The Unwalled City Part 1

THE UNWALLED CITY (a novel in three parts)

1

            Jason’s father was killed in a car crash.  The accident, if that’s what it was, happened early in the morning.  There was a great deal of fire and the dead man’s body was destroyed by the flames.  At the funeral, Jason looked at the sealed casket and wondered if any part of his father was really inside.  Jason’s father had flown fighter planes during the Korean war and, then, had been a commercial pilot for many years.  He had families in several cities where the planes that he flew frequently landed and there were many strange faces at the funeral.  The pastor didn’t know what to say and seemed tongue-tied.  From the pulpit, he had to admit that he had not known the dead man.

            Jason’s father was a wily and selfish man.  So Jason half-believed that his father had faked his death and vanished to found a new family, perhaps in Canada or Thailand.  Apparently, people did this all the time.  It was hard to believe that a man who had shot down MIG jets in combat over the China Sea would be unable to control his Mercedes Benz on a curving highway in the suburbs.

            At the time of the crash, Jason’s father was separated from his mother and living in an apartment with small balconies turned to a big lake.  Jason visited his father in the apartment a couple times and suspected that he was drinking heavily.  Alcohol had always been his weakness.  From the balcony, the lake was white in the winter, icy blue in spring, and foggy with green algae as summer ripened into autumn.  Once his father took Jason and his girlfriend out on the water on a pontoon boat and they sipped cocktails while the sun set.

            Jason’s mother cleaned out the apartment.  She said that she filled a dumpster with many things that she didn’t want to mention.  Jason helped her carry some boxes, wrapped in duct tape, to her car.  The boxes were very heavy and Jason wondered what was in them.  His sister, who was a stewardess, was in Europe.  She purported to detest her father and did not attend his funeral, nor did she assist in cleaning the apartment.  The empty rooms overlooking the lake smelled of cigarettes and vodka.

            On the way downtown to where he lived, Jason drove past the place where the crash had happened.  It was a curve, shaped like an “s”, where the road wrapped around a little inlet on the lake.  Jason saw some skids outlined in yellow paint, as well as a few circles and other marks smeared on the asphalt by the highway patrol.  There was a gouge in the gravel and dust on the shoulder and, then, a patch of burnt weeds haloed by tiny pebbles of bright, glittering broken windshield.  Scabs of slag were puddled in the ditch by a conduit that jutted from the embankment bearing the road bed.  The conduit looked baked and brittle from the flames. 

            Jason parked on the gravel shoulder and paced around in the ditch looking for clues.  He didn’t know what kind of clues he was searching for.  Anything would do.  The slope of the embankment was slippery with spilled transmission fluid and oil and there were big ruts where the tow-truck had dragged the burnt carcass of the Mercedes from the ditch.  A redwinged blackbird dive-bombed him and barked warnings.  Motorists passing on the highway looked at Jason curiously.  Jason thought that he should buy some plastic flowers and erect some sort of monument to the crash.  But, then, he remembered his father’s scorn when he saw those roadside memorials – “It’s a monument to someone fucking up,” his father said, “do they think this is Mexico City or something?”

            A couple months after the funeral, Jason’s mother called him.  She was crying.  Jason guessed that his mother had been in a quarrel with his sister.  She asked him to come and see her after his last class at the University.  Jason asked her what was making her cry.  “I can’t tell you by telephone, but it’s awful, it’s very awful,” she said. 

            When he was finished with school, Jason drove to his mother’s house.  She lived on a leafy residential street in St. Paul.  It was the street and house where Jason had grown up and, after his parents’ separation, he had been sad to see his mother living there all alone in that big white two-story building.   The dog house left over from his childhood was still in the backyard, half-buried in leaf litter and, in the underbrush of the shrubbery, Jason saw the glint of his dead dog’s aluminum water bowl.  – Someone should pick that up, Jason thought.  His mother had made Jason’s old bedroom into a knitting room, piled high with craft materials.  His sister’s room now contained a sofa and a mural-TV. 

            Jason’s mother was sitting at the kitchen table.  Her eyes were red from crying.  She had not wept at the funeral of his father and so he was surprised to see how upset she was.

            “Did you have a fight with Mandy?’ Jason asked. 

            “No,” she said. “What makes you think that?”

            “I don’t know,” Jason said.

            “I get along very well with your sister now that she doesn’t live here anymore,” his mother said.

            There was an envelope lying in the center of the table.

            “It’s this,” she said, nudging the envelop toward Jason.

            He picked it up and turned the envelope edgewise to look inside.  There was a color photograph in the envelope.  He shook it out onto the table.  Jason’s mother averted her eyes.

            The photograph was hard for Jason to interpret.  It was mostly black with a scarlet highlight at the picture’s center. 

            He picked up the photo and looked at it closely.  The shell of a car devastated by fire occupied most of the picture.  The driver’s side door had been wrenched open and lay like a black, charred tablet in the sooty grass.  There was a shapeless charcoal-colored oblong slumped behind the half-melted steering wheel.  The fire had seared through the clotted rectangular form to expose a bright knot of gore.  Jason could see his father’s heart in its glistening pericardial sack in the center of the photograph, a kind of red target-shaped clump in the heap of ash and burnt flesh. 

            “My god,” Jason said.

            “Who would send me a thing like this?  Who?” his mother demanded.

            “What does it say on the envelope?”  Jason turned the picture on its face to see if there was anything written on the back.  It was a blank.

            “You can see,” she said.  She was crying again, little disorderly gusts of tears.

            The envelope was postmarked Worthington, a small city 160 miles to the southwest.

            “Who do you know in Worthington?”

            “No one,” Jason’s mother said.

            The return address on the envelope was written in a scrawl of pencil.  It was some sort of cipher: R U P E (ing)

            “Are you peeing?” Jason said.  “You gotta be kidding me.”

            He turned the picture over again and scrutinized the image.

            “It must be some sort of police photograph,” he said.

            “Why would someone send me this?” his mother said. 

            She looked at Jason as if he somehow knew the answer.  “It’s one of your father’s goddamn mysteries,” she said.  “It’s one of his mysteries.”

            “You should report this to the police,” Jason said.  “Maybe there’s a record showing who got the picture from them.”

            “It’s one of your father’s mysteries,” she said.  “I’m sick and tired of having to solve them.  I don’t want to know the sick answer.”

            “What are you going to do?”

            “Let it go,” she said.

            She flicked the picture across the table toward Jason.

            “Take it if you like,” she told him.  “I don’t want it anywhere around here.”

            Jason gingerly lifted the picture and slipped it back in its envelope.  Then, he put the envelope in his breast pocket.

            His mother shook her head: “Your father was not the man he claimed to be,” she said.  “He wasn’t even the man that he thought he was himself.”

            They walked to a neighborhood grill.  Jason talked about his girlfriend and his classes at school.  His mother cheered up.  She paid for the meal and hugged him when he got into his car to go home.

            Ten years later, Jason’s mother died unexpectedly.  Mandy, who was living in Barcelona, came to the funeral.  She disapproved of some of the arrangements that Jason had made.  At a tavern near their mother’s house, Jason’s wife defended him against some critical comments that Mandy made.  There was an angry quarrel and Mandy used her cell-phone to call a taxi-cab.  “I don’t want you to take me to the fucking airport,” Mandy said.  “I’ll get a standby to Europe tonight.  Good riddance.”

            Jason tried to stop her, but she shoved past him and the cab was already waiting on the curb for her.

            Jessica, Jason’s wife, said: “You see, she can’t face going to the house again and cleaning up your mother’s stuff.”

            “I don’t know,” Jason said.

            “She just can’t do it,” Jessica said.  “So she made up this fight with you – “

            ”It was with you –“ Jason said, correcting her.

            “Same difference,” she said.  “She’s using this as an excuse to get away and not take responsibility for anything.”

            “I suppose you are right,” Jason said.

            “You will never see her again,” Jessica said.  “She will go back to Spain and you will never see her again in your life.”

            “We were never close,” Jason said.  But his eyes welled-up with tears.

            The next day, Jason and Jessica went to his mother’s house and began to throw away the things that she had accumulated over her lifetime.  The place was very neat and tidy, but when his mother’s things were piled-up in the dumpster it made a great heap of books and knick-knacks and clothing.  They decided to throw almost everything away.

            His mother owned an old roll-top desk.  Jessica said that they should search all of its nooks and crannies carefully.  She told Jason that sometimes old people hid money in desks like that, sometimes in secret drawers. 

            Jessica was right.  They found two-thousand dollars in twenties in the back of a spring-loaded secret compartment.  With the money, they found a sheet of typing paper folded into thirds and taped shut to make a package.  Jason tore through the tape and discovered a small faded snapshot between the folds of paper.  The photo was yellow with a black back.  It looked like an old Kodak polaroid, colors drained down to a dull yellowish sepia.      

            The polaroid was brittle, implicit with an edge-curl that the paper package had suppressed.  In the picture, an attractive young woman, eyes shadowed by glasses with heavy dark rims, brandished a baby toward the camera.  The woman’s dress was a light hue faded in the picture to a color that Jason couldn’t quite identify.  Scorched-looking grass tilted toward the lens.  That long-ago day had been bright and behind the shields of her glasses, the woman seemed to be squinting.  A small rustic well occupied the picture’s foreground.  An austere geometry of fence and house framed the mother and her child and there was a shadowy figure, mostly blurred, behind the woman, leaning around a column that, perhaps, supported the roof of a porch.  The infant had the blurred indistinct features that babies sometimes show in photographs.

            “Who do you think that is?” Jessica said.

            “It might be my mother,” Jason answered.

            He turned the picture over and saw that there was a faint scribble of writing on the back.  He didn’t recognize the hand.

            Jason lifted the photograph and held it close to his eye.

            “It says something like Jason four months - Peru.”

            Jessica took the picture from his hand and scrutinized it carefully.

            “You were a cute baby,” she said.

            “Peru?”

            “Did your mother go to South America or something?” Jessica asked.

            “She never left the country, not to my knowledge,” Jason said.

            “Well, I suppose, we’re reading it wrong,” Jessica said.

            “I guess it’s a mystery.”

            Jason put the polaroid back in its paper packet, bundled the packet with some other documents – some old contracts, a deed, and an abstract – and took it home.  He planned to look through the other documents but never took the time. 

           

            Several months after Jason and Jessica separated, it was clear that reconciliation was impossible and that a divorce would ensue.  They met for a drink in the tavern where the quarrel with Mandy happened five years earlier.

            “Last time we were here with your sister, things didn’t turn out to well,” Jessica said.

            “We will do better,” Jason said.

            They congratulated themselves on splitting before a child could be born and damaged by their acrimony.

            “That bullet missed us,” Jason said.

            Jessica said: “If I hadn’t had the miscarriage, things would probably be different.”

            “I suppose that’s true,” Jason said.

            Jessica named some times when Jason could come to the house where they had been living and pick up his things.  Jason said that there was so much stuff that it would take a couple of trips.  Jessica didn’t disagree.

            Jason lived near the University in a rental place.  The house that they had purchased together was across the river closer to downtown.  On the first trip to the house, Jason borrowed a small truck from a friend at the graphic arts shop where he worked.  Jason and his buddy stopped at the bar, fortified themselves with a half-dozen beers each, and, then, went to the house and carried out the big things.  Both men were a little drunk and they scuffed an easy chair against the wall near the front door.  Jessica was angry and said that they really should not be moving furniture when they were drunk.  Jason began to cry a little and Jessica was embarrassed and locked herself in the bathroom.  Jason’s friend was afraid that Jessica would call the police and report them for drunk driving.  “No, no,” Jason said, “I don’t think she’s vindictive.”

            When the truck was loaded, they pulled onto the freeway and crossed the river bridge in the slow lane.  People were hurrying to and fro and honked at them.  It was growing dark and they displayed their emergency flashers.

            “We’ll attract attention,” Jason’s friend said.  “The cops will stop us.”

            The bridge was long and white, two lanes in each direction hanging high over the river gorge gloomy with twilight where the water veined from the falls upstream unfurled long ribbons of white froth.  It seemed like it took them a long time to traverse the bridge over the Mississippi.  The towers of the city stood overhead like constellations in the night sky.

            The next day, Jason emailed Jessica and apologized to her.  He said that if she didn’t object, he would stop by alone the next evening after work to pick up the small things.  “Okay,” she replied, “but no drinking, right?”

            The house where they had lived for three year no longer seemed familiar to him.  There were new pictures and Jason didn’t recognize the furniture.  The smell of the place was indescribably different.  Jason supposed that Jessica had a new man in her life.  Near the house, the freeways hummed and vibrated with rush hour traffic.

            “I just want to get my stuff and get out of here,” Jason told Jessica.

            “That would be for the best,” she said.

            He carried some boxes of books to the car.  She had separated his CDs and DVDs from her things and put them in several brown paper bags.  Jason was sad to see several CDs that they had played many times for one another during the first couple years of their marriage.  Perhaps, she had never really liked the music on those recordings.  One of the CDs was something she had bought for him, but that he always thought that she liked more than he did.  When he saw the case of that CD with its bright colors, he began to cry again a little.

            Jessica said: “Don’t do this.  Please don’t do this.”

            It took him two trips to carry the CDs out to his car. 

            “Is that all?” Jason said.

            “There’s one more bag,” she pointed to another paper grocery sack set by the front door.

            “What is that?”

            “It’s just miscellaneous papers and things I found,” she said.  “All your stuff.  Some old deeds, contracts, an real estate abstract.”

            “It’s just garbage,” Jason said.  “I don’t want it.  Throw it away.”

            “I’m not going to throw away legal documents,” Jessica said.  “That’s irresponsible.  You take it and do what you want.  If you’re going to get rid of it, then, I think the papers ought to be shredded.”

            “It’s just garbage,” Jason said.

            “Maybe, but it’s your garbage,” Jessica told him.

            Jason looked at her face and wondered how he could ever have fallen in love with her. 

            Reluctantly, he picked up the paper bag and set it on the front seat of the car beside him.  The boxes of books and the bags of DVDs filled up the backseat and blocked some of the rear window.  As he drove, the freight in the car shifted in a way that made him uneasy.  When Jason came to the entry ramp onto the freeway and, then, across the bridge over the river, he decided that he would take another, less direct, route home.  Traffic seemed stalled on the bridge anyway – there was some kind of construction underway and one of the lanes was blocked with big orange machines that men were scrambling all over.  A vapor of cement dust rose up over the places where the machines were slowly rumbling over the bridge decking.

            Jason drove another dozen blocks and, then, turned to take another bridge over the river to the little island between banks, and, then, into the city.  As he was navigating his turn, sirens sounded all around him.  In his rear view mirror, he saw fire trucks and police cars zooming down the road that he had just traveled.  Beyond the river, in the city, the streets between the skyscrapers lit up with ambulances zigzagging between the columns of rush-hour traffic.  People were standing on the sidewalk along the rails of the bridge, some of them dressed in jogging clothes, others holding the leashes of dogs that lunged and pulled – the people were looking toward the freeway bridge.

            Jason turned on the radio and learned the high bridge that carried the freeway over the river had just collapsed.  A dozen cars, at least, were drowned in the water.  Overhead, the sky blossomed with helicopters. 

            At his house, Jason looked at the TV and saw pictures taken from high overhead showing the big bridge slumped down into the river.  A school bus was half-submerged in the dark water where the bridge decking tilted into the current.  The fallen bridge was ringed with flashing red lights.

            The pictures made Jason feel very sad and tired.  He began to tremble uncontrollably.  He went to his car to carry into the apartment boxes of his books and other things.  But he felt weak.  His strength was waning and he didn’t think he could lift the heavy boxes.  Rather, he contented himself with carrying the paper sack of legal documents into the kitchen where he set it on the table.  Then, he went into his room, laid down, and fell asleep.  The air was still howling with sirens. 

            The next day, Jason told everyone at work about his close escape.  Some people were mildly interested, but most of them seemed to think that he was being a little overly dramatic.  Just about everyone had some sort of story about a close-call.  It seemed to Jason that the only person that could understand the gravity of his brush with death on the bridge was Jessica, but it would not be right to talk to her.  That night, Jason carried the remaining items from the car into his house, but didn’t unpack them.  Everything around him had taken on an aspect of being temporary and provisional.  There was no need to unpack because he had no home. 

            On the weekend, Jason sorted through the papers in the sack of legal documents.  He kept the abstract because some of the old entries were written in a beautiful spidery calligraphy that he found intriguing.  He also kept the photograph showing him as an infant with his mother.  Jason taped the photograph to the mirror in his bathroom so that he could look at the picture when he was shaving. 

            A few weeks passed.  Sometimes, fear gnawed at his stomach like some species of persistent hunger, waking him in his bed in the middle of the night.  The darkness was suffocating.  Once, when he couldn’t sleep, Jason turned on the light and sat up.  He had been reading a mystery novel in bed and he rummaged in the sheets and covers for the book.  It was missing.  Perhaps, it had fallen off the bed when he was tossing and turning.  He got up and went into the kitchen for glass of milk.  The carton in the refrigerator had a foul smell and so Jason dressed and went downstairs to where his car was parked in the lot behind the apartment building.  The sky was overcast and the light rising from the skyscrapers downtown tinted the clouds the color of overripe tomatoes. 

            There was a Rainbow Foods grocery store eight or nine blocks away. The aisles of the grocery were barricaded with big stacks of cardboard boxes – groggy-looking kids with fishhook-ornaments caught in their eyebrows and lips were restocking the shelves.  A couple of night-shift refugees were listlessly shoving wire aluminum carts around the chest-high pillars of boxes between the shelves.  Sheets were covering the delicatessen food.  The silver tables and the heaps of ice in the deli looked funereal, post-mortem – corpses of meat and cheese were awaiting identification under the sheets.

            Jason’s mother was standing between freezer coolers.  He glimpsed her from the dairy section.  Someone had dropped a carton of eggs and the bright yellow tempura of the egg yolks glistened on the tiles. 

            Since she was dead, Jason didn’t want to disturb her.  His mother was neatly dressed and looking in a distracted way at a chilly wall of frozen pizzas.  Jason took a carton of milk from the shelf and walked briskly down the freezer aisle toward his mother.  She turned the corner, shoving her cart ahead of her.  Jason wondered what dead people ate, but he was too remote to see what she had in her cart.  He hurried to the end of the aisle and turned the corner, surveying the produce section.  Mist whispered over the fresh fruits and made a faint fog in the air.

            The next day, Jason was very tired   After work, he went to a bar and sat alone at a table.  He gazed at the Tv and had a half-dozen glasses of draft beer.  He thought that the beer would help him sleep.  He had no difficulty falling asleep, but once again, fear pressing at his belly woke him in the middle of the night.

            Jason went in his bathroom and found the toilet sunny with urine.  Jason’s mother was sitting at the kitchen table looking at her folded hands.

            “Why didn’t you flush the toilet, mom?”

            She looked up at him curiously.

            “It’s a habit I got into when you kids were really little,” she said.  “I’m sorry.”

            “What kind of habit is that?”

            “When you have babies in the house, you don’t flush the toilet.  The sound of the toilet flushing wakes up little babies and, then, you’ve got a crying kid on your hands.  That can be rough when you’re really tired.”

            “I see,” Jason said.

            She asked him if he was having trouble sleeping.

            “I am, mom,” he said.  “Just recently.”

            “That’s hard,” she said.

            Jason asked her about the picture that he had taped to his mirror in the toilet.

            “I didn’t notice it,” she said.

            “I wanted to ask you – what’s with the picture?”

            “What picture?”

            “We should go and take a look,” Jason said.

            She nodded her head.

            “I wanted to tell you something,” his mother said.

            “What?”

            “Your father wasn’t the man you thought he is,” she said, looking over her bifocals at him a little apologetically.

            The verb “is” puzzled him.  Jason thought – I suppose if you’re dead, everything is present tense.

            “I’m going to look at that picture,” she told him. 

            “It’s taped on the mirror in the bathroom,” he said.

            She stood up and walked down the hallway to the toilet. 

            The toilet flushed.  A few minutes passed.  When she didn’t return to the kitchen, Jason went to the bathroom.  She wasn’t there any more. 

            The next day, Jason thought that he should talk to his sister.  He tried to email a message to his sister from his laptop but it didn’t connect to her computer.  Probably, she had changed her email address.  Jason didn’t have her mailing address anymore.  It occurred to him that Jessica might have the address written down somewhere at their old house.

            Jason drove over to see Jessica.  She met him at the door, but didn’t open it for him.  She looked a bit wary.

            “You wouldn’t have my sister’s address would you?”

            “You said, you didn’t have a sister,” Jessica said.

            “You mean after that fight?”

            “Whatever,” she said.

            “I have a sister,” Jason said.

            “Whatever,” she said.  “I have to go now.”

            She shut the door.

            Jason felt as if he were being slowly erased, feature by feature. 

            At his apartment, Jason accessed the internet with his laptop.  He wondered about the names of the persons who had died in the bridge collapse.  Maybe his name had suddenly appeared in the column listing the casualties. 

            A few lines beneath the top entry, Jason saw this link: Bridge collapse – Peru – infrastructure failure.   He wondered if a bridge in Lima or Cuzco had fallen into some sort of gorge howling with flood waters.  In the Andes, Jason recalled, bridges were built from lathe suspended by hemp over the abyss.  A bridge like that had fallen into a canyon at San Luis Rey – he had read that story in High School. 

            The link opened an article from a local newspaper, archived from the week of the bridge collapse that had almost swallowed him:  Overshadowed by events in the Metro, the collapse of a bridge in rural Minnesota underscores pervasive infra-structure problems that may seriously harm the out-state economy.  The reporter said that thousands of bridges on county roads in the north woods and prairie were fragile, aging, and damaged.  The Department of Transportation had insufficient funds to properly inspect and maintain those bridges and many of them were reported to be crumbling.  The problem was exemplified by a bridge that collapsed into a stream in southern Minnesota near a village called Peru.  A motorist traveling the county highway the day after the bridge collapse drove his pickup truck off the fallen span and was killed in the crash.  Peru, the article advised, is a small village near Worthington in the southwest corner of the State. 

            A photograph accompanying the article showed some slabs of concrete tilted into a deep flooded ditch.  Tasseled corn stabbed at the sky at the horizon. 

            Jason read the article several times.

            At work on the following Friday, Jason couldn’t concentrate.  He scanned Amazon for music and DVDs but didn’t order anything.  He expected a message but wasn’t sure what it would be and so anxiously checked the texts on his cell phone.  He sent a few emails to people that he knew, telling them about the bridge collapse that he had narrowly avoided. 

            Jason’s office was in an old mansion built by a lumber baron a hundred years before.  The neighborhood, which had once been very elegant, had fallen on hard times – the row of mansions on the avenue glared down at a small park where junkies were drowsing on benches and old men with crooked sticks and paper sacks full of booze wandered between tattered rose bushes and drained fountains full of beer cans and candy wrapper.  At noon, Jason walked the sidewalk on the perimeter of park.  He didn’t often enter the park because the beggars made him feel ashamed: it was humiliating to give in to their demands, but he felt ruthless and guilty when he ignored them – you couldn’t win.  Some Guatemalan ladies were pushing baby strollers along the sidewalk and people were walking dogs.  A city block to the east, a commercial avenue lined with decrepit mortuaries, fast food places, and liquor stores siphoned traffic through the battered residential neighborhoods to the sierra of skyscrapers a half-mile down hill.  The big old houses towering Rembrandt-brown over the shade trees on the boulevard looked aghast at the sidewalks where poor people were sauntering to and fro on obscure errands.  The sun spilled heat onto the streets and it was humid in the alleyways filled with dumpsters stinking with garbage. 

            Jason ate at McDonald’s and, then, walked back to the mansion where the Graphic Arts business was located.  The old houses didn’t have much parking and Jason’s car was wedged tightly into a corner of the tiny lot poured between the big stone dwelling with its cavernous porches and turrets and the bunker-like carriage-house, incongruously decorated with a filigree of Queen Anne style lattice-work.  Jason pried the door to his car open, extracted a map of the State from the pocket on the back of the passenger seat, and, then, stood under a tree buzzing with insects that shaded the front of his old Volvo stationwagon.  He opened the map and spread it on the hood of the car.

            Where was Peru?  He didn’t even know where Worthington was located.  – The southwest corner of the state, he recalled.  There was a freeway that ran like a ruler’s edge along the south border of Minnesota.  The freeway was a thick red line.  He found Worthington.  Peru was to the east, in an empty space near the border, caged between several roads marked with spider-web fine lines.  He bent close to the map to read the letters and marks – he wasn’t sure if one of the lines half-bisecting the letters P-E-R-U was supposed to be a road or the boundaries to a county. 

            “Planning a trip?”

            Jason looked up.  Michael, Jason’s boss, had squeezed himself between the driver’s door and the adjacent car. 

            “Not really, just checking,” Jason said.

            Jason wondered if he was late returning from lunch.  It didn’t matter.  Michael often drank over the noon hour and his eyes seemed to have trouble adapting to the dappled light and shadow falling through the shade tree onto the chrome of the car. 

            “We need to talk,” Michael said.

            “Of course,” Jason replied.

            “I get the feeling that something is really bugging you,” Michael said.  “You know I’m intuitive.  Very intuitive.”

            “Yes,” Jason said.

            “This is a creative business,” Michael said.  “You have to be intuitive.”

            “I agree,” Jason answered.

            “I don’t think I’m getting your best,” Michael said.  “I think you’re underutilizing yourself.  Do you follow?”

            Jason said he wasn’t sure.

            “I’m not underutilizing you,” Michael said.  “You’re underutilizing yourself.  I get the sense you’re disengaged.”

            “No, not at all,” Jason said.

            “Here’s the deal,” Michael told him.  “I think we need a paradigm-shift.  On Monday, next week, bright and early – nine a.m. let’s say – we have to talk.  We’re going to make some adjustments.”

            “Will this be bad for me?”

            “Oh no,” Michael said.  “Good.  We’re going to talk about a paradigm-shift.”

            “Should we talk now?” Jason asked.

            “Not now,” Michael said.  “I’m going to the lake cabin this weekend.  Got to get home, pack up the kids and the missus, and beat the traffic.  I’m out of Dodge in about an hour.”

            “I see,” Jason said.

            “On Monday morning,” Michael repeated.  He winked at Jason, turned and scuttled sideways between the tightly parked cars.

            Jason folded up the map and laid it on the passenger seat in the front of the Volvo. 

            He went into the cool mansion-house, nodded to the receptionist who was talking to her boyfriend on the phone, and, then, climbed the ornate wooden steps to his office.  Forty minutes later, as he gazed out his window, he saw Michael walking along the garden path to the parking lot.  Either Michael had been drinking in his office or the booze that he had swallowed over the lunch hour was catching up with him – he walked unsteadily, wobbling a little over the paving stones. 

            As soon as Michael pulled out of the parking lot, Jason shut off his computer.  Normally, he just flipped off the monitor screen and kept the drive running when he left the office for the weekend.  But this afternoon, he pressed the button to shut down the drive as well.  The computer made a little sigh and turned itself off.   Without the computer’s drive running, his office seemed very silent, lonely, and abandoned.  It was as if he were already gone.

    

           

2

            There was the road under the car and, above, the sun stuck halfway up the western sky.  The road was sometimes concrete, a broad groove running between low hills draped in corn and other crops that Jason couldn’t identify.  Sometimes, the road was a narrow strip of winding black asphalt, a ribbon of plateau above deep, subservient ditches crouched along the right-of-way and flaring with yellow tongues of golden rod.  In Minnesota, a mid-summer day is 18 hours long and the sun was motionless in the sky.  Instead of setting, it seemed to simply redden, dimming as the hours passed.

            Where the freeway narrowed to two lanes, Jason veered off the road to buy gas at a Kwik-Trip.  He wanted to announce himself and his destination.  In the store, he asked the girl if she knew where Peru was located.

            “Is this a joke, Mister?” she asked.

            “No, I’m going to Peru” Jason said, handing her his credit card.

            “Isn’t Peru a country?  Somewhere over by Afghanistan?”

            “It’s a town by Worthington too,” Jason said.

            “Never heard of it,” the girl replied.

            He drove for an hour through small towns strung like beads along the state highway every ten or twelve miles.  The towns seemed to be deserted.  They were full of enigmatic buildings that Jason couldn’t identify.  Looking down side streets, sometimes, Jason saw an old man or woman sitting on a porch, a young mother taking groceries out of an SUV parked along a green lawn, a dog trotting toward a puddle of water.  Somewhere south of Mankato, he caught a radio station that played nothing but songs that he knew and liked.  It was a gift that the evening offered to him.  Jason felt exhilarated.  – It’s a road trip, he told himself.  Just what I needed for my soul, to cheer me up.  He sang along with the radio.

            The country was flat with reefs of trees in dense groves fencing huge fields of row-crops.  Silos shaped like Thermos bottles stood alongside old houses.  The houses were weathered and grey, but the silos looked new and glistened in the sun and they cast huge truncheon-shaped shadows across the fields.  All of the vehicles ahead of him were going very slowly, weaving, now and then, across the center-line – each car contained a solitary farmer, old with yellow whiskers, peering out from under his feed cap at the growing crops.  Jason had to brake since the vehicles inspecting the corn were traveling  much below the posted speed limit.  Passing was hazardous, though, because the traffic in the oncoming lane roared toward him at high speed, pick-up trucks filled with kids who seemed to be half-drunk, careening across the countryside.  The traffic headed in the opposite direction – that is, driving generally toward the city – was all in a hurry, pedal to the floor, charging over the highway.  In his direction, it seemed, that the vehicles ahead of him were barely moving at all.

            At Worthington, he came to more freeway.  The broad lanes were all empty and the ramps deserted and the smooth white road invited him to drive faster, far faster, than was prudent.  Even so, sometimes, a truck hustled past him, it’s steel side all serrated like a cheese grater.  The trucks were full of pigs and Jason saw their wet truncated noses and their eyes looking nervously from the sharp-looking slits in the trailers.  A power plant with red brick stacks flared at the horizon and, near the towns, there were big windowless buildings with whitewashed concrete block walls.  The buildings were guarded by syringe-shaped vats and tanks, also painted white.  Across the median, semi-trucks from South Dakota pushed forward, aiming at the darkness incipient in the flat, featureless and shadowy east. 

            Jason stopped at a rest stop and consulted his map.  An old man dressed in a green janitor’s uniform was sitting in a closet-sized office between the Men’s and Women’s toilets.  He was listening to a baseball game on the radio.  To the north, some big thunderheads were boiling up above the endless fields of corn. 

            Jason took an exit off the freeway and, then, drove along a narrow road, pocked with potholes, that looped back under the Interstate.  The land around the road was marshy and the weight of the trucks customarily traversing the highway had gouged and torn open the soft places in the asphalt.  Chunks of tar lay scattered along the gravel shoulders and at the centerline.  Several communications towers, like extension ladders propped against the sky, blinked red signals back and forth over the corn. 

            The highway passed between two lakes becoming a causeway that emerged from a dense stands of trees that confined the open water.  The lake on the right was mostly reeds and marsh crowding a stagnant pool green with algae.  On the left, there was a wide, shallow plain of open water wiggling with the evening breezes.  Beyond, the lakes the road was serpentine, twisting and turning as if it wished to escape from the wheels of Jason’s Volvo. 

            A snow-white waterfowl stood, motionless as a carved decoy, near a clump of cattails.  Suddenly, the tar road dropped away ahead of him.  Jason slammed on his brakes and skidded sideways, coming to a stop only a yard from where the gravel shoulder had collapsed in an avalanche of sand and pebbles into the ditch made by a stream.  The bridge was gone.  Some rubble lay in pyramidal heaps on both sides of the black tongue of asphalt that was slumped down into the creek bed. 

            Jason got out of the car and shook himself like a wet dog.

            “For Christ’s sake,” he shouted. 

            A mile ahead, on the other side of the creek, he could see a grove of trees and some metal shacks along a railroad track.  Two spider-shaped scaffolds hovered above the trees and there was a zinc-colored box like a little steel skyscraper gleaming in the setting sun.

            The creek moved listlessly in its shadowy ditch.   Near the place where the small bridge

had collapsed, the stream seemed artificially straight, flowing between grassy embankments that looked as if they had been heaped up along the watercourse by earthmoving equipment.  Beyond the river bank mounds, in both directions, the stream subsided into a braided silver ribbon turning and twisting through sodden-looking meadows where fallen trees, stripped of their bark and ghostly white, lay like broken barricades.  A few cattle were grazing in the sweet grass by the water.  Across the little ravine, Jason saw the fractured roadbed, jagged with cracked asphalt teeth.  More of the bridge had survived on the other bank – some guardrails dangled down into the ditch.  From his vantage, the twisted guardrails beyond the creek looked limp and exhausted.

            “Now what?” Jason said. 

            He was still a bit shaken by the close call and he walked around his car, kicking the tires. 

            Then, he got in, took the wheel, and carefully backed-up, retracing his way along the winding highway, toward the isthmus between the lakes and the freeway exit.

            At a crossroads a few hundred yards from the freeway, there was a gas station and a café.  In the café, two women were sitting across from another in a booth.  One of the women had been crying and her eyes looked red and inflamed.  A waitress was watching television from behind the counter.

            Jason asked the waitress how to get to Peru.

            “Why do you want to go there?” she asked.  “It’s just a ghost town.”

            Jason said that he thought that he had lived there once.

            “Oh, I’m sorry,” the waitress said.

            She took a napkin and, with her pen, made some marks on the paper.

            “I nearly got killed,” Jason said.  “The bridge is gone and there’s no warnings at all.”

            “A guy got killed there last month,” the waitress said.  “It was awful.”

            “Me too,” Jason said.  “I almost drove right into the creek.”

            “It’s supposed to be marked.  It’s supposed to have detour signs and highway barriers and all sorts of warnings.”

            She looked at Jason suspiciously.

            “Are you trying to fool me?” she asked.

            “Why would I try to fool you?” 

            “There’s been some folks from out-of-town.  I don’t know, lawyers or people from the state or something,” she said.  “Kind of investigating.”

            “Not me,” Jason said.

            “Well, it’s supposed to be all marked and safe,” the waitress said.

            “It’s not.”

            “No one goes down that road any more anyhow,” the waitress said.  “There’s nothing in Peru.  Just meth-heads, really – you know, to tell the truth.  It’s a ghost town.”

            “I almost got killed,” Jason said.

            “Maybe the kids moved the barricades and markers and such,” the waitress said.

            Jason nodded.  He went to his car and squinted at the marks that the waitress had made on the napkin.  From far across the darkening prairie, there came a faint rumble of thunder.

           

             

3

            The sun was setting when Jason came to Peru.  The gravel road entered town between two metal sheds tinted red by the sunset on their corrugated tin roofs.  Shaggy untrimmed trees arched over two-story frame houses scattered at irregular intervals throughout the wooded grove.  From the cornfields, the village looked compact, a tract of shade trees standing in a dense green and shadowy drift swept up against a wall of steel grain elevator buildings.  But, beneath the trees, gravel lanes cut a grid through a space that was largely vacant, porous with fallen or abandoned buildings, empty lots with footpaths crisscrossing them and the remaining battered homes, with their collapsing porches, were set eccentrically at the back corners or edges of lawns.  In some places, abandoned gardens looked like parking lots or salvage yards, shrubbery crowding against the fenders and chrome of wrecked vehicles, rusting farm tractors and farm implements showing rusty shafts and axles and hook-shaped snouts through a mist of thistles.  Many of the houses still standing seemed to be deserted, but there was no pattern to this dereliction – a more modern bungalow, with a fresh face of siding, was drowned in tall grass and weeds, windows blind with plywood, next to a gaunt, ancient house built from raw field stone with a ruinous porch where two Mexican men were sitting, mariachi music blaring from speakers between their ankles.  Jason thought it strange that the best and most recent buildings in the village seemed to be big garages, two or three or even four car structures, standing proudly upon heaps of rinsed gravel, with big silvery doors closed against the evening. 

            Every lane in the town seemed to lead to every other lane.  You drove in a circuit without intending to.  All intersections were oblique, formed at acute angles, dirt and gravel roads cutting large wedge-shaped slices of land, large enough for a horse or two to graze against a hedge of flowering shrubbery, the sockets of empty cellars surrounded by stalks of golden rod.  But the pie-shaped lots became increasingly smaller as the lanes approached the vertex of the town, a kind of tiny Times Square beneath the ramparts of the grain elevator, a big blank wall of corrugated steel looming over railroad tracks that Jason glimpsed in the gaps between the metal boxes.  At one side of the small triangular plot of land there was a concrete block building that looked like a dilapidated rest stop toilet labeled Peru Town Hall.  A couple of abandoned commercial buildings and a small heavily fortified post office, built from massive rusticated stone blocks occupied the angle forming one side of the triangular square – the post office had a curved facade and an entrance that was like the mouth of a cave opening into impenetrable darkness.  Two drainage ditches intersected in the grassy wedge and six or seven men were standing beside a picnic table drinking beer.  One of the legs of the picnic table was unsupported, hanging over the grassy ditch.  A couple of yellow mongrels were prowling the tall grass growing under the grain elevator.

            A culvert stuck its tongue out from under a pathway over one of the ditches by the picnic table and a man in a black tee-shirt with a chain attached to his belt was spraying water from a hose onto the culvert.  Jason pulled his Volvo into a space under the metal flank of the elevator all ripped and gouged into deep ruts.  The car lunged and bounced under him.  He shut off the engine and unrolled his window.  The air smelled like hops, a odor of decaying malt and he could hear doves cooing somewhere overhead in the eaves of the grain elevator. 

            – So I am here.  Now what?

            Some motorcycles were parked along the concrete porch of the town hall.  A song by Led Zeppelin was playing from a car radio near where the men were sitting at the picnic table.  The man with the hose sometimes brandished the nozzle toward the other guys at the table, threatening them with silver-grey loops of water.  There was some shouting.  One of the kids jumped up and crimped the hose to cut off the flow.  The men on the picnic table shifted their weight so that the table tilted, scattering beer cans around the ankles of the man with the hose.  Some bats flapped about in the growing dusk making aimless, irregular circles over the tiny park.                 The man set down the hose and the kid gripping the crimp in his fist released it.  Water surged out of the hose end that lay across the gravel lane, a puddle that expanded to darken the

pale dust. 

            “Hey,” the man said.

            “Hey,” Jason said.

            The man went to a valve on a stubby upright pipe and shut off the water.  He walked a few steps toward Jason, swaggering a little, legs spread as if his motorcycle were still gripped between his thighs.

            Jason had his map in his hand and started to unfold it.

            “Are you lost or something?” the man said. 

            The kid who had crimped the hose followed the man in the black tee shirt and stood a few feet behind him.  He was wearing a red bandana on his head.

            “No.”

            “Most folks who come here are pretty much fuckin’ lost,” the man said.

            “Really,” Jason replied.

            “They don’t know where the fuck they are.”

            Jason could tell that he was drunk.  He could smell beer on his breath and in the seamy folds of his jeans. 

            “No, I guess I know where I am,” Jason said.

            “So you came here intentionally.  I mean this was like the...objective of your journey or something?”

            “I guess so,” Jason said.

            “You guess so or you know so?”

            “Sorry,” Jason said.  “I know so.”

            A couple of the other men sitting at the picnic table stood up and wandered over toward them.

            “Well, what brings you to Peru?”

            “Just to have a look,” Jason said.

            “Not much to see,” one of the other men said.

            “I don’t know,” Jason said.  “I just got here.”

            “You must have snuck in the back way,” the kid with the bandana said.

            “Well, the bridge was out,” Jason answered.

            “Well, when you was sneaking in,” the man in the black tee shirt said, “I guess you must have seen the ambulance come out of here.”

            “I met the ambulance.  Out on the dirt road.  It was a pretty tight squeeze,” Jason said.

            The kid with the bandana said: “Troy, tell him why there was an ambulance leaving town.”

            “Some guy was here, from down in Iowa, with his scooter,” the man in black said.  “He was busting wheelies all over the place, stirring up the dust, you know, and not acting real respectful.”

            “He was bothering the widow,” the kid in the bandana said.

            “Showing off like an asshole,” one of the other men said.

            “Anyhow,” the man in black continued, “ he got a piece of re-rod stuck in his wheels and, boom! down he went, flipped head over teakettle.  Knocked his head on that culvert down there and made a real mess.”

            “How did he get a rod in his wheel?” Jason asked.

            “He was asking for it to happen,” the kid in the bandana said.

            “He ended up right down there, where I was cleaning up after him with my hose,” the man in black said.

            “Jesus,” Jason said.  “How bad was he hurt?”

            “He’ll live,” someone said. 

            “I’m betting that you come down here to take some pictures maybe and get some statements, some tape-recorded statements, right?” The man in the black tee-shirt kicked at the dirt.

            “No,” Jason said.

            “Well, if you’re here to investigate, you can investigate this motorcycle accident.  See it happened not more than an hour ago.”

            “Really about a half hour ago,” one of the men said.

            They were all holding beer cans.

            “You seen the ambulance,” the kid in the bandana said.

            The man in black said:  “If you’re wanting to investigate something, you ought to take some statements about this motorcycle crash.  I can show you right where he landed.  It’s all right here.”

            “I’m not here to investigate anything.”

            The man in black said: “You’re not being exactly truthful.”

            “Otherwise, why are you here?” the kid in the bandana asked.

            The man in black took a pack of cigarettes from his jeans pocket and lit one.

            “I used to live here.  When I was a kid,” Jason said.

            “That’s bullshit,” the man in black said.  “You don’t look like no one who ever lived here,”

            “He’s driving a fuckin’ Volvo,” someone said.

            “The folks that once lived here come in two categories,” the man in black said.  “There’s them that moved away and they don’t never come back, not never.  And there’s those that stayed, and they don’t never leave.”

            “I see,” Jason said.

            “So which are you?” the man in black asked. 

            “I don’t know,” Jason said. 

            “You’re trying to come up with excuses.  Shit to blame Derek for getting himself killed,” the kid in the bandana said.

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

            “When the bridge went out,” the kid said.  “You’re trying to find out shit to make it all Derek’s fault.”

            “We were with him.  That night.” another man said. 

            “Okay,” Jason said.  “But that’s got nothing to do with me.”

            “That’s bullshit,” the man in black said.  “And you know it.”

            “Yeah, why don’t you go and file a report about all the warnings you saw out there tonight?” the kid in the bandana said.

            “I didn’t see any warnings,” Jason replied.

            “And so, how’d you like that?”

            “It was pretty fucking dangerous,” Jason said.

            “Exactly,” the man in black said.  “Just like it was the night that Derek drove into that hole.”

                                                                                    “Real, real dangerous,” another man said.     

            “Shit, the world is a dangerous place,” the kid in the bandana said.  “People get hurt all the time.”

            “I know,” Jason said.

            “If you think that you’re gonna talk to the widow, I want you to know that it ain’t happening,” the man in black said. 

            “I’m not here to talk to anyone.”

            “Well, you’re talking to us,” the kid in the bandana said.

            “My pleasure,” Jason replied.

            “Are you gonna write in your report that there wasn’t one fucking sign or barrier or anything out there by the bridge?” the man in black asked.

            “I’m not writing a report,” Jason said.

            “Then, you’re a fuckin’ useless piece of shit,” the man in black said.

            “I guess you’re entitled to your opinion,” Jason said.

            “Of course, I’m entitled to my opinion.  Are you going to tell me otherwise?” the man in black said.

            “No,” Jason replied. 

            “Get out of here,” the kid in the bandana said.

            “We’re like an honor guard,” the man in black said.  “We’re protecting the widow.  She don’t need any more shit.  You know, no offense, but you’re not exactly welcome here.”

            “I understand,” Jason said.

            “No offense,” the man in black said.  “I know you gotta job to do, but not here, okay?”

            “You’re making a mistake.  I’m not who you think I am.”

            “Who are you?” the kid in the bandana asked.

            One of the men holding a beer can said: “Maybe, he’s come for the wedding.  Maybe, he’s just early.”

            “Are you here for the wedding tomorrow?” the man in black asked.

            “What wedding?” Jason said.  “I’m not here for any wedding.”

            “Okay, then you’ve got no reason to be here,” the kid in the bandana said.

            “If that’s what you think...” Jason began to say.

            “That’s what we fuckin’ think,” the man in black said.

            Jason turned the key in the ignition, started the car, and shut the door.  His window was still rolled down.

            “No offense,” the man in black said.  “Adios!”

            Jason backed up carefully.  It was dark now with lightning flashing at the horizon. 

            He flipped on the car’s lights: gravel ahead of him, the scabrous side of a battered shed, a stack of firewood in a rack against an elm tree. 

            The town was confusing.  He couldn’t recall where he had entered.  Looking in his rear-view mirror, he saw a pale plume of dust rising behind him.  A stop sign suddenly loomed above, a red wound in the dark.  He turned onto an asphalt road and drove across a rumble strip of old railroad tracks. 

            He wasn’t sure as to his direction.  The black top highway made several sharp curves, marked with yellow signs with arrows on them. 

            Then, the road dropped away in front of his car.  He slowed and pulled onto the shoulder.

            Jason was on the other side of the place where the bridge had fallen into the creek.

            “Now what?” he said.  And: “I guess I’m going back into town.”

            He got out of the car and sat on the hood for a few minutes, breathing deeply.  When the lightning flashed in the distance, he saw the sky all savage with black clouds pivoting on bolts of fire.  But the storms were still too remote to make any sound.  They swept toward him across the rolling prairie in eerie silence. 

            After a few minutes,  drops of cold water splashed in his face.

            Jason cursed and got back into his car.  He turned around.  The wall of trees concealing the village was mostly black.  A couple of window panes, faint as candles, shone through the foliage. 

            A knell of thunder sounded faintly behind him.  He put the car in gear and crept back toward the town.             

4         

                       

            When his headlights splashed against the corrugated side of a quonset hut, Jason slowed and shut them off.  Perhaps, he could prowl through town and emerge on the other side unseen. 

            But someone was standing at the center-line of the asphalt road shaking his hand at the front of Jason’s car.  He slowed, took a deep breath, and pushed the button to unroll his window. 

            An old man with a white beard leaned toward the car. 

            “You could hit someone with your lights off like that,” the old man said.

            He smelled of booze and cigarettes.  The white in his beard and the fringe of hair outlining his face gave him a silvery aspect.  It was like the moon leaning toward your car-window. 

            “I’m sorry,” Jason said.  “I cut the lights because I didn’t want to bother anyone when I went through town.”

            “You’re bothering everyone by just being in the county,” the old man said. 

            “I’m sorry about that too,” Jason said.  “I just want to get past the buildings and out of here.”

            “I’ll help you,” the old man said.  He also smelled of smoke and burning.  “Do this,” he said, “go up to the first driveway on the left and turn there.  You’ll see my bonfire.  Stop by the fire.”

            “I don’t need to do that,” Jason said.

            “Yes, you do,” the old man said.  “Otherwise the suitors, the bachelors won’t let you get through town without a beating.  They already half-killed one poor son-of-a-bitch.”

            “How do I know –?”

            “I’m a wreck.  Do I look like a threat to you?”

            “No,” Jason said.

            “For Christ’s sake,” the old man said.  “Put on your headlights.  I don’t want you running over my dog.”

            The old fellow turned and walked unsteadily toward the trees.  The breeze was stirring the leaves and, in the dim arbor, Jason could see a pale horse standing behind an improvised fence.

            He found the driveway and turned.  Trees crowded in close around his Volvo.  Then, he saw the glow of flames, fire furtively darting over a black carcass of logs in a pit ringed by loaf-sized field stones.  A few folding chairs were standing by the fire-pit, battered metal things that looked as if they had once been owned a school cafeteria.  A fat girl dressed like a man and wearing flip-flops on her feet was sprawled on one of the chairs.  Opposite to her, a skinny man with greasy slicked-back hair was smoking a cigarette.  The skinny man was wearing a wife-beater tee to show off tattoos cascading down from both clavicles to make bright-colored sleeves around his wrist.  A lean mongrel came prancing toward the fire, dangling tongue wet and red like a savage flag.

            The old man came blundering out of the underbrush, flapping his arms to dislodge the mosquitos that were biting him.  A plume of smoke fogged the clearing.  Up a slight hill, a big house stood, all open porch and big windows where the breeze made curtains stir like ghosts.

            “Sit down for a while,” the old man said.

            Jason approached the fire, gave the palm of his hand to the dog’s tongue, and, then, sat on one of the crooked chairs by the blaze. 

            “I’m Arthur,” the old man announced.  He waved with the back of his hand at the girl. “Miranda,” he said.  “How do you do?” the fat girl said to Jason.  Jason nodded.  “This is Ari,” Arthur said, pointing to the man with the tattoos.  “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Ari said.

            “And you?” the old man nodded at him.

            Jason said his name. 

            “We’re sipping whiskey and waiting for the storm,” Arthur said.

            He passed a bottle of Yukon Jack to Jason.  Jason put the bottle to his closed lips and, then, opened them a tiny bit to admit a trickle of the sweet, biting alcohol.

            “We need to be patient and let the storm pass,” Arthur said.

            Jason saw that his lunar face was in half-eclipse: his left eye seemed spoiled, like a piece of ruined fruit in its swollen socket.  Beneath his chin, the old man’s beard was braided and dangled down like a pull-chord. 

            “Don’t bogart the sipping whiskey,” Miranda said, reaching across the fire. Her finger nails were painted purple to match her toenails.  She was wearing jelly flip-flops. 

            Jason passed her the bottle.

            “You nearly got yourself spanked by those good old boys uptown,” Arthur said.

            “So I gathered,” Jason replied. 

            “Bunch of fucking tweakers,” Ari said.  Miranda handed him the bottle but he didn’t drink.  He passed it to Arthur, taking a joint from his pant’s pocket, which he lit and put between his lips.

            “I assume you’re not some kind of fucking cop,” Ari said.

            “Everyone thinks I’m someone that I’m not,” Jason said.

            “It’s the human condition,” Arthur replied. 

            The bottle came back to him. 

            “What brings you to town?  I mean really?” Arthur asked.

            “If he’s another insurance adjuster, he’ll say his half-ass Volvo stationwagon,” Melinda said to Arthur.

            “If you want to do investigations in the country,” Ari said.  “You shouldn’t drive a half-assed Volvo stationwagon.”

            “I’m not an investigator.  I’m not working for any insurance company.”

            “Well, we’ll find out in due course,” Arthur said.

            “Why is everyone so suspicious?” Jason asked.

            “It’s a small-town,” Arthur said.  “The pathology of the small-town is paranoia.  In cities, it’s the opposite: the pathology is indifference.  Here’s its reversed – everyone cares about everything and leads to paranoia.”

            Miranda said: “He’s not paranoid.  People are just out to get him.”

            “Indeed,” Arthur said. 

            “I used to live here.  At least, I think so.  When I was a little baby.”

            “Really,” Arthur said.  “Give me your family name.  I’ve lived here all my miserable life.  If you’re from these parts, I may know your history.”

            Jason told them his last name.

            “I don’t recognize it, but I may have forgotten something,” the old man said.

            “He’s fucking half-senile,” Ari said.

            “Also regrettably true,” Arthur said.  “But it’s more complicated than that.  A lot of people come and go.  They live in the old farm houses out around here.  It’s a good hiding place.  They don’t stay long, just until the heat’s off.”

            “I don’t think it was anything like that,” Jason said.

            “I’ve lived in this shit-hole from the very beginning,” Arthur said.  “My grandpa had the quarries, the gravel pits.  My ancestral gravel is under the road-bed all the way from here half-way to Mount Rushmore.  All the way across South Dakota.”

            “He’s a very important person,” Miranda said.

            “The biggest fish in this pond,” Ari said.

            The bottle came around again.

            “My daddy had the grain elevator,” Arthur said. 

            “That looks like a big deal,” Jason said.

            “My daddy’s grain elevator blew up a long time ago.  Those tin-shacks down there – that’s someone else’s asset.  They stuck that thing up after the explosion.”

            “And he was our teacher,” Miranda said.

            “That’s why we’re so fucked-up,” Ari added.

            “Teacher?” Jason asked.

            “After Korea, I got a teaching license.  But everyone figured I’d just run the grain elevator,” Arthur said.

            “But then the damned thing blew sky-high,” Miranda said.  “His loss, our gain.”

            “A tragedy,” Arthur said.  “So I taught at the school here in Peru.”

            “There’s a school here?”

            “Not anymore,” Arthur said.  “But once I was even the principal.”

            “When the school closed, he had to go and teach in Worthington.  At the Catholic High School,” Ari said. 

            “What did you teach?”  Jason asked.

            “Latin,” Arthur said.  “I would have taught Greek too if they had Greek.”

            “He’s a very learned fellow,” Miranda said.

            “A real scholar,” Ari said. 

            “Our friend has come here to explore his origins,” Arthur said.  “But I’m afraid events conspire to make this hamlet something less than hospitable.”

            “It’s crazy,” Jason said.

            “The origin is always crazy, uncanny.  The first and the mightiest,” Arthur said.

            “I mean those guys.”

            “They’re all assholes,” Miranda said.

            “Fuckin’ tweakers,” Ari said.

            “The suitors, the bachelors,” Arthur’s wounded eye seemed to sometimes wink at Jason.  Out on the prairie, the thunderstorm was stalled like a besieging army.  Cannonades of thunder rolled across the plain.

            “What do you mean ‘suitors’ and ‘bachelors’?” Jason asked.

            “There’s some back-story here,” Arthur said.  “We need to fill you in.  That’s the nature of places like this.  It’s all back-story.  There’s no present story.  It’s all something that happened a long time ago.  Like Faulkner said: ‘It’s not history, it’s not even in the past’.”

            “You’re confusing him,” Miranda said.

            “He’s a teacher,” Ari said.  “Of course, he confuses everyone.”

            “It has to do with a local swain,” Arthur said.  “And the beautiful Helen.” 

            “What?”

            “As you may have gathered,” Arthur began, “those yokels congregating at the railroad tracks...that conclave of morons, I’m sorry to say...they form a sort of honor-guard for the beauteous widow.”

            “Her name isn’t really Helen,” Miranda said.

            “Penelope,” Arthur said.

            “No, that’s not her name either, professor,” Ari added.

            “The name doesn’t matter,” Arthur continued.  “The story is all that counts.  In that house –“ (he gestured) “– resides the belle of the county, the most beautiful woman in this part of the state, the glamorous widow.  About a month ago, her husband sailed off the remnants of the bridge a mile north of here, hurtling himself into immortality.  Of course, we were all suitably grief-stricken.  After the funeral, the male mourners have all become suitors and you met them, I fear, an hour ago – all engaged in their bachelor vigil.”

            “They’ve been hanging around town since the funeral,” Ari said.

            “Sooner or later, they figure that if they are patient and wait long enough she will have to choose one of them.”

            “Why doesn’t she just leave town?” Jason asked.

            “Why don’t we all leave town?” Arthur said.

            Miranda said: “What town?  I don’t see much of a town.”

            “Some people from the State have been here to inspect the bridge,” Arthur said.  “It was – as they say – a dark and stormy night (much like our present evening) when the tragedy occurred.  It’s disputed as to whether there were barricades and detour signs warning travelers as to the hazard.  And the deceased, I’m afraid to say, had been at a tavern Elysian, I think, – it’s another village a few miles from here – he had been drinking and there’s debate about how much and so, of course, the whole matter is a bit murky.”

            “The bridge wasn’t marked this evening,” Jason said.  “I almost crashed into that hole twice.”

            Ari said: “Those fucking idiots keep stealing the DOT barricades.  They keep throwing them into the ditch.  They want to prove that there was nothing warning the husband on the night of the crash.”

            “How does hiding the barricades tonight prove anything?” Jason asked.

            “You will have to ask them,” Miranda said.

            “I guess they’re trying to protect the ramparts of the city,” Arthur said.

            “Ramparts?” Jason asked.

            Arthur said: “But there are no ramparts.  It’s an unwalled city.”

            The whiskey was burning in Jason’s throat.  The bottle had gone around a few times.  With each pass, he drank more deeply.  Something cold was entering the air, the metallic fore-taste of the thunderstorm.  

              “I would like to see this Helen or whatever her name is,” Jason said.

            “Mortal man can not look on the face of such beauty and live,” Arthur replied.

            Miranda shook her head: “She’s not all that special.”

            “Objectively,” Arthur said, “she is a statistical rarity, a very beautiful woman.  Not that common anywhere, but in a place like this...it’s been years.”

            “Years?” Ari asked.

            “There was a wedding once...” Arthur said.

            “Tomorrow?” Miranda asked.

            “No, long ago, when my eye got hurt,” Arthur said. 

            “I didn’t think the girl getting married tomorrow is any great shakes,” Ari said.

            “She’s nothing special either,” Miranda said. 

            Jason stood up.  Smoke was blowing in his eyes.

            “I guess it’s a tragedy, or something,” Jason said.

            “The carnage is continual here,” Arthur said.  “It’s an unquiet grave.  You shouldn’t have come.”

            “Where does that widow live?” Jason asked.

            Arthur stood and walked through the smoke to take Jason by the elbow.  With his free hand, Arthur pointed again.

            A belt of trees stood between them and two structures, one of them an old farmhouse standing stark and white in the flashes of lightning, the other a modern split-level with pale siding showing amber light in a window.  Someone had built a treehouse in the bones of an old dead oak in the shelter-belt and some tar-paper rags flapped loudly in the breeze.  The treehouse looked like the kind of gaunt platform on which Indians buried their dead.  Beneath the scaffolding of the platform, a white boat was marooned in the weeds.  In the yard, beyond the trees and the boat, a small round ruin, like a collapsed igloo flickered in the lightning – in the flashes, Jason saw that it was the wreckage of lawn ornament shaped like a wishing well.  The windows of the farmhouse were dark and empty.  A shadow, like a willow tree disturbed by wind, flitted across the golden-colored light filling the window on the back of the modern home  crowding against the farmhouse.

            Smoke swirled in his eyes and the whiskey made him feel unsteady on his feet.

            “I think I see her,” Jason said.  “She’s there at the window.”

            “If you catch a glimpse of her, you will be smitten,” Arthur said.

            “Bullshit,” Ari said.

            “You and I are – shall we say? – immune to her charms,” Arthur added.

            “She’s nothing special,” Miranda said.

            “You see the two houses there, side-by-side,” Arthur said.  “Her husband was already demoted to the farmhouse.  She’s pregnant with his child, but he was already demoted, out of the new home and living with the roaches and the mice in the old place when the crash happened.  That’s true.”

            “True,” Miranda said.  “The poor bastard was on his way out when he got killed.”

            A slender form moved past the window, swiftly like the wind turning a page in an open book. 

            Jason found the whiskey bottle in his hand again.  He held it like a club.  For some reason, the bottle didn’t seem to be depleted by their drinking. 

            “I would like to see her,” Jason said.

            “Young Telemachus,” Arthur said. 

            “Tele – who?”  Ari asked.

            “Our young Telemachus from the great city to the north of us,” Arthur said.  “He has come to rout the suitors and defend the virtue of the beauteous widow.  Odysseus returned from his travels.”

            “You all talk like this guy?” Jason asked.

            “He’s traveled,” Miranda said.  “He was in the service and fought in Korea.  He’s been places.”

            “None of us have ever been anywhere,” Ari said.  “But Arthur has done things.  He’s seen the world.  He’s been lots of places.”

            “I lived in New Jersey,” Arthur said, “when I was in college.”

            “And he goes to New York City for two weeks, two whole weeks, each summer,” Miranda said.

            “Broadway and the Met.  I like musicals and the opera,” Arthur said. “It’s a weakness.”

            “See’s he’s cultured,” Miranda said.  “He’s a sophisticate.”

            Some big drops of icy rain splashed in Jason’s face.  The thunder rumbled and the dogs hidden in the brush began to howl.  It was a lonely sound, like a train whistle far away.

            “I gotta go,” Jason said.  “I gotta get out of here.”

            “Before it’s too late,” Miranda said.

            Jason caught his foot on a log, tripped and almost rolled into the fire.  A flock of small sparks flared and leaped over where he had fallen.

            “You don’t really seem okay to drive,” Ari said.  He extended a hand to help Jason rise. 

            “The cops are pretty aggressive out in the country,” Miranda said.  “I wouldn’t get behind the wheel.”

            Lightning flashed, switching the trunks of the trees and weathered edges of buildings on and off like a light bulb.  Sometimes, the flickering was silent.  Occasionally, thunder growled at them.  Jason had the bottle in his hand again.  He took another drink.

            “You get out in the night with the storm and the gravel roads twisting around this way and that – you’ll get lost or worse,” Arthur said.  “There’s no safe way out of here tonight.  And I don’t like the sound of this weather.”

            “I guess you’re our guest for the night,” Miranda said.

            “I really ought to be going,” Jason said.

            Arthur shook his head: “Too late for that now.”

            After the first flurry of fat, cold raindrops, it had been dry and the wind, panting in the distance, seemed to hide itself in ambush. 

            “Let me show you something,” Arthur said.  He stood up and led Jason away from the fire, along a path worn ankle-deep in grass between the trees.  They walked single-file, lit by flashes twitching in the sky overhead.  A nub of gravel road dead-ended in the grove and Jason saw several old vehicles parked there, back windows glazed with thick yellow dust from the dirt roads.  The brief shower of heavy rain drops had spattered the dust on the windows with dark paw-shaped marks.

            They walked between the trucks and, then, stooped to follow a footpath that tunneled through a tangled hedge of brush.  Ahead of them there was a table of the kind that you might find in a school lunchroom.  The table was set on uneven ground and sloped away from an ivy-covered wall.  In the flash of lightning, Jason saw that the wall ran three or four car-lengths to the right and left, windowless and half-hidden behind house-high thickets of scrub trees and flowering thistle.  Another trail, littered with beer cans and broken glass, lead along the brick wall to a corner.  A small courtyard or bay opened beyond the corner: slender saplings shaped like tall, agitated flames were gathered together in the area enclosed by the walls.  The saplings had erupted through fractured concrete, cracked and heaved underfoot.  The walls around the bay were open with windows through which small trees were reaching skyward from within the shattered interior of the big, flat building.  At one corner, the rusty ring of an basketball hoop hung overhead.  Bricks had scaled off some of the walls and someone had collected them in neat stacks ranked in the center of the courtyard – but that must have been years earlier, because the piled stones were overrun with weeds and weather was eroding the fallen bricks, blurring their outlines so that they slumped into cone-shaped mounds.  Aluminum soffit was dangling in ribbons from the cantilevered edges of the structure.

            “It’s my school,” Arthur said.

            “Abandoned,” Jason replied.

            Arthur handed him the bottle of whiskey.  Miranda lit a joint.

            “It’s fabulous,” Arthur said.  “A fabulous ruin. Green mansions.”

            On one of the blind walls, there were some words scrawled in red and blue paint.  The words were Spanish and bracketed by big floral patterns, spray-painted and crooked petals of color on the crumbling bricks.  

            “Half the town is Mexican,” Arthur said.  “All undocumented.  That’s how it is now.”

            The lightning was more insistent and vivid, separate bursts of radiance accompanied by short barking peals of thunder. 

            “I was principal here,” Arthur said.  “Before the trouble.  The criminal stuff.  And, then, they closed the place down – that’s thirty years ago now, at least thirty years.”

            Jason took another drink.  The lightning flaring around them was making him feel dizzy.

            Arthur lead them to an alcove where a big orange school bus was tucked into an opening in the side of the ruined school.  The school bus was half-concealed behind a tangled screen of small trees.  A canvas tarp smelling of mildew shrouded the door into the bus.  Arthur pulled the tarp down dislodging several large spiders that scuttled like crabs across the broken paving stones into the weeds.  He levered the door open and they climbed up the steep steps into the bus.

            The darkness smelled of patchouli and marijuana.  Arthur fumbled with his lighter. 

            “It’s Arthur’s famous fuck-pad,” Ari said.

            “Nonsense,” Arthur said.  “It’s just my office.”

            Yellow steady light poured from the lantern that Arthur had lit.

            The inside of the bus had been stripped of its seats.  A couple of old bean-bag chairs were sprawled in the corners of the long, oblong space.  An old boom-box sat on a steel table and, in the center of the bus, a khaki green futon was spread across the floor.  A couple of brooms were leaning against the curving metal side of the enclosure and several ash-trays were scattered around the edges of the futon.  Some wine-bottles with their throats jammed with candles and shaggy with brightly colored candle-wax sat on the table.  The flash of the lightning didn’t enter the bus – all of its windows were cloaked with plush purplish drapes, heavy as velvet and riveted to the curved steel sides of the vehicle.

            “Wow,” Jason said.

            “It’s my little refuge,” Arthur said.  “Some people have summer places at the lake.  This is my cabin.”

            “You can listen to music here,” Jason said.

            “My CDs of dead German and Italian singers,” Arthur said.

            Rain drummed on the metal roof overhead and the wind suddenly shook the sides of the bus.

            “Here it comes,” Arthur said.

            Jason had the bottle in his hand again.  He said that he felt a little sick.  Arthur took the bottle from him and Jason lay on the futon.  It smelled of mold and old cigarette smoke.  The air was suddenly wet and thick.

            “I should go,” Jason said.

            “Where would you go?”  Arthur said.  “There’s nowhere to go.  That’s the truth: nowhere to go.”

            Jason closed his eyes but felt nauseated.  After a while, he sat up.  The rain continued to pound overhead but the wind had stopped.

            “I should have left after college,” Arthur said.  “There was no reason for me to come back here.  Daddy didn’t like me and I didn’t like him.  I could have made my way in the big city.  I had decorations...decorations for valor...from Korea. There were a million things I could have done...But I stayed here.  It’s like some kind of fabulous fairy tale in reverse, like where the handsome prince turns into a frog.  I should never have wasted my life here.”

            Jason looked around and saw that Miranda and Ari were gone.  He was alone with Arthur. 

            “These little towns – “ Arthur said.  “You come from here.  I come from here.  Everyone in the big cities can trace their family back to some little shit-hole like Peru.  But anyone with any spine, any guts, any fortitude... anyone who wanted to live got the hell out.  These towns are rotting.  They’re charnel houses filled with the dead and the dying. I had a friend, a really good friend...he’s dead now...my friend...we were very close...and for the first half of his life, he was imprisoned in an asylum, a State hospital...see, he was different from others, different in a way that...but he was different and so his parents, I guess, locked him away and threw away the key and so he had to live in the looney-bin, the fucking nut-hatch, until he was almost 35 – half his life, more than half his life...In the seventies, they closed down the asylums, the State homes – people discovered that they were like concentration camps... brutal, I tell you, inhuman! – so my friend was put out on the street and I found him that way and he told me something that I think is very relevant, pertinent...He was like a trustee (at the home I mean), the bosses thought he was reliable, they gave him the run of the place and would send him on little errands out on the grounds, around the State Hospital – see, in those days, these places were like cities, they were self-sufficient:  they had farms and farm animals and vegetable gardens and shops and their own heating plants; the place had its own printing press and newspaper.  So my friend would be sent by the interns or guards or whatever they were out through the woods to an old quarry where there was a cave with a big concrete hatch.  That’s where things like potatoes and carrots were stored, a big dark vaulted grotto and back, behind, the root-vegetables, in a sort of cage...at least, that’s how my friend described it...in this cage there were these big oblong rubber sacks, a whole bunch of them...Now, my friend is in the cave to pick up a burlap sack of potatoes, but he gets curious and sees that the padlock to the cage behind the veggies is unlocked, so he goes back and rummages around in those rubber sacks.  It’s winter and cold in there, you can see your breath, and what does he find?  Lo and behold! the sacks are dead people, inmates – patients I guess – who died and couldn’t be buried because the ground is all frozen and there’s no one to pick up their bodies, the corpses are unclaimed, paupers, poor, poor paupers, and so they’re just stuffed in those rubber sacks and put in the cave to wait for the dirt to thaw, you can’t bury anyone until April...see, it’s what’s called a mortuary cave...And, then, my friend figures out the reason that the guards always send him to get the carrots and taters – it’s because the place spooks them, all those cadavers piled up in the back of the vault, stiff and cold, waiting to be buried...poor dead people with not a soul in the world to claim their corpses...Now, my friend was very resilient – you had to be to survive as he did – and the place didn’t bother him at all.  He liked it because it was peaceful.  Out in the wards, people were always howling and yowling and screaming at you – but here, in the mortuary cave, the dead people were just calm and quiet and serene as potatoes, no difference really at all, completely inert and peaceful and so, my friend went there as often as he could, every day if possible, because it was quiet and you could think and be alone...See it was a charnel house, a storage room for the dead, and that’s just like Peru, just like all these little towns if you get my meaning...”

            The rain had stopped.  It was very still.  Somewhere overhead there was a fracture in the metal and a puddle of water had accumulated under a steel chair.

            “I’m an old teacher.  I talk a lot.  Listen to public radio: Texaco sponsors the Metropolitan Opera – an intermission, there’s always a quiz – I don’t know, used to be at least.  Talk and listen to music.  It’s what I do.  That’s all I do now.  Can’t manage anything else.  And a lot of the time, I’ve got no one to talk to...I’m shunned, registered fucking sex offender, and all on a misunderstanding...who’d want to talk to me?  See, the zombies out here ought to be left alone.  We ought to remain forgotten.  These dead aren’t going to ever be resurrected.  It can’t happen.  That’s why I don’t know why you came here?  What’s the point?  You’re disturbing our rest?  You’re disturbing our...I guess you would say... disturbing our vigil.  See we’re really all just waiting...”

            Jason saw things spinning around him.

            “Waiting?”

            “We’re all just waiting and waiting.  Maybe, you recall how that goes.  You’re at a party and there’s someone there that you want to fuck...a boy or girl, it doesn’t matter, it’s the same thing.  You’re waiting for him or her to get drunk and give in...you know?  But there’s other guys waiting too, like most parties, way too many hooks and not enough fish, right?  So you just wait and wait, you’re gonna out-wait the others, your rivals, so you keep waiting and hours pass, and, then, its dawn and you’re still waiting, and, then, it’s another day, and you’re still waiting, and pretty soon, you forget what you were waiting for...see, it never happens, the thing you wish for, it doesn’t happen...but you keep waiting and waiting, you don’t move on... and, then, the thing you’re waiting for is gone after a while, lost:  the boy or girl got old and ugly or died, and you can’t recall what made you wait anyhow and, then, you figure out that you’ve spent you’re whole life waiting, your life is done it’s over and you think: what was I waiting for?  But you can’t, you can’t for the life of you...you can’t remember what exactly it was...”

            What time was it?

            Arthur loomed over him.  He approached.  The light was all wobbly.

            “You shouldn’t have come here,” Arthur said.