Girl and Bear Continued

It was her father who had taken her to see the bear, a year after her mother had disappeared, leaving only a sliver of packing paper that read, “Gone back.” It was a stone-white morning, before the birds began to stir, when she woke and saw her father sitting in the corner, watching her with his red rimmed eyes. “You look like your mother,” was the first words he spoke. Then, “Come. Let’s see the bear.” The girl sat up without speaking and studied the room--the stove dark, the larder empty, the fiddle strings torn from their pegs. “Alright,” she answered, in the flat tone she shared with her father.


The girl pulled on her boots, though they were stiff and crimped her toes. She shivered to the creek and scrubbed her face with water that burned like snow. She hurried back to the cabin, though it was as cold as the outdoors, and took the wooden comb with the missing teeth and quietly brushed her tired hair, just as her mother had done, then strung it back from her face without a mirror to fix it. It was October, and the days had been warm, but the cabin was tucked in the thin canyon above Wagner creek where it remained covered in shadows long into the afternoon. Her winter coat was too small for traveling so she opened the trunk, without asking, lifted her mother’s heavy coat, and wrapped herself inside like an Indian girl.


Outside her father prepared the mule with leather satchels on the haunches, a folded army blanket for a saddle, and a braided strap for pulling. The girl came and stood by his side without speaking. When all was fixed, he set her on the blanket, just below the neck, and placed the knotted mane in her hands. He paused and took in her mother’s jacket, then lifted the dark oily strap, and led the quiet beast along Wagner creek, toward the highway. The girl knew not to speak, but after awhile her ache could no longer stay quiet, “I’m hungry,” she said, and then stiffened, uncertain if her father would turn angry. But he was too tired for anger and with weary eyes he said, “I know, dear. I know.”


Down the road they traveled, their thoughts soothed by the mule’s heavy feet. They came out from the trees and walked the dirt road between orchards. Halfway to town, father spied a patch of blackberries at the edge of a pasture. “Wait here,” he instructed, then carefully climbed the stone wall and walked between a handful of sleepy cows with smoking nostrils, until he reached a tumbleweed of vines. She waited while the mule nipped at the roadside clover, her stomach crying for food. To keep warm she rubbed her legs against the animal’s bristly belly and buried her fingers deep within the mane.


Her father returned just as the sun began to glow behind the Siskiyous. He opened his hands and gently offered a palm’s worth of red and purple speckled berries. “They’re past season, but it’s something. At least until we get to town.” She lifted them carefully into her own hand, and as the mule began to walk, she placed the berries one at a time into her mouth. Some were bitter, others washed out, but the last one was perfectly sweet and she rolled it with her tongue until it fell open.

Rondo Unleashes a World of Hurt on His So Called "Buddies"

Rondo’s tallywacker was still smarts from the nip of the pekingese. He gingered himself into the broken circle of homeless men, allowing the queerness of their predicament to grow unchecked. It was Coco who first tried to broker the distance, offering up the Hamms he’d been nursing, but Rondo wasn’t having any of it. He backhanded Coco at the elbow and the luke warm libation took flight.

“Jesus, Coco!” he punctured the silence. “Jesus H. Coco. I don't even know where to begin.” Rondo paced aside the truck stop dumpster like a dog gone mad until he finally ascended the crate box, beside the fire barrel, and commenced to dole out the expected come uppings.

“Buddies?! Buddies for life? Isn’t that what you said Wolfgang? Well, where the hell are my buddies now? Where are they Shep? Wang-she? Calypso? I am so sorely—I see that smile Shep and I've got half a mind to shank you right now!" Rondo waited for the buddies to collect their composure.

"As I said, I am sorely disappointed. God gives a male one secret pleasure. One solitary digit of comfort. Though the whole body betray the man, the Lord provides one faithful Ebenezer, a staff of pride that might be raised in times of joy and times of sorrow. An honest man might expect that when he proffers a commitment of fellowship, swears an allegiance of friendship, treaties—in good faith I remind you—with men akin to his own situation, congregates his affections and entrusts them to his companions under a promise of 'buddyhood'—that man might expect his brothers in arms, his spiritual intimates, to vault all obstacles. Most particularly when that man is in perilous danger of losing the holy sepulchre of his own existence, his spiritual gift, his visible sign of the Father’s heralded love.

But no! The faithful soul who trusts in the treaty of buddyhood is a tragic figure indeed. That's what you've reduced me to my buddies. A dime store tragedy. The man who stands before you is bereft of all faith in a beneficent deity, a man hallowed empty by the cowardice of a people he once claimed as kin.

Shep! For Godssake Shep, you sheepdip! Can’t you set your Norwegian snuff aside for a hare’s whisker? Is it too much trouble to lend an ear to a fellow soul cast upon the capriciousness of human friendship? And you, Wolfgang! I’m ashamed to say, I dappled my eyes a time or two when you spoke of the blitzkrieg of remorse that raked your childhood. My heart reached out to you my Germanic friend. But now I count it a point of shame. No more Wolfgang. No more shall you feel the comfort of Rondo's loyal heart.

Sure, I was in need of coin--like any man in my situation. The nightclubs no longer desirous of the pluck and strum of an Alabama banjo. And sure, I was grateful Wang-she, when you told me of the potential to earn a few dollars at the Sweet Dreams Rest Home holiday festival. So I went, and I played my gift like the lil' drummer boy before the baby God incarnate. I caressed them to tap and sway to Alabamy Bound, and When That Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam', and Alabama Jubilee, and then finished her off with Old Folks at Home (in Alabama).

Then, as you all are well aware, the bitty with the white snowflake pekingese stood and let that cattail of a dog run and take hold of my John Thomas with a vengefulness that I've only seen in my darkest visions of Hades. The dog hung their, mind you, while the bitty, and the nurses, and my so called 'buddies' stood agog." Rondo went silent and looked down at his bruised jewels.

"We thought you'd handle him yourself Rondo," Chauncey mumbled.

"What did you say Chauncey? Did you say handle! Handle! Goddamn you Chauncey, to Satan's lair. In case you haven't noticed Chauncey, I'm a professional.--course you got no idea what that means, so I'll enlighten you: When you're playing Old Folks at Home (in Alabama) and your comin' round home to the final lick, you don't stop to wrastle a pekingese. You finish whatchya started! Why? Because that's what the public expects. Because that's what a P-R-O fessional does. But that's not what a buddy does Chauncey. Hell no. A B-U-uddy, upon seeing his companion distressed, lends a hand, reaches out and removes the offending mutt. Displaces it from his friend's Yankee noodle. What other meaning could you possible interpret from our Saviour's admonition to 'Love thy neighbor?'

I guess that was too much to expect. I played my tune. I turned the corner toward Alabamy. I finished what I started and let the pekingese dig is damnable fangs into my manhood, and swing his furry headed body in a most hateful tempo. There I stood. Playing my last licks. With a pain that only Christ Our Lord can contemplate."

Rondo stepped down from the blue plastic crate. "Well it's over. Yes sir, it's over. I am no longer anyone's buddy. I return to my selfhood from which I'm quite familiar, thank you. I enter the citadel of my own soul, no less lonely then when I first journeyed forth from the womb--hope in mankind being my only loss." Rondo picked up his canteen and took a long swallow of his own urine mixed with Grey Goose vodka. He gave the buddy circle a final look, "I guess what I'm trying to say is: Screw you guys."

He turned, lifted his banjo case, then ran, into a dark field of forget-me-nots.

The Girl and the Bear

There was a girl in a cabin who would lie on the floor and think of the bear. She would lie under the wool blanket on the red fir planks with her mother’s quilt and a flat brown pillow and she would think of the bear, on the ground, in the lamp-lit park, shackled to a tree. The girl lay on the floor because she had no bed, and she lay in the dark because there was no light, no electricity, no matches to strike. Dark and still, her father asleep, she lay thinking and feeling and remembering the bear, all alone, beneath the moon.

Matt, Leah, Twins, Fontanelle, Cigarette, Elbow

On the lam from Colonial America, the MLA and Lisa, Matt

found himself in a room with somebody's maps and forgotten lines and Leah.

Sound-fade: contented sigh over shot of shrieking twins—

the boy, Gabriel, slams his fontanelle

on my kitchen floor. Matt heads for a cigarette,

through spilled formula and fresh blood and an elbow.

And whose, you will ask, is the elbow?

If you figure it out, please tell Matt.

Having finished his cigarette,

he’s back, all smiles, hails Leah,

who is still dabbing a near-ruptured fontanelle,

still comforting her begrimed and roaring twins.

And without comfort herself. I thought they were twins

when first I met them—Leah bending an elbow

with the booziest of our boypoet friends, tendril fontanelles

and spinning bonnets blooming on her rosebud lips, as Matt

looked besottedly up at her, his only Leah,

his second chance, and lit his umpteenth cigarette.

I woke in the morning to a desolation of stubbed cigarettes

and couples and friends tumbled like twins

in the womb of their headachey dreams. And Leah

made breakfast and then, steering me by the elbow

to a room where sat the man himself, said that Matt

had grown unrecognizably dark. Ah, such a fontanelle

is fragile hope, and love is a fontanelle—

so exposed while growing together—or again it's a cigarette,

newly lit and soon stubbed out. And Matt

sat dark with having stubbed Lisa. How shame twins

love, how love and burden entwine and hang heavy from your elbow.

He and I nodded and looked across at Leah:

girlishly blond, astute and womanly-wise Leah,

who knew Milton and knew what a fontanelle

was already, and could tell her ass from her elbow

in matters of love, and was not adverse to cigarettes

or good Guiness, and was willing to bear Matt twins.

She smiled like clear water, and we looked back across at Matt.

Back in the kitchen, my admiring gaze holds Matt and Leah,

the stout twins and their fucking fontanelles.

Matt lights a cigarette, and I pick at my elbow.

Not Tonight: Anti-Erotica To Keep You Out of the Mood

Beneath the Denny’s grease traps the two heavyset women leaned into one another until their sweaty brows touched and the stiff hairs from their nostrils intertwined, like squid tentacles on a plate of boiled spinach.
_____

The surgeon began to have second thoughts about the mixed species transplant he had performed on himself. At first, the thought of replacing his penis with a live banana slug had filled him with an exhilarating sense of completeness. Now that it was a reality, he began to harbor doubts—the constant slime trails on the underside of his corduroys, the late night leaf feedings, and now this burning, foaming, mucus filling his swimsuit. He high-stepped from the salty ocean, ran into his beachfront condominium, and quickly dipped his slug-genital in a glass of cold milk. He sat on the linoleum floor and watched the frightened black eyes as his “penug” stretched its tiny puse face, struggling to breathe. He reached down and gently caressed its slimy head, “There, there little buddy. There, there. Daddy’s gonna make it all better.” Suddenly all the doubt and uncertainty was lifted and the surgeon realized he would make mollusk love to himself that very afternoon.
_____

When their mouths finally parted, she looked down and noticed her tiny feathers of flaking skin were now dangling from the herpes boils at the corner of his mouth, and she knew, just as she’d always known, that this was true love.
_____

Some of the nurses speculated that the two men with Alzheimer’s were unaware of their actions, but the young gay nurse had seen their hand-holding and knew that Earl and Mortimer were finally coming out of the closet. That night, as the rest of the orderlies drank coffee in the lounge, the male nurse gently removed the catheter from Earl’s penis and attached it to Mortimer’s. Then, while the two men looked on, the nurse detached the colostomy bag from Mortimer’s side and, after a small incision, inserted Mortimer’s tube into Earl’s colon. The nurse beamed, “There. Now you two are truly a couple.”
“I can’t find my cows!” Earl called out.
“I’m late for work,” Mortimer whimpered, “they’re going to fire me.”

"We die of too much life."

This is an actual memory, I think. It seems completely real, anyway. I am looking over the side of my father's small motor boat. His gold(-painted) watch sinks away from me into the water, crystal face up and fish-tailing its shoulders deeper with each clear moment. The watch is the only thing that catches light and the only thing that marks distance into the great light-and-depths-swallowing, eddying greenblueclear of the ocean. It falls for much longer than I would have thought possible, marking off seconds of depth, bearing sunlight, oddly clear and still in the way it occupies its receding. As if seeing is not, after all, a function of distance but a function of light and focus. I reach farther over the side of the boat, into the water, and trouble the surface with my fingers, because something about this seeing has become too much.

There is this incredulous moment just after you cut yourself and just before the cut begins to well up with blood, or just after you've misjudged the roadway and just before you collide with the guardrail, when the always-present, neatly chatty potential for (at least minor) disaster hangs dumbly open. And the natural desire is to try to reknit the clean slice of the sudden aberration by not believing that what has just happened has really just happened. That it's now good and finally and irrevocably done: become what they call "a fact". This moment when fear and regret and hope and resignation and total attention find themselves, for a moment, having exactly the same thought. This moment is so deliciously vivid that almost no one would revisit it ever again if they could help it. And almost everyone longs for it in spite of themselves, at least a little bit.

Last night I hardly slept, and when I was sleeping I was actually turning certain images from Moby-Dick over and over in the upper waters of my mind, at that depth where things are beginning to get dark but where slender receding illumination is so oddly vivid. I kept having this image of an enormous dark whale rising soundlessly towards me out of the blackness of the ocean. And in the dream I was terrified and totally absorbed. But I kept thinking that the depths were not foreign to me and that it would be silly and maybe also dangerous to look away. And then I kept waking up and thinking of my dad's fake gold watch falling the other way. I thought something like this, only without words, but more as a feeling that I should do something about it: The ocean is unfathomably deep, its depth is composed of fathoms, no one of which--no dozen of which, no hundred of which?--resists the eye. The ocean would swallow your gaze if the mind didn't know to teach the eye the trick of iconic seeing: see not what cannot be understood; instead, see a flat black surface, see the image we have rehearsed.

There is something falling through the ocean, a gold becoming green and then blue and then the all-color, black. There is something rising out of the depths of the ocean, finding outline and light and then words, and--too quickly--polite words, rehearsed, inert words. But the place where they cross paths, you can see that place, and that's somehow where joy comes from. Joy would swallow your gaze.

Starting Over

One time we made a boat.

I woke up in the rail yard on a floral quilt pulled from a Motel 8, my brain swollen thick, my chest anchored in silt and shame. I sat up to relieve my sore hip and the sun skipped off the Bacardi Gold and struck my eyes blind. I raised my hand, picked up the half empty bottle and hurled it with a powerful self-hatred. I had never been to the abandoned rail yard and yet the place was familiar—the disorientation, the head full of tears, the dull repetition of failure. I stood, buckled my jeans, and spotted the freeway duplex where I’d once dropped Wantu. I stepped through the weeds and junkyard earth, climbed the bank, and knocked.

He came to the door grinning in his orange winter vest. I inquired about the bird and he pointed to the overpass. I narrowed my eyes and saw a flutter of grey just beyond the railroad cars, alighting in the narrow space between concrete supports. I asked, uncertain, if I could come in. He turned and walked, leaving the door wide. I followed him through the bare gypsum hallway into a dining room with red brick linoleum, a pinewood children’s table, two pine children’s chairs, and a chain link chandelier with pentagons of plastic amber. He sat in a chair that fit him and poured chocolate milk into two tarnished baby cups. I sat into the other seat, my oversized body squatting like some kind of obscenity. He slid a silver cup. I held it and deciphered the engraving: Julia Margaret Campbell 5-23-52. We thank God for you this day!

I emptied the tepid chocolate and suddenly lost all purpose. What was I doing? Why had I come here? What did I want? I blushed, feeling lost in my being, when Wantu said, “You want to build a boat?” I stared at him not knowing how to react. He stared back. “Sure,” I shrugged. He stood and we walked downstairs through a darkened garage that smelled of burnt leaves and orange peels and headed through a hand-cut doorway out to a field of star thistle, glittering glass, neat stacks of railroad ties, and wrappers fluttering like racing flags. We followed a thin rabbit trail down to a creek I never noticed before, a creek with clumps of cattails and wild willow branches growing thick along the level bank. The water was thin and sickly, clotted with plastic bottles, a clump of faded panties, a leg of jeans, submerged shopping bags, and other signs of the careless human beast.

We stepped like cranes until we came to a clearing bordered with tilting oaks and clusters of washed-out foxtails. He pointed to a log--a clean, skinned, beeswax trunk--sitting in a nest of its own golden shavings. “It’s cedar,” he said with pleasure. Once he said it, I tuned my senses and noticed the warm fragrance. It was like breathing a mother’s prayer, and it gave me a sudden urge to surrender tears. I walked over and placed my hand on the primitive vessel. The boat was seven or eight feet in length, shaped more like a bathtub then a canoe, it’s edges heavy and thick, the inside pounded like a copper kettle, the heartwood as red as sunset.

Behind me, Wantu stood sticks within an ashen circle of stones. He gestured to the oaks and I walked over and collected the dried branches. He made a cone of kindling then placed a ball of dried grass at its center and lit it with a cheap yellow lighter. The grey branches were soon aflame and Wantu walked back along the trail returning with chunks of splintered ties. He placed the tarred wood on the kindling until the fire turned tall and blue and smoke billowed thick like a steam engine. Wantu stood back and smiled. We then walked to the water’s edge where he showed me an aluminum stock pot, the lip as tall as Wantu’s waist. We filled it halfway and then I waddled it back to the fire where Wantu helped me position it on a platform of cement blocks until its bottom was wrapped in flames. Then Wantu gathered stones as big as cantaloupes and dropped them into the pot. I looked at him questioningly.

“To soften the wood,” he said and pointed to the boat. He stood and waited for me to piece it together.

“We pour this into the boat…,” I started. He nodded. “Then we dig out the wood?” I continued. He held up the sharp rock and smiled.

“Ah-ha!,” I grinned, grateful for a plan.

We sat and waited for the water to boil. Wantu pulled out two dimestore, corncob pipes from his vest. They were new with tiny stickers on the stem that read “Made in Taiwan.” He pulled out a red foil bag and poured a mixture into each bowl. I looked closely in my bowl and noticed what looked like dried apple, splinters of cinnamon, and clove spikes. Wantu handed me the plastic lighter. I lit the concoction and took a hard draw. It burned my tongue, bit my throat, and fumigated all the oxygen from my lungs. I stood reflexively and began to cough. “What the hell is this?” I sputtered. Wantu, pipe stem clamped at the edge of his mouth, looked at me, eyebrows raised with concern. He reached out and handed me the foil bag. The red package had an ornamented pine tree and read: Christmas Seasons’ Old World Mulled Wine.” “Wantu, this isn’t tobacco! This isn’t for smoking,” I admonished him. “This is for wine. At Christmas time.”
“But I like Christmas,” he said apologetically. I was stunned.

“You like Christmas? Fine. It doesn't mean you have to smoke it." Wantu looked down. “You are right. This is terrible,” he shook his head with a pained look. And then, for no reason at all, I started to laugh. And then Wantu looked up at me and laughed. We laughed and looked at one another and before I knew it, I had started over again.