Ted May Gets Out of the House

The yellow parallelogram moved up the wall. He could see it move. He fell back into sleep then awake 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 beat on the faded carpet and the window sash ticked in the heat. 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 instruction, 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.

Ferral Young, Kolob, Utah, February 15

One thing is in Kolob some don't know the day we was born.  It wasn't the custom to keep that day, and all I know is I was born this month, February, in 1923.  My mother always said they had lost track of the day which they could do in them winters that was so cold and snowed-in.  They could go a month without that anyone came by and in them days there was no 144, just the old cattle trail over to Youngville.  It could take half a day to get to town and so snow on the ground kept us at home.  I was born in this house.  I was the second youngest and now the only Young left, unless my boy is still alive.

As a boy I mainly remember ranch work.  We had the biggest outfit this side of the mountain, maybe two thousand head after the war for a few years.  Sometimes I rode to town for mail.  That was half a day riding, then get the mail from Sister Larsen, then go up to the schoolhouse to see if there was some children there, then spend the night at my cousins' house, where the yurts is at now, then ride home the next morning.  I did not see people except my family and some ranch hands, only in town now and then.  There was ever so often a dance in town, and one time a year we rode over to Youngville, too.  Them times was what we talked about and looked to all year, when we saw other young people at the Tabernacle.  There was a picnic and all the cars circled and still some wagons and many horses.  Horses was how we went over the mountain and did most all of our traveling seeing how the ranch is mainly ledge and steep, all rock and tumble-down pine and too rough for cars.  So one time a year we rode over to Youngville.  That took a hard two days each way.  The ride was part of the excitement, spending two days on the mountain with the other Kolob families, all the mule trains, a few wagons.  The riding and talking, the campfire, the music and dancing.  I knew the Kolob families more from fetching mail and crossing to Youngville than from being neighbors.  Now with 144 paved and driving I can see people every day, though I mainly do not.  I got used to the quiet and alone.

Them dances in Youngville was so exciting!  Families went from Kolob, like I said, and from the crossing, and Cedar, and even four days' ride from Castleton and John's Flat.  I think it was five hundred people one year.  This was between first cut and when I and my brothers went for firewood, so June.  We didn't know how alone we was in all this country till we saw all them cars and horses and the dust and so many people, each one with his town's color on him, a bandana or a scarf.  Yellow for Kolob.  We watered down the Tabernacle horse lot so's there's not so much dust and we set up shades and passed the time talking and eating and flirting, getting reacquainted with them's we hadn't seen since the year before, and music and dancing at night.  We was all in the church in them days but there was some drinking though you could never see it, just its effects, some of the men got pretty loud and boisterous and to carrying on.  But I think the bishops pretty much just looked the other way.  I remember once this old boy got to yelling and swung at Joseph Richards and the boys took him and throwed him in the ditch to sober him up.   The dancing went all night.  When I was sixteen there was girls' choice and I danced with Lena Young and I thought about nothing else but them two minutes for the next year when I found she was just married up to Cedar.  That broke my heart.

In '42 I got called up.  It was a letter in the mail.  One for me, one for my big brother Hyrum.  Mainly, we did not hardly know of the war.  There was no news except rumors, and we was the first to get called up in Kolob.  We just read them papers and didn't hardly know what to do.  It said report to our post office, which in them days was just Sister Larsen's front room.  We had to leave our chores and go down.  When we got there Sister Larsen did not once stop crying and we learned we had to report to Salt Lake, which maybe we never would of gone but we did go.  We had two weeks I think, then rode over to Youngville with my little brother William so he could take the horses back.  We rode in a government car with some other boys to Salt Lake.  I was sick scared, I admit, but I kept it hid.  I was over Lena by then, but leaving my mother crying broke my heart.

Once I had seen a picture of ZCMI, but it was so big and pretty I just stood there and about got killed by a delivery wagon, I was such a country boy!

We went to bootcamp and trained and got split up.  The last I ever saw of my big brother Hyrum he was in a line going into a tent.  He was a big man.  I remember I was encouraged by how big he was in that line of skinny boys, but he did not come back from the Pacific.  He was killed on Midway.

Me, they sent to France.  I was a shooter.  It was the hunting they said. Thing is, I was never much for hunting.  We had more beef than we could eat.  Now there's deer everywhere on the ranch, but in them days they was mostly gone.  I shot some when they got in the hay, but there was little call for it.  But the army thought I was a shooter, so I did that.  On this, there is not much to say.  I saw some Germans at a distance a few times, but they was always heading away.  I did what i was told, but there was little action till Paris.  It was the end of the war, which, now, we of course didn't know, but we walked into Paris and there was some shooting, but in the morning they was gone.  I got the job of guarding a line of Germans that surrendered.  I just had to stand with my rifle and watch those boys.  They was in bad shape and I have to say I was praying they would not run because I would hate to of shot them so close after seeing how regular they was.  I had to watch them for a week.  Every day a pretty girl walked by and the Germans watched her and pointed and whistled and some called to her in French.  She ignored them, but she smiled at me a few times.  Now, one thing is that the Paris people appreciated us Americans and we took that in and we did get so's we wore our helmets at a tilt, and carried on like peacocks.  Even the shyest boys winked at the Paris ladies and strutted like roosters.  Some of the boys got girlfriends.  They couldn't talk French, but they was everywhere American boys with Paris girls on their arms.  Off duty at night there was dances and lots of drinking but it was not like them Youngville dances back home.

This is when I met Clothilde.  She was the one I mention, a pretty Paris girl that walked by my guard station every day.  So I was at the dance one night and I saw here there, and I don't know what got into me but I walked up to her and told her my name.  There was nothing we could say, what with my no French and she being a French girl never been to school neither of us.  She was so pretty.  Her dress and shoes was worn down from the war and living poor, and she was too skinny, but I fell in love with her that night.  She was small and chestnut-haired and always about to smile.  I hardly know who I was them days after that dance.  I learned a few words of French.  I found flowers out of that city that was mainly empty of what to buy.  I got her a cake and she was so pleased.  I was there maybe one more month.  I proposed we get married and she agreed.

Then I had to go back to America on the boat to New York.  But then I went back and the Colonel married us.  She was not allowed in our camp, so we saw each other only walking around the city.  It is hard to remember now but I about died of not being with here all the time, of only holding her hand and dancing with her.  It was some time and then we went on the boat to America.  We took the train to Salt Lake, then got a ride to Youngville, and all the time she got quieter and quieter.  Then the horses back to Kolob.  This was a bad time, as Clothilde never had been on a horse, which I did not consider, and I could see she was scared and sad.  I did what I could, trying to make her smile, bringing her flowers, but when we got back home here she was not talking.

Neither would my mother she was so angry I got married to this French girl not of the church without even her blessing.  It made the family very upset the way I come home with Clothilde.  We moved into the cabin out back.  Clothilde stopped talking at all.  Then the winter, which was more quiet and alone than ever I remembered after the war and Paris.  Most days Clothilde never once out of bed, just lying  facing the wall.  In the spring our boy Hyrum was born, named for my big brother.  In that June I was haying some long days.  When I come back to the cabin one night Clothilde had taken our boy.  I rode up the mountain looking, but she was gone.  That was in '46.  I never seen her or our boy.  Hyrum is old now hisself, I think 67 years old and I don't know him.  All the days of my life I miss him and his mother.  My family is dead and buried on the ranch now, and I have lived by main force of hoping they would come back.  That and that I like my work here.  My dogs, my ranch, this good life.  I just wish they was in it.

The Girl Kandace Is Bored and Goes up to the Store

5/5/2014
rev 7/7/2014

The Sheriff's wife had forgotten the list. Again.

Chips, she thought. And cream of chicken soup.

Go outside, she said to her boys.

And the other chips. For his lunch. Where did she leave the list?

Go outside, she said again, barking this time.

Gladys covers that stool. Hangs over the edges like her butt is the top of a mushroom or a cupcake.

One of the boys started bawling. Out, she heard herself yell in the small store.

The boys went out. The smaller one sat down on the edge of the porch with elaborate collapse and too much looseness in the arms.

That one is a queer, she thought, then crossed the idea out with her free hand.

Frozen pizza. Two bottles of pop.

Gladys had her enormous breasts propped on the counter. This was a joke just this morning at the Post Office, the great weight of Gladys' breasts requiring her to always prop them on whatever burly structure was nearby. The Nelson boy had a cow down and now had it in a harness hanging from his loader and he suggested such a contrivance for Gladys and her breasts.

She took her shopping to the counter. Gladys slowly focused on the pile and sighed and started to tally. The Sheriff's wife squinted out at the gas pumps. The girl Kandace was there leaning on the tailgate of the red jeep belonging to a boy who lived down at the yurts. The girl's hip rocked out and that knee straightened and she propped her hand and her skinny elbow jutted. That is a girl flirting, thought the Sheriff's wife. The sun came through the girl's yellow skirt.

The least that little bitch could do is wear a slip, said the Sheriff's wife.

That little hooker, she thought.

Gladys heaved herself around to look. She snorted and went back to her tally.

The girl Kandace flipped her yellow hair out there in the white sun. The boy from down at the yurts was hanging up the nozzle. The girl laughed, threw her head back, her big white teeth, her red mouth.

That little bitch, said the Sheriff's wife. She is asking for it.

All the boys watch her, said Gladys.

And all the men.

Gladys and the Sheriff's wife looked. The girl did a little wave as the boy got back in the jeep. She turned on the toes of her flip-flops and walked toward the store.

If her mother wasn't such a fall-down. Teach that little hooker to be a lady. She finished saying this as the door jangled open and the girl entered with a blast of white light and heat and perfume.

The Sheriff's wife said You have a good day, Gladys and shouldered past Kandace and out.

You too, love, said Gladys, too quiet and too late.

Gladys turned and watched Kandace sway into the store. Just a filly, she thought. Under all this there is a filly like that, she thought, and settled her breasts onto the counter. What a cow I am, she thought.

* * *

Kandace got tired of TV. Her mother was sleeping it off in the back room, snoring. She thought, He will come home soon. She felt it in her chest, the hot surge of warning in the boring day. She went to the bathroom and brushed her teeth while she looked in the mirror. She spit and rinsed and turned this way and that. She pulled in her tummy and arched her back and she thought I will not always look like this I will get old and ugly so I will let them see me now. She folded the top of her skirt over once, then twice to show more above the knee. She brushed her hair with a little water. She took her mother's sunglasses and two dollars from her frumpy old shoulderbag. She stepped out into the glare. She headed toward the woodshop and prepared to be seen. She heard the jointer running before she turned at the head of the driveway, and the men laughing in there, and she smelled the pine. The lowering sun on her face and the heat off the road. She took out her phone and studied the screen and pretended to chew gum and flipped her hair back as she walked in front of the shop's big overhead door. She knew they were watching. She had known them her whole life, they gave her blocks of cutoff wood when she was a girl and always warned her away from the machines. She kept her gaze on the mountain, blue in the north. Rain, she thought. She walked and behind her one of the men laughed and their half-deaf talking resumed. She glanced at her reflection in the window of a parked car and adjusted her posture. To look purposeful but unhurried, to show confidence, this is what she tried to do, but she was careful not to show her effort or her calculation. When she was out of the carpenters' line of sight she prepared to show delight and surprise around the next corner at the Trading Post, where the new woman worked. She reminded herself that Meredith had brought the jewelry back from Taos, and to remark on it. She turned the corner and saw in a stealthy glance that the Trading Post door was closed. Two men sat in the porch rockers but they didn't notice her. She thought I can get up on the porch and look through the window at the display of T-shirts and mugs and they will look at me and I will be able to look back in the reflection, but she did not.

She started to cross the Post Office road right when the red jeep pulled up to the gas pumps in front of the store. The college boy Billy got out and waved to her. Just lifted his hand and smiled. She smiled back.

Hi Kandace, he said. How's it going?

She held up her thumb and finger a little apart like she was picking a cherry and she looked at him through the gap. Just a little bit boring, is what, she said, and smiled.

You? What're you up to? Not out foraging. She put this word in quotes with her fingers.

They chatted. She laughed. He grinned. He was done pumping and said Okay, then, and she waved and turned toward the store as he climbed back into the jeep.

Those fat cows watched the whole thing, she thought when she saw Gladys and the Sheriff's wife. Their faces looked to her like moons behind the Visa and Mastercard stickers.

She pulled the door open. The bells jangled. It was cool and dark inside and it smelled of bread and money. The Sheriff's wife's fat arm banged her as she let her eyes adjust. Gladys muttered something, too quiet to hear. The girl walked very slowly under the evaporative cooler, feeling her sweat dry. She could feel Gladys watch her. Gladys had put on like two hundred pounds. Kandace could remember when Gladys had been pretty and busty, and now she is just enormous and has breasts like gallons of milk.

She bought a popsicle and walked toward home as slowly as she thought she could without seeming strange. Several motorcycles growled by, each with a couple astride, heading for the Park. She didn't see anyone then. The highway went silent again and the heat from it distorted the cliffsides and the sky itself was leached of blue above its long scar. The chairs on the Trading Post porch were empty. She sat there in the shade and slouched down with her elbows up on the sticky arms of the chair. Smoke rose from an inch of cigarette in the can of sand. She rhythmically clapped her knees together, feeling the sweat stick and unstick. The sun lowered into the trees and the breeze started and cooled her. Her hands were sticky with popsicle. She got up and walked toward home.

As she approached the house she saw her stepfather upstairs, vague behind the curtain. She saw the shape of his workshirt collar and the epaulettes. She imagined his horsey smell. She would have to talk with him if he was upstairs and she felt the tedium of the day come down on her as the sun set and she thought I will be pretty old and he will still be in my life. He will be an old man. I will know him long after my mother is dead. From drinking. From lying in bed all day. She imagined the weight of the pistol and imagined several TV murder scenarios. She thought of her future in prison and felt a wave of grief for everything she would never have, for going to the electric chair for her hatred of him.

* * *

He stood at the top of the stairs. She came in and started up, then saw him there.

'S it going, Kandace? he said.

T.J.

Where you been?

Out, she said and sidled past him. She could smell him. She pushed her door open against the weight of the piled clothes.

You eaten? he said.

Uh huh, she said, though the popsicle was not enough.

Nothin in the house.

Don't I know it, she said. Goodnight. She met his eyes for a moment and smirked.

Night, he said as she clicked the door shut.

jackrabbit

Kade Takes His Walk, April 26, 2014, Kolob, Utah

He walked and remembered to stay to the edge. This is where he threw the bag of bees. The gravel here at the edge is full of goats' heads is why the boots. This is where the Cruise America with the Californias in it came over the hill at sunrise and he swinged up into the cottonwood but it hit him anyway bet he didn't even get hurt but Mom yelled and cried all day and told him one thousand times never walk in the middle only to the edge. This is where that one summer the renters lived after Old Man Nelson died and he saw her tits in the night but only the one time. He kept going back to put his dink in the fence at her window but he never saw her tits again and then she went to the City. This is also --this same tan house-- where the tall skinny guy lives now and cuts his Coors cans into silver twists and has this like Christmas tree of Coors cans now shining in the porch. He walked to the crossing and stopped to decide which way to go. To proceed. This decision he always made by wind, which way it was blowing, and this time it went to the Mountain that is North. And so but, --however--, another wind, a stealth wind, went East to the canyons and so that is the way he went, stealth now, blending into the roadside grass walking like an Anasazi on just the toes of his boots so that the 2014 Subaru Outback with Thule roof rack out patrolling to sniper him cruised by and didn't even see him til it was too late for them and he squeezed the detonator. And this is the biggest Angus bull in Kolob. He climbed the fence and hooked his heals and sat the top rail, He built this fence with his Mom for the rich City people. The rail is lodgepole pine from Montana which what a wasteful expense had said his Mom. They did not want the bobwire to snag the deer or hurt their bull which however no bull this enormous will get even a scratch from no stinkin bobwire. And this is a cow with Old Man Ferral's brand on it pushing into the fence and the bull's dink is like a red arm so he sits and and watches and the bull humps the cow and he has a pretty good viewing angle and he smiles about how much he can teach that renter with the tits when she moves back to Kolob looking for some cowboy loving. When the bull is done and the cow is back to eating and the Mexican is riding in and the wind goes North he dismounts the fence and walks. Here is the tiller they let rust by the road and he knocked last summer and offered to take away and they said no. This house is also now renters. This is the quakie where the bees was and when he knocked and offered to take the rusty tiller and the renters said no they said but you can take those bees away, only they called them yellowjackets, and they laughed but he took a trashbag and just quick slipped it up over the big nest and over the branch and tied it and then cut the branch off and got stung only once and took the branch with the buzzing bag back up there and threw it in the weeds and they gave him five dollars and a Coke Zero. Here is the tall skinny guy coming in his 2012 F-350 and doing the city wave he does. His hat is not right. He walked through the willows where the road is low. This is where the cougar that night was standing and he surprised him and went through the fence where even a lamb can't fit and so he started carrying his revolver that the renters wanted him to shoot the Coke Zero can but a man doesn't show off with his revolver Mom said and plus he had no ammo they don't sell no .38 over to Cannonville no more but a cougar knows the sight of a sidearm and is very terrified of a cowboy hat even with no horse under it. He came out of the willows on the rise. This is a 2WD in a rut, is what this is. Just a old Dodge as can't get out of the mud where the riser blew last week and it is still wet and soft and tore-up. He walked up to the guy pushing that has mud all over and says I am Kade and the guy's hand is small and soft. They are up to they axle in snot-slick bentonite mud and not doing it right so he goes over to the now-fixed riser and gets a couple rocks and puts them in the ruts and a couple more and the other guy who is driving and has earrings but is probably not a faggot guns it and the 2WD gets on the road and the first guy gets in and says thanks and they drive away slingin mud all over and he gets the rocks out and puts them back by the riser. He remembers that Old Man Nelson's boy bought this pasture so he walks over to his house but he's not in so he tells his new fat wife Lucinda to tell him he can move handlines if he wants two dollars the run. She is not a kindly woman so he keeps it short and all business. This is where the road just goes on with no houses for a good stretch before town and he remembers when he was a boy he raced through here when he was short enough to ride Mom's buckskin Yellow that was then the fastest horse in Kolob and he always won. But now he is tall and that horse is not going to last another winter and is swayback and got no teeth to speak of however is a good horse for Mom to get out on now and then such as Fourth of July Parade when the Relief Society goes riding in dresses they made. There was this one time he was racing and that was when the road was first paved and the buckskin Yellow didn't know paving and lost his feet on the bend and Yellow and he'd almost gone down but he dragged his left boot and Yellow'd twisted like a cat and they come out of the bend at full gallop and won it anyway which is how people still slap his shoulder ten years later and tell everyone he is the best rider in Kolob he that don't even have no horse. He walked and walked. There is his Coke Zero can now pink in the weeds. Here is the Nelson boy's new gate that is hung on a opener that is $600 at the IFA. This is the stumps of the Russian olives with the green kind of herbicide they but on to kill them and the tangle where they threw all the branches and he got the logs for firewood that burns hot as hell but it smells like cigars and is not worth it on account of it's a bitch to split it. In last winter he had got tired of TV and he went to the hippy barn to the Invasive Non-Natives which is this slideshow and a talk by this hippy from over to Arizona and they hooked him up with a job in the canyons cutting saltcedar that they call tamarisk and anyways it was itchy scratchy hot work but the pay was real good and he liked those hippies and the Survival School girls from down at the yurts and there was this one that wore buckskins and had a braid and he saw her peeing in the sand and she did not look one bit shy but he gave her her lady privacy but them last three, four weeks in his sleeping bag when she was over there sleeping pretty in the moonlight just about near wrecked and killed him after he saw her butt and another time one of her tits when she was working a Stihl. Those are things that stick with a man day and night and make him wish he had a wife mostly one with a braid and brown skin but he doesn't like a woman doing chainsaw work. That is too manly. Here is the cottonwood that the hippies put the swing on that is a cedar log on this purple rope that they was going to try to climb out over that high branch and he tied his wrench to and threw it over and they told him that was a great idea Kade and one of them gave him a hug in her swimsuit the one with tattoo around her waist. This swing goes way out over the Nelson boy's pond and they drop in and he likes to watch but no way is he going in that cowshit water and no way is he taking his shirt off with no hippy girls. This is the flat rock. This is the other of those lodgepole fences of wasteful expense. Here is the four walls but no roof of the old county shed with its biggest packrat nest he ever saw. Up here is the new tower for cell phones which he is going to get one. And the bend where another Cruise America came too wide and killed the Lyman boy when he was out to get the mail. He always stops here to think about that and he squeezes the detonator here every time. There was this one time these drunks knocked his hat off and there was five of them and all he could do was squeeze the detonator even though any one of them he could beat and maybe any two as they was weak city boys, just milk-fed. But so, however the detonator is just something he does when what else you going to do. No way you going at a Russian olive with a hatchet you use a Stihl. And no way you going at five drunk college boys with your fists you use the detonator. This is where Bishop Young's Dad shot Old Man Nelson's brother Hyrum for stealing his water with a underground old 4" handline he hidden at night in a ditch he dug and patched up the sod over it which his buddy Stanley Young said why would you work so darn hard to steal water if you could just do some ranching with all that effort and buy your own darn water share fair and square. It is always better to do it fair and square the water thieves get caught sooner than later and can't sleep well neither before nor after gettin put in jail. This is the driveway he needs to get after with the grader the weeds are gettin tall this spring. It is getting blue on the mountain the rain this year is good there will be overflow water through June at least and it looks like a three-cutting year the first they've had in five years. This is his Mom walking up with the healers. What are you grinning at she says and he says hi Mom I did my walk I stayed to the side Old Man Ferral's cows are knocked up the renters is not back yet I got some city boys out of the mud up where the riser broke don't worry Mom it's lunch time.

Letter Demanding a Towtruck, Stat.

Dear Kirk, Nan, and Peter,

This is a letter about my fucked up story, once known to my vast readership as The Pure of Heart, but now stripped of title and lying in a gutter like so much used kleenex (TM). I am writing this letter without regard for your feelings, only mine. This is an act of faith, and, as is true of all such rash absurdities in my life, I am doing it not because I want to, but because I am desperate. And because Anne Lamott, whom I adore, in Bird By Bird told me to write this. Me personally. I was reading that great book again because I want to be a good writer and it's the best book I know on the topic, and I opened the book at random, which is a form of divination all of us ex-Mormons can understand, and there it was: what I needed to know: if you're stuck in the way I am stuck, in slick mud driving a story that is no more capable than a Saturn sedan, the thing you --I mean I-- need to do is write a letter to somebody with a towtruck. I have this informal writing group I belong to of which its other members are happily unaware, and all three of you are idling your big towtrucks and this is my plea for help.

Help. Please.

This story started as the most natural thing I've ever written, almost. The generative idea was that I could say something useful about religion, or leaving a religion --let's say for the sake of conversation that the religion is a weird, provincial, American one that looks suspiciously like a for-profit corporation-- by simply strangemaking the idea of purity. Instead of repentance and sacrament, these cats'd take lots of broad-spectrum antibiotics, and subscribe to a doctrine that equates biological corruption with spiritual corruption. Fine. I find that weird and funny, and one of my hopes is that my readers will find it weird and funny, too, and have a sudden sense of having stepped into the void religion-wise. Or, a little less grandly: that my readers will see, even for a moment, how strange religion really is. The central weird conceit of the story, I like to think, may be able to waken readers for a moment from the sleep of habit, in which religion is rarely seen as fundamentally psychological, desperate, and nightmarish, like Fuselli's horse with its glaucus eyes right there in the bedroom.

However. I am now on major re-write #4 and the story gets farther and farther from what felt natural and right when I first jotted down a draft late last summer. THat first draft had all the reassuring spontaneity and organic gushing-forth that for me indicate a good idea. No struggle. No weeping and wailing. Hardly any effort. Just an indecent gushing. But this time the editing process has been tortuous. I am long into the self-loathing phase at this point. Maybe six months of that. And I'm nowhere near line-editing yet. And every time I revise I start with a feeling that I'm heading in the right direction and end up with the feeling that the story is less interesting and engaging than it was a few hours earlier. I am once again experiencing what I have so many times before: that I write characters and places and things with great alacrity; that I tend to procrastinate big structural decisions, plot, and drama way too long; and that I often get miles into a story before I realize that there is little in the way of central event or logical narrative drive.

To be specific: in this story, there are two fulcra: the first is Yeshua being abandoned in the Outer Darkness when the church fails. The second is meeting June and having a new life open up. I like both of these. But I don't know if they're enough. Or, as Kirk has rightly observed: maybe they're enough but too late in the story. As I originally pictured it, the birth scene, right up front, would be strange and deeply disorienting for the reader. The reader would have the sense of stepping into a place that is full of familiar objects but where everything is driven by repellant, or maybe just bizarre, doctrines. My original hope was that a reader would find this simultaneously distressing and disorienting and fascinating. The language would be a semi-familiar mash-up of modern American vernacular and Old-Testament pseudo-scripturese. The cultic certainties, the hints of persecution delusion, the dogmatism, and the isolating chosenness of the Pure, behind their wall and their Protections would show religion as something maybe scary and coercive and unacceptable. [? Here I'm on thin ice, I think...] Anyway, when I read version 4, which you haven't seen yet, I think I'm farther from that unsettling glimpse of the weirdness of religion than ever. Given tribal human nature and the fragility of minds, we should find cults terrifying, and we should, I think, vastly expand our conception of cult to include any mass movement that hears voices and yearns for something beyond death. But we find all this terribly mundane. uh. uh. uh. and so: THIS STORY NEEDS TO GET MORE AND MORE SAVAGE WITH EVERY REVISION, not more and more polished. And, when Yeshua chooses normalcy, if that's what he eventually chooses, it needs to stretch out into his future in ghastly banality. I think. At least it does for me. The future, I mean. Stretch out into ghastly banality with a vanishing point out on a blank horizon.

[Digression: this is what Don Gately sees at the end of Infinite Jest, BTW. He has his one life, and it is constrained by his isolation in individual experience so that there is no sustained experience of the One possible, there is just "and when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out." We invent God to avoid non-endings like that. He's dessert. A resolving chord. But we're good moderns now, and can dispense with all that.]

Yeah but so:let's say for a moment that Anne Lamott was right in telling me to write this letter. It is an act of faith, and the miracle that succeeds it is my moment of clarity up there in ALL CAPS^^^. This story needs to be more savage. What does that mean? It means it CANNOT END WITH GOD OR WITH ANYTHING GOD-LIKE: there is no dessert, no moment of resolution, no gloriously concordant unity of the orchestra, no moral conclusion, no happily ever after. The tide must be way out. Let's say Yeshua chooses June. He must be choosing her because he likes her more than he likes some other way forward, not because she is some kind of Romantic culmination. He has to face the blank horizon just like the rest of us mortals: without the magical ability to prophesy. Without assurances. With the same existential uncertainties we all face. Of course. Duh. Yeshua is in his life. His past is lost. His present is complicated and distracted. His future is unknown. He meets a girl he likes. He chooses to go with her because that is all a person can ever do: try to walk the long walk with people you really love and try not to be waylaid by promises of something else. There are but three limnae: learning, love, and death, yeah? Beware the merely liminoid: drugs, entertainment, religious chosenness, stuff like that. Does Yeshua have a great moment of insight? Does he suddenly understand that his church was nothing but a projector sending an image of God at the blank horizon? Does he commit to a life of radical modern no-bullshit realism? Does this insight creep up on him and remain inarticulate, so that he simply walks forward into his life with [and, someday, without] June on an inarticulate hunch that it's the best path he can be on? I think this is what I mean my keeping the story "savage": it doesn't allow false comforts, just the journey and the learning, love, and death that happen along the way.

ok. That's all for now. I am committed to doing this well. I don't really know how, so I opened Bird By Bird and it told me to write this letter, which I did with little sense that I would figure anything out, but with some faith. And what I think I learned along tha way is that the story needs to be unsparing and that Yeshua must be directed by warmth. Thoughts?
Many thanks,
V.

How I came to Love the Bucktoothed Aztec Maiden - ROUGH DRAFT

In a shabby border city in the 80s, in an ESL high school, in the hall by the front door, across from the laughable-inept mural of the Battle of Puebla, on the radiator, early in the AM I sat with Mike, who, of course, was drawing. With great, precocious fluidity and control, I now know, as an art critic. But back in the day, when we were, what? seventeen? I just inarticulately knew that Mike was good. Very good. I mean, I could draw, and would, a year later, win a scholarship for my drawing, but Mike had a gift. I swallowed my envy. I was practicing my cool. We arrived an hour before school started. A few teachers with coffee, looking vulnerable or candid or human under the fluorescents shambled out of the faculty lounge, trailing clouds of tobacco smoke. The copy machine chugged and wheezed in the reception office behind us. Then the front doors opened and the kids poured in. We sat on the radiator and watched, as though on a rock in a flood. We mocked: those suede loafers the Mexicans wore, and their hairnets and dickies. The jocks' muscle shirts and blow-dried hair and submissive, chirpy girlfriends. The geeks for all the usual reasons. There were very few we never mocked: the beautiful sad girl in the trenchcoat. Her little brother, who I one morning decided had "moral authority", and, at any rate, had a beauty and severity and seriousness that left us silent. For no reason I can remember, we also never mocked the soccer players, who were somehow, in our high-school minds, not jocks the way that players of American sports were jocks. For one thing, they smoked lots of grass. For another, they moved as a synchronized pack and had a reputation for sudden savagery, though iy was delivered with something like affability. The morning I'm remembering right now Mike singled out a short, fat, bowlegged, bucktoothed Mexican girl for caricature. As a defender of the weak, as I saw myself, I saw her as off-limits, so Mike's choice of target made me uncomfortable. But my cool was more important than my compassion, so I watched poker-faced. He did a few quick and economical sketches. Uncanny resemblance. Funny exaggerations. Her thick makeup almost clown-like. Her teeth horsey. Her hair towering and precarious. Her boobs spherical, helium-filled, and in the way. Once he get her right, he began a new drawing: a feather-plumed, muscular, stern-faced Aztec [god? prince?] strode up temple steps carrying, not the voluptuous and swooning virgin maiden of Mexican folk-art iconography, but the bucktoothed girl. The more likely virgin. I tried but failed to contain my laughter. It was a great drawing, a great joke, irresistibly funny.

I don't remember how it happened, but at some point I had learned that I could walk into the reception office and make a copy and would not be questioned. I just acted like I was on an errand: brisk, focused, entitled. When Mike did a good drawing, I took it into the office and copied it. Then we looked for a good place to hang it. My gift to match Mike's drawing was an ability to jump at least two feet higher than anyone else in the school. I could stand flat-footed on the gym floor holding a basketball and suddenly launch vertically and dunk the ball behind my head. I was just about six feet tall at the time. I could reach almost eleven and a half feet. I donated this gift to Mike's art. I took those copies, added a strip of tape to the top edge, found a good display wall, grasped the copy in my right hand, took a long step, leapt, and left the drawings high above the floor. We always did this at the last possible moment before the late bell rang. The halls were nearly empty. We aimed to create a noteworthy mystery.

People noticed. We liked to lean on a wall within sight of our latest "hanging", as we called them, and watch students stop and laugh or shake their heads. We lived for their speculation and comments. Mike lived, I think, for their approval. "That's AWEsome!" could make him smile through his cool. A caricature of our jowly, gorilla-browed and much-loathed Principal was received with such glee that we heard kids talking about it in class days later.

Not all our hangings were well received. Some were notorious. Mike's gift came with a deep undercurrent of anger and aggression. His caricatures were not cute or endearing. They were mean and pointed. He was usually calm and very quiet, but when he mocked someone or something his color rose. He spit. And when he drew to mock, the drawings seethed with bitterness and contempt. They hung in the halls, out of everyone's reach but mine, transmitting unease. Our classmates responded. When they laughed, it was at someone's expense, with adolescent cruelty and schadenfreude. When they didn't laugh their faces contorted. I think they felt disgust and pity. I often did.

One time, Mike drew a massive, turgid, spurting penis wearing a sharp business suit, sitting in an ornate golden throne on a cloud, surveying a small, pathetic Earth. Understand that I was Mormon. I was at school early in the morning not because I was an early riser, but because I was required to attend a 6:00AM youth seminary class every schoolday. The penis-God shocked me. The suit seemed somehow an even graver affront, as I thought Mike meant to attack my Mormonism, with its suited hierarchy and corporate structure. As I sat that morning and watched him draw I was deeply uneasy. I loved my church and longed to be better-suited to it, less inclined to rebellion and suspect interests. But I had developed a real solidarity with Mike over several months of sitting on the radiator. I sat and watched and did not show my unease. And when the time came, as the halls emptied after the first bell, I took the drawing into the office, copied it, taped it, and, without waiting for Mike's input this time, I jumped higher than I ever had before and affixed it to the glass face of the portrait of [********] that hung front and center in the entry hall. As I fell back to ground Mike muttered "Fuck, dude.", the sweetest approval I ever heard from him. It was brilliant. All the tawdry neoclassical ornament and grandiose symmetry and faux-ceremonial axiality of the main hall focused on that drawing of penis-God. He sat up there on his throne judging us. Aloof, unassailable, virile, and contemptuous.

Between first and second periods we stood nearby and watched. A student stopped and looked up. Then a few more. There was no laughter. Some shook their heads. Some looked disgusted. Some asked for explanation. That was girls, mostly. Mike stood with his arms crossed. My hands were shaking. It hung there all day. I felt dread. The next morning it was gone. We figured a janitor with a ladder did the rounds every night looking for our hangings. I liked to imagine him re-hanging them in some dank mop-closet around a girly poster. I wrote a short story for my English class in which a janitor collects these crazy drawings until his mop closet is full of them, floor to ceiling, and then a girl is assaulted on campus, and he is convicted of the crime because of his deviant art collection. I had a shaky grasp on American jurisprudence, but my guilt was clear and focused.

I was a lonely kid. I hadn't wanted to move to the shabby border city. I had lived in Boston, and I hated the provinces. I went through my schooldays in grim-faced silence, suffering no fools. I was depressed, I think, but I kept that weakness hidden in judgmental severity. I became a music snob. I dressed like an east-coast artist, though I was a fine athlete. I wrote twisted and dark stories. It seems contradictory now, but I found comfort and refuge in my Mormonism, to which I had converted early in high school while still living in Boston. So when Mike and I started hanging out I put great stock in our strange friendship. We barely spoke, and we knew very little about each other, but we were tight. Even though I spent that entire year sitting by his side, I knew very little about him. In fact, I never knew why he was at school every morning when I showed up at 7:00. He was a cipher. He always wore the brightest Hawaiian shirts and shorts, all of them heavily mended and patched. He wore cracked old shoes. He stunk of mold and I thought I detected a hint of urine and motor oil. His hair was a wild pile of blond curls, Beneath our very different uniforms we shared a lean ropiness. Now, as an adult I suspect that he came from a bad home. Maybe he chose his eccentricity, but I suspect he wore his father's castoffs and lived in squalor. I don't know.

The entry hall, as I wrote, was grand. At the back, above the portrait of [*********] the hall rose to two high-ceilinged stories and a balcony looked over the entry. A cornice ran around the hall. The morning Mike drew the Aztec [?] carrying the bucktoothed sophomore, I undertook a new feat of hanging. I remember feeling some hormonal recklessness. I took the copy and swung my legs over the railing and walked out along the narrow cornice, kicking wads of gum and dust to the floor far below. I stretched and hung the drawing on a well-lit spot about 25 feet above the entry floor. Mike gave a half-smile of approval. I rushed off to class with my hands shaking.

Later I had to get something from my locker. As I was leaning down I felt an explosive pain in one hamstring and in the top of my head, and found myself a moment later lying on the floor with my head in the locker, reeling, seeing stars. A squat Mexican gangster in hairnet and Barrio Hollywood jacket was standing over me, winding up for a kick. I managed to spin out of the way. He pointed at me and said something I couldn't understand, and turned an walked off in a group of other Mexicans wearing the same jacket. As the crowd thinned out, I sank to the floor by my locker. My head was cut and bleeding, a nerve in my neck was pinched, and the back of my thigh was contracted into a hard knot in which I could feel every heartbeat. I think he kicked me in the hamstring. After a while, I got up and left school and took the city bus home and went to bed.

When I went back to school they were waiting. They didn't dare attack me in front of the Principal's office, but two of them stayed in the hall after the late bell rang. I walked past them pretending they weren't there. They followed me to class calling me a faggot the whole way. They were there after class, too. Maybe five of them. I stayed in a group of students. One of the Mexicans reached in and knocked my books to the floor. I managed to grab them before they could attack me. Later, I was in my art class when something hit me on the head, hard. One of the Barrio Hollywood boys was in the class and had thrown a baseball-sized handful of clay at me. I bent down and picked it up, shaped it into a perfect sphere, wound up, and threw it as hard as I could back at him. It skipped off his desk and caught him on the shoulder as he spun away. His stool clattered to the floor. The teacher looked up, came over, and marched us to the office. The principal knew the Mexican, but not me. The Mexican got three days' detention. I got one. After school. I sat in the cafeteria with the usual miscreants, including several from the Hollywood gang. They stared at me and I stared out the window. A short while before the end of detention I approached the monitor at her desk, nodded my head toward the gangsters, and said, in my most even and matter of fact way "Those guys are going to kill me if I leave school with them." She flinched. I said "I need an escort out of here." She pushed the button on the intercom and asked the receptionist to come down. In a minute I was in the Principal's office, waiting. When he came in, he knew my name. "What's the matter, Mr Lewis?" I repeated my certainty that I would be attacked after school. He expressed doubt. I leaned forward and showed him the two-inch gash in my skull. I told him the story, but left out the drawing of the bucktoothed girl. He asked if the attack was unprovoked, and I said yes, and he seemed satisfied. I stayed an hour past the end of detention sitting in his office, doing my geometry homework. Doing beautiful proofs, vowing to myself to stay out of trouble from then on. When I left his office, I walked down long empty corridors to a back door and walked a back way to a distant bus stop. I didn't go to school for a week. When I did, I avoided Mike and started sitting closer to the front of the class. I had avoided participation before then, but started doing the work and raising my hand. I discovered a gift for geometry proofs and creative writing that before I had only suspected. I thrived in a modest way.

I avoided the Barrio Hollywood boys. They cooled down, but I made accidental eye-contact with one between classes one day and I could see hatred and unfinished business in his level stare. Even after that summer break I could sense their animosity. During my senior year I barely saw Mike. I took most of my classes at the University and applied myself and stayed out of trouble at school. One day a few weeks before graduation I was in the hall with just a few other students when two of the gang came down the stairs and spotted me. They both immediately came down the stairs at a run. I don't remember feeling an impulse to run. I just backed up and swung my backpack off my shoulder in a movement more or less like a forehand tennis stroke. It contained at least two fat university textbooks, which knocked the running gangster's upraised arm aside and collided with the side of his head with enough force to throw him off his feet and headfirst into the wall. His smaller buddy collided with me and knocked me backwards onto the floor. I blindly reached up and grabbed something. His cheek and hair. I grabbed and closed my fist and he screamed. I bounced his head off the floor and got up and he stayed down. The first guy I'd hit squared off and wanted to fight. I said, in a remarkably calm voice, "If you take one step toward me I will put you in the hospital. I will break your face." He spit on my shirt, helped his friend up, and they left. I picked up my backpack and headed home.

News got around school that I had beat up two of the Hollywood boys. There was much glee among my white friends. I just felt exhausted. I didn't want their back-slapping. I wanted to done with high school forever.

The next day I saw the guy who had originally attacked me. The bucktoothed girl's cousin, I had learned. He rarely came to school. I saw him put an enormous burrito in a locker and noted the number. this was nearly a year after the original attack and my neck still hurt. In a moment of inspiration, I walked up to the science lab, and, using the purposeful act I'd perfected in making those photocopies, I walked into the supplies closet, grabbed a fat dry-cell battery and a copper wire, and walked back out. Nobody stopped me. I went and found the gangster's locker, ran wire from each terminal of the battery, and welded the locker shut. Just a few quick touches around the strike plate, and a bead of molten steel on each hinge. The smell of scorched oil paint filled the hall.

At lunch I stood opposite the locker and waited. Pendejo, as I'd come to think of him, tried his lock several times, punched and kicked the door, swore in two languages, then noted the welds and swore some more.

Over the few weeks before graduation a terrific stench developed around his locker. That big burrito must have gone anaerobic. Flies clustered around the vents and flew in an out. I pictured maggots. One morning the door was gone. There were grinder marks where they'd cut my welds and the hinges. A faint odor of putrid meat remained, under the smell of bleach.

A year later the leadership of the Mormon church called me to be a full-time missionary in Mexico. When my friends heard this, they said all sorts of racist things and reminded me of the fight. I had always assured them I had no ill will toward Mexicans in general, and that I didn't care where the Hollywood boys were from, but they never quite took me seriously. The fact is, I shamed a girl, and her cousin defended her in his hamfisted way, and I got lucky defending myself. I was a scared and lonely boy, and it felt good to hang out with scared and lonely Mike, there on our radiator, like a rock in a torrent of other scared and lonely kids. We found solidarity, even identity, in our mockery of them. We had an eye for the grotesque, but we didn't have the experience to feel compassion. Now, that bucktoothed girl, I'd pay for her braces.