Highwaymen

By Paul Skyrm

Prealudere in Two Parts

i.

                        Said it was the dust that tripped him up ; too much , the dust. Mornings drinking coffee, reciting Ten Commandments watching lubricant game show television broken up with hourly devotional wipings of bureau mirror dust. Windows. Cherry wood writing desk mother bequeathed ‘fore death. Glass veil o’er Monty Hall and the clab of revelers costumed in Mardi Gras. Vanilla curtains found at a garage sale last Thursday. Bathroom mirror. Each attended to like a Civil War soldier; the old man imagining himself Walt Whitman; a novice in mending broken skulls & gun powder bones but deeply-versed in alleviating the pain beneath the wounds and holes; an alchemist of sorts.

                        Priests. The old man saw the dust as priests. Hunched Ichabods walking against harvest, sky, moon in parks, places where leaves die & crackle under pitiless trod. Confession brought blindness, purge & father-may-I’s he only bayed as a snot-bubble mudder-pirate would, fighting sleep dreaming of DiMaggio and the Splendid Splinter, droning before school morning state capital examination: “Washington. Olympia. Texas. Austin. Ohio. Columbus…..” then erase  when number 2 lumber laid down and  mimeo sheets pass up a Christmas light strand of friend & foe to teacher who’s hand will shrivel cold in her daughter’s tears. “Lonely grubbers those priests and school-masters!!” he mused – no life excavated or precious breathed exhumed ever comes without fear & trembling. What exists under the dust has no colour of it’s own.  otta get beneath the mind, crawl under the heartless heart. Clear dust. Mind…… sharp.

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ii.

                        “Is the boy dead?”

                        A strange silhouette gleamed hulking before lighted window drawn with curtain. What rain preceded this confrontation between man & shadow now was a breathing mist wreaking of old blood hovering between the two figures. The darkness; hiding.

                        “What  you seek you wont find here. Go home to your wives. Go home to your children. Alive or dead, leave the boy be.”

                        “He’s afflicted. The boy’s touched with evil. Why you wanna hover over him like this? Since the day he came here, nothin’ but horrors come with him.”

                        As the man spoke, a coven of townsfolk haloed behind his back illumined by flames dancing entranced gypsy-like on the end of wood poles and bundles of straw held equally high by woman and man. No one was spared from holding something:  pitchfork, knife, or rifle; everyone came with something in their hands.

                   “With a nail & an eye does the enemy show himself to be an ally.” The strange shadow himself flung his voice , holding the boy like a skeleton of water dripping in his arms. “He speaks his diatribe as if it is law. One man speaking for all of you! He is nothing beyond a scared, confused mule shepherd who thinks himself a squire or a pope. ‘Divinely anointed’ he tells you! Only a devil would call himself ‘divinely anointed.’”

          “Hand him over you wretch! There are dedicated sick in there infirmary Katherine attends to; God’s infirmed. Not the devil’s sow. What you hold there is Purgatory! An emissary of Lucifer! Yous hoverin’ over him….well that makes you one of the cloven-hoofed’s own”

          “Lest we forget friend, Lucifer is the Angel of Light.”

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                        “Friend? Friend? He talks like we kin er something? Listen boy, we started out cum stains in momma’s belly. It don’t matter how you start, it’s what you end up as! Not how you begin beggar…its how you end!”

                        What ample hour & space hung between the masses now diminished to a hushed harmony of the crowd reciting the Lord’s Prayer while the shadow resisted his retreat, holding fast with a boy & promises.

                        “Whatever you do to me will not touch me. Nothing’s ever lost. You can never touch me.”

                        “….forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us…….” En harmonium

Katherine woke to vigilante sermon bombarding her sleep; remained

hopeless in rushed housecoat  and bare-feet in the doorway ‘til she received the boy from the dark figure as a kneeling mother receives the Host in Sunday steeple prayer. The crowd’s menacing shifted without notice amonst them. Like some gazelle lost in the lion’s reaching, hate feasted on pursuing the nuisance that prevented the kill. Raised pitchforks gleamed with moonlight ; torches threw their flames like blood on rusted tongs. Rifles cocking rang like church bells in Gamorrah…..

                        “….our Lord who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done..”

          The crowd hung his carcass from a tree branch like Judas. Slashed open his belly so the hawks would find him by the stench.

                         Iron Sam woke, sobbing so it whisked breath away from his lungs and left it hanging like spider webs in the joints of his shack; such dolor in his gut, he yearned for the pitchfork rust left holy on his tongue. His body clenched in seizure;

strummed a lyre.

                        When a boy, he visited this scene in sleep from the visible world of law & fault. The reason he returned to this vision he knew not why; guardian-ed by tree and mountains looming. The mantra over & over in his mind accompanying this gothic play was constant; he summoned with this chanting, beating, drumming:

”you can’t ever defeat evil. you can simply survive it.

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Iron Sam

                   He loved watching fires: harmless cigarette wrapper held o’er candle flame at Grandma Jorgensen’s window kitchen table maze-tobacco-stained hair smoke conversations; the woodstove belching in the barn shrouded by tree and shadow; some primal caw about fire allowed Iron Sam the pathos to sleep alone. It was the perestroika infernos delighted what hell dwell within his evening bones. Barking, nays;  a Lucifer of pandemonium glee turned over in blood joy & bloated as the screams, the dreams melted with flesh & wood.

Tossin’ another beer can amidst the pauper of bonfire he built to cook

a pot of beans and wieners, Iron Sam knelt down against the snap & smoke. Breathing in a moment, he held the stench in his throat and mind; smelling this perfume before……not in the company of fire or wood though. He searched himself for the answer that wouldn’t come. And he was pleased with his failure. He didn’t see his soul as darkness or light. But shadow. Reflection. A palsied replica of flawed origin. 

                        Iron Sam’s shack grows wild & messy between tulip-tree and stars; a one-room iris lit by sun and candle with the moon; box flap window, old pacer side window glass. Axe, pitchfork, tin bucket slashed with eight shades of other people’s dried house paint. Teepees of fire-wood immersed the moon-swaddle, wheel-barrow crusted in a shell of concrete and rocks, woodstove, washtub for dishes & body, skinny cot army blanket under window, butcher’s block, mother’s sewing machine table, single back chair of maple that when he sat in his knees touched his chin, paperbacks on dirt floor; Tolstoy, Hemmingway, Gonzo journals, Bukowski.  Those vicious parishioners of skid row soul prose. He lay smoking with stars musing torches moving through, hovering in the night, bounding to loose this monster. Envelope taped to ceiling from a drunk hand scrawl, droned his eyes to flutter:

all who wander are not lost

he read it again, thinking he had missed something, like the

perfume: all who wander are not lost.

The moon shone three more turns, bleats of heart & Iron Same would

rise for wiping sleep from his bones.  Another winter plowing street snow, smoothing buckled roads, lingers.

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Darrell

                   Her shower singing woke the night-watchers, the mothers unemployed & children discovering morning from dark within the neighborhood; most of the troubled folded back into sleep while others ruthlessly pulled shit out of their mind and cussed at the woman singing. Darrel lay under his daughter while his woman sang. His breathing sounded the old whores of dead-petal-hours ruminating; the daughter squirming on his bare belly felt like twelve kittens crawling about him, shunning woman for man, knowing he to be the one she suckles some pre-natal Uumbanda ritual where skeletons suckle wolf cubs & women marry bears;

this girl held concealed none of the father’s struggle to recognize her as his own.

           Darrell drifted off to a visceral sleep listening to his woman’s singing. His daughter scampered down the hallway; apple juice on the mind.

Iron Sam

            The black kettle Sam found at Volunteers of America between sheriffs’ sale houses & amusement sanitarium. Most of his possessions were imbued with this sentience: passed from hand to hand, hand-me-downs, weathered genius. The man thought his breath was old itself ; not stale, just….recovered. Thrift stores with their battered artifacts & minstrel idols pried from the dead, dying, outlaws & paupers were a kind of Edgar Cayce-ian lion-prowl reminiscence his own heart rediscovered with  in the grain of a sad black kettle boiling snow into hot water, fit for a tub and squeaking bone-jams.

            Iron Sam Flint woke with coyote & gathered snow in that tin bucket for his weekly bath. Axe & plough where left them; angled against shack’s exterior wall , it too weather-beaten and worn down showing old bones; the one that faced sunset, whereupon the morning brought out what was left behind. Before rising, Iron Sam uttered a little lamb of thanks : if all is taken or if all remains, he is untouched.

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Darrell

                        Sarah whisks a blue bowl full of yolk, mentions her thanks of Darrell; his parting the life he takes leave of in daily temperance simply to provide a meager bounty in absence and returning when the whistle blows. Whiskey and coffee. His daughter, scampered and fussed all morning, now asleep in elephant trunks of black hair flowing around her clutching on couch cushions:  morning cartoons, apple juice in the carpet. Darrell wanted whiskey with his coffee but cleaned the apple juice spill instead. Feeling at peace with his fear in attending his daughter, her dependence on him was by choice, unlike Sarah’s whose clinging came after pills & vodka one night that lasted from tenement to Section Eight to trailer.

                        Vinegar, paper towels & scrub ; the girl slept through. Back in the kitchen, Darrell dressed from dining room hamper watching artillery strand of  trailers through window : snow & ice, wind scraping against sheet metal, howling. A sickening bludgeon of wind barreling against window : an aluminum bat ripping cowhide & twine. That sound is wretched, he thought. A baby’s skull against a skillet. You know someone or something lost a chance. That sound crippled Darrell, slipping on his shoes. His breath scraping over his teeth.

                        Her singing breaking from a distant rustle, bassooned down the hallway; he thought only of strangulation.

Iron Sam

                        Iron Sam hitchhiked from the main road below the mountains to his locker & salt trucks, ten miles. Six suns long now he would rumble taking that hike down with a brown paper bag lunch in variance from peanut-butter & jelly on wheat bread, an apple, granola wrapped in newspaper, banana to last night’s corn-beef hash or stew in a French vanilla coloured thermos with blue cup-top.

                        This nomadic ritual brought with it it’s usual chamber of highwaymen who round-robined picking him up along the road. His own pick-up lay rusted and barren back at the shack; a Paleolithic skeleton diseased of some beast extinct, crouched beneath the trees and snow-caps, the silence somehow kept the gone-beyond beast’s old world growl & roar. Thing hadn’t fired & turned over in eight

6

years ; something gone that long don’t need fixin’.

          His intentions, useless as they be, were to walk from shack to garage; churn up the menstrual perfume of pine & cedarwood in mindful stroll; a smudging of asphalt & ether with young sun and old man not yet parted, fox stirring from fox dreams in a gulley. Iron Sam being a part of this world most folks through without noticing accepted anonymity as if it were a kiss from the fat girl wrapped in wreaths & Christmas lights walking home from high school house-bash; her presence a gourmet pedestrian guffawing for the revelers ; her sob-full exit crows the bleak avenues boiling with winter rain.

                        Iron Sam watched for charged eyes;  the ones he dreamed of alone. In his passage, deliberate & ripe, he strained to find what he saw in those fires of his; a buoyant fertile unbending crude awe that only existed in the headdress flames he secured around himself ; yet what was discovered in all this? A Ferris wheel round sextet of curious commuters taking turns in transport to & fro merely for the storytelling later, reminisces over withering skin and palsied limbs to disobedient grandchildren?

                        The first commuter was a balding blabber who Iron Sam could only listen to, not look at. Today he picked Flint up eight majestic strides around the second curve in a barren road:

                        “Guess I’m goin’ your way this day Sammy boy. Harharharharhar! My turn feller. Hop in!”

                        Flint walked alongside the empty passenger seat, door swung open, taking infrequent drags off his smoke; brogans sinking in the voluptuous glop of roadside mud & dead leaves. Tires roll with precise pause. Abraham Christmas conversed alone to Sam as if the two sat on tenement fire escape, finishing the day with beer.

                        “Catch wind of the temperature drop Sam? Why I had my thermostat up to 72 and still needed the flannel pajamas! Guess you needn’t worry about trifles such as thermostats. You get bitter cold, just throw some more wood there in the bellystove.harharharharhar! Snow’s got to be around the corner don’t ya think?”

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                        “Sure. Sure. Seem’s right enough.”

                        “Well why don’t you hop in right-quick here; I’ll take you the ways remainder.”

                        Blood-bone skeleton cars honked their frustration;, goblin-contorted-faced drivers shouting “FUCK YOU!” passing Abraham and Flint on the mountain road as both figures slowed to an accordion wheeze:

                        “Put your cigarette out first please will ya Sam?”

The conversations didn’t morph; blind-mind talk of weather and

reminding Iron Sam to eighty-nine his smokes, Abraham turning the radio to white morning political-liberal-talk-junk further eating America into asses & elephants. Sam kept up his smoking and slipped in to Christmas’ offer ,  thinking wind in the trees sounded like that Mel Torme song about people walking around in a daze living high above the ground; dreams & days passin’ people by. Clenching his Thermos of beef barley, Iron Sam was sure he would wake from Abraham Christmas, this car ride, these trees, the plow-trucks and work that waited at the end of the line. He was sure he would wake in darkness, hear his woman & boy grunt hunger ; that tune was familiar. He woke to hunger ;  knew how to appease it, feed that demon of human longing. It was something Iron Sam could wrap his hands around, bring down by it’s  skin, break bones from meat & share with tribe. The stench of raw blood, his woman’s broken teeth, putrid, innards burning in the pit; medicine for the infirmed. Iron Sam waited to wake in that cave, waited……smoking his cigarette, clenching a Thermos of beef barley.

Darrell

        He shoved an eight-track in the truck’s deck. Morning companion, Dill Hoover, drank cold coffee in mittens ; swivelheaded. The pair met every morning at Hoover’s on Crackel Road; three traffic lights straight south of Darrell’s trailer. Long enough for the truck to warm up and fire. Hoover’s pick-up was re-poed; a great dane of a man came to get it while Hoover was taking a shit. He saw the hitch and dash through waist-high bathroom window. Dill sprayed Lysol, finished a paragraph on llamas in Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader. And breathed.

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      “Ya know something Darrel, we pass these here damn houses ev’ry morning. Hell, I make this my home & all the I mean…..I mean I don’t know a friggin one of’em. The people is what I speak of, not the houses. Just seems wrong, unChristianness to pass with no greeting or a ‘how-do-you-do’ so much.  My one neighbor there, he works over at Paris Bros Garage, mechanic right? I take the trucks over for fixin’ more than not & he just don’t make no talk other than talk about bad radiators, gear boxes, whatever be the problem. Same when we get back home; never gives a word for word’s sake. It’s all receipts and company checks this guy knows. We livin’ in a-non-o-mous days Darrel. Gets so I think I’ll forget my own name if it weren’t writ down somewheres.”

                        Darrel chomped on a glazed donut, driving with knees, fidgeting the tape deck get playin’. Earth stood blinding today. Stark. Broad. The tape still wouldn’t play.

                        “So last night I’m watching some television,” coffee slurp, hack, haucher, nose phlegm, spit in the freeze , “some of that evenin’ news. This Punjab lady with some great ole’ chestnut crackers starts in how Iowa University done this research says the more time you invest on talkin’ on the internet thing, the more likely you’ll have what they call social ang-zi-uh-tee…something like that. Know what that is Darrell?”

                        The tape warbled, wobbled voices of the dead drunk. Darrell bit at the stale donut. The tape wouldn’t play it right.

                        “& see social ang-zi-uhty is where you get real scared about havin’ to go places, talk to people. Like you was watchin’ yerself a right scary movie – Psycho or that one flick where the girl makes winky outta that crucifix jabbin up inside her there and gets her momma to start lickin’ her filthy little bush…she was possessed tho’ by this devil er something er other….wadn’t in her right mind, I don’t want you thinking I was watchin’ those movies where the momma lays down with the daughter and the son acting like they was married and shit….that’s right blas-fee-mus ……..what the hell is the name of that flick….she gets her head spinnin’ and spewin’ that green shit. I heard that was pea soup. You believe that was pea soup Darrell?  hell…..everythin’s Hollywood these days. Made up bullshit. I marry me a good girl I was thinkin’, turns out she done had laid with every slouch the county done seen come & go. Don’t know what you getting’ into anymore even when you do. But that’s

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what that is, that social ang-zi-uh-tee. And ya see everyone there is on the internet, not in the town square or on their front porch talkin’ ya see. Bein’ human. Got me thinkin’ the other day maybe I’ll open me up one uh those….oh…whats the name…..joints where they come to sit at them round tables and they have them fold-out computers sittin’ there to check their information superhighway mailbox….damn it Darrell…..names uh things I aint familiar with always get me forgetful…..”

                        See him wasted on the sidewalk in his jacket & jeans/ wearin’ yesterday’s misfortunes like a smile

                        Mornings here hid behind themselves; muddled sun in dirty river of grey cloud, body of dirt & water & mud shedding Her blood, barren eggs and tissue in the form of snow and frozen rain. Lactating mother squatting over these two barren pilgrims in rust-tub of truck rolling highway through menarche talk, fumbling to discernment.

                        “AHHHH RIGHTYOOO JERICHOOO! A little Kristofferson between boys…..HOT DIGGITY WOMPAM……..!!!!!!!”

“God damn it Dill! I’m eatin’ a stale donut listenin’ to your shriveled ass

talk nonsense nonstop. You ain’t even thought that if you’d shut up here once in awhile to shit , people might get to say a word? Aint you watchin’ me tryin’ to get this music to kick on Dill? Minute it comes to right, you squakin’ like dinner’s on the god damn table and you been in solitary confinement two weeks long! Damn it Dill – ‘s like you eat the life right out of folks.”

                        The singing stopped. Dill brought his lazy limbs in like a twine of hair lifted from shower drain – tight to his trunk, bent over coffee the way Gandhi must have looked before he was shot in the head and carried in flowers.

                        “See that’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout, right there, “ Dill’s voice lay stock in gospel praise, propelling from a child-sore-sadness bent over Styrofoam coffee into rattler strike, plummeting in it’s timbre; growl, a sinister matriarch slashing her lover’s throat so the children may feed ,  “how can the world come to change if some highwayman drivin’ his jalopy ball-sack truck in the snow can’t even offer change

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hisself. You just mean Darrell – make everybody else mean ‘round ye too. Just a mean old mutha fuckin’ dog.”

                        Tamer of prophets, old voice wound in tape and plastic, warped in it’s praise and crawled ‘long the minds of the truckmen filling their cab with somber joy; two men wearing their souls like bearskin, wolverine pelts; wishing , hoping yet bullied by further highway-work, mortgages, electric bills, propane tanks need fillin’, stale donuts, coffee gone cold before song breaks on a road tained white ; salt laid down by the night crew.

Iron Sam

                        Abraham Christmas watched Iron Sam thru the rear-view; tilted away from trailing cars.

                        “Saw on the news last night this girl, I think she was about 17 or 18, who was sentenced to 6 years in jail for stabbing and leaving her newborn in a quarry where the baby died.”

                        “Where was the child’s old man?”

                        The car hummed along; descending, threading out of the tops of trees down for the town below.

                        “Said the two kids’ parents didn’t know about the baby”

“No. I mean the baby’s old man. Where was the infant’s father?”

                        “Ah, yeah right – oh he was there. Gets two years himself for aiding in abandoning the child. A quarry. In a quarry.  Like an animal. Just a sickness and it sickens me to think about it.”

                        “So why bring it up?”

                        “Conversation Sam. I know you don’t get a lot of news from out in the world up there all alone. Just like to keep you informed with what’s happening out here.”

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                        “Sounds like I can do without such talk Abraham……..why don’t you tell me about your wife, your children.”

                        The car emerged from mountain and wood a long-thought-extinct beast from the Cenozoic Era who spent these millions year dashing from annihilation running until the rivers became stone and the forests became winding asphalt roads and he could die in the splendor of a smog blurred sun. They hit the interstate with Flint’s inquiry of Christmas’ brood.  Abraham began to spasm at the wheel; a continual perception of falling.

                        “My wife Sam?”

                        “You talk about removed articles; parcels of tales that have nothing to do with you or I. I fall asleep at night wondering if you’re just my guardian angel, a guide of sorts, and I’m holding you up in your deed-doing by having you come be a man taking me to work certain days. Nothing ever you speak about concerns itself with you directly. The teaching is to the teacher & comes back most to him.”

                        Earth: rolling, morphed from tall pines and duff to a brawling religion of metal and traffic lights blinking, summoning. The sun hid behind morning clouds; gone were hawk and squirrel. Windows rolled down an inch for fresh breathing; they both affirmed without speaking a faint estrusian perfume in the ether.

                        “My wife is a good woman. She went to Tufts. We met when she came visiting a high school girlfriend of hers at Vermont where I was studying coincidentally. A group of us were waiting at a crosswalk and she was there with assorted friends; re-acquainted and inherited you could say come to find later. We just got to talking standing there because there wasn’t anything else to do but talk or wait. Ambiguous at first mind you; the requisite ‘dark night isn’t it?’ and she replied ‘that’s usually what happens at night.’ I was finding my way, opening myself up as much as I was her. As we talked, our groups of friends kind of mingled and broke up amongst each other until there was one glob of human’s laughing, shouting, talking, walking together as one organism almost; dependant on every molecule of humanity and discourse. So we went out for beers, talked, danced, felt awkward, then drunk. So we agreed against the bathroom door in the bar to meet for coffee that afternoon. After that, we just kept with each other and POOF! All of a sudden we’re married, moving ‘cross country for a bench tech job I got with a microchip manufacturer and we’re talking about starting a family. From a crosswalk to the long walk….wow. Make sure I keep my mind on the road mind you Sam, haha, all this thinking will surely put us over the guard-rail!”

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                        Circling ‘round Iron Sam, hunter to he who is prey, the city snarled and dug at his swarthy grimed heart. Soil & earthworms in his ears; a heart clogged with melting snow and axes. He saw man-hole covers and steam billowing from gapes in the fit; jaw shot off at the hinge repaired with hooves saved from the slaughter & nails from the barn took down after twister. Suits and dresses moving along wet sidewalks talking on cell-phones; he heard one suit say “my status is firm. I’m worth the extra fifty grand seeing as I can pull one hundred times that amount for your operation.” He watched from behind tentacles of smoke wrapping themselves in a wave, this man, putting monetary value on himself, a measly fiftythousanddollars. True, Iron Sam couldn’t conceive of fiftythousanddollars but he thought of sow auctions he’d been to with his father where the men would yell out figures and prices for snortin’ hogs after circling them in stalls and eyein’ them with a poacher’s mind ready to take home the boon, fatten ‘em up and slaughter them for food. Funny how now people themselves were sellin’ themselves off, fattening themselves to oinker ; sledgehammer comes quicker than they realize.

                        Christmas gave Flint nothing but silver trays and biscuits. The woman he spoke of as his wife didn’t breathe in his retelling. Abraham described her as a laundry detergent or curtains. An acquisition stumbled into with a squeaky, lock-jaw wheeled grocery cart; a half-price bargain bought solely for the savings it brings and not for it’s filling of a need.

                        Dismantling of bone.

Iron Sam flung the cigarette out & thought without speaking until

Abraham Christmas pulled up to the station, letting Iron Sam leave with simple parting of : “I have a dinner meeting with the boss tonight Sam. I’m in line for a promotion :  supervisor. So don’t be stubborn and catch a ride with Julie or Gary.”

                        Raising of hands, nod of the heads, Christmas pulled away from the slugging figure and watched him shrink in rear-view ; his pudgy fingers turning white and strawberry red tightening around steering wheel; his mind and sanity clung on thinking “promotion. Supervisor. Promotion. Supervisor. Roof for the house. Siding in the summer. Promotion. Supervisor. Promotion. Supervisor”

                        As if an angel would ever wear a suit on this road.

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Sarah & Samantha

                        Mother and daughter dutiful, rolling through white light aisles, morphing from galleys of bananas, kiwi, MacIntosh’s, Golden Delicious, plastic-cone wrapped thundering bouquets to silver cans, gallon juice jugs, milk cartons, bleu cheese wedges, halos of Romano, cold rump trays of beer, sausages. You can find Sarah’s daughter there, in the chicken, pressing little fingers against a plastic adhesive poking blood still jostling there in the chicken bones; moving it from thigh to leg to breast – watching it dance a leaf against stars. Joy in being a four year old: sweet smiles hung, mother’s weeps at night to drown lullaby.

                        “C’mon here little girl. We have to get back so mommy can start cooking.”

                        “but , but , but I like the smells heeeeeereeeuh!”

                        “There’ll be better smells at home baby girl. We have to go to the spaceships now, c’mon girlie”

                        “The car smells like grandma mommy, I want that one..” pointing to the chicken she left behind, still punctured with her finger-presses, rising back into themselves.

                        “C’mon punkin”

                        Samantha whirled about, singing to white chicken, sinew & cold wet blood on her tiny fingers; pudgy pout counterpoint to her lemur eyes; bountiful, ecstatic, devout, pierced tears on Christ’s thorns, delighting in the colours & stresses.

Sara moved a fog through the aisles, creeping around fat-bellied soup cans stacked five high on core-board shelves & pepperoni sticks swollen, bundled utters in the waking pantomime for to milk Faberge from snout. Minding the coupons and cash, finding credit card and loss of conversation with the grey cashier fingering banana and celery stocks, eyeing tampons, Sarah lifted graham crackers in the red box and began filling conveyer.

                        “Taking care of an infantry are you Sarah ?”

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“Samantha you don’t need the gum – put it back”

                        She did so without resistance, turning her attention to the spaceship and the funny dough-faced pilot who in entering advancing years also shed distracting feminine wiles; wands of light hair protruding from chin, her voice more barrel-chested ;  Sarah forget each time she saw her pilot if it was a boy or a girl……she asked a different question each time, most adults would find demeaning, but the pilot found inquisitive.

                        “What’s that?” pointing again, this time to the pilot’s neckline.

“”Oh these little copper bells sweetheart? Well, my husband gave me

these a long spell ago. Your mommy’s mommy probably was about the age you are now!

                        “You’re old!”

                        “Samantha!”

                        “Oh it’s quite fine Sarah dear. It’s nice she asks questions. Shows her mind isn’t mottled.”

                        Sarah kept eye on the burgeoning total with each passing parcel. One-hundred-fifty bucks in her wallet for two weeks, one credit card with needle-eye room to fill, three other cards maxed out. A trailer she would enter; temple to no valuable artifacts; she adored & loved Samantha, but that little girl would never be an artifact in this life. Sara would see to it Samantha never lingered long in that trailer.  Boxed bookshelves, plywood desks, liquidation center couches/recliners, box-television set her father dug out of the basement. No clocks. A child’s finger-painting-frescos on the fridge. Sarah thought of Frida at this moment; wished she could love a woman like Kahlo did Diego. Softness, delicacy on her lips. Not this sweaty broken-toothed life she moved within.

                        “See Sammie, my husband used to go out and dig up treasures from the ground. People would leave them behind; people who came before you and me”

                        “stuff they lost?”

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      “It wasn’t so much lost as they left things behind they couldn’t fit in their backpack when it was time to move.”

                        “Mommy says I have to leave the smells here. Our car smells like grandma.”

                        “You can take the smells with you in your mind Sammie. Everywhere you go you can remember all these smells.”

                        The pilot’s little hanging copper bells: jangling, hardstone, friars slinging against the other in drunken reverie, little hanged Judases grotesquely tangled, suffocating, pulsating, hardening. Sarah wished she could pay, leave and drive home. There was no need for idle talk. It put no money in her hand, no food on the table. Lingering only meant wasting.

                        “Those people culdve taken, uh, their stuff, uh, in their minds toooo”

                        “Who knows? Must have been done with what they needed them for hunnie”

                         “Ok.”

Finally – “Onehundredtwentysevenandthirtytwo.”

                         Sarah couldn’t resist this emerging story while pulling out her credit card.

                        “So your husband, he was an archeologist?”

                        “Sure was. He went on an excavation when we first met back in 1931. Over in Pippin Lake. Towner’s Mound back east. That was the Hopewell Indians region. Lewis went with George Towner himself. They found these copper bells in the shape of tubes, see; Lewis found them himself. About forty I believe he told me at last count they had. He tucked five for me away in his satchel. Lewis said he was sure it was me who put them there “ - a tea kettle whistle laugh shook from her rosy-cheeked recollection – “That I was a little Hopewell girl and wanted him knowing I knew what he was doing even when I wasn’t around. I didn’t care a hoot what the man did. No woman but me could stand his snoring anyway, hohohoho, so who’d have him?”

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Lewis. The pilot had said it like he was far away. Quietly. Reverently.

Out at war or another excavation. He was coming back in her mind. When Sarah herself spoke of Darrell; she remembered; she never did speak of Darrell.

                        “How’s Darrell hunnie?”

                        “Oh he’s fine. Working as usual. Busy this time of year with the roads and everything.”

                         “I bet he sure is. It’s nice to have folks to come home to when you’re all spread out over the day, doing what needs done. It’s always nice to come together at day’s end.”

                        Samantha fell asleep at the second traffic light. Darrell wouldn’t be home for three hours. The pilot didn’t ask about his standing. Sarah herself had no trinkets to show that Darrell mined for her. No clanging copper bells from seventyfive year gone Towner’s Mound back east. Her clothes bought before Darrell. She parted from the image of him climbing on top of her that night four years ago. Could have been any man. Didn’t mean it was Darrell. Could have been God;  No man.  Samantha was asleep. Darrell wouldn’t be home for another three hours.

Iron Sam

             The trucks lumbered like mastodons through Caligula’s Rome as they plowed and snorted and cleared out the city moderna. Snow endlessly driven ahead of the men behind wheel & motor. Christmas’s foretelling of snow ; Iron Sam smoked another cigarette driving the plow down Sicklerville to Keenan Road. City left behind, Flint lurched around parked cars leaving whole snake mounds of snow behind him & brought in the smell of cold pine. His body quivered like stone; such ways the earth expresses Herself, dresses Herself with adornments grown out of the emptiness: trees, bushes, stones, grasses, mountains, geysers. The aroma of one’s own power unearthed & worn with such girlish propriety – ah! – better than petrol and coffee in the tumbling of white sun to pink sun.

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                        Flint kept the cab of his truck in ordered tsunami. Pockets of cleanly defined filth. Brown paper lunch bags strewn like lovers’ clothes shed ‘cross floor-boards; cracked & listless hobo clowns filled with browning apple cores, black banana peels, blue orange rinds. A coffee cup pug:  green, white and written in yellow Garamond type the words JOHN DEERE on both spheres; half a sip of orange juice sloshed idly in black plastic cup holder. He rarely got the rig up over 50milesperhour;

damn wheel would shudder. Kept a pyramid of paperbacks in a brown paper grocery sac on the passenger rumble. He only read the book on top, the eye ; that changed. Two years and the same six books supported the Change:  Sartre’s NAUSEA, a black & white photograph retrospective on the history of boxing from Thesus’ pleasure and bare-knuckle pugilist James Figg on up present day, Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE, an official baseball register of stats and pictures chronicling the year nineteenhundredandsixtysix, a Brooklyn Bridge dust jacket edition of Hart Crane poems and a biography on Marlon Brando. He finished Gibran’s THE PROPHET on Tuesday. Today, the Change was Gibran’s THE PROCESSION. Doors locked while driving. Radio off. Iron Sam’s thoughts were static and vivid enough. The world stood still outside his plowing. He was the one moving.

                        19hundredsixty6; Mike Hegan was playing first base for the Triple A Toledo Mud Hens, waitin on the call for pinstripes and centerfield monuments to the dead. Onehundredsix at bats with twentytwo free passes, came to a batting clip of oneseventynine that year. Iron Sam thought of his father; Jim Hegan who caught for the Cleveland Indians. He wasn’t much of a stick either. Now he called a great game, blocked the plate like Mara : an eclipse. Lo to squeeze a single outta his lumber was as fruitless as drawing venom-stained oracle Black Rosary priests from the womb of Madame Theresa tho disputing their presence invetro could fashion a tunic of fools as yr coven. Of course devils stalked and ruminated within La Santa de la Gutter as they do within the cauldron of Buddha, Jesus and Man but it is an unconscious heresy that mimics the worst and remains sedentary save to destroy the balance of Heaven & Hell & Earth & Venus & Pluto:  the playground. Especially apocalyptic is the weighted measure of sandlot, diamond and leather. Iron Sam then thought of his own father; & rolled the windows closed.

                        Turning down Keenan Road, Flint parked truck in her cul-de-sac. He would work late tonight.; walk home after city cars passed unknowingly before his shack.

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Darrell

                        “How about you Darrell….how’s the old lady?

                        “Good I guess.”

                        “You guess? HA! When’s the last time you checked on that? If you don’t, someone else will HAHAHA!”

                        “Real funny Gordy. When’s the last time you let your wife fuck you up the ass?”

                        “What the fuck bugs you ‘Rrell? All the fuckin’ time anymore.”

                         Two men rising from break table, walking towards, nose-to-nose……

                        “She ain’t my concern, see. Samme is. I got no beef with anyone who don’t’ lie & bullshit there way with me. Got that Gordy? Now shut up about this thing.”

                        “You always shoutin’ ‘bout somethin’ with her. She lied to you, she fucked with you, and never no reasons why. What the fuck ya yellin’ for Darrell? C’mon man. What the fuck you yellin’ for?”

                        The two men slumped shoulders and fierce-pose. Gordy grabbed Darrell by the oil-stained sleeve of his work shirt;  in their relenting, Gordy still aimed for some fierce show of compassion:

                        “She lied – alright Gordy? She just lied.”

Sarah & Sammie

                        She laid Sammie down on the comforter for her nap. Mind wandering, Sarah sat on the bed and stroked Sammie’s thin blond hair.

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                        “I liked pilot’s bells mommy.”

                        “Mrs.Elsinore hunnie-bear; yeah, they were pretty. Just like you”

                        “huhuh-huh, huhuh-huh….you’re funny mommy”

                        “rest Precious. When you wake up you can help me make dinner before daddy comes home.”

                        Sammie’s face looked a lion tucked under her crossed arms. Strong, peaceful , a raging titanic cathedral bell soul battering against her bones, growling to jump & howl the ghosts surfacing. Her tiny face, an open furnace door in her dark room.

Iron Sam

                        Her trailer wasn’t a trailer when you were inside & Iron Sam Flint waited in the kitchen rocking against the counter edge embroiled with heating water for hot chocolate, offering prayer before pour and sip, holdin’ his water while Jeni perfumed her breasts or plucked nose hairs before bathroom mirror. She had potted vines hanging from patio awning he saw through kitchen window; their spindly winding glass arms gaggling in jew’s harp wind. Would he too be emaciated and wasted of love with Jeni? Yes; if he let her be the one to remember and feed it. This guarded betrothal tasted sulfuric in his heart & he thought of dental floss & whisks as a boy whipping eggs in silver bowl with mom ; the gurgling yolks and whites sounded like a fat man chocking on mucus and feathers; if that is the sound of the world dismembered he would love Jeni for her presence, behold her as she is. Yet again he thought of Whitman, of that heavy-planked seraphim cock-sucker’s lyrics : there was a child went forth every day and the first object he look’d upon, that object he became.. His love for Jeni, was it mere virgin love for oneself through another body? Was all this a way of expressing love and erotica for one’s own bones through pleasing anothers? Making love to Jeni because Iron Sam as of yet hadn’t unearthed his own vagina?

                        The splash of light thrown on a couple of framed family pictures hanging in the hallway went dark; Jeni appeared from the miasma pulled from light.

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                        “Didn’t you hear the teapot blowing silly?

                        His body didn’t spasm from her words startling, it was her clean rose hue of breast. Jeni’s bulbous cheeks haloing slender knives of lip painted scarlet ; how her tea cup eyes melded with her skull raging out into a splay of cross-hatched shoulders billowing down to a crooked winding of hip, thigh, ass, calf, ankle and toe. How girlish this brutish tranquility as she moved the tea-pot to cold burner.

                        As a girl, Jeni admired her nakedness in mother’s mirror with iron concentration. Hiding under clothes, hiding under bones. She surfaced in her vision eschewing the heft of sin and inadequacy she came to in herself perusing the jib & stump, the loup-lump, river-banks, the tin-tang of inner thigh spreading further to become ass & the grace with which she turned, arched her back : bedsheet over a hanged man whipping in branches and wind. This ark of frenzy and desire hid something holy;  her youthful linger found to be holy itself. Her quick scrambling from mother’s room to her own bedroom. O! prowling fantasies of what her first man would delight in when delving within her shroud! Mother downstairs screaming from fullsink of dinner’s dishes : “Jennifer! You’re going to shake the chandeliers right out of the ceilings with all your running. Take it down a notch !”

But she didn’t care; wombing herself in quilt cloistered, pensive,

charged with shiver & tremble in dark room waiting for the stranger that wouldn’t come.

                        He held out the cup she gave him. He thanked her for the hot chocolate: a sip, a tumble. Flint approached Jeni in her robe, fumbling to find the counter seat and reproach his cup. Iron Sam nestled nose & lips behind her right ear, deep in the sweet smelling alley of skin and bone. He splayed his hand across her belly, drew her away from stove and kettle.

                        Jeni’s breath grew wobbly; his hand full of callus raked across her cold skin, opening tiny beads of blooded threaded on themselves. She hooked her legs around Flint’s knees peeling her like spider off its web, laying her on a dark floor. His hands answered her body’s stuttered yearnings : “Touch my face. Now my breasts. Squeeze my ass.” Jeni curled like a cloud around him, whimpered and moaned. Her robe spilled open, her body surfacing delighted in his hands in the dark that burned; kisses melted her body to stars. It didn’t matter their occasion of meeting; she had

21

forgotten as a flower forgets the hands that planted the seed; but there were those hands, unearthing, their shadow spectre of compassion. She smelled tear and coffee on his teeth & fat breath ; this was her Prince Myshkin, her George Willard, her stranger made Idol; his grotesque breathing syncopating her beating heart. This sweet beast, this lamb came to her, for her; he turned her back on Iron Sam so he may take her. Let the hot chocolate wither cold. Lift her from her robe from the floor, bring her breasts to his lips so again he may remind : this body is not dirty.

Darrell and Sarah; Iron Sam & Jeni

                      Darrell sat drinking the last gristle-swill bits of coffee as the truck  pulled down the aisle of trailers towards what roads lay ‘neath a purgatory of snow. Sarah inside cooking, Sammie would wake soon & Iron Sam smoked a Pall Mall Jeni offered him from empty pack. Darrel poured out the grounds, standing in the cold, scanning the trailer park. What stopped him from entering uninvited a woman alone? Unlatching, without word, and be led into her, work clothes and all. She would love his sweaty underwear, stench of a body hidden under layers of cloths seeped a day’s toil; as the body is sought & found in her peeling, it’s boils, it’s unmasked vulgar exultations, would be adored & loved by this strange woman found in desperation. And this strange woman found in joy. And this strange woman found in her bathroom.

                        With this thought, Sarah stepped out in the cold:

”Hey stranger. Dinner in ten.”                                                                                         

                        Styrofoam cup, warm hand. Only one door to go through.

                        Darrell followed Jeni inside and with her into the bathroom. She sat down, folding toilet paper around her fingers :

                        “Get done what you needed today?”