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Something Was Bound to Happen

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Something Was Bound to Happen

 

When he said they were getting married, I told him it was a mistake and that something was bound to happen. It was true she was very beautiful and talented and appeared on television, but I had noticed things. For example, when I answered her question about East Germany––where I had attended conferences for university teachers of German–and mentioned that some members of the Communist Party were not true believers and had shown notable levels of humanity and kindness, she had looked down at the ground,let’s face it, clearly suspicious that there was something very wrong with my thinking. This looking down happened each time I talked about the paradox of some people maintaining their goodness even during swings toward authoritarian societies, while others didn’t. I said I couldn’t explain it. Which only made her frown more.

I love my friend dearly, and wished him well, of course, and went so far as to offer him my home as a site for the wedding ceremony.  His third.  And who knew about her? Questions concerning her immediately came up against my own lack of grace. She was too beautiful, too shapely, too charming, overbred, privileged, and too far out of reach for someone like me, even if I could get beyond my lack of favor in her eyes , or ignore my usual poor judgement.

In any case, they accepted the offer, and the many guests arrived on a sunny warm day after a night of heavy California costal fog. They followed the slightly squishy newly mown path through the field to the top of the hill and the windbreak of ancient cypresses. The sun slanted down through the massive limbs, women’s eyes moistened, and children twitched and looked the wrong way. The couple, dressed in expensive flowing white linens, seemed to glow in the filtered light, as they began to exchange their vows. I had already mentioned that the place where she had chosen to stand was not ideal. The night’s fog had been dripping from the dark cypress needles above them.  The ground under her pretty white flat-heeled shoes was a slippery white clay that sloped a little too much. When I tried to caution her, she dismissed me with a “Don’t worry about it.” A moment later, following the eyes of the child ring bearer, I raised my gaze and saw there was a red fox lying at nadir of a great limb that swooped down over the wedding couple and then up again. I knew from its behavior––it being so close to humans with its eyes closed––meant it was sick and probably from rabies. I put my forefinger to my lips to swear the very young ring bearer to silence. But by now all the rest of the children were looking up, too and whispering to each about the wonder of a sleeping, sweet little furry something just over their heads.

 

The officiating fellow, a close friend of the groom, was a tall bearded Mexican UNAM professor of Astro Physics from Mexico City with flashing eyes and Roman features. This man asked for the rings, both of which fell out of the young ring bearer’s hand and landed on the wet clay the bride was standing on. With a quick glance to the Mexican astrophysicist, the bride bent over to retrieve the rings and, in so doing, showed a generous amount of cleavage. I saw it and so did the astrophysicist, who met her second glance at him with a generous smile. At which, the bride dropped one of the rings herself, and this this time, when she bent to retrieve it, the fox fell, or jumped––no one really knows––onto her back, then to the ground where it staggered back toward her, baring its teeth. With a snarl, she handed my friend the rings. The children shrieked and backed away, while the bride, with dark look at me, began to slide downhill on the slick clay, barely gaining speed as jumpers do when they begin from the top  a ski jump.

To save herself, the bride grabbed my friend by the tail of his expensive linen jacket and–because his shoes were also-high-fashion flat–he found himself slewed  around in front of her, seeking his balance, raising his legs to chest level, first one, then the other, like a highly trained clown on a low high wire feigning losing his balance. But still holding the rings. As, one, the wedding party clapped, thinking it had been rehearsed that way, The couple were, after all, known to be good skiers. It had to be a new twist on an old ceremony, something different and very Northern California.

 

And so, they slid ever faster down the slope in the cleavage between two smaller slopes, the depression that had always carried runoff from the fog-dripping cypress down to the diminutive farm pond at the bottom of the hill.  And when they hit the stone wall between us and the pond. And because the stones had been placed with a lack of expertise––mine, I confess–– and were not interlocking and keyed and laced and overlapping—the whole structure, like so many bowling pins, collapsed from the force of their ceremonial impact. The bride and groom landed in the brown water, where they were pinned to the bottom not even six feet down. The astrophysicist and I had sprinted down right behind them, albeit to the right on more stable ground, and leapt into the pond to save them. I, my friend. And the astrophysicist, the bride, whom he scooped in his arms and carried up out of the pond. A few of their friends at the top of the hill had continued clapping, still partially convinced, I assumed, that this had been the most extraordinary Northern California wedding they had ever witnessed. I held my friend around the waist and looked down at the brown water where the little male mosquito fish pursued the fat females in endless chase. My friend leaned against me, coughing. The water was cold, and I could feel him trembling. When I heard a car start, I looked up in time to see the astrophysicist and the bride drive down my driveway in his BMW and out onto the country road, heading east.

 

 

 

The Launching

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The Launching

 

First of all, let me say, Welcome Home.  There’s something inviting about wind- and sun-grayed shingles and wild roses and small pane windows and wrap around porches. You see how the sand stretches out in low tide ripples beyond the dune grass toward the sea.  This is what Utah Beach looks like now, but gray and menacing then when we landed there so many years ago. This not a place just anyone can come to.  We are privileged to have this old house, which will belong to all of you when I am gone.

 

I first came here as a boy—that’s a long time ago.  My mother cooked apples—not apple pie, the way you might be thinking right now because of the smell in the air. She baked apples whole with walnuts, nutmeg, cinnamon and brown sugar in the place where the core had been.  My father smoked his pipe and sat in a white wicker chair on this same porch with the same Delft blue two-inch boards newly painted every year.  He sat at a little round wicker table and dipped his pen in black ink and wrote poems that made people’s eyes water when he read them aloud. Which is what he did at funerals, weddings, births or when his friends launched boats they had built.

Once his younger brother—my uncle Flori—built a Seabright skiff.  For beaches like this you needed a skiff with a flat bottom that would keep the boat upright when the tide went out and not tip over and let seaweed, flotsam, and crabs wash in. This was before the time of big highways and plastic boats. Uncle Flori built his skiff out of yellow pumpkin pine planking that seemed to glow in the gloom of the old barn, where he worked and where his chickens watched and commented. He used a special plane to make the bevels for the lapstrakes so they would overlap each other to form the hull. He steamed the strakes in his steam box and ran them hot through the scattering chickens to clamp them to the skiff’s backbone of already placed ribs, supports, stem and stern, all in white oak. Next, he drove the copper rivets through the overlapping laps to hold them all together. Months passed. This is what you did in the winter. There was no television to watch. The cow’s gave off just enough body heat to keep Flori and his chickens from freezing to death.

Eventually, when everything was ready— thwarts, gunnels, weighted rudder, tiller, gudgeons, pintles and cheekpieces, and thole holes sealed with a hot tapered iron, everyone gathered in the marsh grass beside the creek, the same creek you kids swim in out in back. The place where in earlier times many a New England schooner slid sideways down greased skids into a bobbing high tide.

On this occasion, with Uncle Flori’s Seabright Skiff, my father took his pipe out of his mouth, and gave a speech that made most of us see the South Seas, Arctic lights, rare stones, white birds filling the sky and God herself. They were words that made my GreatAunt Bessy Kingman cry and my eyes water. I think for a moment I was thinking, as I always had, of a beautiful Indian girl who was lost in the swamps of the forest primeval whom only I could rescue, although my father’s poem never mentioned anything like that.

“Hold on! I will answer questions in just a moment!”

And then Uncle Flori took a sledge hammer–he didn’t really need something that big–and popped out a wedge, and the skiff slid down its skids and bobbed in a clear high tide, bucking a little like a foal, and my father said, “Congratulations, Flori, you’ve given birth!”  And everyone thought that was funny, and just when they were laughing and had their mouths open and their faces lit up with life, I noticed the face of a girl I hadn’t seen before, with the edge of her big straw hat bent up and letting the sun down on her teeth and lips and the hint of circles under her eyes, and her amber skin.  And she’d been watering her eyes just the way I had, so we were really closer to each other than we might have been at some other moment.  And later we all went walking along the side of the creek all the way to the river to watch Uncle Flori row with his new self-made counter-weighted birch oars. There was a spray of roses on the stern seat and a bunch of sunflowers tied to the bow, and Aunt Laura sat on the bow thwart, showing her white stockings because she had pulled up her skirt so it wouldn’t touch the water that was entering because the pumpkin pine strakes had not yet swelled enough to make the skiff watertight. And then we went back up the creek, through the marsh grass, crossing the muskrat trails, and I ended up walking beside the girl with the amber skin, a little back from the others, and she seemed wonderful to me, smart and more than my match in everything, and two months later we were married, and a year after that you Jonah, were born, then you Roger were next, then finally you, Mark. For a long time, I had worried that all of this was little more than just another ritual of a white privilege, this house and the beach and everything. I told you boys about a few things I had learned. Like be on the lookout for someone where you laughed and could be yourself.  Where love is like the water you swim in like a fish.  You listened and have chosen well. And now I have a delightful brood of beautiful grandchildren, who are half Japanese, half Nigerian, part Mexican and part Native American. I know you’ve heard this all before, but on a day like this when we gather to remember your mother and grandmother, here at this old house with the gray shingles and the rock roses and the beach stretching away, I just wanted to tell the story again. How I met her, what it was like, and why this is a special place, so all of you, your wives and children, so all of you won’t forget.  But as Proust or somebody like that said: “Reality is a state approached only through memory.”

Something like that.  I don’t remember, and you’re not supposed to at my age.  Anyway, I think it smells like the apples are ready, and I say why don’t we go in and eat them, the walnuts, the cinnamon, nutmeg and brown sugar, all cooked together like this family­–How very lucky we are! And how very lucky I am to still be here with all of you. Some of you little ones had questions and I will answer them when we are eating our apples.

Cayman

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Cayman

“It takes me about ten minutes to get inspired.” This was my typical lament at Collin’s house, where the men gather to write. And so, I took my notebook and went outside for a short night stroll, figuring that darkness was more suggestive than indoor lights. I eased the screen door shut, crunched down the driveway past the four plastic flamingos on the lawn and climbed the footpath and turned left along the dike road that held the swamp back on one side and the Pacific on the other. I crossed the old, riveted bridge, still painted here and there, now closed to cars for safety reasons. Below, beside the black water of the swamp, there against a bank of sand lay–I counted them–seventeen caymans with their narrow snouts and fat bellies, one twice the size of myself, two more only slightly shorter, yet still heavier than me.

I stumbled down the path at the end of the bridge and approached from downwind so they would not smell me. They lay facing the west, listening, I assumed, as I was, to the rumble and thunder of the Panamanian surf. I lowered my profile and crabbed my way toward them, my notebook on my belly and my penmanship pointing skyward. But when I let myself down with a little bump, my legs out straight, with speed that defied vision, there was a thrashing splashing, enough to induce a limbic tingling up and down my spine that they had not come straight at me. When the water settled and my heart slowed and I thought to breathe again, and now with sufficient inspiration, I found my pen and began to write.

I wrote about the Caymans, their eggs, their cousins the crocodiles and alligators and iguanas and lizards, and then acquaintances and colleagues at the university. I wrote as medieval poets do, about chastity and unrequited love.

“Oh horn-browed beauty with yellow teeth,”I wrote, “what is this longing to dance with you in your fetid keep, if only I knew you wouldn’t clamp those shapely jaws on me the bard who sings your scaly charm?”

As I wrote, I noticed bubbled brows watching me from just above the surface, gliding toward me.

“I will write of your belly white like mine,” I murmured on, as I wrote. “But never about that place nearer your tail. What about breasts? Some sort of rounded form that poets love?”
Still silent—to be expected—she drifted closer, rose out of her slimy sink, and dripping waddled up the sandy bank until I thought it wise to back away.”

But something kept me in my place. Was it the look she gave me? It must have been a she, I thought, because I saw some sort of softness below her neck.

Something held me by the left foot. Or was it just the poet’s mood? I read her my poem. She closed her eyes. I like to think she wept.

My audience had grown. Now all seventeen lay at my feet, the moon rose full from behind the bridge.

I thought to sing them an ancient Nordic lullaby. The mood seemed right. We stayed that way until I at least was chilled by the salty mist and decided I should leave and return to the men’s writing group. But when I started to rise, she the Big One opened her eyes, and, with expression, refastened her grip on the tip of my left boot and held me there, as if to say, “One more,” and so I invented something on the spot, “O great beauty of this miserable swamp, the moon thy mother warms thy snout, and even if you now let me go, I would not leave, I love this so.” And with that, she let me go, snapped her teeth in a triple clack. With this signal I saw I was free to go. But since love is fickle and poets, not always honored, I kept looking behind to be sure she had not changed her mind and was considering dragging me back into her murky muck to eat. I climbed up to the dirt road, crossed back over the bridge, and followed my lunar shadow toward the house. Looking back down, I saw the sand bank beside the bog was clear and not one of the seventeen Caymans had thought to linger. The men’s cars were gone, the house was asleep, still guarded by Collin’s four flamingos who never slept. My forty-year old Land Rover Defender growled up a start. My notebook rode beside me, my penmanship facing up, largely unreadable from the speed with which I had written. It was the only evidence of my inspiration. That and a slight tingling in my boot.

Pátzcuaro’s Horses

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Pátzcuaro’s Horses

Jon sat in Pátzcuaro’s Plaza Grande, heavy in spirit and no longer young. He sat in the shadow of the great ash trees but in his mind horses lifted their heads, as if they had finally sensed his presence. Then they formed a black-brown river, their tails outstretched. and were halfway across the road before he could react, and then the image faded. His hand dropped and felt the cold stone of the bench. It was not what he needed to be sitting on. It awakened a dull ache halfway down his spine. His wife was waving at him, got no response, hesitated, her hand still in the air, then continued walking toward him. When she finally got his attention, she stopped and called out that she was going to get mangos at the mercado in the Plaza Chica. He nodded, smiled and waved. The image faded more and more, the further she walked away from him.

He had been in Michoacán for three months, and he was still trying to understand. Seeing, not shopping, was what he wanted to do, see the horses that grazed beside the road between Erongarícuaro and Pátzcuaro. In the plaza’s penumbra, although they weren’t there, he could still see them, some with ropes still attached to their necks, some with slipped tethers that now dragged from one front leg, where they had been tied between fetlock and hoof. Now nothing held them away from the road but his own distant and silent imploring.

The contradictions assailed him. In Mexico horses were special, clearly loved, involved in the lives of the campesinos, who treated them as part of the family, walked with them to pastures beside the lake, rode on them, visited them during the day with an entourage of wife, friends, children, burros, cows, and dogs. With so much contact, they were comfortable around humans. He supposed you could walk up to them if they knew you and their ears would not go back. There was no greater pleasure for a campesino, it appeared, than to ride his mare, with all his gear—the saddle with the leather-covered wooden frame and pommel, the sheathed machete, the coiled suspended lazo and, for festivals, the gaban de caballo, the poncho of still oily wool that covered saddle and rider. For summer rains he rode with a yellow plastic poncho, rubber boots, his tightly woven straw hat with a black swallow tail ribbon hanging down in back. And, most important, a month-old colt, free, sleepy, trotting behind, pulled along by the invisible connection with its mother.

In the square, where he sat, a young attractive middle-class woman, perhaps from Morelia, walked beneath the ashes, followed by her brood of two boys nine or ten, on new roller blades and a girl, six or seven, on roller skates. The girl sat down on an adjoining stone bench, while her brothers lurched off around the square with the loud chatter of the privileged. The mother had passed close enough for him to form an impression. She was stylish and at once comfortable in her clean blue jeans, pink blouse above, clean white tennis shoes below. She was young, athletic, and private, a counselor to and protector of her children. There was something about her, the way she walked, the whisper of indecision, eyes empty, that spoke of discontent. Perhaps because it was a Sunday, and the other protector was not with them.

He looked past her, west beyond Pátzcuaro to where he knew horses moved through a 19th Century landscape, a riparian quilt of many greens, interlaced with dirt roads and paths between milpas, corn fields, that swept up toward dark volcanic mountains or downward toward the shimmering lake and its soft bordering marshes where, here and there, campesinos still ploughed with oxen. In his mind, through his failing eyesight, he could see a campesino and his son, on one horse, the boy sitting back on the horse’s haunches, chatting and laughing in tones he associated with a satisfaction he himself had not grown up with, living near Boston. Now and then, the father swung the coiled lazo and rapped down on the rump of a straggling calf. The calf hopped ahead but not too far. With inflamed fly bites on its back, there were worse things than a slow rap from a lazo. They wove back and forth behind the cattle. There was no hurry, only the practical delight of riding herd and, for the animals, the activity of being herded toward pasture.
They passed other horses with children mounted with their fathers, perhaps a girl of nine or ten. They carried bundles of pasto, grass, cut by hand with a short-handled sickle, as feed for pigs or a milking cow. They passed a burro, also heading home, carrying rostrojo, drying corn stalks. When the animal is fully loaded, it is hard to see, the farmer leading it, with his machete looped over his shoulder. It was a walking haycock of corn stalks, slung by knots and ties known by the father and taught to sons, and sometimes to daughters as well. They followed a grassy lane back toward the village and their house, where, warm in the sunlight, a mare grazed close to her colt. The colt stood on legs that were too long, staggered, nudged its mother here and there, looking for teats, sucked once or twice and then looked up at the entourage of animals and people returning from the lake.

It looked over at him seated under the great ash trees, its head still bowed, at the level of the teats. Feeding and connection to its mother were the stronger impulse than standing tall and alert. The mother’s presence and protection made it unnecessary. Plus, it was all too much effort, for colts were always tired from so much growing. The mare was watchful and moved between him and the foal. He could no longer see the foal, partly because of the mare’s position and partly because of the age of the ash trees and shadows of time that he sat in.
Again, it was evening, and a campesino lunged his horse in the area between the road and stonewalls, holding the horse from the end of a long rope which was attached to its halter. The horse, snorting and farting alternately, trotted in a circle around its owner, wearing a shallow circular trench in the soft earth. They were both excited. The campesino turned and grew dizzy from the blur of passing stone walls, road, and dark volcanic mountains, the smell of earth, and the presence of an ownerless dog whose ribcage is showing. The horse’s hooves, a muffled pounding, trembled the earth, and in the falling darkness campesino and horse belong to each other.
By twilight, which tends to be Jon’s only time, the horses were loose and moved over the old paths that eventually crossed the country roads. Flat-nosed three-axled Autocar, Dina and Mercedes trucks with tarps lashed tight over their freight hurtled over these roads. They and thirty- or forty-year old buses spewing black diesel smoke wore heavy steel tubing grates over their radiator grills, grates called tumbaburros, a little Spanish sentence in itself which means something like, “Knocks burros aside,” but also horses. Mules and cows received more supervision and were kept corralled at night.These were the devices that protected them from horses and cattle that wandered across the road at night on legs that snapped from the impact. With tumbaburros there was no need to slow down, whether day or night.
Another animal sat in the plaza and watched with Jon. It was one of Mexico’s ubiquitous ownerless dogs that all look the same and feed in garbage dumps or from wherever they can, especially the ranging females with hanging teats that are desperate to feed their pups. People kicked at them and threw rocks. They flinched and slinked away, always preoccupied with their bottom position in an unforgiving pecking order. From so much effort to survive their responses were dulled. They stumbled against each other when avoiding a stone. They snarled while mobbing a bitch in heat or, distracted, crossed the road without looking to catch up with the families leaving for the pastures beside the lake. Or they cut back and wheeled around into the path of trucks and buses and cars. And died in great numbers and lay on the road for days, before they disappeared . Their bloated legs stuck out at an angle toward the sky. They turned dark, and the air around them turned putrid. There were always two or three dead dogs on our road. It was said that some drivers aimed at them, as if it were a game.
A man walked by Jon with his two children, a girl perhaps thirteen, a boy perhaps ten or twelve. She was as tall as her father, the boy nearly as tall. But he was very much their father, warm and present. It was obvious, as they hung on him, that they looked up to him, assured that he was looking out for them and loved them and treasured them. Jon had two sons. They were in their mid-thirties, but he was not sure what they thought of him, nor if he had looked out for them sufficiently, though he loved them dearly.
But what concerned him now was not so much his sons but rather dead horses. It was not something he had considered entirely possible. Dogs were one thing, but horses, entirely different. The first horse lay on its back in a ditch with its legs straight out and rigid. It lay there for two days, then it was gone. A tractor, an ox team, a truck—somehow responsibility had been assigned and the carcass was removed. From where he sat in the Plaza Grande, he could see it, albeit indistinctly. But how was it lifted into a truck and taken away for rendering? He couldn’t think it through the first time. There was a piece missing. Dead dogs and dead horses on the road? Everyone knew you didn’t stop when you killed something. The legal problems were too great, too labyrinthine, leading to grudges and complications you couldn’t afford to be involved in. And so, in his mind, he moved on.
The second horse lay in the middle of the road on a beautiful morning, when they were on the way to Pátzcuaro. They slowed down to maneuver around it. As they got closer, they saw a dogs ripping at it, a whisp of steam rising from its still warm flesh. On the way home it was still lying there, in the middle of the road. Three dogs tore at the horse’s rectal and vaginal areas where the flesh was softer and more accessible. Another dog lay dead in the road, a victim of its own distraction. The next morning, the horse lay just off the pavement. Now there were seven or eight dogs ripping at it. In one night, they had devoured everything but the rib cage, the backbone and parts of the leg bones, now bare and pink. Its massive head was missing. That afternoon, on the way home from Pátzcuaro, they saw the rib cage lying over near the stone wall, where one or two dogs tore at it. On the next day, nothing. Seven or eight hundred pounds of horse devoured in a day and a half, leaving no trace except a layer of undigested grass from the stomach.
Then what? Under a full cold moon, bored with eating, with their tongues bloody and hanging out, would they try to run down the panicked colt? While, not far off, trucks bellowed through the night, spewing smoke, churning ahead like angry ships?
The rollerbladers clattered by and stopped to ask their mother in whining tones, couldn’t she just please step across the street and bring them cups of the popular homemade ice cream?
They saw the third horse on the road to Salvatierra, on the way to the 25th Cervantino, the International Cervantes Festival held annually in Guanajuato. In area away from villages, a dark form lay on the side of the highway, its legs raised and slanting upward because of the bloated belly. On the way back six days later, its stomach had been cleaned out, the rib cage lay open like a dark basket. Its other parts remained blackened and uneaten, a sign that only slow-eating buzzards had been at work, for dogs would have taken everything, to the last bone, with no time left for the corpse to turn black.
Then later by himself the mountains above Guanajuato, between Schubert and the Ballet Folklórico Nacional, fleeing the crowds, high up on the summit of La Bufa, he walked along the ridge toward the mining village of Calderones and came across two horses, one white and one black black with a white face and two white rear socks, grazing unattended there at the top of the world. They walked away as he approached wondering where they had come from. He found their fresh tracks and followed them along a cattle trail until he came to a grassy green spot at the base of a cliff, a sign that there was a seep higher up. The hoof marks were deep and plentiful and led to a filled water hole. Frogs jump in from all sides when he approached. There were smaller hoof prints he assumed from burros led there with milk cans to fill from the hole for human needs. He climbed higher and the mouth of a cave rose before him. An old stone wall, now tumbled, had formed half a corral to keep animals contained at night. There was a break in the wall, and so he entered the way he could see the two horses had recently, stepped onto the thick carpet of dried manure finely ground from many hooves over the years. On the rear wall at about eight feet he saw an old and skillfully painted painting of a saint. Under the ashes in the square, Jon peered again through dimness to read the name underneath, but it seemed even less clear than ever before. “Aogostino,” perhaps, maybe a shepherd’s patron, but with white skin. The date, even less clear, looked like 1788. And below that, a careful hand in blue paint had written “Animals are not permitted in this space because it is sacred.” He could see them now from the stone bench, the white horse and a black one with a white face and two white rear socks, nuzzling each other, wrapped in each other’s closeness, taking shelter from rain and heat and drought, in their sanctuary beneath the shrine. Then he had looked down and seen human footprints as well, which after some time he had realized were his own joined with those of the horses.

The woman on the bench, with the Nike shoes and pink blouse, might have been watching him, because of the way she turned her head away quickly when he looked her way. But the question faded and she faded. A friend had recently told him a story about the shortcut to the Uruapan highway from the Erongaricuaro-Pátzcuaro road. It was a rough dirt road, and the last part of it was an abrupt rise. When they came up over the lip, he said, there was a dead horse lying on the side of the road and five Purépecha Indians, three children and their parents, dressed in their best clothes, sitting on the horse. It was a cold day, and so it was possible, the friend reasoned, that death had been recent and they were keeping warm while waiting for the bus, or maybe, he thought, they were simply communing with a beloved and valued animal.
Now Jon could see the marsh in great remembered clarity, the lush flatlands beside the lake with the slow motion flight of a blue heron or two, the private studied stalking by lesser egrets, and the black, nervous freshwater cormorants. Cattle fed up to their bellies in water, fifteen or twenty of them, making the sounds of vast African splashing herds, strange and glorious—Mexico’s water buffalo, pulling at fat grasses and ignoring the carnal pleas of the young bull with his bowed and swaying head, showing the whites of his eyes.
Far from the village, in this remote, perfect world of eating, movement, and water, Jon had approached a campesino trying to increase the tension of a barbed wire fence with a crowbar, then nailing it tight. They talked. Philemon had had three wives and seventeen children, ten of them now dead. He was seventy-eight and had worked in Jon’s California hometown in the Fifties picking apples. His father had lived to be a hundred and one. He had little contact with his living children who were all in the States. He couldn’t read or write, and so letters were useless, telephones too expensive. Jon held the crowbar after Philemon has hooked the wire and tensed it, while Philemon nailed. They work together. One of the staples fell, and Jon coildn’t find it. Philemon picked it up and asked Jon how his eyes were, and Jon told him he was going blind, a rare disease, the steady degeneration in the cellular connection that permited vision.
They were quiet for a while, sitting on a grassy bank with the sun on their backs, listening to the cattle moving through the water, the croaking of a blue heron, the egrets’ fussing, the young bull’s suffering. Jon told him about the Purépecha Indians sitting on the dead horse, as if they had been waiting for the bus. He asked him why they were doing it. Philemon’s Spanish grew clearer or maybe Jon was listening more intently.
“It’s just a place to sit,” said Philemon. “If it’s not smelling and rotting, it’s a place to sit.
“You don’t think it’s that when something so large and so Mexican and so good dies, it uses a big share of death, more than it needs for itself, and then there’s less of it, less death, for the people sitting on the horse, and that then life is better and stronger for the living?
“Sure, that’s it,”said Philemon, nodding, his smile warm and friendly.
“And that the horse’s soul is still there, and then it passes into the people who are there right close to it, and they profit from its goodness and beauty?”
“That’s even better.” Philemon paused. “Look, my friend” he said, the hammer hanging at his side. “The truth is I don’t really believe in all that. I believe in God, although you don’t see me in the church very often.” He stopped for a moment. “But you know, my wife believes in it. My third wife,” he added, grinning. “She believes that’s why all her children lived. The goodness of animals. The innocence of horses. That’s the word I use.” There was another pause. “But I think it’s because I married her young and strong.
“And pretty?” .
“Yes, very pretty!” The old man laughed and reached into his breast pocket and fished out a squashed package of cheap Alas.
“Do you smoke?”he asked, and fumbled one out.
“No. Thanks.”
“Good! You’re still young.”
And then he lit up, the match, his hand trembling, and they sat with the sun on their backs, listening some more to the big sound of cattle moving in water.
Just then the boys pass by again on their roller blades, ignoring their sister’s pleas to wait for her. Jon rested his hand the cold stone of the bench, then leaned forward and got up and realized that His wife was standing right in front of him, studying his face, and holding two large ripe and blushing mangos for him to smell. And then he put his arms around her and held her tight and felt the warmth of her body, but also the two mangos she was pressing against his back, like the young breasts she had pressed against him when they were young.

A Homage to Writer and Rebel Gerry Haslam

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Gerry Haslam and I used to huddle in his or my office located in the new gym at Sonoma State College, before it became Sonoma State University. It might have been his first year. I know it was mine. That was 1967. I was overwhelmed. I was the single parent of two little boys, 5 and 2, Markus and Dylan. I was still writing my PhD thesis for the stuffy German Department at UC Berkeley, where Thomas Mann’s son Golo was teaching. Whom I hardly registered and never spoke to. The Vietnam War was raging, and I was trying to find my place, without much success in the Age of Free Love. And so, in this weakened condition, I was susceptible to Gerry Haslam’s satanic whispers that he would write literature rather than be a fussy critic of other people’s creations. To me, this was a daring heresy that I could scarcely take in. I could only see that he was a rebel, and that part stuck. And so, easily influenced, I started to write, little stories here and there in German and English. Without really noticing it, I had joined the creative conspiracy, instigated for me by this kind and clever man. He had taught me the alchemy of S + W = L. storytelling plus work to make literature. One day, twenty years later, in Weimar, East Germany where Goethe and Schiller had written, I asked my mildly Marxist professor of Germanistik (pronounced with a hard g) the Faustian question, “Why analyze literature to death instead of creating literature?” The young woman was speechless and now had another reason to be suspicious of me. At age 70, I published my first novel and, in a month or so , at almost 85, I will have published my fourth novel , plus a collection of short stories—all of it historical fiction set in Mexico where Dianne Romain and I have lived for the last twenty years.

All of this, aside from the Dianne Romain part—who is also a novelist—may not have happened without those early heretical whispers from that kind and loving academic rebel, my friend and fine writer Gerry Haslam.

The Down from a Thousand Geese

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La qa  

 

There was a student at the university where I taught German. He was an aerial photo analysis expert during the Vietnam War or, as the Vietnamese say, the American war. His job was to guide B-52 strikes on villages and troop concentrations in Laos and Cambodia, strikes which had been forbidden by the US Congress. He had been instructed to target villages where crops had been planted in straight lines, this being an indication, according to higher moral authorities, that the villagers were communist. He began to vector the bombing runs as far away from villages as he could without being caught by his diligent superiors. He also turned to heroin for relief from thinking about the people he had already blown to pieces in the Arc Light attacks, where each time a five square miles of terrain was obliterated by the B-52 bombing pattern. Eventually he refused to serve and was imprisoned and served time in the US military prison, and then came to my state university from San Quentin Prison, whereupon he was elected the student body president and went on to receive many honors.  For many years he was the president of the Vietnam Veterans’ Restoration Project, a veterans’ organization which built eight medical clinics in Vietnam. The US Veterans Administration never recognized his disability claim for post-traumatic stress syndrome. After hearing him talk about his war and post-war experiences, my love and I ate at a local Chinese restaurant. While waiting for our food I wrote the bulk of what follows on paper napkins.

The Down from A Thousand Geese

My Great-Great-Great Uncle Chu Li was half Chinese, half English—the son of an English merchant and a warlord’s daughter. My relatives continued to marry non-Chinese to the extent that you would be hard pressed to see any Asian ancestry in the contours of my eyes.

Chu Li ran away from home because, he said in letters to those who were born after him, there was more cruelty there than there was down on a thousand geese. His grandfather, the warlord, sent out searchers and warned them that they would die if they did not find Chu Li.

Meanwhile, Chu Li wore a disguise and sat on the bank of a great river, thinking about the beauty of the world and the pettiness of human beings. One day the warlord himself came to cross the river. While the group waited for the boat to ferry them over, the warlord asked the young man sitting on the bank if he would care to be one of his soldiers.

The young man, who was Chu Li, answered, after some thought: “If I declare my loyalty to you, what obligations will you have to me?”

The warlord waved his hand impatiently. “I will give you one ten-thousandth of what I earn in a year, plus food and shelter and rice wine enough.

“But will you care for me like a grandson?” Chu Li asked.

The great man waved his hand dismissively but did not leave. “A grandson obeys his grandfather. The burden of respect rests on him. Therefore, that is how I would treat you.”

“You mean, Your Lordship, you would never walk with me beside a great river, holding my hand, teaching me wisdom and how to laugh? You would never show me which pomegranates to pick and how to eat them?”

“You are to be my soldier to help rule my country, not a soft mother’s child who eats pomegranates all afternoon.”

“What about my mother, if she were to pass?”

“If she were pretty with breasts and hips, I would order her to show her respect by lying with me with her legs spread so that I could show her my power and domination.”

“Your lordship,” said Chu Li, “I do not think I would want to be the grandson of one so powerful, so impatient, so unwilling to learn.”

At that the warlord raised his sword and struck Chu Li on the shoulder with the flat of the blade, sending him rolling in the dust of the riverbank.

When the boat crossed the river with the warlord, who was Chu Li’s mighty grandfather, a cable broke and the boat turned over and sank and all the horses and men were drowned. Only the warlord still swam above the waves. Chu Li entered the muddy water and swam to him and held him by the beard like a goat. The water had washed away Chu Li’s disguise, and so his grandfather recognized him.

“I will throttle you like a goose when I have you in my hands again, you impudent mother’s boy!”

At which, Chu Li let him go.

“Why are you drowning me?” shrieked the warlord.

“I am not drowning you, old man,” said Chu Li. “I am only obediently not interfering in my punishment, so that you may be unobstructed in your absolute right to choke out my life.”

At which the warlord hissed: “You will die by my hand,” and sank beneath the waves, heavier than the wet down from a thousand geese.

Uncle Manny Takes the Wave

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Uncle Manny Takes the Wave

 

My Uncle Manny once told me over a wickedly scrumptious Bear Claw and coffee at a country restaurant run by a religious cult that his secret goal was to be able to stand in front of his own mirror and point to his mat of white chest hair and say, “I’m the surfer. I’m the surfer. I’m the real thing.” He was already sixty, so I was careful to keep my reaction to a supportive nod that would hide any trace of doubt.

 

When Uncle Manny got to the beach, he found his former student Holly with three of her friends pulling on their wet wetsuits. It was February, eight o’clock in the morning, gray and cold and a light sprinkle falling and little hope of any sunlight that day.

 

Holly was glad to see him. He was her former professor in a section of the War & Peace Lecture Series, where he had also been a lecturer and had given talks on genocide Guatemala, Mexico, and Chechnya.

 

She wanted to know what he was doing there.

 

“Jogging, getting some air,” he said. “And you? Surfing? So early in the morning and in weather like this?” The truth was, he knew she often surfed there weekend mornings and had hoped to run into her.

 

“We had a sleep-over,” she said, “and we’re going to do a little surfing now and let the water wake us up.”

 

She was pulling on the top of her suit. She wore a sweatshirt but had extracted her arms from its sleeves and was working herself into the top of the wetsuit without revealing anything. Once suited, she hopped around on the balls of her bare feet, getting her board out of the car, waxing the top and cracking the windows on the old Toyota Four Runner for her dogs

 

“Want to come?”

 

I could, he thought. He had the new wet suit in the back of his truck. He had his  stately ten-foot longboard, which he had never tried to use, and he found Holly attractive.

 

“I’ve actually been thinking of taking lessons.”

 

“You got a wet suit with you?”

 

“I do…”

 

“Well, then, come on out with us!” she said, gathering her ankle leash in one hand and the board in the other.

 

“I’d be embarrassed,” he said, making a clever joke out of the truth.

 

“Have you used it yet?” she asked, smiling and with no trace of mockery.

 

He hadn’t. He’d only tried it on in the shop’s dressing room. It still had the tags on it. And that had been three weeks ago.

“I’m backing into it slowly.”

Holly’s smile was friendly, maybe even a bit more than friendly. Or was it also partly puzzlement over his phrasing “backing into it,” one more bit of irony she half expected from him and never quite got? Was she pondering these things, he wondered, or was it just him?

It was darker overhead and raining a little stronger.

“Come on with us!” she said, in a voice that was clearly an invitation, possibly on more than one level.

He knew he was too old. On more than one level.

Then she introduced him to her friends as one of her favorite professors. Her friends were Heather, Annie and Willow. Names like that. Friendly, warm, interested faces. No judgment. In their minds, perhaps a few unformed questions about the matter of his age.

“We just go out and have fun,” Holly said, over her shoulder. “See you!” and he watched them trotting over the gray beach, like otters approaching a stream. Holly skipping sometimes, her little frame, her neoprene-covered bow sprit, maidenhead breasts heading seaward, her rounded aboriginal bottom moving above her strong, youthful legs. A delightful sisterhood of young working women, carrying their hand-me-down boards that they’d inherited from their boyfriends present and past. He watched as they trotted then, full of confidence, bent over to wrap their leashes around their tanned ankles. Then he watched as they walked deeper into the waves. toward the spot where the lagoon emptied into the surf as a tidal river and where, he knew, Great White shark were known to feed.

The next time he looked, Holly was up on a three-foot wave, turning and twisting like the very best of them. They were, he decided in that moment, the real thing, and he was not.

He watched them for a while, standing in his black rain-proof running pants, his windbreaker, in his Gortex running shoes. He recalled a story his priest had told him. How the priest had an assistant for a while, a big Irishman with a mop of red hair, big workingman’s hands, a broad smile and a kind heart. And how for some reason everyone began referring to the likeable assistant as “The Priest.” And how he, the smaller man, the real priest, would go home at night, look at himself in the mirror and say, “I’m the priest, damn it– I’m the one who’s the priest!” That is what Manny wanted to say one someday. “Damnit, I’m the one who’s the surfer.”

We know this little secret this from Uncle Manny’s diary, from a passage that Aunt Stella had forgotten to purge with her black magic marker—the last entry before he finally left for Hawaii to take surfing lessons.

God only knows how his mind was working. We learned from his short, barrel-chested instructor Brent McNab—the Hawaiian great-great-grandson of Episcopalian autocrats who had ruled Hawaii and suppressed Hawaiian culture and independence—whom we were  later able to track down at Waikiki Beach, that Uncle Manny had done extremely well for a man his age. He had learned to leap into a surfer’s crouch almost immediately, had figured out the timing required to catch and take a wave, to stand up, balance and choose a path right or left away from the part that that was beginning to break. More astonishing was his seemingly instinctual ability to slant down across a wave’s face and then shoot up again and escape over the crest just before then wave broke. Casual observers, as well as Manny himself, agreed that he was well on his way to being the real thing.

But we also learned that on his sixth day as a surfer, he entered a Z.A. – a zone of arrogance, as Brent Macnab put it. Brent had told him not to surf in waves so large that he would not be able to hold his breath for the time they broke and held him down. On this occasion, he had also overlooked the lesson about applying only certain kinds of wax on the top of the board and only in certain amounts. It appeared in hindsight Manny’s talent for quick learning had not extended to attentive listening, for he had not internalized Bret’s two warnings.

On the day my Uncle Manny actually did become the real thing, Shinsaku Umahashi, a Japanese  camera man for The Japan Times with a new extra-powerful telescopic lens had set up his tripod on Diamond Head, a volcanic formation a good mile and a half from Waikiki Beach and happened to focus on one particular wave because of its size. He could make out the man sitting on his longboard in front of the rogue wave. He noticed the shock of gray hair and concluded it indicated he was observing a surfer of much experience who would put on a worthy display before the might of the enormous wave. Then he noticed the dark shadow in the water between the wave and the surfer and how it approacing with about the same speed as the wave. Both the wave and the shadow had almost arrived when he started filming.

In the water, Uncle Manny lept up as the wave lifted him, then found himself sloping along the face of something that was simply too big. Some said it had been easily twenty feet high from trough to crest, and poorly shaped, as they say in the parlance. Too steep and too unstable—impatient, as it were, to avalanche forward and unfurl all its tons of water not in sequence but all at once, in a thundering, frothing, churning, downward explosion.

Well, the long and the short of it was—according to Brent Macnab, who was watching him through binoculars—that Uncle Manny saw the problem and, for all his inexperience, realized that he had to leave his board and get in the water right then and there and disengage from the wave. But because of the matt of white hair on his chest, McNab thought, he found himself wedded to the over-waxed top of his rented Waikiki long board and therefore had to hurtle forward with it, until he was airborne, tumbling end over end through the air in front of the monster wave before he disappeared beneath it and the board came up broken in half, still overly waxed, with much of Uncle Manny’s white chest hair. But without Uncle Manny.

Instructor Macnab, the Honolulu Metropolitan Police Department, and the US Army, whose park-base the Fort DeRussy Military Reservation all this had happened in front of, all had their different theories, but in the end settled on the version that a large shark must have been in the wave with Uncle Manny and had taken him out to sea for a snack and then dropped him somewhere farther out beyond any ZA, where what was left of him – whatever part of him that had escaped sharp teeth, must have been nibbled into extinction by lesser fish and crabs as it drifted away and eventually sank, without Uncle Manny ever wearing his wet suit, the one he’d left in Northern California, and without ever returning to the frigid waters where he could have frolicked with Holly and her young feminist working class otter sisters, or even stand in front of his own mirror and point to his matt of white chest hair and say, “I’m the surfer. I’m the surfer. I’m the real thing.” That is, until editors at The Japan Times shared a film clip of the Waikiki incident where “an older experienced surfer” had met with a double nemesis, an event they gave the ghoulish title 本物だった The Real Thing. With most of the emphasis laid on the size of the wave, the age of the surfer and the fact that he was most likely eaten by the very large shark that had been in the wave with him. When the clip played on American channels, Holly and her friends discussed it in solemn voices, while Holly wept.

 

 

My Father’s Loves

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My Father’s Loves

 

When my father died, in 1976, notes began to appear.

First, on a piece of blue paper, placed in his journal, “There are no hints given. The coffee hits the spot. The biscotti are making me non-literary and not inclined to edit the novel. The moon is full. The air is cold. My yawns weigh me down. All of me still in the first person. There is a philology book I am supposed read: The German Language. It is 800 pages long. I am going for a walk. Would you like tea when I get back? Do not ever forget I love you. Mary Ann.”

The trouble was, it was not in my father’s handwriting. Nor in my mother’s. My father had glued it into his journal in such a way that it was hard to open. And Mary Ann was not my mother’s name.

He wrote that he had found her note stuck behind the frame of her bureau mirror, once when he was snooping around.  “It was folded in the middle, the way she used to part her hair, tucked away for the times I might need to read it.” With the date in his hand, “January 3, 1956.”

That was the first note.

Not too long ago, I found the second note.

My mother had asked me to repair the top drawer of her bureau. The drawer was binding and was hard to pull in and out. I knew a few gentle strokes with a wide-angle plane and a little sanding would do the trick. There, hidden from prying eyes, under the liner paper, was a scrap of paper and words written in my father’s hand, written twenty years after the Mary Ann’s note.  “Up at 5, gone for a walk, we’ll have coffee together when I’m back. Don’t forget I love you.”

That morning my father went to the river in his gray felt hat, wrapped in his brown herringbone woolen overcoat, and puffing his pipe, a neighbor said, and doing the stroll he loved so much, past the mill pond, and down the lane through pines, over the glacial sand toward the salt river skirted with ice, and slipped into the black river without his pipe or coat, or felt hat which he left hung over a the post at the end of the town wharf.

After the funeral, we walked to the river—my mother went by car, she grieved too much to walk—and we threw wreathes of white florist flowers into the river and sang Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

 A trusty shield and weapon

He helps us free from every need

That hath us now o’ertaken….

 

Six months later my mother discovered my father’s journal, and out of it dropped the message to him from Mary Ann. My mother read the diary, and a jealousy seized her so great that she was hospitalized for a week and nearly gave up her will to live. When she returned home, steadied between my brother and me—both in our early forties and undecided in our need for her to live or not to live, she asked us to assemble all my father’s papers, place them on the table beside her bed, and then leave her alone.

That night, she called me at my home in Cambridge. My wife and I had gone for a walk, and my Cynthia, our fourteen-year old daughter, talked to her troubled grandmother for over an hour. She could not sleep, her grandmother told her, without knowing what had become of this Mary Ann. She had to talk with her, if she was still alive, and could I, Cynthia’s father, call her back immediately, no matter the hour, and pledge my support in this project. Cynthia said she talked about love and passion, and about the excruciating pain of jealousy felt in the permanent absence of the person one loved. And then she cursed my father and wept and asked Cynthia if she believed in love, and whether she thought youthful passion meant more than the love between those who are old. My Cynthia is wise for her age, but these questions, she said, about youthful passion required an adult response, not hers.

Two years passed, and I spent many hours searching through records, telephoning relatives, interviewing my father’s surviving friends. And then I found Mary Ann, in West Arlington, alone in a brick house, with a black Labrador retriever and a hired companion.

At first, she pretended senility, the passage of years, forgetfulness, always disputing her identity as my father’s old love. After three visits I decided I would learn nothing, and I asked her to forgive me for disturbing her. Two days later, she called me. She could not sleep, she said. There were things to say, but they didn’t concern me and would I come for her the next morning? She wished to talk with my mother. And it would be a private meeting.

The next day was impossible for me, but the following Sunday afternoon I drove her to Marshfield. My brother had already arrived, to be with my mother as she waited. I led Mary Ann to the house, the Labrador following behind. My mother met her at the door—cordially, graciously, as she had always welcomed guests. She guided Mary Ann toward the living room and the crackling fire. She turned and asked my brother and me to walk to the river and see what the tide was. We protested that we already knew the tide. She said we looked peaked—that was her expression, in two syllables, and we needed a walk. It would do us good. My brother looked at me. Then Mary Ann asked us whether we could walk the dog. That she loved the water.

“She could swim in the river. It’s a place she would love.”

How did she know about the river? I thought, and had she swum there naked with my father?

My mother advanced on us, driving us back through the kitchen, and Mary Ann guided the dog to the door. “Her name is Lucy,” she said with a smile,

And then, more softly, “Maybe she can tell you the rest of whatever you might want to know about me.”

Then Lucy, my brother, and I watched the old women walk stiffly back into the living room and settle at opposite ends of the couch. I grabbed a few things I had set aside in the clothes closet, one of them my father’s felt hat, which I put on my head, and his pipe, which I put in my pocket.

Outside, snow began to fall around us in heavy flakes. We moved around the outside of the house so we could look through the living room windows. We saw the old women nod their heads as they talked and to our surprise laugh, not just once, but again and again. And then they cried and held each other and were soon sitting together in the center of the couch, where they looked at pictures from photo albums and drank tea, then sherry, and then more sherry.

The snow had built up on our shoulders and our feet had grown cold. Lucy the Labrador had found other things to do and wandered farther and farther away from us, skirting the yard, a dark busy form against the whitened pines. Finally, she pulled us away from the windows, and we followed her down the lane, past the mill pond, down over the glacial sand, crunching and squeaking in the fresh snow, until we reached the banks of the river and stood and watched the her plunge into the black water and swim toward the opposite bank—and be swept downstream by the tidal current, so that we called to her in alarm. But she climbed up through the salt grass on the far bank, bounded upstream, reentered the water and, using the drift of the current, returned, intelligent and proud to the very place we stood.

The sky had cleared, and the moon appeared big and round and bright. The Labrador walked to the end of the town wharf and shook her coat, so that the spray glinted in the moonlight for a moment, then disappeared. And we laughed and said she was a hell of a dog, and that we’d better get back before the two old ladies killed each other or got drunk and had heart-attacks or the dog got pneumonia. We needed a drink anyway, and when the dog stood beside me for a moment, I reached down and felt her, and she was black like the water of the river, and warm, and very much alive. The last thing I did, with my brother’s agreement, was take a last smell of my father that still lingered on inside rim of his hat—the same smell I got when I rubbed my own scalp and smelled my fingers. Then I lay down and launched my father’s felt hat, inverted like a boat, with his pipe in the middle. Then I stood up and the three of us watched as the hat began its journey seaward. I held the dog by the collar until her impulse to rescue the hat passed. It had started to snow again, and we stood for a while at the very end of the wharf, trying to see whether we could hear the big flakes hitting the water. A lost cause because of the way dog’s soft panting filled the night.

“How long will it float?” my brother asked, and I said I didn’t know much about the seaworthiness of felt hats or the buoyancy of pipes. Or, for myself, just when the water would extinguish his smell.

 

The Woman Inside Me

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The Woman Inside Me

 

I woke up more than once last night to consider what was going on inside me. Three men are walking out along a point of land toward a drop-off. Two of them are leading a young woman between them, their hands above her elbows. She is dressed in a long white T-shirt. There are blood stains on it located just below the curve of her belly. Her hair falls about her face. She stumbles. The footing is unsure, but that’s not the reason she’s stumbling. It’s a garbage dump, and it is night. Depending on your understanding of the world, at some point you realize they are a death squad and that they are going to execute her. She is thinking about her two-year old daughter, who is probably sleeping warm with her grandmother. That woman has scooped the child up close to her. The child sleeps but the grandmother cannot. The little girl has been told it’s just for the night. Her mother feels the blood dripping down the inside of her leg. Everything hurts. She sees the child’s face, her baroque lips and curled eye lashes. The men drop back. She picks her way forward. Barefoot, stiff, unsteady, docile, not thinking clearly because of the prolonged strangulation that was part of the raping. So she would mimic sexual excitement. She reaches the edge of the garbage cliff. She catches them off guard and bolts forward, jumps over the edge, falls, pushes away with her bruised legs to maintain her descent, until at the bottom the collapsing wall of rot and refuse overtakes her and buries her underneath , saggy baby diapers and soiled toilet paper left unflushed because the plumbing in this country cannot devour used toilet paper.

 

She lies still, holding her breath. A few shots land around her but miss her. She hears the cries of rats who then also lie still. The three men with skin as brown as hers and speaking the same language, decide, “Vámanos a la chingada de aquí,” Let’s get the fuck out of here. We’re not going to ruin our shoes going down there.” They fire a few more rounds from their beat up black market M-16s at the spot they think she must be. But the ammunition is expensive, and they stop shooting. “Let the pigs eat her,” they say. They walk back to the pickup, vowing to do it differently next time.

 

“Kneel,” says one of the men. They stand in the light of the pickup’s head lights. But she turns around instead and faces him. The T-shirt is soiled but still shows the round of her breasts, a place particularly soiled where they have grabbed and pinched her. There are blood spots at the place just beneath her belly. She pushes the hair out of her swollen, bruised face and looks at them. With her tongue she wants to touch the loose tooth, but can’t. The extra two men have come to watch, drawn and attracted to this final stage of the raping ceremony, the consecration of the punishment of women by men. But she is already destroyed. The man pulls the shiny Smith & Wesson .45 out of his belt. He holds it up in both hands, brings it down leveled with her forehead, at her soiled, waiting, non-reacting face. He mumbles some words of absolution for himself. “Vaya con Díos!” The shot makes the shooter jump. It knocks the young mother and labor organizer over backward. She lies on her back. The shirt has risen enough to see the dark hair between her legs. The blood on the inside of her legs. “Whore!” one of them hisses.

 

I roll over and throw my leg over the woman I live with. My weight and closeness do not interrupt her sleep. She is warm, and smooth. It is the place I feel most at home, the most protected. I have no energy left to ponder the woman’s last thoughts, her last image. Instead, I have her again run for the edge of the dropoff and leap, crash down through the soggy cardboard and pig shit, down through the rats and Styrofoam steak package bottoms, rotten vegetables—those that have not been found and eaten by the poor and the pigs. But again, the bullet sends her reeling backward, and I turn again, rolling my shoulders under so that I don’t pull the covers away from my love and lift my leg over her again, careful not to disturb her.

 

I try to fall asleep but wake up again, urging her to leap. But she never can. When they have you, there is seldom anything like escape. Only hopelessness and the on-rushing moment of one’s extinction. That is the moment and image I flee from, but it has a life of its own and keeps returning. “Wake up, and see my face, see the moment of my nakedness, my helplessness, my abandonment, see me with my mouth open and the dark stump of my tongue they have cut from me.  See me again as he raises the gun, lowers it, and takes my life. Do not leave me and my tongue for the pigs! Swear you will visit my daughter!”

Why My Hair is White

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Why My Hair is White

 

 

One evening, upstairs in a Connecticut brown shingle house on Long Island Sound, I stood in front of the mirror as usual, naked as usual, and oiled my hair a slippery black, smearing downhill flat against my skull with a viscous goo a friend brought me from Alaska, walrus oil—something to encourage my hair, to bring on new things, and maybe old ones as well. And then I lay back, showered and cool on the smooth, expensive summery sheet so soft and was bathed a second time in wind coming through the evening screens on both sides of the wooden room.

I never expected the results. A cry full of longing rose up out of the sloshing cove. It was more a sobbing toothy singing, possibly the walrus cow we’d heard of, even though I know you’re thinking it was the wrong latitude. Yet there were connections. My own Clarissa was gone, drawn beneath that moody water back in another summer, sailing alone—an accident, best not mentioned again, even to myself. I thought nothing of it, the cries briefly confused with memory. I lay on my aunt’s guestroom bed, lingered instead at the edge of boyhood, adolescence, young man love, times full of hope and expectation and yearning in memory of Clarissa’s sun-warmed skin, her breasts, her fears, my hopes.

At the same time, I heard the gravelly crawling on the driveway, the sigh of elms, I felt the moon’s full blue, the cat’s mentioning something about shadow and the invasion of territory. And not until the moon had slipped in through the screens on the other side of the wooden room, on the side away from the sea, did I sit up on my stretched sheet and peer out over my white legs to see her, massively huddled at the foot of the bed, with her weight bowing down the floor, and probably the old beams below it, and eclipsing my aunt’s disordered shelves of vacation mysteries.

What can I tell you? How much I pitied her? Not my aunt with her lipsticked cigarette stubs and her unfinished glasses of Scotch, but my sad blubbery visitor with her big eyes, one turned sideways, spy glassing me, calling on me to explain myself and the stuff in my hair, the cruel trick of the oil, the impersonation of friends in frigid worlds I would never understand. I thought to look at the tube, the one the oil had come in. Was there some writing on it, something I should have considered, some warning? We sat that way for a while, waiting for the moon to move on and leave us for the elms, the sand tennis court, the cove where the boats lay rocking, asleep, including the one which had carried my Clarissa to her grave beyond the reef. A plunging fifteen-foot nun she had cut too close to, which spilled her over the side, then repeatedly drove her under until like Ahab she rose and fell with it, entangled in its mooring chains, no longer afraid.

I felt I owed my visitor some explanation, sitting there with my hands on my knees, she with her flippers touching the brass bed on one side, and Agatha Christie on the other, her tail, wet against the white porcelain of the toilet all the way into the adjoining room.

“Do you have some kind of message for me?” I asked. “Is there something I need to know? Or is it only something about my hair?”

I fully expected her to disappear, as all apparitions do, fade into shadows, join familiar contours, become clothes flopped over wicker rockers, lumped blankets on pine chests, towels on the floor, the shadow of a door in the mirror. But she shifted and sniffed the sniffing of twenty dogs. I smelled seaweed and fish breath, ripe squid and sour sand, dead eels and mud at low tide and most curious of all, the hardest part to tell, the smell of sunlight and wind on a young neck and cheek, the wry wrinkle, the corner of a mouth, she who could mock me in water, at tennis, a flurry of legs while dancing, wrestling and breathy in bed.

I hesitated, something cold uncoiled in the stomach.

“Clarissa?” I asked, fearing my own voice, fearing what the question might bring.

“Clarissa, is that you?”

But there was only more sighing from the flippery, undulating mass, the one eye cocked in my direction and that seemed to say, “Watch what you say, think, and do. Watch what you remember, ask to repeat. And stop oiling your hair with oils to which, God knows, you have no right. And above all, leave the dead alone, do not disturb their sleep, nor their drift, as they tack through dark water. Get lotions from the earth, its plants and such. Take memories from the living. Walrus fat is for walruses, and life for the living.

And then something pressed me back upon my sheet, where I placed my hands, my fingers intertwined, over my chest, and sank back down into summer sleep, determined to leave well enough alone, as I’d been told .

In the morning she was gone. But not the water on the floor, nor the smell of the sea. I rose and showered long, scrubbed and purified, revealing my hair as what it was—preternaturally white, and resolved never again to use what was in the tube, nor yearn for the dead. And since then, I have gone dry, tousled, feathered, fluffed and never flat. I have a girlfriend. I am kind and say “I love you.” And almost all of me means it. I’m reformed and renewed, in every way, with abundant confidence. Except that I do not sleep naked in moonlight on sheets pulled flat beside the sea, nor yearn for things I cannot have, and do not ever peer at that spot between Agatha Christie and the porcelain toilet, in that wooden room, above the cove and the bobbing, breathing, sighing sea.