Coffee in Huesca

In a small café in a stone building in a row of stone buildings, Marie was alone besides the barista. She took a seat by the window overlooking the cathedral rising against the mountains. Yesterday’s storm clouds floated like an armada towards France.

Marie had never been here before. To Spain or Huesca. Never heard of the city before three weeks ago.

She looked like them with olive skin and almond colored eyes and black hair pulled back. Everyone spoke to her in Spanish. The clerk at the hotel. The waitress at last night’s restaurant. The boys who called to her on the street. No hablo, she said, except to the boys, whom she imagined, wouldn’t care.

Her mother presented them on Christmas morning in California. Little kits from National Geographic with one q-tip to tell you everything about the past. They planned to swab the sides of their cheeks after dinner and forgot for all that dishes that needed washing. Marie flew back with the box in her suitcase still unopened, found it months later while moving to a new apartment two blocks away and fifty square feet larger. She almost threw it away. But, then, why not? It was already paid for.  The results arrived at her new place, feeling old already. The downstairs neighbor had a dog.

Mas? asked the barista from his counter. Marie shook her head. He put two fingers to his lips, made the sign of smoking. Tenga? he asked. No gracias, she said. Even simple phrases made her nervous. Smoke curled around the café.

“What’s it say?” he asked.

Marie shrugged. “The basic stuff. I’m from Africa.”

She reread the results after he had left without doing the dishes. It said three fourths of her had mingled in America long enough to not matter anymore.  From England before independence, from Germany circa 1856, from Ireland ten years later. Families who had built a springboard from farms and military service for generations before leaping into the middle class. She knew this already and that there was nothing else to know really. But her last quarter arrived on a ship in 1939. Her grandmother, whom she never called grandma, but always Elena, didn’t say exactly from where in Spain or why, though vaguely sometimes suggesting Franco.

The archivist spoke as much English as Marie did Spanish and together they stumbled through records of battles in poor penmanship and sometimes rain stained ink. Where were the computers? Why wasn’t there a database of some kind? He found his name in a long list of names of men who had died, deserted, or been lost.  Ortega, Anacleto. P.O.U.M.  Novembre, 1938, the back read. ¿Seccion 32?

Her coffee had gone cold. Marie collected the grids stuck to the side with her thumbnail.

The archivist told her he was more likely in Sietamo. For the people, here, he said about the local graveyard, pointing down at the red tile floor.

It took an hour and a half to go twenty miles, most of the time not moving, but waiting for the next bus with her thin coat wrapped tightly. She hadn’t expected Spain to be so cold, foolishly imagining it all to be like the Mediterranean while stuffing single suitcase. She bought a ticket for too much money one week before leaving, packed the night before, and didn’t even figure out how to get from the airport to Huesca until she got there. The taxi driver took her to the train station when she told him where she wanted to go.  Marie was sure he overcharged her for the fair. Or did they do that here? It was hard to tell in this place where now and then, first world and third didn’t quite collide so much as osmote.

The last bus dropped her at the foot of a hill. Marie climbed carefully up the stone stairs slick with rain coming in sideways now. She hadn’t packed an umbrella. There were few headstones. The wooden ones that remained were rotting. There were no section markers. Marie stood in the center, trying to feel a pull one way or the other and felt the wind blowing from all sides.

P-O-U-M? she asked the archivist, annunciating the letters in her awkward accent. Marxista, he said, by which she knew what he meant.

She took her mug to the counter. The barista watched soccer through the static. Marie cleared her throat. He hesitated to look up during a corner kick.  Mas, si vu…por favor.

“Wait. Where are you going?”

“Huesca. At least, I think that’s how you pronounce it.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“ Yeah, sure. Why not? Why not do anything. But why?”

“ No reason. Are you going to do the dishes tonight?”

Marie had a desk in the corner. Third floor in the popular science department. Manuscripts swathed in broad strokes of red pen piled on the floor. Tea cups left for days until an intern collected them for washing. No one like her could have a great-grandfather like this. Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe he died as an old man. Not in a war she had hardly ever heard of that somehow happened at the same time as World War II, as if anything could have happened at the same time.

Marie went back the next morning. The same archivist was on duty. He might have been the only one. Raul. What a name. He pushed his glasses back. “Hello, he said.”

“Hola,” said Marie. “Do you have more? Information?’

“Possiblimente. Pero, em, long time. Si?” And directed her to this café. “A dos?”

She had another hour. The barista poured himself a glass of wine. Through the static hazy outlines of men appeared to be running after nothing. Three more days until her flight home. What else was there to do in this city? It was not Madrid. Not Barcelona. Not even Seville. They went to church. There were farms just outside the city, almost inside the city. They spoke with thick accents. Maybe catch a train to Paris.

It said she had distant cousins in most major cities. Even Hong Kong and Cairo. But her direct antecedents stayed here, for centuries. That should mean something. But Marie was so Christian she didn’t think about Jesus. So American she didn’t think about America. He was. It was. She was. What is?

One team scored. Not the one the barista was rooting for. Putas. Marie left a tip on the counter.

Raul brought her a photograph. A. Ortega, R. Diaz. C. Diaz. 1938 Septembre, read the back.

Rifles casually slung over their shoulders, they stood in a field with the cathedral behind them. “Donde?” asked Marie. Raul drew her a map. I think, he said and wrote down the busses that would take her there.

The battlefield was a vineyard now. Marie slipped through the low wood fence.

He didn’t look like Elena. Not really.  Same eyes, maybe. Not that you could tell from a black and white photo taken sixty years ago. Anyway, lots of people had the same eyes and A. Ortegas was not a unique name.

The fallow vines stretched beyond the next hill like waves after a rain storm. Half frozen, half sodden, the ground shattered then gave beneath her. She should have brought water. Worn better shoes. Climbing upward, Marie ducked under row after row. Raul said there was a field at the top, though they could have planted vines by now. Marie wondered if all the men were buried in Sietamo. She didn’t think so.

She called her mother before leaving.

“Oh, that’s nice,” she said. “You and Dan are going?”

“No just me.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No. I’m just going.”

“Why?”

‘No, reason.”

“Where is Hoo, what’s it again?”

“Huesca.”

“Near France.”

“Well, that sounds nice.”

“Mom? Did Elena ever say where she was from?”

Her mother sighed. “No. She might not remember. She was pretty young. Children have a tendency to forget things like that. Is that why you’re going?”

The rows broke at an empty old house. Hardly a house. One of those wooden ramshackles left to abandon along byways the western world over. This rot of dead time. The door creaked when she pressed. Shafts of light marbleized in the airborne dust. The walls were full of holes the size of carpenter bees. Rusted brass shells rolled under her footsteps. She’d never seen a bullet before. Not even an empty one. Why hadn’t someone cleaned these up?

Marie rolled a shell between her fingers and stepped outside. Dusk fell over the valley. But on the hill the light was the color of ripe wheat and rose when it hit the mountains. The cathedral looked aflame.

It was supposed to have cleared things up. To make things clearer. To explain. That’s what was advertised. Not this mangled system of roots that made even the near past seem distant, darker for knowing. And where was she supposed to go from here? She had already arrived where it ended.

 

Legs like David

She had legs like David and Joseph was drawn to them irremediably.

He took her to a concert at Turtle Pond where the listeners boarded paddle boats and tried to stay in place while a quartet afloat on an unanchored dock drifted slightly this way with the rhythm of their bows playing Schubert in G until they reached the shore and someone had to push them out again for the encore. The muscles of her thighs and calves individualized working the peddles against the water’s oddly centripetal current. Her knees especially looked like his. Joseph restrained his hand, longing to touch. She had worn a short dress, as if, knowingly.

He took her for Korean east of Times Square in one of those restaurants between 43^rd and 50^th that patronized mostly by chefs, line cooks and wayward tourist, are by and large lost to the average New Yorker. She ordered octopus. The table hid her lower half. Joseph wondered if Ethiopian wouldn’t have been better.

Did you like the concert?

He took her home and took off her clothes. Her legs gripped him like a vice from above.

Do you want to stay? he asked too late, her zipper already zipped. Another time, she said and slipped out the door. Joseph stayed in bed, wrapped in white sheets and moon coming through the window whose curtains he had neglected to draw.

She didn’t answer the phone. Joseph fingered his patella shaped bruises. He went to the restaurant where she worked lunch, waited for her to exit the kitchen’s swinging doors. She didn’t, though he stayed through four drinks. It’s her day off, said the hostess. Joseph went out in the now evening and oh-so-clean avenues of a reformed island, wanting to get lost in the dank streets of 1980 where one could make love unabashedly behind an overflowing dumpster. The street lights streamed on.

I need to see you, he said to her answering machine. She doesn’t work her anymore, the hostess told him the second time he went to wait, told him before he even sat down. Believing she was a liar, he made a fool of himself.

He saw David once, in Florence at twenty-two. Seventeen feet tall he must have been the equal of the Philistine’s only apparent weapon. Joseph thought, standing in front of him, beneath him, he more than Pygmalion proved there was a soul beneath this stone flesh.

She disappeared. Escaped. Eloped maybe, for all he knew. Could have left the city, though he couldn’t say for certain she’d ever lived here. Joseph wandered for her. Across Midtown, Harlem, and Greenwich. Through Bedstuy, Williamsburg, and Guwanas. Queens even.  The Bronx once. Looking for her legs or ones like them and sometimes seeing close approximations umbrellaed by flowing skirts, cased in cut offs. For weeks he kneaded his bruises back to purple until his body, tired of sending blood, refused him.

The season changed, trousers and no chance and like this Joseph went on through the winter. Answering the phone expectantly. Maybe this ring. Death in the family. Emergency operation. Some such reason. The snow thawed. Skirts again though laced with boots. Joseph could have recognized her by her knees alone and did. In the Rambles one bright afternoon in April. The hem of her dress caressing them  and making him remember his mouth, how well they fit inside. She had a man on her arm, half his age, her age, well dress, coiffured, collar upturned. It’s me, he said. She turned, turned again, pulling the  young man as she went. I’ve been looking for you, he called, too late, again.

Joseph couldn’t stop himself for weeks, for months. Returning to the same path, his skin burned, the summer mosquitoes came to know him. Got tired of his taste. No knees and the number he had had been disconnected. He waited the days into nights when those willing to give themselves against the trees did.  Joseph tried to conjure the image of her and David’s legs, always almost succeeding.

Petanque

Paul Laroque walked from Ardennes to Bey sur Seille, beginning his trek after the battle and before the dead were counted. Not being among the living, he hoped that, so near to the end of the war in February of 1945, he would simply be mistaken for a stray arm or a faceless body, and left his tag in the mud for someone to find.

The night shivered as the last mortars crashed in disemboweled fields. Strands of stray barbed wire tangled his feet, ripped through his boots, two sizes too large that he had pulled from a dying German soldier.

He walked only in the dark, fearing the French and Americans as much as the Germans; deserters were not treated kindly by either side. During the day, he hid himself as best he could in half-collapsed trenches, in the broad branches of elm trees to which he tied himself, beneath piles of leaves and in holes he bore in the sides of snow banks.

He could feel the moment he crossed into Lorraine, that contested territory, which the Germans and French traded back and forth since before Napoleon the First. He knew he had arrived, not from a sudden sense of belonging, but his feeling of alienation in this part of the world that belonged nowhere and to no one, not even to itself. His father, a colonel in the first World War, had signed the declaration of independence for the Nation of Lorraine, quickly nullified at the behest of the French government with the sallow soldiers it sent running in only hours after the ink had dried.

Oh, well, he thought, staring at his house beside the Seille, running quiet and straight through its treeless and marshy banks.

Although the fighting had bypassed their town, the Germans had no doubt knocked on his door. His wife spoke German as well as she did French, and kept a picture of her first cousin from Alsace, who wore a swastika and a brown shirt in a frame in a drawer to be taken out, as they had planned four years ago for this inevitable occasion. The quartered moon ran in the river, barely rippling in its muddy bed. He left his gun on the hilltop, burying it beneath a pile of leaves at the foot of a chestnut, to be retrieved later.

The door to his son’s bedroom creaked as it opened. A dog Paul had never seen raised its head, but remained silent. His son did not stir as Paul went to his bedside. The dog moved with a whine, curling up beneath the window.

“Geoffrey,” he whispered, and the boy smacked his lips. “Geoffrey,” he whispered again.

“Hello, Papa,” he said, still dreaming, and Paul ran his fingers through the boy’s blond hair.

In the kitchen there was nothing to eat or drink, save the last dregs of a bottle of wine that Paul poured into a jar left by the sink. He had not noticed before, but the reprieve from walking and the slowing of his blood made him feel the cold within the house. Opening the stove, he found no embers and no wood beside it. It was then that the house seemed as ravaged as the front lines where he had fought for half a decade, from which he had escaped, intact, unscarred, as if some angel had spread his wings around him, while others fell before they could even announce their death with a scream.

He looked at the stairs. They would make noise as he walked and his wife might wake and shoot before determining who it was that drew near to her.

Accustomed to staying up nights by now, he ventured out again to see if Lenore had hidden any food in the barn’s loft. Groping through the darkness, he found a box of matches and struck one, but did not risk lighting the lantern. The carcasses of their milking cows hung from the beams, dried and stripped almost entirely of meat. The remnants swayed in the wind coming through the holes where Lenore had removed planks for fire wood. He pulled a bit from the sternum and gnawed, thinking of all the mornings he had milked her and sold milk to his neighbor who made cheese. Their fathers and grandfathers had plied the same trade.

“We’ll get more,” he sighed.

The night edged towards dawn. Paul walked to the back of the barn to watch the moon sink into the horizon. In the half light, he saw his pétanque boules lying in the dust, scattered by his son. The metal was colder than the night in his hand. He sat with them for awhile, turning them in the frozen ground, tossed them into the air, catching some, letting others fall with a soft thud and the faint sound of cracking frost. The moon sank lower. The first rays of sun crept onto the fallow fields.

He could wait no longer and crawled up the stairs on all fours, anticipating the click of the revolver. But she was still sleeping, curled up in her white nightgown and her coat and turned toward the window.

“Lenore,” he whispered, and he could tell her eyes were open though she did not move.             “Lenore,” he said again and slipped into their bed.

She felt the same, but looked different. He closed his eyes. She spread her palms across his skin and he imagined her as she was, before the war, and then in the barn with their young skin still impervious to the pricks of hay beneath them.

“Have they let you go?” she asked when they had finished.

“No,” he said, retrieving a cigarette from the bedside table.

“That’s my last one,” she said pulling it from his hand for a drag before returning it.         “Then how are you here?” she asked, exhaling a thin cloud of smoke.

Paul shrugged. “I left.”

“Are you going back?”

He did not answer, instead burying his nose in her hair. “How is Geoffrey?” he asked.

“Hungry,” she said. “Tired of salted meat.”

“Mama,” Geoffrey called from the foot of the stairs.

“Coming,” she said, again stealing the cigarette from Paul’s hand, then crushing it in a tin ashtray.

“Don’t tell him.”

“Why not?” Lenore asked, adjusting her nightgown and rebuttoning her coat.

Paul shrugged, pulling on his trousers. “I am leaving again.”

She stepped back. Her eyes until now dry and sanguine, filled with hatred. She flew towards him, striking him on the chest, flung herself on his lap, beat on his arms.

“Bastard!” she screamed.

He took her by the shoulders. They were thinner, weaker than before, and he moved her gently off of his lap and onto the bed. The linens were gray with dirt and soot.

“It’s almost over,” he said. “The Germans are retreating. France will be ours again.”

“France!” she screamed and Paul placed his hand over her mouth. She tore it away.      “What do I care about France,” she rasped. “We aren’t French. We are from Lorraine.”

“We’re not from Germany,” was all he answered.

“Who are you talking to, Mama?” Geoffrey said, walking up the stairs.

Paul slid into the closet, almost emptied of clothes.

“No one,” Lenore said, turning her boy around and patting him on the backside. “I’ll be right down.”

“Where are the chairs?” he asked when she closed the door.

“Where do you think?” she said, pointing at the fireplace.

A dingy silence covered the room. Lenore walked to the frost-covered window.

“When are you leaving?”

“Tonight.”

“To where?”

“To Germany.”

“What! Why? They’ve left France?”

He nodded.

“Then don’t come back,” she said, straightening her clothes, running her hands over the permanent creases in her coat. “If you would leave, me, him, for what is not even your fight, I don’t want you back.”

He slapped her. “It is our fight,” he mumbled and sat on the bed.

She walked to the door.

“Sleep,” she said, unshaken. “You must be tired.”

“Lenore…”

“I’ll leave some soup for you. There won’t be much.”

Paul fell into a dreamless sleep filled by an interruptive silence. Night came. The moon showed only a sliver. Lenore did not return to bed. He opened the door to his son’s room. She stared at him with indifference.

He ate the half-bowl of marrow soup she had left him, ice almost forming on its surface. More of the barn was missing when he went back once more to look at his son’s pétanque court. He had been shooting, Paul could see, by the divots in the frost-hardened ground. He picked up the boules, arranged them in a triangle, and scuffed out the imprint of his boots before leaving. The road east stretched before him like a hallway into the night.

Lenore gave birth to her second son on October 15, 1946. He did not scream when he came into the world and did not thereafter, only whimpering when he cried and stretching his lips into a slight, crooked smile when he was happy. She named him Pierre and taught him German while his school taught him French. He was an average student and never remembered anything past his exams. Occasionally, he left school with a sore hand from the slap of a ruler for daydreaming in class. After one such day filled with imaginary pirates and numerous reprimands from his teacher, he returned home to find his mother occupied and his brother gone.

Outside, their yard brimmed with dandelion moons. Pierre ran through them, arms out, scattering their feathery brushes as he went. He followed their path to the door of the barn, cracked enough for him to squeeze through. It smelled of dirt and heat and cow dung. Pierre pinched his nose and looked up at the haystack, towering to the ceiling. He made sure his mother was still pinning the sheets between two elms, then climbed to the top, despite her warnings of snakes and heights. From there, he surveyed his kingdom below. Their young cow chewed her cud in the pen, swatting black flies with her tail. A large beetle shimmied through the dirt. He watched these everyday events with pleasure from his new vantage point, picking straws of hay from their bales and watching them flutter down like tiny golden spears. He did not notice how much time had passed until the cow belted out a hungry note, tired of chewing and rechewing her lunch and waiting for dinner.

But before he began to climb down, he noticed, with the new hay his brother brought in that morning, the loft had become just a short jump away. Having often wondered what his mother stored there—treasure, dead bodies, photographs—but never the opportunity to see it, Pierre inched toward the edge of his tower. He saw only a dark recess filled with indistinguishable shapes drenched in shadow. He inched closer, his soft soles clinging to the edge. Knowing only irritating scratches and uncomfortable bug bites, he had remained thus far in his life, unfamiliar with true pain, and the thought of broken bones did not cross his new mind. So, with a breath, he heaved himself across and into the loft, landing squarely on his feet amongst disused horse bridals, bits, and blankets. He kicked them aside with his feet and plugged his nose from the musky smell of horse sweat as pungent as the afternoon they were last used.

A spider’s web caught on his nose and he pulled the sticky silk from his face, pausing to crush its maker beneath his heel and examine the mutilated body with its eight legs still intact, before moving on to the other things stacked in the corners and against the wall. A coil of frayed rope caught his eye and having a fondness for tying useless but perfect sailor’s knots, he moved toward it, ducking without needing to.

But the interest he had in the rope vanished when he saw the six shiny steel boules lying in the center. Never having seen them before, he bestowed them with near infinite possibilities. Small cannon balls from the first war. Tools for smashing rocks. For rolling into ant nests, beehives, mole tunnels. For throwing at birds, or just to look at. He found them heavy in his hands and carried them two at a time, lining them up against the edge of the loft, then nudging them off one by one with the toe of his boot, watching their quick descent and the plume of dust when they hit the ground.

When there were none left to push, Pierre jumped back to the hay, climbed down, and kicked the boules out of the barn with his arms folded behind his back. Outside, the sun rested halfway between its apex and horizon, shimmering orange in the undisturbed blue. Pierre threw his new toys in its direction, half certain they would not reach their target. Once launched, he ran to find them hidden in the tall grass. His small arms could not throw the heavy boules very far and he found them quickly. On the third of these semi- contrived hunts, he saw Geoffrey walking back from soccer practice.

Pierre looked at his brother as he always did, with a sense of awe. A boy of sixteen, Geoffrey was one of the strongest men in the town. He spent his weekends fixing widows’ roofs and shoeing horses for old men. He never asked for pay, but his customers always gave him what they could, and Geoffrey would force the few coins in his mother’s hand.

“You should save,” she told him every time.

“For what?” he would ask and curl her fingers back for her.

He treated his younger brother like a son, scolded him for bad exams, indulged him with sweets on his birthday, slapped him when he misbehaved, but never beat him like the other older brothers whose siblings came to school with bloodied noses and bruised limbs. But as Geoffrey drew near, Pierre saw his face as he had never seen it.

“What are you doing?” Geoffrey asked.

“Nichts,” Pierre said.

Geoffrey boxed his ear. “In French,” he said.

“Nothing,” Pierre said.

“Then what is that?” Geoffrey demanded, pointing at the shiny object weighing on a clump of grass. Pierre retrieved it, and, forgetting his brother’s mood, smiled as he presented Geoffrey with his new treasure. He laid sprawled on the grass before he knew his brother had raised his hand.

“Where are the rest?”

Pierre whimpered.

“Where are the rest?” Geoffrey screamed. Pierre ran. Geoffrey overtook him, scooping him into his arms, carrying him back to the spot where he had first fallen. He stood Pierre up, slapped him and grabbed his shirt as he began to fall.

“Get them,” said Geoffrey, and Pierre brought the boules to his brother one by one. Geoffrey took them back to the barn. Pierre waited, frozen where he stood, though his senses begged him to hide.

But all seemed forgotten when Geoffrey reemerged from the barn, gently taking Pierre’s hand as they walked towards the house. The air smelled of sweet pork and chimney smoke drifting into the evening.

Lenore looked up from her book as Pierre shuffled into the kitchen the next morning, fingering the bruise beneath his right eye.

“Don’t touch it,” she said, cracking two eggs against the counter’s edge. “You’ll make it worse.”

“Where did Geoffrey go?” Pierre asked, fingering through his mother’s book, looking for pictures. Finding none, he put it down.

“To your grandmother’s, to help her with the garden. And I have to go to town today,” she said. “Will you be good and stay here?”

Pierre nodded and ate his eggs. He watched his mother fly down the road on Geoffrey’s bicycle with her skirts rippling behind her.

Pierre began walking towards Mr. Garmont’s house as soon as she disappeared from sight. Pierre had never seen Mr. Garmont outside of his house, but always behind the front window, smoking cigarettes, and staring out the at the street as if expecting someone to come. His mother sometimes brought him food, staying for a while to talk, and the tax collector never bothered him for money. He had lost all of his children in the war, his three sons and his one daughter, who had been an army nurse. Pierre knew none of this. Nor did he know Mr. Garmont’s wife had died of what the doctor could only diagnose as grief soon after a uniformed serviceman delivered the fourth letter. He knew only that behind Mr. Garmont’s house was a shady pool where the fish would eat breadcrumbs from his hand.

Pierre did not even look to see if Mr. Garmont was at his window. His vacant gaze scared him, made him feel as if he were not there, as if he were a ghost. So when he heard his name called by the old and worn voice on the porch, he froze mid-step.

“Pierre,” the voice called again.

Pierre turned. Mr. Garmont leaned heavily on his cane, his beard overgrown, almost touching his clavicle, his clothes heavy with dust and old sweat.

“Come here,” Mr. Garmont said.

Pierre walked toward him, clutching the bread he had brought for the fish.

“I saw you,” Mr. Garmont said.

“Yes, Mr. Garmont,” Pierre said. “I’m sorry…I just wanted to see the fishes.”

“No! Yesterday. You had your father’s pétanque boules. Did Geoffrey teach you to play?         I thought he stopped. Looks like you have a good arm on you,” Mr. Garmont said, feeling the boy’s tender muscle. “So, did he teach you?”
“What?”

“Pétanque!”

Pierre shook his head. “He took them away from me.”

Mr. Garmont tilted Pierre’s face up with two knotted fingers.

“Ah, yes,” he said, noticing the bruise. “Well it is hard to lose a father. Not as hard as losing a child.”

Not knowing what Mr. Garmont meant, Pierre only nodded.

“Well then. I will teach you,” he said and gestured towards a leather bag. “Bring that.”

Pierre dragged the bag behind Mr. Garmont as he hobbled down the stairs and around the house.

“Now, give me the cochonnet.”

Pierre gave him a blank stare.

“The little red one,” Mr. Garmont said. “So. The object of the game is to get your boules closest to the cochonnet. Simple, no?”
“Uh-huh.”

“All right. Here are yours, and here are mine,” he said dividing the boules into two sets of three. “Would you like to throw?” he asked, and handed Pierre the cochonnet.

Pierre heaved it as far as he could.

“Too far!” Mr. Garmont laughed. “I am old. What are you trying to do to me? It must be within six and ten meters. Now run and get it,” he said, and called, “there is good,” when Pierre was within range. “Allez, now, throw one out there, underhand, like this,” he said, and took the boule in the palm of his hand. “Yes?”

Pierre nodded and took the boule. It landed a full meter from the cochonnet. “I’m no good,” he said.

“No, that is very good,” Mr. Garmont said. “You always want to be in front on the first throw. Very good. Now, let us see if I remember…” He eyed the course, felt the weight of the boule in his hand, then threw. It landed halfway to the cochonnet, rolled, and stopped right on the mark. He tapped his cane against the ground twice. “That is how you point. Now, you again.”

Pierre threw, and it rolled past his first.

“Good,” Mr. Garmont cried. “A natural, just like your father!”

Pierre smiled and carelessly threw his last boule. It rolled past the cochonnet.

“Concentrate!” Mr. Garmont cried. “Even a smart man needs to work hard. Now try again.”

Imitating Mr. Garmont, Pierre squinted at the course and, thinking he noticed a slight slope, tossed the boule to the right of the mark. It rolled into the cochonnet, pushing Mr. Garmont’s boule off. Pierre jumped. “Allez!” he yelled.

“Very good,” Mr. Garmont said. “Now, since you’re closer, it’s my turn.”

Pierre watched him stiffen his wrist and lift his arm higher than before. Leaning into his cane, he exhaled a rush of air, and sent the ball flying fast and straight, hitting Pierre’s boule.

“A carreau!”  he cried, then looked down at Pierre, who had almost began to cry at the sight of his lost point. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll be able to shoot soon enough. Should we play again?”

Pierre looked at the road. Geoffrey was halfway back from their grandmother’s house.

“I have to go,” he said.

“Tomorrow?” Mr. Garmont said.

“Tomorrow is Sunday.”

“And God plays pétanque. Come after church.”

Geoffrey stopped Pierre when he reached the house. “Where were you running back from?” Geoffrey asked when he reached the house.

“Nowhere,” Pierre said.

Geoffrey tilted his head. “I saw you.”

“I was looking at the fishes behind Mr. Garmont’s house.”

“Oh,” said Geoffrey. “I hope you didn’t disturb him.”

Pierre shook his head. “He doesn’t mind.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he doesn’t,” Pierre retorted and sulked off to his collection of picture books.

He woke early the next morning, snuck into the kitchen and peered out the window at Mr. Garmont’s house. He was not in the window, not rocking absentmindedly in his rocking chair. No cigarette smoke clouded his house. Pierre half wondered if he was dead.

“You’re up early,” his mother said, dressed already and wearing the sweet perfume she wore only on Sundays.

“Why does Mr. Garmont always sit by the window?” Pierre asked.

Lenore lifted him off the counter. “Well, he isn’t there now,” she said.

“But all the other times.”

“Because he is sad. You’re too young to know why.”

“No I’m not.”

“I wonder where he is….” Lenore mused. “I’m going to check on him. Make sure your brother is awake.”

Geoffrey snored. Pierre climbed in bed beside him. “Mama says it’s time to get up,” Pierre whispered, but he continued to snore, and Pierre pressed an ear against Geoffrey’s chest to listen to his breathing. The room warmed. Pierre slipped his hand beneath his brother’s hair, tried to intuit his dreams.

“Boys!” Lenore yelled and clapped her hands twice. “We will be late!”

Geoffrey groaned. Pierre pretended to yawn.

“All right, all right,” Geoffrey mumbled.

“Help your brother dress, Geoffrey. I have some things to do before we go.”

“Where was Mr. Garmont?” Pierre called after her.

“The garden!” Lenore laughed. “If you can call it that. Now get dressed.”

“But what was he doing in the garden?” Pierre whined, pulling at his stiff collar as they walked to church.

“And what makes you so interested in Mr. Garmont?” Geoffrey asked taking his hand.

Pierre looked back at the old man’s house. He wanted to tell his mother. But the beating he received from his brother, who had always taken care of him, who he knew, even at such a young age, fed all three of them and bought him new clothes when he needed them, made him believe there was something evil about the game.

“Can I go to the confessor?” Pierre asked.

“To confession,” Geoffrey corrected, looking at him quizzically. “What do you want to confess?”

“Isn’t that what the priest is for?” Pierre asked, kicking a rock.

Geoffrey said nothing. Pierre felt small. “I stole a rock,” he said at last, almost believing it to be true.

“Oh,” said Geoffrey, smiling at his mother. “Why did you steal it?”

Pierre shrugged. “I liked it.”

“You should return it when we get home,” Lenore said.

“Can I go to the, I mean go to confession now?”

Lenore nodded. “After church,” she said.

Pierre could hardly sit still through the reading of Deuteronomy and its long list of things he could and could not eat, and tried to concentrate by imagining eating all the animals listed among the latter, like ravens and owls and oxen. The reading from Paul was almost torture, though usually he liked to watch his mother sit up and nod in agreement when the pastor said things like: “We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair.” But today, not even the reading from Matthew with his stories of earthquakes and angels could hold Pierre’s attention.

At last, the final amen was pronounced.

“Can I go to confession now?” Pierre asked after the usher had ushered them out.

“Do you remember what to say?” asked Lenore.

Pierre nodded. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been…how long has it been?”

“You have never confessed,” Geoffrey said.

“Can I say that?”

“Yes, you can say that.”

Pierre reached up to the confession box’s ornamented door knob and stepped inside.

“Sit down, my son,” said the priest.

Pierre sat.

“Have you come to confess?”

“Uh-huh,” Pierre said, his heart racing in the dark.

“Yes?” said the priest.

“I forgot,” Pierre said and fled the tiny chamber.

Outside, he ran into his mother’s legs, gripping them tightly and pressing his cheek against the soft fold of her skirt.

“Did you confess?” she asked.

Pierre shook his head.

“Next time,” Lenore said.

Steel blue clouds hung over the green fields of young wheat. They rolled over each other, mounting with rain, releasing short tumults. Waves of thunder shuddered through the air.

Pierre pointed at the clouds. Geoffrey scooped him onto his shoulders and took his mother’s bag. The three loped toward home, not speaking and adoring the imagined danger of summer rain. The view from his brother’s shoulders was not at all like his own. The world seemed larger, more dangerous, full of possibility and chance. He could see the beginning and end of the storm, could see their house, their barn with the loft, and their cow huddling below the tin roof. He could see past those things too, almost, he believed, to the end of the road, where nothing existed but what he imagined.

They came to their porch. Geoffrey lifted him over his head and placed him on the stairs before opening the door for their mother. Pierre looked again at the world and saw only Mr. Garmont’s house.

His mother closed the door. The rain swept across the fields like a broom, and reaching their roof, pounded on the thinned shingles. Pierre climbed onto the kitchen counter and saw Mr. Garmont smoking and rocking himself in his rocking chair.

Rebecca

Rebecca uncurls in the pew rented to her by the night janitor for a favor.  The rooms smell of sweat and incense.   Jesus hangs above the altar.  There is a heart within His heart painted with flames.  His beard is fixed in perfect ringlets.  Rebecca checks that the blinds are drawn to the storefront church before approaching the plastic  candles in their brass-colored tin holders.  She flicks them with her forefinger.  A dull ring sounds and stops, as if it had run into a mattress.  She touches His plastic feet pierced by a plastic nail and feels nothing except the cool object on her warm hand.

There is no sunrise, only a lightening of the gray.  Rebecca buttons her coat from the bottom, wraps a scarf around her neck as she walks around the church to the dumpsters in back.  Yesterday’s vesper doughnuts peak above the rim in their pink boxes scratched by rat claws and teeth. Her cart remains untouched and locked.  She smiles at her accomplishment, thirty dollars worth in one day, enough for food and a room for two nights, the chance to wash and dry her best clothes, folded neatly in a shopping bag twisted around her hand.  They are vestiges of the past, slacks, a button down shirt, a pair of faux-leather shoes, a bra.  She imagines herself riding in an elevator, sitting behind a desk, filling out forms to be shuffled and filed and faxed.  But there is no coat in her bag and the one she is wearing is stained with soda and beer from the cans she collects.  It is too cold not to wear a coat.  Not enough, she thinks.  The words form a ring.  She tries to interject, but the chain remains.  The air around her grows heavy.  Rebecca leans against the wall, feels herself sliding and then the frozen pavement.

Notenoughnotenoughnotenough.

Behind this, she hears the shuffle of feet across the parking lot.  She grasps her cart.  A man stands above her.

Have to leave, he says.

She does not move, wanting just to rest.

Leave.

No.

The man grabs her arms and hoists her to her feet.  Leave.

The key hangs from a string around her neck.  She is wearing too many layers to take it off and instead bows before the lock.  Rebecca worries the lock is frozen, but pushes it anyway while the man watches.  She feels she can feel him hating her.   The lock slips.  She looks at him once.  He is short.  He has a mustache.  She will avoid him in the future.

On the street she looks back.  Nothing differentiates the church from the bodega next door besides what is written on the sign, Ebenezer Church of the Christian Missionary, instead of Alex’s Deli Mart.  Same building, same size, same bulky letters.

The south entrance to the park is open.  Two lions on the gate spread their jaws for her.  She sticks a finger in both, laughs, makes sure her digit remains.  She is alone except for the pigeons scavenging the trashcans, strewing potato chips and Chinese noodles onto the grass and cobblestones.  The morning’s first engine backfires, the pigeons scatter.  Rebecca usurps their abandoned can.  Newspaper, dog excrement, a milk carton of school lunch variety, and on top, an emptied can of Mr. Pibb shining like a nickel in the sun despite the dull day.  Rebecca plucks it by the metal tab and deposits it with the rest.

A light snow begins to fall, barely hushing the ratcheting of steel store gates and Ranchero music wafting through thin windowpanes.  Rebecca finds a bench next to the mosaic compass in the center of the park and notices she is east.  The direction makes her think of its opposite and her childhood California spent splashing in the azure waves that seem so ridiculous now that she is drenched in gray.  The pigeons have return to their trashcans.  The workers arrive dressed green coveralls, shooing the birds away and talking to each other of what they did the night before.  This one went to a party, this one to a bar, this one stayed at home.  They parade past her, adorned with rakes, shovels, brooms, and boxes of rock salt.  One man has the pleasure of removing the desecrated trash bags and piling them onto a mini-truck.  Rebecca thinks she does not envy him even though he is the one that stayed at home.

The snowfalls for a moment like down feathers, thick and soft and silent.  A breeze skates across the ground, casting back up the flakes, delaying the ruin that lies in coadunation.  Rebecca stands, fishes her pockets for gloves, walks through the immense hallway of white outside of which she imagines there is nothing.

The center will be open soon and the line will start forming sooner.  Rebecca is anxious to transmutate her treasures.  Through the park, left on Knickerbocker Avenue, across the street and down the long line of ninety-nine cents stores selling little for ninety-nine cents, carencias with pork and chicken hanging in their windows, and vegetable bodegas smelling of mold and star fruit.  Shoppers swerve around her.  With her rattling cart and oafish footsteps weighted with boots two sizes too large, it would have been easier to walk on the other side of the street where the park fence borders the sidewalk.  But she is pleased to part the sea of people crowded onto the slim walkway, trimmed more by outdoor displays of produce and shoes.  Displacing the masses, she feels her weight has been a little relieved by God, or, that He has ordained her with a halo too bright to stand near, and forgets this morning’s uneventful encounter with Jesus.  Her step lightens.  She smiles, pushing forward with her cart.

The sidewalk widens once past Jimmy Jazz’s Discount Fashion.  A Jamaica bound M train shakes the elevated tracks.  Evangelicals set up on the street corner, fiddling with their portable generator that refuses to run their tools of conversion; two amplifiers, three microphones, and an electronic keyboard.  But the woman with a forest worth of flyers insisting upon divine mercy in three languages is working well enough, extending her hand and message into the commuters running to catch the approaching Manhattan bound.

Glory be to God, she tells Rebecca and Rebecca takes her flyer, puts it in the bag with her good clothes.

At the drive-through Popeye’s on Myrtle Avenue, foot traffic defers to cars and busses and trucks racing towards the Williamsburg Bridge.  Rebecca waits for the light to change, pressing the crosswalk button every few seconds, unsure she has performed the operation correctly.  Finally the cars stop.  Rebecca looks to see whether she is ignored or gawked at by the idle drivers.  Both.  Waving to no one, at nothing except the air moved slightly by her hand, she waves for all of them and especially those who had caste their eyes down in doubt that now look up with disgusted curiosity.  Rebecca wonders if they will tell their families and coworkers about her  when they arrive to where they are going, as her father used to regale her with stories of the deranged homeless crowding the benches of the park near his office in Santa Monica.

It is not far now.  Past Stanhope and Stockholm and Dekalb, a left on Cedar to Evergreen.  She hurries past the pool hall, already almost filled with men holding beers and cues sticks.  Two blocks ahead she sees a man weighed down by the trash bags slung over his shoulders.  Rebecca pushes harder, wanting to reach the center before him.  He turns left first, disappearing down Cedar, too far to catch and too close to where they are going.  She slows, finding her breath.  Dizzy and tired, she hardly notices the next block.  But her attention returns at the corner.  The line does not yet extend past the fence.  Rebecca sprints the remaining distance, the individual cart wheels twisting and turning over the pockmarked pavement, but all together remaining straight.

There are only three others waiting for the machine to be released from its cage; a woman who looks as if she had arrived hours before with a dozen mangled shopping bags forming an island around her feet; a man with a shopping cart (not as nice as her own) and a crumb-covered beard; and the one she saw earlier, his bags still flung over his shoulders.  The attendant is smoking his cigarette below the building’s awning.  Rebecca knows they all know better than to ask him to hurry, despite the snows disintegration into rain.  She slides her scarf around her head.  The attendant flicks his butt into the parking lot and unfurls an oversized umbrella.  Neither speaking to nor looking at them he unlocks the cage, pins the gate back, and switches on the switch.  The machine whirrs, falls silent, starts again.  The attendant motions the first in line forward.  As much as she can, she gathers her bags and wades forward.  Rebecca watches in disbelief as the woman waits for the coin to drop after each can before inserting another.  The line of feet shuffle, tap, stomp.  Rebecca feels better that she is not the only one.

Come on, the man with the beard grumbles and picks at his crumbs.

The man with the garbage bag squats, lifts one over his head for shelter.  Rebecca can feel her coat soaking through and thinks of the room she will rent after this is finished.

At last, the woman’s last coin falls.  The man with the cart has twice as many cans but takes half the time, being practiced at his profession.  The garbage bags also empty quickly and their carrier departs with bulging pockets.  Rebecca wants to warn him of holes, but it is her turn and the line behind her has begun snaking onto the sidewalk.

By far she is the fastest, pirouetting between her cart and the machine, dropping her coins into a shoebox placed directly below the slot.  She is finished before the rain turns to hail and under the awning with empty cart when the line begins to disperse to come again when the weather clears.  The front door is on the other side of the building.  Most do not go inside, but Rebecca does not like to carry around the box, so obviously filled with tender when in rattles in her cart.  The woman behind the glass smiles shyly when Rebecca enters.

You have to leave that outside, she says, looking at the cart muddying up the white tiled floor.

Rebecca chains it to a steel pillar and shakes the rain from her hair.  She slides the shoebox over the counter.  The woman slides back rolls for her nickels and dimes.

I’ll help you, she says and points to a card table with two chairs in the corner.

Rebecca removes the coins by the fistful and spreads them flat on the table.  She blows into the collapsed rolls and feeds the coins in, folding over the tops when they are filled, and taps them twice to make sure she has left no empty spaces.  The cashier works slowly, but steadily and Rebecca does not know what to say to her as the coins slowly  disappear from the table into the tubes.  She is young and common, not unlike Rebecca once was.

Becareful, she wants to tell her but cannot think of what it is she should be careful of.  There was no moment Rebecca can recall, no slip, no fall, no falling, only impact and the cart she stole from the Associated Supermarket last year.

They finish their rolls and the cashier counts them out to thirty dollars and eighty-five cents.

Do you have ones? Rebecca asks.

The cashier examines her drawer.  Not enough.  How about a ten, two fives, and ten ones?

Rebecca nods and rolls the bills into the inside pocket of her jacket.

Julie and her Chickens

Julie woke to the panicked squawks of the hens.  In the half light, she pulled her galoshes on the wrong feet at first and righting them, ran towards the commotion.  A raccoon sprang over the fence.  Julie tore open the gate.  The chickens flocked around her, pecking at her ankles and throwing themselves into the air.  Nothing besides the overturned water and a few broken eggs appeared disturbed.  But the rooster hadn’t crowed as he usually did in a feeble effort to scare off the intruder.  Julie shut the gate behind her and went out into the yard.

The sun rose over the eastern mountains.  Julie found him where she expected, under the oak tree where he had spent the better part of last year.  He had lived longer than most at seventeen.  She brought a sheet from the house.  His body was heavy with rigor mortis when she lifted him and wrapped him in the cloth.  She was twenty five when her father bought him.  He had let her chose the name and she called him Buck for no particular reason besides that it seemed a good name for a rooster.  Buck was lazy all his life, or gentle, as she liked to think, preferring to peck at the shoes in the mud room rather than to corral his harem, and they started calling him Old Buck before he’d even reached his prime.  Julie dug the grave next to wear he lay with a garden spade.  The earth was soft from an early fall dew.  Still, the digging took longer than seemed necessary.

She did not know what to say over the mound of dirt after she covered him.  It felt somewhat preposterous to mourn a rooster.  Julie sat beside the grave with her back against the oak and sifted the earth through her fingers.  The chickens, having already forgotten the raccoon, were silent, no doubt back in their nests.  The ranch was quieter already without him, more stagnant, less alive.  Julie stood up, found a large rock in the yard, and gave it to buck as a headstone.

“There’s nothing to be done about it now,” Julie told herself while soaping her hands.  There had always been a rooster on the ranch and in the past, it had been easy come by one.  Some farm or another always had an extra, wandering around unwanted, trying to encroach on another man’s brood.  But over the years the neighbors had left, or died, and the ranches around her own turned into subdivisions of identical houses.  Julie’s was the last.  Of all the children she had grown up with, Julie had been the only to stay.

Until now, the phone book had been employed to soak up the water from an unstoppable and invisible leak in the kitchen sink pipe.  Julie retrieved it wearing a pair of yellow kitchen gloves.  Though semi-glued together and mostly smeared, the pages were more or less legible as she searched for a live poultry or livestock listing.  Nothing of the sort was to be found in the county, except for one “P.J.’s Farm Supplies,” in Solvang, a full hour and a half away.  Besides this, her only hope was “Central Seed and Feed,” located on the edge of the city.  Julie dialed the number and waited while the phone rang a dozen times, hung up, and dialed again, and waited again.

After three tries, she gave up to examine her other options.  Her sister, Charlotte, was scheduled to bring her groceries that Sunday.  But it was Tuesday and she felt the hens could not wait that long.  Besides, Charlotte, like the rest of her siblings, seemed anxious when they came to visit, complaining of bills and work and children and spouses while fidgeting with their coffee or tea.  None of them, especially Charlotte, would find the death of a rooster important enough to leave their jobs early or even make the thirty minute drive to the ranch after work.   There was little they could do in any event she decided.

She found the key to her father’s truck buried beneath the piles of old bills in a drawer in the kitchen.  The engine turned over three times before the truck started.  Not having driven in years, Julie checked the mirrors, the gauges, and seat belt several times before forgetting she needed to reverse.  The car lurched forward.  Julie found the brake an inch in front of family canoe that had not been used since they were children.  I should quit this, she reprimanded herself and moved to turn off the engine, but thought of the raccoon eyeing the eggs.  It was a scene that would no doubt repeat itself and, so she backed cautiously out of the garage.

The farther she drove, the farther she leaned over the steering wheel until her head almost touched the windshield.  Even then she did not adjust her posture, ever vigilant in her quest to avoid small animals and large stones she might otherwise run over.  She did not think it would be possible to be more petrified or for time to move any slower.  Then she came to the freeway, that new river of commerce, full of the flotsam and jetsam of commuters and semi-trucks and joy riders who all drove, it seemed to Julie, at reckless speeds.  There appeared among that endless current of automobiles, no room for her.  For a second time she considered  aborting her efforts.  But, while the light was still red, she reached into her purse to retrieve the detailed note with the directions to, the phone number for, and the address of the last seed and feed store in the whole county.

“Damn raccoon,” she muttered, heaved her weight onto the gas pedal, and cascaded down the onramp.

At forty miles an hour, she was traveling faster than she had in years.  Yet her efforts proved insufficient for her fellow drivers, who honked and gestured as they veered into the left lane to pass.  Clenching her teeth and drawing her lips tight, Julie could not force herself to accelerate.  Though fixated on the road, her mind could not help but devote another part of itself to visualizing a wall of flaming cars crashed in her path and she strained not to break for this imaginary accident.  In the twenty minutes it took her to travel thirteen miles, she had passed by the sight of her death innumerable times.

Parked in the Central Seed and Feed’s lot, she exhaled the single breath she felt she had been holding the entire time.  Her right hand trembled as she slid the gears into park.  She took it into her lap, held it with her left.  Not so bad, she thought, marveling that her veins remained mostly unseen and small instead of bulging like blue wires beneath her skin.  She had always seen them as older, aged from the wear that comes with household work beginning in late childhood, when her parents became too old to care for themselves, and she just old enough.  The youngest of nine, she was born to be their caregiver and accepted the burden without thought, understanding her life with the phrase her father used to explain most things in the world, “that’s the way things are.”

Oh well, she thought of these thoughts and glanced up at the store.  An unkempt man with a tangled goatee and a large straw hat watched her from a lawn chair in front of the store.  A vagrant, she consoled herself and tried not to make eye contact as she walked by, clutching her purse with both hands.

“Hello,” he said as she passed.

Julie walked with a quick clip through the door.  He followed and Julie searched desperately for the absent sales clerk.  A service bell rested on the counter with a sign reading, “Ring for help.”  With a flat, tense palm, she struck the bell twice.

“Can I help you?” the man asked.

“You work here?”

“I own it.”

Julie smoothed her hair.  “I need a rooster,” she said, still clinging to her purse.

“Uh-huh,” the owner scratched his beard.  “Well, we don’t have any in stock, so to speak, but,” he rummaged through a pile of catalogues, “I do have this,” he said, presenting her with a publication unceremoniously titled, “Cocks and Hens.”  “I can order you one,” he explained after a look of confusion settled over Julie.

“Order me, one!  From where?”

The owner flipped the catalogue over.  “Ottawa, Iowa,” he read.

“Why so far away?”

“This is the only catalogue I have.”

“Fine, I’ll take one,”  she said and turned to go.

“But you have to pick one out, Ma’am.”

“What do you mean, ‘pick one out?”

“A breed.”

“I want a rooster, not a dog.”

“All the same, they come in breeds now.”  The owner flipped through the glossy color pages illustrating and describing the new, genetically improved hens and roosters and handed it over for Julie’s perusal.  Her eyebrows lifted slightly higher with each specimen.

“Willy,” had guaranteed potency.  “Johnson” would live no less than ten years, all of which would be “productive.”   “Moby” had altered vocal cords that produced a quieter crow.  But it was “Big Buck” who caught her eye.  His name, rust red feathers, and regal black crown bore a striking similarity to Old Buck.

“That one,” she said, planting her finger on his picture without reading the description below, characterizing him as “aggressive and virile.  Perfect for ‘free-range’ egg factories.”

“Big Buck?”

Julie nodded.

“All right.  He’s two hundred.”

“Two hundred dollars?”

“It includes shipping and handling.”

“But I don’t have two hundred dollars with me.”

“Check book?”

“No.”

“Credit card?”

She did have a credit card, but it had been presented to her by her oldest brother, Jed, with the strict instructions, “for emergencies only.”  This is an emergency, she thought, and handed over the silver plastic card, signed the slip and left her phone number for the owner who promised to call her when the rooster arrived in a week or two.

She hardly heard the angry honks during her drive home, thinking solely of her hens and dreading the turn into the driveway.  They sat in a row facing the road, awaiting her return and the arrival of a new mate.

“Sorry, my little ones,” she said entering their pen with a bucket full of grain.  “He’ll be here soon.”  Julie gave them twice their usual portion.  The hens returned only reticence and Julie trudged back in the house to build a fire and watched it burn out.

She did not wake until seven the next morning.  A thick fog drew itself up the hill with a few stray wisps slithering along the ground and dissipating near the old outhouse.  A flock of quail darted around the yard with no apparent plan or direction beyond the next bush or bramble.  The kettle hissed then whistled.

“Mitsey, Joann, Sissy,” she cooed.  “Food Madeline.  Corn Gretchen,” she called to her hens by name.  But they stayed in their cubby holes and the feed remained strewn in the dirt.

She returned to her tea, now cold, and tapped her fingers against the table as she stared listlessly out the old glass windows that had long since started to sag in their slow liquidity.  The late September sun caste its pale and shallow light over the yard, on to the leaves of the oak under which Buck was buried.  She thought of how she had always been able to fix things, to nail down what remained even after the death or departure of another.  When one by one her siblings left the house, Julie preserved their rooms, kept them ready for their return, prevented the space admitting an absence.  The ranch too was the same as when her parent were alive.  Their room remained untouched, the bed made and their clothes hanging in the closet.  She still planted corn in the spring and kale in the fall, still made roast pork for Sunday dinner.  Her family had always tacitly agreed with her that change was best mitigated by ignoring it ever happened.  But her chickens lacked the capacity to accept or practice denial and Julie was left to imagine the ways in which she might fool them in to believing that life went on as usual until the new rooster arrived.

Possibilities turned over in her head; a stuffed rooster planted in their coop and netted off so they could see but not touch; a recording of a crow she could play to fool them into thinking their mate, though not present, was not far off; a painting of a rooster to be hung on the fence of their coop like some kind of idol they could genuflect to during their morning and evening meals.  But she had no idea where to obtain any of these items, nor did she believe they would be particularly useful.

“This is disgraceful,” she said of herself and the nightgown she was still wearing at ten.

In the bedroom, she stood in front of the mirror to undress, watched the nightgown slide from her shoulders, fall from her waist, pool around her feet.  She cupped her breasts, pushed them up to where they used to sit, pulled at the extra skin on her elbows and jowls, pinched the love handles spilling over her square hips.  She crooked her arms and raised them above her head, mocking her reflection and feeling her body had been wasted, cooped up in this old house, and knowing there was nothing to be done about it except acceptance.  But in her self derision, she noticed something a bit bird like in her movements, the way her arms floated around her body as if disjointed, the way her long neck turned from one side to the other without involving her shoulders.  She smiled a little and took her usual Wednesday dress from the closet that signified today was the day to sweep and dust the house.

Though she lived alone now, the dust did not settle at a lesser rate.   Nor were the floors any cleaner for her solitude.  But her work felt light as she went about it, musing over an idea that occurred to her between the kitchen and the den.  When the last room was rendered spotless

and dusk began to settle over the eastern mountains, Julie left the house for her garden.

Beyond the rows of withering flowers, the last of the summer corn bore their weight with a slight bend at the center.  Julie twisted two cobs from their stalks.  The sun passed below the last peak and the moon began to rise in the west.  Digging her toes into the earth, she remembered her only lover who used to lay her down in the oak grove not far from the house.  He had been a neighbor boy who volunteered and came back as a man no one recognized, beaten and corrupted more than she had thought possible.  Before he left, they planned to marry.  Julie was relieved when he never mentioned it after he returned.  He found someone new, moved somewhere else.  There hadn’t been another after him and she, with foreknowledge and some deliberateness, became a spinster, maybe the last of her kind in America.  She was not single, but alone, without suitors and without hope or desire of them.  The future looked the same as the present, as the past.  She had liked it that way, liked it that way still.  But, with her bare feet growing cold in the gathering darkness and the night animals beginning to scratch and call, she thought of what might have been.  A house in town, children, a job rather than the charity of her siblings and the meager family trust.  These things had their appeal, independence and company, but she knew she would not prefer anything to be otherwise.

Her father had slid the cardboard beneath his truck in case an oil leak should spring and stain the cement floor he had poured with the help of his then young sons.  But, he had taken good care of his trucks and there were no oil stains on either the floor or the cardboard.  Julie kept it as a small and mostly unseen memento without giving thought to future possible uses.  The next morning, she brought it into the kitchen where she punched two sets of parallel holes with a meat prong, threaded them with twine and tied the cardboard to her arm.

“Now that will do indeed,” she said, lifting her new wing.

The hens squawked as Julie approached.  The glint of oily skin flickered in the grass next to their coop.  Julie ran, lowering her wing in the way of their sightline as she went.  They quieted and Julie could not tell if it was confusion or relief that stayed their shrieks.  The snake coiled itself around.  Julie kicked dust in its direction.

“Shoo!”

It did not comply, but in the meantime, the chickens had gone back to their hunt for worms.  Julie found a pebble in the dirt, closed one eye, aimed, and threw.  Her missile missed and the snake stuck out its tongue.  Julie stuck out hers.  With this last insult, it slithered off.

A breeze caught beneath her cardboard wing as she lifted it from the ground and she felt a feeling not unlike that of a chicken’s flight: all feather and bluster, airborne just long enough to leave the earth.  Her arm lingered in the air before she lowered and raised it again, catching the contours of the wind like a child waving her hand out of a car window.

At noon, she gave the hens their lunch and retired to the veranda’s rarely used rocking chair where she could keep an eye on the coop. The chickens had been her father’s idea.  “They’ll give you something to do,” he said when the last of her siblings had left the house.  He drew the blueprint for the coop on butcher paper and she held the nails for his hammer, never doubting his stroke would be accurate.  A fresh coat of paint every few years and new hay for the nests were all the repairs it ever needed.  Still, it’s upkeep and improvement became a hobby of his.  Once, he had talked of building a contraption that would carry the eggs immediately after being laid into a cushioned depository, cutting down on the number of feathers glued to the shells with excrement and the risk of getting a hand pecked bloody while trying to extract an egg from the nest of an angry mother.  She was glad his plan had never come to fruition; she enjoyed the labor of cleaning the shells and the trust required to delicately extract an egg with a slow and steady hand.  With that thought, she missed both her father and Old Buck, but found herself no longer looking forward to the arrival of the new rooster, realizing it would not be a return to the old, but a further sad progression away from it.

She thought seriously of canceling her order the next afternoon as the hens flocked around her and her wing.  We do well by ourselves, she thought.  But the order had been placed three days ago, and no doubt the rooster was already in transit by truck or train, perhaps, by now, somewhere in the plain states.

Besides, the hens would be happier with a mate, she told herself.  Yet, they had been used to the gentle ways of Old Buck who neither pushed nor prodded and never forced himself upon them.  Now, they were accustomed to her acting as their guardian.  Another change so soon might upset the tenuous balance and she regretted not thinking of these things before.  But more than this she lamented his imminent arrival for herself.  She had enjoyed being needed again for these few days, had forgotten the peace it had brought her to massage her father’s chest and legs so they would not develop bed sores, to remind her mother what show she wanted to watch when she stared at the blank television screen.

She spent more and more time with her hens as the days passed.  On Sunday morning, she brought a chair into the pen so she could sit and read while the hens strutted contentedly around her bare feet.  It was there that Charlotte found her in the afternoon.

“What are you doing, Julie?”

“Reading,” she replied, unstartled.

“I can see that.  Why here?”

“I like to be outdoors.”

Charlotte lit a cigarette.  “I’m going in.”

“All right,” Julie said, returning to her book to finish the paragraph.

Charlotte had already brought in the two bags of groceries and gone off to use the toilet when Julie came in.  Since her winged arm had been concealed by her body and the chair, Charlotte had not seen it.  Since Julie had been wearing it all week, she did not notice it as she began to unpack the groceries with her left hand.  But when Charlotte emerged from the bathroom and saw her sister wearing a piece of cardboard on her arm, she paused before approaching.

“What is that, Julie?”

“Oh,” said Julie, untying the twine, “it’s for the hens.”

“What do you mean?”

Julie leaned the wing against the wall and glanced out the window to see if the hens were watching.  They were not.  She placed her hand on Charlotte’s shoulder.  “Old Buck died.”

“Who?”

Julie flinched.  “Our rooster.”

“Oh.  Right.  I thought he died a while ago.”

“No, he died last week.  My wing makes them feel…safer.”  Julie watched a grin and a chuckle emerge from her sister.

“Are you feeling okay,” Charlotte laughed.  “I mean, a…”

“Don’t concern yourself with my well being,” Julie snapped.

“Julie, I…”

“Thank you for the groceries.  I suppose your husband and son are missing you this Sunday afternoon?”

“No.  They’re at a baseball game.”

“Well, I have work to do.”

“Fine,” said Charlotte, stubbing out her cigarette.  “I’ll see you in eight weeks.”

“Fine,” said Julie, “see you then.”

She had not desired the interruption and so despite their acrid parting, Julie felt only relief when her sister left.  Charlotte and the others, Julie decided, or, decided to acknowledge, came for pity and duty, and not for love.  Their visits had always been a burden; she was expected to clean and cook in anticipation of their arrival, and when they came, they looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to recount the events in her mostly idle days like some sort of talking natural history museum tableau explaining what life was like before all the hustle and bustle of modernity. But whereas their visits, though burdensome before, had not impinged upon a greater responsibility, now she had the hens to think of and begrudged her sister for not realizing this, especially when the new rooster would arrive any day now.

That any day arrived sooner than Julie had expected when, on Monday morning, the Central Seed and Feed owner called.  It was all Julie could do to offer a curt thank you and retrieve a map from the kitchen drawer.  She ignored the strip of gray representing the freeway running directly into town, opting instead for the jumbled grid of side streets where she could travel at the leisurely and sane pace of twenty-five miles per hour.

There were no mishaps in backing out of the driveway this time.  But Julie sighed at the sight of her hens in the rearview mirror.  Speckled brown, black and white, pure white, gold, rust, and gray.  Where was this attachment last week, she wondered and felt there could be no good end to all this.

The owner sat up in his lawn chair when she arrived.  “It’s in the back,” he said, and hoisted himself unwillingly from his repose.

Julie waited outside, desiring an extra second of delay before the final decision had to be made.  She tried to think of a legitimate sounding excuse for not taking him.  The chickens died.  I’m moving.  I had a nervous breakdown. She smiled at this last one.  Charlotte, she thought, would certainly corroborate my story.

The owner returned with a large cage draped in a white sheet.  The rooster let out an ear piercing crow as he set it down.

“He’s been doing that all day,” the owner grimaced and rolled the sheet onto his arm, revealing the largest rooster Julie had ever seen in her life.

“He’s all right?”

Julie nodded.  “Thank you.”

He carried it to her car and she fastened the seatbelt around the cage.

“May I borrow that sheet?”

“You can have it,” he smiled.

Julie looked for a long moment at the monster in her passenger seat.  He looked back, then with an unperceivable jerk of the head, darted his beak through the cage, barely missing her wrist.

“He’s been doing that, too,” the owner said.

Julie spread the sheet over the cage, making sure not even the feet showed.

Past her driveway, past her family’s ranch, and past the half empty housing development she drove into what was left of the country and the summer hills starting to green with the first fall rains.  She pulled over next to the fence stairs of a field.  The rooster continued trying to peck her through the bars as she walked and Julie had to hold the cage at arm’s length to avoid his beak.

“I’m going to let you out now,” she said at a safe distance from the road and gathered a handful of dust in her fist in case he attacked.  The rooster seemed to understand both the carrot and the stick and became quiet as Julie lifted the door to his cage.  He stepped out, turned, and cocked his head at Julie.

“No hens,” she replied, “but you’re free.”

The rooster strutted in the general direction of a not so far off farm house.

At home, Julie reattached her wing and joined the hens in their coop.  She sat with her hands full of grain.  They ate with gentle pecks and let her stroke their feathers once they had gotten their fill.

Red Star

Peter groaned out of bed, put the coffee on, turned to his window to watch the black sky tinge blue.  Sophie pulled his pillow over her ear.  Delivery trucks slid out of their garages, the baker’s son snuck out for a cigarette, and from down the block, the faint metallic ratcheting of the news stand opening.  The percolator sputtered.  Peter took a cup with him to get the paper.

The owner was cutting the strings when Peter got there, his fingers blackened with fresh ink.  It was too early for talking and Peter placed a coin on the counter, took a copy from the top.

Soviets Lift Berlin Blockade, read the first headline.  Peter ran back to his building.

“Sophie,” he whispered, lifting the pillow from her head.

“There’d better be coffee,” she groaned, rustling from under the sheets as he poured her some.

“I told you,” he said, handing her the paper.

Sophie squinted.  “Don’t you think it had something to do with the air lift?” she yawned.

“Something.  Not everything.”

“Well,” she said.

“Well I think we should go.”

Sophie turned the page.  Peter reached for his boots under the bed, laced them up slowly, waiting for her to say something.  She didn’t and he kissed her on the cheek.

It was his third job in seven months.  Now he was a fish monger.  Before that, he worked in a machine shop and before that, as a pipefitter’s apprentice.  He would have liked to stay in the trades if he could.  But his name was getting around as a trouble maker and tossing fish was the best he could get.  He felt the stench on his clothes was visible when he finished a shift, that a marine fog accompanied him home.  Sophie did not disagree and always had a bath waiting for him when he got home.  It was getting worse now that summer was coming on.  The fish, with their silver bodies and open mouths and bulging eyes set with the last terror, had to be covered and recovered with fresh ice.  Except by the end of a shift, nobody noticed the smell anymore and only remembered the ice when one of them started feeling nauseas.

The boats and trucks had already come and gone when Peter arrived.  It was another man’s job, to pick through the catches, haggle for the best and pawn the worst off on the new man.  Peter didn’t envy their higher hourly wage.  Arriving at three a.m., they might as well not sleep, and many of them seemed not to.  But it was his job to sell, which he hated.  More than a few times he’d found himself caught up in the enterprise, presenting a price far too high for what he was hawking.  The smart ones talked him down, usually women, cooks for the last great families of the city and slightly-better-off than working class housewives.  But the dumb ones bit.  He didn’t like to take advantage, even if they were bourgeois and tried to reason that they got what they deserved.  Besides, their credulity evened out the price he gave to those who announced their poverty by asking for something cheap.  Peter gave them half off whatever they happened to be eyeing, considering the discount his contribution to the redistribution of wealth.

Sam, the buyer, was stroking the scales of a large tuna fish as Peter walked up.

“Hey,” Peter said.

“Damn,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s hot.”

It wasn’t then, but it was at noon.

A haze of cigarette smoke poured out of the apartment when Peter opened the door.  Sophie was there with her coworker, Rosemary, a pile of butts between them in the kitchen table ashtray.

“You weren’t kidding,” said Rosemary, waving a hand in front of her puckered face.

Peter shrugged and drew the curtain around the bath.

“Sophie says you want to go,” said Rosemary while Peter undressed.

“I  do.”  His pants were stiff with fish oil and grime and fell to the floor in an unnaturally upright pile.  Sophie had filled the tub early.  He braced himself sinking into the cold bath.

“Don’t you think your mustachioed friend was just buckling under pressure?”

“I think if he was the tyrant everyone says he is, he wouldn’t of buckled under pressure.  And I think it shows he cares more about the people than he does his own power.”  Even the soap smelled like fish.

“Sure,” said Rosemary.  “What about his bomb?”

“Propaganda.  There’s no reason for him to want one.  All it would do is hurt the cause.”

Rosemary laughed.

Peter slid beneath the water, blew out his breath in one, long stream, heard them crushing out their cigarettes when he came up for air.  Sophie slipped behind the curtain.

“Off to work?”

“We should,” she said, combing back his wet hair with her fingers.

Peter took them into his own.  “Are you coming tonight?”

“It depends.”

“There’ll be a lot to talk about.”

“There’s always a lot to talk about.  You need a shave,” she said and ran her hand over the bones in his face.

Peter drew himself up after they left, his body still aching with the residue of lifting crates and ice-picking ice and jawing for hours with one customer after another.  But his mind raced east, consumed by the possibility of seeing the Soviet Union, that great experiment in human freedom and progress.  Caught between equal suspicions of the American Communist Party’s lockstep propaganda and his government’s vitriol for all things red, he saw clearly now as the time to resolve these disbeliefs.  To discover for himself what was true and exactly how far the people had come since the means of production had become their own.  Peter lifted his typewriter down from the closet shelf, staggering a little under its weight and odd angle.  Sophie had bought it for him at a secondhand store in Maine while visiting her parents.  They didn’t approve of Peter, insisted on calling him Pete, and claimed they could only afford the one train ticket.  Unable to afford any train tickets, he happily stayed in New York.  She dented the wall while carrying it up and he started Democracy in Review, a quarterly in which he and an occasional contributor detailed egregious abuses of the Bill of Rights.  Blacks denied freedom of assembly with billy clubs and the butts of riffles.  Union members shot at and shot for challenging a sitting business manager.  Women denied the right to vote by being deprived of their lunch hour on a certain Tuesday in November.  The New York Communist Party let him use their mimeographs once every four months and he’d gotten up a pretty good subscriber list, posting issues as far away as California.  Naturally, he assumed all the Washington DC subscribers were in the FBI and he had them in mind when he sat down at his typewriter.    Stalin in the Right, he wrote.

He typed two copies to take to tonight’s meeting at the Jewish community center, wanting to pass them around for edits.  Peter folded each copy once over its length then twice over its width using a ruler to tighten the creases and slid them into opposite sides of his cap.

Sophie came up the steps as he was locking the door.

“Wait for me,” she said.

“I’ll be outside.”

An ice cream truck had parked up the street, playing its sugary jingle.  The next door neighbor’s children marched by with double scooped cones, sure to keep them up past their bed time.  It seemed too early to be this late.  But time seemed both to expand and contract when he wrote.  Hours passed so slowly that when they were gone, they seemed not to have existed at all, as if the rhythm of the keys beneath his fingers and the counter point of the letter strokes across the page somehow delayed the usual progression of a day.   Peter didn’t try to cultivate this state of mind.  It just came to him and it was because of this he knew there was something to what he was saying.  Not only in this or that article.  But the whole idea of it.  The idea that when time was broken into minutes and hours  in service of the economy, to make it possible for time to have monetary value, we all grow old much faster, that we are dead the first time we enter the office, shop, or store.  And if a person’s time was instead given to the individual to do with it what he pleased, and his work benefited not  bosses and stock holders, but the whole society, only then could his life have meaning and meaning was the greatest enemy of capitalism.   He was thinking about this and the passing cars when Sophie came down in slacks and a blue cotton blouse.

“You’re wearing my hat,” she said.

“It’s my hat.”

“But I like it.”

“Here,” he said, sliding it over her hair.  “But I’ve got things in it.”

“I can tell,” she said and scratched were the paper pushed against her scalp.

The building looked darker than usual when they arrived.  Though, sometimes for precaution, they left all but one light off, Peter still held tight to Sophie and tried to see into the darkened alleyways.  Seeing nothing, he reached to open the door and they shoved him in the back.    His hand tore from Sophie’s.  Three men in workers’ boots and grease stained trousers stared when he turned.  Sophie’s face assumed an expression of annoyance.  He wished she wouldn’t do that.

“What’s the big idea,” she said, standing up to the tallest among them.

The man stepped back, slightly speechless.

“Are you anti-Semites?” she asked.

“You’re not Jewish, lady,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Jewish ladies don’t wear pants.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Sophie muttered.

“Come-on honey,” said Peter and tried to lead her elsewhere.

Another of the men blocked his way.

“And who’s this?  Your Rabbi?” asked the new man.

“What’s your business?” said Peter.

“What’s your business,” echoed the big man.  “Doesn’t this one talk smart?”

“What do you want?”

“What do we want?  We want you Reds to go back to Russia.”

“It’s a free country,” said Sophie.

The men moved closer.

“We’re not,” said Peter, stepping in front of his wife.

“This is where you meet.”

“It’s not us.”

The man who had been silent until now grabbed Sophie by the arm, pulled her from him.  “Then why is she dressed like a man?”

“I dress how I want.”

“With a man’s hat?” he said and knocked the brim back.  Peter’s articles fell to the pavement.  The five of them stared motionless at the two meticulously folded pieces paper until Sophie reached for them.  The man who’d taken her arm pushed her away, began to unfold one.

“Not her,” said Peter.

They didn’t listen.  Sophie moved back to Maine and asked him not to come.  His job at the fish market had been filled after he missed three days of work.  They said nothing could be done when he asked.  His  landlord was waiting on the stoop.

“Two weeks,” he said, eyeing Peter’s bruised face.

Peter trudged up to the fifth floor.  After that, he could hardly pull himself down again, even to eat, spent his time memorizing the ceiling and rolling the cigarettes Sophie had left behind between his thumb and forefinger.  He lit one once, watched the smoke circle the room and escape through a cracked window.  Eventually, the landlord let himself in and found Peter lying on the floor.

“By tomorrow,” he said.   Peter turned back to the ceiling.

Friends had offered their couches while Sophie was in the hospital, after she’d told him she was leaving without him.  Instinctively, he knew their offers were impossible to accept, to live on their pity, to endure their apologies.  They had all been there, inside, had heard Sophie scream and claimed they thought it was a stranger.  He didn’t care.  Either way, their guilt and fault would compound his own.

New York City’s brief dusk was closing as Peter gathered a few things into an old suitcase.  Two shirts, underwear, his only winter coat, their wedding photograph.  The rest he left for the next tenants to sort out.  The neighborhood children had abandoned their opened fire hydrant for dinner leaving the street mostly quiet.  Water spewed into the gutter, pooled around the storm drain clogged with candy wrappers, brown paper lunch bags, a child’s sock.  Peter misjudged the distance and depth kicking at the puddle and submerged his shoe entirely.  It landed on the sidewalk with a wet splat.  Regrettable since he didn’t know where he was going other than for a long walk.

North was the general direction he chose, if only because there was more north than south to the island from where he started.  In a dozen blocks or so the city started to change, replacing tenements and brick with brownstones and white marble.  Peter dragged a hand across the closely spaced bars of Gramercy Park’s wrought iron fence.  On the other side, women in silk summer dresses and men in dinner jackets strolled through the manicured paths, lounged on oak benches with cigars and cigarettes.  Near where he stood, a middle aged man whispered in the ear of his wife, she not much more than twenty.

“George,” the wife giggled, running her hand down his lapel.

Peter stared in disgust.  They did not see him, seemed to see nothing outside their enclosure and Peter had the sudden urge to scream, to shake the bars of separation, to show them with his fists exactly what it was to be one in the masses.  Their money bought his suffering and the suffering of those like him, worse off than him.  Their greed created the men who hit his wife, who broke her arm.  Peter felt it only just to teach them the true cost of their wealth.   But there was Sophie to think of and she, he thought, might come home any day now.  Now was not the time to cause trouble and he kept north.

The city swayed again, rich back to poor where Broadway intersected Fifth.  He remembered Rosemary lived nearby, on the top floor of a warehouse.  Sophie and he had gone there once for a party.  They stood in the corner while others caroused around them, wielding musical instruments and brandishing wet paintbrushes.  Sophie insisted all night that Rosemary was a poet and this was why.  He recognized the green door as he passed.  It was open when he went back.

“You bastard,” she said, inviting him in.  “Smoke?” she asked, lighting one herself.

Peter shook his head.

“I forgot.  You don’t smoke.  You don’t drink either, do you?”

“Not really.”

“So what do you want, because if its sympathy, you’re not getting it.”  Rosemary pulled a beer from the bucket of ice.

“I got kicked out.”

“Well boo-hoo.”

Peter took one of her beers.

“Help yourself,” she said, blowing smoke through her nose.

“I need a place to stay.”

“You, Peter Hale, need a place to stay?”

Peter nodded.

Rosemary considered her cigarette.  “For how long?”

Peter shrugged.

“Not a good sign.  Three days.  And I don’t have a sofa.”

The floor wasn’t so bad with a spare blanket for a pillow and his winter coat beneath his shoulders.  Peter’s head felt light with alcohol.  It was the first time he’d drank since the military.  For his flattened feet, he won a post in Washington State where he stacked crates of food and watched for enemy planes.  They used to miscount the beer rations, take the extra boxes up the hill and talk about what they would do if ever deployed while silently thanking God the war looked to be ending.  He kept his politics to himself back then.  Sophie asked him to; the quickest way to the front was blushing red.  Besides, Peter liked the simplicity of his war.  Days in the depot or up in the watchtower, reading instead of keeping a lookout for Japanese bombers.  He went through the Russian canon up there, equal height with the redwoods.  Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, from whom he learned more about life than he ever had living it, or thought he did.  And then, Hiroshima.  Peter went home with a wedding ring for Sophie and the belief that history could be bent like the arc of a novel by the right man.

Rosemary was gone when he woke late the next morning.  There was a note on the door.

Close behind you

The streets shimmered with heat and the air felt as heavy as water.  Peter was suspicious of everyone he saw.  The gray man in the gray suit; the woman snapping and unsnapping her purse on a bus stop bench; construction workers taking their union break in the shade of scaffolding.  They all seemed dangerously satiated with comfort or the wild dream of it.  A mother and child nearly ran him over on their way out of a drugstore, each sipping Coke through a long straw.  It occurred to him then that the revolution had already happened, and he was on the losing side.  It didn’t matter, he decided.  The work outweighed the end anyway.

Brown butcher paper covered the NYCP’s storefront window.  The sign was gone.  Peter pressed on the door.  It was locked.  He thought he heard footsteps after knocking.  Minutes passed.  He knocked again.  An eye appeared in the peephole.  Peter waved, sheepishly.

Known for his un-proletarian love of clothing, Raymond looked disheveled for once with his shirt and trousers wrinkled into rags.  He had no jacket.  Peter followed him into the main room.  The lights were off and a mat lay among the tables and chairs and discarded drafts of pamphlets extolling the virtues of workers’ collectives and equality between the races.

“Have you been sleeping here?” Peter asked.

“Just last night.  We’re taking turns.”

“Why?”

“They raided the Chicago office last week.”

“Who’s they?”

“They, they, who are they ever?”

“What would you do if they did?”

“I don’t know.  Call the police.  Look Peter, I know it’s been hard and we all owe you one.  But now’s not really a good time.”

“A good time for what?”

“For your paper.  We suspended printing.   I mean ethically, I’m against it.  Now more than ever, you know?   But I can see their point.  This’ll pass.”

“I’m not here about the paper.  I want to go.”

“Now’s not really a good time for that either, Peter.”

“Now more than ever,” he replied.

Peter went back to Rosemary’s with a list of names and addresses.   She was there with a cigarette perched between her lips, cross-legged on the floor and scribbling.

“Don’t talk to me,” she said.

“Can I have some paper?”

She threw him a leaf and exhaled a heavy cloud of smoke.  Peter inhaled deeply.  She and Sophie smoked the same brand.

Three weeks later he received a response.  By then, Peter had moved out of Rosemary’s and into the NYCP office full time.  He’d learned to sleep through the bottles and rocks and bricks since the glass had been replaced with cardboard and wood.  The projectiles came less and less often as the days went on through.  It seemed people were starting to forget exactly who inhabited that office on Barrow Street.  The letter came in the usual code which  Raymond interpreted.  He was to depart in one month on a cargo ship from the New Jersey Harbor to Norway.  From there he would take a train to the Baltic coast of Sweden.  Members of the Party would be waiting to ferry him across.  They were enthused that an American with such good credentials should want to come on a “sightseeing trip,” and were more than happy to pay his way.

The world kept moving at its quick clip, dissolving August into September.  Peter would have hardly noticed except that Sophie had sent him only two short letters in the last month saying she was all right, doing better.  But her words were distant, more so than is usual even in a letter, as if while writing she had been looking out the window and letting her hand carry on by its own devices.  When he called, her mother invariably picked up, lied about Sophie sleeping or reading.  He didn’t imagine his letters got through either and these periods of silence between them made the days seem interminably long.  He would have preferred to spend the remaining time before his trip holed up in the office, letting the sun rise and fall without his attention until the date arrived.  But as it was, it was as if his whole body reached out for her and finding nothing, forced itself to walk, hoping exertion would in part take her place or at least tire him enough dim to her palpable absence.  But even passing the Flatiron building, the Empire State, the point at which the East River became the Harlem and when it met the Hudson, and back again, Peter arrived at the office no less aware than before.  So he turned to the three typewriters, left to gather dust since the NYCP had stopped printing their paper and, unwisely threading a long ream of paper through each, started to write what would soon grow out of control.  His idea at first was to compose three short articles detailing various superiorities of communism.  Worker controlled factories.  Collective farming.  Open and free expression through speech and art.  Simple themes that could be expressed in five hundred words or less.  But as the nights wore on and he stayed awake closer and closer to dawn, each thought led to another tangential, metonymic, and sometimes dissimilar topic.  And the tone grew more defiant, vitriolic even.  The Marshall Plan was nothing but a ploy to re-enslave the war torn nations of Europe.  Truman was colluding with fugitive Nazis to develop a more destructive nuclear arsenal.  America was the source and center of the world’s injustices.  But his hatred was not what disturbed him when he stopped to think in the infrequent clearings among the haze of words and thoughts and type and ink.  What worried him most was his faith.  Rumors of prison camps and the assassination of  Leon Trotsky, which had heretofore impeded his wholesale devotion, lost their resonance, were almost forgotten.  When he did remember them, perhaps paused between lines while resetting the bar or crossing out a misspelled word, they were dismissed as lies spread by nonbelievers.  Besides, it would be impossible for such inspiration to originate from anything other than pious truth.  Unthinkable that without reason his hands would insist on the means and ends of the International Commenturn as not only just, but absolute.  He felt he had possessed since childhood a quiet but persistent voice keeping him close to rectitude, on the side of the executed rather than the executioner.  It would not have abandoned him now, even in the wake of a brief, if painful, accident.  He became convinced.  Maintained Stalin was foremost a man of peace, that the poverty of the Eastern Block was no price at all to pay for the equality and justice resting on an imminent horizon.  That as sailors once followed the northern star, so should mankind now navigate by the red star rising in the east.    Black type swallowed the white paper, unremittingly until almost no blankness remained.

Almost every day a member of the NYCP checked in to make sure there hadn’t been a break in and to give Peter a sandwich.  Each found him mostly in the same state.  Red eyed, sleepless, catatonic yet at the same time, brimming with zealotry.  Peter’s conversation was clipped to acrimony and the members wondered amongst themselves if it was such a good idea to have him live there after all.  But none of them wanted his job.  The political landscape was changing.  There were stirrings in the press and in the air about another red purge.  So they let him stay and sometimes brought yesterday’s paper.  Peter didn’t pick them up except to check the date.  He knew the world and what went on.  There wasn’t anything in there he needed to know and these days he thought about little else besides his writing and his trip. Even Sophie slipped his mind now and then, replaced with the possibility of getting a Russian translator and later, publication in the USSR.  He rushed to finish, typing with furor, wanting the keys to bend beneath his fingers and the letters to punch through the page.  Yet the work grew no nearer to completion, bleeding onto second reams.  There seemed no end to this uncoiling and he could feel the slick, cold, reassuringly hard decent into meaning driving him on.  If only he could pinpoint the exact origin, the precise point at which man diverged from a collective animal to a solitary one, a selfish one, he might know the way back.  Peter’s hair brushed against his shoulders.

Three days before his trip and Peter hadn’t slept much, hadn’t moved much from the typewriter.  Only through concentrated disregard was he able to ignore the atrophic pain in his limbs.  He didn’t hear Raymond come in, or slam the door, or run into the main room, or notice the stack of papers clutched in his shaking hands.

“Peter,” he said, letting the news tumble all over the table.

Peter finished his sentenced before glaring up at Raymond.

“Look,” Raymond pointed.

It was a familiar picture.  Thick roots churning the earth, a stem without scale leading up to an almost comical mushroom shaped cap in black and gray.  He had seen such photographs before, of Fat Man and Little Boy, of tests afterward in the Nevada desert where men on horseback could be seen in the distance.  But the headline was different.   Soviets Test Nuclear Bomb.  There was something.  At first small.  Like a tapping between his ribs and it traveled, splitting at his shoulders and stretching to his hands that clutched the newsprint until it tore.  And then it was gone.

“What do you think?” asked Raymond.

“I don’t know,” said Peter and went back to his writing.