“Round two,” the waitress said. She delivered three perspiring mugs of beer and a basket of chicken wings. “Just how old are you kids, anyway?”

The boy opened his mouth to answer.

“They’re twins,” the man said. “Going back to college soon.”

The waitress eyed them all sideways.

“It’s fine,” the man said. “They’re mine.”

The waitress disappeared.

“You said back.”

The man ignored this. He raised his glass. “Drink up.”

The girl pulled a face. “It tastes like hairspray.”

“You get used to it.”

The boy belched. His sister laughed.

“I’m hungry,” the boy said. He reached for the food.

“Drink first,” the man said. “Then eat. That’s how it’s done.”

The three of them drank.

“Don’t ever have more than two of these,” said the man. “You could find yourself in trouble real quick.”

“What kind of trouble?” the girl said.

“You’ve heard of the buddy system?” said the man. “Never go into a place like this alone.”

“My face is tingling,” the boy said.

“What kind of trouble?” the girl said again.

The man fell silent.

“Men aren’t worth a damn,” the man finally said.

“I am,” the boy said.

The boy downed his beer. He tore into a chicken wing. His father looked at him.

“Not a one of us,” said the man.

“Is he telling the truth?” the girl asked her brother.

The boy chewed his food.

“Drink up,” the man said to his daughter.

“I don’t want to,” the girl said.

“You need to understand how this feels,” said the man. He tried flagging the cocktail waitress down.

The girl crossed her arms. “What happens if we do get into trouble?”

“Call me,” said the man.

“You’ll be three counties away.”

“I’ll come anyway.”

“And if this buddy system of yours doesn’t work?”

“It will,” said the man.

“If it doesn’t?” the girl said.

The man considered this.

The girl pushed her chair away from the table. “I’m ready to leave.”

The man didn’t answer. He offered the girl his wallet.

“Pay up,” said the man. “I’ll drive you both back to my place.”

The girl stood. She didn’t take the wallet. She looked at her brother.

“It’s the truth,” said the boy. “What he said. More or less.”

“Which is it?” the girl said.

The boy didn’t answer.

The girl walked away.

The man watched her go.

(This story was originally published in Zouch Magazine)

I’ve just turned 40 years old. It was a tougher birthday than most, and I want to be alone. So I’m headed for a sports bar called Humperdinks to watch Manny Pacquiao go toe-to-toe with Manuel Márquez for the WBO Welterweight Championship of the World …

You can read the rest of this essay at The Morning News.

“The geese are winging in from the north. First a hairline thread in the muted horizon, then a cross-stitch in the sky over Portaferry, in County Down, Northern Ireland. Soon a dark and honking seam gliding in against the ebbing tidal narrows, breaking rank at last to alight in ungainly spray atop the waters of Strangford Lough …”

This is the opening to a recently published short story of mine, “The Ornithologist’s Last Wish”. The fine folks over at Phantom Drift have included it in their inaugural literary journal of “new fabulism”.

So get on over there and buy yourself a copy.

Everyone had felt it coming – we were a Real Estate Investment Trust, for Christ sake, on the bleeding edge of the biggest property bubble in history – but Moody’s flamboyant downgrade on Monday from “Hold” to “Underperform” had still smarted. Pete, my only real friend in the place and for several years now the head of Sales, went from stud to dud in the space of a single, gut-wrenching afternoon, during which the two of us watched the revenue pipeline dwindle to a trickle as his customers went running, not walking, for the exits.

We’d been hoping my own focus on signing partnership agreements might hold the business over with scraps from someone else’s table, at least until the credit freeze began to thaw. But the Moody’s move had so spooked the three musketeers – a trifecta of rock star sales guys on Pete’s team – that they’d all jumped ship to sign with our number one competitor by late Wednesday. My partners got wind of the mass exodus and followed suit the next day. When George finally called from the bank to cut our line of credit I thought Pete might blow chunks all over the Persian rug in my office.

Things got so bad by Friday that Herb Templeton, the eponymous founder of Templeton Investments, began to take an intense and unwelcome interest in my activities. I’d spent the last twelve years of my life clawing up the rungs to VP, but if Pete and I didn’t find a way to help get things back under wraps, and I mean post-Goddamned-haste, the company would have to stop paying vendors or, even worse, the staff. And if it came to that Herb would alter the trajectory of my career path in an abrupt and unpleasant manner.

But with my wife Rebecca and our two young boys Chandler and Davis out of town for just a few more days, I’d be damned if I was going to let anything intrude on my weekend plan to escape the heat and cool my heels in an outdoor swimming pool. Rebecca had taken a month-long sabbatical from her medical practice, and was now winding down the summer on a whirlwind tour of Europe with her sister Clara. We’d left the kids in the aging but still competent hands of her father Joseph out in California, who the boys simply called “Gramps.”

Pete swore on this swimming hole east of the lake, a throwback to the kind of country clubs he and I had frequented as kids growing up in the seventies. The pool was seemingly the last place in town you could buy a beer, a burger and a pack of smokes to while away the day, a freak loophole in the municipal zoning laws excluding it from the dragnet of smoking ordinances sweeping through the city. It was operated by a semi-exclusive men’s society called the Fraternal Order of Eagles, a secretive and little known organization similar to the Kiwanis Club.

“It’s the only place I can still go to swim and smoke,” Pete confided. He’d been trying to kick the habit off and on for almost five years now, but the seesawing demands of an ever-increasing quarterly sales quota continued to jettison him back off the wagon. I’d stopped smoking cigarettes over a decade ago, the jaundiced stench they left on my fingers and clothes finally pushing me over the edge one day after I’d barely touched a lunch that had gone down more like tar than chicken salad; now I found myself dutifully following the minor victories and demoralizing defeats inherent in Pete’s noble but doomed death-match with Big Tobacco.

“This pool is a treasure, Frank,” Pete had warned me yesterday, cradling the directions in his nervous little hands like he’d been tasked with preserving some rare historical document. “I mean it – it’s not just for anyone. So don’t tell anyone about it, okay?”

“So it’s like Fight Club, then?” I asked.

“You got it. Don’t talk about it.”

“Let’s head over there first thing tomorrow then.”

He grimaced. “Can’t do it,” he said. “Nancy’s making me go to her parents’ fiftieth anniversary.”

“So you’re making me fly solo?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said, handing me the directions.

I took my time with the drive over the following morning, idling past the shuttered storefronts edging the lakefront, up and over an earthen berm supporting the Trinity railroad line and deep into the unexplored hinterlands east of Dallas. I turned onto the dirt road paralleling the train tracks and rolled across a lowland flood plain dotted with abandoned and sagging houses, each struggling to stay afloat atop a sea of cloying ivy. When I finally found the weedy junkyard they called a parking lot, several hundred feet past a dented yellow sign reading “Dead End,” I’ll admit the sight of the place gave me pause.

At first glance, the Fraternal Order of Eagles pool and country club looked more like the kind of institution that was raided on weekend editions of COPS. Everything about it emanated an inspired kind of white trash elegance, from the architectural mayhem of the doublewide camper outbuildings to the feckless landscape design decorating the front walkway; it reminded me of the finer miniature golf courses I’d played in the Coors-fueled days of my youth. I pulled my car into the shady shelter offered by a stand of blackjack oak and made my way past the tinted cabs of pickup trucks and SUVs, sardined among the random foliage of trees looming up out of the sandy lot like giant cattails.

I opened the peeling red front door of the main clubhouse and stepped into the cool, dark interior, where a shrunken doorman pressed a miniature microphone to the scar above his larynx and demanded “five dollars for non-members” in mechanical monotone. I fished the wallet from my swim trunks and pulled out a warm and wrinkled twenty for the miniature bouncer. As he droned a fifteen count of singles back at me from the till with his free hand I felt like I was learning arithmetic from a talking pair of barber’s shears.

“Rules of the road,” the machine at his neck gargled flatly. He pointed a finger at the hand-painted sign, which warned in neat little rows of block letters to SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK and LIFEGUARD NOT ON DUTY: SUPERVISE YOUR CHILDREN AT ALL TIMES and GLASS CONTAINERS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN IN THE SWIMMING AREA.

I stepped down into the dubious decorum of the bar: a tidy, wood-paneled retreat from the God-awful summer heat outside. At ten in the morning it was already filling up with a handful of bar flies, aging Eagles looking as if they’d been planted here longer than the trees in the parking lot outside. Their graying heads swiveled around as one to regard me from where they sat smoking, bunched together at a line of card tables ranged in orderly formation along the length of the windowed wall at the far side of the room. The cerulean shimmy of the pool beckoned in the lazy brightness beyond.

“What’ll you have, darlin’?”

A skinny barmaid leaned stolidly into the Formica bartop from her perch upon a cracked plastic barstool. The waning hints of what had once been a beautiful face glowed arterial red in the neon glow of a sign floating in the air over her shoulder: Fraternal Order of Eagles, Aerie #3108: Liberty. Truth. Justice. Equality. Fraternity.

I bellied up to the bar like a sailor on shore leave. “One bourbon, one scotch, and one beer,” I deadpanned in a mock blues drawl, cocking my head to one side to read the name embroidered into the woman’s shirt: LIBBY.

She groaned.

“Let’s go rocks on the scotch, Libby,” I said.

“It’s too early in the morning for John Lee Hooker,” she swiveled around to sift through the pyramid of bottles stacked precariously against the mirror behind her, unfazed.

The assembled Eagles turned back round to their table, sensing I was at worst an impartial observer to their secretive mid-morning ruminations.

“So he was mad at his wife when they took off?” A skinny Eagle asked one of his companions, the flabby demarcation of a farmer’s tan peeking pinkly out from the legs of his too-tight swim trunks. He took a drag from the cigarette idling absently between his fingers, his cheeks caving in upon the long angles of his face as he inhaled.

“Sure was,” answered a gorilla-faced fellow in a white cotton polo shirt, the Aerie’s crest stitched in gold thread above his left breast. “That was his second mistake.”

Libby’s thin, liver-speckled hands dealt a pyramid of plastic cups before me with dispassionate expertise. “Seven big ones, honey” she said.

“Can I start a tab?” I asked. “I’m going to be here for awhile.”

She surfaced from the depths of some daydream to size me up, her eyes sharpening into bemused crow’s feet. “Whatever you want,” Libby finally said. “But we don’t take Amex.”

I handed her my plastic and downed the bourbon with a grimacing hiss. Libby dropped the card into a black tin recipe box on top of the cash register, then sat back upon the barstool, her eyes soon glazing against the hypnotic spell cast by the water past the windows.

I palmed the other two perspiring drinks in one hand and went to survey this mythic oasis of a pool I’d heard so much about from Pete. As I stepped out of the air-conditioned cocoon of the club and into the searing envelope of heat outside, the pores on my arms and face bloomed in silent, aching alarm. The pool was an Olympic-sized, indigo fjord framed by five or so yards of concrete, replete with twin multi-level diving boards and a fusilli-shaped water slide which every few minutes would hurl a slippery, screaming body splashing out into the rolling waves of the deep end. On the well-manicured lawn opposite the pool a younger Eagle was already stacking burgers and dogs in red and white checkered paper serving boats, many of them stained through with gray grease spots. Several couples had staked claim to the pockets of shade offered by the thickly growing oaks ringing the property behind the grill.

The shade held no allure for me – I was here for a belly full of booze and the insouciant regret of a peeling sunburn. I’d sleep it off tomorrow and be back in the rotation on Monday with a fresh take on Herb’s high-minded theories on risk versus reward. Flip-flopping over in my sandals to an empty deck chair, I tossed my towel, wallet and phone on the concrete then eased into the cool pool, both drinks still in hand. An almost childlike glee bubbled up from my admittedly impressive stomach.

Years ago, I’d have felt self-conscious about the formerly flat tire that had, of late, started to inflate beneath the elastic waistband of my swimming suit. But Rebecca was a plastic surgeon, handing out tummy tucks and boob jobs like Pez candy to the Dallas socialites fortunate enough to afford today’s version of the fountain of youth. After hearing her talk about the freak show of sizes and shapes who went under the knife every day in her office I felt pretty confident my girth fell within the socially acceptable range of normal. I swirled the icy warmth of the scotch around my tongue and surveyed the motley assortment of flesh that had been drawn out of the suburbs and down to the water for the day: a rough-edged mixture of men and women in their thirties and beyond, chatting and drinking and floating lazily on inner tubes and foam mattresses, their offspring chirping and splashing in the safety of the shallows.

At the investment firm you were lucky to see a person’s wrists during a typical work day. But today I was confronted with the half-naked truth that the human race, by and (increasingly) large, just isn’t all that attractive. Here was a hirsute mass of a man sitting on the concrete lip of the pool dangling his feet in the water, the hair on his chest and back growing in such thick tangles you’d have thought he was more missing link than not, a faded heart shape tattooed under the bushy growth supporting his collarbone. There was a walrus-like woman stuffed into a tight, dark singlet, which threatened to constrict the flow of blood to an overabundance of blubber hanging from her extremities. And everywhere I looked there seemed to be lean and hungry women flaunting what Rebecca referred to as “the tramp stamp” – a kind of winged tantric symbol inked into the skin of the lower back, right above the ass.

Watching the tattooed women and thinking about my wife, I felt a stirring in the nether regions of my swim suit. Even at forty three, Rebecca was still as beautiful as when we’d first met: every sultry, slinking five-foot-ten inches of her brunette and Pilates-sculpted body. After fifteen years of marriage I still harbored schoolboy fantasies about her, imagining the two of us pressed up against one another in the soapy warm rapture of our steamy marble shower. I’d told Pete as much one afternoon over lunch, then watched him stutter in shocked disbelief at my good fortune.

“That’s just wrong, Frank,” he’d argued. “Have some sympathy on the rest of us poor sods, why don’t you, and fantasize about someone other than your wife for a change.”

I dusted the scotch and crawled up out of the swimming pool to sit in a plastic lounger, dripping wet and settling now into a comfortably numb mid-morning stupor. An ancient and familiar potpourri of charcoaling meat, tobacco, chlorine and freshly cut grass wafted past my nose; I knew then I’d be parroting this place’s praises in Pete’s office come Monday lunch.

I’d lobbied hard for a pool of our own when Rebecca and I had first designed the house, almost five years back now, but she’d been pregnant with our youngest boy Chandler and, overcome by a hormone-inspired fit of maternal due diligence, had done some research on the potential hazards of pool ownership in Texas.

“Did you know,” she confronted me one evening, shaking a small stack of printouts in her clenched fist, “if we had both a LOADED GUN in the house and a POOL in the back yard, the boys would be twice as likely to die from drowning as from a gun accident?”

“But we don’t have a gun,” I said. “And even if we did, it wouldn’t be loaded. And they make those barriers now to keep the kids away from the water.”

“This says it usually happens when people are standing around the pool, just talking. Everybody thinks someone else is paying attention, and they quietly slip under the water. No splashing, no yelling. Nothing. Nobody notices until it’s too late,” her voice edged a half measure higher. “Twice as likely, Frank. AND we live in Texas. More kids drown in Texas than in any other state.”

“It’s a big state.”

“I’m talking about RPM Frank. Rates per one thousand,” she rested the crinkled sheaves of research in anxious tangent to the bulge of her pregnant belly. “I’m no idiot.”

A pregnant and well-informed plastic surgeon with an agenda isn’t one to be trifled with, so I deferred the dream of a backyard oasis of my own, at least until the boys were old enough to take care of themselves. I bartered instead for a man-cave above the garage – more a man-tree-house, really – a place where Pete and I sometimes smoked his stash of precious Cuban cigars and played cribbage into the dissociative limbo falling over the neighborhood just before dawn. It was at these times, alone with Pete in the tiki-bar kitsch of my arboreal garage apartment, when I sometimes felt as if the entire house was defined by the phantom limb of the pool that had never been.

There was a sudden vibrating movement under my deck chair; I bent down and fumbled for the cell phone, which showed Herb’s glowing face scowling up from the thing’s digital display. I let it buzz over to voicemail and angled the chair to catch the direct rays of the sun, then sat down to bake in the autoclave radiating up from the concrete around me.

Over time Rebecca and I had reached a kind of peace accord on the pool safety talks; she’d even suggested leaving the kids with Joe, who did have a pool, during her month-long sabbatical with Clara. It was true that Chandler wasn’t quite up to snuff in the water yet – but he wasn’t far off, either. I encouraged Rebecca’s newfound confidence in the kids, sensing an imminent construction project in the back yard within the next year or so, my long-anticipated aquatic retreat.

She spent weeks on the phone with her dad before pulling the trigger on the extended childcare arrangement, rehashing with PowerPoint precision the data points regarding accidental drowning she’d used against me only a few years earlier. Joe said all the right things, though, because nearly a month ago Rebecca and the boys had boarded a jet plane bound for San Francisco. After the handoff with her dad she flew on to New York to meet Clara for the long haul to Heathrow. The last postcard I’d received was sent from the Guinness factory in Dublin; Rebecca’s fastidious cursive handwriting informing me that their menstrual cycles had synched up (“I’m the alpha sister!” she crowed) and that “Guinness Is Good For You!”

The beer now nothing but a sudsy paste in the bottom of my plastic cup, I padded back into the frigid bar for another round, wrapped loosely in the sun-baked sarong of my towel. The club was filling up quickly, an animated archipelago of bald and graying heads poking up from the pall of smoke drifting about the card tables.

One of the original Eagles came up for air from behind the glowing cherry ash of his cigarette. “Tell me about this chain thing again,” he asked the gorilla-faced man.

“Every crash has one,” huffed the silverback dogmatically, his breath disturbing a hovering miasma of white fog which wisped in tendrils about the men. “It’s a series of mistakes that, taken together, start to amplify in seriousness and effect. Eventually you get a kind of death spiral. Systems fail, more bad decisions are made. Then …” he sandpapered two simian paws past one another with a slicing clap, “… you crash.”

“And all he had to do was make one right decision, at any point in the chain, and they wouldn’t have crashed?”

“It’s called breaking the chain.”

Libby slid a pair of white-capped draughts into my hands and I ambled back out to my spot, wishing I’d had the foresight to bring a cigar or two along for the trip today. In the hallucinatory six months after I’d stopped smoking, I’d found myself smoking them to scratch the nervous, itching nicotine fits tempting me to give in, just this one time, and light up. Now that I’d kicked the Camels to the curb, though, I sometimes found myself consumed by an overpowering urge for the sweet stink of a Montecristo.

The P.A. system surged to life: a high, pealing whine followed by the faint roar of classic rock music, adding another acoustic texture to the low hum of locusts and subdued conversation around me. I sat watching as two boys attempted to out-splash one another from the lower diving board, the synkinetic clatter of the plank keeping time to the two-phased kersploosh of their bodies jack-knifing haphazardly into the water. It got me to thinking about Chandler and Davis, who were both now old enough to enter elementary school; I couldn’t wait for the days when the three of us could hang out by the pool like grownups, unencumbered by the infantile weight of water wings and safety goggles.

It had been two days since I’d spoken to the boys, so I found my cell phone and dialed Joe’s number. As the phone rang I plopped heavily down onto the concrete edge of the pool to trace figure eights in the water with my big toe.

“Joseph Fuller’s residence,” answered one of the boys, I couldn’t tell which.

“Hey son,” I said tentatively. “It’s dad.” The liquor and a steadily growing heat was making me a little loopy.

“Daaaaaad!” The long yelp gave it away – it was my firstborn Davis on the other end of the line. “We’re having fun with Gramps. Can we get a pool? Chandler’s even learning to swim on his own now. Please? Gramps says they’re almost no work at all. Plus there’s health benefits to swimming. All of the Olympic swimmers had them when they were kids. What do you think? Gramps says they don’t take long at all to build.”

“Maybe.”

“Daaaaaad! Maybe means no.”

“Maybe means maybe. Where’s Chandler?”

“He’s in the pool.”

“By himself?”

“Yep! He’s learning how to doggy paddle and everything.”

“Where’s Gramps?”

“Inside.”

“What’s he doing inside?”

“Number two, I think. Maybe number one.”

“He’s using the bathroom.”

“Yep.”

I’d need to tread carefully with Rebecca on this one. Joe was pretty set in his ways, having lived alone for as long as I could remember, his wife dying too-young of pancreatic cancer before Rebecca and I had first met. But Rebecca would bludgeon the man with his own cane if she found out he’d stepped away from the pool, even for a minute, with the boys still in the water.

“Alright, buddy. Keep an eye on your little brother for me, okay?”

“Okay, Dad.”

“And tell Gramps to call me right away when he gets out of the bathroom. You got that?”

“I got that.”

“Okay. I love you. Hugs and kisses to you and Chandler.”

“Extra hugs and kisses to you, Dad.”

“Bye.”

“Bye Dad.”

I heard the rustle and click of the call switching off on Davis’ end. Changing the setting from vibrate to ring tone, I maxed out the volume and set the phone back into the shade under my chair, then launched into the pool with a quick thrust of the hips for a relaxing lap across the pool’s midsection.

I pulled in a long, deep breath before submerging to push off into the muffled static under the water’s surface. The distant depth charge of divers slicing into the deep end sounded in slow motion above the high-pitched gurgle of the jets and drain working in tandem all about me. I opened my eyes, blinking against the chlorinated sting, and marveled at the graceful ballet of arms and legs pirouetting through the aquamarine haze. This was the one place on earth I wanted to be right now. I flapped my hands about like fins, turning slowly around to survey the surreal underwater moonscape, and vowed to stay down for as long as I could manage. I swallowed a mouthful of air, eyes bulging, unwilling to exhale and admit defeat, but eventually my lungs threatened to combust from the pressure and I surfaced, gasping for air in the harsh glare of the sun.

As my breathing returned to normal I saw a boisterous brouhaha of women and children setting up camp nearby, cordoning off an ambitious piece of poolside real estate with a brightly colored perimeter of beach towels. An inner fortification of coolers and floating devices provided a second line of defense against intruders, several over-engineered water toys reminding me of the futuristic space weapons I’d seen in Buck Rogers comic strips growing up as a kid.

There had been a stretch of years in my youth – maybe seven or eight blissfully ignorant summers, now long gone by – when I’d planned every waking moment around being in or around the water. I’d wake up, shovel some toast and eggs down my gullet, then ride a silver BMX dirt bike across town to meet my buddy Kurt for a few hours of ball hawking in the creeks surrounding the municipal golf course. We trolled the unkempt fringes of the otherwise well-manicured lawns hunting for lost golf balls, which sold for a dime apiece after they were polished back to their former glory in the soapy water of the ball cleaners by the first hole teeing green. Ten dimpled orbs each would fuel the next twelve hours of swimming with an oily cheeseburger and a few grape sodas; twice that and Kurt and I lived like heathens, sating ourselves on nachos and the sugary, fizzing wonder of Pop Rocks mixed with soda. After the lifeguards banished us from the water for the day, I’d pedal back home, breathing in the tight, asthmatic gasps of someone who has swallowed more than his fair share of chlorine, my skin radioactive with a beet red burn.

My daydreaming was interrupted by the cartwheeling arc of a plastic action figure careening out into the air above the pool, ejected from the boisterous campsite by a little boy who couldn’t have been more than four or five years old. It plopped with a succinct plink into the water before me; I watched as the boy’s face registered first shock, then anger, followed quickly by sadness and finally a kind of constipated horror. His chest heaved in preparation for what looked to be quite an impressive display of waterworks.

“You want me to get that for you?” I asked, pointing down at the toy, some kind of bohemian Neanderthal wielding an axe. I fished the action figure out of the drink and tried to hand it to the boy, who backed away in wide-eyed alarm, his horrified expression intensifying. I had to hand it to his folks – they’d done an admirable job driving home the whole stranger danger thing.

“He’d love that,” said a heavily tattooed woman watching us from behind a pair of oversized, mirrored sunglasses. “Bobby, why don’t you take your toy from the man.” She waved a lit cigarette in my direction, as if giving Bobby permission to come closer.

His face twisted into a tight knot and he retreated further away.

“It’s alright,” I said. “I’ll just set him here by the edge and you can come get him when you’re good and ready.” I tossed the action figure to the concrete and waded back over to my piece of the poolfront for another mouthful of beer.

The tattooed woman lay smoking in a reclining deck chair, her salmon-colored bikini having difficulty containing her cosmetically enhanced chest. A spotted panther of some sort was inked across her shoulder, its tail curving around to disappear into the freckled softness of her cleavage; I wondered briefly if Rebecca had installed her double Ds.

“You don’t come here very often,” she said. Not a question, more a statement of fact.

I was feeling good – high and light. “Then how come it feels like I’ve never left?” I said, pleased with my comeback.

She tilted her head at me, her eyes hidden behind the silver orbs obscuring her face, then reached over to drop her cigarette into an empty plastic cup, exhaling a white mushroom cloud of smoke up into the cloudless blue above. I saw the rubbery striations of silicone bulging out from the tight confines of her bikini top and doubted that this was my wife’s handiwork.

The phone rang then but I didn’t recognize the ring tone. I’d assigned Joe a jingling Jimmy Buffet song about cheeseburgers, mostly because he was a vegetarian and the cognitive dissonance washing over me when he dialed never failed to induce a chuckle as I answered his calls. I let the cell ring over to voicemail and stood up to dry off with my towel, ready for another showdown with Libby.

“I’m heading in for another round,” I said to the woman. “Do you want anything?”

She angled her mouth into a kind of sideways smile. “Jack and Coke on the rocks,” she said. “And thank you.”

An air-conditioned cold front blew over me as I stepped into the clubhouse; a wave of goose bumps washed over my limbs and my arm hairs flared out like the hackles of a dog. I sat down upon a barstool, dizzy from the constant oscillation between the tropical heat outside and the arctic air inside the bar. Libby stared blankly across the countertop at me until my wits had returned.

I ordered another round and gazed out at the fishbowl of humanity on parade past the window as she fetched the drinks. All but one of the Eagles had dispersed, abandoning the frail fellow and his too-tight trunks, who now sat nurturing the singed butt of his cigarette. He caught me watching him and sat straighter in his seat, eyeing my flower print towel and the damp and drooping curve of my shivering belly.

“So what do you think of our little getaway here?” He asked me.

“I love it,” I said. “I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to find the place.”

“That’s good,” he said, extinguishing his cigarette in the ashtray with an efficient twirl of his wrist. “For some folks it can be a bit of an acquired taste. We get a lot of parents in here complaining about the cigarettes, asking about lifeguards and such.”

“Not me,” I assured him.

Libby slid another pair of cups over at me and I headed back outside, nodding to the Eagle purposefully. After a quick detour past the grill to order a cheeseburger and fries I delivered the Jack and Coke to the tattooed stranger.

“I’m Frank,” I said, collapsing into my deck chair with a groan.

“Linda,” she replied, stirring the drink with her index finger. The bright gleaming of her nails matched the color of her suit.

“Is that your son?” I angled my chin at Bobby, who had retired to the shade of a nearby tree and was now building a sort of holding pen for his action figures with a beach towel and a yellow floatie.

“My sister’s,” Linda said, sucking the remnants of the drink from her finger before taking a long, loud sip from the brimming edge of her cup. She glanced over her shoulder at the boy and we both watched as Bobby led two plastic men across the cracked earth for a brief interrogation session, which he conducted in an emotionless voice devoid of inflection.

“He’s working out some issues over there, it looks like,” I said.

Linda’s insect-like sunglasses turned back in my direction. “Your phone rang while you were inside.”

I reached under the chair for my cell. Punching up the call log I saw it had been Pete, not Joe, who’d rung. Wondering what was taking Joe so long to get back to me, I dialed his number again, only to get the distant blare of a busy signal on the other end of the line.

“I’m expecting a call from my father-in-law,” I explained.

“Mmmm.”

I saw the grillmeister lay my burger and fries onto a paper plate and went over to grab my grub, shouldering past several teenagers to slather the toasted bun with yellow mustard at the crowded concession stand, where several enormous bees circled and dove in Kamikaze-like fury to carry morsels of bun and pickled relish off buzzing into the trees. The long, whistling call of a train rose mournfully above it all in the distance.

Settling back into my seat, I focused my attention on the juicy perfection of the burger in my lap, devouring it with the intensity of a kid on furlough from fat camp.

“Wow,” said Linda. “Hungry much?”

I grunted in the affirmative, blinking back a salty rivulet of sweat streaming into my eye.

In the deep end of the pool a gaggle of teenagers were enjoying an endless summer romp away from the drudgery of homework and after-school activities, their toned and hairless recklessness unencumbered by the weight of jobs and family, each day stretching out before them like a blank canvas in need of paint. After laying the burger and fries to waste I slapped my own belly proudly; as I’d grown older, I found myself more and more comfortable with the aging bulk of my body, waking each morning to settle into semi-consciousness like I was slipping into a pair of worn slippers. I stood up, brushed some crumbs from my stomach, then hopped into the water with a splash.

“So where’s your sister then?” I asked Linda after resurfacing.

Linda reached for her pack of Marlboro Lights, flipping the top open one-handed and tapping a lone cigarette out of the box in a deft movement which must have taken years to master. As she lit the cigarette her bikini-top struggled to maintain its purchase on her chest.

“At work,” she finally answered from behind a veil of smoke.

I couldn’t take my eyes from the cigarette. “Can I have one of those?” I asked.

“Here,” she said, handing me hers, “take this. I’ll light another one.”

I struggled up out of the pool and dried my hands before taking it from her, settling back into my chair to experience the tingling rush of that first, tentative drag. I exhaled slowly, doing my best not to cough, and sensed that an illicit pact had just been sealed between the two of us.

The phone rang again under my chair but it wasn’t Joe’s Jimmy Buffet ring tone. I left it to complain noisily beneath me, savoring the peaty tobacco flavor on my tongue.

“You know, it’s been almost eleven years since I’ve had one of these,” I finally said, examining the sloughing skin of ash crumbling from the tip.

“You only live once, right?” Linda answered.

I nodded, wondering what color her eyes were behind those sunglasses.

“Hey, listen,” she said, sitting up. I struggled to keep my eyes focused on anything but the twin swaying of her breasts before me. “Can I ask you a favor?”

“You can.”

“Can you keep an eye on Bobby for two seconds while I go out to my car? I’ll be right back.”

In the shaded sand nearby Bobby had assembled a triangle of plastic prisoners like bowling pins. I watched as he rolled a soiled tennis ball through them all, making explosive, rumbling sound effects beneath his breath as he wrought destruction upon the group.

“Sure,” I said, my head swirling. “He seems preoccupied enough.”

Linda pointed at a hefty woman bouncing her toddler on the pool steps nearby, her skin noticeably devoid of tattoos. “That’s Diane,” she said, “my friend from work. If Bobby gets worked up about something she can probably handle it. I’ll be back in five.”

Diane and I waved at one another from across the pool as Linda snatched up her purse, skipping barefoot into the bar for the parking lot. I downed the rest of my drink and dunked myself in the shallow end, listening to Bobby slip in and out of a whole range of menacing voices as his fantastical plastic army waged war upon one another in the dirt.

Why hadn’t Joe called back? I waded over for my phone and dialed him again, the line switching directly to his voice mail after a single ring.

“Joe, this is Frank,” I said more loudly than I’d intended. “Call me on my cell right away. It’s about the boys.”

As I slapped the cell shut I saw Linda’s car keys lying on the concrete next to her deck chair, and imagined her fumbling through the bottomless pit of an empty purse out in the parking lot. I dried off and fetched the keys, intent on saving the day.

“Hey Diane,” I said to her friend, “I’m going to run out front and give these to Linda. Keep an eye on Bobby there, okay?”

Diane nodded at me and lifted the pink blob of her daughter laughing into the water. Shoving my keys and phone into the pocket of my suit I traversed the darkened bar and made my way past the mute bouncer to the parking lot, now a Technicolor horizon of automobiles parked at odd angles in the slanting light of late afternoon.

Several meters into the underbrush I spotted Linda listing serenely against a tree, the bumblebee reflection of her shades pointing skywards as she smoked. I plodded in her direction, jingling the car keys high in the air as I neared.

“You might need these to get into your car.”

At the sound of my voice she started, dropping the cigarette on the ground near her purse, which lay propped half ajar against the tree’s trunk. As she knelt to pick it up I saw that it was actually a thick marijuana joint, damp and oily green with perspiration.

“Thanks,” she said thickly. She extended a hand, offering up the roach. “Want a hit?”

I nodded, taking the joint and pulling in a long lungful; my chest filled with a warm, amber glow. When I could hold it no longer I exhaled a bluish cloud into the air, watching as it flashed in dancing chiaroscuro past the mottled rays of sunlight streaming through the canopy overhead.

“Tell me something,” I heard myself say. “What color are your eyes?”

I was stoned out of my gourd. I stepped closer to her then, understanding on some level that a line had been crossed, but unable or unwilling to turn back. She smiled, tilting her head down to stare at me over the top of her sunglasses, but before I could bring her face into focus Linda recoiled, as if stung.

“Where’s Bobby?”

“I … he’s …” I was having trouble verbalizing the pictures in my head. “He’s inside with your friend. Jane, or …”

“Diane,” she interjected. She stormed back across the lot for the pool.

Time seemed to slow. I followed her freckled back into the bar and past Libby. Once outside we found the discarded heap of Bobby’s toys lying motionless in the sand. Linda scrambled for the pool, frantically shouting the boy’s name, but thank Heavens he wasn’t in the water. Diane’s blank stare told Linda and me that something had gone wrong. Linda’s shouting intensified as she scoured the pool and bathrooms for Bobby, but he was nowhere to be seen. Soon I was yelling the kid’s name too, my voice ragged from the weed. How long had I been here? I heard Libby’s voice pleading over the P.A. system for everyone to please stop what they were doing and pitch in to look for a lost little boy.

On the shady lawn behind the grill I saw the plastic Neanderthal lying near a chain link fence containing the sand volleyball court, a curling sheet of metal folding up into itself around a kid-sized rend in the chain links. Linda and Diane squeezed through the hole and plunged into the trees looking for the boy, the tension in their voices muffled by the foliage and the approaching whistle of a freight train.

Libby called the police, and soon a squadron of tanned and uniformed officers were interviewing me over the clipped staccato of walkie-talkies and distant hollering.

“Walk me through what happened sir,” an excitable young cadet asked me, notepad in hand. I did my best to reconstruct the afternoon, ending with our discussion in the parking lot.

“Show me,” he said.

I moved in slow motion back out to the tree where Linda and I last stood, seemingly hours ago. As we neared the spot I spied her purse, and reached down to retrieve it for the policeman. As he took the purse from me a gray envelope fell drifting to the gravel at our feet. He bent down and inspected the waxy paper.

“Who owns this?” He asked, snapping the package with his index finger and standing quickly.

“I don’t know,” I said. The slow, rumbling roll and pop of railroad ties buckling beneath a moving train echoed faintly through the trees nearby.

Another officer was called over and together the two men examined the packet.

“You two were smoking heroin,” one of them said.

My phone began to ring.

“What?” I needed to sit down. “No … not at all. I mean … we …”

In my right pocket Jimmy Buffet was singing about “heaven on earth with an onion slice” and the world seemed to be bucking wildly under my feet. I stepped away from the uniformed men, desperate for air.

“I have to take this,” I said.

“Don’t move sir,” the excitable one reached down and unsnapped his holster, palming his weapon. “Put your hands up where I can see them.” He took a step in my direction.

I held my left hand up, warding him off. Everything seemed to spin; the poles had shifted and the earth was turning counter to the normal direction of things.

Why hadn’t Joe called sooner?

“I have to take this.”

There was the hue and cry of a discovery being made near the train tracks. Both men looked away.

I reached for the singing in my pocket.

He pulls one of the karate students out of the lineup, an older guy wearing an Orange belt who looks like he’s still in sponge mode.

“Shielding Hammer. Move.”

Sifu comes in low and slow with a left and the Orange freezes, momentarily stunned at being called out onto the mat.

“Come on, you know this technique. Defense against a left punch: slide back, parry, block, rake the face, elbow.”

A light goes on in the Orange’s eyes and Sifu comes in again. This time the Orange slaps Sifu’s hand out of the way, then bounces a block off of his arm before pushing him on the chin. Sifu falls back and away and the Orange drag steps forward, elbowing him in the chest.

“Better. Now listen up class, do you see where his left hand is? Dangling down there by his leg like a dead fish?”

A chorus of affirmative mumbling rises from the assembled karate students.

“He didn’t check with that hand, so all I have to do now is …” Sifu leans in and head butts the Orange very gently, “ … this, and his nose is broken. You have to finish it correctly or you’ll regret it.”

Sifu claps the Orange on the shoulder and the man falls back in line, rubbing his forehead. Definitely still in sponge mode.

“Alright, pair up and practice the kumite – right kick, right punch, palm heel – then move into either the lock-flow or techniques, depending upon what you need for the next belt.”

Sifu walks off the mat and motions for you to follow him into the practice room.

“Rachel, how are you feeling?” He closes the door. The vivid hum of the air conditioning unit runs heavy in your head.

“Okay.”

You don’t tell him about the gnawing darkness in the pit of your stomach, the void that’s begun spreading out into your joints and muscles.

“I talked to your dad,” he looks down at you. The green knowing in his eyes pins you in place, like a mummified butterfly in one of those display cases from biology class.

“Yeah.”

The A/C snaps off, the tin slapping of the fan spluttering erratically down to nothing until it’s just the sound of your own breath, thick and slow and laboring in the cool dim air.

“Listen, I want you to know that we’re all here for you. Every one of us.”

You don’t say anything because the darkness is swelling, flushing up past your neck to invade your scalp like a rash. Fucking dad. Asshole fucking liar he promised.

“I had to tell the other instructors, Rachel. We need to know if you’re getting into a situation out there that you can’t handle.”

So here it goes.

“Listen, we’re going to speed things up a little. You’re already First Brown anyway. How would you feel about going for Junior Black in three months?”

The tide of darkness recedes a little. You hadn’t expected this – normally it would have taken a year, maybe more. Sifu’s probably just feeling sorry for you, throwing you a bone before you start gimping out on him in class. But you don’t care, because you want the Black. More than anything, you want the Black.

“Pretty good.”

“We’re going to have to work with you every day after school though, Rachel. It’s not going to be easy. And I can’t promise you that you’ll pass the test.”

Sifu’s old school like that: he’s not going to just give it to you.

“Are you up to it?”

“Yes.”

“How do you feel?”

“Better.”

**

Three years ago, when you were in third grade, Dad signed you up for Kenpo. He was scared, afraid you’d find yourself “in a situation,” as he likes to say.

“Girls need to be careful,” he says. “You need the tools to defend yourself, in case you’re ever in a situation.”

You hated going to the dojo at first: the uniformity of the place, the rote memorization required to learn the creeds, the repetitive back and forth of the techniques. And the forms, the way the Blacks moved together out there on the mats, dancing along to the soundless beat of what must be some kind of retarded disco house music, dipping and kneeling, twirling and kicking at nothing but the wide mirror running the length of the wall.

But then one day, you were only Orange then, Charlie Cavanaugh had tried to push you down at school, angry about something you’ve both long since forgotten. You went into Triggered Salute without thinking, accidentally breaking his nose when that first palm heel to the chin landed a few inches higher than intended. You got in trouble – they even threatened to expel you; but after feeling Charlie’s nose break so easily under your palm, you were hooked.

Sifu pulled you out of class that week, visibly angry. “What’s the third creed?”

“I will use what I learn in class constructively and defensively in order to help myself and my fellow man, and never to be abusive or offensive.”

“What does that mean to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Really. Well you better start figuring it out or I’m bumping you back a belt.”

You scrambled for the first answer that came to mind. “It means I’m not supposed to hurt people.”

“That’s right. The things you learn in here can be very destructive. Do you know what destructive means?”

“Yeah.”

“Listen, when I tell you about the importance of discipline, and control, I’m not just flapping my mouth to hear myself talk. These things are important. Because what I’m trying to teach you in here has the power to help you. But Kenpo can only help you if you use it for the right purposes. That boy … what was his name?”

“Charlie.”

“Charlie. He’s bigger than you?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s a bully?”

“Yeah.”

“Well he probably deserved what you did to him. Did it feel good?”

“Yeah.”

“I bet it did. But what I’m telling you is that sometimes, doing what’s right doesn’t feel good. You’ve learned enough in here to seriously hurt someone out there on the playground. And if it ever happens again, I’m kicking you out of class until you can prove to me that you’re ready to use karate in the right way. To control what’s in here,” Sifu tapped you then, hard, on the forehead. “Not what’s out there,” his hand shot out in a wide arc, indicating the dojo, the parking lot, the whole wide world beyond.

You “applied yourself” after that, as Dad likes to say, poring over the arcane names painted on the walls of Sifu’s dojo as you learned the techniques. Grip of Death: step forward, check the knee, double hammer fist, turn, knee the groin, palm heel, hand sword to the neck, palm heel. Cross of Destruction: grab the hands, step through reverse, twist the arms, kick the knee, land in a neutral bow, pull down with the left, push up with the right, break the elbows. Sometimes you stayed after class, reading the names of the more advanced techniques, imagining what the upper belts had in store for you: Dance of Death, Thrust Into Darkness, Broken Gift, Leap from Danger, Unfolding the Dark, Twirling Sacrifice. Each one rolled like a promise off your tongue, hinting at something beyond your understanding; something untamed, flickering in the periphery of everyday life, waiting.

You remember, almost to the day, when it all started. It was after you’d broken Charlie’s nose, after you committed to getting the Black, when the cramps moved in. You were in fourth grade by then. Mom brushed it off to growing pains.

“You’re so tall for your age, honey,” she said. “Look at how strong your calves are! Your body’s just having trouble keeping up is all.”

Eventually you learned to work through it, the viselike tightening in your legs that woke you up in the middle of the night. You were still soaking it all in – “sponge mode” as Sifu calls it. You’d breathe in the ache until it was almost too much, then let it ooze out of your nostrils, warm and damp and slow, letting the murky isolation of your bedroom absorb the throbbing uncertainty of it. It was not unlike taking a direct hit to the nose during sparring class: if you try to fight it, the panic blinds you in a hot, white flash … and then you lose.

Stop. Breathe it in. Let it run its course. Breathe it out. Let it go.

The pain never really went away, you just learned to move through it, realizing that it would give way against the force of your will. By then you’d graduated from Orange to Purple to Blue. Sifu started calling you Man-of-War, which you had to look up on Google.

“You’re starting to process the movements,” he said one day after practice. “You’re pulling them apart, then reassembling them for your own purposes. You’ve graduated from sponge stage to jellyfish stage.” He tried to explain his theory to you, about how all Kenpo karate students started out like a sponge – a blank slate with little knowledge or control of body mechanics – evolving as they moved up in rank much like the animals did: from sponges to jellyfish to worms to insects to people, backbones and all. “By the time you’re Black, you should have developed a spine,” Sifu said. “And you should begin to question everything I tell you. Until then, you do what I say, when I say it.”

But biology isn’t your best subject, and you ignored everything but sponge stage. And the backbone you’ll get at Black; that’s becoming more and more important.

There was Green, then Third Brown, then Second Brown – the malignant shadow of your pain dogging along at your heels the whole way.

Then one day during sparring you took a punch to the sternum – a “love tap,” as Sifu would say – and couldn’t catch your breath for three days. Mom took you to the doctor and there were tests, more office visits, and more tests. Then there were needles and biopsies and scans and peeing into cups then more needles, needles everywhere, measuring your every move. By the time they had it all figured out you’d graduated to First Brown – only one away from the Black.

Of course the Doc laid the news on Mom and Dad first. You walked into the shuttered tension of the Doc’s office and sensed it straightaway – you were a goner; the bloodshot turbulence in dad’s eyes told you everything you needed to know. As Doc mumbled on about the symptoms all you could think about was the Black.

Doc gives you eighteen months before you’ve gimped out past the point of no return, maybe six more before lights out. He tells you to take it easy in Kenpo, drink lots of water, take lots of breaks. He sounds like one of those Yoga instructors on Mom’s workout DVDs.

“It’s important to listen to your body now, Rachel. If you get short of breath, or if you get tired, it’s important to stop what you’re doing, and to rest. Your heart is very fragile now,” he says. “And too much strain could be … well. Just take it easy, okay?”

Who’s he kidding, anyway? How is eighteen months any better than six? Or four? One?

Stop. Breathe it in. Let it run its course. Breathe it out. Let it go.

Three months to Black.

**

Dad picks you up early from school now, nearly every day, and drives you to the dojo for private lessons with Sifu. He tries to hide his worry behind stuttering bursts of small talk.

“So how was … how was your day?”

“Fine.”

“What did you have for lunch?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Come on, you must remember what you ate. That was only, what, three hours ago?”

You fidget in the air-conditioned cocoon of the car. “I don’t know. Pizza.”

“What kind of pizza?”

“Cheese.”

“What about for dessert?”

“A cookie.”

He eases on the brakes and pulls the car gently into the dojo’s parking lot, where it glides to a soundless stop. “Pick you up at six?”

“Sure.”

You flee the muffled pressure cooker of the car and jog into the bright distraction of the studio. The dojo is shaped like a shoebox, with a wall of mirrors running the length of the place and makeshift bleachers along one side where the parents and bystanders can sit during classes or promotion ceremonies. Most of the square footage is covered by spongy red mats. You wave absently at some older Blacks sparring on the mats as you make your way back to the locker room. You change quickly into your gi and tie the Brown around your waist. Only a few months ago it was all you could think about, the Brown. But it’s already getting old, its utter lack of Blackness weighing around your midsection like an anchor.

Out on the mats you sit down in front of the mirrors and stretch, slow and deep like the Doc told you to do. Sifu has painted the entire belt progression on the walls above the mirrors, a bright panoply of colors overlaid with artistic etchings describing every technique and form required for the belts: Yellow, Orange, Purple, Blue, Green, three different shades of Brown, varying degrees of Black, and finally Red. A few years ago he refined the program and was forced to repaint the entire wall, erasing the elaborately drawn calligraphy with a coat of gray primer then hiring an artist to paint each belt and technique again, from Yellow to tenth Black, in a faux Chinese style that you have to admit is pretty slick.

Sifu’s a sixth Black now, higher than anyone you’ve ever seen (at least in real life). You asked Sifu about Red once and all he said was “everyone should have a goal.”

“Are you ready Rachel?” Sifu’s done with the other Blacks now, and walks over to where you sit stretching on the mats. You stand up, ready for your lesson. The other Blacks begin practicing their own forms, more advanced techniques you can’t quite follow yet.

“Yes sir.”

“Alright,” he says. “First things first. We’re doing pretty good on techniques but it’s going to be hard work for the next couple of months. The black belt requires that you jump through a few extra hoops. In addition to the techniques, the forms and the sparring, you’ll need to start working on a thesis, and start preparing a personal form.”

“What’s a thesis?”

“It’s kind of like a book report.”

“About … ?”

“Anything you want. It just has to sum up why you’re ready for the black belt.”

“Okaaaaay.”

“You’ve seen the other students perform their personal forms during the black belt tests, right?”

You nod.

“Well, to get the black, you have to create your own. Take five of the techniques you’ve learned, modify them in some important way to fit your own style, then make them work together in a unified whole to create the form. You’ll need to come up with a name for it, too.”

The homework assignments doled out, Sifu begins working the techniques with you. The defense against a roundhouse club attack, Calming the Storm, gives you some trouble. Sifu slows it down, breaking it into little pieces for you to digest.

“You’re getting spooked by the club coming at your face,” he says, “which is understandable. But that’s exactly what the attacker expects you to do. You have to embrace the fact that moving into the threat will actually get you out of harm’s way. If you step back, you’ve got to move about three feet to get out of range.” He tosses you a stick. “But if you move forward, you only have to go about six inches – right into the empty spot between us. Now try and hit me with that,” he says.

You swing the stick at half-speed in a wide arc towards Sifu’s head and he steps forward, deep into your personal space. He blocks your attacking forearm with his own and you feel the bony attack of his knee checking against your leg. He shoves in slow motion at your face with his free palm and you both freeze.

“See how that nullifies the attack? The club doesn’t have anywhere to go now … it’s dangling out there in mid-air. Then you can finish it out …” he resumes the technique, crossing his arms to simultaneously check the club and punch you in the sternum before stepping in further to elbow you in the stomach. You double over against the force of the elbow in your gut and Sifu twists the club from your hand, “… strip the club.” He steps quickly away, “and escape from danger.”

You practice it a few times, Sifu attacking you in slow motion at first. You begin hitting him harder, eventually letting loose with everything you have, your wimpy arms flailing against the stony perspiration of his arm and stomach. He doesn’t seem to notice, speeding the technique up in increments as you both work. Once you overcome the initial flight reflex the space beneath his upraised arm becomes a pocket of opportunity, a void ready to be filled with your darting movements.

“Good,” he says, rubbing out the red spot on his chin you’ve been using for target practice. “Now just do that a thousand more times over the next three months and you’ll have it.”

**

You used to hate the karate uniform, the leveling effect the gi had upon your features, making you indistinguishable from everyone else in class. But since the diagnosis you’ve come to relish the relative anonymity found in the dojo. It’s a welcome escape from the uncomfortable wave of sympathy directed your way from teachers and friends. Not to mention your parents, the way Mom frets over every breath, her wide-eyed unease at even the most commonplace of bodily functions; the clearing of your throat has the potential to send her into paroxysms of worry.

School’s not much better, where you navigate a minefield of suspicion and rumor, sidestepping huddled bunches of classmates as you walk the halls between classes. You’ve noticed a dead zone of about fifteen feet radiating outwards from your person, inside of which the conversations become less animated, the glances increasingly surreptitious.

Your favorite subject is fourth period – Social Studies – where your teacher Miss Young explains the evolution of human civilization, her soothing voice somehow making sense of the ebb and flow of dead and dying over the centuries. You take comfort in the way that seemingly minor things – farming, the wheel, the alphabet – can dramatically impact how people think and act for thousands of years afterwards.

“Turn to page two hundred and seventy six in your Social Studies book,” Miss Young says. “What do you all see there?”

A static symphony of flipping pages fills the classroom.

“Stick figures.”

“Horses.”

“Naked people.”

A collective snicker rises from your classmates.

“Enough,” Miss Young says. “These are called cave paintings, some of the first examples of written human communication in the world. These were painted onto the walls of a cave in Lascaux, France more than seventeen thousand years ago.”

“Why?” asks Charlie Cavanaugh.

“I’m glad you asked, Charlie. Some anthropologists think that very special people, called shamans, would paint these images onto the rocks in order to perform a kind of religious ceremony. Does anyone know what a shaman is?”

You raise your hand.

“Yes Rachel?”

“It’s like a Dumbledore, from  Harry Potter. Some old guy who can do magic.”

“You’ve got the gist of it, Rachel,” Miss Young laughs. “Rachel’s basically right, class. Shamans were like – well, like magicians, to their people. These paintings were done before humans had invented the written word, before organized religion, before the evolution of complicated speech patterns. To them, the world was a very violent, scary place. People still believed that things like thunder and lightning, drought and fire, were a sort of magical occurrence that they could harness and control with their behavior.”

“Why didn’t they paint thunder and lightning then?” Charlie asks. “All I see is horses and cows.”

“Well, we don’t know for sure. What we do know is that the people living in these hunter-gatherer societies,” Miss Young writes the words hunter-gatherer on the blackboard, “spent most of their day looking for food. They hadn’t discovered farming yet, and so they were at the mercy of the rains and their own hunting skills to feed their families. If they couldn’t kill a horse or a bull, they couldn’t eat. Some people believe that these paintings were part of a kind of ceremony that was intended to bless the hunters with strength and skill, so they could be successful in a hunt and come back with food to feed the whole tribe.”

“That’s stupid,” Charlie says. “They’re just stick figures.”

“Well, it might sound dumb to you and me, but remember – these people were very different from us. They believed that by painting the rocks with their visions of the future, they could embed a kind of transformative power within the cave walls, which they could then draw upon to become more powerful. There’s a term for it, called sympathetic magic,” she writes sympathetic magic on the board. “It means they believed the painted rocks held an intrinsic ability to affect their lives and livelihoods. The caves were a sacred place, and the magic in the walls was meant to continue – even after a particular shaman or hunter passed away.”

“Forever?” You ask.

“Forever. It’s very similar to the concept of voodoo dolls, or … what’s another example …”

“The Horcrux,” you hear yourself saying.

“Excuse me?”

“The Horcrux,” you reply. “From Harry Potter. It’s something – like a book or a necklace – that a wizard can put a piece of his soul into. To try and live forever.”

“Okay, that’s a good example then, Rachel. It sounds like this Horcrux thing relies on the theory of sympathetic magic as well,” Miss Young taps the words on the board behind her. “The idea is that, until the object itself is destroyed, the person who has placed his energy into it can live forever.”

“They can be immortal.”

“You’re right, Rachel, thank you. That’s a better word.”

**

You’ve never really taken a shine to English, and the thesis weighs on you like the Brown hanging heavy on your waist. Sifu says he “only” wants five pages from you … double spaced, in twelve point font. But you’ve been starting, deleting, starting over, editing, deleting, and starting over again for weeks now, with only two paragraphs to show for the effort.

After school, you slip into the quiet comfort of the dojo and change into the canvas camouflage of the gi, the thick black cloth shielding you from the dead zone of sidelong glances which follows you everywhere else.

Sifu walks over once you’ve finished warming up. “How’s the personal form coming along?”

“Fine, I guess.”

“What are you calling it?”

“I’m not sure yet. I’m still working it out. The end is giving me some trouble.”

“Let me know when you’re ready to give me a dress rehearsal on it.”

“Okay.”

“Today we’re sparring,” he says. “Did you bring your sparring gear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“During the test you’ll have to go up against three other Blacks and hold your own during three one minute bouts. We’ve got to start getting you ready for it.”

You suit up in padded headgear and gloves, girding your limbs with Velcro shin guards and worn foam sparring boots. The constrictive embrace of the body armor against your skin helps dispel the growing discomfort in your muscles. Sifu has asked several older Blacks to stay late tonight and help out; once you’re dressed you find them waiting for you there on the foamy brightness of the mats. You pop the bite guard into your mouth and shift your weight from one foot to another, waiting.

“Alright guys, we all know one another here,” Sifu says. “This is Rachel’s first time with the three on one format, so let’s take it easy at first.” The three Blacks surround you, two teenage boys and an older woman: a grab bag of taller, heavier and more experienced opponents.

“Are you ready, Rachel?”

“Yes, sir.”

You hunker down into a right neutral stance and raise your fists up to defend your face. The Blacks spread out in a circle around you on the mats and begin moving in, one by one. You block a half-hearted roundhouse kick with your elbow and move into the attacker, pummeling him with a quick combination of jabs before dancing back into the center of the circle. A fist hits you on the kidney and you spin around, dazed. The woman lands a roundhouse punch to your headgear and you push into her, unleashing a series of elbows and punches in her direction before escaping back into the center of the mats.

“Where are you, Rachel?” Sifu calls from the bleachers.

“I’m getting my ass kicked,” you shout back. Several attackers land simultaneous punches to either side of your body.

“Why?”

“Because I’m surrounded.” Another foot lands heavily on the thick part of your thigh. A dull pain registers in your brain. That’s going to leave a bruise, you think.

“Every situation has – at a minimum – two sides to it,” Sifu says. “Right now you’re on the losing side of this one. The key to changing that dynamic is all determined by your perspective.”

You don’t answer, your breath coming in ragged gasps as the Blacks tighten the circle around you. You hook an ankle with your own and push one of them off balance, spinning around to block a roundhouse punch with your upraised arm. You feel the weight of your blood coursing thick and heavy through the veins in your neck.

“I don’t know what to do,” you say.

“Change your perspective,” Sifu answers.

It comes to you then, like one of those scenes from the movies where the clouds part and the angels sing from on high. As the woman steps in to attack you duck under her upraised fist and grab her by the lapels of her gi, spinning around quickly to shove her back into the center of the circle. She falls backwards into another attacker and the two of them momentarily fumble with one another, distracted. You move in to work on the third attacker, doubling him over with a kick to the gut before stepping to his side and shoving him into the center of the circle, between you and the others.

“Good!” Sifu shouts. “Now you’re on the outside of the circle. Keep one of them between you and the rest, and keep moving to the outside of the circle.”

The sparring match continues until your vision pulses red behind your eyelids and Sifu claps his hands for the Blacks to back off. A bittersweet wave of emotion washes over you: you’ve jumped over an important hurdle, but the Blacks were pulling their punches. You could feel it in their strikes, see it in their eyes. Sifu’s told them about your illness, and asked them to be careful. You’re getting the sympathy vote.

In the real world you’d have been toast in thirty seconds flat … and everyone in the room knows it.

**

You spend weeks working on the personal form, practicing every spare minute of the day, working through the sore muscles and the shallow breathing. You’ve seen others perform their own forms during tests for the Black, and it always looks a little cheesy. You’d dismissed it as a necessary evil, a tedious hoop you needed to sail through to get the Black. Until now, Kenpo has been a very structured, almost scientific discipline: Sifu tells you what you need to know, you learn it, then you move up. But this is different; the sheer scope of the task looms like a thunder cloud on the horizon of your consciousness.

During recess, you leave the other kids behind on the playground, seeking out a secluded spot behind the gym to practice. You begin with Intellectual Departure, sliding back to avoid an imaginary right kick and moving into the threat, spinning around with a back kick into your invisible attacker. It’s coming together, but something’s off … and if you can feel that, Sifu will spot it in a heartbeat.

“Whatcha doin’?” Charlie Cavanaugh’s voice slices through your thoughts like a rusty knife.

“Practicing,” you turn to face Charlie, your face flushing red with embarrassment. Your breathing tightens.

“It looks kind of gay.”

“Whatever, Charlie. Shouldn’t you be bothering someone else?”

“Nope,” he says, walking over to you. “You’re not going to be around much longer anyway, so I figure I should get my digs in while I still can.”

The darkness covers you like a shroud. You step into him, breathing heavily. “You know what, Charlie?”

“What?” A nervous smirk plays across his features.

“Someday, thirty or forty years from now, when you’re really old … like fifty … you’re going to remember this,” the tears are welling up but you don’t care. “You’ll want to come back to sixth grade, and get a do-over on this day. Because you’ll realize that you’re about to die, and your whole life has been spent running away from it, from death. Your whole stupid life. And you’re going to wonder what it was that I knew, back in sixth grade, that made me look so fucking cool, so stone cold calm and ready for it.” The tears are running down your cheeks now. “And I won’t be around anymore to tell you about it. You’ll have to figure it out all by yourself. And by then it will be too late.”

Your turn and walk back towards the playground, leaving the shiny rivers of shame to leak down your face and into your shirt. There’s a gaping hole in the pit of your stomach, gnawing away at your insides.

Breaking his nose again would have felt better than this.

**

You print out the thesis and deliver it to Sifu one day after school. During sparring you see him reading through it in the practice room, a red pen moving slowly over the words. After class you sit quietly on the bleachers waiting for him, a sharp ache spreading from your right thigh out into your lower back and midsection.

“This is good,” Sifu says. “Sympathetic magic, huh?”

“It’s something we learned about in Social Studies.”

“You’re right, you know,” he sits down next to you. “No two Black belts are ever the same. Your personal form, the way you inflect each technique and form – nobody has ever received the Black you’re about to get, and nobody ever will. It’s completely yours. Completely personal.”

“I know.”

“There are a few spelling mistakes I’ve marked here,” he hands you the pages, covered in red ink. “Fix those and you should be all set.”

“Okay.”

“How’s the personal form coming?”

“Not very well.”

“Do you want to practice it for me?”

“Not yet,” you say. “I need some more time to figure it out.”

“Alright. Other than that you’re looking really good. You’re doing great, Rachel.”

“Thanks.”

“Three weeks to Black.”

“Then what?”

“That’s up to you.”

**

The outlines of the personal form are taking shape, but something’s missing. Every day after Dad drops you off at the dojo Sifu offers to help, asking you to practice the form for him. You get away with mumbled excuses for a few days, but eventually he forces the issue.

“Look, Rachel, it’s only two more weeks until the test,” he says one night after you’ve finished working techniques. “I have to be honest with you, I’ve never promoted someone to Black without seeing their personal form before the day of the test.”

“It’s not ready.”

“It doesn’t have to be ready. I’d be surprised if it was, to be honest. That’s why I’m here, to help you with it.”

“I don’t want any help!” The shrill scrape of your anger surprises you both.

Sifu nods. “Okay,” he says. “I get it.”

**

By the time test day arrives your rear kicks are starting to flutter out in midair like a dying bird, some important muscle fiber having wasted down to nothing in your leg. During the car ride over Dad and Mom share halting, forlorn looks in the front seat, trying to pretend like nothing’s wrong.

The dojo is full of familiar faces: family and friends, aunts and uncles and teachers and cousins all gathered in your honor. By now they’ve all heard about the diagnosis, and know you won’t make it to Second Black. There’s another guy testing today, a middle-aged Green going for Third Brown, and from the minute you take your place on the mats to warm up you can see he’s nervous. The two of you work on each other for a few minutes before the test, feeding techniques and going over the finer points of footwork.

“Are you ready?” You ask the Green.

“I guess,” he exhales deeply, his lower lip quivering.

He’s afraid of failing the test. You should be scared too, but a soporific calm has settled in, entrenching itself more and more firmly with each panting breath. Sifu hasn’t seen your personal form, and he’s not going to pass you just because you’re sick. But you don’t care. The Black is going to be yours, completely unique; unlike any other belt before or since. Otherwise it won’t work.

Stop.

You look out at the assembled crowd, the background static of conversation and video equipment whirring in your head, like the distant sound of an ocean trapped inside a seashell.

They’re all afraid, you think. Every one of them.

A line of old men follows Sifu into the dojo from the practice room, wrinkled and stooped Kenpo practitioners with bars of red shining bright against the threadbare belts slung across their drooping stomachs. There’s an Eighth Black, a Sixth, two Fourths and Sifu, each clad in a dark gi faded to gray by years of sweat and abuse.

“Hello everyone!” Sifu shouts at the assembled crowd. “Please take your seats. We have two students testing today: an adult Green and a junior Black. Each student will demonstrate several advanced Kenpo karate forms, then we’ll feed them some specific attacks so they can show off the more advanced techniques they’ve learned. After that we’ll see their personal form, and end with some sparring – definitely the most exciting part of the day for most folks!”

Sifu and the older Blacks sit in a row of chairs placed before you on the mats, ready for the test to begin.

“Once we get started I’d like to ask you to keep the conversation at a minimum. If you have little children, make sure to keep them quiet during the test or take them outside so the students can concentrate,” Sifu says.

And just like that, it’s here.

They move you through Staff Set first. As you twirl and buckle the staff against a quartet of invisible attackers you can feel your heart thumping thickly beneath your gi, sweat beading like dew on the pale film of your skin. Your breathing quickens, sooner than you’d expected, but there’s nothing to be done at this point except push on through the test.

Sifu calls a line of students out onto the mats to feed you techniques, Greens and Browns and Blacks silhouetted against the light streaming in from outside. The colorful hieroglyphics painted upon the walls of the dojo flash like fireworks in the edges of your vision.

“Begging Hands. Move.”

A Blue grabs both of your wrists from the front and you step back into a left neutral, twisting your wrists to throw him off balance. You kick once at his groin and he doubles over. You follow through with another kick to the Blue’s chest then palm heel him with both hands in the solar plexus. He falls down with a grunt onto the mats and a Black steps in to take his place.

“Escape From Darkness. Move.”

You turn around so the Black can throw a right sucker punch high and fast from your left side. You jump forward onto your right foot and kick at his knee with your left leg, nearly missing when a twinge arcs from your Achilles tendon to your lower back. You finish out the technique quickly, twirling around to sweep him to his knees with your right leg. You grab his right shoulder from behind and punch quickly, raking down across his face with your left and then faking a neck break. Your chest is burning now.

Breathe it in.

A Brown moves in.

“Calming The Storm. Move.”

The techniques blend into one another, a numbing barrage of blocks and kicks, elbows and parries, the other students coming at you with everything that they have. Several times you miss an important kick, your foot dangling out in mid-air like a broken limb, and Sifu makes your opponent feed you again until it’s done right.

After you finish out Leap From Danger on a slow-moving Green belt, Sifu claps his hands, signaling that you’re done with techniques.

“Great job, Rachel,” he sits before you like a chieftain, the other Blacks ranged to either side of him in their seats, watching your every move. “Are you ready to show us your personal form?”

The clapping of your friends and family is drowned out by the roaring rush of blood in your ears.

Let it run its course.

“Yes.”

“What’s it called?”

“Embracing The Void,” your voice answers.

“You can begin whenever you’re ready. Good luck.”

Breathe it out.

You close your eyes and the ghostly bright afterimage of the grizzled Blacks dissolves into an ashen kaleidoscope of shifting figures. You’re reminded of ancient shamans preparing for the hunt, drawing magic from cool, painted stones. Your heart sloshes frantically inside your chest; the hair on your neck stands on end. The neon pulsing of your arteries shines red against the tenebrous calm growing behind your shuttered eyelids.

Let it go.

You step into darkness, feeling the warm give of the mats against the soles of your feet.

Begin

“You’re the man of the house now, Henry,” Helga said, “I know you’re only twelve, but I’m still expecting you to lead.” She stood stoically beneath the hushed blur of the ceiling fan, the pale white forklifts of her arms extended to receive me.

“Lead where?” I asked. I could hear the muffled laughter of my sisters rising up from the relative safety of the love seat behind me; the four of us had just finished pushing it up against the far wall in an attempt to transform the sparse living room into something resembling a dance floor.

“Ladies,” Helga’s voice dropped an octave as she looked down the bridge of her nose at the giggling girls, a withering glance that stopped all but the most foolhardy of our aunts, uncles and cousins dead in their tracks. The giggling stopped.

Helga’s husband Papa Ned passed away a long time ago, a year before I was born. After years of living alone on the three hundred acre farm she maintained, assisted by an occasional and grudging workforce of grandchildren offered up by her three surviving sons, Helga now found herself playing hostess to me and my sisters. Only two months earlier she’d decided to “expand her horizons” and enrolled in correspondence classes to learn the basics of ballroom dancing, and Helga wasn’t about to let our unexpected arrival deter her from the task at hand.

“So help me Lord,” Helga whispered in a low, husky voice, “you three will learn the Fox Trot before the senior’s dance at the Rotary Club next month,” she shot another look down the long barrel of her nose at my sisters, who extricated themselves from the cushiony quicksand of the couch and shuffled out into the middle of the room to take their places next to us. “I don’t care if you’ve had a rough ride of it lately. Moping about the farm all summer won’t do anything but make you unpleasant company. And nice, tall men don’t want anything to do with uninteresting little ladies.”

After Mom disappeared my sister Julie promised Heather and me that she’d take care of everything. At sixteen Julie could already drive and was by far the tallest one in the family, and on those qualifications alone we’d placed our faith in her abilities to see us through this latest mess, at least until Mom came back and everything went back to how it was before. But after ten days had passed with the three of us alone in our Atlanta apartment,  it was obvious Julie wasn’t going to be able to walk the talk, so Heather called Helga over in Texas, who drove her dilapidated Ford truck through the night to collect us in Atlanta the very next day.

Julie was already running hot when she found out about Heather’s call, but she nearly boiled over when Helga dropped in. She tried telling Helga she was running the show now, thank you very much, and the three of us were doing just fine without her. Mom usually came round after a few days; she was just a little late this time, was all. But Helga wasn’t having any of it – she dragged Julie forcibly out onto the porch and they had a knock-down drag-out right there on the rails for the whole apartment complex to overhear. When they came back inside Julie’s mascara was running in charcoal-colored rivulets down her face; she told Heather and me to pack our things, we were moving to Texas to live with Helga until it could get sorted out. Now we were being forced to learn geriatric slow dances on the dusty plains of some prairie town instead of riding our bikes over the lazy mazes of asphalt near home.

Julie and Heather both remember when things were different, when Dad and Mom and the three of us lived all together under one roof. But things got weird after Dad up and disappeared one day, sending Mom into a spiraling doom of drinking and sleeping. Soon she was disappearing too, sometimes for days on end. She’d managed to course-correct often enough over the years to avoid total catastrophe, but the latest bender had apparently taken more of her than she’d been prepared to give.

Dad had been Helga’s oldest son; Julie says he was tall and handsome like the rest of the uncles but I don’t remember a thing about the man. Since he went missing almost ten years ago nobody’s heard word one from him. Uncle Ron thinks he’s dead, and Uncle Bill believes he’s on permanent vacation in Vegas or someplace called Folsom. None of us knows what Helga thinks – she won’t talk about it, especially now that me and my sisters are underfoot.

“Now do y’all remember the count?” Helga asked.

“Slow-slow. Quick-quick,” Heather replied promptly. Since we’d arrived my middle sister had been steadily brown-nosing her way into Helga’s good graces.

“Very good Heather. Go and start the music, please” Helga said. “And remember what I told you about how delicate those records are.”

Heather went over to the gigantic wood-paneled gramophone player and lifted the needle, starting the dark disc to spinning. A scratchy string of static pops reverberated through the house as Heather skipped back to take her place with Julie, who was playing the male dancer this go-round. The brassy blare of big band music burst out into the room and Helga began dragging me counterclockwise around the floors, our steps echoing off the rafters overhead like the distant sound of horses’ hooves.

“Now Henry,” Helga shouted above the God-awful crooning of Bobby Darin singing Call Me Irresponsible, “if you’re going to lead, you have to look out for my well being.”

“Okay,” I said, moving my foot quickly out from beneath the descending threat of Helga’s shoe to avoid serious damage to my limbs.

“You have to make sure I don’t collide with another dancer or, Heaven forbid, stumble into a piece of furniture,” Helga yanked on my right arm, turning us in a slow wide arc away from our current collision course with the fireplace. “See how I pulled on you a little bit and we turned? Well, once you begin leading, you’ll do the same thing. Only you’ll be steering your partner instead of the other way around.”

My grandmother suddenly slowed and I plowed headlong into the musty weight of her bosoms.

“Now do you see how I slowed us down? If we were on the dance floor and about to run smack dab into the punch bowl, you could do the same by pulling on my arms and slowing your step. Because your partner won’t always be able to see what’s coming up behind her – it’s your job to make sure everything’s going to be okay.”

I pulled my nose out from between the oppressive padding of Helga’s breasts.

“Promise me you’ll work on this? I don’t want to fall down and break my hip at the Rotary Club dance.”

“I promise.”

**

Helga’s house sat on a low rise overlooking fields of wheat and cotton which had once been the envy of friends and neighbors alike; but over the years all but the grass pasture where she still kept a few milk cows had fallen into a state of disrepair. None of Dad’s three brothers – my uncles Ron, Bill and Jim – had taken a shine to the farming business, having had their fill of it working for Papa Ned as kids. We saw them pretty regularly though, as they all still lived within a stone’s throw of Helga’s farm and dropped by nearly every Sunday after church to host a potluck feast cooked by my aunts.

The first week on the farm we learned that we were expected to work for our supper. Each of us pitched in according to our abilities, grumbling at first until we learned that the big, gaudy rings on Helga’s fingers weren’t just for decoration: she could lay a grown man flat with one swipe from those jeweled knuckles. I landed the chore of hauling water from “down yonder” by the well to the rusty water trough, where a few cancerous-looking cows lapped it up with foamy purple tongues that brought to mind some boa constrictor snakes I’d seen on a video one time at school during detention. The pump was a good thirty yards from the trough, and it took an even twenty buckets full of water to fill the damn thing – more if the cows showed up before I was done and started sucking down the fruits of my labor with their slimy snake tongues.

My first few days on the job were quite an ordeal, with me pumping the handle on Helga’s well furiously until the water came rocketing out of the spigot with the force of a fire hose, where it promptly ricocheted back up out of the bucket like a geyser to soak my jeans and shirt clean through. I’d sneak back into the house dripping like a drowned dog and Helga would send me out back to strip down and towel off. I must have gone through five changes of clothes those first two days alone.

“What in tarnation are you doing down there by that well?” I could tell by Helga’s horn-rimmed frown she wasn’t pleased. “All I asked you to do is fill the trough with water. How difficult can that be?”

“I keep getting all wet.”

“You’re not obtuse are you? Your Mom never told me about any deficits.”

“No.”

“Well figure it out then, Henry.”

Eventually I learned to listen for the burbling rush of the water as it came rising up the pipe out of the ground below. Then I got the bright idea to count the number of pumps it took to fill the big aluminum bucket up (nine), and after that I never got wet again … except for the time I tripped over my own foot and fell flat on my face in the chocolaty mud.

“Stupid cows,” I spat at the animals jostling lazily for position at the trough. Their hollow bovine faces looked down at me, splayed out there in the mud like a dead frog, then turned back to their lackadaisical slurping and burping.

As miserable as the experience of Texas was turning out to be, I took some small measure of pleasure in the fact that both Heather and Julie were trapped inside the house with Helga. She’d been struck near to dumb with disbelief when Heather had tried tossing a shirt in the trash because of a lost button, literally unable to comprehend the fact that a girl of fifteen was unable to sew.

“What do you do when you get a tear in your clothes?” Helga asked, arms akimbo, as she stood over the trash can examining the shirt in question.

“I don’t know,” Heather said. “Deal with it? Or toss the thing out.”

“Sometimes clothes actually need to be ripped to look cool,” Julie added. “It’s a style thing, Helga.”

“What is this world coming to?” She pulled the shirt out of the trash can and wielded it like a limp baton in the air above her head. “I’m going to teach you girls how to sew this summer,” Helga declared, “if it’s the last thing I do on this earth.”

The on-the-job domestic training didn’t stop with sewing: Helga had soon developed a daily regimen of cooking, cleaning, washing and dancing lessons which rivaled any class in Home Economics offered back home in the Atlanta public school system. All three of us learned to milk the cows, taking shifts in the thin pre-dawn darkness yanking and tugging on their anemic teats; the animals suffered silently through our administrations until we’d learned to unclog their plumbing with a minimum of fuss.

“It’s so … Little House on the Prairie,” Heather complained one afternoon in the few hours of down time we could catch between lunch and dinner. The three of us were slouched like drunk puppies on Helga’s front steps, grumbling about the agrarian labor camp into which we’d somehow been conscripted and trying not to think about how long we might be stuck here. Helga had retired to her room for the customary pre-dinner nap, shutting and locking the big oaken door leading into the dark depths of her bedroom, which was strictly off limits.

“What’s up with Helga’s bedroom, anyway?” I asked. “She carries that big skeleton key around with her like she’s strapped with a Glock or something.”

Heather stood up to mimic Helga’s ramrod straight posture and slow, deliberate diction. “Hello children,” she intoned, looking down at us as if from a great height. “I’m Granny G – the baddest little lady this side of the Mississippi. Don’t mess with me or I’ll bitch slap you upside the head with my gold-plated knuckles,” Heather brandished a fist decked out with imaginary gangster bling.

Julie and I doubled over in snorting fits of laughter, nearly rolling off the front steps as Heather aped her way through a pitch perfect impression of Helga as a rough and tumble Atlanta gang banger trying desperately to rob a senior citizen’s home for money to feed her addiction to Geritol.

Heather froze mid-sentence.

“Do another one!” I guffawed.

“Let’s not,” came a gravelly crackle from behind the screen door leading into the house.

The three of us clammed up real quick, turning to find the gray silhouette of our grandmother backlit by the blue glow of the living room behind her. Heather skipped over to sit snugly in the spot between Julie and me on the steps, shrinking down to the size of a gopher and drawing her mouth tight as a zipper.

“Why don’t you three come in and help me cook dinner,” said the dim shadow behind the screen door. “We’re making meat loaf and baked potatoes tonight.”

We trudged inside and took our places silently beside our grandmother in the kitchen, chopping and cooking in the warm glow of Helga’s house until the awkward moment passed. After dinner I helped clean the dishes and suffered through another hour of dancing lessons, finally trudging up the stairs to fall fully clothed into the freshly laundered bed sheets which Julie was learning to dry on a clothesline in the back yard. I woke only once, late at night, to the arthritic groaning of the roof as it cooled under the dark Texas sky. I fell back to sleep almost immediately, wrapped in the tight sunlight smell of those sheets.

**

Helga’s faith was like an umbrella – it came in handy several times a year but mostly stayed in the closet during fair weather. Her relentless and unforgiving approach to domestic protocol certainly wasn’t scoring any points with the man upstairs, and Helga didn’t make us bow our heads in prayer before meals like our uncles did. And yet every Sunday she woke us for a breakfast of buttermilk biscuits and honey, then forced us into the starchy discomfort of our “Sunday best” for early services at the Church of Christ in town.

My sisters and I were in agreement that Helga used church as an excuse to satisfy a deep and secret longing to sing backup in a traveling soul band. The moment the dreaded phrase “turn your hymnals to page …” passed the preacher’s lips, Helga’s powdered cheeks took to quivering with the fervor of the truly devoted. She sang as if her life depended upon it, eyes half-closed, examining the hymnal in her raised hand as if it held the secrets to the very universe. The noise which issued forth from the massive barrel of her chest was unlike anything I’d ever heard: a cacophonous, wailing dissonance which reminded me of a sack of cats being drowned. I once saw her draw a breath so full and deep that a button shot free from its tenuous tether upon her dress to fly two pews away and hit a small child in the back of the head.

Sunday morning was also Helga’s one chance to really let her hair net down and socialize with the other old ladies in town. After our harmonic humiliation at the feet of the Lord we’d follow her to the diner across the street and eat a piece of coconut cream pie as Helga engaged in a kind of codified, small-town banter notable for its reliance upon exclamations, nods and the subtle inflection of the eyebrows to emphasize a point. It was like listening to Braille.

“He sure does looks like his old man,” the wizened Mrs. Hunter offered as we took our seats in the diner.

“Yes,” Helga sighed, settling into her seat carefully. My sisters and I chose our chairs around the table and took up the laminated menu cards.

“Did anyone ever tell you that you look exactly like your daddy?” Mrs. Hunter eyed me sideways.

“My uncles,” I replied.

“It’s uncanny, is what it is,” Mrs. Hunter said.

Helga let out a watery sigh and waited for the waitress to notice our arrival.

“How’s Randy doing these days, anyway?” Mrs. Hunter asked quietly.

Julie, Heather and I stared at the red and white checkered tablecloth and said nothing. I fingered the frayed corner of the menu where the plastic sheets were coming unglued, listening to the satisfying pop my thumb made as it worked at the bubble underneath.

Helga’s brows tightened into a gray umlaut of displeasure. “Fine, Ida. He’s fine.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Mrs. Hunter said. “He sure is the spitting image, is all I have to say.”

The crisp chime of the bell atop the diner’s front door announced the arrival of yet another hungry family making the migration from early services across the street. Helga nodded to the latecomers, Mr. and Mrs. Nelson, who navigated between the huddled masses in our direction, their teenage son trailing close behind.

“Well Helga,” said Mr. Nelson, a tall wisp of a man with a wide, dark visage that was larger than it should be, as if at any moment the disproportionate mass of his head might unbalance the rest of him. “I’ve heard you have visitors. Who are these fine looking children?”

Helga’s eyebrows relaxed and a reluctant smile broke across the southern hemisphere of her face. “These are my grandchildren: Julie, Heather and Henry.”

Mr. Nelson extended the bony monstrosity of his hand in my direction and I shook it, squeezing as hard as I could. “Henry, you remind me so much of your Daddy,” he bent down, his head growing even larger as it descended from on high. “Randy, was it?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Man alive,” Mr. Nelson paused, “he was a … a vicarious young man, that’s for sure.”

The smile leaked from Helga’s features.

“This is my son, Jake,” Mr. Nelson said, clapping his son on the back. “Jake, say hello to these fine young ladies.”

“Hello,” Jake said, crossing his arms and rolling his eyes at his parents. He fidgeted with his tie and stared fitfully at his feet. Heather giggled softly.

“Jake just received his driver’s license,” Mrs. Nelson piped in. She licked her palm and tried to tame a stray blond lock sprouting like a weed out of the otherwise carefully landscaped tangle of hair upon her son’s head.

“Really?” Heather said. “I got my learner’s permit at the end of the year, so I can drive with a licensed driver in the car.”

Jake’s gaze found its way from his shoes to my middle sister’s anxious face. “I can take you driving if you want,” he said quickly. “The dirt roads around here are good practice. That’s how I learned, anyway.”

“Oh Helga, can I practice driving with him?” Heather turned to my grandmother, who was still trying to catch the eye of the waitress. “Pretty please?” She sure knew when to pour on the sugar. “I promise we’ll be extra careful.”

As Helga considered the implications of Jake’s aggressively styled hairdo and my middle sister’s nubile young body traveling at speed behind the wheel of a moving automobile, her eyebrows did a kind of palsied tremor, eventually settling back into their resting place above her wrinkled gaze. She leaned out into the cramped aisle between tables, angling to get a better look at Jake Nelson, who straightened up and uncrossed his arms under the harsh floodlight of Helga’s critical stare.

“I guess,” she finally said, righting herself in the chair.

The waitress saw us and waddled over. “How are you today, Helga?”

“Fine,” Helga said. “Another day on the right side of the dirt, at least.”

“Can’t complain about that,” she pulled a notepad and pencil out of her apron. “What’ll it be?”

“Coffee,” Helga said brusquely. “And try to bring it before I die of thirst.”

“Anything for these kids, or are you just going to let them starve to death while you tank up on coffee and cream?”

“You’ll have to ask them about that,” Helga said. “I don’t own this bunch.”

“Just leasing, then?”

“Something like that.”

**

Helga got it in her head that both Julie and Heather needed new dresses for the dance at the end of the summer, explaining that their current wardrobe was “borderline strumpet” and wouldn’t go over too well with the Rotary Club set. As Heather whispered to my oldest sister about what I could only imagine to be her excitement at learning to drive under Jake’s watchful eye, Helga dragged the three of us down the street to a fabric shop and purchased six yards of white cloth and a few handfuls of frilly lace, telling my sisters she’d deduct the cost from the weekly allowance she was holding in escrow until Mom made her way back to us.

“How come Henry doesn’t have to get his allowance docked?” Julie complained.

“He will,” Helga said. “He’ll need some boots, but he already has a pair of jeans and a white shirt.”

“Why do we have to dress up and he doesn’t?”

“It’s different for men,” Helga said.

“That’s not fair,” Heather sighed.

“Fair doesn’t have anything to do with it,” Helga said.

Back at the farm house Helga had me follow her down into the storm cellar to look for an old tailor’s mannequin, the two of us rummaging through boxes of what looked like props for a wild west movie in the musty dampness. As we made our way to the back of the cool, cramped room where Helga remembered placing the mannequin decades ago, I stumbled across a dusty cowboy hat, a blue felt Stetson with a black leather band circling the crown. Helga told me it was Papa Ned’s before he died.

“Can I wear it?”

Helga gave me an exasperated look. “Sure,” she said. “Now help me move these boxes so I can get to that mannequin.”

I angled the brim of the hat down low over my brow, then helped Helga clear a path to the far wall of the basement. We uncovered more cowboy paraphernalia as we worked, eventually discovering a belt buckle misted over with a layer of green patina, its once silver surface etched with a bucking bronco kicking high into the sky. Then Helga handed me a double barrel Remington shotgun with a polished walnut stock, its gray metallic barrels gleaming coldly in the dull yellow light cast by the bulb over our heads.

“Be careful with that,” Helga said sternly. “Go and lay it over there by the stairs.”

“Is it loaded?” I asked, hefting the incredible weight of the gun in my hands carefully.

“Of course not,” Helga said. “Now step to it.”

I set the shotgun up against some boxes at the foot of the cellar stairs and helped my grandmother clear away a few more feet of stored belongings until we reached the far wall, where we found the headless torso of the dressmaker’s mannequin hovering like a ghost beneath a yellowed linen tablecloth.

“Now hustle upstairs with that thing,” Helga said. “Your sisters have a few things to learn about how clothes are made.”

I heaved the lifeless mannequin up the basement stairs and out into the living room, the wooden base of it clattering a noisy tune across the metallic grate of the gas heating unit set deep into Helga’s wooden floors. Outside, a caravan of cars was parked in the front yard. My aunts and cousins were trudging up the dirt path to Helga’s house, laden with various steaming foodstuffs covered in aluminum foil. I stepped out onto the front porch and held the screen door open for the approaching entourage, nodding at my aunts and baby cousins as they bounced boisterously inside to begin preparations for our customary Sunday potluck dinner.

“Is that Henry I see there?” Uncle Ron shouted up at me. “Get over here and let me take a look at you.”

My three uncles were leaning lazily up against the hood of a white Dodge pickup truck, and from a distance they were each indistinguishable from the other: tall, lanky characters who moved with the casual confidence of men who had tamed a corner of the world to his satisfaction. They wore clean white shirts and cowboy hats, the diverse footwear peeking out from the legs of their crisply pressed blue jeans was the only real clue to their individuality.

I made my way down the front steps and over to the Dodge.

“Is that Papa Ned’s hat?” Uncle Ron asked, walking over in his dark leather ropers to stare down at me. “I’ve always wondered what happened to that thing.”

“Yeah,” I said, taking the cowboy hat off and handing it to him. Uncle Ron turned the blue hat over slowly in his hands, examining the inner lining with great interest.

“Well I’ll be,” said Uncle Bill, still leaning motionless against the hood of the truck. “Would you look at that! I feel like we’ve just jumped back twenty five years boys. That’s Randy standing right there, as sure as I’m alive.” He crossed his weathered work boots and leaned over to spit a stream of brown tobacco juice into the dirt.

Uncle Jim strode over in polished ostrich skin Tony Lamas to take the hat up from Uncle Ron. “He’s like a carbon copy, this one.” With one quick flip of his wrist Jim twirled the hat around his hand and onto his head, smiling broadly down at me. One of his front teeth was encased in gold, and as the dying rays of the sun caught the tooth it sparkled brightly from where it sat deep within the honeyed grin on his face.

“Let’s hope that’s not the case,” mumbled Ron.

Uncle Jim fished an etched silver flask from his pocket, unscrewing the lid to take a long pull from the container. “Give the boy a break,” he finally said, his eyes watering from the whiskey, “he’ll be fine. Nature versus nurture and all.”

I stared at the elaborate etchings on the silver flask. Jim held it out for me to examine and, without thinking, I took it up and upended the contents into my mouth, swallowing hard against the hot burn of the whiskey as it coursed down my throat. I handed the flask back to him.

Jim stared open-mouthed down at me under the shadow cast by Papa Ned’s hat, as if he was seeing me for the first time.

“Sweet Jesus!” whispered Ron. “Jim, if Mother saw that you might as well knock the other tooth out yourself.”

Jim screwed the top back on the flask and slipped it back into his pocket, then jostled my shoulder playfully. “How’d you like that, Henry?”

“Just fine,” I said, my head spinning. I resisted a powerful urge to cough.

“Your daddy sure took to it,” Bill said. “Drink’ll ruin you faster than cancer, you’re not careful, Henry.”

“What happened to your tooth?” I asked Jim. As I spoke I felt the edges of the world ebb gradually back from the droning sound of my voice.

A loud, braying laugh erupted from Uncle Ron’s belly. “Yeah, Jim. Why don’t you tell him how you got that purdy smile!”

Uncle Jim flipped the hat easily back down from where it sat upon his head and handed it to me, fixing his eyes on some indistinct place on the horizon. “Well,” he said, “when I was about thirteen years old your daddy Randy and me got into a not-so-polite discussion over which of us was going to get the honor of shoveling cow manure from the barn into the field for fertilizer. I postulated that it was his turn, but Randy had another idea about it.”

“They were squealing back and forth like stuck pigs over the whole thing,” Ron laughed.

“One thing led to another and we started scuffling,” Jim said. “It was nothing really, but your grandmother Helga found us out and decided to show us what a real brawl really felt like.”

“She actually made them square up and beat the tar out of one another in the back yard,” Bill interjected.

“We got tuckered out pretty quick. But every time we tried to stop fighting she’d whip us with a big, leather belt until we started at one another again,” Jim laughed. “We fought so long and hard Randy knocked my front tooth out …” he grimaced and pointed to the gold-plated tooth, “… here.”

“He was a tough son of a gun,” Bill said.

“It cured them both of fighting, at least,” Ron said.

Jim nodded and went back over to lean up against the truck. “In my defense, Randy was four years older than me at the time. Though Mother’s medicine sure did cure me of fighting. I haven’t been in so much as a heated debate with anyone since that day,” he said. “Except for maybe my wife.”

“She’d take you in a brawl, hands down!” Bill guffawed. He turned back to me. “How ‘bout you, Henry – you get into any brawls over there in Atlanta?”

I shrugged my shoulders. The truth was I’d been in detention more times than I could count, the last time for giving Nelson Taylor the what-have-you when he’d made an off-color crack about Julie.

Bill regarded me in silence for a moment. “What’s Mother got you doing to earn your keep?”

“We brought a mannequin up from the basement so my sisters can make a dress,” I said.

Bill spat another damp vector of tobacco juice noisily into the dirt, where it kicked up a miniature cloud of dust. He wiped his lips clean with the back of a calloused hand. “Do you boys remember the photo Mother had of Randy?” He smiled. “The one where he was done up in that little white dress?”

“Hell yes!” Ron laughed. “He must’ve been about two or three years old in that picture.”

“Mother used to make baby dresses for ladies around town for extra money,” Jim explained to me. “But Mother and Papa Ned were so poor at the time she couldn’t afford a proper mannequin, so she’d make your daddy model the dresses because he was about the same size as the little girls she was making them for.”

“He used to get so damned mad when we teased him about that dress,” Bill muttered. “I mean, he’d actually turn bright purple with rage. I wonder what happened to the picture?”

“It’s probably down in that basement with the rest of Mother’s stuff,” Jim said.

“Or Randy destroyed it,” Bill whispered. “Just like everything else he touched.”

I said nothing and walked back up for the house as Ron elbowed Bill in the arm. Looking over my shoulder I could see my uncles shoot a few sharp, fast words back and forth under their breath.

The dry afterburn of the whiskey rose up through my chest and nose like mentholatum vapor. I could hear the crickets tuning their leg muscles up for a long, hot night of chirping, but Helga stepped out onto the front porch to ring the big iron triangle hanging from her front stoop and the insects dialed things down a bit. We all moved inside to wash up and chow down, and I was soon caught up in the noisy swirl of family and food and joking inside Helga’s house, my aunts serving each of the men as they pontificated on topics ranging from how to dig a proper fence post to which high school players had a genuine shot at starting for the U.T. football squad in the fall.

Soon the talk turned to the headless torso of the dressmaker’s mannequin hovering in Helga’s living room, with my grandmother explaining how she was going to teach each of my sisters to make her own dress for the Rotary Club dance.

“It’s actually quite simple,” Helga assured Julie and Heather. “Like painting by numbers.”

“Except harder,” Julie said, “right?”

“Well … yes. A bit.”

“Do we really get to pick how they’ll look?” Heather asked. “Anything we want?”

“Within the limits of good taste,” Helga warned sternly.

“Cool,” Julie said. I saw her picturing herself in the handmade dress of her imagining, and wondered how closely her own vision of good taste aligned with Helga’s.

After my aunts cleared away the dishes from the table it was time for more dancing lessons, but with so many grown men available to help lead it looked like I might be off the hook for the night. I made my way quietly out back and sat in Helga’s whitewashed porch swing, listening to the first faint sounds of big band music drift out of Helga’s open windows and into the cooling summer air. The darkness was moving in slow from the east, interrupted by the sparse waltz of the increasingly emboldened fireflies. The urgency with which they flared up stood in stark contrast to their measured fade back to black, like lit matchsticks being tossed in slow motion out into the purpling horizon, burning slowly down to dust.

**

After that Sunday Jake started calling on Heather several times a week to see if she wanted to practice driving in the bright red Chevy pickup truck he’d spent the last three years of his life saving for. Helga ran the boy through a gamut of formalities before she’d let the two of them alone together in Jake’s car, making him sit for a combination of coffee, pie and cross-examination three whole visits in a row before finally giving her grudging stamp of approval to the dubious enterprise.

“I don’t want any driving over thirty miles an hour, do you two understand?” Helga stared at Jake through the intimidating frames of her black horn-rimmed glasses. “And that truck better stay on the road along my property line so I can see where you are.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jake said.

“I’m quite close with your parents, Jake,” Helga warned. “And you’d better treat my little Heather with the same respect that you’d treat me … or even your own mother. Is that understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

To his credit Jake was patient with my sister as she began the ear-splitting process of learning to drive a stick shift. They spent the better part of two weeks just pulling that truck up and down Helga’s driveway, the chainsaw bite and whine of gears grinding against one another causing even the cows to shiver with discomfort. Eventually Heather learned to ease down on the gas and pop the clutch at just the right time, after which the car stopped jerking about in dusty fits and starts and began rolling along with relative ease. Like how a real car moves, only slower.

Things got really interesting when they moved the show out onto the road. Julie, Helga and I sat watching from the relative safety of the front porch as Heather inched the truck along the dirt road fronting Helga’s property. We tracked the car’s progress against the barbed-wire fence line Helga said Papa Ned and my Dad had strung ages ago, the scrub oak fence posts now leaning precariously to one side after years of wind and weather.

“Does anyone else feel like we’re watching the first few minutes of a disaster movie?” My oldest sister Julie asked as the three of us sat watching Jake’s truck inch slowly along the road.

“It reminds me of something you’d see on America’s Funniest Home Videos,” I said, “right before the punch line and the laugh track.”

Helga glanced over at us both, a puzzled expression on her face. “Sometimes I haven’t the faintest clue what you children are talking about.”

**

Soon Helga began pulling each of my sisters aside for private tutorials on how to measure, cut, sew and adjust their dresses for the Rotary Club dance, which loomed larger in our minds as July petered out and we flipped the page on Helga’s calendar over to reveal the month of August.

“Three more Saturdays to go!” Helga announced tartly. “We’d better step up your dancing lessons, Henry. You’ve a ways to go before you’re ready to lead.”

As their dresses gradually materialized from mere ideas into actual, wearable objects made of cloth and linen, I noticed both of my sisters looking more and more to Helga for guidance on the finishing touches of lacework, which my older sister called some fancy word I didn’t recognize. Julie actually shushed me once after I made a joke behind Helga’s broad back about it.

“Give it a rest, Henry. It’s not like she chose to have us here,” Julie explained. “She’s just trying to help out the best she can.”

I was silent for a bit.

“Where are we going to live once school starts up again?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

What the two of us did know was that Heather had fallen for Jake and been knocked silly by the impact. She talked about him in hushed, doe-eyed tones which had formerly been reserved only for the latest boy band or movie star, and would return from her driving lessons flushed pink with unconsummated teen passion.

“He wants to take me to the Rotary Club dance,” Heather whispered to us one afternoon as Helga slept.

“At least you’ll have a partner who doesn’t need a walker to get around the dance floor,” I said.

“Hey guys, can I ask you a favor?” Heather’s voice lowered even further and she leaned into both me and Julie on Helga’s front steps. “Jake asked if he could take me for a drive tomorrow afternoon while Helga’s napping.”

“Heather!” Julie screeched. “If Helga finds out she’ll skin you alive.”

“I know,” Heather said. “But I wanted to see if you guys could cover for me if Helga wakes up while I’m gone. Just tell her I went to get one of the cows. I’m going to tie it to the fence before we go, then Jake’s going to drop me off on the far side of the field so I can come walking back home with the cow … just in case.”

The diabolical simplicity of the plan gave me a newfound respect for my middle sister; I made a mental note to think twice before crossing her again. Julie stood up and stomped angrily away from us, motioning for Heather to follow. I tried tagging along but was told in no uncertain terms to mind my own business, so I walked down to the well and filled the trough with water for the cattle, cursing at the unfair burden of chores and dancing lessons and Sunday singing and the inexorable Texas heat.

The next afternoon when Helga retired to the cool retreat of her bedroom for a nap, Heather marched straight out into the field, pulling one of the cows behind her on a thick, knotted rope. Julie and I watched the disembodied outlines of our sister and the animal trudge slowly away in the shimmering waves of heat rising up from the earth.

“This isn’t going to end well,” Julie said.

“Nope.”

“It could take the cake for the stupidest thing she’s ever done.”

“What about the time she lit the curtains on fire?”

“That was an accident,” my sister replied. “This one is on purpose.”

My oldest sister had a point.

Sure enough, the minute Helga woke up she sensed something was not as it should be.  I tried busying myself with the water bucket but was stopped before I made it three steps from the porch.

“Where’s Heather?” Helga demanded.

I pointed absently in the direction my sister had disappeared. “She said something about going to get one of the cows from the field.”

“Henry,” she scolded me, “where did your sister go?”

“That way,” I said, pointing again.

Helga’s eyes narrowed. She looked me up and down several times, then turned and disappeared back into the house.

I busied myself outside for as long as possible, scared that if I went back inside Helga would use some kind of East German torture technique to make me spill my guts. I didn’t have to wait long, though, because suddenly Jake’s truck came roaring up the road along Helga’s property, skidding to a gravelly stop at the base of the driveway. The passenger side door opened and my sister jumped out of the car. She shouted something angrily into the cab at Jake and slammed the door with a metallic clang before turning to run up the driveway towards me. Jake gunned the gas and his truck tore off down the road, its oversized tires kicking up noisy contrails of gravel and dust in their wake.

“What happened?” I asked, jogging over to Heather.

Her face was covered in tears, and her breath smelled like the whiskey I’d pilfered from Uncle Jim. Heather looked down at me and tried to smile through her tears, but the result was a strained sort of half-grimace, which she tried wiping away with the heels of her palms.

“Nothing,” she finally muttered. “He’s just an asshole, is all.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

Helga and Julie came running down from the house. Helga took one look at Heather and her weathered face crumpled.

“Where’s the cow at?” Helga asked softly.

Heather pointed to the horizon. “On the other side of the field, tied up against the fence.”

“Henry, you go fetch it,” Helga said. “We’re going inside and get started with dinner.”

I watched as the three women walked together up to the house, then turned and set out for the far side of Helga’s field to find the cow.

**

Heather’s ill-fated driver’s education classes came to a crashing halt after that. Helga must have had words with Jake’s parents, too, because the following Sunday we saw him sulking around the church parking lot, scanning the crowd for Heather after services. But Jake’s mom was quick to pounce, beating him into the back seat of their car before Jake could make his way over to see my middle sister.

“It’s probably for the best,” Julie said as Helga drove us back to her farm. “I bet he’s a terrible dancer, anyway.”

“All left feet, I’d wager,” Helga added. “And he’s not tall enough for my tastes.”

Heather laughed.

Helga spent one final week bombarding us with Bobby Darin songs, until the dawn of the big dance finally broke thin and pale through my window. I woke to find an enormous box resting at the foot of my bed. It was Julie’s day to milk the cows so I lay back and pressed my eyelids shut, trying desperately to recapture the vivid image I’d been dreaming only seconds before. Something about a butterfly, or a worm; or a butterfly that was also a worm. In any case I lost the thread of the dream and opened my eyes, then sat up in bed to open the box.

Inside was a brand spanking new pair of calf skin boots: light brown leather with a dark, fanciful inlay fanning out from the fronts like the wings of a phoenix. The oily saddle smell rising up from the box reminded me of a new car. I dressed quickly and eased them on by the pull-straps, clomping around in my bedroom until Helga shouted up at me from the kitchen to please stop it and come downstairs for breakfast.

“Well,” Helga asked as I thundered woodenly down the stairs in my new shoes. “What do you think?”

“They’re cool,” I said. “Thanks, Helga.”

“Do they fit?”

“Pretty much.”

“Then you’re welcome.” Helga motioned for me to help her set the table for breakfast, then went outside and lifted her nose gingerly up into the air, sniffing the damp morning mist into her lungs. “A storm’ll be rolling in later today,” she called from the patio. “We’d better leave a little early tonight to avoid the rain.”

After breakfast my sisters spent the rest of the afternoon putting the finishing touches on the frilly collars of their dresses while Helga and I went back over the major components of the Fox Trot. I was finally getting the hang of it, pushing gently on my grandmother’s big white hands to steer her around the room.

“Good work, Henry,” Helga said. “How are you feeling about it?”

“Fine, I guess.”

“That’ll have to do.”

After lunch Helga baked a plate of peanut butter cookies, her contribution to the evening’s festivities, then told us all to go wash up. She disappeared into the bedroom for her own mysterious, matronly preparations. I pulled on a white shirt and brushed my teeth, then sat waiting on Helga’s patio in Papa Ned’s cowboy hat, watching the thunderclouds build up in the south. Eventually my sisters came drifting down Helga’s broad stairs like princesses, the pristine white finery of their homemade dresses fluttering softly about their legs and ankles.

Helga appeared, dressed in an polyester pink lace suit that looked to be a few sizes too small, her horn-rimmed glasses hovering darkly below the matching pink hat sitting upon her gray head. Her square shoulders strained wrinkled and tight against the smooth fabric of her dress as she moved.

“Are we ready?” she asked.

The three of us nodded and piled into Helga’s Ford for the long drive south to the armory, with Helga fretting the whole time about the malevolent fury of the storm darkening the horizon ahead. The clouds ballooned slowly up into the stratosphere, like an inky infusion of food coloring diffusing through a glass of water. A whistling wall of wind buffeted the truck, almost forcing Helga’s car out into the next lane of traffic.

“This one’s going to be a barnburner,” Helga commented, hunching over the steering wheel to gaze up at the advancing storm. “We might even hear the tornado sirens tonight, kids.”

“Really?” I asked. “What do we do then?”

“Duck,” Helga smiled.

I blanched.

“Don’t worry, Henry,” Helga assured me. “The place we’re going is probably the safest place to be during a tornado warning.”

We rolled up to the armory, a massive sandstone and cinderblock bunker with small, square windows, just as the rain began blowing in silvery sheets across the parking lot. Helga parked close to the front door and I escorted the women in crouched, running bursts from her truck to the armory, sheltering them from the raindrops with Helga’s large, black umbrella. Julie nearly dropped the plate of cookies as we sprinted through the damp, slanting bedlam.

Stepping inside the place you’d have thought it was Christmas time in August, with strings of big, multicolored bulbs crissing and crossing one another to form a glowing, rainbow-colored canopy above our heads. My sisters and I followed Helga over to a card table where several brightly-dressed octogenarians sat chatting one another up, eyeing the growing crowd of senior citizens in the main dance hall as they waited for the action to begin.

“Well, hello Helga! Who are these fine-looking young children?” asked a hunchbacked woman dressed in a canary yellow dress, her bright red lipstick almost glowing against the paper-thin creases in her pale, white skin.

Helga straightened up and turned to admire me and my sisters. “These are my grandchildren,” she said, eyes flashing. “Randy’s kids.” Helga elbowed me and grimaced in the direction of my head; I removed Papa Ned’s cowboy hat and nodded at the women.

“Well it’s a pleasure to meet each of you,” said another stooped matron decked out in deep purple. “You can put those cookies over on the table with the rest of the food,” she motioned at a long table and I followed Julie over to deliver our offering. We walked the length of the buffet admiring the spread: steaming plates of macaroni and cheese, fried okra, deviled eggs and a kind of pink-colored pudding dotted with marshmallows and pecans.

“What’s in the punch, you think?” I pointed at the giant plastic punch bowl, filled to the brim with a dark cherry liquid dotted with floating slices of yellow pineapple.

“With this crowd?” mumbled Julie. “My money’s on arthritis medicine.”

My sisters and I explored the room, steering ourselves in a tight-knit pack from one end of the place to another, trying to avoid the slow-moving old folk for as long as we could manage. But eventually a blue-blazered geezer in a cowboy hat took his spot behind the sound system, and soon the same big band music we’d been hearing at Helga’s house got to thumping big and bright and loud through the armory building.

Heather shouted something I couldn’t quite catch.

“What?” I asked.

She leaned into my ear, shouting. “The DJ sure is pumping up the volume.”

“He’s probably deaf,” I shot back.

Heather laughed and the three of us plopped down into some folding chairs to watch the show. The electric crackle of the lightning storm outside occasionally interrupted the swinging tempo of the music, a few times dampening the lights and sound near down to nothing before the power kicked back on and the place surged freakishly back to life.

We watched Helga seek a partner in the rave-like peak and fade of sound and color. Compared to the rest of the Rotarians our grandmother was an Olympic decathlete, moving like an arctic ice-breaker through the brittle-looking crowd in search of a man who came close to equaling her in height. She was in for a long night.

Several old men shuffled purposefully in the direction of my sisters, who were soon being escorted carefully out into the center of the room as if they were a pair of china plates. Julie and Heather began scooting clockwise around the dance floor with their escorts, their well-seasoned companions smiling broadly as they moved.

“There’s nothing more beautiful than a lovely girl in a white dress,” said a voice next to me.

I nearly jumped, whipping around to find some old coot sitting in the chair next to me, his face half-hidden by the big, white cowboy hat sitting on his head. We regarded one another in silence from beneath the wide brims of our hats.

He was the first to crack. “You the man of the house over there, then?”

“Not by choice,” I said. “That’s just the way it’s shaking out.”

“That’s a great place to be in life,” he said, smiling wistfully down at me. “A young man in a house full of young women.”

“I guess.”

We regarded each other for a moment longer, finally turning in unison back to watch my sisters dance under the pulsing net of multi-colored lights.

Before long Helga plowed her way over and yanked me out on the dance floor for a spin around the room, her eyes sizing up each weathered cowboy in the hopes she’d find one suitable to her tastes. Helga smelled like a mixture of soap and baby shampoo. I counted the steps under my breath as we danced: slow-slow-quick-quick, slow-slow-quick-quick, trying to guide my grandmother carefully through the fossilized mob around us. Helga smiled as I led her carefully in the direction of my sisters.

A sharp, deafening clap sounded outside and the lights died down completely, the music cutting off with a crackling scrape. A series of muffled exclamations cascaded through the darkness. Unthinking, I kept dancing, steering Helga another few steps into the gray gloom, where she bumped up against something tall and thick that stopped our forward progress altogether.

“Oh!” Helga shouted, just as the lights flamed brightly back up.

I’d led Helga smack dab into a tall, lean cowboy dressed in a light gray suit, and she now stood dripping in a pink pool of punch, one side of her dress stained bright red with the dark liquid.

“Heavens to Betsy,” Helga murmured, cantilevering her head out sideways over her body to survey the damage.

“Oh dear,” said the man we’d collided into. He held an almost empty plastic cup in his hand, runnels of pink punch dripping down his wrist and hand. “My apologies.” He removed his hat and bowed a white-haired head down at Helga.

Helga’s cheeks flushed red. “Henry,” she stammered, “go fetch me some napkins and soda water so I can clean up.”

I did as I was told, grateful I’d somehow avoided Helga’s thundering wrath for the accident. When I returned I found Helga and the man settled into a casual banter, their big, wide arms gesturing easily as they talked. Helga took the soda water and napkins from me and then, to my great relief, shooed me away as if I was a horsefly.

My sisters skipped over, having extricated themselves from the sclerotic clutches of their escorts.

“Who’s the hunka-hunka-burnin’ love Helga’s talking to?” Julie asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I ran her into him, though, and probably ruined that dress. I’ll bet I catch hell for it tomorrow.”

“Look at them laughing there, Henry,” Julie said. “She’s not going to say a word about it, you mark my word.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “Wanna dance, Heather?” I asked my middle sister.

She smiled and took my hand. We walked together out into the crowd, then danced the Fox Trot until it was time to leave, much later in the night. Helga’s tall drink of water turned out to be a pretty good dancer, taking her for a few laps around the dance floor before seeing us all out to her truck, after the worst of the howling storm had blown its way past the outer darkness beyond the armory’s fortified perimeter and it was finally safe to head back home.

**

The three of us drove back to Helga’s in near silence, the background buzz of jazz music still ringing in our ears. The storm had been worse than we’d thought. Several times as we drove Helga had to steer the car up onto the shoulder of the road to avoid the leafy barricades of downed tree limbs. A few flickering remnants of ball lightning roiled across the cloud cover up above our heads, followed several seconds later by an answering rumble from the retreating storm.

As we neared Helga’s property the road devolved into a muddy morass of packed earth and gravel, with entire sections having been erased in the flash floods which had coursed through the area during the dance. We passed a stranded red truck caked with mud, sunk almost to the cab in the quicksand depths at the shoulder of the road.

“That looks like Jake’s truck,” Heather whispered, craning her head back at the abandoned vehicle as we drove slowly by.

“That boy just doesn’t know when to quit,” Helga said, frowning back at the stranded truck reflected in her rearview mirror.

Just down the fence from Helga’s driveway a narrow trench had washed through the road. As we neared the gulley I spied what looked like an enormous, slithering snake stretched across the road, the seething surface of its skin shimmering wet and slimy in Helga’s head lights.

“What’s that in the road?” I said, pointing.

Helga stopped the truck and punched on her high beams.

In the few inches of water coursing from one side of the road to the other were literally hundreds of bullfrogs; their eyes glowed orange against the night sky, and their dark, wet bodies shone back at us as they crawled and hopped their way out of the wash.

“Ew!” Heather said.

“I have never seen so many disgusting looking things in my life,” Julie seconded our middle sister.

“The storm must’ve washed them out of the creek and into the road,” Helga said. “Henry, I don’t want to crush them when I drive through there. Go out and kick them out of the way with your boots.”

“What?” I asked.

“You heard me,” she said. “It won’t take but a few minutes.”

“But I’ll get all muddy.”

“So,” Helga said. “We can wash you up when we get home.”

I tried protesting but Helga wasn’t having any of it, so I soon found myself ankle deep in frogs and mud, blinking against the brightness of Helga’s headlamps. I used my new boots like a bulldozer, scooting the soft, fat creatures out of the way so Helga wouldn’t crush them under the wheels of her truck.

After I’d boot-scooted the amorphous flood of amphibians out of the gulley I motioned for Helga to drive over the wash. The truck splashed through the mud then braked as it neared me. I opened the passenger door and tried climbing into the cab.

“Oh, Henry! Gross!” Julie protested, shoving her hand in my face.

“Oh no you don’t, young man,” Helga said, taking in the dark, stinking layer of mud covering my legs and boots. “Jump up into the truck bed. We’re almost home anyway.”

I did as I was told, riding the last half mile or so to Helga’s house in the back of the truck, my face awash in the cool drizzling remnants of the storm. We pulled up to the dark outline of Helga’s house and it became clear the winds had downed a power line somewhere nearby: not a single light shone inside the place, and the usually bright front porch sat gray and silent before us.

Helga turned off the car and the four of us plodded through the mud to the porch. She reached for the handle and pushed on the door, only to find it locked.

“That’s funny,” Helga said. “I don’t ever lock the front door. Did one of you kids lock the door on me before we left?”

My sisters and I shrugged our shoulders and said nothing.

Helga fished around in the jingling depths of her purse in search of the key.

“Well I’ll be,” Helga said softly. “I must’ve left the key inside, too.”

We followed our grandmother around the side of the house to try the back door. It, too, was locked.

Helga laughed. “We’re in a pickle here, kids,” she said.

“What about one of the windows,” I offered. “We can crawl in and unlock the house from the inside.”

“I usually leave my window unlocked,” Helga said.

We followed Helga around to the other side of the house until we found her bedroom window, which sat about five feet up off the ground from where we stood. I took Helga’s keys and wedged them down under the sill until I could get my fingers underneath, then pushed the window squeaking up high over my head.

“Why don’t you go in, Henry,” Helga said. “Our dresses will just get soiled climbing up the side of the house anyway. We’ll meet you in the front. Make sure to take off your boots once you get inside.”

The three women watched as I pulled myself up into the obscurity of Helga’s room. I kicked and groaned, finally heaving with both arms to fall face-first into the downy softness of Helga’s bed, which lay just under the windowsill. It was darker inside than out, and it took my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the difference.

“Are you alright, Henry?” Helga’s broad face stared, unseeing, in at me from outside.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll meet you out front.”

I tumbled off Helga’s bed to the floor, then stood and tried to orient myself in the silent obscurity of Helga’s bedroom. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I found Helga’s door and moved towards it. I saw what looked like my own reflection and paused, thinking I’d stumbled upon a mirror.

I moved closer but the reflection didn’t reciprocate, so I reached my hand out gingerly to touch the face before me, my fingers eventually finding a framed photograph sitting atop Helga’s dresser. I pulled the object in and examined the picture carefully: a faded, sepia image capturing a frowning little boy dressed in a girl’s white dress, a much younger Helga standing laughing behind him. I could’ve sworn it was me there in that photo, my face scrunched up in anger at the abject humiliation of the entire situation.

I heard a loud, grating clank and turned to look behind me. The thin rays of the moon leaked in through Helga’s open window, illuminating a dark trail of mud which tracked across Helga’s bed to where I stood upon her hardwood floors. I’d forgotten to take off my boots, and for the second time tonight was certain I’d catch hell for it later.

The sound came again, louder this time, from the deeper recesses of the house beyond Helga’s bedroom door. Setting the photograph back upon Helga’s dresser I opened the door and stepped out into the quiet length of the hallway, the sounds of my passing diminished by the layer of mud caked under my boot soles. As I neared the door leading down to Helga’s cellar I heard the noise again and stopped dead in my tracks.

“Cock tease, is what she is,” came a slurring drawl immediately to my left.

I shouted in fright, jumping sideways, and fell thudding against the hallway wall.

Jake sat slumped at the top of the cellar stairs, cradling Helga’s shotgun in his lap, both barrels glinting cold in the wan light streaming in from Helga’s front windows. I could see the outlines of my grandmother and sisters milling fuzzily beyond the frosted glass of the front door.

“That sister of yours is a God-damned cock tease, Henry.” The sour smell of bourbon wafted up from the darkness.

I was too scared to move. I looked down at the indistinct outlines of Jake’s form, trying not to breathe, and watched as he listed to one side and seemed to pass out against the door jamb. Without thinking I bent down and quickly grabbed up the dead weight of the shotgun from out of Jake’s grasp, my fingers sketching shaky sine waves in the air as I moved. Jake whispered something into the wall and tried to pull himself up.

I imagined my father then, purple-faced with rage, trying to fight his way out of the picture on Helga’s night stand. I reared my leg back, feeling the heavy heft of the boot, and kicked Jake square in the chest. The soft, fleshy give of his body against my foot satisfied a deep, unspoken itch somewhere inside my stomach. Jake crumpled moaning back onto the floor and raised a hand in half-hearted protest, but was now too far gone to put up much of a fight.

I took the shotgun and walked unsteadily over to the front door. I inhaled deeply, unlocked the door, reached down and turned the handle. Outside I found the expectant huddle of my grandmother and two sisters, their dresses pasted damply to their skin as they stood waiting for me there in the thundering darkness. Anxiously waiting for me to tell them it was safe to come inside, that everything was going to be okay.

I call it
future memory,
holes in a moment seen
sideways, peripheral
confirmation of a path conceived
in childhood (or earlier) and
the hot aching pang
of reassurance that follows
tastes like air before
summer rain.

My children are ancient –
tiny goddesses
molding time like putty,
able to blink once
and watch
as the world gives
against the force of their
desire.

Our oscillation between
extremes leaves
scattershot footprints,
and backtracking through
darkness you stumble into
holes like breadcrumbs
left by an earlier self,
and give strength to
the one that
remains.

On day two-hundred-seventy-four I looked past mother’s breast and saw that it would be important, the learning would be, to her. You won’t believe me about the last part, the memory breast and the idea about the learning being such an important. “He would have been too young,” you’ll say inside and if you still have a cat you might say it even out loud because this makes you feel like you’re being heard.

But it’s true, I’ve always been able to read them. It’s all in the eyes and in the making contact. Father finally told me about it on day one-thousand-eight-hundred-ninety-nine, “It’s important to make eye contact son,” he still says it. On day one-thousand-one-hundred-nineteen I learned to read the words on the labels, green labels first then red but after that they came in a rush, the other words from all over and I lost track. It won’t ever stop now, as long as I have eyes at least.

I could tell mother and father were excited, very “proud parents” about the labels and the reading, right there on day one-thousand-one-hundred-nineteen when I read “peas” off the first green label. They made laughter then and gave me ice cream which I “love” and mother began reading with me every day after. Of course there was testing too; I’m always doing exemplary on the testing because of their eyes, that help me understand what they want. After that it’s “all downhill” as father says.

The goldfish present was a reward for my “job well done” on the testing and I remember the day, it was one-thousand-four-hundred-seventy-six. At first I thought the goldfish was already dead because the eyes “were,” but then it was gasping and I thought of course the goldfish is water-drowning (you probably think this is funny but I was still learning then). So I took it for a tricycle ride in the outside, the goldfish which began air-drowning in my sweaty hand on the tricycle in the outside and I saw its eyes change and that’s when I learned about the context. Later, when mother came in the outside and asked me where was the goldfish, it was the place that was the important in her question.

You see mother was always asking me about the place so I thought “it” was the important. But it’s not, the place isn’t, important but the context “is.” The sweat and the palm and the air-drowning goldfish can be in Boca Raton or Boise or Prague or even Yourtown, and maybe it is in Yourtown (you don’t know, but now you’re suspecting); it’s the context of it that’s mattering to the air-drowning goldfish whose eyes are deadening, deadening, dead.

Mother’s eyes told me that it was too much, it all was. She didn’t do exemplary on the testing is my guess. I told her don’t be hard on your self but she “was” and I think she was afraid of all the doing: the learning and the reading and the exemplary testing and especially the context. It was making her tired. They never found out what happened to her, but even if they did I think they wouldn’t tell me for fear. I learned about the importance of eye contact at her funeral on day one-thousand-eight-hundred-ninety-nine, “It’s important to make eye contact son,” father said as they all came after to shake us and I see he’s right now.

Then it was just the three of us, father and me and the cat when we still had it. Then I met her, on day two-thousand-one-hundred-eleven because father couldn’t talk about it, he was too busy with the thinking and the working and was beginning to be tired too because his “dogs were barking.” It was important to father that I ask for her help in the not being scared or too hard on my self, and so he took me to the Services department where I met her and we began the talking.

She says the talking is supposed to make me feel better and I tell her that it does. I can tell this makes her feel good, not “happy” more like satisfied and she’s never tired. She has big blue eyes and is exemplary at the making contact with them, which I’ve found is unusual. She thinks I should be sad and I tell her that I am, being sad, and we play games and do the talking.

The bruises started appearing on day two-thousand-seven-hundred-eight and I could tell it upset her, the bruises did because things had been going so well, such “great progress” she kept saying. She wanted to know where they were “from” and I told her the story about father and how important it is to be making contact with the eyes; she wouldn’t understand the context anyway and father was very angry that day after the talking. I knew he would be angry but the talking is also the important now and I’m beginning to understand how it all works, I think.

They found the cat on day two-thousand-seven-hundred-nineteen water-drowned in the potty with its eyes looking like the air-drowned goldfish’s did that day on the tricycle. She wants to know what happened but I don’t want to do the talking today, I tell her I’m “afraid” and she seems worried because without the talking there’s nothing for us to do except play and we both know she’s too old for it.

The bruises are getting worse and she brings some others along to play with us and we all do the talking, which I’m learning can be useful when it’s done right. That day after the talking, two-thousand-seven-hundred-fifty-eight, father came as always and the others wouldn’t let him take me and father was even more angry than before; I thought he might change the context right there in the hallway but the others took him away and she said not to be scared so I told her I wasn’t, being too scared. She smiled down at me and reached out to do the touching of my hair and I saw her hand do the rubbing of her stomach which had been getting fatter every day.

I understood then that she was going to be getting tired soon, with the mothering and the working and the talking and the playing all getting to be too much; she was “only human,” after all. The others took me to live with the new father and mother while they all did the talking with my first father and for many many days things were good until they found the second cat, in the alley behind the new house and the context had changed again.

That day she was very upset and wanting to rush through the talking, doing the rubbing of her stomach the whole time and she was scared, I could see it in her eyes. She told me I would need to take a test and I knew I’d do exemplary on the testing like always and said so, and I think this made her happy. The test was easy, even “fun” if you wanted to call it that, and afterwards I asked her how I did and she said that my score was “perfect,” then the others came back into the room to watch us play again, doing their own soft talking in the corner.

I reach out to do the rubbing on her stomach and see the skin on her arms do the chicken bumps as she moves away and that’s when I find out about the mistake, about the context and the place and which is the important. It occurs to me that the place might be if not the important then at least somewhat. I need to change this one to find out, so I look at her eyes and tell her what she’s wanting: that everything will turn out fine and she’ll be a great mother and they’ll all live “happily ever after” and won’t ever be getting too tired. I can hear my voice calm and it’s so sure, the voice, and it must seem pleasant to her. It might take some time, but she’ll come around; I’ll have to avoid making again the same mistake.

Don’t worry though I’m not in the being too hard on it, my self, I’m just a kid and I’m still learning how it’s supposed to be.