I am in a bed, on top of a pile of bloody sheets. There is a loose cover, blood-stained, draped over most of my body. My head is twisted to the right, eyes half-closed as I squint out beneath my lashes. My left hand is twisted upward, under a lumpy pillow, the fingers grazing a metallic object that I seem to know is a pistol.

There are other bodies all around me, one or more on top of the bed with me. I don’t know how I got here; was it just that I was asleep, checked into a hotel while traveling through the country? Was it some tryst, or was I ill?

Where did all those other people come from? Next, I become aware of noises, jumbled noises. Near me, flies – a constant droning. From the floor, an occasional soft effluence, a release of some ill-defined moisture or gasses. No moans…. Why aren’t any of these people moaning or crying out? Perhaps they are dead; or, perhaps, they are lying in wait as I am, deciphering the situation, trying to get enough orientation to respond.

From the next room, or what I assume to be the next room, a dull rumble of men’s voices, occasionally punctuated by a husky laugh. I strain to pick out words, but cannot. Could it be a foreign language?

Beyond all this, an occasional rumble, as thunder. Not thunder. Explosions, far away. A rattle of window glass follows each of the louder ones. It is night because it is dark and there must be at least one window in the room, and there are crickets somewhere, but not too nearby.

Am I hurt? Shot or cut, or beaten? The cover seems wet, sticky. Clearly blood, which I cannot abide.   Why then am I so calm in thinking about this? In my dream, do I know it is a dream, so it doesn’t matter? I try to drag my right hand up from alongside my body, and encounter the cold flank of another person. I think that he could be dead.   I know it is not a woman; or, do I just assume it? How much more is assumed, and how much is real?

I slowly pull up on my hand, and its back drags along the clammy flesh of the other. I am afraid to make a sound, or destroy too much of the silent symmetry around me, for I do not know how it is balanced. I decide to test my parts. Slowly I wiggle each hand, move my mouth, my feet, try a deeper breath. Everything works without pain. I ignore the itch between two of my toes, and the cramp across my shoulders.

I fish for a hold on the gun under the pillow, and my left hand slips into position; I seem to know what feels right. With the gun as my protection, I run my hand along my own side, onto my chest and belly, as far down my thighs as I can reach without disturbing the cover. There are some patches of unidentifiable moisture, some sticky, some just damp, but my fingers discover no holes or rips in my body underneath any of them. Somehow I have escaped whatever carnage befell the others, and somehow I slept through it or passed out or repressed it.

A voice grows close and the door opens a few inches. There is a pause, and more words are exchanged. I let my eyes open another fraction, and see a band of light vertically, and echoed on the floor. Then the door pushes wide suddenly, and there is a silhouette of a man in a cap; he is carrying a stick, or perhaps a rifle. I force my eyes shut, and suppress my breathing. In this new silence, even my thoughts pound in my ears.

Deliberately, the man moves across the floor, his progress traced in his boot-falls and his kicks at the unresponding bodies. There is occasional silence, and I let a peek escape from my clenched eyes; he is bending over some of the bodies, and pocketing odds and ends that he pulls from them.

A sharp knock in one corner freezes him, and I shut my eyes quickly. I am forcing myself not to move, and then I sense the knot on my face. I relax my features and go blank. Another tap from some unseen source, and the room is filled with the rattling of automatic gunfire. The slugs thunk into wooden walls, bounce off the cement floor, bury themselves into unyielding bodies with a viscous suction. Every ounce of me concentrates on not moving, but I must have startled because the gunfire stops and I feel his gaze toward the bed. I want to swing the gun barrel to point outwards, but am afraid to move my left hand. He is closer, his breath a short staccato mixing with the flies and the crickets. A voice yells from the other room but my man makes no reply; I hear and feel him picking his way to the bedside. He is there, he is over me. I cease to breathe. The body to my left moves into me, in response to what must be a poke of the rifle barrel. I leave my weight dead, and loll back against the force.

Another voice is now in the room, at the doorway. There is an exchange of gutturals I do not understand, and the nearer man drops spit on my face as he talks. In my mind I twitch in reflex, but my skin seems to remain placid because in another few seconds he is retreating, picking his way backwards over bodies and among limbs. I feel his distrust as he stands once more at the door, his eyes scanning the human debris for any motion. Then the door swings firmly shut, and there is laughter from the other side.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

I am in a bed, on top of a pile of sweated sheets. There is a loose cover, semen-caked, draped over most of my body. My head is twisted to the right, eyes half-closed as I squint out beneath my lashes. My left hand is twisted upward, under a soft feather pillow, fingers still holding the long strands of her hair.

There is one body next to me, curled and curved to fit into the convex spaces my own body defines on the mattress. I don’t know how I got here; is this my new wife in our bedroom, or some past or future affair, or some hooker drunkenly taken to some hotel room at the end of a long business day in some fungible mid-Western city?

I am afraid to move, to admit that I am awake. What will I say if I am addressed? I don’t know a name, or even the name I have used, or possess. I do not know if I have been sweet, or brutal, or inept; or if I have failed, or have given pain, or been the butt of her laughter.

Without moving, I allow my body to exude out towards her, sensing better her length, heft and feel. She is not as long as I am, but I cannot tell if she is full or slight. Twisting her strands of hair in my hand under the pillow, I know (imagine?) that it is long and blond, fine but without shape and style; I now know that it falls straight unchecked from her head to below her shoulders, and I remember her ears peeking out on each side.

My mind runs across my body for signs, and I am sure we have made love, but not often. I am wet, but sticky and caked. We have loved and slept, and we have not washed or stirred afterwards. There is no hollow ache in me; I am not spent. Did we choose not to continue, or did we just decide to sleep in that single mellow moment? Was it too good to spoil by more, or too poor to tempt a repeat? Or, was I just drunk again, dribbling off into a flaccid snore?

How does she smell? Neutral, but bathed; slight residue of flowers. Safe – not the smell of the kind of dangerous woman one can imagine in a nameless tavern where no one looks at you squarely. A friend perhaps, or at least an acquaintance.

But what if she is a friend of my family, or someone from my office, someone whose morning-after brings awkward complications, or at least the need to tell and repeat a story until its details become consistent from both of us? I had long ago hoped to avoid those mornings, no matter how tempting seemed the prospect of the night.

She exhales heavily, stretches, and parts of her torso and limbs lose contact with mine. Then there is a long pause, as she also remembers where she is and whom she is with, or perhaps realizes that she cannot do so either. Slowly, she pulls away from all contact, and I feel her hand grasp the cover to hold it in place as she slides out and onto the floor. She lets the cover fall back, and its warm drape settles into the curves where her body used to be. Bare feet move across the unidentified room, and the floor is not carpeted; the stick and pull of her toes and arches squish into the dark air. A door gently closes behind her, and in the next moment a line of light appears on the floor, its shine dissipating as it spreads towards the bed. I open my eyes, and water is running.

I take this chance to strain against the dark, forcing my eyes wide to absorb the scant light from under the door and learn what I can from the room. There is a pile of clothing half-way across the floor, a dresser and a mirror and two large windows with curtains drawn. Each side of the bed has a small table with a lamp, and I still hear the water so I grope and turn on my lamp – one click. Forcing my eyes further, I look at her end-table; there is nothing on it but a crumpled tissue, with blotted lipstick at one end. On top of the cover there is one plastic wine glass, a trace of white wine in its side. Stuffy air masks a smell I do not know, and the slow whirr of the fan masks all sounds outside the room save the now dying trickle of water.

I click off my lamp and lower myself to the position I remembered. I wait and my mind waits, and we are both very tired, so tired because it is late and it is confusing and we are oh so very tired that we lack the energy to decipher it all, although we want to, my mind and I, or we sort of do, except the bed is soft and the room is humming and I recognize the smell at last, it is almonds, and I love almonds, which are sweet and gentle things with romance and bouquet.   My mind wishes to sleep, and I cannot deny it.

Later, sometime later, I awaken with a start. I know I am alone. Light eludes the drapery and outlines the contents of the room. The bathroom door is open, empty beyond. On her end-table she has set the empty wine glass upright, and in it sits her tissue. I unroll the tissue and breath through it, drawing the air through the lipstick, but all I smell is almonds.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

I am in a bed, on top of a pile of bloody and semen-caked sheets. There is a loose cover, similarly coated, draped over most of my body. My head is twisted to the right, eyes half-closed as I squint out beneath my lashes. My left hand is twisted upward, under a feather pillow so ancient that it has gone to lumps. My fingers graze some object that repels with disgust but I cannot move away from it when I try. There is no link between my will and my body.

There are other bodies all around me, and they are all still, except for the woman pressed against my side. Her curves reach into the spaces my body leaves but we are out of sequence, and touch only roughly, bone upon bone. I know how we got there, this woman and I. We wandered down a street, into a hotel, came together over the sounds of the war that came ever closer, and then there were shouts, and gunfire, and as we sat up in amazement the door sprang open, men poured through it and then other men followed them, spraying gunfire and then settling their sights on each crippled body and pressing the trigger for a long time until the bodies no longer responded to the punctures and the thuds. The men looked at us in bed, and laughed, and one pointed his weapon at us but another barked a guttural command in the language of the country, and reluctantly they backed from the room, leaving us seated among the corpses.

We looked out beyond the curtain then, this woman whose name I did not know but who was stranded, as I was, for a night and day and another night in the airport when the rebels began their unexpected drive to the sea. She was from Germany and was traveling to the interior to see a sister; I was returning home from unsuccessful business.

Or perhaps she was a prostitute caught between the lines of war, attaching to any man who wandered into her view, even if he was not really there but just bouncing through his personal stream of dreams. Yes and then we hid together in a dark room upstairs in an unattended hotel, I just took the key to room eleven from the slot behind the desk, and made love in the emptiness and waiting because that night might have been our last through no fault of our own.

From behind the curtain could be seen that much of the town was afire, and men were walking and running, and the sky to the East glowed red. There was noise and bombs and small arms fire and crickets were dying in their fields as the fire swept over them. We returned to our bed and lay there because we did not know what else to do, and we smelled the bodies and their emissions, and the heady fumes of fuels and floating dust of burnings, and we made love and fell asleep.

I hope I gave her pleasure, although I now recall that she gave me pain. Then I tried to place my body so that our curves would coincide, but she was the wrong height, or she resisted subtly, or I did not remember how, but it did not work. Then the noise below grew louder and came up the stairs, and again men were in the room. I reached beneath my pillow for my gun, but withdrew instead long strands of blond hair, and stood naked on the shiny floor pointing strands of hair at them.

They overcame their surprise, and laughed. He shot her many times, and her blood sprayed over the bed and splashed onto my naked torso. I tried then to awake, but they saw my game, saw what I was trying, and moved to foil my escape in ways that I could not understand. I heard other voices, real voices then, and I tried to cry out, but the power ran out of me, and I lost that detached control that had carried me over and through that dream, that variegated dream, the infinitely repeated concentric circles of my dream, and the bullets hit me, racked me, finally disemboweled me, after all those nights when I was impervious, unassailable through all permutations of my story, my dream that I had played with, toyed with, edited and rewrote with impunity.

The bullets killed me as surely as if they were real, and I floated back into sleep. On my tongue, there was the faint taste of almonds.

The slightly sweet dusky smell of a small cigar crept out from under the folds of the red curtain and into the bar. The rule, or was it a law?, prohibiting smoking was not much observed, and certainly not in the private booths. Occasionally, a modest blue-ish puff could be seen drifting upwards, to be swirled out of existence by the ceiling fans.

Earlier Molly had just chewed the slender brown tobacco end; the cheroot was a rum crook, soaked in some non-distinguished liquor until it absorbed the flavor and odor and sugars into the fibrous strands. Molly did not find the mixture of leaked rum unpleasant when sloshed around with her spit and her Jack Daniels, and thought there should be a clever name for the combination, like one of those Asian drinks with fruits and umbrellas.

Miss Molly was newly retired as PE teacher at the Girl’s Academy on the hill, other side of town of course. Something more than a fixture, something less than an institution. It was an early retirement by mutual decision. The current run of girls did not appreciate the advice about aggressive use of the curved end of the field hockey stick to slow the opposition, and suspected with some accuracy that their coach rather enjoyed giving the lessons in real time. There had not been even a single mention of Molly’s attentions to the girls who, over the years, few in number to be sure, had enjoyed receipt of the pain and had understood the invitation it was designed to convey. Those disclosures would come later.

Molly grew up near here; this side of town. She went to the town school; big, gangly, nasty around the edges, played girl’s basketball to be in the paint with elbows out, played field hockey although she found herself always panting for breath; the cigarettes from 13 onward did not likely help her efforts. Molly was caringly nurtured by her mother, a woman of faded refinement abandoned by her husband with three small girls at home of whom Molly was the youngest. The household rallied to protect Molly from the things that the world had already done to her, too late to do much good except to protect Molly from the ramifications of her diffidence.

As a young woman went to State Junior college and majored in physical education. She liked the locker rooms most of all, instant assumed closeness that did not require really knowing anybody. She liked smiling all the time, at least when she really meant it. Big-boned and soft-tissued, with cropped hair and bitten nails, Molly dated a few guys who hung around the teams. She did not pursue a relationship, and none pursued her. Upon graduation, a friend of her mother’s recommended her as an assistant coach, and thirty years later she had been still there at the Academy, one of those graying invisible minions assigned to the minor sports for girls who knew they needed to exercise and knew they had no knack for it.

The curtain pulled back a few inches, releasing a block of smoke and odor; the opening was in invitation to come and sit and hang out. You didn’t come knocking before the curtain parted; Miss Mollycoddle came in and lined up her three whiskeys and two rum-soaked, kicked off her sneakers and pushed her sweat socks off each foot with the toes of her other, and meditated alone about her day. Since her retirement she had taken to sleeping later, rolling out of bed around 9, taking care of her toilet and smoking a half-pack of American Spirits with her Sanka. Molly did not take a newspaper and she only used her computer to check the lottery and to allow her sisters to send her emails they insisted on sending; sometimes Molly would read them and, sometimes, not.

This day Molly had spent some time putting articles in her scrap book. She had a book for each year with articles about her teams. She had no favorites as to groups or individuals, and never much worried that her teams always lost about the same number of games they won. On occasion her own name would appear; she used a light yellow highlighter to direct one’s eyes to that part of the article. Sometimes there was a picture of the team huddled with the coach but Molly often cut out those pictures and did not put them in the book; she did not much like how she looked in her track suit with her calves showing their meat below the knee while all the girls seemed to have tapering legs ending in pinched heels visible (or sensed) even through the thick game socks.

Her departing retirement gift, aside from a plaque and a five thousand dollar check, had been a flat screen TV; she had thanked the dean and faculty in a brief, muffled speech and had lugged the screen home herself; it was not that large, it fit in the back seat of the Subaru quite comfortably. The box was still propped against the wall of the living room, Molly was thinking maybe she would ask around the tavern to see if anyone would make her a good offer; her old set was smallish and not that sharp, but good enough for the soaps and she liked sitting close anyway, why get a bigger screen just to sit further back, seemed a waste. Besides, she would have to get someone to hook up the new one if she kept it, and she didn’t know anyone who could do that for her as a favor and was not in the habit of paying people to do work around the old house that her mother left her after her sisters had moved on to the City.

“Who’s the dame in the booth,” I asked. The bartender leaned forward discreetly.

“That’s Miss Molly.” A pause. “She’s a regular.”

“Regular what?,” I asked, thinking myself pretty smooth.

Another pause, a scowl. “A regular PATRON,” he explained with a touch of bored sarcasm. Molly might have been a sullen minor player, but she was a local sullen minor player; someone new to town didn’t get to share that perception even if accurate.

I must have knit my brow or something, or sent some signal of my own annoyance, because the bartender decided to lean forward again. “Just retired. A coach of girl’s teams at our private academy, Miss Molly.”

“Yeah?” I swished my Rolling Rock around my mouth; the neck of the bottle tasted soapy. “I coach kids at the Y. In the city, ya know?”

The bartender shrugged; he was almost as bored as I was.

“Think she’d like to talk?” I glanced over, could not see much of her face but I saw she was nursing a whiskey glass. “Talk shop, ya know?”

“Well, the curtain’s open so Miss Molly is what you might call in a receiving mood. Go knock yerself out.” This with a shrug and a tone that gave neither encouragement nor warning.

I lit a Camel, stuck it in my mouth, grabbed the beer in one hand and my order case in the other and walked over to her table.

“I know the type, it’s almost like a bad TV show,” the bartender murmured to himself. Louie pretended to wipe some water spots off the shot glasses as the salesman slipped off the age-veined leather stool and searched for his balance between the bottle and what appeared to be a heavy black sample case.

Louie didn’t own the place. His brother’s widow did. She was too dumb to suspect his skim, but then again business was so slow in the recession that it almost didn’t pay to grab the few bucks a night. If it weren’t for a few regulars – Miss Mollycoddle had surely been one of those for some time, although her intake had spiked upwards since her retirement – the place would have slipped beneath the waves. Shutting down the kitchen on week-days felt like the leading edge of a quiet demise.

“Thinks he’s a smooth talker. From Mason City, thinks his shit don’t stink, at least when he’s out among us country folks. Thinks every woman sitting in a bar is just waiting for some out-of-town guy to try out his hardware. Thinks every woman sitting in a bar is looking for it, from someone who won’t stick around to brag about it and mess up her small-town reputation. Fuckin’ asshole, ya ask me….”

Louie watched the creases in the herringbone jacket fail to fall out as the salesman receded towards the booths; too much sat-upon in the car, almost permanently implanted in the fabric. Probably just the coat from some old suit anyway, not a very good contrast with the beltless gray slacks that had slipped down just enough to bunch unattractively on his shoe-tops. At least this one didn’t have so much of a paunch that his waist-band rolled over, showing elastic and white trim where the belt-loops should have been. “Must keep himself in shape,” Louie said to himself with little interest.

The town was half-way from the old business center of Mason City and the new ring of businesses attracted by the last governor’s economic development zone. Lots of sales people came through, mostly end of the day, say 4 pm or so (although some did arrive around 11 or 11:30 in the morning, already beaten down and ready to spend a few hours before they filled out their call sheet with imaginary visits that were likely to result in orders in the next six months, make that nine to twelve). They pretended to be disappointed that the kitchen was shut, but a bag or two of Planters salted peanuts seemed enough to satisfy them, on the house don’t ya know.

Louie had worked at the Deere showroom for most of his life, right from High School in fact. His wife died, left him childless at sixty with an aluminum-sided house that plunked like a ukulele when the rain hit it from the side and a ten year old Dodge that needed a wheel alignment. The bar paid less and the hours were longer, but he was tired of discussing horse-power with a shrinking bunch of farmers who usually couldn’t qualify for the financing package once they decided on a model. Besides, there really was no boss here, and most of his friends dropped in to chat from time to time, which didn’t quite happen at the showroom. Louie didn’t know about the cancer yet, but he’d be spitting blood soon enough – about the time Mollycoddle left town, in fact.

Jake’s left knee popped when he slid off the stool and his leg hit the linoleum, and for a minute it felt like his balance left him as his sample case pulled him left and almost launched his beer out of his right hand. Jake had hurt the knee playing basketball years ago and every so often it gave him a momentary pang until the bone remembered its place and settled into the socket groove.

“This is a bad idea – maybe,” he thought, “didn’t like the expression on that skinny marinka behind the bar. Never know how weird people are, and I sure didn’t get any good vibes from the smoking babe behind the curtain. What the hell, whatuvIgotalose,” he asked himself, and since nothing sprang to mind he kept walking.

As he got near the booth the residue of cigar smoke reached him. Jake remembered smoking his father’s White Owls as a teenager; the cardboard-y odor as they burned down, the small bits of tobacco that peeled off the butt and stung a little if you accidentally swallowed them. He switched to cigarettes as soon as he could afford to buy them; his father was a cigars-only guy when home, which was not much. His mother never let inhalations of gasses interfere with the wine coolers.

Lousy trip, he thought. The recession had hit machine tool shops hard, no one wanted to upgrade and, if a bit or chuck was a little too worn, well it’d probably last another few months or you can always borrow a part from Joe or Fred, or just do without. No one was buying anything these days, not around Mason City anyway. Friggin’ Obama couldn’t fix a dripping faucet, let alone the manufacturing….

Jake was close now and would have stopped for a better look if he dared, but he didn’t. In for a penny in for a pound, he thought, and he took a deep breath and leaned slightly into the haze and the residual whiskey air, narrowed purposely his eyes to their cynical slits, and started to talk before he had to take a hard look at Miss Molly.

“Excuse me, sorry, bartender” he began – but then, I already told you that.

“Excuse me, sorry, bartender said you were a coach, I do that sometimes also; wonder if you’d like some company?” I was leaning slightly into the booth, as Miss Molly was back against the wall, kitty-corner; one leg was straight out on the seat, the other sort of tucked up under her rump in a flexible way that a guy my age would never have any hope of achieving.

A full-cheeked, almost puffy middle-aged face looked up at me, rimmed with too-blonde hair close cropped in back with short bangs across a low forehead. Her eyes were pale blue and little washed out, but with a suspicion of a spark lurking in the corners. The mouth was small, pursed, without color; there was no make-up anywhere. Suspected fine lines at the corners of the eyes were hidden by the tavern light; her upper lip showed the slightest start of vertical ridges as her skin shrank back against her jaw. A couple of ruddy patches might have been from the liquor — or just the residue of some ancient acne.

Molly shifted her body into a more upright posture, her grey blouse catching against the naugahyde of the bench behind her and pulling across her chest; looked like she could afford to lose a few pounds, but it was the kind of broad body that let you get away with not bothering.

“Sure,” she said, waving the back of her hand in the vague direction of the opposite side of the booth.

__________________________________________________________

I see this guy coming towards me and right away I know. I just know. Doesn’t happen much but then again most of the guys here are local and know better, and most of the guys who aren’t local aren’t here very long, and likely not once they get a good look when I’ve shoved the curtain back for a little bit of the old O2. He’s either a teacher or a coach or just a plain old drunk, and he’s city so he’s got some sort of rap, or some story. No one ever walks up to you and looks you in the eye and says, “I’m bored” or “I’m lonely” and “I’d like to talk with you for a while if that’s okay.” Someone puts that on me, they can talk all night and me drinking Jacks and sharing my smokes too and maybe even something else though it’s been God knows how long.

He’s sort of mumbling now but I hear “coach” and why not so I pick my ass up a bit so I am not aiming my pants-front right at him and I wave him a seat. My budget is set at three a night but I am sure he’s good for a couple to supplement my mood, just so long as I don’t mention that they sort of suggested I not be a coach any more. This one’s the type who keeps his wedding ring on his finger, as if you can hide the slight swelling and indentation after you’ve slipped it into your pocket. I like that kind of honesty in a man. Particularly if he looks like he’s showered lately.

Life is good.

So this guy is Jake and he gives me his card and he’s selling fittings and drills and things that do not interest me. He coaches boys, soccer and basketball, a City gym in what he says is not the best part of Mason. What do I do, well not much just resting up between jobs thinking of office work or volunteering at the Town playground, yes lived here my whole life yaddayaddayadda say if you’re still nursing that beer do you mind why yes thanks –Jack and a couple of cubes is all. His face is thin and pinched and the skin is slightly grey under his greying stubble, and he chain smokes cigarettes and two fingers of his right hand are yellowed so he must do it a lot. Maybe he’s my age, dark eyes close together, eye-brows growing across, looks like a wiry ape but spindly arms and legs and a slightly bagged sport coat hangs pretty straight so he’s still sort of in shape, at least weight-wise, which is something someone in phys ed looks at automatically even if you are not possessing any sort of interest. The flap of his coat seems to flutter regularly at the edge of the table; his left heel must be tapping up and down at a pretty good clip.

So I figure I’ll give him a little tweak to see how he rolls, seeing as how I am dumb country and out of a job and he’s this hot City guy who coaches soccer and basketball in his spare time, and I ask him if he is staying over on this trip, and his cigarette pauses just for a moment on its way up to his lips and I know I have caught him off guard.

“No, just on the road for the day. Finished a bit early, didn’t have time for lunch so I thought I’d just stop in to wet my whistle before I headed – uh, back to town.” He couldn’t get out the word “home” but wasn’t smart enough to head off the moment; I’m thinking, this is fun but that’s ten points off. Followed by some silence while I am smiling inside and starting the second Jack he’s ordered for me while he’s on what is his third or fourth Rock and pretending to neaten up his cigarette ash in the chock-full plastic ashtray so he can collect his thoughts, think up his next line, and test it for tone and bull-shit content before he opens his mouth again.

Jake gives it up. Would have bet you my five grand graduation bonus he was going nowhere. He puts his legs in vertical position while he is sitting down, so he can stand up when his farewell speech is over.

“It was great talking with ya, Molly. Maybe we’ll get a chance to talk again sometime.” He’s up now, leaving his half-drunk beer on my table, his black case loosely held in his left hand, the lower edge on the seat, the whole thing titled towards him. He sticks out his hand to shake, and I give it a shake and a slight squeeze because by now I am really feeling great, five is right up at my limit not that I haven’t on occasion topped out at a higher count.

“You take care and drive carefully, Jake,” I admonish with quiet sincerity. I look him in the eye with open lids and slightly raised eyebrows. I have big eyes. I know that this look makes people a little uncomfortable.

Jake is dropping a few bills on the counter and talking low to Louie, and then there is a wave over his shoulder and he is gone; the sunset invades the room for a minute until the door swings shut. I take another sip, I am near the bottom, my eyes are closed. I hum the Academy fight song for no reason, then sense someone near me and open my eyes. Louie is standing next to the table with another Jack.

“Here, on the house,” he says.

“Thank you kindly, Louie,” I reply. As he is walking away he says over his shoulder, “What an asshole.”

I pick up my drink and tell it to Louie’s back. “You got that right,” I tell him.

 

Charlamagne Zawacki of course did not like her name. It made people smile, while their brows knit in an effort to understand what they were hearing. Early on, she began calling herself Charlie Z. In this fashion, her social and business intercourse was, she perceived, facilitated.

When Charlie turned 40, she decided to change her legal name. Hiring a lawyer, a woman who took Charlie’s needs with studied seriousness, she selected her new official label. The problem was that she needed something consistent with her informal moniker. “Charlie was not much of a problem, it could lead back to Charlene, Clarice, Candace, Cheri, Sherri, lots of choices. The “Z” was more of an issue, until her lawyer suggested just using it as a floating middle initial. In this fashion, the unimaginative but neutral Sherri Z. Smith was born one day in a dusty court room in the downtown, with no one in attendance at the birth except for Charlie, her lawyer, an indifferent judge and a more indifferent bailiff.

The Zawacki family came from the vague middle of Europe some time just before 1900, and drifted quietly into the plains outside of Kansas City, where the dirt looked and felt familiar and the oats grew much like they did back home. Over time, the children drifted away into other names, other geographies, other jobs. When Charlie Z came to the City, a nineteen year old with typing and Gregg shorthand and a commercial high school diploma, and a broad open face pale as corn silk under corn silks of wispy hair, she left behind at home her early-widowed mother (who was born a “Smith” of all things, but was dragged down name-wise into Zawacki-dom by the convention of marriage) renting out her 160 acres for others to farm, a dyslectic younger brother with no identifiable skills, and a flower-rimmed plot near the copse of trees with small stones for her dad and, alas, for her sister who died of some fever no one ever figured out.

Charlie was at a low point when the invitation came. Her third live-in, a forty-something lawyer with an aversion of permanency, had just cleared out his side of the closet. The roof leaking in her condo building had just resulted in a $20,000 assessment that her static salary at the agency would not easily cover, and lately her mild-colored skin was getting some grey shadows around the fine lines sneaking out of the corners of her eyes, linking her less-sharp blue orbs with a growingly frizzy bowl of dried-out hair. Stepping from the shower, she had just that weekend wondered about those hollow pocky pits developing on her upper thighs and buttocks.

Mom was planning a modest reunion. Weren’t that many Zawackis to invite. Mom and Louis, Charlie’s brother, were resident at the farm, where he was in charge of one of the folding beach chairs on the wooden porch looking out to the trees and grave-stones. Mom’s sister, not really a Zawacki at all but a must-invite nonetheless, had promised to come with her husband the near-failed salesman; any body will do for these reunions. Her dad had a brother who with his wife was now deceased, but there were four cousins, two being men in their sixties, one now sporting the last name “Zane.” The two women also, one a Hunter and the other unfortunately a Smedley by marriage, each coming with spouse but not children, all of whom were long gone to distant coast cities. All were expected, or so they said. Would Charlamagne please attend? “Haven’t seen you in almost a year, darling…” the note wheedled.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

You can drive on the 80 in just about a straight shot from the City to the farm, but it’s almost 800 miles and Charlie’s nine-year-old Toyota is not confidence-inspiring. The inspector barely let her front tires qualify in March. Harry Zane could pick her up on the way through, but Milly Zane never shut up about Charlie not getting married, and besides Charlie did not relish the captivity of not having her own car. “Why work if it doesn’t leave time for a mate; you know you don’t have all that much time left, not that you aren’t a handsome woman, I am not saying otherwise, but if you want kids let’s face it that horse probably is well out of the barn by now and trotting off down the road and you are not as they say getting any younger and we women we just wake up one day and we’ve lost whatever it is, the allure and….”

Charlie charged four cheap tires and bought a quart of WD 30 that she herself poured down the pipe; the Toyota would have to serve. One good thing about the farm, you could pack light, the back pack would have worked fine but Charlie Z did not want to hear the Zawakis agreeing that Charlie was still a hippy runaway even at 45 or was it 46 by now; she dug out an old suitcase and packed its stuffy interior with a big robe she did not need so her few necessities would not be shifting and curling up in the open spaces of the valise. Then the day before she was to leave, her car inexplicably died.

Charlie jammed the small Samsonite into the rack over her bus seat. Her row-mate thankfully was a taciturn thirty-something, and after a nod he buried himself in a Harry Potter paperback. Half-way back in the bus, close but not too close to the closet toilet with its over-bright reading light, as if someone would hunker down in there and do their business buried in People or We. As for Charlie, she had picked up a Vogue at the bus terminal, not that she ever read Vogue, but it would be a good item to leave in a conspicuous place when she unpacked in the farmhouse. Sometimes the best defense was, well…

Valentin Legure meanwhile was concentrating on pressing his right leg tight to his body so as to not accidentally encounter the leg of the blond woman who had the seat near the window. Around 10 she had begun to snore regularly and very gently, sort of in a charming way to tell the truth. Her magazine had splayed open in her lap and, on one of the long easy turns the bus made as it puffed down the interstate the magazine slid off her lap and then disappeared slowly under the seat in front. There was no way Valentin could reach over for it without finding himself in an awkward and unexplainable posture.

Valentin had been on page 262 for a couple of hours, not that he knew the precise page number nor the contents of text in front of him because he was unable to read. It just kept people away from him, he had found, and stopped conversations which invariably got too complicated for him to follow, usually almost from the very beginning. It had, for example, completely squelched any talk between him and his row-mate, although now that she was asleep he was lonely for the illusion of shared time and space and would have liked to venture a couple of neutral topics with her, testing whether he could tamp down his fear and embarrassment. She was pretty, and as soon as the thought came to Valentin he jammed it right back down into his head, rammed it down as far as he could go to hide it because those kinds of thoughts never did work out for Valentin.

Zach Goode had been hired by the Intercontinental Bus Lines to trouble shoot the routes and there had been a few petty thefts and one harassment in the last few months on the line between the City and Prairie Junction. Zach had his eye on the big kid sitting next to the sleeping blonde for maybe fifty miles or more. He was holding a book and looking at it intently, but never seemed to turn a page. He hadn’t done anything unusual or improper actually, but Zach viewed himself as a trained professional, with his associate’s degree in criminal justice although none of his courses actually had anything to do with detective work; he was, after all, trained in “justice” and thus charged with a responsibility to be observant in the protection of the public riders.

When the bus pulled into Arrow for lunch and a pit stop, Zach noticed that this guy stood up and let the blonde out first and then came out of the bus last, letting other passengers shuffle past him. Odd that the guy picked up his small duffel from the overhead; Arrow was not a destination, just a diner in the middle of a wheat field; that was wheat, Zach thought, without really knowing and he made a mental note to look up what wheat actually looked like as that kind of information might someday prove useful.

The blonde sat down at the end of the counter with her magazine; the guy sat right behind her at a small table, with a perfect view of her backside shifting on the red Naugahyde counter seat, sort of like Zach thought someone who was stalking a person might position oneself. Zach himself stood leaning against a drink machine sipping a tonic. Life being pretty dull for Zach, never in his 14 months having discovered anything to report, he began to feel that this was going to be his first “case.”

The blonde stood up, took her magazine, came to the soda machine and dropped four quarters for a can of Pepsi. As she straightened out from picking it out of the slot, her eyes caught Zach’s.

“Thirsty?” It came out of Zach reflexively, naturally.

“Yes, actually. Too much salt on the fries or something.”

A brief silence.

“I’m Zach. Zach Goode.” Lower: “I work for the bus line. I was watching the guy in the next seat.” Excitement flooding into his voice now. “Has he, like, said anything to you – a about –uh – anything?”

The blonde glanced over the room, saw Valentin’s back and stared. “Don’t stare,” said Zach, with an urgency hardly required, particularly since Valentin was facing the other way and you could have danced naked behind him without being noticed.

“Oh. Yes. I mean no. No, I think he said hello when I sat down but he had a book and I fell asleep for most of the ride up to now.” She bit her lip briefly. “Why? Do you know him?”

“Not sure,” Zach lied, trapped in his own imagined intrigue. “What’s your name?” Dumb question, he knew it the moment it came out.

The blonde squinted. “Why do you need to know my name,” she asked, suddenly suspicious.

Zach was saved by Valentin standing up. “He’s getting up. Look, just go back to your seat and don’t worry, I’ll be watching,” he hissed.

She took a step away and whispered quickly over her shoulder: “Charlie. My name is Charlie Z.”

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

The sun stood paper-thin with its lower rim on the horizon, orange through the light haze of dustiness, casting long shadows from the corn rows as its light skimmed the top of the tassels. The air was still hot, and as always dry, here on the plains as they began to tilt lightly but inexorably up to the blue-black sky. The air was almost visibly congealed into tiny balls of palpable but translucent matter; things could be seen through it almost perfectly and yet, somehow muted in tone and sharpness. Charlie Z knew that moment at sunset. She had moved half a continent just to get away from its empty sameness. Her head lolled between the seat-back and a gentle forehead touch on the warm window. Next to her Valentin, silent for a couple of hours now, stared at page 262 until he could remember the shape, but not the meaning, of all the symbols on the paper.

A few rows behind, in an aisle seat, Zach flipped through his car magazine while keeping an eye on the blonde and the creep. That guy really was a retard; clearly he hadn’t read a word, Zach thought; the spine of his paperback was now so flattened and open to the same place that when he let it sit on his lap for a moment the pages no long tried to flip shut.

In a couple of hours the bus would arrive at the end of the line, pulling into the yard next to the railroad station where the trains no long stopped, the long-legged green bugs pasted to the front window with their fragile wings and legs sticking out askew into the wind. The stickiness of their bodies would make it hard to hose them off and someone would have to scrape the glass as if clearing off frost on a winter morning. The plains had an endless supply of insects, but the big green ones, they were the easiest candidates to get glued to the window at dusk.

Zack was thinking he would have to make his move soon, but did not know what that was. Charlie Z was wondering why she was on the bus, sorry that her mother was meeting her, now she couldn’t change her mind and just go back to the City.

Valentin was trying to think of something to say. He reached into his pants pocket and checked for the edge of the envelope that contained the letter from the director to the grain operator in Prairie City who had agreed to take Valentin and train him to work in the storage silos as part of an experimental program. Valentin knew that someone would meet him at the bus and he was to give the letter to that person. He couldn’t recall if it was supposed to be a man or a woman, but to his mind that sort of thing had a way of getting worked out one way or the other. Valentin had had a few jobs before but he was happy he was going far away to work at something new that wasn’t indoors. He did not like assembling plastic key chains all day, that much he knew. The envelope was there but touching it did not give him any ideas for a conversation. It was getting dark and he knew the trip would end soon, the man from the half-way house had told him that he would arrive just after it got dark and it was getting dark, he knew that.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

Lydia Zawacki made sure Louis had a lemonade out on the porch before she got into the Ford 150. The truck hiccupped to life, a quick shudder running through the fenders and making them crinkle audibly where the rust had worn almost through. The motor was good but the bodies never seemed to last.

It was about a year, Lydia thought. Long time not to see Charlamagne. She did not exactly miss seeing Charlie, but she liked Charlie well enough and she knew she was supposed to be excited to see her. The whole reunion was beginning to look daunting now that people were starting to come; first Charlie, then Lydia’s sister the following day and so forth until all the bedrooms would be full and all the blankets in the house deployed, even the ones with the moth holes that smelled of moth balls anyway; the head-achy odor seemed to fill the rooms on the third floor, and there wasn’t much a breeze to blow away either the heat or smell. Maybe people should have booked a room in the hotel in town; but then again, how can you have family pay for a room when you have the old farmhouse with all those bedrooms just sitting there.

The corn was coming okay this year; the Johnstons, who leased the fields, would do well and be able to pay the second half of the rent; wasn’t always the case, Lydia was at the mercy of the rain and the insects the same as the farmers themselves, truth be told. The slightly oily smell of the insecticide drifted into the car through the partly opened window, mixed with the more fundamental smells of manure and grassiness that Lydia had long ago learned not to recognize or at least identify; it was how air smelled, wasn’t it?

There weren’t any real hills out there, but the land did roll a bit and the Ford slowed and labored a little over a small hillock. Lydia sighed; no money to spend on a new car, though this one was almost through its second rotation around its odometer. This was the second Ford since Bernhard Zawacki had been put in the ground out past the back porch, but it was what—maybe 12 years old, and its predecessor was just as old when it broke the axel, so how long was Bernhard in the ground now? It was a question, an idle question; what little ache there was had long since subsided; his passing now was a marker on Lydia’s path, not an independent sorrow.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

The bus stopped. Charlie hugged her mother and walked behind her towards the pick-up. Valentin stood on the macadam looking lost until a man in overalls approached, glanced at Valentin’s proffered letter, and started walking him towards the center of town. Zach picked up Valentin’s accidentally dropped book and quickly riffed the pages looking for clues to fall out, and then looked up balefully at Valentin’s receding back. Lydia turned West towards the farm, Charlie on the bench seat next to her; Charlie closed her eyes and let the smell of growing grain mixed with the hot dry wind envelope her through the dusty side window.           

It smelled unfortunately like home.

 

 

I am often asked about my working habits. Until now, I have eschewed revealing them. Some may find them bizarre but, more importantly, they are so personal and idiosyncratic that I am certain they cannot be put to productive use if emulated by others.

Success, however, has attracted attention which, in turn, has fostered a combination of vanity and willingness to shock. The devil-may-care liberation of being able to say virtually anything without creating offense — indeed, almost always thereby enhancing my aura – has led me to describe the processes leading to (what many have described as) my colossally powerful oeuvre.

I forewarn you that what follow is my actual process; it is not invented to mock the question, nor as a comedic send-up. I follow my regimen each working day, or rather afternoon. I have never known a great idea which could be attributed to labor expended prior to noon-time.

I sit in a conventional office, albeit without telephone. I sit in an inexpensive black leather chair, although my buttocks do sometimes inconveniently stick to the surface as I wriggle. You see, I always work in the nude. In this fashion am I open to all available sensations, as well as having access, as needed, to erogenous zones.

I do have a touch of whimsy, however. It reminds me of the basic humanity which must be at the core of very great works. I wear a white chef’s toque, always immaculately clean, as I “cook up” my productions.

And I have never enjoyed being barefoot, and over the years have experimented with numerous shoes and slippers. I have, this past decade, adopted very light running shoes, to “speed” my effort and to keep my feet reasonably cool, as I must maintain air temperature in the mid-seventies by reason of my nudity.

My computer is my link with my assistant, Bertha Zvik, who sits in the adjacent room but obviously cannot enter my workspace on a regular basis. When I need to instruct her directly, she must put on her blindfold, and then enter and guide herself to the front of my desk by use of the handrail we have installed for that purpose.

I arise at ten precisely, take twenty minutes of stretching, shower with tepid water, and eat half a cold pink grapefruit. I do not like my grapefruit sectioned; I rather prefer to pierce the moist flesh with the side of a non-serrated teaspoon and segment it from the binding filaments in a deliberate if squirty motion. I wear a robe while eating, to keep the citric spray from my body, as I find that the spray dries to an unpleasant sticky residue. I take one cup of coffee with a generous pour of cream to cut the dark roast, but only one cup; otherwise my need to urinate during work time becomes a distraction. At precisely noon I pass by Bertha, nod my hello, enter my office, remove my robe and place it on the hook, take my fresh toque from the table, walk across the highly polished linoleum floor, and seat myself.

You may be surprised at the linoleum; not the kind of floor covering you would expect in the home office of someone such as myself. As a child, my bedroom floor was covered by a medium gray sheet of linoleum, which my father had carefully rolled out, using an industrial razor to trim the edges and to fit the carved flaps around the feet of my steam radiator. This linoleum had a pattern of darker, ebony squiggles as an overall design, and with my child’s imagination I sometimes awoke with an awareness that those squiggles were alive, moving and malevolent. I would be careful never to let my bare feet touch the floor, relying on a series of close-toed slippers, nor would I allow my bedding to droop onto the floor and allow the squiggles to climb up and onto my mattress while I slept.

At first, I pretended that they could not climb the legs of the bed, but as I grew older I realized that this was an implausible supposition. That is when I placed the pie tins under each leg of the bed, and filled each tin with water. My parents were stunned by my assertion that squiggles clearly could not swim, but after faint protest and an earnest discussion which I could almost hear through the common wall of our bedrooms, I was told at breakfast that I could maintain my moats – which I did for many years until I left for college.

Now when I set up my home office, my staff could not locate linoleum either in rolls or in tiles that were anything like the design of my childhood, but I found an artist in Soho who undertook the task of creating a huge linoleum-based work in light gray, festooned with squiggles conforming to my best recollection, and I had that installed on my office floor.

It is a reminder of how we move forward from our childhood fears and yet, we are also tied to them in some indirect way, as if they inform our world view at a very basic level.

Perhaps that is why I am careful never to slip out of my running shoes while I am working.

In any event, I work without food or drink from noontime until I feel myself drained of psychic energy. Or need to toilet. And then I arise, save what is on my computer, lock my handwritten notes and any dictated tapes in my locking vault, place my toque on the table so staff can replace it for the next morning with a freshly laundered toque, resume my robe and leave the work wing.   Typically, Bertha will be at her desk, although if I have been lost in creativity I may have worked into the late evening and Bertha may have left. Our arrangement is that if I have not exited by 9 p.m. and have not texted her to stay, Bertha may leave without formally advising me.

I follow this regimen, while in residence in the City, Tuesday through Friday. On Saturdays I prepare for receptions, galleries and restaurants. On Sunday I read the Times cover-to-cover, skipping only the automotive section and anything written by Tom Friedman, as I find discussions of the flatness of the world distasteful, and one never knows when Tom will take off in that direction. Besides, Tom has a derivative mind, although when I mentioned it to him he did not seem to agree.

Mondays are my days of renewal, and information gathering. I can walk in the City with a modicum of freedom. The theaters are dark, keeping hoards of undesirables away. Most working drones are attentive to their occupations and are off the streets, particularly after a weekend. This allows me to observe all those people with whom I feel allegiance; truckers delivering stuff, clerks restocking shelves, working women taking a day off, the unemployed, the crazies, the con men, the people of ambiguous intent, the people trying out their new/old hustle (“brother, you are looking really fine today” followed shortly by “I’ve enjoyed talking with you but now I gotta confess that I find myself coming up just a little short….”).

I often go downtown for lunch, dim sum or a deli, maybe a dirty water dog from a street cart. I talk to people continually, often turning on a small tape recorder or taking a quick picture with my cell phone so that I can capture the moment and later extract the nuance.

Once or twice a year, I travel alone for a week or two, sometimes new places and sometimes old ones. I have given up on France, I tell you. It’s a long story, and a shame, but it is fully the fault of the French, and not me. ‘Nuf said. I rather like the Greek Islands, where the locals try to hustle you at backgammon. Retsina has replaced Chambertin Clos-de-Beze as my go-to libation. On these excursions I take no notes or photographs. I just absorb. When people recognize me, which often happens, I smile and chat but never sign. I think it rude they should ask, but do not say so.

That’s it. That’s my work “process.” The mechanics of my life. I owe it to posterity to be accurate so, you should note, I hereby assure you that everything I have told you is accurate, and without hyperbole. Not very interesting, but remember that you asked to hear it. I suppose now this information will be bisected, dissected, parsed, conjugated, analyzed, reinterpreted, related to my body of works, be speculated upon in my biographies, and otherwise blown out of proportion by people like you. Well go to it. As for me, I am a few minutes behind schedule.

Would you please pass me my robe? Ah, thanks….

So, of all the curious cases I’ve had through my many years of practice, no doubt the strangest was the Gleason matter. Now that I am retired, and after so many years, I see no reason not to tell the whole story, not just what appeared in the public court papers.

It was in the late ‘50s, in the City, a time of residual racial tension. I was working out of a small office, just starting out on my own, taking whatever cases came through the door. Someone at the Bar Association gave the family my name, and one Saturday morning my door opened and Buster’s mother peered in from the hallway, perhaps expecting an ante-room or at least a secretary; I was a few years away from either such luxury.

I motioned her to a chair and we introduced ourselves. She carried with her a hint of the pine-scent from the newly washed hallway floor mixed with a strong overtone of perspiration that bridged the short distance to my desk. I realized after she was seated that I had not risen on her entry; I think I was surprised she was a Negro woman, and I suspect she did not expect a white lawyer to get up from his chair in any event.

“Call me Mrs. G, everyone does,” she instructed me in an inflected blend of Southern drawl and City terseness; she wiggled her bulk in between the wooden spindles of the chair, her dark blouse straining against her chest and her black skirt hiking dangerously up over her enormous black thighs; she sloughed off several sweaters and wraps, which I believe served in lieu of an overcoat. Her small brown paper bag she placed carefully at the edge of my desk, the top crumpled where she had held it with apparent vigor.

I was still living in my late parent’s brownstone, but the surge of Negroes moving North after the War was peaking as they followed jobs and presumed opportunities. Their invasion changed neighborhoods almost overnight, houses gobbled up block by block. Already, my white neighbors and I had begun to receive the phone calls from the real estate brokers; if we did not sell now at the higher price, later sales would be inevitable and would reflect the fallen real estate values that “those folks” always brought with them. The Negroes were coming, the Negroes were coming, they drive down prices maybe 50%, maybe more.

My young wife, like so many other brownstone residents, was beginning to both worry and then feel guilty about being forced out rather than staying to embrace our new residents who had to be okay, yes, if they could afford the high purchase prices being discussed….

As Mrs. G continued to jiggle her bulk into submission, an uneasy détente with my oak chair that I thought I heard groan in its joints at one point, I had a chance to observe. I guessed she was one of those “cleaning women,” always black (it was well before we starting calling the Negroes black, actually; “Negro” was in fact one of the nicer descriptives) who would come to your house to clean. You would call the City Employment Office and “order” a cleaning woman, who would show up the next day in work-clothes, sometimes carrying her own pail or shopping bag containing her particularly favorite form of cleaning supplies. In exchange for 75 cents an hour and a lunch prepared by the lady of the house, and in exchange for absorbing the pervasive odor of sweat unimpeded by then not-yet-popular deodorant products, your “domestic” would clean out your toilets, wash your linoleum, scrub the mottled grey surface of your gas range, and (if you were lucky and didn’t get one of those “I don’t do windows” types) would glass-wax away the City grime from your bay windows.

Mrs. G’s bag contained fives and tens totaling $140 which, Mrs. G explained, was all the family could now afford, and would I please help her Buster, a good man who could be in trouble for, well, exposing himself — which was not as bad as it seemed if I would only go to the City Jail and talk to Buster and learn what she gently called “the particulars of the situations.”

“More than once?,” I asked quietly.

“Yes,” she replied with some annoyance that I had bothered to confirm her precise choice of word, “situation—zzzz.”

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

Buster was wearing blue jeans without a belt, a plain white undershirt in the old style with straps, and those black tall Keds sneakers with no socks and laces; the tongues drooped sadly over the top of his feet like a pair of panting and none-too-clean street dogs.   I did not then have enough contact with Negro men to venture even a guess as to his age, but he was not a kid and he had no gray; maybe early thirties, or thereabouts? Buster was pretty close to thirty I concluded, one side or the other. He spoke with the flat nasal tones of the City with no trace of the South, unusual for his time and place. I asked him what he did for a living; he had no job.

“So what do you do with yourself when you’re not looking for work?” I was trying to get a feel for the guy and did not have the touch for it.

Buster smiled but did not look down, rather engaging my eyes directly. “Don’t do much, boss,” he said in a sardonic, subdued drawl which he had acquired just in time for his answer to my question.

“Buster, please don’t do that thing with me. I’ve got your rap sheet here and it shows five – or is it six, yeah six separate complaints for indecent exposure. That’s a crime that puts you in the jug, Buster, in case you were wondering.” My tone was emphasized when I tucked my chin onto my chest and looked at him through the tops of my glasses.

Buster came back diffidently. His mother had wanted a lawyer. Wasting her money she made the hard way, cleaning up – white people’s shit. She musta hit the bank pretty hard, paying for a white guy to boot. Buster himself, he’s gonna plead out and avoid the “dance where the Negro goes to the judge who assumes he’s paying the white lawyer because he’s guilty as hell and so he needs the boost of paying up for some white guy to defend him, so he goes to jail real fast for exposing his dick to a bunch of white women and he’s broke also.”

I recall thinking that his analysis was not far off the mark in all likelihood, but my job was to defend, not commiserate about the quality of justice. “Buster, please just tell me what happened. Did you do it, let’s start with the first one? And if you did, what were you thinking, what the hell were you trying to prove?”

Buster sighed, and you could see him deciding that he had to go through the drill. He told me his story.

“We’re hanging at Jojo’s, on the stoop. It’s the summer, ya know, it’s hot as shit. No one’s got any money. Louie and Stepp, they’re working at the machine shop on Center, ya know? But the rest of us, we ain’t getting hired so fast. Here my mama she’s working in white people’s houses…” Buster dropped his head and shook it; then looked up and looked right at me and continued: “and she’s paying for me and everything” [here an accusatory glare, his brow knits at me] “and supporting me and my sister, and I got my High School diploma, my mother she pays for some classes for me to learn how to talk like no Nigger talk so I can get a better job that way but, ya know, I think it is hurting me actually, the man he wants me to shuck and jive and he just thinks I’m acting what I’m not like. Almost” [another glare] “uppity.”

“So most of our mamas, they’re cleaning houses, the usual. And we don’t like that so we don’t think about it that much, all our money comes from some tired old mama with knees hurting so she has to ask my sister to rub them each night, some Negro woman with a crap life on her knees five or six days a week to bend and scrub for some white woman who don’t work nowhere anyhow, ya know? Makes you …” [long…pause, eyes roll upwards in search of the word, then quietly] “sorta sad and pissed. Ya know?”

“So whaddaya gonna do? Can’t afford no beers, ain’t even mentioning some hard stuff. I could cry for my mama. I keep looking for work and it ain’t easy. Then one of my friends from school, he tells me he gets an interview at Wilson’s, the big store downtown huh? And he’s like he goes in and the guy tells him they are looking for laborers, that’s the word he says, laborers, not some guy who thinks he’s some executive or something, ya know? So my friend he tells the guy, “no just what are ya tellin’ me,” and the dude he say, “we want someone willing to do the manual laborer, not someone thinks he’s on his way to some college.”

Buster leans forward, this is his teaching moment. “So here we got all these fuckin’ white bitches, sippin’ their tea and watchin’ my mama’s ass, and Jo-Jo’s mama, and Tyrell’s mama, they’re leaning on their hands and knees over a bucket wiping up the shit this woman’s kids dropped on her floor, which sucks enough to do but why she looking so hard at my mama there? Why, I’m asking you now lawyer? You know? You wanna guess?”

I thought I knew. I knew I wasn’t about to answer; maybe he’ll just answer his own question. Seconds pass; maybe not.

Buster waits long enough to know I am trapped, and his smile breaks out broadly. “Well, I can tell by your not answering me that you KNOW the answer, just don’ wanna say, which I do truly understand. So I’ll tell it for ya, man. She wants to be sure my mama ain’t stealin’ anything. Stealin’ her shit, ya know? Stealin’ all her precious stuff, like mama’s gonna grab her new Crosley TV and drag it home on the bus so we can all sit around and watch Amos and Andy.”

A long pause.

“So fuck that. So I’m thinkin’ what am I gonna do to punish those snotty white bitches with their fuckin’ 75 cents an hour for my mama’s ass waving in the air, scrubbing her white kid shit up offa the floors; and then it just come to me. Just like THAT!” A crisp snap of fingers; I get a glimpse of nails bitten below the quick, more like some little claws of some underground digging creature moving mud around his tunnels.

“So next afternoon I go out to Sunnyside, I take a stroll around, and then I sit out back the A&P, there’s a back door there I see, and every once in a while one of them white bitches she comes out with a big bag of food, and then one comes out who I don’t like the way she looks, sort of snotty in a fancy dress with flowers, don’t even notice she’s pretty or ugly or what ya know, so real quick I pull down my trousers and my shorts and I wave it all around, like hey look at my hardware, y’all.”

Buster looks down for the first time in a while; he seems upset by his speech if not his actions.

I wait but he’s done with his story. “So, what happened?” I ask. I look down at the police report. “Says here you ran away?”

“Yeah,” Buster is weary now, the good part is over for him. “She looks funny and then just turns away, then damned if she don’ look back real quick like she don’ believe what she seein’, puts down her food bag real slow and neat and starts back to the store. So I hike myself up back together and run like hell. Don’ know what she do next, I am gone from that place, fa sure….”

There is a long pause. Buster had been talking at least for the moment, but now he is talked out it seems. I scan the police report.

“And these different times, different stores all around Sunnyside, you did those too?”

“Yeah well, that’s where my mama works mostly, Sunnyside, there a lotta money out there in Sunnyside ya know.” A small smile. “Betcha you live there yourself, huh.” It is a statement of fact, not a question.

“I live on Fifth.”

“They break your block yet,” he asks, smiling again.

“Let’s stick with you, not where I live. You’re telling me you did this what, seven or eight times? Never got caught? Never said anything to these women. No one ever chased you, at least until this last one?”

No answer. I am ahead of myself, asking too many questions at once, he is closing up.

“Let’s start out again. So you tell me you did the first one?”

“Yeah, I done it alright.”

“And the other seven, no wait the other five?”

“Prob’ly. Only remember four others actually but sound like maybe the fifth one was me too.”

I am scanning down the report, looking for my next question; I see something I do not understand.

“What does it mean here, the women said that when you exposed yourself you sort of, well swung it around and it was – white in color?”

Buster laughed for his own amusement, low and short. “Yeah, that’s why I guess I done all the other five, they all said it was white, a real white waving machine man. Ain’t no one else gonna do like that, y’know?”

“Hold on there, Buster. Are you telling me that your….” Hard stop. Buster smiled really wide this time, for me as well as to himself.

“Well, that would beat all if it were white, I tell ya,” Buster said. Then he told me the rest of his story.

*          *          *          *          *          *          * 

We came to trial in Muni about four weeks later. Until then, Buster stayed inside his jail; no need for more trouble. Mrs. G brought me three more bags, each with about $15 in small bills.

“Leave him in,” Mrs. G instructed. “Don’t you ask no bail. He’s like to do something stupid if you let him out. ‘sides, we ain’t likely able to raise no bail anyhow.”

“I have an obligation to my client. I might be able to get him out on recognizance, remanded to you, no cash bail.”

“You gonna do your job, you gonna leave that Buster right where he is. You listen to his momma now, I’m bringing you the money and I’m tellin’ you how this is goin’ happen! Boy never so much stole a candy bar, don’t care what he tells you. Boy needs help. Let him out on our block, you think you doin’ your lawyer duty to help him. You ain’t so smart you think that.”

So Buster I left in stir, they call his case, he is brought in, he is wearing a nice shirt with a collar as I told his mother to bring him, but she is not in court, I guess she is washing some white bitch’s floor somewhere. I wish Buster had better trousers, not the thing he was arrested in, and I wish he had shaven, he has a lot of stubble for a young guy, but by and large he does not look like the dangerous type. His Keds still don’t have laces, they flop open above his ankles, the tongue flapping onto the top of each foot as he bounces his legs nervously under the defendant’s table. The Assistant DA, I know this guy, he’s pretty good, one of the few who looks at the file before he starts talking to the judge, he responds he is ready to go to trial.

“Is the defense ready?” asks the judge.

“Your Honor, I request a bench conference before we begin.”

“Counsel, no one has said a word yet. You have a problem so soon, even before we start? We haven’t even sworn the jury yet. Why don’t we try this case, doesn’t look too complicated, I see this is the first time your client has been to court, the boy’s got his troubles as I am sure you will tell me, I don’t even know why you didn’t plead him out….”

“Your Honor, the charges are indecent exposure. He cannot be guilty as a matter of law and I ask your indulgence to approach.”

The ADA rolled his eyes, but the Judge (Joe Henry, an old warhorse who has heard it all, but a decent and mellow fellow at root) holds up his hand and waves me forward. “But this better be good, Mr. Winters. Tell me fast, I am all ears, why he cannot be guilty AS A MATTER OF THE LAW. All five, six times, where he’s been ID’d by good citizens in all of these – incidents.”

“Your Honor, the prosecution will allege, accurately I might add, that all the female victims, or alleged victims, saw a white — member, well a white sex organ.”

The judge’s eyebrows raised slightly, he grasped the edge of his desk and pulled his chair forward a couple of inches and looked around me at Buster, fidgeting at the large oak table. He settled back behind the judge’s bench with a slight smile. “Yes counsel, do tell.”

“Well, it is hardly likely he painted himself white down there,” I started.

“I am not interested in speculation and you may find this humorous but I would like to hear what you are trying in your own stumbling way to tell me.”

“Sorry, your Honor.”

The judge turned to the ADA. “Mr. Grantham, will in fact all witnesses, if asked, testify that the— testify as defense counsel has suggested?”

“Yes, your Honor. We are not—exactly sure what that means but all of them did mention that, but they also positively identified it; or rather, I mean, identified him. The defendant. His face, that is….”

“Your Honor,” I jumped in, “I am not saying that Mr. Gleason was not the person standing before all of these women. What I am saying is – well, perhaps I might impose on your Honor to ask learned counsel about the white sweat sock my clients was, shall I say, WEARING at the time of his arrest.”

The judge turned to Grantham, and I swear the judge licked his lips gently in preparation for laughter. Grantham for his part glared at me, and then softened his expression as he turned towards Judge Henry.

“Yes?” asked the judge.

“Uh, yes….” said the ADA slowly.

Henry turned to me. “I am, yet again, all ears,” he said.

“Your Honor, I am not saying my client is not guilty of a tasteless prank. But the gravamen, the essence of the offense of indecent exposure is, well, ‘exposure.’ And my client just didn’t, shall we say, expose anything to anyone.”

“Mr. Grantham?” asked the judge.

Grantham sputtered, the judge began to chuckle and I could not resist.

“Perhaps the learned prosecutor can point to a city ordinance,” I invited, “prohibiting the opening of one garment to reveal, however shockingly, yet another article of clothing.”

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

Buster disappeared from my life. I think I was told that he moved away from the City. I have no idea if he did good or evil. His mama paid me fifteen dollars a week until my whole fee was paid– $400. All in cash, all in small brown paper lunch bags, all hand-carried to my office. After a while I began feeling guilty about the whole thing and I asked he to stop paying me, we were even, but Mrs. G would not hear of it.

Then about ten years later I heard from someone, a client, that Buster had passed away. I would have been interested in the circumstances, but they were not offered and I decided not to ask.

For years after, I got a constant flow of small cases of all sorts from the Negro community in the Borough. They dried up about the time that the nomenclature graduated to “Black.” We held onto the Brownstone until it was one of the last ones on the block not sold to Negro buyers; by then, the price had shot upwards radically, and my wife and I found a lovely ranch house in Sunnyside that we could now afford. In fact I am writing this while sitting on the small deck out back, we are still here though our kids are long gone.

For some reason, I insisted that we always do our own house-cleaning, even when the time came when we could easily afford to pay someone to do it for us. My wife, long-suffering as they say in so many ways by reason of her husband, never pressed the issue, and I felt obliged to pitch in with the housework well before that became the fashion or, at least, the alleged norm. Perhaps, I do not know, my wife understood.

My own reason was really quite simple. I owed it to Buster.

There were five women in an untidy oval, all seated in beach chairs. Or rather, arranged on top of the flat part of beach chairs where your legs normally stretch out, surrounded by random towels and magazines, all leaning in towards an ill-defined center point for an indeterminate discussion that bounced around shopping, kids, shoes, Saturday night dinner. All were tanned, well turned out in glittery bikinis, all toes neatly painted, sandals with pom-poms (no flip flops here), lots of gold. Also lots of squeals, and most sentences punctuated with gratuitous “like”s used as unfortunate connectives.

My guess was in their early thirties, not late but they had kids. Hard to tell. Designer sunglasses. Gym toned. Conversation told me in their forties but, well, they just looked too damned good to be that old. And then, there were those squeals….

Well to do. Edge of rich. Truly rich would be at their own pools, or one of those exclusive Boca beach clubs, not here at a hotel beach club which was apparently open to locals who could pay what was likely a hefty but not prohibitive tariff. Large tote bags, draw strings on top. Expensive. But no logos. They are tuned in, they know that logos are all so yesterday. But expensive no doubt; yes sir.

Out of the sacs came, randomly, now a cell phone, then a tube of coconut smelling something, bottle of vitamin water, pulled from the deep recesses, sometimes pulling along with it some unintended detritus of loose papers, a lipstick, tissues, an eyeglass case, a tumble of keys—ah yes, Mercedes symbol on the key chain fob.

My chair was close, unintentionally close, a logistic mistake by the hotel beach boy, who might have thought I would enjoy the view, or perhaps just did not much care where he plunked down some transient hotel guest. And yes, the view was – nice. Covey of blonde shiny hair, punctuated by one dark-complexioned (and perhaps even a touch plump-y, is that possible?) woman with slick black close-cropped hair. Several hair bands coordinated with the bikini fabrics.

The perhaps plump-y woman was closest to my chair, I had to look directly at her when I put down my New Yorker. Not enough spin classes perhaps? I perused her up and down one time for good measure; no wedding band.

I was planning to move, the tide had receded, I could drag my chair down the gentle slope a couple of yards, dim the cacophony, replace it with sloshing wave sounds. Just about mustered enough energy to sit up against the pressure of the sun on my chest when a snippet of conversation stopped me. A discussion about New York. No, New Jersey. Some of the women were from New Jersey at some point. Not all. Three now were local, members of the beach club it seemed. The others—visitors from the North. Plainview I heard. I know Plainville, I think, somewhere vaguely West of the Holland Tunnel, a commute to Manhattan, maybe Newark?

No deep New York-Jersey accents. How come? Schooled out of them? Replaced for some by what now passed for an East Coast of Florida accent, scrubbed of origin yet not Southern either. The pervasive connective “like” notwithstanding, a well-spoken if squeal-ish group by objective standards.

Although objectivity was for my part, on reflection, like hard to come by….

Other women of similar ilk stopped by for cheek-pecks, reminders about tennis, reservations at some restaurant; meet my friend Rachel down from New Jersey, meet my friend Sarah from Temple, meet my friend someone from somewhere, you know Miriam don’t you Antonia? Antonia, the darker woman is Antonia, perhaps Italian not Hispanic? Why am I trapped into listening to this?

“Hi there, how are you girls doin’?” A male voice, not a very original greeting but delivered full of gusto, the promise of being interested in the answer. I turned my head slightly to discover a stocky guy of medium height in a T-shirt and blue shorts standing in the narrow space between my boat shoes half-buried in the sand and the edge of the women’s oval. My view of his backside was superior, sitting on top of tan hairy legs too thin for the rest of him. Trying to look upwards against the sun, was that a small bald spot—bad angle, maybe just sun glare.

“Ya remember me, yes? Lou. Louis Rothman. The party at the boat-yard, the one with the band. Just a few weeks ago. Sorry, don’t remember your name….”

“I’m Cindy,” replied one of the Boca natives.   “I do remember you, you were with Maya Whatshername, right?”

A slight pause. “Yeah, she was my date. You a good friend of Maya, are ya?” Some obvious trepidation.

“”Not really, we just have kids in some things together. Why?”

“Oh, yeah,” said with some bare sense of relief, “cause she just blew me off after that party….”

“So you’re single!” Could not tell whose voice, what with the triumphant minor rise in volume accompanying this seemingly vital deduction.

“Divorced actually.” I think, can you be divorced not “actually,” perhaps merely theoretically? Why do I dislike this guy I don’t even know?

“But it’s okay,” he offers, “we’re still friends! Hey mind if I sit down for a minute, it’s kinda hard to talk down on you girls, you know?” He is seated on the edge of Antonia’s chair before the chorus of “sure”s has ended, Antonia’s feet curling quickly away and under her in self-defense. Lou is still talking, unawares, talking about something I miss but which the group seems to find absorbing.

“Yeah, I get the kids every other weekend. Bought a big condo over on 83^rd. That new building?”

The local women grunt recognition, and Cindy asks if the building is nice; yes with a concierge, he admitting that he needed all the help he could get. General laughter. I could believe he needed more help than a concierge could possible deliver….

“So, hey, all you girls married or what?” Asked with a simple open smile. Wow, do I dislike this guy. Let me count the ways. My father, born almost a century ago and a stickler for refined speech, told me that “hey” was for horses not people. My mother, born with her own Victorian sense of good taste, told me that you did not ask that kind of question. My wife, born into a more modern time, told me that there were women and girls, and the cross-over point was somewhere in the late teens and that in our upper middle class suburb calling grown people “girls” was something of a major political correctness faux pas. Why is this guy holding court with these, okay you got me to admit it, really hot women when he’s talking shit like that?

No one says, coldly, ”how do you come off asking that?”

What I hear is an energetic bunch of yesses, a modest pause, then Antonia softly mentioning a recent divorce while slipping her ringless left hand unconsciously under the edge of a beach towel on her chair.

This good news moved Lou onto a more solid placement of his rump on Antonia’s chair, just a minor wiggle forward which this time is not met with a reciprocal contraction of any female body parts. Followed by more talk about restaurants, don’t these people have kitchens, plans for tonight, how long are you down here for, I begin to drift way, I am thinking of the sound of the waves again, looking for my resolve to sit up.

“Hey, how about a drink? You girls want a drink?”

A bunch of quick no’s, gotta drive, kid to be picked up, too early, too hot, drinking on the beach gives me a headache.

No worries for Lou, he is off talking schools, and the New Jersey geography, he is asking inappropriate questions about spouses, he finds out he went to the same college as one of the absent husbands, and (Lucky Lou) the same school as Antonia’s brother! What year, what’s his first name, what frat house, do you know if he knew my buddy Jake, actually Joel but everyone called him Jake on account of whatever. Names and years offered, Lou it turns out is 42. Cindy mentions she is 45. Against my intentions my head rolls right for another look. Pretty damn good for 45. I reassess the group. Pretty well cared -for crew.

“You girls sure you don’t want a drink?”

In Boston if I called these people girls they would offer some sardonic remark, at a minimum. At least, a chilling of the atmosphere. It is comforting to me to think, it feeds into my superior self-image to think, that in Boston, if I were Lou addressing this group, there would be a chilling of the atmosphere and surely no tequila shots.

But Lou is cruising, he’s set at 80 and he is on cruise control, his hands are off the wheel, his chariot is humming down the road he wants to be on. “Tequila shots!! Let me buy you girls tequila shots. Just one, whaddaya say?”

Lou has hold of the group in some vaguely male way. Across the few feet of sand separating us, I can feel, palpably feel, the charge in the air. He is young, single turns out he is a sports agent (“oh do you know that guy, you know who, he’s the Giant’s big running back, they play y’know like just a few miles from my house in Jersey…”), his testosterone is sweating out of his pores, it is wafting into the oval and being breathed, imbued by osmosis, he is infecting the herd.

“Sure— okay just one but then I gotta go – giggle giggle” all floating in the air while a seemingly triumphant Lou is off his rump with remarkable alacrity, hard to believe how quickly he is up and harder to believe how fast he is back carrying a small try of shot glasses. He must have tipped the bartender at the beach bar shack a twenty to jump the line and get back here so fast.

Klink, klink, skol, a toast to the beach, another toast to Antonia we wish her good look, bottoms up, the beach waitress stops by to pick up the empties and another round gets ordered, then some more, who cares if my kid gets picked up and I’m sauced, half in the tank at three in the afternoon, I’ll get the nanny to pick him up, hey can your nanny pick mine up, general laughter. I am thinking, I cannot believe it but I am jealous, I am embarrassed to be jealous but yes I am, jealous that this chunky, balding, divorced shitty-employed clueless inappropriate jerk has got five beautiful girls, dammit women, totally enthralled. Enthralled with talk about nothing. Dumbo, listen up, what about the problem of global warming, why don’t you discuss the situation in Syria why dontcha?

“Say, Antonia, I don’t know if you have plans for tonight….” Carefully timed tactical pause, this guy is good, I will give him that. Next thing I hear is that Antonia of course is excused from dinner at the Crab Shack tonight, we have a group but it’s all couples, we’ll catch up tomorrow. Next thing I know everyone is on their feet gathering their miscellany, everyone is air kissing and waving good-bye, I see Lou and Antonia already at the stairs leading back to the hotel, hands linked, she is hooting “I’ll call you later,” Cindy says she will leave the key in the same spot, Lou promises in a booming baritone “I’ll take good care of her, don’t you worry,” and I glimpse Cindy and Rachel, the last to leave, stuffing stuff into their beach bags.

“Nice guy, can’t believe he’s still available,” says Cindy. “Yeah, but it hasn’t been all that long,” says Rachel. “Shit, I’m late,” says Cindy. “And do you care,” asks Rachel. Mutual mirth, fading up the beach and then they too are gone.

I hear the gurgle of the waves.

I am calming down from my embarrassment about my angry thoughts when I sense a shadow over me. Looking up, I see Celine, our beach area’s waitress, the young and blonde and blue-eyed and open-faced and small-nosed and lovely Celine.

“Excuse, me, sir, but — I am not sure, were you with the group that just left?”

“No. Not at all,” I snap, too adamantly, straightening Celine up as she tries to figure out what she did to offend.

“Sorry, you startled me,” I tell her. “Why do you ask, is there anything wrong?”

“Well, I have this open bar tab for three rounds of tequila shots….

I’ve heard lots of not so nice things about Empee, but you better not tell ‘em around me and my family. For me and my people — well, Empee is the salt of our earth fer sure. I’ll mention just one thing, so you can understand. In Brooklyn one year, we was all so young then ya know, my daddy was laid off from the trucking, and pretty soon money just wasn’t around, ya know. So I and the guys we’re on the stoop just talkin’ and my father walks out to buy some cigs, and Empee he says hey, what’s with your pop ‘cause he usually working right up through the dinner. And I tell him, “Empee, he got laid off and we on the welfare, ya know?”

And Empee, he is all about saying that is terrible and he knows this guy always needs drivers. So I ask him, what you know about people hiring people, we just a bunch of guys with no jobs, playing cards and hanging and all. And Empee, he is huffy about now and says, basically, look maybe I don’t want to work but I could, and I know people, good people. So everyone is hooting a little, but Empee he gets the beer somehow so no one is landing on him real hard and all.

So that is like a Friday or Saturday and that Monday, someone calls my pop and says hey I hear you a driver and I got needs for that in my shop, you come down to DeKalb Avenue, he gives him a number, and we talk about it. And don’t you know Empee he got my dad a job right like that, didn’t ever say anything about it except when I tried to talk about it he said, Lias, just don’t talk about it, ain’t no one’s business.

And that was just once, there was others as Empee got older and started going into the City regularly, all dressed up, all like a mystery but he helped out lots of people I tell ya. Me too. That Empee, he knew who his friends was, I tell ya that. Cool ass card man also, I tell ya.

Ya know, one time we was …..

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

For a first novel, Mr. Pierre has written on a rather strange theme, a fairy tale for adults but with purely child-like tropes. It is hard to categorize The Further Adventures of Maximillian J. Pussycat, and this reviewer has been looking at fiction for a couple of decades now. The premise, that a pet cat is particularly equipped to carry the world’s moral burden by reason of multiple lives, and the self-affirmation that comes from that perception, is stretched to its philosophical extreme by reason of the cat speaking to the world only through the mouth of its eight-year old owner. That conceit makes it difficult to separate the profound from the infantile, provided there is a difference of course. And it is not clear what Mr. Pierre had in mind by referring to “further” adventures when there are no “prior adventures” within our frame of reference. The photograph of the author, on the back cover flap, shows a small grey kitten of no particular standing; this reviewer suggests that in fact Mr. Pierre is homo sapien, although not of the most robust tribe.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

Count 1: Violation of Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934

22. The government repleads all facts set forth in paragraphs 1 through 21 above.
23. In or about the Spring of 1992, Mr. Pierre revised the format of his Sunday afternoon program, away from a listener-participation discussion of positive energy derived from nearness to feral animals to a general monologue concerning the United States economy and the economy of Latvia.
24. In or about June 10, 1993, Mr. Pierre placed a series of short sales orders through his on-line brokerage account wherein he effected disposition of shares of all the companies traded over the Exchanges of the United States and Latvia engaged in the business of selling armaments to the Middle East.
25. On information and belief, the aggregate proceeds of such short sales was approximately $7,434,800.
26. In early July of 1993, Mr. Pierre began mentioning on his radio program, which by then had a listenership of almost cultlike magnitude among the aged 35-54 cohort, that a certain fictional feline appearing in a book previously authored by him in the early 1980s, believed that negative energy derived from the arms trade with warm-climate countries could depress the market value of all companies within that space by a factor of 30%-50% over the next few months.
27. All stocks reasonably within the identified industry grouping thereupon began to fall in market value, and by mid-August had declined from their June 30 market price by an average of 55%.
28. On August 30, 1993, Mr. Pierre covered his short positions by purchasing the subject securities at reduced prices, generating a profit, prior to sales commissions and charges, of $7,111, 723.35.
29. By reason of a manipulation in the information available to the marketplace for a group of companies the securities of which are traded over the exchanges located within the United States, Mr. Pierre conducted a fraud on the marketplace by which the general trading public was damaged to the extent of approximately $7 Million, in violation of the laws of the United States.

*          *          *          *          *          *          * 

The first time I married M. Pierre—yeah, right I married the old guy twice – was in ’75, in Rockville, Maryland, which in those days was just really a farm town. I was daughter of the man who had the only hardware store in Rockville, a big barn of a place with a loading dock out back from which daddy sold everything from rolls of barbed wire to fence posts to milking machines to I don’t know what. I was a little long in the tooth by then, resigned to Rockville like a pleasant sentence to a lifetime of relaxation and without much of an interest in men; frankly, nothing had worked out and I felt I was sort of lucky not to have ended up like half my friends, on the bus to Baltimore to visit Dr. Tom, the famous Dr. Tom.

So this tall thin guy buys an old house, not even a real farm house, just a square box of a place on the outskirts of town, meant to be on the edge of things but the town never really got that far; red faded paint, dark though, going to greyish purple, rail fence, but nicer than it sounds actually, neat lawn and a new roof, daddy sold Harry the shingles and some paint to fix the place up for this new guy; rumor had it he bought the house for cash, sure it was only 25 grand or so but not a lot of people had 25 grand free and loose in Rockville back in ’75.

And this guy, M. Pierre a’course, he comes into the shop one day early on looking for bigger lightbulbs, he can’t see at night he says, the place is really sort of dark and he needs lots of light. So I ask him as a matter of politeness, why do you need so much light. I’m a writer, he says. No kidding, I say, as there weren’t many of those in good ole Rockville at the time, what are ya writing? “A short novel about a feline,” he replies as if he were saying something normal like “the life of George Washington” or “a cookbook for egg recipes.”

“Can I see some part of it?”

“Well,” he says with some surprise, “it is not usual for someone to ask to see a work in progress.”

“Yeah,” I says. “Maybe not where you come from but here in Rockville, everyone knows everything about everyone. Where you from, anyway?”

“Points North,” he says and I reply “Ya gotta mean New York, no one from New York wants to admit it around here, not that there aren’t many anyway.”

So M. Pierre, he gives me that famous M. Pierre smile, and I melt just feeling it all of a sudden, and he says with that smile, he says “I guess Rockville is just a friendly place so next time I come in I will bring you a chapter or two and you can tell me what you think.” And I said that is fine with me, I will look forward to it, and we both smile politely at each other and I can see his eyes moving around me a bit and I think, at that moment, “hmmm, that’s pretty interesting even though I am surely younger than he is, maybe not much but….” We married that winter and I loved him but never knew him and when the baby died he stopped giving me that M. Pierre smile and we were divorced as part of his leaving Rockville with his book finished and off he went to New York and got to be famous and a media star.

About 20 years later, in fact October 18, 1998, by then he was what, well past 60 and I was a only few years behind him on that score, on that very date I am closing the store at 6pm and thinking about going back to the house we shared, now in fact part of the thriving town of Rockville, in walks this distinguished guy, same grin, really nice clothes, and I read about him in the papers, a successful investor and even did get to publish that book about the cats which I thought was pretty lame, man knew damn near nothing about cats I tell you, and he says he’s been thinking about me and would I like to pick up again and move with him to Atlanta which was where he was now living, having just gotten out the Federal Jail there for something to do with stocks and he say no reason to move onward, having nowhere to go; which led him to thinking, blah blah, and so if you were coming onto 60 years old and spent your whole life behind a wooden counter in Rockville Maryland you would agree to move to Hades with the devil himself if he picked up the cost of the train ticket, and so a week later I showed up at this small cabin near the bus station in Atlanta and just moved in with my stuff and we were married and had a pleasant few years before one day I came home from the food store and his clothes were gone. He left a lot of money in the bank account, so I figured it was a clue that our relationship had run its course and I transferred the money to the store account and went back to Rockville which is where I now live, having sold the store and ending up in the only place where I had any friends to speak of.

I guess I was still married to the guy when he died, but I didn’t hear about that until after, and was not mentioned in the obituaries the librarian found for me on the internet. Mr. Tucker inquired on my behalf but there was no estate left for me to make a spousal claim….

*          *          *          *          *          *          * 

I first met M. Pierre when he arrived at the Thompson Retreat here in Slocum, and I recall the day perfectly. It was a Saturday in the Spring of 2004, and the forsythia had been out for a few days. He came walking up the gravel path, dragging a small suitcase on tiny rollers that the taxi driver had gotten from the trunk. Tall man with straight white hair, neatly trimmed, wearing a sports coat which is not how most people dress when they get here. Hair white as the sheet on your bed. I was on the porch in my chair, and up the gravel path he walks, straight as an arrow, little stones shooting out behind the wheels on his luggage, just strolling up the path with all those yellow flowers on either side of him, like some triumphal honor guard.

He said, “Hello old timer” and I said “I bet you’re older than I am” and from then on, until his passing, we were best friends. We talked business, he had his theories but after a few years the government had to pick up his tab so I guess his business success was not so great, ya know? He showed me a book he had written but it was about cats so I took it and told him I enjoyed it but frankly I couldn’t get out of the first paragraph. Damned cat talked and everything; he said it was a book for adults!

He said he had no people, and no one ever visited him. He got no mail. When he died all he had was his clothing and a pearl tie tac which Mr Lattimore gave to me as a remembrance. I don’t wear ties at my age, but I sometimes put it in the lapel of my shirt for decoration.

I do miss M. Pierre. Miss him a lot…..

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

“It is my pleasure to talk to you, class, on this beautiful day. I am from New York, and I did not know how beautiful it is in San Francisco until I got here. You are very lucky to be children here, and I am very lucky to be able to speak with you.

Your teacher said you were a very smart class and so I am going to ask for your help. I have just become a teacher myself. I started studying later in life. I did not really go to school to be a teacher until I was almost thirty years old. I know that sounds really old to you. It is not that old, but it is old to start paying attention in school. I know you kids will not make that mistake that I made, I know you will do your homework and pay attention to your teachers and parents all along.

So I teach writing. How to write stories. I have an idea which we can discuss, an idea for a story. It is about an animal, a pet in a family. It might be a dog, or a cat, or even an iguana or a turtle. Does everyone know what an iguana looks like?   Good. This pet is pretty special. This pet is very smart, almost as smart as you children, and can talk. Not pretend talk like in a fairy tale, but can really really talk. And this pet has the answers to all the problems of the world. But no one will listen to him or her.

So what I want to ask you is, how do think the best way would be for this pet, let’s call her Max, to be able to tell the world the answers to all its questions? Who wants to start.      —-   Someone can start, there are only ideas, not wrong answers, we are making up a story here. You? Good. And what is your name……”

*          *             *          *          *          *         

 

Special to the New York Times, Page 47, April 18, 2014.Pierre, M.,author and public personality, passed away on April 4 in Slocum, Georgia at the age of 80. He left no family and the cause of death was not disclosed.

Mr. Pierre, born July 15, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, as Maurice Pender, had a meteoric career in the public eye, parlaying his one published novel, The Further Adventures of Maximillian J. Pussycat, into a wildly popular radio talk show that ran from 1978 to 1993. Born into poverty during the Depression and after serving several brief prison terms for various petty crimes of violence, Mr. Pierre was adopted by the Brooklyn Catholic Archdiocese under a special program to benefit underprivileged Brooklyn citizens. He graduated from Brooklyn College in 1963 with a degree in elementary education, taught school around the country for a decade, then removed himself to Rockville, Maryland, where he spent several years crafting his haunting novel, a tale of a highly moral pet feline who had finally found a way to communicate its thoughts to the world.

Mr. Pierre built a radio career on the book, at one time being heard over 656 outlets in the United States and Canada. His utilization of his radio program to manipulate the price of securities caught the eye of the United States government, and after conviction he served three years in prison at the Atlanta Correctional Institution. Having lost his radio pulpit, Mr. Pierre lived out his life in seclusion in Georgia.

Married once in the early ‘70s to Lettie Harrison of Rockville, Maryland, Mr. Pierre divorced Ms. Harrison shortly after completion of his novel. The couple had no children.

Norman Cattan, former programming head of Central Broadcasting Network, remembered Mr. Pierre from his heydays as a radio personality. “He never was flashy; he always was calm, understated. Not the kind of shock-jock people you hear on the radio today. Always had an interesting, softer angle on life. He got sidetracked by some problem with the SEC in the’ 90s. Never understood all that, why he did it. He was such a gentle, helpful man.”

*          *          *          *          *          *          * 

“The son of a bitch, he took all my money and never looked back. Damned right I’ll tell you about so-called M. Pierre. He was born up North, New Jersey I think, or Massachusetts. Wherever, he came from dirt. He had no manners, but that guy had a lot of what they call charm, charm like the guy selling you vitamins on the TV, that kind of oil. Rap like a hammer. That shit about his being born in the South? Of people who were from the French? Don’t you believe it. I knew the guy, ya see. Real well, I knew him. That’s how he robbed me, son of a bitch, in this town in Oklahoma. Summer of ’70, he arrived because he had been hired by the public school to teach English. Said he wanted to settle into town before the school year started. Hot as hell, that summer….”

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

Dear. Mr. Madison:

I am writing about a pair of your thin-soled “Manhattan” model shoe, which I purchased in brown in Macy’s, just a couple of weeks ago. I found that, through normal wear, the front flap of the sole on the right shoe has separated from the upper part of the shoe. The people at Macy’s say that I must have mistreated the shoe, but I assure you I did not.

I am asking you to send me a replacement pair, 10W, or at least a right shoe, in brown, to the address below. I am in the media and I need to look my best at all times and would be pleased to comment favorably if you were to make good on your shoe at your earliest convenience.

As you know, one comment by a radio personality, either favorably or not, can have a big impact on the commercial success of any company, particularly a company directly serving the consumer.

I eagerly await your advice.

Yours truly,  M. Pierre

*          *          *          *          *          *          * 

WIKIPEDIA ENTRY MAY 22, 2015

1. Pierre, born Maurice Pender in Brooklyn, New York July 15, 1933, and died of natural causes on April 4, 1914 in Slocum, Georgia, American author, radio personality, investor.

 

Personal Life

Writings and Radio Career

Later Career

Personal Life:

Mr. Pierre was born to poverty in a particularly depressed area of Brooklyn, New York of working class parents. An indifferent student in school, Mr. Pierre dropped out of High School at age sixteen. There followed a period of petty crime and temporary jobs. He was then taken into a program run by the Catholic Archdiocese of Brooklyn, which paid his living expenses while he graduated (1963) from Brooklyn College with a major in education in three years.

Pierre traveled through much of the United States holding various jobs in education until he settled in Rockville, Maryland, married Lettie Harrison in [? Information needed], to whom he was married for several years while he wrote his single novel, The Further Adventures of Maximillian J. Pussycat.

The novel was wildly successful and launched Mr. Pierre on a career in public broadcast described below.

Little is known of his personal life after the publication of his novel. [further information needed]

Writings and Radio Career

Mr. Pierre’s book, cast as a fairy tale for adults in which a feline, speaking through its master, explores the simple truths of life and the need to return to basics, topped the charts for fiction from its first publication in June, 1978 for seven months, and remained a top seller through six editions and eleven paperback printings, the last edition being published in English in May of 1992. It was translated into fourteen foreign languages, and was the basis for two cartoon series on Cartoon Network, one voiced by Meryl Streep.

The most transparent and most quoted passage from his novel, The Further Adventures of Maximillian J. Pussycat, is set forth below, a soliloquy by M. J. Pussycat himself:

“You must understand. I am a cat! Mystery is my life. Or lives. I do not have only nine, you see. I have many. Each new day is a new set of lives, to live as if my entire life. If I bring joy that is good. If I rub up against a visitor to our home and she begins to gasp and wheeze because she is allergic to me, if she must be taken out to the fresh air in extreme distress, if she even happens to die on our porch, her air passages swollen beyond relief, her face blue-tinged as her chest heaves uselessly– well, her day of her life was not very good of course but, as for me, I still had the arm chair to lie in and my little girl who stroked my fur and who told me that it was not my fault.”

Mr. Pierre was contracted to conduct a daytime talk show about any and all topics, first on CBN, beginning in May of 1980. His four hour talk show was moved from the 12-4 slot to the 3-7 slot after several weeks, when it was clear that his drawing power, and simple way of phrasing serious life questions so that the solutions become obvious, had attracted a large following. Unique among talk show hosts, his popularity was highest during prime “drive time,” and did not wane although he never had guests and had no formal training in any particular area.

In or about 199? His program suddenly diverted to reports on economic matters and selection of investments, which triggered a sharp decline in his popularity. His show was moved to Sunday mornings only in 199?. In 1994 he was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for violation of the Federal Securities laws, was convicted and spent 3 years of a 4 year sentence in the United States low security penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia.

Later Career   [if anyone has credible information about Mr. Pierre after his release from prison, please propose supplementary information to the editors]

          *          *          *          *          *          *  

Selection from Eagle Scout Project Outline submitted by Scout First Class Maurice Pender, Troop 81, Brooklyn New York, September 24, 1954.

“At the new beach park known as Jones Beach, located in Suffolk County, Long Island, there are three very long walkways from the distant parking areas to the beach houses and beach itself. On hot days, many people become tired and thirsty during that walk, carrying chairs and umbrellas and coolers and permitted beach toys. My project is to install water stations at 25 yard intervals on all paths, using pumping equipment, piping and water fountains provided by the Park. I have a letter from Mr. Robert Moses, Director of the Triborough Bridge Authority, saying that he will cause the State of New York to provide all materials including bubblers if our troop will dig, and then cover over, the ditches to bring the water along the paths. Work will be done during the beach “off-season.” My Troop will provide the labor. We will have parents pack suitable food and transportation. My project will improve the park and cure dehydration, which leads to many headaches and is a factor in drowning accidents.

My thanks to Mr. George Richter, Asst Scout Master, who helped me write this project proposal.”

         *          *          *          *          *          *  

Report Card

Spring Semester 1943

PS 216, Brooklyn New York

Absent: 22

Tardy: 13

Grades

English Composition                         B

American History                              B

Mathematics                                      C-

Science                                                C-

Geography                                         D

Art                                                      C

Music                                                  A

Comportment                                    D. Maurice is a polite, respectful boy, always correct with teachers. He is often the center of disturbances, however, usually involving large numbers of children. He seems to make groups of children angry with each other. Teachers and our psychologist, Mr. Levitan, suggest that Maurice be taken to a consultation with a private practitioner, as he is a bright boy with behaviors that we at 216 do not feel experienced in addressing.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

Selected Street Interviews, Conducted by Murray Schlictstein, “Man on the Street” for WKKL-TV, April 10 to 16, 2014. Each interviewee was asked if he or she had heard that M. Pierre had died.

+ Really. That is too bad. Poor woman, sorry she passed.

+ Oh, that guy.  I don’t even think that guy every really existed, it was whaddaya call it, a fake name, a nom de plume for someone else, some famous guy. Urban legend I think. Pretty sure about that. Yeah.

+Great man, listened to him all the time for must have been a couple of decades. His novel changed my life. He made me understand that each of us has both good and evil, and that sometimes you don’t get to choose which one of you comes to the table at a particular time. We are all part of the unpredictable world, you know! Goddamned genius‼ Hey, carpe diem.

+ Oh, did not know. Shame. Best shortstop the Mets ever had.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

Yeah, M. Pierre was my father. How’d you find me anyway?

I haven’t had any contact with him for maybe forty years before he passed away. My mother told me I was a love child, that’s the way it was on the streets. Hard times. Sometimes he would come by, but after about when I turned 10 or 11 he just stopped. I cried about it, yeah, asked mamma why he had stopped, he was nice to me and my only father. It was years later that I once tried to reach out to him, he was on the radio of course, I called in but they would not put the call through. I left my number and explained why I called and the woman said she would be sure to give him the message, but I never did hear back. I guess he was just a fleeting memory for me, but I was just no memory at all for him.

It wasn’t until Mr. Jamison, the guy who wrote that biography about my father after he died, came to see me, that I learned about the, well, I guess the alleged incidents. He had seen some court records about a case brought by my mother about some sort of improper conduct, but I told him, I don’t recall anything of the kind. I think I just loved him because he was my only father.

By then of course mama had passed, so I had no one to talk to about all that….

#

 

I am angry with myself, given my slow start. I almost gave up the whole thing when I realized that here I was, 22 years old, likely one-quarter of the opportunity already had passed me by, at least statistically. Then again, you really cannot expect a child to pick up on this, so maybe I lost only, say 10% of what you might reasonably expect.

I tell you this: if I ever have a kid, I am going to start the collection right from birth and then, when the kid gets the idea, he or she will have a complete set of everything right from the get-go. That sort of a jump has got to resonate in terms of commitment to the effort.

I had been saving facial hair since I grew a scraggly beard a few years ago and then had to cut it off for a job interview. It came off in such a neat tuft that it seemed a shame to just toss it out so I put it in a shoe box. It was quite natural after that, when I cleaned out my electric razor, to brush the loose hairs into that same box. For a while I kept the cut beard piece separate in a corner, but after a while I just brushed the cut hairs into the box no matter where they fell.

It was a few months into this practice that I realized that I was missing a lot; so, I made a list.

There is of course hair from all over the place; mostly on top of the head although I had started to shave my legs for bicycle racing. Nail cuttings from fingers and toes are pretty easy also. Some of the other stuff was pretty esoteric but completeness counts, I thought (and think) so I set up discrete little glass jars for the stuff that comes out of the corners of your eyes and the morning, and sometimes those thick finger-nail coatings of yellow stuff from your ears. At the end of that phase, I remembered that sometimes you get stuff from your navel but I think that years of that stuff would only fill an empty cigarette box.

I was pretty happy for a few months when I caught a bad cold and couldn’t stop coughing. At the end I was bringing up these green elastic tendrils from somewhere and that seemed a little gross to me but they were so substantial, compared to some of the other stuff, that it just seemed illogical not to save that and I found an old paint can and starting putting it in there and also what came out of my nose which was hard to separate from the tissues sometimes and that is why there are those white lacy paper things in there.

I went on the internet and had trouble finding anyone else with this hobby except for this one guy in Portland, Oregon who was shy about it but it turns out he had thought it all through and was also saving saliva without anything in it and also sweat and his waste, if you know what I mean. Saliva didn’t seem easy to capture plus you spit all the time and then brush your teeth and how do you save that, anyway? As for sweat, that seemed impossible unless you were willing to save wet clothes and then over time they just dry out, but I did buy some 20 gallon lawn bags and I am experimenting with T-shirts that I use for exercise.

One night it hit me like a rock as I was brushing my teeth that I had forgotten about the teeth themselves! By now I have all my adult teeth and who knows what my goddamned parents did with my baby teeth, but I bought an old porcelain jar labelled “TEETH” which I think was a 19^th Century thing for false teeth, and since I did not have anything readily handy to put in there I asked my dentist to pull my wisdom teeth and I put those in there, as a starter.

You will by now notice that I have avoided mention of those noxious extrusions like passing air from either end, not to mention excrement and urine. I was loathe to even think about it, for a while, except for the air or gas which it seemed to me was sort of benign if elusive. I do try to belch, when home, into a large glass jar and I have tried to do the same with passing gas from my rectum, but I don’t mind telling you that I am having a hell of a time with that part of it and the fact that my collection is so incomplete is, I tell you, depressing on occasion.

Now I view myself as a wholly normal human being and the idea of collecting excrement and urine is repulsive, and the argument that my collection demands no less still cannot get me comfortable with that process.

So here is how I handle it, or at least have handled it for the last couple of months anyway.

Actually, there is no real benefit to your hearing about that part. I think also we can avoid the whole sex thing except to say that when you are alone the collecting is much easier than if are with someone else, except for this one girl whom we are not going to talk about.

Let me tell you, instead, how I hope to expand my collection.

There are two related collectibles that I have not yet approached. One is blood and the other is actual flesh. The blood is easy although actually hard to collect and when you go to the Red Cross they will draw it but then they do not want to give it to you. My doctor was also very unsettled by the discussion and I don’t think he will help, even if I were to go back there again which I doubt. Minor collections into the jar are fine but very slow and a couple of more spectacular efforts scared me as I got woozy the first time and on the second try I actually passed out and wasted a whole bunch and ended up just stuffing the whole red-soaked wash cloth down into the jar which absorbed most of the earlier collections and certainly took away from the purity of the effort to date. But I think I can get the blood thing to work, and have begun to discuss it with my girlfriend who says she might help me to do it but was thinking about a trade for what I can do for her in return.

The flesh thing does represent the very edge of my comfort zone here but, then again, I am a young guy and likely can grow into it. Visible impairments will upset friends and parents and ultimately make employment difficult but I am exploring overeating followed by liposuction as one partial solution. I still have my tonsils and appendix and these seem benign candidates and I am starting to read about adenoids and gall bladders which, I have reason to believe, also are expendable.

My girlfriend has told me she has something really exciting to discuss with me tonight so, if you will excuse me, I will trim my nails, answer calls to nature, shave, and then head out to meet her. It has been a real pleasure talking with you. Let’s do it again sometime.

 

Now I guess if you were writing a modern novel, the kind where each chapter is four pages and there are 75 of them and each chapter really is a scene in the ultimate movie version when the studio wants to pick up an easy script for summer release, you would start my story right now, in my cell. You then go to flashbacks, the story unfolds, and it is unchallenging (you have to know how it ends after all, the movie begins in a jail) but has that satisfying roundness of narrative that makes you feel afterwards that you have seen a full “story.”

What really troubles me is not that they did not prove me guilty, but rather how the facts – what the DA called the “evidence” – incredibly wound itself around my person so tightly that I could not escape. It’s not a matter of my thinking I was smarter than anyone else; it’s more a matter of how circumstance encompasses reality and thereby dictates the future.

He was an old guy; at his house, number 77, where his widow and children and grandchildren gathered in his memory that night, Sitting on the coffee table in the front parlor of the brick-front turn of the century neo-Victorian, was a home-made picture album of his eightieth birthday party held that very winter. I knew him well in a shallow kind of way, a perpetual guest at the home of a mutual friend where he and his wife also were regularly invited. I liked him; he had that courtly reserve that comes with guys that age who wear bow-ties. When I was told of his death, I wanted to attend the funeral but it wasn’t convenient, coming as it did on a sunny warm Sunday in early summer. I decided to pay my condolences instead on the next day, after work, when I could stop by on the way home from the City, say the warm things I felt, tell the widow we would stay in touch, and still get home in time for a half-bottle of Pinot and a few smokes along with Sunday’s left-overs.

They were digging up the streets and it was one of those muggy Boston days where the trees in Back Bay offered no relief; the heat fell into your car through open windows and was mollified only by cranking up the air conditioning. I circled the block twice, deciphering the parking signs and trying to avoid the red traffic cones around the trenches, angry that I had gotten a late start and was bumping up against the hour when visiting was scheduled to end. Taking a chance next to a cryptic yellow stripe on the curb that may have meant I was pulling into a tow zone, I swung out of the car, tucked my small purse under the front seat, ran my palms down the sides of my skirt, and headed down the street.

The door was half open, letting into a small vestibule with an inner door beyond. Quietly I shut the outer door behind me and let myself through into the hallway. The dark oak woodwork of a turned banister and paneled stair to my right, pocket doors half opening to a lush sitting room on the left with a couple of couches, chintz around a small marble fireplace, crystal chandelier hanging from a high ceiling with central plaster medallion and dentil molding around; the air was cooled, the room inviting. The room was also empty.

On the wall, a small shelf held a hand-lettered sign on a white card, the script full of seraphs and mock medieval adornments: “Please remove shoes.” I slipped out of my heels and pushed them gently to the side of the hallway.

I took a few steps down the hall; black and white photographs on the walls, polished wood floors with rich red Oriental runner, a casual table of vaguely Chinese influence to one side. I walked tentatively back into the house when I was struck by the absolute silence. Could there be a prayer being said, a silent observation of some sort, in one of the back rooms? Holding my right arm out and slightly in front of me as if to ward off a sudden turn in the landscape or to sense a change in surroundings, I walked in small steps further down the hallway, past an empty dining room with glass breakfront and heavy table and chairs with ball and claw feet sinking into an even darker Oriental, into a kitchen redone with stainless steel and granite, surrounded with glass-fronted cabinets. Empty, the stools around the counter standing at unoccupied attention.

I paused and listened; it could not be this quiet! Could people be up the stairs? Improbable. I leaned into the rear stairwell; somewhere the hum of an air conditioner. Something clearly is not right about what I am doing; I lean further into the rear stairwell, one foot on the first step, hand gently on the rail and listen without breath. Something is just not right. I turn and walk quickly back down the hallway.

*       *     *

Mildred is ushering out the last of the visitors, me included. There has not been a chance to speak except for the perfunctory condolences, and now there is that awkward silence when she says “You’re going?” and I say “yes, it has been a long day for you.” Compelled to fill the ensuing silent moment, I tell her that a funny thing happened to me on the way to her house, I wandered into number 75 next door, I was so flumoxed about being late and all, and it was the strangest thing, the door was open, I took off my shoes, I got all the way into the back of the house and there was no one there of course, I got out as fast as I could once I realized my mistake, felt like a fool when I looked at the house number and came right over but was amazed that the apartment, lovely by the way, was wide open like that and what was the sign about the shoes all about?

“She’s strange. Perfectly nice but strange. Came to the funeral yesterday, you would have met her…. No one on the street locks up, I know it’s in the City but we’ve all been here for years, it is really quite safe. Even when Lou goes out for his late night walks—well….” Suddenly Mildred’s face sags, her years etch their sorrow on her cheeks as her eyes fill. I am sorry I started but can only give her a quick hug, a squeeze of the hands and I am again out in the heat, the contrast to the cool interior makes me break out into moist globules, I have to wipe my forehead twice before I can regain the car. I sit back in the driver’s seat and sigh. I wonder why my right hand quivers a little, and then I remember and I turn on the ignition.

 

*   *   *

 

“So then what did you do?”

“I told you. I got concerned. Scared actually. The place was clearly empty.   It felt empty. You know, sometimes when you just stop and think for a minute and it comes to you, there is no one there. Just a feeling. So I went out into the street and saw I was next door, the numbers are those little brass things, I just went up the wrong steps and the door was open. So anyway I went into 77.”

He kept his notes in a black and white bound book, what we used to call a composition book in school. It was not a large book, more like half-sized. He wrote in pencil, a small bitten piece of yellow pencil, it made him curl his fingers and hunch over the page as he laboriously recorded whatever it was that inspired him.

“You want coffee?”

“I want to go home. I’ve been here for an hour and half. I told you what happened. Didn’t you talk to Mildred next door?”

“We have a few things we still have to go over. You sure you don’t want coffee?” He was a large black man, Detective Browning or Bronson or somesuch, he had given me his card and I had slipped it into my purse and didn’t want to go digging for it so I didn’t use his name. Somehow I sensed that coffee equated to more questions; I waved my hand dismissively.

Browning/Bronson came back into the room with steam coming out of a white plastic cup with playing cards printed on the side in black and red. All aces. “Machine is terrible but it’s all we got, the guy next door closes at 4.”

“I don’t know what more I can tell you. I thought the place was empty. How was I to know someone was dead? I never left the first floor.”

“Now that’s one of the things I wanted to ask you about.” He flipped back to near the start of his book. “You know, we got your fingerprints on the railing heading up the back stairs. How am I supposed to believe you never went up there, those stairs go right to the hall outside her bedroom.”

“I told you, I was listening up the stairs. I must have put my hand on the railing.” I paused. “I am sure there were no fingerprints up the stairs, you know on top.   And I’m sure there were no footprints.”

“Well, you don’t get footprints on a carpet, and no dirt or anything if someone is barefoot.” He did not write into his book; an ominous sign? “Why didn’t you tell me you knew her?”

“I didn’t know her name until I came in here, didn’t know it when you called. Why would I tell you that? Or, not tell you that? Look, I don’t want to say I am confused or worried but I don’t know what is going on here. Why do you keep asking me questions? Should I have a lawyer or something? I didn’t do anything and you’re acting like I did.” My voice squeaked at the end, I wished it hadn’t.

“I told you we are just trying to understand what happened. If you want a lawyer go call one, I won’t ask any more questions.” He glanced up over his reading glasses; his stare said, if you ask for a lawyer then I know you need a lawyer and why would that be, young woman?

“Look, I told you what happened.   I don’t mean to be uncooperative but I don’t have anything else to say. I would like to go home. It’s late, I worked all day.”

“If I send someone with you and drive you home, can we pick up the shoes you were wearing last night?” His brow made quizzical motions. “Might tell us something. We both know you were in the place, and we both know when, and I am told that the subject died at…” pages flip briefly “… just around 7:30. That was sort of when you were there?” It was a statement disguised as a question. “The shoes might, well might tell us something about this.”

I didn’t like that question; my heels had been scuffed on the rough pavement around the apartment, where they were digging up the pavement, and I had dropped them at the cobbler on the ground floor of my office building on the way into work that morning. Somehow I was not enthused about explaining that fact, however benign.

“Whaddaya say?”

“I think I want to talk to a lawyer. You’re making a big deal out of this and I don’t like it.”

Browning/Bronson flipped his book shut, looked up and allowed himself a brief, thin smile.

*     *     *

Well, Let’s not get melodramatic here. I have no idea how they found out about the whole history, maybe it just came out later when they started digging. You really never know, when these things happen, about the sequence of things. So the grand jury indicted me based on that whole thing in New York and the finger print, and then the cobbler was slow as only cobblers are and they found some blood on the bottom of the left shoe and since I had told them I left the shoes at the front door there really was no way that there could have been blood on that shoe if I were telling the truth. I guess. Who knows.

The knife had no finger prints but where the blade met the hilt was a strand from a rag they found in the kitchen and they figured out someone had wiped the knife clean, and my lawyer thought that ten years was a great trade against the risk of going to trial, which he was sure we would win but then again you never know about juries, now do you?

So here I sit and I am told that the way it worked out the case is over and done with. Which is good. Because now I can finally say it, and it feels good to say it.

It was dumb luck they lived next door, dumb luck I wandered in, dumb luck she was in bed with the flu, just one of those really really weird things, you know.

But I am just totally glad I killed the bitch. I truly am.