Oil Train

　

1.

Emma parked her car out of sight, behind the crumpled tin and zinc silo. Warm, bright light colored the ruins of the abandoned farmstead. The old house was mostly intact and it cast a shadow across the disheveled shrubs surrounding the structure. Some well-worn footpaths zigzagged through the tall grass to the grim, storm-battered stockade of the shelter belt. Some long-necked implements, possibly an auger and a cultivating machine, stood rusting in the high grass still bleached blonde with winter-kill. The farm stood on an exposed ridge seventy yards from the State Highway, a cold and windy place in the winter.

Emma’s husband was scheduled to preach two days from now. She wondered if he would adhere to that schedule and presume to address the congregation when it became known, as would surely be the case, that she had fled from him and their daughter and marriage. This was an imponderable and, as Emma stood next to the battered farmhouse, she realized that she could not answer that question no matter how much she thought about it. This made her sad because she realized how little she actually knew about the man to whom she was married. Her knowledge was inadequate when it came to his mind and, of course, to him she was also unknown, a fabulous, formless darkness that he could not pierce no matter how desperately he tried.

Probably, Emma thought, her departure would merely inconvenience him and, notwithstanding her boyfriend’s protestations to the contrary, she thought it unlikely that he would make any real effort to pursue her. "You must take off the license plate on the car," Cody Ran told her. His email message directing her to await him at this abandoned farm advised that another license plate was in a blakc garbage sack, pinned down by a brick, on the back stoop of the house. "Put that license on the car," Cody Ran’s email message said. "That way, he won’t be able to track you down." But Emma didn’t think her husband was the sort of man who would hunt for her. Instead, he would shed some mild tears, console their daughter, try to pray although without success, and, then, reconcile himself to a situation over which he had no control. That was Emma’s assessment of the situation, but, then, she had just admitted in her own mind that she didn’t understand her husband, that he was older than her by a full ten years, and that he was, after all, a man and, therefore, more accessible to the understanding of another man, even someone flamboyant and godless like Cody Ran and, so, perhaps, her lover’s assessment was accurate.

Emma removed her lap top computer from her car and carried it, power cord dangling treacherously down to her ankles. The cord snaked between legs as if to trip her. Cody Ran’s last email, setting the time and date and place for their elopement, instructed her to take the computer and carry it toward the shelter belt where she would find the wreckage of a windmill beside the palisade of smashed and twisted trees. He ordered her to lift the plywood covering the well-shaft so that she could throw the lap top into the darkness. "Your husband is a powerful man," Cody Ran had written to her. "He will use his influence to search your computer for clues to our romance. He will try to discovery my identity and force you to return to him and your loveless marriage."

Blizzards had crushed the windmill and it was a criss-cross of metal staves pointing into the sky. She slid the plywood decking away from the pit and inhaled the cold, watery breath of the earth. If nothing else, her relationship with Cody Ran would be an adventure. The computer fell away from her hands as if they had suddenly become numb and nerveless. All of this cloak and dagger stuff, this espionage aspect to their liaison was intriguing to her, even exciting, but, completely unnecessary she thought. Nonetheless, she was preparing to deliver herself into the hands of her lover, a man she had met only for one afternoon, and whom she knew entirely from his emails and pictures and short jocular videos posted on that very same computer that had now dropped soundlessly into the darkness beneath the splintery, warm plywood. She supposed that it would be thrilling to do his bidding for a time, to serve him and make him happy, and that, certainly, the relationship would not last because, after all, it was built on deceit and treachery. Surely, she would tire of Cody Ran or he would lose interest in her but, then, she would be occupying a different life. The nature of this different life looming before her was unimaginable, but necessary and so, trembling a little at the brush of the wind rising up from the vast flat flood plain below, she slid the plywood back over the well and, then, went to the rear of the house to retrieve the substitute license plate and the screwdriver that she would have to use to put that plate on her car.

Emma took her cell-phone from her pocket and looked at it. Cody Ran would arrive at the farmstead in ninety minutes. Cody Ran had told her to throw the cell-phone away as well. "If you come with me," he said, "I will tolerate no signs of your past unhappiness. We are embarking on a new way of life." But too much of her life was stored in the cell-phone and she wasn’t willing to hurl it into some ditch or slough. There was always a possibility that something might happen to her daughter. Mothers who fled their husbands were inevitably punished in the children that they had left behind and, if her daughter was hurt somehow or hit by a car or diagnosed with leukemia, then, she would want to take the call or, at least, read her husband’s text-message to that effect. That would be her penance for the adventure on which she had embarked. She would have to conceal the phone in her purse, keep it on mute, and consult it only surreptitiously so that Cody Ran would not know that she was already defying his orders.

She had been apprehensive about replacing the license plate. But the task was easier than she expected. Cody Ran had not thought about the discarded license plate. His carefully engineered getaway documented by email had not included that detail. Emma wondered about that omission. Perhaps, he had not considered everything. Perhaps, Cody Ran’s plan was flawed. Maybe, he was like her, fleeing from something known into the unknown, and his imagination had not fully fleshed-out the future between them. Emma felt proud that her cunning was a step ahead of her lover’s plan. She carried the discarded license plate to the well into which she had dropped the laptop and tossed it into the darkness as well.

At this time of year, before spring planting, the flood plain was striped with alternating ribbons of fallow and cultivated land. The edges of the fields were green with brush and freshly sprouted weeds and the land that had been broken for tilling was the color of dark chocolate. Far away and invisible from the mild height were she stood, an incongruously slender and mild-looking river flowed toward the north. In this latitude, a river that flows north invariably encounters ice blocking its outlet and, accordingly, every spring exceeds its banks upstream, a vast, sluggish and knee-deep overflow more like a geological event than a flood fanning out across the many miles of flat land to create an ephemeral cold lake that the winds stirred to little wavelets breaking against the levee-like embankments of the roadways crossing the plain. The farmhouse stood on the range of low knolls hemming in the ancient flood plain and its transient spring-time lakes, the first ground in forty or fifty miles raised high enough above the waters on a pedestal of glacial moraine to be secure from the spring-time flooding.

Like green islands, little villages dotted the plain. Emma seemed to be able to see forever, but she was gazing toward the east, the rising sun, and, therefore, back toward the past and town on the banks of the river where she lived with her husband, the pastor and candidate for the Synod bishopric, and her little daughter. The perspective seemed ruthless to her, as pitiless as her current mood. If she turned in the other direction, toward the cut in the hills made by the state highway, small featureless heights cupping sloughs and glacial lakes rose above her in the direction of the setting sun, an acclivity so slight as to be imperceptible, but, nonetheless, rendering it impossible to see any distance in that direction.

Jesus, Emma thought, was 33 when he began his ministry. That was her age as well.

　

2.

The representatives from the Burlington Northern and the Santa Fe came late to the meeting. Someone joked that the railroad officials had found themselves detained by one of their own oil trains, a pipeline on rails more than a mile long, at a right-of-way crossing somewhere out in the county. But, in fact, the BNSF people were lost in town as a consequence of a GPS system that didn’t have the proper coordinates for the Humboldt Public Library in its memory. Ten minutes later, they bustled into the library, making brisk and insincere apologies, and blinking, as if in overly bright sunlight, at the big crowd of people crammed into the meeting room. Some TV people were present from Fargo and they had shoved themselves to the front of the assembly with their cameras and sound recording equipment and many of the townsfolk, who were less aggressive, loitered in the hallway outside the room or gathered in grumbling groups among the stacks in the library, in the little lounge between the periodicals and encyclopedias, or, even, stood outside in the cold parking lot.

The railroad people consisted of a woman who had flown into Fargo that afternoon from a big city on one of the coasts, the supervisor of the North Dakota BNSF operations, a squat man too heavy for his suit who shifted uncomfortably in a chair that seemed too small for him, and a featureless lawyer of indeterminate age who proclaimed that he was "just an attorney" and had nothing of significance to say but who, in fact, did almost all of the talking. Humboldt’s mayor introduced himself, tapping at the microphone to get the attention of the crowd and, then, he called for the city council members to also rise and be recognized, something that they did one by one to cautious applause and friendly jeering. Then, the mayor told the BNSF folks to identify themselves.

The meeting had been called to discuss the nuisance caused by the huge oil trains that periodically rumbled through Humboldt. The trains transported crude oil from the Bakken shale formation on the other end of the state to refineries in the Midwest or, even, Galveston and the Louisiana delta. The trains were immense, so long that a man standing on the red locomotive emblazoned with the BNSF shield would have difficulty seeing the end of the train – an immense caravan of hundreds of identical black torpedo-shaped cars. The cylindrical cars looked like bombs and, in fact, the so-called "light ends" of the oil stored within them, the most volatile fraction of the crude, was flammable and had exploded in the course of several recent derailments. In Quebec, more than forty people had been burned to death when a BNSF oil train slipped off the tracks and blew up in a residential suburb.

"What guarantee can you make" the Mayor asked, "that something similar won’t happen to us in Humboldt?" The BNSF right-of-way bisected the town, running for a thousand yards within the village-limits with no fewer that six gated right-of-way crossings. A woman stood up and taking a microphone proffered to her said that she ran a day-care and that the tracks were a stone’s throw from the fenced backyard where her children played. Another woman, a teacher at an elementary school, expressed her concern as well. "We feel we have a slow-moving bomb moving through our city five times a day," the Mayor said.

In the back of the meeting room, a young man with a mullet haircut was sweating in a pilled brown sweater that was too warm for the crush of people in the room. The young man asked a middle-aged man wearing a feed cap if the trains passed through the town on a regular schedule. The farmer in the feed cap said that until two weeks before the schedule of oil trains rolling through Humboldt had been classified, a proprietary trade secret – "they said they were afraid of terrorism, someone blowing up the trains en route," the farmer told the young man with the mullet. "But do you know now?" the young man asked. He had a pen poised over a moleskin notebook. "They finally agreed to tell us in advance," the farmer said. "The oil train schedule is posted on the bulletin board at the City Hall." "Is it accurate?" the young man asked, making a note. "Like clockwork," the farmer said.

The farmer looked at the young man with curiosity. At the front of the room, the woman from the Coast was saying that BNSF was doing its patriotic duty and that the oil trains supported the war effort and America’s energy independence. A bearded man in the audience, someone known to be an organic farmer and a radical environmentalist, denounced the oil companies and, then, the wars in the Middle East. The lawyer said suavely: "Those are issues on which we can agree to disagree. We’re hear to answer questions about our operations as they affect your city."

"I don’t know you," the farmer whispered to the young man. "Did you just get hired by the newspaper here in town?" The young man shook his head. "No," he said, "I’m with the newspaper in Bismarck. We’re going to run a story on the effects of oil trains in small communities this weekend." "You don’t say," the farmer said in a soft voice.

A local policeman took the microphone and said that he had been delayed responding to emergency calls by up to fifteen minutes. "Those trains are endless," he said, "and they cut right through the middle of town. I can’t get west to east or vice-versa if there’s a train passing for almost a quarter of an hour. That time is vital if I’m responding to a medical emergency or a domestic."

The lawyer said that the local ordinance requiring the train to travel no faster than 15 miles per hour in town was the cause of that delay. "We would like to transit the town at our regular rail speed of forty-five," the lawyer told the crowd. "That’s why we’d like to see the speed ordinances relaxed." "The trains are too big," a housewife told the people. "I don’t want them going any faster than 15. I live a block away from the tracks. If they go any faster, the ground shakes like an earthquake." "You see," the lawyer said, "it’s a balancing act. There are a lots of competing interests." The policeman said that he knew ambulance drivers and EMT’s who had lost patients while waiting at the railroad crossings. "We have to get the train through town faster," the cop said. The housewife sneered at him and said that the police were just looking for an excuse for high-speed chases and that wasn’t necessary as far as she was concerned. "With all due respect, madam," the cop said, "you don’t know anything about law enforcement." Some of the people applauded; others hooted.

"Could we go 30 miles per hour, perhaps?" the lawyer asked. The little fat man who was the regional director of the BNSF nodded vigorously. The woman from the Coast was impassive, seeming to count the number of people in the crowd for some report that she was planning on filing. The hippie farmer stood up again and asked rhetorically: "Isn’t there a better way?" The farmer turned to the man with the mullet standing beside him to make a sardonic comment. But the young reporter had vanished.

A half-hour later, an imposing fellow wearing a thick, khaki Carhart coat asked several pointed questions to the BNSF panel. The man had a Minnesota Vikings stocking cap stuffed in his coat pocket. The local news media angled their cameras to film the man with the penetrating questions. He announced that he was a journalist from Bismarck who had come to the meeting to report on it for his newspaper. After the meeting, the farmer wearing the seed cap shook hands with the Bismarck journalist. "It’s nice to see that you’re so interested in this problem," the farmer said. "I met your colleague in the back of the hall."

"My colleague?" the journalist asked. He had taken the stocking cap from his pocket was preparing to insert his head into it. Some flakes of snow fell from the sky.

"I hope this is the last snow for the year," the journalist said.

"It should be fifty degrees next week,’ the farmer responded.

"Spring has sprung," the journalist replied. "I don’t know who you mean," he added. "I’m the only reporter here from Bismarck."

"It must be another paper," the farmer said. "The kid said he was a writer for a Bismarck paper."

"There’s only one paper in Bismarck," the journalist told him.

The farmer was puzzled. He squinted: "I guess I misunderstood him or something."

The meeting had lasted for three hours. The BNSF representatives looked weary and glum. They had to return to Fargo, a distance of fifty miles on a completely flat arrow-straight road that ran between muddy fields and snow-clogged ditches on the flood-plain. Driving from the townhall meeting, the regional coordinator glanced at his watch. Something hooted in the distance. "The train," he said. "You’re fucking kidding me," the woman from the Coast replied.

They stopped at the railroad crossing in the flare of the warning lights and listened to the iron wheels clacking as the hundreds of oil cars rolled by, each of them briefly bathed in blood, it seemed, by the bright red signal. A long queue of cars and pickup trucks gathered behind them. The train seemed barely moving and the rhythm of the wheels snapping against the right-of-way was like some kind of prolonged, hopeless morse code, a message tapped out to the cold skies overhead.

"This is a fucking nightmare," the woman from the Coast said.

"Five times a day for this town,’ the BNSF regional director said.

"I could run as fast," the woman said. "When I go for a jog, I run as fast. These fucking yokels."

The lawyer said that the right-of-way in the town was questionable anyway, eroded by years of grain-trucks rumbling over the tracks. "The infrastructure wouldn’t support thirty, let alone 45," he said.

A pickup truck behind them flooded the interior of the car driven by the BNSF regional director with a pitiless white light. The lady lawyer used the illumination to re-apply her lipstick.

"You gotta be kidding me," she said again, gesturing at behemoth train.

After he had left the meeting, the young man with the mullet drove downtown and found the City Hall. The door was open and he went inside. The offices and meeting rooms were all locked but the hallway was lit and the tile floor smelled of waxy polish. Somewhere, a vacuum cleaner was running. The young man stood in front of the bulletin board and looked at the schedule listing the times that the oil trains would be passing through Humboldt. He made some notes in his moleskin.

Two hours later, the young man sat in his car, facing the railroad track where a train assembled from hundreds of identical black cars, each with a hatch like a submarine, was lumbering by. The woman with him kept bending toward his face to kiss his lips.

"Where does he think you are?" the young man asked.

"I told him that I was going to the town meeting, the big hoo-ha about the trains," she said.

"He must know it’s over by this time," the young man said.

"My husband doesn’t pay attention to things like that," the woman said. And she leaned over, straining against her seat belt to kiss him again. The red lights flashed across their face, warnings that both of them ignored.

"I’ll give you instructions where we will meet next time," the young man with the mullet said.

"I’m so happy," the pastor’s wife told him.

　

3.

On the frontage road at the Coon Rapids’ off-ramp, there were two restaurants, Dennys and Perkins. Zig and Terry wanted to eat at the Dennys. Cody Ran Emmett overruled them. He said that he needed to buy a Peanut Butter Silk Cream pie as a gift for a woman. "You can get a patty melt in Perkins just as well as Dennys," Emmett said to Zig. "It’s always a mistake getting involved with a woman," Zig replied. Emmett shrugged and parked the car. There is a navigable river and a transcontinental freeway and coast-to-coast railroad tracks in Coon Rapids and horns hooted in the cool evening air perfumed with diesel.

After they had eaten, Emmett took his moleskin from his pocket and explained the plan. Terry looked skeptical: "It’s over-complicated," he said. "Why do you have to put in all this complicated stuff?"

Emmett replied that his scheme was ingenious. "We use the train as a wall. It blocks the whole town, cuts the place in half. The police station and most of the businesses, the residential housing – the people and commerce: it’s all east of center. West you have the railroad tracks, grain terminals and warehouses for sugar beets, the part of the town that floods and is mostly vacant lots, and, then, the river which is the border, of course. There’s no reason for cops to be cruising anywhere west of the tracks. Once, the train comes into town, law enforcement can’t get across. I heard them complaining about it – the oil trains are a mile long and they go very slow and there’s no way to get around it or under it. All we have to do is get to the west, across the tracks, and, then, the train will cut off all pursuit for – I don’t know – they were saying as long as fifteen minutes."

"But it takes too much timing," Zig said. "You got too much choreography."

"Not at all," Emmett replied. He had stolen a phone book from the motel where he had stayed in Humboldt during his last visit. He took the phone book from his briefcase and opened it to the page in the front where there was a Humboldt city map.

"The bank is only a block, a block and a half from the railroad crossing," Emmett said. "We know the exact times that the big oil trains come into town. It’s scheduled at the city hall and the trains are reliable – they show up like clockwork."

"So we leave the bank," Terry said, "drive across the railroad tracks and, then, what?"

"The train cuts off the cops," Emmett said. "They can’t follow us. We cross into North Dakota –"

"— and, then, the North Dakota state patrol blocks the road and we’re fucked," Zig said.

"Not at all," Emmett told him. "The closest town in North Dakota is about 26 miles to the west. It’s not exactly heavily populated up there. If the cops in that town get the alert, which will take a while, they have to deploy east, that is, drive to the border to intercept us. That’s where the woman comes in."

"This is the part I don’t like," Terry said.

"I don’t like any part of this, " Zig said.

"Don’t be pussies," Emmett said. "We zoom across the valley, about ten miles to an abandoned farm house, just off the road. She’s waiting there with her car. We switch vehicles and, now, they’ve got no ID on us at all."

"You can’t trust a woman," Zig said.

"This lady’s a pastor’s wife," Emmett said. "She loves me. She’s totally reliable."

"A pastor’s wife?" Terry shook his head. "The bitch must be crazy."

"Must be crazy to want any part of you," Zig said.

"There’s only one part of me she really wants," Emmett said.

"So, then, what?" Terry asked.

"We let her drive for awhile, make nice," Emmett said. "Once, we get west of Bismarck, we knock her out or something, put her in the trunk of the car, and let her ride there."

"I don’t want to be part of a kidnaping or a homicide," Zig said.

"She’s very...attractive...lush, you’ll see what I mean..." Emmett said. "We can take turns with her and, then, let her off somewhere in the oil patch. No one needs to get hurt."

"In the oil patch?" Terry asked.

"Get out to Williston and leave her in oil patch. There’s plenty of women working the camps out there. She’ll be fine. We can even pay her something for her trouble," Emmett said. "Acquire the car from her. She’ll be ashamed of the whole thing and, I’m guessing, won’t say a word to anyone."

"That’ll never work," Terry said.

"We must have another vehicle, another car stashed somewhere," Emmett said. "Someone’ll make our car in Humboldt. That’s why we need another vehicle."

"Can’t we just hide one in that farmstead?" Zig asked.

"It’s too late," Emmett said. "We’re past the point of no-return. She’ll be waiting for us there, tomorrow afternoon."

"It’s much too complicated," Zig said. "You’ve got too many moving parts."

"Trust me," Emmett said. "You can trust me. I’ve got this analyzed. We rob the bank, use the train to block any pursuit, switch cars out in the country. Then, we’ve got the woman for entertainment. That sweetens the whole deal. I’ve told her to be completely secretive, to conceal everything to keep her husband for getting on our trail. So I can guarantee that she’ll be discreet."

"That’s not the nature of women," Terry said.

"What do you know?" Zig asked.

"I know," Terry said. "I’m not a lover-boy like Emmett. But I know."

Emmett closed the phone book and put it in his brief case. "The train comes into town tomorrow at 2:45 pm. We hit the bank at 2:38 let’s say. We’re across the tracks by 2:45. Safe. You gotta see these oil trains – they’re monsters."

The waitress brought their checks. Emmett signalled that he would take the tickets. He looked at them and waved to the waitress. "Miss – Miss –" he said.

She returned and smiled at him tentatively, shifting from one foot to another as if her heels and toes were sore.

"We had one pot of coffee between us," Emmett said. "It’s supposed to be bottomless."

"It is bottomless," the waitress said, biting her lower lip.

"There’s three charges here," Emmett said. "But we had only one pot of coffee."

"That’s how we’re supposed to charge," the waitress said.

Emmett threw the tickets down on the table. "That’s fucking bullshit," he said.

"You don’t need to talk to me that way," the waitress said. She turned and walked back to the cashier’s station.

A minute later, an older woman wearing slightly tinted glasses approached the table.

"Is there a problem?" she asked.

"We got overcharged on the coffee," Emmett said.

"Let it go," Terry advised.

"Just let it go," Zig said.

"It’s supposed to be bottomless," Emmett said.

"It is bottomless, but we charge per person. It says so right on the menu," the woman said.

"She didn’t tell me," Emmett said.

"It’s right on the menu," the older woman said. "And you shouldn’t be using the F-word with a young girl like that."

Emmett shrugged. "Whatever you say," he replied.

"Just let it go," Zig said again.

Emmett tried to hand the woman some money. "Pay the cashier," she said.

Terry left a tip on the table and Emmett paid for their meals and the coffee. He went to the bakery counter and picked out a Peanut Butter Silk Cream pie. Tapping on the glass protecting the pie, Emmett said: "I need that cream pie for my sweetheart."

"They’re so good," the cashier said.

"Cream pie for my sweetheart, darling," Emmett said.

"I’m not your darling," the woman told him.

"You don’t look like you’re anyone’s darling," Emmett said.

The woman blushed, looked away from him, and, then, took his cash. She put the cream pie in a paper bag.

"We’ll eat it up before we get to St. Cloud," Terry said.

"You do that," Emmett told him. "and I’ll have to shoot you dead."

"You bet," Zig said.

　

4.

Emma sat on concrete steps beneath the farmhouse’s back door. The steps were pre-formed, a single pour of terraced concrete mass-produced by some company that also made burial vaults and culverts. In the shadow of the house, the concrete was cold under her body and she shivered slightly. When she closed her eyes, the sound of birds trilling over hidden seeps of water in the nearby shelter-belt became louder and more vivid. An image of her husband, preaching from the pulpit about the sanctity of all God’s creation occurred to her but her inner eye assigned colors to the bird songs and the whisper of the trees in the breeze was a water-color wash and so the pastor’s face was all overwritten with swirls and vortices of sound.

She went inside the house. Places like this went vacant when the last family member living on the farm fell and broke her hip and had to be moved to a nursing home in one of the nearby towns and, then, for a few years, a grandson living in a city a thousand miles away might try to rent the house for eighty or ninety dollars a month, but, in the end, the tenants always turned out to be dead-beats who used the place for cooking methamphetamine and, after the home had been thoroughly trashed with uncollected garbage and the droppings of the pit-bulls trained to patrol the property perimeter and the soiled disposable diapers disposed of in adjacent ravines, stinking white avalanches of them among the discarded implements and appliances. Then, the tenants would strip the copper wire from the conduits and unscrew the light bulbs and leave the place so that it was deserted once more and, now, suitable only for the bulldozer. This is what inevitably happened to such places, the homes of the pioneers erected with blood, sweat, and tears on the lonely Dakota prairie and this house on the hill was, now, bereft, having completed the stations of the cross as were relevant to an abandoned farmstead and, within a season or so, maybe after someone had used the house to commit suicide, the walls and the old shingle roof and basement gouged into the loess hill would be knocked down and buried under the hillside, all the debris pushed down deep enough so as not to interfere with the plows and cultivators managing the crops of soybeans and feed corn that would be planted on the site. The bulldozer hired to demolish the house and the outbuildings would also be used to uproot the shelter belt and shove the trees into a big pyre that could be lit on fire and burnt for a day and a night until reduced to ashes, thereby also increasing the tillable acreage on the site.

Emma thought of these things happening, idly and without interest, and she wondered where she would be when the earthmoving equipment sliced through the walls rising above her, walls that seemed so permanent and firmly affixed in the earth but whose firmness, she knew, was a sham and an illusion – it was all just lathe and two-by-fours swathed in some insulation, a balloon that a single prick might pop. The end was coming; this much she knew.

Emma looked at her watch. Time had slowed. It was like watching a pot and waiting for the water to boil. She found that the back door was open and so she went inside the house and found that it was bright inside, the big windows designed to admit as much sunlight as possible into a structure that had been built before electricity brought artificial light to the plains. On a table, in one of the rooms, there was a child’s backpack made of shiny vinyl, straps and fasteners splayed out around the plastic pouch like ineffectual and broken limbs. A coffee mug sat disregarded on a counter. A mummified mouse adorned a trap in the corner of the kitchen. The steps creaked as she climbed them and she wondered if they would hold her weight. Upstairs some clothing knotted together as if to make a tourniquet lay in the center of a bedroom. Some hangers glinted in an open closet and there was an ankle-high stack of girlie magazines in other of the rooms under the window sill overlooking the shelter belt. The ceiling had collapsed in the bathroom and filled the tub with charred-looking shingles and rotting boards prickly with nails.

Emma stood over the stack of magazines and inhaled the smell of rot coming from them. She looked across the bright air to the shelter belt. A squirrel was making a tour of the tallest tree in the grove. The squirrel scampered higher and higher, lunging upward over branches that became increasingly delicate until they were merely fronds, a bundle of twigs swaying under the ascending squirrel’s tail and hind quarters. Just at the point where the branches yielded, suddenly dropping out from beneath the squirrel, a kind of aerial trapdoor opening in the heights of the tree, the animal leaped laterally, catching another web of spidery branches that cushioned the squirrel and, held its weight, until the little creature could find a better grip on a more solid bough. Blithely, and with complete confidence, squirrel began a tour of the heights of this new new tree, climbing upward again until Emma felt dizzy watching the animal and, assessing its routes, all of them leading to yet another plunging lunge across the void.

She went downstairs. Her guts clenched with anxiety. Was there a place to go to the bathroom?

Probably, Cody Ran would not appear. She would remain here until the day darkened and, then, return chastened to her home, her husband, her child. It would be almost acceptable. But, yet...

Emma walked around the house and took courage from the sunny side of the structure, the high white wall reflecting the radiance of the day down on her. With every thought that Cody Ran was not coming, she felt a countervailing motion. Something was approaching: it was moving across the plain, relentless, implacable – she felt a sense of great and irresistable momentum, a force laboring to arrive and make itself known. Emma didn’t know whether the force was within her or in the world outside – but when she stepped on the ground, the earth trembled with the onslaught of a new existence dawning all around her.

　

　

5.

They drove into Humboldt mid-afternoon. The sun was bright and reflected from the glass and aluminum window frames like fire from a welder’s torch. Emmett parked the car three blocks from the bank next to a church. The church was built on a mound a half dozen feet above the surrounding businesses and overlooked a swampy city park. Emmett opened his brief case and removed some battered opera-glasses that he had purchased for eight dollars in a pawnshop in St. Cloud. He looked across the city park, past the white blister of the bandshell, a forlorn-structure that seemed to have been deposited in the bog like an ark by some great and muddy flood. The park stretched along the river where there were some pens imprisoning mangy captive wolves and a bison, threadbare as an old davenport, creatures lurking behind the cyclone fence, a sort of refugee camp that had to be evacuated to higher ground every spring. Beyond a fog of brush and trees, perhaps, four miles away, a railway trestle embalmed in black tar, spanned the river.

"When the engine pulling the train crosses the bridge" Emmett said, "we will have about nine minutes to rob the bank and cross the tracks. I’ve timed it."

"I can’t see no bridge," Terry said.

"It’s in those trees," Emmett replied.

"Don’t see it," Terry said again.

Emmett asked if Zig and Terry had their weapons. The two men squinted at Emmett nervously and reached into their coats to assure themselves that they were armed. Emmett asked them if they had their loot bags. Zig said that he had tied his burlap bag around his waist, hidden under his coat. Terry shrugged: "Probably won’t be any loot," he said.

Zig opened a sack of potato chips. Down by the river, among fallen trees and flotsam tangled in sumac bushes, a man was walking a cream-colored labrador. The river was invisible, a faint scent like a wet basement in the breeze. Emmett looked from his wristwatch to the trestle, picking the wooden beam out at the bend in the river, the sun catching the surface of an intervening lagoon and striking off sparks of light that momentarily dazzled the eye.

Emmett reminded Zig and Terry to be careful with their firearms and to be polite to the cashier since it would not be beneficial to terrorize the bank employees to the point that they were unable to respond to the robber’s commands. He appraised Zig’s profile, sitting beside him on the front seat, munching on a potato chip. Then, he looked in the rear-view mirror and caught a glimpse of Terry. Terry was licking his lips so that they looked wet and glossy and he kept casting an eye over his shoulder. When Emmett turned the opera glasses toward the railroad trestle, he was puzzled: a black, moving wall was shuddering there, a mirage in the tattered woods that seemed shapeless, a tremulous shadow riveted to the span of iron and creosote-coated timber. The locomotive had already crossed the bridge and was hidden in the river-side trees.

"We’ve got to go," Emmett said. He turned on the car and put it in gear and, then, drove to the edge of downtown, a couple of taverns and a furniture store with a delivery truck parked at its door and the bank beside a mortuary that occupied a florid Victorian mansion with a tower and filigree scroll-work over its porch. The train track was a half block away, rails riding a gravel mound where lights were posted next to a white gate on a metal pivot. The lights were still green and the gate was upright. Beyond the crossing, a grain elevator bulging with fat, round bins rose up along the concrete trough of the channel into which the river had been funneled. A bridge made from angles and trusses of steel tilted up to make an inclined ramp over the canal.

Emmett guided the car along the curb in front of the bank. He brought the vehicle to a stop and Zig and Terry hopped out, swaddled in the long coats that covered their weapons, ski-masks rolled up like stocking caps in their hair. The bank was sculpted from heavy chalk-colored stone, a miniature Greek temple a half-dozen steps above the sidewalk, its facade disfigured by an elaborate three-landing handicap-ramp zigzagging to a dark door inset within columns and a pediment. The two men glanced back at the car where Emmett was waiting, clawed down their ski masks over their faces, and, then, pushed through the door into bank.

Emmett pulled forward with the car idling. A couple of pick-up trucks rolled past the bank and, at the end of the street, where there were more commercial buildings, a panel truck was double-parked, someone making a delivery at the insurance agency or the law office or the accounting firm on the corner. Looking right and left at the first intersection, Emmett turned and navigated around the block, passing alleys forlorn with garbage bins and puddles. After making circling the block, Emmett had the car facing toward the tracks and the grain elevators and the river running in its concrete slit beyond. A yellow light was glaring at the railroad crossing but the gate was still pointing skyward on its pivot. Emmett rolled down the window and thought he could hear the distant industrial clang of the slowly approaching train, although, perhaps, it was his imagination.

A car door slammed. Emmett looked across the street and saw an old man ascending the steps into the bank. The man had bad knees and he swiveled his hips climbing the marble stairs and Emmett wondered why he had not taken the longer, but less steep route offered by the handicapped ramp. The old man had left his car idling, illegally parked next to the bank. Emmett saw that there was a baby in the car, strapped into a daisy-yellow car-seat and a big, agitated dog that smeared the side windows of the front seat with its hot breath and red tongue. The old man leaned forward, pushing through the heavy door atop the steps. For a moment, the classical visage of the bank seemed to snarl, devouring the man who went inside. Emmett shook his head back and forth, peering up at the bank and the door in its shrine of marble columns and carved pediment seemed to make a face at him, a sinister, staring mask with oval volutes like inexpressive wide eyes.

Emmett glanced at this watch. He looked toward the tracks and saw the amber light turn to red. The gate rotated down, an aluminum lance across the road. –Why hadn’t Zig and Terry come from the building? The crossing guard barred the intersection three minutes before the actual arrival of the train. – This is getting too close, Emmett thought. He thought he could feel the oil train’s slow and steady approach as a tremor in the roadway. The train’s siren howled, a loud brassy note like the whistle on a factory.

Emmett turned off the car and, leaving his door open, ran across the sidewalk, mounting the steps to the grotto-like opening into the bank. He heard loud voices inside, people screaming at one another in shrill, trembling shouts. The temperature of the air was different inside the bank, electrified, it seemed: the old man was standing a half-dozen feet inside the door waving a tiny hand-gun at Zig and Terry. Their sawed-off shotguns looked huge and crude in comparison to the old man’s dainty, bluish pistol. Everyone was shrieking but Emmett couldn’t pick out any words in the cries other than a few curses. Terry stood behind the bank counter, nearest to Emmett and the old man waved his gun at him, shifting the pistol in his hand as if making the sign of the cross in the air. Some people were crumpled on the floor, lying on the tiles and carpet like discarded pieces of clothing. Across the room, Zig noticed that Emmett had forgotten to draw down his ski-mask to cover his face. He gestured, saluting in Emmett’s direction, pantomiming that he should pull the mask over his eyes. The old man caught Zig’s gesture from the corner of his eye, pivoted on his heel, and began firing his pistol in that direction. The shots sounded like firecracks exploding in quick succession. Terry’s shotgun made a deep booming sound, a splash of fire coming from the muzzle as the old man pitched back against the wall, the pistol clattering as it skidded across the tile floor of the bank’s entry. Terry vaulted over the bank counter, caught the tip of his boot on the counter’s edge, and plunged face-first to the ground. The sack of money that he was carrying disgorged a flock of greenbacks that scattered across the floor. Emmett saw that Zig was slumped against the wall, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

Emmett turned and ran out the door to his car. Terry was a couple steps behind him. He lost his footing on the bottom step and skidded forward, dragging the muzzle of his shotgun against the old man’s car where the baby and the dog were imprisoned. The big dog snarled and lunged at the car window, then, diving into the backseat with the baby to pursue Terry along the length of the vehicle. Emmett put his car in gear but it didn’t move. Then, he realized that he had instinctively shut off the vehicle when he left it to dart into the bank. He fumbled with his keys and found that they had assumed an unfamiliar aspect, keys entangled in metal rings holding other keys, a sort of puzzle in his trembling hand. The big dog squirming through the center of the old man’s car had somehow dislodged the gear shift and the vehicle began to move, just a shudder at first, but, then, accelerating in reverse toward where Emmett was shaking the keys back and forth, trying to knock them into some configuration that he recognized. Terry piled into the back seat of the car, shouting: "Go, go, go!" The train wailed again at them and, then, the old man’s car speared into the side of their vehicle, rocking them to the side.

Emmett got the car started and shoved it into gear. The old man’s car was heavy and bent the side door inward and, for a moment, it seemed as if the two vehicles were interlocked in some fatal, improbable embrace. But, then, Emmett’s car slid sideways and he aimed it for the railroad crossing, stabbing his foot down on the accelerator.

"You can’t make that," Terry screamed.

But Emmett was committed to crossing the tracks, his right foot pressed down on the gas, and the car seeming to rear up under them, hurtling toward the railroad crossing. The oil train’s locomotive looked like an immense, implacable badge of metal bearing down on the place where the road rose to cross the tracks.

"I’ve got it," Emmett cried.

He veered a little to try to go around the arm of the gate, but caught the metal with the left edge of his windshield. The crossing guard crumpled inward and the great locomotive seemed to topple forward, rolling over them like an immense metal avalanche. Emmett felt the car caught against the iron grill on the locomotive so that the vehicle was folded inward, bending as if an accordion joint had been miraculously installed in the car’s midsection. The locomotive’s wheel spun next to the car’s side-windew, black churning iron lit by canopies of sparks. Then, something gave way and the locomotive shrugged off the car so that it rolled end over end away from the track, showers of glass spraying inward and fists of the airbags pummeling them.

Emmett heard a high-pitched whistle, a beeping sound like an alarm clock. It was the seat belt warning sounding in the car. He was lying face-down in the gravel, a couple yards from the squashed car. When he put his hands down to push himself up off the gravel, pain surged through him and he heard himself scream. Someone else was screaming. Terry was nearby, the lower half of his body pinned under the car. He clawed at the gravel as if to excavate a trench into which he could crawl. In measured, dignified intervals, the oil cars on the train were exploding – the big torpedo-like cylinders boomed like howitzers when they blew open. Emmett could see the cars heaped up along the track, derailed to the right and left of the iron rails, making an abstract black diagram of linear force like the meander of a stream. When the oil cars burst, they leaped eight or nine feet into the air and, then, crashed down so that the ground was shaking with the detonations. Pillars of black smoke gushed upward and the flame, at first, seemed merely incidental, a bright orange fringe to the billowing plumes rising into the sky.

Emmett looked down and saw that the fingers on his right-hand were dislocated in all directions. Not one of them was in sort of proper alignment and so his wounded hand had a curious appearance, something like a cracked and bloody starfish. The front of his body was wet and it seemed that he was wearing a sort of butcher’s apron, sheets of blood running down from his mid-torso to glisten on his thighs and knees. He walked a few steps uncertainly. An oil car behind him exploded and the blast knocked him down, a wave of fire bathing his shoulders and buttocks.

– Someone will find me and I’ll be okay, Emmett thought.

But, then, he remembered that the train that bisected the town was blocking any emergency vehicles that might be sent to look for accident victims. – What had they said, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, even, he thought.

The crushed overturned car was ablaze and Terry was flopping up and down in the fire.

Emmett worked his way to his feet and staggered forward. He wanted to reach a place where he didn’t have to hear Terry’s shrieks and wouldn’t be tempted to look in that direction. But it wasn’t clear to him how far he would have to walk to achieve that objective. Furthermore, each step seemed increasingly difficult. So after a few seconds, he sat down, cross-legged on the asphalt to wait for someone to rescue him.

More of oil tankers exploded. Emmett’s hair caught on fire and he saw the asphalt around him blistering and melting in the heat.

"Help," he said tentatively.

Then, he cried out more loudly: "Help! Help!"

But no one came.

　

6.

Emma thought it would be craven to sit on the ruined front porch of the farmhouse, among the shards of broken glass and the beer cans left by local kids, to watch for her lover on the plain and the road crossing it. So she sat on the backside of the house, looking up the slope to the shelter belt crowning the ridge. She looked at her watch: Cody Ran was late.

At first, she felt relieved. In matters of the heart, "late" meant "never" – at least, that’s what she thought about a suitor tardy to his first or second or third date. Since Emma was relieved, she thought it strange that her cheek was damp with tears. She found herself idly brushing at her hair and, then, chewing a wisp in the corner of her mouth. She hadn’t chewed on her hair since before her marriage. It was a habit of which her husband, the Pastor disapproved.

Emma felt a disturbance in the air. She decided she would walk around the house as if it were Jericho’s walls, making the transit five times and, if Cody Ran had not arrived by that time, she would get in her car and drive back to her husband and her home. When she came to the front side of the house, she saw a smudge of smoke rising in the green-gray distance, a black smear at the edge of what could be seen. Nausea flared in her belly. Something had gone terribly wrong. Her child was endangered, perhaps, injured or dying. This was the curse that God visited upon mothers who abandoned their children for their lovers. God was just but wrathful and his punishment was swift and sure. She felt certain that deadly peril threatened her daughter.

Emma went to her car and drove back on to the main highway. On the two-lane blacktop, she accelerated until her car was moving at a speed higher than seemed plausible. The fields around her blurred to a smear of green and muddy black. Emma aimed her car like a projectile for the pillar of smoke rising on the horizon.

　

Bandit's Return

Bandit’s Return

　

1.

The baby squirrel was damaged in some way and it’s gait charmingly lopsided. Bandit regarded his prey from two related, but differing, perspectives. Through his amber lens, the baby squirrel was a mouth-watering treat, a delectable morsel whose squirming between tooth and tongue would fill his jaws with delight. But, of course, that pleasure would be fleeting, as is always the case, and considered from his blue point of view, the pink, ill-formed and fetal creature could afford him with several minutes, if not an hour, of entertainment there on the plush grass in the shade of the old oak tree. From her vantage atop a utility pole, the mother squirrel scolded Bandit in a high-pitched chattering voice to which the infant appended a whistling, peeping cry, but the tom-cat was rather deaf and these sounds reached him only remotely and, therefore, did not add to his delectation.

To sate his hunger pangs, Bandit bit off one of the baby squirrel’s feet. The little flipper-like limb crunched between his teeth and there was a brief, satisfying squirt of blood, something that reminded Bandit of a nice mug of beer that he had once drained in a single heroic guzzle. He swallowed the squirrel’s foot and, then, released the embryo from his clutches. The baby squirrel scuttled away for an instant before Bandit cupped the little pink tube of flesh under his paw. He sniffed curiously at the baby squirrel and, then, lifted his paw so that the squirrel could continue its hopeless flight. After the squirrel had limped to the limit of Bandit’s grasp, and, even, beyond, he pounced, caressed the squirrel with his teeth and, then, spit the infant out on the lawn so that he could continue his play. The squirrel was blind and hairless and decided to roll over on its side and play dead. But Bandit saw the sides of the baby animal twitching and so he gouged at the squirrel with a claw, splitting the creature’s belly. The wound was serious but not mortal and, viewed through his blue eye, Bandit decided that the fun could continue for, at least, another three or four-hundred heart beats. But, at that moment, a bigger brute intervened, something with coarse, wiry fur and equipped with a muzzle like a sledge-hammer filled with inch-long yellow teeth. Bandit reared, and the fur stood on his back inflating him like balloon, and, spitting, he darted away from the German Shepherd, sprinting close to the ground toward a tight squeeze under a fence through which he had chased a small rabbit only a few hours earlier. It was no problem for Bandit to outrun the dog, at least across a short distance, but the tom cat was well aware that canines had stamina and that they could be alarmingly single-minded, if clumsy, in their pursuit and so he was appalled to find that someone had patched the hole in the fence with a wooden board. The tight squeeze was no longer available as an avenue of flight and so Bandit reversed his direction, darting between the legs of the pursuing hound and scrambling through some shrubbery to emerge near another fence that seemed long and impermeable. The dog was caught in the shrubs, blundering through the undergrowth, and Bandit turned the corner of the fence-line, found an alleyway and another tight squeeze under a pile of wood into a nest where a rat had lived the preceding summer. The rat had gnawed a passage into an adjacent shed and so Bandit wiggled through the opening and found himself in a dim chamber festooned with spider webs ornamented by mummified flies and beetles. In the chase, Bandit had forgotten about the baby squirrel. But an old crow had observed Bandit’s torture of his prey from his perch on a winter-killed bough in a nearby evergreen tree. As soon as the tom cat fled, the old crow flapped his wings and landed next to the wriggling baby squirrel. With a few deft jabs of his beak, the crow eviscerated the squirrel and returned to his branch to swallow the baby animal’s innards.

All of this occurred on a day in early August on the 1300 block of 8^th Avenue Southeast.

　

2.

Squeaky’s best friend was Dolan. They had been drinking buddies for twenty years when Dolan died. Dolan’s death saddened Squeaky to the point that he felt that his heart was broken: he was short of breath when he thought of his old buddy and felt stabbing pains in his chest that caused his ears to ring and made the fingers on both of his hands tingle.

Dolan was a big man whose left eye had gone missing in some remote brawl or combat zone. Alcohol had polished him the way that an agate is polished in a tumbling machine: the booze had smoothed away all of his hard edges and sharp lines so that he was a round, pinkish sphere without neck, waistline, and with his legs seemingly fused together at his upper thighs. It seemed improbable that he could walk, but he could move, sometimes with surprising swiftness in pursuit of his next drink. Like Squeaky, Dolan had refined his digestive system so that it functioned best on beer supplemented sometimes with peanuts or a slab of microwaved Tombstone pizza or a bit of beef jerky.

Dolan lived above the Hiawatha Bar, a tavern by the railroad yards that had once been a Fraternal Lodge, a meeting place for the Improved Red Men of America. Old age had decimated the tribe and, ultimately, the Red Men sold the bar. The new owner preserved some of the more noteworthy decorations in the lodge, including a mural showing Indians shooting arrows at a disgruntled moose and a bas relief calumet displayed on the wall next to the toilet. Since the Red Men was a fraternal organization, the tavern was originally equipped with a men’s room only. However, law required the bar-owner to install a ladies’ room. This renovation was duly accomplished but the plumbing was configured in such a way that the tap for hand-washing was a basin outside of the small closet-like toilet, a white porcelain sink installed next to the rest-room door. As it happened, the deficiencies in the sanitary accommodations were moot anyway because women rarely entered the bar and, when they did, stayed only so long as they didn’t require the facilities – when a lady had to use the rest-room, she invariably left the tavern, crossed the street to the bar on the opposite corner and didn’t return. So the Hiawatha was a male enclave, a place where serious drinkers assembled in the morning and didn’t depart until late at night, and, as far as Dolan and Squeaky were concerned, this was fine with them – women were excitable and made complicated demands and both of them were dedicated to serenity, that is, accepting the things that they could not change, principally the fact that both of them were drunks.

A few years before Dolan died, Squeaky had some heart trouble. He collapsed while chipping ice from the stoop of his tiny house. In the hospital, Squeaky did well for the first twenty-four hours, rallying and showing the nurses’ elaborate, and charming, courtesy. But, then, withdrawal symptoms afflicted him and he suffered from seizures and clawed the IV tubes from his bruised forearms and tried to flee the hospital. Dolan came to see him and pleaded with the doctors’ to let his friend have a simple glass of beer but this was forbidden and Squeaky ended-up unresponsive in a medically induced coma. The booze and starvation had withered Squeaky so that he was tiny, brownish thing, a wrinkled baboon or chimpanzee, motionless in the intensive care unit, screened from the world by a tangle of cords and tubes and monitor leads. Squeaky emerged from his coma, weak and baffled. But he saw Dolan at his bedside and smelled the strong drink congealing on his breath and looked into his friend’s one surviving eye, chalky blue as the water melted from a glacier, and said: "Get me out of here!"

A day or so later, Squeaky was released from the ICU and, after the weekend, Dolan took him to his home. Since neither of them had a driver’s license, and since Dolan did errands by bicycle, a cab had to be called to take the two men to Squeaky’s house. Dolan stayed with him for another two or three weeks, nursing Squeaky back to health and, as soon as he was able to reliably walk, they went to the Hiawatha Bar, took up their accustomed places in the tavern, and returned to their habitual lives. Squeaky put his arm around Dolan and said that he had saved his life and Dolan’s blue eye became moist with tears and the bartender said that for the next ten minutes all drinks were ‘on the house’ in honor of Squeaky’s return to the land of the living.

A few years passed. Dolan developed diabetes and his toes became gangrenous. Squeaky had to care for Dolan after the amputations. Of course, both of them knew that it was necessary to avoid any extended hospitalizations that might result in a booze ban enforced by censorious and humorless doctors. One night, Dolan remained in the bar after Squeaky had gone home to his tiny cottage. Dolan swept out the bar and cleaned the toilet, work that he did for the tavern-owner in exchange for his rent. Smoking was forbidden in the bar – the laws had changed – and so Dolan, who sometimes smoked Swisher sweet cigarillos went outside to light up. Either he slipped on the ice or was knocked down by a passing car. In any event, Dolan fell onto the cold pavement and couldn’t get up and, then, at least, two or, possibly, three vehicles drove over him. Blood and fluids were squeezed out of Dolan’s body by the tires of the vehicles and he was found the next morning frozen fast to the cement, still alive but unconscious – he was dead before noon.

3.

Squeaky sat in the afternoon sun on the block of poured concrete that was his backstep. His tiny cottage was too warm to be comfortable. In a cooler at his ankle, he had a liter bottle of Diet Seven-Up and a bottle of vodka bedded on ice. Dolan used to sit next to him on the backstep perched on a white plastic chair that sometimes edged dangerous close to the side of the poured concrete steps, but Dolan was dead now and Squeaky was alone. Although once there had been a railing enclosing the steps, the metal balustrade had been set uncertainly in the concrete and eroded by rust, until it’s supports had fractured and fallen down among the feral shrubs and, sunflowers growing along the backside of the house. Dolan’s plastic chair, unused for half a year, had also fallen into the shrubbery and a big brown garden spider had spun a web between its forlorn plastic legs.

An air conditioner plugged a window on the side of Squeaky’s house, defeating any cross-ventilation through the structure. In order to cool the little shack, Squeaky had to run the air-conditioner since the window admitted no breeze, but this was expensive and not particularly efficient. The air conditioner was old and it made a throbbing noise when it operated, sometimes achieving a resonant frequency that vibrated in the studs and lathe walls of the house frightening the centipedes so that they fled their nests in the insulation and, emerging onto the faded wallpaper or bathroom tiles, skittering across wall and ceiling with shocking speed and impunity. The breeze that the air conditioner pumped into the house had the stink of a swamp, a malarial dense odor of rotting vegetation and methane bubbling out of mud and stagnant water and didn’t cool the house so much as it made the rooms humid and only slightly warmer than the back stoop where it was shady, after all, and the shadow sometimes probed by a breeze and cooled, at least to knee height, by the ice packed around the vodka and soda pop. Sometimes, Squeaky thought it would be best to just knock the air conditioner out of the window and restore the flow of air into the house, but the metal box of the machine was unwieldy and heavy and he had hoisted it into place only with the help of his friend, and drinking buddy, Dolan and now Dolan was not around to assist him in removing that appliance.

Squeaky was contemplating the weather, and worrying about the warmth that increased every day as the sun lingered longer and longer on the horizon, and he was wondering if he should buy some fans to push the hot air from place to place in his house, calculating the cost of fans as compared to his next social security check and alcohol budget, and he wished that Dolan could come from his grave and sit next to him on the back steps so that they could debate the pros and cons of removing the air conditioner and substituting fans in its stead, a plan that Dolan would probably have vetoed in favor of simply spending more time in the nicely refrigerated Hiawatha Bar, arriving earlier in the morning before the days’ heat became excessive and staying as long past closing as the bartender would allow, remaining in the air-conditioned bar as Dolan swept the floor and cleaned the toilets and, maybe, even sleeping on the tables until dawn came and it was cool enough to go outside in the freshening air and, maybe, stroll a block or two — that would probably be Dolan’s contribution to the argument and, then, they would either agree or agree to disagree and pour more drinks from the vodka and the liter of Diet Seven-Up, watching the traffic passing on the street and the little girls playing hopscotch on ladders chalked on the sidewalk and waving in a friendly manner to people from the neighborhood walking their dogs, Squeaky watched the shadows of the leafy branches decorating the pavement as the day turned blue and became evening and, occupied by his thoughts of this kind, and remembering his dear friend and drinking buddy, Dolan, Squeaky did not notice the large tom-cat that emerged from nowhere in particular and moving, step by step, with a pompous rectitude, strutted across the backyard and, then, climbed the poured concrete steps to sit as still and regal as the statue of a pharaoh at Squeaky’s feet. Squeaky was worrying about his air conditioner and wondering whether he could persuade the social worker who paid him a weekly visit, a so-called "wellness check," to assist him in moving the bulky air conditioner, removing it from the window that it blocked, when he felt eyes upon him, had the sense that he was being closely observed and, then, looked down to see a large tom-cat at his feet, gazing up at him. The cat, welcoming his look, purred contentedly and, then, rubbed himself against Squeaky’s trouser leg. Squeaky put his hand down to touch the animal’s velvety skull and the cat suddenly jumped upward to sit on his lap. Squeaky was surprised at the cat’s friendliness. Normally, he thought of cats as remote and indifferent but this animal was very gentle and it peered up at Squeaky’s face with unabashed love and, even, admiration. The cat patted at Squeaky’s chest with little tapping motions of its paws as if it were trying to heal his wounded heart.

"Who are you?" Squeaky asked the cat. It meowed in response to his question. "I wonder what’s your name," Squeaky said to the cat.

The cat was odd-eyed. It’s left iris was a warm rich honey-color, an amber eye next to a blue one that was cold and chalky the water melted from a glacier in the high mountains.

The cat sat with Squeaky until it was dark outside and the mosquitos were biting so that he decided to go into his house. He gently set the cat down on the ground at the foot of the steps and said: "Shoo! Now, you go home." The cat looked up at him quizzically. Squeaky turned and walked up the steps and, when he opened his back door, he felt a sudden, graceful caress against his calf and, then, he was indoors and the cat was with him not prowling so much as strutting happily a few steps ahead of him. "I guess you’re here for the night," Squeaky said. He opened a can of tuna and fed the cat and it, then, curled up at the foot of his bed, humming a little in its throat.

The cat was clean and affectionate. It did its business outside and followed Squeaky around as he went from place to place in his house or yard. Squeaky named the cat "Bandit" and bought the animal a collar. He fed the tom-cat milk and canned tuna. Bandit spent half of his time outside, hunting or patrolling the shrubbery and the flower gardens adjacent to the alley way. But each night, the cat came to the door and tapped gently, not insistently but with a kind of grave courtesy, and so Squeaky let Bandit into his house where he slept curled-up at the foot of the bed.

Squeaky had a sister who lived in Iowa. Every two or three months, she stopped at his house to deliver him some groceries and, even, brownies that she had baked or caramel fudge. Squeaky’s sister was suspicious of cats and didn’t trust Bandit at first, but, after a half hour or so, she warmed to the animal and, even, stroked his shoulder, the cat arching his back toward her hand. "Where did you get him?" she asked. "He’s just a stray," Squeaky said. "It’s a very nice cat," Squeaky’s sister said, "and someone must be missing him." "I don’t know," Squeaky said. Squeaky’s sister took a couple of pictures of the cat with her cell-phone. "Maybe you should post one of these pictures," she said, "in case the owner is looking for him." "I’m the owner now," Squeaky said. She shrugged and said that she would email the picture’s to Squeaky’s computer but he told her that it had become infected with a virus and didn’t work any longer.

One day, Squeaky rode his bicycle to the Hiawatha Bar. He had not been there since Dolan’s death. A few old men greeted him when he came through the door and they bought him drinks and reminisced about Dolan. It wasn’t as painful as Squeaky had expected and so he stayed longer than was prudent and, later, found that he couldn’t ride his bicycle – as soon as he mounted the bike, it wobbled out of control and several times he fell, scraping his elbow and knees. It was an endless summer afternoon that became an endless bright evening, the sun pasted in the sky and not dropping below the horizon but merely becoming a different color, the orb changing its hue from blindingly bright white to amber and, then, to a glacial blue, all the while, the shadows lengthening but the cool darkness frustratingly remote. Squeaky had been away from his shack for many hours and he couldn’t quite remember where he had last seen Bandit. He poured some milk into a saucer and opened a can of tuna that he placed on his back step and, then, went to bed, wearily conscious that the cat was not curled up at his feet.

The next morning, the milk and tuna fish were still on the back step. Flies were swarming the tuna in its can and drowning in the milk. Squeaky dumped the spoiled milk in the bushes, disturbing the big garden spider who scrambled into hiding, and he replaced the tuna with a new can, waiting for Bandit to return. But Bandit didn’t come home. Squeaky decided to walk around the neighborhood to see if anyone had seen his cat. At first, he tried to ride his bicycle but the frame was bent and he couldn’t get the wheels to turn without making an irritating grinding sound and so he went on foot.

A couple blocks from his house, he saw an old lady spraying her garden hose at her sidewalk. Squeaky asked the old woman if she had seen Bandit. She set the hose aside to flood a flower bed next to her house. "I seen a nice big tom-cat a couple days ago," she said. "The cat had a little animal friend, something like a baby rabbit, and he was playing with his friend."

"Where was this?" Squeaky said.

The old woman pointed to a lawn across the street.

"A dog chased the cat," the old lady said, "and I saw him run between the houses by the fence and, then, up the alleyway."

Squeaky thanked her and crossed the street to lawn where his cat had been playing with the baby animal. An old crow sitting in a green cloud of leaves made a derisive sound.

Squeaky walked up and down the alleyway behind the houses. The heat had fermented the garbage in the bins along the alley and the stink made Squeaky feel dizzy. He called Bandit’s name and, once, thought that the cat was padding along a couple feet behind him, but when he turned, he saw only the utility poles and the little garages and the wrecked motorcycles and abandoned cars and boats disabled atop concrete blocks, wood piles rotting against old fences that were themselves collapsing, discarded odds and ends defended by dogs that rushed out from hiding places to bark at him.

The next day, the social worker made her "wellness check." Squeaky said that his heart was hurting him and that he had felt very sharp, stabbing pains in his chest when he was walking in the alleyway looking for his lost cat. The social worker asked about his cat. Squeaky described the animal. The woman brightened as he spoke – this was a problem that possibly could be solved.

"Have you seen him?" he asked.

"No," she said. "But we could make a poster, even offer a reward for his return."

"That’s a good idea," Squeaky said.

The social worker asked Squeaky if he had a picture of the cat and he answered quickly: "No, no, do I look like I have a camera?" But, then, he recalled that his sister had taken the cat’s portrait with her cell-phone. "There is a picture," he said.

He called his sister and told her that he needed her to email the picture of Bandit saved on her phone to the social worker’s computer. Squeaky’s sister did as she was told and the social worker said that she would print the picture, duplicate it in color even so that Squeaky could post signs offering a reward for the missing cat. The social worker was young and optimistic and had only been on the job a half-year and she still believed that what was lost might be found and that, at least some problems had solutions and that the solutions were within reach.

The next day, Squeaky took a dozen posters around the neighborhood. The posters were neatly printed and said that the cat "answers to the name ‘Bandit’." "REWARD for Bandit’s return!" the poster told readers, advising that the cat was last seen "on the 1300 block of 8^th Avenue SE" – that is, the place where the old lady had watched the tom-cat playing with the baby animal. Squeaky had an old claw-hammer and some small tack-like nails and he held the poster at eye-level against the splintery tar-coated wood of the telephone poles, pounding the nails through the card-stock on which the poster was printed. Hammering the nails into the utility poles was more strenuous than he expected and, when Squeaky was done with the task, his heart was pounding and clammy sweat beaded his forehead.

Squeaky and the social worker had not decided what sort of reward Squeaky would pay if the cat were delivered into his custody. The reward would have to be valuable, something rare and fine, for the kind person who returned the odd-eyed cat to its owner.

　

4.

Bandit explored the shed into which he had fled. A large, extended family of mice lived behind the walls and, sometimes, they emerged to taunt him. He stalked the mice unsuccessfully, their profusion distracting him – no sooner had he settled upon one of them as prey, then, another emerged from hiding to lure him into futile pounces and inaccurate leaps. In the course of the chase, some jars on a shelf were dislodged and they crashed to the concrete, disgorging a sticky, fragrant substance. The heavy scent, as inedible as a rose bush, filled the air and the odor made Bandit drowsy. He made a couple of desultory dives after fleeing mice and, then, pillowed his head on a pile of burlap sacks in the corner of the dim room. The world slipped away from him and he felt as if he had fallen in thick, glutinous water, sucked down through the half-light into strange, feverish dreams. Perhaps, the poisoned air would have suffocated him, but, just as he was about to surrender to the fumes pressing him down, a young mouse ran over the burlap and across his tail. This roused Bandit to the chase, ancient instincts galvanizing him so that his spine arched and his fur bristled, and he hurled himself after the mouse, firing himself like a torpedo through a squeeze in the wall that set him free, if dazed, to wander an alleyway where the air felt cool and fresh, even, though it was, in fact, humid and heavy with an approaching thunderstorm. Bandit set the prisms in his eyes to detect the polarization in the light, a means of navigating even when the sun was hidden behind clouds, and aligning the rays in a certain manner, he darted down the alley toward the place where he lived with Squeaky. He smelled the rancid tuna fish on the back stoop, the souring milk, and the greased metal scent of the garden spider, and looked up, with relief, to the back door of his house and, just at that moment, lightning snapped through the air, ionizing the oxygen in his nose, and the light came an instant later, blinding him, then, the deafening crash that rocked him on his paws and set his ears ringing. Disoriented, Bandit fled into the shelter of some nearby trees only to find that the lightning had speared them so that barbs of fire and ash were drizzling down into his fur. He fled into the alley where torrents of water and gusts of wind drove him through ruinous backyards and past toppling branches and collapsing fences into a neighborhood that was completely unknown to him, the territory of another tom-cat, threatening scents billowing around him like red flags signifying danger.

After a couple of nights sleeping rough on porches and under parked cars, Bandit followed an odor trail to the queen-cat of the territory. She was seductive and Bandit mated with her and, then, discovered that she had a brood of kittens. Good taste and decorum required that Bandit kill the kittens and so he snatched each of them, one by one from the queen cat’s nest, snapped their spines just under their skulls and flung the tiny corpses into a flower garden. The queen cat understood the imperative, but, nonetheless, tried to stab him with the daggers of her claws. Bandit knocked her aside only to confront an earlier suitor, another menacing tom-cat with a fat belly and a nose that had been split in previous combat. There was no choice but to fight and, after a long and bloody brawl, Bandit was defeated. He crept off to lick his wounds. In the battle, Bandit’s amber eye had been gouged-out, an instant of agony that seemed oddly familiar to him, and the monocular world shifted shape and was unfamiliar and, when danger loomed and he darted for a squeeze in which to hide, his surviving ice-blue eye misled him and, sometimes, he crashed against the wall or the posts of a fence. He thought it best to simply die and so he crawled under a porch and remained there for several days, lying on his side and panting mournfully, but death did not come to him, and so he emerged and limped into a backyard where there was an old woman. The old woman smelled of a hundred cats, a rank, festering odor, and she was like him: one of her eyes had been wounded and had fallen out of her head. The old woman noticed Bandit staggering across the lawn and scooped him up in her apron. She carried him into her house and set him on a table and Bandit was conscious of hundreds of eyes glaring at him, other prisoners in her house, ragged, emaciated cats too weak to even challenge one another, lying in the hot shadows of the room, their fur matted with their own feces. The old woman put some kibble on the floor and shoved Bandit off the table so that he could elbow aside a half-dozen other cats and kittens scrambling for the food. The other cats were sick, infected with salmonella and a dozen other bacterial infections, and Bandit knew that if he were trapped in the house for more than a few days he would succumb to illness as well and perish. So he found a pillow in the room where a dozen or so cats, feeble with inanition, were watching televison. The old woman had the TV tuned to Fox and she talked back to the screen and Bandit decided that he would recuperate for a couple days, watch some TV, and let his eye-socket heal before making his escape. He kept apart from the other miserable inmates, cautious about sharing even their water bowls, and he disdained the noisome, clotted litter boxes, filthy caskets in which several mummified cats lay, victims who had perished while defecating. After three or four days, cadging food from the old woman, and following her up and down the stairs and into the toilet to learn her routine, Bandit discovered that she would leave the house, always around mid-day when the sun was high overhead, stepping onto her front porch to pick up a kind of advertising flier, the Shopper. So, he clung close to her calves, rubbing his fur against her dirty jeans, and, when she opened the door, he shot through her legs, flinging himself with desperate abandon out of the house. The old woman spun to the side and fell and Bandit heard her hip snap like dry wood and, as she called out for help, the other hungry cats swarmed over her, tearing her flesh and eating it. Bandit bit off the tip of her little finger for good luck, swallowed it in a single gulp and, then, ran down the front steps, fleeing along the sidewalk toward downtown.

For a few days, Bandit wandered far and wide, a lone wayfarer on the windy paths of the earth. Once, he found himself in an alleyway smelling of beer and urine. Voices came from inside of a bar and Bandit knew that the people who were shouting and calling to one another were very drunk. The parking lot by the tavern aroused strange memories in him and he felt a gloomy kind of panic. The faces of the dead trembled before him and he could smell their different odors, the scents that had distinguished them when they were alive. His mother who had been run over by a car came to him, resurrected and trotting across the parking lot in the twilight. He moved toward where she was squatting, impenetrable as a boulder on the edge of the night, and was about to groom her with his tongue and teeth when she vanished and he was left alone in a great hollow place were moles underground made peeping sounds and shrews savagely bit through the throats of grasshoppers who screamed in frequencies unimaginably high. All of creation seemed to tremble and cry with pain and Bandit remembered his friend Squeaky and wished that he could find his way back to him.

At dawn, Bandit went to the river, cautiously climbing down a slope of fractured concrete rip-rap. Laotian and Vietnamese refugees who had come to town sometimes fished in the shallow water below the dam over which the river foamed and slid in a moving dark sheet. The fishermen cleaned their fish on the flat rocks and, sometimes, left coils of innards on the stones, enough fish-guts to make a reasonable meal. Bandit was sniffing the broken stones for his breakfast when two boys approached. He saw that they were carrying a kind of plastic pail and a wicker basket. The boys paused upstream, cast a line into the water, and, then, squatted by the edge of the river. Bandit approached cautiously, hoping for a hand-out. Then, he felt a sharp pain in his flank. One of the boys had whirled a fishing line with hook through the air and the barb was caught in his hip. The boys shouted and splashed through the shallow muddy water, dislodging frogs squirting away from them in all directions.

　

5.



Squeaky was sitting on his back step, wondering how it could be so hot in late September – probably, it was climate change. The world was getting warmer and the seas were feverish and the ice-caps were melting into the hot broth – at least, that’s what Squeaky had gathered from watching TV – and so, now, he wondered if he should attempt to cool his little house by running the air conditioner even though he had almost no money and it would be another ten days before his next disability check arrived and comfort was expensive, better maybe to hike to the Hiawatha where it was cool and dark, a long walk for him in the blazing sun since his bicycle was busted. He looked at the trees and saw that the leaves on some of them had already brightened to yellow and red and, yet, the sultry heat enveloped everything and the cicadas hummed overhead in canopies of gold and brown the color of fox-fur.

And, as he was considering his poverty and the air conditioner and the distance to the bar by foot on the hot day, two kids from the neighborhood approached, toting a battered plastic bin. Squeaky recognized the two boys. For several years, he had taken bribes to buy booze for them at the liquor store ten blocks away – the transactions were structured as a bottle for each boy and one for Squeaky as well, all financed with money filched from the kids’ parents. The boys looked hot and irritable and the bin that they clutched between them seemed perpetually on the verge of falling down to the pavement, overturning and spilling its content onto the sidewalk. Jeremy, wearing a tattered black tee-shirt showing a green-faced zombie, beckoned to Squeaky. Squeaky waved back to him. The boys took that as an invitation to walk through the alleyway gate in Squeaky’s broken-down fence, dragging the bin between them as they approached the back step.

"What do you have there?" Squeaky asked.

"It’s your cat," the other boy, BJ, said.

"My cat?"

"What’s it called? – Bandit. We caught Bandit."

"Where?" Squeaky asked.

"Skulking around my backyard," Jeremy replied.

"Well, bring him to me," Squeaky said.

"We want our reward," BJ said. They dropped the bin at the base of the concrete steps rising to where Squeaky was sitting. A faint yowl came from inside the plastic box.

Squeaky took out his wallet. He opened it and counted his money. He had seventy-two dollars.

"I’ll give you twenty bucks," Squeaky said.

"Twenty bucks?" Jeremy replied. "You gotta be kidding. You offered a reward. That’s no reward. We want a hundred bucks. A hundred bucks for sure."

"I don’t have that much money," Squeaky said.

BJ kicked the plastic bin so that it skidded forward against the concrete back steps. The cat hidden inside protested again with a feeble moan.

"I want my cat back," Squeaky said.

"Well, then, pay up," BJ told him.

The two boys squinted at Squeaky and their pale, childish faces were indistinct masks of indifference, half-formed and incomplete.

"I could give you forty, but...forty, forty is all I got," Squeaky said.

"Fuck, you probably don’t even have forty," Jeremy said. "You’re just a fucking old drunk."

"You’re right," Squeaky said. "I need my money for booze. But, listen, I can give you forty."

The two boys stooped as if to pick up the bin and haul it away.

"I don’t have any more than forty right now," Squeaky pleaded.

BJ looked at Jeremy and asked: "What do you think?"

Jeremy said: "Give us the money."

Squeaky handed him two crumpled twenty dollar bills. BJ kicked the bin hard so that it toppled over so that the lid slipped aside. A ragged brownish cat that looked as if it had been singed in a fire, scrambled out of the bin and stood blinking at the sunlight. The cat’s tail had been partially burned off and the animal made a forlorn meowing sound.

"That’s not my cat," Squeaky said. "I want my money back."

"Fuck you, you’re just an old drunk," Jeremy said. The two boys grinned at him and tried to make their faces look hard and contemptuous, but instead they seemed merely mischievous, playful even, high-fiving one another and, then, backing away from Squeaky as if afraid that he would pounce on them from his height atop the back steps. Squeaky knew that without the forty dollars he would run out of money and that, unless he could cadge drinks, the level of alcohol in his blood would run dangerously low and, then, he might be visited by monsters, not hallucinations or fantasies, but real monsters, disfigured creatures that stood silently in the corners of his room and glared at him, as real and palpable as the cat licking itself at his feet, and, after the monsters, there would be delirium and, probably, seizures and, then, he would wake up in an emergency room intubated, possibly unable to breathe for himself -- it had happened before and, now, it would happen again because he was short money that he had depended upon and so Squeaky began to cry, his shoulders stiffened and tears flowed from his eyes, and his lips sputtered some curses at the departing boys. BJ and Jeremy were shaken that Squeaky was crying and, of course, they each wanted to comfort him and, even, perhaps return one of the two twenties that Jeremy clutched in his hand, but neither one was willing to show weakness to the other and so, instead, they trotted to the back gate and kicked at it, and when the back gate in the old fence, didn’t open immediately, they kicked at it again, so hard that half the fence fell down, startling them and, then, cackling. the two boys ran away down the alleyway.

Squeaky’s hands were trembling with rage and his eyes were blinded by tears. He reached down to the cat limping up the steps toward him. The cat lunged and bit him on the knuckles and, then, with a shriek like a wounded human baby, departed sideways into the shrubbery vanishing as if it were smoke blown away from a guttering fire.

A cop car pulled into the alley and spun its light for an instant, emitting a taut little howl from its siren. – This is good, Squeaky thought, the cops have come to arrest those boys, they will be detained and have to return my money. I have been defrauded. This is good.

A police woman wearing a complicated belt and a square-cut boxy uniform stepped out of the squad car. Her eyes were hidden by black sunglasses that reflected the half-collapsed fence and Squeaky’s little shack and the place where he was standing, face wet with tears, on the back stoop. The police-woman stepped over the fallen fence as if she were daintily stepping across a corpse thrown suddenly into her path. Her nose wrinkled with contempt. In her hand, she was holding one of Squeaky’s posters offering a reward for Bandit’s return.

"Sir, did you put up these posters?"

"I lost my cat," Squeaky said.

"Are you the one who put up these posters?" the officer asked again.

"I’ve been defrauded," Squeaky told her. He couldn’t stop crying and his voice vibrated with emotion.

"You didn’t answer my question," the lady cop said.

"I put up those posters ‘cause I want to get my cat back," Squeaky said.

"Well, you know that it’s a criminal offense to post placards or advertising on city utility poles, you can’t do that."

"Why?"

"The staples degrade the poles. Those poles are the property of the city. You can’t be using them as a bulletin board."

"I didn’t know," Squeaky said.

"I could fine you five-hundred dollars right here and now," the lady cop said.

"I don’t have no five-hundred dollars," Squeaky told her.

"I figured as much," she said, looking around at the chair fallen into the bushes, the garden spider dangling from its web, the little cooler at Squeaky’s feet containing cans of malt liquor, the air conditioner crammed into the window and blocking ventilation to the house, the broken bicycle, and the smashed fence.

"You’re gonna have to go to each utility pole and remove those posters and, also, remove any staples or nails or tacks – whatever it is that you used to affix the illegal advertising," she told him.

"I can’t do that."

"You have to do what I tell you, or I’ll give you a ticket and summons to appear in court and, then, you can pay the five-hundred dollars or sit in jail."

"I can’t sit in jail," Squeaky said.

"Then, get off your ass, and remove the posters from each and every utility pole. Listen, Squeaky, I’m trying to cut you some slack. Just do what I tell you to do."

"I’ll get my goddamned posters," Squeaky said. "I’ll get them down. But I want you to find my cat."

"I’m not animal control," the lady cop said. "You can call animal control. But I’m giving you 24 hours to get those posters down from the utility poles. Do you understand?"

"I understand," Squeaky said.

The female police officer turned and walked back to her squad car in the alley, cautiously stepping over the broken fence. She looked hot and irritated and Squeaky thought that she was probably happy to regain the air-conditioned comfort of her vehicle. There were some deep and jagged potholes in the alley and the lady cop didn’t want to drive her squad car over them and so she backed up onto the street, reversed direction, and, then, cruised away, rolling through the stop sign next to Squeaky’s house.

Squeaky felt his heart shudder in his chest. He stood up and went into his garage to look for his chainsaw. A few years before, Squeaky had made some money cutting wood and selling it for people’s fireplaces and he had an old chainsaw that he had used in that enterprise. The saw was shoved into a corner, covered with spider webs and dust, and it seemed astonishingly heavy to him – that he really once wielded such an implement for hours at a time seemed fantastic. Now, it was almost beyond his strength to clutch the thing in his fist, trembling with rage and his eyes blinded by tears. He tugged at the starter cord – two, three, four times but the machine didn’t even cough. His heart lunged and bucked in his chest again and the pain made him want to sit down but he had to start the chainsaw so that he could take down the posters attached to the poles lining the streets, telephone poles up and down the avenues, eleven poles, since the lady police officer had clawed one of his reward posters from one of those utility poles and had carried it as evidence, like a wounded bird, into his back yard to confront him with the proof of his crime. He tugged at the starter cord of the chain saw again but the machine didn’t respond – there wasn’t even a rattle or a puff of smoke from its motor.

An old axe hung on the wall. Squeaky cast the chainsaw aside, letting it drop heavily to the concrete and he saw the plastic guard over the blade break and the dust was shaken from the grip. He took down the axe and swung it experimentally, feeling its weight and heft. Then, Squeaky carried the axe to the front of his house and stood by his mailbox, clutching the tool. The sun beat down on him and the cry of cicadas reached a deafening pitch and Squeaky heard his breath coming in sobs as he strode down the sidewalk to the first telephone pole on the block, the splintery black and tarry wood still emblazoned with his poster offering a reward for the return of Bandit. He swung the axe against the pole and it kicked back hard, ripping the tool out of his grip so that the axe bounced away from him and skidded across the sidewalk.

Squeaky turned and found the axe lying a few yards away. He stooped to pick it up and, then, saw that the lady policeman was standing across the street, her revolver drawn and aimed in his direction.

"Don’t pick up that axe, Squeaky," she said.

"You told me to get my posters down and so that’s what I’m doing," Squeaky said.

He picked up the axe and walked back to the utility pole. This time, he swung the axe less ferociously and it bit into the wood a little so that chips from the pole ricocheted off his chest.

"Stop chopping that pole," the lady cop shouted. She had approached to the middle of the street and her revolver was trembling. From the corner of his eye, Squeaky saw the muzzle of the gun vibrating.

Squeaky hit the pole again, swinging less violently so as not to bruise his hands. The pole was hard as iron and the dull wedge-shaped edge of the axe bounced away from the wood. The scent of creosote filled the air.

Sirens sounded and, suddenly, there were other squad cars and the landscape flashed red with their lights as Squeaky hit the pole again. Two male cops approached Squeaky, screaming at him.

"You might as well shoot me," Squeaky said.

He turned toward them and held the axe out to the side so that its handle and blade would not interfere with the bullets that he expected them to fire into his chest and face.

"Put it down, Squeaky," one of the cops said.

Squeaky’s heart stopped and his eyes overflowed, bulging as if to pour everything in them out onto the sidewalk. He took a faltering step forward and, then, plunged toward the ground. As he was falling, one of the two male cops fired his taser, aiming at Squeaky’s genitals since electrocuting suspects in the testicles afforded the most comical results, a pleasant and amusing diversion from the tension of the stand-off. But Squeaky’s legs had crumpled under him and he dropped into path of the electrodes fired downward at his groin. The electrodes caught him in the chest and the surge of the electrical charge plugged into his failed heart and coursed through the muscle reestablishing his heart beat.

Squeaky writhed on the sidewalk next to the telephone pole, his eyes luminous with tears.

　

6.

The hospital was cool and people spoke in soft voices. Everything was very clean and white. Under sedation, Squeaky slept peacefully and without dreaming. When he woke, the IV in his forearm felt inflamed and he had a headache. He could see over a low dustless ledge to a window and, outside, it was still hot – people coming and going in the parking lot wore shorts and sleeveless blouses although the trees in the distance blazed with Fall colors. After his midday meal, a couple of silent figures entered his room and stood at each side of his bed. The figures were grey with protruding pinkish ears and exorbitant whiskers like black spikes drilled through their cheeks. Squeaky asked the two intruders what they wanted from him but they were silent, glaring at him with tiny black eyes. When the nurse came to take away his dinner tray, Squeaky asked her to expel the two intruders standing as sentinel by his bed. She made some kind of an excuse that led him to understand that the two men were guards that had been sent by the police because he was in custody and awaiting arraignment for posting bills on the utility poles. Squeaky was given some more sedative so that he could sleep but he felt very feverish and the IV site on his arm irritated him and, when he closed his eyes to rest them for a few minutes, two more sentinels had been posted, sullen-looking disfigured men in grey uniforms with protuberant pink ears and whiskers, one guard at each corner of his bed. Squeaky said to them: "How do you expect me to sleep with you standing at each corner of my bed?" He called for the nurse and, again, pleaded with her to make the sentinels go away.

Squeaky closed his eyes again and, when he awoke, he couldn’t speak. Something was choking him. Each breath that he took encountered some kind of resistance and seemed to tremble on the edge of a deep and black abyss – his breaths were physical things, rectangular in shape and shoved out of his throat and mouth, teetering on the brink of suffocation. He gagged on a tube pushed through his nose and throat and felt a kind of pumping that threatened to inflate his sinuses and skull to the bursting point. The sentinels now numbered many dozens and they crowded tightly around his bed.

Later, Squeaky saw Dolan. It was if he were looking through a blue lens. The atmosphere over his bed was like the inside of a gemstone. Dolan shredded the sentinels with his teeth and they vanished like vapor. Squeaky’s breathing was coordinated with the pump automatically inflating and deflating his chest. The edges of his body were filled with light and tingled.

When Squeaky next looked out the window, the sky was dark with heavy, rumpled-looking clouds and the people in the parking lot were hustling to escape the cold, wearing heavy coats and walking bent forward as if against an icy wind.

　

7.

One of the boys stroked Bandit’s fur while the other removed the barbed hook from his side. "The poor cat is missing an eye," the boy said. "He got hurt somehow," the other boy replied. When they returned to the place where they were fishing, the cat followed them, rubbing against their bare legs. "He is very tame," one of the boys said to the other.

After they had finished fishing, they climbed up from the river, scaling the bank that was cluttered with fallen trees, red sumac growing from collapsed walls, and thorns flying tattered pennants of plastic shopping bags. The cat followed them home. Someone mentioned that the animal looked vaguely like a fat, well-fed cat shown in flyers tacked to telephone poles in a neighborhood a few blocks away. "There’s a reward for the return of the cat," one of the boys said. "But does it say that he’s got only one eye," the other boy asked. "I don’t think so," his friend replied.

They fed the cat and it stayed on their porch overnight. The next day, autumn finally arrived. It was like turning off a switch that controlled the hot, sultry weather. The day was grey and overcast and cold rain fell through trees that suddenly looked grim and metallic. The boys hiked the neighborhood where the flyers had been posted but found that someone had peeled them off the utility poles. Just as they were about to abandon their search, they saw a pole tucked away in an alleyway still bearing the poster. The wind had tattered the poster and it was bleached by the sun and, now, wet and half illegible with the icy rain spilling down from above. But they could read the address where the cat’s owner lived and the name of the pet. "Are you Bandit?" one of the boys asked Bandit. He cocked his head and showed, for an instant, the little flame of his pink tongue.

The boys led the cat to the address where Squeaky lived. But no one was home. A housewife came from across the street and said: "You don’t want to be associating with this man. He’s insane, crazy, dangerous." The boys nodded their heads. When they looked around, the cat had vanished.

　

8.

When the weather turned cold, families of mice fled their nests in the grass and hidden in the shrubbery to invade Squeaky’s little house. The back door had been left open when the police used the tazer to knock Squeaky to the ground and no one had come to shut it. An opossum and a musk rat also temporarily took up habitation in the house, but they were den animals and the rooms were too big for them, open space that made them uncomfortable, and so, after rummaging around the rooms for a couple days, the bigger mammals abandoned the home, leaving it to the invasion of mice.

When Bandit entered the house, he found that it was full of mice. Bandit stealthily slunk through the open door and, then, turned and, with his paws, patted the door shut. This would prevent his prey from escaping from him. Then, for the next couple days, he mercilessly hunted the mice. When he was done, he had shredded with his teeth and claws 108 mice in total.

A few days later, Squeaky returned from the hospital. He was very happy to see Bandit, one-eyed now, but otherwise none the worse for wear sitting in his chair by the TV. The cat greeted with him a silky purr and came to be petted. Then, they sat down together to watch television.

Thompson's Hobby

　

1.

"If you are going to kill a police officer," Thompson said, "it must be done in cold blood. People who shoot cops are always in a panic or about to be arrested or acting out of mental illness or revenge. So, of course, they always get caught. Killing someone, particularly a cop is as easy as pie if you plan carefully and act on the basis of theory."

"Theory?" Oracio asked.

"Ideology, on the basis of a calm commitment to first principles," Thompson replied.

The small space heater emitted an orange glow insufficient to warm the guard-shack. In the parking lot, a couple of stragglers for second shift scuttled over the ice. Although it was twilight, the lights standing above the cars and parked pickup trucks were not yet illumined.

"But you used to be cop yourself," Oracio said.

Thompson collected his lunch pail and thermos. He had not removed the jacket that he had worn to work under his heavy brown coat. He shrugged himself into the big coat. The late-comers, looking fixedly at the pavement ahead of them, entered the annex to the guard-shack and, then, used their fob-keys to pass through the turnstile.

"Someone should note those guys down," Thompson said. "They’re always late."

"I’m sure the foreman knows," Oracio said.

"No, no ‘supervisor’," Thompson told him. "We have to be politically correct, gender neutral. The word is ‘supervisor’."

The factory rose in tiers behind them, eyeless walls of fluted concrete and steel that sometimes clanked and rattled as if enormous chains were being hauled across cold and unforgiving cement. Evil-smelling vapors rose into the frigid air and formed white, greasy-looking tumors over the plant.

"Well, I got to be going," Thompson said.

Oracio poured some coffee from his thermos into a dirty mug. He scanned the duty-roster on the clipboard at the desk and, then, ran his finger down the list of contractors and other persons scheduled as visitors to the second shift.

"You gotta be joking about this cop-killing stuff," Oracio said.

"Sure," Thompson replied. "It’s just a thought-experiment. And if I was really plotting murder, do you think I would tell you? That’s the problem with even those who have a meticulous inclination – they tend to boast, take trophies, tell the wrong people the wrong stuff. All the planning in the world doesn’t get you anywhere unless you can keep your big mouth shut."

"So why are you talking to me?"

"Didn’t you say you were going to be deployed again, next month?"

"Back to Helmund Province," Oracio said, grinning uncertainly.

"Patriot stuff."

"Yeah, it’s great," Oracio said.

"You gotta be meticulous," Thompson said. "You have to be well-funded. You can’t do this kind of thing on the cheap. And there can’t be any kind of personal motivation. It has to be disinterested."

"So why would you do this?"

"To even out the score. The cops are always killing mentally ill guys and Black kids, Mexicans too, my friend. Someone just needs to even out the score."

"That’s cold," Oracio said. "That’s cold as ice."

"It’s a hobby," Thompson replied. "Like any other. Some people go on cruises or collect classic automobiles or piss away thousands of dollars of their retirement money at the casino or playing golf. The cost of killing one cop is about the price of a trip to Cancun and a week at an all-inclusive. And it’s a helluva lot more thrilling."

"But no one gets away with it," Oracio said.

A jet of steam speared the cold blue air above the plant. Beyond the fence and parking lot gate, city lights twinkled in the frost.

"You go to a peaceful suburb. You target your man. You figure out his routine and catch him on a lonely strip of road away from his prowl. After you kill him, you put some incriminating evidence on him so that the investigators figure that he was a criminal himself. You stroll away and that’s that. The frame is the icing on the cake. You haven’t just offed the dude but you’ve poisoned his reputation. You’ve made him blameworthy. I tell you it takes the edge off the investigation in the dead cop is somehow to blame for what happened."

Oracio said: "You are so full of shit."

"Of course," Thompson said. "I’m just teasing you."

"I’m on the waiting list for a law enforcement job out west," Oracio said. "When I get back from this next deployment, I’ll use my veteran’s preference and get a police job. I’ve already taken my civil service exam."

"Well, I was a cop for 25 years," Thompson said. "You get a great state pension."

"I gotta get through this next deployment," Oracio said, "and, then, I’m home free."

"There’s nothing like police work," Thompson told him. He scooped up his lunch box and thermos and cell-phone, nodded to Oracio, and, then, stepped out of the guard shack onto the rutted ice in the aisles between the parked cars. A threshold of darkness had been passed and, suddenly, the overhead lights flickered, splashing the vehicles with a color, a feeble radiance against the encroaching gloom.

　

2.

Thompson came from a family of cops. An uncle had been killed in the line of duty and other shirt-tail cousins were on disability and workers compensation because of back injuries arising from tussles with people that they had arrested. In High School, Thompson was a good athlete and earned a baseball scholarship to a State University. But he didn’t like college and dropped-out to attend the police academy. He started his career as a beat cop patrolling the streets of a small midwestern city in the State of M-----, working his way up to become a lieutenant and shift supervisor and, finally, detective. When he retired from the force, Thompson wore a business suit to work and spent most of his time at a desk reading reports and confidential informant memoranda and coaching younger officers as to their courtroom demeanor and testimony. Before becoming a manager, Thompson was both grievance steward and a negotiator for his bargaining unit. Although a few dangerous situations required Thompson to draw his service revolver, he had never discharged the weapon in the line of duty. But he was a good shot and,when required to demonstrate proficiency with his weapon at the range for his annual recertification, earned commendations for his marksmanship.

The year before he retired, Thompson attended a party hosted by several of younger police men on the force. His divorce was in its final stages, and so, he came to the gathering by himself. The day was warm and the people at the party were drinking beer and standing around the grill where meat was cooking. Wives and girlfriends sat on the porch under a plastic salmon-colored awning watching small children who were splashing in a plastic wading pool shaped like a turquoise shell. Several dogs trotted in circles around the swimming pool, yapping at the children. Sometimes one of the cops would pick up the garden hose coiled in the grass by the pool, depress the trigger on the nozzle, and shoot a stream of water at the children giggling in the shallow water or the men brooding over the grill or the younger women sitting at the edge of the redwood deck under the awning. A lady cop, who was something of a show-off, had been dowsed with water to the extent that she had removed her blouse to reveal the top of a bikini swimming suit. The woman had a nice figure and the young men cast dejected, sidelong looks in her direction envying her boyfriend whowas an ex-Marine and banker in the town and not worthy of her charms.

When it was time to eat, a couple of the off-duty cops carried trays of bratwurst, hamburgers, and burnt, blistered wieners to a folding table set against the back wall of the house. Some salads and bowls of chips with dip had already been placed on the table. Two of the larger dogs approached the folding table and sat on their haunches a half-dozen feet away staring greedily at the food. Thompson was on the porch with the women. He was an old man as far as the other guests were concerned, a white-collar worker who spent his days sending emails and reading reports on the screen of his computer, and so it seemed natural that he should be with the young mothers and the older wives and the men with grizzled beards and beer bellies who had served in Vietnam.

A child screamed and one of the dogs crept away with tail between legs and ears flattened against the fur on his skull. The little girl’s mother scooped the child up in her arms. The other dogs, innocent but fearing retribution, scattered. The men at the grill turned and glared at the women and the children, upset, it seemed, that their joviality had been so rudely interrupted, but disinclined to do much of anything. Other women encircled the mother and the crying child. The dog had snatched a hot dog from the little girl’s mouth and, in the course of that theft, bit the child’s upper lip. The puncture wound was deep and bled profusely and the child howled so that the dogs were afraid and some of them barked, while the malefactor, a German-shepherd and Labrador mix, nervously paced the perimeter of the lawn.

The men debated the situation. Someone said that the child should be taken to the emergency room so that the wound could be cleansed. But, of course, if that were done, a report would have to be made about the incident and the dog might be condemned as dangerous and everyone had been drinking, more or less heavily since it was fine day with congenial company, and this raised the question about who would drive the little girl to the hospital with the child’s mother, who was herself more than a little tipsy, to answer the inevitable tedious questions. No one was afraid of being stopped or arrested in light of the professional courtesy owed by one cop to another, but, nonetheless, the whole situation could become problematic, particularly if the dog had bit before, something that was rumored and, also, the subject of debate.

One of the men had served in Iraq as a medic and had some civilian EMT training as well and so he looked at the wound and, after some more conversation, pronounced it minor, disinfectant with gauze and a bandaid would suffice as care – "it’s too small to suture anyway," the former medic said, "might as well avoid the ER room bill." After her initial fright, the child’s mother had become apologetic – "we don’t want anything to happen to the dog," she said. The lady officer had put her blouse back over her bikini top, preparing, perhaps, for the party to come to an end, but she relaxed and, then, one of the men took the garden hose and sprayed all the dogs indiscriminately, driving them into a corner where they huddled disconsolate and dripping with water, a miserable disheveled pack shivering in the corner of the backyard.

Thompson said that he didn’t agree with how the incident had been handled. He told the wife of one of the patrol officers that someone should make a report. "You know," he said, "if this had been civilians, one of the cops would probably have shot the dog." "People get trigger-happy," the woman said. "Particularly the young bucks," Thompson replied. The hostess brought the wounded child an ice-cream cone and the little girl smeared the chocolate all over her face and, before long, the incident was forgotten and the lady cop had removed her blouse again and, when she went into the house and emerged with a big pitcher of slush-ice margaritas, the party began again in earnest.

After the weekend, Thompson filed a report about the dog bite and there were some quarrels in the locker-room and exercise facility at the Law Enforcement Center. One of the other officers said that it was fortunate that Thompson was working a desk because the other cops probably would think twice about coming to his aid if he needed help. Thompson filed a report on that remark as well and a couple of union grievances ensued and, after a half dozen months, he decided that it would simplify his life if he simply retired – he had put in his time and earned his pension and there were other things that he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

　

3.

Every cop has a doctor for a friend, someone with whom he plays cards and protects against drunk driving offenses and whose children come under police patronage and, therefore, are exempt from minor drug offenses. In return for these services, the doctor is expected to issue notes to the policeman excusing him from work on medical grounds or confirming disability claims for the purposes of workman’s compensation as well as providing certifications necessary for FMLA leave. Thompson’s physician friend dictated a one page letter qualifying the former policeman for medical leave from his work as a security guard. The doctor was accommodating because Thompson had done several favors for him and so he wrote the letter without wasting time on a physical examination – some years earlier, Thompson had hurt his back when scuffling with a thug in an icy alley and so he had sciatica, subject to periodic exacerbation, that could be used to justify either intermittent FMLA leave or a continuous absence from work.

A week after Oracio deployed to Afghanistan, Thompson submitted forms qualifying him for four weeks FMLA. In the ten days before he took leave, he was careful to hobble around the shack where the security guards were stationed, unsteady on his feet because of his low back, displaying an admirable stoicism about the crippling pain, but, nonetheless, grimacing and swallowing large quantities of what appeared to be Vicodan.

Thompson sent a text-message to his daughter, a single-mother living in another state and said that he planned to drive down for a visit. Thompson’s relationship with his daughter, at least, after his divorce from her mother, was based on the fact that, sometimes, she asked him for money and, sometimes, he gave it to her. "I would like to get to know my granddaughter better," Thompson said. His daughter sent him a text-message saying that she had a new boyfriend and that the man was staying with her so that there would be no place for Thompson to bunk in her small home. Thompson wrote back to her with the message that he had not intended upon imposing upon her hospitality and that he had booked a motel room for the visit.

Thompson went to the Men’s Warehouse and bought a dark blue suit with pinstripes, something appropriate, he thought, for a funeral. He hung the suitbag from a hook in his backseat. In his duffle bag, Thompson packed underwear, toiletries, black dress shoes with a tie neatly rolled up in both the right and left toes, sweat pants, jeans, a few shirts, and a Smith & Wesson K-38 Masterpiece with four-inch barrel together with a box of S&W 38 Special cartridges. Like most police officers, present and former, Thompson owned many firearms, including a half-dozen that he had acquired through irregular channels and, therefore, could use without concern that the weapon would be traced to him. The K-38 had been languishing in an evidence locker, an artifact from some long-forgotten narcotics bust, and Thompson had taken the weapon from a barrel of contraband firearms scheduled to be melted down to slag with miscellaneous knives, saps and shanks intermingled with baggies of marijuana, cocaine, and oxycontin.

A few years earlier, one of Thompson’s buddies had died from cancer. The man’s radiation and chemotherapy had resulted in terrible nausea that the dying man treated with brownies fibrous with marijuana. Thompson had a contact at a medical facility in the next county who provided the weed for the dying man, an orderly and ambulance driver who periodically traveled to Colorado to bring back packages of medical-quality marijuana. Patients scheduled for chemotherapy were told to talk to the orderly, whispered conversations that, although not formally charted, had an aura of medical respectability – nurses as well several of the doctors had recommended transactions with the man and he was known to have good quality dope that was off-limits to law enforcement. Thompson left a message on the orderly’s cell-phone that he needed to talk to him and they met a Burger King just off the freeway on the edge of town.

"I hope it’s not for you," the orderly said. He was a heavy-set man with military haircut and a tattoo of the Virgin of Guadulupe under his chin, on the right side of his throat. "No, not me," Thompson said. "It’s a cop buddy who’s too ashamed to do a deal with you." "What’s to be ashamed of?" the orderly said. "Sooner or later we all get sick." The ambulance driver was on-call and he set his pager on the table between them. After eating, they went into the parking lot and Thompson paid him $500 in one-hundred dollar bills for a package of OG Kush weed. "Don’t let him operate a vehicle on this stuff," the orderly said. "It’s a total couch-lock." Thompson bought a dozen hydrooxycodone tablets as well. They shook hands. "You tell your buddy that my prayers are with him," the orderly said. "I know," Thompson said. "I know."



When Thompson reached his motel, he opened his laptop and accessed the place’s WIFI. He had spent $750 at the Burger King as well another $13.50 for his lunch and the burger with fries the ambulance driver had eaten. Round-trip tickets to Cancun were priced at $1175. With a mechanical pencil that he carried in his breast pocket, Thompson entered the price comparison in his moleskin notebook.

　

4.

The city was surrounded by desert and dry hills. The hills were on the horizon many miles away and the basin was flat without rivers or creek beds or any topography to speak of. A monotonous grid of avenues and streets, absolutely regular and, therefore, predictable spread across the flat land shimmering in the heat. Where freeways intersected, malls rose above hot terraces of parking ramps. The surface boulevards were four lanes wide in both directions and studded with traffic lights placed so that a motorist could see to the next stop-and-go semaphore and the traffic queued there.

Thompson checked into a Knight’s Inn fifteen minutes away from the suburb where his daughter lived in a small house. The area around the Knight’s Inn was zoned light-industrial, vast warehouses and strips of identical, low-slung offices that were so new that most of the tenants announced their presence with hand-lettered cardboard signs. Fast food places glistened at the intersections. Trucks were always coming and going in this sector. Semi-tractors hauling big trailers turned wide at the intersections and Thompson learned to stop some distance away from the crossroads so that he would not have to back up to allow the trucks to pass. The Knight’s Inn was made of concrete blocks and the walls were cold and damp, but, also, soundproof.

Every other day, Thompson drove to his daughter’s house to see his grandchild. Sometimes, he took the little girl to lunch at a local pizza place or walked with her in a drab and cheerless playground with hot gravel between the swings and the slides. As he expected, his daughter was always short of cash and she hinted that Thompson should pay her something for the privilege of visiting his grandchild. So he gave her a couple hundred dollars, bought a tank of gas for her old and unreliable car, and, one night, took the family –his daughter, her boyfriend whom she called her fiancee, and the baby – out to eat at an Olive Garden restaurant. The boyfriend did not allow the little girl to order from the children’s menu but instead asked for another entree with breadsticks, food that the little girl could not eat and that was taken home instead in a styrofoam tray to be eaten as lunch the next day.

In the evening, Thompson drove for a half-hour to another suburb across town. It was a nice place with an village center constructed to resemble a series of Spanish missions aligned around fountains with terra cotta figures of angels and dolpins. Two large golf courses, green and glistening with water irrigating them, occupied opposing corners of the town. The golf courses were lined with big houses sparkling with many windows and boasting three and four car garages. One of the golf courses was entirely surrounded by residences; the other club was built along a drainage ditch, a concrete channel with a spine of sandy silt at its dry center, and an interminable commercial avenue that ran parallel to the desolate canal as frontage to car dealerships, drive-through banks, fast-food places, and bunker-like office buildings. At one end of the avenue there was an airport and planes swooped low over the landscape dragging their huge boomerang-shaped shadows across the spongy-looking golf course and the canal and the businesses lining the roadway. Traffic coursed along the avenue at all hours because the airport was big with planes coming and going all the time and it was anonymous: rental cars, lost tourists, janitors and counter-workers going to work at the terminals on the edge of the desert.

The law enforcement center, together with a municipal courthouse shaped vaguely like the Alamo, was in the part of the town with Spanish-style architecture. At shift change in the late afternoon, lone officers in patrol cars cruised territory assigned to them, following routes that were well-defined and predictable. After a couple nights surveillance, Thompson began to follow a young cop, an aggressive driver who accelerated too fast from stops only to brake impetuously at intersections so that his squad car almost skidded. Sometimes, the patrol officer rolled through red lights if there was no traffic in the vicinity and he had a habit of rousting Mexicans, often people coming from work at the airport, subjecting them to long and intrusive stops along the side of the boulevard that passed the golf course. Perhaps, the cop thought that he was doing some kind of drug interdiction work but it didn’t seem like he found much of anything in the vehicles that he pulled over and, then, probed with the white beam from his big, bludgeon-shaped flashlight.

The young cop worked twelve-hour shifts, six to six, on a schedule staggered three days on-duty, alternating with weeks requiring four days patrol – it was a regime pretty typical for suburban police with which Thompson was familiar. At about 1:30 in the morning, the cop went to a taco truck operating outside a place called the Rodeo Bar. He bought food from the counter-window at the truck, carried it to his car, and, then, drove a quarter-mile to the parking lot between an insurance agency and an orthodontist’s office. Thompson observed this routine for several nights and, even, stood in line behind the policeman as he waited to order his food, a plate of tacos pastor with tortillas wrapped in tin foil and served in a plastic tray next to smear of refried beans. The cop was youthful and an amateur barber, probably his mother or girlfriend, had cut his hair in a way that made his protuberant, pink ears look particularly ungainly. His uniform had been freshly laundered and, despite the odor of cooking meat and cumin, Thompson could smell the cleanness of his clothing, a faint scent of starch and bleach and deodorant.

The next night, Thompson parked his car at the Rodeo Bar and stood among people who had come outside onto the tavern’s patio to smoke. At 1:30, he saw the squad car signal a turn from the boulevard and pull up beside an aluminum picnic table sitting next to the taco truck. As the young cop emerged from his patrol vehicle, Thompson walked along an alleyway toward the orthodontist’s office and the insurance agency. A cyclone fence lined the alley that had been gouged by flash floods and, beyond the wire mesh, there was trailer court, the mobile homes turned with their backs to the commercial avenue and its businesses. A coyote trotted ahead of him and dogs chained to the trailer houses howled mournfully. Thompson reached the orthodontist’s office and saw that it’s side facing the insurance agency was complex with a long zigzagged wheelchair ramp made of new lumber aromatic with creosote. He walked up the ramp to the first switchback and squatted, peering through the palisade of wood enclosing the landing. After a couple of minutes, the squad car appeared, turned into the parking area and, then, spun around in a tight circle so that the vehicle was facing back to scrutinize the divided road that led to the airport. The policeman shut off the motor of his car and unrolled his window and, then, Thompson could see a faint phosphorescence illumining the young man’s jaw and cheeks – he was reading text messages on his phone. The cop ate his tacos, took a couple swigs from an energy drink that he removed from a backpack sitting on the seat next to him, and, then, got out of the car to drop the plastic tray and the wad of aluminum foil in a rubberized garbage bin next to the orthodontist’s office. As he pitched the trash in the bin, Thompson could smell him again, the crisp freshly laundered scent of his uniform. Thompson felt a sudden, awful disappointment, a terrible dismay at how easy it would be to kill the young man.

Thompson predicted that his target would be off-work for a couple days. Although Thompson patrolled the avenue leading to the airport and paced off the distance between the Rodeo Bar parking lot and the orthodontist’s office, he did not expect the young man to be on-duty. He explored the shadows around the insurance agency and discovered that the offices were located in a building that had once held a muffler business. Red transmission fluid stained the concrete pads outside the building. Thompson crossed the boulevard, waiting for red lights in both directions to halt the spurts of traffic on the busy road and explored the drainage ditch. Airplanes with their landing lights blinking descended over the long, pale sluice of concrete channel and on the golf course beyond the ditch big fistfuls of water were flung across the dark fairways by night-sprinklers that made a chugging sound. The canal was a peaceful place and Thompson could lie on his back on the warm sloping panel of concrete and look at the stars and the big planes that moved among them.

He expected the cop to be back on the job after a couple of days and, at midnight, drove back to the airport boulevard where columns of street lamps lit the road bright as day. He drove as far as the airport where the road entered a compound of rental car lots and parking ramps. The boulevard narrowed to a two-lane country road and ran among eroded badlands for a few miles before turning to pass between orchards of pistachio trees. At 1:30 am, Thompson was waiting for his target at the Rodeo Bar, but the patrol car did not appear. At two in the morning, Thompson drove back to the Knight’s Inn. He decided that he would kill the cop the next morning and that, if by some chance, the young man did not appear at the taco truck, he would select another target and initiate different preparations for the murder.

Thompson visited his granddaughter during the day and took her to the zoo. It was very warm and the animals rested in their cages on their bellies panting in the heat. The polar bear and seals hid under the water with only their black noses piercing the shimmering icy-blue flood. In the evening, Thompson took a nap and, then, watched TV listlessly until midnight. He thought about pouring himself some drinks from a bottle of whisky that he had purchased the day before but he wanted to avoid a hangover in the morning and thought sadly that he had reached that age where intoxication is not worth its after-effects. He took a warm shower and dressed carefully in his blue suit, selecting his pale grey silk tie to knot under his chin. He made sure that his underwear was clean. If he were shot, he didn’t want to be hauled to the hospital in dirty underpants.

The taco truck was at its appointed place, overlooking the aluminum picnic table. The smokers stood on the patio in a haze of grey smoke. Four or five people, some of them obviously drunk, were lined-up to buy food from the truck. One of the men, staggering a little, called the truck a "roach coach" – he looked like he was Hispanic himself. Thompson felt a sickness in the pit of his stomach when he saw the squad car rolling down the boulevard and signaling its turn into the The Rodeo Bar’s parking lot.

Thompson walked swiftly from where his car was parked to the trenched alley and followed the cracked and pitted asphalt to the orthodontist’s office. The coyote was nowhere to be seen but some of the dogs tethered behind the cyclone fence caught his scent and barked at him. Thompson went up the wheelchair ramp to the first landing, knelt there and, using his cell-phone for light, checked his revolver to make sure that it was properly loaded. After verifying the condition of the gun, he eased off the safety and set the weapon on the wood planks next to him.

The young policeman drove into the lot between the dark insurance agency and orthodontist’s office. It seemed to Thompson that he took a very long time to eat his tacos. Several times, Thompson saw the young man’s face glowing with the light from his phone. For the first time in all of his nights of surveillance, Thompson noticed that there were beacons and transmission towers on a low hill beyond the golf course – he saw the red lights glistening like rubies among the dull yellowish stars. The police officer finished his meal, opened his car door, and, then, walked toward the garbage bin to discard his white plastic tray and the lump of aluminum foil. Thompson stood up when the man was lifting the plastic lid of the garbage bin. He fired three shots into the cop. The flash from the muzzle reflected off the aluminum foil, a bright spasm like heat lightning. Thompson ran down the ramp, stood over the fallen man, and fired a fourth shot point blank into his face. Then, he took the baggy of marijuana and the hydrocodone vial, together with an envelope of twenty dollar bills from his pocket. He put the drugs and the envelope next to the motionless man, a couple feet from the glimmer that the dead cop’s belt buckle made in the moonlight. Then, Thompson turned and strode along the cyclone fence, walking briskly through the chorus of dogs now barking and howling at him. In a couple of minutes, he had reached the parking lot at The Rodeo.

Thompson started his car and, taking care to signal, edged into the surge of traffic coming away from the airport. The stoplights seemed timed against him and he had to wait at each intersection. It didn’t matter. Although he had rolled down his window and cocked his ear, there was no sound of sirens. At the fourth intersection, a mile or so from the place where he had killed the policeman, an oncoming car winked at Thompson’s vehicle. The car flashed its lights at him three or four times and the driver, even, tapped the horn lightly. Thompson ignored the car facing across the intersection toward him and, taking care not to speed, drove forward, accelerating quickly when the light changed to green. After another five minutes, he reached the ramp leading to the freeway, signaled his turn, and descended toward the stream of cars and trucks whistling by. Again, a car flashed its headlights at him. Thompson swore under his breath and merged with the traffic on the freeway. It was only after he had driven another two or three miles that he discovered that he had forgotten to flip on his headlights – the boulevard was bright with overhead lamps as was the busy freeway and, in the torrent of traffic, he been a black, dangerous shadow, an unlit car among the procession of headlights.

　

5.

Bag pipes squealed on the dusty knoll. Waves of blue surged down the avenue, badges and clips on utility belts glittering. Some of the police squadrons marched in orderly groups, paramilitaries moving silently in lock-step toward the church. Other groups were rude, noisy, undisciplined, like a mob streaming from a football stadium after a particularly humiliating defeat. Near the church, the crowd slowed and thickened and Thompson saw the rooftops lined with cops in dress uniforms, ranks of police in dark sunglasses posed against the sky like snipers. Because he was retired, Thompson wore his business suit and a bright red tie to celebrate his triumph. On his lapel, Thompson had pinned crossed flags, an American flag and a thin blue line banner. His red silk tie was held in place by a thin blue line tie-tack.

Thompson knew that it would be suffocating in the church and so he found a bench shaded by a tree. Two other older cops, squeezed into blue uniforms a couple sizes too small for their beer guts, sat beside him on the bench. The cops were old Irishmen and they had been drinking and Thompson saw that their eyes were wet and red. "It’s a terrible thing," Thompson said to the old men sitting on the bench next to him. "A terrible thing, indeed," one of them replied.

The gangs of police moved with the peculiar swagger and authority of armed men. And, Thompson noticed that the sea of blue uniforms was almost entirely male, indeed, belligerently masculine. Only a few female officers were in evidence and they seemed to be protected by husbands or fathers, also blue-clad. Thompson thought that the columns of armed men were like an army and, in fact, an army that proclaims itself victorious and that has entered the city as a conquering force. But, then, it occurred to him that the simile was inexact because an army always knows that there is another enemy force, equally armed and powerful and poised to inflict casualties on it, whereas this great gathering of men, even in its ostensible grief, imagined itself invincible.

When the ceremony began in the church and the TV monitors like great stiff flags showed the priest and the grief-stricken widow with her pale, earnest children and the city dignitaries, the two old cops beside Thompson stood up and, indeed, climbed up to stand on the seat of the bench so that they could see better, teetering over him. "You can stand too if you like," one of the old cops said to Thompson. "Oh no," he replied, "I have a bum knee. If I get up there I will fall." "Suit yourself," the other cop said. "I can hear what’s going on from down here, just fine," Thompson said.

To Thompson’s surprise, the mayor blamed the shooting on certain newspaper articles criticizing police tactics in a recent hostage stand-off. Then, a local congressman said that the shooting was caused by an African-American radio-host, a drive-time DJ who had recently condemned the police for racism. The people in the throng agreed and when the DJ’s name was spoken, a deep, long growl emerged from the crowd. Then, the president of the police union took the podium and mentioned recent contract negotiations and said that the killing should be considered when determining whether law enforcement salaries should be adjusted upward above a simple cost-of-living increase. The cops outside the church screamed their approval of the union official’s words.

Four or five people rose to speak about the dead officer and they delivered their eulogies in a husky stammer, their speech interrupted by weeping. The young man who had died was characterized as a hero, kind and generous to all and courageous. He was said to be wholly incorruptible. Thompson felt the blood rising to his cheeks. A dull, maddening rage filled him and he thought that his heart might explode in his chest. The young cop had died only a foot from drug contraband, a flutter of twenty dollar bills falling onto the gaping wounds in his chest and head; he was crooked, a thief and an extortionist. Didn’t anyone know the truth about how the cop had died? Was there a cover-up under way? It wasn’t enough, Thompson thought, to have assassinated the young man – his memory had to be murdered as well; he had to go to his grave under the emblem of cowardly corruption. But not a word was said about the circumstances of the murder or the drugs that surely had been found by his body. The speeches continued, a low, stuttering drone against the heat of the morning, and, in the distance, squad cars brought to intersections to block them in honor of the cortege wailed mournfully. Thompson thought that he was going to faint. The two old men standing on the bench towered over him and they wept and their tears fell and spattered Thompson and it was like standing in a bath of acid.

After the funeral, Thompson made his way to a tavern frequented by local police in the shadow of the city’s football dome. Patrol cars were illegally parked all around the stadium, big fleets of them haphazardly double- and triple-parked and blocking the streets. Thompson sat at the corner of the bar, surrounded by men in blue uniforms, glumly drinking a beer. A bitter taste rose in this throat and half-choked him.

The bartender was pouring whisky and tequila shots on the house and proposing toasts to the dead cop and his wife and the man’s two little boys. "To a great hero!" the bartender said, his face greasy with the sweat and exertion of serving so many hard-drinking men.

Thompson couldn’t contain himself and he nudged the big man sitting next to him. The man had sad eyes and his face drooped and his service revolver was hung from his gut in a slovenly manner. "Do you want to know the truth?" Thompson asked. "I don’t know," the big cop said. "Well, here’s the truth," Thompson told him, "that cop who was gunned down – he was crooked; he was found with high-grade marijuana and hydrocodone, and cash, cash too."

With the word "cash," the sad-eyed cop sat up and looked interesting. "They found cash with him?" he asked. "That’s what I heard," Thompson said.

"How much?" the cop asked.

"I don’t know," Thompson said. "Not that much, maybe $200."

"He was probably funding a buy or something, you know, vice work," the sad-eyed cop said.

"From his prowl car, in full uniform?" Thompson said. "What do you think?"

"It doesn’t matter anyway," the cop said. "He was murdered because people hate cops, everyone is told to hate cops. The TV and the radio tell you to hate cops. You can’t hate minorities, you can’t hate fags or trannies, but you can hate cops."

"I guess that’s true," Thompson replied.

"So how do you know so much about this?" the fat cop asked.

"I saw the report," Thompson said.

"There isn’t any report yet. I got buddies downtown. No report’s been released yet."

"I saw a draft report," Thompson said.

"That’s bullshit," the fat, sad-eyed cop said. "You’re just making things up to be contrary."

"I am not," Thompson said. "I know for a fact that the kid that died was a bad cop. A disgrace to his uniform."

The fat cop slowly stood up from his bar stool and looked at Thompson sorrowfully. "Why do you have to say things like that?"

"It’s true," Thompson replied.

"You can’t know that," the fat cop said. "I don’t want to have to fight you. But you just can’t know the bullshit that your talking."

"He’s real know-it-all," another voice added, "he thinks he knows everything." A heavy hand thudded against Thompson’s shoulder.

Thompson turned around to see a cop from his home-town, a malcontent with whom he had clashed before leaving the force.

"What are you doing here?" Thompson asked.

"Paying my respects," the man said. "Not like you, I guess."

"I’m just surprised to see you here," Thompson said.

"This bastard hates all cops," the man from Thompson’s home-town said. He spoke the proclamation loudly. "He’s a traitor."

It was momentarily very quiet in the bar.

The fat cop added: "He claims that the kid was dealing dope or something when he was shot."

Thompson stood up and said that he understood that his presence was unwelcome and that it was time for him to leave the bar. The bartender put his hand across the bar and held Thompson by the wrist. "You’re not leaving until you pay for the two shots you just downed," the bartender said.

"That’s bullshit," Thompson said. "I thought the drinks were on the house."

"On the house for everyone who supports the police force, the thin blue line, god bless them!" the bartender said.

Thompson shrugged. As he searched his wallet for cash, someone lunged at him. He dodged the punch but walked into another blow that broke his nose. There was a brawl and people were punched accidentally who didn’t know what the fighting was about and so the riot spilled out onto the street, among the parked squad cars.

Arrests would have been made except that there was no one on-duty to make the arrests or process the paper-work.

Thompson wiped the blood off his fists and face and, then, limped several blocks to his parked car. He visited his granddaughter for a couple hours in the afternoon and, then, went to the motel, checked-out, and began the drive home.