Jock Stewart Cleans Up the Town

After falling asleep, I drive into a one-stoplight town wearing a fedora. I’m the one with the Smith Corona typewriter and the hat; the town appears etherized on the harsh Texas landscape

As I approach a small newspaper office named The Aurora, a kid follow s me with his eyes. He calls to his father.

“Somebody’s comin’, Pa.”

“Well, let him come, Joey.”

I stop at a narrow creek and climb down out of my Willys. “I hope you don’t mind my dipping up some water for my old radiator at your place,” I said.

“It’s all right,” says Joey,” rolling a sheet of paper into the old Remington typewriter next to the front door.

The sound of the platen startles me. I pull the loaded Smith Corona off she shotgun seat, tense, waiting, he knows I’ve got the drop on him.

“You’re a bit touchy,” says the boy’s father, stepping outside with his wife next to his son.

“Habit,” I explain.

His wife is a fetching woman and we acknowledge each other as people who could have met under other circumstances on the back road of another universe on a night when she snared me with a little black dress, and we married, had a family, and lived sweet throughout our days. Then we let it go.

“Joey, you know better than to point that Remington at people.”

“Bet you can type,” he says.

“Little bit,” I respond.

An old truck pulls up next to the creek. Several men get out like they own the place. The lettering below the driver’s side window says Junction City Mud Slinger.

“I don’t want trouble, Joe,” his wife tells him.

“Take the boy inside, Monique,” says Joe. Then he turns to the veteran newsman getting out of the truck with a pair of well-notched Royals. “You’re on the wrong street, Ryker.”

“I’m not here for trouble, Starret,” says Ryker. “Who might this be, he asks.”

“Jock,” I say, without offering him my hand.

Ryker shrugs like I’m a washed up reporter there to beg for a job. I shrug back. Ryker doesn’t like that. I can tell by the way his grip tightens around the Royal in his right hand.

“Starret, I came to inform ya. I got that printing contract for the new asylum. I’m telling ya now, I’m gonna need all my town’s resources.”

“Now that you’ve warned me, would you mind gettin’ off my place?”

“Your place! You’re gonna have to get out before the snow flies,” says Ryker. His boys laugh and nod in agreement like they share a single brain.

“And supposin’ I don’t?”

“You and the other squatters…”

“Businessmen,” says Joe.

“I could blast you out of here right now, you and the others,” says Ryker.

“Ryker, they’re building a state pen on County Road 3724 for guys who think they can blast a man off his own place.”

“What do you say about that, Jock?” Ryker asks me.

I push the carriage of my Smith Corona all the way to the right. “I’m a friend of the Starretts.”

“Well, Starrett, you can’t say I didn’t warn ya.” The men climb into the truck. Ryker drives through the vegetable garden as he shifts into second gear.

After a elegant dinner, compliments of Monique, I drive into town to buy the kid a soda-pop. He wants me to teach him how to type, but that’s a part of my life I’d rather forget.

Grafton’s Mercantile, a two-story building that needs paint, is filled with copy editors and compositors from the Mud Slinger, all drinking bad whiskey and smoking roll-your-own cigarettes.

I recognize columnist Jack Wilson, dressed in black and ready for a funeral, his Underwood near at hand.

“Name your poison, stranger,” says Grafton.

“Coke.”

“Coke?”

“That’s what I said.”

“We don’t sell much Coke in these parts,” says Grafton. “The kids all drink Dr. Pepper. The men drink bourbon.”

“Interesting,” I say.

Ryker walks over and hands me a Coke from the icebox.

“Best you take this out to The Aurora and then ride on out of town,” he says.

Wilson, who’s been pretending to be asleep up to now, stands up and says, “Junction City ain’t the kind of town that needs a Jock Stewart.”

“Nor a Jack Wilson,” I respond.

“What’s that name mean to you?” asks Wilson.

“Jock, I wouldn’t pull on Wilson,” says Ryker.

“I know who he is, Ryker. I’ve heard about him.

“What have you heard, Jock?” asks Wilson

“I’ve heard that you’re a low-down yellow journalist.”

Wilson smiles.

“Prove it.

Wilson is already reaching for his Underwood, but I catch him between the eyes with a cartridge lead before his weapon cleans the tabletop. Ryker is reaching for his Royals, but I whirl and drop him with a strong action verb. Then I pick up the Coke and head for the front door.

“Jock, look out.”

Joey must have followed me on his bike. But there’s the society editor firing on me with his Olivetti. A wild gerund catches me, steals my breath away, but I’m on him with a barrage of prepositions and he falls back into a display of Snickers bars.

“Thanks, Joey.” I hand him the Coke as I climb up into the Willys.

“Come back to The Aurora, Jock. My bike will fit in the back.”

“Afraid not, Joey.

“Pa’s got things for you to do, and Mother wants you. I know she does.”

“I gotta be goin’ on, Joey.”

“Why, Jock.”

“A man has to be what he is, Joey. You can’t break the mold. I tried it and it didn’t work for me,” I say as I ease out on the clutch and begin moving west with the gathering night.

“Your shirt’s bloody, Jock. You’re hurt.”

“I’m all right, Joey. You go home to your mother and your father. Grow up to be strong and straight. And Joey, take care of them, both of them.”

“Yes, Jock.” The kid is crying.

I head out County Road 3724 past the cemetery and lose sight of Joey in my rearview mirror as I pass an old service station with a gleaming Desoto parked next to the high test pump. I don’t have the strength to shift out of first gear

But his words follow me, plaintive and ghostly.

“Jock! Jock! Come back Jock.”

-

In Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire, Monique snares Jock with a little black dress on page one. Do they get married. Do they live happily ever after? You’ll have to read the book for the shocking answers. It’s only $5.99 in e-book format at Smashwords.com

Olongopo – from ‘Garden of Heaven’

My novel Garden of Heaven – an odyssey continues to make the rounds of prospective publishers in a journey that’s as much of an odyssey as the writing and living of it. Meanwhile, here’s a brief snippet based on my experiences in a sailor town in the Philippines. I understand that the town has greatly changed since I was there in the 1960s and since the Navy closed its base there in the 1980s.

-

Night was settling down over the hazy first lights of the bars and hourly rate hotels along Magsaysay Drive and the razor-sharp edges of Kalaklan Ridge like an old whore.

David hurried across the Shit River Bridge, dropping several 25-centavo coins over the railing; he heard an explosion of whitewater, heard the laughter and the shouting, ‘Salamat, Joe, Salamat.’

He crossed Perimeter Road, ignored the hopeful greetings of the money changers behind their well-caged windows, then dodged a badly mixed throng of sailors, girls and honking multi-coloured jeepneys that swelled out into the Gordon Avenue intersection. He cut across the street, smiling, waving at imagined friends in the distance, and moved with the deliberate intent of a man who had crossed this street hundreds of times.

‘Casual alertness, that’s the key to surviving Olongapo’s jungle of thieves, gangs, girls, high-strung Marines, bored Shore Patrol and Hard Hats, and drunk boatswain’s mates and snipes,’ Lowell had said.

–Hey Joe, cold beer cold beer cold beer, nice girls.

Touts were everywhere below the slapdash smorgasbord of disheveled signs and awnings, leaning telephone poles, and the rag-tag assortment of buildings with their upper floors stacked up in odd strata.

–Dance here, Joe, music, mighty fine.

Assorted conversations flew past, barely audible in the close heat… ‘Hintayin mo aki,’ …‘Magandang amaga, Carlo, kumusta ang bagong sanggol?’… ‘Hey Joe’… ‘Tao po! Tao po!’… ‘Hoy, tulungan mo akong magdiskarga sa trak na ito, pwede ba?’… ‘Good food here, Joe!’… ‘Galing akong Maynila. Nasaan ang Zambales Bank?’… ‘Balut, Balut!’… ‘Tayo na’t kumuha ng makakain’ ‘Magandang ideya, handa na ako sa napunan’… ‘Nagustuhan mo ba ang bago kong kamera?’

The sign for the Galaxy Bar was plainer than most. An unadorned interior stairway led to the second-floor club, a large room strewn with tables occupied by sailors, many with girls whose eyes caught the low light like predators or gods. David didn’t see anyone he knew. He had a small envelope in his back pocket for Maria.

Two girls who had bathed in perfume and spackled their faces with makeup were leaning against the bar watching a waitress organise a tray full of San Miguel beer bottles.

–Maria, tingnan mo itong malambing na lalaki.

–Lamayo ka sa kanya, Adelaide.

Assuming he’d actually heard her name in those quick Tagalog comments, Maria was the one wearing a red dress, thrusting herself forward to him as he approached, posing her sweet curves, allowing her long hair to seductively frame her face, smiling as though they were friends with a history. He could almost see himself in the high gloss of her lipstick.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Malcolm R. Campbell, author of Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire.

Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire

Here’s a snippet from my upcoming novel to be released August 12.

Coral Snake Smith needed two omelets to loosen his tongue.
For an informed source who made his living trading information
for food, one might think Smith would have picked up some table
manners along with the details of everyone else’s life. Jock drank
half a cup of cold, gritty coffee and tried not to watch. Smith’s pig-
in-a-trough noise was bad enough.

Jock’s dear old daddy always said, “Jock, take my word for it.
Sloppy people are all going to hell.” He also said, “If a man smells
like a whore house, he’s going to hell.” Smith had two strikes
against him today and it wasn’t even noon yet.

“What did Lucinda Trail have to say?” asked Jock while Smith
was licking his plate like an all day sucker.

Smith almost dropped the plate.

“Are your people following me around?”

Jock shrugged. “That, plus you’re wearing her perfume.”

“We were together, but not in the Biblical sense,” said Smith,
and he grinned like it was something he spent a fair amount of
time contemplating. “A man can do worse.”

“Word is, Clark has.”

Smith did a spit take with the remains of his coffee. “So has
your boss, but none of this is what Lucinda asked me about. She
wanted to know why Monique Starnes bought two sacks of Race Ready.”

“What is that, some kind of Viagra knockoff?” asked Jock,
recalling that while his Scotch tasted funny last night his
performance had been better than usual.

-

Copyright (c) 2009 by Malcolm R. Campbell

Jack Rose – Only a Memory

[Deck Log Fragments: “00-04 Maneuvering on various courses and speeds while conducting flight operations 04-08 Steaming as before. 08-12 Steaming as before. 0939 Received daily muster report. No new additions or deletions. 12-16 Steaming as before. 1225 Completed flight operations for this date. Set course 140° Speed 25 knots. ”]

The ship was scheduled to depart Yankee Station the next day for a period of upkeep at Subic Bay. Skipping lunch, David headed for the flight deck late in the afternoon after stopping to buy a Coke at PAO. Warm weather. Definitely not December 29^th kind of weather from a Montanan’s point of view. A few puffy clouds, otherwise bright sun with a light wind out of the northeast. The 03-level hatch was open to let a little fresh air into the passageway. Random voices, somebody whistling, toilets flushing in the head just past the open hatch.

–Ward?

Chief Coleman emerged from the 03 passageway wiping his hands off on his trousers.

–No damn towels in the head, he said.

–You need me back at the shop, Chief.

–We’ve lost Rose.

–Shit.

Coleman watched several small fish jumping alongside the boat, couldn’t quite say the words, coughed, spat and got himself composed. Heavy ground fire, Coleman said without looking at David. Ackersly saw him go into the water and sink like a stone, then circled until he was on bingo fuel. No sign of Rose; he never ejected. South SAR came up empty and called it a day.

–Rose was a good man.

–Good enough to steal my chair, said Coleman. You need some time?

–Yes.

–Ward, how much do you know about a sluff speed brake?

–Absolutely nothing.

–Christ, why can’t they send you people to school before you show up on my watch?

–God only knows, Chief.

–Well then, I’ve got a little OJT waiting for you when you’re of a mind to do it.

–Thanks, Chief.

Coleman slapped him on the back and cut across the flight deck toward the island.

After he finished puking up the Coke and his guts and went to wash up, David saw that the chief was right. There were no damn towels.

[Deck Log: “ Steaming as before.”]

Copyright(c) 2009 by Malcolm R. Campbell, from “Garden of Heaven”

Storybook

My fairytale “Storybook” appears in the current issue (volume 2) of Future Earth Magazine.

The magazine is free and downloadable as a PDF file.

Vision Quest

Vision Quest

And then it was the horse.

Sikimí burst out of the rain chasing his daemon eyes.  He was a terror, that one, pulling storms.  David’s strength rushed back into the stony earth like water from a flushed toilet. Those eyes—deep sweet rage—rage rose and fell, rose and fell, in ecstasy, in pain, synchronized with breath and muscled strides. There was no cover. He flung off his shirt, focused his tumbling thoughts with the pure tones of vowels, climbed naked bedrock between forks of a creek, felt a clean tension in his hands and forearms, felt Earth’s heat climb his legs, forced breath and a strident growl from his burning throat, and exploded into silver fire in the shape of a man.

The horse came on, without pause.

–Aiá, Kyáiopokà, Stookatsis. Eagle streamed out of the pale overcast east of the rain and dropped the ghost lariat vine into David’s waiting hands.

He made a large loop, wrapped the loose end around a knob of rock like a climber’s belay, and let gravity take his weight down into the pain of his left ankle. This was good. This was his new anchor.  Sikimí was twenty yards away when the storm swept around from the north and swallowed the prairie whole. All sounds were rain, and grey.

Then, screams, hooves pawing scree, Sikimí’s head shooting up out of boiling shadows, striking into the pain of his broken ankle like a snake and sliding away into the depths, except for the eyes which hung for great moments like molten saucers of gold on a black table.  David dropped to his knees, the vine in front of him puny and limp on the stone. Before he could think, or spit rain and curses, those eyes rose up like the birth of fire and Sikimí’s breath seared his face.

When all was lost, he jumped forward with the Stookatsis noose in his hands, fell into the centre of an ocean of rain, and grabbed Sikimí’s neck. The mane blew into his mouth.  He gagged on seaweed. Salt scraped his eyes blind. His hands pulled a raw cry from the horse’s throat.  For just moments, the vine around the rock restrained the thrashing beast and David was able to swing up onto his back.  Then hell hit with no mercy.

Sikimí spun, twisted, tore the air, shook the prairie with his rage, slid through rocks and mud into the creek, transforming the rising torrent into high foam. David coiled the flapping loose end of the vine around his right hand and arm, and clawed the mane with his left. His thighs and calves ached against the horse’s flanks.  In the rain and the dark, those eyes spawned lighting, followed by belched thunder across the rank grass. Those teeth were into his legs again and again, until he jammed his heavy climbing boots against the side of the horse’s head. He was breaking Sikimí’s jaw, shattering the huge mandible into elemental powder, screaming forbidden words with each kick, again and again, until he saw what he had done, and slumped down against the hot neck and whispered, ‘there boy, there boy, you goddamn son of a bitch.’

Thwarted, Sikimí ran. He ran and the rain cut into David’s face like old knives. He ran and the contour lines rose and fell in a grey blur beneath his feet. He ran and David felt an uncommon exhilaration. Irreverent of the land, he ran west into the deeper storm where rain and cloud coalesced into a palpable sea.  The dulled colours of a spilt rainbow, elongated like taffy pulled to the breaking point, swirled past on a cold tide. Shimmering schools of light darted and feinted in great unisons between the shadows of hill and dale.

When Black Horse ran, he ran with long, graceful strides and the passion of lovers. When Black Horse ran with long, graceful strides and the passion of lovers, his movements created a dance choreographed to the music of drums deep in the earth. David heard the music between his legs as uncommon heat and released his grip on Sikimí’s neck.  He heard shrill notes and dissonant chords burn upward along his spine like fire on a short fuze and he released the noose and saw it float away into the blue grass.  Now then, he was pain personified. Now then, in the overwhelming face of it all, he, David Ward, was dancer and dance; now then, he was a woman straining in tears and blood to give birth, he was a dark haired child straining in sunshine to pull his playground swing above the tree tops, now then, he was a man in his prime breathing hard beneath weights, now then, he was Eagle traversing the hyacinthine blue where air and sight are pure, now then, he was Black Horse leaping the western horizon, now then, now then, when he could see and he could feel, there appeared in his path, dreams, first as curtains of light, then with depth and breadth and movement where Sikimí tore them apart in dance.

He rode across the old range at spring, where rains had recently watered the bluebunch wheatgrass and fescue, and there was a dog the colour of snow running around and around and around the new green in an ever-widening circle.

He rode along the edge of the great war, knocking about the arms of the dead, where rains had recently diluted the blood and the dust down into the great river, and there was a man dying in the night near a church, and he knew him, he knew him, and saw his blood on the flanks of the horse.

He rode into a kind circle of box elders where grass and legends were sweet, and there was a blond-haired child he did not know reaching for a key in an old bucket.

He rode through the confluence of moon and incoming tide, kicking up diamond spray and sea soup and sweat, and he saw a woman wearing a sheer cloak of moonlight; her face in shadow, he did not know her, yet she called to him, ‘Davey, Davey, wait for me.’

He rode past a log cabin at the head of the Lake of the Lone Woman.

He rode through flowers and flowers’ dreams.

He rode into a white room, where his father lay tired and white-haired on faded sheets, and there was in his faded grey eyes a white faraway look when he said, ‘I don’t mind. I don’t mind.’

He rode past a red umbrella.

He rode through a foreign sea where a flaming plane fell from the sky between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and saw a rush of rainbow-filled bubbles surge upward past the pilot’s face like a wind-torn curtain, and there—just below the forward section of the canopy—was a stenciled name he resolved not to forget.

He rode down a street buried in dark winter, where the light from windows gilded the surface of the snow, and there at the far edge of the city he tore up a dark hill scattering tarot cards, past a woman in a red dress running toward a hidden white car, and burst into bright summer and salt cedars and cinnamon ferns and a man and a woman he could barely see in the sun glare jumping, most likely, to their deaths off a high ledge in a halo of fire.

He screamed Gàidhlig words he did not know, spontaneously and urgently, Is creutair gun truas thu.  Chan eil ann a bhith a’ sealltainn dhomh an t-àm ri teachd ach ‘ga ghràbhaileadh an cloich.  Aon uair ’s gu bheil e gràbhalta, tha e ‘na leac-sgrìobhadh, then the horse leapt a long barbed wire fence where a bright yellow quilt was set out for a picnic amongst wild flowers, where his grandmother stood upon the highway’s yellow centreline, laughed and watched him pass, and there at the far side of the road where Sikimí charged a curtain of cottonwoods and mountain shadow, David turned to look into her eyes and fell.

Sikimí pulled up, turned, stood over him, shining and ebony, raised up on massive hind legs, screamed the scream of a tortured trumpet on the world’s last day, and spat a stone.  It struck David’s left leg at the broken place.  He wanted to double over into his pain, he was just doubling over, just, just, when that flailing foot clubbed him dead centre in the back, stole his breath, forced him face down into the dry spikes of a roadside weed. He fell into the polished stars dancing and pressed his ear to the ground.  The earth shook with departing hooves.

Darkness followed, undefined and still. Now as he came out through blurred curtains of grass and cloud, he saw: No horse, no quilt, nor a blue Nash, nor a family, nor any evidence that humanity had passed this way, except for the fence and the road.  Whatever the fence was meant to fence in or fence out was not present. Other than himself, whoever was meant to pass this way had long since passed or had not yet passed. He imagined pushing himself upright, crossing the narrow road, rocky shoulder and memories of wildflowers and climbing over that long fence into the great freedom. He imagined hurtling down the road one way or the other in the safety of the old Nash. He imagined the caresses of women. He imagined old friends. He imagined turning the clock back.

Walking was impossible. Crawling was improbable.  Jayee was six hours away, if he remembered, if this was the day they were supposed to meet on the Jeep road south of Nináistko.  Six hours to crawl, what? a mile perhaps? He stared southward along the edge of the road through the wide spaces between the blades of grass.  He was trying to raise himself up and the pain pulled him back. He was trying to raise himself up and flushed a ptarmigan out of the brush in a flash of brown and white. He was trying to raise himself up like a baby fresh out of the crib, with fresh memories of his previous lives. He had been Eagle transcending the spin of seasons above the green world. He had been Black Horse, running loose through dreams, through rain for a thirsty soul.

Sun was hot and bright and he lay in a puddle of gold.  Consciousness rolled over him like warm waves on a beach. He was trying to raise himself up when the undertow pulled him back. He heard the cries of strange birds and smelled fish. He was trying to raise himself ashore when a bright red pickup glided to a stop on the road next to him. He saw one pair of faded dungarees, and one pair that was crisp and blue. He saw two pairs of work boots, one more worn than the other.

The boy thought he had been hit by a car when he stepped out onto the macadam to thumb a ride south. The other, the grandfather with the faded dungarees and the well-worn boots disagreed, shaking his head in a jerky fashion as the world flickered in and out of view.

They made a splint out of the rolled up pieces of several cardboard boxes and secured it with frayed pieces of rope and the boy’s leather belt. They lifted him into the back of the pickup, half sitting, propped between bales of mixed roadside grass. The old man, the boy’s grandfather, with hair as soft and faded as his jeans, leaned over the bed of the truck, lifting David’s left hand to eye level where it was plain to see it was clenched around a perfect stone, and said, and said, and was saying—it took some effort to decypher the words—and was actually asking the question, finally, in a voice so soft and wonderful.

–Za aníwaz?

Yes, what does it mean, this dear stone?

–I have been fighting Nináistko the mountain, Píta the Eagle and Sikimí the black horse, David said. This is Píta’s egg and Sikimí’s bit.

–Two medicines, he said. He surrounded David’s left hand with rough stained hands and raised it up next to his plaid work shirt into a sweet aura of soap and sweat and tobacco. He grinned and said, this honour is already growing heavy—like a big load of shit that hasn’t been shit.

The grandfather man laughed. He was laughing when he got in the cab of the truck. They pulled off the shoulder and drove south. David slept in fits and starts between the bales of grass. The air was fine; it tousled his air and flowed cool into his mouth for these first breaths. When he was awake, he caught fleeting glimpses of himself, unrecognizable and new, and laughed. Had to.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Malcolm R. Campbell, from “Garden of Heaven”

Garden of Heaven excerpt

Eve tells David about Dr. Hunter’s Tryst with Diana…

When he arrived, he found the house locked and dark. Like a child, he called for her and peeked through the windows. With an expectant sigh, he lit his pipe, checking his watch in the light of the match. He had taken her some flower, a posy, and he almost burnt it, it was so close to the fire. The front door opens out onto a porch that runs the full length of the house. Poor man, he paced that porch, goodness, too many times to count, with measured steps hollow and regular on the grey wood like the heart of the earth.

The porch, from west to east, was strewn with dirt and dog blankets and rawhide toys. Near the front door, a 100-pound bag of Jim Dandy had fallen over, spilling dog food across the welcome mat. He walked past this clutter, back and forth, without missing a beat in his step. Daddykins has allowed large, unkempt azalea bushes to dominate the west end of the porch; on the east end, the ramp they built for old Grand Daddy – may he rest in whatever peace he deserves – slopes down into the straw covering the drive around to the back of the house.

Dr. Hunter walked to the top of this ramp many times and then back along the porch past the dog food and the blankets to the azaleas, returning again to the top of the ramp at intervals that could only have been co-ordinated by dark forces. With your gift of random sight, Dr. Ward, you would have seen that time from west to east along that grey porch was compacted in such a way that while his senses told him that he paced steadily, Dr. Hunter was – to the objective observer off the porch -rapidly accelerating to the point where informed speculation might calculate his blood pressure and pulse rate to be at strong pre-arousal levels.

At the chosen time, when he was finally breathless and did not know it, he stood in mid-step at the east end of the porch. At the chosen time, there was a climax of risen moon and yapping hounds and the call of a brass horn. He saw past the middle field, dark green by day in recently seeded Kentucky 31, now covered with sliding wraiths of silver fog to the hill at the forest’s edge. It was she astride Black Arrow, the terrible horse, oh David I know your sixth sense has shown you this and God knows you know from horses. She neck reined him hard and turned down through the dogs into the pasture’s white lace. When the horse flew over the rail fence in a graceful blur of power and woman, Dr. Hunter saw that Diana wore white flowers in her hair and a sheer cloak of moonlight. Her right arm was straight out in front of her and tense, and in her right hand, she held a bow, and three arrows grasped between her fingers into a trident. Her left arm was bent at the elbow, and she held across herself a horn that caught the light. The reins lay loosely over her thumb. She controlled that horse with balance, and legs muscled and wet. He saw that. The dogs arrived first, a great 28-leg blur between the fence and the night west of the house. Then she, dropping her weapons into the shadows of the yard. Her eyes were on him already. He saw that, too, until the moon was at her back, highlighting her hair, darkening her intent.

Much happened simultaneously, Black Arrow stepping high through the dry straw, Diana rising and falling behind her horn, William breathing out ghosts into the chilled air, fluttering wings – some dark bird – deserting the second storey eaves, the moon casting a single shadow down the length of the porch. He said something but she didn’t hear him, for the horse was on the ramp now, and then on the porch, shaking the structure with each step, pushing him backwards until he was against the post left of the door sucking in his aura.

When Black Arrow’s breath was hot in his ear he dropped his pipe, making sparks. She dismounted, came to him and stood in profile to the moon just shy of the desperate bulge in his trousers, dripping Black Arrow’s sweat and her own, mixed, and while the flower was falling from his left hand he saw the dark streaks on her thighs. He struck a match, then another and Jesus she was covered with blood from the waist down. Good God, woman, what, he wanted to know. She whispered that she would tell him more than he could bear.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Malcolm R. Campbell

Dream of Crows

During the coroner’s inquest into the matter of your death, a well-meaning friend or relative will step forward with your affidavit stating that you purchased Dream of Crows because you read a review of it in Naked Tales, saw it in the window of your local Barnes and Noble, or—more likely—that you were intrigued by the probable connexion between the book and an odd string of assisted suicides in a Florida swamp. But, were you alive to testify, you would tell it true, as you well might if you survive truths no man should know. You sense these truths already, you feel you’re reading these words now because you were called to read them now and, by the same token, that when the time comes you will follow that call out the north road to the old cemetery where a crow sits next to the open grave.

Ask yourself one question: “What do I remember?”

Do you remember telling a friend—or was she really the friend you thought she was?—that “I’m finally to the point in my life where I have nothing left to lose by tempting fate”?

No, of course not, for if you did, you wouldn’t be risking more than you know at this moment. But, think back in time. It might help.

Six Months Earlier

“Some day an oracle will tell you this: ‘But, think back in time. It might help,’ she tells you, and you sigh aversively to remind her that this is exactly the kind of circular conversation you deplore on a first date when—quite frankly—you’re seeking less wordy pleasures.

“Will it help?”

“Only if you do it within three months,” she says.

“What if I don’t?”

She laughs and this bothers you because her eyes are dancing and light as though she knows something sluggish and heavy about you and is simply letting it slip away into the darkness where alligators and ghosts out in the swamp will consume it like so much road kill.

You watch her eat her steak in the flickering light of the candles. She eats like a savage and you wonder if she might consume you that way later in the evening.

“Nice gazebo,” you say when she looks up and licks the A-1 Sauce off her lips.

“Eddie-Ray built it.”

‘’Who?”

“My husband?”

“Husband?”

She shrugs and pours herself another margarita. She tops off your glass at the same time you’re thinking you’re going to need it.

“Most people my age are married by the time they get to my age.”

You glance back at the sepia-coloured cinder block house flanked by weeds and slash pine trees. The windows are dark except for the small, isolated glow of a cigarette behind the sliding glass doors in the centre of the house.

“That’s him, isn’t it?”

“He likes to watch.”

“Watch what.”

“Me.”

“What about me?”

“You’re of no consequence unless you touch me.”

“What if I do?”

“You know how to find out.”

You finish your drink while concentrating on the cigarette. It glows brighter when he takes a drag off it but not bright enough for you to see anything other than a rather large pair of binoculars focused, presumably, on her.

“I’m finally to the point in my life where I have nothing left to lose by tempting fate,” you announce.

“I jimmied up his wheel chair,” she says.

“Good.”

She blows out the candles.

***

As you read, do you not remember this?

How ghostly pale she was in the cloud-filtered moonlight when she stepped naked out from under her little black dress.

How she stepped down into the yard behind the gazebo and ran along a narrow path into the swamp.

How the cigarette continued to glow with no apparent malice behind the sliding glass doors.

How deathly quiet it was.

How you shed your clothes and followed through the swamp to a cemetery on reclaimed high ground encircled by fetterbush, titi and sweetbay magnolias, and how she stood, holding a single candle in front of her breasts, next to a weeping stone angel.

How she whispered, “fate loves a man who risks all in a the brief chance to play with fire.”

How the night screamed and was consumed.

Three and a Half Months After That

In your estimation, you’re a practical man, but after three and a half months of inexplicable sexual abstinence you are beginning to wonder what manner hideous karma has found it’s way into your utilitarian bedroom. Your wife, to say the least, is curious.

You complain of nightmares and she believes you after she hears you talking in your sleep.

“You said, ‘just one more open grave,’” she says.

“I believe you.”

“You need to get help and I’m not saying this just because I’ve been so lonely,” she says while she butters her breakfast toast and you stare past her red hair and her sheer nightgown and watch the trash man sling the blue recycling bin into the yard next to the morning paper.

“I’m sorry,” you tell her. You’re not really sorry but you want to be. “How long has it been?”

“You haven’t touched me since the night before your last business trip.”

“Which business trip?”

“Your three-and-a-half-months-ago business trip to north Florida.”

“Panama City,” you manage to say, in spite of the scattered puzzle of memories that began lying heavily upon your mind when your wife said ‘touched me.’

“Oh, I remember, she is saying. “The hotel owner with some package deal or other that had gone sour.”

“Really sour.” You respond more or less on automatic pilot because the words touched me are not your wife’s words, not until she just said “You haven’t touched me since the nigh before your last business trip.”

They’re words out of an old movie, something on cable, something you must have watched after the hotel owner with the sour deal finally called it a night, allowing him to return to his room and sleep. The movie, a black and white tale about an axe murderer in a wheel chair and your recent dreams are tangled inside your head.

You look across the table. She’s finished her toast, had time to clear away her plate and her coffee cup and leave the room in her see-through red lingerie that you had no impact on you whatsoever. She’s right, though, you haven’t wanted her since you came home from the trip. You can’t imagine wanting her, touching her, as she put it.

As she leaves for work, you tell her you’re going back to bed.

“Good,” she says and backs out the door into the bright morning.

You leave a blank sheet of paper on the nightstand on the off chance you’ll dream about something and have the presence of mind to write it down. When you wake up, you discover a page of scribbling:

Bluesy hotel bar. Old guitar player from New Orleans. Hotel owner Mike saying drinks are on the house. Bottom shelf whiskey. His assistant, Angelique, dark, sultry, barely in a black dress, telling you on the house occurs once in a blue moon. She is standing close, closer than Mike. I’ve never seen a blue moon, I tell her. I’ll show you after I prepare myself. All the talk settles down while the singer performs “Them Ol’ Conjure Woman Blues”. He’s playing that for you, Mike tells you before he passes out. Me? The bartender comes over and says Angelique’s a conjure woman, she talks with crows Why, I’m wondering out loud. Suddenly returned from preparing herself, Angelique says crows are guardians of knowledge. The wind coming strong, salty along the coast road while I doze in the shotgun seat of her old MG. She’s singing, one arm around me, one on the wheel. Then we’re naked, dancing around the edge of a cemetery, your blue moon baby she is telling me, and I’m telling her it doesn’t look blue. Ever made love in an open grave, she is asking and before I can answer she’s humming bluesy songs in a key so minor they could cry a man’s heart out. These are strange epitaphs, I tell her as she jumps down into a cozy, freshly dug hole. “He touched me,” that’s what they all say, I say, and she says everyone’s gonna touch somebody sometime and so will you if you don’t undo my spell. Spell as in spelling bee? Can you spell voodoo? Make love to your wife three times in three months and the spell goes away. If not what if not what if not what? Want me now? she asks, I’m here, close and hot in this cold hole, do you? If not what? Oh, and she laughs and puts her hands on me. If not and you’ll return to me, to this very place, this place of the blue moon, now, have me now and I’ll have you forever. The guitar man is playing older songs when I return, the place thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of musk and I see the bartender looking at me like a hyena. I’m grinning like a hyena, he informs me. Why? If not what? he asks, and I say a normal person with a normal smile. You’ve gone past normal, to the swamp and back, beyond the grave and back. You did the conjure woman, didn’t you. I most surely did. I thought so, you’re a marked man, a man looking for an axe in the side of his head. Pour me something, pour me a tall cold one

***

It’s time.

As you pack your suitcase, you wonder what you’ll do if she comes back inside and tells you she’s skipping work so you can make love all day, and all you can think of is that a dream calls, that a woman down on the coast once told you that crows dream the world into place and we’re stuck in those dreams unless we wake up and open our eyes.

You’re talking to your suitcase now because your wife is getting farther away, passing the bank, heading into her day.

“I’m heading into my day, too, and my day is a trip to a holy place because truth appears suddenly to lovers and blind men. I’m no lover, not lately. You see, I asked her what would happen if we didn’t make love in that open grave beneath the blue moon that didn’t look blue.”

You finish your bloody Mary while you think about Angelique’s body next to you, on top of you and underneath you while you died over and over and went to hell over and over and if that wasn’t holy you didn’t know what was.

And she answered you like this: “If you don’t make love to me now, you are but a crow’s nightmare.”

God help you, but you don’t want that.

You wonder if an axe stuck in the side of a guy’s head hurts more or less than a meaningless life. Something to ponder on the trip to Florida, to that world of sweetbay magnolias and blue moons.

Out of habit, you lock the front door.

And now, as you approach the final words of Dream of Crows and sense a change in the weather, you’re wondering if you should have left a note, a goodbye of sorts, a “thank you” for time served.

Spinning World

I emerge from Her Private Hell, snarl at the glowering porcelain dog posted outside the door, and step into the summer darkness. The night smells like an old straight jacket and gathering rain.

Long experience carries me down hill easily and I arrive again at the Ten & Ten Club, a battleship grey bar beneath an umbrella of safe light at the corner of 10th Street and 10th Avenue. The neighbourhood declines in value between the house and the bar. 

          The dim room contains six people with cautious eyes like the eyes of night animals at a forest’s edge. I sit alone at a table and make no threatening moves. Every object in this room is frayed, faded, scuffed, stained, or broken.

          Someone has left today’s newspaper lying on the table, ‘the facts of the world,’ as Grandma used to tell me while I was young enough to listen. ‘Little facts are little lies, large facts are large lies, and the world keeps on spinning as before waiting for truths,’ she said, is saying now inside my head, and I shove the thing away after reading that while body counts in Vietnam are up, each death is, according to experts, 1% more meaningless than it was last week.   

          With whisky, past and present become a mixed drink in cubist time. Floating on this the great water of life, unrelated events juxtapose themselves upon the frayed edges of my personal space. Here together I see Mother and Father sitting in sunlight saying the sky’s the limit, Nancy crying at night always always in Jill’s arms, Players at a billiard table struggling with their combinations en route to one hundred and one, My first love walking on a beach the last night I saw her, The sound of a gentle rain, then and now, A Japanese woman in a red dress leaving with a man who wears a bouncing hula dancer tie, Students on the last day of class saying they will never forget me, The infinite foreverness of Jill’s promises, broken and otherwise, My promises to myself and others, the same, A sailor in dirty whites at the bar describing his cars (loved and wrecked) before falling off the stool into a sea of ashes and spilt beer next to the jukebox, Countless roads not taken.

          Now, as though I’m merely sleeping, I’m wrenched up by a voice and here is the Japanese woman blurred across the table, walnut coloured and naked except for the carelessly splashed red satin paint flowing down her contours fast enough to hold my attention.

–I am Keiko.

          –Konnichiwa. I’m David.

          –Buy me drink, David? Her eyes do not know how to yield.

          –My money has been converted into more liquid assets. Except for this.

I shove the remaining small change across the table.

          –Sa, you think I just born?

          I stand and turn my pockets inside out, producing a bent stick of Beemans gum in its crumpled pack and my wallet. Keiko snatches the wallet and pouts.

          –Okay? I ask as I slouch back into the chair.

          –What kind of job leave you with no fucking money?

          –I’m a teacher.

          –Ah, sensei. She reaches across the table, is reaching along the rising wave of a single note of a crying jukebox saxophone until her blood-red fingernails just just scrape my unshaven face from earlobe to throat. So, she says, is saying, will say for eternity, I will call you David-sensei, professor David, yes? yes?

          –Whatever you like, I say. She traces the edge of my ear with a sharp nail while I explain my hard and fast rule: When the money is gone, I go home.

          I reach for the wallet dangling from her free hand and she jumps away.

          –Damn rain outside, Sensei.

          Keiko examines the wallet’s plastic windows one by one like the pages of a sacred text. The music has her now, a great hymn electric down the curve of breasts and hips, she is moved by drums, she is unconscious as the holy words drip from her lips, AMOCO, SEARS, VISA, she sweats and invites me to lick the salt from her thighs.

She slings the wallet down onto the table and the plastic windows riffle like shuffled cards and Nancy’s picture slides out between the ashtray and my empty glass.

          –Kawaiiiiiiiiiiiiii, she coos. Oh cute baby. Yours, David-chan?

          –Yes.

          –Blue eyes, like pure ocean sky. What do you call her?

          –Nancy.

          –Someday, I have picture like this and hear kawaii and utsukushi from friends. That later. This now. She slaps the wallet across the table with the back of her hand. Now, you broke. I see that clearly.

          The sailor, who has presumably been watching the ceremony from the floor in front of the jukebox, walks over holding a beer bottle by the neck.

          –You done using her?

          –That’s a poor way to put it.

          –Dance with me honey, I already bought the music.

          Keiko is handing me the wallet and I am reaching over to take it when the silver dollar drops out of the pocket behind my house key, hits the table with a thud, and rolls off onto the floor. Keiko crawls after it.

          –Isn’t that sweet, the sailor says, watching her. So, hippy-boy, where were you while I was defending my country? He drains the rest of the beer from the bottle and sets it down hard on the table.

          –Here and there.

          –You ought to be ashamed coming in this place, coming into a Navy bar. You listening? he asks loud enough to draw a frown from the bartender. He points to the ribbons above his left pocket. See these? Fact is, in my world they still mean something. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?

          –Looking at your uniform, my guess is you probably earned them for falling into the shit river on your way back to the ship after losing all your money in a game of Lucky Nine at the Galaxy in Olongapo City.

          –You were there, sorry, I didn’t know, too many friends, can’t get the anger out of my system. He is mumbling now and he knows that he is.

–I lost myself, I tell him with a ring of some small truth in my voice.

He looks at like me he’s seen a corpse and wanders off without putting coins on my eyes.

          Keiko emerges from beneath the table, triumphant with coin and sits down closer than my desire.  

          –This magic event, wallet giving birth to new money.

          –Give it a good shake: see if we got twins.

          She pushes down the wrinkled hem of her dress, definitively, and examines the coin.

          –Sa, David-sensei lie to Keiko, hai? She glares at me over the coin’s edge. 

          –That’s my good luck piece, not money I spend.

          –Lucky money? she asks, sarcastically. How is your luck today, David-sensei?

          –Bad. My luck has lost its power, for you see, my world is spinning as before.

          –Oh, Keiko sorry. She pulls a chair around the corner of the table and slides in next to me. Tell me about bad luck, she says, laughing.

          –Forget it, I’m leaving, rain or no rain.

          –Don’t be pissed with Keiko. She slaps her hands lightly against my face and shoves my lips into a pout. Hai, hai, this what I see, mouth squeezed so much you are monkey face.

          When I smile against my will, she takes her hands away but not her eyes.

          –Now, enlighten Keiko with tale of great woe. She swivels toward me in her chair and dumps the full weight of her left leg across my lap reminding me of another sensuous leg 8,231 miles away—as the crow flies—on a heading of 327.3°. Her eyes widen, Holy shit, she gasps, David-sensei is one great samurai.

          Jasmine, heat, and distant drum, I am pulled down, I am pulled down, I ride the languorous cry of the sax down the long, low, descending curve of her leg into the deep shadow where the otherwise tight, perfect hem of her dress is interrupted by one frail thread where the red stitch has failed. She knows. She knows what I want, and I am doomed and liberated beneath the weight of her knowledge. But for want of a few frail dollars, I would bring her inside my inviolate space and use her extravagantly within the larger confines of a world forever looking the other way.

          She brushes my hand away from the hem of her dress. 

          –Tell now; come to heaven later, sweet Sensei.

          –It’s a long story, Keiko.

          She waits. Her breath is in my mouth.

          –Tell.

          –Once upon a time, when time was little more than a frail thread hanging before the gates of heaven, I was a professor, steeped in the high country of words and served in great halls where logic and intuition were the sun and the moon, and where knowledge was a palpable firmament.

          –Tell, she says, and hovers close enough to soften her eyes in my field of vision.

          –Then the dump went bankrupt.

          –What dump?

          –Barrington.

          –Okay, Barrington dump, then . . .

          –Then I was unemployed.

          –Yes, unemployed is friend I know for damn sure.

          –Then the college reincarnated itself as a business school with no need for fine words or those who taught them.

          –Reincarnated, I know of this. Come back as rat, or leech maybe.

          –You are very wise, I tell her. Now, I have an offer from another college. But, the bastards want me to teach nouns, the persons and places and things of words and then they want me to teach verbs, the am is are was were being been of words. I am humiliated.

          –So desu ka. I see, I see, blind Keiko see. She lights a cigarette and her smoke is in my face.

          –What do you see?

          She laughs, is laughing behind the smoke.

          –Some joke? I ask.

          –Bad karma, she says seriously. Keiko sorry to laugh. She thinks David-sensei piss in wind about easy problem. You call up college bastards and say, ‘Your job smell like bad sushi.’

          I smile at that.

          –There’s just one problem. If I tell the dean at Central College his job smells like bad sushi, Jill will leave me and take our daughter with her.

          –Jill is ugly name.

          –She’s no sweetheart. I take a drag off the last of her cigarette and stub it out in the ashtray.

          –Sa, lowly job with wife or no job without lowly wife, hai?

          –Yes.

          –Either-or is always worse than eating cake and still having it, no?

          –Always.

          A trite recitation—why not just say ‘my wife doesn’t understand me,’ allowing Keiko to infer that she alone is capable of the empathy I require?—but I am broke and the sundry details are cheap, roughly worth a tinker’s damn, a rat’s ass, or a flying fuck.

          She drags her leg off my lap, she does this slowly and without mercy, and signals the bartender who lumbers over with two cups of hot sake. I push the silver dollar across the table.

          –No, I pay, I pay. She extracts a bill from her shoe and slaps it into the bartender’s hand. When he is out of earshot, she says: Anyway, crappy sake in crappy cups.

          –It tastes all right, I say, remembering Olongapo, Yokosuka, Hong Kong, Yankee Station, and a war a world away. Thanks.

          –I tell you my story of woe. When story over, you go home and I go back to work. Okay?

          –Okay.

          –When I was little, my family grew wheat on Kyushu. Then hard times come, everything gone, and we move to Sasebo. We do many jobs and think about new farm someday, maybe truck farm close to town. Have you been to Sasebo?

          –No. My ship always put it at Yokosuka.

          She giggles and lights another cigarette.

          –Keiko thought you hot navy man once. This story is about a navy chief named Walter.  Walter’s ship comes to Sasebo.  For short time, Walter is like every man I meet, you know?  Then, one day he says, ‘marry me Keiko.’  Crazy crazy, I think and make him come back next day when he’s sober. What do you think happen, David-sensei.

          She leans in so close when she talks that the question tickles my cheek.

          –You got married and lived happily ever after.

          –Happy ever after not for Keiko. Walter brings me to Chicago, shows me lake, shows me honourable State Street, walks with me in parks—not with hand up my dress like other men I meet. Happy happy happy, for a year. One day, Walter buys a new car. After long ride, with loud radio, he stops at oasis on Tri-State Expressway and humps me.

          –He what?

          She frowns, looks at the floor while picking at the chipped rim of the sake cup. You understand, Walter says damn good-bye.

          –He dumps you.

          –Yes yes. I am no good like Barrington. But not know what is hump then.

          –Sex.

          –Holy shit, he sex me too. Goddamn hump me three, four times in Fred Harvey men’s room. Hump, then dump. I am one humpty dumpty girl. All broken. Heart is here, head is there. After two days waiting, police take me home.

          –You never saw him again? I ask.

          –Never. But friends see him, fat and happy. They see also girl from Great Lakes walking close to him on beach.  Keiko lose face. Lose weight, too. Sa, David-sensei, bad sushi everywhere.

          –So. Here you are.

          –Bad karma, she says. But you know the important thing David-san?

          –Not any more.

          Keiko stands up fast, knocking over her chair. She ignores the sharp crash and the splintered ladder-back and raises her dress, just enough, just enough. The bar’s eyes watch from their safe, inviolate hidey-holes.

          –Holy grail, Walter say once. I say just piece of ass, expensive maybe, but that’s what I say. Not Keiko’s heart, she slaps an open hand against her chest and drags long nails down the fabric making faint lines. Not heart. Nobody buys Keiko’s heart. Try sometimes, but can’t afford what’s not for sale. You agree, David-san?

          I pry open her small, clenched hand and the dress slides down slowly—good God how can I not notice?—and remember my old Navy cohort Jack Rose (lost over the Gulf of Tonkin) telling me about a bar girl, crazed out on drugs, who pulled a knife and screamed out a string of curses punctuated by a name that was not his, and Jack’s needs, as he called them later, were so great that he stood there with the knife point in his face and yelled, ‘Screw me or kill me, those are your choices.’ This, and the nagging of my own needs, occupies my thoughts while Keiko further explains what’s not for sale and I wonder if the world will ever know what it cannot buy.

          –I say to hide your heart well, I say for want of anything better to say.

          –And you? she asks, stepping back, crossing her arms tightly against her chest.

          –I’m going home; it will be light soon. I untangle myself from my chair, retrieve the wallet and the silver dollar and move toward the door.  Look at the rain!

          –Ha. No umbrella, you stupid fool. She runs to the coat tree and yanks a large red umbrella out from behind a teetering pile of jackets and old scarves. Where’s your car?

          –I walked. My house isn’t far. I’ll be all right.

          –Hurry up, Keiko snaps, opening the umbrella into the diamond rain beneath the Ten and Ten Club sign.

          She clings to me in the centre of this red-roofed, inviolate space while I juggle the umbrella into a comfortable stasis. The rain sounds like rain on a tent. The street, the closed shops, the lightning and the rain, make a fine blur, gentling the world. Her left thigh is pressed against me. My right arm follows her belt around her waist. Keiko looks straight ahead up the Tenth Street hill, as do I. My singular focus on our full-body, co-valent bond, gentles away years of Jill’s accusations into a fine mist.

          I breathe pure jasmine now, one hand gripping the handle of the red umbrella close to my chest, the other sliding unobtrusively down over her hips. She leans her head in against my shoulder and runs her hands over me like an old lover who keeps her intentions new. I take a mental snapshot to record the consensual fiction of our slow walk clearly, to remind me later that she wears no visible stain of her work.  

          One block away from the house, I close the umbrella and pull her into the close bear hug of a phone booth with the bulb busted out of the ceiling.

          –What, you Superman now?        

          –The deadline for accepting the job is noon tomorrow. By then, I’ll be dead to the world.

          –You wake them up? She asks, eyes wide, bright beneath eyeliner, eye shadow, falling waves of hair and night.

          –Telegramme, sweetheart, telegramme.

          As I dictate my message ‘PLEASED TO ACCEPT YOUR KIND OFFER. WILL CALL TO CONFIRM DETAILS,’ her lips touch my ear and she whispers ‘you find true Holy Grail now, David-sensei.’  

          –I know, I know, what else is news on this damn night?

          With fair effort, for Keiko is here and now and all I know, I reach past her and open the door. There is in her smile a fleeting pureness that darkens as she unfolds herself from me and steps backward into the rain. She stretches with an audible purr, arms above her head with tensing muscles, and fixedly watches the caress of my eyes as the dress clings exactly to the contours of her form, transparent as Cellophane and just as cold.

          –No humpty dumpty girl tonight?

          I step out of the telephone booth, no Superman now, and open the umbrella.

          –Shut up and walk me home.

          –Sa, you funny man. She ducks beneath the umbrella and when we walk she does not walk as close as before. You, real funny man, but make good telegramme, she says, rubbing her eyes.

          –Stop crying, it wasn’t that good.

          –Not crying. Damn rainwater running down face, you asshole.

          –Like I said, shut up and walk me home.

          She takes my arm now. I set a slow pace, and beneath the diffuse, everlasting rain, I hear two metronomes, the dull drum of my shoes on the sidewalk, and the sharp double rim shot of hers. We pass the familiar doorways and signs and reach the front steps to my house in due time.

          –Keiko run away before damn Jill spy from window. She kisses me lightly on the cheek as I wrap her free hand around the silver dollar.

          –No, not your lucky piece.

          –If I forgot to tip the bartender, leave this on my table. Understand?

          –Domo arigato gozaimasu. Her voice is strong. She points to the rain or tears running her mascara. You funny man, David-sensei, and I’m laughing now, she says. Here, hold this.

          She hands me the umbrella, stoops down, contemplates her feet, then quickly as though she is making a momentous decision, places the coin into her left shoe.  I pull her up to memorize her face. Her mascara has washed away. I hear her breath, creating her anew over and over, I feel her heart’s beat, and my own, synchronized, until—at the beginning of some random movement or word—she runs.

          –Your umbrella! But she is running faster than the sound of my voice, exclamation mark included, or chooses not to hear.

           I try to follow and turn my ankle on the bottom step and collapse into a muddy puddle at the edge of the walk. Mere moments later, after I pull myself upright, Keiko is already hours away into the past. Tenth Street is deserted in the grey dawn light. I look back at my house, asleep and empty seeming, and see that She has waked, found me absent, and left a friendly lamp burning for me in Her Private Hell.

          Outside Her Private Hell, the landscape of my morning world lies a few degrees east or west of standard reality, signifying the existence of a psychosis or a cypher.  Keiko’s umbrella, half full of water, stands like a large red birdbath on the right side of the puddle.  No birds are present.  Mud covers my clothes and the right side of my face. Fog, newly made and gentle, creates and uncreates rolling loops and sprays like the surf of a waking sea. A far-away whisper—leaves fluttering in the wind or a woman’s voice calling over and over, konnichiwa, konnichiwa—creates and uncreates satin images inside my head.

          The pure sound is fleeting and darkens into the raucous cry of an over-revved engine. A car with yellow eyes speeds past, running the stop sign at the corner of Tenth Avenue and Fifth Street. A newspaper, slung carelessly from the car ricochets off the north side of the oak in the centre of the yard, and—half way out of its waxed,  brown wrapper—flattens a pile of fresh dogshit at the edge of the walk before bouncing in a perfect bell curve onto the porch where it slips neatly back into the wrapper.

          Statistically, the odds of this series of events occurring in any man’s lifetime are so low that the chronology tends to confirm the synchronicity and meaningfulness of all objects and events. But, even if the paper’s flight-path were random and purposeless, I feel privileged to have witnessed it.

          After hiding the red umbrella behind the spare tyre in the trunk of my car, I run inside to take a shower, slip into clean clothes, and tell Jill my news

Book Give-Away Number 1 (Tethered)

Books are dropping, crawling and slinking through the house threatening, rather like gremlins, to take over the place.

That said, I need to start giving them away to people who really want them, starting with Amy MacKinnon’s dark and wonderful 2008 debut novel Tethered.

Here’s my Amazon Review

I have high praise for this novel, not because it was published on my birthday, but because it exemplifies the best of what a praiseworthy novel must offer: character, setting, plot and language. MacKinnon combines these focuses in “Tethered” into art and artistry.

Clara, who is highly introverted from an unkind childhood, connects better with the dead than the living and finds her perfect peace among the bodies she prepares for burial at the funeral home where she works.

But there’s a child predator on the loose. Mike, a policeman trying to come to grips with his own grief over a family tragedy, is trying to track down the man responsible for the death of an unidentified girl whom he refers to as “Precious Doe.” He needs help, both human compassion and professional expertise, but Clara cannot give it. Yet, she must, for more kids are missing, and she knows their pain.

This well-researched story is both a mystery and a love story. MacKinnon’s blunt, highly controlled prose reminds me of the writing of Kent Haruf in “Plainsong” and is a perfect fit for her protagonist and the cold basement room where she prepares the dead for a rest she fears she’ll never know.

If I worked for the New York Times, I would have included this book on the newspaper’s recent list of 100 notable books for 2008. Based on the Precious Doe case of 2001, the novel cries out to be read and understood, and when you finish reading it, you will be transformed by the experience.

How to Enter My Give- Away

Leave a comment with the word “Tethered” in it for any of my short short stories posted in this weblog (before or after this announcement).

Post your comment between December 19, 2008 and midnight (eastern time) December 31, 2008.

One commenter, selected at random, will win my used, well-cared-for hardcover copy of  “Tethered.”  This drawing requires no purchases. It’s limited to individuals within the United States.

The winner will be contacted and asked to supply a mailing address just after the new year.

Good Luck.

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