The Unwalled City Part 2

THE UNWALLED CITY (Part two)

II

1

            Voices said something about a wedding.  Names were named.  A smell of onions and burning insinuated itself through the humid air. 

            Jason had been sleeping hard.  It was the sort of sleep that seems an activity requiring intense, if pleasurable, exertion.  He awoke moist with sweat.  His head, rotated to the side the way a swimmer grasps air while performing the Australian crawl, had leaked saliva all over the pillow.  His cheek was wet and sticky. 

            It was sunny outside the bus.   The sky was clear and looked washed, but puddles and foliage dripping with rain water made the air steamy.  The day would be hot. 

            Jason made his way around the bus to the weedy slit between the long orange metal side of the vehicle and the red brick wall of the school.  Concealed there, he pissed against one of tires of the bus. 

            A thumping sound caught his attention.  He followed the sound to a courtyard where a man in a white tee shirt was dribbling a scuffed-looking basketball.  The man bounced the ball in tight circles, rotating where he stood, and, then, pitched it up at the hoop nearby.  Some tatters of rope hung from the hoop’s rim and the ball swished down through them.  The windows in the school looking out onto the courtyard caught the sunlight and reflected it in bright streaks and flares across the fissured asphalt and concrete playground. 

            The man retrieved his ball and walked toward Jason. 

            “Good morning,” the man said.  Jason didn’t recognize him. 

            “Good morning,” Jason said.

            “How are you doing this morning?” the man asked.

            “Okay,” Jason replied.

            “Not under the weather?” the man replied.  “You were pretty much wasted last night.”

            “Yeah, I know,” Jason said.  “But it’s funny, I don’t feel hungover at all.”

            The man in the white tee shirt pushed the ball away from his chest, making it jump on a bounce into Jason’s hands.

            “Heads up,” he said, but only after Jason had caught the basketball against his belly.

            Jason turned, flung the ball up at the hoop.  The ball punched against the backboard hard and dropped back to the ground.

            “Say Melinda told me to thank you.  To really thank you about using your car,” the man said.

            Jason was embarrassed because he didn’t understand what the man meant.

            “My car?”

            “Don’t you remember?”

            “I must have been pretty inebriated,” Jason admitted.

            “Well, her baby got real sick, you know,” the man in the white tee shirt said.  “High fever and like a seizure or something.  Her car was messed-up and she was afraid that if we called the ambulance, she wouldn’t be able to go with the kid.”

            “Oh, I kinda remember,” Jason said.  But he didn’t remember any of this.

            “You said she could take her car to town, to the hospital with the baby,” the man in the white tee shirt said.  “So she left with the baby – drove to Worthington.  It must have been about two a.m.  That was good of you, man.  Noble.”

            “Oh, it’s nothing,” Jason said.

            He asked the man in the white shirt how the baby was doing.

            “We don’t know,” the man said.  “She hasn’t called back yet.  It’s long-distance from Worthington and I don’t know if she has any money to make the call.”

            Jason asked: “Do we have any idea when she will be back with my car?”

            “Hopefully later today,’ the man said.  “Before she left, she said that if you had to get going, someone could run you into town to the hospital or whatever.”

            “I’m in no hurry,” Jason said.

            He kicked at a small, greasy-looking weed sprouting from a crack in the tar underfoot.

            “Her name is Miranda right?  I didn’t know she had a kid.”

            The man cocked his head a little: “No, Melinda.  That’s her name.  Melinda.”

            The sun was giving Jason a headache. 

            “I’m thirsty.  Is there a pop machine or something?” Jason asked.

            “Through the trees,” the man said.  “In front of the store.”

            He pointed to a dusty pathway that ran between some yellowish trees, zigzagging along borders that only the property owners could identify, backyards where dogs were chained and mewling, abandoned privies in tall goldenrod next to overgrown piles of wood and shingles salvaged from fallen buildings. 

            Jason felt a little dizzy.  He walked along the path, under the trees that whispered overhead and drizzled little glittering drops of water down on his forehead. 

            “See you later,” the man in the white tee shirt said.  “If you’re still thirsty tonight, there’ll be plenty to drink.  It’s gonna be a four keg street dance, right after the wedding.”

            “I heard about that,” Jason said over his shoulder.

            A procession of cars and trucks were parked along the asphalt road angled into the gravel lanes between the houses.  The vehicles looked like they were antiques gathered for some kind of custom car show – they were brightly polished and looked new, but Jason recognized that they were old models, probably well-used, without seatbelts let alone airbags hidden in their consoles.

            Some women in summer dresses were sitting on a sagging porch.  Peeling white columns supported a shingled lean-to roof over them where a cat was sitting in the cradle of a bowed drainage gutter.  The women were chatting with one another and chopping onions with sharp wood-handled knives.  The air was sharp with the scent of the chopped onions and the women’s faces were moist with tears.  Jason could smell the sulphur odor of eggs cooking in the house, beyond the screen door.  

            Across the street, on the short buckled sidewalk in front of the post-office and general store, a couple of older men were smoking cigarettes and sitting on folding chairs in front of a fat black howitzer-shaped tube.  A fog of steam was rising from one end of the oily-looking metal cylinder.  A greasy chain, like the mechanism from a bicycle, was clattering and twitching as it was dragged by the sprockets through a little gas-powered motor.  The motor was reddish and seemed to have been amputated from a lawn mower.  The air smelled of baking grease and oil mixed with gas. 

            A third man came from inside the general store.  He had leathery-looking beef sticks in his hand which he distributed to the other men.  Tucked in a niche between the post office and the general store, Jason saw an old-style pop machine labeled Coca-Cola in a flowery cursive script.  In the center of the clapboard facade to the general store, someone had painted the words Georges Grocery – the lettering was uneven and the print seemed about to slip from the wood down onto the battered awning over the grocery store’s front door. 

            Jason walked across the asphalt street to the pop machine.  He was surprised that a bottle of Coca-cola cost only 50 cents.  He took a couple quarters from his pocket and put them in the machine.  Nothing happened.

            “You have to reach in and pull out your bottle,” a man wearing a feed cap supervising the cigar-shaped metal cylinder said.  “It’s an old machine.”

            “Can’t beat the price,” Jason said.

            “Sure,” the man in the feed cap said.

            A fat blonde woman wearing a smock came out of the post office.  She sat on the three or four concrete steps leading up to the shadowy cave-like entrance to the building.  The post office was heavily built with rusticated red stone the color of clotted blood.  The post office windows inside the looming arch of rock were cluttered with peeling yellow posters.

            “It’s already making my mouth water,” the fat woman said.

            She had a cup of coffee in her plump hand.

            “Should be real good,” one of the men by the rattling, gear-driven machine said.

            She fanned her bosom and throat.

            “Gonna be a hot one today,” she said.

            “Good for the corn,’ the man in the feed cap said.

            Jason extracted his bottle of coke from a spring-loaded steel mechanism that clutched the bottles inside the cool chest of the soda machine.

            “Town looks a lot different in the daylight,” Jason said to no one in particular.

            “You get in last night?” the woman from the post office asked.

            “Yes,” Jason said.

            “Bride’s side or groom?” the fat woman took a sip of her coffee.

            “Neither,” Jason said.  “Who’s getting married?”

            “That’s a long story,” one of the men by the black metal cylinder said.

            “Be a lot of excitement here today,” the man in the feed cap said.

            Jason noticed that the men had a bucket of lard sitting between them on the sidewalk.  He had never seen lard before.  It looked like some kind of snow-white industrial lubricant.

            Jason stood in the shadow of the post-office and sipped his coke. 

            “Big doings in town,” the lady from the post office said.

            “Where’d you stay?” the man in feed cap asked.

            “You’re a nosy one, Jeremy,” the woman said.

            “And you’re not, Pumpkin?” the man replied from under his feed cap.

            “It’s a friendly question,” Pumpkin said to Jason.

            “I slept over by the school.  I was with an old guy.  A professor or something.”

            “Really,” Jeremy said. 

            Pumpkin made a clucking sound: “You know about him?”

            “Not really,” Jason said.

            “We don’t need to go into that stuff,” one of the men smoking a cigarette said.

            “You were his guest?” Jeremy asked.

            “Uh-huh,” Jason said.

            “Any problem?” the man in the feed cap asked.

            “Why do you ask?”

            “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Pumpkin said.  “Maybe he’s a friend or something.”

            “To each his own,” Jeremy said.

            He stood up and popped open the lid of the metal tube.  Inside, the corpse of a pig glistening with fat was slowly rotating on a spit.  Grease was dripping from the pig’s ears and snout.  The other two men rose also, dug out some lard, and smeared it with a sort of trowel on the pig’s belly and hams. 

            “Already looks good enough to eat,” Pumpkin said.

            “We’ll have so much pork,” Jeremy said, “that we’ll all get the gout.”

            “I hope so,” Pumpkin answered.

            She looked across the street where the women were peeling potatoes.

            “Smells like the eggs are ready for the potato salad,” Pumpkin said.

            “I hope they put mustard in the mayonnaise,” one of the men said.  “I like it with mustard.”

            “Yeah, that’s good,” Jeremy said.     

            The metal walls of the grain elevators along the railroad track seized the sun and reflected it down into the village.  Grain cooking in the morning heat in the big steel bins smelled like bread baking.  Across a vacant lot, a long garage built from whitewashed cement blocks stood open.  Inside, a man was washing a compact tomato-colored firetruck with a green garden hose.  Puddles of soapy water glistened in the rutted gravel in front of the garage.

            Pumpkin fanned herself with a sheaf of junk mail. 

            “There will be a big brawl, I’m pretty sure,” she announced.

            “Why do you say that?”  Jason asked.

            “There’s always fighting at weddings around here,” Pumpkin said.  “It’s expected, like the pig roast and the wedding dance.  I just hope no one gets hurt too bad.”

            “The bullshit never ends,” Jeremy said, sighing.  The dead pig was glistening under its coat of grease.  One of the men drew on oven mittens and pivoted the hot lid to the cylinder back down over the meat. 

            “I need to find my car,” Jason said.

            “Where’s your car?” Pumpkin asked.

            “Miranda had to borrow it ‘cause her kid was sick,” Jason told her.

            “Miranda?”  Pumpkin looked puzzled.

            “Or Melinda or something like that,” Jason said.

            “Melinda,” Pumpkin replied, patting moisture at her cleavage with the pink blossom of kleenex.

            Jason stood up and walked across the street toward the path that led toward the abandoned school.  The windows were open in the little houses huddled under the big, storm-wracked trees and voices called from within the green shadows.  The gravel lanes were desolate and white in the blast of sunshine from overhead.  At the end of the lanes, old quonset huts like huge tin pipes half-buried in the weedy soil stood against ramparts of corn, fields frothy with wind blowing across the crops. 

            A shimmer of saplings and bushy thistles veiled the brick walls of the school lying like a flat, abandoned measuring stick on the edge of town.  On a little knoll above the school, a big white house stood with round towers rising above the steep pitch of its attic.  A white picket fence protected the house and flowers in buckets suspended from the porch cascaded down into gardens where other blossoms were climbing fragile-looking trellises.  Behind the house, a big barn was hunkered down in a muddy meadow next to a pole shed with a new vinyl garage doors.  The silo had collapsed into its pit-foundation and seemed to have become a kind of quarry, stacks of brick and cement blocks neatly ranked around the ruin. 

            Something was creaking rhythmically.  Jason rounded the house and saw that the wooden porch wrapped around the building.  At one end of the porch, two young women were sitting on a bucket-like love-seat suspended from bolts overhead.  With almost imperceptible motions of their toes (bare in their sandals), the girls were rocking the swing back and forth. 

            Jason approached the house.  Bees hummed around him in the flowers.

            “Is Arthur around?” Jason asked.

            “He’s still in the Cities,” one of the girls said. 

            “I suspect he’ll be dragging himself home this afternoon, in time for the wedding,” the other girl said.

            “Well, I need to get back to the Cities,” Jason said.

            “Don’t we all?” the blonde girl said.  She was wearing a man’s tee-shirt over her bra and jeans cut-off above her knees.  Her hair looked wet as if she had just bathed. 

            “See I loaned my car to Miranda, because her kid was sick, and now...”

            “You borrowed your car to Melinda?” the other girl said.  She had red hair and freckles. 

            “Good luck with that,” the blonde girl said.

            The red-haired girl clicked her tongue disapprovingly: “You don’t need to be so catty, Jackie,” she said.

            Jackie asked: “She told you her kid was sick?”

            “I guess so,” Jason said.

            “She doesn’t have a kid,” the red-haired girl said.

            Jason climbed the steps and stood on the porch near the swing wobbling back and forth.

            “That’s great,” Jason said.

            “She’ll turn up.  She always does,” Jackie said.  “She’ll be here for the wedding or, at least, the dance and the fight.” 

            “Yeah, she won’t miss the fight,” the red-haired girl said.  

            “What’s going on here?” Jason said.  He settled back on the porch balustrade facing the two girls, a rill of red flowers from a hanging basket flowing down his shoulder.

            “Watch out,” Jackie said.

            “It’s probably all rotted-through,” the red-haired girl said.

            “You can sit between us,” Jackie said. 

            “It feels solid,” Jason said. 

            “Everything’s rotten around here,” the red-haired girl said.  “You can fall right through the floor into the basement.”

            “That’s right,” Jackie said.

            The girls introduced themselves and Jason told them his name.  The red-haired girl was called Norma.  Between their sandaled feet, a plastic pitcher filled with Kool-Aid stood on the smooth-polished floorboards.

            “You want a drink?” Norma asked.

            “Better warn him,” Jackie said.

            Jason didn’t understand: “What?”

            “It’s electric Kool-Aid,” Jackie said.  “Not too strong.”

            “Very mellow,” Norma said.

            “See, we’re getting loaded,” Jackie told him.

            “Why?”

            “Why not?” Norma answered. 

            “It’s a protest,” Jackie said.  “We’re protesting this wedding bullshit.”

            “I gotta pee,” Jackie said.  She stood up and went through a screen door into the house.

            “We’re kind of house-sitting.  For Arthur,” Norma said.  She poured a little syrupy Kool-Aid into a Dixie cup and took a sip.

            “You want some?”

            “Why not?” Jason said. 

            Norma poured him a cup of Kool-Aid.  It tasted cold and fruity; ice cubes were floating in the pitcher.  Jackie came from inside the house and drank some Kool-Aid also.

            “Here’s the deal,” Jackie said.  “the groom is an asshole and the bride is a bitch.  That’s about it.  There’s a lot of folks who don’t think this thing should happen?”

            “Why is it their business?” Jason asked.

            “Look around you,” Jackie said.  “Everything is everyone’s business here.”

            Norma said: “People don’t like the way the happy couple treated the groom’s ex.”

            “And she’s not even from around here,” Jackie added.

            Norma frowned:  “The groom was working up in the Cities and he gets involved with this girl.  I guess she’s knocked-up and so they come down here to escape scrutiny, I suppose, or disapproval or something.  They set up housekeeping here in town.  She has the kid.  And, then, a couple months later, he’s going out with this other chick.  Abandons the girl, who’s very, very sweet and, now, he’s getting married to the other woman.”

            “It’s like a little Peyton Place,” Jackie said.

            “We’re boycotting the wedding,” Norma said.  “Out of respect for the girlfriend.”

            “Arthur says there’s two sides to it,” Jackie added.  “Arthur is very tolerant.  He says there’s always two sides to everything.  But I don’t get it.”

            “We don’t get it,” Norma said.

            “It’s the groom’s parents,” Jackie said.  “They farm 1800 acres.  They think everything’s for sale.”

            “It must be rough on the woman with the baby,” Jason said.

            “She oughta just leave town,” Norma replied. 

            Jackie stood up and stepping to the edge of the porch surveyed the groves of trees with the shacks and garages scattered across the wooded wedge of land between the ruined school and dull metal heights of the grain elevators.  Gravel lanes shone white between colonnades of tattered-looking shade trees.  The buildings seemed to have preceded the triangular grid of roads, dropped like pale, scaly hailstones from the hot sky and resting now where they had fallen.  A pickup truck was crawling along one of the lanes, moving slowly so as not to stir the dust – it looked like the kids in the truck were looking for a lost dog. 

            Jackie gestured toward a squashed-looking house standing among rafts of weather-beaten debris.  Next to the building with its slumping shingled roof, a trailer house sat on a skirting of fiber-glass.

            “She lives right there,” Jackie said.  “With the baby.”

            “And she’s gonna be stuck there during the street dance tonight,” Norma said.

            “That’s why everyone’s expecting a fight,” Jackie said.  “There’s people in this town that are gonna stick up for her and the baby for sure.  And the bride’s got brothers who are pretty scary.  All of her people are coming here from Elysian for the dance.  It’s supposed to be a four-keg dance.”

            “Elysian?” Jason asked.

            Norma said: “It’s a little town, even smaller than Peru if you can imagine – about twelve miles from here.”

            “Why don’t they just have the dance in Elysian?  That’s where the Bride’s from.”

            “We want the dance right here, in Peru,” Jackie said.  “So we can fight them.”

            “The bride’s brothers are very scary,” Norma said.  “I know them.  They’re psycho.”

            “We’re boycotting the wedding,” Jackie said.  “But we wouldn’t miss the fight for the world.”

            Jason looked at the trailer house.  Strange curlicues and arabesques of antenna wire sprouted from the flat roof of the trailer.  It was strangely fascinating, an involuted pattern inscribed against the humid air.

            The girls talked for awhile but he didn’t hear what they said.  Sometimes, he heard them but couldn’t quite see them.  Someone was laughing loudly a hundred yards away where the pig was roasting.  Several small rabbits crawled out from under the porch and sat on the grass in front of the house.

            They drank some more Kool-Aid.

            Norma said that they should go into the house and listen to some of Arthur’s records.

            It was cool and cavernous in the house.  Beautiful things lay all around.  Framed pictures

caught reflections from the windows in their glass and were liquid with darting glimmers of green and yellow.  The couches were soft and swallowed you up in them.  Silk and velvet clung to the walls and draped windows.  Jason thought the rooms were like a harem or like the set of some rare and exquisite play. 

            One of the girls found some grapes in the refrigerator and plums also and they ate the fruit.  Norma put on a Procol Harum record and slow-danced with Jackie.  Then, they listened to some music from an opera.  High-pitched voices bellowed to one another while men growled from their bellies to the scratching and whining of fiddles. 

            The girls put pillows on the floor and lay there, pretending to sleep.

            Jason looked at an engraving of a naked boy on the wall.  As he looked at the picture, the image dissolved in dots and lines bitten into the cream-colored paper.  Outside, the wind stopped blowing and the day became very still.

            After a long time, they went outside, stretching and yawning. 

            “We know where there’s a bare-ass beach,” Jackie said.

            “Are you up for that?” Norma asked.

            “I guess,” Jason said.  “But I gotta get my car back.”

            “That’ll happen,” Norma said.  “Later.”

            The town looked different, brighter with more distinct edges. 

            They walked down the gravel path to an old pick-up truck parked under a lightning-scarred oak tree.  A white slash disfigured the tree’s crown where cicadas made a sound like buzzsaws.  Jackie was carrying a cooler; Norma had two towels, thick and plush, from Arthur’s bathroom, a third towel wrapped like a turban around her forehead. 

            They sat on the hard bench-like seat in the truck and Jackie tried to start it.  Under the big dial of the steering wheel, there was a choke button that you had to pull.  The engine sputtered and, then, throbbed into operation.

            Jason didn’t know if the swimming hole was a mile from town or ten miles.  He kept losing track of his thoughts and becoming disconnected to the landscape that crept by outside the open window – fields singing with insects, shelter-belts where a storm had snapped trees so that huge branches hang down still luxuriant with green leaves, vines dangling down like some kind of jungle and, at the edges of the groves, pale heaps of construction materials, two-by-fours, shingle, sheetrock with halos of golden rod around them.

            The road came to end in a grassy harbor carved out of an overgrown woodlot.  Beer cans glittered in the grass and there were ruts made by kids that had parked there in big trucks.  The girls went ahead of Jason, leading him along a narrow pathway beaten between trees that towered overhead.

            “It’s an old gravel-pit,’ Norma said.

            “Arthur owns it.  It was his grandpa’s gravel pit.”

            They passed No-Trespassing signs hammered onto the rough trunks of trees.  Jason saw ants dashing up and down the trees on ridges of sunlit bark.  The No-Trespassing signs were riddled with holes from birdshot fired at them. 

            The path went up and down and twisted in tight loops, intersecting with other paths criss-crossing up to the tops of brush-covered hills shaped like teepees or dunes.  Then, the texture of the air changed and became cool and dank and they skirted an eye-shaped socket full of black water.  Some house-sized machines, augers and steel rollers and shredded conveyor belts, lurked in matted domes of shrubbery.  The skeleton of a huge turtle, yellow skull shaped like a parrot’s beak, rested on a boulder.  Then, the path dived down a slope, past crumbling limestone cliffs to a deep green pit brimming with water.  A rib of gravely sand edged down from one of the twenty-foot bluffs.  The cliffs were seamed with shelves of yellow stone and angled down into the water on the other side of the hole.

            The girls took off their clothes and suspended their garments on the bare, sun-bleached branches of a dead tree.  Jason stacked his clothes on the sand beach. 

            The water was cold and clear.  Beneath the beach, the tongue of sand fell off into an abyss.  Jason could feel his numb shins and toes hanging over an immense, imponderable depth.

            They were in the water for a while, then, sat on some boulders heaped in the shade.  Their buttocks made wet hand-shaped prints on the dry stone.  Then, they went in the water again.  After awhile, they sat on the boulders again, shivering and drank cold beer from the cooler that Jackie had brought.  A deer thrashed in the brush and they saw its bright, dark eyes.

            Norma had a small radio.  It was the size of a cell-phone.  Norma said that it was her “transistor.”  She turned on the radio, found a station in Iowa, and they listened to dance music as they swam.

            Jason thought that the swimming hole and the naked girls were a kind of paradise.  He tried to be a gentleman and not look at the girls, but, whenever he thought that they had turned their faces aside, he glanced in their direction.  They were slender and had nice figures and their faces looked very young streaming with water, prettier now that the make-up made sloppy from the humidity was washed off their cheeks and eyes.  Their wet hair seemed long and straight.  He had to piss and so he paddled into the center of the oval pit and felt the warm of his urine enveloping his thighs.  It was a wonderful sensation.  Dog-paddling in the middle of the pond, his eyes and nose just above the water, he looked at the girls lounging naked on the boulders.  For some reason, he couldn’t see them clearly.  Something intervened in his thoughts and a sort of screen covered the pink and rose flesh of the girls. 

            At first the sun shone straight down into the glare of the pond, but, then, shadows lengthened and the water became dim and opaque.  When they sat resting on the boulders, the chill was more intense and deep-seated.  Jason put on his underpants and the girls covered their hips with their panties.  They lay on the sand beach listening to the little radio.

            Norma seemed to be asleep.

            “Do you have a girlfriend up in the city?” Jackie asked.

            “Not really,” Jason said.

            He wanted to touch Jackie but she was lying farther away from him than he could reach.  Instead, he put his hand on Norma’s waist.  But she seemed to be still sleeping.

            Maybe, they fell asleep for awhile.

            Awaking, they dressed.  Jason now understood why the girls had carefully suspended their garments in the dead tree.  He had sand in his trousers, gritty between his toes and his tennis shoes.

            The way back to the pickup truck was not very far at all.  Distances had been misleading when they had hiked down from the parking place to the swimming hole.  And Peru was just above the road, hovering like a green mirage nearby.

            An ambulance in no particular hurry was gliding away from the village.  The humidity made the rising dust into a golden vapor hovering motionlessly over the gravel lanes.  It was the trace of accident and injury.

            “It’s already started,” Norma said.

            “What?” he asked.

            “The fighting of course,” Jackie said.

            Pick-ups and old cars were parked at random angles on the crushed stone under the steel walls of the grain elevators.  The road was broad in that place, a big lot where grain trucks waited to unload their corn and beans in the autumn, and it made a natural dance floor.  Folding chairs, stenciled School Property, were set in the open around the gravel parking area and some tents like those used to protect open graves in cemeteries had been pitched on the lawn near the road.  A stubble of knee-high ruins, mostly overgrown with dull-green nettles was being prepared as a bandstand – a streak of rusty tracks ran diagonally across the street to the ruins where some kids with long-hair wearing black tee-shirts were crouching over amplifiers and a small PA system.  Little kids were trampling down the nettles to clear a place for the band to play.  Extension cords snaked along the rusty side-track to sockets on the side of the elevator.

            The ambulance seemed stalled, two-hundred yards out of town, creeping along hesitantly as if the driver and his emergency personnel wished to return to the party.  The yellow dust trail hanging behind the white ambulance was like the train of a bride’s dress sweeping through the fields of tall bewhiskered corn.

            “That’s an old ambulance,” Jason said.  “It looks like a hearse.”

            “I wonder who got beat up,” Norma said.

            The best men and the bride’s maids were standing in two groups, separated by the wide street.  The best men were wearing three-piece green velvet suits with carnations in their lapels.  Their long hair fell over their shoulders and some of them seemed already drunk.  Heavy-set women in floral dresses were bent over the open cannon-shaped cylinder, plucking meat off the carcass of the nut-brown hog.  A beer keg like an artillery shell was set next to the hog-cooker and some girls were squeezing beer from a rubber tube into big Kool-aid pitchers.  Another beer keg stood across the street, in front of the post office and the general store.  Already some clear plastic cups had been dropped onto the street and were crushed in the gravel.  A guitar twanged – “check, check,” someone said over the PA system.

            Near the edge of town, a crowd of people in their Sunday best stood, looking out over the crops to where the ambulance seemed stalled on the horizon like a faint white mirage.  Men in leisure suits smoking Swisher Sweet cigarillos and women in neat slacks with blouses low-cut to show their cleavage were watching the ambulance recede into the distance.

            Jason and the two girls walked toward the people looking at the ambulance.  They approached several women standing on the porch of an old house.

            “What happened?”  Norma asked.  “Did someone already get beat-up?”

            A middle-aged woman wearing a robin’s egg blue pants-suit turned to her and said: “No, no, one of the guys cooking the hog got hurt.  He was drunk and caught his fingers in the rotisserie.  They had to use a wire-cutter to get him free and, maybe, he’s gonna lose part of his pointer finger.”

            “Too much booze, too little sense,” another woman said.

            “Luckily, the hog’s cooked.   But the machine’s busted,” the woman in the blue suit said.  “There would be a lot of hungry folks here if he had got caught in that thing an hour earlier.”

             Norma nudged Jason and pointed discretely, shaking her wrist and the back of her hand in the direction that she wanted him to look.

            “That’s the girl,” Norma said.

            “What girl?”

            Jackie whispered: “The girl who got knocked-up and who this asshole groom should have married.”

            Jason looked to his side and saw a slender woman with a little baby on her hip.  The woman was smoking a cigarette.

            A man dressed as a wedding guest approached the woman and put his arm around her waist in a reassuring gesture.  Twisted around his neck there was a black cord from which a big angular Kodak Land camera was dangling.

            “This is off to a bad start,” Jackie said.  “Someone loses part of their hand before the party even begins.”

            The man backed away from the woman holding the baby and said something to her.  The woman stepped toward a small decorative wishing well installed on the grass near her and set her lit cigarette on the lawn ornament.  Then, she stepped back so that the man could take a picture of her holding the baby.

            The woman’s back was to Jason and he couldn’t see her face.  He slipped to the side to get a better look, standing near the white wood pillar supporting the awning-like eaves of the porch. 

            The camera flashed.  The woman had long hair wrapped into tight whorl of bun.  The baby cried out at the flash and clawed the air.

            “Will she attend the dance?” Jason asked.

            He wanted to know more about the woman and her baby.

            “No,” Jackie said.

            “Of course not,” Norma added.

            The band began to play a cover of a song by Johnny Cash.  The woman with the baby picked up her cigarette, turned and walked away.  The man who had taken the picture peeled the print from the cantilevered jaw of the camera and followed the woman.

            “I feel so bad for her,” Norma said.

            “She should move away,” Jackie said.

            “Would you?” Norma asked.

            “I don’t think so,” Jackie answered.

            “I don’t think so either,” Norma said.

            The women working over the dead pig heaped its meat on doubled-up paper plates.  Young men took flasks out of their pockets and began to drink from them.  Several little girls with their pig-tails wrapped up over their heads and wearing bright frocks ventured out onto the gravel in front of the band and began to wiggle their hips and shoulders.  Old men stood in one group, gazing in a proprietary manner at the younger people.  The older women worked with the food, toting aluminum trays of calico beans and potato salad. 

            Pumpkin stood by the keg by the pork.  Women with small children and teenage girls made a ring around her.  The younger women were managing the beer pouring from the keg.  They moved briskly, efficiently, like barmaids in a tavern. 

            Someone lit a string of firecrackers and girls squealed and some of the men jumped, then, grinned sheepishly at each other

            “I thought someone was shot,” Pumpkin said, fanning her bosom with a church bulletin from the wedding.  “They say that the Gundertson twins are coming from Elysian.”

            “Who invited them?” another woman asked.

            “No one invited them but they’re coming all the same,” Pumpkin said.  “They’re nothing but trouble.  Someone ought to call the sheriff when they mosey into town.”

            “Then, we’ve got the law at our dance and who knows what happens?” someone said.

            A girl said that she was at a wedding dance in Frost and that the cops had to be called because of a fight.

            “They ended up busting the bridegroom and taking him to jail.  And half the bride’s maids got tickets for smoking pot,” the girl said.

            “Imagine,” someone said to Pumpkin, “spending your wedding night in jail.”

            “That would not be good,” Pumpkin said.

            “Not at all auspicious,” a man’s voice added.

            A heavy-set bearded man had joined the group.  He stood a little outside the circle.

            “Arthur,” Pumpkin said.  “You snuck up on us.”

            “I’m very stealthy,” Arthur said.

            A younger man wearing granny glasses under his frizzy grey hair peered at the women standing around Pumpkin.  Arthur patted the younger man on the shoulder.

            “I sneak up on you, don’t I, Sam?” he asked the younger man.

            Sam nodded his head.  He was wearing bermuda shorts and had skinny legs laced with old, horny scars. 

            “Is there going to be trouble, Arthur?”  Sam asked.  He looked frightened.

            “No more than usual,” Arthur said.

            “Did you just get into town?” Pumpkin asked.

            “Yes,” Arthur said.  “Sam and I were up in the big city, rambling around.”

            “Rambling,” Sam said. 

            Pumpkin eyed Sam suspiciously.  Then, she shrugged her shoulders.

            “They say that there’s gonna be a big fight,” Pumpkin said.  “The Gundertson boys are coming here.”

            “They’re morons,” Arthur said.  “But look at it like an opera.  The Montagues and the Capulets.”

            “Who?” Pumpkin asked.

            “It doesn’t matter,” Arthur replied.

            “You’re right.  It doesn’t matter when they’re beating you to a pulp,” Pumpkin said.

            “I would have thought that getting his arm ripped off would have stopped the younger one,” Arthur said.  He turned to Sam: “A couple years ago, the younger twin was riding his motorcycle drunk, messed up in an intersection, and got his arm ripped right off at the shoulder.”

            “Holy cow,” Sam said.  He looked from face to face, then, turned his eyes down to look at his battered tennis shoes.

            “It just made the bastard meaner and tougher,” Arthur said.

            “What kind of mischief can a one-armed man make?” one of the younger girls said.

            “Just you wait and see,” Pumpkin replied.

            The shadows lengthened.  Jason drank beer.  The brides’ maids stood in a bright group, clutching flower bouquets, beneath a light on the side of the grain elevator swarmed by flying insects.  Bats came out to graze on bugs whirling about in the dense, moist air.  A mother sprayed her little girl with insecticide in an aerosol bottle. 

            Some cars and pickups came in from the country and people mobbed them, but they were friends, some of them bringing six–packs of beer and bottles of hard liquor.  The bride cut the puffy white cake and her mother, who looked tired in her tight dress, handed out slivers of frosted crumbly cake on small disposable plates.  Half-full plastic glasses of keg beer were drowning gnats on tables and abandoned on chairs and set on the hoods of cars and trucks.  The groomsmen made a pack around the beer keg across the street and they were hooting in the gathering darkness.  Overhead, the moon poked its grizzled face between fragmentary clouds, turning them into silver wreaths as it spun through the sky. 

            For a long time everything had been moving very slowly for Jason, but now things accelerated.  Girls were laughing in the shadows and low-flying bats zipped in irregular loops through the people dancing.  Old men and women were galloping back and forth in the gravel to a polka.  The bride surveyed the scene from behind a table buried in cups and bottles, a white vibrating mound gazing out over the people filling the street underneath the stoic pile of the grain elevator. 

            Arthur and Sam had gone somewhere.  They came back to the party giggling and hilarious.  Arthur was wearing a steel pot on his head like a helmet.

            “We’ve come to organize the defense of our polis,” Arthur said.

            “Of our police?” someone asked.

            “Of our city,” Arthur said.

            Sam trailed behind Arthur like his shadow, stepping cautiously with knees lifted high, through the debris of dropped beer cups and the white discs of fallen plates. 

            Some motorcycles roared at the end of a gravel street.  The people dancing paused and looked to the darkness at the edge of town where the one-eyed lights of the cycles bounced and twisted in a fog of yellow dust.

            “Now what do you think, professor?” someone asked Arthur.

            “We are hospitable to all friends,” Arthur said.  “But fierce in the defense of our ancient liberties.”

            He rapped his knuckles on his tin-pot helmet. 

            Jason thought that it was time for him to leave Peru and return to his apartment in the city.  He had an important appointment on Monday, although he couldn’t recall its details.  A couple of extravagantly dressed women stood near Arthur, punk-rockers with Mohawk-hair and staples in their cheeks and lips.  – Miranda? He said to himself.  – One of those girls might be Miranda.  When he lifted himself from the folding chair, Jason felt strangely light, as if he were about to drift away into the wild depths of the night.  His feet didn’t exactly follow the instructions from his brain and he swayed a little when he walked.

            “Arthur, Arthur,” Jason said.  Arthur’s face was hidden in the darkness.  Only his eyes caught glimmers of light from the moon and the Christmas tree bulbs forming a garland around the cafeteria table where the bridal party was seated.

            “Yes,” Arthur said.

            Arthur raised his right arm and made a Fascist salute to Jason.

            “Fellow citizen,” he said.

            “My car, my car, I let Miranda drive it,” Jason said.  “But now I need to be going.”

            “His car?” Sam asked.

            A small man with only one-arm swaggered up to the keg of beer.

            “Is there a charge for the cups?” the one-armed man said.  He was accompanied by a man who was his double except not missing an arm.  Both of them were dressed in work clothes, wearing heavy boots and dirty jeans but with tattooed forearms bare.  Each hid his baldness under a wrap of red bandana.

            “It’s a party,” the woman pouring pitcher-beer said.  “Free-will donation, if you want.”

            “Are we welcome here?” the one-armed man asked.

            “Everyone’s welcome, as long as you stay mellow,” the woman said.

            The kid playing lead electric guitar said that the band was going to take a short break.  The dancers clapped politely in the dark.  A couple of red spotlights were aimed at the amplifiers and the musicians were bathed in darkroom-scarlet light.

            Some more men, bigger and louder, than the twins in the red bandanas appeared from the shadows in the steel slot between the towers of the grain elevator.  Beyond the railroad tracks, a couple more pickups were bumping through terrain gouged by grain trucks along the steel rail and road bed.  Another truck, moving a little erratically, rolled up to the edge of place where people were dancing, inundating the party-goers with its bright headlights.

            “Those brides-maids,” the one-armed man said to no one in particular.  “Those dresses really show-off their tits.”

            “Tits out to here,” his brother said, put his hand about a foot in front of his chest.

            “No need to be rude,” Pumpkin said to them.

            “We’re sorry,” the one-armed man said, showing his white teeth to her in a grin.

            “That’s okay,” Pumpkin said. 

            “No offense,” the one-armed man’s brother said.

            “None taken,” Pumpkin replied. 

            “Can we get a beer from the other keg?” the one-armed man said.  He pointed across the street, beyond the double-beam of light cutting across the party, to where the groomsmen were guarding their keg.

            “But you’ve already got a cup,” the woman pouring the beer said.

            “I know but we want to get one from over there too,” the one-armed man said.  He lifted the cup to his lips, drank most of the beer, and, then, poured out the remaining swallow or two on the ground.

            As he walked across the street, the headlight beam outlined him in white radiance. His gait was crooked as if he were favoring a heavy, wounded arm that no longer remained attached to his shoulder.  His brother skipped along side him.

            The two men plunged into the group of groomsmen.  After a minute or two, they emerged from the tight group of young men and began to saunter back across the street toward the keg that the women surrounded.  When the one-armed man reached the center of the street and stood in the glare of the headlights, someone threw an empty whiskey bottle at him.  He ducked and the bottle scuffed across the gravel. 

            “What was that?” the one-armed man said.

            He walked back with his brother to the crowd of young men which closed around them.  Some girls ran toward the group of groomsmen.  Someone shouted and a couple of people fell to the ground.  Suddenly, other men appeared, lunging from the pickup pouring its light into the crowd.  Boys were shouting obscenities and more people dropped down onto the ground, rolling back and forth in the dust. 

            “Just what I expected,” Pumpkin said wearily.

            Jason stepped away from a man with a bloody face flailing with his fists around him.  Then, a pack of a half-dozen boys appeared through the slot between the grain elevators.  The bride’s mother jumped in their way to block their passage and was knocked, spinning around, to the ground.

            A couple of middle-aged men, who had been standing aloof from the fighting, screamed something and ran up to butt at the boys coming onto the street from where the bride’s mother sat on the ground bellowing.  They swung their heavy fists back and forth, windmill punches, that knocked half the attacking kids to the ground.

            The younger men strutted into the spotlights that the pickup truck cast onto the street.  They fought there for awhile, mostly shoving and cursing at one another.  The women huddled in the darkness shouting encouragement or telling the boys to stop fighting.  Arthur crossed the road to the shambles of ruin where the band had been playing.  With Sam, he stood a little above the undulating mob of men grunting and pushing each other bathed in red light.  He raised both arms, inhaled melodramatically, and, then, waved his hands as if directing a symphony orchestra.

            After a few minutes, someone threw a bottle at the truck casting light into the crowd.  The bottle cracked across the truck’s windshield and sailed into the noncombatants where it bounced off a toddler’s chest.  In the darkness, some of the younger women began to make a loud keening noise.  A man got into the truck and backed it away from the fight and, as the vehicle rolled backward on the street, the boys swinging their fists at one another let their hands drop to their sides and contented themselves with shouting insults. 

            Jason was standing next to Arthur.

            “I haven’t seen so many people having so much fun since we used to show the movies in the gym at the school,” Arthur said.

            He rapped his knuckles for good luck on the pot protecting his brow.

            “Someone’s going to get badly hurt,” Sam said quietly.

            “Not likely,” Arthur said.  “Sound and fury signifying nothing.”

            The group of young men who had been fighting disentangled themselves.  The local boys stood by the beer keg next to the hog roasting rotisserie and let the girls rub the blood and dirt off their lips and cheeks with napkins.  The napkins were marked with the initials of the bride and groom.  The Gundertson twins and their friends gathered around the keg across the street.  The kids in the band went back to their equipment but found that the scuffling had dislodged power cords.  The guitar player knelt in the darkness, groping for electrical wires.  Another man began to crawl through the gravel, tracing a cord toward extensions near the grain elevator.  The moon lifted itself hesitantly over the steel ridge of the grain elevator and a cold, silvery light fell into the tree tops and through the still leaves, mottling the lanes.  The musicians were too drunk and distracted by the fighting to find the broken connections.  The PA system hissed a couple times, but there was no music.

            Arthur and Sam threaded their way through the disconnected amps and monitors.  They approached the keg where the Gundertson twins were drinking and holding court. 

            “Can we have peace here?” Arthur said.

            The one-armed man stepped out of the shadowy crowd and approached Arthur.

            “What do you want?” he asked.

            “I want you to shake hands with me and say that you will enjoy our hospitality in a peaceable manner.”

            “I’m not gonna shake hands with no homo,” the one-armed man said.

            “Okay,” Arthur said.  “Then, shake hands with Pumpkin or someone and just say you’ll be nice.”

            “I know you,” the two-armed Gundertson boy said.  “You’re that homo professor guy from Worthington.  You’re the guy who got charged with sucking off truck drivers at the rest stops on the Interstate.”

            “I was never convicted of anything,” Arthur said.

            “Get away from me, queer,” the one-armed man said. 

            Arthur said: “Sticks and stones...”  But he backed away.  Sam was behind him sniffling like a nervous puppy. 

            Pumpkin met Arthur in the middle of the street, between the two belligerent groups. 

            “Well, at least, you tried.”

            “The olive branch was rejected,” Arthur said.

            “Well, at least, you tried.”

            “Are they going to fight some more?” Sam asked.

            “I don’t think so,” Arthur said.

            After about fifteen minutes, the one-armed man stepped out of the crowd around the keg where he was drinking.  He announced that the beer was running dry.

            “We’ll need another keg over here,” he said.

            Someone shouted a curse at him from across the street.

            The moon shone on the bride and made her white dress gleam like ice.  She rushed into the middle of the street. 

            “Why don’t you just go home?” the bride said.

            She slapped at the one-armed man and he pushed her down.

            Someone stood too near a microphone where the band was set up and a feedback loop shrieked like a siren.

            Everyone was fighting again.

            Pumpkin had been sitting on a folding chair by the keg under the Christmas tree lights.  She called out “Robert!” to a middle-aged man wearing dark sunglasses standing beside her.  A woman said; “Someone should call the sheriff.”  Pumpkin said: “You can’t trust the cops.  We don’t know who they’ll blame.  Everyone will get arrested.”

            “So what are we going to do?”

            “We have to take care of this ourself,” Pumpkin said.  “Enough is enough.”

            She gestured that Robert should follow her and they crossed the street diagonally, staying clear of the crowd of kids screaming at one another and brawling in the dark center of the street.  Babies were crying loudly and some families had withdrawn to stand in frightened little groups deep in the darkness under the trees.

            A couple of minutes passed and, then, a heavy engine rumbled and headlights cleared a path in the darkness.  The town’s tomato-colored fire-truck stood at the end of the block, panting like an old dog.  Slowly, the fire-truck advanced on the mob.  When the front fender of the vehicle was close enough to be flecked with dust kicked out by the combatants, the truck stopped.  The hot blaze of its headlights seemed to enrage the boys and they flailed at one another wildly and inefficiently.  Bodies were strewn on the ground, kids creeping this or way or that to get out from under the crush of boot and heel.

            Robert pulled the lever of the emergency brake and climbed down from the idling truck.

            Pumpkin stood on the dais of the truck’s running board.

            “You stop fighting right now!” she commanded.

            Robert unspooled a dozen feet of fire hose and pointed the nozzle at the mob.

            “I said stop fighting right now!” Pumpkin said again.

            Someone threw a bottle at Robert which he fended off with the nozzle of the hose.

            “Okay!”  Pumpkin shouted.

            Robert squeezed the trigger on the hose and a blast of water lunged toward the crowd.  Where the spray crossed the headlights, the jet shone brightly, a thigh-thick glistening and white column.  The water exploded on the crowd and dropped several of boys down on the gravel.  Then, the spray subsided, the arc of water drooping and splashing limply in the dust.

            “Will you stop?”  Pumpkin said.

            “You can’t do this,” someone cried.

            Robert shot another burst of water into the crowd.  Some of the kids retreated into the darkness but others pranced forward, challenging the white blast of water as if they were children playing in a lawn-sprinkler on a hot day.

            The spray from the hose arched and, then, went limp again.

            The one-armed man went around the fire-truck, passing by Pumpkin as he circled the vehicle.  She tried to grab him by the hair, but only succeeded in dislodging his bandana.  He jumped on Robert from behind, wrapping his good arm tightly around his throat.  Robert made a choking sound and whirled, dropping the hose nozzle in the wet gravel.  The one-armed man’s twin darted forward and picked up the hose.  He squeezed the nozzle and used the water to punch at the crowd.

            Robert was lying face-down in the dirt.  Gundertson kicked him several times, gently as if he didn’t want to inflict any lasting injury. 

            “You’re gonna fuckin’ spray us,” Gundertson shrieked.  “You’re gonna spray us like we were a bunch of niggers?

            His twin held the hose against his chest, set his boots in the gravel in a firm stance, and triggered another blast of water into the crowd.  People howled and threw things.  Behind the man wielding the hose, Pumpkin was fumbling at valves on the side of the truck.

            Sam was standing a little apart from crowd.  He flapped his hands at his side as if they were wings and shook his head back and forth.   The man with the hose saw him and aimed the blast of water at his ankles.  Sam tripped over the jet smashing against his legs like a truncheon.  He fell to the ground and was spun sideways by the water crashing against his back and ribs. 

            “You need to take a bath you fuckin’ retard queer,” the man with the hose said.

            One-armed Gunderson shouted: “Give the retard queer a good bath.”

            The spray of water rolled Sam over in the mud.

            Arthur pulled the pot off his skull and ran toward the man with the hose.  He clubbed Gunderston across the side of his face with the pot.  The hose’s nozzle popped free from his hands and twisted and squirmed in the air, powering great pillars of water upward into the night so that droplets fell gently on all the people gathered on the street like spring rain.

            The one-armed man tried to pull the hose toward him, clawing at the fat python-like tube that writhed in the mud.  Arthur hammered him over the head with the pot, but lost his grip so that it fell to the ground.  For a moment, Arthur and the one-armed man held the wriggling hose between them.  The blast of water spun around and raked across Arthur’s face.  Screaming he kicked the one-armed man in the crotch.  Gunderston crumpled.  Pumpkin had found the valve and the hose collapsed, limp, coughing a few last puddles of water into the gravel.

            Suddenly, it was still.  Water trickled over stones and some droplets, stalled overhead by branches and leaves, splashed to the ground.  Arthur held both hands cupped over the side of his face.  Some flashlight beams prodded at the wet gravel and the men sprawled in the puddles next to the firetruck.  Someone shoved a folding chair under Arthur and he sat down heavily, gasping as he moved.  Soaked, Sam stood next to him.

            A woman who said that she was nurse emerged from the darkness and bent over Arthur.  The men who had been fighting had withdrawn to opposite sides of the street, fading into darkness so that all the people now encircling the fire truck seemed old and haggard.  Voices of boys and young women echoed from black places in the wood lots between houses or from the darkness at the dead ends of lanes.  Some headlights swept the cornfields and trucks rattled over gravel.

            The nurse gently peeled Arthur’s hands back away from his face. The rays of the flashlights flared suddenly on a raw skid of bright blood covering the side of Arthur’s head. 

            “It’s his eye,” the nurse said.  She spoke quietly.  “Has someone called for an ambulance?” 

            A man said that Pumpkin had gone into her house to place the call. 

            A couple of drunk older men staggered over to the table and spooned pulled pork onto buns.  They groped in the dark for the potato salad and the opened bottles of barbeque sauce.

            Sam was shivering.  “You’ll be alright,” he said to Arthur. 

            Arthur said: “It hurts.”

            In the depths of the country, a siren sounded and chained dogs took up the cry.

            “We’d better shut down the kegs,” a woman said. 

            Standing under a bouquet of Christmas tree lights, a girl lit a cigarette.  She said: “I’ve the got the car keys...for that guy...you know, I borrowed his car, last night.  I need to give him his keys.”

            Two women standing near the girl with the cigarette whispered to one another.  The moon had slipped behind a cloud and it was very dark.  The women were shadows, black apparitions with tiny slivers of blue and red light trembling in their eyes. 

            “He was here a little while ago,” one of the women said.

            The orange glowing tip of the cigarette bobbed slightly.

            “I don’t know where he is now,” the other woman said.