RED CEDAR REVIEW
RED CEDAR REVIEW



RED CEDAR REVIEW

Vol. XIII No. 1

Spring 1979


Contents

Rosa Maria Arenas

The White Birches.................................................... 1

Love Poem Using Words Having the

"Long O Sound”.................................................. 2

Myron Taube

Callers.................................................................... 3

Robert Michael Rutan

An Old Familiar Place................................................17

This Imperceptible Rising and Falling........................18

James Haug

Late Nite TV..............................................................20

The Moron................................................................21

Ann Halm

Red Stars....................................................................23

Dennis Ellman

Water........................................................................39

I Am.........................................................................40

Ruby Hoy

For My Friend Who Has No Poems...........................41

Emilio DeCrazia

Minnesota Story.......................................................42

Daniel L. Klauck

In Pittsburgh..............................................................81

Davy Jones...............................................................62

Keith Taylor

Housepainter's Revenge............................................63

Dave Sims

Strands......................................................................64

Contributors' Notes..........................................................79

Magazines/Books Received.......................................81-82

Order Form for Red Cedar Review/Press.........................87

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Harry Smallenburg
Harry Smallenburg


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THE WHITE BIRCHES

Rosa Maria Arenas

My sister used to live across from 
a forest of White Birches

You may not know this

but the black dappled bark of a White Birch 
has eyes

We all knew these trees could see, could hear

You had to be careful about what you said 
You could only talk about what the trees 
were like that day, what shade, what coolness 
or say nothing

You had to move slow so the trees would know 
you wouldn't hurt them

Those black holes, those eyes 
could become mouths 
an arm could disappear into 
or your head might want to plunge in 
to join that green inside the bark

You had to be careful

You had to keep an eye out

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LOVE POEM USING WORDS 
HAVING THE “LONG O SOUND”

Rosa Maria Arenas

Oh Moe it is snowing

The moon set low like an opal 
in Oklahoma, in Toledo Ohio, in

San Francisco they think your odor holy 
Your nose, Your elbows, Your toes 
They want to offer up in bowls to Pluto

Even Opie on the sofa at home 
thinks youre the best thing since ravioli

In a bolero by the window 
Smoking and drinking coca-cola, 
Singing O-Connie-O to no one at all, 
You have more appeal than cantaloupe 
More character than oak

No one is as old as you

No one has more soul

But that's my opinion

You inspire wonder like an

Arizona meadow overrun with armadillos

If you move to Chicago

I will follow

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CALLERS

Myron Taube

She sat up in the bed like a small bird caught in a trap 
of pillows and blankets. Her face was small and hard. Over 
her creased, thin-lipped mouth, her nose was finely beaked. 
Her steel-gray hair was cut short, emphasizing the 
beakishness of her nose. Though she was close to eighty, 
her eyes were bright, and her head moved quickly as her 
daughter carried in her breakfast tray and put it down in 
front of her. She glanced down at the orange juice, toast, 
hard boiled egg and cup of tea, then at her daughter, who 
moved from one window to the next, pulling up the shades.

"Where's the paper?" she asked, feeling under the 
tray.

"It must be downstairs. I'll go get it."

"You don't have to wait on me," she said.

"That's all right, Mother."

"Millie will be along soon; she can get me the paper."

"Mrs. Williams has the wash today."

"What's the wash? I used to do the wash in two hours. 
She won't do anything once she gets the kitchen clean."

"Mother, stop it. You know she takes care of the 
house."

"Well, I don't like her snooping on me."

"She's not snooping."

"Then why's she wearing sneakers?"

"They're not sneakers. They're regular nurses' shoes 
with crepe soles."

"I don't like her always sneaking around. I don't have 
any privacy."

"Mother, please."

"And I don't like her handling my food and handling 
my dishes. And I don't like her trying to handle me."

"Mother, stop that. You don't find help so easy these 
days."

The doorbell rang. "That's Mrs. Williams," Stella said.

She went downstairs, and Martha quickly ate her hard- 
boiled egg and sipped her tea, smacking her thin lips. It 

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wasn't the same since the hip got broken. Stella made more 
of it than it really was, but if Stella knew how little it hurt, 
she'd probably stop having Mrs. Williams. It was good having 
somebody else around. Every day the newspaper had 
something about somebody caught in a fire or tied up by 
burglars. They could come up through the basement and 
nobody'd find her until Stella came home. The thought of 
lying on the floor with her arms and legs tied and underwear 
stuffed in her mouth made her gag, and she spit out 
the toast. She plucked crumbs off the blanket.

Stella came back. "Here's your newspaper. Mrs. 
Williams is downstairs, and she'll do the kitchen first."

She cocked her head. "What about me?"

"Would you like her or me to get you something?"

"No."

"All right, Mother. I'll be back by five."

"That's all right," she said, her voice just a little above 
a sob. "Don't worry about me."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing, nothing. Just don't worry. You go off to 
work and leave Mrs. Williams down there, messing around 
in my kitchen. I'll stay here. Don't worry. I'll be here when 
you get back."

"Stop that, Mother. Stop getting so melodramatic."

"I'm not melodramatic. If I fall out of bed, I'm sure 
Mrs. Williams will help me get back."

"Only if she hears you fall. Otherwise you'll just lie on 
the floor all day until I get back."

She caught her breath. "I never thought you'd say 
what you meant, not like that."

"All right. Bang on the floor with a shoe, and Mrs. 
Williams will hear you."

"Of course, she will, while she's vacuuming and listening 
to the TV."

"You have the phone. Your number is different from 
the phone downstairs, so you can call her and she'll come 
up."

"A blessing for little mercies," she said.

"Good-bye, Mother."

"Not good-bye," she said. "Auf wiedersehen."

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“Auf wiedersehen, Mother.”

Five minutes later, Mrs. Williams waddled into the 
room. Heavy and slow her dark brown face was brightened 
by white teeth and yellowed eyeballs.

"Well, well, how you this mornin', Miss Watkins? How 
you feelin'?

"Don't ask, Millie. Nobody really cares for an old 
lady."

"Oh, you ain't so old, Miss Watkins. You just a little 
fra-jile —that's all.”

"Listen, Millie, when you get old, nobody cares.”

Mrs. Williams laughed, her double chins, her breasts, 
and her flabby arms taking part. "Well, we is all got problems, 
that's for sure. 'Cause if it ain't one thing, it sure is 
going to be another.”

"Listen, Millie," she said. "Would you help me into my 
chair.”

"Sure,” she said. "You put your bathrobe on so you 
don't catch cold. You want I should get it?”

"Would you, please?”

Mrs. Williams took from the closet the flowery pink 
and gold bathrobe Stella had given her mother for 
Christmas and put it around her. The big body hung over 
her, the enormous breasts close to her face, almost on her 
shoulder, and she could see outlined against the white 
uniform the seams of her slip and the bulge of her 
nipples —she wore no bra —and she held her breath. Under 
the starchy smell of the uniform she always detected 
another smell.

"Now, Miss Watkins, you gonna let me slide you off 
yo' bed an' on the chair?”

"Yes, Millie. But be careful, don't let me drop.”

Mrs. Williams laughed. "You just relax an' let Ol 
Millie take care. I handle you like you was my little baby.”

She wheeled the chair over and set it alongside the 
bed. "Now you just relax yourself,” she said, and swung her 
over the side and lowered her into the wheel chair. "Now, 
how was that?"

"Thank you, thank you," she said quietly, letting out 
her breath. I'll take care of myself this morning.”

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“You sure you don't want nothing? 
“I'm sure, Millie, thank you."

* * * *

She pushed her wheel chair to the door and listened. 
The vacuum cleaner and the TV were on downstairs. She 
shut the door carefully, then pushed herself back to the 
dressing table. She turned on the radio, then looked at 
herself in the mirror and frowned. Helpless old fool. They 
were still giving the nine o'clock news. Good. She reached 
down to one of the bottom drawers and took out four wigs. 
She placed one on her head, tucking a few gray hairs into 
place and smiled. What a lovely auburn color. She rubbed 
on a little blue eyeshadow and blinked. She highlighted her 
cheeks with rouge and powdered her face. She put on her 
lipstick, she smiled at herself in the mirror. She looked 
twenty years younger.

She took the phone and dialed: three-three-three-nine- 
one hundred. Busy. She jiggled the plunger and called 
again. Still busy. She dialed again. There was nothing to do 
but keep dialing until another person finished. They only 
had four lines. She dialed again, and this time she heard the 
phone ringing. Good. She reached over and took the paper 
from the bed, spread it on the dresser, and looked for a 
good item to talk about. There really hadn't been any good 
callers yet, so she had to find something in the paper. 
Sometimes somebody called in ahead and said exactly 
what you wanted to, and you had to say the opposite. That 
was a test of wit. Yesterday, one lady called to complain 
about sex education and read off a John Birch thing she 
was going to read. So when Fred Sturdely put her on, she 
just said the opposite, that there was a bunch of dirty- 
minded old biddies around who never understood what life 
was all about, anyway. And Fred was pretty glad she had 
called, because even though he said nasty things about 
girls in mini-skirts, she knew he really liked the women. 
Always putting the people on, like that. But she started 
talking like she had four of her own in school, and they 

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were all getting better every year, and never having no 
trouble because they was getting sex in school. She got 
herself so excited, she began talking about how beautiful 
sex was, and she wished everybody could go to school and 
get some of it, there just wasn't enough to go around. They 
should have it in churches, too.

The whole thing was so funny, especially because she 
had to think fast. It was almost like when she had the 
double call. That was the greatest moment of her life. Just 
unbelievable. They'd been talking about the race riots and 
the Viet Nam war, and one man called in to say that that 
war was just a civil war, and we had no right to be there, 
and the next caller said he sounded like a coward, and 
didn't he love his country. Then she got called, and she was 
Mathilda, bent and shaky, with a little Slovak accent. She 
got all excited, and Bill Frost asked her if she really thought 
anybody who didn't want to fight was a coward.

"Well, I seen 'em," she said. "I seen 'em, an' my taxes 
is going to pay for their welfare."

"What do you mean?" Bill asked.

"I mean, they don't pay no taxes, because they don't 
work. They's the ones been makin' all the trouble with the 
marches and the picketin'. I says, if they don't like it here, 
they should go back where they came from."

It was always fun to say that with an accent, that they 
should go back where they came from.

Bill Frost got excited then and said, "Now wait, 
madame. Are you suggesting there's no room for dissent in 
this country?"

"Not when they don't pay no taxes, they ain't got no 
room for dissent. When you work hard an' pay your taxes, 
you got a right to dissent, but the best thing to do is shut 
up, because if you don't like it, you ain't got no rights."

"Now wait," Bill said. "Who are these "they's" you're 
talking about? After all, I've dissented, too. Do you have 
any they's in mind?"

"You know who 'they' is, Bill."

"No, I don't."

"It's them blacks that's taking the jobs away from 
white folks," she said. She remembered that Mrs. Williams 

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was downstairs, so she spoke quietly, holding the phone 
closer, her hand over the mouthpiece. "They come into our 
good neighborhoods and take our houses," she started to 
chant. "They take our jobs, they take our men, they . . ."

And then Bill cut her off, and she laughed while he 
made a long speech about being tolerant and believing in 
free speech, but that some people went too far. And then, 
while she still held the phone, he answered again, "Hello, 
Bill Frost." She was so surprised, she was almost at a loss. 
He must have flipped the same switch again, and she could 
hardly believe her senses, but he said "Hello" again, and 
she took her teeth out to disguise her voice. Oh, it was 
good, because she said, "Mr. Frost, I'm a first time caller, 
and I'm a little nervous."

"Don't worry," he said, "I've been doing this for 
twelve years, and I'm still nervous."

Then she had the beautiful idea to make it southern. It 
would work, because she hadn't said more than a sentence, 
and he couldn't catch the change, especially when she had 
dropped her teeth out. "Well, Ah've been upset by what 
that lady said, the one who was just on, saying those nasty 
things about our Nigras. Ah'm so scared, Bill, bein' on the 
phone for the first time, but I Ah know, because Ah've lived 
with them evah since Ah was a little child. Ah was very fortunate 
to have a dear old Nigra mammy. Ah do dearly love 
the colored."

She was sure Bill Frost had swallowed his tongue. All 
he could say was, "Yes. Where are you from?"

"Ahm from Carolina," she drawled, "and Ah do know 
and respect Senator Thurmond. We southerners do love ahr 
colored. We understand them, and we know it ain't ahr 
dear Nigra friends who cause the trouble. We know them, 
and they're good, God fearin' people, sadly put upon by 
outsiders. Ah know who the trouble makers are."

"Oh? Who are they, ma'am?"

"Well, Ah certainly don't want to point a fingah at 
nobody, but it's not ahr good dear Nigra friends who cause 
the trouble. You look at all the hippies, all the draft 
dodgers and card burners and marijuana smokers. You look 

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who got all those policemen in Chicago in trouble. You 
know they're all Jews."

"Now wait a minute," Bill Frost said. "You can't make 
statements like that."

"Ah said Ah didn't want to point a fingah at nobody, 
but it's the truth. You know it's a Jew war in Viet Nam. They 
put us in. We didn't have no business there, but them Jews 
put us there."

"Now wait a minute. You just said they were the draft 
card burners and they also put us in there?"

"That's why they can't be trusted."

"I'm sorry, ma'am," Bill said, "I just can't let this conversation 
go on." And then he cut her off and went on 
another long apology. But that call made her day.

Oh, they were so different, she thought. Bill was so 
serious trying to be nice to everybody. Wasn't at all like 
Fred Studely or Mel Purvis. Oh, that Mel Purvis was the 
worst. A Jew. Always having the liberal Commies on there 
to defend other pinkos. Sometimes she got him four or five 
times a week, and he was the worst one with that one call a 
show per week business. Very fast with the finger on the 
button. But she got him. Couple of times he just flipped her 
out as soon as he heard her, but she made up six or eight 
different people to throw at him. They didn't let you use 
your name, but she had names made up: Annie Kroposki 
talked all Pittsburgh, with 'dahn tahn," and "yins," and 
"could care less" and "pop"; and Ludmilla was a Polack 
from Polish Hill; and Lady Lulu, the one she invented on 
the spot, was a red-blooded American Southern WASP. 
Once she tried Mrs. Moskowitz, a Jew lady from Squirrel 
Hill, but she didn't think she was what she seemed to be, 
probably because she sounded too kikey. But she did a 
good Helga the Swede, and a terrific Katy from Dublin, like 
one of her neighbors, because it was good to keep the 
Presbyterians hopping a little.

She waited, glancing over the first page of the newspaper. 
Somebody held up a gorcery store and killed a 
customer, but the owner killed one of the hold-up men. 
That would be good for Ludmilla. She knew the woman 
who was killed. She opened the paper. Ann Landers had a 

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good column about a man who had women. Maybe Lady 
Lulu should talk about keeping a man, maybe keeping a lot 
of men. Be good to them. Bake them apple pies and take 
off their shoes. Let them watch TV. No, not Lulu. Make her 
Yetta. A breathless thing in her twenties, maybe, married to 
a brute of a truck driver. . .

The radio had a commercial, then Fred Sturdely's 
voice came from her lap. "Hello, Fred Sturdely. Good 
morning."

She picked up the phone quickly and said, "Yes, Fred, 
I'm a first time caller, Fred, and I'm a little scared."

"That's all right ma'am. Just go ahead and talk as if 
you're talking to a friend."

"Yes, Fred. Now look, Fred," she said, and her eye fell 
on an item about a parolee who was picked up on suspicion 
of murder. "I'm really worried about this death penalty 
thing, where they're letting all the crooks out of jail instead 
of killing them."

"Are you talking about capital punishment? You know 
I'm opposed to it. There's no difference between the 
criminal's taking a life and the state's taking a life."

"Now wait," she said, trying to make him the aggressor. 
"You haven't given me a chance. You don't listen."

"Sorry, ma'am."

"It's easy for you to talk about not killing criminals." 
"Any citizen can talk about it, ma'am."

"But you're not giving me a chance."

"Sorry."

"You don't know it's different for a woman."

"Why?"

She didn't believe he'd ask. She didn't want to overdo 
it, but she felt herself getting excited. "You men don't 
know what it is to walk in fear. You don't know what it 
is when you come home from church, to wonder what's 
waiting at the dark alley. You don't know what it is to be 
knocked down and attacked. . ."

"I'm sorry, ma'am. You certainly sound as though 
you've had some serious experiences."

"Oh, yes," she said, a tremulo in her voice. "I was 
raped three times before I was thirty."

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"Oh, God," Fred Sturdely blurted out.

Then he cut her off. Fred Sturdely actually cut her off 
the air and played three commercials in a row. When he 
came back, he sounded kind of shook up. She tried calling 
back while he said a few stupid things, like being sorry for 
her and hoping she had treatment, and that nothing happened, 
and that was why some people believed in therapeutic 
abortions. It was half an hour before she was on 
again. This time she put her voice down, very low, and tried 
to sound beery.

"Listen, Fred," she said. "You got a bunch of women 
calling in about what that woman said about being raped 
three times?"

"Gee, I wish we could get off this subject," Fred said.

"Now don't you cut me off. I been trying to get on for 
three hours now."

"All right."

"What she said, you can extend to twenty times. Because 
nobody really cares about what women really think 
in this country. So she's right. They should have a law, 
anybody who rapes a woman should be killed."

"Now wait a minute. Isn't that a cruel and unusual 
punishment? The constitution says . . ."

"I don't care about that stuff. You kill them once or 
twice, you won't have no more rapes in this country. Like, 
you do down south. .

He cut her off again, and she laughed hysterically. Oh, 
she felt weak, and sighed deeply. She took off her wig and 
put it back in the drawer with the others. She wiped off her 
make-up and stuffed the crumpled tissues into a paper bag. 
It was so difficult without a sink in her room. Stella should 
have left a bowl of water for her. That's the way it was in 
the old days. Young people never realized what good they 
had because they never knew what things used to be. She 
remembered hundreds of dressing rooms in which she had 
to clean herself up in a basin of water. She chuckled to 
herself, clucking and smacking her lips together. But looking 
at herself in the mirror, she realized how naked her face 
had become without her wig and make-up. Her mouth was 

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still full, because of her dentures, but she looked like a 
plucked chicken. She felt depressed.

The radio continued. People called in to answer her, 
and she giggled. It was quite rewarding. It really didn't 
matter what they said, or how they responded. They could 
hate her, if they wished. Let them agree with her or disagree 
with her. That wasn't the important thing. What was important 
was that they had heard her and were responding to 
her. They were an audience. Her audience. She could have 
been standing before the foot lights bowing to them. She 
could have been performing one of her great roles. St. 
Joan. Juliet. Lady Teazle. What did it matter? It was just a 
few moments on the phone, yet she felt the same tiredness 
and the same exultant feeling she always felt after a performance.


It was disheartening, in a way. And yet, in a way, it 
wasn't. Of course, it meant that she had gotten into her 
role. She had felt it, she had made it intense, she had 
created. She had closed everything off and let her words 
come out as if they weren't hers, but that woman's, the 
other woman's, and she was not herself, but the other 
woman, and it was that other woman who had called. That 
was the secret, the whole secret, to stop being yourself, to 
be somebody else. But the strain. Oh, the strain. It wasn't 
just that she had stopped being herself and had suffered 
someone else's sufferings. It was the process itself. But to 
be so tired after so few minutes. Only three minutes on the 
telephone? Old, she muttered to herself, an old crow. She 
was only a shell of a person, fragile, delicate boned, and 
the strain was too much for her. She lay back in the wheel 
chair and closed her eyes.

She woke with the knocking on the door. "Yes?"

"It's me, Miss Watkins," Mrs. Williams said. "You 
want me to make you lunch?"

"Come in," she said.

Mrs. Williams came in. "Yes, Ma'am."

"Millie, help me into bed, please."

Mrs. Williams wheeled her over to the bed and pulled 
down the blanket. Then she took her in her arms and swung 
her onto the bed and covered her with the blanket. "What 

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would you like? I made some jello, or we got some prunes 
you can have with milk."

She made a face. "You expect a person to live on jello 
or prunes?"

Mrs. Williams laughed, her teeth flashing in her 
chocolate face. "That's what yo' doctor put down for you, 
and that's what yo' daughter says you should get, an' that's 
what I'm gonna give you."

She stared at Mrs. Williams for a moment. "What 
flavor jello did you make?"

"Now, what flavor did you want?"

"You stop that, Millie. I asked you first."

"Well, I made two flavors, lemon-lime and orange."

"I like black raspberry," she said quickly.

"Well, I ain't got no black raspberry today. Maybe 
tomorrow I'll have black raspberry, today I got lemon-lime 
and orange."

"I want prunes," she said.

"If I make you black raspberry tomorrow, you think 
you'll eat it?" Mrs. Williams asked.

"Why do you ask that, Millie?"

"Well, I wanna know, if I make it, if you's gonna eat 
it?"

"You ask me tomorrow," she said.

When Mrs. Williams left, she was depressed that she 
had to ask to be put back into bed. She was just a bit more 
tired today, and didn't feel up to sitting at the phone all 
morning. Everything was so difficult these days. Even the 
broken hip. It should have healed and been forgotten 
months ago. Now it was hopeless. They had braced it with 
pins and supported it with rods, but it was no good. Even 
the food. Prunes. She ate prunes at least once a day, yet 
she had a chronic constipation. She had had it for years. In 
the hospital she had to use the bedpan, and swore she'd 
never use it again. "I won't have it," she said. "I won't have 
it one moment this is my house. In the hospital they may 
humiliate me and mortify me as they wish. But I will not 
tolerate such treatment in my own home." She didn't care 
how often Millie or Stella carried her to the toilet. She sat 
on the toilet for a half hour or an hour at a time, her frail 

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body working strenuously to produce a miniscule evacuation. 
"I don't expect elephant turds," she told Stella, "but 
when I work like an elephant, I want to get more than split 
pea."

After lunch, she sat on the toilet for fifteen minutes, 
then rested for an hour while Mrs. Williams went shopping 
for supper. The drapes were closed, and in the subdued 
light of the quiet room, she drifted into moments of sleep 
and dim awakedness, turning her head to focus as best she 
could on the portraits of the greats — Garrick and Mrs. 
Siddons, Booth and the Barrymores, Adams, Hayes, Cornell 
— until she came to the large oil of herself as Titania, and 
the wood-carved masks of comedy and tragedy. Two sides 
of one coin. Life and its impossibilities, she thought: the 
terrible gap between our desire and our achievement: 
tragedy. And the comprehension, almost divine, of our own 
futility. Sitting on the toilet, threatening my heart with final 
collapse, that has in it the essence of tragedy. But my 
achievement, not enough to put in a diamond setting —that 
is comic. She grunted to herself. I'm getting vulgar. I'm 
becoming a buzzard, a vulture, a bird of carrion waiting 
upon my own demise, waiting to pluck my own flesh. Ech.

She heard the outside door, and knew that Millie was 
back. She pressed the button on the bed and waited. It 
would be two or three minutes. She'd put down the 
packages and take off her coat. Maybe put away the 
perishables. Five minutes, no more.

The door was knocked, and she said, "Come in."

Enter Mrs. Williams, looking a bit wind-blown. "Did 
you buzz?"

"Yes, Millie. Would you put me in my chair, please?"

"Yes'm." She brought the chair over and swung her 
into it. She was always so careful, so good. It didn't matter 
what she thought or felt, she was always so careful. She, 
too, must be a fine actress.

It was almost three, and she had time for one more 
performance. "Millie," she said, "please don't disturb me 
until I call you."

"Yes'm. You want me to shut yo' do'."

"Please do."

14


She waited until Mrs. Williams had gone out, then 
listened, her head cocked, until she heard her steps going 
down the stairs. She pushed herself to the dresser and turned 
on the radio. Bill Frost was talking now. She put on the 
long blonde wig and combed it alongside her face. She 
made her mouth a red smear. Then she dialed three-three- 
three-nine-one-hundred. Busy. She tried again and again 
until she got an open line and she heard the phone ringing. 
A commercial came on. Bill again. It was all about the upcoming 
elections, and she felt the stupidity of it. What did 
it matter which rascal was elected? She kept staring at 
herself in the mirror, her long hair hanging to her shoulders, 
throwing shadows across her face, filling her sunken cheeks 
with darkness; her red-slit mouth was a groan of hopelessness. 
She held her hand up to her face and bit her 
thumbnail. What a great, what a tragic face, she thought, 
and wondered what lay behind it. What would it say to her, 
to anybody?

"Hello, Bill Frost," She heard from the phone.

She didn't answer immediately.

"Hello, can I help you?"

"Bill," she said quietly.

"You'll have to speak up, ma'am, I can't hear you."

"Bill," she said, a little louder, a little huskier.

"Yes, what can I do for you?"

"Bill," she said again, staring at her face that she 
noticed began to lose its focus.

"Can I help you?"

"I don't know, Bill," she said, her voice husky, almost 
desperate. "I don't know who to talk to, Bill."

"You can talk to me. Can I help?"

"I think . . . Bill . ."

"Yes, what is it?"

"Bill, I'm so unhappy, so terribly unhappy, I can't talk 
to anybody. I can't tell you everything... But believe me. ."

"I'm sorry ma'am. If there's anything. . ."

"There's nothing," she said, staring at the mask in the 
mirror. "But if something doesn't happen soon. . . I'm going 
to kill myself."

15


When Stella came home, she checked the kitchen and 
found that supper had been made. Then she went upstairs. 
The house was quiet. She opened the door to her mother's 
room and looked inside. The small, bird-like head was on 
the pillow, turned to the picture of herself as Titania.

"How are you, Mother?" she asked.

"Fine," she said, and turned to look at her.

"Did you have a good day?"

"Yes, Stella."

"Any calls?"

"No calls, Stella dear. Just a few quiet thoughts."

16


AN OLD FAMILIAR PLACE

Robin Rutan

I walked in a burning meadow. Nearby, 
in a pond, cows sat cooling themselves, 
while a garter snake unrolled his skin 
and left it on a rock. Lulled by the 
ripples from the pond, by the sound of 
the snake as it shed from its skin, a 
grasshopper awoke from its fantasy to 
the serrated reality of the praying 
mantis. I came to an indentation, an 
old familiar place, where memory curled 
and burned, and the tendrils crispened 
against the skull; a fencepost, listing 
in the yellowing sea of grass, like a 
pile in a forgotten bay slanting to the 
remembered land, caught my shirt with 
a protruding nail and tore my flesh. I 
walked back up toward the house, but, 
turning from habit to count the cows, 
still sitting in the pond, I saw your 
memory hanging from a post, a skin, shed.

17


THIS IMPERCEPTIBLE RISING 
AND FALLING

Robert Rutan

I spend the morning skinning 
active verbs. My apron is 
drenched in their blood. Up 
to my neck in the intestines 
of clean words that resist 
catonation like flacid stems 
of old dandelions, I tool 
on a serif until my head 
cracks open and a cauliflower 
blooms on the glowing stalk 
of my neck and ignites into 
flames. Things get worse 
before they get better, but 
when I'm done, you seem pleased.

Your calendar grows a beard 
and speaks like a holyman, grants 
benediction and the afternoon.

We peel the rind 
from this thick companionship, 
descend,

to find our burning 
relic safe, uncooled within.

Then, according to the ritual, 
we put hair on the bleeding 
sinew and wail like shamans 
as we bury it again.

Returning to that certain compatibility 
we have achieved 
despite some fundamental incongruities, 
you seem, if nothing else, complacent.

18


Tonight the moon will be 
the edge of a dime, the 
coin in its slot, as seen 
from the reversed side, and, 
this soft breathing at my shoulder, 
this imperceptible rising and falling of your wings 
will fall 
beyond the curtain to the full face of the moon.

Tomorrow, like jews cringing in 
their cellars, passive verbs will 
want nothing to do with me; I'll 
slit the throat of every pronoun 
I know, but for now, listening 
to your rhythmic breathing, listening 
to this insane calendar chant 
mutely from its nail, I take care 
that my thoughts don't touch upon 
your dream, for even in sleep, you seem pleased.

19


LATE NITE TV

James Haug

A dog barks at footsteps 
though no one has passed.

I hear a car drive for miles 
a cigarette burns at the end 
of my arm 
the lights of other towns 
eat through the darkness. 
When I think

I am the only one 
here, a gondolier 
poles down a canal 
to the tune of O Sole Mio 
a car salesman says 
he can save me 
more than anyone else. 
Sleep comes like a razor.

Later, I come to & 
switch off the National Anthem.

The wind, a thief, pushes 
in a screen. I carry 
my chain of silence.

The stars are lost behind 
the moon, the moon caught 
in my neighbor's antenna.

20


THE MORON

James Haug

I wake up drunk, find the water 
in my hands. The neighbor's toilet flushes. 
The valley sleeps into Monday morning. 
The front door. Thick fog. Coffee.

I know nothing can help me.

I drive around the corpses of small animals 
careful to avoid their crushed bodies.

The sky is the bottom of a shovel.

I press the brake for the light 
press the gas for cars behind me.

Wave hello to people on the street. 
The week is a string of white flags.

When I finally reach the Institution 
nothing has changed. The smokestack 
& the potholes. The office politeness, 
the bulletins, the neat snap of heels.

I sit in a room of empty chairs. 
The moron would sit in one, blind 
for thirteen years, & say

"Well you know I have trouble seeing."

But he is dead this morning

& his vacant bed is a mark 
on the ward record book. His clothes 
are packed in a box by the door.

Someone will take his room in a week.

Larry, back from the autopsy 
sprays his arms with disinfectant

& talks about the diagonal incision 
across the chest. I watch patients 
walk through black trees, the wet cold 
the steel sky coming down.

21


Steven Flegg
Steven Flegg


22


THE RED STARS

A. M. Halm

The Trotwood trailer was number eleven and rested inbetween 
five or six tall fir trees. When he wasn't inside at 
the round table looking at the B181 TTROTWOOD plated 
serial number on the doorside Bill Paris would come outside 
and take walks around his trailer. He liked the Trotwood's 
rectangular shape and the way it softly pointed into 
the branches of the trees. Light and shadow fell from between 
the pine needles onto the cement porch. To make 
himself happy he toed his shoetops upon the dark strips 
and when he tired of that he would count the mailboxes 
across the street first in ascending order then backwards by 
twos. He noticed that there were twelve even though there 
were eleven trailers. The boxes were silver and barnshaped 
and rested on thin chest level poles in groups of twos and 
threes. One two three four five six seven eight nine 
ten eleven twelve. Now. Twelve ten eight six four two. 
Bill noticed he saw light and shadow on the mailboxes too 
and that it flowed and moved from the tin back to the 
pavement. One through twelve. Twelve through two. 
Much better than shadows.

Even though he liked the mailboxes Bill liked the 
mirror in his bathroom the best. And if i go inside i'll 
have four hands instead of two. Not only was there 
the mirror but also a Venetian blind window with seven 
shutters that opened and closed with a string. The bathroom 
was in the front part of the trailer so when he looked 
in the mirror and then through the Venetian cracked 
window he could see the little girl's trailer across the street 
and sometimes even the little girl. When he saw her he 
would watch her and enjoy the way she bent and squatted 
and picked tall flowers to smell and put in her hand. She 
seemed to be broken into thin strips first light then dark 
behind the window and as she moved it was as if her parts 
all neatly flowed back together again. And the mirror i 
can have twenty fingers now instead of ten.

23


Bill discovered he could play games with the mirror 
since it upset him to look flatly into it. He didn't like his 
glasses and his short thick hair and the way his ears curled 
inward at the top. There was a dent where his two front 
teeth met instead of a space. Often when he stood in front 
of the mirror he flapped his lip over his teeth and pressed 
behind the dent with his tongue. He thought that if he 
pressed every day for sixty seconds that his teeth would 
straighten and look like the little girl's. But he found that 
all that happened was that a crooked ridge formed on the 
end of his tongue when he removed it from his teeth. Sometimes 
he even had to pull on his tongue with his fingers to 
make the mouth skin wet and smooth again. But most of 
the time he would just ignore the ridges and drink a glass of 
milk passing the whiteness over and under and in between 
the bumps on his tongue.

Bill would play the milk game in front of the mirror 
waving the glass back and forth so that it caught the reflections 
of the ceiling light. Forward and backwards up and 
down. Who is that? it's me with a glass. And look 
there's two of me now. Two with really four eyes 
and really four times five fingers. But i can't touch 
me it's only a funny glass. Look i just leave the swirls 
from my finger tips. Better clean it and take the glass 
back to the round table,

The round table which his mother and father had 
given him when they had moved to Florida was in the 
kitchen. It was a nice oak table with two chairs but he was 
still upset that there was no table cloth given only a full set 
of blue china dishes and placemats. Sometimes Bill would 
sit at the round table with the wind and the curtains blowing 
over his arms and write notes on half sheets of colored 
typing paper. There was a hexagon Chinese lamp with long 
red string tassels falling from iron dragon tails which hung 
over the center. Bill liked to hit the strings with his finger 
and watch how they lapped apart and then lapped back together. 
Strange thin shadows lined the paper at a diagonal 
and sometimes he would write crosswise up and down 
them.

24


Most of the time the letters he wrote were to his Mom 
and Dad and if he tired of writing to them his third choice 
was the little girl in the across the street trailer. At first he 
wrote them with a big fat pen that had a cap which screwed 
off and had red and green refills. Printing was more fun 
than script and he always made his e's square like the ones 
on an eyechart and his a's with a circle base and a curve on 
the top. DEar Mom DEar Dad. EvErything is so funny all 
thE timE and i laugh and laugh and laugh. That's good 
bEcausE you always madE mE laugh whEn i wantEd to cry. 
i know it's good to just gigglE and not to laugh out loud. It's 
EasiEr to havE sEcrEt jokEs thEn right? He never sent the 
letters but kept them in a tiny shoe box in the cupboard. 
Mom and Dad's address was written on a yellow strip of 
paper and taped on the box's underside but he never lifted 
the box up over his head or turned it over so he could see it. 
It's bEttEr that way. i know it is. ChildrEn movE away and 
somEtimEs forgEt about Mom and Dad.

Bill got the names for the letters from a cloth address 
book that he rested in the cupboard on the opening side. 
Most of the pages were half filled with names that belonged 
to people he had known and collected in high school. 
One name in the t section was owned by a girl with funny 
blue eyes and round lips who always wore silk shirts with 
flowers. Clara Trafelet had been somewhat of a friend to 
him and at times they had sat in the courtyard at school 
and quietly thrown stones at other student's feet. She 
always had laughed and smiled with her eyes wrinkling at 
the corners. Bill thought she looked pretty in her blue shirt 
with her hair drifting inside the collar. Once he touched 
Clara's hand and another time her leg without her noticing. 
He wanted to write her a letter but couldn't decide what 
color paper to use. Certainly i couldn't use yellow. That's 
only paper for Mom and Dad.

For Mom and Dad and now in the shoebox. 
Bill drew the shoebox from the cupboard shelf liking the 
way that the cardboard bottom swooshed and slid against 
the wood. With DEar Mom DEar Dad held between his 
teeth but not touching his lips he held the box in the flat of 

25


one hand and lifted the top off with the other. And now 
put the cover so it fits nice on the bottom.

Folding the paper in two with the tips of his fingers Bill 
placed the letter on top of the stack. Folded twice folded 
twice and he remembered a sheet of paper inside an 
envelope he had found once inside his mother's purse. 
Folded twice but still it was hedging out of the 
envelope and the envelope was coming triangularly out of 
the purse. Bill watched as the shadows of the iron bar 
bridge fell one by one by one through the car window and 
onto the letter. His window was cracked so his mother's 
smoke could trail from her mouth over her purse his legs 
and out. Bill saw that some of the smoke seeped between 
the open edges of the letter folds. He liked the way the 
grayness curled and settled around the folds and the 
shadows of the bar bridge falling one by one. And the letter 
and the letter i wonder what's inside.

While his mother's eyes were in the rearview mirror 
Bill slipped the letter from the envelope into his fingers. 
Folded twice and he opened it being careful not to loose 
the creases. There was a group of big black block letters 
that spread across the top of the page. He tried to spell 
them out but because the paper bended in towards the 
creases he had to put his face in close so he could see the 
letters near the fold. CLINIC AL EVALUATION

OUR LADY OF THE LAKE 
MERCY HOSPITAL and William Paris 
that's me and he put his face close but the words after 
the block letters were tiny and run together so they only 
looked like lines. He tried holding the sheet at an arm's 
length and focusing but then the shadows from the bridge 
cross-hatched the lines. Near and far near and far and billy 
what are you doing.

At an arm's length he felt the letter snatched from his 
fingers into his mother's and onto the floor near her feet. 
Her eyes were on his cheek and not in the mirror as she 
pulled the car to the side of the bridge and stopped. I told 
you to sit quiet and whoosh a car and look at me when I 
talk to you. He did and saw her eyes were covered by her 
hair and watched as her hand brushed it back so he could

26


see her forehead with lines. I ought to smack you and no 
mom that hurts and don't you defy me billy and no mom no 
mom and he opened the car door.

Billy he ran first trailing his hand on the bridge 
railing. It felt shiny for a moment then cold so he ran into 
the middle. Looking down and watching his feet fall he saw 
the road was made of diagonal iron grating above the 
water. He liked the way his feet sounded and the way they 
up and downed across the bridge. They seemed to chime 
and fall in rhythm with the lapping. Rise and fall lap and 
lap and billybillybilly come back.

And what and he turned into a shadow. He saw his 
mother pale with a white letter flapping in her hand rising 
and running behind. Billybillybilly. Her feet seemed to skip 
each iron bar shadow like not stepping on a crack to break 
a back. She was pink then pinkblack then pink then he turned 
his head forward and fell. The diagonals were cold 
against his belly. Billybillybilly. He didn't hurt but lay with 
his eyes looking through a sideways bridge square at the 
water. Lap lap lap and it's so cool and shiny. He put 
two fingers through the grail since three wouldn't fit. But i 
can't touch the water. Rise and fall lap lap lap and 
billybillybilly.

He felt her feet near his face and turned his head from 
the water. Lap lap lap in his ear but he could see his mom 
the letter flapping and crinkled. Get up and whoosh and 
the grating against his chest felt cold and iron. Her eyes 
looked as they did in the rearview mirror darting and mom 
brush your hair away and what do you mean by running 
like that and no mom ouch. She grabbed his shirt collar so 
he could feel the top button against his apple. Come on 
and he saw the letter fall and then he picked up to put between 
her drawn tight lips come on. He dragged his feet on 
the diagonals. Come on and then lips drawn tight and the 
letter letter letter it's yellow in the shoebox.

Shoebox put it back. He placed the lid back 
holding the box steady. Swoosh and slide and next to the 
shoebox was a plaid cloth bag with the drawstring drawn 
tight. There were blocks inside triangle square oval and 
round blocks that he had played with when he was little.

27


He remembered how he sat on the linoleum in his parent's 
basement with his legs straight and spread and arranged 
the blocks between his calfs. Most of the time he built tiny 
houses with orange oval blocks for chimneys and surrounded 
them with green rectangular fences. He was careful 
never to let the blocks rest or touch the sides of his legs and 
left one half inch of linoleum shining inbetween his skin 
and blocks. That way in case he moved or scratched his 
small framed houses would not fall. When he played he 
always whistled and laughed and i laugh and laugh 
just as much now Mom only i don't much 
play with blocks.

Play with blocks. Bill rattled the bag against his chest 
so he could feel the round and square edges inside beneath 
the cloth. Rectangles and ovals green and orange. Open up 
and dump on table. The blocks slid and clapped on the 
wood table top. Bill folded the drawstring bag and held it 
between his kneecaps as he drew the chair beneath him. 
With one arm resting straight on the table so his fingers 
almost touched the window sill Bill began to separate the 
blocks according to their color shape. Green rectangles 
here Orange ovals here Red squares here

Yellow triangles here. He was careful to line the blocks 
up on the diagonal line shadows from the Chinese lamp. He 
looked at the triangles and saw laying flat that two made a 
square. Nice to fit. Stacking them upright one block thick 
he made a five story wall and with an oval lined window. 
The sun's rays seemed to meet at a point in the center of 
the block window and made a yellow patch over his eyes. 
He squinted against the patch drawing a few strands of hair 
over his eyes to break the light into pieces. And there's the 
little girl. I can see her on the steps.

He saw her looking strange and white and in places 
dark. Bill liked the way she sat and hugged her knees to her 
chin and the way she seemed to look through the flowers. 
He saw her as if in pieces first a strip of her right side her 
middle her middle again her left side and then focusing 
through the strands he could see her as one. And i can see 
her yes i can. So pretty and quiet and little not 
young behind the red flowers.

28


So pretty and quiet and i wonder if there is any 
mail. Bill removed the block bag from between his knees 
and slid the chair back from the table using his feet and not 
his hands. As he walked out the serial door number B181 
TTROTWOOD he noticed the sun shining through the 
block window left an oval on the wood.

And the mailboxes one two three four 
five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve. 
Now any mail. Bill opened his mailbox and placed his hand 
inside. Since there was no mail he ran the palm of his hand 
once over the bottom up the curved sides and back over 
the bottom again. The metal felt cool and shiny. For a 
game he decided to look inside just once and see if he 
could see out the other side. No it's just silver 
cool and dark. No mail. He straightened himself with a 
hand on his back and closed the box so he could hear it 
click. No mail. But look there's the little girl.

She was standing and looking in her mailbox with her 
hands softly at her sides. Bill saw that she was little not 
young and liked the way her small body curved and cast a 
shadow which was dotted by the ones cast by the leaves. As 
she clicked the box shut she turned her face and smiled. So 
pretty and quiet and little not young.

Hi my name is bill and she said hers was Lisa. She 
stood with her leg shadows falling into the mailboxes. Her 
hair was not blond but a somewhat strawberry and fell over 
her eyes so he could just see the blue circles through the 
strands. Hearing her how are you today and seeing her 
hand with glitter silver polish on only three fingers coming 
to her face brushing her hair back made him smile not 
reply. I'm fine today she said how about yourself. Fine 
o fine. Fine O fineO Fine. I just want to talk 
to you.

No reply but she began to fan her face with two 
letters. Her hair had fallen away from where she had brushed 
it and seemed to rest and glide rest and glide on the 
whisps made by her letters. Crossing her legs at the ankles 
Bill saw her shadow change on the mailboxes into a one not 
two slender strip. Rest and glide rest and glide and i 

29


can see your eyes blue not dark beneath your 
hair.

Please don't leave and she turned floating over 
the leaf shadows with her face tilted on her shoulder so he 
could see the profile of a smile. The letters were square at 
an arm's length so Bill could see the faint scratches of her 
trailer's address on the envelope. He focused his eyes on 
the scribbles Lisa Clavoy 180 Trace Park Court 
No. 9 as she lifted the letters to her back pant pocket and 
slipped them inside. Only an inch white edge showed 
above the cloth. As the paper caught the sun with her walk 
the envelope glowed and then dimmed and then as she 
dipped under a pine branch broke into strips of gray and 
less gray. Curving against the needles she mounted the 
trailer steps and wait Lisa can i put your name in 
my address book. Sure and she waited as he

stepped between the shadows of the leaves to stand with 
hers of her hair upon his hands.

So pretty and quiet with the red flowers at her

feet and your name is Bill yes. Yes and he watched 
as do you want to come inside and her strawberry hair 
drifted down her shirt resting and gliding on the circle pattern. 
He put his hands in his pockets as the trailer door slid 
open against the inside carpeting. Bill so your name is Bill 
I've see you a lot at the mailboxes and yes i'm waiting 
for a letter from my Mom and Dad. Your

Mom and Dad and yes they live in florida and I 
always liked the ocean Bill.

Swoosh excuse me I needed to close the door. She 
brushed him with her side on his arm as she walked from 
the door to the table. There was a vase with three silk roses 
yellow pink and blue and she lifted the glass vase to put the 
letters underneath. Lisa offered him a piece of fruit with 
here take your hand out of your pocket. It was round and 
cold with a bruise near the core. He ate the bruise first 
swallowing it quickly then biting into the crispness below. 
He found he couldn't hear anything but his chewing loud 
and like crackling paper at first then soft and swishing 
when he reached the twenty-eight chew. Another bite and 

30


he could only see her lips not hear her here sit down while I 
get us some sunglasses and the chair was square and oak.

The sun came through the window only at the top 
because there were half curtains that covered three 
quarters of the glass. Bill liked the way the light fell rectangular 
on the carpet and what are those bits of 
sparkle. As he looked more into the rectangle and chewed 
he noticed that his chewing made his cheeks swell and puff 
under his eyes. He stopped so he could focus. Glitter it's 
glitter. He pressed his legs against the back of the 
chair and stood. My my my and watched his feet as they 
fell on the floor his toe coming to border on the sun.

Glitter glitter it's glitter and so pretty and

quiet with the red glitter at my feet. He bent down

first on one knee then on both. He was careful to keep his 
knees on the border but spread his hands into the sun. He 
liked the way he could spread his fingers and the way ten 
shadow lines fell over the sparkle. And look if i tuck my 
thumb underneath there will be eight and now

six now four now two only it can't be 
one unless i take out right hand.

Red stars there's red stars. Bill opened his hands

with his fingers one by one. There's red stars and o can 
i touch them. He bent over and trailed both hands on 
the carpeting. He could not feel the stars but they shined 
and stuck to his palm when he lifted them. My look stars on 
my hands.

On my hands and in my pockets. He stood one

knee straighten then one knee straighten with the sun stripping 
across his face. And look and look there's a 
painting norman rockwell jfk. JFK JFK on the

wall with eyes that see me even if i sway.

Swaying and with his hands and stars Bill turned when 
he hear Billybillybilly here. Lisa was behind him a pair of 
glasses on her face and in her hand held by the bows. Here 
and he took them seeing that they were mirrored. Are you 
going to wear a pair and yes but my glasses. Hearing 
her it doesn't matter they're my father's they'll fit over 
yours he took them curving in his hand. He liked the way 

31


the glasses fit the bows curling behind his ears so he could 
feel the cold plastic against his skin and atop of his own. 
She smiled and looked nice with the glasses. And i can 
see myself in your eyes.

In my eyes no Billy maybe in your own and she turned 
his face from her mirrors into the one on the opposite wall. 
But no i could and no Billybillybilly just look and be quiet 
but please only for a moment Lisa. And he looked 
and he noticed that the mirror was not on a wall but on a 
dresser. It was an oak dresser like the chair at the table and 
the mirror it has three sides.

Three sides and he approached it with the sun and Lisa 
behind but still in the mirror. And look she's in the

glasses and the mirror there's one and a

split and a mirror and her and a split and a 
mirror and her. He found he was surrounded and then saw 
himself three and a four and a five time in the glasses.

Three and a four and five and a JFK

jfk jfk and a Lisa behind and mom there he 
is look and he turned his head from the tv. His mother was 
standing her head in a scarf bent and vacuuming between 
the rectangle strips of sun. First back then forth then stop 
and she rested her elbow on the hoover upright so her hand 
fell limp at the wrist. Mom look and she did and he turned 
his face back resting on his knees. Look there's a flag 
waving red and blue and white and look

there he's waving. Bill kneeled forward so his face was 
close to the tv. He liked the way that he could first see the 
pictures from far away and when he came close just dots. 
Just lots of tv little dots in the face and

the flag. And back and he saw white stars one two 
three and mom what comes next four and he

placed his hand fingers spread on the screen. Back and 
forth back and forth and look i can see

myself between my fingers on the screen.

In the screen no billy get back right now and she turned 
his face and tilted his head forward to his knees. But no 
mom i want to look then be quiet billy and he

lifted his head and looked once more. Bill saw that there 
was a parade with flags and a man waving and mom is

32


he waving to us and no billy that's in texas and be

quiet and look at the people. But they're waving and he 
waved back and look mom they're smiling at me 
and stop it billy but he liked to see his fingers black line the 
screen. One two three four five and 
he counted the shadows falling between the faces then 
onto their faces then back and he laughed. He liked the 
flags and the children on father's shoulders waving the way 
and the man in the black car with hands waving open and i 
want to touch them. Laughing he tilted his head 
back and up at his mother. She was standing the Mary bust 
statue behind that had long hair pink cheeks and blue 
beads smiling. Her palms pressed flat on her cheek with her 
fingers spread over her mouth and mom be quiet billy 
and ouch mom that hurts with a curled hand on his head 
and be quiet and mom look and ouch that hurts and 
be quiet billy. He leaned closer again the faces becoming 
more and just dots. Placing his hand on the screen he felt 
his fingers become warm and my head o i hurt and 
dots all i can see is dots gray now

back and mom be quiet billy but mom and black 
and he could hear billybillybilly and feel his mother's 
hands spred and shaking his shoulders and his chest rising 
and falling against the blackness.

Billy and he opened his eyes first focusing then 
trailing them across the close white face and hands spread 
and pushing his chest. Billy and he could feel the air 
cool in his lungs then out then cool. Rise and fall cool and 
cool and billybillybilly stay back. He felt the hands stop 
and saw the face growth farther away until it rested on 
square white shoulders. Is he all right and blur then focus 
and a hand cold and resting on his forehead. Warm and a 
blanket up resting to his chin came down to his knees. Billy 
now lift and he felt hands under his arms and at his feet and 
from the couch and pillows onto the firmness. And lift and 
pale heads tall above white buttoned chests smiling and 
billybillybilly okay. Blur blur blur in his eyes and 
he could hear his mom and the tv behind people laughing 
music and the dots. Billy and her face next to the 
white buttons close and shining and cool. Please mrs and a 

33


hand against her face coming from the white sleeve and rising 
she walked beside him her untucked shirt soft and trailing 
on his skin.

And the waving i can hear the waving and 
the eyes jfk one two three in the mirror and 
Lisa. Lisa and look she's in the glasses and 
he turned and saw her smiling his face smiling in her 
glasses. But i don't like it i can only see my

nose and lips and not your eyes. Wondering 
if her eyebrows were raised in laughter over his nose and 
lips he covered his face with his hands. In the dark he could 
hear her. But Billy o Billy look at me o look at me. Please 
take your fingers away because I can see my stars in your 
eyes.

Spread my fingers and o my my my you

have stars and he counted them one two three on her 
cheeks. Like them Billy and o yes between three

fingers. Billy and she touched his hand taking it from 
his glasses. So pretty and quiet with the red stars on 
her face and Bill yes. Yes and he watched as do

you want to see my room and yes but my nose and

my lips and but Bill please come and see my

room.

She took his hand and it felt warm as he stepped on 
the pockets of her feet in the carpet. Her room was through 
a curtain and pink with a canopy bed. Pink and i like 
pink and so do I. She jumped head first laughing up and 
down on the mattress. Come jump Billy look and the 
blanket billowed and smoothed by her knees. Come jump 
and he sat feeling her jump on the edge keeping his feet on 
the floor then lifting one leg straight next leg straight onto 
the blanket. Up and down and they laughed she stopped 
and they sat with the sunglasses pushed down on their 
noses the sun patching shadows at their feet.

She turned her head to the side so he could see her 
lashes brushing the inside of her mirrors. He titled his head 
laying next to her on a pillow and found he could see wet 
streaks of her moisture left on her glass. So pretty and quiet 
with the red stars on her face and be quiet Billy let's 
close our eyes and she laughed her hands flat at her sides

34


and he could see her eyes folding shut behind the mirrors. 
On his stomach he liked the way her lashes cast soft black 
shadows on the tops of her cheeks. One star between 
a lash and one star between a shadow and

one star gilitter near her lips.

Bill looked at lisa softly breathing and liked the way 
her small chest rose beneath her shirt. The circles on her 
cloth grew then lessened layed smooth then filled. Toes 
then legs then hips then chest then rise then 
fall then face and glasses and stars. Nice to 
fit and he saw her circles smooth lashes black and still. Rest 
and glide and her hair somewhat strawberry floating inside 
her collar pink with her skin. Lisa and no reply but

laugh and a smile eyes folded. Laying still she was straight 
curves near her hips and neck near her chest. Bill lifted with 
his hands quiet and looked down his chest to his legs. And i 
curve by the hips near the legs by my face 
and Lisa only smile.

Still raised he touched her with his hand near her 
cheeks and stars. Nice to fit Lisa two straight curves 
make a rectangle square. He peeked through her

glasses still streaked with lashes. Quiet Lisa and first leg 
over next leg over and curve then chest then

curve then face then face and glasses and

glasses and stars. Billy and she tried to rise then fell and 
Billy you're so heavy and she laughed smearing his 
sunglasses with her fingers. Laugh and laugh and we 
fit Lisa we fit and rise and fall her shirt like silk

brushing his arm.

A rectangle square her glasses himself and he smiled 
liking the way his face looked small and seeing sunglasses 
not his own. They lay still hands touching palm to palm at 
sides. When his chest fell hers rose and when his rose hers 
fell. He could feel her toes on his feet her legs straight 
beneath his her hips two and small her rising her falling her 
cheek her hair drifting from her collar. And what's underneath 
Lisa and he fingering to her buttons opening

then seeing her white skin small two red dots and my

they're stars. Stars Lisa i have stars too and touching

hers he raised unbuttoning his shirt and see Lisa my

35


stars and he took her hand rubbing against his chest. 
Stars on our chests and do you have them 
here and rising his knees outside her knees he unbuttoned 
her pants slipping them down seeing her hips. Stars in here

Lisa and no no no Bill and they laughed and Lisa what 
are you doing who is that my brother.

Bill saw him her brother half covered by the curtain 
mouth opened and eyes. Who are you and whoosh the curtain 
fell as it caught in his feet. Her brother stumbled then 
stood Bill feeling fingers back on his neck. No that's just 
Bill and he felt his rise leave her fall and then her hands 
trailing his chest. No that's just Bill don't hurt him I hate 
you and be quiet Lisa and her brother pinched and rolled 
him to the floor. Get out get out and boot ouch no that 
hurts as a boot kicked his glasses. Now out and he felt her 
brother firm in his sides lifting and pushing stumbling on 
the curtain. Billybillybilly and ouch get out. Bill saw the 
sun and the stars and the door come close square to his 
face then back then open then out.

Bill's back scraped the stairs one two three then onto 
his stomach on the walk. He wasn't sure if he hurt but he 
beat and beat inside and drew his hands near covering his 
hair. And o my glasses my glasses please my

glasses and click whoosh here and he saw them bounce on 
the bows and into a leaf shadow. He could feel his cheeks 
puffing below his eyes and touched them with his fingers. 
My lips and blood there's blood with my stars

and wiping his hands from his face near his pockets he rose 
to his knees.

Blur blur blur and one knee first then next knee first he 
moved to the glasses. Blur and dots and blur and 
dots and into the sun he fell to the left hitting his cheek. O

and he lay turning his face so his nose not his cheeks 
touched the stones. And my eyes and my eyes i 
can only see slits of the sun and the thin yellow light 
strips ran diagonal near his nose forehead and fingers.

Nose forehead and fingers must bring my knees 
up to my nose forehead and fingers. Bill braced 
his hands so they were flat over a sun slit and bent one leg 
then one leg then inched his knees so they touched his chin.

36


Wanting he found he could not move only his fingers one 
through ten on the sun felt warm. One two three 
four five left hand. Now, One two

three four five right hand.

My hands and he pushed up with his fingers arching 
them on the second knuckle pressing flat. He found his 
palms lifted first then his wrist then his elbows slid and 
scratched. O my head and back curved his head rose then 
fell hitting his nose then bouncing up into a blur. Blur blur 
blur and look there's my glasses leaf shadows

doting the bows. And they're my eyes they can't 
unslit and swaying with his hands he scraped his knees forward 
to rest on a sun line.

And i can see myself in my eyes. At an arm's 
length Bill could see the right lense broken glass jutting in 
places to sharp points the other shiny and smeared. Left 
eye in right lense right eye in left lense and 
o. He leaned forward seeing his eye broken in the right and 
lifted one hand towards the bows. Bowing he fell his fingers 
lapping on the frames. Blur and my nose and the broken 
glass tinkled on the sun slits as laying he curled them over 
his ears. Now up on my knees swaying and look i can

see clear and blur.

Clear and then no i can see and my knees 
straighten one then straighten one. Pressing his feet near 
his fingers then back uncurve he stood hands at his side. Up 
and down and up and down and he liked the way 
the sun met his feet slid over his toes and back to the pavement 
with the shadows.

Shadow and light and looking down he followed the 
sun but first put hand over eye. Toe heel toe heel 
toe heel and eyes up not down. He saw the mailboxes 
silver and chest level glittering in the sun. Light and

shadow and he saw traces of dark leaves nesting on the 
sides inbetween. Any mail toe heel toe heel one two 
three four five six seven eight nine ten 
eleven stop not twelve click.

Click and DEar Mom DEar Dad. i mEt Lisa today and 
wE laughEd and laughEd and laughEd. i know that's good 
and i try now to laugh whEn i want to cry. It's bEttEr that

37


way don't you think and with the hand not over his eye he 
touched the bottom side curve side then bottom. No mail 
DEar Mom DEar Dad and click he placed his hand 
back over his eye curling his fingers over the top of the 
rims. Bend one knee bend one knee and he sat

beneath number eleven his hand over his lips trying to 
laugh. DEar Mom DEar Dad knees to my chin

and back on pole and stars with blood and 
o my quiet and he watched the leaf shadows through his 
eye by his toes.

38


WATER

Dennis M. Ellman

You recited to me,

as if speaking a poem you'd memorized 
as a child,

the elemental chemistry of the body.

And though this happened years ago, 
it surprises me now

to think I must be, as you believed,

a kind of ocean

gathering, as the tides gather, 
the loosened debris of my life.

And perhaps for the first time

I noticed a flow within myself,

a gravitation to the shores of my tongue 
that never ceases,

where, in the stillness behind my teeth, 
the water darkens and ferments 
until your mouth that never opened, 
opens (if only it were here to open) 
to take the water breathing on my tongue.

39


I AM (It startles me to think)

Dennis M. Ellman

older now than you were then, 
the war in which you didn't fight 
abruptly gone. Your friends, 
some lame, some grinning with a tic, 
neighbors once again, barbecues 
and lulling through those hot 
suburban summers. How wonderful 
to have a son, one-year-old, 
who screamed and moved 
ambitiously about, as if that alone 
sufficed to make life good. 
But then the youth of silences, 
the stoney inward flights 
to stave off frightful batterings, 
your chilled contempt 
for all I was incapable of being. 
One says that with the years 
comes clarity, perhaps, a slow mesh 
in the memory. But this, 
I fear, is false. And all that was 
unutterable once is 
inexpressible now. The son, 
his voice so like your own, 
haunts you constantly in dreams, 
a strange and bearded beast, 
and in your wakefulness, mocks you, 
childless, determined in his tasks 
which seem to you unworthy 
of your name. Father, each age 
swells a cliff. And standing 
on the edge, one sees his breath 
descend the insuperable slope 
of days to the sea. There is 
so little chance for providence.

40


FOR MY FRIEND WHO HAS NO POEMS

Ruby Hoy

I have lost count

of the poems I have written for you

poems diced among the green peppers at dinner 
the one stitched into the quilt

the poems hidden

at the bottom of coffee cups and glasses

of bourbon or the one that touched your shoulder 
last night did you think

it was only my hand

41


A MINNESOTA STORY

Emilio DeCrazia

He had never felt such strength before. He held the 
thick rope tightly in his fists and pulled it taut until his 
hands slid apart over the rough hemp. It would hold. It 
would snap a neck as sharply as dead branches broke from 
the big birches he used to climb as a boy. And the beams 
would hold. He had cut them from walnut timber dropped 
with his own axe. They were harder than the steel cable he 
once had snapped with that same axe.

He also had built the barn with his own hands. "If you 
build a barn," he told his neighbors, "you've got to do it 
right. It's got to last." So he didn't settle for pine from the 
lumber yard. Pine was not heavy enough, and a thumbnail 
could dig holes in it. When the neighbors told him he was 
wasting his time and the wood cutting the walnut for the 
barn, he laughed and said he just had to clear more land. 
As the barn went up year by year he fell behind, but one 
day they saw him nailing down the last roof boards. 
Though the extra coats cost him an extra month's work, he 
painted it a white as bright as snow on a cold sunny day. He 
even painted the boards inside. When he was done it was 
the biggest barn around, and more beautiful than the 
church in town.

It was this barn he had come to after turning his back 
on the radar tower near Jason's Mill and walking across the 
hayfield toward his own house, its boards now wrinkled 
and greyed by many winters. When was it he decided not to 
paint the barn or house again? The forties or fifties? And 
was it because he had no cash or because of some trouble 
over the price of paint? It was the price of paint, he recalled, 
the grey house shining again as a memory of the clean 
white one he had carried his bride into over thirty years 
ago. It had to be the price of paint—the paint made 
somewhere in Ohio that kept doubling in price until one 
day, he couldn't remember the year, he told Clarence in the 

42


hardware store he wouldn't buy it again because he was 
waging a boycott to drive the company out of business.

He couldn't remember when he began this boycott 
because the years passed like a blur under the wheels of his 
truck. When he was a boy he used to sit on the back of his 
father's big red hay wagon watching the sunset as the horse 
pulled it in from the fields. Time in those days passed as 
slowly as the sun set, his past lengthening out behind him 
like a shadow. In those days he had a reputation for being 
fast, whether at haying, running bases, or eating. His father 
kept telling him to slow down. "Life is short and I'm too old 
to be on the go," he liked to say, "so I'll go slow." After the 
family bought its first pickup truck the boy liked to sit in 
the back, his feet dangling near the road that rushed out 
from beneath the wheels and then lengthened out until 
everything in view, like his father walking away from the 
house in a distant field, stood still on the horizon.

In a sense everything had stood still. Though everyone, 
even he, had left the old farm, and though the barn 
and house no longer shined, the place still smelled like the 
farm he had grown up on as a boy. The once neat rows of 
corn and grain had been taken over by grass that tossed 
like long hair in the wind, but he heard the same faint hum 
of life in the air. If he had the chance to do it over, he no 
longer would plow the earth; he would send milk cows into 
the fields once planted in corn and wheat, and each evening 
he would lead them back to the barn close to the house. 
We all could have gotten on well enough that way, he 
thought.

No, nothing here had changed and nothing was likely 
to change as long as it remained untouched. Leaving the 
farm at the age of sixty-two was not the only thing he could 
do, but it was the smartest. While he remained alive he at 
least could guard it like a jealous father would his virgin 
daughter. What would come of it when he was gone he did 
not know, for its fate lay sealed not in his will, the piece of 
paper in his shirt pocket containing words scrawled in his 
own illegible hand, but in the whims of his only son, who 
had left the farm for college and never returned.

43


"You know I don't want you to be a radical just for my 
sake/' he told his son the night before he left for college. "I 
want you to learn what you have to learn, and I know you 
may never come back." The words forced themselves past 
the truth, a protest against the other fathers who insisted 
that their sons not leave, or that they return to take up 
where they, the tired fathers, had left off. So he let his son 
go and he did not return, not even to visit the old man on 
his seventy-third birthday.

Because the roads were bad, the old man told himself, 
even before the phone call came explaining that the roads 
were bad. Almost as hot as the weather during the July of 
'33, when he hitch-hiked and half-walked the hundred 
miles to Minneapolis to march with the striking truckers 
who had come from five states to demand a fair day's 
wages for a fair day's work, and who, after Governor Olson 
sided with the strikers against the mob organized by the 
bosses, danced in the streets.

Nothing, not even his wedding the year before, matched 
that celebration, and only once since the strike had he 
felt such anger and joy. When after the strike a trucker 
returning to Iowa dropped him off on a gravel road seven 
miles from his farm, he waved at the truck until it disappeared 
over a rise on the highway. He waved not a farewell 
but tribute to the truckers, the strangers who like new 
lovers had come together and marched with hearts and 
arms locked together. As he turned off the main highway to 
walk the seven miles home, he did not feel the abandonment 
until his farmhouse came into view, its silhouette 
black, except for one small light in the back bedroom, 
against a grey sky sinking into night. His wife did not come 
down to greet him that evening when he called up to her 
from the door, and when he reached the bedroom she only 
half-rose from her pillow to see him. "Are you all right?" 
she asked without looking at him. "Yes, but I'm tired," he 
said.

He wanted to say more —wanted her to ask. He had rehearsed 
it all as he and the trucker from Iowa sat in silence 
watching the cornfields drift past. He would not tell her he 
had walked almost fifty of the hundred miles to the capital 

44


before a farmer stopped and picked him up, or that he had 
not slept in two nights. He wanted to tell her how the men, 
many with their wives, found each other, how they 
developed one mind and heart, and how at the end of the 
second day they were cheered by the soldiers who turned 
to face not them but the jeering faces along the streets. As 
he stood before her unbuttoning the only shirt he had worn 
those three days, the only white shirt he owned, he wanted 
to tell her what lessons he had learned and what new hope 
had surged into his life. But as she reached up to turn off 
the small bedlight, he saw not only weariness on her face 
but a resentment heavier than that he had left behind in the 
streets.

When he made his appearance in town the next afternoon 
to pick up a newspaper, the people turned into doorways 
or crossed the street to avoid him. The faces were 
crossed and wary, and later he saw their eyes. They think I 
betrayed them, he thought; they think that because the 
truckers got more, the farmers got jess. But I know the 
farmers work harder. I didn't want to say the truckers won. 
I wanted to tell them what it felt like to have soldiers and 
workers cheering each other. I wanted to tell them that had 
never happened here before. I wanted them to know we 
had started something for all of us.

They never joined him, though he never stopped trying 
to explain. In the years following the strike he found it hard 
to lose himself in his chores and began spending more time 
in town, at first in the cafe and later in its bars. As he 
entered these places he looked for anyone willing to listen. 
Even though some admitted he was full of ideas and most 
couldn't get angry at him, they turned away when he came 
near, or stopped listening when he caught them at coffee. 
They let him talk, and in time they admitted he stood up 
for his beliefs. Besides, he was a good farmer, even though 
he wasted his time talking and in the city. He had a way 
with crops, animals, and machines, and if they were sure 
they could get away in a reasonable time, some of them 
liked to listen to him talk about farming and now and then 
even stopped by his place to borrow a tool or his old Ford- 

45


son, which he kept shined and tuned and which served him 
until he no longer could get parts.

They repaid him for their talking behind his back. 
When he ran for the town council they didn't put anyone 
up against him, and later when he ran for county commissioner 
they secretly voted for him. He did a good job, they 
agreed, and he could have kept the job, though a few of 
them never forgave him for the things he said against 
religion. He resigned one day in the middle of his second 
term. "Because you don't really want change, you want a 
babysitter," he told them. "And besides, I've got better 
ways to spend my life." After he resigned he began taking 
trips to Minneapolis during the winter months. "To go to 
meetings," he told them when they asked. "Do you think 
things just run themselves? Do you think the world will 
change without planning? Do you think you can ignore 
tactics?"

One day word came back from the city with a grain 
buyer. "They have meetings up there," the buyer told a 
group of farmers. "They're radicals." For a time everyone 
watched him carefully, more out of curiosity than fear. 
Now and then someone called him a communist, and then 
they backed off. One day he found an effigy of himself 
hanging from an apple tree behind the cafe, but he just 
kept talking. When the things he said were quoted in the 
newspapers of bigger towns, almost everyone was just a 
little proud of him.

He was a big grey man. Even before he was married his 
black hair shined with silver strands, and by the time he was 
forty it all had turned. He had spent one year at the university 
before his father, ill and tired, called him back home to 
farm. Someone said the one year away from home ruined 
him because he came back full of complaints about 
religion, the government and the town itself. He carried a 
book everywhere, and claimed there were no books worth 
reading in the schoolhouse or county library. He tried to get 
other people to read his books, but they just shrugged him 
off. As he grew older he didn't shrink as old men do. He 
seemed to grow taller and stronger as his hair grew wilder 
and whiter. Some of the folk thought he could have been a 

46


politician and if he toned himself down, but when he came 
back from one of his meetings in the city and ran for state 
senate right after the Second World War, they didn't vote 
for him. He was bitter afterward and didn't appear in town 
for six months, his wife still driving the old pickup in to buy 
groceries and go to church, as she always did, alone. But 
one day he walked into the cafe wearing a white shirt and 
old black suitcoat his father used to wear, and under his 
arm was a big black book. Someone said he looked like a 
preacher, and they all laughed.

The old black suitcoat and white shirt became his only 
suit of clothes, memorials of the three days in 1933 during 
which he discovered his calling. "If you think I'm a 
preacher, why don't you listen to my word?" he asked the 
men in the cafe. "You'd rather give your souls and money 
to those monkeys dressed in black who pray to their white 
God every time you have some fun. And when the price of 
wheat goes down, what do they tell you? Do they let you 
pray for the price of wheat to go up? Or do they tell you to 
count your blessings while they pray for you? Your churches 
are your biggest bosses, and they're so smart they 
make you feel guilty when I tell you the truth about them."

"That's right," they sometimes said, "that's damn 
right." But later they told each other they only said it to get 
rid of him. Then they avoided him until his words, and 
theirs, passed beyond meanings and memories. Before he 
retired to a room and kitchen above the hardware store in 
town —to write, he claimed, a book and articles for 
magazines in Chicago and New York —his moods were like 
his coming and going from town. Sometimes he spent afternoons 
denouncing the government, waiting on Sundays for 
churchgoers to stop in the cafe so he could divine the import 
of the sermons. Then, as if wearied by his own talk, he 
did not appear for a week, disappearing into his room 
above the hardware store until a new headline brought him 
out again. He'll never burn out, the townspeople told each 
other, even while they wondered how he could keep up his 
farm and his talk at the same time.

One winter before he turned seventy he almost died. 
People didn't notice he hadn't been in the cafe for almost 

47


three weeks; they didn't notice, that is, until they saw him 
alone in a corner booth hunched over a bowl of hot 
chicken soup and a skinny book. "Poems," he answered 
when someone asked him what he was reading, and that 
word kept them away. When that evening they saw him in 
his corner again drinking soup instead of coffee, someone 
noticed that he looked pale. The waitress also noticed that 
the next morning an old woman carrying something 
covered in white linen went upstairs to his room. That 
afternoon a doctor arrived from another town and followed 
the old woman upstairs; they waited four hours for the 
doctor to come down again and tried to read the tiding on 
his face. Within minutes the old woman —she had moved 
to town from a farm after her husband died, and she had 
been seen many times listening to him in the park the 
summer before —came down the stairs, made her way 
through the snow across the street, and entered the cafe. 
"He's dying," she announced to the faces. "He didn't want 
me to say anything, but I thought you should know." She 
stared at them in her own angry silence before someone 
finally spoke. "Is there anything we can do, Missus?" "You 
can keep away from him until he dies —that's what you can 
do. He's angry about dying and he's too honest not to be 
afraid. He doesn't want you to see him being afraid."

When she closed the door of the cafe that afternoon 
they all felt as if she had slammed his coffin lid in their 
faces. They watched her come and go each day, and they 
waited a week and then two but no word came except more 
rumors about a radar tower that had fallen. Then in the low 
hum of the cafe broken only by the nasal wail of a sad song 
coming from the pink juke box in the corner, they stopped 
watching for him and almost forgot that his voice once had 
been the strongest in the room.

One day that winter the door of the cafe opened and a 
noise like a cheer went up. Though still pale, he looked like 
a shaggy Moses carved out of white stone. "My god, he's 
got a beard now too," someone said.

"It's not a sign of old age," the old man shouted back. 
"It's wisdom you see in these white hairs."

48


They laughed. "Well, where have you been, old man?" 
"You think that just because a body isn't running it's 
standing still. The same way you think that just because 
you don't like politicians they'll just go away. No wonder 
we've got a police state coming. No wonder we don't pull 
together according to how much we weigh. You think pulling 
together means being led by the nose. Where have I 
been? Up in my room working on tactics, where else? I told 
you what I do up there —I've been writing my book, and 
right after someone buys me a cup I'll go start the last 
chapter."

He would not go gentle into his good night. Each night 
he sat in the cafe waiting for a farmer to come in, and when 
one settled into a booth the old man advanced on him with 
a copy of the evening newspaper. "The war," he shouted, 
"the war isn't over yet. And we just sit here and write our 
congressmen about the price of milk." He called it the dirty 
yellow war. That war, on his mind ten years, stirred him to 
raise his voice with the men who had listened to him for 
thirty. More than once the owner of the cafe told him to go 
home, and when he did not go home he went to a bar down 
the street, concluding the night with a shot of whiskey from 
his own flask swallowed like a poison to steel him against 
the grey illness that once had brought him down.

Hostility toward him reached its peak at the same time 
the dirty yellow war reached its climax. His talk about the 
war was bad for business and there was talk of barring him 
from the cafe. The town also was beginning to have second 
thoughts about what had happened at Jason's Mill, the 
farm next to his own. When the townspeople had heard of 
how the radar tower had been chopped down with an axe, 
they wanted to point the finger at him even though they 
had seen him almost too weak to walk just two days before 
the tower fell. No one accused him directly when the 
federal agents arrived in grey cars, but many told the 
agents to talk to him. When the agents asked the townspeople 
whether he had been ill the night the tower came 
down, they had to say yes, because they had seen the old 
lady come and go from his place with the doctor. Yet they 
all knew he somehow was behind it. He had given speeches 

49


against the tower in the cafe, and when the big machines 
rolled up to Jason's Mill to begin work on it they found his 
old truck parked across the gravel road blocking the way. 
The younger Jason had forced him off the land at gunpoint 
and had bought dogs to keep the old man away. "He said I 
had no right to the property if I was going to let them build 
on it," the younger Jason told a farmer. "He said he had as 
much a right to my property as I did. He said property is 
theft. That's when I got the dogs."

"Sellout," the old man told a farmer in the cafe. "The 
Jason boy is selling the land out from under us so they can 
grow towers of steel where we once grew corn. No memory. 
If I asked him whose side the army was on in the strike of 
'33, he'd think I was talking football, and if I said Wobbly 
to him he'd think I was talking about weak legs. But I guess 
he's only like the most of us. First we let them take our boys 
like lambs to kill in a dirty yellow war, and now they take 
our land. Someday they'll turn this all into a war zone. 
They're thinking big these days."

The farmer the old man said these things to claimed 
there was sadness, not anger, in his voice. He told the 
agents that he, for one, didn't think the old man did the 
axe-job on the tower. None of the fuss seemed to matter 
very much after a while. A new tower was up within a year 
even though again they found the old man's truck blocking 
the road, and the agents didn't take the old man away, so, 
everyone concluded, he was either a lot smarter than they 
thought or less guilty. So as the dirty yellow war wound 
down and as the tower took a permanent place in the sky 
looking down on their lives, they came back to him, this 
time with a little more respect.

Many years before this had taken place there had been 
other stories about him — stories spun not from what he did 
but from what he said. The untold story that everyone 
wanted to hear was his wife's: the story of the isolated 
woman who never came to town with him except on 
business and who on Sundays came to church alone and 
then waited in the cafe without comment and without a 
smile for him to finish his commentary on the sermon he 

50


had refused to hear and ignore. There was much talk that 
his wife was unhappy with him, that while he kept up the 
talk in town she kept up the farm. But like a good wife, she 
would not permit bad talk about her man. Whenever she 
detected bad thoughts forming in the faces of the wives of 
her husband's enemies, she dissolved them with a stare 
harder than her husband's convictions. Except in her last 
year, she too was tall, hard and grey, and when she walked 
men stepped aside in deference not to her burden but to 
her strength. Her strength began dissolving right after the 
World War. Unlike other mothers in the town she had not 
given her son to the War, but he had gone off to college 
and not returned to the farm. Her husband spent more time 
in town during these years, and someone said she someday 
would leave him. She died without warning in the spring of 
1949, having failed as fast as the winter turns to spring. 
With her the people of the town buried her story. When 
they meandered home with their accusing thoughts, they 
left her husband standing alone stone-faced at her 
gravesite.

He was alone on the farm fifteen years after that except 
for his visits to town. Because he never had a hired 
hand, and because the farm showed no signs of decline except 
the fading white paint on the house and barn, the 
town stopped accusing him of working his wife to death. 
One day he announced that he was finished with farming, 
that all he needed was a room in town and fifty dollars a 
month for the rest of his life. "When I sell my cows and my 
new tractor I'll be a rich man," he said. "We all make a 
religion of work. There's some things I want to do before I 
leave the scene."

So he moved to town, taking a brass bed, an old Vic- 
trola, a library table and an old rocker in his pickup to the 
room above the hardware store. Except for the old lady and 
doctor who visited when he was ill, no one, not even his 
son, entered this room. He had no mysteries to hide in it, 
but people remained shy of the room as if it were the forbidden 
interior of a mind not yet spoken; they told each 
other he wanted to be alone with his thoughts. They knew 
his son came to visit him at the farm now and then because 

51


he told them so. “He's tired of counting someone else's 
money, and tired of all that traffic," the old man said with 
smiling eyes. Then on the appointed day he started the old 
pickup and drove to the farm, the place he still called 
home, and stayed the day or two until his son drove back 
north to the city.

One day last year the son parked his Buick outside the 
old man's room in town, and the people knew something 
was wrong. Keeping an eye on the hardware store, they 
went about their business. They did not have to wait long 
to find out, for everyone could hear the old man shouting, 
and within ten minutes father and son had brought their 
quarrel to the street. "Over my dead body," the old man 
yelled as the son opened the door to his car. "I'll give it 
away before I see it sold. A hundred years from now my 
ghost is going to live on that land, even if you won't." 
Whatever else he said was lost in the roar of the engine as 
the Buick sped away. Many people turned to watch it 
disappear over the hill outside town and they knew it never 
would be back.

"I'll be goddamned," the old man said to a farmer that 
day, "if they taught him anything at college but how to 
count other people's money."

*********

The words he had spoken to his son had been easy to 
say that day. It was big talk, loud talk, and he knew silence 
would have said more. Now he had to be sure: he had to go 
back to the farm to take a final look —to see the land one 
last time and to stand on it in order to feel whether it was 
worth the loss of a son. The son could easily be brought 
back; he was sure of that. A letter, an apology, a hint about 
a new will, and the son, still full of duty, would return. He 
knew that he had raised a good son, though the child had 
left him before he had a chance to make him into a man; 
and he knew that the son, out of respect, would wait until 
he died to sell the land.

52


So in the middle of the afternoon on an October day 
he climbed into his pickup to return to the farm for one last 
look. The old truck, rusty on all sides, sputtered haltingly 
like an old man discharging phlegm. The mailman, who 
usually noticed little, saw the pickup on the edge of town, 
and he waved as he did to anyone passing him. Within a 
minute the town was small in the rear-view mirror, only the 
grey grain elevator visible on the landscape, and the road 
behind him disappearing into fields of drying corn. Framed 
in thick glass, a world of wild flowers rushed by like a 
golden blur, while an oak in the middle of a cornfield stood 
in solid silence before drifting out of view. Beyond the oak 
the hills on the horizon seemed to flow forward like a green 
glacier returning from the sea.

"Maybe I should have left long ago," he told himself. 
"Maybe I should have sold the land right after she died and 
gone to the city. There at least I could have lived with a few 
of my own kind." His thoughts failed as the pickup slowed 
to a walk behind a haywagon pulled by a tractor, which 
straddled the road and shoulder for a quarter mile before 
turning down a gravel road. As the big wagon turned off, 
the big grey radar tower became visible on the horizon, as 
did two human figures standing at the side of the road. The 
pickup came to a stop, and before saying a word two boys 
in their late teens threw their bundles in the back of the 
truck and climbed aboard.

"Where you headed?" the old man asked.

"The city." The one who spoke had hair to his 
shoulders. "Don't suppose you're goin' that far, are you?" 
The boy grinned broadly, showing a row of white perfect 
teeth.

"No sir. I'm just going home —a farm ten miles up the 
road."

"Hey, old man. You should take us all the way. We 
ain't gonna get no ride from no hick town like this." This 
one, dressed in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, did not smile.

"Where you men from?"

"New Pine," the longhaired one said.

"No school these days?"

53


"We ain't got nothing more to do with that/' the other 
said.

"Then you work?"

"Then we're bored, old man." The boy with the long 
hair widened his smile as he said the word.

"Then you're going to Minneapolis?"

"Right, man. The Jefferson Airplane is coming tomorrow 
night."

The old man's face winced in perplexity. "The 
Airplane, man," the boy in flannel went on, "they ain't as 
good as the Association, but they're all we can get in these 
parts."

"He don't know what you're talking about."

"Hey man, a group. The Airplane's a group."

"A group?"

"A rock group, man. Where you been? You know — 
sha-boom, sha-boom. You remember now?" They both 
laughed, and the old man forced a grin, though he didn't 
remember. "You never listen to rock, old man? Ever hear 
the Airplane? It's good for your soul, man."

He thought of the old Victrola he had brought with 
him to the town. "No, I prefer not to," he said. "But I once 
heard the orchestra play Beethoven. It was many years ago, 
but that was good for my soul."

"Where did you hear it, old man? In the park in town?" 
The boy laughed

"I bet he ain't never been to Minneapolis," the boy in 
flannel said. "I talked to one old farmer who told me he 
ain't never been to Minneapolis. That's no lie."

"Yes, I've been to Minneapolis many times," he said, 
"and once when I was young like you I hitch-hiked up 
along this road like you." He had begun the story he knew 
could go on like the road to the city.

"Did you hear blues? They had blues in your day, 
didn't they, old man?" the longhaired one asked.

"No," he replied, "I went to a strike."

"A what?"

"A Strike. A protest."

"You mean a demonstration."

"Yes, a demonstration."

54


"Never had one in our school."

"Why not?"

"I don't know."

"And besides," the boy in flannel said, "the teachers 
are so dumb they'd call out the National Guard."

"Doesn't that make you angry?"

"It don't do nothing, man."

"You don't like politics?"

"They're all corrupt. As long as they don't bother me. 
Live and let live —that's what I say." The longhaired boy 
relaxed in his seat, well-satisfied.

"We don't belong to no party," the boy in flannel said.

"And you didn't like school?" the old man asked.

"Booored. Eight hours a day, five days a week."

"What do you think causes that?" He lifted his foot 
from the gas pedal slightly.

"These hick towns. There ain't nothing happening 
here. There ain't no one more interesting than us —and 
that's because we go to the city every chance we get—and 
there ain't nothing louder than the sound of growing corn."

"You left out my pig," the one with the smile said. 
"My pig Sally's more interesting than you, and when she's 
in heat she makes more noise than a county full of growing 
corn."

"You can stick your pig," the other said, "and someday 
I'll eat her."

"She'd be better than that fat one you're screwing 
now." The two of them laughed again, but he didn't hear 
the laugh, just as he didn't hear the pickup strain under the 
weight of his foot as it pressed the gas pedal to the floor; 
and as the truck veered onto the shoulder of the road, he 
didn't see the ditch until the longhaired boy grabbed his 
arm. In the next moment the three of them were sitting in 
silence, looking up at the road from the ditch, all of them 
too stunned to tremble.

He felt the fear first when he stood next to the truck, 
his legs suddenly elastic and weak. "You all right, old man? 
You look pale as a ghost."

55


“I'm just a little wobbly, but I'm all right." He smiled 
not at them but at his private joke. “I'd hate like hell to go 
this way, especially at my age."

"You want me to drive now, old man? You want to let 
me drive you home?"

"No, I prefer not to." He re-entered the truck and 
started it. After saying some things to each other outside the 
truck the two boys got in.

"You slow down now and stay on the road."

“Yeh, man, I ain't got but one life to live."

"You see, old man, my buddy here is scared. He had 
an older brother killed in a car accident last year. It was a 
tragedy."

He drove on two miles before anyone spoke again. 
Then, as if from nowhere, the words came. “It was no 
tragedy," the old man said. "It may have been sad or too 
bad, but it was not tragic."

The words were spoken quietly, addressed not to the 
boys or to himself or even to the air rushing past the window. 
The boys looked at each other, shrugged. A few 
minutes later the old man came to a crossroad and the boys 
climbed out. As the old man drove off he looked into the 
rear-view mirror to see if the boys were waving to him. The 
boys were facing the road down which they had come and 
soon disappeared into dots behind him.

He parked the truck in the middle of the gravel drive 
leading to his farmhouse. Once outside the truck he stood 
in the grass near the house breathing in the fragrant air and 
surveying the landscape as if trying to recall the lifetimes 
that had passed here, and, like the Norway pines surrounding 
the house, to stand still in it for a moment. To the right 
he saw his two hundred acres bathed in the soft colors of a 
setting autumn sun, the yellow grass flowing over the fields 
like water on a wide river. To his left a quarter of a mile the 
grey radar station, its legs lost behind a hill and its head 
slowly scanning the horizon, stood like a steel giant only a 
hundred yards from the old stones that once had been 
Jason's Mill. He saw near there the walnut grove where he 
had dropped the logs for his barnbeams. A fifty year-old 
shame returned as he recalled the lie he had told his 

56


neighbors. "I told them I was cutting the logs to clear the 
area/' he said to himself, "but we all knew I just wanted to 
have the best barn in these parts." He looked at the barn; 
even with its weathered boards it looked solid and strong, 
no sag visible anywhere in the roof, "and it still is the best 
barn in these parts. They said I'd never finish the thing, but 
they thought I was too weak to finish another job too."

He began walking across the field toward Jason's Mill 
and the tower of steel. Halfway to the tower he stumbled 
across an old hickory fencepost half lost in the grass. He 
picked it up, beat the air with it once, then locking it in his 
fist carried it like a club. When he reached Jason's wire 
fence he used the post to hack his way through it, and his 
heart pounded with fury as the tower inched higher and 
higher into the sky with each step he took closer to it. Then 
as he came to the top of a rise the whole tower came into 
view, its steel legs wide on the ground and its superstructure 
supported by thick cables emanating in all directions 
toward concrete cubes planted in the field. The old man 
paused a moment at the summit of the rise, his form outlined 
in black against the sun setting behind him; then he 
began walking closer to the tower until he came to the 
fence surrounding it. At fifteen feet intervals signs were 
posted on the fence: DANGER KEEP OUT. U.S. GOVERNMENT 
PROPERTY.

Three years ago, he thought, they didn't have a fence. 
You could just walk right up to it like it was a big brother 
who lived next door, and though you couldn't shake hands 
you could talk to it. Now you can't get near enough to 
reach one of the wires, and if I touch the fence it'll take my 
picture. I suppose they're watching me already— suppose 
they have been for twenty years now. Me —who couldn't 
keep my wife happy, and didn't have the heart to keep my 
son on the farm until he was too old to want to leave. And 
now what? Should I attack it as if it were a windmill? 
Throw a stone at it? Try talking to it from over here. Write a 
letter to my congressman? Go home and pretend to forget 
it when I know damn well it's minding my business and 
everyone else's too?

57


He lifted the cedar post over his head with two hands 
and brought it crashing down against the fence. In that 
moment a memory flashed through him, blinding him to 
everything but the few minutes he had spent assaulting a 
tower like this one three years earlier. He felt the old 
strength return, the wooden post crashing against the fence 
feeling as light to him as the axe that with a dozen blows 
cut the inch-thick cables holding up the tower. Each time 
he struck the fence he saw again the sparks the axe let off, 
and he heard the sharp snap the cables made as they burst 
free into the air. And he remembered that before he felt his 
hands stung numb from the crash of steel on steel, he saw 
the superstructure begin to totter like a drunken man, lose 
its balance against a sky full of stars, and fall. He was surprised 
that there was no explosion when it hit the ground; 
the grass muffled the fall and everything went suddenly 
silent as if the earth were helping him keep his secret. 
When it was finished he was awed by the ease by which the 
tower had been brought to its knees, and he rubbed his 
hands to get some feeling back. Then, careless even of the 
tracks he left behind, he threw the axe over his shoulder 
and walked back to his truck.

It was easy then. Even the agents the government sent 
out were city slickers who didn't bother looking for tracks 
because they didn't want to get their clothes dirty. But now 
it was different. The fence around the new tower had a few 
dents in it, but it had not given and no doubt already had 
sent its electric warnings. They would come for him this 
time. The old man took one last look at the tower, threw his 
post at the foot of the fence, then turned his back to it and 
began walking home.

By the time he reached the old farmhouse the crickets 
were singing in full chorus and the sun had sunk beneath 
the horizon. He stood a moment looking at a broken 
window in the old house; a chill passed through him as he 
thought of the coming winter. I'll have to get back to fix 
that before the snow starts flying, he thought as he turned 
and began walking toward the barn. As he walked a vague 
fear that he had lost something from one of his pockets

58


surged through him, and when his hand found the piece of 
paper in the pocket of his white shirt the notion struck him 
for the first time. "It's maybe the only thing left for me to 
do," he said half-aloud. "What else can I do to make them 
take it seriously? There's nothing waiting for us but old age 
and accidents —not tragedy or even political murder. So 
we'll have to appeal to their pity. Yes, we'll make ourselves 
pathetic. If no one will crucify us, we'll have to hang 
ourselves."

He paused before he walked on, his motionlessness as 
frozen as the notion that had overtaken him like a decision. 
He looked at the old hay-waygon still standing outside the 
barn door like a big wheelbarrow, the oak from which there 
once hung a swing made of an old tire, and the house itself, 
once boardered on all sides by two rows of flowers his wife 
spent hours stooping over. More than the place he would 
miss his memories of the place, the place he had forsaken 
for a barren room in town and the people who listened but 
never heard. A bird flitting overhead broke his reverie, and 
without thinking he began walking not to the barn but back 
to the truck.

"No," he told himself before he had taken ten steps. "I 
can't go back there. They'll listen to me less and less until I 
make a fool of myself."

He turned and walked toward the barn again, and in a 
minute stood beneath its thick beams like a child lost in the 
shadows of a cathedral. He found the rope precisely where 
he had left it years before, and after checking it for its 
strength, threw it over the walnut beam in a corner near a 
white stool that he and his father once had used for milking 
cows. He was pleased to find in his coat pocket the pen he 
always carried. He bent down on one knee to write two 
words on the other side of the will he took from his shirt 
pocket. "It's hopeless," he wrote in a clear hand. As he 
folded the paper and returned it to his pocket he saw a 
frown form on the faceless head of the radar tower. Then 
before it could turn from him he placed the white stool 
under the rope, and, testing the balance of the stool, with 
steady legs stepped onto it.

59


Sam Mills
Sam Mills


60


IN PITTSBURGH

D. L. Klauck

brittle worn steel 
workers reminisce 
days of courage and honor 
strong and fine as the steel 
forefathers cried and bled for 
"giants worked the mills then 
men so tall they shadowed the sun 
their women stood by them 
children respected them 
this use'ta be one helluva town 
a real shot 'n' beer town"

but of today 
drinking their 'iron city' beers 
these rusting remnants of legends 
sneer

"the old ways are mocked 
children have grown wild 
our own women compete against us 
there is no honor left for men 
even the new steel warps and cracks"

they cannot tell you what happened 
these hard-hat relics do not know 
that blood and tears 
have nothing to do 
with the making of steel

when men cry and bleed for steel 
what are children to respect 
what comfort can women be

61


DAVY JONES

D. L. Klauck

the old fisherman

stows skeletons of fish 
under his bunk

barracuda shark marlin 
many others

each having Christian 
names personal histories 
silent futures 
known only to him

some nights

after sudden squalls

from his dark

rooming house window

you'll hear him hailing fish 
with courageous hymns 
of the sea in rhythm

with the steady creaking 
of an old wooden rocking chair 
held fast by a rusting memory

fathoms deep

62


THE HOUSEPAINTER’S RECREATION

Keith Taylor

The housepainter goes to bars 
where interesting women ask 
him what he does. He says — 
I paint. They treat him 
with respect, even awe; they see 
brown paint under his nails 
and imagine he paints dark 
canvases, full of angst 
and gloom and sorrow. He smiles 
sadly when they talk to him.

One offers to pose, but he says — 
/ don't do people. She understands.

63


STRANDS

David Sims

There is a place where the old and the dead gather 
together in rusting, twisting heaps of steel. In the day, the 
sun catches the surfaces— pitted and rotted and weak. 
Grated metal dust, fine as pollen, forms the hull-skins of 
mangled barges, and ravished tows, and punctured flats. 
Iron cables stretch from one shell to another; there is support 
only through numbers, structure only by mingling.

Ropes sprawl scattered on the decks. The plaiting 
unravels within many; frayed ends splay out; paper tape 
somehow clings to the strands, the glue backing long since 
lost in the moisture. Black bubbles erupt from the plastic 
lines, where someone tried to merge the ends with fire.

Deadheads, niggerheads, poke up from the corners of 
the wrecks. Some are pressed flat —pounded thin by the 
hammering gunwales of long-ago, now-nameless tows. 
Others split wide with great mouths of jagged iron teeth; 
decaying from their own space; no strength left to hold. 
The red eats into them.

At night, the darkness gives life to the graveyard. 
Shadows rise from the water and prance and pivot behind 
the silhouettes of the pins and stacks. Sounds rise from the 
mud of the banks and become the voices and laughter of 
men forgotten. Fireflies burn like cigarette butts in the 
windows of the boats. The slap of a fish echoes the smack 
of a card. The larger blackness of the wrecks extends out 
over the water, swallowing the natural contours of the 
river, swelling in its gain, leaving only darkness and nothing 
in return.

Now it is dusk. Neither brightness nor shadows hold 
sway. From the deck of one flat, like a fungus from a log, 
grows a shack of corrugated tin, bound together by rivets 
and covered with tar. A door of carpet flaps in the space 
between internal opacity and external half-light. Gray 
smoke crawls from a small lead pipe on the roof and 
mingles with the air.

64


The river barely seems to move. Only the ripples 
nodding out from the semi-sunken hulls mark its passage. 
Wires and cables drop down from the boats like spittle 
dangling from an old man's chin; the water catches them 
and covers them. The air and the water, from above and 
below, slowly eating.

Wind rustles trees in the forest behind. Sounds 
emerge: birds sing noise, grasses rub, a twig snaps quick 
and sharp. An insect risps from somewhere, hidden deep 
and small. Scents drift toward the mud; flowers open 
themselves. Clover.

Bird shadows, racing the sounds, wing past leaves, 
then grasses, then rushes, then water. Dying light 
follows

them 
sparkles are eerie as hell. Whenever the light glints up off 
the water, I get to thinkin about them two kids. It's sorta as 
if their ghosts were swimmin in the water, and everytime I 
get caught up in splicin or chippin they come back just to 
remind me not to forget em. Not that I ever would, mind 
you, even without the ghost-light.

Somedays Thaddeus will sit up on a niggerhead and 
curl that fat caterpillar tail of his around his legs and stare 
at me with eyes like sewer-mouths. I found him down by 
Old Man Zubich's barges in the bulkhead of one of 
Cumberland's hoppers when he was only a kitten. Flies had 
crawled under his fur and laid eggs; his face was all twisted 
and one eye was swollen shut and he didn't look like he'd 
live a week. I picked him up anyway, maybe cause he looked 
like me, maybe cause I figured if I couldn't save him at 
least I could put him out of his misery. I was feeling kinda 
lonely then, too, just livin up here at the boatyard, not 
much to do. Not many tows bother stoppin much.

Anyways, I dug out the eggs with a hot knife and he's 
been here ever since. It's funny, sometimes he'll act like he 
knows all about me, and all that happened up there at 
Marietta.

No. Thaddeus won't let me forget em neither.

I killed them two boys. Ain't no gettin around that and 
you might as well know the truth from the start. I was 

65


deckin on the Titan, a nice little double-screw Cat. Me and 
Bob Kelly was crew; pilot was Uncle George Kurran. 
Tommy Davison was captain and owner and we was pushin 
a load of six empties into Singer's Wall, just above where 
old lock twenty-seven used to be; you know the place. It 
was a mean-ass night. Dark so thick it was like lookin 
through the mud that gets stirred up when you're feelin for 
catfish in the shallows. It was a little after midnight, and 
second shift, me and Uncle George, was sittin in the galley, 
waitin for Kelly to come in. Uncle was as nervous as a bird 
shittin razor-blades cause he had to spell Davison at the 
wheel and he never could see too good at night. Only 
reason he had his license was cause Johnson up at the 
Coast Guard office married his baby sister. Now I'm not 
sayin what happened was his fault, mind you. I'm just telIin 
you that he couldn't see too good, that's all. Well, Kelly 
came down from the bow watch and Uncle George took off 
upstairs. I was just finishin lacin up my boot when I looked 
up and there was Kelly slurpin liquor. In those days it didn't 
take me much to get goin and when he offered me a swap 
well, one thing led to another and I never did get out to the 
watch. Now, looking back, it seems like only a couple 
seconds passed between when I agreed to one more drink 
and when I heard the crunch and echo and then the engines 
screamin as George shoved em back hard and fast. I 
jumped out to the bow and started up the towin knee, but 
Davison was already ahead of me, scramblin down the thin 
deck and screamin for the watch. That's when I sobered up 
quick and knew for sure somethin bad had happened. How 
bad I didn't know till I ran up to the lead barge and looked 
down into the water where the searchlight was pointin. At 
first I didn't see nothin but the white insides of some 
chewed-up wood. But then I saw him. The orange life 
jacket and the skinny little arm and then the whole boy. 
And then another one. Just floatin there. Davison didn't say 
anything as we hauled up the bodies. We dragged em down 
to the stern of the tow and covered em with a tarp and then 
I was sick for a while. The kids must've been out fishin in 
the dark; they didn't have no lights or anyting, else even

66


George would've seen em for sure. And since I wasn't out 
where I was supposed to be, nobody did. The undertow 
smashed their rowboat, sucked em up, and filled em with 
water. If the jackets hadn't kept em floatin, we never 
would've found em. George lost his license; same for 
Davison, only he went broke, too. Kelly just disappeared to 
godknows and I ended up with a mean-ass cat and two 
ghosts. One thing, though. I don't drink no more. Jesus 
knows I need it sometimes. Even now, don't seem right, 
nobody goin to jail. But I guess I'll just probably go to

hell 
it ain't fair, Pa," the boy said.

"Shit it ain't, Luke. You think I'm goin' to feed and 
clothe you when all you do is sit on your ass? I want that 
fence finished by tomorrow, and that's all there is to it."

"But Pa. . . "

"One more word and your teeth'll be settin' in your 
tonsils."

Luke turned from the battered couch where his father 
sprawled, a can of beer clutched in the man's large hand, 
sweat and grease still visible around his hairline where he 
hadn't bothered to wash. The boy walked into the kitchen, 
grabbed an apple out of the dish on the table, and pushed 
on the screen door. The rusty spring clicked as it expanded, 
the tone growing deeper as the length increased.

"Where you goin', boy?"

"I'll finish it in the mornin', Pa," the boy yelled back. 
Then he bit into the fruit.

"Don't you go down to that boatyard, hear?"

Luke stood still, the apple in his mouth, the juice running 
down his chin from where his teeth had split into the 
white.

"You hear me, Luke?"

Luke let the door slam shut. Dust flew out into the air; 
paint-chips scattered down to the dirt like the seed-pods 
from trees.

The boy's father was off the couch and through the 
door before the echo of the slam had faded. Luke tried to 
run, twisted once, rolled twice, but already it was too late.

67


The hands closed upon his hair and shoulder, and as they 
lifted him up, Luke could hear the second bang as the door 
slammed again. Then the hands reversed direction and 
smashed him into the dirt of the yard. The impact wracked 
his small body; the apple shot out of his mouth and rolled 
into the grass, tiny flecks of dirt clinging to the moisture. 
He watched the path of the apple, sucking wind, trying not 
to cry.

"I catch you goin' down to that freak one more time 
and the only thing your ass is goin' to be good for is 
shiftin'."

"He. . air wheezed out "ain't no. . ." and tried to 
rush back in "freak, Pa," but the lungs did not work "just 
'cause his face. . and the boy could not breathe "is scarred. 
. and all he could do was cry.

"I ain't tellin' you again." The father entered the 
house. Moisture dripped from the son's face. He sat up, ran 
his hand across his eyes, and feeling the tears, wept even 
harder. At last, holding his breath, he forced himself to 
stop. He rose and walked to the apple, picked it up, and 
brushed it down his jeans to clear the earth away. With one 
hand he reached deep into his pocket, and withdrew a tiny 
piece of yellow and red rope, braided together in a twisting 
pattern of alternating colors. Certain he had not lost it in 
the fall, he tucked it away and cut through the brush 
toward the

river's 
kinda high today. They must be lettin some down from the 
next pool. Oh yeah. That boy came down again yesterday. 
He's a strange one. Doesn't come near wrecks, just sits 
over in the rushes and watches me while I'm workin. I try to 
keep my face away from him; I don't want to give him the 
willies or anything, and I know my face tends to do that to 
people. Even me, sometimes.

I never told you about that accident. It happened a 
couple years before I started workin the Titan. I was just 
out of school and lookin for work and I got signed in on the 
Spike Crain, a big-ass, triple-screw GM diesel run by Dravo. 
I figured I was pretty lucky, gettin to work for Dravo right 

68


off, without any experience. Well, we was pushin about 
twenty sand and gravel barges from Galliopolis down to 
Dairo, and we was around Martin's Ferry when it started 
hailing like shit. I never seen nothin like it, before or since. 
Them ice-stones smacked into the steel of the boat so loud 
it sounded like there was a million skeletons fuckin up on 
the roof of the pilot-house. Frankie Goessman was captain, 
and after the noise let up, he sent me and Glenny Fry out to 
the front to check for damages and make a play —fannin 
out and catchin the barges in a double line instead of a 
triple since the river got kinda narrow a little ways farther 
down. Well, me and Glenny walked out to the first cut, 
slippin a little here and there cause there was ice and water 
on the decks. Old Goess started to play out, and I wasn't 
too quick with the lines yet and the hail had made em all 
stiff and jagged with ice. When the rope started to tighten 
around the pivot head, my hands didn't quite work fast 
enough and before I knew it Glenny was scream in for me to 
run but by then it was too late. The rope got wrapped 
around the head, the coil slipped under, chewed itself to 
shit, and snapped apart like a grenade. I felt a quick, mean 
burn on the side of my head and then I just went black. I 
woke up on the galley table, my head wrapped up and one 
eye covered over with a ripped-up pillow case. We finished 
the run, of course, and by the time I got to a hospital it was 
too late. Best they could do was sew me up but they 
couldn't do nothin for the eye. It was dead. The stitches 
pulled the skin tight around it somehow, and it grew this 
bluish-gray sack, and it just sorta healed half-over. 
Sometimes I look at myself in the water and nearly throw 
up. The skin's all shiny and purple and the sack's all. . .

Well, never mind. But whenever that kid shows up, I 
try to keep my right side towards him. What the hell. Long 
as he don't bother me, I guess there's no harm in his 
watchin. Every once in a while, though, he reminds me of 
them other boys. And that ain't too good. But I guess I got 
it comin.

It's funny how Thaddeus will let him be. Damn cat 
knows he's out there in the weeds, but he doesn't bother 

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runnin him down. Doesn't happen too often that that cat 
will light on somebody he likes. Couple years back some 
preacher girl came down here, tryin to save my soul. She 
weren't two steps up the ramp before Thaddeus was there 
in front of her, hissin and archin his fur and spittin like 
Satan himself. Guess the girl kinda figured that way too, 
cause by the time I got around the corner to see what all 
the fussin was about, all I seen was her long, brown legs 
tearin up the brambles and her Bible layin scattered in the 
mud. Jesus. It was funny as hell.

Only one other person Thaddeus let come close, and 
that was Melissa. Never really knew much about her, except 
she was the only woman I ever knew who didn't make 
sick faces when she first saw me. She used to bring me pies 
and such and we'd jus sit and talk. Well, I guess I did most 
of the talkin. She never said much. Just listened. I 
remember sittin beside her in the evening, listenin to the 
frogs along the banks and the crickets in the weeds. It was 
nice, just sittin there. I didn't want to fuck her or nothin 
like that. Just talkin was enough for me. But she stopped 
comin around a couple months back. Guess she got tired of 
me yappin. It sure got lonesome here for a while. Say, I 
wonder if that boy knows what happened to her. I'll have to 
ask him, if he ever comes

close 
to his head he could hear the insects whirring. The wind 
had stopped and Luke sat alone on the log, just listening to 
the tiny wings as they sang and grew larger and louder by 
his ears. He did not move, even when he felt the bugs crawl 
inside the openings.

Farther down the river, the man snapped a rope out to 
an old tow boat, churning up white water amidst the green. 
As long as he had been watching the man, Luke had never 
known him to miss. The line would snake out, all loose and 
formless, and then when he twisted his wrist, it would settle 
around the cavel of the deck or the pin of the barge, and 
stretch tight and clean, almost like a stick. And he did that 
all only with one eye. The boy knew; he had seen him up 
close once, when the man did not know he was there. He 

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had seen the bubbled tissue and the jagged line slashing the 
side of the man's head. It didn't matter, though. His father 
was wrong.

He watched the man talking to the deckhands, while 
the boat took on fresh water from the circular tank beside 
the shanty. Luke waited. After a time, the hose was coiled, 
and he saw a man flip a package of cigarettes down from 
the second deck. The cellophane glittered for a space in 
the warm afternoon light, and the boy was sure he had 
heard the crinkle of the paper as the scarred man's hand 
closed around the pack. He waited until the lines were cut 
loose and the boat had disappeared around the bend and 
the smoke from the diesels had dissipated. Then Luke rose 
from his nest in the rushes and sloshed along in the mud 
toward the metal hulks. The muck rose to his knees in 
places and weighted him down, but Luke pressed on, his 
green eyes slanting off to the sides of his path, unconsciously 
searching for snakes.

At last he came to a crude cement post, in which was 
anchored one end of a cable, the other end tracing out to 
the edge of the rusted flat. A few steps farther on was the 
end of a wooden ramp, constructed of roughly-planed 
timber.

From where he stood, still partially in the weeds, Luke 
could see the man as he sat smoking. He was balanced on a 
deadhead, the cigarette clinging to the corner of his mouth, 
his head surrounded by a haze of smoke. He barely moved, 
other than to shift the position of the butt between his lips.

"Hey! Mister!"

Instantly, a yellow cat appeared from around the edge 
of the tin shack. To Luke, he seemed to emerge from the 
very steel of the deck. It was if he blinked the animal into 
existence; the boy tried to banish him in the same way, but 
when he opened his eyes, the cat was still there, glaring at 
him from deep, black sockets. A fat, furry tail moved back 
and forth across the metal surface, possessed of a life of its 
own, totally incongruous to the silent stance of its owner.

The man had not moved his position, other than to tilt 
his head slightly upward, in order to bring the boy into his 

71


vision. A large hand covered the left side of his face, the 
fingers spread wide, some touching his ear, others touching 
the wrinkled corners of his eye. Like the cat, he was silent.

"Hi," Luke said, his voice dropping.

The man pulled the cigarette from his mouth and 
snapped his fingers, flicking it out into the river. Then, softly, 
"Howdy."

The boy could hear the insects calling from the river's 
edge. For the first time that day, he felt the heat in the air, 
the warm sweat running down his back beneath his t-shirt. 
"Uhm. . . My name's Luke. Luke Farley."

"Yeah?" The man watched his cat; a muscle tremor 
rippled beneath the mottled yellow fur. He offered nothing 
more. Minutes passed. Luke wished he had stayed in the 
silent safety of the rushes. But then, "You been cornin' 
down here a lot. I've been watchin'."

"Yeah. I know," the boy replied.

"You want somethin'?"

"Don't know. Naw, not really, I guess." Luke stood at 
the end of the ramp, his hands in his pockets. His fingers 
felt the comforting twist of the small length of rope. He 
twirled it, keeping his hand sheathed. The man sat perched 
on the pin, one hand masking the scar. The cat moved his 
tail and licked his fur.

Suddenly, as if he had made a decision, the man dropped 
his hand, exposing the scar. "Name's Amel. Nice to 
know you, Luke."

The boy's gaze flitted quickly past the scar, and 
settled upon the clear green of the man's good eye. He 
smiled. "Hi."

"You like boats? Is that why you been cornin' down 
here?" Amel eased his body down from the pin. His feet hit 
the plating, and he crossed to the angle of shade formed by 
the shack.

"Yeah. I like boats." The boy left the second question 
unanswered, for he had no reply. He forced himself to concentrate 
on the man's actions, directing his attention away 
from the ruptured sheen on the left side of Amel's head.

"Not too many come around here anymore. Just some 
old friends of mine. You'll see lots more if you head on up 

72


to the lock. I'm pretty sure the master'll let you sit and 
watch. Long as you don't get in the way."

Luke settled himself at the end of the ramp. He glanced 
toward the water; as he did so, he could see the shimmers 
of heat twisting away from the metal of the deck. 
"Naw. That's okay." He watched as Amel fumbled at his 
waist, reaching for the cigarettes. "Hey. Gimme a smoke," 
he said, wondering at the reaction he would receive.

"Shit. You're too young."

"Naw. I smoke all the time. I'm pretty near ten." 
"Packs a day?" Amel asked, raising his eyebrows.

"Naw. Ten years old."

"Ten, uh?" The man pushed the pack to his lips, pulling 
a cigarette free. "Your folks know you smoke?"

"Naw. My Pa don't know nothin'."

"Your Ma?"

"She's dead."

"Oh." He threw the crumpled pack to the boy. It hit 
the ramp and slid to within his reach. Luke, surprised at his 
success, pulled one free and stuck it between his teeth.

"Gotta match?" he mumbled, teeth clenched.

"I thought you said you smoked all the time. How 
come you don't carry your own?"

"Most of the time," he managed. "I left 'em home 
today."

Matches followed the path of the smokes. Soon Luke 
was puffing vigorously. The cat watched, sitting half in 
shade, half in sunlight. Then the boy was coughing, and the 
cat rose from his haunches. And finally choking, as the cat 
walked away.

Amel laughed. "Too strong?"

"A mite," between spasms.

"You know, you remind me of Thaddeus the

time 
passes slow down here. Especially at night. I've been 
having this dream for a while; ever since Melissa stopped 
comin by. Almost every night I wake up shakin and sweatin 
cold, with nothin to do but lay there scared and wait for 
mornin to come through the door.

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It goes like this: I'm sittin on the deck of some boat. I 
don't know which one, but it must be big, cause I can hear 
the engines thumpin down below. I don't know the river 
either; none of the islands or markers look familiar. I'm just 
sittin there in the dark when it starts rainin, real soft at first, 
but then pretty soon it's comin down in waves. I just sit, 
feelin the water run down my hair, drip off my nose, and 
fall down my neck, chillin me and gettin my clothes all wet. 
Pretty soon it covers me; every part of me's just soakin. 
And then it gets darker; real dark, darker even than that 
night on the Titan. I notice I don't hear the engines 
anymore and I look around, wonder why, cause I can feel 
that I'm still movin. But I can't see anything. I lift my hand, 
but I don't see it, so I push it toward my face, but nothin 
happens. I don't feel anything. So I start hittin myself. I'm 
swingin, and I can feel my arm gettin tired somewhere in 
the dark, but I'm not connectin. I try feelin for myself then, 
trying to stay calm, but there's just nothin there. I try to 
scream, and that's when water rushes into my mouth and 
down my throat and I know I'm drownin; drownin quick, 
too, cause I can feel the water fillin up my lungs. It seems 
like I'm floatin now, instead of moving fast. Just driftin. 
And I figure I must of fell overboard and the current pulled 
me under. I know there's water in my chest cause I'm not 
breathin at all, and I know that if that's so, then I should 
be dead. But I'm not. I try makin noise, but instead of air 
comin out of my mouth, water shoots out; I can feel it 
squirt past my lips, no bubbles or nothin. I try movin, even 
though I can't feel myself, and that's when all of a sudden I 
can see. The black clears, and there's a plastic rope floatin 
in the water just ahead of me. I grab for it, and my hand 
feels but not me, just my hand. It's like somebody else 
was doin the grabbin for me. The plastic bites into the skin 
of the hand, but the fingers keep holdin, keep squeezin. 
Then the rope flips around like a snake, and I feel it up 
around my neck and then the rope's doin the squeezin and 
grabbin and it's forcin the water up out of my chest into my 
head. I can feel the pressure buildin up behind my eyes and 
in my ears and then my eyeballs are pushed right out of my 

74


skull and they hang and float there in front of me, and it's 
eerie as hell, cause even though they're my eyes I can see 
em all the same. And they're both new and good; the left 
one is clear and the sack's gone and it's just like it was 
before I got the scar. The hand feels the rope around my 
throat and my chest is full of water and my eyes are just 
hangin there and I think Cod, God I should be dead. Why 
ain't I dead? And that's when them two little boys come 
swimmin up to the eyes, and they're laughin and somehow 
screamin at the same time, and they each grab an eyeball 
and they squeeze with their tiny hands, and I can feel their 
fingers just tightenin, closer and

harder 
to be nice to you, boy. Where's the mud from?"

Luke looked down at his feet. The brown earth 
covered his sneakers, cracking and flaking off into a trail 
across the kitchen floor.

"Down by the orchard, Pa. . ."

The fist caught him in the mouth. Luke felt his lips 
cracking and then the pain jammed into his body. Tiny 
needles of fire shot up into his head, and raced themselves 
down across the back of his skull into his spine. He slammed 
into the refrigerator; the chipped porcelain thumped 
dull and hollow.

"You're lyin' again, boy. You're just like your Ma was. 
What I tell you about that freak?"

Luke sat numb. Blood filled the hollow beneath his 
tongue. He could feel it welling up, thick and warm and 
slaty, before it escaped from the corners of his mouth and 
trickled off in thin lines to the floor. Tears burned his eyes. 
He felt tiny pieces of sand rubbing his mouth and spat 
teeth onto the floor in a spray of red and saliva.

"What's the matter, boy? Can't you hear?" and his 
father kicked. The boot caught him in the side; the boy 
heard his rib crack, almost distantly, and then a new surging 
wave of heat overpowered him and he was on the floor, 
the cold linoleum pressing against his cheek.

"Shit, boy. I told you things was goin' to be different 
now that your Ma ain't around no more. You think you can 

75


pull the same shit you did when she was alive? Jesus! Why 
do you think I. . The man stopped, then quickly reached 
down and lifted his son into the air. Luke felt the ground 
disappear beneath him. His father continued talking, but 
all he understood was the he missed the cool comfort of 
the floor.

"I'm the boss. You hear? When I tell you not to do 
somethin', I expect you to listen." He slung the boy across 
his hip, and passed through the door, banging the limp 
body against the wooden frame. He flung the boy away 
from him into the mud. Soft, brown earth splattered up 
from the impact. "When you're done cryin', you get your 
ass in there and clean that floor up." Luke shifted in the 
sticky dirt; he could hear the sucking sounds as he moved. 
Pain was returning, "one more time, boy. . ." The warning 
hung, and then was shattered by the slam of the screen 
door.

And pain was all he knew

it would have to end sooner or later. Always does. Poor 
kid's more busted up every time I see him. Ain't none of my 
business what his old man does, I suppose. I got this feelin 
it's my fault. Yeah, I better send him home next time he 
comes around. No need his gettin killed on account of me. 
Jesus. I already got two ghosts. I sure as hell don't need 
another. I'll miss him for sure. For a while I wasn't so

sad 
stories, happy stories, I don't care. Come on, Amel. Any 
kind. Please?"

"All out of stories, Luke. You better go on home."

"But Amel. How about the one where the boat went 
over the dam? You never finished that one. Or. . ."

"I don't remember it now. You better get."

"How about. . ."

"Luke!"

"But. . ."

"I said I don't have no more stories."

Thaddeus sat on the roof of the tin shack, cleaning his 
fur. Luke glanced up, tears welling in his eyes, and stared as 
the pink tongue darted in and out, quick and fleeting, there 
and gone.

76


"Amel . . . .?"

The man said nothing. His vein-twisted hands grabbed 
at the strands in his lap, and knotted and turned and twirled. 
His head hung down.

Then the boy was up and gone and all that remained 
was the cat and a

place 
where a man sits balanced on a perch of rusted steel. His 
hands move slow and careful, pleating together the three 
fiber strands of a hemp rope. As he works, he remembers 
another rope, a smaller one, a gift to a woman who did not 
laugh or run away. His face is scarred. One eye is covered 
with pale, shiny skin and a cloud of gray and blue. The 
other is green and stares into nothing, oblivious to the 
actions of his hands —the fingers do not need the eye. A 
yellow cat licks his paws on the far edge of the pitted steel 
deck. The animal pauses, cocks his head, and listens to a 
forest-sound that only he can hear. The man looks up at the 
cat, and seeing him frozen in space, tries to listen, tries to 
feel. But then he misses the shift of a finger, loses a strand, 
and the splice is ruined.

77


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CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Rosa Maria Arenas is a media kid, junk collector and poet 
who has given innumerable readings throughout 
Michigan.

Emilio DeGrazia has published poems, reviews, and critical 
articles and has had fiction published in Green River 
Review, New Magazine, and elsewhere. He edits Great 
River Review.

Dennis M. Ellman published a book, The Hills of Your Birth, 
in 1976 with Momentum Press. He just purchased a 
"beautiful antique side board which is bigger than my 
dining room —(or do I only wish it?)." We'll give him 
the benefit of the doubt and call it hyperbole.

Steven Flegg is an undergraduate at MSU. He has previously 
published in RCR.

Ann Halm is a student at MSU and is circulation manager 
of Communication Outlook, a publication of the Artificial 
Language Laboratory in the Computer Science 
department at MSU. This is her first time in print.

lames Haug works in a migrant program in Geneseo, NY. 
He will have a chapbook out soon from La Huerta 
Press, Staying Overnight at a Strange House.

Ruby Hoy is a student at Central Michigan University. Her 
main interests are old-timey music and dance.

Daniel L. Klauck has been published in Stonecloud, The 
Greenfield Review, Quixote, and several other little 
magazines. His first book, Everything Else . . ., was 
released by King Publications in 1976.

Sam Mills who edits the Red Cedar Review, occasionally 
does collages; this is the first time his art work has 
appeared anywhere.

Robert Michael Rutan claims to be unpublished (he 
published both a poem and a story before "but they 
were real turkeys and I'm not owning up to them") and 
languishing in a prison in Iowa.

Harry Smallenburg works at The Center for Creative Studies 
in Detroit.

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Myron Taube teaches English at the University of Pittsburgh. 
This is his 50th acceptance, achieved in time 
for his 50th birthday.

Keith Taylor has been a housepainter for 12 years and a 
student in the creative writing program at Central 
Michigan University. He has work accepted at The 
Greenfield Review and Waves.

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MAGAZINES RECEIVED

Triquarterly 43, The Little Magazine in America, Elliott

Anderson, ed. Evanston, III. $6.95

Cottonwood Review #19, Mike Smetzer, ed. Box J, Kansas

Union, Univ, of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66045 $1.90

Impact Magazine, Vol. I, No. 4, The Commentators Press,

P.O. Box 61297, Sunnyvale, CA 94088 $2.50

Silverfish Review #1, Roger Moody, Randall Roorda, 
editors, Box 3541, Eugene, OR 97403 $1.00

Tar River Poetry, Vol. 18, #1, Department of English, Austin 
Building, East Carolina University, Greenville, NY 
27830 $1.50

The Smith/20, Harry Smith, ed., 5 Beekman St., New York,

NY 10038 $3.00

Spit in the Ocean, #3, 85829 Ridgeway Rd., Pleasant Hill,

OR 97401 $2.50

Phantasm, Vol. 3, #4, Larry S. Jackson, ed. Heidelburg

Graphics, P.O. Box 3404, Chico, CA 95927 $2.00

Forms, A Magazine of Poetry & Fine Arts, 79 W. Goepp St., 
Bethlehem, PA 18018 $1.25

Skywriting, Vol. Ill, # 1&2, Martin Grossman, ed., 511 
Cambell Street, Kalamazoo, Ml 49007 $4.00

Sheepshead Revue, Vol. 4, #1, Univ. of Wisconsin, College 
of Creative Communication, Green Bay, Wis. 54302

Centering 4, F. Richard Thomas, ed. Dept. of American 
Thought and Language, Ernst Bessey Hall, MSU, East 
Lansing, Ml 48824

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BOOKS RECEIVED

Selected Poems, Margaret Atwood, Simon and Schuster,

New York 1978 $4.95

The Poets Story, Howard Moss, ed. Simon and Schuster,

New York 1973 $4.95

Silent Voices: Recent American Poems on Nature, Paul

Fereo, ed. Alley Press, P.O. Box 30340, St. Paul, MN

55175 $2.95

Hearts of the Tattoed, Jim Hubert, Impact Poetry Series,

P.O. Box 61297, Sunnyvale, CA 94088 $2.00

Saying My Name Out Loud, Arthur Dobrin, Pleasure Dome

Press, LI Poetry Collective, Inc. Box 773, Huntington,

NY 11743 $2.50

Leo (a round of poems), Charles B. Taylor, Slough Press,

184 Q St., Apt. 2, Salt Lake City, Utah 84103 $1.50

The Creek, Victor Depta, Ohio University Press, Athens,

OH

Raw Hands and Bagging, Coco Gordon, Water Marle Press, 
175 East Shore Rd., Huntington Bay, NY 11743 $2.50

The Chinese Poems: Letters to Distant Friends, Dan Gerber,

The Sumac Press, Fremont, Ml $3.95

Circumstances, Robert VanderMolen, Sumac Press $3.95 
Vivisection, Ron Mieczkowski (no price listed) 
Refractions, Paul Shuttleworth, Impact Poetry Series $2.00 
Safe Passage, James Margorian, Stone Country Press, 20

Corraine Road, Madison, NJ $2.50

Foam on Gulf Shore, Duane Locke, UT Review, U of

Tampa, Tampa, FLA 33603 $2.50

The Life Machine, Try and Bear It, Blue Skies Calling, R.

Leroy Williams, P.O. Box 578, Perry, FLA 32347

$3.00, $4.00, $3.00

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Apricot Twostep, Ernest J. Oswald, 128 Laguna St., San 
Francisco, CA 94102

Small Crimes, 23 Poems, Bruce White, Expedition Press

83


84


RED CEDAR REVIEW EDITORS

Sam Mills

Lynn Domina

Brenda Swope

Susan Lockhart

Ann Shanabrook

Carolyn Cigan

Sharon Puchalski

Paul Murphy

Terry Lawrence

GRAPHIC ART

Steven Flegg

Sam Mills

Harry Smallenburg

RED CEDAR REVIEW is a biannual magazine of the literary arts 
published at Michigan State University. Manuscripts may be submitted 
to 325 Morrill Hall, Department of English, Michigan 
State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824. Please include 
return postage.

SUBSCRIPTIONS —one year (two copies): $4.00

single copies: $2.50

OUR THANKS to the MSU College of Arts and Letters, English 
Department, Student Media Appropriations Board, George 
Kooistra and University Publications, Albert Drake and other 
friends.

Copyright © Red Cedar Review 1979

Michigan State University Printing

85


86


Back Issues of RCR................................................................................$1.00

One issue of RCR...................................................................................$2.50

One year subscription of RCR..........................................................$4.00

Postcard Mysteries, fiction by Albert Drake................................$2.50

Love at the Egyptian Theatre, poetry by Barbara Drake .... $2.50

I would like to order copies of the above marked items.

Enclosed is my check or money order for 
payable to the Red Cedar Review, 325 Morrill Hall, English 
Department, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Ml 48824

Please mail to:

Name 

Address 

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88


In This Issue:

Poems by:

Arenas

Ellman

Haug

Hoy

Klauck

Rutan

Taylor

Fiction by:

DeGrazia

Halm

Sims

Taube

Graphics by:

Flegg

Mills

Smallenburg

Vol. XIII No. 1

Harry Smallenburg
Harry Smallenburg