Time

The skies are monumental in October in south Louisiana for the clouds are both high cirrus off the Canadian frontier and low nimbus with deep blue southern roots, rainy thunderheads and white lightning all afternoon long. And October is the cruelest month in that respect for the beauty is fading ever closer to death and one watches life disperse and one fears the coming of winter that will be grey and slack and high blue skies like pictures in old encyclopedias from the 1950’s with those Four H faces popping jump-ropes under the nuclear blue skies. October destroys more relationships and kills more souls than whiskey. That is why it contains the great burnings of All Hallows Eve and so October is the revival of pagan instincts and the wildings that must occur after the harvest when the wine is finally ready and no longer green and love must be made that children will be born in the summer when there is plenty of food and warmth. And this is October as well. Louisiana glides by, the view of the Interstate, the ditch between the roadways with an occasional cop and the great grassy bushes with white topped flowers and the overpass farm road and mostly just a flatness and a feeling that god must be watching because there’s nothing to see or do except read the signs for Vinton and Sulfur and then a nice big piece of Lake Charles to munch on and it is glorious by day with the beaches spread in a sandy arm and the refineries stinking up the land and the boats running under the tall bridge and the chemical plant shooting a million cubic yards a second of perfect white smoke into the air and down that narrow bridge with the car in neutral and the prayers off your lips and this is why October is brilliant. Look at that sky would you look at that sky. You are never going to beat the hands of time so quit trying. Believe that you are all right and okay and all that you have done will have to be forgiven some future time when you will be absolved. So October skies are forgiving skies too and that’s their ultimate message, the message of forgiveness. October skies are goodbye skies and time to realize that the promises and dreams of the spring have been born or not in the October future. And what is the harvest? And who will unstone next year’s soil? No one, maybe, or maybe there will be more help, more friends, better times. October skies may lie but they have their use because they, like other times of the year, are times to take stock and make up with oneself. See the landscape going by, a uniform unity of grey marred left and right by shards of red yellow green orange. It is October in a Louisiana mind and that’s fine. It’s the eighth month in tenth place. What should one expect? Nothing worth doing should be too easy to get through. And there will always be just a little more time.

Money

It is his destiny now to plow back through the crazed landscape of yesteryear in a movement through space as well as time. Like a list of the dead all the totems of Texas reverse themselves and here is Beaumont and there is Orange and here comes the bridge over the Sabine and back to the land of the coonass and there is a magical quality in the heroic high that accompanies exhaustion for a young man can feel that he has given his best and done his worst and has six unfired rounds in his gun to show for his day. And that is a good thing. So pass him you travelers and forgive his crazed bug-eyed stare and wave to him little children from the back of your station wagons and honk at him truckerman and truckerwoman and forgive him if he can’t keep up with the rest of you. He’s had a long day already and a pretty radical weekend overall. And if each person is the vehicle they drive then indeed he is a gutted monster with a voracious appetite and tons of unchecked power and it will remain to be seen what he will do with it and how he will proceed.

As it is it is enough to stare down the dipping gas gauge and wonder how far he can go and if he must needs stop then where will he stop. The options appear to be three. Drive to Baton Rouge and look up friends of the family, his godparents no less. Drive to Washington Louisiana and ask Uncle Tommy for a tank of gas. Stop somewhere and ask a random stranger for help. None sound great and the first is maybe doable and the second is certainly doable but a significant detour and maybe it would be better to hit Baton Rouge which is a mere hour from New Orleans and so he’d only have to ask for 5 bucks and nobody would begrudge a man 5 bucks would they? No, no they wouldn’t and so that’s the plan the perfect plan and Gabe is too young to know that the perfect plan is the enemy of the good plan and so he hunkers and clunkers down behind that wheel and gazes into the flatness and the white line dashing and he sees the world through the Yes’s of billboards and tractors and new cars and mobile homes by the many and everything in the world for sale at any price and he knows that nearly every molecule of the entire world represents money and it is terrifying, the road itself is money and the paint upon it is money and the mown grass along the highway is different money as are the signs painted for money and screwed together for money and planted in the earth for money and monitored for money and to even contemplate the money that is the vehicle in which he drives would be mind blowing and practically obscene. Or the shoes he wears brought with money from southeast Asia on a money ship piloted by money men to be unloaded by money longshore men in a money town and put on an 18 wheeler for money and gassed up the truck for money and coffee up the driver for money and pornoed him to the eyeballs for twenty million different monies and put him on the road for money to run over money and up Gabe’s ass right here on this very highway for money. And that’s what Gabe needs. Just a little bit of money.

The Spy Who Loved Me

Never mind the years behind the machine. Never mind the wrong turns everywhere. Never mind the girls done wrong and the way I’ve allowed my name to be spoken in front of others. Never mind the shame that I have brought upon my family. How many hundreds if not thousands of dollars have they spent. How many times did they sit in front of someone and hear terrible things about me. How many calls from the pokey have they got? Only a few but friends have gotten the ones my folks didn’t get, most of whom are still my friends if barely.

How many miles did I travel across this country trying to find myself. I didn’t see him on the Ohio River when I steamed out of Pittsburg. I didn’t see him when I mooned my former cruiseship as it steamed for the Bahamas. I didn’t see him on the flathead beds of Utah when I was driving my 62 Impala across the Great American Desert. I didn’t know what he even looked like when I signed aboard the Golden Hinde. Always running away and off to sea. That was me you saw looking at you from inside a bus bound for Baton Rouge. I saw you driving your new or new used car and I wanted you to know that I knew who you were, that I could see into you and your own soul. That was me on a plane to Portland Oregon and you sat next to me and we remarked on the sunset that lasted as long as we could keep up with it. And that was me cutting across the country in a yellow mustang ragtop on my way to California and I stayed at your motel with my dog and you asked me if he was a good dog but you were an immigrant and so you said is dog god? And I said what and you said is dog god and I said yes the dog indeed is god. And I’m not even going to go into the dog that sustained my soul for 15 years nor am I going to go into the reason behind that final mythical journey to California when I was no longer looking for myself and could therefore finally find others. No that’s another story for another time.

What I will tell you about is one of the times before this time when I wasn’t even aware of who Gabe was and what he’d done, none of that had been told to me yet or I hadn’t learned it or I hadn’t taught myself. There was a time when a spy loved me. Yes he did and that’s where the story goes weird for most of us because I’m not gay and boy was he. He sat in my section in a restaurant on Biscayne Bay in Miami ordering many white Russians and tipping me heavily. He asked me what my goals were in life and I pointed out the enormous picture windows at the white hot cruise ships moored along the mile-long pier. I want to work on one of those I said and he said well that’s easy I’m the head of accounting for Royal Caribbean. Now the only reason I didn’t notice how shabby the head of accounting for Royal Caribbean was dressed was because I was almost homeless myself so anyone with an address was rich in my eyes. He met me for drinks a day or two later and talked obscurely about his gayness and the years he’d worked in Russia for the CIA and the men he’d killed and the women he’d forced himself to make love to. God what I didn’t know back then and he told me about secret ways to kill people and he looked like an oily Cuban which he was and Miami was full of weird shit and I thought pot was a new invention I’d just discovered.

He got me an interview with Royal Caribbean. I arrived at the appointed hour and told them I wanted to be a waiter. They laughed and said they never hired Americans as waiters because the work was so killing they couldn’t be bothered and they’d quit. The threat/promise of a plane ticket back to Poland or Africa or Singapore or wherever these dudes came from gave them the courage to put up with the insanity of cruiseship waitering. Out of luck but I got passed on to a fellow who needed pursers and here I was with hotel experience. With one good reference I could be on a plane to France to meet a brand new cruise ship, the Nordic Empress. What about the head of accounting, my friend the spy? The food and beverage manager who was interviewing me said my friend the spy was only a temporary employee in the accounting department.

I had one person at the Baton Rouge Hilton I could still call and I did and she gave me the reference I needed and I was off to France.

I’ll miss you said the spy. Give me your social security number and that way I can always find you.

It was an easier time back then. Nobody cared about identity theft. Hell, I was Gabriel Doucette and I had no idea whatsoever. I knew I was ready for the next thing. I wrote down my social security number and handed it to him. My last gift before I left forever. Did I contemplate changing the number? Sure, wouldn’t you? But I didn’t. I want him to find me. I want to hear his fake spy stories again. Now that I am so close to being finished with mine I want to hear about other people madnesses. I want to know if they know where their story stops and their life starts. And so if he is you look me up someday. I’d love to hear from you.

The Philosophy of the Saints Fan

Gabe imagines the fellas at the Superdome getting ready for the game. The hard work has been done, filling every ice bin in every hotdog stand in the entire building. There might be time now to sneak a peek at the game though watching Saints football on the job is usually an exercise in frustration. Gabe and the others are often in the corridors lugging something or pushing something when they hear the crowd suddenly surge and roar and Gabe or Maginnis or JJ or Lil Roy or Dr. Dex in their bruised purple shirts and blue jeans (like some mild mannered guardian angels ready to intervene on the behalf of threatened concession stands everywhere) will run to the maw-like openings and stare out onto the arsenic green field and wonder what they missed and then stare at the enormous screens hanging over the field and watch the replay, usually something bad. (Actually Maginnis rarely will abandon his post to watch a moment of the game. He’s paid a quarter more an hour to tell his peers what’s what.) Indeed it’s through him that they all work there earning their nickel 98 an hour and getting one free hotdog for lunch. Gabe is sick of those carcasses of boiled meat and stale white bread and watery mustard and relish like candy though it sounds kind of good right now with the freeway in reverse in front of him and nothing for his noon meal and a gas gauge that will be a problem sooner or later with its depleting condition and why didn’t you ask Terry for ten bucks I’ll never know. I guess it felt awkward, a hero having to borrow money for gas. Oh well.

That’s your father’s philosophy and it’s the philosophy of the Saints fan too. Oh well. Maybe they won’t suck next year. Oh well. Gabe would like to have that state of mental peace but it’s hard to come by when you pull for the black and gold. God they long for respect. Just give them 9 wins out of 16 contests. Just let them get that much better because after all they were 1-15 just four years ago and they have flirted with disaster ever since. It’s as if god really meant to punish the metropolis for some arcane crime. Probably slavery for New Orleans was down the river where mean young bucks were sold and it was a flesh market of the first water. Yes that must be it, the sins of both a national policy and a human policy conspired to place at a curve in the Mississippi River on land barely suitable for hogs much less mankind a city with a cathedral and landings for oceangoing vessels and bridges that span the mighty surging python of muddy water coming straight down from Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, all that crushed sediment from a glacial past and it rolls right by New Orleans all day and all night and there mankind watches and waits for shipments of foodstuffs and manufactured stuffs and crews of living creatures, some lowing in the tongue of the unguents and some lowing in the tongue of West Africa and each is prodded into their pens and the cattle may be watered and fed but the people may not, at least not until they’re docile from exhaustion and the insurmountable heat that mimics the great cumulus clouds rising in the distance like a mockery of heaven. And on those cobbled streets will walk slave masters and slaves and on those streets will the greatest of human crimes be committed for here as in legend the slave families will be ripped apart and when that happens there ain’t no need to even go on living. So there in the city that care forgot are the billion tramped down lives that have lived to see the ultimate in terror, to see your child, wife, husband, mother, father, grandparent sold to another man and taken away forever to be treated as such by such. Yes it is that holy place where sky and multiple bodies of water meet, that place they call the land of dreamy dreams. And the horror of the past tense and the bland and even depressing nature of the future tense combine into a present tense that is half manic, half suicidal and with that kind of energy whipping around the town how the hell you think fools are gonna be able to win a football game? True that. There is no home field advantage in New Orleans for the spirits will have their own say and the men in the black and gold silks ain’t nothing but a zombie army for a zombie queen and they no more control their own destiny than does a cloud control its direction. Yes this is true and Gabe and any sensible Saints fan know it.

Look outside and see the flat Texas landscape of rice fields burning green in the morning heat and see a biplane dip and spray death upon the waters and think how right you really are. Those miserable fucks are really at their best when they’re on the road in some hostile environment where they’ve been picked to lose and they’re playing for nothing but pride and then you should see them motivate. Lord have mercy they did it last year in the Philadelphia winter and practically subzero and dead was the football as the Great Dane kicked it and long was the distance that he had to kick and swirling were the winds and hard had the men played for 69 minutes and warm were the locker rooms where they would be heading immediately if the game ended now and it did end now for the kick was long enough and dead true and that win gave the Saints 8 for the season and with one game to play another win was an in to the playoffs and how could those mighty warriors lose? Because the last game of the season with everything on the line would be played in the Superdome against the wily Los Angeles Rams and it would be a Saints offensive and special teams fiasco and a seemingly great triumph for the Saints defense which would not give up a single point for the entire game until the end when the Rams had the ball and were down one and needed to move about 45 yards and they did and the quarterback was a bloody sacked 8 times mess but he made those few completions and the Rams got into field goal range and with no time left on the clock the barefooted kicker made the kick and sent joy through the heart of Los Angeles a thousand miles and two time zones away. And the spirits of a billion black folks with their flesh ripped like fabric and their bones broken like they’d been dropped by an osprey had their own satisfaction with the outcome and those spirits watched the sad and silent drunken masses of Saints fans walk back to their homes and cars and tears fell and the spirits said child, child, child you ain’t even begun to cry.

The Longest and Most Complex Dream

Terry heads inside his house to watch some Oilers football. They’re worse than the Saints but a man needs something easy to do after a morning like this one. Have another brew and another joint and catch up on the sleep. Maybe wake up and forget you ever did it like it was the longest and most complex dream where you were able to traverse great distances in a few moments in the time it would take to read about it you’d already be there and it would shift every so often because you’d lose control of your mind and your subconscious would rear its ugly head and populate your dream with unknown characters or familiars from other lifetimes. Terry might awaken on the couch in the detritus of Colt .45 and another Oilers humiliation and wonder why he dreamt of a white boy with a gun and he’d attribute it to a TV show where all the people are white especially the ones who have guns. And then he’d remember the part of the dream where Eric threw himself off the balcony and he’d laugh to remember it and then stop laughing because it might have happened. And he might recall the look of horror and surprise on Jamaal’s mother’s face with a gun pointed at her son. And then Terry might remember that it went down that way more or less for real and that he was a part of it and the primary agent of violence once he was told the truth. He might hate and curse Gabe for the shame of these undertakings and perhaps wish that indeed he had killed the messenger. And his feelings might travel in stereoscopic directions as he drinks again and remembers what was done and he may feel that the best was what was required and that’s what he was able to give. And he might decide that it was okay of Gabe to shatter his morning and his life because the poor boy certainly needed help. And then Terry would be good with it all and turn the TV back on and watch the afternoon game.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Terry buys them each a tall can of Colt .45 and they pop them right away and take long foamy pulls of the metallic and tasteless malt liquor.

Coldest beer in town says Terry appreciatively and they sit in the warming October air inside the borrowed automobile enjoying the goodness of life and a job well done.

You smoke says Terry.

No.

In don’t mean cigarettes.

Weed? No, not really.

Not really.

I tried it once when I was a freshman, didn’t feel anything except a little stupid.

It’ll do that for sure says Terry and he pulls a joint out of his jacket pocket. He opens a pack of matches snagged free off the liquor store counter and he sparks up the number. Warm rich smoke, the smell of an old woman’s wig on fire fills the car. They sit parked some yards down from the entrance to the store and the J goes back and forth and Gabe starts humming a song and Terry joins in and it’s a great song they sing in the face of the highballing sun coming ever closer to the noon, ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone, only darkness every day. Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone and she’s always gone too long anytime she goes away. And I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know well ya better leave them young things alone ‘cause ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone…

And Terry says you all right man, you good. He reaches over and slaps Gabe’s hand with the authority of a Black Panther swearing in the only Anglo-Saxon and then they clink the cans and sip their beer and there is the brotherhood of violence.

Just as Eric and Jamaal sat at their own liquor store perhaps literally perhaps not and communed over malt liquor or cold wine or jack daniels or nothing but YooHoo and smoked or didn’t smoke and talked or didn’t talk and slapped dap or no slapping of dap no matter. What is true was the relationship Terry and Gabe have and what Eric and Jamaal had and what they had all done together in perfect agreement with each other and so they were conjoined like a double helix of DNA inextricably nailed to one another’s destines and future punishments and future rewards. All because of the events of this morning which of course are concatenated on the events of July which are concatenated upon the events of a year ago and 9 months before that and before that the birth of time. All together of a piece and these brotherhoods of bad deeds justified go on and on and on and nothing will stop their formation and reformation until the last atom bomb falls on the last cockroach. Then we will be done with ourselves and our good deeds none of which will ever, ever go unpunished.

JC

It didn’t go down the way you thought of course. As you glide back across the streets of Houston and all the folks bound for church and bars and the grocery store and the Mickey D’s for breakfast and donut shops are all busting out their seams and you drive among them like an ordinary citizen but you aren’t any more. And it didn’t go down the way you thought and you thought you were going to have to kill two rapists but you didn’t after all. Your dreams were wrong so now is the time to relax into the bucket seat and feel the all-over rush of what you’ve just done. In less than an hour you have become a minister of justice or at least his assistant.

Terry sits back in his seat eyes closed. He handled it so beautifully it’s hard to believe it could have gone any better. No dead bodies just humiliation and degradation. And you’ll tell Althea when you get home. Live the rest of your life knowing that you did what you could. Feel for once free of the terrible guilt that would be yours if you had never done anything, just let the knowledge burn into you forever like a chunk of white phosphorous carried on down from father to son.

Some things are changed and better but not all things and Gabe understands that what is still alive in him is the death of the junkman. Althea may be avenged but the junkman will forever be a wandering shade in need of a good deed. And this of course is beyond Gabe’s scope. He can no more go confront his Uncle Foot than he can assassinate President Reagan. Sure it could be done but at what cost. No, that sleeping dog will stay asleep forever for the man is a recluse from even himself not to mention the status quo and he doesn’t even have an address.

The junkman might come back when you get to Louisiana but who knows. His is another story it seems and he has been personified in the opposite by Terry who is a man of rash action. What would the junkman have done? Forgiven of course just like JC Himself, forgiven everyone for everything and at last forgiveness of themselves. Jesus of Nazareth would have just waved a hand at the whole deal and said such is man and then He would have pressed His lips against your ear and said grace my son grace and you would know that that was the key to it all just having a little bit of grace and you would smile with Him and laugh with Him and know that you had done good and followed His advice, that there never had been and never would be a revenge drive to Houston Texas. It was all just a fantasy woven out of sorrows because after all wasn’t it because He was sad that God made the world? And yes that is exactly what JC would have done but not Gabe and given the chance to shame those mutherfuckers I know most of you would have done the same thing.

You Don’t Know

Terry says he would have corrected that shit right away, save Gabe the unnecessary of having to make this trip and contribute to the delinquency of his own minority.

I’m not sure why she didn’t tell you says Gabe. She was scared I guess. She said they had guns and were going to kill her if she told.

Guns. Those bitch ass mutherfuckers ain’t got guns. They in the ROTC, they play with guns those little jerk off GI Joes. They ain’t got guns. And it wouldn’t matter one bit if they did.

Terry gives Gabe instructions as they cut across town sticking to the city streets. Gabe’s heart is thumping and his eyes are peeled for the fuzz but Terry just sits back and breathes taking in the day like a man who spent a night in jail and is glad to be back in the free world. Terry says Jamaal stays with his mother so this one will be a little trickier. Nobody wants to harm any innocent bystanders. A few minutes later they pull up in front of a neat one story brick house. Terry says gimme the gun. Gabe does and Terry stashes it in his waistband. Follow me says Terry and they proceed down the side of the house. Terry knocks and knocks and knocks and at last the window slides open and a voice says who dat.

Yo homes it’s me man. My car ran outta gas. Can you let me in to use the phone?

Fool what the hell you waking me for. Walk your ass to a pay phone.

Come on man.

Bitch you crazy. What time is it?

Time to get yo ass up.

Hell no fool, go away.

Come on man.

Alright…meet me at the front door.

The window closes. Terry and Gabe walk to the front door and a moment later it opens. Jamaal appears, a skinny black dude with a Jheri curl.

Yo man says Terry this is my pardner Gabe.

Jamaal could not care less. He leads them through the house to the kitchen where a large black woman dressed for church is frying ham.

Mama says Jamaal you remember Terry. He needs to use the phone.

Of course he can use the phone. The portable is right there honey.

Jamaal heads back to bed. Terry walks over and kisses mama then takes the phone and walks out of the room. Gabe steps over and introduces himself.

Ya’ll been out all night?

No ma’am. We were on the way to church.

That’s good. You go to school with Jamaal?

No ma’am I’m from New Orleans. I’m just visiting.

On lord that crazy place. I went there one time and got my purse stolen in broad daylight. I ain’t ever gone back.

Mama looks up and drops the fork. Terry and Jamaal have just entered the kitchen, Terry with the magnum pointed at the back of Jamaal’s head.

Oh my lord she says.

Sorry about this Mrs. Washington says Terry. Jamaal had something that he wanted to tell you.

Lord have mercy my heart says mama staggering. Gabe snags her a chair and she plops into it. What is going on she says.

Tell her says Terry. Tell her or I’ll smoke yo ass. Tell her what you done to my cousin.

Jamaal stands there looking as pale as a black person can get.

Eric already admitted it says Terry. You know what you did. Tell her. Tell her fool or I swear to god I’ll kill you now.

Oh my god says mama please stop this.

Tell her fool.

Jamaal’s entire body shakes with fear.

Tell her!

Mama says Jamaal. I did something bad.

What you did child.

I, I mean us, me and Eric Head, we…

You what honey. Tell mama what’s going on here before I have a stroke.

Mama, I’m sorry. We, me and Eric Head we, we, we, we raped a girl.

Oh my god says mama. Oh my god oh my god oh my god. Oh Lord, help me please. What did you just say? Tell me what you said because I know I can’t be hearing what I think I’m hearing. You did what? Say it.

We, we raped a girl.

Oh my god. Why? Sweet Jesus why? Why on god’s green earth would you ever do a thing like that? Tell me.

I, I don’t know.

You don’t know. Who was she?

Terry’s cousin.

What’s her name?

I don’t know.

You don’t know. You don’t know. You done ruined some poor child’s life forever and you don’t even know her name.

Her name is Althea Jones says Terry.

Gabe stands in the incandescent energy of this room at this hour on this day. Birds can be heard. A door slams shut down the block. A car starts on the street. Inside the house the ham burns and smokes. Gabe reaches over and turns it off. No one notices. Jamaal stands in his underwear clutching his shoulders, shaking. His mother rises to her feet with great effort, steps over to him and lays her large hard worn hand on his soft dark cheek. He’s a pretty boy that Jamaal. Why he would ever have to resort to raping girls is beyond all knowledge or even power of knowing.

Where’s my Jamaal says his mama. Where is he? I look at this boy standing here in front of me and I don’t see him. I don’t see the young man that took a job after school when his father left. I don’t see the young man who stayed by his grandmother’s side until she passed. I don’t see him. Where is he? Where’s my Jamaal? What did you do with him? You took him. You took him away.

Standing there in the withering pity of a mother’s love, Jamaal shits himself. Mama steps back and looks at him standing there in his own filth.

Lord have mercy child, you done messed up my floors.

Water

The woman jerks the fluffy white mini-wolf by its neck as it sets off after birds and squirrels and blowing leaves. She needs sleep, she needs coffee, she needs this dog to take a shit. Success, the dog stops to do its business. The woman stands and shivers in the early morning cool. The dog finishes and the woman jerks it back in the direction they came leaving the dog shit pile for other people in other rooms.

Terry’s neighbor emerges in a shuffle and makes his way slowly down the driveway, this veteran of foreign wars. You can see he’s paid a terrible price for his American dream, the well-tended lawn, the American flag in all her glory, the magnolia tree dying from too much water. All of it earned on the banks of Iwo Jima or some such hell and he reaches his newspaper, the fat Sunday slab and bends over with a will that would have shook Xerxes and picks up the newspaper and holds it, studying the headlines, muttering and licking his lips. He looks down the street in either direction taking in what may be his last view ever of this dirt bag world. Bah, he spits on the grass and turns and heads back through his open garage door. A moment later it begins to lurch shut in convulsive jerks.

Terry emerges from his house carrying a red plastic gas can. He walks over and gets in the passenger seat. The gas can sloshes between his feet.

Okay he says. Let’s roll.

Terry gives Gabe directions to Eric’s apartment. The Trans Am rumbles through the endless suburbia that is Houston. The sun is a burning drone just above the horizon, a menace to the eye both head on and in the rearview mirror. Cars move through the morning like ghostly caricatures of themselves and you know some of them are on the way to no good. How many men get up and shit and shower and shave and then head out the door and go rob a bank or a liquor store or a truck driver? How many men order their eggs over easy and then head out the door and kidnap a mother and her child and do things to them that if caught will get him the gas chamber? How many men have orange juice and no sleep and then head out the door and go assassinate someone? Many perhaps and Gabe is ever closer to believing that he is one of these men.

When did she tell you?

Yesterday, no Friday I mean. It’s all starting to run together.

She’s sure about their names right? ‘Cause it would be some kind of fucked up if we wasted the wrong mutherfuckers.

Yeah she was sure.

What about the other dude, who was he.

I don’t know I never asked.

I need to pop that bitch for even thinking he could do some shit like run a train on my cousin. Fucking Eric Head I been knowing this dude since we was in middle school. He run some shit like this. Boy you gonna be some kind of sorry. And Jamaal, that bitch. I should’ve known he’d be up to some shit like this. That’s what smoking crack do to you make your ass do fucked up shit that gonna get you straight out killed.

Silence for awhile as they roll down a broad boulevard empty on both sides, just cleared fields waiting for man’s next paving project. A lone white oak stands out there in the off-burning mist dappled with grey flecks and clinging bits of Spanish moss like the last witness to an Indian massacre or the only survivor of shipwreck and the tree is waiting for its executrix to come saw it down to a stump and then a hole in the ground and then nothing there at all except what never was.

Where’s your gun?

In my bag in the backseat.

Lemme look at it.

Yeah go ahead.

Terry unzips the duffel bag, roots around and then pulls out the Smith and Wesson. He whistles and holds the gun respectively hefting its weight in his hand. You came ready to do it right he says. How much ammo you got?

Six rounds that’s it.

Well if we need more after we fuck this fool up then we can hit the gun shop. But I’m sure we don’t need but one or two shots from this mofo to put a fool down forever.

True that, says Gabe.

Turn right at the next light says Terry.

They turn down a street of apartment buildings, dingy and decayed in various faux styles, French chateaux, Spanish Moroccan, Swiss. All are relative failures, the more so with the acid rain, termites and general neglect making the row look like a failed movie set in need of an insurance arsonist. A few boys are riding their bikes down the center of the street. Each has a toy machine gun that makes noise when you pull the trigger and has a red tip that lights up. Still they make machinegun sounds themselves as two chase one. I got you. I got you they scream and the solo rider says no you dint no you dint and he looks over his shoulder and sees the Trans Am coming up easy behind them and he jerks the handlebars and he’s losing control and has to decide do I save myself or drop the gun and he holds onto the gun and the bike spasms and the handle bar is driven into his gut like a bayonet. He falls, the bike flops and the gun clatters across the cement. Stunned, his friends screech up next to him and watch silently as the boy, a bit pudgy, rolls on the street in great pain, the wind knocked out of him, calling for his mother.

Gabe parks next to a faux Tudor apartment building with the exposed beams drooping around the windows like the face of a depressed giant. They get out of the car and Gabe puts the magnum in his jacket pocket. Terry says follow my lead.

I’ll do that.

They walk through the parking lot and enter the inner courtyard of the apartment building. There’s a swimming pool, moldy with a rusty hurricane fence surrounding it. They pass the laundry room where a dark woman folds clothes. Spanish radio is playing. Her niño on the floor holding a toy pistol watches Gabe and Terry pass. From behind closed doors they hear TV and low talking and smell cooking fatty meat. Gabe doesn’t feel hunger or nervousness or much of anything except the feeling that he’s entered a dream that he’s dreamt 1,000 times before and now it’s real and the singular thought running through his mind is this is just like a movie because that’s what I am comparing it to and so we must have crossed over some time in the twentieth century into thinking that life truly imitated art because we wanted it to but no maybe it’s earlier than that maybe it dates back to the novel or farther, to the theatre, for life is a play and the world is a stage and so even farther back greater than the Greeks and perhaps beyond the Sumerians and the Mycenae to a world inhabited by pottery figures no more and at last the caves, the fucking cave paintings as his father would say, nothing can touch them and everything has been done already and art is dead but long live art because without it we’d have nothing to compare ourselves to.

This in a flash as they mount the stairs and proceed down the balcony to apartment 218 except the one is missing but the unpainted numeral-shaped wood still shows through. Terry shakes himself like a boxer and Gabe is damn glad this grizzly light skinned black man is not coming for him at this hour or any hour. Terry looks down the balcony and without looking at Gabe says you ready.

Yeah.

Like I say, follow my lead. No shooting until I say so. Okay let’s do this. Stand on the side so he can’t see you through the peephole.

Terry knocks. He knocks again. He knocks a third time and the door whips open. Standing in the door is a short stocky white boy with bleached blonde hair and a Texas A & M tattoo on his shoulder. He’s wearing boxer shorts and nothing else. Rubbing his eyes he says what the fuck Terry I was sleeping bro’.

Sorry says Terry I just was wondering if I could use your phone. I ran outta gas.

My phone says Eric and he looks at Terry then looks at Gabe no recognition registering and when he looks back at Terry he sees a fist hitting him square in the face. He staggers backwards into his foyer and Terry advances silently kicking and punching until Eric is lying on the floor in a pool of blood. Terry speaks over him.

You know why I’m here you rapist mutherfucker. I’m gonna fuck your ass up bitch.

Gabe steps inside and closes the door. Across the room is a screen door and down below a view of the swimming pool. Terry continues to kick the shit out of Eric.

Yes mutherfucker says Terry applying his sneakers to Eric’s face. A jet of blood flies across the tiles. She told me you and Jamaal ran a train on her ass.

No, no, it wasn’t me it was Jamaal I didn’t-

Don’t you dare lie mutherfucker. I ain’t done with your ass. Oh but no. Hold on.

Terry grabs the gas can off the kitchen counter and starts pouring gas on Eric’s pounded and bleeding face. Gasoline pools on the floor and Eric thrashes in it turning the gas a soft pink on the white tiles.

You feel that little homey. That’s the last thing you gonna feel before I burn your ass alive. You gonna burn little mutherfucker burn.

Terry looks at Gabe who just stands there holding the magnum on Eric.

Yo man see if that fool got a lighter in the kitchen. I’ll check in here.

Terry steps over to the coffee table where a bong is perched amidst a pile of video games and porn.

Yo bitch I know you got a light. Where’s your matches at fool.

Terry is some ten feet away. Eric jumps to his feet, sprints through the living room crashes through the screen door and dives over the balcony rail. There’s a thud from down below and then a screech. Gabe and Terry step out onto the balcony and peer over the side. Eric lies on the ground against the fence where he landed face first. Both arms appear to be broken. He tries to stand but this is difficult without the use of one’s arms and he fails. He tries a second time and fails better. He tries a third time and fails best of all. Then he topples over in a flopping spasaming moaning mess. A door opens downstairs, a brown face peeks out, there is talking in Spanish and then the door closes.

I knew that little Rambo mutherfucker would try something like that says Terry. I was hoping the bitch would kill himself but this will do don’t you think?

Yeah.

Gabe grabs a dishtowel and starts to wipe up the gas but Terry tells him not to. It’s just water he says and opens the door, a shaft of morning sun cutting across the wet tiles.

Pool Table

So what’s up says Terry.

Ya’ll have a rec room?

We got a pool table and what not in the laundry room he says and points to a half open door next to the pantry.

Can I see it?

You wanna see my pool table? You drove all the way from New Orleans to look at an old pool table?

No not really says Gabe I just need to tell you something and I need to do it in that room.

I was out ‘til three in the morning man.

It’s about Althea says Gabe and that stops the conversation like a clock.

Terry nods and takes a mug of coffee and snags the bottle of Tylenol and says I’ll be right back. He walks upstairs to his mother’s bedroom. She’s camped out on a kingsize bed with the drapes pulled, a purple bruised light filtering through the room. She wears a black patch across her eyes and doesn’t move as her son places the coffee on the bedside table. What’s he want she says and Terry says I don’t know he just said it’s something about Althea and mama says well I hope everything is all right and her son says I’m sure it is. Then he turns and leaves the room pulling the door shut behind him and goes back downstairs.

He leads Gabe through the kitchen to the door, flicks on a light and descends a short flight of stairs to a small room with a waterheater, washer-dryer, pool table, ratty sofa and a stereo. He flicks on another light, just a single bulb hanging from a string. Gabe stands there next to him and looks around the room. He places his hands on the pool table, rubs the worn and scarred felt then walks over and sits on the couch. He hangs his head.

What’s goin on man says Terry.

Ya’ll had a party last summer when Althea was staying with you. Late July.

Yeah.

Althea didn’t tell you what happened that night.

No. What happened?

She was down here with the headphones on and the lights out. Three dudes snuck down here and jumped her. One changed his mind and left. The other two stayed.

Terry stands there, not moving, his face frozen, the eyebrows arched and his wooly hair in a wild corona over his head. His mustache twitches and his mouth is a frown.

What.

They raped her. They gangbanged her.

Terry’s eyes bulge like a mad animal. He does not blink at all and his nostrils flare and you can hear him inhale.

Who.

Eric Head and Jamaal Washington.

What. Eric and Jamaal? Eric and Jamaal? No. No. No. That can’t be right.

She told me herself.

Mutherfucker. Mutherfucker. Mutherfucker. Mutherfucker. I will kill those bitches. I will kill those bitches deader than a mutherfucker.

Terry inhales, exhales, inhales, exhales, inhales then steps over and punches the wall. Bang a hole appears in the dry wall. Bang he hits it again and bang again and then he turns and he looks at Gabe and says so what the fuck man. You drove all the way here just to tell me this shit.

No, I drove here to see if you know where these bitches live. I’m going to kill them.

Oh yeah? Oh yeah? You gonna kill these mutherfuckers? What ya got, ya got a rod? You brought something?

Yeah I brought a gun.

What ya got?

I have a .357 magnum.

A magnum? The mutherfucker is serious. Okay that sounds good, that sounds very, very fucking good. Yeah I know where those bitches live. And now would be a very good time to do this.

That was what I was thinking.

Okay let’s motivate. You parked outside right?

Yeah.

We take your car since you ain’t hanging around. Cool?

Cool.

Okay let’s do this. I’ll meet you outside in five minutes.

The Purchaser of Her Secret

He knocks again. He rings the doorbell. At last the locks are turned from the inside and the door opens revealing a large burly young black man in a red bathrobe rubbing his eyes and wondering who the fuck is knocking on his door at this hour.

Hey Terry I’m Gabe Doucette, Althea’s boyfriend.

Terry rubs his eyes and focuses them upon Gabe. Who, what, where, when, why, how cross his mind in a flash and then he smiles.

Where’s Althea?

She’s back in New Orleans.

Oh. She’s there and you’re here. What’s goin’ on, you just passing through?

No not really. I drove here last night from New Orleans. I was hoping I’d find you home. I have something important to tell you and it couldn’t wait.

A voice from upstairs hollers. Terry who’s at the door?

It’s Althea’s boyfriend Gabe. Gabe…

Doucette.

Doucette says Terry.

Oh. Well what’s he doing here? Did something happen?

Gabe shakes his head no. Terry hollers up the stairs no ma’am.

Oh. Well it sure is early. Honey, put on the coffee and bring me a Tylenol.

Yes ma’am. You should come in. We’ll talk in the kitchen.

Cool. Can I use the bathroom?

Sure man it’s right down the hall.

In the bathroom Gabe stares at himself in the mirror, letting the water run.

I wonder if those guys used this same bathroom, stared into this same mirror and if they did then I’m seeing them now staring back at me for all reflections are contained forever in the mirror once you look and there is the infinity of faces staring back at me through my own eyes including theirs for I am they and they is me and we are the enemy and we is us. And there’s no reason at all do go any farther with this. I’m sure I can think of something to say to get me out of here and why would I want to spoil Terry’s day? You don’t want to do that to these poor people and really what would Althea want? Would she want you to tell Terry? Maybe. Didn’t she tell you so that you could be the purchaser of her secret? But why would she do that if she didn’t want you to do something? She would want this too I’m sure of it. She’d say kill those mutherfuckers like she wanted me to kill her stepfather and no to that but yes to this. Why else did I drive here if not to do this terrible deed and yes I will be one of them when it is over but that’s fine I can live with it and if toppling this next domino is going to lead ultimately to my own appointment in Samarra then so be it.

Gabe turns off the water and dries his hands and opens the door and turns out the light and walks down the hall to the kitchen and he knows every footstep was trod by those whom he would destroy, they walked these floors and touched these walls and this house is defiled with their deed. At least until the truth is revealed.

Nothing but a Nightshirt

Two-story white house with dark red shutters, an American flag, sycamore trees in the yard, the dying green canopy dropping leaves like paper brown boats. Sprinklers throw armatures of water over the lawn, their whicking sound like some benign Gatling gun. Nobody moving, no cars astir, no children in the yards, no life at all save for an elderly couple walking with a purpose down the sidewalks. They pass in front of the house engaged in no conversation, almost in competition with one another to reach an unknown destination, perhaps death.

Gabe watches them walk by then returns his attention to the house. Althea’s aunt lives here as does Althea’s cousin Terry. This then is the place where it all went south, Althea’s life that is. The party was here at the house she lived in all summer long. Will she ever be able to return here? Will she ever wander into the rec room where she was sacrificed? Eric and Jamaal if you are to be found this day let your final moments of slumber somewhere in this town be of the god you worship you poor pitiful lads, the god of butt fucking. Because that’s what happened isn’t it? Some pederast used each of you for his own pleasure at the expense of your humiliation and dehumanization and you were nothing but a nightshirt. And what did you feel and what were you thinking when you walked out the front door that night? Hit that ass literally like it was meant to be hit and go home and wash the blood off your dick and say to yourself in the mirror, I like you. I like who you are right now. Do you do and say that after an episode like that one? Do you slap dap with your homies and go your separate ways knowing that you are bound together by what you have done and you must forever live in doubt and fear that someway and someday you will be found out? And so the ultimate joke perhaps is on you the guilty because Althea can eventually sleep in peace knowing that what terrors you visited upon her were not her own doing and Gabe can come someday someway to understand through good works, drugs and therapy that he too was not to blame but you, you mutherfuckers you will never be free because you did it and you know you did it and someday someway you will come to know that in what you did there was no justice. And what is coming for you this day perhaps is that very thing, justice.

A Gift From Prometheus

What begins as a trickle of trailer homes along the frontage roads becomes a cascading tidal wave of liquor stores in their garish and broken neon and titty bars that offer barenaked pussy and bring your own hooch and the endless line of car dealerships ablaze at 530 in the morning like a gift from Prometheus and this town might be his town too for it could be right here in the middle of the floodplains that he clutched two handfuls of clay and made you and me and when we were ready to learn or our descendants were ready to learn he gave us more than the powers of fire no he gave us the gift of agriculture and medicinal plants and taught us how to tame horses. And Texas ain’t Texas without horses and the cowboy rhythm is even here in this Sunbelt Gotham City exploding out of the earth in country music yahoos and towers constructed of petroleum products. Yahoo indeed and if a man were a man he’d undertake a helluva lot more adventures than just whipping through the night at a comfortable speed to find and secure two rapists and shoot their brains into the air. No a man’s man would be a Heracles who’d free Prometheus from Mt. Caucus and then slay the Thespian Lion and wash out the Augean stables, diverting rivers or in this case bayous and there are no stables but there’s one big ass city that could be swept away tomorrow and who’d care besides Oilers fans. And here’s the Astrodome itself arriving in Gabe’s view like a spaceship parked and sold for cash and now there it is ready for something but nobody knows what. And if you don’t think the breweries of Houston are enormous then wait until you pass miles under their colossal trees of billowing smoke and lights and the pride of St. Louis is straight out of the ground water of Texas and pumped out of Texas valves into Texas trucks and shipped lukewarm to every corner store in the USA. And they fulminate do these enormous cities within cities and their orange glow is a testimony to the industrialized state and to glance upon their smokestacks and walls of white steel is to wonder whether any man works there at all or have we finally passed forever into the tomorrow of machines making machines making machines.

Dawn catching up to the mortal man, she slips over the horizon, her octopus consort spreading red tentacles across the impenetrable sky, dawn and her red lavishness and her pink shank bones and to see her is to drink nepenthe of the soul and adios to suffering and adios to pain and let me too return to my home and a love and a family and a safe harbor. Let me start no war here and save the revenge of my Helen to a future time and a future man, maybe the man I’ll be some day. Oh sweet dawn let me go no farther in my American machine. Turn me back and get me past the Sabine again and give me the close comfort of the junkman who apparently doesn’t cross state lines. Sweet dawn I know I am a rascal and I always have been and look I’m driving almost blind into a city I’ve never seen and I’m engulfed by her immensity for New Orleans is obviously a huckster’s haven compared to the industry and glory and dismissiveness that is Houston Texas and therefore the greater world. Take me back dawn, I am ready to go back to a hearth fire and I will go to church this fine Sunday and you’ll see me yet in one of those megaworship houses if that’s what is necessary and dawn are you there I’ll worship at whatever tower and whatever oracle if you turn me around and I’ll escape with my ambitions and found some great kingdom that would have made Carthage proud and each day we’ll worship at the temple of Dawn. Do you hear me sweet maiden? Can you not radiate from me and into me and fill me with something majestical, a life force that I do not contain. I feel the pull of the wheel and I’m doing it, I’m pulling into the gas station and I’m going to open this map and when I do I’ll be one step closer to this destiny I have chosen.

The Downtowns of America

A hotel with the name painted on the side and one light glowing upon that name and nothing else to imply that the facility still welcomes guests and can care for the weary traveler. The fact that Gabe can spot this structure from an embanked Interstate explains succinctly why the Ambassador Hotel is stultified to the point of comatose. It’s everywhere Gabe will ever go in America, those vacant streets and the unimportant downtown and all that wasted infrastructure and it is in need of razing or a renaissance but it is the single element that reflects the times he lives in, when cities were fictions and the good old days really could be seen reflected in the concrete surfaces of dead commerce and shuttered stimulation, reflected was the ebullience of people walking the streets hailing cabs and strolling through the darkness and there was more to fear back then and people had less fear. The downtowns of America are now seen as nether worlds of trouble and neglect and to go down there is to take your life in your hands and that’s why no one goes down there and that’s why they become places where such activities do indeed occur. And goodbye to Beaumont and all that it represents in its failure to have any purpose anymore and so like the great cities of the ancient world Beaumont will disappear, covered by sands and tides and Beaumont will just be another place to mock poets and historians who will wonder whatever became of the greatness that was Troy.

Houston less than an hour away and the wide fields of rice pass on both sides and Gabe summons the shade of his father’s father to get him through this pitch black world of flatlands broken only by the lights of trailer homes and distant copses of shadowed trees gathered in silent presbyters. Pawpaw he can barely remember for he was practically a living ghost to Gabe’s father and barely a figment of Gabe’s imagination. A birthday party when he was a boy and Pawpaw was there talking French to the six year old child. Gabe thought the old man was asking him about his latest bike wreck. He pulled up his shirt like a legionnaire home from Algiers and Pawpaw laughed and obviously he had been asking the boy something else. That was the only time Gabe saw his grandfather so everything else must come from stories. How Pawpaw drove a truck for the Allies, a fearless driver who took great risks and always got through. He loved the war especially once he crossed the Rhine. He told people he never slept on the ground again after that. But the war couldn’t last forever and soon he was home in Washington Louisiana doing almost nothing. They never made two like him people said and this must have been true, kindly and easygoing and completely illiterate. He’d had his chance at schooling. When he was a child he rode his pony to the one-roomed schoolhouse and turned right back around and rode home when they told him he couldn’t bring the horse inside. Of course his mama never made him go back. It was that kind of world and Pawpaw grew up on a wide spread that got sold during the Depression and the Doucettes went from middle class to poor in one day.

So help him out old Pawpaw for all that you never did to raise your own young and I know you’re out there somewhere in the night yourself still alive and smoking pall malls unfiltered and nobody knows your name anymore and your kids don’t care until you die and then they’ll bury you and say very little and so your life has been merely offspring and you helped feed General Patton’s army and helped them shoot up the Nazis with your well-driven ammunition and that’s it, that’s all you get credit for so watch over your young buck grandson tonight and if his eyes start to droop slap his cheek and waken him and if his spirits flag and the car begins to drift then shake him awake with a what are you doing and he’ll appreciate it and it will get him across the last few miles of tamed and deflowered country devoid of any hospitality or much of anything at all and keep the boy safe in the borrowed car and let him arrive alive in a place where he can do good things, take action, make and enforce certain choices. Help him Pawpaw help him for he will need you only one time ever and this is it, this is the day and these are the times. Gas and the brake pedals are where they always are and thank god the car has power and from one pool of passing truck lights to another Gabe reaches for the radio 99 more times and then he just begins singing a song about grandfathers and fathers and old days and old ways anything that rips the heart out of a broken young boy. Old man, take a look at my life I’m a lot like you were…

The White Spitz

That Christmas the Doucettes invited over their neighbor Mr. Mike, a conflicted Minnesotan like Agnes, a big friendly bear of a man who had recently lost his wife and daughters to divorce. He sat in the living room drinking good scotch and listening to the record he’d given Agnes for Christmas, the soundtrack to Woodstock, and Agnes, frail redhead in pajamas danced around the room, she and Mr. Mike singing along.

Well it’s one two three what are fighting for. Don’t know don’t give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam.

Don’t eat the bad acid said Gabe’s father as if he had been there. He wasn’t anti-hippie or anti-drug he just hated crowds and lines which was Woodstock plus rain.

It’s the brown acid said Agnes correcting him. Jeez as if you’d know. You don’t know anything about Woodstock.

And she danced around the room tight as a monkey. She was good times when she let her hair down and she might even sneak a hit of weed when the kids went to sleep. That made her horny and high and Gabe’s father approved of that in all ways. “Semel insanivimus omes.” We have all at some time been mad. Hell when he met her she was sitting on the roof of an old Victorian house high on LSD. He’d had a beer, two or ten it didn’t matter but he could hold his hooch and she could hold her LSD and that day they fell in love. Love on LSD and that’s probably not the best use of one’s decision-making faculties but what the hell they weren’t going to get married were they. And then they were married and that was 1971 and this was 1980 and boy was the world upside down.

Well it’s four five six open up the pearly gates. Don’t know don’t ask why. Whoopee we’re all gonna die.

Mr. Mike deep into his tenth scotch looks over at Gabe enveloped in the gift he gave him, his officer’s jacket from Vietnam. It’s handsome dark green wool with a few ribbons and the howitzer insignia of the artillery branch. Mr. Mike did his tour and did it more or less willingly and came home to America and a pregnant wife and a lot of big sounds going off in his head most of the time. He saw little in the way of carnage but all you really need to see is one good buddy with his face shot off to make you a new and less improved man.

Knowing what I know now says Mr. Mike I would never have gone.

Gabe’s father nods sips his Benedictine. He points at Gabe.

I didn’t have to go, that one saved me and before him his mother when they weren’t taking married men and before that college.

I got screwed said Mr. Mike. Right out of high school with no job. They got my ass quick. My father was proud. He’d been in the Pacific. I almost walked to Canada. I should have gone to Sweden and fucked a different woman every day. Burp. Sorry.

No, no says Agnes. Gabe needs to hear these things.

I’d have volunteered says Gabe.

That remark is met with silence. Only Country Joe and the Fish have anything to say. You’re gonna have to sing a lot louder than that you fuckers if you wanna stop a war.

Finally Gabe’s father says well I’m damned. Here I am preaching antimilitary establishment to my students and then I raise a kid who wants to join the army. Jesus Christ. Oh well.

He takes a deep draught of Benedictine and settles deeper into the easy chair.

Mr. Mike regards Gabe, his eyes two lumps of anthracite burning out of a piggish face. He gave the boy the jacket because he knows he’ll never have a son. Something must be preserved even if he has no place for it in the museum of his mind. He belches again and says why would you wanna do something irrational like that?

If you volunteer you get to choose where you go.

That’s not true says Mr. Mike.

Well, I think it’s important to serve your country.

Listen to the little shit says Agnes. He’s been listening to Reagan.

Reagan is a dope says Gabe. But I do think we should blow Iran off the map.

Listen to the warlike Ugnaught says his father. Well just be glad that I didn’t volunteer my boy or your ass might not even be here.

Mr. Mike continues to regard Gabe then says I’d like a cigarette if you don’t mind.

Gabe’s father pushes the pack towards him and says if you don’t smoke others will smoke in your place.

Mr. Mike takes a cigarette and says I’m gonna step outside and Gabe’s father and Agnes both say you don’t have to do that and he says I prefer to and Gabe’s father says I’ll join you and Gabe goes too.

All three of them walk outside and stand on the edge of the patio. Before them is the black hole of the woods, thin in the December depths and the lawn crisp as new money and hoared over with a light frost. The moon is almost gone, just a sliver opening the sky up like a cut veil. They breathe into the cold air and the men smoke and their breaths double in size. They shiver a bit but Gabe’s father is almost impervious to the cold and Minnesota Mike stares winter in the teeth and Gabe is in an outsized wool dress jacket with his father’s colorful scarf wrapped about his head.

He is the first to see the white Spitz emerge from the depths of the woods, sniffing at the ground as it advances to the edge of the Doucette’s yard. Nobody says a word. Mr. Mike makes a move towards it and Gabe’s father says wait and Mr. Mike stops and waits to see what will happen next. The dog sniffs the ground like a pig looking for truffles, sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff, doing little circles as it returns to a spot repeatedly. Finally it begins to dig furiously throwing up a little silt pile between its legs. It gets something in its teeth and it begins tugging on it, a branch, a long pale and dirty branch, no a bone, an arm and a hand and the lanky thing begins to slowly unfurl of its own and it struggles out of the shallow grave wherein it has lain so long and what finally staggers to its feet is the rotten body of a man or what was once a man for now it is a scarecrow with one leg and one arm and half a torso and half a head. No matter, the dog is so happy. It jumps about as the man teases it higher with his hand, the dog leaping in the air and barking, barking joyfully, so full of love and gratitude and life and finally the two begin to disappear into the depths of the woods and are gone with one last bark.

Mr. Mike stands there a long time. How many shredded bodies will he see when he meets The Man? How many shells did he send screaming thorough the sky, something from faraway coming very fast to tear apart body after body after dink body? He’ll never know if his dreams are real. He has a lifetime to wait to know the truth. It’s almost unendurable.

I had a dog looked just like that says Mr. Mike. Came home from the Nam and the dog was gone. Asked my wife she said they had to put him down, he bit somebody. Said he’d gone bad. That dog never went bad. People went bad. And they killed my goddamn dog.

Mr. Mike reaches up with his cigarette hand and wipes his eye.

Gabe’s father taps his ash off his smoke and says well I’m going inside.

Merry Christmas says Gabe.

Merry Christmas say Mr. Mike and his father together.

The Fork

The first secret he remembers were his mother’s pills, millions of solar systems and Gabe never told anyone about the box under the couch until he told his father and by then it didn’t matter anymore, his mother was gone. The second secret he remembers is one his father told. They were buying a sweater for Agnes and his father bought the one she was expecting but also purchased a second one as a surprise. Don’t tell her said his father but Gabe couldn’t help himself. When he saw how happy the first one made her Gabe blurted out there’s another one too. His father never let him forget that act of faithlessness. As Gabe grew older he came to understand that he didn’t know the power of a secret and so couldn’t understand why keeping it was important. But then his father gave him another secret and this one Gabe managed to keep.

It was about a boyhood friend of Gabe’s father, one Mr. Joe. Mr. Joe’s father had committed suicide but Mr. Joe was told that it was an accident that occurred while cleaning his shotgun. Gabe’s father said the Cajuns kept it from him because suicide was regarded with fear and loathing and unconsecrated ground. Gabe asked his father how anyone knew the truth and his father said something was found that led people to believe he’d taken his own life. Don’t ever mention it around Mr. Joe his father said. I won’t, said Gabe but every time he was around Mr. Joe he’d have to think about not saying it as if an imp were in his mind trying to speak its well-rehearsed lines. Don’t say it he’d whisper to himself. Don’t say your dad was a suicide. And it bothered Gabe. They saw Mr. Joe frequently for he too lived in suburban New Orleans and was also a slave to Uncle Sam.

Then one Thanksgiving Gabe went on his first deer hunt in Washington and after that he didn’t have to worry about uttering the secret anymore. In attendance with Gabe were his Uncle Tommy and father as well as Mr. Joe. Nobody saw anything worth shooting in the rainy mess that was that November morning and the men soon retired to a bar to drink. Gabe played pool and Cajun songs on the jukebox and the men got thirstier and thirstier and the rain fell in an all day torrent. Around 4 p.m. the men pulled themselves off the barstools and everyone headed out to the station wagon. They piled in and Gabe’s father spoke to Gabe’s uncle.

Tommy I told old Joe that his father’s shack is still standing. He said he wanted to see it. Would you mind taking a ride out there?

Sure said Uncle Tommy, though we don’t wanna be too late getting back.

Aw hell said his father she knows that I’ve been drinking. That I’m drunk. Fuck it.

We can stop by said Uncle Tommy and he whisked them through the streets of Washington and over the trestle bridge and out into the empty nothingness of a field where Mr. Joe and his old man had lived many years ago. It was a sorry shack with the door stolen and the windows boarded up and no steps, just an open doorway where inside could be seen a few sticks of dusty furniture. His uncle stopped the car about twenty yards from the door and his father said well old Joe there it is.

Yep, said Mr. Joe, a kindly jug-eared man with a thatch of black and grey hair.

Can I get out?

His father said hold on a minute.

Why.

Just because said his father and Gabe sat and looked out the window at the worthless old shack. His father lit a cigarette and passed the pack to Mr. Joe. Uncle Tommy used an orange-stick to manicure his nails. Gabe looked over at the house again. There was a man standing in the doorway.

Look he said.

Everyone looked but nobody said a word. The man, dressed in dark gray trousers and a white undershirt smoked a cigarette and looked out over the open earth as if he could see to South America. He smoked and stared and the sun broke through a wet cold afternoon and shined like god’s own halogen torch. The man finished his smoke, flicked it into the yard, turned and went inside and sat at a little round table. He reached down and pulled a shotgun into his lap, an old Steven’s. He hawked and spit and then placed the butt of the gun on the floor and put the barrel in his mouth. He couldn’t quite reach the trigger. He tried a few different angles, then got up and placed the gun on the table, hawked and spit out the open door and then went into the kitchen. A moment later he reemerged with a fork. He sat back down and again put the butt of the gun on the floor and the barrel in his mouth. Reaching down with the fork he used it to depress the trigger on the shotgun. The explosion somersaulted him backwards, the soles of his feet disappearing in an almost comical flip. Smoke hung in the air as did the echo of the sound.

A moment passed and then everybody got out of the car, walked over and peered inside the shack. No mess of brains, no splattered headless body, nothing, not even a raising of dust. Gabe looked down at where the steps used to be. He saw something. He reached down and pulled it up out of its shallow grave. It was the fork. One of the times was bent almost 90 degrees. Gabe stepped over and handed it to Mr. Joe. He looked at it for a while, then bent the tine straight, put the fork inside his hunting jacket and got back in the car.

All right, said Uncle Tommy. We better get on home.

If You Need Us Call Us

Are you in your squad car roaming the night streets, looking for crooked ways and crooked means, a vessel of justice who only sees us at our worst? Or are you one of those perpetrators of depravity, hunched over your night kitchen with pen and paper, drawing ingresses and egresses, searching for the right word in a chilling note? Is the world at 4 a.m. as easily divisible as this: there are those on the make and there are those on the clock and the twain shall meet but some do not? Let’s hope you doctors and head shrinks on 24 hour call are not yourselves swimming in lap dances and nickel whores because the night is also peopled by the lonely and the sick and you know you’re out there, I’m talking to you, clutched in your t-shirt and sweatpants, your stringy hair and your hideously lit cigarette. You know I mean well when I say that I see you too at 4 a.m., we all do and we’re here for you, just ask and we’ll get you help. The emergency room is always well-lit and well-staffed with people just like you, night owls that have careened off course. And beyond these poor creatures cooking in their juices are the late night clerks, some like the redhead, boisterously alive and the others sad and shackled dark men from foreign shores who never ever sleep, not even when they die. They are a hardy lot as are the aforementioned strippers, selling that fantasy and doing it good. And those sweets of the night can’t be found without the dealers of strange medicines, our modern apothecaries and they are worth their weight in gold to those who wait for a call back or someone to come home and get the monkey off and let a goodtime sigh just finally exhale from their lips, they is out there too. And the ever-watching eye of big brother is watching the Russians and the Chinese and the North Koreans and the East Germans and the Czechs and the Iranians and the Iraqis and the Indians and the Pakistanis and the Americans. Those dudes are awake hunched over radar screens, poking through late night files, eating the doughnuts of information. Those nuclear warriors never sleep. And the football coaches crazed with victory and defeat are watching film and drinking black coffee and waiting to die. And you know at last that we are all out there at one time or another, the worried, the guilty, the horny, praying, waiting, blacking out. We are all of us a part of that cosmic cringing, the great itch of time that has us up the way we used to be when we were an ancient organism in search of. It is this past time when we were nocturnal that drives us up and into it like the freakstorm that it will be or deeply in the other direction into the normal world of sweet and not so sweet sleep. And where are you? And have you chosen yet or does it choose you? And if you need us call us. We’re up too.

Wallet

A red-haired woman built like a linebacker wipes down the coffee counter as Gabe fixes himself a cup of Joe.

Howdy she says loudly as if it weren’t four o’clock in the morning on a Saturday night.

The sound reverberates around the brightly lit emporium of kitsch. Plates shaped like every American state. Shot glasses for every state, bells and ceramic dolls and snow scenes and water scenes and pencils and pens and stuffed animals and cutting boards and steak knives. Furnish your entire home at a Stuckey’s, lots to eat though not much food. Gabe lurks down an aisle looking for a map of Houston Texas. Redhead points it out to him and he glances around to see if there’s anything else he needs, cookies candy beef jerky hotdogs nachos ice cream beer. Well the beer is too late to purchase and none of the rest sounds worth a damn. He steps over to the counter and reaches for his wallet. Wallet, what wallet? You have no wallet. No indeed you do not and in a flash Gabe’s heart skips and he knows he left it at the tiger gas station, all his money except change from the bottle of Maddog in his pocket and he’s barely able to pay for the coffee and the map.

Lose something? says the redhead as Gabe pats his pockets over and over again hoping the wallet might somehow find its way back.

Yeah says Gabe I sure did.

He exits the Stuckey’s into the driving blast of an 18-wheeler roaring by, gets in the car and fires up the throaty motor. Already half a tank burned and he’s not even in Houston and no more money. Gonna have to ask for help. Might could make it back to Washington Louisiana on this much gas. We shall see. He drops the car into drive and joins the road.

Seventeen and Clueless

Man has melted the ice caps and desalinized the sea. Man has carved the earth in his likeness, farrowed the fields and terraced the hills, altered the course of the greatest of rivers. The landscape has been explored and spelunked and razed and ruined and fed again on carbonized products that emerge from places like the one he just passed and Gabe is oblivious to the man-altered world that is involuted all around him. Jet planes pass overhead carrying their midnight riders and their exhaust tears great ribbons out of the malleable air. Spaceships circle the globe taking pictures of the birth of other spaceships. It’s all a mystery and a nothingness to him for he is stumbling across the ultimate wisdom of knowing nothing and knowing that there is more to even know you don’t know and this can be achieved and embraced by discarding all reliance on what is and instead focusing on what is coming. And so it means that he must let go of all that he was in Louisiana and all that he cared about and let himself be a vessel of new experiences and not plagued by the forces that once held him. So say goodbye to ever seeing again that sweet girl who sleeps in her bed of violation under a New Orleans moon. Goodbye to her and what she is, your first lover. Goodbye to the thoughts forever locked in supple memory banks of the night just six weeks ago when you made love for the first time. For her it was the first time she willingly had sex with someone and she let you chew on those words for the rest of your life. And you lied about your many posturings. Ha, ha and man did your inexperience show the first time. Over already just like in a book. But that’s fine really because you’re young and dumb and full of come and the second time that night was a lot better and at last in her ecstasy she told you to stop and you didn’t and felt the powerful all-consuming contradiction of sex. And goodbye to standing afterwards in the window forty floors above Canal Street and the river sprawling down below with the waterfront lit and the traffic cracking and a mist coming in off the river, an army of fog and deep-cleansing draughts and gone is Althea sprawled on the bed wrapped in sheets watching you in the glory of your body all of seventeen and clueless about any tomorrows and she loves you as deeply as young people can and gone is all that as you dressed and it’s hard to say goodbye but you must for the past is an encumbrance to the future and the present is just a myth. Nod your head Gabe Doucette not with sleep but with deep gratitude that you have something good to think about at all when you think about her and be grateful that you gave that to her too.

The Glory in What Wasn’t

The Sabine River is the only difference between a coon ass and a dumbass his father likes to say and the river is broad and wide and dotted with the coast guard and a ship or two and then it vanishes in the infinity of down below and Gabe is in Texas and being urged by a sign to drive friendly, the Texas way. And he knows what kind of place this is and what kind of people must live here strictly from reading the first mileage sign that tells him Houston is 100 miles away and San Antonio is 300 miles away and El Paso Texas is 1,100 miles away and so to live in this land of giant space requires either a great mind or a tiny narrow one for nothing middling can make it in a land of great diversity and terrifying emptiness. And there is no glory in this drive, merely the working out of old evils.

He has had little success at the thing he most wishes to be good at and this as always is the cruelty of life, to be worst at what we do best. Perhaps the greatest throw he ever made, quarterback that he allegedly is, is the throw that almost killed his brother Yves. And it wasn’t a football it was a shovel handle and boy oh boy would that have changed the road he’s on. How long ago was that? Four years and he and Yves were in the woods behind the house and stick-fighting and of course Gabe was getting the better of his brother, seven years his junior and a bit of a chub. Whack and Gabe caught his brother in the leg and the boy cried and continued to fight and Gabe egged him on, taking out his malice on the innocent for it wasn’t the boy’s fault that his mother favored him, her only child. Whack and he caught the boy in the shoulder hard and he cried and dropped his stick and Gabe said pick up your stick you pussy and the boy said I’m not a pussy and Gabe said yeah you are pussy and the boy turned and ran in the direction of the house crying and Gabe knew the weekend was over if the kid made it inside what with the tears and the bruises Gabe would be grounded as sure as shit and he hollered to his brother to wait. But the boy kept running and Gabe reared back and threw the shovel handle through the air like a javelin. What was he thinking? Perhaps he thought to hurl the stick near enough to his brother to frighten him. As he released the shovel handle he said to himself that is a good throw. And it was. It sailed through the autumn afternoon air and descended with increasing velocity and landed on top of the boy’s head like a jet fighter caroming off an aircraft carrier. Whack and flat it bounced off the boy’s skull and the child who was running did not stop, indeed he got faster and his cry, already in the highest of registers went higher still like an ambulance caught in a traffic jam and he kept those little legs moving and disappeared around the corner of the house.

That was a glorious throw and a glorious feeling for in the span of a half breath he went from exaltation to horror to relief and he laughed as he walked over and picked up the shovel handle and put it away and already his father was on the patio telling him to come inside and Gabe did and was grateful of what had not happened, the blunt end of the shovel handle impacting the boy’s medulla oblongata and wham the kid would have dropped like a stone, as silent as the staff that felled him. Imagine explaining that one to your folks. No, the glory was in what wasn’t and at that moment it was good enough.

And for his father, perhaps his finest moment occurred on the day the whole town of Washington Louisiana was in an uproar over a young black kid they were trying to lynch. Lord knows what the child had done but it was something like whistling at a white gal and he was said to be here and said to be there and a few different mobs walked the dusty streets almost as much at war with one another as with the black race. And Bennie was at school that day and probably the only white person in that town wishing that the young black boy would get away wherever he was and whatever he had done. For Bennie knew the ways of white folks and what they get up to and he had no heart or stomach for that at as early an age as he could remember. His glory was across the railroad tracks in the huge field where they played a massive game of baseball, so large and so many kids at once that a boy of no applicable athletic skills could be placed in deep right field and left out there inning after inning to just fart around, which is what Bennie was doing late in game when he looked up to see something in the tall unmowed grass beyond the playing field. And he knew it was the runaway negro and he knew he could say there he is and he didn’t and he watched as the boy a whip of a lad in coveralls slipped through the grass on his belly like a lizard and into a copse of trees and out of sight and out of mind and out of town for sure and was never seen nor heard from again. And a sudden sound like a shot from a gun and Bennie turned and it was not a gun it was a baseball bat and an older kid had laid wood to that baseball and it tore through the sky and all eyes turned to watch as it flared and burned and its arc brought it right to Bennie and all he had to do was put up his hand and he did. Whack sweet Jesus and he had caught it and he staggered backwards holding the ball aloft while his hand throbbed white hot and the other kids jumped around and hollered and then half-carried him from the field.

You Are Going to Regret this Someday

Do you know where your mother is? Agnes, the poor dear, is under an umbrella of valium back in the big easy, curled up in the deep slumber of the marital bed, perhaps exhausted from the hurly burly of the chaise lounge. But the other mother, the one who hatched him, where might she be? Possibly cast out of Eden completely for who knows what really happens to our parents when they lose all grip on responsibility and take to the hills. Some thrive under the added pressures and invent new languages of self expression. Others clutch at the stains on their clothing and weep for a time before they got on the path to self-absorption and devolution. And Gabe is pretty sure his mother has succumbed to the forces of the latter and she too wanders the world like a child, hand out and willing to accept what the world offers. She was a sad case that gal was, a heroin addict who was trying to save the world and raise a kid. She succeeded in none of those endeavors and Gabe last saw her when he was in kindergarten. After four years of living under her opening and closing rooftops, he’d spent the last 9 months with his father and Agnes. Gabe was fine with that arrangement though he missed his dog, a little white shitbird named Fido Q Dawg. No room for the dawg at his father’s apartment and when Gabe went over to see his mother for the last time Fido had been replaced with a baby and a crib.

You have a sister his mother said showing him the dark-haired girl.

This child was from her new husband, a man to whom she owed her heroin habit. He was in the slammer at that time as he would be quite often. Meanwhile Gabe’s father waited downstairs in the Volkswagen for Gabe to tell his mother he didn’t want to live with her anymore. Judge’s orders son and so there Gabe sat on the floor of his mother’s apartment playing with a new toy, a whirly bird the color of a school bus and his mother hovered about wanting to feed him. She ate weird food because she was a drug-addicted hippie and most of it Gabe found disgusting and he said no to the plain yogurt and bean curd and sprouts and played with his bird. He ignored his mother and wondered where his other toys were, things made of wood, natural toys for an unnatural life and he decided they were gone because the apartment was different and the stuff in it was new in an old way and there was no room for him, just a crib.

Do you want to come live with me again she finally asked.

No said Gabe I want to live with papa.

That was it and she shut it off completely the way only the most hurt and betrayed soul can, she leaned in and said I’m telling you that you are going to regret this someday and I want you to remember that you had your chance to live with me again and you didn’t take it. Do you understand?

Yes says Gabe.

You understand?

I understand.

Are you ready to go?

Yes says Gabe.

Take your toy.

I don’t want it.

Take it. I bought it for you.

I don’t want it. I don’t like yellow.

Fine, it will be here for you when you visit.

But he never visited because she didn’t live there very long and in any case he didn’t want to nor did his parents want him to visit, there was always a sense that his mother would just take off with him on a psychedelic bus trip to a cabin in the north woods and no one would see him for many, many years. No she walked him partly downstairs to his father’s car and he got in and buckled up and his father said you told her.

Yes said Gabe. I told her.

Okay said his father and he turned around the car in the street and she was already back upstairs and Gabe looked up at her apartment window as the VW rumbled by and he saw the orange curtains blowing out of her window and then the window slammed shut trapping one little corner of the fabric outside and Gabe felt that he would always be that lonely piece of curtain.

Wearing Found Shoes

The night lit only by travelers and he is whipping through the all-seeing all-knowing wilderness of the Louisiana mind. His foot slips a moment off the accelerator and the car lulls, then he punches it again and it takes off. He realizes that he is wearing his father’s hand me down penny loafers and this is instructional for it shows how the father comes to manhood out of poverty and can afford to own shoes that he can hand off to his son knowing they will be useful and not embarrassing because the story of all stories that seems to stick out most painfully for him is not really the one about Foot killing the junkman because he was simply a witness and couldn’t have done anything about it and no one thought any lesser of him for having seen what he saw or doing what he did which was hide the body and hide the truth. (Not that there was much of an inquiry. Bennie figured some Negro asked the sheriff if they had the old junkman locked up and he said no and had they found his body somewhere in the road and the sheriff said no again and that was it, Foot forever prophylactic against any stalkers or seekers of vengeance or at least truth.) No the most painful of all memories was the time his father found a pair of penny loafers someone had thrown away and they were fine- looking shoes but there was only one problem, the hole in the sole. It wasn’t so large that you couldn’t wear the shoe anymore so he stuck a piece of cardboard in there and wore them about sporting new kicks and proud of them the best shoes he owned. And they caught his buddies’ eyes and one of them asked if they could borrow the shoes for a hot date and Bennie said no. He had to on account of he was embarrassed that someone would know that he was wearing found shoes and so he said no which was as unlike him as anything he might ever do and his buddy said come on man lemme wear them shoes and Bennie said no again and his buddy looked at him funny and said fine be an asshole and skulked away hurt feelings and Bennie’s were hurt too for the shoes had caused the smallest rift and it was unnecessary and goddamn but he hated being poor.

And maybe Gabe can understand his father a little better as the horror of Lake Charles Louisiana emerges from the stumping blackness, a place built by the Demogordon with all its sinister powers and if there is a hell on Earth it is Lake Charles by night with its flaring towers of natural gas refineries and chemical plants and the air foul with sulfur and mortality and one narrow bridge over an estuary and a view down below of railyards and thick watered canals and box cars and chemical cars all asleep in the evil purple lights of the security systems, and the air flares with explosions and the traffic is murder at any hour, the car sliding across the steel riddle at the crest and then down the plunging skyline into a Dystopia where the machines make men who make more machines and all the planet has been sucked dry and scorched. And Gabe understands his old man in that anecdote more than he ever has or ever will again. The fear of poverty drove him from Washington Louisiana and kept him on the typewriter for twenty years and that is enough time to have fly at glory and then one day he simply stopped writing and strapped on the government mule that is the lot of a GS 13 and earned his soldier’s pay for the federal government and left behind all those other wishes and wants and Left Banks and views of the Sphinx and the Silk Road and a career behind the edge of his intellect and all because it was good money, a good job, good pay and the father can give away his second best shoes and this yes son is a very, very good thing.

The .22 Short Suicide

No sleep, at least not until a rest area appears but Louisiana is built on the inexact science of graft and so there is always a hunk of decaying infrastructure lurking out of the gloom, an obviated bridge in the middle of nowhere, a road through the swamp to serve one representative of one parish and sure enough a rest area appears outside the fine town of Jennings Louisiana. Gabe is hell yes tired and he pulls into a parking spot at the end of the row amidst RV’s and 18 wheelers and station wagons, kills the car, drops the bucket seat back, follows it into a prone position and almost immediately he sleeps. He might dream. It’s not impossible that he would have a dream and someday remember it. It’s unlikely however for few dreams linger in the soul. A few flashes, an image, a notion, an unrecognized place suddenly made familiar. There’s no end to theories of why and what and how one dreams but one likes to think there’s a yet to be determined purpose, something as apparent as the microbial world and we wait for a Leeuwenhoek, some inventor of an new instrument for the mind. Perhaps dreams are visions of things to come and so one afternoon we walk a new street and we have that moment called déjà vu and yet might it not be otherwise that we have dreamt this moment in time some time ago and so this memory is a validation that indeed this is the point on the compass in which we must dwell? So let Gabe dream and let him dream of the janitor of the old school his father attended for 12 years, Mr. Quirk, the .22-short-suicide. Yes the old boy worked twenty years or more on the job and he’d been in the first war and limped a little and was the color of his grey shirts and grey pants and he lived in the little shack adjacent to the furnace it seemed for he was always in there listening to the radio mostly the news and during football season the LSU Tigers. Who knew he was a man who would shoot himself? When it happens people are shocked but rarely surprised. Oh yes they say that person indeed was one fucked up piece of work and how did we not notice and so Mr. Quirk shot himself in the temple with about the smallest bullet a man could choose, a .22 short which would kill a rabbit from close range but was far more lethal on tin cans. And the temple if you don’t know is a poor choice, go for the mouth if you want to be professional and so Mr. Quirk did not die right away. Rather he lingered in a coma for many months with that tiny bullet lodged in his brain dreaming its .22 short dreams. And this is what Gabe dreams. He is walking down the Spanish moss veiled streets of Washington Louisiana. The moon is in and out. The landscape is swarthy and dim but not menacing. He is able to walk naturally and finds that he is carrying a deer rifle as he approaches the old school. A man stands on the grounds holding a spiked cane and a black trash bag attached to a wire frame. He impales a white piece of paper and thrusts it in the bag. Behind him the majestic tree that dominates the grounds of the school twists in a wind that seems to be affecting it and nothing else. The man stops picking up trash. He drops the cane and the bag and removes a handgun from his waistband. The man holds the weapon to his head and looks in Gabe’s direction with utter pity, for the insult that Gabe will never understand, the mere suggestion that a person who kills themselves is not in their right mind, no far from it they are in the mind they inhabit 100% of the time and it becomes unendurable and then that too vanishes and at last there is nothing at all to live for and so then you must die and the man who must be Mr. Quirk fires the gun but Gabe will save the day and his rifle is at his shoulder already and he fires and the bullet is leaping across space and time across the yard and into the path of the .22 short which has moved so slowly that it hasn’t quite reached Mr. Quirk’s head and the congress is made and both bullets ricochet into the darkness and Gabe has saved Mr. Quirk.

If Dave Brubeck Would Really Let the World Go Black and Die

Lafayette Louisiana, where Gabe has never set foot never having had a reason to come here but this is his father’s stomping grounds from the old college days and so for Gabe it is a phantasm of imagined good times. He navigates the thirsty Trans Am through the winding curves of the town, another place where the Interstate came in like a wild and untamable river and cut its way through the ventricles of the heart of the city leaving swathes of emptiness and blocks of disrepair in its wake. The light of the night and well into the early hours of the morning though there’s no watch on his wrist and of course the clock in the car has long since shut down. No matter the time he’s either ahead or behind but it doesn’t matter for how can he be late when nothing can start until he arrives? Therefore it is he and his own pace that decide this journey, this quest half fantastical, half holy. And somewhere on the streets of Lafayette is the specter of what his father once was, an undergraduate, a beat, walking the streets at the latest of hours or rather the earliest of hours and indeed rather both for by his final semester he was going to bed at goddamn o’clock and getting up at the crack of fuck. All of this over a woman for Lafayette is where he met his first wife, his starter wife as it were. Kate was her name and she was a party girl. Smart, damn good-looking and she liked to have a good time, too good a time it would seem for she was the first of his betrayers and screwed his best friend while he was out of town. Bad Kate and Bennie who was now Ben was the forgiving type but it ate at him and how could it not lord have mercy they’d only been married five months. They were separated after 10 months and a year and a half later he was in Mexico getting a divorce. So Lafayette had been kind to him in a way that only an undergraduate town can when it receives you like the whore that she is and yet charms you senseless with her scholarly chambers and above all her willingness to let you express your opinions no matter how trivial banal or bright. It’s good to have a place where after all you were man-made and self-made and you got your drink on and slept with a few girls and experimented with pot and listened to jazz and read beat poetry and was basically a beat. Yep, he was a beat because he was beat, beat down by the white race of which he was a member and beat down by the red scare and beat down by Russian dogs circling the earth in spaceships and beat down by golf and leisure wear and straights and their hair long on girls and ever so short on boys and he was a beat dog who drank with all his friends all night and played Calcutta Blues on the turntable and wondered if Dave Brubeck would really let the world just go black and die and the answer was yes. Yep, there it is, the college town and Gabe winds through it in less time than he’d think it would take to crunch a metropolis no matter how small and then again into open country with just the last few signs offering him an exit opportunity for that way north just a half hour maybe less will take a body to Opelousas and just ten minutes later he would be in Washington Louisiana and there would be his aunt and uncle’s house and a spare room for him to rest and the night is so dangerously long and it has been a long day’s journey into this night and wouldn’t it be better to just slip off into slumber than carry this nugatory mission to its inconsequential conclusion?

A Minor Crime

Before class one morning Bennie sat next to the new auditorium fiddling with a stick, absent-mindedly scrapping it across the brick wall. Rubbing the stick back and forth produced a gouge, sufficient evidence of shoddy construction but nothing a child would understand. A bell rang and young Bennie went inside to class. Later that morning there was a school assembly in the new auditorium, grades 1-12 all gathered in the close-quartered heat and slapping flies and fans spinning and the American flag big as ever. The school principal wanted to address the student body. The big man, veteran of the pacific theatre stood at the lectern and barely able to control himself he explained that there was a criminal among them unfit for civilization, to be driven from the gates with catcalls and whippings. Yes, you see someone among them had that very morning vandalized the very building in which they sat. Yes this pervert had done something insidious. He or she had scratched out a gouge in the bricks. Yea verily and it was true. You could go see for yourself someone had scratched a gouge in the bricks with a sick and he wanted the little prick to stand up right now and take his due. No one spoke. But Bennie’s soul swam in and out of the shoals of terror and he shook visibly and sweated and pissed himself with fear and one of the older boys made a fart sound and there was laughter and the gouged brick was briefly forgotten. But nothing is forgotten and the gouge haunted Bennie for the rest of his time at that school, ten more years holding his breath and then he was gone but when he came back to visit and he brought his son to see the old school, by god there was the gouged brick and Gabe’s father smiled at the thought that such a minor crime could have attracted the eye of such a mighty terror as the principal. And yet each deed is subject to judgment and since no man will bear to be judged he must simply go forward for if he does not then he will surely go backwards and there lies judgment too.

If I Won

The last gas before the endless causeway over the Atchafalaya, the one he remembers from his childhood and the forever miles watching the concrete rails whipping by, mile after crazed mile. He rolls up to the pumps across from sure enough a royal Bengal tiger pacing a small steel cage. That’s one pissed off critter and if he wasn’t a man-eater yesterday he is today and he walks back and forth back and forth and for a millisecond Gabe considers blasting the lock off with his magnum but he doesn’t for a myriad of reasons not least of which is the fact that he only has six shells and that might not be enough for the crimes he will be committing. A knot in his stomach that he wishes away as he heads inside to pay the cashier, a pimply gal about his age. She asks him if he wants to purchase a raffle ticket for her high school band. It’s only a dollar and the prize is a shotgun.

Sure says Gabe. A dollar can’t hurt.

I wish I could enter she says handing him his ticket. If I won the first thing I’d do is shoot my daddy.

With that she gives him a smile and tells him yes there’s a restroom around back and no he don’t need a key.

Gassed up and emptied for now of piss and the long bridge in front of him, Gabe bids goodbye to the meanest tiger and the meanest daughter in the world and gets back on the road. No junkman but no matter. He comes and goes as he wants to and Gabe doesn’t mind that he may be losing his marbles. If feelings are the important things then he feels good and good about what he’s doing and he can ride all night if necessary thinking about what can be changed and what can’t be changed and what the difference is between these things. For example down below him and miles away from the specter of the Interstate is his Uncle Foot living in a shotgun shack plumb in the middle of the swamp. Lonely is he by the kerosene lamp. All his life he has needed space. He has these many years lived in a house in which he can stand on the back and front porches and fire a shotgun and not hit anybody. Same for both side windows and that’s what a man needs, trap-lines to check and game to hunt and eat and if he had the will he’d build a still but he doesn’t and he prefers beer anyway which he gets at the fish dock twenty miles from Jesus and all His kind. No, it’s a solitary life for good old Uncle Foot and that can’t be changed. His wife is still dead. No order of Lazarists can undo the cancer that dropped her twenty years ago. He’s still the finest cabinet maker in three parishes but that can be changed. Slowly his skills have rotted. Once upon a time his work was so par excellence that the sheriff of Washington traded him early release for some minor offense and twenty-five dollars to redo the cabinets in the jail. Foot took the money, drank it all up and came back that same night asking if he could have his cell back temporarily. Of course they let him in. Yes those good time Charlies is gone and there ain’t no changing that neither. Can’t change the murdered man now can you? Can’t undo that drunken night in 19fiftysomething, can we? Can we? Is there some antidote to guilt? Can there be forgiveness when the ghost is a foot and the killer is drunk in bed? How to pull off that gestalt? Stand forth before humanity and say I accuse? Nothing is forgotten and nothing can be truly forgiven until we face our frozen fears and let the other off the hook.

The lull of the road, the simple enduring lull of the road, the battered interior of the golden Trans Am, bits of trim hanging by stripped screws, gashed leather, punched out dashboard, incredibly cramped and puny back seat, the racing steering wheel like Parnelli Jones coming around those turns like he’s riding on rails. But there is no Parnelli Jones and no turns either, just straight into the rumbling and headlight-lit future and Texas somewhere ahead like a train to catch and an empire to strip of its wealth and a thousand tribes of horsemen and the oil-cooked world and the streets ashamed with plenty and miles of cattle lowing. Yes Texas is there for you too and still time to change your mind but not really, you can turn around no easier in the ultimate articulation of this than you can turn around in the literal sense for this is a straightaway mutherfucker of a causeway with miles of cypress tops and shooting stars falling into the murk and one other lane clogged with passing trucks and cars crying across the south Louisiana landscape like an ebbing wave, like a shrinking time, like the last age of kings.

Dreams of Jack Burden

Three lanes of action each way and Gabe is in the far right lane with girders at eyelevel and a view of the state capitol building lit up like the rocket ship it resembles about to be launched on a mission to Mars. The house that Huey built but when Gabe sees it now he thinks of it as Governor Willie Stark’s personal monstrosity. The bridge bumps along underneath him and out to the left and the right is the river lit here and there by the lights of tugs and barges and a solitary party boat carousing, a band down on the decks, people dancing and standing at the rails and watching the same thing that Gabe is watching, the capitol building exploding in an effulgence of light. And perhaps a woman is at the rail of the party boat with her arms clasped about her and perhaps a young man has followed her outside and he takes off his jacket and wordlessly puts it over her shoulders and then steps up to the rail next to her and he too takes in the capitol building, that temple to high living and something of a mausoleum with the bullet holes in the marble walls and the spot roped off where Huey Long was shot down. And the other bullet holes at the end of the hall where Dr. Weiss, the man who killed Huey Long was felled by the bodyguards who filled his body with bullets long after he was dead. And if you’ve read All the Kings Men then you’ll never forget how Willie Stark’s assassination plays on the page with Sugar Boy holding Willie in his arms and asking him if it hurts.

With the capitol and that whole side of the country behind him now Gabe can concentrate on the descending face of the bridge and Port Allen Louisiana beckons the weary traveler with its steaming facilities and domes of petroleum and its fearsome lights and one lonely blue sign hidden in the industrial labyrinth advertising a liquor store that cashes checks. And then before him is the deep darkness between cities that is the story of the south where men cluster in the built up landscape but also they crave their loneliness and they live in farms and shacks and trailer homes far from their fellow man in the black and haunted land between the towns. Along the corridor of the Eisenhower Masterplan there is the usual crap at each junction with a lesser road, the franchised food and the gasoline, but between those abhorations is a clean dark night lit only by the lights of yon fellow traveler and your own inner working mind. And bless the good lord for good books and All the Kings Men was a good one, the best he’s read so far. In the face of all his expectations he read it in a trance and dreams now of being Jack Burden. But there is something in him of all the characters, even Anne, for he like she wants love that has a purpose, already at 17 he knows enough to know that simple love without ambition gets swept out to sea. And that is Jack Burden. And Gabe Doucette feels a kinship in his bones with little Jackie because he too is a wellspring of private mutations, crimes carried on his back committed by the distant past. But in him too, he knows it and says it now to the junkman sitting in the shadowy bucket seat and back again like you knew he would be Gabe says I have big things inside me and so I’m like Willie too. I want to change the world. And if the junkman was talking on this trip he’d say no man can change the world until he changes himself.

And Gabe would say I am.

And the junkman would say well that’s no change. That’s who you always were supposed to be.

It’s my destiny Gabe would say.

Yes.

And would this have been my destiny if my father had burned his hands off with that white phosphorous he stole?

Who knows?

What about Mrs. Courvillion? What if he never met her?

Who? the junkman would say as mother night in all her labors unspooled and parceled out strings of inky blackness and then cut, cut, cut it off at the places where the lamps were lit in the fields and the filling stations burned in the blackness and then back to the weaving and ever-producing fateful darkness.

Mrs. Courvillion was my father’s third grade teacher Gabe would say. She taught him to read.

Is that right?

That is right. I saw the very desk where he sat. My father and I paid a visit to the school one time when I was a kid. It was summer and the janitors let us walk around. He showed me his classroom. Showed me the desk in the same spot it was in thirty years ago. Said the teacher told him he was going to sit in that desk right there and learn to read. And he did. She taught him to read and he began with the baby books and it burned his guts out being held back and the humiliation was about all he could stand and who knows what would have happened if there had been no Mrs. Courvillion. My father said there were people graduating from that school that were 21 years old who couldn’t read. Grades one through 12 in one two story building and the little kids getting it from the big kids and my father sat in that desk and learned to read and by Christmas he was at grade level and by summer he was three grades ahead and then he knew the power of the word, the worlds that live undercover and he wanted to be an adventurer and he wanted to raise the dead and he read and read and read and the years passed and one day he looked around at the town of Washington Louisiana and said my god I’ve got to get out of this place. And he did. He read his way right past the folks who sat in the barbershop and called people nigger lovers and he read past the shack with the outhouse where he lived with his mother and he read past the poverty that was an all day sucker and he read his way out from under their noses until the day he said goodbye.

Well that’s all right the junkman might say.

And Gabe might say well it’s all because of Mrs. Courvillion.

And the junkman might say well I guess you owe her a thank you.

And Gabe might say well I guess you are right.

And together the junkman and Gabe might say thank you Mrs. Courvillion. Thank you for holding that freckled-faced kid back and putting him on a path that brought him to my mother, an educated woman in an educated town and brought him to a wall of books and brought him to the masters that he might live in a forever shadow of the masters, Yeats and Joyce and Beckett and Faulkner and so cowering in their gloom he might never decide that he too is one of the pantheon and so to Mrs. Courvillion thank you for creating that in him and for creating me, on this path through this wilderness in this my 17^th year for I too am a reader and this is my story, my teller of tales and here I am trucking through the night, an unspeakable and unwavering force of vengeance, like the furies, like an old testament god.

What the Manager Will Say

The land begins to rise ever so gently and here and there a hardwood oak stands totem in its own lamplight and the land grades up ever so higher again and again and soon the Interstate is curving through one last tract of trees before he rounds a bend through a forested park-like setting to see the Hilton Hotel standing 25 stories high like a great Scottish keep. Sheet white and lit in thirty different rooms, each with an unpeopled balcony and Hilton is written in twenty foot blue letters and he is upon it and beside and it is gone and Baton Rouge is suddenly on all sides and the Interstate 12 merges right there too and the highway and the night and the manrent that a body must pay in his vassalage of traveling all get higher and tighter. And even in the rumble of the Trans Am and the jangle of the nerve ends and the now vanished old negro man gone from the scene but his return an inevitability Gabe must needs look back at the Hilton Hotel now in his rearview mirror and gone, blocked by an 18 wheeler hard on his behind. He sees all in one swift shot which is himself working behind the front desk of that hotel in a gaudy tie and cartoonish pants and blotches of dry angry red skin on his face because he is a nervous and larcenous fellow. He is charming and good-looking and his fingers are very light. Everything he wears was bought with stolen funds, as was his car, a junker parked behind the hotel. He is on the run from New Orleans and his friends think he’s shit and his girlfriend doesn’t trust him and he’s a fuckup from ass to Christmas. This hotel is the suite of his infamy. He sees the friends he’ll make, bellmen who read Faulkner and want to run away to Memphis and crazy cats from Thibodeaux and Houma who drink and smoke and eat any drugs they can find, and soulful cats like Henry the black bellman, tall and handsome with his quiet forgiving voice and his chopped haircut and his easy ways.

And Gabe knows that one day long after he has left that place in his wake the way a man bids farewell to a country, he will return to that country again, walk through the sliding glass doors of the Hilton Hotel and walk up to the front desk and ask if Mr. So and So is there, the hotel manager. Gabe is asked who should he say and Gabe says Gabriel Doucette and he knows that name is meaningless to the clerk but it means something to the manager and it once meant something to the world, and might again. A noble name, a name carried across the ocean by a Frenchman two hundred years ago. A name sullied by the present keeper of that name. And Gabe knows he will simply wait until the manager sticks his head out the door of the office and calls him inside. And Gabe knows he will see the food and beverage manager or the assistant hotel manager, some good looking woman with long legs and nice breasts and turtleneck sweaters even in summer to hide that neck and she’ll look right at him with a look that can only be described as fuck you I once trusted you look and Gabe will walk into the hotel manager’s office and sit in the offered chair and the manager will sit too, a beefy man with a beefy mustache and a thatch of hair and an overworked body and mind exhausted by the demands of this earth and he’s wearing a yellow shirt and a brown tie and somehow Gabe will know it’s one of three outfits he’s always owned. And the manager will say what can I do for you. And what will Gabe say. As big rigs pull him through the sweetly moving stream of traffic that rips Baton Rouge in half and he is gliding over the LSU lakes and sees the slate roofed houses alongside that he has seen for years and watched their rooftops decay and wondered who lived there and why they let their beautiful roof die but that is clothed in darkness lit only by god’s mind and the orange sodium streetlamps that create small cones of warmth amidst the foulest blackness and the traffic pulls the car and the car pulls the traffic and the signs tell Gabe where LSU is and downtown and the capitol and North Baton Rouge but he knows this route, it’s all been a trip he’s driven before and before him soon will be the Mississippi River and the bridge over that river and then the journey will really begin, so one last thought to tidy the soul. What will Gabe say as he sits there in some future position of ill-repute and private humiliation? How will he defend or explain that which is his destiny and future and not yet his state of being?

I lied, he says. I lied and I stole and I lied about what I stole. And I’m sorry. I don’t have any explanation for my behavior. I was a sick person back then. I’ve taken some time to travel and figure out who I am and I’ve moved back and I wanted to come here and say I’m sorry for what I did. I don’t know how much it was and I don’t know when I’ll be able to pay it back but someday I will.

And what will the manager say as he stares at Gabe over his crossed arms and on his desk are two pictures of his daughter, fishing age 8, graduating high school age 18, a tall longhaired girl, worth a soul-killing job to raise right. He’ll say I knew you were lying. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you came in here and admitted what you did. That’s what a man does. He admits when he was wrong. What you just did was hard and I’m proud of you. If you ever need a job, come by and see me.

And Gabe will get up and shake his hand and walk out the office and say goodbye to the clerk and there’s Henry the black bellman at the door and god it’s good to see him and he’ll say where you been man and Gabe will say all kinds of places and then they’ll laugh and Henry will say man I gotta get outta this place and Gabe will say yeah you do and they both know he won’t but they’ll shake hands and say goodbye and Gabe will step out into the bright beautiful Louisiana afternoon and look at the sky and say thank you.

Copper Drainpipes

One night Bennie and his buddies were knocking around the high school, outta money and down to their last nothing. As he leaned against the wall to piss out the end of their beers he noticed that one of the drainpipes of the two-story building had come unriveted from the bricks due to an encounter with a delivery truck. He also noted that the pipe was composed of copper and that underneath its verdigris skin was shiny copper-colored copper which equaled valuable scrap which equaled cash. He finished his piss and then began pulling on the pipe and with the assistance of his knucklehead friends they tore down about twenty-five feet of pipe in one horrendously loud and heard by none save them crash. Someone went and got an old car no one used much because it only the parking brake worked and they loaded it up with those giant metal straws and cruised on down to the junkman’s yard. There they roused the old man who lived in a yard of dead machines and scrap and a barn full of more dead parts of nothing. He inspected the copper pipes and then gave the white boys cash money. Off they went to get drunk. They congratulated themselves on their good thinking and then thought no more about it until one day they were walking the streets and the junkman suddenly pulled up next to them in a broken down model-t truck. He killed the motor and eyed the boys standing there greased up hair under the white hot Louisiana sun.

The junkman said without greeting or preamble ya’ll took them pipes off that school.

Nobody said anything for awhile then finally someone said yessir.

The junkman looked at them. That saggy craggy beaten down face, that corona of thinning white hair, the overalls, the dirt. Ya’ll know what happen to me if people think that I stole them pipes?

Nobody says nothing. They know.

Y’all come down to my yard today and get them pipes.

Yessir.

With that the old junkman dropped the truck into gear and it pulled away leaving the boys in the dust. Someone went and got the old no brakes car and they trundled on down to the junkman’s yard and got those pipes and they said nothing about the money because there was no money they had drank it all up but the junkman just waited until they and the pipes were gone and then he closed the screen door. It took them over an hour to get to Opelousas what would have taken minutes in a car with brakes and then another hour driving around. It wasn’t any one person’s idea that they find a white owned junkyard and they did and the owner saw nothing amiss and gave them cash money and thus they sold the pipes a second time.

After Gabe’s father told him that story Gabe asked if they went and gave the junkman his money back. His father laughed and said no, they went and got drunk again.

Gabe’s Murdered Man

He passes through a weedy forest that sprang up when the Interstate went through. Someday those trees like miles of women with wet hair will be replaced by hardier and sturdier trees. The future is in the present just as the past is too. And someday the future will be a present and this will be its past. And so even as Gabe rides alone through the night save for the hallucination of a murdered man in the passenger seat, so too did he once ride this corridor as a passenger in his Uncle Tommy’s car. And as Gabe sat there, perhaps 8 years old, he saw his neighbor’s father pass in a battered sedan, a gruff man about his father’s age who was at home a lot and sometimes beat his kids. And there he was riding past and Gabe had just happened to glance over at the green sedan that was already ahead of his uncle’s station wagon and he said hey, that’s our neighbor.

His uncle turned down the radio. What’s that son?

Gabe repeated what he’d said. He just saw his neighbor pass in a flash with a worried look on his face and he had the air about him of a tense man on a secret mission, it struck Gabe quickly and in the nonce that he knew that the man was with another man and they were up to no good.

Maybe they’re going hunting said Gabe and he might have even wanted to believe that for it was hunting season and they appeared to be men who were after something. And it seems they were for later that same year the neighbor was arrested for burglarizing several homes on his own street and Gabe knew that he had been right and he’d seen it, the look of deception. Shaggy hair, glasses, almost a doppelganger of his father except he was a criminal and his father was not. Gone away to the Big House now and the family moved off the street even before Gabe and his family did and that was the past almost ten years ago.

And there is the present situation which is Gabe in a jacket blue jeans t-shirt jacket and penny loafers with an overnight bag in the backseat containing extra clothing and a loaded gun and in the passenger seat is an old black man, Uncle Foot’s murdered man and therefore through the storytelling process Gabe’s murdered man and through that same process into you the listener and so it is Gabe’s murdered man and yours too and what will you do about it? Gabe looks at the empty hole where once an AM/FM was with an 8-track tape deck and wishes for the hundredth time already that the Trans Am came with sound. There’s sound all right and it’s the roar of the road and the Trans is a beast sitting down on the concrete on those 36 inch rims and to the undiscerning eye it’s a beaten piece of once was good shit but to the driver and to the true believer it’s Jehu’s chariot and you drive like Jehu through the willow forest and the exit signs for Lutcher and Destrehan, two district rivals whom you’ll never play in football because they’d crush your ass and you wonder for the 99^th time how Ben Franklin the school for egg heads is in a district with big country schools that aren’t even in Orleans Parish the mystery of the cover-up and it all probably goes back to Coach and the inscrutable Irish monk that he wasn’t born to be and speaking of Ireland and since you’re trying not to lose your mind, think of that good U2 Irish rock and roll that you can’t escape and they’re always on the radio so reach for the invisible dial and turn it on and out of the crushed speaker faces on the doors and out of the broken woofers and tweeters in the rear dash comes the sound of that repetitive piano and it’s the loneliest sound in the world and then the guitar comes in and the reverb is your very soul shouting down from the mountains and you know, yes god you know that all words spoken and all deeds done come at last back to you. And so any indignity is your indignity and any degradation degrades you. And as the brown haired apostle begins to sing in the wind-whistling air you sing with him, you sing all is quiet on New Year’s Day, a world is white, it’s underway, I want to be with you, be with you night and day. Nothing changes on New Year’s Day. And that is the present and the future is there too and it will be this, you behind the wheel of JJ’s car, his future car and you will already have wrecked his first one and dented this one and now you’re behind the wheel taking Maginnis up to Baton Rouge to LSU and you’re 19 and nothing can kill you it seems except yourself and Maginnis still has the vision and the fire but you dear Gabe have only a degree in courtesans and a twice suspended driver’s license. And you shouldn’t be driving anyway. And it is night and the sun just went down and you’ve had several drinks. And this same song comes on and Maginnis turns it as loud as it will go and he says (so unlike him) go fast man go fast if you get a ticket I’ll pay for it and you turn up the motor on that car and you pass a dozen Sunday drivers cruising through the night and no cops and no car crashes and the music drives you on and on and it feels good except for the feeling bad part because you know your best days are already behind you. And that is the future which will be a present and this will be a past. And the past will be the distant past and the future will also be a past and there’s a future far out of comprehension to the 17 year old mind in which Gabe Doucette may look back not with anger but with love and compassion and regret and he will want the past to be different and in his alchemical way he will learn to make it so, different, the mutable past, different, the ever shifting present, different, a once and future future. All of it contained in a moment, in a song, with the windows open and the murdered man’s cigarette smoke contorting and intorting in the air and then sucking out the glass and sing sweet brother sing, sing Gabe of the present and Gabe of the past and Gabe of the future, sing I want to be with you be with you night and day.

I’ll Make It Up As I Go

Gabe turns the key in the ignition and the engine kicks over on the first try. A good sign. A very good sign.

I guess you won’t be at work tomorrow morning says Maginnis.

I guess not.

I hope you know what you’re doing.

I don’t. But I guess I’ll make it up as I go. This is all unfamiliar territory now.

What should I tell JJ when he sees the car is gone?

I don’t know. Maybe he won’t notice. Maybe I’ll be back before you guys are done. You don’t have to tell him you helped me.

I don’t mind says Maginnis. I wish I could go with you.

I know.

Well, call if anything happens. Don’t be stupid.

I think it’s too late but thank you anyway.

I’m sure you’ll have one helluva story to tell.

I’m sure I will.

Gabe Doucette drops the rumbling Trans Am into drive and pulls away from the curb. When he reaches St. Charles Avenue he turns left and parallels the streetcar track, from time to time a streetcar itself, clattering along, a few random riders staring into the future one square of streetcar headlamp at a time. Alongside St. Charles are homes composed of gingerbread and old money, twisted and verdant as the very live oaks planted 150 years ago. The street curves like the great river herself, that oily brown snake coiled on the flood plain to the south, her presence as commanding as a lover listening to you in another room. And a glance through the wreck of the dashboard to find the gas gauge and a half a tank will get you somewhere not here so wait until you get on the highway and somewhere in a lonely lamp-lit world of men and machines you’ll find a pump of high test and you’ll have coffee and keep moving. And he’s not tired now, Gabe isn’t tired though he’s half drunk or should be but there’s nothing like pointing a loaded weapon at a man to sober you both up. And he’s fast approaching the expressway and once you get on that mother you can ride forever without getting onto a surface street until Texas is on all sides and Houston is your milieu. So this is the last chance by god to turn your whole life around and do something different, years or days or hours or minutes from now you’ll be able to look at this moment as you pass Delmonico’s and a Popeye’s and a honky-tonk and a fleabag motel and now Lee Circle taking you around the bend and the godfather of the confederacy stands atop his pillar looking down upon the city that surrendered without firing a shot and the Trans Am catches the streetcar tracks that run on the street and they will pull you if you allow them to back down St. Charles Avenue whence you came and you could return the car, no one would know what was in your heart, it would be over but if you turn the wheel and you do, you turn the wheel and you race through the downtown streets past men in the middle of their lost decades swimming from bar to bar and past the train station and then jump, jump, jump onto the onramp and ramp up to the viaduct of the expressway and join the endless flow that is America and is the night. The Superdome looms on the right, a fat pumpkin-colored orb, the mother-ship, temple of disappointment. The towers of the city hotels and oil-built skyline like shards of glass driven into the ground from a mighty height. None of that belongs there. New Orleans is a city of low homes built above the earth. And that is the sweep of the world before him. The expressway takes him across space and time and he cuts through the cemeteries and the bone yards are silent and he runs the heavy V-8 hard under the train track bridge that takes a soul to other places and then he joins the ribbon of concrete and dusty dreams that is Interstate 10. And it’s good to be jazzing through Fat City in a Trans Am on a Saturday night. Glance out the window and see them putting on makeup in the mirror and swilling a secret beer. They’re your fellow citizens and they’re out for a good time on a good night. Bound into their tops and bottoms and most uncomfortable footwear they joust through the lanes trying to get to wherever is the next big thing. The newest news and we all want to know it and hear it and be in it. There are those on the roads. But there are others too, men and women mostly behind the wheel of big rigs and they too ply the highways delivering me my hotdogs and you your fried pies. They wander the darkness from the mountains to the coast pulling and pushing the loads that will stick to our ribs, fertilize our lawns, grow our crops and clothes. They are the fuel bearers and the transporters of beasts and they are also on a singular mission, a get there get it done and get home kind of thing. They have purposes and families that sleep under the spell of ignorance of who they really are and what they really do. And so Gabe is more in league with these night swans and is not a wanderer but a seeker and in this case his name might even be Nemesis, his handle as it were. Metairie drops away as does Kenner and this is suburbia flat like an ironing board clustered with malls and more malls and still more malls and all of it is of a piece as far as being ghastly by day and luminous and concealed by night. And then blessedly the highway narrows to two lanes in both directions and you jump onto a causeway that will take a body out of the western end of the city that care forgot. Gabe glances to his right once and sees only the tan leather bucket seat and glances again and sees the old black man, the junkman that his Uncle Foot killed. Sitting there in that sporty seat wearing a dark suit and a porkpie hat, black with a burgundy hatband. He smokes and will continue to smoke one endless hand-rolled cigarette. He will say nothing because the dead need not use the brutal communication system that is the spoken word. No the dead just are and is and so they are only required to be in order to be understood. And Gabe knows why he’s here. Clearly Gabe is losing his mutherfucking mind on the causeway no less where any error sends a body and his vehicle over the side to a watery grave, so easy, take it easy and like Maginnis would say keep it at 68 mph and so what if you’re motoring in a stolen car with a pistol in your possession and a hallucination in the passenger seat, so fucking what, this is America right, this is the dream, isn’t it, to take the road trip that will cleanse your soul, to make a pilgrimage to a holy spot or complete a quest like a knight of old, whatever or wherever, just go, go, get behind the wheel of your American machine and gallop across this sleep-starved and coffee-choked land. Do it. And tell the stories because only the stories will save you, it’s why you’re here and what you were made to do. Remember the stories and even if you become blind drunk keep telling your stories, keep on being a teller of tales.

I’ll tell you about the white phosphorous he says.

Before him is the road lit by the demonic glow of the angry hawk-faced car. On his left is a sweep of cypress on a moonlit horizon. Before him is a tirade of power towers carrying juice to the frightened white folks on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. He drives steady and easy and not fast at all and everyone passes him and he passes no one. He has made this trip many times as have you as have I.

My father and his buddies used to hang out at the high school after hours. They would wander the halls looking for things to get into, poking around. One night they slipped into the chemistry lab and there my father found a jar labeled white phosphorous. Inside were a few grey chunks of rock covered in oil. My father had read somewhere that white phosphorous would ‘do something’ if you threw it in water so he reached in and pulled out a chunk about the size of a golf ball, sealed the jar and left. He and his friends climbed out the window they’d unlocked during the day and walked ten blocks down to the bayou. All the way the oil is dripping off the phosphorous, leaving a trail to be detected if anyone wanted to. When they reached the bank of the bayou my father tossed the oily chunk out into the water. Booooooooooooommmmmmm! It hurled itself a hundred feet out of the water, higher than the WPA Bridge and dropped back down and blew up a second time. The boys including my father shot off in different directions scared shitless at the ruckus they’d just caused. Lights were on, dogs were barking, people were standing on their porches with shotguns asking what the hell that was. Later my father and his buddies all had a good laugh and agreed to keep it secret. And later still my father read that white phosphorous will ‘do something’ when it is exposed to the air and so had that oily chunk that he carried so blithely through the dusty unpaved streets of Washington Louisiana might have begun to combust right there and the phosphorous would most likely have seared itself into his flesh before he could think and before he could think again he might have tried to brush it off with his other hand and then both hands would be aflame and before he could think a third time he would have plunged his burning hands into the slimy ditch alongside the street and Booooooooooooommmmmmm! And that would be the end of one kind of life and the start of another entirely different one, the life of a man with no hands. And he wonders if he would have ever left that town then. Would he have simply sat on a porch somewhere and drank himself to death. Would he have dictated like Dostoyevsky two novels a day? Where does he go, a man with no hands, a claw-covered kingdom. Wants the touch of woman and knows she’ll never be able to bear his stumps nor his cold steel. Better to be born without a ball sack or have them shot off by the war. White phosphorous. It could have changed it all. The old black fellow is half listening. What would have been my destiny had I too been born of woman but in that heaping town on the hills and not in some faraway metropolis. What then. Who was I if that’s what happened to the white phosphorous and his hands.

No answer. The junkman was an excellent listener. And that’s what Gabe would need if he was going to do the impossible and dare to imagine the unthinkable. The road before him. Darkness at midnight in the central time zone. Gas and a gun and no radio. But a place that will have you is never far from the roadmap. Just keep on driving. Plow forward. There never will be any more looking back.

Why Are You Carrying a Gun?

Maginnis slows and soon joins the traffic on Broadway. They want to know what the fuck Gabe was thinking breaking out a pistol like that. Was it loaded? Well, yeah. What good is an unloaded gun?

Holy shit says Maginnis, we’re going to jail.

Shut up says JJ and get us to my house so we can get out of this crappy car.

They proceed down Freret Street through the campuses of Loyola and Tulane Universities. They spot a cop car but apparently there’s no APB out for three stupid teenagers, one with a loaded gun. The uptown oaks hang over the streets, the movement of law abiding citizens in and out of well-lit bars and sweet mansions nestled on their well tended lawns. It’s a peaceful night in New Orleans if you’re not carting a gun around.

Why are you carrying a gun? says JJ.

Gabe in the backseat wants to just say I don’t know, I thought it would be fun to carry my rod tonight but instead he tells the truth. He says what Althea told him yesterday, how it went down on a Saturday night in Houston Texas. He tells them that she called for him she said Gabe and he tells them that he hears that cry for help all the time now it seems to be an echo from a lost song cruising forever around his sleepless mind. He says he feels disturbed and distressed and he says he thinks he better do something violent or it’s going to cook his soul in his young body and fill him with illness cancers and nephritis and greed. He says he wants to go there and find these guys and off them.

How will you find them? says Maginnis.

Gabe says he figures Althea’s cousin knows these guys and he’ll gladly help execute those fools.

I can’t believe we’re talking like this says Maginnis. It’s like a movie.

Yeah, but it’s not a movie says JJ.

Maginnis turns down Valence Street and a moment later pulls up into JJ’s driveway.

Don’t park this piece of shit in my driveway says JJ.

Fine says Maginnis. I’ll park it on the street and when the cops see it, what’ll you think will happen?

They’ll arrest your stupid ass and Gabe too. I don’t even know you mutherfuckers.

They get out of the car and walk down the side of the house to the kitchen entrance. JJ heads directly for the downstairs bathroom. Maginnis grabs a bottle of brandy from the pantry and he and Gabe retire to the billiards room. They take pulls off the bottle and regard the quiet books.

What are you gonna do says Maginnis.

I think I’m gonna take JD’s car.

The Trans Am?

Yeah.

Is it running?

It started up fine when we took it for a joyride.

That was six months ago.

We’ll see then. If not, oh well.

You know I’d lend you my car if I could.

I know.

They sit for a few minutes taking in their thoughts and feelings but there is no patience in a young man and so Gabe rises after his time is done thinking and he walks up the backstairs to the second floor. The house is quiet. Down the hall he sees the purple flicker through the transom of granny’s TV set. She’s dead to the world. The parents are in Hollywood. Now let’s see if JD is here. Answer, no. The light is on perpetual flame to JD’s ruined ambition but JD himself is gone. He’s somehow managed to attract a hot girl so JD has been crashing at her house and this is good, it’s all the opportunity Gabe needs and he walks in the bedroom and gazes around the landscape of dirty laundry and beer cans and indeed there are the car keys sleeping in an ashtray piled with pennies, treasure from 1,000 pointless wars. The keys that he yanked last spring when he took the Trans Am for a quick peel out in the rain and those keys, one for the ignition and the door, one for the trunk, looped on a silver ring are in the pocket of his jacket and then he turns around and grandma is standing there looking at him.

She peers at him with narrowed eyes and his heart stops and starts and stops again and flight or fight can’t kick in because you can’t fight a 75 year old woman and lord knows you’d never outrun her.

You’re not JD she says.

No ma’am I’m Gabe.

What are you doing in JD’s room?

I was just admiring his football stuff. I play-

Is there a girl in here?

A girl?

That’s right.

No ma’am it’s just me.

Grandma looks around as if Gabe may have a girl hidden under a pile of dirty underwear then she turns and leaves.

Gabe pretends to admire the exploits of JD’s best game ever. A moment later he leaves the bedroom and heads downstairs.

Foot Was a Generous Man

Where to now? says Maginnis.

Fuck I don’t know says JJ.

We could go to the school says Gabe.

How much beer do we have left?

None.

I’m sick of beer says JJ. Let’s get something else.

They stop at a Time Saver on Prytania and the lazy eyed freak sells them a bottle of MD 20/20.

Maddog he says, putting the cold bottle of cheap wine into a brown paper bag. Spelled backwards is goddam. Good luck.

Out into the night and not far from The Fly is Ben Franklin high school, right there at the river bend across from the Camellia Grill. They park around back and easily jump the low fence and saunter across the asphalt basketball courts toting a bag of wine. Gabe carries his overnight bag as well, says he has money in there that he doesn’t want to get stolen. Whatever, they could care less, it’s up the basketball goals and then they clamber up the roof and stand on the gravel and tar top of the Green Hall. The main building towers over them, too high to try for especially with a sack of wine and a belly of beer. The three young men sit on the slate roof of the cafeteria and pass the bottle of wine around. Sweet and cold like wino blood and they all agree it’s awful and they keep drinking. Talking shit. Which teachers are assholes and which ones they’d like to bone. They arrive at a consensus about the principal. She’s early 40’s but still very doable. They talk little about college or any of that mess. It’s too far away. Now is the time to talk about homecoming and the game and who’s going to rent a hotel room and does anyone wanna split the price. Gabe waits until the conversation ebbs and then he tells a story. He always does and it’s one of the reasons they come, to tell stories and to listen to Gabe. He always has a good one about his father and tonight he tells one of the best. He says that his father’s older brother was a big galoot who liked to fight and drink and play cards and chase women, all that wild coonass shit and Foot was his name on account of his big feet. And his father Bennie was never tight with Foot growing up but when Bennie was 18 and Foot was 25 the two started running around a little bit, honkytonking and what not. Foot was a generous man and would buy drinks when he won at bourre which was often and good for that because he hated to lose. One night at the old saloon on Main Street in Washington Louisiana Foot was playing cards and drinking whiskey and getting beaten by the cards and the whiskey too and he lost a lot of money and he didn’t like to lose. He stepped outside, still carrying the rocks glass with ice and whiskey sloshing about. Bennie and a buddy followed Foot. He drank his drink and then spat into the empty lonely street. Foot said the saloon whiskey was shit and Bennie and his buddy agreed, the saloon had shit whiskey. Then Foot said he actually kind of liked it and they said well, they kind of liked it too. Foot said nothing for a minute. He just stared across the street. Slumped in a doorway was an old black man, once the town junkman but fallen now on hard times. He could be seen asleep on the streets most nights. Foot kept his eye on the old man as he walked across the street, Bennie and his buddy following in Foot’s wake. Foot stopped in front of the old black man, hovering. The old man was dead asleep. Foot took a step back and held the rocks glass up to his right ear like he was fixing to pass a football. Then he stepped and hurled the glass straight into the old black man’s face. The sound was a thud and a shatter and the old man’s eyes opened like a steer about to get the mallet and Foot was on him stomping him with those big feet, stomping, stomping, stomping the life out of that ruined old man. The junkman said not a word as Foot’s big feet crushed his throat and he gurgled and died and Foot jumped back like there was a snake at his feet and he said ya’ll grab that old nigger and drag his ass to the bayou. And they did. Bennie and his buddy grabbed the old black man and Bennie used his jacket to wrap the horrible dead man and they hoofed four blocks to the bayou and threw it in with the jacket and without weighing it down and under the eyeless master of god the body just floated away. The end says Gabe.

That’s fucked up says JJ. Killing an old nigger like that.

Don’t use that word says Maginnis.

Gabe used it.

That’s because he’s telling a story. What happened to your dad?

Nothing says Gabe.

And Foot?

Nothing. He still lives down in the swamps somewhere. The Atchafalaya I believe.

Well I’m gonna take a piss says Maginnis.

Just take a piss says JJ. You don’t have to fuckin’ announce it.

I want the world to know I am urinating says Maginnis a bit too loudly, his voice echoing off the stone building. And there he is in full indulgence with his junk out and a steaming sizzle on the rooftop when a beam of light catches him in the face.

Don’t move sir says a voice from below.

Maginnis looks over at JJ and Gabe and says get the fuck out of here. It’s the rent a cop from the Burger King.

Gabe and JJ take off for the basketball goal, Gabe carrying his bag. Regrettably and thank god they are forced to ditch almost half the wine. Maginnis is in the rear putting his privates away as they scramble down the basketball goal. The rent a cop appears across from the fence as Maginnis reaches the ground and he follows them alongside until he catches up to them jumping over the gate. A portly black man in a dark uniform he has a fake badge and handcuffs, an important flashlight and a radio.

Don’t move he says. You guys are under arrest.

For what? says JJ.

Sir, turn around and put your hands behind your back.

What?

Sir, I am placing you under arrest for trespassing.

The rent a cop holds his cuffs in his hands. He has a lot of nice tools on that belt but no gun. He reaches for his radio. He’s calling for backup. Send the real cops. He’s got a big haul. He brings the radio to his lips.

Put it down says Gabe.

The rent a cop looks over and sees Gabe holding a large handgun in his face.

Drop it says Gabe.

He drops it.

Holy shit says Maginnis.

Dude says JJ. What the fuck.

Be quiet ‘Steve’. ‘Harry’, get the car. You he says to the rent a cop. Turn around and lay down on the ground. Do it now. Do it now or I’ll shoot your head off. Sir.

The rent a cop turns around and lies down on the ground.

You’re making a big mistake he says.

If you don’t wanna die mister, I suggest you shut up. Please.

Gabe picks up the radio and throws it far away. Keeping the gun trained on the rent a cop he walks back to Maginnis’ car. He gets in and the car pulls away.

The Fly

The Fly was a wide open space of soccer fields and benches along the river but mostly it was a parking lot where the kids came on weekends. You know what I mean because you went there too because every town of any size has one and even country kids have places where they hang out and try on the masks of adulthood. So grab a six pack of something cheap at the K & B drugstore because they never check ID and throw a few buddies into a big old family size car and head down Magazine Street and turn in at the zoo and take the rise over the railroad tracks, kawhump and watch out for peafowl because they wander the dark landscape uttering horrible cries and then up the levee and there’s the river wide in front of you, asteam with great ocean-bound vessels and quaint little sidewheelers and the yawn of the sky is great and maybe there will be a moon. Follow the road through the fields past The Fly itself (bathrooms and a concession stand) and the loop of the road will take you to a long lot where the kids are parked. And pull in and see who’s there. Thirty different schools or more are represented and they’re mostly rich uptown kids but kids from Franklin get respect because you’re smart and weird and look around for guys from other football teams so you can size up the opposition and trade handshakes. And girls, girls, girls, they’re running wild and they travel in packs and they giggle and 7 out of ten want to be Madonna and the other 3 want to be boys. And they chortle and trumpet and ask you if you have extra beers.

No says Maginnis.

Yes says JJ and hands over a precious Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Why’d you do that? says Maginnis as the girls promptly leave.

I wanna get that slut’s phone number says JJ.

Fine says Maginnis but you don’t have to give her our beer.

She can have my second one says JJ. I hate beer anyway.

Fine says Maginnis, but I could have drank that beer.

You’re an alcoholic says JJ.

Damn right says Maginnis. And proud to be one. Burp. Just like my old man.

You fucking disgust me. Let me out of this car before he farts.

Too late.

Jesus you’re a pig.

JJ gets out and Gabe and Maginnis do too and they walk past the other cars and look at the girls. And remember the music because it’s always important to recall the tunes. We know now that music becomes embedded into the memory and so when we hear the old tunes we involuntarily recall the times that went with them. And so remember the songs whatever they were for you when those were your times. A lot of Van Halen. And there was Ratt going round and round. And the Thompson Twins (an unrelated three-piece) were telling you to hold them now. And Michael Jackson. And Run DMC. And all of it ran together from car to car and person to person and people peeled out in a dust pile and couples walked hand in hand in the glare of the headlamps and someone said oh my god and it meant nothing more serious than a broken nail. And you moved through that landscape with the sun completely gone from your day and your life descended into darkness, chaos, perverted visions, unclear thoughts loud noises invaded all the corners of the mind and people came and went at random nothing was clear, no finite destination in mind and always one could be sure of one thing and one thing only, that your friends were your friends to the end and nothing you’d do or say would drive them away. So walk the sidewalk past packed parked cars of cute girls and be a cute guy with your cute friends and your jiveass wish-you-were-black ways. Be that kind of boy under the glowing and semi-shuttered streetlamps up there at The Fly. Each lamp a cagy praying mantis overlooking her prey and walk past the family cars where teenagers have had too much to drink and someone is yakking in the weeds and those kids over there have pot, you can smell it and tell by the music they’re bumping, they’re burning down the house. And girls in their boyfriend’s letter jackets and you are aware that your girl has your letter jacket and she’s at home now while you’re out cruising for new ass. Just like the night she needed you. Out messing around because it’s in your blood to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and almost never the opposite and here you are again under a sliver of the moon, a lil’ high on Pabst and walking around with your buddies, so sure you’ll never let them down, and all the time you are as untrue to yourself as you will ever be in your life. They know nothing of who you really are.

Stink Finger Is Better Than No Finger at All

JJ is sprawled on his bed watching TV. Gabe and Maginnis walk in.

Just let yourself in fuckers says JJ, slapping dap with Gabe.

We will, says Maginnis. You know the kitchen door is always open.

Just let my father catch you walking in without knocking. He’ll shoot your dumbass.

Are your parents back?

No they’re still in LA.

So how’s he gonna shoot me then?

I’ll shoot you myself.

Sure you will says Maginnis. Who’s playing?

Auburn and Florida State.

Who’s winning?

I don’t know I just turned it on.

There’s a knock on the door. JJ’s older brother JD walks in.

You watching the Florida State game?

No says JJ.

Yeah we are says Maginnis.

Cool. I’m gonna grab a beer. You dudes want one?

Sure says Maginnis.

No says JJ.

Fine fuck you then.

JD leaves.

Why did you tell him we were watching the game Maginnis? I don’t want that fat fuck in here farting in my room.

Jesus dude don’t be such an asshole. He’s your brother for Christ’s sake.

He’s a fat fuck and an asshole.

JD can be heard taking a horse piss in the bathroom down the hall and then he returns carrying an open 12 pack of beer. He passes one to Gabe and one to Maginnis and then plops himself down at the end of JJ’s bed.

Move over fucker says JJ. You’re blocking my view.

Fuck you. You move your lounging ass.

JJ administers a kick to JD’s back. Without turning around JD reaches back and punches his brother’s leg. They exchange a few more blows that way and then JJ moves.

Where’s the remote? says JD. Turn up the sound. I wanna hear what the fuck’s going on. Who’s winning?

We don’t know says Maginnis. We just turned it on.

What are you dudes doing tonight? Gonna get some stink finger?

Maybe.

Stink finger is better than no finger at all.

JD burps, crushes his beer can and drops it on the floor. JJ tells him to pick that shit up and JD burps again and picks up the can and tosses in through the open window. The can falls two stories and lands with a plunk on the car parked in the driveway. That’s JD’s Trans Am down there, beached for over a year now due to JD’s multiple moving violations and DUI’s. JD pops another beer and asks if anyone else needs one. Nope, nobody can keep up with JD. He wiped out 1/3 of the keg at last night’s party before the party even started. He’s four years older than JJ but he looks like he’s middle-aged. The sorry hangdog eyes, the thick and gone to fat athlete’s body, the greasy unwashed hair, the general air of slovenliness and depravity. He was once the king of Franklin football, such as it was. A visit to his bedroom reveals a shrine to the good old days, the stolen white helmet, the framed stolen green jersey #69, the dry rotted cleats, the yellowed and framed newspaper article from the times-picayune dated October 10, 1979, Franklin 21 Shaw 20. And if you peered through the dusty glass and your eyes were sharp enough to read the fine print you’d see JD’s name in a sentence in which he was credited with the game-saving fumble recovery. It was right there in print, the glory that was. And his little brother couldn’t say that. Hell no the little fucker’s name had not once appeared in the paper in the three years he’d been playing and not once this year either and probably wouldn’t be, they sucked these guys did and it was good that they sucked, now his little brother would know what it felt like to play for a suck-ass team.

Y’all won last night says JD.

Yep says Maginnis.

Who’d y’all play?

St. Bernard.

That’s a district team. Coach has ya’ll playing district now?

Just that one says Maginnis. We play them because they suck.

They didn’t suck last night says JJ. They played their asses off. We got lucky.

That wasn’t luck says Maginnis. That was skill.

What skill? I tackled the quarterback and he pitched it right to you. You’re lucky your slow ass didn’t get caught from behind. Bitch. That should be my touchdown. You took my touchdown.

How’d I take your touchdown? Were you gonna tackle the man and catch the ball out of the air and then run 100 yards?

Maybe. And it was only 95 yards you lying fuck. Okay everybody shut the fuck up. The second half is fixing to start.

It’s the high speed passing attack of the Florida State Seminoles versus the juggernaught ground attack of the Auburn Tigers. It’s fast guys versus faster guys and every five minutes JD says look at that nigger run. It’s a game of highlight reel plays, breakaway touchdown runs and long bombs. Easy kicks are missed and impossible kicks are made. The hits are ferocious and the crowd is a furious being, a schizophrenic monster consuming itself, 80% Florida State and 20% Auburn and they hate each other and the fans from either team may indeed battle in the stands and it might resemble Xenophon’s Greeks cutting their way to the sea if the Tigers win. Though it seems the home team has the game in hand and at one point is leading by two scores. Then the tide is turned and Auburn is on top. But not for long. They too surrender the lead and Florida State has the chance to put the game away. It all comes down to a crucial 2 point conversion. The Seminoles have thrown the ball at will on the Tigers’ secondary. However with the game on the line the coaches call a running play and the back is tackled shy of the goal line. The stop is magnificent and gives Auburn one more chance. Meanwhile JD is pissed. He’s got money on the Seminoles.

That son of a bitch he says as the TV flashes the stern face of the Seminole coach. Bastards. Bastards one and all. They don’t wanna win. They just don’t wanna lose. Fuckers.

JD finishes his 8^th beer in an hour and tosses the can out the window. It falls and clangs off the car, a once fine street machine that like its owner has fallen on hard times. Gabe has often eyed with covet in his mind that low-slung beast with the menacing (if somewhat dented) grill, the aluminum rims in need of a bath, the t-tops still locked in tight. I wonder, thinks Gabe Doucette. I wonder. I wonder where if JD still keeps the car keys in the ashtray full of pennies in his bedroom. I wonder, I wonder, I wonder.

Kickoff to Auburn three yards deep in the end zone and the return man takes the ball out anyway and gets to the nothing much and is thrown backwards and there’s a penalty on the Tigers and they’re starting their last drive of the game on their own one yard line. They’re in run formation and everyone knows they’re going to run and the quarterback is standing in his own end zone and his three backs are behind him and he calls for the ball and hands off to a back and then gets out of the way. A linebacker slices through and hits the ball carrier in the end zone but he cannot bring him down and the back keeps running and gets seven yards. And this is how the music will be played and this is the dance that will be danced for Auburn will if nothing else do what they do best when they are in the worst place to be behind on the road with a touchdown necessary to win and they execute the way they’ve done since day one and they run and run and run and run, six yards here and 26 yards there and an inch to get the next set of downs and there they are on the Seminole two yard line with less time on the clock than it would take to read this aloud and on the play that they must make to win they execute and an Auburn Tiger carries the ball over the goal line for the game-winning touchdown and the crowd goes mute save for the small knot of blue-clad Auburn fans clustered in one end zone and JD stands up and says mutherfucker and throws his newly opened beer can at the window and Smash a hole appears shaped more or less like a beer can.

JJ is off the bed and cursing and JD says sorry bro and JJ turns and with fists raised walks his brother out of his room and then he leaves to get a broom. Maginnis trails behind laughing and Gabe also exits and walks down the hall past JD’s room, a quick glimpse of the bed crushed in the center and fouled with body grease and the shrine to Franklin football and the old dusty turntable and an ashtray on the bedside table containing a million pennies and was that a set of car keys on a ring? Maybe but Gabe keeps moving as he hears JD emerging from the bathroom. He continues down the hall and takes a set of stairs down to the billiards room. Empty, just a golden light burning in the globe above the smooth green felt table. One wall is lined with books, many, many leather volumes, mostly law and history and literature including the collected works of the Marquis de Sade. Gabe steps over and takes a volume from the shelf. He opens it at random but it’s in French. No dirty pictures either, just the smell of daily dust and forgotten sins. He replaces the volume and then looks down at the floor. Last night I lay with my lover down there. And we made love. And it was good. And then it wasn’t good anymore and she told me to stop. Why. Because she thought I was someone else. Or that someone else had been there and I had driven them away. That I had saved her. And I didn’t. I didn’t save her. I became one of them instead and perhaps I always will be one of them, a sinister night shape, a hard-handed villain with one thing only on his mind and we’ll forever be afraid of what we might become with too many cocktails and too many memories and the certain knowledge of how to hurt her like no man ever could. I could do that. So which will it be the impossible or the likely? What could never be undone or what will most surely be undone? Your choice.

Maginnis appears in the doorway.

You ready to leave?

Yep.

Make Me Feel Like a Man Again

The Mayfair is a small dark bar with a smaller back room, a curving bar with the usual booze and beer. What distinguish the place are the bedsprings nailed to the ceiling and decorated seasonally. For October it’s Halloween of course along with the usual cornucopia of black and gold Saints decorations. The young men enter the cool shadows, all eyes turning from the bar briefly and then back to their conversations or interest in the TV on mute. Mack waves them over. Mr. Mack sits at the far end of the bar in the alcove near the payphone. He’s still strong and will help the girls change out a keg, the cigarette never leaving his face. His hair is silver and thick, his eyeglasses perched on that handsome Irish mug, a tall man with unusually large finger tips, each like a marble under the skin. Came from having encephalitis when he was 18 and the drugs they gave him did that. Killed his baseball career deader than a tombstone. He was a heavily recruited badass pitcher out of Jesuit high school. After 9 months in bed he was nothing but a has-been. Everything after that was downhill. Two marriages and a passel of kids and he’d trade everything to be 17 again and pitching baseball for the Blue Jays. That’s why he loves his boys and the way they play football. They get after it and they’re smart too, going to a good school and getting good grades. He likes his boys and especially the oldest. He’s hard on the kid and knows it but goddamn he has to be. He has to be. Who else is going to teach him how hard this world is? They’ll take every one of your dreams and fuck them up right in front of you. Fill you with poison to kill other poison and you never threw a baseball right again. Couldn’t, and the only thing you were ever good at was throwing a baseball hard and true again and again and getting strikes was like taking a breath and then they took that away, left you with nothing, no good at reading, writing, arithmetic, nothing at all. So yes he’s hard on the oldest son but not nearly as hard as his own father was on him. That S.O.B. Yes sir that was a mean one and he had to earn his respect from that hard bastard and earning it was finally one day they had to fight, real punches, not pulling any back and he was 16 and his father was twenty-five years older than him and a veteran of a hundred and a half brawls and he began beating his son about the face, smacking him and driving him back, throwing short hard jabs and forgetting that the boy had a long reach and the son stepped to his right and popped his father in the jaw and then stepped to his right again and swung low and hard and hit the older man in the left kidney and dropped him. That was on a Christmas Eve no less. The next morning his mother came to his room and said your father’s been pissing blood all night but he wants you to know he’s proud of you.

What you boys having says Mack. Beer?

Sure. Beer sounds great.

Brenda the bartender all six foot whatever of her with hair like Texas and tight jeans and a belt buckle like Texas too and she doesn’t even begin to ask for ID, just starts filling up a pitcher of beer. She passes it over and glasses are filled and a toast is made and Mack tells his son and his son’s friend Gabe that he’s proud of them, that was a helluva game. He slips his son a check without either of them saying a word about the amount or the lack of any amount or anything at all. It’s not the son’s place to do anything not even protest this misuse of himself as a dog’s body to convey the rancor and the humiliation from parent to parent and person to person who once stood before god and countrymen and swore to live as husband and wife until death do they part and they’re not dead, they’re alive more or less and all they’ve got to show now is an emissary of their crime.

But the beer is good and cold and it’s good to bring father and son together and talk about the big play and the big game and what the rest of the season might bring. There’s a fine juke box with enough good music to get you through several dozen pitchers of beer and so brown eyed girl, make me feel like a man again, make me feel like a man. Let me buy the young ones illegal beer and let me be the young ones too holding the cue sticks and sharpening the tips with little worn cubes of blue chalk and dusting their hands and I dust mine too and who shall break, why I shall break and crack go the balls and nothing falls and I am the beautiful ivory balls themselves dropping into green holes and I am the cue stick stroking and applying equal and unequal forces. I am each sole citizen lost in the sea of their own madrigals. I am the brown eyed girl herself appealed to across space and time. I am the pay phone that never rings and never gets used and I am the empty and quiet back room. I am all the tips in the jar and jack Daniels in his glass house and the cold bottle of jagermeister in the ancient icebox. And you are there with me hanging with the decorations from the ceiling and there are Halloween spooky cats and mummified faces and Count Dracula the wolf-man and the Saints and the two themes are inseparable, a hounding of the dead from their unholy resting places, a communion with the martyred examples of faith and it’s all scattered across the bar, that feeling of impossibility and that hope for a happy inevitability, it is what keeps a father close at hand, loving his sons in his own stunted and taciturn way for he is no angel, this father, nor are any that have ever lived and he may be you or me someday but he is there at his usual spot under the TV at the end of the bar and god help him but he does love his sons.

Miss Mack

Miss Mack gives them a cherubic smile out of that toothy face, wizened since she was 16 like a gnome, merry and blonde and portly and alive. Her kids move in and out of the house, off the porch, in the living room, upstairs singing to the Eurthymics. Who’s that girl one of them sings and she sounds lovely, echoing her melody in the gloaming. The sun has dropped low enough to be only a legend and the sky is purple pale and dying blue. Darkness soon shall rule. Miss Mack offers the boys a beer and gives Gabe a smooch. Maginnis says he’ll wait and heads upstairs to shower. Gabe goes to the kitchen and opens the refrigerator door. It groans on weathered hinges and inside all is a wonder of quasi vegetable, quasi animal, quasi mineral life. Condiments from before the war. Tupperware cracked and oozing fluid. Things wrapped in aluminum foil, wings and feet protruding. Amidst the madness, four beers and he snags two and closes the door and exhales. The house is chaos with many kids and various adoptees that drop in from time to time including the great Miguel Champ himself gone to the Navy and learning how to blow up the Russians. There are others and there are two dogs and two cats and kids tear up and down the stairs of the two story apartment with clothes strewn everywhere and broken furniture and busted machines and too much love for any heart to hold. That’s her, Miss Mack and she sits on the porch, mother to the whole depleted world.

What’s up kiddo?

Not much. That’s about all he can say. He’s waiting for the opportunity to arise, whatever it will be. He’s considered asking Maginnis to borrow the Montero but frankly it’ll never make it and anyway Maginnis would have to say no. It’s the only legal car they own. Gabe peers through the chatter of kids and animals and birds and the falling light at Miss Mack’s old telephone van parked across the street. Might make it. Might not. Can’t drive faster than 55. The front end is shot. No plates, no brake tags, practically no brakes. Nope. So even though the Maginnis Clan would (out of love only) help him perform practically any deed they can’t get him to Texas. A bus. Take a greyhound bus. And then do what? Walk around town looking for the bad guys? No. Out of luck. Shit out of luck.

Congratulations says Miss Mack. That was a great game last night.

Thanks.

How’s Althea?

She’s great. She’s with her family tonight.

Which is a lie. She’s grounded for coming home late last night. Her stepfather will be lurking around. If there was ever a person who should be killed it is he but that chance has passed.

How are you?

Say great. Maybe you’ll mean it. Maybe you’ll be great again. Or spill the beans. That might work too. She’s got a heart as big as Texas. She’d listen to the whole skein of actions, from Miguel Champ to the bunk beds to a summer in Houston to a Saturday night just like this one a few months ago. And she wouldn’t ask why he never wrote her or visited her. She wouldn’t blame him for everything he couldn’t have done. She would hold his head against her Irish bosom all fresh with soap and sweat too and she’d smell just like a mama should and she’d cry if you cried and laugh when you laughed and she’d say those sons of bitches, those sons of bitches and then she’d lay a hand on your cheek and tell you that you were okay, that you were a good egg. She would do that and then it could be done. It would take the courage of a higher order, courage of the first water to tell your sad story to some caring empathetic soul, a mother, somebody’s mother if your stepmother was somewhere in the darkness and the other one the birth mother lost on a planet of toxification, then find somebody else’s mama and let her love you and say it was okay, have the courage to tell her your troubles and so by her listening and you speaking you would free yourself of the need to do anything more than just live your life. Put the gun out of harm’s way. Go to work at 5 a.m. and watch the Saints beat or get beaten and then go home, put the gun back in the drawer and lie down and sleep for 999 years.

Nope. Can’t do it. Cannot do that.

Maginnis emerges from the house, head wet but hair combed, pulling on a shirt that matches nothing and takes Gabe’s beer from his hand and takes a sip and hands it back and says ready to take a walk to the Mayfair?

Yep says Gabe.

He gets up, kisses Miss Mack, thanks her for the beer and walks off the porch and perhaps out of her life. And if so, goodbye.

Sun of Yesteryear

Turn the Montero around and ramble down Pressburg Street to Bullard Road where the only choices are north or south, left or right and go left and take the long and newly shellacked road past all that was and all that is coming. A new middle school going up and it will fill someday with students and thrive and then empty in a panic, the entire city gone via the waves or the missiles or both or neither, something new and worse and the landscape will truly be a landscape of zeroes and nothing will live out here anymore except wild animals and runaway cats. Ride past it all, as familiar in its potential as it will someday be in its future. Just an eve of destruction, nothing more or less. And ride with your best buddy past all that future happiness and misery and on the floor of the car is your bag with extra clothes and a gun and you could tell him now, tell your best buddy what went down in Houston last summer, you could do that but you won’t. Because you can’t do that to another person, contaminate their mind like that. This is for you and you alone so keep your mouth shut and ride, ride sweet baby Gabe up onto the Interstate and face first into the falling afternoon sun, the 5 o’clock sun of yesteryear. Ride that fat gas-guzzling machine because gas is cheap just a 1.25 a gallon or less and open the windows and just relax into the air of a Saturday night. And let the bad times roll off you, allow yourself to feel free one more day and one more hour in that day and as the landscape of the city with its apartment complexes and malls and crappy houses recedes let it drift, your mind, let it drift into happier places and dreams. And as the machine takes you and your friend up the high-rise bridge let yourself believe that you can truly ride the sky itself into infinity of possibility and nothing will ever be greater than the way you feel right now, completely alive, not waiting nor wanting, this is the only place you’ll ever know or want to be again. And be here. Up with other cars over the great arch. The lights of the city spread in a carpet of gold. The sun warming the planet just so. Roasting coffee in the air and smog and sunshine and the exhaust off the city and its machines. And then down the bridge and riding the viaduct across the land and all the people in their houses underneath you and all of them doing their thing, listening to the radio, talking on the phone, out in the yard, out on the stoop, laying up in the bed with one another, hands reaching for wanted and unwanted fellows of the night. And it’s coming down upon them, another Saturday night in New Orleans. It’ll be on you so soon you won’t know how you arrived into the daze of the evening. You got in the car. You went for a ride. And now you ask yourself how did I get here? Maginnis will take you across the city and into the corridors of downtown. The hotels in their flaring glares offer no security of the mind. The great Dome where you will not be tomorrow looms. Hospitals and cathedrals and the city a breathing sweating beast. There’s no hope or room for it anywhere and so no, you cannot do anything else except ride and when the ride is over you will have done well and done the thing that must be done well too.

There is Nothing as Accurate as Silence

The clothes in the drawer are folded and stacked just so. Rolled bunches of socks. White underwear. White v-neck t-shirts. And sleeping in its case, his 17^th birthday present, one Smith and Wesson six inch blue steel with walnut grips .357 Magnum Model 586. Unloaded per his father’s wishes but snoozing alongside is one speed-loader of hand loads. The gun, wrapped in yellow oilcloth says nothing. What is there to say? Now’s the time the time is now. When will there ever be a better day than today, or tonight or yes tomorrow morning. How will you get there? How will you get from New Orleans to Houston and back in one day and one night? I don’t know. But I hear it. I hear her say Gabe, I hear it now every hour and almost every minute of every hour already and it’s been less than a day since she told me and if I have to live the rest of my life with that sound in my ears, her voice, her keening and prayerful utterance then I don’t know what will happen to me or what kind of life I’ll lead but I fear it. And so it must be done now, tonight or tomorrow and I don’t know how I’ll do it or get there but I will. He puts in his bag along with the work jeans and Ogden Foods t-shirt and extra socks and drawers and his work tennis shoes a speed-loader and the gun, one with stopping power, you’d only have to shoot a man once with that. For sure. He zips up the bag and checks to see if you can tell there’s a gun in there. Maybe. He takes it out, goes to the bathroom, grabs a towel, comes back and wraps the gun. In the bag and done. Not quite. He opens a drawer in his desk and pulls out her letter. It’s a fat envelope with a dozen pages of her lovely handwriting. How beautiful to see one’s name written by someone they love. It makes you whole. Your name under their pen or your name in their mouth and you become something more than you were without that. Both inside and outside yourself you are spying, espionage of the developing soul. Gabe puts the envelope to his nose. A perfume so evocative it will be turning his head in strange places twenty five years from now. On the front is the superscription for her aunt’s house in Houston. Gabe writes it down, then puts the letter away, grabs his bag and looks around one last time at the bedroom of his youth. He’s plowing new fields. This ground where he grew from 12 to 17 is ready for a fallow season and he knows it. There is nothing as accurate as silence and no value greater realized than with absence. Go young man. Turn around and walk out of the boyhood and into the manhood of the rest of your days. Gabe turns off the light and starts to close the door but changes his mind. Leaving it open will comfort his father while he’s away and it is also a comfort to himself.

This Is Me

I’ll be ready in fifteen minutes says Gabe.

Cool says Maginnis.

Be gone in 15 or else they’ll be here for hours. His father will get them hammered and they’ll all end up out in the woods shooting books. Get out before his poor father gets too used to having people around to talk to, people who haven’t heard all his stories. Not that Gabe is tired of them. He’s been hearing them since he was a child, and each time their memory becomes more and more his own memory so that the stories of the parent become the stories of the child and the child imagines themselves taking part in the action, they themselves are climbing out the window of a moving automobile, they themselves tote a chunk of white phosphorous to the bayou, they themselves carry off the copper pipes looted from the school. And Gabe who loves his father finds that the stories are comforting as a signature of a past that is already gone forever and escaping with every nanosecond. And now Gabe has his own stories and they are awful. She said one word, your name. She said Gabe and then they punched her to the floor. They hurt me she said. They hurt me bad. They even hurt my hiney. And Gabe can take a hot shower and shave his teenaged face and he still won’t be exfoliated of that new skin that is growing, growing, growing all the time, the skin of stories, things that have happened to us and things that we have done. It is all we are and all we ever were and all we will ever be and one day we know it and perhaps this is that day. Gabe stares at himself in the wet mirror wrapped only in a towel and says this is me, this is who I am. This face, these eyes, these are my eyes, this is me. Not some person in my imagination, not some confabulation of my boyhood father and me, I is I and me is me and this is us right here in this bathroom staring at myself.

Shortest Beer Run Ever

Maginnis puts on a shirt though he’d rather not. Besides the bruises and cuts from last night’s game he’s got handsome sunburn. Dutiful grandchild that he is Maginnis the Honest has been in Bay St. Louis most of the day cutting grammas’ grass, pulling weeds, cleaning out the gutters. For his efforts she gave him gas money home and two beers. Those are long gone and he walks up to the front door hoping that he doesn’t stink too much. He rings the doorbell and no one answers and he rings it again. Knowing the good doctor like he does, Maginnis proceeds around the side of the house. Knowing the good doctor like he does he lets his voice precede him ere he get blasted. He comes to the patio and stops. Dr. Doucette is on the patio facing the woods. He’s got his joint out and is watering the lawn with a fulsome piss.

Who’s there says Dr. Doucette.

Sorry to disturb you sir. It’s Maginnis. Didn’t mean to interrupt you doing your business.

Maginnis how are you. Hold on a moment, let me just finish here. Ah good. That’s much better. Normally I would walk to the edge of the woods and piss but I’m getting old. You know you think you’ll always be strong enough to piss out of your yard. Then one day you can’t. Or you don’t. What brings you here? Gabe is out. He and his brother went for a bike ride.

I’m here to pick him up.

That’s right, he told me this earlier. He said you were all going out tonight.

Yeah we sort of have this ritual, I don’t know if you’d call it that, but a few of us guys who hung out all summer, if we win we get together at school and climb up on the roof.

I did that with my friends when I was in high school.

I think that’s why we started doing it. Gabe tells us stories.

He does huh. Well, most of it was harmless. But you all need to be careful. In my day the police paid almost no attention to our antics, such as they were. It’s not like that anymore. They’ll lock you up if they catch you up there now.

Yessir. We’ll be careful.

Good. Now I’ve done my fatherly deed, even if I’m not your father. Say, let me ask you something. I can’t drive. Goddamn DUI. Don’t ever get one of those by the way. That’s your second and final piece of advice. Anyway, as I was saying I can’t drive myself anywhere. Would you be willing to take me to the store so I can buy some beer?

Sure Doctor Doucette. It’d be my pleasure. May I use your restroom first?

Be my guest. Use the restroom or piss off the patio. It’s all the same to me.

I think I’ll use the bathroom.

It’s down the hall.

Maginnis uses the facilities and then they proceed out to the car. They climb in and Maginnis fires it up like an elephant’s roar through a wind tunnel. Vroom and they’re slowly moving down the street. Dr. Doucette explains that he’d prefer to not go to the closest store, it being the scene of his recent display of Walter Bates’ philosophy that you get more with I’m always polite and a gun than just I’m always polite. Maginnis listens to Gabe’s father reiterate the deeds of a few hours earlier when he gave that kid in the muscle car what for. No surprises there. From what Maginnis has seen and heard about Gabe’s father anything is possible. He’s a garrulous fellow with a good sense of humor, self-effacing, everything that Maginnis’ father isn’t. They tool down the tar-coiled streets under mimosa and magnolia and weeping willow Maginnis pictures his own father and the inevitable rendezvous tonight at the Mayfair. His old man will give him a check and as always it will be for too little and he’ll walk it three blocks over to his mother on Constantinople Street and she’ll see how much it is and depending on what bills she has the bastard that she’ll call him will either be a real bastard or just a plain old bastard. And that’s later but he’ll have Gabe with him and his old man will buy them beers and it’ll be okay for 30 minutes. And his father will say good game. So fucking what.

Doctor Doucette guides them down Chef Menteur Highway to the We Never Close at the corner of Read Road. Maginnis parks and Gabe’s father goes inside for beer. He emerges with a 12 pack and away they go. Shortest, fastest beer-run ever. The doctor pops one and drinks it quickly hiding it from imaginary and impossible cops. Maginnis declines while he’s driving and this impresses the good doctor for its sensibleness.

Stay away from women says Dr. Doucette. They’re trouble. Though I’m sure it’s too late for you. You’re a good looking fellow. I’m sure you have plenty of dates. It’s probably too late for you and Gabe. He’s all wrapped up in that girlfriend of his. Says she gives him headaches. I know what he means. That’s what women is though just a big headache. You know what I mean?

Yessir. I have four sisters.

Maginnis jumps off Chef Highway and back into Sherwood Forest. A calm older suburb, at ease with its population and its children in their religious and private schools. House after house of secrets. Everybody’s got one and this is mine.

You know something says Dr. Doucette. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It’s probably embarrassing. But I’ll tell you anyway because one I think it won’t bother you and two it might do you some good. The worst mistake I ever made was fooling around on my wife. Less than a week after we got married. An Indian girl. God, you know I don’t even recall her name. Riva maybe. Anyway it doesn’t matter. And I don’t really know why I did it. I’m not a carnal person, not really. And I had wanted to get married. But I did it. And I felt so fucking guilty that I immediately went home and told Agnes. Of course she was hurt. She was very, very hurt by that. I wonder sometimes if maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. I don’t know. We were trying so hard to be good honest people back then. Tell the truth. The truth will set you free. Fuck all that. Sometimes a lie is the best thing in the world. Sometimes a lie is more freeing than any truth could ever be. And not even a lie. Just say nothing. There’s a quote I like, I forget who said it not that it matters. ‘Silence is so accurate.’ I like that.

And down Friar Tuck, Robin Hood and King John until they reach the Doucette home again, the quickest beer-run ever but not so fast that a man couldn’t give you the entire story of his life.

Flamingo

A gun is something to look at and touch and handle and it fills the inside of a body up with the satisfaction of a well-lived life to know that you own it. With a gun the fact that it can kill or maim is of secondary or even tertiary importance for Dr. Doucette. He is a paranoid man however and it is fine to know that should any galoot come ramping up his driveway he can deal with it the way it was meant to be dealt with. Like with that kid in the car today. Not with fists, with a well-tooled gun that does all the talking for you. Not that Dr. Doucette has ever been much at a loss for words. He sits at his workbench in the garage next to a wall of bookcases containing all that he has or will never or ever read. The books that once were a central feature of all his apartments have now been stashed alongside the folding ping-pong table and the worn and busted Big Wheel. The times they are a changing. He sips at his beer, the last of two from yesterday’s 12 pack and he must husband them until his children return and then he’ll send the Ugnaught out for more beer and he’ll give the boy money so he can get himself one as well, for later. Because he knows the boy drinks. All boys drink when they’re 17. He sure did. Hitching a ride to the honkytonks when he was in high school. Smoking and drinking and listening to music and walking the rails home again if they couldn’t find a ride. He and a lot of men who are dead now or so forgotten in time they may as well have never been anything more than a fictive evidence of a fictive place, a Yoknapatawpa of the mind. The good doctor hefts his Colt Python chrome-plated 6 inch .357 Magnum. God, what a good-looking gun. Like a piece of art really. Something a dada artist might dream up, art that kills. Fill the shells with ash and shoot black dust at the world. He sips his beer, touches the table top. This old thing, a handmade butcher block table given as a wedding gift. Made especially for Agnes and him. Once the centerpiece of their kitchen, the nicest thing they owned. And now its once smooth polished surface mnemonic of Sweden that good blonde wood and those hard edges that had cracked many a hip bone in his drunkenness and one slightly short leg so it required a matchbook underneath at all times and its complete representation of what all he represented in Minnesota in 1972 modern and clean and hip and handmade and imperfect and painful and all with the best intentions and now here it was at the other end of the Mississippi River down in the land of cotton back to the south where the winter was no burden though the summers were hell and what family he cared about his sister lived only two hours away in his old hometown and boy was the table fucked up now. Holes drilled in it for his compound press and hot lead had spilled and scorched it and now it was just a work bench where a wet can of beer could go anywhere. The edges were still sharp sons of bitches and he’d walked into one as recently as yesterday. Dr. Doucette lifts his shirt and examines at the waistline where the table got his hip. Black and blue and yellow. Well, I had been drinking. Be careful. Thus was Oedipus. What? Never mind. Dr. Doucette smokes a cigarette. A gun within reach, a beer too. Let neither fail me in my hour of need. Two good sons riding around on one bike somewhere. It’s good they get along. He barely knew his older brother Foot when he was a kid. Later they spent time together and he got to know him well, too well. None of that right now.

He lets his gaze fall upon his books. Next to his well-worn copy of the collected works of William Butler Yeats is a Moroccan bound volume of the same. Gilded spine and gilded cover and gilded edges of each page. Good paper with a watermark. A ribbon of silken fibers shat out of a worm’s ass to mark one’s place in the book. The inscription. To Ben from Agnes. Merry Xmas! That’s it. All the passion of a glass of water. Nothing about any of the poems in particular, how they may have affected her, which if any moved her. He must have read Yeats to her a hundred times before they were married. No, less than that but still. Once she looked at me with reverence. What happened? No matter. The book is lovely and of course something he will never use. Why would he? He has his old reliable with each page dog-eared and certain phrases underlined in felt tip or pencil and he wouldn’t use that chunk of decorative for anything other than a doorstop. People have books like that, rows of them, the complete works of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Lord Byron and they’ve never opened them up much less read them. There’s something about people like that that he doesn’t like, a false pretense as if they lied about their personal finances or their cock size. Vulgar. He’s become a vulgar old man. He looks at the book his wife gave him. Was it already four years ago? A damnation. It must be destroyed. And so Dr. Doucette decides to shoot it.

He takes the gun and the book and the last beer and he walks out the sliding glass door and into the yard and none can impugn him for what he is about to do, it is his house and his yard and his gun and yes it is illegal to discharge a firearm in Orleans Parish so what they can fuck themselves and besides he and his wife know a cop. And what he must look like with a weapon and a book and a beer walking through his backyard past the tomato plants and the merliton that grows but makes no merlitons and the Wandering Jew that has gone insane and taken over. He must look like a man on the frontier who must shit where there be monsters and so goes nowhere especially to the outdoor squat without a handgun. He proceeds into the woods. Shafts of afternoon sun. Cooler and brown in the shadows. He walks until he can no longer hear lawnmowers and the screams of children. He finds a stout tree and lays the book at its base. He steps back ten paces deliberately. He turns, glances around again to makes sure no one is around, no, no one here at all except him and his secret. He aims the colt at the book and pulls the trigger. Boom and Mr. Yeats jumps into the air, landing with a plop in the leaves. Dr. Doucette takes a sip of his beer. A flash of pink suddenly alights off to his left. A flamingo, windblown and orphaned, maybe even zoo escaped, flaps through the trees and out of sight. A flamingo. A pink fucking flamingo. Son of a bitch. Dr. Doucette gulps his beer and then crushes the can. Fuck it, he tosses it under a bush, then walks over and retrieves his book. What to do with it, a bullet punched through the heart? Put it back on the shelf? Throw it away? Hell, he might even read it now, the ruptured poems cleaved through and through. What the hell. What a life.

The Devil-Worshippers

Soon it will be the southern winter and the wiping out of the leaves and the grass and all will be still and dead except for the evergreen oaks. But before that you have the beauty of October and the trees are mixed greens and browns and flaming reds, oranges, yellows and it’s good to ride with your 10 year old brother through the neighborhood that you watched sprout out of the earth in a year and a half. Before that it was a wall of trees and you lived one street over. Then the bulldozers came and down came the trees and you moved to the house you live in now, the dream home built very specifically according to Agnes’ wishes by the company she half-owned and everything was perfect, the cathedral ceiling, the built-in bookcase, the dark brown carpet, the fancy linoleum in the foyer, the kitchen, the garage, the hall, the champagne carpet in the living room where no one lived. Within two years the floors were coming up one by one. First the foyer, then the hall, the kitchen, the den. Real Italian tile going in and Gabe and his father on their hands and knees laying grout, his poor stepmother a manic beast, piloting a huge sander that could carry you off. Each project bigger and the furniture changed and endlessly rearranged and the books came off the built-in bookshelves and into the garage and now the house was unrecognizable from the inside. And Gabe knows it will always be so, that he’s not long for that house and his stepmother’s ways and soon the father will be left alone to push the RCA across the den and rip down the paneling and dig a hole for a new hot tub. Or maybe no. Maybe they’ll all learn when he leaves how arduous it all was, the endless manias, the tearing down and starting anew, the basic lack of any day to day satisfaction. And Gabe will wish them well when he leaves, out of the house and the neighborhood and down Bullard Boulevard and then onto the Interstate 10 and all the way across America he’ll go, even great Texas with its two day ride will pass underneath his wheels and one day he’ll be at the end of the country and staring at where the 10 ends and Santa Monica under his feet and he too will understand and forgive because he’ll know at last that everybody is just the same, crazy, fucked up, full of unfulfilled promises and unmet and unanswerable dreams, everyone is top to bottom with compromises and he’ll let them all off the hook for their mania and depression and alcoholism and abandonments and he’ll be the better man for it. But today he’s just a kid on a bike with another kid and he tells the child about what their father did at the convenience store.

Do you think he would have shot him?

No telling what his father might do if he got truly angry. It happens so rarely. He holds his temper like he holds his booze which is to say very well most of the time. Still there’s always that moment when he might just slip and throw it all into the wind and then bang, bang. And Gabe wonders about himself and his own willpower, but in reverse. Will he be able to do it when it needs to be done? He’s sure only to the point of imagining it. But the feeling of being unprepared for the great devilish act of homicide is one that can only be erased by the act itself.

His brother asks if they can go look for the devil worshippers’ clubhouse. This legendary place has never been seen though kids in the neighborhood claim to have been there and seen the rope where that kid hanged himself. What kid? You know, the kid that no one knows his name but he went back in the woods and worshipped the devil and then hanged himself. Oh, that kid.

The two brothers on one bike ride down Bullard with cars whipping past one or two at a time and off to the left is one of those crazy manmade lakes, dug for the earth their hole produces and thus the land around them is high enough for the house to be insured and so a house and many houses are built around this lake which fills up in a year or less with rainwater. And they are deep and dangerous, cold and pitiless and lifeless and black and Gabe knows because he once tried to swim across one and got less than halfway across and knew it was his last day on earth if he didn’t turn back and he did and it wasn’t.

To the right is a bank of trees that will soon go choppity-chop and that is where, somewhere in the depths, the devil worshippers might have built their shelter and shrine. The boys ride up to the edge of the woods and then enter. There’s a thin path that winds through the trees. Here and there an earthen ramp for bike tricks and the tire ruts in the dried mud of many bikes many years ago. After awhile the path ends, loops back upon itself and here the brothers dismount. They walk the bike across the dead leaf-covered landscape dodging the spider webs that hang in the air like bizarre fish and indeed there is something of the underwater aspect about it all, the aqueous quality of the dark air pierced in places by shafts of Indian summer sun. Though the way is easygoing they perspire, especially the younger boy who exercises rarely but loves the thrill of adventure and so will push himself past his pie crust limits. He unzips his jacket as they walk and something falls to the ground. He picks it up and Gabe says what’s that?

Nothing.

That was something. Show me what you have.

He shows him. It’s a piece of dashboard from a car. Carved into it in block letters are the words and symbol I (heart) Elise.

Why did you bring that?

I don’t know. I like it.

I didn’t even know you kept that.

He says nothing, just looks at his older brother. How long has it been since they saw Elise? Three years. Four. She was the prettiest girl in the neighborhood, smart and funny and quick to mature. Boys took an interest in her, as did young men. She and Gabe ran on the track team together and would sometimes train at the elementary school near their houses. She’d tell Gabe about the parties she was going to, the drugs she was stealing, the sex she was having with her new boyfriend, a high school guy. She and Gabe were only finishing the 8^th grade but Elise had big plans to see and do it all and no parental curfews or lecherous stepfather was going to get in her way. Then one morning Elise wasn’t at her desk and the principal pulled Gabe out in the hall and asked if he knew where she was. She’d run away over the weekend and her parents were blah, blah. Gabe had no clue but it didn’t matter. Soon the whole world knew where Elise was. That very night she and her boyfriend were drag racing down Hayne Boulevard out past Bullard where it was fine for racing as long as the cops didn’t come which they almost never did. But times were changing and the east was developing and a little convenience store had just opened past Bullard the week before and a little old man was pulling out in his little old car and he intersected two speeding muscle cars carrying five adolescents. All were killed. The next day Gabe and his little brother rode their bikes over to see what was left of the accident. Not much. The cars had been towed away and the road cleared of the major debris. Gabe took in the scene of the destruction with quiet pause, too young to weep for the tragedy that every adult fears for themselves and their children. Mostly he thought of Elise and the crush he’d had on her the whole year. He’d gone so far as so climb the tree behind his house higher than any of the other kids went and there he carved I (heart) Elise. None knew save he that it was up there. Even god wasn’t in on the secret of his 13 year old soul. From time to time he’d climb up there and watch the carving change, become old and worn looking and in just a few months it looked like it had been there for years. The tree had initials carved all over its stout pregnant trunk and Gabe wondered how many just wishes like his were. His little brother was poking through the glass and trash of silent but deadly Hayne Boulevard. He bent down and picked up something and studied it and then brought it over and showed it to Gabe. It was a piece of dashboard with I (heart) Elise carved into it. Maybe her boyfriend had done it though more likely she had done it herself, a testimony that the world would love her someday. And I love you now thought Gabe. He handed it back to his little brother and they rode home. And now here it was again in his hand, a relic from a long time ago, something that happened to an ancestor, a legendary forefather who walked into a dark continent with just the clothes on his back and years later walked out crazy.

I guess it’s cool that you kept it. It sucks what happened to her.

His little brother says nothing just looks ahead at the trees then the ground then around. Finally he says I saw what you and Paul did to her.

What do you mean?

That time you guys pulled her into the woods behind our house. I saw you rape her.

What.

The word hangs in the air like a balloon. A crow caws. A branch drops from a tree. The smooth leaf-covered floor. A dead creek bed meanders through, its dry banks evocative of rolling brown hills. The brothers face each other over a prone bicycle. The older brother’s hands form into fists.

What did you say?

Nothing.

Yes you did. Say it again.

No.

Say it.

No.

Then you didn’t see anything. If you were watching us which you have no business doing anyway you would have seen that we didn’t do nothin’ to her.

Okay.

You better not go around telling people we raped a girl especially is it’s not true. You understand that? That’s almost as bad as killing somebody. Do you even know what rape is?

He says nothing afraid to look at his brother whose voice has risen steady since he began speaking.

You don’t do you? Do you? Yes or no?

I don’t know.

What the hell is that? I don’t know. You either know or you don’t know. You know what sex is?

Yes.

You know what I mean, when a man and a woman do it. Or a man and a man or a woman and a woman.

A man and a man?

Don’t worry about that right now. You know what I’m talking about right?

Yeah.

Okay. Well rape is when a man makes a woman do it and she doesn’t want to. It’s not just grabbing a girl by the arms and pulling her into the woods because you’re playing. It’s doing that and then taking her clothes off and putting your pecker in her and making her do it.

His little brother picks up a stick and waves it at a spider web.

You understand me now? Don’t go telling people me and Paul raped someone.

It doesn’t matter anyway. She’s dead.

It especially matters now that she’s dead. Okay?

Okay.

All right let’s go a little farther or else turn back. I’m getting tired.

They push on through the dark and shaft cut air, dust motes like the centers of galaxies and spider webs in their path and the trees the only witness to two boys on a Saturday afternoon. And in the depths, far beyond where even the older boy has gone, through thickets and brambles they come at last upon a battered clubhouse composed of stolen and scrubby lumber. The pentacle crudely painted on the side gives the devil worshippers’ clubhouse its official title though there’s nothing particularly Satanical about the place. There are names of bands carved into the two-by-fours, AC/DC, Black Sabbath. OZZY. A torn copy of Hustler magazine displays a rain-wrinkled picture of a woman with three breasts. An empty bottle of Night Train Express snores on the clubhouse floor. One tennis shoe asleep on a milk crate. A t-shirt filthy and full of holes hanging from a nail in the ceiling. And as his brother farts around the clubhouse looking for the devil, Gabe remembers the time he and his friend Paul grabbed Elise and pulled her into the woods behind his house. They were stick-fighting and Elise came around wearing short shorts and she knew she was giving them boners telling them how Neanderthal they looked and the guys made jokes about carrying off the women of their enemies and she laughed and said just try it and so they did, Paul who was a stocky boy took one arm and Gabriel took the other and they perp-walked her into the deeper woods where her cries would not be so easily heard. And she laughed but it was a nervous laugh because they had her arms pinioned and moving quickly through the afternoon slanted sunlight into the dark and foreboding trees. And she said you guys are just kidding right? And Gabe said maybe. And Paul laughed and said yeah maybe and he wanted you to say yes you know that right he wanted it so bad for you to say yes with him so that together you could have executed at least one of his fantasies by dragging that poor child into the peeling trees and laying waste to her soul. He wanted you to do that with him say yes not even say it just let it be known that it would be okay to go forward with what this twist of fate had given. And Gabe felt it and knew it and did not do it. He let go Elise’s arm and Paul carried her two or three steps further and then he also let her go and laughed and Elise did too except her laugh sounded funny like she was about to cry. And she left right away and Paul watched her leaving and he said that was cool. And somewhere in the yard or in the woods his little brother saw him do that and what did he think had just happened? Who did he think his brother had become? What am I becoming?

His little brother throws a rock at a tree. It bounces back and hits his shin. There’s the devil for you. The kid makes a face and looks over to where Gabe is standing, seeming to admire Satan’s sanctuary. But Gabe is a million miles away. His brother sees this in his eyes, on his face, in his body language. He knows that his older brother will be just like their father, a wandering soul forever lost in an ever less familiar world.

Let’s go he says. I’m hungry. All I’ve eaten today is pie crust.

Nuclear Future

His father contemplates the emptiness that is represented in the driveway and then gets out and helps Gabriel unload the car. Guns and vests and ammunition and one sorry squirrel, skinny, hardly worth skinning and a fat raccoon that’ll have to be gutted soon if it’s not too late already. He looks down and that striped old daddy. The nuts he should have cut those off immediately. It’s liable to be double gamey. Not that he can imagine eating such a thing. Put it in the oven it would look like you were cooking a child. His son was right. Who the hell he gonna ask how to cook a coon. The maid liable to look at him like he offered her a hog maw. Or chitlins. Might as well pay the woman with a watermelon. It’s hard trying to be a good man in an evil and cynical world. He grabs his coon and heads inside.

Gabe’s younger brother is in his bedroom watching Abbott and Costello and eating a graham cracker pie crust still in the wrapper. There’s nothing else to eat he says which is more or less true. There are eggs and meat and vegetables and fruit but no milk and no cereal and no bread and the child doesn’t cook and is afraid of knives so he opened up the pie crust with scissors and he’s halfway done with it and getting sick quick. At a commercial break their father confirms with the child what no note tells. Agnes is out playing golf and will be home later. That’s it. No time, no plans, no worries. Their father takes in the information that is nothing new and nothing unexpected, then he leaves to go disembowel his coon.

Gabe offers to help and together father and son grab a sharp knife and a whetstone and their kill and they step off the back patio and walk through the backyard and their yard is not deep but they have no back fence and so you walk into the woods like the maw of a beast under a canopy of hardwoods and vines and the lawn extends some twenty feet into the woods and it feels like one is a citizen of the forest. They squat and lay the coon out on a bed of newspapers. The older man sharpens the thin-bladed knife until he can shave with it and then he spreads the coon’s belly open and hands his son the knife and shows him where to cut. White fat and blue tendons and red muscle gone dull. Plenty of guts but they’re intact and stink of life and what life has become. The coon don’t care. He’s in coon heaven but still it’s horrible to do this to anything and one wouldn’t want it done to them. Perhaps it is the disconnect of the intact and almost adorable face and everything else, open and gutted and gashed and shot and then the pelt turned inside out and the feet pulled through and all along the head remains attached and the face almost perfect until the pelt is pulled all the way off leaving nothing but a flesh-covered skull. And that will be you someday. And that will be me and us and them and everyone. But the coon has been killed to be eaten and it’s ready and Gabe quickly does the squirrel and saves the tail and the coon tail too. His father says something about curing the coonskin and he goes and grabs the salt from the kitchen. For a moment it is Gabe alone under the sheltering bough of these October trees in a small wood in the eastern suburbs of New Orleans. He is 17. It is the spring of youth in the October of a cold war year. The nukes are pointed at destinations known and unknown. The fear of apocalypse has become something like fluoridation. It infects the souls of the young and the old so thoroughly that they don’t even know it’s there. It manifests itself in the very decision making processes of all the worlds’ citizens and especially the American race. Under their Russophobe skies they kill and disease and destroy one another, shorn of any unity, as likely to turn on their countryman and family member as any Slavic revolutionary garbed in red and brandishing hammer and sickle. It is a sickness this war without war and its radioactive influence has indeed created what Orwell said would occur, a set of mindless individuals who both believe and doubt everything and so they believe in nothing except the violence they are shown and the rapine that is celebrated and the degradation that is the American way. Under the sheltering boughs of a small woods is Gabriel and the remains of the hunt and these are his thoughts or will be some day long into a cold and nuclear future.

I’m Always Polite

Mr. Walter Bates takes your weapon, even brand new, and it shoots one way and a week or so later he gives it back to you and it shoots the Walter Bates way. Which is to say the action has the fluidity of a viscous liquid, something almost alive and awaiting your touch to instantly warm it like a cat coming alive under one’s finger, a complex killing mechanism in your hand that practically fires itself. And Mr. Bates hasn’t the faintest sense of arrogance of the reputation he has in three parishes and two states but every once in awhile you’ll be watching him in action with his jeweler’s eye screwed into his face and his thin hair slicked over his dome and his pale fat hands assembling and disassembling and tightening and shaving metal and recoiling springs and measuring things in degrees that can only be seen by the microscopic eye and he’ll say more to himself than his guest damn I am one hell of a gunsmith. And no sooner do those words leave his lips then he asseverates the opposing view, that he knows nothing and never will and forever will be the barest of hacks mutilating the good work of better men. Dr. Doucette appreciates this dichotomy in Mr. Bates and recognizes it in himself for he is a humble man from humble beginnings who hated the arrogance of his own race and so rejected it utterly and thus finds himself impaled on the idea that not only is he no better than most men he may be worse. And this is troubling. And Dr. Doucette who admires Walter Bates who is always polite is glad that he is not Walter Bates. Because the man has an invalid wife and a real one not like his own who is an invalid only on certain occasions and not bedridden and sick unto death 24 and 7. No, poor Mr. Bates does truly have a wife in a room with the shades drawn and she needs help going to the bathroom and nobody has ever asked Mr. Bates what it is she has but Dr. Doucette thinks it’s cancer. And he admires this in Mr. Bates as well, that he has only acknowledged once the incomprehensible meaninglessness that his life has become, only once and Dr. Doucette saw it all in a single shake of the head, heard Mr. Bates’ say that life was hard, harder than you ever dreamed and it broke a man down. And then no, just like that he was singing the old tune, everything was fine, everything was Jake.

However it is Mr. Bates’ personal philosophy which truly appeals to the good doctor. ‘I’m always polite.’ Mr. Bates explained to Dr. Doucette that the world was full of badness and the only thing a good man could do was carry a well-tooled weapon with an acceptable amount of stopping power, nothing less than a .357 though his own preference was the .44 Special, (a neglected caliber overshadowed by its Magnum older brother). He had a blue steel five inch Smith and Wesson with black Pachmeyer grips that lived on his person basically all the time. He found it rare to have to use it but was not afraid to reveal its presence to anyone who crossed him. And everywhere he went he was always polite. Dr. Doucette admires that phrase so much that he repeats it like a mantra, a Buddhist prayer that must be spoken and re-spoken, a chant, a rosary, a litany of our fathers. He will be relating a story and mention how he called someone sir or ma’am (because I’m always polite). And he likes this because it allows all possibilities. He would rather avoid most things including all confrontations and so the thought that one only need be polite is a simple guarantee that you will act well and perhaps have great courage. ‘I’m always polite’ is a philosophy to be lived by and Dr. Doucette gets the chance to test this philosophy out on the ride home.

Gabriel steers the car to a convenience store near the house for one more beer. He sits behind the wheel and watches as his father ambles in, holding the door open for an old black lady who thanks him, then heads for the beer cooler, losing his way, somewhat unsure of what he sees or where he is. A pitcher of beer on an empty stomach and another one coming down the pike. He’ll be a handful this afternoon and possibly all night. Alcohol is an amphetamine for the man and he can go days without sleep or food, just beer and cigarettes and staring into the woods like Jesus Christ Himself is going to come walking out. The last straight man in America still doing justice to a mustache selects a tall can of Schlitz for he likes his beer cold and cheap, not malt liquor cheap but always one or two grades below Budweiser and its ilk. Everything tastes better if you think you got a deal and there is the good doctor paying for his beer and a pack of cigarettes and he has to look at the register to know the total because he can’t hear the cashier, he’s half deaf in one ear and tinnitus in the other and why does everybody fucking mumble these days. He exits the store and walks over to the car and gets in, eager for the beer. After all it will get no colder. Gabe waits while his father buckles up and then extracts the beer for one good sip before they leave. A car pulls up and blocks them in, a muscle car in primer grey and a girl jumps out and runs inside the store. The driver sits behind the wheel, music playing. He sticks a cigarette in his mouth and reaches down to punch the lighter.

Excuse me sir says Dr. Doucette. We were just about to leave.

The ratty metal head in his black concert t-shirt says nothing.

Excuse me sir.

The driver turns down the music.

What?

Excuse me but we’re just about to leave. Can you move your car please?

The dude says nothing, just turns the music back up and reaches down for the lighter, puts it to his face, lights his puff and then gives Dr. Doucette the finger. Across the knuckles of his left hand are tattooed OZZY.

Fuck you he says but the music is too loud for them to hear so it looks like he’s blowing them a kiss.

Gabe’s father exhales a sigh then he hands the beer to his son, opens the glove box, removes the Police .38 from its oilcloth, glances to see if it’s loaded and it is, it is always loaded and then he opens the car door and gets out and walks over to the muscle car. The driver looks over and sees the gun pointed at his face. The cigarette drops out of his mouth. He turns off the music.

Listen closely because I’m only going to say this once says Dr. Doucette. I want you to move your car right now or else tomorrow morning your mama is going to be looking at you in a coffin.

The muscle car leaves in a shriek of oily smoke as the good doctor returns to his car. He puts the gun back in its oilcloth nest and extracts his Schlitz tallboy from the wrinkled and sweat soaked sack. He pops the beer and takes a sip. Still cold. More to himself than Gabe he says I’m always polite.

Striking

Dr. Doucette is sad for his son whom he loves dearly and wishes with all his mortal powers that he could take the boy’s girl trouble away and just like that ease him into the calm waters of a calm life with no bypasses and no grief. And that can never be and it makes a father sad to his blue bones. And a father must do then whatever he can despite the limitations of fate and her forces. He must speak some sagacious advice, offer the youth a lesson in humility.

I once had it pretty bad for a girl he says. Rebecca Lefleur. Beautiful girl. No, let me correct that. She was striking. Blue eyes. Dark hair. And a good sense of humor. Not many women have that. It’s more important than people know. Anyway, I liked her a great deal but I decided to play it cool. So when school got out in the spring she said call me sometime this summer and we’ll do something. I wanted to. I thought about her a great deal. All summer in fact. And in my mind I thought I was being just the king of cool. Didn’t call, didn’t write, nothing. And I waited for that first day of classes. I prepared myself to see her. I was so sure she was pining for me all summer too. And there it was, the first day. I saw her and she said Bennie how are you? I said fine, how was your summer? Grand she said and she held out her hand. I got engaged. Boy oh boy. I said something nice and then skulked off like a scalded dog. Anyway. Now I forget what the point of that was. I guess it all works out. She got married. I did too. Three times.

The outskirts of the city appear, all the inchoate mess of the darkness now clears in the unforgiving afternoon glare. Abandoned cars alongside great white herons. The shell of a fish factory overcome with tufts of yellow grass and coiling links of green vines. The remnants of a failed diner like some shot up movie set, the signs and the windows exploded, the wreck of careers and dreams and industry gone to the four corners and only their sad crimes of misjudgment left to show for who and what they were.

Don’t you wish you had called her even once says Gabe.

His father stares straight ahead at his existence arriving out of the sky. Worlds within worlds and we live forever with all our possibilities. We’ll never know what we don’t know we know.

Sure he says. I wish I had called her. She was a very pretty girl. Striking.

Whack.

Yep. Whack indeed.

A Purpose

Look at that one his father says.

A redneck wearing nothing but blue jean shorts is hauling his ass down the shoulder of the road on a three-wheeler. He swerves to avoid a dead animal in front of him and winds up heading into traffic. Which in this case is a station wagon filled to the gills with family. Panicked, the driver of the wagon swerves and as the three-wheeler corrects itself it appears that all will collide in a horror. Somehow they miss one another and the three-wheeler launches itself into the front yard of a fishing camp, perhaps its destination all along, approaches a pile of oyster shells and the driver stands up as he flies over the shells, landing with an explosion of dust. And he rides on.

Each bend in the road reveals the glory of unfettered nature, reedy grasses and twisted salt killed trees. And each bend in the road reveals man’s need to shit everywhere he can, broken refrigerators, dead bags of personal belongings, fucked up toys, children’s clothes pulled apart, dead pets, shoes. Where does it come from, this need to join the communal pile? Perhaps like all things that we want to get rid of it is best to do it in a public way. It cleanses the mind to throw away what is undesired in front of witnesses as if they may hold us accountable. Like the cigarette smoker who tosses his vile, smoking butt in disgust when oh so recently he put her paper lips to his and kissed, kissed, kissed.

Dr. Doucette smokes and smokes a lot. It doesn’t seem to faze him. It helps that he doesn’t attempt any cardiovascular activity at all. The secret to a calm heartbeat is fatalism. Everything is going to be destroyed anyway. No sense in getting worked up over a few smokes. Still he’s glad his kid doesn’t smoke. At his age he was already smoking a pack a day, maybe more. Walking those streets. The streets of Washington, Louisiana. Walking them with a purpose, every one of them, walking them down, staying the course saying I’m going to walk this town down and then I’m going to walk out and never come back. And he did. He smoked and read and walked and smoked and wrote and read and then one day he walked to the bus station and got on and was gone. Sure, he came back plenty but he was gone and he knew it. How does he know? Because of the way it makes him feel when he goes back. He can’t stay more than two or three days and his skin crawls. Too many memories. A small town soaks them up and each vessel will hold its fair share and so the water tower and the trestle bridge and the post office and the mansion on the road out of town and the old steamboat hotel where he lived as a child, each of them is full to the rim with personal recollection and each stone is a memory unturned and the streets themselves speak his name, even paved over now which none but Main Street was back then they call out to him they recognize him and they ask what he’s doing back. And the streets will ask him if he’s done it.

Done what?

Done what he said he was going to do.

Which was what?

You know say the streets. You know what we’re talking about.

Well, I tried. Lord knows I tried. Writing is hard. After awhile I just gave it up. I’m sorry. I did the best I could. If you don’t like it go screw yourselves.

That’s not what you said you would do. You said you’d never forget what happened that night.

What night?

You know what night. The night Foot killed the Junkman.

I don’t want to talk about that.

All right, we won’t. But remember what you said.

I remember, I remember. Now leave me alone godammit.

Gabe turns to his father. What?

What?

Did you say leave me alone godammit?

Maybe. I don’t know. My mind was wandering.

I know what you mean.

Your Cheating Heart

The bartender, a bleach-blonde of uncertain age sticks a bottle of coca-cola in front of Gabe along with a short water glass more or less clean. His father notices two old men at the end of the bar staring straight ahead at nothing, silent as a book, each with his own pitcher of beer with a plastic cup of ice floating on top. The bartender explains that this keeps the beer cold, exactly the type of thing his father might have thought up himself.

I’ll have a pitcher as well.

Careful, says Gabe.

Oh I’ll be all right. She’ll probably be playing golf most of the day. Just in case however let us decide now exactly how many beers I have had. We’ll say, if asked that I’ve had…three. More than four will scare her and she won’t believe anything less. Good?

Good.

Glass to glass there’s a clink and his father takes a deep draught off his beer, then wipes his mustache.

Behind the bar is an open door and in the distance can be seen a marsh fire burning away. Set deliberately to promote new growth it resembles a mushroom cloud, its grey and white mass towering into the sky, infiltrating the atmosphere for miles, blocking out the sun.

Look at the rednecks with their redneck nukes says his father. They’ve harnessed the power of the atom but they’ve got no clue about ballistics. They just load that fucker up with as much pig uranium as they can find, maybe add an old car battery and a can of gasoline and then they let it fly. Boom!

The wind is sweeping the nimbus clouds of smoke across the water, at their root the wicked orange flames. The oxygen levels are high and the fire just burns and burns and burns. Nothing would stop it but a deluge and there will be no deluge today.

When are the Tigers playing says the bartender as she turns on the dusty old Magnavox. Its strangled screech penetrates Dr. Doucette’s mind like a spike to the brain. He frowns, takes another sip of beer, then pushes some quarters towards his son.

You can shoot pool if you want.

They look over at the scarred and cigarette-burned pool table, bumpers stained in concentric rings, hard white patches where the fur has been eaten down to the slate.

I think I’ll play the juke box instead.

Good luck finding anything.

Sure enough he’s stymied to find anything other than country/western but he recalls that he and Hank Williams share a birthday so he punches in Your Cheating Heart. The twangy fiddles start up like a machine slowly catching speed of its gears and then old Hank is croaking over the speakers about all the wrong his woman done him. It’s good enough for his father and good enough for the bartender and the two old men, none of whom pay any attention to the music as if it existed only for the father and the son, a moment encapsulated, the marsh-fires thunderous stewards of a better and less violent time and the sun coming off the shell parking lot making you squint and the air is thick with dust motes. The father nods his head. Good old Hank.

Gabe takes a sip of coca-cola. For the briefest of moments he can pretend that he is someone else, someone he had been very recently. A different dude altogether. How freeing it had been to not know anything. But he sought knowledge and it found him and gave him that which he didn’t know he didn’t want. He once was just a jerkoff teenager with his whole life in front of him. All he wanted to do was climb up on the roof of the high school on a Saturday night and moon the stars and talk about what was coming and never what was and only rarely about what is, those sweet summer days just three months ago when the music sounded better and the beer washed all the bitterness away easily because there was nothing to be bitter about except the fact that he was 17 and a virgin. Well that changed.

Saints play tomorrow says Gabe’s father in answer to the bartender’s repeated question about LSU.

No shit Sherlock says the bartender changing the channels with a pair of pliers. High school on Friday, college on Saturday, pros on Sunday.

She flips through the channels stopping at last on cartoons. Tom and Jerry have created an ice rink in the kitchen. Ingenious, the kind of thing his father might dream up. They flooded the kitchen and then they yanked the Freon coils from the back of the refrigerator, dropping them to the floor. Instant ice and the cat and mouse begin a figure-skating routine. Moments later the big black maid and Butch the bulldog come barreling into the room. The bartender laughs as the maid climbs atop the dining room table. Meanwhile the dog chases the cat who chases the mouse around the room and eventually out the house. Haw, haw, everyone laughs as the cat gets set on fire and the bulldog runs face first into an anvil. Haw, haw. And the maid continues to scream, afraid of a mouse wearing a little bow tie.

Where are the Saints playing? says Dr. Doucette.

In the Dome.

So you’re working?

Yeah.

I guess you’ll be taking the car all day tomorrow.

No, Maginnis is picking me up this afternoon. I’ll spend the night at JJ’s house.

Oh. So you’re leaving tonight and coming back sometime tomorrow. Got it. Well that should be fun. Big plans? Got a date with yer best gurl?

Nope, just me and the fellas tonight.

Well good. You all be careful.

We will.

Who are they playing? The Saints I mean.

The Rams says the bartender as she wipes out a glass. The goddamn Rams. I hate ‘em. I hate ‘em almost as bad as Atlanta. Maybe more. Especially after last year.

What happened last year? says Dr. Doucette to his son.

The bartender overhears. Were you dead or something? Those sonsofbitches beat us on the last play of the last game or we’d have gone to the playoffs.

Oh yes says Dr. Doucette. I forgot for a moment what team it was that did that.

The goddamn Rams that’s who. That Dickerson. I hate him.

Who?

The bartender’s mouth drops. Who? What do you mean who? You don’t know who Eric Dickerson is?

I might. What position does he play?

What position does he play? He’s a running back.

Those are the ones who run with the ball, right?

Yeah honey, those are the ones who run with the ball. What do you think they do, kick the ball?

No, no I know that they have a kicker that kicks. Who are the Saints running backs?

This he addresses to his son.

George Cokehead Rogers says the bartender and Earl Old as My Grampus Campbell that’s who. And ain’t neither one of them worth a shit.

I thought Rogers was good.

He was. That’s the word, was. He done taken too many trips to the snow if ya know what I mean. He ain’t got it no more. What we need, I’ll tell you want we need.

What’s that?

We need Dickerson. I hate him but damn he’s good. Last time they played the Rams, I about shot my husband. Instead I shot my truck. I love my truck but you can’t go to prison for shooting it.

Wise choice.

Yep.

One of the old men sitting at the bar says I don’t pay any attention to football anymore. These days it’s just our nigras fighting their nigras.

Sure is says the other old man.

Dr. Doucette purses his lips, turns to Gabe and says there once was a time when I would have said something to those old coots. Or left the bar. Not no mo’. It’s not that I condone it, you understand. I just don’t have the strength to try and change people anymore.

I don’t think you can change anyone.

Listen to the philosophical Ugnaught. You can put a bullet in ‘em. That’ll change ‘em.

Gabe wonders when he could go to Houston. Two more weeks of football. Can’t go until then. And how will I get there? I’ll have to tell pop some lie and take the car. And how will I find those guys when I get there? Her cousin. I can go to her aunt’s house and ask her cousin if he knows where those two who shall from now on go unnamed live. If so, then I’ll go to their houses and what? Do you really think you have the balls to shoot somebody dead? Do you? Yes, yes I do. I can’t stand the thought that these guys got away with something like that. And you know that she wasn’t the first, no way, guys like that are predators and you’d be doing the world a favor if you smoked them. So do it, man. Do it. Lay your plans carefully and come upon them unawares. What’s the first rule in the art of war? The element of surprise.

.

Ducks

Where could those ducks be? Certainly not in the ditch alongside the road. Yet that’s where the noise is coming from. Father and son listen hard, not breathing. Ducks? No way. Can’t be. And yet the sound is loud, the sound of many ducks honking. Could it be that they’ve come across an obscure nesting of ducks that have chose paradoxically to decamp alongside a highway tooled by sportsmen? It’s like a burglar living next door to the police station. They listen. Ducks. It is definitely ducks about twenty yards away.

Both Gabe and his father have their guns loaded against just such an occasion. They take the weapons off safety and begin the creep. Slowly they move towards the mucky ditch at the edge of US Highway 90 running in a road kill-dotted line across their view. They step closer and closer, splitting apart to put themselves in the best position to open fire, adjusting their angles so they won’t shoot each other or a passing car. Expecting to see an exploding axis of ducks rising pell-mell they face instead the quacks of frogs that do sound remarkably like ducks. Even the older man says so and he’s seen 100 times the wildlife his son has. Each man unloads his weapon and marvels at the duplicity of nature.

Just as well says Dr. Doucette. I don’t care for shooting ducks anymore. They mate for life.

Perhaps he cannot bear the thought of the duck that will never mate again. Too sad and he wonders why it should be so, that nature should force that upon a creature. All part of something he will never even begin to understand.

Geese mate for life too, says Gabe. I feel bad about shooting that goose last year.

Well you didn’t mean for it to happen.

I aimed my gun and fired at it.

Yeah but you didn’t think you’d hit it. I didn’t either. I wouldn’t feel too bad about it.

Wolverines mate for life also and if their mate is killed they spend the rest of their lives pursuing the killer.

Is that true?

True. We learned it in biology last year.

Well it makes sense. They’re ferocious things. Ugly and mean. I wouldn’t want one coming after me.

What if ducks and geese did the same thing?

What, followed the killer of their mate?

Yeah, what if they tracked them down?

You’d have old what’s his name…funny looking British director. Always put himself in his movies…

Hitchcock.

Yes, Hitchcock. Goddamn, where’s my memory gone? Exactly, Hitchcock. The Birds.

I haven’t seen it.

That’s what you’re talking about right? If the birds attacked us?

Sure, says Gabe looking past his father. What if….duck! He dips his head down suddenly and his father does too then rises back up and shakes his head smiling at the jest.

That’s a good one Ugnaught. You got me. For that you have earned a second coca cola. And this one can be in a clean glass.

Almost clean.

Exactly. Almost clean.

The Trees of His Imagination

See for yourself says his father reaching for his smokes.

He lights a Marlboro and takes in the skies. A shot of cirrus clouds above and that’s the end of summer for today at least. A cold front should be moving in tonight, but nothing serious, no plants will have to come in, it might be nice.

Gabe picks up his father’s hunting vest. Heavy. Too heavy for squirrel. Something big in there. Big with a full fat body.

What did you shoot, a dog?

Ha. Nope, no dog.

The young man opens the zipper to reveal his father’s kill. One fat raccoon, an old male with nuts the size of ping pong balls. Just a touch of crayon red blood at his muzzle. That burglar’s mug. Those articulate paws. Just slow ambulatory scavengers, the diametric opposite of possum which appear to be a creation from the mind of a god suffering from kidney stones.

Poor guy. I like coons. I like their faces. And their paws.

Yeah, me too. I wouldn’t have shot it if I’d known what it was. I just thought it was the king of the fox squirrels. Oh well.

How do you cook it?

I don’t know. We were poor but not that poor. The blacks ate coon. They seemed to like it. Hell, I don’t know, anything is better than starving to death. I guess I could ask Uncle Tommy, he might know. Nah. He was a middle class Cajun. They looked down on eating stuff like that. I could ask one of the Larroque brothers. They tried everything. Their parents even caught them roasting a buzzard. Hell, I have no idea where they are or if they’re even alive. I could ask Miss Ruby. I’ll bet she knows how to cook a coon.

You’re gonna ask an old black woman for her coon recipe?

You make it sound ridiculous.

It’s not ridiculous. I just wanna be there when you do it.

Miss Ruby is their cheerful and enormously unreliable maid. The Doucettes are her Friday and Friday is the end of a long week for the Miss Rubys of the world. She’s fat and black and sweet as chess pie and looks like a cartoon mammy. Gabe helps her with the laundry to give her a better impression of white folks.

I heard your shotgun once. Did you get a squirrel?

Yep a little one says Gabe.

Do you want to shoot the .38?

Okay says Gabe and he takes the pistol out of his jacket, aims it at the cancerous burl on the tree and fires four rounds into it, bang, bang, bang, bang and each shot rips those bastards open dead they fall to mama earth.

Well says his father I wish you hadn’t shot the burl. I liked it.

Sorry. I just think of it as an enemy to be removed.

Yeah. But the tree doesn’t mind.

I know but I do.

I see that. Go ahead and shoot the last two. It bothers my mind to know there are two unfired rounds in there. But don’t shoot the burl.

Okay says Gabe and he imagines them alive again and running away in separate directions. If they live they spread their contagion. Gabe levels the weapon and sees one in his mind’s eye turn back to look and Gabe fires and hits that fool in the face. He moves the weapon to his left and sees the second guy running a zigzag pattern through the trees of his imagination. Zigzag, fire, bang, dead, a fifty yard headshot on a moving target.

Took you long enough says his father. Did you get all your bad guys?

Sho did.

How many did you have? Did you try and break my record of 10?

Nah, just two.

Two’s not much of a challenge.

Well it was a very specific two.

Oh yeah? You have someone that you want to shoot?

You could say that.

The older man says nothing for a minute. Both of them listen to the woods in the morning. The wind rustles and it ebbs and flows like a swooping symphony that only they are privy to. For a moment there is no apprehension, no need to be anywhere else. A father is a father and a son is a son. They stand in one another’s company, the boy 17, the man 45. And then the father breaks the silence by saying what he knows he must for guilt is his anchor and he can’t bear to think that his permissiveness will ever drive his son to some act of desperation and so the father will have to bear witness to what he created like some Frankenstein in reverse, the creator fleeing the monster of his creation.

Don’t go shooting nobody.

I won’t.

I mean that. It’s fun to make up stories about blowing holes in people. The difference between that and all those bad mothers up in Angola is that they didn’t know the difference. You know what I’m saying?

Sure.

Okay, good. Ready to go?

Let’s go.

The father goes to pick up his coon but his son says I’ll take that and he hoists the vest to his shoulder, heavy with a mistaken identity.

Thank you. That’s a big help.

No problem.

PhD

In his 40^th year he became a posthole digger at last, his PhD earned and awarded with all its rights and privileges. People can call me Doctor Doucette he said and then mocked his own and others’ pretensions. He is no more a doctor than a general in the army but somehow it replaced the other thing, even older than poetry, older than time for it came out of something that knows no clock except its own timepiece and it comes from a wanting which has pushed and pulled at the human soul since caves were lit by smoky fires and brush strokes were applied to walls. And this is an easy task if you bake bread or fine tune weapons or sell insurance. Your art is your work and your work is your art and you’ve achieved without witness what every artist since Og in his cave has craved, the ability to support oneself with one’s art. For Doctor Doucette has always wanted that row of books across the shelf, his genius like some escarpment of a degree so nonnegotiable as to be considered impossible to scale and so men die and reputations are made attempting to scale it, Joycean in a way only Joyce could imagine if Faulkner had sprung fully armored from his head. Something like that.

The good doctor removes a cigarette from its package and takes in the forest primeval in the new dawn. Birds flicker in various bushes warning him of potential boar that allegedly haunt these woods. He and his son have been warned against molesting the Russian émigrés but Doctor Doucette’s experience with wild animals allows little consideration for a tusked beast that could eat him. He keeps a rifled slug handy in the breast pocket of his vest, should he spy one of those red eyed monsters or god forbid a sow and her young and Mr. Plug Ugly defending his porcine honor. He lights his cigarette, imagining how he’d pull off the magic act of getting the slug into his Remington in the space of a few seconds. He’d be faced with the dilemma of having to eject live rounds of ammunition in order to place the slug in the optimal position versus firing several shells of #6 shot into the boar before he could then insert the slug into the gun and apply (hopefully) the coupe de grace. It’s a stimulating dilemma, the exact kind he likes to take his mind off his wife. My wife? My wife? What wife? I have no wife. He decides that he would shoot the boar in the face with the #6 shot.

Better to open up into your wife’s business partner.

Don’t say that.

But it’s true. You know you’d like to shoot that s.o.b.

Sure. But that is not gonna happen. We don’t do things like that anymore.

We don’t?

No. I can’t go around shooting all the people I don’t like.

It depends on how you do it. It could look like his black ass just got shot.

Don’t get racial. This isn’t about race.

It isn’t?

No. Why would it be?

Because your cute little white wife is spending a lot of time with that big black man.

It’s not like that.

Not like what?

He’s not…he’s not after her.

He’s not?

No, of course not. He’s married. He has two daughters.

Grown women who don’t even live at home.

One of them does.

Yes and I believe she’s 20 years old.

So what? What the fuck are you saying? That he’s having an affair with my wife? Is that what this is all about? Is that why you’re bringing this up now when I’m trying to enjoy a little peace and quiet? Mother of god it pisses me off when you bring these things up at the most inappropriate times. Jesus H. Christ, give it a rest.

Doctor Doucette finishes his cigarette. The last lonely puff or others will smoke in your place. He crushes it out on his boot sole, then separates the filter from the detritus, pockets it, winnows the paper and tobacco chaff through his fingers and watches it descend in a brown and white drizzle onto the dry leaves of the earth.

The good doctor has a song stuck in his head, Suspicious Minds by Elvis Presley whom he never cared for even though they came of age more or less together. He keeps hearing those women singers in the background, wailing like the angels of the inferno. We can’t go on together with suspicious minds, and we can’t build our dreams with suspicious minds. That’s about all he knows of the song, that and something about I still see suspicion in your eyes. Why is this damn thing stuck in his head, reverberating like a boomerang hurled out of hell by a demonic half-witted child?

He checks his watch. Time to head to the burl and meet his son. The boy will be on time. He’s good about that despite having the same vein of procrastination that the father has. Manana. Manana disease. Then one day, no mas mananas. He spent a summer in Mexico with a college buddy, drinking bad tequila, speaking bad Spanish, avoiding the whores with some success, writing almost nothing about it but inspiring in his son the need to visit that cactus-bitten hardscape if for no other reason than to see the ghost of what his father was. And his mother. Dr. Doucette made a second trip down there in the company of one woman while obtaining a divorce from another. For infidelity, no less. Well, those were interesting times. And she seemed like the real thing, that second of his three wives.

Pushing through the branches of trees, avoiding the yellow and black tiger-striped spiders he sees that busty-assed gal, short of stature but big of mind, a reader, a doer, a thinker. Yes, there had once been a time when her love and joy seemed to exonerate him from the greatest of all fears, doubt. For the time that they were together (and it was good 99% of that time) he felt wondrously sure of his destination. Writing and focusing continuously his genius mind. And then it all crashed like a liver-grown drunkard failing in his last act. Boom and the body fell and it was dead before anyone could call the cops. Yeah, life was funny. It just kept changing, never standing still, no one thing you could look at and say yes, there it is, this will endure like fossilized shark teeth, grim but effective reminders of what once roamed the earth. No, the only thing a man could do was read and reread the great ones. In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree, where Alph the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were girdled round…

He could go on. He knows it all. That and plenty more. No gift for the stage and what a waste of a great memory for he might have performed all the parts of Lear including the King. He might have been an Arabic scholar who memorizes the entire Koran. An emissary of a distant land in which an entire peoples’ knowledge had been taught to one man and he had memorized it all and now he was on the journey across labyrinths to deliver his liturgy to an unknowing and perhaps uncaring audience. No, he is a man who knows a lot about a lot and a little about damn near everything and what is the end result? We can’t go on together with suspicious minds. And we can’t build our dreams…

Stop it, he says to the air. Stop it now.

Doesn’t work very well, ordering yourself about. Many were the times he tried to control his own thinking. After the divorce with number 2 he worked at Minneapolis Moline (No Two Parts Made Alike) and lived the part of a Bolshevik, reading his way through Karamazov while running a drill press. He’d had enough control of his mind back then to do anyfuckingthing. 1970. The War was on the ropes and the whole country knew it. He was 30 and damn good looking. He screwed motorcycle girls and bartenders and college students if he wanted which he didn’t at first. What the hell did he care if his X wanted to join a commune and live in the North Woods? Be my guest, honey. It’s been a fun ride. What did he care if she wanted to shoot smack and play that goddamn American Woman record 24 hours a day? So what? He was sick of it all and maybe something good and bitter would come out of it, a novel called Jawbone and it would do that and more. Why did any of that crap matter? Simple. The kid. The kid they weren’t even supposed to have.

He walks through a shaft of sunshine and he enjoys that moment, the catch of flies and dragonflies in the thick yellow and he looks up at the source of that incandescence and wonders if that’s all god ever was and ever would be, just a beam of light in a gloomy woods. It hasn’t been much more than that to him in all his 45 years. Too many deaths at too early an age. His sister when he was 8 and then her husband a year later. And his old man not around, divorce so rare in Coonass country and yet there it was and so he the youngest grew up quite alone. God. Where was god? He’d once been an altar boy, a good catholic, an annoying catholic. Then he turned 8 and failed the 3^rd grade and he went to 2 funerals that same year and he was done. Done. Done with god so long ago he had no idea if it was true or just a story he told himself about something that happened to someone else. What would he say to god? Want a beer? Now explain everything. Explain death and miracles some other time and Christ is self-explanatory and there hasn’t been anything good since 1962 so to hell with the present except what I want to know is this: what does my wife want? Because I don’t know and if I or she or we or somebody doesn’t figure it out soon it won’t matter what god thinks or does, there’s going to be long faces and tears and I don’t know what. And that’s no good.

A sudden crash in a tree overhead and Dr. Doucette looks up, sees something that he can’t immediately identify moving through the branches 50 yards away. The mother of all fox squirrels. It must be. Look at the size of that thing, the way the branch sags under the weight. That fat fucker has met his end. The good doctor strides across the forest floor keeping his eyes trained continuously on the slow moving-beast ambling through its topiary kingdom. The doctor lifts the shotgun to his shoulder. Goddamn but that’s a big squirrel. And still he can’t see it clearly for it is a brushy dervish of leaves and what else could it be, a monkey? So fuck it and he fires into the leaves at what he can’t see, an act he rarely if ever does. Something large falls to the ground with a thump.

Oh well. A man changes. His dreams change and so do his deeds. One day he’s shooting into the unknown and the next day…careful Doctor Doucette, that path leads to darkness of the mind and guns at dawn and open fire and dead Negros and he’s seen enough of them to last two lifetimes. Moving through sound and smoke, Doctor Doucette, PhD in American Studies, approaches his kill.

Something

They park and cross the empty highway into a world of deep sleeps and heavy falls for the pine forest is closest to the road and though it is no place to hunt it is majesty and silent beauty such as can be seen in the predawn grayness. The older man and the younger man split into solo trajectories tacitly agreeing to meet at the cancerous burl in several hours. Until then they will walk with their thoughts, listening to the world awaken, ears pricked for the characteristic sounds of squirrel on their breakfast rounds. A crash of limbs as loud as dishes breaking and then you are searching for the tree whence it came. Squirrels are wily and terribly stupid and both qualities may manifest themselves in the same animal. They’ll bark at you not ten feet from the business end of your shotgun and then run. They may lay completely still until they resemble a patch of Spanish moss and then you know they know the awful capacity of your weapon and what a dose of number six shot will do even from the faraway ground.

The great giving Earth Mother herself is represented in the presence of two huge magnolias. There is power in those trees and shelter and the ancient world before man waged war upon all that he loves. Gabe finds himself under those great fecund lemon-smelling things as dawn cleaves the sky. His body is sore and his head is filled with pain. It’s hard to believe so much badness could happen to one sweet girl. It’s difficult to digest it all. It’s impossible to digest any of it. He vomits.

As he took her home last night he asked what their names were.

What?

The guys, the two guys, what were their names?

She looked at her hands and then she put one of them to her face and she shook her head and said why do you wanna know? What are you going to do?

I don’t know. I don’t know. Nothing maybe, I don’t know. Something. Just tell me. What were their names? Do you know?

She bit her lip and she shook her head yes, yes she knew their names, of course she knew their names, they hung out with her and her sister all summer long and they all knew she had a boyfriend and she wouldn’t fool around and she didn’t flirt with any of them, not like her younger sister with the big boobs who was out every fucking night until whatever hour at the Denny’s and that was the simple and horrible truth about the whole deal. Those guys probably thought they were raping her sister. Not that it mattered. Running a train on a bitch was running a train on a bitch no matter who she was. She said their names.

And now sitting under those magnificent trees he repeats their names. Eric Head. Jamaal Washington. He says their names again and again until it sounds like a dull prayer to a god who can give his followers no more complicated liturgy than the utterance again and again of those who have betrayed his covenant. Taken something that she will never have again. Peace. Simply put peace. Already he can feel it raising itself through the galleys of his soul, past reason and past doubt, this terrible need to do something terrible, to wreck vengeance upon the world. He sees his beautiful girl and then he sees them on her, assaulting her, dogs, sharks, vultures, gangs of pigs. No balm for a young man’s soul and he wonders how he’ll ever be free of these bad thoughts. He sees the landscape coming into focus as the sun crests the horizon and sends golden knives into his eyes. He sees the outlines of trees commencing into the trees themselves, their invisible leaves becoming picturesque gowns, their branches now obfuscated by a million trillion corollas. And with the light comes sound and the forest awakens with the clamor of the woodpeckers knocking and the crow caws and things drop from great heights and crash to the forest floor. And still he cannot escape his own thinking, cannot outhunt his own thoughts. And from time to time she’ll think he is one of them. That the enemy has been found and they are we. And he’ll be trying to block it out of his mind, everything that has ever happened to that poor loving child, her stepfather (the frying pan) and a rec room in Houston (the fire).

And then he sees the squirrel. The unluckiest squirrel in the world has trotted down a tree and is poking through the brush some twenty feet away. Gabe has sat silent and the squirrel has gone about its morning and here it is chewing on a twig and looking for a nut and Gabe raises the shotgun to his shoulder, he has to use his opposite arm and opposite eye and so it takes a moment to make sure he’s got a bead and then boom, the gun jumps and kicks his arm hard like testing to see if you can take a punch and the squirrel never knew what hit it. The sound of the gun echoes off the great magnolias and the air smells of gunpowder as he lays the gun back down on the leaves and descends into sleep.

God Help the Nutria

They leave their well-ordered world and join the chaos and man-killing naked might that is Chef Menteur Highway, a ribbon across America that takes different names for at heart it is US Highway 90 and out on the flanks of New Orleans East its name means ‘big liar’ in French and this may refer to a fork-tongued Indian or a bayou that led to nowhere and nothing but that matters little for now it is a testimony to the power of the Interstate System which annihilated a 1,000 corridors of commerce just like this one. Once the only route in and out of New Orleans east, Chef Highway has become failed motels, failed restaurants, failed shopping centers, failed diners, tackle shops, hardware stores, pizza parlors and poboy joints. Shot out Falstaff swings in the wind. The veterans of foreign wars have shuttered their doors, as has the bingo parlor and the bowling alley. A motel where the Beatles allegedly stayed has been literally engulfed by the earth, its porches descending into the muck of the no longer hallowed ground. All that remains in this Dystopian landscape is NASA pumping coruscating clouds of white, orange and red steam and god knows what else into the night sky, all lit by tiers and cages of yellow and white labyrinths of industrial complex fenced off and guarded. And one is almost free from the tentacles of the city as you pass the Vietnamese refugee courtyards and the Vietnamese grocery stores and the wrecked cars from the dead Vietnamese teenagers that die by the handful drag racing on this mean highway.

For miles Gabe and his father ride through the walls of marsh grass and it seems they have the road mostly to themselves. There are three bridges that they must cross before they reach the hunting grounds and the first one is upon them, a narrow drawbridge flanked by trawling boats and the promise of leaving forever. Then a long stretch of blackness after you cross it, meandering through the neighborhood of fish-camps and each one has a clever name to set it apart from its neighbors and so We’re Spending the Kid’s Inheritance is hard by Hurricane Harbor which is adjacent to Mama’s Always Right and the shell shoulders are agleam with the headlamps of the car and god help the nutria that walks across the road for Gabe will not swerve, no sir, and so that rodent goes thump under the car, its last view made in Japan and the car keeps flying low to the ground and onto the second bridge, another drawbridge and this landscape is more remote with cypress swamps and a branch of the Little Pearl River and pirogues and sleeping rednecks one would be wise to not fuck with. And again you are jiving through the moonlit landscape of marsh grass and then the marsh is spread before you, blue lights and blue shadows on the silver-faced world and it is beautiful and then gone from sight and you round a big turn and the last bridge is ahead just past the grass-topped turrets of the old Spanish fort with its spiked cannons and its soft red brick walls and his father grabs the handle of the door and says watch that son of a bitch he’s hauling ass, a Chevrolet pickup truck bearing down the long narrow swing bridge over the Rigolets and on both sides are the unruly waters and above is a little booth where the Bridgeman sings to himself and the Chevrolet truck is increasing its share of the two lanes available and Gabe must be steady as a stone and let the car guide itself on this narrow bridge over moon-dappled waters and the truck is upon them and the driver has a cigarette glowing in his face and the broad white hood of and the silver bumper pass them and all is clear, they leave the bridge with a thump and the maw of the woods is 10,000 yards ahead.

Nice driving says his father. Whew.

The Hands of Editors and Publishers

It is over an hour before dawn. There’s Gabe drinking coffee in the kitchen. He takes it like his father, sweet with half and half. His father is standing on the patio smoking a cigarette, contemplating the plot of woods behind the house. It is a rare thing, this oblong of trees in a landscape of development, an ode to a family of warring siblings that cannot agree on a selling price. And so it remains a separate peace and good enough for a man raised in a small town to recall days of youth when one wandered into the woods when school let out in May and emerged in late August like some feral dog. And a man could ditch it all now, couldn’t he? Leave the wife (poor dear) zombified on valium and psychotherapy, and leave his youngest child, sweaty-headed slug a bed, and his oldest son, survivor of his second marriage and a constant source of bewildered pleasure and mnemonics as the boy’s existence reminds him of a wife and all she once was to him, yes leave it all and just go jungle, heart of darkness indeed, take one gun and 100 rounds of ammunition and a light jacket and a pack of cigarettes and a lighter and TP in case he got lucky and could take a shit. No, the woods by themselves would never do. What a man needed was a house in the woods. With a fireplace. And a cat. And a revolver on the side table tooled by his only friend Walter (‘I’m always polite’) Bates. And a bastard of a wind outside. And a glass of Benedictine. And a book, an old friend, Yeats or Joyce or Keats. And a strong door against a harsh and prostituted world. That would be good indeed to leave them all behind and head for the cabin in the woods. Let his legacy deal with itself. Perhaps the suitcase in the attic with the college decals and its contents of manuscripts might make its way Kafka-like into the hands of editors and publishers who would recognize him for the cenobite he’d always been in his heart, a follower and leader of no men but himself, a zealot for the religion of lazy. And they’d know, all of them, wife and children and mankind, what he’d always known and always seen and always been, bootstrapped out of the cotton fields and into the suburbs, Moses left stranded where the refuse is dumped and the fires are kept burning, a man truly in hell

Ahead of Its Time

Everything that hurt last night hurts much more this morning. He wants only to be warm and lay in the stiffness of victory, each crackle of the joints, each patch of bruised and broken skin a reminder of how good it feels to fight and how much better it feels to win. And for a moment he can remember a time when the only thoughts in the morning were that today might be the day that you’d finally get laid. It was Saturday and that meant that after the lawns were mowed and the cars were washed and the shed was cleaned out and the leaves were raked and the sidewalk hosed down and the driveway too until the entire universe seemed to be one wonderful world in which you had tamed all the edges of chaos and it shone, the cars, the sidewalks, the neatly edged lawn, the ring of white St. Augustine roots around the cedar tree, your father’s admonition in your ears not to cut too close or you’d kill it and now everything was done and it was time to shower off the sweat of yesteryear, the drain running with leaves and grass clippings and your head washed and smelling like jojoba or something and you shaved your teenage whiskers and then you admired yourself in the mirror and then you went to your room and clothed your nakedness. Looked at the poster on the wall of the supermodel and looked into the eyes that wanted you and you wanted them. Then you took your wallet and set of car keys and told your parents goodbye and assured them you would be home at the decided time and then out the door and into the night of driving around and maybe somebody knew some girls or a party and so if you were lucky you’d meet someone who wanted you and you wanted them and then.

You don’t have to go hunting if you don’t want to his father says.

No, I’ll go, says Gabe for he knows that his father is as helpless as an infant without him. It is he who must drive them if they are going anywhere and so he swims out of the seas of memory of what a Saturday night meant as recently as two months ago and puts sore feet on the floor and the body rises.

Gabe’s father touches his son on the arm. He’s a good strong boy. It pains a father’s heart to see him battered and bruised. It’s a terrible game, that football. People get crippled. People die. He watches those mutt Saints on the TV and wonders how any of them live from week to week or even play to play. He’s been to the boy’s game once, a heartbreaking loss to an all black school from the bottom of nowhere in Plaquemine Parish. God they hit each other like some type of feudal honor was at stake and perhaps there is something of those ancient instincts there. The warlike heart that must not be denied. Well hell, better to issue them shoulder pads and cleats than M-16’s and combat boots. And so the father, who has no aspirations for himself and therefore none for his sons other than that they should be happy, (the most mysterious of chimeras that any man might pursue), accepts his boy’s desire to butt heads and why not? The boy dreams of playing pro football which as likely as the father taking a spacewalk. Still, let the young dream. It is with a pang that he thinks of the time he told the boy he couldn’t be an astronomer. Surely the child was only in love with the word which speaks of Renaissance men and their naked minds exposing god for the false witness that he was. No, he told the boy about the mountain of mathematics an astronomer must scale and that settled the boy’s hash fast. Perhaps the father was subtly leading the child along the alternate path of writing. Even then are the seeds laid and no fruit falls far from any tree. Why else share all those great words, all that wonderful poetry if not to raise a child in the image of oneself, a lover of beautiful words, a leader of some movement far ahead of its time.

The Ill that Ails Them

The soft sound of classical music in the air, lending substance where before there was only thought. Thoughts can be problematical. Thoughts can unhinge the mind. Thoughts can produce more thoughts. Thoughts have a way of staying on the mind, heavy blankets, a zone of poison gas, an invisible hand. Thoughts seem to reside in the vitreous humor of each eye, images collected from the memory, images created by the febrile brain. Thoughts of darkness and evil and the polluting feeling of unwelcome hands reaching out to lay themselves upon you and rip off your raiment and discard your dignity and destroy their own final orb of frontal lobe executive empathy and then the body meets the body and the action truly begins. Her Y-shaped figure in the darkness and there is heat and fluids and savage tearing into the most sensitive of tissues and a coupling as violent as two dogs in rut and a ruthless pounding that produces an almost immediate and humiliating ejaculation and then it’s done like a killed creature, like man at the slaughter and it’s not over and will never be over and it’s sure as hell not over now for another wants his feast of fell, he too wants to rips and plunder and plunge and destroy and penetrate a young girl’s ass because that’s what she wanted, right, the little cocktease bitch, well who showed who, right? Who showed who what was up when that bitch got tore open and fucked in the ass and a mutherfucker needs to give himself a ribbon for that one, a prize, a red rose tattoo for bloodying up a black girl, right? Right? Isn’t that the way it went down? And where are they on an October night? Where are they under what stars? Do they think that no one will ever come for them, that no vengeance can find them? Can they be safe forever, undone by none, free to commit such rapine as they please at some future time? Perhaps they lay together these brothers from other mothers. It would right and good and correct for them to be in one another’s arms, cradling each another. It is what these horrible striplings require. The very act of their coupling together with a third person in between is just a substitute for what they really need, what will really kill the ill that ails them. Like every other rapist that ever lived, each of those young men in their Houston (or wherever) darkness is also a rape victim. In the terror of their years are equally paralyzing fears, memories of torn tissues and humiliation and hands that went where they wanted on their young and tender bodies. And so you rapist mutherfuckers wherever you are this is the last bit of pity anyone will ever allow themselves to have for you and your kind. In your own night with your own red sentinel and the air thick with strings you are forgiven for your trespasses as we ask others to forgive us for ours.

Wish

How was the game Gabriel? Did you win? Good, that’s very good. Say do you have the .38? Good. You didn’t have to use it I assume? A quick swab of the barrel would reveal whether you are telling the truth. I’m just kidding of course. I’m sure you would never do anything silly like wave a gun around in front of your friends. I just worry, that’s all. I worry about everything really. I worry that the cops will stop you and see the gun and think you’re some kind of criminal and shoot you. I worry that someone will break into the car and steal the gun and go kill someone with it. You know how it is. Too much time on my hands. Sitting here waiting for Agnes to come home. I worry until she’s here and then I worry until you’re here and then I stay awake worrying about other things, things I have no control over. Lebanon. The Russians. Kidnappings. Killer bees. It’s annoying. A few beers help of course. Not that Agnes can understand that. She’s always worried that I’ll drink too much and become abusive. Which has never happened and never will, I guarantee that. No, I’m the quiet kind of drinker. And what about you, Ugnaught? Would you like a beer? Would you grab me one please? They’re right there in the freezer but these old bones don’t feel like moving. I can have one or two more. I was reading that part of Ulysses again. I’m sure I shared that with you. If you don’t smoke, someone will smoke in your place. Good stuff. And how are you Ugnaught? Okay? Didn’t get too beat up this week, did you? That’s good. You look worried. Are you worried? Is life so hard for the Ugnaught? Well, all I can tell you about that is this: those problems that you have now will look like single spies indeed when you’re older. Hell, you’ll wish you had these problems again, believe you me.

He Knows

The victory party is at JJ’s house, a spacious Victorian uptown. After much drinking, Gabe takes Althea to the billiards room, locks the door and turns off the lights. Only the rays coming through the blinds from the house next door light their way. The party rages in all the rooms around them. People knock on the locked door and leave and others come and they knock and leave. Screams of delight. Shouting and laughter that goes round and round and merges with the talking until one cannot distinguish individual voices anymore, it’s all one cacophony and it rings the bells of madness, makes one wonder about and question their own thinking, their own sanity for if they are unable to distinguish the individual then how will they know that they haven’t been swallowed into the godhead, the great maelstrom of humanity passing off this plane and into what’s next pushing her harder and harder and her knees burn and her arms hurt and the sound cascades over her and music from three different stereos are playing around the house, something rock and roll out by the pool, Prince 1999 from upstairs and Run DMC very loud in the kitchen and it all rips into her and she is afraid and confused and drunk and she calls out stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. He stops. She curls into a fetal position shaking, weeping.

Where are they? she says. Where are they? Where are those guys?

Gabe doesn’t say a word. He just hugs her shaking body. He doesn’t have to ask her what guys she means. He knows.

The Way to Play Football

A mediocre football team traveled on an October night down to St. Bernard to play a team even more desperate than themselves and it could be won but it required more than so called fundamentals, it required heroes, players who might later be named Small School Player of the Week, players like Maginnis. The St. Bernard Eagles were about to score a touchdown and extend a three point lead to nine but it was Maginnis plucking the quarterback’s errant pitch out of the air and there was Maginnis in full stride, clunky pads on his arms like some retard escaped from the hospital where he’d been locked against harming himself and Maginnis outran the mob behind him and he scored and the bastard made his first extra point of the season giving Franklin a four point lead with two minutes left to play in the game. And so it comes down to this: St Bernard has reached the Ben Franklin ten yard line. A touchdown wins. They have time for one last play. Coach says watch the big boy and everyone knows who he means, that big fullback who has been running over them all night. The ball is snapped and the Eagle quarterback sets up and Maginnis blitzes him and the quarterback flicks the ball to his fullback who makes the catch and turns up-field and he’s got one man to beat to the end zone and that man is Gabe Doucette who has tracked the big galoot the entire time and is now flying across the gridiron to make the tackle. The fullback makes no attempt to juke him, it is simply immovable object meets overwhelming force and when the two young men collide there is a crack so loud that people in the stands sit up and the fullback lunges for the goal but he is staggering from the force of the blow and so it is like dreaming where you forget how to move your legs and cemented like that to the turf of his home field JJ knocks him out of bounds. The final horn blows. The game is over. Coach spots Gabe standing near the goal line aimlessly staring into the middle distance. He hollers for him to line up and shake hands with the opposing team. As Gabe stumbles past him Coach grabs his arm and says that’s the way to play football son.

Ah, now the bus is Pandemonium. Sweaty equipment clogs the seats as the young men hang out the windows and sing the fight songs. In the parking lot the straggled crowd ambles to their automobiles. In the distance are the towers of light, great incandescent totems shining their glare upon an empty field. Untold insects cluster and hurl themselves into their finality. A young woman walks alongside the bus, a girl in blue jeans and a Franklin letter jacket. She is exceptionally pretty this girl, slim with petite breasts and a small cute butt. She peers up at the windows of the bus. Someone taps Gabe on the shoulder and says Althea is looking for you. The young woman looks up at him and smiles, her brown eyes shiny with love. She waves and Gabe resists the urge to wave back. She frowns and waves again and this time Gabe is sure this beautiful young woman is waving to him so he waves back. She smiles and purses her lips and says I love you, then turns and walks away with one last backward glance. Someone on the bus whistles. More singing breaks out. Everywhere we go people wanna know who we are so we tell them we are the Falcons the mighty, mighty Falcons. The players are a dirty bunch in their bloody white jerseys and Gabe looks down and sees his own blood mixed with the dirt on his thigh pads. And the singing goes on as the bus pulls out of the parking lot leaving behind the stadium and its klieg lights. Gabe has no idea why everyone is happy or who that girl even was. Dr. Dex is sitting by his side holding ice to his arm.

Did we win?

Dr. Dex looks at Gabe. You all right?

I don’t know. Did we win?

Yeah man, we won.

We won? You’re sure we won?

Yeah man, I’m sure we won.

Why doesn’t it feel like we won?

The Parish

On all sides is the sorrow of St. Bernard Parish, the refineries and chemical plants cheek by jowl with Rocky’s Oyster House and Tammy’s Beauty Parlor and the elementary schools and the cops and the firemen and the orange groves and the fisheries are all contaminated by the refined gasoline and god knows what is produced in the chemical plants and so whomever comes across the parish line knows immediately where they are by the smell alone. The Parish, people say and everyone knows what you mean. The Parish is bumping on a Friday night though. You better know it. It’s time to pull the old Mustang or Camaro out of the garage or off the rack and onto the streets for some good time cruising. Crank up the music. Find some Zeppelin. And the driver of the muscle car is rewarded by the opening riffs of Black Dog and it's enough to make a mutherfucker wanna jump out of the car and shoot ten people or run a school bus off the road and kill fifty fucking football jocks. Fucking jocks. They claim all the hot bitches and they act like the biggest jerks and it doesn’t matter whether the team sucks or not because they’re still the biggest dudes and the teachers want to keep their jobs so they make sure the football players pass their sorry-ass class. And screw those guys. Jock head shit birds. The driver of the muscle car reaches for the ashtray and extracts a fat joint rolled in a Zigzag and he lights up and poof the air fills with acrid goodness and he passes it to his buddy in the passenger seat and they both look up at the bus where one of the football players is watching them. Suckers, says the driver of the muscle car and he gives the football player the finger. He and his buddy laugh and hit the number again and Zeppelin is crushing it, JimmyfuckingPage man, and the weed is nasty and makes you cough your nuts out but mixed with a few cold ones it’s all good and so let’s give those loser bitches on the bus the finger again-fuck you losers- and then let’s get moving down Judge Perez Drive because the light has changed and you can pass the bus (Ben-Franklin written on the side) and haul ass through the next yellow light turning red and check the mirror for cops, no cops, and so yes, yes, yes put petal to metal and let it out, Friday night, open her up and Zeppelin rules and weed, even bad weed rules, and cheap-ass beer that you jacked from your old man is goodness magnified and you put the joint to your lips and you have OZZY tattooed your knuckles and you rule you rule the world, dude man, you rule the mutherfuckin’ world.

Make Me Clean

The guardrails are low and the young men ride high and so when they peer through the windows at the horizon and the firmament it seems as if they too could be one with the birds and fly over the marshy landscape flat as an anvil all the way out to the sea. Before them is the watery nothing of St. Bernard Parish. Behind them is Orleans Parish only slightly less catastrophic. The waterway oozes, plied by pleasure craft and the Coast Guard. A tanker steams and fumbles along the broad channel slow as an old man inexorably arriving at his next task. Oh to be young and free. Oh to go back to a time when you knew so little and wanted so much. Those will be reversed but the young can’t know that. Someday you will know too much and want too little. But not today, today you know just enough to make you dangerous. And there is the western sky, a red crab nebula consumed by the coal black Earth. There is the future. But what if one could head east into that maw of purple blackness and travel at great speed and reach the sun and pass it and orbit the Earth and pass it again until you had gone back in time to late July. A Saturday. Compelled by nothing but bad judgment and the instinct of a lawless man you would have taken the only letter she wrote you from Houston and you would have smelled that perfume and then torn the superscription from the envelope and there it was, you had the address and then you took your Smith and Wesson from the drawer and you went out to your father’s car parked at the curb and you got in and drove all afternoon and arrived late at night but right on time, the party would be in full swing and there would be people dancing in the living room and people smoking pot outside and people in the kitchen getting drunk and it would be loud as a mutherfucker, a hundred voices all raised in exaltation and no one would know you and no one would care. It would be a party of the first order, an ephemeral awakening, knowing that tomorrow is the death of today and so we must go on, on, on relentlessly living this life because if we don’t then someone will live it in our place. And you’d have the six inch blue steel magnum tucked in your jeans with your t-shirt hanging over it. You’d look around until you found the rec room. Off the kitchen like an extra pantry door. It’s locked. This means you’ve arrived too late. You knock. You knock louder but the music is bumping and someone just screamed because something was spilled on them and a bottle smashes and a beer can crushes and you cannot wait any longer and you shoulder open the door and descend the stairs and reach for the string light bulb hanging in the air like an idea and you pull the string, flash, and you see it all, her in her nudity and they in their rapine, exposures exposed, and you lift the gun hand, take no breath at all just unleash fate, bang, bang, bang, bang and then you take her from the floor and escort her upstairs through the chaos you have unfurled and out to the car and then behind the wheel, you fly out into the night like a dying insect on its last pass at the lamps. And along the way you will stop at a cheap motel and get a room and then you’ll enter that room and turn on the cranky faltering air conditioner and you’ll wait while she showers and she’ll wait while you shower and then you’ll come to bed, turn low the light and she’ll lay in your arms and say make me clean. And you’ll do that. You’ll make her clean.

A Fickle and Ever-Changing Thing

If he were to signal the driver and get off right here and walk home what might he find? His father sitting on the patio with a cat on his lap. Where might his father’s mind be at that moment? Loneliness eating his soul. Nurse the drink until the drink is done. Pet the cat until it’s time to make another drink. And wait for the phone to ring. A phone call from a hotel bar. Business. His wife is discussing business with her business partner and he’d just be bored and frankly she gets a bit embarrassed when her husband is in his cups for he begins quoting the Classics and he’s quoting the Bible and he knows something about everything and he thinks he knows more than other men and frankly when he’s been drinking he’s a fucking bore and so that’s why he’s exiled to the Elba of the back patio on a Friday night. Gabe’s father sets the cat on the patio and the glass on the ground and walks to the edge of his yard where the woods begin, this small patch of trees that gives a man the illusion that there is another world besides this one and he unzips his fly and pulls it out and lets go, the stream of great relief and perhaps the feeling that all is sufficient unto the day. His mother used to say that and she was no great believer in anything except man’s need to annihilate other men and yet she too had a grip on the godliness within her and wanted to believe that night was no time to be anything less than at peace. But what might a sinner man do if he’d had just enough vodka? While the golden stream spins out before him he thinks of the possibilities open to a man with the frontal lobes of his heredity and the legacy of his familial, all the murderers and slave traders and vile stuff. Talk in his youth of shotgun blasts and dead men in a heap on the side of the road and great uncles fleeing to Texas and beyond and even one with his son’s name, a Gabriel from another century riding out on a train called sanctuary and heading towards a grave called tomorrow. Yes, oh yes what might this old Doucette do into his 5^th vodka (but if asked will only admit to two) on this Friday night with one son armored up for the basest of all sports and the other son watching the TV and the child too young and spoiled to be any help for a drunken middle aged man who suspects that his wife, the child’s dear mother, may be screwing around. Dare he think it? Why not? Por que no? Femina semper mutable et varium. Woman is a fickle and ever-changing thing. Nothing in this shitty world would surprise him anymore. And so if the phone rings and he answers and she says she’s at the Kit Kat Lounge in the Holiday Inn on Chef Menteur Highway then by god he’s not gonna say a word, hell no, just say okay dear real sweet like an old fashioned TV show and then hang up the phone, call United Cab, order a taxi and then he’ll get two guns because you get more with a kind word and two guns than you do with just a kind word and one gun. He walks into the house and into the bedroom and removes his Colt Python .357 Magnum from the sock drawer. Oh son a man could break out of the pillory with this fucker and then heaven help the mariner. But no, not the Colt. For it’s the king of handguns but it’s the king of misfires as well. The rich son of a bitch. Himself he means. How the hell did he get this close to perfection that he has the gun of his dreams and two good boys and the gun misfires every forty rounds and while his boys are still good his wife is probably sleeping with a Negro? There. He said it. So screw the Colt and take the Smith and Wesson .357 Model 686 that resembles his son’s gun in every way except his is stainless and the grips are blonde. A beautiful gun. And completely reliable. And so the cab is coming no? And he still must gather his cigarettes and lighter. His wallet with money. His eyeglasses. His house keys. Okay. He needs a second gun. Something smaller. Perhaps an automatic. He’s still got the old Titan .25, a cheap Italian but reliable yes and plenty lethal from five feet away. Which is as close as he intends to get. Because this is how it will go down. He’ll take the cab to the Kit Kat Lounge and he’ll walk in and he’ll see them sitting at the bar talking and his wife will be smoking and each will have a drink, his wife will probably have whitefuckingwine and who cares what her Negro drinks, no one, and then he’ll see it, the giveaway as portentous as Desdemona’s handkerchief, but not a leaving rather a caught and held moment, his wife’s foot touching her business partner’s shin. Then his wife stands and says what are you doing with that gun for Christ’s sake and in one thousand one, one thousand two, she’ll know what he’s doing with that gun, boom, and the impact will throw her over her stool and onto the floor dead as a mackerel. And then he will point the weapon at himself and shoot a hole in his heart. Bang, dead he’ll fall and dead he’ll lay on the shocked and outraged carpet of the Kit Kat Lounge, his wife’s blood and his mingling on the faded paisley print.

Gabe’s father returns his Smith and Wesson to its sleeping place among his t-shirts, returns the Titan to the handkerchief drawer. The cat wants a snack and why not, it's a good cat, a very good cat. Night is almost upon him. No phone call and isn’t that all for the better. In fact he’s tempted to take the receiver off the hook but what if there’s an emergency? He puts some wet food on a paper plate and places it on the kitchen floor. Meow and the animal eats. Useless creatures and yet he loves this one with the pull of the stony Moon to the uncaring Earth. Neither can survive without the other though to truly merge them into one entity would of course destroy them both. A man loves his cat. A cat loves its snacks. He makes another drink that he’ll never admit to and then steps outside, a cigarette-lit universe from which a man can no longer flee nor does he want to. It isn’t his destiny to wander. It is his destiny to endure. He raises his glass. Salud.

Home Run

The big Cummins diesel grunts and labors like a ship floundering in high seas and each person is silent save Coach and his assistants who quietly talk among themselves. For the other souls aboard this vessel through today and all their tomorrows and all their yesterdays it may as well be the voyage of the damned who endured training and persecution in order to put themselves and their belief system on the line and now they know that they are about to be wheeled to the front, sent against the enemy and no matter how they felt yesterday they’ll only feel this way today. Each young man onboard that school bus knows that today and tonight are his greatest chances for fame and each desires in his heart to be anonymous one more day. And so they pray. And they put headphones on and sing softly. And some stare out the window at the uptown homes under old oaks and they pass the streetcar clanging and a ubiquitous Popeye’s chicken shack and the majesty of the Notre Dame seminary dominating the landscape like a manorial home built in a time when escutcheons were defended to the death and the only game was war and the fruit truck is selling pumpkins for it is autumn and pumpkin season is here and though it’s still hot as hell during the noon hours the evening brings a transformation of cool air and less voracious insects and the promise of fall even as Promise itself dies with the leaves. The bus jumps on the Interstate and heads across a landscape of zeroes for that is what Eisenhower’s Big Idea has done to a hundred American cities, cut a swath through homes and businesses owned primarily by minorities and extinguished them with a buyout and left in its wake an overpass miles long, a foul, cage-clattered zone of sleeping, homeless wretches and auto impounds. So ride, ride, ride the 10 which runs from Santa Monica California to Jacksonville Florida leaving nothing so much as what a conquered army implants upon a conquered people, evidence of power, a willingness to use cash for diplomacy and a remembrance of gutters past. Over the spires of churches that rise above the neighborhoods below like a pike amidst a clatter of warriors Gabe sees the draining, emptying blue sky. Night will descend as it does each day more powerful and awe -inspiring than a simple sunrise which is clearly the universe giving birth like some mongrel unable to help herself from becoming pregnant. Night is the greatness that is to be worshiped. These are the times when god is you and you are god, when He has all your memories and you have all His potential. And think then too of all the nights that have passed. Think of the summer night not so long ago when your sweet girl lay down in darkness and awoke in great fear. Might a body have the courage to recall where he was on such a night? Might a young man of no particular belief call upon the Mysteries to help him remember? He might do the math, less algebra than sums, simple sums. She came home a week after the attack that occurred on a Saturday night and so on through the formula like one were working out Fermi’s Last Theorem of one’s personal destiny until you are sure that the night in question was not so different from many nights in late July. You were with another girl. A girl named Sue from a different school with braces, maybe she was Spanish or something else, dark hair, dark eyes, quiet the way a girl should be and her as inexperienced as you but willing to try new things if one knew what one were doing. And you didn’t. She probably mistook your slow pace for that of a kindly lover when indeed you were scared shitless. Would she let you do this? Yes. And would she let you do that? Yes. And this? Yes. And that? Yes, yes. And so you advanced base to base, time after time, date after date, sometimes at the World’s Fair which had transformed the warehouse district into a pimpery of underage alcoholics and sometimes on the couch of a friend’s house and sometimes in JJ’s swimming pool, a brick grotto under descending mimosa where swimsuits were as relevant as golf clubs. And now you are staring out the window at mother night and there’s a sliver in the sky of sister moon and you are very aware of where you were the night that they grabbed Althea and she had time to say one word’ Gabe’ before they beat her down and raped her. You were somewhere rounding third and praying sweet Jesus for the home run.

The Steak

That cow most likely had a fat and easy life and then one day met her maker, a man with an electric device in his hand and BAM the cow was on its knees and dying was already its condition and the cow had no regrets, no films to finish or books to write or stories to tell. If it bred it loved and if it didn’t then it didn’t and it simply was and then it wasn’t. And its meat was removed by men in armor and knives in the bloody halls of a slaughterhouse and god help you if those Mexicans got down and started swinging, knives flying, they cut, cut, cut and never asked questions later. And from the carnage of an average day comes a hunk of average meat and it makes it to a Safeway and then it makes it into a shopping cart and then it comes home. Frozen for a time being and forgotten more or less among the Ore-Ida and the peas and the ice cubes and the waffles and the unnamable and the unnamed spilled Slurpees and half-eaten Pushup Sticks congealing into waxy, oily masses that spread like pools of pahoehoe lava. Then one day the meat is remembered and fetched from the freezer and placed in a sink and the cow though dead and its innards fed to other cows and so they are dreaming about it and its cud-chewing ways, yes the cow lives again, softening by the hour until at last it is unwrapped from the white butcher paper and lain across a young woman’s face, for she has a magnificent shiner. The steak on her face is speechless but the young woman is not and cannot be speechless. Nevertheless there are only so many things she wants to say. So it is rather what she doesn’t say. She does not tell her aunt and cousin that she was raped in the rec room. Perhaps the combination of fear and shame and trauma and after all the sense that she somehow brought this upon herself the way her stepfather intimated that she brought him on herself. So she says she walked into a wall. Whether she is believed fully or not isn’t said. Moreover there is no steak available for the torn vagina and anus. No cow can save her from the pain and swelling down there and no enzymes can ease her fear that she might be pregnant and no beefsteak will ever be able to get into the corridors of memory and wipe them clear and all the rivers of all the major continents and some of the minor ones too will never clear her of the feeling that somehow she managed to bring another terrible thing upon herself. And what to do? How to carry around a piece of beefsteak on the mind? How the poor child felt like she was full to the edges with this terrible thing and so at last it had to come out. That must be the reason. Gabe can think of nothing else, no other reason why, it just had to come out, today of all days and all times as if there would ever be a good day or better time.

What Becomes of Inter-racial Dating

Althea hears similar language in band for the director is an Italian given to the frustrated outbursts of his profession. However her mind is often on other things. Why not? She’s a senior and basically her real life has already begun. Each day at noon she and a classmate depart school and head downtown to the Hyatt-Regency where they change into the garb of hotel employees (concierge and front desk) earning their class credit and a little pay. It’s exhilarating though the work is taxing and one must be on their feet and best behavior at all times. There are certain responsibilities in being young and gifted and black not the least of which is that one must not act like one of those project niggers. She smiles. She’s more apt to use that word than Gabe who strenuously objects when she says something like those black-ass niggers piss me off with their ghetto talk, you can’t understand a word they’re saying. Yes it ain’t easy being black anywhere and New Orleans is no different. She’s always known it and entering the work force brings it home again and again. Is she there for the pleasure of white men and black men and to serve white women, to be degraded at the hands of suspicious and preternatural black women? It ain’t easy. It ain’t easy being pretty. It ain’t easy having little titties and a petite butt. It ain’t easy having weirdly long legs and arms and a short compact torso. It ain’t easy being the keeper of secrets and that’s why she’s here waiting for Gabe.

Coach is finished and the cafeteria screen door busts open, two dozen hungry adolescents en route to burgers and grease and sugar and Gabe walks out and sees her and smiles. Althea says can we go for a walk.

Sure.

Gabe takes Althea’s arm and they walk across Carrollton over the streetcar tracks down Hampson Street past the ice cream stand and the video game parlor that sprang up like an overnight mushroom and the little shops that sell rich white women whatever their minds desire and they reach a small park one block in dimension with a serpentine sidewalk and a half dozen wrought-iron benches and this is where she leads her young man so handsome, the quarterback, a captain, his hair, his eyes, his soft manner and shyness, he’s a boy, acts like a boy, plays boy games. They sit. The park is empty save a pair of middle aged white women power-walking the sidewalks passing the interracial couple, looks on the white ladies’ faces of mild shock, perhaps envy, perhaps muted outrage, like seeing someone pissing in public. Who knows? Who cares? Love conquers all and can contain all secrets. Love sent the man to the moon, love brought him home again and love could have kept him there. Love will endure.

I have to tell you something.

She pulls herself in close to his armpit under his jacket where it’s safe. She tells him about how it happened. No not the deal with her stepfather. Another terrible thing. Perhaps worse. She tells about a party towards the end of the summer at her aunt’s house in Houston. A big blowout and no adults to mind the kids and the music was thumping and the liquor was flowing and it was on like popcorn. Except she didn’t feel like partying, she was sad and lonely so she went downstairs to the rec room and turned off the lights and lay down on the ratty sofa and put on the headphones and turned on her favorite record by Earth Wind and Fire and she had Reasons going loud, too loud to hear, and then she realized that she had unexpected company down there in the rec room with the lights out and the door locked and the music bumping upstairs, two-thousand zero, zero party over oops out of time, and she fought back and hit one guy in the nuts and hurt him bad but another one punched her in the face and she knew it was over. Three guys but one decided he couldn’t go through with it and he left. The other two stayed. And what did she say before they tore into her? She said ‘Gabe!’

She buries her face in his chest as the white ladies make another pass and the looks on their faces warn him that this is what becomes of interracial dating.

Famous

The cafeteria windows are covered with steel mesh. Sunlight streams through in a weave. Down the Green Hall one hears lockers slam, shouts, tattered references to conversations. The serious students are departing for the day with all their books. The less serious are leaving with nothing but their plans for the weekend. Some will meet the challenges of Benjamin Franklin Senior High School for the Gifted and Talented and overwhelm it with Herculean efforts. Others will falter and die like ships in the horse latitudes. Pigeons coo above the cafeteria. A streetcar passes on Carrollton Avenue, its characteristic crackle, whirr and boom as it hits pavement then screeches to a halt across from the school. Coach has a question for the team.

Who wants to be famous?

No one raises their hand. This must be some kind of trick. Coach repeats the question and still no one says a word.

What about you, Maginnis? You got a big mouth. I’ll bet you wanna be famous.

No sir.

No. What about you Jackson? Your parents are Hollywood writers. I’ll bet you wanna be famous too.

JJ says he doesn’t care about any of that crap.

Coach lays those eyes on Gabe and says what about you Doucette? You like to walk around with your shirt off. I’ll bet you wanna be famous.

Gabe considers the question. Famous. Who doesn’t want fame? An assurance that you won’t disappear. That your words or deeds will be recalled. That you’ll be understood for something more than a gigolo of life’s pleasure. Yes, who would not want that? Beats anonymous.

Sure. I’d like to be famous.

Coach smiles broadly, gazing over his agents of destruction as if to say, see there are fools who walk the earth who look and smell like men but they are not men, they are the infamous and the proud and the extravagant and the profligate and they are not of us or with us and so must be rooted out so that all and sundry may see their foolish example and profit by it.

You do huh? You wanna be famous? Well, I’ll tell you what you gotta do. It’s real simple. Lose this game tonight. Lose this game tonight to a team that is 0-23 in its last 23 football games and son I guarandamntee you will be famous. You’ll make the national news. Hell I believe you will make the USA Today. How about that? That sound good Doucette? With your sunglasses and your straw in your mouth. You got your pose all ready for the photographers. There it is. It’ll look good in the papers, make ya mama proud.

Coach pauses. He can’t keep up with himself. He’s half red neck, half Mick and 100% hard ass but he’s also a pedant in the original meaning of the word, displaying his learning via a calm and friendly demeanor in the halls of the school that belie the savage he can be when he’s lashed you to the blocking sled or sentenced you to an afternoon of vicious and pointless calisthenics. His dichotomy is the dichotomy of mankind and it is on display any time one wants to engage with him. He wants what we all want-fame-and he despises what we all despise, infamy.

Fundamentals he says at last. It is and always will be about fundamentals. The team that tackles the best and blocks the best will want it the most and 99 out of 100 times will win. That’s it. Get your nose in there when they got the ball and knock their goddamn lights out. Get on your blocks and stay on your blocks until you drive that bastard into hell itself. And if you get in the end zone act like you’ve been there before. Ya understand?

Yessir.

In the Green Hall

In the Green Hall, a locker-lined corridor that leads to the cafeteria, moments before the classes change and so like a film where the extras crouch off-camera waiting for the go and then suddenly it’s been given and the emptiness of the green concrete floor is replaced with a hundred bodies jostling to get in their lockers and wet heads emerge from the locker rooms having completed first period physical education, girls with their makeup sealed onto their skin like the masque of a buried pharaoh and freshmen staggering under loads that would tax a Sherpa struggle out of the cafeteria carrying band instruments and it is as if the zoo had been set free, screams of delight and disappointment and a hundred conversations and books fall with a slap and young men slap dap and the very cool say nothing but they too have a sound, their wants, their hopes have the sound of underwater conversation bubbling at the edge of understanding, strangely familiar and yet completely alien. The wheelchair-bound student cruises slowly through the crowd of entering and exiting students, smiles wryly and pinches a little ass if he can and the girls all reach down to hug and kiss him. He’s handsome, the wheelie man in a striped oxford button down and faded jeans, new white sneakers. He was tall when he could stand on his own, six feet or more and he’d have been the big tight end that the football team needs, soft hands and above average speed and his high school experience would have been coterminous with that of his peers, running around, a dash of glory, some backseat poontang and then off to the world. But no. There are dangers in shallow waters a Zen master might say. A simple dive into a river might result in a catastrophe. A broken back and dead below the waist and how will you explain that when you get home? The suffering of the broken man is not for himself and how he has ruined his future, it is the immense and total realization of the power of a single soul to alter the fate of others and the broken man can live with what god hath wrought because He hath wrought it through the broken man and his own actions and the broken man will face god in his chair and they’ll have it out, man to god and god to man until the man is god and the god is man and there will be nirvana or death but not both but it is what the broken man has done to his mother and father that will kill him dead in his bed if it kills him at all, the ultimate disappointment perhaps for the broken man knows he has killed his family as dead as a doornail and he finally has the knowledge of how we can truly change others and so therefore the world.

And as Gabe stands there at his locker swapping one notebook for another Althea slips up behind him in a coil of perfume and places her fingers across his eyes and puts full lips to his ear and says guess who. And he (who is white) turns around and kisses her (who is black) amidst the crowd of red, white, black, yellow high school humanity and some are this and some are that and each is allowed their belief system but Gabriel and Althea don’t care, they’re 17 years old and this is love.

Algebra Reject

The algebra class is already hunched over their sheets of purple mimeographed problems, brows furrowed, hands clenched around yellow sticks, those same sticks in mouths, ears, scratching the face, neck, back. The pimply horde. Mostly juniors except a couple sad sacks like Gabriel Doucette, algebra reject. He’s late but it doesn’t matter. He didn’t study. He takes off his jacket and drapes it on the chair. The clock ticks. Sweat forms in his pits, runs down the length of his arm, drips onto the desk. A thing that began two years ago has now been bookended.

In three more years John’s grandmother will be six times as old as Jack was last year. If Jack’s present age is added to his grandmother’s present age…

Saturday afternoon. October of his sophomore year. The football team gathered at school readying themselves for the night’s contest against the easiest opponent on their schedule, New Orleans Academy, and even the greenest players knew they’d see some playing time. Perhaps that was the root of Miguel Champ’s decision to risk the wrath of the coaches and disappointment of the team for it was 330 and then 430 and then 445 and the bus left at 515 and Miguel Champ, starting tailback and inside linebacker still had not arrived. Phone calls were made to an apartment in the Desire Housing Project but no one answered and no one would have known anything about Miguel’s’ whereabouts even if they had answered for he was a young black male who walked the earth at his peril and what can be given can be taken away.

Coach summoned Marty Love to his office and Marty emerged looking like a prisoner who’d been given five minutes to clean his cell, write a letter home and then face the hangman. The underclassmen were gathered together talking about when they thought they might get in and at what position and then Marty Love was among them with that half sick smile. I’m starting he said. Coach told me I’m starting. I’ve never started a game. Four years. Never started. I’m starting tonight. The young men clapped his shoulder and he awkwardly slapped dap with the black guys who took the time to correct him. Five minutes later Miguel Champ walked up. He had no explanation for himself though the black guys gave him knowing looks and talked closely among themselves speculating as to what and who and where and how.

The bus left with Miguel Champ in his usual spot in the back but no one spoke to him because to do so would have concatenated the speaker with Miguel Champ who ran like Zephyr and played football hard and fast and he was cool and black and shaved his head and strutted when he walked and every man wanted to be him and all the girls wanted to do him and he walked the Green Hall like a god, an aureole of young women following in his wake.

Josh, Sunny and Andy do a job in the ratio of 1:3:3. They earn a total of $364. What percentage would Andy get after dividing the money according to the ratio of the work done?

Marty Love looked like an old skinny gnome, all gristle and nerdyness rolled into the pimpled, pale corpus of a forever roll-player. Loyal as a dog, relentless in his hustle, notorious for carrying the largest practice dummy and the biggest water jug. He and Big Brown were up front doing jumping jacks and stretches and Miguel Champ was hidden in the deepest ranks with the freshmen. It looked bizarre, Marty Love puny among the big linemen, bug-eyed and clumsy as a man emerging from a deep sleep.

John has fifty stamps. Some are worth fifteen cents and some are worth 20. If their value is $9.50, how many of each kind does John have?

The game began. In their dark green jerseys the Benjamin Franklin offense assembled in their huddle. Across from them wearing white silks trimmed in red and blue were the NOA cadets. The quarterback began hollering something towards the sideline. He needed something. He needed another player. Where was the tailback? Where was Marty Love? The Coach yelled his name but it was too late and the quarterback had to call a timeout one minute into the game. Marty Love faced the Coach.

What are you doing son? Why aren’t you out there?

I don’t know. Miguel is here and I thought-

Don’t think son. It’s not healthy. Do you want to play?

Yessir.

No you don’t.

Yessir!

You don’t want to play.

Yessir!!

You want to play?

Yessir!!!

Then get your ass out there and play.

As Marty Love took off for the huddle, Coach told the quarterback to give him the ball until he scored.

John drove for three hours at a rate of fifty miles per hour and for two hours at 60 miles per hour. What was his average speed for the whole journey?

By the end of the first half it was clear Marty Love wouldn’t score a touchdown. Holes were opened for him and he went through them at a decent clip but the Cadets hit him high, low and often. They’d prepared in fear all week for # 33, Miguel Champ, and instead they were facing #32, his biological opposite and so they took their fear out on that buck-fifty white boy and Marty limped off the field at the end of each drive looking worse and worse, jersey torn, bloody elbow, bloody lip, blood smeared on his thigh pads. Coach asked him how he liked playing and he said he liked it all right and Coach looked at all the young bucks and said good because that’s what playing feels like. Meanwhile the Ben Franklin passing offense rang the points up like a carnival event and the defense took two fumbles back for touchdowns and John French returned a punt for another touchdown and by half time it was a lot to a little and still Marty Love could not score.

Coach told Miguel Champ he was sending him in with the second half kickoff team and he jogged out and took his place at the end of the line and he was as serious as a young man can be who is not partaking of war. His pants were snow white and his jersey was perfectly clean and he was ready when the referee blew the whistle and the Falcon kicker connected with the football and sent it down the field in a low tumbling career and those who might have been watching would have been witness to something akin to the race against Atalanta, the swift and beautiful girl of Greek myth who offered herself to the man who outran her and death was their reward for second place. And there was Miguel Champ in full thrust and there was Miguel Champ untouched closing in on the prize, the hapless NOA return man who had only time to gather the ball and take a few steps and here came Atalanta around the corner and Miguel lit into that boy and lifted him off his feet and carried him some distance as both sidelines and the tiny crowd in the stands and the Franklin band all made the same sound, oooh, that’s what they all said and then Miguel Champ came down on top of him and it took several minutes and the help of two teammates to get the boy’s dazed and busted body off the field.

A class of twenty-five students took an algebra test. Ten students had a mean of eighty. The other students had a mean of 60. What is the mean score of the entire class?

Coach told Miguel Champ to stay in on defense and a few plays later he forced a fumble. Coach told him to stay on the field and he sent in the rest of the offensive starters for what would probably be their last series. Coach grabbed his quarterback’s facemask and said give the ball to Miguel until he scores. The first play was a toss sweep and Miguel made the corner and was gone, no one could catch him, no one would, and it was a sight to see his legs moving so fast and his hands like blades and he was running away from the ghetto and towards something that will never be felt again or even understood while it is inside you and in front of you is the simple and intractable feeling of endless youth and possibility. And though the NOA Cadets made an effort to pursue him, no one chased Miguel Champ harder than Marty Love who missed his block and found himself running untouched down the field, racing to beat Miguel Champ to the end zone and he was almost at Miguel’s side when the tailback from the Desire Housing Project stopped at the one half yard line, looked back, saw Marty Love running up and handed him the ball. Marty Love carried it into the end zone. The referee raised his hands. Touchdown.

Gabe stares at his algebra test remembering the back of the school bus, the black guys singing and slapping dap, the white guys grinning and trying to be cool, O’Neal the fullback chewing dip and spitting into a cup and the young bucks had gotten some playing time and hadn’t shown their ass and so they could feel that someday they too would be in the back of the bus with their shirts wet with sweat and all the talk would be about what they had done and how they’d done it. And the black guys were jiving with Miguel Champ because he’d been messing around with a girl when he should have been at school suiting up and how Miguel Champ couldn’t help himself, he was right where he wanted to be and so there he was in some hot gal’s bed, buck naked, when her daddy come home. Holy shit and grab your drawers and what not and out the window before he sees your black ass up in that bed and Lord knows the man carries a gun 24/7, sleeps with it under the pillow, he’s a hard ass old school Negro whom one does not lightly fuck with. And then run down an alley, balls and dick bouncing, the one-legged dressing dance, shirt inside out and no socks, just shoes and zipper and belt open you run your ghetto-fast ass to the bus stop and take that to the streetcar line and then race the streetcar thirty blocks to the steps of Benjamin Franklin Senior High.

Good thing you didn’t get up in that ass says Big Brown. Her step daddy would have shot you for sure. Then Marty would have never scored.

Miguel Champ smiles, says nothing.

Gabe knows this story inside and out. He was there as a witness in the school bus and on the sideline and later he will come to learn whom the girl was. A night of many beers and long gazes at the groined and starry sky.

It was Althea said Maginnis.

My Althea said Gabe.

Your Althea said Maginnis. You know she used to date Miguel?

Yeah, I guess I knew that.

And some time after that Gabriel and Althea are talking and she tells how Miguel Champ did indeed leap out the window to his freedom but she had been caught and no one was fooled, her father or rather stepfather saw that ghetto nigger running out of his house and he raised hell with his stepdaughter and raised hell with the girl’s mother and a punishment was decided upon, a month-long grounding the following summer. She’d be given chores or a project and her stepfather decided he’d throw out the bed she’d tried to get laid in and have her build bunk beds for herself and her younger sister. Cutting wood, hammering nails, dusty, dirty, sweaty work for a slender teenage girl. All the time watching her, knowing what she was up to, knowing what she wanted and he meant to give it to her in the bed she’d make herself when it was done and the grounding was over and the sister was out and the mother was at work, driven there by the stepfather who didn’t allow any of his women to drive, and then he returned home to the house where he hung out most of the day and he entered quietly and Althea was still asleep, sleeping late was her only vice and he slipped open his jeans and climbed into the bed.

Gabe puts on his jacket, takes the test up to the teacher’s desk and lays it face down. There isn’t a single mark on it, not even his name.

How’d you do?

Piece of cake.

With a Dead King

As he approaches the station wagon Gabe glances around the park. Nobody here but us chickens. Closer and closer until he can see his reflection in the station wagon’s long side glass. Standing behind him is an old black man in a dark suit. Gabe stops and turns around. Nothing. He looks back at his reflection. The old black man is regarding him with quiet and profound scrutiny. He shakes his head ‘no’ then fades away. Gabe turns around. Nothing. The park is as empty as a gourd. Even the squirrels are bearing no witness nor is there the caw of crow or the coo of pigeon or the whoop of crane. The silence of a dead kingdom with a dead king.

Gabe steps up to the passenger window and knocks on the glass. The stepfather looks up slightly startled, a sheaf of developed photographs in his lap. He rolls down the window and says ain’t you supposed to be in school?

Gabe regards those green eyes, waxy tan skin dotted with moles and freckles, that face, that head, that body all pumping, pushing, pumping, pushing and then pulling out and she said she felt something hot on her arm. Gabe clutches the pistol but it remains in his pocket.

I happened to see you driving and…I wanted to tell you something.

Oh yeah? What did you want to tell me?

Just…that I know.

The stepfather looks at him a moment and then says you know what.

I think you know what I’m talking about says Gabe. I think you know exactly what I am talking about.

The stepfather smirks. Boy, you better get on out of here with what you know or what you think you know.

Gabe looks away. Now would be the time. So easy and so clean. But no. The old black man said no. And Gabe knows who he is and why he was there and Gabe is grateful. So instead of pulling out his father’s revolver and irrevocably altering both of their lives he forms his hand into the shape of a gun and points it at the stepfather’s face. Bang he says softly and then he turns around and walks away.

Ripeness

The lights go yellow and he punches the gas and he’s flying, no problem, but a car turns right in front of him and he has to jerk the wheel to avoid colliding with it. All in a moment he sees that distinctive woody station wagon and the driver’s white floppy hat pulled down over his brow. Gabe parallels the station wagon for a few blocks regarding the man, Althea’s stepfather. Now is the time and the time is now. All is ripeness. A gun and an opportunity to use that gun. A chance to draw down on that man and tell him to his face what you know and then open up on him blow out both his eyes and as he falls to the soft earth you can say that was for raping your stepdaughter you piece of shit. Gabe crosses behind the station wagon as it turns onto Fontainebleau, moving under the speckled oaks past shotgun doubles and wide cement stoops, tree-busted sidewalks and the sun plying open the morning with golden claws. The station wagon turns onto City Park Boulevard and parks in front of a camera store as Gabe drives past and parks. Watching in the mirror as the stepfather gets out and walks inside the store. He opens up the glove box and takes out the gun. It’s an old .38 Special, a mutt of a gun experimented upon by his father over the years, blued, browned, baked in the oven, left overnight in the deepfreeze to see what would happen (nothing) regarded by his father to be a singularly poor weapon that would take two rounds at least to drop a man the stepfather’s size but probably only one if you shot him through the head. The stepfather emerges from the store with a paper bag, gets in the station wagon and pulls away from the curb passing Gabe who slouches needlessly in his seat. The stepfather hasn’t any notion that he is being watched, his murder contemplated, his disposal guaranteed. Instead he rambles past Delgado College and turns into the oak dappled park. Gabe follows. They cross the miniature railroad tracks that he rode with his father, memories of the looping, hooting toy of a train cutting through the trees. All silent as a grave this morning. They pass the public tennis courts, empty save for a single elderly couple beating hell out of the ball. They pass the long colonnade with its stone lions flanking steps that descend into a duck infested lagoon. They pass the temple to Venus. Many was the night that Gabe and his father and Pabst Blue Ribbon sat in that Doric round and contemplated the heavens and the earth and the untold mysteries contained in the oak-tangled darkness. Deep were the pleasures of the unknown world. Long were the moments of excited promise of tomorrow coalescing between the old and the young, the latter still with visions of youth, the former something of a boatman for the boy’s rapids-filled future. Gone in the passing as Gabe continues driving for the stepfather has parked near the Casino and so Gabe crosses the small stone bridge over an arm of the lagoon and thus he finds himself across from the Dueling Oaks. Here men once faced each other with weapons and seconds and the last thing the loser saw was his god. How many times have you wanted to be here facing that son of a bitch. And here you are. In the near distance, the museum of art stands in all its dull white integrity, the heavy bronze statue of naked Ulysses ready to greet a ball sack-unready world. Adjacent is the teardrop shaped field bordered by parallel ellipses of the miniature train tracks. On that field are a dozen days everlasting when boys chose sides and then ran and shouted and threw and ran with the ball in the legacy and witness of the Dueling Oaks and committed themselves to sweat and bleed and the sides were chosen and you accepted what you had and recognized your limitations and you were able to overcome or be overcome and the afternoon ended with clean, well-ordered minds. When a game was all that mattered, indeed a game was the entire reason to be. Gabe gets out of the car, sticks the gun in the pocket of his jacket, closes the car door and heads for the bridge. The Dueling Oaks timeless and irrelevant have seen what can’t be understood by animal or mineral. The groans of the earth are nothing to them nor are the hammerings of a tattered and adolescent heart. Do it if you must they seem to imply. Kill cleanly and kill well. Do what must be done because a man no matter how young cannot live cleanly and purely when his mind is full of knowledge so awful he hardly dare breathe it much less speak it. How in this very park he sat in that car with Althea and she’d had many red cocktails and was wearing a white dress and their mouths were on one another and Gabe in his clumsy way groped uncertainly under her dress and her hand reached down and caught his and she said go slowly, don’t be like him. Who said Gabe but instead of answering she turned away, stifled a cry and then vomited pink all over her white dress.

Something You Rarely if Ever Do

When did it happen? When did your father become a mere man? What yesterday recalls the slippage from the ranks of the illustrious to a simple spot at the foot of the throne? When did weakness manifest itself so thoroughly that now the boy sends the parent off to his duty? One day the father can toss the boy like a coin and the next day the son is turning over the motor, urging his crabbed and poisoned nuncle to haul ass or what I’ll give you what for. Gabe takes off the seatbelt that he wears only for his father’s sake and turns on the radio that he isn’t allowed to play while his father is in the car nursing tinnitus and a chronic hangover. Dig if you will a picture. You and I engaged in a kiss. The sweat of your body covers me. Can you my darling can you picture this? Of course you can. Recall the days of yonder when destiny was something they said when you were dead which was never and you got on the long broad concourse that ran alongside placid Bayou Saint John and you parallel the golf course and driving range and you sped on across today, tomorrow and ten times as many tomorrows at one with speed and time and fast, stupidly fast and rude and you blew through yellow lights and whipped around sight unseen minivans and trucks and whoever else was in your way in a race against a clock you’d never catch and who cares, downshift and the bridge over the Interstate is ahead and the carefully cut lawns of city park are on your right, live oaks wearing their boughs like great green hoop skirts and you see an opening around an old mama poking her way in the fast lane so you cut quick and hard to the right not checking the mirrors which is something you rarely if ever do but you trust your third eye, your sense of what is and what isn’t there and you fly through the gap ahead of the mass of jostling vehicles in your wake and you hit the bridge like the winner at 24 hour Le Mans glancing in your rearview mirror to see the car that you have cut off veering from the road, off the shoulder and into the grass, skidding, bumping over the sod rails left by a tractor, clots of grass flying, the driver standing on the brakes, his face a maze of fear, his passenger wearing the equivalent look though without the wheel to embrace she is more naked in her potential and a there is a third person in the backseat that cannot be clearly seen, just a howling mask of oh no ringing across the landscape. You of course speed on.

The Hidden Obvious

His father feels he’s getting one over on the world by recycling the lead he finds into bullets that he casts himself, something like a water diviner able to see the hidden obvious and make use of it. He tells Gabe to wait even as the traffic light is changing and cars stacked up behind, headlights glaring in the morning air damp with the autumnal dew. Gabe protests and his father pauses a moment to cast a pointed look at the boy, barely seventeen and as fresh to the world and its miseries as a new-foaled colt. You too? That’s what that looks says. Even you, son of my loins and my cunning mind, even you who have harbored my guilt, fear, doubt, reflections even you will in the end turn on your old father like a toothless dog that needs to be shot. Then he steps out of the car and walks over and picks up the tire weight as cars squeal around them, horns blowing, curses uttered, the foolishness of the man who collects trash. Gabe guns the motor and his father says hold on goddamn it, let ‘em go around. And the cars go around.

Over the Danziger Bridge with Lake Pontchartrain spread out slate blue. A small white plane dips and wiggles as it lands at the airport, a little winged coffin. Spread out in the distance is the manicured beauty of Lakefront Drive with its benches and stepped seawall. At the base of the bridge is a patch of white sand, an imported spectacle used solely by the blacks though segregation is as dead as Jim Crow. No bathers at this early hour nor is there any life at the nearby National Guard barracks, their Korean War-era guns as silent as the cement that fills their barrels.

It’s not the lead his father says. You know I don’t care about that. It’s just something to keep my mind off things. He opens the glove box to deposit the lead inside. Shit a mile, I forgot to take out the .38. He stares at the gun like it might vanish on its own. Well hell, I can’t take it into work. It’s against Federal law to have a gun in that building. I guess you’ll have to keep it. Don’t go waving it around at one of your Ugnaught friends.

You know I’d never do something like that.

I know.

The sedated landscape passes as does the time between father and son. All is reversed for he that rides as passenger once had sole control of the wheel but that was too many alcoholic beverages ago and now the state of Louisiana has seen fit to revoke his driving privileges. Not that he cares. He never liked to drive, never cared for On the Road or its ilk, never sought the open highway and the slow wheel that pours the sand. He is a man who travels via his mind, battling with god and the devils and the very rarest of them all, the masters. He tackles Joyce each night with envy and greed, whips Becket about the garage, chuckling at the old cancers that dwell in the diseased mind. He needs no driving, only a driver and for this he is grateful. Still it’s a pain in the ass having to get up at this hour just so the boy can get to school less than on time for a class he’ll never need again. Math. Shove it up your ass. They pass through the gentle beauty of the lakefront neighborhoods, school buses and commuters and coffee sipped and glum faces and a woman screaming at her carload of children hollering into the rearview mirror as if she were addressing a reluctant and slow-witted god.

Christ says his father. Christ on a bike.

Happy Friday says Gabe.

Yeah. TGIF. Take God and Fuck It.

That’s TGFI.

Yeah. Fuck that too.

A Dangerous Thing

Most mornings his father is late leaving the house which means most mornings Gabe is late for school. First period algebra, a class he needs to graduate, a class that he is repeating and currently failing. His father counsels him with the advice that reading is more important than math and points to himself as an example. He took many extra journalism classes in college to escape one math class. Did he become a journalist? No. However he is a writer, penning articles on such matters as brown lung and the boll weevil for the United States Department of Agriculture. A published writer, his dreams have been realized though not as he imagined. There is no Paris Review, no Esquire no Gentleman’s Quarterly. The walls of his home aren’t lined with his masterpieces. No the bookcases are empty of books, all the tattered copies of Ulysses and Malloy and The Sound and the Fury banished to the garage where they line the wall next to a work bench where he reloads his own ammunition. The dreams of a literary life have died and a man without his dreams is a dangerous thing. He concentrates his need for perfection on the mundane, a scrubbed sink, a disemboweled handgun, a recycled piece of lead. He stares at the darkness that envelopes the woods behind his house and wonders if it isn’t too late to shed the fictions of his existence and just go native, pack a few guns with some stopping power and walk into that stand of hackberry and poison ivy barely a square mile in dimension but fathomless in its memories of a small town youth when summers stretched into millennia, when boys walked barefoot through dusty streets and cooked what they killed, when you stole rarely but borrowed often and lived by your wits and dodged snakes and spiders and crazy old Negroes and stayed out until the fireflies lit your dirty skinny body home.

His father gets in the car and lights a cigarette, then checks to see no one is about to run them over as they ease down the street past middle class suburban doom. A row of brick houses, each uglier than the next, half of them built by his wife’s real estate company. That was years ago and now she’s doing a new thing, the insurance thing, running around selling policies to the blacks and the Vietnamese. She has a new business partner as well. She attracts these older gentlemen who remind her of a father she never had. This one is a big black bastard, nice enough and married with kids but why the hell does his wife have to keep these types around? To talk to, she says. Can’t she talk to her husband? Hell she has a shrink what more does she need? It pisses him off.

They turn onto Bullard Boulevard, once a dumping ground for bags of trash and old machines, now a well-paved corridor through a wasteland. The Somme his father likes to say. It looks like the fucking Somme out there. Mud flats and craters, lumped machinery and dead tractors, bulldozers, digging machines, unreadable, unknowable, abandoned seemingly for lack of interest or workers or simply because the money as always is a scarce and treacherous thing and is gone but not forgotten. Across the way is a line of trees, the last great eastern woods, far boundary of New Orleans before the land gives way to standing water that consumes half the city at all times and more, much more at others. Soon those woods will be bulldozed and the trees razed to raise new trees, slender oak and magnolia saplings that will require thirty years to produce a thimbleful of shade and by then the neighborhood built to house white flight will be overwhelmed by black families that are themselves fleeing the violence of our kinsmen.

Gone Too Long

It was August and Gabe was riding the bus from the east on the long run down Chef Menteur Highway past all the dead zones of commerce that had once been Gentilly Woods, all the property values decimated by the crime waves that emerged from the Desire and Florida Housing Projects. He sat in the far back corner on the hot engine and looked out the window at the shuttered car dealerships and abandoned shopping centers and old black ladies shuffling to nowhere with all they owned in two plastic bags. And in his heart his emotions passed from high to low and back again. He was excited because this was the first day of football practice and he was sad because it had been two months since Althea had left for Houston and not called since and so it looked like it was over. Or was it? So hard to be sure when your blood is poisoned with hormones. And who should step aboard the bus but Miguel Champ clad in the blue jumpsuit of the park employee, a day of cutting trees and raking grass his destination. They slapped dap and they hugged and Gabe told him where he was heading.

Two a days. Bet you don’t miss those.

I do, said Miguel Champ. I actually do.

And Gabe saw it then, the first sign of what was out there for everyone but especially boys becoming men, the longing to hold onto that brief flicker of time which was itself timeless and already Miguel Champ had it and Gabe wondered if he would have it too. But it didn’t make sense. Miguel Champ was Miguel Champ and didn’t Tulane, SMU and Rice all offer him scholarships? Miguel Champ just shook his head and said that college wasn’t for him but he didn’t know why. He said he was joining the Navy and Gabe’s jaw dropped.

The bus rambled past the seminary tucked behind a grove of trees like a piece of god’s wisdom waiting in an urban wood and then the bus went under a railroad trestle that leads in two directions and both are out of New Orleans and one was probably out of the state and even the South itself. That would be good. To jump a train and leave it all behind, take a journey to tomorrow where no man knew what you’d been or what everyone thought you would be. And then the bus rambled past the sleepy mansions of Old Gentilly with their shaded lawns and martini-soaked silences and picture windows open to a world that had changed.

Miguel Champ asked how Althea was and what was there to say? Neither flight nor fight is an option with the human heart and if one knows nothing one is left simply with their own imagination which is indeed enough. Gabe said something like absence makes the heart grow fonder and Miguel Champ replied gone too long and it may wander. And then the bus stopped at Elysian Fields Avenue and Gabe stood and Miguel Champ stood and they hugged and Gabe knew Miguel Champ was proud of him for his new muscles and his calm mind and especially because Miguel Champ had to be proud of what was happening in front of him because there was nothing anymore happening within him. And then he gave Gabe a slap on the ass and was out the door.