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  “Just having fun. He’s got a friend with him.”

  “Fun? Doesn’t sound like fun to me.”

  “I’ve never seen her before, actually. This girl.”

  “Yeah, well, tell him if he doesn’t find a way to keep the noise down, I’m calling the cops.”

  “Okay.”

  “You tell him that.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve got enough to worry about without his shenanigans.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I closed the door and bolted it. Felicity kept on, but now her screams became short little cries of mercy. My father stayed silent. Maybe his lips kept moving. He was always moving his lips as though talking to someone invisible. They still didn’t seem to know I was there. I pulled on my jeans and snuck out the back door, barefoot.

  It was cold when I hit the ground. Just getting dawn. Behind our rooming house was a long black rail yard going off to Stanley and Bingham. It diminished into blinking neon and brakeman’s signals. They were loading secret metals that someone told me were being sent out to Los Alamos and Alamogordo. The cargo were hissing and groaning as they waited. The smells of donuts, steam, waffles, and coffee spilled out across the busted-up yard and into the vast dark desert. Speechless men hauled huge heavy boxes on iron wheels across the gravel. Now and then, one of the forms would emit a nod or a groan, but the world remained enigmatic, shrouded, and unspeakable.

  I followed the same rules of geographic orientation as if I were walking alongside a quiet river. On the way out I would keep the tracks on my left shoulder, and on my way back keep them on my right. Long as I used the tracks to guide me, I’d never get lost. Simple. I followed the long iron snake until the commercial lights of downtown receded to dots. My steps became louder. Lizards and little animals darted away. I tried to keep to the smooth cool sand but bullthorns and shattered bottles tortured my bare feet. Little soft patches of cooch grass gave me momentary respite until some thorn or nail punched through and finally I had to retreat. The iron rail still held heat from the day before and I found myself hopping back to town on the creosoted ties.

  Once I reentered the nest of pink neon and green beer ads I looked for a light in the window of our boarding room. I imagined I saw it from that distance. I imagined I saw my dad frying bacon but maybe not. Maybe I was making something up. A solid life of uncertainty.

  Squad cars surrounded the rooming house. Swirling blue lights. Mrs. Hynes was standing on the front porch surveying the goings-on with her little dog yapping in her arms and a sweater thrown over her shoulders against the early-morning chill. She had the grim look of someone watching the aftermath of a road accident. Felicity was standing on the sidewalk wearing a sheet, teeth chattering, sobbing, as a female officer tried to keep the top of the sheet closed tightly around Felicity’s huge breasts. Purple mascara ran down her cheeks. The lady cop escorted her into one of the squad cars, which immediately sped off with its siren wailing. A woman in a long pink coat was yelling at my father, who was in his boxer shorts, smoking a cigarette. A cop stood on either side of him, squeezing on his bare elbows, then handcuffed his wrists behind his back. The woman in the pink coat kept yelling things like “Cocksucker!” and “Bastard!” while the cops placed him in the back seat of another squad car and protected the top of his head from hitting the doorframe. Which I thought was a really strange gesture since they were already doing severe damage to his character. Now, all the police cars sped off with their sirens screaming, following my father as though he’d just shot the president. Mrs. Hynes went back inside with her dog and shut off the porch light. The woman in the long pink coat kept crying and going in little circles, searching through her deep pockets for more crumpled Kleenex. Her lips were moving. She was talking to someone far away. She bent down and took off both her high heels. She dangled them from one finger as she weaved away from me, down Trace Street.

  Purple as Blue

  You know what it is, don’t you? It’s the blue mascara. Why that color, for instance? Blue? Crying? Why crying? You asked for it. It was you all along. I told you—mess with an older man, you’re asking for trouble. I told you that and you didn’t believe me, did you? Why else would you go out and buy blue mascara? Deliberately. Why would you hang around? He’s an older man. I told you and you didn’t believe me, did you.

  Castles in the Moonlight

  She simply walked out on me, this last one—not Felicity—(I’ll think up a suitable name for her later), this young Girl—let’s call her that for now. Not the “wife” or “wives,” as it were, but another one, extremely young, for my age, that is. Something in me can’t quite believe it. Anyway, one bright morning there she was, like an apparition from the forties, standing at attention with her red Naugahyde suitcase ready to roll. Point-blank. In the kitchen, too, before I’d even had a shot of coffee, she told me in a sort of whispered monotone that she thought she was “leading me on.” That was her phrase, like something disconnected to her essence was somehow seducing me beyond her volition. Some ghost of herself. I found it a little hard to believe and began flailing around in my short memory for some other clue, some transgression I might have committed at the breakfast table. In any case, I put up no big objection—the more I protested, the more convinced she might become. She told me she was going off to see her aunt in San Francisco. Some “aunt”—flying that very morning. “Adios.” I lost what little composure I could summon and asked her why this sudden departure when we hadn’t even had time to settle in. She told me it had to do with my polishing off more than half an ornate bottle of mescal the night before, including the ropy worm, and plunging into long rambling associations of joint suicides from the medieval past, mainly Heinrich von Kleist and his young mistress, Henriette, on the banks of a gigantic lake lapping softly through the night while the little German town in the distance slept soundly. No lights. Just the distant silhouettes of castles in the moonlight. Maybe this could all be true. Her huge brown eyes were full of conviction. We are from totally different eras, after all. Time has marooned us, without feeling.

  Succubus

  Another morning, before this Girl came along, something was crouched on my chest—curled up there like a cat, but it wasn’t. I awoke very cautiously, careful not to disturb the creature, barely breathing for fear the thing might spring at my face. Maybe some kind of phantom or—succubus, is that what they call it? In any case, the One who distributes destinies and nightmares, That One. Female, for sure. Curled up like it was the warmest place in the house, eyes focused on the wall above—yellow eyes—posing for someone taking a picture of her with an iPhone, maybe. She wore a leering grin like one of those cat demons in a Goya drawing that seem without motivation. Black eyes, Pacino dead eyes. I didn’t feel panic but I could feel all the signals of alarm going off inside me. Little electric jolts through my shoulder and ears. Stinging with “prickly heat.” I watched her down the length of my nose without moving my head. I didn’t try to touch her or shoo her away. I wanted no sudden hysterics; no thrashing around that might turn into accidental slashing or biting. A deep throbbing drone came from her neck, but still this was unlike any domestic cat I’d ever come across. I remembered seeing a rare strip of black-and-white footage, taken maybe in the twenties, of the last captured Tasmanian devil before that species became extinct (or has it?), but it was unlike that monster as well. Not as big. No stripe. This was simply a lurking presence that happened to inhabit a feline shape. I just watched for a long, long time as she slowly rotated her head from left to right, then, I suppose, she’d had enough of whatever warmth I was emanating and slunk off, weasel-like, dissolving into the folds of the hallway. I lay still for a while, feeling cold drafts sift through the room. I listened to the thermostat click over. Not moving seemed important. Maybe I had turned to stone.

  Blackmail Dialogue

  “I’ve been recording all our phone conversations, you know.”

  “What?”

  “All these years. Yup.
”

  “With a tape recorder, you mean? Like a detective?”

  “Well—”

  “How long? We haven’t known each other that long.”

  “A long, long time.”

  “Oh God.”

  “There’s nothing to be ashamed of. They’re very beautiful.”

  “What are? No—”

  “The conversations.”

  “What are you going to do with them?”

  “Put them in a book.”

  “A book?”

  “By me.”

  “By you?”

  “By me.”

  “What about me?”

  “All right, coauthored by you and me, then.”

  “I don’t want to be a part of this!”

  “I’ve already got them typed up.”

  “Oh no!”

  “They’re beautiful! You’ve said some beautiful things over the years.”

  “No, I haven’t. I’ve said nothing beautiful! Nothing I’ve said is of any importance.”

  “You have.”

  “It hasn’t been years, either.”

  “Over the one year, then.”

  “What, for instance?”

  “All the descriptions of my pussy.”

  “No!”

  “All the stuff about your penis.”

  “No, no, no, no, no.”

  “The way it stands up and throbs and gets all juicy.”

  “Listen—”

  “My pussy and your penis—beautiful!”

  “Oh God—NO!”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Who would be interested?”

  “Plenty of people.”

  “No! No one.”

  “You said my pussy was like a pomegranate, for instance.”

  “No, I didn’t! I never said that!”

  “ ‘Multifaceted,’ you called it.”

  “NO!”

  “Multifaceted and ubiquitous.”

  “Ubiquitous?”

  “It goes on forever. All at once.”

  “Stop!”

  “No—”

  “Please stop!”

  “My pussy will go on forever! All at once. That’s what you said. Do you want to meet up and I’ll show them to you?”

  “What?”

  “The conversations.”

  “You’ve got them all written down? Hard copy?”

  “Of course.”

  “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “No meeting. I want you to stay as far away from me as possible.”

  “But why?”

  “Your age, for one thing. How old are you, anyway?”

  “Very young.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “No one cares.”

  “Everyone cares. It’s illegal.”

  “Why are you so afraid of breaking the law?”

  “You’re the one who should be afraid of the law.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Oh no? Plagiarism?”

  “What’s that?”

  “To pass someone else’s work off as your own.”

  “It’s both of ours.”

  “It’s not! It’s neither! It’s not even work. It’s talk.”

  “There are some beautiful things in there—beautiful moments.”

  “There’s nothing in there of any intention.”

  “Sometimes the most beautiful things are purely accidental.”

  “That stuff was never intended to be recorded, let alone written down! Plagiarism is what it is. Pure and simple.”

  Famous Golfer

  I wonder what finally drove her to make this call? There’s no doubt she’d been thinking about it for some time. Plotting. She’d made her mind up to confront me with it. The idea that our casual conversation might have some merit—even literary value. The whole thing was outrageous. Why? “Ambition” was easy to come up with, but did she really think it was that easy? A nineteen-year-old girl? What made her first think it up? Maybe it was my invitation for her to stay in my guest room. It could have been that. Little did I know. When I was nineteen, I certainly had ambition, but I wanted to be a famous golfer, not a literary figure. I didn’t want to be nearly as famous as, say, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, or Gary Player or any of the ten best back then. I simply wanted to be on the professional tour and in the hunt. One of those young guns who’s always threatening but just not “there” yet. A great putter and chipper. (I was known for my short game.) The literary world was way over my head anyway. Mailer, Capote, Nabokov. How would you ever begin a conversation with one of those nuts? I know nothing about butterflies, hand-to-hand combat, or whisperings of the Deep South. Maybe she just wanted to be associated with me. Maybe she thought she could just short-circuit all the toil and sweat and jump right to the juicy stuff: bright lights, Tony Awards, limos with Russian drivers who don’t speak English. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just wish yourself to be famous—like you had some genie at your command? It didn’t matter what your “artistic state” was—whether you had something to “say” or not—whether or not you had an ax to grind, politically or otherwise. You just one day wind up famous and that’s that. Look—I’m famous! Can you see me glitter? Can you see my spangles? I don’t deserve it, but then, who does?

  Early Anthropology

  Last night he was struggling on brittle knees to light a fire. He remembers. He remembers that much. Lighting stick matches to balls of crumpled outdated obituaries from The New York Times (he still had the habit of dipping into the Sunday section now and then). Blazing piñon and cedar while she sat, propped up on his leather couch with her taut knees sticking out and running on about Android Genocide, Virtual Videos, Driverless Google Trucks, Collective Mind Particles, Dolphin Vision—things like that. Running them all together loosely, end on end, in a kind of tapestry of association that he found bewildering to follow. He nodded acknowledgment, pretending to track her train of thought while watching an early anthropologist’s face flare up in flames. Some guy who once discovered an unheard-of tribe in New Guinea back in the distant sixties—untouched by European influence. Wild, naked people, running around with spears, attacking neighbors—raiding, pillaging, kidnapping, killing at random. Coming at the time it did, this discovery was concurrent with the Tet Offensive, which seemed to be the only issue of real importance back then—monks going up in blue flames, pistols point-blank to the head, orange serpent napalm waves erupting through the jungle. Turns out, through further studies by this extinguished scientist, the cannibals’ entire motivation was simply to acquire young females. Girls. That was what was behind all this. Girls.

  In any case, I wasn’t trying to suggest that she and I should try joint suicide. I hardly even know her. Just take guns and blast each other’s brains out. That’s ridiculous.

  Sheet of White Paper

  Finally, desperately, I told her I was ready to make a deal. I didn’t feel so old, I just looked old, I told her. I looked slightly ridiculous in my thermal socks, too, I admitted that. She made no gesture of recognition. Kept her head low. Mute. I’d just come out of a long relationship of insipid stalemate and now, I said, negotiation seemed appealing. She could go ahead and fly to San Francisco to visit this “aunt” of hers (there was nothing I could do about it anyway), but then, if she decided to come back, I promised no more agave and I would completely refrain from any mention of suicide—joint or otherwise. I wasn’t begging, either. She told me she would consider it but she was definitely going. I nodded. She’d had enough. “Fine,” I said, “that’s all I’m looking for—that’s all I want—a little consideration.” She almost smiled. “Just do me one kind favor and return the rental car to the rental place down off the highway. We’ll definitely stay in touch.” Again, no answer. I made no attempt to even peck her paternally on the forehead. She took off in the early-morning mist in some front-wheel-drive Japanese job, looking very small behind the wheel.

  I went on about my business,
although rattled. My hands shook. I kept everything in and resisted the sensation that aloneness brings sometimes—to let everything out. I did my usual stuff after she left, although her eyes kept popping up in front of me. Her huge brown eyes. I poured coffee into my favorite cup that said “Weed, California” on one side, a red bucking horse on the other. I sat at the little Mexican table, looking out at birds feeding on black-oil sunflower seeds. Juncos scratching then stopping abruptly, listening as though to something they’d never heard before. Now and then, the giant scrub jay would sweep in and take over, causing all the little ones to flee, just like those helpless villagers in a Kurosawa film. I remember asking her one morning if she’d ever heard of Kurosawa. She hadn’t. I was not surprised.

  I pulled myself together by doing some arm and shoulder exercises I’d learned from a theater director. The landline rang, and it was her again. I was glad to hear her kid-like voice. She was at the car rental place and couldn’t find the drop box for the ignition key. I imagined her standing there by the side of the highway, the key dangling from one finger. Her waist. It was still early and the place wasn’t open yet. I asked her how she was going to get to the airport from there and she said some boyfriend was going to pick her up and drive her. “Some boyfriend?” I said.

  “Oh, here it is. I found it. Never mind.” Evidently, she’d just discovered the key drop. “I’ll call you from San Francisco,” she said, and hung up.

  I decided to take the little red beat-up Tacoma down to have breakfast at Manny’s Roadhouse, then pick up a load of dry cedar for the kitchen chiminayo. I like the redness of cedar and the way it smells once you’ve got it roaring. At first, I thought the truck wasn’t going to turn over in this sudden cold snap but it turns out I hadn’t pressed the clutch all the way to the floor. One of those safety devices built into the ignition system in case you’re dumb enough to start it in gear. I left the dogs to roam on their own and took off down the frozen dirt road. Ravens were pulling the stringy guts out of a squashed rabbit and seemed very reluctant to get out of the way. I didn’t slow down.