Walking Pocatello

About Walking Pocatello

2010-11-20T18:12:00.026-07:00

Walking Pocatello is my love letter to the city. I first moved to Pocatello in 1972, and I've lived here, on and off, ever since. I was born in another state and grew up in another Idaho town, but Pocatello is my home.

Each month in the blog archive contains a piece or two of the collection. Some of the stories are accompanied by a "Facts Behind the Fiction" post.

In 1996, while living in Oklahoma, I began writing Walking Pocatello because I was homesick. I may have over-romanticized the town, because when I began reading the pieces in writing workshops, listeners would often come up afterward and say, "Pocatello sounds like a fascinating place!" I had to remind them that I was fictionalizing many of the people and events, although the locations were real.

When I returned to Pocatello in 1997, I was unemployed, so I sat in a tiny apartment in The Brentwood and wrote the rest of the collection. By the time I finished, my savings account was gone, but fortunately, I was then hired to teach at Idaho State University. ISU Press published Walking Pocatello a few years later. The book continues to sell modestly, but consistently.

After retiring from teaching in August of 2009, I began blogging and decided to publish the collection online. This allowed me to add photos to my narrative and also reach a wider reading audience.

To answer a few frequently-asked questions:

1. Yes, the places that lend their names to the titles are real. However, some of them have ceased to exist.

2. Yes, many of the events really happened to me or others in very much the way I describe.

3. Yes, a few of the characters are real people, but most of them are composites or completely invented.

4. No, I am not the main character or narrator of each story (except for the Prologue). Some of the first-person narrators are male.

I hope you enjoy "walking" Pocatello by reading these stories as much as I enjoyed writing them.

To order a copy of the book, Walking Pocatello, call the Idaho State University Bookstore, (208) 282-3237, or send me an email.

To see more photos of Pocatello, go to http://pocatellobackside.blogspot.com

To see photos of the beautiful landscapes surrounding Pocatello, visit my friend Ruth Moorhead's photo gallery at http://www.pbase.com/moorruth/2011&view=slideshow

Saturday Night at the First National Bar, Part III "White Bird"

2010-10-11T12:17:00.014-06:00

Rachel starts to say something, but suddenly Shane looms above her. “Rachel! You’re looking good tonight.” He touches the tops of her shoulders lightly with the flattened palms of his hands. “Going to sing something with us?”

Rachel puts her palms on top of his hands and leans back, looking up at him. She lifts his hands away from her shoulders and holds them a second before letting them go. “No, but she will,” she says, nodding at Tamsin.

Tamsin blushes and starts to protest, but Shane doesn’t look at her. He smiles down on the top of Rachel’s head. He takes Rachel’s hand and pulls her to her feet. “Come on. We’ll do some Black Crowes. Or some of your stuff. You can use my guitar.” Tamsin sits back in her chair, relieved, but a little disappointed. Frankie sidles up to the table, scoops up the old glasses, the dregs of their milky concoction diluted with melted ice. She deposits a fresh drink an inch to the left of a cocktail napkin.

The Love Dogs move about the stage, repositioning mikes, swapping picks. The bass player quickly changes an exhausted string. Greg hunkers down behind his drums. Glumly, he watches Rachel tweak the keys of Shane’s guitar, bending her head close to the body of the instrument. Shane lowers his mike to Rachel’s level. She makes an experimental strum, then waits. Greg taps one-two-three-four on the high hat, and the lead guitar slides into the beginning of “Love Junkie.”

“Put myself on the line one too many times,” sings Rachel, “irrational and romantic--need I need say more?” The dancers curl around each other, hips and arms churning and rubbing. The room warms. Rachel’s voice winds around the feet of the dancers, low and bittersweet. She lifts the microphone off its stand and holds it close to her lips. “Too many years of putting out and feeling down.” Shane keeps the rhythm on the fish bell. Greg opens his mouth to join Rachel on the chorus, but sees Shane’s warning frown and shuts it again.
Plaid Shirt has temporarily left his vigil near the pay phone and is whirling around by himself in a corner of the dance floor, his eyes closed, his scraggly goatee pointed at the ceiling. Above the music, the cockatoo screeches its version of the song.

An old man with a long, ragged beard and tattered overcoat comes in the side door of the bar. He has a stack of well-thumbed papers under one arm, and although it’s warm tonight, a tired woolen scarf is wound around his neck. He moves from table to table in a friendly way, shaking hands like a host and greeting several people by name. He’s also begging for change, which he gets, along with an occasional one- or five-dollar bill. He whisks these into the pocket of his overcoat before moving on to the next table. The old man negotiates his way across the dance floor, pausing now and then to join in. He executes a couple of tricky jitterbug steps with a pretty secretary, twirling her under his arm and back into her partner’s embrace and never losing his grip on the stack of papers. When he reaches the back of the room, he checks the pay phone coin return slot before entering the men’s restroom.

       Onstage, Rachel is singing another of her own compositions now, accompanying herself on Shane’s guitar. The music swells, and Rachel’s words rise above it, cool and clear: “Ten thousand silver blades...are better than what you gave to me,” she sings.
   Greg sits numbly behind his drums. He stares at the back of Rachel’s head and idly rotates the drumstick in his left hand. Shane leans close to Rachel’s mike and harmonizes on the chorus. His shoulder touches hers, and she doesn’t draw away.
   The old man comes out of the men’s room, wiping his hands on his rumpled overcoat and smoothing his beard. He says something to Plaid Shirt, who shakes his head and points to the pay phone, then gestures at the pet carrier on the floor. Plaid Shirt lifts the carrier to shoulder level, and the old man puts his face close to it. The yellow beak arches out of the small opening. It snags one of the long, grey hairs from the man’s beard. It tugs, and the man laughs. Plaid Shirt laughs and slaps the old man on the back, then sets the pet carrier on the table and opens its door. He holds his fist in front of the open door, and the cockatoo hops right up on it, curving its long toes over Plaid Shirt’s clenched fingers. Plaid Shirt holds the cockatoo out toward the old man, who draws back a little. The cockatoo strains forward toward the man’s beard, its yellow beak snapping. The man pulls back farther. Plaid Shirt laughs again and holds the cockatoo up on his fist. He looks over his shoulder at the bar to see if anyone else is watching this.
   Suddenly, the air is full of white bird.

The cockatoo whirs by Tamsin’s head, making straight for the dance floor. She ducks, and the bird swoops low over the dancers. It takes a few seconds for them to realize what’s happening, then a woman shrieks. Her partner cringes and flings his arms over his head. The bird circles the dance floor, then darts toward the open front door, and the bartender snaps a towel at it as it goes by. The bird whirls right and circles the room again. Plaid Shirt jumps in the air, trying to grab it as it passes over him, but he misses by at least three feet and lands off balance, knocking the old man against the pay phone. People are shouting and laughing. The Love Dogs falter a bit--Shane and Rachel have both stopped singing--but Greg keeps a beat going, and the bass gamely keeps on strumming. Some of the dancers shuffle in place to the music; others are frozen in mid-dance, staring after the bird. Frankie closes the side door of the bar, then, as the cockatoo wheels in her direction, holds her tray up in front of her face.
The bird is beginning to exhaust now; it droops lower as it passes overhead. It skims over the bar, heading for the open front door again. It’s just about to pass Myers Afraid-of-Bear for the third time, when Myers raises his arms above his head, as if to intercept a football pass. His huge hands close firmly around the bird, and he plucks it from the air and hugs it to his chest. The cockatoo lets out one terrific screech, struggles briefly, then goes still.

“Don’t squeeze him! Don’t squeeze him!” The young man in the plaid shirt leaps toward Myers, arms outstretched. “Give him here!” he pants.

Myers looks down at the ruffled bird in his hands. He thrusts the cockatoo toward the young man, who grabs it and cradles it against his chest. He soothes the bird’s plumage. He croons to it and covers it with the plaid shirt. He carries it back across the room and places it gently in the pet carrier, then latches the carrier door. Glancing once again at the silent pay phone, the young man picks up the carrier and slowly makes his way to the door and out into the night.

The Love Dogs pick up the dropped thread of Rachel’s song. Her voice rises in the final chorus. The dancers resume their dancing, the drinkers their drinking. Dr. Innes’s lost blonde clings to one of the frat boys who gives a thumbs-up signal behind her back to his pals. The biker chicks lean against the bar, silent, their arms linked, watching the dancers. Myers stands over his barstool and drains another glass.

“Thanks,” Rachel says quietly as the music finally ends. She passes the microphone to Shane, lifts the guitar strap over her head, and leans the instrument against the wall behind the keyboard player. A smattering of applause accompanies her exit from the stage, and she makes a little skipping curtsy and heads for her table and her waiting drink. The drummer taps up a new beat, and the music begins again.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is the last post in the on-line version of Walking Pocatello. Thanks to Sherrod Parkhouse for his contribution to some of the photos used with these posts. Thanks, also, to Connie Rodriguez-Flatten for use of some of her photos of Old Town Pocatello at night. Future posts on this blog will be related "Facts Behind the Fiction" and new stories about Pocatello.

[To order a copy of the book, Walking Pocatello, call the Idaho State University Bookstore, (208) 282-3237, or send me an email.]

Saturday Night at the First National Bar, Part II "Strike Out"

2010-10-09T11:20:00.001-06:00

Back on stage, Shane ends “Take Me to the River” with a long-held final note and an angry glare at Greg who sustains his flatted note an instant longer than Shane's and then crashes his sticks against cymbals in a tinny flourish. “We’ll take a break and be right back,” Shane growls into the microphone, then whirls around to Greg. Rachel and Tamsin are close enough to the stage to hear Shane hiss, “Listen, you asshole, if you can’t stay on the note, just shut the fuck up. One more time, and I’m turning your mike off."
"Oh, lay off, man.” Greg slaps his sticks together on the metal edge of his snare.

“No, you lay off." Shane leans over and pinches the drumsticks together with one meaty hand. The muscle that runs along Shane’s jaw flexes, just like the bicep of the arm holding the drumsticks. Both men tighten their grips on the sticks and glare at each other, their faces strained and hot. Shane pulls the sticks close to his chest, and although Greg resists, he’s off-balance reaching over his drums, and he staggers forward. Shane lets go with a throwing motion, and Greg reels backward, jostling the cymbals. He jerks himself back into balance, hands clenched at his sides, and makes a lunge toward Shane, but Shane has already stepped off the stage and is headed for the bar. Greg starts to follow, then stops and bends over to sort the snakepiles of cords that connect the mikes and instruments with the amplifiers.
“He’s looking at you,” Tamsin tells Rachel, trying to talk without moving her lips.

“I know he is,” Rachel replies in a low voice, holding her glass close to hers. “But it’s over. He just needs to get that through his head.”
Tamsin pushes her chair away from the table. “Gotta go to the bathroom. I’ll help you ignore him when I get back.”

       The plaid-shirted man is dialing as Tamsin passes him on her way to the door marked “Ladies.” He holds the receiver to his ear for an instant, then slams it down and resumes his pacing. Tamsin sees a flash of white against the holes of the cat carrier under the table.
   When she comes out of the restroom, the man in the plaid shirt is again holding the pet carrier up to his face. “Whatcha got there?” Tamsin asks. He extends it toward her at arm’s length. Peering through the holes in the door of the carrier, she sees a large white bird. It cocks a bright turquoise eye sideways and peers back.
   “What is it? A parrot?”

“Cockatoo.”

“Does it talk?”

“Yeah, but not in here. Too much noise. Wanna hold it?”
Tamsin shakes her head. Plaid Shirt holds his finger to the carrier and a sharp yellow beak jabs at it through the small opening. “Looks vicious,” Tamsin says, “or hungry.”

“Naw, just nervous.” He sets the carrier down again and pushes it back under the table. “I’m waitin’ for a call. My girlfriend’s s’posed to call me. Don’t know what’s keepin’ her.” He goes back to the pay phone and stares at it, rocking back and forth on his heels, his hands in his back pockets.
Tamsin goes to the bar and orders two more White Russians. Myers Afraid-of-Bear is standing quietly, stolidly, by his corner stool. He’s laid a twenty-dollar-bill on the bar in front of him, and he runs his thumb over it gently, smoothing the wrinkles and the folded edges. The biker chicks are deep in consultation. The one with the helmet has set it on the floor. She balances a booted foot on it and leans close to her companion. Her voice is tense. “I don’t care what he does,” she says, “you’re not going up there tonight.”

The other woman sighs heavily. “You don’t understand.” She’s taken off her leather gloves and put them on the bar. There’s a slave ring on her left hand. Its silver chain loops around her wrist and trails across the back of her hand to a heavily-sculpted serpent wrapped around her middle finger. “What else can I do?” she says.
The band starts up once more. Tamsin hands the bartender a five-dollar bill and he passes her the drinks. She carries them back to the table, and she and Rachel sit and sip and watch the band. Shane leans into the microphone, his mouth wide, his eyes squeezed shut. Tamsin likes the way Shane’s black Zildjian t-shirt hugs his chest and shoulders, the way his long, dark blond hair hangs around his face. Rachel’s scanning the crowd. She points at a small man sitting alone. “Look. There’s Dr. Innes, our math teacher. He’s always in here by himself.”

Ralph Innes is short, nudging forty, wears a lot of brown, and drives a sports car he bought a couple of years ago when his wife divorced him, about the time he started writing poetry. His hair is full and of one solid color, which makes it look like a toupee. In class, he’s very particular. Before he begins his lecture, he arranges his papers in two neat piles--one pile for lecture notes and another for overhead projector transparencies which he lifts with two careful fingers and places, smudgeless, on the glass plate of the machine. His calculator and mechanical pencil are always arranged on the desk exactly parallel to the papers, their top edges perfectly aligned with the top of the stacks. Occasionally, he will interrupt himself to readjust the alignment of these materials before continuing his lecture about logarithmic progression and skewed curves.
Rachel and Tamsin watch as Dr. Innes lifts his beer for a long draught. His eyes never stop scanning the room. Suddenly they lock on three women at a table on the opposite side of the dance floor. He takes another long drink and wipes his lips with a folded handkerchief he takes from his breast pocket. Setting his glass down firmly, he rises and straightens the shoulders of his brown tweed jacket, then walks across the dance floor, stepping carefully around the couples swaying to the Love Dogs’ rendition of “Mustang Sally.” The women see him coming. Two of them--one plump, one slightly sallow--look at him expectantly. Their slim, blonde friend studies her fingernails. Dr. Innes leans close to the blonde, one hand on the back of her chair, one hand flat on the table near her drink. He speaks long and apparently earnestly in her ear. She raises her head and rakes her hair back over her shoulders with one hand, then turns her face away from his and says something to her two companions. They glance at Dr. Innes and giggle nervously. He straightens and takes his hand off the table. He stares at the blonde, but she continues to look away. Slowly, he turns around and recrosses the dance floor. When he gets to his table, he drains his glass, standing up, then counts some coins into the table’s ashtray and heads for the door. He doesn’t look back. The music ends abruptly as the door closes behind him.

Saturday Night at the First National Bar, Part I "Open the Doors and See All the People"

2010-10-01T12:17:00.013-06:00

It’s hot in the First Nash tonight. They’ve got both doors propped open: the front door that says “First National Bar” in gold letters and the side door that opens on Harrison Street, which is really just a glorified alley between the backs of the bars on Main Street and the west edge of the railroad yard.

A few of the regulars are straddling the dozen or so stools that are bolted up to the bar. Brando is showing off his newest tattoo to a tall, good-looking man wearing a black eye patch. Brando rolls the sleeve of his t-shirt high on his shoulder and prods the swollen flesh. The man with the patch inspects the tattoo amiably, leaning against the bar, one long leg thrown casually over the nearest stool.

Myers Afraid-of-Bear has claimed the corner barstool near the front door, and everyone who comes in that way has to maneuver around his massive six-foot-six frame. Myers doesn’t actually sit on his barstool; he stands over it like a guard dog while he drains glass after glass of Budweiser. Sometimes, toward the end of the evening, if there aren’t too many people left in the bar, he’ll stand on his barstool and let loose his coyote call, one of the most mournful and beautiful sounds ever heard. Most weekend nights, Myers makes a little walking trip up Harrison Street, stopping at each of the bars along the way, where he stands tall and silent in the smoky gloom or the raucous hilarity of the different establishments. The First Nash and the Bourbon Barrel are his favorites, but he dutifully visits the Whitman and the Grand Saloon and the Wheel Club, although he is quickly thrown out of the Wheel, because the owner there doesn’t like him or his coyote call.
Heather, a young woman with closely-cropped, bright yellow hair stops to admire Brando’s tattoo, and he hands her one of his business cards. She flirts for a moment with the man in the eye patch, then passes on down the length of the bar, exchanging a word or two with the other customers sitting there. She stops behind two men, the older one of them in a battered cap and rubber boots caked with earth. Putting a hand on each man’s shoulder, she massages their backs. “Keep your hands to yourself, honey,” says the older of the two men. He playfully slaps Heather’s hand away from his friend’s shoulder and replaces it with his own, massaging the younger man’s back with large, circular motions. All three of them laugh, and Heather passes on.

The Love Dogs are playing tonight, and the drummer, Greg, is flipping his sticks high in the air and singing loudly and tunelessly. Two young women in jeans and tie-dyed cotton shirts watch him from their places at a small table near the stage. One of them--Rachel--smokes and keeps time with the music, waggling her cigarette in one slender hand. Her roommate, Tamsin, sits with an arm slung over the back of her chair. She taps her knuckles lightly against the wood and occasionally hums a few words of the song.

The two women can see that Shane, the lead singer, is throwing the drummer looks of annoyance, because Greg’s supposed to just drum--something he does well--and not sing--something he doesn’t do well. Greg knows that Shane is pissed, but he keeps on singing. Tamsin bets Rachel that there’ll be a fight before the night’s over.

The Nash is filling up quickly. Besides the regulars, there are a few grad students in jeans and jackets and a handful of guys who work for the railroad and the potato processing plant. The tables ringing the dance floor are filled with groups of secretaries, freshly curled and lipsticked for their “Girls’ Night Out,” and trios of frat boys and used car salesmen, the former in skull-hugging baseball caps, the latter in crotch-hugging polyester slacks.

Frankie, one of the owners of the First Nash, is waiting tables tonight, helping out the new bartender. Frankie’s dressed in stringy drapes and beads, and her frosted hair shoots around her head at odd angles. She claps whiskey shots and beer bottles down on the bar in front of the regulars, then balances a tray loaded with more bottles and shots on one bony, jutting hip and winds her way around the crowded tables, repeating drink orders and laughing one-liners out the side of her purple-lipsticked mouth. She replaces soggy cocktail napkins with dry ones and sets new drinks down in the center of each table. Rachel and Tamsin are drinking White Russians. Rachel stirs the milky liquid with her finger, then repositions the glass in the middle of her cocktail napkin.
At the back of the room, a young man in a faded red and grey plaid shirt and a fledgling goatee paces around the pay phone that hangs on the wall near the twin doors marked “Gents” and “Ladies.” He stops and drags a blue plastic pet carrier from under a table in the corner, lifting it to eye level and peering through the perforated front panel. He pokes his littlest finger through a small opening in the door of the carrier and strokes the creature inside. The young man whispers to the animal, then sets the carrier down on the floor again, pushes it back under the table with his boot, and glances anxiously at the unresponsive pay phone.

Two women in biker leathers come in and stand near the bar. One holds her helmet in front of her like a shield. The other runs a leather-gloved hand through her fried blonde hair and looks around for a place to sit. The bartender motions the women toward a couple of vacant stools at the far end of the bar. He leans over the bar to hear their order above the music, then turns to draw two mugs of beer.

*Photo of First National Bar courtesy of Connie Rodriguez-Flatten, 2011

Facts Behind the Fiction: The Hump Yard

2010-09-28T08:47:00.029-06:00

Here's a link to a YouTube video of a pneumatic hump yard. This sound is familiar to anyone who lived in Old Town Pocatello before the hump yard was closed in 2002:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndryMwF41Kk&NR=1

Here's more information about Pocatello's hump yard, from http://utahrails.net/up/up-yards.php

Pocatello, Idaho
Pocatello was Union Pacific's first hump yard and was opened in 1947 (it was called a retarder yard when first completed). When the new Pocatello hump yard was opened, motive power consisted of single, and later, double sets of new NW2s. As rail traffic grew during the late 1940s, so did the number of trains operating through Pocatello. Train length was also increasing, necessitating increased use of double NW2s as hump power, with their attendent full, six-man switch crews.

A news item about Union Pacific ordering seven double-rail Model 31 electro-pneumatic car retarders from Union Switch and Signal Company for use at their new Pocatello yard. (Railway Signaling. Volume 40, number 8, August 1947, p.504)

A news item about new two-way radios for Union Pacific's yard offices and Diesel switch engines. Also mentioned was that the new yard at Pocatello cost $2.6 million. (Railway Signaling. Volume 40, number 11, November 1947, p.727)

The Pocatello yard has a 14-track receiving yard, a 28-track classification yard (designed for 40 tracks), and an 11-track departure yard. Other facilities included a car repair yard and a locomotive fueling station. Pocatello is a junction for routes from four directions on Union Pacific. To the south is Salt Lake City and traffic destinations in southern California; to the east is a connection at Granger, Wyoming, with the original 1869 Omaha to Ogden mainline, and all destinations eastward; to the west are the destinations in Oregon and Washington; and to the north is the traffic points in eastern Idaho, and the mineral traffic and connections with Northern Pacific, Great Northern, and Milwaukee Road at Butte, Montana. The lines in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington originate large volumes of fruit, vegetables, lumber, phosphate, and live stock. Points in the Northwest are also the destinations for much coal and manufactured products. The amount of rail traffic through Pocatello varied with the seasons, but in the late 1940s when the new yard was opened, the peak was about 2,200 cars per day.
Previously, switching at Pocatello was done in two flat yards that had become inadequate to handle the growing levels of rail traffic being moved through the terminal. The new yard required the purchase of 75 acres and the realignment of 4,400 feet of the adjacent Portneuf River. The ascending portion of the hump grade raises at 2 percent grade, and the descending portion was built with a short stretches of 4 percent, 1.6 percent, and 1.3 grades until a general west to east descending grade of 0.2 percent is attained. Included in the construction of the hump itself was a car inspection point, manned by five inspectors, that allowed inspection, with lighting and plate glass covered inspection pit, of both sides and the under side of each car as it passed over the hump. Access to the inspection pit was gained through a concrete passageway under the crest of the hump. The new yard also included the installation of a new 150-ton Fairbanks-Morse track scale and 30,000 gallon diesel fuel tank to service the seven Diesel switch engines assigned to switching duties in the yard. ("New Classification Yard on Union Pacific". Railway Signaling. Volume 41, number 1 (January 1948), pp.36-43. A general article about the new "recently constructed" yard at Pocatello, Idaho.)

[Magazine article] "This Modern Yard Expedites Traffic", (Railway Age. January 10, 1948, p.120)

Buddy's, Part XIV "The Hump Yard"

2010-09-28T02:37:00.011-06:00

Henry S rustles his papers. “Uh, let’s see. Oh, yes. Describe an intimate moment that you and the subject shared.”

“Well, if by intimate, you mean physical--”

“Not necessarily,” says Henry S briskly.

“I was there when Rose’s daughter was born.”

“Good,” says Henry S, making a note. “And?”

“And we shared personal information--about boyfriends and lovers, stuff like that.”

“Yes.” Bob-bob.

“She held my head for me once when I was sick, drunk after my boyfriend and I split up. She stayed up all night, taking care of me. I threw up on her shoes.”

Henry S wrinkles his nose. “That’s not exactly what I’m looking for.” His wire-rimmed glasses flash a little, reflecting the glow from a nearby cluster of faded chili pepper lights.

I must have dozed off for a while, because when I woke up, it wasn’t morning yet, but the room was no longer dark. Blue-grey moonlight came through the slats of the window blind, striping my arm and the blankets like those uniforms prisoners wear in old movies. Rose was breathing deeply and regularly, but when I turned toward her, I saw that her eyes were open. Her left arm was bent up above her head, and she was staring at the raku mask that hung on the wall near the foot of the bed.

“You’re still awake?”

“Yeah.” She shifted and yanked on the covers a little.

I stuck one leg outside the blanket to cool off. “It’s hot in here.” My pillow had worked its way down between the mattress and the wall. I pulled it out, swatted it into fluffiness, and tucked it behind my head, pressing it into the curve at the back of my neck. I closed my eyes again, but I could imagine the stripes of moonlight and shadow as they lay across my face. “My god, I was sick,” I said. “I can’t remember ever throwing up that much. Sorry ‘bout your shoes.”

“That’s okay. They’re only Italian leather."

I started to laugh, but that made my stomach hurt again, so I stopped and lay quietly, trying to breathe evenly. I was just about asleep again when Rose spoke softly, as if from a long, long way away. I wasn’t even sure she was talking to me. Her voice was like a voice in a dream. I didn’t open my eyes.

“My family stayed right here in this house one time. I was about ten. It used to belong to the Imperial 400 Motel next door. They rented it out by the night to families that were too big to stay in the regular rooms. My aunts and cousins and I stayed here for a couple of days while my folks looked for a new place to live. Can’t remember why we had to leave the old one. I slept in this bedroom--maybe even this bed--and I remember waking up about 4:30 in the morning. There must have been a full moon, because the room was pretty light, like it is now.”

Rose stretched both her arms up over her head and slowly brought them down on top of the blanket. “What woke me up was this strange noise. It was kind of like a flute--a tonette, we used to call them in school--and it went from a long, low tone to a higher one, and a higher one, ’til it reached a note so high--it was almost like a musical scream, if there is such a thing. I couldn’t imagine where it was comin’ from. All I could think of was that someone in the next room or maybe next door must be playing some kind of flute. It was so eerie. I lay there for the longest time, listening to it, feelin’ kind of enchanted. Almost afraid. Then, just when the tone got so high I didn’t think it could go any higher, there was this terrible booming noise in the distance--walls crashing together, buses colliding, a big noise like that. Then nothing."

I waited, but she didn’t say anything more.

“Well, what was it?”

“I didn’t get up to see. I fell back asleep, I guess. When I woke up later, I wasn’t sure if I’d dreamed it or not. Nobody else said anything about it.”

“Did you ever find out what it was?”

“Sure. You’ve heard it.”

“I have? I haven’t heard anything like that here.”

“Sure you have. It’s the trains. When they sort the trains over in the railroad yard, the hump yard. They ease the cars down this incline. The retarders--brakes--make the screaming flute sound, and the boom is the release of the pneumatic controls.”

“Oh, yeah, I’ve heard that. But not in the middle of the night.”

“It was the weirdest sound I’ve ever heard.” She yawned and turned to face me. “In the morning,” she said, her voice low, like she was telling me a secret, “I got dressed and walked across the street to the campus. It was really early. Nobody was out yet. The dew was really thick on the grass, and the air was so fresh, and the trees were so still, like they were waiting for the day to begin. Everything was just waking up. I remember thinking how beautiful and still and green it all was."

I put my hand outside the covers and felt for her hand. Her long, cool fingers were smooth in my palm, like well-polished silver.

“I wish I could have been there, too,” I whispered. Rose didn’t say anything, and soon I was back asleep.

“How would you characterize the subject, in relation to yourself?” Henry S’s pen hovers over several small boxes. Reading upside-down, I can see choices such as “Spouse,” “Friend,” “Neighbor,” and “Co-worker.” I don’t see one that says “Beautiful Dark Soul” or “Sister Spirit” or even “Mentor.”

“She was my best friend,” I say.

Henry S bobs his head and makes his final note.

[To order a copy of the book, Walking Pocatello, call the Idaho State University Bookstore, (208) 282-3237, or send me an email.]

Buddy's, Part XIII "The State Trooper"

2010-09-26T02:23:00.004-06:00

The last time, on my last visit to Pocatello, I sat in Buddy’s waiting for Rose. Waiting on my barstool by the jukebox, drinking beer and playing song after song, until I had to go break another twenty for quarters, and while I was standing by the cash register, the Idaho State trooper came in and looked around and then walked right up to me and said, “Ms. Lish? Jackie Lish?” I nodded, wondering why a State trooper would be patrolling Buddy’s parking lot and what did I do? Forget to re-register my plates? Then he said, “Ms. Lish, I’m sorry to have to tell you that your friend has been in an accident,” and I knew that it must be bad, because they don’t send State troopers into Buddy’s to get you if everything’s going to be all right.

Rose was killed almost instantly, in spite of the helmet she was wearing, and Tamsin’s father died, too, a few days later, without regaining consciousness. Tamsin was going to graduate from high school in a few days, and I was in town for that and to help celebrate her eighteenth birthday. After the funeral, I called and quit my job and had a friend pack up the stuff in my apartment and send it to me, and I’ve lived here in Pocatello ever since.

Actually, that bad night wasn’t the last time Rose and I met at Buddy’s. It would have been if she’d showed up, but, of course, she didn’t. The last time we met at Buddy’s was when I came back for my mother’s funeral, a couple of years earlier. I hadn’t been to Paris in a long time, and my brother Kip had to hunt me down by calling the University Alumni Office. Rose met me at the airport and drove me straight to Buddy’s for lunch. She said I needed the garlic to help me get through the funeral and seeing all my relatives after being away for so long. She was right: all afternoon I sucked the fumes of my own breath, reminding myself that as soon as it was over, I could leave and go to Rose’s house, where no one would ask me wasn’t I married yet? and when was I going to come back to Paris? and did I know that DeMaughn Young’s wife died last winter and his two cute little children sure missed having a mommy? Not “their mommy,” just “a mommy.”

Buddy's, Part XII "Two Dead Rats"

2010-09-23T02:09:00.010-06:00

“And these difficulties,” says Henry S, “these differences were usually resolved in what way?”
“Oh, we’d spend a few days apart, but one of us would usually call or stop by before long, and--like I said--we could pick up where we left off. Pick up where we were before the argument.”
“Admirable,” Henry S says to his notebook.

“If I had two dead rats, I’d give you one,” said Rose when I opened my back door about two weeks later. She held up two neatly-rolled joints.

I opened the door wider. “Get out of here, you slut. I’m still mad at you.” She stepped through the doorway, and I gave her a hug, making an exaggerated grab for the joints at the same time. She hugged me back, and we struggled, still embracing, into my kitchen.

Rose flopped into a chair and put the joints on the table. They formed a yellow paper arrow, ends touching and pointing at me as if asking a question.

“I’m sorry, Rose. You were right. He’s a jerk, and I knew it all along. But, you know how it is, I wanted to believe it was different.” I sat down in the chair opposite hers and put my hands, palms up, on the table.

“Forget him.” She looked around the room. “I’m assuming he’s gone?”

“Came and got his stuff last week.” I laughed one short ha! “After I got home that night, I stayed up, thinking. First I was mad at you. Then I was mad at him. Then I cried and fell asleep for a couple of hours. When I woke up, he still wasn’t home, so I sat here and worked out this whole speech I was going to give him when he got here. By then it was about five in the morning, and I sat here talking to myself, talking myself right up into being angry and then back down into this really calm, really tight place. This went on for about an hour, when suddenly I realized he wasn’t coming home.”

Rose nodded and touched the joints, aligning them into a more perfect arrow, still pointing my way.

“So, I got out a bunch of those big Orbie bags that I use for the trash, and I started loading them up with all his stuff. All his clothes and football shit and those stupid trophies. I put them out on the curb next to the grass clippings.”

“Perfect! They got hauled away with the garbage!”

“No. It wasn’t trash day. They sat there for a couple of days, and then they disappeared. He must have come by when I was at school. But he did take the grass clippings.” We both laughed.

“I think he moved back into the dorms. I can’t afford to stay here by myself. I don’t even want to. So, I’ve been looking for another place. Found a little apartment over on the west side of town.”

“I’ll help you move,” said Rose. “I’ve got a friend who’ll loan me his truck.”

“Saturday okay?”

Rose nodded.

“Good,” I said. “That was easy. Now, fire up one of those dead rats.”

Rose pulled her little box of matches out of her pocket.

The waiter brings me another beer and another bottled water for Henry S. Maybe it’s the beer, but I’m feeling pretty relaxed.
“One time we got high. I don’t know if you ought to put that in, though, about getting high.” Henry S nods, and I go on. “And we modge-podged everything in my house.” Henry S’s pen writes m-o-d and hesitates. He looks up.

“It’s a craft thing. Like glue, only clear. You paint it over pictures and stuff, and they stick to whatever you put them on.” I make painting motions on the side of my water glass, then rotate it as if to show him the design.

“And it’s called ‘mod pod?’ ‘Mod podge?’”

“We always called it ‘modge-podge.’ I don’t know. It’s in craft stores. I still have a lot of the stuff we made. Ashtrays with pictures on the bottom, pencil holders and trays, a cigar box with a Kliban cat cartoon on it. Two cats are sitting on a fence in the moonlight, and one cat says to the other, ‘If I had two dead rats, I’d give you one.’”

Henry S arrests himself halfway into a bob. “I’m not sure I understand.”

I shake my head. “Not important.” I point at his sheet of questions. “How many do we have left?”

“Just a couple.” He moves his pen over the list. “Describe the last time you saw the subject.”

I look at the little red tricycle hanging over Henry S’s head. “Can’t say that I can remember exactly when that was. I’d been living out of state, you know, there at the end.”

*Cartoon from Cat by B. Kliban, 1975

Buddy's, Part XI "Kip's Story"

2010-09-21T01:39:00.001-06:00

I thought of the first time I met Joe, right after I got to Pocatello. I was in the Corner Pocket using the pay phone to call some friends who said I could crash at their place. Their line was busy, and while I waited, I watched these three guys playing pool. I could tell they were football players by the way they stood--kinda hunched, with their arms away from their bodies. The best-looking one kept turning around to stare at me before he took his shot, giving me the come-on in a “look-at-me-aren’t-I-cool?” sorta way. And then he started talking to me, only it was like he was really talking to his friends. Or the other way around. Saying stuff like, “Never had me a farm girl. A big ol’ Idaho farm girl,” in a drawling, mock-country voice. The way he was talking to me, about me, I remember wondering when or--terrible thought--if I would ever shake off the look of Paris, Idaho.

He kept talking and flirting, and by the time the game of pool was over, he had bought me a couple of beers, and I was standing with his arm looped around my shoulders and neck, ready to go home with him. I never did call my friends. We went back to the little house on Fifth, and I didn’t even get out of bed for the next four days, except to go to the bathroom or get something to eat. I just lay around, watching TV, reading magazines, and painting my toenails, until Joe would get home from class or football practice and we’d get into the shower together and then spend the rest of the evening fooling around.

When I thought about how Joe liked to razz me, talking in his fake country accent about “big ol’ farm girls,” I began to understand what Rose was telling me. I remembered Joe saying something about having “a Chinese chick” one time, just to see what “Chink Poontang,” as he called it, was like.

I stood up, swatted some leaves off the seat of my pants, and went into the Student Union. I put a quarter in the pay ‘phone by the door and dialed my own number. It rang six times before Joe answered. He must have been asleep; his “hello” was deep and blurry.

“I just had an interesting talk with your girlfriend,” I said, making my voice as dry and cold as I could. I didn’t feel dry and cold; I was sweating, and my hand was shaking.

“Whazzat?”

“Your old girlfriend, Portland Rose Harris.” I pronounced each of Rose’s names slowly and deliberately.

There were a few seconds of silence, then, “Aw, Jack. That was a long time ago. She ain’t nothin’.”

Just my best friend, I thought.

“Jack? Jackie? You there? What’ve you been doin’, baby? Com’on home.”

I didn’t say anything. I held the receiver tightly and looked at the little plate in the middle of the dial. Someone had scratched over the printed numbers with a ball-point pen. I could read the “(208) 232-” but the rest was obliterated.

“Baby, you there? Come home. Let’s get some dinner goin’. Jack?”

“Joe?”

“Yeah.”

“My dad used to have this gun, this old twenty-two pistol. Not big enough for hunting. He used it for plinkin’. Target practice, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“He never cleaned it, and it was in pretty bad shape, but he liked to carry it around. In his pocket.” I looked at the ball-point pen scratches. Why would you do that? I wondered.

I went on. “He used to take it with him to the bar. Liked to show off, I guess, with the handle of it sticking out of his pocket. But one night he got all liquored up, and he took the gun out--just to show to somebody, you know--and the bartender got mad and told him to get rid of it or he couldn’t stay in the bar. So he gave it to my brother, Kip, who happened to be in there playing pool with some friends, and Kip took it out and put in under the seat in his truck.” I stopped. I noticed that I wasn’t sweating anymore, and the telephone receiver was light and dry in my hand.

“So? Jack?”

“So, nothing. Kip drove around with the gun under the seat of his truck for several weeks--months, maybe.”

“Is that it?” Joe exhaled heavily into the ‘phone. “What’s the point?”

“No point,” I said. “Except one day, Kip’s cleaning out his truck, and he remembers the gun. Reaches under the seat and gets it out, puts it on the seat, thinking he’ll give it back to Dad next time he sees him. Drives around for a couple of days, then one day goes by the house to drop off the gun. Stops the truck, opens the door and starts to get out, when BLAM! The gun goes off. Shoots Kip in the leg.”

“Shit!”

“Yeah.”

“Was he hurt? I mean, bad?”

“No, not too. It was just a twenty-two. He was laid up for a few days, ‘til his leg healed, but he’s okay, now. Doesn’t limp or anything. Does have a scar, though. Little round hole near the top of his thigh. Looks like a big dimple.”

Neither of us said anything for a few seconds.

“Uh, Jack? You comin’ home now?”

“Yeah. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” A few more seconds of silence, then, “Joe?” I said.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t really feel like seeing you when I get home. Don’t you have someplace you could go?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess. Yeah.”

“Okay. Good. ‘Bye.” I heard his “Bye, Jack,” as I hung up.

Buddy's, Part X "Sucker!"

2010-09-19T01:20:00.004-06:00

Just then, the front door of the restaurant opened, and Rose came in, rushing a little and waving at me. She called her order to our waitress as she crossed the room to the table. I decided not to wait until she got too comfortable.

“Why didn’t you tell me you knew Joe?” I said as soon as she sat down.

Rose looked a little surprised. “I did. First day we met.”

“No, I mean knew Joe. Slept with him. You were his girlfriend.”

This time she looked a lot surprised, but something else, too. Several expressions, including what I thought were anger and sadness, passed over her face. “Jack, I wasn’t his ‘girlfriend,’” she said finally.

“Everyone in here seems to think so, including” --I tossed my head in Susie’s direction--“the waitress.” I paused. Rose was looking down at her hands. She wasn’t wearing nail polish these days; in fact her nails were stained and chipped on the ends, and she picked at the rough skin of a callous that had formed on her right palm. I repeated my question. “So, why didn’t you tell me? D’you think I’d be jealous?”

“No.”

“Well, what?”

Rose looked up. “Are you gonna break up with him, Jack?”

“No. I don’t know.” I tried to read her face, but all I could see was that she was concentrating--the look that she had the first time we met, when she crossed the street. “Maybe. But I don’t get it. I thought you were my friend. How come you didn’t tell me Do you still have a thing for him?”

“No!” The word came out louder than she probably meant it to. The people at the next table looked our way.

“No,” Rose repeated. “I don’t ‘have a thing’ for him. And you shouldn’t, either.”

“Hey, I love Joe. He’s been really great to me. I can’t help it if he dumped you and--”

“He didn’t dump me. It isn’t like you think.”

“So tell me how it is.”

Rose exhales heavily. She looked angry again, her brow creased and her dark eyes glittering. “It isn’t. I don’t want him He doesn’t want me. But he’s a creep, Jackie, and I don’t want you--"

"Oh, stop it!” I interrupted. “We’ve been friends for a year. Why didn’t either of you say anything?”

“He probably doesn’t remember.”

“Whattaya mean? Because he was drunk?”

“Well, he was drunk, we both were, but that’s not why. I... I wasn’t anything to him, Jack. Just something he wanted to do. An experience he wanted to have.”

I didn’t know quite what to make of this, but, I didn’t like it, so I got up, pushing my chair back hard against the wall. Susie had just come up to our table carrying glasses of ice water in both hands. I brushed past her roughly, making her spill the water, and I ran out of the restaurant and down the block toward home. I don’t think Rose tried to follow me, because after I slowed down and looked back at Buddy’s, there was no one on the sidewalk.

It was only a few blocks to my house, but I didn’t want to go home right away, so I angled up toward the campus and cut across the quad to the Student Union. It was just about dusk, and nobody much was around. I sat down on the steps by the Union. I felt like crying, but I didn’t.

I sat there breathing kind of hard and watching the bats that come out that time of the evening. They flapped out of the big trees that ring the quad and looped, one by one, around the grassy square. I remembered watching my brothers “fish” for bats from the front porch of our house in Paris. They’d tie a small sinker on the end of their fishing line and cast it up in the air toward the trees in our yard. The bats, mistaking it for some kind of flying bug, would swoop out of the trees at the sinker, pulling up at the last minute, when they realized it wasn’t something to eat after all. “Sucker!” my brothers would yell at the bats and cast again.

Buddy's, Part IX "What the Hell?"

2010-09-17T10:51:00.005-06:00

I look up. Henry S is asking me a question, repeating a question, I think.
“Reunion?” he says. “You had an argument at a family reunion? A class reunion?”

“No, not a reunion. I was thinking of something else. What argument are you talking about? What reunion?”

Henry S huffs a little to show his exasperation. He repeats his question to me in a clear, careful voice that I imagine he usually reserves for speaking to the mentally retarded. “Did you and the subject ever argue or have an altercation you would characterize as a ‘fight?’”

“No.” I paused. “No. We liked to discuss things, and Rose was pretty determined about her opinions--so am I, for that matter--but nothing I’d call a fight, really.” My answer doesn’t satisfy Henry S this time. This time, he doesn’t hurry to make his notes and get on to the next question. He looks at me directly, bobbing his head only a little, sensing something.

“Well,” I say finally, “we did argue some over graduate school. Rose was supposed to go to graduate school, but instead she took a job at the railroad.” Henry S is writing now, satisfied. I feel relieved, off the hook. “I always thought she wasted herself, wasted her talent,” I add. “She would have been a great teacher.”

I had a beer while I waited for Rose. She’d said she might be late getting off work. She was new on the job and had to finish up some of the scut work after everyone else left for the day. That’s partly what I wanted to talk to her about: her job. Her last year in the Art Department, her teachers had talked her into applying to graduate school to get her MFA, maybe even teach. Rose submitted several applications and art portfolios, and she got accepted at Kent State and a couple of other big schools back east. Tony and I got all excited, and the three of us would talk about which school was the best. I noticed that Rose seemed less enthusiastic than either of us, but I didn’t really think anything about it until May came, and Rose graduated, and she still didn’t say where she was going to go.

Then she got that job with the railroad, and every time I called her she was just getting home from work or just getting ready to go back or too tired to talk right then, and I saw that her job was starting to swallow her up. And it was just a job in the railroad yard! They moved her around, like they did all the new people, training her in all aspects of the yard--some security patrolling, some maintenance, all kinds of work. Whenever I asked her why she wanted to work there, she’d say something about the good money, but I couldn’t believe that was all there was to it.

In the year and a half since I’d met Rose, I’d really gotten my act together. I finished my GED and started talking college courses, including a couple of art classes. Joe and I still lived in the house on Fifth, and we got along pretty well together, although he refused to do much of what I was interested in, saying that he needed time by himself and besides practice and class and games during the season took all his energy. In many ways, that was okay with me, because I could spend as much time with Rose as I wanted. At least I could until she got the railroad job.

That day in Buddy’s, I was going to pin her down, make her explain to me what was going on with her, why she wasn’t making plans for graduate school or at least to do something more with her art.

The bartender cleared his throat to get my attention. “D’you wanna order something to eat?”

“Naw. I’ll wait ‘til my friend gets here.” I slid off my barstool and tugged a couple of quarters out of my pocket. I plugged them into the juke box in the corner and punched up some ELO and Ozark Mountain Daredevils, then climbed back on my stool and idly twisted back and forth with the music. Buddy’s was fairly crowded for a weeknight, but not with anyone I knew. When both songs ended, I got a fresh beer and wandered into the dining room, thinking I’d grab a table and, if Rose didn’t show up soon, go ahead and eat without her.

The dining room was crowded, too, so I leaned in the doorway, watching a waitress clear a table that three guys--jocks, they looked like--were leaving. The waitress was laughing, and I heard her say what sounded to me like “Fussarelli,” so I listened more closely to the end scraps of the conversation. I caught the words, “kicked them outta here,” and then, from one of the jocks, “nigger.” I was startled to hear this word, and I must have stopped listening for a few seconds, because the next thing I heard came from one of the guys as they passed me on their way toward the door. “Did her in the back room of the art gallery,” he said, and the others snickered lewdly.

They went on by, and I sort of stumbled over to their recently-vacated table. The waitress was wiping up the last of the crumbs and replacing them with fresh placemats and sets of silverware. She smiled at me and indicated that I should go ahead and sit down.

“Excuse me, but were you”--I waved toward the door and the jocks’ retreating backs--“were you talking about Joe Fussarelli? The ISU football player?”

The waitress, whose nametag read “Susie,” nodded in a friendly manner.

“And a woman named Rose?”

Her smile faded a bit, and she shrugged. “I don’t know what his girlfriend’s name was.”

I persisted. “But she was a black woman? Tall?” I held my hand an inch or so above my head.

Susie considered. “Yeah, pretty tall. Little bun on top of her head. D’you want to order now?”

“In a minute.” I pulled out the chair and sat down heavily. “When was this?”

She had started away from the table. “Beg pardon?”

“When were Joe Fussarelli and this woman in here?”

Susie stopped and turned. She looked up at a tangle of fishing line that dangled from the ceiling. The line was laden with bright red plastic bobbers and brass fish hooks. “Let’s see,” she said. “I guess it was, oh, about two years ago. Yeah, two years, because Jeremy--the bartender? He’d just started working here, and he was the one had to ask them to leave.”

“How come? What were they doing?”

Susie slowly shook her head and laughed that “boys will be boys” way dads and businessmen do with their sons and young male customers. “They were sooo drunk. And making a lot of noise. And then, well, he got a little crude, and some of the other customers were getting annoyed, so Jeremy told them they’d have to leave if they couldn’t quiet down. And I know Jeremy was nervous, because Fussarelli is so much bigger than he is. But it was all right. They left okay. No problem.”

She looked at me as if to say Isn’t your curiosity satisfied yet? and I gestured at the menu. “Could I get a salad, please?”

“Sure,” said Susie. “And garlic bread?”

I nodded, and she moved away toward the kitchen. I sat there staring at my beer glass and thinking What the hell?

Buddy's, Part VIII "Prayer to the Kiln God"

2010-09-15T01:50:00.003-06:00

“With what frequency did you and Portland Rose have contact?” asks Henry S.

“Look, please just call her Rose. She didn’t really like the Portland part.”

“Yes, well, I see. I already have the information about the origin of her name.” He flips the pages of his notebook. “I talked to some former customers of her father’s restaurant.” He takes a sip of his bottled water.

“Sure you don’t want something to eat?” I nudge the plate with half of my Chick’s Special on it. “Try some.”

Henry S eyes the open-faced sandwich laden with juicy meatballs and thick, red sauce. “No, thank you,” he says. “I’m vegan.”

“Pardon? You’re Norwegian?”

“Not Norwegian. Vegan. It’s a kind of vegetarianism.” He looks back down at his sheet of questions. “How often would you say you and Rose”--he emphasizes the single name--“had contact?”

“Oh, at first, two-three times a week. After she graduated and went to work for the railroad, I didn’t see her very often. Then I moved away and didn’t see her for a few years at a time.”

“But you still kept in touch?”

“No. Yeah. Neither one of us was a very good letter writer. Thing about it though, we could always pick right up where we left off.”

Like the time I picked up the ‘phone, and Rose’s voice said, “It’s a girl. I want to name her Tamsin, after my mother. What do you think?” and I hadn’t even known she was pregnant.

“That motorcycle guy?”

“Yeah. We’ve been gettin’ along pretty well.”

“Evidently. Hey, I wanna be god mother.”

“That’s why I called. See you soon?”
Or one night when I was working late in the ceramics studio, trying to pull a tall jar the way Tony had been showing us in class, only I kept making the walls of the jar too thin, and my fingers would pop right through the clay, and I’d have to squash it all down and begin again. I could make tall stuff in class, when Tony was there helping me. He was flirting with me, though, not just helping, because he’d lean in close behind me, putting his arms around me, holding my hands on the jar with his big hands. He’d probably say how else could he show me? but I noticed that he never helped the guys in class the same way he helped the women.

I kept trying and trying, but my clay kept collapsing, so I decided to take a break and call Rose, who I hadn’t seen in about three months. As soon as she picked up the ‘phone, I asked her to meet me at Buddy’s. She said give her fifteen minutes. She’d just gotten off work, and she sounded tired, but by the time I’d cleaned the clay off my hands and walked the eight blocks or so to the restaurant, she was there. Without even bothering to ask Rose how she’d been doing, I launched into a tirade about my frustration with the clay. She must have just come off a full shift at work--it was about 9 p.m.--but she said, “Let’s go,” and we got our Chick Specials to go and went back to the studio.

Under Rose’s tutelage, I was pulling up tall, graceful jars within an hour. True, she used Tony's “hands on” technique at first, but hers were the arms of an encouraging mother--no need to breathe heavily on my neck--and as soon as she could feel that I was in charge of the clay, she let go. When I was finally working all on my own, Rose wandered around the studio examining the stuff that my classmates had made. She peered into a half-loaded oven in the kiln room, and without hesitating, she was able to pick out the pieces I had done.

She pointed at a thick bowl that had been placed adjacent to one of mine in the kiln. “That’s going to blow,” she said.

“D’you think so?”

“Positive. Look how much clay’s left in the bottom. It’s sure to have a big air bubble in there. I’d move my piece, if I were you. Whose bowl is that, anyway?”

“This guy in my class. He’s new.”

“Well, his stuff oughta be on a shelf by itself,” she said. She lifted the heavy bowl gingerly and set it to one side, then carefully rearranged the tiers of pieces waiting to be fired. “No sense ruining everyone else’s stuff.”

“As I remember, some of your best work was made of stuff that got blown up.”

“Well, yes, but that was before I learned to avoid it. I never intentionally broke things. If I said I did, that was just a way to cover the mistakes I made.”

“Rose, I’m disappointed! Here I thought you were this big reconstructionist, this great collage artist.”

Rose made a sound like she had something stuck in the back of her throat. “You were pretty easy to impress in those days,” she said.

When we had the kiln reloaded, Rose pulled a small chunk from a block of wet clay in a plastic bag on a nearby shelf. She sat down on a stool near the kiln and worked the clay between her fingers, kneading and shaping it with sharp twisting motions. I went back to my work in the main studio and successfully threw three pieces, one after another. When I finally sat up to stretch my cramped back and shoulders, it was very late. Rose wasn’t in the studio, and I looked for her in the kiln room. At first the room seemed empty, but then I spotted Rose, asleep on a pile of newspapers and straw near the raku kiln. Her hands were folded under her cheek as if in prayer, and her knees were drawn up toward her chest.

I started to wake her, but my eye was caught by something hanging on the side of the nearest kiln, the one we had reloaded. On the top of the kiln crouched a new god, a little woman about five inches high. The woman had a round fat face and belly and little round breasts. Her legs and arms were fat, too, but the fat was twisted into spirals that dwindled away into points instead of feet and hands. Her hair, too, began as thick clumps that sprouted from her head and twisted off at wild angles, drooping finally down her back and the sides of her face. The little god’s mouth was open, as if to scream or command, and her eyes were tiny diamond-shaped dots of clay set into deep-pit sockets in her plump face.

Anchored by the squatting kiln god’s fat buttocks, was a strip of coarse, grey paper which I recognized as a length of hand towel torn from the roll in the women’s bathroom. Rose had written something on the paper towel in black ink. It was a poem, a prayer to the kiln god, and the words of the poem were shaped like a flame sitting in a saucer. I leaned closer to the paper and read:

put

it in

the fire

--that's the

hardest thing.

I struggled for this

pot. Centered, lifted

it up, up between strong

fingers. My back shaped it

with every ache. Sweat dripped

from my brow, sponged into the

clay, and we were one. But you

would take it from me and test it

in the flame. Kiln god, please

be merciful! Scorch it, bake

it, bend it to your whim.

Just don't blow it or

its neighbor

to bits.

When your mercy is fused, your anger cooled, may I recognize it

Waiting with the others for our reunion.

Buddy's, Part VII "Chick's Special"

2010-09-13T03:58:00.005-06:00

We went to Buddy’s. It was only a few blocks down Fifth from the Fine Arts Building, and we walked in a friendly silence, with me stretching out of my usual rambling shuffle to match Rose’s long-legged, straight-ahead stride. When we got within about twenty feet of the restaurant, the smell of garlic hit my nose, and when Rose pushed through the door and held it for me, the tangy odor drew me right inside, like a warm, welcoming vacuum cleaner.

I’d heard Joe talk about Buddy’s, but he always made it clear that it was the place he went with his teammates and that I was not to expect him to take me there. I wasn’t old enough to drink legally anyway, although we could have sat in the restaurant side. At the same time Joe was indicating that Buddy’s was off-limits to me, he did so much talking about the place that it made me want to go there. He said their cooking came as close to what he called “real New York Italian” as anything outside his mom’s house could, but the way he said “anything” and “could” told me that he still didn’t think that much of the food.

It was near closing time when we got there, and I followed Rose through the restaurant part of Buddy’s where two dispirited couples lingered over their pasta, idly stirring the last few bloodied strands of spaghetti. We went on into the bar, which was livelier than the restaurant. Rod Stewart moaned “Do You Think I’m Sexy?” from the rainbow-lit jukebox, but he didn’t drown out the raucous laughing of a group of jocks pushed close around a table in the middle of the room. I recognized a couple of Joe’s teammates, but they were so deep in the telling of a joke that they didn’t notice me. A couple of older guys--professor types with beards and those little round wire glasses--leaned against their stools at the bar, arguing and waving their beer glasses at each other for emphasis. Rose nodded a greeting to two women dressed in bikers’ leathers who were sitting at a table for four by the window. I thought they might ask us to join them, but as we passed, they just smiled briefly and went back to their conversation, leaning far over the table, their faces only a few inches apart.

Rose pulled two chairs around the smallest table near the back door of the bar. “What’ll ya’ have? I’ll get it.”

“Uh, beer, I guess.”

“Well, yes, beer. Any particular kind?”

“Oh, yeah. How ‘bout a Bud?”

“Bud,” said Rose and turned away toward the bar.

I felt a little embarrassed. I’d drunk plenty of beer with my brothers and with Joe, but to be honest, I’d never paid attention to what I was drinking; I’d just downed as much as I could, as quickly as I could, trying to be like the guys. My oldest brother liked to brag about how much beer his little sister could put away, and he used to buy it for me and my friends whenever we wanted it. Rose was the first person who had ever asked me what kind of beer I wanted, and it made me feel more grownup but also kind of stupid.

I watched Rose reach over the bar. In one graceful motion, she gathered a beer bottle in the circle of each thumb and forefinger, hooked her third fingers through the handles of two icy mugs, crooked a five-dollar bill at the bartender with the little finger of one hand, and pivoted back toward our table.

A waiter ambled up behind Rose, and she said to him over her shoulder, “A salad and a Chick’s Special with meatballs. Two plates.” I waited for him to ask me what I wanted, but he turned toward the kitchen without even glancing my way. We sat in silence for a few minutes, Rose drinking her beer in big, thirsty gulps and me sipping mine and looking around the room at the people, the jukebox, the collection of red items hanging from the ceiling.

Rose laughed. “D’you think they’ve got enough shit up there?”

“Yeah. What’s it all for?”

“For? For decoration.” She pointed to a mobile of lacquered boxes hanging in one corner, their shiny red sides twisting in the warm air. “That’s mine. One of my first art projects. Ah! Here’s our salad.” The waiter plunked two plates of food on the table and drew two smaller plates from underneath his arm.

“Anything else?”

“Nope,” said Rose. “Thanks.” She dealt me one of the smaller plates and filled it with large, oily hunks of lettuce from the overflowing salad bowl. “Antipasto?” she asked.

I didn’t know what she meant. “Anty--?”

“Antipasto.” She held up tiny triangles of pale cheese and salami. “Like an appetizer.”

“Oh! Oh, okay, yeah. A piece of cheese, please.”

Rose flipped the small pieces onto my plate. “Take half that sandwich, too. Don’t try to talk while you’re eating. Just enjoy it.”

I did. I thought the food was absolutely exotic. Buddy’s garlic salad, dripping with olive oil and mined with huge chunks of bleu cheese, was about as far from the plain green Jello salad served by the church ladies in my home town as New York City was from Paris, Idaho.

We sat and ate and listened to the jukebox and the laughter of the guys at the bar, and it was wonderful. I felt sophisticated and excited, yet content, and, of course, at that moment, I had the biggest crush on Rose that I’d ever had on any teacher or any boy in school back home in Paris.

So Buddy’s became the place where Rose and I usually met. I didn’t tell Joe, not until the end, mostly because he’d staked out Buddy’s as his territory, but also because Buddy’s became part of a secret life I had outside the one I had with him. I didn’t mean to make it secret, and if he had asked, I’m sure I would have told him all about Rose and going to Buddy’s. He just never asked. Which should have clued me in about my relationship with him. Now, it seems obvious. Oddly enough, Joe and I never ran into each other at Buddy’s. I sometimes saw his teammates there, but if they told him, he never mentioned it to me.

Buddy's, Part VI "What Heaven Looks Like"

2010-09-11T12:09:00.006-06:00

I’d never been to an art show in a real art gallery, and the first thing that struck me was how empty the room seemed to be.
There were all kinds of pictures hanging on the walls, and here and there around the room were wooden stands topped by glazed jars and glass boxes filled with small metal angles and quirky silver jewelry. But there was lots of room around each piece on display, and the walls and floor and wooden stands were painted flat white. Rows of spotlights mounted on black metal pipes crisscrossed the ceiling, each light shining on a different part of the room. There was so much white and light, I thought that this must be what Heaven looks like. There were no shadows anywhere.
A girl about my age with an embroidered shawl and one, long, dangly earring handed me a thin paper book with a big “W” on the cover, and, opening it, I saw that there was a page for each of the artists who had work in the show. On the third page was a picture of Rose. She was looking straight at the camera in the same concentrating way she’d stared at me the day I met her, and underneath the picture was a paragraph written in tall, spiky lettering.

I build and rebuild. My art is concerned with the

mechanics of construction, and I want the viewer

to focus on the rhythm of joins and departures.

Meetings are never smooth, conjunctions never

perfectly symmetrical, and partings never com-

plete or permanent. To achieve the disjunction
of connections, it is sometimes necessary for me to

destroy a piece in order to create--or recreate--it.
I didn’t know what to make of this. Underneath the paragraph was a small picture of a clay mask--a man’s face--which looked familiar, and I wondered if it was some famous guy I’d seen before, maybe in the newspaper or on TV.

I started around the room, moving methodically from one painting to another, dutifully noting the title and each artist’s name. When I found a piece with Rose’s name on it, I stood an extra long time in front of it, examining it for traces of her, clues--other than her name on the small white square of paper tacked next to it on the wall--that it belonged to her. In one water color of a forest lake (or at least that what it looked like to me, in spite of its colors that no lake ever contained and its appearance of floating in the air above the trees) I found a faint image of Rose’s long, tapered fingers. In purply crayon lines smeared on rough-fibered paper, I caught a glimpse of a dangling pendant that I imagined Rose might have worn low in the sparse depression between her breasts. The pendant seemed to sway as I tilted my head slightly right and left in front of this sketch, the thick layers of crayon catching the light and moving it almost undetectably back and forth like one of those little holographic pictures that you get sometimes in cereal boxes.
Under a square glass dome I found Rose’s name next to a trio of silver pieces that resembled miniature tornadoes, heavy, swirling masses that tapered viciously to slender funnels. The jewelry confused me; it seemed both beautiful and dangerous, and I imagined lifting those turbulent earrings to my lobes and fastening that shimmering, angry cloud on my breast.

“Like ‘em?” Rose’s voice came so suddenly, so close in my ear, that I jumped and knocked my wrist against the edge of the glass case.

“Jeez! You scared me! What’re you doin’ here?”

“Well, I am one of the people in the show, you know. I’m sort of expected to be here. The proud but humble artist and all that.” She shrugged and laughed offhandedly. “You like my stuff?”

“Yeah. This jewelry is great. I’d like to have some of it.”

“Sorry, it’s promised,” Rose said flatly. Together we stared into the display case. Our reflections were creased and bent in the middle by the angle of the glass top. Rose’s hair was again knotted tightly on top of her head, which made her reflection extend an inch or so beyond mine.

“You look nice, Rose.” She was wearing levis again, but this pair looked fairly new--not torn or stained. Her shirt was heavy and black, with triangles of emerald and teal green. She wore flat-heeled boots of dark teal leather and heavy silver rings on each hand.

“Thanks. Have you seen the raku pieces? Over here.” She took my arm and steered me across the gallery to a wall of plates and masks. Large slabs of porous clay gleamed with metallic blues, greens, and golds. In the places where the pieces were unglazed, the clay was rough and sooty. A series of faces fashioned to be neither completely human nor wholly animal grinned and grimaced darkly. Some of the masks looked familiar: I thought I recognized a larger relative of the little chicken kiln god, her gaping beak ready to cackle or gulp worm. An over-sized man’s face with thick, pursed lips--the mask that was pictured in the brochure--stared stonily out over the gallery.
I gestured at the man’s face. “Do I know him?”

Rose smiled. “Well, sort of. Last time you saw him, you smothered him in leaves. This is the stuff we fired a couple of weeks ago.”

“Wow. They sure look different.” I studied the finished pieces before me, but I could find only a vague resemblance between these hard, glittering images and the fiery living things that Rose had pulled from the blazing kiln with her tongs and baptized in my barrels of newspaper. “How do you know how to do this?”

“I assume you mean besides taking an art class?”

“Yeah, I mean, how do you make them look like you want them to? I mean . . . I’m not sure what I mean . . .” I stopped and looked at the wall of masks for help.
"If you’re asking how do I plan for them to turn out this way,” she gestured at the masks, “I don’t. That’s what I like about working with clay. There’s a limit to what you can plan. You have an idea about the shape of the pot or whatever you’re making; you can use a glaze that you’ve seen on another piece; you can try for the same affect each time, but you can’t predict what will happen in the kiln. There are chemical reactions between the fuel source and the glazes, between individual pieces. A slight change in kiln temperature can make a big change in the glazes.” Rose touched the edge of the chicken mask, adjusting its angle on the wall ever so slightly. Her voice floated up toward the pieces on the wall. “At some point, you have to turn your piece over to the kiln gods and trust that they’ll know what to do with it.”

“I remember you said something like that before, when we were in the kiln room.” I thought about all those Sundays I spent going to church all day long: Sunday School and sacrament meeting and whatever that was in between--Merry Miss?--before my mom finally gave up and let me sleep in. “You know, I never heard of anybody believing in stuff like that. That kinda talk wouldn’t go over very well where I come from."
"Well, I talk a lot of trash sometimes.” Rose shrugged. “Come on. Have you seen it all? I’ve put in enough time. They’re gonna close soon anyway. Let’s go get a beer.” Without waiting for me to answer, Rose started for the door. I folded the show’s program carefully and put in it my jacket pocket, then hurried after her out of the gallery.

Buddy's, Part V "No Artsy-Fartsy Show"

2010-09-09T19:28:00.002-06:00

"So, ceramics was one of Portland Rose’s hobbies?”

I see that there’s a blank for “Non-Vocational Interests” on Henry S’s printed sheet. “It wasn’t just a hobby,” I explain. “She was an artist. The University has some of her stuff in their permanent collection.”

“Ah,” says Henry S. “Maybe I can talk to someone at the gallery. There may be records of some kind. Maybe slides of the artwork.” He makes a note in the margin of his notebook.

I couldn’t get Joe to go with me to Rose’s show, and we wound up arguing.

“I told you, Jackie, I ain’t goin’ to no artsy-fartsy show. Now stop buggin’ me.”

“But I want to go.”

“So, go. It’s just across the street, for Chrissakes. You don’t need me to hold your hand. I’m tired, and I wanna go to bed early. I thought you said you knew some chick who was gonna be there.”

“Well, I do, but I don’t know her that well. I just met her once. But I want to go.”

“SO GO!”

He slammed out of the room, and I pulled on my jacket and crossed Fifth Street to the Fine Arts Building. The gallery was on the lower level. When you go in the front doors, there are two curving stone staircases branching down, right and left, and I stood hesitantly at the top, looking over the side. Rose wasn’t in sight, but I could see Tony shaking hands with some people. A tiny bald spot at the crown of his thick, dark hair winked up at me. Tony motioned the people toward a table that was set against the wall and loaded with bottles of wine, a punch bowl with orange slices floating in it, and trays of cheese and fruit and bread splayed out like hands of cards laid face down. I started slowly down the stairs, sliding my palm along the cool stone banister. As I reached the bottom, I caught Tony’s eye and was treated to another of those slow, appraising smiles of his.

“Well, look who’s here--Rose’s little friend. Jenny, was it?”

“Jackie. But with a Q-U-E.”

“Oh, with a Q-U-E, huh? Well, good to see you again, Jackie with a Q-U-E.” He pointed at the refreshment table. “Have something to eat?”

“Uh, no thanks. Is Rose here?”

“Was a minute ago. She’s around somewhere.” Tony moved up close, and even as tall as I am, I still had to lean my head back to look up at him. “Want me to show you around?” He was so near that I could feel his warm, burgundy breath on my forehead.

Just then, a blond woman in overalls and a pair of pink, high-topped sneakers slid up to Tony and looped her arm in his, pulling him toward her, off-balance. “Tony, you old lech. What are you up to?” She turned to me and smiled widely. Deep lines crinkled away from the corners of her eyes. Her wet, bright lipstick matched her shoes, and I noticed that she had a gold-capped tooth in either side of her mouth. “You better run along and look at the pictures, sweetie. I need to talk to Tony-Boy, here.” She yanked Tony away toward the table, and I turned and went into the gallery.

I’d never been to an art show before. Oh, I’d been to the craft fairs that the ladies in the church put on, of course, and I’d been to the Art Barn at the Eastern Idaho State Fair. In fact, the summer after ninth grade, I won an Honorable Mention in the Senior High Division for a collage I’d done in art class. I’d torn a bunch of pictures of Wonder Woman out of old comic books and arranged them all around at different angles. Then I cut out pictures of vegetables from my mom’s gardening magazines and pasted them on top of Wonder Woman, putting tomatoes over her breasts and stalks of corn where her legs should be. I glued pictures of lettuce on her head and apples over her heart and strawberries between her legs. My mom didn’t like it--she said it made her feel “upset”--but my art teacher, a young guy who was only at our school for one year before he moved back to Oregon, said it was the best thing he’d seen all year. After it won Honorable Mention, he said the State Fair judges would have given it First Place, except for one old fart who wanted to throw it out of the contest altogether, 'cause he thought it was "nasty."
I wonder what I did with that picture. It used to hang in the kitchen of the house on Fifth, but I don’t remember seeing it after I moved away from there.

Buddy's, Part IV "Raku Fire"

2010-09-07T01:50:00.004-06:00

For the next twenty minutes we worked like fiends. As soon as Rose removed a few loose bricks from the front of the kiln, a blast of heat surged up our faces and arms. Rose shot commands at me: “Open! More newspaper! Now some leaves! Look out! Comin’ through!” The pots glowed angrily in the pinch of her tongs, and as she released them one by one into the barrels, I smothered them thickly with newspapers. The air grew acrid with smoke and fumes, and my smeared and sweaty face dripped black newspaper ink.

After all the pots were out of the kiln, Rose and I took off our gloves, bought Cokes from the vending machine, and went outside to cool off. We leaned against the cool brick wall on the shady side of the Fine Arts Building and gulped the fizzy cold drinks, letting the Coke run down our dry throats and make little rivulets in the smeared ink and sweat by the corners of our mouths.

“God, I’m hot. How often do you do that?”

“Not too often. A regular firing isn’t as bad. You can let the pots cool down in the kiln. But wait’ll you see how these look when they’re finished. It’s worth the trouble.” Taking a handkerchief from her back pocket, Rose mopped her face with it, then handed it to me. “You should see yourself. You look like you’re melting.”

I wiped my face and looked at the damp, black-streaked handkerchief. I touched the scarf tied low on my forehead. It was soaked through, and my hair, matted underneath it, was wet.

“Hey! Tony!” Rose beckoned to a man in the distance who was crossing the grassy quadrangle opposite the Fine Arts Building. He returned her wave and veered toward us. “My art teacher,” Rose said to me. “If you like Joe Fussarelli, you’ll like Tony.”

“Whattaya mean?”

“You’ll see.

And I did. As the man came closer, I could see that he was built like Joe: tall and thick through the chest and arms, with heavy legs. He swaggered a little, rocking up on his toes like jocks do, holding his arms away from his sides carefully, as if ready at a moment’s notice to dive for a ball or run quickly in the opposite direction. Tony was older than Joe--his thick, longish, dark hair was touched here and there with grey--but his heavy eyelids drooped slightly over big brown eyes, just like Joe’s. When he got over to us, he smiled one of those slow-blooming smiles that handsome men use to distract you while they calculate your chest size and leg length. Joe had smiled at me that way the first time I met him.

Rose performed introductions like she was firing an automatic pistol: Tony-Jackie-Jackie-Tony, then launched into a description of some problem she was having with the temperature gauge on the second kiln. I didn’t know if she was trying to distract Tony’s attention away from me or what, but she led him back up the stairs, and I followed without saying anything. When we got to the kiln room, they started fiddling with the gauge, and they seemed to have forgotten I was even there. I straightened some stacks of newspapers and pushed some leaves into a pile in the corner with my foot, but still they went on with their conversation, talking now about the art show and ignoring me. I took off the scarf Rose had knotted around my head and fluffed up my bangs. I shook the scarf out and folded it neatly in a square, but there didn’t seem to be any particular place to put it, so I dropped it on top of a pile of other rags.

I cleared my throat. “Well, I’d better be goin’, now.”

Rose glanced away from Tony for a moment. “Okay. Thanks, Jackie. See ya later.”

“Nice meeting you,” said Tony, giving me another smile.

“Yeah. Nice meeting you.” I paused, but they had already turned back to their conversation. I watched them for a few seconds. Tony leaned against the kiln, one arm hooked up over the top, one foot propped up on a couple of stray bricks. Rose frowned at the problem gauge and tapped it with one red fingernail. I looked at the barrels full of newspaper ash, at the three little clay gods still keeping watch over the kilns. The chicken-god looked back at me with its glittering red eye. Its little beak curved sharply sideways as if to cackle or peck or maybe even smile, but neither the chicken-god nor the dragon-horse nor the little fat man invited me to stay any longer.

Buddy's, Part III "The Kiln Room"

2010-09-05T01:03:00.003-06:00

I come back slowly, the way you swim yourself out of a weed daydream. Henry S is bobbing and looking at me expectantly. “Sorry. What d’you say?”

Henry S has printed the numeral two in his notebook. He repeats the question. “I said, ‘What activities did you and the subj--and Portland Rose enjoy that bonded your friendship?’”

“Look, why don’t you just refer to her as Rose. She didn’t really like the Portland part.”

Henry S bobs his head, I guess to show he’s heard me. His pen hovers over his notebook. “Bonding activities?” he says. He’s annoying me.

“Well, you might say we shared a certain interest in smoke.”

“In smoke?” Henry S scribbles furiously.

“Well, ceramics, actually. We fired some of her ceramic work together.”

“Ceramics,” notes Henry S. “Plates and cookie jars and such?”

“Not exactly. She did make some pots, but her pieces weren’t like the stuff you see in stores.”

The tricky part of raku firing is getting the clay pots out of the kiln while the fire is at its hottest, and then dumping them into a barrel of dry leaves or crumpled up newspapers without dropping them or burning yourself in the process. The leaves and papers burn around the pot as it cools and make it look really neat--kind of metallic red and blue and greenish-gold.

The Art Department’s kilns sat four in a row, big domes of yellow brick. That day, two of them were going full blast, which made walking into the kiln room like walking across the Idaho desert in the middle of August on a windless day. There was some kind of ventilation hood sucking fumes out up through the roof, but for all the noise it made, it didn’t seem to cool the room any. The kiln room was not only hot, it was littered with what looked to me like just junk: stacks of newspapers, metal trash cans filled with old leaves and straw, piles of rags and broken clay pots, and quart-size mayonnaise jars jammed full of paintbrushes and weird-shaped metal tools sort of like the ones you see at the dentist’s office. Two pairs of long-handled metal tongs leaned against the nearest kiln.

Rose sorted through a pile of gloves and rags, taking up first one glove, then another, examining them for holes, and discarding those that were too tattered. I noticed something on the nearest kiln and wandered over to take a closer look. On the top bricks of the kiln, near the front, were three clay figures, about four or five inches high. One was a little, fat, naked man in sitting position; his legs and penis were exaggeratedly long and hung over the edge of the brick he perched on. Another was shaped like a rearing horse with the scales of a dragon and a dragon’s curved, pointed tail. The third had the head of an angry chicken with a tall, spiky comb. Real feathers had been stuck into little holes poked the figure’s sides and back, and tiny red marbles glinted at me from its eye sockets.

“Kiln gods,” said Rose from behind me.

“What do they do?” I gingerly touched the little dragon-horse, the friendliest-looking of the three.

“Whattaya think? They watch over the kiln. If they’re happy, nothing bad happens to your pot.”

“And if they’re not?”

“Things blow up. Glaze runs. Stuff sticks together. Who knows?”

“For real?” I started to laugh, but something in Rose’s serious, dark face stopped me. I gently scratched the dragon-horse’s tiny hoof with my fingernail. “Hey, little kiln god,” I whispered to it. The kiln god gave no sign that it heard me.

Rose pulled a faded cotton rag out from under a pile of newspapers. “Here, tie your hair back with this.” She flipped the rag into a triangle-shaped scarf, and motioned for me to lean down. I noticed for the first time that we were about the same height--5’10”--tall for a woman, even for a big farm girl like me. I bent forward from the waist, and Rose tied the scarf tightly around my head, making a knot at the back. When I stood up straight, she patted it smooth across my forehead, tucking a little strand of my bangs back out of sight. Her finger felt cool on my face where it pushed my hair up under the scarf.
She pulled on a pair of long gloves that came up over her elbows like the ones society women wear to the opera, except these were made out of leather, cracked and stained with sweat. She handed a second pair to me and then checked the gauges on the front of the kilns. “Can you do what you’re told? And fast? Without asking a bunch of questions?”

I nodded yes.

“Okay. You bunch up a big wad of newspaper. When I get the kiln open, we’ve gotta take the pots out quickly. I’ll get ‘em out with the tongs and drop ‘em in the barrels. You throw the newspaper in on top of ‘em and then clap the lids on tight. Got that?”

“Got it.” I grabbed sheets of newsprint and began crumpling them into balls.

“Just don’t touch the pots. You can’t believe how hot they are.”

Buddy's, Part II "Wanta Smoke a Joint?"

2010-09-03T01:52:00.001-06:00

The first time I saw Rose, I was sitting on the steps of the house on Fifth where I lived with my boyfriend, Joe. I was seventeen and had run away from Paris about a month earlier. That’s Paris, Idaho. Nobody would run away from the real Paris. Wasn’t the first time I’d run away from home, either, but this time my folks didn’t call the cops. I spent two days in county jail for running away the first time, until my brother Kip came and bailed me out. Mom was going to let me sit there a while longer. Guess she figured I’d want to go back to school after that, but she was wrong. I didn’t want to go to school or work on the farm or wait tables in that shithole bar where my dad drinks himself stupid every night after work. Wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do except never go back home.

I’d met Joe the day I got to Pocatello, and I moved in with him right away. He was living in the house on Fifth with a couple of his friends, but he kicked them out after a week, and then it was just the two of us. I didn’t have to pay any rent. Joe said I could stay there just because I--as he put it--“kept him happy,” but I also cleaned the house and did the cooking.

Rose was standing outside the Fine Arts Building right across the street. I’d never seen a black person before, except on TV. That’s easy when you grow up in Paris, Idaho, population 581, all white, almost all Mormon. Anyway, Rose stared at me real hard, and I stared back, and then she started walking over my way. I remember noticing how hard she swung her arms when she walked, and she didn’t smile. She kept looking at me with this real intense expression on her face, like she didn’t have her glasses on and needed to concentrate in order to get me into focus. She was wearing a bright red shirt and faded levis with holes all up and down the legs, not on the knees where you’d expect them to be, but on the fronts of the thighs and down lower on the shins. She had on big clompy boots--the kind my brothers wear when they go pheasant hunting and walk through the corn stubble in the fields.

She just kept coming, swinging her arms, and she didn’t even watch for cars when she crossed Fifth Street. When she got closer, I could see that a red bandana was threaded through the loops of her levis to make a kind of belt, and her hair was pulled up on top of her head in a fuzzy little bun.

She walked right up to my front steps and said, “Hi. Wanta smoke a joint with me?”

I’d never gotten high before, but I’d heard about it, so I said, “Okay,” and we went inside and sat down at my kitchen table. Rose pulled a little red leather bag out of her front pocket and unzipped it and laid out an orange paper folder that said “Zig-Zag,” some silver tweezers, a tiny box of wooden matches, and a black plastic film canister. She told me to bring her a plate, and I got one out of the cupboard and gave it to her. She flipped the top off the film canister and shook some of the dried weed out on the plate and started crumbling it between her fingers. I noticed how slender her fingers were, and pink on the tips. Her fingernails were long and painted red, but the polish was pretty chipped. When the weed was crunched up real fine, she took a thin, yellow paper out of the Zig-Zag folder and made a couple of extra folds in it lengthwise, pressing it down on the table. Then, cradling the paper gently, she filled it with the weed. She rolled the joint back and forth between her fingers ‘til it was slender and round, and then she licked the sticky on it with one quick swoop of her long pink tongue. She gave the end of the joint a tiny twist, stuck it between her lips, and, with only one hand, she tapped open the match box, shook out a match, and scraped it against the side of the box to light it.

The match flared, and she held it to the twisted end of the joint, drawing on it heavily. When she passed the joint to me, I drew on it the way she had. I heard the burning paper crackle as I inhaled. I choked. Smoke scraped the sides of my throat as I coughed it up, and the glands under my ears burned. “Went down the wrong way,” I gasped, handing the joint back to her.

“Happens.”

I coughed my way over to the sink and stuck my mouth under the tap. “That’s a mistake,” Rose warned. I hung far into the sink and choked water and struggled for air. I thought of the fish I caught the first time I went out with Dad and my brothers. It took me forever to land the damn thing--nobody would help me, not even Kip--and when I finally got it into the boat, it gasped frantically, flipping from side to side, its glassy eye begging me to put it back in the water. My own glassy eye stared at the ceiling as I lay over the sink and waited for the coughing to subside. I thought I heard Rose laugh, but when I finally got my breath back and turned around, she was smoking and picking at the polish on her fingernails. “You’ll get used to it,” she said, “but you probably won’t catch a buzz the first time.”

“How’d you know it was my first time?”

Rose pursed her lips and gazed sideways into middle distance, stroking an imaginary beard. “Hmmm. How’d I know it was your first time?”

“Okay, okay,” I laughed. “Guess it wasn’t too hard to figure out.”

“Not too.” She threw her head back and exhaled smoke at the ceiling. When she looked back down, I took the joint from her and tried another, more cautious drag.

“My name’s Rose,” she said without exhaling, “What’s yours?” She sounded like some hippies I’d seen in a movie once who talked like their noses were stuffed up or like they were politely burping at the back of their throats. Don’t Bogart that joint, the hippies had said to each other in the movie, but I didn’t know what that meant.

“Jacqueline. My brothers call me Jackie. But I’m changing the spelling to J-A-C-Q-U-E. It’s French.”

“I know. So, Jackie, do you go to college, or what?”

“Not yet. But I’m thinking of getting my GED and then goin’ to ISU. You a student?”

“Art major. Gettin’ ready right now for a big show. In two weeks.”

“Over there in the Art Building?”

“Yeah. Gallery’s in the basement. Kilns are upstairs. We’re doing a raku firing today, but I had to get out of there. Too hot. Yesterday I burned all the hair off my arms.” She held both of her long, bare arms toward me, turning the backs of them up f±or my inspection. I couldn’t really see where they were burned, but there didn’t seem to be any hair on them, so I nodded sympathetically.

Rose took another drag on the joint. “When we finish this,” she wiggled the joint between her thumb and first finger, “we’ll go over and you can help me take the pots out. You’re not doin’ anything, are you?”

“Just waiting for my boyfriend to get home.”

“Oh, yeah? Who’s your boyfriend?”

“Joe Fussarelli. He plays football for ISU. D’you know him?”

Rose didn’t answer right away. She held the remnant of the joint in her left hand and pointed at the silver tweezers with her right. “Pass me that roach clip, will ya?” As I handed her the clip, I noticed that its base was shaped like a naked, kneeling woman. The woman’s arms were stretched high above her head where she held a cluster of marijuana leaves. The silver was heavily tarnished in the crevices between the leaves, but it gleamed smoothly along the woman’s thighs and buttocks, where the clip fit cozily in the palm of my hand. The cluster of leaves ended in a tiny spoon.

Rose fastened the joint in the clip and took a few final drags, puffing quickly. She pinched out the last of the fire and released the extinguished roach onto the plate. She squinted at me through her exhaled smoke. “Yeah, I know Joe,” she said. She unzipped the red leather bag and replaced the Zig-Zag papers, film canister, matchbox, and the silver roach clip. Then she stood and slipped the bag into her front pocket. “How’d you hook up with him? Wait, don’t tell me. Don’t really need ta’ know. Come on. I gotta get back and check the kiln.”

Buddy's, Part I "This is Going to Take a While"

2010-09-01T01:00:00.012-06:00

So, here I am again, sitting in Buddy’s, waiting for somebody to show up. Seems like I’ve spent a sizable chunk of my life sitting in Buddy’s, waiting. They ought to put up a little plaque over this table--The Jackie Lish Commemorative Waiting Corner--or at the very least, they ought to name a barstool after me. That end one, there, by the jukebox. I’ve probably twirled back and forth on that stool enough to wear out the gizmo that makes it swivel a half dozen times. I know I’ve fed quarters into that damned jukebox and punched up “Jackie Blue” by Ozark Mountain Daredevils enough times to cause that record to go platinum by myself.

Buddy’s hasn’t changed a whole lot in all these years. Well, they keep adding to the collection of stuff that hangs from the ceiling. All kinds of things, as long as they’re red. Somebody in Buddy’s likes red. They’ve got a little red Radio Flyer wagon, Coca Cola boxes, clusters of wooden apples, a kid’s sandbox shovel and bucket, decorative tins, a shiny red tricycle. Stuff like that. A few years ago, during the chili pepper craze, they strung red chili pepper lights all over the place. Half those lights are burned out now, and the dust on the chili peppers makes them glow sorta greenish instead of red, but it doesn’t seem to occur to anybody to take them down.

The food hasn’t changed much, either, which is good, because I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t come here and get my garlic fix when I need it. The Chick’s Special with meatballs and a Buddy’s salad--that’s my order, and it never changes. Rose used to say that there’s a dark, needy place inside the people who come to Buddy’s, and it must be fed, and the only food it wants is garlic salad. They bring you that salad, and it’s drenched in olive oil and so big that it falls off the bowl and stains the tablecloth, and the aroma of garlic stings your nose like ammonia. You take a bite and hit one of those big chunks of bleu cheese, and your eyes screw up tight in your head and you make a little growling noise deep in your throat.

Where’s that goddamn waiter?

I don’t know who this bozo is who wants to interview me. Some kinda journalist. Said it’s for a “three-part series on Idaho’s African-American citizens.” Educational channel program or something like that. I told him I didn’t know what I could tell him that he couldn’t find in the newspapers. Surely they’ve got all that over at the library. “Psychological angle,” he said. Explained that he’s got a degree in “cognitive reassemblage” as well as journalism, and he’s working on a thesis that "illustrates his technique.” Whatever.

Anyway, he said he wants to know about Portland Rose. Which makes me laugh, because nobody called her Portland Rose. She’d let you call her that one time, but then she’d give you one of her concentrating looks and say, “Knock off the Portland. It’s just Rose,” and if you forgot again, she’d act like you weren’t talking to her.
This must be him. Looks like a “three-part series” guy: vegetarian thin, wire-rimmed glasses, turtleneck, suit jacket, and too-clean, ironed levis. Monogrammed breast-pocket handkerchief. HSM. The S in the center of the monogram is much larger than the H or M. Day Planner, also embossed with an S supported on each side by H and M. Notebook. Gold fountain pen--nice touch.

“Ms. Lish?”

“Call me Jackie.”

“I’m Henry S. Milford.” He sure is proud of that S. He bobs his head a couple of times and gives me a firm, job-interview type of handshake. “We spoke on the telephone this afternoon.”

“Yeah, I remember,” I say. But I didn’t have to write it in my Day Planner. “Wanta eat while we talk?"

“No, thank you. Do they have bottled water here?”

“Well, you can ask. Try the salad if you’re hungry.” Henry S. Milford beckons a waiter and enters into a fussy dialogue about Aqua Vit and Crystal Geyser. When the beverage problem has been solved, Henry S uncaps his fountain pen, opens his notebook, and prints the date at the top of a blank page.

I take another bite of salad. “So, you want the ‘psychological angle’ on Rose?” I say around a mouthful of garlicky leaves.

“Well, from your personal point of view,” he says.

What other point of view could I have? I think. “What, exactly, d’you want to know?”

“I have a list of questions for you.” Henry S bobs his head again, a gesture that doesn’t seem to be in response to anything in particular. I can tell that it’s going to get on my nerves. He takes a printed sheet from a pocket in his notebook. “These are questions designed to elicit memory responses.”

“Memory responses.”

“Yes.” Bob-bob goes his head. “By uttering key words, memories of specific events are stimulated, and the subject begins to retrieve additional information which can then be coded.”

What a piece of work Henry S is. I just stare at him for a few seconds, so he goes on. “For instance, the first question is: Who introduced you the first time you and the subject, Portland Rose, that is, met?”

“Who introduced us? Nobody, I guess. At least, I mean, Rose introduced herself. I was sitting--”

“Subject introduced self,” says Henry S, bobbing and making a check mark on his sheet in a little box next to the word, “Self.” He prints a numeral one on the first page of his notebook and writes, “Subject introduced self,” in tiny carefully-formed letters.

I can see that this is going to take a while.

West Side Castle, Part VII "All Together Now"

2010-08-26T04:00:00.011-06:00

As Cara watches, Persis’s eyes narrow, and her lips pull in and tighten until they nearly disappear. Then, swiftly, this tense look is replaced with an expression of supreme calmness. Persis stares at her husband with wide, blank eyes, and for a moment, Cara has the sensation of seeing Ashley’s grave face superimposed on her mother’s.

“Those rooms are nice,” Persis says finally. Her voice is quiet and even.

Leo smiles down at her.

“We’ll have to go again soon,” Persis says.

“Yeah, sure, Sweetheart,” says Leo. His gaze moves from Persis to Heather and back, faltering. Persis continues to watch him, and Heather watches Persis. The corners of Leo’s smile drop a bit, and a tiny crease appears between his eyebrows.

“Leo,” Persis says, and although her expression does not change, Cara can see a tremor passing through her upper body like an electric wave. Persis’s hair is shimmering, still catching the light of the fire, but now it’s crackling with its own heat.
“Leo,” Persis says again. “You and I have never been to the Home Hotel.”

“Sure we--” Leo begins, but his involuntary flick of a glance at Heather gives lie to his assertion. “Sweetheart,” he says, and it’s not clear which woman he is addressing.

“You son of a bitch,” says Persis. “You’ve been fucking her. In the fucking Home Hotel.” Her words crack over the heads of the group. Edward and the guitar player turn, startled, from their contemplation of the fire. Lily is frozen in place with her arms against her chest, hands folded protectively over her bracelets. The chess player’s eyes snap open, but he keeps his head down on the pillow next to the baby.
Heather lifts her head, but she doesn’t withdraw her arm from the back of the sofa. Her fingernails brush the upholstery lightly just inches from Persis’s shoulder.

Persis’s grey eyes are nailheads now, her skin tight across her cheekbones. Lines at the corners of her mouth point down like angry arrows. She jumps to her feet, standing chest-to-chest with Leo. The tallest of us, Cara thinks and is surprised at how removed she feels from the scene being played out before her.

“In the fucking Home Hotel,” Persis repeats, but her voice breaks, and there’s not enough breath left to finish the last word before her throat closes around a sob.

Leo says nothing. He stands still in front of the hearth, the firelight lashing patterns of stripes on the backs of his legs.

Persis stares at him--everyone stares at him--for one two three four heartbeats. Then Persis turns and scoops up a netsuke figure from a collection of such pieces on a narrow table beside the sofa. Her fingers curl around the ivory carving of an old man playing a flute. She runs her thumb over the smooth roundness of the old man’s head and hunched back. She hefts the small figure like a skipping stone in her palm, then turns, and with elaborate casualness, she flings it at the stained glass pane of lilies nearest the fireplace.
The netsuke figure hits the pane with a blunt smack! that makes everyone jump. It falls to the floor and rolls under a chair. Persis watches it out of sight, then leans down to pick up the toddler from her pillow near the hearth. As she reaches for the little girl, the chess player flinches his head away from her hands. Ignoring him, Persis shoulders her child and walks quickly across the living room. She mounts the stairs, and when she gets to the top, those below can hear her calling “Bedtime!” to the older children.

The group by the fire breaks up somberly, bidding each other goodnight in muted voices. No one looks directly at Leo. Lily and Edward each give Cara a hug and file slowly upstairs to their rooms. Heather replaces her book on the shelf, picks up her flute, and carries it down the hall to her room at the back of the house. The chess player sets the game pieces back in their starting positions, then unfolds a quilt onto the sofa, patting and smoothing it into place. Taking a toothbrush from his hip pocket, he heads for the small bathroom on the far side of the entryway. The guitar player carries the last of the dessert plates into the kitchen. Then he unrolls his futon in a closet-like room built in the space under the stairs.

Leo banks the fire, nudging the charred and glowing logs together with an iron poker. Cara watches him draw the steel mesh curtain across the fireplace opening. She pushes herself up from the hearth. “Well, I’m tired. Where did you say I should put my things?”

Leo collects Cara’s knapsacks from the entryway and leads her to a room at the end of the hall, next to Heather’s. He brings fresh bedding from a linen closet in the hallway and helps her make up the daybed next to the ponderous oak rolltop desk which dominates the room.

“I’ll get that moved out tomorrow,” he says, nodding at the desk. He puts a thick hand on Cara’s shoulder. “If there’s anything you need, you let me know.”

“Thanks, Leo. I’m okay.” Cara stops. A hard knot rises in the back of her throat. “I hope this isn’t going to be a problem. The doctor said only about six months.”

“You could never be a problem, Darling. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”

“Persis--”

Leo pulls her against his chest. “Don’t worry,” he says again. His breath is warm against her head. “It’ll all work out okay. We’re all together now.”

[To order a copy of the book, Walking Pocatello, call the Idaho State University Bookstore, (208) 282-3237, or send me an email.]

West Side Castle, Part VI "The Home Hotel"

2010-08-22T04:00:00.013-06:00

Persis and Leo sit next to each other on the sofa, facing the fire. Persis curls herself into Leo’s shoulder and puts her head on his chest. Leo strokes her hair, lifting it so that it catches the light from the fire, then slowly letting it fall through his fingers. Heather sits behind them on a low bench placed in back of the sofa. She leans one elbow on the cushion behind Leo’s head.

Leo pats the empty seat on the other side of him. “Cara, wouldn’t you be more comfortable over here?”

Cara shakes her head. “I’m fine. The heat is wonderful. In fact, Lily, don’t you want to sit by me?”

Lily fans herself with a section of newspaper. “No, I’m fine. I hate to sweat.”

Cara leans forward, elbows on her thighs. “I like it. Reminds me of Lava Hot Springs. Say, are the pools still open? I’d like to go down there.”

“They probably are tomorrow,” Persis says. “We could drive down for a soak after dinner.” Everyone murmurs excitedly at the plan.

“Wonderfully hot!”

“After dark’s the best time.”

“Good for sore muscles after skiing.”

“Steam’s so thick you can’t see three feet in front of you.”

“I haven’t been for years and years,” Cara says. She nods at Leo. “Last time was with you, I think.”

“That time the ambulance came.”

Edward looks up. “Ambulance? What happened?”

“Well,” Cara explains, “we’d just gotten the room filled up--”

“Room?” Edward looks a question.

“Oh, Cara, you don’t know!” interjects Lily. “They tore down the rooms and built a new pool, out in the open.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. In fact, it couldn’t have been long after you left. Because Leo and I--” Lily pauses for a heartbeat. “I mean, the first couple of times I went there, they still had the rooms, but then one day we went, and they were just gone.”

“What rooms?” Edward pleads.

Cara turns to him. “There used to be this row of little rooms. Off the main hallway by the office. You could rent your own private room. Each one had a shower--like in a bath house--and a dressing room just inside the door. Then there was this cement ramp you walked down, and you could turn on the valve, and the lower part of the room filled up with hot mineral water. You could sit in there and.....” She breaks off, remembering.

Leo and Lily pick up her sentence. “You could take food--”

“And a bottle of wine--”

“Or some pot--”

“Of course, bathing suits were optional.”

“I don’t think I ever even took a suit with me,” says Cara. She looks down at her bulk. “Probably wouldn’t want to do that now.”

Leo jumps to his feet. “Are you kidding?” He raises Cara from the hearth and waltzes her gently in front of the fire. “You’re just as beautiful as ever, Darling.”

“I never liked those disgusting little rooms,” says Lily. “Who knows what kind of germs you could pick up. Like sitting in old soup.”

“Sounds wonderful to me,” Persis says. “Wish I could have been there.”

Cara disengages herself from Leo’s arms and plops back down on the hearth. “Well, it was---” she breathes heavily, “a very sensual experience.”

“So what about this ambulance?” Edward asks again.

“Well,” says Cara, “one time we were in there, and we heard a lot of commotion. Out in the hall. At first, we just thought somebody was drunk--”

“That happened a lot,” says Leo.

“But when we looked out, there were the paramedics, hauling this man out on a stretcher.”

“Remember how huge he was?”

“Oh, god, yes. This giant, naked stomach. Just as round and bright red as a beach ball. Actually that’s about all I do remember about the poor man.”

“What’d he have? A heart attack?”

“I guess. Never found out. Wouldn’t be surprised. It was hot enough in there.” She looks at Leo standing in front of the fire. “Those were some good times, though. I’m sorry it’s torn down.”

“Yeah,” says Leo. “Now, if you want a private room with a tub, you have to settle for the Home Hotel.”

“The Home Hotel?”

“Yeah. That old one on Main Street. They put hot tubs in each room. Big enough for two people. Pretty nice.” Leo rocks a little on his heels, his back to the fire.

No one says anything for a moment or two, and Cara becomes aware of an uneasiness hanging in the warm air. She glances at Leo, but he’s looking at the ceiling. Probably thinking about putting in a skylight or painting something up there, Cara thinks. Lily is rearranging her bracelets, and Edward and the guitarist are staring into the fire. The chess player appears to have fallen asleep with his head on the same pillow as the baby.

Only Persis and Heather are alert. Heather’s chin is propped on her long arm, which is stretched along the back of the sofa. Heather’s posture is relaxed, but Cara can see that her eyes are intent on Persis’s profile. Persis is sitting up and looking straight at Leo.

West Side Castle, Part V "Tai Tai" 太太

2010-08-17T04:00:00.029-06:00

Edward pushes himself back a little from the table. “You know, I’m not gonna be here much longer,” he says. “I’m gonna move out as soon as I graduate.”

“I don’t mean you, Edward. You have a right to be here. We all do.” The flush in Persis’s cheeks has subsided, and now she smiles with one corner of her mouth. “After all, if I can put up with your mother...” She ends her sentence in the exaggerated tones of a mock martyr.

“Gee, thanks, Pers’,” says Lily. “And after I showed you how to make that artichoke crap.”

Persis laughs. “Thanks for reminding me what I do like about the arrangement, as odd as it is. How else could I learn to make ‘artichoke crap?’”

“Is that ‘make artichoke crap?’ or ‘make an artichoke crap?’” Leo asks.

“Arty-cap, arty-cap,” the toddler interjects, tapping her spoon on the table.

“You can lead an artichoke to butter, but you can’t make it crap,” says the chess player, and everyone groans, but the mood around the table is now playful. They all pull their chairs closer, and the children resume their wriggling and talking. Second helpings are passed around. Leo pours small glasses of Tuaca for the adults. He gives Ashley and the boys their own thimblesful of water with a minute drop of Tuaca in each.

“Let’s have a toast,” he says. “To family--” he gestures with his glass to Persis and Edward and the children--“and to friends”--he toasts the guitarist and the chess player. He raises his glass to Cara and Lily. “To family who become friends.” He pauses, then adds, “To friends who become family.”

“I think you’ve got it covered,” says Lily. “Can we just drink now?”

太太 Everyone tosses back the Tuaca, and there’s a little coughing and spluttering. Cara touches her watering eyes with the corner of her napkin. She clears her throat. “Heather, what was that word you used a few minutes ago?”

Heather tilts her head to one side. “What word was that?”

“When we were talking about...about wives. Tie-something.”

“Tai-tai.”

“Yes, that’s it. What’s that?”

“It’s a Chinese word. Tai-tai. First or head wife.”

“I guess that’s you, Cara,” Lily says.

“Not if it means ‘head wife,’” says Cara. “That’s Persis. Besides, she’s the only one of us who is a wife, technically.”

Lily makes a dismissive sound. “Oh, technically.” She plucks the last olive from the bowl in front of her. “Hey, Heather,” she says, “what’s the word for second wife?”

“I have no idea,” Heather says. She turns to the chess player. “Want to pass that dish of cranberries this way?”

Edward gets up and sets his plate in the sink. “Who’s ready for dessert?” A chorus of protests and groans answers him.

“We’ll clean up,” says Persis. “Why don’t you guys go make a fire, and we’ll have dessert in there in a little while.” She puts the toddler on the floor and begins stacking plates. Cara gets up to help her, and Lily finally rouses herself and carries the Tuaca glasses to the sink.

The others file slowly into the living room. The guitar player rubs his full abdomen, picks up his guitar, and stands idly strumming it and gazing out the window. “It’s starting to snow again,” he says to no one in particular. The chess player challenges Leo to a game. Edward begins laying a fire, and the toddler curls up on a large pillow next to him on the floor and promptly falls asleep. Ashley and her brothers race each other up the stairs to the playroom.

Heather goes to the shelves and takes out a thick book with Chinese characters printed on the cover. She carries it to a chair near the chess table, opens it on her lap, and, drawing a pen from between the pages, begins making notes in the margins. Her writing is thick and spiky, not unlike the characters on the book’s cover. Occasionally, she leans forward, calling for Leo’s attention, turning the book and holding it so he can see what she’s written. Once, she points to an illustration in the book, and they both laugh, their heads close together over the page.

In the kitchen, the three older women swiftly fall into a cooperative rhythm, clearing the room of its culinary debris. Dishes are scraped and stacked in foaming hot water; leftover food is cartoned and stowed in the capacious refrigerator. Persis snaps on a radio that sits on a shelf over the sink, and the three women hum along with the tunes that waver out over their work.

Finally, Persis takes two of the pumpkin pies from the tin pie cupboard in the pantry. She cuts them into wide wedges, burying her knife in the rich, fleshy filling. Fresh bursts of the smell of nutmeg flood the kitchen. Cara tops the first two slices of pie with whipped cream and carries them into the living room. “Who wants dessert now?”

Edward and the guitarist are already in place near the fire. Leo stands and stretches. As he moves away from the chess board, his opponent looks up from deep concentration. “Hey, what about the rest of the game?” the young man says.

“Heather’ll finish it for me,” Leo answers over his shoulder. “Won’t you, Sweetheart?”

Heather looks up from her book, reaches, and moves Leo’s queen, as if randomly choosing a new position for her. “Checkmate,” she says, and closes her book. “Now, pie.”

The group ranges itself around the fire, balancing dessert plates on knees and the edges of furniture. Cara sits on the raised hearth of the fireplace, warming her back. She holds a bite of soft pumpkin in her mouth, letting it slowly dissolve before swallowing it. “This is so good.”

“Did you know that Leo made it from his own pumpkins?” asks the chess player.

“Yes, I heard all about it.”

“Is there anything he can’t do?” the chess player murmurs to the guitarist. The two young men shake their heads and continue wolfing pie.

West Side Castle, Part IV "A Little Dark"

2010-08-13T04:00:00.019-06:00

Leo and Edward load the table with platters and bowls from the stoves as the rest of the group finds seats around the table. Ashley and her two little brothers worm their way into chairs on the narrow side, against the wall. They are followed by the chess player, still bemoaning his loss, and Heather, who takes the end seat near the head of the table. Lily hasn’t moved from her place at the the other end. Cara pulls out a corner chair between Lily and Persis, who balances the toddler on one knee. The guitar player sits next to Persis, across from Heather, and Cara notices that both young men compete for Heather’s attention, consulting her about music and chess moves. Sunlight coming through the windows of the French doors picks up highlights in Heather’s spiky hair, giving it the effect of a gilded coronet.

Leo and Edward take places at the head of the table, and the next few minutes are filled with the clatter of passing plates. Leo stands to carve extra slices of turkey. Edward jumps up frequently to replenish serving dishes from the deep basins on the stoves. Those served begin eating without ceremony, and for some time, the plentifulness and quality of the food commands a respectful silence.

At last, with the first urgency of appetites slaked, the group grows more talkative. Leo lays his knife and fork across his plate and motions to Persis. “Sweetheart, hand me that book behind you.” Persis takes a slim volume from the sideboard and passes it down the table.

Leo clears his throat. “I have something I’d like to read to you.” He holds up the book. “Found this at an estate sale last year. Dated 1887. Never heard of the poet. Somebody named Koslowska. This is a translation.” He opens the book at a dog-eared page and reads:

The shawl of forgetfulness covers my face

I suck time through fibers

That fill my nostrils with dust

I choke on memory.

The mirzippu--

Leo looks up. “That word’s untranslated, but a footnote says it most nearly means ‘undertaker.’”

The mirzippu lifts the caul from my head

Peels my eyelids

I see my life as a day, an afternoon
You are all with me

We are shining
There are no partings, no diminishments

There is only this day, this moment

And there can never be death.

Leo closes the book and puts it on the table. No one says anything. Persis holds her small daughter’s hand and studies the tracery of tiny blue veins on the inside of the toddler’s wrist. Cara bows her head over her plate. The pressure behind her eyes is great, and her nostrils flare with the effort of a swallowed sob.

“Jeez, Leo,” Lily says finally. “Couldn’t you find something a little more macabre to read?”

“I like it,” says Heather. The two young men nod agreement.

Persis smooths the skin on the back of the baby’s hand. “It does seem a little dark for Thanksgiving dinner. And the children.” She glances across the table at her sons and older daughter. Ashley’s wide eyes give nothing back.

“I was focusing on the theme of togetherness,” says Leo. “We’re all here, this afternoon. Family and friends.” He pauses. “And, this is probably as good a time as any to tell you all that Cara--” He smiles at Cara, and his voice grows husky. “My dear, dear Cara is coming back to stay with us for a while.”

A brief glance passes between Lily and Ashley, no more than a movement of eyelids. Edward leans forward, speaking across the guitar player and Persis. “Welcome home, Cara. I’m glad you're here,” he says.

Cara looks up from her plate, not at Edward nor at Leo, but at Persis, sitting beside her. Persis draws herself up straighter in her chair, readjusting the squirming toddler on her lap. A slow, ruddy tide surges up her neck to her cheeks.

“Tai-tai,” says Heather. Her eyes gleam.

“It’ll be nice to have the company,” says Lily. She reaches for a bowl of Greek olives, selects one, and begins chewing carefully around its pit.

“When did you decide this?" says Persis. When she speaks, her voice sounds unused, as if it were early morning and her first cup of tea had not yet loosened her throat. She stares at Leo until he moves his gaze from Cara to her.

Cara touches the younger woman’s arm. “It’s only for a few months. A year at most.”

Persis doesn’t look at her. “When did you decide this?" she repeats. The children, who have been eating and moving restlessly, pause at their mother’s tone. The guitarist shifts in his chair. The chess player opens his mouth to say something to Heather, then closes it and examines his fork closely.

Leo shrugs. “Cara wrote a few weeks ago. I didn’t think you’d mind. After all, Lily lives here--”

“Lily never left,” says Persis.

Lily says nothing. She touches her silver bracelets, aligning them precisely on her arms.

“Leaving or not leaving has nothing to do with it. Cara is my wife--”

“Was,” Persis and Cara say together.

Leo holds up a hand. “Was my wife, and she’s still my friend. She needs our help now, and we have enough space. She can have her own room down here on the first floor. I’m clearing out the little office next to Heather’s room.”

He looks steadily at Persis. “And,” he says, “this is my house.” The simple statement holds a world of possession in it.

“Persis, I’m sorry--” Cara begins, but the younger woman stops her.

“Oh, it’s not you, Cara. I had a feeling you were coming back to stay.” Persis waves her hand vaguely around the table. “It’s just that this is getting so...so odd.” She sighs. “I mean, how many families have two ex-wives and a current wife all living together? Not to mention the children and assorted friends.”

West Side Castle, Part III "Oh No, Not Another Wife"

2010-08-09T04:00:00.013-06:00

The long-legged girl leans against the kitchen counter, arms folded across her chest, watching her mother, father, and little sister. “Ashley,” Persis says, “Come take the baby into the living room. Too crowded in here. Someone’ll drop a pot on her head.” Ashley scoops the toddler out of her mother’s lap and balances her on one jutting hip. The little girl grabs handfuls of Ashley’s hair.

“Take them all with you,” says Leo. “We’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”Ashley herds her little brothers, tumbling, before her. As she passes her father, he drops the oven mitt from his left hand and reaches for her. She makes a slight ducking movement, shifting the baby to her other hip and eluding his caress.

“She’s a beauty,” says Cara. “What is she? Thirteen?” Persis doesn’t answer. She stares after her daughter, then turns her eyes to Leo, who once again is resettling roasting pans and kettles.

“She’ll be twelve next month,” says Lily. The three women look toward the open doorway that leads into the main room. They can hear the children giggling and the sounds of a guitar examining chords. The piping of a flute ascends the tonal scale, and the guitar follows it.

After a moment, Persis rouses herself. She gathers a handful of silverware and begins dealing it around the table. Lily takes a linen napkin from a stack on the bench beside her and folds it into a pyramid. Her tapered fingers caress the heavy material, creasing it into shape. She pitches the napkin toward the first place setting, then repeats the process until eleven pyramids dot the perimeter of the long table.

Cara wanders into the living room where three young people, all about twenty years old, sit cross-legged on overstuffed furniture ranged around a wide, stone fireplace. A chessboard inlaid with jade and white marble squares occupies most of the space on a table in front of the hearth. The arrangement of the chess pieces reveals a game nearly ended. The king stands in check. One young man strums a guitar, his brow furrowed in concentration over the placement of his fingers on the frets. A second young man listens attentively, occasionally offering advice about the correct fingering for a particular chord. His hand hovers hesitantly over the chess board. He traces possible moves in the air above the pieces. The young woman--Heather, Cara decides--sits sideways in a leather armchair on the opposite side of the chess table. Her legs are curled beneath her. With one arm propped on the back of the chair, Heather holds a silver flute to her lips. Its airy tones warble up and down the minor scale. Heather’s whole body droops and wavers with the notes of her flute. Her long neck arches languidly, as if it can barely support the weight of her head. Her hair is closely-cropped--as short as any man’s--and colored an intense yellow. For all her wilting posture, Heather’s eyes are bright and hard and fixed on the chess board.

Cara watches the game for a moment, but it’s clear that Heather’s opponent will not be able to save his king. Cara wanders about the room, examining its carefully-arranged clutter of artifacts. Five tall celadon jars command a low table; exotic shells and polished stones spill out of carved teak boxes; a collection of silver and bronze armlets set with ovals of jade and turquoise line a bookshelf crammed with old texts, their bindings faded and raveling. The unvarnished wood of the walls is covered with paintings and hand-pieced quilts and loose weavings whose fibers ramble across feathers and slivers of bleached bone.

Cara opens the front door and pulls her knapsacks into the tiny, skewed entryway near the base of a wide staircase. She gropes in one of the bags and takes out a small pill bottle. Shoving the bags into a corner, she grasps the bannister, and hauls her bulk upward. At the top of the stairs, she hesitates before several doorways on the landing. The one on the right opens on a room in bright disarray. The floor is littered with shoes, the bed piled high with dresses and shawls and scarves. Mounds of jewelry cover the dressing table. Boxes of chocolates and cartons of designer cookies lie ravaged on the nightstand. “Lily,” Cara mutters to herself.

Selecting another door, she passes into a long room that contains a king-sized bed on a raised platform and a dressing table with an oval mirror made from hammered nickel. Leo’s four-harness floor loom dominates one wall. It holds a weaving in progress, a mass of thickly-tufted blond wool hyphenated with dried grass. A folding Chinese screen at one end of the room shields a deep, claw-footed tub and a porcelain basin. Cara takes a pill from the bottle and puts it in her mouth. She cups her hands under the running tap and gulps water.

Just then, the girl Ashley puts her head around the edge of the screen. “Dinner’s ready.”

Cara gives a little jump. “Oh, Ashley! You startled me.” The girl doesn’t move. She swings her hair away from her face, and Cara notices that Ashley has her mother’s clear, light eyes and rather blank expression. Not much of Leo in her that I can see, Cara thinks, except maybe that air of ownership--over herself, at least.

Ashley stands without leaning, her arms crossed on her chest, and watches the older woman in silence. Cara splashes more water onto her face and neck and pats herself dry with a towel.

“Lily says you’re going to stay.” It’s not a question. “Mother thinks so, too.”

“Oh? And what does your mother have to say about that?”

“She said, ‘Oh no, not another wife.’”

Cara starts to smile, then checks herself. “What do you think about it?”

Ashley shrugs. “Doesn’t matter to me.” She turns away. “Dad said to tell you dinner’s ready.”

West Side Castle, Part II, "Is She--?"

2010-08-05T04:00:00.034-06:00

Drawing a sleeve over one wrist, the woman rubs the pane clear of fog and spies an older man standing before yet another stove, this one more modern but equally massive. Only the back of the second man is visible, but the woman notes thick, corduroy-clad legs, a well-muscled back that spreads into heavy shoulders, and a tangled mane of greying, sandy hair. The man opens the low oven door, squats, and draws from the oven a deep, lidded roasting pan. In one facile movement, he hoists the heavy roaster, slides it onto the stove’s surface, and knees the oven door closed. He lifts the lid with a pot-holdered paw, and bending over the steaming contents, fills his lungs with the savory fragrance of roasted turkey. Reaching far over the pan, he draws a carving knife and a large, two-pronged fork from a rack above the stove and plunges the fork deeply into the breast of the bird. Its juices spurt and run deliciously. The man slices a portion onto his mighty fork and turns, lifting the meat triumphantly above his mouth and nodding a kind of toast to the rest of the room.

Just as he is about to devour the steaming morsel, the man spies the woman outside the window. His fork clatters to the stovetop, and with three long strides, he reaches the French doors, flings them open, and grasping her with both hands, hauls her into the room.

“Cara! Come in!” he booms. “Lily. Persis. She’s here!”

Persis, the tall, younger woman, moves quickly around the table, her arms outstretched. She and Cara embrace warmly.

“Leo said your train was late,” says Persis. “Why didn’t you call?”

“Thought I’d walk.” Cara nods at the thin woman seated at the table. “Hello, Lily.” Lily, her mouth full of cracker, smiles and gestures toward the nearest chair.

Encircling Cara with one arm, Leo wrenches away her coat, muffler, and gloves, casting them onto a pile of similar articles in a large basket in the corner. He pushes Cara into the chair. “Sit! You look tired.”

Lily leans across the table and hugs Cara. The two women press their cheeks together, Lily’s pale and smooth, Cara’s plump and flushed. Cara pulls her knitted cap off and runs a hand through flattened hair.

“I am a little winded. It’s a steeper climb from the station than I remembered. Quite a trek for an old lady.”

“Nonsense! You’re not old.”

“You just say that because we’re the same age, Leo.”

“Stop it. Fifty-seven is not old. You’re just tired. You haven’t been well. Have something to eat. Here, Lily, share some of that artichoke concoction.”

Lily pushes a plate and the carton of crackers across the table. She covers a cracker and hands it to Cara. “Try it,” she urges. “It’s got artichoke hearts and Parmesan cheese in it. Persis just took it out of the oven.” She smiles at Persis, who turns to a bottle-cluttered sideboard and fills a small glass.

“Have some Tuaca,” Persis says, proffering the glass. “Just a swallow. S’powerful if you’re not used to it.” Cara sniffs the amber liquid, then swallows and splutters. Persis laughs, and Leo pats Cara’s back.

“Go easy, Darling. It’s strong stuff.”

Cara wipes away the tears that well in her eyes. “That’s an understatement. What is this?”

“Leo brought it back from Mexico,” says Persis. She hands Cara a linen napkin. “Whole case of it. It’s about all we drank when we were down there last summer.” Persis smiles at Leo over Cara’s head, and Leo throws his head up and makes a kissing motion.

Lily waves at the plate of crackers. “Better have another of those, Cara. Soak up the alcohol. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself lying on the floor under the table, wondering what happened.” All three women laugh.

“And you don’t want to miss this dinner,” says Leo, turning back to the stove and the glistening turkey. “We’ve been working on it all week.” Again, he slices and stabs meat onto the large fork.

The young man has been watching the reunion of the four adults from his station by the stove. Now he shyly approaches the table and places platters of fresh fruit and vegetables at its opposite ends. “Dad and Persis made pies from their own pumpkins,” he explains to Cara. The others join in.

“Had to smash it twice through the sieve.”

“Stayed up all one night, stirring it.”

“Pumpkin’s been cooking for three days.”

“Ground the spices with the pestle and mortar Leo made.”

“Enough for eight pies!”

Cara laughs and throws her hands up, as if to surrender. “I’m impressed!” She smiles at the young man. “S’good to see you again, Edward.”

“Good to see you, Cara. I didn’t know if you remembered me.”

“You were only about nine when I last saw you. Not a little boy anymore, are you?”

“I’ll be sixteen next week,” Edward says, blushing. He returns his attention to the kettles on the iron stove.

“He’s grown up nicely.”

“Thanks,” says Lily, selecting a slice of pineapple from the platter.

“Place has changed a lot since I was last here,” Cara says. “Not surprised, I guess.” She tosses her head in Leo’s direction. “He can’t leave it alone, can he?”

“It’s the art project that never ends,” laughs Persis.

“He moved the front doorway in August,” Lily says. “Heather’s really into Feng Shui stuff. Spends all her time analyzing the layout and calculating the correct position of the rooms and furniture.”

Cara looks up. “Heather?”
“She’s been here about a year,” says Lily, smearing another cracker with the artichoke spread.

“Is she--?”

“Yes,” Lily says. She puts the whole cracker in her mouth, chews, and swallows. She starts to speak, and a flake of cracker falls from her lips to the table. Lily presses a fingertip on the flake and returns it to her mouth. “You know, Cara--” She breaks off as the four children clatter into the room, demanding to know when dinner will be ready.
The three smaller children surround Leo, the little boys wrapping themselves around his legs and pulling on his arms. He detaches them gently. The toddler, a little girl with wispy, almost-white hair, mimics her brothers. She locks her hands behind her father’s knee and squats on his foot. Leo lifts the toddler a few inches off the floor, raising and lowering his leg. She squeals in mock terror and clings to his leg as he hops across the floor to the table where Persis sits. Persis stretches her arms out toward the child, and Leo lifts her into her mother’s lap. The little girl reaches one arm out to her mother, but retains her hold on Leo’s leg. He hops in place, laughing and gently shaking the toddler into Persis’s arms.

West Side Castle, Part I "Lewis & Clark"

2010-08-01T04:00:00.036-06:00

Named for early explorers of the West (Lewis and Clark, of course, and others such as John Charles Fremont), the streets in Pocatello run up the steep foothills that border the town on its west side. These asphalt namesakes, so vigorous as they pass by the bank and the land title office and the public library, lose steam when they reach the hills. They turn listless and spindly, their energy trailing off into graveled driveways. Weighed down with heavy cement curbs and sidewalks, they stop abruptly against a fence or in someone’s front yard.

Late this cold Thanksgiving morning, the thickset figure of a woman toils slowly up one of these narrowing byways. She pauses at the end of each block, drops the three heavy knapsacks she carries, and tightens a woolen scarf around her neck. She pulls her knitted hat lower over her ears, tucking escaped tendrils of silvered hair away from her face. Swallowing large gulps of icy air, she again picks up her bags, readjusts them from shoulder to shoulder and hand to hand, then resumes the climb toward her destination: the last house on the street, set off to the left behind a low wall of crumbling stone.

When the woman finally reaches the end of the street, she pauses, panting, in a yard where scruffy grass shows between splotches of trodden snow. An ancient Chinese elm crowds the driveway, heaving cement up under the wheels of the battered truck parked there. The house is large and made larger by the addition of newer sections to the original structure. Chimneys sprout from bare circles in the thick frosting of snow on the roof, and icicles hang from the many corners and cornices. The front door sits at a slightly skewed angle, as if the Feng Shui advisor knew that the house had been built on the back of the dragon and had tried to make amends.

The woman drops her bags by the front door and walks gingerly around the side of the house on a snow-shoveled path. She glances at each frosted window as she passes. No two window casements are the same: here, one is angular and modernly tailored; there, one is beveled and set in an ornately-carved frame. The first window is crowded with glass bottles that glint greenly or with rainbow hues. The second opens onto a double pane of stained glass lilies. The woman pauses before the third window and peers at the overgrown foliage of an enclosed greenhouse filled with ferns.

The path ends in stone steps that climb over a berm and down into a sunken garden behind the house. Brushing the snow from the steps with a gloved hand, the woman sees that each stone offers a single word carved in heraldic letters:

JOURNEY

EPIPHANY

VISION

The woman mounts warily. To step is to commit, she thinks.

On the west side of the garden, the foothills rise abruptly. A heart-crested arch woven of willow branches frames a narrow path that climbs the hill, winding around clumps of sagebrush, heavy with frost, and clutches of tall, dry grass. A low shed of pale sandstone blocks is set into the hill on one side of the path. A litter of pottery in various stages of completion lines the sill of the shed’s single window. Next to the shed is a kiln pasted together with bricks of several colors and textures.

Another branch of the path curves back toward the house, where mist rises from a deep, rock-rimmed pool set into a wooden deck and guarded by stone gargoyles whose fantastic expressions are ready to alternately menace and delight bathers. The odors of sage and cinnamon lure the woman across the deck to a pair of French doors. Peering through their rectangular panes, she sees that a feast is being laid inside. Three oak tables on sturdy legs and pedestals have been pushed together to form one long board. Delicate lace tablecloths drape and sway across this banquet table, anchored with stoneware basins and gleaming cutlery. Chairs and short benches are crowded around the table. Like the windows, each chair is different from its neighbor; each is carved or painted or cushioned uniquely. Beyond the table, human figures skate and scurry, moving plates and ladles and wineglasses from cupboard to counter to sideboard. Four children--two young boys, a long-legged girl with hair the color of newly-ripened wheat, a cherubic toddler--dart amongst the working adults.

A slender, middle-aged woman sits at one end of the table on a padded window seat. Her dark, thinning hair hangs forward from her sloping body, shadowing her face. Her fingers and wrists are burdened with heavy silver rings and bracelets that are sculpted lavishly with Celtic designs. With avid fingers, the woman plucks a cracker from a carton, spreads a cheesy, greenish mixture onto it, and then, sweeping her hair over her shoulder, she places the cracker carefully in her mouth. She chews and pauses, chews again and nods to a tall, younger woman standing at her side. The younger woman, whose darker-wheat hair declares her the mother of the leggy girl, smiles and scoops the rest of the greenish mixture onto the plate.

By pressing a cheek against the cold glass of the French door, the woman outside can see, at the far end of the dining room, a massive cast-iron stove with porcelain fittings. It stands, like some ancient pagan altar, on a raised tile platform. A young acolyte hefts a covered kettle from one burner of the stove to another, dexterously switching hands and rearranging a steaming teapot and a metal dishpan full of potatoes. Taking up a sinuously-pronged utensil, he pounds and thrashes the vegetables into foam, pausing only to add generous dollops of cream and salted butter. Steam rises from the frothing pan and clouds the pane of glass through which the woman looks.

A Cut Above, Part VII "A Big Mistake"

2010-07-26T04:00:00.046-06:00

The next morning I shake Kevin awake. “Kevin, come look. I can’t believe what they’ve done.”

   “Who? What?” Kevin rubs a hand through his tousled hair and across his face.
   “Jilly. Lorene. Lyle. I heard them laughing out there this morning. I thought for a minute that they were drunk, but it’s way too early.”
     “What’d they do?”
     “They’ve drawn bars on the windows of his car with shoe polish or something, and they’ve written stuff like ‘Dirty Old Monkey’ and ‘Beware the Beast.’ He’s still in there, asleep.”
   “Oh, he’ll think it’s funny. He doesn’t mind. They’re always joking over there, calling him ‘Stinky’ and whatnot.”
   “I don’t know. Somehow, this is worse. Too personal. Come look. ”

Kevin gets up and wraps himself in his robe. I follow him downstairs and out onto the back porch. Over Kevin’s shoulder I can see Nigel’s battered station wagon parked near the shed. Nigel’s sitting up in the back, his hair matted and poking at odd angles away from his head. The windshield has bars drawn on it with something that looks like white paint, and the words, “Come see the Monkey,” are written across the vertical lines. The side and back windows have more bars drawn on them. “Dirty Monkey” says the window on this side.

We hear laughter. Lyle and Jilly and Lorene are standing on the back steps of A Cut Above. They point at Nigel, still sitting in his car, and make monkey noises, “Hoo-hoo-hoo.” Lyle jumps off the porch in an ape-like crouch, holding his arms low to the ground. He throws himself around the garden, hoo-hoo-hooing and pretending to swing from the trees. His thongs smack the bottoms of his feet loudly.

Nigel opens the back door of his car and crawls out. He brushes out the wrinkles in his overalls and rakes his hair back under his cap. He turns and looks at his car, moving around it, reading the words on the windows. Even from our porch, I can see his ears get redder. The weathered back of his neck glows above his crumpled collar. I put one hand on Kevin’s shoulder in front me and lean on him.

Nigel turns to the laughing trio. I’ve never seen him so pink, so freckled, so burned. He opens his mouth, but it takes him a few tries before any words come out. When they do, they sound torn. “You assholes. You fucking assholes.” His voice wavers and cracks its way up an octave. “I may just be an old queer, but I’m not a monkey, dammit!” He stops. He takes three sweeping steps to the corner of the shed, where the Weed Scourge is propped. He grabs the Scourge with both hands and waves it over his head, hoeing the air. Jilly and Lorene shriek with laughter. Lyle hoo-hoo-hoos and dances from one foot to the other.

Kevin turns to me, his face ashen. “This is a big mistake.” I nod and watch.

“Stop it. Stop it!” Nigel runs at Lyle. He lifts the Weed Scourge high and throws it. It falls about three feet short and bounces once in the grass. “Stop! It!” Nigel screams.

Jilly and Lorene fall silent. Lyle freezes in mid-crouch. Nigel strides over to him and picks up the Scourge. Lyle flinches, moves sideways. Pretty quick for a fat guy, I think. Nigel holds the Scourge more carefully now, almost tenderly.

Lyle straightens. “Hey, guy. Can’t take a joke? Come on. Can’t take a joke?”

Nigel turns back toward his car, holding the Weed Scourge close to his side. He puts the Scourge in the back and walks around to the driver’s side.

“Come on, Nigel,” says Lyle. “Don’t go. Can’t you take a joke? Come on. Don’t go.”

Nigel gets in and backs his car away from the shed. He stops, opens his door, and reaches out to wipe the windshield with his shirt sleeve. The painted bars smear across the glass. Nigel drops back into the car, slams the door, and drives away, leaving us staring after him, locked in a wordless tableau: Lyle on the edge of the parking lot, his hands still monkey-clenched; Jilly and Lorene on the Cut Above porch steps. Kevin and I draw back into our house and close the door softly.

It’s late, but I can’t sleep. Kevin’s been lightly snoring beside me for two hours, but I stare and stare at the wall. There’s a full moon tonight; even with the curtains drawn, there’s enough light in the room for me to see the pattern on the wallpaper. I haven’t seen Nigel since Saturday. He hasn’t come back to get the week’s check, Lyle tells me, and the waitress at the Whitman says he hasn’t been there in four days.

The garden committee came this morning and gave Lyle his blue ribbon and a little plaque that says “Best Wild Garden.” There were still a few things left to finish up, but neither Lyle nor I got around to them. Guess it didn’t matter to the committee. I didn’t go outside while they were here, I watched Reverend Bleat and Mrs. Farnsworth and some other woman walk around and ask Lyle questions. Mrs. Farnsworth even patted the new Boner on the head while she was showing the other woman the berms.

It’s hot, hotter than it’s been so far this summer. We kicked the sheets off right away, and Kevin is clear over on his side of the bed. I sit up and lift my damp t-shirt away from my body. Then I get out of bed and pull back the curtain. The moonlight makes everything the color of cement. If I look far to the right, I can see the new Boner sitting obediently between the berms. His sightless eyes are fixed on a bushy azalea, its grey blossoms heavy with moonlight.

There’s another statue in the garden tonight. A man leans, motionless, on the Weed Scourge, one heavy, rubber-booted foot cocked behind the other. He surveys the last of his labor, the filled borders, the graded berms. He tucks a grimy bandana into his pocket, props the Scourge against a low tree, and, with gloveless hands, lifts the hem of his shirt high over his head, sweeping his cap off with it, too. He bundles the cap and shirt against his chest, then drops them on the ground. The moonlight washes the hard knots and sinews of his shoulders and back. The silver planes of his chest rise and fall rhythmically. He’s beautiful, and, from my window, I love him.

[To order a copy of the book, Walking Pocatello, call the Idaho State University Bookstore, (208) 282-3237, or send me an email.]

A Cut Above, Part VI "Boner"

2010-07-21T04:00:00.021-06:00

At noon, I find Nigel sitting at the counter in the Whitman, slurping the special of the day, barley and beef stew. “You shouldn’t have done it, Nige,” I say, sliding onto the stool next to him. “He’s sooo mad.”

Nigel shrugs. “Have the stew. It’s good today.” He goes on slurping, but I can see in the mirror over the back of the counter that he’s smiling into his spoon.

“I’ll help you load it back in your car. Did your friend Tony make it?”

“Pretty good, huh? I call him ‘Boner.’”

“Well, that’s appropriate.” I laugh. “You should have seen old Rev. Bleat.”

“That asshole. What about Mrs. Farnsworth?”

“Well, actually, I think she thought it was funny. But they whisked her out of there so fast.... You know, I like the idea of a dog. Just one a little tamer. A little smaller, maybe.” I see the waitress approaching with her order pad and wave her away. “Nothing for me, thanks.”

Nigel dunks a piece of bread into his bowl. “I won’t be over today. Got some work on the West side. I’ll come by after the shop closes and get the dog.”

“Okay. See ya later. You know we’re going to have to work extra to make up for this.”

Nigel shrugs again and turns back to his stew. “Yeah, yeah. See ya later.”

The next day Nigel and I start early and work silently and hard. About two-thirty, we take a break and go over to A Cut Above. Jilly and Lorene are each with a customer, so Nigel and I stand in the doorway to talk. The customer getting her hair cut eyes us with some alarm, and I’m aware of how disheveled we look.

“Where’s Lyle?” I ask. “I haven’t seen him all day.”

“Over at Mrs. Farnsworth’s house. He talked to her this morning.” Lorene’s got her name badge on today, so I know it’s her. She rolls her eyes at Nigel. “He was so pissed yesterday. He stomped around here for an hour. Couldn’t even cut his appointment’s hair. I had to do it. Good thing you were gone.”

“So, what’s he doing with the Farnsworth woman? Apologizing?”

“No. That’s what’s weird. She called him, and I’m not positive, but I think she was laughing about it. Don’t you think, Jilly?”

“That’s what it sounded like from this end. I think it’s Rev. Bleat who’s the most up-tight, but I saw him when he was stuffing Mrs. Farnsworth into the car, and I think he was laughing, too. Just didn’t want anyone to know he was.” Jilly’s bending over the sink, shampooing her customer’s hair. The customer, her head a bubble of soap and curls, tries to sit up, but Jilly pushes her back into place. Jilly flips soapsuds in Nigel’s direction. “You knot head. You had to know Lyle’d be pissed. They might have disqualified him.”

“No, Honey, that’s just what they wouldn’t do. I’ve seen some of the other entries. There’s nothing in town that comes close to this yard. Not even my other gardens.” Nigel tweaks the points of his neckerchief and turns to me. “Com’on. Let’s get back to work.”

We strain over the granite stones of the pond, heaving them into place, and Nigel mutters, “Boner or no Boner, this yard’s going to win. Lyle knows it. That stupid committee knows it. Just wanted to give him a little jolt. That fat queen has been bossing me around for years. ‘Nigel dig this. Nigel plant that. Can’t you get me some birch bark? Why did you give so-and-so my baby pines?’ You watch. He won’t say a thing to me about this.”

He’s right. We spend the next three days finishing the pond, laying some stepping stones, and planting a pile of chrysanthemums Nigel’s rescued from a dumpster in back of K-Mart’s garden center. We stay out of the shop, and Lyle busily comes and goes from A Cut Above, pretending not to see us. Our backs bent over our work, we pretend not to see him.

I bunch together straggling stalks of baby’s breath, and Nigel binds them with twine. “Nige, I’m curious. What did your friend Tony say when you took the dog back? Did you tell him what happened?”

“Oh, he knew what would happen. He laughed the whole time he was casting it.”

“What’s he going to do with it? I can’t imagine anyone else will buy it.”

“Sure they will. He just took his little chipping hammer and--bonk!--performed a doggy circumcision. Boner’s fine. Just not as well-endowed now.”

“So, are you bringing him back? I’m not sure the garden committee could stand seeing him again, even in his ‘altered’ state.”

“Naw. I’ve got a new Boner. Very modest. Paws together and all that. I’m bringing him by tonight.”

On the fourth day, Lorene asks Nigel to go get her some wine, so I dig up a bulb of garlic and pick a plateful of beans, and we take them into A Cut Above for a little snack. Lyle’s there, finishing up a cut and style. We’re in the back, zapping the beans in the microwave when Lyle comes in, his flip-flops trailing snippets of hair across the tile.

He pours himself a glass of wine. “Everything goin’ okay?”

“Sure, sure. We’ll have it all ready by Tuesday. No problem.”

“Need anything?”

“Nope, we’re fine.” Nigel casually peels a slice of blistered skin off his arm.

“Okay.” Lyle shuffles back out to the front of the shop. “By the way,” he says, without turning his head toward us, “the new statue looks good.”

A Cut Above, Part V "Quite a Dramatic Treatment"

2010-07-17T04:00:00.022-06:00

A few nights later, I’m awake again because of noise in the yard. I get up and look out the window, then sit down heavily on the edge of the bed. “God, he’s at it again.”

Kevin leans up on one elbow. “What’s going on?”

“Nigel. He’s out there in the garden. His car is right up on the lawn.” I pick up the clock and hold it close to my face. “It’s two-thirty. What can he be doing now?”

Kevin climbs across me and draws back the curtain. “He’s unloading something out of his car. He wouldn’t be burying a body or anything, would he? It looks like he’s got one wrapped in a blanket.”

“Oh, who knows. I just wish he’d quit clanking around. Why can’t it wait ‘til morning?”

“D’you think I should go down and see?”

“No. Especially if it is a body.”

“Maybe he hit a dog and he’s burying it. It’s about that size.”

“Well, he is a terrible driver. Oh, hell, come back to bed.”

The next morning I wake up late. Downstairs, there’s a note stuck on the cupboard above the coffeepot:

I pour a cup and wander into the front room. Kicking a pile of newspapers away from in front of my favorite chair, I sit and sip and try to wake up. Car doors slam out front, and I can hear Lyle’s businessman’s voice, a blend of officiousness and conciliation that I’ve heard him use at City Council meetings. “So glad you could come early, Mrs. Farnsworth. Reverend Bleat, how are you? I’ve got the forms all filled out. As you can see, the work is well under way.”

A woman’s voice murmurs a reply. This must be the screening committee. Lyle had said something about a selection process for the contest. Mary Farnsworth--“Mrs. Dr. Farnsworth,” as she likes to refer to herself--is a Martha Stewart wannabe. She’s always organizing chocolate festivals and garden awards and tours of people’s houses. Reverend Bleat is the pastor of the Presbyterian Church and president of the Pocatello Gardeners’ Club. We’ve never heard him preach, but Kevin and I like to joke about his name reflecting his oratorical style.

Lyle is giving them a tour of the grounds. Maybe I should go out. After all, half of it is my yard, too, and I’ve done part of the work. I don’t hear Nigel out there. Probably Lyle has scheduled the committee’s visit for when he knows Nigel has something else to do. Maybe he doesn’t want either of us out there. I don’t know if Lyle has told the committee who’s doing the work. Surely, he’s not pretending to have done it all himself. I check myself in the hall mirror. I look presentable. I’ll just wander out as if I don’t know what’s going on.

I step out the front door, coffee cup in hand. Lyle has discarded his usual t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops in favor of a grey-green polo shirt, tan slacks, and loafers. He’s wearing his toupee, of course, and he’s leading Reverend Bleat and Mrs. Farnsworth around the first low berm. He indicates the location of the pond. “Ahh,” says Mrs. Farnsworth.

“Very nice,” says Reverend Bleat, making a note on the clipboard he carries. Lyle nods to me over the committee members’ heads, and I step closer. Mrs. Farnsworth turns and smiles politely, but without much interest. Rev. Bleat glances my way and returns his attention to a flowering quince that Nigel has planted in the space between the pond and the second, higher berm. I can tell that Lyle has already explained my status as his tenant. I’m not going to figure in the contest as either land owner or gardener. I smile and nod politely and drop back behind the group.

“We’ve staggered the berms, you see,” Lyle explains, “so as to minimize the views of street and parking lot. The second berm is high enough to effectively block the view of both the street and the alley. This creates a private garden within the garden.” At his mention of the parking lot, I stretch on tiptoes to see if Nigel’s car is gone. Sure enough, it is.

“This is quite a dramatic treatment,” says Mrs. Farnsworth. I wonder what errand Lyle’s sent Nigel on.

“Step around here, Mrs. Farnsworth,” Lyle says unctuously. I notice that Nigel’s tires have left faint marks on the grass at the side of the larger berm, but it looks as if it’s been raked over, so he must have been here earlier this morning. I wonder what he could have been doing out here last night.

I look up, suddenly aware that the committee has stopped its appreciative murmuring. Lyle, Reverend Bleat, and Mrs. Farnsworth are standing just on the other side of the high berm. Mrs. Farnsworth is breathing hard, as if she’s been running. Lyle looks apoplectic; his face and neck are so tightly strained that his toupee rides high on the top of his head. His mouth opens wide, but all that comes out is a strangled “Erk.” Reverend Bleat jerks his clipboard up in front of Mrs. Farnsworth’s face, grazing her nose. I remember Kevin’s note.

The trio whirls about and begins stumbling toward Reverend Bleat’s car, Lyle and the Reverend hustling Mrs. Farnsworth along between them. Reverend Bleat is still trying to keep his clipboard in front of Mrs. Farnsworth’s eyes. Mrs. Farnsworth begins to laugh, and Lyle and Bleat hurry her faster toward the car. As they brush past, Lyle glares at me over Mrs. Farnsworth’s head.

I turn away from them and step around the corner of the berm. At first, I think that the animal, a large grey dog, is real and has wandered into the yard by accident. Then I realize that this dog is unlike any other dog that will ever stray into this or any other garden. About three feet tall, solid cement, rearing up on his back legs, he paws the air playfully. He grasps a cement bone far back between his jaws, and his smooth grey eyes stare blindly. A happy dog, a rambunctious dog, a virile dog. A very, very virile dog, I think, as I identify the likely source of the committee’s embarrassed retreat. The penis of this dog is not a regular-sized doggy penis; it appears to have been modified by the sculptor. No, not modified, augmented. This dog is rampant in more than just stance.

“I’m going to kill him!” Lyle stands beside me, hands on hips, toupee swiveled over one ear. “Is this his idea of a joke? Did you know he was having this made?” Without waiting for my reply, he turns and lurches into the shop.

A Cut Above, Part IV "Someone Gets Pissy"

2010-07-13T04:00:00.002-06:00

This afternoon, as I dig a drainage trench around the pond, I find myself thinking back on that wedding a year ago, that meeting between Nigel and Dad, and I stab my shovel into the dirt, turning over the clods and whacking them hard with the back of the blade. Nigel’s creaky laugh filters through the forsythia bush behind me. “It’s just a trench, Honey. You’re not digging to China.” I bury the shovel blade in a pile of earth and wipe my forehead with the back of my arm, smearing sweat and dirt together. Nigel comes around from behind the forsythia and hands me an extra bandana. “Looks like you need a break. Let’s pick some nasties and go have a drink.”

Jilly and Lorene, the two women who work for Lyle at A Cut Above, look just alike to me. They aren’t twins, not even sisters, but I never can remember which is which. They’re both trim and dark-eyed, they both wear jeans and black t-shirts that say “A Cut Above,” and they change the color of their hair so often that it’s confusing. Their stations are side by side in the shop, and they share hair dryers, curling irons, clippers, and even customers with equanimity.

The two women like to drink in the afternoons if business is slow, and if Nigel’s around, they’ll give him a twenty to walk over to Albertson’s and buy them a bottle of wine. When the garden’s going full blast, Nigel often takes them handfuls of fava beans to eat. Fava beans, zapped in the microwave of the little kitchen on the enclosed back porch of the shop, taste really good mashed and mixed with cream cheese and freshly-ground black pepper.

Most days, Nigel and I take a break around three o’clock and join Jilly and Lorene for a snack. Today, Nigel serves us pansies and nasturtiums with our wine, and, after a couple of glasses, we have fun imagining what other flowers we could cook up.

“How about ‘Holly Ham Hocks’?”

“’Banana-Daffodil Delight.’ It’s a blended, frozen dessert.”

“Pan-fried Petunias. With gravy.”

“What kind of gravy? What flower begins with ‘g-r’?”

“Geranium gravy.”

“That’s ‘g-e-r.’ Pour me another glass of wine.”

Jilly or Lorene--I don’t know which--looks out the back door of the shop. “Oh, Ni--gel,” she says in a sing-songy voice, “there’s someone here to see--ee you.” She points toward the parking lot where a slender young man in tight levis and a western-cut shirt poses against Nigel’s battered Rambler.

Nigel looks out over her shoulder. “It’s Trey.” He tosses the plate of flowers on the counter and hurries out the door and down the few steps to the parking lot. Jilly and Lorene stand at the window and watch.

“He’s so gorgeous.”

“I don’t get it.”

“What a waste.”

“You said it.”

They go through this every time Trey comes around.

Suddenly Lyle looms in the doorway of the break room, a bundle of towels in his arms. “Don’t you two have anything else to do?” He puts the towels on the counter, shakes one out with a snap, and begins folding.

Jilly and Lorene say “No” in unison and laugh. Then they peel themselves off the window and begin clattering the plates and wineglasses into the sink. I pop the last nasturtium into my mouth, squeeze past Lyle, and head for the front door of the shop.

“Out the back door with those boots,” says Lyle, and I swivel around and march back through the break room. Lyle follows me out the back door. Nigel and Trey are leaning together on the car, passing a beer bottle between them. Lyle frowns. “Am I paying you for that?” he calls.

Nigel laughs. “You couldn’t afford this, you old queen.” He takes one long, last chug of the beer and tosses the bottle into the back of his station wagon. Trey smiles a slow, tantalizing smile at Lyle--the kind of smile you see on beefcake calendars--then turns to Nigel and holds out a hand, palm up. Nigel unhooks a key from the bunch he digs out of his pocket and places it carefully in Trey’s hand. “See you later, kiddo,” he says. Trey folds his long legs into Nigel’s car and backs it out of the parking lot. He flutters a wave at Lyle as he drives off.

Lyle stands with his hands on his hips, fuming a little. I don’t think he’s really in a bad mood; he just thinks he ought to be. Nigel laughs again, and picks up the Weed Scourge. “Let’s get back at it,” he says, giving me a wink, “before someone gets pissy.”

A Cut Above, Part III "The Wedding"

2010-07-09T04:00:00.007-06:00

The next day--the day of the wedding--Nigel was around all morning, fussing with huge jars of zinnias and marigolds, weaving garlands of tiny rosebuds in morning glory vines for the bride and her sister to wear in their hair. He fashioned a cascading bouquet of poppies, daisies, and columbine for the bride to carry, and he placed leis of cosmos around my neck and Kevin’s, kissing each of us coyly on the cheek and croaking, “Aloha.” In the yard between our house and the barber shop, Nigel had tied willow branches into a heart-shaped arch under which the groom, the bride, and the mayor, who was performing the ceremony, would stand.

About eleven-thirty, I noticed that Nigel had disappeared; the Scourge was propped neatly against the back porch, and his car was gone. By the time the wedding guests--about 30 family members and friends--began to arrive, he was still missing, but by then we were so busy greeting people and moving chairs out to the yard that neither Kevin nor I had a thought to spare him. The sky was alternately greying then clearing; the sun retreated, then burst back warmly from behind skittering clouds. Elderly guests whined their preference for an indoor ceremony; children raced in and out of perpetually-flapping doors. At one-fifteen, the mayor arrived and, checking his Daily Planner, bounced impatiently from one foot to the other, asking, “Where’s the bride? Who’s the groom?”

By one-thirty, rain was dotting the sidewalk, and we yanked chairs back into the house, instinctively arranging them in concentric half-circles facing the wide, black, wood-burning stove that crouched like an iron altar on a raised tile dais on the far side of the front room. Nigel had created a particularly riotous arrangement of gladiolus, sunflowers, and huge stalks of pig weed which sat on the cold stovetop, and the mayor took his place before the stove-altar, turning solemnly to face the guests, his hands folded prayerfully around his Daily Planner. I noticed that the deep purple, fuzzy tops of the pig weed jutted wildly from behind him, and that by closing my left eye, I could make the pig weed appear to protrude directly from the mayor’s ear. I called Kevin’s attention to this, and, as the bride’s sister took her place as Matron of Honor and the groom took up his position, we amused ourselves by opening and closing first one eye and then the other, making the pig weed emerge first from the mayor’s left ear, then from his right.

Just as the bride came down the poppy-bedecked staircase, the sun broke through the clouds with an intenseness that caused her to exclaim, “I wanta be married in the garden.” So, over the grumbling of the older guests, we all trooped outside, and the wedding party arranged itself under Nigel’s arch. As the mayor hurried through the ceremonial words, stumbling a bit over the do-you-takes, out of the corner of my eye I saw Nigel come out of the shed at the back of the yard and join the ranks of guests standing under the dripping eaves of the house. He paid little attention to the other guests or the ceremony; instead, he rocked back and forth on his heels, admiring the flowers.

The ritual was soon over, the mayor dispatched to his next appointment, and the elderly relatives escorted back inside for refreshments. The bride and groom moved around the room, receiving congratulations and advice, and Kevin and I poured champagne and juggled napkins and forks and tiny plates of pink-frosted wedding cake. I could hear my father’s comradely “Ha, ha, ha!” boom from the kitchen. He and the bride’s sociology professor hovered around the beer keg, refilling their glasses and squeezing thin slices of turkey and prosciutto together with their fingers before stuffing them in their mouths. The groom’s parents sat on the stairs, plates balanced on knees, while my aunt Margaret quizzed them on the details of their son’s up-bringing. “So, you said he played football in high school,” I heard her recapping. “Didn’t he wrestle, too?”

Everyone raved about the flowers.

I was shouting an offer of more cake to the groom’s hard-of-hearing grandmother when Nigel appeared at my elbow. “Oh, there you are, Nige. I wondered what happened to you. Everyone’s talking about your handiwork.”

“D’they like it?” He exhaled heavily, and I could tell he’d already had several refills of champagne. “I’m ‘shpecially pleased with the pig weed.”

“Yeah. That arrangement’s quite, ah, entertaining.” I looked at Nigel more closely. His costume incorporated elements of his gardener persona with a jaunty interpretation of the joyous wedding guest. The overalls had been replaced by khaki riding jodhpurs and the puttees freshly rewound over his rubber irrigation boots. His shirt was buttoned high, as usual, and a virulent mustard-colored bandana was knotted so tightly around his neck that one end pointed determinedly at the ceiling and the other at the floor. A snug-fitting tan bush jacket constricted his shoulders and torso, shrugging up an inch or so further whenever he lifted his arms. His hat--brown and wide-brimmed, like Smokey the Bear’s--sat far down on his brow, secured by a cracked leather chin strap. The most noticeable detail of Nigel’s costume, however, was his scent: a confusing mixture of Old Spice, paint thinner, and unwashed man. Unvarnished.

“D’you get something to eat? Come on.” We squeezed past two inebriated guests--former boyfriends of the bride--propped one on each side of the kitchen doorway.

“Nigel, you haven’t met my father.” Dad looked up from his close examination of the beer keg’s spigot. “Dad, this is Nigel. He did the flowers.”

Nigel extended a peeling pink hand to my father, who rapidly shifted his glass of beer from right to left. “A pleashure, sir,” rasped Nigel, grasping Dad’s hand and pulling him forward, off balance. Nigel’s rich breath poured into Dad’s face. “A real pleashure.”

Dad reared back, sloshing his beer. Nigel’s scabby pink thumb pressed into the back of my dad’s hand. Dad looked down at their joined hands, then up into Nigel’s flushed face. “Yeah,” he grunted and shook Nigel’s hand away the way I’ve seen him shake blood and feathers off his fingers while cleaning game birds.

I steered Nigel away toward the table. “Uh, how ‘bout some cake? Here, take a plate.” I cut a large chunk of wedding cake and put it on the saucer Nigel held. Behind us, Dad yanked open the door to the pantry, slammed it shut, then opened the door next to it. He stomped into the bathroom, and I heard him snap the lock and clap the toilet seat up. Neither Nigel nor I turned around. “Sorry,” I said. “I think he’s had a lot to drink.”

Nigel shrugged. “Honey, who hasn’t? Le’sh go look at the flowers.”

I could have predicted Dad’s reaction, I guess. About the only thing he’s ever said about my relationship with Kevin is that he’s glad my mother’s not alive to see it. Dad and I have never been close, and it’s not like he had a lot of expectations of me that I disappointed, so I suppose I should be glad that he doesn’t completely boycott every event in my life. Of course, he’d say he was at the wedding because of his granddaughter, but actually, he was never any closer to my two daughters than he was to me.

A Cut Above, Part II "Unvarnished"

2010-07-05T04:00:00.006-06:00

Late that night, a noise from the yard rouses me, and I get up and open the curtain in time to see a battered car drive off the curb. Its muffler poots a soft farewell down the street. Kevin rolls over and opens one eye. “What the hell time is it?”

“About midnight. I think that was Nigel. What can he be doing? He drove right up over the curb.”

Kevin yawns. “That guy. Who knows? Probably drunk. You know he’s been sleeping in his car in back of the shop? He gets up early. Thinks Lyle doesn’t know.”

“I don’t think Lyle would care. At least, not as long as Nigel’s working on the garden. It’s a long drive back out to Tyhee.”

I let the curtain drop. I raise the blankets high and stick one cold foot into the bed, planting it firmly on Kevin’s warm ass. He swats the covers down over my leg. “Hey! Are you crazy? Get in, and don’t put your feet on me. They’re like ice.”

I laugh and settle in the bed. Kevin scoots a few inches away, toward his side. He exhales forcefully, his way of indicating annoyance. I turn toward him on my side and sneak my arm around his waist. There’s a brief, token resistance, then he lets me pull him close, in spoon position. I put my face into his thick hair and breathe into it warmly. I match my breathing to his, and soon we’re both asleep.

Next morning, I see that Kevin’s right: Nigel is sleeping in his car. It’s six a.m., the coffee’s on, and from our back porch, I can see him curled up in the back of his faded-orange Rambler station wagon. That has to be uncomfortable, but then, Nigel often looks uncomfortable. He’s got pink, freckled, Scottish skin that blisters and peels all summer long, even though he’s the most covered-up person in town, cold weather or hot. His rusty, greying hair is usually plastered under a hat, his weathered throat strangled by both top shirt button and knotted neckerchief, and the backs of his calloused hands are blistered through tattered gardening gloves. Even his voice is uncomfortable--certainly to hear and surely to use. His words yank themselves up and down the register, jolting and grating on the listener’s ear, as if he were perpetually afflicted with a case of strep throat.

I realize that Nigel must sleep in his car a lot. He has a house out on the reservation, but he spends most of his time in town, traveling a spider web of routes between the Oasis Bar, the Whitman Cafe, and the many gardens he creates and tends.

Nigel’s married. At least that’s what he told me last summer when we drove up into Portneuf Gap to cut wild daisies and larkspur. His wife is a Shoshone-Bannock woman--that’s why the house out on tribal land--and they have some kids, too. “Half our kids are pink, and half are brown,” he said. I don’t know how brown his wife is, but it’s hard to imagine anyone pinker than Nigel.

I remember wondering at the time What could Mrs. Nigel be like? Nigel says they don’t see each other much anymore, that the kids are pretty much grown, and his wife is content to spend her time visiting with her sisters and playing bingo several nights a week at the reservation casino. He goes home once a month or so, but the rest of the time he spends in town, gardening and sleeping at Trey’s or in his car. Nigel and his wife have a pretty casual marriage, and I gathered that was all right with both of them.

My mind was on couples and weddings that day. My daughter was about to be married from our house--a garden wedding, if it didn’t rain. Nigel was doing the flowers. Even though A Cut Above’s yard was crammed with every standard variety and experimental Nigel could steal from gardens around town, that wasn’t enough for him; the day before the wedding, he and I drove into the foothills south of town with buckets and clippers and the Weed Scourge. Nigel knew where there were whole hillsides of larkspur, ditchbanks glutted with ferns, roadside stands of hollyhocks. We harvested gullies and the edges of farmers’ fields. All morning we cut and bagged and twist-tied, until the bed of my pickup was full.

Then Nigel flipped open a burlap bundle he’d loaded in the front seat earlier that morning and pulled out still-cold bottles of beer. We sat in the sun and looked down through the Gap where the Portneuf River slices the hills just wide enough to fit Pocatello in between, and we drank our beer and talked about marriage. I wasn’t too happy about my daughter’s choice. They didn’t have much money and neither did I, so the wedding was going to be one of those home-grown affairs, where everyone pretends that love is what really matters, as if that’s enough to keep couples together.

I remember telling Nigel a little about my failed attempt at marriage, and he told me about his wife. He also told me--not for the first time--about Trey, the guy he’s with now, about how it surprises some people that an old queer like him managed to attract a beautiful young creature like Trey. I’ve seen Trey, and I didn’t say so to Nigel, but I’m one of those surprised people. Nigel explained it by saying that guys like Trey don’t want someone soft and unblemished like themselves; they want a really masculine man, one who acts and talks and smells “unvarnished,” I think his word was. I don’t remember what I said in reply, probably just swigged my beer and looked down the Portneuf Gap.

A Cut Above, Part I "Nigel's Little Helper"

2010-07-01T04:00:00.007-06:00

From my room upstairs under the sloping eaves, I hear them in the yard, planning what will go where. Lyle sounds irritated and determined. He knows what he wants: the “Best Wild Garden” award at this year’s show. He thinks he knows how to win it, and he knows he needs Nigel to translate his plans into reality.

Nigel has his own ideas. His creaky voice rises. “If you think anyone’s going to be impressed by a lot of scraggly dahlias and a couple of cement statues, Honey, you’ve got another think coming.”

“You don’t like the lions?”

“Everybody’s got lions. You need something different. Something unexpected. Something lurking behind a berm. Those judges turn the corner and say, ‘Jeez Louise!’ Then you’ve got their attention.”

“I dunno, Nigel. Don’t want to give anyone a heart attack. How about a wicker swan?”

Nigel snorts. “No-no-no. You let me take care of it. I’ve got a friend who casts garden sculptures. He’ll make something special for you. But no lions. No swans.”

I turn my book face down and push back the curtain. Lyle has left his wig inside the shop--it’s hot today--and his bald head shines up at me. Every few seconds he tugs his t-shirt back into place over his paunch. Lyle tells everyone that fat is a healthy sign now. He says that if you’re fat, you can’t be sick yet. His feet in rubber sandals splat-splat on the sidewalk and across the driveway.

Nigel’s dressed for garden work in grass-stained overalls, a threadbare dress shirt buttoned up to the neck, rubber boots, and a paint-splattered golfing cap. His lower legs are wound in strips of rags--Nigel calls them his puttees--and he carries a garden tool he designed himself: part hoe, part shovel, part bird-in-flight. Its wing-like blades gleam wickedly. Nigel calls it the Weed Scourge.

They cross the lawn between the two houses, the one Kevin and I rent from Lyle and the one that contains Lyle's barber shop, A Cut Above. Lyle ties red string on bushes to be yanked and trees to be pruned. Nigel gestures hugely to indicate the layout of the next berm. He tamps the ground with the Scourge; he’ll dig a small pond here. He shows Lyle how he’ll rim it with granite blocks. Lyle looks hungry but doubtful. I can see from my window his struggle between desire to win and fear of what all of this is going to cost. He doesn’t know that late last night, in between watching for police patrols up and down Main Street, Nigel and I salvaged the rest of the granite from the old Pioneer Building rubble and loaded the blocks into the back of my truck. They’re in the shed right now under a tarp. Lyle doesn’t know how much Nigel and I want to win, too.

I met Nigel a couple of years ago when Lyle hired him to take care of the grounds around A Cut Above and our house next door. I’d heard people talk about Nigel’s talent, but it wasn’t until I saw what he was doing with our yard that I got interested enough to ask if I could work alongside him and learn. At first I just followed him around on Saturdays and afternoons when my classes got out early, but then summer came and I decided that a season with Nigel would teach me more than the botany lab assistantship my professor had arranged. When Lyle learned I was going to be Nigel’s assistant, I had a little trouble convincing him that I wouldn’t ask for pay or want to knock any money off the rent he charges us. Now he calls me “Nigel’s Little Helper” and expects to see me out in the yard, especially afternoons and weekends.

At first, Kevin thought I was nuts. “You’re gonna work for free?” he said. “Fixing up somebody else’s property?”

“You said yourself that we should try to get Lyle to sell us this house. Look at it as an investment in our future home.”

He bought my logic. Like Lyle, Kevin’s a businessman, an accountant. That’s how we met, in fact. He handled my taxes the first year I was divorced, first helping my ex-wife and me sort out the money tangles, and then--later--helping me sort out the emotional ones. Kevin made it possible for me to save enough to go back to college. We’ve been together for six years now, and my finances and lovelife have never been in better shape.

Facts Behind the Fiction: Recipe for Mr. Harris' Barbecue Sauce

2010-06-25T20:58:00.016-06:00

In the 1970s and early '80s, I ate at Harris' Bar-B-Cue often enough to believe that Mr. Harris varied the ingredients in his barbecue sauce each time he made a new batch. Here is the recipe he used the day I was there to learn how to make sauce.

Chop and sauté together two onions, 2 carrots, about 1/2 of a bunch of celery, and a handful of garlic cloves.
Dissolve 1 cup of brown sugar in 6 cups of ketchup, 1 12-ounce can of tomato juice, 1 12-ounce can of tomato paste, and 2 quarts of canned whole tomatoes.
Season with 1 teaspoon of cumin and 1 tablespoon each of dry mustard, black pepper, pickling spice, horseradish, paprika, Liquid Smoke, and vinegar. Add one bay leaf.
Bring everything to a boil and then simmer on low heat for one hour.
Remove the bay leaf before bottling the sauce.

Makes about one gallon of sauce.

Harris Bar-B-Cue, Part III "All You Got Left Is Nothin'"

2010-06-18T20:51:00.005-06:00

Martin took the second bottle of champagne and began edging the plastic stopper out. This one stuck and then suddenly shot across the table, hitting the wall just behind Tom's shoulder. Tom let out a “Hip!” of surprise, and we laughed and jostled each other, catching the foaming champagne in our glasses.

“Another toast,” said Martin. “To Tom, the future doctor!” We lifted our glasses.

“What kinda doctor are you, Honey?” By now the woman's greasy smile had slipped to the side of her face. She hung nearly half out of the booth, one arm dangling at her side.

“He’s gonna be an ENT.”

“A nee-tee what?” The woman turned an ear toward Martin and struggled to right herself on the slick leather of the booth.

“An oto-rhino-laryng-ologist” answered Martin carefully in a slightly slurred version of the voice I’ve heard him use when dictating his patient notes. “Ear, nose, and throat, and auxiliary structures.”

“Like the tongue,” Tom added, giggling a little. “Don’t forget the tongue.”

“Ah, yes.” Martin drew himself up a little straighter. “The ever-important tongue. I’d say the tongue was important, wouldn’t you, Kay? Wouldn’t you say the tongue was ever-important?”

I laughed. “I’d say you two have probably had enough champagne.”

“The ever-important tongue,” Martin persisted. “Look.” He picked up the first champagne bottle’s plastic stopper and stuck it on the end of his tongue. He waggled it at me. He waggled it at Tom. The stopper bobbed crazily on the end of his tongue like a bizarre mushroom-shaped wart. Tom picked up the other stopper from the floor behind his chair. He brushed it on his shirt and stuck it on the end of his tongue. He waggled it at Martin, then at me, then at the woman in the booth.

“Don’t be waggin’ that thing at me, boy,” she scolded. The two men laughed. Martin’s stopper dropped off his tongue and rolled across the table.

The woman was roused now. “What’s so funny? You makin' fun of an ol’ lady? Don't you go makin' fun.” A wet thread of sauce hung at the corner of her lips. “Harris!” she shouted toward the kitchen. “Your customers ain't got no class! Comin’ in here, makin’ fun of an ol’ lady. Slummin'. Think it's funny.” Her complaints ran down, and with a little moan, she slumped back in the booth.

Tom waggled his tongue at me one more time, then took the stopper off and studied it. Martin poured more champagne in our glasses. He half turned to offer some to the woman in the booth, then seemed to think the better of it. She was leaning against the wall of her booth, her eyes closed, her beer can tilted precariously in one hand.

Mr. Harris came back in with another pan of cornbread. “You all want more barbecue? Got some left.”

“Thanks, Mr. Harris,” I said, “but I think we've had enough. We'd better get going.” The three of us stood and brushed cornbread crumbs from our laps. “It was good, though. A great birthday dinner.”

Martin picked up the champagne bottle. “Wait.” He drained the bottle into an extra glass and handed it to Mr. Harris, who took it with a slight bow.

“One last toast,” said Martin. “Happy Birthday to Kay.” We all clinked glasses, leaning far over the table from behind our chairs. Mr. Harris drained his glass with one gulp and smacked his lips.

Martin took some bills from his wallet and pressed them into Mr. Harris’s hand. The three men began moving slowly into the front room of the restaurant. “Thank you mightily for comin’,” said Mr. Harris.

I turned and groped among the debris on the table. “Give me those stoppers,” I muttered. “Want ‘em for a souvenir. My thirty-fourth birthday at Harris Bar-B-Cue.”

The woman in the red leather booth roused herself again. She blinked and swallowed a dainty hiccup. “Yeah, you'd better hang on to them things, Honey,” she said, “'Cause it don't last long.” She peered at me over the top of her beer can. “Men come sniffin' ‘round for a while, but then they sniff on. Then all you got left is your goddamn souvenirs.” Her voice trailed off liquidly. “All you got left is nothin'.”

Martin and Mr. Harris were standing at the cash register near the front of the restaurant. I put the stoppers in my pocket and turned to find Tom leaning against the dining room door jamb, watching me. As I sidled past him, he grinned and waggled his tongue. “Best in the West,” he whispered. Maybe, I thought, but don’t be too sure.

* * * * * * * * * * *

In a way, the fire was beautiful: sparks from the roof hung in the trees like twinkle lights, and each wooden slat on the house was outlined in gold. The front door was gone now; the interior showed solid flame. I remembered Mr. Harris’ one room: the sagging couch, the crackling tv set, the bed pushed behind a screen in the far corner. The huge photoboard covered most of the back wall; a hundred smiling faces shone in the dim light of the shadeless floor lamp.

I imagined the photoboard frame glowing now with a red it never knew in paint. The edges of the photos begin to curl, the emulsion behind the images bubbles, and foreheads sprout boils that consume whole faces. Martin and I huddle together, clutching the heart-shaped chocolate box. My face, pressed close against his, strains hotly to hold its smile. Black edges in and swallows us.

The roof on the restaurant went first, groaning and bringing down its supporting rafters. The roof of Mr. Harris’ house outlasted its walls; the whole structure listed to one side and slid gently to the ground like a fainting Southern belle. The flames went out in the rise of dust and smoke. I held your hand on the way back home.

[To order a copy of the book, Walking Pocatello, call the Idaho State University Bookstore, (208) 282-3237, or send me an email.]

Harris Bar-B-Cue, Part II "Happy Birthday"

2010-06-09T20:41:00.008-06:00

Martin poured champagne for all of us, then gestured to Tom and me with his glass. “Here's to Kay. Happy Birthday!”

We clicked our glasses together and drank. The champagne fizzed and perfumed the air under my nose. I took another gulp and, over the rim of my glass, caught the eye of the woman in the booth. The woman lifted her can of beer in a toasting gesture. "How old are you, Honey? If you don't mind me asking.” Her voice was as well-oiled as her face. A curl of cigarette smoke rose from the litter of ravaged dishes on the table in front of her.

“Thirty-four.”

“Oh, thirty-four,” she said, as if clarifying something I’d left unexplained. “I r‘member thirty-four.” She contemplated the pull tab on the top of her beer can, bending it back and forth until it snapped in her fingers. “Yes, I do. Thirty-four. Year I lost m’teeth.” She dropped the tab into the can.

Martin rolled his eyes at me, his way of discouraging further conversation, but he needn’t have worried. I couldn’t think of a suitable reply to her statement, and anyway, the woman seemed to have lapsed back into her reverie. She crooked the tip of her smallest finger in the opening of her beer can and idly dangled the can above her table. In our silence I could hear the tiny, wet clink of the pull tab as the woman swished it around in the near-empty can.

Mr. Harris stuck his head around the corner of the dining room door. “Barbecue comin’ right up,” he said, in the manner of a train conductor announcing the next stop.

I sat up a little straighter in my chair. “Thanks, Mr. Harris.” I leaned toward Martin and gave him a hug. “And thanks for treating, Mart. I really do like this place.”

“I know you do, Hon’.” Martin hugged me in return and left his arm around my shoulders, braced on the back of my chair. “And if you want to spend your birthday with Mr. Harris, so be it.” He refilled our glasses.

Tom balanced his elbow on the table. “So, what did you mean when you said Mr. Harris has your picture?”

“Oh, he takes pictures of all his regular customers. When we first started coming here, he kept inviting us next door to his house, but we thought it was too weird. Then one time we were here on Valentine’s Day--remember, Marty? And Mr. Harris was giving all the women these little heart boxes of chocolates.”

“He was really flirting with Kay,” said Martin.

“In a sweet way. Just a little bit lecherous. And he kept insisting that we go have our picture taken. So we did. He has this old Polaroid, and he took our picture and put it up on this big bulletin board with snapshots of all his other customers. I think everyone in Pocatello has their picture up over there.”

“At least everyone who’s ever eaten here more than once,” Martin interjected.

Tom looked intrigued. “Seems an odd thing to do.”

“Well, yeah, but kinda nice, too. Sentimental.” I laughed, remembering. “He also asked me to come over some Saturday and make sauce with him. He makes a huge batch every week and keeps it in big glass jars in the back.”

“D’ya ever go?”

“No. But I probably should. His sauce is the best.”

Tom laughed. “D’you ever think that maybe ‘making sauce’ means something else?”

“Hmmm...maybe it does. Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t go.”

“Maybe you missed out. It’s not every day a woman gets to ‘make sauce’ with the ‘Best in the West’.”

“Aren’t you clever.”

“Aren’t I.”

Martin shifted in his chair and poured himself another glass of champagne. “So, Tom, you’re Pre-Med? What’re you going to specialize in? Or do you know yet?”

Tom turned to look at him. “Ear, nose, and throat, I think. That’s something I can do no matter where I wind up--little town, big city.”

“Well, if you’ll take my advice--” Martin began.

“This your old man, Honey?” The woman in the booth suddenly leaned toward our table, her voice sliding in between Martin’s words. “Or that one?” She gestured at Tom with her beer can.

“This one,” I said, nodding at Martin. He glanced at the woman, then gave me a smile. Your old man, he mouthed silently, then, “I love you, Kay,” he said in a low voice.

I tipped my glass high, swallowing the last bit of liquid. “And why do you think that is?”

He looked at the ceiling, smiling. We’d had this exchange before. “Because you’re mine,” he replied.

My usual rejoinder was, “All yours plus shipping and handling,” a phrase I’d started saying near the beginning of our relationship as a result of some long-forgotten joke about mail order brides. But as I opened my mouth, the words, Maybe, but don't be so damned sure crossed my mind, and surprised, I shut it again. I made myself smile back at Martin. He seemed a bit puzzled by my lack of response.

I turned to find Tom watching us. His eyes moved from me to Martin and then to my chest. When his gaze came back up to my face, he didn't seem to mind being caught looking. He even winked.

The woman leaned farther out of the booth and laid her hand on Martin's arm. “Hey, Honey, how ‘bout some of that champagny?” Martin obligingly filled an extra glass and handed it to her. The woman drained it quickly. “Yep, I ‘member thirty-four,” she repeated. “Good year. Damn fine year.” She ran the fingers of her left hand across her upper lip. Martin offered her a refill, holding the bottle steady while the remaining few drops of champagne drizzled into her glass.

Mr. Harris came in with plates of ribs and potato salad cradled on his forearms. He carried a dented metal pan of cornbread in his left hand, and he dropped it in the middle of the table. “Hot!” he warned. “Little scorched on the edges, but it's fine. Just fine. You all dig in. Here, young lady.” He pulled a checked bandana from his apron pocket and unfolded it on my lap. “Don't want to spoil your pretty dress.”

“Thanks, Mr. Harris. It smells delicious.”

The old man bustled out again and returned with a handful of paper napkins and three pint jars, each bristling with a bouquet of knives, forks, and spoons. Martin selected a fork from one jar and polished it with his napkin. I trimmed the blackened border from the cornbread and cut it into triangles. Tom had already started on the ribs. He grinned and licked his sauce-laced fingers. “This is great!” he exclaimed to Mr. Harris, who still hovered around us, setting a gravy boat of extra barbecue sauce near Tom’s plate. “The best I’ve ever had.”

Mr. Harris beamed. “Best--”

“Best in the West!” we all said in unison and laughed. Mr. Harris seemed to find this particularly amusing; he hobbled back into the kitchen, chuckling and shaking his head as if at some greater joke.

Harris Bar-B-Cue, Part I "We Saw the Smoke"

2010-06-02T07:05:00.017-06:00

We saw the smoke from our third-floor window in the Fargo Arms. I thought it must be the tire store, and you said the Kwik Stop. But when we put on our coats and walked over that way, passing those places, they were okay. It was farther up Fourth Avenue, and soon we could see that it was Harris Bar-B-Cue--not only the restaurant, but Mr. Harris’ house next door. The fire trucks had arrived quickly, but those buildings were so old, and it had been so dry that summer that the firemen soon put down their axes and concentrated on spraying the African Bethel Methodist Church on the corner to keep it from burning, too.

We got pretty close--across the street--and we watched the fire eat up first the restaurant and then the house. Old Mr. Harris wasn’t in there, of course, and I was glad, now, that he was dead a year and didn’t have to see this. The heat wasn’t as bad as you’d think, even after we crossed the street and stood on the curb, although every once in a while there’d come a big THWACK! from inside the restaurant that made us jump back. We began to hear explosions: large, wet pops--the gallon jars of sauce bursting--and the air was redolent with the smell of barbecue.

* * * * * * * * * * *

We could smell the barbecue as soon as we got out of the car. The pink neon light--“Bar-B-Q Best in the West”--was flickering, and the rip in the screen had gotten bigger since last time, but the spring was new, and the door caught Martin on the heel as we went in. Mr. Harris heard it slam and came hobbling out from the kitchen in the back of the restaurant, rubbing sauce off his dark hands with his apron.

“Howdy, folks. What'll it be? Barbecue?”

“Yes, Mr. Harris. It's my birthday, today.”

“So you came down to old Harris' for a party. And who are these fine gent’emen?”

“You remember my husband, Martin. You’ve got our picture on your board. And this is Tom. He goes to the University and rents our apartment.”

Tom transferred the paper bag he carried to his left hand, and the three men shook hands. “A mite sticky,” chuckled Mr. Harris. Tom laughed, too, and wiped his fingers on his jeans. Martin stared into his palm, then shook his handkerchief out of his breast pocket and picked off the tiny glob of barbecue sauce that clung to the heel of his hand. He carefully refolded the handkerchief, soiled side in, and transferred it to his back pocket.

“Well, c’mon in and set yourself down.” Mr. Harris led us into the dining room of the house-turned-restaurant. There was only one other customer in the place, an older, shiny-faced woman sulkily drinking beer in one of the booths that lined the front wall. The booths were upholstered in cracked red leather. Grimy tin Coca Cola trays were nailed to the wall over each booth, and above them, faded posters advertising Nabisco crackers and Pear’s soap curled away from their tacks.

We took mismatched chairs around a painted wooden table in the center of the small room. Mr. Harris elbowed his way past Martin, pushed a chair in behind me with a courtly flourish, then pulled one up for himself. He sat with bowed legs curled around either side of his chair and leaned an elbow on the table. “Got a batch of cornbread just about ready. Barbecue’s comin' right up.” He turned to Tom. “Best in the West. Used to cook for the Union Pacific Railroad,” he explained. “The Portland Rose. That was a great ol’ train. I cooked my way from Portland to Denver and back again for twenty-three years.”

Tom nodded attentively. “Twenty-three years, huh? That’s a long time. How’d you wind up in Pocatello?”

“Well, I met me a girl. On a stopover one night. She was servin’ cornbread and pourin’ coffee down at the old Yellowstone Hotel. You know, down ‘cross from the railroad depot?” Tom nodded, and Mr. Harris went on, folding his arms on his chest with the air of someone settling in for a long spell of yarning. “Sumthin’ ‘bout the way she sliced me a extra big piece of cornbread and asked if I wanted honey on it made me think I oughta hang around a little longer.” He paused and stared out the dingy glass of the dining room window. “She’s been gone, now, fifteen years.”

A slightly scorched smell wafted toward us from the kitchen. Mr. Harris pushed his chair back and stood up. “Speakin’ a cornbread, it’s pro’bly done by now.” He hurried back into the kitchen, his bandy legs rocking him from side to side.

I leaned low over the table toward Tom. “The rest of the story is, he married her, they opened this restaurant, and they had a daughter they named Portland Rose.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. ‘Course she went by Rose, not Portland. Worked for the railroad here in town, ‘til she was killed in a motorcycle accident.”

“You never told me that,” interjected Martin. He sounded surprised and slightly injured.

“Guess I thought you knew. I’m pretty sure it was when you were working the Emergency Room.”

“Sounds like kind of a tough character,” said Tom.

“Not really. ‘Course, I didn’t know her well.”

Tom nodded toward the kitchen where Mr. Harris’ off-tune humming competed with the crashing of pots and pans. “He’s sure a character.”

“Something like that,” said Martin. “By the way, are we going to have some of that champagne you brought?”

I turned over three of the thick, scratched glasses that sat upside-down in the center of the table. “Yeah, let’s get this birthday celebration underway.”

Tom drew two sweating green bottles from his paper sack and held them up by their necks like trophy pheasants. Martin reached across the table and took one from him.

“I’ll do the honors,” he said, turning the bottle and scrutinizing the label. “Oh, a domestic brand.” He peeled the foil from the top of the bottle. “With a plastic stopper. I see we won’t be needing a corkscrew. Not that there’s likely to be one in this place.” He put his thumbs on either side of the stopper and toggled it up out of the neck of the bottle. “Kay drags me here two or three times a year,” he explained to Tom. “I’ll admit the food is good,” Martin held his glass up to the light, turning it this way and that, “but I make sure my tetanus shot is up-to-date before coming.” He chuckled at his own joke, and Tom smiled politely.

The Wheel, Part III "The Twenty Goes 'Round"

2010-05-20T02:30:00.015-06:00

Anne had a way of appearing silently at exactly the moment when Frankie was apologizing to a customer for messing up a drink order or when the bartender was sneaking a broken glass into the trash. Anne’s glittery little eyes missed nothing, and the corners of her mouth perpetually pointed down.

Frankie felt grateful to Anne for giving her the job at The Wheel—the hours were perfect for her class schedule—but, at the same time, she was a little afraid of her. Anne wasn’t the friendliest boss Frankie had ever worked for, and the only generosity Anne could be considered guilty of was letting her employees drink as much as they wanted the last half hour before closing. This was a mixed blessing, though, because Frankie and the others soon got very good at tossing down shots in that last half hour, and they often got so drunk so quickly that during clean-up, several glasses and, occasionally, a chair got broken. The replacement costs came out of their wages, and they went home most nights feeling sick and vaguely cheated.

Anne’s gimlet eyes went immediately to the Indian. The bartender had just set another beer in front of the Indian when he saw Anne approaching. He took the dollar bill the Indian had placed on the bar and backed away quickly. A little fist of fear grabbed in Frankie’s chest.

Anne stopped abruptly by the Indian’s bar stool. “You’ll have to leave,” she said sharply. The Indian looked from side to side slowly, not seeming to understand the words or even where they were coming from.

“Leave. Now.” The words were authoritative, but not loud. Only Frankie and Mike and Gary and his friend at Table 3 heard. And the Indian. The other customers continued to laugh and talk and smoke. The Indian stared at Anne as if to read her lips.

“Now. Get out.” Anne’s words flicked through the smoky air. The Indian stood up, still holding his beer, and peered at her through half-closed eyes.

“Get out now, or I’ll call the police.” Anne reached past him and opened the side door of the bar. The Indian slowly turned to look around the room, as if for an ally or at least an explanation. His gaze passed over Gary and his friend and stopped on Frankie. She stood still, clutching her drink tray to her chest where the tightness made it hard to breathe.

The Indian set his beer down carefully. Slowly, he moved away from the bar, pushed through the side door, and stepped out into the alley. Anne shut the door firmly and marched back to her office. She said nothing to either Frankie or the bartender. Frankie stepped back as Anne passed. Mike snatched up the Indian’s beer glass and wiped the bar where it had been. Gary and his friend sat in silence, Gary still red-faced and breathing heavily, his friend searching the pockets of his jacket nervously, his eyes cast down. The rest of the customers continued their talking and smoking.

“Miss, can we get those drinks?”

Frankie turned to the group at a table behind her. “Sure. Right away.” She gave their drink order to Mike without looking at him, and he filled it without comment. As she was distributing the drinks, she noticed Gary and his friend putting on their jackets. Thank God. Gary’s friend seemed to be trying to catch her eye, but Frankie looked away. She lingered at the other tables, carefully resetting glasses on fresh napkins. From the corner of her eye, she saw Gary’s friend leading him by the arm. They crossed the room, and the padded leather front doors swished closed behind them.

Finally, she returned to Table 3 to pick up the empty glasses. Gary had left a quarter, a dime, and two pennies as a tip. Big spender. What a creep. Under a crumpled napkin where his friend had been sitting was a twenty-dollar bill. Frankie tucked the bill into her pocket. She carried her tray to the bar and emptied it. She put her hand back in her pocket and touched the twenty. “I’ll be right back, Mike.”

Frankie hurried to the side door, opened it, and stepped out into the alley. The night had turned cold; she could see her breath. The bulb over the door cast about half a block’s worth of light, and across the parking lot, the lights of the train depot glowed yellowy. The chunky shadows of the dumpsters made a black and grey checkerboard on the alley.
At first Frankie thought the alley was deserted, but then she heard a faint scraping noise to her left, and turning, she saw the Indian. He was leaning against a telephone pole, his head back and his eyes closed, the way she’d seen him standing at the bar.

Frankie walked up to him slowly. Was he asleep? Passed out standing up? This close, his face was even bigger, and in the semi-dark, its colors were shades of grey and blue. The panels above his lips and between his eyes, his temples, the vast forehead and cheeks were all slate and cobalt and tungsten. She took the twenty-dollar bill from her pocket and held it out in front of her. “Excuse me.” The Indian didn’t move or open his eyes. She stepped closer and brushed the front of his jacket with the bill. “Excuse me. Ah, are you okay?” Still, he didn’t move.

She extended a forefinger and gingerly touched the second button on the Indian’s jacket. Pressed lightly. Pressed harder. Suddenly, his big eyes snapped open. She jumped back. “Jeez, you scared me. Are you okay?” Frankie nodded toward the bar. “Hey, I’m really sorry about all that.”

The Indian with the big face looked at her. He said nothing, and he didn’t look at the twenty-dollar bill.

“Here, I thought maybe you could use this.” Frankie held the twenty out at arm’s length, as if offering scrap meat to an unfamiliar dog. “I’m sorry she was so rude to you.”

The Indian still didn’t look at the twenty, but his hand came up from his side and took the bill. His huge eyes reflected the dim light flatly.

“I gotta get back inside.” The Indian said nothing. “It’s cold. I’m still on shift.” Frankie backed away. “Well, goodnight,” she said, “thanks.” She paused with her hand on the knob of the side door. The Indian had gone back to his pose, big eyes closed, big face turned toward the sky. Frankie open the door of The Wheel and went inside.

*Photo of the train depot courtesy of Connie Rodriguez-Flatten, 2011

[To order a copy of the book, Walking Pocatello, call the Idaho State University Bookstore, (208) 282-3237, or send me an email.]