October in the Shawnee

I remember White Eagle was at the campfire the night that a drunk farm kid stumbled in and shared some of his information. There were other people there, too, Grizzly Bob, Smoky Joe, who was a rival of Grizzly Bob, Mac, Fawn, and Chloe, for starters, besides me, but I don’t remember all that clearly, there might have been a few more. It was late already, maybe past eleven, but it didn’t matter in the rainbow campground; people were up all night often, and sometimes things didn’t get started until about midnight.

So-called rainbow people would gather somewhere in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois in October by general agreement; someone would find a place where everyone could camp and they would arrive, often hitchhiking, all through the fall, and then leave when the weather got colder, usually heading for Florida, Texas or warmer climates. Often they knew each other from past gatherings or from staying at one of many rainbow farms or ranches around the country. They fancied themselves modern-day wanderers, living light off the land, never settling for very long, exploring and living out Native American prophecies, learning how to get food from the forest to supplement what they got from dumpsters in town, or from panhandling, or from various other means. Usually visitors brought stuff. The better prepared were ready for about a week or two in the woods.

So, on this night, a kid drives in, parks his truck and walks right past A-camp. A-camp is where the drinkers stay, up by the two-lane, and they stop outsiders and usually get their alcohol and use it up. Sometimes this works well for everyone: the outsider gets a drunken version of what’s going on; the A-campers get a steady supply of alcohol, and everyone else stays deeper in the woods, left alone. This kid got past A-camp somehow, came to the campfire deep inside the encampment, brought something to smoke as an offering, and settled on a log near the fire to talk for a while.

Now I’d hitchhiked down from Maine, on my way to Nevada, and wanted to rest a little; I wasn’t much interested in the talk around the campfire, and in fact was ready to settle in for a good outdoor sleep. I could have easily gone twelve or fourteen hours if they’d let me. But this farm kid started telling about the Indian mounds in the area. When he was growing up around here, he said, his parents told him that there were Indian mounds everywhere, and even pointed them out. They were especially in the lowland areas near the river, but you could find them a ways off the river also. Most were overgrown and worked back into the land so that, since the land was hilly anyway, it was hard to determine what was a natural hill and what was on old Indian mound, covered with trees and brush until you didn’t know what it was.

White Feather pricked up his ears; I know he was taking in every word. He could tell when someone knew what they were talking about. It’s true that the kid was drunk, and had smoked a bit, but it didn’t matter. He’d been in the area all his life. He had no reason to lie. Also, it seemed like there was a reason he was here, in this place, telling this. Sometimes people say stuff because you're meant to hear it. Smoky Joe said right off the bat they ought to form an expedition and go check a few of those Indian mounds out. There was general consensus about that; you see, these rainbow folks like nothing better than a good tromp in the woods, you never know what you’ll find, and a couple of people knew this part of the forest well enough to know a bit about what the kid said about how to get there. The main problem here was a kind of rivalry developing between Smoky Joe and Grizzly Bob.

There were three mounds right over this very bluff, the kid said, and gave directions, though the directions didn't seem very clear to me; I knew very little about this forest. Smoky Joe made him repeat them, but White Feather didn’t need that. He’d heard it well enough the first time.

It was now about three in the morning, but nobody there made any move toward their tent or sleeping bag. The kid kept up with his rambling. He was a nice kid; cowboy hat, blue eyes, slightly slurry in his speech betraying a little of what he'd drunk. Every time it rained, the farm kid said, you’d find arrowheads in the gulleys, but you couldn’t tell if the arrowheads were from the mound people or from the generations of Indians who came through the place later, the more modern ones, who were found by the Europeans when they started canoeing in the place around 1600 or 1700. By that time the mound people were gone, but their mounds remained all up and down the river, and who knows what was in those mounds. Some of the mounds, like Monk's Mound in Cahokia up near St. Louis, were entire cities, covered over and over with mud until they were huge, wide towering things; others were smaller, and represented either homes, or burial sites, or other things. Once, up near Cahokia, an archaeologist figured out that some mounds were placed facing the direction that the sun of the summer solstice, or maybe the vernal equinox, came in. Those mounds, he figured, would be more important mounds, likely to be a burial mound of a leader. And, sure enough, in this one mound, they’d found a leader, with rocks, jewels, shells, and skeletons of young girls in there with him.

Now it was a point of pride among the rainbow people that they knew the vernal equinox from the solstice; they were in touch with the natural world, and would therefore know which of the mounds to go poking around in, if they chose to go that route. Both Smoky Joe and Grizzly Bob laid claim to some knowledge of the vernal equinox; maybe they already saw the expedition as sure to happen and each wanted to establish himself as leader. Their rivalry was in full swing here as they discussed particulars of the vernal sun in this particular part of Illinois. I myself knew nothing of the equinox, or of the area; I had nothing to offer, nothing to pretend; if there was an expedition, I’d rather just sleep. But I watched in grim interest, because of Chloe. Chloe and Grizzly Bob were an item, but were known to be having trouble. I sensed Smoky Joe being more than a little interested in this situation. In any expedition anywhere it would be of more than passing interest if Bob went, if Chloe went, and if Joe would be in the same expedition.

White Eagle stared straight ahead, poking at the fire with a stick. To White Eagle it wasn’t a day-trip, or a leisure excursion. He knew the Shawnee pretty well. He’d been scouting the place out for years. He knew where several mounds were, right off the bat, besides the obvious three the others were after, that weren’t far down the trail. The question to him was, what do you do when you find it? Do you break right in and look around? White Eagle had no problem walking across a cemetery, or reaching into a dumpster. But he had trouble with the idea of messing with Indian graves.

Around four in the morning the kid actually left; he had to go to work somewhere in the morning, and there was some discussion of how to get back onto the main roads from where we were. White Eagle was most useful in this kind of situation; he really knew his way around, even though, as far as I could tell, he had no car, and rarely left the encampment. The kid thanked us and left; then, talk of an expedition then began in earnest. I was against going right away, because I really needed some sleep; I made my feelings known. I, however, was sorely outnumbered. After a couple of pots of chicory coffee, an expedition was gathered that had Smoky Joe and Grizzly Bob as leaders, with Chloe, me, Mac and Fawn also going along. When it came time to go, though, White Eagle was nowhere to be found, so we left without him. We took some provisions but packed lightly. The sun was coming up across the river when we got up to the bluff but in general it wasn't hard to see where we were going. We came down the bluff into the bottoms along the river.

At various times I got views of people and the way they walked through the woods; usually we were on a path; some wore moccasins or had hide water-jugs over their shoulders. Chloe was by far the most interesting person to watch. I had fallen for Chloe, though I knew she was with Grizzly Bob; most of what I knew about Bob or anyone else, I knew from talking to Chloe. Whether she and Bob were married or not I had no idea. I wondered how a woman could camp for weeks at a time and stay so beautiful, yet she did, and she wasn't particularly threatened by being with a crowd of rough characters in the middle of the woods. Fawn was a little more nervous about it, but Fawn had Mac; they'd been traveling together for a year or two, and had just come back from Guatemala or some such place. Smoky Joe was like me, a free man, unattached. His parents back in Tampa or someplace wanted him to be a doctor, but he wanted to tromp around the woods all the time with the rainbow people. He was willful, in other words. Like the rest of us, he felt pressure to get back into the world, make money, live a normal life. But unlike us, he was likely to never buckle to that pressure. He walked with a purposeful gait, which was ironic since I never figured out what he would have done if we'd actually found a mound. The woods were beautiful with their early-October colors and there were caves made of large rock overhangs everywhere; one could feel the overwhelming presence of others in the area, who had lived in this wooded river-valley for years; where else but in these caves?

At one fork in the road Grizzly Bob wanted to go right, but Smoky Joe to the left. We stopped and sat along the path to discuss it, and try to recall what the farm kid had said. Chloe sided with Grizzly Bob, naturally. But Mac also believed we should go right. That was enough to swing the balance; I had no feeling except trying to stay awake, and Fawn was of no use in that situation. We went right. But alas, the going got tough and now Smoky Joe got more vocal about his disagreement, harshly blaming Grizzly Bob.

Grizzly Bob was a large guy who got the name Grizzly from his facial hair. He was an ex-con, trying to stay off alcohol and the hard stuff, but always threatening to get back on it under pressure. I worried about Chloe and thought she looked kind of beaten down half the time, but she had choice to stay with him. He carried a large knife that he used for everything, and made me, for one, willing to go along with him just so I wouldn't ever come up against it. But Smoky Joe had no such compunction. He felt like he knew the woods, knew the direction, knew where he wanted to go, and this wasn't it, and it was Bob's fault. Pretty soon the two were yelling at each other; harsh words were said. We were way out in the woods; we were lost; we'd probably been going in circles. Nobody could even say for sure which direction we were going anymore. The problem was, any rational consideration of the right thing to do was now lost in this heated argument which threatened to turn violent. I remember looking at the afternoon sun coming in through the canopy of trees overhead and feeling like the Shawnee was a beautiful place, being defiled to some degree by these two buffoons ready to kill each other. Every once in a while, the sun would glance off of Grizzly Bob's knife, which hung from his belt, and I had passing illusions that maybe he wanted it that way, maybe he knew the sun's angle as well as he said he did. Smoky Joe badgered him relentlessly, unfazed by the knife.

But it was Fawn, in the end, who saved the day. She got between the two men and started challenging them to use what they knew to help us find the way. In fact each man knew quite a bit, and pretty soon the two leaders agreed to go back the way we'd come and take a different, shorter, route back to the campfire. We arrived at the campfire at about eight or so, well after dark, but that was ok, because we knew the way at the end there, and when we got there, a big dinner was being served, as if they knew six hungry hikers were about to arrive. Around the fire we told our story, how we ended up in the middle of nowhere, how it almost came to blows, how we turned around and came back. People there knew quite a bit about Cahokia, about how there were mounds all up and down the river; how they were pretty much overgrown now; how Cahokia had been the biggest city in North America for a thousand years; how they'd traveled the rivers up to Montana, northern Minnesota, the Smokies, and the Gulf, all to trade for and bring back things like silver, obsidian, or fine shells.

Rainbow people were at their best when they were well-fed and talking dreamily about ancient Indian tribes. As out of sleep as I was, I was enjoying the campfire now, with its drum circle, beautiful Chloe over there with Bob's arm around her, one pot of chickory coffee after another. When I finally slept, I slept maybe sixteen hours or more, and had to leave almost immediately when I woke up. I had a good memory of the woods, and especially that night's campfire. But what we'd all forgotten was White Eagle. It turned out, as I found out way later, that he'd found an Indian mound, but had fallen into a deep hole, at or near it, accidentally, and died, and wasn't found until much later. When they found him they were pretty sure it was an accident, but you never know about these things, sometimes it seems like the mound just swallowed him up and took him.

Trestle at the Snake

One day in the summer of 1975 James jumped on a boxcar in northern Idaho, having thrown his pack into it before he jumped. His pack had only a loaf of unsliced bread, a jug of wine, and a block of cheese; he was going west. He collected his pack from the floor of the boxcar and began to prepare to sit in the doorway, watching the gentle rain in the forests of Idaho as the train passed through it. But from the shadows in the back of the boxcar he was aware of a man waking up and approaching him. The man, who called himself Charlie, a very old man with a large white beard, walked slowly but came and joined him in the doorway of the boxcar. James shared chunks of bread, slices of cheese and sips of wine as the train clacked through the rainy mountains.

Charlie said with a kind of slurred voice that he had just killed a man in a small town in Montana, though he wasn’t sure he’d actually done it, and had a perfectly good reason which he’d be glad to share. Though James couldn’t believe this, the more of the man’s story he heard, the more he believed. The man really didn’t have a reason to lie. He was old, maybe weeks from death. He appeared to be talking for the sake of getting the truth out before he died.

He’d grown up in the Dakotas, he said, and had fallen to jumping the trains to Seattle regularly in his youth. One time when he was in Seattle he got a job on a ship that went to Japan, and had befriended a Russian guy, Sergei, on a ferry somewhere in Asia, perhaps between Korea and Japan. Things went bad with Sergei, something about smuggling drugs into Singapore, but he had cut loose from him and returned to the USA hoping to forget him. Years later he was working for the railroad in a small Montana town when this Sergei came after him and kidnapped his wife, as punishment for the betrayal that, according to Charlie, was not justified.  Sergei and his henchmen had driven the wife down to Denver and hidden out, demanding ransom; Charlie had eventually paid, grudgingly, but lost his job in the process and ended up moving to Seattle; his wife, however, left him and married one of the gang members, a young guy named Ivan, selling the house and moving to another small Montana town. Ivan was a rough guy who got work in a lumber camp of some kind.; however, he raised Charlie’s son, who had been conceived right before the kidnapping, and who thus had a rough life, growing up not knowing his birth father very well.

In this town, however, was a community of old Italian prisoners-of-war; they had done hard labor during World War II; many of them had stayed in the area.  One old guy, almost dead, befriended the son and told him that, if he should ever go to Italy, he knew where a fortune was hidden, in a remote mountain outside of his village.  The son told his birth father, Charlie, and they went to Italy together, and retrieved the treasure, worth maybe $600,000 in American money.  

On this trip he’d actually become quite close with his son, who he hadn’t known well when he was growing up, and became a little angry that he’d been deprived of bringing him up. They jumped trains in Italy for a while; sometimes they’d even paid to ride them, since they had the money.

They knew they’d have trouble getting the money to the USA, though, and while they stayed in Italy, trying to figure out how to do that, the son fell in love with a woman whose family owned a vineyard, and he took his half of the money and settled in for a beautiful life; they eventually had a son.

Charlie, with roughly $300,000 and nowhere to go, decided to hire some Italian thugs and go search out Sergei, who, he figured, had ruined his life. 

The train clacked along through the mountains, and the drizzle turned into a steady rain. The bread and cheese were gone but the wine remained; they were drinking it slowly. James thought of his own father, a railroad baron back in Minneapolis. In an indirect kind of way, the father owned the train; whenever James got in trouble, he’d mention his name.

Sergei was running a wine distributorship in Yalta, but was much too clever for Charlie. The kidnapping took almost a year for Charlie to plan, but he took four thugs up into Yalta as soon as he was ready. The thugs kidnapped his wife, but there was a horrible shootout when the ransom was being delivered, and several people died and were injured, both Italian and Russian. Oddly enough, Sergei and Charlie met up afterward and even made their peace. They’d agreed that destroying each other in an endless vicious cycle was pointless, and agreed to stop immediately.  Charlie found out that Ivan was Sergei’s son. Sergei gave Charlie an ornate dagger and told him to give it to Ivan when he returned to the US. It was a family heirloom.

Charlie did not go back to Montana directly, though, because he had no money, needed work, and was best able to find that in Seattle. But, many years later, he went back, because he’d heard some disturbing news: Ivan had killed his son in a fit of rage. The son had come home to visit; the money was not a problem now due to his connections to the vineyard. The son was flaunting it, richer than Ivan would ever be.

Ivan was out on bail, and Charlie found him easily. He avoided his wife; she apparently was in the town, but he didn’t want to see her. He took the dagger and caught Ivan stumbling out of a bar late at night. He made it look like a robbery. He then jumped on the trains, where he felt most comfortable, and spent about a month going back and forth across the north, avoiding the authorities. It was actually quite easy, since he knew the trains so well, and he knew places where he could slip into the towns and buy some food, and they’d actually know him. In the places he went, he was a regular; nobody had any reason to suspect anything.

James asked him why he’d said he might not have done it.

Well, said Charlie, it turns out that, since he’d carried that dagger so many years, the fantasy of using it had played and replayed in his mind, before he’d even known about what happened to his son. He’d actually wavered, feeling on the one hand that Sergei was right: vengeance was pointless, one should bury the hatchet, or the dagger as it were, and get on with one’s life. Or, on the other hand, that a ruined life should be paid for, an eye for an eye, so to speak. His mind was fuzzy sometimes. He wasn’t sure, and took to rambling; he was quite old.

The train came to a wide bridge over a river far below; this was probably the Snake. James stood up and went to the other open door of the boxcar, and peed out of it. When he came back the old man was gone; he’d jumped from the train, almost certainly to his death below, in the river. James looked the best he could out the door of the train, but saw nothing; he saw nothing on the bridge behind, either; it would have been easy for the old man to clear the bridge; he wouldn’t have had to jump more than four feet to get over the rail. The train was going too fast for James to get off and investigate. He went to the back of the car to investigate the man’s belongings; there wasn’t much except a blanket, a couple of old sweaters, and a shirt. Inside the shirt, though, was an ornate dagger. James, half drunk that he was, still didn’t think twice; he heaved it out the door, and down into the valley.

Eveline

Eveline was buying mangoes in a fruit-market kind of store when her 2-year-old son ran out the door and into the city. She was aware that it was trouble, right away, but unfortunately left her credit card with the cashier as she ran after him. At the time she’d been carrying a bag with some sex toys and another bag with some books she’d picked up at a used book store; she left them at the fruit store, too, but she had her purse around her shoulder and carried that with her. When she got out the door of the fruit store she just saw his little form dart around the corner going north toward the square. In a panic she grabbed her purse in her hands so she could run better, but unfortunately ran right into a man who was in a half-run and who had been trying to get around another pedestrian, an older lady on the sidewalk. Right there, just outside the fruit store, there was a collision between the two of them; the lady let out a little cry as she stepped out of the way; Eveline lost her balance but fortunately remained on her feet.

“Oh I’m so sorry,” said Eveline to the man she had hit, a man named Daniel, as she recovered herself.  He was a slightly heavy-set, sincere looking guy with curly hair. “I have go catch my young son.” She tried to put her clothes back in place, as he had really run into her in a most unsettling way.  He too, however, seemed to be polite, dishevelled, in a hurry.

“Sorry, ma’am, I didn’t see you at all,” Daniel said. Some papers he had been carrying were scattered all over the ground, and he started scrambling to get them before the wind blew them into the street.

When Eveline got around the corner the boy was gone, and she was in full-scale panic. There were doorways up and down the northbound sidewalk, going toward the square, but if he was up in the square anything could be happening, and he’d have to get across a busy street up there. He wasn’t very good at crossing busy streets, but he was a curious lad who would try anything. There was no sight of him, no adults looking for flustered parents, nobody, in spite of the fact that this was downtown on a weekday. There were cars driving on the road, and across the street, several pedestrians, but here, on this little stretch of downtown street, nobody.

She checked the doorways as she made her way down the street. One simply had a stairwell up; it was empty as far as she could tell. In the next was a barber shop, in which an old man was getting a haircut.  People didn’t look at her or act in any way like she should be looking for some young child; they didn’t alter their behavior in any way. A panic was settling inside her; her son was lost. She couldn’t believe it; he was lost without a trace.

Back at the fruit store there was an unfortunate convergence of opportunity and financial hardship. The cashier, Darla, asked for an early break and took Eveline’s credit card down the street in the other direction to use it. She ignored the bags on the floor or the inevitability that Eveline would come back after them eventually. Darla was short, heavy-set, and plain-looking, intensely aware of the contrast between herself and Eveline, who was tall, wispy, beautiful. Doreen had had her eye on a necklace that she had been unable to afford for maybe three months. She had the idea that this necklace would be the perfect accessory for her, and would give her just the right appearance. She was convinced that she deserved it, because she worked hard and needed to look good at night.

Now Darla’s crime has been committed before, and in fact people are well-protected against this crime; Doreen’s manager, if he had known what was going on, would have been horrified, would have fired Doreen immediately, would have made every effort to assure Eveline that he would make reparations and would have put Doreen in jail. But he never saw it. He’d been in the back of the store cleaning up a spill of grapes that had been somewhat damaged from being dropped by a box. Later, when asked, he said he just didn’t know what she had done.

Eveline, having determined that her son was not in the barber shop, moved on to the next doorway, which was an American-food kind of restaurant-coffee shop with tables going on back quite a ways, and a cash register over on the right side as she entered. Various sets of people occupied various tables going on back, but the place wasn’t full; it was about eleven a.m. Somehow she thought that, had a two-year-old just run in and run to the back, people would look at her with the familiar look that they give parents as if to say, “oh, there’s the derelict mother of that two-year-old,” and she tried to gauge whether the look she was receiving was in fact that look.   She was in a hurry as there was an outside chance the boy had run all the way up to the square in which case she had better get up there as soon as possible, but instinct told her that the boy would be unable to go past a doorway such as this without at least trying it. So she tried to gauge the reactions of several of the customers. Was it the look of people wondering how a mother could get so far behind a darting young child? Or was it simply the look of people interested by her young, beautiful, slightly disheveled appearance?

Back in front of the fruit-market store, Daniel had collected his scattered papers, which were in fact legal documents pertaining to his divorce from his wife, who had left town with a rock drummer or perhaps it was his roadie, when the band had come through town maybe six months ago. Daniel had been completely flustered by running into Eveline; having collected his papers and rearranged his clothes, he now was unable to continue in the direction he’d been going, but, rather, decided to follow Eveline around the corner where she had disappeared, going north toward the square, in order to get perhaps another look at her. In fact, for the moment, at least, he’d completely forgotten where he’d been going, or why he had been running at a half-trot down the street. He’d been in some kind of a hurry, but all that, and the reasons for it, were now lost. But, amazingly enough, when he got to the first doorway, with the stairs going up to a hallway with apartments coming off of it, who should be coming down those stairs than the young boy, two years old, lost, not quite realizing what he’d done or what the consequences could be. Being two, he had some trouble with the steps alone, but he was aware when a strange man was looking right at him from the doorway below, and they both stopped for a moment in their tracks, exchanging looks.

Uptown Darla’s hands shook as she signed the credit card receipt buying the necklace for $47; she was grateful it was under $50, considering the possibility that she would be caught, and the fact that stealing things under $50 in value was considerably different from stealing things over $50. All I need, she thought, is this necklace. She had, on the way down to the jewelry store, weighed the pros and cons of the crime she was about to commit, having something of a morality crisis, but had come down anyway on the side of committing it. Her job was going nowhere. Her life was meaningless. Only the necklace made any sense to her, and even then, only when it was on her neck. She ran it through her fingers as she slipped it on, and admired herself in the mirror provided by the store. But alas, when they handed her the receipt to sign, she had forgotten Eveline’s natme, and spelled it “Avalon.” The owner, who had seen her in the shop eyeing the necklace earlier, looked at her with suspicion, but said nothing.

In the restaurant, nobody paid any attention to Eveline, except an extremely well-dressed man way over on the side, who put his napkin on the table, rose and approached her. He was a crime syndicate boss; he lived in this same block, in fact on the same second floor apartment where her son had just wandered; he ran a sophisticated numbers racket which included various other kinds of crime, and in general did most of his business at a fancier restaurant a few blocks away; however, he frequently ate here, because he lived here, and because he needed some variety occasionally. He was  evil, if you considered the way he made a living and the way he dispatched with his enemies, yet he was extremely sensitive and could tell immediately that the young woman was in trouble. He asked politely if he could be of service. He was even willing to interrupt his own dinner. He would have, in a minute, marshaled the resources to find her son, or help her in any other way she deemed necessary. Knowing him, being involved with him, would undoubtedly be a mistake, however. He wore a fine, tailored suit with a red handkerchief in the pocket.

You have to realize that this happened in about 1999, before the era of cell phones really kicked in. A young woman now can be presumed to be instantaneously connected to thousands of family and close friends, all willing to help at a single text; she would be crazy to take a toddler into town without this. In this particular era, however, it was possible for a woman to be uptown, with her child, but without instantaneous connection to all her friends or her family, but rather relying on her instinct, or an occasional use of a pay phone, or on the kindness of strangers. Furthermore, in this era, in many cities, people came downtown to shop and spend the day; many shops offered a variety of things, and restaurants such as this one would fill up with hungry shoppers around noon and do a healthy business almost every day. Yet the regulars, such as the crime boss, the waitresses, or the jewelry store owner, for example, people who were in this neighborhood day in and day out, knew the lay of the land; they knew when unusual people passed through; they knew when something wasn’t right. It was a community.

So it was that a waitress raised her eyebrow when the crime boss approached Eveline, because she knew that he was a very wealthy, polished character, and she could see that Eveline was disheveled, upset, vulnerable, yet quite beautiful. The waitress was busy, and unable to help Eveline herself; but took interest in their conversation, because she too could see that Eveline was distraught about something. But right at that moment, Daniel could be seen from the front window, walking up the street, holding the young boy’s hand.  Back in the stairwell they had had an awkward moment. The young guy was afraid now, since his mother didn’t follow him up the stairs; he hadn’t seen much up there, and he encountered Daniel when he’d come back down. But, as luck would have it, Daniel remembered exactly what his mother looked like; he had seen just enough of the boy coming out of the store and going around the corner to associate the two together, and could clearly see their resemblance to each other. He asked the boy if he’d lost his mother; he assured the boy that he would find her, and, taking the boy’s hand in his, he was true to his word.

The reunion of the mother and boy, right in the front of the restaurant, was a sight for everyone to see; the crime boss felt a little left out, however, and went back to his meal. Eveline thanked Daniel repeatedly, and promised to hold onto her son more carefully. Daniel, it seemed, was happy just to talk to her again. He walked them back to the fruit store, where her packages were retrieved, but she forgot about the credit card until later. That story didn’t turn out so well for Darla, but Darla hadn’t really been thinking very clearly that day at all; years later she would look back at that day as the beginning of a long decline.  Months later, however, Eveline had forgotten everything: Daniel, the mangoes, the restaurant, the credit card, everything except perhaps the cut of the crime boss’ suit.  The image of that suit, with its red handkerchief, stayed in her mind for months, jarring her out of an otherwise routine life. The boy, however, remembered it for a lifetime.

e pluribus haiku 2012

now on kindle