ut the window of the guesthouse the manic chattering of birds, the ugly barren sky, the insect-laden woods they fell so in love with when they bought the house, just left him nauseous this morning.

It might have been nice if his wife would have stayed all night with him. If she would have wrapped those strong legs around him one more time like she used to do. No one felt like her. Every woman felt different but Helen wrapped around and into him as no one else did.

A blue jay slammed against the window. Roger jumped. He realized how badly he had to pee. He cranked open the louvered window. He opened the door. He had to fix a tear in the screen. He fiddled with it. The bugs came in that tear. The scotch tape was curling.

The Professor had to work on a poem this morning. Regardless, the one sure thing was his writing. Awards or not, he still had to write the next poem.

Way up in Michigan, alone with his mother, who sipped port in the morning, jug wine in the afternoon and whiskey with his father in the evening, he would sit on a small table on the back porch with a pencil and a piece of paper. His mother mumbling and stumbling all day, talking to non-existent people, arguing with them, combing her hair, putting on her makeup, and, like clockwork in the afternoons, embracing that same faceless man who made her scream behind the closed door of the laundry room.

No toys for Roger. His mother was an artist. Here. Look at my paintings. Black pencil sketches of tortured sad, people. Bleak, stark, angry trees. Clouds thick and swollen with storms. Draw, she said. We all start simple. Stay simple, his mother told him more than once, glass in hand, cigarette in the other, faceless man stretched out on wooden steps leading up to the back porch. The man had the biggest, silent smile. You’re a simpleton, his mother told him.

He didn’t draw back then as a child. He could not draw. He ran down to the lake and tossed rocks in the water. He always ran along the same familiar paths. He remembered the mail truck coming up the gravel road. The white picket fence and the two horses they had in a small green clearing. Huge trees taller than the sky surrounded this clearing. The horses blew their noses and stretched their necks down to munch on grass. He was afraid of them.

He would come back and try to draw but instead copied words out of books. This he could do eventually. He didn’t even know what the words meant at first. He was a simpleton. He couldn’t draw pictures. He drew words. He could do this.

And then one day, he can’t remember how old he was, but he was aware that summer of what went on in the laundry room, he wrote his first poem. It went like this:

Hunting for a fish
Instead I found a dish
Of pudding on a log,
Oh, hell’s bells
It was not pudding,
But something from a dog.

The faceless man in a white t-shirt and a little black sword tattoo on his arm, much thinner, much younger than his father, read this poem first. It was about to rain.

The man couldn’t stop laughing. He would read the poem again and let out more laughter. He said it was the funniest damn poem he had ever read. He patted Roger on the back and said he was the next goddamn Ogden Nash. He couldn’t stop laughing.

His mother returned from somewhere. She read the poem. It made her smile. She patted him on the head.

“Not bad for a simpleton,” he remembered her saying.

It splattered huge raindrops when she read the poem. Drops so large each one could fill a cup. They hit everywhere like sparse, muted explosions.

They were going for a walk. Write another poem, his mother told him. The man kept laughing. His mother told the faceless man to stop laughing.

He remembered her red-painted fingernails sliding into the back pocket of the man’s jeans as they ambled down the path towards the lake.

It kept raining and it turned into a cold, dangerous rain that was joined by rumbling thunder and lightning.

Each raindrop could fill a cup.

The red fingernails. The large drops of rain.

Roger never remembered bugs back then. His mother drinking and smoking and screaming in the laundry room. Bugs were everywhere now. He found some fresh scotch tape to put on the screen.

Blood

Flowers went into the vase every Saturday without fail. This Saturday, roses were carefully removed from their paper and placed one by one onto the table. She was going to the cemetery today. It was her Father’s birthday.

Roger tried to talk to her but she flitted around the room. He followed her once and had his hand batted away from her shoulder. He stood there as she rapidly snipped flowers in the sunroom.  Her face was blurry in the sunlight.

Then Helen cleaned up the kitchen, made the coffee, poured him juice, set out his vitamins, turned the TV down low, sipped on a cup of herbal tea, and hurried back to the flowers.

Roger did ask her how her doctor’s visit went. He vaguely remembered her saying she had went to the doctor. Well, fine, of course, she said. Was he going to the Cellar tonight? He often went to the Cellar on Saturday nights. Listened to students read their poems. The female students flirted with him, probably. She was staying home.

She snagged her finger on a thorn. Just enough to draw blood.

“Fuck!”

Roger, of course, with a twenty-year-old redundancy, told her to be careful. She used the F word again, along with the you word. He asked her if she wanted a band-aid. She sucked at the blood, blinked away tears angrily. No, the blood would be good for the flowers.

Roger said nothing. He wanted to scream at her. He wanted to pull her across the room by her hair.

“Okay then.”

Helen, eyes sunken and dark, pale lips twisted, headed to the shower.

Thoreau

Roger poured himself a cup of coffee and listened to his wife in the shower. He went and sat out on the back patio. He didn’t like the sun today. It was getting very hot. He stared out into the woods and thought about how Thoreau had said that the greatest of all miracles would be to exchange eyes with someone, if only for a short time. There was something to that. He would first change eyes with Darla, and then his wife, experience them, let them experience him, and then everything would shake out with such metaphysical clarity the world would stop turning, perhaps.

He took a drink of coffee. He had a good life. He had a good life! He took a drink of coffee. He was getting better as a poet. His lines getting longer, less concise, less controlled. More lucid. Lucidity wasn’t necessarily good though. Darla, this last year had brought with her a crazy sense of manic spontaneity that he absorbed to some degree. This could explain the lucidity.

And he was simply more confident. That had a lot to do with it. The shower was still going. He thought about jacking off. His prostrate wasn’t right this morning. It was too early for a drink.

The best two poems in his last book, “Perfect” and “Concept of Flowers” were wholly unlike his previous stuff and solely inspired by Darla. Funny how you start to unhinge and fall apart right when it gets good. He suddenly thought of Thoreau leaping and dancing around that famous pond in just his underwear and flowers in his hair, a little maiden from Concorde lurking behind a bush.

“How extensively did you travel in Concorde, Henry David?” Roger said out loud.

He practically leaped out of the lawn chair. He had to call Darla. He had to hear her voice. He decided he would see her tonight.

The Cemetery

The old lady shook her rug and watched a dull red Datsun rumble down the gravel road, a smoky white cloud of dust taller than the car trailing behind it. The cemetery was composed of a small patch of trees. It had been there since the turn of the century. Flat corn and wheat and bean fields surrounded it. In the distance, a silo, a barn, and a farmhouse were the only buildings that interrupted the skyline.

The red Datsun stopped and a woman in red sweatpants and a loose over-sized Illini t-shirt got out. The old lady went inside.

Helen stood over the notebook-sized off-white tombstone with a bouquet of fresh-cut flowers from her sunroom. She bent down and laid the flowers just in front of the tombstone. She sat down on the soft grass, stretched her legs out, leaned back on her palms.

She watched her father drive that blue and gray Ford tractor mower around the cemetery. He mowed the cemetery every week in the summer time. That day, he smiled at his daughter as he paid special attention to one area at the side of the cemetery. A blade stuck out of one side of the tractor like a large straight razor. He was clearing out a place for himself.

She kicked rocks in the road that day as the blade of the mower chattered like it was clipping the hairs off an elephant. The trees, the fresh smell of cut grass, the flat fields of beans growing in the fields in all directions, this cute little road, made her tingle from head to toe. She would occasionally stop playing and wave to her father. She kept waving to her father until finally an almost imperceptible crack of a smile crossed his face and he nodded to her. This was all she needed at six years old.

Helen sat up and tucked an ankle under her thigh. She rearranged the flowers in front of the tombstone. She would never forget that moment. That moment when her father acknowledged her existence with a smile and a wave and how it struck her heart so clean and happy, and how simple it all was back then.

That particular day Helen suddenly remembered was two days before her father would die of a heart attack. The angina had gotten progressively worse and he knew it wouldn’t be long.

Helen planned to be buried here. Her only child would be buried here. There, underneath a beautiful ash tree was her mother’s grave. Helen wanted to be buried right beside her father. No offense to her mother. Her daughter would be buried next to her. Helen wiped some dust off the small plate of a tombstone. This thought rippled warm and complete all through her right now.

A year ago to the day Roger had come with Helen to lay flowers on her father’s grave. He seemed preoccupied. As always. Roger stuck his hands in the front pockets of his jeans, turned and stared off into the distance. This onset of fidgetiness Helen had no explanation for. She asked him that day if he wanted to be buried here.

He wasn’t sure, he said. Then he said something Helen thought rather odd and even cryptic.

“I haven’t earned the right yet to be buried here,” Roger stated. Then he went back to the car.

Now it was just Helen. She had brought her daughter a few times in the past but she thought it too weird and essentially irrelevant to her so she wouldn’t come anymore. But Helen found herself coming more frequently the last few years. It was peaceful and comforting and her father was here and her mother was up there under the most beautiful ash tree and everything felt better.

Helen lifted one of the flowers to smell it. It had the most fragrance of any of the batch she had brought. She placed it carefully on top of her father’s tombstone.

Donald Fagen

The private detective sat down at the table in the corner of the Dunkin Donuts fairly hard. Harry wasn’t a fat man but he wasn’t all that thin either. When he hit fifty it was harder to keep the pounds off. Everybody talked about cholesterol. He stared at the supposed FBI informant sitting across from him. The frail, slovenly dressed college student wore gray shorts and black socks with old brown leather sandals. He had on a washed-out cream REM t-shirt. His eyes flitted around like a bird.

“I like cholesterol.” Harry said. The informant stopped flitting for a moment.

“What?”

“Cholesterol,” Harry continued. “I think it’s good for you. I want more in me. The more the better I’ll be.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of Camels. The pack had matches in the cellophane around it. He planned to buy a Fighting Illini lighter while he was here. Harry took the matches out of the pack. “Smoking is the best decision I ever made in my life.” The informant looked around. Harry had read a book once that the government had sent him in the seventies that talked about icebreakers when talking to informants. He didn’t understand the chapter at all. But he did pick up the word ‘misdirection’.

They were the only ones in the donut shop this time of day. Out the big glass window the sun was a scarlet red and heading down. The homely young girl behind the counter moved closer to them. Her mouth was closed but one corner of her mouth was up higher than the other, like maybe she’d just taken a bite of shit. She spoke in a belligerent, nasally voice. She told him he couldn’t smoke in here.

Harry looked shocked at this remark. He looked at her and then at the informant.

“Yes, you can,” he said, almost in a concerned voice. He tapped out an unfiltered Camel, stuck it in his mouth. He took it out of his mouth and then wet the end of it to keep the tobacco in. He put it back in his mouth. He struck a match and lit the cigarette, blew smoke up into the air. He shook the match out.

“See what we can do,” he said to the informant. “When we put our minds to it?”

With a look that fell somewhere between disinterest and disgust, the girl walked to the other end of the counter. She crossed her arms. She leaned against the counter and stared out the window.

Order A Bottle of Rain by Jim Harris

“Never say can’t,” Harry chirped. The informant seemed about to bolt. His bottom lip was quivering. His eyes were watering. Harry picked a piece of tobacco off his lip, flicked it. He looked around, then straight into the informant’s eyes.

“So you know who’s gonna kill Ronald Reagan.”

The nervous flitting, the rapid eye movement, everything froze on this boy. He looked like he’d just been stabbed with a knife or stuck his finger in a light socket.

“Ronald Reagan?” Total abject disgust spread across his face. “Ronald fucking Reagan?” He pounded his forehead with his palm. “I thought that woman said Donald Fagen.”

The informant was close to crying now. “And just last night, fucking last night! These two people were talking in Murphy’s Pub. They said Steely Dan sucked. Too technical, no life to their music, one hit wonders—Reeling in the ye-ars…”

“Stowin’ away the ti-ime…” Harry completed (out of tune, of course).

“Yeah! And then one of them blurted out that Donald Fagen couldn’t write a song with his dick and the other agreed and then they toasted to his death! Death to Donald Fagen! They both said!”

Harry tapped the matches on the table, looked out the window. This happened all the time in his line of work. Dumb ass people after a quick buck from the government. The counter girl had turned her attention to them. Harry winked at her. She looked away with a scowl.

The informant was beside himself. He jabbered on about how he didn’t know anyone who wanted to kill Ronald Reagan. Hell, everybody wanted to kill Ronald Reagan. The guy was an idiot, a fucking President who probably didn’t know where he was when he woke up in the morning. Now killing Donald Fagen—that was a crime; the greatest songwriter since Lennon. You can’t let them kill Donald Fagen.

“Do I still get the money?”

Harry took a drag off the Camel.

“No.”

“Shit!” the informant said, with a very strong emphasis on the Shh, his hands doubled up into fists. He abruptly got up and left. He tried to slam the glass door shut but it worked hydraulically and the resistance almost knocked the frail little bastard on his ass.

After a moment all that could be heard in the donut shop was the buzzing of the electric donut-shaped clock on the wall. Harry worked on finishing his cigarette. The girl made her way back down the counter. She asked Harry if he would give her money if she said she wanted to kill Ronald Reagan.

“No,” Harry said.

The girl went back down to the other end of the counter.

Harry left.

Persistent Child

They ducked down an alley by the Brass Rail Tavern and the pot had struck Darla and turned her into a red-skinned chatterbox. Jacob just plain and simply thought everything was just plain and simply wonderful. It was so hot and there was a thin coat of sweat all over him. Darla brushed her hand upon his chest and it drenched her hand. It embarrassed him but then she did something weird—she lifted up her shirt and mixed her sweat with his and just kept walking and talking.

Darla’s Native name was Kanukee, meaning persistent child. “Darla is a Greek name,” she said. “I don’t know where I got it. I think somebody on the reservation started calling me that and it stuck.”

She was born right here in Champaign County somewhere, Darla said. Her mother walked out into the woods and six hours later she cut the umbilical cord with a kitchen knife and lay there until the sun came up.

“Then it got weird,” Darla said. Her mother couldn’t support her here. “She’s the last living Kickapoo Native in Champaign County. A male friend of hers delivered me to the Mexico Kickapoo tribe. I was wrapped in a black blanket with a pink bird on it. That’s all I know about it.”

“That is weird.”

They collapsed in a clearing on the edge of the park. It was too dark to see where they were exactly.  Darla collapsed a little too close to Jacob. He tried to move away from her but her hand had him firmly in the crotch now. She had pulled her shirt up far enough that her stomach touched his.

“Don’t get any ideas,” Darla said. “I’m not the least bit attracted to you.”

Jacob’s head spun ridiculously but he was still pretty sure she had her hand in his crotch.  She eased away from him and kept talking. She took the last hit of a nub of a joint.

“For many years I dreamed and I heard my mother talking to me in whistle speech in those dreams. It sounded so beautiful. My aunt told me there were songs Kickapoo mothers sang to their newborn children that they would sing when they had a child. They didn’t have to know the song but that it would come to them when their child was born. Just like when baby dolphins instinctually swim to the surface for air, Kickapoo people have songs buried inside of them that come out only when they have to.” Darla stared at his chest. She touched a nipple. “Isn’t that sweet?”

“Sweet,” Jacob repeated. He laid his head back upon the grass. Her hand slid down from his chest. His jeans opened enough that she could get her hand down further than he expected. He was in no shape to resist.

Darla talked about helping a pregnant Kickapoo woman have a baby one time when she was ten. It was a horrible peach-colored sun in the sky over cactus weed and scorpion skins in a barren area marked off by polished sacred stones culled from the depths of the Great Lakes and sanctified by the Native Gods some four hundred years before. “We came from the Great Lakes. That is our roots.”

She was stroking Jacob like he was some kind of sexual pet. She tossed the useless nub away and undid his belt, undid the top button of his Levi’s. Unzipped him maybe halfway. Her hand seriously slid in.

“Wow, Jacob. Glad to see me, huh?” She laughed. ‘I thought you’d be small. You’re not small. You’re like really proportional.” None of this talk made Jacob all that comfortable, but he did keep getting harder. Her hand moved up upon his stomach. She said the Professor’s stomach wasn’t bad for a forty year old, but he could stand to lose some weight, but he still wasn’t heavy. “Girls don’t mind guys a little heavier than them anyway. It’s an insecurity thing.”

“Proportional?”

“Well, you know. You’re not very tall. Put that thing on a six-foot-six guy, and, you know, it might not look so big, you know?”

“Okay,” Jacob said. That’s all he wanted to know. That was enough.

“I mean yours would look okay on a tall guy. Tall guys sometimes have less.”

“That’s fine,” Jacob nodded. The conversation could move on.

Darla remarked how in affairs, women often put on weight, and men, more often than not, lost weight, especially men who were lying through their teeth to their mistress about how they were going to leave their wives and all, and the mistress got all content and happy because that someday was only the next holiday away.

“Experience?” Jacob said.

“When the professor and I get married, anytime he starts losing weight I’m going through his pockets.”

Jacob laughed but not too loudly. He remembered his wife, how thin she got, how she looked better than she ever did, how, fuck— (It made his proportion a little less proportional).

Darla went back into Native history suddenly, asking Jacob if he thought Kickapoo sounded funny. Yes, frankly, he did. It sounded more like an anti-Winnie campaign than the name of an Indian tribe.

Darla laughed. She said Kickapoo was applied to more names of rivers and streets and snake oil remedies than any Indian name on earth. Just down the road Danville had Kickapoo State Park. Al Capp made Kickapoo famous with a cartoon where they drank Kickapoo joy juice.

“Who’s Al Capp?”

Darla told him.

“Oh, yeah.”

Darla put her mouth right over his belly button, sniffed, and pulled at the thick hair on his stomach with her teeth.

“I like your stomach,” she said, giving his groin a firm hold and squeeze. If she hadn’t been born to consume and conquer a certain Professor she might even like Jacob a little, she said.

“Story of my life,” he said, and on Persistent Child drove with the history of her people, pausing only to sit up and light another joint, then, her hand going right onto him, stroking on a little deeper, a little firmer now.

The Kickapoo tribe had been historically different from the other Indian tribes in their relationship to the genocidal white man. At first, they were as fierce and warlike as all the tribes. In fact, the French, who wanted to assimilate the Indian, hated them the most. Kickapoos didn’t want to assimilate. They wanted to keep their culture, their blood, so they fought fiercely.  

“Might be hard to believe with the name Kickapoo, which everyone thinks is the funniest Indian name for a tribe.”

But the Kickapoo, at one time, were called the three-Tomahawk tribe. When they scalped the white man they hit them on the head three times with their Tomahawk and with a vicious precision, and then ripped their hair off like they were skinning a squirrel.

Her thumb was on top of his other head now. He tried to hold his breath.

Darla pulled her hand off of him, sat up, made a religious gesture of some kind, and said, “That all changed when the great Prophet Kennekuk appeared on this glorious earth.” She made another gesture of prayer. “Just like the great Lord Jesus in your religion and the great Gandhi, Kennekuk believed and preached and demanded one thing, and one thing above all others.”

Jacob asked what that one thing was.

“Peace,” she said. She reached and unzipped him completely. She asked him if he believed in God.

This made him freeze. He considered lying. She was looking directly at his erection sticking straight up his stomach.

“No,” he said. He had to be honest. “Religion has one flaw to me. You don’t fear death. That means you can justify anything. Wars, terrorism, rude comments to people who don’t think the way you do….” Darla fell back dramatically, let out a loud laugh. He sat up and nearly saw stars as he caught half his penis on the tight elastic of his worn-out underwear. He spoke as he rearranged. “I’m serious. The concept of an afterlife means you don’t have to be held accountable for anything in this life. I think that’s pure crap. I’m no better than a flower or a weed. I bloom intensely for a short time, try to make the best of a nice day, then back to dust. It’s enough for me.” Darla sat up. She pulled him to her. She started kissing Jacob. Her tongue felt great. They kissed for a long time. The way she breathed so hard as they kissed was like nothing Jacob had ever experienced. She pulled gently away from him finally. Her eyes sparkled like onyx mirrors in the near blackness. Her smile was the greatest smile he had ever seen. But he still had a point to make.

“I’m serious though. I have no interest in eternity. I get bored on my two days off. That’s a goddamn long time with the people who are gonna make it up there! Imagine hearing that ‘look at these wrist scars, it hurt! That’s what I did for you!’ a couple million times. You’ll be begging for hell, guaranteed! Here, with you, this is plenty. Your kiss. You can stop there. Flowers don’t even get kissed like that.” Her eyes filled up and her jaw locked a bit, mouth half-open.  Then,

“It’s not working, Jacob. I don’t like you that much.” She eased him back down. He fell easy.

She lit a Marlboro Light this time, nestled in close to him. Her history lesson wasn’t over yet. She tugged at his jeans and put her hand in just the right place. The expression on Jacob’s face was as if he’d just turned a corner and walked into the girl’s locker room by accident. “Yikes,” he said, preparing himself for the rest of her history lesson.

Yes, when the great Kickapoo Native Prophet Kennekuk came on the scene his Kickapoo followers changed their whole philosophy of life. They still refused to assimilate with the white people—this even the great Kennekuk couldn’t change. But he did teach them that it was futile to keep fighting like their fierce and proud Apache brothers were doing, and even more futile and philosophically wrong to acculturate like their weak and misguided Cherokee brothers were trying to do. What Kennekuk taught them was to live as their name implied. Kickapoo, by the way, means “he who moves about.”

Move about! He told his followers, and more importantly, take your time moving about. Don’t move until they make you; don’t leave until your welcome mat is worn out. In short, Kennekuk preached a philosophy way back there in the early 1800s, that remarkably resembled the lifestyle of the 1960s hippie generation; fart around as long as you can on someone else’s time, mooch as much as possible, and don’t leave until it’s almost too late, and then, right before your welcome is shot straight to hell, turn and do to the ugly white aggressors what they hate having done to them more than any single thing.

Darla had a firm hold on Jacob’s penis now as she spoke and was stroking in rhythm to her melodious, distinctly Indian intonations. Her thumb pressed firmly on his bulbous, swollen head. He dug his fingers into the earth. He asked her what they were told to do to the white man. She stopped staring at his penis, looked up at him.

At one time the Kickapoo Native was considered the “homeless” tribe because of how many places they had to move to. “We aren’t homeless. We choose what we choose.”

When the Kickapoo Native once again would get kicked out of wherever they found a comfortable place to live by the indecent, callous white devils from across the sea, they were instructed not to be sad, depressed or troubled in any way. The Great Mystery awaits all the Kickapoo. The great Prophet Kennekuk, his baby face and piercing black eyes exuding strength, confidence, and humor, told them to utter and spread throughout the great Kickapoo nation a phrase that would for all eternity eat at the core of all white heathens forever and a day.

Darla went back to stroking Jacob. He let out an animal groan. This girl knew what she was doing. He still had to know though. He asked her again what the phrase was. She stopped. She whispered something in her native tongue before continuing.

When the great Kickapoo tribes were collectively and singly chased out of their farmlands and buffalo hunting grounds in first the Great Lakes and then the Midwest and then the Far West and then eventually all the way down to Mexico, when the tribe had been reduced by the end of the nineteenth century to under six hundred souls from the tens of thousands that roamed the earth dating back to prehistoric times, the Kickapoo uttered this phrase each and every time they had to move.

It was with fierce pride and an angry sardonic tone, they essentially spit out, “There goes the neighborhood!”

And then off they would go to somewhere else.

Jacob put his hand over his mouth to stop from smiling. She went back at him. His fingers went back into the earth. Her mouth found his head but only for an instant. His eyes went shut as her hand got firmer and faster. He opened his eyes. Her eyes were sparkling and her mouth was open just slightly and there was a little bit of drool in the corner of her mouth. How was it that some women knew the secret to pleasing a man, and other women didn’t? Or did they all know, but some just chose not to give a damn? Regardless, a hand job by a woman who gave the appearance of actually seeming to enjoy doing it, was without question, one of the most intensely pleasurable experiences a woman can give a man (or so Jacob thought at the time).

Darla got serious about it now. She straddled Jacob and with her right hand working overtime, she stroked his swollen balls with her left. It was a bit intimidating to Jacob but, Christ, he hadn’t had so much as an erection in over a month.

So with a month’s worth of sad horrible lifelessness built up, Jacob finally exploded with such ferocity and sheer volume, as to cause any Kickapoo God of Fertility to flinch. He asked Darla if there was a Kickapoo God of Fertility. She cocked her head a moment. She hadn’t heard of one, no. She finally let go.

“Wo!” Darla said, staring down at the little streams and ponds of seed all over Jacob’s belly. “You needed that.”

After a brief journey to the Happy Hunting Grounds and then back to the cooling ground of earth, Jacob said, “Yes, I did. Thank you.”

Affection

The poet remembered. The streets especially. The old broken leaning, oozing, dirty streets. The glistening neon nights. Topless, bottomless, writhing bodies swirling around eerie blue-lit poles and the thick, animated waves of people holding plastic cups of beer marching up and down Bourbon Street. The mimes and musicians. It was an adult’s only level in Dante’s Inferno called Funhouse. All the buildings were old, in various states of decay, leaning inwards, wheezing inwards, as if the sediment that could cover three states that spilled out of the bottom of the Mississippi every year was finally pushing up under the whole damn city.  The heat, the humidity, the sediment. At any moment, it appeared, the whole damn place would just explode and bury everyone in carp shit and mud. And then the cheap beer vendors would crawl out first and open up, followed by the strip joints, and then the Cajun restaurants. In a matter of minutes the party would start again.

Order Nowhere Near the Sea of Cortez by Jim Harris

This thought brought Roger back to the journalist from the Picayune-Times who sat slumped comfortably in the wrought-iron chair across the small wrought-iron table from him. They were on the sidewalk of a beer joint just off the University Quad called Loony’s Pub. She looked just like he remembered New Orleans. She had a whale tattoo the size of a silver dollar on one arm, and a yellow carnation on the other. She had a little blue dagger on her right index finger. She was thin and dark and oily. Her nose was large, as if it were draining sustenance from the rest of her body. Vagabond European heritage, he surmised. The nipples on her unabashedly saggy, small breasts dully stared at him as she spoke. She held a freshly sharpened Number 2 pencil and a small pink-paged spiral notebook.

Her face screwed up in serious reflection for a moment. She wore old, faded, saggy jeans that looked like they may never have left her body. Those jeans fit her like they were now a part of her. Her sandals were tiny and black with one thin strap dotted with sequins holding them on her feet. Her toenails had been painted, but not recently.

“After I finished the final poem in Morning Cylinders I wanted to let it soak in before I even looked at it again,” she said. “It was like many have said about your work before. Compassionate, conventional, wise yet not preachy. Layered. Layered is the word I see associated with your poems a lot. You stay in touch with the past, but have that eye for the present. Stumbling onto those two lovers on the beach and your mixed feelings about reacting to it with your daughter at your side. Would it be better to react or act like everything was fine? That was well done.”

He reminded her that was in his book before Morning Cylinders.

“Yes.” Then she blurted out what she was leading up to. “You’re hiding something in this one.” She pointed her pencil at him. “Masks. You have that brilliant one about a mask you saw in a shop window down on Royal Street.” She stopped pointing at him. She asked him if he had a good time in New Orleans.

A thin layer of sweat coated his shoulder blades and the underside of his arms.

“It’s an interesting place,” he said. She was still in her state of deep, contrived, seriousness.

“Don’t you think,” she paused. “A great writer disturbs and lesser writers simply entertain?”

Roger thought suddenly of Darla. He missed her. He hadn’t been able to talk to her all day. He had a thin, vaporous smile on his face. She continued to talk  She was clearly on some agenda of her own. He didn’t write to disturb. He didn’t write to simply entertain either. She kept talking though. She should have pursued him hiding something. Fucking short attention-span journalists. He waved to the waitress. They had Becks on draft. She said that in his latest book he had grown more blunt, less abstract.

“I think what defines a great writer for me is the ones that leave me the most uncomfortable. I don’t want to leave a story or a novel or a poem with some sort of intellectual satisfaction, happy with the fact that I’ve witnessed some pompous writer growing to love his characters, or—” she pounded a fist on the table, startling him—“I absolutely hate it when a critic says a writer has shown great affection for his characters!” She made a sound of disgust. “Preachers show great affection. Dysfunctional parents, functional parents – if I need affection I’ll buy a dog! It’s real! Male writers who read too much fucking Dickens are the problem! Did literature peak and die with Great Expectations? Huh?”

Roger didn’t know what to say. The woman was obviously upset.

He finally said this:

“I’m a poet.”

She ordered a tequila sunrise.

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I have this writer-lover and he’s driving me nuts.” She sat up, tugged at her shirt, and took a deep breath. She re-pointed her pencil at him. His head went back slightly.

“You’re hiding something!”

He smiled.

Moments

Katherine blurted out such a laugh and used so much abrupt body language; she spilled her glass of water. It was the first spot on the spanking white clean tablecloth.

They had eaten almost all the salad between them. Katherine ate the most. Helen had only picked really. But her story about how Katherine put her coat on, told her first grade teacher she was going home now because she no longer liked school, and then walked right out of school, put her in stitches.

“I had almost forgotten that one,” Helen said. “You did. You’ve been like that your whole life.”

Katherine grew serious. “I’m going to do better with my classes next semester,” she said. “I mean it. I just, like Dad says, need to simplify, get focused. I get into dumb relationships, get too involved with my friends’ problems, you know? God, Dad went ballistic when I told him I had a crush on my math teacher and was going out for a beer with him.”

“He did?”

“Pretty out of character. I mean, God, I’m legal, you know? Caught him at a bad time, I guess. Dad’s a little weird lately.” Katherine asked her mother if she wanted that last chunk of chicken on her plate. No, she could take it.

Helen melted as she watched her daughter, so unabashedly, so innocently, chew on that last bite of chicken, and saw her daughter sucking on her breast all those years ago so unabashedly, so innocently. She could not tell her daughter now. Not at this moment. It had to be another time.

Helen cleared her throat and looked out across the clean, well-kept little garden, relished in one of these last, ever-closing moments.

On Gravity and Relativity

“Toulouse-Lautrec!” Doc said to the two police officers who were approaching the makeshift stage Doc had built in his house. The officers stopped.

“Yes. The greatest dwarf French painter of the 19^th century. He stood 4’11” in high heels (which he wore on more than one occasion) and was a dwarf because the French had bad accountants back then. Those sundry accountants routinely advised the French aristocracy to inbreed as a mean of keeping hold of their money.” Doc Garrelts rolled his eyes. “Better than tech stocks, I suppose.” Doc held an index finger in the air as one of the officers started towards him. They planned to arrest him, once again, for disturbing the peace. The officer stopped.

“But it was all about one thing.” The officers, for some reason, were listening.

“Motion,” he continued. “A leg or an arm or half a head was always off the canvas in Mr. Lautrec’s artwork. Yes, he did stand in closets and watch prostitutes and followed them up staircases and was pissed generally that these beautiful French sex objects ignored him completely as he wandered around the brothels, but oh the paintings that came out of him. Motion. Movement. And to think it all began a good two hundred and fifty years earlier with Galileo.” The officers looked at each other. Doc said to listen.

“Galileo, in the early part of the 17^th century pioneered the study of motion, and concluded, among other things, that if you ran as fast as you could off a cliff, when you ran out of momentum, you dropped in a linear path straight down. You would think he spent way too much time watching Road Runner cartoons, but that’s all hearsay.”

One of the officers started to say something to Doc but the other shushed him up. It had been a boring day so far in Urbana.

“And within a year of Galileo’s death (supposedly after falling into an open manhole in Florence, Italy. ‘See! I told you so!’ were his last words) Sir Isaac Newton was born and would later refute most of Galileo’s theories.” Doc Garrelts nodded. “Sir Isaac, a born-again Christian Mama’s boy who may or may not have been partial to his own gender, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s okay though,” one of the officers said.

“Sir Isaac, while a genius and all, was also a quick-tempered Brit with a short trigger. So one day when he was a little pissed up, he staggered under an apple tree and was under there long enough to have an apple fall and smack him right on top of the head. Sir Isaac let out a string of curses and then grabbed that apple and heaved it as far as he could. Then Mr. Newton froze as he watched that apple. It didn’t fall straight down. No! It fell proportionate to the loss in velocity. It fell in an arch. It curved.” Doc gestured. “The rest is history. The path of the earth; stars in the sky.” Doc nodded.

One of the officers asked how this all fit with Toulouse-Lautrec.

“The steam engine, silly boy. Chinese slaves slowly cutting a path through all the sacred land of the Indians. Trains! Trains in the latter part of the 19^th century allowed people to sit quietly in a comfortable seat as the reality of the world passed by as just colorful blurs. Whoosh! Motion! When you can move so fast that everything starts to blur you either lose your perspective or come up with a new one. Mr. Lautrec wanted to capture motion. Movement. It fascinated him. It fascinated everyone. Moving fast was the flame that lit the industrial furnace. It caused artists to become fascinated with movement. It would lead to this inherent desire to capture movement. It would lead to…”

“Motion pictures?”

Doc pointed. “That, yes. But it would lead to a man Marilyn Monroe would call the sexiest man in the world. It would lead to Einstein. Mathematician, Philosopher, notorious womanizer, what hair that man had!”

One officer looked at his watch.

“It would lead to the greatest discovery of all time. Einstein came up with the theory that if you moved fast enough away from the earth you could defeat time. If you traveled fast enough, for every one of your minutes, the people back on earth would age a year. God what a discovery. What a great man.”

One of the officers, after a short pause, asked Doc what his point was.

“Well,” Doc said, smiling. “If I can run fast enough away from you, you’ll slow down and I will get away."

He bolted off the stage.

The Ghost Dance

There across the street was Lincoln Park. The trees were tall and dark and skinny and were planted so dense and close together they all looked nervous and about to be arrested. Dull lights scattered muted light here and there. At night it was terrifying. In the daytime young women with strollers still avoided it. The trees were too thick, too frightening.  

Throughout the years there had been many screams that went unheard in Lincoln Park. The stories were legion. Emily’s story was there. Jacob couldn’t believe she walked this way five times a week to get to the hospital. Every night, headphones on. Her walks to work through this ugly park might be over now. He had no clue why she did it. There were other routes to get home. Jacob turned and headed in a different direction.

The street he took was empty and there along the sidewalk a wheel on an overturned tricycle spun madly. He was already dead. Golden light lit the attic of some nice old house over there where some gentle old woman probably sat upon a cushioned soft wood swivel chair reading some portentously secret history that left her even more comfortable with her wealth and memories, as some mutually contented old fat seedless cat curled into a corner of the world’s softest leather sofa, as poor, poor Greta, frightened and lost, nervously prowled the darkness along Interstate 51 outside of Indigo. Jacob couldn’t even go back for her. He was out of cash and out of gas. His car barely made it to her apartment. That’s why he was walking home. That’s how empty the tank was. It sputtered on the edge of town. And now Jacob sulked. He brooded. And blocks to go before he slept.

And then he would get money and gas and retrace the route all the way to Indigo and back until he found that cat. Maybe the rejuvenating powers of a cat returned would help Emily’s poor, overwhelmed white cells make a comeback. He stopped walking. The tips of Jacob’s hands and feet tingled with an almost overwhelming sadness.

“A Milleresque walk home,” Jacob muttered.

 Jacob was even a little hungry, if he thought about it, and he was always on the verge of being horny. But this wasn’t Paris. He stopped dead in his tracks. His last image of Henry Miller was a shrunken, bald-headed old man hunkering in a wheelchair on the Today Show. What a sad last image. And now he was dead too.

Jacob said all of this and more to himself, mumbling really, to keep from crying because it made no sense to cry. He had to do more things that made sense, he decided. He came to the edge of the park. Across the street a sickly square bicycle repair shop stood on a corner across from the park. Jacob crossed the street. He made his way around the bicycle building.

Five homeless people sat around a yellow fire burning in a rusted out trash can. They were all sitting except for one. It was the large bearded homeless man who sat on Green Street all day with his things and a cup. Jacob only saw him sitting. He wore an army jacket. His beard fit his face like it had been ripped from several different people and pasted on. His hair was matted into accidental dreads. He moved up and down as if pulled by some cosmic marionette.  One foot was rising as the other fell. He was chanting something. The others were nodding. Jacob’s eyes widened. His heart stopped as suddenly as the man stopped to stare at him, his eyes glowing, one foot suspended in the air.

“Ha! Ha!” the man said, sending Jacob reeling.

More homeless people came out of the darkness. The sweet smell of cedar drove the fire as it emitted a perfect circle of quietly flickering dull musty gold light. Everyone was cast in sepia, as the fire was just strong enough to punctuate the surrounding area of darkness with total impenetrable blackness. More people joined in the slow, ponderous stomping dance. Someone handed Jacob a wooden bowl and told him to drink. He did. It was peyote tea and this was a peyote Kickapoo ritual. Jacob knew this without being told directly. A voice was telling him this and he knew the voice. She must have followed him when he left them at Emily’s place. It was Darla’s voice and she was somewhere close but his eyes were frozen on the fire as the peyote engulfed him. It all made sense.

Peyote is a circular cactus and a bird’s nest is circular and so is a Kickapoo wickiup and life and earth and sky were all connected through circles and so what if Einstein made some ferial comment about how as a circle of illumination grew in size, so proportionately did the ever-increasing circle of surrounding darkness? Blah, blah, blah. Peyote took away such Einsteinian negativity.

Darla was so funny, Jacob thought as the lens of his peyote-state began to widen and narrow all at once. He looked around for Darla. His eyes found Abbie instead. She stood beside a stack of white box lunches. The presiding Kickapoo medicine man appeared hovering just out of reach of the flames on the edge of the blackness.

He spoke of Jack Wilson. Wovoka. He spoke of the rains to come. He spoke of the dance. Jacob perked up as the medicine man made an aside about rain and the greatest of all rains was coming soon and wasn’t it silly how different the Indian was from the European? Indians would love to walk around with a rain cloud over their head. What a great thing! I mean truly, an Indian would give up his Eagle feathers for this! And what an asinine rhyme European children are taught—“Rain, rain, go away, come again some other day…” Damn! Why not tell the world to turn as dry as a fart and blow away!

“Doc!” Jacob exclaimed as he listened to this hovering, hooded Kickapoo Shaman. Abbie touched his shoulder and her hand melted through his body. Her soft, inviting hand held his heart firmly and the warm cool feeling this generated made his heels tingle and his balls throb.  She had him right where she wanted him. He tried to say Darla but he couldn’t. The muscles in his mouth were too relaxed. But her face, Abbie’s face, was Darla’s face. Abbie’s hand was Darla’s hand. Abbie’s hardened nipples staring at him through the purple silky gypsy blouse were Darla’s nipples. This was an older, wiser Darla but it was Darla and her hand slipped even further down from his heart and she had him there, too. In the luminescent peyote and cedar haze and as her lips, those perfect thick and painted lips were close enough to exchange breaths, Abbie’s perfect nose, Darla’s nose, touched his and she said.

“I’m sorry, Jacob.”

“Sorry?”

“What happened to Doc,” Abbie said.

Jacob looked across the fire. The shaman was gone.

“He died?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Running from the police,” Abbie bit her bottom lip. “Lecturing on Toulouse-Lautrec.”

This puzzled Jacob.

“But don’t feel bad,” she said. “Just come to his wake.”

Abbie sipped from the peyote bowl.

“And bring your Indian friend,” she said.

Jacob was filled with a horrible, wretched sadness. The peyote was doing a bad thing to him. He was losing his sight.  He better get home.

“Doc’s dead,” Jacob said.

Jacob left the fringe and stumbled home.

Temporary Magic

It was the annual town walnut fight for all the boys. Jacob’s brother had told him to stay home but their mother had gone to work and Jacob went outside, picked up a walnut, and headed down the street.

He had been running from an older boy his brother said looked like a girl. This boy planned to assault Jacob, first with walnuts and then with his cock, and then with a Louisville Slugger baseball bat he got at a White Sox game in Chicago.

He ran fast, little Jacob did. He would always be a fast runner. But the first walnut struck him square in the back of the head and sent him tumbling into thick, crackling slippery leaves. He tried to scramble to his feet. The leaves were too thick, too slippery. He scraped his face on a stick, drawing blood. He was too frightened to cry. And that’s when the blackness came. He remembered the leaves being so deep he couldn’t go anywhere. He treaded as if he were drowning. He could see nothing.

The boy struck him repeatedly with walnuts. In the legs, the chest, several times in the groin. The boy hit Jacob so much and so hard Jacob started to go numb. Jacob lay bloody and welted up everywhere, his vision gone completely. His breathing was shallow. He still wasn’t crying. He heard the boy take a piss in the leaves.

He felt the boy pull him up by the front of his sweatshirt. He felt something strange and pliable under his nose and on his upper lip. He kept his mouth clamped shut.

Then he heard the shouts and the thuds of walnuts hitting the boy. Jacob cowered upon the ground. He heard the boy cursing and then screaming and feet rustling the leaves and then his brother’s voice came through loud and clear.

His brother broke the boy’s jaw with a big rock. Then he carried Jacob home. The boy and his family moved away shortly after that.

Another time the blindness came Jacob was twelve and his ten-year-old cousin, Dorina, lost her eye to an errant bullet. All he could remember then was his Grandfather yelling out her name.

He felt something hit his back. It was Kris’s sweatshirt. Something else hit his back. Her sweatpants. They smelled of perfume and bathwater. She crawled under his sheet, pulled it up to her chin. She reached over and snapped the frayed brown elastic of his baggy, torn briefs. She called him a squirt. A squirt with a nice butt.

She had something to talk to him about. Kris had spent the last three days having one epiphany after the other and she had even put down money for an apartment in Normal and regardless of what anyone said Illinois State was the better college over Eastern. She even talked to the counselor about the English department. They had a good English department, Jacob. He flinched as he felt something slippery slide into the back of his underwear. It was Kris’s silky, smooth panties. No, he was going to Eastern.

The rain grew heavier and hit the glass in waves. Jacob turned around; his eyes passing over and through Kris as he finally ended up facing an Aimee Mann poster on the wall and said to where he thought Kris was, “I’m blind.”

Kris, who had let the sheet ease down past her belly button, sighed a quick sigh and said, “Evidently.” Kris knew about Jacob’s episodes of blindness. It was all in his head, she had said. And perhaps it was, but he couldn’t see her now.

Outside the water was running in torrents down the old street. The driver had finally gotten the tire changed on the hearse that set in front of Doc’s house. The sky was so thick with pregnant, ugly gray clouds it was almost dark. It looked like the rain had settled in and would be staying for a while.

Of course Jacob, the master of missed opportunities, could not see Kris’s body when they finally consummated this strange, undefined relationship. A temporary magic left them squirming and moving together that morning slowly at first, easing their lips upon the other as if pulled by some thick, invisible adhesive. It was as if they were walking on some sexual moon. After this long moment of discovery, this quiet consummation, they finally started laughing and talking and jabbing and poking and pulling at each other like two ghosts opening sex toys one Christmas morning. After one particular moment of intensity, Jacob kissed and licked heavy thick salty sweat off Kris’s make-up free cheeks, his own breathing as hard and deep as he could ever remember. She was glad he was blind actually. She was glad he couldn’t see her. Otherwise it would have been the first time he had ever seen her without her makeup on. She didn’t like anyone really to see her without her makeup. It might scare him, Kris said. She also was glad he didn’t know where she was earlier. She was human now though, with Jacob. She wasn’t earlier. She didn’t say this.

“Arrabella,” Jacob said.

And on they went that morning, moving on deep into and around each other in search of the other side as it rained and flooded the cracks outside and for a while Jacob forgot about Greta and Emily and Doc and how he could never have Darla and Kris forgot everything too. Forgot her morning.

Then they fell asleep, the rain being the only noise they could hear.

There were worse moments in time, Jacob said to the fading darkness.

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