Short Stories

for the ages!

Clubs are Trump

Edward was teaching a little girl how to play Caveman the other day; it’s a very popular card game in his extended family, in which clubs are trump. There was some question about whether the little girl was old enough to understand the concept of trump. I should make it clear that this was during the Trump presidential campaign of 2016. It was almost like the word had two meanings every time he used it, but he had to use it, to describe the card game.

Edward was retired and living in a public housing complex where rent was cheap. He’d taken to playing solitaire in the courtyard. When one 13-year-old, Ayesha, and her friend, came by, he taught them Caveman. They came around a lot, mostly in the afternoon, after school. This afternoon, Ayesha had brought her sister, Lili. Lili was about six, maybe. The afternoon sun shone into the courtyard. Ayesha, he had gotten to know, over the last few weeks; she was pretty, with olive skin and frizzy hair. Lili looked like her too; she was pretty, with the same dark brown eyes, and a look of innocence.

Compared to the other card games that used trump, bridge, hearts and spades for example, Caveman was relatively simple. On the first hand everyone got one card, and bet, one or zero, based on whether they thought they would win. Next hand, they got two, and bet two, one or zero; and on up to ten, and then back down to one, so there were nineteen hands altogether. The only thing that mattered was whether you bet right. If you bet too much, you got no points. If you scored way over what you bet, you got no points. But if you bet right, you got ten points and whatever you’d made.

Edward focused on teaching little Lili the game, but every time he said the word “trump” he thought about the election. From Edward’s point of view there was nothing much good about the election or the campaign. Trump, it seemed to him, was a shallow liar who just kept changing the subject or refusing to deal with things he’d said or done in the past. But this is not about his campaign, right or wrong, or his character, or the things he believed in, if any. It’s mostly about how you have this important idea, in cards, and now, every time you try to express it, or hear it, you hear this name. As he spoke he realized that he cringed every time he said it. He was no longer able to describe a card game easily.

And to the little girl, it was a hard concept to learn. She had just barely figured out that a nine was better than an eight, which was better than a seven, etc. Now Edward was telling her that clubs always win, it doesn’t matter the number. Two of clubs beat that ace of hearts. Clubs were trump; that means they’re the best, and you can’t argue with that.

The girl made a horrible wrenching face, and Edward couldn’t figure out if the problem was that she was getting the information from an old man, or she just didn’t like the information itself. Ayesha squirmed in delight. She loved the game, and was getting the hang of it, and was eager to gamble whether her single card would win among the three of them. She clearly had had so much fun playing Caveman, in the last three or four days, that she’d gone directly home and told everyone about it. Lili for one decided to come out and try it out. Ayesha was a pro already, quite good at the game; she had no trouble with the concept of trump.

As it turned out, in that hand, Edward had a six of hearts, and Lili had a ten of diamonds, but Ayesha had a three of clubs and won. And she was overjoyed because she had bet one. Lili hadn’t really bet, since it was a trial run, but she was devastated that she lost. Ayesha, in her older-sisterly type way, tried to convince her that that’s the way the game went. To Ayesha, it was simple, and it was a lot of fun.

Lili had a little fit, right there, and turned her lip, pouted, and then cried. To her it was simple. She had a ten, but her sister had a three. They tried to explain it to her several times. Her little lower lip stayed out. She wasn’t buying it. She was clearly unhappy.

Edward looked at the girls in the afternoon light. Little Lili had a bruise on her cheek. These were common in young kids, but it made people suspicious. It made Edward suspicious. They lived with their mom and stepfather. The stepfather wasn’t very nice, or so he suspected, though it was none of his business. It was only his concern, because he was retired and played solitaire a lot. In general, as the days turned into weeks, he tried to stay out of it.

He knew what he knew about the family from Ayesha, because they were actually pretty good friends. Many afternoons Ayesha would join him, and there were many afternoons before they even started playing cards, and a few after they started playing cards. Was it his fault that they liked playing cards? For several weeks Ayesha would come straight out to the courtyard and play cards with him, right after school. It was in plain sight. He was careful not to do anything to arouse her mother’s suspicion. The mother would see them, or watch them, from her kitchen window. The mother was actually pretty nice to him; she’d come out a few times to get Ayesha for dinner. Ayesha, in turn, would tell him about the family, tell him about school, and surely, tell the family everything she could learn about Edward or about such things as Caveman. It was a pretty good relationship, except that the stepfather loomed over it. When the stepfather came out, he was not very friendly. There seemed to be a threat of violence in everything he did. He’d barely look at Edward. It was almost as if he couldn’t bear anyone having influence over the girls except him.

The next hand, Ayesha was the dealer. Edward got a ten of clubs and an ace of clubs, and bid two. Ayesha looked at Lili’s hand and together they didn’t know what to bid; they finally bid one for Lili. Ayesha herself bid one and played a jack of clubs.

Now Edward had a choice – lose on purpose, and give Ayesha her one by playing the ten, or just rolling right over her with the ace and taking both. Either way, Lili would lose. But here he had the impulse to let Ayesha win, and he played the ten.

He had let her win before. She was familiar with his style, and she knew that sometimes he was as cutthroat as anyone, and would play to win; other times he was generous and let a little thirteen-year-old feel good. She would find out, in this case, that he’d let her win. But it all didn’t matter really. If it had mattered, he wouldn’t have let her look at Lili’s hand. He was beginning to realize that Lili hadn’t really mastered the idea of trump, and she was still struggling with the concept of how you figured out who won. In this hand she had the queen of diamonds and the queen of hearts. It was a very pretty hand, but she got zero. She lost to the trump, and she lost to the ace. When she asked what she got, her sister said, “nothing,” and she burst into tears again.

Fortunately it was dinner time, and the stepfather was on his way out to retrieve the girls. Thin and gaunt-looking, with a tattoo on his arm, he looked ominous. All he said was “Girls, dinner,” but the hostility was oozing out of him. Edward couldn’t figure out if perhaps he had hit Lili, or what, and he wondered if this was something he should get involved in. Ayesha made a face, but got up to go with him. Lili was a little slower, still trying to figure out why she got “nothing” and what it meant. It didn’t mean anything, Edward wanted to say; go get dinner. Finally the stepfather said “Now!” and the little girl wet her pants on her way, getting up out of the chair and turning around to run home. She was in tears. Edward had not explained well enough the concept of trump. Or perhaps, he should have engineered it so she was the winner.

The following day he changed his routine. He went out in the courtyard in the morning, and he was gone in the afternoon. He didn’t want to face either of the girls, or hear any more about it. He was retired, and wanted to be left alone for a while. He didn’t turn people in for little bruises; turning in kids and families to the authorities was serious business. But he doubted himself. He wondered if being proactive was better, in case he could prevent worse things from happening later. As usual, he was trying not to get involved. It was the mom’s problem, and if she didn’t want to see what he saw, he figured, that was her business.

But the little card game replayed itself in his mind in the next couple of days. He thought of the way the girl was stuck on the idea of “clubs win no matter what” – it sounded to him, sometimes, like “Dad is right no matter what,” or “just do whatever Dad says no matter how low he is.” A girl like that was naturally trying out her own independence, and taking a little beating for it.

And the news, of course, was full of Trump, Trump this, Trump that, Trump and the 13-year-old girl, Trump and the mistreatment of his underlings at this or that business. Eventually Edward turned off the television too, and took solace in a game of solitaire that was mentally rigorous, and almost impossible to win, but still relaxing, and made more so by a sip of alcohol in his own kitchen.

Eastern Elbow Time

Ken’s job was to sit by Lydia’s side while his wife and her mother, Lydia’s partner, went out for groceries, in a busy neighborhood of Miami. He had known Lydia, a tennis pro, for many years, and they had gotten along well, although now dementia had set in, Lydia was near death, and it wasn’t as fun as it used to be to talk to her. Every few minutes, she’d ask what time it was. Ken would say, patiently, 10:15, or whatever, but he had to bite his tongue to prevent giving him the wise-guy answer from his youth, “Two freckles past a hair – eastern elbow time!”

As a child, growing up in a boisterous family outside Pittsburgh, this answer was almost a matter of pride – that one didn’t wear a watch, and didn’t care, and you could get more precise on how little one cared, but still, anybody who actually wants the time in a place where kids are playing hard, well, they’re pretty much on their own. His siblings and their friends lived a kind of boisterous, outdoor life, and very rarely were focused on the demands of the civilized world. When his little brother would say “Leave me alone!” he would frequently say, “How much, a thousand, two thousand?” with the same kind of torturous reference to a real world he neither cared for nor had any solid connection to.

But now, fifty years later, he sat at the tennis pro’s bedside, and was concerned that a reference to “elbow” might stir unpleasant memories, or at the very least confuse her, at a time when she needed reassurance. He liked Lydia, and cared for her a lot, though these times, when he was in charge of her, were difficult for him. In the past they had shared a lot of stories, and they shared a kind of ruthless competitiveness that probably was hard on both his wife Ann, and her mother, Jane. Ken could tell, sometimes, as Ann and Jane slipped out the door, that they relished their time away from their partners, though it could just be, in Jane’s case, that Lydia had become very difficult to care for. Her decline was rapid, her dementia more serious every day, and, though they had chosen to keep her out of a hospice facility, they were pretty sure her time was limited.

One time, Lydia had come back from a tennis tournament, beaten by a woman whose primary trick was throwing off the timing of the opponent. She’d built in a kind of fake start, and was just unpredictable enough with it so that she’d only serve when she was pretty sure the opponent was off-balance. It worked. She wasn’t a great server or even a great tennis player, but she’d throw off her opponents often enough, that she’d pick up enough points for a win. And she’d beaten Lydia that way.

Ken’s own story had to do with dynamite, though now, he couldn’t remember how he’d related the two stories. A good fifteen years of his life involved dynamite and blowing things up, often in remote places that involved extended concentration over days or even weeks, to get back to whatever bridge, road or building was going to fall. Part of blowing things up was superimposing a countdown on a real world clock and counting back from that zero hour to plan everything else out. At Jane and Lydia’s, he’d tell the stories of blowing things up. Once, though, Ann pointed out that the professional cook had the same situation, counting down with every course of a meal, so that it would all be hot and ready and beautiful at that last zero-minute, all at once. And this had stung him deeply, because the implication was that the cook spent his life feeding people and making them happy, whereas he’d spent his life destroying things. It was as a result of that comment that he changed his career, and became a professional cook. It wasn’t as dramatic a change as you would suspect, and Ken was able to pull it off pretty well; he was a good cook, and even now, was satisfied with his life and where it had gone. Sometimes Ann complained that his competitive nature robbed her of the joy of cooking, but there was no question they ate pretty well as a couple, and were able to feed their friends and relatives pretty well, too. Just last night he had cooked Jane a fancy dinner, and they sat and talked about old times, better times, for a long time into the evening.

Another time when they had been visiting, he had asked Lydia why, in tennis, one would have “love” when one had nothing. At least once every game, he said, one person would have “love,” and that would mean he had nothing. Of course, said Lydia, because the game comes from the French, “love” is actually “l’oeuf” or “the egg.” Actually that player has the egg, which is not really nothing, but kind of looks like a zero. But this answer didn’t satisfy Ken either; it was almost like the explanation was more confusing than the problem itself. And he went back and forth with Lydia; she would ask him why he was in the dynamite trade, for example, or ask him why it was that old man Nobel felt so guilty about blowing things up that he’d gone and started the Peace Prize. Their relationship was refreshingly honest, in a family in which many things went unspoken. She told him bluntly about fallings out in her own family, particularly about her being with Jane, but the same conversations never took place in the rest of Jane and Ann’s family. Lydia and Ken told the truth to each other, almost always, and that made their relationship unusual.

Ken slowly became aware that Ann and Jane would probably be late again. There was no question Miami’s traffic was horrible. And sure, they needed to get away; sure, they’d get a coffee, and perhaps talk, at the grocery store. They’d say things they couldn’t say around Ken or Lydia, and maybe they’d lose track of the time. But on his end, each minute seemed to last forever. Lydia was quiet most of the time, so he listened for every noise in the driveway.

But then, Lydia woke up suddenly, asked for some water, and began to talk to Ken with unusual lucidity, after asking for the time, of course. It was now about 10:28, and he told her so, biting his tongue again to prevent being a wise-guy; he expected Ann and Jane to be back at about 10:50, allowing for Miami’s traffic. She told him, more or less out of the blue, that she had always enjoyed talking to him, and that she had no regrets about her life. She said that she felt they shared that certain feeling that you get in a tennis match, of wanting everything to go right, and turn out well, to do the best you possibly can. He looked at her in the morning light, which came through the bedroom window; she was unusually beautiful, even though death was almost entirely taking over. And she seemed to be carefully telling him everything she wanted him to know, possibly knowing she wouldn’t have another chance. He stopped, almost breathless himself, and simply listened.

He had heard stories of people dying, and in fact had been by his own mother’s bedside just a couple of years ago, as she had died. Sometimes dying people see people who have gone before them, and even talk to them. Sometimes they are sure that a car is waiting for them, or that they are about to meet someone. And he knew that it could be that dying people know more than we do, and see more, and it’s not just the delusions of people who are beginning to lose their handle on reality. With Lydia, it didn’t seem like any of this was happening, but there was no doubt that the time was close. Having said what she wanted to, she fell back into a deep, restless sleep, and he simply sat by her side and watched her. At one point she woke up again, and once more she asked him the time. It was now 10:50, and he told her, once again hearing “two freckles past a hair” clearly in his mind, a clarion call from his own past, wandering around in the woods. Again she fell back asleep. Jane and Ann were expected any minute; undoubtedly Miami traffic was worse than they’d thought.

For a while Ken drifted off into daydreaming; he thought again of times in his childhood when most of what he said was things like “two freckles past a hair,” and “How much, a thousand? Two thousand?” The first, he actually liked, because it represented a simpler time, when one didn’t carry cell phones, and have that electronic fact burned into your home screen; it was a reminder that you could be disconnected, or oriented toward more physical things. The second, though, had an edge to it, and ignored the speaker’s need to be left alone. This was the problem, he thought, with big families, and probably one of the main reasons he never had kids. You were never left alone. No matter how obnoxious your siblings were, you were stuck with them and their big mouths, every minute.

He snapped out of his daydream when Lydia stirred, and something seemed to change. Suddenly, in her sleep, she began to lose her spirit altogether, and she stopped breathing, right in front of him. At the same time he knew it was bound to happen at some time, he was totally unprepared for it, when it did happen; he didn’t cry, or shake her, or try to talk her back to life; he simply watched, surprised. It was not that she hadn’t been able to say good-bye to Jane or Ann, it was more that it seemed, that, if there were no accidents, she had chosen to die in a room alone with him, at that moment. Was that possible? He was shocked, and didn’t know what to make of it. The moment stayed with him, even as he watched the color leave her face; she had clearly died.

When Jane and Ann came home, only ten or fifteen minutes later, they too were shocked, but immediately went into arrangements mode – they called the funeral home; they began to do things that they’d been planning to do anyway – call the family, distribute her belongings. Ken was in a daze for a few days, basically remembering the two images: Lydia, beautiful, by the window, the morning light on her, and Lydia, dying suddenly, slipping away, without warning Ann or Jane. And even though the funeral and beyond, it wasn’t discussed – they simply didn’t talk about such things.

(9-16)

Shower of Fear

Kevin flew into Baltimore on a stressful flight from Dallas at about 5 in the afternoon. The roads in Maryland curved around, with woods and greenery on either side of them. He made sure he would be able to get to his hotel downtown, not far from the airport, but there was a horrific accident on the interstate that filled the shuttle passengers with stress. The shuttle driver himself didn’t seem to flinch, but that was his job; he drove right by it like it was an everyday thing. Downtown, cars seemed to be driving too fast, too aggressively, for Kevin’s taste. He was eager to check in to the hotel, drop his bags off, and take a shower before the evening’s activities.

His plan was to go to a reunion of his battalion in Vietnam, of people he’d known maybe 45 years ago. They were a wild bunch of guys, but they got together periodically to relive their war years, and they usually drank like crazy. The reunion was his plan for the evening, though he planned on skipping the heavy drinking part, to ensure his own survival, and call it an early night. In the morning, a friend of the family, Will Murphy, had agreed to come downtown for breakfast at about ten. Then he’d turn around and head back to Texas. That was it. He was in Baltimore basically overnight.

In Texas they’d warned him that Baltimore had a lot of crime. In fact several friends had mentioned that, and one had warned him to be careful. So before he left he took an old wallet, one he had gotten in Vietnam, and put it in his back pocket; he put his money in his front pocket. This was a trick he’d picked up in Paris one time many years back, that assumed pickpockets or robbers would go for the back one. He felt silly, making compromises to fear, when in fact he’d been in Vietnam for years; having survived a war, he should be able to survive Baltimore.

He couldn’t really tell by looking at it, but it seemed there was a pretty high level of fear here, that he didn’t really experience in Texas. Texas was dangerous, yes, everyone was armed, and half of them were crazy, but here everyone seemed to be afraid, no matter who they were. People looked at him quickly, or looked away; they were in a state of alert, but not direct communication. He’d gotten this impression just from the shuttle and what little interaction he’d had before he checked in.

He took the wallets out of his pants and got ready for the shower. In the shower, as often happened, his war years all came back to him. One night his battalion had been attacked by raining missiles that had landed randomly around their encampment and killed several of his buddies. It was a very long day and a half, in which he’d gotten some sleep, but was so afraid that he rarely slept well, that night or any night after that. And Kevin had only been a radio dispatcher, for the most part out of the worst of the action, not in as much danger as everyone else. But it had still damaged him, left him permanently afraid of things like hail or even falling walnuts. In the shower, occasionally, it would come back to him, and once, back in his drinking days, he’d collapsed in the shower and almost died. It was soon after that that he’d given up drinking altogether. But he came to the reunions regularly. Rather than trying to forget everything, as some of his mates had tried, he purposely relived it, as much as he could, even if it took a plane flight and a weekend to do it. He got it out of his system.

He walked to the reunion dinner, which was at a hotel near his, downtown. People looked away from him as he walked in the streets; it was already getting dark. One old guy asked him for money under his breath, more or less. Kevin stopped and gave him a dollar, and the guy seemed genuinely surprised that anyone would recognize his humanity; people for the most part had ignored him, except for the police of course, who probably would have run him out of there if they’d had a chance. The guy himself seemed to be living in fear, almost as if by standing there he too could be victimized, by someone, anyone, especially if they thought he had anything.

Kevin slowly became more aware of a number of guys like this; they’d come downtown, out of money, out of options, probably feeding off the tourist trade or the Orioles game in one way or the other, criminal in some cases, and probably not, in others; just begging was not necessarily against the law. One guy, though, shuffled past him, mumbling something about cocaine. Kevin knew that if he’d stopped this guy, he’d probably end up seeing the whole city, as the guy took him around, at his expense, trying to get him whatever he needed. Kevin said nothing though. His days of doing that kind of stuff were over; he wanted nothing to do with this. He watched all the people carefully, though. He saw some, dressed in orange and black for the game, or others, just dressed up, wandering around downtown going from restaurant to bar or to the Inner Harbor. Many seemed to be tourists like him; sometimes, you couldn’t tell. The large seagulls at the inner harbor flew back and forth, watching for scraps; the inner harbor smelled like the sea, but it was doubtful that any fish had made it in that far. The seagulls were after tourist food.

At the reunion dinner, he sat with Dave, a guy he didn’t know too well, who was actually from Baltimore. He had to admit to Dave that it was a pretty city, with old buildings, the smell of the sea, old boats in the harbor, crab cakes everywhere, a kind of rustic charm to it. Dave accepted the compliments, and gave him some advice. He was all too aware of the fears people carried around, of just the feeling of having to watch out, downtown, stay out where everyone can see you, and get out of there before it got too late. Dave took all the public transport, which was actually pretty good, he said, and allowed him to go places without parking, which was important. But he said it was a world of its own, and there was fear everywhere. He told about the Lincicum line, and the Howard line, and how there always seemed to be more guys at the bus stop than actually got on the bus, because those were places where you could stand around, and decide what to do next, and not get run out of downtown for having nowhere to go. Kevin admitted that this was new to him; even public transport itself was unheard of, pretty much, in his part of Texas.

A wild spirit prevailed at he reunion, and sure enough all the old buddies, after dinner and ceremony, retreated to some serious drinking around the city. Some of the guys had planned long and hard for this wild drunk, were well prepared, and had even scouted out the best places. They drank like they never drank elsewhere, hard and seriously, and they watched out for each other in the process. But all of them had been damaged in the war. One, Jones, had told the story of how his teenage daughter had made a loud sound behind him once, accidentally, and he swung around and hit her so hard he’d almost killed her. He was sorry; she was his own daughter, and he had no pent up hostility toward her. But he had pent-up something, and it had come out of him so fast he couldn’t even control it. And most of the guys were like that. In a pinch, you wouldn’t want them snapping on you, in Baltimore or anywhere else. So when the program was over and the drinking showed signs of getting serious, Kevin excused himself and made his way back to his hotel.

Now it was more like eleven, and the night was taking a turn for the serious, even though his hotel was maybe only ten blocks away. Another black guy shuffled by him mumbling, and at a bus stop a white kid asked him for a couple of dollars; he said he’d lost his wallet at the game, and was from the Eastern Shore, and was stranded, and needed to take the bus out to where someone could pick him up.

Kevin, a little angry this time, gave him a couple of bucks, and the guy was grateful. Kevin was angry because basically he didn’t believe the guy. And he didn’t feel like it mattered. So he was from the Eastern Shore – did that make him more trustworthy somehow? All the elements of his story – they could be true; then again, maybe not. His uneasiness ate away at him while he walked.

He was glad to make it back to the hotel without incident. He didn’t know how those old guys from Nam did it, staying out beyond eleven, in this kind of place; maybe they were looking for trouble, looking for a fight, or just wanted to see what would happen. Back in the hotel, he washed it all off with another shower. It didn’t quite make him feel better; in fact, it made him wide awake, and finally, he looked out his window for a long while, way down at the street below - the cars, the people walking the streets at midnight. A town like this, he thought, never sleeps.

In the morning Will Murphy was glad to see him, and they ate crab omelets at some place he had picked out as good, downtown. One thing you had to admit about Baltimore, he told Will, and that is they know how to eat crab. Will was in his eighties, with a big tuft of gray hair, and said he didn’t mind coming downtown, as long as it was morning. It was familiar to him; it was home. He liked the Orioles, and being near Camden Yards, but rarely went to games. He seemed reasonably happy, though he’d outlived his wife, and all his old friends, and even two of his children.

When Kevin mentioned the reunion, though, and all his old war buddies, Will told about his World War Two reunions. Most of those guys, he said, are gone now, even the ones who lived through the war, and they had suffered the same kind of trauma and shock that Kevin and his friend Jones had suffered. They had been in a wide area in Germany, on a large hillside, and Germans came through by the thousands, killing almost everyone. It was just by chance, he said, that he himself had been in a kind of ditch, and looked dead already, and they passed him by. There had been nothing anyone could do; they were vastly outnumbered; they couldn’t save their fellow soldiers, even if they had done anything different. In their reunions, the survivors talked about the randomness of it, how three out of four of them had died that night, and the remaining ones often got together and simply wondered why they were lucky enough to still be alive. They felt guilty, he said, because it was all so random, and there was so little anyone could do for each other.

The morning sun came into the restaurant as people came and went, and the waitress brought out plate after plate of food. She had a slight black eye and a hardened look, but maintained her cheerful disposition. At one point, some guy came into the restaurant at the front, disheveled, hungry looking, and with a single dirty look she sent him on his way. Nothing here for you at this moment, her look said.

Will, lost in thought for a moment, finally leaned a little closer to him and said, basically, that the crazy thing about that war was that on some level, he knew those Germans were just like him. He could have been doing the running through the hillside, killing everyone, but he happened to be face down in a ditch. Or he could be firing his gun down on a whole hillside of enemy soldiers, as he was at some point, instead of being on a hillside, having bullets rain down on him from above, as he had been on another night, or maybe a couple of nights. It was all just the luck of the draw. He’d been on both sides. For some reason, he was still alive, and he had a twinkle in his eye.

His spirit restored Kevin’s faith, to some degree. He still had to get out to the airport, and at the same time Will was doing some errand downtown and catching some bus out to the suburbs. But Will was up for it. He liked Baltimore, and was perfectly happy to stay here the rest of his days.

Going home, Kevin’s flight took him through Austin, instead of Dallas; that was a completely different experience. People were more upbeat, looking forward to a good time, and whatever business they were doing, it was likely a different kind of business than what you’d go to Baltimore for. He was surprised, really, that you could fill up a plane with people going from Baltimore to Austin, but apparently they had no trouble filling the plane. The announcements by the pilot always reminded him of his radio dispatcher days, when he heard some really scary stuff, but the pilot welcomed them and told them everything would be fine. He said the weather was good in Texas, but there was a chance of hail out in the plains. Hail is one thing that made Kevin very nervous; he’d go out of his way to avoid it. But on an airplane, and traveling in general, one had the feeling that it was all out of one’s control. You go where the planes take you, and if you happen to hit some turbulence, well, you just hold on until it gets easier. And once you got out on the highway, it was pretty much a straight shot, wherever you were going, anyway. Just stay awake, and don’t let it get to you. He reached down to his pants, and noticed that the wallet was gone, the one he’d gotten in Vietnam. His first thought was that it had been pickpocketed. But then he remembered; he’d left it by the shower in the hotel. Empty as it was, it was a tip for the housekeepers. And he wasn’t really using it much anyway.

9-16

House Party

House Party

Three dogs lit into the kitchen garbage with an intensity and joy that was almost unbelievable, riveting to those who saw it, from the start. The biggest dog, a black lab, was a good climber and also had the best method for opening the lid of the garbage can. He, it seemed, was doing the hardest work. He was being egged on by a medium-sized orangish terrier and a little black Chihuahua. The terrier couldn’t believe his luck. He jumped on his back legs pawing furiously at whatever the lab delivered to him. He barked for more. His shrill cries of joy filled the air.

One by one, the lab pulled empty packages of bacon, uneaten hot dogs, a box of cookies that was down to its scraps, and wadded up paper towels out of the garbage. The wadded up paper towels had been used to clean up the bacon, so the terrier and the Chihuahua lit into them as if they were starved and hadn’t had bacon grease for years. They ripped them into little pieces, swallowing parts of each towel in their frantic excitement. And yet, the lab kept delivering more: this paper towel was full of coffee grounds, which spread out all over the kitchen. And then there were egg shells, which dripped uncooked egg as they rolled around in the pile of garbage on the floor. There were containers with partly eaten lunches in them, and at one point what remained of Chinese take-out – the soy sauce and rice, they spread furiously around the kitchen, as they tore up the cardboard and tried to get at the little meat scraps that were tucked into the folds of the cardboard.

This wild hedonistic party was being recorded by a single cell phone, which had been propped up on a nearby table, with the movie function on, focused at a point about two feet from the garbage can. So, in effect, the viewers saw much of the joy of the dogs, tearing and ripping at the bacon package, for instance, or tearing up the paper towels, but they didn’t see much of the lab, except his tail, and the fact that it was he who actually pulled the food packages out of the garbage can. In other words, there was plenty of evidence that the black lab was the main culprit. But much of the time, you couldn’t see directly that he was doing it. The other two dogs excitedly waited for each piece, and barked at him to keep it coming. The terrier scrambled from one piece to another, barking all the while.

The lab was clearly being egged on by the terrier, and trying to impress him. The terrier acted like he had never been at such a party, never experienced such joy, never tasted forbidden delights like paper towels wadded up in bacon grease. He acted like he’d been cooped up all his life, going to obedience school, obeying his masters, and now, he was free in the world, free to do as he wished, to run with the bad dogs, to indulge in whatever garbage suited his fancy. He moved from one piece of garbage to another, frantically tearing things up and spreading coffee grounds all over the kitchen, but he couldn’t concentrate on any given thing, and in his haste he would often leave delicious morsels, not even seeing them, going from thing to thing in a desperate attempt to experience all the forbidden joys of life.

The Chihuahua, however, was more systematic, more evil, and more experienced. He’d teamed up with the lab before, and he knew how this worked. He knew how to get the lab to deliver to him everything he wanted, and he wasn’t bothered that the terrier got to some of it first. He also knew that there were chicken bones at the bottom of the garbage; he could smell them, and he knew that the lab was the only one capable of getting them and delivering them. But, toward the end of the lab’s frenzy, out came the chicken bones! Some had fallen into an empty donut box with a clear plastic window. Easy enough to rip up the box and pull the chicken bones out one by one. The Chihuahua lit into them knowing that the owners could come back at any moment, ending the entire party. It was a live-for-the-moment experience, like hitting the jackpot at Vegas. Get it all now while you can; you’ll remember this moment forever.

The owners in fact were nowhere nearby; they had gone for a walk, and it was a long rambling walk through the city park and wasn’t liable to end for at least an hour. Because the dogs got a good jump on them, an hour was more than enough to tear into every single piece of the overfull garbage can, and the cell phone caught the whole 55-minute rampage, somehow having enough battery and enough space to make a wild movie. In terms of pure food, there was no doubt that the Chihuahua had gotten more than his share, as he’d been systematic, ruthless and aggressive, whereas the terrier was in such an emotional frenzy that he missed much of it, and the lab, of course, was busy with the art of pulling it out of the garbage itself. The owner of the house, Angela, was actually the owner of only the lab, and lived with a number of roommates of both genders, thus the bad diet choices, but she had been watching, and thus responsible for, the other two dogs. She, of course, was a bit dismayed upon her return, to see her kitchen look like a tornado had gone through it. The Chihuahua belonged to Burt, the guy she had gone on the walk with. Burt was actually a little proud of his Chihuahua, for so aggressively rampaging through an obvious treasure. The terrier belonged to a neighbor; in fact, it was true that the neighbor had been quite protective of the terrier, and the terrier had never been in such a situation before.

It was the neighbor, however, a woman named Laura, who put the entire movie on YouTube, ensuring that the three dogs would be famous for the rest of their lives. The movie got over three million hits, with many people watching it four or five times. One thing that was riveting about the movie was that the action never stopped: bacon package, donut box, fortune cookies, leftover pizza, rat poison…wait! Did I say rat poison? Yes, and in fact, people became fixed on that rat poison, because it added a bit of risk and danger to the entire movie. The dogs were oblivious to the poison, and selective; they left it alone; they had better things to tear into. But there was rat poison in the garbage, and it was clearly visible in the movie; later Angela admitted that she had used it and thrown it away, and thought it was safe from the dogs, wrongly of course.

Another thing that made the movie popular was the clearly different personalities of the dogs themselves, who seemed like they’d never had so much fun in their lives. It was the party of all parties, the wild festival of greasy plastic and food scraps, spilled oil and coffee grounds. For most viewers, it was forty or fifty minutes of the wildest most uncontrolled joy ever witnessed. And the three had a mutually symbiotic relationship. The lab was enjoying being the provider. The Chihuahua, with his constant low barking, made sure that the lab never got tired, made it all the way to the bottom. The terrier in his frenzy made high-energy chaos that really set this off in the world of YouTube – it had something over your average movie.

One little scene at the end, however, showed a very remorseful black lab, with a very guilty look in his eyes, as his owner, Angela, scolded him for being such a bad dog. In fact, as many of the three million viewers pointed out, she was a bad owner, because she had somehow forgotten to put the garbage out of the lab’s reach, and had left three dogs at home alone with a garbage can full of chicken bones and rat poison. The pressure became so great on the local animal control people that they came and served Angela with a citation for endangering dogs, to make the point that one should not allow dogs to do things that so clearly endangered them. Angela ended up being remorseful, not because she had such a huge mess to clean up, but because she had a nasty little fine to pay, and she was famous around town; when she went to the Wal-Mart, even the clerks knew her as the woman whose dogs tore up her kitchen. So many people had seen the movie, so many times, with her face clearly visible in part of it, that she now had a kind of fame around town, where the movie had been seen perhaps more than in other places. One man even found her name and called her up, saying he was looking for a black lab, and hadn’t been able to find one, and figured she might give him hers, since she clearly wasn’t taking very good care of it. She got angry, though, and said she always took good care of the lab; she walked him, and threw sticks for him at the park, and always fed him regularly. She couldn’t explain his orgy of bad behavior, of course, but didn’t feel that warranted having the dog taken away from her. She loved the dog. In fact, she was glad to see that, after the severe scolding, things went back to normal, more or less, except that they were both famous now, whenever they did go on walks.

As for Burt, though, that relationship between Burt and Angela didn’t last long. They had just met each other, but by the end of the walk in the park it was obvious they wouldn’t be a very good match. Both were in school and both had busy lives of work, school, extracurricular activities, other things. It was his attitude toward the kitchen, however, that tipped her off. He didn’t care how much work it would be to clean it up, nor did he offer to help clean it up; he even seemed to get some pleasure out of his dog’s getting the better of some woman that he’d just met. She sent him on his way, and they didn’t see him or the Chihuahua for a long time. She also changed her living situation the following semester. Sometimes, having a dog meant you couldn’t be choosy about your housemates. But you could get away from the extreme kinds of things her present roommates ate.

She did stay in the house, though, until the end of the semester. For many months afterward, when the terrier came over from the neighbor’s house, he would bark at the lab and get into a posture of playing. When he did this, she could almost imagine, and practically hear, the terrier reminding the lab of the party, and wondering when they would get that kind of chance again. The lab, of course, maintained his utmost loyalty to Angela, bringing her a stick regularly, and maintaining his good-natured temperament, as if it never had happened. But he kept his eyes open, prepared for any possible chance that could come in the future. (9-16)

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Hunger

The Western Bar & Grill, which fortunately served breakfast, was just opening when Darryl and his four friends rolled in, parked, and entered. They had been hunting elk all night, without sleeping at all, and finally decided to go to town to get some breakfast, just about the time the sun was about to rise. The bank stood across from the Western, and the trees beyond that; the town was still, and there weren’t more than a few cars in the whole road.

Once they were seated in a booth, Darryl felt a tinge of tiredness, like he would fall asleep before his breakfast even arrived. But the waitress, Angel, brought coffee right away and the five hunters started arguing more or less the same way they’d been arguing all night. They each had brought different skills to the hunt; Hank knew where to find the elk, Gary knew, or claimed to know, how to get them to go from one place to another; Pete knew how to get the meat out of them when they were down. It turned out the little old guy, Jimmy, didn’t know any of that, but Jimmy was able to get them out of the deepest woods once, at about four in the morning, when all the other four were completely lost. Darryl had brought very few skills to the hunt, but he did have a gun, and he had the hunger for elk; he’d much rather be eating that elk right now, than this Denver omelet that was coming to his table fresh.

But the omelet was good, and the coffee was hot and powerful, and pretty soon Darryl was able to focus better on what each guy was saying. They were still talking about the elk; they all had wanted to bag one, like Darryl. The elk were known to come to town, especially in hunting season, and Angel at one point said she thought they knew it was the only safe place at this time of year. The elk was much larger than deer, harder to kill, far more stubborn, but the question was, how smart was it, and did it really know what it was doing when it stumbled from place to place? They debated for a while. One guy they knew would kill them and only take the head, because he valued the antlers, but not the meat, really; Darryl, however, had tasted the meat, wanted the meat, and valued it, in fact, was hungry for it even on top of this omelet breakfast, and barely able to concentrate as he was.

The Western Bar & Grill had an elk trophy on the wall; it wasn’t looking directly at the five men, but Darryl felt that when he looked at it suddenly, perhaps its eyes were turned his way. That’s ridiculous, he thought, it was dead, there was no way it could be looking at him, or anyone else, it was just a head on the wall. But he remembered one time when he’d brought his young daughter to this very room, for dinner, and she’d become upset that there would be an elk head on the wall, and started asking him all kinds of questions about how it had got there. He actually hunted much less now that she was older, and was never quite able to tell her the whole story, but as an avid hunter with the opportunity to go out with these four friends, he’d had to take them up on it, and go out Dry Canyon together.

Now they got into an argument about where they had been, and in fact, on Hank’s advice, they had gone out Dry Canyon as far as they could drive, and had set out on foot through the woods. Hank was the leader, so everyone was willing to follow his advice for a while; they had circled around a bit, got lost, gone in the wrong direction a ways, and finally figured out how to get back to the canyon and back to the truck they had taken. Now, in the restaurant, they began arguing about whether they had done the right thing. At each point in the night, even at 4 am, in the pitch black darkness of the forest, they had to make these decisions together, all five of them. Now, in the process of reliving them, the same disagreements came up. Hank was kind of a showman. He did it for his image of himself, leading his buddies into the forest and bringing back an elk to brag about. But he wasn’t necessarily right about Dry Canyon; much of his brash confidence with the landscape was unfounded. He repeatedly had to defend his decisions against the challenges of guys who also felt they knew the place.

In fact, Jimmy, for one, was becoming a little agitated. You could say whatever you wanted about the elk themselves; he knew elk, he hunted elk, but he knew he wasn’t an expert. But when you started talking about where things had gone wrong, Jimmy knew that. He knew north from south, he knew a half mile from three-quarters of a mile. It’s like he knew every deer trail up and down every mountain in the forest. And in fact, he probably did. You could argue with him on these details, but you couldn’t win. Darryl knew that without Jimmy, they might not have made it back nearly so easily. So when Jimmy started in about some decision they’d made, way back at some god-forsaken intersection of path and deer-trail, on the side of some mountain out by Dry Canyon, Jimmy was probably right.

Darryl sipped his coffee and remembered the moment. Thousands of stars had covered them as they leaned on their guns and argued, and Darryl had gotten the feeling that if they could just shut up they could hear the elk tromping about; that elk had probably known they were coming a mile away. The point was to find a place where the wind was just right, where the elk couldn’t smell the people, preferably up a little, and get real quiet and wait. But in fact they had never found that place, because they could never agree on where the elk were or where they were going. In the middle of the night, they were still arguing, instead of sitting there silently, waiting for a sure kill. Darryl didn’t know that much about hunting, but he knew that much: that if they were still walking, they weren’t going to get anything.

Angel came back around, and kept filling up their coffees and teasing them about not shooting anything; perhaps they could buy some meat from her husband, she said, and each take it home, and pretend they’d shot it themselves. Deep down, Darryl thought that was a good idea, because he no longer cared about actually shooting the darn thing, he just wanted to eat some. He was still a little delirious from lack of sleep, but fortunately it was a weekend, and nobody was in a hurry to get anywhere, except maybe Jimmy, who had some kind of weekend job as a guide. 

But as they paid their bill and walked out of the Western Bar & Grill, into the morning sun, there was an enormous elk, standing out in the middle of downtown, right in front of the bank, watching them impassively. He had broad shoulders and an enormous rack; to some degree, he was what each of them had been seeing or imagining all night.

You couldn’t shoot him here; he was right in front of the police station, and Ed, the town cop, was just getting to work. Just like Angel said, he knew he was safe, right in the center of town, and he was just looking at them as if to challenge them, or perhaps to mock them. Perhaps he’d followed their truck all the way back from Dry Canyon, or just knew where they were, and where to wait to get a good clear look at them.

Hank was the most offended, and even said something to the elk, as he took it as kind of an affront to all his effort, and felt that, in a personal way, this elk was making him look bad. Jimmy grumbled under his breath, in a hurry to get in the truck and get out of there; to him it was a practical matter. Darryl smiled, watching Hank almost walk over and grab the thing by its antlers. But the image of the elk danced in his eyes, as he was still not sure he was entirely awake. The taste of elk was stronger than ever in his imagination, but it was going to have to wait for another day.

The morning sun was now coming over the trees, and people were beginning to come to town for various reasons, noticing the elk in the process. It wasn’t that big as news; most of them had seen an elk downtown before. This one was like most elk; he didn’t much want to move, but finally was persuaded to lope off, when Angel herself came out with a pan and a big spoon to bang it with, practically right in his ear. He had huge antlers that took up a lot of room and pointed toward the sky pretty much no matter how he turned his head. He glanced at the bank, and took a last look at the five hunters, as if he’d remember their faces, and come back for them later; then, he headed out of town toward the woods. 

In the truck now, the men went their separate ways, and when Darryl got home, he told his wife that he’d seen one, but wasn’t able to shoot anything. It’s just as well, she said, since she'd have been unwilling to cook it, if he had.

8-17-2016