English Studies Forum

Exit Chino

an excerpt from A HalfMan Dreaming

David Matlin

            When my father came home after fighting in Europe and getting a medal, there was no work, especially for a “War Hero” with the wrong shade of skin, the wrong name, and the wrong language until he walked into the offices of this wholesale rose growing nursery. A Kiowa Indian named Tom Green was sitting behind a desk doing some end of the week check writing and my dad asked if there was any jobs. “Anything” my dad said, “I’ll do it.” He’d heard about these Jews who grew roses and their Kiowa foreman but nothing more until my father walked into that office with ten bucks in his pocket.

My first memory of Wesley, the son of that Rose Farmer, goes back to that moment when we were on a grammar school playground in a little town called Chino, California. It was one of those perfect Southern California autumn days with the Santa Ana Winds building, but only just enough to crinkle the edges of live oak in the canyons of our surrounding hills. The Wind created an edgy, hard dryness perfect for the careless smoker to conjure a hundred thousand acre blaze with a single throwaway butt, or, carrying some remnant strontium 90 off Yucca Flats, straight to the edges of alfalfa harvested up to the borders of our classroom windows, the poisonous isotope was absorbed by local diary cattle whose fresh milk products were purchased directly by our parents.   Wesley was spinning “tops” and he was pretty good too as he unfurled those solid little wood bowls with a wrap around string on a steel spike and let’em hop and twirl. Then suddenly there was this big shadow covering the whole playground. Wesley was the first to look up. It was a “Flying Wing” hovering, a Cold War Secret Darkness that few, away from the Air Force off limits high priority shadow zones, ever got to see. It was that shadow that brought us together, and it would loom in everything we shared from our boyhoods to the fury that separated and swallowed us , but kept us connected as we became men.

It must’a been second or third grade when Wesley began throwing knives at our feet, playing “stretch” until the other players felt almost split in two, or he stood alone in the Farmer’s furrows as the spray planes dived over that family’s rose fields and moved not a lash. His alert, unhesitant challenges provided a barrier between himself and other kids, as well as attracting and angering them with his quick, supple remoteness that made them feel fragile and vague. We also played “range war” with real horses over the skeletons of Indians caught out in the nineteenth century “death shoots” and murder storms native to every California valley. The way he tracked that “Flying Wing” with his eyes, watched its shadow cover us.

We became friends that day.

But this story really begins in 1964 in the middle of my first tour of Vietnam when the only things that became real on my body were my trigger fingers and my dreams about the falcon men and falcon women who haunted the Mississippi, with the eye markings of the peregrine falcon shadowing their faces as they lifted severed heads through the water plazas and avenues of their great Mississippian centers and if there were ever going to be any words I didn’t know if they’d reach anybody’s lips ever again or if they’d be able to find the lost minds flying through the dream air of their journeys which might turn to vapor too, and in that, things became something larger, a version of the life I took and the remaining life I could imagine from nearly a year spent in solitary confinement and that would make me want to stay alive, to ask when is a country good? When is a country suitable for living? When does a country have a broken neck?

Death rubbed me until I turned green and glistened. It stained me with its little pustules of shit and deception that become ancient blood blisters with no place to rest. 

My name is Lupe. I’m Wesley’s friend and this is a story that extends from the books I first read in Wesley’s home, and what I saw one afternoon on a hill overlooking a chicken ranch.

Most of the time I feel like the woven portion of some labyrinth with my veins collapsed in valleys whose names the papers would print, where me and Wesley’s childhood friends were  made to be so expert nobody in any world would ever want us or the ones like us; me and Wesley’s other surfer friends, who became such unusual killers after not much more than one whiff of those waters called the Mekong.

The best violence, how it could be offered and taken, has balls and nipples, the whole thing still there, regular when it got home, then just sort’a crumbles and swells even though I entrusted my throat to shrunken waters that shout at me like a shrunken head that says, “Son, go bring me the stink of a country. I want to eat it.”

Combat got to be such a habit it couldn’t be stopped. Just got stuck I guess. Stay around long enough and some explanation might rise up. One friend came back. Stayed real calm for about a year. He got a scholarship to UCLA or some such, wanted to write a novel like Naked and the Dead. Went in a Marine captain and came out. He was alive with a job on a sheep ranch up around Point Delgada, and spent the second year on that part of the Pacific Coast shivering in the corner of a little cabin he’d been given. He was the first one we knew who re-emerged re-wrapped. A man for sure in name, but he said it was like some mouse came to nibble the cuticles, first, around his toes and fingers “How the fuck would you like that?” the mouse asked, “and if you want more, why you are a mountain to me,” and slowly the mouse ate, loving the Marine captain’s repulsion, the center of its heat remolding him, bruising him too and in his dream he was becoming a skeleton, the mouse’s hunger making him feel mysterious, filled with a triumph he might steal from the farthest winds.

There’s a list. Most of ’em went to prison. Substituted one combat for another. One friend got good with a mortar, set up and pinpointed a range of horror. Said it was like cleaning carburetors or bleeding brakes, that he was control center for the flow of gasoline, brake fluid, blood, and those screams in the night when the forms of dismemberment fall and he could direct the carving, slice and distribute the results. “Just administration” were his words, dial up the vocabulary until those were the only syllables left. He got home after two tours and a Bronze Star, went from impersonal to personal murder specializing in the use of victims’ underwear. He’s in prison now. When me and Wesley went for an ugly visit the only things he wanted was hashish and some François Villion. If we couldn’t supply either one then don’t ever come again.

When I landed at Edwards Air Force Base for the last time my dad and a man named Tom Green were there. But my mother wasn’t. She told me later she was afraid after three tours to see who’d get off that comin’ home jet. She was afraid. I was afraid to tell her that I had the eyes of a spider and knew what Hell was and would always be denied shelter. Burned will be the birds. Burned will be the sands of the sea. Burst will be the wells. Burst will be the count of days. Burst will be the count of nights.

Tom Green had known me and Wesley since we’d rode our bicycles to Wesley’s house, a couple of second graders. Tom Green and Wesley’s father were out in the corrals and hog pens checking over horses and pigs, saddles, feed and fence posts checking for termite rot.

On that list too, there was a pregnant sow, a mean one, a really mean one looking for the smallest chance to do any damage she could. We arrived about the same time that old hog almost ran down Tom Green. She’d missed “bout an ass hair’s worth” as the Kiowa reported it, “but by God, it was a miss” though he’d had to dive into a mixture of mud “and a pure inch of lost farts that’d wandered out headless into the Southern California sunshine.” Wesley’s father was looking over the Kiowa when we got off our bikes. He was looking at the hog too. Though she was a good breeder probably the appearance of two young boys kept him from killing her right there. He saw Wesley and me, gave himself a chance to laugh and asked Tom Green if he wanted a beer as well as a whiskey and a shower to wash away the humiliation.

That was the first after-school afternoon after we’d seen the Flying Wing.

Their house was full of books and paintings and the things the Farmer’s Wife brought home from some of her travel. Some of what we found in that library scared us. But it was the place we both got caught up in. The books, the paintings, the Pre-Columbian ceramics brought from Oaxaca and Peru, Yucatan, and Kentucky. From that first day Wesley’s parents let me read and watch and listen. We learned to share, in that initial moment, our fascinations and our nightmares, and I’ve never forgotten what Wesley’s mother said that same afternoon as we looked at some of the textiles she’d brought home from Peru, the kind of, what Wesley was able later to call, around the tenth or eleventh grade, the “Sudden Speech” she was capable of, that often made the moment she said these things into a heavy, dispossessed twilight. “Who will forgive us,” were her words, “when we are small, have grown too ugly, for this land,” and then walked out of the room. But she and the things she brought to that house have never walked out of my mind.

 There were artists too who came to their rose fields from LA and New York and movie producers the Rose Farmer knew from his earliest childhood. They came for their visits in gull-wing 300SL Mercedes Benzes, Cadillacs, Citroens, MGs, Jaguar Sedans, convertibles that to Wesley and me seemed big as houses and we’d get rides sometimes, sit with a starlet or a wife on the hand-sewn leather seats heading to their favorite Basque restaurants or to some “Inn” out beyond Etiwanda where you’d see Robert Mitchum or Faye Spain and they came to say “Hello” to these men and women who visited the Farmer and Wesley’s mother. They’d sing and talk, drink and argue about books, art, politics, the transport of it for themselves and each other almost irresistible maybe because they’d gone, many of them to a war and were still amazed at those moments they were standing at the edges of rose fields their boyhood friend had planted far as the horizons around them as if it were an enormous secret nobody but themselves could overhear or see.

And because they were Jews maybe their amazement included their, many of them, one generation remove from what? The fever that lives, but where exactly? Is it the fever that lives in our mouths, where everyone’s language, the seat of words begins to die? Is this the notification of an end, of people, a civilization, a sky that accompanies the life of a world or the verbs that refer to and are attached to divine beings and the diseases they send? The Persons of the Verb casting the spells of Beginnings, or the time before symptoms and the delicate placing of an illness into the obscurities erasing health slowly, treacherously as they swirl below the surfaces of pronunciation where rotting, the rainbow of rotting assumes its wealth of wrath, wealth of rage, seeping, perforating the courage of life, the courage to want to be alive?

We found this quote one day after his mother had returned from Peru. A piece of paper she’d misplaced in the mess of unpacking, the mess of another return to the Farmer as they were squandering everything they’d built and lived for:

                        Thy eye, thy heart, thy understanding

                        Such is the breakfast that festers

                        Such is the sun

Wesley would look at this kind of random object, hold it for a time, then light it on fire as it floated down an irrigated furrow into the spectre of huge rose fields not ever meant to absorb such messages.

Me and Wesley read a bunch of stuff, thought and talked about it. But before a man with his lungs bursting half out of his mouth from a sniper shot, watching himself wash away in that second of his own living horror knowing everything he would ever know then, even though no book for me at that point could visit such dying, I thought the only thing then might be a story, a poem, a painting, a Huaca Prieta carpet like his mother brought home, some remnant with bat hair, bat teeth and wings and the syrupy mud that infected this world with sub-utterances calling to sexual pleasure, a fertility sea where Gods swim and become fetuses and galaxies, orchids heavier than lead or sun-eating moths which pretend to be pillars of the most recently seen double rainbows.

In what world am I placing this prose and those capacities to vaporize any reality lying before the sweep of even the slightest decompositions? The resting place of a mind, a penis, a vagina, a human hand with nothing to hold, leaves no document of the having lived, the having once been now no more massing, sucking the liquids of the recently murdered and their unclosed eyes, sucking stupor, rage, ecstasy, the portals of ancient ventriloquisms and their miracles of blatant shambles, wonder-ravings of magically violating disinterest, and the cities waiting for the first signs of their alliances with rotten unseen planets releasing any lollipop stained chumps from the present tense taking root in soft tissue, dietary reconstruction, one-sided chewing and the side effects it brings to hallucinations? 

Wesley didn’t get much forbidding from his parents, but there was a group of refugee survivors living in a Quonset hut compound way down on South Euclid Avenue almost to the Prado Dam. They had some acres purchased for them by a Jewish organization in L.A. and transformed the land into an egg ranch with thousands of chickens. We’d see them once in a while at the Rose Farm, a man or woman talking to the Farmer, to Tom Green, me and Wesley hired out to the Nursery for a summer fifty cents an hour hoeing weeds, puking over our first cigarettes and thinking we were some really fancy bad-assed ten-year–old pachucos, and going to Saturday matinees with our earnings to see movies like X The Unknown with Trevor Howard or John Wayne in Genghis Khan where we’d chew “Milk Duds” and hope a girl we’d heard about who supposedly cut out the front pockets of her “Levis”  might sit next to us and what we’d have done neither of us knew either; feed her “Milk Duds” while the Mongol warrior on the Big Screen Epic pulled off Susan Hayward’s night-gown or jack-off into our pop-corn containers as one of those unpocketed damsels made out with an older boy two rows in front of us, wait for the female usher to shine her flashlight and throw the sinners out of that Hollywood darkness into the quiet sun-eaten streets of our ranch town.

The egg ranchers didn’t look different from anyone else except they had the tattoos on their forearms, the little numbers that we’d talk about all the way into the rest of the day or just shut up into a kind of extinctive wonder about where and if we’d ride our bicycles on certain mornings because the last miles of the one main central avenue of our valley town held two of the mysteries of the world we knew even then we’d never comprehend, leave us flat and stunned no matter where we’d go or what we’d come to. One was a World War II field where the Air Force trained some of its fighter and bomber pilots and there was a big hanger they built there, thought it was locked tight, but it was never enough for kids like Wesley and me who snuck in and stared at the plane there, and it was the “Enola Gay” just standing still and we walked around it, touched it.

We stood under its bomb-bay that had been used five years in the immediate past as we understood time as six-year-old boys. After that we stared at the rear plastic turret with a machine gun barrel still sticking out of it. Looked like you could pop out the name, jump through the portal there and dance foot-to-foot with the Mirror Beings carrying cups of miraculous spit from the beginning of the Second Creation, and us, not quite knowing that B29 was the mother of what fuckin’ world exactly, name it maybe, and the name will erase your throat before it ever comes up for air.

The other was the chicken ranch and the people who gathered and sold their eggs in the various towns where we lived off the bluffs of the Santa Ana River clear to Palm Springs and outward to Cadiz. They trucked their harvest those miles and came back with the needed cash. The Farmer didn’t think those men and women liked any of it but they made some, asked for help once in a while and he and Tom Green rode out to weld a broke plow or help them chain hoist a dead engine, bring it back to just enough life. They were “Survivors” from the Death Camps but the one’s who gathered the corpses from gas chambers, threw them into the pits, did the kind of labors that don’t have any identity really, but lie as an insuperable whisper still waiting to mangle and consume perhaps even Fate itself that appears as just one more innocent before these Ziggurats. Seemed almost impossible that one small town could contain such things now spread out a light year beyond what the Sun can ever touch and won’t stop until it reaches a next solar system and a next.

Wesley was told by his parents and Tom Green not to bother these people. And that was a part of a kind of a list too. Don’t bait rattlers. Watch for rabid dogs. Make sure before wandering into a vacant field that there’s no bull around, and look for trees or boulders to climb if one comes over a ridge no matter how distant. Don’t walk into a vacant meadow in a thunder storm or you’ll attract lightning sure as a steel rod. Don’t bait black widows or scorpions, and brush down the horses before and after riding into the Chino Hills. Don’t set no tumbleweeds or stray outhouses on fire. One or two kids in our town, fuckin’ with matches got burned to death messing with this incendiary thistle from Russia which’d go off like some vicious little plutonium meteor and we knew if a kid wasn’t quick enough he’d either get grazed or get boiled and no mercy from that falling star. We did everything this list said we shouldn’t do including a gun fight one day at a neighbor’s house. We got bee-bee guns, pellet guns, 22 pistols, sling shots, broke the windows, filled that home full of holes and we were lucky as hell then some twelve-year-old wasn’t laying in a coffin, an ice-smooth .22 shell trenched through that body. There were rock fights, school-yard brawls, usually Okies, Philippinos and Mexicans against whites or Mexicans trying to be white.

I remember my dad on a late night heard a suspicious noise down the streets of our barrio. He got up from his needed sleep, took a flashlight and walked out the door one kind of person and back through it another. He found an Okie kid we knew on a bicycle out on that pavement. And it wasn’t exactly “on” a bicycle either; he was wound into the machine like someone made him into a spider web, bones rammed through him, and sprays of shredded flesh everywhere.  Someone did it with a car, then took off. My dad hoped he’d never see anything like that again, came home, laid down and took sick. The Farmer and Tom Green when they heard about it next day got a doctor, and Wesley’s mother cooked food for our house. Those days my mom was sure my dad wanted to give up being alive, he was tired from the sight of one more piece of violence no matter what its source. Tom Green and the Farmer put up a reward, found the runaway and helped the poor family of the murdered boy with funeral expenses. They also waited for my dad to get well and go back to work. I was told after that to stay out of school-yard fights, especially the ones about “race”, didn’t make any difference what color the dead boy was or what name he had. Some of the people in the town whispered things about one less “Okie” and chuck in some Jews too and that made my dad want to throw away his medals but Tom Green and the Farmer talked to him, helped him through it, let him know they respected the price he paid. I guess that meant too Wesley and me became nearly inseparable, so when he rode out toward that chicken ranch he wasn’t alone.

It was hot the summer morning when we started, about 90 degrees. We had water, a thing we didn’t ever play with or ignore.  Though the sun wasn’t as dangerous out toward places like Heber or Calipatria where the Farmer and Tom Green periodically drove to in those years looking for possible farm lands, we understood the warning, the stories about “sun-stroke” and the sneaky ways death might turn on its switch in any couple of kids, tap on the front teeth or eye lashes, start up its kind of darkness around the finger tips, move up over each fold of skin patient with its intrusions, go in headless at first so as to humble its own extravagance and tendencies to cause suspicion and alarm. Don’t be no Horse Queen, Death, ride up real pretty and lacey, and smelly. Be quiet instead as a drought ravaged oak wrapped in its final shrinkage.

We took the back roads, instead of the two-lane main avenue which was too dangerous. The rigs boring down at sixty to eighty miles per hour carrying their loads of cattle, hay, citrus, lumber, sheep, pigs, and chickens had a wind effect on children on bicycles; for the adults it was a white knuckle tightness where fingers went dry and stiff over steering wheels, and a lurking head-on could shimmer in the slightest gesture of distraction, a glint of humblest light or shadow straining the eye, the muscles of a thumb causing whiffs of front-end sway. A tractor-trailer looming up, expanding in size; not just steel, weight and speed, but noise, malevolence, the séance of machinery, fury, grease, stale rubber a quarter melted with the metaphysics of a re-tread, a blow-out, a stack of shit finally unable to co-operate with any of the dimensions assigned to it. We’d see a wrecked car, hauled on a flatbed once a year no matter how much our parents didn’t want us to, the front end curled as if for an instant it’d been gored by some rhinoceros suffering from a brain infection not able to quit its violence even for those light years that are said to come up for sale by the heaven and the earth of shrunken water and shrunken heads. We knew usually they held families on the way to a summer day at the beach, people having to come through our valley and car wrecks were as much a part of the secret landscape as Enola Gays. Seemed nearly a law of nature as we rode our bikes past the alfalfa and corn fields and on toward the stables where we could see mean, stunningly detailed Andalusian mares running a fence-line next to us like they were the dawn of rain too reckless and smooth to have ever breathed fire. They were wide-eyed, prick-eared, jittery as mud daubers out on their maiden hunt to paralyze a victim.

 We did stop to watch them but didn’t want to see any injury to those animals breaking the fences to break us, and we admitted these horses scared us, lurching against the clean white-washed wood carrying the immense age of their kind and ready even in this form to kick in the jaws of ancient lions and dog-bears, in order one more time to finalize the untraceable starvations lurking in their hoofs.

The egg ranch was about twelve miles up hill from these horses, the steepest grades having to be walked. The total ride was forty miles and Wesley calculated we’d come home by a 6:00pm July twilight muffling any cause for alarm. Summer afforded these excursions and kids like ourselves fanned out on their bicycles into arroyos, canyons, over hills, distant valleys where we’d still find arrowheads, pieces of ceramic and woven chord left by what people we didn’t know, and wondered at the same time whether these things represented an “Indian Shoot”; the gringo murder sprees, relishing their works of disappearance, drinking of the annihilation and its wandering savageries as if it were the mark of a loving god calling for these children and only these, their lifelessness marked by only the corpulence of a noise which touched the Dead Here with an even more distant sleep than the Dead There. Are you listening to that god, listening gently while he presses his breath, the discharge of his decayed teeth, his snarling yet-to-be human face attracting the projects necessary to sustain the surpluses of death? This is one of the questions I did not know would rise up from that moment on a far away grammar-school playground when this boyhood friend spun his top directly at my feet, and it seemed to me, even then, he wanted to draw blood just to see what I would do. He was the only kid I ever saw who came to such an edge and pushed at it, tried to incinerate it, or recompose it, or make it into a piece of luck the unlucky could transform into a system of personal roulette. I’ve tried to reckon why the shadow of the Flying Wing is like white lead for me, a substance I can add, providing the most sensuously uncertain surface to make a story with, and a surface too, ready to kill me, as it would anyone who uses it, painter, story maker, weaver or “Good Speaker” who makes up language and risks it instantly for anyone who comes to hear the indigestible, floating mosaic of those years of the Cold War that began our boyhoods and moved toward the riddles that would feast on my early manhood and plunge this story into its membranous surfaces, portals, and exfoliations which are the only solidities I can offer to myself, and to the trust of the reader who will understand the shakiness and precariousness of the centuries and their parts I’ve reconstructed. The Madmen of the Cycles. What was their scent, Son, before Existence came to them? Daughter, bring the flock of red birds at the bottom of our wells. Bring their green tonsils to boil the Moon.

 The wind was right that day. The smell of chickens drifted over the tomato fields and ravines which bordered these no-nonsense irrigation designed crops. There were also acres of sun flower, each stalk six to seven foot, flocks of red-wing blackbirds arriving for those heavy with seed flower giants sort of seemed to forget everything as the local growers sent their daughters and boys out into that blind bird-rush for seed and bird fatness with 4/10 shotguns, small bore, easy to load, cost less than poison as far as the growers were concerned who wanted their children used to seeing life as to seeing death, no ornaments, no sympathies and don’t waste the goddamned buckshot. Hey there “Squat Face,” “Fart Foot,” “Three Squeezes For Funny Pleasures,” “Ass Sniff,” “Got Guts,” “Loves To Be Suffocated,” you’ve got all the best names for the Oldest God.

  About two miles from the chicken ranch we began to see feathers, not a lot, but  caught in the road-side brush. Wasn’t thick either. Just wind and feathers combining, swirled in a hot dust-devil and then dying out into small clumps hanging from going to skeleton tumbleweeds and stickers. If this was a warning our ages allowed us only to see the barest edges of the White Trees the born come to with ropes around their necks and say as they approach these great, scented giants, “I wish to eat. I wish to keep adorning the stars of the darkness of night.” And in being Earthless after that, what”? The Father will be Death? The Mother hard with her tongue of stinging coral? And will the birds in those branches be singing Wilson’s Pickett’s “Soul Survivor” with its reference to the year “1965 when everyone was still alive… Soul Survivor, All Night Rider.”

  Half mile away Wesley took us into an arroyo. We covered our bikes with branches and leafs and built what we thought was a natural pile, then did an inspection for any glints of sun on chrome, tell a story to other kids who, if they saw, assumed instant ownership, no questions asked, no explanation given. Gathering our canteens and lunches, we climbed up a steep hill from there. Wesley said he’d heard they’d been given a choice; Israel or here. He remembered one night the Farmer said “the Survivors” had come. He was on the way to bed and spent time in his pre-sleep darkness thinking about that word and who exactly was attached to it and if anyone was would they look like those terrible pictures of humans, dead and nearly dead, somehow more remote than Death, or the God of Death in the regimented day to day mutilations forced upon them, unmoved by life or lifelessness or by what either one ever had been or will be and murmuring into the future with its immense frenzy of malice, the venom of it cool and watchful leering with the insinuations of its unleashed alchemies. We looked at the pictures, the recently died thrown into queer, lurid piles fluttering with their kind of exultant, paralyzing savagery and would this be part of an existence to come? The adults before the questions we had about what happened, who did this, who thought it up and why seemed nearly to retreat and sink into the mirages their answers offered. There was no firmness to anything they said, answers came as earnest defiant smallnesses, glinting and broken, going no further.

So out of that dispossession and shock about adult limits, the intelligence they carried rounded off to some slippery unyielding blankness, Wesley and me got on our bicycles that day, took a pair of binoculars to see for ourselves about these people who were seen not just as “Survivors” but on a scale of “Survival” we’d heard secretly voiced, as something to be looked away from, freaks even, casting themselves helplessly, astoundingly from the writhing, working, constantly dilated death, the years and years of it for some of them, to the golden, sun-washed hills of our ranch town with its summer sunsets of washing light cascading in various shades of yellow and pink to the driest, most concise darknesses of our chaparral nights.

And how many of them were there? Twenty at the most, some with young children working eighteen hour days making a kind of kibbutz on what had been the promontories of a hacienda. Once, at the Rose Farm a group of kids our age arrived, but we were told to get our hoes and start weeding. We looked at each other just the same, and tried to reduce the distance with a smile, a stare or two. They were shy and nervous and kept to their silence as a couple of mothers gathered them up and drove away. They spoke a language I’d never heard. Wesley said it was Yiddish. The Farmer and Tom Green loaded the bed of a truck with roses, vegetables, loafs of bred, then drove after them. Maybe twice more we saw that group of fellow children coming from Augustofsky’s, a dilapidated resort by the time we were children in the late 1940s, started by a local Jewish couple in the 20s, for Jews, primarily from L.A., and the one remnant ornament of their once thriving business was a swimming pool packed in the summer with the children of the Jews, the Mexicans, Armenians, Portuguese, the Basques, the Okies, the Serbians; entrance fee fifteen cents, and for the Holy Rollers who tried to convert any of those swimmers of that mysterious, slightly scary chlorinated ocean, the price was, as it was for everyone else who took a shower there, a bad case of “athlete’s foot” and a possible fist fight to see who was who.

We got to the top of the hill Wesley had chosen. It was around two o’clock and the afternoon winds were up, carrying the sounds and smells of that place. The same children we’d seen were shoveling manure into wheelbarrows, cleaning, leaving fresh water and seed for the birds. They laughed, chased roosters and a dog, but were steady in their basic labors, picking up an occasional hen, examining it, then gently setting it back in its cage. We also saw a man and a woman planting roses at the edge of a large vegetable garden, and a modest orchard of fruit trees that would begin to fruit in a year with proper watering, and they were setting some gopher traps.

Wesley had once heard the Farmer say they knew nothing about farming; they were from the “Crushed Fires of the Second World War.”  We couldn’t imagine what those words really meant. Our fathers and mothers were so completely secretive about whole segments of their lives, which seemed made of empty continents with tides and currents and invisible cities running in waves we never quite wanted to go near not because we were afraid of drowning, but weary of the edges of strangeness which hung unnaturally, worked the silences of their larger lives bound to murmurs we could not touch, knew nonetheless the hovering chill of it running to the core of our bicycle and horse journeys into the faraway hills and arroyos calling perpetually to us with another alien silence but one we entered and touched and which did not go lame before our shuddering curiosities.

As Wesley and I watched, the woman picked up a shovel and began to dig, her shoulder-length hair tumbling and lurching with the effort. The tool’s simplicity and demand for balance and coordination wrenched her but she kept at it, the baked mid-summer earth cruelly violating to the awkward strikes of steel she delivered. A clotted pile slowly grew next to the hole she was digging. She paused to wipe her face and brow with the bandana she’d tied around her neck and resumed the heaped, rough labor of the digging. At least thirty trees and as many roses had been planted, each accounting for similarly exacting work by hand, every resistant inch yielding to her though we saw she was not polished at this phase of the work, never would be.

At one point the man left his own labors of hoeing and clearing rocks from the large garden and brought her water and a snack of what looked like fresh peaches. They paused, sat down, and drank. He took a knife from his pocket, and a handkerchief, which he soaked with water, squeezed out the excess into the hole she was digging and delicately wiped the dirt smudges from her face, her neck, her shoulders. Then he cut the fruit into quarter slices, and laid them on the spread handkerchief. They ate slowly, she wiping the dust from his hair, putting the fruit slices in his mouth, the humble intimacy strong and fresh.

Wesley told me he’d seen this couple when he’d gone with his father one Sunday to the Nursery office. They had heavy accents but spoke their English carefully. The woman was taller than the man, “stately and beautiful” as Wesley’s mother commented on that same Sunday afternoon to friends who came for a day’s visit from L.A. Three fingers on her right hand had been mangled. “The Camps” one of the visitors to the Farmer’s home said about this woman knowing a guard there went into a rage over her “comeliness” (the word the guest used), even though at that point disfigured by her emaciation, smashed her hand with the butt of his 98K Mauser, but did not follow his violation with a bullet as he did with two or three other previous women.

 The man bore no outward scars other than some rotted teeth, and though he tried he could not hold back all of his smiles. And when he did this the woman looked at him with a pained, nearly helpless straight seeing she did not know how to nor was interested in hiding, and of course there were the numbers tattooed onto their arms and these were not hidden either, but divulged, working at the eye like no other numbers we had ever seen. Death. The euphemisms for Death that can’t ever reach the human throat and the numbers that can be multiplied unbearably.

They must have taken twenty minutes with their break, and so Wesley and I started looking at two others, a man, and a boy our age working on a flat-bed truck the Farmer gave them. They were taking the engine apart; the heads, pistons, cam, carburetor, generator were placed on a sturdy table. It was obvious to us the adult was explaining the parts and their function, teaching the boy, letting him whet his hands with grease, get them dirty, helping him before the steel things to be attentive and organized. The boy watched and touched, looked at the adult as he held a rocker-arm or manifold. Another woman came out of the house carrying a tray with lemonade, sandwiches. The man and boy cleaned their hands and the three of them ate, drank sparingly, the taste of the drink and food collecting for them at an equal point of their hunger and work, as they let the inanimate metal of their mid-afternoon study grow hot under the sun. The children who tended the chickens washed their hands under a nearby faucet, came to the tray with its piled sandwiches. The kids jostled each other, laughed. The dog came into their circle, put its head on the woman’s lap; none of these gestures were transitory or unreal and their gentle simplicity almost frightened us because the adult whispers and warnings not to stare, to stay away made us feel like shadows rather than, as we originally thought, them, as the sky seemed to gain in starkness and height.

Wesley heard those Sunday visitors from L.A. tell his mother and father the man was nearly dead when the American troops found him surrounded by many who almost held out but could not find one more breath. He had been a painter in Hungary, Czechoslovakia; Wesley couldn’t quite pin it down.  He’d been shot through the neck and left to die one or two days before the liberation. He did not talk for almost a year afterwards, but Wesley knew he had been sketching, painting small canvases. There was one hanging in his parents living room, a landscape; sunset and Joshua Trees illuminated by a Mohave sunset he composed while visiting and delivering eggs outside of Palm Desert. Wesley’s mother had it framed.

We were sharing a canteen full of water as the woman continued to pet her dog when we heard it. A quick rustle of dry grass not more than four feet from our uncomfortable and self-conscious perch. A rattlesnake, a big one. We followed it immediately. It coiled, shook its rattles. We backed off and did not kill a snake that day. The incident took at least an hour. A thing to pull a pair of boys away in complete amazement down into an arroyo where it crawled under a huge boulder; beautiful and ruthless and irresistible pressing us with its taut, repulsive lure.

When we remembered the top of our hill there was already shade piling around us from a descending sun and we ran. The woman with the shovel was cutting a rose out of its black can, mixing a pile of soil with manure. We watched for a moment as she filled the hole with this mixture, extracted the rose and its soil ball, making sure it wasn’t root bound, then placed it, looked at it, touched it and applied half a bucket of water. Each of her motions as she did this planting were graceful and exacting, in almost complete opposition to her previous, determined shovel work, and as we turned to recover our hidden bicycles, the first rays of the still far off sunset washed over the valley.  We saw a small eruption of reflected light from our about-to-be abandoned perch. We looked at it and knew it was the corrugated aluminum roof of the hanger where the Enola Gay lay in state and that somehow the two points we were to live as boys and young men joined here in the valley of this Southern California river. Our journey to that hill above the chicken ranch did become a part of our childhoods and the gravity and tenderness we saw there, even though we came to understand what an intrusion and unintended violation it was, gave us the nerve to begin to think and to dream, and to dare each other with stories, obsessions, inventories of monstrosities and wonders that carried me through high school, and into Vietnam and Detroit.

When I came back to California, from a third and final tour in 1968, I wanted to see those Andalusian mares once more, but the fields were all houses, sub-divisions and they looked like segments of tape worms part-by-part appearing and sucking, the invisible head buried in an overlooked ditch, each one part as if this were now a thing which conquers and eats and has an endless endurance bigger than anyone born here on earth and it made me feel secretly ashamed to see that I hadn’t seen that all the bombs and defoliated earth and poisoned forests, the napalm sweetened vaporizations I’d directed from the ground and participated in wasn’t anything compared to this amplitude of extinguishments, utterly composed, utterly inviolate and convincing. Crazy are the days. Crazier are the nights.

I stayed home a month, no more, and nearly had a fight with my dad who, though he didn’t say it completely, thought his war was the real war, and mine, some kind of displaced sepulcher that couldn’t measure up, its traces of defeat and fatigue somehow the fault of we, the one’s who bathed in it, and followed it to its ends, and did not come back spotless. I didn’t want to hurt him or my mother, so I packed up. I wasn’t negligible to them, but it was obvious I’d been rearranged into a shell neither they, nor myself knew what to do with and home was sort of the weight of a word at the end of a day sinking and dribbling with spit. They hated it. And I hated it more. There was no reverse either to shift into, and none of us could help staring. I left most of my money, whatever it was, with my parents and told them to buy a new car; any leftovers buy some furniture, a washer, whatever they wanted. I’d write when I got to any destination but it was better to go, better than waiting around for prison.

 While I was going over maps late at night after my parents had gone to sleep of places like Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and Idaho, a guy in my last unit sent me a card from Oregon. He was parachuting into forest fires and the work was dangerous and mean. “Come to see me if you come back whole,” the note said, “There’s a job if you want it.” I hitch-hiked up the California coast, camped out, kept myself invisible as the “war” had taught me, leave no evidence of my having been an anywhere or an anything, the lessons fully activated and comprehended as I searched the coastal horizon for migrating whales. “Smoke Jumper” the job description said and my friend, Kevin, was waiting for me. The fires reached from Oro Fino, California to Orofino, Idaho, and we dug fire breaks and fire lines with picks and shovels, bulldozers and fingers, squirted napalm same way here as there except the enemy was fire and there was no killing zone I ever saw that carried the sweep of death so clean and pure as if God were “day night, war peace … mixed with spices” of yet unscented planets and leaving behind a trail of glass.

The parachuting wasn’t that bad either. You just jumped, and the fire would race to meet you like it was some running bear twisted and curled with a beauty contest rabies, the ensemble of its squalor designating omens of being eaten by wild beasts snarling over the choicest parts. We ran for our lives on those fire lines until the one afternoon Kevin ran no more. A last flame surge caught him in Oregon, the kind that waits for one whip of its own run-out winds. He was 80% blistered, still alive when I found him: “Broiled, Lupe. Be goddamned. Didn’t figure it this way. Do one thing if you can. Help my parents this fall.” Shock was so thick when he got to the end of the last veiling noun he let go, heart didn’t have one more pump in it. Sneak up, Death, climb each creaturely obelisk, shrewd under the hottest mixtures of fire and light. Kevin came onto “The Slab” cold as could be trying for over three years to avoid the draft after graduation from a little place in Ohio called Oberlin College. He was twenty-five, older than most draftees, and decided if he survived, that he’d go back and study the history of Mexico. We talked for two years about Indians, music, cars, and he could quote whole passages from the diary of Columbus or the Popoh Vuh, the sacred Book of the Maya. I taught him the art of holding still, to be soundless, to sniff the world where we’d landed, to read the signs around him and that someone out there who wanted to survive as much as he did was better at the killing. Any let up before that single fact and you could walk the meadows on the other side of that River where the bees are white and their honey is green. He was the only other person besides Wesley who gave me a way to dream about being alive, and fighting fires like he said, was withdrawal from the gore we’d been to and made, give himself some cover and distance in order to become human again if that was possible. Touchless breath without death, poor have become the books, richer has become suffering.

I didn’t want to drive when that season was done. It seemed safer to stare out a window and watch the waves of the land, pay someone else to do the labor. So I caught a Greyhound Bus to a little town called Barnet, Vermont, then walked into a countryside I had not seen before.

It was mid-September and the rolling hills almost seemed to physically sway with the movements of a clouded sky. The forest was green and individual trees were turning various shades of reds and yellows and they were shimmering though there was no visible presence of any wind. I stopped to smell and taste the air, as Wesley’s father’s Kiowa foreman, Tom Green taught us to do when we’d stay up all night with him, as he watered the rose fields and talked about Oklahoma, Quanah Parker (“Who brought the Church'a peyote”) and Wovoka (“Who sold my grandparents the Ghost Dance like it was a Buick convertible,” and we heard his breath in that phrase take a nose-dive that scared us with its fury and grief), horse-breaking, and the “medicine women who went alone into the prairie to gather and be gathered by visions with nothing more than their bravery and their minds.” Tom Green’s sharp, but fragile stories about another world, and the women and men who lived and died there gave me and Wesley our first senses about how to be meticulous before anything made out of words. “Take a moment. Get your directions straight,” he advised us, “so you know how to talk and walk in or out of trouble; be flooded, be quiet. No ostentation to it, but for that instance you can let the indifference sink away from the edges, not be broken by its coldness which comes to any body in any world.”

This said while budding roses or fixing cuts and insect stings to a pair of boys as if such information might settle like a slow evaporating rain-drop or loose pollen irritating the throat.

 There were perfumes of late season flowers still hovering in that autumn Vermont air, and I would come to know over those short months a different flower scent passing with each day until the first killing frosts, the beautiful reduction building, so certain and final and hotly exact as hornets crawling over a last hanging apple under an autumn sun, that heat in spite of its apparent definiteness crawling with the hollowness of the winter to come.

I remembered how Kevin described maples; the reds and yellows, burgundies and golds, the leafs turning gradually and sometimes a single tree suddenly over a stream, that watery edge gathering the color to itself, quick and scant in its furtive radiance. The forest smelled like rotten figs and that reminded me of the huge fig tree behind the rose farm office that went purple with its fruit, and we’d pick the figs and eat them and watch the wasps and ants swarm over the fallen sun-mangled harvest of that tree and hope we wouldn’t get stung though we often did and Tom Green took some ammonia and “magic Indian spit” and rubbed the ugly sting mounds on our arms or ears and said, “Now boys, count to thirty and remember not to piss off these wasps every damned time you walk by'em,” and then shoo our asses to weeding plant cans or loading flat-beds until we’d get a late afternoon ride in the bucket of a skip loader, laughing and scared with each up or down thrust of that thick steel.

A breeze picked up as I watched and listened in that country of the Connecticut River (my home water is the Santa Ana which starts in what were once the grizzly bear canyons of the San Bernardino Mountains and I still reckon my directions no matter where I am by the way that stream flows through rugged hill country, freeways, and suburbs that get their epidermises fondled and peeled by photo-chemical pollination as it flows to the Pacific). A fox came to the edge of a cornfield that bordered the road I was walking. Guess it’d never seen a Mexican before. It was raw and tense and the tail of a rat hung from its closed jaws, and it let me walk by it, let me see it, then jumped away into the clusters of green surrounding it, the attachment of things to appearance left more erect and peculiar by the animal’s shrewd manipulations of the suave emptiness it produced in its wake. I’d never been to New England, never felt a tinge of cold like this in the hottest autumn air. It wasn’t something that came along and introduced itself like a Fletcher Jones sales pitch for used Chevys, but I felt it pinch the folds of my ears, grab my knuckles, not a lot; it rose and went away and came back with the easiest breeze and you knew it wanted to bite, but not yet. It was waiting though, and the sky was inclined to the most restless shades of blue, the contours of land mixing with wind and shadow and last flowers, some of them wilted in ditches I was straddling.       

There were big farm houses and barns but the land seemed still to be empty, the ice-weight and its breath a nameless day away with that pronunciation held at bay by nothing more than the wing flit of a worn out bee.

Kevin described his parent’s barn as  “circular, the only one of its kind for miles,” but it took me till five that first afternoon to find it, and Kevin’s father tending a tractor in the shadows of some late corn stalks, a Massey-Ferguson with chest-high wheels hooked to a combine. He had a grease-gun, was applying its head to each of the nipples that kept the hydraulics rising and falling; that in addition to talking to his machine so it wouldn’t go belly up even though by it he’d done everything right, equipment and men equally immersed and wedded in each of the helpless forevers that won’t stop arriving. He wore an engineer’s cap, glasses, was tall at least as his own son, 6’4”, and was so closely attending his tractor he didn’t notice me. His blue long-sleeved thick cotton shirt and pants were covered with dust and the hum of crickets was concrete, its amplitude part also of the decorum of disappearances faultlessly ravishing each glint of shadow and light of the hot autumn I promised my friend I’d go to.

“Mr. Dutcher,” I heard myself saying the name above the din of insects. He didn’t hear me, and I said the name this once more and louder. He looked at me. His face was wrinkled, studious. He was an older father than mine or Wesley’s, Kevin born at that point when this man was in his late forties to early fifties. He stood full up still watching me, my presence, color, accent completely foreign to him.

“Mr. Dutcher, Sir. My name is Lupe.”

“You’re Kevin’s friend, then?”

“Yes, Sir. That’s right.”

The creases around his eyes relaxed. I put out my hand and he, rather than extending his own quickly embraced me and said he was glad I’d come. My throat tightened at that moment and I almost cried. What was I really to say to this man. He’d lost his only child, not to the poisonous strangling war where he’d done two tours who’d I’d held on a mountain in Eastern Oregon. And the mother. She was probably doing the daily chores, moving disconsolately over her concentrations, the ones looming over the years and now melded to her breath, to the fallowness invading their lives that would also be absorbed and rounded off in daily gesture. I was afraid even to pronounce Kevin’s name, and the thought of how he’d been butchered, or was it “waxed” to bring up a vocabulary, one best suited to being made into pulp. The blankness that came upon me then, next to this man with his immediate obvious dignities. I felt some puke rise up but managed to keep it below my throat. I knew where Kevin’s addictions to a war stopped. I didn’t yet see any end to mine. I put my duffle bag down.

“Can I help with anything, Mr. Dutcher?”

He looked at me, at the duffle bag. Didn’t let his eyes wander any further.

“It must have been a journey. And you’re a long ways from California.”

A man who talked word-by-word and had passed that resource on to the son. There weren’t too many of them.

“Always travel light?”

“Long as travel don’t weigh anything more.”

He smiled.

“Let me get that bag, son,” and he put it on the tractor.

It was 5:35 p.m. The daylight still strong enough but Kevin’s father said, “Let’s put it up for tomorrow.” We rode about half a mile to a sparsely beautiful circular barn that was immaculately organized inside, the hand tools hanging from their rings and oiled; machinery cleaned, greased and ready for winter or summer, the hayloft waiting to be filled. There were also old harnesses of various kinds, saddles, and other leather paraphernalia ready as the day when men and horses were bonded to this work. The space between barn and house was covered with an exactly trimmed lawn and flower-beds which were glaring with the wilt of an encroaching fall. There were apple trees too. A small punctuating orchard offering almost parchly restricted umbras of shadow. Each tree was carefully trimmed. They were old and gnarled, held in the writhing tides of their advanced ages.

I compared them to the wild oaks of the California savannahs and canyons I’d grown up with, trees that can live four or five centuries ending their lives as twisted giants, each surge of growth a teeming hemorrhage timed to fire and drought, stingy rain and tough emaciated squirrels, harvesting their acorns and I would come to see their Eastern cousins, the red, the white, and rock oaks, their tall mostly straight trunks shading a small meadow or creek-cut ravine, and if not, an old singularly huge tree with its penetrant spread of branches and shade allowed to be the only survivor of a sacrificed grove in the middle of a field, the one life and its vitality set apart from the sustained inexorable removals that somehow make this landscape tensely abrupt and secretive, its edges absorbing human perception as it rises up. The Indians knew this landscape as an intimate fight for the mind, an experiment of treacherous wakefulness that occupied them for at least fifteen to twenty thousand years. These fruit trees seemed to hover in a last core of themselves, some with trunks half filled with nothing but air. The apples were small, knotted, and I loved their tart, sweet taste, leaving a fresh aroma on the palette that served notice to the dust and grease of the days to come that those two intimate invaders  couldn’t have everything.

We walked around the old brick and clapboard farmhouse. Kevin’s people had been here since at least the 1730s, fought Indians, the French, the English, each other, and the weather. His mother was sitting on a piece of porch furniture overlooking a lake and rolling hills that to me, seemed under the billowing late afternoon clouds, to be almost like chrysalises writhing to become the beings of winter.

“Ida,” Kevin’s father said, not loud, he didn’t want to startle her, had the habit of saying the name, but you could tell he still liked to pronounce it, that it was fresh on his lips.

“Ida.” And she turned her head toward him, the range of his voice had not sunk, left her in the soft lacquers of disappointments or stupefying tolerances. She hesitated, her body held itself and her hands with their arthritic knuckles squeezed the air for a second, as if closing upon that emptiness might make her less prone to having become inaccessible.

She was also tall and wore a printed flower dress, faded by the late afternoon sunlight, and the formality she observed of watching the day close over this countryside, each night growing imperceptively colder than the last, in this season with no reversals.

“Lupe?”

She meant it immediately to be the name of a welcome stranger and made it obvious.

She walked down the steps of the ancient porch to look at me.

“We hoped you would come.”

She couldn’t help holding her distance, and didn’t want to freeze the three of us there too long either.   

“Can we show you your room?”

“Yes, Mrs. Dutcher. I’d like that.”

Though there was the hesitancy of good manners not wanting to impose any assumptions, and the numbness that had set in over Kevin’s death, she insisted on taking my duffle bag and opening the front door of her home.

The rooms were high ceilinged, the walls thick with rock and mortar and whitewashed old brick and big fireplaces, furniture was waxed and plain, pieces that had become antiques in any other setting, but here they were used and grounded without their being a covert treasure waiting for appraisal. The windows were also large and let in a scattered sundown. The floors were thick oak planks worn with the habits of household travel. The stair treads were wide and deep, carpentry skilled and plain. Generations of children who came to be grandmothers and grandfathers crawled here, played wondrous hide-n-go-seek and broke some arms. We climbed to the attic storey. It was the “Guest Room.” Its wallpaper had browned with age, the print of birds in flight faded. There was a bed with a handsome quilt spread over it, and a simple pine armoire for clothes. Mrs. Dutcher had placed a white porcelain pitcher full of flowers on a nightstand.

“Lupe, let me show you the bathroom too.”

It was down a short hall and had a bathtub with dragon’s feet, a little swimming pool where I’d spend some time; toilet had a pull chain and copper lined well, floor was also oak plank.  Everything was scrubbed to a raw, dignified layer.

“Kevin’s room is the one on the second floor. We thought you’d feel more comfortable here.”

She was right. I dreaded being put in that room. If that had happened, I didn’t think I could have lasted more than a couple of days.

Mrs. Dutcher got some towels from a wall hamper, hung them on simple pine racks.

“Please make yourself at home, Lupe. We’ll be downstairs readying dinner.”

I got my duffle bag, emptied it, looked out the window at the darkening landscape and a rising full, harvest moon, orange and elaborately fascinating and it seemed to be pulling the trees on the distant hills, pulling the daughters and wolves and the corn-hair of the ripe last crops.

I smelled the food and walked downstairs.

Kevin’s mother made a lamb stew. His father got some beer out of the refrigerator and we sat in the kitchen and talked while Mrs. Dutcher boiled potatoes and gathered late season greens from her garden.

“Did your trip take long?” Mr. Dutcher asked. He folded his hands on the table. The skin thick with old gashes and scars.

“Nine days. Wasn’t bad though. Saw country I’d never seen before. Beer tastes good too. Thanks.”

They both smiled.

“Did you get the package I sent?”

They nodded. It had Kevin’s things in it, including the medal he’d won which he didn’t talk about, kept it in a copy of a book he always had with him called Crazy Horse, Strange Man of the Ogallala.

Wasn’t a lot. Boots, clothes, books and notes he kept.

“We can’t pay you much, Lupe. But we can pay.”

No room for small talk.

“Didn’t come for the pay, Mr. and Mrs. Dutcher. Whatever you can afford will be fine.”

I stayed for two-and-a-half months and every dinner was delicious. More I ate skinnier I got chopping and stacking wood, bailing and cutting hay, taking in the summer and fall harvest and helping with general chores like painting, glazing and hanging storm windows, readying the barn and equipment for winter. One day though, it was done.

The last afternoon we spent before a fire, some of the oak I split to keep these gentle people warm in the lonely winter they were about to go through. It was time to go. They gave me Kevin’s copy of Crazy Horse, the one he’d taken to Vietnam, and thanked me with a dignity as quiet as the rising moon I saw through the window on my first night in their home.

Next morning, rather than have them drive me to a bus station or anywhere else I was hitch-hiking at sun-up. If I’d have known on that sunrise where I’d end up I would have stayed an extra week. Maybe the delay could have jangled the sequence of events and kept me from reaching Detroit on Thanksgiving weekend a month later. I was in a bar for a beer or two and a cheeseburger ready to call my parents, let’em know I was thinking about them when this couple in a booth near me got into some angry words. I didn’t try to catch any of it. It wasn’t my business. But the man was saying such ugly things to the woman about her and their kids it almost made me sick. The cheeseburger was good too and my not being able to get one simple goddamned bite down because of what this citizen was doing was starting to grind in. Everyone in the place had looked up too. No one I know wants to ever step between any couple like this and have that rage turn on the third party but the fucker was so nasty and mean I’d thought I’d break the rule for a second, try to tell the motherfucker I didn’t give a shit what was goin’ down with him and his goddamned wife but he was makin’ it hard for me to eat, wasn’t askin’ for trouble, just hold it the fuck down so’s I could have a quiet last beer, pay muh bill, and leave. The son-of-a-bitch went real quiet for a moment, then smashed his old lady in the face, straight up broke her nose and some teeth and said “How’d you like some of her blood for ketchup?” That was a question I hadn’t heard, not even after three tours. Didn’t have a fancy answer for it either, never gave a shit and never will. Stuffed the cheeseburger down that asshole’s throat like he was a force-fed pigeon. Big guy too, thought it could never happen, and an off-duty cop with too much time on his hands. Guess that’s why they gave me three years in a Michigan jail for nearly killing him, along with my refusal to “feel remorse” was what they called it, the damage non-lethal but memorable, say some similar shit to his wife again or bully the kids, and just look in the mirror to get the crash-test-dummy results. I started thinking about Wesley, our childhoods and what had happened in solitary confinement; locked me up for eight months for being escape prone. Almost made it too, except for the razor wire that caused some major leaks. In that solitude I started to dream about how I would go to play pool in Detroit, hustle, see how much I could buy how much I could be bought for it'd make no difference ride that white ivory ball down Woodward Avenue toward the tree surgeons from Tennessee I came to know in prison who liked killing the ancient huge Dutch Elms in Motown’s wealthiest neighborhoods that were rotting with disease, neighborhoods wanting all vestige of the trees removed and before the chain saws, the whirling steel, there was talk. It always got around to sex. Which girl friends fitted best in what chairs. What Southern Comfort could do to people’s daughters and boys, the sexual mass of their desire mixing with the frail sawdusts of the fungus wounded elms.

*More of David Matlin's A HalfMan Dreaming will appear in our fall issue.