McDonald's Drive-Through

 

This story should not be construed as critical of McDonald’s, a leading purveyor of fast food.  McDonald’s imposes high standards on those who operate its franchise restaurants. Almost always, service is polite and efficient, kitchens sanitary, and the food delicious and nourishing.  But...

A few years ago, I was traveling for business and found myself staying in a hotel in an unfamiliar city.  The property had a restaurant on-site and I went there for supper.  There was no hostess, but a girl at the bar in the back of the dining room told me that I could sit anywhere that I chose.  There was no one else dining in the place.  After a few minutes, she took my order for a drink and said that a waitress would come to my table in a few minutes.  The restaurant displayed antique farm implements such as rakes and hoes on the walls and a placard in the elevator said that it served “hearty meals.”  I finished my drink and the female bartender asked me if I wanted another.  She said that there might be a slight delay.  No one else came into the restaurant and the other tables were empty.  After I had finished my second drink, the bartender came to my table and apologized – it seemed that the chef hadn’t come to work this evening and so food couldn’t be served.  

I went to my car and used my cell-phone to locate a McDonald’s nearby.  The hotel was in a river valley near a large freeway bridge.  The place was rather isolated, surrounded by barren empty lots, warehouses, and trucking firms with silent fleets of vehicles parked behind chain-link fences.  I followed the directions on my phone, driving under the span of the freeway bridge and, then, up a winding road that followed a wooded ravine to the hilltops above the valley.  The neighborhood on the bluff seemed largely residential but there were small strip malls at the intersections and a McDonald’s with drive-through located between office buildings on a side street.  

It was not late, although most people probably wouldn’t be eating supper at this time, around prime-time for television.  There was no one ahead me at the drive-through, no cars waiting in a queue and no one pulled up behind me either. On the speaker under the illuminated menu, a voice sounded: “Welcome to McDonald’s, this is Dub.  May I take your order?”  I listed the items that I wanted.  The voice was blurred a little with static: “Drive ahead to the first window,” the man said.  

I drove forward, but couldn’t see any window opening onto the drive-through lane.  This was baffling.  I pulled ahead to the side of the restaurant and parked next to the sidewalk.  Then, I walked around the building, but couldn’t find any windows through which payment could be made and food delivered.  A car-length behind where my vehicle was idling, I found a door that opened into a small, dimly lit corridor.  The place had a tile floor and there was a janitorial rig, a bucket with mop on caster-wheels, pushed into the corner.  A little counter opened into a cubicle where a man was sitting.  

The man was wearing a sort of sanitary turban.  He was one of those unfortunate persons born with half of his face missing.  On the smooth, featureless surface of the left half of his face, an eye with a solid black eyebrow had been either painted or tattooed.  On his chest, I saw a name tag: Dub Devi.  

“I just ordered,” I told Dub Devi.  His real eye was big and dark.  The fake eye was a black smudge.  

“Yes,” he said.  “I couldn’t find the first window. Is this the place?”  I asked. Dub Devi gestured at the janitorial equipment in the corner.  “Does this look like a drive-through window?” he said.  “Actually no,” I replied.  “Just drive ahead to the first window,” he told me.  “But I didn’t see a window?”  He shrugged.  “You must not have looked in the right place,” Dub said.

I retraced my steps and went back through the door to the drive-through lane.  My car had vanished.  Again, I walked around the restaurant, but there was no sign of my vehicle.

Inside the restaurant, I asked to speak to the manager.  “My car is missing,” I said.  “Someone has stolen it.”  The manager was a very young girl with freckles and red hair.  “What do you want me to do about it?” she asked.  “It was stolen right here, out of your parking lot,” I said.  “I doubt that very much,” the manager replied.

I asked her what I should do.  She suggested that I report the theft to the police.  “Where is the police station?” I asked her.  She gestured in the direction of the boulevard.  “It’s about 12 blocks,” she said.  “Can you call me a cab?” I asked.  (I had left my cell-phone in the car when I went into the building to see Dub Devi.  “No,” she said.  “Cabs don’t service this part of town.  It’s a dangerous neighborhood and they’re afraid to drive up here.”  “So what am I supposed to do?”  I asked her.  “Walk down the street and talk to the cops,” she said.  “That’s what I recommend.”

“But you said that it’s a dangerous neighborhood?”

“You’ll be alright,” she said.  “Just stay on the sidewalk under the street lamps.”

I went outside and walked a half-block to the sidewalk running parallel to the street.  After walking about six blocks, it became very dark.  There were no more street lamps.  I decided that I must have gone the wrong direction and so I reversed my path, returned to where the McDonald’s was located, and, then, continued, hurrying from street lamp to street lamp on the sidewalk.  The street lamps made a buzzing sound overhead just barely audible to me.

The police station was a fortified concrete block building.  Squad cars with sirens were coming and going.  I went into the lobby for the public.  It was a small room with pictures of law enforcement officers framed on the wall and there was a large window that opened into a dimly lit space where a couple of women were sitting in front of computers and speaking into microphones affixed to their headphones.  One of the women noticed me and came to the window where there was a little port through which she could speak to me.  I told her that my car had been stolen at the McDonald’s a dozen blocks down the boulevard.  The woman blinked at me and yawned.  She seemed to be very tired.  “Have a seat and an officer will be with you shortly,” she said.

A few minutes later, the door buzzed and a policeman entered the room.  He was a large man carrying a clipboard.  I admired the gun strapped at his hip.

I told the policeman that my car had been stolen at the McDonald’s.  “I’m sorry,” the man said.  “But it happens all the time.”

“Really?” I asked.

“It’s a common occurrence,” the policeman said.  “You shouldn’t have gone there to eat.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“It’s a bad neighborhood,” the policeman told me.  He asked me for details on the missing car, but it was a rental and I couldn’t describe it at all.  

“How do you expect me to help you?” the policeman asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.  And I really didn’t know.

Grandpa's Ballot

 

1.

Hubie filled out his absentee ballot carefully, checking every box and marking his preferences even in judicial and congressional races in which the names of the candidates were unfamiliar to him.  He scratched his mark in the box next to politicians running unopposed.  Hubie was not about to leave anything to chance and he thought that if some of the boxes on the form were left blank, someone might contest his vote or, even, disregard his ballot.  Everything had to be done properly.  Elections were governed by enigmatic rules that no one really understood – at least, this was how he grasped the situation.

After completing his ballot, Hubie signed it carefully and, then, slid the form into a stiff manila-yellow envelope.  After sealing it, he signed that envelope as well and, then, slipped it into another larger white envelope marked with the words Official Ballot.  Then, he drove to the Ballot drop-off box standing in the center of the parking lot at an old K-Mart closed now for several years.  A couple of pickup trucks and a van were angled toward the ballot box, parked several car-lengths from the sheet metal cube.  Someone on a bicycle was warily circling the ballot box.  A jogger darted past ignoring the polling place.  

The sheet metal box stood on four sturdy-looking legs bolted to the asphalt.  The top and edges of the box were decorated with the red, white, and blue of Old Glory.  Airplane cable girdled the box and, then, was latched around the steel stalk of a light pole.  Overhead, where the mercury halogen lights drooped down atop the pole, the round eye of a surveillance camera surveyed the crinkled asphalt around the box. The side of the thing was labeled in big yellow letters OFFICIAL BALLOT DROP OFF BOX. The abandoned store made a gloomy backdrop at one side of the big, empty parking lot.  In places, the asphalt had split at the seams and withered thistles and golden rod grew from the fissures in the parking lot.  The mountains rose in a great wave, blurred by shadow, over the edges of the city sprawling above pale grey terraces cut into the foothills.

A man with a black mask ambled toward the ballot box, looked suspiciously in both directions, and, then, pressed an envelope through a slit in the side of the metal container.  He hurried back to his van and sped away.  Hubie could see the silhouettes of people in the pick-ups.  The bike rider veered close to the box and dropped his ballot.  Then, he rode away, passing between the parked pick-ups that seemed to stand sentinel.  In the cab of one of the pickups, someone rolled down a window and a plume of cigarette smoke curled into the cool air.  Hubie got out of his car and approached the box.  He heard his footfalls sounding on parking lot.  – There, he thought: it’s done.  One of the pick-ups backed up as if taking his cue from Hubie’s casting of his vote.  Some headlights shone over the edge of the parking lot.  The nettles and thorns were crooked and brown like the dismembered legs of giant insects embedded in the tar.  The padlock on the ballot box caught the headlight’s glare and, across the lot, the beam raked across the silent, aghast facade of the abandoned K-Mart, all plugged and stoppered with plywood sheets over doors and windows.  

2.

Hubie’s grandpa didn’t walk so well and, because he had poor vision, he could no longer drive.  The old man lived in a little bungalow on an arid side-street slipped between some anonymous-looking warehouses and a fuel depot where eight or nine big white tanks rose between hedges of iron pipes.  Hubie’s mother said that grandpa had completed his ballot and wanted someone to come to his house and take the form to the official box at the old K-Mart parking lot on Arapaho Lane.  Hubie had better things to do and grumbled a little, but his mother said that it was important to the old man and that she would pay him 20 bucks for performing this service.

The old man didn’t come to his door.  It was open and Hubie went inside.  The place smelled of the old man, a faded odor of stale beer, perspiration, and urine.  Hubie’s grandfather was reclining in his Easy-Boy, watching Fox News.  The room was dark and the curtains were all tightly drawn.  The bright colors on the TV leaped like flames, flickering on the walls and coffee table – it was more colorful during advertisements.  A little dog limped across the carpet, the fur around its eyes discolored.  

Hubie asked his grandfather if he had completed the ballot.  The old man grunted and gestured toward a little desk in the corner of the room.  The TV screen cast color on the old man’s silver walker, the metal cage standing next to where his legs on the footrest were extended.  The ballot in its white sheath was sitting on the desk top.  

“Did you sign both the ballot and the inside envelope?” Hubie asked.  The old man nodded his head.  His eyes were dark and without luster.  

“Who did you vote for?” Hubie asked.

“You don’t ask a man that,” his grandfather said.  “It’s a secret ballot.”

“Yes, it is,” Hubie said.

Hubie asked the old man if he had eaten.  “I can go out to McDonald’s if you like,” Hubie told him.

“You’re a good boy,” the old man said.  “I appreciate everything you do for me.”  He continued: “But I’m not really hungry right now.  Later on, I can open up a can of something and microwave it.”

“If that’s what you want,” Hubie said.  “Do you need anything?”

The old man had a glass of something on a folding TV-table next to his Easy Boy.  The little dog walked in circles as if confused.

“I’m okay,” Hubie’s grandfather said.  “I’m pretty tired.  But I’ve been fretting about my vote.  I want to exercise my franchise.  You’ll help me, right.”

“Of course,” Hubie said.  There was something conspiratorial about the old man’s side-long glance at Hubie.  It was as if they were planning some kind of crime together.

The old man groped in his pant’s pocket.  Hubie saw that his trousers were a little dirty, flecked here and there with dropped food, and clotted around the ankles and knees with dog hair.  

“Come here, come here,” the old man said.  Hubie approached and the old man suddenly reached for his wrist and took his hand.  He shoved a twenty-dollar bill into Hubie’s fist.  

“I really appreciate it,” the old man said.  “Now, you better get going.  Before the polling place closes.”

Hubie thought that he should tell the old man that the polling places were open 24-7, but supposed that this might be hard to explain.  “I’ll get it done, grandpa,” Hubie told him.  He said goodbye and went outside.  It had been hot and stuffy in the old man’s house and it was good to be in the open air.  A breeze that smelled of sage and pinyon pine swept down from the foothills.  In the darkness, the housing developments high on the sides of the front range glittered above like constellations in the night sky.  

He drove down the avenue, crossing the hissing bright groove of the freeway.  The old K-Mart was about a mile away on a boulevard lined with fast food places, Mexican and Chinese take-out joints occupying old insurance agencies and laundromat buildings.  When he came to that road, Hubie turned in the opposite direction and drove down a ravine where silent, dark buildings perched on the hillsides.  At the bottom of the ravine, a railroad crossed the lane and there was a stark, empty intersection supervised by a traffic semaphore suspended overhead like a brooch necklace on the dark throat of the night.  A bar called the Rodeo Club was beyond the intersection, a furtive-looking concrete block building where a red neon light outlined a bucking bronco.  Most of the neon sections were burned-out and the sign was all dots and dashes that looked like a character written in Arabic or Japanese.  It was after Covid curfew but the bar was still open.  No one came down here unless they knew where they were going and the people who frequented the bar lived in the neighborhood and regarded it as an extension of their kitchens or living rooms.  Hubie had twenty dollars in his pocket and the expectation of another twenty when next he saw his mother and so he decided that he would have a few drinks.  Then, he could drive up the lonely ravine, join the traffic starting and stopping at the timed lights on the boulevard and drop off the ballot at the box in the K-Mart parking lot.  The bar was a quiet place where people minded their own business; Hubie went there to drink when he wanted to be alone.

The little parking lot shadowing the tavern smelled skunk, marijuana that someone had recently smoked.  The bar was most empty.  The bar maid inspected Hubie from head to toe as if to ascertain that he was a legitimate customer and not someone sent to bust the place for serving drinks after curfew.  She had sleepy eyes and was wearing a loose-fitting sarong that looked like pajamas.  A TV was tuned to a show in which amateur singers competed for fame and fortune.  The ads were all political, black and white for the negative commercials and warm amber colors for the positive endorsements.  Election day was still a week away.  

Hubie kept his surgical mask over his mouth, although he had slipped the face-covering down so that his nose wasn’t covered.  He discretely slipped the mask down to drink his whisky-seven.  Hubie didn’t want to risk a drunk driving charge and so he told himself that he would have only two drinks before departing for the K-Mart.  

He was on his fourth drink, when his cell-phone hummed against his breast bone.  He pulled out the phone and saw that it was his mother calling him.  

The TV show was now a basketball game played to an empty auditorium.  The empty stands made the players vicious.  They elbowed one another and fought under the hoop.  

Hubie’s mother said that grandpa had fallen in his kitchen.  The old man had managed to croak out his address before passing out.  The Life-Alert signal had summoned an ambulance to his house and he was now at the Riverside Hospital, apparently in Intensive Care.  Grandpa’s condition was not good and members of the family were gathering at the hospital.  Hubie’s mother told him to go to Riverside and take the elevator in the new building to the Fifth Floor.  Intensive care was the top level in the hospital, closer to heaven people sometimes said.  Hubie shuddered.  A close friend had died there a year earlier after a bad motorcycle crash.  In Hubie’s experience, no one survived intensive care.

3.

Riverside Hospital was in a crease in the foothills.  Hubie drove down toward the building where a red beacon for helicopter landings flashed on top of the roof.  At first, the hospital was below him and he looked down at it as if it were in a well with the red eye of the helipad blinking at him.  Then, the descending road was on the same level as the helipad.  When he parked, the beacon light flashed overhead, on the tall rampart of the building.  The surface lot, normally full of cars during the day and early evening, was half-empty.  He pulled up close to the Emergency Room door.  That entrance was barred and so he had to hoof it across the front of the building to the Acute Care entrance.  At that place, a masked woman with huge black eyes took his temperature by tapping a little wand against his forehead.  He was okay and so she let him pass.

Hubie found his mother standing near the doorway to a little non-denominational chapel.  Inside the chapel, Hubie saw some people kneeling in front of small table with a pale cloth covering it.  

“You can’t get any closer,” Hubie’s mother said.  He looked down the long corridor and saw a barricade of the kind you might encounter at a highway detour.  Several security guard with their faces ominously covered were sitting on folding chairs next to the detour sign.  

“How is he?”  Hubie asked.

“It’s a stroke, a brain event,” Hubie’s mother said.  Her sister came out of the chapel with her eye-shadow streaming.  

“He’s in a coma,” Hubie’s aunt said.

Hubie flashed on the ballot resting on the front passenger seat in his car.  

“I don’t think he’ll recover,” his aunt said and, then, gasped a little for air.

Hubie went into the chapel and sat in the last pew.  A few people were sighing and sobbing noisily.  The sound bothered him and so he left the chapel to sit with his mother in a nondescript niche labeled on its door: FAMILY ROOM. After a few minutes, Hubie’s sister appeared, her lips pale-looking and screwed tightly together.  Hubie’s cousin, a big fat man with a tiny beard, slouched into the family room.  

“We can’t go down to see him?” Hubie’s cousin, Leon asked.

“No,” Marcy, Hubie’s sister, said.

Hubie’s mother sniffed the air and turned to him.  “Are you fuckin’ drunk or something?”

“I had a few drinks,” Hubie said.  “But I’m not even remotely drunk.”

Hubie’s mother glared at him.  

Hubie didn’t like the atmosphere in the Family Room.  Marcy said that she was going down to the parking lot to smoke a cigarette.  

“You can’t smoke on hospital property,” Leon said.

“See if they can stop me,” Marcy replied.

“I’ll go with you,” Hubie said.  

4.

Although it was called “Riverside”, there was no river in the stony dry gulch under the hospital building.  Some cottonwood trees leaned thirstily into the cleft in the hillside but no water was flowing there.  A few big, grated storm sewer openings were cut into the hillside of the draw.  The round storm sewers were like empty eye sockets opening into the loose gravel above the dry river-bed.  

A jogging path ran beside the dry creek on a shelf overlooking the dusty-looking watercourse.  Some benches were set at intervals along the path, each illumined by a single dimly lit bulb atop a metal stanchion.  Several of the benches were occupied by solitary nurses in scrubs.  One of them was weeping loudly.  

Hubie and the fat man, Leon, sat side by side on one of the benches.  Marcy stood socially distanced from them, smoking her cigarette.

“Well, he’s best out of it,” Marcy said.  “Things have gone to shit.”

“I don’t know that,” Leon said.

“He didn’t think it was hopeless,” Hubie said.  “You know, his last act was to vote.”

“Vote?” Marcy said.

“How did he vote?” Leon asked.

“He filled out an absentee ballot just like they say you should and gave it to me to drop in a box,” Hubie said. “That shows a some optimism.”

Marcy nodded and said in a wondering voice: “So he voted?”

“Not exactly,” Hubie said.  “I got the sealed ballot still in my car.  I didn’t get time to drop it off before all this shit hit the fan.”

“Well, you know what the law is?” Marcy asked.

“What’s the law,” Hubie said.

“That ballot can’t be cast.  He’s a dead man.  Dead men don’t get to vote,” she said.

“But he’s not dead,” Hubie protested.  

“Coma,” Marcy said.  “Same difference.”

“I don’t think you have to show any particular level of awareness to cast a vote,” Hubie said.

“That’s true,” Marcy replied.  “Just look at the current President of the United States.  Obviously, half the electorate is brain-dead.”

“Very funny,” Leon said.    

“He was completely lucid when I saw him a couple hours ago.  The vote was already sealed in the envelope, all ready to be delivered.”

“What was he doing?”  Leon asked.

“Watching Fox,” Hubie told him.

“Then, you ought to throw that envelope in a ditch somewhere,” Marcy said.

“No, no,” Leon replied.  “It’s a valid ballot.  You know the law don’t you?”

Hubie said that he didn’t know the law and that none of them knew the law.

“It’s a felony to interfere with a validly cast ballot,” Leon said.  “You could go to prison if you don’t cast that vote for him.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Marcy said.  “The poor man’s gone.  His vote can’t be counted.  You can just throw it away.”

“You’re saying that just because you don’t like the way he voted,” Leon said.

“We don’t know how he voted,” Hubie told them.  “I asked and he told me it was none of my business.”

“I know how he voted,” Leon said.  “Grandpa was a patriot.”

“I know how he voted,” Marcy said.  “The old man was senile and a bigot.”

“Don’t talk about grandpa that way,” Leon said.  He stood up from the bench as if offended to be anywhere near Marcy.  He walked a dozen paces down the path.

“Don’t be that way,” Marcy said.  “We shouldn’t let political differences come between us at a time like this.”

Leon grunted.  “Political differences are all we got in common.”

“And our grandpa,” Hubie said.  He paused.  “Listen, I told him I would cast that vote.  That was my promise.  I gave him my word.”

“Well, you didn’t follow through on your promise,” Marcy said.  “You went to a bar instead and now this has happened.”

“I didn’t know he was gonna keel over,” Hubie replied.

“They’re just waiting to pull the plug,” Marcy said.  She had worked as a nurse’s aide for a few years and spoke confidently.  “For all intents and purposes, he’s a dead man right now.  He’s going to the light, to be with Jesus.  There’s no way back from this sort of event.”

“I’m not that sure,” Leon said.  “Medical science is pretty wonderful.”

“Not that wonderful,” Marcy replied.

“I owe him,” Hubie said.  “When I’m done here, I’m going to go out to the ballot box on Arapaho Lane and cast his vote.”

“It’s not worth the risk,” Marcy said.  “You might be casting a vote for someone you know to be dead.  That’s a felony.”

“You ain’t no lawyer,” fat Leon said.  “You don’t know that.”

“Well, I’m pretty damn sure,” Marcy replied.

“I gave my promise to him and I’m gonna keep my word,” Hubie said.

“You don’t owe any obligations to a dead man,” Marcy said.  “He’s beyond our politics right now.  I see him kneeling at the Great White Throne.  A promise made to a dead man can’t be enforced.”

“Where did you get your law degree, Marcy?” Leon scoffed.

“It’s true,” she said.  “The dead don’t have any rights.”

“I’m not going back up to the hospital room,” Hubie said.  “Right now, as far as I’m concerned, grandpa is alive.  I don’t know nothing to the contrary.”

“You’re just gonna stick your head in the sand?”  Marcy asked.

“You promised,” Leon said.  

The air smelled faintly of fire.  Parts of the Front Range were burning.  It had been a dry, hot season.   The creek bed was full of finely sifted dust that shone silver-white in the diffuse moonlight.  Hubie’s cell-phone rang.  

“I’m not gonna answer,” he said.

“Who’s calling?” Marcy asked.

Hubie took the phone from his pocket.  It was his mother.  He pressed the button on the side of the phone to mute it.  “Some kind of sales call,” Hubie said.

Hubie looked along the paved jogging path.  Where the trail turned, a couple were huddled together on a bench kissing.  A nurse in scrubs walked wearily up the trail toward the ramp that led to the hospital parking lots.

“Voting is for the living,” Marcy said.  “I’m not even all that sure that old folks ought to be able to vote.”

“That’s crazy, Marcy,” Leon said.  “So where do you cut it off – after eighty you don’t get to vote? after seventy?  Fifty-five for Christ’s sake?  Where do you draw the line?”

“You should have an investment in the future,” she replied.

“‘Investment’?” Leon snorted, “that’s like saying you can’t vote unless you own a house or have a big 401K.  You know, I think that’s been tried.”

“That’s not at all what I mean,” Marcy said.  “If you’ve got one foot in the grave, what makes you qualified to vote.  It’s about a future that you’ll never see.”

Hubie looked at the dark trees greedy for the creek’s intermittent moisture, all of them a little wind-torn and ragged, clustering around the dry stream-bed.

“You know,” Hubie said, “people plant trees whose fruit they know they’ll never taste.  That’s true, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes,” Marcy said.

Leon said: “You plant an apple tree so your grandchildren can eat fruit that you’ll never see.”

“It makes you think,”  Hubie said.  “I’m not sure that we don’t owe something to the dead.  After all, we wouldn’t be here except for them.  They suffered for us.  They came before.”

“So what?” Marcy said.  “A vote is about the future.  You’re voting on what the future should be.”

“Make America great again,” Leon said.  

“That’s bullshit,” Marcy said.  “But you vote because of how you see the future.”

“But the future is made from the past,” Hubie said.  “The future is all about what has happened in the past.”

“The dead should rest in peace,” Marcy said.

Leon said: “Dude, go put that vote in the box.”

Hubie pondered the situation for a moment.  “You know, they talk about the dead not dying in vain,” Hubie said.

“That’s patriotic nonsense,” Marcy said.  “The dead don’t get a say.”

“Grandpa would die in vain if you don’t cast his vote,” Leon said.

“You’re putting a pretty high estimate on politics,” Marcy said.  “Grandpa didn’t live and breathe politics.  Some years, he didn’t cast a vote at all.  He didn’t care that much about it.”

“But this year,” Hubie said, “he wanted to vote.  I have his ballot in my car.”

“Grandpa always said that they were all crooks,” Marcy stated.

“Crooks and scoundrels,” Leon said.

“People put too much emphasis on politics,” Hubie said.  “There’s a lot more to life.”

“But this is the most consequential election of our lifetime,” Leon said.

“I suppose,” Marcy agreed.

“I don’t know what to do,” Hubie said.

Rotors battered the air overhead.  They looked up and saw a Medi-vac helicopter hovering above the hospital.  The chopper’s lights flashed red and it was so bright that Hubie and fat Leon and Marcy  all seemed dipped in blood.  Slowly, the helicopter lowered itself onto the roof of the hospital. 

5.

At the official polling places, where there were election judges, voters were given a little round adhesive sticker printed in red, white, and blue: I VOTED!  An election judge handed you this sticker after you had cast your vote.

Old Pioneer Cemetery had once been in the country, on a hill overlooking a village now absorbed into the city’s suburbs.  The white limestone grave markers were scattered along the prairie ridge, rows of dark green cypresses outlining the tract of land.  Some comedian had stuck I VOTED! decals on many of the ancient, weathered stones.  A news crew with camera filmed the gravestones marked with the stickers.  The dead, it was reported, had come out of their graves to vote.

People claimed intimidation at the polls.  The political parties each sent Poll Watchers to voting places and there were some clashes.  Anonymous callers claimed that thugs were abroad with kerosene and gas in jerry cans and that they were incinerating ballots in the drop-boxes.

Reports of voter fraud were managed by a bipartisan volunteer committee.  One Democrat and one Republican were assigned the duty of scanning surveillance footage taken at drop-box sites where voting irregularities were claimed to have occurred.

Randy and Melinda, both election watch volunteers, were handed a thumb drive by their Committee chair.  They took the thumb drive with a laptop computer into a small conference room at City Hall.  Both were wearing lanyards with badges showing their names and pictures.  

The conference room was brightly lit but airless, without windows and behind a heavy metal door.  It looked like a place where a crime suspect might be interrogated or, even, tortured into a confession.

In the real world, Melinda was a real estate agent.  She had dry, sharp, bright features – a pointed nose and pointed chin.  She was stylishly dressed and had a nice figure – it looked as if she spent weekends hiking in the mountains or whitewater kayaking.  Randy was overweight and had trouble keeping his shirt tucked in to his jeans.  He was a union steward at a factory that produced plastic parts used in the telecommunications industry.

Melinda opened the lap top, booted it up, and, then, looked at the complaint form, a single sheet of paper on which they were to write their observations, mark a box either “Confirmed” or “Not Confirmed”, and, then, both sign at the bottom.  

“Let’s see here,” Melinda said.  She read the complaint typed at the top of the form.

“Ballot Drop Box 132,” she read.  “Arapaho Lane.  It says: ‘Dead People Voting Here’.”

“How do dead people vote?” Randy asked.

“Damned if I know,” Melinda replied.  “I guess we’ll see.”

She plugged the thumb drive into the side of the laptop.  The image on the monitor screen was clear.  At the center of the picture, a metal drop box stood on asphalt shattered into pieces like a jigsaw puzzle.  The drop box gleamed and they could see the cold, bright reflection of a steel padlock latched onto a metal cable tied to the pole on which the camera was mounted.  There was some fish-eye distortion at the edges of the image where Randy and Melinda could see a couple of pick-up trucks parked at eccentric angles. 

“Pretty desolate location,” Melinda said.  

“I’m surprised that even the dead would hang out there,” Randy said.

“I guess we’ll see,” Melinda repeated.

A man wearing a black mask appeared at one corner of the screen.  He strolled up to ballot box and dropped an envelope in the slit in the steel container’s side.  The camera-angle showed the bald spot on top of his head.  Then, a bicycle rider appeared.  He was riding slowly and the bike seemed to wobble under him.  Without stopping, the rider approached the ballot box and slid his vote envelope into the gill on the side of the container.  A minute later, a small dumpy man with unkempt hair and a limp walked decisively up to the drop box, put his ballot in the slit, and, then, patted the container on its top as if it were a small child or a dog.  

Randy and Melinda watched for a while.  Nothing interesting happened.

“Don’t see any dead, do you?” Melinda asked.

“Nope,” Randy replied.

“Okay if I fast forward?”

“Yep,” Randy said.

She sped up the footage and the voters now were like divers appearing for a second, plunging across the screen, and, then, surfacing again at the edge before disappearing.  They watched in silence for a few minutes.

Suddenly, Randy thought he saw something. It was just a momentary flicker on the screen, something that he perceived only after the image had flashed across the monitor.  For an instant, Randy imagined that he saw a long procession of people gathered by the ballot box.  It was the solemn republic of the dead.  Randy glimpsed them standing humbly under the fish-eye lens of the camera: the poor tubercular dead, emaciated in their faded, old-fashioned clothes, pale mothers and fathers, an Indian wearing rags, some women in black long gowns made from crepe as if in mourning, business men with dust on their tophats and the shoulders of their frock coats.  

“I saw it,” Randy said.

“What?”

“I don’t know,” he said to Melinda.  “Run it back please.”

She reversed the direction of the thumb-drive’s feed. Then, they watched the pictures for ten minutes, slowing the imagery down to a crawl and, often, freezing the frame.

Whatever Randy had seen didn’t appear again on the lap-top screen.

“I don’t see anything,” Melinda said.

“Me neither,” Randy replied.

The Doll

 

1.

Reynolds was waiting out a girl.  He assumed that if he lingered long enough she would invite him to bed if only to get rid of him.  This wasn’t so much a strategy as an instinct.  But instincts are often wrong: a little after midnight, Reynolds found himself on the sidewalk in front of her apartment.  He checked the watch on his cell-phone and saw that he would have to run several blocks to reach the last train to the suburbs where he lived.  He put his head down and jogged along the gloomy side-street toward the boulevard.

That train was never on time and, so, Reynolds expected to make it to the light-rail platform before it was too late.  At the corner, he saw the station, a raised concrete pier under a metal awning standing between the lanes of the boulevard, a chain-link fence wrapped around the site. A stop light interrupted his dash and, when he jaywalked in the middle of the block, Reynolds found himself trapped against the mesh fence protecting the train-stop with vehicles zooming past him on the right-of way.  Beyond the fence, he saw the train skim over the tracks and slide to a stop next to the landing, the passengers standing in the compartments to exit, bracing for the slight recoil when the cars stopped.  People waiting under the metal awning got onto the train while others departed, some walking decisively to the exit, others blinking a little as they looked around and took stock of their surroundings.  Reynolds was dashing up the steps to the platform when the train shuddered, and, then, departed from the landing.  The doors were closed and the train was a series of brightly lit capsules hermetically sealed against the warm and humid night.

The boulevard was a central thoroughfare to this part of the city and the road, split by the light rail, ran between lakes and over a deep river gorge and through commercial and industrial districts for many miles.  There were disturbances a half-dozen miles away in a dilapidated neighborhood where poor people rented houses with ruinous roofs and broken chimneys over drooping zinc rain gutters, old ragged homes amidst shaggy unkempt trees and hedges.  Reynolds cursed under his breath and looked in the direction of the rioting, wondering if he could perceive some trace of the protests in the air or traffic rushing by on both sides of the light rail stop.  The sky was aglow with orange-amber light cast upward into the sky by the innumerable streetlamps.  This illumination was diffuse and didn’t come to any kind of discernible point and Reynolds couldn’t see any flame reflected against the clouds.  Sirens whined in the distance.  The cars and trucks zipped past, driving purposefully, Reynolds thought, as if under some kind of deadline rushing them either toward or away from the calamity.  He had felt imperilled as he skittered sideways between the live lanes of traffic and the steel fence.  But whether it was the civil unrest at the end of the boulevard and in another district of the city, or just the fact that most people on the roads this time of night were drunk or under of the influence, Reynolds couldn’t determine.  He wondered whether he would have noticed, in the passing vehicles, anything different at all if he hadn’t seen the rioting on the girl’s TV, the set turned to the local news, but without sound:  slow-moving crowds of people shadowy in the dim light made gestures of defiance and a store front spilled gouts of flame outward to shine in the broken glass on the sidewalk and a police car was burning next to tire-scuffed curb.  The camera kept showing the fiery police car as if it were the key necessary to unlock the secrets of the night.  

“No trains after this at all,” a voice said.  “The city’s under a curfew.”  

Reynolds was returning his unused public transportation card to his wallet.  He looked up.  A man about his age wearing a pale blue surgical mask was standing between two vertical girders that supported the metal awning.  He wore red sneakers that were conspicuously untied, jeans with frayed cuffs (too long for him), and a black tee-shirt with a slogan written across his chest: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.  

“I guess I’ll just have to hoof it,” Reynolds said.

As a matter of etiquette, Reynolds dug in his pant’s pocket and removed his mask.  It was butterfly-shaped and black with elastic ear-bands.  As he was putting the mask over the lower half of his face, the man on the light rail landing said: “I think I know you.”

As Reynolds arranged his mask, the man in the black tee-shirt pulled his face-covering down below his chin.  Reynolds saw that he was sweating and his chin, pointed and a little protuberant, glistened with moisture.

“You look familiar too,” Reynolds said.

“Pufahl,” the man said.  “We were in High School together, at Washington.”

Eight years had passed.  Reynolds remembered the name but not the face.  Pufahl had been a bully, a swaggering kid older than the other students with long sideburns and a nasty disposition.  He came from a large family of ruffians, was ignorant and proud of it.  Reynolds seemed to recall that Pufahl worked after school in an auto salvage yard and had a car cobbled together from wrecks, a big loud vehicle scabrous with peeling paint-primer.  In order to impress a girl, Pufahl had once tried to head-butt Reynolds, unsuccessfully as it happened – he had closed his eyes as he tried to slam his forehead into Reynolds and missed him entirely.  This embarrassed the bully and, so, after calling Reynolds a name, he just pushed him backward with both hands punching at the other kid’s shoulders blades.  Reynolds didn’t recall whether the blow had knocked his down – possibly he had fallen with the girl giggling at him, but this wasn’t clear.  He remembered that Pufahl’s hands and wrists were all scabbed over welding burns.

“Yes, I know you too,” Reynolds told Pufahl.  

“It’s good to see you, dude,” Pufahl said.  

Reynolds looked around for some exit other than the crosswalk where Pufahl was leading him.  There was no other way to leave the train stop.

On the sidewalk, Pufahl said: “Crazy night.  They got half the city burning out there.”  He gestured vaguely down the boulevard.  

“I saw it on the news,” Reynolds said.

“Crazy night,” Pufahl said.  “We gotta stick together.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah,” Pufahl replied.  “Roving bands of looters.”  

Reynolds noticed that Pufahl’s surgical mask was stained with some irregular brownish spots under the cone of his nose.  The lower edge of the mask seemed to be moist.  On the sidewalk, he stooped to tie his tennis shoes.

“May have to run,” Pufahl said, “And I don’t want these mothers trippin’ me up.”    

2.

The window air-conditioner in the girl’s apartment chugged and sputtered and Reynolds could hear water trickling inside the unit, drizzling down the brownstone wall of the building.  She lived in two rooms with a closet-sized toilet four flights of steps above the sidewalk.  On ground level, the entrance was crowded with bicycles, a half dozen of them chained to a steel pole that anchored the cast-iron banisters on the steps leading to the apartments.  The bikes were parked together so that it was hard to navigate a way between them and Reynolds had wondered if this obstacle constituted a fire-hazard.  The steps and landings were filthy, black with grit tracked into building in the winter-time, and, as he climbed the stairs, Reynolds’ encountered beer cans strewn in the way and some empty plastic grocery sacks flitting underfoot like pale moths.  The windows in the stairwell were protected by metal mesh and were so dirty that the twilight outside penetrated only as a smudged faint glow.  Reynolds noticed that most of the lights in the sockets along the steps and at the landings were broken.

The girl was unconventional, at least, so it seemed to Reynolds.  He knew her from a convenience store down the street from the office block where he worked.  Her earlobes were deformed and droopy from large gage piercings and she had a kind of steel clip driven through her right eyebrow.  She had painted her hair orange and green, a fuzzy tangle teased up to stand in columns over her skull.  The walls of her place were decorated with posters for local bands, tattered placards that were scarred with staple marks where the cardboard had once been fixed to utility poles or the bulletin boards in record shops.  A small TV was set on her kitchen counter, beneath some old white-washed cupboards.  The TV was tuned to the news with the sound muted: protests and riots, ambulances escaping down long avenues, broken glass and people merrily looting while others in the crowd held up their cell-phones like badges to film the chaos.  

Reynolds had come at the girl’s invitation.  She said that he could visit her and that they would “hang out” together.  Reynolds had brought a four-pack of hard Seltzer.  On the table between them, the girl had set a single candle sprouting from a wax-smeared wine bottle.  She had opened another bottle of wine set next to the candle.

They talked about local bands.  She was very knowledgeable and dropped names.  It seemed that she knew some of the musicians.  The apartment, despite its tiny size was warm.  He could see her bed shoved up against the wall beyond the opening into the next room.  She kept her garments neatly folded in cardboard boxes that had once contained bottles of liquor.  In the dark crack next to her refrigerator, Reynolds glimpsed a mouse-trap baited with a gobbet of peanut butter.  When he went to the toilet, the sound of his urine splashing in the bowl was loud, echoing through the tiny apartment.  The bathtub was hidden behind an opaque plastic curtain.  A hamper of dirty clothes, mostly underwear it seemed, was pushed under the little porcelain sink hanging from the wall.

The conversation turned to the protests.  “Enough is enough,” the girl said.  “If the cops stop you, they have all the power and you have none.  That’s just the way it is.”  Reynolds nodded.  “You have to do what they tell you,” she added.  “What kind of idiot resists the police and gets killed for it.”  Reynolds nodded again.  “You’d have to be a fucking idiot,” she said.  She stood up and opened a drawer in the cupboard beside her kitchen sink.  Sharp blades glittered there, catching on their edges the flickering yellow light from the candle.  She lifted out a small pistol.  “I know how to use it,” she said.  “My dad taught me.”  She put the pistol up to her heart, pressing it against her left breast – she was wearing a black tank top.  Then, she set the gun back among the knives and pushed shut the drawer.  

She had a small CD player wired to a black Bose speaker.  She played some of her favorite tunes for him.  Notwithstanding the small size of the stereo equipment, the sound filled the apartment and reverberated in the walls and Reynolds thought that the volume might even upset the mousetrap and trigger it into snapping shut.  On the last song, she stood up and danced a little, swaying her hips and shaking her breasts.  She invited Reynolds to dance with her.  They had only enough space to slowly turn themselves around in circles.  When he reached for her shoulders to draw him to her, the girl pushed him away, giggling a little and opening her eyes very wide.  Reynolds thought that she had beautiful eyes, big and bright and staring like those embedded in the head of a doll. 

It didn’t seem that things were advancing.  Reynolds suggested that they go out and walk along the lake.  A big oval lake stood in the middle of the neighborhood about four blocks from her apartment.  The air conditioner wasn’t keeping up with the heat in the apartment and Reynolds knew that it would be cooler outside.  The little flare of the candle made an orb of heat at the level of their faces on the table between them and they were both sweating.

“I used to like to go walking in the cemetery,” the girl said.  A narrow one-way lane encircled the lake.  A big Victorian-era cemetery full of weeping angels and small marble mausoleums with stained glass transoms occupied the near shore of the lake, stretching back from the beacg and the terrace where the road ran toward wooded heights.  Reynolds knew that there was a chapel with a dome like an Arabian mosque standing among the graves.  Many famous people were buried there – governors of the State and senators and local artists and musicians.  

“We should go there,” Reynolds said.  “No,” she replied, “the gates are all padlocked shut.  They close the place even before the sun sets.  It’s because of that thing that happened.”

Reynolds was in the mood for a spooky story.  He asked her what had happened.

“It was awful,” she said.  “A little girl from a very wealthy family drowned in the lake.  I think it was last summer.  They buried her in the family mausoleum overlooking the water.  But someone broke into the grave and took her body.  They haven’t found it yet.”

“That’s terrible,” Reynolds said.

“The mother went crazy.  She had to be hospitalized because the body was stolen.”

“Who do you suppose would do such a thing?”

“I can’t imagine,” the girl said. “It’s terrible and it ruins the cemetery for me.  If I go jogging down there, on the sidewalk around the lake, I think about that little girl and her mom and it just makes me so sad.”

“It’s a terrible thing,” Reynolds repeated.

The girl stood up and shook herself a little as if to unravel the bad thoughts that had suddenly entangled her.  She put on another song and danced for a while.  She closed her eyes and seemed sealed within herself.  Seated at the little round table, Reynolds watched her sway back and forth.  Her lean body cast a tall, wobbling shadow on the walls.  On the TV, the protesters had attached iron cables to a statue of the Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind, and they were tugging at the bronze woman who stood upright on a plinth of pale stone, her mouth open as she were singing or crying out in pain.  Apparently, the people in the crowd were under the impression that Jenny Lind had been a slave owner.

Reynolds looks at this watch.  Things weren’t progressing.  And it was warm in the apartment and smelled of wine and curdled butter.  Making love in this kind of humidity would be repulsive, Reynolds thought.  But he was willing to make an effort and so he thought about whether he should move from the rigid steel folding chair where he sat to embrace her.  Some force held him back, pinned to the chair.

“We should go out for a walk,” Reynolds said.

The girl opened her eyes as if she had been in a trance.  She put on another CD, something more mellow.

“Do you want to smooch?” she asked.

Reynolds said: “If it’s okay with you.”

She came to his side and sat on his lap.  They kissed for awhile.  Her breath was faintly foul.

When he tried to slip his hand under her tank top, the girl pushed him away.

“Not yet,” she whispered.  She went to her refrigerator, opened the freezer compartment, and put a couple of cubes of ice in her styrofoam cup of red wine.

The girl wanted to talk to him about the difference between men and women and a relationship that she had ended with a musician that she admired.  Reynolds indulged her.  When she went to the toilet, Reynolds quickly put on another CD so that he would not have to hear what she was doing in the bathroom.  She came out with her hands dripping wet.  She danced by herself again.

Reynolds looked at his watch.  “If I don’t leave now,” he said, “I’ll miss my train and, then, I’ll have to hike out to the suburbs.”

He expected her to tell him not to worry about leaving and that he could stay the night.

“You had better go,” she said.  “It’s a quarantine you know.  And if you stay, you may have to hunker down with me for the next two weeks. I don’t think either one of us wants that.”

Reynolds looked around the tiny apartment.  “I’d best he going,” he said.  He kissed her on the cheek and, then, rushed to the door and bounded down the steps.  

3.

It was, in fact, much cooler outside.  Pufahl said that he would shake Reynold’s hand but that this was not allowed due to the virus.  A faint smell of burning excited the breeze.  Sometimes, when the leaves in the trees on the side-streets rustled, Reynolds thought he could smell the nearby lake, green with algae, a heavy wet odor like fish or earthworms on the sidewalk after a thunderstorm.  

They walked together in the direction of another avenue on which Reynolds could hike to his apartment about four miles away.

Reynolds asked Pufahl what he was doing for a living.

“I work at an auto body place,” Pufahl said.  “Go out to clubs a lot at night, partying all the time, dude.”

“That sounds great,” Reynolds said.

“How far do you have to go?” Pufahl asked him.

Reynolds said that he lived across town.

“You’ll never make it,” Pufahl said.  “It’s a curfew.  The cops are out and picking people up.  Or you’ll run into some Black Lives Matter dudes.  That would be a bad thing.”

“I’ll be careful,” Reynolds told him.

“No, dude, you gotta crash at my place,” Pufahl said.  “It’s just a block away.  I can give you a ride tomorrow.”

“How about tonight?”

“No can do,” Pufahl said.  “I got some problems with my license and if I venture out and get pulled-over...well, man, I’m fucked.  Really fucked.  Tomorrow, things will settle down and I’ll drive you home first thing.”

“Can’t we make it tonight?”

“Not with this curfew,” Pufahl said.  “It’s too risky.”

“It’s okay,” Reynolds said.  “I’ll just walk.”

“No, you gotta go through some sketchy neighborhoods.  The tribes are all out tonight.  You’ll never make it.”

“It seems pretty peaceful to me,” Reynolds said.

“Peaceful here,” Pufahl told him.  “But the brothers are pulling down the whole city.  You best stay at my place tonight.”

Reynolds thought of the long dark streets and the shadowy parks and the bridge over the deep black gorge that he would have to traverse.

“I don’t know...” he said.

“I insist, dude,” Pufahl replied.  “You know, I insist.  I didn’t treat you so good in High School and I feel I sort of owe you.”

“Don’t mention it,” Reynolds said.

Pufahl turned and they walked along an alleyway between fragrant lilac bushes.  Old garages and sheds squatted next to the rough asphalt underfoot.  Somewhere a dog barked.  

4.

Pufahl lived in the basement of an old house near a tiny park.  Across the street, Reynolds could see a swing set with chains chattering a little in the wind and the metal blade of a slide.  A single lamp illumined a statue of a man in bronze coattails playing a violin over an intersection where three sidewalks met.

Concrete steps led down to a private entrance on the side of the house.  Along the front curb, two old cars were parked, one of them missing a wheel and supported on a cement block.  Big sepulchral stone urns flanked both sides of the sidewalk leading toward the porch and the upper levels of the house 

Dead leaves filled the groove leading to the basement door.  Their feet crushed them.  Pufahl unlocked the steel door and they went inside.

A stack of pizza delivery boxes, almost waist high, stood next to the entrance.  The apartment was cluttered with various sorts of tools, drills and torque wrenches in black plastic cases and a big battery charger on wheels with electrodes trailing on the floor.  Some heavy coats hung from hooks and there was a huge plasma TV screen set against the window wells opening to the outside of these rooms.  Heavy rubber boots lined one wall and there was a latex cape and some work gloves piled in an alcove above the footwear.  The kitchen was disorderly, stacked with dishes in the sink, and another column of pizza delivery boxes piled up on the floor, tilted sideways as if about to come tumbling down.

It smelled as if a bird had died and been mummified on a windowsill or as if there was a mouse petrified somewhere in a mouse-trap.  Reynolds thought about the mousetrap next to the girl’s refrigerator and he shuddered a little.

Through an open door, Reynolds saw Pufahl’s bed unmade, a rickety contraption of metal posts and sagging wire.  A doll, about half life-size, was sprawled across a rocking chair next to the bed.  On the wall, there were a couple of posters advertising horror films.  

“Nice place,” Reynolds said.

Pufahl opened the refrigerator.  On a plate painted with a blue Chinese scene, Reynolds saw some wedges of pizza.

“You want a beer, dude?”

“Okay,” Reynolds said.

Pufahl handed him a beer.  “You can have a slice of cold ‘za,” Pufahl said.

“I’ll pass on that,” Reynolds said.

“We can have that tomorrow,” Pufahl said.  “Breakfast of champions.”

Pufahl asked Reynolds if he wanted to smoke some weed.  “Okay,” Reynolds said.

Pufahl went into the bedroom and rummaged around in a little cabinet between the doll and his bed.  He brought a small wooden casket into the room where Reynolds was sitting on a threadbare davenport facing the big TV.  Pufahl retrieved a remote from between the cushions on the sofa and turned on the TV.  The police precinct building near the protests was on fire.  Shadowy figures staggered through smashed storefront carrying booty in their hands.

“It’s wild, isn’t it?” Pufahl said.

He rolled a joint and they smoked.

Time dilated.  Long silences intervened between words.  The colors on the TV set seemed blinding.  Reynolds thought that the riot was now being broadcast in three-dimensions and the chaos and looting seemed to be invading the living room.  The bonfires lit the mob in strange ways.  People seemed to be darting to and fro with their heads on fire.

Reynolds’ belly cramped-up.  He said he had to use the toilet.  Pufahl showed him through the bedroom to a little stall behind a old wooden door.  It was all white in the toilet and the tiles sprayed clinical light in Reynold’s eyes so that he looked monstrous in the smeared mirror.  He pulled the door shut and barely got his pants down in time.

As he sat on the toilet, Reynolds saw a kitty litter box, clean and raked, under the sink.  The bathtub looked like a sarcophagus and there was a grimy ring around its edges.

It was hard to judge the passage of time.  Reynolds wasn’t sure if he was occupying the toilet for a very long time or just a matter of minutes.  The toilet paper wasn’t on the spool but sitting upright on the side of the sink.

When he came out of the toilet, Reynolds was facing Pufahl’s untidy bed and the doll slumped on the rocking chair.  The doll looked very old, an antique, and seemed to be in poor condition, parts of its waxen face had spalled away to reveal some black substance under the pale skin.  The doll’s eyes were shut and its head was haloed by a bonnet of pale, blonde hair.  It was dressed in a sort of pinafore and had tiny withered-looking hands.

Reynolds went into the room with the TV.

“You must have a cat?” Reynolds asked.

“I had one.  But I had to get rid of it when I got my doll,” Pufahl said.

“I see,” Reynold’s replied.

“You took a real royal shit in my lavatory,” Pufahl said.

“Sorry about that.”

“No problem.  None at all, Dude,” Pufahl said.

The flames and the looters danced on the TV screen.

“You know, I feel I should apologize to you,” Pufahl said.  “I mean I didn’t treat you that great when we were in High School.  It’s something I gotta make amends for.”

“Amends?”

“You know, like in AA, one of the twelve steps.  A man’s gotta make amends,” Pufahl said.

Reynolds nodded.

“I’ve don’t a lot of very bad things,” Pufahl said.  “I’m glad I met a friend tonight.”

“I’m glad too,” Reynolds said.

They watched TV is silence.  Pufahl went into the bedroom, stroked the hair on his doll, and, then, used the toilet.  He kept the door open as he urinated.

Returning to the living room, Pufahl said: “Man, it’s rank in there.”

“I’m sorry,” Reynolds said.

“No, dude, I’m the one who’s sorry.  So sorry.  Just so sorry,” Pufahl said.  

“It’s all forgotten,” Reynolds told him.

Pufahl had pulled his mask down to his bewhiskered throat.  His eyes looked wet.

“So you’ve sort of had a tour,” Pufahl said.

“Sort of,” Reynolds replied.

“Well, you’ve seen my toilet and my bedroom and the stuff in my bedroom and everything right,” Pufahl said.

“I guess so,” Reynolds said.

“Well I want you to know that I’m really sorry for what I’ve done,” Pufahl told him.  “I’m sorry for how I treated you in High School and I’m sorry about the rest of it too.”

“It’s okay,” Reynolds told him.

“There’s a reckoning,” Pufahl continued.  “There has to be a reckoning.  And you gotta make amends.  That’s what I learned in AA.”

“I understand,” Reynold’s said.

Pufahl reached behind his back with his big right hand and lifted a large shiny gun to his head.

“Just tell everyone I’m sorry,” he said.  Then, he pulled the trigger and fell over.  

Reynold’s yanked out his cell-phone but found that its battery was exhausted.  He couldn’t even call 911.  He looked around the house but didn’t see any sign of a land line.  Perhaps, Pufahl had a phone in one of his pockets but Reynolds was afraid to touch the body.

He stood up and walked briskly to the door.  Then, outside, he ran down the sidewalk toward an all-night convenience store about four blocks away.  The clerk blinked at him nervously.  Reynolds was without a mask and his cheeks were spattered with blood.

“There’s been a shooting,” Reynolds told the clerk.

The kid said: “You can take anything you want.”

“No, no,” Reynolds cried.  “Let me use a phone.”

He was on hold for a long time.  The dispatcher sounded weary and irritable.  “There’s been a shooting,” Reynolds said.

“What do you want me to do about it?” the dispatcher asked him.

“A shooting,” Reynold’s insisted.

“There’s been a lot of shootings,” the dispatcher said.

Reynolds put down the phone.  He went into the toilet and wiped the blood off his face.

He walked home through alleyways, hiding from the cops that sometimes roared around street corners heading toward the rioting.  Part of the way, Reynolds limped along under a pall of acrid black smoke.  The sky was brightening in the east when he came to his apartment.      

      

An Eventful Convention

 

Rogers attended a business convention.  The gathering was held in a coastal city, one of those places with a charming inner harbor but no actual sea shore.  Rogers, who was said to be a good father and family man, made a detour to his mother-in-law’s home to drop off his two children.  With his wife, who was six months pregnant, he drove to the town and registered at the convention hotel, a skyscraper with green fluted glass walls and a restaurant well-known for its seafood at its apex.  

The convention began with a plenary session, scheduled for the morning after his arrival.  Then, there were “networking” and “break-out” sessions after lunch.  A dance in the grand ballroom was appointed for that night and, then, there was another meeting of the entire group scheduled for the next morning, commencing at an hour decently late because it was anticipated that most of the participants would be hungover.  A famous figure in the Administration had been hired to address inspirational remarks to the assembly.  Then, there were to be farewells and the convention would be adjourned a little before the noon hour.  Although the ostensible purpose for the assembly was educational, in fact, the proceedings were designed to allow business representatives maximum access to their customers so that they could buy them drinks and expensive meals and, otherwise, bestow small favors in order to ingratiate themselves.  The convention was deemed important, but not too important, by Rogers’ boss – he was vacationing in the Cayman Islands with his new wife and said that he would “catch-up” with Rogers while the assembly was under way.  

On the first night, Rogers skipped the welcome banquet.  He met a customer quite by accident while waiting for elevator and said that his pregnant wife was too tired from traveling to attend the banquet.  But, in fact, his wife had made reservations at a famous restaurant locating in a renovated warehouse on one of the quays.  The inner harbor had narrow cobblestone streets lined with expensive boutiques and small picturesque bars, some of them said to date back to the previous century.  There was a small contretemps when Rogers sighted the customer to whom he had lied on the other side of the bar waiting for his table and, when Rogers’ reservation was announced, the maitre de said his name in a loud, even brazen, tone.  But the two men pretended not to see one another and all went well.  The other fellow seemed to be with a woman who was not his wife and, so, it was best to avoid an encounter that night.

The sessions the next day were tedious but by mid-afternoon everyone was half-drunk and the seminar rooms were mostly empty, only young people were there still earnestly listening to the speakers.  Most of the more experienced attendees were in the corridors or clustered around the stations selling drinks.  Rogers thought things were going rather well and made some new business contacts.  An important customer asked Rogers if they might leave the convention hotel and continue drinking in one of the ancient inner harbor taverns.  Rogers said that this was a fine idea.  The customer wanted to pick up women. He had come “stag” to the convention and was planning to avoid the dance – “you know, I’m not much of a dancer myself,” Rogers replied to him.  Of course, Rogers said that the drinks and dinner would be his treat.  

At the tavern, they drank a pitcher of grog made with Bacardi rum and other cordials.  The drink was named after one of the hurricanes that vexed this part of the coast and it was a powerful decoction.  For some reason, Rogers hadn’t had occasion to drink during the last six months and so the booze had a disastrous effect on him.  He felt sick and went into the toilet to vomit.  Then, the customer said that he wanted to smoke a cigar and, so, Rogers used his credit card to buy two Dominican cigars.  The customer smoked his cigar in a wet alleyway between sinister walls of crumbling brikc and mortar.  A light drizzle was falling. Rogers put his own cigar in his breast pocket, discovering in that way a bone from the barbecued ribs they had eaten a few hours earlier.  They went from bar to bar.  On one side-street, they watched several men mugging a tourist.  The tourist fell onto the wet cobblestones and the muggers kicked him in the head.  Rogers found himself groping a fat blonde who smelled of patchouli.  He had lost his customer somewhere.  

The inner city streets were an intricate maze and Rogers had difficulty finding his way back to the  hotel.  Sometimes, he could see the tower of green glass, a slippery-looking shard embedded in the dark rainy sky, but there seemed to be no way to reach the place.

At last, Rogers stumbled into the lobby of the hotel.  An elevator with glass sides whisked two men falling all over one another up to the rooms above.  Rogers’ boss and his new wife were checking in at the reception desk.  They seemed bedraggled and worn.  Rogers’ boss said to him: “Long night I guess.”  “Looks the same for you too,” Rogers said, immediately regretting that he had, perhaps, insulted his boss’ wife who was ordinarily quite glamorous.  A softly purring escalator lifted them up to the mezzanine where the ballroom was located.  The debris from the party was scattered across the big room and some music stands were still located on a dais at the head of the hall.  Confetti and streamers were strewn about and there were smashed glasses on the floor and some chairs knocked over.  “Looks like quite a brawl,” Rogers’ boss said.  His wife smiled.  She asked Rogers if he had received the little gift that they had sent to his room.  “I don’t think so,” Rogers said, but he wasn’t certain.  

The corridors in the hotel were broad and people were still padding about, reeking of booze and barefoot.  Rogers’ suddenly recalled that his wife had come to the convention with him.  Presumably, she was enraged at having been abandoned.  Rogers couldn’t recall the room number.  He walked slowly up and down the hallways hoping that one of the doors would trigger something in his memory.  A door was ajar and seemed familiar to him – he pushed it open and saw a woman sitting on a bed with dark, accusing eyes.  She seemed startled by him.  Rogers didn’t think that she was his wife, but wasn’t wholly sure and, so, raising his hand to show that he meant no harm, he stepped across the threshold.  The woman muttered at him and gestured toward the telephone as if she were about to summon aid.  Rogers backed out of the chamber and stood in the hall.  

Perhaps, he was on the wrong floor.  He found a stair-well.  Up or down? Rogers wondered.  He went down – the stairwell wasn’t air-conditioned and it was warm and stank of spilled booze.  The floor below seemed somehow more familiar to Rogers although, in fact, it looked exactly like the corridor and rows of locked doors above.  Rogers thought that he should call his wife and ask her for the room number, but, then, he remembered that this had all happened many years ago, before cell-phones were invented.  So there was no way to place a call and, in any event, he expected his wife to be distraught with anger at him.

At last, he found his room.  His luggage was on the floor beside the bed.  There was no trace of his wife.  Someone had spilled some red fluid on the floor by the toilet.  The patch of liquid was about four feet square and a pale color, like diluted tomato juice.  Rogers wondered whether it was cranberry juice or, possibly, red wine.

It was pretty apparent that Rogers’ wife had fled to her mother’s house.  Rogers knew that his marriage was wrecked and that this was the beginning of the many years of catastrophes that would afflict him.  On the pillow of the unmade bed, a tin of sugar cookies from the Cayman Islands sat unopened.  The tin was decorated with small, smiling alligators.  The cookies hadn’t yet been opened.  The stain on the floor near the toilet troubled Rogers.  He moved the cookies to the night-stand and lay down in the bed, fully clothed.  His head ached and, when he shut his eyes, he saw the puddle of red glowing as if it were radioactive.  Someone would have to clean up that mess.   

Via Crucis

 

Abertees is eleven miles northwest of the Minot Air Force Base.  More precisely, the gravel road to Abertees runs for eleven miles from the where the black-top ends at the westernmost gate to the AFB.  A rancher talking too loudly in a cowboy-bar in Minot said that there were some folk gathered out there, doomsday types, plotting sabotage against the base.  This kind of thinking could corrupt airman at the base.  A report was made and Jordan was told to take an MP vehicle and drive out there for some low-level recon.  In the last month, the western fence had been breached in a couple of locations, the chain-links sheared apart, and there was suspicion that anti-federal cells were active in the area.  The commanding officer told Jordan: “We want to head off mischief of that sort.”

Jordan thought that he should pack a lunch.  There were probably no cafes or fast food places where he was going.  He thought that he would stop at his quarters and make himself a sandwich.  But, then, someone called him on his cell-phone, however, and he was distracted.  

The AFB’s footprint is a little irregular on its western flank and the road crossed fenced government land, tracts extending out beyond the principal perimeter.  There were no checkpoints, just cattle guards made of metal bars crossing the gravel and tall fences so that Jordan drove onto AFB land for a thousand yards, passing the perimeter fence, and, then, off again.  The terrain was grey under grey skies, dry-land wheat growing on the barren hills that had once been sand-dunes, it seemed, hidden under the vegetation rippling out to the horizon like the waves of a choppy sea.  Marshes hid between the knuckles of hill with a little open water that the wind was stirring like soup in a pot.  The slopes too steep for machine cultivation were planted in hay and Jordan saw some cattle in the distance.  A braided creek ran along the side of the gravel road, no trees growing along its switchbacks and, so, open and exposed to the enormous skies.  At one point, Jordan passed a seamed concrete pad with a Christmas tree of pipes and meters – it was a capped-off oil well from which the pumping equipment had been removed.  

Heavy trucks had broken the asphalt into a mosaic of black chips.  The road followed a draw into the hills, running beside the twisting stream that was naked to the sky, dark water flowing among reefs of gravel and undercut banks where the creek had eroded a black channel under the sod.  Unlike the stream, the two-lane blacktop ran arrow-straight, seeking out the highest point on the highest treeless ridge.  An oculus had opened in the eastern sky and some silvery rays of light shot down to sweep across the grasslands, tinting the crumpled hills blonde where the beams came to earth.

From the hilltop, Jordan could see Abertees below, the place displayed like a diagram on the wrinkled winter-wheat and hay fields.  Some trees wrapped around the side of an oval pond that looked icy with slate-grey waters.  In the trees, Jordan glimpsed a few houses, rusting harrows and other implements, farm wreckage abandoned in wooded ravines fanning down the side of a barren bluff that stood behind the town.  The sphinx-shaped hill seemed to nudge the village with its pale tic-tac-toe grid of streets into the cold lake.  A column of tempest-shredded utility poles marched in single file down to the hamlet.  Across the lake, a gravel pit was scored into the hillside with a rickety-looking tower with conveyor drags like spider-legs set in the center of the crater.  A rich man’s house with beige towers and a separate pole-barn for cars overlooked the town from a hilltop beside the gravel pit.  The edges of the lake were bare – the sheet of water just tucked itself under the neighboring hillsides.  A green patch of flame-shaped cypresses marked a small cemetery stuck like a band aid on the side of the crouching-beast bluff.  

Abertees didn’t look like much of anything and, strangely, the closer he approached, the less there was to see.  An obelisk-shaped grain elevator along the road leading down to the town was abandoned, leaking rotting corn from its sagging walls.  Several of the houses in the village were also deserted, half-hidden behind thickets of unruly brush.  Where the road crossed the grid in the center of the hamlet, a couple of brick commercial buildings were boarded shut.  The coop gas station ran on credit card only, just an island of pumps in vacant lot.  Next to a couple of burned out houses, Jordan saw ramshackle trailers, scarcely fit for camping.  An elementary school occupying a block near the intersection was pierced by trees growing up through the broken roof.  Beyond the intersection, the two-land highway turned to gravel and became an undisciplined scrawl across the grasslands.  

No one was around, although several of the derelict houses had old pickup trucks near them.  At the end of a dirt lane, a bar with a curved brick facade and opaque glass bricks for windows seemed to be open and three trucks stood next to it.  If the place was full of dooms-day preppers or militia men, Jordan didn’t see any evidence of them.  He turned onto another side-street that led to a Catholic church were the lawn had been mown recently, a brick nave topped by a squat bell-tower where a fissure cleft in the mortar was green with crawling ivy.  The church stood in front of a hollow in the hillside where Jordan saw a path and some big urns overflowing with livid roses.  A figure in black was walking in the garden.  This was as good a place as any to nose around.  Jordan parked the MP vehicle near the walk leading to the church’s front door.  

The door gave a little when he pulled, as if chained somehow inside, but it didn’t open.  He walked around the building, passing a couple of graves with low granite markers in the shadow of the walls.  A few split logs had been pounded into the gentle sloping hillside to make some rustic steps leading to a cobblestone path.  A metal arch over the path was marked with iron letters that said WAY OF THE CROSS.  On a tree, just beyond the archway, someone had nailed a yellow sign lettered with the words: “You’re on camera – smile!” next to single staring eye.  Pots of roses stood at intervals along the path.   

Jordan thought he would catch up with the person walking in the woods.  The trail went slightly uphilling zigzagging between old trees that drooped as if in exhaustion over the path.  At each angle in the cobblestone path, a small hut made from greenish fieldstone hunched over a shadowy niche.  A pane of plexi-glass sheltered terra-cotta statues lodged in the alcove and painted pink and red and green and robin’s egg blue.  The window opening into the first station was wet with condensation and blurred the figures behind.  Some Gothic letters spelled out words that Jordan couldn’t read – it was a foreign language although he saw the name JESU among the unintelligible words.  In the niche, Jesus was led like a donkey on a tether away from a man in a red toga seated on a throne.  In the background, a column was shown in bas relief next to a pale dome. 

The path led slightly uphill between glades of cottonwood trees with charred-looking bark like crocodile leather.  Jordan didn’t see anyone on the trail ahead of him.  The stations on the way of the cross were surrounded by disheveled-looking box-elder trees grouped around the stone shelters.  Cold winds had already sheared off the leaves the treetops and they lay withered and brittle on the path.  But lower branches, protected by the hollow, were still green.

Each hut was marked with a cross embedded in the mortar above the window shielding the figures.  Jesus wore a white robe and his pink feet were barefoot and vulnerable.  His beard was camel-colored, an incongruous shadow on his soft jaw.  Although several of the stations showed him falling, the drapery of his sculpted white robe was inviolate, unbesmirched.  In one display, the savior encountered several women whose faces were strangely white and inert.  Each station bore words in barbarous-looking letters that Jordan couldn’t decipher. The savior’s torturers had sharp profiles like mallets or axes and their eyes were dark gashes in the terra cotta.  They tore Christ’s clothing from his torso that was stained by little curlicue rivulets of scarlet.  The savior’s breast, torn and bleeding, hung like a shield from the cross and his girlish face was turned aside, mouth contorted with suffering.  When mourners peeled Jesus from the place where he had been nailed, his body seemed unnaturally elongated and boneless, a ribbon of pale flesh hanging like a limp banner from the splintery wood.  The background was now black and riven with a painted bolt of lightning and pillow-soft skull rested at the base of the cross.  The story ended with shadowy niche in which Jesus rested on his back on a grey slab, a frieze of grief-stricken women caressing his naked body.              

The trail made a dog-leg from Christ’s entombment to a small chapel built like a kiln from yellow brick.  Narrow stained glass windows opened into the structure just below its small bronze cupola.  Perhaps, the figure that he had glimpsed on the trail had entered the chapel.  Jordan tried the door and it yielded inward into a dark octagonal space.  The air smelled of mildew and there was an altar against one of the walls above which Jesus was being killed again.  Some women stood under his corpse, featureless like half-melted candles.  There was no one in the dark, evil-smelling chamber.  

Outside, Jordan heard a faint trickle of running water.  A few yards uphill, another fieldstone shed stone amidst bright red sumac.  Next to the shed, water was gathering in a tub-shaped trough and, then, flowing down a brick-lined channel next to the path.  Jordan walked to the shed and looked into it.

The cross on its ceramic plaque embedded in the mortar above the case’s window had slipped sideways so that it showed as an X.  Someone had fired a bullet through the plexi-glass and there was a round wound in that material, big enough to inspect with your finger.  Below the display, hooked and barbed letters spelled out the words HIMMEL AUF ERDE.  Jordan said this to himself, slowly sounding out the letters.  

Behind the plexi-glass, the tableaux seemed to show a grotto far underground.  A mass of stalactites dangled down from the arch over the figures.  Looking more closely, Jordan saw that the protuberant formations were in fact angels like tumors with vestigial fins falling toward the earth like a hail of bombs.  A mighty oxen and a great lion were both tamed to the yoke and hitched together to pull a sort of chariot.  On the chariot, a figure stood with hands upraised like pale tentacles.  The bullet shot through the glass must have hit the figure because it was headless.  On the brawny shoulder of the bullock, an eagle perched, bearing in its talons a pale swath of banner, also inscribed with illegible words.  A raven perched on the lion’s mane with its beak partly open as if about to speak.

Except for the trickle of water flowing from the battered-looking stone sarcophagus, it was very still.  Even the wind had ceased its whisper in the trees.

Far away, a dull concussion sounded.  

Then, something honked in the air.  At first, Jordan thought it was geese flying overhead and squeaking above like a rusty hinge.  But the sound, twisting through a convolute of some kind, became a sky-trumpet.  The blare sounded overhead like scarlet plumage blown through the sky.  

***

Across the waters of the cold lake at Abertees (a ghost town for all intents and purposes), within the crater of the gravel pit, Jerome sat in the cab of a two-ton truck and wondered whether the battery would fire the engine and, so, he muttered something under his breath, an incantation for good luck as he gazed across the hood of the big vehicle to the snowplow mounted there like the tusk of a mighty beast, a heavy iron blade forged like a weapon.   The truck was parked on a slab of concrete next to the crusher machine with its web of conveyors all rising to a pinnacle overhead and there were conical piles of stone sorted according to dimension (pea-size, river-rock stones, heaps of cobbles as big as loaves of bread) next to the vehicle that Jerome was attempting to start.  The engine turned over slowly at first, but, then, caught and the hydraulics engaged, suddenly completing the gesture that the machine had been implementing when the truck was shut down a month before, dropping the heavy snow plow’s iron blade onto the concrete with a loud bang, a sound like thunder that spread away from the two-ton truck and ricocheted off the steep walls of the quarry and, then, rolled across the grey waters of the lake into Abertees (almost a ghost town).  Jerome put the truck in gear, forgetting for a moment about the heavy iron blade and, as the truck lurched forward, the metal plow scraped against the cement, striking up a flare of flying orange sparks at the same time that the metal squealed, at first, a raw squawking sound, and, then, a high pitched note, a tone a little like a trumpet sounding a fanfare and this noise whirled again around the quarry and echoed from its sheer walls, and, then, because it had nowhere else to go, swept across the still waters of the tarn into Abertees (more or less a ghost town) and, then, Jerome stopped the vehicle, engaging the hydraulics to lift the blade, and climbed out of the two-ton truck, the engine still running (he was worried that if he shut it off, the truck wouldn’t start), and walked a dozen yards to the utility trailer near the crusher machine.  Inside the trailer, Jerome poured himself a cup of hot coffee from his thermos, its insulated metal sides decorated with a red and black tartan pattern and it seemed to him that his sense of smell, in recent years impaired by sinus infections and allergies, revived, then, in the most extraordinary way, because the smell of his coffee was rich and dark and altogether delicious, a wonderful aroma that lingered even as he left the utility trailer and walked with a spring in his step (no longer feeling any trace of his rheumatism) back to the truck into which he climbed, not noticing that the snow plow was no longer there because when something vanishes, when something simply goes away there is nothing at all to notice and, then, Jerome put the vehicle in gear again and looked to his side, over the cold lake and toward the village where he saw several people clad in white garments standing next to the slate-grey water bearing in their arms banners of some sort, a sight that surprised him because Abertees, after all, was deserted and, indeed, really nothing more than a ghost town.   

***

Jordan walked past the stone stations crouched along the crooked path and, then, down the timber steps to his van.  He had forgotten the mission that had brought him to Abertees.  Whatever it was, he had apparently accomplished.  The sky had cleared and the sun was now shining brightly.

The road seemed less battered and smoother than he recalled from his trip into town.  Jordan drove to the top of the high ridge.  At the crest of the hill, he could see for many miles.  The empty prairie rolled to the horizon, a wilderness of brown and blonde hills.  He gazed into the distance but couldn’t see the Air Force Base.  Apparently, it was too far away to be visible from this hilltop.  

On the windy ridge, the gravel shoulder widened so that he could pull the MP van off the asphalt. He veered to the right to park.  Jordan was slightly hungry and he wondered about the time.  He glanced at his watch but saw that it had stopped.  On the passenger seat next to him, Jordan saw his lunchbox, decorated with a red and white tartan pattern.  He must have packed a lunch before leaving on this assignment.  

In the lunch pail, Jordan found a ham sandwich made with just the right amount of mayonnaise and meat on wheat bread.  There were even four pickle slices tucked into the ham.  An apple was also in the tartan-colored box, big and red and so bright that it seemed to glow from within.  Jordan rolled down his window and shut off the van.  

Something white was moving on a knoll about a mile away.  Some people in pale robes were walking in a procession in the tall, bleached grass.  Normally, the sky above the military base was scribbled with crisscrossed contrails.  But this afternoon, the sky was unblemished, a blue crystal vault.  The heavens were unmarked and so blue that it made Jordan dizzy to look up into them.     

   

Good Boy

 

“Dogs keep evolving.  You can measure this in many ways.  Look at old movies showing Rin-Tin-Tin.  Rinty is obviously very clever in a canid sort of way.  But he’s inexpressive.  He doesn’t grin for the camera and remains generally inert in terms of his acting.  He’s defined by what he does not how he emotes.  The dog looks like a wolf and fur is dark so that you can’t really see how his face looks – his head is just a blur of black.  When he runs, Rinty doesn’t lope – he dashes very low to the ground with his legs churning under him like pistons.  It’s feral and not really photogenic.”

Harry was sitting on his porch with his dog, Frodo.  The sun was setting in the haze from forest fires burning in the nearby mountains.

“You can detect some increase in expressivity in Lassie.  But, Lassie is pretty much a one-trick pony – she whines to communicate and can’t really act: she’s always disagreeably subservient.  But the dog is gorgeous and has features that the camera can read, at least, to a lilmited extent.

Frodo was a Wheaten terrier.  The smoke in the air bothered him a little.

“Take a look at Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  In that novel, there’s a dog, Karenin, that smiles – in fact, the last section of the novel is called “Karenin’s Smile”.   As far as I know, this is the first dog in history to be described as “smiling”.  When people first read Kundera’s novel in 1984, they were puzzled: “Could dogs actually smile?”  Well, when you look at them, of course, they have learned to smile.  No one would have any question about that today.  Each year, each generation, dogs become more and more expressive, more communicative.  They become more like their masters and mistresses.  Those old working dogs in the 19th century, the mastiffs guarding farms and the pit bulls in the coal mines and the little spit-terriers running on treadmills in kitchens – they turned rotisseries – these animals were pretty much just machines with wagging tails.  They didn’t have much human about them.  But, with each passing generation, dogs become more and more conventionally “loveable” – the more breeds progress, if that’s the right word, away from their origins as working animals, the more human they become.  In the course of single human’s lifetime, you can see this quite clearly.”

The smoke particles that reddened the sun made Frodo sneeze violently.

Harry replied: “You know, Frodo, I don’t necessarily disagree with you.”

Frodo said: “You got it, boss.”

Eridanos

 

When Wettstein awoke from anesthesia, he felt confused.  It was not so much a mental state as a physical condition.  Something was missing.  Mid-day, he felt a little better and his nausea had subsided.  It was an out-patient procedure and, so, his wife drove him home.

After his nap, Wettstein hobbled onto his porch.  The insects that are legion at the end of summer fizzed in the tops of the trees and, at dusk, fireflies beckoned to one another in the lilac bushes.  Wettstein was reading short stories by an Italian writer reckoned to be heir to Borges and Kafka.  (At least, this was what had been printed on the jacket of his book.)  He thought the stories were overrated, but wondered if the author’s short novel was more accomplished.  Wettstein read carefully, made pencil notes in the margin, and, also, corrected typographical errors in the print.  When it became too dark to read, he stroked the fur on his old dog’s throat and behind her ears.  When all was said and done, Wettstein thought that he was missing about twenty years – where were his memories of that part of his life?  He recalled only a few things from that period: some plane trips, a woman, a couple movies and books that had pleased him, high mountains and a skiing accident, a bout with pneumonia.  Wettstein supposed that it was true of most people: if you have lived long enough, much of your life, which consists of memories, will be inaccessible to you.  

The short novel by the Italian author was no longer in print.  But copies were available through some of the used book sellers on-line.  Wettstein was puzzled that most of the booksellers were asking an exorbitant price for the novel – apparently, paperback editions of the English translation were rare: most of them were selling for around $150 dollars.  There was an exception, however, a discount book business in Atlanta and, so, Wettstein ordered the volume from that seller, providing his credit card for the purchase – the novel cost $19 dollars with shipping.  Wettstein supposed that the book would be badly damaged in some way or that the transaction simply would fail, but, in fact, after four days, the package arrived with the novel inside.  

The book was handsome, unblemished and, apparently, unread.  The short novel was printed in large elegant type (Bodoni, Wettstein observed) on crisp cream-colored paper.  The book’s covers were reinforced, stiffer than an ordinary paperback, and more durable.  The volume was elegant and fit nicely into Wettstein’s hand.  On the front end-board, an image from an early painting by Edvard Munch was reproduced in vibrant color, something moody and brooding, and both covers were turned-in so that their fore-ends could be used as book-marks, an aspect of the edition that Wettstein admired.  The pages were set in an adhesive binding.  On one of the endpapers, the publisher had listed other books issued, apparently, as part of a series.  Wettstein surveyed the titles of the other volumes with interest.  The novel was re-issued from a previously copyrighted translation, this new edition printed by a publishing house called Eridanos Press.  

Wettstein read the book with pleasure.  The novel was interesting and well-written and the translation was lucid and unostentatious.  He wondered about the other novels identified as part of the Eridanos’ series.  Most of the books were unknown to him, although he recognized some of the authors.  The novels seemed largely to be works by surrealist or symbolist writers – he recognized something by Huysmans and some short stories from Marcel Schwob.  There were several books by writers with German names, none of whom familiar to him: what was The Waterfalls of Slunj by someone called Heimito von Doderer? who was Hans Henny Jahn? What could possibly be the subject of a novel called The Hierodule or another: Five-and-a-third Deaths?  What was The Cryptogamia by Akutagawa. Wettstein had read only one of the books in the series, The Baphomet by Pierre Klossowski and that was many years ago, when the world held a different aspect for him. (Wettstein was pretty sure that the book was now lost.)  He vaguely recalled that The Baphomet was an icy account of some sort of perversion involving a decapitated and bearded head.  Klossowski, Wettstein recalled, was the brother of the painter Balthus, and an expert in allegorical emblem engravings involving alchemy.  Several books purported to be short novels by Pirandello, or short story collections.  Most of the writers were French or Italian.     

That afternoon, Wettstein looked up some of the books on the internet.  All of the Eridanos editions were out-of-print and, apparently, rare.  Many of the paperbacks were advertised by second-hand book dealers with prices exceeding two-hundred dollars.  Presumably, some bibliophiles collected these volumes.  Pictures showing the book displayed very handsome paperback volumes similar to the book that Wettstein held in his hand – the editions were tightly bound with fore-edges turned-in, covers decorated with paintings by surrealist or expressionist artists.  

His second hospitalization was more eventful.  After his surgery, Wettstein’s lawyer brought him some papers to sign.  He couldn’t communicate because of the tube in his throat, but was able to write on the legal pad that the lawyer rested on his breast.  The lawyer acted as if he had known Wettstein for many years and, as if they had been involved in adventures together.  But Wettstein was embarrassed that he couldn’t recognize the man and wondered if his wife and attorney weren’t plotting something against him.  He was too tired to read the papers that he signed and they might have been anything.  

The days blended into one another.  Then, the tube was extracted from his throat and he was able to eat a little.  An ambulance took him home.  The book by the Italian writer that he had been reading when the emergency occurred was at his bedside.  The binding was handsome and cool to the touch and the print was large and elegant and instantly legible: the letters seem to have sculpted by the gentle touch of millions of eyes on them and their barbs had been polished away so that the characters were smooth as pebbles on the shore of the ocean.  For some reason, Wettstein could remember the events in the book much more clearly than his own life – decades were still missing and the void seemed to be growing.  But the book’s events were clear: a fighter was lost in the mountains; in a remote valley, there was an ancient villa, almost completely abandoned.  But an old man lived in the villa with huge savage mastiffs.  And there was another presence, a whiff of perfume, and a tomb and, beneath the labyrinth of the villa’s rooms a crypt with instruments of torture.  None of these things were retained in his memory, but the moment he took up the book, all of its details returned to him.

After completing the novel, Wettstein studied the book more carefully.  Eridanos was said to be headquartered at a place called Hygiene, Colorado.  (There was no address only a post-office box.) Was this a real location or some kind of sly, perverse fiction?  A new cleaning lady was puttering around the house.  Wettstein’s hospital bed was set up in the formal dining room and, through an arched entrance, he could see the woman kneeling on the floor, mercilessly polishing the hard wood.  Her posture was such that Wettstein could see her rump and upper torso, as well as her arms rowing away at the hardwood floor, but her head and face was not visible to him from his vantage in the big white bed with its stainless steel rails.  For some reason, he could now recall the cover of The Baphomet, an image of a severed head with angry dark eyes grimacing – a detail of a renaissance oil painting of Goliath’s decapitated head or, perhaps, the trophy of John the Baptist presented to Salome?  The cover, as visualized by Wettstein, was red and yellow except for the lurid image of the severed head. 

Most of Wettstein’s books were in the basement – at least, he believed this to be true.  The formal dining room was empty of books – there were a couple of book reviews on a table and a New Yorker but nothing else to read.  As far as he could see through the arched entry into the living room, the books had all been removed from that place as well.  Apparently, his library was now in the basement.  Wettstein cleared his throat loudly and the cleaning woman looked up at him.  He asked her to his bedside and told her to go downstairs and see if she could find a copy of The Baphomet among his books.  The woman looked at him suspiciously and her English was poor.  Wettstein found a pencil on his night stand and wrote the title of the book on an index card.  He repeated his instructions to the woman but her dark eyes were dull and uncomprehending.  She seemed to smell slightly of vinegar.  The woman went away and Wettstein heard her feet on the stairs.  After ten minutes, she returned, panting a little from the steps.  

“Is no book like that,” she said.  She handed him back the card.  

“I have thousands of books,” Wettstein said.  “You couldn’t have looked through all of them.”

“Many, many books,” the cleaning lady said. She nodded.  “But not that one.”

Wettstein said: “But you could scarcely have searched.”

“In the one room,” the cleaning lady told him, “all books are same, maybe ten different, but all the same ten books.  Hundreds.”

This made no sense to Wettstein.  Why would he be warehousing many copies (a hundred?) of the same book.  

The cleaning lady left his bedside.  The shadows lengthened.  He heard his wife’s car in the driveway.  He couldn’t ask her to search for the book.  She didn’t like the basement and was afraid of what she might find down there.  

The next day, Wettstein looked at pictures showing Hygiene, Colorado.  Google images on his Ipad showed a church made from grey and brown field stone standing among some disheveled trees.  In another picture there were more trees with silvery leaves (a species of olive it seemed) shading a few old graves.  A wooden general store with gas pumps and a covered wraparound porch was shown in another photograph, the sort of place that you see at isolated intersections where roads meet in the wilderness.  A tall mountain, its stony upper terraces and peak covered in snow, rose above the junction where there was a café and a street that dead-ended at a row of round pawn-shaped grain bins.  Nothing suggested any kind of publishing enterprise.

The river Eridanos, Wettstein thought that he remembered, flowed from moors where sedge-rimmed marshes were cupped in pot-holes in the tawny, thistle-covered barrens.  The river was the color of tea and flowed north through immense forests, a broad turbid flood undisturbed by any white water or rapids.  Because of the river’s northward course, ice dammed the river near its mouth on a cold grey sea and this caused the Eridanos upstream to flood and change course, wrapping itself around the woods to create innumerable grove-islands when the water was high.  In seasons of high water, the main channel shifted several miles, excavating prehistoric forests that had been drowned by the river and buried in silt.  When the current cut open mud banks, sometimes, beds of golden amber were exposed.  Many of the bright cells of amber preserved brown and black insects in the translucent stone.  

Wettstein asked the cleaning lady to find his atlas so that he could check his impressions as to the river.  She didn’t understand his request.  On the internet on his I-pad, Wettstein learned that the Eridanos river didn’t exist in reality and was said to be mythical.  In his Theogony, Hesiod described the river as flowing into the great waters that encircled the world, Oceanus and Tethys.  Eridanos flowed into the circumambient sea between the Amber andTin Islands.  But this description was not helpful in locating the river – the Amber and Tin Islands are also mythological and don’t correlate with real places. A thousand years later, the monk, Nonnus, wrote that Typhon bathed his monstrous coils in the Eridanos – but this reference in the Dionysiaca (why has no one produced an English translation of this work? Wettstein wondered) probably should be construed only to mean that the constellation named after the great snake was reflected in the waters of the river wherever it was located.  Another source said that Eridanos was a stream near Athens that had once flowed down from the heights to trickle through the city’s agora – but, then, the creek’s canal was bricked over so that the stream flowed underground and, after a few hundred years, its whereabouts were lost as memories faded.  Things could go missing and simply be forgotten – Wettstein knew this all too well.  Virgil, in his Aeneid, solved the problem as to the location of the missing river by simply putting the Eridanos in the Underworld.  It was one of the streams that watered that mournful realm.  Far from preserving recollections, presumably, to bathe in the Eridanos was to lose your memory, to forget about things – so it was odd, even paradoxical, that a publishing house, an enterprise that preserves thoughts and ideas, should be named after such a river.  

The lawyer made a house-call.  He showed Wettstein some records relating to his business.  There were more papers to sign.  The woman who had been sitting by his bed in the hospital was with the lawyer.  She looked worried and, from her expression, Wettstein construed her to be his wife.  Some things were still a bit fuzzy to him.   

Wettstein asked the lawyer why a business would be located in a tiny town in the West without an address, but merely a post-office box.  The lawyer winked at him and said that if a company wanted to avoid process – that is, being sued – it might establish its domicile in a place where there was only a post-office box.  In most states, a complaint can not be served by mailing the suit papers to a post office box.  “If you don’t have a registered agent for service,” the lawyer said, “they can’t get process, can’t get the lawsuit started.  So it will buy you time.  If you can buy time, say a couple months in litigation, that can sometimes be very helpful.”  Wettstein assumed that there were suits and so he asked him about them.  “Settled,” the lawyer said.  “Many years ago.  Don’t you remember?”  Wettstein said that he remembered but he did not.

The lawyer opened his brief case.  It was a new brief case made from leather that hadn’t been completely cured and there was a faint skunk-like odor about it.  The lawyer showed Wettstein some papers.  They appeared to be bankruptcy filings.  “This is 90% complete,” the lawyer told Wettstein.  From the papers, Wettstein concluded that he had been once been involved in the publishing business.

After the lawyer left, Wettstein was very tired and, so, he took a nap.  When he awoke, he found his I-pad resting among the sheets next to him.  He found some more pictures of Hygiene, Colorado.  Above some steepled foothills, a big mountain rose into the sky.  Half of it was bare and without trees and, during most of the year, there was snow on the heights.  In other pictures, the mountain’s summit was without snow and brown, the color of a clay flower pot that you might buy in a nursery.  Wettstein thought that there was a picture of that mountain in one of the bathrooms of his house, but he couldn’t use the toilet any more and, so, wasn’t sure about that – one mountain looks pretty much like another.  He recalled skiing and the cold of ice cast up against his cheeks as he chopped his way downhill, cutting back and forth through powder snow.  He must not have been a very good skier – there was a painful spot and some lumps in the joint of his left ankle, probably a healed fracture sustained on the slopes.  Wettstein thought that a person would remember sharp pain, but, apparently, this wasn’t always the case.

The little field stone church in the photographs of Hygiene had been built by German Anabaptists, members of something called the Church of the Brethren United in Christ.  Historical pictures showed a three-story wooden mansion near the church.  This was a sanitarium for patients with tuberculosis and the reason for the village’s name. Tall walnut trees shaded the sanitarium’s porches and turrets.  Erected in 1883, the sanitarium served patients for only a few years and, then, was transformed into a hotel.  People smoked in bed in those days and the sanitarium burned to the ground in 1926.  Wettstein imagined the lung patients sitting in quilts and comforters in their wheelchairs.  They looked up to the mountain with its white peaks like horns. When was Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain published?  How much money would a book like that make for its publisher?

The Church of the Brethren denied free will except in one respect: God’s grace is resistable, they maintained.  So you could will damnation upon yourself, but not salvation – the latter was achieved by the gift of God’s grace, an election that no good works could earn.  When he was little, Wettstein had been taken by his mother to an immense church.  The church smelled of cedar wood and it’s inside was dark as a hunting chalet.  Some lights flashed on a stage and there was an organ with pipes as big as the muzzles of cannons and the sound that the instrument made was thunderous.  The great auditorium stood among an encampment of tents and the ocean was nearby, long lines of green waves sweeping land-ward and breaking on the cobbled grey beach.  Wettstein recalled his mother holding his hand.  In Ocean Grove, where the church was located, cars were forbidden on Sundays.  Their car was parked outside the village, at the edge of the Asbury Park boardwalk, and to reach the vast wooden auditorium, his mother led him, with another lady who seemed to be older, across an iron bridge over a canal that smelled of saltwater and dead fish.  The sea shore also smelled of saltwater taffy, although this was behind them, on the boardwalk.  The Church of the Brethren built the auditorium at Ocean Grove for revival meetings and it was the largest wooden structure in the world.  Wettstein marveled that it had not yet burned to the ground.  Later, the Brethren merged with the United Methodist Church.

In those days, women wore hats to church.  In the great auditorium, men in black suits carried offering plates mounted on long brass poles and they used those lances to probe the worshipers who put dollar bills and coins in the baskets.  Everything was very well organized.  Wettstein was just a little boy when he attended this church and, he thought, it was one time only.  The experience filled him with the desire to tell others about what he had seen and felt in the church and how the organ had sounded so that you felt its music rumbling in your belly and backbone.  Yes, he explain this to others.  Wettstein thought that his memories of the church auditorium at Ocean Grove were somehow related to the problem of the books published by Eridanos Press, headquartered in Hygiene, Colorado, but he couldn’t quite draw the connection.

Once, Wettstein had enjoyed sitting on his porch and reading.  There was a nurse now who came to see him every other day.  She helped him into his wheelchair and rolled it onto the front porch.  The days were warm, but evening no longer retained the heat from the sunlit afternoon.  After a while, Wettstein felt cold and wished that he had a quilt wrapped over his shoulders and arms and nested across his lap.  He looked across the neighborhood and above the shingled roofs and the crowns of the trees.  Was there a mountain that loomed overhead with white arms outstretched above the foothills?  Wettstein knew that the terrain was flat, but his eyes showed himself something different.  Darkness descended and several streetlights were nudged on by the shadows.  The streetlights were amber-colored and the night flooded the neighborhood like a great, slow-moving river.