The Pickle

The Pickle

Alonzo grew up in Austin, Texas, so the name Charles Whitman was quite well known to him. He was the ex-Marine who got up on the main tower at the University of Texas-Austin and killed sixteen people in one day, back in 1966, and it seemed like everyone knew somebody he had killed, or was related in some way to the havoc he had wreaked. When Alonzo joined the Marines, it was pointed out to him that Charles Whitman had been a Marine, so he felt, in a way, like this guy had cast a shadow over his life. Every time there was a school shooting his name came up again. People had been talking about him while Alonzo was growing up, and they were still talking about him.

When Alonzo came back from the Marines, he lived with another ex-Marine, Ricardo, in an old house in Austin, and prepared to go to graduate school, where he was eventually to get a degree in Anthropology. He and Ricardo went out drinking a lot, as Austin was good for that, and they'd often end up talking about their "demons." They were referring to the nightmares you would get if you had killed people, as both of them had. Ex-Marines worked together to keep from become Charles Whitmans, and fit back into a society that really didn't understand them or what they had been through, and in that regard, Alonzo and Ricardo were good for each other. In a sense, Austin was worse that way than most places, because people were so busy having fun in Austin, ex-Marines like Alonzo and Ricardo risked becoming even more isolated. So they drank a lot, and comforted each other.

In Ricardo's house, which Alonzo was now living in, was a round jar that appeared to have a brain in it. It had a label, and Alonzo swore the label could have read "Whitman" or something like it, though it was faded. It was an old jar, and whatever it was in there, was in formaldehyde, or a strong-smelling substance. Ricardo just referred to it as "the pickle," and invited Alonzo to move it back to the garage, which he did one day; that's when he saw the label. It disturbed him, but he couldn't get much information out of Ricardo. There were some other graduate students who had lived in the house; there were, at one point, a few other jars like it around; most of the jars had gone away as people moved out, but this one didn't. One time Ricardo said to him, well, if it is a brain, how am I supposed to get rid of it? What do you do with a brain? At that point Ricardo was not advocating removing it; he didn't want to deal with it.

Alonzo forgot about the jar, but after Ricardo moved out, he got married and had a son, and his wife would occasionally ask him about that jar in the garage. "Why not just toss it out?" she'd ask. He thought about what Ricardo said, and left it there, probably too long. His wife knew when it was better to drop a subject, and she did. 

Alonzo thought about the demons, occasionally, too. He'd dealt with his, really, by becoming an expert in Mayan archaeology. Those Mayans had secrets, and Alonzo knew them; this made him feel better about having secrets himself. He'd killed people in Iraq, they'd killed people down there in Mexico and Guatemala, and nobody was free of demons. Demons were the psychic wreckage of killing, the memories of the living. Ricardo dealt with his demons by lifting weights fanatically, and breaking glass whenever he had a chance, for example, in bars. Ricardo and Alonzo still went out drinking regularly; they talked about it.

One night Alonzo pressed Ricardo about the jar. Ricardo was really the only one who could know, since he used to live in the house, and he knew something that he wasn't telling. After they'd drunk a few, Alonzo pressed him more. Finally Ricardo got mad. "It is a brain," he said. "The university had them sitting around, and some people took a whole bunch of them right out of the Animal Resources storeroom, and that's why they were in that house. You can go ahead and get rid of it if you want, Alonzo, I'm sure it's useless now. It's been sitting there what, twenty years?"

Alonzo was aware that he, too, was drunk, and was slurring his words, but he said, "You know what's creepy, is that I could swear it said 'Whitman' on the side. I swear I saw it."

"You need to get rid of that jar," said Ricardo. "You want help? I'll help. Let's go." He never even dealt with the Whitman comment; he just basically got Alonzo to get out of his seat and get in his car. Ricardo insisted. They went to Alonzo's house, opened the garage, and found the jar. They looked at the label, which was now too faded to read. Ricardo wrapped it up in a couple of old rags, and put it out in the middle of the back alley, away from the garage. He took an old axe and smashed the jar in pieces, but, because it was wrapped in old rags, the glass shards didn't fly all over the place; after all, there were kids in the neighborhood; they didn't want a kid walking in glass like that. The smell of formaldehyde was strong, but Ricardo, with his massive frame, shielded Alonzo from seeing the gruesome contents, and he walked the whole mess down the alley to a dumpster, and got Alonzo to walk away from it, and go back to the bar. At the bar, Ricardo argued that he'd felt responsible for the jar, since it was in the house that he'd basically handed over to his friend. It was his job, so he got rid of it. He told Alonzo to forget about it, although, when Alonzo got home, his wife mentioned the noise in the back alley. It had waken her up, and disturbed her, as if she'd known. That was back in about 2007.

Fast forward a few years, and there were a few more school shootings. Sometimes it was a Marine, sometimes it was just a school, but it seemed like every time you turned around, people snapped, people killed people, everybody got rattled. Austin's claim to fame, of course, was having the first, and the worst, but now there were many of them, so many that Alonzo wondered what kind of world he was bringing his kid into. When the Virginia Tech shooting came along, Alonzo was actually relieved, because that was the first one that was actually worse than the Charles Whitman shooting. Some guy somewhere would snap, and Ricardo and Alonzo would talk about demons and how that evil stuff would just build up inside you, if you let it, if you didn't work it out. Alonzo felt lucky, actually; he had a wife and kid; he had a job; he had a friend, Ricardo, who understood his demons and helped him when the nightmares got to him too badly. Every time some shooting happened, he basically thanked God it wasn't him that had snapped.

Eventually, Alonzo was able to get a little more out of Ricardo about the jar. There was one graduate student, in particular, Ricardo said, who had gone over the edge. It seemed to Ricardo that each of the students in that house had had a jar, but this guy moved out, and didn't take his jar. Maybe they had stolen the jars together, from the Animal Resources lab, on a dare, but when it came time to move, this guy wasn't going to move his jar, and left it behind. And something bad had happened to him; Ricardo wasn't sure what, because he didn't know the guy well. But he had always associated the jar with that guy. At first, he said, he wouldn't get rid of the jar, because the guy might come back for it, or because it was too hard to get rid of it. But now, he felt differently, and he hadn't hesitated to just smash it when he had the chance. Ricardo was in an ongoing war with his own demons. If he had an axe and a jar, he'd use the axe on the jar. He'd lost his patience with letting things get under his skin.

Just recently, the news came out. Some brains were missing from the UT-Austin; maybe they were in San Antonio. University officials admitted they didn't know exactly what had happened to them. And, word was, that one of them was that of Charles Whitman, who had actually requested an autopsy before he went on his rampage. Nobody in San Antonio had any idea, the trail had gone cold, and they had to admit, they just weren't sure what had happened. They were old, though, they said; they wouldn't do anyone much good. Probably somebody had just thrown them out, because they needed the space. Ricardo, when he heard that, agreed. "That's how things work at a university," he said. "People lose track of stuff, they'll lose it, because they don't even remember what it is or what it means. Unlike those people in Iraq; the people in Iraq, they'll never forget anything." As he said it, I realized that those people, his demons, were right there with him; they'd been right there all along.

(12-12-14)

The Other Guy's Fault

I detest texters who cost you a light, because they're so busy not paying attention that the green light comes and goes and they still haven't finished their text until the very end of the light. So this one time I saw this happening; there was a little red Mustang right in front of me in a left-turn lane, and I really leaned on the horn, right in her face so to speak, because I didn't want to miss another light. People don't usually honk their horns like that in Texas, so she got a little rattled and gunned it, but the problem was, she was in reverse, so she smashed right into me, right in my face, so to speak, and my Caddy started to let out a plume of steam that kind of altered the visibility.

Why would she be in reverse? At first I thought she'd smashed me deliberately, because she didn't like my horn. But no, I found out later, she was in reverse because she'd gone a little too far into the intersection in the first place, and she'd had to back up right before her boyfriend had face-timed her. And it was game day, which around here means more traffic, unusually high anticipation, people in a hurry, people carrying entire kegs to the parking lots over near the stadium, everybody waiting for them, and all this frenzied activity. So people were not happy that we were still in this left-turn lane with a huge plume of steam rising up over us, and some people started honking and becoming visibly impatient.

I was furious, as I've already said. But lo and behold, when I saw her getting out of her car and coming toward me, everything changed. She also was quite upset, trying to imagine what would happen to her insurance, what it would cost to repair her Mustang and my Caddy, whether to call a tow truck or the police, how to get wherever she was going, and all that. Her boyfriend was yelling at her on the cell phone that she held in her hand, going "Victoria! Victoria! Are you there?" Well of course she's here, idiot, where else would she be? I didn't like this guy already. He had heard the crash, I'm sure, and had some idea what was happening. As it turned out, he could also see a little bit, depending on how she held the phone.

Years later these counseling people taught me that they'd asked everyone how they knew they'd met the love of their life, sometimes in a crowd, or in a situation like this, or wherever. People just know this stuff, and there's no accounting for it. That's kind of what I was going through. I could describe her to you, her long red hair and freckles, all the unique characteristics, but it wouldn't matter, it was other things that did it. Maybe it was that she obviously had this jerk of a boyfriend who would demand that they face-time right while she was turning left on a game day, how insensitive! I had to save her from a guy like that. Face-time, as you may know, is like a phone call on your cell-phone, but you can see the other person, which some people don't like, and they can see you. But what's the point? I don't generally need to see people when I call them.

So we stood there in the road, exchanging insurance information, and the police were there relatively quickly, considering the traffic, and now of course the whole intersection was very backed up, cars going back five or ten blocks in every direction while people tried to get past us. But we weren't going anywhere; it was obvious, to me, anyway, that my Caddy would need a tow. Now her boyfriend was screaming at her something about how whenever somebody hits you from behind, it's his fault. If a car runs into a car in front of it, it's that car's fault, no matter what. Yes, buddy, but this wasn't what happened, I was about to tell him, and I felt like grabbing that phone right out of her hand, but I didn't have to, because suddenly she took the phone and threw it hard on the ground near her own car tires, whereupon it smashed and broke, but ended up way under the car somewhere, where we could still hear this boyfriend going on and on about the other guy's fault. Now this was right before the policeman arrived; the policeman got a sense of what had happened, but he didn't see it directly, because his view was blocked by a delivery truck that was unable to get around us successfully. But right after she'd smashed the phone, she was finding her insurance information and giving it to me, and it was kind of like she was giving me her number, the way she was looking at me, and it was also like, smashing that phone was getting rid of the jerk, he was gone, just like that. That's what it was, as it turned out, because he had given her the phone, and he was the one who had insisted on face-timing or having her always answer it, and, she said, she could get another one easily and it wouldn't have to be all set up on his conditions.

Probably the angriest person in the entire situation was this one football fan right behind me, who was so close to the Caddy that he couldn't just get out and go on his way. Now I know he was a football fan because he was dressed in the local red-and-black, but everyone is, I guess, but he also had these flags on his car.  He was mad partly because the person behind him, a young and helpful graduate student, had simply turned off his car, gotten out of it, and started directing traffic. The graduate student was helping the delivery van get through the intersection; everyone was really impatient; but this football fan directly behind that car kept waving his hands at me like I could get him out of this situation. Sorry, man, my Caddy is blocking the intersection, and you're trapped from behind. There's nothing I can do. He starts honking and yelling like somebody's supposed to do something. Maybe he was honking at the graduate student. He's the one who needed to be somewhere. I was beginning to feel like, football game or whatever, I just wanted to stand here with this woman for a little longer. Leave me alone, I'm concentrating.

The policeman finally had to go over and threaten the football fan with arrest if he didn't shut up and let everyone direct traffic and get out of here. The tow-trucks came; she had one too, but they couldn't get anywhere near us because there was so much traffic stuck or moving around us. The boyfriend, whose yelling under the car finally stopped, arrived on the site and was so angry that she told him to go away and leave her alone, but he said no and raised his voice at her. Maybe it was his red Mustang that had been damaged, or maybe he just wanted his phone, or maybe he saw right away that he was losing her and his world was falling apart, but he was pretty steamed up, and it was all I could do to not step between them. But finally the football fan stepped in and started yelling at him, because he couldn't bear watching a young woman being so mistreated. So now these two men, the football fan and the boyfriend, started pushing and punching each other, and this was a little surprising, because there was a policeman right there, although that policeman may have been preoccupied at the time, but what did they think? Eventually the policeman called for backup, they separated the two men, and hauled them both off for assault, because they'd both swung at each other. Victoria tried her best to reason with the boyfriend, whose name was Charles, but he wasn't seeing reason, he kept pushing the idea that it was my fault, that she needed to get the phone, and that she was acting kind of like she liked me. This last one was true, I hoped.

The football fan, for his part, had kind of a hot temper, as I've said, but once he got out of his car he could see that I couldn't move until I was towed away, and besides, the graduate student who had trapped him from behind wasn't maliciously blocking him in just to keep him trapped all afternoon. As it turned out, he owned a business, and this business had put a lot of money into what they called a tailgate, where they barbequed a pig or whatever, in the parking lot, and drank heavily before the game, and all this cost the business thousands. They didn't care; it was a tax write-off, but it all depended on him bringing the proper ingredients at the right time, probably secret barbeque sauce or whatever, so he'd gotten a little mad that this whole thing was being held up by this accident.

So the football fan and Charles were pushing and punching each other, and this was mostly a problem because it was still a busy street and cars were slowing down going each direction to watch these guys get mad at each other. But eventually the policeman got involved and the backup that he called got involved too; this other guy got there by foot which is obviously faster in this situation, and they arrested these two guys for assault. The football fan was asking if there was anything like "justifiable assault" because this sure was a case where this guy deserved a punch or two, but the policeman was explaining that they could sort out right and wrong with the judge, for now they were just getting off the road. And they did. Victoria put up a cursory fight but was actually a little grateful to see that Charles guy hauled off. Maybe things weren't working out so well for him, and surely not for them. When they hauled off her car, it ran over the phone, and she didn't even look at it.

Years later, we were married, Victoria and I, and we saw that football fan at a game. He said something about how that tailgate had become an enormous thing, and we had to stop by sometime before the next game, but I think that he liked her more than me, and I'm not much of a tailgater anyway. I go to the games as a professional journalist, but I learned to let Victoria do other stuff on those days, because she knew way too many people, they would come around and talk, and I couldn't watch, and she didn't care so much about the game itself anyway. You'd think her texting, face-timing in the car, backing up right into me, and throwing the phone right in front of me would all be red flags that said, watch out for this woman, and yes, my friends told me the same thing; she's obviously not one for cool, careful deliberation.  But it all turned out pretty well, and I ended up writing up all that wild behavior to the fact that she was just at the point of breaking up with that Charles guy, and that was a stressful time. Charles turned out to be a real loser, but that is another story; at least she had the good judgment to ditch him when she had the chance. And years later, I'd tease her about how she'd put on the gas without even realizing she was in reverse; she'd tease me about how she had to smash my Caddy just to get my attention. But, as I said, it all worked out in the end.

(12-14)

Not It

I was sitting at the local park, watching my children one Friday afternoon immediately after school; because it was Friday, the children were joyful, and very active, and it was a beautiful day to be out there swinging on the bars, going down the slide, and doing things kids do. Various parents were on the benches around the outside of the play area, myself included. I was still processing an accident I had seen earlier in the day, which I had come upon while out driving; I had called 9-1-1, and the police had come and asked me a number of questions about what I had seen, but I hadn't seen much and I ended up a little set on edge by the officer's attitude. His attitude, it seemed to me, was that I shouldn't call if I hadn't seen enough of it to really help him figure out what had happened. My attitude was, you don't say what you saw, unless you're sure that's what you saw.

Now this park has a walkway around the play structures, and trees around the edges, and the play structures are set on sand so that kids falling off of them are more likely to be ok. There was a variety of children, ranging from five to about eleven, and they were all tearing around screaming shrilly; my two children, ages nine and six, were involved with a couple others and were yelling "one-two-three not-it!" which, as I understand it, is designed to make one of them "it" so they can start a game of tag. Now they all enjoy tag, pretty much, except that the youngest ones sometimes spend more time as "it" and have a harder time catching the older ones. But this game, "one-two-three not-it," which I'm sure the reader may have encountered, requires everyone's permission, and basically assigns you to be "it" if you are the last to say "not-it." If you just claim that the whole process is unfair, however, because you didn't hear it, or because the speaker of course knows when it will happen, then what can they do? They don't have an "it" until someone agrees to be "it." And sometimes that means they don't have an "it."

Now out of the corner of my eye I saw a kind of creepy man who had advanced upon a young boy, about eight or nine, and kind of had him cornered in a creepy way. It's not that there were corners anywhere, there weren't; it was all out in the open, though over in the edge of the park. The man appeared to be trying to get the boy to go with him, perhaps to a car, or somewhere, without forcing him to do it or making it appear that he was taking the boy against his will. The boy, fortunately, had some sense that this was not a good idea, but was beginning to buckle under the pressure, it appeared; it was hard to say what they were saying, because it was over on the edge of the park. This upset me and I began watching them, but my attention was pulled back to my own children.

That is because one of the other children, one of the ones who was not mine, so to speak, became upset about the outcome of "one-two-three not-it" and began pushing my kid, and calling him names, and this looked like it was going to require some intervention. I shifted on my bench to see if I would have to do something. One doesn't want to intervene in these things; we want the children to work it out for themselves if at all possible, but we all know sometimes there are people in this world, people who make it difficult to just work it out or just find someone who is "it" so that kids can just play the game. I am not an officiator concerning who said "not-it" last, but I know when one kid starts pushing my kid, it's already gone too far. You don't want to be "it," ok, go your own way, maybe some other kid will want to play tag. The kids maneuver around on the playground, stretching their muscles, running and screaming, and it's all a corollary of life, a little dance where good kids grow up and live their lives, and the bad kids start getting singled out, yelled at, chewed out by parents, run off from playing with certain kids, etc.  In this case I just got up, walked over by the offending kid, a scruffy mean-looking fellow, who probably got beat at home regularly, and he ran off, probably determined to get my kid again sometime later.

Now in the back of my mind was that kid across the playground: Did he buckle? Did he have parents around? Who was the creepy man? It occurred to me, in that split second or so, that that man represented every parent's eternal nightmare, the evil stranger preying upon our children. Not that I knew that for a fact; I didn't know him, didn't know the kid, didn't even know the kid's parents. I'd seen the kid before, that's all. That was enough to make me worry about him. 

I glanced in that direction and he was still there, the creepy man, desperately trying to convince the kid of something. I couldn't hear their exact words. The kid was wise to stall, I could see that. Then, to my surprise, from behind them, in two different directions, came two policemen, and they approached the man in such a way that he now was trapped. They talked to him for a while, and clearly made him show an ID. At some point the boy wandered off beneath them. Now I was sitting down again, on the bench, free to just watch them as my own children continued to play. And sure enough, after about twenty minutes, they arrested the guy, read him his rights, and took him over to the police car where they drove him away. Before they left I saw the two policemen talking to each other, and one pointed in my direction; I had no idea what that was about, and was confused momentarily, but since they did nothing except take the creepy guy away, I was left to believe they were just talking about me. It was a brief gesture, but it was clear to me anyway, as if one policeman was pointing me out to the other. Yet neither was the one I'd talked to earlier in the day.

My own children now had a lively game of tag going, and this meant that they were running quickly in front of me, going up the slide, taking stairs and play structures in leaps and bounds, and occasionally arguing about whether one had actually touched the other. This is a normal game, life as it should be, kids filling their lungs with fresh October air.  The little kid who had been the subject of the scene across the park, I lost track of; maybe he'd gone home? There were people who lived near the park who just let their kids go out into it; perhaps they would be more careful next time, or, they would never even know what had happened.

I scanned the news for anything about them finding some pedophile, but found nothing. Later, though, at home, I noticed that my phone had made an accidental call to 9-1-1, probably when I'd shifted in my seat. It was set with 9-1-1 as the top call, and had just redialed and called them right around the time of the incident. They had answered the call, no doubt, and they had pointed at me because they had known that it was I who had originated the call. If they had asked, I would have told them that it was accidental. But I'm glad they came, nevertheless. You don't want guys like that hanging around your park, preying on children. Whatever his business was, I'm glad it was intercepted.

10-14

Ferris wheel

When the circus came to our small town in Texas, I of course had to take my 10-year-old daughter, and we lined up at the ferris wheel for one of our first rides. The last time I'd been on a ferris wheel was back when our family lived in Dallas, and I got on one with my older brother. We'd gotten stuck at the top, and he started spitting on the people below. We were only stuck for about twenty minutes, but it was one of the longest twenty minutes in my life, because I imagined that if he'd hit someone, they would be waiting at the bottom when we finally came down, ready to beat us up, or with a posse to string us up or haul us off to jail.

That was in Dallas, though, and we didn't know any of those people that he was aiming for. Now, in this small town, chances were pretty good that I'd know just about everyone, or at least half, since people came in from the country. I knew this one guy back in the line about seven people; he was in a wheelchair, and he was trying to get special consideration for getting into the ferris wheel. His name was Barton, and I knew how he'd gotten in that wheelchair. He was a friend of my brother's, a little older than I was, and had goaded my brother at one point to go out racing or to do some wild and reckless things. My brother was a target for this kind of stuff so it made sense that a guy like Barton would come after him. But he got into a car wreck; killed one of their friends, killed an old grandmother out on a country road, and he himself would be in a wheelchair the rest of his days. Fortunately my brother wasn't involved; he was lucky. 

It was about sunset as we loaded ourselves onto the ferris wheel and started on up to get a view of our small town. Having moved from Dallas at the age of about thirteen, I'd always been aware how painfully small this town was, and it didn't help that the music track of the ferris wheel seemed to be stuck on "It's a Small World." I could old John Wallace's auto repair shop, and another place where they still owed me $18 for cleaning out their shed. I held onto my daughter tightly, even though we were safely behind a metal bar. You don't want to go in the wrong direction in these places, I thought, or there would be no way out, that was the disadvantage of a small town. People were as friendly and as helpful as they could be. But they knew you too well, so if you wanted to reform or change direction, you couldn't, because they were too sure they already knew who you were.

Some of my brother's friends had joined the army; others had gone off to Dallas as my brother did, where there was room to constantly reinvent yourself. I looked out at the sun setting on the town though, and I was satisfied that it had worked out well for me. I'd stayed, got a job and had a family. To my daughter, this would be all there was.

This ferris wheel got stuck, too. It was after we'd come around the top, and were on our way back down. My daughter and I sat there looking at John Wallace's auto repair for almost an hour while they went and got a cherry picker to get us all down. It was a laborious task, but eventually some guy I recognized from the fire department came and lifted us into the cherry picker which then brought us gingerly down to the ground, maybe an hour after we'd gotten into the car. Meanwhile they'd sent the people in line home; the thing was broken, and they couldn't finish it. The heck of it was, that stupid song "It's a Small World" was on the whole time. It was like the sound track was connected to the ferris wheel itself, so they couldn't just turn it off or change the music. It was on the whole time.

And it was much more of an ordeal for Barton, or so I heard. For us, it was about an hour, and we got a story to tell, a free ride in a cherry picker, to make up for the time we lost to do the rest of the circus. For Barton, it was more like a six or seven-hour ordeal, because he was at the top, and a simple cherry-picker wouldn't do the trick for him, because of his special condition. He had to wait for them to get all the right equipment, and that took quite a while.

At work, someone said that would be a lawsuit for sure, seven hours at the top of a ferris wheel. I pointed out that it was mostly the sound track that was the torture, the rest of it pretty much wasn't their fault anyway. Things break; there's not much you can do sometimes. I had sympathy for those circus guys, since I myself had no clue how the thing worked either. I considered it quality family time with my daughter, who didn't seem to mind. I had no idea how Barton took it, though, I almost never saw him. 

Burger, fries, and a coke

One night in late May, in the town of Zhouyuan, Shandong province, China, an American woman named Anne arrived on foot at a McDonald's to find kind of a commotion there. Outside the restaurant, a policeman was arguing with a few people near a very fancy white car. Inside, another American woman was speaking fluent Chinese to a couple of policemen; their conversation seemed to center around the woman's cell phone. The police were agreeing with her, and seeming to cooperate; they were trying to be nice. Anne averted her eyes and used her broken Chinese to order a burger, fries, and a coke. The Chinese workers hurried to bring her her order and make her happy. She was disappointed in what she received, but she'd been prepared for the disappointment. McDonald's in China could not really compare with McDonald's in the States; she'd been told that before.

Anne was a missionary in a town near Zhouyuan, and was on her way back to where she was living. She'd stopped here because, hey, she was in the city, and besides, it gave her a good memory, a connection to her home town back in Alabama. Her mission was going well, and she'd actually learned some Chinese, enough to order, for example. But she'd only been in China for a few months, and it was all pretty new to her. Here in the city, there were hundreds of bicycles, even at night. People watched her openly as it was relatively rare, apparently, to see Americans. Aware that people were watching her, she tried to mask her disappointment in the burger and especially the fries, and just enjoy the familiar surroundings - the red booths and yellow tables, the picture of Ronald McDonald on the wall, the golden arches outside the window. But as she looked around she was aware that the people in the restaurant were somewhat traumatized, even the workers. The workers talked in hushed tones to each other. One woman in the corner stared blankly, as if she'd seen her own death in the last few minutes. Something was not right.

Suddenly, the woman who had been talking to the police asked Anne if she could join her in the booth, and Anne readily agreed. She had brown hair, brown eyes and an open American expression; she was of medium height and a little overweight. She introduced herself as Corrine, and said in a casual way that she was from Oklahoma, as Anne mentioned Alabama. Corrine's hand was shaking as she sat; a cup of coffee was in one, while the cell phone was in the other. But she collected herself quickly and seemed to appreciate Anne's company. Corrine was in her thirties, while Anne was only 22, but they got along quickly and well. Anne forgot about the bad taste of the burger and instead listened to Corrine's story.

Corrine, and others in the restaurant, had apparently just witnessed a brutal murder of a young woman, outside the McDonalds. Six people, apparently members of a cult, had come into the place and requested people's phone numbers, but had gotten into an argument with one woman. A child in the group had insisted that the woman was a demon, she said, and the adult members of the cult began to beat her up, right outside the place; she had died. The police had come and arrested everyone, including the leader, who had arrived in the fancy white car.

Corrine had apparently caught the whole thing on her cell phone video camera, and had agreed to send it to the police. That's what the negotiations were about. Corrine wanted to keep her phone, but was more than willing to share the video. Corrine had reasonably fluent Chinese; she said it was from watching soap operas; it was clearly much better than Anne's, and she was able to carry on her conversation with the police pretty well, and send them the video by text. It was impressive.

Anne asked Corrine about the cult, which, according to Corrine, was called Eastern Lightning. It was Christian, but they believed that the messiah was already here, in the form of a woman, and they were known for being abusive and violent, according to Corrine, though she admitted she didn't know much. She had no sympathy for them, after what she'd seen, though. She said something of the nature that the police here weren't great, but they were better than letting these wacko Christians go about beating people to death. She herself hadn't called the police, but she had no problem with sharing her video, if that would help the police put these people to justice.

For some reason, Anne began to tell Corrine about her own circumstances: how she'd gotten in trouble in her small town in Alabama, being a rebel with her boyfriend; the boyfriend had joined the Army and gone to Afghanistan, while she, Anne, had found Jesus and come here. The white car had reminded her of the sheriff's car in that small town; she'd actually been in it once. It was the car of a pushy, arrogant, powerful jerk, she thought, and she thought of that sheriff while Corrine was describing the leader of the cult.

Anne saw the blood splattered on the McDonalds window, and thought for a moment about the murdered woman, who she could only imagine. According to Corrine, there was little anyone could do to save her life, because there were at least five attackers, and they had some kind of bludgeon or something that they'd used to beat her with. Corrine seemed to blame it all on Christians in general, as if Anne's mission was no different from this cult, and that offended Anne deeply, but she knew that people knew very little about different kinds of Christians, and realized that Corrine would know even less, living in China and all, whereas Anne had seen all kinds of things in her small town in Alabama, and knew that all kinds of things went on under the name of Christianity that would not really qualify as Christian. One had to look past the many who would abuse the name of Christianity, to truly find the heart of the religion, she felt.

Anne's impulse as a missionary was to try to convert Corrine, but she resisted it. Corrine seemed to have deep resentment against Christianity, and alienation from the US, which she'd been away from for several years, being the wife of a businessman. Something told Anne she'd already done the best she could, just by being Christian and not sympathizing with the killers. Her impulse as an American was to say that it was too bad it had happened at a McDonald's; it made the US look bad, and it made Christianity look bad as well. She sometimes wondered what Chinese said about Americans when they were out of earshot, when they were home alone but could see the Western world, with its senseless violence and bad food, encroaching in their town. She didn't want to know.  She couldn't blame them for being a little suspicious.

Corrine finished her coffee just as Anne finished her coke, and they got up to go their separate ways. Corrine thanked Anne for her comfort in a time of stress, for giving her an opportunity to talk about and process what she'd seen. Murders were rare in China. They'd be talking about this one for some time, she figured. And she was right. When Anne got home, she saw it on the state-run media service, and from then on she heard repeatedly about the brutal murder. The government, which was called the "Red Dragon" by cult members, was not crazy about the increasing popularity of Eastern Lightning, or any other cult, as far as Anne could tell. A crackdown was coming, somebody said, and there was no telling how that might affect the lives of the missionaries. Being a missionary in China, they said, wasn't easy, even in the best of times.

PO'd

I was hitchhiking down from the North Country, through Chicago, but taking the tollway around the city, when an old guy in a Lincoln picked me up. Like a Cadillac, the Lincoln was roomy, with a nice radio and dark interior, and the guy was a well-dressed businessman of some kind, a little moody. We talked location for a while; he was going somewhere in Indiana, but close to Chicago; I was going much farther south. It was a cold November day, and there had been a freak ice-storm that had made stopping a little dangerous, one reason I'd avoided going straight down through the middle of the city. It was early evening, too; dark was coming quickly, and that would change hitchhiking a bit.

He wanted to talk about light bulbs, for some reason, as an example of a moral dilemma he had at work. "Suppose you had a way to make light bulbs cheaper; you'd do it, right?" Well, yes, I said, though I wasn't a businessman. "If you did," he continued, "you'd have an advantage in the market, right?"

"Now suppose that as you made them cheaper, they wouldn't last as long. But you reached a point where people didn't notice, you'd still do it, right?" he asked. I began to see what he was getting at.

"Now suppose you could measure people's perception, and you could figure out how long it took before they didn't notice. That would be the ideal length of time to make them last, right?"

"So your research is based on people's perception, not on how to make them last as long as possible with as little expense possible."

"Well," he said, "sometimes that physical part, mastering the craft of making them, is long ago perfected, fairly equal among competitors. So the only thing left is their ability to measure the perceptions of their customers. That's what separates the winners from the losers."

We went past the McDonald's above the freeway, near O'Hare; when we stopped at the tollbooths, he had his ninety cents ready. This was a relief, to tell you the truth. Sometimes people give you a ride on the tollway, and they hock you for ninety cents, which, if I have it, I feel obliged to give. But I don't want to. I'm hitchhiking, and it was icy out there. I was glad he paid the toll.

The toll collector looked out of his little dirty glass box with a glazed expression, though I'm sure he thanked us or mumbled something under his breath. Every time I saw these guys I thought of the story in the newspaper, which I'd read in Wisconsin somewhere, about some toll baron who kept all the profits, long after the roads the tolls were meant to pay for, were paid for. It was legend around Chicago, a kind of corruption everyone took for granted; this millionaire was living it up somewhere out here in the suburbs, while his minions stood in their little glass boxes trading dollars for dimes. And calling the police to come after you if you sped through without giving them their ninety cents.

The old guy drifted into a kind of silence, thinking about the morality of robbing the average man; it was all a matter of perception, he maintained. It wasn't moral, it wasn't right, but it was the way it was. You make them worse, you survive in the market. Planned obsolescence, it was called.

Some people, himself included, remembered light bulbs lasting forever, poor people taking them with, when they left one apartment to move to another, so that they'd never have to buy one. They could make them last forever; they knew how. They could, but they didn't. We discussed this for a while; for part of that time, he was mumbling, as if he remembered a few light bulbs himself. But I knew it wasn't about light bulbs; he had some larger problem that he wasn't bringing up. I felt like he wanted me to judge him, the immoral businessman, but I didn't. I was grateful for the ride. The car was warm. He was genuinely friendly.

It was snowing lightly, and the snow twinkled up against the bright lights of the tollway which shone on the treacherous roads below. If the snow became significant, you could no longer see the ice patches; if that happened, it was real trouble. I tried to gauge whether this guy had had a martini or two, because those things matter in this situation. But the best I could figure, he was sober. He clutched the wheel hard. He was going home with a face of grim determination. There was one more toll collector. This time the road widened out to maybe eight windows, but it didn't matter. Each one that was occupied would have a grim-faced toll man. Again the guy paid the fare; he had his dollar bills ready. The road was slick when it branched into eight, and then again on the other side, but he managed it well.

It occurred to me he could have been the toll baron himself, with his nice Lincoln, and his fine shoes, not revealing his true business. But then, he wouldn't have had to pay at all, and he wouldn't be living in Indiana. No, that wasn't him. I'd never know; I'd never see him again.

Eventually the Lincoln made some funny sounds, and he apologized and pulled over, somewhere just as we were getting into Indiana. Something sounded funny in the car, and he was going to see if he could do something about it while things were still open. He grumbled something about American cars and apologized as he let me out on the edge of the road. I put up my collar, grabbed my pack and went on my way. I was grateful to be on the other side of Chicago, which was too busy for my taste, with too many people that weren't going anywhere except maybe the next little suburb. It was time to get some miles under me; I wanted to be in Alabama, and out of the weather, by dawn.

e pluribus haiku

e pluribus haiku 2014 is out. 875 haiku, better packaging, more complete. I'm really proud of it. click on the picture to order it through amazon or by kindle. my intention was to publish on July 4, but if you think about it, the season is already over by then. The season is now. so pass this along, and celebrate the diversity of this country, its 50 unique states (and the District of Columbia); and the expression, through poetry, of a traveler's view.