Jack's Boys - MNArtists.org

Jack’s Boys 

a novel by 

Michael Ramberg 

Michael Ramberg 

2922 California Street 

Minneapolis, MN 55418 

612-788-6833 

mramberg@visi.com

Jack’s Boys Ramberg Page 2 of 228 

Part I 

1. 

Jack’s Boys 

There were several years where I didn’t think about Jack, my father, much at all. But 

understand: All my life he’d been no more than a drunken bully infected by wanderlust who, 

after periodic short desertions, had abandoned us one final and permanent time by dying. So I 

punished him the only way you can punish a dead man, by removing him from my thoughts 

altogether. And I did not allow his return until the third spring after his death, when I found 

myself in the undignified aftermath of a brief and embarrassing relationship. My younger brother 

Theo was involved as well, of course, because interfering in my life has long been a hobby of 

his. One day while we were having lunch, he mentioned to me that he thought Jack’s father 

might still be alive somewhere. 

“Betcha he’s still out there kicking around,” was what he said, forcing the words through a 

mouth half-filled with roast beef sandwich. He challenged me with an intent stare, his jaw still 

working, then pulled a slug of Coca-Cola through a straw stuck in a 32-ounce waxed paper cup. 

I took a drink myself as I considered this new option, that Jack’s Dad might be alive. It was 

entirely possible, of course. When he’d died Jack had been in his mid forties and hadn’t said 

much one way or the other about even having a father. But because I hadn’t thought of it first I 

said, “I don’t think so.” I was often jealous of Theo’s observational skills, and somewhat


resentful. Six years younger than I am, it was a continual sore spot for him to be constantly 

pointing things out to me. Lunch had been his idea as well. It was a Sunday afternoon and he’d 

simply shown up at my apartment door, as Theo sometimes does, and told me we were going to 

lunch, and that I was paying. 

“But consider it,” said Theo. “Just think about it.” He scratched his cheek, inspected and bit a 

ragged fingernail. Taking his time, knowing that eventually I would see things his way. He 

glanced around at the other customers in the restaurant, a dimly lit deli near the University only a 

few blocks from my apartment building. The room buzzed with the white noise of foreign 

conversations, of intimacies being passed against the anonymity of a crowd. A television stood in 

one corner, flickering silently through a series of commercials. Theo said, “There’s no reason we 

should think he’s dead, just because Dad never talked about him. It’s more likely they were just 

pissed at each other.” 

“Jack told me his Dad was dead.” 

“He did not.” 

“Sure he did. Heart attack. Decades ago.” 

“Blah blah blah. Not true.” 

“So, what, you have secret information?” 

“Okay, he said something like that. But he said heart failure, not heart attack. And that’s what 

Jack always said about people who were still alive but had become huge disappointments. He 

said it about Uncle Davey the multiplex manager. He said it about half the poets in the world. He 

said it about Ginsberg, remember? He said Ginsberg hadn’t written any decent poetry since his 

heart failed and he joined the staff at Brooklyn College.”


Sure I remembered Jack’s rants about heart failure. I remembered him standing in the living 

room, his jacket flying about with the waving of his arms, rambling about the great ocean of 

poets whose hearts had stopped but whose pens kept moving. I pushed the image from my mind 

and said, “I remember heart failure. But I heard heart attack.” 

“You’re missing the bigger picture. It was the same thing to him. Besides, I checked the 

phone book. According to Ma Bell, there’s a Lawrence LaFleur living on Riverside Drive in 

Binghamton, New York, at this very minute.” 

“Coincidence,” I said. 

Theo took his eyes from the television, shifted his weight around and dug into the inside 

pocket of his jacket. I squinted briefly at the shirt he was wearing — old red gingham with small 

mother of pearl snaps — to make sure it hadn’t once been one of mine. Like most third children 

Theo had grown up in hand-me-downs, but unlike most of them he hadn’t outgrown the habit, 

and every once in a while I would still drag boxes of clothes I hadn’t worn for a while out to my 

mother’s house in Clear Lake, the suburb where we’d grown up. He’d go through them, take 

what he wanted, give some to his friends and take the rest to Goodwill, where he’d pick through 

the piles of what other people had brought in. He shopped at garage and estate sales, any place 

with second-hand clothes. It must have been at one of these places that he got this shirt. He was 

also wearing a black motorcycle jacket I had never seen, a style I wouldn’t have suspected Theo 

might want to adopt. He fished in the inner pocket for a second and then came out with a pack of 

cigarettes. “Don’t tell Mom,” he said. “You know how she worries.” 

I said, “Oh boy, new bad habits. Well, you’ll have your whole life to quit, I guess.” Theo was 

eighteen, about to finish high school. He had a place waiting for him at St. Olaf College in the 

fall, an enrollment he was making serious threats about not accepting. His hair was short and


dark, several shades darker than my own hair, which I liked to keep long to hide my round, 

babyish face. Every once in a while Mom used to tell us that we had different fathers, though she 

didn’t mean she’d had an affair. What she meant instead was that in the years between my sister 

Kelley’s birth and Theo’s, some fundamental change had come over Dad, and though I suspected 

what she meant was that those were the years Jack went from being a heavy drinker to being an 

alcoholic, I never pushed her to be more specific. Instead I used to tell her that she was crazy. I 

had dad’s nose and mouth, Theo had his eyes. We were and always would be Jack’s boys. 

“Mom can’t say anything,” said Theo. “She’s back up to a pack a day.” 

“Can I say lung cancer? Can I mention emphysema?” 

“They’re linking it to colon cancer now, too. And how’s that love life, by the way? What 

happened to that A.J. girl?” 

I must have looked startled, because he smiled smugly. Our conversations often progressed 

like this, as if we were keeping score, and now he collected his points and sat back. I answered, 

“She doesn’t want anything to do with me. She has a boyfriend in Milwaukee. We’re supposed 

to take her out to lunch tomorrow, the whole damn editorial staff. It’s her last day interning.” 

“Too bad Dad’s not here any more. He knew ways to get around boyfriends. Remember 

Carol?” 

I thought about it, looking at the customers lined up in the aisle, shifting their weight from 

foot to foot and talking among themselves. “No.” I said. 

“In Denver. He told it a hundred times.” 

“I guess I do now,” I said. “But to hear Dad tell it there wasn’t a way, as such. Things just 

happened around Dad.”


The smoke from Theo’s cigarette curled upwards, broke into threads and dissipated slowly 

into the corners of the delicatessen. He exhaled out of the corner of his mouth in much the same 

way Jack used to, a slightly self conscious exhalation while his eyes focused on tapping ashes 

into a small stamped out metal ashtray. A show came on the television, and five seconds after it 

started Theo said, “It’s the one where Carla dates the professor.” 

“What?” I said. 

He pointed at the television. “Cheers re-runs,” he said. 

“Oh,” I said. 

Theo had always had a fascination with television. He studied the tones of the screen, the 

pixilation of form, the quality of production and subtle implications of set design and blocking 

patterns. When he was five he noticed that one of the networks consistently filmed their soap 

operas on darker sets than the other two, and a few years later he managed to learn which shows 

had been videotaped and which were recorded on film. By age seven had managed to sort 

network programming from the affiliates’ and before he’d turned ten he had deciphered the rules 

of syndication. We called him the television savant and were secretly worried that his watching 

habits would stunt his emotional growth. 

“I bet he’s still alive,” Theo said. “I’ll bet you on it.” 

“Who?” 

“Come on,” he said. “Pay attention. Larry LaFleur, Senior. Who did you think?” 

We left the deli and walked to Fourth Street, where Theo had parked his car by a meter he’d 

neglected to fill. After he’d tucked the parking ticket in his pocket and driven off, I followed a 

habit I had recently picked up and boarded a bus bound for downtown Minneapolis. It took the


most direct route, across the Washington Avenue bridge and past the Metrodome, and when I got 

off the bus I was in the heart of the steel and glass district, the glamorous shellac of a city trying 

to turn its back on prairie outpost origins for a spit-polished silicon future. From a distance, I 

knew, the city had an even, bell-curve horizon, a gap toothed bulge on the otherwise flat land 

surrounding the river. But inside, the city turned into canyons of stone and glass, and an angled 

patchwork of sun and shadow played over buildings of varied architectural distinctions. There 

were buildings here now that Jack had never seen. The sandstone and glass Norwest building, the 

geometrically indecisive First Bank Place, the AT&T building with the rosebud planes of glass 

jutting out from the top ten stories. When Jack had arrived, the tallest building was still the 

Foshay tower; when he had died the IDS tower still dominated. I thought over how he would 

have reacted to such an event, at the makeover that had taken place without regard to his 

absence, and decided it would have pleased him only as fuel for his bitter grudge against 

apparently senseless progress. Or he’d have loved it; the world’s merry march of fools, he might 

have called it. You could never tell, with Jack, which way his mind would go. 

I walked slowly through the lobbies of buildings, along cozy skyways over faded asphalt 

streets. I prowled through the glitter of Saks, the shabby grandeur of Dayton’s. I watched the old 

people in their suits and the young in their torn, worn out clothing, and then took a nearly empty 

bus home. After nightfall, from my apartment, I knew I would be able to look out west at the 

buildings I had just left, and that in the dark they would be defined as black sentinels against 

grey sky, each block enscripted with white squares of light where supposedly offices were still 

open and people were working late. It looked like a puzzle, like a giant coded binary message 

written out over the whole city in a seemingly random on-and-off of workaholics and cleaning 

crews. I had been watching it for months. Waiting for the message to finally be made clear.


2. 

The next day, after the editorial staff took A.J. to lunch I went to her office and found her 

loading a storage box with personal items to carry home. There I made one last brief and 

painfully forced attempt -- the battle of A.J.’s office -- to convince her that there was, indeed, 

some sort of love between us. The details are unimportant, even uninspired, which is to say 

humiliating. I went home to my apartment and, dejected and feeling with the right of the scorned 

suitor like the loneliest person in the world, I pushed my recliner to the darkest corner of the 

apartment and sat down with a half-hearted resolution to stay there, in the dark, for the rest of my 

life. I stared alternately out the window or at the bare walls. Or nearly bare except for some Van 

Gogh prints I had clipped from a calendar the year my father died in a hospital in Duluth, 

Minnesota, just hours after Mom, who was in the process of divorcing him, showed up, came to 

his room, and stood at the foot of his bed. I had cut out the prints that fall even before the 

calendar was made useless by the changing of the year, and I remembered (but just barely, the 

way I remembered the hospital only as the white of nurses moving wraith-like against beige 

walls) packing the prints between flat pieces of cardboard, tying them up with string and setting 

them carefully out of harm’s way. 

I sat there, imagining the apartment darkening with nightfall and getting light in the morning 

and myself watching the same sequence repeat itself over and over for a long, long time. After a 

few minutes, staring out the window at the church on the corner and at the city rising in the 

background above it, I decided Jack’s father probably was still alive. What that should mean to 

me I didn’t know. I thought of him as an old man on the front porch wondering where his son 

had gone off to. I thought of me, ignoring the memories of the man who was my father. And


things kept somehow coming back to A.J., to her off-center smile and fondness for velvet hats, 

and the only thing that made me stop thinking of her were Jack’s stories. So to get my mind off 

of A.J., or to try and beat Theo at his own game, or simply because it was time, I let myself think 

of Jack again. 

On Saturday mornings when I was little he’d take me for rides. We’d drive around the cities 

to look at far suburbs or we’d drive to the homely downtowns of Minneapolis or St. Paul where 

we’d stop at diners for breakfast, or anywhere people were gathered together, and Jack would 

make friends and find out what was going on. When we got back, we’d take walks through 

downtown Clear Lake, visiting the shops in the open courtyard where on one end stood a liquor 

store. Jack’d take me in and he’d buy a bottle of whiskey that wouldn’t last the week. 

Then we’d stop in at the barber shop where Jack would tell his stories for the tenth, or 

twentieth, or hundredth time. Sometimes it’d be slow and the barbers would be in their chairs 

themselves passing time with idle chatter about President Ford or Governor Anderson, and then 

Jack would come in and maybe we’d get a cut or maybe not. They’d talk about the folks in town 

who’d lived there forever and about the people, more every day, who’d just moved in. And 

judging by the rate of construction out beyond the highway there were more folks on the way. 

Every day it seemed a new field was cleared and roads laid down to handle the constant flow of 

trucks carrying lumber and shingles and concrete to holes in the ground that sprouted nice little 

homes like housing was simply the latest crop for the American heartland. 

It’s gonna go on forever, Jack would say. They’ll keep building these gronky little houses on 

every scrap of backyard dirt they can find. They’ll build ‘em on top of each other after that, till 

from space we look like a big prickly ball of cheap pre-fab housing.


And the barbers would laugh and one of them would say, You’d think all these folk’d be a 

good thing for downtown. Why, we’ve got a Applebaum’s grocery and Persimmon’s Department 

Store and the Arcade Theater and the Clear Lake Tavern. Plenty to do down here. 

You’d think so, said Jack. 

But downtown Clear Lake wasn’t doing well at all. There was that mall to the south in 

Maplewood that had recently opened, and the Saturday morning barber shop think tank figured 

the horde of new arrivals just headed there and forgot about this quaint little section of Clear 

Lake. There were only the old-timers who knew about it any more, it seemed. 

And Jack, who’d been a regular since the fall of 1968, which was the year he came to town 

riding shotgun in a VW microbus. He was coming north for the summer to look for a friend he 

had met in Denver when this bus found him in Iowa City. It belonged to a man from St. Louis 

who was not in the bus, because his son had taken it after a heated disagreement and headed 

north. The reason for the disagreement and the young man’s flight was a girl from Madison, 

Wisconsin, who lay on a makeshift cot in the back of the bus. She was eight months pregnant 

and spent most of her time drinking Coca-Cola and chanting Janis Joplin lyrics. They were 

headed for her parent’s house in Madison, hoping to make a home there based on trust and 

understanding and a generally more fair shake in things than they’d been getting from his folks 

in Missouri. 

In Iowa they picked up Jack and cannonballed from there, stopping only to gas up and let the 

pregnant girlfriend — she was nineteen, tops — relieve her bladder. Every fifteen minutes the 

father-to-be would point his chin at the back of the van and stare at her as the microbus drifted 

listlessly toward the edge of the road. He’d rub at his beard, a thin patchwork of dirty blond 

curls, and say, You gotta pee, Sunshine? As the wheels bit shoulder gravel she’d answer with an


uh-uh or an emphatic uh-huh which Jack couldn’t decipher but the driver could, and if it were 

necessary they’d pull over, open the doors and she’d do her thing, puddling the highway from a 

squatting position in the doorway. 

Then they’d start again, chewing up the road and spitting out exhaust. You know, man, the 

father-to-be kept saying, though three times out of four he didn’t finish the statement but let it 

dangle. He wore a tiedye under a leather vest and a beaded medallion. Jack himself wore sensible 

clothes, plain cotton shirts with collars and cuffs that he’d picked up in Kansas City thrift shops. 

Jack wasn’t with the hippies, he’d tell the barbers on those Saturday mornings. He didn’t like 

their music, he didn’t like their politics, and he for sure didn’t like their drugs. He’d seen them 

on acid and was convinced there was something evil at work there, in this drug that delivered 

psychosis disguised as liberation. Why, he wouldn’t be surprised at all if the government didn’t 

have a hand in it. It’d work perfect in their favor to distribute tasty pharmaceuticals to would-be 

political radicals in order to waylay the entire movement. No, the hippies weren’t his thing at all, 

he’d be sure to say, though he’d catch rides with them and drink their whiskey and listen to their 

stories and tell them his own. But he couldn’t figure them out, how they could be so dumb and 

feel so free. 

And the barbers would ask, So what were you doing, Jack, out there hitching rides and 

wandering like a damn fool yourself? 

And Jack would say, I was a traveler myself then. I was not yet a responsible brain dead 

citizen with mouths to feed and a lawn to tend to. Why sir, I launched my journey in 1960 and 

didn’t stop till Carrie Anderson sank her lovely hooks into me. I was gonna show Kerouac a 

thing or two, that was my so to speak philosophical underpinning. And so I got ambulatory, and 

lived a life to be proud of in every corner of America I could get to. Not that it was easy toward


the end, you see. I had to fight through hordes of these tie-dyes, like Sunshine Knocked-up and 

her boyfriend Mellow Fellow. 

Who’d be driving along and sometimes just say Far Out in a way that Jack would expect him 

to point out the window at something. He rarely did, and when he did point it was at something 

that probably wasn’t there, since Jack saw nothing but trees and fields and power poles and the 

like. 

What type of chemical have you been sampling? Jack asked. Then he had to repeat it. 

I’m on love and peace, the guy answered. And Jack laughed and handed him the whiskey 

bottle and wished it weren’t nearly empty. 

Me and my Bobby McGee, sang the girl from her cot in the back. Luh-la la, luh-la, luh lah-la 

... she went on. Looking back on it, Jack told me, it was nothing to be proud of, though I’m sure 

till their dying days all three of them — wherever they are now — are still laughing about it in 

some secret place in their heart. 

They dropped Jack at the Applebaum’s near the highway at three in the morning and sped off 

like a clipper on the winds of the American night, the boyfriend behind the wheel and Sunshine 

curled up in the back. Jack finished off the whiskey under a streetlamp and thought for a second 

about what to do. He had an address for his friend, but no map and no inclination to go 

wandering, and there was a bench right there where he could catch up on his sleep, so he settled 

in as best he could and dozed off. 

Around five in the morning, a policeman poked him in the ribs with the end of his baton. 

Jack was in the middle of a banquet dream at the time, seated at a table mounded with food, an 

all clarinet orchestra behind him playing the bridge from “Well you Needn’t” in seven-four time. 

Then he was awake in the semi-dark of flourescent streetlamps, his vision obscured by wooden


bench slats. Aftershocks of pain throbbed in his ribs. He rolled over, sat up, scratched at the 

scruff on his chin and saw a policeman hovering darkly over him, ready to give him another 

poke. Hey there, friend, said Jack. You’re gonna give me appendicitis with that thing. 

I don’t think so. 

Jack looked up, ruffled his hair, gave the cop his best smile. Seriously, he said. Knew a guy 

in Montana got appendicitis this very way. Course he’d been feeling it for a few days, then Joe 

Cop came by and with a kindly nightstick poke popped it. Ambulance came and hauled him 

away - not sure whatever happened to the guy. Though you’re right to say the nightstick didn’t 

give him the appendicitis, to speak exactly. Kind of a pre-existing condition, guess you’d call it. 

I can’t let you sleep on that bench, mister. 

What time is it? By your watch, I mean. 

Four thirty. 

Jack nodded, said, All right, then. Ninety minutes will have to do tonight. Name’s Jack. He 

stood up, offered a hand which the cop refused to shake. Judging by the cop’s babyface, rosy and 

flushed in the fifty degree chill of night, Jack figured he had five, maybe six years on the kid, 

though his eyes, small and dark and unyielding, held a desire for authority that was older than 

any one man. Jack hated to see it. Another mind caught up in the establishment, another soul for 

the machine to chew up and spit out. 

Sorry to be of trouble, said Jack. He picked up his pack and sorted through his belongings - 

tobacco, zigzag paper, half-empty matchbooks, a pocketknife too big for his pocket, a 

toothbrush, comb, and some books — and pulled out a paperback edition of Proust. I’ll just read, 

he said, sitting down and flipping open to his spot. 

Keep it moving, Jack.


I still didn’t get your name, Jack said. 

Keep it moving. 

Well, now, I can understand that a man sleeping on a park bench might be an eyesore. 

This is a respectable town, pal. 

But a man reading, and reading Proust ... well that’s a heartwarming sign, a mark of culture 

any town would be proud of. 

Please, sir... 

I’ve got a standing invitation in St. Louis, I’ll have you know, that I can sit on a park bench 

and read any time I think it’s proper. That’s how much they trust my discretion. I have a note 

from the mayor, somewhere... 

The cop exhaled through puffed out cheeks, glanced about in confusion. 

Sir cop, said Jack, leaning in to look at the cop’s name tag. Beliveau, he said. He scratched 

his chin again. You play hockey with a name like that? 

Sir... 

You look like a hockey player. Sure you do. 

Well, now, sir. I did play in high school. 

You related to the Captain of the Canadiens? 

Oh, no, sir, but it’s, you know... 

An honor to share the name, I’m sure. 

And just like that, he’d won. He’d gotten the man talking, and then he’d found the man’s 

likes and dislikes, and after that they were friends, and Jack felt triumphant. He’d pulled another 

mind from the machine, and not coincidentally talked himself out of legal troubles. They started 

in to talking about the Habs and high school hockey, at which the cop had excelled. In the end,


cop Beliveau took Jack back to the station and let him hang out in the waiting area where he read 

Proust and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and drank weak coffee until the sun came up. After 

that he was let go with the promise not to sleep on any more benches, a promise he hoped to be 

able to keep, because Clear Lake – the town, the people, the angle of the sun, the very idea of it – 

was beginning to grow on him. 

3. 

I’d met A.J. in January, when she showed up for an internship at the magazine where I 

worked as a copy editor/fact checker. The first time I met her I asked her, probably for the fifth 

time that day (I was one of the last in the office to be introduced to her) and the thousandth in her 

life, what the initials stood for. April June, she said. Then I asked her, probably for the second 

time that day and the six hundredth in her life, what had happened to May. May was my 

mother’s name, she said. I laughed my hopeful laugh, winked a barely perceptible wink and said 

I’d see her around. We saw each other often over the next few months, around the office and at a 

few happy hours, but despite the proximity, despite everything I thought I felt for her, she saw 

nothing in me strong enough to disrupt her normal romantic inclinations. 

I took her to lunch once, to a place called J.O. McRiski’s, a good-time tavern with seven- 

dollar appetizers and antique household equipment such as washboards, butter churns, and cast 

iron tongs bolted to the walls. She told me about her family, who all still lived in Appleton, 

Wisconsin. She spoke in a shy, measured voice, with frequent stretches of deep insight. I, 

kidding myself, hoped her quiet voice was hiding in a hintful way a strong attraction to me, so I 

talked to her in a confident bluster, making broad, relatively shallow statements about my job 

and its relation to the world. She was interning with the senior editor, a position conveying


prestige well beyond mine both in current responsibility and potential future earnings. You could 

tell from her confidence, from the way she casually controlled the direction of her intelligence, 

that she would be in charge, someday, of something important. Classrooms, corporations, law 

firms. 

She looked up at the stuff on the wall and said, “I always feel like I should reach out to touch 

these things, to pet them like kittens. It’s the domestication of history to mount the worst 

elements of our former life in places of recreation. That way, we can mock them.” 

“Ah, sure,” I said. 

“It turns drudgery and constraint into a quaint background noise. Actually, it’s kind of 

disturbing.” 

“Very post-modern,” I said, having a sudden urge to order a strong drink. 

A.J. said, “Don’t get me started.” 

I said, “I love you. Really.” 

She laughed. “Don’t be a dope,” she said. 

We sat quietly. I had nothing left, no more conversational gambits. Then I heard myself say, 

“My father once met Jack Kerouac.” 

“Really?” 

“So he says.” 

“When was this?” 

“1960, in California. In fact, he claims to be a character in Big Sur. In one of the early 

scenes. Kerouac hitches out to California to get away from the maddening throngs of the East 

and live a solitary life in a cabin like Thoreau. But he’s not Thoreau; after a few weeks he invites 

all his drinking buddies to come out there and they all get drunk and stay drunk. Anyway, he


gets to San Francisco and about page 63, he hears that his old cat is dead, and he of course has to 

go out drinking. He goes out with this guy named Ben Fagan and Fagan’s pal Jonesy. Jonesy’s 

my Dad. Dad claims on that day he delivered a speech about how the population explosion was 

going to require houses built on top of each other hundred of miles in the air until people from 

space with high powered telescopes would look at Earth and see a big prickly ball.” 

“That’s funny.” 

“Yeah, my Dad Jack told that story all the time. And then he ended by saying that in the book 

his speech went to Dave Wain, who got all the other great speeches in the book.” 

“That’s too bad, if it’s true.” 

“Well,” I said. “Why shouldn’t it be true?” 

“No reason,” she answered. 

Then we were quiet again, and I said, “I really do love you.” 

“Oh, God,” she said. “Just leave that alone, would you?” 

“But I do,” I said, and then I said a few embarrassing things about destiny, and feelings, and 

about how unique my current emotional state was. She stared at me. I stared back. Then she 

calmly went through the reasons why it was never going to happen. There was a boyfriend, for 

one, and for two there was a complete absence of reciprocal feelings on her part. I didn’t need a 

three, but three was that she was moving back to Wisconsin after she graduated. Before she 

could get to four I was up and gone. 

Over the next few days, and especially after my meeting with Theo started me going through 

memories of Jack, everything that had happened with A.J. became more and more frustrating in 

light of my father’s often-told stories of romantic success. There were dozens of them, it seemed. 

There were sweet beauties with sad eyes in California, surly ball-busters in New York, one


tragically obsessive schizophrenic from a small prairie town he was passing through on the way 

to someplace else. He had stories like the one involving Carol in Denver, endless variations of 

seduction and romance followed by partially-clad escapes through sticky windows with a bundle 

of clothing in one hand and enraged cuckolds a step behind in heated, relentless pursuit. 

Why him and not me? Didn’t these things get passed from father to son like eye color and the 

shape of your hand? I sat in the armchair with the skyscape of Minneapolis in front of me, a few 

hours every day. I was sulking and didn’t care. I listed the reasons I should pity myself, and then 

I went over each of them in greater detail. My descent into self-pity became in itself a primary 

reason I should pity myself. It seemed cruel that after all Jack’s excesses, my life would end up 

being, at the very best, unspectacular. 

I slept in the chair a few times, a heavy blanket tucked under my chin, and had dreams in 

which A.J. and Jack sipped tea and listened to a radio while shuffling a deck of oversized cards. 

Behind them lay a field of stones, on one wall hung a wood frame tennis racket. One morning I 

woke up after this dream and tightened the blanket around my throat against the cold and went 

back to looking out the window. At a certain point the church across the street finished services 

and people began to emerge from the building. According to the church’s display box the sermon 

for the day had been titled “Tapping God’s Magic Within You,” so I watched the aftermath of 

the service with an eye keened for evidence of this magic. Worshippers straggled out into the sun 

and turned up their collars against the cold. They chatted amiably, shook hands. Stepped into 

cars and drove away, steeped in the conventional. After a few minutes of this I realized with a 

shock that it was Sunday. 

The morning turned into afternoon. I went out and bought some things I needed, then came 

home and put them away. I lay on the floor to look at a magazine filled with pictures of celebrity


couples, but only flipped through the pages, my mind glazed with boredom. I turned on the 

television, turned it back off. Stood up, walked back to the window, thought about the things that 

might happen when I went back to work the next day. 

Then the phone rang. I turned away from the window and looked at the phone, waiting for it 

to confirm that there was a call coming in. I debated not answering. I have always hated phones 

for several reasons, not the least of which is the disadvantage of not knowing and then not seeing 

who had dialed your number and the unstated, forced intimacy with that faceless, bodiless other 

whispering into your ear. But it didn’t stop, and I didn’t want to hear my answering machine 

message, nor did I want to eavesdrop on whatever it was the caller would say to the machine 

while they thought I wasn’t listening. So when it rang again, I answered. 

It was my mother. After brief hellos, just as I was ready to pass her the standard formalities 

— health inquiries, job status — she asked if I had heard from Theo. “No,” I said. “Not since we 

had lunch a few days ago.” 

“He hasn’t been home since yesterday,” she said. “I thought he might be with you.” 

“He’s not with me. I haven’t seen him.” I thought about what he’d said a few days ago about 

Jack’s Dad being out there somewhere, and it occurred to me that there was a tiny chance that he 

was on his way to New York State, but I didn’t tell Mom that. I thought it was more likely he’d 

found a party somewhere and stayed the night. I said, “I don’t know. Maybe he’s with a friend. 

Did you call Ashley?” 

“Ashley?” 

“His girlfriend, Mom.” 

“Girlfriend? Can Theo have a girlfriend?”


Outside, another family emerged from the church, a woman leading a little pink-jacketed girl 

by the hand. I said, “Apparently so. He told me something about a girl named Ashley, he said 

they went to parties together.” 

“Parties? Ah. I see. So you think they spent the night together.” She cleared her throat, then 

began coughing, the sound becoming fainter as she courteously held the phone away from her 

mouth. “Sorry,” she said. “So. I guess this news should be making me upset.” 

“What about Kelley? Has she seen him?” Kelley, my sister. She lived with her boyfriend, a 

writer/artist, in Uptown. 

“No.” There were sounds of fidgeting in my ear, then the sound of flint striking steel, a 

sucking and exhalation as she lit up. Mom said, “I guess I could try to call a few of his friends. 

What kind of name is Ashley for a girl?” 

I said, “They’ve been naming girls Ashley for quite a while now.” 

Mom said, “Does she have another name?” 

“He didn’t say.” 

“Okay. Okay, well, I’ll call you if I find him. Okay? I mean, he’ll probably come home five 

minutes from now and I’ll have called you for nothing, right?” 

I said I agreed with her, though I wasn’t sure at all. 

That week the absence of A.J. hung about the office. Her desk sat empty except for paper 

clips and post-it pads. On Tuesday I knew where she would be — she had a class in Folwell Hall 

at two o’clock, and I had the urge to go there and track her down and try and talk to her, though I 

had no idea what I could say. Instead I stayed at work, proofreading and fact checking an article 

on a wholesale pioneer in Austin, Minnesota. He had built a fortune by transforming old


warehouses into outlet stores by the name of ReSaleCo, which the author of the article described 

as a name with “bounce, with life, the kind of alluring name that sucks customers in.” A.J. had 

bounce, and life, I thought. And I’d been sucked in. Later in the same section I found that the 

pioneer was, of all things, an orphan, which made me think of Jack. Work was obviously 

hopeless. I set down my pen and covered my eyes. 

4. 

Mom heard nothing for a few days until she’d come home from the grocery store to find a 

message from Theo. He told her that he was all right and that she shouldn’t worry, but didn’t 

give her any more information, which of course made her worry all the more. She’d been gone 

when he called, she told me. This seemed a betrayal on her part, that she’d gone out for groceries 

as if nothing was wrong. Then she became angry at Theo, her voice hard and trembling, and she 

said, “I won’t have this. I won’t have him behaving like...” She didn’t finish, but she didn’t have 

to. He was acting like Jack. 

On Thursday, late in the evening, the phone rang. After picking it up I found that my voice, 

unused since the afternoon, refused to come out. Someone on the other end said my name, and 

after clearing my throat I affirmed I was who the caller said. 

“I’m in Binghamton, New York,” said the voice. For a moment the fact meant nothing to me, 

then I remembered that it was Jack’s hometown, the town that according to his own legend he 

had left in the fall of 1959 for the allure of the open road, the city he almost never talked about. 

Still, without knowing who the speaker was, though I should have been able to guess, I was lost. 

I stammered for a response, then asked who I was speaking to. “It’s Theo,” said the voice.


Theo?” 

I collected myself, placing that fact into a framework of other facts, then I said, “My brother 

I had done this, not recognize his voice, several times before. The voice, Theo, said, “Fuck, 

yeah it’s your brother Theo. You got some chick named Theo calls you?” 

“No,” I said. “But I have a mother who’s nagging me every six hours because of my brother 

Theo who’s all of a sudden gone without a trace.” That sounded better, I thought. I was finally 

into the conversation, scoring some points. I went on: “She nearly went to the police. She’s 

calling me all the time, ‘Was it something I did,’ ‘What’s wrong with you people?’ and the 

increasingly popular, ‘I thought I was through with this kind of thing.’ What the hell are you 

doing in Binghamton, New York? How did you get there?” 

“I walked part of the way. Actually a very small part of the way. Most of the way I was 

riding in cars with other people.” 

“And how did you meet these people?” 

“Well, they stopped and picked me up.” 

“Oh, Lord. Did you walk backwards and stick your thumb up and everything? Did you hold 

up a piece of cardboard with the word Binghamton?” 

“It’s corny at first, sure. But it’s not as crazy or unsafe as you’d think.” 

“Uh huh. So, you’re there looking for Larry Senior, I take it.” 

“Yeah.” 

“He’s dead.” I felt sure of it, absolutely. 

“Well, I don’t think so. I called the number and someone answered. A woman. I asked if 

Larry was there, and she said he was sleeping.”


I said okay, attempting to collect myself since it seemed he’d turned the tide and won another 

round. I said, “You could have called him from here, you know. I have vacation coming, we 

could have driven out together...” 

“Well maybe next time we can trick out the old wood-panel station wagon and play license 

plate bingo while we get trail mix crumbs in the seat cracks, but this time I did it this way. I’m 

going there now; I figure I might as well drop in and see how he’s doing. I just had to tell 

someone. I’ll call you later.” 

“Hold on.” 

“What?” 

“Don’t think I’m trying to be negative. But what, really, if it isn’t him. What if it really is a 

different Larry LaFleur. A cousin, maybe.” 

“Matt...” 

“Theo...” A long pause, the filtered, fiber-opticized noise of cars driving on roads invisible to 

me. Cruising in the back country of wherever Theo was. 

He said, “Perhaps you misunderstand the point.” 

“Or what if it is him, and he turns out to be a bitter, twisted old man who hates his son so 

much he can’t stand the sight of you.” 

“See, I don’t get you. I don’t understand how you can think of all these possibilities and then 

decide not to find out which one is real. All those questions, Matt. Those are why I go there. It’s 

why people do things. Why they ask questions. To find out.”


“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think the only point you have is to prove Theo LaFleur is now a 

grown-up and no one can stop him, whatever whim pops into his head.” 

“Oh, Jesus. The shit your mind comes up with. If I’d wanted this lecture I’d have called 

Mom, for Christ’s sake. No, this is not about me ‘acting out.’ This isn’t about me ‘being Jack.’ 

It’s about finding the family we should’ve had all along. Or isn’t that important to you? That 

Jack never thought enough of us to introduce us to his parents? Aren’t you curious about what 

the big secret was?” 

“I never thought there was a secret. I thought he was dead. I thought they probably didn’t get 

along...” 

“Right. And I’m on the doorstep of getting answers, and all I hear from you is how bad an 

idea this is.” 

“Well, good luck to you,” I said. “Though I thought I was clear that the idea itself was fine.” 

“Okay then.” 

There was another burst on the line of that new, digitized static, a burbling hiccup in service. 

“How long will you be there? I don’t ask for myself. I ask to tell Mom that I asked you.” 

“I don’t know. Tonight, maybe tomorrow.” 

“What’s it like out there?” 

“Grey. It looks like it’s going to rain.” 

“All right then.” 

“All right then.” 

And we hung up the phone. 

5.


Thinking of Theo walking through the streets of Binghamton, I couldn’t help but think of the 

way Jack must have walked through the streets of Clear Lake on those three spring days in the 

late sixties. A young man in a transitional season engaged in scanning the streets of an unfamiliar 

city far from home, noting landmarks and street signs, thinking of things as he’ll need them for 

future reference. Jack had gone to Clear Lake to see Davey Anderson, my mother’s older 

brother, who he had met in a bar in Denver when Davey was out there visiting a girl he knew and 

Jack was there doing the things he did. After leaving the police station, Jack grabbed breakfast at 

Popsie’s Diner, then followed the instructions a waitress had been kind enough to give him until 

he was at Davey’s address. He checked it against the hastily scribbled marks on half a cocktail 

napkin Davey had given him in Denver, then looked up at the house again, a sixty year old 

colonial recently converted from boarding house to apartment building, a flimsy structure whose 

definitive elements were dry-rot and warped shingles and peeling paint. 

He knocked on a few doors, getting for answer only shouted demands to go away until 

finally a woman named Karen Howard directed him to Davey’s apartment. He found Davey’s 

door and knocked. He polished his shoetops on the backs of his jeans and tapped his pockets for 

cigarettes. After a few minutes, the door opened. Davey, as a result of being half asleep, groggily 

disoriented, and having fully expected never to see Jack again, didn’t recognize him. He scowled 

and pouted and then, after another moment, he did recognize Jack, but was so surprised to be 

facing him that he couldn’t think of anything to say, so Jack took the initiative. Davey, said Jack. 

I figure this probably isn’t a good time, since the lady I just met said you work nights. 

Um, said Davey.


Karen Howard. Green eyes, sweet as apple pie, Mmm-mm. Listen. I know you probably 

didn’t expect to see me and all, so I won’t even stay more than five minutes, and I didn’t know 

your phone number or I’d have given you a call. 

guess. 

Come in, said Davey, not sure why he was saying it. Saying, God. It’s good to see you. I 

Oh sure it is, good to see someone you can go over the old times with, and I got a fresh load 

of new times to fill you in on, like I can tell you stories of that girl you had your eye on, Marie, 

the one with the limp remember? Jack stormed into the apartment, throwing his small backpack 

onto a couch. He opened a window with a glass-rattling shove; he inspected an ashtray, took off 

his coat. Picked up his coat again, dug through the pockets. Rolled and lit a cigarette and stared 

at Davey through whorls of smoke. 

Davey said, Well, no, I guess I don’t. He meant remember Marie, but it sounded like 

something else. He didn’t stop to think about it, instead saying, You want coffee? 

I’ll make it, said Jack. Get dressed. Or do you want to sleep? Go to bed. Take care of 

yourself. He poked his head around corners until he found the kitchen. He rattled through 

cupboards, began assembling a battered percolator. Davey tried to remember where he had left 

his wallet, how much money he had on him, ran through various other contingencies. After 

Denver, said Jack, I went back to Dallas, where things had cooled down to some extent. He went 

on about conquests and failures, of visits to cities and trips to bars and apartments, talking as 

much to himself and to fill the vacuum of silence around him. Davey straggled back to the 

bedroom for a cigarette and to change clothes and heard maybe half of what was said in the next 

room.


A few hours later Davey left for work at the Arcade Theater, where he’d started as a ticket 

taker years ago and was now assistant to the manager. His money was in order — people always 

checked their money around Jack, were always surprised to find it still there — his spirits were 

good, another side effect of being around Jack. They’d made plans involving Davey cutting out 

of work early, borrowing a car and driving into Minneapolis. Jack washed up the dishes they had 

used for breakfast and then, a few minutes later, when the calm of the empty apartment began to 

wear on him, he changed into a clean shirt and walked out into the town. 

Jack used to tell me about Clear Lake in the spring of 1968. He used to tell me about the big 

steel cars that prowled over concrete roads, about crowds of hat wearing, tie sporting 

establishment men and an over riding spirit of optimism. In the daylight, Dad told me, with 

people scurrying about their business, downtown Clear Lake in 1968 had the feel of a city sitting 

on the verge of something extraordinary. And on this day, with the sun shining in a pale blue 

sky, and spring showing everywhere — neon buds crowding tree branches, the air crisp but 

warming up — the sense of imminent greatness was particularly strong, or so it felt to Jack. He 

told me that people said hello to each other as they ducked in and out of the grocery stores and 

specialty shops, that cars stopped at unposted intersections to let pedestrians through and men 

tipped their hats with generous smiles to ladies who smiled and nodded back. Clear Lake as a 

city at its apex, riding the crest before the breakwater and crashing surf of growth to the south. It 

would be a few years before the mall went up in Maplewood and the bloom of Clear Lake was 

officially cut and dried by the mass merchandising efforts of companies in far off cities who 

moved in and took the money out of Clear Lake’s pockets. Or so Jack and the barbers would tell 

the story years later. But for now he walked as a foreigner among the Clear Lakers in his brown 

shirt with no tie and no hat and his hair that needed to be cut, and though people didn’t stare at


him, they sensed he was out of place. He himself wasn’t quite used to the suburbs, most of his 

travels had taken him to the centers of cities where he saw the emerging drug and flower culture 

sprawled out in fashionable misery; he’d lived in warehouse districts and seedy hotels and only 

rarely had he gotten to places like Clear Lake. He wondered where all the young people were, all 

the kids questioning authority with flowers in their long, long hair and fringed leather jackets, 

and then remembered what day it was. Tuesday. School day. And all the true hippies would have 

long ago abandoned the button-down suburbs for the grunge and freedom of downtown, where 

they could luxuriate in day-glo squalor and make idealistic, drug-induced plans to change the 

world. He went back to the Applebaum’s where the VW microbus had dropped him off, strode 

through the small door, picked up a basket. They carried milk here in cardboard cartons, he 

noticed, and had a butcher’s shop in the back, new additions to the grocery stores from his 

younger years. They were dead set on making everything bigger. Bigger stores, bigger packages. 

He surveyed the interior, the tight shelves of sliced bread and potato chips in plastic bags, 

stacked cans of peas and canned juices. By the registers kids eyed up candy bars in paper 

wrappers or rifled through a metal spinner rack of three-to-a-bag Marvel comics. He stood in line 

to pay for his coffee, eggs, hamburger, bread, assorted other foodstuffs. Tried to strike up a 

conversation with the cashier, a middle aged woman in a tightly twisted bun, blush applied in 

two small circles to her cheeks, who peered intently at the price stickers before keying them in to 

the register. She said nothing to his queries about the butcher’s shop, just read him his total and 

efficiently counted back his change. He stopped at the florist’s next door where he bought six 

roses. On the way back to Davey’s apartment people smiled at him; it was amazing they way 

people changed when they saw you carrying flowers. Hair and clothes didn’t matter anymore; 

people saw flowers and assumed love. He carefully went up the steps, and at Miss Howard’s he


set the roses in the angle between door and frame so that they would fall inward at her feet when 

she opened the door. Then he put away the groceries he had bought and went to sleep. He 

dreamed of stones. It was a dream he had often, of broad flat stones in a field under the sun. He 

didn’t wake up until there was a knock on his door. Karen Howard, blushing and stammering, 

her hands carving the air with long fingers to accentuate her apologies, had come to return his 

flowers. In her stammering she was beautiful, and Jack could sense in her shyness and repression 

a flower’s bud coiled and ready to bloom at the hand of a caring gardener. 

He invited her in, and after a hesitant pause that was not hesitation at all, in she came.


6. 

Theo called back the next morning before I left for work. It was to tell me that not only was 

our grandfather alive, but that he, Theo, had spent the night in his house. And, he said at one 

point, “The old man looks loaded. As in, stuffed with monetary units.” 

“Don’t be disrespectful,” I said. Then I asked him to back up and start from where we’d left 

off the day before. 

“Well,” he said, “After hanging up the phone, I had to scratch my armpit, so I did that...” 

“I can fill in some of the details myself,” I said. 

“Okay. Fine. Well, it was getting dark but I was still a few miles from Binghamton, so I 

started walking, but the city gave out so I had to hitch again the last few miles; I got a ride with 

this groovy chick on her way to an AA meeting who told me she’d probably end up in a bar 

afterwards just for the change of pace. She took me right to Grandpa Larry’s house, and man I 

thought I was in the wrong place for sure.” 

The house, a large three story ranchero style house on a stone foundation, stood on a small 

rise in the huge, well manicured lawn. Small shrubs punctuated a red stone garden along the 

apron of the house, and in the yard stood two trees bare of traditional branches, but with bulbs of 

knobby bark on top of the ten foot trunks from which small, tender shoots were emerging into 

the spring air. The long driveway, covered in a thin, intricate layer of grey ice, curved through 

the yard, along the side of the house and past an alcove door before slipping under a chain link 

gate and entering a small white garage. Theo walked down the driveway, puzzling over the 

knob-ended trees before deciding that what happened was, every fall a gardener came and cut off 

the growth of the season, and every spring the little shoots grew back. He rang the bell on the


side door and stepped down onto the pavement while waiting for an answer. He patted his 

pockets, felt his cigarettes, coughed into a fist. A dog in the next yard barked once, then was 

silent. 

A curtain in the window moved back and Theo saw a shadow of a face peering out at him, 

and a moment later the door was opened by a seemingly middle-aged woman in a pale blue dress 

and white cardigan sweater. She eased open the storm door and spoke through the narrow crack. 

“Yes?” she said. 

“Mrs. LaFleur?” 

“There is no Mrs. LaFleur.” 

“Is Mr. LaFleur at home?” 

The woman stepped onto the top step and closed the main door behind her, holding the storm 

door open with her hip. “Mr. LaFleur can’t see any visitors,” she said. “What do you want?” 

Theo cleared his throat. “My name is Theo LaFleur,” he said. “I’m from a town in Minnesota 

called Clear Lake. My father’s name was Larry LaFleur, Junior, so I’m wondering if Mr. LaFleur 

is my grandfather.” 

The woman looked at him suspiciously. When she stepped out into the light Theo could tell 

she was not middle-aged, as he had first suspected. She was perhaps in her late twenties, though 

her glassy eyes, a network of thin wrinkles around her mouth and the severity with which her 

hair had been pulled behind her head made her look older. She moved her eyes slowly back over 

her shoulder, then forward, took a pack of cigarettes from her sweater. She struck a match, 

exhaled smoke. 

“Wouldn’t you know your grandfather?” 

“Not in my case.”


She eyed him suspiciously, picked a shred of tobacco from her lip. 

“Here,” said Theo. “I’ll show you some identification.” He reached for his back pocket. 

“No,” said the woman. “Come in.” She backed into the house and held open the storm door 

for Theo as he passed her, then she closed the door. “He’s sleeping now,” she said, remaining 

near the door. “He isn’t well enough to see people much any more, not since the last stroke.” 

Theo looked around briefly. The house was well but sparsely furnished in a kind of restrained 

opulence. A plush leather couch against one wall under an oil painting, another wall facing the 

couch made up of a bookcase, a wooden desk, its surface clean of papers and pens but with an 

office-style phone next to a small calendar. “He used to work from home?” Theo asked. 

“I don’t know,” said the woman. “He was a lawyer. I’ve only been here for a month or two, 

since the last nurse quit. He doesn’t talk much.” 

“My name’s Theo,” said Theo. 

“I stay upstairs. He’s not in too much danger, really, but he likes the company when he’s 

strong enough and needs some help when he’s weaker.” She opened the door and flicked the 

cigarette butt out onto the sidewalk, then she sighed. “Guess I’ll just have to pick that up later,” 

she said. 

“What’s your name?” Theo said. 

“Lizbeth. No ‘E,’ no ‘A.’” 

Theo walked over to the desk, Lizbeth following behind at a distance. “How long before he 

wakes up, do you figure?” He fingered the calendar — December 6, 1991 — picked up a bronze 

bust from a small wooden table and looked closely at the figure’s chiseled, steely eyes, but there 

was no way to tell who it was meant to represent. The oil painting, as far as Theo could tell, was 

well done and perhaps worth a lot of money. Washed out strokes of grays and blue marked by


occasional suggestions of both human limbs and mechanical devices. Halves of gears stalking 

smudged out arms in a blue mist. 

Lizbeth started watching my brother more carefully at this point, and when he turned to face 

her she said, “I guess I will have a look at that driver’s license if you don’t mind.” 

Theo reached into his pocket and brought out his wallet and gave her his license. She cupped 

it in her palm, glanced from Theo’s picture to his face, squinted. “It’s provisional,” she said. 

“Nineteen seventy-six. Well holy cow, you’re just a kid. You looked older.” 

“Can I have it back?” 

She gave it to him, saying, “He usually wakes up around eight or eight thirty, but he usually 

eats and watches television for a while. He’s most coherent in the early morning. Six or seven.” 

The time was six thirty by Theo’s watch. He thought it over, added an hour for Eastern time, 

nodded to himself. 

“What makes you think he’s you’re grandpa, anyway?” 

“He’s got the same name as my Dad, who was Larry LaFleur, Jr. He’s in the town my Dad 

grew up in. And I figure he’s pretty old, right? Otherwise you wouldn’t think I could be his 

grandkid.” 

She thought about that for a second, seemed to decide she had realized this all along. Said, 

“So what if he is? What happens then?” 

“Well,” said Theo. “I guess we’ll just wait and see.” 

Larry woke up at eight. Lizbeth was there waiting for him with a bowl of soup while Theo 

stood in the shadows of the doorway. The old man refused to eat at first, then grudgingly allowed 

Lizbeth to carry soup from the bowl to his mouth until it was half empty, when he quit. She


wiped his chin and white mustache, then told him, “You have a visitor, Mr. LaFleur. Do you 

want to see him?” 

He scrunched up his face. “Is it that ...” He pointed, said, “In the doorway?” 

Lizbeth nodded. 

“I thought maybe a ghost. But now you say he’s real. Is it a lawyer?” he said. Lizbeth shook 

her head. “Too late for a doctor,” he said. 

“It’s only eight. It’s a relation. A friend.” 

“All my friends are dead.” 

“I meant relative. It’s a relative.” 

“Don’t have any.” 

“Maybe so. Should I let him in?” 

“Who is it then?” 

“He says he’s your grandson.” 

“That’s why a ghost. Looked like Junior.” 

“His name is Theo, and he comes from Minnesota. He’s eighteen years old and he has your 

chin.” Theo shifted his weight in the shadows, scratched his chin. 

“My show is coming on. Maybe some other time.” 

Lizbeth stood and turned around, walked out of the room. Theo approached, stood next to the 

bed. “Mr LaFleur?” he said. The smells of decay and restorative medicines, the long entrenched 

pungency of chronic illness, mixed thickly in the air surrounding Larry’s sickbed. 

The old man’s head rolled on the pillow to face him. Theo looked for resemblances in the 

shape of the nose, in the angle where wrist joined hand. Short white hair lay around his head at 

bizarre angles; he had large fleshy eyes and a large head that illness had reduced to layered


pockets of pasty skin. He saw no traces of Jack. The old man said, “Doesn’t ‘Some other time’ 

mean anything in Minnesota?” 

“I came a long way.” 

“Keep going, sport.” 

Suddenly there it was, in the slightly squared slope of his forehead, a loosely fleshed match 

for the shape of Kelley’s. His hands clasped into fists and beat softly against each other end to 

end the way Jack’s had. “You’re his Dad, all right,” said Theo. “He had your manners.” He sat in 

the chair Lizbeth had abandoned, scratched the back of his neck. 

“All right, let’s play. Who’s your mother?” he asked sharply. His lips thin and pale over 

toothless gums. 

“Caroline Anderson LaFleur,” Theo said. 

“And your pop?” 

“Larry LaFleur, Junior. He went by Jack.” 

“When did he die?” 

“Nearly three years ago. Three years in November.” 

The old man rolled his head back to where it had been and stared at the television. “Where 

was he?” he asked. 

“He was in a hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. He’d run off from home again. Some woman he 

found on the road took him to the hospital when he collapsed in her car. She took him to an 

emergency room and we never heard from her again, we don’t even know her name. Turned out 

Jack had cancer in the stomach and he died about a month later.”


The old man’s bent, arthritis-wrecked hands continued to grip an imaginary baseball bat on 

the sheet covering his stomach. He thought for a second, then said “Which are you? Matthew or 

Theodore?” 

“I’m Theo, sir.” 

“What’s your sister’s name? If you have a sister.” 

“My sister’s name is Kelley. That’s e, y.” 

“A normal man would be convinced by now. This man remains skeptical. All right, 

Theodore. You see, my show is coming on.” Theo looked to the television, where a man with 

white hair was getting ready to solve a murder. Theo knew the show, knew this one was a repeat, 

that it was not doing well in the ratings overall but managed to regularly win its time slot which 

for shows of its kind was good enough. Larry said, “We’ll talk some more in the morning.” 

“It’s good to meet you,” said Theo. 

The old man rolled his head to look at him, then turned back to the television. “There’s a box 

in the basement,” he said. 

peace.” 

“What?” 

“Show me the box I mean and I’ll know who you are. Now let me watch my damn show in 

Lizbeth met him in the hall. She said, “Is it him?” 

“Were you listening?” 

She shook her head in an indefinite way. 

“He said there was a box in the basement. Did you hear that part?” 

“I don’t know what’s in the basement. I’ve never had to go down there.”


She led him to the kitchen and showed him a small white door. He opened it, felt around on 

the wall and found a switch, flipped it on and went down the steep, narrow stairs. The basement 

was unfurnished and cold, a low ceiling of beams and exposed ductwork over a clay floor and 

walls of stone and concrete hardened into inward oozing spill shapes, the uneven surface making 

an intricate texture of pitted, dusty shadows in the glow of the suspended bare bulb. In one 

corner stood a pile of paint cans and bundled drop cloths, in another was a stack of boxes. 

He shifted boxes, reading the markered labels. Fall clothes, sweaters, photographs. He went 

through all the boxes, then started over. The box Larry must have meant was one of the first he 

had looked at, a box about the size of Theo’s chest, wrapped up in brown paper and bound with 

twine. Canceled postage stamps were affixed to one corner and Larry’s address was written in 

Jack’s hand slightly to the right of center. He brushed off some of the dust and picked it up, then 

hefted it to check its weight and guess the contents. It was heavy, and whatever was inside 

shifted slightly, sliding over itself with a slippery hiss. He carried it upstairs and into Larry’s 

room. The old man looked at it, said, “That’s the box,” and turned his attention back to the 

television. 

“You didn’t open it,” said Theo. 

“I read the postcard that was taped to the front. He’d send postcards once in a while. Every 

few months, maybe a year goes by.” 

“Let me open the box.” 

“He wrote that you were born, that Matt was in a play. Postcards. Just a line or two every few 

months.” 

Theo worked at the knotted twine, eventually removed it, wound it around his hand and 

threw it in the wastebasket. According to the red postmark the package had been mailed on


October 21, 1988. The adhesive holding tape to paper crumbled away at a touch of his finger, 

and then he removed the brown wrapper and tossed it aside. 

The box was filled with papers, most of them loose but some stapled to each other, and on 

the papers was Jack’s handwriting, each page filled with a block of writing. Theo picked up a 

postcard that lay on the top. It had a picture of a loon bobbing in the water and the word 

Minnesota in red letters. Theo turned it over and read what Jack had written: “Hi, Dad. Take care 

of this shit.” Then Theo read the second sheet of paper. He looked at a second sheet, then a third. 

“I think it’s poetry,” He said. 

“Isn’t that interesting?” Larry said. 

Theo glanced through a few more sheets, read a few words, not comprehending any meaning 

in them. He sat next to the bed, the poems balanced on his lap, and scratched at his chin. 

“Did he ever want to be a poet?” he asked. 

“Who?” 

“Jack.” 

Larry said, “Who’s Jack?” 

“My father,” said Theo. “Larry Junior.” 

“We just called him Junior,” said Larry. His eyes half closed stared up at the ceiling, fixed on 

a point far above the roof. “He didn’t like that either. Every month or two he came home with a 

different thing for us to call him. Ace, Carlo, Pepper. High school friends called him Bud, I 

think.” Larry’s hands were fidgeting on the sheets again, but slowly. 

“Did he write poems when he was a boy?” 

“I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose he might have.”


“But to mail them all out here.” Theo riffled through the top pages, then walked his fingers 

deeper, lifting corners, sliding his hand into the still cold heart of the pile. Glanced at random 

phrases from random pages. It appeared to be all poems, perhaps three hundred pages worth. 

“What do you think he might have meant by it? By sending them to you?” 

But Larry had closed his eyes and gone to sleep, and had no answer but the slow rise and fall 

of his chest. 

Lizbeth showed Theo to a room where he could sleep, a small room with bare walls, empty 

dressers and a private bath next door. A twin bed with a simple blue cotton spread, brass lamp 

with a white shade. Theo kicked off his shoes, lay down, and slept for several hours until he 

needed to use the bathroom. When he finished he turned on the light and checked out the closet, 

fingering his way through rows of old clothes packed in on wire hangers; conservative clothes 

from the fifties and sixties, dull tweeds and extravagantly patterned weaving giving no clue as to 

who had worn it previously. He tried a few on, noting which ones fit and which didn’t, and then 

he carefully rehung them. 

He was hungry, so he wrapped himself in the plush robe he’d found in the bathroom and 

without bothering to turn on the hall light — there seemed enough light, perhaps the moon was 

full — went down to the kitchen and rooted through the near empty refrigerator and cupboards 

before finding enough material to put together a sandwich. On his way back he went through the 

room with the desk he had seen this afternoon. Lizbeth stood at the window, smoking a cigarette 

and staring at the rise in the lawn. “Can’t you sleep?” Theo said. She didn’t move, so he walked 

closer and asked her again.


Though she seemed startled, she waited a moment before turning around. Her face was blue 

and white in the light from the moon that spilled in through the window, but her eyes were still 

that glassy brownish-green. “I got a little bit hungry,” he said, and as evidence held up the 

remaining half of his sandwich. 

“Is that the turkey?” she said. 

“Were you saving it?” he asked. 

She shook her head. “I guess you found what you came here for,” she said. She blew smoke, 

closed one eye, turned back to the window. “That must make you happy.” 

“Things are just starting,” Theo said. 

She said nothing to this, might not have heard. Whatever moment she was having, Theo 

decided, had nothing to do with him or his grandfather. Her pack of cigarettes lay on the end 

table next to the couch, a small red pack, cellophane shimmering in the darkness. 

She said, “You probably think I’m a little bit dumb, don’t you. People tell me that, that I look 

dumb. I got through the nursing program at the college, though. It took me a long time because I 

was in an accident.” 

She was quiet for a long time, until Theo said, “I’m sorry to hear that.” He picked up the 

pack, pulled out a cigarette and lit it. 

“It’s nothing you’ll probably ever have to deal with. I was in the nursing program to start 

with, and then seven years ago on the way to school my boyfriend’s car turned over. He got 

killed, and I had about twenty broken bones. Coma for three months. Physical therapy lasted a 

few years, then I went back to get my degree like it never happened, except that all my 

classmates were gone and all the students were fifteen years old or something. They tell me my 

mind wasn’t affected, but I learn things slower now, I think. Things are hard to remember.”


Theo swallowed, then said, “My sister says that the mind and the body are more connected 

than even doctors think. You damage the mind, she says, with every paper cut.” 

Lizbeth said, “I’m a nurse. I’ve heard that before. Sometimes it feels like if it were just a 

little bit keener — my mind — or if I made connections a bit faster, the world would make more 

sense. Things wouldn’t get missed. And sometimes I watch the world go by like it’s packed in 

cotton.” 

“What things get missed?” 

“I can only guess.” 

“Like what? Medications?” 

“No,” she said. “When I learn something it stays learned. Your grandfather is fine. That is, 

for a dying person.” 

“He’s dying well, you mean.” 

“He’s dying as in going to be dead. He drafted a living will. If there’s an emergency, a 

cardiac or system failure, he’s given orders not to take any extreme measures. That means you’re 

pretty much ready to go.” She took a cigarette from her pack and lit it from the one burning in 

her hand. “Not that I’m any kind of person qualified in extreme measures.” 

“But you’re here to keep him alive.” 

“In the less active way that I’m not supposed to let him die. If anyone were asking me I’d say 

let your grandfather bury us all.” They continued to smoke together. Then she said, “How are the 

poems? Are they any good?” 

“I don’t know.” 

“Do they rhyme? Isn’t that one way people measure poems, on whether they rhyme or not?”


“Some words in the poems rhyme with other words in the poems. But overall, I’d say the 

poems do not, as a rule, rhyme.” 

“I won’t remember that,” she said. “It’s like it’s gone already. The funny thing is, about my 

mind. You think I’d get used to it. The slowness. You’d think you’d settle in to your own head.” 

Next time we were on the phone Theo said to me, “There’s this nurse here, Lizbeth, no e no 

a, and she’s unsettled in the head.” 

It was morning and I was eating toast. A fragment of jam fell from the toast and ran down my 

arm as I said, “Are you going to take advantage of her?” 

“Why would I do that?” 

“You’re doing all sorts of other Jack-like things.” 

“Well, I’m not doing that,” he said. 

“Well, okay.” I wiped off the jam and prepared to run my arm under the tap. I ran water, 

rinsed my hands off, rolled up my sleeve. 

Theo said, “She’s more your type.” 

I didn’t say anything, rubbing at the jam. Then I said, “My sleeve’s all wet now.” 

“Huh?” 

I said, “Unsettled is my type?” 

“If you’re sleeve’s wet, by all means take care of that.” 

“What?” I hadn’t been aware I’d said anything about my sleeve. But Theo didn’t go on, and I 

didn’t say anything, and then Theo said, “Did you know he wrote poems?” 

I thought back to our walks on Clear Lake Saturday mornings. His dusty feet slapping the 

road. I said, “He used to recite poems to me all the time. Ginsberg, Corso.”


“Yeah. Like on his drives. He used to talk all the time, reciting things.” He’d talk with his 

arms waving, with his head nodding, releasing the wheel and grabbing the passenger to press 

home a point. You’d fear for your safety, but he was an excellent driver who noticed everything 

and surprise you by including things you’d seen miles back in his ongoing monologue. “Things 

that sounded like poetry. He did that with me, too,” Theo went on. “I thought they were all 

poems from the Beats. Or road friends.” 

“Yeah,” I said. I dried my hands and arms, returned the shirt’s cuff to my wrist and buttoned 

it down. “Why do you ask?” 

“Because he wrote them all down.” 

“Wrote what down?” 

“Poems. He wrote them down and mailed them all out here to Larry. There’s about three 

hundred pages of poems out here.” 

I took that in for a moment, turning it over in my head. I said, “Why would he do that?” 

Neither of us knew, and it was time for me to go to work. I told Theo I had to go, then told 

him to be careful. 

Before leaving, I stopped for a second to stare at the recliner, at the walls, at the floor of my 

bedroom where yesterday’s discarded clothes were strewn about the hardwood floor. I looked 

through the window to the view of downtown made hazy by the dust of a dry season. We didn’t 

know why Jack did anything. And the fact of our not knowing was probably part of the reason 

Jack had done it. So we did know, partially. He’d done it so that we might wonder why. 

7.


That weekend I went to Mom’s house for dinner with her and Kelley and Kelley’s boyfriend. 

I drove through the glut of traffic that lay over Highway 36 like drifted snow. My car rolled 

slowly past retail complexes and corporate parks, then I took 35E north to 694 and through 

another stretch of concrete bunker-style shopping malls housing the same retail outlets I’d just 

seen. 

I took Highway 61 north, the same road Jack had once hitched from its origin in Duluth to its 

end in New Orleans, and I saw by checking my watch and then the clock on the dashboard that 

there was almost an hour before Mom was expecting me. So I drove past the road that went to 

her place and continued to downtown. A farmer’s market was in progress, and a crowd of people 

milled about in the center square. I drove around the gathered people and through the rest of 

downtown — it took only two or three minutes — and after circling the block a car pulled out 

into the street and I slipped into its parking space. Then, the car locked behind me, I put my 

hands in my pockets and for the first time in years I walked through the town I had grown up in. 

Passing through the crowd, then standing against a brick wall where I was out of the way but 

had a clear view of the people against the backdrop of small boutiques, a bookstore, the same 

liquor store and same barber shop from years and years ago, standing in a row of shops that 

shared walls and made a solid front against the square, I decided that Clear Lake in 1994 was 

probably not much different from the way Jack must have seen it on that clear dawn in 1968. The 

people strolled aimlessly through the square half intent on buying produce and half simply happy 

to be out in the sun, among people, with the stretch of the weekend in front of them. 

It seemed to me this scene would make more sense if there were someone with me I could 

explain it to; what I mean is I started thinking about A.J. I found a pay phone, dropped in a


quarter and dialed six digits. Hung up the phone, fished the quarter out and dropped it back in. 

Seven digits, hang up. This time the phone swallowed the quarter, my last one. Just as well. 

I walked out of downtown into a section of older houses built during one of the earlier boom 

times. It was in this area, I think, or perhaps have invented, that Davey lived, and it was possibly 

on this very spot that Jack first met my mother. I picked a house and considered that it might 

have once been Davey’s home, but whatever psychic resonance or voice from beyond that would 

have confirmed my choice did not reveal itself. 

It had happened on the first night Jack was in town, while the two of them were leaving to 

pick up a car and drive in to Minneapolis when a girl came up the walk carrying several books 

and a pad of paper clutched to her chest. Jack didn’t notice her at first, then, when Davey said 

hello, he looked down at her — she had long straight brown hair, a small lock of which, six or 

ten strands, hung directly over her right eye — and looked away. 

The girl said something, a name, that might have been her destination. 

Davey said, Mom and Dad know you’re out? 

God, yes. The hawks know everything. So I’m trying my best to deceive them about little 

things, anyway. Like, I took my books so they at least think I’m doing homework. See? She 

raised the books to Davey’s face. And then she looked up at Jack, at his tousled hair (he had 

combed it before leaving but his habit of brushing through it with a nervous hand had destroyed 

any pattern the comb might have left) and tried to hold her smile, but it faded as she continued to 

look at him. She gathered her books back into her chest and looked at the ground, then back to 

Davey. She bounced on her toes and said, Guess I’ll be seeing you. Mom wants you to come 

over for dinner. 

I’ll be there tomorrow night, same as every week.


She then continued on her way. Davey watched her for a few steps and scratched his face, 

brass bracelet falling against the cuff of his shirt. My kid sister, he said. Carrie. Sorry. Hey, 

Carrie! She looked over her shoulder and back at them through the curve of her hair. This is 

Jack, said Davey. I forgot to introduce you. 

She swivelled around and continued walking, but backwards. Hey Jack, she said. 

And Jack said, Hey there. 

I crossed the state highway, moving away from downtown along with a few other people 

leaving the farmer’s market. I passed a few people who were on their way in, a group that 

included a woman who eyed me suspiciously as she passed, and after a few more steps I thought 

it might have been a girl I’d gone to high school with, but when I looked back at her again she 

was facing the other direction, so I went on. 

I passed through several blocks of houses, nondescript houses all done in the same hurried 

post-war style, the first phase of post-war suburban expansion. Though Clear Lake had existed 

previous to the war as a train depot and resort town, (a famous writer of the 1920’s was once 

banned from the local yacht club for drunken behavior) it was as a suburb, in the energetic 

sprawl of the fifties and sixties, that Clear Lake became what it is today. 

It was at the tail end of all this transformation that my parents got married and moved into the 

house I was approaching. A small lot, a small house with lilacs in the front and an oak out back. 

Whoever moved in after Mom sold it had tended the lawn back to health and trimmed the lilacs 

into a neat rectangle. They’d given the house a decent coat of paint and a new roof. It looked 

very nice, I had to admit. A cold wind from the west blew the last oak leaves with a lazy tumble 

over green shoots of lily and tulip in carefully tended beds.


Finally I returned to my car and drove to my mother’s and parked in the driveway next to 

Kelley’s twenty-five year old VW Beetle. I looked at my watch and saw that more than two 

hours had passed, and my detour through Clear Lake had made me late. 

When I reached the door and checked my watch again I reasoned that the half hour I was late 

would worry and upset no one. My family was tolerant of late-comers; my mother herself for 

instance was constantly caught up in minor battles over where she’d left her keys or whether she 

should wear the warm winter jacket or the more fashionable spring coat. I knocked, then pushed 

the door open and went in. 

Kelley lay on the sofa, feet propped on an arm. She was watching television, flipping through 

channels and chewing on the fingernails of her left hand. “Matt!” she shouted, but half-heartedly. 

“Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?” 

“I’m watching TV. There’s a woman who used to be on ‘Eight in Enough’ selling some type 

of exercise equipment on Channel 5, another woman who used to be on ‘Making a Living’ 

selling a food dehydrator on Channel 9, and on Channel 11 John Wayne is behaving in his usual 

highly moral though unenlightened fashion.” 

I said, “How have you been?” 

“Not that dehydrating food is immoral. I don’t mean that at all.” She changed channels 

steadily as we talked, a stale parade of newly coined images, all of them familiar and friendly. 

“See, if Theo were here he could tell us what this means. Festive images of shrivelled foodstuff, 

smiling former sitcom sidekicks in aprons.” 

I said, “He’d say, ‘What’re you watching that crap for?’”


“Oh, at first he’d say that, he would. But even this has a pull on Theo. TV is the barometer of 

our times. He’d say, food dehydrators indicate a spiritual dryness. Exercise equipment means 

metaphysical decay.” 

“John Wayne means ratings points from old ex-marines.” 

“Right.” 

I asked if there were any cookies. 

Mom baked. Mostly cookies and cakes, the occasional pie, baked in massive spurts which in 

the past had coincided with Jack’s manic phases. He’d pick up people in bars - artists and 

musicians, the occasional non-violent biker, and they’d come back to the house after closing time 

and drink some more and shout, and sing along to some guy who’d brought a guitar, and then, in 

the smaller hours of the morning they’d trickle out into the hazy night, most of them never to be 

seen again. The next day, Mom would bake mountains of cookies that far exceeded the family’s 

ability to eat them. We regularly took tins of cookies in to school and distributed them during 

lunch, and if there was still extra she took it out to food shelters and school bake sales, to any 

cake walk or charity fund raiser that would take them. 

Kelley told me there were a few, but she had finished them that morning. “How long have 

you been here?” I asked. 

“A while,” she said vaguely. 

“So how’s work?” Kelley worked for a temp agency, shuttling back and forth between 

several office buildings as a data entry specialist. She was also working her way toward a degree 

in Anthropology, at a pace slowed both by her need to work full time to pay tuition and by a 

timidity regarding her own intelligence. I had recently decided that with her deceptive 

intelligence and tendency toward waifishness that Kelley was the type of woman who would not


see her prime until her mid to late thirties, after years of disappointment and self defeating 

behavior. One of these days she’d wake up with a master’s degree, a sweet if quiet husband, and 

a steady, satisfying job. She’ll wonder at the person she used to be for all those years, and be 

astounded by her current happiness. I felt good for that future Kelley, and proud to be her 

brother. 

“I’m doing okay,” she said. 

“And Wilton?” 

The rhythm of her channel flipping changed, became irregular, then evened out again. John 

Wayne, stock car races, stop motion dinosaurs, a woman in a white suit wearing a headphone 

mike. 

“Is that Laurie Anderson?” I asked. 

Kelley nodded. “It’s a performance art retrospective on Channel 2.” 

I said, “I remember when she was cutting edge.” 

Kelley said, “Mom went out for milk. Should be back any time now.” 

I said, “Theo seems to be okay.” After talking with him I had called my mother to fill her in 

on the few details he had given me, and then I’d left a message on Kelley’s machine. Every time 

I called her I had to leave a message, and when I asked her about it she said they screened calls, 

especially at night, in the hours Wilton spent writing and didn’t want to be interrupted. I said, “If 

you returned messages...” 

“Mom told me.” 

“Still, you could have called back.” 

“I was here. When you talked to her.” 

“Mom didn’t say. Till when?”


down.” 

“I kind of never left. Could you sit, please? You make me nervous the way you never sit 

I hadn’t realized I was still standing in the doorway in much the same position I had taken 

after closing the door. My hands were in my pockets, my feet firmly set about a foot and a half 

apart. I took my coat off and hung it on the coat-rack, then kicked off my shoes and sat down in 

the armchair, my feet carefully placed in the crack between ottoman and chair. I wondered about 

cookies again, then remembered the last one’d been eaten. 

“So you’re staying here now?” 

She nodded, raised a hand and set it on her head, held it there. Looked me in the eye and said, 

“Two things, like ripping off a band-aid: One is we broke up. Two is I’m pregnant.” 


“Due in early winter.” 

“Pregnant with a baby.” 

“Definitely a baby. Which isn’t the only reason we split up. Kind of a straw breaking the 

camel’s back thing.” 

“I’m sorry. I guess. And congratulations.” 

“You guess. Everyone says I guess congratulations. That or, if they’re insensitive they say, 

‘You’re going to keep it?’ Like it’s a dress I’m not sure of. An ill-fitting garment. Pregnancies 

are in limbo these days. Like we’ve soured on reproduction. Seen enough of it; nothing new 

there.” 

“Another institution under assault.” 

“Exactly,” she said.


A pause. We stared at shriveled food, football, men at desks, John Wayne on a technicolor 

desert. Familiar images, predictable endings. I propped my feet on the ottoman and stared 

intently at the screen, waiting for what came next. 

Mom came home, bustling through the side door from the garage carrying two paper sacks of 

groceries. The cat shot from my legs and bounded to a hiding spot in the next room. I got up to 

help with the groceries and without looking to see who it was who had taken the bags Mom 

thanked me and took off her coat. 

She hung her purse and coat on the rack behind the door, pulling on the sleeves to make them 

completely right side out and then, after pulling a few cat hairs from the hem, turned to face me. 

She smiled. “Matt,” she said. “Good to see you.” We hugged, and a moment after she let go so 

did I. “I got caught in traffic, imagine that. Heavy traffic between here and the Rainbow. It was 

the parking lot, really. Some little old lady — not me, ha, ha — got her car hit by a teenager. But 

I’m here now. Is the lasagna done?” She scurried into the kitchen to check, then stopped. “Matt,” 

she said. “How have you been?” 

“I’ve been fine, Mom.” 

Kelley stood over the table eyeing the two large sacks. She grabbed the edge of one bag and 

peered in, then took out a head of lettuce and two tomatoes. “I thought you were just going for 

milk,” she said. 

“Milk is in the other bag,” said Mom. “I thought we might like a salad.” 

“Oh.” 

“I just thought that it wouldn’t be much of a meal without something green on the table. You 

know, with it being spring and all. Have we heard from Theo?” 

I shook my head.


“Okay, then. We’ll have to call him.” 

“He didn’t give me a number.” 

“I have the number.” 

“How did you get it?” 

She shrugged and continued to pull things from the shopping bag. Cucumbers, carrots, bacon 

bits. “I’ve always had it. I found it in your father’s personal papers.” 

“This is news to me. Is this news to you, Kelley?” 

“Yes. But not surprising.” 

She set a head of iceberg lettuce on the counter, then began re-folding the paper bag. I picked 

up the lettuce and picked at the tape that held on the webbed plastic wrapper. I said, “Why didn’t 

you tell Theo about this before he went off across the country?” 

“I didn’t know he was curious. It’s the tragedy of you LaFleur men that you’re always 

keeping things secret that aren’t secrets.” 

room. 

“He’d have gone anyway,” Kelley said. Then she turned and walked back into the living 

I pulled off the wrapper and picked up a knife, then set the knife down. “So let’s call,” I said. 

She got the number from the other room and I dialed it. The phone did its little miracle, sending 

electric impulses across the country to make another phone ring. A woman answered. When I 

asked for Theo, she asked who I might be, so I said, “I’m his brother.” 

“Oh,” she said. “You must be Matt. Hello, Matt. What are you calling for?” Her words were 

slow and measured out almost without inflection, but I sensed more friendliness behind her voice 

rather than hostility, though I wasn’t sure. 

“Ah ... Just to say hello. You know, check in. Is he there?”


“Oh, yes. He is in.” A minute later, Theo was on the phone. 

“Hey, he said. What’s up?” 

“Who was that answering the phone?” 

“Lizbeth. The nurse. I told you about her.” 

“Is she always that spooky?” 

“She’s not spooky. She was in an accident; she told me all about it. We had quite a night.” 

I looked at Mom, shaking out the head of lettuce over the sink, then I turned my back on her 

so she wouldn’t hear what I might say. “I thought you weren’t doing that.” I said. 

“Oh, it’s all perfectly G-rated. We’re both insomniacs, that’s all. Don’t be jealous.” 

I was about to ask him something else when Mom put a hand on my shoulder. I turned 

around and looked at her. She had her other hand cupped in front of her ready to take the phone 

from me. “Here’s Mom,” I said. “She wants to talk to you.” 

“Oh, God,” said Theo, and then something else that tapered into thin tinniness as I took the 

phone from my ear and set it in mom’s hand. 

She turned away and said “Hi, honey,” into the telephone. She folded her free hand into the 

crook of her elbow and curled her body into the phone. She said calmly, “This is some stunt, 

isn’t it?” and then something else I couldn’t hear. 

I went to the living room where Kelley had slouched down into the sofa, her hips nearly over 

the lip of cushion. She pulled at the hem of her skirt, straightening it out and flattening till it fell 

discreetly over her knees. She was pregnant now, a permeating, transformative fact. 

Kelley said to me, “What did he have to say?” 

“We didn’t get much of a chance. I wanted to ask him more about the poems, though.” 

Kelley said, “So Dad wrote poetry?”


“Guess so,” I said. 

“What is it? This thing Theo did. Is it some guy thing? Have you had the urge to run across 

the country?” 

Jack.” 

“Not too strong,” I said. “But I think Theo’s more interested in finding things out about 

“You should call him Dad.” 

“He liked Jack.” 

“Besides, we all know what Dad was like. How he was never here, how people used to stop 

by and drag him out at all hours and he’d come back at three a.m. drunk and raging and shouting 

about corporate communists and fascist hippies and Lord knows what else. Theo and me used to 

talk about it all the fucking time. Jack was an alcoholic, plain and simple, with all the classic 

symptoms and the usual complex of co-dependents surrounding him.” She’d sat up during this 

speech, struggling on her elbows, and when she was done immediately began to slouch again. 

I said, “Well, I’ve told him too. And he remembers a lot anyway, but not adult memories. I 

guess he feels left out.” 

“Well. If anyone was left out it was me.” 

I didn’t know what to say to that. She looked up at me, seeming to try to provoke me into an 

argument, but I said, simply enough, “What do you mean?” The cat had somehow worked her 

way into my lap and was now cleaning herself, licking a forepaw and then swiping at her 

forehead. 

Kelley said, “You were the boys. He’d take you everywhere. Saturday morning walks, car 

rides to Duluth. And I was the girl, left home with Mom.” 

“You did plenty with him,” I said. “He took you to movies. I remember that.”


“Oh yeah, Bambi was loads of fun. But you two were the last to be with him. When it came 

down to the end, it was you two he came and got.” 

“That last week wasn’t exactly a picnic,” I said. 

“You loved it. You loved watching him be Jack.” 

She was right, of course. There was Dad, who was irresponsible, who took too much time off 

from work, who drank away half his paycheck and left the house to crumble around his family, 

and then there was Jack. Jack the free spirit, the wild man with no past, who drove like the wind 

when and where any whim took him, the man who made everyone he met fall in love with him. 

Jack the poet king of wherever he went. 

“Everyone loved Jack,” I said. 

“They sure did,” Kelley answered, smiling. “And poor Mom, who had to watch the whole 

show. Figure she had no idea what she was getting into when she met him at that kegger.” 

“I thought they met at Davey’s house,” I said. Kelley gave me a blank look, so I told her a 

brief version of their meeting on the street in Clear Lake on Jack’s first night in town. 

Then Kelley said, “I heard that from Davey. But Mom doesn’t remember that, so it doesn’t 

count. Mom told me the first time was at a party out by the barn where the malls are now. They’d 

put together a bonfire and found a keg and rumor had it a few of the wilder kids had scored some 

acid from a guy who visited the high school in a Firebird GTO.” I sat back and listened, stroking 

the cat. Kelley said, “Mom wasn’t really into the party scene, she always said, she went because 

her boyfriend — you remember Elliott Festival, right?” 

I nodded. We all knew him. Elliott Festival was the associate principal of the high school, a 

hometown kid who’d stuck around to make good. “Anyway, there’s this friend of a friend thing 

and Elliott takes her out to the barn. It’s cold, and they’re huddled up around the fire, and the


guys go ducking behind the barn for he-man communal pisses and that sort of thing. But so poor 

Elliott can’t hold his liquor and pukes on his letter jacket and wants to leave, but the party had 

really only started. Poor Elliot.” She leaned in close to me and said, “He still calls.” 

“Elliott?” 

She nodded. “There was a message on the machine.” 

“Huh,” I said. “Did she call back?” 

“I would think so. The message sounded like they’d been in dialog for a while.” 

“Mom and Elliott together again,” I said. If they’d been together in high school, this would 

be for the third time. I let that go and said, “But at the party what happened?” 

“Jack showed up. Uninvited, carrying a bottle of whiskey and his charm. It was around 

midnight. He saw the lights from the road, he said, and thought he’d check out the action. Passed 

the bottle around, told everyone he was in town visiting Davey Anderson and whoever else 

would put up with him. Mom told him she was Davey’s sister. So they hung out for a while and 

then they drive him out to Davey’s.” 

I said, “And that was it? They were in love then, with Elliott acting as chauffeur?” 

Kelley had struggled herself into an upright position again, and leaned forward to put her 

elbows on her knees. She put out her hands palm up and said, “Reports on love are sketchy.” 

We heard Mom hang up the phone in the kitchen and Kelley fell silent. There was silence in 

the kitchen, then we heard the sounds of her approach. Kelley raised her eyebrows at me and 

pursed her lips to show the conversation was over. She lay back on the sofa and began again to 

arrange her clothes around herself, stroking her belly with the flats of her fingers. 

We were all quiet for a minute, Kelley pushing out her lower lip, still distractedly flattening 

the fall of her sweater. I tried to sense the embryo within her: A vital pink cluster of


differentiating cells aligning bilaterally from oversized head to tiny heel, a misshapen figure still 

bearing gills and a stubby tail. Developing by rules of its own, breathing amniotic fluid and 

taking food from a tube. An alien being struggling to become human. 

8. 

The next afternoon while Larry was sleeping Theo went out for a walk. He went down 

Riverside Avenue to a cross street and then turned north, past a large grassy park dotted with 

large gnarled oaks and trimmed with bushes and in one corner a vintage twenties era carousel, 

which according to a plaque on the door was one of the prides of the city. It was boarded up now, 

the horses coralled behind green plywood and thick wire screen, not to be opened until Memorial 

Day. He walked past the park until he reached Main Street, where he took a right and walked to 

downtown, a small collection of late nineteenth century red and white sandstone buildings, none 

of which rose higher than fifteen stories. A clock on one of the buildings showed five o’clock 

when he got there, so he hung around on street corners and in the small shops that were still open 

and watched the exodus of cars and the small stream of men and women walking out of 

buildings into the bright spring light. 

He walked past a bar, peering in through glass walls at dark wood paneling, neon fixtures, a 

man seated at a piano. A pot-bellied man with a ragged mustache stood behind the bar, phone to 

his ear. It was getting cold out and Theo had nowhere to be, so he went in and took a seat. The 

bartender set the phone down, eyed Theo through slit lids and shifted his toothpick to the other 

corner of his mouth before asking him for identification. Theo sifted through his wallet and


pulled out his fake driver’s license and showed it to the man. He eyed the plastic card warily and 

handed it back to Theo. 

“Minnesota, huh,” he said. “How’re the Packers doing?” 

“They’re fine,” Theo said. “But they’re in Wisconsin.” 

Theo paid for his beer and turned to look at the man at the piano. Unshaven and obviously 

drunk, he sat on the bench with his left hand resting on the keyboard. He played a chord, shifted 

to another chord, experimentally added more notes with his right hand. The progression was 

familiar, but with the missed notes and hesitations the song itself was hard to name. 

“We let him play as long as the place isn’t too full,” the bartender said. The handset to the 

phone still lay on the counter where he had left it. 

“Should have brought my guitar,” Theo said. 

“You play?” 

“Couldn’t do worse than him.” 

“Maybe if I had the piano tuned.” 

“Sounds tuned. Probably needs new strings.” 

“They do that? Re-string pianos?” 

“Sure.” 

“Seems like those strings should be a permanent thing. Hidden away like they are.” 

Theo said, “Yeah, they change them.” 

The drunk at the piano strung together a professional sounding phrase from the song “Let it 

Be,” then returned to tapping out chords. 

“That sounded okay for a second,” Theo said.


“He says he used to be good. Played the coffee house circuit in Ithaca. Was in a band that got 

famous round these parts soon as he left it.” 

“That’s the way it goes sometimes.” He sat for a second, listening for another recognizable 

phrase. Then Theo pointed to the handset and said, “Are you on the phone over there?” 

The bartender looked over, shook his head in self-chastisement. Walked back to the phone 

and said hello, started talking. 

A minute later a woman came in and sat at the bar next to Theo, though there were empty 

seats everywhere. The bartender hung up the phone and without asking mixed a drink for her. 

Setting the drink in front of her he said, “Where’s Fred these days?” 

The woman shook her head, said nothing, fumbled to light a cigarette. When the bartender 

left she turned to Theo and whispered, “He knows where that bastard Fred is.” 

“Pardon?” 

“He’s going to hell if he’s lucky.” She looked up at the television mounted in the far corner 

of the ceiling. A man seated behind a desk, head tilted toward the camera as he read the evening 

news. Before Theo knew what was happening he had found out that the woman sitting next to 

him was trying to leave her boyfriend. Theo nodded politely as she went through the details. She 

had taken up with this man Fred after leaving an alcoholic who beat her. She loved him — Fred 

— well, probably she loved both of them, but though this most recent one didn’t beat her he was 

fooling around with other women. “What’s a person supposed to do?” she asked Theo. He 

looked her in the eye as the drunk at the piano started playing a Randy Newman song. She was 

short with dark hair and a bleached mustache, blotchy pale skin, and there were rings around her 

eyes either of smeared make-up or exhaustion, the poor lighting making it difficult to tell which. 

Faded white t-shirt with a blue collar and cuffs and blue trimmed pocket, jeans tight over pouting


abdomen, black sneakers scuffed to white on the toes. There was the possibility that once, in 

high school maybe, she could have been described as pretty, but she wasn’t any more. Theo 

looked up at the television, at the poorly centered anchorman in front of a cheesy, fog-shrouded 

river valley backdrop. He asked if she had any kids. She nodded. 

“Kids make it difficult,” he told her. 

She nodded again, dragging on the cigarette. Reached under her shirtsleeve to scratch her 

shoulder. Then she a smiled with a surprising sweetness. “I love my kids,” she said. 

The television showed a pretty blond woman in a blazer and skirt standing in front of a 

weather map. She smiled brightly, pointed at a sun pasted over Ontario, made gathering motions 

with her hands. The woman next to Theo lit another cigarette. 

Theo pointed at the piano player, who had made it halfway through his song with a rocking, 

drowsy glee and said, “He’s doing okay now. When I came in he sucked.” 

The woman said, “He used to be good.” 

Theo walked back to the house by the same path, under a sky that had clouded over to a 

uniform steel grey that threatened rain. Larry was asleep and Lizbeth was out. Theo walked 

through the house, exploring rooms he hadn’t seen before. There was a study with a built-in 

bookshelf filled with literary first editions on one shelf and law books on another. There was a 

second wall filled with plaques and honorariums from the Kiwanis club, the Rotary club, the Boy 

Scouts and the local chamber of commerce. The rest of the house held three spare bedrooms, a 

porch out back with a potting table and another patio with a barbecue grill and picnic table sitting 

on the edge of a lime-green lawn that gradually sloped to a grove of sycamore trees clinging with 

bare roots to the steeply pitched banks of the Susquehenna river.


In the garage were two cars, an old blue Pontiac and a newer Oldsmobile. Everything about 

the house suggested a man who’d lived well and been respected by his community, a man who 

didn’t have anything to hide. And these were the people, Theo figured, who hid things best of all. 

That night Theo woke at three in the morning, blinking into the unexpected light of the 

corner floor lamp. After a few moments of confusion, he sat up and saw Lizbeth at the window, 

exhaling cigarette smoke through the screen. Her kinky black hair was gathered with a band at 

the back of her neck, flaring out again over her shoulders. She didn’t appear to notice him, and 

what it was that could have engaged her thoughts he didn’t know, until he suspected something 

must have happened to Larry that she was getting ready to tell him about, perhaps ordering the 

words in her mind perfectly before she began speaking. 

“Is he all right?” Theo asked. 

She turned to look at him slowly. “Sure,” she said. 

“What’s up, then.” 

“Nothing. I couldn’t sleep.” She tapped out the cigarette in an ashtray and sat down in the 

small round chair, brushing ashes from the front of her wrinkled nightshirt. She went on, “He’ll 

come out of this in a day or two. This is a thing that happens where he just gets extremely tired. 

But he’ll come out of it.” She had a calm reserve in her voice, a way of intoning her phrases with 

a sure sense of authority that wasn’t there when she was talking about anything else but taking 

care of people. 

Theo rolled over and sat up, adjusting his shorts to ride properly on his waist. He ran a hand 

through his hair and watched her calmly. She said, “He still has a few months left, they tell me.”


Theo said, “I was planning on leaving in the morning.” Lizbeth nodded. Theo went on, “I 

was thinking. I need a car. I noticed there are three. One is yours, two are his.” 

“Yes,” said Lizbeth. “One is mine, two are his.” 

“So I need one.” 

“Yeah. I don’t know. I mean I don’t know about that sort of thing. Meaning it’s up to you. 

But he has two cars he hasn’t driven for years. Maybe he’d want you to have it. One.” 

“Well you’ll need to tell him if I have to take one before he wakes up again.” 

“You’re in a hurry, is one of the things you’d like me to know.” 

“My Mom, really. She worries.” 

“Momma’s upset. How old are you again? Seventeen?” 

“Eighteen next month,” said Theo. He felt her eyes on his bare chest and said, “What is it 

you’re thinking?” 

“Just what people think,” she said. “When they spend a lot of time alone and suddenly 

someone’s there.” 

“You don’t have a boyfriend?” 

“You don’t have a girlfriend?” 

“I do, actually.” 

“Someone your own age?” 

“Approximately, yes.” 

“But forget about it. I decided right now. I never get out of this house long enough to have a 

boyfriend. There’s another nurse that comes in once in a while, but even then I don’t get out. I 

don’t know. Why should I be telling you this?” 

Theo shrugged, said, “People tell me things. You can’t help it.”


“It’s because this is a transitional acquaintance,” she said. “And mostly likely it’s I’ll never 

see you again. So I can tell you anything.” 

“You think it would be a mistake?” 

“I meant transitory. In passing. And because it’s two people here in a room isn’t a reason. 

What sense does that make? I made a lot of mistakes,” she said. “And that would be nothing. I 

killed a person once. An old lady with cancers all over her body.” 

“How did it happen?” Theo said. He reached down to the floor next to her feet and picked up 

his shirt. He looked at it, shook it once, and put it on. 

“She was sick. She wanted to die. It was like this, it was an in-house care situation where I 

was assisting another nurse. Part of my training, a few years ago. She kept saying she wanted to 

die, but we can’t just kill people. ‘Shoot me up with something,’ she said. ‘Inject me. Fill me up 

with something that’ll end it.’ When it was my turn to watch over her she wouldn’t shut up about 

it. ‘Kill me,’ she said. ‘It’s too much pain.’ I told her I couldn’t. ‘Let me do it, then,’ she said. 

‘You just fill the needle.’” 

“You did that?” 

Lizbeth shook her head. “No. But then one night she didn’t talk about dying. She sat there 

talking about her children, how one worked on construction sites as a supervisor and another one 

who worked for the power company and there was a daughter who became a television 

meteorologist, and they’d all given her beautiful grandchildren. I thought maybe she was past 

wanting to die and wanted to live for a while longer. So I went to bed and then woke up in the 

middle of the night like I usually do but this time it was because I remembered I’d left a bottle of 

sleeping pills on her night stand.” Her face remained calm as she spoke in her slow monotonous 

voice, her eyes glancing from point to point above Theo’s head. “I went in to take them away,


thinking there was no reason to because she’d been so happy telling me about her daughter the 

weatherwoman. But the bottle was empty. She’d taken all the pills. I checked her pulse; she was 

gone. So I sat there for a while, waiting. Trying to work out an explanation for what was 

happening. There would be questions. You know. I’d probably loose my license, go to jail.” 

“Were there questions?” 

“No.” Lizbeth chewed on her lower lip, then pulled a cigarette from Theo’s pack and lit it. 

“They didn’t do an autopsy. One of the things you learn is that the closer someone gets to death 

the fewer questions there are about the way they ultimately go. You know, like, what’s the 

difference? They asked a few questions. Nothing intense.” 

“What did you say?” 

“I said she was talking about her kids and then went to sleep. But you know, I don’t know 

what the truth is. Whether I knew when I left the room whether the sleeping pills were there or 

not. If I let myself forget at the time, or convinced myself later that I’d forgotten. Or if it was 

because from so many times over the next year of telling myself I’d forgotten that that’s actually 

what I remember now. That I’d forgotten them there. Stuff that’s not the point, because the real 

question is what were they doing there in the first place.” 

Theo said, “So you didn’t kill her.” 

“No. But I just think like that sometimes. That I did.” 

“You’re probably being too hard on yourself.” 

She said, “Probably I am.” 

Theo looked at the cigarettes but didn’t light one. He put his arms behind his head and looked 

at Lizbeth. “So that’s what keeps you up at night.” He said.


“That and other things. I get headaches if I lie down too long because I had that trauma to the 

head. So three hours is about how long I sleep at a time, then I get up again. And I think about 

things like after this job, what I’m going to do. I’m going to look for work in a hospital 

somewhere. Someplace with people around, where I can go home afterwards. I’m going to live 

someplace I can have a cat, I think. And I’m going to call up the other nurses and we’re going to 

go out on weekends and I’m going to get married to a guy that doesn’t know anything about 

medicine or diseases that old people get.” 

“Are you going to have any kids?” Theo asked. 

“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” she said. He thought she was joking, but all she did was 

shorten her neck and blow smoke. 

9. 

For me, mornings were the usual struggle in which getting up and going in to work always 

won out over a moody day spent sulking in the apartment, and once at work I pushed slowly 

through the log-jam of manuscripts and departmental memos that showed up on my desk. I 

would have liked to see the person who delivered them, Sharon Wildbrush, because she was 

pretty and we always got along well, but it seemed that either our schedules were completely out 

of synch or she was trying to avoid me — I couldn’t tell which. There wasn’t anything romantic 

between us, but on the other hand I couldn’t recall anything I had done which would make her 

not want to see me, in fact all I had done was smile and tell her that she did a good job of 

delivering the manuscripts, to which she would reply that I was wearing a nice tie. 

I admired her saying that because my ties, when I wear them, are frighteningly conservative 

— plaids and muted paisleys tied with a lumpy, childishly square Windsor knot. Ties that never 

quite match the effort I put into selecting more stylish shirts. But she was a good looking young


woman, one who I would have liked to see more of had I not been fascinated by A.J.. And, since 

that escapade was winding down, the idea of seeing Sharon over lunch began to make headway 

through my thoughts. Unfortunately, I had not seen her in more than a week and was starting to 

wonder if she was even still employed by the magazine. 

I had to see the editor, Maggie Keefe, to clear up several confusions in a piece I was working 

on — night life on St. Paul’s Grand Street — and when I had done that I asked, casually, about 

Sharon. 

“I thought you’d heard,” she told me. “She asked to have her schedule changed so she could 

avoid the harassment.” 

“Who was harassing her?” I asked. “It wasn’t me, was it?” 

She seemed not to have heard the last half of my statement, or chose to ignore it, instead 

saying simply, “Pete.” Meaning Pete Johnson from circulation, who worked at the desk next to 

mine and seemed incapable of talking about anything not related to whatever sport was currently 

in season. Overweight, balding and squinty, I had no trouble picturing him as a sexual harasser, 

and I wondered if I shouldn’t have seen it coming and given some kind of warning to Sharon. 

Why I should have seen it coming, or what kind of warning, I don’t know. Then Maggie said, 

“I’ve talked to him about it. I’m surprised you didn’t hear.” 

“I’m out of the loop on a lot of things,” I said. 

I returned to my desk to brood over the manuscript. I transposed a sentence from passive to 

active. I retitled the article, changing it from “It’s a Grand Old Street” to “Grand me your 

Wishes”, a change I figured was probably too clever to make it into print.


The next day Larry was strong enough to sit up in bed and eat by himself, and then Theo 

helped him into the wheelchair. Theo wheeled him to the library, where they sat for a while 

surrounded by Larry’s books. Lizbeth set up an I.V. tube as Larry complained, making a face as 

she probed for a vein. The first thing he wanted to know was what Theo was doing about school. 

He seemed satisfied that it was spring break, and then he wanted to know how he was getting 

back to Minnesota. When he found out Theo had no plans (he was careful not to mention hitch 

hiking) Larry insisted that either he buy Theo a plane ticket or set him up with a car and traveling 

money. After Theo settled on the car, he began asking about Jack. 

He found out that Jack had left Binghamton more or less for good in 1959, intending to travel 

for the summer before returning to attend college. That summer stretched into a year, and the 

year stretched into two, and then three, and when it became apparent that Jack would be able to 

travel indefinitely on the interest his trust fund brought in, Larry decided to take action. He 

refused to let Jack stay in his house when he came to town and threatened to cut off his money. 

But Jack simply stayed at friend’s houses or out of town all together, and the money was 

undeniably and legally his. The last time Larry saw Jack was 1965, and aside from a rare 

postcard the only thing he knew about Jack came from bank receipts whenever Jack pulled 

money from his trust fund. Finally, in 1970, when Jack’s mother died, Jack provided the final 

wedge by not coming home for the funeral. 

“We had no way to get hold of him,” said Larry. He puffed his cheeks, rubbed at his chin. 

Said, “We called people who called people who said they told him, but how do I know if they 

did or not? I was sure at the time that he knew and had stayed away out of spite, so I transferred 

all the money he had to a different bank. At least, I thought, I’d give him a scare.” Larry picked 

up an arm to run through his hair, then looked in annoyance at the I.V. tube dangling from his


skin. “It was his money, of course. Legally, I couldn’t take it away. It was a sneaky move to deny 

him access to it; but all I did, see, was move it to another bank. He could have asked where it 

was and got it any time he wanted. Guess I won that round. Or he did. Hard to tell. He never 

touched his money again.” 

“Never?” 

“No. It’s still there. I suppose it’s yours now. I’ll see if I can find the papers. It’s yours and 

your brother’s and your sister’s.” 

“That was the year he got married,” Theo said. “The year he settled down in Clear Lake. 

You’d think he’d want that money. Instead of taking a crap job in a lamp factory, sweating and 

going crazy and taking money from mom’s parents for a down payment on a matchbox house.” 

“Well, the last time I talked to him we said some things. He called me a sick twisted old 

bastard, I called him a dumb hippie. And after that we decided not to talk to each other for a 

while. It just stretched out longer than I’d expected.” 

“And you didn’t even come to his funeral.” 

Larry didn’t answer that. He sat still, then he gave a quick sniff and rubbed at his nose. Then 

he said, “That’s the past. Tell me about you, Theodore. Are you finishing school soon?” 

“June.” 

“College?” 

“I’ve been accepted to St. Olaf.” 

“Hm.” 

“It’s a good school.” 

“I’m sure it is.”


“If it helps, I think Jack was sorry.” Larry sat quietly, a hand tapping the wheelchair’s vinyl 

padded arm. “He was a damn stubborn man. I see that in you, too.” 

“What about after college?” 

“I want eventually to work in images.” 

Larry scrunched up his eyes questioningly, shook his head. “You kids. I have no idea what 

you say.” 

“Maybe I’ll work in television,” Theo said, slowly. “I find television fascinating. The way it 

both defines and initiates cultural trends. How it’s become an alternate reality. A self-adapting 

icon. I think images are going to be the literacy of the future. The future’s going to belong to 

people who can write in images.” 

“You remind me of him. Saying things that make no goddam sense.” 

Theo paused. Said, “The thing about television is I think I love it too much to be able to work 

in it. I critique, I analyze. I don’t know if I could be creative in a field I simply love to watch.” 

“You should read books. Books are permanent, they sit on your shelf. I read the classics. I 

used to, anyway. Shakespeare. Milton. Midway along the journey of our life, etcetra.” 

“Dante. Yeah. Jack used to love Dante, too. And Milton. He loved the melodrama, the storm 

and thunder.” 

“Melodrama was right. Foolish nonsense.” 

“He’s why I know Dante. He kept books around, too. Battered old Penguin classics that I’d 

pick up and poke through. He’d catch me, glance at the page I was on, and start quoting. You 

should read the poems in the box. He wanted you to read the poems.” 

“I wanted for my son to have a good education, so I collected all the best writers of history. 

Junior read them, too, though not as intently as I’d hoped. Whipped right through twenty five


hundred years before he was eighteen. Read maybe five percent of what was there. A sentence 

here, a paragraph there. Had no patience. He didn’t have a thorough mind. Then he turned to 

dime paperbacks and bad poetry and popular fiction by sloppy beatniks. That shit he read cover 

to cover.” 

“I think if you read a few of the poems. Maybe you’d find he remembered the classics. In any 

case it’s a way for you to know him again.” 

“Start wheeling me in to bed.” 

“I’ll leave them on your nightstand.” 

“My eyes hurt too much to read. Elizabeth, come here!” 

“Her name’s Lizbeth.” 

“Elizabeth!” 

“Maybe I could read them to you. Maybe you’ll like them.” 

“You’re his damn son, all right.” He pouted for a moment, lips working over his dentures, 

hands clenching and unclenching in his lap, fists pounding heel on thumb, until Lizbeth came in 

and disconnected the i.v. Theo watched, then helped push him down the hall and lift him into 

bed. 

“Tell me you won’t,” said Larry. 

He didn’t know what he was answering any more than Larry knew what he was asking, but 

Theo said, “I won’t.” 

Then Larry fell asleep. Theo watched for a few minutes, amazed by every regular slow rise 

and fall of his frail, failing chest. He dreamed, and this fascinated Theo also, the frantic darting 

of eyes under age-spotted lids. He woke again around nine and directed Lizbeth to give Theo 

some money for the trip home. He gave instructions on which car he should take and the proper


way to set the choke, and suggested a few roads Theo might want to take, and then he fell asleep 

again. 

Late the next morning, after waiting in vain to see if Larry would wake again so he could say 

goodbye, Theo left. He made one stop at a Kinko’s to run off some copies, drove back to the 

house to drop them off, then began the drive home. Route Seventeen followed the southern 

border on New York State, hugging the ridges of low mountains above a river valley and now 

that his fate was in his own hands the landscape seemed friendlier, more inviting. He stopped for 

lunch in diners and chatted with farmers and retired executives from the city. The villages were 

cozy, nestled in woods under webbed power lines; at intersections traffic lights dangled in the 

breeze. He made it to Cleveland, intending to take his time coming home. But the Midwest was 

nothing like southern New York State; it had become suburbanized and the tollway was 

monotonous, and every stop was the same. He made it to Madison and spent another night in a 

hotel room on Larry’s credit, and by ten the next morning he was home. 

I was at Mom’s with Kelley when he pulled into the driveway behind the wheel of a big blue 

Pontiac that got horrible mileage but drove like a dream — he had cruised for stretches at ninety 

miles an hour. The box of poems was on the back seat, resealed with masking tape, and we 

paged through them, passing them around, wondering what to do with them. Finally, because I 

was the oldest and had a degree in English, Kelley and Theo decided I should keep them. 

10. 

One night when I was little I woke from sleep at what felt like the latest hour imaginable. I 

got up and stood in the dark of this never before seen time of day, then wandered out to the 

living room, holding my pillow for comfort. Just outside the door I heard tinny television voices,


the ultra high pitched hum of the picture tube. I stopped, waited and planned my next move. 

Someone else had evaded sleep and found this hour, I realized, and it was probably one of my 

parents. I moved quietly to the door, hoping not to be spotted and sent back to bed. It was Jack, 

sitting on the couch, watching television and drinking. The light from the picture tube cast his 

face in a pale light, and he stared straight into the television without moving his eyes. I stood 

quietly, hoping to avoid detection, but he turned his head and saw me standing there, met my 

eyes, and smiled. Then he winked. Then he turned back to the television. A moment later he 

looked back at me and waved for me to come over. He said, Can’ sleep either? 

I not sure how or if I responded. On the television, the picture suffered from poor reception, 

wavy lines chasing triple images in snowy monocolor. I pointed at the antenna, maybe said 

something. 

Jack rubbed at his eyes and drunkenly said, They cut their power down a’ ten-clock, bastards. 

Broadcast sucks. Can’ get a decent pitcher. Cold nights like this no help either. Come on watch, 

though. Don’ tell Carrie. I’ll catch shit. 

So I spread out my blanket on the floor and sat down to watch, leaning back against the sofa. 

Probably I fell asleep there, though I’m not sure. Over the next month this happened several 

times. I’d wake up and go stand in the doorway, where I could see Jack watching television. 

Johnny Carson, perhaps, or a movie in scratchy black and white, and Jack would be slouched 

down low in the sofa, his head settled into his shoulders, a tumbler of whiskey between his legs. 

Other nights he’d be waiting for me, it seemed. He’d be hyper and fidgety, and when he saw 

me he’d say, There’s my boy! and pick me up and carry me around the house. He’d take me 

outside and we’d stand in the heavy night air. He’d say, Are ya ready? Listen to this. Then he’d


yell at the top of his lungs, casting out a mighty Wheeeee-Haaaaaaaaawww!!! that broke through 

the night and set dogs barking up and down the block. 

Why do you do that? I asked once, removing my hands from my ears and giggling. 

And he said, Somewhere out there is a guy whose somnolence has been profoundly 

disturbed. He’s wide awake now and saying in bewilderment: Who the fuck keeps doing that? I 

do it for him. 

Later that month a friend of Jack’s named Nick Kastle, a poet from New York City, came to 

visit. It was a Thursday shortly after Jack had come home from work, and he’d barely had time 

to crack his first beer before the doorbell rang whereupon Jack opened the door to see Nick and 

his then-wife, an angular beauty named Alina, standing on the porch. 

Son of a bitch, said Jack. 

That’s me, said Nick. 

You found me. 

Shit yeah. I followed the trail of empty bottles to your house. 

God Damn! Nick Kastle has found my house! Well, Jesus fuck. Let’s go out. 

We just got here, said Alina. 

I meant come in, said Jack. Absolutely. Whew! Nick. At my house! He opened the door 

wider and stepped back to let them in. They walked in and looked around, saw Carrie in the 

hallway in her maternity dress and house slippers. She stood there trying to display defiance; 

she’d been invaded again and needed to pretend she didn’t care. This guy, said Jack to Carrie. 

This guy’s a poet, a genius poet. This is Nick Kastle.


She gave him a good look. Nick was tall and stoop-shouldered, with dark kinky hair and a 

large dark eyes. He stood with his hand over his heart, cigarette nestled in his fingers. Charmed, 

he said. 

Pleased to meet you, said Carrie. 

C’mon let’s sit, said Jack. Let’s getta drink. Couch is over there. He showed them in, ran to 

the refrigerator and came back with two more beers. Carrie, he said. C’mon. Let’s sit. 

Carrie sat in her favorite chair, a padded rocker, and laced her fingers over her swollen belly. 

You got a little critter coming, said Nick. 

Congratulations, said Alina. 

That’s gonna be what, three? 

Jack nodded, hair flopping into his eyes. 

Alina said, When’re you due? Then she went back to chewing on a thumbnail with her slight 

overbite. 

September 1, said Carrie. 

Moses on wheat toast! said Nick. What’s that damn thing doing around your neck, Jack? 

Jack looked down at his tie. Damn, he said. I forgot all about that thing. Usually it comes 

right off when I git home. 

Well it’s frightening, Jack. It’s disturbing to see you this way. 

Jack yanked the tie out from under his shirt collar, then pulled the loop over his head. He 

hung the tie on a doorknob, all the time talking. He said, Forget about this. It’s not me. This is 

but a disguise I wear in order to support my family. I got mouths to feed and more on the way. 

So it’s put my queer shoulder to the wheel, to quote Ginsberg. He swallowed a good sized 

portion of beer and wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. Need another? Nick nodded before


checking his beer and finishing it off. Jack said Yeah, let me tell ya I was shocked when they 

told me about this tie thing. I been at this factory place for three years and all a sudden I get this 

promotion. They tell me I’m management now, I gotta wear a tie. 

Managing? Back in the day, you couldn’t manage your own life. 

I don’t think of myself as management. I’m a, like you might call, a union rep. I talk to 

workers and ask them what the hell they want, then I talk to the suits, ask them what they want, 

and then I explain everything to the other side being careful to make it sound like it’s the same 

damn thing, and things get settled. 

Jack picked up Kelley, who had wandered in from her nap, settled her onto his hip, then 

maneuvered around the coffee table and settled onto the arm of the chair next to Mom. 

Nick said, Never figured you were the type of guy to be making peace, Jack. 

I’m not against a fight, you understand. Not at all, I’m with ya on that, Nick. But this is 

business. This is shit that ain’t worth fighting over. But it’s okay except for that there work- 

leash. How many ties did I own when we got married, Carrie? 

You’d never seen a tie when we got married. 

I had maybe two. I got a whole collection, now. It’s something, all the kinds of ties they 

make. Patterns, stripes, pictures. Some mornings it adds twenty minutes to pick out a damn 

work-leash. Anyway, itsa good, steady job. I mean, there are worse ways to be living. And I can 

take time off for travel pretty steady. I only wish Carrie liked to travel. 

Like hell that’s what you wish, said Carrie. I do like to travel. What I don’t like is the way 

you travel. Living like a goddam bum, sleeping in rest stops and scrounging off people we don’t 

even know for food. 

I like meeting people.


You like making a nuisance of yourself. 

Jack looked up at Nick, asking for support where he knew none was coming, at least not with 

Carrie and Alina in the room. He said, Anyway, I have a steady job and a wife and kids to come 

home to. What I mean to say is, I have stuff you have to keep account of so it doesn’t walk away. 

That happens here in the suburbs like everywhere else, a thing that surprised me, living as I did 

in cities, thinking anything outside city lines is green grass paradise. You hear things a funny 

way living in the suburbs, you know. Why, I was out barbecuing last weekend, and I was 

expecting Jensen down the road to be out at his grill cause he barbecues like clockwork, 

understand. Only last weekend he wasn’t there. And I’m grilling and such, poking at charred 

meat, and decide to let the coals burn without me for a while so I go and check the mail. And 

there’s the other neighbor asking if it feels funny to be grilling without Jensen, then tells me 

Jensen up and left his wife. Tole her fourfive days ago he was going out for cigarettes and then 

he doesn’t come back. He’s got an apartment out in Roseville now, one of them with round door 

tops and iron handrails. 

I heard that story before, said Nick. Not with Jensen, mind you, but with friends in the city. 

Oh, sure. But to hear it walking out to the mailbox, past a lawn you mowed two days ago. To 

hear it on land you have connection to and a mortgage on. Here, in the belly of the American 

Dream, you know, where you been swallowed up like Jonah, where even us cynical bastards 

expect things to be different. Leaving for cigarettes and not coming back. I know I’d at least tell 

Carrie I wasn’t coming back. 

That’ll be kind of you, said Carrie. 

They all stopped talking and spent a few seconds sloshing beer around in the bottom of their 

cans, and then Jack got up, setting Kelley down. He went to the kitchen and poured himself a


shot of whiskey. While he was doing that, Kelley toddled over to Alina and stared at her until 

Alina picked her up and set her on her lap. 

When Jack came back he had an embarrassed look on his face. Speaking of which, he said, 

This here is crazy, but it looks like I’m out of smokes. Nick? You still working through the Pall 

Mall warehouse? Nick fished through his jacket pocket and came out with a crumpled ball of 

cigarette package and tossed it to Jack, who squared off a couple of the corners and peered into 

the opening. Only four or five left, he said. He pulled one out and straightened it a bit, set it in 

his mouth, tossed the pack back to Nick. We’ll need more soon, he said. Honey? You got any of 

those menthols left? 

You’re not even thinking about smoking menthols, she answered. 

I ask for when I make the run, Jack said. 

You’ll be coming back, right? 

If I got yer cigs, then sure I gotta come back. Cause I’m not burning menthol, Sugar. 

Then I need some, if that’s what it takes for you to come back. 

Fine then it’s settled. Whabout you, ‘Lina? Got any? 

Alina shook her head and said she didn’t smoke. 

No kidding, said Jack. Well. You want to see the neighborhood, Nick? 

Nick looked up at him, blinking his big round eyes slowly. He was still wearing his old vinyl 

jacket, so he pulled at the lapels, eyeing first Carrie and then Alina. I’m game, he said. 

All right, then. Jack brushed a hand through my hair, then did the same to Kelley and then he 

and Nick left.


It took them several hours, but they finally did come back when everyone had gone to sleep 

except me. Their entrance had shaken me from whatever shallow sleep I’d found, and their 

voices in the kitchen kept me awake, so I crept down and listened at the door. 

You’ve got to have something, Nick said. 

There’s nothing, Jack answered. There’s only the five or six you stole when we were in 

California. Anything more than that is gone. They were shuffling about, opening and closing the 

refrigerator door. 

You can’t be serious, Nick said. They were good. As good as anything I’ve seen. 

I didn’t think so. 

There was the popping and splashy sound of a cracked open beer can foaming and spilling 

onto the floor, then the scrape of chairs. 

What about that whole Jonah in the American Dream speech. You rattled that off pretty well. 

How about that? 

I don’t know, said Jack. 

There was the sound of them lighting cigarettes and chairs creaking and the feeling of them 

both being deep in thought the way grown-ups were. 

We could use them, Nick said. The whole world could. 

Ah, the whole world can go ta hell. 

I’m sure you could use the money, said Nick. 

Argh. And then, the bigshot, he brings money into the picture. You know what money does. 

Once you start having money it just leads to wanting more money and more spending and there’s 

no end to it. 

Jack the impractical, said Nick. Jack the uncorrupted.


Jack who’s got a family to raise an a mortgage to pay, Jack said. There was a long pause and 

more scraping of chairs and then Jack said Well, if there are any, I fer sure won’t just hand em 

over. Ye’ll have to search fer them and cleave them from whatever remains of me. Hell, they’ll 

probably be all that does remain of me. 

I’d rather not wait, Nick said. 

Greed is a destroying force, Jack said, And this Jack has no sympathy for it. Jack will save 

you from your greed, and I will remain stubborn for a while longer. 

They were talking about his poetry, of course. It must have been that for years he intended 

that they exist only in his head, and then, somehow, in a Jackian moment of revelation, he 

changed his mind and started writing. Or that had been his plan all along. To deny that they 

existed but be secretly at work and then, when finished, to cast them away like seeds on the wind 

to germinate or die as the fate of the world determined. 

That would also have been like Jack, to leave his future in the hands of fate. After Nick and 

his then-wife spent the weekend, he and Jack packed up and went out west, to Arizona, for a 

week. During that time the union held a vote to strike and shut down the plant. Needless to say, 

when Jack finally returned from Arizona, he had no job. 

He said he’d always been happiest as an independent contractor anyway, that being fired was 

just another way of moving on. He’d rather be out, on the hustle, making things happen. Over the 

next few years he’d hold dozens of jobs. He passed the state exam and went to work on road 

crews, hauling asphalt and directing traffic around work sites. He learned to drive the big rigs 

and in the winter he’d be part of the MnDOT snowplow team, sitting high in the cab of a giant 

orange truck with a massive curved blade bolted to the front bumper and snow swirling about his


ears, he and the other plows driving in a powerful wedge sending waves of crashing snow-surf 

swirling and breaking onto the medians of the freeways and highways of the metro area. 

When his patience for that job ran out he talked his way into seasonal work on golf courses 

and landscape companies, then found he had an aptitude for tinkering with the machines in the 

equipment shed. He’d clean engines, fix broken mower reels. For six months he apprenticed 

himself to Bob LaFontaine, a mechanic with a shop across the highway from downtown, and set 

about learning how to fix cars. He and Bob became drinking buddies, closing down the Clear 

Lake Tavern and then taking the drive to Wisconsin to catch last call across the river, where the 

bars closed an hour later. He’d work for Bob for months at a time, then quit for some other job 

he thought he’d like more, then when that ran out he’d talk his way back into Bob’s good graces 

for another stint at his garage. 

He also found he had a knack for fixing just about anything: radios, stereos, television sets. 

He’d convince the owners of repair shops they needed an assistant, then learn everything they 

knew. Eventually he started taking in broken electronics on his own and kept a shop in the 

basement where he’d putter with things late into the night. 

So when other kids asked what my dad did for a living I’d never know what to tell them. Oh, 

you know, I’d say. As long as there’s a roof over your head you don’t ask. Jack goes out in the 

morning, comes back at night. You know there’s a room in the basement full of radios and wires 

and shit. My friends would look at me like I was crazy for not knowing, and I’d tell them they 

were crazy because their Dads were professors, or engineers, or doctors, soulless brain-dead 

automatons, and they’d think I was crazier still. 

It would have been no better to tell them he was a poet, if I’d known. That down in the shop 

he must have had a secret box filled with paper and pens and that he scratched away down there,


putting down words. Crazier still to realize he didn’t want anyone to know except his father. But 

there they were, years later, a box of poems on my kitchen table. 

I read through them and then re-read them, and then talked some more with Theo and Kelley 

and Mom. I thought they were good, but didn’t know how good. The only way to find out was to 

try and publish them. From my days as an English major I knew that much of the publishing of 

new poets was done in small literary journals, publications with obscure names — The 

Whitewater Review, The Cream City Review, or nonsense sounding words like Callyx or 

Zyzzyva. 

I suppose it was to be expected that I called A.J.. It was the weekend, a lazy Saturday 

afternoon with blue sky and high thin clouds. The sun shimmered off of shallow puddles in the 

road in front of my apartment building and the church across the street had its doors wide open. 

Minneapolis glittered in the afternoon sun, pale buildings with nothing to hide. 

Since I last saw A.J. several weeks had passed, so it was with only my regular phone trauma 

that I cautiously dialed her number, hesitating before hitting the seventh number and coming 

close to hanging up twice; once before it started ringing and again after the third ring, but it was 

soon answered by a deep voiced male who said hello. 

“A.J., please?” I said. The phone clacked in my ear, a loud noise that I figured was the 

handset on the other end being carelessly placed on a hard surface. Across the street a teenage 

boy began sweeping the steps and sidewalk of the church. On the other end of the line the 

boyfriend’s voice got small and called out A.J.’s name. There was a hustle of off-phone 

conversation and the scratch of the handset being picked up and A.J. breathing. 

“Hi,” she said. 

“Is this a bad time?” I asked.


“I guess that depends.” It was one of those hyper digitized phone lines, a connection that lent 

a supernatural echo to her voice, a hollow and beautiful whisper in my ear. 

I paused, listening to a crystalline puff of her breathing, then said, “This is Matt LaFleur. 

Does that help?” 

“Oh, gosh. Hi Matt. What can I do for you?” 

“If this is really a bad time I can call back ... ” 

“No. Kevin is up here for the weekend; we’re going out in an hour or so. Shoot.” 

“Okay. Um, let me first... I mean. Hold on.” I willed myself not to speak through a pause 

where just about anything could have been said, then I went on. “Anyway, I wanted to ask you a 

professional question. It’s like this: I told you about my Dad, right?” 

“You told me he died a few years ago.” 

“All right. Well, it turns out he wrote a lot of poetry that I think is pretty good, but I’m not 

sure. I mean, I’m his son and all and what would I know. But I was thinking that it might be 

good enough to get published somewhere, but I can’t think of where and I’m still not sure it’s all 

that good. I guess I’m asking for your help.” 

“It sounds interesting,” A.J. said. “Read me some of it.” 

“What, you mean now? On the phone?” 

“Sure.” 

“But I was thinking ...” I was about to say that I was thinking we could meet somewhere, but 

then stopped. Reading it over the phone would probably be about the same thing. “Okay,” I said. 

“Hold on.” I carried the phone over to my desk, where the box of poems rested, and sifted 

through the top layers, finally pulling out Dishwater Blessing. “This one’s short,” I said. And I 

read it:


The neighbor collects ceramic angels and 

lines them up on the kitchen window to 

bless the dishwater or some such thing. 

But from my kitchen the view is of the 

ass-end of Angels lined up 

ready to release a heavenly chorus of 

Angel farts. 

What am I to do, Lord, 

with the blessings such as you have 

given me? 

There was some sort of indecipherable pause on the other end. Then A.J. laughed. She said, 

“That’s pretty okay. That’s funny. God that’s funny.” 

“But is it good? Would I be wasting my time to send it out? It’s hard for me to tell. What do 

you think?” 

“Well, it is hard to tell. The poetry market is usually glutted, but I’d say that one probably 

has as good a chance as any at getting published. There’s this magazine in Missouri called the 

Ozark Review that publishes a regular feature called History as Literature. They usually publish 

diaries and journals and stuff like that, but they may be interested in Jack’s poems, especially 

since they last year published some of Kerouac’s previously unpublished letters, so they have a 

sort of Beat esthetic. I don’t know. Send them a few, you know, along with a letter explaining 

Jack’s claimed link to Kerouac. Then wait and see what they say.”


“So what do I do? I mean, do I type them up or what?” 

“Well, definitely type them. Typing would be a good start.” 

We talked for a few more minutes, finally agreeing to meet for lunch to go over the poems. 

After I hung up I was frightened she might call back and cancel, so I turned the phone upside 

down and unclipped the cord plug from its square socket. I wrapped the cord twice around the 

phone and set the now disabled unit on the table, intending to replug it sometime on Monday. 

11. 

On Tuesday evening around eight o’clock I was at my desk, trying to get the poems into my 

old computer and printed off for the next day’s meeting with A.J., when someone knocked at the 

door. It was Theo and a long-necked girl who stood behind him looking over her shoulder down 

the hall. “Theo,” I said. “What the hell.” 

In the days after his return from Binghamton Theo had slipped easily, though churlishly, 

back into the routine of high school. Late for homeroom, cut a class, make up an excuse. He said 

everything they taught was something he already knew, or had long suspected, or didn’t care 

about. He said he couldn’t see how college would be any different at this point, that there was 

nothing specifically he wanted to study and so he shouldn’t throw his money away. I tried to 

convince him otherwise, but he had a point. 

“Hey,” he said. “You got any food? We’re starving.” 

The girl shadowed him through the door. She was wearing a green, second-hand flower print 

dress with a square neckline under a wrinkled grey trench coat. Her hair was straight and brown 

and parted in the middle and her dewy brown eyes scanned my apartment quickly, then she 

stopped and stood in my hall as Theo went into the kitchen. “Hi,” she said to me, smiling. “I’m 

Ashley.”


I nodded to her, then called after Theo, “So what’s up?” 

“Nothing. We’re going to First Avenue and thought we’d stop by your place and say hi.” 

Ashley said, “Do you want to come along? There’s a great band playing.” 

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “How are you guys planning on getting in? I mean, being 

seventeen and all.” Theo came back into the living room, carrying an open bag of potato chips 

and three beers crooked under his arm. Ashley took two and offered one to me. “I have beer?” I 

said. 

“Well, I don’t suppose the methods have changed all that much since you were in high 

school, Matt,” said Theo. “There’s only two ways: sneak in or use a fake I.D. Or go to an all ages 

show. Which is tonight.” 

He walked into the bedroom. Curious, I followed and when I got there he had opened my 

closet and was looking at my wardrobe. “You done with any of these shirts?” He said. 

I looked in. Because of Theo’s habit of wearing my clothes I had taken to sorting my shirts 

by use. When I did laundry, all the clean shirts were placed on one end, so the shirts I wore least 

congregated on the other end. I looked in closely at that foot and a half, a collection of shirts I 

hadn’t worn in weeks. I pointed to the end on Theo’s right. “The last six inches or so,” I said. 

Theo nodded and I walked back out into the living room, where Ashley stood over the poems 

and the printed sheets of paper I had been working on when they came in. 

“Are these Jack’s?” she said in a high-pitched sing-song voice. She wore burgundy lipstick 

and several earrings in each ear. “They’re pretty,” she said. She pointed to the jagged spacing on 

the printouts, indentations and punctuation I had tried to copy from Jack’s handwritten originals. 

“Nice use of space.” She set down the pages, rustling them, ran a single finger over their surface.


“Listen. You should come along. I’m meeting some friends of mine. Nice girls. Legal age and 

everything. Theo says you need to meet some people.” 

“Theo says lots.” 

“They’re really nice.” 

Theo came out of the bedroom with a single green corduroy shirt over one forearm. He put 

an arm around Ashley’s waist and they leaned into each other and then fell against the door 

frame. 

“Come with us,” he said. 

“I can’t,” I said. “I have work in the morning, and I have to type these up.” 

Theo nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He finished the beer in his hand, tightened his hand 

around Ashley’s waist, rubbed at the seat of her dress. “Let’s go,” he said. “Matt, we’ll catch you 

later.” 

call.” 

“Bye, Matt,” said Ashley. 

“Oh,” said Theo, “I was supposed to ask you if your phone is broken. Mom’s been trying to 

“No,” I said. “Not that I know.” I thought about unplugging the phone that Saturday and 

about not remembering to plug it back in. Theo nodded, said goodbye again. The door closed 

quickly behind them and there was laughter in the hall, then silence. I tucked the unopened beer 

under my arm, picked up the phone, unwrapped its length of cord and put it back together. 

I called my mother the next day to tell her that I was going to send Jack’s poems to the Ozark 

Review. She didn’t care, she said, but she did wonder what Jack’s intentions might have been.


“He sent them to his father’s for a reason,” she said. “If he’d wanted them published he would 

have sent them out himself.” 

kids.” 

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think he didn’t want them published till he was gone.” 

“Well that’s not what he told me.” 

“He talked to you about it?” 

“A few times. It was always that he’d been kept from being great because of me and you 

“So you knew he wrote?” 

“I knew he tried a few times. But he couldn’t be inspired without taking a few drinks, and 

when he drank he couldn’t concentrate.” 

I said, “He never told me.” 

“And what does his past matter? I didn’t care about that. All I knew about Jack when I met 

him was that he was staying with my brother and said he was looking for a job in Minnesota. My 

god, Matt, you know this story. What do I have to go through it all again for?” 

“Tell it,” I said. 

“Well, it’s pretty much the same story,” said Mom. “He paid attention to me. Took me to 

movies. I thought he had figured out which rules to break. He’d been to San Francisco, New 

York, he said he’d been mentioned in a famous book. I thought he could take me places, maybe, 

but I think he was looking for an anchor. Neither of us got what we wanted.” 

I said, “I don’t know why, but I don’t think that’s true.” 

“Look.” She stopped. “The only important thing now is what to do with the poems. And 

about that I don’t care. Do what you want with them. They’re not mine. If they were mine, Jack 

would have given them to me. He gave them to Larry, Larry gave them to you.”


“And what if I give them to you?” I asked. 

“I won’t take them. There was only one person who could have given them to me. Maybe not 

even one.” There was a pause. The flick and scrape of a lighter, exhalations, then her voice 

again. “Just remember that he couldn’t face us long enough to give us that box himself.” 

“What if they’re about you?” 

“Matt, I have to go to work. Goodbye.” 

I waited fifteen minutes for her to leave, then called back to talk to Kelley. I asked her how 

Dad had proposed to Mom, if she knew. She sounded sleepy; I pictured her mousy hair loose and 

uncombed about her head, her eyes puffy. 

“In a cemetery,” she said. “Three months after they met. He picked her up in a car he had 

bought on money no one knew how he got — ” 

“The trust fund,” I said. 

“Shut up, let me finish. And he took her out to the cemetery, parked under an old oak tree 

and asked her if she could see herself in here someday, parked next to his carcass.” 

“The old romantic.” 

“You should ask her these questions yourself.” 

“I did. Right before she left; she wouldn’t answer. I don’t have the patience for her, I guess. 

But I think her marriage to Jack embarrasses her somehow.” 

“She’s following the current pattern. First marriages are common enough now to have 

become regulated by societal expectations; they’re usually brief, impulsive, and regretful. I 

include my relationship with Winston in this class of relationship, because it’s producing a child. 

Nobody’s proud of their first marriage.” 

“I’ll remember that.”


“So he proposed to her and she thought about it and decided to marry him.” 

“And they were in love?” 

“Ask her yourself.” 

“I did. She wouldn’t say.” 

“There’s your answer.” 

“Do you have a cold? I thought at first you were just tired, but you still sound that way. Is 

this a pregnancy thing? How’s the baby?” 

“The baby is doing well.” 

“Any kicking yet? Any morning sickness? Or am I confusing trimesters?” 

“She mostly sleeps, and the morning sickness has passed.” 

“But how does it feel? Philosophically speaking?” 

“Like I’m renegotiating my lease with humankind. Really. I see why it takes nine months to 

become a mother. Forget the physical changes. It takes that long to reprogram the mind. Already 

my thought patterns have altered themselves. I inspect rooms for sharp corners and exposed 

electrical outlets. Poisonous plants. I’m alert to strangers. Fat contents of foods. Merits and 

pitfalls of the Montessori system.” 

“And Mom is being supportive?” 

“She is. And Theo. Considering that the baby is putting pressure on him to go to college so 

she can take over his room.” 

“Talk about the wrong reason to go to college.” 

“He’ll figure it out.” 

“Sure he will.”


I couldn’t think of anything else to say for a moment. I noticed the room had started to 

become dark, that I was having trouble seeing colors, that shapes were bleeding into each other. I 

told Kelley I had to go and hung up. 

I typed up the poems I hadn’t typed up, made new photocopies and sent the ones A.J. had 

told me were the most suitable for publication to the Ozark Review with the sixth draft of a note 

saying, basically, that I thought they might be interested in them because of their past publication 

of Beat poetry and Jack’s tenuous link to Kerouac. I at first expected them to come straight back 

to me. After two weeks, though, I had the blind optimism of a person who has never dealt with 

magazines before, and considered they were certainly going to be printed. By the end of June, I 

was starting to wonder if they had gotten them at all. 

12. 

Every Fourth of July the city of Clear Lake threw a party that included, among other 

activities, a parade and bazaar. There was a costume contest where kids from the community 

dressed up or tricked out their bicycles or built floats from red wagons, and then all of them 

winners and losers alike would march in the parade, walking in ragged disorder behind the high 

school marching band. One section of the local park was designated as a bazaar with booths and 

a pavilion and an arcade where people sold pretzels and cotton candy and soft drinks and people 

mulled about all day, and after nightfall there would be a fireworks display out over the lake. 

I had planned to show up around nine thirty and meet Mom and Theo and Ashley in front of 

Theo’s stand in the bazaar. Ashley, who in the fall was moving to Chicago to attend art school, 

had talked Theo into setting up a face-painting booth where they could paint flags and stars on


kids’ faces for a couple bucks each. At ten, half an hour before the parade was scheduled to start, 

I finally found them at their booth, made up of a card table covered in faded black corduroy to 

keep things from rolling around. 

A line stretched back from the table past a pretzel stand, kids in various costumes, only a few 

of which were patriotic. I remember when I was a kid there were always founding fathers in tri- 

cornered hats and pioneers in coonskin caps carrying cardboard muskets and carpet remnant 

scalps. There were astronauts in lunar landing module floats, as well as the occasional mermaid 

in a wagon pulled by an older brother dressed as Mark Spitz. Today’s kids had different 

priorities, had turned the parade into a mid-summer Halloween party without the monsters and 

gore and store-bought plastic masks. Little kids milled around in homemade purple dinosaur 

suits or Mideast inspired Aladdin style vests and caps, carrying cut-out cardboard magic lamps. 

Ashley was working on the arm of a young girl dressed like a figure skater in a white leotard 

and short skirt, her skates tied together by the laces and thrown over her shoulder. Theo sat on 

the far side, behind Ashley, working on the pectoral of a boy in a basketball jersey and cut-off 

jeans whose tri-colored, bunting covered bicycle stood next to him. 

“Hi, Ashley,” I said. I had to raise my voice to make myself heard. There was a folk duo at 

the pavilion, the murmuring buzz of crowd noise and the occasional firecracker set off 

somewhere in the distance. The tatoo Ashley was working on was an American Flag in a light 

wind, corrugations of cloth misaligning the geometry of red and white stripes. 

“Hey, Matt.” 

“Nice flag. Your first of the day?” I looked up at Theo, waiting for him to notice me and say 

hello. He didn’t.


Ashley said, “I wish.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “These kids got no imagination. 

Flags and stars and big old fours. That’s it.” 

The skater, overhearing, looked down at her shoulder forlornly, then up at me. I shrugged. “I 

like flags,” I told her, but she didn’t seem satisfied, forming her candy red lips into a pout. 

Ashley finished the tatoo, lacquered it with hair spray, collected the fee and sent the girl on her 

way with a warning not to smudge it, and that it would come off with baby oil. 

“You look busy enough,” I said. 

“Jesus am I busy.” 

“How’s Theo doing?” 

“I don’t know. He’s good enough with flags and numbers and stuff, but whenever someone 

wants something more adventurous he sends them over to me.” 

Theo looked up. “I should have practiced more. I didn’t think anybody’d ask for the whole 

darn Battle of Bunker Hill.” 

“Let me see what you got there.” Theo turned the kid around to show me the pectoral he had 

been working on. A passable rendition of a waterspray style firework lay on the boy’s skin, 

backgrounded by an ornate four. “Not bad,” I said. 

“Oh the hell with you,” Theo said. “It’s a goddam masterpiece.” 

“Where’s Mom?” 

“She went off with Elliott.” 

“Elliott Festival? What’s that mean?” 

“Shit I dunno. I wish that prick’d find some other broad to moon over, though. Jesus. Figure 

it’s been, what, a million years. Move on, I say.”


Ashley’s next customer was a primly dressed eleven year old in a short sleeved puritan 

costume. “I know what you want,” said Ashley. “You want a big red A on your shirt, right?” 

“I want a firecracker going off,” said the girl. “On my cheek.” 

I stepped back and watched Ashley begin to work. She cleaned the girl’s cheek with a bit of 

cotton dipped in alcohol, then set in with the brush, dipping it in a jar of paint and working off 

the excess. ”You should get an A,” said Ashley. “I have one. A real tatoo, right on my boob.” 

She spread the paint quickly, inscribing in quick definitive strokes the outline of a broken 

cylinder and a puff of escaping smoke. “It stands for Ashley.” 

After twenty minutes the officials called all the costumed personnel to line up for the parade, 

and the line thinned out, leaving only two high schoolers who were quickly satisfied with flags 

and muskets. When they were gone, Ashley started packing things up to store them for the after 

parade crowd, and Mom came out of the crowd, wearing large dark glasses and a light yellow 

dress with green trim. On her arm was painted a large yellow snake surrounded by the legend 

Don’t Tread On Me. 

By her side was Elliott Festival, bald and thin, who at one time had been my mother’s high 

school boyfriend and for the past ten years was the associate principle of Clear Lake High 

School. They’d been together in high school, and there had been one other time, in the days 

before Jack died, when they’d been togther. Jack had started drinking again and Mom had had 

enough, and declared an end to her marriage. She took Kelley and moved in with her brother 

Davey, started filing divorce papers, and started spending time with Elliott. What they did, how 

far it went, no one ever told me. But it ended the moment Jack was found, and I’d figured it was 

done for good.


“Matt,” she said. “Have you been here long?” I shook my head. “You remember Elliott,” she 

said. He was dressed conservatively, in a pair of blue seersucker pants and a white cotton golf 

shirt. 

“Sure,” I said. I was concerned for his head. It was pale white and shone in the sun. He stuck 

his hand out, and I shook it. He had one of those dry, limp handshakes that waited an instant and 

responded to whatever pressure you exerted and returned a nearly equal force. 

“How’ve you been, Matthew?” He spoke now in the same hearty school-hall voice that I 

remembered echoing through the cafeteria and open spaces of Clear Lake High. “Hello, 

Theodore. Hi, Ashley.” Theo and Ashley stood close to each other, arms around each other’s 

waists, and said hello. We stood behind the first tier of viewers to wait for the parade to begin. 

Somewhere back along the route the marching band finish their warm-up and begin playing their 

first number. 

“So you two,” Theo said to Mom and Elliott. They looked at each other. “Can’t stay away 

from each other, huh?” 

“Oh, I just live two blocks away,” said Elliott. He tried to force out a casual smile, an attempt 

at guile that fooled no one. “I was in the garden and saw Carrie. So I came down to say hi.” 

Every part of him seemed to be reflective. I couldn’t see his eyes behind the white flash of his 

glasses in the sun. 

Theo said, “What is this, your third go ’round?” 

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Elliott. 

“We’re friends,” said Mom. 

“Or has this been going on the whole time?”


Mom and Elliott stared at Theo. I looked around to see if anyone was eavesdropping on our 

family secrets. I said, “Maybe we should...” 

“Just forget about it? Jesus, Matt, you forget about everything. I’m trying to get to the bottom 

of this.” 

“Theo,” said Mom. “There’s very little to get to the bottom of. I can promise you that until 

very recently Elliott and I have just been friends. Good friends. And that’s all.” 

“Oh, boy,” said Theo. “We can come back to that. But what about very recently?” 

“Well, recently we’ve been exploring some feelings for each other,” said Elliott. 

“Ah, that’s beautifully phrased. That’s the most eloquent description of new love that I’ve 

ever heard. That one should be on a Hallmark card with a pastel picture of the Santa Maria. 

‘Darling, I’m most sincerely glad we explored our feelings.’ Good. Fine.” 

A little girl holding a wad of cotton candy was watching us with big brown eyes. She looked 

right at me for a moment, and I winked at her and shrugged a little. 

“I must say,” said Elliott. “I’d hoped you’d be more open to this idea.” 

“But what’s that mean? That’s not what you should be saying. You’ve just got no idea. It’s 

proof that it’s all a bad idea. 

“And what should we be saying?” 

“If you were saying it you’d know. If you don’t know then forget it.” 

“I think you have issues, Theodore, that need to be addressed.” 

“Issues.” 

“Anger. Hostility.”


“Oh, that’s just the tip. I have a latent hostility toward authority figures. Also there’s a 

narcissistic asocial disorder. It all stems from an unresolved, rampant Oedipal complex. Or 

here’s a core issue: you’re an asshole.” And then Theo showed Elliott his finger, turned and left. 

We stood around watching him leave. Ashley rolled her eyes and shook her head. The little 

girl went back to her cotton candy, and the band started their second song, the music louder with 

their approach. 

I realized I hadn’t said a word through the whole thing, and thus had not taken a side. I 

looked at Elliott, wondering exactly what Theo disliked about him. He was polite and well- 

mannered, smart and reliable. There seemed nothing there to hate, and maybe that was it. 

The parade started like it always did, with Cub scouts carrying the flags of the United States 

and Minnesota, followed by a few special education teachers from an elementary school dressed 

as clowns, tossing candy at the crowd. The Grand Marshal rode by, some rich or prominent 

citizen by the look of his tan, his gleaming dental work, his well pressed polo shirt. He sat 

waving and smiling on the back of a bunting laden sports car donated by Kingfisher Auto. There 

came rows and rows of costumed children and cardboard floats made by parents in their 

backyards after work. I was pleasantly surprised to see a float that carried a refrigerator box cut 

to the shape and painted like the space shuttle, manned by kids in blue jumpsuits. Members of 

the local Babe Ruth Baseball team that had won, or come close to winning a title of some kind 

(‘congratulation’s [sic] on your “championship” season,’ read the banner) last spring rode a 

flatbed truck; they wore orange shirts and carried worn leather gloves and waved stiffly with 

their free hands. Parents moved into the flow of the parade with video cameras and the children 

reacted indifferently, glancing over and then back to the parade route. What did they care about


video cameras, they seemed to say. They’d grown up on tape and were desensitized to the 

experience of having complex technologies reduce their images to electromagnetic pulses. 

“Where do you suppose Theo went?” I asked Ashley. 

She shook her head and shrugged. “Fricking la-la land,” she said. 

The parade went on, punctuated occasionally by the sound of illicit firecrackers popping in 

some distant street or woods, small sounds of violence breaking into the crowd’s collective 

festive consciousness. Mom asked where Theo had gone and we said we didn’t know. She 

creased her eyebrows and was quiet for a second, and then Elliott said, “It’s too bad Kelley 

couldn’t come out.” 

“She was sleeping when I left,” Mom said. “She’s been exhausted. Wilton’s been calling, and 

she’s wondering if she did the right thing. So when she fell asleep this morning, finally, I didn’t 

want to wake her.” 

“Does Wilton want her back?” 

“Well, she won’t say exactly. Only that he doesn’t want her gone. Out of his life.” 

“I’m glad I’m not twenty any more,” said Elliott. 

Ashley, glancing around, spotted a few kids milling about her card table, waiting for a tatoo. 

She looked at me. “It looks like I have a few more customers,” she said. 

“Can you handle them without Theo?” 

“Sure. It’ll just go a little slower.” 

“Because I can draw,” I said, though she had turned and continued walking without 

acknowledging my attempt at humor. 

“It’s all chaos suddenly,” Mom said. “Everything was fine. Now Theo’s like this, and there’s 

a baby on the way.”


“There are phases, and stages, all through life” he said. 

Ashley had set up her stool and arranged pens in front of her on the corduroy and was sizing 

up the bicep of a boy holding a skateboard against one leg. Mom leaned against Elliott slightly, 

bare skin of her arm against his. She held his forearm with her opposite hand, smiled. You could 

tell they were on the verge of something, the big something, if they hadn’t arrived there already. 

They’d seemed to forgotten I was there. I knew I should have followed up on what Theo had 

been getting at and asked what they were doing; any normal person would have. But they were 

together, a united front, and it was none of my business, not really. 

Across the street I spotted Theo, working his way through the crowd. Mom said, “He’ll come 

around. You’re a nice guy. I like you.” Suddenly she saw me. “Matt likes you.” She laughed. 

“Don’t you, Matt?” 

“Sure,” I said. “What’s not to like?” 

“Great,” said Elliott, his head flashing like a light bulb. Theo walked slowly, nodding, saying 

hello to people and clusters of people. When he reached the corner, he turned and disappeared 

behind the corner of the hardware store. 

“Don’t worry about Theo. Theo’s wrong about lots of things. You’re not an asshole, for 

instance.” 

“Thanks. I always thought so.” 

I said, “You don’t have enough personality to be an asshole.” Then I crossed the street and 

rushed to the place where Theo had disappeared. When I turned the corner I saw him talking 

with someone, a teenage girl, a friend from school, no doubt, with lank red hair and holding a 

young boy by the hand. Theo said goodbye and crossed the street to a lemonade stand, where he 

bought a bag of peanuts and one large glass of lemonade that he drank most of before he had left


the counter. He chatted with the vendor, an old man in a brown shirt, for a few seconds, then 

went on his way, eventually stopping on one of the benches and sitting next to a man in a leather 

jacket and beard who was drinking from a bottle in a bag. Theo took the bag and drank quickly 

from it, then offered the man some peanuts. 

I hung back in the shadows of the entrance to a building, keeping an eye on him. They talked 

casually and smoked a cigarette, once in a while Theo sat up straight, cocked his arm behind his 

head and threw a peanut shell or piece of ice at the garbage can twenty feet away, missing every 

time. They set off a few firecrackers, lighting them from the cherry of their cigarettes. Eventually 

the man with the beard took out another brown bag and handed it to Theo, who took it. He 

handled it by the object inside the bag, wrapping the excess paper around it before standing up. 

He shook the man’s hand and walked away toward the lake. 

On his way to wherever he was going Theo stopped and chatted with a few more people. He 

pointed to the painted shoulder of one the boys and offered a thumbs up in approval, perhaps, of 

his own work from earlier in the day. When he came to the beach he stood and watched the 

crowds bathing in the sun and the waves lapping in from across the lake and the white regatta of 

triangular sails that obscured the far shore. Then he worked his way down the beach into the 

woods, and I had to hurry not to lose him. 

The park and woods north of the beach, known as Founder’s Park, had been the property of a 

recluse who refused to sell them when the development of Clear Lake was at its peak in the late 

sixties. When the recluse died he had left the woods to the city on the condition it not be 

developed, which it hadn’t, leaving nearly a mile of prime forest with a few walking trails on the 

beach and a small creek that fed the lake, tumbling in from low bluffs. It wasn’t a private area by 

any means, but the trees were dense and the terrain difficult, making many small spots where a


person could hide and not be found right away. As I started in on the main path, not sure how I 

would find Theo or what I would do when I did, someone set off a loud firecracker, an M-80, 

somewhere in the woods. 

I struggled through the underbrush, checking out the few hiding places I remembered from 

when I had played here as a kid, remarking on the fact that I had never gone back since early in 

my Senior year, when I came here one night with my then girlfriend Dawn Engle. Someone set 

off another M-80, and I followed the noise, climbing up over one of the boulders to get a look at 

the area. 

Theo was standing in a small clearing below me, pointing at something on the beach fifty 

feet in front of him. The M-80 sound reported again, echoing out over the water as Theo’s hand 

came back to his shoulder and a small dime-sized hole appeared in the base of a birch tree near 

the shore. I spoke without thinking better of it. “Hey,” I said. “Theo.” 

He spun around, the gun perched in his hand by his ear, the muscles in his arm tense. “Hey, 

Jack,” he said. “Come on down. Take a shot.” 

“Matt,” I said. “My name is Matt.” I sat down on the boulder. My breath came quickly and I 

felt the warmth of the day coursing through my head. “Damn it, Theo,” I said. “What the hell is 

going on?” 

“This guy,” says Theo. “He says he’s got a police issue firearm. He says why not try it out? 

Why not kill a few trees? And I’m thinking with all the fireworks, who’s going to know?” 

“You don’t think cops know the difference?” 

“Maybe. So what?” 

“So this guy just gives you his gun?”


“Looks that way. I figure Paul’s not worried. Paul trusts me.” He looked down at the gun and 

touched the barrel with his free hand. “Come on,” he said. “It’s a good gun for shooting.” 

I slipped down, the rock’s sharp edges opening small wounds on my legs and hands that I 

wouldn’t notice until the next day, and walked through the tangled underbrush to Theo. I took 

the gun from him. 

“Did you see Mom and Elliott ?” I said. “I think they’re together.” 

“Welcome to Common Knowledge City,” said Theo. “That bastard. He calls her up to tell her 

I’m cutting class, and then they go back to his place to talk it over.” 

“I thought he was married.” 

“Divorced. Five years ago.” 

It was the first I had ever held a gun, and it was exactly as I had expected it to feel, the 

weight of tempered metal impressing itself into my sweat slicked palm. I had visions of 

hypothetical flesh opening under the impact of a bullet now nestled in the chamber, an 

animalistic swell of power high in my throat. I felt its weight and watched the sun’s reflection 

turn the oily black finish pearl white, and then sighted along my arm, aiming at the small hole on 

the birch tree, fingers all the time outside the trigger guard. “It feels good,” I said. I put my finger 

on the trigger and tested the resistance, felt the thin wand of gunmetal divide the fleshy pad of 

my first finger, then let up. I touched the trigger again, but not hard enough to discharge the 

round. 

“I don’t know why I hate him so much,” Theo said. “Maybe it’s how she was with him when 

Jack died. Or it’s that if you think about it, she should have been with him from the beginning.”


I said, “Because Jack crashed that kegger, where he never should have been, and disrupted 

everything. There’d have been no Jack and Carrie, no crazy shitty life, and no us. You, me, 

Kelley, we’d all be different people. Or no people at all.” 

“Maybe we’re the different people, you and me. The ones that were never meant to be.” 

I handed the gun back to Theo. “You’re not even going to shoot it?” he said. He worked at a 

latch to release the clip from the stock. He inspected the rounds, the precise interrelationship of 

copper bound by steel and coiled wire, then pushed the clip back in. 

“It makes me feel like a kid,” he said. “Like I’m six years old and the world is new again, 

open to possibilities.” He aimed the gun at the base of a new tree and fired. My ears rang with 

the report, but I couldn’t tell if he had hit anything. He picked up the paper bag and a leather 

holster and deftly assembled the package as it had been, then looked at me. “Life is filled with 

infinite potential,” he said. “Doesn’t that scare the shit out of you?” 

I looked at the bundled gun package and asked for it back so I could take my shot. 

Part II 

1. 

As that summer turned into fall I was still spending evenings in the old easy chair, watching 

as the sky darkened and the buildings downtown transformed themselves into great black slabs 

spattered with small white squares of light. I had stopped searching for meaning in the lights, 

stopped even believing there was any to be found, perhaps, though I hoped there might be others 

who continued to look. The episode with A.J. had officially ended, meaning it no longer felt 

inevitable that we would one day be together, and I was waiting for the next in the series of


infatuations that I expected would define the rest of my social existence. With my share of the 

money from Jack’s trust fund I bought a computer and retyped the poems a second time, printing 

off endless copies in varied fonts and sizes. I taped them up around the computer until the walls 

became scaled with loose paper and unrhymed, oddly metered verbiage. Late at night I would 

wake from bad dreams, boot the computer and sit in eerie phosphorescence with paper fluttering 

about my ears in otherwise undetectable night breezes. I read the poems and re-read them, 

memorized and dreamed about them, hated them. My life felt disarticulated, plotless. I took to 

wandering through Minneapolis again, down Hennepin Avenue with its garish neon testaments, 

past gay bars and run down theaters, up trendy Nicollet with pennant laden storefronts and brass 

fountains. One window for a parlor of psychics with the symbols of ancient magic engineered in 

neon. Hands and eyes and twisted unidentifiable glyphs. Domesticated occult images, their 

powers lost by the forgettings of generations. Secret powers, arcane divinations; the burden of a 

fading away life. I would sometimes stop walking and feel no need to ever start again. And then I 

would. 

The time for Theo to decide about school came and went and when school started in the fall 

he was still living at home. He went to five or six farewell parties for friends of his going off to 

different states, including Ashley, who packed up and moved to Chicago. 

One day shortly after Theo would have started school I received word from the Ozark 

Review about the fate of Jack’s poems. The editor, a fussy man named Morgan Patch, called me 

up and wanted to know if I was for real. 

I said, “I’m not sure what you mean.”


He answered, “Is the man who wrote these poems the same Jack LaFleur who had five 

poems published in the Spring 1964 issue of the periodical ‘The Granite Lotus,’ then edited by 

Nick Kastle?” 

“I guess I wouldn’t know,” I said. 

“You wouldn’t know?” said Morgan Patch. 

“I know Nick Kastle and my father were friends.” 

“And why am I supposed to believe that?” 

“I don’t know why you wouldn’t. I thought you were calling about the poems I sent in.” 

“Oh, believe me, I am calling about the poems. I am definitely calling about the poems. And 

I really must apologize for the delay in our getting back to you, for they were in the slush pile, 

which they barely cleared, and then they were in the hands of my editorial assistant, who had no 

idea what he had his hands on, and then we had to re-set an entire issue and so our time to read 

was delayed another entire month and it wasn’t until I myself happened to be glancing at his 

desk and saw the first poem and your father’s name that I became involved. That was yesterday.” 

“Fair enough,” I said. Something seemed urgent in his tone but I couldn’t figure out what. 

“I think I should say we want to publish the poems.” 

“Well, that’s fine,” I said. “Thank you.” 

“But there’s the matter of the historical record.” 

“I’m not sure what you mean.” 

“Well. You know Nick Kastle?” 

“We met a few times, sure.” 

“Well, Nick is a fine poet, and he works in the publishing field himself now as an adjunct 

poetry editor for Winterberry Publishing. I suspect he’ll be calling you about this as well. He’s


the one who’ll be really excited about this discovery. Because he’s the one who started the whole 

thing, the whole anecdote slash myth become legend. For that small segment of us who call 

ourselves Beat scholars, there’s always been a legend of Jack LaFleur. Nick told us about Jack 

LaFleur, how he lived the life from Kansas City to both coasts. How he wrote the clearest, most 

vivid poetry Nick had ever read. He said he was among the best poets he’d ever met. And he’d 

met them all: Ginsberg, Corso, DiPrima.” 

“Huh,” I said. 

“The only problem was, LaFleur wouldn’t write his poems down. He’d keep them 

memorized and recite them, but he’d only rarely write them down. If he did jot anything down, 

he’d tear it up. It was through luck that once he wrote down about six of them and then went on a 

drinking jag and forgot them. These six Nick rescued and published in ‘The Granite Lotus’ 

twenty-five years ago.” 

“And he’s been waiting ever since for more,” I said. 

“He was certain there weren’t any. But now we know different.” 

“So you’ll publish them.” 

“Certainly. In fact, I’d like to see all of them and pick from them myself. And I’m going to 

contact Nick as well and let him know his chickens have come home to roost.” 

“All right, then,” I said. 

I sent copies of the rest of the poems to Morgan Patch and over the next few weeks he 

described to me during marathon phone calls, in exhausting detail, the strengths and 

shortcomings of each poem before deciding which ten he wanted to publish. A few weeks after 

that, tear sheets came to the apartment for my final approval, though there seemed little for me to


do. The process was a bit overwhelming, and I tried to be as helpful as possible, but Morgan 

Patch lived in a strange world filled with notions of thematic symmetry and complexities of 

semi-metered verse. So I just listened, mostly, and tried to figure out my role. 

In the middle of this, a few days before the tear sheets arrived, Nick Kastle called. “You son 

of a gun,” he said. 

up.” 

“That’s me,” I answered, suspecting it was Theo. 

“This is Nick Kastle,” the voice said. 

“Nick Kastle,” I said. “Holy cow. Nick Kastle has found my phone number. He’s dialed me 

“Moses on pumpernickel, how’ve you been? It’s been ages.” 

“Seven years,” I said. I’d last seen him outside the Clear Lake Tavern, on a night when Jack 

had been hauled away on a drunk and disorderly. 

Nick said, “I called your mom. She said you were handling everything to do with the 

poems.” 

“Yes,” I said. “She doesn’t want anything to do with them.” She’d reminded me Jack hadn’t 

wanted her to see the poems while he was alive, and his death, as far as she was concerned, 

didn’t change that. Or perhaps her disinterest simply lay in having no desire to read poetry, or in 

the fear that she wouldn’t know how to judge them. Simple, everyday reasons made hopelessly 

complex by her refusal to speak them. 

“She never wanted to see the other side of Jack,” Nick told me. “The side that was in 

competition for her. The poetry, the travel.” 

“I think it’s because she knows it would bring up bad memories,” I said. “The drinking, the 

abandonment.”


“Well, in any case, I’m glad to know there are more poems. Morgan faxed them to me. My 

God, Matt. To hear him speaking again after all these years. That voice of his. Moses and 

Buddha in a T-bird, on the parkway. I tell you.” 

“I’m glad you like them,” I said. 

“We’ll publish them, of course. If you’re willing. I’m thinking of an anthology, to start with. 

We’re working on a piece with two other lesser known Beats I think your father will fit in with 

perfectly. I’d also like to reprint the original six from the ‘Lotus.’” 

“Well, I’d like to see those,” I said. 

“They’re quite wonderful. I’ll send you a photocopy. I’ll let you see the original issue when 

you come out to New York. You are coming, right? We need to talk. I’d like to see the original 

manuscripts. We’ll need photos, too, for the bio. I’m just so excited about this whole 

development, I can’t tell you.” 

“You sound excited,” I said. 

“I tried to convince your father once to let them be anthologized in a collection I was putting 

together twenty years ago. He refused. He said I’d have to rip them from his dead body.” Nick 

paused on the other end for quite some time. Perhaps he realized after the fact the literalness of 

what he’d just said. Perhaps we were both recalling that night Nick had come to town with Alina 

and they’d sat at the kitchen table and Jack had told the world it could go to hell. Nick was 

waiting for some response, I’m not sure what. Perhaps he expected me to continue Jack’s refusal 

to anthologize his work and had an argument ready to convince me otherwise. Finally he said, “I 

assume that won’t be a problem now?” 

“I didn’t know he refused,” I said. “Maybe I should think that one over. At least, you know, 

kick it around.”


“Well, by all means kick it around. But don’t act on it. This is big, Matt. We’re putting 

together the next edition of the Beat Companion right now, and there’s a perfect spot for him. 

The terms, I’m sure, will be quite agreeable.” 

“Well,” I said. “Okay. I’m going to give you an un-official go-ahead. The only reason I’m 

not making it official is this thing that maybe he didn’t want them out there for some reason.” 

“Let me tell you the fact that he eventually wrote them down and then put them out of harm’s 

way tells me that he wanted them to survive. I know that, Matt. Your father, believe me, was 

stubborn enough to destroy anything he didn’t want eventually brought to light. Let me assure 

you that these are fine poems, whatever Jack might have thought about them.” 

“Yes. I’m sure you’re right. So call me back next week, and I’ll give you the official okay.” 

“Let’s say this week is to honor what once was Jack’s wish,” Nick said. “Let’s call it the 

hiatus of his will.” 

2. 

A week before I left for New York, on a day when the streets were wet and slick with the 

residue of a drizzling, wire-thin rain, Theo drove mom’s old car out to my office building. I met 

him in the lobby to walk the five blocks to a display-windowed coffee shop on Nicollet Mall 

where we were to meet Kelley. Buses motored past octagonal, gazebo style passenger stops. It 

was late summer. Months had passed since Theo had gone to Binghamton, yet it still seemed a 

recent event. 

Then we came to the café where I ducked quickly in, Theo distracted by something on the 

other side of the street and so not following. I went back and stood near the door, hands in 

pockets. I had figured he’d be comfortable in this café, a place called Way-Cup’s that held open- 

microphone poetry readings every Monday night and seemed in every other way to be typical of


the institutionalized bohemian lifestyle Theo seemed destined, if he could avoid further gunplay, 

to drift into. The decor was done up in vintage fifties furniture needing only moderate repair, the 

walls were painted in faded red and white stripes and had been signed in black marker by the 

famous and the wanted-to-be-famous people who had once stopped in for a cup of coffee or to 

read from a chapbook their uncles had published. I thought of it as a place Jack might have liked, 

a place off the beaten path where cliques of people in smoky knots passed confidences and 

waited languorously for the next phase of their lives to begin. There were couples of the same 

sex, different sex, their emotional attachments hard to judge, who all came in and placed 

shopping bags next to their feet while they ate bran muffins or double fudge brownies and talked 

over which of their friends were making the biggest mistakes. They kept their eyes on each other 

or the walls, or the subdivisions of their brownies. They and their friends seemed like complete 

units, their lives fully enmeshed in other lives with no room for more. 

That afternoon Way-Cup’s was empty except for a blond, goateed young man in a formal 

shirt and tie who sat hunched over a note pad, a cigarette dangling from his unoccupied hand. 

But the potential was there, the smoky café a glowing portal between worlds, and I wanted to 

bring Theo along in the hopes that his presence would summon forth an opening to the other 

side. 

By the time I was done scanning the interior Theo had retraced his steps and come through 

the door in an irritation that amused me to the extent that I had been responsible for it. 

“Could have told me,” he said. 

“Thought you were paying attention.” 

“Cagey bastard.”


We walked up to the cash register and looked at the nestled pans of pasta salads and 

sandwich fillings in a glass cabinet. After a few moments Theo said, “Can we once go to a place 

where we order your food sitting?” 

I looked up from the salads to Theo, then to the sweaty faced girl behind the register. She 

opened her mouth, then closed it and went to stand in the doorway by the back room. We 

decided to wait for Kelley to arrive and ordered coffee before walking across the scuffed tile to 

sit at a table where the only view was of the empty table next to us. 

I opened up the backpack and pulled out the galleys, eighteen clean sheets of bright white 

paper elegantly printed with ten of Jack’s poems as selected and ordered by Morgan Patch. In an 

accompanying five page introduction Morgan Patch had written a biography of Jack, and of what 

might have been his place in the Beat movement had he published more of his work during his 

lifetime. 

“Which did they pick?” Theo asked. 

“Clear Lake, 1990,” I said. “Dead Ends. Key Ring Blues. Buick Century of Doubt.” 

“A poem about a car. Dude, that’s hard core.” 

“Ah, what else. The Ass-end of Angels. American Lotus. The Corn Soldiers. Khruschev’s 

Toupee. RoseDale, 1980.” 

“A poem about a shopping mall. Also, tres cool.” 

“And, finally, The Day the PTA forgot to Pick up the Cub Scouts at the YMCA.” 

“Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. Cool.” He picked up the introduction and glanced through 

it, then looked up to see Kelley. He waved her over and she waved back and came to us, her coat 

flapping around her as she passed through the room. She had recently begun to show, a slight 

swelling in her abdomen leading her to the table.


“Okay, you guys,” she said. “This is so neat. Hold on.” She reached into her handbag and 

pulled out a manila envelope. “I brought baby pictures. Same day service!” She handed them to 

Theo, who opened the envelope, pulled out two small black Polaroids and handed one to me. I 

read the margin, saw that day’s date, Kelley’s name, a time. The photograph was white streaky 

marks radiating in a conical distribution on a black field. I stared at it, waiting for the image of a 

child to emerge from the random pattern. Finally an elongated head appeared, the curve of a 

back, feet and hands. 

“Boy or girl?” Theo said. We exchanged photographs and I saw the same image with only 

minor variations. 

“For lack of other evidence we’re calling it a girl, though that leg there,” she pointed to a 

spot, “Could be acting as a shield.” 

“Another secretive LaFleur boy,” I said. 

“Are those the poems?” 

“Yep. They’ll be out in the spring issue,” I said. 

“Good, good.” 

Theo set down his photograph, picked up the introduction and handed it to her. “I gotta pee,” 

he said. He got up and went to the back. 

I said to Kelley, “That’s the introduction they want to put in front of the poems.” She set to 

work reading the first paragraph. “It probably glorifies him beyond all reason,” I said. 

“Well, that probably can’t be avoided in the literary world. I say fine. Let the world make a 

hero out of him if they want to. But we know the truth, right?”


I knew her version of the truth: Jack was unreliable and mean. And since the fall, I’d been 

thinking much the same thing. So I didn’t say anything as she took a last look at her sonograms 

and tucked them back into the envelope. 

When Theo got back I was busy staring out the window and Kelley had turned her attention 

to Morgan Patch’s introduction. “Listen to this,” Kelley said. “‘Those of us who every day read 

the poetry of the aspiring poet, the dross, the scribbling, the self-indulgent, know that out there in 

the world is the exact opposite. That for every twenty or thirty mediocre poets with delusions of 

grandeur, there is the true artist with no desire for publication. There are those poets out there, 

saints really, who work privately, scribbling beautiful lines of verse that never see the light of 

day. Heroic verses that get tucked away in kitchen drawers, brilliant notebooks that get dumped 

in the trash. How many masterpieces have been lost to the landfill? How many great works have 

composted with the coffee grounds? Luckily, the work of Jack LaFleur’s is no longer among the 

lost masterpieces of the century.’” 

“That’s laid on pretty thick,” I said. 

“‘Jack LaFleur knows his territory. He works against the grain of the culture which nurtured 

him; he recognizes the trap America has laid for him and walks in anyway. He daily faces the 

lion’s den and is spared by the magic of his faith in a mystical world beyond the reality we see.’” 

“That’s some pretty eloquent horseshit,” Theo said. 

“‘Jack LaFleur was at every moment aware of life’s duality, a world view summed up in this 

couplet from Clear Lake, 1990: “Every anchor is also a leash/Every comfort a jail cell bar.”’” 

“It’s so easy when he says it like that,” I said. 

“They’re making a new Jack as we speak,” said Kelley. “One who stands above mortal men. 

A structure of ashes from the burned reality of our father.”


My own thoughts had gone in different directions after I’d read the introduction. I’d realized 

that even now, Jack was still capable of going into the unknown and bringing back friends. Now 

and forever he would always be Jack, and a little thing like death couldn’t stop him. 

“I don’t know about this book project though,” said Theo. “It’s a separate deal from the 

magazine?” 

“Separate deal,” I said. “They want me to come out to New York to sign papers and do 

various other legal things.” 

“The whole thing sounds a little dubious.” 

“Nick seems pretty hot for it. He’s pretty sure Jack was the great undiscovered Beat master. 

The real deal, like one of those janitors who rents out a garage and then builds a miniature 

cathedral out of chewing gum, cigar boxes, and tinfoil.” 

“I mean more like what’s the point of this thing. Why drag up twenty year old poems and not 

look for some new thing?” 

“They’re Beat poets,” I said. 

“So what? Why are unknown Beat poets better than unknown Romantic poets?” 

“It’s partly because it’s an anniversary,” I said, repeating what Nick had told me. “The Beats 

first came on the scene about fifty years ago. And it’s partly that there’s a core following of Beat 

poet readers out there. It’s like there’s a built-in market for this stuff.” 

Theo said, “That’s something Dad would have hated. Being a pre-portioned, shrink-wrapped 

commodity.” 

“So we’re nostalgia brokers,” said Kelley. “We’re cashing in.”


Theo said, “Like that revival of Hair at the local theater. Mom went last week with Elliott. 

Do you believe they found anyone willing to see Hair? Do you believe they found anyone 

willing to be seen in it? That run-down old second-rate show.” 

“I wish these rumors and sightings of Mom and Elliott would just solidify into a simple fact,” 

I said. “Like: he’s her boyfriend. Can we just say it? Mom was with her boyfriend. Doesn’t that 

sound nice?” 

“Ex-boyfriend would be nicer,” Theo said. “Elliott has nothing to offer. Total waste of 

organic material.” 

“Tough tits for both you guys,” said Kelley. “It’s pretty official. There’s been a couple 

mornings now when he’s sneaked out early.” She looked at Theo and laughed, then at me and 

said, “Don’t give me that look. Mom can have sex if she wants to.” 

“Matt thinks if he’s not having sex no one should be.” 

“Very funny, guys,” I said. “As far as cashing in goes, we’re not going to make enough from 

this book to retire. We get the advance and a percentage if sales go high enough, which they 

never do on poetry. Odds are it won’t see a second printing. Odds are the first printing will end 

up remaindered, forgotten, and lost. They’re doing this for public relations, to assure the public 

that Winterberry Publishing hasn’t completely written off poetry as a commercial force. Which 

they probably should.” 

“Are you going to New York?” 

I told them I was, and then Kelley said she was starving, so we went up to the register and 

ordered food. Kelley ordered a double helping of caesar salad and I ordered a sandwich, which I 

had to think twice about when Theo said he was tired of always eating food with his hands and


ordered a pasta salad. We ate for a while, Kelley more voraciously than I’d ever seen her eat 

before. After a minute or so, Theo said “Where’d you get that shirt?” 

“What?” 

“That’s nice.” 

“You can’t have it. This one was Jack’s.” 

“Did I ask?” 

“Ever since I’m a kid, you’re taking my clothes. Most kids hate hand me downs.” 

“I don’t mind,” said Theo. “I think I got used to it too much.” 

“All the kids are dressing like that now,” said Kelley. “It’s one of the last things left to shock 

parents. Other people’s worn out clothes.” 

“It’s all us third and fourth kids who are keeping the profit in second hand stores. We’ve 

made a fashion statement out of being neglected. We neglect ourselves. Bad haircuts, worn out 

clothing. That one was Jack’s?” 

I nodded and said, “It was in the trunk of his car. You remember how he left the last time? 

No luggage, no clothes? I figure he bought one, wore it, threw it in the trunk.” 

“The Century? The Buick Century of Doubt?” 

“That’s the one.” 

He’d bought the Buick for seventy-five dollars the year after Theo was born, three or four 

weeks after a road friend had showed up and dragged Jack out to Arizona. We’d been using only 

one car, an old blue Chevy with plastic seat covers and thin spokes in the steering wheel. A 

monster of a car by later standards; not too special at all during those days. But we were a 

growing family, and we needed two cars.


The new car was being sold by Davey, Mom’s brother, who after his brief stint of wildness in 

the late sixties had settled into upper middle class prairie inspired domesticity, as Jack put it. 

Davey had married a school teacher who quit teaching as soon as she became pregnant; Davey 

got promoted to an office position with General Cinema where he managed several multiplex 

movie theaters. He put on forty pounds without complaining, bought a Lincoln Continental and 

moved to a new housing development that had blossomed a few years earlier on a stretch of 

former farmland. His wife disapproved of Jack as shiftless and unreliable, and had managed to 

convince Davey of the same, though they were willing to sell him their old car provided he put 

up the money in cash. 

So one weekend afternoon Jack told Mom that he was going out to Davey’s to take a look at 

the car and she said You can’t leave me here without a car. 

He looked at her, not sure what she was really saying because he’d left her without a car 

before and she hadn’t objected. And then she said, You’d better call Finley one more time. 

I stopped working on the Lego house I had been assembling on the carpet in front of the 

coffee table. Finley was our next door neighbor, an old widower who distinguished himself in 

my memory by regularly hosing down his sidewalk. We had borrowed his car as back up 

transportation on several occasions, and on the one occasion we’d needed it to get diapers for 

Kelley I’d opened the glove compartment to find three empty packs of cigarettes and a pair of 

red, age-crumpled women’s leather gloves. I knew they were Mrs. Finley’s, and that she was 

dead. The implications of Finley keeping them, or of not knowing they were there, frightened me 

so much I was scared of the day we would have to use the car again. 

All right, said Jack. I know what this is, he said. This is a shakedown. And so fine, you have 

a point and that means we’ll call Old Man Finley. He said, You see, this is one of the essential


dilemmas of modern life. He zipped up his old white coat and walked to the phone. Always 

looking for ways to tie you down to the house. Cars ‘er for mobility, he said, picking up the 

phone and dialing. Yet ye can’t be mobile because you might need the car. Mom sat on the 

couch, arranging a blanket around Theo’s head. Jack went on speaking into the receiver as the 

phone rang somewhere, saying, They look for ways to trap ya, it’s incredibly clever, why look at 

microwave ovens for instance. Incredibly convenient, so convenient we’ve got people fighting 

each other to go into debt fer ... Finley? We got us a near situation over here. I gotta go buy a car 

so the wife has one when I have the other, but I can’t take the one we have and she doesn’t 

wanna come along, so if you weren’t going anyplace I was wondering if we could keep you and 

your Olds in reserve as back up insurance. A rider on our policy. He gave me a quick wink and 

pulled the cuffs of his shirt out from under the jacket sleeve. Great, he said. That is so copacetic 

I’m in a coma. See you inna shot. He hung up the phone and left the house before Mom could 

say a word. We almost thought he’d left, but he didn’t go out to the Pontiac, instead going out 

across the lawn to the Finley’s house and then out of sight. 

Three minutes later Finley’s car — another Chevy — pulled into the driveway next to the 

Pontiac and Jack was in the house, rattling two silver keys on a chain. Here ya go, he said. 

Emergency transportation courtesy of Rupert Finley. I’ll be back in about an hour, maybe with a 

new car; no, that’s not right. If I buy you’ll have to come back with me to drive it home. 

I imagined Finley next door in a daze at the hurricane of Jack LaFleur swindling him out of 

car keys and car before he knew what had happened. Let’s have a goodbye kiss, said Jack. He 

leaned over her, kissed her. 

She giggled briefly and said, I knew you’d cave in, Sweetheart. And take Matt with you, 

okay? Jack looked down at me and smiled.


He’s busy with his blocks, Jack said. 

I’m done, I said. 

Jack looked from me to Mom, Then said, all right then. Come on, soldier. 

“He took me along to get that car,” I told Theo and Kelley. “You were a baby and Kelley was 

just about to start school. He took me a lot of places on the weekend. Mom asked him to, most of 

the time.” 

“She figured if you were along he wouldn’t skip town for the weekend.” 

“It worked,” I said. There were many car rides when he had that thousand mile stare in his 

eye, the one that meant in his head all he wanted was to keep the car pointed wherever it was 

headed and not stopping till he needed gas or cigarettes. And it was me in the seat next to him 

and the knowing that he had to bring me back home that kept him in the state. 

“They have all sorts of ways of tying you down to domesticity,” said Theo. 

On those trips Jack talked endlessly. I think he talked to himself when no one was around, 

but there was almost always someone around. He had a need to seek out people and tell them 

things, he used words as a connection to the people and events around him, he was a man you 

could never conceive of being alone. Alone Jack would fade into the furniture, he had a 

pathological fear of loneliness, I suspect. In grocery stores he kept a running patter that included 

whoever was passing us in the aisle. He’d be in the yard with the garden hose and we’d come out 

and hear him talking to the lawn, telling it to grow, damn it, there was no room for leaves of 

slack, they’d all have to pull together. 

We rode in that big car on that afternoon we went to buy the Buick and Jack talked about 

how when they had bought the Pontiac Mom had wanted a station wagon but Jack’d told her No,


ma’am. There are implications to owning a station wagon. Symbols and obligations congregate 

around station wagons like flies on a horse’s carcass. Issa a badge of domesticity, a Detroit 

manufactured anchor of responsible brain dead citizens of whom I am proud, a goodly percent of 

the time, to count myself. Because there’s a dignity in routine, a kinda honor in losing yourself in 

the interchangeable mass of American humanity. Up-at-eight, at-work-by-nine, have-some- 

coffee America. Identical white-shirted soldiers, proud warriors in a warless age. Besides, he 

said, he was too old to be living the kind of life he’d led before. It wears on you. No place for a 

broken down old man. 

I sat in the front seat next to him. Neither of us wore the lap belts; we didn’t even think about 

wearing them. I breathed in the smell of warm plastic and burning oil. When I sat forward I 

could see the road ahead of us and the cars and houses going by, and when I leaned back there 

were only the tops of trees and blue Minnesota sky and the sounds of my father’s monologue of 

check out that car I drove one of those babies in Phoenix a few months ago and Looka there, 

another new mall going up in Woodbury, can’t imagine we need another one but that’s why I’m 

not in the business I guess and The secret to buying a car is making sure it starts up right away; a 

car needs everthin’ working perfectly for a good spark and rumble; it takes more than five 

seconds or it kills why then something’s wrong somewhere tha’s gonta cause you pain and 

money and the money’s the least of it. 

Theo interrupted the memory by snapping his fingers next to my ear. “I’m here,” I said. 

“Knock it off.” 

“Which one are you staring at?”


I returned my eyes to where they had been. Two women were sitting at the previously empty 

table, a thin, bookish woman in a loose fitting dress and a hawkish woman with severe black hair 

and a pierced nose. 

“The blond,” I said. 

“I didn’t think she’d be your type,” said Theo. “Too school-marmish.” 

“I have a type?” I said. 

“Sure.” He looked at Kelley. 

Kelley said, “Remember Dawn Engle?” 

“She was my type? We went out three times. Went back to an old boyfriend.” 

Theo said, “But she was your type. Blond, flowsy.” 

“Questionable moral character.” 

“You wanted to save them.” 

“To lift them from the depths of sin.” 

I said, “Don’t you two have anything better to do with your time?” They looked at each 

other. “Anyway,” I said. “I figured out those girls don’t want to be saved. They’re content to be 

treated miserably.” 

Theo pulled out his cigarettes and lit one. “So you got a new type. That girl.” He lowered his 

voice. “Bookish and inhibited, yet with a streak of wildness she’s tamed by herself. With a 

boyfriend in another state, a handy rejection you don’t have to blame on yourself.” He blew 

smoke into the air behind Kelley’s head. 

“They’re engaged now,” I said. “A.J. and her boyfriend. No big loss.” 

“You really need to let loose a little,” said Kelley. “Women are attracted to you, but you 

can’t just wait for them.”


The woman with the glasses at the next table looked over at us, glancing at me and then at 

Theo. She stared at him for a few seconds, then turned back to her friend. I waited for her to 

make eye contact with me again but her eyes went down to her plate, where her fingers were 

picking at a bran muffin. 

“What about you?” I said to Theo. “We could do a double pick-up, right? Since Ashley’s out 

of town?” 

“Chicago’s not that far.” 

Kelley gave Theo a secretive look that let me know he had been confiding in her things he 

hadn’t told me. We said little more over the course of lunch except for two word critiques of our 

various meals. Theo and I were satisfied, Kelley wasn’t, though she finished everything and went 

back for a slice of carrot cake. And then we departed for the streets of Minneapolis again, 

moving through the thinning crowd of people as a ragged unit of three among the neatly dressed 

bearers of business suits and dresses. We passed a group of silver haired bankers all dourly 

watching their feet. “Retirement party,” said Theo. “I saw the watch.” 

“Could be you someday,” said Kelley. 

“Matt, maybe.” 

We reached Kelley’s ancient VW and for a few moments we stared silently at the rusted side 

panels and three faded flower power stickers on the hood. The car was parked at a wide angle to 

the curb in front of a now expired meter. She checked the windshield wiper for tickets, found 

none, opened the door. 

“So,” she said. “When are you going to New York?” 

“Three weeks,” I said. “I have to call them and let them know for sure I’m coming.”


Kelley nodded, looked up at the top of a building. “Let’s do this again,” she said. “We should 

get together more. The three of us.” 

“We should,” I said. Theo agreed. 

“I mean,” she said. “I feel right now like you guys and Mom are all there is.” 

“There’s another on the way,” Theo said. 

“I remember,” Kelley said. She waved goodbye with the hand that held her keys, a gesture of 

my mother’s she had picked up through sight and habit or choice or unavoidable coincidence of 

genetics. Then she hopped into her car and drove away. 

The lots of the development where Davey had moved his family had little vegetation aside 

from sod yards seamed like brickwork, two-foot spruces and spindly ash trees held upright by 

triads of staked twine. As we pulled into Davey’s driveway there seemed something ominous in 

the bare spaces of the new subdivision. Some agoraphobic looming in the sight of bare lawns and 

blacktop driveways surrounding the houses standing in an evenly spaced row of similar houses, a 

design childlike in its simplistic conception and menacing in its machinelike execution. 

On first sight the Century Jack was about to buy was little more than a brown metal box with 

smooth tapers, a mild incarnation of the mid seventies conception of aerodynamics. Small 

buttons of rust dotted the rear fenders, a hairline fracture crept along the lower third of the 

windshield. Not much to look at, Jack said. But she sure makes this antiseptic neighborhood 

more interesting. No doubt they think it’s an eyesore here on this patch of skinned earth. This 

whole place could use about ten morra these junkers to liven it up a bit. He approached Davey, 

who had emerged from the house at the sound of the Pontiac in the driveway. They shook hands, 

stared each other down for a second, turned to look at the car.


When I walked up to Jack Davey bent down and patted me on the head, chucked me in the 

arm and pointed out a football lying on the grass that I could play with if I wanted to. I picked it 

up and gave it a few token throws. 

Looks good, Davey, said Jack. 

Oh, she runs fine for sure. 

I’ve heard her. Purrs like kittens under there. 

You bet. 

Hey, Matt, said Jack. I caught the football I’d just tossed and looked at him. Yer holding it 

wrong, he said. Hold it by the laces. He came over and showed me. Put your fingers here, he 

said, and your thumb there. 

I tried it, but the ball was too big. 

Ah, said Jack. You’ve got tiny hands. Your hands’ll probably be too small your whole life. 

Well, do the bestcha can, then. 

He looked back at Davey. His handser small, he said. Then he walked back to the car and 

said to Davey, Well I’m familiar enough with her to say I’ll buy her right off you but you bet lets 

give the formalities a run through, the door slamming tire kicking formalities. American Karma 

checks, rites of worthiness. He kicked the tires, gave the fender a shove to check the suspension. 

Howza movie business? Still showing that space movie? 

Sure. Doing well for us. 

Yeah. I saw it with the boy there. I was surprised, the way it all played out, you know, that 

guy with a black helmet and princess in white, anthe samurai swords anthe cowboy gunfights 

and everything. The guy who put that together, he was doing some thinking. Kind of threw 

everything in the pot, there.


I guess he did, said Davey. 

Yessir, a good stable profession you got yourself there, the movies, though you prolly don’t 

get much a chance working in your office an flirting with your secretary alla day to go see 

anything. Yer the bossa how many theaters izzit? 

Eight. Twenty screens. Be twenty six as soon as the mall in Woodbury goes up. He crossed 

his arms, rested them on his belly, looked up at the sky. 

Jack said, Twenty six screens. Yeah, we saw that construction site on the way in. He touched 

the antenna with a fingertip, bent it back, released it. The stiff metal vibrated a few seconds 

noiselessly and came to rest. Jack nodded. Tossem keys here, he said. 

The car started right up, roaring to life through the rusted tailpipe and then settling down to a 

menacing sweet purr. Jack punched the gas a few times, then drove it around the block. When he 

got back he pulled a roll of cash from his pocket and paid Davey. 

He drove the Century home, planning to come back with Finley, who Jack figured would be 

available, and get the Pontiac. Leaving your Mom with Finlay’s car for a few more hours, he 

said, winking and chuckling. 

I sat higher in this car than I had in the Pontiac and for the first time could see the road in 

front of me and through the passenger window there were houses and trees and the construction 

site they had talked about. 

Now, said Jack, I like Davey and all. I guess I owe him because he introduced me to your 

mother anall. But he’s changed, you see. More than I have, I hope or fear. He’s descended in a 

way, faded into domestic obscurity. Succumbed to heart failure, like we all of us do. I figured 

when I met him that first time, when he broke the nose of that former Hell’s Angel I figured he


was the type of guy who one day would write poetry worth reading. Metaphorically. But I guess 

I figured wrong. 

The car responded the way all cars did to Jack’s control, downshifting smoothly when he 

accelerated, staying dead center between the lines even as he took his hands away from the 

wheel to light a cigarette. 

He said, I guess I looka him and ask what’s the hell the difference between him and me. We 

live in the same place after all. The same conditions apply. You have no idea how places affect a 

person, turn you around into someone else. Miserable here, complacent there, chattering lovesick 

crazy bastard in another, all defined by latitude. It happens to everyone. Even those crazy kids I 

rode in with all those years ago in the VW Microbus; why when I drove out to Madison a year 

later to see how they were doing, the scene was outrightly pandemonious. The guy’d up and left 

his girl with a little baby. Just packed up that van and never to be heard from again. There was 

nothing there but Sunshine and a darling curly headed babywaif and the baby’s grandparents 

eyeing me like I was the delinquent one. Oh, Matt, I tell you there are evil forces out there that 

put snakes in a man’s head, vipers to whisper dire thoughts that if you listen will drive you to 

ruin. Promise me you’ll remain angelheaded, Matt, okay, and not become weary and broken 

hearted like all these people you see who don’t even know they’re weary and broken hearted ... 

But he didn’t wait long enough for me to promise anything, he just kept right on talking, this 

entire time driving swiftly over the freeway he nonstop described the weariness of frontage roads 

and the depression that fell over him every time he looked at a new strip mall going up and at the 

ones already there with all the cars parked out front and that what broke people’s hearts in the 

end was driving incessantly on frontage roads to strip malls and buying things they maybe


needed and maybe didn’t no one knew any more what was really important and what was just 

blind and impulsive money-spending and furthermore ... 

He took an unfamiliar exit, drove down streets I didn’t recognized, blew through stop signs 

and drove hard over railroad tracks. The car moving through open spaces and Jack going on and 

on, his sentences looping and expanding aimlessly, then stretching suddenly and lengthily toward 

some definite yet unreachable point. 

Suddenly I knew where we were, but Jack drove past our driveway while lighting a cigarette 

from the dashboard lighter. He looked over his shoulder at the rose bushes and zinnias Mom had 

planted years earlier. The roses put out only sporadic blooms — there were aphids, she said, 

nothing she could do — though the zinnias bloomed well. She was proud of her fall blooms, of 

the dry blossoms that don’t display themselves till everyone suspects the season for flowers is 

over. Jack stopped the car. He turned it around in a wide arc, grinding tires through the hard 

gravel and soft grass of the neighbors’ lawns, then accelerated into our driveway, hitting the 

brakes sharply and throwing the transmission into park. He smoked quietly and said damn 

several times. 

He and Finley picked up the car that afternoon. The next day he didn’t come home from 

work, and after that we didn’t see him for ten days. 

3. 

Because back then I traveled so seldom I made slow, methodical arrangements when it 

became apparent that I was indeed going to New York. I called airlines on three consecutive 

days to inquire about ticket prices, then three days more to make hotel reservations. The day after 

that an editorial assistant called to tell me that they had already made arrangements for me, so I 

called to cancel those I had made. And then I decided that I should stop in Binghamton to see my


grandfather, and so set about another round of slow phone calls and price quotes and hotel 

information searches. 

With my plans more or less set I told Maggie Keefe that I would be gone for one week, then 

on a whim told her I needed two. She agreed quickly enough that I began to suspect the office 

didn’t require my skills as much as I had thought they did. But that was silly. It had been me, 

after all, who on three occasions had caught major layout problems before the issue went to 

press. Though on my way back to the desk I figured maybe they were mistakes that would have 

been caught anyway, and none of them had even approached catastrophic, and it might have 

been in my job description to avoid such problems in the first place. I was dispensable, a liability 

even. The moody guy in the back cubicle with indefinite responsibilities; there’s one in every 

office. I entertained a fantasy regarding the termination of my employment. Sat at my desk and 

mentally cleaned it out, throwing my meager possessions into a cardboard box from the copy 

room. After tiring of that, I looked through an article on studio apartments, paged through 

photographs of tiny yet well decorated housing units, then stacked the copy and photos on one 

corner of my desk. Aligned the corners, then moved the stack, realigned the corners. It was a 

listless afternoon, worthless for productivity, so I paged through envelopes the mail person had 

dropped off while I was away. 

“Lousy mail,” said Pete. I looked at him and nodded. He had his cigarettes out and resting on 

the corner of his desk, a sign he was about to go outside. It was October, the first cold snap of the 

year, but he wouldn’t take his coat, preferring to stand in the cold with only the heat of 

cigarettes. He said, “I haven’t had any good mail since Sharon transferred.”


I was vaguely surprised he would bring up her name; I would have lived in quiet shame and 

dread. “So what do you hear from her these days?” I said. Bored and listless, desperate to pass 

the time. 

He said, “We’re seeing each other. Might be getting serious; hard to tell.” 

I set down my pen carefully and blinked hard. Said, “Yeah?” He might be lying, I thought. It 

was best to be careful and let the conversation play itself out, keeping what I had heard about 

harassment in the far back of my mind. Because my own personal life had always been so simple 

— offer myself, be usually refused or occasionally accepted, but in either case eventually 

moving on with little entanglement — I had always been surprised at the complicated ins and 

outs of other people’s relationships, always not quite believing they had the courage to put up 

with such things as they did. With lies and misunderstandings. Unknowing petty cruelties and 

worthless secrecy. On some level it seemed these things had always been what kept me out of or 

ended my relationships; I’d always been baffled by what could inspire others enough to 

overcome them. 

“It’s a funny story,” Pete went on. “We flirted with each other, or so I thought, and then she’s 

gone because she thinks I’m a creep. Fine by me, I guess, except that I’m on probation now and 

there’s a memo in the women’s bathroom about me.” 

“Figuratively, I hope,” I said. 

“Whatever. I guess that teaches me to notice when a woman is wearing a skirt. So I see her in 

a bar a month or two ago and buy her a drink. We talk. A few days later I call. She can’t go out. 

Then I call again. Eventually she starts calling back. We saw each other every night last week.” 

“Sounds cool,” I said. I picked up my pencil and started back in on the article about studio 

apartments, then quit. Pete went on about Sharon, about how she was studying for the LSATs. I


started making a chain of paper clips, then went back to the article. Sharon was a good cook, it 

turned out. I folded a piece of waste paper into a square box the size and shape of an ashtray. 

Pete went outside to smoke and came back. The afternoon went on in this way for quite some 

time. 

That night at three in the morning I awoke after a series of unclear yet frightening dreams. 

Still frightened, I lay awake for a while, trying to remember what they were about, but I could 

not. There were no specifics, only pale residues strewn across a generic template of dread that 

eventually receded as my thoughts turned to what had caused the dreams. Again I came up with 

nothing. 

I turned on the radio but instead of being lulled to sleep I found myself obsessed with trying 

to decipher the lyrics of modern songs. All the singers had adopted moody growls and distorted 

their guitars to an epic, nihilistic pitch that let only the barest essence of musical theory through 

their tight filter of primal, market oriented angst. I listened closely, eyes tightly shut, for several 

minutes. Eventually, though I rarely interpreted more than a random phrase or two at a time, I 

discovered they were all about alienation and self pity, lyrical non sequiturs strung together by 

battered guitar chords. This sense of sameness was disappointing because I had enjoyed this 

music earlier in the day, thinking of it as my generation’s demons in the process of being tamed 

and transformed. But in the calm of darkness they rang false, the timeless sense of three-thirty 

forcing perspective on the petty self indulgences of popular culture, of an era in the first stages of 

entrenching itself into tiresome, anthemic repetitions.


I was near sleep again, or hoping to be near sleep, when someone knocked on the door. It 

seemed a phantom knock at first, precursor to a dream, so I rolled over in anticipation of sleep 

and then whoever it was knocked again and I was wide awake, sure that this time it was real. 

There had been mistakes along these lines in the past, drunks looking for the last party 

wandering to the wrong apartment, out of towners straggling in after blown out tires or dropped 

transmissions and not knowing the right apartment number. I tried to stay prostrate and wait it 

out, but whoever it was knocked a third time, the number which proved they were serious, not a 

quitter, so I climbed out of bed into the moist, warm air. I had left the heat on again and hadn’t 

noticed, would have slept through it and woken up with a headache. I turned on a light. I put on a 

shirt, sweatpants, a bathrobe, and opened the front door just as Theo called for me to wake up. 

“I’m here,” I said. He was wearing the green corduroy shirt he had taken from my closet the 

last time he was at my place, and the same black motorcycle jacket he was always wearing in 

those days. His jeans had grass and dirt stains, his face carried the pallor of exhaustion or 

intoxication and the air he carried in with him smelled of marijuana, motor oil and perfume. 

He looked me over quickly and said, “Sorry if you have a woman in here.” 

“Funny guy.” 

“I’ve had a rough night,” he said. “I’ll trade you details for a place to crash.” 

“From the looks of you the details will probably kill me.” 

“Rode hard and put away wet.” He pulled out cigarettes and offered me one, which I took. I 

smoked and didn’t cough but he barely noticed, and neither of us said anything about it. 

“What is that?”


“Radio.” The music drifted in from the other room on a tinny and distant timber. It was a hit 

from a previous year by a group whose lead singer had killed himself after battling drugs and 

depression. 

“Checked out,” said Theo. I nodded. He seemed sober but tired, his eyes open and clear, and 

his hands were steady. He took his jacket off, wadded it up and put it at the end of the couch to 

use as a pillow while he talked. “I didn’t take any shit. I know I smell like it. But it was too 

uncertain a situation. Paul was in one of his moods, and this chick was totally messed up before I 

ever met her.” 

“What chick?” 

“Don’t even know her name. I was hanging out this afternoon with some guys from school, 

we drove into uptown, hung out, you know. Kid stuff.” 

I didn’t want to know, really, but here he was, telling me. Since the incident on the Fourth of 

July he’d told me about a few other things he and his new circle of acquaintances did. There was 

petty theft and stuff more dangerous, cheap thrill seekers, one group of suburban kids whose 

hobby was to dress like the homeless and then drive down to Uptown and sit on the pavement to 

panhandle. Then they’d go around to the record shops and second-hand stores, pockets jingling 

with quarters, to shoplift. There was one group Theo knew that he was purposefully vague about, 

his voice one of someone who knew just enough to do his job. They were involved with a guy 

who ran a scam and they would sometimes help him out. They stood behind people who were 

making long distance calls and memorize calling card numbers, which they would then sell to the 

guy for ten bucks a pop. Theo did it himself once, and then the same guy talked him into 

carrying a bag of goods between parties. He did that twice, and then he saw a bust that could just


as easily have been him, and he promised me that afterwards he wasn’t going to get involved 

with anything that smacked of felony. 

But today had been good clean high school fun involving PG movies and soda pop, he told 

me. Until the movie was over and he came out of the Uptown Theater a little after four and said 

goodbye to the people he had come with, then started walking to his car. A woman stood on the 

corner a few blocks away, staring at a building. She looked up at Theo and motioned to him with 

a finger. “Is that the MacGregor Building?” She said. 

Theo looked at it. He had no idea what building it was, but figured that with all the buildings 

in Minneapolis the odds of that particular one being the MacGregor were pretty slim, so he said 

no. Then, though he told me he should have known better, he didn’t continue right on his way 

but let her speak again. 

“I’m supposed to meet someone,” she said. “Right there, maybe. Fifteen minutes ago. But I 

guess forget about it, now.” She scratched her nose. She had dark hair, a thin pale face and 

watery blue eyes, and after she scratched her nose she scratched her wrists, shifting a small 

triangular handbag from hand to hand. 

They began walking together in the same direction. Why in the same direction Theo didn’t 

know, whether she chose to follow or they were going the same direction or if she had no 

direction. 

“There’ll be other meetings,” said Theo. 

“There might have been a job out of this one. Something with computers. At least not 

waitressing.” 

“My sister says there are only three types of jobs,” said Theo. “Food service, information 

prostitution, and worthwhile.”


“Which does she do?” 

“Information prostitution. Temporary data processing jobs, with computers. Hates it. She 

says with all the potentially valuable information in the world she wastes her time tracking paper 

clips. This is my car.” He reached out and unlocked the door, then realized it was the passenger 

side. The girl looked at him and he smiled, embarrassed — or so he hoped — and then he walked 

around the back of the car. He unlocked his own door and started to say goodbye when she 

opened the passenger door and climbed in. 

“This isn’t a taxi,” Theo said, draped between roof and door to peer in at her. 

“I know.” She scratched at the tip of her nose again. 

“You should be careful. Think about safety.” He sat down, closed his door. “All I’m saying is 

I could be anybody.” 

“So could I. Let’s drive.” 

He drove, angling toward the east. The woman didn’t say where she wanted to go but sat 

quietly for a few minutes and then started digging through her handbag. She pulled out a few 

hand rolled cigarettes and started to light one. 

“Wait on that,” said Theo. “It’s not my car.” 

She looked at him, put the joints away and pulled out a package of pre-rolls. “How about 

Carletons?” she said. 

“That’s fine. I’ll take one of those, even.” 

“You want one of those others later, though?” 

“Sure, maybe.” 

“Where are we going, again?” 

“To a place I go to sometimes. There’ll be people there. Things to do.”


“I don’t know,” I said. 

“What is that? What don’t you know?” 

“How much of this to believe.” 

“What’s not to believe?” 

“The whole thing. The complexity of events occurring randomly. The way the two of you 

gravitated toward each other. The way people flock to you. You collect them. Crazy people, 

regular people. It’s not normal.” He kicked off shoes, lay down, stretching himself over the 

length of my couch. “So where did you go?” I asked when his pause had gone on for almost a 

minute. 

“Out to Sunset Memorial. It’s a place we go to hang out, just for the hell of it. You know 

how us bad kids are. Toying with death all the time. The whole crew was there. Pauly and Mitch 

and his sometime girlfriend.” 

“What do you do out there?” 

“Hang out. Passing time. I’m thinking about filming them. Making a documentary about the 

underworld. About the people who live on the margins of society, their economy and 

sociological structure. A real look at people who don’t have jobs, don’t want jobs, but get by 

anyway.” 

I didn’t say anything to that. It sounded horrible. 

Theo went on, “It’s getting colder out there, so they’re going to have to find another spot. 

And Pauly says that the police are on to something going on out there. Complaints from decent 

citizens. We were in the old part, with the tombstones and inscriptions. The real part, with 

monuments.”


“I want a tombstone when I die,” I said. 

“Damn straight.” 

It was another of Jack’s requests, that he be buried beneath a big piece of rock. A stone slab 

refusing to yield, a thing that alters your path, a stone among stones in a field, like death itself 

tombstones were disruptions to be reckoned with. 

“I told this girl,” said Theo, ”that the appeal of cemeteries lies in their encapsulation of the 

past. Everything ever done comes to rest in a graveyard. Bank robbers, captains of industry, 

torrid perversions.” 

“You’re quoting Jack.” 

“I think that makes it more true, if I remember it and use it at an appropriate point. It’s a 

reflection of the universal.” 

He closed his eyes and appeared on the verge of sleep, then, eyes closed, he continued 

speaking. “So we walk down the hill to the mausoleums. She walks up to one, pulls at the iron 

gate, asks me if I ever wondered what it’s like on the inside of one of these things. It’s one of 

those old family crypts where the whole family’s dead and inside and there’s no more room for 

stiffs anyway, so behind the gate it’s bricked up with cinder blocks, and I tell her it’s probably 

real dark and mossy in there. A haven for fungus and disease. Unhealthy. She lights a joint, 

offers it to me. I turned it down. Honest. 

“Down in the party grove Pauly and Mitch and Joanie are hanging with a few other people I 

don’t know. Telling lies. Sorting out the details of deals. Don’t ask what they are. You were 

about to ask who these people are and what they do. They don’t do things you or I understand. 

They don’t even know. They live on instinct. Mitch knows some wicked things about computers, 

how to manipulate calculations. Pauly I don’t ask. And you’re wondering how this place is the


place where all the stuff gets done. I don’t know. It’s just a place people like us go to find other 

people like us.” 

“It’s fascinating how you spend your free time. Congregating with felons, picking up strange 

women, doing drugs. You couldn’t do that at college?” 

“I told you: I don’t use, I don’t sell, whatever you believe. Reality is the shits enough for me. 

I drink some, I monitor. I step in to calm things down once in a while.” 

“A caretaker. You. The one who fires guns at trees.” 

“A safe hobby, compared to other pastimes. I try to take care of people. It’s the last idealism 

of my youth. That I can make a difference. The gun’s a placebo.” 

“So what happened out there tonight?” 

“Pauly takes an interest in the girl. A surprise. He’s married, I think, but estranged. One of 

those complex things that comes down to two people who haven’t got a clue. They have two 

messed up children, collection agencies with direct phone lines, a floor covered in broken dishes. 

So Pauly and this girl started talking tonight, touching each other. They have the look of 

preliminaries. Then they started arguing. It started looking bad, with fists and poses and spit out 

words. So I step in, Captain Peacemaker. Turns out they’re arguing in Spanish, which I didn’t 

even know Pauly spoke. I mean, I knew he lived in Mexico for a while, but I didn’t expect him 

to know the language.” 

“He doesn’t look like the person who’d commit himself to learning a language, you’re 

saying. He looks like he doesn’t need language at all, perhaps.” 

“So I can’t do anything, though it doesn’t mean I won’t try. I stand there and they look at me 

and keep going. The girl is doing most of the talking. Gesturing. It feels like some foreign movie 

where nothing makes sense. Pauly starts to push her a little and grab at her at the same time. She


pushes back, tries to get away. I tell him to cool off and he doesn’t. Pushes me, I fall down, get 

up, take another shot from him. Finally I get them separated and I’m still in one piece and the 

gathering goes on as scheduled. I’m talking to Mitch and his girl for a while. Some other people 

show up. Half an hour later I notice both Pauly and the girl are gone again. Don’t know if they 

left together or not.” 

“Did you look for them?” 

“Not much. Nothing I can do, really. God. It’s going to be something if I can get a camera 

down there. People will freak out. Them, us, the viewer. I think they’ll let me. They wonder what 

I’m there for anyway. Bringing a camera will be a good cover for me.” 

both.” 

I didn’t want to deal with his camera idea, so I said, “And after all that, then you came here.” 

“I’m here, right? I must have come here if this is where I am.” 

“Well, okay then. Maybe you should get some sleep. You seem worked up, and exhausted 

“They fascinate me, these humans. The way they just, I don’t know. Do things. I want to tell 

everyone how strange and beautiful they are.” 

He went to sleep, and I picked up the phone and called Mom’s house. Kelley answered, and I 

whispered into the receiver, “He’s here.” 

“Is he okay?” 

“He’s fine, I guess. He’s asleep. He’ll be home in the morning.” 

“Mom’s asleep too. She might not even know he’s gone. Where was he?” 

“The movies. Cemeteries. He’s doing things you don’t want to know. Things he probably 

shouldn’t be doing with people he shouldn’t be with. And next time he wants to film it.” 

“Okay, so what do I tell Mom in the morning when he’s not here? Is he drunk?”


“No he’s not drunk. Tell her we went to a movie but the early show was sold out so we went 

to the late one.” 

“Okay, I’ll... oh, crap.” 

There was a disturbance, then muffled voices and the sound of grabbing and clicking, then 

Mom’s voice saying, “What is it?” 

“He’s here,” I said. “Theo’s with me. Matt.” 

“Where’s he been?” 

“We went to a movie,” I said. “The early show was sold out so we went to the late one. And 

so he just said, let me crash here, and he’s asleep.” 

don’t.” 

“I don’t know why I picked up the phone,” Mom said. “I don’t know why I bother. I really 

And then she hung up the phone. 

4. 

For some reason the woman behind the ticket counter never really made clear to me there 

was a four hour delay at the Pittsburgh airport, leaving me to sit quietly in a poorly padded seat, 

thumbing through an old copy of Desolation Angels I had found in my closet. It was a book from 

Jack’s collection, part of which I had also inherited after his death. It wasn’t until several months 

after the funeral that we were finally able to commit to going through his things; there weren’t 

many after all. Jack had an aversion to things. He had shirts and ties and shoes and books, but 

after that his possessions were meager. A few old pocket knives with chipped blades, a Timex 

watch. His only jewelry was his wedding ring, which was buried with him.


Such things went through my mind as I sat patiently, occasionally wandering into the 

concourses to stare at the pedestrians as they came at me. All of humanity passed me by, from 

the elderly in travel suits to the young in jeans; a socioeconomic spectrum, a parade of 

demographics, all trailed by leashed luggage or weighed down by shoulder bags. Eventually it 

felt as though I were not only one of the crowd but a being the crowd had created, a composite of 

their own creation from the residue of their travels. Rather than frightening me the feeling gave 

me a sense of liberation, of potential being tapped. By the time the plane arrived I had finished 

three beers in a bar just off the corridor and was about to approach a pair of women dressed in 

warm up jerseys for the University of Indiana Soccer Team. I heard my plane called, looked over 

at them, shook my head (they didn’t look back) and walked back to the gate, where I boarded the 

plane without delay. 

It was a middle-aged plane, a DC-9 whose tubular cabin reminded me of a city bus, or a 

subway car, the generic design of a mass transit system eerie in this context of a vehicle designed 

to travel miles above the earth. You’d expect it to be special, like another world. I stashed my 

luggage in the overhead bin and settled into my seat. Shortly after takeoff from the plane bucked 

twice, then pitched into a steep bank, causing the woman next to me to put fingers in both her 

ears and assume the crash position. She told me, eventually, that her name was Nancy Rohn, that 

she lived in Johnson City, New York, a village just next door to Binghamton, that she had 

transferred to this plane from Charlotte, North Carolina. 

In the past few minutes I’d taken to believing my existence was purely transitory, that I had 

no life outside the airport and the anticipation of a plane that hadn’t yet arrived, and possibly 

never would. Perhaps travel had transformed me from a creature of the here to a creature in


transit, with no future and no past. In any case I looked Nancy Rohn in the eye and said, “My 

name’s Jack.” 

I told her a few things, leaving out the poetry and Theo’s previous visit, making it sound as 

though this were my mission alone, independent of another person’s context. It seemed 

important that I be self reliant in Nancy Rohn’s eyes. A rogue traveler on an obscure personal 

quest. I told her a few things about Jack, not telling her I’d appropriated his name for myself. I 

told her how he had never reconciled with his father and so kept us from meeting him. She 

nodded sympathetically, often touching my forearm with her left hand, the diamond in her 

engagement ring flickering dully in the cabin’s murky light. She was young, not much older than 

I, and pretty. 

We talked through the flight. She was married to a pastor at a local church where she 

sometimes played piano and tended the kids in the nursery. As we started our descent to the 

Broome County airport she asked me if I was booked in a hotel. 

“The Holiday Inn,” I told her. 

“That’s nice. They have a good bar there.” 

“You’re meeting someone at the airport?” 

“No. My husband was supposed to meet me but he was called out to Vestal.” 

“I’ll drive you,” I said. “I have a rental waiting.” 

We descended through fog, my anticipation rising as I expected at any moment for the fog to 

end and ground — the broad, dark rolling hills of Theo’s description — to appear below us, 

studded by lights of homes and commerce. But the fog continued as we descended, and the only 

view of ground came just moments before landing, brief hazy glimpses of small trees and black 

grass passing swiftly beneath us and then the landscape leveling out as the plane touched down


on wet ground and decelerated, engines screaming in reverse thrust. Nancy Rohn kept her head 

down and ears plugged until the plane had slowed to a crawl and the engine noise subsided to a 

dull idling roar. The she sat up, shook her hair out and giggled. “I can use a drink about now,” 

she said. 

“We’ll get you set up soon enough,” I said. 

She smiled, began arranging the few things in her lap. 

“It’s raining,” I said. 

She peered out the window, thrusting her face across my chest, leveraging an arm against my 

shoulder for a better look. A small silver cross dangled from a chain on her neck. “Not for 

Binghamton it isn’t,” she said. 

We tucked our collars tightly around our necks to ward off the rain, descended the metal 

staircase attendants had wheeled up to the door and walked across the tarmac to the main 

terminal. Our luggage came in five minutes later and the rental car was waiting in the lot. We 

threw our bags into the trunk of the red Shadow, then I let Nancy Rohn in on the passenger side. 

She directed me down the correct roads to Binghamton, which turned out to be a ten or twelve 

mile drive down the side of the valley. She fingered her cross, toyed with the chain, told me how 

her husband delivered his sermons with a quiet, patient voice that put about a third of the 

parishioners to sleep every week. “Even me sometimes,” she said. I listened as she chatted 

amiably about her husband, her wedding, her in-laws. Her mailman was inconsistent, the lawn 

was rarely mowed properly, churches were losing worshipers. In all her life appeared a safe 

place to be even with all the inconveniences. She gave me directions straight to her house. 

“How about that drink?” I said. 

She said, “Oh, Jack. I’m exhausted.”


She pointed out minor landmarks along the way. The park with a carousel, the high school, 

the garage where she got her car fixed. 

I dropped her off in front of her house, pulled her bags from the trunk. “Thank you, Jack,” 

she said. She wiped rain from her cheek, smiled. “It was nice meeting you. Good luck with your 

grandfather.” 

“Thank you,” I said. 

“Follow Main Street,” she said. “It’ll take you more or less straight there. You can’t get lost 

on Main Street. Turn right on Hawley. Can’t miss the Holiday Inn.” She smiled again and 

walked briskly up her front steps, went inside. I stood in the drizzle, wondering if I had done a 

wrong thing, if there were something I could have done that would have led to me and Nancy 

Rohn having a drink together at the Holiday Inn bar, as had seemed imminent at one point. I got 

in the car and started the engine and twisted the stereo knobs until I found a familiar song. 

The hotel was indeed easy to find; I parked around back and struggled with my luggage. A 

woman about my age checked me in, chattering coyly with me as I filled out forms. Though I 

barely answered she talked about how my room had been recently redecorated, how there was a 

convention coming in a few days, how the rain was supposed to continue. I felt at ease in the 

calm flow of her talk, the same calm I’d felt from Nancy Rohn’s chatter and mistaken for 

flirting, and I began to think of Binghamton as a city where people talked with strangers and talk 

was used as a bridge across separate lives and not as a form of commitment as it was in the 

Midwest. 

“So enjoy your stay,” she said. 

“Well thanks. Maybe you can come by later for a drink,” I said.


She laughed, distinctly forming the laugh into a series of ha sounds. “Oh, I have to stay here 

till morning,” she said. 

I nodded and said something like all righty, then. 

My room was located across the hall from the ice machine. It was spacious, cheaply 

furnished and carried none of the easy charm I had begun to associate with the city. The air 

smelled of synthetic fibers and the sterilized residue of a thousand professional travelers, as if 

countless traveling salesmen trudging to innumerable conferences had somehow permanently 

tainted the bedclothes and door frames and the Winslow Homer fishing scene over the 

headboard. I thought about going down to the bar for a drink, maybe two, but didn’t. The 

freedom travel brought had begun to fade, the thrill of transition. Nearly gone. I lay down on the 

stiff comforter, clasped my hands over my stomach, feeling the dampness of rain on the front of 

my coat. Thought about sleeping, and in the end I slept. 

5. 

When I was in high school Jack drank all the time. On the weeknights when he was home he 

would sit in the basement and drink or he would be out somewhere in the city, talking to other 

barflies, and drinking. We put up with him as best we could. We spent time at friends’ houses, 

joined after-school clubs. Because if we were home, and Jack found us, no one knew what might 

happen. He’d offer to take us for rides to get ice cream at the twenty-four hour grocery store and 

we’d have to talk him out of it, or wait for the idea to leave him. He’d ask us why we weren’t 

doing homework, who left the milk out of the refrigerator, or whether I’d mowed the lawn like 

he asked. It was sometimes summer, when there wasn’t any homework, or the milk would be 

safely tucked in the fridge when he asked these things. And aside from mom’s small flower


garden the lawn was a patchwork of bare dirt, dandelions, crabgrass and creeping Charlie. The 

questions didn’t matter as long as they were about keeping a house running; he was making 

jokes, mostly, bad drunken jokes about things that weren’t funny. 

Once I was on the couch reading when he came out and said, What the hell. You’re reading 

books? Standing on the carpet with his feet in worn wool stockings, a flannel shirt open over an 

old t-shirt. Curly hair clumped and matted. Well on his way to drunk. He’d look at the book. 

Once it was Thomas Hardy, and he grabbed it from my hands to look at the title and said, Angel 

or Alec, who fuckin cares? I’ll tell you, I read a lotta books and it didn’t do me no fucking good. 

I read Chaucer and Faulkner and all that shit. Homer, Chandler, Mailer, Proust. Fucked my head 

up. It’ll mess your head up, too, got it? 

I said I did, but it didn’t matter what I said at this point. 

You wanna know the only thing that taught me about life? 

I didn’t move or say anything. I wanted to be miles away. Probably he did too. 

The only thing taught me anything was chasing skirts. That’ll learn you a thing or two. 

Suddenly he softened, his eyes moist with a recollection. He plopped himself down in the 

padded chair at the end of the sofa and said wistfully, Why, this one woman-child I chased for 

years on end, ah old Dezzie was her name, the sweetest girl and who grew to the finest woman... 

and then he faded off and looked at me with the fury he’d seemed to abandon just moments 

earlier. So what do you do, here in your prime skirt-chasing years? You’re here reading Jesus 

Fucking Tom Hardy. I can’t believe you have any of my genetic code at all. 

He stood up and threw the book across the room and went back to the basement. On some 

nights he’d storm out the door. He’d leave and come home at two in the morning. The neighbor’s 

dog would bark, and he’d shout back, a raving lunatic trying to out-bark a big black Lab. He’d


yell at the dog, nonsensical ravings he’d say: You’re not Rupert Finlay’s dog, Rupert Finlay 

ne’er hadda dog nor one so mean an’ barksome as you are, big stupid dog who slunk inna town 

when Rupert Finlay whose Ponniac was always at our ready, thas the kinda Saint Rupert Finlay 

was, but you Blackheart Dogbark show up while Rupert Finlay’s onniz deathbed and ya steal his 

house dog-viciously out from unner him... 

When he’d finished chastising the neighbor’s dog he’d bang and stomp and go sleep on the 

sofa in the basement, where by morning he’d wake up, wander into the kitchen and apologize to 

whoever was there. 

I dunno whas wrong with me, he’d say. I dunno. I know I’ve run out of yer sorries and I’m 

running outta saying I’m sorries. I’ll tryta do better. 

And you’d tell him maybe he should join one of those stop-drinking groups where people sat 

in the basement and talked about it. He liked to talk, didn’t he? And he liked to meet people, 

right? 

But not for Jack. Those groups’re dangerous, he’d tell you. Those groups’re based on this 

shadowy national organization that nobody knows who’s really in charge. They put yer name 

onna list and the list gets spread around and you just know the government has a copy of it and 

they’re going through it with a comb looking for reasons to crack down on these poor souls who 

go to the church basement to worship their greatest weakness. 

You’d say you didn’t know about that, was he sure? But of course he was. On some topics 

Jack couldn’t be convinced of anything but what he believed himself. 

I hadn’t bothered to tell Jack that there was a skirt I was after: blond, flowsy Dawn Engle. 

She was in one of those unstable, on this week and off the next high school romances with a boy 

named Jim Anderson. I sat with her at lunch and then again in Civics class where we’d been


placed in the same discussion group. We’d debate the Iran-Contra dealings, or whether the cities 

really needed light rail, but all I was interested in was Dawn’s chest and her flowing, blond- 

streaked hair. 

One weekend I knew she and Jim were off again, I sat by the phone waiting for the courage 

to call her. Just to say hi, I’d say, and then I’d say hi and try to think of something else to say. It 

took half an hour of waiting and two aborted attempts, but finally I dragged the dial of our old 

green rotary phone through the sequence of Dawn’s phone number and listened to her phone 

ring. When she answered I told her who I was, asked her how she was doing, said I had just 

called to say hi. She said Hi back and, since I could think of nothing else to say I asked her to go 

out. She hesitated, then said sure. A few awkward moments later we’d set a date, then I hung up. 

I went to the room I shared with Theo and saw that he was on his bed, dressed and lying 

under the covers with his arms behind his head. 

It’s a crazy world, I said. 

Someone oughta sell tickets, he said. What are we talking about? 

Dawn Engle. 

Still pining away? 

We’re going out in a couple days. 

Theo said, Good for you. I myself was napping. I had a dream that Kelley was getting 

married and I was videotaping the wedding with a borrowed camera that kept running out of 

film. This was odd because it meant the marriage wouldn’t be official. 

I said, Nothing happens any more unless it’s on video tape. Football games, graduations. We 

have to see something eight times before it sinks in.


Theo said, Jack says we don’t trust our memories any more. 

Theo was eleven years old at this time. Teachers and principals had wanted for the past two 

years for him skip a grade but my parents wouldn’t let them. Though Jack didn’t have a problem 

with it — the less time spent in school the better, he figured — my mother was convinced 

skipping grades was a harbinger of genius and was afraid to burden him with expectations. For 

about a while she tried to foster his intelligence by buying books from the classics section of the 

B Dalton’s in the mall, scouring shelves for the black-spined Penguin classics, books by English 

novelists dead for a hundred years, books that Theo didn’t read but I did. 

I asked, Was Jack giving her away? 

No. He wasn’t there, and I didn’t look for him. I spent a lot of time wondering why I wasn’t 

looking for him. 

Ah, I said. A guilt dream. 

Is adulthood going to be like this? Theo asked. Will we just sit around trying to find out what 

we’re thinking, or will we actually have a clue, do you figure? 

I sat down on my bed, then lay down, kicking my shoes over the edge. I said, It’s best just to 

never grow up, if you ask me. I let my thoughts drift, tracing a finger along a seam in the 

wallpaper. 

Soon the door opened and Jack’s head appeared. He looked from Theo to me, and then Theo 

and I looked at each other. We didn’t know he was home, we hadn’t seen him for days. Then we 

looked back at Jack. 

He shouted: Whee-Haaa! There’s my boys. I looked at him carefully for signs that he was 

drinking. Maybe just a shot or two, I thought. Maybe completely sober. 

Howdy, pardner, Theo said. Where you been?


I been here. Where would I be? 

We never know, I said. 

Hell, that’s a mean and base thing ta say. I’m always here. You know I’m anchored, rooted 

and hog-tied to the homestead. He glared at us, then smiled and said, You guys wanna go fer a 

ride? 

Of course we did. Rides with Jack were the high points of our lives. We walked through the 

house, put on our shoes and got into the Buick. He took us north to the cornfields beyond the 

suburbs, all the while with his continuous patter that only Theo could begin to turn into dialog. 

He said things like, Up here the farmers still rule, tilling and coaxing and bringing forth plants to 

churn the earth with their busy roots, leaf-blades upturned to mother sun and moist with dew and 

rainfall. I can’t see for how long they’ll hold out, the noble tillers, against the mechanical 

monster corporations stalking their livelyhood with massive corporate technology like those 

olive forest farms in California where they suck massive acres worth of olives into giant 

machines that pit and cure and dump them on the market at rock bottom prices so the economists 

can draw their bell curves and say everything’s working exactly how you’d expect, and ye’d be 

convinced too if only your heart were replaced with a tin can like with this procedure we’re 

working on... 

Where we going, pop? Said Theo. 

We’re heading out to this place. Kelley and your mom and I met these folksa while-back and 

they said come back anytime. They’re folk that made a fortune in the city as lawyers and then 

decided to set themselves up with a patch of land like the farmers of old. So they have what you 

call a hobby farm, with miniature cornfields and miniature goats and whatnot. So today we go


out to stand in the fields and the lawns where corn stands in rows like soldiers on the parade 

ground. 

We were driving past rows of corn that were standing exactly like that, in even rows that 

aligned with my vision at regular intervals as Jack drove by. He drove the car onto a dirt road 

that led to a cluster of out-buildings around a medium sized red barn, then parked near a small 

shed. We got out and looked around while Jack called out, Usted! Hey, buddy, Usted! 

Soon a woman appeared. She was thin and pretty, her face weathered and angular, and her 

brown hair was gathered at the back of her head and held with wooden pin stuck through an 

embossed leather oval. Jack, she said. So glad you could come back. You brought your sons. 

These are my boys, he said, introducing us. This is Matt, he said, this is my oldest. And this 

is Theo. Theo’s smart as a whip. Say something smart, would you? 

others. 

Theo said, The root cause of today’s inflation is an across the board increase in wages. 

Well, said Linda. That is smart. 

Matt’s smart, too, Jack said. Matt reads books. 

Ah, I said. In the end, Elizabeth marries Mr. Darcy, after each learn lessons about judging 

Jesus, boy, Said Jack. Do you read any books about men? 

I looked around uncomfortably. Ah, hell, said Jack. I didn’t mean nothing by it. Don’t get all 

pouty, now. Jesus fuck. 

Matt’s got a date, Theo said. He was trying to help, I think, but there was something else on 

his face as well, like he knew it would be a help laced with embarrassment. I shoved him a little, 

but he’d scored his points already. 

Jack said, He does, now? With a girl?


I’d been uncomfortable before but felt now like I wanted to disappear. We loved rides with 

Jack, but there were risks, and sometimes a price to pay. Yes, I said. 

Dawn. 

Well I’m proud of you, son. It’s about time. 

Who’s the lucky girl? Said Linda. 

Her name is Dawn, I said. 

Ah, rosy Dawn, said Jack. Fair of skin and eye, I assume. A glimpse of heaven on earth, is 

It’s, like, nothing, I said. 

With that attitude I’m sure it will be, said Jack. 

We were just about to start cooking, said Linda. 

A good idea. Mind if we join you? We brought supplies. 

He opened the trunk of the car. Inside were steaks and a bucket of coleslaw and a case of 

beer. We took all of it down to a fire that was burning in a pit behind the barn, where we met 

Linda’s husband Jeff, and we had a quick cookout right there. Jeff went out to the cornfields and 

cut off several ears and roasted them over the coals, and Jack burned the steaks and told his 

stories and listened to Jeff’s, and Theo and I watched and listened and ate and then threw a 

baseball around. When the sun went down, we went back home. 

One night the next week, I went to see Mom in the kitchen, where she was baking. She was 

standing at a counter measuring flour, sifting it into measuring cups set on waxed paper. All 

about her in the kitchen ingredients lay in small dishes, chopped nuts and dried fruit, bowls of 

sugar and coconut. She moved methodically through the order she had created, shifting bowls to


make more efficient use of her counter space, recounting the eggs in the refrigerator, checking 

the double boiler. 

I watched her baking for a few minutes, hoping for her to notice me, then I said, Jack’s been 

acting funny. 

You should call him Dad. 

He likes being called Jack. Otherwise he wouldn’t have picked that name. 

How has he been acting funny? 

He’s picking on me because ... he doesn’t understand me. 

Mom said, It’s hard for him to understand things sometimes. Things will work out. 

My mother and I often spoke in these cliches; probably we thought we were protecting each 

other by not being exact in expressing our emotions, or maybe it was because Jack and Kelley 

and, more every day, Theo spent enough time vocalizing emotion that the two of us felt obligated 

to be more reserved. 

So I stood there in the kitchen for a few more moments, waiting for one of us to move the 

conversation beyond the awkward generalities. 

I said, Theo doesn’t have this problem. Jack’s proud of him. 

He’s proud of you, too. Remember he used to take you along with him on the weekends 

when he went out? 

You made him, I said. He says he spoiled me by doing all the work. And now he argues with 

me because I’m always at home. He thinks I should be out on the road, drinking. 

You don’t have to do that. 

Can you tell him he drinks too much? Maybe if he joined a program. 

You know Jack doesn’t trust things when they get too organized.


Can’t anybody tell him anything? I asked. You used to snap at him all the time. You told him 

bullshit, made him change his mind. Now you bake cookies. 

Mom said, Things change. I mean, you get tired of it. 

I said, The last time I told him he drank too much, he said that Ronald Reagan had done 

marijuana with Jack Benny, so why shouldn’t Jack LaFleur have a few shots of Jim Beam now 

and then. 

Listen, honey, said Mom. What would you think if Jack didn’t live here anymore? 

What do you mean? 

I mean, if he and I weren’t married, and he didn’t live here. 

He’s not here that much as it is, I said. I’d thought about it, considered that she maybe 

wanted out. I didn’t know exactly where Jack would go, but it seemed to me that if he were cut 

loose he’d never come back at all. 

No, said Mom. He isn’t here much, is he? 

So, what’re you going to do? 

I don’t know. 

Dawn and I went out once, then once more, and a week later we had another date. She was 

waiting on the porch of her house in a floral print sundress with narrow straps over the shoulder. 

She kissed me on the cheek in greeting; there seemed in the gesture to be portents for the rest of 

the evening. 

We had dinner at Perkin’s, then she asked if I wanted to go for a walk on the beach. She 

seemed sadder than usual, her large brown eyes lost in concern over something. I said sure, let’s 

go, and let her lead me by the hand back to the car. We drove down to Founder’s Park and


wandered through the paths, up rocks and down to a narrow strip of beach under spreading elm 

trees. Groups of cloud covered most of the stars, and to test the situation I said I used to have all 

kinds of allergies to anything in lake water. I said, I wish the sky had those lines on it like you 

see at the planetarium. It would make finding the constellations easier. 

She took my hand again and said I never thought of that. 

I said Maybe we should go to the cemetery and lie around on the tombstones. These 

sentences I was casting out, they came from nowhere and they didn’t phase her a bit. Random 

combinations of ideas unassociated even with themselves. 

Everything comes to rest in cemeteries, she said. We could let the sky spin above us forever. 

I looked down at her, took her other hand. She said I love to lie in the sand, Matt. Softer than 

tombstones. She kneeled down on the beach, bunching her dress about her thighs. I joined her on 

the sand, leaned forward, kissed her, touched her shoulder, listened to small waves tumbling over 

smooth stones. 

She let me get the zipper halfway down before pulling away. One of the straps fell off her 

shoulder and rested on her arm revealing a blue elastic strap. I said, What’s wrong? 

She said, You’ve been very nice to me. 

Uh oh, I thought. 

Like a brother. 

Oh, shit. 

What, oh shit? It’s just, I don’t want to go that far. She was tracing double fingertip furrowed 

patterns in the sand. 

With me, or with anybody, or what?


She made a very irritated face, then said, I’m meeting Jim Anderson later. We’re getting back 

together. Her dress lay loosely over her chest, revealing the top of her bra cups and wide 

stretches of skin, clean American girl-flesh grey in the moonlight. She put a hand on my thigh, 

squeezed my knee. It’s beyond us all, she said. 

I stammered, Beyond...? Even after she’d said it she didn’t seem like the type to say such 

melodramatic things. Then I got into the spirit and said, But I have feelings for you. 

It was an embarrassingly pointless thing to say, made more embarrassing by the fact that the 

cause seemed well past lost. Her mind had been made up, and I was not the kind of person who 

could change other people’s minds even long enough to make them do regrettable things. 

She pulled me down to the sand, kissing me. We lay like that for a while, maybe five 

seconds, kissing, then she pushed me off and stood up. Began walking down the beach again, her 

zipper still open in the back. I rolled over to my back, looked up as the clouds of early autumn 

rolled over the slowly rotating sky. When I got up she was sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree, 

throwing small rocks into the lake. I watched from a distance, rings in the water spreading from 

point of impact, white arcs on black and then disappearing. A minute later I asked if she wanted 

to go, and she said she did. 

It took only a few silent minutes for me to get her home and deposit her on the walk to her 

parent’s house, but after that it was only eight thirty so I decided to drive. I went around the 

freeway that bounded the cities, the loop of 494 and 694 that once was the outskirts of urban 

sprawl but now bounded the inner core of the urban area, had become the superfluous markers of 

the sprawling heart of the upper midwest. I went around the loop twice, the first time in forty 

minutes, the second in thirty-five.


6. 

Other guests made trips to the ice machine throughout that night in the Holiday Inn. They 

came down the hall and I would be disturbed by their footsteps and laughter, by the wet rattle of 

ice being scooped up in plastic containers. At the first disturbance I half-woke, gaining enough 

presence to kick my shoes onto the floor, at the second I removed my coat. There were enough 

disturbances that by three a.m. I had stripped to my shorts and was tucked safely under the 

covers, a normal traveler in a normal pose. 

By dawn I was still tired, and so slept for a few hours after the room had filled with a gray 

uninspired light. Then, awake, I lay in bed and stared for a few minutes through a break in the 

curtains at a small vertical section of Binghamton, tasting the light of morning in a strange city. 

In daylight the room lost none of the pallid gray loneliness that had come over me the evening 

before. The drizzle of the previous night was still falling, and when I got up and opened the 

drapes I saw a full view of downtown Binghamton. There were many squat red and white 

sandstone buildings, a few buildings of black glass, and one town hall type building with a small 

green copper dome. The view was filtered through rivulets of water tracking down the dirty 

windowpane; the buildings themselves seemed to be melting down toward the earth. Cars 

crawled along indifferently mended streets or idled at red lights as pedestrians shuffled over 

cracked sidewalks. It was a scene you’d never want to see from a hotel room, but there I was. 

I showered, dressed, carefully remade the bed and then drove out to Larry’s, following 

directions Lizbeth had given me in the brief conversation we’d had a few days before I left. The 

dashboard clock read ten-thirty, a half hour past the time I told her I would be showing up. 

Main Street took me past the high school, a large depression era fortress of cement and 

brown brick. Only when I was well past did it occur to me that Jack had gone to school there,


passing four years studying the basics as the fifties turned into the sixties and his mind turned to 

the road. He had walked over the same ground years before, had haunted the same halls as the 

students who now loitered on the commons, who with stylized snarls lit up forbidden cigarettes. 

There was only one story he ever told of those days, and it had to do with fall, and the fact 

that in when he was growing up you were still allowed to burn your leaves after you had raked 

them. He told me there was nothing like being able to burn your leaves, nothing like the feeling 

of leaning up on your rake and watching as smoke curled towards the sky to mingle with the 

smoke of other leaf fires. That was all he ever said of Binghamton. 

When I reached my grandfather’s and turned the car into the drive a woman who could only 

have been Lizbeth was in the garden, smoking and looking up at the top of the house. She gave 

no concession to the rain, not even the token upturned collar and hunched shoulders — no 

raincoat or umbrella, nothing but a blue windbreaker over a blue shirt and worn white jeans. Just 

Lizbeth looking exactly as Theo had described her. Pensive but hard edged, vulnerable only in 

spots she would never expose. She was a little taller than I had imagined, and a bit thinner, 

sharper, and her only acknowledgment that I had arrived was a quick glance in my direction as 

the car rolled to a stop. I parked the car behind the other car in the driveway and stepped out into 

the rain. 

“He isn’t here, Matthew,” she said, dropping the cigarette and crushing it into the pavement. 

“Excuse me?” 

“They took him away this morning.” 

“Took who away? To a hospital?” 

“No. Is that a Plymouth?” She pointed at the rental car.


“Dodge,” I said. “Same thing. What happened?” I zipped up my coat, then unzipped it, put 

hands in pockets and tightened them around sticks of chewing gum and loose pieces of currency. 

“He had a condition. Apnea. He had it a long time. It means you stop breathing as you sleep. 

Lots of people have it for years and years. Usually you start breathing again. Sometimes you 

don’t.” 

“And last night he didn’t?” 

“Last night,” she said. A rivulet of water ran down the side of her face, crossing and 

recrossing a thin strand of hair stuck to her skin. 

“I’m sorry,” I said. We stood in the rain as it lightened from a drizzle to a mist. In the garden 

zinnias were blooming, vivid orange against fallen brown leaves. I pulled out a piece of gum and 

tried to unwrap it but it fell to the ground. Lizbeth watched as I bent over to pick it up and 

returned it to my pocket. “Can I go inside?” I asked. 

We walked slowly past the cars toward the side entrance. Behind the house was a broad 

green lawn, then a line of trees and beyond that the earth descended steeply to a wide, slow 

moving river, probably the Susquehanna. I asked Lizbeth what kind of trees those were, because 

I didn’t recognize them. She said Sycamore. 

Inside, I went to the first chair I saw and sat down while Lizbeth took off her coat. “It seems 

strange,” I said. “With everything else that was wrong with him that something he had lived with 

all his life should finally kill him. Can I have a cigarette?” She offered me one, gave me a lighter. 

I set them both down on an end table, folded hands over my stomach. 

“You can’t ever tell when people are going to die.” She placed her hands together, loose fist 

in palm. “The funeral is tomorrow. He made plans months ago, allowing just enough time to let 

his old business partners know. This was before Theo came out here, before he knew you were


interested in him. He wasn’t very big on ceremony. There’s no church service. Just a chaplain at 

the cemetery. When is your flight?” 

“Day after tomorrow. Morning.” We sat for a while. She picked up the unlit cigarette I had 

set on the end table and lit it for herself, replacing the lighter when she had finished. I said, “I 

feel cheated.” 

She said, “You’re not like your brother.” The room became smaller as it filled with her 

smoky exhalations, but that didn’t bother me. What bothered me was that since dawn the clouds 

outside had thickened to make the day grow darker and more menacing. “Theo wouldn’t have 

come into the house on hearing news like I told you.” 

“Or so you’d imagine. Maybe you’re right. Are you here taking care of the estate?” 

“I’m not the executor. He has a lawyer for that. It reminds me, she was looking for a relative 

to sign some papers. I’ll give you directions. I’m here mainly to clean up, get the equipment out 

of the house. Settle things down in the house. Take care of it for a few minutes.” 

“Consoling an orphan house.” 

“I’m going back to my apartment soon,” she said. “I don’t even remember what it looks 

like.” She remained still as she spoke, her green eyes fixed on some point on or through a pane 

of rain streaked glass. 

I asked, “Do you have a Coke or anything?” 

She shook her head. 

“Water?” 

“In the kitchen.” She made no motion, so I got up, removed my coat and carried it over to the 

hall, peering ahead for signs of formica or large appliances. It was just off the side entrance, a 

large kitchen with dusty floors and glass fronted cabinets. Three inverted glasses and a few plates


rested on a towel next to the sink. I took one and filled it with water and drank it there in the 

kitchen, looking out at the garden. The rain continued to fall, harder now. I rubbed at my eyes, 

filled the glass again and then poured the water down the drain. The scene felt flat, devoid of 

whatever emotions should have been there. I had come expecting little and received nothing. 

Anger or resentment seemed unwarranted and superfluous emotions without referents. Loose, 

flying symbols without anchor in the physical world. It would be this way: I would go to the 

funeral, I would pay my respects, I would fly to New York the next morning. 

I called into the next room, “Are there things to eat?” 

She called back, “Help yourself.” 

The refrigerator was empty, the shelves had only canned vegetables, soup. I shuffled back to 

the living room, looked at the desk Theo had told me about, picked up the anonymous bust and 

set it back down. 

“I really hate it when people die,” said Lizbeth. 

“So do I.” 

“So does everybody. They say it in other ways. Such a tragedy. Remember the life, not the 

death. But I hate death seems to be what they’re saying. Only nobody says it.” 

“It’s good to say it.” 

“He wasn’t in pain, they say. He led a good life.” 

“I know,” I said. “I’m sure he was a good man, one I would have been proud to meet.” 

“Let’s get out of here. There’s nothing to do here. I’m going out to get something to eat. 

You’d think I’d be in a different line of work, hating to see people die the way I do. But I got on 

the track and no one kicked me off — they encouraged me, after the coma, to continue. My 

mother, then the physical therapist. I was in an accident.”


“Theo told me.” 

“And I never stopped either, though I knew maybe nursing didn’t mean what it meant before. 

People talked about how I overcame obstacles, they put an article in the paper. But the truth is I 

didn’t know when to quit and now I have nothing to fall back on.” 

“Where is a good place to eat?” I asked. I sat down, crossed my legs. 

“There are places.” 

“I guess what happens is you do what you’re good at. What you can get away with.” 

“There’s a restaurant on Main Street. A delicatessen on Court. Fast food everywhere, if you 

like that.” 

“I’d rather order my food sitting today.” 

“What do you think of working for a magazine?” 

“I’m probably going to quit.” 

“I think, when I was little, I wanted something else. But I’m not sure now. So much is blurry 

these days. Are you really going to quit?” 

“I hadn’t thought of it until I just said it. Jack — my father — used to say that when he was 

in a strange town, one of the things he did on the first night was go around to all the restaurants, 

eating just one thing from the menu. Appetizers mostly. He said it was a good way to get to 

know a city.” 

We sat there in the dim room without speaking. After a while I discovered that I was tapping 

the cigarette lighter against the wooden part of the chair’s arm, and that I had been doing so for a 

minute or two. I didn’t stop. Eventually we stood up and began moving toward the door.


On the way to the car she said, “It feels sometimes like I died in that accident. Like whatever 

my life might have been died and this part you see now is a ghost.” 

“You feel like you’re wandering among the living.” 

“You know what I mean.” 

“Is that door locked?” I said. I inserted the metal part of the key into the car door, holding 

onto the chunky plastic handle, twisted. She pulled open the door and sat in the car, closed the 

door, sat staring straight ahead as if nothing of consequence had just been said or done. 

When I started up the car she said, “This is one of the few times since the accident I’ve been 

in a car with a man driving. It was my boyfriend, it was a nineteen eighty Chevy Sprint. My car, 

he was driving. Blue. It was a clear stretch of road, highway seventeen just west of Windsor. We 

weren’t fighting, we were getting along. The car went off the road. That’s all I remember. Going 

off the road.” I backed the Dodge into the turnaround, put it in gear and pulled out into the 

driveway. “We turned over a few times, I guess, but the next I remember is a room filled with 

white and bleached out bedsheets and tubes and everything in my head is at half speed.” 

“I hate hospitals,” I said. “I’ve only been in hospitals three, maybe four times. The last when 

Jack died. My father,” I said. 

“I hardly ever talk to my parents. They moved to Florida two years ago. I send a Christmas 

card, they send me presents. I’m not much of a talker.” 

“I’m sure you do fine.” 

I took a right onto Riverside drive, then turned left at the first stoplight. “Beethoven Street,” I 

said. “That’s nice.” 

“Beeth-oven,” she said. 

“What?”


“That’s what we call it here in Binghamton. Beeth-oven Street.” 

“Is that like a Franklin Stove?” 

She waited a second, then said, “There’s also a Go-eathy Street.” 

“What’s that?” 

“G-o-e-t-h-e” 

“Goethe,” I said. 

“There’s also Schubert, Haydn and Mozart.” 

“I’ve heard of them,” I said. “But not Beeth-oven.” She didn’t say anything. 

We came to Main Street, where I took a right. I said, “Is that a restaurant?” She didn’t 

answer, but it was, so I pulled into the parking lot and shut off the engine. 

For the moment the rain had stopped, leaving a thin wet sheen over the parking lot and the 

rest of the landscape. The clouds remained, a slate grey sky that filtered down over the tops of 

the valley ridges visible in the distance. Water dripped listlessly from the eaves of the wooden 

building. The city felt closed in, flanked by hills and a low sky. Cracks ran through the asphalt 

and extended into the concrete sidewalks, an indiscriminate decay. Lizbeth walked toward the 

restaurant, not realizing or not caring that I had taken a moment to evaluate my surroundings. I 

watched her open the door and go inside, stood until the door had shut completely, then went to 

join her. 

We were seated against the wall, at a table covered with a red and white oilskin cloth, a fake 

carnation in a short bottle. “Is this place Italian?” I asked. “I didn’t even look at the name.” 

“This is McCurdy’s. They serve just about anything. Pizza, hoagies, hamburgers. I don’t 

know. I haven’t been to a restaurant in months.”


When the waitress came, Lizbeth said, “We’ll have some appetizers.” We ate breadsticks and 

fried cheese curds, then asked for the check. The waitress, a middle aged woman with drop- 

frame plastic glasses attached to a string around her neck, asked us what the hurry was. No hurry 

at all, we said. 

The next place was Chinese, where we ordered egg rolls and won ton and sat in a booth 

under a picture of the owner shaking hands with a local politician. We didn’t talk about the food, 

whether it was any good. After finishing we drove to a diner where we had french fries and 

onion rings. There were more pictures of owners shaking hands with local celebrities. I poured 

ketchup on my plate and dipped, but Lizbeth ate methodically from the basket without adding 

anything. She looked up at me and said, “Do you ever think of words you don’t know the 

meaning to? This has been happening to me lately. Words come to me that I’ve heard 

somewhere, only I don’t know what they mean. Words like ulterior. Do you know these words?” 

“That one,” I said. 

“Maybe you can tell me what it means?” 

“It means there’s something else beyond the obvious. Like you have ulterior motive. That’s 

the only time you use that word. When someone has ulterior motives. Reasons that aren’t 

apparent.” 

Lizbeth nodded, finished the french fries and prepared to leave. 

We found another restaurant, a local place that tried to imitate the good-time chain 

restaurants like Chi-Chi’s and TGI Fridays. The name of the place was Greedy’s, and the decor 

reminded me of J.O. McRisky’s in the Twin Cities. Replicas of vintage advertisements, rusted 

out antique kitchen appliances, the requisite photographs of local entrepreneurs shaking hands


with men of regional fame. Greedy’s had a wide selection of appetizers; we settled on a gigantic 

deep fried onion cut into petals and served with a french dressing dip. 

She looked up at me and said, “Trochaic.” 

“That’s a type of rhythmic pattern in poetry. Hard-soft, Hard-soft.” 

She said, “I blame a lot of things on the accident, I know that. I tell myself if my mind was a 

little bit clearer, my thoughts a little bit faster, I could decide what I want.” 

“Everybody thinks that,” I said. 

“Exactly.” 

Another Chinese place that she had to give me directions to find. South on Hawley, cross a 

bridge, take a right on Vestal Parkway, several miles west. It was a small old building across the 

road and uphill perhaps a third of a mile from a huge strip mall containing a Wal-Mart, Dick’s 

Sporting goods, a hobby shop and a tenplex theater. We stood in the parking lot and looked 

down on the cinder block retail bunkers shimmering damply in twilight. 

Lizbeth said, “It’s as if everything you ever wanted in your whole life should be down there 

in one of those stores. But you know it isn’t true.” 

I said, “The trick to being happy in America today is to deny that you know.” 

“They have chicken wings in here. Chinese chicken wings.” She turned and walked into the 

restaurant, as if not caring whether I would follow. 

On the basis of the appetizers we decided to stay for a main course. The only pictures were 

watercolors of Chinese landscapes on wide fans, and from the back room came the chatter of 

immigrants. Lizbeth coiled lo mein around her fork and said “I think happiness is irrelevant. I 

think people worry far too much about whether or not they’re happy. That’s what I decided over 

the last month.”


“I used to think that if I were a different person I could be happy. If I could transform my 

personality. But I didn’t. I’m not a different person. Then I thought it was the people around me 

who were to blame for my not being happy.” 

“I don’t think happiness as a goal is attainable. It’s not that simple. It’s complex. 

Ubiquitous.” 

“It means something is everywhere. Widespread. Usually cultural objects, like Disney, or 

Major League Baseball caps.” 

The cooks chatted with the waitress out by the empty tables, an emphatic oriental banter with 

occasional raised voices and names of American movie stars. 

Outside the clouds were dispersing, leaving a black sheet punctuated with stars. I said, 

“Maybe what I’ve been waiting for is more a congregation of events. A nexus.” 

“Nexus,” said Lizbeth. 

“A place where things come together.” 

“We have to stop at the courthouse tomorrow anyway,” she said. 

“I know.” 

Cars drove by on the highway, the clouds continued to part. I thought, Sometimes decisions 

come on you in funny ways. We had to go to the courthouse anyway. 

I checked out of the Holiday Inn and spent that night at Larry’s. In the morning, awakened by 

the sound of Lizbeth’s door closing down the hall, I got up, showered, and went through the 

clothes hanging in the closet. They were smaller than Jack’s size, or about the size he might have 

been in high school, and they fit me better than the shirt I had found in the trunk of his car. 

Narrower across the shoulders, a bit more snug in the neck. The shirts had tidy collars, the sport


coats had neat, knife blade lapels and three buttons. I pulled out the single dark suit that hung in 

the back recesses, hung it from a doorknob, looked at it closely. It appeared to have never been 

worn. There were no telltale creases at the knees or elbows and white tailor’s chalk still traced 

the seam between sleeve and shoulder. I brushed off the chalk, put on the white shirt I had 

brought and slipped into the suit. I looked for ties, found nothing. Took off the suit coat, dug 

through my bag for the ties I had brought, slung one loosely over my neck. I sat down on the 

edge of the bed, picked up the phone, dialed Mom’s number. 

said. 

I thought I had dialed incorrectly for a moment, then recognized Theo’s voice. “It’s Matt,” I 

“As if I can’t tell your voice by now,” he said. 

“You know I have trouble with phones.” 

“Where are you?” 

“At Larry’s.” 

“How is he?” 

“I’ll tell you later. How did your interview go?” 

“Tell me now.” 

I didn’t say anything. 

“This guy I talked to is a maniac, a real video philosopher. He’s working in video to pay the 

bills and film to fulfill his artistic vision. Anyway, I got a job. They’re going to call me a 

production assistant, they’re going to give me five dollars an hour, but I figure after a few 

months I’ll get a decent raise. How’s Larry?” 

“What does this shop do?”


“They shoot commercials. They have a branch now that does computer generated special 

effects and that’s the branch that’s growing. But Tyler is still stuck on film and video. He says 

he’s excited now that videotape is in the first stages of obsolescence. He says that frees it up for 

real artistic possibilities.” 

I toyed with the phone cord, stretching and compressing sections of small coils. “So you’re 

stuck in the no-growth part of an industry?” 

“Oh, there he goes again. No, I’ll learn everything. Computers, video, the whole deal. I’m 

eager, I’m flexible. I’m a people person. I’ll prostitute myself for food money while I work on 

the side in my chosen medium.” 

“You’re going underground.” 

“Deep, deep cover. I’m the Velvet Mole. I need to get an apartment. There’s a new baby 

coming that needs my room.” 

“So you’re going to bring a camera down to the party grove?” 

“I think so. I think it’s time.” 

“With the obsolete, thus artistic, medium of videotape as your cover.” 

“Now you get it. Radio variety shows, poetry, vaudeville. All once commercially viable, now 

practiced only by a handful of dedicated cranks. You have to be an artist to cling to the old 

ways.” 

“It’s going to be hard for you to be an artist, since you can barely draw, Theo.” 

“The cameras do all the drawing. I compose and select and edit. Hell, I don’t do anything yet. 

I’m a gopher. I get coffee. Quit trying to crush my spirits.” 

“Well I’m sorry. I forget you’re new to the grind of nine to five. When do you start?” 

“I start on Monday.”


A pause that lasted too long. So I said, “Larry died yesterday morning before I got here.” 

“I figured you were going to tell me something like that. When you wouldn’t talk about it 

right away.” 

“We’re going to the funeral today. I wish there was a way to get you out here in time.” 

“I hate funerals.” 

“I know you do.” 

Theo had not gone to Jack’s funeral. On that morning Mom had gone to his room and he 

hadn’t been there. He was missing for the whole day through the wake and funeral and returned 

to the house at midnight and slept on the couch. 

“I know how you hate funerals,” I said. I picked at the sharp crease in the suitpants. “I 

remember one you didn’t even go to.” 

“I was out stealing that day,” he said. “I started out wanting to go to the funeral because he 

was my Dad but then I thought about how he seemed to be bailing out on us ... ” 

“He used to seem like he was bailing out on us three or four times a year. He always came 

back, Theo.” 

“I was fourteen. I thought this was the real thing. I still think it was, in a way. Not coming 

back. Mom was going to divorce him. That was real. It was the end times. So I put on my black 

slacks and a white shirt, then put on my sneakers because I didn’t have any dress shoes. Then I 

thought I’d take a walk before we left. I didn’t stop till I got downtown. I went into drug stores 

and when no one was looking I put things in my pockets. Breath mints, shampoo, condoms. I 

started stealing condoms that day. You don’t know this. All through high school I sold stolen 

condoms.” 

In order to appear as if I had known I said, “I knew something about that.”


“When I got out of the drug stores I would walk to another store, dropping the things I’d 

stolen into garbage cans. I spent a lot of time doing that. Then I went to Heather Simmons’ 

house.” 

“You don’t need to tell me this.” 

“I had the condoms, she had the reputation, I figured why not? She wasn’t home. Her sister 

was, though, and we sat and talked, and made out for a while.” 

“And you came home at midnight.” 

“Larry’s dead, Matt. You’re the oldest LaFleur now.” 

“I’m wearing Jack’s suit to the funeral.” 

“It didn’t fit me. Too small.” 

“Mom’s at work?” 

“Right.” 

When I looked up Lizbeth was standing in the doorway. She wore a plain grey dress with a 

high collar and long sleeves, her white nurse shoes, was staring at me with her flat eyes. I 

checked my watch, realized I had places to be, that I was probably late. I said goodbye to Theo, 

hung up, tied my tie. Shrugged my way into the suit coat and straightened the lapels. I smiled at 

Lizbeth. She nodded back. 

We got to the courthouse and stopped by the office of Larry’s legal representative, who was 

waiting for us with a coat in hand, ready to go to the funeral herself. We ran through the terms of 

the will. Much of Larry’s money was to go to charity. A brief, unassuming rider stipulated that 

the remainder was to be split among the issuance of the deceased or their issuance, should that


person be dead. Us. Me and Kelley and Theo. I signed papers, chatted curtly with the lawyer, 

who offered to walk us out to our car. We said we had another stop to make and said goodbye. 

We checked the directory and found a second office. A person spoke to us for a few 

moments, and we signed more papers. Lizbeth took a copy of one of these papers, folded it into 

an envelope and placed it in her purse. At a certain point we were told to kiss each other, so we 

did. She tasted of toothpaste and nicotine. I thought, We are doing the right thing. I realized I 

hadn’t shaved that morning, that it didn’t matter. We left silently, several feet apart, and drove to 

the funeral. 

7. 

The rain had stopped and the clouds departed overnight. The dry roads had a grayish cast, 

and the houses in the neighborhood we drove through were in the midst of unchecked decay. We 

took a left off main street, drove. Came to a big old cemetery under a haze, the air and pollen 

somehow filtering the light in a way I had never seen in the Midwest. Large old trees loomed 

over tombstones and mausoleums on hills, we drove through the main gate past a caretaker’s 

house half embedded in the rise of earth to make it level with the corpses of men and women the 

caretaker was there to tend. The tombstones were worn with age, the names and dates indistinct 

to me as I drove through patches of sunlight and shade. I asked her how old the cemetery was. 

“There are civil war veterans in here,” she said. “People who fought in Antietam. A few from 

Gettysburg.” We passed a twenty foot obelisk, a stone angel, one wing chipping away. 

“They’re still using it,” I said. 

“People are still dying,” she said.


The new section had fewer trees and smaller tombstones, cheaper testaments laid out 

unsheltered from the blue sky and bright sun. A hearse sat parked off the edge of the road near an 

erected tarpaulin over a square edged hole. Three other dark, expensive cars. I recognized the 

lawyer, who stood speaking to a small yellow haired man while five or six other people stood in 

a group and an elderly couple sat in folding chairs by the grave’s edge. As we drove up the 

yellow haired man made gestures toward the grave and the group broke up, moved towards the 

elderly couple, began arranging themselves for the service. I parked the car next to a dark 

Lincoln, shut off the engine. The assembled mourners turned their heads and looked at us, then 

turned their heads away to look at something else, looked back. 

The man with yellow hair came up to greet us, but the lawyer intercepted him, told him that 

she knew who we were and told him. 

“Well,” said the man. “I didn’t know you were out here. Welcome. I’m Robert Woodvine. 

I’ll be conducting the ceremony.” He had the devotional bearing of a protestant, the residue of 

self-righteous humility. He leaned to one side as he spoke, wore oversized plastic framed glasses, 

stared at me intently, unnervingly. 

“Okay,” I said. 

“Larry LaFleur was a good man,” he said. 

“I know he was,” I said. 

“He led a good life,” said Lizbeth. 

“I know he did.” 

We assembled over the hole in the earth, three or four on each side and Robert Woodvine at 

the head. He read a short passage from the Bible and talked about Larry’s contributions to 

Binghamton and the field of law. He had worked in tax law, serving the entire southern tier, and


had contributed pro bono counsel to prisoners seeking retrials. He gave generously to charity, 

had fathered a child who was no longer with us but whose grandchild was, and at this point the 

pastor gestured to me. The other mourners looked at me again, whispered to each other, smiled 

politely. I shifted my weight nervously. 

The pastor threw a clump of dirt onto the coffin. An elderly woman threw in a rose and then 

put her shoulder on the man next to her. Then the service ended with a “Go with God” from 

Robert Woodvine and the mourners remained circled around the coffin for a few moments, then 

looked around at the cars again, then at me. 

“It was a nice service,” I said to Lizbeth. 

“That’s what people always say,” she answered. 

Pastor Woodvine approached us, asked me how long I was in town. I told him until the next 

morning, when I had a business appointment in New York. He shook hands with me, thanked me 

for coming, headed for the cars. 

“I don’t think he ever met your grandfather,” Lizbeth said. “I never saw him at the house.” 

I said, “In some countries they hire women to mourn.” 

The man who had been seated when we arrived approached us. He looked at me closely, 

nodding. “I can see it,” he said. “You have your father in you.” 

“It’s the shape of my chin,” I said. “My brother got his eyes.” 

“I knew Larry Junior. Course we called him Bud.” 

“My Mom called him Jack.” 

“Bud was a hard man to know, but I guess I knew him as well as anyone back in high school. 

Always was at the center of something, but no one could figure him out. I knew Dezzie, too. 

Through her sister — we were dating in those days.” He looked over his shoulder at the woman


who had been next to him I assumed was his wife. She wore a navy dress with large gold 

trimmed buttons and was talking with another, older man. “Bud would come around to the 

house, looking up Dezzie. She was another spitfire, the only woman who could keep Bud 

checked. Remember one time I was on the porch with Juliet and Bud drives up in his dad’s car. 

Parked it and waited. Hit the horn, waited. Waves at me, waits. So he steps out of the car, starts 

coming up the walk, then stops. Puts his hand in a pocket of his windbreaker,” the man copied 

this gesture, slipping a hand in his suitcoat, “And pulls out half a sandwich. Ate it right there on 

the sidewalk, content as could be.” He looked at me, waiting for my reaction. “But I suppose 

you’ve heard that story already. I remember nothing ever happened to Bud that didn’t get turned 

into a story.” 

“I never heard that one,” I said. 

“Well, I remember it. Though I guess a man eats a lot of sandwiches, and you can’t expect 

him to remember every one.” 

“I guess not.” 

“I tell it because that’s what I remember about Larry Junior.” He stared at me hard to show 

that he had just said an important thing. 

I nodded intently, then I said, “Who was Dezzie?” 

“Dezzie was his high school flame. Desdemona Williams. Beautiful girl. Dark curly hair, 

fiery eyes. I was dating her sister, also beautiful. Would have married her. Juliet Williams. She’s 

here. Over there.” He pointed to a slim woman in another cluster of mourners. “Anyway, Larry 

would have married Des, but the Williams girls were put on earth to break hearts.” He smiled 

wistfully, almost proudly, at the memory of his heartbreak, then went on, “So, Dezzie married


Chuck Reilly who took a job with his uncle in Kansas City and Juliet strung out an engagement 

with me that I won’t get into.” 

“And Jack followed Dezzie.” 

“Jack?” 

“Larry Junior. Bud.” 

“He followed Dezzie?” 

“He kept an apartment there. Before he got married. That’s what my mother says. She said 

something about a woman, but didn’t know her name.” 

“I guess I heard that. You’d be better off talking to Juliet. Hey, Juliet!” He waved to the 

woman. She looked at him with a serious expression that turned confused, then she smiled. He 

shouted to her that she should come over when she had a chance, then returned his attention to 

us. He said, “I remember he was always hanging around the school but never showed up for 

classes except maybe English, where he’d argue with the teacher about Dostoevski and modern 

poetics. Said that some day Allen Ginsberg would be recognized as a genius even in 

Binghamton. He campaigned to get Ginsberg in the library and lost. I think he’s still banned 

from the library. I heard he was g-a-y.” He looked up at the sky, then at the Juliet Williams, who 

sidled up and said hello and was hugged in response. Woodvine then turned to Lizbeth and me. 

“This is Bud’s son,” he said. 

“What?” 

“Bud. Larry Junior. This is his son.” 

“Hi,” I said, and then I told her my name. 

“Well holy God,” said Juliet. “That’s kind of amazing.” She put a hip against a tombstone 

and lit a cigarette. I watched, captivated, only a dim awareness that Lizbeth stood by my side.


Juliet was slim and athletic, with short reddish brown hair and a splash of light freckles across 

her tan forehead. She was beautiful now, in middle age, with rounded cheekbones and a firm 

chin and the merest hint of crows feet around the eyes. How she’d looked as a teenager I didn’t 

want to imagine; and Woodvine had said her sister was the real beauty. 

She said, “You’re Bud’s kid, huh?” She looked at Lizbeth. “Aren’t you the Stevens’s 

daughter?” 

Lizbeth nodded. I noted, sheepishly, that her last name was Stevens. Or had been until this 

morning. 

“You out here to get the dirt on your old man?” 

“More or less.” 

“And you wanna know about Bud and Dezzie?” 

“Whatever you can tell me.” 

“Huh. Well. Let’s see. Dezzie’s still out in Kansas City, working on her third marriage to yet 

another remote asshole father figure. She’s an account manager for some computer company. 

Real middle management shit.” 

“What do you know about her and Jack? I mean Bud.” 

She rolled her eyes and sighed. Said, “Damn, I know it all.” 

It was a long, highly detailed mess, of course, as all the great romances are. There was high 

school, where they dated with the passion of puppies, and then there was the year afterwards, 

when Dezzie got married and was dragged out to Kansas City by her new husband, an older man 

with a business opportunity in the construction business. Jack was wandering, in California 

mostly, then one day he shows up on Dezzie’s doorstep in Kansas City, telling her she’s the one 

and no husband will stop him. But she won’t take him to bed yet as she’s married only a year and


still happily deceived by love that her husband is perfect and her marriage secure. Though she’s 

unfaithful enough to keep Jack around, like a pet, a big shaggy mutt who can’t stand to be away 

from Dezzie. And she of course loves the attention and returns it by baking him pots of pasta and 

sweet pastries and flirting with him shamelessly and pecking his cheek and touching his arm. 

They’d go everywhere together, him lovesick and devoted and her pulling him along on a string. 

Until one day her husband comes home to say he’s been cheating on her and it’s time to come 

clean and he moves out. And then out of spite and revenge and let’s face it curiosity and pent-up 

sexual tension Dezzie takes Jack to bed. He thinks it’s his time, that Dezzie is his reward for 

playing the patient and saintly and loyal mutt for all these months. And then of course she takes 

her husband back, and then when the husband cheats again, Jack’s back in the picture. It goes on 

like this for a couple years, Juliet told me, various combinations of breaking up and reconciling 

and moving in and out. 

She said, “Then she met her second husband, a lawyer, a guy who could keep her in the 

money, which she’s never had because Chuck Reilly’s got no business sense at all, it turns out. 

And three is one too many for Dezzie to keep on her schedule what with the divorce proceedings 

and did I mention there was a kid? So it’s good-bye, Bud, and she meant it that time. She told 

him, ‘You say you love me but you never listen to what I say. You bring your creepy friends 

around at all hours and you drag me out to run-down dives and you’re always drinking or drunk. 

And now I’ve got a real man who can take me to the opera and buy me nice dinners in 

restaurants with cloth napkins and I’m not going back, Jack, I’m cutting you loose I mean it.’” 

Juliet dropped her cigarette into the grass and ground it into the earth with the toe of her 

narrow black pump. “That’s the last any of us heard from Jack. All we knew was my sister


kicked him out of her life and everyone was happy ever after. Till she and the lawyer got fed up 

with each other. Which is a story you don’t need but is kind of more of the same.” 

I looked at her. I looked at the gravesite where Larry’s coffin still hung over the hole in the 

ground and its border of green plastic carpet. 

“Liz, right?” Juliet said to Lizbeth. 

“Lizbeth,” I said. “No ‘e,’ no ‘a.’” 

Juliet nodded. “You two come together?” 

“A matched set,” I said. 

Woodvine cleared his throat and pushed at the knot of his tie. He excused himself and 

walked back to the cars on the road. 

Juliet said, “I should be going, too.” 

“I’m glad I met you,” I said. 

“Yeah. Listen. I always felt sorry for Jack, really. The poor mook, letting himself get strung 

along like that. Dezzie never did have a talent for letting people go easy. She was pretty. Hell, 

she was gorgeous, which meant she knew there’d always be more guys coming along. Goodbye, 

Jack, she said. And that was it.” 

That was it, I figured as Juliet turned around and walked away. I guess at that point he left 

Kansas City for good. He wandered again, rootless and free and for two, three years he didn’t go 

back, only hearing from friends on occasion that Dezzie was happily transformed into a lawyer’s 

wife, draped in high fashion outfits and ensconsed in a well appointed split-level in a posh 

suburban neighborhood. Married to a lawyer just like his crappy old man. 

He won’t go back, he can’t, though often enough he finds himself in Missouri and getting 

closer as if pulled by remote siren voices and he has to hitch a ride with anyone he can that’s


going the other way, any other way, and one day it’s these hippy kids in a VW microbus and 

they’re plowing north cause the guy has knocked up his girlfriend and the only place they know 

where the kid’ll get anywhere near a fair shake is her parents place in Madison, Wisconsin but 

they’ve gotta stop in St. Paul first cause they a know a guy there’ll hook them up with some 

weed so come on in, Jack, we’ll take you where you’re going and damn if Jack didn’t meet a guy 

few weeks ago from some town called Clear Lake near St. Paul so he says Sure I’ll come north 

and the tie-dye kid says Glad to have you, only be aware of Sunshine back there who’s in her 

eighth month meaning we gotta stop and let her pee every forty miles or so, and so that’s what 

Jack did. 

8. 

Once we reached New York City there was a lot of activity, long uneventful sequences of 

planned meetings and contract signings and quick promotional events where I shook hands and 

waved to strangers. I handed over a few photos of Jack so they could pick the one they wanted 

for the anthology’s dust jacket. We were there for only two days that went by like hours. From 

the brief slots of time we were given to try our hands at tourism, I don’t remember much about 

the city except what you see on postcards or in television montages. There seemed to be 

something about the city’s design that encouraged transient memories, some prevalent style of 

architecture that suspended experience in favor of recollection. That rendered the city as a thing 

not to be explored but as a series of pre-ingrained sensory images to be checked off against a 

master list of New York highlights. Skyscrapers looming overhead, garish Times Square sex- 

shop enticements, Radio City Music Hall. The bustling indifference of a city riding a hip, dark 

edge. Dirty street, dying trees. Shuffling listless people, their stories lost to the world and 

themselves. A city Jack had hated for its impersonal nature. Though the people he had known


here were friendly enough, none of them were from the city. All the natives, he said, hung 

together in packs or left for Connecticut, meaning perhaps that the people the city collected were 

more interesting than those it raised. 

In the small hotel room, the bed crowding the walls to leave only a small walkway from 

closet to television to a small apron in front of the window, Lizbeth and I unpacked our things 

and clumsily tried to establish a domestic relationship. I walked to the window to let her move 

about more freely in what little space there was. Half of the view was a brick wall, the other half 

a partially obstructed view of lights and wire and cars passing through Times Square. 

We were expected in the lobby shortly, but needed to take showers. After a brief hesitation 

she decided to shower first. I sat on the bed, turned on the television, feeling both nervous and as 

if I were fulfilling a role I had been born for. Ten minutes later she emerged from the shower soft 

and damp, wearing the hotel bathrobe tied loosely about her waist. The skin of her chest was 

freckled and taut; she was drying her hair with a towel. 

“It’s yours,” she said. 

“Thanks.” We stood close to each other, face to face, and I noticed that she was an inch or so 

taller than me, that her sharp nose had a single dark spot just off center of the tip. She hadn’t had 

a cigarette for hours. I said, “How’s the water?” 

She said, “It’s very hot. Almost too hot.” I touched her waist with my fingertips, and she 

responded by placing her hand in the crook of my elbow. We stood like that for a while, and then 

I kissed her. There was the noise of people talking from the television set. When we parted she 

looked over my shoulder. Asked, “What are you watching?” 

I said I didn’t know. Then I said, “We’re in New York.”


During our brief meetings Nick Kastle he showed us his old charm, smiling and thoughtful. 

He inquired about the family, then took us to dinner. He handed me back the photographs I’d 

given him, along with a packet of enlargements that had been digitally enhanced. They’d chosen 

the one I’d expected them to, the one of Jack in his white driving jacket, leaning against a 

fireplace with a cigarette dangling from his fingers. A sly grin tweaks the corner of his mouth, 

his head and eyes cocked upwards toward a corner in the ceiling or some point beyond, his 

thoughts lost in that other world only poets have seen. A woman’s hand is on his arm, extending 

out of the picture frame; Mom’s, I’d always thought, but you couldn’t tell. 

I told Nick Kastle Mom was fine, Kelley was pregnant, Theo was about to start a new job. I 

told him I was married to Lizbeth, and when he asked when the wedding had been I told him two 

days earlier. He asked how long we’d known each other and Lizbeth said a few weeks. Nick 

laughed warmly, and made it seem like the sanest thing in the world when he told us that was an 

amazing thing, and wished us luck. 

The last time I’d seen him was during the same week Dawn Engle broke up with me. One 

morning shortly after that night on the beach I woke up and went out to get the newspaper and 

there he was on the front lawn, staring into the east at the sunrise. He lifted his arms, hesitated, 

began guiding them through intricate open-palmed gestures. I watched from the porch, the 

newspaper in my hand, as his limbs flowed through motion after motion, repeating certain moves 

over and over: the flick of a wrist to turn over a palm, an outstretching of hand and arm to grasp 

an invisible object, a look of steady concentration on his dark, sharp-featured face. 

I watched him for several minutes, then set down the paper and approached him, feeling a 

resurgence of what I had felt before in his presence, an upsurge of confidence, a link to a more


powerful world. He looked at me, continued in his motions, slowed them, then stopped. Tai Chi, 

he said. 

I know what it is, I said. 

You’ve grown about four inches, Matt. 

Thank you. 

He nodded, began moving again. I tried to follow, looking to understand the essence of his 

motions. He said, Let’s start from the beginning. Stand arms at your sides, legs apart. Lift your 

arms like this. He raised his arms and held them at his chest like a begging dog, then began 

pushing out his hands alternately. I repeated the motions slowly. 

I said, Do you ever call when you come in to town? None of you ever call. 

We do generally call, said Nick. But when we get your mother she tells us not to come; when 

we get your Dad he doesn’t tell you. 

My family’s messed up, I guess. 

Well, your mother likes her privacy, is all. Nothing wrong with that. I’m not staying here 

anyway. I’m on a book tour. Hotels all the way. Rock from side to side as you do that. Knees 

bent. Americans never want to bend their knees. 

He still drinks too much, I said. It drives me crazy that he can’t stop. It makes him expect too 

much of me. His life is limited now, and he sees mine as dwindling at the same time. 

I hadn’t planned to say these things; I hadn’t even had these thoughts before. But with Nick 

that was the way it was. He inhabited a world where people constantly unburdened themselves, 

and wherever he went that world came along. You would be in his presence and begin to play the 

role of confessor, to speak from some part of your self that he conjured up. 

Nick said, Has he tried counseling? AA? Self-help?


He says all that is a big conspiracy. If it were really self-help you wouldn’t need a book 

someone else had written, he says. 

Jack’s logic. Fully self-contained and irrefutable. 

He drives me nuts. 

Maybe you should get some counseling. 

No. I’m young and still psychologically resilient. Could you talk to him about it? 

Nobody can talk to Jack. 

I continued the motions he had shown me, feeling the muscles in my upper back stretch and 

relax. My socks became damp and heavy from the morning dew. I swayed back and forth, 

keeping my eyes on the sun just beginning to emerge from behind the houses across the street. 

Then the door opened and Jack came out. Oh, mother of Moses it’s Nick Kastle, he said. Matt, 

whatta ya doing keeping this bastard all ta yourself? 

He was showing me Tai Chi, I said. 

Keep yer knees bent, kid. That’s the secret to the Oriental mystic art of motion. Hold on. He 

looked back through the window in the door to make sure the coast was clear, then walked to a 

corner of the porch and lifted up a loose floorboard. He pulled out a flask and took a swig of 

liquor, then offered it to Nick. 

No thanks, Nick said. It’s too early for me. 

And it’s too late for me, Jack said. Hee Hee. No telling Carrie, now. Oh, God it’s good ta see 

you, Nick. Let’s go. I’ll call in sick and we’ll go somewhere. 

Where you working now? Nick said. 

I’m filling in at Bob’s, said Jack. But hell with it, there’s nothing but oil changes lined up for 

this day.


I have to be somewhere at ten, Nick said. 

Then tonight. We’ll hoist a few at the Clear Lake Tavern. Say you will. 

I will, Nick said. 

And we’ll bring Matt along. We can sneak him in. That is, if he’s not seeing his girl tonight. 

You’re seeing a girl? Said Nick. 

Before I could stop myself I said, No. She dumped me. And then I felt the gaze of Jack turn 

to a scowl. 

He said, She did what? Ah, Buddy. How’d you manage that? What’d you do to her? Ah, 

Nick, look at him now, he’s heartbroken and he thinks it ain’t even his fault. 

Jack, said Nick. Lay off. 

Jesus, Nick. Listen. You don’t know anything. I’m trying to console him, and you can’t even 

tell. I have confidence in my son. I know maybe someday Matt’ll pull his head out of his ass, 

maybe. But till that day I’ll be here with a crowbar helping him along, and it won’t be pretty. But 

all right and let’s look at the time and I have to be going to work now so I’ll see you tonight, 

Nick, and I’ll see you too, Matt. I love you, ya little shit. 

He walked out to the Buick and started it up. The car needed a wash and was starting to rust 

around the wheel wells, but the engine still purred like kittens, and he backed it out and drove it 

away and Nick and I stood on the lawn and watched until he went around the corner and was 

gone. 

That night, like I had been doing in the days after Dawn stopped seeing me, I took out the car 

and drove. After the Pontiac died Jack bought a second-hand Toyota for the family to drive while 

he took the Century every place he went. On the weekends Kelley would be out with a boyfriend


and Theo spent time at friends’ houses, so I had the car to myself, since Mom always stayed at 

home. I would drive out to distant suburbs and stop in parking lots for maybe ten minutes, just to 

get out of the car for a while. I’d go to suburbs that might as well have been in other states: 

Minnetonka, Eden Prairie, Hastings, Orono, Maple Grove, Wayzata, Woodbury. Mile after mile 

of anonymous cities made of four lane highways lined with low square warehouse style 

buildings. There were houses in there somewhere, sitting on their grid, hidden from the 

unsightliness, but I never found them. On that night I drove around the loop three times until I 

wasn’t sure where I was. I took an exit that turned out to be for Clear Lake and drove down the 

lamp-lit streets of my home town without fully realizing where I was. Familiar streets looked 

dark, held that alien aura of wet pavement and stranger’s furtive glances from parking lots of 

bars and the windows of all-night gas stations. I passed a bar with an orange roof and a crowd 

outside gathering around a police car, two uniformed officers in black jackets holding a drunk 

man by the elbows. After a moment I recognized the bar as the Clear Lake Tavern and suddenly 

knew where I was and that I had always, since the exit, known where I was but had been too 

preoccupied to recognize the fact. The man being guided gently into the police car and holding a 

moist, reddening compress to his face, was Jack. 

I guided the car onto a side street, parked in the first stretch of pavement not being used for 

traffic, and ran back to the Tavern just as the police car was pulling away. I looked through the 

crowd for someone, anyone I might recognize, and after a moment I spotted Nick Kastle, 

standing in a small knot of Jack’s friends. Will Johnson, Bob LaFontaine, Carl Lund. Nick 

spotted me, squinted in recognition, waved me over. 

You saw what happened? 

I saw them putting him in, and then driving away.


Jukebox, said Nick. 

Of all the things, said Bob LaFontaine. He rubbed a hand over the mound of his belly, 

adjusted the angle of his cap. 

We’ll let him sit for a while, said Nick. He put his arm around me, though I felt little need for 

consolation. 

Someone said, He hasn’t been himself the past few weeks. 

I didn’t know what to say. The police car drove away leaving tracks in wet pavement. 

I went home. Mom didn’t ask where I had been and had no reason to ask if I knew where 

Jack was, so I didn’t tell her anything. I went straight to bed and laid down, expecting the phone 

to ring with the news. Theo lay sleeping in his bed, dreaming his video dreams, and in a while I 

heard Kelley sneaking in from her date. I thought about Dawn and about the rest of my life. How 

Dawn sat on that tree trunk throwing stones into the depths as my father drank and Nick read his 

poems. I thought of all the things I wanted — that all of us wanted — but couldn’t name. Dawn 

and me. Mom and Theo and Kelley. Nick Kastle. 

And Jack in the bar. Jukebox playing Journey for the eighth time like no one’s sick of it yet. 

Thinking everything is bullshit, even when Nick arrived as Jack knew he would. To try and 

smooth things over, to try and take the rough edges off the world, the poet as God striding 

through his own little universe, scattering wisdom from a pouch full of cleverly disguised 

cliches. And yes he’d admit it, Jack seven-eighths through the slide into drunkenness, already 

having finished off several shots and working on a pitcher of beer, pouring it into a mug and 

drinking and then pouring more, he’d admit there was nothing left to be said. If that meant 

anything. And the jukebox says, Wonder who’s sorry now? as Nick is coming and then Jack says 

to him, I knew you’d be here you sorry pile of bullshit. I knew you’d show up to try and smooth


things over, but it’s too late because everything’s turned to bullshit now and it doesn’t matter. 

Said to Nick, Do you hear this music they’re playing? Something my son probably likes. Pop in 

another quarter, Nicky, help us cram it down our own throats. You saw my son. And what do 

you think of that, Mister? He’s mine all right, little bastard. Thinks he can do whatever the hell 

he wants. 

And Nick said, Matt’s a fine boy, Jack. 

Jack turned, saw the row of bottles lined up in front of a mirror behind the bar, cocked his 

arm, and after a quick check to make sure the bartender wasn’t looking, threw the glass. Bottles 

fell over, rolled off the shelves, some of them breaking into sharp edged fragments that mingled, 

falling, with the glass of other broken things as the mirror splintered into spider-web shards. Jack 

pointed at the shattered image, at the great dark wedge of wall where silvered glass had fallen 

away. He hooted, jumped up and down. Gave Nick an experimental shove, then a harder one. It 

was a commotion now, a Jack-centered disequilibrium spreading through the room. People stared 

and pointed, and then men began lumbering toward him, arms like horror show zombies reaching 

out to restrain, and Nick made motions to lead him to the door to allay the bouncers, but Jack 

threw off Nick’s hands. He jumped up and down again, reached out, knocked off the hat of the 

person next to him, then looked for more hats, pushing his way through the crowd. A hat flew 

toward the ceiling, a small man in glasses fell over. When Jack came to the jukebox he lifted up 

one leg and kicked at the glass three times before a web of cracks appeared. Then the knee of the 

leg he was standing on buckled and twisted and he fell to the damp floor, where he flailed for a 

few seconds, fingers scrabbling at cigarette butts and chair legs on their way to his injured leg. It 

was his eleventh jukebox kicking, and he couldn’t even get his foot through the glass. He was 

old, a failure, and Journey played on. Or it wasn’t his fault. Space age polymers, Jack thought, a


clear carbon-fiber plastic glass substitute, most likely. The world had, indeed, gone to hell when 

even glass couldn’t be trusted. It was then the zombies converged on him, led by Nick. They 

helped him up, and Jack could see in the moment his armpits were being pulled that Nick too had 

been sucked into the machine, had converted his art into lubrication to keep the gears from 

wearing out as quick and to make up for this betrayal he tried to punch Nick, his friend, with in 

the back of his mind the knowledge that he was free to do as he pleased, now, in this drunken 

state, because in sobriety Nick would be his friend again, would forgive him as he had in the 

past. The world was like that; a forgiving place with hard edges and soft corners and too much 

bad music and there was nothing left but to start throwing punches, drunken roundhouse flailings 

with no object or purpose fading into exhaustion, as the sound of broken glass faded into the 

sounds of people making plans to find a broom. 

Part III 

1. 

There were odd days, weeks even, that I don’t pretend to understand now. I had to learn 

things about living with a woman that I’d rather not have had to learn. Not the usual things about 

a woman’s physical needs, though these were disconcerting in their own right, and not even the 

usual male complaints about saying the wrong thing when she asked me how she looked, 

because in these areas Lizbeth seemed not to care and never asked. What bothered me was the 

intrusion on an entrenched way of life. After washing dishes she would put them in places I 

couldn’t find and I had to search through cabinets before asking her where, say, the colander had 

ended up. She took up closet space, bought groceries that I wasn’t used to, had a different brand 

of toothpaste. She began eyeing my furniture skeptically and spoke of replacing it. I became 

nervous when I came home from work to discover she had already gotten the mail, had an


anxiety attack when mail arrived for her. (They were responses to resumes sent to local hospices 

and nursing homes; after two weeks she began getting calls for interviews.) But I adjusted, 

realized that this was all normal. 

And then there were adjustments of the smaller, more intimate kind, and the reason I didn’t 

want to have to learn them was because they were things I should have known. Things that 

should have been common sense. I had to grow used to the fact that she would sometimes look at 

me with no intention of telling me anything — just a long glance with no other intent. There 

seemed many of these gestures toward me that could have been given to anyone. Non specific 

shows of attention. The time we spent together had long stretches where we could have been 

strangers thrown together on a long bus ride, our conversations filled with commonplace phrases 

having nothing to do with our legal, romantic, or societal connection to each other. 

Every night she fitted the couch with sheets and blankets and curled up to sleep, her head 

settled into a pillow she had bought at a Target store on her second day in Minneapolis. Some 

mornings as I came out of the shower I would find her standing by the window, staring at the 

buildings of downtown. What she was seeing I didn’t know, what she was thinking I didn’t ask. I 

had requested that she please not smoke in my, now our, apartment, but sometimes on these 

mornings she would have a lit cigarette cocked between her fingers and an old, chipped coffee 

mug for an ashtray on the end table next to her, and I found I didn’t much care if she smoked in 

the house or not. She was trying to quit anyway, was down to two or three a day, and skipped 

days as often as not. 

It was on these mornings that my heart began to move more solidly in her direction. It had 

never occurred to me before that love – if I may use the word for those early days of our 

marriage — could be filled with dead space, that it was not an all-consuming distraction. That


passion could be an intermittent phenomenon, that the most intimate parts of my psyche had their 

own cycle of ebb and flow. On these mornings I would take the cigarettes from the end table and 

light one for myself and smoke with her, and she would look at me, squint, and shorten her neck, 

a mannerism I had only recently determined she did in place of laughing. 

It did not surprise me that I had difficulty in telling the family what I had done, and it was in 

this area that caused what tension there was between me and Lizbeth. She noticed that on the rare 

occasions when the phone rang I was anxious to be the one to answer, and while I talked she 

sulked on the sofa. We didn’t talk about it, though we both knew we were going to have to. 

Theo, of course, was the first one who found out. He called one Friday to see if I wanted to 

go get a cup of coffee, go to a movie, and work out some details of a video project he was 

starting and needed some help on. I told him to come by the apartment, and we would go out 

from there. I hung up the phone and sat next to Lizbeth and took her hand. 

“Are you sure you want to do this?” She said. 

“We have to make this official,” I said. 

“Is this what it takes?” 

I looked out the window; rain had begun to fall on the church, on the message box that read, 

“Hope Frees you Up.” 

“You’re feeling melodramatic,” she said. “And it’s rubbing off on me.” 

“I’m thinking ‘frees’ sounds just like ‘freeze,’” I said, spelling out each in turn. “But they 

mean the opposite.” 

“Melancholy, I meant. I meant melancholy.” 

“Just a little bit. What do you think would make it official?”


“It feels official,” she said, looking in the same direction I was. She said, “That looks like a 

Binghamton rain.” 

“Drizzly,” I said. 

Theo knocked on the door half an hour later. We were in pretty much the same position, 

though Lizbeth had turned on the television set to watch the end of a golf tournament in a place 

which was getting far more sun than the Twin Cities. “Do you want to get that?” I said to her. So 

she went to the door and opened it. From where I was I couldn’t see Theo, but I saw Lizbeth 

smile and gesture for him to come in. He turned the corner and looked at me as Lizbeth returned 

to the couch and sat next to me. “Hi, Theo,” I said. 

He started laughing, ran a hand through the hair on the back of his head and said, “This is the 

type of thing I should have known was going to happen.” 

“It’s not really like it seems,” I said. 

“Oh.” 

sense.” 

“We’re kind of married.” 

Lizbeth said, “Not kind of. We are married.” 

I said, “As opposed to, say, simply living in sin.” 

He stood there for a few seconds, then said, “So it is what it looks like, then. In the traditional 

“We have the certificate, somewhere.” 

“In my purse,” said Lizbeth. She looked at me and said, “I should put it somewhere.” 

“The filing cabinet,” I said. “Maybe we should get a safety deposit box.” 

Theo said, “I’m kind of thirsty. Do you have anything to drink around here?” 

I said to him, “I’ve been having trouble figuring out how to tell people.”


“If you have anything. Beer. Coca-cola.” 

“You know where to look. Now that I’ve told you, I’ll probably call Kelley tomorrow.” 

“She’ll want to know.” 

“Mom is another matter.” 

“How is that?” 

“I feel as though I’ve lied to her. Deprived her of something. Of all the pre-marriage, in-law 

rituals, and now I don’t know what to say.” 

He backed into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “How about saying ‘Mom, I got 

married?’” 

“I’m trying to figure out her reaction. How to get the least volatile one.” 

“I’m sticking with, you say: ‘Mom, I got married.’” Lizbeth closed her eyes and briefly 

shortened her neck. Theo returned with three cans of soda and began passing them around. 

I said, “You don’t seem too surprised by this.” 

“I guess knowing I should have seen it coming made it easier. It seemed to make sense when 

you opened the door. You blend in to these surroundings. Already you’ve softened the masculine 

edges of the place.” 

I said, “Is that why you’re not talking about how big a mistake we’re making?” 

“Is it a mistake? It’s an easily fixed one, if it is.” 

“It’s not a mistake,” said Lizbeth. 

“That’s not my place to say. Besides, this is more your style. You’re not the meet-a-girl-in-a- 

bar, plan-a-dream-wedding, long-engagement type. You’re more the type to make subversive 

assaults on time-honored institutions.”


“That’s why I’m dreading telling Mom. Because she’d have wanted to see the traditional 

white dress and cummerbund, dog-and-pony show. She’ll be upset I took that away from her.” 

“Call her now,” said Lizbeth. “Call her and tell her right now.” 

I stared at her. She said, “It will only get worse if you don’t.” She looked at Theo. “I’ll call 

my parents right after.” 

I dialed, waited. Heard the low buzzing of three rings before a series of clicks gave way to 

mom’s voice saying hello. Then I said, “It’s me, Mom.” 

She said “Hi, Matt.” 

I said, “Mom, I, uh...” 

She said, “Is something wrong?” 

“Ah...” 

“What is it?” 

“Well — it’s a good thing, actually.” 

“Tell it, then.” 

“I met this girl out in Binghamton.” 

“Yes?” 

“I’d like you to meet her.” 

“Okay.” 

“We should set a time as soon as possible.” 

“Sure,” she said. There was a long pause, then she said, “Is there anything else you’d like to 

tell me?” 

“Like maybe what?”


“I don’t know. What does one say in times like this? Except, is she there with you now? Did 

she follow you back here, to Minnesota? Does she have a name, what’s the color of her eyes, 

how much do you love her?” 

“Her name is Lizbeth, she’s here next to me and her eyes are green.” 

“Hazel,” said Lizbeth. 

“It depends on the light,” I said to Mom. “Her eye color.” 

“Would it be safe for me to talk to her?” 

I handed the phone out Lizbeth, shrugging to ask her what she wanted. She held out her hand 

and I laid the sweat-slicked receiver across her palm. She wiped it on her shirt, then held it to her 

ear and said, “This is Lizbeth.” She listened for a second, then spelled out her name. “Twenty- 

six,” she said after another pause. Then, “I’m a nurse.” 

I stood next to Theo until Lizbeth waved us both out of the room. We walked back to the 

television set and stood by the window, watching as a man across the street began rearranging 

the letters in the church announcement box. He worked slowly, sorting through the letter box and 

arranging them on top of the box before carefully inserting them into the grooved felt placard. 

He finished, closed and locked the box and entered the church just as Lizbeth hung up the phone. 

The next sermon would be “Loaves and Fishes.” 

The next day I helped Theo with his project. I met him in front of a small office building in 

the middle of a parking lot ringed by several other small nondescript office buildings in a kind of 

slapped together style, a small cluster Jack would have called a trailer park for offices. Theo was 

waiting for me by the entrance, nervously jangling things in his pocket. I parked in the middle 

row of painted white grids in the nearly empty lot, locked the door and walked up to Theo while


he opened the door with a large key. We strode past the lobby’s shabby furniture and cheap 

bulletin boards, paper fluttering by single thumbtacks in the wake of our passage, into a hallway 

where from behind the second door a man emerged to look at us. He had thick glasses and a 

large beard and on his shirt, nearly destroyed by age, was a cracked and faded cartoon figure of a 

round green troll showing us his middle finger. 

“This is Lenny,” said Theo. “Lenny, this is my brother, Matt.” Lenny gave a reclusive nod 

and a brief thing which might have been a wave hello. 

“Doing it today?” he said. 

“Might as well dive in.” 

Lenny gave another nod, this time a bit more firm, and ducked back inside his room. Theo 

looked at me and said, “We’ll see him again when the camera is rolling. And I should warn you, 

a lot of what’s going to be said is total crap. Lies, really. This is kind of a performance piece.” 

He led me down corridors whose walls were made of a soft plasterboard cubicle material 

covered with cut out magazine pages and stills from movies and television shows, a large glossy 

collage that reminded me of the walls around my computer, still scaled with pages of Jack’s 

poetry. The light was poor in the corridor and many of the images were dark. Theo stopped, 

pointed one out to me. 

“This is mine,” he said. “They asked me to put one up my first day here — they ask every 

visitor to add to the collection. Kind of a community work in progress.” 

I looked at the image he had chosen for his addition. A postcard from Graceland showing 

Elvis shaking hands with President Nixon. I remembered getting it in the mail about ten years 

ago, and that Jack had scrawled across the back “See you soon,” and signing it “The King,” and


that the postmark had been registered in Lexington, Kentucky. It had spent some time on Theo’s 

wall, but how recently I couldn’t recall. “Interesting choice,” I said. 

“Men destroyed by fame,” he said. “Whose images trapped them in failure.” 

I looked more closely at the wall, saw Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon, one of those 

gold-limned Klimt portraits, Bob Dylan in heavy black mascara, William Faulkner in a tightly 

knotted tie. 

“Did you bring one?” 

“Yeah.” I pulled out one of the enlargements of Jack’s dust jacket picture and tacked it to the 

wall in the nearest open space. And then both Theo and I looked at it, at the image of him staring 

up at something and thinking whatever it was he thought that put that grin on his face. 

Theo said, “In history there are no people. Only images of people.” He started moving, 

gestured me to follow. “I don’t know. But it’s kind of a cool wall, in a fire hazard sort of way.” 

We took a few turns and went through a door into a large studio with exposed metal braces 

against grey cinder-block walls. Cameras stood on wheeled tripods near padded trunks. In one 

corner sat a red overstuffed chair by a false fireplace and an end table with a vase of red plastic 

carnations. “We film a cable access show here. Mainly it’s just a guy making fun of bad movies, 

but it’s kind of amusing. Back here.” He slipped behind two false walls and through a door into a 

flourescent lit storage room filled with metal shelves stacked with old electronic equipment, 

much of it torn apart to expose wiring and green cards studded with capacitors and resistors. An 

editing suite with a panel removed against one wall, a spaghetti pile of patch cords in the corner. 

“This is the one,” Theo said, picking up a camera attached by cable to a cassette recorder. 

“Beta, but we can convert it in editing to VHS. You remember how to use these things?” 

“Point and shoot,” I said.


“That’s the basics.” He showed me the proper switches, checked the power levels, scrounged 

through a table and came up with a battery pack, which he clipped to the tape assembly. 

“Charged it up yesterday,” he said. “We’re ready to go. And remember, most of the stuff I’m 

going to say is a lie.” 

He’d promised we weren’t going to the cemetery today, that we would just be driving around 

the city, talking with Lenny and Lenny’s friends. I nodded, hefted the tape unit over my shoulder 

and put the camera to my eye and began to shoot as Theo started talking. 

2. 

I woke up the next morning with a headache. I was also light-headed, with a nauseous pit in 

my stomach which I thought was nerves. But it settled down to a bearable level, and when it was 

time to leave for mom’s I was still sick, but not sick enough to call anything off, so we made 

preparations, walked down to the car and started on our way. On the first stretch of freeway I 

said to Lizbeth, “We might start talking about Jack, my Dad. We always do.” 

“What was he, like, crazy?” 

“He was strange. He drank too much.” 

“Was he violent?” 

“No. Never.” 

Lizbeth didn’t say anything, but sat staring out the window at the scenery. It was the season 

of deepening fall, leaves drifting on gusts of winds and settling in stretched out piles against 

fences and hedges. Immense towers of latticed steel stood on either side of the freeway, holding 

a meshed web of power lines for us to drive under. Lizbeth held her seat belt just over her right


shoulder and every few seconds tested its resistance, pulling it out and then letting it reel slowly 

back into its housing. 

When the towers were well behind us I said, “Well, once, yes. He hit me. Once. But for some 

reason it doesn’t count. It was in the beginning of my senior year of high school.” 

“What happened? Why?” 

“Nothing. I don’t know. I just said something stupid, maybe, not realizing how drunk he was 

or not caring but just wanting to speak my mind for once whether he would understand or not. Or 

it was something I did, or maybe didn’t do.” 

As Lizbeth continued to stare out the window so I could see only the tip of her nose and side 

of her cheek. I passed a red Geo, checked my speedometer: 75 miles per hour. 

As I eased off the gas Lizbeth said, “What was the thing? That you did or didn’t do?” 

“I don’t remember. I said some dumb thing. He’d just been let out of jail for causing a 

disturbance in a bar. Tried to kick the glass out of a jukebox. And he went from the jail to the bar 

and from the bar to home and I called him a stupid drunk, and that was it.” We were approaching 

the mall, acres of low flat buildings amid plastic signs on tall polygonal poles. 

I didn’t tell her about Dawn Engle. How it seemed to me at the time his fury was focused on 

how I couldn’t keep a girlfriend. But anyway I called him a drunk and he said You’d be drunk 

too, if you had yourself as a son. 

Jack, I said. What did I ever do to you? 

For an answer he shoved me a couple times till I was against the wall and then swung a fist 

around and smacked me in the chest. It was a funny swing, I realized as I fell to the floor more 

from the shock of it than from the pain. It was as if he couldn’t believe he was swinging it and 

didn’t know where he wanted it to land. He looked down at me on the floor and I saw Mom and


Kelley in the hall watching and then he started laughing. Ah, Buddy, he said. I’m so effin’ sorry. 

Jesus F. Christ, get up and let’s have some cocoa. C’mon. He offered me a hand and pulled me to 

my feet and put an arm around my shoulder and patted me on the head, laughing and chuckling 

like we’d just resolved every problem there ever was. 

The same red Geo I had just passed passed me. I checked my speedometer again: 50. 

Accelerated. I said, “Do you know what we should do? Pick up something for Kelley’s baby. 

Something to deflect attention from ourselves. Because I feel tense. I really do.” 

sorry.” 

“Okay,” Lizbeth said. Then she turned the topic back to Jack by saying, “He told you he was 

“Yeah. He did. It was funny. It was like he was treating me like I was one of his rough-house 

friends, where you smacked each other around and then you had another round. Only I didn’t 

know it. And Mom didn’t know it.” 

silent. 

She opened her mouth to say something, didn’t. A cross look on her face, but she stayed 

I exited the freeway, coasted through a green light, sped up while guiding the car between 

sets of broken white lines. Up a hill, over asphalt. The next light was red, and I stopped as a 

stream of cars moved through. I watched the drivers slip by us. Obese women in flowered 

overcoats with strands of sweaty hair stuck to their faces, black men in short dreadlocks, rusted 

out fifteen year old Toyotas piloted by balding professorial types in wire-rimmed spectacles. A 

multitude gathering for varied tasks in this center of commerce. A cloud covered the sun, turned 

their faces grey. The light changed.


It took several more minutes to get into the parking lot and find a space. We walked through 

the chill of early winter and parked cars gleaming under sunlight, an accumulation of wealth 

sunk into transportation needs and left here on display while the owners shopped inside. A warm 

blast struck us as we entered the store through the mechanical sliding doors, then a slightly more 

comfortable heat in the store itself, a vast warehouse the size of a baseball field filled with 

children’s clothing and accessories. Wide twisted strips of bright green bunting swayed in the 

currents of the room’s upper atmosphere, colorful placards embossed with infantalized teddy 

bears, wooden rocking horses, tin soldiers and other antique Christmas decorations. We walked 

past carousels of tiny clothing, of jumpers in five colors and ten sizes, past racks of doll sized 

shoes, bins of caps and mittens and blankets. Cartoon characters leered at us cheerfully from the 

pockets of shirts and the backs of jackets, bow-headed mice and pajamaed frogs, icons of fruitful 

play, guardian sylphs for the Eden we have made of our American childhood. 

We talked about getting rattles, a diaper bag, baseball caps, finally settled on a simple green 

outfit designed, perhaps, for a female baby, though we couldn’t be sure. We charged the amount 

to a credit card and walked outside, then drove back into the traffic. The sun was shining from 

directly overhead now, glaring off icy patches in the road that deadened the sound of our tires as 

we passed over them. 

I said, “You’ll like Mom. After you get used to her. She’s kind of quiet.” 

“I like her already,” she said. “I’ve talked to her.” 

“And Kelley. But not as quiet.” 

We drove up Highway 61, past the car dealers, across the bridge separating a small lake 

called Eagle Lake from Clear Lake on the other side. “Look at them,” Lizbeth said, pointing to a 

group of ducks swimming on a circle of water surrounded by ice ringing the shore.


“They always stay longer than you’d think,” I said. 

We drove past all the things that were familiar to me and I found myself explaining them to 

Lizbeth. The Kingfisher Auto lot, where a twenty foot statue of the founder on the roof was 

always decorated according to season, at this moment in a pilgrim’s hat and holding a musket. I 

felt like Nancy Rohn on the night I had arrived in Binghamton, rattling through an endless chain 

of trivial associations, but Lizbeth didn’t seem to mind. As we passed through downtown Lizbeth 

said, “Is that your brother?” 

I turned to look in the direction she was pointing, toward the small gazebo and fountain near 

market square. Theo was sitting on the gazebo roof, legs dangling in front of the gables. The 

video camera was up to his face, he was panning over the highway. I looked closer, confirming 

that it was Theo, then began guiding the car in his direction. I parked in the market lot, stepped 

out of the car, walked up to the gazebo. He panned the camera down until it pointed at us, shot 

our images for a few seconds, then shut it off. 

“Do you have a permit for that?” I asked 

“I have an artistic license.” 

“How’s the project going?” 

He rubbed at his neck, stared at the view. “I think it’s found it’s focus. Center. Whatever.” 

“What is that?” 

“I can’t tell you.” He slung the camera over his shoulder, twisted himself around and dropped 

to hang from the roof for a second, then swung his body outward and dropped the rest of the 

way, crouching low on impact and steadying himself with a hand. “Captain Action Figure,” he 

said. He looked tired, with dark circles under his eyes and a dark stubble on his chin. He rubbed 

at his eyes and yawned.


“Were you planning on being at the house?” I checked my watch to see we were twenty 

minutes late already. 

“I was waiting for my ride.” 

“Ready?” 

He nodded. “And Elliott is there.” 


“He didn’t spend the night, even though I told Mom it would be okay.” 

“You’re trying to mend the bridge?” I said. 

“It’s just wasted energy,” he said. “Sure I don’t like the guy, but where’s that get anyone?” 

A light snow began to fall as we drove to Mom’s, the kind of light, drifty snow that would 

blow across roads in feathery, writhing crescents but wouldn’t accumulate into ground cover. 

There was a knot in my stomach, my head felt suddenly light. Theo said, “That was a stop sign, 

back there.” 

I said, “Oh.” then, maybe fifteen seconds later, I said, “I’ll stop twice at the next one.” And 

suddenly I felt a visceral jolt of excitement and dread; the thrill and agony of leaving things 

behind. I rolled through another stop sign, or so Theo told me. As the knot in my stomach turned 

into distress, turned over quickly into nausea, moved up in my throat. My mouth filled with that 

clean, watery saliva you get in those moments just before vomiting. I pulled into mom’s 

driveway. I released the clutch, killing the engine, and lunged out of the car, one foot somehow 

tangling up in the seat belt, then stumbled into the remnants of a leaf pile. Rose to a kneeling 

position and vomited. Sat looking at the spreading pool of sick, then did it again.


Theo helped me to my feet, Lizbeth helped me to the door. I explained that it was just nerves, 

but suspected otherwise. My head was still light, though for the moment I felt better. I asked 

them not to tell anyone what had happened, that it wouldn’t happen again, though the truth 

seemed otherwise. We went in, where Kelley was reclining on the couch in stretch pants and a 

loose flowery dress of the recently popular style — high waisted and flimsy. I told her she was 

glowing expectantly. 

date.” 

“Oh, to heck with you,” she said. “I’m swelling. I’m displaying my condition. I’ll never get a 

Theo said, “I like that dress. I should have known you’d get pregnant when fashions turned to 

the maternity look.” 

“Yeah, clever funny guy. And get me some ice cream.” She laughed, then said, “I’m serious. 

So who’s the little friend, Matt?” 

“Little friend ha ha ha,” I said. 

Lizbeth said, “I’m Lizbeth.” 

“Lizbeth what?” 

“LaFleur.” 

Kelley nodded. “Well, isn’t that a coincidence?” 

“No,” said Lizbeth. “Not too much.” She looked down at the Kids R Us bag holding the mint 

green jumper and handed it to Kelley. “This is for the baby,” she said. “What trimester are you 

in?” 

“Whichever one demands the most ice cream,” Kelley said. 

“I’ll do it,” I said. “Where are Mom and ...” 

“Elliott,” Kelley said. “In the kitchen. Where you’ll find the ice cream.”


“She’s not normally like this,” I told Lizbeth. 

“It’s the vitamins,” Theo said. “She’s healthy for the first time and can’t handle it.” 

Kelley said, “They’re making me take the vitamins! The health fascists! It’s all like Jack 

said. Now, you to go get ice cream. Both of you. So I can chat with Matt’s little friend.” 

“I’m going,” I said, and I went. 

The wallpaper in the hall seemed different, its pattern more intricate, the colors less vibrant; 

the floor, too, seemed canted at an odd angle. I turned a corner, shoulder jarring a spice rack with 

a bottle-rattling thump. Mom was seated at the table, chopping carrots while Elliott washed out a 

pot at the sink. Very domestic, very normal looking, very message delivered, I thought. 

“Hi, Matt,” she said. 

“Hi, Matt,” Said Elliott. 

And then I was sitting down, a sensation in my spine as though it had been a sudden or 

unexpected manoeuver. Mom was saying “... never this touchy when I was pregnant. Your 

father’s genes, probably. Are you okay?” 

“I’m just tired,” I lied. “I want to tell you two things. First, Lizbeth and I are married. Second 

... ” I had no idea what the second thing was. So I said, “I was lying about being okay. I think 

I’m coming down with something.” 

Mom turned the knife over and scratched at the stretch of wrist below her palm. Elliott said, 

“Married?” 

“The whole thing,” I said. 

Theo came in then and said, “Ice cream.” 

“Jesus,” said Mom. “What’s she doing with all that ice cream?” 

“Making an amniotic float,” Theo said.


This struck me as unbelievably funny and I began laughing, hard. I doubled over, braced 

against the table and rocking with silent laughter. Caught streaky glimpses of floor and shoes 

from the slits of tear smeared eyelids. Then I was standing again, red-faced and dizzy. I stared at 

Elliott, who had moved to stand next to Mom, and I looked at Theo, then down the hall where I 

saw Lizbeth sitting on the edge of mom’s recliner. Realities began to overlap, images of my 

family I had held for so long destroyed by the simple realization that the people I had known all 

my life were not the same people they had been. I didn’t know them, I didn’t know me. I walked, 

head bent, hand cupped over my mouth, to the bathroom, where I vomited again. Then I walked 

back out to the living room, lay down on the couch, and abandoned myself to the flu. 

3. 

When I was in college I had minimal contact with Jack. I spent two summers with mom’s 

cousins in Ohio, and then moved into a house I found from an ad on a bulletin board, a house I 

shared with five other guys. I worked full time in a grocery store, then interned at a newspaper. 

Roommates set me up with good looking, disinterested sorority girls whom I dated, then stopped 

dating, with little emotional damage to either of us. To pass time between classes I hung out in 

coffee shops and rented movies. Contact with Theo led me to believe that Jack was trying to 

change, and I didn’t doubt it. I didn’t doubt he could change, if he tried hard. But I couldn’t see 

that it mattered if he did. 

He stayed sober, and along with drunkenness abandoned the exuberance of his wilder days. 

He moved around the house like a sedated replica of the former Jack. He quit his job at Bob 

LaFontaine’s garage to get away from the temptation of old drinking patterns. He stopped telling 

his stories, stopped talking at all about anything except the day to day affairs of keeping a house


together. He repaired the stereos and radios and televisions that came in, but there were fewer 

and fewer now with the solid state equipment being turned out by Japan. 

Theo said he trusted Jack to remain sober even though no one else did. Theo said Jack had 

turned a corner, that getting arrested and slipping almost over the edge like he had was the final 

message. Mom and Kelley wouldn’t let themselves be fooled. Mom moved into the guest room 

and picked up a night job at a local drugstore. Kelley, when she was home (she had picked up 

another boyfriend, a college student and struggling poet), stayed in her room, reading and calling 

her friends. They waited, biding their time, for the final collapse. 

Three years later, in the heat of early autumn, it came. Mom found a half empty bottle of 

scotch under the sink, called the golf course where Jack had a part-time landscaping job, and 

found that they hadn’t seen him all day. 

She took Kelley and drove out to Davey’s, leaving a note for Theo to call her when he got 

home. Then she called me. In a brief, intense conversation in which she avoided specifics as only 

my mother can, she told me nothing you wouldn’t have expected to hear under the 

circumstances. She told me divorce was all but certain. She said she wanted to take control of her 

own life. That she had been foolishly optimistic and naive. That she hoped it wouldn’t hurt us as 

children too much, that we were old enough as adults to take things in stride. I made noises of 

agreement and consolation when it was that time for her to cry. Then I hung up, and when the 

phone rang a few minutes later I answered it again. It was Theo, at the house, saying he was 

going to stay at home and wait for Jack. He knew Mom would see it as taking sides, but it 

wasn’t. It was Theo making a choice of his own, out of a desire to be in a place where his choice 

mattered, making an adult decision. And even if it were a matter of taking sides, he said, then he 

was going to take Jack’s.


I listened, my mind too enshrouded by shock to make any comments at all, barely registering 

the things he said. When it seemed like the appropriate moment I hung up, stood by the wall 

phone, stared at various things in my roommate’s room. The chunk of wood hacked from my his 

desk, the twisted yellow wreckage of his bedsheets. I went in, picked up one of his pens, 

inspected the raggedly chewed end. There seemed to be the same pattern of damage in the 

chewed pen as in the twisted sheets. Intrigued, I peered at the laundry in his closet and saw the 

same indescribably similar display of characteristics — whorls of cloth, an identifiable sense of 

roommate-inflicted compression — in the pile of shirts and mangled white jockey shorts. 

I was looking at samples of his handwriting when I saw him coming down the hall. Startled, I 

walked out to join him and stood, panicky, by the window. A car horn sounded from the parking 

lot below. Hey, Laffy, he said. I can’t remember his name now, only that he assigned me a 

nickname no one else used. He said, What’s going on? 

I was looking for a pen, I said, holding up the raggedly chewed Bic. 

Oh. You look kind of rattled. 

Well. I guess my parents are splitting up. Getting a divorce. 

No shit? he said. 

No shit, I answered. 

That’s gotta suck, he said. 

Jack disappeared without a word, and as the days of fall shortened into the days of early 

winter we expectantly waited. Mom and Kelley stayed with Davey, and Theo stayed at the 

house. He skipped school regularly and began hanging out with a rougher crowd. Because of his 

truancy the new vice principal, Elliott Festival, called my mother to find out what might be


wrong. They met for lunch, they met for dinner, and things progressed from there. He would 

have dinner with Mom and Davey’s family; they would take Kelley and my cousins to free 

screenings of new movies. Kelley insisted they were lovers, and though I didn’t dwell on it, it 

was probably true. 

As a favor to my mother I made frequent visits to Clear Lake to check up on Theo. As often 

as not when I went out there he was gone, even if I called before leaving. Once or twice I found 

him smoking in the kitchen with a skinny, blond girl in bare feet and overalls. We would talk for 

a while, maybe grab some hamburgers, and when I got home I’d call Mom and tell her 

everything was fine. In the evenings I devoted myself to schoolwork. Far from being a 

distraction, the chaos of my life forced me into a steely concentration and my grades — always 

good, never great — began to show improvement. In one course we were reading the 

contemporary masters of the short story such as Carver, Munro and Ford. I felt free to roam 

amidst the sparseness of their prose and draw conclusions that pleased my teaching assistants and 

professor. A woman in my European History class took an interest in me so we went to a few 

movies and generally spent some time together. We talked about a lot of things, but not about 

Jack or my family, and my inability to open up to her eventually caused her to lose interest; we 

stopped seeing each other after about three months. It didn’t bother me. I can’t remember her 

name either. Life seemed calm and uncomplicated when I wasn’t being forced to think about 

Jack, and my only worry where he was concerned was that, unless Theo or Mom called, I wasn’t 

concerned with him at all. 

Then, one afternoon shortly after the woman I’d been seeing told me she’d rather not see me 

any more, I went out to the house to look after Theo. He wasn’t there, which wasn’t a surprise, 

but I stayed, opening up a book and reading it on the front porch. I had read a few pages and then


gone inside for something to drink when Theo came home. He found me in the kitchen making 

lemonade. There you are, he said. We’ve been looking for you. 

I’ve been here, I said. Waiting for you. Who’s we? 

Me and Jack. He came by about an hour ago and we went to get you. Your roommate said 

you were out here. Come on. Jack’s taking us for a ride. 

It was a Thursday afternoon and on Fridays that semester I had only one class until Monday, 

which again had only one class, and after that I didn’t think any further. Life was uncomplicated. 

I didn’t think about anything but instead flowed on instinct. I followed Theo outside, and there 

he was. 

He was leaning against the fender of the brown Century, smoking, one hand stuffed into his 

jeans pocket. He was wearing his tattered white road jacket with the quilted collar and button-up 

cuffs. 

keys? 

I said, Where you been, Jack? 

Chicago. Detroit. Kansas City. 

Where we going? 

Davey’s cabin. 

I looked around, a tactical pause. Ran a hand over the back of my neck, and said, You got 

I got the keys, Theo said. From the house. 

Where after the cabin? I asked. 

Wherever you want to go, Jack said. He looked down at the book in my hands. What’s that, 

he said.


class. 

I held it up. It was a copy of the Beat Companion, required reading for my modern poetry 

Shit, said Jack. I coulda been in that. 

We stopped to gas up the car, then headed north as a mist settled in and deepened into fog as 

the sky darkened and night set in. We drove through a dull white opacity laced with the bare 

branches of black trees, grasping at us like fingers. 

I stopped again, Jack said. Drinking. I had that three day bender and woke up in the morning 

ashamed again and somewhere in Onomonowoc, Wisconsin. Ashamed because being drunk is 

kid’s stuff. Anyone with a bottle can be a drunk. He winced, clutched at his side with one hand, 

cigarette ashes crumbling into his lap. 

I said, You okay, Jack? 

Right as rain, he said. I guess I missed knowing what it was like, being drunk. How liberating 

it was. How elemental the impulses are. How it makes your life seem simple, black and white, 

when it’s really just getting worse and worse. I missed not knowing exactly how long it had been 

since I lost control. 

Two years, eight months, six days, said Theo. 

I lost count in the units that mattered, Jack said. In the units my heart uses. He grimaced 

again, clutched his side through layers of cloth. 

Duluth was fog-muted city lights and the invisible specter of Lake Superior, a great cold 

mountain of water turned over to rest on its peaks. Jack piloted the car onto the state highway 

that would take us to the village-like cabins of Windy Point and the cabin Davey had bought in


the a few years earlier, when his career had solidified at vice president of regional operations for 

General Cinema’s Midwest area. 

We came to the exit for the road to the cabin. Jack pulled over, rolled to a stop, idled at the 

intersection. The last time we had been out this way, in the first summer Davey had the cabin, 

the road had been newly paved and at the turnoff from the highway stood a new ten pump gas 

station and convenience store, and ground had been broken across the street for a Perkins. That 

site had never been developed and stood now as an empty sheet of pavement jutting into the 

grass. The convenience store had closed five of its pumps, and when we went in for supplies we 

discovered the rear quarter had been abandoned to empty, dust laden shelves under burned out 

light bulbs. We filled a basket with canned goods and overpriced bread and paid a young woman 

with jet black hair and purple nail polish. She asked Jack where we’d come from and when he 

said Minneapolis, she said she was planning on moving down there in a couple months. 

I suppose you think it’s pretty exciting down there, Jack said. 

Better than here, was her answer. 

Because Jack said he was tired, I drove the rest of the way. I had never driven the Century 

before. The steering was loose and the brakes were getting soft, but the engine still ticked evenly. 

A few miles from the cabin the road turned to gravel. We bounced along the rutted path for half 

an hour, tan dust kicking up behind us to mingle with the moist fog of the north woods. My rear 

view mirror was worthless, and ahead of the car I saw only two white cones of fog and blurred 

streaks of gravel. 

The cabin door was unlocked and slightly ajar. Jack pushed it open and tried the lights, but 

nothing happened. He stumbled around till he found the fuse box, tripped the breakers, and the


lights came on. Someone had been there, probably kids from surrounding small towns come out 

to party. They hadn’t stolen or broken anything, but beer cans and empty bottles littered the floor 

and end tables, and in the kitchen soot blackened pans lay on spill stained counters. Jack 

inspected the disarray, found half a bottle of vodka and poured it down the sink as Theo and I 

watched. Kids, he said. Reminds me of long ago times, kind of thing I would have done at their 

age. Theo’s age, I guess. 

Guess I was never that age, I said. 

Doesn’ matter, Jack said. It was a long time ago. 

What are we doing here? Theo asked. He cleared a space on the couch and slouched into it, 

feet propped on the debris laden coffee table. 

We’re cleaning up, Jack said, pulling a white brassiere from the corner of a tasteful Monet. 

Then we’re going to wait until things downstate settle a little. There’s going to be lawyers and 

proceedings and court dates. I wanted you two to take a little breather before all that. He was 

putting beer cans into a brown paper grocery sack as he spoke, dropping them in with dry 

metallic rattling sounds. He stopped, clutched at his side again. 

See a doctor, said Theo. 

No doctors, said Jack. I haven’t seen a doctor since I was twelve. Besides, what if this pain is 

my ticket out? He laughed, and for a second looked like the old Jack. Brushed a hand through his 

hair, rubbed his mouth. Said, You boys think I’m kidding. 

He cleared off a chair, set the bag aside, sat down. He grabbed a soup bowl covered with 

burn marks and cigarette ash from the party and set it on his lap. 

Foo, said Jack. I’m plain tired. Wore out. 

I was still standing, looking around at the debris on the furniture.


Have a seat, boys, Jack said. We’ll be here fer a while. 

I began looking for a spot I could clear to sit. Finally settled in on the couch, feet up on the 

coffee table. I watched Jack as he rubbed at his chin, ruffled his hair. Theo carried the supplies 

we’d picked up to the kitchen where he started putting things away. 

Jack fell asleep there. I took the cigarette from his fingers and the ashtray from his knee and 

set them back on the coffee table while Theo covered him with a blanket. 

What the hell are we doing? Theo said. 

Whatever he wants, I guess. 

We gathered some firewood, then built a fire and went to sleep. At some point the fire went 

out and the night turned cold and I shivered half sleeping until dawn, breathing into the space 

under my single blanket to retain what warmth I could. 

In the morning we scoured the grounds of the cabin for downed trees and stripped the small 

branches and carried back logs that we hacked at and split into firewood. It was good work that 

kept us warm and our minds off what was happening and why we were really there. And then as 

we were stacking the wood on top of the meager pile Davey had left for us, Jack said, A more 

philosophical person would give you two a big speech here. 

I wasn’t sure at first what he said. Theo said, What? 

Yeah, a decent father would have words of advice, something suitably moral laden that you 

could live by. He chucked a block of wood onto the pile. It was growing at a funny angle away 

from the cabin. 

No they wouldn’t, Theo said. I’ve met fathers like that. They say stupid things all day long. 

Things like Just apply yourself, and You’ve got to behave more responsibly. 

I’d never tell you that, Jack said.


Damn right you wouldn’t, Theo said. He swung the ax into a log and wood chips jumped 

from the cut and settled on the ground. There was a chainsaw in the toolshed, a nice electric job 

that would have gone through the log in seconds, but we didn’t care. 

I said, I’m sure you’ll come up with something to tell us, Jack. Something good. 

Jack laughed. He said, Jesus. You still believe in the tooth fairy, don’t you buddy? But 

you’ve got a good heart. I know that much. It’s in there somewhere. 

He set another block of wood on the funny pile and took a look at it. He put both hands 

against the pile and leaned in and with a quick heave set it true to the cabin wall. Then he 

grabbed at his side again, breathed heavily a few times. 

He said, You guys remind me of me. Like parts of me got split out and dumped into two 

other people. And so what’s the point of me any more, I think sometimes. 

I wanted to say being Jack LaFleur is the point of you, but I figured he’d just push that back 

in my face as well, so I kept my mouth shut. 

Then Theo said, The point of you is your entire life. 

And Jack said, Are you trying to cheer my up or piss me off? Listen. Did I ever tell you two 

about the time I almost met Kerouac again? I was going to go down to St. Pete and see if he 

remembered me. I’d see if I had the balls to call him for giving my best lines to Dave Wain. 

He took the ax from Theo and hacked at the log as he spoke. He said, I went down there 

primed to meet him, set to knock on his door and walk in and talk to the man. I knew what he’d 

turned into, mind ya. Bitter ole drunken hermit who didden even want to see his own daughter so 

I’s pretty sure I wasn’t gonna get in myself, but what the F? It’d be a story to say Kerouac kicked 

me out of his house, anyway. So I hitched down to St. Pete where he’d holed up with his mother


and wife to pretend to write, though nothing he wrote sold any more. His usefulness as a living 

person was over. Ready to pass into the sainted dead, he was. 

Jack had set the ax down after chopping a few times. His face was pale and he was sweating. 

You don’t look so good, Jack, I said. 

I been under stress, Jack said. 

I picked up the ax and took his spot over the log. Swung the ax into the notch he’d made, 

then did it again. 

Jack said, Back then it was one moment of beauty after another. There was an Idaho sunset 

from the back seat of a Greyhound bus I’d spent my last twenty dollars to get to Seattle. There 

was a Kansas City dawn filled with gold light where I woke up with best girl in the world by my 

side... 

We finished chopping and stacking the wood. It was early afternoon so we made some 

sandwiches, then found some rakes and started gathering leaves into a pile. Jack said, We should 

go to a movie later. Drive into town somewhere and find a theater and see whatever’s playing. 

Yeah, said Theo. 

I thought we were laying low, I said. 

Aye, said Jack. But he’d gotten that look in his eye and his hands were fidgety. 

You didn’t finish your Kerouac story, Theo said. 

Jack said, So I went down to St Pete, hoping to see Jack Kerouac again. See if he 

remembered me. Maybe I could tell him how delighted I was that he quoted me and pissed I was 

that he gave the speech to that bastard Lew Welch who he called Dave Wain. I’m hitching 

through Tennessee, through Alabama, and the weather is beautiful and the hitching easy if thick 

with hicks and bigots. Sunsets like oil paintings every night, sunrises like fire. Picked up a few


road friends. Life seemed good, that good you only recognize later is the good that comes from 

final things. Around Jacksonville I pick up a paper and see he’s dead. His liver had collapsed the 

previous afternoon and he bled to death on the inside. 

I went down there anyway, walking like a robot, hitching like a derelict, which is what I felt 

like now that Kerouac was dead. I thought about Clear Lake, where things weren’t perfect but 

was better than anywhere else. 

We’d piled up the leaves in a big clearing behind the house. We should burn ‘em, said Jack. 

Get a bonfire roaring and snapping. 

I’ll find the gas, Theo said. He went to the utility shed and started moving things around, and 

soon returned with a red can and handed it to Jack. 

As he splashed gas onto the leaves Jack said, I walked by his house; by that time it was 

empty, everyone’d cleared out to Lowell for the funeral. It was just another house in just another 

city. So I headed back north. Figured it was finally time to try my hand at being a grown-up in a 

city where a good woman loved me. 

He lit a cigarette and tossed the match onto the leaves. The flame spread slowly, then the 

leaves caught and burned with a dark smoke that rolled upwards carrying burned out frameworks 

of leaves that tumbled from the rising column of heat back to the earth. 

Jack said, I suppose now I couldn’t even do that. 

Theo snatched up Jack’s pack of cigarettes, pulled one out and lit it. I think you don’t give 

yourself enough credit, he said. 

Jack took a drag, looked at me, then at Theo, and said, Maybe so. 

4.


After the anthology was published it sold surprisingly well. It gained the attention of local 

media, with a short piece appearing in the books section of the paper. Then I was asked to appear 

on a radio show produced by NPR’s local affiliate. I did my best to relate the stories I best 

remembered. Spontaneous, ill-fated camping trips to the Tetons, a fall spent fire watching in 

Montana, the endless road stories. Of crashing hippie communes in Idaho, drunken midnight 

games of statue tag in San Francisco parking lots, a tagalong hitcher who slit his wrists one night 

as Jack slept in the back of an abandoned rail yard, leaving Jack to wake up and discover the 

body in a pool of dried blood covered in a thin grey layer of rail yard dust. 

But they weren’t my stories, and I felt guilty that I was riding Jack’s life to a kind of pseudo 

fame. So I read a few of the poems, and then told the interviewer some things that I remembered 

about Jack. The stories of him and me walking through Clear Lake, chatting with barbers and 

street sweepers. About him going out in the street at midnight and yelling whee-ha, and then later 

coming home and getting into shouting matches with the neighbor’s dog. I told about all the 

people who’d showed up unexpectedly over the years, the Nick Kastles and the strangers to us 

who Jack greeted like royalty. 

I even told them about the cabin. How he took Theo and me up to Davey’s cabin and how on 

the second morning we woke up and he wasn’t there. We poked around and outside the cabin, 

looked at the big burned out circle where we’d burned the leaves and twigs the day before. All 

we found was a note on the kitchen table that said Went to the movies. 

So we waited there, without a car, until rains came and the mid-afternoon sun started going 

down the western side of the sky. The phone was not connected, we discovered. We talked a 

little bit, about where he might have gone and if he was coming back. By early evening we


figured he was gone, and even if he wasn’t, then so what? We’d start walking, make for that 

half-empty convenience store where we could find a phone and call mom. Go crawling back. 

Does it bother you what he said yesterday, I asked Theo as we set out. 

Does what bother me? 

What he said about he came north and married mom because basically he didn’t have 

anything better to do? 

That’s not what I heard, Theo said. I heard he was in love and wanted to start a family. 

Well, I heard something else, I said. I thought to myself that pretty much everything about 

Jack bothered me. The way he lived, the way he thought either too little of us or too much and 

couldn’t decide just to be our father and leave it at that. Better not to even think about it. So I 

didn’t. 

About half a mile down the road, tucked behind a bend, we found the Century of Doubt 

parked in the brush just beyond the shoulder. The keys were in the ignition and on the dashboard 

lay fifty dollars in a disorderly array of fives and tens. Some second car had left tracks in the 

mud, wide script-like patterns of arcs ending in points. Theo and I looked at each other, then at 

the car, then at the tire tracks in the mud. At the sky, at the trees, back to the car. 

We got in, and I started the engine and put the car in gear. 

Wait a second, Theo said. Where are we going? 

I stopped and thought about it. 

We could go anywhere, he said. 

It wasn’t true. So I drove home.


The interviewer asked me in her concern-laden, overly intonated NPR voice if that had felt 

like a betrayal, and if I was devastated by his desertion of us. It’s what I would have asked, and 

it’s what you’d expect to hear. But it wasn’t really the case at all. Because Theo and I knew Jack. 

We knew that this was what he did, and part of us knew it was the last time he’d get a chance. 

Because three weeks later he was dead. That woman, whoever she was, dropped him off at a 

hospital in Duluth and disappeared; Mom broke off her relationship with Elliott and drove north 

to see Jack, taking the three of us along. He died quietly one night shortly after being admitted, 

the cancer in his stomach particularly efficient in its job. There were no stirring final words or 

actions, no resolution of old hard feelings. He just died, leaving it up to us to sort through what 

he had left behind. There was a funeral, and mourning, and the resumption of my life. We put 

him in the ground under a modest tombstone, one just big enough to chip the blade of any mower 

that tried to pass over it. Then we went on with our lives. 

I went back to school as quickly as I could and returned to my studies with a steely 

concentration I hadn’t had before and haven’t had since. I finished the semester with a 4.0, made 

the dean’s list, had an essay nominated for a composition award. 

Life became simple, free of entanglements and complexities. Things could have gone on in 

this way forever, and without Theo’s trip to Binghamton, they might have. Because I wouldn’t 

have stopped feeling safe, feeling clever, as though I had cheated the world by finding a 

relatively painless path through life. Jack was far from my mind, though it wouldn’t be fair, as I 

have said before, to say I forgot. 

5.


The book continued to sell into a second printing. Lately there has been talk about printing 

Jack’s section together with the poems that weren’t included in the anthology as a separate 

volume called Late to Rest: The Complete Works of Jack LaFleur. An independent film maker 

called asking for rights to film the poems as a movie (I don’t see how it would work, but we’re 

talking about it). I have been urged by lawyers to incorporate his memory into a holding 

company that will protect his image, likeness, and literary works against infringement. Old road 

friends of Jack’s call, they send letters, they want either a piece of his action or help in 

publishing their own work. I ignore most of it. Three different women have called claiming to 

have had affairs with Jack at various points in time, but I’m not sure about them. They could 

have, of course. None of them are Desdemona Williams, who remains, as far as I know, in 

Kansas City, married to her third husband. 

Kelley had her baby, which turned out to be a boy she named Owen Lawrence. Mom and 

Elliott are engaged now, they’re planning a quiet ceremony in the Spring, when she and Kelley 

and Owen will move into Elliott’s four bedroom house near the park in Clear Lake. Theo may or 

may not move along with them. He’s been hanging out with some of his friends who went to the 

University of Minnesota, and discovered that there are extension classes where he can study film, 

so he’s taking one. And then he found out there’s an option at the University to create your own 

degree program, so he thinks that’s what he’s going to do. 

I came home from work one day to find a package with no return address had arrived in the 

mail, and when I opened it I found an unlabeled videotape, the casing a dull grayish black except 

for the maker’s white logo. The lack of identification, its un-rewound state, the covert delivery 

system, all these things clearly marked it as Theo’s project, finished, edited and delivered.


I put the tape in the machine, rewound it, settled back on the couch. Lizbeth was out 

working, having taken the night shift at a nursing home as the first best offer she was given. I 

was grateful for the time alone and slightly guilty to be happy in her absence, but I missed her as 

well. Things, as the say, worked themselves out in those months after we came home from New 

York, after she nursed me through that nasty five-day flu that wreaked my joints and made me 

babble incoherently. When she came home, usually after two in the morning, she would join me 

in our bed, and my sleep would become more sound. 

When the tape finally began to play there were several seconds of nothingness, the dead grey 

and white buzz of blank tape, then a blue screen, slanting lines, and a brief message reading 

“rewinding” next to a backwards running clock. When the clock hit zero the screen went blank 

and I heard a woman’s voice say, “Okay. I think it’s ready now.” 

The screen showed the building where Theo and I had gotten the camera, then cut to the 

supply room. Theo stood by the editing suite and said, “I’m stealing this camera from the place 

I’ve worked for less than a month. They made me promise to bring it back, but I don’t think so.” 

His face, backlit by fixtures against the far wall, turned from side to side as he spoke; the colors 

minimal, the barest of images. He says, “Let’s move out.” 

His image walks out through the gap between dividers and wall, into the studio with the 

camera following shakily and shooting from a low, disorienting angle. Theo walks quickly 

through the studio and into the maze of halls; the camera pans across the wall of images but only 

a few are visible. Spiro Agnew, Betty Page. Lenny is waiting in the hall by the exit, watching 

casually and holding a can of diet soda. 

“This is Lenny,” says Theo, talking to the camera. “Lenny’s a crazy bastard. Let’s see if we 

can get him to come along with us.”


“So where you going?” 

They exit. The shot switches to the outside, from near Theo’s car. Lenny is standing by the 

building, laughing at something Theo has said, the troll on his shirt rippling. 

“Are you coming?” Theo says. Lenny looks stunned, thinking it over, and in the next shot he 

is in the car, the camera in the back seat shooting grainy silhouettes of Lenny and Theo’s heads 

before panning to shoot out the side window at passing trees and small houses. 

Lenny says, “So what’s the plan?” 

“The plan,” says Theo, “Is right now just to go out and ask people questions. Like, what’s the 

most dangerous thing you ever did?” 

“Hey, cool, man.” 

The car slows, stops, and as it moves through the intersection Theo says, “So what’s the most 

dangerous thing you ever did, Lenny?” 

“Oh, like me, man? I didn’t think you meant me.” 

“Don’t answer if you don’t want to.” 

“Heroin, man. Yeah. You’re totally like not there, only you’re so there at the same time you 

can only just be, like cottage cheese, man, but it can see. Big buggy eyed cottage cheese. And it’s 

you at the same time. I can see how people get hooked. Like tapping into oblivion. Is that the 

type of danger you mean?” 

Theo had taken the car onto the freeway. The camera pans from the drivers side across the 

rear window and out the passenger side window. Trees and grassy plains, clouds and blue sky in 

streaky cheap video; the typhoon hiss of wind in the microphone. “I just ask the question. Danger 

is danger,” Theo says. 

“Oh ... Angel Dust, man. I forgot about Angel Dust. That’s fucking killer, man.”


The scene cuts from the back seat of a car to the bluffs of the St Croix river. Theo is walking 

through trees and over rocks, the low jagged cliffs behind him looming dark against the late 

morning sun. Lenny walks into the picture carrying a midsize rock. He drops it, stares at it. Theo 

says, “We stopped at Lenny’s place to pick up some stuff. You okay, Lenny?” 

“Quesa tostada,” says Lenny. A woman comes into the picture, a gawky woman with long, 

tangled hair and freckled skin in a loosely fitting black dress. She approaches the camera with a 

natural smile, hemp necklaces dangling stone amulets and says, “Doing things in the woods, 

sunshine.” 

Theo says “One of the other things we picked up was Lenny’s wife, Zoe.” 

Zoe says to Lenny, “How about we do it?” 

Lenny says to Theo as the camera wobbles, “Can we?” 

Theo says, “Do what you want.” The camera, however, stays on Theo as he watches Zoe and 

Lenny move off to the side. “Kesey used to do things like this,” Theo says. “Him and the 

pranksters, which coincidentally included Neal Cassady, who appears as Dean Moriarty in 

Kerouac’s On the Road and as Cody Pomeroy in several other Kerouac novels. This makes him 

the only figure successfully involved in the two major counter culture movements of post-war 

America. Just a bit of trivia. Show them for a second.” The camera pans over to Lenny and Zoe, 

who despite plentiful love-making sounds are sitting three feet apart from each other, Zoe 

wearing Lenny’s shirt over her dress. Zoe takes off Lenny’s shirt, stands up, pulls her dress over 

her head. “Better pan back over here,” Theo says. Then, “It’s interesting. How some women look 

better with clothes on. “And pretty much all men.” 

Theo standing in front of a coffee shop in a scene I had not been involved with. He stands 

still for several seconds, waiting or just standing. He is wearing Lenny’s shirt, the faded green


troll, under his now trademark black jacket. Then he is standing in front of a shopping mall in the 

same pose, still waiting. The scene shifts several more times, and it is always Theo standing 

slightly left of center, in front of several buildings. Somehow he’s managed to stand in the exact 

same spot in every scene. The Crystal Court, the Ordway, in front of banks, houses, skating 

rinks. In the last shot, standing against the wall of a Perkins, he says, “It’s always me. Wherever 

I am. Isn’t that crazy?” 

Then it is night, in a cemetery. People are standing around a mausoleum. Theo’s off-camera 

voice says: “They don’t know I’m here, and it’s better that way.” Several more seconds of this, 

and then the camera is on a woman in Uptown, pulling a purse strap up onto her shoulder. She 

says, “The most dangerous thing I ever did, is stay with my last boyfriend.” A clean cut man in a 

baseball cap says, “I played football my senior year without a cup.” A man in a business suit 

says, “I just quit my job.” 

Shot of a tall, thin man in a weary leather sport coat. He says, “I don’t know what you’re 

asking, kid. Is that a real question?” 

“Just what’s the most reckless thing you ever did. Craziest. Most likely to cause shitloads of 

trouble.” 

“You know I’m not saying anything real when the camera’s rolling.” 

“Yeah, yeah. I know you don’t have a real job or anything, but I’ve seen all the equipment 

you have in your house...” 

“I’d like to know what you’re going to do with that tape, first of all.” 

“Just say something.”


“I do what’s necessary. And right now that is to say that perhaps as far as safeguarding my 

welfare, the most prudent strategy is to maintain as low a profile as possible. A state of perceived 

non-existence whether or not substantiated by fact would perhaps be low enough.” 

A shot from the roof of a building, still in Uptown, landmarks all around; Calhoun Square, 

Lake Calhoun, the marquis of the Suburban World Theater. “My father lived on the road for a 

long time.” Theo walks into view, sits on the ledge. “We didn’t see him much. He had a network 

of friends he would take off and see. Without telling us where he was going. He also wrote 

poetry, something else he didn’t tell us about. The call of Bohemia, I guess. Though it’s not that 

glamorous. I’m only eighteen and I’m already kind of sick of the whole alternative scene. Not 

that this area...” a wave of the arm “... Has anything to do with the alternative scene. Most of 

these shops are corporate owned. Most of the people here are just folks looking to spend money.” 

Another, perhaps the same, shot of the cemetery. “These folk, though. I don’t know what to 

call these guys. The true rootless. A purer breed built for survival. No conception of danger. I’ll 

be back.” He enters the picture, descends the slope. A jumpy cut where he disappears and 

reappears halfway down the hill, then another where he reappears in the middle of the group. He 

approaches one of them, Pauly, perhaps, and receives a brown paper bag, which he tucks into his 

belt, and then he starts coming back up the hill in the same sequence of cuts. 

Uptown, the rooftop, for a few brief seconds. Theo lights a cigarette and looks down on the 

intersection of Hennepin and Lake, walks to the camera. 

In the woods, again, this time in Founder’s Park on the shores of Clear Lake. Light snow 

cover, the sounds of feet crunching newly frozen ground. Sets the camera down with a series of 

swirling images poorly captured by the video tape, streaky glares of sky and branches, until 

finally the picture steadies, a shot from the ground of birch trees and water. Theo walks about


fifteen feet away and says, “Neal Cassady died in Mexico, his body found by the railroad tracks 

where he’d been wandering, heading somewhere God knows where.” He pulls out the brown 

paper bag, removes the gun, checks the clip. He smiles, says, “I know none of this makes sense. 

It’s because I’m still learning how to do things. I’m still learning what it is I want to say. I am in 

the lion’s den, armed only with a my faith in the magic of a mystic world beyond our own.” He 

points the gun, an indistinct blur in his hands, at the camera. There seems for an instant to be a 

small point of light in the muzzle of the gun before the screen goes blank, returning to the grey 

and white buzz of uncoded tape it had begun with. 

Epilog 

It surprises you, the way the largest shopping mall in the United States can sneak up on you 

the way it does. No billboards, no flashing lights, only the barest of signs directing traffic and the 

surrounding landscape filled with trees and office parks and car dealerships and the ominous 

loomings of jet airplanes taking off and landing, huge black crosses moving at unsettling angles 

across blue sky. Then, driving under the freeway and through a lean arterial junction of 

underpasses and branching, divided highway it is there, a low, solid concrete monolith flanked 

by slant-layered parking ramps and orange traffic cones. Mall of America. The Mall of 

Mammon. HugeDale. The Mega-Mall. 

Cops direct you — the fiancé of your friend from Wisconsin, who is driving — around, up a 

ramp, into a free slot about two city blocks from the entrance to Nordstrom’s. The four of you 

step out of the car, stretching, confirming the presence and contents of purses and wallets. Pre- 

consumption rituals akin, your friend says, to hunting rites and fertility dances. Then you walk


through the parked cars towards the entrance, looking out onto the surrounding development. 

She says, This will be your last view of the outside. You know malls never have windows. 

No windows, no clocks, you think, then say. Pure product divested of temporal and spatial 

constraints. The lessons of history made corporate and franchised. 

You walk through the shops, the vast concourses in various designs from steely metallic to 

warm earth tones, past fountains, through the masses of tourists from New York on day trips, 

past the locals on blind dates, past foreigners speaking in unintelligible tongues. Past the Western 

wear stores, the Chinese food stands, the Franklin Mint outlet, something called the Recycling 

Store. Numerous shops with nature and science themes — The Endangered Species store, the 

Nature Conservancy, a shop called Bare Bones selling medical charts and novelty keychains and 

make your own chewing gum kits. World’s strongest magnets. The nature stores all sell the kinds 

of things you used to see at National Park service souvenir shops — rocks laminated to index 

cards, pocket sized guide books to birds or cactuses, stones on black string necklaces and guides 

to the night sky made of phosphorescent stars on blue cardboard. Map stores and travel agencies 

and information booths for state tourism boards and reservation based casino gambling. She 

says, I guess people come here to get an idea of where else they might like to go. 

In the Hologram shop you stare at a variety of three dimensional images in eerie shades of 

copper and greenish blue: stuffed birds, crystal balls, motorcycles, copper haired women who 

lower sunglasses and wink as you walk by. In the windows of the sporting goods stores stand 

banks of television sets wired to perform as a single unit. While you walk by there is a football 

game from Florida, the picture sliced into twelve sections so the key elements — part of the 

offensive line, the fullback — are cut in half by dark margins between single televisions. She 

says, You can watch twelve TVs at once this way.


Florida—Penn State, Her fiancé says. 

Your wife says, I almost went to Penn State. 

In the bookstores you see copies of your father’s book set up in a prominent display, a small 

tag saying Local Author helping to move the merchandise. You leaf through a copy, peer at the 

end pages to get a glimpse of your name. This is the kind of fame you enjoy. The photograph of 

your father on the back cover has been enlarged and placed on an easel where he can look out on 

the crowd as it passes by him, his enigmatic smile unsurprised; he saw all this coming years ago. 

Perhaps he would have hated it after all to be a pre-packaged product shrink-wrapped for 

consumption. Then again, maybe he would have loved it. 

Then your wife is tired, so you go into the amusement park and sit. You ask your wife how 

the baby is, and she says it’s fine. Your friend gives her consoling words, touches her stomach as 

her fiancé leans in close, punches you playfully on the shoulder and tells you you’re going to be 

a father. It is not certain whether he’s feeling jealous or lucky that it’s not him. 

You are in the center of the mall on the fringes of the amusement park, in the lazy shade of 

sunshine filtered through skylights and an intricate web of structural beams. Around you are 

exotic firs, underneath you a bench made of plastic formed into wood-grain, your feet resting on 

a cobblestone path of some resinous, stain resistant polymer. Strangers move past you on vague 

errands of the moment, on their way from one corner of this world to the next. The rides swirl 

around you, gleeful shouts echo off facades of plastic and neon. There is an odor of air 

conditioning, and chlorine from the log-flume ride; the animal scent of humans in fervent 

recreation. Around you the buzz is sexual, animalistic, the teenagers in makeup or leather or 

stringy dreadlocks, reveling in the liberation reduction to modern primal urges has brought to


them. This is where we are, this is what we do now. You are safe, you think. You are where you 

were always meant to be. 

END

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