his shoes off and threw the covers over him with all his clothes still on. Then she started to cry again. “Shut up and get me some ice,” he said. She cried her way into the kitchen and after a year or two came back. “What took you so long?” “I came right back.” “All right. I can’t think too well—I guess I don’t feel good.” “You’ve got to tell me what happened.” “Them polacks. Them dirty polacks. That lousy Joe Pulaski and his bunch of lousy polacks.” “All right,” she said, “stop it, Bucky, stop it.” He heard her sniffling as she packed the ice in a towel and put it on his elbow, then she went away and came back with more ice. Soon it was dark and cold with an ice pack on his eyes. “Listen,” he said, “where’s Ma?” “At work. This week she works nights, you know.” “Yeah, I forgot.” 65 “Do you want me to call a doctor?” “No. It ain’t that bad. I just feel sick kind of.” “You lie still.” “Listen, you know what I’m going to do to that Joe Pulaski?” “Be quiet, Bucky, don’t talk more.” “You don’t know what bastards they are,” he said. Then he flew up into a cloud. It was soft and white and very warm; from up there he could see the whole world, and he felt good. He floated higher and higher and the world got farther away. He felt peaceful and warm. Then the cloud broke and he was falling. Now the world got larger and larger as he fell toward it. But a terrible thing happened. All the land disappeared under water and he had nowhere to fall but in the ocean. The ocean was dark and rough. He started to yell and Ina woke him up. “What’s the matter?” he said. “You were dreaming.” “Oh,” he said. He closed his eyes again. His skin felt cold and bumpy. Maybe he was going to die. He’d just been on a battlefield and was shot, wounded seriously and taken back to camp. Carol Reece was his nurse. He watched her move around in her clean white uniform, her hair long and blond under the little nurse’s cap. He was going to die and Carol Reece felt sorry for him, she’d do anything if only he’d live. In fact she loved him. She could not live if he died: her life would be worthless. In the last moments she knelt by the bed and told him so. She needed him and loved him. That Jim Collins she couldn’t stand. It was him she loved, and he could not die and leave her. But the trouble was he died. It was a deep black hole and he was falling into it. He knew it was death and there was no way to stop. He opened his eyes and the hole was still there. He could not escape it. He let out a yell and tried to get up. Ina held him down. “What’s the matter, Bucky, what is it?” He lay paralyzed and looked at the hole, the sweat standing out all over his body. Then he realized it was only the window. The window was open, and beyond it the night was dark. He lay back a little easier. “I’m all right,” he said, “let go.” “What are you afraid of, Bucky? What is it?” “Nothing,” he said. He put his hand down under the covers; he was fully dressed. That was good. From his pocket he took his knife and opened it quietly so Ina couldn’t hear. Then he held it in his hand against his leg. 66 He looked at Ina. “Can I do something?” “No,” he said. “What is it, Bucky?” “Leave me alone,” he said. “You look so funny and scared.” “Shut up,” he said, “can’t you leave me alone?” He lay with the knife gripped tightly in his hand and looked at the window. It was so dark and damp outside. He felt helpless lying in the bed, but he could not take his eyes from the window or go near it to close it. “You stay here,” he said. “I will, Bucky. Are you all right?” “I guess I’m a little crazy. Everything is very light and dizzy.” “You better go to sleep,” she said. “I will. But you promise to stay here and not go near the window.” “Why? Why in the world, Bucky?” “Jesus Christ,” he said, “can’t you do any simple damn thing?” “All right,” she said. “I can’t take crap from everyone,” he said hazily, and then he fell asleep with the knife held rigidly beside his leg. —But the very next Sunday Ina got up before the old lady and came into his room. In the bed he was lying awake, but at first he kept his eyes closed as though he were asleep. He could feel Ina kneeling beside his bed, not moving or saying anything, and after a while he opened his eyes, and said: “What’s the matter?” “I want you to come, like before; I want you to try and make it nice in the family.” After she said that he closed his eyes again. She made him feel rotten and sad and sick in his stomach. But he didn’t know what to say because it wasn’t a family and never would be. “I was lying in bed,” said Ina, “and thinking about how I used to read the Bible to you—how it was when you were younger and everything.” “It was a long time ago,” he said, and he thought, it’s so long ago it wasn’t me then, or it isn’t me now, or I just don’t know who I am or was. “Why do you hate Mama so?” “I don’t hate her. She makes me sick and sorry; I don’t know why sorry.” “You don’t understand.” “I understand we’ve been cheated, you too only you don’t know it.” “What do you mean, Bucky? What do you mean cheated?” “I don’t know,” he said; the whole subject made him sick; “Listen, why don’t you go away and let me sleep?” 67 “Oh, Bucky." She put her head down on the bed, and he couldn't look at her. “That's what I mean: you’re so hard to get to any more. Please, Bucky, don’t be so far away from me too." “All right," he said. “No. Not that way. I’m not telling you." “I don’t know what the hell you expect me to do." “Come to church," she said, “do it like you used to." Then he lay silently and thought about the father standing above him with the light of God in his eyes and the condemnation in his speech—the judgment that rose from his guts like a storm on the ocean—and he saw the father all in black standing on top of the water and commanding him to come, to step forward into the water and be lost in God. “No," he said, “I’m not going to sit and be fed a lot of junk. If that’s all you got to say you better go back to bed, or go get into your hat and lose your head." “Please, Bucky," she said—she was hurt and the gloom of Sunday had trapped them both. He felt like damning something he didn’t know, whatever made Sundays and the rest of it; his guts were all chopped to pieces and dead. It was a lousy mess. “Go away," he said, “I’m sorry but I can’t go to church, I don’t want to hurt you but I can’t stand Mama. When I look at her I feel lost and scared. I don’t know what the hell to say. Go on to church and leave me alone." —That night he dreamed the sky grew heavy and clouded over with a storm. To get away from it he ran down into the earth—it was soft and he was able to jump into it and work his way into the soil—and he kind of swam deeper and deeper, until it was so dark he couldn’t see. Behind him the wind howled and sucked the earth up into the sky. He had to dig faster and faster to stay below the surface, to keep the storm from getting him. But no matter what he did the storm, opening the earth, got closer and closer behind. —“Look," said Guinea, “what are we gonna do?" The question repeated itself like the slow plodding of their footsteps. He let it hang for a minute, the dull sound lost in the twilight muddle of the waterfront businesses. He blinked the neon away, but the signs came back out of the gray dusk. He walked, but his feet were leaden in the street. “I don’t know," he said. “You tell me." “I can’t," said Guinea. “I’m a lost soul. I’m a ship at sea, a plane in flight." “You’re an idiot," he said. “Come on," said Guinea, “a beer." 68 So it was decided, the routine, the always present thirst. “A beer?” he repeated, “the road to hell?” “Christ,” said Guinea. “Sure,” he said. “Christ Jesus, the rube.” Guinea stepped sideways and opened his arms in exclamation. “Ain’t it the Rube himself?” “The very Rube,” he said, taking a bow in the street. “The very Rube of this shit-house place. I’m disgusted.” “Come on,” said Guinea, “you need a drink.” So It was decided. He walked on. Guinea slouched along beside him. They turned the bend around the big church, then it was all down hill to the water, the water grey and solid under the near-night sky. Along the right side of the road the splotches of neon flashed: Bar and Grill, Louey’s Restaurant, Worms, Shinners and Frozen Bait. He soaked it all up dumbly. He felt detached. “I need a rest,” he said. “You already had a two week vacation, since you heaved that desk through the window.” The thought drove a shaft into him; not the window, something else. He felt a flash of anger at Guinea, then he let that too soak into the growing darkness. “The old lady went to school about it. I'll be back this Monday.” “Here's Ziggy's,” said Guinea. Ziggy, with his wide, red face laughing; Ziggy, smiling his cool sly smile behind the counter. “A coupla quarts.” “You fella’s eighteen, aren’t you?” “Hell, yes. Why, man, what d’ya mean, Zig?” “I got to check, you know. You know how it is I sell to minors.” Then the cool, sly smile counting the change twenty-five cents too short. “You boys know how it is.” “Sure,” said Guinea. “Good old Zig.” “A real hell of a guy,” he said. “I could lose my license,” said Ziggy. They held the quarts, each one wrapped separately in a brown paper bag. When they went out it was dark, the sky above the white flicker of neon a deep deep blue that became richer as they passed from under the lights and headed out on the town dock. “Let’s sit below the bulkhead, on the rocks.” They scrambled down the side, holding the quarts up away from the rocks, 69 slipping down the ledge to the large flat slab that hovered only a few feet above the water. They sat down and pulled out the opener. The quarts hissed, spurted; a foam rose and dribbled out their necks. He took a big gulp and felt it fizzle all the way to his stomach, then it burned back and lifted a tingle to his scalp. He squinted his eyes and looked out at the bay, dark and calm in the clear still night. A sudden rush went through him; a thrill greater than alcohol washed through his body. There was a secret in the night, a thought that became a presence behind his sight. He took another swallow and waited for the presence to grow. It came slowly, increasing with the beer; it darkened and flashed a fear over him. But he let it grow. The pattern went on: fear, excitement, pleasure; he let it grow larger. It expanded inside him. The night opened out and began to fill with warmth and he felt the knife blade of fear cutting through the softness again. Then he opened his mouth and let some of it out. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, "Guinea, every day, I mean if you look back on a week, say, and think about it, it seems like we don’t really do anything.” He looked sideways at Guinea to see his expression. He wondered if he was being a damn idiot to even open his mouth. If Fats were here he wouldn’t say even a little of it. But Guinea was different, Guinea you could talk to more. “What do you mean?” said Guinea. “We do plenty.” “Listen,” he said. “We drink, right?” “Sure.” “How many days a week?” “I don’t know. Five. Seven.” “And there’s a rumble or two, right.” “Yeah, a rumble or two. We drink five, seven days. So what?” “And what about school? What do we do there?” “Nothing,” said Guinea. “Not a damn thing.” “Right,” he said. “You see, we don’t really do anything.” Then Guinea was silent. He seemed to be thinking about it. The whole thing was not very clear anyway, but the pressure behind the thought continued to grow. He feared suddenly if he did not get it out it would go and maybe he would never know if it had really been there or not. “I’m sick of it,” he said, “disgusted. I want something better, something bigger.” “Sure. Like what?” “I don’t know,” he said. He groped further into the center. The Guinea was not getting it but he had to go on. A dark smothering thing began to 70 Figure without caption. Snowbound Donna Hunter Donna Hunter descend upon him and the clear excitement became muddled. He lost sight of it himself. “I’m going to take out Carol Reece," he blurted suddenly from the confusion, "take her out, get that chick to know who I am/* But the excited clear feeling was in danger. Somehow now the words were hollow and stupid. For letting them out he despised himself and even before Guinea began to laugh he filled with a deep burning hatred that drove out at the Guinea who had listened to his insides in a way he would not even let himself do. He smashed the bottle down on the rock furiously. “What the hell’s so funny?" he yelled. “Carol Reece,” laughed Guinea, “so, Carol Reece, huh?” “Yeah! What the hell’s so funny?” he demanded again. He saw the Guinea with all his magazines, his hand on his pecker wishing. He saw the pages turn and the hot frustration surged in him. The Guinea was useless and he could not stand being near him. He held the neck of the broken bottle and every muscle in his body tensed and strained forward at that dark laughing useless mouth. But Guinea was not even aware. He laughed and laughed. He held his stomach and rocked back and forth. “What’s so funny?” he roared, “oh, Christ! Carol Reece. That beautiful luscious broad. You and Carol Reece. Oh, no!" Then he lunged forward, caught the Guinea’s hair in his left hand, snapped his head back, jammed the jagged edge of the bottle against the soft skin of his throat and said, "You filthy Guinea bastard! You sick pile of vomit, get out of here! Get away so I can’t see you! Get out of here now!” He shoved him backward off the rock. Guinea landed partly in the water, got up and scampered up the rock. He turned and swore and spat a huge gob of phlegm that sailed down the slope and splattered on his arm. Then Guinea was gone and he stood looking up at the empty pier. He began to wipe off his arm and he sat down on a rock and looked out across the water. He knew something had changed. He knew something was different now. All at once the feeling he had been struggling with for so long leaped out into the night and became a real thing. He couldn’t believe that something so ridiculous had happened to him. In his mind the thought became a chant that repeated itself over and over. I love her, he thought. I’m in love with Carol Reece. I’m in love with Carol Reece. I love her. The thing was so new and strong he thought he would explode. He jumped up and his throat was all tight with a huge knot in it. He began to walk along 72 the rocks. He got to the strip of sand and continued to walk away from the pier, away from the lights, walking farther and deeper into the night that had become so full of her. When he reached out, he could touch her. He had called out her name to the world. He had told Guinea even though he had laughed. He had fought in connection with her name and given her a place of importance in his own life. He felt that right then she would be able to know it, feel it. He had created a bond between them that reached to wherever she was. For the first time in his life he was filling up instead of becoming more and more empty. His whole being expanded to meet the night. He walked on and on without thought of stopping, and the darkness instead of death was a new well of life he plunged deeper into. He crashed through his own life into something he did not want to control. And he didn’t stop to wonder where it had come from or how it would end. —In bed he thrashed around, turning over and over. He burned inside; the flush entered his cheeks and continued to rush inside his head. The pattern was red and white, and it flashed alternately, searing his heart like a hot iron. He saw her in images, flashing on and off in the darkness. He rolled over and the tight knot choked inside him. The crazy fear shuddered through him leaving him weak and racked with a desperate fever. He called out to something growing inside. But then the red flash passed on and he lay silently, lost in the darkness. Some of the old fear returned and the thing growing inside him stopped suddenly and listened. He saw something briefly that made him shudder and cower against the soft sheet. He closed his eyes against it. But the shape was inside him; half animal and half human, it staggered to its knees. Its body was pierced with sharp spears. It tried to call for help. The mouth worked soundlessly. It turned its mangled head toward him. One bright eye looked out through the pulpy red flesh and drilled into his brain. —He watched her gather her books together, lift them absently against her full firm breasts. The other students rose and passed by him out of the room. He sat numbly, paralyzed in half his mind; then he rose and a will deeper inside him started his feet to move. He followed her out of the room. He would not let himself think of her, of her hair, her straight back, of her hips. He thought nothing bitter as he walked down the hall, jostled absently against the other students. He moved on in a new world. She was outside; walking alone, she was past the locker room. Her hair glistened in the bright sun. There were yells from the field beyond the 73 bleachers, thuds and the sharp thwack of a football being kicked. The air was soft and full in the warm sun; it dropped lazily out of the clear sky and flushed his head. He walked slowly. But inside he was racing. He heard the screech of burning tires and the sharp mesh of clanging gears. Through his mind a car hurtled forward, he slammed through the gears and suddenly the road blazed at him. His breath caught as he saw her again in front of him. He felt the sweat standing out on his forehead. He saw himself as he was with Guinea and Fats, his blue jeans, his leather jacket, his boots—he looked at himself again to realize he’d left them all home. He had on his slick trousers, the yellow sport shirt with no jacket, and shoes. He passed his hand over his combed down hair. Now, he thought, do it now! But his feet refused to move faster. A rush of light surged dizzily with the effort. He held on as though he were going to fall. Then a calm center rose and pushed out of him. He feared it but could not resist it. He walked on faster. The power of a dream urged him on, then it was a nightmare and he recoiled, in his mind turned, almost running—he jumped on the accelerator and the force threw him back. His hand jammed the various gears. Then the night burst at him and he heard the sharp skidding sounds on the road. He spun wildly and then flew out over a cliff. “Carol,” he said, “I . . . Wait a minute.” She turned to look at him. A cold impersonal stare not even knowing. He ran up. “We never talked,” he said. ”I don’t think you even—” “What do you want?” The short, cold question. He froze inside. He whirled. “Nothing ... I . . .” Over. Over before it began. Lost, destroyed, hopelessly out of reach—a first and last time gone in two seconds. His own hand turning the pages of the magazine. The puffy flesh under the tight brassieres, the pictures the best of what he would know. He and Guinea. The best. “. . . I wanted to walk you home.” But the disgust, the near hate there in her wonderful eyes, her round breasts squashed against herself, her white skin tightening. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” The pleading—the sick lost pleading despising itself. “Just let me walk you, to your home. I’m going that way and . . .” “Why should I?” The hate and disgust, swelling, the sentence filled with it; curt, abrupt, no 74 time for you. And still the magazines the only way, even wanting it now, loving the darkness and the fantasy, the bright colored pictures pulsing in his head and his hand jerking his . . . “I don’t know. I thought we could . . .” Stopped—her eyes decided, hardening, the words coming out and no way to stop. "Leave me alone. I know all about you and that group of yours." “I don’t have a group. This is me, just me. I don’t have any group.” “If you don’t leave me alone right now I’ll scream or call the cops or something.” “No, please,” he said, “listen . . .” He stopped. The shape passed into his vision, the presence inserting itself and driving him back, the thick football neck and the small eyes asserting, “What’s going on here? Listen, Carol, is this guy in your way?” Jim Collins stepped forward and stood squarely in front of him. —He looked at the thick neck, at the square, husky face and the small colorless eyes. “Get out of my way,” he said. But as though ignoring him, Collins asked again, “Carol, is this guy bothering you?” “If you don’t get out of my way, I’ll bust your fat head open.” But he was big, he was calm and sure of himself. His thick neck swelled into an arrogance. His shoulders heaved. “I think this punk needs to be trimmed down.” The confidence swelling, the maddening belief in his own power and goodness, the cool control of the right and the strong. “He wouldn’t let me alone,” she said. “He followed me out here.” And the way she said it caressing him, her voice warming at Collins’ back and by that very fact mocking, laughing over his shoulder at him and taunting now. He tried to say something: his mind raced for the biting comeback; he wanted to smash them both but at the same time he was crying inside. Through a veil of bitterness and rage he saw how easily Jim Collins filled a place in her life he could never hope to find. He tried to hate her but he couldn’t. He stood still and could not even open his mouth. But Collins stepped forward. “Shove off,” he said, and one of his broad meaty hands came out and shoved against his chest so that he staggered backward. He regained his balance clumsily. “Don’t hurt the little boy,” said Carol, laughing. “Let him run on home.” “Sure,” laughed Collins, “I’ll let him run. Shove off,” he said again and again the big hand drove out. 75 He felt the solid thud on his chest but there was no feeling behind it. Again he staggered backward and stood up awkwardly. His hands flopped at his sides. His legs stumbled numbly. He was outside his body and getting farther away. His sight filled with Carol’s face, laughing; his mind repeated the warm confidence with which she had accepted Collins’ protection. He was aware of being the villain. He was not the hero but the enemy. Instead of fighting for her he was against her; she was protected by Jim Collins against him. He could not fight and win because now there was no winning. He was not her hero. He took the next shove still without awareness. His body was an empty thing, battered and knocked by an impersonal sea. He plunged backward along the sidewalk. Collins came ahead, laughing; then for the first time he saw the wide mocking face directly. He focused on the small taunting eyes as the head advanced. A clot of vomit rose in his throat and he tasted a bitter acid which burned his mind awake and suddenly he felt the solid pain of the heavy hand against his chest. He gave under the blow but this time his feet remained under him. He tensed, let all the power of a sudden rage build in his arm and he struck out quickly. His fist squashed into Collins’ nose and he saw strings of blood and saliva fly out to the side. After his steady retreat this new attack caught Collins off guard. He drove at him smashing his fists rapidly in his face and stomach, but Collins did not go down. He lifted his knee hard but only hit Collins in the thigh and he tried by hitting furiously to keep Collins’ face open. But Collins was a mound of muscle that seemed to absorb everything. He lowered his head and dove in at him in a last attempt to knock him down. But this time he caught Collins’ fist rising from the ground and his head burst apart in a blaze of white light. The realization that Collins was still up pierced his stomach with sudden fright and he turned sick and weak. He reeled back but caught himself and lunged forward again. This time Collins was ready and the blow sailed by just glancing his right shoulder. Immediately he felt a hammer fist bludgeon his stomach and a blast of knuckles exploded in his right ear. He reeled back dizzily. His mind was screaming in his skull and tracers shot back and forth across his sight. The mountain advanced and he felt the blows from another dimension. They landed and he knew they landed but he did not feel them directly. Something crushed his body in half and the wind went out of him. He doubled up and then another something wrenched him up straight from his jaw and he was whirling, flying, sailing backward and then he landed, rocked back with his head at the sky and his mind thought this is grass, lift your feet, you have fallen, and then the center inside him that was no longer himself but something mechanical took over and his feet rose 76 automatically in the fall, and they connected with the mountain rush that would have buried him. From that other dimension he heard the hollow smack and somehow he knew it was Collins’ jaw crunching against the heel of his shoe. The mountain disappeared and he stumbled around to raise himself. He stood up but the green lawn they had fallen across inverted itself and he found he was lying down again. He got up again and the street was a river of yellow water rushing before his eyes. He tasted the warm blood taste and he spat out a thick syrupy mass. Before the mountain crashed into him again he saw Carol standing on the sidewalk and looking at him. She was saying words but the sound was lost in the whirr of an engine that raced in the river. He walked into a fist and then he fell forward against the side of the mountain. The river lapped around the base of the mountain and tried to pull him under. He looked over a hill and there was Carol again. She was cheering and calling things, but he could not hear them because of the engine. Then the river drowned the engine and he heard her voice and then the sound was clear and he heard her calling: “Give it to him. Show him, Jim. Give it to him good!” Then the mountain came toward the river and he went down under the avalanche. His head filled with tons of rushing water but through it all the center repeated words to itself, the words echoed loudly: “Get him, Jim, get him!” But the sound drowned in darkness. He felt the center struggling to reach the surface but he was divorced from it. His body fumbled mechanically a million miles away and then something broke through to the surface and there were screams. A sickening bitterness and disgust washed over him, then there was an earthquake and the mountain fell away. The loud screaming switched into his consciousness. There was great confusion and a sudden shock brought his mind back. He saw through his own eyes again. Collins was on the ground, holding his stomach and rocking back and forth. A dark pool was spreading out around him on the grass. Carol began screaming over and over. He saw two boys rush up to Collins. A woman behind him was screaming things from the porch of her house, and he looked at her in bewilderment. Then he looked down at his hand and he saw the knife glistening in the sun and it was a long time before he knew what it meant. Then suddenly he understood. —At first he could not think beyond the running. He was a tight knot of aching and driving muscle that twisted and turned and tied itself up tighter. Through his eyes he saw shapes, bright blazing shafts of light that ended in darkness, shadows that deepened and then broke apart in bolts of filtered yellow light. 77 He crashed through the low hanging branches and broke his way through the tangle of low brush. He fell but his legs continued to run, churning and clawing at the damp earth. He sprawled flat in the thick piles of leaves and shrub and his arms and feet continued to thrash steadily in the fast running motions. He rose up and stumbled forward against the trees. With his arms out in front of him he found his way through the thick tangle. His feet chose the best path at a single steady speed. There was no stopping and there was no end. There were no trees or bushes or clumps of sharp rock. There was only light and dark, hardness and pain, the sharp stinging lash and the dull thud, the rise and the fall, the cool soft dampness and the gray flickering endlessly flashing and dulling. He stumbled out across the creek and then fell down in the patch of yellow sand beside it. Suddenly everything stopped. He reached out for the water, his arm fell into the coolness and he let it lay there. He turned his face to the side to free his mouth of the sand. He spat out the yellow grit spasmodically. Strings of thickened saliva and blood sprayed out and hung in a web from his panting mouth to the cool round pebbles by the creek bank. He lay still, paralyzed with exhaustion. His chest rose and fell against the solid layers of sand. He searched numbly for the thing that would tell him what to do. Inside his skull he groped around the dark corners and angles searching for his mind. He found something that had a direction to it. He could not hear what it said but he knew it was going somewhere and that if he would wait soon he would know what to do. He felt the congestion in his mind clear. The sharp ache in his chest and side broke through to awareness but then began to recede. His body was a maze of pain, but soon he was able to distinguish the various kinds of pain and then he could match the pain with the particular part of his body that felt it. His face felt raw and sticky with blood. His tongue licked out at his torn lips and then retreated, repulsed. A thick flap of flesh seemed to be slowly dropping down over his one eye. In a moment he decided it was his right eye, the one that was squinting at the clear water that trickled over the creek bottom. He moved his arm, the right arm, he thought, the one in the creek, and he saw the ripples fan out and then get carried away by the current. His legs twitched slowly as though remembering how to run. He felt a tightness in his ankle, and his stomach knotted suddenly. The cramp in his stomach recalled that heavy fist smashing and driving at him. He tried to tense the row of muscles below his chest and the sudden 78 Figure without caption. Melvyn S. Bucholtz pain made him dizzy. Through the pain he saw Collins again, rocking forward and back on the ground holding his stomach, clutching the hole that spurted red. His own pain let him enjoy the image for a moment and then a sudden burning panic seized him. Oh sweet Jesus, he thought. Oh my sweet Christ! The blanket of fear closed over him and he lost direction again. He quivered slightly and then began to shudder violently as he began to claw at the sand. A thick muttering sob dribbled through the gore that continued to form in his mouth. His eye closed and then there was darkness. He choked through the darkness and then he lifted his head so he could see out of his good eye. The sunlight glistened in the creek and stabbed a needle behind his forehead. He pushed himself up from the chest. Behind him he felt his legs begin to draw forward and his knees fumbled under him. He crawled forward to the creek and leaned over to suck the cool water into his thickening mouth. He could not purse his lips and he licked at the water with his tongue, drawing the coolness into the burning cavity, swishing the liquid over the flaps of torn skin and blood soaked teeth. He spat a rust colored fluid into the creek. He sat up and looked around him. The shadows were long from the trees and the sun slanted in at an angle. He rose, steadying himself with his left arm against a tree, then began walking along the creek. His wind came back to him and soon he began to trot. He leaped over the creek and ran on the other side where it was cleared. The crunch of his feet on the brush and stones started his mind working in a rhythm. They’ll go to the house, but they won’t be there yet. It just happened but it seems like a year. That bastard Collins. Did I really do it? I saw the knife and him sitting there. Did I really do it though? I saw the knife, sitting rocking with his hand holding the spot. They could have stopped me, too. They could have jumped on me and called the damn cops. Cops probably there now. They watched it and then afraid to come at me after I did it. That damn woman screaming. I remember the screaming. I ran. They were afraid to stop me. I’m still running. Am I running? He picked up his stride despite the new aches. The pain congealed again, became a general pain that he felt as one thing again. Ina. Got to tell Ina. Not let those bastards do it. Got to explain. Oh, Ina, I got to run. The running a swelling and pulsing, lifting, his feet mindlessly rising, falling. He came out of the woods and ran down the alley behind the row of small white houses. He crossed over to the next street and plodded up the hill. On the top of the hill he stopped, saw absently the bay through a break 80 in the trees, let himself roll into a down hill stumble, stopped himself halfway down the slope and turned left through the front door. Ina was in the kitchen. Not looking at her he passed quickly into his own room and got his leather jacket out of the closet. From the bottom of his bottom drawer he got another knife and stuffed it in his side pocket. He kicked off his shoes and stepped into his boots. Then he turned and saw Ina looking at him. “Oh, God, Bucky,” she said. “Oh, God, no!” For a moment a mixture of fear and anger washed over him. “I can’t explain,” he said. “I’m all right but I ain’t got time. For once, Ina, for one goddam time will you please not get all shook and let me talk?” But she looked at him with that wild despair in her eyes. Her mouth opened to speak but no sound came out. His heart sped up suddenly and he was afraid. “I got in a jam. I got to get out.” Her mouth worked a few more times before the sound came. “Bucky. Oh, Bucky!” “I’m all right. But I got to get out.” The need to hurry swelled in him and gagged the words in his mouth. He choked and gasped, and tears welled in his eyes. Ina moved toward him. “No,” he yelled, “I got to say.” He moved backward away from her. “I want you to know I didn’t mean it. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused you and Mama. I don’t hate her. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s not you or her, it’s me. I know it’s me.” He stood and looked at her and then the hard knot began to rise until he thought it would explode inside him. He held it back, and he began to shake and the water streamed out of his swollen eye. He clenched his fists and then with a sudden rush and release the knot rose and he burst out crying. He doubled up and Ina ran to him and he felt her arms around him. He heard her crying too and then the fear poisoned him again and he pushed out of her arms. He stood and looked at her and there were no words for either one of them. Their eyes met and there was a great fear in the room. The fear seemed to grow, and then it was a live pulsing thing between them and they could not speak. They stood, afraid, the fear growing larger and larger. Then he turned and ran out of the house. Suddenly he was alone again and running. 81 RUTH LECHLITNER Prehistoric: Circa 1960 A.D. Chrome-sleek saurians crawl on an overpass above parallel insect-runs where pedunculared ants scurry from metal-jawed termites that raise antennae feelers — where tropical-colored beetles meet to commune with jewel-eyed totems placed at a trail-crossed jungle. It isn’t hard to imagine this big-bodied, foraging dinosaur with its long neck topped by pin-head perception, lumbering into a fresh asphalt pit, to sink there hip-caught, bellowing — while winged pterodactyls zoom-arrow their course above huge thunderheads into an always contemporary west-setting sun 82 Directions for a Contemporary Composition In Mixed Media —Sketch under smog-veiled, cindered light the upthrust phallic forms of Night. Beneath, place shattered bone-white nudes in horizontal solitudes. Enclose, with missle arcs, a mind disaster-meshed; a heart designed with broken plastic fragments . . . Frame the whole in charcoal edged with flame. Give it no title. Sign no name. 83 M. S. HOHAUSER I doodle the most profound of doodles. my baby is in the arms of history. we sit, a father child cameo dichotomy learning to speak together—in polysyllables, words we stole from the world. I am a father and a scholar before the sun, lighting the flying tresses of my Jewish girl, running innocent as the speech we want, across a field of some crazy Greenwich morning. Greenwich is a lane, a place, and a phenomena the time of which has long since lost its bittersweetness: my baby will lay across a soft worn universe; my girl in the hidden womb of a dead angel; I talk, talk as all the visions invade from time, history, the whistle of one womb or another, while the poem is sketched, a doodle in sound. 84 The carnival wind, and an eon of Pushkin, tell me that I must say what I’ve to say. the air, a red and flaming garment wrapt tight about you, whirls the atmosphere and sets off a portion of the shunning darkness, as a candle, dripping one hot plasm ember tear to a dish, full soft and warm, with fallen tallow, divides clinging sullen shadows. a poet reads from memories of trenchent verse, shadowgraphs of mystic dread, made brilliant in this abcess world; solitary prophet sits listening behind the quick elastic rhythm of a poet’s word on the lips of song, ashamed his sound doesn’t come from the belly of a twelve string. 85 Untitled Drawing on canvas Untitled Drawing on canvas Robert Oppenheim MOTHER GOOSED by Mark Kupperman Max Zucher had these theories. One was that the distinctive quality of modern man was his inability to stare or be stared at. “The starers are gone," he said over beers at McSorley’s, “passed into legend." I was sliding in the realm of stupor and asked him what he was talking about. He answered in his W. C. Fields voice. “Listen, my son. It was in that time before man assumed the guise of divinely inspired creature. There then existed this sacred species of primeval homo sapiens. They were mutants whose livelihood depended entirely on their specialized use of the stare.0 Image explicit, Max exploded. “Huge prehistoric beasts, mouths goried with blood, fell prey, downed exhausted, victimized by these early men. Hour upon more hours . . .° He interrupted himself for a drink. Max had brought his own stein, a tall pewter mug with a hinged metal cap. Carved on the side was a centaur in the process of seducing a mule. Tilting the brew above his head, Max emptied the last few drams. In an exhibition of remarkably trained coordination, the mug dropped from his lips and the primed explosion of narrative in- 87 stantaneously returned. “Hour upon more hours, these men practiced and exercised their stare. Encountering another animal, they’d shoot death frozen gazes at their opponent’s eyes. Then, neither being moved. To avert your adversary’s eyes was the gravest sin against the ancient jungle code. It was defeat, a sure sign of weakness and cowardice.” Max leaned back against the wall. His head rested framed by the skeleton of the Kentucky Derby victory wreath from 1897. Suspended from the horseshoe shaped sides of the wreath, on a rusting chain, there was a silver plate that validated the date of the race. The wreath was the largest item hanging on the tavern walls. Among the phantasmagoria were two centuries of campaign buttons, handbills, trophies and medals, postcards, family photos and a myriad of penny museum objects. Traditionally, each customer left something worthless to further decorate the bar. The custom, begun with the tavern about 1800, compelled me to donate a two line poem written on the inside of a matchbook. That was six months before, the night I met Max at one of the Donker’s parties. I was dating a wild-ass girl from Westfield. She was invited and I tagged along. During the festivities she disappeared and Max, with totally drunken composure, began talking to me. He had this patterned conversation with anyone he didn’t know. He called it his “cryptic introduction phrases.” If I had failed to respond to it, he would have proceeded to talk about himself. “Answer the Sphinx’s riddle, pronounce the hollow of your groin and you may follow me past your Mother’s silence.” I had answered, “The sound of one hand clapping is an old man’s dream.” The shakey response threw him off balance, literally. He was about to laugh and pat me on the back when he slipped. In one grand forward motion, he tumbled over a long-haired girl grooving a mandolin, knocked over a three-legged table and meshed his head solidly into the floor. “Pig, pig, pig.” the injured girl shouted at Max’s unconscious body. He groaned. I remember helping him up and taking him outside. It was a clear night with music pounding to the street. I wanted to walk. Max followed like a zombie, shaking his head more awake each block. After we reached Bleeker St., he had recovered enough from his walking nectar’s slumber to lead me to McSorley’s. The rest of that night and early morning we sat laughing at and listening past each other. Max showed me his name carved six different times on the wooden table tops. It was hard finding them all since they were mixed in with a million maybe other scratches. Max, considering himself the Michael- angelo of table top artists, had used a special wood tooling set for his last two carvings. The M’s resembled the gargantuan first letters of the Gutenberg Bible. Flourishes and bubbling ivy-streaming lines crowded all directions. 88 They obliterated several other more modest reliefs. When I carved my initials with a borrowed penknife, Max and I made a drunken pact to return the last day of every month for an evening’s binge. Then, at the end of summer, Max was expounding his new theory—the stare syndrome. Within his illusions, he could create realities, do no wrong and could conquer all worlds. "The power to overcome another’s stare,” he continued, “and to force other beings to hide their weakened eyes and minds is a most awesome weapon. “A world, without knowledge, is saved from my demonstration of this destructive power only by my personal benevolence.” Something hurt sharply in my shoe. Removing it, I found an asphalt pebble. “But for this spark of long lost kindness, humanity would shrink from me in mindless fear.” Max’s emotional affinity to what he says is a frightening quality that was beginning to permeate his thesis. A few weeks after I met him, he was flying on marijuana. He told the assemblage that he was as tough as steel. He asserted that he possessed a brain capable of withstanding any pain to his body: that the “zen spirit flowed violent” in his veins. Extending his flattened palm at us, he shouted, “My hand defeats mightiest rock. This skin fibre is strength.” Then he grabbed a cigarette from the communal ashtray. It was lit, but he sucked a few deep breaths burning the ash red. Slowly, paced by sweat rolling down his forehead, he lowered the cigarette into his hand. The two objects ground into each other. The burnt skin smell a single proof of his conviction, Max dared us one at a time to test him by rubbing out our smokes. We complied. In sequence, each companion walked his different radius across the room and burned Max’s hand while he snarled toughness. The Donker smoked an oversized Mexican cigar, puffing on the fat brown roll with methodical breath. The cigar grinding in, Max’s palm sizzled like spilled boiling water. He spent the next day at some health clinic. Second degree burns. The appendage was useless for about a month. “My thesis hasn’t completely convinced you,” he spoke reaching across the table for my drink, “Time is nigh for experimentation.” My drink poured into his and emptied. “Into the street, disbeliever, thou heretic of your own worst describing.” I followed. Waving monthly farewell to the bartender, we marched onto the street. A deserted world. Cars were parked hugging the curb, but none moving. Lights on against the night in apartments were the only signs of life. But just a hundred yards away civilization waited on Madison. Max, skipping to the corner, slowed to shuffle through hand in hand couples, 89 lovers and drunks, stalking unknown prey. A striking game animal, poorly camouflaged in suit, hat and attache case, moved toward him from the far end of the block. Spotting him, Max lifted his hands from his pockets and tightened them against his sides. The game concentrated on his feet and the traffic, and didn’t see Max until they stood just feet apart. Cemented to the sidewalk, Max stared straight into the businessman’s eyes. Their crossing sight snapped the man’s head backward. In sudden shock, he twisted his view. His entire head turned faced to the street. He walked wobbling awkwardly. He never saw the little Puerto Rican woman carrying shopping bags that collided into him. Vegetables and chunky tin cans splatted and clunked on the pavement. “Unlimited power!’’ Max screamed in the midst of the two fallen bodies and the rolling food. He raised one triumphant foot to the businessman’s back and threw his voice and arms at the passing people. “My stare would conquer this world, cast these petty creatures into fearfilled chaos.” He gleamed at the city with crazy glazed eyes. He picked a carrot from the ground, stuck it between his teeth and ran across the street. We were off. Spinning a broken course past pedestrians. Timing sprints through traffic. Running west toward the Village. Max ran ahead. He trotted easily. He was older but in better shape. Football and Track, I think, at Boston U. Still about twice a week he put on a sweat suit and ran around Washington Square. Black high sneakers, baggy sweat suit and six and a half feet above the ground, an old time sleeping cap with a white fuzzy ball on the end. Running across Fifth, Max took extra hard breaths into his lungs and forced them out rhythmically. We slowed to Sixth. Max decided to stare down everybody he passed. He beat them all — old women, teenagers, sandled beats, hoods with greasy heads, everybody. The empty corner ahead isolated a tall girl trying to hail a cab. Her head swung out anxiously to the street and back to the corner not to miss a taxi from either direction. Max slid to a spot where she would see him when she turned again. He planted himself and waited for the kill. When the girl finally turned, I saw her face wholly mad. Her cheeks drew tight. Her lips held shut like she was about to spit or scream. Then she saw Max behind her. And she didn’t turn away. All of her was mad and suddenly she had something tangible to be mad at — some idiot was trying to stare her down. 90 She swung around to face forward at Max. Her handbag dropped to the pavement. Her lips curled into a snarl. Raising her head, she shot back a freezing, hating stare. Max was bewildered, but only for a moment. The skin on his forehead pulled low over his eyes. He cocked his neck a careful inch ahead and tightened his hands into fists so hard the blood left and the fingers went white. And that’s how they stood through the night. About twenty feet apart, never moving, swearing petrified soundless dares and curses. A crowd gathered. But the sidewalk between the two was left empty. It was holy ground protected by the group whispering and pointing. A standoff with weapons more vicious than guns. Armed with adamant silence and frozen vicious eyes, Max and the girl stood pledged in battle. The audience maintained its size for the first two hours. If anyone left, their vacant spot filled quickly with another curious face. An apparent father lifted his young son onto his shoulders for an unobstructed view. Cars slowed passing the corner. All parking spaces for blocks were taken. Strangers to the throng were hushed silent. I got hungry. The blue neon line above the vegetable stand across the street attracted my stomach. The shop, crowding over the sidewalk, displayed its produce on stacks of used crates decorated by aluminum foil. When the stand closed, the stored products left the actual store space with enough room for an excommunicated churchmouse to painfully squeeze through. The crates held overripe avocados, exotic fruits from the hot houses on Long Island and vegetables from pastoral Jersey truck farms. While I was feeling a green melon a salesman wearing an Hawaiian bright patterned shirt stepped to my side. He had watched me cross from the crowd. “What da hell goin’ on over dere?” “An old lady’s being molested by a German Shepherd.’’ “Oy, Germans, dey should all be killed.” “German Shepherd dog." “A lady’s attacked by a dog?” "German Shepherd dog.” “That’s terrible.” “That’s sodomy.” I selected a cucumber. It felt cold and solid green. A cucumber looks clean while you eat it. The salesman charged me seven arbitrary cents while he strained for a distant view of the other side of the street. I walked back to a spot near Max. He had to be tiring, but there was little 91 visible evidence of it. Both he and the girl stood firm with no alteration of their stance. I doubt that Max saw me return. Deep in his posture he wondered why he was doing it. Eating the cucumber I watched the girl. I first noticed she had tall pink legs, a good length of red hair and over-puffy cheeks. A juicy cucumber. Leaning on a concrete building corner and dropping on the ground, I fell asleep. Never remember losing consciousness. I’m not even sure how long I slept. A gray world when I woke. The crowd was gone. No cars. One discarded drunk hung himself up with a lamppost. Max’s body bent. His back twisted off his waist. The distorted curve of his spine defied all known laws of gravity. His face sagged open at his mouth. The forehead skin had loosened and slid over his eyes. He was still staring but through gradually closing slits. The girl had lost her anger, but she stood at an upright angle and looked steady at Max. A dog, a stringy, brown-colored mutt with distant collie blood, lifted a hind leg at Max’s knee. In delayed response, Max’s strained legs rejected the wet feeling. They shook slowly first, then nervous trembling. But Max fought it off with the last filament of his pride and kept standing. Then it started again. His legs went wild shaking, running without lifting off the pavement. He swung his arms for balance, tried to open his eyes wider, moaned and fell off the curb. The girl didn’t notice he had fallen. She stared past the spot where her opponent had been, watching the colors blur in the early sunlight. Finally she saw Max in the gutter. She shook her eyes to focus. Slowly picking up her bag, she limped down the block, turned a corner and disappeared. The Nedicks’ stand had opened. They had no water, so I bought a small cup of orange drink. The liquid lost its color splashing on Max’s face. I lifted him from the asphalt and listened to his groans. I pulled a couple of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. I stuck one lit in his mouth and took the other. With smoke rising around him, he turned to me. A stupid Stan Laurel smile pointed his chin. “So much for conquest,” said Max. 92 WILLIAM NAGY Halloween It must have been the incongruity or maybe it was the beautifully poetic justice that made me laugh when I saw the herd of wild pumpkins smashing children on the sidewalk or maybe it was the way they ran down the street after me bouncing trailing vines and tendrils I was about to tell them my true feelings toward pumpkins but what can you say to someone when you’ve just finished carving a face into the back of his father’s head? 93 DANIEL OLMSTEAD His Taxidermists Yellow Glass Eyes Broken-haunched an old dog walked Humping the seasick shore away, His eyes glass and taxidermist’s yellow of owl, Ground to the wet nose Searching for old factory scents (Where the caretakers used to take his care) That remain between his ears Where once were sifted sounds (Now snarled sights), His fingers tasting sand and his tongue Searching for bodies they used to feel When paws were fingers and bitches were hot. Hawking along like a hie-skigh bird Searching for carrion to scent the fur Along his neck with his eyes ecstatic tight, His nose sucking sand, His spitless breath swelling his tongue, His bones rattling in his pelt, His tail curling round old man genitals, And his daft yellow eyes Foreign in the bright sun. 94 Trying his nose for the old smells In the husk of a sand-dead gull The flydry eye met his own yellowl And neither of them saw. His fingers licked the whitehot bitch: But tighter curled the tail. His nose swooped to the rotten gut: But only sucked a feather. He listened cocked to the cry of the bird: But the song flew to roost in his ears. His tongue fingered a boney beak: But tasted the smile of death. Searching for carrion to scent his fur The time for the owl flew white with his eyes So his broken hips saw where to go And he crambled across the moon-broke sea And the dog shrunk out of the flesh And his bones lay crossed in the sand And his sockets sunk to the scent in his skull And he flew with the eyes of the owl: His taxidermist’s yellow glass eyes. 95 LEE CARSON Dutchboy Alice I travel from a land of hinter, Skating on a frozen splinter, An Alice out of netherlands On the brink of fimbulwinter. The tatters of my wooden shoes Clack dully on the grimy ice; Blue eye swivels, wonders whose Thumb I’ve left in paradise; The grey one struggles with the mist That cloaks the many-legged land Wherein an undiminished hand May clench into a fist; Where Cheshire cats, both thin and cautious, Recognizing men as such, Concern themselves with mounds of sand And cannot grin So Goddamn much. 96 PETER LUNGREN Recollection of a Chilly Afternoon Lost implanted on furrow ground we stood Blistered by the wind and sand mixing Our thoughts, to think they mattered then As now, and then tomorrow will they end? And if so what then? There we stood unplanted In our minds, shrugged shoulders pulling down The slender stem of roots all wanting bloom, But blossoms disappear and appear again And again it seems we have come so near In cycling so far, there really is no end. Why do we stand erect when we can not bend? Swirling pebbles slapped our faces and dashed about In mischievous wind like overflowing voices Trying to cool and soothe what had once been. Our shoulders drooped like old crooked stumps Moving toward the grave down we slowly ran To once planted chambers deep buried beneath The sun swollen knoll of wind blown sand. Figure without caption. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS MARK KUPPERMAN is a sixth term senior from Maplewood, New York, majoring in Humanities. His work has appeared in Columbian Review, Arcadia, and Zeitgeist, WINTHROP ROWE teaches English in the College of Business Administration at Michigan State. His work has previously appeared in Zeitgeist, BRIAN SLAY MAKER is a sophomore at Michigan State, from Jackson, Michigan. This is his first published work. PETER FIORE is a graduate English major at Michigan State. His poetry has appeared in Obscurity and a Penny, a Chicago literary magazine. At present he is working on a book of short prose and poetry. THEODORE SJOGREN attended Michigan State. He is currently finishing a novel. His story, “A Legacy of Silence," appeared in the winter issue of Red Cedar Review, M. F. JONES is a student at Michigan State. This is his first published work. GELACIO Y. GUILLERMO, JR, is an instructor in English at the University of the Philippines. He is currently working on a first volume of poems. CRAIG STERRY is a resident of East Lansing from Hingham, Montana. He has published poetry in Caravan, Lamoni, Iowa; Caravel, Palo Alto, California; Promethean Lamp, San Francisco, where he won third prize in the Promethean Lamp National College Poetry Contest, in 1965; and in the winter issue of Red Cedar Review, He was the first place poetry winner of the 1965-66 English Department Creative Writing Contest. 98 MICHAEL CRONAN is a senior from St. Ignace, Michigan, majoring in English. His poems have appeared in Zeitgeist and in Flame Poetry Annual in Corpus Cristi, Texas. MELVYN S. BUCHOLTZ is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at Michigan State. He has previously been published in Red Cedar Review. RUTH LECHLITNER is an alumnus of Michigan State, class of '23, now residing in California. In addition to four books of her poems, her work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, Saturday Review, Harper's Bazaar, The Nation, The New Republic, The Minority of One, The Carleton Miscellany, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Literary Review, Epos, and the Christian Science Monitor. M. S. HOHAUSER is a sophomore at Michigan State, majoring in Philosophy. He has published in Creo, a New Jersey literary magazine, Impact, the literary magazine of Fairleigh Dickinson University, and the winter issue of Red Cedar Review. WILLIAM NAGY is a contributor to the winter issue of Red Cedar Review and has been published in The Paper. He is a freshman at Michigan State majoring in philosophy. DANIEL OLMSTEAD is a senior English major from St. Ignace, Michigan. He has published poetry in Temple, a Central Michigan University literary magazine, and has also had poems accepted for publication in Zeitgeist. LEE CARSON is a sophomore from Chicago, majoring in English. He has published poetry in The Paper. PETER LUNGREN is a junior at Michigan State majoring in English. This is his first published work. 99 Mother Mother Donna Hunter