Wamba: A Novel (Literature of the American West :, V. 8)

Literature of the American West William Kittredge, General Editor

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WAMBA

Other Books by Max Crawford Waltz across Texas The Backslider The Bad Communist Lords of the Plain Six Key Cut Icarus (with Michael Koepf) Can’t Dance The Red & The White highschoolharry&co Wing Shot Eastertown (forthcoming)

WAMBA ■

A N OV E L

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MAX C R AW F O R D

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS : NORMAN

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crawford, Max, 1938– Wamba: a novel / Max Crawford. p. cm.—(Literature of the American West : v. 8) ISBN 0–8061–3391–0 (alk. paper) 1.West (U.S.)—Fiction. 2. Separation (Psychology)—Fiction. I.Title. II. Series. PS3553.R293 W36 2002 813'.54—dc21

2001053493

Wamba:A Novel is Volume 8 in the Literature of the American West series. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources, Inc. • Copyright © 2002 by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University.All rights reserved. Manufactured in the U.S.A.

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I was going to call this I Murder Mommy, but it didn’t work out. Author

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Wamba

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I Murder Mommy

314

TwoToe Ole Lone Lobo Wolf

xxx

It looked like it had been written on a bar napkin.

xxx

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24 Robert James came back for them alone. Fear strikes the girl, age 56 Coolie loved the plains, there, the first time he saw them, and the land 71 Like a lot of Texas plainspeople, them that could afford it, we went 81 A bat flew into my room one night, m’dear, but I was not afraid, for 117 Of course they would be excited their first trip back to Arkansas, and I 180 On to the bus station then, the bus station of my dreams, a bus 190 They were married in secret.That’s what they said.You believe it? 215 Not so Roy Max, Max Roy, Max Roy Max Yeaman. He faced it 9 uncles and a pop 314 I hunted her, down these plains, our dark heart, that secret spine, our 321 It was night.A soft night. Not that late.The bars and burger drive-ins xxx etc xxx etc xxx TwoToe some called me but I had more names than that.Altogether xxx “It looked like it had been written on a bar napkin.” xxx let it come back to grass again and night be dark

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WAMBA

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Families are cheap. Everybody’s got ’em. OK—orphans.The lucky ones. I wanted to be an orphan once, when young. Orphans, I figured, had it made.We went to this orphanage, our family, me quaking as usual.There were no orphans anywhere to be seen. Just this big orphanage room laid out like an army barrack. Strict, quiet, dead empty. Don’t know what they had done with the orphans. Off chopping cotton, probably. Everything deathly, shining, folded, squared. Coolie, an old army man, loved it. Even the toys stood in ranks, spit-n-polished.And not an orphan in sight.What a life. Being out of sight. And Wamba wept. All this got started at my old man’s funeral. I went over his casket after this Baptist preacher, a true half-wit. Never got all the way up to the preacher, as these pulpits they have nowadays’re like bulletproof limos. And they keep a couple heavyweight pallbearers nearby.This must happen every day.The old man’s casket was cherrywood. Dark, burnished, it glowed.We had a cherry tree out at the Home Place.We used to climb it, Chick and me. Coolie liked it too, the tree, and he liked the cherries as well. On top of this dark, burning, redbrown cherry casket were spread some flowers. Little roses. Dusty red and dusty white roses.The lady at the florist said to my mother: “You want some baby’s breath with ’em,Wamba?” There at the funeral, at the graveside, after I had thought very seriously about going over my father’s casket for this preacher, there the banker Darty said of the cherrywood and the dusted little roses:

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“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything dead look so lovely.” He liked roses too, Coolie, the old man. He grew them for a while. After we had left the Home Place.After he had given up. He gave up on the roses in time too.Took up tomatoes.The little ones. I suggested to Wamba that maybe we should put a spray of tomatoes on the casket.The little ones.The lady at the florist looked worried. Coolie grew the best little tomatoes in town. He would get out every evening and slap the stalks and fruit around with a broomstick. All the ladies in town, they belonged to the garden club and toured, would drop by. “Why, Mr. Richardson, you got the best tomatoes in town.The little cherry ones. How in the world do you do it?” “I creep out every evening and swat them around with a stick.” The ladies tittered, as Coolie was a handsome man, and darted back to their Buicks. But the old man knew what he was talking about. Nothing living likes it easy.There’s got to be struggle to bear fruit.And Coolie gave it up. Gave up and moved us into town. Longer day than quitting the army. “That boy draws like a girl.” It’s true.All I ever wanted to do was draw. Birds.And grass and wheat and willows and weeds and brambles and bushes and those trees that bore fruit and their fruit with them. And they would wave in the breeze and the borne birds bob with them. “Draws good as a girl, that boy a yore’s Miz Richardson. Sister Wamba, if yawl don’t mind.” It began then, this longing to kill mommys and their preachers. Early on. She just stood there, looking stupid, embarrassed. Stop drawing birds and be a man, that was the message, and I was only six or something.And him too. Just as bad.The big army soldier. He faded. He stepped back, back, till he was not there, as I held out my drawing, the drawing I had done of the owl, hoot, screech and barn, the scissortails and they were lovers, the roadrunner, sparrows of so many kind and the chickenhawk, red hawk, nighthawk and old mr. bobwhite and that poor whippoorwill and the cardinals and larks and jays, red and blue, and the bobbobbobin of the robin and the soaring sorehead buzzard and the eagle I followed that day, golden not the bald, the sea, the great American eagle of my dreams, all these and more, all the birds and their perches and more of them too that I had seen and tracked and scouted that day, day after endless day, watching them, following them, tracking and scouting them, studying

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them, thinking them, and drawing, ever drawing them in my mind, and now my father faded, faded with her, faded away as this fat beef-face sucker came closer and closer still till— I flipped the notebook over to the back page.Where the action was. The babe with the huge breasts, nipples size of saucers, cunt grinning like a cat.That shut him up.This was a preacher, see. It’s what this is all about.Art and religion and sex and death to preachers who call little boy artists girls. They bought me a gun so I could shoot birds instead of sketch them. But a couple days of killing and I tossed it all in. Decided I had rather be rich. I come from two families, not one. Of course all families have families, as surely as (most) children do, but for a time I thought my family’s families were but the one.They had the same name, my family’s two families. This confused me for only a short while, but outsiders proved to be no such eager learners; though the latter’s confusion, or their reaction to two families/one name, has changed markedly over the years. Early on I would apply, say, for a social security card, and at the box MOTHER’S MAIDEN NAME would write “Richardson,” for it really and truly was, and would receive in some time a stuffy reply, the application form returned with the MAIDEN on the form circled in red. In later years and kinder times, when not all who thought a boy who carried his mother’s name a steaming idiot, I would receive kinder, more understanding queries. “Dear Love Child,” they might commence and I knew it then for sure. Not once during all those crazed, nocturnal searches through family papers, never did I find a Coolie-Wamba marriage certificate. That, of course, because they not married that respectable fourteen months before my birth but the infamous five! Or maybe not married at all. Bastard, bastard—who does not know the schoolyard taunt, if only in the mind; or worse, surely worse—orphan, little orphan boy! My real father was lost in time and their lies. Some friend of Coolie’s. I must find him, my real father, my true father, I once thought, I was that mad, that lost, to think that dear lost Coolie was not my dad. They were pals in the army, the army air corps. Before Coolie washed out or was it bad eyes (oh the past and their lies!) and gave it up and walked away from his beloved army and came home to the Home Place, a place

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that, though it came close, at times close indeed, never was, quite, his home. Coolie came back to the Home Place, early thirties, I suppose, came back to what he had walked away from to walk off to the army; the saddest day of her life, Granny Holmes once told me, the day Johnson Alan walked off down the road to join the army, his beloved army. Coolie came back to the Home Place then. Maybe the house had been built by then; or maybe that’s what Coolie did that winter he first came back, built the house that would give the Home Place its name. They had lived in dugouts before, when the two boys, Coolie and Babe, had left the Arkansas piney woods and come out to the Texas high plains.This dugout—the first Richardson, the first Arkansas or sometimes Blanco Richardson, settlement on this these plains—was found maybe three, four miles south and west from the Home Place, on that section that would come to be known as the Widder’s, this after their tough manly sweet sister Gert, she who had followed the younger boys out to the plain and would lose her Arkansas husband, John Lawford, building her own house on that section that would be hers and had herself thereafter been known as the Widder Lawford, Gerda called Gert. But now, later on, Coolie, after walking away from the army, now he was living not in a dugout at the Widder’s but in his own house at the Home Place and was farming that section, as Babe and Gert were living and farming over at the Widder’s, all of them probably living in houses by then as well, all the children still working for Old Taylor, the old man, his life playing out back in Arkansas—so that was the set scene, houses not dugouts, when this old pal of Coolie’s from the army air corps days dropped in. Flew in and landed there on the road that runs in front of the Home Place. I’m sure that’s how it happened, how my father, the phantom I once so foolishly thought my real, my true father, dropped into my life, bringing my life with him, his foolish phantom son. They all flew, all the Arkansas or Blanco Richardsons and some of the Dolle or Dollé Richardsons too. It was in their blood, taking machines up into the air and bringing them down, sliding them down so smooth and sweet on that road that ran along in front of the Home Place. And how could a man living on those high plains not fly, not dream of flying? There was nothing but sky all around, everywhere you looked but straight down there was sky, and the earth itself, flat, featureless, near bare of tree, that spoke to men of the ease with which they might take their machines up into the sky and the soft care of bringing them down.And for that, their

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landing strips were everywhere; over these plains a jumbled checkerboard of these flat straight roads had been laid out, few running to a length less than a mile, the side of a section; and even the wires, the highlines that would come to kill so many of these young men in their machines, invisible claws that would reach out and snatch them and their machines from the sky, even these killers were then but an electric dream, that sunset my father set his machine down on the road that ran there in front of the Home Place. He met Wamba sometime during those days. She was living and teaching school over in Dolle—pronounced Dollé or Dolly and back in the old days, some said, even written that way, Dollé—around where her tribe of Richardsons centered.These plains out there, where they met, that boy from down around Blanco, the girl from over towards Dollé, they were vast and went on forever north and west from where they started, there from the caprock that stood only a mile or so behind the Home Place. Why Coolie always favored our place, I figured, chose it from all the others when Old Taylor died, it sitting there with its back to the breaks, we called them, land rumpled and broken and treed, land that had water in creeks and streams and rivers running over it; yeah, the old man liked that, sitting there with his back to all that, the old land, its old ways, the face of a pilot, a pilgrim, a pioneer turned into a wind rising and sweeping down from those plains stretching endless toward the west, running up north. Over these plains were scattered some towns, a couple or so big ones among them but that was it.The rest of these towns stalled somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 in population, a natural demographic function operating there, you would think, as these towns were well distributed, evenly or near so, over the plains, a consistent 20–30 miles separating them, as if done by reason, economic or political. No need to put names on these towns, not that these names are of no interest and should not be remembered, only—not by me; it was one of these towns, see, leaving the Home Place and moving into that town, that killed us, our family, as surely as frost, if there’s enough of it and it lasts the winter, will kill any living thing. No, the interest here is in the communities, we called them, that were found scattered in those days among the towns that were themselves scattered over the plains. If there was less regularity to the arrangement of these communities scattered among the regularly scattered towns, the principle was the same.As the small towns plugged the gaps between the two big towns (Hubbard and Monterrey, more, a lot more, later), say,

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so these communities filled the void between the small towns.This spread of the populace had to do with concrete, or the lack of roads made of it, and cranky cars and tender-footed tires and their losing struggle against a sharp kingdom dominated by nail, screw, spike and barb dropped from the wire, and not to forget a downright steel-burred weed called the goathead. Though gliding autos and rock-rubber tires came in time, it was years before—not till I was in highschool—the Home Place did not stand seventeen miles from pavement. So these country communities, portioned about, served the country population as mini-towns, ranging from the keep-it-simple church, school and store of Blanco, the Home Place’s community, to the extravagance of Dolle, which boasted all those and a gin and an elevator and a post office open on Saturdays as well; and there were streets there in Dolle and houses sat here and there along the streets, like they did in real towns, and you didn’t mind the gaps between the houses and called them vacant lots; and one of these Dolle townish streets was paved between chugholes; and there roared a population of 80 and a city limit sign that boasted: Dollé (some antiquarian had slipped out one night to add the foreign mark), pop. 80. And so Dolle could well have thought of itself as a town-in-waiting, a town-in-the-making, a potential, soon-to-be town. But it was not to be. If Dolle did not simply disappear from the face of the earth, not a trace of it left on the ground, as was Blanco’s fate, it suffered and fell back, with the coming of the highway and the long-running automobile and its steelbelted tires and the simple vanishing of the nail. Don’t know how they hold houses together these days, but that travelers’ dread has gone from the face of the earth, or the road, as surely as has Blanco, where I started school again, for real, when we came home from the war, back from the army. Blanco and Dolle or Dollé, then, and Wake and Lake, Barwise, Cone, Sand Hill, all that sand and still no hill, Plano and Llano (pronounced Lano or Layno, never the Spanish yäno),Turkey and Quail, from McCoy to McAdoo, a six-man football power, Silver Falls and Red Alp, down off the plains, their falls and alp, red and silver, as gone as Blanco and the nail, and Aiken and Quannah and Haeme (Hay-mie, after the German who made the popular plow), these are the names of but a few of those country communities that were once scattered over the plain, particles of dust drifting through space. It happened at a cowboy Saturday night dance, my making.We used to go to a good number of those things before Cady (Cade called Cady, see

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the Two Richardsons chart, p. xx) died—killed himself—and Wamba stopped all that, having a drink and a dance and a good time, stopped it all as if it were all her fault, her baby brother putting a bullet into his brain. And now there was penance and suffering to perform and their preachers and their performances to suffer; and Coolie stood there and went along and we stopped going to the cowboy dances Coolie liked so. Coolie never cared much for cowboys, or the cowboy who had come up onto the plains to farm and refused to give up his cowboy dress, but Norris was an exception. Norris was the cowboy who came in after the war to farm the Cash Quarter (so called by Coolie though it was in fact a section) there across the road, Cash being the old grump who had retired somewhere up on the Red River or down around Possum Kingdom; and Norris had a cowgirl wife called Cat and wore cowboy boots and the hat and Levis and a pearl-snap shirt on his Farmall and Coolie didn’t mind any of that because Norris threw his Saturday night shindigs that Coolie so liked and because Norris was quiet, a quiet man, like Coolie, and Norris wasn’t Old Man Cash—Coolie would have liked just about anybody for that. I’m not saying the movie people got it wrong when they invented The Quiet Cowboy, as they certainly could have had Norris in mind when they drew up their hero of few words, but to my experience Norris and his like were the exception to the rule and that rule was Norris’s cowboy brother who even Norris called the Talking Cowboy and Coolie and Norris would laugh without noise, which was their way, quiet even in laughter. Norris’s brother was called Racehorse— “I had me a dream last night, little Roy, and that gal of mine down in Tom Green County, that gal was running around on me like a racehorse” —and every time he came up from the 6666s or the Spur or the Matador, whatever cowboy country wherever he was cowboying, Norris and his cowgirl wife, Cat, would throw a dance; and we would all cross over the road and walk the quarter mile to Norris’s little house for it was set off the road and there Coolie would have a dance and a drink and take a little of Racehorse’s cowboying money at poker and we kids, after a sip or two at a beer, would woozy and warm find our way into the pile of coats thrown in the corner like in the old cowboy song and there warm and woozy would drift asleep looking over the dusky polished floor to the other, bright-lighted room and the pointed-toe boots there, four to a pair, sliding swishswishswish to the music of an old cowboy two-step, throw your coat in the corner and stay a little longer, there drifting asleep.

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It all breaks down.Those first times I remember, there at the Home Place there after the war, I am taking them and putting them back, back before the war, when Coolie first met Wamba, there somewhere around Dolle. Back then Old Man Cash still lived in the little house a quarter mile over the road, and the only time Coolie went over there it was a dance if fight is dance, Coolie and Old Cash going around, there were the weeds the lazy old man had let go to seed, the seed drifting over to Coolie’s manicured fields.And the first-war biplane that landed there in front of the house, that was my father all right, Coolie flying that plane and he landed not on the county road out front but on the field road that ran alongside the house, the road that ran deep into the heart of the Home Place, that ran into the lake that lay hidden there, a swamp, a whirlpool, in the dark center of the section we called the Home Place. And the army pal who flew into these flat, featureless plains to seduce Wamba and make me and the next day flew off to leave a sobbing lonely little country girl there so alone, sobbing all alone—the dashing romantic pilot, the cad, and all that and the rest of it was all in my mind. It’s all there’s ever been, there ever will be.What’s in my mind.That picture of it in my mind. It was a slow thing, Coolie falling in love with this little dirt-poor country girl turned one-room schoolteacher. Both were natural celibates, a born bachelor, a young maid growing old; maybe not so naturally aging alone and lonely as all that, was Wamba, a true wife and good mother robbed of it by poverty, position and circumstance. Still she was not the hot flirty thing to have a fling with this one-night pilot. Rather, a good girl too good for her own good. If she was a trapped solitaire, Coolie was made for it. Behind his pride and principle, oh all those proud principles, there shyness lay.The photos of Coolie before he came to the Texas plains, his life as a playboy around about Hot Springs, the hottest spot then between K.C. and Dallas, even these blurred snaps of that dapper young man in sleek suit and rakish collar slouched before the latest runabout showed that for all that and all his reputation, this quiet, mild young man might find himself timid among women; as was she the same before men, the young heated woman who lay alone in that desolate country teacherage longing for a man, longing for the dashing cad to land his plane on the road that ran there before the schoolhouse, longing for the rich man’s son to come away from his lonely, batching life, so alone there in the

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house he had made over toward Blanco, and take up her hand and take her away to that warmed Home Place there on the empty plain and once there, warm together in that lone, cold void, take up the love that would in time make the likes of me. War was my true beginning. Before that I remember little.That one day visiting the Blanco School, that one-room inferno that I would return to after my wars, no one in his right mind would ever forget that. And a Christmas, I think it was, a flat box of many small compartments and in each a tractor, harrow, combine, the like, though probably that gift, that Christmas came later, with hard memory, true memory, memories that linked together more and more often to form that unbroken string, a solid thing, a single memory, till now they have come to disintegrate again and break and shatter as one turns back to the black pit one knows before life, before one has remembered. Only one such hard, early memory remains now. A wire fence. Not the bob-wire, so they called it at Blanco School and so, in time, a very short time actually, did I, but chicken wire, I know it now to be.And behind this squared, barbless wire there floundered and staggered about some stringy white chickens, frail, foolish and senseless as I, first remembering—pullets they would come to be called when memory produced talk. And then came that first true memory, a sound from above.A shriek, a cry, a tearing groan. In my mind it still has to do with battle, siege and war, that creaking, crying, moaning windmill that stood like some medieval tower over our fortress house, the mill’s many-sworded face ever turning into the wind, to face our silent coming enemies, to warn us by her cries that storm and the spy wind that brought dark times yet unseen were on their way. And too the cranky old piece of tin, pipe and 4x4 proved later, when Chick got old enough to know nightmare and her fears, to be a fine mad princess shrieking out for help and deliverance, trapped there by howling demons in that creaky, crying old tin-plated tower. Looking back, little Chick lying there in her little bed, kicking her little feet and shrieking away, it was a wonder I didn’t get swatted around more.And my dear sis’s later love—how did that come to be and stay?—for the demon boy who first showed her how truly mad and shrieking she would one day come to be? Please do not skip over or in any way ignore the following chart. In fact, I would recommend its close study. I might even suggest to the

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printer that the chart page be printed separate from the book, perforated at the binding so that it may be torn out and used as bookmark as well as mnemonic guide as we progress further into this tale of the Two Richardsons: Arkansas rather than Blanco (see note)

Dolle or Dollé

Old Taylor Blanton w—Netta Nell Holmes

Thomas Baylor w—Minnie MacCready

Their Children Rosalee Ann h—Marshall Willson

Lula h—Joe Simms

Gerda called Gert,Widder Lawford etc h—John Lawford

Robert James w—Buena

Taylor John called Young Taylor,Teeter,Teet,Tee w—Jonanna

Autrey w—Audrey

George called Babe w—Phyllis (née Fewell!)

Erna Lee h—Dip, Dipper,The Dipper, The Big Dipper etc Roscoe

Johnson Alan called Coolie w—Wamba

Wamba Lane h—Coolie

Gretchen called Boots h—Alvin Redd

Billie h—Herschel Byron called, at times, usually by Coolie, Lord Byron

Turner called Dusty w—Roxie called Rox, Sox, Soxie Roxie etc

Horace Chas Homer called Homer w—Victoria never called Vixie, Trixie Vixie etc

Patricia always called Trish, Rogers never Pat, Patsy, Patti or w—Lily Patticake, except, so said Coolie, by Old Taylor who was the one going around handing out all these nicknames h—Zip or Zipper Zimmerman

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Franklin Crawford called Cade called Cady Frank, usually by the boys, or unmarried at death Crawford, usually by the girls, and never, after age 12, Snookums, Baby Snooks etc w—too many to name died infants Jodie Wright

Zachariah called Zach

You may have noticed that though I have included the children’s spouses where pertinent, I have omitted naming any offspring of these couplings. No cousins. Not that there aren’t any, there are probably hundreds, but that every boy, girl, jack and jill of them was loopy or simply out to get me. Cousin Roy, so some of the Dollé, country-bumpkin cousins called me till, like Franklin Crawford and Snookums, I put a stop to it. Cousin, a familiar, familial phrasing that knots the stomach still. Actually there is one exception here. Probably best to get it out of the way. You have noted the entirely bizarre pairing of Autrey to Audrey (once met a girl name Roye pronounced Roya, we took one look and fled to opposite ends of the earth), well can you imagine the fiendish cruelty when they named their son Audie? Really Audie was a decent sort, for a cousin, maybe three or four years my senior and as fine a hunter, rifle/pistol shot as you would want to see.Audie taught me to shoot and hunt and kill and then taught me to walk away from it, as did he in time, as had his father Autrey, when that man no longer had need to seek out beast and bird of the field to feed his family. So the legend goes. That Autrey, back in the depression, the lean times, the hard times, that this preacher turned teacher, teacher turned killer, took his rifle out in the evening and returned with something for the pot, without fail—so said his son years later, his father the finest shot he had ever seen—and then later, when times grew fat and good, Autrey put his rifle and his fine killing skill away and neither touched nor practiced them again. In truth, Audie, the similarly-named son, did not technically give up the hunt and the kill, merely the gun. But for most stalking the wild deer with bow and arrow would amount to much the same.And even then, under such tight circumstances, Audie, as had his father, took only what might feed his family and his flock.Yes. Both father and son, born killers, were teachers failed at preaching.

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If I shall have harsh opinions of preachers herein, it’s really only that dumb-cluck who planted Coolie and about oh forty to fifty othersuch absolutely worthless skypilots I would like to see get it in the neck.That is, nothing wrong at all with the stake, if only the devil’s disciples got a hand at the matchbox, demons and godlings toasted fifty-fifty. Godlings, you know the ones.They who take the perfectly ordinary word god and turn it into Godt or Godtt or sometimes, in a real lather, Godttt! But these preachers turned teachers turned killers were not among that lot.These men, Audie and Autrey, and beyond them their father/ grandfather, the titular head of the Dollé clan, old Thomas Baylor, there was in them a longing to be preacher, to preach and to be turned away from it, that spoke of man’s hunger, his need to create beauty, truth, a certain salvation of both spirit and substance, to create then an art from the suffering and joy of mankind, to take up body and soul as if they were but an artist’s pen and paper and make with them birds, their song and their bower, as once had I, only to be told—boys don’t draw, somebody’s got to teach and kill and mind the store.These were kind, decent, gentle men, these killers turned teachers, farmers, shopkeepers who longed to preach and to draw, the men of the Dollé clan, old Thomas Baylor and his sons—with the possible exception of the next youngest mutt, Horace Chas Homer, the rich man among them, the backslapping, bullshitting lawyer turned politico turned another wasted life. These soft, smiling, quiet men characterized the Dollé Richardsons as surely as did the snappish, shrewish, sharp and sarcastic women of the Arkansas Rs define their bunch. At least looking back, blurring vision to see whole rather than part, that is what I remember of these two gangs, these men, the failed preachers and artists, of the one and the women, better men than any man, of the other. One family was rich, the other poor.And so that was how they came to the Texas plains. Notice the family similarities—beyond the same last name—on the Two Richardsons chart? The chieftains, so called by ministerial squaws, both T. B.s.Ten children each: one each to perish young and of the survivors through adulthood, four girls, five boys. The first born, girls, born within a twelve-month span; the two benjamins, though Cady did come late, maybe three, four years after Franklin Crawford, but close enough, these two runts to go on to die by their own hand—if one can call Franklin Crawford, in trouble with the bank, in trouble with the tax man, in trouble with wives, ex-wives and those so many other women,

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rolling his Caddy twenty-three times a suicide, and I do.Took out six light poles, the cops said, four one side, then crossed over the road for another couple. And then there were the similarities in their differences. Old Taylor Blanton and Thomas Baylor, on the surface so different it would seem—rich and poor, secular and sacred—maybe down deep the reasonable humor of the one (all those nicknames) matching well the kind imagination of the other (all those lap-rocking stories to the grandkiddies—see “TwoToe Ole Lone Lobo Wolf,” p. xxx).And their wives, both strong, strong-willed women, so very, very different within and under their strengths.And the passive boys of the one tribe matched as well, be it head to tail, by the aggressive women of the other. And to end, for a time, the plain correctness of the one bunch standing as bookend to the bone-cracking honesty of the other.And on and on till you come to their coming, these patriarchs, Taylor Blanton and Thomas Baylor, one rich, powerful, witty, the other poor, peaceful and dreamy, onto these Texas plains within the same year or close to it, there in the early 20s, right after the first war, there at the foot of the American Century, one moment you think it will last forever, the next that it was damned to oblivion the day of its birth. It was Coolie who drove Old Taylor out to the plains that first time, so I would like to think but the figures don’t match. Maybe Coolie rode as a kid that first trip west, but it was only later, on those many trips west, that it was Coolie doing the driving, Coolie loving the control of these machines—planes, cars, in time the massive self-propelled combines—as much as anything he would ever turn mind and motor skill to. Coolie’s good tales of these adventures. Flats, previously observed, Coolie said there seemed to be one, if not two at a time, every twenty miles or so, puttputting along those one-lane brick highways, if one were so lucky to find it among all this dirt, so narrow these early hard roads that even to pull to the shoulder might still mean a head-on with the oncoming puddle jumper.And the maps, the road maps in those days were word maps—like some gabby old farmer leaning on his hoe and pointing directions and recalling whatever history and what else came to mind: “Quarter mile north and a left at the Baxter red barn, you’ll see the Burma Shave signs along there unless you miss it, then bout ten mile there’s a great loafing rock cross the road, Granmaw Nappin, so called in the old days. . . .” Who chauffeured Old Taylor before Coolie—Babe and Young Taylor John,Teet, the two boys on up the line, I suppose—but among the family and in the

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old man’s mind it was his third son’s pride and position to be behind the wheel, whether whatever automobile (the first they had, the first in Princeton,Arkansas) was headed toward the Texas plains or only making that short hop out to Mt. Bethel and the Old Home Place there, the only real home place the Arkansas tribe would ever know—even Coolie, even Franklin Crawford, the most westward-looking of the bunch, they never considered there would be another, not like the sixty-odd acres and fine old shiplap whitewash house out near Mt. Bethel Baptist Church, where Old Taylor got his start in farming, commerce, the like, age twelve. Those Texas trips made the first great division in the family.A division that all agreed to, all welcomed. It comes as amazement to me now that wives win first, mommys, men, children second, third, last and next-tolast, that upon Old Taylor’s death, there at the beginning of 1937, only months before my birth, Netta Nell, Granny Holmes would take only a child’s share of the property (cash another matter) still left to Old Taylor’s crash-ridden, depression-decimated empire; and am further amazed that these ten, nine children and Momma, could portion out among them without slightest spat or squabble who got what and where. Gert, Babe, Coolie and Franklin Crawford went west; while Rosalee Ann, Gretchen called Boots, Dusty and Trish stayed home.Young Taylor, eldest son and namesake, alone was given the right to share out his inheritance, half Arkansas, half Texas, a divided spread that Young Taylor, a divided man, soon sold back to the family—this when he turned his eyes even further west, toward California, the first of her boys that Netta Nell Holmes would see walk off down the road to places she had never known, adventures that could not be dreamed of, so far from home. To ride a wagon at the foot of the American Century, the roaring 20s, was the mark of Cain, in those heady days a betrayal called poverty, and that was how the Dollé bunch, then thought of as the Jack County Richardsons, arrived on the plains, refugees driven westward by the conquering hordes, progress, prosperity and property, their train pomp, position and pride. On the wagon there would have been old Thomas Baylor for sure and the two oldest boys, Robert James and Autrey, and Lula, the oldest girl, for she and Mama, as Minnie MacCready was called, each so disliked the other they grabbed at any separation offered; and probably too there would be Erna Lee, the only real beauty the family made and her father’s favorite, the favorite of them all, even liked by the disliking, dislikable Mama, for Erna Lee wore her beauty easily, as some can go with-

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out dress without notice, as if there were nothing there to be noticed at all, simply beauty.Wamba then was the oldest to stay back with Mama and care for the little ones, a caring Mama cared little for, while Papa and the two oldest boys and the two oldest girls went up onto the lonely, lost plains, to send back for them when a house was found, a farm or its rental, a dugout made, a crop put in. Chick and I would come to know little Wamba’s fear as the wagon and all those so much older than she wound west till they were gone.The fear that she would never see any of them again, not alive. Such was our fear, Chick’s and mine, especially mine, those days that Coolie and Wamba drove off in the morning to travel the fifty miles west to Hubbard, our large town out on the plains, a city it could be called among all its surrounding small towns. Our fear, or mine, lay in the technological future, centuries, it would seem, past Wamba’s fears of marauding Indians or stagecoach stickup artists, in the ever present, ever real, ever deadlier, ever more likely car crash, our fear of it or mine.We would sit then on the Home Place front steps in the evening, after the big yellow bus brought us from school to the empty house, and watch out toward the west, watch toward the sinking sun, our parents without doubt dead and mangled in that head-on or sideswipe or jackknife or roll, the so many ways a car can kill, sit waiting and watching, waiting, waiting till Chick gave up the vigil, learned to live with newfound orphancy and skipped off to play with the kittens in the grass or some such, leaving her quaking, shrinking, numbed, bitterly orphaned brother to sit and wait and watch and watch till there as sun’s plate touched earth’s crust, there it would be, the plume of dust miles and miles there to the west.The plume grew and grew, in size and speed, it billowed ever higher, closer, now streaking right and north, then that disappearance to slow and make the corner, now there it grew again, closer, larger, swifter, ever closer, now streaking left and to the east, east toward us, till finally at the plume’s sharp point there would appear the car, the flashing white Lincoln Coolie had bought after the war.Then, at last, the flashing white car and roiling plume of dust would make that final turn and come hurtling down the road that ran before the Home Place and its horn would sing out and Chick, accepting parents and home as carelessly as she had adopted orphanage and nobody, leapt up from her kittenish games and ran out to the road waving, while her frozen,doomdulled brother sat and watched and waited, even as the glittering Lincoln rolled up beside the house and happy Wamba and smiling Coolie piled

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out, bristling with gift and surprise, watched and waited did he till they came, his happy parents and chattering sis, and lifted him up and swung him around to come down, come alive, not orphan, not alone, not left by them all now, not yet, there at the kitchen table, surrounded by gifts and all their surprise. 24 Robert James came back for them alone. Fear strikes the girl, age ten, the little mother even then. The mule is wrong, black, the wagon too, a painted thing, some custard color and spokes and wheels whirring crimson in the sun, and the WAMBA’S man there, there in the wagon alone, that is not the TALE boy who left them there alone, the girl, Mama, the little ones, four oh so long months ago. Now there is a man, alone, in the painted wagon, not the boy Robert James, the kindest boy the girl had ever known, and now the boy gone man in four oh so short were those months, now he sees the girl standing back, not running, running down the road to see his new mule, the wagon painted now, the boy grown a man; and Robert James rises in the buckboard seat and takes his blackbrim hat and waves with that and laughs and calls out to the girl, It’s me, Robert James, come to fetch you home. Our new home, we got a house now and Papa’s got rent on a farm, Robert James calls, teeth white as hatchet, brow white as snake, all the rest burned brown under the sun. Now the girl runs out the yard and down the road and Mama there in the door, even Mama who don’t much care for kids or don’t care to show it much, now she as hard as leather straight through to the heart, now she smiles some and touches the back of her hand to her eye like there was an itch as the girl, the little mother, runs and runs and runs down the road calling out Robert James Robert James you’ve growed yourself a man. And Robert James laughs his hatchet teeth and swings the girl up to the seat with him and calls out to Mama still standing there in the door, the little ones now come gathered there behind her to look out on the brother grown a man, he has come home to take them back home, a new home there on the plains, these plains so high you have to crawl up a mountain, Robert James laughs and swings the little ones up, up, up onto the wagon bed.And that’s our new home out there in the west, and look to the new mule, Bert he’s called and he’s a beaut, and what new words you got there

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Robert James, and cost forty bucks, to be paid and took out of our earnings, Robert James laughs out his new words. And look at the paint on this old rig, Robert James laughs out his new words, Papa has bought me a bucket of paint and a brush, a brush black and thick as a stash, the one I’ll be starting before we get back to our new home.And he’s bought me all the paint I’ll ever need and I done painted the house a fine ole yeller, old ivory said the man at the store, and some crimson too for the trim and I done painted the house and the trim and with what was left back, Papa thought long and hard, two shakes of a lamb’s tail, smiled Robert James at the little ones, their eyes big and round as saucers, going bigger and rounder still at all Robert James’ new words, big words. And look there, with what was left back I put the last of the crimson trim on those rolling wheels and flashing spokes, flashing like fire in the sun. And me and Papa and Autrey, we got the winter’s crop put in the ground, and Lula too, she was there every bit as good as any man, working ole Clovis down the lines straighter than ever Papa could, and Erna Lee, you kids, oh those fine new words, she’s kept up the new house and washed and sewed and cooked, and cooked as well. Oh Mama, Robert James called out to Mama now come some down from the doorway, making as if all her interest was in for Bert, that new black mule, sleek and fine and trim as a racing horse. Oh Mama,Wamba Lane, Billie, and baby Homer too, you ought to see it. Erna Lee there at the stove, a beauty like you have never seen, and me and Papa and Autrey all praising all that fine cooking there done by Erna Lee and there Lula setting there at the head of the table, like Mama, Mama’s place when we all get back home, and Lula looking over the cornbread, done nice and firm, towards black, there around the edge, there’s Lula turning her cornbread and saying,Where is that Wamba? Papa, where is that little Wamba girl, that little cook.We got to send Robert James back to bring that girl back home.And Erna Lee, such a beaut these days, she’s gone and cut her hair short, that’s the way it’s done nowadays, says Erna Lee, ever the one to be looking over the new magazines while the supper’s cooking on the stove.And Erna Lee looks up from her new magazine, oh these fine new words Erna has been teaching me and Autrey from these new magazines, she turns and smiles at ole sister grump, Lula who can work good as a man, better than most, and Erna smiles and says to me, And Robert James, don’t forget Mama, when you go down into

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them breaks to fetch Wamba Lane.You bring Mama back too. And the little ones, they can come too, and Mama can sit there, at the end of the table, looking down its length toward Papa like always, all our eyes closed shut, praying hard for thanksgiving that Robert James had gone down to the breaks and brought Wamba Lane, a little mother even then, age ten, back home, to our new home. Robert James smiled at his sisters, their little fussings, Lula and Erna Lee, Lula already a big country woman, Erna already the sleek city girl.And now little Wamba, age ten, already a little mother, her eyes big and round as saucers as Robert James told of their adventures climbing up onto those high plains. He made it sound like heaven, a land up in the sky, that was the way he told of their new life there.The fine farm Papa had got, rented, a quarter section all their own. And of the day Papa and Robert James and Erna Lee had rode over to the big house of the Mister who owned the farm that would be theirs, rented, the rich Mister who owned all the land thereabouts. Owned so much of it that he owned a town too, even called it after himself. Robert James drew a sheet of paper to him and wrote out their new home’s name for Wamba, that bright little sister, she always knew more than any girl in school and that was even when she stayed out for harvest, stayed at home with the little ones when all the family but them were out in the fields. Mama always saw to that.A country woman to the bone, still she always saw that the girls and the boys too stayed at the dinner table at night after supper had been cleared away and did their studies, the boys who had worked in the fields that day nodding to sleep over their books, putting their heads to their books like they were pillows. Robert James wrote the word of their new home and turned the paper to little Wamba. It’s like a magic word, little girl.You look at it one way and you say it another. A doll and a dolly, said little Wamba and took the paper and the word said with her to bed that night, the magic word that was to be their new life, while there Robert James talked her to sleep with tales of that life and its adventures. And we rode up there to the big house, the Mister’s, that old wagon not yet fixed and painted and trimmed, and poor tired old Clovis still in harness, him just longing after that climb up into the sky to be put out to pasture, and Papa says, Round to the back, and he was right in that.

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Where the renters came to speak to the Mister and we was all let into the big house, even me and Erna, even after Papa had said, Set outside, the Mister smiled at pretty Erna Lee and let us all in and set us there at the table too, there with the Mister and Papa as they spoke of the farm and what provisions and credit and oh little Wamba all those new words, you have never heard such fine new words for the things Mister would be supplying till Papa brought in that first crop and we could start paying it back. And Mister saddled up his fine horse and we climbed back in the wagon and Mister cocked an eye at ole Clovis and said we would be doing better and we rode out toward our new place, hollering and waving there at Lula and Autrey left behind at the tent as we passed and then on out to the new farm and there was a house on it.Your days for you and your children to pitch tent are done, said Mister and cocked an eye at me and smiled toward Erna Lee.There was more talk of land, Papa and Mister walking a ways out from the house, while me and Erna stayed there in the house, nosing around, me dreaming of fixing things up and maybe asking Mister for some paint and a brush and you know Erna, already her nose in a magazine, what some other dreaming girl dreaming of city life had left behind for her to find. Papa and Mister came back in, saying we would be staying on in the house that very night.There was wood enough in the stove and some stuffing mattresses and tomorrow we would get bed and springs to them. Those were the adventures Robert James told of the new life they would be leading, Mama all this time standing there at the door, as Mama did, stand there at the door and wait and let Papa or the little one with the skint knee or even the finest visitors come to her. Now Mama had done with listening to Robert James and his soft talk, Robert James like Papa one who liked to talk the little ones to sleep, tell them stories they would remember in their dreams, tell them of their dreams like they was a future, like he was looking into a crystal ball. Come leave the child and let her sleep, Mama says to Robert James.We got matters to discuss now.And Robert James smiled to Mama like he was a man and he so very near was after his adventures up on the plains, and he calls out to Mama already sitting there at the dinner table, supper all cleared away, Mama wearing her night spectacles and already going over her counts and books. Two shakes of a lamb’s tail, Mama, Robert James smiles, but first

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thing I got to tell little Wamba how we got her this husband already picked, fine husbands for her and Erna Lee, with Lula saying she wants no truck with such highstepping fancy people and their boys and their ways. It was there, going back to where we had pitched camp and tent and to pick up Lula and Autrey and pack up and move direct on over to our new house, an old new house, Robert James smiled at little Wamba, eyes big as saucers, bright as stars, that was when we come onto their party there on the road.There was four of them and four horses they was riding and a couple more to pack their tents and gear, carrying that along with them out over the plains like they was like us, with no house to move to, but they wasn’t. Oh no they wasn’t packing their tents and gear like that, not at all. You didn’t have to take but that one look, that first look, them way on down the road, to know they was not like us.You see how I’m all dressed up now, like it was Sunday go-to-meeting, and that’s how these four, the two men and the two boys were dressed up. No old overalls and straw hats like me and Papa and Autrey, they were dressed out like me now, but finer, finer things, their black jackets and low-cut trousers and broadbrim black hats, brim to crown stiff as board, and their open white shirts and the little ties like they was made of string and tall boots that glowed like fire from the shine on them, you could make out easy the shine on their boots and the saddles even under the dust, they glowed so like fire. And their faces stood tall and handsome and burnt brown from the sun and the two men had moustaches, black and thick as bear, like the moustache I’ll be starting once we get started back up onto the plains and Mama has come to forget all the new ways and words and looks that are coming with our new life. Our Mister saw the party ahead and he waved and put his horse into a lope and went on up the road to the party and Papa pulled old Clovis up, for the Mister and the two fine men were friends or knew of one another and he would let them have their talk, and while our Mister and the two men talked, the two boys with them turned their horses, even the littlest boy riding a fine grown horse, toward us and looked down the road toward me and Erna Lee, I think it was we they were looking toward or maybe, smiled Robert James, it was just the pretty Erna Lee. In a short time Mister made a motion and now all looked down the road to us and Papa switched up ole lazybones Clovis and we went along to them. And we rode on down, little sleepyhead, and was introduced, the Mister speaking of Papa, that he was his new man, and the younger of the two fine men, he swept off his black hat to Miss Erna Lee.

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Now that they was close we could see that one fine man was younger, he was the land agent, and the other, the older, he was a Mister himself, a man so strong in his look, the likes of which we had not seen. A man made of angles and hard flat places, there seemed to be no soft or rounded part to him. But that once that he looked to me, the young land agent his hat still off his head chatting fine things to our pretty Miss Erna Lee, that once he looked over to me, this fine, powerful, hard-looking man, looked over at the tatter straw hat and the raggedy-andy patch overalls and just for a second there, this fine man, he owned a whole town back in Arkansas, so said in time our Mister, it was then there came up a look in his eyes when he looked into mine. Can’t say what it was, this look. It was somehow kind in a way, but not soft.There would never be something soft to this man who owned a town, a real town, our Mister would laugh in time, just something in that quick look into my eyes that spoke of knowing. Like, almost, I was some kin to him. Almost like I might have been some lost son he had not seen for years. Almost like I was something, somebody he might have known, maybe seen, when he was a boy. Then he turned from that and back to Mister and their business, if they could just get the hat back on the land agent’s head and that head turned from pretty Miss Lee, then they would do their business.That was what Erna told us that night, our first night in our old new house, that was what she would be called from now on, now that she would be going into town, not that little country girl but Miss Lee, just that, and all the while Lula, a proud country woman already, snorted like a hog at such fancy names and their ways.And oh such fine and fancy names they were too, little Wamba.Their Mister, he was a Taylor, a last name made first, Taylor Blanton, and the boys, the older boy another Taylor,Taylor John, and the smaller boy, him sitting his huge horse, legs stuck out over the saddle skirt, legs so short they could not reach stirrup, he was another with a fancy name made backwards, Johnson Alan.And then this was the surprise our Mister had for us, little lazy girl, this was how, to all these fine people with last names made first, this was how our Mister introduced Papa when we rode the wagon up. Mister smiled and said, Mister Richardson, I want you to meet Mr. Richardson, and Mr. Richardson, said our Mister smiling, I would like to introduce you to your new neighbor—he will be, when his young land agent finds him the land—Mister Richardson. And that’s how our Mister said it, laughing kind as we had said our to-dos and goodbyes and rode on. Now there you go,Tom. A

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couple of boys there for your girls, they get a little older, and they won’t even have to change their name. Miss Richardson, I would like for you to meet Mister Richardson, and Mister Richardson, please be so good as to say howdy-do to Miss Richardson, so said Robert James and smiled down on his little Wamba Lane, her large eyes of wonder long closed, talked off to sleep and her dreams of one day marrying a man, the son of a man who owned a town, blast near the whole thing, back in Arkansas and has now come out onto these plains to buy up what’s left.And Robert James, who came back alone to fetch them into these dreams, tucked the little one, age ten, in tight and went in to Mama sitting there at the dinner table, supper cleared away, and Mama put on her night spectacles and took to entering in her book and counts all the figures Robert James had come down with from the plains. xxx What they looked like then. Both families knew a dark streak within the fair. I once thought I was that way, off color, darkie, jew, red engine, maybe a little chink. That’s where Coolie picked up the name, handed down by Old Taylor Blanton. Well the brothers maintained it was he worked like one and there was truth in that, some, so Coolie himself said. Of them only Coolie worked like work was meant to be, like Old Taylor and those men who through work have made themselves, work like work was breath, you didn’t even stop it in your dreams; while Teeter believed in getting it done and getting into his flivver and getting into town; and Babe, so slow and easygoing he could have been a Dollé boy, the Lord hadn’t meant for a man to take a break He wouldn’t’ve handed him a hoe to lean on. And there would Dusty be, Coolie laughed without noise recalling, one year scampering around stuffing bugs in a jar, the next summer he couldn’t get them out of his heated head, thought of nothing but girls and he hadn’t even been near one, age thirteen. But for fact, Coolie, the name came from a touch of something Chinese there about the eyes. Might easily have been called Sleepyhead, for he looked all the time, from baby snaps to him lying in his grave, as if he had just waked up; a puffiness around the eyes that narrowed them, gave them that Chinese slant, as if he had just waked up. Of the five Arkansas boys, those three,Taylor John called Teeter, Coolie and Dusty born Turner, looked brothers and acted the same. Men maybe not quite as tall as they seemed, carried themselves straight to the point of stiff, stiff-necked even, though that was good part appearance as

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they liked their good times too. Heads held high, hair ever cropped short —and who would blame them, Netta Nell keeping them up to school years in curl and dress, an odd practice oddly common among better Southern people—and their bodies angled, every way you looked at them you saw something sharp, something flat. All that military bearing, no wonder they took off readymade to the marines, air corps, the army. There was good pigment in their color, fainter in Teeter John, strong brown in Dusty, and Coolie, he was made up of an assembly of tans and browns, flesh and hair, depending on time in the sun these trading places—hair tan, skin dark in summer, and by Christmas they would have switched around—a shifting of coloration that drew ladies to his door long after he had come to wandering about the house wearing three hats stacked one atop the other. Babe: a softer, more rounded man in flesh and spirit. Now consider boy five, Franklin Crawford.To start, anyone who ever called this marvelous monster Snookums or Baby Anything must have been out of his or her mind. But these are only looks, and now the Jewish question—now that brown blood and squint thin eyes have got me quarter African, quarter Pekinese.That fear, that I, an atheist, had not formerly been properly Christian, only came to me my first year at college, for it was not till then that I first saw my first real live Jew. And he looked a lot like me. A small round dark little guy who could beat the socks off you at gin rummy. And he had this rich, loud, backslapping uncle who came to visit the dorm,Abraham called Abe who looked and brayed a lot like—well let Coolie explain it, that time he and his baby brother Franklin Crawford were met by a Coolie acquaintance on the street, and after Frank had brayed some and gone off somewhere, the acquaintance turned to Coolie and asked,“Who is that loudmouth Jew?” And Coolie laughed, without much noise in the telling for he maybe alone among them all save Momma had a soft spot for this monster Baby Snooks, and replied,“That loudmouth Jew is my brother.”And that quiet, brown, gin-rummy sharpie is my son.When my college roomie’s Uncle Abe dropped by the dorm to tuck a twenty behind his ear, advise he should knock with eight, and ask if he was getting any—it hit home. A Jewish uncle. Well actually, though Franklin Crawford was indeed the backslapping, twinkler-on-the-pinkie Abe, winking and blinking at all the campus cuties, sucking on that stogie, rubbery lips working it hard, let’s leave all that for later, where it fits, till we get over to Horace Chas Homer on the Dollé side and can bury forever all racial stereotype, Horace

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Homer being one hundred percent Baptist bullshitter. Franklin Crawford was indeed a big man and as much a physical sissy as six-two ever made, and if he had a fierce mind for numbers he might waste it on gin but never rummy, nor would he hanker after nephew’s teen girlfriends for he always brought along something better in tow, and as for being loud, that was true, he did bray when he spoke but, well, he suffered a stutter as fierce as his intellect, and he knew that as runt in a ten-pup litter he must howl through his crippling affliction to get it out and get it heard and get what he wanted. So you see that Franklin Crawford might well be a small brown boy’s favorite uncle, or tied for first, but what really attracted was, well, have ever had this thing for gap-tooth people and Uncle Frank had this gap between his two front teeth, of a size that there might have once been a third front tooth there, pulled, and in this gap had grown a most amazing teat of gum flesh that at times, when Franklin Crawford brayed or bayed or bawled through his stutter, I swear that then this teat of gum quivered like a tuning fork.And he had pepper-kinked hair spattered with salt and wore those glasses, coming into fashion at the time, that were dark plastic over the bridge, as were the horned handles reaching back to loop over the ear, but showed nothing but a glint of rimmed metal under the lenses, so that Franklin Crawford looked maybe not so much Jewish but dark-browed Italian inquisitor or some gypsy devil come to give you candy and sell you off at the fair. No, it was actually more Netta Nell, Granny Holmes who looked Jewish—and could have been, don’t let that Holmes fool you. It had been Holm or Hulme or some German when her granddad Isaiah had landed in Savannah, Ga., late 1848, and on several occasions Netta Nell had tormented Taylor Blanton with that, for one was always tormentor, one tormented.The Isaiah from Isaac and the Stein turned Stone; Rebecca, Becky Stone, she had been wife to Ike Holmes; no crack about German or Jew would pass without Netta Nell claiming her cross-heritage for all to hear. I did not know, did not believe it as true that Granny Holmes was Jewish, not only looked it but was, till years later at some highrise bigtown cocktail party when I saw her across the room. Netta Nell Holmes as she might have looked at twenty-five, Taylor Blanton first coming to call, not so much a tall young woman as looking so, the tight-curled hair that had been handed down well-salted to Franklin Crawford alone among her children, and that look about this young woman, that look in the eye of ferocity, pride, that intelligence that had come down not only to Franklin Crawford but to them all, all the

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girls—I could not help but make my way through the cocktail crush and chat toward this young woman, my g-maw years back. “Hello there. Say, you wouldn’t mind telling me your last name, would you? Just curious. You look just like my grandmother. When she was young of course! Twenty-five? Ha ha ha! Twenty-two?” “Lightfoot, how gross,” responded this young woman, thus for all practical purposes ending my days as a Jew, for you see there was that certain time in my life when I had grown not so much up as grown out of fearing Jewish, black, Indian, Mexican and Chinese blood and had taken rather to embracing the mystery of these alien races and all those pretty young women who embraced them. Their faces, these women my father came from, the face they had passed down to my beloved sis. I did not see these faces, not clearly, till Netta Nell Holmes died, age near ninety, there at her funeral back in Arkansas and there were all the Holmes women and girls and their faces gathered there. I don’t recall why Chick was not there that day among her sisters, these Holmes women and girls, her cousins, her aunts—maybe off in Poughkeepsie, wherever IBM had shipped her new-tied husband for training—but she was there still, her face, all around me.Those tall, gaunt, haunted faces, high bones to the cheek, wide, thin mouths, hollowed eyes that were never near so lacking life and care as their noble, wearied faces might suggest.While there we were,Wamba and I, our horribly round little peasant heads, round little peasant faces stuck on them, round little cheeks, round little noses, round little tater traps grinning out horribly at you. I do not think I have ever known such lovely, such lonely faces as those of Cheryl Charles called Chick Richardson and Netta Nell Holmes called Nellie. He called her that sometimes, Old Taylor, so said Coolie and the older girls; he sometimes called her Nellie when he thought no child was creeping about to hear. If this is being diagrammed—and it is, by me, but on another sheet of paper, a bar napkin actually that you can’t see; you’ve simply got to learn to read—then we have drawn out with connecting lines the three Arkansas boys,Teeter, Coolie and Dusty, looking like brothers, and Babe and Franklin Crawford, odd boys out; and with that set we move on then to a similar classification among the Arkansas girls, coming up against that trio—Rosalee Ann, sometimes called by her Poppa (as Taylor Blanton was called by the girls, though ever Pop by the boys) Anna Lee Rosie, Gerda called Gert called Widder Lawford and Gretchen called Boots. There,

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standing before those three demon women/hellcat girls, the way they look is not enough.There must be their spirit, their battle, their war as women against a world unfairly fashioned, unjustly ruled by men. If this is a tale of wasted talent and failed ambition—and it is, it is so profoundly that, that among all these twenty-six, the double dozen of parents and children (with Chick and I and other grandkiddies chipping in our waste and failure there at the foot), there is only Wamba left standing at the end, with all the others brought down about her, she alone who has conquered her world, brought down her foes to sing triumph every Sunday morning, triumph for all to hear. So these three must be considered now before we move on over to the boys of the Dollé bunch, they, from Robert James, the oldest, on down to Cade called Cady, the youngest, sadder tales still, such waste. Not that Rosalee, Gert and Boots did not look alike.They did, some. If the three mentioned boys, those that looked brothers, seemed taller than they were, these three who looked sisters looked larger. They actually were pretty hefty in leg, hip and ass, but not so from waist up—little breast, the narrow shoulders and thin arms that had been passed down to Teet, Coolie and Dusty as well.Their faces wore fearsome masks, or could if you were a little kid and one of them was after you, as one of them seemed ever to be, in one form or fashion. That these three she-devils might consider this writer, if not exactly an angel then surely leaning toward that trade, a mini-devil or devil-in-the-making did mystify; as did the one’s pursuit of the cherub, who perhaps had tossed a firecracker under a late-dozer’s bed, belie her age.To crown all this similarity, hard to say about the hair. Rosalee Annie had once been red gone white dyed brown so that all a tangle; while Boots kept her hair trimmed so like a man’s that it was little noticed when she was after you; and Gert’s hair, the auburn salted hair liked best among those favored memories of these three, one that this memberer can recall without going clammy anyway— this fine-shaped manly woman, oh she so wanted to be, striding to the mirror, hair short and manly as Boots’s, and there Gert would make magic.The man’s cap or hat flung away, the plaits wound so tight around the skull now wound down to hang towards her waist like those of an Indian princess, and those plaits themselves unplaited and a great cape of hair grew out and was washed and brushed, brushed by Gert and then, at times, by those of us gathered to watch, till her hair reached out like a fiery, amber crown, and then Gert would wheel dramatically, make a

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demon face and witch’s cackle and claws, and we little ones would scatter, delighted in being so frightened and not frightened at all.An entirely different experience, I can tell you, than having Aunt Rosalee, a cracker having concluded her morning dozer, up and after one, out the bedroom door down the stairs out the house and halfway to town. Or Aunt Boots just giving you a look.To speak of inspiring terror, the real thing. Trish, girl four of the four, the youngest girl, was another matter. In looks and mind too, in spirit so very different from Momma and the other girls. Have never met don’t think someone, not in the Arkansas tribe anyway, who can so readily be called good. Simply good, that is, without being simply boring to boot. Good has to be of some interest to count, I’m sure you agree. Much as fascinatingly naughty is as common as grass. Have you ever met a boring baddie? Not I. Or maybe only me. Looks, it was as if someone had sat on Trish early. Like before birth, in the womb, and had sat steady enough in Netta Nell’s lap that little Trish came out warped, near crushed. Curvature of the spine.And with the whopping ass of the older girls, and their smallish upper body too, that gave her the posture and movement of the cripple she was not, not at all.And too her face was folded in some way; so unlike the high, correctly chiseled faces of the others, there was some funny, amused twist to her mouth and eye; and so unlike the others as well her hair sat a brilliant crinkled red wavy cap, tilted a bit like a cap, over her head, all this bob and wave the style of the 20s flapper which, as cruel history is forever changing the rules, would become the style of the 50s old maid; and her bright bluebell blue eyes, the others’ gray or pale or muddy dark; and her skin, this covering so set Aunt Trish away from all our tans and frecklings; her skin was white, a pure pearl white, smooth as polished marble and cool—even under the dank Arkansas heat Trish sat cool under her crinkled cap of crimson hair, snapping her flashing blue eyes. It was as if I had entered a temple, for her house there in Arkansas was ever cool, cavernous and dark, a temple in China, say, and there in its bowel sat an idol, a Buddha of sorts, as if some genius Chinaman so long ago had made this idolatrous statuary the spittin image of Buddha, the way she had probably really looked in life, not one of those heavy-lidded big boy fatties with his legs crossed. Not so sure Trish was quite so goody-goody as imagined. Like that time she told Coolie that she had stoneaches good as any unlaid man till she finally married Zip the Zipper Zimmerman.Another difference from all bros and sisses,Trish was religious, the rest of the Arkansas bunch so

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agnostic they’d never heard the word, and it was while doing that, being religious in her fifties or so, that she met Zip, a plump, jolly Baptist missionary at a Baptist encampment or retreat—such precisely-employed military terms!—and was shortly married.As Zip had buried four previous wives, usually in jungles, the older sisters figured little Trish was being set up to be number five, Zip handing her tidy fortune over to Lottie Moon Along the Amazon, though in fact it was Trish who would fuck, so it is pleasant to imagine, Zip to a happy end. I will have some hard things to say of Baptist preachers in time so maybe should say now that Zip was like no Baptist preacher I ever saw. In fact one sometimes wondered if he was a preacher or even a Baptist. Never once did he try to save my or anyone’s soul, not that I know of. And if Wamba would weekly set to memory the latest Baptist Standard, there one would come upon Zip chuckling over a copy of Science & Society. And all those back issues of New Republic and Nation tromped on the floorboard of his car.And as for some of the art works Zip smuggled out of Indian and Ceylon—both the act of illegal importation and those very interesting coupled statuettes led one to consider that the old Zipper might have gone beyond the mere backslide. I grew interested in the matter of female stoneaches and thought to call up my three ex-wives, an act of research.A mistake. Bea, wife one, had been second alto in an all-girls’ marching-whistling band —something connected with either the navy or the Unitarian Church— and during our shared time when matters approached impossible, she would break out into a Baltimore oriole or train hoot that would bring a diesel locomotive screeching to a halt. Even less luck with Burr, wife two, either a communist or a capitalist, have never quite made that out.Anything to do with sex or money or could one come couchcrash a few months, Burr would say the phone’s bye-bye sound: “Click.” Then Rissa, wife three, some sort of foreigner, haughty and humble, mocking and weeping, whose monthly call, and these about anything under the sun, would usually begin with the report of things shattering all about the room. Perhaps still owe something on the Costa Rica hotel deal. They had their troubled marriages too, the oldies. Just because they divorced less frequently than they murdered doesn’t mean that Netta Nellie and Taylor Blanton didn’t produce ten kids and detest every minute of it. Coolie put it with Tacitean pith:

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“If Pop picked up a rope Momma would grab the other end and pull.” There was some division among the kids who suffered such quarrelling, a choosing of sides, Gert the captain of the pro-Poppa team and not without justification. See, if Gert was madly in love with her father, then Momma was just as mad about John Lawford, Gert’s husband, he who caught the 2x4 behind the ear and lingered on six months.Years later steam would still whistle out Gert’s ears. “And Momma, there at John Lawford’s grave, saying she would never cry over another man and Poppa with years and years to live!” And then, if I happened to be at the wheel, and often I was during highschool days, driving Gert all around her Colorado ranches, then Gert, face set hard still after all those years, would instruct me to pick up speed and see if we could find a rabbit or something hopping along the road, something to splatter. In at least one case their marital battle drew even me, not more than seven and this long after Old Taylor Blanton was dead, into the fray. In this instance I plopped down heavily pro-Momma. The Night-Light Wars. Unless you are old or of a certain age, possibly Southern or of that background, and have had some contact with both town and country ways of living, then this, the night-light schism, will probably pass you by. It is this. If one is country one sleeps in a totally darkened house, but townies leave on a low light, usually in the second bathroom, an ostentation that anyone who has ever known the winter ice or summer smellings of the outhouse will surely forgive. Legend: Taylor and Nellie spent their honeymoon night hopping in and out of bed, Poppa, country, turning off light, Momma, town, turning it back on. Now if you’ve ever been a quaking, ferociously neurotic seven-year-old who was certain with every sunset that sometime during the night, there in the dark country dark house, he would go stone blind, you will then understand how that quaking boy, during the jocular retelling of this honeymoon struggle, might cry out from his corner, “Just let her leave it on for Christ’s sake!” It was well into highschool, when asked over to a country friend’s house, that I did not first check out the lunar schedule, look out for cloud cover. Final mention must be made of the snuff/moustache standoff. Simply: Taylor Blanton refused to kiss a woman who dipped snuff, while Netta Nell would buss no feller, not even a ten-kid husband, who sported a stache.

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“At least we know now that’s how they’re not made,” said the little, lithe, extremely sexy Roxie, Dusty’s ever so fine not-aunty-in-the-least highsteppin Little Rock society girl wife, and gave Dusty a wide, wet smack! on the puss that pleased Dusty no end. In this legendary marital battle I found both combatants to be wrongheaded. It should have been a repellant sight and smell, I suppose, an old woman dipping snuff. The last time I saw her alive, it was—Granny Holmes long bound to wheelchair, frieze of defiant Jewish kink sprouting under knit cap, deep-set eyes burning hatred of Yankees, old men and their wars. Granny Holmes shaking her fist that so many of her boys would go off to these wars and that now I too would be joining them. How could I then wait with anything but anticipation—the excitement such as I had first known as a boy when I could scarcely see up to the table—as this fine war/old man/Yankee-hating ancient woman took out from the sleeve of her shawl the snuff barrel, no larger than a spool, and set it like talisman on the table before us little ones gathered round, excitement then as Granny Holmes so delicately scooped the small spatula into such dun fragrance and shoveled a heap into the purse pocket of an outstretched lower lip. Never has perfume been brewed that approaches the pull of snuff ’s exotic aroma or the elegant ritual of portioning it out; these drew the little boy to sit on the old woman’s lap, to be nearer, nearer still the erotic musk, the sexual ballet of the handling of the stuff, such sweet and sour snuff. Likewise have always had this thing for those old style walrus moustaches that, in modified form,Taylor Blanton grew. Now if I never really had the burning urge to kiss Granny Holmes’ black-stained lips, surely the smacking, even by boy perched on grandadly knee, of such a brush was out of the question; but there was once an old man on a train, he had that soft bristled moustache of Taylor Blanton, and I asked him straight out, “May I sit next to you? My grandfather had a moustache just like that. He died before I was born.” And though the stiff young woman across the aisle looked as if she was on to something going on, the kindly gent smiled, lifted hat from seat, twinkled and dozed off to sleep, his head slumped deliciously on my shoulder. When one turns the page to the Dollé Richardsons, looks fade, or their importance does, in face of that clan’s common gentle spirit and kind intelligence—this as characteristic as was the ironic temper and swift

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sarcasm of the Arkansas Rs. But still, attention must be drawn to Robert James and Cade called Cady, the oldest and youngest boys, to their darkness. In some way, perhaps it was that these each seemed so at peace with himself and the world, I took them and their black lank hair and soft dark skin to be Indians, of that stock, some native blood coursing there, somehow. It seemed that they, I don’t know, simply knew.Their small smiles at the foolishnesses of man, the madnesses of his world. That which they knew, one a failure, one a suicide, I know not. It cannot be said or put in song or word or made picture of, this thing they knew; there simply can be no knowing it by those of us who have never known, do not now, nor ever will. Only now as I drift ever deeper into not knowing, not then, not now, not ever, I still find some peace in this, having known these two men who did, one a failure, one a suicide. To call Robert James a failure seems harsh judgement of such a man, but there was this feeling as he went through life a decent farmer, father and husband, surely the finest older brother a little mother, age ten, could ever wish for, that there was this sense of loss to Robert James, that loss ours, we all who knew him.That he did not tell us. He did not tell us more. I was not alone in feeling this waste, that Robert James might have with struggle come out of himself, his world, to give us more of just that, himself, his world. Once Wamba mentioned he could have made a scientist and Mama, the only thing good I ever knew her say of any her children, she figured maybe a vet.And Coolie, who never befriended Robert James as he did Cady and specially Horace Homer, once said of the oldest Dollé boy, apropos of exactly nothing that I can recall: “I wonder why more men like Robert James aren’t preachers.” Pause: look out across a field of Sunday wheat, tall, golden, maybe it didn’t need this day of rest.“Or why there aren’t more preachers like Robert James.” This missed calling I too understood, the preacher, the speaker Robert James might have been.There have been in my life maybe a half dozen people by whom I have been charmed, mesmerized, as a snake is charmed by song.There is no explaining it, what is said, how it is said. I only know that when these few people have spoken to me or I have heard them speak to others or even generally, there came over me a diminishment, a lessening of me and of all cares and concerns. Something like a child, I suppose, being talked to sleep, curling ever deeper under the cover of sleep, the voice having lost all meaning now, as one grows ever smaller and more secure, safe, yes that is it: one is safe within that speaking voice

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somewhere, and all will be right with sleepy near sleeping child and his ever shrinking world if only that voice will go on. Such was the last afternoon I spent with Robert James, this a short year before his death, and we had not that afternoon seen one another for so many years. How many times out of hospital, the number of major operations, I don’t know, only that his hair still fell Indian black, lank over forehead as he charmed away the afternoon with a vast recollection of biblical prophecy that foretold our coming doom, ours and Russia’s and the world’s to boot, in holocaust. His real biblical erudition, the politics of apocalypse that always pleased, the quiet, rhythmic, almost-chant it was, Robert James spoke, stopped, breathed, with little sign just how difficult such breath was to come by, to speak again of sinful nations, their people laden with iniquity, their seed gone to evildoing, children corrupted, wives forlorn, their lands turned to sand, vines dried and wasted, they are gone away backward. . . . Well, there’s no real way to dissect the power of this performance that was so far from that, performance; only that I did not care if that afternoon ever ended. Or at least had to end with going back for another round with Wamba. “I spent the afternoon with Robert James. He spoke of the Bible.” “I always said he would make a good Bible historian.” “Or preacher. He would have been such a fine preacher.” Wamba gave me this cockeyed look she had developed in old age. Sudden conversion? After all these years, unlikely. More likely: imposter or that boy standing out in the sun without that pith helmet again. “Like Papa would’ve made, only Mama wouldn’t hear of it.” And Wamba wept. Of Cady, a subject, a man, an influence in my life too large to enter now. Later.When I have thought and remembered and understood. Later, when there is room.The room in which I tell this now.The room I had before I took to weeping and could not do anything else.They have let me come back to it now and it’s been a year. I’ve bought the gun and the burger and the big Coke for the whiskey for the drive over to the cemetery.The room is in Hubbard, about a fifty-mile drive.The room has one window. It looks out on downtown Hubbard, the big town, they call it a city, on the plains, Monterrey, on your way up toward Colorado and the mountains, being a close second. Nothing near third, third glad to be a town.The room is in a sort of high-class down-and-out fleabag, quiet and clean. Only Hubbard would think of such things. Each and everyone here

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is nuts, but we’re kept under control. Out back there’s a small heart-shaped swimming pool. Nobody ever swims in it. On the door leading out to it there’s a sign CLOSED—NO BOTTLES—NO RUNNING

Maybe that’s it. A couple run the place.The man is ex-air force, a spotlessly clean mechanic and he hands you an eight-hundred-buck bill for your car.That guy. His wife is screwier. She claims she is English. Or was before she forgot the accent, the money system, who’s queen these days and even the direction the place is. They play forty-two with a couple slicked-up winos down in the game room every afternoon after the office is shut. Next to the game room is the TV room.You are not supposed to drink in there, but you do. Just take life in hand and cross over Avenue Q to Taco Bell and buy a big Coke and pour the whiskey in it and slug away, watching ball.They suspect, but they don’t know. But, like Cady, later for that. Later on. Only to say now, of his suicide, that Cady’s death, its means a service revolver to the temple, no more broke his peace within and with the world than did Robert James’ failure, as we have come to call it, his. His failure to get out and make more of himself, be larger, more important, get out and spread the gospel of a man simply being good, that one might be good for no practical reason at all.That is what I now pray for, pray as hard as breath, the service revolver on the car seat beside me, pray like breath to a god that is not nor ever has been nor ever will, that this last thing that I am driving fifty long miles to get through may not be an act of war, rebellion, violence, despair or any sort of statement. Only a final coming to an end.A peace, at last. Oh my word, at long last. Mama Min or Minnie we were to call our maternal grandmother and Papa Tom our grandfather, never the more formal, or was it more familiar, Granmama and Granpapa allotted other grandkiddies. By whatever names, if easygoing Arkansas Babe would have made a good Dollé boy, then Minnie MacCready would have fit right in with the snappish, warring Arkansas girls. It was Mama Minnie’s approach I recall most vividly. A human bowling ball, with you, age six or so, a trembling ten pin.To be fair, Mama did not chase you down like Gert and Co. and shake you till your teeth chattered, but there was the promise of it. The promise of something far worse. Like dying like a chicken. There are three sorts of chicken murderers. Old Tom Baylor would simply snatch up a pullet, straight to the block and dispatch head with

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hatchet.Alternatives considered, not a bad way to go. Except for the walking about some poor chickens got into, looking for their lost heads but had no eyes to see. Surely why Papa Tom never had much appetite for Sunday fried chicken, ever content to nibble around the pope’s nose, so saddened was he by the sight of that blind, mindless bird searching around for something lost, maybe forgotten, it couldn’t remember what. With Coolie came the scientist, the technician of chicken death. Hang the bird by its feet, insert pen knife into beak, and sharp jab up through mouth roof and into the brain. Drained all the blood from bird tissue so the meat was soft and relaxed if you had stomach for such chicken execution; and then there was that bucket of collected blood, went good in the gravy, so crowed Franklin Crawford who knew where to hit a queasy kid, Chick say, and get her pulley-bone all to himself. But nothing quite equaled Mama Minnie’s grabbing up pullet by head, first whirling the bird in a great loop, like one of those Olympic hammer slingers or the oldfashioned pitcher’s wind up, and then on the downswing there came a swift hard wrist-snap!—and if that chicken took a headless hike, after that rollercoaster to death, it would do so with a wobble and a weave.And if that didn’t put you off your drumstick, lying there cold and dead on its Sunday plate, then Horace Homer, the Dollé’s equivalent to Frank the Fiend, would recall how GreatGranPap used to bite them off, the chicken head, and tuck it there in his cheek, like it was a chaw—and that did it. Gone.While all these truly medieval country types would sit there and yowl for gizzard gravy and giblet pie. There are still the nightmares, Mama Minnie’s great crepe-flabby bicep going flapflapflap winging that bird to its end. Lula then, the oldest girl and child, the only other family member who did not much partake of Tom Baylor’s kind spirit and gentle mind. Lula loomed, in her own fashion, as much a terror to small rascal as did Mama Min and the Rosalee/Gert/Boots troika, kid chasers. Lula struck her fright simply by being there. By opening her mouth to howl out talk, by making a laugh from the hounds of hell, by flapping sagging craw like a sick sail, by jutting gyp-stained teeth, gold-trimmed and silver-inlaid, as ceremonial shield.A lot of this was Wamba’s fault, this fear of large, country looking, country dressing and living, country talking and laughing and thinking women; and from Wamba too came the distaste that would soon replace such fear, the contempt that would in time grow for all country ways,Wamba’s sworn enemy, the ways of Lula, Mama, the Dollé family’s

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ways—her own if she did not crush them out within her. Out to wipe such country ways from the face of the earth, what better little middleclass townie troops to send to battle than her own studiously made, relentlessly crafted middle-class townie children? It took me years to get over this prejudice against country people and their ways, years to understand that the generally soft and easy country Dollés were every bit as worthwhile, in mind and heart, as the swift, caustic citified Arkansas bunch. But by then it was too late. Too late, at least, to befriend and explain and understand the country woman called Lula, as by then her hollering and hooting, though little different from her previous attempts at chat and chatter, were those of madness. She was the only one of the Dollé bunch to go insane, I think, while in the Arkansas gang all but Trish and Netta Nell died mad or close enough. Other than Taylor Blanton on the Arkansas side, Erna Lee of the Dollés was the only one of the twenty-four of the two families (excepting the two boys, Jodie and Zach, died infants) that I did not know or remember knowing, the latter possible in the case of Erna Lee as she did not die till sometime after my birth.What I do remember.Town, an excitement, an adventure, an odyssey for an early country rememberer. A house. Brick, more exotica and more still, a drive that wound to the rear of the house where the roof stretched out to shade and cover from rain the visiting automobile. Flowers climbing a trellis, blue flowers, morning glories, they told me, morning glory, a magical name for a flower so blue and so right, and the thick cream morning light pooling beyond the covered drive’s cool, deep shade.While Erna Lee—we children told to stay like dogs put out—lay inside dying. Erna Lee’s husband, Dip, the Dipper, the Big Dipper Roscoe got a bad rap on that, I think, Mama Minnie,Wamba, to name but two, going on how the pretty Miss Lee was locked away in a dark room and left there by playboy husband to waste and die.To be fair, if you have terminal cancer and with a couple aspirin the big painkiller of the day, if your head is bursting and your eyes and all about your body afire, who wouldn’t want a cool, quiet, dark room away from it all, as far as life can hide from such a death? And Dipper the playboy, from what I knew of him later in life, and knew of him by knowing his oldest daughter, Cora, so much like her father, Dip the Big Dipper was simply a large, garrulous, gregarious man who sought out all the fun in life there was to take.The lounge lizard, as I had once heard tell—like: the nearest lounge was maybe two hundred miles away, but had it been across the street: not

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the Dipper’s style: that an exuberance, a zest for life and a truly corny sense of humor to match. Like: years later there was the Dipper at the county fair exhibiting his latest invention, for he did invent things that did not need it, and to gather kiddies and trailing mommies and daddies to the crowd, he had nailed a box filled with straw six feet or so up the wall, a sign proclaiming 5¢ SEE WORLD’S ONLY HAIRLESS TAILLESS NO-BARK DOG GENTLE TOO 5¢

with a step ladder provided for the viewer. If some of the kiddies expressed bitterness about such huckstering—“ain’t nothing in it but a hotdog wienie, Ma”—the Dipper kindly returned the five cent piece. No complaint and both kid and the Dipper were richer for it, a pretty good price for your first lesson in the slippery surprises of life. But then too there was that something fair, something right to the Mama/Wamba complaint about the Dipper, an understanding that came upon me, age six or under, that first day I came near to knowing Erna Lee or did and did not remember.After Cora, Curly (Dip and E. Lee’s daughters) and I had walked two blocks down to the highway filling station (a stroll along the Via Venuto to this Blanco resident, six or so) and I had been hustled into buying a round, a cousinly hustle (heads you pay, tails we don’t) I did not mind then nor now, after that rip-off we returned to Erna Lee and her dying sipping and sucking, and with Cora feeling a bit bolshy, more than a little like fun-loving Dad, we slipped into verboten territory, the house. And there it was that I first knew, in this one of my first memories, of that trek made toward death, life’s last-chance saloon, what the living call dying.The dark hit first, but so close behind it might have been a rider to the dark came the smell. Dying, death.The smell and dark of them. Must, medicine, flesh fouled—I had no idea then what parts death’s scent held, only that as Cora dragged me deeper into its dark, I so longed for and long for still the return of grass made buttery by sun, shade so cool blue it might when touched cling to the fingers, horn-pale flowers climbing above and around and the small open house made for a car, its comfort and its care. Then we came onto it, like the faithless to a shrine, a place that should not be seen, not so early—life’s cruel promise that it will go on and on: the portrait of Erna Lee Roscoe née Richardson, wife to Dip the Dipper, mother to Cora and Curly, her wedding photo set square on the center of a table long and broad enough to carry a

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coffin, a plank that in a few weeks’ time would indeed do so.The pretty Miss Lee. Such other portraits as Horace Homer, Dolle boy 3, and not to forget those who have married in—take Buena, wife of Robert James: fine, full-bodied, full face with that ever fascinating two-front-teeth gap.And of course there’s Papa Tom himself,Thomas Baylor, the Dollé patriarch. These and others shall be left to be scattered through these tales as need for them arises. For now, to finish for a time what they looked like, let us finish with the youngest Dollé boy and child, Cade called Cady. To say that Cady looked Indian is not right; he simply was Indian, least to me. He looked, thought, talked, moved over the earth as if he were native to this land.As at ease with who and where and what he was as the Comanche who once rode these plains as they fled to find harbor from the encroaching invaders, us. But maybe not from me, I’ve always hoped. Sure, my mind and spirit are white, no doubt about it, but the way we look, Cady and I, there is similarity. Not large men, actually tending toward small, or short, there is a certain roundness to my frame and Cady was a stocky man, to a degree, if not exactly square then nothing plump. And if there can be a devilishness to my countenance and demeanor, I feel that Cady smiled upon such a prankish boy. He killed himself, I have said that. Up in Monterrey, the second near town, big town, near city on the plains. A couple three years after the war was done. To think he flew thirty-five missions over France, over Germany, and early one morning he took up his service revolver and walked from his boardinghouse room down to the nearest funeral parlor, to the loading dock there at the rear.Wanted to cause as little mess and hauling around as possible, I suppose.The funeral director, as undertakers had taken to calling themselves, was waked by the thud.That’s what he told the cops and the reporters at the time. He was waked by the sound of Cady’s body striking the building’s wall.The shot, it seems, had not disturbed him. He was a small, dark man, Cady, and kind to all the world. In the note he left at the boarding house he apologized for the means of his departure.As if putting a bullet into his brain was an unfair thing done to others. But, as he wrote, he had no choice. Life was simply not for him. 56 Coolie loved the plains, there, the first time he saw them, and the land down off the plains as well, the breaks we call it. It was his first grown horse to ride, that made part of it, and the boots that did not lace and the

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hat with brim so broad there was no seeing out from under it, that was all part of it, and being called Mister Richardson at times, usually by the land agent who had a twinkle to him but never smiled or not much in saying it; it was being a man or took for one, a new man, a westerner, a Texan, a rich man—he would be all those things someday though nobody said the words, sure not Pop.The change was done on the train ride out from home, from Arkansas, the stopping C OO L I E ’ S there in some big Texas town, bigger than ever seen in TALE Arkansas, Dallas or Ft. Worth, probably, and buying boots and hats and all their gear, tents and bedrolls and a crate of tin cooking things and all the rest they would be needing for their new life, the life of men, rich men, for they would be buying the land they crossed over this time, so said Pop.They would be buying the land that would make them Texans, said Pop, them that would come out and make the land theirs. But then buying land, that don’t mean it will be yours, said Pop and looked to Taylor John, the oldest boy,Teeter as he was called still by Momma and the girls back home but not now by Pop who had dropped that boyish name at the start of this journey toward being a man and taken to calling his oldest boy Taylor, like he was talking to himself; and when Pop had looked to Teeter now Taylor John, the oldest boy had looked off like he had never hated anything so in his life as leaving Arkansas, home, the trees and ridges and running hills and serpent rivers and their black gumbo soil and the big house Pop had built them there in town, leaving all that and going out to where there were none of these things and to ride a seasick train to get there and that didn’t even get you there, you had to ride a big dumb old horse to get you there, all this when you had that shiny flivver and sassy flapper waiting by the phone there at home back in Arkansas.That was part of it, when Teeter turned away from Pop and looked off east toward home.Then Pop turned to little Coolie, that boy, him looking up with hope into the sweet lowering snout of his first grown horse. And Pop gave his number three boy a hand up to the stirrup and got Coolie sitting high and fine on the high waxed saddle and that was it, that was when Pop said, looking to Coolie and then to the land agent smiling, a bit, it was then Pop said, And we’re going to be needing us a Texan soon.Wouldn’t you say so, Mr. Harrison, said Pop looking over the saddle shoulder toward the land agent, he was called Mr. Harrison even if he was a young man and he was a Texan, and Mr. Harrison he came up to the other side of the saddle and made as if he was fixing something tight

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there where everything that could be fixed had been fixed tight and fixed again by Mr. Harrison and then again by Pop.And Mr. Harrison, smiling a bit, he fixed and tightened something again and then smiling over the saddle shoulder and its rising horn to Pop, he said, I would think you may have done got yourself one, Mr. Richardson. Looks like a Texan to me, smiled the land agent, and that was it, part of it, how Coolie came to love the plains and being a man and being a Texan, everything about them all so wide and new. Pop had been out to the Texas plains before, maybe a year ago, not much less anyway. He had told us about it when he got back home. The rain. You wouldn’t think of all that rain up on those high, dry plains, now would you, Pop says over the map. You’d think all that rain’d stay back home in these old piney woods where it belongs. Just twenty inches a year average, semi-arid, semi-desert, Pop says using all the strange new words that for a boy fit just right the strange new place he would be going to ride a horse to, a big one, and pitch camp out there and keep lookout for wild Indians and outlaw rustlers while Pop and the land agent bought all the land as far as the eye could see. Four sections, Pop says, and he drew out the figures for that, all this new and mysterious as well, as no land we owned in Arkansas was ever called a section, just so many acres out by Mt. Bethel, so many of riverbottom along the Little Caddo. And then after we got out to the Texas high plains, after all that riding on the train and the big cities we saw and stayed in,Teet sick as dog from the old train swaying, Pop sick of Taylor John, saying he should have brought Babe instead, not some lovesick, trainsick boy. Even out there on the plains, the Texan land agent he used all the new words too.Topsoil, caprock, Comanche, buckskin, dugout, tipi, cayoose to hoosegow and on and on, all these things and more we’d never heard words for them back home.The land agent laughed about all that rain out there on the plains the last time Pop had come, so much rain when there was so little of it, semi-arid, semi-desert. Twenty inches a year would be about right, the land agent laughed, and eighteen of it come the Saturday night your Pop rode into town, mud about the courthouse square belly deep to a gin mule, and now who knows we just might get another little Texas shower come this Saturday night pitching camp out there under the stars. Water table, windmills, coyotes, tarantulas, sidewinders and on and on, these were the new words the land agent spoke that first day we all rode out on the plains and our first night camping there under the stars, the sky so big and full of stars there didn’t seem to be any ground anywhere around.We rode

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on out the next day and our second night we spent camped at what we’d come in time to call the Home Place, the Texas Home Place, for there would be but one Home Place for any of us, where Pop was born and raised out near Mt. Bethel, there in Arkansas.There stood a well-grown grove of trees already there, there where I would in time come to build my house and make my own Home Place, and that was unusual for this part of the plains, so far from town, so said the land agent and we would agree as we had seen few trees but those circling the playa lakes scattered over the plains and some stunted things put out about the few settlements found out this far from town. No tree, not any bigger than a bus, had we seen since we had left the Dollé Place, which was where the bricked road had ended for us as we left that roadway to head south overland. Some say an early, early settlement was first here, so said the land agent after we had set camp for the night and cooked and ate and washed up, there at what would be my Home Place. But I never knew of that early, early settlement before us and my people; and those who were known as the first out on these plains, those that did settle early in this area, down off the cap southwest of here, five miles maybe, they knew in a place this lonely for settlers that had there been an early, early settlement made here under these trees, then they who had settled first down off the cap surely would’ve known of it, but they had known nothing but the talk of it, an early settlement made up on the plains, under the trees that would now make our Home Place. But then maybe there is something to the tale, said the land agent, you never know, for there is a good well dug here.Yonder. All boarded and covered over by grass now, but it goes down twenty feet and was dug out by somebody. Comanches didn’t dig such wells, not to my knowledge, and who else was here, who could’ve been? Buffalo hunters maybe. Maybe there was another tribe, not Comanche, a people who didn’t much care to stay in place, at least not out on these plains, maybe there was some of the pueblo people from on over in New Mexico; maybe a band of them was banished from their high cliff dwellings and fine adobe lodges and sent out to wander these plains— maybe it was them, a lost tribe of people who dug it.Whoever it was was somebody who knew how to dig a well, and they had planted these trees with seed, cottonwood, that you usually only find down in the breaks around riverbank and water. Then after making their well and seeding their trees, they went and disappeared from the face of the earth. It speaks

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of the good water that runs underground here that such as cottonwood have set down roots and survived, you know that, little Coolie? There runs a river of water just here under our seats. A sea trapped in rock.An aquifer, said the land agent, a man who had been off to college and studied words like that there, words so new that some were new even to Pop, like when the land agent said the four sections Pop was buying were not contiguous, even Pop had smiled at the young land agent and his new words. Someday we’ll find a mill strong enough to draw all that subterranean water out, said the land agent, and this plain will sparkle with running open ditches, and crop and fat cattle and orchard will be all about where now all to see is grass. Be like an Eden by the time you get big, little Coolie, said the land agent, and Teet and me drifted off to dream of that.That Pop was buying us into heaven, my dreams anyway were of it, as I think Teeter’s were back home with Hupmobile and his honey. Our four sections were rode and walked over the next day and some into the next, and the land was bought by agreement there on the spot, hands shook there very near where Teeter and Babe would come to make their dugout in two years’ time and begin to turn a land that had never known steel put to it.The land agent, a man who had been off to college and now had come back, he knew these things.That this plain had been laid down by a sea thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago and then had been abandoned by it to make in another time dry land, silt turned mud turned topsoil, six feet deep, some places deeper, all this millions and millions of years ago.You boys, you see, the land agent smiled, have been sleeping on one of the oldest beds known to man. It’s called earth, Mother Earth. They rose up next morning to the crackle and tang of frying bacon and simmered coffee, the land agent up even before the early bird Coolie. Sunup then, that time of their land-crossing days such travelers liked best, best but for sundown, for it was then when the sun sat low to the earth, light sweeping over it like a dusty breeze—blue in the morning, then the evening’s red, old yellows, the brown of cake. It was those two times then the plains lost its metallic glare, its grit and harshness, like it was some shield that had been set over the earth to protect it, to drive men and their plows away, defiant, hard and shining at noonday like steel, as if no dragged plow would ever open its flesh.With that good breakfast the land agent presented a surprise, though the boys wondered at Pop, who did not much care for them, that maybe he had been pretending not knowing it.They would be going down off the plains today, down into the breaks, into ranch country where trees grew and the land lay folded

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and rumpled and disturbed and some rivers and creeks ran here and there like things without a mind, though today, the land agent laughed, there might be no water running in them. All that had run off away to the sea the last time your Pop had come, the land agent laughed and Pop too, for he had bought his land and he had seen his Texan in the boy, or thought he had, and was feeling fine.This ranch country down in the breaks was home country to the land agent and he was called Harrison. He had told that story and now he told it again and none of them minded, were pleased at it at that, for there was a way with the land agent when he told his stories, and he had many of them.There was some sound in his voice that captured the boy, held him as if he were a small thing there in the palm of his hand, like a little bird that had fallen flying too early, and the land agent had picked him up in the palm of his hand and gently scooped him back to his nest, old mama bird scolding away, scolding the little bird who had tried out his wings a little too soon.And Teeter too, he was some pleased with this story about the land agent’s home. How his greatgrandaddy had first come out to these plains years and years ago, the first white man to set foot on this earth, since the conquistadors anyway—not on the plain itself, for that remained wild and alone for centuries after the Spaniards had come and had a look and gone on. Maybe as wild but not quite so alone was the land agent’s home, the broken, protective land that sat there under the plains’ brow.The caprock, the land agent called that and smiled at the new word, and headed Pop and the boy and young Teeter toward it,Teet pleased to be going anywhere that was somebody’s house, to be riding into the rising sun, riding east, maybe this sweet-talking land agent’s home was something like Teeter’s back in Arkansas, maybe it even had flivvers and flappers and phones, Teet figured as they rode down toward the home old Jim Harrison had come here so many, many years ago to make for him and his wife and his boys and the one girl who did not survive.They rode east that day in this wild scrubland of mesquite and brush and prickly pear, so different from the plains they had left back and not Arkansas either, young Teeter noted with growing gloom, and that scrawny, sailing thing there, a jackrabbit like no rabbit the boy had ever seen, and now came another scrawny, sailing one, this a roadrunner, like no bird the boy had seen, and then that toad, a horny toad, the land agent smiled, that looked more like a tiny dragon than any frog or toad the boy had ever known.Then the land agent stops his smile and banter and stops his horse and the others and takes his saddlegun from its scabbard and

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goes on ahead on foot, and there’s a rifle shot, another, and the land agent comes back with a snake fat as a cat, long as a rope, a rattlesnake, a snake like no snake the boy had ever known. Now even sour Teeter perks up at that and that barking in the distance, but that was no dog belonging to a house, a house with a flivver and a phone, but a coyote or maybe that old lone lobo wolf who preyed around this land back when the land agent was a boy and hankering himself to go on up onto the plains and chase wild Indians there though the Comanche had been long gone from there, gone from any free plain but that one in a boy’s head, in his dreams.Then toward late they came upon a lost old mama cow. She’s lost a strayed calf or thought she has.At the looks of her old udder, she has had no calf for years now the land agent figured and took the thick tent cord from the packhorse and looped it so easy over mama cow’s head and led her back into the fenced pasture, as they went on in to the old Harrison homestead, the land agent’s home.And the house, and the ranch around it, the boys had never seen such a house, not even their fine bake red brick green tile roof house in Arkansas, not even the plantation big houses of Georgia and Alabama, those Momma spoke of, of living there till the Yankees came and burned them out and turned them into sties and silage barns, not any of these could ever quite match the elegance, the serenity of the old Harrison Place, found there down off the cap, not more than five miles from Blanco.A tall thin house that had it been man might have seemed a comical figure, but not so as structure, this elegant, serene house rising from break land, mesquite and scrub cedar, and beyond the cottonwood that lined Blanco Creek, which as the land agent had predicted ran dry for now.This house stood up from the land and trees and outbuildings about it like a tower, glowing white, blue-white in the evening’s dying light, the sun already dropped behind the caprock rim.That white coming from the house, that came from the stone of the house, the stone that made the caprock there under the plains, a twelve- to twenty-foot cake of limestone or some sort of hardened caliche over which the rich plain topsoil had been laid.A chocolate loam, the land agent called this topsoil and though Pop scoffed—college geology or not, that chocolate one this young land agent had made up—that was near what it was like, the plain and the caprock over it, an ivory white cake of stone caliche and spread over it a vast plain of chocolate loam.And so when old Jim Harrison had come up to this country from those German settlements in the hill country out

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west of Austin and San Antone and the fine limestone bluffs that rise over the creeks and rivers down in those parts, and now seeing that some such stone made a palisade to top the surrounding canyon walls, old Jim Harrison had settled here, under those walls and made him and his kid brother a dugout and had then gone up to the caprock and knowing the skill had begun to hew out the stone blocks that would make him a house tall like a tower.Their party rode down then into this ranch headquarters, the land agent called it that with a laugh, and were greeted first by an old black spaniel, a ranch dog that had not known currycomb since his mother had licked him dry. A snakehunter, that pooch, the land agent said, they called him Sam for Samson or Sambo he was that black—surely, the land agent laughed, underneath that coat of dust there is some black. Like the same old black spaniel I would know years later, coming then with Coolie when he came to visit, drink whiskey and deal a hand or two with Toodlum, the Harrison boy Coolie would share tent with that first night he came as a boy himself down off the plains to pay call at the old Harrison place.That later dog was a snakekiller too, bit so often killing snakes their bite was nothing to him, a dog like old black Sam now coming out through the scrub at the scent of the rattler laid like bandolier over the land agent’s shoulder, a dog who liked nothing in life so much as taking the deadly rattler by its neck and shaking it and shaking it till it was dead. A bronze point of light showed from a kerosene chimney lamp there in a window of the house, its kitchen, and they all came out to greet the arriving party, the young land agent now leaving his Mr. Harrison behind and becoming Uncle Mack and Mack and Mackie you! And what names they all had, these Harrisons, now and then later on, when Coolie a grown man then and I the boy with him would drop down off the plains, the boys to sleep under canvas out in all the stars, the same as had Coolie and Teeter, boys then, and the same as the Harrison kids that first night they came down off the plains. Flukie was the father then and there was his wife Blue and Toodlum the boy a touch older than Coolie, he would be the father in time, and the girl Cotton, they made the Harrison family then; as in time, when Chick and I were to come, Toodlum, Charley, Choice and Scarlett would be the Harrisons, Coolie and Toodlum grown men by then.And with that arrival so long ago and its welcome the men and the boys and for that matter Blue and Cotton too, ranch women, cowgirls, dressed in pants and boots and snaps up the front shirts, everybody went off after Uncle Mack and the rattler, for it was a big one, near

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five feet, and a special treat. Long enough might even make you a cinch, laughed the land agent called Mack to his older brother called Flukie, he who indeed had grown a pot let hang over his trouser waist cowboy style. And Mack skinned the rattler quick behind the barn and Blue spread something like salt it was, with something else in it, over the snakeskin’s meaty side and Flukie hammered that high as he could reach when standing on a stump on the barn side, while Mack still moving his jackknife quick and sure as a surgeon parted the redblood meat from the snake spine, making strips as long as his arm and coiling them on a platter brought out by the girl called Cotton. Coolie, even young Taylor John, an expert in such affairs, had to look and look again to be sure this lean little cowgirl wasn’t a boy. Fries up fine and white and tender as chicken breast. Maybe a little taste of frog leg in it, Uncle Mack laughed at young Taylor, Teeter going a touch green there and going on toward ashen when Pop laughed out in return, Pop saying that young Taylor was his official taster on this trip out to Texas, he would get first bites of everything on the menu that night. Fried tarantula, the furry black rabbit-hopping spider, so big you set it on a stool its legs would dangle off on the floor, not to forget a full course of prairie oyster! Teeter going off in the mesquite for a rest and a breather when the prairie part of this oyster was explained, and too bad he was gone off too, for he missed Uncle Mack’s cowboy recipe for son-of-a-gun stew. But then that evening, when the red, greasy snake did cook up white and light and dry, good as maybe better than pullet breast, and there were the t-bones too, cooked in some smoky way, a tangy pepper tomato sauce, sweet and hot and sour, all of them in it and all that smoked into the meat; by then, with white meal chitlin cornbread good as you could find back home—so long as Teeter was assured them chitlins had nothing of the oyster or the prairie to them—by then even Teeter’s appetite had returned and was served so well that the homesick, horsesick, lovesick young Teeter Taylor John could put on his Hot Springs hotshot look for little Miss Cotton, even if she wasn’t much past twelve and you couldn’t ever be sure, not till tonight and they kids all got shipped out into the tent, that she wasn’t some almost good-looking boy. They did sleep out in the wall tent that night, the four of them, with Pop and Uncle Mack stashed in the kids’ bunkbeds inside the house, or would be if they ever went to bed that night, for way past midnight there could be heard from the house laughter and talk and some glasses clinking and now and then Uncle Mack scraping away well on the fiddle, the

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same worn fiddle that Old Jim Harrison was said to scrape well on indeed in his day.While all these so-called grownups were going on inside the house like kids let out of school, a quieter and surely more sober entertainment was presented in the big wall tent set up down close to dry Blanco creek.Toodlum, the Harrison boy, telling stories. Not that young Taylor did not pitch in some about the high life up in Hot Springs and Miss Cotton proved far from the shy young thing with nothing to say— like her cowgirl mother, Blue, if it needed saying, Cotton got it said.And even little Coolie, the littlest and sleepiest and quietest of the bunch, even he said something once or twice, if only to be saying it, so that the bigger kids wouldn’t think he was so little and quiet and sleepy that he had already drifted off. But in the end it was Toodlum Harrison, who would come to be as good a friend to Coolie as his father Flukie would be to Old Taylor Blanton; it was Toodlum as a boy who held the floor with these great yarns of this new land and the way it had been back in the day when Toodlum’s granpap, Old Jim Harrison, had first come to this country and lived in a dugout over yonder on high ground that year or so that he and his kid brother cut the rocks from the cap above and all around them or maybe they hauled them up from that quarry down around Austin and however it was old Jim Harrison came by these stones, he and his brother took them up and made them the fine stone house that now stands up tall and straight as a tower, gleaming white in new moonlight. These the stories that Old Jim had told his boy Flukie and Flukie had passed on to his boy Toodlum, the stories that Coolie would one day pass on to his own boy, Roy Alan Richardson by name, the stories that young Coolie drifted off to sleep to, the littlest and quietest and sleepiest of them there in the wall tent that night so long ago.While it was young Taylor John wide awake now, all ears now, and with a purpose. No Hot Springs hotrods now that Toodlum Harrison was spinning his yarns, his granpap’s yarns. Now it was Taylor John figuring how many girls these yarns would collect about him back there in Arkansas,Taylor John doing a little adjusting here and there, like putting himself there in these yarns, there where Old Jim Harrison once stood, making it Taylor John Richardson out on those plains being chased by Injuns and turning there at the brow of the caprock to stand off the dread Comanch and run them back.Yessir, that would gather a bevy of beauts about Tee Texas Taylor John, Indian fighter, so figured Teeter called Teet called Tee as now he too drifted off like little Coolie, for it had been a long day’s ride over the plain, coming down off

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the cap and into the breaks, and any man who made it, no matter how Texan, would have grown a touch weary toward moonrise, would have found himself falling off toward sleep, his ventures out on the Texas plains going on and on. xxx Coolie loved the plains with a divided heart.That was my image of him anyway, him standing out on the road at sunset, his back to Arkansas and its river bottoms and piney woods as if they didn’t count. He was out there looking west with no memory of them, as if he was looking west for coming weather, only that. Looking west toward the mountains and mountain streams and high snow-chilled pastures of New Mexico and Colorado as if these places didn’t matter either; they meant no more to him than black riverbottom and that Sunday stroll through the softfloored piney woods of home. No, the plains was his love now and he was out looking west for the weather that came from there, the spring’s sandstorms, looking east for the summer sun that would warm and feed his crop, looking south for the great clouds that brewed up far out in the gulf and brought their tropical torrents so far overland to them, looking north for that blue norther that would send sleet and snow and ice straight down from Canada, from the Arctic, from hell, it sometimes seemed like, if hell be cold. 71 Like a lot of Texas plainspeople, them that could afford it, we went up into Colorado and over into New Mexico for a couple weeks every summer, into that part that was strung along those states’ north-south borderline, from Raton and its horseracing in the east over to Durango and Mesa Verde and its lost civilization in the west, an area some mountain, some plain, some ranch country, some farmland. But for that one time we got turned back or were advised to at a cop roadblock—polio in Colorado that summer, bad, near epidemic, back when polio ravaged childish legs and chilled to ice our minds with the fear of it, life in an iron lung —other than that polio summer we bore north through the heart of the plains, called the staked plains, el llano estacado in Mexican lingo, and came into rolling country, rolling prairie some called it. Might’ve looked flat to a ridgerunner, but those rolling rises and sweet falls made hills for a staked plains boy.Then a quick dash over the state line and quicker still up up up into those green and red mountains, me and Chick flinging aside our funny books to experience the view that Coolie claimed he was doing all this summer driving for, when in fact he simply liked to drive the car, an Olds 98—I believe he had traded in the flashing Lincoln for the more

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substantial GM product by then, farmers starting to rake it in those years after the war. ¶ Couple nights at Raton, pronounced Ratone rhyme San Antone, there over the pass, Wamba averting eyes from the ponies and Coolie’s gaming on them and those fillies too that gathered around Coolie, a good-looking man, till they caught sight of rollingpin wife and cookiecutter kiddies, and there was that one who still gathered after that sobering sight. Then snake on over to Taos, there Wamba eyeing the matriarch tourist, she kept a little place in Taos year long—these nothing but bigmouth, bucktooth babes with hair painted silver, cheeks adobe tan, sparklers running up down pinkies, gin breath and lipstick gumming the drooping butt:Wamba eyeing such highprice trash out of this eye, out of that, something she wanted there, something she didn’t.After Coolie had made purchase of the art he liked more than he ever knew, the paintings, drawings, a totem, some Mexican faking Indian—no such turquoisestudded silver for Wamba, no Ulster woman had ever touched such wog stuff, and anyway you had to be of the darker coloration for such gaudy bauble to show, it got lost in a field of dusty red freckle—after some of that good buying, then it was on over to Santa Fe for lunch, making it easy even if Coolie turned out the pokiest Texas plate on the road, passed by every sissy state in the Union, even Rhode Island once. If Coolie ever spoke fond of town beyond Princeton, his pine-covered hometown back in Arkansas, it was this old pueblo town of New Mexico, its capital, Santa Fe. Long lost now to the likes of us, tourists from hell or Texas, you pick ’em, but then, in ’46 or so, even then this lovely old Mexican piled on Spanish piled on Indian village felt like the remains of what Santa Fe must have been five hundred years ago, yeah, you blurred your eyes hard against the yellow Olds and the dread tourist assault platoon, and old Santa Fe remained. Now to the restaurant, the point of all this driving, thousands of miles of it, I sometimes thought. Coolie liked this joint so and its food, a big loud joint, the loud absorbed some by thick adobe walls dusted soft chalky green and scattered over with some bullet holes left from some attack—Indian on soldier, soldier on Mexican, Mexican on Texican, and the food, that was the runoff Mexican, the beatback Indian getting some return shots in that retreat, going down slinging the holy jalapeño into every steaming, delicious platter they brought out and Coolie and I could not get enough of it.Wamba looked over all this, beans, rice, tortillas, peppers, my dark skin—every now and then let’s reach over and give it a good rub, see if any of it comes off—with strict suspicion. Particular sus-

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pect paid the paperthin corn pancake bread, the tortilla. If Wamba’s life had any meaning, a beginning and an end, that trek was from her delightful skilletbaked country cornbread to reach there in town the vague supermarket square tubes of plasticwrap whitebread. Rubrubrubadubdub on whatever part of me Wamba could pin down, that Mexican waiter standing there smiling at Coolie’s wild Spanish, that there was at least this one gringo who would give it a try. If this rub would then suddenly cease that was only Wamba in full panic.What if this dark did come off, what would that mean? Dirt, that’s what. So that night at the cabin Wamba came after me with a sure fury. Dirt or dark, something was going to give, grime or hide, before sunup.And that cabin in a small troutstream resort high in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, that or the mountains or the foreign name of them or the understood foreign name of them when Coolie translated that for us into the white Baptist tongue—all of it, it all threw Wamba into greater despair than white Baptist had ever known. The Blood of Christ Mountains—well see the white Baptist little baby Jesus don’t have any blood. Plump and tasteless and white as one of Coolie’s hung and drained pullets, plump and white and tasteless as those squared tubes of plastic bread Wamba kept flinging at me and Chick in the backseat, and some little jars of Miracle Whip, and pancake stacks of pre-sliced bologna, anything to wash all things foul and foreign out of our little bloodless white Baptist systems. ¶ Three nights of Catholic hell and them lockedin-the-backseat picnics and time to move on, Coolie having done with his not so much fishing those fine trout streams as walking about them, their rounded stones rusted brown neath the crystal water, dusted soft and plump as mushrooms along the shore. After a couple days we pushed north a ways up toward Colorado, south central Colorado, and crossed over into a valley that would mean a lot to our families in coming years. Good for some of them, bad for others. Riches or actually not quite being ruined for that one; for the other, being ruined for sure and absolutely. The San Luis Valley. A valley so big that, as one local bser put it—least I figured it was bs as in those days nobody had even come close to getting up to our earthly satellite—a valley so broad and long, the bser had it, you could see it from the moon. Probably.And indeed it was so large, this valley, that it was like being back on the plains, but that there in the distance, you could see the ghosts of them, those mountains, range after range of them, so distant they might have been storming clouds rolling out over the plain.As for the days of riches and ruin, the one to follow hard on the

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other, that all began with Coolie speaking of the valley to Franklin Crawford, this after our first trip up into the San Luis, not long after the end of war.The riches, that was Franklin Crawford running up to Denver the next day to put down payment on a vast spread there.The ruin and the near ruin, those came later, when Franklin Crawford, his wheelerdealer empire cracking at the joints, induced both Coolie, a bit, and Gerda called Gert, a lot, to come in and invest in the San Luis spread. Only when Frank had agreed to change invest to the more direct and accurate bail me out did Coolie go in and even then only enough to keep his baby brother on the street; while Gert called the Widder, who thought she knew the measure of any man, particularly kid brothers Coolie and Frank, went in whole hog. But then to Franklin Crawford’s credit, with his highrolling life coming to pieces and those pieces raining down on his head, one of his last acts while he still had anything but personal credit was to repay Coolie what he had invested—no interest, all that inflation —but still the thought and the original sum were there, and Coolie was moved that his chiseling little brother had at least got that right.And further moved when Frank returned Gert’s money, or a good deal of it, from beyond the grave.The life insurance policy that Frank took out maybe a month before he rolled his Caddy twentyhowevermany times, those to benefit from it were his son,Adrian, the only such issue of his many marriages, and his older sister Gerda. If some of the highway cops and the insurance company for sure and maybe me, at times even now even me, if some thought that life policy straight through those thirty short days from accident to no accident at all, there was no real proof against it. No note anyway, no indication of any kind but that Frank knew that Sand Hill curve like the back of his hand, knew eighty was it, least for his Caddy, and went on into it at one twenty anyway; other than that, all suspicion, only that, suspicion that Frank had rolled his Caddy to die, a common enough way to suicide out on those high flat plains—the postwar cars, all that horsepower, the roads so straight and flat till, till the blacktop took that killing twist out around Sand Hill, all that sand and still no hill. ¶ As little as I was, even then, that first time there in that high mountain valley, before he had brought word of it back to Frank, you could see Coolie liking that plain set in a valley, the mountains sketched like thunderhead so far away.You could see him liking the valley as a place to be, but then you watched him closer, as I do now that he’s gone, nothing left of him but what’s in my head now. When I was not quite so little and

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knew more of beauty and its treachery, I could see him then looking toward the crops and pasture strung out over the valley, see him reach down to a sandy, grayish, maybe alkaline soil nowhere near the match of the Texas plain loam, measure the long hard winters, the short rainy summers, a growing season even shorter and more strewn with hail and trouble than his place back on that high plain, a real plain, no pretty little mountains set around, and you’d know then what he liked this valley for, liked it as a place to be, not to farm, not to ranch, and so when he went in with Franklin Crawford, he went in for that reason, not to farm nor to ranch the valley, but to have that one place on earth where he liked to be. ¶ On then west and a bit north, up into those mountains that ringed the valley, they seemed to go on forever, west and north, me getting darker as we climbed into them and rounder and greasier from the mountain sun and all those burgers flung into the backseat, anything to get my mind and tummy off the refried bean, the mighty pinto mashed and peppered and simmered to a delicacy, with Chick there, still on white bread and mayonnaise, she couldn’t face no more baloney—that aversion, could it be some memory of Uncle Horace Homer hollering for horsecock! the name he put to the near sausage before it was sliced thin as a playing card— Chick growing thinner and paler by the minute and Wamba slapping mayo to Wonder Bread noon and night, all-white Baptist sugar dumped on the Cheerios of a morn. Is it any wonder then that this poor woman, my lovely little sis, given such a refined white diet, all color and content beat and boiled out of it, that she went on to lose her mind, started to, early forties? ¶ Another spell then at another troutstream resort and we turned the 98 south and west and made for our true destination—the track, tacos, trout and truck farming but things to do till we got there, got to Mesa Verde, where we were meant to be. Even Wamba, little Baptist plain girl, looked toward those lonely, lost cliff dwellings there in northwest New Mexico and near yearned for them, it seemed, for truly that would be the point of our turning back, where we tucked tail, gave up all this fool driving up one mountain to drive down another, and headed back to God’s country, the Texas plain—it God’s because nobody else, as Aunt Jonanna, that California cutup, put it, would have it. ¶ We’re going to be leaving Mesa Verde before we get there, not for long, we’ll get back, for it was then, coming down from our lost, lonely week at Mesa Verde, turning away from those dwellings where so many souls, so lost they have vanished from the face of the earth, where centuries ago these forgotten

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souls made their home in those cliffs high up in that region that makes the four corners, it was then, see, turning south and east and back, going back home, that Coolie and I ever played our game. Farmington vs. Gallup, those two towns found there in NW NM, so aptly named. Cowboys vs. farmers, rancher head-to-head with sheepherder—that game. Now yo not fool enough to even dream of becoming real ranchkid—horsebreath and cowpatty abounding—but one could learn a certain fierce loyalty to the life hitting Hwood’s latest sanitized celluloid equine opera at the Ritz every Sattidy afternoon.And with all those fine names—Gallup, Durango, Tombstone, Dodge, Rim Rock,Yuma and Deaf Smith, the county—and some picture postcards you could fake enough wild west to get past your little pen pal there in Devon, England.The game, Coolie smiling on my Gallup loyalty while speaking highly of Farmington’s virtues, we all knew it was a sham. But a game, Coolie matching my ranch enthusiasm with his own for the honest rigors of sodbusting, a game we were playing. For as we turned east and back there, there in the real west, leaving behind us Gallup, Farmington, all that and all the rest, Coolie, a quiet man, grew quieter still. Going back now, back to a place and a life there that he did not belong to, had nothing to do with him. From Cline’s Corners on there was silence, only silence, nothing but silence, from any of us. Silent as that day at war’s end when we packed up from our big house at Fort Sam in San Antone and drove back, back to where Wamba would be inflicting revenge and making her home, that the terrible instrument of her vengeance. ¶ But Mesa Verde before we go back to that silent home. Another silence, a silence of a different sort. The silence of peace. The silence that follows not war but life itself, that war, that peace.A silence I know well now, or will soon, the pistol lying on the seat beside me, their graves all over there, not far, three of them and a fourth place left flat and in native grass, left waiting.The silence of a man at peace, he has ended the war with himself and the world about him, or will soon. South and west we shall follow him then toward Mesa Verde, down the Million Dollar Highway, nothing but gravel mountain road, maybe the gravel to cover the road had some gold dust scattered in with the shale, maybe that million, the 98 flying now over solid road, making Durango easy for eighteenth straight burger lunch and more pitcher postcard masterpieces, pitcher Durango town front, Durango Colo postmark back, signed Durango Kid, and off to limey pen pal. Quick south then to park entrance, this still in Colorado, a park so large it takes up two whole states,

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and then to commence that climb up to Mesa Verde. This plateau we went towards, it was like our plain but high, higher, there in the sky. It was climbing a mountain, like back there in Colorado, everywhere mountains, but here we were simply climbing into the sky. Climbing a mountain that was not there, a mountain gone, it had been cut away, and we climbed to it still, up into the sky. Then some crest or ridge or something and we went down, the road coiling, curling through low cedar and the like till it opened onto us there at the parking lot: a rising smoothed tan cliff, its face windcarved a vast hollow, wide, tall, not deep, and in this dished shallow in the cliff face there clung an ancient elegant city, house set upon house in the most marvelous crazy jumble, no pattern to the stacking of house upon house but that of art and art’s longing for variety—this tumbled comb of adobe dwellings that so gracefully filled this hollow carved over so many, many centuries from the browned sandstone wall. ¶ That cowering parking lot there below greeted us as a riotous celebration of tourism, so it seemed to us lonely plainsfolk then, what in fact were but the first shaky babysteps toward that truly headless industry, right up there on the podium with heartless war and desolation TV. But then we were principally away from the park’s headquarters, the hotel and museums and their displays and the cafeteria and dining hall, off in a lodge and piled maze of cottages found higher up the slope looking out over Mesa Verde’s metro cliff dwelling and steep valley, near a gorge, that lay between.All of which suited Wamba just fine, as I was quick into the college kids who worked the dining halls as guides, parking attendants and so on, soaking up that life of freedom from Mom and Pop that would send me from the plains to college to circle the world. And do not think these collegiates minded either, chuckling away with this greasy round brown boy who traded in stories of farting preachers, horse halitosis and sparrow murder back home. Such friendships led this scarcely good little mommy-loving Baptist Bible-braying junior sodbuster to suffer yet more backseat banishment, burgers tossed in like the 98 was cage at the zoo, such confinement imposed anytime we went near the park center complex. The week there? Just that, as any tour will be for any kid, but another week. Dig up a couple memories anyway.The slim-line college girl who—maybe indeed bordering delightfully on Wamba’s notion that collegians who had anything to do with the lower orders of education bordered delightfully on being of the pervert-weirdo class—did indeed seem to take an unusual hankering for a round, brown, greasy boy; the museum skeletons, their

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gaping grinders of particular interest—“Maybe he’ll make a dentist,” offered hopeless lost mom to lost-cause kid—all that stuffing down all that stone-ground corn, mucho stone, some corn, from incisor to chomper worn down to gum; and of course more and more still, all that bubbled up in a tourist stew, taste of this, touch of that, nothing ever really standing out, not till the night of the bat, the bat that that night flew into our cabin room.That Wamba and Chick would shriek and flee the flapping rodent would be understood, as that was their gender’s training in those days, as was it correct that father’s sangfroid would be passed on to son.Vampires aside, no safer creature in the air, said Coolie, as their blind radar will keep them as far from you as you care to be from them. But this bat, somehow his radar was bust. It’s a story I would tell over the years, a story that will change in time, a story I would tell a granddaughter had I ever had one, a story, then, I shall tell you. 81 A bat flew into my room one night, m’dear, but I was not afraid, for my father had taught me these creatures can see light in dark, it’s day for them, and I knew well that this bat wanted far less of me than I of him. Around and around my chamber flew this bat and I put aside my book, for I was reading in bed, to watch him circle, there near the ceiling, circling about with normal bat curiosity. I first thought he figured, who is this dumb human lying there abed with reading glasses on, calmly watching what could possibly be dread bloodsucking vampire bat circle his chamber room? But shortly I took to seeing his circling in a different light. Seeing, I don’t know, some desperation perhaps in such circling.The open window and starlit night and dark freedom stood there and still the bat did not fly out, his circling growing ever lower, lower still, as he tired. It was at this time—the till then calm bat observer remembering his father’s pro-bat wisdom but now considering some less than calm action like leaping out of bed and running out the room, the tiring bat’s circling dropping a touch too close to bedside for comfort—that now another bat, a second bat flew into my chamber. This proved to be the smart helper bat come to give good, sound radar advice to dumb lost bat whose system was on the blink. Cheepcheepcheep went the smart helper bat circling right alongside the tiring dummy—the open window and starry night are just there, sillybilly, just fly out where it is dark and you will be safe and free cheepcheepcheep. And then the smart helper bat did just that, as if in demonstration, he cheepcheepcheep flew out the open window. And the tired dumb bat kept circling, dropping ever lower, ever toward the bat

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observer who already had one leg from under the cover, foot on floor, preparatory to panic-dash out of room. Once again the smart helper bat cheepcheepcheep flew into my chamber and flew around with the tiring dumb bat offering in-flight technical assistance cheepcheepcheep, but all to no avail.The dumb tired bat seemed determined to circle down down down till he was damn near in bed with me, or in the bed where I had so recently been, and no amount of cheepcheep was going to change his mind. So the smart helper bat threw up those tiny hands they have there on their wings and flew out into the night, to leave the dumb bat to his doom, that being swatted at with a newspaper by now panicked former bedreading batlover.Well, you can be perfectly fluent in bat, but let me assure you that not all the cheepcheepcheeping in the world will work such wonders on a dumb bat as one good rolled newspaper swing.True, a miss, but at times a good swishing miss will work as well, for this swishing miss immediately returned the dumb bat to his senses, and he immediately darted out the window into the starry night and bat freedom, a wearier but wiser bat. Now, I have changed the story over the years, m’dear, and this is how I would tell it to a granddaughter had I one and will tell it to you. I think, you see, I saw these bats all wrong. The first bat, he was not so much a dumb bat but an old, tired bat, and being old and tired had confused him.And the second bat, let’s say she was a granddaughter bat and had flown into the room not so much to scold cheepcheep the first bat for being dumb but rather in a softer, kinder cheepcheep to tell tiring old papi bat that if only he would trust her, follow her, she would show him the way out the open window, back to safety and the dark of the starry night, far far away from newspaper-wielding human maniacs. Yes, I believe I like that second, revised version much better and I’m sure, m’dear, you’ll agree. And so the bat flew into our cabin room our last night at Mesa Verde, had a look around—two shrieking female humans, two moderately calm newspaper-wielding males—and flew right back out again.And so shall we, m’dear, you and I, fly away, out the open window and into the starry night to safety and our dark freedom found there, when I am old and tired and, being tired, confused. Come then, m’dear, come along. Cheepcheep. Wamba’s fear that last evening at Mesa Verde, Coolie standing there on the edge of the cliff, having a twilight smoke and looking out over the gorge toward the vast cliff dwelling there—that wall still blazed, sanded

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bronze and gold from last light—it was not at all the same fear she knew that time Cady stood there at cliff ’s edge, the Grand Canyon falling, spreading away forever, Cady laughing at his sister’s fear, the little mother, age ten, still. No, Coolie out there,Wamba gathering Chick and me to her as she looked out the cabin window toward Coolie’s last smoke, last look over the gorge toward such an elegant, lost, dead and gone forever civilization; no, her fear for him was not that he might fall or fling himself to death, her fear for him was that she had married and had children by a man who wanted to be alone, left alone, and that by her being there, she and her children, that by her love she was slowly choking, draining all life from him, the man she so loved. While with Cady at the cliff she was simply afraid he was going to let out an airborne warwhoop and jackknife over the edge. It was that obvious even then, that Cady had death on his mind. He had only three short years to live after the war, if that. For a time he came to live with us there at the Home Place and help Coolie build the back room; would have been my room off away from them all, on my own or nearly so, had we not gone on to build Wamba’s revenge, redwood and ranchstyle, and moved into town. He didn’t come straight to us when he first came back from the war—tailgunner B-17, Europe thirty-three or so missions, and as one of ten planes in those murderous daylight raids didn’t return, you could say he had lived lives over the allotted nine—he first got some work in construction over in Hubbard, at the new Sears store going up over there or maybe it was the Humble Buick-Cadillac showroom, some place huge anyway, and was at that work the first time I remember laying eyes on him, Cade called Cady. It was like the house we built in town: this Sears hangar never again looked so bright as when it was being built: open, alive to life and the world beyond, that day we went over and saw Cady, back from the war, there at the building site. It was then I first figured I was black.The incident that I would in time understand as making me black, or thinking or wishing I was, it occurred that day and went like this. It was lunchtime or couple minutes before, and we were allowed onto the building site to wander around with carpenters and electricians, and in wandering about the great unfinished hall, Cady pointing out this and that to Coolie, both fine carpenters, we came upon a drinking fountain set in the wall.Two drinking fountains. Like they have in some schools, high one for the big kids, low for starters, but these fountains were set the same stoop level, side by side, that which distinguished

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them being only the words painted above. If I read well enough to read the two words, I did not understand them, WHITE and COLORED, not what these two hateful words really meant. Cady looked at the fountains and he looked toward me and we were both so very dark, even if Cady was lightened some by sawdust, and he smiled and stooped to the COLORED fountain and drank and stood back and smiled, and I followed and did as my new hero, my new uncle, had, drank COLORED. Now if freckled Wamba, yanking pale Chick along, went to the WHITE fountain briskly and there she and her daughter did drink copiously of WHITE water, Chick’s little golden head held down long after she had taken to gagging on the stuff, that display was Wamba’s only comment. Not a word said and I had to learn later these words, WHITE and COLORED, what they meant, really meant, on my own.And Coolie, that chaos of tans and browns, he stood back. Not drinking. Not thirsty. Not talking. Cady came home from the war not exactly as he had gone off, he had seen too much death, destruction for that (see fiction 5 or 6, anyway “Richardson boys reunion wartime London,” p. xxx), but he came back showing no outward signs of that horror. Not like Dusty, say—infantry major, battalion intelligence, fought across France deep into Germany— when back in postwar Arkansas and one of us cousins would wake in the night, there would Dusty be, outside, smoking cigaret after cigaret, looking off toward the woods as if sleep and some peace of mind lay there. No, Cady’s wounds were not of body, nor even the mind, but of the heart, of the soul, and he came back to help build the new Sears over in Hubbard, then came over and put on our back room much the same quiet, amused, kind, brown-skinned boy who had gone off so many years before. But he was longing to die, surely he was, even then. He must have so been looking forward to it, death, even on the one summer trip he came with us west, when he stood there on the vast canyon’s rimrock and laughed, laughed at life, laughed at death, and Wamba called out for him to step back, don’t go so near, not to death, and then wept when he did so, stood back from death for now. And Cady back from death, little Chick and me were snatched from danger too and slammed for safety into the 98 or maybe it was still the flashy little Lincoln or maybe later still one of the two Packards, those shiny tanks, or could’ve been during that one disastrous year of the Hudson Hornet, the car you stepped down to get into and called out to some hefty passerby to haul you out—they forgot to mention that part in their ads, getting out.

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Homosexual? I don’t think so. Franklin Crawford at work again. One of those guys with women underfoot, always crying faggot when some guy is simply wise enough to avoid them, like smoking and the crossword, simply not picking up the habit in the first place. But then if I do still think of Cady as some secular priest for whom sex was merely beside the point, still, even so, there might have been something, some truth or its germ, in Frank’s slander. If Cady’s relationship to me as boy and the girl Chick was beyond reproach, was that fine avuncular affection that knows no secret Freudian agenda, then there was that one incident, an episode that now does call such foul doubt to a mind much tainted by such, a mind without breadth or the understanding to push on through its swamps toward high ground, let’s call one ignorance, the other wisdom. That summer Cady came to build on the back room, that summer he came with us on our family tour west, that summer we pushed on past the cliff dwellings of New Mexico, on over toward the great dams of Nevada, the canyons of Arizona, the deserts of California, it was that summer of our great western quest, not turning back till we hit Needles, went and set foot in California, for Coolie had this lunatic idea that Chick and I might set foot in them all, all forty-eight—it was when we returned loaded with Death Valley postcards and the like that things changed with Cady.That a boy’s idea of him did.The idea that an uncle might as well be a man. Something, someone else. He came toward the end of summer, when the days were hot, hotter than ever, and nights had begun to cool, that’s when he showed, Cady’s buddy, his pal.Wamba saw through this character first glance.Word. Bob, Bill, John, Whatever Word, it didn’t matter. But another of these self-important types always called by last name only, Word, like he was fucking Byron or somebody.You wouldn’t think it would be Wamba, would you, majored in naiveté, a minor in gullibility, that it would be this dumbcluck country girl who saw straight through to the doublefaced heart of this bullshitting con artist; saw with all that little mother cluck and worry that Word, this bser, had come to take her baby brother, her baby, for a ride. Not to say that Coolie wasn’t on to this Word as well, but Coolie had another battle to fight.This war with and within himself that only deepened now that the outdoor war was ended. See, Coolie had not fought, not like Dusty or Cady or Rogers—glider pilot, France D-Day plus some. He had not even served in combat zones, as had Taylor John and Autrey—aircraft carrier plane mechanic and battleship chaplain,

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respectively, both in the Pacific—but had done his time in administration, a desk jockey. Not too old for combat duty, just too valuable running the army back home. Still Coolie was not happy that he had never fought, had never served in danger zones, and this unhappiness with himself became generosity toward those, like Cady, who had done both, extending even toward those like Word, worthless bastards no matter how they might have fought or where served. Cady probably made it up, that he and Word had flown on the same plane.Word could’ve been some guy Cady had met in a bar, there coming out of the army, whatever, and it would have made no difference to Coolie; he would have taken Word on his worthless word still, he was hurting that bad, not having fought. I had never seen Cady quite so animated, quite so happy and chatty as now that Word had come.A homosexual crush—I don’t know, maybe, but then too part of it was simply booze. Coolie still kept beer around the house and, if back from Arkansas, a couple jugs corn squeezings, and even Wamba would not be signing the pledge till after Cady’s death; but Cady did not touch the stuff, not till Word came. Sure, that was it, surely part of it or maybe all, the change that came over Cady when Word showed up.They slept in the same bed in the back room abuilding, and after a hot day on the roof went out to the tank and stripped and swam there and drank together, quietly, after Coolie had spoken about one rowdy night, and talked, talked only. It was that, the talk really, that was new to Cady, before so alone, so shy.Talk of the war, of friends, places, the so many places they had been and Cady, this quiet, shy uncle blossomed under such talk. Jokes, these I didn’t get of course, but Coolie smiled, even now that his misgivings had grown and were building, waiting to break into the open, still he could not but smile at such jokes. Best of all though, by far, even Wamba enjoyed these, for Cady must have been a mimic in childhood, were the imitations: me in a sulk, the dreamy Chick, and Wamba, these we all, even Wamba, enjoyed most of all, and Mama and all the brothers and sisters, imitations of all but Coolie, and Coolie was let be. And the accents. Brooklyn to the Bronx, English, Scot, Irish, etc., Southern, from Lula’s country twang all the way up to Word’s Kentucky hill-country hog howl, FDR, Churchill, the new president, and movie stars so good you closed your eyes and Gable was there and Scarlett too. Cady could do the women so well, do walks and gestures and move his face about like Bette Davis even, her heavy-lidded grimace, her barracuda smile—maybe that was it, what got Franklin Crawford to thinking, got him to talking.That

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and Word. The end came one evening, I think Cady was gone over to Rogers and Mama and Papa at Dollé, that evening that Word was left to drink to himself, and without Cady’s companionship and entertainment Word sat down, blurred and stinking, and had a chat with Chick and me, two that he had previously avoided like plague.And that was it. Nothing else. No touching, no fondling, no lap sitting like with Cady, just Word, alone, unhappy, drunk and slurred and, when Coolie called him out to talk the two of them, weaving and wobbly as he went out to talk to Coolie on his own. It fades after that or becomes confused, some of both.We all left. Chick and I off in the big yellow bus to school; and Cady, I don’t think Cady ever came back from that time he went over to see Mama and Papa at Dollé and left Word so drunk and alone, Cady going over to help bring in the cotton; that was spoken of or maybe it was Word, maybe Frank’s nose for a man’s man was wrong there—the homosexual pass had been made and it had been Cady, a friend, a buddy, a pal and no more, maybe he had been at the receiving end of it and as buddy friend pal no more Cady had gone and left Word alone; and then Word, he did stay on there in the back room for a time, got the windows in, hung the door, and then he was gone.We woke up one morning and Word was gone.The back room was finished and he was gone.The checks started coming in a week or so later. Twenty of them in all, all that were in the book Word had taken, the spare Coolie kept for when the old ones ran out. Coolie had to honor the first check, Banker Darty advised it would be best, to be on sound legal grounds as Coolie, not noticing the spare book was gone, had placed no stop order on those numbers; but then after that, Darty legally filing the stop order, the law informed of probably theft and probable culprit, Coolie lost no more than that first hundred bucks,Word leaving a string of poorly forged paper across the deep South,Word forging his way home. He came back long after that, Cady, and only knocked on the door and would not come in. Would not say much to any of us, not even Wamba, only asked if he could speak to Coolie outside, alone.You could see it in her face then as she watched them from the window.That look of fear and triumph I would come to know well. Coolie, you see, had told Cady long before that Word’s forgeries had cost him nothing, not a penny, and that Cady was in no way responsible, not fiscally, not in any way, for his friend’s misdeeds. But Wamba knew the truth, the hundred bucks, and

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she had blabbed to Mama maybe, to someone around Dollé anyway who went on to blab to Mama, and by the time Mama got through with it, Mama no great follower of the uppity Blanco Richardsons, the story had come out that Coolie was putting it around how Cady had cost him a hundred bucks, how Cady had brought a thieving pal into Coolie’s house and now, typical of your lower-class Dollé Richardsons—this Coolie was supposed to be saying—Cady was running out on the debt he owed that one so-called upper-class R, there over around Blanco. Such was the story or near it that finally made it to Cady, now over in Papa’s Dolle cotton patch, pulling bolls, bringing in the bales; and now Cady, dark as Comanche and as lean from that backbreaking work in the fields, now he had saved up the hundred bucks that the fifty cents a hundredweight had finally earned him and he had brought it over that dying November evening to repay his debt, and he would not take no for an answer, not believe a word when Coolie said he owed him nothing, that the stolen checks had cost Coolie nothing.Take a look at the looks on their faces when Cady held the bills out to Coolie and held them and held them out to Coolie as they talked till finally Coolie took the bills and Cady turned and walked out to the car waiting on the road, Cady not shaking hands farewell as Coolie’s hand was full of bills. And Wamba watching there at the window, the look of fear, of triumph as she turned to hurry back to the kitchen as Coolie turned to come back into the house,Wamba, fearful, triumphant, hurrying so that it would seem she had always been there in the kitchen, over the sink, at the stove, not watching out the window, slyly watching.And Coolie’s look when he came into the house, the look of hatred, the look of rage in that face so well-trained to suppress such looks, any look at all, Coolie’s face hard and black as stone as he came into the bright kitchen there, Chick and me at the table,Wamba at the sink or stove, back turned, as if nothing was going on or she didn’t know of it anyway, she hadn’t been there secretly watching from the window. And Coolie reached over the table and put the bills under the sugar bowl and then he went out. Out the back way, past the back room, he went on outside coatless on this chill November evening, not going out front to the county road, to look west like he might have done had he gone out to look at weather coming in, but turned instead and went along the field road, the road that led if you followed it along far enough to the pasture that bordered on the cap. Coolie went out coatless and turned east then and away from the setting sun, turned and walked east toward the cap and

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the breaks and the building night, where Coolie went when he wanted to be alone. Cady’s suicide, the morning we learned of it anyway. We woke to howling, little Chick and me,Wamba howling her grief, misery, there are no words to match it, an animal howling but no animal has been born to howl out such grief, such misery. Now creep to the bedroom door and there beyond Wamba howls and clings to Coolie, clings then to Rogers, the brother one up from Cady, another baby from the little mother, Rogers having waited till dawn to drive over from Dollé with the word the town sheriff had driven out to Dollé the night before, near midnight, the word that Cade called Cady, the benjamin of the Dollé family, was dead, age twenty-six. After that chaos, more of it, it all piles together, chaos, no real memory of it from its beginning, not till you reach its end. And that’s Chick and me left alone. Why they didn’t let us go on to school that day, I don’t know. I’ll never know.Would a family suicide contaminate them kids without ’em? Or would it be we, the sufferers, who would be fouled by the happy, the normal, the unconcerned? Whatever, lil sis n me were dumped off at Deke and Polly’s, couple miles on over toward Blanco, and there rose the morning’s second memory, after Wamba howling and clinging. Chick and I sitting there in the swings alone. Grim Coolie and Wamba weeping gone off in dust, one of the bulging Packards, the maroon one, I believe, we had another just like it, slick green, afterwards or before. Wavewave swingswing.The dust settles or drifts away, no breeze the skin knows but you can see it.Then Juanita and Bobby, Deke and Polly’s brats, girl touch younger than me, boy shade older than Chick, they come dressed for school—book satchel, lunch pail, the gear—come pushed all suited up out of the house and stand away from us, stand waiting for the bus, stand looking off down the road for it, standing away as if we really did have this disease, tragedy, and they hadn’t had their shots yet. Then comes the bus, the big hellish yellow bus that should have Chick and me off to the nightmare Blanco school with all the other little Blanco monsters, but not that day.That day we stayed on the swings creakcreakcreak as the big yellow bus, windows filled with devil faces, bundled off in a cloud of dust toward that pit of terror, the old-fashioned whitewashed one-room country schoolhouse, Miz Munday out on the front porch swinging the handbell like she was flogging a misspeller. There was always some disagreement between Chick and me, from the very first.Which was the frying pan, which the fire—bus or school? Of

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course the point of the old saw is that you get cooked coming or going, but then, as in cooking, there are different ways in which a child might be frightened out of his or her wits.The school’s was a decidedly, though not entirely, psychological horror; while the bus ride, particularly when we were old enough to leave Blanco school and ride eighteen never-ending miles on into town, might be classified a more straightforward physical torture, though there were exceptions to that standard as well. Shall we start at the school, then take a ride? Yes, start here. Miz Munday, Blanco schoolmarm, was mad. Not the sort of mad that Coolie and Chick came to know, nor Wamba’s delirious Baptistism, nor even my own tussle with the condition, weeping all this last year and I simply could not stop it, but rather, Miz Munday’s madness, it was like the phrase Dusty brought home from his infantry wars. The walking wounded.Yes.That’s how Miz Munday was mad.Totally batshit but still ever ready to go into action against the sworn and hated enemy: children, their happiness and peace of mind.This war, I believe, was called education. In addition to that sort of mad, Miz Munday was mad about certain other subjects but these two principally: mad dogs, hydrophobia and the death suffered from it, and her son, Big John Munday, played first base for some Texas League team, Ft.Worth—the Bullshippers? Surely not. One would not think that a minor league ballplayer would be such a force as to warp a kid’s mind—particularly since Big John never (thanks sports fans!) paid visit to Blanco school as Miz Munday was ever threatening. But there was such an evil about this guy, it leapt out of the grainy sports page photos Miz Munday had tacked up all around the blackboard. Big John holding up a swollen black finger jammed by tossed ball and grinning out at us little scholars as if to say exactly what will come of you if he ever made the promised pilgrimage to Blanco; he’d file us out during recess, half-hour hells in any case, and we’d play a little blackfinger hardball. Needless to say, I have been to but one baseball game in my life, stricken with terror that a foul tip might come streaking my way. Ah mad dogs, a day passed not that Miz Munday did not pass on the latest news bulletin concerning them, as if there were packs from up around Oklahoma headed our way, straight for Blanco, muzzles afoam, fangs slathering deadly drool—and of course not to forget rabies death, thirty days chained to your bed, now you aslather, foaming and so on. Nor can the disease’s treatment be overlooked.Thirty days of shots with a horseneedle right in the belly, a cure that caused many a kiddy to wonder:

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couldn’t you go straight on through to the chained bed, the screaming and foaming and so on? These terrors reached deeper into Chick than me—I kept a puppy of one sort or another throughout these maddog days. She confided well into adulthood that she still did not much care for sewing, a phobia picked up from that one tale, the young woman Miz Munday knew, her skirt slashed by rabid dog. That evening in making repairs, she bit thread away from spittled tear and straight on it was to thirty days of needle or chain, you pick ’em. Chick being a little one, veins hard to find, she came down solid behind chain, slathering and so on, no torture close to digging and drilling around a little arm, anything for blood. As for direct physical violence at Blanco school—if one excludes recess, this twice a day, and lunchtime, and not to forget those periods before and after school, when the perverse bus arrived early on the one occasion, late the other—its terror was found more in threat than actual delivery.True, Miz Munday was an old-fashioned slapper; why practice such dangerous modernisms as switch and paddle when one could, while strolling the aisle between desks, simply haul off and swat a small scholar for a loop, for, for the most part, no discernable reason at all. Such was life at Blanco school that Chick and I, at day’s beginning, thought that that first school day we stayed on the big yellow bus, passed Blanco school right by, to go on to school in town, that that day would prove the happiest of our lives. Bye-bye Blanco School! Luv ya! Yeah and it proved a mere hour and a half and eighteen miles later that we staggered off the big jolly yellow bus as if we had done our first death march, up the Burma Road and back.What, of course, we had faced for the first time in our brief and sheltered lives was the adult world. Or the freakish promise of it. The display by deed as well as tale, as there were seniors, seventeeneighteen or so, mixed in with the little third-graders, them of the world our parents had gone such lengths to shelter from low-grader view. Such as the senior coupling (near usually dry) that went on along the long backseat, we little ones stood about there not so much to ogle but rather to shield from driver’s mirror rearview said coupling. After that first—it was probably no more than forty-five minutes—ride I slumped off the bus a wiser and more worldly little boy.Again, it hit Chick harder. She confided later, that night we were sharing fond memories of Blanco school, that she scarcely ever had a decent orgasm not imagining she was back there at the bus backseat, in that ring of little third-graders, watching, shielding, watching again.

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As for the humdrum everyday violence of the big yellow bus, let’s pass over that sort of thing for now (see The Clod Wars, coming to your theatre soon) and go straight to the only time in my life I ever saw someone, a friend, near beat to death.This was Weldon McClure, my closest bus pal and mentor in bus dirty deeds.This the day that Weldon’s older sister Sally Joy happened to be sitting in the seat there behind Weldon and me. I personally think Weldon brought this moth from home, that he had captured this moth months ago, put it in a jar, fed it leaves and so on, getting it in shape, being sure its little wing muscles were fit, as Weldon, so far as bus devilry went, was a boy of vision and laid out his bus pranks with the thoroughness of a military commander.The campaign began with a simple sally.With moth gently cupped in fist,Weldon turned back and slipped the fluttering insect down big sis’s blouse front. Sally Joy was oh fourteenfifteen and had good knockers, so said Weldon, a true country lad who dreamed of nothing so much as doing to his sisters in the evening what he and brothers had been pestering cows, sheep and the like with a boring milking morn. What occurred next simply made little sense as Wamba was already at wringing such country ways and traditions as incest-can-be-good-healthy-fun out of me. I thought: someone slips fluttery moth down your shirt front, you simply reach in and pull it out or shake it free if your shirttail is out.What Sally Joy did was nothing.Well, not exactly nothing. First, breath came quick, cheeks flushed, she grasped the seat back before her, eyes rolled back, threw her head forward, threw it back, she took to panting, moaning, then groaning, back arched, threw head forward, two hands gripping the seat back knucklewhite, and then came that great reaching, falling cry the boy would come to know and treasure in time, and the fluttering little moth flew out.Then commenced an attack the ferocity of which one has not since known.Weldon was this tough, really tough little country kid, but there were those of us who did not really expect he would ever come around. Got so wild and woolly that Mr. Snyder, veteran driver, actually looked up to his rearview; but seeing no blood or weapons, just the usually backseat gatherings, the grizzled old-timer shifted gears and pressed on. Had never in twenty-odd years been tardy to townschool, this big yellow bus, and no hammerlocked country kid, blue going black, was going to start it now. The dirt clod fights, The Clod Wars, as put by friend who likewise passed through the idyllic sport and pastime of country-school life, turn us really to a different sort of battle, one that I understood at the time as

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little as backseat coupling and pubescent girl with fluttery moth brushing budding breast.This warfare was class warfare. In preface I will say to any parent who must engage in such that if your children are used as weapons, either of offense or defense, in these struggles, that such use borders on crime, war crimes, for we—and I began life as such a little weapon—simply do not understand what the hell is going on. Like, why is it that some people like us (Franklin Crawford) and some people can’t stand the sight of us (Mama Min, Lula) merely at the sight of us? Not as crippling as being loathed for color of skin, bend of nose or eye slant, but in that league.They look, they see, they hate. Clod fights aren’t really the point here then, so much as that activity during which such clod flinging occurred.Walking. Do you walk two, three, maybe four, maybe more miles home from school; or does mommy come pick you up in her new Olds, Buick, Lincoln, whatever brand’s going this year? In time I got into country ways, even the deadly clod fight walking home with country pals, but Chick, again she suffered. Never again to feel safe outside a car, she confided, not one not driven quickly away from one-room school/big yellow bus/clod fight reality by mommy or some surrogate, hubby etc. Oh yes, Chick loved her country-goes-townie Wamba and her class struggles every bit as much as I loathed and fought mine. There were some revenges, an early one anyway, that I did exact unwittingly. Consider my first full day at Blanco School, just back from Fort Sam, army and the war. Dressed out in full townie kit. Capless. Sweatshirt with SUPERMAN and his flying figure over the chest.Tan shorts, for this was as much late summer as early autumn. Some sort of crepe-sole canvas shoe, not even tennies, not even dread basketballblack if you can imagine. I must say that dropped off by Buick or whatever there at Blanco school, I and pinafored sis were greeted kindly by all the country kids standing around, longing, I know now, for evening’s clod fight. Greeted as if we were alien creatures, friendly, simple, but not up on current country couture—and that would have been for boy: overalls, the carpenterish pinstripe preferred over trainengine dungaree blue that fall; a billed earflap cap, these bill and flap corduroy-covered in some tartan design; the flannel shirt likewise plaid; twelve-eye brogans; and, when it got down somewhere near zero, a Levi jacket and cotton gloves, dark, not the stiff white models that by that time of the year would have been worn thin pulling bolls.The bitterest look seen till then, and for a long time since, came upon Wamba’s face that

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next Saturday in town, her son dragging her into the Farm and Ranch, there to be outfitted in exactly the same manner as his new little country pals, that fashion that Wamba had sworn life’s blood to escape. As then years later, her victory as the squire’s wife/MizJohnsonAlanRichardsonBlancoTexas secured, would she turn back to her childhood country ways, at least to the point that would drive her by then extremely uncountry son to consider mommy mayhem, the real thing. (The reader is referred to the exceptional study of the matter, “I Murder Mommy,” beginning p. xxx.) Wheat it was that Coolie first loved, his back to the riverbottom, face to the mountain pasture.Wheat he loved and the plain it grew on, wheat beyond the grass that had once carpeted the plain and the cotton that came to choke it; the buffalo grass of the mountain pasture out west, the blackland cotton of the riverbottom back home, nothing could come close to it in his divided heart, nothing about as far as you could see but a waving, drifting, rolling plain of wheat. Plow and tractor finished the grass, and pump and water made cotton king. Another division to consider there, class and a host of others.The drifting hobo cowboy and the peasant tenant plantation-bound.The shiftless shitting cow and the fruitless little tree.While yonder lies field upon field till together they stretch from horizon to horizon, from the shadow of the tropics on through toward the chill of the arctic, wheat, golden, ripe, knee-high and sifted through by wind, the aristocracy of agriculture, a thing solid, simple and sure. Basic as bread.Wheat. They must have started turning under the native grass, as we called it, maybe even before the turn of the century, but even so late as Taylor Blanton’s first trip west, says Coolie, there was much of the plain still standing, as it had been forever it would seem, in grass.Wheat then came and if you got to vie manmade gainst natural, that grain could come as close as you could get to embracing both, that one time that nature and man pitched in and did something together. My own first memories, or close to it, were of it. Late fall, going toward winter; cotton in and left to stalk; feed, this traitor to all about it, grain planted row crop, there was nothing of a grass to it, this feed—maize, milo, highgear, some names for it—combined in that season not right for such reaping; all that done then and the hurt land let to rest and move on over to those wider tracts of summerfallow, vast stretches of land left quiet a year, and then the serious matters of seeding begin, the making not of shirt and thread nor slop

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for heifer and hog nor even the mighty grape or staple spud, one to fill out a stew, the other to spin the head; but rather the beginning, the first step toward the baking of holy bread, it was then the drilling of wheat would begin, late fall, going toward winter. Drill, summerfallow, seed crop, coming up and heading out and going tan, combine, elevator, stubble, lonely stubble, the wheatman’s dream, the one-way plow, the flatland buster, volunteer, those brave little grains left behind, they would not give up, would start that cycle up again, make that baking bread on their own—such words, such fine, mysterious words were among the first I ever knew. Actually the true first was canyon, the getting off those blasted plains and away from wheat—fields and fields and fields of the stuff, till the world was but that, a single mindless field of maddening, waving wheat— as far away from the stuff as a Packard would take you.Yes, canyon surely my very first word or certainly should have been for it was filled with that excitement of getting away from all that wheat and on to the promise of danger and maybe death, and a very sincere promise it was too if the scatterbrain leadfoot Wamba was at Packard wheel. Then, the little conscripted seed grains put to bed in, well, to be fair to cotton and feed etc., wheat was put to bed in rows like everything else, though, to be fair to wheat, the little grassy grains were bedded in rows so close set that when the wheat shot up over a foot, foot and a half, it could have been grass for all practical purposes.You sure couldn’t get anything as rude as a tractor wheel between these delicate rows, thus, though not technically correct, the origin of the flatland vs. row crop division. Let’s see, after drilling—odd how often such military phrases pop up—yes, then comes the wheat bed’s cover quilt, her winter blanket. Snow.This was my first warning as a child that I would never understand all this shoving seed in dirt and praying that it grew, praying that it would rain one day, not the next, etc., etc., nor would much care to. Snow, the white material that will turn your fingers numb in minutes, this is supposed to keep the little earth-snuggled grains warm? I simply refused to believe it, no matter the pounding of it in, and still have grave doubts.That I made noises as if to go along with the contention that snow might prove a more gentle watering of the sleepyhead grains than rain, as there can be something of a tiny fist to a drop, and the crashing and crushing done by flashflood is there for all to see, gave my poor wheatfarming pop some hope that his arty killer son might some day at least talk, if not actually perform, farm-

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ing reasonably sensibly. A hope that never got out of the ground, I’m afraid. Next: snow melted, little grains got their gentle drink and dutifully shot up. One would not think that such success would turn a theoretical farmboy away from a life of sowing and reaping. It goes like this. See, seeds are like horses.There are some people who can keep their nag from going straight back into the barn, plenty of that for today thankyouverymuch, and some people who cannot. Same with seeds.They know very well who planted them and exactly how much lollygagging they can get away with. Me, if I have ever planted anything that ever sprouted I cannot think of it. Burr, wife two, once noted that her houseplants simply fell over when I walked into the room. So, pretty dull period there, wheat sprouting left, right and center, wheatfield looking pretty much like those new lawns in the housing development going up out by the airport flight path—no way you’ll ever play croquet there, José. But then, as with your stunted, dribbling lawn, all changed. Overnight, it would seem, wheat came up knee high and so green and the wind moved over it like waves crossing a sea and if one were ever driven mad by the monotony of it, that there was simply nothing else around but knee-high grass shifting under a wind, then that too was like the sea; you might think you can think of nothing else but canyon, anything to get away from it, but then once escaped, like the sea it calls you back, that sea of wheat rolling and billowing and breathing beneath the wind, and you cannot wait to get back and once back on that landed sea of wheat you cannot imagine that you were ever away from it. Ah, now comes the best of all, for wheatfarmer, wife and kiddies, and all the banks and merchants they owe, the best by far for us all—the harvest.The green wheat tanning, going blond, golden, then along its whisker tops pale, a pale almost white. But then our excitement, Chick’s and mine, a child’s excitement, lay beyond the harvest, went deeper and beyond the mere cutting of wheat, as Christmas is, sure, a warm event in a cold season, but one that carries within it all the joys and hopes of a time on earth that can know few. They began I don’t know how far south, if not on the banks of the Rio Grande, then farther south than San Antone, sometime in late April/ early May, mas o menos, and would end their epic march up the continent cutting spring wheat up in Canada, five, maybe six months later. Combine crews. Now I will accept, with some grace, the wagon train and its trail boss and settlers and their crossing this land as the true American epic, boss and his herded pioneers our hero and heroine, but will not give

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way to this idolatry of cowboy and cattledrive, stinking beasts and mounted drifters, the obligatory stampede tossed in to keep viewer on toes, not put head-to-head gainst the great northern thrust made by the combine crew. Cow, steer, heifer, herd, horse, even the words pale and fall back, know nothing of the dignity of wheat, field upon field to the horizon, and the intelligence, elegance and mechanical precision of a combine string numbered high as twelve on occasion making its swift, sure-cornered round, deep, ever deeper into the pit of a golden field, dusted gold strewn all about, dust like gold lingering in the air. Some saddle-borne layabout versus the wandering philosopher prince of the combine crew? No contest. How did they call the great cowherd saga—Red River? That stinking hole in the ground that couldn’t even make it up into Oklahoma.While the noble combiner reaches for the northern lights, the polestar! Even end product, try cutting out both and see which you hanker for first, that which brings to belly true hunger, beef or bread, the bloody chop or piping loaf.These bull-shifters ought to thank their lucky stars for the Indian, as being massacred would no doubt prove high point of a dreary equestrian day. Right after the war, see, most farmers around there didn’t own a combine—don’t know why.The riches to be granted these farmers not yet so accumulated as to lay out for such expensive machines; maybe the bomber plants and tank factories hadn’t been refitted for peace; maybe it was simply cheaper then to hire out this work done; whatever, the communal coming of these roving crews made true festival of the work that would, with luck, occasion the feast.This cousin—one of the good ones, they do keep cropping up, must soon set record straight—he spent a couple years making that trek from near Mexico well up into Canada and spoke of our harvest excitement from the crew’s point of view, like if your life is one continual harvest that does take some of the edge off the celebration. Spring, early summer, that first year anyway, he got well into the romance of it; much like the cowboy myth, ride in, cut wheat, break a farmer’s daughter’s heart, kiss your Farmall and combine off into the sunset; but then later in the season, that second year, the farther north they cut the more often he and his buddy would find themselves skipping the local Saturday night dance to search out a pingpong table and, much as a cowboy at trail’s end might pass by sizzling sirloin for Caesar salad, if they got near bread it would be that baked from a meal ground from corn. Not so for us, we little stay-at-homes.There could be no sight like it, that

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caravan of flatbed trucks hauling bright red combine; we would go over to the cap and wait for it, that ten, sometimes twenty truck train coming up at us, the plain and all our wheat, winding up toward us through the canyon, the trucks shifting down to granny and granny groaning up that last steep bit of the canyon wall. They were our first taste of the great world beyond, these men who made the combine crew and brought their ways to us delectable and dangerous as spice fresh in from the Orient. It was an Australian who taught me to swim. One guy, German, not French, from there on the border, ever said a bonjour and a toute à l’heure to Wamba, the language she had studied in college and this the first she had heard of it since. Another German, older than the Alsatian and from deeper in the Reich, he and Coolie got on. Hans, the only name among them I remember, had been a POW at the wartime camp there at Fort Sam and could return now a free man and reminisce with Coolie about that old San Antone post, no imprisonment had ever been such pleasure, didn’t make army kacernes like that back home. And men, and boys— some of them, for their swagger, were not much more—from every quarter of the States and Canada; from Vancouver or thereabouts he was, that near boy who brought Chick the cottontail bunny he had found in the stubble. He had combined over its mother before he saw the nest and he set Chick to setting it up a hutch and things to nibble, he did so want to keep the thing alive, make it strong and well again—maybe then they could let it go, back to the wild where it belonged, if only it wouldn’t die till they were gone, so he could take that memory with him north, that something he had killed was still alive. Water changed it all, drove them all away, those good times, and this is not childhood talking, the softened memory of it; there were indeed good times before water came and drove it all away. Dryland wheat. Irrigated cotton. Coolie never got over it, like driving away from his beloved army, maybe worse even than moving into town. Row crop.You want to take the mystery, the romance, the very life out of something, you drill grain one winter, the next fall you’re looking down the row, row after row, at a row crop. Irrigated cotton. Make you rich and make you sick. Roughly: the first price I remember on wheat was two bucks a bushel, an average good dryland crop twenty bushels, forty bucks an acre. Cotton—granted this price remembered later—let’s say around thirty-five cents a pound, five hundred pounds to a bale, average good irrigated cotton a bale to an the acre, a hundred and seventy-five an acre. And you look at it today,

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decades on: wheat has put on forty cents in all that time, cotton has about doubled, seventy cents in a good market, they had hurricane down on the Delta, floods along the Nile; and what was plain as the nose on your face forty years ago has become little less than religion on those plains today. Cotton, our Lord and Master, King Cotton. But it’s got to be irrigated. Another division that stood between the Blanco and Dollé Richardsons was that, simple as that: dryland, Coolie almost never went out of wheat and when he did it was to feed, never cotton; while old Tom Baylor could not shake the old ways—cotton, dryland cotton in a country where rain one month out of whack would drown the little plant, while to see dry the next and the next after that and the next and the next after that such cotton-planted land would blow sand, a desert.Then water came, pumped out of the vast Oglala aquifer that underlay the plains, and turned Coolie back to the cotton, the old ways, the old farming, the past he was escaping. It turned him to the dirty, messy business of irrigating; the tricky, sleepless nights of running twelve wells, pushing water down quarter-mile rows, to be sure to be there, four in the morning, to move the twenty or thirty suction tubes on along the open ditch from the rows watered— right to the end and not over into the bar ditch—to those rows still dry; and that raging pump motor, twelve of them, all running fulltilt 70mph, sometimes six weeks straight, till your mind burst from the din from the hellish monster set outside your bedroom window there at the Home Place. It was all that that gave a man used to the simple, clean, quiet life of wheat and what water there was that fell from the sky his first heart attack, trying to dam up a busted ditch, that gave him to dream of moving up to the Dakotas, on into Canada maybe, trade off all that good irrigated cotton land for ten thousand acres dryland wheat, five planted, five summerfallow, that in time drove him to toss it all in and rent out the land and move into town, a ghost in Wamba’s dream, a dryland grain planter putting in time in that town prison paid for by all that watered fibre. To say that Coolie never met a weed he didn’t loathe would be putting it mildly. It was like some kind of floral racism.The sight of one of them standing out there in a field, the field didn’t even have to be his own (see Fistfight with Old Man Cash, p. xxx) and I swear Coolie wanted to stop the truck and slog out and tear it out by roots.While I found them rather interesting actually and, after I had forgone birds, killing and drawing them, took the out-of-step plant to be in some way kin, as if I were, well, a sort of boy weed or maybe weedish boy. Not that we all got along, boy

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with weed, weed with boy. Consider the nasty goathead. A weed not loved by boy. Botanical hatred—still not strong enough. More like it: a chortling deathcamp commandant presented a field of weedy undermenschen. Hoeing—an activity that was said in some mysterious way to build mind, harden body and temper soul but in fact did little more than bore and blister—this practice I flung myself into at the sight of the goathead weed. It is a vine that creeps flat, thin and wide over the ground. The enemy: its thorn, detachable and steel-hard upon the plant’s maturation. These pebble-size thorns were shaped as they are named: two barbed horns, a barbed beard and a barbed neck. Those four-point puncture makers they invented during the war, their design was surely taken straight off the goathead; no matter how they landed something sharppointed was sticking up, a blown tire or spiked heel guaranteed. And as when living at Blanco, Chick and I abandoned shoe late May not to tie a knot till September, we were at these fiends’ mercy till a good hide grew over sole. Of course every weed had a distinct personality.The joker in the bunch must be the devil’s claw or spur, a weed not much noticed on the ground, but when stepped on it snapped its two prongs up and grabbed onto heel, whatta card—jackinthebox!—the life of the party. My favorite, though not much favored by farmers, was the roly-poly chubby cheerful ever bubbling and bounding along in high spirits, not a care in the world, tomorrow will be another day, the chuckling chin-chucking old uncle of a weed—the tumbling tumbleweed. Of course all this friendly burbling depended on the round weed’s size. Like that weed that Old Man Cash let grow in his field, that which sent Coolie over the road for a couple rounds, a tumbleweed that grew big as a house, when it finally let go its roots I would imagine it came on bout as friendly as a Sherman tank, crushing all in its path. I must say here that I think Coolie has given Old Grouch Cash a bad press over the years. Surely there is some wit or at least scientific curiosity in a fellow who sets out to grow the world’s largest tumbleweed, the world’s first and only tumbleweed tree; then to press on to such class as to have local newspaper out to take graduating weed picture, before it uprooted and frolicked off over to seed Coolie’s clean fields, whatta busy missionary, the ever rolling, tumbling tumbleweed. On then to the careless weed, ever dropping things and breaking them or forgetting to cross its ts, it simply could not care less. And the loco weed, that which would send old Elsie the milkcow off to jump over the moon or give it a good shot; the heart sinks that this might

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have been some form of the weed made famous by my own drugged and dopey generation, that that entire country might have been covered with such a fine smoke; how much more pleasant my bitter boyhood would have been had I known to toss away the classic cornshuck and fire up a loco, weaving from out behind the barn with woozy grin and the munchies. Now to consider the killer weed.Actually not so much weed as a grass and if it killed it did so by the heart strain, hypertension and suicidal depression that plagued those farmers who dedicated their entire lives to eradicating the pest. I mean, this innocent-looking grass would simply not fucking die, it simply would not fucking go away. Nuke the thing and fallout would drift it over to English rosebed; dig out its roots, dig it deep as a grave, dig all the way to China, and there it would be when you got there, a good stand of Johnson grass messing up your rice paddy. The weeds memory turns to now have no names, not really. Spooky weeds, Chick called them, but even that does not do justice to these weeds that lined those country bar ditch roads in those days, that encircled and choked the playa lakes that are scattered over these plains, the weeds that grew to great grasping trees that reached out there at dark, dark coming, their thrashing limbs reaching out to grasp boy and kid sister as they dash for home, dash through this gantlet of rushing, howling, moaning weeds toward that light in the distance, home, the kitchen window, Wamba there washing this, basting that, running for their lives through the lowering dark these two small figures from the past, the mad princess shrieking wild fiendish laughter, trapped ever in her shrieking moaning castle, calling out through the winds and the weeds whipped to frenzy by them that these two, they too will be grasped by thrashing, reaching weed and thrown mad and shrieking into that howling dungeon castle, there to live out their lives, howling, mad, reaching out, out for that light in the distance, home, the kitchen window,Wamba there watching, smiling as her two little ones came rushing down the field road toward her and home, the good queen in her happy palace. The shrieking moaning castle and the mad princess trapped there was the old abandoned gin over by the Gin Place.That was the old and proper name for that half sitting over there beyond the playa lake that makes the northwest boundary of the Home Place, and the Gin Place will be that half ’s name again if I have anything to do with it. See, there is this cousin, Dewey, a real Cousin from Hell, who Wamba has dragged in to run the

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farms now, and Dewey has set out on this campaign of destruction, desecration and demolition, such as, for a start, changing the names for everything.The Home Place, I would have chained myself to mailbox before that changed; sacrosanct; and I think even duncey little Wamba, pushed around by Dewey like a putt-putt kiddie car, even she might have demurred. Or would have stood back in the shadows and let me do better than demur. Her style these days. Dewey this, Dewey that, watering too early, planting too late, bitch, complain, grouse, gripe, till finally I have had enough of it and her and go storming off and out; and then and only then does she step in and make out like it hadn’t been her idea in the first place, well implicit in all her grousing, the firing Dewey if he didn’t return her calls, if he always got his own cotton in before stripping ours etc. More of this Wamba style in its proper place (see I Consider Mommy Murder 32d Time, p. xxx) and stick with these arbitrary, gratuitous name changes for now. Now Dewey’s name-change reasoning is all right so far as it goes, and that is pure-d Dewey, never finishing anything or at least not thinking it out to the end. It goes like this. We have four farms, three sections.The Home Place, a section previously introduced; the Gin Place, a half so called by Coolie, me etc; the South Half; and the Blanco Farm, a second section. Now Dewey came to calling the Gin Place the North Half or the East Half—pedestrian, wishywashy, that says all you’ll ever need to know about Dewey, no poetry in the man’s soul—because sometime during my highschool years 1) the old abandon gin at the Gin Place was finally torn down, all removed, so there’s nothing more there now than a plow parking lot and 2) a new gin was put up right over next to the Blanco Farm and that farm miles away. OK. OK. Let’s have us some Dewey Think. Like: It’s not entirely unreasonable—another of Dewey’s tricks, this facade, this sheen of ratiocination—it is not beyond the realm of the imagination to order a tractor driver and one-way over to “the Gin Place” today and—as there is indeed no gin within miles—that this directive just might, maybe, send this sub-literate to roadgear his John Deere and drag over to the Blanco Farm, this miles away, as indeed a new gin nowadays sits there over the road.All this, to pursue Dewey’s point, causing not Gin Place wheat stubble, which needs it, but new-sown Blanco Farm soy beans, which do not, to be plowed under. Goddit? Dewey’s position on the name change. OK. So. I have made counterattack. My campaign has been, since my primary ally, Coolie, took to wandering around the house wearing three hats, to revive

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the old tradition by displacing these vaguely directional monikers, North Half, East Half, useful but prosaic, quelle ennui, with something with a bit of the nostalgic old, a bit of the sensible new to it.The Old Gin Place. Of course the problem with my longing to return to the old ways in a new form is that, say, what if the new gin over by the Blanco Farm suddedly grows old, ergo—maybe more tractor driver confusion, its possibility anyway. So—who knows? Maybe bumping off Dewey along with Wamba will simplify. On verra. In any case, confusion shall not be your problem now.When the Gin Place, Old or Plain, is spoken of, all should understand that to get there, one does not hike west five miles over toward Blanco, but rather takes the path I followed then, when weeds grew like forest all about and we were small and frightened and not frightened at all, for the weeds that lashed out to grasp us were but weeds as tall as we were small, weren’t they? On to the Gin Place then. Let’s leave the Home Place and house, sis in tow, and make along the field road that ran east from the house over toward the weed-ringed playa lake that stood between the Home Place and the Gin Place, and a swamp, a forest, a jungle it was, that playa lake, a wild that little Chick simply would not be towed through, now bolting as the first nighthawk or hoot owl or bloodsucking bat bursts from such thick weed cover, now she turns and runs not frightened, not frightened at all, back home. Leaving intrepid, surely intrepid, brother to creep forward alone toward the shrieking castle and the mad cackling princess trapped there, the old abandoned gin, still creeping toward that creaking castle comes he, even now that the husk of sheet metal has been long torn down and carted off, nothing left of it but a poor pasture parked with plows, drills, cultivators, the like, still, even now, to that creeping creaking madness comes he. It was my first taste of the past, that old gin, my first sense of something gone and it would never be back. Whatever your equivalent, an abandoned gin or elevator, those made of corrugated sheet metal, would be hard to beat. It was shaped like a ship, this gin, longer than it was broad or tall (in contrast, the old elevators stood tall, thin, squared towers), a ship that once so long ago had come upon a becalmed sea and got stuck there, in a sea that went dead, and from that death became in time land; a ship now locked on this sea plain, captain, crew and voyagers long fled, ship left to drift, an eternal wind giving voice to its despair, loneliness, abandonment by the present. Much had been left inside the place, the heavy

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metal stuff anyway, machines and systems and devices that ever mystified, intrigued that crawling, climbing, clambering boy and would lead in time to his studying to devise such irrationally rational, hard, linked and moveable metal things. Once years later, when such dreams of machines and their tools and toils had long dissipated, I lived before another derelict gin. Not gin, maybe not, as this was up near Canada, on that northern reach of the plains Coolie called our country, we had so much in common with it and its people; maybe an elevator but this elevator boat shaped like a gin; whatever, this shell of structure sat there abandoned, like me and the life I had come to, as far as that life would go without ending, without turning back, up there in the north part of this northern town, up there by the northside tracks. No, not good times that reaching the end, coming north and now turning back. The collapse of the wide world out there, that which I had escaped into age seventeen, that was all gone now; now homeland and only that all about, home even here, two thousand miles north of home.What had brung us to this pass revisited, my new old life and me—an attempt to reconcile with Burr wife 2? She lived hereabouts.An attempt to make peace with them all, Bea 1, Rissa 3, son, daughter, from foeish chum to chummy foe, it was all that—how I came here—and too it was that first toe-dip toward taking the plunge, diving in headfirst, coming home, dry as dirt unless it’s wet. The house where I lived by these northside tracks, so near to Canada, was near derelict itself, filled with skis and skates and backpacks and pup tents and other gear, for the friends who had lived here before had split up and split, gone back to cities or maybe south; and we sat alone, me, this gear and this house near derelict as the elevator there by the northside tracks.About us lay nothing really but that, tracks and elevator; no other houses, nothing, nothing but nothing, a lost place, forgotten by the town clustered over there somewhere, away from the tracks.There was not even a proper town street running into the house, but a path become a trail; it wandered here and there getting to the house, as had the road back home that crossed the Four Section Pasture, that path become trail become road, it too abandoned straight-line geometry and wound gently over that last big piece of native grass there on the Texas high plain.A virgin growth, I suppose the Four Section Pasture was, till Dewey and partners bought it up and turned it into yet another fucking farm. Coolie liked nothing more, before Dewey and his train of one-ways descended, than to drive over the Four Section Pasture on the way to town; and on Sundays we

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would drive out to the pasture and stop the car and get out and be out on that plain like it had been, a good deal of it, when he had first come here a boy. I sometimes felt that Coolie, not a picnicker, wouldn’t have minded tossing fried chicken in a basket and a blanket in the back, to spread these out there on the native grass, have our Sunday meal there, nothing about but some grasshoppers and an old prairie dog over there and the clouds in the sky making castles and monsters and faces and funny forms with no names to them at all. But he never brought himself to it.What would the neighbors think—they might drive by this most desolate spot in the world any moment.Tetched in the head that Blanco Richardson bunch. Spreading a blanket out out there in the middle of nowhere and eating cold chicken out of a basket, like that pasture was some kind of park and they were hifalutin city folks, and all this on the day of the Lord, nothing about as far as the eye could see but the Lord and all his creation. So thought little Wamba and so she infected Coolie, a man once independent of what others thought, with her fears. No, hers was not a soul made for the plain still carpeted by the grass that had stood here for centuries, century upon century; no, she grew a row-crop soul, cotton and cotton alone thrived there, row after row after row of it, and her regular, long-lined fear that we might be seen eating like primitives, like beasts, there on the ground. Nor was her past ours, that too, not Coolie’s, not mine, her past was not like any of ours. Not a field of shortgrass, it reached beyond the horizon. Not this caterwauling tin ship beached so far from sea.Wamba’s past carried the grit of reality, the grit you chewed if you ate off the ground. Something to be escaped from, an enemy to be battled with one’s life, a monster to be slain, a defeated legion taken captive and marched off numb and silent, to waste and wither in the wired camps of forgetfulness. Or simply stand it up, the past, stand it against the wall, raise rifle, fire! and let it tumble dead in a ditch. No blindfold, no last cigaret, no rites. Just kill and do not think about it. Kill, Boy, kill. See Boy kill.Along those lines. 117 Of course they would be excited their first trip back to Arkansas, and I would have it no other way. Mine was not so happy.To them to leave the plains was to leave all they had ever known.To drop off the cap to a land bumpy as a bad boy’s bed. Rivers sluicing like ribbon over it. Dark thicket of tree and brush and their shadow and shudder at a bright noonday calm.They went toward a thing unborn. I toward something dead and buried and now rising from its grave. And new, the newness of it. For

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them an expectation, a wonder, something marvelous, fresh. I, my new, that which was both old and new, going back into something I had never known, had known forever, there was nothing in it but dread of what I had known and fear of what I knew naught of. New. To start. My husband’s proud family; a poor country WAMBA’S girl now a proud woman, married and carrying child, TALE to be humbled again, a country girl once more.The old man, Old Taylor Blanton, was dying back there, back in Arkansas; he had seen me once, when Johnson Alan and I had recent met, even before our courting, but the old man would not be remembering that meeting or me; so that his dying would release me from that one confrontation, its examination and the failure to pass it. Of the rest of that proud Princeton Ark family I knew only two, maybe three, and, who knows, maybe they would skip the grilling, remember my name, not ask—who are you anyway? Date? Serving girl? Not fair this to Babe, one of the two or three I knew, the brother next up from Johnson Alan. Those two had partnered to operate the Texas land before Old Taylor, seeing too many chiefs, had handed sole control over to Johnson Alan. Babe never made me pay for that, Babe kind and easy about such things. A kid brother his boss? He scarcely seemed to notice, let alone mind. Babe could have easily been one of my own, an older brother, Robert James, Autrey, the men of the Dollé Richardsons like that, kind and easy with the world and all the little sisters there.That was how Babe looked upon his brother’s bride.Another new sis to be looked upon gently. But then there was Babe’s bitchy little wife to deal with. Phyllis.Who was she to look down her pointy little nose at anybody, not me anyway. Her people, the Fewells, about as country as you got. Of course her papa had that fancy name of his, Moses, like it was something handed down from Sinai, and to boot he stood a deacon there at the Blanco church. Not half the size of the roaring Dollé church, and made of wood not brick as is the Dollé school as well. But still, Deacon Mose she came from, plain old Tom mine.And she could swish her cute little ass around my clopping clumsy tread as if we were not exactly the same: two little country girls who had bought first-class tickets on the gravy train. Married the rich man’s sons, the rich Richardsons, so nasty folk around Dollé called them—and I mean to your face—and my rich son just happened to be boss, out in Texas anyway, while hers a soft sweet dumpling man who could not care that his kid brother ran the show; left more time

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for catfish fishing, Babe’s true love, and getting out of the house and away from the deacon’s daughter, who was indeed a cute little number, the way she walked, it swished her skirt. Once I tried it, walk and skirt swish, and Johnson Alan asked,What’s up? Throw out a hip or something? Straight back quick to clompclompstumbleclomp you would’ve thought she’d been born behind a mule.And Gerda, the Widder Lawford, and so unlike Babe, not happy at all that her beloved Poppa had made kid brother Texas boss, if I had known her previous to the first Arkansas trip, I wouldn’t bet on her taking any note of me. Not then, not now, not ever. Not to get upset over that snub though.You could be a little dirtfarm country girl, you could be the Queen of Siam, and Gert would look straight through you, she looked right through us all, women.Talk about a woman who talked man, walked man, thought man, and you talk Gert, so in love with her dying Poppa, that was the only woman in Gert, the adoring daughter of Old Taylor Blanton, a king of men and maybe he had been once, when he wasn’t occupied dying.And that sharp tongue of Gert’s—they all had it, all the Arkansas girls, all but sweet little Trish, the only one who actually ever did look at me—Gert’s barbed bite was not at all unwelcome, not always. Like when the deacon’s sassy daughter sashayed up to the dinner table, Gert hardly looked up—Phyllis Fewell, is that a joke? Now one more of these monsters toward which Johnson Alan’s roadster carried us, I had in fact, technically speaking seen but not actually met, as in Howdy Do. Monster of monsters, that was Franklin Crawford. Back then, at first sight, a big babyish boy, some teenager, big enough for it, him slumped in the back of Johnson Alan’s roadster there standing on the road.This meeting occurred right after we had met, Johnson Alan and I, long before our courting, my first setting eyes on Franklin Crawford, this blubbery brat, he wouldn’t even look up from the book his nose was stuck into, wouldn’t even mumble out HowDeeDo, no matter how Johnson Alan tried to tease him into it. Now you take little Roxie, the first of the back-in-Arkansas Richardsons, the rich Richardsons, I ever met, this on that head-splitting gut-clenched trip back to Arkansas to see a dying Pop—Coolie more or less having to drag me out of the roadster parked there in front of the big house—well now this Roxie girl standing there outside the big house, the big Arkansas Richardson house, she looked like no friend to me, like more swish-n-sass sis-n-law to me, but how wrong can you get? Roxie, as I would come to know her, wife to Dusty, boy four of the five, there stood Roxie, sassy and saucy, outside the Arkansas big house, and she

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actually looked at me, Johnson Alan dragging me out of the roadster and making the intros, and she smiled too, Dusty now coming out of the big house, making us four now, two brothers and their two new wives, and if I hadn’t been paralyzed by fear I might have joined in; all of us sure should have been smiling and laughing and chatting away as we four turned toward the big house and the sheer hell that surely waited there for the one of us, surefire little Wamba, she was smiling not a crack, like somebody old was dying therein, just there inside. She had never seen such a house, not to say had ever actually been inside one. It could not have been that much unlike my own first memories of the place, when houses, fathers, all the world is giant and great to you.That summer we had come down off the plain different, going down from it, east, into the rising sun, rather than our customary crossing the plain to rise into the mountains for our summer tour, making toward a red, wearying, softened sun falling to dark beyond the peaks. Now we came east and down into that land so rightly called the breaks; our land, so secure up on the plain, safe from all harm, now we found this new land, the land all about us, broken, battered, tossed and strewn about—and we had never known such excitement! A land mammoths had once trod and in moving over had destroyed. Rivers, we had them, sort of, when you went down into the canyon there south and west of the Home Place, but for a couple springs there was not much running through them but stuck sand; and now we came onto the real thing, rivers that had water running down them, and not just any old river, but a star among rivers we came to, the river, the Red River—they had made a movie about this river we came onto. So the river we crossed, maybe it wasn’t John Wayne heroically pushing his herd north; maybe that river, so said cynic Coolie, had been some Hollywood river, somewhere out in California; still such skepticism made no difference to us—we were crossing a classic. Oh and the bridge over it, the eighth wonder of the world to be sure, kick the hanging gardens of Babylon down the list, make way for this bridge; not the stumpy, flat, uncovered bridges around about our scantily rivered plains, but a great arcing roadway arched over with a spidery network of silver and steel, shadow and sun clashing like swords of knights of yore upon our car’s shielded hood. And on into Oklahoma! a foreign land! and Coolie’s first stop for a beer, you bought it from a shop, like groceries, not dug out of some bootlegger’s Caddy trunk. The stopover in Oklahoma will be

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swept over for now, as it deals with cousins, simply too nice a day, one’s first trip back to Arkansas, to deal with the horror of that, cousins, and on then to Arkansas.The day lengthens and dark comes not long after crossing the state line and the magical sign announcing it—welcome to Arkansas, and faretheewell Oklahoma and adios Texas, all magical names so far as this small traveler was concerned, and thank God for Mississippi, another of Coolie’s cynical cracks not understood at all, not at the time, or Ar-Kansas would be last—and sleep soon came, Chick and me cuddled in the back of the red doodlebug Ford, all that war money and all those Lincolns and Packards it would buy still far, far away.Then waking sometime in the night, a castle rearing over us, the night sweet with something I did not know. Magnolgia, honeysuckle, nightshade, black-eyed susan and dogwood are but some of the names yet to be gathered to make that night’s rich perfume. Someone, Coolie, I can feel him now, they had a feel to them, Coolie and Wamba, to be in their arms, there could have been no one else in the world carrying me into the house, through a darkened kitchen, vague lights and voices from rooms beyond, but we ascend away from them, up a maze of stair, these the fascinating back stairs, up from the pantry with its nook and cranny, up, turn, spiral, bang head, to the small landing before the maid’s room; along a hall then but one wall was missing, a balcony that ran along above the house’s great room, the low lights I had seen only in reflection, the voices heard but not words, now these came from there, below, beyond sight; it was the ceiling, the great room’s ceiling, that’s all a near sleeping boy saw that night, its hanging plaster hung like cave drippings, a sea of small sharp waves turned head over heel, crests curling down like the final whipcream whirl swirled upon a sundae; the sound of Coolie moving over these floors, a polished wood that sighed and creaked under his tread and another of those smells, the night’s house smell rising from its wax; to a bathroom then, no matter the complaint and there was not much of it, for this room itself might have been palace; fixtures, tub, toilet and their various knobs and levers all plump, enameled, an old white, all oversized and round and cool and soft to the touch, while the floor lay covered in a Chinese checkerboard of the smallest tiles, their white hexagon and black borders, a soft cool honeycomb underfoot; Chick in bed, asleep already, asleep still, the bed, nothing known in Texas so deep and easy, you sank into it and its pillow and cover, not to stir till morning; the window left open there and slowly, sleepy came the night’s last call, the first night of the first trip to Arkansas:

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a train passing in the distance, its hoarse call carrying through the night, a call that would take a boy ever deeper, deeper still into this magical land and its magical names and smells and visions and tastes and feelings, a magical place in a man’s boyhood called Arkansas, thank God for Mississippi, we’re not last.To wake first, for I was the early bird, here or at home, Chick still sawing away, she would sleep till noon you let her, sleep like death, and to creep out of bed and creep over the creaking thick polished floor not to the window but a door, a door to the outdoors, two glass doors, that let out onto a balcony.The night before had indeed been foggy, how it had felt and smelled, the cool damp of it, had not been a sleepy boy’s mind softening scent and sound, transferring them, muffled and moist, to imagined sight; at least a mist now lay over the house and grounds, a night fog it could have been, which dawn was now lighting. But now, as the clearing had only begun, you could not see feet beyond the balcony rail; the house’s wall brick, a red so dark it would be brown but for the fire still in it, glowing even through the night’s dew; roofs all about, there, there, just there, just beyond touch, and some now appearing over yonder, these rose steep to spiked gables and were paved with wave upon wave of rounded gutter tile, a polished dark green, this roof tile, and the gutters themselves and the trim about the balcony and windows all wore this same green, wood green, the damp wood afire with all its green. Now a thing, some monstrous shape rises from the mist, a tree, there, only feet beyond the balcony, a tree the size and wealth and spread of which is not known to the plain. The birds have risen with me, the cries of so many of them carrying through their waking or maybe it was only that one old lone scolding mockingbird; everywhere dripdripdrop from gutter, eave, bower and barrel, the night’s fog, the morning’s mist all collecting here, there, to fall away with the rising sun. And with that, first light, to creep back inside, dress in what can be found and let a nightshirt do the rest, to creep then out to the house, mansion, cathedral, wonderland. Back the way we came in last night. Peer over balcony railing, peer down into great room, hall, arena. People and their burnished light and garbled voices gone. Grip waxed floor with toes, disappointing—smooth thin planks not so chatty as last night, there under Coolie’s boy-toting tread. Like to find the jerked, twisted nightsteps, but here now a grand coiling, curling staircase lets down to the great room, a chandelier wide as a wedding dress, shimmering ice, looming over all—can’t resist it. Descend then to this room more hall, arena, vast palladium stage to tiny boy. Fireplace at

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one end, dining area at the other, that half a room itself, one side wall cut back to open onto the hall. Fatty couches and chubchub chairs, furry velvet, slick cool leathers binding them, scattered about that part of the hall that went toward the fireplace, cold and gray now, by next Christmas Eve a crackling glow for family’s gathering.Walls of books and paintings posed among them and at that end beyond the fireplace more double glass doors, and these seemed everywhere about the hall, let out onto a sunroom where early hot chocolate and sugared home-fried doughnuts might wait an early bird come next Christmas morn, his second trip back to Arkansas. Carpets great and small, round, square, the length of a jungle snake whose patterns these short-pile rugs carried or those like them, from Persia and all over the place, places where they fly them. Quick snoop out the front door. That lifting, towering tree outside bedroom window now viewed from ground up, up, up, goes on forever, up, up, up. Such deep midsummer shade beneath the tree, will be come late morning, noon, all day long that afternoon. Ground about its trunk beat bare and dusty, that settled still by morning damp. Attack on nosy boy by cranky mockingbird and on around to back. There at the house side a twin carport, door open into pantry and kitchen inside, then head on back, down a four-lane drive to find at its foot a garage big as the house on the Texas plain. Bigger, this garage has quarters above the dual car shed—two cars for one house—there a light now, Coolie, almost as early up as his boy, rising to the day’s first cigaret, Coolie and Wamba staying away from the big house that night, in those quarters above the garage where the boys bunked as they grew old enough for it, two a time, Teet and Babe first,Teet off and Coolie went in with Babe and on down the line till Franklin Crawford had the room over the garage all his own, a living situation that so pleased the rascal that he wondered, could all the world too, when his brothers went off to farm, sail the seas and fly the skies, could life be like that too, all his own, all on his own. Around the house to the back then, the little deep red Ford parked there, and from the back door came the simmerings and hisses and juicy smellings of breakfast cooking. And a hungry boy bursts into the kitchen to see the largest, blackest woman or any other type person he had ever known. Larramae, this big-to-busting black woman, made this huge, jelly-shaking start at Little Roy, as he was ever to be called by Larramae who had given Coolie his right name too, Johnson, Larramae’s own last name, Larramae Johnson it was, and that settled, that Little Roy was no gypsy boy come to snatch

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a pie cooling off on the sill, then one boy used to damp cereal, bananas, cinammon toast, whatever modern breakfasts Wamba had read were upto-the-minute in her ladies journals, now hungry boy was sat before a plate of things he could only have dreamed to eat first thing in a morning—sausage and ham and a bright-eyed egg and bisquit and butter just churned and honey borrowed from Miz Bizzy Bee, all stuffed down a finger hole in that bisquit heavy as a horse’s hoof, light as a lady’s touch, and grits from hominy and pone from corn, all covered over with a flour gravy stewed from the leavings from that fine spiced patty-flat pork sausage that Larramae and her man had ground and spiced and cured from that big old red hog they had slaughtered and butchered and hung and smoked at their place out at the Old Home Place, the only real home place to these Arkansas Rs, that place out by Mt. Bethel. OK, sure, fine, so the brat in my belly is going to have some boohoo memories of his own, of his own first trip (first remembered) back to Ole Ar-Kansas, well mine, I made that one on my own. He was still there inside me see. Not yet popped out to become that clever, sharp-dressed little shield and sword I would fashion to wreak vengeance on them all. Now it was all left up to me, me all on my own, as Johnson Alan’s kid brother and his flashy new wife—Dusty and Roxie, don’t you just love these nicknames, cute is not the word, you will not be having one, Roy Alan, hear?—there they come out of the big house to greet us, Coolie, former Hot Springs hotshot and his dopey frecklespeckle little country girl with dopey pancake no nickname, no name but Wamba, and they escort us into that hell called a new husband’s home.Actually it’s odd that she came to be something of a friend to a girl like me, Roxie Berry from Little Rock. Society playgirl—she smoked and drank cocktails and swam length after length at the country club and played golf and bridge and tanned well and was said to make money, some pocket change anyway, at these and other games of skill.With her uppity Little Rock family, no worry there, this Rox being looked down on by the Princeton,Arkansas Richardsons or anyone west of Boston. Mother and father doctors, physicians, spent so much of their early marriage in places like China, where Roxie was born. Probably what gave her that Oriental, Jewish look, just a touch. Her father looked a touch that way, Dr. Berry, a small chubby smiling Buddha, those large, lidded, sleepy eyes, you could see it, that their blood hailed from France back when, that must explain it, Roxie said, the Jewish, Chinaman look,

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the general foreignness there was about them. My boy came out in the end looking a lot like them, this strange little foreign devil, his skin so dark it just would not scrub off and I gave it a try. Her mother, the other Dr. Berry, looked like some English grande dame.Tall, imperious, back so straight, carriage perfectly correct, silver white hair done up like it was a crown and it did look so atop Mrs. Dr. Berry, like a silver crown.Their money came from somewhere you couldn’t see. Missionaries on the Amazon or the like, not making a penny on it, and they come back home and move straight into one of the biggest houses in their part of Little Rock and they hung out without effort with them who ran the biggest houses you ever saw anywhere. Not like any missionaries I had known, who bellowed and grew red in the face from it or were pallid and said not a word, who ate nothing on their plate or who ate it all and then some and then took to looking you over like you were some little nigger girl out in Africa, nothing but that grass skirt on.And these so-called doctoring Little Rock missionaries played bridge and went to the country club, just like Roxie, and though they didn’t smoke or drink, they just said these were unhealthy things to do and not a word about the Lord. But then as they were doctors, maybe they had signed up for missionary work caring more for healing flesh than for sparing spirit, the Drs. Berry, Roxie’s folks. And of the three Berry kids, two of them were doctors, too—the boy doing missionary work out west with the Apache Nation and the girl, she doctored near some park in New York City, setting out to make as much money as medically possible, as Roxie put it. I saw them only that once, the brother/sister doctors, Peter and Sam, for Samantha, much later on, after the war.We were out at Dusty and Roxie’s farm, so they called it, though they had nothing but white-fence fields of green rye grass with black cattle nosing over it and a shaded house that looked like no farm house I had ever seen.We were out there on our way home, back to Texas, and we stopped in to say a last good-bye, and during the brief stop a car pulled up in the drive, the Berrys driven down from Little Rock.They all piled out of the car, the four of them, the two mom n pop Drs. Berry and the two kid Drs., Peter and Sam, and then the oddest thing happened. Instead of trooping in to sit around the parlor and visit, as was custom in my family, three of the four, Mrs. Dr. Berry and Peter and Sam, without so much as a howdy-do to anybody, the three of them took off hiking down the country road toward the woods, all talking hard, probably talking politics as Mrs. Dr. Berry was said to be big in it, the

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problems of Negro people in particular.Then it got stranger. See, there inside the house not Roxie or Dusty or Johnson Alan or even the Mr. Dr. Berry who came in and was introduced around properly, not a one of them even seemed to notice this bizarre behavior on the part of the three others.That’s all they did. Pull up. Stop the car. Hop out and start hiking. I had never seen anything so sophisticated in my life. In our family only Lula ever pulled that stunt, jumped out of the car there at Mama’s and hoofed off down the road. But then that was during Lula’s spells, when she was known to leap out of moving cars, anything to get away from Joe Simms, who was putting poison in her food—poor old long-suffering Joe Simms, I so understood his plight, being so country you don’t know which way is up. Once inside the house, the big house back in Arkansas, the four of them, the two brothers and their new wives, three of that four disappeared and she was soon left alone, to be on her own, in that house, so vast and strange it was more like a set on a stage than a place in which to live; and the family members and those married or close to them or born of them and maybe some neighbors and friends, they all moved about and talked and gestured and laughed and called out to one another in the same fashion, as if they were actors, and not particularly good ones, upon a stage.The boys of course went straight up the stairs and down a hall up there on the second floor to pay respects to their poppa, as the old man was called, and then of course Roxie, who had seemed for that minute or so they had met there outside like she might be her friend, at least stand around with her for a couple minutes there inside the big house, least till she got her bearings or till Coolie got back from looking in on his dying daddy; but no, at first opportunity Rox said, Won’t be a minute, hon, back in a jiff, and went off.That Rox did come back in a very short time and then proceeded to be her guide and companion that first day back in Arkansas, till she got her sea legs—and Roxie had laughed at that, laughed as if she knew exactly how some poor little country girl might feel—that was fine and a good thing for Roxie to have done, but still, that Roxie had just gone off to mix herself a stiff drink and come straight back, that was not the point, which was that this poor little country girl, for that five minutes, had never felt so alone in her life. So alone that they all were dead, all she had ever known, ever loved, family, friends, you name it, all gone, even herself, standing there by the fire mantel, the fire’s heat reaching out to warm, cook, burn her, she felt dead. Not so

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much dead as she simply did not exist. Had it not been for me shifting sides in her tummy, she just wouldn’t have been there, could have stood there, clinging to the mantelpiece, invisible, dead, nonexistent; no one ever would have noticed a little country girl in such a house, such a crowd; yeah, now it was but my tiny heart working in there, little Somebody Alan, now it was that second little heart beating drum down there in her belly that kept her alive and flesh and blood and bone and existent—that and the fact that not two minutes after Roxie’s abandonment someone did notice her existence.And of course it had to be the dread Franklin Crawford, he to become her nemesis, the bane of her coming existence, the curse of her life to be, five or six months on, this bullshipping, backtalking, badthinking, beerbelting bullyboy she would ever seek to destroy in me, it was now he, her fear that he might someday be me, who stamped over, brayed, beamed, breathed bad breath bad and belched, Now who who who do you belong to, honey? F-f-f-fu-fu-fu Fu-Fu-Fu–Fuh! Fuh! FREE TONIGHT! that she paused a moment before answering—taking some time to identify the strange hoo-hoo-hooting and the sticky string of fricatives as probable stutter and another time to decide just whom did she belong to, Coolie, Johnson Alan, MrJohnsonAlanRichsonBlancoTexas?—and that in that moment of dumb, Franklin Crawford grew bored with this stringy, speckled little simpleton and lurched off to give someone else’s wife, girl, aunt, mother or daughter a hard time, that well-timed retreat would not save Franklin Crawford or anybody who would dare perform like Franklin Crawford. She swore then and she swore there she would get them all, all the Franklin Crawfords of the world, even if that meant getting me, her son now making his first tumbles in her tummy. Oh yes, our battle was joined early,Wamba’s and mine, back when we both were defenseless, no real way to attack, back when I was the only thing live to her, she all around the only world I figured I’d ever know. The town had two colleges. Can you imagine that, a town the size of Princeton,Arkansas, with Hubbard, out on the Texas plain, twenty times bigger and only Hubbard Tech to boast, and this Ar-Kansas burg with two—well can you just imagine that, such a town with two colleges, such a house with two cars, everybody you met walking around with two names, and further that this just happened to be Thanksgiving,Turkey Day, this the day I had first come to Arkansas, and that these two colleges played a football game on that day, I 90

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can’t imagine anything so fine and foolish as that and further that it was decided that after the brothers and sisters had all seen the old man, had a look at him, that they all together would go over to that football game. Johnson Alan, as she called him still, now he came down from the sick room grim, angry, for he had not known of his father’s madness, had not been warned of it, the madness that in time would come to him and then come again to his lovely beloved daughter, Cheryl Charles she would be named, called Chick. After that had been done, after all had gone up to Poppa or Pop as he was called by the boys, then all together they would bundle up—for this glorious late fall afternoon would turn gray and cool before the game’s last whistle and all the reunion parties at the colleges, they would turn to a night on the town, that drive up to Hot Springs, maybe a midnight supper there, and then the dancing would begin and it would be like when all these old grads had been at school, the Roaring 20s, and not to forget the top-down ride back to Princeton, four in the morning, all jammed freezing into Franklin Crawford’s new convertible. All thus properly bundled up for the fresh evening in store, they would walk over to the stadium. All those fine cars parked all about the big house, Franklin Crawford’s ragtop actually parked up on the front lawn as they called yards in Princeton, Arkansas, here in the better districts anyway, and they would all gather together, twenty of them, maybe more, some arm in arm, some singing out one college’s fightsong, some the other’s, thus they would leave all those fine cars back and singing and laughing and clinging to one another and they would walk over toward the stadium’s roar, the game already begun. No, she could not imagine that either, not any of it, that first afternoon back in Arkansas, the ease and the arrogance of these new people, her new family, her first powwow, so said Johnson Alan smiling, with his tribe of Richardsons, the Arkansas Richardsons. Oh her list of things not to be imagined, it grew and grew. Imagine such as: arriving at the game whenever they chose, and leaving it too, at least Franklin Crawford stood up at halftime, after the baton twirlers had marched up and down, announced in his braying stutter football a sport found not interesting and with that had walked out of the stadium. And all those fine cars left back at the big house, the insolence of that, and the self-esteem of a walk through town, when back home, back on the Texas plain, only drifters walked and those poor boys there at the Blanco school, they walked home from school but then they didn’t have 91

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any fine cars left back at home, did they? No act of insolence in it to them, they had to get there, they walked. And Johnson Alan, he walked too, if you want to call it walking; every evening he would take that walk after supper—stroll being the word I would more prefer but for the feel of degeneracy and decadence it has to it, like when Jesus walked he was not one to saunter, say, but then Johnson Alan’s walking was done down the field road, he did own it, not at all like walking out on the county road, public property, for all to see, like a poor boy walking home because it was the only way to get there. No, Johnson Alan’s walk was to take him over toward the cap, where he would stand and look down into the breaks, into cowboy country, look east, back toward Arkansas and his true home, and even if I knew it, that Johnson Alan’s walking was a pining for a way his life had been and never would be again, none of those busybodies over around Blanco church did. Why if any of them ever saw Johnson Alan out walking of an evening, I could just say he was out looking over crops.And if that Miz Nosy Parker ever cracked there warnt no crops in the ground that time a year and that old Model-T pickup would git you down that field road just as good as shank’s mare and back home agin doublequick—why then in reply I would simply give her an arch smile, smiling if I could bring it off like Roxie sometimes smiled at braying, stuttering Franklin Crawford, smiling with irony and pity, that is to say, and reply that it was simply in Johnson Alan’s blood, walking.They all did it back home in Arkansas. It was a family tradition, walking where you could drive. And that snoopy busybody, that deacon’s wife from over at the Blanco church, why then it was that she would make her own smile, arch and ironic, and that said it all. That smile that would lay this little country girl low.That smile that said:Tetched in the head, they are, that tribe back in Arkansas.All their fine ways and proud lives and loud talking and newfangled ideas—it was going all around through the Blanco church about those country people who had moved up, that for all their money and their fine houses and long sleek cars, still: a tribe not right in the head. Old Taylor Blanton lay there dying of it, their madness, while they left their sleek and shiny cars back and walked over to the game, getting there late.The happiest afternoon of my life till then, maybe ever, that fine, crisp, crackling fall afternoon that he and I, Johnson Alan and I, walked arm in arm over to the game, his family frolicking and chattering all about us, as if we belonged to them, Johnson Alan and I and you too

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down in my tumbling tummy, as if we all were part of their family, even if they could be, shall we say, eccentric at times. You can’t see it, can you, down there inside me, you can’t see a little country girl sitting in the dorm Saturday afternoon after Saturday afternoon, the football stadium just over yonder, the roar roar after roar come mocking into that lonely college dorm—no date agin,Wamba Lane? Jest answer the hall then, couldja hon? Ole high highschool harry said he’d be calling—he’s down at A&M. I said jest call me Lane, bich. I’m droppin that country girl Wamber like a hot tater, ever I scare me up that one date. . . . And they were off, all the hall heroines, off to walk cross campus with their dates toward the roar of the crowd, so if we’re a little late, the dried fall leaves crunch underfoot, all the other hall honeys and their dates frolicking and chattering around like they was this one big fambly, bit funny in the head at times, there’s that one boy turning cartwheels across the campus lawn and somebody else, some girl wearing his hat . . . and then there at the window watching you duck mighty quick cause that hall hussy with boyfriend in ever college in the state, now she turns to wave bye-bye—no date, too late, lil Wamba Lane, an don’t fergit to answer that hall phone, girl, an all look back at that dead empty winder where lil Wamber Lane has just been spying them and lies now sobbing her little country girl heart out there on the floor, left all on her own, all alone. Well actually not true. None of it.Well not all of it. Just: general picture: true. Details that are wrong; I am not, strictly speaking, left alone in my dorm room. Billie is there, not on the floor but at her desk, and it is she doing the weeping. I am merely growing smaller and smaller inside. I could no more go to the window and look out toward the stadium and all the girls and their dates crossing the campus, strolling, laughing, chattering as we now stroll, laugh, chatter toward our game, now, a lifetime later it seems—back then, a life, a lifetime back I could no more have gone to that open window than I could fly to the moon. Lest I be seen. So sat there at my own desk, Billie there at hers, weeping, growing smaller and smaller, like there only a few minutes ago in the big Arkansas house, when Roxie had gone off for a drink, growing smaller and smaller still till Franklin Crawford comes over, brays a pass like I am a servant girl, growing smaller and smaller, till I get so small he turns away, bored. I could have been so small I was just gone. Little Billie, back there at the dorm, my little sis is weeping cause she can’t go to the game, maybe

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weeping for somebody back home, maybe both. Maybe she had this crazy crush on this Dolle boy or maybe he was from over around Cedar Break no cedar no breaks back there at home in highschool. Maybe the boy comes from a better family, landowners say, like my Johnson Alan, and she didn’t stand a chance. Sure.They had had that one date once, maybe it was that Sadie Hawkins Day, that one day the girls ask the boys and the wrong girls are ever asking the wrong boys and it is this joke, and they go out for a walk, maybe down to the drugstore for a soda and after that quick sip she is dumped back at the boardinghouse before dark, before the rich farmer’s brat goes off in his car over to see that girlfriend who don’t ask him he asks her, she lives there across town, not in no boardinghouse just across from school, and that night Billie wept for she loved a rich boy so and her heart was broken. As she weeps now still, there in our dorm room. It was she see who had been there at the window, silly little Billie, not understanding or maybe just not tending my good advice—on game day gal you don’t go nowhere near that window, you at window you ain’t game, no date, just wait, got it?—and there he was again, like back in highschool, this rich boy from Cedar Break crossing the campus with his date, a girl from our own dorm maybe, and little Billie didn’t even know this rich boy was in town, she didn’t dream, see this rich boy had gone off to Texas or SMU maybe, she didn’t know what he was doing here on Bible Belt U. campus, he had no business being on this all-girl all-Baptist campus, and little Billie gets so excited seeing this rich Cedar Break jerk crossing the campus with this Bible Belt Bitch that instead of hitting the floor like I had instructed, poor naive still-so-in-love little Billie calls out to this boy and waves.An this rich Cedar Break turkey, and he walked like one gobblegobble head and long redwart neck throwing forward like he was looking over the ground for grain, now he turns around and waves at Billie.An calls out Hi! Gobblegobble. And he doesn’t even recognize her, or he doesn’t remember her name, or maybe he knows I’m down here at Bible Belt and he can’t see through his beadyred turkey eyes which one of them pore lil Dolle Richardson gals it is and so he just calls out Hi! And Billie, this pretty little simple sweet countrygirl, she still won’t give up, won’t hit the deck and crawl back to her desk on all fours like there’s snipers out in them campus woods, now Billie waves and calls out Hi! Remember me! Billie Richardson from out Dolle way! And the rich boy and his rich date, she a pink sow to his turkey gobblegobble oinkoinksqueesqueesqueel, they laugh a laugh and turn their barnyard snouts and go on to the game.

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And then, it is then at long last that my sweet baby sister, oh I babied her too, I was little mama to her too, only three years younger, now she crawls away from the window and comes to her desk and sits weeping as we all, Johnson Alan and I and Dusty and Roxie are there too, up ahead the weaving, braying Franklin Crawford, as well, all Princeton, Arkansas Richardsons now, we all stroll on over late to the game, chatting and frolicking as we go, but there is one of us looking back, she won’t even have to turn her head, this one, looking back to that little country girl from out around Dolle sitting there at her desk, growing smaller as her baby sister weeps away, smaller and smaller still. The boardinghouse there in town, she and Billie lived there the last two years of highschool, when they finally left the Dolle country school and came into town for those last two years, and as they were too poor or there were so many it made them poor, they boarded there at Mrs. Graves’s big old house, there across the street from the town highschool. She was three years older than Billie, but she had stayed out one harvest too many, to tend the little ones and do the cooking and cleaning now that Mama had fallen into her spells, those spells when Mama sat and did nothing, did not even dress or wash or even brush out her hair, and that one year she had lost, that same year bright little Billie had jumped up a grade, they came into town that year for those last two years of school with but a single year of schooling the difference between them. Mama had always ruled the kids’ education, while Papa gently advised. Lula had presented no differences between them, the oldest girl and child, a bigbone rawbone country woman who wanted no life but country life and had no truck with Mama’s schoollarnin ways, she stayed out that last two years of schooling, quit after the Dolle country school had taken her as far as it could go and took to helping out Papa during that spell when Mama moved nowhere but from bed to rocker and back, worked like a man in the field, Lula did, worked like a char in the kitchen after that long man’s day till she met Joe Simms from over beyond McAdoo and moved off from home, her education long done, and so there was no deciding to be done there, not with Lula, who was to stay at home, who go on off to school. She would look back years later with bitterness, regret, no little guilt that the first decision made by Mama, Papa advising, was that decision to hold Robert James, the oldest boy, out of school. Even Coolie, no great admirer of the Dolle Richardson mind (exceptions: Cady and Horace Chas Homer, that good-time Charlie),

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even he recognized the scientist, doctor, maybe the good vet Robert James would have made. And instead Robert James went and made a middlin farmer. But then who is to say what is lost/what won in finding/ not finding one’s calling.The arguments she and I had,Wamba and son, debates, discussions, I found myself arguing Coolie’s loss, his son’s loss, for surely by not finding a calling (me) or finding and giving it all away (Coolie) we have lost our way in life, life without a calling. Of course her argument, that which sent me into rage after a rage, was that Coolie had lost nothing, wandering around the house with three hats on, while I would be found if only I would come back to the plains, make up with little baby Jesus and take to dirt farming where I had dropped it stone cold, age eighteen, the day I left home forever; or till now, now that I am back; and in my argued rage missed the point I should have swallowed; that there are other things in life to find than a calling or, more to the point, there are callings that reach beyond one’s mere professional existence.And so that seemed of Robert James. If he agreed with Mama and Papa and stayed home and farmed those two years he might have been away at college and then was given by the Mister his own quarter, and then a half, of his own to rent over the road from Mama and Papa, he did not do so as sacrifice, but accepted, sensibly, graciously, the hard facts of their hard life.The boys who have the brawn and back for farming must stay and work the land, while the girls who do not, they shall be the ones to go off and labor with their minds.That this law was broken hard on the heels of Robert James staying at the place, Autrey, next boy down, being sent off to seminary college, caused no bitterness among any of them, not even Robert James, for all longed for one of them to make a preacher, one of them to take up the Lord’s word, the profession that old Tom Baylor had given over to farm another’s man’s fields and raise a fine family. She then—little Wamba now taking up her chair and coming across the dorm room to sit there with her sobbing homesick, lovesick, lifesick little sister, to sit there and hold little Billie in her arms as she, little mother, age ten, had so often done to heal some pain, a scraped knee, a slap from Mama in one of her moods—she next would be called to sacrifice her learning, to leave the girl’s Baptist J.C. after two years, let little Billie go on over to the campus, on over to the four-year school where boys and girls studied all together, while herself, little Wamba, would be the one to go back home. It made sense again, and if she would from time to time voice what a fine scientist or historian or Bible scholar Robert

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James might have made, never did I hear a word, not a peep, of protest that she must relinquish the study of the French tongue, and a language it was she so loved, and let little Billie stay on in school.There was at that time, you see, an opening there at the Dolle school, and board at the school and room at the teacherage were provided, and so much, then, of her salary could be 1) sent over to Mama and Papa and Robert James if he came up short, for he was taking so much of his time from his own land and giving a hand to Papa, a slow man growing slower, and after that family donation maybe 2) there would be enough left over for a present, something to buy them a proper coat or the like, then 3) a bit to send on down for Billie and Autrey, him down at the seminary at Ft.Worth; and as the Dolle school board demanded that the new teacher be of a certain maturity and age and she was that age and Billie was not, that was decided then, she would be the one to come home; and not even Mama, who was the one to make the pledge, much believed that promise, that once Billie had done her four years at school, that their places would be changed then and little Wamba could go back and finish out her own four years of the language she so loved, while little Billie could come back and herd around the country boys who were driven to coming into the Dolle school for what purpose they knew not. But then her anger, bitterness, resentment (for simply because a thing is forgot don’t mean it never was) was soon lost, for it was there, her second year at Dolle school she met this gentleman from over Blanco way—Miss Richardson, I would like for you to meet Mr. Richardson—at a function, some square dance or cake walk, at the school, and at that first sight any idea of signing away her third year at Dolle and going back to some lonely weeping dorm room were ever forgot. But it wasn’t easy.You make it sound all so easy, with all your easy remembering, it’s not easy at all living through it, doing it, being there. That’s all your easy remembering is worth. Soft when it should be hard. Bitter when it might as well have been gentle, forgiving. It’s worth nothing, this easy remembering, remembering for somebody else. Wait till later, wait till you start remembering for yourself. Then you’ll know, you’ll know what it’s like then. How it can be hard when it should be soft. Forgiving and forgetful when some bitter, riled memories are called for. You want to remember that walk for me? That first family walk back home, his home. I’ll do it just fine. Sure, out of that stuffy,

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spooky, big old stupid house, who needs a house that big in some dump like Princeton, Ar-Kansas, to get out of it and get walking, walking through town late for the game, me on Johnson Alan’s arm most of the time, when Franklin Crawford wasn’t yakking the talktalktalk he was ever yakking, yakking businessbusiness, who would get what now that Poppa was dying, now that he would soon be dead, sure, why not, let’s remember that walk and call it fine. It was all right. Out in the fresh air. Franklin Crawford not quite so loud, not sounding it anyway, out of doors. And Roxie.Whenever Johnson Alan and Dusty named Turner were taken off, Roxie came over for the rest of the walk, the sisters Gert n Boots n Rosalee Annie going on ahead, to be up there with the boys, like they had as much business in the family’s business as the boys. And the town we walked through, it was all right. Little junky here and there and some old big trees that looked past their time, could have used a trim anyway, and all the signs of sin, the town being up close to Hot Springs, where it all began, a fallen Eden if there ever was one, and more big old houses and only old moneybags and his cranky wife living in them, no kids anywhere, as if kids were forbidden, shunted off to childhood like it was something you found on the wrong side of the tracks, and it was awful hilly too for a town, streets up and down, up and down, no reason for it, just running up and down to be running up and down, and then, after Roxie gave me such a dangerous shot out of her purse flask (and she carried a pistol in there too, such a dangerous, friendly girl!), then, after a second hit it all got better.The town. I near closed my eyes and saw it anew.The streets and the buildings and houses on them hanging on for dear life to these hills—now I knew where I was.A town in Switzerland. Somewhere in the Alps. Somewhere where they speak both French and German, my lovely French and the German I would be learning when Billie came back and bailed me out of that Dolle dump hic pardon school.And I would be then a French major, German minor—have you ever heard of anything so grand? No university could turn me down—B.A., M.A., Ph.D., I would cross the world, a French major, German minor, other langues falling under my learned lance, and there, in my Grand Tour, I would come to this very village high in the Alps.There is a picture of it still in my grammar.The first French grammar I ever owned.The picture that so carried me away those long lone afternoons in a room in a dorm in a school made for poor girls only, girls who would take their two years and a certificate and tuck tail and run back to that one-room school (at Dolle, two

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actually, big-time compared to Blanco) and be glad of it, glad of a job when times were hard and crops lean and Papa a slow man slowing down and Mama just sitting there day long and rocking while one of the little ones brushed out her hair—a picture of a village high in the Alps, a picture that took me into it, to a place where they spoke to me in French and German both, everybody a French major, German minor, a place that knew not those long, lone afternoons in a room in a dorm, the sounds of people walking over the campus, their chatter, frolic and banter coming up to the poor country girl crouched at the window, watching, hiding as she watched.And now in that village high in the Alps, a man is walking along the street, walking ahead of her, away, walking away from her, and now the man stops and leaves those others he has been walking with, their banter, their business, and in stopping he turns back and in turning back he sees her and the fine Little Rock girl she is with and he smiles and he waits for her and he says her name and now, now she is well-fortified by another shot from Rox’s flask, he takes her in his arms and they waltz over the bumpy, clinging streets of that village in the Alps, waltz away to a fine great house, a chandelier for every light, and all gather about their wedding dance, all raise glass in santé to their swirling form, two now made one, a third held tummytight between, all crying out their names, their glory, their love, happiness and yet more happiness to come, a happiness that can never end, that late afternoon late fall, walking through a town that, if you have had another hit from Roxie’s flask that dangerous girl, and now narrow your eyes to boot, a town that might have been a village in her dreams, there high in the Alps, walking arm in arm with the only man she’ll ever love, walking late toward a game, her first trip back to Arkansas, major French, German minor, a child, a boy, her son tumbling and twitching in her battening belly there below. Sure, why not, let’s leave her there on a high note, walking through town with Coolie, late for a game, actually not so much arm-inarm as, after the shots from Roxie’s flask, hanging on for dear life, trying desperately not to clopclopclop along like a redback mule, trying to figure out how in the world Roxie did it, such a small thing striding along stride for stride with striding Dusty and not making a sound; but if we leave her there half-tipsy, three-quarters happy, and one hundred percent clopclopclop, it must be noted that that first Arkansas trip, like all the others, had its ups and downs, was not entirely a bed of roses.The game went fine, some-

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body won, someone lost, more shots from Rox, some practice smoking, little raw talent displayed, near choke on the French inhale, but then the cocktail parties and a dances and nightclubs there she went down, swoosh like a diving rollercoaster, what with Coolie, or Johnson Alan as she was still calling him in those days, going off with his old college roomie, now a famous reporter all over the world, whose namesake this writer, her son, would be, and there was that clingy thing in the green dress, some of her was in it anyway, and Coolie off for hours with the bitch or twenty minutes anyway and Roxie now nowhere around or jitterbugging her socks off and there was the lipstick smudge on the collar when Coolie did finally return, but then Coolie’s old roomie now reporter and couple dozen others were seen during the evening with clingy thing’s paint all over them, the gurgling bawling Franklin Crawford gurgle bawling about the kiss spot on his boxer shorts, and then the moonlit convertible ride back from Hot Springs, cuddled asleep freezing and toasty in her sweetie’s arms, the brief cop stop at which Franklin Crawford, who had been self-anointed world’s 1) fastest 2) living 3) safest driver, learned that he was definitely 1), just barely 2), and dead last place in the history of the internal combustion engine so far as 3) went, and on then to the night in the honeymoon cottage it was called, the apartment fashioned in the room above the two car garage, where all the boys had lived, from Teeter down to Snooks, when they got too big for the big house and their britches, and that was fine all fine, even if she did feel that their not sleeping in the big house was surely some kind of statement, like before Teeter first lived here these above-garage rooms had been servants’ quarters, right?, but then all that was forgot in some loop-the-loop lovemaking, and then came morning.The hangover. Her first and last hangover. Someone had left a fiery clanging gong in her brain. Open eyes? Close eyes. Sunlight breathed a furnace outside window. Could not swallow. All that region had petrified. And Coolie, he who had done all this to her, he lay there snoozing away. And he simply would not wake up. And then when she dressed and crept miserable into the big house, there was Franklin Crawford whistling away at the stove, frying up some miserable concoction, but then this heel-clicking chef—how did he do it? hangovers, just don’t have ’em, he claimed—gave her a glass of suspicious-looking tomato juice and it tasted off too—little vitamin supplement, drink ’er down—and that was better and after the refill it was better still, and then all the brothers came in, even Coolie, the last one in and he the family early bird, and when

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she, homemaking wife with a vengeance, came to the stove to make mommy magic, she was sent back to the table and given coffee, black, steaming, that Franklin Crawford had made from the bean, he actually had this little gizmo that ground up the bean right before your eyes, and when the other girls came in they too were shunted over to the table while the most extraordinary event unfolded, a thing never seen before, these boys,Teeter, Coolie, Dusty up now, they all pitched in and did up the breakfast, Franklin Crawford, she had never seen anyone learn to cook so quick, now in no time at all he was frying up French toast, shell crisped brown, inside the bread a heavenly meringue, all sprinkled with powdered sugar, and there was basting bacon, never before cooked to such delicacy, not too chewy, not too dry, just right, and maple syrup drained from a tree they owned themselves. A tree out at the Home Place. Not our Home Place. Not the place that Johnson Alan and I had made out on the Texas plain and had called it that too, the Home Place. No, this was their Home Place. The Arkansas Home Place. The Mt. Bethel Place. The place this extraordinary family called home. A place no outsider could ever call home. Even you should be able to understand that, even if you weren’t there, boy-making down below, you won’t be going out there to Mt. Bethel, not for years yet, and even then, years on, it still won’t be your Home Place, it won’t be mine. No, that hell they called the Home Place, the Mt. Bethel Place, that will be their Home Place, his Home Place, not yours, not mine. His. Theirs. Just the way they said it.The family.The older kids. The ones who had lived out Mt. Bethel and could remember it. Rosalee Ann down through Johnson Alan, Coolie he finally made me call him. They remembered it, remembered living there before Old Taylor came and built the big house in town and moved them there. It’s in their voices, you can hear it. Mt. Bethel, the Mt. Bethel Place, the Old Home Place. It was like that afternoon, after the family business had been done, there would not so much be a drive out into the country to see some old beat-down house, but a pilgrimage to a shrine. Some holy place. Jerusalem, Mecca, Fort Knox. And the family business meeting, there at the long table in Old Taylor’s den, that did it too.Tied that rope of fear around my neck. Maps and surveys and title deeds spread out all over the place, I was servant to them there. Bringing coffee, water, emptying ashtrays, more drinks, matches, whatever, they snapped a finger I jumped, they called out I toted it in.And the talk overheard while serving—the talk that was them

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divvying up what was left of Old Taylor’s empire, who went to Texas, who stayed in Arkansas, who got what out on the plains, who wanted this or that back here, back home—such talk had never been heard in my life. Nothing like it. My family had never known such talk. What decision were made back in Dolle, such small, so dire these decisions, these Mama made, Papa advised.And I’ll tell you, you kids, you kept your mouth shut, even the onery Lula, for the most part.This Arkansas powwow and all its conflab, it had me frozen over like a tank goes solid ice when it comes a hard winter. But then on that afternoon’s drive out to Mt. Bethel—she rigid as that frozen plank next to the languid Coolie, Franklin Crawford having handed around bottled beers at the meeting—there came a change over her, a relaxation, an expectation, a thankfulness that she could but dimly understand.A memory she did not know she had.A childhood she did not know of. Oh she had heard Mama, Papa, Lula some, talk of the life they had known before they had come out to Jack County in north Texas. That early life somewhere in east Texas, the piney woods, Papa called them. Blackland, bottomland, land so good it was better than all the red clay Georgia ever dusted up. Now she was going back into those piney woods Papa had remembered for her, like he had remembered the red clay of Georgia for all the children gathered round. Now she was going back into that place she had never been, not even in memory, back into the east Texas blackland Papa had so longed for, the Georgia redclay that Mama scoffed at, and any such memories Papa might have of dragging a mule through that black gumbo botttomland, a plow fixing itself to that fine redclay like it had been set in cement. It was this memory she had never had on that drive out to Mt. Bethel that day that turned something deep within her mind, deeper still, something within her heart. Something that would one day turn me from killing her, this memory she had never had. It had been dry that fall and the roads through the woods ran narrow and straight and the fog that had lain over the roads that morning, these mists had long drifted off and the dust rose over our cavalcade, four cars in all, and coated them with its fine yellow powder, the yellow of the roads, this cloud to reach up and cover the trees with our dust as well, now turning these woods all along the narrow, straight road a fine, sickly, deathly yellow—they might have been coated with ash, only some snatches of green, some bright, some dark, to be seen far back off

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the road.Too, smoke from the fall butchering lay heavy around the clearings, there where the butchering was done, all blue haze in these hollers cleared in the woods, and the light that lay over them, the men’s old work clothes and caps, the bellies of the great pots, these all hazed blue and dull black, all black but for the men’s faces that turned to our cavalcade, but for the bright winking red fires there underneath the boiling pots. Actually, now that she thought about it and turned to look back, the hogkillers’ faces had been black too. Probably smudged from sucking up all that hogbelly smoke. But she was a fool to think this black made up of smoke. Fool not to have been forewarned that what all these ritzy rich white folk had in mind for her, this poor little country girl, a white nigger to them for sure, was her final humiliation and only that. But stunned by love and hangover she rode on in the racing car, all the white folk in the car chatting and babbling and guffawing as they do, and suspected naught.They passed a church, some riotously rhythmic stamping and singing going on there, and even if the white folk in the car hawhawed at such highspirited hymning and slapped a thigh and spoke some dialect, still she did not get it. Not even now, with little pickaninnies lining the road, standing back bigmouth and bugeye to watch the whitefolkmobile go racing by, not even with every face she saw black, and black from birth not boiling boar, not even then did she gird her racial loins and make her face as stiff and white as it could possibly be. In fact she was so gaga goofy that she smiled and laughed and waved too at all the black little’uns laughing and waving and racing the dust as the four big cars raced by.And then there it was, there it sat, there by the turn in the road, the Home Place, the Mt. Bethel Place, the old house where so many of these white folk in the racing cars had been born, and upon seeing the Old Home Place all the white folk in the car grew solemn and quit their kidding and joshing and made their faces white and stiff as they could make them. Like they were approaching a shrine, a holy place, and taking it very seriously.When in fact what all these long white faces meant was that the joke that was to be pulled on this dopey little country girl was just now coming up. Like that moment just as you are lowering your fanny toward whoopee cushion there hidden on your chair, how all your buddies sitting around, moments before they had been lighting farts and trading punches, and now a hush falls like they were back in church—that’s what this silence meant.The calm before—the whoooopeee! And sure she fell for this sad-sack act hook,

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line and sinker, didn’t she? And how could she not? The house they now slowed to, it was their first house back there at Dolle, the house they had come to, leaving Jack County and coming up on the high plains. And it was all painted and trimmed and there were bright little flowers shining from the beds all around the front porch, everything all bright and sparkling like their Dolle house had been kept up, back before Robert James had had to leave home, to go over the road and batch there on the new land he was renting, leaving their old house to go unpainted now, year after year, till now its sidings were weathered a soft blank gray, like back before Lula went off over toward McAdoo to marry Joe Simms and never came back to plant her black-eyed susans and bluebells and the glowing orange marigold she had so carefully tended before.Yes, that memory misted her sight as the cars stopped and all got out and she with them, for with all these fine white folks, rich and fine as their Mister back at Dolle, now in coming back to their own old house, they were bringing her back too, back to the old house, the home Mama and Papa had made them there on the Texas plain, on over toward Dolle.And then it was that the joke hit splat tween teary eyes, so tearing in fact she couldn’t quite make out what all the long-face white folk had now, of a sudden, taken to whoopin’ n hollerin’ over. Something up there on the front porch, it would seem, for the direction of their pointings and mirth landed there. Larramae! Larramae! all, even Coolie beside her, were crying out and laughing and slapping hand to thigh, hardly a whitefolk thing to do, and now somebody grabbed her and hauled her up the steps to this fine old settin n swingin front porch, one like they had back home, back in Dolle, and then, as she came through her tears and the crowd of whitefolk around the front door, there stood Mama, like she always did, standing there at the door and letting the world come to her, be it the Mister looking for rent or a child with something skint, everything about this woman, all of her just like Mama, big and fat and a little frowny, except that this Mama was black. Black and blacker than any smudge soot ever made her. Deep, shining, glistening black. It was then that she knew she had been had. It had all, everything, the big house in town, walking to the football game, the topdown ride back from Hot Springs, French toast and crunchy bacon, allowed to eavesdrop on family business if she seemed to be serving, a joyful tour through dust-yellowed woods, included in that holy of holies the trek out to the Home Place—all, it had all been designed for this moment and its single purpose. And that? Why all these

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fine white folk bringing her out here to her own home, the place back in Dolle, a reminder, a little tweak to let her know just who she was. Pore lil country gal. White nigger. White trash. Pore white trash. And now the tearing eyes were gone. Now she let go and bawled flat out. And now Johnson Alan, as she called him then, laughing without making sound, laughing kindly, it seemed, not laughing cruelly, with derision and contempt, not at all, now her new husband drew her to him and drew them both through the crowd of white folk gathered around black Larramae, gathered there like they were back the children that Larramae had raised and cooked and scrubbed for and had switched when bad and had gathered up in great meaty black arms when hurt and had done all those things for these white children a mother would do, loving, scolding, bossing, sighing and having hope for them, as surely and sweetly as had they been her own.And now that Coolie had got them through that crush of grown-up white children, now that he had brought his new wife to meet the big black mother they loved and feared as surely and sweetly as their own, now, in bringing her here, now he finally spoke her name. Wamba. Wamba, he said. Wamba. Wamba, the big black woman said, her memory going so far back it went back to Africa, to a time she had never known. Wamba. Wamba. And she took this poor little country girl to her, this white nigger, white trash, poor trash and my mother, me twitching and turning in her tummy below, she went to this big black mama as if she were her own. Child, mother. Black, white. Fine, poor. Trash, Pharoah. Mama, daughter. All the rest of it was forgotten, that first trip back to Arkansas. Nothing else to remember, now that she had remembered that. Wamba. Her name. xxx Well obviously much more on this subject later (see Names, p. xxx). The point being now—how do you kill a mother with a name like that, even if she is a Baptist? If I have learned anything in this journey, driving back down deep back down into the dark heart of the plains, it is that one simply cannot commit mommy murder feeling qualmish. Or you had better not, as it will drive you crazy. Take it from me. Weeping a year. Sitting here by their graves, a pistol showing dull on the car seat beside me. Bugs lugging off the French fries and burger I have tossed out the window, the whiskey going down etc etc. Not that she wasn’t a racist —that fine African name notwithstanding—that is, if giving it a try counts. But to tell the truth, I’m not so sure that trying, in such as racism, counts for much at all. In matters of serious import, surely it is only in

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consistently producing the goods that one can feel any claim to achievement.And she simply didn’t have it in her, simply couldn’t pull it off. She had been raised in a colored folks, colored people household, but when was finally convinced this a racist insult she gave it up; though not without reluctance, for of all the terms that black and white and everyone else have come up with for people of African origin, she felt this, to be called colored, had the greatest dignity to it; what she would have preferred herself to be called had she come from the people of Africa. Nigras was big among her bridge-club buddiettes during the LBJ reign, but as Prez went on to call ants and aunts as well, ain’ts, the mother who sweated blood drumming such countryisms out of her children’s vocabularies soon returned to Negro, no matter the feel of the northern know-it-all to it. I do not think she much ever cared for black, as most of those so called simply were not all that black, not all of them anyway, and that colored would not only be gentler, the more dignified term, it would also be more accurate. She ever had trouble getting a tongue around Afro-American and perhaps dimly perceived the linguistic illogic therein—surely you are either one or the other—but her bridge-club pals again came to the rescue. Make it Afros and you could kowtow to all those liberal uppities and have insult as well, like who wanted to be member of a race named after a hair-do? But looking Miz Sara in the eye, the woman who came to help her clean, Miz Sara with her shiny ebony tight-wound crown of hair, she simply could not connect that in anyway with some kinky tumbleweed bush six yards around. Of the minor directly racist epithets—the chuckly junglebunny, the friendly coon, such a cute little beast, masked and always washing, and there in the Top Ten forever so many decades, the familiar darkie—she found such to be male talk, not in the least chuckly when uttered by woman or girl. And only once, but that one time, did I ever hear from her the dread nigger and in saying such a look of panic came to her.A look of fear. Guilt. Pain. She had uttered a blasphemy, committed a sin, said a crime. It simply was not within her nature, within her soul, this mindless, stupid, criminal loathing and despising of someone of another color skin, hair kink, eye slant, nose bend. I do believe that she had never thought such a word till that moment immediately after having said it, and in saying it, ever regretted it. OK, class. She was the landlord’s, the squire’s wife, and she demanded, or at least suggested, that some obeisance might be made to Coolie by way of a certain respect paid to her position. But at heart she was no

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more into class superiority than she was racial. She was possessed by an egalitarianism that being MizJohnsonAlanRichardsonBlancoTexas simply could not snuff out. It was only Coolie’s pride of place (and dormant racism) that prevented her welcoming people of all classes and colors into her house to sit at her table, a door that her father Tom Baylor had left open till Minnie MacCready had slammed it shut. I know: classic white middle-class patronage, what I have to say, what all the white Baptist hausfraus said—that Wamba, whatta Christian, she lives the Word, treats that colored washwoman and them pickaninnies like they was flesh and blood, etc. But that was, in fact, the case. Miz Sara, the black woman who came to help, as Wamba ever put it, and the two Mexican women, Rosa and Sally, who followed,Wamba really did treat them as friends dropping by to pitch in, as country women did when she was a girl.You got your washing in, canning put back, you went down to the Wrights or on over to the Russells, see if Big Mary or that late-rising Roberta needed a hand. Money in such cases proved an embarrassment to her. You don’t pay friends, but after a couple free work days Miz Sara came straight out and asked for some and it finally worked its way into Wamba’s mind, friends as they were, these women were hire and you paid them for it, it was a town tradition.Then, seeing their living conditions as humble as her own upbringing, she swung the other way and started paying half again the going wage. This lasted no longer than Miz Sara working for fun. The Baptist ladies gathered quick and sent preacher into the breach. “When the Lord saith, Charity begins at Home, Sister Wamba, He was in fact speaking of the House of the Lord.You get that Coolie Rich’son to tithing down to Brother McDannell, that bookkeeper we got down First Baptist, and he’ll see the colored church—my how they do sing, how they raise the roof—get their cut.” But if Wamba did knuckle under to that race/class system—pay ’em just enough they won’t come rob you a yores—she did not always buckle under.The photographs of Miz Sara’s grandchildren, and Rosa and Sally’s children, that were displayed about the house: take that one graduation shot of beautiful black Lila in her white gown and mortar board off to TSU on scholarship, about the first of her or any other off-white race of our town to be so provided, that studio portrait sat atop the TV console, right alongside like shots of Chick and me, and no matter the raised eyebrows of the all-powerful 1929 Study Club or the sardonic smiles among the Bridge’n’Brunch crowd, there little Lila’s photo remained—she had

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first come to the house with her grandmother, too young yet for school and still could read well enough from the Good Book to the two working women. I understand. I hear you talking. So one white woman treats her colored help with decency, showers some affection on the little ones—such patronage only goes to serve racism and class privilege, deepens those divides rather than bridges or destroys them. But your perfectly correct theory is simply not so. It is wrong. If we are ever going to win these battles against place and prejudice, it shall not begin in senate or jury room, but rather in the hearts and minds of those like Wamba Lane Richardson, those who simply see no such differences among human beings. So some are black, some poor, the Lord has let it go on and on now and as the Lord is all-powerful and His wisdom knows no bounds, why sure then the Lord musta intended it that way and to meddle with the likes of color and cash, that would be the Debil’s work and on and on—and so my little theory comes to grinding halt there at the front steps of the Baptist Church, the neon sign spread out there over the front doors and there are plenty of them and it is a big long sign. Still. Still, if I am wrong and your notion of goodness decreed, fairness by fiat is correct, still it is there in the human breast that good and fair were born, where animal first had any idea of such things, and only there that the final battle, the battle to make that fair head and fine heart rule, will be won and all such wars put to an end. Though the Wamba Wars of Religion will form the climacteric of this dark journey into essay, memory and imagination (see “How to Bump Off a Baptist,” e.g., p. xxx), I think it would only be wise—I mean these hostilities did begin early on, before I ever dreamed I was destined to fight on the side of right, light and secular might—that some trenches shall be dug now, fortifications thrown up, supplies and materiel stockpiled, just in case the heavenly horde decides to fall back from full frontal attack and lay siege, a strategy advocated more than once in their bestselling desert warfare field manual, see part I in particular. Now not saying that it was solely Baptistism or even religion generally that drove me to creep up on Wamba’s house in town that night, mommy murder burning a hole in my mind; there were other factors involved; but still religion and Baptists might be called the linchpin to a boy buying a six-shooter to blow what should have been simply a beloved, dopey, good-hearted little ole lady away. And it was precisely that, their Baptist

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perversion of what is good in Man, that indeed is what sent me on my murderous mission. If I could not wipe out them all, then I could plug that one. My funny little mother, as Chick ever called Wamba after we had started to grow and she to shrink.And these Bapto-Christian crimes committed against the good in the human heart are nothing compared to those mocking savageries done upon their very founder, the guy who thought it all up, the Son on the three-spook board, that heavenly XO, Little Baby Jesus. Have you ever actually read the Bible? I’m not talking the lead-off hellish Hebrew bits—good prose you’re reading the Jacobean big hit, but as for philosophy I’d rather be a mullah—but don’t stop there, flip on back, back to the back of the book, where everything the Field First says is printed in red, was in the first Bible I ever had. If you can actually get that far and then can actually read this stuff, and take what J. C. is saying at face value and don’t get jesuistical and try to pass off “the eye of a needle,” that through which a camel may as easily pass as a rich man into heaven, as some sort of slang for those four-lane dromedary gates they had back in the walls of old Jeruselem—it is then that you will see, and in no time flat, that what this saintly, peaked, feather-tressed fairy was was in fact a beatle-browed, bushy-head, raving commie. It’s all right there. It’s in the Book. Blessed be the Meek, blessed be the Poor, the Weak shall inherit the earth and somebody else along those lines gets the Kingdom of Heaven. My God, dear Father and the Holy Ghost, it’s all right there and in English, no wonder it took two millennia to haul the papist pricks kicking and screaming out of Latin: this is revolutionary stuff. And here a Sunday morn come all these sinners, plump and painted, pampered and powerhouse—not a meek or weak ’un among ’em—to a gather at the gates of the local musclebeach First Baptist, there to—but no, enough. Mere hypocrisy. Small beer. Minor-league ball compared to what these preachers and their bepreached are up to and that, the real Baptist evil, is control. Now. Right. Nothing new.What every religion from old Confucius down to Est West has been up to, but there is a difference, in these Bapto-Protestants.The Muselmen—they want you hitting the deck in the right direction couple dozen flops a day. The Jews—actually a pretty quiescent gang among these evangels, they only want the world out of their hair so they can get on with being the Chosen People. And mighty Rome! Surely the greatest empire the Almighty ever stood on armored horse, all they really care about is monopoly trade, couple thousand jungle outposts where they can dump lefty priests, and that Club

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Roma may do something in the Ligue Italia this year. But of all these— may they long to roll back history or fob off couple gross second-knee doormats for the praying season or make you hottest item at the wiener roast—not one of these fanatical fiends has ever come near the Bible Belters’ ambition. Heart, head, your cods, even your soul—let the others scramble for them. The Church of John the Baptist wants nothing less than your vote. So? What’s the big deal? A sheet of ballot paper, it’s theirs. They can have it, never touch the stuff. But there’s a catch. See, once they have that roll with all its little boxes and Xs, once they have your vote they’re not going to want to give it back. OK. Fine. Smile there on that fog-bound deck in La Jolla, chuckle away crouched in your muggersieged penty in Gotham, sneer across town hitting .450 in the synagogue’s slo-pitch softball league—sure, they’re not really out after you, are they? Or are they? Nah, couldn’t be, these white and sweated hicks. All they want is your vote, your country.Your redwood jacuzzi, the 8rmvupk, you feel like going to church the wrong day of the week—fine. No problem there.They’ll just have your vote and they’ll have your country and leave you skipping right along, not a care in the world, happy as a sandboy, right? Sure they will. After, of course, you’ve been dunked forever in that Great Baptistry in the Sky. Huey Long once noted that when fascism comes to America it will come wrapped in the American flag.What the old Kingfisher forgot to add is that our Fuehrer, our Big Brother, will prove a Baptist preacher. Or maybe just a deacon will do. Let’s see, had a list here somewhere. But where? Gone.The bartender wiping out my jigger, eyeing the clock, maybe he’ll remember, I’ve told him all. Oh well, time to hit the road anyway. Buy the gun—there’s a drive-in pawn shop down the street, don’t even have to slap shoe leather fore you slap leather. Road beer and the last burger, the same—all delivered to your car window.Then on out to the cemetery to get this business done. Getting late and can’t be late for that. But first one for the road. A classic horror, it simply dwarfs all others.War, death, madness, peace, boredom, sadness, all and any cower before its majestic terror, the bonerattling, mind-numbing, heart-fluttering frightfulness of—The Cousin. There were hundreds, probably even more, but we shall be dealing with a mere five here, leaving Dewey, Killer Kin, that Cut-Up Cuz for later, when I shall be considering tossing him into the pot with most mommys and a good portion of the world’s preacher population.The Five

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Cousins then.Well, technically speaking the number’s accurate enough, but by my own precise definition there were but three of us—Chick and Lilith called Lily in spirit and fact really these marvelously kind and understanding little sisters. The three true, perfectly awful cousins then: this writer, of course; Alvin Richarson Redd usually called Alvin Richardson Redd or, familiarly, Alvin Richardson Redd; and the dread Camilla called Camy called Cousin Camy once and that person still carries facial twitch from the whiplash. So.There were Chick and I there in Texas; Alvin Richardson Redd in Oklahoma; and Camilla and Lily in Arkansas, all Arkansas Rs,Ark-R parents, respectively, Coolie, Boots and Dusty; their spouses, respectively,Wamba, Alvin Redd and Roxie.Three weeks a summer we toured then, the five of us, a week passed at each of our respective domiciles. To characterize these three individual weeks would be like describing life on Venus, Earth and Pluto, that different, maybe more different than that. Texas, I think we most found that a blandly pleasant time.We were still at the Home Place out near Blanco then and with Wamba doing her SuperMom act, that word of this might filter back to Boots and Roxie, word that, if we didn’t go swimming daily at the country club chez Rox, then neither did we slave away under Boots’ camp regime,Wamba proud that for seven days we performed near zero chores and paddled about the horse tank out back, a water hole so unique to our visitors that it might have rivaled the Princeton, Ark. Country Club, club sandwiches poolside, golfing and lazing and tanning and tennis going on all about, had only Rox been there tankside to bring all to life, as she ever did. Leave back Wamba and the Texas week for a time then—for they shall have their excitements, their trials—to consider Roxie and Boots.An aunt from heaven and one from the marine corps, surely. Now one would hardly describe Roxie an angel—or a nicely naughty one if so.To describe her beauty, there must be attempt made at it in hope that in words’ failure some lingering impression of this extraordinary woman will survive. Her mouth was large, mobile, plastic. There were many teeth, and these were large and pleasantly protuberant. Lips a fine velvet opening to that toothy smile that said so many, many things to a small boy groping toward manhood. Simply one of the most amusing, seductive, intelligent, expressive features ever placed anywhere on any human being a small groping boy has come to know and find all lacking that, that mouth that could in a moment make a clown’s frown, Cleopatra

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smile while performing something sultry, sophisticated and sirenish with a cigaret. A thick short brush of silver gray hair, silver gray since don’t know when.Tawny skin, down along the forearms tanned light as baby fur. Bug eyes. Great orbs ever wandering, rolling, smiling, trying ever so hard to look severe—generally toward bolshy daughter Camy—and, though snapping and smart, there was always that amusement there.A tiny thing really. Slender legs—arm slender—arms slenderer still. Movement both graceful and awkward. Bent, beautifully bent nose. Black thick arched eyebrows, an overarch that said it all when Camy,Alvin Richardson and this writer were up to making our usual trouble and nonsense. Fine swimmer, better at poolside tanning, better yet at bridge, and best of all—how she shuffled the cards, a great arcing span flying from hand to hand that not one of us, not ever in our lives, could come to emulate. Southern drawl that simply cannot be pinned to page. Quick and easy, warm and sharp, mocking, forgiving; so elegantly did Roxie speak, the blurred exact sound of it, she might well have hailed from a foreign land, adept, expert, fluent at our tongue but for that slightest accent.Ah yes, but where on earth or globe would one find that land that had issued Roxanne called Rox, Roxie Sox Richardson née Berry, began in China, to end in Arkansas, lived somewhere in between, maybe but in a small boy’s dreams of being a man. Boots has done been sketched in, I believe, as has Wamba maybe, I forget. Arkansas, the house there was blue. Chalky blue, the chalk blue we see in kindergarten and never again, a soft blue that looked it might come off on one’s fingers at the touch and sometimes did. The siding neath this furry blue some wide thin planking, trim around the windows, doors and base the same, this trim white, the same chalky, dusty look and feel to it of the blue siding, and the simple fencing around house and joined fields, they were made of the same plank, painted that white that looked as if it might come off to the fingers with a touch and never did. A farm, a ranch? Nothing like a farm out on the plains, a ranch down in the breaks. Thick woods stood behind the house and outbuildings. The woods Coolie ever longed for out on the Texas plains, ever trying to cut such longing into a joke after Sunday dinner, out living on the plains with a country girl who had every lunch a dinner, every dinner supper, him looking out the window at those plains, you could see them, feel them, hear them, taste them, know they were there, blank, blighted, treeless, tract-

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less, know them to be there beyond the thickest town hedge stuck up around the coolest house your wife has built in town, know these plains were sitting there outside as sure as Sunday dinner; and after every Sunday dinner he would push away from a table of chicken fried, broasted, roasted, boiled n broiled, and he would say it, he always tried to smile: Now if only we had a piney wood just there, behind the house, to take a walk in. And this place did, there in Arkansas.There stood a woods back of the house and the outbuildings, these a shed and a stable and a small smokehouse, not looking like they belonged to a farm or a ranch at all.A clearing had been made there at the house, maybe three hundred yards long, stretching north maybe, maybe west; with the country roads here running along through these woods any which way they cared to go, nothing geometric or of the compass to them, you didn’t know which direction the clearing stretched; only that it went on for a couple football fields and ended there, north or west, at the hand’s house; this house old, unpainted, lived in by a lone old black fellow who wasn’t much of a hand at that, he had come with the old house and the clearing and would stay on till lightning struck the house one storming night and burned down the house and ran off the old man, Buck he was called. Again words fail.To call this grassy meadow, this clearing, a pasture, it could not be so; least not to a wee dryland, flatland traveler; to him it was none of these, it was park. There were great trees, pines, I suppose, here and there, so great indeed were they that one didn’t much think of them as trees, as there were no branches to deal with within fifteen feet of the ground and as for the possibility of their being climbed, a climbing boy dismissed them as trees and thought rather their trunks massive columns, these to support the roof nature had made over this meadow, pasture, park that indeed had no sense to it at all of being a clearing, something that had been cleared; but rather that it was something that had been covered over, roofed, enclosed from nature; a natural cathedral, amphitheater, arena sheltered from the sky; for there simply was no sky, no sense of being outdoors when one crossed to go on over to the woods or down to Buck’s with a message or to take carrot to tease Tony the paint pony to halter; one felt then this place less something man had cleared, a clearing; no, one thought it then more a great hall, one made by nature, left back to shelter and secure a small traveler come from a land made of nothing but that sky overhead, that eternal emptiness ever hanging over his head. Even this place had to have its name, all must be named, and was called variously and casually Buck’s,At

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Home, or the Pasture, for at times it became more than a children’s park and extended corral for the pony and work had to be done there—a place to pen a bull that must be kept off the herd and there was always the yearling to be fatted—and those men who came to work there or sought directions to it, needed that name to guide them there.A field lay over the road, called just that, the Field, this a place of work entirely, the herd was kept there, a place where children and their play were not allowed. Not that they would have gone there on a bet. Not with the herd there.They were black, these cows there; huge; black again; every last one of them horned like bulls; big black bunched shoulders; and those horns, not the harmless treelimbs sported by docile longhorn herded cross movie screen by kindly cowboy; no, these horns spoke of a boxer’s hook and cross, the short, muscled, lethal horns that juggled matador down Old Mexico way, to spear them in the end like so much campfire wienie; and black again were these killer cows; even their steaming breath rose black smoke, had furnace blast to it, tasted close of brimstone and the devil’s work—or it certainly seemed to that first day back in Arkansas, the visiting plainsboy rushing to the white-washed fence to see all the black cows scattered over the green fields.And now to stand back in memory, back away from black cows strewn over the emerald shamrock shining green of the pasture, the field, the park as it unrolls down toward the silver glint and twinkle of a car passing along the Texarkana highway, this mid-distance; beyond that the dull, distant outline of the aluminum plant, battleship gray its squared bulk, with puffing smokestack puffing smoke to match, puffing its gray into a sky azure, once was, now gray going black—they had such blue over there once, around the aluminum plant, did before the gray going black block plant came in. Back then, let’s back off, back away, go back. Back over the road, back from the green field and the black cows hoofing it over to eat you there. Back over the road that winds through woods like snake or river, a road pale yellow, dries to a powder under noonday sun, but now, with evening’s mist coming in it’s gone rich, an ancient amber, old gold of Roman coin gone soft underfoot after the rain.Turn then back, toward the chalk blue house just there, the trim about its doors and frames flat white, it knows no shine, the rail fence about the house and pasture whitewashed the same. On then around back, toward the pasture, clearing, by whatever name we shall call it, dark and quiet now with night and fog coming in; but at midday its grass floor rippled with buttered greens, the pine canopy filtering noon sun through, these dappled

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lights danced then over a green gone black now, night and fog seeping up. The backing woods too a tangle of greens, shadow and sun among the trees playing their games, and the trees themselves lending in, some dark, old, some bright and young, and if this would be fall in the fall ever the dazzling redleaf fire of hardwood scattered among the evergreen. Look down the clearing now as night comes on. There at the foot, Buck’s house, old, unpainted, its gray walls soft as fur, the bronze flare and glow of a kerosene lamp now lit and damped down; then out back another fire, back beyond the old barn, Buck butchering that old sow hog or the fatted calf, the blackbelly cauldron bottom sizzling red, the crimson glow of heated iron in the blue coming night. And now it’s here, now it’s there, that white phantom coming over the pasture, that would be Dusty, just shirt and face showing, all there was of him to be seen coming in from chores, the ghostly pale face and shirt coming toward the house. And beyond that another specter moves; splashes and bars of white connected to no human form, now they rise there by the woods and now we come closer and closer to it still, the halter held behind the back, the carrot offered, Tony, here, here boy, to the pony, a paint, only the whites of his crazed colored coat to be seen in the gathering dark, the only color about now but blue going black, the carrot held forward, Tony, here boy, its orange like a beacon drawing the grumpy little beast to halter and one final breakneck bareback turn of the pasture before true dark and suppertime. Colors not your mania,Arkansas scarcely your idea of heaven on earth? Are mine.Twas Jonanna, w to Teeter,Taylor John, Calwisegal, who put the noshin in the noggin. Let her tell it. It was late fall, around Thanksgiving, there at the Blanco Place back in Texas. Brown, everything brown, the brown of earth, of weed and stalk and sleeping tree, browns pale, wasted, washed, browns going hard, toward iron let to rust, toward black, all bleached and drained of color, nothing but earth, the browns of earth.The sky, even that wild clash of blue and cloud glazed white and gold gone now; gone too the red sunset afire, the black, blueblack wall of storm coming, that cracked by lightning’s ragged scar, now even that monster was gone, leeched, pale, bleak, it stood there without color too. And Jonanna looks out the north window at the Blanco Place there, looks north down the road to the old Wright Place, Short Charlie and Big Mary and their brown-eyed girl all gone, left for another place and better luck, the house abandoned, barns left to fall and rot, all brown, faded, all color, hope faded, beaten out, and Jonanna cracks:

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“This looks like hell to me.” It was during one of my subsequent and not infrequent tours of UT down in Austin, a colorful place, that I picked up a local mag and read a poem.This penned by some local prof/poet, he on TDY in Texas from his nativeland, someplace likewise colorful, maybe Vermont. I read this poem. This prof/poet drives out into west Texas, late fall, around Thanksgiving, and he returns to write of the hellish landscape so long ago observed and condemned to perdition by Jonanna and me. And this prof/poet, this poem, the way he describes all these browns, it makes it seem that this hideously ugly, desolate, absolutely hopelessly arid, stunningly flat and featureless tableland out on the west Texas late fall high plain, that all this was in fact a place and a time of beauty. I read this poem again. I read this poem again.Talk about memory and art at war. Look. Somebody has got to be right, somebody wrong. No middle ground. Not out on those high plains, winter coming on. I drew some conclusions from this. One, that if this poet wrote what it was really like, driving his Saab through this autumnal moonscape, he’d probably lose his cushy job at UT. And this art of poetry, it may be a beauty bull, but it’s got a roaring bear market by the tail in truth.Truth beauty, beauty truth? Just weak eyes and a big heart. You know, a poet or you’re in love, not again. I never was actually a commie. Just something to piss off everybody at Coolie’s funeral. A conversation piece. It broke the ice, it got the ball rolling. But neath the jolly jesting there was some point to it, Daddy Marx’s class consciousness.That there is indeed a way of thinking of people, of looking at the world, that there are differences among/between us other than age, race, gender, intelligence, talent, nationality and lingo; that there are people out there who are just like you, or very similar, in all above departments and are still, somehow, different. Sure, it has something to do with car, house, clothes, the school kiddies flunk out of—and what year, brand, size, league, how many indoor toilets they got going. But neath all this, what this difference really is is what you do during the day; when you kiss hubby/wife goo’bye and you’re off to work.Work.That is what this difference is. It all started in Oklahoma, this class consciousness. Even I find that a touch bizarre. The town first, before we hit the factory floor, the Oklahoma town. Bigger, much bigger than the Texas town we would move to when we moved to town, bigger than Princeton,Ark., pop. 10,000 +/-, though not up to Hubbard’s high five figures, scraping six by century center. But big

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enough that that’s what a bus-ridden little visitor from the plains first noted; where Alvin Richardson Redd lived was a big town and he never let you little hayseeds forget it. Ouachita. Of all the magical names I may come on, surely this name for this perfectly ordinary mid-size town ranks tops or near. Indian, as are so many of our magical names. Don’t know if it has specific meaning but it moniker for a tribe that ran there along the south and east shores of the plain, the spelling made by poet or someone French, compared to the prosaic Wichitas of Kansas and Texas. And the pronunciation, do you make it as much like good ole Merican Wichita as possible,WAH-she-TAW, or keep the mystery, the French, the Indian to it—Wa-SHEE-ta? This small debate and its importance shall be made much of in time (see “Oklahoma, the Discovery of Communism, Politics, and Uncle Franklin Crawford’s Introduction to the Sport of Arguing Just for the Hell of It,” p. xxx), but for now there is other unknown terrain stretching before a boy and another name, another magical, mysterious name and the new world being built all about it. Vaska.A movie theatre. The wife of the man who designed it.The shopping center and the suburb that had taken to rising all about it. Oh yes, my late-born friend, once these dread things too were as magical as a land that knew rivers that ran water through them, mysterious as rising to look from one’s bedroom window direct into a deep damp dark forest, there. But the Oklahoma house, the abode of the Redds, Alvin, père, Boots née Richardson and little Alvin Richardson, the pencilneck knowitall, before that discovery. Houses, though each entirely different, said nothing, made no statement to me then; the meaning of this difference among houses only striking home later, when we went to town and built Wamba’s house there; only then it was that I knew that houses bragged or blushed, blustered or bumbled as surely as cars. (Refer immediately to upcoming and all-import “The Three Houses,” p. xxx, an essay, an understanding, maybe key to it all.) It was a square, dumpy, neat little house, the Redd house, sprouting dead square in the middle of the middle class, maybe now slipping touch toward lower m/c with Vaska and her spread going up, spreading out couple blocks away. Nothing special, the house, a place to be inside, nada mas. What was in fact special about the Oklahoma house was its front yard and the drive that led back to the garage—as pleasing and strange to a boy as touching a house, its plank siding, and having one’s fingers come away chalk blue.Actually probably more so, this small front yard, this made

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not flat as front yards would come to be when they became lawns, but rather two plump, bursting, fresh-baked buns, made two by the sidewalk steps rising like lust between them.And as for the narrow, steep drive that burrowed into these swelling hillocks, diving deep and long between them, till all about but their swollen mounds had been taken from view, only the dark, damp pit of the garage yawning beyond, the car grinding, whining, groaning, straining toward it—such were the sensations, the experiences, the wild and frenzied, softly now, now spent, promises that actually, beyond expectation, still interest a boy become man, even now. Knew nothing of suburbs then.Their strangulation and their suffocation and their stultification were not dreamed of by children come down off the Texas plain, children come out of the blue house out on the Texarkana highway; but these dreads, these dreams were aborning there in Ouachita, in Oklahoma, such names, the names; birthing then only four blocks over and west of the small, sturdy house of the Redds, father typesetter, mother taught some sort of school, son a whizkid, Latin, violin, he knew well how to say these names, such names, names aborning, names dying, in Indian, French, in tongues forgot, tongues yet to be writ, and what these new names meant, the old did not; these suburb visions and vanities that rose to light that region around and spreading out west from the Vaska, the theatre, the names, such names, and that gathering of shops that had not yet been named, would in time be named the Vaska Shopping Plaza, the names, their names, such dead and deadly names, such killer and kissing names. No matter. Our excitement approaching the Vaska was real and should have been. A summer evening, still blue not black, walking over those four blocks, making west through such sturdy, stodgy streets, and then there comes a corner and there, in the middle of nowhere, there one is presented a lighted, an excited place and gathering—it has no business out here, nothing but sturdy, stodgy little houses out here: the Vaska, tricolor neon for its vertical name, the cars circling, crowd milling, it all, its lights, clamor and speed belonging somewhere downtown, a downtown that will be in time choked and starved and shut off and away from us by the Vaska and her plazas and malls and omnis and -plexes. Same stealth, cunning and betrayal to be practiced on city center by the housing development(s) blooming out west of the Vaska.Take a bike ride now, it’s morning. Peddlepeddle past the sturdy, stodgy, etc., hi Vaska! what goin on tween mini-movie mogul and Ruski architect wife, hm? bike back to vacant lots, empty where PigglyWigglyRexallBuster-

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BrownMidasMufflerDairyQueenZales!names! will grow, and then brake, scoot, slide around corner blinded by billboard and there it lay, stretching to an admittedly rather nearby horizon—suburbia. That force—forget auto and telly—that would drive an open, gregarious, communal culture into isolation, an inner loneliness. An entire nation, you got the bucks, staying inside, not going out, sure as hell not going down there, not down into that town pit where they hang out, them that don’t have the liquid to buy all that suburban loneliness, them that walks or buses and listens to the radio or reads or actually has a chat, one of them actually having a talk with another one of them, those who have been driven to stay, not let leave, down in that American graveyard, the old neighborhood, downtown. Have gone bust several times from starting out till now, but it was that first time I went under that I learned most from being in the red.Young, just married, one of the kiddies arrived, both of us, Bea and me, we hit the want ad life.Wanted: work: anything.Wanted: workers: but not you. Still can’t look at the back of the paper, not drinking coffee, smoking a cigaret at some greasy spoon, not without that empty stomach tying up, knotting, all that wanting and there’s nothing there they want. But, you see, after crawling out of the white collar blues, it wasn’t so bad, being white collar down and out. You were young, a goodwife pulling her weight and then some, the kiddie safe with granny.There was, see, that lure, dropping down into the lower orders, an excitement to it, a danger, an unknown reaching out its tentacles, calling from the rocks, bring your little craft in closer, closer still, she called out, come in from the sea, you’ll be safe and snug here, in my little harbor among the rocks.Well, it was that siren song of capitalism, come closer, closer still, that I had heard first years ago, a boy, first going to Alvin Redd’s place of work, print shop, to see him work, setting type how Gutenberg meant it set, by hand. There were these things I did not understand that first day paid call on N. A. Jiff Printers, where Alvin Redd disappeared off to every morning, hauled himself in from the evenings.To start: the Alvin Redd that had left the house that morning/come back tonight was not the Alvin Redd we came on there in the back of the print store, there in the shop. OK,Alvin Redd’s shy, suffering smile, no ink would ever blot that out, but the white, well-dressed and pressed gent who had left home a.m./back in the p.m., he and his clothes had picked up various sorts and shades of blue to black, only the dim white smile seeing through.Then comes son Alvin

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Richardson Redd—read Latin or would, play the fiddle or be paid hard cash not to—if he didn’t exactly treat his dad as servant at home they did not exactly pass hours on end at father-son heart-to-hearts, now this little chickenface Dr. I.Q., now he couldn’t get enough of his old man and the work he did, dragging me from machine to machine with a pride that surely matched little G-berg Jr.’s, look at the Bible old dad knocked out and in the wink of an eye.That Boots looked angry most of the time meant odds were she would be looking angry now, but now even I, observer now starting out, saw this anger change. Double and redouble and go on to become an anger of an entirely different sort. Not the usual anger this, the anger of strength—a superior woman born to a world of lowly men—but a helpless, powerless, bottomless anger. An anger that knew no way out of itself.The anger of the weak, the beaten, an anger that knows no hope. And this new anger struck this strong, willful woman at the very same moment that knew the birth, the beginnings of my class consciousness.This when a booming voice called out from the front, the secluded front of the store—for we had come into the back, the print shop, through that back door—a voice calling out for Alvin Redd, calling him Al, no one ever called him Al, not even Franklin Crawford come to visit and argue, not at home, not, till now, anywhere. And dutifully did we troop then through a curtain and were let from a place blue and black and hammering noise into a place clean and white and quiet but for booming voice that issued from a man dressed out as had Alvin Redd this morning, clean and white and hardly quiet, the voice booming away. Al, come on, boy, don’t be bashful, come on out, as had indeed we kiddies and Boots so dutifully trooped out into the front of the store, all there so clean and white and but for the booming quiet. But Alvin Redd had not so followed us, but rather had stopped there at the curtain, looking into the front and staying in the back, no matter the booming voice, Al, come on, boy, come on out of hiding, and there Alvin Redd and his small, shy smile would stay, there at the curtain, the voice booming beyond, his wife’s anger, her shame, her humiliation and degradation crumbling and cracking and casting about her fine strength, her fine anger.The voice booming,Alvin Redd staying there, smiling quiet and shy, at that curtain hung there by class between one and the other,Alvin Redd so longing to return to his world, his work, his class, the blue black humming clattering quiet of his machines, their song and they were calling him back. Al, come on back, back where you belong, we need you here, how we going to run, come on back, into the back, so quiet here,Al, in the back. 120

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Oh other tales to tell of those three weeks, countless examples of their differences, if night and day knew a third those three weeks would have been it (see “Child Labor: Its Three Forms,” p. xxx), but now’s the time to get on the road, get there and get back, by far the most exciting of our adventures, if one discounts being chased by Elsie the Cow and being stepped on by Tony the Pony or that paddle in the Texas tank out back —you shore that wasn’t that old needle-whisker catfish just grazed yore leg?—those bus rides, we children on our own for that fleeting, neverending time, between Arkansas,Texas, Oklahoma, and back.To begin one must begin at the bus. Not the old-line gasburning gawky hogsnout hood upfront and all that racket underneath job; but the diesel, this purring way off in the rear somewhere, leaving driver to sit there right at the bus’s bulging forehead, looking right down onto the highway underneath, pretty close to same view for children ordered up front—avoid them sweatslobber candypushers back in the back—all the world to see from those broad wraparound windshield streamliners, the Santa Fe Chief of the bus world, the sleek Greyhound, the Dirty Dog, so called by the candypushers back there in the deep adult den there in the back of the bus. After bus excitement, traveling alone, age seven to ten, next came an adventure close second: the bus station. Now for the Texas station in the town we would move to when we moved into town, that was standing on the corner outside this abandoned filling station, some old nightwatchman punching a card, you’d get your ticket proper and pay fare on over toward Vernon: standing there waiting for the bus on the corner no different than standing there waiting for the school bus by the mailbox out Blanco way. Ouachita, its bus station was a feast of glamour, glass and grandeur, Grauman’s Chinese, Rockefeller Center, as was it meant to impress such arriving bumpkins.A studied, needless tour to wall of lockers, cafe headed toward bigger things, like making cafeteria someday, baggage room with more cubbyholes than Noah hammered tight on the Ark—all this, the tour of Ouachita bus station provided for, studiously, needlessly, by Alvin Richardson Redd—we hadn’t left nothing under lock, not hungry a tall, grabbed our bags straight out from under our bus’s belly, all ready and set to head on out to the suburb and get into the chores Boots had all lined up, a week would probably do it just fine, we get this tour of the modern, new and neat over with. Not much to say about the Princeton, Ark., station really. Bus pull up, there’s Rox leaning against her forest green Ford, that little station wagon they made then, a 121

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woodie, pile out and grab up luggage in a rush, dart straight to the woodie, stash bags, pile in and straight off to the blue house, everybody has his/her own glass, wash Kool-Aid drippings from that, unpack bags, pickup your own dirty socks, happyhappy to do so for when it’s done it’s off with Soxie Roxie, whatta name whatta aunt, to country club, to swim tan swim lunch there, club sandwiches, they don’t know ’em in Texas, maybe heard tell in Oklahoma, ham and bacon and white breast meat and two colors cheese and mustard and mayonnaise and pickles sweet n sour, you want ’em both, and most delicious two olives, one green and it’s got a red heart, t’other black and stoned inside, and toothpicks stuck on bread brown or white, toasted or cool and clammy, and three pieces to one sammy stead the Texas Two or Okie One, cut them crusts? You say a word to the chef, and to end all they’re sliced not once and straight across, one box made two, quelle ennui, but rather all sliced once and once again, from corner to corner, four dainty triangles thus made, and then there’s your ice tea poured in long tall hiball glass, while come now Rox’s swimming, tanning, cardcutting ladies, her pals, to commence a conversation, these ladies, on matters and ways of life and love and liberties that will keep one small brown boy nibbling a sandwich that could have been long gone long ago, let slender, dark, near girlish Isabella finish that yarn bout the golf pro’s second wife, she and her caddie in a Caddy have just blown into town. 180 On to the bus station then, the bus station of my dreams, a bus station dream. Came the end to our three weeks and time to split apart, two of the three parties to bus their way home, the third, home already, to wave and shout Next summah! Don’t forget to write! the truckin two off. That no doubt the toughest trial of all, that summer that came around that it came Texas’ time, that its week would be the last in line.All the small Tex traveler had to do now was turn around, a step or two, and he was home, already back home and they were gone, them three weeks from heaven, them cuzzes from hell, no more bus to take you home, you standing there where the bus had stopped, waving, waving at the cuz faces, them that had to travel on to get back home, waving waving at those faces there in the back window till the bus made the corner and was gone and all the rest gone with it too, all gone, all them and all their excitement gone and you with but a step or two were left alone, left already back home, nowhere to go but where you are.

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On to the bus station then, the bus station of your dreams.This bus station way back there in the past, way on up in the future, was not one of the arr/dep stations TX/OK/AK but was a changing station, and it was there in Texarkana the change to make that last leg coming or going up to/down from that luscious Arkansas week.There where you hopped on or off, coming or going, that big Chicago-St.Louis-Little Rock-Dallas bus, and hopped off or on one of those dumpy puffing milk-run buses, this that breakloaf puffer n huffer that would dump you off high up on the Texas plain, there at the foot of Aunt Boots’s boot camp, or spirit you way away from such—such sad, joyous little wanderers making that one last, that first bus change there in Texarkana TX maybe AR. But then there are other changes to be made there in the bus station of your dreams cause down the years this station, this change has come to mean so much more than that, so many other places in that one, so many other stages in a life that has come and gone. The buses stopped out back then, in a great shed that was open, the very top of it, to the sky, the buses drawn into angled slots, to rest there, Chick thought, before their next run, horses lined oblique in their stable stalls. Grab what hadn’t been checked into the yawning belly of the bus; so long Cuz Redd, next summah! you be outta the dogpaddle then! he late, late for his OK bus, frantic his checked things wouldn’t come in time to be popped from one bus belly to the next, frantic if only next summah! he didn’t sink he’d swim; bye-bye, bye-bye! then and press on through rear door into bus station, couple three hours to kill, some time to spend, Chick and me. Not much here, not there going in, not much promise for exploring kids. One guy in a cage like bird or con handing out tickets longer than your arm; couple benches gainst couple walls, soldiers, sailors laid out looking deader’n they’d come to be, we have that next war; some vending machines to intrigue, one that told your weight, another coughed up the future; low wide platform, pounded shining steel, beyond that the musty cavern that made the baggage room, bags reaching into the gloom, bags, more bags, stacked and lined and shelved like books in a library, big fat books for big fat giants to thumb and dogear, keep all their secrets hid there; press on toward the front of the building, toward the action, that racket rising like crackling fire of hell, the damned, the mourners calling out their woe, their hallelujahs; couple rooms off the long hall, their doors closed but take a peek; poker players gathered at a smoking table, green plastic visors stuck to darkened brows, a dangle light over the spread green

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felt, all the gamesters looking up, gray, weary, at exploring boy, maybe they’re bus line ticket takers, grip checkers checking tickets to lost n found, cutting cards, dealing n spieling, maybe that’s years and years on; and on then, on through those years and years, down that smoky corridor of adolescence to spring fullgrown into the great front hall, the foremention hell made heaven-to-order for devlish boy, angel sis quaking like leaf, clinging like vine. It was then I closed my eyes, as do I now, lit up my nose, open ears, so much the better to see, m’dear, as I see now.The smells then, there inside the door.Wax, the wax of polish, the wax of polished leather and these sounds. Tappity taptap tappity taptap of jumping polishing cloth, the soft whirr of brush, the voices, the two black men, one old and black as dead night, hair powdered white, the other a younger man, tanned chocolate, sharptalking, talking sharp to the tappity taptap, the murmured laughter of the two seated white men, slick shining boots and shoes thrust out, seated so high over all on their shoe-shine throne, and now comes the final craaaaack! of snapping cloth, the gentle touch to toe, a forefinger lifted there under boot sole—shine’s done, mister. Over across from there, to the left, there will come smoke, fragrant smoke and the heavenly leaf of tobacco unfurled; not here the foul cigaret, its mints and its filters, but the grand cigar, sipping end clipped click, while at the fired end there clings couple inches pale caked ash, don’t knock it free, boy, let all the world’s fouled taste be trapped there, nothing but breath pure as you sniff at the pale rich smoke pulled through; and pipes and their blends, the riot of briar and beech tapped full toward tight, the match struck scraaakkk! and its flame allowed to age and cure of sulfur before, like caressing a lady’s palm, its heat circles gently over the glowing bowl’s blend; all that’s what you know of the tobacco stand, that and the snaaap of the opening morning’s paper, the old Italian, he looks one, he’ll hand over that fishwrap too, dime an edition weekdays back then. Got to have some seeing to go on in, can’t be stumbling now like little blinkies, sis n you. Creep open eyes no more than floor high then and there’s the soft tread under you, that little grooan made on those old boards under you, they no wider than a schoolboy’s ruler and baked brown by age and oil and what the oil has come to lift and let be swept away; and there in the cracks between these furrowed boards, your creeping can see it now, the dank red lines the broom left back, all that’s left of the sawdust and oil, red deep rich as beet, the swamper spread out late, late last night fore he pushed swwisssh his wide longhandle brush broom straight from one end,

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sixty feet I bet, and back again, making no more of such sweeping than a farmer plowing rows, a fisherman trolling the seas. On then, on into the den and you got to pop ’em wide like they tell you at school, the crossing there, stop look n listen, don’t want to get self splatter-mashed by cross traffic, thicker than Broadway and no horns of warning, now that waitress bearing down bearing three lunch specials up one arm, two pies and a couple coffees down the other, hollering hot stuff! making her way from the shortorder counter one side over to the free-pouring bar the other; these planks face off one another like mirror image, look it too, like twins, you blur your eyes and don’t look close as that parson’s wife come in for a burger, she noting close one counter gives out beef this side, the other pours up booze that way; and now duck again; you dodged the waitress going right, now duck the drunk making left, he’s got that hip swivel weave you don’t see outside the Cotton Bowl, and you’re safe on through. All those years no waitress ever spilled a drop, no drunk took notice of you and little Chick’s dart through legless legs. Both you fearless as some Hollywood hero charging Iwo, no worry for loss of limb or life, that’s sis n you, cause now you’re making for it, a beeline toward that temple to monthly print and pitcher, it stands there even now, there in the hall’s dead center, that pyramid of pulp, pulpit and pulchritude, paean to princess, pope and pauper, where all with wandering mind and itch to be there, somewhere, anywhere else, where all those who long for silver screen and the open road and lives they’ve never seen, now they’ve come to worship and now gather at this, the temple to gloss, gossip and glamour—the magazine rack. But not for you, not that stop, not yet. Get little Chick settled in there at the rack, she read glance through the glossies in the movie mags not allowed around the house back home; and that done, sis flipflip study hard America’s holy text, its Bible, its MagnaCartaConstitutionKoran, flipflip Jane and Rock a duo? flipflip Bogey and Marilyn strike out flipflip; and now that sis’s settled, now you move on on your own, on to the front of the hall, toward that great window, that wall of glass that makes building’s front, a wall window to let the fronting street and all its world inside, would but for that plated glass, that glaze of sun and swirl you’ve come to stand before, that window.There are tables put about here, tanned under the morning sun, and old men sit about them, a couple there clickclickclick they’re at dominoes head-to-head, wouldn’t play partners for love nor money, never go near the effeminate forty-two; next on couple more at cribbage and its board, pegs racing about it like

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horses at the track, and their strange litany of score fifteen two fifteen four double run jick jack makes for twenty-one; and more old men, always old men, they’re just sitting, set about like dolls at these tables by that cruel girl, old age, old men now, always old men, old men alone now, reading the morning paper, monks poring over sacred text, must be set to memory case the Saracens storm; some drinking coffee, some something a little stronger slipped in, some just sitting, just looking out the glazed plate glass onto the street and its people and cars, such health and happiness, such wealth and youth to have it, out there, on the street; then there’s one old boy, he turns and looks toward another boy, at a boy looking out that sundusted window tall and wide as a wall, at that boy looking out longing, yearning for the life out there on the street, a life to be had for the taking if only he weren’t this lonely old man, this boy, if only he weren’t sitting there at the window, this boy, sitting and looking out and yearning like he was old; this boy and this old man longing there at the window, if only he were a boy, if only he were old.Turn back then from a boy being old, an old man, he had once been a boy, and go back over to the seven-roofed house they had stood there in the center of the hall, square between the bar on the one side and the short-order grill on the other. And that was what it was built like, like a house, this rack they called it, this standing display for magazines and out-of-town papers and paperbacks and maps and books for the traveler, guides to things to see and what to do and where to eat and how to speak if you’re going far, far away from home and here, like the boy that now comes over to this great magazine rack. It’s built like a house, the magazine rack, with each rack rising slant up like a roof, like a house with seven roofs, one roof set over another roof. And there’s little Chick crouched down on a newspaper stack, half hidden under the lowest of these lowering roofs; looking down, all you see of her is whitearmthinlegs, fringe of skirt, sock and shoe; and she’s fallen asleep down under that roof; now you too crawl into it like the blanket house you make back home, blanket, couple chairs, and it’s so quiet and secret in there and no one knows you’re there and you’re safe and warm and not at home, not at some lonely bus station so far from home, and thus sheltered you close your eyes and you’re asleep at that house deep within your home. So let’s let that be where the boy goes now. He goes home, and he goes out all over the world in getting there, coming home. He knows the guide he’s looking for and there it is, the biggest book they got to read in

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the rack, big and heavy, thick as encyclopedia, this big fat heavy book, and the boy takes two hands and takes that book down off the shelf slanted like roof and now he creeps into his own house there at home.They can’t see him there, feet and legs that’s all they’ll see. No boy there, just a pair of feet and legs, boy and girl. Nothing to mind out for, not for hustling waitress or weaving drunk. But a couple kids off the bus killing time before they go on home.The boy, now hidden and safe, opens the book, the fat thick and heavy book, and it takes him home, takes him all over the world, this book, not a book of words, nor one of pictures, no diagrams, tables, charts or plates nor any mathematical jungles—no this book is a book of places to be and how to get there, an atlas they call it and who knows why, a book of maps, a book to tell you where you are and how to get there, where you aren’t, back at home, wandering all over the world, snuggled quiet and safe and alone in those four corners of the earth, like you are crouched quiet and near sleeping there at home. New Boston, Palestine, Paris, Electra, that’s how the boy will go home and go anywhere over the world.Tokio, Roma, Port Arthur, you got them all too.All those places all over the world you got there back home. Moscow and Medina, York and Utica, Kent and Kingston, Saints Cloud, Croix and Cruz, not to forget Paul, Petersburg and Pedro, from Asti to Athens, Belgrade to Birmingham, Cairo to Canton, all but a hop skip jump from where you live, dreaming you are everywhere, dreaming you are back home. And so you are, dreaming you are back home, already there. It should have been the bus driver, the driver who’ll drive you on over to Palestine or Paris, you change bus there, should be him picking you up half asleep in his arms, while up ahead, there in the aisle, that would be that blueplatespecial waitress leading little Chick along back down the corridor, back to the waiting bus, don’t she sleep, don’t she ever sleep, little Chick? But it ain’t them at all carrying sleeping near sleeping boy, not them at all leading chattering chatty Chick she don’t sleep she never sleeps. No, now it’s Coolie’s arms that have you and have taken you up, and up ahead that’s the nice old woman who sits across the aisle, Chick and her chattering and chatting all the way home.You could hear it all the way there, their chat and chatter, she never slept, she don’t ever sleep, now it’s that lady up ahead leading little Chick off the bus and Coolie carrying you off it and out to the waiting car.And now all aboard come wave at their windows, the driver grins and beepbeep touches his horn, the great lever works the door to and a great suction sighs, the air brakes breath shhhhhhsh, and the

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bus is gone.And there’s Wamba ahead now leading gabby, jabbery Chick on while Coolie lays his near sleeping fallbacktosleep boy over all the backseat and little Chick gets to ride up front, breaking all rules sitting up there in Wamba’s lap, telling this telling that, don’t she ever sleep, don’t she ever stop talking her gabbing and jawing and the tales and adventures of the trip, a movie house called Vaska, a man named Redd turned black at work, the drinking glasses there at the blue house, each his own, drink wash n dry, then out to the country club to swim and tan and hear the latest, the golf pro’s second wife, she’s back in town sporting a new driver, and Coolie smiles back in the mirror and Wamba too, she turns to look back at the sleeping sleepy boy. He’s near it now, sleep and sleeping, and that little Chick she don’t sleep, for three weeks not a nap, she don’t ever sleep, not till tonight when she’s back home, mattress off the floor back on the bed, little Chick too back up there tucked up in her own bed, she’ll be sleepy then. Me too,Wamba there sitting by the edge of our little beds, light low from another room,Wamba talking now,Wamba talking us back home, talking us to sleep, little Chick and me, Chick first, then me, in time me too, sleepyheads. xxx 190 They were married in secret.That’s what they said.You believe it? Me, I dunno.After losing the birth certificate case—sure, you remember that one. It was big back in ’37, ’38.Whenever it was I was born.They got to get their heads together on that one, start counting up to nine, they got any notion putting one past this gumshoe. Right? Yeah.We thought we had that book closed tight and thrown at them on that job, the two birth certificates in one caper.You don’t get it right the first time, see, the night of my birth, you can’t even remember the ma’s name, put down Wanda Jane for Wamba Lane, don’t even know maiden name and it’s the same as yores, dummy, then you go back to the birth office, there months later—it’s like a joke, this is—and you put it right. But it all falls apart. I thought, you see, that my father was another man, that there had been another man in my mother’s life, the man who, though I never met him, only read his name in print, I took for so long to be my real father, father in spirit, kindred spirit, rather than some grunting beast spitting sperm on ovum, gene jumping gene. One is such a fool to think there can be anyone else. Father, mother, daughter, son—it’s only flesh and blood that count, that which cannot be shared. Ideas, tastes, loyalties, politics, humor, and on and on and all the rest, these are not things that must be rent, torn, slashed to separate father from son, daughter from mother. Only blood, only flesh.

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It was a good ’un though, the idea of it, hated to see it go. Coolie lying there in his narrow, lonely batching bed and the phone ringing—like, problem one, no phones out around Blanco then, nor Dolle, some rewrite called for, with a phone ringing in ’36, ’37—and it’s this hysterical little girl calling him. Woman actually. She’s bawling like a kid. And Coolie don’t even remember who she is. Nine months ago, long time no see. Sure there had been some dance, three trimesters back, some function over around Dolle. And what happened? He’s trying to remember, this born bachelor. Sure, now he’s got it.This old air corps buddy was in town and he landed his biplane right out there on the road, there in front of the house.This flyer was out of the air corps then, like Coolie, this buddy, and he had this job spraying around there, flyin n sprayin, and somebody says, sure there’s a Rich’son, calls hisself Coolie, lives over yonder towards Blanco, up on the plain, not far from the cap, and this buddy flies in, Roy by name, what Coolie demanded I be called and I always found that suspicious. Naming me after this old army buddy who happened to hit town nine months before I was born.This Roy, this old buddy of Coolie’s, he’s a live wire and he learns from this cowboy who has moved into the Cash Place there over the road, him and his cowgirl wife, they tell this hotshot pilot there’s a dance going on over in Dolle come Saturday night. Gonna be a good ’un, this cowboy swears it.A real cowboy fiddle and stomp, steel slide n belly rub. All the cowboys from all over that cowboy country down off the cap, Matador, Dickens, hell they’re comin in from Quannah, arriving from Aspermont—and this playboy Roy, hearing all this, he talks cool, shy, quiet, lonely Coolie out of his usual Saturday night.That lonely walk he takes down the field road, crossing over that stub of pastureland there, to stand on the brow of the cap and there have a smoke and look off east toward home, over there where night is building, and he has that smoke and then he turns west, into a setting sun, and he walks back on toward an empty house he can’t call home. Now none of that, not tonight, this Roy says.Tonight there’s this dance over in Dolle, them Dolle girls are said to be hot, says Roy, all heated up for them cowboys coming in from down off the plain.All in a lather for them two hotrod pilots flying in from over around Blanco. And that’s what they do. Roy drags Coolie away from his Satiddy nite mope and tosses him into the front cockpit there and they fly, man, they fly on over to Dolle and they land the plane over there on that playground pasture out back the Dolle school, Coolie doing the flying, everything but the landing, Coolie still

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can’t land one, not after that landing he screwed up in flight school in the army, that screwed up landing that Coolie walked away from, hardly a scratch, the screwed up landing that killed his instructor, yeah, the kid screwed up the landing and the instructor got it in the neck, got his neck broke, and Coolie, he washed out after that, walked away from flying and the corps and gave up and came out on the plains and ran his daddy’s farms and did whatever his daddy said for him to do, everything but land the plane, and his hotshot buddy did that, landing the plane there in the pasture out back of the Dolle school where Wamba taught. Miss Richardson, as she’d be introduced that night, she taught school there, a hot little Dolle number longing for a cowboy, a pilot, for a gentleman farmer from over around Blanco way, owns a whole section all to hisself, will do when his dying daddy back in Arkansas gets his dying done. Yeah well you can see how the birth certificate caper didn’t come off. Fell all apart and this with that highly suspicious birth certificate laying right there in my hands, them hot little hands. Oh my god I was that mad, that lost to think dear Coolie was not my dad.And so too was found the tale, how it came to be that 2. they were married in secret. Mad and lost. Yeah. It too. It was sometime during the fall of the year, late, towards Thanksgiving, as the time they were to be away from Dolle and Blanco, they needed more than an ordinary weekend for that.There was more to their getting married than a Saturday night and back to work. But then,Thanksgiving, that itself has always caused concern. Like, what’s the rush? Why not wait till school’s end, late May, early June? Several possible answers. She was knocked up. But that knocks my birth schedule for a loop. Like, if this be true, that I was made late ’35, then nine months later, born mid-’36. When in fact was born mid-’37. I mean this date, July 14, 1937, is on the birth certificate, and no matter how shifty this document looks otherwise, I cannot believe that the state of Texas was that screwed up, bribed, whatever, that they would get date of birth wrong by a year. Next. Maybe this made ’35 kid wasn’t me. Strong contender. I mean, I was ’37, and some other little fish was ’36. Like: I wasn’t ’36, man. So. Maybe not the first at bat. Could be. Like: he/poor little she, poor little sucker, made ’35, never made it. Died on alive. Back to fall ’35 then. You still there? OK. Knocked up, quicky marriage, then miscarriage. Had to be that, miscarriage. Stillborn out.This poor little fella/sis had made it full term you can take it from me Wamba would have been out blubbering over that little grave

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every Sunday afternoon, me, Chick and Coolie standing there feeling rotten, like she used to drag us out to Cady’s grave and weep away, the rest of us standing back and hating it all, all this misery, this feeling rotten. Course have to check this out, call up ex-wives, they should know, but offhand, take a stab, I don’t think aborted or miscarried fetuses are planted. More like, tossed out with whatever’s gone off in the fridge. Like they were just that, meat past sell by date. Another leg of lamb gone green, you don’t want to be reminded they were once alive and now are dead. Subhead that.Abortion out too.You don’t get married in secret so you can abort.And neither of them would have anyway. It wasn’t in them. Killing something alive. And it is that. Just because it ain’t breathing air and don’t gurgle, coo and have g-dad’s ears don’t mean it’s not alive. If I have learned anything on this haul it’s that if it ain’t dead, then it’s alive. And yeah I can’t stand these pro-lifers any more than you, but I am one, oh I am so indeed one, so very pro-life now that I am faced with taking one away. Mine, hers, it hurts both ways. Right.Wrong.You think about it. So to follow our chart then—and this is all being charted out, by the way, on these innumerable little bar napkins the bartender keeps supplying, he picks up a filled up napkin and wads it up and tosses it in this great big barrel so I can come back and find it later, and then he puts another little napkin under my glass and I’m off again, charting and figuring and noting it all down—like, B. it would have to be miscarriage. But nah, I once asked Wamba that straight out: had there been a little one, older bub or sis and he/she didn’t make it, died before she/he had a chance to live, and Wamba smiled. One of the nicest smiles I’ve ever seen. From her, from anyone.A smile kind, understanding.A smile like maybe for the first time in her life she did understand, did finally see that it was me there inside my skin, not someone else, not someone or thing she wanted me to be, and that smile said that she was glad that it was me and that she understood and then, smiling that smile, she said the words, kind, understanding, that no, there had never been another me, an earlier version.There was just me, then Chick, and nothing, nobody else.And so if you believe that, and I do, oh I so do believe it, then miscarriage gets the X. Next subhead. Fucking. Not Fucking. And these two as plausible as anything you’re ever going to get out of me.Yeah: just why did they rush headlong into this marriage? Why didn’t they wait those six months or so, till May or June and get married then? All open and aboveboard, in church with all the trimmings. OK.Those two reasons why not. Fucking

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and not fucking let’s call them little i. and little ii. Like: i. They had been fucking for some time or maybe that had been their first fuck, and Wamba had turned up the guilt burner and Coolie, his lifelong passivity now showing its peaked head, had caved in. Marry? Not something he necessarily wanted to do, but then not something he didn’t want to do, not necessarily—that was Coolie from beginning to end.And too maybe he simply liked the fucking. Hadn’t been doing a great deal of it out there batching on the plains, maybe now that he was finally getting some—and maybe she was hot, you never know—he would go to any length, like marrying a woman he didn’t love, maybe didn’t even like much, just to keep it coming. Same reasoning follows: ii. Not fucking. Both of them dying to get at it, but he a bit sex shy, she too and something of a prig, or at least intensely proper, no matter how hot—maybe they were of the old school, you hopped into bed together, you married first. Sounds stretched these days, I know, but do you know, they were different back in those days, our parents, some of them.They really believed in such as marriage, felt it made fucking all right, maybe made it more fun, more relaxed and tasty, it all being legal.Topsy-turvy to our world, to we the children of marriage, such legality and propriety, ours an age of breaking laws and doing bad and being wrong, doing the exact opposite what everybody tells you.That’s me, that’s you.And everybody telling us how to do everything up to and including how to breathe: that’s them. And now, that all charted up—wad wad file in trash barrel like hitting a jumper—now we deal with the real marriage.The real secret marriage. Its secret gone from human memory but for me and this little white square napkin folded in four, wad wad hookshot file, it’s all in here; we’ll come back for it all later, the bartender, he’s OK, he’ll keep the barrel back just in case. 3.They were married in secret, sometime in the late fall, when all stood sere over the plains.They had planned to get off them, the bleachbrown plain, and go down into broken country, a treat that for these plains lovers, their Acapulco, their Niagara Falls, getting downriver, least their dry beds ran wriggled toward the sea, the earth all about tossed and chewed, and there, there stood a tree, a whole string of them, that had not been planted by any man, surely not by some plainsettler longing, soreheart, for the broken country he remembered back home. Billie, the bride’s kid sister, kid by three years, had some teaching job down somewhere off toward Abilene or Wichita or maybe even on down toward Ft.Worth, some reason the village Hamlin comes to mind, or Seymour, or Colorado City, but

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no map and can’t be sure, and Wamba suggested that: that they go down and stay the weekend at Ballinger, I think it was, where Billie now taught, get married there, maybe even make it a honeymoon; Billie’s teacherage was a house all her own, and there was the spare room. How come they did it just then, decided to run off and get married with nobody knowing, I don’t know and don’t think much should be made of it. They decided it—like Rissa and me, walking down the high street one day, see marriage shop, pop in, tie knot, neither thought about it before nor has forgotten it since—probably decided to get married like they have decided everything since.Wamba wordlessly wanting, wanting till something snaps in Coolie and he says it, what she wants, and thinks he means him, he wants it too. But this time, maybe their deciding, one wanting, the other not not wanting, maybe their decision to slip off and marry was not so harsh, so cold and brutal, as that. Surely there was a great excitement to it.And if only one loved, the other did like, probably a lot, and marriage, at least the first time through, that eternal coupling does, much like your first pass through a car wash, loom all brushes and splashing water and pounding dampers and hissing steam and various other excitements and impending dangers, like—you sure you rolled up that winder, dear? And maybe there was simply some plain common sense to it. Like, Coolie was pushing thirty, bachelor city, and Wamba, by time’s cruel count, was twenty-three and nearing old maid, would be thought one come late May and school’s end, and all her celibacy, such reasons for observing such, would be shot. So.Why not get on with it? Oh yes, why ever not? Wamba and Coolie had met the previous summer and had done some proper courting—Coolie spoke of their first date he drove his flivver all the way into town in second gear, so shy was he that in shifting he might brush her leg, so afraid she that in moving leg he might take it she did not like him, love him already—but now, in early fall,Wamba had taken to spending some time, serious time, over around Blanco. She had a friend there, Polly Standifer who had married Deke Cammel, and she came to see Polly and Deke, little more than newlyweds themselves, and Coolie came over to Deke and Polly’s too, and sometimes Coolie gave Wamba a ride back to Dollé in his flivver so that now, around about Thanksgiving, there was talk in Blanco and Dolle too that these rides Mr. Richardson gave to Miss Richardson, from Blanco over to Dollé, not fifteen miles if that, that these journeys sometimes took a day and a night to complete, purty near for that drive, you even thow in the flat tire, that last rain.

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There came to be this talk then passing around Dollé and Blanco too, and so why shouldn’t they themselves start passing it around, to Polly and Deke first, as sort of a joke, that they were secretly married.Then when Polly and some of her friends there around Blanco started passing that around, that they were married and nobody, mainly the Dollé school board, knew, why then they too became amused at the idea, at its secrecy and its excitement, and from there it was but left to one of them to make the suggestion, the other willing with all her might that it might be so, that they make this rumor of secrecy and excitement a fact, and so that’s how it came to be that 4. they were married in secret. Don’t know what went wrong.That which skewed awry. Somewhere between leaving the Blanco place and arriving down in the little cowboy town of Toro plans changed. Instead of driving on down to Billie’s and getting married there or maybe getting married somewhere on the way and driving on down to Ballinger, I’m pretty sure that’s where Billie was teaching then, and pass the honeymoon there; what happened instead was that they did indeed get married along the way,Toro, but then so hooked they did not press on down to Ballinger and Billie’s.They instead stayed the night in that little cowboy town and even then, the next morning, and they had plenty of time even then to push on down to Ballinger or Seymour, they didn’t press on anywhere. Don’t know if they hung around Toro those two long and lonely days—unlikely if you’ve ever seen Toro, they’re saving up money to buy them a horse, then they’ll make a one-horse town—or just drove around that lost, lonely cowboy country, you could drive for days and not see a cowboy, drive for days and not see a cow; but I do know what they did not do was drive on down to Billie’s in Ballinger, like they had planned. I’ll tell you what went wrong, I think. I think that in Wamba suggesting this trip down to Billie’s for wedding/ honeymoon there was a touch more than sisterly love. I think what it had to do with was more like a whole lot of sisterly hate and revenge. Now I don’t know how much of this hatred, lust for revenge, ever bubbled up into Wamba’s consciousness, probably not much if any at all, but that’s how Wamba worked, how she hated. Little Billie, her closest sister, three years Wamba’s junior, if you told someone today that these two little old ladies, loving ladies, short as bowling balls, eyes wheeling like circus rides, the last two of the Dollé clan alive, that they in fact have hated each other all their lives, from the day little Wamba, age ten, started working out her mommy-rules-all act on little Billie, age seven, why then that someone

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you told, he would probably whip out his sixgun and put you out of your misery. Particularly if it was a cousin. Particularly if it was Dewey.Though to be fair to Dewey, he is the sort of cousin more likely to get shot at than do the shooting. Dewey, if he ever wants to bump somebody off, like me, say, he takes you up for a ride in his airplane. If you come through that experience sucking wind—like landing without your landing gear down, he forgot that bit—you are Lazarus material. Not so much alive as merely arisen. Of course it was that, ruddy revenge. Plain as shine on shoe. All that humiliation Wamba had suffered—having to go back to a spinster’s life at Dolle school while Billie finished not only the two-year girls’ course at Bible Belt Girls J.C. but went on over across campus and there made two years at the Big Bible Belt U and went out into the world with parchment—yeah well now those tables were turned. Now it was Billie, with her fancy four year degree, dying that slow, lonely death down in Ballinger, living a spinster herself now in that cold, friendless teacherage alone; while now it was sister Wamba coming to be married to the most eligible bachelor to be found in that country between Blanco and Dollé, Cone and McCoy, that great townless swath that stretches over that furthest southern reach of the plains; and now sweet lil Wamba was going to rub badbadbadlittlegirl Billie’s nose in it, like she used to, age ten, when little Billie, age seven, gave her any sass. That is one way of looking at it, or two actually, why their wedding plans changed.That Wamba got a little softhearted there, jumping down off the plains. Like maybe she figured making her spinsterish lil sis the witness to her marrying a Mister’s son, a man who would be in time a Mister himself, that maybe that would be a little too much revenge, even for someone with Wamba’s killer’s instinct, making for the jugular. Or, number two, maybe it was just that. Not coming: the superior revenge.That the real killing blow, that it would be better revenge by far just to let lil sis cool her heels that long, lonely weekend in the teacherage. Let her wait, this time let little Billie eat her own heart out, no reason to dish it up and serve; her sitting there waiting, waiting for her favorite sister, the sister she loved more than anyone in the world, let her hang there, twisting in the wind, waiting for her beloved sister and her fine new husband to show. And oh what celebration it would be, the wedding cake she had baked and all the signs she had painted up and stuck around the walls WELCOME MR & MRS RICHARDSON and all the little favors set about the table, that done laid and waiting too, the roast bubbling in the oven, the funny little hats they’d be wearing and the tin

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horns they’d blow, like it was New Year’s, and all the presents they would hand out and open and share like it was Christmas, and all the confetti and all that rice little Billie had got to throw at the wedding and that bouquet of roses, roses red for love, white for purity, the bouquet the bride then would throw back to the bridesmaid and that she little Billie, age seven, would catch, so that she would not always be that bridesmaid, waiting, waiting there for them to come and they never would, never—oh yes indeed, surely, surely that was it, it was that.That revenge, the waiting that eternal weekend, that short sweet life, for them to come and they never would, that was how their plans came to be changed that night 5. they were married in secret. He did not like it, the secrecy.That’s what he told himself, it was the secrecy he did not like. Not the wedding, the wedding was fine.That was what he told himself the day they set off to be married in secret. She had wanted to come to him the night before, to pass that night in the Blanco house, they would leave from there, no need for him to drive over to Dollé the next morning, ten miles against the way they would be headed, but he had said No. He had said No, that he wanted that last night to be alone, his last night as a man not married to be his own. No. He had told her something else, a white lie he considered it. Some tradition, the bachelor’s party, that was it. His last night of freedom, his last night out with the boys. Deke Cammel from over toward Blanco, and Norris, the cowboy who had just come onto the Cash Place there over the road, and Wildcat Trice and a couple other rakes from around McAdoo, they played poker, used to, coming over to his bachelor house at Blanco to play some cards and have a drink, some of the corn whiskey he distilled in the storm cellar, and there was Bobby Thurston from Lakeview and not to forget Toodlum Harrison down at the Old Harrison Place down off the cap, he liked his home whiskey and a little spit-in-the-ocean too—that would be his last night out with the boys, his last night a free man.And she laughed and smiled quick right after it, for it seemed he did not much like her laugh, he liked better her smile, when she smiled some and kept her mouth closed; and she went back on over to Dollé, to spend her last night there a spinster; and he was free of her then, for the last night of his life he was to be free of her; and he passed that night alone there in the Blanco house, sipping his own fine whiskey and he walked out around midnight and looked up into the cold, clear stars. He woke raw, rough. Unsteady, uncertain. It was like a dream he woke to, a nightmare. He would marry

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that day or the next a woman he did not care to marry. But then that could be any woman, even the one woman he had ever really loved, for he wanted to marry no woman, not even the one woman he had ever really loved. He rose, dressed from the day before, and considered it was the drink. He stripped, bathed, dressed in suit and shirt and shoes that would take him to a wedding, ate, drank, a splash in his coffee, and went off over toward Dollé, thinking that was it, the reason he felt raw, uncertain. How he came to drive over the brownparch plains feeling nothing in him, not even dread, nothing there within him.The drink from the night before, waking in what he had worn the day before.That was the void he felt in him now.The void of death.The end of life.That he now approached that scaffold, marriage, the end of a man who would live alone if he were to live at all. She teased him for it, his hangover, his night out with the boys.That did him good, her gentle teasing, that and the jug he had put in the jump seat, there with the valise that had been meant to carry the suit he now wore—yes, that’s why they did not press on, go on down for the wedding and celebration and honeymoon her little sister had so worked to supply for their pleasure, why they pulled up there in the little cowboy town called Toro, why married there, honeymooned there in that cowboy town, that cowboy hotel.That it must be done now, tonight, or not at all. Another morning, waking raw, uncertain, and he would not go on.With new drink from the jumpseat jug, her gentle teasing that he did look like that, a man walking his last mile, these were the things, the wind in his face, her gentle smile, jug again, all these conspired so that they stopped that night in the cowboy town called Toro, hardly a town at all, and there 6. they were married in secret, so secret that no one knew, not even her sister there waiting alone in her lonesome teacherage, waiting for her own Mister to come and touch her hand and take her away from Ballinger, O’Donnell, Hamlin, Post, some place like that down off the plains. Down into cowboy country they went then, nothing around but cows, that country so big you were lucky to find one of them. Country so wide the only cowboy they ever saw was the J.P. who married them that evening. Maybe he had forgot his spurs, the sixgun, but he had all the rest of it; he had the hat, and his wife, acting witness, she had to look over the cowboy J.P. hard before he remembered to take it off, the tengallon Stetson. And then that wife made a nod and only then the cowboy J.P. was free to drone over the words, and the newhitched couple had a kiss

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and signed some papers, and the J.P.’s wife tossed some rice, and then it was the wedding party broke out.The cowboy J.P. and his wife, a witness, and some traveling man stopped that night at the little cowboy hotel, his car broke down, his life too, trying to sell in this depression, at the end of his tether, he stood witness too; them four it was that started things up, everybody having a snort of that good homemade whiskey, even the J.P.’s wife polished one off; that little wedding party now went on over to the hotel for the night, the cowboy J.P. breaking out his fiddle, the hardluck traveling man had him a footlong juiceharp, and he could make it talk, he could make it sing.And dance, the J.P.’s wife knew all the good steps—put your little foot, the schottish, that cowboy twostep—and she got the young bride and her two left feet out on the hotel carpet, that rug rolled way back, and the two girls showed the boys a jig or two. Came next was Buddy from over the road, the station and garage and little cafe, Buddy’s OilWell it was called, with a Christmas tree derrick set on top shining like a lighthouse beacon through the night, warning the passing traveler of the rattler cage Buddy kept out back, Buddy swearing you ordered a rattler steak you could go out back and choose it live, eat her down and it was all on the house; Buddy now comes over the lonely, lonesome old highway, so lonely and lonesome the local kids played tennis on it, stretch up a net and go three sets without having to let her down; now Buddy comes in with news good and bad for the traveling man, Buddy can fix that jalopy of his in no time, no time at all, soon as they get the parts up from down around Ft.Worth, couple three days a week’ll do it, and fix her up then and get her running fine, all for thirty bucks and the car ain’t worth twenty; Buddy tells the traveling man that and tastes some of that fine stormcellar whiskey, and the traveling man, gray in his suit, blue as his tie, he has a second sip as well and says, What time’s that bus? Couple three days a week, that bus’ll come up from Ft.Worth, bringing thirty bucks of carburetor for a twenty buck car, and everybody has a laugh and a dance.And all this commotion raises the cowboy from the big ranchhouse that sits atop the hill overlooking the town;Toro this ranch is called, the town named after it, this ranch old as the first white man who came to this country to set up stringing wire and riding line when they ran out of wire or it hadn’t showed up yet, this ranch so big it’s bigger than the county, so big there’s ten thousand head out on it and nobody’s ever seen a one, not a cow not a calf; Shore not me and I been ridin this land two year now, so says the old long lonesome cowboy hearing the music and stompin and hollerin. He

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has left the lone and lonely big ranchhouse up on the hill and come down for the fun; nothing up there but him and some meskin boys in the bunkhouse, all the big folks, they’re gone off and left the ranchhouse to stand empty there but for that couple first weeks they open quail, maybe that couple weeks after they close it, then on that closing, shootin’ll be good then, then there’ll be a party on up at the big house like the party going on tonight down here at the hotel; and the old lone cowboy comes in and he has some of that fine homesqueeze whiskey and he has a dance and he sings a sad song and he sits himself back down by the jug and asks around; Buddy, the traveling man, even the J.P., even he couldn’t get it right first time, what all this partying was doing going on and it ain’t even Saturday night yet but will be someday, couple three days a week; and the cowboy has him a nip and another slow sliding Texas twostep and sets himself back down. Wedding, so says the J.P.’s wife, and the cowboy don’t believe it; now who was it mongst them they had got themselves spliced? Nobody around who looked like that, no bride nor groom in sight; and it went on like that the night 7. they were married in secret, the cowboy not believing it, no bride no groom, and the J.P., it’s plumb out of his mind and tomorrow his wife’s off to her sister’s down around Ballinger, Colorado City way; a week couple three she’ll be gone, so long away when she gets back that newmarried couple, they’ll be but a couple names in a dusty dry book, that bride that groom, nobody else believing, nobody knowing; just them two, bride and groom, they alone would be knowing and remembering alone, forever and alone, that night 8. they were married in secret and nobody knew. It was war and an old friend that killed off their marriage, or threatened to till Wamba and the peace she would bring him, bring us all back to, killed off that war and the freedom it and an old friend promised him—promised him that, freedom and war, every time he picked up a newspaper and saw it there, war and above that his old friend, his name; then following that name his old friend would tell of that, of war, and his freedom if only he would put down his peace and come to them.Won’t be saying the name now, that of the old friend. Not that it’s not important, his particular name, for of all the names that make what importance this has, it is surely the most important, for his name is my name, or part of it anyway. Well, you’ve probably already guessed part of it, our first names, they the ones shared; but still, even you knowing mine by now and by knowing mine knowing his, I don’t think it would be wise to say these

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names till it’s their times to be said; for there will be many more names said then, and much of their significance, these many names, the name we shared, have never had, names we have had others give us, names we’ve had that those who would conquer us and rule us have taken away. In fact of such importance is this naming, saying the actual names, that I suggest, paradoxically, that you must not under any circumstance skip on over to these names and their naming, (go on, go skip on over to “names, their song and their light,” p. xxx, and get it over with), but stead just hang on and sip of their wine in time. He rose early the morning after 9. they were married in secret and went out. She stayed in bed. She was awake, well awake, but she stayed in bed still. She knew that now, knew it well. That when she came into his house, his place near Blanco, that she must stay in bed.That he rose first and rose alone and did not want her or anyone around him for that first hour, after his waking.That first night she had passed at the Blanco house, the night they first made love, the following morning she had leapt out of bed and hustled around for coffee and breakfast and served these to him in bed and she had seen that he was not pleased. Next time she wised up and pretended sleep, as she did this the morning after 10. they were married in secret, and had lain there useless and fretting as the smells of coffee brewing, bacon simmering came through the house. It was she then that, after his hour or so alone, was served bacon and coffee and other things in bed.All the wimmen round town, particular that hardline 1929 Study Club, they figured they was all a little queer, them Richardson boys, always climbing out of bed first, make that cup a coffee on their own, him sitting there sipping at it and smoking a cigaret and reading the newspaper with such fine concentration that one might have thought it holy text.When ever other redblood farmin realman, he had that goodwife out and milkin cows and lookin under layers and fryin up, particular of a Sunday morning, whilst he just lay back and had that realmanly snooze. She figured out whose idea this was, menfolk serving the wimmen like they the one was wimmen and t’other menfolk, that first trip she went back to Arkansas.That bigbaby Franklin Crawford, he even put this apron on to do it, mixin up all that good gooey stuff for breakfast and washin up as he went along. Franklin Crawford that big knowitall telling her to sit down and hands outta his kitchen, him telling her like he had actual been there, that’s how them queer chefs in France did it, washed up ever lil thang as they went along, so as to make it nothin fer her to do, that real

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woman, that one super lil Taxes housewife, leaving her to sit there twiddlin thumb, achin to git in there an do some sizzlin n scrubbin. He rose early then the first morning of their marriage and went out and she passed that usual miserable hour before he would be back, bringing with him coffee in a thermos and a bigfat Sunday newpaper, and now it was that she could roll over in bed and smile morning fine morning and pretend she was just waking up. He tossed her over the funnies and the women’s section, that’s all she was good for, that’s what that said, and he poured her out some coffee from the thermos and had that look, that not looking at her, that told her to keep it zipped.They was trapped here in this single hotel room and pretendin he was back home and alone, least alone there in the kitchen while she was back in the bedroom simulating slumber, him sitting there at the kitchen table and sipping coffee, never a realman’s slurp, and sucking dainty on a cigaret and reading not what realman’s supposed to read, sports first, ag news and hog prices, maybe a little on the business market, not even that front page, what with all that good Taxes news splayed all over it and maybe just a tic from D.C., some snotswipe outta Noo Yark. Nosir.Them ladies outta 1929 Study they had that right bout them Rich’son boys, quair n commie; he went right on past all this good realmanly reading and went straight to it, you knowed it, the international commie news. Outta foreign places.All them wars and riots and rebellions and revolutions usually made by them darkskin complected. And that name there, that was what he was looking at now.That name she would come to loathe and fear, loathe and fear him sitting there staring at it, staring at what news of war and foreign places there was written under it; as in time she would come to loathe and fear my sitting there and staring at it, my name, half of it, the name of the man I was named after, the name I would one day stare at with such longing as it meant to me what it meant for him. War. The world at war, a world of foreign places and cultures as mysterious and unknown to him as their tongues. A world away from this twobit Texas cowboy hotel room and this marriage to a woman he did not love or even like.Toss her the funnies maybe, maybe she had the brains to get through them if only she wouldn’t read them all, if only she just read one or two, like he did, he read one or two, his favorites, the Katzenjammer Kids, Gasoline Alley and ole chinless Andy Gump and Krazy Kat, he read these and laughed in reading them. Didn’t laugh like no realman we ever seen down here to 1929 Study, laughed quiet as a smile, laughed polite as a lady, making no snort nor

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snaggle snuff nor hogcall hoot, while she read ever one them funnies, all sixteen color print pages of them, back to front.Well maybe she did skip over that fancyman some limey fairy Prince Val you call that a name fer a realman, he didn’t even have no talking like funnies was supposed to talk, everything worth saying up there in a little bubble over their heads, nosir not this Prince Val, him with his swishy lil skirt and knees too good fer any realman, not to fergit that absolutely deevine pageboy, dearie, nosir all this limey oletime fairy talk was all writ down there at the bottom of the pitcher, that drawed a little too good, it was like you was reading a book, and did she ever have a good time at it. Reading them funnies all the way through to the end. Back to front. And did she laugh, hoop and a holler at the good uns. Or, so she laughed at first, before she saw that look from him.That she was not to laugh—a smile or two, that would do. Before she learned she was not to read the funnies back to front—a few would do, one or two.That was what that look told her.When that laugh looked him up from his name, my name, it would so become, back there on the international page.That look from him that said, I have married the wrong woman. And if you’re going to stick around, honey, you best start becoming that woman I wanted to marry. And you can start right now, honey, by not reading all the funnies but only a few and lay off the hogcall hoop and make a little smile, that’ll do.And so it was early on, the first morning after 11. they were married in secret, that she began to struggle to become the woman he had wanted to marry and in doing so she turned delicately back, then, to Prince Valiant, that limey queer, and smiled. xxx They were roommates in college, the old man and Roy Max Yeaman, the man I was named after or partially so (see Names p. xxx for that story, a tragic one), for by the time I was born and he world famous he had lopped off half his name and I missed out being Roy Max or Max Roy, forget now how it first went, and ended up holding that half he didn’t want. Roy Max, that’s how he was known, called back then, I’m pretty sure—was of course the school paper’s editor, star reporter and set type in a crunch, for it was not a large paper and not a large school. Coolie earned a degree in mathematics, hardly the training for a west Texas farmer, you would think, but then in those college days, the heart of the Jazz Age, the Roaring 20s, becoming a west Texas farmer was hardly on Coolie’s mind. Seen from Arkansas, from the big house there in town, Hot Springs, the hottest spot between K.C. and Dallas, but a hop up the road, for Coolie, most of the Arkansas Richardson kids, the west Texas plains

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and the farms that would be carved out over them was not so much a way of life as an adventure; something one did for a summer or at most a year or two; live like an Indian in a dugout and bust sod, then come back to Hot Springs and the flappers there with tales of living like an Indian in old Indian country, driving a tractor as big as a house over this wilderness. It is at Coolie’s core that he did nothing with his studies of advanced math; that after graduating with honors he turned his back and walked away from it, as he would so do in flying, the army and, in time, farming. To be fair, he told me later that had he known what reason there might be for the abstractions he learned, what purpose they might serve in fashioning jet propulsion, say, then he might have gone on, applied his mathematical skill and talent to a form of engineering, the like, but then that is only what he said long after he had turned his back to his skill and talent and walked away from them.As a crash that killed a trusted flight instructor turned him from flying, as a countrygirl wife who would not quit her fear and loathing of foreign lands, their peoples and their tongues turned him from the army, as his loss of any interest in life turned him from farming to move to town to dabble there, insurance, real estate, land agent for a Hubbard bank, he would in time turn from all these and take up that which he loved most in life, his loss of any interest in them all, in it all. 215 Not so Roy Max, Max Roy, Max Roy Max Yeaman. He faced it full on and waded in. College days.The usual, maybe, for you and me, but not so for Coolie. Quiet, dignified, reserved, shy.And now comes the new roomie staggering into the frat house, the wisecracking Roy Max, never a crack not wise, shined ’em brilliant, mouth motoring, brain storming, tossing back beer and juggling babes from knee to bed out the back door, who that blonde leaning on front bell this time of night, remember a name, babe’ll do it, its gotta, and usher her in, chat with the quiet, shy, gently smiling roomie while pudgy frightwig Roy Max, Jew, Moor, Cockney King of England, Brooklyn Bum, the Whiz Kid Wizzard of Oz, he claimed some blood from all of them, papa Saracen swashbuckler, mama Dago diva, that Toledo twosteppin tenor now singing in the shower, ready for romance but the lass tripping down the back’s grabbed up the last frat pin, had six stamped out in case of need, need more, may I offer you my letter jacket m’dear, so it is highschool wrap, don’t get picky, and the school ring as well, oh well here’s a silver locket from greatgram, why so it is inscribed Prop. Fred’s Bail n Bond Tiajuana Mexicali, so why then my

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sworn everlasting love will just have to do ina pinch, all the while roomie grabs the door, catches the phone, nice guy for a roomie, you say you got sisters, you say you gotta twin stashed back in the dorm, mercy me, Coolie son, grab up that phone, catch the door, we gotta pair of hearts to break . . . and on and on and so Max Roy Max roared on, springing from the college high board to dive headlong into the deep end of life, some lost love, all liberties taken, avoiding most loss of limb while grabbing all the life he could carry home, only some liberty taken, that grumpy campus cop not amused from time to time. Maybe that was the top of Coolie’s life, those four years rooming with Roy Max, Max Roy Max Yeaman. Could’ve been, maybe was for sure. It’s not unknown, those college four years passed free from home and mom n dad waiting back home, and free as well from that other home waiting up there four years from now, that second home of job and work and mom n dad only now you are them and their home, that’s the one clawing you in, there’s no escaping that home up there ahead, you becoming them, them you.Yes, I do believe that time off to college, those four years of nothing to do with being a child except being a child all on your own, those four years of not being a child except not quite yet being all on your own—I do believe now that maybe those college years were the only good times, free times, he’ll ever own.That’s the way I saw him anyway, Coolie, the old man. That Max Roy Max Yeaman, that that roomie was the top of his life.That’s the way I saw roomie anyway, the top of Coolie’s life now flattened by her and the plains and the farming he felt dragged to. Figured that that first time I saw his name in print, Max Yeaman. My name it should have been.Would’ve been but for her. Would’ve been but for him. She wasn’t alone, see, halving me from my name. He was in on it too, Max Yeaman, Roy Max. See, while she bloody butchered off the Jewish Max, he was having that country Roy removed by journalism’s silent surgery. Both of them, leaving me without a name to call my own, half a name no name, not out there on your own. Roomie didn’t dream it, I don’t think, that graduation night, high times in Hot Springs all night long, that he was leaving his roomie back by going on on his own.The plans he talked to Coolie, the plans for the future, he saw all these no bigger plans than how to get their frat pin and letter sweater back from the Sandall twins, Jane or June or Jean or Joan. His plans were big and broad that last night of college, that morning they

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drove back home and college was dead and gone. He sipped a beer and laughed into that topdown breeze, Coolie there careful at the wheel.All his big plans, they’d take him from bigtime to bigtime, Broadway to Bangkok, Hollywood to Hungary, and they would in time, they would; but he was not that dreamer at all, not like Coolie, a dreamer who dreamed only dreams and let them waste till he never dreamed again. No, Max Roy, Max Roy Max, he was but days from becoming plain Max, he was with all his big plans, so big they sounded like dream that easy early morning drive sipping beer driving easy back home, he was behind all the dreamy talk a man of specifics.There were steps, a mounting stair of them, within his dreams. And that first step, bigtime Arkansas, peanuts to the world, crime reporter, Little Rock, that was all set.Would be reporting in tomorrow morning, make that tonight, time to start laying up those stepping stairs that would mount from one dream on to the next, on to another. He jumped right in, covered a hanging, one done by the state, right off and made its strangling so real you smelt the blooddrumbursting through the ears, eyes popping like ivory balls scattered over greenfelt table. For fun, when he wasn’t watching black men dangle for whistling at a white girl, he took to jumping from soaring planes, some parachute strapped to his back, usually, and that made a slow Sunday front page. But what got dream beyond the confines of Arkansas, got the news services watching was that tornado cutting over from Oklahoma, cutting off a corner of Arkansas, cutting its deadly blow on up toward Kansas—he got in his car and ran that wind down and he was hired out of Little Rock, they sorely saw him go, specially that ladies fashion columnist, she so sorely hated to see Max Yeaman go. Off to Dallas then. UPI, AP, some other news machine, they’d make him a minor bureau chief in a couple years, that crazy kid who chases storm and knows how a neck stretch when it break, but he saw that one coming. Got into Dallas vice so deep, and some of his own, maybe he had got a touch too adroit at dealing deuces to you, aces to me, and one foggy morn two days after the last night he figured he’d ever know, he picked himself out of a ditch heading south and went on heading that way.That story he’d always told to amuse the whiteblondecollege gals, mama some Mexican Jew out of Hungary, maybe some of it was true. Found himself in Mexico City anyway, spewing Spanish like he knew what it meant, got a couple pesos a night writing heads for some little American colony rag and did that for a time, writing big black heads naughty and nice:

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YANK ARMS TO FOOT HILL SWILL BILL

and oh yes SORTAMAYOR SOTOMAYOR SORTAMAYORSORTAMAYNOT

oh yes.A legend in the trade and had boss editor looking to create new positions to suit his talent, like copyboy, when one late Zona Rosa night after bedding the paper and putting her to sleep, he ran into a photographer, they munched menudo down at Tía Jesus. Sandino? Never heard of him. He’d take him anyway. Some rebel down the isthmus. Everybody from Las Lomas to Pedregal, they figured this yanked scribbler another Ambrose Bee, disappeared and gone and he was indeed from New Tenochtitlan but not Old New York. Showed up sunburnt and skinny ten months later, manuscripts under arm, faded photos from a former photographer, and now used his head. Books’re fer the birds, he knew that, but he made that headfake. Then with that contract in hand made the deal he longed to make. Serial rights with North American or Reuter or somebody, byline as a kicker, monthly check and writing daily again. No not quite daily, what he so longed for the rest of his life, that old life back in Little Rock, writing daily and writing the next day again, but somewhere in between. Feature, byline, Latin America, anywhere down there you want. But he didn’t want. It was Europe he wanted. The Mexican mama from the ghetto may have been just that, fast talking to cover three Bs and a C in college Spanish, but his old man, Hungarian gypsy Jew outta Rotterdam, was not. Lady luck played her card then.While he was playing in Harlem, being feted while the fete was hot—member that Sandino feller, down Guatymala way, whatever happen him?—the bureauman in Madrid went kaput. Spain, whatta backwater. It was Berlin and Paris, Moscow and London, those sirens calling, they would be in time the sirens of war, but once again Practical Pig reeled Daffy Duck in. Stepstepstep take steps to make it to Rome or Leninburg. He had the Spanish, that cowboy rebel down around Panama, that interview with Sandino, the bosses liked that a lot and so that was it.The new boring little republic of Spain, its hothead Reds, and off he sailed. So it was the most boring corner of Europe, he’d stir something up, December ’34, and there he headed, toward Spain and all that peace, only toros died there. Good beaches, good sun, good place to write that book, good place to get away from it all. So said the bureauman who met him at the dock.The bureauman who was shot.A Jew, a Polish name, out of that stock, a man

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who could see it coming.The streets running Red, red, the nights afire mitt blitz und krieg. He smiled sad, the old bureauman, at the young warlover come to fill his shoes. He had wanted something hot, this firebrand, this hotshot, not all these beaches, their sun and bull and paz. He wanted to be where it was at. Communism, Fascism, headed for Kollision, not down in Panama, Europe’s version of it, call it Spain, call it sleepy. Not down somewhere tanning, olé olé, with some tired old Polish Jew, mama from Leyden or Liege, somewhere down on a beach.All that sand, all that sun. Panama, where they make the hats, change the water in the locks. Spain, they run the bulls there, their Reds wear black. No, he wanted to be there at the hot center of Europe, a furnace black and red, war and riot, its clatter and clash all round; cities on fire, afire! sorry citizens on the move; look there! looming up the cemetery hill, that buzz in the sky the innocent bee to shoo away, that hum above, its falling sting, the last moment of your life; conferences, pacts, alliances and all such betrayals, sorry statesmen on the move, governments falling to ruin, ministers disgraced, citizens rising, outraged, blown rudderless by their leaders, leaders cunning and smooth, drawing their people toward doom; these, all these, the dark, torn heart of Europe and her wars, it was these he longed for so, death but a seductress, a woman coming for him through a dream; he wanted no truck with backwater now; shed college, some stodgy provincial capital, gone from another, dodged all those rolling Mexican heads, near a year of a nowhere jungle, jumped New York’s sinking ship, no war, no war there at home, not for years, never; now he wanted no more of Spain and sand and bull and her sol, this bloated appendage to Europe and her wars; no war in Spain, not for years, not ever; no more of these provincial Iberian docks, their peace, their democracy, the tired old Polish Jew who met him there, sunny, peaceful ’34; the old Jew yammering away of the coming horrors of the coming wars; all that old Jew yammering there on the Bilbao docks, yammering at him as if he too were a Jew, as if all those college yarns he had told collegegal were true, you a Jew? how ’xcitin’, quelle drolerie, never slept with a Jew; now the old Jew there on the ’34 docks in the sleepy burg Bilbao, now waving bye-bye adios ciao ta-ra aufwiedersehen from the deck of the same rusty tub that had brought him to sleepy sleeping Spain; this backwater, this burg Bilbao, this dusty, distracted, dispirited appendage to Europe and her wars; the old Jew calling out from the fading boat, They’re coming for us, bye-bye arrevederci adieu so long; they’ll be coming over the mountains for me, across the sea for you;

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they’ll be rising from the plains, the plains this country, all countries, these men, all men, we have there within; in three years time you’ll know, you’ll see, cried out the sad smiling Jew, waving, smaller and smaller, bye-bye faretheewell to you my wandering Jew. In those three years then, call it ’37, call it just there, on those Bilbao docks again, oh yes they were coming hard for him then; in those three years, the Jew hunters were coming now hard for him, hard for you. No, he wasn’t longing then for the seats and centers of war and revolt, not standing on those docks three years hence, Bilbao, Nazi stukas shrieking, screaming down, flinging flame and fury on his Jewish head, his wandering Spanish soul, not in ’37 did he sneer, a tired old Jew, at a tired old Jew. Oh no, not then.Then glad to be out of it, thankyouverymuch, away from mother Europe, off to sleepy sleeping Panama.Where they make the hats and let the ships go passing through. Quite obviously I know quite a lot about this, more than you, as well I should as I did nothing but research or tons of it anyway that year I wept or was it the year before, tracking mommy, lost and mad. I simply went back in the old newspaper files there at Hubbard, where I have both wept and been lost and mad, and dug out every Max Yeaman byline I came to and read the stories that followed neath my name, his, it should have been.The tornado chase, trek to interview Sandino etc., all verified, all in print.And after that masterpiece “The Fall of Bilbao,” the epic this man’s concern and curiosity led him through, it went on and on. He was being chased around the world, see, chasing himself, but not now. Now the Jew hunters, the Red raiders, the enemies of the republic and its people came after him, his kind, his country. Running, running they all were now. Guernica, it’d make a great painting, it’d been flattened, and the man ran from that.West. Back toward home. Safety. Quiet peace Panama Little Rock that penthouse East 70s overlooking some park. He ran to Bilbao. That somnolent silent burg now burst with bomb, carved by crater, dealing out death, hand after hand just for you, Jew, you stand still in Old Bill Bow! Pow! Wow!—wholesale! running a special this week! death! got just the thing for you! just take it off my hands! West then. Santander. Running, running west. Blockade. Refugees rioting. Crying calling out. France, oh ships of the Brit Empire takes us there! Gay Paree! The Eiffel Tour! Surefing, mate. But see, youse gotta have dem froggie visa fings. Just pop into nearest froggy visa shop and whack a stamp.The catch? All French consuls have locked their consulates and gone, fled into the night, all froggy

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stamped and proper and everfing. Nowhere to turn but west away from Franco’s fighting fiends, his fiendish friends, Duce and Dolph, make for that last chance, land’s end—Gijon.The rumor there, you see, that a colorful American by the name of Ham n Eggs Jones, wich sucha moniker surefing Yank, had cracked the Nationalist, read Fascist Franco Falange, blockade and would sneak unstamped refugees least out of falling Spain, least steam us out to sea.And that was where I wrote it, my masterpiece, or actually spoke it over the radio, shipboard.There would be a book in time—brought out during the war, made famous as propaganda and as quickly dropped with peace for our people had picked up different enemies different friends by then—but this, though a well-crafted thing, had more of the eerie power of that radio call to any land or power, that would listen: “And so this is Max Yeaman aboard the courageous Ham n Eggs, so we all call her, this mighty, rusted tramp freighter bound for Bordeaux if they will have us, her and her cargo. Date line: November 2, 1937. Position: at sea.And so signing off, Max Yeaman, refugee.” xxx The point of all this globetrotting godfather gab is that this,“The Fall of Bilbao,” was precisely the international news article that so engrossed Coolie that honeymoon morn after 12. they were married in secret.You member. Her lying abed, slurping coffee, reading funnies word fer word, laugh now with mouth open, believe me, soon to be replaced by a sipping, selective, smiling silence. Him staring deep, ever deeper, deeper still into the international news, his old roomie’s name, his words calling out from sea. Yeah well, the real point of all this Bilbao bother, the point within the point is this.This petite scene encapsulates my struggles with her, world battling home. You have probably noticed—or you will soon—that there lies a great hole, a vast void at the center of this history. Within that empty heart lies me. Within that tractless plain rests the world. Both—both world and me—surrounded by home and her. Coolie was going through all this close combat then, but he did not understand the opponent’s power, perhaps knew not even that such an enemy lay within his lair. Not me. I knew she and her home were there, suffocating, strangling, besieging, all along. By the time I came to pore over Max Yeaman’s frontpage byline and the savvy words littered beneath, I knew my nemesis well. Only too well.Wamba, her plains. Mommy, her home. But it didn’t help. Nothing will.There is no escape. Her plains. Her home.

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World and me, we’re finished.Thirty forty years of one wandering the other, this circle of freedom has turned back and come to its end. Back to her. Home.The world, me, at our end.The end of the rope. Loved my war, did I, and all its worldly wanderings, at an early age. Had three, these worldly wandering wars, and, no matter their differences, found them to be all just fine. Adventure, dread and luxury, the very lap of it. Bliss or Bragg, Lee or Lauderdale,Wayne or Worth, Sill to Sumter, the names are but that. Names. Names of magic, to be sure, but beyond that we, meaning all but Coolie, meaning basically me and little Chick, never got near, not anywhere near their forts, camps, bases and posts. Not so of Fort Sam, of course.We actually lived, for once, inside the place. But that came near the end and will be gushed over then. But, in order now, our three wars. Mine. 1) Motel, with ashland park out back. 2) To live under a river and a man named Doc, he talked funny, as in Dat gotdam Plymout’! a streamliner among cars. 3) Cool clean plump sherbet houses all in a line, stucco, ours limegreen, stucco, that magical word, these fine lined houses in a line, cool, calm, clean, stucco. It had been cut from ice cream, our limegreen stucco house there at Fort Sam, you could taste it, feel it, dream it, still can, those lined sherbet houses there at Fort Sam, Sam Houston, San Antone we called it then and still do. It was probably during the war, and these three places we lived then, that I began to become aware of their differences, houses and neighborhoods; that some were rich, some poor, some dirty, some clean, some bad, the people there, some good, i.e., Baptist, toss in a couple Methodist, mistaken, that’s all, and thinkin bout switchin back. Still, it was not the mindcracking understanding that would strike later, with peace, when Wamba built her house in town. No, it was only later, peacetime, upon seeing that house, that I would understand, truly, that houses and where they are found and the people who are found in them are not the same. Not even close. Not at all. But not there at first, not at war, did I know, really know, such difference. From the Blanco house to the 1) motel to the 2) house crouched quaking neath a river to the 3) limegreen all-in-a-line stucco house, even then, even if I was growing aware, dimly, daily, of the beauty and peace that come with wealth and power, that said, even then I would have gladly gone back to the 1) motel and the adventures we knew there. Probably should stress that: I.The one glad to go back. Me. Chick flat out hated our 1) motel life. And it was then, living on the doorstep of a crashing highway, all those foreign and otherwise lowclass types crowded

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all around, this stinking garbage dump out back, then it was that Wamba took to wearing dark sunglasses, felled she was by crushing headaches, and all seemed concluded, but for the war. As for Coolie, I simply do not remember him ever being there at the motel. Playing poker, overseas, a girlfriend on the side, more likely he had kept his small BOQ room at the post, he could not take another night of a wife blinded by black goggles and pain; little daughter laid out on a pallet on the bedroom floor, pale, cold, still, as if despair were death; plump and happy his round brown son, covered with ash and grime and soot from the world of his adventures— highway, ashland, playing doctor with the little gal in cabin twelve, those and sundry other acrid stinks and musky smells. He could not take it, coming in at night, wife moaning with pain; the girl on the floor, he had to lean in close to her little form, listen at her mouth, to feel her breath still there; the wandering boy snoring blissful in the bathtub (so bathing out), covered with the stench of soot, the perfume of cabin 12, could use the tub for a scrub himself, sleeping happy boy; while all the while, all night long, out front the highway roared by; the motel manager greeting him back every night, Welp, lost us another’un today.Was a Merc got ’im.—to hear the old sadist you never knew, dog, cat, maybe this time a child, maybe a son, maybe this time an Olds that had got ’im. No wonder then Coolie stayed sleepless at poker, applied for positions at the front, crashed on over on some goodtimegal’s sofa, maybe stayed on at his small room at post BOQ, smoking cigaret after cigaret, the call of taps coming over the parade ground, the crunch of guard detail marching out onto its fine gravel, off to post midnight watch; now come the voices of men returning from the PX beer bar, the NCO Club, their laughter, their raucous camaraderie, made tasteful, pleasant, by the peace he had come to find in war; and now that peace had tracked him down and found him there at that motel and made its nightly war, so that at times, smoking cigaret after cigaret, volunteering for OD, anytime, anywhere, he actually found himself longing to be back on the farm; almost; almost anywhere would be better than one more night at motel hell. Well not me.Was hortbroke when we left motel, the fires of noman’s land smoldering out back, puppy death on the highway up front, but it didn’t last long, that disappointment. For you see, adventure was to be replaced by a place even better: danger, death and dread of the coming flood. I do believe that I was the only member of our group much concerned about this; that we had moved from 1) motel to a 2) house that

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cowered, or so did I, beneath the wall of a roaring river. I mean, these other three lotus-eaters went about as if they had never heard of the little boy with his finger in the dike, Noah’s ark and other wet tales of woe where water, which is normally best kept underfoot, gets the upper hand and you have to climb this virtual pyramid to get up to it and there sloshing along is this vast river of it, and you look upon this moiled plain of water heaving by and it is just there, you can reach down and touch the stuff, and then you turn and look back down the high sloped wall you have just mounted and far, far down in the distance below lies your new little house away from motel, and there too are mom n pop n lil sis, all going about their lives as if the deluge was not verily at hand, happened in fact to be slopping around damn near straight overhead.Years later it took but the pitterpatter of shower on roof to bring back those days of sinking dread. Even now as I assemble these notes—wad wad hookshot file!—I find myself cringing at the very sight of the stuff, water, even when peacefully reposited in one of civilization’s finer inventions, the cocktail glass. But other than the real and everpresent threat of ending up on this barge with a bunch of giraffes and hippos and things, the nightly promise of it—looks like rain! clouding up—2) life under the river proved a jolly time for all. For one thing I was introduced to a new and alien world, held out across the street. Doc, he was called—as later Coolie’s best pal at Fort Sam will be called Porky, what names, what fine names for pals—he hailed from New York surely, viz., dat gotdam Plymout’!; and there was a wife, Molly, surely Irish no matter her married handle Benedetto; and then came the terror of our street, our dead-end street, the street that ran straight into the wall of the river and failed there, just couldn’t push on, this terror then proved to be Doc and Molly’s mounded muscular massive menacing daughter,Adelaide.Adelaide—have never been to Australia nor ever plan to—maybe only two three years older, she strode over the street like some kamikaze gunslinger: gone haul yore dry wesTex ass up that straightup levee wall an baptize yo eternal in dat ole man ribber runnin dere up in the sky. On the bright side,Adelaide was a Catholic.And I’m talking dyed-in-the-wool, hard-line, resurrect-the-inquisition mackerel-munching headbanging R.C. It simply could not have been better. Leaving the motel and all the joys of bathtub bedroom, infantile sex and kitty mangle highway, now to have this sumo nun, junior grade, out to save my soul for this cross-dressing Papa, I was simply, and this near literal,

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propelled into seventh heaven. Don’t know where watching Wamba was at this time—bobbysoxing around the house, I suppose, outta motel hell! don’t fence me in! pistol-packin mama!—but I was actually allowed to attend nun school with Adelaide, at least that one time. One look at these batwing crones soaring over their little latinists, Adelaide shaking in her boots, had me sprinting back to the little house under the river, munching burger on Sabbath eve and otherwise lapping up Protestancy and its wetlip goldilock airyfairy limpwrist pinkpale son of God.Anybody, anything but that real and really suffering, really dying wino hippie hanging limp, tortured, bloodied and weeping from the pagan Roman cross; no golden glowing halo about his black brow, just a crown of thorns ripping, tearing at his skull. Believe me, if anybody ever got this monster father called God right, it was the Papist crew and their sadistic portrayal of such heavenly child abuse. But then, evil incarnate or goodytwoshoes, Big Daddy’s victory has been won, hasn’t it? Never saved, ever lost, me. Never to assume the majestic calm of atheism carried from cradle to grave. Never to know the supreme disinterest that rational man knows before a thing that simply does not exist. If I found rivers running through the sky, that sky ever stood there underfoot.The world or me, one or both, we were indeed stood on our head, battling phantoms, never to get it right. Ever wrong, ever lost. These have stayed with me over the years.To begin.The scent of the ashpark out back of the motel. That which had been burned and now there was nothing to it but that odor, the harsh cleanliness of the stench of ash. Next. Climbing mountains to find pools and streams, fields and streets of water, at their tops.Wheeling through the air, as if to walk on sunlight, tiptoe through the stars.Those two have stayed, stuck well, with this, the third and last. The peace one finds in war. The calm, its still beauty, that lies at the heart of a killing machine, men gathered together to turn all the world to ash, to send all hurtling through space, tripping toward the sun.The army post.The old ones anyway.The ones away from bawling sergeants and the rapraprap of the rifle range, away from the bawdy bachelor barracks, the PX bully swilling three.two when all the civilian joints are shut—away from all that to do with war and unlettered men collected to make it.Yes, let’s turn our back on all that, shall we, and head now over the pale gravel quad, away from barrack, PX, men marching in drill, their bugle, bangbang and calls of command so distant now they could be the cries of those left behind, those left there on the shore,

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as we head over the vast polo field, tiny horses and gaudy riders in frolic miles and miles away, and make then for the army post.The old post.The peacetime post.The way the army had lived and sported before war had come and screwed things up. Like a club, it was, like an outpost in some distant time and place, another century, during the Raj, a place and a time like that, something like that.That is where we make for now.Wheaton Road. Where peace ruled no matter that the world played at war. Wheaton Road.There where the rulers lived, officers, their caste, in those 3) ice cream houses, each a different flavor pastel. So alike were these houses that a boy coming home might once walk in the front door of Chaplain Gray’s tangerine abode, blush hello at the good Chaplain and Mrs. Gray smiling at table, and walk on out the back, blushing mightily, if only they won’t tell.Yes, let’s go on out back, out to the alley that ran behind all our ice cream houses.An alley more like street I had ever seen, as our street out front was less road than avenue or boulevard, a narrow grassy park and tropic trees grew along its center, that was Wheaton Road. A place we rarely ever went actually, out front. For us children the alley was our world, where all the other children lived and played. Particularly the horrible little Ganz bitches.They got it all from their bitchy mother, of course, some smartass New Jersey type who wouldn’t let us climb with Rachel and Ruby daughters into their small gnarled thorn tree. And thorns removed, those twisted limbs made for such fine climbing. And even with a fall there lay beneath a cushion of fine springy bermuda to bounce tumbler back to her feet again.That she might rush off to tattle and tell Jersey City mama how once again that little sex maniac hayseed from across alley had, in merely raising pinafore for peek, been the one to send her tumbling. A somersault cartwheel onto the featherbed of bermuda grass. Of course we all hated each other, back on the alley—we were children, right? Blessed are the little children? Yeah, sure. Just keep chair, whip and gun handy—if you only had three hands. You think the alley feuds grew pitched, you oughta seen the schools. The only thing that saved my sanity was, in our constant army maneuvering, our attending, Chick and me, three four different schools for each 1) motel, 2) house under river, 3) Wheaton Road, everywhere we lived. Like marrying a lot of different wives keeps hope up—I suppose, it’s got to get better sooner or later. These places were jungles, these schools. Chick feared and loathed them so that she could read highschool level by second grade and had a pretty good grasp of algebra; graduate, graduate,

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it’s all she thought about, anything to get out of these baby bedlams.The anarchy that ruled along the back row, where I was ever banished, farts were learned to be lit there, if only one would explode!, fuck books, those eight-page cartoons, Jiggs giving Maggie one, were studied with such care that I do believe an entire generation has come to an end thinking sex can only properly be accomplished by Soopy and Lois, Dagwood and Blondie, they could rattle through the whole thing in eight little pages. Backrow also intro to deceit, most people being not nearly so dumb as you think they are, and betrayal, again most people being not nearly so dumb as you think they are. Least not Bobby Fly. This little teacher’s mongo sat there in front of us, back row but one. Listen.The idea was this. That instead of having to haul our loaded bladders down the hall to boy’s room—fifty-fifty you’d never return, all those Camel sucking third-graders lounging around pulling pud—why not instead take a wee piss back there, right under Bobby Fly’s seat, and do that MMMMMMmmmmmmmmmm!! and some finger-pointing, something along lines of what Bobby Fly took to doing when he saw puddle puddling under his chair, this cretinish ham actually going so far as to stand on his chair to mmmmmmmmmmmm!! pointy finger, like innocent little piss puddle was some rising flood, the histrionic snitch.Then all my little backrow henchpals they got into the act, mmmmmmmmmmm! pointy finger, and I was nabbed. Collared and hauled off down where the third-graders lurked; I mean, some of these guys shaved. To be fair, teacher wept that afternoon after school, wept with Wamba come to fetch me home, wept at what a mess I was, we all were, we little wartime backrowers, wept that it was war that made us so, an entire generation still lighting them up, waiting for that one that will do it, the big bang! But not so, not so. Can’t mmmmmmmmmmmm! and pointy finger war and her babies. Not war’s fault, her baby boy sitting there redface in the back row, promising he’s going to break Kid Quisling’s tattletale neck first recess, longing for next year to get here, third grade then. But then this we did not know then, that these times of war were good, not till we came to the end of them.That day Rachel Ganz, pal by then, came riding her bike along the broad alley out back, Rachel calling out and waving to her mother, she sitting there on back stoop watching Chick and me climb and fall from to spring up to climb again the thornless thorn tree. Rachel calling out it was at an end. Flinging her Flyer onto the bouncy carpet lawn to rush to her weeping mother, her mother

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weeping now, as well she should, as would we had we known, that the war had come to its end and all would be going home, leaving Wheaton Road and the alley back there, and going home, to peace, to hell. Such was my impression, in any case, that Mrs. Ganz had been weeping for us and our going home to peace. The sounds of voices, a captain shouting, a wife weeping, rising through the house at night, they were gone and all was a quiet. Men in trucks had come and brought boxes and crates and had put all our things away in them, and so the house on Wheaton Road was emptied of all but us and what little we needed till we too were packed in a car and gone. The alley lay still; they too were gone. Colonel Ganz, a doctor, and a kindly man, he and his weeping wife and cheering girls were gone. Porky Fulton, Coolie’s poker pal, a captain too, he and his wisecracking wife and chunky son, Harry, gone.The silvery, smiling chaplain and wife next door, their house a fine misted orange, gone.The Novembers, the Snows, Major England and his English wife, their names spoke to us that they were gone.Then one day too were we.The army, the war, was ended and we were gone. Silence and the car and the road ahead.The backs of their heads. Not a word. Coolie smoking cigaret after cigaret, smashing them out on the wing window there, a crust of gray and black, a circle of burn collecting there, cigaret after cigaret crushed out there against that glass. And now Wamba, now that we have left the hills and woods strewn there about San Antone, now that we have reached the noon glare and metallic sheen of the plains, now with its steel light shrieking against our squint, only now does Wamba take off her dark mask, her greenblack shades, and look back, look back in the side mirror into the back, look back into me.Your wars are ended, they are gone. Peace is mine and these plains and you, like him, now you both belong to us, my peace, my plains, me.You. Him. Done. Mine. Gone.You are done. Mine. Gone.

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9 uncles and a pop Cady 1. I was shot by the time all us Richardson boys, both sides, managed to get together in wartime London, Xmas ’44 or thereabouts.The probability table has been sketched out, I believe.Those murderous daylight raids we ran over Germany, over France, one in ten did not return. After nine you were flying on borrowed time. At thirty-three I cracked up. I had cracked up before, at fourteen.After thirteen the rest would be easy. I was so mistaken. Fourteen and the waistgunner got it. Both of them.The plane held together, just.A B-17. Flying Fortress. But then back at the strip, to get out of the -17, the tailgunner had to backflip and crawl forward through the craft, crawl to the waist door. I waited.They told me to wait, the men who had flown the plane. Sitting there in my plastic bubble, the .50 cool and quiet, empty. I watched them all, but they did not see me. No. One medic.The medic and the driver and the squadron surgeon, they came first in the jeep. And that medic, when the jeep slid up before us, the men in it flying out, the medic looked up at the waist of the plane, the ragged hole torn through it, and then he looked back to me. I raised a thumb.And the medic held out his hand flat, palm down, stay put, and no one looked at me again. Not till the landing officer came and looked at me in my plastic bubble, what are you waiting for? and I crawled out. Over blood that had frozen and now had warmed. It seemed everywhere. Tacky, like paint not quite dry. Tacky to hand and knee in crawling, then standing tacky still against my step. An adhesive pull and cracklesnap as boot broke free of blood that had frozen, now warmed,

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warming some but not yet dry.The crack-up came at the end of every mission then. I could not leave my happy sunny bubble, so safe there in the sky firing .50 rockets at whirring targets, look! the clouds just there, thumpthumpthump and innocent puffs, ackack ackack, its innocent thump and puffpuff smoke drifted by.They came and fetched me away. Came for me through that sticking, snapping blood underfoot.Thirty-three, they told me later. Not bad to make it that far. Cracking up each and every time, till they came for me, I might have been dead, how quiet they came for me there in my happy plastic bubble. Had not fired a round that day, I don’t believe.That’s what I learned in time, that’s cracking up. No point in sending you up now, boy.You’re sent up to kill and you forget.You’re no use to killing, boy, you’re out, boy.That’s what they mean when they say you’ve hit the rocks, cracked up, boy.The record’s a hundred something.You didn’t do bad.They told me such lies later and let me go.That’s how I came to our meeting there, all the Richardson boys, both sides, gathering in wartime London, Xmas ’44 or so, the final Xmas of the war. Cracked up, that’s me. Is that what you want? Is that what you want to know? Franklin Crawford 1. What crap, that’s not what he wants, you know what he wants. He doesn’t want our wars.We all lived through them, see. War, life—he could not care less. No use to this little ghoul. He’s after peace, death, the end, kid. He’s got ’em on the brain.Yeah that’s where it all is, the seat of the trouble, all in his head.A screwball. I saw it when he was a kid. Those drawings he did. You were there, you saw ’em, you remember.This kid was five and he was weird.That’s early, five. If mommy from manicomio hadn’t quashed all that, busted up his crayons, called him a girl, tore his really nice weird shit to shreds, maybe there would’ve been hope for the world. He could’ve cut off an ear and hung around on undergrad walls.Yeah. But then without that outlet, shall we say, the world is now in deep trouble. See Hitler for that. See: artistic drive, thwarted. Mussolini, Mao, Mohammed, I thru M—a message to mothersome meddlers—you gotta little versifier, let him rhyme. Otherwise humankind will pay. Or if not that extended, then all who ever knew him.The people of his blood.We knew him. Bounced him on knee till he puked. Fed him beer, watched him flop like a fish. Held him up by heels till he chomped on delicate delicacy. There’s not one of us who doesn’t bear scar from such proffered paternal palship. He was out to get us way back then, and look at him now. We were real, you know. I mean real living flesh-

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and-blood breathing human beings.And now. Just monsters in his brain. Beasts of our own wild, clawing within his imagined cage. Let’s go straight to the heart of the matter—so far as I’m concerned. My life, he’s fucked that up totally, hopelessly, unforgivably. But my death. His my death, it’s a lie, calumny, a straight-out crime. Having at it when I rolled my Caddy there.Took out six light poles, four left, couple more after the crossover. It was night, four in the morning, he got that right. It was somewhere, on my way down to Mexico,Villa Acuna, Boystown. Not the Sand Hill road, the turn there, the turn I knew like the back of my hand. Not this maybe suicide like he’s got in his head. I won’t die, I won’t kill myself. Not now. Not yet. That’s later, my death, the fine way I killed myself. I know this road like the back of my hand. I’m looking at them now, my hands.They’re at the wheel. Eighty, that’s all this curve will carry. Not one-twenty, not even close. I know that like the back of my hand. I know where it is, I know when to brake.When to stomp. Not yet. Not now. It’s later, there at the end of my life, that’s how I’ll kill myself. Plenty of time, plenty of time. Old. Defeated. Life all gone.The others—Teet, Coolie, Dusty—that’s how they died. Mad old men not even interested in that, their madnesses. It’ll come to me too. Suicide by all interest draining away. I won’t be that old. Christ, the things I’d done.Things I’m going to do. Law school, maybe grad school too.All my farms, my ranches, all my houses, my cars, all my pretty cars, they are gone.Wives too. Listen, it ain’t putting the cut up lady back together that’s tough. It’s keeping her home when the ranch, the house, the cars are gone—now that’s magic.And the trouble with the bank. My pal there,VP loans, Jimmy West.We were cutting some corners.They caught us. Caught Jimmy.The bank inspectors. He went off and disappeared, Jimmy West.Then they came for me.That’s when I took to running. Rolled the Caddy. But I’m not going to die. Think I’m going to, but there’s plenty of time. Stomp. I got till the end of my life. I’m so drunk I don’t know which way is up. Only. It was never down. Not for long. Look, I’m out in some field. How I lived through that one, I don’t know. Light poles here, there, all over the road. Clipped off like it had been shears, the Caddy’s jaws.Yeah and that, the Caddy, just some ball of steel now.A tangle of tin, that El Dee.This old man is there in the field, pulling up something by its roots. He gives me an onion— good thinking—and takes me to his adobe.This old boy is some kind of Mexican, I told you that, I was on my way down to Old Mexico, looking for my missing bank buddy, my grabby gone pal.Whatever, this old boy

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don’t speak any language I know. He hides me out and I mean the rest of my life, man. The cops come and haul me away. I shoulda stayed there under the bed. They didn’t believe a word of it, rolling my Caddy twenty-six times.There’s not a scratch on me, not a nick, not a bruise, not even a bloody nose. Even the cop doc said he’d never seen anybody dead so clean. OK.A black eye, but that was the cocktail waitress at that cantina back up the road. Everybody had a good time over that one. Belly laughs all around and I was home free. Scot-free. Franklin Crawford 2. Listen, this kid making up all our deaths is death weird. Dragging us all together there in wartime London so we can sit around some pub shooting the shit, everybody jawing about how he’s going to get it in the neck. He’s got it on the brain, man. Death. How everybody all around is dead.Yeah.Weird. Death mad.And he had it from the start. Some of these pictures he used to draw, like he would kill this bird, see, shoot it, and instead of like Audubon, his big hero—I gave him the book and told him how this bloodthirsty frog did it, killed thousands and thousands of birds and then drew them like they were live—well this kid, instead of looking at these birds he had killed and drawing them like they were still alive, imagining, you understand, that part, well this totally batshit boy draws the birds exactly as they are, draws them dead. One time I think I came down on side of Mummy the Dummy, there when she banned dead birds tacked up all over his bedroom walls.These birds, eyes gone gray, beaks ajar, their pointy little tongues lolling out—he had this kid sister catatonic. Paralyzed. So. Ripriprip shredshredshred. But then this krazy kid, he knew how to fight back. His masterpiece followed.That country Baptist church choir there at Blanco? Right.The preacher and wife and some deacons tossed in. He let the ladies keep their hats on. Maybe some high-heel shoes. Ripriprip burnburnburn. I mean, this kid got the murder mommy bee in his bonnet early on.Yeah.That’s the point. This kid, for all his weirdness—letting the ladies keep their hats on, their purses, drawing dead things dead—usually his weirdness had its point. This suicide he’s got for me, how he came up with it—well I am flattered he didn’t want me ending as I did.The ladies can keep their hats on, the bird is dead, and his favorite uncle, one of the two of us, the swashbucklinwheelerdealerripsnortinfuckemallandsleeptillnoon uncle Franklin Crawford, he just can’t die some office zombie somewhere, there in the Ag. Dept. in D.C. No.A violent life cries out for violent death.Yes. So. Let’s take this apart, my death, his death for me.Three suicides had he in mind, in thinking out mine for me.We’ve seen the rolling of the Caddy 160

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twentysomething times and I really did make it through it with nothing but a little back problem, sciatica now and then, nibbling onions with this kindly wetback till dark, really was headed down Old Mexico way, trying to find out Jimmy West.That’s one.Three, the third, we’ll do it later, that’s the big one.When these imagined suicides for me start edging over into the imagined suicide he’s got for himself. Cady’s suicide grabs the lion’s share of that imagined end, but that’s for Cady to decide. Whether he wants the kid in on his end—I don’t know.The second, my number two, that’s the one closest to the heart, the one that almost was me.That was me thinking suicide that day, thinking about it. Planning it.Wanting it. Driving out to do it.And not doing it. He knows this one—I mean actually knows it, I mean he was there in the car with me that day I drove out to roll my Lincoln, I think I was driving the Lincoln at the time, roll whatever it was however many times it was going to take. It was wives this time, the second suicide, the real suicide, me really thinking it anyway. Women. Doesn’t seem like would be enough, does it, but me and this kid, we share that.With.Without. One way or the other, coming, going, with, without, they drive you nuts.To distraction. Outrage. Despair. One day with: murder. Next day without: hari-kari. It was without, next day, that I decided to take a drive. As fast as the Lincoln would take me. Can’t remember how old this kid was. Four, fourteen, forty.Along those lines.A little D&D, kid. Driving and drinking. West Texas, an Olympic event. Can’t remember how I got him out of mommy’s clutches.Those maternal claws. He still shows the scars. Kidnap probably. Nobody home, I took him.Actually little sis was there but she was watching the radio. I’m telling you these kids were futuristic. Hang out some notes on the clothesline. Gone to look at land. It could mean anything. Buy. Sell. Commune with nature. See how it lies.Tourism. History.Yeah that was it. Something old, something dead, something bloodthirsty for this little sidewinder. Macabre does not do him justice. No accident he once told me bats were his favorite birds.This history, it was some kind of Indian massacre.As there was no monument there, probably it was the Indians who received the massacring, to be fair just their ponies. All that was left this huge pile of pony bones. A bunch of these Indian ponies, maybe thousands of them, all herded up and shot, their bones piled up in a great monument to civilization. Like pushing candy on this kid. His eyes glowed, and he was only about that high at the time. The wind howling its ghost, all this anguish through this bonepile.Actually I think we left little sis holding her

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breath under the bed. But it was speed really, you didn’t need a bone skyscraper to get this kid hotfoot to the car. Speed, he was hooked on it already.Who can blame him, Coolie puttputting around.Those new cars they took to making after the war, they were made for speed, they were made for death. It was the in way to go out there on those plains. No tall buildings to jump off of, no rivers to dive into.Aspirin the heaviest drug allowed, by the time you gag down bottle or so you’re put off the whole idea. Lotta rope and no trees. Motor idle in the garage—that nosy Baptist next door’d get smelly and sniffy and the jig was up. Gunshot—wake up half the dogs in town, you happen to miss you’ll never get back to sleep. Nah, let the rolling wheel do the work. Let speed.And out there on the plains you don’t really have to roll the Caddy, take out all those high-line poles, lights and phones all around out for who knows how long. Nah, the plains themselves provide better than that.They’ll give you a soaring, sailing, wingéd death—there where they end.There where there should’ve been more plain and there isn’t. Just space.To tell the truth I can’t remember it, the truth. I really do think, or certainly would like to believe, that I simply got my roads mixed up. I thought I was on the Toro highway, see, that’s one road that leads off the plains, when in fact I got it wrong and went sailing off the plains over to the south, over on the Spur highway. The difference is big if you’re into death. Bigger still if you’re into life.The Toro road, it takes a sharp turn to the left just there under the brow of the plains.You sail off the plain there one-twenty and after your flight you and your Caddy or maybe it was the Lincoln are down there in the purple sage tumbling with the tumbling tumbleweeds. So:Toro: sure thing death drive. But: Spur: the road runs as straight off the plain as it has run up on them. A short flight, your three-point back there on the blacktop and you’re on your way to Spur for some ungodly reason. Ah well, got the massacre all fucked up too. It wasn’t Indians but their ponies, couple thousand of them, that got slaughtered.And the bonepile made by the slaughtered ponies, that was gone too, we couldn’t find it. I was weeping by then.Tourists, the wind, time—skeletal evidence carted off. I sat down and cried. Ponies, their bones scattered and gone. But the kid didn’t seem to mind. You can take the Toro road next time, get it right next time, unc. You ought to have seen his eyes. Me weeping over taking the wrong road, the ponies, not so much as a bone left to mark their slaughter.You ought to have seen his eyes—the Lincoln, I think it was at the time, flying off in space, all those Indians, their paints, their bones piled high as a hill—they

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shone, his eyes, as we winged toward death, oh bright as buttons did they shine, soaring off down toward Spur. Franklin Crawford 3.The same with my third suicide, the third death he had for me.We’ve had 1) accident; 2) thinking about it; now we come to the 3) real thing. Mine; Coolie’s; his. He saw them all. Saw they’d never be and should have oh my word, my word, should they ever have, have been done and gone and forgotten. I happened to know this guy who did it right, like this kid, he wants it for him, Coolie, me.This young guy who did it right, he got into Jimmy West’s poker game, I met him there. In fact it was driving back from one of our sessions there in Hubbard, that was the night this guy did it right, didn’t make the Sand Hill curve—eighty is tough, one-twenty and you’re flying with the angels. But let’s see this guy, his end, there with the kid.The kid’ll see it cleaner, clearer, there in the swimming pool at the little country club they got there off the cap and he crawls out of the water he loves and comes over and sees this young guy tee off on the first tee, the golf course they got there. Sees him there. Him. Coolie. Me. Kelly, that was this young guy’s name, first, last, who cares. His old man was second best haberdash in town, the old guy wore spats, waistcoat, lived in a colonial bought by wife’s dough, the best part of town, doc one side, the TV fridge dealer across the street, sent his boy Kelly away to school, far off, out in the world. But the boy Kelly came back, came back a man, came home to kill himself. Sure that’s where he got the idea.The way I died and didn’t, Coolie died and should have, the way he died, he would, oh how he swears he will, that sophisticated boy now a man, traveled the world over and now he’s come back home to kill himself, roll his Caddy out on the Sand Hill curve, to die.That first day he saw Kelly/me/Coolie/him there at that little country country club, Kelly coming to hit a golf ball off the first tee, him crawling out of the pool to come watch, he’d already heard the story, the jokes, the skepticism going around.The haberdasher’s fancy boy come home to farm. Never worked a day in the field, always down at the store softsoaping some shoesale, hands that never knew dirt, a brow ever dry of sweat.That’s what the talk was going around, then it got worse, the skepticism, the jokes. A gentleman farmer? Won’t sit a tractor? Won’t slop a hog? A windshield farmer fine—but a windshield farmer having to rent land? A windshield farmer’s got to own. Now Coolie Rich’son, lives out Blanco way, he can put on them airs, dress fine in his sharp-crease khakis and get away with it, just, dressing out and putting on them airs of gentleman farmer, and that’s

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because Coolie don’t have to rent no land—he owns. So his rich daddy give it him, he owns and you got to own, you can’t rent and drive around in your pickup like some squire.You rent you got to climb up and mount that Poppin Johnny the same as if you was help, put a shoulder to the wheel, tote that barge etc etc.That’s what the kid knew when he crawled out of the pool to watch Kelly hit off the first tee, and seeing him there even this kid knew it was not right. Kelly simply didn’t belong. Like me, like Coolie, like him, we were not right there—we were wrong.This trim young man was dressed out like one of those ads in a New York magazine, some pretty boy dressed out like he was a big white hunter.Wore the same khakis, like Coolie’s, old army khakis, faded now, washed and washed again not for the dirt in them, washed and washed again because the army told you to, and they were pressed and sharpcreased down the trouser front—how could clothes so soft hold that crease, because the army told it to.And the hat he wore, white straw, flat crown, broad brim, a bandana band, the hat of a plantation boss.And the tan, Kelly’s face was not that brown that comes from work, hours, days, years working under the sun, that dark black tan of a life working the fields. No that was the tan of play, of sport and recreation.And sunglasses, no farmer anyone had ever seen, not one working the fields, not even one driving out from town to watch that work being done, no one around here had ever seen any kind of farmer wear them, dark shades over the eyes. No, that was not right there, that was wrong. And then when Kelly finished his round of golf, the kid came out of the pool again to see Kelly walking up from the last green, toward the clubhouse and the drive that led up to it and there a young woman sat in a car and oh how wrong she was, how wrong for the place, and how right she was, how right for the kid now climbed out of the pool, the sun slanting over the course now, the kid shivering some now, wrapped like a Roman in his towel to watch Kelly come up from the ninth hole to greet his wife sitting in the car there at the clubhouse drive.And this car, wronger than sunspecs on an International Harvester, this car was a sports car of some kind, nobody knew what, some foreign make, we didn’t make them zippy little heaps here after the war, not after we had won it for all them foreigners and had some bragging to do, like make cars five six times longer than anybody outside funeral parlor business had need for, this zippy little car, green and a ragtop to boot and that top down now even with this late August evening going to shade, going to cool, that ragtop down so you could see properly the woman sitting

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there in it. Young blonde tan shades hair pulled back behind her ears laughing waving smiling as now she rises up in the seat to wave and smile at her husband coming up from the final green. Oh yes that was all wrong, that was not right, the car, the woman, the way she sat up on the seat back, up where a proper car would have a roof, and smiled laughed waved at her husband after his hard day on the course. She looked so glad to see him after what, couple three hours, like he was just home from the wars, that was not to be seen around these parts, and now him too, like some foreigner, like that puddlejumping little car, now Kelly comes up from the course, up through the trees and their long slant shadow, and now he’s laughing smiling waving too, looking like he’s so glad to see her too, his foreign wife, looked it, sitting there on the seat back like no wife around these parts ever dared, her head would be sticking through the roof for a start, and now he comes up quick, quick and happy, quicker and happier than any husband around here ever come up to his wife, not after a hard day on the course, and now he tosses his bag in the car back and he and his wife give kiss and laugh and smile and look so glad to see one another, not the way husband wife supposed to look these parts, and now Kelly he doesn’t get under the wheel like one of our husbands would, the man always doing the driving, no woman ever doing the driving when a man’s around, no he hops in the passenger seat and she whirls the little car around in a cloud of dust and scoots that foreign job right out of there, on up toward the main highway. Golfers, swimmers, the bridge club gathered in the clubhouse there, even them old grannies have raised from their seat to watch this doomed happy smiling so glad to see one another couple roar off in a cloud of dust.That, the dust, the billowing tail of it flaring up along the road, that was the only thing right, not wrong, about Kelly, me, Coolie, him, all of us come home to make our death out there on the Sand Hill curve. Die out there in a cloud of dust. Die like we were meant to. Die rolling the Caddy don’t know how many times that night coming back from Hubbard, from Jimmy West’s poker game. No telling how much we had lost that night. Everything. Her. Farm. Car. Her. Everything. She called out to him, called him Sweetie, him trotting up with his bag from the course.That’s all any of us ever wanted. Hi baby! Make a par? Me, him, you, us. Everything. Horace Chas Homer. I’ll do the talking for those of us who couldn’t make Frank’s little shindig, his Christmas clambake, there in wartime London, the last Christmas of our lives we’d ever get together. Sure, they

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understand, me talking for us five who couldn’t make it—I am the mouthpiece, right? Of the five, two of the boys had stayed home, and then there were the three of us who saw action in the Pacific theater. Babe, on the Arkansas side, and our Dolle’s own Robert James, they stayed back and farmed, Babe over there south of Blanco, Robert James renting that place over the road from Mama and Papa, about three miles east of Dolle. They got nuthin to say, it’s been agreed, and I’ll be handling it. Of the other eight boys who did serve we all survived, four boys from each Richardson house. Some close calls but not a scratch. All, that is, if you don’t count Cady a war casualty, his death, the suicide, made by war. But you think along those lines maybe we all died in the war. Didn’t really live through it, just our bodies. And peacetime came along to bury us, it would in time. May be some truth in that, about all but me. Not even this droopydrawers kid making all this up—war= life, peace = death—not my awful awful wife, not the Hubbard DA, my thieving ex-partner, the voters of Brown County, not one of them will be planting Horace Chas Homer before his time. Now.The three of us in the Pacific. Me; my older brother, Autrey, the preacher, a chaplain on a battleship, he the number two Dolle boy; and Taylor John called Teeter by some, the oldest of the Arkansas boys, he served on a flattop, plane mechanic, marine, a sergeant. Was tacking up my sheepskin when the Japs hit Pearl, I served as legal officer to the navy, shore-based, island hopping there in the rear, as we pushed west.Was in charge of deaths. Deciding how it was our boys had died. Hearing testimony, reading reports, all concerned with dying right and dying wrong.The cowards, the heroes.Who got the medals, who got forgot.They picked the right man for the job. Sifting through death and how and why it had come. Somebody with death on the brain—take the morbid kid making all this up—and he’d’ve been there with Cady within a month. Slashing wrists, popping pills, squeeze that last one off into the skull.A man who loved life, a man who was life and knew it, a man who knew that life was all they’d ever give you and you got to take some too—I sailed through death on a smile. Even there at the end, when it looked so bad, muscles gone in my neck, head slumped to my chest, couldn’t even keep my eyes open, nor speak, head hanging as if in shame, as if penitent for the shameful things I’d committed, but even then no matter how bad it looked, like I had quit and I was sorry, even that wasn’t true. Just was not true. He saw it too, the kid making all this up.There at Coolie’s funeral or his sister’s or another one, such plantings were coming

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in flocks by then, he saw this old shuffler, couldn’t talk, open his eyes, couldn’t even hold his head up—he saw all that death acoming, but then he saw too the little Mexican nurse there with me. Oh it was during the war that I came to have taste for women with some color to them! And seeing that colorful little girl, this kid smiled. Oh no, I was not one of the walking dead he saw all about him—Coolie, his dear sister, all the rest. Oh no. Might’ve looked it shuffling along,Victoria, the wife, yapping away, she still at her form of life as well, yapping, but even that wife yapping in my ear, maybe wishing I was dead, even then, I was still alive then, dying, near dead. Oh death would get me in the end, the very end, but even then, some said, not even then. Oh sure, you could say I was one of those, like Coolie, who saw life’s end at war’s end; sure I saw that old shuffler, blind and mute, head beaten bowed by peace, deathly peace; but on V-J Day I said they’re going to have to come get me, hunt me down, death and her six helpers to carry me along; and I tossed off the gold braid and wet blue and hit the ground running. And then too I had my honey at home already halfway around the track.Already driving me crazy,Victoria was, the wife. Deciding me to decide some day I just might be better off crazy or looking it. Heading me lickety-split toward loony life, even then. Now. Victoria had this uncle there in Brown County—never gave us a nickel, never would—and he was out starting to haul peacetime in, the government giving the old fraudster not only contract to erect these massive grain elevators, twenty thirty silos rising side-to-side, like white towered fortress walls they were, not only that contract did old Jub Jeffries reel in, but a second and that was the contract to store government-bought grain in what the government had paid him to erect. Now what we got stead that nickel, not a dime, not a red cent, from Uncle Jub was a quick lesson in chase, cheat and chisel—and junior partnership in a law firm that some would come to call just that. And oh that law partner. Bert Waters. Oh what a beaut, what a man, world’s worst lawyer, this saint of sin, O. Bert Waters.To start I got to take over all the business Bert didn’t have.And all the play he did. Here it was Victoria who saved me again and again, damnit. I was doing just fine as this big blubbery rubbery backslapping asspatting goodtime Charlie nobody was ever going to take seriously, certainly not me, and then Strictly Vickly, woman wasp, walks up. Bert and I could have our little fishing jaunts down to Old Mexico—oh that taste for brownpepper skin!—and Bert was on this commission down in Austin, he got me on it too—some study on taxation of Texas oil pipeline,

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namely little to none—and come back home and Victoria would have me elected Brown County DA. Damn near did that once. Crying shame I lost that race. I was so suited for the work and world of politics. Did what money told and made the people understand, oh they so wanted to believe my bluff and babble, they so wanted to understand. And that alone—people simply liking me—almost got me there.Then that night of the election—seventy-two short and this was in Brown and all the desert counties therearound and me and Bert were thinking recount, Vicky too—some friends of Uncle Jub’s, friends from over Hubbard way, they were big on the Railway Commission—and I will tell that body had all to do with the price of Texas oil and state’s rights to gouge our Yankee brethren for every nickel they splashed down their gas guzzler and nothing to do with railways and interstate commerce, so called—and the next morning I woke up happy happy to still be alive and in private practice. Seems Tricky Vicky had pulled one on Uncle Jub, getting me a lot closer to the Brown County courthouse than I was ever meant to be. Next killer blow killer peace dealt was killing off old Bert and purt near all the practice I had built up for both.You’re looking at peaceful suicide, suicide by death, Bert’s was a beaut, it took the cake. Now not up to that sheriff downstate, shot himself in the belly six times with a single-shot .22; nor to forget that drug lawyer, cut his prick off inch by inch, laid the little weenie sausages out on the tub rim and drowned in the bath; surely classics in Texas county-level self-destruct; but old Bert, he could be up there on the platform anyway. Chomped up so many aspirin pills he couldn’t keep them down, drank so much whiskey he couldn’t stay up, broke his neck failing down the stairs in a one-story house. And oh yes taking up cigar smoking and drinking teabag tea that first night of his death, that same brand stogie I prefer, same little Lipton baggies wife Vicky fancied —oh yes we woke up the next morning,Victoria and me, happy to be alive and saddled with Bert’s run-up debts, that cigar-smoking farewell tea party to life enough to keep us both in line the rest of our lives.Till right there at the very end.They got me then and good, or maybe it was just me getting me. Q:The cause of this man’s death, officer? A: Life. Yep oh yes I loved it there, all the way through, all the way to the very end, and even beyond, some said. Sat there in my satin coffin smiling away, they tell me, the undertaker could not take those wrinkles out—that twist

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of lip had been set by life and death no death could turn it down.They even offered to tack that lifted lip down, drive a nail in ’er, that undertaker was determined to give it a straight lip come hell or high water, but Vicky demurred.Afraid, I was told, that they hammer mouth shut, maybe something else might spring loose, eyes pop open while lowering me into the pit, and so that final farewell leer was let alone and let be. On to the bad business then.Another grin, another grave.That’s what brought me, all this happy disaster, into the kid’s head, that strange place. His old man’s funeral, Coolie’s, me there with head drooped to chest and still there tagging along behind the cutest little meskin nurse. He got that joke, this demented kid. Like he got the joke there at my trial, my lawyer claiming I had done it all as a maniac. He got that one first bounce, first time, that first time I went nuts, said I did. Legslapping sideholding jawaching wild about that one, he was. Uncle Horace Homer, he told Wamba when he heard the crazy news, he’s the sanest man I’ve ever known.You see Horace Homer out bawling from field to field like Lula when she went mad, bawling like a cow lost her calf, poor old Joe Simms following along in the pickup, having to keep on the roads, cutting this way and that to figure where he’d cut poor bawling Lula off? You see Horace Homer sitting in that stove rocker day after day-long day, day in day out like Mama, Wamba and all the little ones left in her care, left tending Mama, brushing out her hair, bringing her the wishbook so’s she could wish? You see Horace Homer like Wamba herself, mad with pain, those headaches that stood her frozen in that Texas heat, that day they’d left the army and come back home, that day she knew that by coming home she had killed off her husband, killed any interest he’d ever have in life, in her, their kids, their home, and there was no guard to her madness, sunglasses, pills, the doc suggested nose drops, her standing frozen still in that blistering heat. You see them mads? You see any of them? No. No. No, he laughed when I committed myself insane. Down to that plush private home down in Houston, right there two blocks from the AstroDome, little bus takes all us oldies and baddies and maddies over to the game and back again. Oh yes, he got that joke and he laughed, got that joke we all live. Why, by remembering me he can get that joke that’s himself, he can laugh there along with himself at that. His life, mine, yours. He can laugh at that and them all. Now the trial. Just looking at it you wouldn’t think it a laughing matter at all. Nosir. But I was laughing all along. Most of it a laughter that

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goes on there inside of course, but not always. Sometimes you just can’t help yourself, no matter how bad it looks, and have let go and have a chuckle. That smirky smarmy crack the prosecutor made about the defendant, that there were some nights the baby rapist couldn’t get it up. When some in the courtroom twittered, why I twittered right along too. Let that fatso tortchaser try to get it up night after night, there on the office floor, this she-cat wanting it more, more—you had to chuckle just a chuckchuckchuckle at that, this fatty peepee patty sweating it out night after night there on the office floor.Another laugh, this’un just allowed to smile, was that fourteen year old she-cat, there she now sat in the courtroom, two years had turned her a little lamb, meek and mild, never sucked prick till you thought it’d drop off, never knew of such sucking, this raped innocent, now sweet sixteen . . . worth a whoop and a holler, that’un, kept it at a smile. Another bellybuster? What this trial was all about. Politics. Wetback politics. Gringo politics. Everybody wanted a change of venue. Prosecution, defense, all agreed to that. Trial moved from small pokey Brown County, county seat Browntown, pop. 8 grand, over to Hubbard, the big city in these parts, Hubbard County, the same, big among counties till you get up to Monterrey or down toward Tom Green.This blubber Hubbard DA, he had his eye on something big, like Marvin’s seat in Congress, and how do you go in and grab that, the fiefdom of the White Hope of the Plains? You go meskin, that’s what.That was the bellybuster there.This Hubbard DA, he’s so prejudiced against Mexicans all his servants, even the garden boy, are colored, and there he goes playing up to the pepperbelly populace.While the babyraper, the child molester from Brown County, he had given over his life, much of his career anyway, to these people who drift up from the South to do us whitefolk our work for us.That was back of me getting shied off that first recount, the recount I could’ve won and the Brown Town prosecutor’s badge with it, my defending that bracero, that wetback, who had killed one of his own. Didn’t even speak English this boy, and I took my highschool Spanish in and got him off.Well got him life, but in those days, you’re a bracero living in a tent stretched off your truck, it was good as off. And so it was I got backed off the recount. And so it was I got the rep for being these people’s man, he even hablas a leetle of their lingo.Victoria didn’t much care for it there at first, all those calls coming in from Juans and Josés and Juanitas and Jesuses, these people showing up at the back stoop at all hours, sombrero in hand, but what with the old pard Bert taking off and

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leaving half our white business in ruin and the other half staying away, warned off me like I’d been warned off recount by the courthouse crowd—what else was there left to do but take these people and their pesos in? And that wasn’t much, sometimes it wasn’t even that. But it was steady and it grew, my business with these people who for the most part were fine people, good or better than most the whites you see walking through your door.And then that rep spread over to the colored people and though they didn’t pay as regular as the Mexicans, they were good people too, they all had their problems, and then it spread on over to white people over on the wrong side of the tracks, people called poor, called white, called trash, people who at one time just might have been my people, dirt farmers poor and proud, and they were good people too. Then came the break.There was this kid, the son of one of the big men in Brown Town, he had got this little girl in trouble, this girl a little señorita, such a bright and pretty thing just like my own, and I got that settled and so there it was, now the rich whites, the poor Mexicans, everybody was happy with old Horace Homer, the backslappin BSer, the people’s pal.And we were living from it in the best part of town and when these people still kept coming to the backdoor, I couldn’t turn them away even then, even when I didn’t need their money or their troubles anymore. I don’t know why, maybe it was that way Papa looked at the world, all men god’s creatures. Maybe it was that I simply liked these people, liked their politeness, and they were plenty smart, and I liked the way their language sounded when they said it, and I liked their spiced up food and their colorful dress, the way the women could dress up in those bright satin dresses, and oh yes I did much care for those women and their dark hair and black bottomless eyes and their brownburningbrown skin. Oh yes oh yes, that was the chuckle we all had there at the trial, at my humiliation, what all called my end. Maybe you couldn’t see it, see me laughing there when the DA crowed he had brought the monster to his knees, brought this evil to its end, but it was there, there to the end to the happy end. Me lying there in my silk stuffed box, just couldn’t keep that smile off the snatchkissing kisser, all the good citizens of Brown Town passing there by the coffin.Why even the choir leader’s wife, she had that nice brown skin, she swore up and down that that old monster up and winked at her there, grinning out from death. Not a bad way to go when you think about, them having to hammer down that grin, it just won’t stay down, that shiteating grin, not even there at the very end.

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Autrey. There would be that irony that I, the only killer among them, would be the only one among them not part of their killing, as I do not think praying for the souls of those who would kill or be killed was part of that, their killing, their war.They say I began a hunter, but I am not so sure. One can never be about one’s early times. The memories are a checkerboard then, some there, some not, and those we retain are often strewn about in a jumble. But there is something there that tells me, as I age and commence to die, that killing began it.That it was the killer who became the hunter. I don’t know. Fascination with the machine of death, the rifle in this case, would be before that, for they are elegant, thoughtful machines, these rifles, pistols, guns. Yes, that would be the proper order, I think.Weapon, killing, the hunt.That I have long since quit them all has reversed that order in all our minds, even mine, now that I am brought to remember such matters.And there was the necessity of it too. Our hunger. For as a boy I carried home meat to our table, and the rifle and its ammunition, the family provided these to a boy as they might give him gloves in the fall to work the fields, as when winter came there were pockets enough to warm his hands. I quit of course when the necessity, the hard times were gone. I quit of course when I became a man of God. I quit of course when I came to know my son. But I need have had no concern for the boy. It was the hunt that drew him, and does still.The violence of the gun explosion, the slashing made by bullet, the sound of it and the tearing wounds left him dazed and ill.When he hunts now he hunts in silence, with longbow.And the killing, making things live now dead, even now he turns his face from what he has done. The killings he performs are but that.The kill.The finish to the hunt. It is only that, the design of the hunt, that death must be its end, that drives him to such finishing.The hunt demands it. Death. A popping flashbulb will not do. But what I feared unreasonably in my son—seeing myself, not him—I came to see in the other boy.The boy who is speaking for us now, now that we are old and dead. I saw the killer there in him as I had known it in me.The machine, the stalk—they meant nothing to us as boys, he and I. I saw it quick and so did he.We were there at Mama and Papa’s, the Dollé place, out in the pasture that runs along the poor land around the playa lake. Audie, my boy, must have been fourteen or so. And the other boy,Wamba’s boy, he couldn’t have been more than six, seven.Though I had given all up years ago, even simple shooting, I had come with the boys into the pasture, for, though Audie knew well how

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to shoot and handle the gun, I did not know if he knew the greater caution that must be taken in teaching it.There were two guns, rifles.The .222 Audie had received on turning fourteen and his old singleshot, a small .22, that was what the other boy carried.We set up targets down by the playa lake, dried and empty that season, and walked back up toward the house, so that when we turned to fire, the house and Mama and Papa and all in it would be to our backs, our weapons firing into nothing but the targets and the lakebed beyond. My mind went off. I don’t know where. Saw that Audie knew well that teaching needed double the care of doing and that he and the boy and their two weapons and their care with them were fine and—I don’t know. My mind went off.There came to me the hissing crack of the .222, that I knew, but in looking down toward the targets I found myself looking beyond, my mind off—I don’t know, a boy again, maybe that was it. My first gun, first shot, first kill. I did not even know if the boy had fired his smaller weapon—I think he probably had not—when the warning cry came to me. And there was Papa in his old field truck, the one that never left the land, not even going onto the web of dirt road laced around our lands. He had not come from behind us, from the house, nor from beyond the lake, the way we looked and were set to fire. From somewhere off, I don’t know where.That was probably it. In going back, to where I was a boy again, first gun, first shot, first kill, my vision had drawn down as it had then, as my mind had drawn down, a thing aimed, it knew nothing of what might be about it but that, that which was to be killed.And now Papa and the old truck came into those sights and what I saw I killed.The warning cry? Don’t know much of that either. From behind. One of the women coming from the house, seeing Papa, the old truck coming along toward our targets.Audie crying out to the boy. Me, a man now, crying out to the boy who saw nothing now, heard no cry, saw, heard nothing but the kill. He fired, the boy did.There came the cry, the small snap.The weapon had not fired, but the boy had. The boy had killed, but the weapon had not. I can’t say why. Had Audie not loaded it for the boy? What had jammed, what had gone wrong—I do not know, never will. Only: the boy had killed and the weapon had not.You can see it in his eyes still.The fear of the stalk still there, even after the kill. It has stayed in me, all this time. Like light may glow after the sun has set. Before the dark of the kill has come over him. Fear’s gone now. He lowers his gun. He is no longer afraid. He has made the kill.The thing is dead. He smiles.

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Teeter,Taylor John. He hated Jonanna, I always liked that in this kid. He hated her and he let it show. Jonanna.The wife.A razor-sharp tongue.Will laugh in your face. Says whatever comes into her head. Never thinks: will it hurt, will it not? Arrogant, a man she’d be an asshole. Sarcasm. I’ve seen people wither, sear neath its frost. Me, for one.Till I learned to keep my mouth shut. But not this kid. He wouldn’t quit, he wouldn’t shut up. He showed his hatred, he said it straight out.Whatever Jonanna said, he made it the opposite. Even when he was wrong, routed, humiliation ruled and reigned, still his hatred burned, his tongue wagged.The first time, the kid couldn’t have been more than seven eight nine. It was sometime before Christmas,Thanksgiving maybe or maybe early in the December holiday, sometime before the big day.We were headed for Arkansas, coming from California.You were always doing things backwards, once you got out to California and stayed.Always headed east, going back home, when everybody else was westward bound.Anything to get away from it all. But not Jonanna. She was born there, on the coast.About as native to the place as you can get without being Indian. I knew how the country Dollé R’s felt around us, the Old South Arkansas gang. Like plowboys and hayseed hicks, when Jonanna dragged out the old pictures, the family album.They were Spanish Californians or maybe Mexican Californians. Forget when they shifted over, but they were early, her people.Whatever the name, you wouldn’t have seen any of them squatting and scurrying like monkey through an artichoke patch, topping onions, clinging for dear life to a cherrypicker. Grandees.There was nobody there back when they were there. Jonanna showed the pictures, it’s how we came to get married. Juana Anna.That’s what she would have been called back then.You couldn’t say No.They lived on these great ranchos or maybe haciendas.The closest neighbor’s grand house forty miles away, maybe a hundred.There weren’t any roads. When they went to visit a neighbor they’d stay for weeks.What the kid always hated about the Dolle R’s, the country bumpkins.They called it visiting.There was something about the way they said it, squeezed the i’s like they were things on your nose. He hated that and everything else about visiting. Sunday afternoon was a good time. Funerals, weddings. Any time you were all dressed up and miserable in that highstarch collar monkeysuit and had every right, after church or burying or splicing was done, to rip all that misery off and hop into something more comfortable.That was when visiting was properly done, in its classic form. Back in moccasins and that soft old khaki shirt, strolling the woods, let-

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ting the fried bird settle, understanding that if there was a god you’d more likely run into him relaxed and comfortable out in these woods than stiff and straight and straitened all afternoon over to Great Aunt Selma’s, that eternal afternoon of visiting. Coolie hated it too.That’s probably where the kid got it, hating everything in sight, particularly the stupid. But Coolie never let it out. Not till he started wandering around the house wearing three hats and crying out for Momma, years and years gone. One such crazed Sunday afternoon he came in from his noon nap, all ready for his afternoon nap, and saw his living room nap couch filled with visitors, they all wondering who it was the tallest cousin among the thousands upon thousands of Richardson cousins there must be. Bored with that, Coolie stretched out on the floor, there on the rug, and took to stroking the pretty ankle of the pretty cousin, she was maybe eighteen. When they made him sit up in a chair, he joined in the visiting.They were wondering, Wamba and all the other Dollé R’s, who the tallest cousin among those thousands was. Coolie joined in the visiting and wondered who the shortest cousin was.They wrestled him back into the back bedroom for his evening nap. Sure I hated the grandee’s granddaughter too, but I never let it out. Not even there at the end, not like Coolie.When you are so crazy you can let it out and people’ll have a smile at hatred and wrestle you back to your room, nap after nap after nap. No, they won’t see your hatred then, see hatred as hatred, no, they’ll see it but another form of crazy, saying what you think, what you feel, wondering who the shortest cousin is, telling the truth. No, I wasn’t like Coolie, always cracking jokes after he was cracked. Like he was always wandering around in his three hats, crying out for his Momma and his brothers and sisters and Arkansas.While the wife he hated, instead of letting it ride, this longing for those long dead, long gone or as crazy as he was, instead of just saying something like, “OK we’ll hop in the car tomorrow and drive back to Arkansas and see Momma,” and so forth, this wife he hated would explain ever so carefully, “They’re all dead, Johnson Alan.” Another of her revenges, going back to that name he hated, dumping Coolie, the name he loved. And Coolie would sit at the kitchen table, near tears, his voice quaking, “How can you tell a boy something like that? That his mother is dead.”

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And the kid hated her for it, for going on and on, telling the truth, bludgeoning this poor old near mindless fool with the truth, it could have been a ballbat, till his eyes filled with tear.The closest the kid ever saw Coolie come to crying except for when Momma died. One night the call from Arkansas came in and Coolie took it and he took the news and he went out into the night and did his crying there, alone, where no one could see. Or maybe he just let his eyes fill even then. I don’t think he ever cried more than that, let his eyes fill and turned away. More than I ever did married to Jonanna and afraid for my life, there at the end, there when I went zombie too, like Coolie, except there was Coolie making cracks and telling this Baptist nurse she could go fuck a duck when she wanted to change his diaper. Or that time Coolie was wandering around the house, now he was looking for his wife. And the wife he hated, she would say, “Why Johnson Alan,” this true idiot,“I am your wife!” And Coolie would grab her and give her a big hug and twostep her around the kitchen. And he would give a wink over her shoulder, he would let it out then. “Well I guess you’ll just have to do till she shows up.” And waltz on around the house, winking, patty fanny, even when Preacher was there diving into the devil’s food, the brownies, Preacher liked his sweet dark. Did let it out that one time though, that hatred of her. It was that time we were on our way back to Arkansas, sometime before Christmas, and we stopped there on the Texas plains, they were on the way. Coolie and his wife were still living out at Blanco then, out on the plain, not yet in town where some of the sky was walled off, but still out on the plain, there where the sky stood all about, like rising water—you would drown in that sky if you let go and took a breath and said what you thought. She hated those plains. I feared them. I always did, since I was a kid, my first trip out. Feared them.You come out onto these plains like she did, grown, you come upon them bearing east, going back home someplace, if not going back to your home then to somebody’s—then you merely hate the plains. But you’re a kid leaving home and you’re headed west and you don’t know what’s out there beyond these plains, maybe there’s nothing out there beyond this dead, flat, burned black to brown sheet of earth, and then you know to fear them.That they may be hell, like she said, but if beyond hell there’s nothing, you’ll take hell.That’s what I feared coming

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onto these plains.That they were the last step before nothing. Death, that instant before it. She called them hell anyway, that’s what got it all started. We were out there, before Christmas, headed toward Arkansas, and the plains stood all about us like earthen sky, the sky of the grave, brown, dark, flattened, without life or light, glare and dirt and dark, and she looked out the window toward some old house down the road, what Coolie’s fine old Home Place would come to when his she abandoned it to drag them into some air-conditioned nightmare in town, and she turned back and smiled. She had a smile, Jonanna, that sliced.A laugh that tore limb from limb. A voice that slashed and burned. She turned back and smiled and said, “This place looks like hell to me.” That was when the trouble started. Nobody said anything. Not a word. Not Coolie. Not me.We all sat there looking at something else. It was Wamba, the timid, stupid, hicky little country girl who said it. “A lot of people around here think it’s heaven.A lot of people around here call it God’s country.” And Jonanna laughed. It tore, it slashed. She laughed. “If this is God’s country, then God is mad.” That’s when the trouble started. Nobody said anything. Nothing. Not until this kid piped up. “What’s He mad at?” That’s when their hatred began, when the trouble started. Everyone burst out, we roared laughter.You didn’t think it would ever stop. No way to get riposte in then, not even you had voice shrill as steam whistle. But she knew how to wait, Jonanna. She was going to get this kid. Come hell or high water his scalp would be hers and she wasn’t going anywhere,Arkansas, Christmas, anywhere, till she had cut it, ears and all. Christmas did it. Never has so fine a weapon been imagined, when it comes to doing in a kid. It was this uncanny repeat of Coolie’s Christmas, there where he went hard, cold. He could have been this kid, Coolie. See, Momma, Pappa, somebody told little Coolie his Christmas present began with a g, the letter g. For months he dreamed gun. Come Christmas morn he opened this package a bit small and flat for a gun, even a sixshooter, and—gloves.You could not have felled him swifter with a poleax. Same principle second time around. This kid, Coolie’s kid, wanted this train for Christmas. He had never wanted anything so bad in

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his life. He ate, dreamed, breathed this train. He had it all picked out in the wishbook, the one he wanted, and word trickled back from Santa’s helpers that it was not a lost cause, if Santa could keep it under twenty bucks. No problem, said the kid, showing the wishbook picture of the train around. $14.95. Jonanna asked to see the picture of the wishbook train.The kid handed over, still gloating his victory.And Jonanna smiled. You could see it, her reeling this wise kid in. See, the way the wishbook page was laid out, there were two trains on that page.The big, good, long red train up at the top of the page. A short, worthless puttputty black choochoo down at the bottom. And in between these two trains, there stood the figure: $14.95 and Jonanna reeled this kid in. She didn’t say a word. She smiled. She moved a finger up to the top of the page. And there, by the big red train’s cockpit stood a figure so large and clear that a wishbook wishing kid had looked right through it.The figure: $39.95 You have to give the kid credit. He didn’t go down without a fight. I liked this in this kid.The wronger he was the harder he fought. Like that time with his cousin, Alvin Richardson Redd. Alvin Richardson, who knew everything about it all, one day he called a trolley car a trolley car. The kid said it was a streamliner. I mean they were like five or so, I don’t mean they were in college or anything.Alvin Richardson knew who was right.Who was always right. Trolley car! Streamliner! Alvin Richardson was blue by the time they got this kid’s fangs out of his neck. Same here, but different winner. “$14.95,” the kid maintained. Jonanna smiled, finger still on: $39.95 The kid showed the wishbook around. Asking a second opinion. Nobody said a word. Nothing. No opinion. Not me, Coolie,Wamba. We all smiled, we did that, a little. Smiled sick. Not like Jonanna smiled. Her flapping flag of triumph. The kid started to weep. No. Bawl. He went straight into it.Abandoned by Santa, his filthy lying helpers, everybody. He flopped around on the floor. He convulsed. He had to be carried off into another room and sat on. His choked cries rang through the house. “$14.95! $14.95!”

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And Jonanna smiled. “We’ll see. Come Christmas morning.” Don’t think anybody heard it but me. Or maybe she didn’t actually say it. Maybe she only looked it. Maybe that look, just it, was worse. Her look of hatred.Triumph riding high hatred’s back. The next morning we were packing up, getting ready to push on to Arkansas. Coolie and I took our walk away from the car and the women and children. The way we did in our family, brother or sister paying farewell to sister or brother, we two always walked away to say good-bye. Coolie could be a stiff man, we all could be, we three boys, Coolie, me, Dusty.We could be proud.We were proud.We knew where the line ran. Where to stop. When not to go over the line, not to go any further. Family matters. Money. Family money in particular. Still, that morning I held a twenty in my hand. There in my doubled fist. I don’t think he could see it, but he knew when I reached the fist toward him. “The big red train.” I didn’t say it of course, I didn’t have to. He knew. He heard. I thought he would go still and distant then, go dark and cold, but he took my closed hand and closed his around it. Fist over fist and he didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to.We had seen it in our eyes. Our hatred.That one morning, there before Christmas, when we let it out. We had no children, Jonanna and I.To give Jonanna credit she probably saw it coming—the kid’s hatred, the kid’s coming triumph that coming Christmas morning—and ducked. In the nick of time.You don’t want to be dawdling on the tracks of parentage when a boy’s big red train comes rolling in. Dusty. I had no son.Two daughters, but no boy. No son is better than the wrong son. Coolie told me that, once. I didn’t think so, but who am I to say, never having had a son. I imagine it’s something you simply cannot imagine.That is, if you imagine it, having a son, you’ll never get it right. They come along as individuals, you see, not as sons. I have thought of various boys over the years as sons, imagined that they might be sons to me, but then after a while of that my mind is always turned to other things and they go away, these imagined sons. Coolie assured me—not so with a real son.The little fuckers cling like skin—and then they go away and disappear and you’ll never ever know such a lone in your life, not that lone. I’ve heard what they say of losing a son.Those nights after you have

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lost a son.Those mornings. If you have been so unfortunate as to sleep, it is those waking mornings—they shine bright as hell. Momma lost a boy. Jodie, Jodie Wright he was called. The Dollé Richardsons lost a boy as well. Zachariah called Zach. I’ve never been certain, but I believe Jodie came fifth in line, was third boy, placed there between Babe and Coolie for that short time he lived. Died ever so young. Before school age. Pretty much the same with Zach, the Dollé boy. Middling born, died age four or five. Don’t know much beyond that of either. But that Momma mourned her boy’s death for years afterward.You would think with nine survivors on your hands, your grief might be lost among them, but not so. She loved him harder, more, than she ever would any of us. It was in the imagining, I suppose. Imagining what he would have been, might have been, looked, talked like, had he made it through the scarlet fever, whatever. Something like imagining the son you’ll never have, you’ve never had. It seems that an inconsolable grief rises from the loss of that which can never be returned, things never there. Coolie no more understood the misery my son brought me than I his. I would have given anything for his misery, he much for mine. I mean, this kid of his was a real screwup.And that was the son I looked around for, the screwup. Of all the boys I’ve imagined as sons, it’s the hopeless screwups I’ve most strongly imagined as mine.The boy who turns out the exact opposite of dad.What drove Coolie crazy, I sought most in my life. I did actually have that son, an imagined son, a lost son, during the war. I lost him there during the war, but then peace would have been the crueler killer.The postcards from over the years. Christmas cards that gradually petered out.Aren’t we going to send him a card again this year, dear? That lonely old man without a son.The one wasting away his love down in Arkansas on sons that never write.Your old commanding officer—what was his name? Colonel Richardson? Major. I was only a major when he died. He was still alive when we all got together, there in London, wartime, Christmas ’44.That was the cruelty of it, one of them, that he died right there at the end.The war not yet over, not officially, but over for us. We’d been ordered to stop. Let the Reds have Berlin.We didn’t care. It was theirs, we were so glad to stop fighting the Hun, you have never seen anyone fight like a German, not on his home soil. Except maybe the Reds. We got the word, you do not repeat do not want to go fighting them. Not for a pile of rubble called

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Berlin. This kid, so much like Coolie’s kid would come to be, was my driver and, if I couldn’t squeeze a clerk out of Division, he would be that too. I was S-2, battalion intelligence officer, and this kid was my driver.All through the war. From France deep into Germany. Brittany to Bavaria. Skalicky. Mickey, Mick. Private Skalicky.Always making PFC, always getting himself back to Buck. Polish, of that extraction, I believe. From Pittsburg, an area or a suburb called Duquesne, I think I have that right. One of the highest IQs in the battalion. So much like Coolie’s kid.Always getting into hot water. Hated the war, hated guns, hated the uniform. Had to get on him about that, the uniform. He wore it like a sweatsuit. It was a lost cause. Even after the commanding general had chewed my ass, the baggy fatigues, no steel pot, that was supposed to be a salute, private? even then it was pushing water uphill.And too a thief, hustler, charmer, applepolisher, cornercutter, bugout artist and dugout politician—in short, one of the best driver/intelligence clerks you could dream of being assigned to, as I so often imagined, that it was I who had been assigned to Pvt. Skalicky. But then there were times one had to put a foot down. Even pull and point a .45.The time I very nearly killed Skalicky, one way or t’other, coming or going, by hook or crook. It was early days. Still fighting in France. In that minor, so-called, mop-up, so-called, of the German from Cherbourg.What, a couple weeks into combat, nobody knew what he was doing but the Germans and they seemed to have taken it into their square heads to kill as many of us as humanly or otherwise possible. Skalicky and I, driver and S-2, were moving forward, not so much beyond our lines as to their left, to recon an observation post for our battalion C.O.—another asschewing from the Division Old Man, an S-2 who had not dreamed that among his many duties would be scouting observation posts for his C.O.—when, away from our units, we received hostile fire. Oh yes, these folks shooting at us did not like us at all. Skalicky, this brown rubbery round forest creature was out of the jeep and off like a rabbit, while his stiff straight southern officer and gentleman was scarcely a footfall behind.When we had made an irrigation ditch or shallow canal, we celebrated by breathing.To lose the jeep was not a dishonorable happenstance—that I had learned in two short weeks. Materiel came and went. Maps, however, did not. Particularly intelligence maps. Even the lowly intelligence maps of the battalion intelligence officer—these were not mislaid. Neither lost. Nor forgot. Nor left behind. If neither mislaid nor lost, the battalion intelligence maps of the

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39th Bn 4th Inf Div had certainly been forgotten and left behind and perhaps were soon to be lost.They were back in the jeep. Now I’m not sure if I actually would have shot Skalicky, but after a time of debate —though it was true that the maps had indeed been in officer’s hand at the time of the attack, overriding that was the driver’s responsibility not only for his officer’s vehicle but all S-2 property and possession within said vehicle as well—the effect of having a .45 muzzle a foot or so from his face gave Pvt. Skalicky cause to consider. Even back at the shell-riddled jeep the German guns who had made such riddling were a good hundred, maybe two und hundred yards away. Skalicky, with his fine statistical mind, did not even have to calculate the odds—foot here, hundred yards there—and the maps were retrieved and private and captain, as I was then, became, if not fast friends, not yet father and son, something like uncle/nephew, brothers, older, younger. It was this ease between us, and the laxity it bred, that killed Mick in time.There, near the end.When we, our unit in any case, were at peace in all but name. Those not veteran to that war cannot not know what popular sport jeep stealing (and truck and tank and at times plane as well) became as we pushed over through France and into Germany. Skalicky proved an adept at turning up something when our official vehicle went missing and showed talent as well in redesigning bumper I.D., all the license plate olivedrab transport needed those days. It was one of these jeeps that Skalicky stole that killed him. Misappropriated. Use of government property for private purpose or personal gain—forget the exact phrasing in the indictment. Oh yes, they were going to court-martial Pvt. Skalicky dead. Or stamp on his papers: not killed in the line of duty. Our front lines were quiet, April ’45, and we were a good distance behind them.The 4th or our part of it had seen heavy action for near a year straight now and green troops had been brought forward to watch and wait out Hitler’s fall. Saturday afternoon. Like a peacetime army.They just took the jeep, our jeep, my jeep, S-2 39th jeep for a ride through the surrounding hills. Donlon, an Irish kid from New York, from Engineers, went with him, a good kid, from what I had seen. Donlon survived. Hardly a scratch. Skalicky too, when they brought him in. He looked to be sleeping. Only his chest, it was flattened, caved in.The M.P. investigator said it looked like it should have been the passenger, not the driver, killed. From the way the jeep had overturned, onto the passenger, the

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right side. But Donlon swore Skalicky had been at the wheel. It had been his idea to take the jeep. It was, after all, his jeep, his officer’s. He had the key. Not Donlon. It made sense.And the gentle slope on which the jeep fell over.That fit too. Skalicky was a miserable driver. Puttputted around like an old woman. He never relaxed at the wheel. Only the typewriter was worse. He hated the sound it made. Tickitytackitytick.With artillery, mortar, rifle fire booming and hissing and crashing all around, Mick would have to be dragged to the typewriter. It drove him crazy. Tickitytickitytack. Only Mick could have overturned a jeep on that baby slope, where he died. In the end I did my bit of good, maybe the best I managed during the war. I bailed them both out. Skalicky and Donlon. Donlon and Skalicky. First impulse was to let Donlon go down. It only made sense. Mick hated to drive. Donlon would have been at the wheel. The wrecked jeep: I studied the wreckage: it had indeed been the passenger, not the driver, whose chest had been crushed. All breath and life crushed out of him. But then, of course: why punish them both? Why not let the dead take the blame? You could see the argument, the pleading for it, in Donlon’s eyes. I talked to the I.G. captain, a Detroit cop in peacetime, and we agreed, without much said, to let it drop. Next there would be Skalicky’s record, the record of his death. I had it changed too. In the line of duty. Oh it seemed like a good, brave thing to do at the time. Facing court-martial, possibly, myself. Sending my driver off on some Sat aft errand that had to be stretched film thin to make official. But then the chance I took, in the end, if good it was not quite so brave.We were near the end. Like some countries, when one administration is nearing its end, they forget and forgive—rip up all outstanding parking tickets, say.The C.O. looked over my report and filed it deep. Thus it was as we passed through April toward May 8, 1945. No need to forgive what is forgot. Pvt. Mickey Skalicky’s body was shipped back to Duquesne, I believe it was—perished in the line of duty. Officially. Honorably.The imagined son was dead. But then maybe that’s how it’s best done. Just imagine all these things. Fathers. Sons. Maybe we would like one another better that way. Less love. Less flesh and blood. There’s so much pain that way. Less hate is what I mean. If only we could choose these things. It is that, isn’t it? Our lack of choice, that we hate and love so. So often all at once. I scarcely love anyone, hate anyone, these days. Certainly no one all at once. My son John. One shoe off one shoe on. He looked like he was sleeping. Maybe they all do.

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Rogers. I was the only flyer of the bunch, the only pilot. Maybe that’s why Coolie and I never got on. I was a flyer, a real one, good, maybe better than that.And he had washed out. Flopped. Not even that. Not even up to failure. He stood back.Turned and walked away. But maybe that wasn’t turning tail at all. Maybe that was only looking into yourself and being smart.Accepting what you see there. But then best to let him tell it in his own words, when he shows up (see Coolie 1, p. xxx).As close as his kid ever saw Coolie look into himself and say what he saw, that letter he wrote Dusty about washing out. Not an easy letter to have written, Dusty still a boy, teenage boy then, Coolie, the big army pilot, his hero.Yes, you could say that was a letter written by a man, even if the man wasn’t hero. I was something like that over on our side, Cady’s hero growing up, we the two youngest boys, the two youngest anything of the Dolle bunch.We became about as close as anybody in our family, I think, Cady and me, maybe closer even than Wamba and Billie. Close like that anyway. The closeness beyond brother/brother, sister/sister. The closeness of roommates, like Wamba and Billie had been roommates when they went into that boardinghouse in town, to go to highschool, and then roommates again when they went down to college, I believe they shared a room for a year down there. Don’t know why Mama didn’t think of it sooner, getting some of us boys out of the house.We were stacked on top of one another in that Dollé house, even after Lula and then Robert James, then Autry went off to: marry over beyond McAdoo or batch rent Mr. Dollé’s place there over the road or go off down to the seminary in Ft.Worth, respectively. If I said Mama thought of the idea, that was the way you dealt with Mama, having her come out the one come up with this bright idea. So, Mama got the idea that I should fix up the old smokehouse, left empty since Papa gave up fall butchering, Papa going old and slow and wearying, I think, of trying to bring animals and our old ways of farming, the old Georgia ways, out here to the plains, where all would be machine and man, but those two, and a far fewer still of the latter there toward the end. Who would’ve thought of it back when we were little, when whole families gathered about a single tractor like it was high priest, that one day a single man would step out his back door and see nothing but machine strewn everywhere about him and his farm, not a living thing, not one animal, as far as eye could see.We were not that old, Cady and me, when we moved out to the bunkhouse we had fixed up. Maybe that was what gave Mama the idea to give in, let us go out and live on our own, me and

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Cady calling it a bunkhouse, like we were on a ranch or in a cowboy movie. Or maybe she had got sick of the sight of us by then, kicking herself for not letting me think of it for her before, moving us out of the house years before. Can’t tell you how good batching is for a boy, even better for two. I couldn’t have been much more than a sophomore in highschool when we moved out of the house and Cady, what, three years younger. And we did live on our own out there, even did some of our own cooking out there, could boil coffee and fry up breakfast on the little wood heating stove anyway. Mama let us be and be little men and I can’t tell you how good that is for a boy turning man.To be treated like one before he is, that surely is the finest way of becoming a man. One of the problems Wamba’s had with her boy, one of the many. Over at the Blanco house they had put on a back room and the boy had that to his own, away from the rest, that one year before they moved into town. But when Wamba began to build her new house and new life there in town, she forgot all that or let the architects she had hired forget it for her and there they were, all these bedrooms stuck there in one end of the house. The four of them living in that house long as a bowling alley and living right on top of one another, more stacked than we ever were, the dozen of us, out at Mama and Papa’s, or so they seemed to themselves to be. But then that’s the way Wamba was turning then.Turning from a country girl to a town lady. Paying somebody, an architect, some decorator, to do your thinking for you, doing that for you that you very well could have done on your own. But once again, that’s more Coolie’s tale to tell (see Coolie 3 on “Miz Cocoa Brown,” p. xxx), better in his own words. Only to say here, if you don’t do something yourself, or have a hand in it, at the very least the idea for it, that thing will never be your own or any part of you. I know me and Cady, that good batching life we had there during highschool, it wouldn’t have been ours, not like it was, if some architect had come and planned it for us, Miz Cocoa Brown had driven over from Hubbard to tell what shades the walls were to be. Sure, later on Wamba saw her mistake, putting that boy in there to live right under her wing and watchful eye, but that’s the way it was with Wamba. Ever remembered her wrong, never saw it in time to make it right.And with a boy, you got to get it right then, right there on the spot, for no amount of remembering how it should have been done is ever going to help the man.Wrongs done early then, some others. Like flying was with me, me being so good at it, dreaming of it so. Some said, Mama mainly, that that was a wrong

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done early to me, when I was a boy.A wrong I did to myself. Been better off if I’d never seen a plane, so Mama said, meddling into my life later on like she never did when I was a boy. But I can’t go along with that sort of thinking, even if there is some right in it. Regret. How things might have been. If only, only if. Mama,Wamba, even Coolie and his turning away from the sky and the machines that flew up into them and the men who piloted them—one of the reasons Coolie and I never got along.Turning his back to the sky, it was like he was blaming that for taking his life away from him.The going up into the sky, that which gave my life to me. Sure that life went away, but it left me with another. My sky gave all it had, it didn’t take, like Mama thought. Never have felt the loss of it, no bitterness, anger, how flying wrecked my life.What I might have been, had I not flown and loved it—a smaller man for not going up in those machines. But then maybe it’s like building houses, raising a boy.The mistakes you make doing something are so much easier to bear than them made by not doing.Think that’s one reason I always got on with Coolie’s boy and got on with him at the very time he was causing Coolie such grief. College, the army, his business deals, the busted marriages—the boy screwing everything up, doing it all wrong. Least he was doing it. Probably why him and Coolie never got along.What was eating away at Coolie. Having a boy who was giving it a try.What’s eating away at the boy now. Having a pop who never did. Oh yes, there’s more to success than not flopping. Remember that.Well by now you probably figured out what flying stole from me. Have tried to keep it down to a gentle roar, but it’s bound to be obvious.The Gabber, Mama called me that. Bull Richardson —but to be fair, I was a j.c. football stud up at Panhandle A&M at the time.And even now, to my own boy I’m the Mall Philosopher and I don’t mind, to him and his new sharp-tongue little wife, don’t mind it at all. I’ve retired from the air force now, my fine wife, Lily, and me, and we’ve bought a good house in Hubbard, the big town on the plains, so I can be near the airbase doctors, the specialists who see after some of the problems flying has left me. So says Mama and I smile and say something philosophical, as I will this afternoon when after the doc appointment I make it down to the mall—our general store these days, sitting around the crackerbarrel, these malls and those benches around the front fountain there—and what’s wrong with that? Modern tractor to a mule and I’ll tell you, anyone who’s ever plowed up a furrow knows there’s nothing wrong with that, the front fountain over the crackerbarrel any day. I figured my

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flying days were over after the war drew to a close.What flying did I do? I was already in the army when the war began. Out in the Philippines. P-40s, Flying Tigers.The kid couldn’t believe he had an uncle who flew a Tiger and gave it up. If you’re too young to recall, these P-40s, Warhawks, had great dragon tiger shark teeth painted grinning about to slash out and devour on the cowling breast. A famous outfit, the Tigers, and we knew it. Hotshots. Good enough to be flying in the navy and in those days, the rubbery tubs those fellas had to come home to, that was good indeed.The war then and its coming. One of Franklin Crawford’s pet theories—Frank always had some crackpot theory, like Eleanor and the Communists were running the country, something to say that would get everybody pissed off and shouting—one of his better shouting-match theories was that Roosevelt and the Hopkins White House knew the war was coming all along. Not only that, they knew the Japs were going to bomb Pearl Harbor and when and let them go on and do it as Franklin Eleanor couldn’t get his war started any other way. Like later Frank would argue—and this actually in an English pub, there in London, talk about a shouting match, talk about just getting out of there alive—that Churchill knew all about Coventry, that first big civilian bombing over there and didn’t say a word of warning. Something to wake the English up, snap them to attention. Later, when I had my used car dealership and spent a lot of time over in the Chevy-Olds showroom, or next door at the John Deere place, coffee pot, couple garden chairs, a place found in between the general store and the mall, there I felt easy about tossing the Coventry theory into the pot. See if it’d wake any of the whittlers up. But I never could go with the Pearl attack theory, that FDR knew about it all along and I’m not talking the weekend before. I’m talking before, long before. No, I never could believe any American president could be that cold.To make it look real, they’d have to let everybody be caught by surprise.And that surprise, I will tell you, was real in the Philippines. Our ammo was shot up in a week.You couldn’t send boys up on those planes like that, without ammo, not knowing it was going to happen, not even some Brain Truster could do that.Anyway, I was always soft on FDR, the New Deal, what he did for the country and kept that soft spot there long after Mama, leading the Republican charge, and a host of others had gone on over to the other side. That Eleanor was a Red and Hopkins ran the show—mercy me.Well it was in fact dogfighting the Japs without ammo, that was how my cockpit floor ended up a tub of guts, mine. It wasn’t too

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hard going up without ammo and driving the Japs into the ground, some hillside.They weren’t flying Zeros yet, not this bunch anyway. I’m telling you, we were hotshots and we knew it.And I took this one Jap into a dive too steep for him and too steep for my innards. I lay around for a while and trained the new bunch coming in, but by then the Japs had Zeros everywhere and there wasn’t much to say but Break a Leg. Got shipped stateside, Kelly there at San Antone.Was reunited with Wamba and Coolie and family there, they had just transferred in to Fort Sam, into a big house on the old post and had plenty of room. Crossed paths with Cady there as well. Cady had flown thirty-someodd missions and had cracked up—a crackup any of us could have, and did, and speak of without shame or disgrace. No more a blackmark than getting shot down. Cady was through San Antone on personal leave, a flying visit, and he smiled, the kid never laughed. I suppose with Horace Homer and me in the house he learned early a smile was about the best he’d ever get in. He was headed back to England. Going to train rookies there, like I had trained after I was grounded. He was a tailgunner and you had to be good to do that and even better to train. But then his real mission—and I didn’t know this till after the war and I’m pretty sure Cady didn’t even know it then, it was such a secret—what he would really be up to back in England was acting decoy. An extraordinary feat, you think about it. Our boys were getting ready for the big invasion of France.They wanted to keep Jerry guessing, keep his Panzers pinned down. Hitler figured we would be coming over from Dover, thereabouts, and hitting Calais, around in there. Just a hop over the channel there and easy landing beaches. So what our fuzzyballs came up with was setting up an entire invasion fleet all around Dover and that southeastern part of England. Fake planes, fake tanks, I mean field after field after field of these dummies. But they wanted some real pilots, real tank drivers hanging around. Going into town on a three-day pass. Not talking much, all hushhush, like that.While the boys who would be making the real crossing, they were restricted to base, nothing got out, like they weren’t even there. That’s how Cady passed that time of the war. Getting a three-day pass once a month, all those Yank flyboys coming into London on the Dover train and not saying a word, all on the pee n que. I didn’t know it at the time I was there at Kelly, in San Antone, but I was being trained to join the real thing.Thought they were putting me out to pasture, switching me over to multiple-prop.What old men flew, some of them B-17 jocks must’ve been as far gone as nineteen or so.Then I got

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trained in gliders. Still didn’t know what was going on. Still didn’t connect any of it with the war, thought the War Dept had lost track, of me anyway. Did not dream that they wanted us to know what it was like for real, flying one of these unmotored things, that they had something real indeed in mind, like we wouldn’t be the tower, we would be the towed, gliding troop transport over the Channel, come D-Day plus a couple. I liked it—the towing, the towed glider I found a headache, too much noise—but it didn’t last long. Pretty soon we got deep enough into France that airborne could handle everything that we needed dropped in. And back in England, there you saw field after field after field of these gliders.Thousands upon thousands stacked along like playing cards. I got out after the war. Oh there was some talk, me staying on, but their heart wasn’t in it. I wasn’t what the new air force needed, the pilot they were looking for, the jet hotshot, he didn’t have to truss up every morning before he could crawl out of bed, he wasn’t going half deaf in one ear, wasn’t showing early signs of hyper-tension, some sort of nerve problem, you don’t call it drink.And they didn’t want to keep me officer, two years j.c., maybe warrant officer at best—I think that’s what really got up Mama’s nose, turned her so against flying, me not being thought officer material, not just then, not 1946 anyway. But then came the next war, the little one, a police action, I believe it was called, and all that changed.That now, according to Mama, that was when flying really ruined my life. Now my little used car lot right across from the Chevy-Olds dealership wasn’t exactly setting the town on fire. Sure wasn’t setting me up to build brick out in the west part of town, out where Wamba and her snooty officer husband, so said Mama, were building, out where Doyle was building. Doyle, he was the number one salesman at the Olds place and he was the one put the bee in Mama’s bonnet, the air force messing up my life. Now Doyle said there was talk going around, most of it from Doyle, that Mr. Humble who owned the Olds dealership, that business was so good there after the war, that and that Mr. Humble’s one and only son had forsaken the Oldsmobile and gone off to play polo in Mexico, that now Humble Olds just might be needing a number two salesman to fill in behind Doyle, Doyle losing customers to Ford-Mercury, even to the Dodge place, so much business and all that country-club life, Doyle could not field them all. Now, at long last, in that maybe Mama was right. It was a way of life I took to, and I don’t have to tell you commission on a new ’98 is somewhat heftier, more substantial than closing on some used job, clawing

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in a couple hundred here, couple more there on old pre-war jennies, beautiful old cars but they weren’t new and the country was. It was what we all thought we wanted, new. Like that pretty little red Ford Coolie had, you may not remember the model, doodlebug back we called it, back when Ford, Mercury, even Lincoln came out of that same stamp, such pretty little cars and there after the war you damn near had to give them away.Which is just about what Coolie did, selling me and Lily that fine little Ford there after the war, when that was about all Lily and me could afford.While Coolie himself, owning his own place, he was about the first in line for one of Doyle’s big new ’88s, this before they’d thought up the ’98 and before Coolie had got sick of the sight of Doyle and had gone on over to a Lincoln, and then there were a couple Packards in there he had to go over to Hubbard to buy, then back to a Lincoln, I believe it was, before he came back home to an Olds, a 98 by this time, even if he still couldn’t stand the sight of Doyle.Yes indeed, Wamba’s snooty husband buying new, me buying used and that from the snooty son-in-law, that set Mama off on a tear.What not flying had done for Coolie, where flying had landed me. Nothing really in it but the argument, but that’s how Mama worked, arguments so well marshaled, mean and malicious that such as truth was forgot about. Flew transport during the Korean conflict, I believe that’s how it was called, could’ve sworn it was a war, it sure looked one trying to land one of those C-40s over there, everywhere you looked a hill and up-and-down cliffs, ice and Chinks, and that flying boxcar—that’s what some fool called it, a boxcar you could put a train inside, hold so big it had its own weather system—the old cow handling tricky as a kite on the runway, soaring like a tank once up in the air. Probably would have stayed in anyway. Lily, who had hated the big war, having to stay home, waiting for me to get home so we could get married, now she took to service life and me being married to it and she to me and we were starting to have kids and selling used cars when everybody was crying out for new—no, it did not take any arm twisting at all to make up that mind, that married mind, you know, the one that’s hers and she calls ours. Surely not a tough decision at all, not after I got that call from Hawaii and they flew us all in, Lily, and the two little ones too, in a special B-52, the Commanding General Pacific, his command plane, just the four of us in it as passengers, it all fitted out, the general’s office, a private apartment.Then the captain calling me forward, asking if I wanted to take the wheel, smiling some, asking if I wanted to take her down, touch her

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down, all the while the captain, an Oklahoma boy, smiling, he liked the way I talked, sounded just like an Oklahoma boy, talking in to the tower nice and easy, nice and easy as I touched her down, that big sweet plane that would be mine the next ten years. Funny how the way you talk would make that difference to a life, but it did.The Old Man a country boy too, from up around Anadarko, he finally got over having a Texan flying him, said Texas was just a mistake any young country could make, before they went back and got it right and called it Oklahoma.That one always gets them out at the mall, now that I’m retired and living in Hubbard, to be near the airbase and docs. But you think it over too.You’re on a commercial airliner, what’s the best news you’re going to hear? That captain comes on the intercomm and he’s talking Texas, he’s talking OK-homa, that good soft easy drawl. And what chills your blood—this limey, the sound of him, Sir Reginald, or worse you’re taking wife and kiddies down Old Mexico way and you don’t understand a word Captain Raul is saying and you don’t want to, its all about remembering the Alamo and getting it wrong, and you got that roundtrip prize your wife won you to Paris, France. . . . Ah yes, that or something like it gets ’em started out there at the mall, at those seats they have there around the fountain, there where the main entrance lets you in, mall going off like tentacles in every direction from there. Just talking Texas, that part up around Oklahoma, just talking easy, make it slow, little gentle racism, some muted politics, nothing nasty, nothing harmful, nothing that can’t be turned back on itself, nothing that serious, nothing you can’t make soft, make a joke, something a kid brother might smile at, even that four days there before he went off to kill himself. The Englishman and the Frenchman and the Mexican and this Texan up in this plane. . . . Sure little Cady would’ve smiled over that one, even then, but four short days to go, and why wouldn’t he? Little soft racism gently told.That easy talk, the slow way of its telling, and a good tale too. Brings a smile there at the mall, all these old fellers sitting around the fountain there, not a one of them with a year left to go.That easy talk, the slow telling.You’re taking them up nearer to death than they’ll ever be, nothing between them and dirt and the dirty death it brings but seven miles of frozen air and nothing’s going to save you now, bring you back to earth alive but that nice easy slow talking, it brings a smile. I never thought Mama much liked any of us, not him, not me, not any of the girls for sure, not any of us. But there was that time, we were out living in the bunkhouse and I was out

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showing little Cady some football moves, some blocks, and he broke his collarbone, he wouldn’t give in, as little as he was he wouldn’t quit. It was like when they brought his body back home, the day we gathered there at the old house for that, that’s how she looked then. Like she looked that day out playing football out by the bunkhouse. Like she would’ve taken the strap to the both of us, but he was hurt and I was too big and what was the use. Still miss that little doodlebug Ford, deep shiny red, tiny little thing, solid as steel they made ’em pre-war, before they started tossing tincans into the mix. They’re all in the air force, the three kids, Lily’s and mine, and that gives me a lot of pleasure. For a time one boy was navigator on one of those blackbox red button planes out of Nebraska, you’re constantly up in the air, twenty-four hours on and week off, that special radio linkup to the White House, maybe the Pentagon.The second boy bombed Vietnam for a time, B-70, I think, I’d started losing track by then, then for a time he drove one of the those spy planes over the Gulf, keeping an eye on our oil.The girl’s married to a major, light colonel maybe by now, hospital administration.You take your two hands and hold them out, flat, palm down, fingers thumbs together, and they move out in front of you now, down there by the front fountain, moving together like a dance, like some ballet in the air, one peeling off, the other on his tail, screaming dive down towards earth, till you pull out you can’t count the g’s just before you splat right into the Orange Julius bar, now rising rising toward the sun, screaming you’re climbing so high, so far away,Tiger and Zero locked in dogfight, ever wheeling, turning, playing like it was a game, lost out there in the sky.That wild blue yonder. Coolie 1. Dear Dusty, My flight instructor was killed yesterday. I don’t know if anything has ever hit me so hard. He was up with another cadet, I don’t know what happened.They said they couldn’t have been more than seventy feet off the ground. Doesn’t sound like enough to kill but it killed them both.You don’t do anything funny, stalls, not anything dangerous that near the ground. Somehow they didn’t keep up airspeed. Maybe the cadet panicked, but there’s no reason to go blaming him. He’s dead too. It happens. That’s what the C.O. said. Now for me, I don’t know. Don’t know if I’ll be able to go on. Will even want to. My first day here I knew it was wrong. I knew I didn’t belong.This place has nothing to do with a boy’s dreams, like all boys dream of flying. This place, it seemed to be about

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everything but flying. You may find this amusing, but take changing clothes. How can changing clothes be hell? When you have to change clothes eight times a day and what you put on new had better look like it’s never been worn before, ever.And the flying, up in the trainer plane, it’s nothing like flying at all, not a boy’s dream of it. It’s a two-seater, our trainers, and the instructor in back, he spends half his time kicking at the pedals. You’re flying along fine and he kicks at the pedals and you’re upside down and when you land you can barely walk, your ankles so bruised, skinned from the kicked pedals. And the stalls, you don’t dream of them, a boy dreaming of flying.These maniac instructors, it’s all they ever think of—how to make the plane quit flying. How to make the plane fall, dive, twist, tumble to earth, the power stall, the worst nightmare of your life, a spinning, spiraling stall, you can’t pull it back, you can’t let off the throttle in this killer stall, you’ve got to push the stick down, forward, throttle full takeoff speed, you’ve got to send your plane screaming toward earth to pull out of this stall.After that I was lucky I could climb out of the cockpit. Some can’t. I didn’t think I could go on. Some don’t. Surely tomorrow they’ll have something worse. But Lt. Merrill talked me through it. Me washing myself out. I don’t know why. He took some liking to me. He was the best pilot in the bunch and one of the toughest instructors around—well not as tough as Lt. Cummings but then The Skunk’s a simple sadist—and tell Franklin Crawford he better know that word by Christmas. I don’t know why, he looked upon me as someone worth saving and he was going to pull me through.You could feel it. He’d warned Lt. Cummings off and he was going to get me through. Maybe like he was going to walk the boy through who killed him. It could’ve been me who killed him. Somebody who didn’t have any right to be up in the air.That’s why Lt. Cummings hated us so.We were killers. Out to kill the likes of himself who were born to fly. Lt. Merrill was married, with two little kiddies, just tots. I sometimes wish I had been the one who had killed him, and myself along with him. I wouldn’t have to have him looking at me now, all the other instructors. After the funeral I’m going to see the C.O. Make it an eye problem.You don’t know how good your eyes have to be, that won’t be any problem. I think Lt. Merrill might’ve liked me for my nickname. Coolie.A good ’un for a pilot, he said. See all the instructors, they all have nicknames. Louie Louie. Barcelona Bill—I don’t know why. Lt. Merrill was called Sandy by the other pilots, only a pilot could call another pilot by these names. He was of that coloration,

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but everybody knew, Sandy, the Sandman, it was because of his voice. A soft rasping voice, like sandpaper that’s about worn down. A voice that made you want to be little again and talked to sleep. Lt. Cummings, he is called Skunk. Skunky.The Skunk. Comes from his hair, coal black, with a white silver streak running through the top of it, though some of the cadets think it might be a moniker that goes beyond that. I’ll be home Christmas, no matter what.Tell Trish I know she’s a good little girl and I’m bringing something home just for her.And tell Franklin Crawford he better know his times up to twelves and his takeaways in his head or I’ll know the reason why. Your brother, Coolie 2. It has to be either Germany or Japan.They need administrators now. Immediate promotion to major. And the personnel chief has assured me I won’t be stuck there forever. Now housing is short, so you and the kids won’t be able to come over, not right away.And you wouldn’t want to anyway, not till these countries get put back together again. That’s one of the things I like about it.We’re not going to let these countries lie in ruin.We’re going to help them rebuild.A bigger job than passing out blankets and gas masks and signing them back in.The personnel chief said that on the civilian level I’d be like an XO to a high-grade executive. And if I ever did want to leave the army, I could cross over to something as good, maybe better, in civilian life. Not back behind the plow, Mr. Jones—that’s how he put it. I won’t deny it, it could be as long as a year before they have our posts, bases built for married officers, but you’ve got the house at the Home Place and if you can believe it, the army is willing to pay us for that, for you and the kids living in a place we own.When we get these family units built, it’ll be like living in America. You’ll never know you weren’t home. Except you’ll have servants and a government car, and an American school twice as good as anything around Blanco and, get this, I’ll be drawing overseas pay. Double what I get stateside and not a nickel of it we’ll actually have to spend. Enough to put some aside, maybe buy another section, if we both think it’s been a mistake, that we want to come back home.After my first tour of course. They want six years. But that wouldn’t all be overseas.We’d be shipped back to Washington in time. Just think! Living in the nation’s capital. Now, little Roy certainly would like that.And if we go to Germany, you could always take up your languages again. I know how much you used to like your French.And the kids would have that second language learned as a

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kid. Remember how you used to wish you’d learned French as a kid? So much easier. Chick and Roy running around chattering German or Japanese.Why we might even have to learn some ourselves, to understand what’s going on. But then little Roy, I’m not sure what he’s on about half the time now, and I think it might be English he’s talking. I know Germany might seem better, but they say the Japanese are the politest, brightest people around, it was only their rulers that turned their heads. And you know how I feel about General MacArthur, he’s going to be running the country. But we’ve got to decide soon.A week. I know. But the C.O. said they needed me there yesterday. So I won’t be able to go back up home with you. But we can get Cady or somebody to come down and give you a hand.And Christmas, I’m afraid we’ll miss that too. But you know Christmases are never lost.The next one will always make that one up. And if we’re in Japan, they have some other sort of Christmas, and then we can have two.There in our new home, over in Germany or Japan. Coolie 3. Miz Cocoa Brown. Here she comes again.The decorating lady from Hubbard.What’s it going to be today.The boy wants his room blue? Doesn’t fit the color scheme.The boy is going to get cocoa brown and he’s going to like it.That for a start. Next.Walls you hate, curtains you abhor, rugs you can’t stand and can’t stand on—literally, it’s true, there is this rug in one of the bathrooms (two bathrooms! rugs there!), it’s bumpy as a rocky road, snag a toe reaching for the soap bar and you’re gone. Sure. Why not. Straight from outhouse to two bathrooms, rugged, let’s take a tour. Bedrooms.Three. One Miz Cocoa persists in calling the master bedroom and will not stop.The other two? Servant bedrooms? Slaves? Hey, how about the great big bedroom and the two ittybitty bedrooms? Zip it, Mr. Richardson.This is no joking matter.This is interior decorating.This is architecture. Be still, boy.All right.These bedrooms.Themselves, fine.At least they perform a function. People sleep there. Same at the other end of the house, oh about forty yards away, this house, if it is short, it is long. Ranchstyle, Mr. Richardson. Like the Maveriks down the street, they’re colonial and they never been to Georgia in their life.And I don’t have to tell you about Banker Darty and his wife, they’re thinking French provincial. If you are not a rancher, Mr. Richardson, you dew own some land. And if that land is nowhere near a ranch and nowhere near your new home, you better start thinking like it. Ranchstyle—that’s it. All right. Fine. Strap on canteen, sleeping bag, pup tent and hike to the other end

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of the house.And there, that’s fine too. Kitchen. People cook here, people eat here. It is a kitchen, this kitchen. Rugged too. Now, Mr. Rich’son, we, the American Woman, have declared war on linoleum, Mr. Richardson. Quiet. Fine. Bedrooms in yon distance, kitchen here. What’s all that gloomy space there in between? The living room and the dining room. The living room? The dead room. Nobody has ever lived in that room, nobody has ever been in that room—save the hike through, pitch camp, before you push on toward yon kitchen—save for funerals when all my wife’s people come to sit and visit and wonder who the tallest cousin is. Same for dining room. In forty years, I swear, nobody has ever eaten a single meal at that dining table—but then, it being shaped liked a coffin, this table, can you blame them? Now now, Mr. Richardson—you do not live in the living room because you live in the den.What den? Why da den yo wife will soon agree to add on in no time at all, cost more than the entire house, so you all will have more room in which to live, Mr. Richardson, when yo two children move on an there is just the two a you, Mr. Rich’son. Now now.You know that. Only country people live in a living room, eat in a dining room.Yore in town now, Mr. Rich’son, an you gots to think like it.There is only one point for a living room and a dining room in town and this is so that at least sixty percent of your ranchstyle floor space can be put square dab in the middle of your ranchstyle and there used for no other purpose than thet yo ranchstyle will be long, Mr. Richardson.Whosoever heard of a ranchstyle being all squiched up, it just wouldn’t be a ranchstyle then, more your Ole New England Sea Cottage or slap mud aroun n call it Meskin Dobie. OK. Fine.All right.Would you care to take a stroll around outside now? Let’s start with the breezeway. Come spring let’s call it the tornadoway.That’s this open passage between garage and house. Let’s wall up that perfectly useless passage in a couple years anyway.There, when the kids leave home and there are but the two of us and we tack on that den. Come winter, let’s call it the freeze-yo-assway, while yo makin yo way from house just there to the garage just there. Now, come summer rain it’s going to be the floodway, but whatever way this way is going to be and be called, it has its point and that is it is the way out to or in from what all these new town houses are all about and that is: the garage. A two-car garage.You say you don’t have two car, Mr. Rich’son? Why then get yourself out there, boy, and pick yourself up that other one. Living twenty-five miles out in the country, you might make do with one, but living here in town, everything you’ll ever want a ten

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minute walk from your front door, you got to have that back up. No walking in town, Mr. Rich’son.That says it all, like you’re country, like you’re poor, like you don’t have two more cars than you got need for. OK. Fine. But out front, let’s pause here before we press on. Cannot speak of the sheer beauty of this house while in its building. And I’m not just talking the raw wood inside before roller paint and briarpatch rug had covered and conquered—I shall be speaking of the structure’s siding, outside, the structure’s shakeshingle roof. Redwood. I cannot speak of the beauty of this house sided and shingled with this fine amber rose tan wood, the beauty of its odor, its fragrance, its perfume. Slap paint all over, it, Mr. Rich’son, top to bottom and do her quick. Can’t let people think yore country and yore poor, living in that unpainted house.And to keep our little hands busy over the next thirty years you get to repaint twenty so times. Make it that mustardgray your wife favors, slip on some babybowelgreen when she ain’t watching. Fine. Fine.The yards.The front yard and the backyard.These are vast.The grass is exotic.African Bermuda— you get the picture. Mowing them, watering them, weeding them, edging them—didn’t know that did we fore we got to town?—I could have farmed a quarter section easy on that labor, used less water. The point then of these things? These vast empty stretches of grass never walked upon but to shift a sprinkler, they have the same point as a dead living room, a dining room without diners.The point then of all these things, this house not a home? That’s an easy un to get, Mr. Rich’son, you just hop into that one of your two fine hardly drove newcars and you just take a little tour and see what it is you have just ’scaped from.The country, being taken for poor out there. Living on that dirty dirt road. Shacky little house, called it the Home Place, you did. Just two bedrooms, one bout the size of the other, couldn’t get a match out of that box and you did, why not enough room to scratch it.And look who’s living out there now. Why they’d be colored, they be Mexican, not white.That boy just out of the army, just starting up, him and his cute little wife. And now look at them kids piling out of that lil ole house, four, five, six, a good half dozen of ’em piling out of that shacky lil house and running down that dirt road waving at your big fine new shiny car, coming alongside, waving and shouting and calling out—you’re coming back home, Mr. Richardson, back to your old home, the home place.That’s the point of that fine new grassed and painted and rugged and empty new house you got in town. You don’t have a home place, the Home Place, anymore, Mr. Richardson,

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somebody has moved in there now and is living there. Living your life there, Mr. Richardson.You can’t stop now, can you, you can’t go back there.You can drive by but you can’t stop.Toot the horn a little, wave at the kids, dodge the two pups chasing the wheels. Pretend you’re out looking at crops. There’s that young feller out of the army out back there. Working near dark now on that old tractor he bought secondhand.Toot your horn, Mr. Richardson, he’ll raise up and grin and wave a wrench. Come on back home. Come on in. That’s his little wife there at the kitchen door now. She’s waving now. Holding a cup of coffee up, calling out. Come on in. Stop awhile. Come on back home. But you can’t stop now.Toot your horn. Keep moving on. Like you’re looking at crops. Like you only happened to be passing by what once was your home, the home place. No time to stop. Got to run. Near dark now. Got to get back to town, get back to that new house there, that new life you got there in town in that new house.Time’s awasting, Mr. Richardson, you got to push it now. It’s near dark now and you can’t be caught out in the dark, so far from home. Coolie 4. Now we’ve put you through all the tests, run the ticker past every machine we’ve got, and I’m pleased to say that not one of them show any sign of any sort of cardiac arrest, nor is there any sign of current irregularity. Now when this happened, when that irrigation ditch broke and you were digging like mad to save water, when whatever happened happened, the smartest thing you’ll ever do was to stop. Sit down on the bank there and let that water run all over the county if that’s where it’s going to run to. Now I personally think all you had was a severe case of indigestion, maybe a hiatal hernia, and don’t think I’m joking.To those who have never had a real heart attack—that elephant sitting on your chest—the intense pain these digestive conditions can cause, it’s not uncommon for there to be that mistake made. Particularly by people who want to have a heart attack. Or to have had one. Or to have some excuse to stop whatever it is they’re doing. Stop filling up that ditching, stop farming altogether. Use the old bad ticker as an excuse to walk away from it all—what your boy has been telling us you were good at all your life. Quitting. Not starting. And why not? You hate something, why do it? Why pretend you love it? And why, for heaven’s sake, go on and on, trying to get your son, who hates irrigation ditches more than you ever did, why try to get him into a way and a place of life he despises? You telling us you want him to do what you can’t? Or, to be more precise, what you

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simply don’t want to do. Just about it, isn’t it? Bailing out yet again. Blame it on the old ticker. Sit around your new house in town. Read dime westerns.Water the grass. Paint some trim. Coffee down at the Pontiac place. Waste your life on something that never was.The heart attack. Now, to be fair, the son has come in recently.Trying to make amends, it happens all the time, at that age, after you have finally keeled over and kicked off. Been weeping a year over it, he has, or thinking about putting some serious time into it.All his wrongs.All your rights. How wrong he was being right, how right you were being wrong. He had this confession to make. After it’s too late of course.They always do it like that. Confess when confession only helps the confessor. But I thought I’d pass it on anyway. He’s gone and got a second opinion on the ticker, see.According to this new hotshot, what with all his new machines, seems like you were right all along.That time you broke your hip, there six weeks before it killed you, well these new hotshots put you on one of their new machines, a scan they call it, over at that big new hospital in Hubbard, and guess what that scan showed up? You guessed it.After all those years, your boy, lot of the other farmers around, they all, everybody was wrong.You were right.You did have that heart attack you said you did, you swore to your boy that you did. Swore to everybody it had been real, that busted ditch attack, and nobody in the world would believe it.Thought, they did, you were faking, trying to push a little indigestion by the docs.Anything to get off that farm and get into town and start wandering around the house wearing three hats.Why your boy near went over your coffin there, near popped that idiot preacher they got down First Baptist.Why your boy couldn’t weep over you for years. Not till now, just now.Trying to reach out and touch you and tell you, there at your grave, all grown over in native grass, trying to tell you somehow, some way.You were right. He was wrong.You always were. He ever was. Coolie 5. I was thinking of the time he first told me of his memory loss, its short-term loss, but I was not thinking of that time, but of a time earlier.When he told me of his dizzy spells, his head going bad.What the docs assured him was but inner ear trouble, those spells of discombobulation that were the first warning of his coming madness.The memory loss came later, so much later, years, maybe a decade later. But even then, with the strides made by science, the study of the maladies of the brain, even then, a decade later, there was no doc around to tell him that. That he would end mad and this was its coming.

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He must have been around fifty when he spoke of the spells that so took his head that he might topple over if he had nothing near to cling to. My freshman year away at college. My first trip home from that new life, it was Christmastime and it was night and there was snow all around, cold snow, it creaked to step on it, and the night was clear and black and hung with stars wrapped in snow, wrapped warm against the cold. He smiled in meeting me at the bus station. Smiled that I asked what had happened to the old station. Surely, when I had gone off in September there had been a grand old station, all wood and smoke and great caverns within the terminal in which to hide and be hidden, and now there was but a hut in its place. A small room, quiet, clean, disinfected, a drugstore without pills or potions, the druggist there high upon his high counter handing out tickets as if you were unwell and the journey he supplied would do the trick, be just the ticket. He smiled at my not remembering the bus station and told me that night driving home of the spells that took his head from time to time and sent him reeling across the room. The night was black, starred, the snow crackled beneath the tires and we smiled at the tales he told, some problem with the inner ear, the beginning, that night, of his journey toward madness. He was about fifty that night and I was coming home first time from first year college and we were so pleased to see one another.There would come times when we would see so little of one another.Times when a decade would pass.Times I would come and driving one summer morning out to the farms—it was then he told me of his memory loss.That he could remember his boyhood with such clarity, while of yesterday, there was nothing there. And then there were later times, so much later now, too late now, that I would come to a father mad.A father who knew me not, he had no son, his journey done, near it, nothing left but getting there and they’ve changed the station, they’ve changed the son. All he knew, ever had known, it was as if it were yesterday and now that too was gone. His madness had taken all but that, all it let him have. A stern parent punishing a naughty child.Your stocking empty but for that, your madness.You play and play and play day after day after day, that toy that came to you at Christmastime. He was fifty, I coming home first time from school. There lay snow all around, it sounded like animal, something small and trapped underfoot, the snow so cold, the old station gone, in my mind it was so, the night black, there had never been light, stars bundled white and furry against such cold, that night he drove me

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home and told of his coming madness and mine, perhaps mine, only he did not know.We smiled at his tales of coming madness for we did not know. My boyhood, I can remember my boyhood with such clarity. Like it was yesterday.Yet yesterday, it’s as if it never was.Tomorrow, I know more of that and it will never come. It was Christmastime and it was night and there was snow all around and he had come to take me home. Coolie 6. That greasy gorilla, he’s no son of mine, I don’t have a son. Not some great greaseball gorilla roaming about the house, ripping out the phones when I call the sheriff, stuffing my things in a bag for him to go, driving the car out through shut door, he’s stealing it, driving it away, down far as the end of the street, robbed me of my checkbook and going away. I followed him out that far, in the whistling wind and sleet and snow and now he’s gone. Just some old woman here howling like wind howling away. Just breathing now. Flopped back on the recliner now. He’s gone. I have no son. Just some old howling woman. I’m just breathing now. Recliner full back. And now there’s this greasy gorilla come back and he’s kneeling there. Just breathing now. No breath but that to breathe by.The recliner gone back and him kneeling there. I try to tell him I have no son, but every word is just breath now. No words but that.This greasy gorilla kneeling here, wiping away at his face when it’s best left like rain to lie still on the ground just leave the rain as it falls and don’t stir it around your face, just leave it be like I leave mine. I have no son, sure not some greasy gorilla. Leave it like you leave rain to lie on the ground. Don’t stir it up.The face will drink it in in time.When the earth turns back to day and the sun burning there.This weeping boy kneeling there by my side, the recliner full back, just breathing now. Breathing, weeping. Just let it lie still and quiet over the ground. Like it’s water. Having no son but some greasy gorilla kneeling there at the recliner and me. Wiping away when he should just let it be and be still. Coolie 7. It’s not like I have not drilled it into him. Every time he comes out with it I drill it into him again. He thinks he’s a little boy again, and no matter the lengths I go to to drill it into him he keeps at it, wandering around the house with three hats on, ready to go back home, what he calls Arkansas, no matter how I drill it into him that this is his home and I am his wife and that his Momma that he keeps calling out to and the brothers and sisters he keeps crying out for, I swear I can drill and drill and drill it into him,

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They’re dead, Johnson Alan.They’re all dead.They’re all dead and gone. Momma.Your brothers and sisters.They are dead, Johnson Alan, and this is your home. Not Arkansas. And you’re not going anywhere.Why last time you got out you didn’t get to the end of the street before you couldn’t find you way home. And I’ll tell you, no matter how hard you drill it into him, he’ll just sit there at that kitchen table and call out and cry out, That’s a terrible thing to say.That’s a terrible thing to tell a boy.Tell a boy he can’t go home now.Tell a boy his Momma is dead. And Poppa. And all his brothers and sisters, all dead too.That’s a terrible thing to tell a boy, that he’s the only one left and left all alone.A terrible terrible thing to say to a boy. And he sits there and won’t believe me or maybe he’s just not listening. Maybe that’s all he needs or ever did, to have the wax cleared out. Maybe that’s what’s called for. Get that Popsicle stick out and gouge out what’s blocking that inner ear. Maybe that’s been the trouble all along. Him wandering around wearing three hats.Thinking his Momma is still alive. Get them ears cleaned out, then we can really drill it into him.They’re all dead.All gone.This is his home. Oh Johnson Alan! I am your wife and this is your home! Coolie 8. [To the Baptist nurse tying him down] And you, you can go fuck a duck! [To the Baptist wife tying down the other side] And the same goes for you, granny! Jesus, you’re fat and short. I can’t stand the sight of fat, short women. [To the Baptist doctor come in to check the knots] Can you? You limberdick prick. Coolie 9. Babe and Robert James.We didn’t serve.We didn’t fight. No reason to come to the reunion. Nothing to say.We farmed.Wouldn’t have said anything anyway.We never fought.We farmed.And that don’t leave nothing to say and too tired to say it anyway.You’ve seen us there during visiting. Farmers. Nothing to say and too tired to say it.All sitting around the front parlor.All dressed up. Just back from Sunday service or funeral or somebody got married.You can spot us. All dressed up in black Sunday suit. White shirt, so white, collar cuff, close up to that burnbrown skin. Brown and wrinkle soft by blowing sand and sun and wind. Forehead snakebelly

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white, there with no gin cap on your head. Eyes red, blurred, look near weeping sometime from that dust and wind and blowing sand. And all our wives scattered all around, usually over the other side of the room.All in plumage, their highcolor dresses, spangled and dotted and patched and splashed and blotched with color—the plumage of a tropic bird.And their calls and talk and chatter and laugh that comes over as voice and song and sound of a jungle too.All these brightfeather women, all talking, all laughing, all calling out, and we ain’t got nothing to say and too tired to say it. Cowboys look good this year, hear what the niggers are doing out in L.A., you still spraying 2-4D? Other than that, just a smile, work up a chuckle now and then.That crazy old coot laying there smack dab in the middle of the floor, wearing him three hats, wondering who the shortest cousin is.And all them chattery chatting brightfeather birds stop—there just a second—and look down on this crazy old coot wearing three hats, him making one of our small smiles. Maybe we do too. Other than that it’s football and Watts and bug poison and not much of that. Something to say when you ain’t got nothing to say.You didn’t fight.You didn’t serve. Franklin Crawford 4. (See Franklin Crawford 4 on over in the next section, p. xxx. It’s his idea and he says he has his reasons why.) Franklin Crawford 5. Fine. Perfect. Gives me this chance to give this kid this warning. Cady’s not going to tell him anything, why he did it, whywhywhy, not going to tell what it was like, whatwhatwhat, he’s not saying a word. Because he can’t. He’s dead, man.You can’t imagine that.You’re dead, man. He can’t imagine that. Only you know. Only he knows. Nobody else.They all think they can, you know, know. Know what it’s like.What it’s going to be.Think they know. Imagine they can. Drop from the rope. Tumble off the bridge. Drift away reaching for the phone. Fumbling there for the ignition.Try to tie that knot around a blood slick wrist, you try it. Dodge that bullet just there, you can see it coming, cept right there at the last. Only that’s all you got, that right there at the last. Oh you got it to live, that’s sure. But not not to die in. Dying begins before the end. It can’t be stopped.The Caddy’s making one-twenty now. Sand Hill curve coming up.Where? When? You know this road like the back of your hand.You got all that life all that life ahead of you.That last there, you got it to live.You can make it. Stomp it back down to eighty. Real quick. Stomp. There at the last.You can make it at eighty.There at the last. Sure, you’re busted out of the poker game.You’re running out of life. But at eighty, stomp it down now, stomp and you can sober up. Find a

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new gal. Put it all into a lawyer. Chapter 11. Give it away, they’ll go away. Go back to that little cow college up in Colorado. G.I. Bill. Get that degree, number three’s the charm. How about that job in D.C. Forty times smarter than the next smartest prof.Ag. Dept. Sure.That’s a life. Off the hooch now. Off the broads. No Caddys neither. Just bus in from Dupont Circle.That’s a life.Why not like it? You stomp it back down to eighty.You got plenty of time. Stomp forfuckingchristman stomp. Franklin Crawford 6. byebye baby ride ’em cowboy goodnight nurse adios and faretheewell signing off over, and out closin er down test pattern time so long an its been good to know you take me back to tulsa too tired to tango too pooped to pop see you in the funnies shuffle off to buffalo kick the bucket buy the farm pull the plug byebye birdie byebye step on the gas hiballin n squawiin lift off chattanooga choochoo orient express atchison topeka and the santa fe first stop the pearly gates all aboard pie in the sky now or never do or die ah why not why not the hell thatd be fine just swell Cady 2. And of course Frank didn’t show up in that wartime pub up in Hampstead. Up near the heath. Up there near the top of London.You get up there top of the heath, the highest point in London, and you can look out all over London. Frank, where he works, is somewhere up there, but even that close he doesn’t show. Nobody does. Don’t listen to the stories. Nobody ever did and nobody ever will. Rogers and Coolie and I did rendezvous that once, but that was stateside, at Fort Sam there in San Antone.And I believe Dusty and Frank had indeed planned to meet there in London, to accomplish at least some of that reunion of the Richardson boys in wartime London, but something came up. One of Dusty’s men, his driver, stole a jeep, he and a pal, and the jeep overturned and one of them, the driver or friend, was killed. Dusty had to stay there in Germany then and handle his driver’s death or the boy being charged with the death of his friend and so that fell through, even that, the smallest reunion, the two, never came off. I didn’t mind, Frank not showing. It was a new part of London to me. Before I had never much got beyond the East End, where I always stayed when in London, maybe a couple trips over to the West End, but I had never been up to that part of London where Frank worked, somewhere north of London. Not Hampstead, that was where the train or tube dumped Frank when he came down into London. Frank was something moderately hush hush, his work. Not codebreaking, I don’t think, nor the planned invasion of France, but some sort of

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your-eyes-only secrecy. I was involved in the latter, not the real invasion but a decoy, an elaborate hoax to wrong-foot the Germans, that had been set up in southeastern England, in that country around Dover. I came little to London then till there near the war’s end, as both camps, the real and the decoy, were not let out anywhere much in those months building up to D-Day. It was only after the great invasion that we boys attached to the decoy group were allowed into London, while those attached to the real thing, they got to tour France, if only briefly, sometimes but a splash in the surf would do those boys. I came to know the East End by accident. My train stopped there in Stratford, I believe it was, and I stayed around that area, not even knowing it was called the East End that first time; then the second time, even if the train would push on to one of the big stations to the west,Victoria, Kings Cross,Waterloo, I got off there that second time at Stratford, hardly the Stratford of Shakespeare’s birth, and went into the East End, now knowing its name. Frank’s hush-hush had something to do with the signal corps, but not cryptography or radar, matters so closely held very few knew of them till after the war. Frank was a sergeant of some kind and surrounded by colonels and generals, these actually electronic hotshots from RCA and Western Electric and some of the best universities in the land and Frank was treated by these youthful, brainy generals as one of the boys. Frank’s work had to do with communication, his outfit in charge of Eisenhower’s SHAFE communications, keeping Ike and the White House, the president, in constant touch. Frank knew people in high places, in any case, had rubbed elbows with them anyway, and many of these were civilian hotshots, administrators and politicians, come to London to see the war and come to the war to see London, that too. My war proved very different from that. It knew three stages. I have mentioned the first, I believe, the fighting war.A long furlough in the States; then return to act as decoy in someplace over near Canterbury, I believe—we were so secret we really weren’t sure where we were. After the invasion, not long after, I was taken off this TDY and returned up to Norfolk. Not back to my original base, which was in Suffolk, but a bit north and west of there, not far by American standards, touch over the county line. I never knew why we were there, at this base. There was absolutely nothing to do but be there. No operations, no training. Some KP, guard duty, policing the camp, can’t think of anything else. There couldn’t have been more than a company of us, if that, given the run of six barracks, plenty of room foreveryone.As time wore on and the

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war drew to its end, they gathered us in a single barrack; but even then, even with so few of us by then, little more than squad, still we really never got to know one another. We were closing the place down, I suppose. Getting ready to go home, our minds on other people and places, maybe that was it. And nothing else happened there either, that ghost base.The great network of strips stood empty, no operations beyond army Pipers hopping in, hopping out, no flight control in operation, they came in for some purpose and, that accomplished, went away.As if these acres—acre after acre of concrete strip, their control towers stood about like medieval castle and tower—were but a dirt country field, the pasture outback, the only thing working a wind sock. I mowed grass mainly, but that was left up to me. I rise early anyway—no reveille, no morning formation—and I would grab the mower and take off, mowing where and what I wanted to mow.When it rained I practiced throwing darts, for I had learned the difficult English game, liked the calculations one made in one’s head as well, and thought for a time there showed some promise there. Rain. Shall we say I became a good deal more proficient at darts than at mowing. Rain.All but the nearest village had been declared off-limits and even the pub in that village, that had been proscribed as well.The Load of Hay. Great peals of laughter rang out from there Sunday lunchtime, otherwise all was quiet.We went down to London—or up, as the locals said, as if London were a high place, one always went up to get there—I went up to London then every chance I got and that proved about every other weekend. I stayed regular with a family there in the East End, Hackney or nearby. They were Jewish, but I didn’t know this from anything about them.They practiced no religion, made no trappings in being anything other than Londoners, Eastenders, Cockneys.They took me, on the other hand, to be an American, a real American, a native American, a Red Indian, the little girl called me. Chief, the dad, Joey, called me, till I told him, no, not a chief, just a brave. “Brave.You boys, you got that right,” said Joey, down at his local for a pint. Tapped mug to mug. “Cheers, mate.” They talked like that and, I would learn, meant it. It could mean a lot of things.Your health; thanks; maybe more. They themselves, braves too, these Londoners, Eastenders, Cockneys. Tough. I feel Mr. Hitler should count himself lucky he never made it across the channel. These people never would have quit. Not Joey, this

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burly boxer, had been in his youth, had the pug nose and plump ear to show for it.And hands that were hard. It could be but touching you and he was very careful about it. He butchered down at a big wholesale meat market. Offered to take me down some night, his day was done by dawn, show me around.When I declined, as still I could not bear the thought of blood, of touching its cling, I believe he understood, as good an understanding of it as I would know. A different look entirely when that Christmas I announced I was going over into the West End. Enemy territory. Joey looked me over, hard, shrugged. Like maybe I was Red Indian, taking the weekend off to go over to cowboy country. He looked, more close than hard, shrugged, touched mugs. “Cheers.” Maybe it meant good luck as well. It was like going to a foreign land, going from Hackney to Hampstead. That I made the journey underground—down one hole, up another— made no small difference.Trees, I mean trees along the streets, uniforms, here everyone wearing one, taxis, not one red bus after another, not one this last half hour, here they come in a pack, and so little damage, so little after what I had come from, what I had seen, what I had done and not seen. I had been told to walk uphill from the tube station and I did. Had not much noticed till now that it had been warm this fall and there was that feel to this late December late afternoon, that it was just coming fall, October, hardly later.Ah, but then late afternoon and just past two, it was indeed to be the longest night of the year.The sun stooped low as I went up the high road, the trees that made this like arcade now coming to the end of the shedding of their leaves, these great clattering rusted things cartwheeling and crashing past, the failing light amber, that brown bronze caught in a pint glass seen through an opening door, time, time, gents, closing time, closing till five-thirty it was here in the grand city, the Smoke so called by Joey and his mates, the poobs are oopen op in London half five, soo it’s said, so said the Norfolkman, the governor of our village local, not so off-limits as it would seem, Christmastime, so near war’s end, springtime, soon, all naming the months of their choice, the ending of war, June a favorite, all raising toast to the visiting Yank, a good lad, tho’ he does mow on at the grass that might just as well be left growing for all the struggle it’s worth, it’ll just be growin’ back. Six, it would be black as midnight then, this the longest night of the year, and I searched out the pub Frank had

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told of, there at the top of the hill and the heath over the road, I did believe it then, that I had come to the top of them.That accomplished, I went along to a movie house and was amused by the newsreels, the audience cheering and booing as if our victory drive across Europe were but horse opera, and slept through the rest. Slept as I had not since I was a boy when Rogers and I moved out into the bunkhouse, we called it that, like cowboys would, and slept there like we had never slept before, now out of the big house, out there on our own. I did not make much search for Frank at the pub. A look in one door, a look in the other, and went on. Can’t remember my intentions. Still the country boy, somehow imagining if I got through this dark, tangled heath, this jungle laid down amidst the greatest city in the world, that if only I hacked on a few more paces this park would become the park it should have been and once over that, there Hackney would lie on the other side. In time I came upon a path, I pronounced it one and it stayed moderately true to its being so named, and went on with it up. And up. And up to the top of the hill and the heath I had once thought I had come to the top of and once there, now at the top, now I turned back and there London lay spread out toward the sea, the greatest city in the world dark and close as jungle. In sitting down there to watch the show—to see if the fire and death we had rained across France and on into Germany might seem as graceful, gentle, quiet when seen from below—I knew there would be no such show. Not tonight. Those, but for a buzz bomb, a rocket now and then, were ended now, those shows we had made. Entire cities flattened, that was not close now, not here, and soon not there, not anywhere, and that show, tonight’s, would be but searchlights streaking the sky far to the south, down along the coast.That show must be seen in the mind’s eye this Christmas night, our gaudy firework of death must be imagined, all of civilization afire and alight, as it might have been seen here from below. It was Firewatchman First Grade Quitney who waked me and made the pinch. German spy found skygazing, snoring away there at the top of the heath, his white face a beacon, the snoring a siren, to guide enemy strikes onto their target, this vast jungled hillside pasture dead dark and completely uninhabited but for said spy and his captor, blackout warden and spycatcher extraordinaire, said Quitney. Back down to civilization then.The copper at the station to which I was marched—leg irons would have been too good for me but none had been issued—the police sergeant there at the station did not seem stranger to Quitney, as referring to the defender of the sleeping

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homeland colonel now, corporal later, seemed to satisfy the old fellow and soon he waddled off to make yet greater nabs.The police sergeant gave our military police a ring, more for the free lift back to my quarters, and when that was produced, my lodging’s address, that end east of the west, the copper’s eyes came up quick, like Joey’s, very near a smile, and I was guided to the canteen in the back. Pronounced a collared West Ham supporter by the sergeant, the riotous reception this received from the officers there, amusement I did not entirely understand. I was handed a mug of tea and asked if I knew of the game of darts.And so that’s how it was I passed the evening of our wartime reunion in London, no one there but me, understanding that my future lay decidedly in the art of mowing, as I do not believe I would have ever have learned much of the game of darts, played English style, had the war gone on a hundred years, had it rained every day. Is this what he wants? Is this what he wants to know? Cady 3. My only regret is that mindful of the pain this would cause some, this departure was put off for so long. But now an end must come to it. I have only been sparing myself. It must be seen as a victory over mine enemy.To be one’s own and only enemy thus ends. I can find no other way to go on. Cady 4. Cade Richardson Staff Sergeant 2213 AAF Base Unit Britain World War II 11 Oct 1924 Dollé Texas 21 Nov 1949 Monterrey Texas Coolie 10. He’s found us, his mother and me, without much trouble. But he’s been wandering about for some time now searching out you. You are over in an older section, that may be the problem, there alongside your own mother and father.You died so young, so many years before they, that is how you come to be there.Where there are so many trees. Once he finds your marker, he’ll come back here, but not to end.There are trees even here, even in this section not so old. No, finding us all he will go on over the newer ranges, where there are fewer trees still, and these smaller, among the grass, and beyond that, he’ll go on over where there’s nothing but that, only grass. He much preferred that, even as a boy, these plains under grass. How they must have been before we came.The grassy plains. So. Let it there end, where it began. 209

I hunted her down these plains, our dark heart, that secret spine, our dimpled fatty’s lean flat belly, its dry freezing hell burrowing, laid out like nature’s freeway, sloping soft as sanded sea, down our middle, center, heart, our core. Probably why we are so screwed up. Country and people. One’s all up and down, the other’s got sideways ever frying on the brain. Just can’t stop that sideways sizzling, it’s the way we think, live, dream. Our history and our past. No matter what roadblock this up-and-down country throws out on our lateral highway, we keep on slashing, burning, pillaging coast to coast. Look at the map, fool. Up and down. Start there at the center we have spoken of. God knows how far they reach up into Canada, who wants to think about Mexico, probably get choked off down around Panama, but don’t count on it—never bet against these plains.They are a killer, going up and down, these plains. Back to map, sucka. Left of plains, mountains. More up and down. Right of plains, big river country, more up and down, don’t let any of them little sorta sideways tribs kid you, kid. Left of mountains, desert, up and down, left of desert, happy golden coast, all up and down. It goes on forever. Right of big river country, you got big woods, up and down, with some around and about, right of big woody, another rocky coast, you bet, up and down, it too. Got the pitcher? If not, refer to map, as we now press beyond such carted regions. And that is, here we are as a folk fighting our way across, over, through, under and around such natural barriers, how can we possibly be but the world’s nuttiest nation, country and people ever at one another’s throats? Return to map, please. Take California. Up and

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down. Long and tall. Now, by the country’s way of laying itself out over millions and millions of years, this golden state should fit right in in peace and harmony with what nature has designed. Up and down. And have you ever seen a greater collection of sidewinding maniacs in your life? While consider the maliciously longways laidout states—Tennessee and Montana will do—and you find there nothing but unreasonably happy natives frolicking about these two geographically perverse principalities, hopping plains to mountain to desert to jungle at about every corner they turn and hardly a psycho among them. Ah, you brought it up, let’s do consider that psychoschizo monster among us—my home state of Texas. This a province screaming out to be locked up. Padded walls twenty-four hour observation no visitors laces or belts.What is it? Is it long? Or is it flat? What’s it doing reaching down into Mexico? Consider the sanity, the reasonableness, the downright humane honor, of the likes of Minnesota and Michigan—they come up to Canada, they fucking stop.

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And PiggyTex’s sideways grabs are just as grabby. One way ever longing for the Old South, Scarlett, the big house, ole man ribber and darkies who know their Yessums or could get back into it with a little retraining. While the other way you’ve got that hankerin to be moseyin along the ol’ Chissum trail crooning comeatieyighyippie or some such gibberish to your ol’ cayoose, usually a 4x4 Aztec or some other obliterated civilization.Ah, but now we come to the piece de resistance, non? Wee. Back to map, Jap. Texas, touchy. See that hunk up there at the top, looks like a blockhouse, pillbox, feudal citadel and that would be about right. See, it is the panhandle—like to meet the lunatic who thought that up—that has saved us all and I’m not talking just Texas, I’m talking entire world from being rolled over. Saved us from them. Saved us from the plains. Didn’t know they were out to get us, did you? Don’t turn that page. Sturdy little panhandle—got to find another name—did it, has stood alone there all these years, faced off and faced down the greatest scourge, plague, demolition derby mankind has ever known. Sure New Mexico has kicked in our brave left flank and Oklahoma—now there’s name about right, something of bedlam’s babbled bawl and bray to it—’s eating away our noble right, but we panhandlers—actually not that bad in that usage—stand ever firm, stalwart and sure, ever faced north to repel that frigid flat arid tractless treeless enemy—this the plains if it’s skipped the mind—pushing down from the north.Texas oh Texas! Down south you whupped the Mexicans in their jungle! To the right, the bloods and bros and their high fives and hand jives diverted to NOLA! Leftward look and all indios et al., and such elegant desert pueblos, all crushed, scattered, blown like flies with the wind! But heaving down from the north, there’d be no stopping those plains, their sliding down glacial crust from their frigid home the frozen pole, crazed by ambition, thirst, their lust to ever extend that implacable advance, sheeting ice and cold and flat and featureless on down down down forever, down down they scrape and scatter like one of those big road graders that used to come out around Blanco and do up the rutted roads dried after the rain—I mean these ruts we knew on those dirt roads after rain, a small child topple in a crevasse, never to be seen again, not till fourth grade anyway—splattering then like some steamrolling dozer all dozing in its path, they—the plains, it has been awhile—reaching on south forever, always that pesky bottleneck down around Panama, reaching on from pole to pole, etc., till all there would be would be death and white and cold. And then they’d

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turn then, wouldn’t they? You think you’re safe sitting there in your cozy armchair, sitting off to one side, being a sideline sort of person living all snug and secure in this mad up-and-down land, but no, no, now they’d turn, these polar plains, they’d turn left, they’d turn right, and now come cold and dead and barren, having no life but what they slay, no light but their everlasting white, come looking now for you, you soft soppy sideways sap. I mean, can you imagine this crazy plain running around the world, there where the equator used to be? Not a place I’d like to put down stakes in. Ha ha ha! That’s the bartender. He’s OK. Good guy actually.Actually he doesn’t actually go Ha ha ha! That’s me. And actually I don’t go that way either. I just write it down Ha ha ha! when the bartender smiles.That’s all this old boy ever does is smile. Every time he smiles I really honestly try to get it down. But you can’t. It won’t write down. So I take up one of those little white paper folded however many times to get four sides bar napkins and I write Ha ha ha! and the bartender understands how tough it is and he smiles and wads up the little laughing bar napkin and tosses it into the wastepaper bin.There is a bottle bin there too. But he seldom misses, rarely gets confused, always hits the right one. The soft plump of yet another bar napkin, this place must have millions, plopping into paper.The crunching craackkk—that’s glass glittering into glass. To say tosses is not exactly right. He always gives it some style.A pretty good hook shot, left and right, a sneaky jumper (foot never leaves ground), but it’s not all bee ball.There’s hiking it under his legs but that makes his face go red and he’s given it up, a nifty behind the back, an excellent ricochet off the bar mirror and—my favorite—when he walks over to the wastepaper barrel and he leans over and gazes down into it, like he’s looking down into a well to see if there’s any water there or if that kitten he dropped in there last night is still paddling around.And then after gazing deep into the barrel he takes my last bar napkin, probably the epitaph (see “It looked like it had been written on a bar napkin.” Last page.) and wads it up real tight, like it’s stone, and then he holds it up over the

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barrel, like the barrel is a well, he holds it up with thumb and finger, like it’s pebble and still looking down he releases the bar napkin and he watches it drop like he’s watching a rock drop into a well.And he watches and looks down, straining to see down into the black void, and now he listens. He cups hand to ear and turns head and listens ever so intently. And sometimes he goes Splash! Not actually the words, just makes the sound.And sometimes he doesn’t go anything. Only smiles and shakes his head and walks down to the other end of the bar.The well is dry, kitty’s sunk. I have come home to murder mommy. The bartender has gone down to the end of the bar. He always finds something to do there. Stands and gazes out the open door.There’s only the traffic there, nada mas. I have come hunting down these plains and I simply do not know if I can ever do it. That Detroit piece of shit blew up not two hours out of town, not a hundred miles on the meter. I was damn near still not quite in Canada. Wigwams everywhere. There were times I simply did not think I would live through it.The fireball crisped everything but some of me and my one shirt and the two suitcases. One carries nothing but traveler’s checks, all signed, countersigned; the other’s laid neatly with white shirts. All right back from the laundry, they are, with the blue paper straps still around them. In the evening, at the motel, I set them up all about the room.They look like wedding grooms flattened and squared into Christmas gifts.This was back when I could get into a motel.The racist fucks won’t let you near them if you’re not driving a car. If you haven’t bathed recently and you scarcely have any clothes on at all. I open the cases and show them the dough and all the clean white shirts. Somehow nothing counts. I’m back down there at the far end of the bar again.Traffic gazing.The lights changing. Redyellowgreenarrowetc. Neons blinking on. Night comes to Route 66. And it’s rout, not root.Yankee sucks.When the hog napalmed on the rez, all those wigwams maybe teepees that stretch to the horizon, a squawling squaw came rushing out of every last single one. These people don’t like us, dear. Except for the chiefs. I frankly don’t think they give a damn.And why not? I stopped at some freeway breakfast house, back when I had a car, back when I had a shirt.All the break-

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fasts were named after massacres. Indian. Of and by, both types. A liberal joint. Custer’s Last Stand $3.99 Short stack. Side of bacon. First refill on the house. After that about half the time I think I was going in the wrong direction.At one point I felt I was in Michigan.All these crewcuts wandering around with sweatered Ms on their chests. Minnesota, Montana, maybe. I’ve pretty much ruled out Mississippi. Spades abound and not a hoe to lean on. Maine—a dark horse, a long shot. I was first picked up by a mad boy.This kid was the real thing. He’d just section-8ed out of the air force in Alaska, and his car carried Alabama plates.When asked if he had an A-letter sweater, he drooled, “And don’t forget Arkansas.” The flesh crawled. We slept that night where the car crashed off the road.When I dug out of the wreckage the next morning I could have sworn we were in South Carolina. I had been there once, you see, so so many years ago. So far from home. It was night. A soft night, this Carolina night. Not that late.The bars and burger drive-ins and the quick-stop markets along the highway still glowed neon’s broken rainbow.A warm night.Yes, it was the south and a summer night there. I was hitching then as well, walking now, through town, headed south then as well, so little seems to have changed. The walking—the cops in these parts, I had learned soon, did not much care for you hitching through their towns. It did not make a great deal of sense to me. It would seem as if, they didn’t want you around, hitching would be the quickest way of getting you out of their town.The old car that pulled over, the old guy over behind the wheel, he pointed to the 7-Eleven or some antebellum equivalent ahead, not far, and I walked on up and met them there. The car bristled, it was stuffed, crawling and clawing with object and life. Fishing pole, shotgun, hatchet, bags, sleeping bags, shopping bags, paper bags and in them more bags, of bread and bologna and burgers and apples and naners and bottles and cans of things to drink, and all amongst them children. I came during the night to know the number of them, but it seemed first look that these children went on forever there in the back spilled and sprawling over into the front. So clotted were these children and things that it was not till out on the highway that I noticed the man

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in the back, a second man, quiet, still, smiling, sipping at a jug neath all these children and all their things to wear and eat and all those places made where they might sleep. In the front there were the first man and a woman. In some way they shifted and made room for me there, in the front.There under the wheel.The man asked to see my driver’s license. That the wallet opened to show the license showed no folding money as well, this meant that for the rest of the night and on into the morning I was guest of what some fools call Okie,Arkie, hillbilly and all the rest and all which they had was mine as well. So long as I drove and LuVerne sat over on the far side. The night’s task was this.The man had stolen his children.When things mostly in the back settled down—the excitement of the new driver, he was walking along the road and hopped in—I saw that there were but six of them, the children, and not sixty as surely there had seemed during that initial period of excitement.The night’s mission was this.The man had stolen his six children, perhaps one a cousin, and now would hide them so they would not be found and taken back from him. Redneck, cracker, ridgerunner, we send the wrong people to Harvard, Cal Tech. Bright, funny, as inquisitive as kids are made, these kids. Particularly the girls. In Pop’s checking my driver’s license they saw Texas. Texas! A magic for them that Paris, New York, the tropic Caribbean held for this dreamer that soft, sweet tropic night’s drive south, ever south, through the Carolinas. Cowboy, sheriff, trailboss, gunslinger, oilman, Texas! Till their chattering imagination succumbed and they drifted asleep atangle, so many of them wrapped around the quiet, smiling, sipping man in the back, the man and Pop, now that the kids were quiet, now with the new driver taken on, passing the jug. My journey has taken me in a great arc, though there was no planning to it. Run away from home? No, simply left. Said good-bye, then left and ran away from home. Quit school when I had no more than started. Open a book, close it, turn to find another knowledge. Of the street, the open road, the sea and its lands beyond. My namesake, the name I had been given, that half of it—she was right to hate it. I went looking for my name, that name they had given me and thought they had taken back, that magical, wandering, stolen half of it. He smiled. He did not mind my going. He smiled and we went out back and grilled steak and talked, not much, like men, one of them going

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away, the other staying back. Oh she hated it so. A man cooking. Men talking, quiet, like friends.Talking quiet, she could not hear.Talking at all. Out back, away from her. Should have been inside, womenfolk everywhere.Women’s work, women’s talk. Should be there sitting and watching and pretending to listen. She hated him. She hated me. Me for going, him for letting me. He should have stopped it. Said no. I should not even have dreamed of not staying put. Not staying home.And now they cook out there, talk quiet out back, they talk now of going off.Talk of never coming back.You could see it shimmering like tear in her eyes, her hatred of him, of me. He smiled. He was going off with me.That’s what she hated so. Me taking him off, him going off there with me.A hatred that flowed out like water spilled over ground, those six months of our going off, me and him, and her hatred of it. She had him broken, trained, spirit numbed, mind and purpose exhausted, and now the fences were down. Kicked them in, I had, and battered out had he. It had only been six weeks ago she had had me trapped, blinkered, muzzled, circling ever circling and there was nothing but her, her world and life, her fencing all around. And now he had smiled and given me a foot up. Smiled and grilled steak and shown me to climb out.To go.To run.To leave. Smiled we both as I came home, came home only to leave. Came home to put in the knife. Smiled and gave it a twist. Six months later, more of the same.The return same as the leave-taking. Exactly the same.The smile, the grill, the quiet words. Her crouched there within her house, her home, her hatred. Waiting for the time to come. Put out more fence, string up wire. Ropes to be plaited, shackles and chains to be forged and fitted.All lashed to her, her home, her hatred. Oh, did you think this was to be some nice light liberal tale, some soppy sappy saga, the prodigal son, some such jazz, come home to feast on begging forgiveness, his acquired wisdom and respect, his new-found fealty to mommy and home, his birthing obeisance to maternal control, her homey will? Boyish hatred becomes manly love—is that it? Along those lines? The worm has turned. Mommy rules. Boy kneels. Well you can fucking forget it. This is a tale of love and loathing and it shall not be altered by your expectations.Ye shall swill the wrath and longing that you are served.They cannot be made asunder, you see, our leave-takings, our love, our hatreds, our coming home.They will ever stay there as one, these two, for their marriage was made in the womb, our love, our hatred of

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them, these mommys and their homes. Nor shall death give release.You are the two.You, her.The two but one.We run in your blood, you scream in their minds.They cannot let go, you shall never know release.You, her, them, now we. Doomed to inscribe that circle, it shall never cease, that going away, now coming home. Now her again, now you. Farewell and greetings, boy and mom. Killers, the pair of you, that now we are one. The journey spoken of described a great arc, its coming tracing its going. A much cleaner, clearer way of going, returning, than the eternal circle, the doughty straight line. More like life itself, that journey through it, to have both circle and line in one, in this doubled arc.There of course had been no such trajectory planned when this began, neither to this life nor that journey.Thought I had a goal, there, and a more-or-less straight line would get me there and once there, there it would end.There would be no coming back by any means or path then. Such folly. The plan was this. As one would one day be president, what better time than during one’s youth to get to know your way around your new hometown, your and your people’s capital, get it all in at an early age. Didn’t work out. Not a scrap of it. This guy who lived next door old hometown, he was in law school or starting out, would be in the fall, as he had the Senate all wrapped up, to be what I believe was then called a page, it would probably be best if I landed something over in the House, something he seemed to consider an undergraduate line of endeavor, he made it sound right down my alley. Upon arriving D.C. I found this jerk driving an elevator over in some office annex.There were nothing but absolutely frightening secretaries around.To give credit, this man of the world gave me free rides up and down and told me much of women, he who would go on to more wives than I could dream of. Never really got over it, not getting to be president, me. But then the journey itself, its very first leg, got off on the wrong foot. I was not to hitch, not till I got out of sight, that was part of the deal. Wamba and Coolie were to drive me to the train and that train, the Santa Fe line, that line that followed 66 on up to Chitown, passed closest through Monterrery, the plain’s second large town, a hundred some miles to our north.Yes, it proved a bitter, doubly bitter step out into the new world, new to me, to find a new home there.The homeleaving, that was grim, that was bad, but then the city itself, Monterrey, going there, maybe that was worse. Monterrey, you see, was where Cady killed himself. For years I considered it unfair that Wamba would blame Cady’s end

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on a town and on a book. But now that I have come back to Hubbard, the largest town on the plain, and taken up the Bible of boyhood, I understand; in tandem, this town and that book will have you sucking shotgun in no time. Hubbard’s near self-explanatory, it the nearest booze-selling burg near Target Mommy (see map, page xxx, further on).The cemetery, the hometown graveyard’s only a fifty minute drive (map on that too, xxx, there near the end).The Bible? That’s a slippery one. As I was strolling along Hubbard’s Avenue Q one day—a hundred yards wide, speed limit 55, smack dab in the middle of town—as I was strolling between taco huts I felt the urge to read a free book. As Hubbard seethes with Bible stores, I was in luck.This one did racket restringing as well. I can see how they thought I had made the wrong turn. I was fifty-five or so, five six, two fifty, tan a high-sheen chorizo bronze, beard done nicely in matching cheek buns, one of those little golf visors, Ping or Muzuno, I kept two, a weathered yellowish yellowing T-shirt, dapper tropic shorts, them that has the hip pockets on thigh front but then I had been dressing in the dark recently, sometime last month it was, never have had particularly good legs even when shaved, and as for my flipflops, when I took them into the retread shop—the roadhugger design, if you please sir—I was soon asked out.The biblical wife proved a softie, it was the overheadsmashhubby the hardliner. No mean victory then that my utter lack of any sort of theological knowledge got me off the sales tax anyway.The wife paid straight out of her own pocket, all pennies, while hubby put catgut under tensile stress. The train proved a disappointment too. The big red streamliner, the Santa Fe Chief of boyhood dreams, to stand on the platform, to see it as a running toy neath Christmas tree, take it to a car wash and those expectations might have been fulfilled. But once inside it all broke down.There one came upon a stinking slovenly hellhole, it outfitted with darkie porters who did not seem to give a hang that this traveler hailed from the ancien regime, that stock; Naziesque conductors ready to switch on the gas you so much went into aisle without ticket; and a scrum of sleazo dank quicktalking cynical adenoidal DAed flyboys making way towards whatever Yankee coop they called home. Did, however, learn from these sallow louts that Chicago was not a northern city and that D.C., it was considered by these belle rapers to be southern.Years later and still I lie awake at night considering that in some way all this was wrong.As in: wrong, the side that won that bloody old war.That part of it that is white anyway.

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The leave-taking there at Monterrey, nor was that right. Of course I took a seat the side away from the platform. No teared bye-byes from this grizzled wanderer. But then there at the very last, when some very experienced-looking travelers indeed had crossed over to windows opposite to wave final, warm farewell to granny, auntie, cuz, it was then that I crossed with them.And there I came to see Coolie and Wamba on the platform, Wamba waving mindlessly, in case, I suppose, I was seeing her if she not me; Coolie looking grim, looking along the lined windows of the slowly everso slowly moving train. Then they saw me. Then it went wrong. Coolie’s face upon meeting mine, grim it stayed even in seeing me. Yesterday’s smile did not appear, nor would for six months and only then to welcome my return. Grim, hardset that day, as if that day might never come, the day of my return. And Wamba now, her bitterness, anger, her hatred of me and him that I was to be gone, now that clenched mommy’s face, that was gone as well. Now her tears were warm, the smile as well, the happiness, the hope she carried for her only son, that shone, that was wrong, not at all the bitterness and anger and hate I had thought to see. The bitterness, etc., of an enemy defeated, that was what I had thought to see and now there was but that warmth, the forgiveness of triumph, the victor’s kind consideration toward a prostrated foe. She knew, see, that I was hers and that I would be coming home. Of course she could’ve just been glad to see the backside of me for six months. Six months more before I would come crawling through the night to do her in. But then that is the nature of this love, mommy boy sis n dad, this love of what one must hate. Should. Surely we should. But can’t. Oh my oh my oh someone, a god of this if there is a god of anything, someone, anyone, please come set me free. Free to hate and kill and gloat once she’s dead. It shall never come, I know, such mommy manumission, but I pray, each night I pray to empty sky that with coming light it may be so.That within the murderous act itself some liberation lies. It’s my only chance. Worth a try. I woke now. It had not been long. Predawn or with mist or fog about it seemed so. Light but no sun.The great tree at my back still—there had been some dream or sleeping understanding of it—and all around the world, it all, for with the mist or fog the tree gainst which I had slept sitting seemed all the world one would ever need.The Lucky I had made to light lay unlit in my hand.The lighter had fallen off somewhere.We had

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come in the dark—finally made it, more like it. In time I studied the map of South Carolina.As crow flies, eighty miles from where I had signed on to where I had napped there under the spreading tree, it grew ever larger, broader, it stretched toward the sky with light. Six hours, probably seven, let’s say six to be generous, let’s call it thirteen miles an hour. Still I was pleased to have come that far in such a time for I was making in the direction in which I dreamed. South. Least there was that.The following afternoon, to be picked up in Georgia by the mad boy, the mad boy out of a Florida brig—we went on then a good ways toward Indiana, I believe, before I jumped out at a stop light, up in Tennessee or somewhere near it, and turned back and made south again. I never really understood the pattern of it.Who would duck down in the seat when whichever child was dropped off wherever. Sometimes it was Raley, the father, who would go low and LuVerne, the girlfriend, who would lead, coax and carry the sleepy sleeping near sleeping child into cousin friend brother’s house; sometimes that switched.Then that one time both scrunched down in the seat and it was I who lugged little Jaspar to the quiet smile of a man much like Raley, a raw, thin man, worn down by more work than there was money, no work, no money at all. Plantation Bill can have his Snopeses and he should be ashamed. Better to go to the poet who wrote the fine pictures. Oh let us indeed now praise famous men. LuVerene stood about five feet tall and walked around close to the same. She had once been a great beauty, that one summer, coming out of thirteen, thirty years back, you could see it in her eyes. She wore a dark dress, squat high heels, small black hat with veil wired up like the sun visors they put on cars those days. Lipstick, rouge and violet water were practiced as well. Raley was well aware of his mistress’s charms. He sat in the middle, between LuVerne and me, without fail.They were in love. It was Raley waking me from slumber, beneath the soft old tree. Now he wanted a driver to his bootlegger’s. I couldn’t say no. He wouldn’t have taken no for an answer anyway. But that is not the point. I owe him, his inamorata, Jaspar the little one, Fay, the eldest and quickest and oh so scrawny pretty and those mill workers, textile, I believe, now waiting inside the house we had come to, waiting to be brought more moonshine that they might continue their quiet, easy drinking till the sun was full up and time to go spin more textile at the mill, pull double shift maybe, no union, no overtime—oh yes indeed I owe them, owe them all for that

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night passed with them, owe them that great debt.The debt that is now paid in full by this remembering, as such is the only coin accepted in these transactions.That debt? That they and their night have given this poor rememberer that small memory of good, that now by so remembering, this cold, cruel, killing machine may for that night, this moment, consider himself well.A man. Good. If but briefly, still. Also was the first taste of the new world, the brave new world that only a boy leaving home to search out the man within him can know. Unless of course you’re like Rissa3’s brat. By five this kid had been dragged by sail across the Atlantic twice concerning import/export; sold the Sun at nine from a Brixton milk shop; while twelve years saw him sitting in some Guatemalan bus waiting for 1) the civil war raging three miles in the hills above to wind up, 2) the bus to fill so that the empty bus parked behind might pull out dead empty or 3) for Mum to show with some new Sandinista chums who would tow her busted van, herself and son three thousand miles up through Mexico to be dumped on the doorstep to America, El Paso; it was by such boyish adventures that at sixteen, my homeleaving age, this kid decided he had had enough of his wandering days and would put down roots in some goatherd village in the mountains above Fez, to become a pillar of the community. Rupert, or Roop in America, I believe he is called. Cannot tell you how much money I lost on that stinking Guatemala deal, importing sixteen Nissan landrovers from Coral Gables Fla to start up a car rental place not that far from the Belizean border, but it was a lot. I have not the slightest idea how many names this place has got.You would think, it being this great big flat place void for all practical purposes of all and every sign of civilization, that it wouldn’t have any. Of course they all would have to have something to do with plains, that word in them, which makes a sort of sense even while driving one to distraction. The Spanish is nice, llano, very nice indeed, even restful, if pronounced properly, yon-oh or the southernly yawn-oh, but of course around here if the fucking word’s got a double l you punch ’em both out, right? I simply do not see how so many Mexicans, being handed down from such ancient cultures and peoples, can possibly choose to live in the state of Texas.As for their taking it back lock, stock and barrel, I feel we are doing them a great service refusing to give in.These people are weird, man. But it’s when you get over to the other part of the name for this place, adjective territory, that’s when the fur flies. High, south, staked, estacado in

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Spanish, again really too cultivated for its usage, and my own personal favorite, the grassy plains. If the names for these plains have now multiplied beyond all reason, now one of those names, no one seems quite sure what it means, not exactly.The dread staked.When young I rather liked the idea of this cowboy being staked to the ground by these redskins so ants could crawl all over him and eat him up.Also how Coolie grilled his steaks out back—a piece of meat set out in the sun for a million years or just let Coolie get his barbecue tongs on it, flat dry blackbrown crusted tasteless all life savagely burned out of it by monster star or cowboy cook, these, the steaked plains seemed just about right as well, well-done. This place, this boardinghouse, is filled with know-it-alls. This is in Hubbard. Average IQ a one handicap and that’s nine-hole pitch’n’putt. The idea being that if you can produce know-it-alls in Hubbard, anybody can. And now I have come to Hubbard to find its one and only, its sole know-it-all in all its history waiting there for me in the 42 room every evening just after breakfast.Technically speaking I know that I am wrong, this idiot right.That as there is, strictly speaking, no boarding here, this place in which I have chosen to live whilst planning, murdering and grieving mommy murder is not, strictly speaking, a boardinghouse. More like a flophouse.The reaction is usually cool. Particularly from the secretary who runs the flop from an office there at the foot of the stairs, glass walls so she can keep an eye on 1) front door (locked after five) 2) mailboxes and mail never comes there and 3) swimming pool so empty out back; not to forget an ear cocked for 4) any conversation that may occur over the pay phone in the hall; while sniffer remains ever lifted toward TV lounge for any 5) whiff of Crow being sloshed into Crush. You have probably met secretaries like her all your life. Once, when I had staggered out of the TV lounge to dial Wamba collect on the hall pay phone, this call made to inform that if she didn’t straighten up and fly right, why then she would be throttled, oh yes it was then, upon having slammed down the receiver—jest don’t make it on Thursdy Roy got hairdo and bridge—that the following comment was heard to issue from within those glass walls: “Brat.” And there didn’t seem to be anyone else in the office there with her, not unless he was hiding under the desk.There’s scarcely anything you can’t see through those glass walls. One would think, coming down these plains from Canada, near in it, that they might weaken, dissipate, grow decadent and derivative as one

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reached their end. But not so. These plains, hers, mine, ours, yours too maybe, they stand tall, firm, proud to the very end.Then bam! they end. This is called the caprock, where they end. How they came by their name, that one name, the staked plains. el llano estacado. There happens to be a second know-it-all resident in Hubbard. I attract them or perhaps it is they who attract me. In any case, these two know-it-alls and that secretary, I am considering bumping them off too, after Wamba. One can see how these poor, misunderstood serial killers get their start.They don’t intend big when they start out. Probably thinking rather small actually. Just the one, oh mommy say, and that’ll do it. It’s that after the horror of planning and executing and then remembering your first murder, after the new has worn off, why you look around and see so many many others who qualify.You’ve got ’em in your own family and know. It’s only one’s crude, stumbling attempt to rid humanity of the inhumane, etc.The sacrifice these serial killers make in lost TV lounge time, the expense of the equipment purchased—usually a hunting and camping store has it all, superb one-stop shopping—must not be forgotten when you open the paper to the garish headlines and clutch your chest in fear. He’s everywhere, this jerk, this second Hubbard know-it-all. If you cannot get anywhere near the TV lounge or the 42 room without the first Hubbard know-it-all, the flophouse philosopher, leaping out from behind the cover of a two-year-old Time to explain for hours, straight through the Brewers’ game, how the Bible was translated all wrong; if this bore, Hubbard’s reigning numbero uno, can cling like skin, not let go till it thunders, etc., least he is not slipped under your door every morning before you hit the hay. The Hubbard Monsoon-Monitor.Yes, dear.A stinking newspaper. Enough to make the blood boil. Actually there are parts that aren’t that bad. The Op-Ed page. The anonymo there calls for the end of the world every week or so. Not talking primitive Orange County nuke-a-gook trash. Fallout, firestorm, earth glowing red as a five ball—kid stuff. This guy goes straight to Jehovah hurling thunderbolts out of the blue. Gets dawn going with a crack, make it a spine. Better still is this front page columnist.The Ag expert. Captain Cotton. Now you wouldn’t think, not even in a place like Hubbard, intellectual content kelvin zero—and that goddamn 42-room smartie knew it, -273.15 C, gotta get a paperback Webster or maybe a Classic Comics,

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throw some Hamlet, some Wuthering Heights at him—that you would so long to read this ag guy and what’s new in ginning circles that you would spring out of bed predawn and drive down to the M-M plant to get copy hot off the press; but it is so. Nuclear biophysics, medieval philology, Gameboy—they have nothing on this guy for sheer Byzantine unintelligibility. Puts, calls, options, forwards, but the ABCs of this cotton-picker’s wide wild world.Wait till you get into grading. Staple, tensile, it goes on and on and on what they do to a little cotton fiber to be sure one makes pima, t’other goes burlap. I think this guy’s name is Duane or Dwayne, a variant, as you walk into any gin scaleroom and half the guys are Duanes or Dwaynes, the rest W. Somethings. Such is the M-M’s triumvirate of genius then, the Op-Ed Zeus, Duane or Dwayne, and this other cat, Hubbard’s number two know-everything. His name is Boyce—and if someone sat down one day and made that up it was not me—and he is your Hubbard historian. Hubbard has, for all practical purposes, no history whatsoever—a cushy post.To give him even more time off from thinking, he is also a prof out at Hubbard Tech. He writes a column for the M-M six days a week. He has written six columns in his entire life, just the six, these six every week, six days a week, week after week after week. One of these columns is how the staked plains came by its name, the true story, and what it means. And I hate every word, word by word, of it. Poetry prosed, romance married, mystery ever so tediously, meanly and maliciously solved. Sometimes one sits and weeps for those times when we simply did not know and found that which ever hovered beyond the reach of our knowing to be of a beauty beyond compare. Much will be said in time of how best to approach the plains or rather how each approach changes the nature and character of these plains, colors the plains by palette and brush of that country you have left back to come upon them.This was certainly true of Coronado, the first what we shall call for simplicity’s sake, the first white man to come upon them, the first European, if you must, who came up onto these plains oh so long ago. 1532, give or take a few. A date that must be kept in mind. Near a half millennium ago, 1532.They came, these discerning Spaniards, oh so long ago, had a look, dubbed it el llano estacado and, by whatever name, put ’em in the rearview, never to be seen upon or see them again. Nor was such an appreciable white or European presence known again, not till 1870-something when Col. John McSwain and his brave Second Cavalry

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crossed them in search of the legendary half-white Tehana Storm and his proud band of MeatEater Comanches, the last free Comanches the earth will ever know. I have referred in this matter to the excellent Lords of the Plain, a sturdy guide to those last Comanche wars, white man’s first return to the plain after near four centuries, this written by a moderately bright cousin, at least we have the same first name, as I have been putting mine back the way it was, it should have been, Max Roy Max, and don’t forget it. Been thinking it over anyway.Writing it down, holding the napkin up to the light.Turn it right, turn it left. Even better, let’s have it straight from the horse’s mouth, as the popular Texas saw goes. Coronado’s own journal of his voyage over these plains, it was more of a report to the King of Spain anyway, I think—most of them were Philips around then.And it is no slip of the pen to say Coronado voyaged over these plains, set sail, for they were like sea to him and his men, a sea of grass and plain and sky. And it drove them mad. Had intended to let Coronado tell that bit, in his own words, but I seem to have lost those words I had written out in the cool empty library. Coronado’s words. I have not so much lost them as cannot read them I cannot so much not read them as they are not words to be read but unraveled lines lines kinked and twisted as strands of yarn unraveled from a sweater you can no longer stand the sight of the muffler your first wife knitted back in the days of yore back in the days of love and little people motoring over the floor back in the days when they talked sass they no more talked words than now you can write them only these long gnarled and knotted now unknotted lines. I had wanted to draw this, you see, but I cannot.They beat that from me as a boy, you see. Do you understand murder now, murder and its engine hatred now? Take a boy who is drawing a bird, the birds he loves, so he is drawing the bird from a book of birds, take it anyway and break his pens and burn his paper and put the book of birds high, high on the very top shelf and tell him.You can have it when you are big enough to reach it.You can draw birds like an angel when you are grown and on your own and buying your own grub and paying rent. Not now. Now you will play with tractors, see, there on the floor, and you will like it, huh. Oh yes. Buy your devil a tractor and kick him down there onto the floor and say. Play, play farm or else. And see him come crawling from the dark for you one night. Hatred has fevered his brain pure now, murder cleansed the fouling filth from his heart now, and now it is time for you to die, OK?

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Chick. Cheryl Charles. It must be done. I don’t ever remember her talking. Least not to me. But even when she spoke to others there didn’t seem to be sound.As if she would take them away from me and speak to them a ways off. You could only see the movement of speech, there was no sound. It’s not that she didn’t like me, I don’t think. I liked her well enough. There is that one time I tried to kill her. Pushed her into the fire there in Alexandria, there in the small house during the war, there beneath the river. Don’t know why I was so irritable that morning. Coolie out on yet another all-nite poker party maybe. Maybe I just wanted to see something burn. Got away with it as usual. She was howling too much to squeal and I hung the halo over one of my horns. She was so stupid,Wamba, I don’t think she ever saw through it.And too, there was that once, she had contracted impetigo and the doc had shaved her head and painted it purple polka dots and they stank.Again: early, during the war.We were on a bus, city bus, and it was raining sheets of sick yellow, the smell of the ill.And Wamba would not stop her bawl. She took it up too, as if she had done something wrong. I wished they had never been born, her too. She had had such curled golden locks.They grew back, I knew they would. Had after the fire anyway.With the rain the river would come falling down from the sky, surely. It never did. She had a vicious streak too, not just me, though I sometimes wonder if she wasn’t simply going along.The war again, the house under the river. For some reason workers had come and taken the top off the septic tank there behind the house and had not put it back. Sadistic handymen, they had left that stinking hole of death unguarded. No ribbons tied to sticks, nothing. We put Chick behind the garage and went and told Wamba she had fallen in. Me and Adelaide and other neighborhood mutants.Wamba there on her knees with a broom probing, probing into such foul slush, probing probing for such a small body.The cries then, the great cries of anguish, these were not those made on the impetigo bus, oh no these cries were such as I had never heard nor ever care to again. And we stood back, our neighborhood gang, and smiled at kneeling, probing, howling Wamba.And now comes Chick from behind the garage door.White pinafore dress, little white legs and arms, maybe white shoes, white socks as well, curly golden hair, she smiling too at Wamba now reaching down, now driving her arms down to find that golden hair, to find and grasp hair or pinafore, anything to drag up and bring back that little white body, its thin arms and legs.

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Children grow hearts at a latter stage—not born with them, I mean— for in time Chick had one good as ever seen. Still, until then, till she grew it or I finally noticed, I mostly got sick of this good little girl rep. The angel and the devil and we looked it, golden white and greaser brown, thin n soft, round n slipperish, quiet and smiling, and: Coolie, does that gotdam kid of yours ever shut up. You probably remember this from your own third-grade days.There were four men walking along the beach and a snake crawled up and the men were so frightened that two held hands one’s hat flew off and the last man tried to catch it. Well when I had made that final stick man , she grabbed up the big flat ashtray, my canvas, and the eyebrow pencil, my conte crayon, and ran off to tell and not even all their laughter, Coolie, even Wamba smiling sort of, could expunge the bitter memory of that early betrayal. Also cost me nighttime lights-out radio, she did. Inner Sanctum and its creaking door, still can’t use Molay Shave Cream, the sponsor, without thoughts of dungeons, crypts.Though I must admit the screaming fits, the terror that had radio yanked, perhaps some blame might be shared.There were my nightly tales of the old windmill shrieking, the mad princess trapped up there in her shrieking dungeon tower, and these must be considered. Odd that she never snitched once, the mad princess, just shrieked away, herself convulsed at times, but kept it zipped so that Wamba took these seizures to be nightmare. Maybe she couldn’t catch her breath to squeal, maybe that was it, I don’t know. If she wasn’t all good, that’s what I’m trying to say, she wasn’t all bad either.And I have never loved another human being so in my life nor will as I loved and love still my dear lost mad and dead sister. Chick. Cheryl Charles. Their madnesses, their deaths, their interments. It must be done.

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It wasn’t only at my father’s funeral that I got up and made a speech or should have. At Chick’s funeral, this episcopal nondenomino fairy, he cared so little for these carwash services that he couldn’t even pronounce her name right. I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t only this cretin’s sloth, his not giving a fuck, funneling my dear mad dead lost sister through his funereal suds’n’vac—maybe Wamba was behind it all.There from the very beginning.As always. Wamba and Coolie had this deal, which Bea1 and I practiced as well, that when kids came along there should be a sharing out of the handing around of the two Christian or given names.Though of course a general agreement was to be reached, both had their fair chance with the name of their choice and, unless it proved absolutely out of the question— Wamba wanting me a Jack—the other usually bit the bullet and accepted the one’s choice. Like: Roy. From Coolie’s old pal Roy Max Yeaman. Though she rather liked the country ring to it—twelve percent of known cousins named Roy—she so loathed the man, Coolie’s best pal, that life of freedom out in the bigwideworld, that she offered a tentative veto. Coolie had his wits about him. OK. We’ll have Max then. She rushed headlong back to Roy. But she too knew her revenge.When her mulish Jack was vetoed, she pounced back with Alan. Coolie’s middle name. I don’t think he ever loathed anything so much as that middle name, except for Johnson, the first—and her first victory had been won. Of course he won in the end, his madness, his death. By the time he had started wandering around the house wearing three hats, her ultimate return to JohnsonAlanRich’sonBlancoTexas, he was an old and addled man calling out for Momma, his brothers, sisters, all dead, and simply did not give a hang what anybody called anybody. Same with Chick. Forget the lazy disinterested punch-in/punch-out preacher. It was Wamba’s revenge that mispronounced my sister’s name there at the Dallas wash’n’wipe. Having lived her life being taken as country white trash by her lumpenbouzhie 1929 Study pals,Wamba had now, there at the very end, rectified what she considered to be the trashy Ch by resurrecting the distinctly lower middleclass moving up Sh. Sheryl.That’s how these Reader’s Digest intellectuals have my sister’s hardsoft lovely name pronounced. It is Cheryl, you fucking fools. Pronounced Cheryl. Hard Ch. Cheryl Charles. And she was called Chick all her life by those who loved her so I cannot say how much we loved her and love her still even now when someone has decided she not be so called, Chick, nor

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even Cheryl Charles, and now that she is mad and dead and rests at peace at last, now there is that final revenge against her and all her beautiful names that you, you fucking little jerkoff jackoff and my cretinous mother, have colluded to call this beloved sis Sheryl. Sheryl. Something out of a fucking movie magazine. I really should get up and deliver some of these addresses, you know. Johnson Alan? You Baptist nitwit, his name was Coolie, nobody ever called him anything but Coolie except for her, and they had to make him mad and tie him down for that.And keep those linebacker pallbearers back, back away from me. It’s loaded and I know how to use it.What are you doing up there anyway, you fat frogface suck? You didn’t know my father and even if you had, you haven’t got the brains for it, simple remembering, you are a Baptist idiot, remember. Oh why do we not remember our own ourselves. Why aren’t we remembered by all his Blanco friends, the only friends he ever had up on these benighted plains. Deke Cammel and Polly, she used to be a Standifer, Bobby Thurston from over toward Lakeview way and that dark-eyed girl he said should be mine if I had any wits about me, and Wildcat Trice and that pokerplaying crew from McAdoo, and Norris and his cowgirl wife, Cat, not short for anything, just Cat, and those Saturday night shindigs you used to throw and Racehorse would come up from cowboy country and spin those yarns that had us all asleep in good time, and not to forget old Flukey Harrison, probably the oldest friend the old man ever had, met boys so many many years ago and . . . and it went on, should have, oh it so should have, it was that bad, this beef-faced Baptist fuck’s memorial to my dear old dad. And she loved it; she sat there and loved it and said nothing, did not stand and speak out and tell this carwash chaplain, this Brother Pal—I feel that probably, originally, it was Powell—tell this Testament turkey that this was not how to say my beloved sis’s name, not how to remember my proud father; but she sat there and said nothing and so did I.And so did I. Their madnesses were different.They seemed so much the same, but they were not. So said the docs and so say I. They were a pair, Alzheimer and Pick. Colleagues and competitors. Now keep it zipped, that’s a good boy.These two docs, scientists, along that line back in Old Vienna where they make the little sausages in those short round cans, they hated each other. Each wanted to be first to know why people go mad. Really mad. Do not speak to me of the uptown

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neuroses that have made Freud billions, his followers, his quacks. Real madness, it so often comes with age. If you ever see it up close, you ever see not one oh no not one but two of the smartest, brightest and, in many ways, best dad n gal you’ve ever seen, seen them fall mad, really mad, truly mad, you will never ever recover from having seen madness up close. They used to call this madness senile dementia. Before Alzheimer and Pick showed up. They saw it was a disease, like sinusitis, and you can’t spray for it. It eats away the brain and there is no way to stop it and no way to put it back like it was before. It means death. Madness and death. As you may imagine, as you are an idiot and if not have probably never heard of Pick anyway, Alzheimer won. He cracked open enough heads, I’m sure most were dead, and found the disease, its ravages, and called it, brilliantly, Alzheimer’s disease. As if he both had had and discovered it. Some call it a condition, even one idiot: a syndrome. As if you can’t call something a disease unless you catch it from something.As if what is born in one’s genes, that that is not where you catch it from; as if that which will drive you mad and see you die is but like sunburn, a really bad one, something blistered and scabbing and peeling there inside your head. Pick was not pleased and he bustled around and found his own disease and called it, tauntingly, one would like to think, Pick’s disease.The neurodoc explained so much of this to me, that my beloved baby sister, sitting in the next room smiling, had fallen prey to something like that which had seen poor dear little Coolie, her father, mad and dead before her.That she was mad and she would be made dead from it too. It was like what got Coolie but it was different, slightly. Technically speaking these mad diseases do not kill. Not directly. Death is but a side effect. So. If you don’t want to die, don’t go mad. Not one of these anyway. I should live in terror of it, as you may well imagine, but I don’t. I take after Wamba and know it. Small and mean and sane. I mean, how sane can you get wanting to murder mommy? If I can ever ever ever get it over with, go on through with it, I know I shall be well again.That is my madness, that I cannot I cannot I cannot. Wamba’s madness is being a Baptist. And shrinking and expanding. Now I know for a fact that when young Wamba stood 5'7" and was a lanky girl. I was there, most of the time, and when not there are the pictures and the marks made on the kitchen door. Coolie, even in his three-hat days, knew something funny was going on, even near the end. He would look across the table.

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“Who is this greasy gorilla anyway?” And observed a perfect disinterest when endlessly told by his keeper: “Why he is your son, Johnson Alan. Roy Alan.” “What a stupid name.”Then lean toward me.“Who is this short fatty anyway?” True, in those last days Wamba looked like an elephant had stood on the top of her head. She’d swallowed a bowling ball. Eyes whirling like a circus ride. Chick, even in her last days, she noticed too. There was this old girlfriend from highschool, her very rich family lived outside town, she happened to be back in town during one of my returns, early days of the Wamba Wars, hostilities declared but no shots exchanged, and this girlfriend, after one of the wildest lives you can imagine, had come home to be a Baptist and about as mad and boring as you can get. Wamba was always trying to fix us up. This happened when Coolie was dead and Chick was coming mad but not quite there yet, and alive, Chick was still alive then, after a fashion, and staying with Wamba. Wamba, dear funny stupid short fat loony-for-Jesus Wamba cared oh so diligently for them both, dad n sis, all those many years it took their madnesses to play out toward death.This old girlfriend came over one day to give Chick some of her old clothes. This old girlfriend’s name was Amanda. Chick stood 5'11" and was lanky then, in madness, as had been her mother in youth, as had she herself.Amanda had gone on to come to a different size and shape. Chick had nothing but closets of clothes, clothes she would never wear again and would never be going out in again but to go to the doc once a year and to the madhouse and then on to her grave.Amanda showed up one afternoon with armloads of clothes to give Chick. She gave a fashion show for Wamba and Chick sitting there in the living room.Amanda trying on these dresses and things as if: if they fit her they would fit anybody. Even a girl six inches higher, twenty pounds lighter.Amanda modeled these clothes. She would slink out from her changing room, the hall, and slink up and down like a highfashion clotheshorse. Like she was on a runway. Out and back.Turn, twist, pause, storm out.And Wamba sat there.And Chick sat there, this the stage in her terrible terrifying affliction when she followed Wamba around like a puppy. And finally, after hours of Amanda slinking in and out, Chick looked over to her mother: “You know,Amanda is crazy.”

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Even Wamba had to laugh when telling this, not long after, and of course Chick smiled as we laughed away, Wamba and me. She didn’t remember a word of it, you see. Chick only lived in the present, you see. That was the nature of her terrible terrifying malady. No past, no future, only the here and now. Some days heaven, some days hell. That and death, the loss of memory, these are shared by the two diseases, Pick and Alzheimer, though even then there are their differences, least were between Chick and Coolie, what they could remember and what not. But that in time. For now the cruelest of their differences.The cruelty of Pick, the kindness of Alzheimer.You see, one seems to strike with aging, so that indeed it may seem a senile dementia; while the other comes with youth, the end of youth.Yes oh yes. Pick drove his mad ax into my sister’s skull early on, oh yes indeedy. She could not have been more than early forties when she first knew Pick’s soft suffocation, memory loss. She was dead at fifty-one. This shall be the beginning of my explanation, some justification for mommy murder. If you care at all for justice, truth, the like, please do not skip on over to the funny bits, among these the actual act of mommy murder. Please stay here with me now, I cannot be left alone with such murder, such rage, I cannot look deep into it on my own, please do not leave me now. What do you think this is? Do you think this is a book? Do you think this yet another book? Is that what you think? How my mother murdered my father, then, and how she would have, gladly, so murdered my dear sister had her disease known any cure. Oh yes. She murdered them both. One in fact, t’other in principle, murdered them by Baptistism. By this thing’s end you shall know full my hatred of them all. Chick was ever so much brighter and better than I—though some wags, many among them ex-wives, observed that that would not be such a tough state to be found in—and her life fell apart.At times it seemed it never got going. Chick was a star in highschool, straight 100s, drum majorette four years, won first and second State in typing and shorthand one year, shorthand and typing the next, and went off and got knocked up in college.And she loved the guy and that was what did her in. She loved this man and he not her and they were married, her dream, for such things were done in those days; one honored such events, conception outside wedlock, by

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being wed, though it was coming into fashion that such might be unlocked, as in time their weddedness was to be. He was OK, a good guy, we simply couldn’t stand the sight of one another. Or couldn’t then, not the both of us starting out to find fortunes, one doing so right, one wrong, and—on and on. Chalk and cheese, hedgehog and fox, oil and water, we simply did not mix.And he had married my sister, my little pet, and spirited her away.And I kept coming for weekends.They were down at SMU and she quit with the coming of Sidney, as I shall call their son, hers, his; I shall call him Sidney for he is dead and the name must stay. Now dead ever so many years, dead at thirteen or so. I shrink inside still to think of the man he would have become. Sidney.And she quit school with the birth of her son and his, and I shall call him Sid, his father, her hubby, and he, even after Sidney, stayed on to finish; he and me too never deserving to be let out of first grade if the likes of Cheryl Charles called Chick née Richardson was to leave school and be secretary and be a mom and a fine mom she was too, easy, kind, a gentle and wise mom, as was she so with everyone, even this writer, her troubled and troublesome brother. Sid. Frat boy; from broken family—a phrase fashionable then, least with Wamba, till they too, Sid and Chick, their family broke, then desertion was more often spoken of—this Kingston Trio pizza hut banjo strumming whitecollegeboy singing darkie bout how tough it was load/unload all them naners; shitty chess player and still he could beat you, made up openings you never found in any book; etc; in short, everything that, at that time, I was not. Namely, a man. Even if he didn’t love my sister, even if he left her upon their son’s death, even if he didn’t really seem to mind Wamba and her constant insults—a man. And a good one at that. So I have come to know. He puts up with me anyway. At all these funerals where we usually meet.Think it’s more than the funerals, as it is usually I who should be the decent one there, as it is usually he who has the right to grieve and be considered gently, with respect, and not I, surely not I. One thing is strange though. His surname. Pritchard. Uncanny resemblance, don’t you think? A Richardson that jumped the gun and shot its wad and could not go on.While Richardson, a name left at the gate, goes plowing on long after Pritchard has lapped and broken tape, headed for the showers. These Texas women, like Chick, like her friends there at the funeral, like Sid’s new gal—there are no women made on earth that come close

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to these Texas women like Chick and her friends and Sid’s new gal there at the funeral.They keep coming out of nowhere, these fine Texas women, these friends of Chick, there at the funeral, all their funerals. She had so many friends, see, and if Wamba and madness had stolen her away from them, now death had brought them back, these fine lanky funny bright amusing and amused warmly drawling ladies, not a man-hating libber in the bunch.They liked us, see, even me, drunk, miserable, jet-lagged, not stoned, miserable, heartbroken and filled with rage that it was Chick and Coolie, not Wamba and me, the innocent the mad and the dead.These Texas women even then, at Chick’s funeral, even then, even with mommy murder borning and burning in my heart, even then they liked me still and were funny and tall and lean but soft but smart but let you go on, a lonely shaggy old bear, sore-pawed and blue, this monster there so drunk and hating Wamba and her Baptists and her Dollé clan gathered there at Chick’s funeral, there to worship their evil goldilocks god, and there they were, amongst such Baptist filth, these Texas women, these fine women, like Chick they were, all her friends. Sid left her but a year after Sidney’s death and why shouldn’t he have and why should I not have been pleased? He was but Coolie releasing himself, there, with his son’s death.A man meant not to marry, to have a son, now he had no son, now he would not be married. Who could blame him? Not me. I was all for this man I had not much liked till then. A year after his son’s death.The hard bravery with which he had met that death, for he so loved his son. Loved him so that at times it may have seemed he loved his wife as well.Thought so, till his son was dead and saw clearly then that it was not so. It is so often so, more often than not, that one loves and the other does not. Likes. Endures. Gives in to.Why not admit it, there, when your son is dead? When that death strips away those lies you tell yourself, that by loving the boy with every piece and part of you, all your heart, that you love his mother as well. His honesty, bravery, courage through it all. Death, divorce.Why shouldn’t I have been pleased to see him go? Even if it meant a further tear at my dear sister’s heart. Even if he should have loved her. But he could not. Do you think there’s no tearing in that? Not loving when one should love. Not loving when one loves you so. Who looked into his heart, Sid’s, those nights he lay alone. His boy dead, wife gone.Those lonely nights Wamba saw him hopping bar to bar, whore to whore, those nights the good man Sid Pritchard passed utterly alone.

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He was such a funny little guy, Sidney, the first time we met.There in his baby bedroom. He in crib, me guest bed. Jesus, it was hot and all that sun from whence it came and all that light it seared down.Twenty-two Rainier Ales, please, why do they call it Green Death, dear? Blinding heat, searing light—look up from morning’s hell and here was this kid, should have been a baby, there in his crib. Standing. Smiling.Watching. Laughing but even then he knew enough of the world and uncles and their hellish mornings to keep it quiet.When this kid’s mom tiptoed in to liberate him for breakfast—some other rugrat would have been howling for it hours ago—it was then that this funny little guy, so I imagined, he held finger to lips. Smiling.What, fourteen months and there he was advising mom, smiling too, to keep it quiet for Uncle Max, as, even then, I had come to think of myself. And why not? Every kid should have an Uncle Max. I think so and you know it. Pete. Pete Willson.The first of Wamba’s triumphs.The first she might come and crow over. Stand upon our fallen breast and holler out number one! I reign! Queen Wamba in her lair, licking wounds of conquest, purring over fallen foe, her daughter, her carnage. Catholic, he was. Divorced. Lawyer or, often, the simple shyster. Alcoholic, he drank. Owned a house in Florida, on the beach, something fishy in that.And he wanted to marry my dear sis left by son and hubby and her mommy would not let her go and poor dear Chick so fine in all but strength, the strength to stand up to this ever fattening evil, she went along and did not marry Pete, and soon he did not call for drinks so often and went to Florida on his own, so he said, and married elsewhere, one them Cathlicks, so said murdering mommy murderer, and dear Chick was left alone by son and hubby and by her gone friend now. But she always had her mommy, didn’t she? Her mommy reeling her in, drawing her ever back, back home, back to mommy, it was as if their madnesses that made them babies had been designed for her, by her, how these madnesses colluded with her plans to bring them back to her, home, the grave and womb, back to serve out their last days under her mommy rule, their punishment forever telling mommy no, forever leaving home, her, her grave, her womb. She tried the same trick with Burr2, wife two. It didn’t work. Banned forever, Burr, from coming to Wamba home? Burr looked at me quizzically.“You say that I shall not be allowed to drive fifteen hundred hideous miles down these plains to visit this little

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old batty Baptist bitch in west Texas? That such riches are forbidden?” Burr looked at me quizzically. Bea1 became Wamba’s champion, or Wamba hers, after our divorce. You ought to have been there eleven years back, at the wedding. Madison,Wisconsin. Unitarian church, cross between homeless teen dorm and band hall. Bea’s many brothers and sisters and some mothers and uncles, fathers and aunts. A Unitarian pastor? He winking at bride Bea and all sisters, mothers and aunts and could not stop it, coulda been a tic. Coolie enjoying the really quite tasty indeed punch almost as much as Bea’s cadet brother,Todd, a staggering winking four years old or so, while all joined in in agreeingment. Bea’s kind mother and good father, artists! such artists! none of their kids would come near the stuff, art!—Dave and Effie being ever so kind and good to Wamba. Wamba? Wamba. “Don’t thank I ever been this far north.” She murdered my father, you know, and would have my sister had there been cure for her disease as that cure would have been denied her, let us pray. But that, my sister’s murder, the nearest I ever came to killing Wamba or anyone, that Sunday morning of that theoretical theological murder of my sister, that shall come with that dark dawn, their false light, it is only the blare and glare of their pits of hell, their power, the power of their dark ignorance and they come Sunday morns to worship it and bow ye all, all ye sinners down, ye who know and care and think and feel, ye shall be made all bowed down before her howling night, her Lord, come her dawn, her Sunday morn, the morning she murdered my sister, would have if she could have. Coolie was fine, physically. I was away, but it had not been long since I had seen him. Helping him dress that one morning, he was eighty-two or so and had a body still, tight, lean, muscular, a body, a physique that I had never known, not even in my teens, in my dreams. He fell and broke his hip. Outside.There by the side of the house, where once grew the small tomatoes he favored. There near the breezeway. He was dead in three weeks. I was with Rissa then, in her foreign home that was foreign to her as well—she like me banished to wander, roam. Her father had died not long ago, that was when the call came in for me, there, in Rissa’s foreign home. Maybe it was a good time for it, I don’t know. It came in, the call that said now my father was dying, he was to die, please come home.

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Did I believe it, the call, the dying father? No.Yes. Both. I don’t know. Only that Rissa had been there with her father, sleeping on a cot in his room when he died and that was right, she said, it was right for her to be there then. Two years before, we had been off, away, when her lovely mother had died. So quick. The great storm of that year. Some plastic trashcan was blowing away and Rissa’s mother had taken her tender heart out to save it and the great wind had taken her breath with it and she had died and Rissa had not known.Till she got the call that her mother was gone.Too late. No. I believed the call though I did not believe and I went. And it took Coolie three long weeks to die, and even then he only died because she killed. Maybe the only truly good act this evil greedy bitch has ever done, killing my father, he so needed to be dead by then. Of course she was clawing me back, back to the nest, back home. There is that instinct in them, mommys, to keep us theirs, keep us alive, at home. Survive survive. Live live, keep them alive and above all, at all costs, keep them home, nested, alive, at all costs they must survive, be mine.And if they don’t? Why kill them for it. Make them pay. But keep them home, mad or dead, do not let them get away. Not now. Not now that you have clawed him back, back home. There was once a friend of Bea’s, her best friend, married and having an affair.A romance.A love affair.And she said to Bea and me, can’t you love two men? No.You cannot love two men, nor two parents, nor two children.You can love but one; and the other, it’s not the same and by not being the same, it’s not love then. For years I looked with contempt upon such specious reasoning. Have your fuck on the side and your hubby at home, honey, and leave poor suffering love out of your sluttish mess, somewhere away from you and your having your hubby and your lounge lizard too. And there, with Coolie’s dying, I came at long last to see that this philandering little bitch had her point; if not for love, then so for other matters of heart and mind.You can, you see, want something and not want it, want it to be and not to be at the very same time.Want your father, with every fiber of your being you want him to be alive. With every fiber within you you want him not to be alive.That six block drive every morning to the hospital. That was my job. The death drive. The morning check. It had been arranged. No midnight calls. None even with dawn. No calls at any time, none at all.There would be the going and seeing of death, none of the hearing, the being told of such. I would go with dawn and see if my father was still alive or was gone. Six blocks. Not far.

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Not long.Wanting the two, so wanting them both. Him to be not dead, not alive, and it could not be, life and death together. Like love, you either do or you don’t.There can be no two. He looked like a mummy.The lean, sculpted youngman’s body gone. There was nothing like it there. No. Nothing there but this curled crouched desiccated gray twisted thing, this thing not alive not dead moaning, moaning with every breath.And she saw me when I came into the hospital room, came off the god knows how many hours flight from nowhere to see my young father’s body become this, this moaning thing, and she saw my recoil from this thing and she liked that. My moving back from this thing, my father, my father had never been such a thing, she saw and moved close and stroked this thing and called it by my father’s name and stroked it as if it were alive, as if it were not dead. I did not touch him till there near the end.Two weeks of watching her vile stroking and speaking to this monstrous moaning thing. But one morning early I came and this lithe young black nurse, they were all so kind and lithe and young these nurses, she asked my help in turning him. And I touched him then. And I have never done anything before or since so right.To have touched him.Touched his strength. He was there, you see, my old man. Even this thing could not take his strength, his being from him. If you can, make yourself do it then, touch them. Her stroking, her talking—I thought such histrionics. Nother Baptist mommy powerplay. But she knew and she was right. He was gone from us but for touching. The murder then. And in this she was right as well. Not right in the doing, or in the addled reasoning or lack of such behind its doing, but in its having been done. Once he had been murdered—there was that matching flash of murderous rage, but it went. It dissipated. It stayed not long, for he was dead and that was right, even if it took an addled murderess to do what I, a cowardly son, could not. Kill my father. Get him forever out of the way. Out of the path of this thing called dying, not life, not death. Get him gone. She only did what I could not. And now, she gone as well, now still I could kill her for it. Murdering my dad. He was not dying of course. Not even close. Just—living. Just a ploy then it was to get me home. I put up with three weeks of mommy grasping bullshit, then had a showdown with the doc. My old man could linger on and on and on. He was on the drip or something, he could stay on and on. Drip, whatever, that was it. For the rest of his living, his not quite

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dying. No mouth feeding. Not even water, I don’t think. Didn’t have the reflexes, the muscles in the throat for it. Just the needle in the arm, the bottle on a high stand.That was life for him. All there was.The doc said to me: no feeding.The nurses too: no feeding. It’ll kill. And she fed and choked and killed him. This only days before I was to go. I had come to see him die and he would never die—or it would take some time. So said the doc. So said the nurses. On the drip, it can go on and on.And so I made the reservation, to go back to a place I could never call home.Anywhere, there, anywhere away from her and her home. Mine too.Why I did hate it so. And her timing was pure. A week before I was to fly away from home she killed him, with three days to spare. That for the funeral. What’s the point of murdering your husband if it don’t serve to keep him back, that badboyson, for the funeral. Why then, there graveside, Brother Pal can save his soul. Have I mentioned that, when I truly first got the idea to murder mommy? Actually probly fifty so time noshin hit noggin. I knew a disgusting elation. I would not be trapped here forever. I would break free of her and home again. I made joyful plans to go to where I had been.When he died, why I would return to obsequies then. She decided to save me the fare. It was late afternoon I got the call.There at Wamba’s house. Chick was living there then too, had been for years, I don’t know.Wamba had taken Chick in years ago. She had been caring for them both all this time I was where I do not know. Chick was not that bad yet but still not good. Not near so good as when she had come a couple years ago. She had seemed normal then—you didn’t look close, you didn’t know.Then you could see it. She was not right. Something slight, eternal had gone wrong. She was not so good now that she could be left alone. She could have stayed with me that afternoon but she chose not to. She had come to that stage, she followed Wamba everywhere. Wamba went from kitchen to the other end of the house, the bedrooms there, Chick would follow.Wamba went to the bathroom Chick stood outside the door. If unlocked she would go in. Locked, she tapped at the door.When Wamba scolded—no more tapping—Chick waited there at the door.You passed her waiting there in the hall outside the bathroom, Chick would smile. She looked so sane then. Smiling, as if she understood the joke. But in that instant only. In that instant she would forget you, her

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smile, the joke, and go back to waiting.That was how Chick was then, the day her mother murdered her father, the stage she had reached. Chick had gone somewhere with Wamba when the call came in. Wamba had not told me where she was off to. She usually said.Told me more of where she was off to than I cared to know.Today she said nothing. Going out, nothing more, I don’t know. Slipping out to go to the hospital to feed my father, that’s where, that’s what. If the docs, the nurses, if I had said my father would die, he could no longer take food or any nourishment into his mouth, that he must die slowly, mouth shut, on the drip, then Wamba and her prayers would show us a thing or two. She would feed the curled moaning mummyish thing and he would grow well and his mind return to right and they would be young again. Not that young. Sixties maybe. Don’t want to ask for too much. Overdo it. Not back so young that Coolie would be boss again. Don’t want them prayers and that feeding to get outta hand. Only so far back as when he knew who he was. She was. She wanted to go back to that at least. She didn’t much care for Coolie not knowing who she was, him going around telling the visiting neighbors and relations that she wasn’t really his wife. Some girlfriend filling in till his real wife showed up. She slipped out of the house then without saying where she was off to, and she and Chick drove the six blocks or so to the new hospital and there in that late afternoon, when no docs, no nurses or sons were around, Chick only, she tried to feed the gray twisted thing twisted and curled and moaning on the bed, she tried to feed him and she choked him and killed him. I would call that murder. Murder by prayer. Murder by talking to someone or something that is not there. Murder by stupidity. Institutionalized stupidity.Across the land, over the world they come Sunday morn, or their version of it, and gather together to worship and praise and sing out and pray and speak to their collected, collective stupidity.These are called believing in God and going to church and killing you if you do not do so too.Wamba’s branch of this stupidity was called Baptist. Southern Baptist. Murderers. Stupid, evil, powerful murderers. To start I would simply shoot a few.A select group.Their leaders.They call themselves preachers and are so called by the flock. Need to know anything else? The flock. But still I think I would simply shoot a few anyway. I mean I would like to shoot one, one of these preachers, simply to make myself a better person. Make some small contribution to humanity, intelligence, civilization.Wamba’s preacher, that’s all I ask for. Brother Pal,

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they call him. That’s cute. Probably really Powell. Brother Pal, I would shoot him down like a dog. He would me, for sure, if he dimly thought such shooting would save my soul.And Wamba’d sit there and go along. “You thank thad do the trick, Brother Pal?” “Wing ’im straight to the pearly gate, Sister Wamba. Pass lil more a that fine blackpepper gravy yessum.” Killing for Christ. How I came to be such a fan of the cruel and savage Vietnam war. Kill for country and capital—at least they fucking exist. But to kill for nothing, for no reason than to kill—no. Stop.Wait. Breathe. Stop. Breathe.Think.They don’t kill for nothing.They kill for power.The power that makes believe that there is something there when there is not. A ghost story.A monstrous eternal outreaching evil.And it, it itself must die, be crushed, murdered. And this, my lone beginning of it. Some call out revenge, but we know better.War and this its declaration. Kill or be killed. Kill and kill again. I bumped off Brother Pal twice there at Coolie’s funeral.Almost got up and made a speech anyway. First time there at the church, a relatively minor rage.The second time was out at the cemetery.The urge to cry out, to kill, it was serious by then. And I kept it zipped. Said nothing. That’s what they count on, on our taking their idiocy, lapping up their bullshit, without a word. Coolie was a master at that.An atheist in all but name, he thought he could go along with them, like he would go along with Wamba.Thought he was strong and smart enough to stand above them and their mindless worshipping a thing not there.Thought he could stand back from Wamba, this little dirtfarm country girl—all she wanted was for him to go along and go to church, that’s all she ever asked, not even to believe or anything like that, just to go along and go to church. And that but once a week. She’d give in on Sunday night and Wednesday prayer meeting and grab that one revival night, that’d do fine, maybe two, if it was in a building, tents out, maybe she’d slip away and go to them all, all seven, fourteen, however many tent-braying nights the revival came with; but that trooping off to that lordly war, that’d be done on her own, she agreed to that. And Coolie smiled and went along with his simple country wife and her simple-minded beliefs and lo, one morning he woke and he was mad and he was hers and theirs too, these lords of dark and coming night, their ignorance, their power over knowing, over light. The first rage at Coolie’s funeral, the first pop-a-preacher urge, was a minor affair. Mere simple stupidity.This idiot not remembering Coolie as

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did we who had known Coolie at Blanco or even moved into town, we who remembered Coolie then as a man of power and pride and principle, a man respected and admired by all who called him friend and father.That this newcoming nitwit simply remembered what he simply remembered, Coolie walking downtown with three hats on, looking for Arkansas, ever searching for his Momma, his brothers and sisters, all dead; that this was what this fool spoke of there in church when he spoke in memoriam of my father—nothing really to get all that worked up over, really. Just leap up and fill his gut with lead, him dodging and darting there behind bulletproof pulpit.They got a Baptist company down there in Dallas that specializes—this must happen every day and twice on Sunday. I think that will be enough for now.Yeah, blow him off and walk away. Draw and quarter, roast at the stake, not yet. Save it back for later. And that will be but a short time later, thirty minutes later, when we had all filed out of the church and jumped into our big white air-conditioned cars and driven them slow out to the local cemetery outside town, over by what used to be called niggertown, now a good deal in property; it was then that I would have liked to have done up them both. Mommy and preacher. It was now, there at the cemetery, my father’s memorial service number two, instead of simply and stupidly remembering only that of my father that he remembered, it was then that this fat-face sky pilot betook himself to save my soul. Oh yes, dear. The hole. The canvas canopy and the dozen so folding chairs underneath, shaded perches for notables, mourners, family members. The coffin, cherrywood burning golden brown that warming August morning, all about those small roses, dusted they were or seemed to be, both red and white, hold the baby’s breath, and there, trapped again as I had been trapped at the church, Wamba one side, poor unbelieving, uninterested, unknowing Chick Cheryl Charles on the other, it was then that Brother Pal, this filth, this species of Baptist scum, chose to do a little soul saving.There at the very cusp of my dear dad’s grave. He allowed that we might bow our heads and in mockery of prayer asked if there were any among the congregation who might want to come forward and pledge their lives to little baby Jesus etfuckingcetera. Oh yes.The depth of her mourning.The void of her suffering. She it was who had set this up.This hit job for Jesus. Bag one for Christ. It had only been yesterday that they had been at their plotting. Sitting there on the living room couch. Sitting close. Near like lovers they were. Him his

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beefy arm around her, she weeping, heads lowered, she grieving, he consoling, something along these lines: “You thank you might jest slip it in there, Brother Pal? Two for the price of one.” And indeed why not? Can see the Baptist Standard front page now. BROTHER PAL OF WAMBAVILLE TX MADE HISSELF A MIR’CLE. PLANT DAD, SAVE SON,ALL IN ONE

“Idea just came me out there in the blue. Why make funerals just a one-way street. Get ’em comin and goin.Also be purty fine place set up a carwash, church teens could do ’er.Time you got the plantin done the Nash’d be spic n span.” Comic exaggeration? Not by much.You want to hear Wamba’s first words to me when I flew in for Chick’s funeral there in Dallas.The depth of her suffering, the void of her grief. “You gone wear thet tie. I kinda liked that polky-dot one. Mighta shaved thet beard off for the casion. Show you membered.You be riding in the limo up with me. Costin lot a money,” etfuckingcetera.The actual words, dear. Oh yes. But then they don’t have a Mother Search Committee, do they, like they have for preachers. I spoke of this to cousin Dewey, he on the Preacher Search Committee, there after my father’s funeral, the most miserable excuse for a memorial service I had ever known, conducted by the most miserable excuse for a thinking, feeling, caring human being I had ever known. Dewey shook his head, made that cowboy smile that never quite makes it.“Believe me, Roy, he was the best of the bunch. By far.” If I have had and will continue to have not much good to say for Baptists, cousins and them that maniacally call these west Texas plains home and their occupation there upon it the killing of grass—now we must consider Dewey.And his girlfriend Henrietta.And their lives, loves and liberties. Dewey the deacon? Oh my my, it is such that keeps us at our lives, loves and liberty, this cowboy farmer eccentric a deacon. Same goes for his gal Henrietta, Baptist Editor for the Hubbard Monsoon-Monitor. If mention has been made of the rag, the resident geniuses writing there, then surely Henrietta, its Baptist Editor, is such a one. Listen, that’s what she calls herself, the Baptist Editor, not me. She’s tall and willowy and hair darkbubbly and an easy laugh but for those

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times she gives it out a hoot! and that’s laugh too, wears bright tropicalpattern things, these somehow neither tight there, loose here, and both, takes to broadbrim straw hats, trey chic, cept when she’s driving her small Jap pickup and then it’s billed cap, usually baseball, usually the Rangers. And that small gap between her two front teeth, Dewey likes it too, I can tell. And such lovely outrage goes beyond sartorial affairs. Her columns, she seems to be able to address all the evils and ills of mankind in these articles, north vs. south and she’s talking hemispheres, knows Yugo geography like the back of her hand, like maybe she’s actually been there, and on and on, and she gets away with it all. Oh the editor Boyce calls her in from time to time, she says, for an attitude check, but otherwise people don’t notice, don’t mind, maybe they even like these most irreligious writings from their classy Baptist editor. Sometimes she kicked all that and wrote of people, people only, sometimes of people who had been forgotten and must be remembered.These writings and those of Duane Mr. Cotton and the Faustian editorials, these I clung to that year I wept there in that small room, the clickclickclick of domino shuffle coming up sharpnsoft from the 42 room. But then sometimes, like Dewey, Henrietta carries all this being a human being, a member of good standing in the human race, a touch too far. Gets it from her mother, says she. Like that column remembering this, that time they got hailed out—Henrietta grew up just another plains farm girl, over around Estacado or where it once was, used to be—and instead of moping around, her mother got the kids together and they went out and gathered up a tub of hailstones and churned a bucket of ice cream. Too bubbly for words, cept that special ice cream her mother made. Puts Grape Nuts, the breakfast cereal, hard nuggets of bran, I suppose, she seeds these in the vanilla mix so the cream’ll come out chunky and chewy, no moping through that. Dewey stayed with me there at the hospital when my father died. I did not care to leave the hospital till my father had left and we waited out there in the back, on the loading dock. Even a hospital this small, it had been outfitted for death, getting the bodies out. Even a hospital this small, they must have to face it every day, death and getting the bodies out and when they built the building they put in the order. A loading dock out back, looking west, toward sundown. The call came late in the afternoon.As this was summertime it might have been evening, after that closing meal, for as I looked out the window,

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as I heard her say from the phone that my father was dead, that she had killed him, she bawling away, even then the sun came low down the street, setting all the grassy lawns afire with green, late afternoon, late summer, moving toward fall.You could hear them practicing football, that’s how you knew summer was going, the grass would be dry, dusted in time. The new highschool is out in that west part of town, the hospital and the old folks’ home are there too, out in that part of town where town stops. But fields beyond there, to the west, and sundown. She hadn’t been able to get it right over the phone, whether dead or dying, but dead was right by the time I drove down to the hospital and that’s six short blocks and them only.As I write of this, my father’s death, water comes from eye, left eye. I am not crying, I do not even feel sad or not strongly so, but these tears, I suppose they must be, come from my eye and fall on down my cheek. I don’t mind them now, they are in fact a peaceful, healing thing to come to man. Not the rage I felt then, at her, at him, at death, at her again for having killed him. But I could not rage long at her or him or anything, not when I came upon my father dead. If I did not turn on the faucet with her and bawl and weep and howl, I raged no more when I came upon my father dead.The thing was dead.That’s what had been thought before.That this twisted moaning desiccated thing was not Coolie Richardson, not my father, but I was wrong.When I saw that the thing was dead, I knew and knew too late how live it had been and that that twisted moaning thing was my father and that I had been wrong in despising her for treating this thing as if it were alive, talking to it, stroking it, holding its hand, placing cool cloth to its brow. Now all that, the rage, the contempt was gone. She had killed my father but then so had I.You do kill, you know, by not seeing life and treating it as such.You kill as surely as by forcing pablum down a thing’s throat and strangling the breath from it. I had only touched him once in those three weeks—it was hard enough to look at him. But then one morning the pretty thin young black nurse asked my help in turning the thing, she was washing it, and I do so. And the thing grasps my arm. Oh you cannot know the life, the strength that is there in my father’s hand as he holds me as we turn him that he might be washed.You cannot know how wrong I have been all this time. Finally, ultimately wrong. There occurred another death at the hospital, within minutes of my father’s.This explained the delay, the funeral people being slow getting my

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father out to the loading dock, but Dewey and I did not mind. A black girl had died. Fourteen or so. Retarded, some other malady, it had not been unexpected, her death, and still how they mourned her passing and so did we. They had crammed us all in this small room, there near the north exit, this room like a dentist’s waiting room, ashtrays, magazines, except one waited here for someone to die or, if dead, came to this room to mourn.We three, my sister, my mother and I, were there then with the black girl’s family.At first I so wanted to break out, break away, near panic, anything to get out, get out of this small stinking room, these poor people weeping; but I came to see that the room stank only of cigaret and sweat, not death, and that their weeping, their carrying on, the black mother leading, was a mourning for us; for I had not wept for our death nor had Chick who did not understand nor was Wamba weeping now, now that she had turned off the faucet.And now there Wamba was with the black family, sitting with the weeping black mother, petting her hand, speaking quietly to her, these two mothers in their grief, and now came the black preacher, a small dapper young fellow, looked he could have been at ease in any pool hall and maybe once had been, and now came more friends and family from what we once called niggertown and will never do so again and will make battle with them that do, and now came the pretty young nurse who had washed my father, she black too, black as ebony, and now the nurse was petting, holding Wamba, for in these three weeks they had become friends, and now Dewey came from our family, maybe there were others, it’s only Dewey I recall, and Dewey lights a long menthol smoke, something had gone wrong with his eyes, we did not speak or touch but waited till the two mothers and their families were gone and put down our cigarets and went out into the hall of the small new polished hospital and went on back onto the rear loading dock and waited there till the black girl’s body came and was loaded into one of the hearses there and then came Coolie and his body was put in the second hearse and the decent funeral director, a quiet and kind man, came and told us of the reasons for the delay and we did not mind and the two hearses pulled away. It was coming sundown, late summer, we stood looking west.A field of highstanding cotton, planted so that we looked down the rows, the rows seemed to run on forever, till they ran together in such a tangle of foliage, it looked jungle if you looked away far enough, out toward the sun.

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To understand Dewey and these west Texas men like him, you have to know this.That during those three weeks of my father’s dying that Dewey came near every night to sit. Coolie had given Dewey his start, had rented him land and co-signed a note to purchase machinery, carried him that one year the bank would not. Dewey came and sat with Coolie and said nothing of it to anyone. I did not know till after the funeral that my morning trips, that agony, those drives down to the hospital to see if my father had lived or died in the night, that these had been made without point.That had Coolie died during the night Dewey would have known. Don’t know how he would have handled that night death. Probably would have waited till dawn, for he knew that was when I came to the hospital, probably would have walked those six blocks over to our house and waited there by the garage. There was a place there he could have a smoke and wait and not be seen by me or Wamba or anyone in the house.And then when I came out to the garage he would meet me and tell me of Coolie’s dying during the night and we would go back inside and if Wamba was awake we would tell her of her husband’s death and if asleep leave her sleeping. Go sit at the kitchen table and smoke and drink coffee and wait for her to wake. Hearing Dewey’s voice in the house at dawn, she would know. Dewey was like son to her and Coolie and I never minded. Or maybe we would have driven back to the hospital first, so that I might see my father dead alone, then we or I alone would have come back to tell of my father’s death.Whatever I wanted, that’s how it would have been done, I’m sure. I tried walking that morning death watch once, the six blocks to the hospital, but I never did so again.The walk back, my father alive, or had he been dead, either of those walks back would have been release. But not the walk there, to the hospital, not knowing dead, not knowing alive.After that one walk there I never did it again.You always drive after that, those six blocks.To know, to know. Billy Hale once took a shot at Dewey. More than one, a couple, the whole magazine. So the story goes. Billy Hale was this crazy old coot, this cowboy farmer like Norris over the road and Toodlum Harrison down in the old rock house, Coolie liked this old coot as well. Carried a tub over his mighty tooled belt, Billy did, with ease and grace, had that cowboy pidgentoe walk, cowboy boots a touch too pointy, uncuffed Levis dragging at the heel ever worn away back down there, pearlbutton shirt open to furry girt, crumple shortbrim straw stetson, handrolled Bugler, ever

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attached to parch crack old cowboy lips, wirerim shades they went dark they went light, drove old Ford pickup ’52 red gone pink, usually a saddle pony standing in the bed, pony hopped in hopped out like a pup, no need for drawbridge.That was Billy Hale—he broke out of nursing home and took a couple shots anyway at Dewey and his Mexican hand. Dewey and Smoky, best hand Mexican white otherwise in our parts, they just hunkered down behind well pump and motor, bullets flying around, till old Billy shot up the clip and Dewey came out and stretched and drove old Billy back to the nursing home. Dewey had been farming Billy Hale’s section and he had been using too many wells or not enough and Billy Hale busted out of the old folks home and drove out and took a shot at him for it. Farming is the most dangerous of occupations, they say, and things like that add up, I guess. But most of the time Dewey was out looking for it.Take that airplane, one of the twenty or so he’s had over the years. Back when I was a kid, highschool, Dewey five six years older, starting farming, we did a little duck hunting.There were these playa lakes all about these plains, scattered fair evenly over them, one a section on average, I’d say, and few sections not marked by them. Round, some near perfectly so it seemed from the air, size close to uniform, though there were the monsters, very few of these, that themselves might swamp a quarter of that section.They filled with what water fell from the sky and with twenty inches annual, often half of that coming one Saturday night in August, were most often dry. Or seem so now. But I remember them lakes always, these gracefully rounded ponds glowing blue below in a dying light.The idea being that we would take Dewey’s latest new plane up and drive around the sky over these many lakes, spot where the ducks had checked in for the night, and return at dawn to knock down a couple, vile, inedible, the shooting, the frosted morning, the fields about cake white, blued white from the new light, that was our sport. We drove around upstairs and spotted some ducks, that sport too, and with night coming fast on the ground till the ground was near gone, we headed home.And then we were upside down. That was Dewey. Upside down, downside up. Firebug. Has to be dealt with too, though in the end that worked out too. Like Dewey remembering up remembering down and landing us on that field road that ran out back of the Home Place, the road Coolie used to walk down, those evenings he cared nothing for weather and the plains

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and walked back away from them and us, to stand there on the cap and have a smoke and look back toward night and home, the home he would never go back to, not like me, not for long, not forever. It was that field road we came down to, dark now, I could not see it, but someone did, Dewey, the plane, for we touched down soft as candy and I could pick up some of the quarters I had won in poker last night, quarters, dimes, halves, they were everywhere, all over the cabin, floor, ceiling, floor now. Coolie, if I had ever seen the old man so pissed off—at someone not me—I do not recall it.The old building started out as a granary, there at the Home Place, or maybe it had been a small barn refitted as granary, the granary where I passed so much time as a boy, wallowing about in a pool of wheat, the mountains and valleys the seed might make, breathing the heavy dusted air, like breathing earth, it had grown so rich from the dust and pollen of the golden red seed. Chick dropped in once, never to return, not even when promised crosshearthopedieetc to unbury her and kitty soon as services over, for heavy death did cling to these seed and those who burrowed neath them. Not sure if we ever found that little cat. If around 1947 you bought a furry loaf that was probably it.This granary, an old wood building, gray with age, was soon abandoned for some shining aluminum jobs, six in a row, six small shining round houses with their peaked roofs, then they too went to waste as farmers gave up holding out grain to see prices rise and went ahead and stashed seed, prices would never rise, not for wheat, in the big elevator over at Wake, over by the Toro highway, tell the elevator man to sell when the price got right and it never did; and so soon all these granaries went and somebody got the idea to turn the old wood granary there at the Home Place into a house, maybe what it had been before it’d been a barn, what it’d been before it’d been a granary. I was gone or not watching, but think Dewey was in the old Home Place by then, we in town, and the granary house was given over to a Mexican hand, if not Smoke then the hand before and his family, these Mexicans hands the best you’ll ever hope to see. Maybe that’s where all Dewey’s kids came from, on loan from Smoky and Juanita, though I swear some of these kids handhanging from the rafters wherever it was Dewey was living, a couple anyway looked white, maybe not, maybe just the coming light. Anyway that was the establishment Dewey ran, whether starting out there at the Home Place or later when he bought or built the old rambling ranchhouse over near the cap, there were always kids and girlfriends and pals all about and these people of all col-

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ors and walks of life. Black, Mexican, preachers, cowboys, always a lot of pretty girlfriends, cowgirls a lot of them, and more of these kids runwild and there might be some deacons and choir leaders tossed in too, for Dewey had started out singing in the choir and stayed on, I always figured, because he liked the singing and the pretty girls singing there in the choir too. He was this cowboy type, see. How that came about dunno as he the only cowboy any Richardson ever made.And he sang gospel till it sounded like Hank Williams, so fine, and he sang Hank, it’d almost make you believe.And there was this poet there once too.Walked into Dewey’s three-ring circus one day and there was this poet, the first and last I’d ever know, and he was a pal of Dewey’s making for Alaska—Dewey had picked him up hitching an hour ago. He was not a small man, Dewey, that cowboy scrawny, caved-in chest sucking down all that dust and menthol 100s, strong as iron and had his cowboy ways. Like the hat and all that, a big hat he had for church, white summertime, like Hank’s, a beaverbrown for cooler nights.Wore white dress shirts, work or worship, French cuffs and the links, whether he was hauling hay or hallelujahing. Never drove any car but a Cadillac and that served as pickup too, bale, hog, whatever wanted transported toss it in the back under the third hitchhiker, you couldn’t squeeze another one in up front. The house Dewey built or bought over by the cap, after he had handed over the Home Place house to Smoky and family, it looked like most new farmers’ houses going up then, these usually near pavement, often near town, these big long jobs covered with brick and maybe some spruce or other windbreak planted around westsouthwest of the place; except that Dewey’s house didn’t look all that new and though it was close to pavement it was about as far from town as you could get and be indoors, this house sitting there on the brow of the cap looking down into cowboy country and the old Harrison place, the old stone house there, its white walls standing long after the fire had gutted the rest; and inside this house of his Dewey had found himself a small wing or el away from the three-ring circus and the rest and this had a big oak door to keep the little marauders at bay; and in this wing there were two rooms, one a study or an office, the second his bedroom, bed big as most rooms, closet big as most houses, and in this closet Dewey had set up a bar and his music system, this he could pipe into any room in the house; this wing or el of the house, that’s where I first thought I was grown up, never dreaming I never would, not in a thousand years, that prom night I brought my date and them doubling

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with us out to Dewey’s and we sat about his bedroom in soft heavy deep leather cowboy chairs and Dewey mixed the girls any cocktail they so desired and we not quite near men had whiskey, like Dewey did, rocks and a splash; fine whiskey too it was, never had it so good, and listened to something I knew naught of on the sound system, you couldn’t call it record player, Mozart or old jazz, something fine, something good, and one of the girls, she the intellectual, the actress, she went through Dewey’s books and found some poetry, somebody I had never heard of before or since, Rilke, someone, and she read from that till we were blue in the face and then smoking L&Ms we drove off dizzy from them, the drink, the stride piano, dizzy from Dewey, this fine cousin, and this fine house that sat there looking down off the cap, over toward the east, toward the old Harrison place, Dewey’s best pal from highschool now taking over ranchreins from his old man, this pal as good and fine and crazy as Dewey, Mickey Dot by name. And then Dewey went and burned down the old granary house there at the Home Place and Coolie came in that night as mad as I had ever seen, as mad as if it’d been his own son, the firebug, as in so many ways Dewey was, his son, my brother. And he wore a small gold ring in his ear and his hair was not long but not short, he bound it up back of his neck for church, and he rode a chopper, girlfriend behind, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and they skied, he and Henrietta, and he favored roping and cowboy golf, never went near bronc riding, never went near the pool, him and his running partner Mickey Dot, and he took trains. Dewey took trains. First class. He’d come aboard cowboy and slow drawl, little long hair, French cuffs a foot long, tailored Hank Williams suit, the pearlwhite Stetson Hank favored, and he’d tip the porter a hundred bucks.Then and there.The train in the station. How one comes to know of the wide wide world, first get that sweet scent of it.Tip first, you’re king till Chicago. He would’ve been anyway, that’s how it was, this cowboy prince, treated like royalty, they all are, see, these cowboysngals, our royal family and you can name a better one if you can. Farmers have always been more on the squire side, I’ve always thought. You did not call Henrietta Hen or Henry or Etta or any of those.You learned that right off the bat. Actually Dewey wasn’t all bad, for a cousin.Take that time, years later, Coolie in his grave, ever the firebug our Dewey, he suggested this time we burn down the old Home Place house. And Wamba sat there. I raged. After he was gone of course.And he had his point, Dewey, something had

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to be done.There was no one there. Burn it to the ground. Raze, destroy, scatter ashes till all was back like it had been before.That was Dewey’s plan and now’s mine. The old Home Place house had been abandoned for I don’t know how long. Awhile. When Dewey and crew had moved off, Smoky and family had moved in, but then Smoke had in some years gone on to get himself some rental land, not just wages, on a half up north a ways, where the land begins to roll and weaken, and no one had lived in the house since.That one time we stopped out front, the house long empty, Chick wouldn’t go in. Going going faster than any of us dreamed, she was, even then Chick would not go in the old abandoned beatdown this house we had murdered, left to waste and starve and weep alone, empty, nowhere, when we moved into town. Chick sat there that day, shook her head, hands clenched tight, looked on off down the road and refused to go in, all the while Wamba, yes it was Wamba there doing the encouraging. “Why Cheryl Charles you don’t want to go in and see that little house on the plains where you were born, now that’s been let go all abandon and fall down to ruin and death and rats runnin over your headnhair etcetc” Every boy should carry an ax in his car. Fire ax, that’d make it legal. Paint the head red and put it in a little glass box.You had ’em on the wall in junior high. Red ax in glass box and instructions: TO EMPLOY AX BREAK GLASS TO BREAK GLASS EMPLOY AX

And I don’t see why not.After chopping out of burning car—cars burn too you know—you could have laid into mommy thennthere and this sad tale of woe oh it would have been done and gone and over oh so long ago. I only went back in once myself, the house empty, abandoned, and never again.Too close to heaven hell to life to death, these memories of what was and what it is now. Like our lives oh all our lives. How in the world do you think I can manage it, day after day weeping, if it weren’t for that? Me, Chick, then, the house as once we all were. Alive. Living. That’s real too. Not just now. The old houses, our bodies torn, these crumbling minds, their aching hearts, them, Chick, Coolie, they all gone but her and me, she soon to be bumped off too, then me—we’re real too.

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Long as you all stay nice and quiet and inside my head and do not go trying to get out. Come on you come walking down the hall and I simply do not think I can go on. Memory’s prisoner, me executioner, death come dawn.That and weeping a year’s all the real we can live through now.This is it. For me, for you. Me. I’m out there now, at the Home Place, standing outside the old empty house. I wouldn’t go inside if my life depended on it. It’s night, see, and no telling what crawly critters, tranchlers and rattlerattlesnakes and blindwhisperbats are lurking there.The bright idea was to drive over here from Hubbard of a late aft/early eve and camp out. I knew then I was not going back inside that house, not on your life, and had it all planned out. Pup tent, sleeping bag, little portable kerosene stove, water canteen, flashlight with, it seems, dead batteries, hairy rope to circle sleeping form so rattlersnakes won’t crawl in for warm snooze and refused to think bout hopping hairy tarantulas they would skip rope and have a campout campersnack. The real idea behind camping out was the journey itself, the timing of it, to get one thing right, finally, in this my short sweet life. Look at it like it was before, like it’s always been. Me in Hubbard,Wamba in Wambaville fiftymile north and east of the Hub City; why of yore I would usually leave on a day trip of a morn, rise to murderous rage after twenty-two Wamba minutes, and puttputt back to Hubbard boardinghouse late aft, early eve.You see it now. Morning east, aft west. Everywhere you looked you had stood blazing sun on hood, like ornament—blind and mad. Or it was dark. Blind and mad too, the dark. So.The idea of it: aft east, morning west. Into the dark. Make night day, blind the sun, drown all light n lumination in pure black, deep dark. Put the sun, sour Ole Sol, behind you. That was the idea behind it anyway, camping out that night at the Home Place. If you feel a touch mad, a lunatic at the wheel, why simply turn time, the world, on its head, everything but you, and maybe you’ll be OK. And what better way to start than drive to night, away from day. Don’t make a whit difference where you want to go, down to Buddy’s Big Boy for fries, for example, you follow that simple rule. Into the dark. Believe me, there are fry joints or the equivalent all over the world; you’ll come on one or something like it sooner or later. OK. It might take time. Like go out for a Whopper and not be seen for years. Still, stranger things have happened. Just get it backwards and save your mind, that’s the point. Except for driving on the wrong side of the road. I know from experi-

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ence you don’t mess with that. Rissa’s people, when I went to visit her miserable little foreign country, they were all at it. Driving on the wrong side and things much worse than that.You learn then and there: everybody out there’s nuts, stay the way you are. Upside down, backwards, inside out, etc., simply do not work then.You think being mad amidst the sane is tough? Just try that the other way around.Visit Rissa. Driving down one of those quaint little hedgehop country lanes, down to village store for loaf of white bread, could be the longest day of your life, pal. The dark didn’t work out either. Not any more than sleeping out where you slept out as a kid. Jump up in the middle of the night—all them jumpy spiders and squirmy snakes and snappy scorpios around and about—and hightail it into the dead dark empty house which in fact is probably headquarters for all such creepy crawly. If I have said I would not go back inside that house if my life depended on it, during the heart spasm it seemed it did. Of course. I know what you’re thinking. Idiot. Hop up n hide in the car. All’ll be dark and safe and quiet in there. It really was genius who invented these, the automobile. Can save your hide from danger, boredom in two distinct ways. Dart in, lock doors, hunker down, one; burn rubber being the second. The problem was—I could find the car, that was all right, madness not that dumb, not yet; what I couldn’t find were the keys. Sure. It got that bad that campout night. Listen, if I was ever a little farm kid, you couldn’t prove it that night. Cityboy as you ever want to see. First thing slick does? Out there in the dark, in the middle of nowhere, no car thieves or stereo snatchers within miles and miles, and this dude locks his car. His only place of haven, only machine of escape.Think I probably lost the keys during the attack on the well. Least that’s where they turned up the following morning. Don’t think some nocturnal beast would have hauled them over there.Anyway, at the time idea grabbed me that these blinking keys had been misplaced during the mad dash down the field road. It only felt like a dash. Lucky to have been a hundred feet.As hadn’t walked so far in years, that was when campy suffered heart congestion and flopped down.What was that creepy crawly under collar? Return mad dash back to howling well, which had started all trouble in the first place. See, they, Dewey and others, had, during my absence, put this irrigation pump and motor right there where I pitched pup tent that night. I had thought to sleep there, near the thing, as its grinding shrieking howl seemed actual machinely friendly midst so much nature and dark. It was, after all, a car motor screaming into the

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dark natural night and, as observed, what better friend to campout boy than car? It set me thinking, her 70mph shrieks.The cruelty of it.These perverse sadistic farmers. Snatching off her wheels and hammering her into the ground. One simply could not ignore such pleading, to be put back in that Olds 88, body by Fisher, that she might go scooting scot-free off down the highway, not a care in the world, so long oil and water topped off, all no doubt as Mr. Olds had intended it to be. Also must be mentioned as well that in leaping out of sleeping bag to thrash away at motor with ball peen hammer—perhaps claw would have been tastier— aside from there being engine liberation, motor manumission on the mind, the fucking howling screaming bitch was driving me nuts! Hammer head soon separated from handle and went flying off in the dark. One of that tool’s most important parts dispatched, I thought to commence hike toward the dark and the quiet, knew heart difficulties, while resting fended off insect advance, and returned to camp a wiser man.There to succumb to a bitterness so sheer that all went numb. It was everywhere about me, see. Not only had they taken night’s holy silence away, noted I now looking out over the plain, weeping quietly, but had gone on and gone off with her dark as well. Even that, the so-and-sos. Stolen dark from night.There is no greater crime and I suffered full man’s punishment, that white night of hell, noiselight noiselight, ever reaching back back ever back, where there was grass, had been once, and night was black and there was quiet and within that quiet some peace lay. It was only a dream. Such was the night boy came searching for. Evening going toward dark boy climbed the cherry tree there at the north side of the house, don’t know if it’s still there or there climbable nor have the heart to look, climbed the branches so far as the house’s eaves and there went up onto the roof. Boy must be quiet and careful now for worrying Wamba works in the house below—fridge sink stove sink fridge how many times a day week year life nobody knows—and creeps now boy to ridge and creeps then careful west along that pole to that overlooking gable if all roof terminology got right and there to the west is night.Actually that is stretching it quite a bit. Dark and boy not locked up in peejays and beddie story force-fed and worry Wamba would have had the hounds out. And boy stretches out on that crease made along rooftop, head perched there like grinning gargoyle, gargoyle boy pulling garish and garisher faces at sis and pop and kittens playing in grass below, kittens and Chick anyway, Coolie

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lying back on fine army horse blanket, German, POW, and laughing without sound at freaking frolic of little kitties and cartwheeling wheeing daughter, smoking a Lucky and looking up now into the stars, the stars out of hiding, now safe now come out now that sun’s asleep, now to do their winkyblinky thing and telling so true the man looking up so far up into them that he could be free there, whirling drifting midst stars and beyond, stars whispering starlight, whispering to him, there is no other god than us, millions pon billions, ball pon ball of fire whirling through cosmic dust, eternal night but for our eternal nightly h-bombing. Nobody notice boygoyle pulling horrific faces above or ignore till now kitties are tired too and girl too and soon Wamba turns from distant kitchen and looks west, through all the darkened house, all dark but bright back kitchen, and looks out toward her husband and her daughter and the purring lolling kittens. And no boy in captivity. Out with sheriff and posses! But this time a white lie with friendly fib will do. Boy’s sitting in a tree gathering wool to him there and he and pup are chasing a rabbit out back running east toward night along the field road where pop once landed his biplane fore he gave it up and planted himself and put down roots. He watches her, through the length of the dark darkening house now.The far kitchen, seen through the length of the house, those three doors one sees through as they make trebled frames to this glowing picture, this masterwork now alive, the woman there moving across canvas, now out of frame, now back, now out, working at something there in the far, distant picturebook kitchen, working ever working, before dawn, past midnight some nights, she never quits she never rests, ever, works and only, it seems at times so, works only only works. Now she turns and looks out from the kitchen, toward them, the man, the girl and dozing kittens on the front grass, and now comes through the dark house toward them, all that can be seen her silhouette gathering size and speed as she comes, so seems, her long loping gait that the man so liked the first time seen, did not even come to notice the rest, a woman’s long loose striding walk all that was seen. She comes through the house and stops there, there at the open front door for this is summertime and all, all doors and windows are open and free to night, to all but her bugs and bats, they’re screened for that. She stands there leaned into that front door frame, loose and easy, and even black blank from little light and that from the rear, the back, the distant kitchen, she smiles, he sees that even in her silhouette, at the man she has married and loves and her children there, them too,

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they’re property now, hers, she loves them see, and now the groggy sleepy children stunned by small sleepings on the grass they rise from pallets made on the grass and they go into the house and she follows, coaxing them along, a mother herding her kids, gently, go along now, sleepytime now, sweetdreams, sandman’s come and you can’t keep your eyes open, falling falling falling tosleep. All gone the man rises and turns from the house and walks out on the county road that runs there west of the house and there he looks forth west and looks out for what I have now come back to see, listens to what I have come to hear.The dark of night, silence and her quiet. What was once there, when he looked out, and now is gone, that I am here. Not strictly true of course. His night is filled with lights, prickly points of stars, they’ve been seen, and now all about the earth, the men and women and children gathered out over these plains, they make their own galaxy, all those homes and homesteads making their solitary light. Now? Now they’re gone, all gone.That light that Coolie saw has gone with those farms and the people who settled and lived upon them.All gone and moved into town and now that is their light you see, the light I look out and see ringed all around. Not the grounded stars of families and their farms, but this sick yellowing miasma seeped out onto the horizon, Crosby there, there Omega, Toro’s off the cap so no see, maybe Rawls, and over the southwest night horizon, most evil of all, the sanded choking lectric storm of Hubbard’s night light choking out even starlight, it’s gone now, light from the silvery moon. Same with Coolie’s silence, though there’s catch there. The howling irrigation well I have come to, that has drowned out true night’s sound as well. For when Coolie stood and listened there were night’s sounds within its quiet. Chirpchirp chirrchirr, bugs and birds mainly, sometimes a neighbor dog crying out, sometimes that old lone loafer lobo wolf of my boyhood dream, singing to the moon, these were the night’s silences then. Now there’s but my quiet. Ours.Yours.That true quiet, that final silence made by man and machine, a roar, a scream that swallows all but its never relenting shriek, its howl.The dark of night, quiet’s silence, what had been before we came and conquered, made our filthy light, our drumming silence, gone now, tonight, now that I have come to not sleep much at the old Home Place. Gone as grass. It was Dewey who set me out to turn it back.Well not back the way it had been before we came and lit and crashed away nightlong, not even the dark and quiet that Coolie knew. But still, something, some reaching

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back, some turning back, some geste toward making what we had wronged right again, make it seem so, if only by our effort. Some small restoration of our past, not ours but the night’s, the land’s, before we came and lighted it and howled and looked down and tore out and killed the grass. Dewey had this cowboy tic. Of looking, at me mostly but others too, not even a sardonic smile, this look that came to his eye.Twinkle—no. But along those lines. Like when I said something outrageous or dumb or dead not right, like when I stormed in and demanded or maybe slinked and suggested that he not burn down the Home Place house, as I wanted to save the many trees standing bout it, particular the cherry tree there on the north side of the old house, the climbing tree. He didn’t tell me the cherry tree was dead or dying and soon long gone, not long for this world where trees don’t count for much anyway; he didn’t have to. Look’d do it. Same that day I stormed or simply suggested, threw out the concept, that maybe Wamba needed some throttling, might do her the world of good, but an idea. She’s old, Roy, she doesn’t have long to go. Let her go in her own time, her own way. Let her go in peace, a peace that’d be best for both of you and me and all the rest as well. Let it be. Going old to dying to death. Make it like it’s just another part of life, Roy. As one immediately notices, such sentiments much better left to squint or some sort of eye narrowing than strewn like mangled flesh over the page. Our discussions, our first step to turn it back to how it had been, some of it, began with water.There lies neath these plains a vast aquifer, a bed of some porous rock that stores water in it, much as shale and limestone or whatever keep petroleum within them. This aquifer is called the Oglala, and I know little more of it than that. Not even its nearest reach toward earth’s crust. Our shallowest drilled motor pump well drew water at two hundred feet; the windmill behind the Home Place was bored to eighty-five; I do not know.The first motor wells came to our part of the plains mid-century, one of the first around being Franklin Crawford’s well, not more than a mile northwest of us.The sudden discovery or tapping of this underground sea might have been product of oil exploration that peeked into the staked plains after the war and tiptoed out not long after. Joke going around among the farmers, first heard by me from Uncle Frank that Sunday we came to view his fullbursting six-inch pipe flow,

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damn near a blow, was the westTex farmer who drilled a well and came home crestfallen that night. “Just can’t seem to get it right, Maw. Oil oil and more oil.” And indeed for a time there it would seem water the more precious flow and we were such fools to think otherwise.There were good wells, bad wells, those in between, and even the occasional dry hole—who knows why. We never found good water on the Gin Place nor on the South Half, both contiguous to the Home Place with its six wells, while the West Farm, four miles toward sunset, sports two of the best ever seen, the other two just making it. Most well pipes ran 6", a few 8", and they were judged full pipe, three-quarters, half, neath that you didn’t want to know, it wasn’t worth running.There were those who saw the end of it even as it began. I had heard word of it before I went off to UT, ’55 or so, and spoke to my geology prof of the Oglala’s prognosis.Ten, fifteen years, said he. Not that the water will be gone, simply not economic to pump. That our water, the plain’s water, was depletable some questioned, and for argument’s sake so that day did I.The geology prof smiled. “No.The Oglala does not run up thousands of miles north, reaching under the Rockies, there to be replenished yearly by that vast collector of moisture, that snow-made water then come running downhill, underground, to the cotton farm pumps that are pumping the Oglala dry. No,” smiled he. And the prof, as most profs seem determined to be, was both right and wrong.The big right was that what was going would be one day gone. In historical terms: gone for good. Geology has its massive clock, you hear a tick every millennium or so, who can say how the earth might heal itself once we man-apes are ourselves gone.The wrong was small. Merely a matter of timing.A matter of years. But even then, the ten, fifteen years till the profitability, if not the water, began to show signs of running dry—yes, that proved a close call. For by those fifteen years on, 1970, the water table had indeed begun to drop. Drop so that weak wells were capped, their pipe and pumps and motors hauled off.And the middling holes, another cousin, Marvin, from over around Hobbs, the New Mexican border, he took to selling these things called submersible pumps, devices that might better bring water from such weak holes up to our human surface, where water, much of it, does not seem to care to be. Push the water up the pipe, don’t pull, that was Cuz Marv’s theory, smaller pipes, these small electric, I think, pumps dropped down the hole and what was once

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sucked is now lifted. Lucky to fill a 3" pipe, but these small submersible jobs so cheap, so Marvin made his pitch, you can have five for the price of a single suction pump. Coolie never bought one, don’t know anybody around Blanco who did, and Marvin went on off over into New Mexico and got into trading used paperbacks, had the little hut there on the highway. But the warning shot had been fired. Bullets whistling over the farmers’ heads as surely as had they been crouched down behind that pump and motor; Billy Hale come to do you in for using too many wells, not enough. If the Oglala would be replenished—and some preachers stuck to their guns, as in, if the Lord provideth and Man comes and does his worshipful duty by destroying every living thing he can lay hands on—and yes, dear, water is a living thing, there’s nothing but death about without it—why then, the preacher theory went, the Lord would come back one day and give Man some more water, land, trees, etc., to lay waste to, etc. But then it seemed that geology wasn’t the only one taking to the geological clock; the Lord set his alarm to it as well and the day that He came back and waved his cross and made the natural world whole and well again, like putting back all the Oglala water that had made so many Levis and Wranglers, the like, the preacher problem was that the Lord might take His own good time about such replenishment, oh maybe make it right in fifty to hundred million years, and that, even most preachers, even the numbskull Brother Pal, were forced to agree, was a long time between crops.And so these farmers, most not unclever men, couple hundred IQ pts over Brother Pal anyway, they began to look about for ways to make their precious living fluid stretch. Conservation.Yes dear, that dread word. These rustics were into, if not exactly conserving the environment, at least abusing it as little as possible. Make Your Water Last. They had no motto, but had they had that would’ve been it. Discipline had always been practiced in how much underground water they pumped up and ran out over the ground, though this care came more from concern for the plant than the water that nourished it.You watered preplanting, May say, cut the wells and didn’t really hit hard till July or so when the plant began to blossom and make squares or whatever pre-bolls are called and these move on toward budding, toward bolls. “You water the fruit, Roy. Not the leaf,” so said the poet, Dewey. But now such wise thinking came to be applied to the water itself, to curtail, contain and defeat water’s greatest natural enemy—evaporation. I don’t know the figures, Dewey gave them once but they are gone, but it

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was a frightful percentage, the water that simply wasted into the air. Now over towards New Mexico and those deserts there, those farmers had little choice. Their land was so sandy fine—easy to farm, made good crop—that water simply would not run over it.The sand sucked her dry with rapacity and greed greater than the high plains’ parched air.And so these sandy loam farmers must fling their water out by great whirling sprinklers, and the percentage Dewey had on that evaporation, it was more frightful still than what we clay loam farmers lost running water down a ditch.The ditch, the irrigation ditch—this was our first point of attack. Oh they pissed and moaned, Coolie among ’em, but in time most farmers all around went for pipe strung along where ditch had been. Some went cheap and laid cheap pipe atop the land, but most farmers, them who were any good at it and knew that spending money on your land was never money lost, Dewey among these, went to better pipe, buried permanent where ditch had run.Too, as Dewey said, it made for cleaner farming. Not having an open ditch, sometimes a double open ditch, or those stacks and lines of light aluminum pipe fouling your turn row—that’s the part of the row where the row ends and tractor turns, m’dear, or the tractor’ll be in the bar ditch, that farmer talk for borrow ditch, m’dear, the couple ditches you dig to make a road, borrow some ground and stack it up in a line and call it road—the ease and neatness such underground works gave to farming, they attracted as well. Other economic and cleanly practices were practiced—piping in natural gas to run the well motors, turning tractors from gasoline to butane—but these were really only incidental to happy healthy farming, to make it cheap and make it clean.There was still that problem of getting that water out of open ditch or buried pipe and out over the land and though some tried those great sprayers, they soon went back to what they had begun: running water down those mini-ditches, rows they call them, that ran alongside the strings of planted cotton. But even now, forty years after geoprof said it would all come to an end, by now, century running down to its own end, even that practice, running water down the rows to nourish greedy cotton, even that is going, going and sometimes, even now, near the end of the row, gone.You get down there at the turn row and the water’s gone, the water’s not there. Spoke of this recently. At a funeral. Not Chick’s or Coolie’s, I don’t think. Some uncle. Rogers maybe, maybe old Horace Homer.Towards dark, Dewey having done his deaconly duty, he left Wamba and her flock

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to their visiting and came to the kitchen and sat with me and had a whiskey splashed into a glass and spoke of its coming.The end.That he simply could not push his water, as he put it, to the end of the row.There was not enough water there that it could be pushed that far, a half mile, not even a quarter mile, not even that far. I listened some, not much, to Dewey’s plan of counterattack, these great turning wheels, hubbed at the pump in the center of the field, and these great merry-go-rounds would walk about in their great circle and there would be some sort of enormous sock or something attached and pumped water would ooze up into this sock and that water then would be not pushed overland along a straight row but rather pulled out in the circle described by this massive walking wheel and then somehow squirted out over little plants. Dewey explained it all, who owned what parts of the system, the sock, the great wheel, the terminal head there at the pump, the pump itself; how what would be lost watering a circle within a square, those corners left dry, would be less than what he was losing the old way, not being able to push his water down to the end of the row. Not that I was not interested, for Dewey could make even irrigation a fascination, even to such a townboy as I; no, it was that there, at the end of our water, there at the end of the row where water would no longer be pushed, I first came to think of turning it all back. Back to the way it had been. Must admit didn’t go all the way back, not that night, back to the way it had been before our coming. Back to grass. No. It would be later, and again Dewey who would take me back so far as that.To grass, just grass.That night I went only back to my old man and his farming, there in the early days. Farming with only what water fell from the sky. Dryland farming, wheat farming.The wheat Coolie had so loved and so as a boy had I. Dewey did this as gently and diplomatically as possible. Not that dryland wheat couldn’t be farmed, the wells capped off, it’s that it wouldn’t be done. Not by him. Not by any farmer.There wasn’t the money in it, see. Dewey’s cut on renting our land was seventy-five percent. Sounds like a lot, but all the landlord puts into the crop is land and school tax and whatever capital improvements are made to the land, fertilizer being one such permanent addition. Dewey and all the other renters forked over for all the rest. Boom or bust, they paid.A tractor these days knocking a hole in a hundred grand bill—nobody could or would take on $2.40 a bushel wheat, twenty bushels an acre, when there was $0.70/lb. cotton, five hundred pounds to the bale, bale to two bales an acre to be had. Even custom

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farming, Dewey farmed old man Dolle’s land in this fashion, hired out for a flat fee, boom or bust, he got paid—even then the wage Dewey would be asking to support all those hundred grand tractors would be more than the cash value of the crop. If I were to do it, dryland wheat, I would have to be doing it on my own. Buy tractors, drills, combine, couple one-ways, couple Haemes, and after that I wouldn’t be able to afford a hand, maybe not even change left back for seed. Dewey gave that true cowboy look, looking what didn’t need saying. Me on a tractor? Just wouldn’t work, Roy, he looked, he said. But then that was when Dewey turned me back, farther back. Back before my father, his brothers, back before the likes of Taylor Blanton and Old Tom Baylor had come out onto this land. Back to grass. When that was all the plant and flower and seed that lay over these plains. “There is a way to do this, after your mother dies and you’ll have the three sections. It won’t make you a rich man, but you could live good. Well enough.The government has the plan—sometimes the government is not all bad—a layout that might be of some interest. Now this is longterm layout, you got to sign on for ten years minimum, and they may be raising that, but they’ll pay, I don’t know, x dollars per acre and all you have to do is let your land go back to grass.” Ha.Who is this farmer kidding? One of the biggest grass murderers on the plain. Go take a look at the Four Section Pasture. “Thought you might like that. Native grass. Buffalo grass. Now you got to keep it clean, but after you get it coming back that won’t be much trouble or expense. There’s a huge layout lot up near Hereford I saw recently. Five years into the program and it’s back like what it must have been when there was nothing around but buffalo and a few Indians chasing them. Now the Home Place would be the place to start, I think.” Dewey drew out pen and there was paper there, like this had all been planned out, some ruse to steal all my land and see me impoverished in some Hubbard flophouse, but after this map’s drawing, impressionistic in style to say the least, by its screwy geometry one could see it coming right off the top of his head.As if he had never thought of grass before, bringing it back, that he was only now thinking of our plain as it had once been. Maybe. Don’t go soft on me now. Not head, not heart. “Now the Home section and what you like to call the Old Gin Half and the South Farm, these three are contiguous or near it.”

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“What I’ve been thinking about, for years maybe, is bringing some of this land around the Home Place and that that runs on over towards the cap, bringing as much of it as I could together.” Of course preplanned. How naive can you get? What a fool. “I don’t know why I did this, probably the worst investment I’ve ever made, but years back I bought the old Burleson ranch down off the cap, just here. Oh I suppose Mickey Dot [Harrison, cowboy/farmer from the Old Harrison Place, the Harrison rockhouse, the first permanent settlement in these parts, Mickey Dot scion and Dewey’s maniac best bud] got me into it. If he

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didn’t actually talk me into it, he got me thinking I wouldn’t be certifiable having me a place down off the plains. I’ve bought a couple overpriced cutting horses and I’ve had that good mare and that one championship roping pony for years, keeping them down at Mickey Dot’s, he don’t care, but I thought I might look around and find a place. As much a place to retire as anything. Something down off these plains.” Cowboy look. “Something I thought you might be interested in.” Ah ha.The hook. But still.Actually. I am. “The Burleson ranch has got a house that’s livable, with some work, one of those old-style desert ranch houses, half dugout, not the elegance of the old Harrison house, the old stonehouse, but I like it, that style sitting half under the ground. And there’s a tank and good water, not enough to farm but enough to run a few head.And the house is set real nice. Right under the brow of the east cap, looking out east toward the morning sun, then shielded from all that bad afternoon glare. Now in buying the old Burleson Place I got some of this wasteland up on the cap, there east of your Home Place and the Trice Place. Burleson farmed it some, grazed it some, water’s just not there, dry right there when you come up on the cap. Now you see what you got here, Roy, if you and me, or just you or just me, one or the other bought the other out, and then we bought up the Trice Place, and that’s available, good price, with Wildcat’s water dropping, and maybe buy up the Wright Place, that half north of your Home Place, why then you can see here, your farm’s stretching into the Burleson ranch, with that you’ve got a block of land that really tells the story of this country—the breaks, the cap, the plains. And it was in thinking that, that I started thinking about that government layout program, and the water table going down, what’s happening to the Trice wells, Roy, is going to be coming to the Home Place wells.Already is. We could go in and invest in that new pivot irrigation system and squeeze some more water out of the Oglala, but that’s not going to be for long.Twenty years, I don’t know, and we’ll be back to watering once a year, preplanting, I suppose, and let the crop run dryland for the season. That’s what turned my mind back to grass.Water going, the government layout. And too that old Four Section Pasture, we used to call it, up toward Lakeview. I don’t know if you remember it.” Oh yes I remember, remember so well that patch of grassy plain that stood as it had always been, before we, Dewey, my people, we had come

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and turned the grass over, killed and buried it, and made that killing ground, that graveyard, yet another fucking farm. “When I was a kid, wanting to be a cowboy, spending more time down at Mickey Dot’s than I did at home, we used to trailer a couple ponies over to the Four Section and ride around. Like we were cowboys or Indians or buffalo hunters or horse soldiers or Spanish conquistadores riding out over these plains like they did four hundred years ago. I’m not saying for sure any of this was in my mind when I bought the Four Section, but I’m not going to say it wasn’t either, there in the back of my dream of turning that land and getting myself rich. Oh I so wanted to be rich then, Roy, I didn’t want to rent all my life, even if I’d had such good landlords as Coolie Richardson and Mr. Dollé, and the buying price we got on the Four Section, it has done that for me, Roy, made me rich or rich enough. But that said, no matter the joy that first day we dragged one-way over the Four Section, the real and true pleasure of seeing all that stiff dry brown more brown some gray wiry tough tasteless undefeated grass being turned over and there was all fine rich chocolate redbrown soil breathing underneath, even then it was there.That first day I wanted to take back what I was doing and put it back like the way it had always been. Back to grass.” Boo hoo? Well actually I was rather moved at this point. For one thing, if Dewey maybe didn’t exactly say all these words, maybe somebody thought some of them up for him, even those words he did say were more words than Dewey had ever said to me in an entire lifetime, mine and his.The poor dirtfarm kid dreaming cowboy, the rich landowner’s son thinking cityslick and exotic ports of call—we never meshed and why should we? And now, why should we not? The water was gone, going anyway.We were coming home, coming back from where our lives had blown us, coming back to grass and the way our land, we called it ours, had always been. Oh yes why not indeed? Boo hoo. “So. I’ve been thinking this over the years. Not putting the Four Section back under grass.The water’s too good there. But it seemed, Roy, I don’t know, maybe I just wanted to see something done somewhere. Maybe that’s why I bought the Burleson place in the first place, not even knowing it at the time.Well this is that dream. I’m sixty-two this year. I plan to go another three anyway, but I did have another little heart attack last year. Henrietta wouldn’t let me go back out in the afternoon and finish up. Hid the truck keys.”

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Cowboy so near not quite smile. “And I got to have more stones cut out after stripping, so they say. But it’s the hands that are going, Roy. Had to bring in Katherine’s boy to do the lifting for me last summer. But I can still rope.” Tilt head notch smile close to it. “And so what I want to see done, Roy, me, you, together would be best, is to make a park.A natural museum. Mickey Dot and that oldest girl are doing something along those lines over at the Harrison Place. But I think this could even be a little better.They basically want to rebuild the old stone house or if the old walls won’t hold build a replica, maybe in Crosby. But here,” he touched the map and I looked and I saw it too, “we want to remember the land. Make it back like it was when we first saw it.Your granddaddy, mine. Like it was before they saw it.” The park entrance would be down off the cap, at the old Burleson ranch house.That was right.That was good.That the park would be so divided, between the breaks and the plain, and that you would first come to the breaks and leave all automobiles and other machinery there and walk or ride animal up that canyon wall, and there was a trail there, Dewey had found that, one of the old cattledrive trails that ran through this country, and that would be history too, in our museum to our first coming into this country—you would leave your automobile behind and go over this rough rocky scrubland and come there through a passage through the defending caprock, that palisade of stone that made the plain, and come up upon these plains, the staked plains, el llano estacado, no different than had Coronado come upon them centuries ago. So much of it Dewey had already worked out. Dreamed, seen, planned, dreamed again. Dewey’s land lay to the east, maybe four thousand acres, some up on the plains, there as you came to their end.The Trice Place would be bought, Dewey was farming that section now and the grandson, granddaughter, gone to Dallas, off to Florida, had agreed to that, that the Trice Place might be part of this park as well.The other purchase he suggested was that of the Wright Place, that quarter or so north of our Home Place, so much of that lot was submerged under the great playa lake that stood there, that lake being the point of this extension of the park, for there could be no true model made of the plain that did not know a playa lake, the natural reservoir that succored the game that once had come up on these plain, looking for water after a rain. Dewey’s ambition was beyond 268

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me, maybe beyond us both, our checkbooks anyway.To keep one of the Home Place wells running and in some fashion make the lake a permanent wetland: such ideas, though fine and good as well, they were off into the next century, when we and the state or the park service or some such had made this land that, a state park, a natural wildlife reserve, like that. Our first steps would be to close down the roads that ran over the land that would be our park and the two counties involved had at least listened to that proposal, as now with our land, the Trice Place, maybe Short Charlie’s quarter, so the Wright Place had been called in my youth, hook all that up to the Burleson ranch, all that then become a single block, so Dewey’s argument ran, there would no need for these county dirt roads running over our park.To fence or not to fence, that was discussed and we were not sure.Then we came onto the part that drew me most strongly to it.That the house there at the Home Place would be torn down as I had wanted, foundation broken up, and all sheds and barns and the sheet-tin hangar for Dewey’s plane, they all would go and some care then taken to bring the surrounding trees back to the fine stand that it had once been, for of all the farm settlements spread over the plains around Blanco, the Home Place was known on the horizon by its many trees. It was even thought by some, me too, that these cottonwood might’ve been here before we came, that we did not bring seed and plant them, that there had been a spring, a well here that the Indians and the animals had known and used, and the trees had come up around it as natural as had the grass. “I’ve had a man from Hubbard over and he says if we do something soon the cottonwood will be fine into the next century, that the willows that god knows who put down probably won’t.There is that acacia there that Coolie planted and that bushy pine too there by the front corner that will come back all right.And the cherry tree, your old climbing tree there on the north side of the house, we will plant another, and put that grapevine back in.Your dad always liked that. Swore to all the Baptist cousins it had been there like that when he came in.And keep the windmill and maybe put a table there under the trees. Make this spot something of a roadside park without the road. Something that our visitors coming up on the plain can make for, that shaded stand of trees on the horizon.There would be no marker to any of us but that, but that would seem enough.” And he looked over the map he had drawn and saw it, and so too did I. It’s not much of a house that I shall be taking down, with as much care 269

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and concern as it was erected. I know the farmhouses you see in mind and screen. They’re all over the midwest, these farm movies. American pitchfork and arched windows with little gothic bald grannies, pointy pitchfork and arched windows with little Eldo eightyyroldtwo drooling on the curtain. Everything tall and white and planked and long glistening windows and red barns hulking nearby. Iowa, Minnesota, you wouldn’t think they ever grew corn anywhere else in the land. Not this house, this farmhouse at the Home Place. Started out shoebox with a roof.They’re everywhere around here. Sal, my ex-partner, my first ex-partner, laughed. His theory: Monkey Ward or somebody came through this swath of Texas stretching west of the 100th meridian and slapped these prefabs up on every farm and ranch that knew a tent, dugout, teepee. Shaped like garages, a place to park people.And I’ve never known architecture so elegant, useful and wise as my first home house, the house out at the Home Place near Blanco. Sal’s gone through the same thing. I made the same mistake as you made about me. His house is a ranch house.And it’s damn near the same as my farmhouse, so very nearly so. Pictured something out of Giant? Me too.This great gothic monster rising from the Texas prairie. Sal laughed. Our houses—the first and only we’ll ever know—are the same. Except that Sal has saved his.This down toward Big Spring, his family ranch, shading over toward Odessa or Ozona, oilpatch country, I forget. Spirits sank when I first came upon Sal’s home house. He and dough had saved it. Me and neglect lost mine. Single story job. Longer than wide. But inside, how Sal and money had brought the house back, it was his home. Mine when I came through the door. I would do the same too, bust or not. But mine, it was too far gone. I have killed a house, me and my flops. Not our moving into town, Wamba’s nightmare there. The American death. Failure kills. Even houses, even homes. Can’t remember how it happened, Sal going one way, up, me down. He bought and I sold.You’d think it would be just backwards—or I did. How do you make money by giving it away, or buying in this case? Burr wife two put it bluntly. “Roy, you are lucky to be as broke as your are.” Sal has a big house in town now. Sheet Rock. What a miserable name for a town. Can you imagine visiting England and this bobby asks from whence you hail. “Plaster Board,Texas.” Enough to make you want to stay at home. Don’t know what Sal is into now. Money museums mansions movies

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maniacs. He has servants.A psychotic framer and his retarded wife.They are the life of the party. Sal’s big house in town used to be the clubhouse for the local golf course.The golfers took this hard, having more or less to camp out in a pup tent for their 19th hole.They fire golf balls at Sal regularly.The psycho woodbutcher waits.When a ball drops onto the green he slips out and nails it to the sod.The golfer strolls up, takes a putt. It’s quite a sight.The retard wife reads L. L. Bean catalogues.At breakfast. She flips through them like you’re looking up a word in the dictionary and you can’t remember how it’s spelled.You can’t even remember the first letter. She’s a rock climber and there’s nothing but sand around here.They hail from the Dakotas. He’s from South North Dakota, she says, and she North South Dakota, he says. Such tabletalk has seen the casual visitor, usually locals, fly into frenzy. Does it need pointing out, that Sal does not live in the big house in town? He doesn’t even go near the place.There’s a rockabilly band there now.Three of them.They tell me their names or they’re ordering pizza. One of them was into logistics. I got the little delivery van dead cheap, with the big yellow plastic chicken on the top. Could be why the pizza parlor went bust. Buncha muggers with munchies troop in and not a drumstick in sight. Sal certainly isn’t. Hiding out at his little ranch house and shooting up the mailbox.The rural free delivery sort.A breadbox stuck on a post.We had one there at the Home Place and a sadistic mailman as well. RFD, he ran over and killed or gave it his all every puppy I ever had. I buried them one by one out in the field, down toward the lake. It never got any easier. He drove a Model T or A, the little one, and did so while sitting on the wrong side of the seat. It made sense. He got out every mailbox he came to, walked around the puttputt car, put mail in box, walk back around etc he’d be out there now. Not to mention danger of slathering puppy attacks.They would lick you to death, these friendly little pals and critters.They hated not so much cars as wheels, I think. Never one of them ever made dog. A row of poplars stood there by the mailbox there alongside the road. Coolie had planted them as windbreak but had not got it quite right.The poplars stood due W of the house and the wind came most often SW.A mom n pop family of scissortails made its home there in the poplars every spring. Who knows where they came from, Mexico probably, and then after so many years one spring they simply did not show. Dead, split up, took a wrong turn, we’ll never know. Maybe they’re swallows, as Rissa says, but they were ours or we theirs and scissortail flycatcher is the finer, more elegant

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name for such fine elegant birds, their scissored tails a foot long, maybe more. The second house I killed was Wamba’s house in town, still at it actually. Gutted the place. And oh the sorrow of that murder, worse than snuffing mommy in many ways, the winds of grief howling along its halls. Except that there aren’t any anymore. Halls. I’ve knocked down all wall that make them, see.When the sheriff drops by I lean the sledge hammer against one of the few remaining interiors.When I say, “Hi!” he pretends he’s the mailman. I’ve ripped up the carpets, shitcanned geegaws. All concrete, bare. The biggest mistake of a mistakeridden life but you stick to it. Bad Boy’s Law. One thing goes it all goes. Like tearing out one’s tongue, plucking an eyeball, salami slicing penis, flinging these things, so much of it crap, away forever and ever.What I would give to have them back but know I can’t. Not even if I had simply stored them. Stacked garage high. Could no more enter there than gone to my doom. For doom is what this is, this retrieval of these things. Do you think this is easy? Do you think it fun, remembering? Remember, yourself, and see. One can’t remember this and not that. It’s all or nothing, babe.The toughest came with the easiest, one ever hard on t’other’s heels. The small school snaps of Miz Sarah’s kids, grandkids, little Lila, Randolph there in Cub Scout blue, smiling wildly their blackbrown and there is no beauty in color to match their blackbrown beautiful faces. Gone. Gone with the studio portraits of Chick and me. We’re things there. Not these beautyblackbrown kids grinning out at camera.Very formal indeed these portraits.And in being wrong there’s something right as well. Chick, the real Chick, ever amused, a smile, an irony at bro’s simplicity and singlemindedness. Now, in this big gilt-frame photo, before I slamdunk in one of those big green plastic barrels I got off the bartender, one for glass, one for trash, I see the look there. The emptiness. Ironic amusement gone.What then? A pigtail pinafore skinny white girl looking ever so empty, ever so mad.The way she would come to look in time. Standing there before the mirror. Looking at nothing. Nothing there. Looking at nothing as she looks now at me. Mad, dead, empty even then. Actually my photo’s not all that bad. Got that faraway look too—musta been in style them days, that mad dead empty stare for kiddies—but in my case I am not looking at you/camera but stare far off toward the horizon. Sad, true. But still, what I came to be. One of those who longs to be

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over there, beyond the earth’s gentle turn. Sweater’s not all that bad either. One of those squareknit things, Scandinavian, with this cubist stag taking a leap.The hairdo—work of art that.With the aid of some industrial engineering and mechanics. Blowtorch and tacks to get that cowlick down. Hammer away, anything, need couple secs before the Brownie snaps then they’re free to sprout again, such devilish twists of devilboy hair. More and more and more of the same.The good, the bad, the awful. Fine octavo red James I Bible, J.C. talking in red, out with abominable Modern Version. Highschool annuals—there was me slamdunk and yet Chick class snaps too so it so hurt to let it drop.The arch now near archaic Encyclopedia Brittanica and the fat fatuous Readers’ Digest novels, four shortened shorties per squat volume. Coolie’s polished walking-heel Justins,Wamba’s Reeboks and even then K-Mart imitation. The needlepoint kitsch supreme GOD BLESS THIS HOME

and that painting Coolie bought that trip to Taos, a distant view of sundust butte, rain coming swift to the frame, from far far back—but no, no, that couldn’t go. Nor the Brittanicas. Nor the Life magazines—that first year we moved to this house Coolie kept those back. 1947.They could not go.The old scratched and scratchy wide-track little hole 78s, Glenn Miller to The Jupiter, the little big hole 45s—oh yes indeed One Mint Julep was the cause of it all! None of that could go. Lying all along. Kept the good, junked the awful.The awful? That which I did not care for? What greater crime than taste made judgment.The kitchen, the beds, the towels—Wamba so very good at towels and sheets and pillows and things, sheets that read all over them sleepsleepsleep curvy like a snake, towels drydrydry the same, even they could not go. None of it has gone. It is still the same. It is awful still.You see, I have indeed obeyed my law. One stays, stays it all. Memories.A garage sale of such, you wouldn’t sell a thing, now would you? Not even the cuckoo clock, the bird that peeked out that once, had a look, and never sang again.The halls n walls, they’re all there too. Nothing gone, nothing changed. How it came to pass that I killed a third house. Remembering. Not remembering. No matter how I strive, I cannot not remember; I remember not. For one thing, I can’t find the place. The Dolle Richardson house,Wamba’s house, her home as a girl—it’s over toward Dolle and I cannot find it or it’s gone. It stood off the road a ways. Haunted. The ground rose bald and bad underneath its frame, its planking weathered,

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dried gray, the soft crumbling gray of old wood not painted now for years and years. One turned off the county road and came up under the thing, something rearing out of a movie, someone would leap out with an ax. Chick broke her crown, or bumped her head very hard indeed, here. A large raw concrete block placed as step before the door. Now she falls and falls so terribly hard.A second head bursts to birth there on the forehead of the first. I’m pretty sure I didn’t push her.That was the fire, during the war. Her head banged like a drum when she went down. Her forehead came out ugly over her brow and turned rotted colors, would do in time a very short time. Wamba figured that how Chick came to be mad. Bumped her head. Wamba had dozens of theories on madness, why God lets it happen. One of her close-up screwy looks at me. And not happen—a greater mystery. It’s either gone or I’ve lost it, that Dolle house. Inside they’re mourning Cady’s death. It’s all I do these days, drive these country roads, endlessly tracing their squares, looking ever looking for a house that’s gone or lost. For something. I longed for curves as a kid.All these squares, all such sharp turns. Nothing is ever eased into.You know where you head at every given moment.Then turn. How they all fitted into this Dolle house, back when all kids at home, the nine of them, ten before little Zach died, I cannot imagine. There must be an attic, they must have stuffed some little ones,Wamba on down, overhead.They kept the bedrooms frigid, that was the country way. One cannot know her longing for central overheating and understand till you knew too her dread, little mama age ten, of going to bed, freezing till you slept.They didn’t actually bring the body and its coffin here today, I don’t think. That’s probably left in town. Wouldn’t be room for it anyway. They’ve come from all over far and wide to mourn their little brother, their smallest, his pointless useless senseless death. Later in life I followed Cady’s death, his final morning. In searching out all the old Max Yeaman bylines I could find I came upon the story of Cady’s death. I did not think I had meant to but I suppose I had. It was a thorough job. Many interesting quotes. Much about how quiet and polite and shy Cady was and how all liked him, so you knew they were probably true. I noted down the addresses, the boardinghouse where he passed his last night, the funeral home where he would die.There in Monterrey, a hundred miles to the north of Hubbard,Wambaville, here. I drove there.This was thirty years later, maybe forty, maybe fifty, and they were gone by now. Oh the house that was once the boardinghouse was still there and it looked old enough

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to have been there now a half-century or so. I walked up and down before the house considering many things before I approached. Knock knock. “Excuse me you don’t know me but my uncle killed himself in this house forty years ago well actually he only lived here, slept here the night before he killed himself and as I’m retracing his steps on that fateful morn I wondered if I might pass the night on your couch, for authenticity’s sake, you see I’ve brought my sleeping bag along though if you have a pillow to spare?” Frostier still the reception at the funeral parlor. It was gone long gone. The building was simply not there. In fact the entire street had disappeared or been sucked into a writhing intersection, your death spot a place where cars met to turn or take off, so the simulation of the last night passed at the boardinghouse was not much sacrilege. I know you’ve done them, these crazy things that turned out right. I came before dawn and parked in the street behind the former boardinghouse and walked to where the funeral home had once been. It did not take long. Dawn came so soft, blue, quiet that morning that might have been a morning fifty years ago—a milkman settling his white bottles on a step, the biking boy tossing papers into the hedge. It came right to him that morning; it would be the craziest, the only sane thing he had ever done. Had similar luck tracking down Franklin Crawford. Not the Sand Hill curve, that was not the death I sought. No. I found that that day we went out and could not find the Indian graves and did not care. They did not much mourn Frank’s death or I did not know of it. Off in the army then, I think it was, the body shipped back to Arkansas for burial, in the small cemetery near Mt. Bethel Church; and it could have been accident, that took the edge off the sorrow, the grief we knew; even I so small, I knew too the pain that day we gathered to sorrow, to grieve the gunshot wound that had killed Cady born Cade. I came back that day I had traced Cady’s death via the Palo Duro Canyon, where the Indian ponies not the Indians themselves had been massacred. I did not stop the car, there was no point to it.The battle, the horsesoldiers scattering the Comanches and capturing their ponies, that occurred down in the great canyon and there would be marker there and that could be found. But I know now that the ponies, fifteen hundred of them, were herded on up the canyon wall and onto the plain and slaughtered there and these plains, they stand so vast this killing ground could be anywhere. I drove and drove and saw that it

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could have happened anywhere. But still I knew and remembered as by knowing I remember now.The story old Papa Tom Baylor, patriarch of the Dollé clan, used to tell. We are there in the front room of the old unpainted sorrowing house, the sitting room, the parlor.The kitchen is there at our backs and door to it so wide that these two, kitchen and parlor, seem but a single long large room.The women are there in the back, cooking and weeping.The men have gathered here, to stand and to sorrow, little said but by Herschel, Lord Byron, so Coolie called him, the schoolteacher.The rooms are warm from stoves in the kitchen, the one here near the rocking chair. He tells the story he always told, old Tom Baylor, me on one knee, sis the other. Of an old lone lobo wolf limping along, for as pup or cub his paw had been taken in a trap’s vise and he had eaten away at the foot till he was freed. He tells the story today the same as if it were any other day and we put our heads to his heavy breast and hear its breaking inside. Thump thump thump. More felt than heard, an old man’s beating breaking heart, wouldn’t you say; as is true as well of the weeping of a house that is lost or is gone and can only be remembered now and even that, like a childhood story most often heard falling off toward sleep, not well, if at all. Dewey turned the screwy map he had drawn toward me.As if it were mine, to see, to know, to have. “Of course you know, Roy, none of this can be done till your mother is gone.” Ah ha. Of course.That did it. Cat out of the bag now. Secret agenda unveiled.All these goodie 2-shoe cuzzes, swait lil Wamber, jest letter pass on a natchrl death when what in fact they are really looking for is the hard guy, the hitboy, who has got the stuff to get the job done.And guess who’s going to be it. Actually I don’t much mind. Not bad to have a cheering section when you set out to murder mommy, even if they do sit there sitting on their hands mouths clamped shut evertight.Wanna hear the time I almost did literally actually in the flesh go over that perfectly awful glass coffee table in the so-called den and have her dispatched before she could hit the reclinalounger eject button? Wanna see? You bet you do. Chick lost her job.And it was a sorry job to lose. Not that they weren’t all sorry, the jobs she took on after leaving school. Of course you know all about this, you always have, but to a brother such learning comes when such is done to his sister, so much better kinder more intelligent than all

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of us, her brothers, her masters. She came to wait when she should rule. Wait—not always.The first sorry job she had after school was private personal secretary to some large Dallas corp, their power&light, something big. She loved her boss, the president, top man right there under the board, and he loved her. So smart, so wry her humor, so understanding of little men and their little ways and how they must be stroked and teased and smiled upon and made feel big and brave again. One meeting one of them, some youngish VP, thought to make her wait. “Girl. Coffee. Black.” Mr. Greer rose from the head of the long polished table, went out of the room, returned, placed the cup before the youngish VP. Never again. We lost track there for years and I knew little of what sorry jobs she had, only that for a time after Sidney’s death she had none. All this, all I shall be saying of Chick, this is not to say it was all smooth sailing for Sid. He knew his sorry jobs, but these—IBM, some international accounting conglomerate, a country club golf course holding company, etc.—he was told these jobs, these sorry jobs, were great.Ticket to the top. He works for himself now, Sid, works at home, and that is fine. And the four-lane bypass—all those years of smiling efficiency, keeping it nice, taking it easy, keeping it all inside while bro-law staggered spewing about the guest cottage—that’s worked out too. Life’s blood goes pumping along as it was meant to, you’re not clawing up the ladder at GM wherever.As for Chick, the sorry job question, the last of these she was to have, she didn’t really need it, I don’t think. She had plenty of money, post divorce. Sid had provided well, more than well, and there was insurance with Sidney’s death, and we both got some land in west Texas when I turned thirty, she twenty-eight. Just something to get her out of the house I think.These were friends, husband and wife, who gave her the job. Something for her to do.They were friends and saw something was wrong, was not right, back so far back as then. She had recently split up with Pete Willson or Wamba’s Baptist mammy pressure had caused her to back away, a Catholic divorced lawyer he drank and owned in Florida not a proper grove but some sinful beach, and that was it, they thought, these friends.Why she sat around the house and drank. Drank and took pills and did not go to church.And that was how the first mommy murder, the first of so oh so many, was born. She took on this job, a small company, run by husband and wife really, something to do with siding or shingles, and then she could not do it and then she was fired, let go.A simple phoneanswering

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pettycash bookkeeper secretary in this mom n pop shop and she could not do it. She could not keep track. She could not remember. Drink. Cathlick ideas. Pills. Not gettin out to church Sundy mornin an revivals too. Living all alone when she came home. It was there the battle was joined. She could not remember and there was no reason for it, none but those. Please forgive us, Chick, but we did not know, back then we did not know why it was that you could not remember. It was years after their deaths, Coolie and Chick, that I came upon this. The first signs that came to them that they would lose their minds and come to die of it. At Rissa’s, her ancestral home, we had come there to visit mum and dad. Swift, you only think of the big people the little people, Gulliver, but there was this other book there in the library, a journal Swift kept before he was banished ever back to Ireland and in this journal, like letters to one of his girlfriends, there was that day that the old guy suffered.Wrote and said his head was bad again.Was off again. He could not think. He could not remember, not what he had accomplished yesterday nor what there should be done today. Back to the book’s intro then, writ by some scholar, lit or history, one would suppose and he knew no more of Swift and his coming madness than we of theirs, Chick and Coolie.Those bad days, he had them too, Coolie, the dizzy spells, the days he could not think, could not remember, those first early signs of his disease, made famous now by a name, what then the head doc told Coolie was but an inner ear problem and walked away.And so too does this Swift scholar in his intro speak of Swift’s fall into madness, the winds that howled through his mind and memory, so too does this scholar speak of inner problems and walks away.And Swift first suffered those days when his head was bad, he could not think, in his forties coming onto fifty and so too had Coolie been, near fifty, when he first spoke to me of the wind howling through mind and its memory. It lingered on fifteen, twenty years, these dizzy spells, not remembering what you had for breakfast, till Coolie was sixty-five or so before the memory loss—short-term, he told me he could remember a day in his childhood as if it had been yesterday—became a united thing; there were no spells now, no recoveries when mind and memory were right, now all locked and linked together and was one thing, his not remembering, not even knowing, he told me once, Coolie still amused at his condition, not even knowing, he said, which way was up. And then slowly, in a few short years it came and stole it all away.All but that one day he and Pop took the wagon into town, that Saturday morn-

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ing, every stop they made, that man looking for a dog they came upon, Coolie a boy again, he knew that up till the very end. How this came to Chick, I do not know. I was not there and had I been she wouldn’t have spoken much of it, I don’t think. Coolie could speak of his coming madness without fear, with an amusement, the absent-minded professor, but such candor and calm was not in my sister, for you see I think she knew and knew all along, while my father did not.That this was but the beginning of the madness that would see her dead. Foresaw the death that madness and it alone brings.After that death,Wamba and I going through her things, I came upon a flight bag, empty but for a small pamphlet, not even that, a brochure, four pages, it folded out. How To Improve Your Memory. So long ago, when she was sane. She knew, she did not know. Chick lost her job. She could not remember. She went home. She sat drank popped pills she did not go out she did not do anything. I was gone away again.Wamba took the Dallas call. Friends, so many fine friends, were flying Chick to Hubbard. They told Chick there was a football game there, a class reunion, a Pi Phi get-together, they told her she could see her mother. Chick loved her mother she would go for that.They packed her bags, for she could no longer even accomplish that, and hustled her to the airport and flew with her to Hubbard.And there Wamba waited.And my sister was never to be free again. One can understand that they did not know.That she went home and sat and did not go out did not do anything. She was depressed. She had lost her job. Lost a boyfriend she liked ever so. Lost a husband she loved. Lost a son she loved ever so. Had a mother like Wamba—now you’re talking depressed, honey.And let’s toss in booze and pills and the Catholic contagion. And she could no longer remember. And they simply did not know, these pals who spirited her away and dumped her in mommy dungeon.And why should they have? I didn’t know, smartysmartybigfatfarty, why should they, rustic Dallasites? I and a lot of these fine friends, opted for lost son hubby boyfriend job. She would be coming back. Booze, pills, the Pope had slipped something into the GnTs. She would be coming back all right. Coming back as a Baptist.A good little girl. Coming back to Mommy.Wamba’s logic does have some logic to it. If my sister could not remember, hold a simple job, live ever again on her own, would in time lose her mind, she would at least be a Baptist mommy-loving lunatic. You may be assured that Wamba would be drilling that into what little mind the divorced swilling Catholics had not spirited off.

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“Do you think that there might be some kind of physical problem— physical mental? Something organic? Look, out of Coolie’s family, the old man Taylor Blanton, he suffered dementia, died addled. Of the boys, Coolie, Dusty,Teeter, and the girls, Gerda and Aunt Boots—of the twelve people who made their family, that’s half. Maybe there’s something to this Alzheimer’s disease. That this dementia, senile dementia we’ve always called it, maybe it’s not to do with old age. Maybe it can strike younger people. Look. Here’s an article I clipped from the New York Times. Maybe we should take her to see a specialist. How long has she been on the wagon now? Not had a drink, no drugs.Three years. And still she’s not right, she’s not well. There’s more to it than that. And the trauma of Sidney’s death and Sid quote abandoning her and you running off Roman Pete Willson end quote—these can’t be it. Not now. Maybe the local doc, this Korean guy, maybe he could recommend a neurologist in Hubbard. Just for a visit. See what he thinks. I’ll drive.” Wamba stared hard into the Baptist TV set. She has two.The other is the football TV set.They sit back to back, these sets, one large, color, set in a console, this ghastly, the other smaller, b&w, pretty much on its own. The big one is the football set. It is aimed away from the kitchen, into the den, toward the two reclinaloungers.The little Baptist set looks into the kitchen. In fact it is damn near a family member, has a permanent place there at the kitchen table. It is rarely played but for Sunday morn and eve, Wednesday choir practice and most every night revivals, they run two weeks these meetings.Yes, the First Baptist Church has a TV station. Its own TV station.That’s all it plays. Brother Pal. I would not believe this at first, but it is so.Wamba stared hard into the Baptist TV set sitting at the table with us, blank, gray.This was Tuesday afternoon. Nothing shaking down at First Baptist. Nothing worth rolling the cameras out for anyway. It was the New York Times crack. Simply could not help myself. I do it all the time and I’ve got to stop. It’s the only entertainment around here, other than the Cowboys and Brother Pal, dropping the New York Times into midst of a Roy/Wamba chat moving quick toward shouting match. All comes to a dead halt.A closing mind is closed.Tight. Snap! Locked up. It is mere self-indulgence, watching a mind seal up, and I am on a mission here.To unsave my sister’s soul, to save her mind. Fat chance. No. Settle for something small. Like the truth, the truth will do. You know, you are wrong. It is right to know the truth, to face facts, even if only for the hell of it. But then the truth may come sugared, no need to gag it down her.

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Next time maybe—toss in Life instead.Wish the old Saturday Evening Post was still around. Clipping from that, something with Norman Rockwell on it, would’ve had Chick snatched up and off to the nearest neurodoc. Have even considered the Baptist Standard, but it won’t do.Too crude by half.Wamba would smell a rat, know something was cooking right away. I mean, she knows, me lapping up the Baptist Standard, she knows there aren’t any cartoons, jokes in it.And there I go, grab the latest issue straight from mailman’s hand, pour a double bourbon hiball, flop out with some Cheezits on the recliner and read everysingleword, moving lips, pointyfinger to the really good bits, howling away, slapthigh, tears of mirth sloshing down.And now I’ve muffed it again.Wamba stares hard into the dull dead Baptist TV set. Me too. And Wamba looks at me as if I’m the one with the screw loose. And maybe she’s right. She did improve under Wamba’s care—it’s not fair, nor right to make it seem otherwise.And Coolie too. He made no improvement, I don’t think, not in mental health—but then maybe neither did Chick, not really. Maybe it was only Wamba and her care and seeing with such labor and dedication to their physical well-being, maybe it was that and only that that made it seem as if—as if they might recover. [And there, there was where we went to war,Wamba and I. I, the realist, seeing no hope when there was none to be seen. She, the religionist, seeing hope where there was no hope, none. Right? Wrong? My point is this. Had my sister’s disease known a cure, my mother’s dark medieval witchcraft would have killed her. Let’s say Chick had had a tumor, a cancer, a thing that might have been hacked off or burned away or poisoned dead and thus the body saved. My mother would have prayed and cut the booze and ciggies and Catholics and pills, till the tumor would have won and no praying or teetotalling or Baptistry could have stood chance gainst its malignant power. Murder by stupidity and ignorance is murder still.That the world of medicine and science knew no cure for the evil eating at my sister’s brain, that she would die whether prayed over or probed at—this in no way absolves mommy’s guilt. She murdered her daughter, had there been any chance to, and that murder in spirit is as deadly as any with knife or gun, poison or pillow to the face, for you see, you let stupidity and ignorance off this time—there was no hope anyway, judge, why hang

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the dum-dum?—why then the next time, when hope’s there, then their crime shall be real, and their victim then? Why you, of course. They shall be coming through their night for you. Ignorance, stupidity, shall we toast their unrelenting power before we execute? There is no madness, no savagery to match them. Nor can war, pestilence, famine and that fourth thing—nothing stands a chance. Not even death shall see their end, even death is servant there to them, their pride, their aim and ambition. Only knowing helps, and truth, but even then these warriors of light must ever be renewed within the human mind, their fires never allowed to gutter out. For darkness ever waits, its silence cold and numb.All hail these twinned, twined kings of night! Know. Understand. Listen. Reason. See.These born and reborn and born again shall throw back their eternal quest. Ignorance. Stupidity.Theirs. Mine.Yours too. Kill! Or be killed. Have a good day.] But this service she made for them is not such a simple thing as it may seem. Motherly wifely love.Yes that but. But 1)? Let’s start with control. In her blood long before she came upon Control:Baptist: Southern branch. She wanted all to be children, see, forever, for she had ever been the mommy, the little mother age ten.And the praise she gathered to her, she liked that as well, preened in it. Lil Wamber, age ten. Look how she cared for them kiddies all day long. Look better cared for than they do under you, Mama. No wonder Mama Min knew her spells, couldn’t stand the sight of little Wamba, age ten. But such praise was but small part of her realm; there control ruled.Age ten she was the boss, from breakfast to dinner (lunch in suburbia), dinner to suppertime and the coming in from the fields, the larger ones, to find little mother, age ten, ruling the roost.And here she had her dream come true, so much later, so much later on. Coolie and Chick. Came home mad one day, these little children. And so were they treated and why not, I suppose. For children they were and being quiet by nature, my father and his daughter, my sister, they didn’t talk back.They spoke not then, Coolie and Chick, and she talked. Talked all the time. Talked to them. Talked to no one. Talked to herself. Did nothing but talk and talk and talk.And feed her face.And talk and feed.Talk as she fed, fed as she talked.And they sat and did not hear and said nothing to this talk talk talk. “Wamba, have you ever thought about shutting up for just one moment.”

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Screwball look across the table. Chick left, Coolie right. Heads down. Left hand in lap. Eating little, doing that precisely. Not hearing not caring not knowing. And she looked good in the Baptist crowd—that Wamber whatta Christin carin fer Coolie Chick like thet—but that but more of the praise, important but not essential. Nor, really, in the end, was control.That her burning ambition, to bring us all back to children in her fold, but that mommy power was not that thing that drove her to give so much of her life and time and energy to such grueling thankless work. No.That master she knelt to from morning well into night: that master was the work: work itself: work work work. She worked oh she worked and she loved the work and she loved to work.There her true master savior and lord. Work.And do you know there are worse. Gone work yersef to an early grave Wamber. Hardly. She’s the last surviving sibling, see. All gone but her. Got the call yesterday. Billie, her kid sister, retirement center in Hubbard, gone. And now she’s alone and there is no work. No one but me and me that work. Never really saw Coolie’s deterioration.There was really little of it, I think that’s true, and too I was gone. Saw him one day and he could not remember morning.The next: mad and gone.The third and final coming home: a thing. Not dead, not living, just gone. Not spared that observation of change, of wasting away, with my dear sister, I’m afraid. That first time coming home since Chick herself had come home, she was all right, I thought. Fine. Not quite.Almost. She was dating a guy and that was good. Out of that suffocating house in airless north Dallas sitting at home—now she was out of the house. At least. Anyway. Kent something. He and Chick had been in the same year in school. Could not remember him for the life of me. Only that: for certain: Chick had not dated him in highschool. Wrong side of the tracks. Wamba and Chick with tracks running down the middle of their hearts? Wamba for sure but maybe Chick too.That Wamba even allowed Chick to date Kent now and that Chick now liked this guy spoke of changed times. Kent was all right. Rebuilt old cars.Was partner in some dealership in Arizona. Had a couple grown daughters, maybe grandkids too. His wife? Something funny there. An accidental death. Donoghue said Kent had bumped her off. Donoghue? The next door neighbor, big and brassy, and Wamba’s best pal. Always after Wamba to toss Coolie and Chick, if only temporarily, in a funny farm so Wamba could make that Canary Island cruise come fall. This was encouraged. Can’t you imagine the relief? Chick and Coolie

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leaning back in their straitjackets, the padded cells, grinning wide. Six weeks of not watching Brother Pal on black and white. Donoghue was not her real name of course. Only the time of afternoon she came to call, honking like a traffic jam, it always seemed to be during that show, Donoghue.An eerie thing.You would have thought she had stepped right out of the TV set, right out of that handpicked audience of true nitwits. It was Donoghue who dragged in the lowdown about Kent, his intentions. Straight from the all-powerful 1929 Study.After Chick’s money, he was. So somebody had heard somebody had heard and do you know it could’ve been true. In the back of his mind anyway. Call it a sweetener.A little kicker. He liked her and with her money that would help.With the money he would take it on, Chick and her problem. But then we didn’t know, did we? Not really. Not Kent not me not one of us. I didn’t oh I didn’t, that first time I came back to see Chick, now living at home, there with Wamba and Coolie. Maybe it was just the shock of seeing Coolie, how fast he had come down, his fine mind gone. I simply did not see Chick, her problem. Let’s look back then. It’s so much clearer now. She was quiet but she had always been quiet but she was really quiet now. But she was going out, dating Kent. I went along once—one night we three drove to Hubbard, a Chinese restaurant there. Chick held Kent’s hand when it not needed for driving.And she said nothing, nothing that was not provoked by question. I saw that that night. You asked, she answered, then nothing. Maybe I was seeing more than Coolie, Coolie only, seeing more than I thought. Maybe I did not swallow, not whole, the booze pills theory Wamba was pushing then. Before I left I tried to talk. Wamba out of the house. Somewhere. Or maybe Chick and I, yes, one morning we drove down to the farm, as we called our farms. I tried to talk as we had before, so often, every time we met. I talked, she listened. I questioned, she answered. She could have been on tranks, her calm, her disinterest, but such was not so. No pills, no booze for these three years, and she was better than when she had come.Wamba and her regime had done that, they had at least done that. But she was not right, my little sis, there was something wrong. I saw that then, flying away in the sky. Surely I saw it then. Soaring away.There freedom lay. Innocence, irresponsibility, there such freedoms lay. Wamba’s prison.Take a peek through the bars.You won’t actually have to come in.Watch an execution, tour the dungeon, but still—a taste of the whip, the ball and chain might do you the world of good.

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The aforementioned visit. My first homecoming now that Chick was back home. Chick had a date with Kent that night, if not the first then the second evening after my arrival. I had hit the reclinalounger soon for it was one of those summers they actually played ball, and there came to me the sound of raised voices coming from another part of the house.Too late in the day for Donoghue, she home watching ball, hollering advice to the umpire, you could hear it out on the street. No, these raised voices, they were other voices.Who? Chick never talked, raised or not. And if Wamba talked all the time, [talked talked did nothing but talk with me and Coolie and Chick there at the table talk as if we were not there talk as if she were talking to herself talk as if we were dolls talk as if indeed it were she and not Coolie and Chick mad talk till that one day I observed “Wamba, do you ever shut up?” Screwball eyes wheeling. Gobble gobble gobble during those eight short syllables.“If you’d just button it till I get a word in edgewise, Roy Alan.”] generally speaking, when Wamba talked talked, etc., she did not do so in a raised voice.And surely had not yet gone so far as to answer back, take on the two parts in the debate ensuing.That debate, now I heard, indeed between Chick and Wamba, and the voice raised, that was Chick’s and with that hope soared for my sister. Chick, finally, at long last, dumping the good little girl, actually talking back to medieval mommy.That debate this. Right out of highschool but don’t turn that page.These small things, these baby steps, it is they that will in time give you full membership to Wamba’s Tower, your sanity drawn quartered brain set dead as stone while still alive. The debate was this. Chick had made a date with Kent for tonight, a long-standing engagement I think, or an agreement certainly entered into before my arrival the day before. Chick wanted to go on and go out. Something special, I don’t know, not just flicknfeed, something with tickets Kent had bought weeks before.Wamba? How could a true and loving and caring babysis run off and go gallivanting with low-class gold digger when long lost big bub had just flown in just so he could hit recliner and watch ball and say absolutely nothing to his thoughtless little sister but question answer and now into extra innings and not even any of that, silence but holler at the ump? I thought we came away victors that evening,

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Chick, me, maybe even Coolie, my going in and settling this debate, shutting up Wamba and her guilt trip, to see Chick fly out the door the instant Kent rang the bell. But that’s not how these Wamba wars go, is it? You think you’re free, you’ve broken out, backtalked, finally, at long last, had for at least this once your own way and slammed out the door and gone off for an evening of—defeat. Guilt. Regret. Recrimination against one’s self.All night long.That night out ruined. Sitting here, home, an antique car show out there, your body is there, out there, but you,Wamba prisoner, your mind’s still here, back home.Where you ought to be, should, if you were not a badbadgirl and did exactly as mommy said and sat bored and alone and crushed, defeated, shackled to reclinalounger, bubba watching ball on TV, pop long ago having donned three hats to make the trek toward bed, mommy talking talking talking she will never stop never let you go, not out there, away. Twas the local doc, a Korean, who took the first step. I was away again. Anyway. By the time I came back home again, Chick had already seen Dr. Janzen, there in Hubbard, and he had offered his diagnostic opinion. Hopeless. A disease similar to that which had struck down Coolie; that Alzheimer’s; this, Chick’s disease, a strain of that brain deterioration, quite rare, strikes its sufferers so early, so deep in their youth, first signs sometimes thirties, for Chick her forties. Dr. Janzen explained all this. Pick’s disease—and not early onset Alzheimer, can’t you Big Al groupies let poor little Professor Herr Pick have his small ever so rare ever so deadly disease? If I understood Dr. Janzen right—for I could not bring myself to read the book Janzen had written on the matter—Alzheimer’s strikes at the brain’s cortex, while Pick eats away at the frontal lobes; and that made so much sense, for Chick’s behavior, least there till the very end, was so much that of a woman lobotomized, full frontal.That time I went with them, Chick and Wamba, Coolie dead now, for Chick’s six-monthly checkup, the tests the doc performed were so simple. So deadly. So true. Janzen sat Chick in a chair across from him. A young guy. Nice. Friendly, like he meant it. Chick smiling, liking him. He asked that she do exactly as he did.They placed their hands palm down upon their knees. He asked her to do exactly as he did. “Raise your right hand to your right ear,” he said and did so. And Chick, smiling, raised her left hand to her left ear, exactly as he had done, mirror image. Frontal lobe gone. No abstractions.

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Next in line there in the destroyed frontal lobe: reflex.The control of them. He had Chick hold out her hand as if to shake his hand, her hand relaxed, and he gently put his fingers into her palm, between thumb and forefinger, and he gently drew his fingers away, brushing as he did so her palm and thumb and fingers.And Chick’s thumb and fingers closed and touched as he withdrew his fingers. Reflex. “Now Chick, I want this time for you not to close your thumb and fingers on mine. I want you to keep your hand open, your thumb and fingers apart. Do you understand? Do not close your fingers on my hand.” And Chick smiled and said she understood and closed again her fingers and thumb on the doctor’s brushing withdrawing hand. Frontal lobe gone. No abstractions, no control of reflexes. A world of reflex, of mirror image. And now Wamba’s war began in earnest.The sneak attack.The second opinion. Dr. Janzen was a neurologist, Johns Hopkins, spent summers at London Neurological Hospital near Russell Square and had written a book on Alzheimer, his disease. He was young to have done all this, kind and right. And Wamba wanted a second opinion. She wanted hope when there was none. She wanted drugs, the Pope and his divorced boyfriend, that divorce from that Sid, anything but this disease.Anything but this disease one was born with.This disease that came from mommy, came from daddy.This disease that bore the mark of Cain. Dr. Janzen shook his head. He was kind. He was right. Of course. A second opinion. But to find a second opinion as strong—he did not say it, what he said was: Los Angeles. One could find a second opinion, one as good and strong as the first, there. Wamba touted this second Hubbard doc.An old guy. Into some kind of head work. Not neurology, something up there above the neck.That old-fashioned kind of doctor.You wanted somebody to tell you your brain was not eating itself away and that you would not die from it, that it was all them anti-Baptist crimes committed in misspent youth, then for a couple grand he would tell you anything you wanted to hear. And so the Battle of the Second Opinion was engaged. One Sunday morning it was when I finally, really, very nearly did go over that worthlesss glass coffee table and murder mommy. Death on a Recliner Chair. This started with this second opinion doc there in Hubbard.When this old guy said he would not offer second opinion to

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Dr. Janzen’s diagnosis; himself was in no way trained to second guess a brilliant young neurologist like Janzen; further, it would be foolish as well to trek to L.A., even Dallas or Houston; that Dr. Janzen was known even round these parts as one of the finest in his field in the land; that he, second opinion doc, wanted no part of Wamba’s opened checkbook; that he thought we should go away and come back in six months time, back to Dr. Janzen, back for my sis’s next checkup, back to be told there was no hope, for, as the old guy said, there was none. You think Wamba was one to be pushed around by me and colluding docs? Not with the Lord in her corner, nosireebob. A heavyweight like the Almighty there handling stool, towel and sponge, she would be laying low Science, Reason, Medicine, Rationality, Reason again if you like, even if it had to go the full fifteen, a split decision, them judges, it was the Holy Ghost, part Cathlick probly, he was never getting it right. We had argued, debated, discussed, pled, ranted, stormed (last three me) for I don’t know how long. L.A. out. Dallas, Houston, the same.The old Hubbard doc, he said he would be glad to examine Chick any time, but only for a physical, wouldn’t be going beyond ear nose throat up into the head. Oh yes, I went to bed that Saturday night exhausted but a victor, weary to the bone, ignorance and stupidity slain at my feet. And I woke to Sunday morning and their resurrection. There seemed to be nothing wrong but there was. It seemed the same Sunday morning I had seen forever, since Chick and Coolie had gone mad, since Wamba had taken over and was in charge. She had risen before me. She sat now in one of the recliner chairs at the far end of the den. The glass door, the floor-length windows there looked east and sunlight streamed in. She sat in the tiltback chair and read—some sort of Sunday school lesson or like garbage put out by the Baptist Standard, as if the Bible and that journal itself were not enough. I did not see it then, the look that had come like holy mask over her face, not clearly. I went then grogged and unsuspecting to coffee maker, the sports page, Captain Cotton, Henrietta’s latest column, how religion, the Baptists in particular, the backwoods hill Baptists in particular, were turning to the right and taking up the gun and the dangers of such—thus armed I came into the den and sat, not in #2 recliner but on some fake French couch and placed cup on that worthless coffee table, the screeching clank of cup to glass at Sunday eight in the morning like drawing nails, fingernails, and I looked across to Wamba and the smugness of her righteous pout, the icily impe-

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rial hauteur of her belief, her ignorance and her stupidity, and I knew then that I and reason et al were dead ducks. Goners. “What are you reading there,Wamba?” “I been reading this story bout this lil boy and all thought all hope lost all but his Baptist famly and when all docs said all hope was lost how they went on in and asked for a second opinion and they went to this doctor in New York, this faith healer, and they had faith and the little boy was saved and cured and he was well.” “Is any of this crap documented, this crap put out by the Baptist Bullshit Standard, is there any proof that this little boy is still alive or even existed in the first place except for this crap they print in the Southern Baptist Pravda?” “Faith heals, Roy. It’s the Lord’s way. He gives out second opinions in my opinion. Fact in my Book he gives out first second and last ones.” Do not really recall much of ensuing dialogue. Only that at some point I had dragged phone off the wall and near out of socket and had crashed the wounded instrument down on the glass coffee table and oh that miserable piece of glass, still it would not break. “All right.You want a second opinion? Anybody. I don’t care. Let’s do it. Right. Get on an airplane, you, me and Chick and go get this second opinion. Go on. Call up the BS Standard and get the number of this quack. Let’s do that. Let’s do get a second opinion.” And it was then that my mighty opponent, this champion of the dark and the dumb, stretched out there on the canvas, clock counting down, seven eight nine . . . , she popped to her feet, good as new, and delivered that killing blow, her heavenly haymaker. “Oh we can’t get no second opinion now. It’s too late for that now.” Etc etc. In effect, gone forever any chance for Chick, if only boy had listened to her—it is he, see, unbelieving boy who has sent simple sis to her doom by not heeding babbling batshit Baptist mommy in the first place. Right off the bat. Better then than never. Stitch in time beats nine. Etc etc. Oh yes indeed, she so very nearly did die that morning and I with her, for I could not have taken breath after having taken up the phone and come over that worthless glass table and beaten her Baptist brains out, one blow would have done the job fine, folks, a tap’s all’s needed for Baptist brain you find it first and she would be dead and be buried and me there with her too, dead and gone and buried too, for I cannot live without her

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with her. Cannot live till she is dead cannot live when she is gone. Cannot cannot cannot. Actually there was a very good piece on this in the Baptist Standard, how I came over the glass table and dispatched mommy with a telephone. As one really should put some effort into these things, they are so rare, mommy murders, usually only one per lifetime allowed, I have been thinking that I might pass on a few hints, professional tips. Something for a rainy day.Wanna see? Wanna hear? That’s best. The crack of spine the googleglubgurgle of broken throat! No? You really should reconsider. There is some poetry in it. Poetic justice anyway.Two birds one stone. Finally did get that worthless glass coffee table. Even if it spells out my doom it’s been worth it. Craaaaackkk!!! Oh how sweet the sound. It commenced, the BS article, thus: that night a bad son crept out to murder mommy, glee, sad wisdom twisting twisted twisting in his heart, rage, a hopelessness within that fetter to his mind. BOY MURDER MOMMY BAD BOY

read the head. Sure Boy’ll take the job.Anything to get out of this room.This room is in Hubbard.The only thing that’s saved his sanity. Never going out of it.What’s waiting out there? Hubbard, principally.This room, it’s inside some squeakyclean boardinghouse. Horror? Hell? Wanna whiff? Crack venetian blind. Always nailed down. Closed.These Hubbard blinds. Out there, see, there Ave Q 50mph river bigwhitecars rushing rightdowntown. Taco hut pizza palace burger bistros abound. Whatta thoroughfare! Somewhere near a labor center, no labor there.When I creep out in the morning, fore dawn, for the paper, maybe a hundred men are gathered there. By dawn thirty, twenty. By noon ten, they are beat; it’s their hopelessness, you see.You drive by, they watch.You’re looking for murder, see. They see. Look out through these absolutely industrial-strength venetian blinds—takes a screwdriver to prize a gap.There in the distance Hubbard downtown.Tween us n them a rubble of vacant lot, some made blacktop zebrastripe—parking! Churches hulk midground. Beyond: all banks, that’s all. Hubbard. Downtown. Root canal.TickTockTaco. MurderMommy. Do anything to get out.Anything. Have been driving and driving, me. But of different sorts.With different purposes and patterns. Now this is different. From Hubbard to Wamba and the cemetery where they, we, where we soon all will be, that is a tighter matter. The other driving knows no bounds. Undisciplined. 290

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Hubbard to Wamba you got to keep it strict.A square. Pretty much is so. Twentyfive by twentyfive mile. Fifty in all. Hahaha. In days of yore, when highways few, no cogitation needed. Only one way to go. Hubbard to Wamba.Yes, let’s go back to that first time, when boy was boy and there was but that one way to go, Hubbard Wamba.Yes, let’s go that old way first, the only way there was then, so much dirt, so little paving; let’s see how desperate despairing youth can be. Start Hubbard and head east.

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OK a twelve-mile jerk ENE but mainly E and you hit Merriwether. Nothing there but that. Eight more, bearing east, and it’s Pascal.These burgs batten blister blight as we move along. Eight more and it’s Rawls and time to turn true north. Is that precisely twenty-five? Don’t push it or I’ll get you. Actually not a great deal of interest lies between here and there, Rawls and Wamba. Headed north, headed home, making for murder,Wambaville —pow! Into last leg then. A community named Cone for absolutely no reason that I can see. Now comes the hitch, a blip of blasphemy.There ten miles shy of Wamba we go down off the plains. Into the breaks breaks Rule One.Ye shall not go off the bleeding plains when you go murder mommy. But a touch of broken land and trees and a stream, though dry, almost always it’s so, a road that curves not only down and up but left and right as well—such variegation could turn you soft. Simple. Sappy. A human being who, for that brief time, forgets his mommicidal purpose. But as there is a golf course down in this big gully/brief canyon, one only has to think links and rage continues. Back up on open plain, all well. Tickticktick we go along. Still north, though there is that slant NNE fore we hit Wambaville wye, then north again, up to Bolivar Road, one short of redlight so you can’t miss it, then three four blocks west and there you are. OK.You got the classic route there. Fifty miles one left turn basically. But first, before we come to the big Neo, fifty and one right, shall we dismiss all minor progeny, them roads dirt and paved that jig and jog and zag and zig this crazy quilt Hubbard to Wamba, routes that boy has stored in memory over all these years, from days first driving till now, last night at the wheel, those many many ways to go murder mommy that have kept him sane as he is, so many squares to be made to go those fifty miles to murder mommy, hundreds and hundreds of routes, all different probably, all those blacktops and county dirts crisscrossing the plains, endlessly endlessly. Boy shall be driving sis’s car for this job, as she’s dead and doesn’t need it.This car was the beginning of the end.White Olds, along those lines, not oversized, Chick never could figure out how to make it run, the beginning of her end.The problem we face now is that neither can I, figure out how to make this Detroit piece of shit run, knobs protruding, dials grinning everywhere.Actually the problem is, I can’t even find this fucking heap.To be fair I couldn’t find the keys either.Well to be honest I couldn’t even find my pockets. In a state, in a tizzy.

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Have I mentioned that I have now come out of my flophouse room for the first time in months, only to find it dark? It is, in fact, very dark in the parking lot. Only the other day I clawed open the venetian blinds and it looked like broad daylight down there. It is night now, I suppose, and though I know well that night is generally more or less dark, I had no idea how dark. Previous to this I have only been out in the dark once in recent years. Can’t remember why, only that I ran about the streets crying out “Yaaaaaaaa! Yowwwwwww!” till it grew light and I made my way home. Rain must be mentioned. Pouring sheets. Hot thick moist this black water raining down. It was only after having found pocket key car that the true horror of rain struck home.Windshield wipers. It’s not that I have been unable to find the knob or dial to turn the blinkin bleeders on, it’s that I can’t find no way to turn them off! Surely there must be another knob for such a procedure. But—two one none, nothing’s there, nothing that works or not, and so these maniacal wipers go on and on and on. That little rubber blade that is usually found fitted to the sweeping mechanism is now, tonight, nowhere to be seen. On and on it scrapes over that trusty swath of safety glass, an unrelenting tortured shriek, steel scarring scraping lashing lacerating the one loyal feature in this heap, this curve of fine glass that not only allows you to see out and see where you are going but does stand-up work keeping rain off your lap. Much has been said of the invention of the wheel, by Mr.Wheel, probably not I suppose, but I do think the windshield, there stands the proud Mrs.Windshield her boy done good, deserves honorable mention. I found this final ultimate Hubbard Wamba murder mommy route quite by accident.Well, no. I was in fact looking for that great Neo, one right turn in fifty miles, this mirror to the mighty Classic, fifty mile one left, but without much interest or even hope that there might be such a thing.There is a lost town out on these plains, see, a town called Llano, the first town we made up on these plains and one night early on it blew away, never to be found again; and it was whilst searching for bitter, tragic, lost Llano that I found this bitter lost and tragic way to go murder mommy. And now I have lost it again, my way, in all this dark and rain, the dark in my eyes, the rain pouring over my face. I am out on the freeway, I-Something, headed north toward Monterrey (see map encore), dawdling along at about twenty or so as while steering with left I am

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with right reaching out trying to rip out that screaming wiper thing by its roots it is driving me nuts! Many cars also on the freeway hail my steady pace, the weaving pattern, by flashing lights, howling horns —Californians probably.There is a turn off, the turn off, up here somewhere, in the dark and the rain.This is near an overpass, that I know, but know as well there no sign WAMBA ——> 25 to mark it either, and there are these overpasses every quarter mile it seems.To miss a turn, seems like such a minor matter, doesn’t it? Stop, turn around, go back when mistake discovered. Well in fact after taking wrong turn, having driven ten miles down this more or less one-lane blacktop and now to find that that blacktop has decided simply to stop, for no possible reason but some highway engineer’s perverse pleasure, now that you have come to the end of the blacktop and there is nothing but mud in every direction but for that ribbon of asphalt there behind, simply no way to turn huge Olds around on said ribbon, and you go on to discover that you are simply too pudge to twist in seat to look back while backing those ten thin miles of pavement, and that the rearview has disappeared during the struggle with the bladeless wiper, it is then, when you get the bright idea to heave up on your knees there in the driver’s seat, then turn back as if you are a fatboy looking for something in the backseat, as you then commence to steer wheel with toes of shoeless foot while operating accelerator and brake with shod pod, when this acrobatic position is then assumed and you realize that so positioned not only can you not breathe with tub overlaid sharp seatback but that even if you could breathe, and not simply be within seconds of losing all consciousness, this is to say that if all this had gone well up to this point, gone according to plan, this fiendish plan to drive backwards ten miles in the dark and the rain expecting that not twenty feet into this backing experience you would not end up in some deadly ditch, even then, all AOK as the rocket boys down in Houston say, it will be then that the dread truth will creep over you.That the Detroit rats who have made this car have made it so that it should go, usually, in one direction only and instead of putting headlights at the rear of the car as well as front, these maniacs have installed there at the rear, the direction in which you care to drive the car tonight, there there are to be found merely these funny little red lights that really tell you absolutely nothing about either where you are or were or would like

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to be. No, neither quiet nor peaceful shall be your end, as you leap out of unturnable unbackable car and run bawling across mudlogged fields, that innocent night you simply took the wrong turn. Well by merely closing eyes fist tight and driving like a banshee the right turn was found and we have come, by that miracle, to Wamba. Oh there was that one bad moment, a terrible terrifying moment when one forgot the curve. Don’t know how it was that came to be forgot, but there,Wambatown lights showing, only minutes from target, road’s curve was indeed forgot.Yes,Virginia, the only cursed curved stretch of road ever found between Hubbard and Wamba and it went and got forgot.The only road that ever killed Franklin Crawford forgot. Or maybe it was Kelly, that guy older than me, nice wife, wore suntans, dabbled farming, drove green MG, maybe it was he who forgot. Or maybe it was just me. There was that moment there, the road curling left, me, the car, its lights rushing straight on, then and there it was that it was seen how wrong it will be if it’s all just forgetting, this end.That such must be planned, ever so closely so, so much more closely than mommy murder—this end that has been planned and now has been forgot must be planned again and again and again.The car sliding now, sideways, sliding off the hard road, now gravel underneath, the car turning as the road turns, the lights, me, we’re all there with the road and its gradual turn, its curve, but the car, even if it is turning with me, its lights, even so the car slides on, ahead, straight on toward doom and taking with us car, lights and me.There’s no forgetting then.All is remembered then.And now the car catches, wheels tires hold the gravel strewn alongside the road, hold the road then, the tough pavement now underneath and we are pulled back car lights n me to sit now shaking sobbing there, the road hard and sure underneath, remembering, planning, never to forget again oh you cannot know its hell never to forget again. Remember and remember and member still again and againanagain. We, the car and I, are in the alley behind Wamba’s house and things are looking up. It has stopped raining. Maybe never has been. Maybe the rain the dark all in a badboy’s eye. Don’t know why he’s come here to the alley that runs along behind the house. Murder drag dump the body someplace—seems extravagant, unnecessary. Place to unload all the murder breaking-in tools sight unseen—unnecessary, pointless. In mommy murder there can be no tools but one’s hands, bare, bloody, not even the handy pillow must interfere with that touch that touching that must be

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done to kill that which has given you your very life. As for breaking in, even if those tools had not all been forgot anyway, they would’ve proved unnecessary. All is open. The gate back to alley is not latched. Nor the breezeway door locked. He simply came in and walked about for a while. Seeing the things he loathed while she lived, seeing them again now she’s dead. No point in such catalogues, these things once loathed loved now, things once to be torn away and destroyed, ground to bits and burned and left to rust and molder, now to be left as are, eternal, not to be touched not by me, the likes of a badboybad, all to be left museum cathedral shrine to mommy and her murder. And she sits up in her coffin, dark and dire, and says in friendly tones: “That you, Roy.Thought it was. Couldn’t sleep myself. Lemme put on a pot.” It’s raining still. It cannot stop. It’s been a cinch, a piece of cake, but for that. “I was praying that it was you.You go on. Put the maker on. See if the paper’s come. I’ll be in soon as I do my business.” We are at the kitchen table now. All calm. All quiet. The rain has stopped.We are not sitting at our correct places. Or are not sitting as we sat as a family. But then that was so many years ago.Then I sat south, near the kitchen, and Wamba north, toward what would become the den. Coolie west, while Chick was placed east, her back to the bulk of the house, near the phone, as in highschool she got most the calls. When madness came to those two, Coolie Chick, and I came to visit and we were once again, if strangely, four, things had changed. And that change has stood till now. Now I sit back to the den, looking into the kitchen, while Wamba, her need to cook and wait and clean, has taken my former place, that chair nearest the kitchen.We’re sipping coffee.Actually Wamba’s slurping and I’m having tea. It is so much further toward morning than I had thought. Summertime and a gray day would have begun. This is sometime in the fall. Still light’s no more than hour away. “This is a little early for you, Roy.” “I know. I couldn’t sleep. Like you.” “Bad dreams?” “I don’t know.Yes. I don’t know. No. Maybe. I don’t know.” “You just felt like driving. Getting out. Driving down to the farm.You used to like that. Driving down to the farm before dawn. Seeing it come up on the road.”

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“Yes. But actually I came over for a reason. I came to murder mommy. I don’t know. Strangle—no. Suffocate you in your sleep. Sit and watch.” “You can’t do that.You’re a son.You got to have a mommy.You got no mommy you’re no son.You’re no son you’re nobody. Nothing.” “Yes. I know that now.About halfway down the hall toward your bedroom.When you called out my name.When you knew. It was me and murder. I don’t know. I understood it. It’s like not knowing something all your life.And then your mother calls out your name.” “Well can’t go doing all that today.You know what day this is, Roy.” “Not Sunday.” “Sunday school and church.” “Oh man, this is too much. I flat out don’t think I can make it back tomorrow.” We laughed. Maybe I did, maybe her. It was better, anyway. But she never quit. Murdered, very nearly so, someone thinking about it anyway, she bounced back. “Why don’t you drive down with me this morning, Roy.” “No. Never. Please.” “Just church then.” “Look. I’ll drive you. Drive you down. Pick you up. Cut church. Like we did in highschool.” “You cut church all that time. I didn’t believe it when they said.” “Me and Jimmy Collins. Some others.The Plano boys. Had drag races out on the Sand Hill Road.” “Explains all them tread marks out by the curve.” “No.That’s all the people thinking about killing themselves and changing their minds. I laid a pair tonight myself.” “You put on a tie and shirt? That’s all they see, you in the car.” “All right.And I’ll wear Coolie’s hats.All three of them.” “Don’t even want to think about that. 6 7/8 anyway.” “Maybe the top one is a little bigger.” “Tell you what. I’ll stay home this morning, with you.Watch it on the TV.You can watch ball on the other set. I don’t need much sound. Just a little.” “No. No point in watching First Baptist on TV you can’t hear the raving. I’ll keep my sound off.You don’t need sound for ball.That way we can be together but don’t have to talk to one another.” “I like that talking.What’s the point of it you don’t do that talking.”

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“All right.You talk. I won’t listen. Like Coolie, like Chick. I don’t think they ever heard a word.” Five second snuffle. On. Off.A tap. “How bout some breakfast before we have dinner.Then we can have supper. Got some of that Jimmy Dean patticake sausage.You like it. Spicy hot. Got a red warning dot on the plastic.” Two in one. Can’t let it slip by. “I prefer my midday meal to be called lunch.” “Why it’s Sunday, Roy.What a thing to say.” All right.“And it’s patty sausage. Patticake is a game girls play.” “He hails from Skyline. Just up the road.That country singer, had him a radio/TV show. Some took him for the beatnik actor.” All right.“What’s for dinner.” “I can thaw anything.” There was silence.To mull this one over.There came a fat plop or soft thud, from out front. “That’s the paper. Little early for that.” “I’ll go out anyway. I’ll carry out the trash.” “Did that last night. Just before dark. Next time give me a ring and I’ll save it up.” We went out of the kitchen, to the front door. It was not locked. I pointed this out, the danger of it. “And the breezeway door was unlocked and the back gate hadn’t been latched.” “Sounds like somebody’s tried to break in.” “I’ll say.” She looked out toward the drive. “Whatever happened to that car of Chick’s?” “Out back. I left it parked in the alley. Had all this gear, equipment I had to unload. Ball bat. Sledge hammer. Knives of many length and fashion. Rope of course. Lotta rat poison. Maybe something to shortcircuit the electricity. Pow! And a roller skate for quiet, though I think on these carpets it wouldn’t go far.You drop down in the pile never to be seen again.That kitten that went missing last year, it ought to be big enough by now to be climbing out. And all sorts of guns of course and ammo for them. Forgot the pills and you’ve got plenty pillows around.” “Why we already got most all that out in the tool shed. Coolie laid it in over the years.”

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“I didn’t know that. I never knew.” “How bout another cup while you’re out.” “Sure. And slip a slug of Beam in it, would you. I keep a spare fifth back in Coolie’s little closet, there with the water heater. His three hats and the bamboo cane and those fine walking boots he favored. It’s got a golf club cover on it.” “So that’s what that is.The mitten with a big red 3 on it and nothing for a thumb.” She looked past me, out toward the drive. It was still well dark. “It’s early for the paper or he’s missed it again.That one we had before, he hit that driveway ever time.” That was true. He the paperman or woman never missed. Paper always there on the drive, never out on dewy lawn or hung deep in bramble hedge. Saw this guy gal only once over these many years.An artist.A circus act. Driving in the dark. Floating papers backhand out window left, sending them forehand zinging through open right. Not to forget the classic left-hand hook, lobbed high and soft over car top. And all the while, there in the dark you could see Zippo flare the Lucky fired up.And he never missed a drive, overshot front step. It was too early. I would not believe he would ever miss again. I stood where the paper would come when it came, plop thud right at my feet, and looked west.To see this morning’s dawn by looking into the dark, where night still stood. Coolie did that from time to time, out at the Home Place. Fed up with farming and Texas and sunsets and us, he would walk down the field road, to the east, to stand there on the cap, looking east, and watch the sunset by looking into coming night, his back to it, the farm, us, it all. But then he turned in time, didn’t he? Cigaret done, he turned and came back. They say I had nothing to do with it, but I’m not so sure. Confessed to everyone in sight, but they just walked away. Natural causes, that’s what they said, tossing it over their shoulder. Broken heart more like it. And who wouldn’t, never having the son she gave birth to. Me, bastard, little orphan boy, changeling thrust into her nest. Instead of murder mommy, there probably should have been more of: bash boy. But there for a while I wouldn’t give in. Mommy without murder, it’s meaninglessness without meaning. Can’t have but the one.That celestial coupling or nothing.When there’s nothing there’s not even a word for it, man. I didn’t even find the body, that’s how low I had sunk. I had at least counted on creeping down

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the hall toward her chamber, bearing ax or bottle of pills or thinking pillow. But the sheriff assured me it was not to be. Of all those score pon score times I came home, thousands ragged jagged ways to get there, I was off that night. Racing to the four corners of the earth. Looking for lives there, places to hide. High hopes and happiness. It was someone creeping down the hall for me. But they stopped at the door and tapped.The long face, hushed voice, message—call or you’ve got one—a killer more deadly that instant than any instrument or means devised for it.This has not been life since. Not without mommy without boy. Flew in, confessed, went to the funeral.You got enough cousins you’re hardened to it; they keel over like flies. Every last one of them shook his head like a cop, not believing a word. Got a late start. Couldn’t find my pockets couldn’t find my keys. Car blew up, took a wrong turn.We sat at the table and drank coffee and waited for the paper and while we waited talked, never questioning the other, only oneself. She loved you very much. Yes. She was a good woman. Yes. She was a good mother. Yes, she was. She was a good Christian and good wife and you loved her very much. Yes yes yes yes! Who stating/who agreeing this hypothetical bullshit who knows and what difference can it possibly make? Don’t you know love don’t you know hate? Having but the one is impossible it’s the way they’re made. Hypocrisy lies deceit treachery faithlessness all those lie there within that touching ground called love called hate and there and only there can they breathe fester and procreate. More love. More hate. Ever feeding one the other. One dies then so goes the other. Night and day. Hahaha. Life and death. Hahaha. So true so true, you can’t escape. Mommy. Murder just let her die. Boy. Murder just let her die. Back when we were one, our one near year as one.That battle stank before it had begun. Now she comes creeping over the night for you for me. Mommy. Son.Take you back in or die.You. And you never loved him? You bet. Lot of it.

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And hate, surely you must have hated some? Some of that.All the time. And so they came together, love and hate? Layer and the cake. And you took out your knife and had a slice? Yum yum. I drive and drive now, I’m not really sure why. Looking for these plains of course and ways to come up on them.Thousands of ways of course but for this account let’s have but the simple four. Coronado came from the east, the first of our kind to come.They traced a great arc in doing so, these shiny sharp conquerors, that form I so favor, the arc, then retraced it going back.Actually it looks more like a big backwards question mark, the dot Tenochtitlán and up New Spain’s west coast into what’s now Arizona, the sharp turn east, New Mexico, will be, and out onto el llano estacado, they called them, these plains, staked plains—that made the mark’s hook. There they were to wander about for a time, everybody getting lost and going mad and then everybody understanding that out on these plains—like a sea they were, not a shrub or tree or rise or fall to the land or any other guide to go by—there is no getting lost as there is nothing to find.And that drove everybody crazier yet. Read all this in Coronado’s own words. Fraid it didn’t do that much for me.To be fair to Coronado, it was only a letter, not even that, a report to his regent and one probably did not grow terribly personal in such documents. Still it was all pretty much went there/saw that, postcard stuff, nothing really very interesting at all, beyond being there first, but for that bit about wandering about lost and mad on these plains for they could think of no other way to be or place to go. Cuz Max’s actually quite good book is some better but not entirely nor exactly what one needs here. How it was. How it had been. I’m the only one around here who knows that now. How these plains now lost forever or for a pretty long time were, how they were before we came.The Four Section Pasture, we called it. Couldn’t have been more than eleven, for that’s when we moved into town, and Dewey dropped by for me there that late summer late afternoon at the old Home Place, we were still there then. Dewey must’ve been seventeen or so, last year in highschool, but he had the mien and manner of a man, somebody forty. But then these ranch kids had that about them. At twelve some of them could look like men. And talk and act it too. Something about horses and cows, I suppose, that makes you

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gray quick.While dragging a plow around, ever a child playing at cars, buddenbudden or maybe uddenudden, two schools of thought there. Had his horse trailer hooked onto his old pickup and he got into the thing and got the horses out without getting stepped on or didn’t say anything about it. There were two of them, all saddled and ready. Now Wamba considered all this not entirely unlike early circumnavigation, while Coolie figured not simply trailering the horses straight on over to the Four Section an extravagance. But Dewey knew his mind and went around doing cowboy things, tying on saddlebags and bedrolls and getting us some guns and clanky cooking things for we would be camping out the night. Didn’t think—or certainly never said such—I needed a hand up, but the way Dewey performed the operation, not cupping hands fingers interlocked, like you were a little kid, instead when I raised a boot he simply put hand under riding heel and tossed me up into the air and I came down on the saddle or some part of it. I liked my little chestnut mare, some, and she, Button, liked me, some, while Dewey’s black gelding Charlie hated him, me, Button and the rest of the whole wide world. There occurred some discussion of gaits and we were off. Dewey walked us a while, about a hundred yards, house, worry mom n pop still well in sight, then made tongue cluck, little rein slap and we were off into a lope that felt awfully like a dead out run gallop. Dewey grinned.The start of the making of a man. Holding onto horse saddle reins anything for dear life, you’ll never trust anyone again. This had not been mentioned in the agenda, not to me mom or pop, that when we arrived Four Sections there would be full-scale party aloose or preparations for it heating up.There was even a chuck wagon, along with a good dozen maybe more horses and the cowboys and gals who had ridden them in, all this set out down at the playa lake that made near center of the Four Sections, this swale well out of sight of any of the county roads that framed the pasture.Think they might have been some kind of club, if not official highschool then some collection of ropers and barrel-racers, for those were the horsey pastimes practiced in these parts, come from all around. Mickey Dot Harrison, say, lived in the old rock house down in the canyon and went to highschool in Crosby, twenty miles south, couple kids from over around Toro and Roaring Springs, another twenty miles toward the east, and some from as far distant as Plano and Quitaque said Kittakway and Turkey, that country reaching way on north toward Tule Canyon and the grand Palo Duro beyond.

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Wherever from, all were at drinking beer, making fine mesquite charcoal fire beds and talking ranch. Spur saddle the price of beef.And there was some of that country boy/gal rasslin n teasin that would go on in various forms throughout the night.And there was this one couple, he from off a ways,Wadsworth maybe, she from Spur, they had been going steady so steady, the Old Folks they were called, they took their ponies and went riding away from chuck wagon and chugalug, just rode out, off to the north, riding slow, talking you could tell, sometime one pointing out something on the ground, sometimes another looking up into the sky, till they were gone from sight, dipped over the horizon. This came to me later of course, in recollection and some understanding, that their riding off, that it was that that brought me to see what and how these plains had been before we came. Disappearing, them and their horses, over the horizon, swallowed up so quick. Gone as if they’d never been. What I would come to see and see plenty of that night was teasing. It turned out fine. In the end Dewey was in control and he always knew when, had that knack, knew how far to push a kid, his teasing, and when to pull back and let him be. Not that Harrison gang, from down off the cap, Toodlum and Charlie’s kids, Roy Nell and Mickey Dot, they professed that ranchkid philosophy, let’s be regular little cowboy cowgal devils and torment this boy farmer till he goes blue. Roy Nell, she had driven the chuck wagon team up from the Harrison Place up over the cap, no mean feat, she had a softer heart than Mickey Dot, would go on to marry a jet plane engineer out in L.A. and have twins, she confined herself to giving detailed ingredients of sonofagun stew as the little kitchen helper was gagging down a brimming bowl of the disemboweled stuff delish. But Mickey Dot, this best cowboy pal of Dewey’s, you could see he had a major work planned for the dark, this rodeo prankster. So it was that heart sank, this cowboy campout night, when it came full dark and Dewey said to me, Come on out here, Roy, got something I want to show you. Come on away from the fire. Just a little walk. And I saw the red whiskey gleam in Mickey Dot’s bullrasslin eyes and knew the end was near, sag shoulder and heavy heart boy not even noticing that that cowboy gleam and grin was directed rather toward one fine little barrel-rider from up around Quanah, her tight turquoise riding trousers. We went on a way, way into the dark, away from fire and light and life, and then Dewey said we had come far enough.We could stop. How we got where we got, well Dewey was obviously following stars, but my

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mind would have none of it. How about that time Mickey Dot caught that garter snake, tied some rattle beads on it and tossed it into the Boy Scout Master’s camp tent. Or that Darden boy, dad had the Hotpoint dealership in town—after that all-nite snipe hunt he changed his name to Elvis, moved out to Reno and made a hairdresser. “What the hell is wrong with you anyway? Just lay out on the ground. Nothing out here but a bunch of crickets. Lay out there, Roy, damn you can be a fraidy cat. Open your eyes, boy. Look up into the stars. Like taking a rocket ride to the moon. Out into outer space.” And so it was. It was something like this, what Coronado and a sober lieutenant did out here on these high plains so many centuries ago.After a hard day wandering around lost and mad, they walked out away from the campfire, away from all light and noise and smell made by man and his beasts, and they lay out on their backs and they looked up and opened their eyes and rode out away then far out into a world made but of stars and the dark about them, keeping one eye open for that Mickey Dot creeping up with that hairy trantchler spider held caught in a jar just before sundown. Coronado probably had one of these jokers too. Eventually made it south, that first journey I went away from home so many years back. Not the south of my dreams.The south as far as one can reach.The polar fields, the carnivals of Rio, the watery void of the Amazon, the tramps of the Caribbean, Havana’s hotspots, not even down to the Keys, the Everglades, them gators there. No plan to that first homeleaving at all. Made that great arc first known by Coronado, went north, east, before heading into that last diving drive south; then back again, again like the conquistador, retracing steps, back, back home. Don’t know why didn’t go on, ever going on, just one day stopped heading south and by stopping began turning back. Coming back home. A turning back, back home, that has never stopped. Not even now, not till now, that one last coming home, that last drive on over to Wamba and Coolie and Chick and all the rest, that’ll be coming up soon—don’t touch that knob, give this coming back its chance.You do it too. Come on back. Leave there. Start there. Back home.You might as well never left. But no. Not quite. Coming back’s not that. Not mere staying. Never that. Leaving, coming back, that’s never home.They were both so glad to see me, the pair of them, and I had grown man enough to accept that, let it please them, thought I was man enough to let them make me boy once more. Just the one night. Coming home, that first time, coming home after that

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first time away. It was eerie close to this, this last homecoming we’ll be making, you too, me and you, going home and never coming back. Let’s go back then, come on now. It was well into fall but a fine warmish evening for that time of year, and though we’d eat indoors, Coolie and I went out back and grilled steaks and things, nothing said of my waxing sophistication, liked them bloody now, while Coolie said not much of anything at all, for you see it had begun, his not remembering, his slide chute through sanity toward madness, that slippery curling fall. Barely had chance to wave finger at busy Chick for tonight was Friday night, the big night, and even better, Homecoming Night, and she off early to band hall to go over the playbook—they scored quick on the other marching band they stood a chance. All that fine too, all right, and better too my own civilian status, the evening’s darkening sounds from stadium across town, me in the car there with Coolie and Wamba, this the first Friday night of my sporting life that I would not be playing wesTex football. Game then went well, well, not to begin. Had me sitting there between them on those blanched bleachers, prodigal son, fatted calf stuffed there between mom n dad, boy once more, coming home. But such sour stuff had not time to set in. Halftime, coming back from snack shack, drinks for three, found that Coolie had rearranged all, made it right, knowing; now mommy it would be sitting between father and son, and boy come home near like man could smile at the game, boo with all the rest, yet another of our 0-0 ties, a school tradition, it stretches back to the days there were no scoreboards, you kept it in your heads, didn’t seem any reason to chalk it up.And there were so many other good things too, that homecoming night. Halftime Chick came out now head of the marching band, no longer some mindless twirler in shorty skirt twirling dimpled shining bar around and jumping here and there; no, now came Chick, drum majorette, dressed all in tan panted suit, an arrogant furred white guardsman’s busby, a grand baton, she looked ten feet tall and so proud, now she raised her mighty staff, now brought it down, and this collection of eighty following huffy puffy band fatties came out with the most warlike cry, of brass and savage drum and clash of cymbal and jeer of pipe and fife; and all went in great dignity, their prance slow, steady, step sure and long along the field, and when they came opposite us, we her flesh and blood, one her returning bud, so elegant did Chick make her bow, the graceful lowering and not by much of her towering hat and we rose with them all and cheered this

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marching band of war, this towering pale blonde drum majorette. And too, one team was the Norther, Blue Northers, and their uniforms of that hue, icy, blue, from helmet to sock; while the Sandies, the Golden Sandstorm, our opponents for the night, their sporting outfits, jerseys, headgear, pants, that golden sand of such storms you see in movies and nowhere else; in all my comings home, that night and all the rest, I had and have as yet to see such a clash of color and lousy football as they made that night, the Northers and the Golden Sandies. Did well at mommy’s funeral, I’ve been told. Didn’t go over any coffins or storm up and deliver great speeches of horror and memorial or think very seriously of doing so. Quiet. Quiescent.Wandered about the graveyard as if it were a garage sale. Found a flower on another grave and when this worthless coat had no buttonhole or had one and they had sewed it up or it had been a fake buttonhole from the start, went and put pilfered flower behind ear and did me a tippitytaptap like Carmen. Went “Grrrrrrrrr” in the back of throat when Brother Pal approached, hand out, going to take my flower away or maybe toss me to the ground. It was a rose. One of the small ones. Dusted red and dusted white.They only came for me once that day.There when you file by the open pit, you take up a handful of sod and toss it gently in, then it was I wadded mine and hummed one down the middle. They were watching, from over toward the back, back over beyond the shady trees. It could’ve only been the undertaker. As I was running for my life back into town, hurdling field and stream, he pulled his big white hearse up alongside and beeped the horn and smiled and waved. Had a free seat going back in, I suppose, probably most always did. Made a mistake back there, at the very beginning, you probably noticed. Got the towns wrong.The town this bar is in.Thought Hubbard and it’s Monterrey. Not much difference tween them true less you are going somewhere then you’re going to get it all wrong. Like murder mommy or maybe straight on to the cemetery. No longer makes one whit of difference to me. Can live with either—me or mommy. But you got to get it right, living ain’t on the mind, burning in the heart. See, if you are in Hubbard the cemetery is 50 mi NE mas o menos, whereas it is 120 S of Monterrey.These are the only two big towns up on the plains. That count for anything and have bars. It’s what caused the trouble

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between me and the bartender, a nice guy.When he kept telling me to go one way, when I knew mommy murder or cemetery would be more or less the other, I thought he was trying to get rid of me. Of course now I know he was only telling me not to do it, mommy or me, that it simply was not worth it. Just leave us be, the both. MurdMom. SooSideBoy. He’s down at the other end of the bar now. It’s late.Almost dark. He’s helping out some kid down there. Some kid like me. He’s just now coming home and he’s so afraid.This kid, frail white thing, skinny white arms,T-shirt, closecrop hair, smoking like a train, so young, afraid.The bartender, you wouldn’t think this old guy would care, so many of them don’t, but he does. He knows this guy, a pal of his.This pal’ll help the kid get himself a job. He advises too. Sure, go back and see the young wife, as young and white and afraid as he. He’s done time too, the old bartender.The brig. They talk like that. Sailors or a marine.The kid smokes and takes a number and makes a call. On the private phone.The bartender lifts it up from under the bar. He lets the kid come around behind the bar to make the call.The job.Then the young wife, so young and white and afraid it won’t be him. Call ’em both, take your time. Makes the kid another Coke, the bartender, ice, slice lemon, on the house, and now comes back down to me. It’s late.That’s fine.Time to go, see? It’s all done. Slaved and slaved but now it’s right. Couple names dates places, maybe a line of poetry, some quote. Something about grass.That’s it. let it come back to grass again and night be dark He takes it up and smiles. It’s right. It’s late.Time to go.Wads it up like all the others, rough drafts, all soggy and scribbled, and tosses toward the big green barrel down there at the end. Tosses it soft. Underhand. Easy. Like pitching horseshoes the stakes the shoes all brittle candycane, like a girl pitches the ball, what’s the point of pitching it can’t be hit, like you’d toss a pup a bone. Easy. Underhand. Don’t want him to bump his new tender nose. Who knows what the last thing will be, maybe something like that, cornball. It’s tricky, the mind. So much quicker than hand and speedy bullet. Can change its tune before shell screws out the barrel.Why I’ve come here, let’s lie face down in such short grass. Be good it’s that, grass.The last thing. But see there comes a sound beyond. Insects burring. A spray plane maybe, two of them. Did not think it the season for such chemical

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warfare. See. Off on a tangent again.They’re yellow, biplanes, the old WWI types, paint bright grasshopper yellow and green and some red trim, tails red, wingtips crimson too, like talons, like blood, all bright against the

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coming storm of night. Oh don’t they scoot along the ground like cars running so quick over the earth, then to rise up to turn, to turn and come back.They come up so sharp and steep and slow, that half 8 they make up into the sky, there to twist, tumble and turn back to spray the next row needing it. Like birds they are, playful, angry, vengeful, green and yellow jays, their beaks dripping red, now turning in the sky to fall back to earth to tease the cat, the old tom crossing the street.They also use the fur to make their nests warm and comfy. See. Even with face flat into grass— gone.There is no way out. Simply cannot fence her in, the mind. Grass, the night gone black, I do not think it will be they who’ll be coming with me, the last thing. We woke wrong. I woke first, usually do when it is blue, and Coolie, I suppose, had crept in to turn on the heater. Blue and the red lectric coals of the small heater. Their voices off away someplace, behind, beyond, mumbled, so not to wake the kids. I woke again. Yellow now, white drained yellow, outside the window a leeched brown. Nothing blue.The little heater whirred on but its red was gone, couldn’t see it anyway.The house was still.The car had come too early, still early in the morning, to do us good. Even Chick, she knew. Sat staring there in bed.The car, its front part, showed in the window. A dull slick red. Had been ours once. We knew. The brother got out of the car and stood and looked away. Coolie went out to him.They stood looking away. One stood telling, the other being told, that he was dead. She had now come to us, not us, just into the room. She crept to the window and crouched to watch. She knew. The brother was dead. The men came toward us, came into the house. She went away, to them, howling like storm. He was dead. Came to them howling like coming storm, howling out happylightbreathlovelonginglife till it all was gone and would not ever be coming back again not happy nor light nor breath again. Fun’s done. Doom in the room. So it seemed for little Chick. I was doing something, maybe making a list as with all this howling it seemed we might be getting the morning off, but Chick, she lay back in bed and looked at the ceiling, all such howling sweeping through the house. Lying back as she would come to be, first mad, then dead, lying there in coffin, on couch, so long and white and quiet, lying and looking at the ceiling, at nothing, the howling then of her mind gone mad, her mind gone dead, the howling now roaring through the house like maelstrom, flashfire, come to bring us down. “Want to play some jacks?” 309

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If anything would do it, bring her back to life, this detestable girls’ game would do it. Had never got past the twosies and that cheating to beat the band. We crouched in that space between our beds, that those who howled out in the rooms beyond might not see us when their howling came to us, not at first anyway. “You start.” I rolled the ball to Chick. She smiled. tossscoopcatch tossscoopcatch comebackdontdontgogoaway come back I’ll make it rightandgoodjust dont go be deadandgone and goneaway ohpleasepleaseplease just stay ohstay stay stay stay tossscoopcatch tossscoopcatch

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“It looked like it had been written on a bar napkin.”

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Plans are on W coming in around 300pp and IMM’ll be about half of that, no more, and the third section, 2-Toe, if he ever gets down to it, if he even remembers, won’t be half of that, not near it.A winding down, some healing to it maybe.“It looked like it had been written on a bar napkin,” the final section, but a few lines. Couple names, couple places, couple dates. Maybe some quote of poetry. Rough draft of an epitaph. And yeah there’s a map on the back, so you won’t get lost. Nothing out there but grass and bugs now. Directions. How to get in, how to get out. Comes dark pretty quick around here this time of year.

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