Glimmer Train's Interview w/ George Saunders

"...I don't get plot. I don't understand it. I don't like it."

"If I'm going to do you, I have to think in your diction, with your precise experience, and...your neuroses and repetitive thought-stream."

Two great, clear insights here: plot and theme need to follow, or emerge from, character or voice (pp. 22-23); and he talks about free indirect voice, that he calls "third-person ventriloquism", in such an understandable way that he pretty much obviates that whole James Wood book (p. 21). Saunders is fun and exciting on the mysteries of writing.
http://www.glimmertrain.com

http://www.amazon.com/How-Fiction-Works-James-Wood/dp/0312428472

http://www.npr.org/2013/01/20/169507764/george-saunders-on-absurdism-and-ventriloquism-in-tenth-of-december

The Story of that 1997 O.B.S. F-250 Powerstroke Diesel

Okay, so I already told you one big thing that happened in Big Headache that turned out poorly, and, so, here's another:

So, late summer 2007 I quit down at Diamond right as soon after we covered the hay because Wilsons had sold it that spring to the goddamned Silversteins from L.A. and they were a fucking nightmare to work for all summer. They come in and fired my uncle Spence Lyman, who was the manager, when he told them he wouldn't dig their illegal wells nor oversee whoever was going to do it and they wanted to change from whiteface beef to Angus stud bulls and it was all summer pulling out all that new fence we just finished to of put in to replace it with that picturesque but useless lodgepole-rail shit hobby ranchers like, working chainsawing all day every day for minimum. I said fuck that shit and saw the hay put up then quit and only a couple hard-up locals stayed on, Ez the Bishop's boy the whiner and Kade of course always doing the work of any three men for the price of one half a man and too retarded to go on strike, and the rest of us replaced with Mexicans they hauled up from Arizona in a stakeside truck. So I was pretty fucking pissed. The Wilsons having been my family's employer since Brigham Young traded them that sick ranchland for a teenage girl or two and my family farming sand. Anyways, Wilsons' own kids went away for careers and whatnot and the land down there wedged between Black Bear and Cedar, those greenest pastures in Kolob with the whiterock cliffs all around and Navajo Mountain just perfect framed away south, just looks like a postcard, like if Kolob had a Chamber of Commerce that is what they would put on the website, no Photoshop required. So Wilsons put it up to sell and got a couple local bids, like from Old Man Ferral and this weekender who owns the dealerships wherever who is buying up ranches, and these bids were all under Wilsons' asking price so Wilsons listed it on the internet on this one site with ads for Bugatti or some such vehicle with these like chiseled fags in tuxes getting out in a urban nighttime all squarejawed and these Photoshopped perfect-ten vixens in tight dresses backlit looking wetly at the fag in that lordotic model-vixen posture like they're on the trembly edge of orgasm, not the kind of ad that's aimed at for-real ranchers. And so the Silversteins saw the ad and put in their last-minute bid at asking and got it and right away the changes. Their whole plan relied on a huge new well a hundred feet from Lower Cat Creek, illegal as the IRS, and they run that pump just one week and the water table dropped so much Cat went underground and not a drop makes it to the canyon anymore and it was just dead trout in the sand all the way down. Anyway, so: like I said I quit right after putting up the hay and hadn't saved for winter so I went out to the rockfall at the bottom of Big Headache to find some income. Way the fuck out there. I was pretty sure there were pots out there. When my father was a boy some men of Kolob had rappelled down onto the granary ledge to get to the Big House and found it pretty much intact, as it had been stranded up there for all those years after the cows ate down all the canyon grass in the '30s and the floods washed out like forty feet of sand. They got one of the great pothunter finds of all time, thirty intact pots, corn still sealed in the granary, even some stick figures and dolls and baskets. That find paid off some tractors in Kolob, tell you what. Anyways, with the new rockfall I was reminded of how many ledges remained out there and there was one place I had been looking at for years where old dry juniper roots stuck out of the cliffwall way up high above the ground, and I figured, because I'm that kind of genius, that those roots had been in dirt once upon a time and probably indicated that the ledge had been right above ground level before the erosion in the '30s, so I went out there to mark the spot and I roped down to the ledge. Sure enough, there was an old fireplace and a mano and some broken points and I eventually made a few dollars, but it was there I had a windfall, I guess you could call it.

When I roped down to the ledge it was afternoon and I had my eye on a big cloud sitting on the mountain. I was high enough above the wash to be safe, but I didn't want to get wet. It started raining while I was still on the ledge, so I moved back under the overhang and got comfortable. Lit a fire on the old spot. The first fire there for a thousand years, probably. Sitting warm and dry in a desert storm is the sweetest thing. Ravens hissing by. The facing cliffside turning dark as it soaks, then the hail bouncing everywhere and the thunder doing that special migraine crash it does, why they named it Headache, as well as the light that is purple and yellow both, which what the fuck? Where can you see purpleyellow that's not the desert in a rainstorm? Pretty soon the canyon starts flowing. Just some red in the water, then with some rocks in it, then a tree or two, then it really got wound up with a big swell of everything from upcanyon that wasn't nailed down. The rain wasn't much where I was, but upmountain it must of dumped because the stream come up to a mad rapid. You could see the cottonwoods shake when rocks got tumbled against them. Those big rafts of floaters, all grass and cattails, get hung up crosswise in the willows. The water red with rock looks like tomato soup some big willow-mustached motherfucker is slurping at. I love that shit, watching a desert rainstorm. So there I sat watching God TV, when I see this white thing coming down. I kept hearing this like drumming sound and then this white thing, some big bucking heaving rectangle spinning downcanyon. It keeps getting hung up in the trees and damming the flood, going slower than the water so if you sorta squint it looks like it's going upstream. Anyway, but pretty soon it gets to below me and I will be goddamned if it wasn't a 1997 F-250 Powerstroke, so O.B.S., 7.3-liter diesel of course, just doing a fucking lovely pirouette down the canyon. You understand this is out of context in the extreme. Not a road for miles. Not even a driveable surface of any kind upstream til you get to 144 near where it summits. That's I guess 2,000 feet up and five, six miles north. Imagine my surprise and how fucking entertained I was. Just laughed my ass off, got a new story to tell drinking at the Small 'm'. I watched it out of sight bobbing down to the confluence. Slept on the ledge that night and roped out the next morning with my bag of illegal injun goodies, and decided to walk around down to the confluence to see if that truck had washed up. Sure enough, it was there in the mud where the flood broadened out, up to its doors in red muck. It had a bunch of dents, of course, and no mirrors, and a cracked windshield, but it looked pretty much like any goddamned ranch truck, except no heeler standing on a bale in the back. Walking back to 144 up the wash I come up with a plan.

Phase one of my plan was: haul it out. Trusting that nobody would find the truck, first I hitchhiked up to Old Man Ferral's to do some fence work for him. I waited a couple days for the water to sink away and the mud to dry out, then I borrowed his camera, his 4WD Massey-Ferguson, some chain, and a tow-bar. I drove the tractor half the night down from the ranch, down to where the main wash crosses 144, and down the sand those miles to the confluence. It is bumpy but drivable. No pouroffs or nothing. I took a picture of myself by the truck, taking care to capture some Utah postcard in the background. I had to do some digging to break the mud suction, but I did get the truck out and towed it all the way back to the shed behind Ferral's linehouse where I've been living at. Very slow going. I got the tractor all clean and put-away like Ferral likes it. Then I started hosing off the pickup. The mud was in everything. That truck was just one big fucking blob of red stucco, I shit you not. I kept at it til the truck stood there all bashed and gleaming in a big puddle of red mud. All day jetting that hose into everything. Old Man Ferral rode out to see but didn't even want to know what the Sam Hell I was doing, just shook his head and spit and kept riding. I kept at that truck all fall. Cleaned everything. Took a close look at it all.

Phase two of my plan was: fix it. I pulled the strarter, alternator, distributer, [carb?], and cleaned and dried it all. Flushed the fuel line. Took off the manifold and got the sand out of there. Anyway, long story short is I just about rebuilt that truck til it was dry, oiled, and tight. I bet I spent 500 hours on it. I banged out and pulled most of the dents and gave it some Bondo and spray primer. And before Christmas I got the fucker running. Ran pretty good, too. I celebrated by driving down to the Small 'm'. Never owned a vehicle before. So up I chugged in that big diesel and all the boys come over to see it. Of course I was noteworthily afoot for years, hitched ever damned place when I couldn't borrow a ranch truck. Always had. So they wanted to know where I got it. I said over to Youngville. Kade knows all the specs, that goddamned retard will surprise you with what he knows. Anyway, a O.B.S. Ford is an admired rig in Kolob. Fielding, who knows diesels from his daddy's shop was there and he said Even though it looks like it falled off the mountain it sounds like it's running good, and that got me a wee bit paranoid thinking Fielding knew something about its provenance, but maybe that was all the grass I was was smoking that day.

I moved onto phase three of my plan: get paid for all that work I did on it. I went to the Town Hall and logged onto the internet and found some Ford truck forums, and posted my before and after pictures and my story of the truck getting washed away and still running great, and I called the dealerships and told them, and pretty much spread the word and finally --long story-- reached the ad agency that does all the Ford Truck ads and they were interested in doing an ad. Got my before picture and they sent out a photographer and she special-lit the scenic overlook up at the top of Strike Valley with the Tortugas all pink in the sunset back there and they buffed up the remaining paint and the primer and the Bondo and they took a picture of me sitting in there with my elbow out the window and a nice new hat, that one I had on at the dance the other night, and then Photoshopped the fuck out of my teeth and made me look halfway to Robert Redford, and they gave me five grand and they ran the ad. That comes out to $10 per hour, which not bad considering I got the truck, too. Who gets paid $10 per hour to work on his own truck, I ask? Yours truly, motherfucker. Yours truly. It was one of my harebrained schemes that pays off better than work. Then, so maybe May of oh-eight I got pretty fucked up out at Spade's bonfire and I was driving Fox and Lauro out to the canyon after, like twothree in the AM, and fucking Sheriff Shumway is lying in wait and we blow by at like 85 without no mirrors to speak of and the muffler still not staying attached right and no headlights pointing at the road so he goes and pulls us over. To his credit he hardly never pulls over a local, only tourists, but this he just could not countenance nor condone, so he pulls me over, asks for licence and registration, which of course I don't have either of, and he puts the VIN in his laptop and it comes up stole. In retrospective hindsight, I do not know what I expected would happen with the truck with the Sheriff, but it had not recurred to me that it would of been reported stole. I figured washed away, act of God. Not stole. Anyway that prick the Sheriff I guess he had no choice. He arrested me, had to drive me clear to Sandwichville that same night, and him with ranch chores he had to call and get his wife to do while I sat in the back drunk off my ass listening and him not allowed as a Mormon to drink coffee, just Diet Coke, so not at all happy with yours truly Handy Whitehead. Plus the whole two-hour ride there I did not hardly shut up I was so drunk but he never put alcohol in the police report and I did not get the DUI I deserved, bless his heart.

As it turns out, this one guy from Loa had been up on the mountain spotting deer in the windup to the archery season when the rain took the whole paved pulloff his truck was parked on right off the mountainside into this swale and the truck just floated from there all the way down Big Headache. How it went over those pouroffs I do not fucking know. It was a miracle. Anyways, of course he got his truck back in very fine mechanical condition thanks to yours truly, Handy Whitehead, and my meticulous, not to say downright fanatical attention to mechanical detail and my turbocharged need to make all machines run like fine German automobiles and I got to sit in jail three days then tell the judge more or less the truth, that I found it in the canyon and fixed it up, but not about the pothunting you can bet your ass, and he threw out the auto-theft charge and fined me $nnn for driving with no license and no registration and no mirrors and he told me I needed to write a letter of this story to help the truck's real owner get his insurance figured out. Anyways, as you now know, this is why I walk everywhere and it is why I insist I am not paranoid, that every interaction I have with the government ends up with them taking from me what I have earned and leaving me to fend for myself in a world not made for walking or for hitchhiking with bad gray teeth and clothes that look like I stole them from a halfway-house mop closet.

Gladys, Kolob, Utah, August 20, 2014

If you are not going to sleep you may as well get up and make some progress. In this last hour —it is still dark— there has been only one vehicle go by on 144 —it was Handy: that truck has no muffler— so you can be out there making some progress without them seeing you. So you put on the light and see that it is only four. There is one hour before Ferral Young will be out, and two hours before Fielding gets to the jobsite to drink his coffee so you should get the box out from where you kicked it under the bed —the sight of it there, unopened, after you treated yourself to the $100 special Dr. Comfort orthopedic shoes you got special fitted up visiting your sisters in Provo, has been giving you guilt because you didn't wear them even once those first few weeks— so you reach the grabber and you get your whole big self off the bed and it makes that moan of relief that always you smile at. The wall is in the way of you getting far enough from the bed to see where the box is at so you poke around with the grabber til it hits something and you get the jaws over the edge and with a few tries you get the box slid out to where you can see it but the lid is taped shut, now you remember, so you can't use the grabber to get it open so there is no alternative but to sit back down on the bed. You back up to it and use the grabber and the bedside table —it feels dusty, you better get the dusting done— to lower back down and you chuckle again because the bed says —you imagine this— Oh my gosh! Not Again! Now that you are sitting the box is down there by your foot so you try to push it onto your feet with the grabber so maybe you can slide it up your shins, but that is pretty hard, so after trying  that for a while you just decide to go for it so you hoist your stomach and your breasts over to the right and hold them there with your thighs and you exhale as much as you can and hold to the bedpost with your right hand and reach down with your left leaning as far as your bulk allows and it goes better than you'd thought: your fingers go right under the boxtop so you can lift it one handed on the first try. So you have the box and you get the fingernail clippers out of the bedside and break the tape and get out the shoes —the new-shoe smell makes you so happy and you remember being a girl and the first day of school, and you have your first cry of the day— and you hold them up to the light. They are perfectly white. They are extra wide and padded and have the Velcro. You get a good hold of them and haul yourself back up to standing and take the two steps to the dresser and get out today's smock and you go around the soft spot in the floor and over the creaky threshold and into the bathroom.

You do your morning business. The grab-bars are so embarrassing. You think of Fielding in here —not commenting at all, of course, he is so polite— installing the grab-bars around the toilet and shower. He was so, what was that word? discreet! and kind as he put the big lag screws into the studs. He did not use the smaller screws that came in the grab-bar kit. Such a hardworking, polite man. You watched him there kneeling in the bathroom —you took half a day to scrub and disinfect and polish the bathroom before he arrived, though it was already perfectly clean— and you looked at his arms, but just in the mirror as you talked about the new house he is building for the weekenders. You saw how every muscle was its own separate thing and when he drove the screws you watched every tendon and muscle in his arm and neck and you saw his shirt untuck as he knelt there in front of your toilet and you went into your room to cry.

After you shower you wipe a small window in the mirror steam and you do your morning honesty, there under the fluorescent. It is Gladys, you say. For there you are. The merciful steam hides the worst, but there you are. You nose is almost gone in the cheeks but your eyes are still pretty. Prettiest eyes, said the yearbook, Youngville High School class of 1994. You do your eye makeup now at 4:30 AM. You are banking on nobody sees you, but if they do you will have your makeup on. You do your hair, too, big and soft and black —lustrous— it makes your face not so fat and accentuates your eyes. It covers your neck the way you do it. You reach your bra off the towel rack. You remember to hold it up to laugh or at least to smile about it. You hold it by one end in front of you and let the other end drop to the floor. You say to the mirror Gladys, you are five feet around at the chest, and you laugh —this you have to force yourself to do, but once you start the laugh it becomes a real laugh, this is the magic you do every time with your enormous bra —and then, laughing, your eyes almost lost in fat and your cheeks like apples, you get it over you and lift each breast into it and get it hooked. You have a secret you worry about, but it feels sexy: for years you have not been able to bend the right way to get your panties on, so you don't wear any, you just get your smock —it is the size of a tent— over your head and let it fall and get your arms into the armholes. No man has really looked at you since way back so you have this secret right in front of them that you are wearing only the bra and the smock and —here your heart beats a little faster— under the smock you can feel the air on you and right now you can feel those parts you can't reach cool and damp as you open the bathroom door and go out into the cool hall.

It is still dark. You clap the light on. Yes, you need to dust. This is a dusty house. You step down onto the porch and the yard light comes on. The yellow light above the gas pumps is in its swarm of moths. Motherfuckers are like paparazzi around a starlet, Handy said one night, and you smile at the thought. Their shadows like manta rays in the underwater dark of the yard. It is barely blue away to the east. You can just see the shape of the Tortugas. On the road you walk and you think of inventory so you don't think of your knees. You also think of when you were a girl walking just here to catch the bus, and of running when you were late, and of talking mornings early before the one-hour busride with Jere Benson and practicing your duets with him and how your breath showed in the headlights in the early morning as you sang and how that big boy —he was on the wrestling and football teams and was very strong— sometimes would just sit and stare at your breasts with his mouth hanging open like he was in some kind if trance. You used to wear a t-shirt you'd outgrown and hide it from your mom under a sweater, then take the sweater off when you sat with Jere on the bus and rock forward on your pelvis and jut your breasts against the shirt and turn toward him.

You feel your heart going. You are walking along the edge of the pavement. 144 is just a pale gray ribbon into the dark. Way up ahead on the side of the mountain you see a light, and then it splits into two and you know it is Old Man Ferral driving out from under his barn light to meet the men downvalley at the corral for sorting. It must be five to five. You walk and smile to notice your heartrate is up and that you haven't thought of your knees in several minutes. Right at five Ferral drives by slow, the way he does, in his showroom-perfect old pickup, and does the finger off the steering wheel wave, and this is when you cross the road and double back. In the light from the store your shoes flash white when they kick out in front of your stomach. You really like these shoes. Your feet feel pretty good. You also feel warm and —here you think through the books you've read waiting for customers, and find a word— exhilarated. You are alive and you feel good to be making some progress. One step in the right direction, you think. No, about one thousand steps, you correct yourself and you smile. You are breathing hard and you are sweating. Your creases have not yet dried from the shower and you slide pleasantly against yourself. Your thighs are a bit chafed, but it's okay.

You go to the back of the store and enter and turn on the lights. You go to your chart and look at the clock and record twenty minutes. You are hungry. You are not having a Coke or even a Gatorade. You get a cup of water and a tin of tuna from the shelf. No carbs for you, this will be a 100% day. You get out your Spanish disk. Fielding hung the speakers. He does all your man-work for trade. He was up on the stepladder, over by the Hostess rack, reaching high into the corner twisting on the wires and you just let yourself admire him for a while. It was a whole minute you sat behind the counter appreciating the shape of him and his competence and his balance —graceful, really, or, no, what do you call it that a man is who moves without waste and is strong and sure and not hesitant? you will call it grace— that feminine word makes you feel more comfortable with him, somehow. You sat and watched and felt warm, and your breasts propped up on the counter really felt exposed, but when he came down and turned around you kept them there, but he didn't look at them, he just looked you in the eye, he kept his professional, neighborly eye contact —nothing untoward, the books would say— and then that thought —that voice— came into your head: You big fat cow, you said  ̶ it said to you— and you straightened your back as he talked and your breasts slid off the counter and fell and you felt their enormous weight in your back and it was all a reminder that you are alone, so —when he left, when the door rang shut— you practiced your laugh. It was hard to start, but it caught on and you laughed at the sight of yourself. You thought of yourself then much older, as the fairy godmother, or maybe as Santa's wife, maybe no kids of your own, but rosy-cheeked and plump in an appealing and comforting way, with matronly breasts tidy behind Victorian buttons, and those little rectangular half-glasses and the gray bun on your head and the lace apron and the children coming 'round for gingerbread and an uncomplicated feeling of grandmotherliness.

And you cried, too, til a tourist came in and you composed yourself, got your breasts back up onto the counter and had your honesty-moment: that your back feels better when they're up there, supported. And the voice said: This tourist will probably go back to his Jeep and tell his hiking buddy about your enormous cowlike breasts —your udder— and they will laugh, and it will be at your expense or simply at the expense of poor country people in general but in any case you will never see him again. But then you —your mindful, intentional, positive voice— interjects: Or he will secretly look at them —at you— and will be filled with desire —maybe he is one of those men you learned about on the internet who prefer fat women with very, very large breasts— and he will say to himself Wow! Memorize those, brother, because back in California we don't often get to see breasts like those!, and he will keep and cherish the memory. It is even possible, you tell yourself, that he will mutter —under his breath but you will hear because of some trick of sound— Magnificent. And his eyes will linger, but only for as long as manners allow, for he is a polite and considerate man, this young tourist, a gentleman like Fielding. Maybe he gets his shopping —probably a bottle of water and a granola bar— and comes back to the counter and while you ring him up you know he's looking —let's say you're wearing that t-shirt you wore for Jere— and he is travelling alone after his girlfriend, who was too skinny anyway, dumped him, so he is in the middle of this beautiful nowhere and, Lo! here is what he has always desired, so he lingers for a moment after you hand him his receipt, and he makes small talk and laughs. He is wearing hiking boots and is sunburned and handsome, and he asks you where he can get lunch, so you tell him about the tables at the Be Merry, and he suggests that, since it's almost lunchtime, you go over and sit together and have a sandwich, and then you hear that voice —it comes to interrupt, you know now its cold level sound, how it hides its cruelty for a moment, how it speaks up loud and rude when things are going well— saying This will never happen as long as you sit on that big double-wide chair with your colossal breasts on the counter and your fat hand up to its creased wrist in that bag of Doritos, you fat disgusting cow, and you pull you hand out and you are alone, of course, in the store. It is now opening time. You sit and you want to cry. The clock is ticking loudly. You see that you still have your Spanish disk in your other hand, so you wipe the orange Dorito stuff on the towel and you pivot and put in the CD.

The sun is well up. The shadow of the store reaches away west across Lymans' alfalfa all the way to the cliff. You can see the shape of it there dropping down the cliffside.

            El niño está saltando, the CD says.

            El Niño está saltando, you say.

            La Niña está saltando.

            La Niña está saltando.

You are clicking through the lesson and saying what it is saying. You are trying hard to hear the hard r's and the soft d's. You are slow but you are getting better.

            La mujer está corriendo.

            La mujer está corriendo.

            Las niñas están corriendo.

            Las niñas están corriendo.

The bell rings and the boy Ezra pulls up to the pumps in Jere's —the Bishop's— stakeside truck. The heelers are up on a bale of hay barking at a long line of bikers that flash by in their colorful tights. The heelers stop barking and the boy Ezra gets down. He is dusty and looks already tired. He waves in to you and he looks like Jere did. You enter Benson into the logbook and record the amount and Ezra waves and drives off too hard, throwing gravel across the pull-in and against the pumps.

El muchacho lleva un sombrero, you say, though you are not at that part of the Spanish lesson.

You hear a truck downshift for the bend and the hill out of town. You try to hear this without judgment, but this is hard. You wonder why the sound of an unseen truck is so sad, and highway sounds of all kinds. You click out of the Spanish lesson to do inventory. You have been avoiding it. It is not adding up. You had left off with the freezer, with the Lynn Wilson. There are ten burritos going to expire tomorrow and you sell an average of one per day. Frozen burritos are not in your diet —38 grams carbohydrates, 390 mg sodium— but you can't just throw them away, can you? And waste the money? You'll put them in the walk-in. You will have to decide soon what to do with all that expired food. The inspector could come by and find it stored in there. Can you trade it for something? Can you give it to the Mexican without offending him? Do Mexicans even eat frozen Lynn Wilson burritos? He seems like such a proud and fastidious man, maybe the burritos would offend him.

You are thinking about food, you realize, and you return to doing inventory. You scroll down through the overstocked items —over $400 going to expire this week if traffic doesn't pick up. A tour bus. The Sheriff's wife with all those kids to feed. That big husband of hers. You get a blaze-orange poster board out from under the counter and sketch in some sale items lightly in pencil, then blacken them with a fat Sharpie. You go out and tape it to the window. Outside the crickets are chattering all up the embankment, the sky is blank blue, the mountain seems at arm's reach though it's miles away, and there is a stink of gasoline where Ezra must have spilled it. An RV slows and through the window a woman takes a picture of the store and they accelerate away. Tourists never wave. You picture yourself appearing in the family slideshow —do they still do slideshows?— standing by the blaze-orange sale sign in your tent-like denim smock with your hair a little flat from this morning's sweat and your bright white orthopedic Dr. Comforts, and you try for a moment to practice your laugh but you have low blood-sugar and you just don't want to right now. You go back in and take advantage of already being up and about to look through the expired low-carb options back in the walk-in. You find the box of cheese sticks, expired a week but they look fine, and a box of frozen broccoli, and a bag of almonds. You microwave the broccoli and you practice your smile while you eat it. To be honest, you have to choke it down and you want some butter, but you can't have the sodium and the butter doesn't expire for a few weeks, so you just try not to think about it. Every tenth almond you tithe to the trash. You are eating when the door rings open. You get the plate out of sight under the counter. It's Kade. He just about fills the door, almost hits his head as he comes in with his hat off like his mother taught him, and he uses the welcome mat, too, though it is a dry day, and if he were much wider across the shoulders he would have to turn sideways. He says hi to you, to the store, the way he does. He calls you Sister Gladys. He has bits of hay all over, but he is neat as always in the snap-pocket shirt and belted Wranglers his mother buys him.

            Hi Kade.

            It is a nice day, he says.

            Sure is. Gettin hot.

            I am loading hay over to Lymans'.

            I can see that.

            It is a good cutting we got lots of rain.

            Yes, we did. You come in for your Mountain Dew?

            Yeah I like it.

You have had pretty much this same conversation with Kade six days a week, varying only with the seasons, since he started working as a boy. He comes in and stands by the freezer and looks around. For Kade even the oldest habits are always fresh and new. He looks at the keychains and flashlights on their rotating stand. He has studied them for months. He looks at the souvenir mini license plates you never sell any of, and at the jackelope postcards. He likes those, always shakes with his silent laugh. You always watch because he seems so full of mirth at the sight of these stupid cards. He finally gets his Dew and you enter it in the log book.

            Can I hear the Spanish.

You click the mouse.

            Una niña.

            Un niño.

            Un perro.

You click on down.

            Un gato.

            Un hombre.

            Una mujer.

You decide to stop there. He does not know what it means. He stands and smiles with his Dew, looking up at the speaker Fielding hung, as though he sees an angel over your shoulder.

            The Mexican speaks Spanish.

            Yes he does, Kade.

            You are learning it.

            I am trying. I practice every day.

            Practice makes perfect Sister Gladys you have a good one.

And he walks out into the sun.

Handy Whitehead, Pierce County, Utah

1. October 2013, Grand Arch Ranch, Pierce County, Utah.

I am Handy Whitehead. This is my voice. The music in the background is von Karajan's recording of Sibelius' Swan of Tuonela and Tapiola, which how the fuck do you pronounce any of that shit? which are long-enough and pretty-enough pieces of music to accompany my story and which will play uninterrupted as I speak so that if you cut even one word from my version of events the music will be interrupted and all will know that you have failed to keep your promise to publish my story exactly as I've told it, not one word altered. A skip in the music means you've proven my thesis about the media, that they, you, are liars and for-profit cheats who do what you do to earn favors from those in power, and I know I have no power except that I have this story, and your people have the power of the government and their corporations, their drones, their garnishing of wages, their heartless enforcers, their credit scores, their poisonous products, their insidious murmurings in the ear of the stupid and gullible and uneducated American people. Their face-recognition software, their scanning of all cellular and internet communications in which every utterance, between man and wife, between father and daughter, is run sixty-four ways through the Facebook servers and they decide what are your intentions and they sell their conclusions to the NSA. I am a yellow-toothed bumpkin, but I'm no retard.

Fucks me right up that here I am thinking I'm off the radar and you just show up here like the Post Office and therefore the goddamned and illegal I.R.S. know my every sexual preference but pull up a stolen milk crate and button your real nice Gore-Tex trademark coat and make yourself right at homeless, but Lucifer help me if where I'm at gets public I'll start with your favorite dog and move on down the list and it will happen night, morning, work or unwinding, driving or walking, beef or beans, you have my word on that. But relax, for fuck's sake, it's just a story. Like to put a kid to bed with.

Guy like me would prefer that what I say be glued up out of letters cut from foreign journals while wearing latex gloves, but I'm going way out on a limb because I trust you. And believe you me if I didn't want to talk to you you wouldn't be here now.

  

Here is where I escape into from what is so bugging me out there. You cannot say one whole complete sentence out there without but some dickweed comes around and does his or her thing that is like the world's thickest penny on the track of my mind in which my thoughts are the train which then does a derailed backflip into some huddled winter blue-collar urban houses in the yellow sodium fug. Made-for-YouTube wreckage. You've seen it: locomotive in a furrow it plowed through the sleeping houses spewing that black greasy smoke, the emergency lights, the earnest and concerned and breathless TV announcer. Anyway, they derail my mind. Nobody benefits from this except my enemies. Not saying that I am paranoid or what have you but it is conceivable that they do not want me to get anything done because believe you me I make no small plans and heads will roll if ever I can really uninterruptedly say what's on my mind and speak this truth to power. So all I have to do is close the door and get all ensconced or whatever and put pen to paper and write my own personal Kublai Khan in Xanadu so to speak and some metaphorical salesman is banging at the door and there I am manifestoless and I can taste the adrenaline and after I've mollified him or her and got back to my desk there it is: gone. Forever. This is why I have put that pile of concrete blocks in front of my door around which this afternoon you yelled in to me some muffled questions about why was I stockpiling building materials of such unsightly nature and don't you know I was about to crystallize after weeks of factfinding the crucial theoretical underpinning of what would have been my magnum opus, but those will have to wait for some future person to formulate them, maybe in, as I imagine it, his remote cave or treetop perch or completely soundproof underground hermitage. I envy him in his hermetic enclosure free from sudden sounds and disruptions such as disease, friends, family, excellent aromas, and the media. I am not one to get all hypothetical by any means but I do imagine that with a sufficiently thick soundproof barrier and a secure perimeter I could generate many great works of intense beauty and unimaginable revolutionary aptness. I say hypothetical because so far I've managed to procure only approximately ninety concrete blocks, though even with these few I see some benefit and have enjoyed the mind game of: picturing what the I.R.S. will do when they come and try to extricate me as the requisite bulldozer would be such a bad p.r. move on their part, post Waco, post Ruby Ridge, that surely the media exposure would make donations come out of the woodwork and one of my major distractions from my life's work would be solved, pronto. This is indeed a pleasant thought to entertain while I burn my phone bills and type my last epistle before they cut the power and the mortar dries. You know I don't have a phone and I've never even seen a typewriter, but you catch my meaning, I can tell. But who am I kidding? There is no magnum opus, neither is there writing, nor manifesto. And the salesman is metaphorical. I got no money, no fungible assets but labor itself. Monopoly capital knows I exist but I don't have what they crave.

  

Only someone whose life has flowed downhill to the drain of a place like this, this hair-clogged p-trap of a place, not even near the Shih-Tsu smallest hamlet of the emptiest road-accessible corner of the brokest county in the dumbfuckest state of Utah, can understand the logistical shenanigans required to live here as a ghost to the government while maintaining a few key social connections. Easier by far, as I proved in my last Bush year, and my Obama years, is to sever all social connections entirely and live like a Piute in a pile of bark half froze when you're not half broiled, never full except before you vomit, never hungry except you're running out of firewood, never welcoming any sound manmade, knowing that if you burn on a still day they will see your smoke, and you burn on a cold night their satellites will see your infra-red emissions and if you owe them enough they will have you in their crosshairs, probably a night-flying drone that feels no compunction if your wikiup can't be repoed for back taxes. Some glossy-cheeked kid fresh off his mission with his faggotty white hand on his joystick nightvisioning down on your fire-signature in the frigid night thumbs the red button, not a feeling in his callow heart but the Holy Ghost whispering like a snapping flag in the dawn, it's morning in America. They have an operation to run, and you are in their way. One such cold night in my 2012, an Obama year, my wikiup caught on fire and I was warm for about a minute then went and slept under a juniper. Next afternoon I'm still there teeth chattering pretty well fucked without food and all the fuzz burned off my last warm pelts when I hear that grumbly sound that sure as death is B.L.M. Ford Bronco in four-low scrambling out to check on the smudge of smoke hanging there in the zero degrees, so I hightail out, risk the ice in Lower Pork-a-pine so they can't trace me, and then watch down on them that afternoon from a secret ledge while that ranger and then two more arrive and take photos and collect my personal detritus from the area and do their inscrutable unnecessary things with clipboards and radios and then they're gone. Missed my cache, but packrats was in it and I was sick to the marrow anyway. Anyway, the best two things to come out of that day of trickle-up economics, in which my desperation and suffering kept the government remoras employed, is:

One, the lady ranger with the admirable ass left her sandwich on my table-rock, on purpose, it turned out, and it contained lettuce and peppers that likely improved upon what Adam ate before Eve ever showed up and beguiled him in Adam-ondi-Aman before the Fall, before this entire human experiment in which if you have steak every day you get bored of even steak, and if you don't, all you want is steak.

And, two, that ledge was north-facing, so I had never spent much time on it, just a couple of summer naps, so I had never really looked around, but spending a whole day up there I looked a bit and followed the ledge around the corner and over a tumbled slab and found that the ledge had a south-facing part, too, which in this country and this far from town and this near water means one thing, usually: Anasazi cliff dwelling, which it was, and I found the most perfect pot I have ever seen, Ancestral Puebloan polychrome, quail and grasshopper motif, the finest brushstrokes like they'd just set it there to dry, no chips, just a little sandblasted on one side, but a keeper, a find for any pothunter or museum or other disrespecter of the past, which I was and now am not, the past being where every fucking thing of consequence ever happened as I like to say to the grex when we're drinking at the Small 'm', so I scratched around for other untouched old things and found just a few broken points and plenty of shards and the usual midden garbage, but that one pot I wrapped up as best I could in the rags that remained to me in my new life and I walked the five miles out to the Fifty Mile and 144 somehow, nearly dead and skinny as a spring deer etc. Long boring adventures ensued, which basically I can summarize as me getting back to town, a different town, and getting some clothes and doing my usual smooth talking until I got that pot to a collector who paid cash, and I was set. So set that transportation became my most pressing problem. I paid cash for a chainsaw and sharpening kit, new shoes, a sewing kit that I would have paid one billion dollars for back in the wickiup when I was trying to attach pelts with pine sap glue, which never worked, and some tough clothes, and some of the handsome dancing kind, and a nice new down bag and a truckload of other stuff but no truck and just like me no plans for how to move all my new belongings back south. The logistical shenanigans required to call up an old friend with a truck without your voice being tracked over the phone lines are best solved by playing deaf, which hardly any librarian anywhere can resists, so I shaped my hair up a bit looking in a shop window, left my stuff under a reesty old blanket so nobody would dare touch it, walked into the library, this is in Ditchfield, and made a pathetic show of writing out a letter to the librarian, who was watching, my request that she call a friend for me because I was deaf and couldn't do the phone calling. Despite long distance and probably all kinds of rules against it and rules against all kinds of kind behavior she dialed and talked with Old Man Ferral for me, who had the wits to not say that I am not deaf and she told me in that crazy-funny way people talk when they think you're deaf that Old Man Ferral would be up to Ditchfield the following afternoon, sooner if I really needed him, but he would prefer I made do for the next twenty-four hours because he had new puppies he needed to make arrangements for and trouble with his tractor and whatnot and after spending every night for the last five years sleeping in a pile of bark and grass freezing my ass off I just laughed and wrote I would wait for him in front of the Home Depot. I believe in the native goodness of human beings who have not yet been corrupted and two things I hue to unquestioningly as gospel truth as I wander around and do my business trying to be a righteous man is:

One, if you are deaf and ask for help, almost all people will turn sweet and go out of their way to excuse your general decrepitude and bad teeth and chimpanzee funk and the ridiculousness of your contrastingly bright white new basketball shoes and do you a favor, even some weird favors, and:

Two, librarians by nature are right up there with lady rangers next to Heavenly Mother for all-time righteous goodness. You just don't see the modern American criminal mind being much drawn to librarian or lady ranger jobs, seeing how the pay is bad, the passions are private, and the whole orthodoxy of both professions as presented in the allied media is that these jobs are for helpers, earnest do-gooders, and basically lousy opportunities for graft and corruption income of any kind, though I did once know a lady ranger who had a good side business growing grass but I think she did it more to relax than for the spending money, because she smoked most of what she didn't give away, and never repented giving me more than my fair share before I learned the Lord's sacrament and quit that shit, which was also poor for my lungs living in that smoky gosh-darned wikiup.

So the next day I stood out by the Home Depot with all the Mexicans like I was just another day laborer. I am no more documented than those boys, but I have blue eyes and I speak without an accent so my American bona fides are unquestionable and the cops can't touch me and I know my rights and I have no identification to speak of, hell I barely have an identity the way anyone these days can put a tape to it or shine a light on it or whatever. So pretty soon up eases that same immaculate Ford Old Man Ferral's been driving since before I was born. I haven't seen him since before my wikiup days, about five years, but up he pulls and I walk up to his window and smile my wretched gray smile which my tongue pokes through in a few places and he smiles back and says all neat and tidy: "Well I'll be darned if it ain't young Handy, back from the dead" in that winning old-timey rancher way he talks, and I have to admit but just to you that I just about cried not having thought all those years about how much I love that old man, but then he looks me over and says "Nice shoes", and then looks at his watch, the only rancher who wears one, and rattles it into first and otherwise makes it clear he needs to get back to his puppies and his little house and his orderly life. I pretty much filled the back of his truck carefully as I could not wanting to scratch it or anything because Old Man Ferral would just as soon leave me in Ditchfield as he would give a ride to someone who scratches that paint job and off we go, my first time in a motorized conveyance since I went down Fifty-Mile in the first place that day George W. Bush signed the 2008 Economic Report, February eleven, 2008, all lies I could not abide, his goshdamned smug moronic fucking monkeyface in that photo in the Oval Office, the line of Councilors behind him, Edward fucking Lazear's got the Ventriloquist Dummy in Chief on his lap, making his mouth move, making him yap and lie and got his prick up the Presidential asshole, and the American people sitting home flabby and insipid, the bovine dipshit voters, drooling at their TVs, and I had to leave America for a while. Old man Ferral drove. I must have been tired because though I was bursting with conversation and my head was banging on his same old well-oiled lever-action I fell asleep right away and stayed that way, maybe for all I know with my head on Old Man Ferral's lap, which I am just joking because that would never happen, until we rolled onto his just-graded gravel driveway a few hours later. That old cowdad never drove that truck over forty miles an hour and cussed out the tailgater the whole time I suppose, but I came back home dead asleep so first thing I remember back here under the mountain is the smell of juniper and cattle and the mewling of that heeler you know who's keeping an eye on you now as you don't let the front door hit you in the ass, my friend.

 * * *

2. December, 2014. Big Yellow Pine National Forest, Utah.

This place is called on the USGS quad Big House Canyon and the weekenders call it that though the old Kolob families call it Lost-a-Cow and in my family we knew a old Piute name for it was Headache-Because-of-Thunder and down at the bottom is a granary and two rooms the Anasazi built and cowboys rappelled into it years ago for relics. What happens is that every kind of people has a use for the place and pick a name that suits them. I just call it Big Headache, not that I ever said it to anyone but myself and now you. I never had a reason to speak of it, and a reason not to. 

Julys and Augusts the gunmetalest clouds come up Fifty Mile and get funneled in here and the lightning just hammers as it comes, every tall pine a nail, as if determined on countersinking every fucking one. Down here between the walls the blue clouds come up from the south with their lightnings hammering hundred-foot pines, see, til their smoking crowns cartwheel down the cliffs, and embers come parabolic ahead of the wind like tracers and at your back as you face the fire and the hail and the careening goddamn treetrunks with their white veins of sap afire, behind you you feel in your feet then hear the water berserk down the mountain a vomit of mud and boulders and old cottonwoods entire and this one time a 1989 Ford F-150 from God knows where maybe the highway a day's walk upslope, but more on that some other time. So Big Headache is a fine name, though most of the year it's a paradise of loneliness. Even five minutes after God tries to burn you out and drown you and stomp you to pulp and flush you out it is serene, meadowlarks and coy dripping and the pretty scent of pine and a cute little white cloud backing out over the clifftop like a flirt out a door. This place always panting after a pummeling and the whole great country cowering for another, never knows when He's going to come home reeling. 

What I did up there in the linehouse where I saw you last is hide from what happened to my old life in the wikiup. And what I am doing down here, out here, in Big Headache is hiding from what happened to the lady ranger. Takes a couple hours to walk there, where the wikiup was, from here. It's in the next canyon, now just a black circle on the ground, a mystery for anyone who ever goes out there, which is no one, hardly ever. That is where I seen her the first time. I have looked down on it from Big House Bench, but I don't go down. That pathetic fucking black circle out there in the junipers. 

After the wikiup burned and the rangers showed up to check on the smoke, and from my hiding place I admired the lady ranger's ass and she left me a sandwich on my table rock and I found the perfect Ancestral Puebloan ploychrome pot and sold it and went back to work for old man Ferral on his ranch is that I started to get all obsessed with that ranger. I had been so alone for so long and her ass was maybe objectively perfect, maybe just in my extreme ass-deprivation or only in those lovely flap-pocket green government pants, I can tell you understand what I'm saying, but anyway I was thinking about her all the time. I was moving lines and riding fences for old man Ferral. The pay wasn't much but he let me stay in the old linehouse and he let me add my groceries to his shopping so I was set and more comfortable than I'd been in years. I was even going into town Friday evenings. Hadn't seen my people in years, hadn't seen hardly anyone. Town was where I started getting the idea I could maybe return to society, at least the narrow, suspicious, backwards bumfuck, opinionated, paranoid, end-of-the-world kind of society you can find in Kolob. So I was going down every weekend to the Small 'm' to sit on the porch and pass the guitar and the bottle and bullshit about UFOs and the government and rain and and whether there is ever the right amount of it, and generally getting reacquainted with conversation, though who am I kidding I will never be good at that, mostly whatever I say ends conversation, doesn't add to it, I know that. But one Friday night that spring after the wikiup, last spring one thousand years ago, I hear that some archaeologists are working out at the mouth of Big Headache, found something interesting under the slabs of fallen cliffside and that the rangers are out there keeping an eye on things when the scientists are away because it's federal land and there's probably some valuable relics they've uncovered. So my ass-addled brain of course right away perks up at the mention of ranger and pictures the super-yummy filled-out shape of those green government flap-pocket workpants, and I dash back to the linehouse and fill my pockets with jerky and I head out in the moonlight, running, not going to wait for morning. It's just out along the east fence, a mile of easy going, then into the pinyons and junipers and out to the secret way between the rocks, the cattle trail that drops into Big Headache a short way above the dig. Near sunrise I saw her asleep by the dead fire. Her government [Bronco] down the wash and the archaeologists' tarps all along the base of the southfacing cliffwall. I sat til the sun reached her and just panted over my boner, you understand, just thinking about just her and me out here alone. When she stood out of her sleeping bag it was nearly too much for me: those legs I'd long imagined stout and brown, and the ass as good as I'd hoped, now just in underpants of the strictly civilian kind. I watched until I thought she'd see me back, behind my boulder, then I walked upstream to the pond, swam a little to rinse off, and found a warm spot in the sun and went to sleep with my clothes for a pillow. Sometime later a splash woke me up and I sat up out of the willows and there she was, floating on her back in the green water, her tits bobbing pure white, the between her legs plain to see. You get me? Just right there. She floated around with her eyes closed to the sun and I just stood there like the jackass I am with my unit getting heavy and when she finally noticed me and shrieked and started to tread away from me wide-eyed, my unit just came alive and stood away from me trying to get to her. The way units do. She crouched in the shallows, brown knees and arms in front of white tits, horse eyes, her clothes fifty feet down the sand, unwilling to stand up, and I just stood there with my unit pointing like a gun-dog, and me panting like one, too. Shameful. I know it. Took me a minute, then I tried to hide it, but nowhere to put it. Stood there shaking holding it, then went back down in the willows to get dressed. When I stood back up she was pulling on her government pants, tits bucking every which way. See? When she was dressed, as it were, she lit out back downstream, kept glancing back over her shoulder, running. I did not follow though of course I wanted to more than I've ever wanted anything.

I sat for a long time shaking. It is the sad truth I was over forty never been with a woman. Horny son of a bitch since I was little but such a goofy and ugly bastard I never did get any. And what with the gray teeth and living like John the Baptist or whatever I was not til that moment ever in a situation where I was ever going to get laid, even by a blind chick who happened to stumble upon me when I happened to be fresh-washed, such as after a rainstorm or something, and mistake me for someone else. I never did meet a blind chick. 

Anyway, I sat and sat, then ate. When the sun went behind the cliff I made a fire in the dry sand. I sat over it into the evening, just me and the pressure in my pants. Late I snuck downcanyon. She had no fire, but the [Bronco] was still there. I bet she slept inside. She was scared, poor thing. Next day I was napping in the willows again she calls out You still here? I sat up and she was on the other side of the pond with her holster on, wary but not wide-eyed now, hair every which way. In truth not a good-looking woman, but even just her brown arms and the shape of her shirt, and her badge and her gun and those everloving pocket flaps made my heart beat. I said Yes, I'm still here, though of course she could see me sitting there panting. 

What are you doing? she said. 

Just taking a nap is all. 

You come down from above? 

Yes, I said. 

What's your name? 

Handy. What's yours? 

Roberta. 

I'm sorry I scared you yesterday, I said. I just woke up to you there. I was asleep. 

You just stood there getting a good look, though, she said. 

I stood and blushed. Finally I just thought what the fuck? Might as well say it. It just isn't every day you wake up and there's a beautiful woman swimming naked right there, I said.

I thought it was private, she said, indignant. 

Well, me too, I said, defensive. We kept sort of yelling this kind of thing back and forth across the pond at each other, both of us embarrassed and wary. She relaxed a bit. Shifted on her feet. I was getting sunburned so I moved along the water's edge to the shade and sat on a rock. She came halfway to me and sat on her own rock. We talked that way half the afternoon. 

The next day, Sunday, she came up again. I was running out of jerky. I did most of the talking, which, no surprise there, right? She was quiet. She got comfortable. Then I told her I came here looking for her but too shy to walk into the camp. Told I was the one whose wikiup burned over to Pork-a-Pine canyon last winter. Then she looked and looked at me, long eye contact, really took my breath, that's not just what they write. I told how I'd been back in the rocks hid when she responded to the smoke and how I found the sandwich she left, and I let down my guard and told her how grateful I was for that food and how I had moved on to ranch work since the fire but that I had her on my mind every day. Disinhibited, like drinking wine, and dry-throated I told her that I very much liked the way she looked that day and could not get her out of my thoughts. I was talking looking at my loathsome feet in the green pond water and she stood and sloshed over to me and stood between my knees as I sat and she pulled my head to her.

This summer I was in the canyon as often as work allowed. We met at the pond when the archaeologists were gone. We were wild. We lay naked by a big fire and also in the sun. We were brown all over. Just waiting all the workweek then fucking like animals as many times as we could do it then lying in a stupor in the canyon. You could of stuck a pin in my eye those nights I was so wrung out I would not of flinched. 

Late August, the last Sunday of the month, with the workweek hanging over us, we were thus passed out in the sand when a great cloud turned the light and the birds went still and the hammering started away to the south we lay still in the sun and watched the towering purple rise from Arizona on its jackboots of lightning. Hammers or jackboots. The edge of rain came upcanyon and the ground shook. She lolled in the hot sand and the ground shook and I looked her unashamed right at her naked dry skin as it spotted with rain. I stood a rock and red mud flushing fresh-fractured stones replaced her as she lay. I stood out of the rush and the rain was a think curtain and the long stretch of cattails that had tented her clothes bent to the red and tore out soundless and bunched downstream and trees stripped of their leaves heaved against the cliff-face, now stripped of its skirt of garden. She was there and then not, and in her place the tantrum of upset mud and stone. The whole canyon stripped and flushed but me on my rock on a sandbar.

As the water fell I picked my way by bouldertops downcanyon calling her. Her [Bronco] stood sideways in red mud to the windows. I found her washed up in some trees at the confluence. It took a day for the wash to empty of flood. Then I carried her all afternoon upstream. Too much broken to fix it and no cloth to bind it. The two reds, the rust in rock and blood. And the red behind her teeth and the black crown she wore. This tourist picked us up on 144. We went up through the mountain to the clinic but she died on the way. That tourist I seen in the rearview with the two reds around his mouth from the lady ranger's mouth he tried to breathe her back alive though I tried that too so the three of us all got the mouth area red with red rockmud and blood. That's most of what I remember, and some bits of clinic, the farmers and hikers and kids in the waiting room as I laid her dead on the floor in the flaking dried mud me forgetting we got no clothes. Her jawbone. And the sheet on her like a dressup ghost. The sheriff with some questions as I vomit on his car. I standing in the parking lot in the blanket he lent me when he turned his back to talk with the tourist and the doctor and I walked out into the willows and up again onto the mountain where I stand on rocks in the flood of leaves where I am back in the shadows unsuspected to let the hikers by where now the nights are cold and half the nights I have no fire and I sleep in the sheriff's blanket in a heap of duff maybe there is still some red rockmud or her blood on me somewhere that hasn't wore off. 

And me in the sheriff's blanket and this Bryce Canyon National Park sweatshirt I stole, and these too-big boots left drying on a Jeep that I filched, the boots, not the Jeep, just outside the firelight watching you pass the bottle and the guitar at the Small 'm', and picking you out of the crowd to follow and speak to, you with your journal you always have, I imagine the song lyrics, the Morning Pages, the editing you must do to strike that perfect balance between forthcoming personal confession and the seemliness your young girls will need from you when they are old and you die and leave your scribblings you imagine they want from you. You set the record straight for them, the record your ex-wife has twisted, you need to tell them why you left and why Kolob, why you quit that job and waste your days here in the bottom of the world doing a pretty good job of recording what I so need to say and not grimacing at the reek of my breath, you are thinking of grad school you just paid off, and the quality books you read, and the life you had that now you don't and I can see even here in the dark under this tree with the winter night too cold on your writing hand and your future now just rawboned laid out before you has shed all its red just colorless now, into the white, my friend.

Ferral Young, Kolob, Utah, October 14, 2014

You maybe believe that it was always the way it is today in Kolob, with the old Mormon ranchers on the one side and the newcomers on the other. This is untrue. When the hippies first come, even when the uranium prospectors come through here the years I was in France in the war, the Kolob people was well acquainted with fighting and backbiting. Of course, we was all of our own minds and as spooky and cranky as anyone else anywhere, but I think you can say we was in two groups: there was the few of us that had land and cattle and buildings paid off and the best grass for winter feed, water uphill of us, and so on. Then there was the rest who drew poor land or it was overworked and so did not have cattle or buildings to speak of, and poor water shares and debts, so they worked for us. Those of us who run the place, my family foremost, had our share of hardship. Our boys died of horses and ranching as much as the others. Our wives died of babies the same as the others. But when the droughts come we had the better water. In nineteen fifty-four our ponds dried to chalk and we had to drive our cattle over the mountain to auction. We lost half on the drive and sold the rest at a loss. But the creek this high never run out completely. We got two lean cuttings off the top pastures and kept our breeding stock. But the other group I mention, the poor-land group, they mostly pack up and move away in fifty-four and fifty-five til Kolob was mostly empty, only two children in school. Some of them come back in sixty or thereabouts to claim their land, but most we never seen again. They just didn't have the water or the grass to hold it. Now, these two groups, we had the resentments and suspectings and gossiping you'd expect, but we also had different personalities that got differenter during the drought and after. I am one of the blessed ones to of come from the water and grass families, so of course I have a perspective on this you can suspect of preferring my own people. But the water and grass families, the big ranchers, we was more educated and polite, valued a gentleness and dignity in our business and had debts of gratitude amongst us that cinched us together. Our clothes was storebought and clean. We did not wear skins and our hats was summer straw and winter felt. We had the better horses and gear and the cars and trucks and we went from time to time to the city and our wives had silver and china. The poor-land families just never did prosper. They was just wore-out. And their manners did show just how wore-out they was: they was a loud, fighting, foul-mouthed people who wore the same dirty clothes all year, patched til they fell apart. Just rags. And pelts, even. They was still deerhide shirts and pants common in Kolob before the drought. They was I think a reckless people, without respect for the tender feelings, no love or kindness or sweetness amongst them. You should suspect me of preferring my own people when I say this, but in them days a boy from a good ranching family would be a young gentleman, and a poor boy would be a reckless and careless scoundrel. They was rascals. I suppose they had nothing to lose, and I and my people we had everything to lose, so we had a code of good behavior we held, while them poor families was just wild. I have not missed more than a few meals except fasting in my life and I don't pretend I know what hunger and desperation will do to a person, but same way my horses are fat and shiny on their pasture, on green grass, with a barn and alfalfa hay in the winters, and wont run or kick when you approach them, them poor boys was like a wild, bony mare you run up a canyon gone to give you heck you try to rope her and will never ride proper.

One time my father was down to Larsons' to sign some paper to take Johnny Jepson's top pasture for non-payment. He owed my father for a loan to purchase water shares. This was the Jepsons the grandfather of Shirl, Kade's mother, down across from the Larson's that is now boarded up. So, my father was down there at the old Post Office in Larsons' porch and Joe Nelson's father was witness. Nelsons was and still is owners of the best grassland inside Kolob and in the draw, and the finest ranchers and upstanding in the Ward. So, my father and Joe Nelson's father and Sister Larson was waiting to take Johnny Jepson's deed to that pasture and he didn't show. So they ride over to Jepsons', just a sorry house of raw boards in a patch of sand and a sorry starved mule out back and Jepson come out yelling and lets his two dogs off their chains. So my father and Joe Nelson's father whistled their four dogs from the road and of course there's a dogfight, but four against Jepson's two, so Jepson goes and starts kicking my father's dogs. So my father and Joe Nelson's father get down and chase Johnny Jepson around and he, Jepson, turn on my father and bite him on the arm and on the hand and on the stomach and I think on the knee before they knock him down and tie him in the dirt. This was not just nipping, it was biting to take a bite of. My father had a strip of meat hanging off his arm and Jepson had blood on his chin and shirt. Anyways, this is what I mean saying the poor families was wild: the yelling, the settin the dogs on them, the kicking and biting, the not paying their debts. This was a reckless people, and no tender feelings in them. I guess Jepson had a pasture to lose, but he knew it was already lost and he was cornered. Desperate.

Anyways, so, back to Handy Whitehead. You want to understand that boy you got to understand the temperament of the poor people. They are a wild and fighty people, even the ones who come back after the drought. Some got their houses back, but no good land or water attached. Most just pulled in a trailer and lived in that, or in anything weathertight they had. Same as always, they work for the ranchers. Handy's family, the Whiteheads, always worked for my family, the Youngs, here on the ranch and cowboying on our leases. Handy's father worked for my father. He was as wild as any, but we was friends of a sort. When Whiteheads was losing their land during the drought, I think in fifty-six, my father made him a deal: that Whiteheads could stay in their house on a acre if they deeded the pasture to my father, and he would forgive their debts. My father had more water than he needed and trenched a new ditch to Whitehead's land, now ours, and watered it and then had Whiteheads work it.  At my father's orders they planted it in winter rye and watered heavy and disked the rye under and planted again and ran just a few dairy cows, and within a few years that pasture was pretty good again. I think Handy's father was shamed. He lost his land, then worked it for my father, and it greened up only when my father owned it. Of course, it was the water. That land was just blowsand without water, and my father owned the water. But before the drought Whitehead had a few head of his own and had some pride. After, the pasture was almost ready for corn, but Whitehead owned nothing and my father owned more than ever. There was a a few years Handy's father would not look me in the eye or speak to me more than necessary. He still cowboyed with me, but I can't honestly say we was friends. His clothes got shabbier and his horse died one winter all underfed, out there between his house and the road with its ribs showing, a shame on that family. With no horse they cut no heating wood that year, and maybe would of froze in that plank house if my father hadn't sent down a truckload of wood. So my father, with the notes and deeds, the water, the work, even the stovewood, you could say he owned the Whiteheads. Handy grew up in that. Just a skinny, running-nose, yellowhaired boy in poverty. I felt terrible about that. I could hardly look at Whiteheads in them days. But Handy didn't want to live like that, in that sorry house on that little square of sand and goatsheads. One thing you need to understand about Handy is he is much smarter that you and me. I suppose that hunger and cold and humiliation put a pang in his mind. Not that he was good in school. Hardly went. But when they paved 144 in sixty-eight the bookmobile came down from Salt Lake. It was a big event, like the circus come to town. That old schoolbus full of books and the pretty lady that checked out the books. Handy checked out the limit every three months, and he read every word. And when he ran out of his books, he borrowed others and read and re-read every one. It didn't matter hardly what. Adventures, Huckleberry Finn, recipes, how to wire a house, romances, he read all of them. He got several of them committed to memory. Handy is the biggest reader I ever met. You might think he's crazy, but he's just halfbroke. Goes on about every darn thing and you can't half understand him the way he talks wild. But there is not a better-read man in Kolob. When he was I think twelve, still little and ragged and wild, we was at the chapel for the talent show, it was always the good families sent their children up to say a poem or part of the Gettysburg or a Article of Faith or what have you. Sing a song. So, Handy goes up out of turn, unannounced, wearing his gray patched poor clothes, and started reciting. Just looked up and started in with that wild squawking voice you heard, and he had us just spellbound. Ten minutes he said this wonderful poem about black ships and the heroes, and the war between the Trojans and the Greeks. We was thrilled. I can still remember. We was all just gone from the room in our imaginings. That boy would of gone on to the end but my father stopped him to let the other kids have a chance.  

Kade Goes Dancing at the Barn Dance

This is the barn dance up ahead. They are parking on the road in the dark in the pickup Ezra borrowed from the Bishop. There is three up front and there is four in the back. They picked up Lauro and this new hippy named Fox and this girl from down at the yurts. Lauro and them are smoking grass not Kade he does not smoke that shit. Kade is drinking beers and stomping them on the truckbed, You better sit down in here says the girl they are down in the truckbed in the hay and fencetools and the twine and the trash the Bishop's truck is full of. Kade is more happy sitting on the stakes up in the wind. You're going to lose your hat Kade says Lauro. He is smiling he flicks his jay into the night. Kade gives the girl a beer she taps the can on his and they drink and he stomps the cans and they get out on the dirt. Ez cuts the engine and they hear the music it is the band from Youngville they are playing the Kolob song the girl is dancing so he swings her in a circle Jesus Kade put me down she says so he is laughing. They are walking by the parked cars to the barn at the end. This is where he moved the handlines this morning on the Christiansens' alfalfa. The handlines are straight that is how he places them. There is some in a truck in lawnchairs drinking he seen them same boys over to Cannonville he sneaks up to their bumper in the dark and bounces the truck hard and they yell Jesus and Fox says Everyone is praying tonight. Ez and his buddies pass a bottle it smells strong. In the light of the barn there are the people in their good jeans and their dresses, some are dancing. This is the barn where the Christiansen boy shot hisself he was Kade's Mom's age they was in school. Also he hung hisself. The way he done it was that he put the gambrel rope about his neck stood on the rail pulled the trigger fell and the gambrel caught him and he rolled out on the rail trolley to the middle they thought he hung hisself til they saw his sunday jacket bloody and most of his head up there in the roof he was dressed for Sunday they never did know why he done it. These are the Christmas lights and the music is loud that is how these boys play it. Those are the cigarette and jay lights here and there in the dark away from the light. Here is Ted he has a flask he hands to Kade it is strong Hi Mr May he says he says Come to dance with the pretty girls? Yes of course. He tries to get Ted to take a beer but he does not he says No thank you Kade how's your mother. She is okay she is not coming That's what I figured says Ted I'll see you round he says and sits on a tailgate with the new cowboy Tomasz who Kade gives a beer and says Hello how are you he says Pretty good thanks Kade and he taps his can on his and on Ted's flask. This is the stansion he welded the hinge on and burned his arm pretty bad. He is looking up to see if the Christiansen boy's head is still up in the roof he knows it's not but he always looks. They cleaned it up but the gambrel is there still they still hang a buck or a elk on there if the weather is cool. This is the sand they put in here for dancing and the stage that is wood from the old church basketball court the basketball lines do not line up now. He is dancing now and Crazy Billy in the band is smiling at him he has beads in his beard he is a crazy son of a gun playing them drums in his work Levi's and just a undershirt. He is looking for Kandace she said she would dance with him. He sees the girls from Youngville but he does not see Kandace. He is doing some spins and kicks and they are playing Twist and Shout the dancers made a circle around him to clap and holler they are passing this bag of wine with the little plastic spigot. This girl from Youngville comes out and does this move that he seen on TV with one hand up and head turned then the other hand up and head turned the other way the tops of her tits is shiny and bouncing so he does his horse-riding move and tips his hat at her and the dancers all yell and laugh and this guy he did saltcedar work with in the canyon hands him the bag of wine and he drinks it. Then he sees Kandace come in so he runs to her and picks her up and spins her and she is yelling something he can't hear it is too loud he just spins her til he almost falls over a chair and then she goes somewhere he don't know where so pretty soon he goes out to a old Mustang in the dark and drinks some Gatorade. It is true he can circle almost her whole waist with his hands she is that small and he is this big. He asks some cowboys do they want to armwrestle he has his elbow on the trunk of the Mustang they say no thanks nobody hardly ever will armwrestle he is that big. Now it is later and he walks back to the truck but it is gone so now he is walking home in the dark along 144 he can still hear the band back there there are eighteen lights in Kolob. Here is the Nelson boy's new pivotline twelve heads it is the biggest in Kolob. Those are some mulies going over the fence. This is the driveway and there are the heelers not barking they know him. There is his Mom's light on she is up waiting for him reading.  He lets the screendoor slap he needs to put on a new closer Hi love she says from her room How was it? It was fun Are you drinking? Yes more than you said she says nothing he goes in and kisses her she is reading she is wearing her reading glasses she is very old and pretty. Now he is upstairs he got axle grease on his good Wranglers he don't know how he remembers to turn out the light it is a long day now it is time to sleep he thinks of Kandace.

Kade and His Mom Go to the Small 'm' market

This is his mom saying Let's go to the Small 'm' market I just need this one piece of glass I don't need to go all the way up to the store. The dogs can go so he gets their ropes. This is the driveway fresh graded and all the weeds drying in the burn-pit. Here is the back way. When he was small he stopped here to watch a snake go down a gopher hole and a cat also stopped to watch under that bush and the cat went in the grass to another hole and waited and the gopher came out and the cat caught it and took it and then the snake came out they was hunting the same gopher. Here is the new foundation for the city people Fielding is building. It is right in the middle of the back way where the Larsons used to throw their bottles. This is the Larson house that has no windows just boards when he was small he played in there he could fit through a gap in the window boards. It was before the roof caved and it was still dry. It is broke now the chimney that one time had smoke and two men was sleeping in there in sleeping bags on the floor and his Mom told him stay away from that place we don't know nothing about them hippies. Here is where they go through the church fence it is down where the ditch washed out a post and they walk through to the back of the Small 'm'. This is the Mexican throwing trash in the dumpster and his Mom waves and so does he and the Mexican touches his hat and finishes his cigarette he is always in a hurry. Here is the porch and it has Kandace, and Charlie and some tourists and so he stops to see Kandace. She has a book. He stops and his Mom goes in. He puts the heelers on their ropes. They don't need ropes but that is the rule at the Small 'm'. Kandace is so pretty he likes to be her friend. Kandace was reading her legs are long and in the sun her hair is up and it is yellow. Kandace waves her way with her fingers she always waves this way. Hi Kandace he says You are pretty and the girl Kandace smiles and says You're sweet Kade. These are the tourists taking phone pictures of theirselves in front of the Small 'm' they have on black chaps and they have new Harleys lined up, the 1200s and he takes out his bandana and wipes the dust off the chrome on the gastank of one and the tourist says You don't have to do that and Kade says It is dusty this will make it pretty and Kandace puts down her book and smiles at him and pats the bench next to her so he goes over and sits down. What are you doing Kade. Going to the Small 'm' he says. My Mom is getting glass cut the brushhog throwed a rock when I did the driveway right through the kitchen window right in the sink. Kandace laughs. Her shorts are very small so the pockets poke out on her legs that are brown. He puts his hand there on her leg and she pushes it away and laughs Oh Kade you are too funny so he puts his hand in his pocket and he has dollars he forgot so he goes inside and gets a popsicle and he goes outside and gives it to Kandace but she doesn't take it. She always eats popsicles but she doesn't want this one so he eats it and gives the sticks to the dogs. The tourists start the Harleys and it is loud and the dogs get riled and Kandace covers her ears. It is hot the sky is blue the cloud has sat there downvalley all day not coming up. Are you going to the barn dance says Kandace Yes he says I will dance with you are you wearing a dress Yes she says What one he says It is blue. This is the one she wore that day at the cemetery for Old Man Nelson's funeral It is very pretty he says. Here is Charlie now coming over Hi Kade, Kandace he says. He is now standing there because Kade's Mom is coming out with the glass it has blue tape on the edges. Window broke? Yes she says From a rock. Kade he says I have some chainsaw work you can do and stacking cordwood and Kade says he will do it tomorrow today he has the Nelson boy's handlines it is going to rain later so he will see him tomorrow.  Let's go honey says Kade's Mom How's your mother Kandace? Kandace says Okay she picks up her book and stands the benchslats marked her legs pink Kade says Kandace I can see those screwheads on your legs from the bench. Oh Kade she says and his Mom says Let's go honey and he looses the dogs and they go into the willows with that piece of glass.

Three Looks at Ted May.

1. Ted May, the Bishop, Tomasz, and the Girl Kandace. August.

The yellow parallelogram moved up the wall. He could see it move. He fell back into sleep then woke again. The room became very hot and he was thirsty. His pillow was soaked and his mouth tasted of sulphur. After some time he reached for his glass but found it dry. With real effort he rolled his legs off the bed and used the railing to get downstairs. He gulped water.

This is my bed and I'm lying in it, he thought. The bed I made.

The afternoon sun poured brass on the faded carpet and the window sash ticked like a furnace. The light lensed through the neat row of Jameson bottles and he thought of church and then of his wife and the ranch and his mind followed the deep singletrack of failure and loss.

The water revived him. He resolved to go out. He knew he needed his friends at this guttering end of two days drunk. He showered and shaved and put on a fresh shirt and his good hat and boots then drove the two blocks to the sawmill. They were just shutting down. The jointer still spun and thrummed a low note. The late light projected the opening of the overhead door into the drifting pine dust.

I am a wreck, he thought. Hi, Tomasz, he said.

Evening, Ted, said the younger man.

The houselike bulk of the Bishop straightened and turned and came forward out of the gloom. Brother Ted, he said, his voice full of outsize delight.

Good to see you, Bishop, said Ted, and smiled though it cost him some effort in his bleary discomfort.

Ted took a broom off the wall and started moving sawdust toward the truck. The mill men did, too, and they swept for a while in near silence, til the Bishop started to whistle.

You have a spirit of gladness, Bishop, said Ted, and the Bishop laughed.

Yes I do, Brother Ted. I was born happy. It is the gift The Lord hath given me.

Tomasz was new here, just arrived a few days ago from out of state, looking for ranch work. He wondered at the Bishop's language, that he could be an old rancher one moment and a jovial Old-Testament prophet the next. He expected a deep and frightening cultic certainty in the big man but so far had seen nothing but good humor and moments of silliness. The Bishop seemed genuinely elated to run a decrepit sawmill and a good-size ranch and to return home spent every evening to his round wife and several children.

Ted was thorough with his sweeping. He ran the broom around and under every obstacle he could lift as he went. The mill men were tired and the Bishop was sloppy but Ted left his area nearly spotless. Got to floss the shop, he said. I got to do something, can't just lie around watching the houseflies.

You can work here any time I got work, Brother Ted, said the Bishop.

You know I don't work for pay, Bishop.

Along the road, in the gravel, the girl walked by, her posture erect, her head canted to keep her hair in place. She thumbed her cell phone intently, proclaiming with her body and her absorption that she did not notice the sudden stillness in the shop. The lowering sun came to the men through her yellow hair and through her yellow skirt and she and the sun and the pine dust that hung in the air seemed to them all of a piece, contrived for their benefit, a silent golden tableau in the sudden silence at the end of a loud and punishing workday.

The Bishop returned to his broom. Tomasz glanced at Ted. Ted smiled and shook his head. You see that Tomasz?

Yessir, said Tomasz.

What's that? said the Bishop.

The girl Kandace, is what, said Ted, with laughter in his voice.

I tried not to, said the Bishop, and then looked down as though the pile of sawdust contained an admonition, or a cure.

Well, I saw her, said Ted. And she is the sweetest thing I maybe ever seen. At least in recent decades, he added, after a moment of thought.

She doesn't even know we saw her, said Tomasz.

Ted said: She don't wear that tight little getup for no other purpose. She knows something. About being looked at.

They went back to sweeping and the sun reached deep into the shop a downangled wedge of light and bats dropped out of the high rafters.

I am getting old, thought Ted. It is unseemly to say such things of a girl at my age. I guess I got to learn to keep my mouth shut, he said. Carrying on like a boy. He thought, Sometimes you don't mark the passing time and make adjustments to your behavior.

They swept the three piles of sawdust into one at the tailgate of the truck.

Civilization and its discontents, Ted said. And Tomasz looked uncertain.

2. Ted May at Church, of All Places, and the Bishop. September.

"And, so, brothers and sisters, that's it for the temple trip and so let's get that put together and get the youth to commit to that and there's gonna be lessons this month on the various temple work: the baptism of the dead and what's it called? Endowments. And one of you counselors need to remind me," here the Bishop grinned in self-deprecation and the congregation tittered as he looked back over his shoulder at his two counselors, and he continued "to get them donations set up and the bus is," his heavy breath was too close to the microphone as he looked down his nose through his crooked reading glasses at a scrap of paper "thirty-five dollars each person over to St. George."

He paused. "Okay, and then we got the storehouse project which this month is peaches and," he looked out over his glasses at the congregation. "Sister Christiansen?"

"It's huckleberry jam."

"That's my favorite. Good on a sandwich." They laughed. "Ok, so we got the peaches and the jam and we need to represent the ward over to Youngville gettin all that canning done, and it's not just the sisters need to get this job done, brothers. There is boxes to haul and when they got a bulging can, why, some brother's got to step up and taste it and see it's not got the botulism." The congregation laughed again.

"You can't say it's anyone's fault," Ted thought. "She could say I was a drinker and she would not be wrong, but who did not want sex and drove me to drink?"

"Okay, then. I think we got a announcement from the Relief Society." He looked through some scraps of paper, one of which fluttered down from the pulpit into the first row of folding chairs, where someone caught it and handed it back up. The Bishop took it absentmindedly while he read from a scrap. "Sister Smith? C'mon up." He turned and lowered himself heavy between his counselors.

"And who is a scrawny and bony son of a bitch with a temper that she didn't want to have sex with? You can't say it's her fault."

Sister Smith strode to the pulpit and seized the microphone with an abrupt wrenching grasp, setting off feedback that she alone seemed not to hear. "Brothers and sisters, it's that time of year again. The annual Gold and Green Ball will be October first. Brothers, you need to dust off your good suits and get your wives, your wife some red roses, which they are four-ninety-nine the dozen at the Ditchfield Walmart, and set the date aside. Every couple should be there. It's pot luck and the decorations will be the loveliest thing you ever seen. October one. And we got to get the punchbowl back from who took it home last year. And we need volunteers to stay after and put up the chairs and tables, so brothers each and every one of you got to sign up on the sheet going around in Elders' Quorum today. Thanks and see you there." She strode off the stage, her heels beating the floor.

The Bishop heaved himself up to the pulpit again and raised his eyebrows and grinned for a couple seconds, for no reason other than to show his affability in contrast to Sister Smith's officious brusqueness. "I wish someone would make a best-of video of me up here," he thought. "I am a entertaining son of a gun."

"Course, she knew who she was marrying. It's not like I was unknown to her. She knew I'm a angry man. If I didn't have the ranch back then she would of married a man who did." He pictured her sitting up there at the organ the way she used to do, with her bony back too straight and her hair too young streaked with gray. He pictured her sitting on the other side of the cold woodstove in the kitchen wearing her coat, and in his mind he held his hand palm-up, in a simple gesture as if to say "Light a goddamn fire if you're so cold," but when he looked up the Bishop was talking:

"...gonna be your last chance in September, so let me know or talk to the ward clerk and we'll be sure to meet, long as I'm home before my dear wife's got the roast out of the oven."

"You always take blame all the way back to Adam. Or Eve," he thought. "Goddamn her. For taking my youth. For her cold self and for taking everything." He thought of the ranch as it had been when they got married. The wide and neat hayfields. The new Ford. The house painted. He pictured her at the woodstove looking up and seeing him gesture, and saw her turn back down to her book with a sour expression on her face. Not a word between them. Both just bones and sinew and silent resentment still in their twenties. "If that lawyer walked in here..." he looked around the chapel and at his neighbors and lifetime friends, the long row of yellow crewcuts where the Bishop's boys flanked their roundshouldered mother, "...I would shoot him in the head," he thought.

The Bishop eased himself back down into the chair. It creaked loudly as the organist played the first moaning notes of the sacrament hymn.

"...shoot him and be justified," he thought. "Come into my life, don't even talk, don't cook good enough to get a hog to eat it, the sour looks, the avoiding me, the never once showing me gratitude or appreciation."

The Bishop looked out over the congregation as they sang. He looked at his boys, all broad and yellowhaired and dressed in the white shirt and blue clip-on. He could hear Gladys sing. "What a lovely voice," he thought, "she still has got after all these years." He thought back to when he was a boy and they sang with Gladys at the talent show and won, and that everybody laughed as they took the stage, both of them big and chubby and apple-cheeked and dressed to match in clothes his mother had made special, not counting on the comical effect of the bold plaid. He thought "This is the life I have got." He looked at his wife, not singing but staring forward with her thick arms folded high across her bosom. He looked at Ted out there at the back of the room, scowling and holding his hat. Ted smiled up. The Bishop felt okay about being the Bishop, right then. He thought ahead to his funeral. They would say that he had always been a kind and decent man, raised his boys right, been a hardworking rancher and mill-man and a valiant defender of his faith.

"Then leaving and taking the ranch and I pay both lawyers. That dried-up lying thief."

The middle-C was sticking again, producing a slightly warbling drone. The room was too hot and smelled of deodorant and diapers and mothballs. He could smell the storebought white bread all the way back here.

"Makes a man drink and drink bad," thought Ted. "Shit on them." He found himself up and walking to the door. Outside he smelled woodsmoke, and the yellow cottonwood leaves ticked across the parking lot. He loosened his tie and got in the old Ford and found his Waylon Jennings cassette, and drove the few blocks home. The mountain was in clouds. He pulled his handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped dust from the dashboard.

He removed his Sunday hat and put it atop the coat-tree. In his hurry to be on time this morning he had left his plate in the sink. Now he washed it and placed it in the rack. He fired the stove. The same one. Her rocker sat there still all these years later. A lightweight ladderbacked chair his mother had also used. He slid it 'til the runners were under the iron stove, then wrenched it hard forward and the old dry wood splintered almost without his effort. The legs came out of their mortises, then the spindles and armrests. The back took some work. He finally removed the kettle from the stove, raised the chair above his head, and brought it down. Then again with vehemence and it broke to sticks. These he swept into a pile in front of the stove. Sitting in his own chair now, he fed the stove the shambles of the chair. The old maple caught and a surge of heat filled the room. "A winter in here," he thought, and reached for the Jameson.

3. The Kolob Tabernacle Gets Under His Skin. December.

By fiat the prophet seer and revelator had it built at the crossroads, not at the corner of one quadrant but at the geometric centerpoint at the very intersection of the centerlines of the two roads in the perfect as-drawn crosshaired bullseye of what would have been a roundabout had more urbane planners had their way but which evolved in fact to become a rough rutted swerve of trafficked bare hardpan and later a merely expedient sweep of asphalt in the midst of which the Tabernacle now stood autonomous, alone and to appearance arbitrary so that what began as fiat ended up as apparent mistake, the certainty of the prophet seer and revelator coming finally to light as hamfistedness, the way what is white and bloated and fishbitten finally slips its chains and surfaces to indict.  He thought: this is a likeness of our discomfort with the social order: that the Tabernacle, meeting place for the propagation of edicts, the leveling of censure, the knitting of the congregation, the buttressing of values and family and general cohesion, should so whelm the townplan that all roads must needs finally go their near-heedless way around it lest it govern overmuch the hurried passage of the people who no matter their allegiances must get where they are going.  And that in delaying them every day by looming there omnipresent, unaware of its architectural solecism, a shadowing reminder of their oaths and contracts, it so chafe and irk that they tire of the order it was placed there to keep and become wild.  Thus the rough expedient looping of the blacktop where the prophet had designed a neat-compassed circle did for him, for this modern man this century later, symbolize the accommodations people, individuals all, make to live with each other else the social contract so irk and chafe that at some personal culmination one of the overregulated citizens mix fertilizer with diesel and bring down the Tabernacle.  In this vast country, at least, it is in no one's nature to be so overseen, stared-down on and disapproved of, by this kind of unblinking panoptic presence of distant authority.  It loomed there and he imagined it circled with a wind-rippled God-sustained red banner declaring Non Annuit Coeptis under an unblinking eye.  One may love the church and resent its nagging.

Then one moonless night in the deadwinter the man ran off the expedient asphalt, well into his fifth of Jameson, and came up in the ditch in the deep snow, tires frictionless, and the headlights bore an upangled wedge of light through the snowfall directly at the facade of the Tabernacle.  For a long few minutes as he reeled behind the wheel it glowed alone and faceless in all the night and as the man noted how its fine old stone was now nearly hidden in the aluminum and vinyl of the expedient costeffective tithebought recent remodel and the whiskey sidled up his esophagus in unctuous laminar flow then he became convinced of his night's work.  He offed the headlights, lurched the two blocks home, and returned with paint and roller.  In the near-complete dark he overturned a trashcan, chinned the gutter over the new modular aluminum entry, made the roof, and considered his canvas: an uninterrupted upper wall of squared blocks of red sandstone maybe forty feet across and taller than he could reach.  He marked the very axial center of the wall, the spot bisected by the cardo of Kolob Town, and drafted in white oil housepaint a vast eyewhite, almond, symmetrical, and stylized.  Then an arm-compassed iris of barnred, then a pupil in stoveblack, which he drew smallish because he imagined it would seem to squint its contempt.  He stood back woozy in the cold and disordered by the gusting of the snow.  The eye was plain even in this moonless solstice, fairly done, clear and simple, iconic.  He threw the paint buckets down into the snow and jumped after.  He worried briefly about the footprints in the snow between his truck and the road.  He left the paint to freeze, fetched a shovel from the truckbed and began to dig and some time later, with the whiskey wearing off, he drove home.