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Here’s a story for our new category, “Our Best American Short Stories.”  “Harbinger Hall” appeared in The Atlantic in December, 2004.  Readers seemed evenly divided on the question of whether it represents a little boy’s fantasy or something real.  I mean, real in a fictional sense, if that’s not too confusing.  My answer is that I completely believe in the story we are told.  By me.  Or more accurately, by my narrator, who is not so much a version of me as he is an extension into adult consciousness of the protagonist, Bobby.  And maybe then again an extension of Mr. D’Arcy.  In an earlier post, I told the story of the Atlantic’s fact-checking of this story.  And now, as we build our new feature, here’s the story itself.Harbinger Hall

Bobby Mullendore was sick of fifth grade, especially without his best friend, Jack B., plus it was spring. Painstakingly, key by key, jabbing hard with each of his index fingers, he typed a missive in the exact language of a certain carbon copy Jack had given him as a good-bye treasure just this past fall.

Dear Mrs. Applegate:
Due to a career emergency we are moving as of 15 April, 1963. Robert will attend his last class this Friday, April 12. He will start school in North Carolina a week hence. Please accept my apologies for this short notice. It could not be helped, and we regret it.

After twenty focused, difficult minutes, after typing the “Sincerely yours” one letter at a time, Bobby pulled the curled paper from the Royal Standard, flattened it carefully, and signed his mother’s name.

That afternoon, at two-fifteen, moving against the tide of the other kids leaving class, Bobby made his way to Mrs. Applegate’s desk. She was searching through a low drawer, sat up straight when he made a noise, looked surprised. And just started talking, as she could do: “Robert! Well. Your homework is better the last few weeks. Your hands are much cleaner too!”

Bobby made no response, merely presented the letter.

“Oh, my!” Mrs. Applegate said.

“Yip,” Bobby said.

The next day, Good Friday, Mrs. Applegate sprang a surprise, just as she had for Jack’s departure: “Bobby Mullendore,” she announced, “is moving.”

On Monday Bobby wore the same old clothes, but with the addition of one Sears Roebuck watch, a reviled Christmas present, strapped self-consciously to his wrist. Mom saw it and smiled inwardly but still visibly, knowing in her Mom way not to say anything. Bobby walked to the bus stop clutching his lunch, stood there a minute in case Mom should look down the road, and then leaped into the woods. Ancient Mr. Green stopped the old yellow beast, maybe even would have honked (he didn’t like to miss a kid), but a couple of Bobby’s former classmates yelled out, “Moved! Moved!”

Bobby could hear Mr. Green croak, “Bobby moved?”

“Moved!” the kids cried.

Mr. Green said a merry “Well, okay, then,” and the bus roared off. It wouldn’t stop here again.

Bobby crossed Wahackme Road, trotted to Dogwood Lane, ducked past Mrs. Smith’s, trotted past the private lane sign, remembered to breathe, trotted along the high stone wall in front of the Schraeders’ house and into the pine forest along the needle-soft path that would take him to the old stone stable where he and Jack B. had found wondrous things: cigarette butts, beer bottles, a big girl’s bra, a pair of tighty-whities with Brent Lovelace’s camp tag sewn in.

All this was on the D’Arcy estate, the centerpiece of which was a stone mansion five full minutes on foot from the stable through well-kept forest on a wide bridle path. “From another era,” as Bobby’s dad phrased it. Jack B. and Bobby had often slipped up to the house at dusk to look in the windows; they’d seen only a maid in uniform once and, another time, a small party—old people having dinner on the great stone patio. Jack B. had had the tuff idea of blowing squeals through long blades of grass, which they did. On the patio the old people went silent in the night, and then they rose. “Now, what’s that?” one said. Another said, “That’s some sort of crane,” and another, “Rare, I should think.” Pretty soon they’d left their desserts and come tottering across the lawn to investigate.

Bobby and Jack B. giggled their way back into the woods, blowing parting calls all the way down the bridle path and luring the old folks on. Then silent: the birds had flown. “Scared them off,” the first voice said. “Quite sure those are cranes,” the second said. Nine or ten old folks huddled in a little knot there in the woods, where any ogre might get them. “A harbinger, I should think,” the third voice said.

For months and months Bobby and Jack B. whispered those phrases under Mrs. Applegate’s nose: “Rare, I should think!” Har har har! “A harbinger, I should think!” Gales of laughter. The “I should think” became part of the comedy repertoire of the whole fifth grade: “Sloppy Joes for lunch, I should think!” The boys didn’t know what a harbinger was, and didn’t look it up, but Jack B. used the word to name the estate.

Bobby spent his first day of freedom in the abandoned stables of Harbinger Hall, inspecting every corner of the place, looking out every bubbled window, finding things to discuss in a possible letter to Jack B.: six old horseshoes, a 1903 penny, a pair of girl’s underpants with two curled red hairs more or less pasted inside (Lovelace’s girl, Jenny Oswest, had red hair), rotting tack, the skeleton of a cat. He ate his lunch at 12:15 exactly on a desklike shelf in the groom’s quarters, under no awful pressure to trade his Ring Dings for egg salad.

“Funniest thing,” his mom said at dinner (fish sticks and tartar sauce). “I saw Mrs. Crawford at the A&P, and she said she’d heard we’d moved!”

“Empty-headed woman,” Bobby’s dad said.

Bobby hadn’t thought till now that his plan had a possible flaw. But the train of conversation chugged quickly away from Mrs. Crawford to a “communication” problem at Dad’s company in New York, and then to a similar problem at Mom’s garden club. Bobby felt the safety of his plan settle in around him.

He stepped off the bridle path where he’d stepped off each day last week, and trotted into the forest on his recon trail until the mansion came in view. Now it was tree to tree, the Nazis in there holding Jack B., dark day, about to storm, and the microfilm in Bobby’s pocket in direst danger of getting wet in the rain and fizzing to deadly acid. He had to make the grand stone entryway, where he’d brazenly hidden his GI poncho on Friday’s mission, a note to Jack B. folded inside it. Was Jack dead? Had Jack been able to decipher the encrypted message? The line of azaleas was a machine-gun emplacement.

Bobby crawled on his belly along a stone-lined drainage ditch and then to the driveway portico and the entryway, breathing hard. His carbine, a polished stick, turned into a stolen Luger. This he tucked into his pants for the climb, chink to chink, up the stone wall of the entryway, twelve feet high. Bobby put his face in the void where the poncho should have been. He held on to the rock crevices, muscles quivering with the effort. No poncho.

He climbed back down, pulled the heavy Luger from his pants, and let it turn into a machine gun, to be held with two hands. Who could have taken his poncho? The game had turned forty-five degrees toward the real, and his fear turned with it. He flopped to his belly in the fine gravel of the drive and crawled the width of the great entryway, hidden only by the lip of the single marble step. At the next corner of the house he peered around, peered into a study, saw the back of an old man writing at a desk. Writing orders to send Jack B. to the firing squad! Bobby stood and aimed his machine gun.

Exactly then he heard two sudden steps in the gravel. One enormous hand grabbed his collar, another the belt of his pants, and someone lifted him off the ground. A heavy foreign accent, very like that of the Nazis on TV, said, “Vat does this mean?”

“I’m just a neighbor kid!”

“You are spyink!”

“I live over there!” Bobby tried to point.

The man pulled Bobby up the step by the collar and belt, across the marble, through a set of massive oaken doors, and then through a second set and into an expansive marble foyer. Bobby’s heart fluttered in his chest. He began to thrash, but the man just yanked him off his feet by his belt and let him kick in the air.

A maid—the very one he’d seen with Jack—appeared on the great marble stairway that rose straight ahead. She said, “Oh, is this the person who’s been … ?”

“The same,” Bobby’s captor said.

“I’ll get Hilyard.”

Soon a door opened, and a butler came into the great foyer, an unmistakable butler in actual tails, carrying the poncho in front of him. He said, “This is … yours?”

“It’s just my raincoat,” Bobby said.

The butler produced the note to Jack B. and read, “Attack-way 0900 hours-way, ill-kay all-way?” Then, translating, he read, “Free you through back wall—stand clear for dynamite?”

“It’s just a game.”

“Use acid on maid’s face?”

“I’m sorry,” Bobby Mullendore said. He would not cry.

“What do you think, Dort? Shall we bother Mr. D’Arcy?” Hilyard said the master’s name in three distinct syllables, like letters: D-R-C. He turned on his heel. The hand at Bobby’s neck squeezed harder, urging him to follow. Prisoner and guards walked about a mile down a corridor of heavy doors to an elaborately arched stone doorway. The butler gave the gentlest knock. After a long, silent wait the thick door opened.

“My,” Mr. D’Arcy said. He was the man Bobby had seen at his desk, the one Bobby had been about to machine-gun through the great windows. He was much older than Bobby’s grandfather, and frailer. He did not look harmless.

“A game, he says,” the butler said.

“And what game was this?” Mr. D’Arcy said.

“War?” Bobby said helpfully. “World War Two?”

“Do you call that a war?” Mr. D’Arcy said.

As the old man slowly smiled, Dort let go of Bobby’s neck and retreated silently down the hall. The butler lingered, but at a subtle nod from his master sighed and padded off.

“Your name?” Mr. D’Arcy said.

“Bobby.”

“Come in, then, Robert,” Mr. D’Arcy said. “I’ve been expecting you.” And the old man shuffled into the room, impatiently waving for Bobby to keep up, as if the boy were having a problem sustaining the old man’s tortoise pace. Bobby performed covert reconnaissance on the surroundings; the room was all dark wood. Books in dark bindings reached to the ceiling. The tall windows were filled with plants—some of them trees, really, growing in enormous earthen pots and pushing the dark, heavy curtains aside, starved for light. The floor was flagstone—blue and red and black. A dozen tall floor lamps lit the whole warmly. The fireplace, set with handsome birch logs, was as tall as Mrs. Applegate—she could put her whole desk in there and stand behind it, and her head wouldn’t even be up the chimney! The brightest spot in the room was Mr. D’Arcy’s desk, piled with books and papers and rubber stamps and a heavy old phone, all of it lit by two golden lamps. A tall accounting book lay open, a fountain pen uncapped upon it, work interrupted. Mr. D’Arcy straightaway recapped the pen and placed it in a golden holder. Bobby wasn’t at all scared, he told himself—something about all the books and lamps.

Mr. D’Arcy smelled of cologne and looked pleasantly stuffed—taxidermy in corduroy. He was carefully shaved and trimmed (none of Grandpa’s long ear hairs and nose hairs), his hair neatly cut and dyed black, shot with white strands, damply combed. His spotted hands had a little shake to them, as if they were conducting their own small orchestra. His face, when he finally looked at Bobby, was large and serious, full of spots and lines, yet something kindly was in it, something soulful and sad inside the hardness of the eyes.

“You want to play war?” Mr. D’Arcy said abruptly. He marched around his desk to the bookcases, reached for a book, and pulled at its spine. A section of the bookcase slowly swung out into the room—a secret door, straight from a monster movie.

“Tuff,” Bobby said.

“Tough?” Mr. D’Arcy said.

“Cool,” Bobby said.

“Ah,” Mr. D’Arcy said.

The room beyond was dark until Mr. D’Arcy found the switch on a table lamp. When he closed the bookshelf-door, the lamp was the only light. He said, “Our map room.” It had no windows, but a fresh breeze came from somewhere. Two walls were full of big cabinets with wide, shallow drawers. The other two walls offered complicated banks of roll-down maps. Mr. D’Arcy shuffled around the room, turning the switches on another dozen lamps and gradually lighting a stately table the size of two Ping-Pong tables pushed end to end. A colorful map, almost as long and wide as the table, was already rolled out and pressed flat at its four corners with iron pyramids.

What land did the old map show? Bobby bent over it with sharp eyes. It was like a painting—somewhat crinkled, hugely detailed, the lakes showing waves, the mountains green with white peaks, the cities with ornate buildings, the borders with other countries orange and forbidding. The very lettering was foreign. Bobby had studied and imitated ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs; he knew the word “cuneiform.” But he didn’t know this alphabet.

Mr. D’Arcy let him look awhile. “Now tell me, Robert, to begin the game: what country is represented here?”

Bobby leaned closer, following a great river with his finger. “I can’t read the names,” he said. The lines of latitude curved narrower and narrower to the top of the map, where they nearly closed, forming a circle, and the North Pole was clearly enough delineated.

Mr. D’Arcy said, “Of course you can’t read it. The alphabet is Cyrillic. That is your first clue.”

Make-believe? Was it a map of—Cyrillia? Bobby didn’t chance that answer. He kept up his close inspection, a creepy feeling tickling its way up his neck. He walked slowly around the table and away from the old man, examining the map all the while.

Mr. D’Arcy said, “All right, then. Another big clue: it is a country now part of the Soviet Union.”

“Russia!” Bobby said. Goosebumps rose on his arms.

“You are correct. Now. To make things easier, let us find a similar map marked in English.” Mr. D’Arcy shuffled to a bank of tall tubes and indicated the correct one with a knock. Bobby helped him lift it—it was very heavy—and helped him lug it to the table. There they pulled it out, unrolled it over the first map, and carefully weighted it flat with the pyramids.

“Russia!” Bobby said again. He recognized it now. Sputnik! Spies!

“Relics, these old campaign maps. I buy them at auction. What I paid for this would build two houses. But see how beautifully it is made. It shows the Russia of the czars. Now. Here’s our game. Let us call it Russian Revolution. All right? And we are czarists. Yes?” Mr. D’Arcy opened a drawer in the table and struggled to produce from it an ornate leather box. He opened the box carefully with both hands, tilting it to show Bobby what was inside: figurines—many large handfuls of tiny metal people, nicely painted.

“We live here, in Saint Petersburg.” Mr. D’Arcy walked around to Bobby’s side of the table very slowly, carrying the box of people. He placed it carefully atop the map and put a precise finger on Saint Petersburg. “But it is summer now, so we are here at our dacha, our summer cottage, I should say, just south of the great city. The year is 1905.”

Bobby had his eyes on the figurines. Each was about one inch tall, and there were seemingly hundreds, all different.

“Yes? Let’s put some players on the board. First we’ll need a nobleman.” Mr. D’Arcy fished in the pile of little people and found a proud fellow dressed in what looked like a smart military uniform. This he placed at the dacha. He said, “Our nobleman’s name, as our little game begins, is Count Darlotsoff. He is twenty-three years old—quite young to be running an estate, quite young to be the father of three children. But such was the time and place. Now let us represent young Count Darlotsoff’s family.”

Mr. D’Arcy emptied the leather box into the North Sea and shuffled a handful of people up next to Sweden, indicating with a quavering hand that Bobby should pick out the players as they were named.

“Father, or the Old Count.”

Bobby picked out a fat fellow in a jacket with medals and put him near Count Darlotsoff.

“Now Mother, or the Old Countess.” Bobby picked an overweight little thing in a gown painted red.

“Uncanny choices,” Mr. D’Arcy said.

Soon a crowd of Count Darlotsoff’s relatives had gathered at the dacha: his beautiful wife (a redhead, like Jenny Oswest), their three children, her two sisters, their husbands, their six and eight children respectively, dozens of servants, two old aunts, several uncles and young cousins. The dacha was not a cottage at all but several mansions surrounded by a dozen fine barns and huge fields. “The trees there,” Mr. D’Arcy said, “were as big as your elms here in Connecticut—very large trees they were, Russian maples, I should say, in rows on both sides of the lane. One looked down over long lawns to … what shall we call them? To terraced ponds, and past these one glimpsed the homes of the peasants, the Old Count’s people, as he called them. ‘My people,’ he would say, as he might say ‘my cattle‘—people, as it happened, who were being stirred up by thinkers from Saint Petersburg’s universities.”

Darlotsoff, whom Mr. D’Arcy called the Young Count, was one of the troublesome thinkers. He’d taken the new philosophies deeply to heart, finding them humane (at least in theory), moderate, and achievable. The serfs had been freed by the Edict of Emancipation far back in 1861, but freed only to economic slavery. The thinkers rose up with ideas: constitutional monarchy, social democracy, anarchism, nihilism, Bolshevism, Menshevism, land reform. The peasants began to covet the fields they worked.

Mr. D’Arcy gave Bobby a long look. “These are things we can talk about in the future, you and I, should you be inclined.”

Bobby nodded noncommittally, shrugged, offered a polite smile.

Mr. D’Arcy fingered the figurine of the Old Count. “Him exactly,” he said with a sigh. “But I’m afraid our game starts with the violent death of this man, and with the revision, I should say, of the Young Count’s idealism.”

The Old Count, it seemed, had cut off all but the most rudimentary foodstuffs to his peasants after the uprisings of 1905. He made hunting illegal, fenced off the ponds, saw trespassers and poachers hanged. Mr. D’Arcy pointed at various places on the map as if the very neighborhoods and shop fronts and carriages were pictured there. The Neva blacksmith, he said, Iosif Vladimirovich Alyoshin, became enraged when his dog was run over by the mounted escorts of the Old Count’s party, which had come into Saint Petersburg to meet with the hated Czar. Iosif, a reader and declaimer of poetry, educated and eloquent far beyond his station, ran after the carriages, caught up with them at the Neva River market, and demanded restitution.

“And what do you think the Old Count said to kindly Iosif, Robert? Did he say he was sorry? Did he send a servant down the next day with one of his two hundred forty-six dogs? No. The Old Count said this: ‘Well, blacksmith, call on butcher Evanitsky! You and your brothers won’t need your meat ration this month!’”

Iosif forgot himself and leaped up, pulling the Old Count out of his saddle and onto the cobblestones. And that might have been that, with Iosif hanged shortly thereafter, but the crowd surged in. They had no time for rope or guns, none of that; the peasants pulled up cobblestones and bashed noble brains, carried the bodies through the market square, and hung twelve on the iron spikes of the fence around the old church. The priest burst out, aghast. Holding his hands up for quiet, he said, “You have proved to God that you are serfs always!” Soon he was hanging from the fence himself.

Mr. D’Arcy gazed at the Old Count’s figurine a long time and said, “I’m glad you’ve picked him out—you’ve a marvelous eye. Let us bury him. We’ll need a graveyard before we’re through, I should say. Let us put our cemetery somewhere beautiful, somewhere we won’t have to move it—here in Sweden, perhaps.”

Bobby flew the remains of the Old Count to Sweden with a slow, solemn hand, and laid the fat little figurine on its back. In the ornate box of people he’d seen a priest, so he picked that figure out and flew it slowly to Sweden, visibly pleasing Mr. D’Arcy. Then he found eleven nobles, one at a time, and flew them to Sweden too.

Bobby said, “The Czar is like the king?”

“Bigger than a king! And his work of repression—repression is a holding down by force, I should say—his work of repression in those years was bloody, inhuman. All of life became so. Murder poured from the palace. Through acts of kindness the Young Count prevented what he could on his own lands, but he saw Iosif to the gallows, saw half the peasant men of the county hanged as well, for merely having been in the square.

“Then history moved forward. You’ll want to pick out some babies there, and more children, and some teens, and some young adults. Six in ten must be buried. Disease, largely, but common accidents, too. One will be the Young Count’s second daughter, I’m afraid. Pick well, Robert, pick well!”

Bobby counted out a dozen babies and young children and youths and maidens, including one thin girl-woman with thick black hair who somehow seemed a princess, and flew them solemnly to the growing pile in Sweden. Mr. D’Arcy stood as if at a funeral, watching each flight to heaven closely, none of the usual adult hurrying or condescension when it came to make-believe.

When all the dead were safely buried, he said, “World War One broke out in 1914. The Young Count was less young now. His politics, which had formerly urged him toward an enlightened aristocracy, now urged him toward an unpopular parliamentarianism, in which a monarch might have some role, however ceremonial. I hope you are following some of this, Robert. Good, good—smart boy. We’ll fill in the gaps presently, and correct any errors I might make. We have years to come in our friendship!”

Bobby grinned. He wasn’t having trouble following Mr. D’Arcy. The map was in front of them, as were the babies—a little cough, a growing fever, and death. And the Czar, a king’s king, flashing with jewels, robes purple—a cruel master!

Mr. D’Arcy smiled too, just so, and proceeded to give a carefully calibrated lecture in history: how the Czar had entered the Great War too enthusiastically; how most Russian factions had followed him; how the Bolsheviks had held back; how the new war had brought food shortages and yet more death; how, with the sudden proliferation of presses, all with points of view, the news had been all gossip; how, with the lack of food and dependable information, anarchy and insurrection had been rife.

“Now I must mention Rasputin. Have you heard of him, Robert? No? Then listen. Later you can read up and tell me what you think of him!” Rasputin, so Mr. D’Arcy said, was an opportunist, a satyr, a supposed monk, politely said to be “counseling” Empress Alexandra, who at his behest (so it was rumored) made secret deals with the Kaiser of Germany, further alienating the people and now the nobility as well. Saint Petersburg, called Petrograd during the war, was itself torn. In the countryside May and June of 1917 saw the peasants, already restive, rise up in waves of violent mutinies. Still the Young Count was sanguine, confident that his good relations with the peasants would protect him. Then, in October of 1917, in a paroxysm of antiwar fervor, Alexander Kerensky was overthrown by the Bolsheviks. After that the many rumbling factions would find focus and coalesce into at least four contentious movements: Whites, Reds, Greens, Blacks. Armed bands from the cities would roam the land as brigands, in uniform or no, joined by disaffected peasants. Meanwhile, for a young nobleman like Count Darlotsoff there was no one left to trust. In desperation he packed up his townhouses and took his family to what he hoped was the safety of the dacha compound, where they spent an ominous Christmas: the Bolshevik coup had unleashed a wave of violence against landlords.

Bobby listened intently and watched the map, from which the story seemed to rise.

“One day, in the first weeks of 1918,” said Mr. D’Arcy, “just when it had begun to seem that the unrest had spared the Young Count and his family, a band of forty came swaggering up the maple lane at Dacha Darlotsoff, straight to the grand doors. Hearing their shouts, the Young Count, though not feeling brave, stood up from his breakfast, pulled off his napkin, yanked on his jacket, and hefted his sword!” Alone, the Young Count stepped outside, barred the doors behind him, and made a stand. Soon his three uncles came running from their houses to support him, and then his brothers-in-law, his five teenage nephews, several young cousins, the children’s French tutor, and the three manservants who hadn’t run off: nineteen youths and men in all, standing against forty.

“The oldest was Uncle Pieter, my age now: eighty-one. The youngest was Cousin Victor (who had been named for Victor Hugo), your age, at a guess: he was twelve.” The leader of the renegades spoke: “We come in peace.” He was tall, with roughly cut leather pants, and for a uniform nothing but the vestiges of an officer’s jacket, on its breast a badge from neighbor Simeonov’s chest. The Young Count’s heart pounded. But he was master of the estate, and had established himself as generous and fair. He stood tall in his riding boots and said, “If you come in peace, then go in peace”—a rather nice line, he thought. All the brigands and all the dacha’s men stood frozen, till suddenly the great doors flew open, and out raced the Youngest Count, a boy nicknamed Chimp, a baby of five years, still in short pants and curls, shouting, “Turks! Huns! I kill you!” He waved his wooden sword and charged with it on an imaginary steed through the men of his family and into the press of soldiers. And just when one would expect laughter and relief in normal times among normal men, a brigand in the third or fourth rank of men—that’s how deep the brave Youngest Count had penetrated—picked the boy up, flung him in the air, caught him by the feet, and dashed his brains out on the stone stairs of the main dwelling. From the criminal’s mates there were cries of disgust, but never mind—the Young Count struck their leader down with his sword, a perfect thrust through the neck, and the old uncles faced the next tier, slashing and killing, but were overwhelmed by the advancing remains of the forty and were murdered one at a time, dying beheaded, disemboweled, gushing blood, as the Young Count and the brave young nephews backed up to the great doors. From above came sudden shots—the Young Countess and the Old Countess, as it turned out, firing the sophisticated hunting rifles of Dacha Darlotsoff, round after round into the band of criminals. And this saved the day: the brigands had only three or four old muskets, slow to load. By the time the brigands turned and ran, twenty or more of them were dead on the stairs, piled on Chimp’s tiny body, and on the bodies of the uncles, and the brothers-in-law, and Feodor, the favorite nephew, fourteen years of age, and two boy cousins, nicknamed Marcel and Louis, and on the cook, the tutor, and the stableboy, too, the loyal stableboy, who’d come up from the village that morning.

Mr. D’Arcy took a long breath, stood erect, and puffed his cheeks, blowing out a series of sighs and looking over the length of the map as if he were staring out across the great expanse of Russia herself. Bobby flew first the broken body of Chimp to Sweden; then those of the three old uncles, one at a time, full ceremony each; and then each of the others. He huddled the remaining family—mostly women and children—behind the Young Count, pictured the great wooden dacha doors closing behind them, imagined the shouts, the tears, the triumph of the women upstairs muted instantly by the tragedy they’d been unable to ward off and had only curtailed.

Mr. D’Arcy lowered his voice and continued. That evening, only two hours later, after barely enough time to drag in the dead family members, a score of brigand bodies still splayed out on the steps, the remains of the motley band returned with a horde of disgruntled peasants from beyond the ponds. Sixty men hid behind the piled bodies and then stormed the great doors. The Young Count and his nephews and nieces and daughters, armed one and all with elegant and thoroughly modern hunting rifles but little skill, fired from the downstairs windows out among the brigands, killing many and wounding many more.

“Even my children fought,” Mr. D’Arcy cried, “made murderers by those they killed!”

Upstairs at the dacha the Young Count’s pretty wife loaded rifles for the Old Countess, who was a masterly shot, picking off brigands like so many pheasants in the stubble of rye. The brigands and their peasant conscripts were no better armed than earlier, and died in growing heaps; but a handful managed to set the dacha doors on fire, filling the house with smoke. Then four of the beasts climbed the stones to the second story, surprising the Old Countess, who was still firing on their fellows. They overwhelmed her and tossed her bodily from the high balcony. She broke on the ground below, in sight of her son, died without a sound while the four brigands handed down their prize: the Young Countess. One could not shoot for fear of hitting her. One could not give chase, not with six young women and girls unprotected in the house.

“The Young Count didn’t know it at the time, of course, but this was the end of the Russia he had loved. His darling wife had been carried off, his mother defenestrated! His horses were gone. His barns were afire. The tutor, the cook, the stableboy, all dead. As for men, only the gardener’s assistant, a German youth the Young Count had never been fond of, was still alive.”

Mr. D’Arcy fell into a deep silence, while Bobby flew the dead to Sweden—first the Old Countess in her plumpness, then the tutor, the cook, and the stableboy, one by one. The Young Countess he held in his hand a minute; she’d only been carried off, perhaps to be rescued. The figurine he’d picked was so beautiful, the most beautiful of them all, with flowing red hair and a red-and-silver gown. Mr. D’Arcy gazed at her too, and at length shook his head very slightly. “She mustn’t have lived long at their hands,” he said.

To Sweden with her! Around Petrograd, Bobby could see rivers of blood, smoke pouring from dachas, flames enveloping the finest houses in town, women carried off, gentle milk cows slaughtered by starving roamers!

Mr. D’Arcy said, “Now—tell me, Robert.” He had begun to pronounce Bobby’s formal name just the way the part-time French teacher at school did: Ro-bear. His eyes were closed. “If you are the Young Count, what do you do next? Remember—you have two living daughters and three nieces, aged twenty down to seven, your single surviving sister-in-law, who is called Monique, and a brave if stubborn German gardener left. What is your course of action?”

Bobby looked at the figurines. What Mr. D’Arcy had said, his eyes closed, was exactly true: the Young Count was surrounded by seven, only one of them a man. Bobby didn’t know what to do. His heart began to beat in his thin chest, all of him safe in this rich man’s map room except his imagination. The first thought that came to his careful head was of heroics: “The gardener and I go to rescue the Young Countess! The women … hide? The women and girls hide in the tornado shelter!” This from The Wizard of Oz.

Mr. D’Arcy smiled briefly at that suggestion and said, “The German gardener is but seventeen, I should say! And the house, remember, is smoking at the doors. These girls—all very lovely, some of them small children, two of them your daughters! And Monique crying and moaning, she’s lost her head—no help there. Do you see? The gardener is a hulk: quiet, impassive.”

Bobby blurted out, “We have to gather everyone and leave!”

Mr. D’Arcy snapped back, “Just leave the dacha, with all its furnishings, all your wealth, all your beloved objects, papers, portraits, pets?”

Bobby replied, “But the brigands will be back!”

Mr. D’Arcy, almost in tears, said, “Leave the dacha and go … where? Where will they not be intercepted? Where should their flight take them?”

“The forest!”

“Exactly—the forest. This was the Young Count’s first thought too.” Mr. D’Arcy closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair, resting a moment before plunging on. He told of the fires in the forest, the brigands lurking there, no escape route obvious.

Bobby smelled the smoke, saw all the blood, saw the old uncles lying dead on the couches of the grand drawing room. He said, “We’d better get going! Let’s move!” He looked at the crackled old map and saw a stream named Ota just where the dacha was marked in Mr. D’Arcy’s own ink. He said, “To the stream? Is there a canoe?”

“Well thought, Robert. Except that, of course, the River Ota is quite frozen.”

“A sled?” Bobby cried.

Yes, a sled. The Young Count and his daughter Petra (the only girl capable), along with the dour gardener, loaded one of the dacha’s elegant sleighs with food and firearms and family papers as fast as they could. Then they escorted a trembling Monique and the younger girls down to the ice, none too soon: a mob in the hundreds approached, bearing torches.

Bobby bit his nails and said, “We have to hurry!”

“Hurry, Robert, yes. The girls tumbled into the sleigh. Monique we had to push. And Dort and I acted as horses. We took up the trace bars and pulled the sleigh out onto the Ota.”

“Safe,” Bobby said. “Safe!”

“Hardly,” Mr. D’Arcy said blackly.

“No homework tonight?” Bobby’s father said at dinner.

Bobby, lost in thought, had to scramble to keep his cover. “Report,” he said.

“Report?” his mom said.

“On the, um, Russian Revolution.”

“Oh, I know a thing or two about that,” Bobby’s father said. “Romanovs. Rasputin. The Czar and Czarina and Czarlings eating too much caviar! It all leads them right down into World War One.”

“Yes,” Bobby said. “But the worst of it comes well after World War One begins!”

His father and mother looked at him for a long time, as proud as pizza pie. Their faces said it all: Bobby was finally taking an interest.

His dad said, “Let’s get out the Encyclopaedia Britannica after supper!”

Bobby ran into the woods and took the commando route, even crawling to the front door of Harbinger Hall—he was a long-lost nephew, a brave boy bringing news of the River Ota. At the great doors of Mr. D’Arcy’s stone house he didn’t even have to knock: Hilyard was right there. “Master Robert,” he said.

“Hi,” Bobby said.

“Mr. D’Arcy will be down from his bath in a moment. You are to wait in his study.”

The day before, Bobby had had to ask Mr. D’Arcy to stop the game: it was school-bus time. And Bobby had worried about this in the night, feeling that he might have offended the old man. He stood in the study not touching anything (Hilyard had said he had best not), looking closely at the grand bookshelf, trying without luck to pick out the secret door. Soon Mr. D’Arcy shuffled in, wearing pajama pants, fleece slippers, and a silk smoking jacket like one the Young Count himself might have worn.

“Good morning, Robert!” Ro-bear. “I see your smile is with you! You are ready for more of my dismal story—more of our game, I should say.”

“Yip.”

“But first, Hilyard has made me realize that there are some questions to ask of you. Are you Robert Mullendore?”

“Yip.”

“And your mum, is she the Ann Mullendore who volunteers at the Nature Center?”

“Yip: Ann.”

“So the redoubtable Hilyard did recognize you, I should say. The third question is about your studies. I’d made the rather hasty assumption that this for you was a holiday week of some nature. Hilyard says no. So why are you not in school?”

Seven lies went through Bobby’s head, but the truth bobbed up in the light of Mr. D’Arcy’s clear eyes upon him: “I am skipping.”

“Skipping! I believe I know what that means! Dort says he saw you one morning two weeks ago, racing through the woods, and then again last week, perhaps twice, and this week, of course, leading up to his making your acquaintance.”

So Bobby told the whole story of his desertion, his defection, his despair. Mr. D’Arcy didn’t seem angry so much as amused, and listened carefully. “Well, never mind. Later we’ll ask Hilyard to make a couple of phone calls on your behalf.”

Bobby’s heart sank. “Um, who’s he gonna call?”

“On your behalf, my boy. No more to say. Not to worry, either. Hilyard has a very delicate touch. But enough of that. We have a game to attend to.”

In the map room Mr. D’Arcy flicked on the lights one by one. Bobby felt glum until he was captured by the map again. All was as it had been left. The dead were in Sweden, lots of them. The living were arranged in their sleigh—a matchbox that Bobby had rigged with four paper-clip runners—upon the ice of the Ota. Mr. D’Arcy named all the figures in the sleigh: Monique, Petra, the other girls. The Young Count stood before the sleigh with the German gardener, Dort. Bobby picked up this figurine and looked at it hard: peasant garb, greenish trousers, a yellow shirt showing a tear, a rake and a hoe over its shoulder. The figure was larger than any of the others, especially its hands. Bobby said, “Can I ask you something?”

“You may, yes, ask anything, as you wish.”

“Is Dort the same Dort?”

“And I may answer or not, as I wish!” Mr. D’Arcy said. He was certainly more cheerful today. “For now let us just say that he is a young, silent, rather irritating German gardener’s assistant, with the one noble trait of loyalty. He is strong—he’s nearly a horse himself, which the Young Count is by no means. The Ota has overflowed its own ice after a recent thaw and has frozen anew, slick and hard and black, I should say. Can you see it?” And Mr. D’Arcy resumed the story.

The sleigh sang along on the most modern polished-steel runners. The problem was in controlling its speed; the two man-horses slipped and slid, holding the trace bars. The Young Count skidded in his riding boots, slithered at Dort’s steadier side, and had to keep shushing the girls behind them, who whimpered. They passed below the Petrokov summer palace, where flames silhouetted brigands passing furniture out the windows. A shout went up—they’d been seen!—and dozens of men came crashing down through the crusted snow on the great lawn. But Dort was a horse and pulled the whole band along the ice at a sensational clip. The Young Count finally gave up trying to help and hoisted himself onto the broadboard and then into the sleigh among the panicked girls. He looked back to see a phalanx of scruffy, slipping soldiers giving chase but losing ground. No comfort there: the milldam was ahead.

The Young Count hugged and kissed each girl and told her he loved her, kissed his daughters passionately as if he would never see them again, and then took up arms. Petra loaded and handed him hunting rifles one by one. The count picked off six soldiers of a growing number, while all the time Dort pulled and the sleigh skittered. At the dam the desperate family tumbled out—all but Monique, who was frozen with fear. The Young Count, the girls, and Dort, thus forced to leave her, stomped through the snow to the mill buildings, where they raced through the miller’s abandoned house, down the stairs, and back outside, onto the ice below the dam, all of them falling and sprawling, the Young Count thinking to reach the far bank and the old sawmill, where they could hide and fight. Just then over the dam came the sleigh, doubtless pushed by the soldiers, Monique riding it down silently. She was thrown out on impact and landed grotesquely broken on the current-weakened ice, which also broke, dumping the sleigh and then the woman into the water.

Dort, the Young Count, the girls, all held hands in a line, Dort and the Count pulling the rest behind. Petra held the one rifle they had salvaged. By now, of course, the soldier-brigands would have the other weapons. Near the sawmill shore, near what might have been safety, the ice simply ended in a deep flow of river water from the millrace. And here came the soldiers, twenty or more men and boys, firing the dacha’s hunting rifles. Marta, the Count’s younger daughter, shrieked and fell dead on the ice. Petra, the older, fired back, hitting no one. The soldiers came forward in a crowd, slipping in their tall boots on the ice. Suddenly the sheen beneath them gave way. One brigand head bobbed and then went under the ice; many brigand arms flailed; many men simply sank under the weight of their stolen clothes and full pockets. Two or three climbed out on Miller Gurevitch’s garden banks—where, Mr. D’Arcy said, “one can only hope they froze.”

All this left the family and the gardener on a huge pan of ice that turned slowly as if it would reach the shore and save those still alive but then abruptly stopped, heaved itself up on something submerged, rose on the slow current, and broke, dumping everyone. Petra and Dort managed to swim out and help the Young Count to shore and safety, but all the others were lost. The survivors’ garments grew stiff with ice. The Count was nearly out of his mind, ready to leap into the Ota and join the dead. Dort had the inspiration to burn the sawmill building, easily done with the vanished sawyer’s flint and steel. Twenty minutes and the fire was ferocious, half an hour and the little band’s clothes were dry.

Bobby studied the figures of the girls. He flew Monique to Sweden first and laid her in line, squashing the matchbox sleigh with a slow fist. He thought hard in the silence, and then flew the matchbox to Sweden too. He could do that much. Then he flew Marta, shot, and the drowned girls one at a time, till all the girls but Petra were in Sweden. Mr. D’Arcy watched solemnly. He said, “Saved from rape by death.”

The map room was silent except for the sound of a fan whirring somewhere in the walls. Abruptly Mr. D’Arcy continued: The remaining threesome walked southward, avoiding towns, stealing food, always marching, growing wild, filthy, starved thin as rats. The Young Count’s plan was to cross the German lines—the Kaiser was more an ally than not, he thought—and make their way, perhaps as refugees or even as prisoners of war, first to Germany and then, God willing, “La France.”

At that someone knocked very softly, and the hidden door rolled open on its secret, silent ball bearings. “You will take luncheon here?” Hilyard said.

“Yes, quite, why not?” Mr. D’Arcy said, in an entirely different voice.

The butler set up a card table, chairs, a tablecloth. Soon he was back with a tureen of bright-red soup, a small loaf of coarse bread, and strips of liver on fine plates. Then came a salad of dark greens, a plate of cheeses, and finally chocolates. Bobby ate with his best manners, Mr. D’Arcy delicately. They didn’t talk until Hilyard came to collect the plates.

To him Mr. D’Arcy said, “You’ve made some phone calls?”

The butler said, “Indeed, sir. I found everyone most agreeable, once a certain level of, let us say, astonishment wore off.” Across Hilyard’s face crept the first smile that Bobby had seen upon it.

A smile spread upon Mr. D’Arcy’s face as well. He said, “And we will have Saturdays?”

“Saturdays, sir, quite so, though it took some persuasion.” Those smiles. Both men looked at Bobby.

“What?” the boy said. He knew the calls had been about him.

Mr. D’Arcy said, “You mustn’t shirk school, my boy. And from here forward you shan’t. I believe Hilyard has interceded on your behalf; you won’t be punished, we think, except by having to come here Saturdays through the school year for tutoring—to, um, I should say, to make up for lost school.” And that was that.

After lunch the band—the Young Count, Petra, and Dort—traveled slowly, finding abandoned buildings to sleep in, freezing by night, afraid to light fires, lingering where they found safety and warmth and food, and then carrying on, making their way south into spring, which was blessedly warm that year. Mr. D’Arcy leaned into his story in the golden lamplight, a hand on the map as Bobby moved the last three figures southward to the banks of a great painted river. Dort crossed first, shouting in German so as to be welcomed. The soldiers he met allowed him to swim back. But he’d read their faces, and he thought that he and the Young Count would be shot for the girl. So they walked several leagues along the river until they found a crossing on rocks under the remains of a bridge. A Russian peasant came to them and asked for food. This was the River Dnieper, he said. He took them to an abandoned dredging barge he’d found. The four wanderers launched that poor vessel and floated south for three weeks, unchallenged. At Kiev they traded the dredging equipment to a docksman for bags of beans and Chinese rice, and then floated on. Kiev was in German hands; Dort barked greetings to soldiers and sailors. And so the grieving band continued, all the way to Zaporozhye, where the peasant took off on his own.

In Zaporozhye—high summer—life seemed as it had always. The band found an estate the Young Count knew, belonging to a friend of his father’s. It was untouched, its master gone, a very old man in charge, a blind great-uncle. He welcomed them and shared the estate’s abundant stores and plush beds. This, Mr. D’Arcy said, was the worst period the Young Count had ever encountered or would ever encounter in his life: the succor and the solace made him comfortable, and in comfort every horror welled up: his wife dead, the members of his family, each a sorrow too much to bear, all dead. He would sleep hard, awake happy, and then remember—and spend the waking day in tears. Dort was the same. Petra was young, and healed more quickly.

“You said ‘we,’” Bobby said. “You keep saying ‘we.’”

“Do I?” Mr. D’Arcy said. He thought a moment, trying to hear himself, and said, “If so, I apologize. It is not I but a younger man I speak of, the Young Count Darlotsoff.”

The old blind man of the manor came to the Young Count in front of the fire one midnight, walking in his sleep (“A true Tiresias,” Mr. D’Arcy said), and chanted, “Listen, noble friend, listen to me. You will be well. You will find freedom by way of water. You will prosper in your new home. You will never forget, but you will come to accept. You will be wealthy again, in a new palace. You will never again marry. You will have no more children. Until one day a boy will come. You will tell him what you have suffered, and even in his innocence he will understand, and what you tell him will change him forever, and you will have an heir in him. You will live long, very, very long. You, who have lost so much, will gain more back. And the boy you befriend will change the world in his turn.” The Young Count found surcease in the old man’s words, found the will to live on.

The Germans couldn’t hold Kiev, and in retreat they took the manor, bunking there and preparing for what, as it turned out, would be their doom. The intrepid three were once again cast loose, heading south. They reached the Crimea, spent what seemed a kind of mourning vacation in Sebastopol, and then went to Yalta, a resort city where White Army thugs handed out random death. Dort found work on the docks lifting; he was accosted constantly, beaten twice for his silence, accused of being a Red, or a German, or a criminal. The Young Count could get no work; he was jeered at and slapped for his accent by anyone who felt the urge, but he made rounds of the meanest back streets for scraps of food, for useful tin cans. Petra dressed as a smaller child, an urchin, and used her fine manners to collect day-old bread, vegetables gone by, the odd soupbone. In fact, the three ate relatively well. They lived under a bridge briefly, and then on the littered beach. Dort kept them in vodka.

One chilly afternoon, as autumn approached, the Young Count discovered a day sailboat from one of the empty resorts, small open cockpit, hull perhaps sixteen feet in length, partially rotted sails. It had been pulled into the reeds by vandals and forgotten. If one stayed out of sight of the piers (where White Army hooligans lined up young men and shot them just to watch them fall into the sea, just to watch the sea turn red), if one slipped in at night, one might supply such a boat with food and water, might steal it unseen. Terror prevented immediate fulfillment of the plan, however—even a hobo’s beach was more comfort than that little boat. Still, over the course of the subsequent weeks they hid a quarter share of their food under the boat’s small foredeck, among moldy life vests. On the penultimate night Dort took ill—vomiting, shitting, coughing.

“Surely I can say ‘shitting,’ yes? You grin! American boy!”

The next morning the Young Count fell ill too. That evening Petra succumbed. Dort became healthy enough to look after her, and then the Young Count came around too. But brave Petra grew worse and worse, and there on the beach, under the salvaged awning of a pleasure yacht, she died.

Mr. D’Arcy cried silently for a long while. Bobby thought that he, too, could cry but would not. He flew Petra to Sweden, feeling that the others greeted her there, that at least she had company there, family—her sisters, her mother, her grandparents. Who did the Young Count have? No one but Dort, the irritating gardener.

At length Mr. D’Arcy continued. The Young Count grew determined. Death at sea seemed a blessing. Even to be shot would be heaven-sent. The night after they buried Petra in Black Sea sand, “for the tides to find,” he and Dort dragged the abandoned boat from the reeds, climbed in, and hand paddled in a calm sea, under a moonless sky, till they were purely exhausted. Then they paddled more. Dawn and a breeze came up, good fortune, since they could still be seen from shore. The breeze turned to wind, and then to a storm—more good fortune mixed with more bad. The boat was tossed and raced southward, but no other vessels were about, no one to spot them. The Young Count had some aristocrat’s sailing lessons behind him, and he kept the little boat before the cold north wind for a full day, cruising ever south. In the night, while Dort slept, the Young Count held the tiller, groaning and weeping, his tears mingling with the heavy rain, the relentless spray. At daybreak came landfall.

“This was Turkiye, Robert, and freedom. And the Young Count did live on, as his Tiresias said he would.” In Berlin some months later, posing as French, the Young Count took a new name. Protected by Dort’s knowledge of the city, he worked as a waiter until he could get to Paris, well after the war. There family money awaited in various old-line accounts, so very much money that he found no obstacles to a voyage to New York, where he became thoroughly American in a matter of months, hoping to shed his horror. But horror ever returned, returned unbidden at every sweet moment, even as he rose to prominence and eventually reigned in the international banking business. In time the Young Count—not so young anymore—found his New World palace, as had been predicted. And in a moment of weakness, of nostalgia, of irrational love and longing for the past, he sent for Dort, who willingly became his master gardener, as stupid and irritating as always, as loyal as always, the only one who knew the Young Count’s story first to last.

Bobby tore up Dogwood Lane, pulling his sleigh full of doomed daughters, skittered on the ice that was Wahackme Road, raced into his own road, all but skated along the tar and breathlessly home. Mr. D’Arcy wouldn’t say a word more about the phone calls Hilyard had made but only invited Bobby back for Saturdays—which invitation he would honor nearly every Saturday of Bobby’s youth and young manhood: lessons on maps, lessons on a polished-brass microscope, lessons in a half dozen languages, lessons in business, ethics, economics, in the theory of relativity, lessons in math and mythology, lessons in what the old man called “charm.” Robert grew intellectually far past his peers, but he loved them and was loved by them and attended school in any case. With Mr. D’Arcy’s help he was welcomed at Harvard College with every blandishment the admissions team could muster. With the move to Cambridge his Saturdays with the ancient man ended, but never the game. He visited during Christmas breaks and summers, and took many road trips with friends to meet the master, sometimes bringing particular girlfriends. Mr. D’Arcy approved only of a certain redhead named Marilyn, whom, much later, Robert would marry. And though Mr. D’Arcy passed away on a winter’s day, expiring quietly alone at his desk, the Young Count was always with Robert. He gave him his many powers, gave him Dort, too, and Hilyard, and a fortune in bonds and real estate and numbered accounts across the great blue globe. Robert B. Mullendore would change the world, all right.

He was late, and ran, slowing only when he saw his parents standing at the end of the driveway waiting for him, Dad home early from work, tall and concerned, Mom in her apron, head somberly cocked, Mrs. Applegate looming just behind them, her formidable arms crossed over her chest.

Joe kept moving, clang and bong of the pots, put more water on—let the kid soak all night!—stoked the fire even more, sat down in the great heat at the table and opened Dune, read a little, thinking lasagna didn’t sound half bad, thinking how in one of these pots here he’d boil the noodles shortly, layer ‘em up in cheese and sauce, let the fire burn down for baking, glass of wine.  He stood twice to check the water.  The third time he rose, he heard Connie coming down the stairs.  Joe bumped in a rush past the table, losing his towel.  He lunged for his pants and shirt, picked them up fast, but they were soaked.  That left him pretty well naked and barefoot in a puddle, keeping back big laughter, holding his bundle of dripping clothes. And right away Connie was there in the doorway, surprised, her hair awry, her bathrobe open over the Harley t-shirt, her cheeks rising into her dark eyes as she grinned at the mess.

She said, “Joe?”

Talus House at Bandolier National Monument

“Investigation” appeared in The Iron Horse Literary Review 12.6/13.1, “The Fiction Issue,” which appeared this past spring.  The fiction issue is a great number with some terrific writers, highly recommended, and comes with a taxonomy.  That is, the editors have divided their offerings into sub-categories: the short story, flash fiction, one-sentence stories (Michael Martone has a great example here), the long story, and the novel, excerpted.  “Investigation,” at 8300 words, fell into their long-story category, but folks, it’s still a short story!  As are all the others except the novel excerpts.  I was awfully happy to be in such wonderful company.  Lee Martin, who succeeded me at Ohio State and is now the MFA program director there (but more importantly a wonderful writer of both fiction and nonfiction), emailed last summer and asked if I had a story to submit.  As it happened, I’d just finished the one I’m posting here.  The idea for “Investigation” came from a place I love, simple as that.  I wanted to set a story there, and this is what emerged.  At first it was just a kind of strange love story, but in subsequent drafts the politics turned up, and welcome.

INVESTIGATION

It wasn’t that Claire was the most beautiful young woman at Punta de Flecha High, Punta de Flecha, New Mexico, it was that she was the most beautiful young woman I’d ever seen, including all of MTV and Hollywood anything and Cosmopolitan Magazine, the works.  And it wasn’t that Claire was the smartest young woman there, but the smartest in the world.  She was in my AP calculus class, no place for Barbies or Paris Hiltons, and in my AP biology class—top of the grade chart, always wrecking the curve—AP English, too, and history, just like me.  I had never taken much notice of the in-crowd girls, but Claire, Claire could manipulate an integer like no one I’d ever seen and I (like the rest of the universe) was helplessly, hopelessly, absurdly in love with her.

Of course Jeff Brick was the first to ask her out, within a bare week of her joining the senior class, having recently been dumped by the second most beautiful young woman any of us had ever seen, Josephina Fox, niece of the former Mexican presidente.  But Claire, Claire had moved from Maryland someplace, her father a sudden arrival, a “top-down” appointment at the secret U.S. government lab my father worked for, which quickly spawned the rumor among us kids that he was FBI or NSA or CIA or any of a number of three-letter combinations: SPY.  Many of my schoolmates’ parents worked at labs like the one my father worked for, some at Los Alamos, so well known, some as far away as the military reservation at White Sands, and many in between, so there were reasons for spies to be in our midst, or at least the gorgeous children of spies.

Jeff Brick was the quarterback of our championship football team, but also the sweetest fellow I’ve ever known, as good-looking no doubt as Claire but no Einstein.  More of a beer stein, in actual practice, and an exercise addict, lovable, affable, tall as a sapling and as lithe.  His father was a test pilot with a Ph.D. and an 8Y security clearance, whatever that meant, his mother an Air Force physician.  He was one of the few jocks who never, not once, found occasion to call me “towelhead” or “sand nigger” or “Islamo-fascist,” or my favorite, “Falafel,” and in fact put Freddy Orco on the ground when Freddy called me “Terrorist” back in junior high.  And Jeff was not a Born Again like Freddy, though on that occasion he did quote Jesus to good effect: “Do unto others what you would have others do unto you.”  No, not a brilliant student but a nice guy, intelligent in his own way, and certainly a catch for Claire as she was a catch for him.

Claire was what you’d expect, I suppose: lissome, blond, Nordic but somehow darkish of skin (no doubt some exotic genetics back in the family tree).  Skin: it is our largest organ and (except for several openings of great interest to me then as now) seamless and blameless (blame no sins on the flesh!), glowing and inviting (at least on Claire), downy (where it entered her J.C. Penney pants), without tattoos (unlike the rest of us—these fads that will ride shotgun down the deteriorating years of our lives!). Why should increments large or small in skin shade make the slightest difference?

Claire dressed modestly but that didn’t dampen her allure; if she missed a blouse button in the rush of her private morning, my gaze was on top of the gape, if she bent to retrieve her New Testament I was reading the label on her underpants (Hanes or Fruit of the Loom, not Victoria’s Secret or Juicy Couture like the other popular girls).  I was close enough to do so not by dint of friendship but only because I sat behind or next to her in every class: we were alphabetical mates: Hesterley, Claire; Hammad, Kali.

My father, a geneticist nearly seventy, was raising me alone.  My young mother, mentally ill, we’d left behind in the hasty move from Kabul, Afghanistan, some fifteen years previous: much younger than Father, she lived with her own parents in her beleaguered hometown, Khowst (a dry little mountain village on the Pakistani border, home to unsavory elements and terrible unrest, at that time much on the minds of American forces, and well bombed and tortured, though my family had survived and would continue to—we lived for their e-mails), of whom I yet hold faint, fond memories.  There would be no recovery for mother.  Her illness and our subsequent move (not entirely unrelated) had put Father Hammad and me frequently in the way of counselors and therapists of all kinds, and the two of us had a really communicative relationship that we were at constant pains to keep fresh and loving around the hole in our lives.  I really mean this and really mean everything I say; I’m not an ironic person, never speak in opposites.  If Father dated, he respectfully told me of his plans, then told me logistical details only: where he and the woman had gone and what time, certain stretches of conversation.  If he had sex I had no idea of it, and would have found it highly gross to know in any case.  If I dated it was entirely because of his encouragement.  I did not have sex, except for masturbation, which he liked to say without even slightly flinching was part of life, and even provided me with certain quite gentlemanly magazines (breasts and bottoms and here and there some fuzz, no “inner workings,” to use his phrase), even while forbidding me porn on the web.  On that basis, in fact, knowing what boys are made of, he did not allow me my own internet account, but gave me nearly free rein with his own.  You did not try to hide computer keystrokes of any kind from Father Hammad; Father Hammad was observant and a very nearly a computer himself.  With a heavy accent, some might say, but I never noticed.  We only spoke English, and I, having arrived in the U.S.A. at five years old, was thoroughly American, with an American’s sense of individuality that often troubled the old man.

“This new classmate,” he said, sitting with me long after dinner.  Always we had candles.  Always some music, a full CD picked by one or the other of us for appreciation, anything from Olmec tribal chants to Italian opera to the Beatles to Green Day to 50 Cent (okay, Dad hated this: too violent, too disrespectful to women) to that day’s selection, which was Shakuhachi flute music from Japan, more silence than tones.  Then talk, when the music was done:  “Son, I think the reason she is dark is because somewhere back there she is partly Afghan.”  (We always say “Afghan” and not “Arabian” as my super-polite teachers say, because Afghanistan is not Arab, not even close.)

I smiled, for what he had said was meant as a joke.  “Oh, Father, she’s exquisitely beautiful.  She looks like someone leaning down from heaven.”

“And not cuckoo?”

“You ask me that every time!  And I repeat: normal as wool carpet!”

“You must ask her out.”

“Brick already got her.”

“She’ll grow tired of him.”

“Well, then, Eddie Rennsalear is right behind Brick.”

“She loves science, from what you tell me.  Ask her collecting.”

“Oh, Father Hammad!  Insects?”

He gazed at me fondly in candlelight, said, “Or ask her to the ancient Pueblo ruins.”

“She’s more like: snowboarding at Taos.”

“But Kali, son, you don’t know how to snowboard!”

“Exactly.”

We sat in companionable silence.   Father seemed to count his breaths.  He said, “I just read a study.  Question: how do the many male capuchin monkeys who are not alpha males pass down their genetic material?”

“They don’t, Father Hammad.  That’s what makes the troupe strong.”

He raised his considerable eyebrows, raised his chin.  “To the contrary,” he said.  “All and only alpha-male genes would limit the pool to the point of disaster in only a few generations.  Was the hypothesis.  So, in a cooperative study between the government of Costa Rica, the International Primate Project, and the Department of Genetics at UCLA, the authors of the article I’m citing undertook extensive DNA analysis.  Finding?  In fact, the Alpha male’s genes in any given tribe were not predominant.  They were not even dominant.  The sub-alpha males, Alpha’s direct competitors, had no distribution at all.  Sub-alpha would be your friend Eddie Rennsalear, and that sad case Freddy Orco.”

“So who was getting the young women?”

Father Hammad paused for effect, just a beat too long, gazing at me amusedly. The candles flickered.

“Who!” I said.

“The whole cadre of submissive males, that’s who!  They stayed entirely out of the Alpha competition!  Instead, they spent all their time with the females, engaged in female activities, grooming with them, helping with the young, looking for food.  Huddling against weather, against the night.  And very often while the Alphas were battling for control of their harems, the submissive males were quietly mating, every day, all day, every night, all night, with any female they fancied.”

I ate my hamburger, Father Hammad’s concession to my Americanized tastes.  He always broiled the ground beef in small squares with dried fire peppers and eggplant chunks, wedges of tomato, all of it served with tabouli, never French fries, because he could not stomach potatoes, chapatti to be eaten on the side or used as a utensil.  Hamburger buns made him snarl.  I sipped my Coke.  Coke he approved of for its caffeine, a kind of tea; he had once thought it was an Afghani product.  I poured more ketchup.  He approved of ketchup because somewhere in the deep past it had been Chinese, and he was very fond of the Chinese, though he’d never say why.

Father Hammad looked at me long with great affection, spread his fingers on the table, his nightly gesture before clearing.  It was nearly time for my homework hours, nearly time for his evening study.  He said, “Invite Claire Hesterly to Bandolier National Monument, show her the ancient Pueblo ruins.  Invite her sisters, too.  Not Saturday night—that’s for Brick and Eddie.  Try Saturday morning.  But first talk with her.  Always talk with her.  Talk with her Monday.  Ask her how things are going with Brick.  Listen very carefully to every word she says.  Talk to her Tuesday.  Ask about her sisters, their progress in school, sweet things they have said and done.  Talk to her Wednesday.  Ask about her dreams, both those in the night and those for the future.  Pluck a stray thread off the arm of her sweater, compliment her eyes, any makeup she uses.  You grin!  On Thursday, talk about ancestral Pueblo ruins.  Make your invitation: nothing to be nervous about.  It’s only cliff dwellings.  And, most important: invite her sisters!  And I will pack a purely Beta picnic lunch for all of you, and serve as chauffeur.”

h

Meanwhile Father Hammad was being investigated for reasons unspecified.  This made his work very difficult.  Unnamed superiors had taken away his computers at the lab and then, with his permission (they had no warrants), had taken away the numerous computers at our dwelling.  This made my homework all but impossible.  The man in charge of the investigation, identity top secret, was known to be Claire’s father, Morton Hesterly, who’d arrived (family in tow) only six weeks before, and who was ostensibly a materials technician.  But his hands were always clean, my father pointed out.  “Father Hesterly,” Father Hammad called him, unafraid and unbowed: Father Hammad had done nothing unethical, nothing illegal, and quite a great deal to further the science of genetics in the American interest, if always with misgivings.

h

Monday Claire had all the answers in Calculus, and it was a beautiful thing.  I had only to correct our teacher, Mr. Givens, once—he was forever dropping cubed roots in the tertiary wave sets.  Claire gave me a look longer than necessary.  I walked her to study hall, which was half indoors, half out.  If you wanted to work or were on detention, you stayed inside; if your grade-point average was above a B, you could go outside.  Claire’s GPA was exemplary, no doubt, but she elected to study.  So I did, too, sat across from her at the large table and read my new library book: a photo compendium of women’s hairstyles.  I concentrated on the construction of the French braid, a fine skill for the Beta male, but also spent time over the diagrams for the swing braid, the pretzel braid, the double-double and triple-double braids, the Russian interlocking braid, the Chinese bun braid, the warrior braid.

“Kali,” she said, teasing me.  “What kind of book is that?”

“I’m trying to learn a French braid.  I always wanted to be able to make a French braid.  In case I see my mother again.  Don’t you think it’s the queen of braids?”

I showed her the page, its careful photo-diagrams, the long-necked, exquisite model, who was in no way more attractive than my interlocutor.

“You can’t learn to braid hair from a book!” Claire said pleasantly.  There was real kindness in Claire.  Kindness, in fact, poured from her eyes, served as apology for her earlier teasing tone.

“Well, it’s a start.”

She went back to her book, and I to mine, but only briefly before she looked up.  I could feel the warmth of her regard, breathed in it for several seconds before looking up as well.

Claire said, “Where is your mother?”

And I told her, the first time I had told anyone anything whatever about Mother Hammad’s struggles, both Claire and I welling with tears by the time the bell rang for fifth period.

h

The next day was her turn to share.  She told me that she had had to move a dozen times since junior high school: horrible.  She reeled off the names of a dozen towns, a dozen high-school mascots.  She’d been able to keep a friendship or two going by email, but mostly it was very difficult to be or to have a friend or maintain a steady romance.  Her sisters were her best friends, sadly.  Because both of them were quite “bent,” to use Claire’s word.  Ellen, one grade behind us, was actually famous for her weirdness, also for climbing the water tower during recess, also for calling Mrs. Chichester, the French teacher, “Mrs. Chimpanzee,” repeatedly, without a blink from our simian instructor.  There was a sister named Judith, too, still in Junior High.  “My phone-in therapist says they’re damaged from all the moves.  Also, my mother has been in a major depression since Judith was born.  Also, my father is basically a Nazi.”

“How did you come out so normal?”

“Oh, Kali.  I didn’t.  I use studying to keep me from noticing how crazy I am.”

“But you’re the sanest person I’ve ever met.”

Instead of complimented, she looked crestfallen.  She said, “My father says I’m unreliable.”

I only looked at her—her lineaments much more complicated than I’d until that moment known, her beauty so mutable: first this face, then that, finally her own face, something beyond simple physicality, something that made her soul seem accessible to me.  I noted a trace of makeup aglitter on her eyelids.  I’d have to ask about that.

“Unreliable,” I said, a quiet joke, since her father was so completely, obviously wrong.  I thought of my father’s advice, reached nonchalantly across the table to brush a crumb off the arm of her sweater, neatened her stack of books.

“Something in your teeth,” she said kindly.

I took care of that problem with my tongue, unembarrassed.  Then, after a very long time of quietly being together with her across the study hall table, I said, “Is Jeff Brick fun to date?”

And every complication left her eyes.  Even her posture shifted: happiness.  “He is so dreamy,” she said.  And then she went on, painful for me, a lot of stuff I knew about him, a few things I didn’t: he was a kind of god, apparently.  The team had won yet another game over the weekend, and Claire was effusive: “Did you see that pass?  He’s like a pro quarterback, Kali.”

I had not seen the pass.

She said, “Forty-seven to seven!”

“Almost unfair!” I said, catching her tone.

“But I’ll tell you a secret.”  She seemed to consider her impulsiveness, gave me a long look.  “The boy can’t kiss.”

A kind of heat penetrated my chest.  “Anyone can kiss,” I said.  Bravado, purely theoretical: I myself had never actually kissed anyone but Father Hammad, and perhaps my mother, no doubt my mother.  “You just put your lips together and etcetera.”

“No, no,” she said laughing.  “Not at all.”

“Not at all,” I said, the heat from my chest reaching my face.

“And he’s clumsy in other ways as well.”

“Other ways?”  I said ingenuously, then realized what she was saying.  Something about sex.

Claire blushed very hard, skipped elegantly past our inadvertent subject: “Plus he’s always got practice.  And the team studies together!  Can you imagine studying with Bobby Orco?”

I kept a neutral face, said, “Are you going to the game this Saturday?”

“It’s all the way down in El Paso.  Not a chance.”

Beta heart pounding, I said, “I have an idea for something to do.”

h

Claire was seventeen, like me.  Her sister Ellen was a famously sullen redhead one grade behind us, just turned sixteen.  The mystery sister, Judith, strawberry blonde, was thirteen.   All the same height, and the same height as me.  Enough looks to go around in that family!  The girls came giggling out of their house—an oversized development federal just like ours—rushed for the car as if they were making a prison break.  Their mother came out into the sunlight behind them, just as good-looking as her daughters but sadder, the forever-trailing wife.  Then the spy came out, Mr. Hesterly, and he was all smiles too, like a steel girder in a good mood.

“Devil,” Father Hammad said under his own big smile, waving back from the driver’s seat of our sensible minivan.  And I understood suddenly that my old man was exacting a kind of preemptive revenge, and not only helping me, subtle man.  Of course Mr. Hesterly thought his detective mission was secret from one and all.  And of course he thought this innocuous play date for his daughters was a way to get closer to his target.  I climbed out to wave to the oncoming monkey females.  Mother Hesterly gave me a long look.  Oh, was her life sad.  Her husband narrowed his eyes at her.  She blanched in fear, brightened all false, suddenly gave every appearance of being thrilled to see me.

“How nice of you!” she cried.

“My pleasure,” I cried back.

“Home by dinner!” their father called, the happiest cinder block you have ever seen.

Young Judith yelled, “Shotgun,” and cut behind me, climbed in the front seat I’d vacated.  My father nodded with pleasure for me.  I found myself buckling in between Claire and Ellen in the rearmost bench seat (the middle one having been removed by yours truly, and with some difficulty, for the scientific-equipment transfers my father was always making).  Claire smelled of sweet soap, Ellen of the Wal-Mart perfume counter, overwhelming olfactory competition, myself in the crossover zone.  And we were off, an hour’s drive to the National Monument.  “I like that skirt,” I said to Ellen, after my father’s advice.  Her thighs were freckled, hairless, thoroughly naked.

“Santa Fe,” she shot back, “Grrl Power Boutique.”

“It’s mine,” Claire said.  “Actually.  From like grade school.”

“Actually, it’s not yours at all, Cruella.”

“And I like yours, Claire,” I said, “I like the length.”  Past her knees.

“You can braid my hair first,” Judith called back, bouncing in her seat.

So.  Claire had been talking about me.  My father grinned into the rearview mirror—everyone’s plan working nicely.

The ensuing silence in the way back was finally broken by Claire:  “Are you ready for the bio test?”

h

At Bandolier we climbed out of the car, the only car in the large parking lot.  The ranger station with its restrooms was closed, October being the beginning of off-season for the legions of summer RVs.  We hiked along the wide trail into the mouth of Frijoles Canyon toward what informational signs told us was Tyuonyi, an Ancestral Pueblo Peoples site, excavated in the early twentieth century, perhaps two hundred rooms arranged in a closed circle.  Claire walked with Father Hammad, talked with him seriously about her aspirations: she wanted to be a surgeon.  “All that cutting!” said my father, disapproving.  He was never happy when human played God.

Judith ran off ahead in her jumper—she looked like a very tall child, but built exactly like her sisters—high boobs, narrow hips, long legs.  Ellen walked with me a few hundred paces, long enough for me to come up with words to say, but before I said them (something about how I liked the red and green of the ponderosa pines high against the blue of the sky), she suddenly bolted like the colt she was, ran off to catch her little sister.  That Grrl Power skirt was no bigger than a washcloth.  Her thighs, her hips, her shoulders were on another level of development from Judith’s.  Ellen was the beauty of the troupe, certainly.  Her hair flowed about her shoulders; her speed was breathtaking.  I slowed to walk with Claire and Father Hammad.

Continuing their conversation with a mere nod at me, Claire intoned bookishly, “The population here is now thought to have been in the thousands.  It all crashed at once.”

“Disease?” my father said.

“Possibly drought,” Claire said.

No, Claire was the beauty of the troupe, and she’d studied up on Bandolier.

“But no one really knows,” I said: we were all good students.

We came to the central village, a great circle of a ruin, once a sort of apartment house, a communal warren of small rooms in a band around an elliptical courtyard containing three stone-lined pits in perfect circles.

Judith was already walking through the complex as through a maze, ignoring the signs: stay on paved path.  “You have to walk through everyone’s room to go to bed,” she said.

Ellen was nowhere in sight.

“I believe they climbed in through holes in the roof,” Father said.  “And perhaps you need to climb out, young lady.”

The circular pits were Kivas, I knew, religious places.

As Judith obeyed father’s quiet authority, Claire read the self-guided tour booklet she’d found in the school library, paraphrasing for the rest of us: “This place was excavated around 1910.  They just left all the original earthen mortar and mud plaster out in the rain to dissolve.  The bricks have lasted—they were cut out of the local rock, which is volcanic.  Um, later, the park service fixed everything up with cement.  The Kiva here was restored more recently.  There would be an altar at one end and a hole in the floor at the other—an entrance to the underworld, the entrance that all souls, all animals and humans came through.  The women kept them in repair.  The men did all the worshipping.”  She snapped the booklet closed, said, “Sexism was part of nature to them.  Anyway, Kivas are just dark pits for heathen men to conjecture in.  They actually give me the heebie-jeebies.”

My father grinned, gave me a wink.  “Males can be quite stupid,” he said.

We continued past Tyuonyi, took a right on a path that brought us directly to the foot of the cliffs, where ground-level thatch-roofed dwellings had been reconstructed.

“Very dark inside,” Father noted, never having been a fan of darkness.

The path climbed upward, and then higher yet, and we looked into cavity after cave after excavation, beautiful little rooms—“cavates,” Claire’s booklet called them—higher and higher above the canyon floor, great views of the ruined village below, petroglyphs in zigzags, prints of ancient hands.

“Cliff Kiva,” Claire said, pointing above us, still reading.  “Large room, small anterooms.”

I left Father and Claire on the path, climbed a new ladder built authentically as the Ancestral Pueblo Peoples had built ladders, looked stupidly into a warren of rooms, seeing nothing as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.  A thin stripe of hot sunlight lit the smooth rock floor.  The ceiling was black with ancient soot.  I climbed inside as into the maw of a beast.  Suddenly, startled, I heard a splashing sound.

“Don’t look,” Ellen’s voice hissed.  And that’s when I made her out, a dim figure squatting with tiny skirt hiked up and white underpants down, clearly peeing into a depression in the floor, peeing into the underworld from whence all life came, nothing untoward to see but those long legs shining, underpants practically glowing.

“Sorry,” I said, and backed away, feet first right out the entrance and back down the shaky ladder.

“Claire says that each Kiva is thought to indicate a family group,” said Father Hammad, skeptical.

Ellen appeared at the top of the ladder with her skirt askew, climbed down: best not to look.

“There you are, Ellen,” Claire said.

As a troupe we followed the path, looked into further evocative rooms, trying to imagine what had once gone on here, what the air in the place must have smelled like.

Judith came running up from behind us, when I’d thought she was ahead.

“I lived here in a past life,” she said, breathing passionately.

“You were an insect,” Ellen said.

Father Hammad laughed at that.

Ellen scowled, wheeled, trotted away from us.

I followed, trying to be discrete, hurried when I got around a corner where Father and Claire couldn’t see.  Ahead, Ellen suddenly left the path and headed upwards, climbing bare rock—easy handholds—even using the danger no climbing sign for a step.  Twenty feet up, she disappeared into the cliff face.

Then her bright face appeared, high above.  “Check this out,” she called.

I hurried, climbed up as she had, looking back to see if Father were in view, and Claire.  They were not.  I followed Ellen into a big cavate, beautifully shaped, much more light than the earlier example, perfect round windows, hearth, small secondary rooms, dazzling view across the valley.

I said, “This must be the men’s restroom.”

“Don’t rat me out,” Ellen said.

“I won’t,” I said.  “I thought it was funny.”

“I just had to go so bad,” she said.

“It just seemed sort of… sacrilegious, if you know what I mean.”

“It’s not like I was shitting,” she said.

We laughed at that.  And then we really laughed.

She smiled for me, the first smile I’d ever seen on her face.  “This place is so fucking boring,” she said warmly.

“I like it,” I said.

“What we need is a couple of hits of ecstasy.”

“Drugs?” I said.

“Or at least a big joint.  Fuck!”

“I’ve never tried any drugs!”

At that, Ellen bent over and vomited frankly.  She coughed a couple of times, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and that was that.

“Are you okay?” I said, alarmed.

“Don’t get your gonads in a twist,” she said.

h

“Well,” Father Hammad said, “All this climbing about is making me hungry.  Let me go prepare our picnic.  You kids go on down into the canyon—it goes a mile more—and let’s meet up back here in an hour or so.  Twelve-fifteen?  Okay?  Twelve-thirty?”

“Oh, I’ll help you,” said Claire.

“Not necessary,” said my dad.

But Claire insisted.  She was Alpha property all the way, and in this crowd Dad Hammad was number one.  The Beta male was to spend his time with the Beta females.

So Ellen and Judith and I set out on the diminishing trail through the extraordinary canyon, at first strolling three abreast, then Judith skipping far ahead, finally Ellen and I alone, shuffling under cliffs filled with yet more carved-out chambers, the ruins of ancient housing.  In a slight meadow I spotted a mule deer buck, its antlers very like the plants it stood among, good camouflage.  “Deer,” I said, pointing.

“So what’s all this phony shit about braiding hair?” Ellen said, trying to pick the animal out of the background.

“Just an interest,” I said.

“Claire’s never going to go out with you, clown.  Don’t get your hopes up.”

“Well, no, I know, I mean, I didn’t ask her to go out.  I have no interest, is what I’m trying to say.”

She put a quick hand on my chest, said, “Let’s slow down here so we can snork when Judith gets around the bend.”

I knew from anatomy class exactly where my adrenal gland was, and felt a squeeze just there, under her hand, as if in my heart, and then indeed, under the influence of the adrenal compound, my actual heart starting beating alarmingly even as my feet slowed.  We silently watched Judith go round the shaded corner ahead and disappear.

“You are such a liar,” Ellen said.

And gave me my first kiss, and then my second, and then instructions: “Open your mouth, dork-wad.”

There was the slightest acid hint of vomit, but her tongue was a revelation, carefully compact, finding mine, probing my molars.  She kept her eyes open, looking for that deer.

Quickly arose a virginal teen boy’s most profound embarrassment: the happy erection of nights and private musings arriving in the presence of company, arriving out here in the light of day under the cliffs of glowering ancients, pushing at my pants, practically knocking, as at a locked door.  And then more so, Ellen’s gripping hand upon that organ, even as the kiss continued, even as her eyes continued to search for antlers.  Embarrassment building toward crisis, I lost my reserve, pointed my tongue like hers, found her individual teeth, the ridged roof of her mouth, pressed her lips with mine.  I had barely the nerve to put my hands on her back.  She squeezed my penis all the harder, pulled me to her.

Judith’s call was like a fire alarm, an extended shriek.

Ellen and I unclenched in a millisecond—but the shriek hadn’t been about us.  Judith wasn’t even in sight.  The younger girl shrieked again.  Adrenaline squirt upon adrenaline squirt, we kissers loped to catch up, I increasingly less hobbled with every step, but Ellen very much in the lead.  I put on the after-burners and we made the corner together.  Judith was a statue in the middle of the path, and just beyond her—and I mean just a harrowing couple of feet—a large diamondback rattlesnake curled with head raised, ready to strike.

“Back up slowly,” I shouted.

But Ellen was more proactive.  She picked up a large rock, barreled forward for the attack, her tiny skirt swishing about her businesslike fanny.  She shoved Judith out of harm’s way with one hand, threw the rock with the other, a dust-raising thud unfortunately just behind the animal, which lunged toward her, clearly perceiving no other way to go.  In hiking boots and bare legs she kicked the creature even as it struck, kicked again, and again, until the awful, innocent thing—fully six feet long—sidewound its way out of her purview.

“Motherfucker,” Ellen said, breathing hard.

Judith, having fallen in tall weeds that might have been hiding any kind of creature at all, shrieked again.

I may very possibly have shrieked, as well.

h

After some excited discussion of the close call, we continued on.  Ahead there was a path, I knew, one that would take us to the cliff face and then up almost vertically through rocks and crags to a series of reproduction ladders that led to a remarkable, fully intact Kiva dug inside a cavate halfway up the cliff face, the best and most complete of all the Kivas on the site.  I told the girls about it.

“How big can this thing be?” Ellen said.

“Yeah,” Judith said accusingly.

“It’s not big,” I told them.  I’d been up there with Father Hammad, and just the two of us fit inside.  We’d taken the occasion to breathe together, as Daddy would say, something on the order of meditation, not quite prayer.  I’d found it unsettling: the Kiva had been built for different lives altogether.

“Then, okay, if there’s only room for two, you better go up with Ju-ju, and then come back and you and I will go up.”  She winked at me in what I took to be a salacious fashion.

“Are their snakes?” Judith said.

“Not on the cliff,” I said.

“Let’s pretend it’s a hair salon,” said Judith.

“Oh, fun,” said Ellen, always sarcastic.

Up at the Kiva I descended first.  “No snakes,” I said.

Judith came down, then.  The roof had been added by the park service, just a platting of pine branches and corn stalks, plenty of light penetrating.

“Okay, I will have a French braid,” said Judith.  She was very different from Ellen, now that I looked at her.  Her hair was lighter, finer.  She smelled like baby powder.  She held her shoulders high, always perfect posture.  She was skinny, but she was not a little kid.

“We need a comb,” I said.

“Just use your hands,” she said, nestling in the Kiva, her back to me, shoulders square.

I put my hands in her hair, pulled it back, tried to remember the book instructions, divided the soft locks into two parcels, pushed one aside (that long, delicate neck), got to work braiding the other.  When I was done—five long minutes—she felt the braid all over with both hands, turned and smiled for me.  She said, “Claire says you’re an ugly geek but I don’t think so.”  And then she fell into me, threw her hands around my neck, tucked her head on my chest, pulled herself up into my lap where she curled up like a hurt puppy, and then bit me, nipped my pectoral muscle with her strong teeth, mewling.

The effect on me was profound, not exactly sexual, not exactly not, a first experience of caring, I would say now, though at the time all I felt was confusion, commotion.

Suddenly the Kiva entrance darkened, and Ellen’s face was above us.  “Perverts,” she said calmly.  She climbed down in on top of us, and Judith and I, legs all tangled together, worked on the bigger girl’s hair, some kind of double French braid that the girls both knew, the three of us pressed together hotly, myself there in the holiest of ancient places, caught between sex and caring.

h

Judith and Ellen and I made it back to the circle village considerably more than one hour after we’d left, but there on a blanket was one of Father Hammad’s wonderful meals, dozens of small plates of dishes exotic and familiar.  There also was Father Hammad, sitting peaceably, rapt in serious discussion with Claire, whom, I felt, I’d just seriously betrayed in advance.  Judith picked up her charcoal-baked bread with wonderment, played at pinching up bites of cucumber yogurt.  Ellen turned up her nose, gave me a hostile yet somehow inviting look, wandered off in her perfect double French braid, unfed, kicking rocks.

“She never eats,” Claire said, holding her napkins with aplomb.  Okay, looking at Claire like that, I had to say that her beauty was by far the deepest owned by the sisters, something magisterial there, aloof, foreboding, intoxicating, a great and insular poise earned in difficult travels and friendships broken by distance.

“We found the intact cliff Kiva!” Judith said.  She was the one sister still capable of lightness.

“The one you and I climbed to, Father,” said I.

“A sublime place,” my dad said slowly.

“We saw a snake,” Judith said.  “It almost got me!”

“Ellen saved her,” I said.

Father Hammad looked alarmed.

“Snakes are a valuable part of the ecosystem,” Claire said.  And she turned to me, distinct change in her voice, said, “Let’s you and I go up there after lunch.”

“He’ll do your hair,” Judith said.

I felt my adrenal gland squeeze, my toes curl, my mouth go dry, my breath quicken, my penis stir: all sorts of physiology, all unbidden.  “Ugly geek” was the phrase in my head.  That hurt more than any racial slur I’d ever endured (though to be Afghani and Islamic in my case had technically nothing to do with race—Caucasians are Caucasians—and nothing to do with religion, Father H. being a Buddhist and I being a Christmas-tree agnostic).  My stomach dropped.  I was no longer hungry.  I had in addition a strong case of what one of my human ecology books called epididymal edema, what the coarser boys had referred to as “blue balls,” an additional something I’d never before experienced, exquisite pain.  Ugly geek!  I couldn’t look at Claire, gazed instead fondly at Judith in her mussed braids.

“We counted two-hundred-forty rooms,” Claire said.

“And that of course was simply the ground floor of the original,” said Father Hammad.

“There are more dwellings all the way down along the cliffs,” I said.

“What a paradise this must have been,” said Claire hotly.  “Your father and I have been trying to map out the agriculture.”

“Where did you learn to braid hair?” said Judith.

We ate the lovely meal.  Afterwards Dad pulled his ornate box of dominoes from the basket and showed them to Judith, who was delighted, captured per plan.  Under her rapt gaze the old man set up a children’s version of the game, one I remembered well.

Ellen had disappeared altogether.  “She’ll be in the car,” Claire said.  “She’s always in the car.”

h

Big Sister Hesterly and I walked side by side down the wide path into the throat of Frijoles Canyon.  I pointed to the petroglyphs her sisters and I had spotted earlier, pointed out the deer (and two new females), still in its place, showed her the spot the snake had stopped Judith.

“I’m so sad about your mother,” Claire said out of nowhere.  “That’s so sad.  Your dad told me more about her.  I didn’t know she’d chopped her hair.  Do you remember that?  Was that the first indication?”

Yes it was.  “I feel ugly,” I said, not really meaning to.

“No,” she said.  “You are … very cute.”

We walked in silence to the path that led to the ladders up the cliff to the intact Kiva, climbed silently, she first, an a posteriori revelation of musculature above me.

In the Kiva we sat side by side, not communicating.

“An ugly geek,” I said finally.

“You are … actually … kind of hot,” she said.  “In your own way.  And if I hadn’t met Brick first I would have fallen for you.  Just so you know.  I admire your intellect, okay fine, but you have a great butt, too.  And such nice skin.”

“What I’m saying is that Judith said that you called me an ugly geek.”

“Oh!  Shut up!  Judith is a brat and a massive liar.”

“Actually, I kind of believe her.”

Claire said, “I would never say such a thing, even about an actual ugly geek, which you are not.  I would kiss you right now, you’re so cute.  And by the way, the smart part is sexy, too.  But I’m a very loyal woman.”  She turned as Judith had, turned in that cramped space.  “I have a new bra,” she said with sudden heat, not just another non sequitur.  Her kiss was of a different order than Ellen’s, more stately, less impulsive, cautious almost, a little dry, no great hunger.  “There,” she said.

“More,” I said.

“My family will move away soon,” she said.

“I’ll find you,” I said.

“You may hate us by then,” she said.

“Listen, Claire, we know all about your father and his investigation.”

Long silence.  “He’d say he’s only doing his job.”  She kissed me again, without Ellen’s aggression, then looked me in the eye.  “He’s heinous,” she said.

We kept kissing, me somehow without the urge to take it further despite my new sense of the possibilities, and the unbearable pressure inside my scrotum.

“Brick just jams his fingers in me,” she whispered.

I kissed her more, nothing to say on the score of Brick and his fingers.

“It’s uncomfortable,” she said.

“He should respect you,” I said.

“He never lingers anywhere,” she said.

I lingered at her lips—no idea what else to do.

“He’s never kissed me this long, not once,” she murmured.

“You’re a loyal young woman,” I said.

“Do you know how to open a bra?”

“No idea.”

“That’s what I like about you.”  She reached behind her, quick gesture, and a certain tautness under her sweater was released.   She had to actually put my hand on her breast, but it was my own idea after a great long while to open her shirt, my idea to suckle at her small pink nipple, to linger long.  She kneeled between my legs to allow me access and somehow in the process brought the pressure of her thighs to bear on my pent testicles.

“That’s all I want,” she said.

“Proper kisses,” I said.

“I’m on the pill,” she said.

We undressed in a lingering struggle, all to the tune of my nervous giggles.  She helped me pull down my boxers, even as I tugged at her belt.  Unbidden, very suddenly, quite a bit too soon, I had my first orgasm in the presence of another human, positively geothermal in its propulsive power, a kind of spurting boy fountain between us, all to a squeal of hilarity and fellow feeling on Claire’s part.  She smeared the stuff on her belly and her breasts, tasted it daintily (if a tad too expertly), acceptance personified.  “You’re so cute,” she said.

I knew not to rest upon my own satisfaction.  I had read in some depth about what women are supposed to appreciate more than anything else sexual, had read several articles, in fact, articles in the many issues of my father’s gentlemanly magazines, and contrived to bring with my virgin lips and flittering tongue and gently probing fingers her cries to the consecration of the Kiva, Jeff Brick be damned.

h

Judith and Father Hammad had found a frog in the Frijoles Creek, a robust little brook that still greened the Ancestral Pueblo Peoples’ Eden (its source is snow-fed springs—global warming will be the end of it before too long).  Claire and I took an interest, leaned over them to look, trying hard not to exude sexuality.  But Father cast an eye on his only son, his Beta boy, all seeing.  And then Judith cast her own eye at her sister, a stare of pure furious jealousy.

I was proud.

“Well,” Father said, not releasing my eye, “We’d better get going.”

He and Claire packed the picnic back into its efficient basket and cooler, and we walked as a tribe out of the ancient village and back to the car, short one monkey.  But Ellen’s legs stuck out the open side door of the van, making us laugh—Claire had predicted where we’d find the girl.  We choked our mirth back quickly: one of the legs was swollen and veined red and purply black, dotted oddly with fat beads of sweat, and Ellen was unconscious.  Father Hammad checked her pulse: irregular, as was her breathing.

“The snake!” Judith wailed, and fell into tears.

In the scuffed toe of Ellen’s right hiking boot, Father found the embedded fangs of the serpent.  The sneaky animal had found a way to delay its wrath: Ellen’s kicking at stones had gradually worked the fangs through the leather and to her skin.  Father Hammad eased the boot off, put a finger to a pair of simple scratches. “She won’t die,” he said.  “But we must hurry if we are to prevent tissue damage.”  In the trunk of the car he had a doctor’s first-aid kit, made up for the Southwest and therefore complete with antivenin, a tiny hypodermic shot he administered expertly under Ellen’s swollen knee.  We pulled the young woman further into the car across the carpeted floor, covered her.  In the process I couldn’t help noticing her exposed panties, dirty pink, not white at all.  Claire sat on the floorboards to be beside her.   Racing, I put the picnic in the way back, and then we slammed doors, and were off.

“Her boot saved her,” Father said, less calm.  “But we’ve lost a lot of time.”

He drove evenly out of the canyon, but very fast, up the long inclined road to the level of the surrounding desert, where finally his cell phone worked.  We met the Medevac helicopter at a crossroads—unparalleled drama, at least in my life—two very efficient military EMTs loading Ellen in while giving her another shot, wrapping her in a space blanket, covering her face with an oxygen mask.  Claire went along for the short flight to Albuquerque.

Judith wept more on the slow drive down there—she had suddenly found herself alone with virtual strangers—sobbed and demanded I sit in the back seat with her, molded herself to me, fell asleep.

h

Father Hammad was arrested quietly two mornings later.  Nothing to do with Ellen—she was fine, the main problem not having been the slight exposure to rattler venom but its combination with severe dehydration, and the fact (discovered in the process of treatment) that she was several months pregnant.  “Gravid,” as the ER physician put it to my dad.  Also nothing to do with the fact that she announced in her waking delirium that I had tried to “poke” her.  That information was duly relayed to her father when he arrived from White Sands that evening, the word gravid having already been translated for his benefit.  He put two and two together and got about a thousand.  You have never seen steel turn go molten so fast as in the blast furnace of that error.

“Pregnant!”  Father Hesterly roared.

Claire was present.  Judith, too.  They cringed, terrified of their father.  Judith looked as if she believed the charges, snuck glances at me, offered the subtlest warm assurance: she would hold her tongue.  Claire looked at me long, more chilly: no matter what, I’d have some explaining to do to Claire, and it might take years.

My own dad couldn’t help a queer smile: Mr. Hesterly was a comic strip character.

“It was not I,” I said, all eyes upon me, even the doctor’s, even a nurse’s.  I said it again: “Not I.”

But that feeble protest, true as the blue sky, wasn’t enough to stop Father Hesterly from leaping upon me and pummeling my face with his efficient fists.  Only Claire’s strength got him off me, only Judith’s cries slowed him down.  His jail night (for assault and battery) had nothing to do with Dad’s jail night two days later, nothing at all.

No, Father was arrested on the basis of thirty e-mails to Khowst, Afghanistan, that in fact I had made using his account, e-mails to my mother, who didn’t exactly know me but could read Pushtu characters, and whom I knew loved to hear just about anything about hair, especially anything about braids, exulted in braids there in her room at the Facility for Mind Soundness.  I translate it thus to give the literal meaning of her institution’s Afghani name.  Because the translator for the investigation, while skilled for an American, got caught in several linguistic traps, translating the Pushtu phrase “Mind Soundness” as “Intelligence,”  “braid” as “helix,” that word appearing dozens of times in my e-mails, its place in my innocuous, sometimes nonsensical, always childish Pushtu sentences rendering the messages cryptic, rendering them suspicious, too, since supposedly they were coming from a scientist working on ultra-secret, ultra dangerous DNA-based weaponry.  I’d called my French braid a double braid, and that came out “double helix,” for example.

Father Hammad was released when the mistake was discovered (the New York Times and I helped with this discovery), had to make his own way back from Hungary, of all places, a forest road far outside Budapest, and not the Punta de Fleche County Jail.

From which Father Hesterly was released with a restraining order.

Two weeks later Claire and Ellen and Judith were moved to Palo Alto, California, where their father, having blown his cool and his cover (to much international attention), looked for work.  Claire contacted me every day—e-mails, text messages, paper letters, phone calls—enormously pleased that I wrote and phoned and messaged her back.  Jeff Brick lasted only three weeks at that distance.  I lasted the whole rest of senior year, with a secret visit around the vernal equinox, Claire meeting me for a nearly ski-less ski trip in Taos, during which I learned to make love.

And now, these six years later, steadies all the way through college (Georgetown for her, Virginia for me), we are an item unchallenged, medical students at Johns Hopkins.  Now when her father calls me “Babaganoush,” it’s only a joke.  Ha-ha.  And anyway, he’s far away.  When her mother calls me son, she’s quite serious, if just as prescription-pill vacuous as always.  Ellen is a new person: four years in the Marines, go figure.  Judith has her troubles, can’t seem to stay in college, weighs a hundred pounds on a good day.

My mother died last spring, hacked at her hair once more, hacked at her breast, and finally flew to heaven. People say, Oh, you knew it was coming.  But of course that’s no comfort, and wrong: I always thought I’d see her again.

Various vegetables with dead bird

Here’s a seasonal offering from my story collection, Big Bend.  “Thanksgiving” is placed first in the book–not my idea, but Charles East’s, the wonderful (former) series editor for the Flannery O’Connor Prize, who paid close attention to every aspect of my work (the new series editor is Nancy Zafris, also a past winner), all by US mail.  I wrote him that I was worried people would think the story was autobiographical, since it borrows a little from the statistics of my family.  And Charles replied, “Whether it is autobiographical in this or that detail hardly matters–this scene will be recognized as the universal Thanksgiving story, the opposite of the one Americans like to tell themselves.”  Anyway, nothing like this ever happened to me or my family, though at times I used to feel just a little like Teddy.  This is an early story of mine, first draft dating back to graduate school in the late 80s.  And not the 1880s, okay?

#

Thanksgiving

When the phone rings in the empty loft Ted knows exactly who it is: exquisite Mary, gentle Mary, tough Mary and brainy—his brother’s wife—for whom Ted would fall in a minute if such things were permitted. She seems cold as they climb through some small talk, gets to the point fast, warms to her task: “Oh Teddy, really, you have to come this year.  You ought to come this year.  Lily wants to show you her watercolors.”  Lily is the oldest of Ernest and Mary’s three little daughters.  “And your mom would like you here.”

“Why doesn’t this Mom person call me herself?” Ted says, growing testy despite his resolution: this year at Thanksgiving he’s going to be part of the family again, no explosions, no tumult, no bubbling in the bosom.  He knows where Mary’s calling from, hears Elrod’s raspy barking, hears the TV in his parents’ sumptuous den (where doubtless his mother is standing focussed like a laser on Mary and the phone).

Mary eats a laugh.  “Well, she’s right here.”

“No fooling.”  Teddy sees it perfectly:  Mary grinning, handing the phone to Mom against feeble protests, Mom’s hands up to keep this difficulty away, Mary smiling more forcedly and holding the receiver against Mom’s ear.

Too late; the old gal has to speak:  “Well.  Teddy.  When are we coming?”

“I don’t know, Mother.  Wednesday?  Thursday morning?  I’ve got a ton of work: a lady on Beekman Place wants a portrait, and I’m showing slides at two galleries.”

From his mother, silence.

Ted says, “And the Met, well not the Met exactly, but this very consequential curatorial entity wants to . . .”

“Well, marvelous.  Whenever you get here is exactly right.”

Now Lily has the phone, no goodbye from Mom.  “Uncle Teddy?”

“Hi, Lily Loops.  Halloo.  Are you coming for Thankspiglet?”

“Oh, Uncle Teddy!”

As always his niece’s giggle is the most perfect music Ted has ever heard.  She likes a sense of conspiracy so he whispers: “Bring the turkey in a paper bag.  Bring eleven cranberries.”

“Uncle Teddy, come on!”  Oh, her laughter, this laughter right now, this is the most beautiful thing Ted has ever made.  The kids!  For the kids he won’t be off his rocker anymore.

#

There’s not a dime in sight for Ted Lyons.  And not a paintbrush either.  He hasn’t made the trip to a gallery—not even SpaceSpace on Avenue D—with slides in hand in a year or more, hasn’t shot slides for six months, hasn’t produced anything to photograph.  Consequential curatorial entity!  Crap. This pompous spur-of-the-moment phrasing plays over and over in his mind, a rebuke.  Back to the nuthouse, Mom must be thinking.  His past success as a painter, life before his—ah-hem—rest time, offers no succor for these angry days.  He and his supposed art are in some kind of extended eclipse, the needling voices in his head so loud he can’t paint in the same room with them.

The lady on Beekman Place wanting a portrait is a fat lie (though once Ted fixed a toilet in someone’s brownstone there). His Mr. Fix-it ad in the back of the Village Voice ran out in August and he hasn’t had enough money to run another.  Monte Dorfman, his comfortably rich roommate and true friend, normally good for a loan, is far away—a tour of Asia and Australia—and he won’t be back for three months.

Ted boils water and makes himself a plate of miserably unadorned Ziti and feels maybe a little of the romance he as a college student might have seen here.  He is an artist.  He is surely going mad, and for the second time.  He will not ask for help, however, will not give a clue to anyone.  If he does, it’s back to you-know-where.  And with you-know-who paying for it.  And finally, the last brick in the wall of romance: Teddy is in danger of starving.  Or at least of being hungry: there’s two or three nights of eating in that big ShopRite Ziti box.

Late, he empties Monte’s change jar, which has enough nickels and dimes for two beers at Milady’s, corner of Thompson and Prince, and where two beers bought gets you one on Frankie, who will knock the bar and say, “This one’s with me, pal.”  And knock the bar all night with a kind eye on the pile of pennies Ted scoots around in front of him, barely shiny with nickels.

A few beers, a half dozen, that changes the complexion of things.

#

There’s no getting back to sleep.  Teddy thinks of Thanksgiving dinner and Lily Loops and Beaner and his sister Kelly and beautiful Mary and Mom.  And Dollar Dad and Big Brother Ernest and Little Bro Jim.  It’s the family that’s going to save him.  Going to have to.  He thinks of Monte and Jennifer in Southeast Asia and Professor Mtuboto at Brown University and the one painting no one ever had any doubt about, Ted’s thesis work, “Self Portrait with Attitude,” an enormous picture in oils of himself with ten feet of blank canvas to one side: his first masterpiece (that is, the first real piece of himself to reach canvas), already ten years old, moldering in some generous lady’s collection.  For the two thousand bucks (his first fortune) Ted wishes he still had the painting, wishes maybe he’d never bought the hope the money had afforded him.  Because in a complicated web he once had a handle on, that sale launched the events that took him to Riverview Heights (formerly known as Riverview Sanitarium), a lovely place with a campus like a college and doctors like calm parents.

Four a.m. and he’s not sleepy at all, still ruminating furiously, still entertaining the comments of all the observers of his ruminations, a clear idea having entered his head: the possibility of his own change.  He could get a job like Ernest’s, wed a woman like Mary, live in a suburb like Newcastle, Connecticut, his own home town, work his way toward respectability and honor, explore the possibilities of commercial art (his dad’s perennial suggestion), stop thinking of commercial art as selling out (Monte’s phrase, Monte in Cambodia) but as buying in, as getting real (as younger brother Jimmy would say).  Because a woman like Mary you interested only with success, with brains, with self-love and self-power like Ernest’s.  Madness was out.

Ted rose and began searching cushions of the bad furniture in his loft—Monte’s loft, if you thought in terms of leases and rent and who had his shit together.  Three shineless quarters in the yellow vinyl chair, a dime in the heater, nineteen cents in the cracks of the warped old floor.  Sixteen one-dollar bills in Monte’s desk drawer.  Smiling gods of heaven!

Meds or Jack Daniels?

#

On the eve of Thanksgiving Teddy rolls out an entire bolt of the Canson Mi-Teintes paper his father bought him those two hopeful years ago.   Dad kindly put out some mean cash at Pearl Paints down on Canal Street: “You got to spend money to make money,” misunderstanding the whole artist game with unusual heart.  Fifty feet of the thick, beautiful paper, forty-five inches high, and Teddy gets to work on his idea for Thanksgiving, his idea for what he can add to the festivities and still have enough cash to pay for the train ride home.  It’s a mural with serious sections and comic sections, a Thanksgiving card, a love poem to his family, his thanks for their forbearance.  He sips Jack Daniels and puts his nieces in there: Lily Loops and the Bean as tidy little Pilgrims; the babies, April and Erin, as cherubs on the back of spotted fawns.  He paints his tall mother slightly unhappy as the Pilgrim matriarch, cigarette in hand, paints Dad beside her in a kind of Pilgrim three-piece suit with musket and briefcase.  He paints quickly, a succession of photographs in hand, quickly and with a humor that comes of using up the last of a formerly huge supply of paint, a supply that once seemed like hope itself.  Good brushes, too, worn but well cared for.  Teddy shows his brawny young sister Kelly beneath an enormous and laden picnic table, holding the whole thing up with one hand and wearing a Grecian tunic—a lady Hercules.  He captures perfectly his brother Jimmy and Jimmy’s wife, Connie, in jogging outfits, their new twin Volvos tethered to teamed horses.  He gets Elrod in there and a good deal of Edenic garden, both to honor his mom.  He paints Ernest lolling magisterially in a cloud, a stern but beneficent god blowing fortune from on high.  He’s painting hard, he’s painting fast, he’s in a lather, he’s damn good, he’s got whiskey in his blood.  “The mural is really working,” say the onlookers, “It’s a pageant!”  He plays with the long composition, repeating figures: there’s Dad off to work; there’s Kelly slaying buffalo; there’s Lily and April sur l’herbe in their swim-team suits, lunching with the painter; there’s Jimmy flinging U.S. currency to the wind; there’s Connie dandling Erin; there’s Ernest intently making a drawing, his first.

Later Ted realizes he’s put Mary in the only Native American costume, painted her at both ends of the absurdly elongated table.  At one end she gazes approvingly at the Ted figure having his Dejeuner; at the other she holds the hand of another Ted figure, the two of them looking up, oh, looking up and pointing at Ernest, the great pale god, unbearably handsome.

They will like this poster.  They will!  The whole family, and then Teddy can ask them for succor.

#

At the Newcastle Train Station Thanksgiving morning Ted steps down into the bright sun, sees a row of twelve-hour parking meters, a gas station, a bent Lions Club sign, the drive-up window of the First Newcastle Bank, a particular tree, all of it fraught with sad memories: Marianne Oplennoff for one, Dad in his business suit for another, the daily commute.

No time to get misty: Dad rockets into the station parking lot in his new Humvee, skids in the gravel, stops so the passenger door is exactly at Ted’s hand, leans hard (no seat belt), flings the door open, shouts, “Son, get in.”

Lily’s in the back seat, grinning.  She’s a small version of Mary, her hair long and black, gap between her big front teeth, flannel shirt twenty sizes too big.  Ted pokes his bulkily rolled mural into the back beside her, throws Monte’s daypack on top of her, just for fun.

“Lillian,” he says deeply, knowing she’ll laugh.  And she does, and puts a long little hand on his shoulder as he gets in, pats him expressively, pure love and acceptance, holds the daypack in her lap.

Ted pats her hand back and pat pat pat it’s a joke.  On impulse then he leans awkwardly to hug Dad and worse, kisses Dad on his stubbled cheek.  Dad is embarrassed, so hits the gas, throwing gravel, and they’re off, just one mile to the old home.

The enormous vehicle has the old-home smell—Dad’s cigarettes, probably, and his shoe polish—and it gives Ted the old-home feeling, a mixture of comfort and dread, with the difference that now he actually recognizes that dread’s in the mix.  Today recognition adds consternation, not comfort.  Dad drives very fast, shooting his spindly right arm out in front of Ted at every stop to protect him from his own inertia at stops as if he’s a kid again.

In the back seat Lily the Looper studies the inside of the rolled mural.  She speaks into it, hollow echo:  “Calling Uncle Teddy.  Come in, Theodore Lyons.  Are you going to stay this time?”

“Not you, too,” says Ted.

Dad chortles. “Of course he’s going to stay!  He’ll stay the weekend!  We’ll have turkey sandwiches!”

“Maybe, Dad.  Maybe not.  I’ve got a lot of work, a ton.  I’ve got a job I might do Saturday.”  There’s no job on Saturday.  There’s no job at all.  Ted’s head swims: Jack Daniels hangover.  Someone is telling him to get home.  This he fights.  He’ll ask for help.  He’ll ask Mary, perhaps, and she can ask Mom, who in turn can go to Dad.

Into the tube of the mural Lily intones: “You don’t like us.”

“Lily Loop Lungfish, you mind your manners!” says Ted, in imitation of an angry Ernest.  Lily screams, getting the joke, then laughs and laughs, sniffing through her nose, embarrassed to let it out.

“Mom’s got a thirty-pounder!” says Dad.

#

The house is still there, Victorian and tall, pure white everything, surrounded by a neat yard and giant oaks, not a stray leaf in sight, not a stray blade of grass.  The fall has been warm so the lawn’s still green.  The sky is blue, the air is clean, the smells are familiar to the point of memory.  The grand over-arched driveway is full of cars, license plates from all over: Ted’s siblings.  Lily takes his hand and walks him up the driveway, feeling somehow the formality of the situation, seeming to know that it’s she who must guide Ted back to the flock.

Jimmy is first out of the house to greet them.  He’s all smiles, wearing a tie.  Ted’s heart wells at sight of his little brother, who’s not so little; in fact, Jimmy’s a big man, over six feet, over two hundred pounds, polished and smart, thick glasses, wet hair.  The brothers meet under the portico in an uncomfortable hug.  Dad has hung back, thin and stiff and suspicious as an old dog.  He turns abruptly and makes for the toolshed where his lawn machines will be.

Jimmy says, “You look like shit,” which is a joke.

“He’s tired,” Lily says protectively.

“Let’s go over to the mall in Stamford and get you some clothes tomorrow,” Jimmy says.

“I’m fine,” says Ted.

Then Connie’s at the screen door—Jimmy’s wife.  “Uncle Ted!” she cries.  Lily’s little sister Bean peeks around Connie, looks impatiently at Ted, spins and leaves.  In the foyer (potted plants, framed photos, a painting by Kelly, two drawings by Lily, nothing by Ted, nothing in the whole house by Ted) the whole gang turns out.  Ernest is impassive, holds out his hand for a shake, doesn’t quite smile, looks ready to give a speech.  Kelly laughs in words—ha ha ha—hugging Ted and kissing his cheek, a mountain of cheer.  And there’s little April, looking pissed, her fist in her mouth.  Beaner makes her way back into the foyer, dragging Mom, who inspects Ted from head to toe.  “What a crowd,” Mom says, and turns on heel.

“You been eating enough there in New York?” says Jimmy, genuinely concerned.

And Ernest says, “Tofu,” derisively, then looks Ted over sneakers to ponytail, clearly finds him wanting.

“He’ll eat today!” Kelly says brightly.  She’s a sweetie, really a sweetie.

“Ziti, I eat,” says Ted, attempting good cheer, but sounding merely cryptic, even to himself. “Tofu’s more Monte’s speed.”

Suddenly there’s the smell of turkey, and Ted relaxes, lets Lily tug him into the little parlor off the kitchen, sits himself down, pulls Lily down beside him on the arm of the big chair, three-year-old April eyeing them both skeptically.

Jimmy says, “I’ll help Mom,” and drifts back to the kitchen.  There’s a record spinning on the parlor turntable, vague holiday music, a fire in the parlor fireplace even though it’s a sauna in here already.  One by one the family files in.  Lily pats Ted’s shoulder.  Baby Erin starts to fuss in Connie’s arms so everyone looks to her.

“Thanks, Lil,” says Ted, seriously, under his breath.

“For what?” says she, also seriously.  Connie has heard, looks puzzled.  Ernest stalks in and leans on the bookshelf, wiry and small as Dad, resumes his appraisal of Ted, visibly repressing some imperious command to get Lily off the arm of the chair.  He says, “Monte and tofu in Greenwich Village,” meaning: Doesn’t that just say it all!

April does a somersault to much applause.

Kelly laughs—ha ha ha ha ha, says, “Have you found yourself a girl?”

And Ernest says, “Tofu,” again.

Irritable Mom in the kitchen yells out, “One hour!” and Jimmy comes flying comically back into the parlor.

Ha ha ha ha ha, barks Kelly.

Then Mary steps in from the kitchen, drying the gravy boat, having rinsed out the dust of a year.  “Teddy Lyons,” says she.

“Mary Meharg Lyons,” says Ted in the same tone, which is appraising and affectionate at once.

She says, “The artist is home.”

Ted says, “Yeah,” and you’d think he was the world’s funniest comedian the way everyone laughs.

“Artist,” Ernest says, and roars.

Lily says, “He brought a painting.”

“You look good,” says Mary.  “You look very happy and healthy and handsome.”  She goes back in the kitchen.

“Dad needs me on his chop saw,” Ernest says, meaning that some repair is under way.  He says, “Artist,” again, not exactly shaking his head, tone modulated so carefully you’d have to guess what he meant.  Observation?  Derision?  Kelly follows him out the door.

Jimmy and Connie linger politely.  Connie tries for a conversation: “How’s New York?  I miss New York.”

“Is that where you live?” says little Bean.

“Yes,” Lily says, patting Ted’s shoulder.  “He lives in New York City, where we’ve never been.”

#

Just before the big meal Ted gets Lily and Beaner to help him with the forgotten mural.  The little girls close the dining room doors and giggle and whisper, loving a conspiracy.  Ted stands on the furniture and Dad’s spattered stepladder, carefully taping the paint-stiffened paper around three walls and close up under the high ceiling.  The mural just clears the tops of the doors and the hutch and the grandfather clock, which tocks.  Bean, who is normally as skeptical as Ernest, is thrilled.  She holds her belly and stares at the likeness of her little self in the Pilgrim outfit, amazed.

Lily crosses her arms in front of her and gets formal, proffers a review:  “I think Grandpa looks perfect except his hair.  His hair is white, Uncle Teddy, it’s not gray like that.”

Ted sup­presses the impulse to argue with her.  She’s nine, for heaven’s sake.  Also, she’s right.

She purses her lips, turns slowly, taking in the mural, one end to the other.  She says, “The food looks so real.  And Grandma looks perfect, and Uncle Jimmy.”

Teddy can’t help it, he stands there beaming.  Praise is praise, and he hasn’t gotten much for months.

“Daddy looks mean,” Bean cries, pointing, suddenly having seen the god Ernest in the clouds.

“Why is Aunt Kelly under the table?” says Lily.

“She’s holding it up,” says Ted.

“And look at me,” Lily says.  They do, for a full minute, Ted and two children, necks bent back, arms folded.  Lily says, “I look stupid.”

“You are stupid,” Beaner says.

Lily says, “And Erin and April, Uncle Teddy, I don’t know.  Erin and April are the worst!”

“Babies are hard,” Ted says.

“They look like little animals,” says the Bean.

“And why is my mom in a bathing suit?”  Lily points.

Eek.  Ted needs Lily’s eyes to show him that Mary’s Native American costume is tiny, a great show of legs and cleavage and burning dark eyes, that old movie poster of Raquel Welch.  It’s obvious, awful, pure aggression, but the likeness is terrific.  Ted has spent a lot more time on her than on the other portraits, and spent it later in the night of painting, bombed on that whiskey when he should have bought monthly meds.  He has her face perfect down to the expression of pain and caring, has her long hair shining blue and dark as midnight, has the dent of her lip, the tilt of her head, the knuckles of her hand.  But where did the cleavage come from?  The oiled thighs?  He wishes for paints to fix her costume, then in a fit of real grandiosity decides she’ll like it.

To Lily he says, “I need help.”

Lily looks at him seriously.

“Come carry things, girls,” says Ted’s mother.

“April and Lily, come help,” calls Mary, as if they are miles away.

Ted takes advantage of the empty dining room to raid the liquor cabinet.  He pours several fingers of Wild Turkey into a large ornamental cup from the top shelf of the hutch.  He drinks fast, pours again, stows the bottle back in its cabinet, drinks up, steps cheer­fully into the kitchen fray, pats Miss Bean on her head.

#

Dad, torn away from his machines, sits at the head of the enormous old table as always, with Bean at his right hand.  Mom sits at the foot.  Elrod the mutt, having roused himself, stations himself under­neath, stiffly, seventeen years old, waiting for scraps.

Ted’s mural hovers above, surrounding the family on three sides.  Everyone but Kelly thinks it’s in bad taste to have painted Kelly under the table like that, holding things up—but she’s proud of her strength, her size, kindly says she doesn’t mind.  Ernest seems to like his position in the clouds, gazes up at himself approvingly.  No one says a word about Mary’s costume, though Mary gives Ted a hard look.  His parents barely look up.

Not another word about the mural.  Big-hearted Connie, all manners, leaps into the void, takes it upon herself to offer praise, something the Lyonses just aren’t good at.  She praises the likenesses, praises Ted’s generosity, praises his palette, praises his ingenuity, praises the perspective, the difficult trick of getting everyone in there, praises and praises him in the silent room.

And in the silence that remains when she’s through, Dad says grace.  Mom and Kelly start passing food around.  Ernest’s in the same seat he’s always been in, exact center of the fire side of the table, equidistant between Mom and Dad.  Mary sits beside him.  Jimmy and Connie, as always, sit across, neatly dressed.  Ted’s next to Mary, Lily beside him.  Kelly’s across from Ted on the piano bench next to Bean, rocking baby Erin, chatting earnestly with April, who is failing to sit quietly.  The plates fill up.  Forks clatter.  The meal commences.

Mom grows sad, sighs and pokes her food.  Unasked, unannounced, Dad gives a technology quiz straight from childhood: “At what temperature does all movement stop?” and instantly the siblings are shouting out answers, childlike in competition.  Mary and Connie laugh, watching the familiar regression.  “Absolute zero,” shouts Ernest for the eighth time.

Dad pretends not to hear, won’t give Ernest credit, moves on.  He says, “By what process is plastic derived from oil?”  Jimmy and Ernest and Ted all start talking, none giving ground, none exactly knowing the answer, so, soon and also at once, they shout out jokes to cover themselves, they shout with laughter.

“I paid for how much college?” Dad says.

“Teddy smells like booze,” cries Lily.

“Lily smells like baby powder,” says Ted.  He feels inordinately and absurdly proud that she has chosen to sit beside him, that he is her relative.  He tickles her between bites, steals food from her plate.

“You are crazy,” she says, patting his shoulder.

“Crazy,” Ted says back.

Kelly says, “Oil is turned into plastic by fouling beaches and destroying indigenous populations and by widening the gap between rich and poor and otherwise assuring the hasty end of human culture as we know it and shortly thereafter the death of the earth.  Ha ha.”

Gentle Connie sees the gauntlet hitting the parched earth, says, “At my office there’s this gal who has this dream to fly in a balloon.  Of course we just laughed and laughed at her . . .”  And keeps trying, though only Mary even pretends to listen.

“Bhopal,” Ernest says, cryptically.

“ . . . signs up for this balloon tour.”

“For or against?” says Kelly.  Ha ha ha.

“Human error,” says Dad.  “Those Continental Indians are ineducable.”

“No more quizzes,” Mom says.

Connie never gives up, tells the entire story of an eleven-balloon pilgrimage to Cumberland Island, even as Ernest and Dad and Kelly face off three ways about the responsibility of multinational corporations to world culture, not the slightest agreement between them in any direction.

“You want to stop driving your car?” Dad shouts finally, his grin a rictus. “You want Ted to stop using his paint?”

Ted raises his eyebrows.

“Teddy needs help,” Lily cries.

“So I guess the lesson is: pursue your dreams,” Connie says, and goes silent.

“Maybe we should take the billboard down,” says Ernest. He means Ted’s mural and says it like it’s Ted’s mural that has caused the ruckus.

“Oh, Ernest,” says Mary.

Ted feels himself stiffen.

“Pinkos,” says Dad.  It’s supposed to be a joke but it isn’t funny and not even Connie laughs.

“You hurt Ted’s feelings,” says Lily, soulfully, aggrievedly to her father.  She pats Ted’s shoulder, says, “You say sorry.”

No one is going to say sorry.  Everyone turns to eating.  The food is gorgeous, delectable, but only Connie says so, a grand “Yum” in the silence: turkey and creamed onions and mashed turnips and sweet potatoes, peas and cranberry chutney and green beans, salad and rolls, lots of rolls.

Ted eats.  He wants to tell Lily he is not hurt by Ernest.  He wants to tell Lily he’s impervious, always was.  He wants to tell Lily how he loves her and how funny he thinks she is.  He wants to say, Lily, don’t worry about me, but he can’t because Lily’s right, he can’t because Lily’s seen through him and she’s just a kid and she knows about Ted and his pain before Ted even knows.  The mural prowls above them.  Ted eats with total absorption and the pleasure of it is the most pleasure of any kind he’s felt in many weeks, many months, more pleasure than in two years, certainly.  One must ask for help, as Dr. Teach, his psychiatrist, often says.

The little girls start a song about bluebirds, and everyone just continues to eat in blind concentration, passing bowls around, filling plates, clanking, slurping, sighing.

Mary sits between Ernest and Ted, eating politely, as if she’s alone at some diner.  Her new red dress is open at the neck, her bra shows ruffles, her cleavage is pale, almost blue.  Among the hundred-thousand glossy black hairs on her head there are a hundred strands of gray, which Ted finds stirring, poignant, perfect. He takes a bite of his food, gazes at Mary, gazes away, bites his food, gets lost in his plate.  Help, he thinks.

Dad is first to finish, throws his hands up—Touchdown!—smiles broadly, proud of his speed.  Ted almost hears him say what Ted wants to hear him say—how good the food is, or how full the fatherly stomach is, or how there’s still a little room for pie—but Dad says, “I’d say round up these environmental weenies and pop ‘em in an gas chamber somewhere.”

Connie laughs absently.  Jimmy looks at her, aghast: Connie is Jewish, as Dad well knows.  Kelly sighs dramatically, but keeps eating big gulps, has hardly dented the enormous mound of food on her plate.

“Everybody?” says Ted in a rush.

“Don’t even say it,” says Ernest.

Mary closes her eyes.

Long pause.  “I was just going to say that we need to think what the world will be like for these little girls.”  He smiles benignly, looks at serious Lily, flips a calm open palm toward April, but his heart pounds as if he’s being chased, or as if he’s been in a crash.

“Can we take the billboard down?” says Ernest, smiling hard.  He’s still talking about Ted’s mural, trying to make it a joke, trying to break the tension, but there’s not a jot of humor in his face.

“What I want to know,” says Mary evenly, “is the source of all this emotion today.”

“Pinkos,” says Dad, smiling hard like Ernest, as red in the face.

“Why is everyone fighting?” says April.

“No one’s fighting, dear,” says Dad.

“Nazis,” Kelly says.

Jimmy says:  “What’s the biggest flounder ever caught?”

Ah, Jimmy.  Dad leaps up and rushes to the living room to get the record book and an encyclopedia, and soon he’s reading loudly about flatfish, fluke, and flounder.

Suddenly Kelly looks up, fixes Ted in her thoughtful gaze.  “If you ask me,” she says, “I think it’s remark­able how these good upright men can do the work they do for Dow and Union Carbide and still want to have children.  Jail’s too good for them.”

“Three hundred forty pounds!” Dad cries.

“No flounder’s that big,” Ernest says.

“Goddamn it.”  This is Mom, just a whisper, barely even a sound, but everyone has heard her.  Ted looks at her a minute.  She is looking at her plate.

“Have the bulbs gone in?” Kelly says.  “Mom Lyons?  Have you got the tulips in yet?”

“I’ve given up on flowers,” Mom says.

“Criminey,” says Dad.

That’s good for more silence.

Ted realizes he’s panting, has run a race, is still sprinting.  He can’t imagine how much whiskey it would take to calm him.  He looks to Mary, Mary dressed more formally than the rest of the family, Mary detached in her pleasant way from all the hubbub, an only child who’s found herself in the center ring of a circus.  Ernest’s beautiful Mary.  Ted bumps her knee with his own.  He looks up at his image of her in the mural.  It’s sexy, it’s good, it’s dangerous.  He leans to her, whis­pers, “I love you.”

She turns to him, incredulous, and though she’s heard him she whispers back, “What?”

And Ted rises, as if to make a toast.  He grips the table edge and begins to shake it.  Kelly laughs, Ha ha ha, and Lily pats his back.  Dad frowns at the rattling of the glassware. Mom says, “Theodore, stop.”  Ernest shakes his head, rolls his eyes.  Jimmy puts his hands up, a calming gesture, looks as though he’s seeing a dangerous stranger.  Connie laughs at the joke of it, generous as always, keeps laughing even as her face registers that there’s no joke.

Ted says, “Everybody?” and shakes the table harder.

“Teddy?” Mary says gently.

“Now, Ted.  Ted E. Boy,” Dad says soothingly.

Ernest stands too, puts a hand on the table to steady it.

Ted looks up at his mural, the images of each of his siblings, his parents, his nieces, his sisters-in-law.  He feels calm, composed, sure of himself for the first time maybe ever.  He gives a croak and heaves his side of the table into the air.  Ernest’s hand upon it is as nothing to Ted’s strange strength.  The plates across the way slide into Connie’s lap, into Jimmy’s.  Jimmy leaps up, catches the lighted candles as they head for the floor.  Bean hops and perches out of the way on her chair, delighted.  Big Kelly saves baby Erin, stands and spins, but Connie’s too late, stays in her armless chair, catches the table in her lap, shrieks.

Ted heaves again, and the half-carved turkey shoots full speed onto Jimmy’s feet before he can put the candles down, before he can do anything.  The creamed onions go to Connie, who’s squawking, trapped, legs bruised for certain.  The yams go to Beaner who—thrilled—knocks her chair over making the catch.  The silverware clangs hitting the plates and glasses, which smash in quick series as they hit the hardwood floor.  Beaner saves the salad, heavy wooden bowl, holds it a moment, then takes the opportunity to fling lettuce and tomato and round slices of carrot gaily in the air.  The centerpiece, a bowl of ceramic fruit, slides quickly and crashes.  The tablecloth slides away.  Baby Erin laughs, Kelly pants, April wails.  Only Mary has managed to save her plate, and holds it stoically as Connie in her struggles tilts her own chair till it falls, bringing the huge table all the way down on top of her.  Jimmy cries out, gives the table another heave to free his wife.  Dad stands with his eyebrows raised, still holding the encyclopedia.  Mom moans.  Thanksgiving dinner is on the floor.  Everyone turns to stare at Ted, stands frozen, mouths open, hands upraised, frozen like that forever.

“Everybody?” Ted says finally.  He looks mystified.

“Gonna deck you,” says Ernest.

Connie has started to cry.

Lily, she just pats her Uncle Teddy’s back.

“We’ll get this picked up in no time,” Dad says, as if the whole thing were a common Thanksgiving mishap.  “No time at all!”