Adelaide Literary Award Anthology 2019 - ESSAYS

ESSAYS ANTHOLOGY

10 and Daniel six; puffy Ivan Senior, at 53 looking older; Ivan
Junior, about 20; pretty Eira, mid-20s, to take many photos of
herself and our group; lean Oswaldo, 30-something, to snap
1,000 shots of everything; serene Patricia in her early 30s; and
a tall young man whose name I can’t recall who like Happy in
Death of a Salesman commanded less attention with his every
strenuous attempt to attract it. José and his business partner
Luigi drove the jeeps.

We stopped at roadside médanos, surprisingly large dunes
in the plains of Apure State, and clambered up for pictures.
These unexpected sands in cattle-grazing country blow in from
the 2.6-billion-year-old Guyana Shield to the east, some of the
oldest earth on Earth. Then everyone ran back to our vehicles
to careen crazy-fast over bumpy ground. Some of us had just
seen an SUV leave the highway to roll three times down a long
embankment. That is the other story at the end of this one.

Miles to the south we camped at Pozo Azul, Blue Well,
where Jesús sorted out the mess of my tent poles for me in
moments. A plunge in a stream, a little sleep, and Sunday’s
first light saw us to Los Venados, The Deer, a port on a canyo
or natural linking inland waterway. From there in a narrow
metal bongo (originally a craft made from a single tree) we soon
gained the Orinoco whose serpentine 1,700 miles and water-
shed drain 80% of Venezuela. The river reflected the nation´s
ongoing drought: lines on the sides of occasional concrete ba-
sins showed a seeming 50% drop. Crumbled riverbanks and
masses of fallen half-submerged mangroves lined our route.
Larger trees leaned towards us in supplication.

Six others joined us at Los Venados. Eduardo, a quiet Pi-
aroa, took over as pilot in the bongo’s stern. Aldo, mixed Amer-
indian, would cook and crew. Guide Otto’s Italian-Venezuelan
physician father came to Amazonas to fight malaria in the ‘40s

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but fell in love with the region and stayed. The doctor’s other
son Vicente soon proved himself knowledgeable and nuanced
in all things Amazonas. Last to board were body-building En-
glish teacher Pepito with his young and silent girlfriend.

The passing hours ushered us up the Siapopo River, then
the Autana. Aldo said the fauna had been hunted out of the
area. Jaguars, deer, spectacled caimans—the few remaining had
learned to associate the sound of outboard motors with danger.
Fishing was so-so. We passed a Piaroa man holding an 18-inch
payara or vampire fish. These feed on piranhas, impaling them
on two four-inch fangs protruding from their lower jaws. That
evening we ate palometa, a small piranha species, in the tiny
Amerindian village of Ceguera meaning blindness.

A score of Piaroa children cavorted like otters in the Au-
tana while we walked among thatched dwellings next morning,
a Direct TV antenna sprouting from the sole one of cinder
block. We sat in the leafy shade of the common area won-
dering how a smiling round-faced half-toothless boy of seven
could so swiftly weave us exquisite little animals from palm
fronds. The Piaroa lose their teeth, Pepito said (citing his sister,
a nurse) for five reasons: the chewing of tough fibrous yucca,
low calcium consumption, soft drinks, no brushing, and no
visiting dentists anymore. Ivan Senior surmised they must eat
a healthy natural diet but Pepito countered they´ve no con-
trol over the parasites they ingest. Indigenes’ life expectancy
lay far below Venezuela’s average of 74 in 2010. The general
population’s has doubtless plunged nowadays amid Venezuela’s
continuing economic implosion.

Piaroa traditional culture (16 kinds of manufacture from
masks and embroidered loincloths to poisons, blowpipes, pot-
tery, weaving and tinctures endured to the 1960s) did not seem
long for this world. We´d seen several coffins encasing the

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bodies of shamans fitted snugly into rock caverns high in the
Autana’s canyon walls, to remain a few months according to
custom. But Otto said the only seven surviving shamans could
find no apprentices. The young yearned for the outside world.
Pepito predicted that by 2020—and here we are—traditional
Piaroa culture would be lost.

A loss indeed for some. According to anthropologist Al-
exander Mansutti (1995),

A fact which distinguishes the Piaroa is their absolute
rejection of the use of physical or verbal violence. Severe in
their self-control (when perturbing factors like alcohol are
not involved), rigorous and disciplined, they are horrified by
anyone who cannot control his emotions. Due to this, faced
with unpleasantness or harshness, they tend to flee, fearful of
the danger represented by the lack of such self-control. Murder
is unknown, due to the belief that one who commits it will im-
mediately die in a horrible manner.… The Piaroa are also noted
for the egalitarianism of their societies, which some experts
characterize as anarchic. They place great value on autonomy
and individual liberties and are aware of the importance of
insuring that no one is subject to the orders of anyone else….

Wikipedia adds the Piaroa see competition as spiritually
evil. Nevertheless, this qualification follows:

Despite sometimes being described as one of the world´s
most peaceful societies, modern anthropologists report that
the relations of the Piraroa with neighboring tribes are actually
“unfriendly, marked by magical or physical warfare. Violent
conflict erupted between the Piaroa and the waeñaepi [sic]…
fighting to control… the best clay for making pottery in the
region. Constant warfare also exists between the Piaroa and
Caribs, who invaded Piaroa territory from the east in search
of captives.

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For others, however, Piaroa culture—at least certain as-
pects of it—cannot die out soon enough. If the pacifism Man-
sutti noted doesn´t apply to relations with external groups,
Pepito told us Piaroa egalitarianism doesn´t extend to women.
Traditionally, females cannot voice opinions. They´re viewed
mainly as highly valuable commodities: the more daughters a
father has, the more bride-prices he can collect. Marriages can
be arranged when a girl is as young as eight. But today some
Piraroa women serve as teachers and nurses in the surrounding
economy as well as in other occupations. Many want to make
their lives with non-Piraroa men.

Vicente provided a stark example. A teacher and mother
of nine had recently told her husband she no longer loved him,
further revealing she´d become involved with a non-Piraroa
man. Several anguished weeks later he stabbed her to death.
Since then he´d been at large in the forested Belgium-sized
Piaroa region, materializing at remote dwellings to ask for food
on rare occasions. “Living like an animal,” as Vicente put it.
One can only wonder at the psychic pain implied by this event
for all the Piaroa.

Despite divergent takes on this people, unanimity ob-
tained aboard our bongo on one topic: the Hugo Chavez era in
Amazonas State. Locals Aldo, Pepito, Otto and Vicente agreed
its 11 years (by 2010) had hurt the Piaroa. Alcoholism, drug
use and prostitution were up. The Ministerio de las Indígenas
had become all but nonfunctional. Its employees no longer, for
example, plied the rivers to little settlements like Ceguera pro-
viding dental and other services. But in the capital of Puerto
Ayacucho the ministry elite were buying the finest houses, with
pools, and traveling to places like Rome and Venice. The Min-
ister´s wife occasionally showed up here and there in the region
but only to hand out cash to passersby. The general state of

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health was worse than before Chavez. Corruption too. Pepito
had worked for Misión Robinson (a Chavista literacy project) but
quit when he saw how badly it was being run: money pouring
in at the top did not materialize at the bottom even to purchase
basic supplies. Ministry officials passing Pepito in the street re-
fused even to glance at him since he’d left. Chavez and high fed-
eral officials flew in for nationally televised ceremonies inaugu-
rating splendid-looking projects which never developed the least
semblance of reality. Amazonas State featured 7,000 employees
filling sinecures and the Puerto Ayacucho mayoralty sported an
even larger payroll, Aldo said. The principal form of subsistence
in the Amazonas money economy consisted of government pa-
tronage for Chavez partisans. Amerindians competed among
themselves for niches on those payrolls. With no industry in the
state, there was virtually no other “work” to be had.

Vicente provided background by noting that in the 19th
century, foreigners extracting latex from Amazonas harmed the
local population. Next, the game became gold leached with
toxic mercury by garampeiros, wildcat Brazilian miners. Otto
added the Venezuelan National Guard had recently shut down
a camp of 700 of these. But how could such a large camp go
undetected for so long? And why was it soon operating again?
Because the Guard had coerced a cut. The force was also prof-
iting from arms and drug trafficking. These, said Vicente, were
the grim facts of life in Estado Amazonas, hard-pressed home of
the Piaroa, Yanomani, and 18 other Amerindian groups.

We dropped back down the Autana 200 yards to gain
our trailhead after lunch. José advised us just before leaving to
bring our flashlights. Flustered, rushing through my camp gear,
I overlooked mine. A serious error.

Soon we were trekking through jungle so fetid the
humidity turned it gray. “Get me out of here!” screamed

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six-year-old Daniel. “I want a helicopter!” Either his sweati-
ness had rendered him hysterical or he wanted to match his
brother´s meltdown in the tedium of the bongo´s thrumming
motor the previous day. “¡Imbéciles!” Diego had called us then.
He´d shouted at his mother he hated her and hoped she would
die. Shut up! was for Jesús who´d tried to humor him. Diego
had kicked and punched some of us with all his might, and
bit his mother´s restraining hands so hard she couldn´t help
but show the pain. Some murmured privately Diego needed
a good spanking. But Sunday evening as we slung our ham-
mocks in an oval thatched churuata, Virginia said she´d left her
husband due to his violence and would never visit any on her
sons. Her younger one Daniel quieted down at the dank foot
of Uripika when Aldo arranged with three descending adults
to take him back to Ceguera.

Next Ivan Senior, the trail steepening, informed us he´d
forgotten his high blood pressure pills in Caracas. We hadn´t
known of his condition. He didn´t want to turn back. Ivan
Junior, exasperated, abandoned his father. Oswaldo and I ac-
companied the older man two-thirds the way up when we went
ahead knowing—or believing–that a guide was following behind.

Above the canopy top: sun-shot revelation! Half of ma-
jestic Autana, all the nearby three-faced Uichí formation and
endless misted jungle lay before and below us. Only Uripi-
ka’s 100-foot scramble remained. But my mild fear of heights
kicked in, so I sat with calm Patricia whose knee had swollen.
Those on top exhorted me to join them—giving up, with mild
insults, to go exploring. Patricia and I felt the awe of the scene
a good while as faint shouts of jubilation wafted down. To my
own surprise I suddenly tried the scramble again and made it.

The 360-degree view from the spongy-turfed top plus the
rousing reception of my comrades forged a peak life experience.

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Beside and above now rose only rocky Autana, the Piraroas´
Tree of Life of which they say [translations here and below
from the Spanish mine]:

In the beginning there was no one but Wahari, He who never
dies; He who never disappears. One day Wahari was thinking
about life, and so He created us, the Piaroa. One day He cut a
Kuawai, the Tree of Life, that held among its forks and shoots all
the sustenance of the world. The fruit, with its seeds, was scat-
tered over the Earth and we had food. Of the Tree of Life there
now remains only the trunk [Autana], turned to stone by Wahari.
Mereya Anemei created the Universe all around the stump–the
rivers and streams, the mountains and forests, the animals, the
rain and the star-filled vaults. This is our country of origin. This,
for us, is the sacred land.

Young Venezuelans in festive mode are heedless. We older
men too overstayed on Uripika. Night falls fast in the tropics.
Jesús and I, descending at last, encountered Ivan Senior still
laboring up through the jungle alone. We turned him round
without a rest. Soon he complained of dizziness; he weaved; he
wanted to sleep. Said he needed an ambulance. We kept him
moving with physical support and stern words, there seeming
no alternative. Blackness swallowed us with only Jesús´s head-
lamp to pierce it. He distributed beams fore and aft like Ven-
ezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel with a light-baton. We
crossed four small tree-trunk bridges over deep muck. I fell on
one but stayed atop and crawled the rest. Soon Ivan pitched
heavily onto his hands, but into something dry and soft, a
second miracle. At length we heard Oswaldo calling back up
the mountain to us ¡Mi gente!, my people! From there a cord
of human voices handed us down the raven path.

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The Piraroa send you two messages. First, see a square
containing four sets of four wedges pointing inward. Your life
begins in the center. Choose any direction and cross one wedge.
You’re among family and friends. Cross the next to join the
great world beyond your home. Cross the third, and look back.
Grasp the meaning of your life. Cross the last into the trackless
expanse of your last days.

Listen! Wahari is addressing you.

If you look at me, I am the red butterfly

If you speak to me, I am the dog you hear

If you love me, I am the flower that opens in your hair

If you shun me, I am the empty canoe the current takes

And breaks upon the rocks.



Coda: The two older daughters lay on the ground. One still,
one writhing.

José knew first aid. Bastante grave, really bad, he said. The
left eye of the writhing one—she was 25—had been smashed
deep into her head. But we didn´t worry about that. Her ribs
were broken and she was struggling to breathe. Fearing (in addi-
tion) a neck injury, Patricia and I tried to restrain her. Impossible.

Tableau: Young woman with tongue protruding. Thick
gout of carmine blood on sparse long grass. Parents’ arms and
faces coursing crimson rills. A small girl walking and screaming.

The 17-year-old lay to one side, quiet but conscious, her
jeans soaked with her urine because the SUV had thrown her

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clear then crushed her pelvis. Stopping motorists lifted it off
her. Patricia tried to reassure her. The girl said she wanted
to sleep. It was important to stay awake, someone said. She
seemed to take his meaning.

Meanwhile her sister jerked her head left and right. She
couldn’t speak but loud moans burst from her at times. Highway
people gathered in silence. Some pitying, some curious.

A man approached the writhing one saying he was a
doctor (she herself was a doctor). José had saline solution. The
man failed several times to inject her arm and hand. Once he
pulled the syringe itself apart. At last he gave up. Perhaps he
was in light shock. Perhaps he was not a doctor.

Some called ambulances on their cels. President Chavez
had announced that emergency vehicles stood ready on all the
nation’s highways for Mardi Gras. Forty-five minutes passed
but no one came. A flat-bed driver agreed to take the stricken
family north over the slow pot-holed road. To what? “Basi-
cally a dispensary,” José said. No hospital stood in those empty
plains. Men hoisted the broken sisters on improvised pallets. A
middle-aged woman climbed up behind them. “They´ve got to
have more help than this!” she admonished the 25 below her.
No one spoke. No one moved. The man who´d said he was a
doctor, despair informing his entire being, climbed in.

José later searched in vain for news of this accident.
Anyone touching injured persons could be held responsible for
their subsequent deaths, a highway department official warned
him. But José said he´d do what he’d done (removed the largest
glass shards from the parents´ faces and bandaged the father´s
deeply cut finger) and everything else he could. Next time.

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by Terry Engel

August 12, 2019

Move in day at the dormitory is the hottest day of the year,
107 degrees with a constant Oklahoma breeze that feels like
standing in front of a convection oven. My daughter’s room is
filled with boxes and bins, three roommates, and three sets of
parents, all trying to unpack and organize and decorate. Once
the heavy work is done, the fathers are commissioned to run
to the hardware store and pick up lunch, assemble shelves and
unpack refrigerators and microwaves, and lug empty boxes and
trash downstairs.

My daughter, Julia Rose, lives on the seventh floor of a
coed dorm with guys and girls on separate wings. The “coed”
part hasn’t fully registered with me until I notice boys un-
packing boxes. Surely I was told that this was a coed dorm,
but in all the preparation this summer, from buying a new
laptop to the roommate meeting to decide who brings the
broom and who brings the shower caddy, I never heard “coed.”
I look at the gangly teenage boys who will share a floor with
my daughter and remember myself as a gangly teen, acned
and introverted, a first generation college student with a mass

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of insecurities. As a college professor, I interact with teenagers
every day, but now I realize that I know very little about their
world outside the classroom.

At the parent orientation session, the dean who han-
dles sex offenses, dating violence, and stalking makes parents
promise to talk to our freshmen about what “consent” means
before we leave. I think about this new terrain for Julia Rose
that, unlike climbing the 14,000 foot Colorado peak when she
was 15, she will have to traverse without me.

Along with coed dorms, I worry about the intensity of
the competitive dance program that selected Julia Rose. She
really wanted a ballet program, and I drove her to auditions at
highly ranked programs in Indiana, Oklahoma, and Utah. Her
mother, Lisa, drove or flew with her to a half dozen more audi-
tions from New York to San Antonio. The auditions were scary.
Two hundred girls and thirty high-school guys competing for a
handful of freshman spots. Make-up, buns, leotards and tights,
pointe shoes; the stretching, the temper tantrums, the tears.
The Black Swan intensity of competition—not just the boys
and girls trying out, but the dance parents. I imagine a dance
mom arranging an I, Tonya pipe to the knee for any dancer
who might take a scholarship away from her daughter or son.

After her first audition at the University of Oklahoma,
my daughter cried. I waited, until she finally said, “Just so you
know, I’m probably going to cry after every one of these.”

The college application and dance audition process fol-
lowed fifteen years of dance lessons, most of them in Little
Rock, a two-hour round trip from our home. For several years
my wife and I took turns driving six to seven days a week. There
were summer intensives with Ballet Arkansas in Little Rock
and two summers dancing at the University of Utah in Salt
Lake, a preview of dorm life and collegiate dance. Mercyhurst

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University rejected her, writing that “our dance faculty believe
you would struggle in our [ballet] program.” After every au-
dition came a two week wait and then the email. She was
accepted into Marymount Manhattan, but in dance peda-
gogy rather than dance performance, and she was waitlisted
by the University of Utah’s ballet program. Mostly rejections.
Depending on how much she liked the school (Mercyhurst),
or if one of her teachers had danced there (Butler University),
Julia Rose would cry for a bit. But then she’d wipe her eyes
and pull out her textbooks, or else pack her dance bag for the
drive to Little Rock.

The night before we leave her at college, she’s feeling the
sadness of our departure, questioning her decision to move so
far from home, wondering if she has what it takes to make it
in the program. Oklahoma City University is heavier on tap
and jazz, her weaker genres, and the program was low on her
list. It’s also one of the top dance theatre departments in the
country. I tell her, “Oklahoma City chose you. That means
something. Dance hard, and you’ll be alright.”

Rhythms

Late in the summer, Lisa and I take Julia Rose to her last
dance class in Little Rock, where we have spent hundreds of
hours at the studio waiting, reading, and grading papers while
she danced. Most evenings we didn’t get home until 9:30 or
10:00, fourteen hours after leaving the house for work. Saying
goodbye to her teachers is like moving out of the old house
where you watched your children grow up; it’s handing over
the keys to the new owners, knowing the house will continue
to be filled and studio life will go on without us. The yearly

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rhythms that have dominated our calendars—Nutcracker in
the fall, Young Adult Grand Prix ballet competition in the
winter, recital in the spring—will belong to other dancers and
parents. Lauren and Allison, who have helped Julia Rose navi-
gate the college dance audition ordeal, tear up as we are leaving.
Lauren and Allison both studied at Butler University; Lauren
danced professionally for Ballet Arkansas, while Allison was a
Rockette at Radio City Music Hall. They’re excited for Julia
Rose. Lauren goes to her car for a gift and a letter. I imagine
it brims with love and pride, as well as advice about how to
survive a college dance major. It’s the kind of advice that I can’t
give. Julia Rose already knows hard work stubbornness, my
two greatest gifts to her.

This summer, when she wasn’t working, Julia Rose spent
many evenings sitting with her mother and me, talking,
watching reruns of the Office or Parks and Rec or the Sopranos,
teasing the cats with a laser pointer, and giving us a hug when
she left for a shift at the yogurt shop or heading upstairs to bed.
There’s a lingering between the life she’s known and the life
ahead. A liminal space where she’s holding on to the doorjambs
with her feet still in high school and home, but her head and
torso leaning forward to college and independence. Bittersweet
is a cliché, but no other term feels so apt for her mother and me.
Pride, certainly, excitement for this new adventure, surely, and
deep sadness, overwhelmingly. Julia Rose is excited, but she’s
also frantic about leaving her cat, Pearl, who sleeps with her at
night and wanders the house with mournful yowls whenever
she isn’t home. Her departure date approaches as inevitably as
a receding glacier before the forces of climate change: nothing I
can do will slow it or make me feel better about it.

One of the joys of becoming a college student or a new
parent lies in the planning. Julia Rose sold frozen yogurt all

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summer, saving most of her pay but using the rest to buy sup-
plies and decorations for her dorm room. One corner of her
bedroom holds plastic bins of clothes and shoes, cleaning sup-
plies, ironing board and iron, a Keurig and a few dishes, note-
books and pens, a refrigerator/freezer, and pictures and favorite
books and personal items that will connect her to her childhood
and family and friends. The move will require most of her com-
pact car and all of my SUV. I moved to college with a sixteen
foot canoe and a ten speed bicycle tied to a Chevy Chevette.
Inside, I had a footlocker, school supplies, a hot pot, a couple
of Frisbees, and a combination record/cassette player with two
backpack-sized speakers and a stack of vinyl. I packed too much.
When we brought Julia Rose home from the hospital, we filled a
bedroom with brand new equipment: crib, mobile, boxes of di-
apers and a changing table and a diaper genie, chest of drawers,
and books and books and books. The rest of our space filled
with a car seat, stroller, and play pen; a wind up swinging chair,
bouncy seat, and a baby bath; stuffed animals, toys, and sleep
deprivation. I remember thinking that first night with her home
from the hospital, that I had no idea how to be a parent.

August 11, 2019 – Sunday morning

Saturday night we loaded two cars for the drive to Oklahoma
City. Tonight Lisa and Julia Rose and I are in a Sleep Inn. To-
morrow we move her into her dorm at 9:30. On her second day
at college she will dance for six hours, where her professors will
determine her skill levels for tap, jazz, and ballet. Wednesday
is the faculty convocation and freshman matriculation, where
professors parade in academic regalia and students transition
from high school seniors to collegians. After the convocation,

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Lisa and I will say goodbye and return home to shepherd a
second daughter, Stella, through senior year of high school
and teach our own college classes. This morning, just before
we left to take Julia Rose to Oklahoma, I found her sprawled
on the den floor, crying and petting her cat, Pearl, who has no
idea about the momentous shift in her routine, no idea that
she won’t be seeing her favorite human for a couple of months.
Julia Rose says goodbye to our Australian shepherd, Zoe, who
had a malignant tumor removed a year ago. Zoe loves to go on
walks, ride with her head out the window, and herd the cats
and chickens, but ten months ago when we did the surgery, we
bargained for a year. I don’t mention this to Julia Rose, since
her homesickness is already setting in.

August 11, 2019 – Sunday evening

After supper Julia Rose and I make a run for Half Price Books.
Julia Rose drives her car and I sit in the passenger seat, which
still feels unnatural even though she’s been driving for three
years. The suburbs of Oklahoma City sprawl in the golden light
of sunset, laid out in a neat grid with major streets running
north and south, sectioning smaller streets and neighborhoods
and shopping centers and parks. There are fewer trees than in
Arkansas, a constant wind, and because we are on the Southern
Great Plains, we can see the tall buildings of downtown from
miles away, rising like volcanic islands out of the ocean.

Half Price Books is as large as a Barnes and Noble and
well stocked with used books in like-new condition and new
books at, as advertised, prices half of what we would pay in
the B & N. The bookstore is a chain and Julia Rose and I had
visited its sister store in Indianapolis at the Butler University

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audition. We have thirty minutes before close, so I head for
fiction. After a few minutes Julia Rose turns up in my aisle
holding the entire Harry Potter series in half-price paperback.

“I’ve been wanting my own set,” she says.
Our copies at home are worn and belong to the whole
family. My daughters were raised on Harry Potter, and we’ve
filled cross-country car trips with my wife reading the books
aloud, or reading a chapter a night before bedtime. The summer
my wife and I taught at an international program in Florence,
Italy, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had just come out,
and every night at the 16th century villa where we lived, Lisa
read a chapter to our daughters, seven and nine at the time,
and to a half dozen or more college students crammed into
our apartment. My children know that if they turn up in a
bookstore aisle with five or six books in their hands, I am a soft
touch, and Julia Rose has caught me on the eve of her transi-
tion into college dorm life. I like that she wants to surround
herself with books and memories from home. She adds up
the cost of the series and the out of pocket expenses she antic-
ipates for the coming year against the thousand dollars she’s
saved from her summer job. But it’s a good price for books in
excellent condition, and I tell her I’ll go in half. She gives me a
twenty dollar bill and I pocket it, knowing that I’ll surprise her
with it later in the year, tucked inside a care package or a letter.

Moleskine

My journals—almost thirty years’ worth, handwritten and then
revised and typed—record travels, weather, book and movie
lists, events, eavesdropped conversations, and notes on places
and people. Written in scene, dialogue, characterization, and

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sensory detail, since I became a father, my imagined audience
has always been my children. When Julia Rose graduated I
shared the electronic document with her, nineteen years of her
life, a prompt for dim memories and events lost to childhood.
In Italy, my college students—for a grade—kept notes on the
cultural sites we toured in pocket Moleskine journals. Imitating
the college students, Julia Rose and Stella kept their own jour-
nals, drawing pictures and recording in their elementary school
print whatever seemed important to nine and seven-year-olds
touring the Uffizi, the Duomo, and the Galleria dell’Accademia,
not realizing that they were guarding against the potential to
forget experiences as the new crowds out the old.

August 15, 2019

It’s a quiet late afternoon after a mind-deadening day of English
department meetings. Already the school semester feels hectic,
and classes don’t start for four days. I’ve cleaned the kitchen,
emptied the dishwasher and started a new load, put in a load
of laundry, and started jambalaya for supper. My wife is still at
her office and Stella, my high school senior, has gone upstairs
to start homework following after-school meetings for chorus
and theatre. This is a familiar time of day, but the rhythm feels
off. For years, the hours after school meant driving Julia Rose
to Little Rock for four hours of dance and waiting in the studio
answering emails, grading papers, reading, napping, or writing.
Or, on the Fridays Julia Rose drove herself, worrying about rush
hour traffic and making sure that supper will be ready when she
arrives home, famished from a full day of school and driving and
dancing. I wonder what she’s doing in Oklahoma City and think
about texting, but then I worry about making her homesick, or

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interfering with her new job of settling into college life, making
friends, and sorting out her own problems. I put away the phone.

Pearl is out of rhythm too. As a kitten, Pearl imprinted on
Julia Rose, and now she wanders the house yowling, looking
for her human whose lap she nests on, whose knick-knacks
she knocks off the dresser at night, precipitating eviction from
the bedroom in front of a slamming door at 1 a.m. Right now
Pearl is perched on the back of the couch in front of the bay
window, watching birds and insects and squirrels and passing
cars—and I imagine—waiting for the sound of Julia Rose’s car
in the driveway and the slamming car door and the rattle of
the breezeway door. The cat senses that it’s time for the girl to
come home, and it’s depressing to think that that won’t happen
tonight, or tomorrow night, or any night for weeks to come.

August 20, 2019

I take Zoe to the vet with a sense of dread because it’s been
ten months since her splenectomy. Last year we didn’t know
how extensive the cancer was, and because Zoe was already
an old dog, I was hoping for a good year. I wasn’t ready to say
goodbye, then, and I weighed the surgery against a few more
good months, which we received.

Just as Julia Rose is Pearl’s human, I am Zoe’s human, and
while she jumps up on the couch and stares out the bay window
at the sound of Lisa’s car pulling into the driveway, when I
come home she explodes into full-body wiggles, barking and
prancing and leaping on furniture and following me around the
house until I drop my bookbag and get down on the floor to
play with her and tell her about my day. Zoe and I have made
the most of the time we bought with last year’s surgery. When

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I take down her leash she dances, barks, twirls, pounces on my
feet, crashes into furniture, and slides into the door, focused on
the leash in my hand. Her herd instincts kick in, and she guides
me to the car, nipping at my legs like I’m a wayward sheep. In
the car we drive with the windows down and Zoe’s head and
shoulders outside, ears flying back in the breeze. On the trail
she runs ahead of me, sniffing the brush, chasing the occasional
rabbit or squirrel, joyous. She runs ahead forty yards, dips off
the trail, then comes back to me, seeking reassurance that we’re
still moving forward, then she dashes up the trail again.

Zoe’s excitement flags when she recognizes the vet’s office.
While we wait she sits, her weight against my leg for protection,
watching the staff move behind the desk, ignoring their attempts
to make her feel at ease with proffered treats. We go into the exam-
ination room and the vet takes her into the back to take a blood
and stool sample, but it isn’t long before the tech brings her back
and Dr. Nelson comes in, wearing faded jeans and scuffed brown
cowboy boots and a polo shirt. She’s a straight shooter, and she
tells me what I expected to hear. Zoe’s cancer has gone into the
lymph nodes, and in these cases, Dr. Nelson warns, death usually
comes between two and six months. A vet in Memphis can do
chemotherapy, but it would involve weekly drives to Memphis
and cost thousands of dollars, a brutal treatment in exchange for
a few extra months of life where the treatment would take away
the energy for walks and drives with her head out the window.
I decide on steroids and antibiotics, knowing that Zoe isn’t in
pain yet, and there will be walks and biscuits and herding of the
chickens in the backyard for a time, but also knowing she will
inevitably decline, and we will know when she begins to suffer. I
thank Doctor Nelson and pick up Zoe’s meds and take her home
and pamper her with dog biscuits. I know that I will have to tell
Julia Rose and Stella, and I think about how to do that.

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September 1, 2019

By the third week of the semester, new rhythms are in place.
Stella’s high school routine revolves around classes, theatre tech-
nical crew, and choir rehearsal. She is voted French Club sweet-
heart for Homecoming, where I will escort her onto the football
field. My school is in full session, and I’m teaching three classes,
directing the Senior Project, chairing the English Department,
caring for a dog and three cats and six chickens, plus taking care
of the routine maintenance of life and trying to have relation-
ships. The dog is the hard part, right now. Zoe is not responding
to treatment, and the vet tells me that she could last a couple
of weeks or a couple of months. It’s difficult to know anything
other than that we will know when she begins to suffer. So I use
the good days, spending my lunch hour with Zoe, taking her
for walks in the evening. I try not to think about what’s coming.

But it is hard not to think about how fast life is changing.
My mother is eighty-three years old and lives alone and refuses
to think about moving closer to my town in Arkansas or my
brother’s town in Georgia. She fell a few weeks ago and gashed
her scalp and broke three ribs and drove herself to a walk-in
clinic. She didn’t bother to call me. A tough little woman,
shrinking with age. This summer I hired a financial planner
to manage my retirement accounts, and we spent hours dis-
cussing my investment attitude, determining how aggressive I
want to be with my mutual funds. It’s odd to think that after
a lifetime of work, I will retire in nine years, assuming I quit
at sixty-seven. The retirement countdown dropping to single
digits sobered me, the abstract suddenly feeling much more
tangible. Nine years. What will that look like? My daughters
should be out of college and working, my house will be paid
for, and my retirement income decent though not extravagant.

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I will have new, arthritis-free knees, and who knows, maybe
grandchildren. More time to write. Time to travel. Time to
putter. Maybe build that wooden canoe I bought the plans
for in 1984. Assuming I’m healthy, maybe walk the Camino
de Santiago in Spain, a spiritual pilgrimage. I think about
the years ahead. I think about next year, when Stella leaves
the house, and Lisa and I will be alone together for the first
time in twenty years. What did we even do with all that time,
twenty years ago, before our world was consumed by diapers
and sleep deprivation, laundry and school lunches, drop-offs
and pickups, parent-teacher meetings and homework, and all
that driving to gymnastics and dance lessons?

It’s easy to think too hard, to get caught up in the mo-
ment, to worry about the future or try to hold on to the past.
Julia Rose calls or texts nearly every day, and often we’ll listen
to the latest news from college on speaker phone. She’s making
friends, learning a new city. The dance faculty are pushing her
harder than she could have imagined, treating her like a pro-
fessional company dancer, and all of her doubts about whether
she chose the best program are erased by the first month of
college. Stella is doing the college tours and applying to theatre
tech programs, starting to weigh her own collegiate decisions.

On the day we left Julia Rose at Oklahoma City University,
Lisa and I went to the convocation and matriculation ceremony
for new students and parents. The parents lined the sidewalk
outside a one-hundred year old building with massive white
columns and a tower, and the freshman class walked through
the line of parents and into the auditorium, followed by the fac-
ulty in full academic regalia. Parents filled the auditorium and
balcony behind the students and faculty. We were welcomed
by various administrators, and the choir sang Carole King’s
“Beautiful.” There were scripture and prayer and hymns—both

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Christian and in Sioux, this being Oklahoma—and then the
faculty senate leader offered this invitation: “This University
is an institution set aside by tradition for the preservation of
knowledge, research into the unknown, the full development of
human resources, the enjoyment of the life of the mind. It is this
special tradition of learning and growth that we seek to extend
and celebrate in this academy.” The students responded to the
challenge and were accepted into the community of learning.

We went to a brunch provided by the university, and then
Julia Rose walked Lisa and me to our car. We said our goodbyes
and I gave Julia Rose a final hug and kiss on the forehead. She has
never liked shows of affection and rarely endures more than a side
hug before quickly breaking it off. Anticipating this, I gave her a
brief hug and released, only to have her not let go. So I held her
for as long as she would let me, and then we separated, and she
did the same with her mother. I gave her my last gift, a journal
to keep a record of this new journey, and then we got in the car
and I watched her walk back toward her dorm and freshman ori-
entation, clutching her Moleskine. She didn’t turn and look back.

Terry Engel teaches writing at Harding University in Arkansas
and spends his spare time hiking and canoeing. He studied
writing at the Center for Writers at the University of Southern
Mississippi. His work has appeared in Adelaide, Sixfold,
Dreamers Creative Writing, Ethos Literary Journal, Cream
City Review, Open City, Georgetown Review, Buffalo Spree,
and has received honorable mention in the Pushcart Prize. He
has one daughter in college and is busy driving the second one
to campus visits and auditions.

320

South

by Peter Warzel

We were south when I dreamed of her, another variation of the
dream I seem to have when troubled. We are always hiding from
others, not for our lives, but to be together, and we are always in
a dance that begins passionately and ends with one taking care
of the other medically or cerebrally, one something of an invalid,
the other wise on in years. The position varies, alternates, always.

South holds its own brand of mojo. The sky turns to haze
with windless heat and the land becomes desperate, more sor-
rowful, trashed by the few inhabitants who profess a steward-
ship of scarce resources without a wink. Plastic bags flutter
from barbed wire, beer cans twinkle off in the scrub.

South is freeing in one sense. It is not of the usual world,
as least in the southwest where south burns intensely, eternally.
There is a blip in logic and civility in the community. It is just
south.

Albuquerque is south, Grants, Gallup, and at the Arizona
border the Indian shops appear, spiffed up and open or burned
out relics of stores. Holbrook is south, Show Low, Globe. Cars
are totems here, south, washed and loud, and in Arizona the
drivers of their cars drive fast, weaving in and out of traffic on
a mission, certain a God given mission.

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Scottsdale is something else, perhaps a dream of south.
But the Arizona cars and drivers are of the same desperado
temperament. The city is clean, pristine, new with straight
edges, signs hidden by landscaping at the street, everything so
low level you cannot see anything. How you find a restaurant
here without GPS is one mystery of this unfathomable desert,
this city of manufactured shopping centers. It is fabricated
history, Scottsdale is ephemeral.

The desert is burning up around the city. Jim, a guide at
Taliesin West, says it is the worst he has seen, a desert ready to die,
ironically due to lack of water. The balance is out of sorts, and
even a landscape of little water needs the little water it requires
to bloom in spring and settle down for the long haul come June.

June is here and the water is not and this desert is blazing
hot. The javelinas are routing in close to the hospital and hotel
in early evening, the coyotes are on the prowl. Water is a dream.

It is interesting to me that my dream comes in Scottsdale.
Maybe not surprising as I am at Mayo Clinic again doing the
work up and so searching for succor. She appears, in the dream,
at some semblance of work, an office, and we meet later at an
apartment, I assume hers. At times she is a culmination of
women, wives, and goes in and out of each character like a
shape shifter, skin-walking from woman to woman, though
tonight she is not, does not, she is in character throughout, and
I can smell her skin like it used to be many years ago.

She has only aged slightly, not fully on into her mid-fifties
as she should be. Her children are somewhere close by, but
not in view in the dream, though we talk of them, and of my
youngest son, the one she does not know. We are not in the
desert but in Denver, in late autumn, and turn the heat up in
the apartment and I hear it kick on and hum in the background.
Most of the dream takes place in the kitchen. Which is where I

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realize I am the caretaker this time. There is something broken,
something raw in her, and the soft focus ambience becomes a
crumbling scene set. Romance has become something else.

South to Casa Grande through the wasteland of south-cen-
tral Arizona. About twenty miles outside of Chandler there is
a church and a wide graveyard with crosses, stones set stark
against the basin and range mountains east. There is nothing
else around. It is surreal, as if the county has come to be buried
here, and perhaps it has. Dust devils spin like fire smoke across
the scrabble, circling a white cross in a whirl. South again and
the ruins at Casa Grande, the ball court, the monolith that
looks like a chunk of clay, caliche, piled three stories high and
carved with straight edges. It is a temple in Syria, an execution
pyramid in Teotihuacan. The graffiti of names and boasts is
carved into the plaster on the interior room walls, all Anglo
from earlier in the last century. The ground bakes, nothing
moves, this is the country that God abandoned.

And has he left us, the same? In the dream I attempt to
take over for God and conjure this friend back to balance. She
still smiles and I know that effort to smile. I know the pain
and the exhaustion in making all look right. When I see the
wounds, when she shows me, the dream disintegrates and I
wake certain in the reality of the moment.

I am south, in the heat and the waste of a land. I am bat-
tered by the sun, stable but not certain on my own legs and
I see her, her, not another, not a shape shifter, smiling at the
kitchen sink saying this will all be better the next time, and I
know I will have this dream again.

South. Where the sun becomes more vertical and the
wind does not stir. The cars scream by spotless and clean, and
the new bars want to be honkytonks so badly, and the Mayo
Clinic Hospital looms like a masterpiece of industrial design,
a temple mound of its own immaculate being.

323

Bussing Through Georgia,
1976

by Larry Hamilton

In Columbus, Georgia there are regulars who appear in the
Trailways Bus Station between 6:00 a.m. and the 8 o’clock cop.

The sitting passenger strangers uncomfortably try not to
stare at the wrinkled black man who got off the bus from
Augusta reeking of Muscatel or Red Dagger. He is now going
from one to the other asking for dimes to call his “chillun” long
distance to Cusseta to come and get their Daddy.

A large black woman with breasts bigger than a grown
man’s head moves confidently behind a counter fixing grits and
eggs and ringing up sales and “giving it to” would be hecklers
in a voice rich with tones that sing glory to generations of free
people who hunted lions with spears.

At 7:15 a plumpish white man in too tight pale green
pants wearing a silk scarf around his neck glides quickly
through the front door. Parading to the center of attention he
pauses, looks around expectantly, carefully. Everyone is aware
of him. They watch cautiously from the corners of their eyes
– they are embarrassed to meet HIS eyes – he is a homosexual.
It is a secret power he holds over us all. He knows what he is

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and he knows that we are afraid. He holds us all at bay, briefly,
then is gone.

The eight o’clock cop with his grotesque stomach held
up by the cartridge studded belt with a shining black holster
nursing a huge revolver shoulders through the rear door. The
toothpick holds still between his fat lips as he glances stony
over the early morning regulars. They in their turn warily ac-
knowledge his presence until he is satisfied that each one has
looked to see him, his big gun and black club.

At 8:05 the diesel smell and irritating roar of the “next
bus to Dallas,” (meaning Dallas, Georgia, no one here thinks
of Texas when they hear that name) sends some people to the
loading docks. Others glance at watches, adjust their card-
board boxes and brown paper bags with twined paper hand
grips and sit back bored.

Finally, the static clogged speaker box grunts out “Phoenix
City, Opelika, Auburn, Montgomery and points West” and I
take my leave of that place, inhaling more diesel fumes and
smelling some stranger’s hair oil on the fuzzy seat back where
I lean my head hoping not to catch anything he might have
had unless it was a case of good luck.

Larry L. Hamilton grew up as an Army Brat, traveling from
school to school, state to state, 2 tours in Germany. He then
spent a few years on active duty himself in Explosive Ordnance
Disposal. He earned three degrees in Government and Interna-
tional Studies from the University of South Carolina many years
ago and spent most of his career in SC state government while
also running over 50 marathons and coaching his sons’ soccer
and chess teams. Now 77, Larry and his wife are living well with
Alzheimer’s on the side of a mountain in Asheville, NC.

325

Cockroaches

by Susan M Davis

Drive-by shootings. Drugs. Gang infested neighborhoods. Sui-
cide teenagers.

This is the hood in Southern California. It’s no wonder
why Molly is tardy nearly every day. She walks down a fairly
long and narrow alley lined with trash to get to school. She
dodges gangs, and turns down drugs, and doesn’t even make
eye contact. The projects are vile.

Nearly every night there’s a drive-by shooting in her
neighborhood. Molly sits at her kitchen table alert, and once
in awhile scrambles to hit the floor as sirens blare along her
graffiti lined street. Molly at five foot one, with dark hair, and
gregarious green eyes wants to be a lawyer.

The square, scratched kitchen table is her place to do her
homework in her Mom’s rented apartment, in the projects.
Roaches with hard, brown shells and spindly legs, crawl up
the hard wood legs of the kitchen table. Molly flips the roaches
off her chemistry book with angry fingers. Her nails are short.
There’s not enough money to support her solidarity with the
fake nail fad. Molly is sick of the projects.

Molly never misses a day of school, but she misses it
on Monday. The principal notifies the staff that her brother

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committed suicide Sunday. He was a meth addict. I taught
Molly’s brother too a few years ago. He was always late for
school and rarely did his homework. Often disheveled looking
and he had a nervous twitch in his left eye.

Tuesday she returns with a face embedded with desper-
ation and lines etched and reserved for an eighty-year-old
woman.

She doesn’t speak as she sits ladylike in her chair. I watch
for signs from all my students. Something has happened. Mol-
ly’s an honor student in a class of forty students. She’s erudite.
She’s driven. She’s my favorite. She reminds me of myself when
I was her age. A driven student, studying all the time, deter-
mined to get acceptance into USC.

The bell rings and Molly doesn’t move from her chair.
Tears slowly trickle down her cheeks. I walk over to her but
leave my classroom door open. That’s the law. Don’t ever be in
a closed classroom alone with a student.

I pull up a chair and we talk. She only took one day off
from school.

“Why are you here today?” I whispered.
“I can’t miss school. I missed yesterday.”
“Do you want to talk about your brother?”
“No, what’s there to say? He was a druggie.”
“Is there anything you want to talk about?”
“Yes.”
“Ok.”
“I missed one question on my chemistry exam this
morning on my make-up test.”
“You still earned an “A” didn’t you?” I asked.
“It’s not the same. I should have never missed one ques-
tion,” Molly said angrily.
“But Molly, you just lost your brother.”

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“I know. I have to be strong. I have to continue with my
studies. I have to be perfect to get into Yale law school.”

Molly walks out the classroom door her head bent. I
wonder if she blames one of the cockroaches she flipped with
her stubby fingernails the night before for causing her to miss
that one question on her chemistry exam.

Whether it was the cockroach, God, Molly’s brother or
herself causing her to miss one question, I know Molly will
continue and strive for the law school of her dreams.

Susan M. Davis graduated from California State University
Fullerton with a degree in English. She has been an 8th grade
English teacher for 27 years. She is a former Teacher of the Year.
Susan also has a Masters of Science in Educational Counseling.
She just completed her MFA in Creative Writing Non-fiction
from Fairfield University in Connecticut. Susan resides in
Southern California with her wife, Karen Kozawa and their 3
Cocker Spaniels. Her favorite color is purple. If you know her,
you will know this.

328

En Passant

by Larry Weill

JG loves LW. That’s what it said. I saw it scribbled all over her
blue canvas, three-ring notebook, a rainbow of declarations
in pencils and pens, sometimes bold block letters, sometimes
fluffy over-lapping rounded letters. Some places, it was within
large hearts, other times only surrounded by hearts and occa-
sional flowers (daisies, I believe). I stood there minding my
own business, letting “Walk Away Renee” flow through my
head, having heard it earlier, when I glanced over, and there
was a notebook covered with my initials. I wondered if LW
was me, Larry Weill. Of course, since I didn’t know the girl,
I doubted it; but it was possible. It could be Lonnie Walker,
but who would like him? He was short and buck-toothed. Or
maybe Lance Whitaker. He was popular, but he had “liked”
Sandy Harper since the sixth grade. Or, it could be me, and
while I too had a girlfriend of sorts, Leslie, we weren’t going
together, exactly. She didn’t have my ID bracelet anyway.

Besides, this girl was cute, for a seventh grader. I mean, as
an eighth grader, I ran in a much faster crowd than she possibly
could as a seventh grader. And I didn’t know she was a year
younger, but I figured she was since she was standing with that
group of kids watching our football team, the Southern Junior

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High Rebels, going down to their fifth loss in five tries. We
were nothing if not consistent. But what did we care? It was
something to do on a wonderfully clear, brisk fall afternoon and
everyone was there, and besides, the Sno-Cone truck would be
by selling bubblegum flavored cones for fifteen cents apiece, a
mound of ice and a squirt of sickly sweet syrup that would turn
your mouth and anything else it touched a nice pale blue. I didn’t
know her name, though – who was JG? Jane? Jessica? Jackie? She
stood next to me, as if she was with me, advertising that she
loved someone with my initials. I had to ask. I fidgeted a little,
wiped a bit of smudge off one shoe with the other, adding to
the size of original smudge. I locked my hands behind me and
swung back and forth, an awkward motion I tried to give up but
for some reason found self-perpetuating. Finally, I unlocked my
fingers, pulled my arms around and cleared my throat.

“Um, who is LW?” I said to her shoulder, since she was
a good four inches taller than me. She turned and looked at
me, her face a mixture of surprise, fear, and bewilderment. She
glanced down at her notebook, held against her chest with both
arms crossed in front, then back at me, her face contorted now
in what could only be described as horror. She let out a small,
“Oh!” then turned and ran away, crying. I watched her run
behind the metal bleachers and disappear behind a gaggle of
legs. I looked over to the kids she had been standing with and
shrugged. In return, I received a collection of frowns and head
shakes. What had I done? All I did was ask her who LW was. I
shuffled over to the group, three girls and a sickly looking boy
with thick glasses and a protruding mouth of gleaming metal
braces. They probably wanted to walk away, but being a year
older gave me some staying power.

“What was that about?” I jerked my thumb in the general
direction of the girl’s retreat.

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“I’m so sure you don’t know,” one red-headed girl with a
face of freckles sneered.

“What?” I shrugged again. She eyed me closely.
“You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“Janet likes you.” She said “likes” that special way that says
she had a crush on me. Janet, huh?
“Janet likes me?” I felt quite flattered. The red-head nodded.
I felt warm inside. It’s nice to be loved, even by a seventh grader.
I looked over to the bleacher. “What’s Janet’s last name?”
“Gish.” The red-head was my confidante now. “Janet Gish.
She’s actually been in love with you a long time.” She leaned
closer to me, so the details wouldn’t be public to just everyone.
It wasn’t lost on me that we had gone from like to love in fif-
teen seconds.
“Yeah? How long?” I found myself whispering.
“About a month and a half. Ever since you held the door
open for her at the tardy bell that day.” I tried to picture it,
but couldn’t. It’s true I held the door open for the others. As a
patrol boy before school, it was part of my duties.
That was it, no doubt. They always fall for the uniform.
Well, I didn’t actually have a uniform, just a white strap that
went around my waist and across my body over my shoulder,
with a genuine silver-colored shield over my heart. But it was
official, no doubt blinding to younger kids entrusted to my care
as I stopped traffic with my red-flag-on-a-stick traffic stopper.
I herded my little sheep across the side street with George on
the other side stopping traffic from the other direction. It was
glorious. We told these adults driving their Fords and Chevys
to stop, and they always obeyed, mindful I’m sure of the badge
on my chest. When the stream of children slowed to a trickle,
the boys closer to school called us in by waving their red flags,

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and we waved our flags to call in the boys down the side street.
They ran to our corner and we shepherded them across, then
all four of us went to the big street and crossed with the two
boys there. I was impressed by the planning that went into the
process. I had my sights on the ultimate prize, though, putting
up and taking down the flag. That required arriving earlier and
knowing the proper flag etiquette, the folding and so forth, but
I had studied it all and I knew, I just knew, I would rise to that
esteemed level before the end of the year.

“Well, I didn’t know.” I looked over to where she had run
off, but couldn’t see her. I knew what I had to do. I walked
around the cinder track that enclosed the football field where
our poor, skinny quarterback Mac Griffith was being knocked
flat by big Henry Kirk, whom I remembered being nearly six
feet tall and a hundred and seventy pounds in grade school.
Mac might be that size when we hold our twenty-year reunion.
I waved to Sam and George sitting in the bleachers with Jo-
anne and Margot, the focus of all their attention not given over
to Archie comics, stingray bicycles, firecrackers, Miss Fortson
the young single math teacher, and French fries. At the far end
of the bleachers, my once-secret admirer leaned against the
rusty pipe supporting the seats above, wiping her cheek with
her palm. Poor Janet Gish, whom I had never even noticed,
was crying over me, but I didn’t quite know why. All I had
done was ask her who LW was. It really could have been Lance
Whitaker, for all I knew. I ambled up beside her and just stood
there for a moment, trying to figure out what to say. Finally,
she noticed me and spun on her heels to face me. Her eyes
were red and opened as wide as I could imagine them being
open. She stared at me, nearly motionless, except, perhaps, for
a slight tremble. I have heard that a baby rabbit’s heart can
burst with fear if you pick it up and hold it. I got the distinct

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impression a similar disaster was about to strike the bunny
Janet if I didn’t say something quick.

“Hi, Janet.” I gave my best smile, the one generally saved
for school pictures. Her eyes filled with water. I had to distract
her. I turned and looked at the field where a squat runner
from Eastern Junior High ran gleefully towards the goal, our
skinny tacklers meekly throwing themselves towards him, ei-
ther landing well short or crumpling if they actually ran into
him. Another touchdown for Eastern. The scoreboard read
42-0, and the second half had barely begun. “So, think we’ll
stage a comeback?” I nodded towards the field. I was being so
smooth – if only I had a moustache.

“Uh-huh.” She shook her head slowly, still staring at me.
I wondered what the first aid treatment was for a burst heart.

“I’ll bet we couldn’t beat Longfellow Elementary.” I gave
a knowing half-smile, my eyes partially closed in a movie-star
look.

“No, maybe not.” She blinked, her eyes less watery now.
I was good.

“So,” I turned and faced her again, “where do you live?” It
was an odd question, I admit, but it’s the only line an eighth
grader really has.

“Um, Hill Street.” She tucked her head a bit, timid and
just a bit coy. I liked it. She held her notebook a little higher
to shield her chin. She was pretty, with long dark hair and
a dimple that I saw for the first time now as she gave me a
faint smile. “Over near the park.” Her eyes were much drier.
“Where do you live?” There’s just not a lot to talk about with
a new girl when you’re thirteen. I wouldn’t discover that the
problem only gets worse as you age until I was in college asking
girls their majors and, ironically, where they were from, which
is really the same question as where do you live.

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“Over on Halifax, by Texas Gas.” My body swayed a bit
in the glow of her pretty smile. I glanced around me vaguely
conscious I was seeing if Leslie was watching. Where did I go
from here? I realized I didn’t want her to leave. “Um, so, want
a Sno-cone?” I felt a slight panic as I realized I wasn’t at all
certain I had any money, but then remembered I did in fact
have a couple of quarters. I was flush.

“Okay.” She brightened some more and seemed almost
bouncy now. I realized that I was in a bit a whirl all of a
sudden. My brain tried to grasp what was happening. Had I
just gotten a new girlfriend, a girlfriend I hadn’t even known
ten minutes before? But such was our ease at the time. I didn’t
know, nor need to know, anything more than she was cute
and she liked me, and, as any man will tell you, a girl who
likes you is immediately prettier than a girl who does not. She
walked with me over to where the panel truck with the faded
painting of a purple Sno-cone sat at the curb. A short line of
kids before us gave me the chance to take another look. She
gave me that smile again and I felt something inside of me
give a quick flip.

We walked back to the football field with our cones (she
ordered cherry, a safe choice, giving her lips a bright red hue)
and I let myself be seen standing next to her, right there in
front of everyone. Leslie would know before I got home. But
I didn’t care. I had Janet who had declared her affections all
over her notebook. The game finished, it was time to go home.
Darkness would fall quickly this late in the fall. I saw George
and Sam coming down the bleachers, alone, Margot and Jo-
anne long gone, but my friends didn’t seem to care.

“So, who’s the girl?” George nodded towards Janet who
was engaged in a serious discussion with the red-head and the
sickly boy.

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“Janet Gish.” I looked at my pals and to my dismay, they
began nudging each other, snickering.

“Larry’s got a girl friend. Larry’s got a girl friend.” They
sang in unison. The age old taunt. It never failed to be sum-
moned, and, somehow, it never failed to goad a man.

“Yeah well, at least I’m not jerks like you two.” It was weak,
I’ll admit, but it was all I could muster.

“Yeah, right.” George stopped singing. He shook his head.
“What homeroom is she in, anyway?” He said it scornfully. A
man in junior high is on his own when he forsakes his friends
for even a moment to give attention to a girl.

“I dunno.” I shrugged. This would be difficult. “She’s in
seventh grade.” I said it like it was a strong point, something to
brag about. Maybe if I said it with bravado, George and Sam
would be impressed. My hopes were quickly dashed.

“She’s the same age as Sam’s little sister, Larry. Ewwww!”
George screwed up his nose.

“Gah, Larry.” Sam was incredulous. “Why would you
want a girlfriend in the seventh grade?” He shook his head in
disbelief.

“She’s not my girlfriend.” I shrugged it off. “I just met her.”
Okay, I really did think she was my girlfriend, maybe. But
denial provides its own refuge.

“Yeah, right,” George said again. He was too close a friend
not to see through me. “C’mon, Sam. Let’s leave Larry to kiss
his girlfriend good bye.” He threw a wry grin my way as they
walked away.

“I’m not gonna give . . .” I let it drop. They were gone, and,
besides, I hadn’t really thought about a kiss, but I wasn’t against
it in principle. I turned and looked at where Janet had been
standing, but she was gone. Instead, the red-head was walking
my way. I looked around and saw Janet almost to the edge of

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the school. If I ran, I could catch her. I started to make a dash
for it, but her friend was right in front of me.

“Um, Larry.” She wore a sympathetic smile. “Janet is
dumping you.” She nodded knowingly. I could only stare at
her for a second and blink three or four times.

“Huh?” I finally managed.
“She’s decided she likes Mac Griffith.” My head spun.
What just happened? Mac Griffith? Our quarterback who was
now probably in traction? Mac? It made no sense. I didn’t even
know Janet a half hour before and now we had been boyfriend
and girlfriend and broken up? I shook my head to stop the
thoughts from spinning so haphazardly. “She still wants to
be your friend, though.” I was gawking now. Friends? The
tired old I-still-want-to-be-friends routine? I couldn’t stand it.
By the next morning, George and Sam would be all over it,
dumped by a seventh grader. My standing was severely dam-
aged. I might never get a girlfriend again, and over what? A girl
I didn’t even know?
It was my first experience with the guiles of women. I was
strictly a pawn in the social chess game of junior high school,
and later high school, captured en passant. I walked home in a
funk. I wasn’t really upset over losing a girlfriend I never really
had, and I was only a little worried about the abuse I would
take from my buddies, my fall in the social fabric of junior
high, or that I would also lose my unofficial girlfriend Leslie.
But I was aware of my own vulnerability. I had been com-
pletely at Janet’s mercy with only the shedding of a few tears,
a blink of her eyes, and a dimpled smile. I had been a young,
thirty minute fool for her, and the way I saw it, a young fool
is as good as an old fool. Then, I decided I was mad. I didn’t
deserve to be treated so callously. It wasn’t fair. That was it, I
had had enough of women.

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Dad came home from work and fixed a meat loaf and
stewed tomatoes for dinner. He served up our plates and asked
about our days, and instead of my more usual reply of, “Nuthin,”
I recounted my story of being liked and unliked within the
course of one-half of a junior high school football game. My
older brother Ernie snickered a bit but Dad raised a stop hand
and he retreated to a steady smirk. Dad listened intently to my
story. When I had finished, I realized my voice had become
higher pitched as I got more agitated. Dad looked at me intently
and said, “Give it time, son. You’ll be okay.” I thought I saw the
beginning of a smile on his face too, but he suppressed it.

As I sat before the television that night with my family
watching The Virginian, I vowed to never, ever allow myself to
be treated that way again, to be a pawn in the game of love. Such
was the depth of my foolishness, I believed it a vow I could keep.

Meat Loaf

Feeds 5-6
Dad often made stewed tomatoes in the oven when he made
meat loaf.

Ingredients:
1 T olive oil
1 onion, chopped
1 green pepper, diced
1 stalk celery, diced
1 1/2 pounds ground beef
1 t garlic powder
1 t paprika
1 t dried basil
salt and pepper to taste

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1 T Worcestershire sauce
1 cup dried bread crumbs
1 egg
1 cup milk
2-3 pickle spears, chopped coarsely
1/3 cup ketchup
2 slices bacon

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
Sauté the onions, green pepper and celery until the onions

are just transparent. Put the cooked vegetables, beef, spices,
Worcestershire and bread crumbs in a large bowl and mix with
your hands until it is well mixed. Beat the egg with the milk in
a separate bowl and add to the meat mixture, mixing well. Add
the pickle and mix to distribute the pickles. Form the meat
mixture into a loaf on a roasting dish. Pour the ketchup along
the top and top with the bacon.

Bake at 350 degrees F for 1 hour.

Stewed Tomatoes

Serves 6
Ingredients:

1 (28 ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes, with liquid
3 slices stale bread, torn into pieces
2/3 cup white sugar
1/4 cup butter, melted
1 pinch salt
1 teaspoon black pepper

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Directions:
Preheat an oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 1 1/2 quart

baking dish. Stir the tomatoes, bread, sugar, butter, salt, and
pepper in a bowl; pour into the prepared dish. Bake until hot
and the tomatoes are tender, about 45 minutes.

Lawrence Weill is a Kentucky author and artist whose books in-
clude Silas LaMontaie, The Path of Rainwater, Out in Front, In-
carnate, and I’m in the Room. His fiction, poetry and nonfiction
have appeared in a wide range of local, regional, and national
journals. He also is a visual artist and an avid outdoorsman.

Lawrence lives in the woods overlooking a beaver pond
next to a wildlife preserve.

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The Drive Home Tapes

by Jason James

We just wrapped up a stakeout on a case I didn’t want to be
on. It was my case, my father told me, but he’d still be there.
I nodded. I just wanted it to be over, whatever it was we were
doing. Dad asked for something to drink. All I had was faucet
water and he sipped some. But something was off. Why was
I on a stakeout with my dad? And why were we in a dingy,
white 1980s Camaro somewhere in New York City? And if we
were on surveillance, why were we facing a brick wall with our
headlights blaring?

As this scripted scene spun, unraveling — I suddenly I got
selfish. I broke from the narrative of my dreamcast character, and
I just hugged him. Just a big bear hug that I wouldn’t let up from.
A hug like I never remembered hugging my father before. This
was my siege and hack, my Shanghai of a dreamt omniscience I
was supposed to only passively view. Even he looked surprised.

I want to say he was here. That he reacted. That we shared
in a moment, briefly, together again. It felt like he was with
me, in the twilight instant before snapping awake at 5:24 this
morning. Except he’s been dead now for more than 20 years.

So then, there it is. Back in reality. I’m alone and waking,
aware now I hadn’t just been with my dad, except in my head.

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My wife claims she’s never seen me cry. I can’t imagine how
that’s possible. Well, here it is, babe, and you missed it, with
tears streaming down, all slobber and snot and me audibly
bawling. My heart still skips as I replay the scene and the hug
and his look of surprise. But please — don’t tell me it was a
vision or a visit or that I just got God’s jolt of religion. As far
as that goes, let’s just say we’re estranged.

I used to have a rambling prayer I would say since I was
little. We weren’t really religious, but I still used to pray, alone,
before bed. It became my silent kiss-up to God, the most I
could do to ward off the looming grey wall I faced — of ev-
erything in the world I thought could go wrong:

Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Amen. God bless Mom and Dad
and Joel and Grandma and Grandpa and everyone I love.
Let them live long and healthy happy lives. I pray that
they don’t get into an accident. Thank you for my health.
I pray that I get big and strong and don’t lose my looks. Let
me live a long and healthy happy life. I pray that I don’t
lose my legs or eyes or end up paralyzed somehow. Thank
you. Amen.

That was me, the realist and the hopeful cynic. I tried
navigating passage through life this way, in our causally skep-
tical police family. And I found I held hope sometimes by just
a thin tether.

Nightly, I repeated my prayer, adding different ideations
of the same bleak theme. Basketball tryouts, meeting girls and
other vital things made their way in. I continued my devout
bedtime thoughts, even after Grandma died of cancer when I
was in junior high. I kept up hope through high school on my
odyssey to become a basketball star, what manifested instead

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into a spiraling masochism of bench sitting and team cuts and
bench sitting again. Whatever the struggle — dating, college
exams, career turns — after fall after stumble, I still carried on.
And quietly, I kept praying.

But everyone breaks. I did in my mid-twenties. A long
and healthy, happy life — it was the cornerstone of every
prayer, since the beginning. Instead — Dad was dead of a
heart attack at 53. I stopped praying after that. I don’t count
the anger I saved for God before bed.

For him taking my father, I unleashed nightly in vulgar,
seething teeth-clenches, a rage I doled in whispers. I lulled
indifferent to what smiting and thunderbolts I might beckon
back in return. I hunkered and grew numb. And it was with
that, by the time I was 26, I froze out what faith I had — in
church or God or religion.

I don’t know what religion means now. I scoff at it. I find,
now, in some ways I always have. I’ve always been leery of
priests and nuns like an aversion to snakes and spiders. These
pontiffs of life never seemed to have experienced lives of their
own, yet they lorded over like they knew all and better than
any of us. I wouldn’t feel the need to go there, to church, not
really ever. I wouldn’t pay homage to these joyless, brooding
creatures I loathed and felt hardwired to fear. Except for the
occasional mass at Christmas or Easter and always from the
far back row, my obligation was over. Then, unceremoniously,
at some point, I stopped altogether. Praying. Going. Believing.
Half-believing.

Having said this, I’m ashamed to say, since then I’ve
prayed audibly to God a handful of times. One was the at-
tacks on September 11th — with the anthrax powder mailings
following after that. Beneath my ocular calm, I ratcheted in in-
sular panic. Dad had been dead three-years and I was without

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my heavy-weight to look to for advice or just a calming glance.
There I was, my adult me, reeling and lost.

I began grasping for what was within reach. Silly as it
seems, I found myself emulating actor Russell Crowe after Dad
died. And for a time, perhaps desperately, a focus on something
strong somehow helped guide me through deep pits. I would
later learn that Dad too — in the absence of his own father —
shaped his demeanor as a man after tough-guy actor Charles
Bronson. But as I settled into my maturity, I found myself still
pushing constantly toward my own ends. I remained haunted,
tediously, by whether I could live to be as tough as Dad. Pro-
jector light idols, at some points, didn’t suffice. And I found
myself taking police tests and running track laps, ever more on
my way to leaving my burgeoning path as journalist to chase
down what it was HE did.

So there it was, when I was maybe 32, leaving journalism
to become a cop in uniform. I look back on what were Dad’s
waning days, and he seemed so grateful that I drew more and
more toward writing. Perhaps he saw me finally breaking from
my resurgent curiosity for the job and life he long existed in.
But on that, he wasn’t right. In his absence, even with me
having matured as a man, I still lived in ways within a boy’s
warped view. The police. What did I expect that life to be,
maybe something like TV? He never bragged or loudmouthed
in war stories. He hardly shared what it was his shifts as a cop
were like at all.

In all my childhood that’s what dazzled most — seeing
him come and go in uniform in his police cruiser. Still, he
warned, again, again, not to follow a step in the work he did.
The warnings what not to do — was that what possessed me?
The question reels anew, just now, as I’m passing by some
cops making a car stop when I’m on my way with my oldest

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daughter for coffee and hot cocoa. “What was it like to be a
cop?” she asks, what she follows with, “Do you miss it?” And
it takes me back again to then.

Now here I am at 32, now doing what Dad did — police
work — in uniform and patrolling in a police cruiser. Some-
times I find there is precious little time – for stopping all the
cars I want to toss, for a DUI accident with injuries, and alarm
calls at strip malls and suburban houses, all on the same night.
And sometimes there is lots of time to think. I find I’m always
on edge, always, just a little.

On the drives home, I had started making monologues,
recorded self-conversations, thoughts on the night, the crazy
shit and quiet. The bar closings that happened downtown be-
fore the fatal DUI crash — head-on into a utility pole — with
power lines draped and dancing in sparks on the street. Then
onto a motel domestic with an arrest and a hospital drug-detox.
All in the first four hours, a night like no other, but still familiar
like any one of my shifts. I could ever so slowly be losing my
mind, but I would keep track making tapes, the annotated
mention of scathing escapes and the hours on-end of tedium
that would take me, nodding, into eye-fluttering exhaustion.

Sometimes, when it’s close to 4 a.m., I’m surprisingly awake
and watching familiar cars slalom the side streets to deliver news-
papers. Other times, I’m placating a prisoner who’s got Hep-C so
she won’t spit or bite when I roll her fingerprints. Almost always,
when I’m off duty and it’s close to 4 a.m., I’m surprisingly awake
in my living room, alone, flipping through channels in the dark
with the volume turned low. I’m awake and thinking about the
night before because I can’t fight my midnight sleep pattern,
even on nights off. Always, I find I’m one step off from a normal
life. One step off becomes a pattern that repeats. It’s these times,
sometimes, when I think I made a mistake.

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What were the things Dad didn’t tell me? Maybe the long
lingering thoughts on stepping into and out of the treacherous
parts of other people’s lives. Recently, mine replay as a loop
tape in my mind:

On one of my midnights, a passerby calls a man honey or
sweetie or something nice sounding though she doesn’t know
him at all. She holds his head and tries keeping him still. She
assures him he’ll be all right, though she doesn’t know that at
all. She holds his head up from the road’s dirt dusted shoulder,
from the sharp and the hard, and she keeps his head still. Just
lay still, honey. I know. Lay still. The ambulance is on the way.

“10-4.”
“69…arrived…”
“…It looks like it’s going to be on the Stratford side.”
“…Call AMR. It’s a bicyclist struck. Serious head injuries,
among others.”
“69…call Stratford. It’s on the Stratford side.”
“Sir, what did you see?”
“69…A passerby states a silver Honda Civic rear ended the
cyclist and drove off.”
“A bicyclist.”
“Sir, did he drive toward Stratford?”
“69…Into Stratford.”
“Whose car is this? If you didn’t see anything, please move
your car, the ambulance is coming.”
“Is this your car? Pop the trunk. Let’s get out some cones.”
“Into this lane. Bring it through here.”
“Slow down. Slow it down.”
“How many cones do you have? We’ll catch up later.”
“69…all units are clear from the Stratford Bridge. Clear
me 05.”
When my wife asks how my day was, I just say, OK. I
don’t want to talk details, not just before bed. But these were

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my transmissions, questions and commands on a call on my
midnight. They run through my head again and again.

I don’t know how to explain calls like this or how we
shrug them off with nonchalance, then dig into our lunch bags
and sip our coffees some more. I don’t know how to explain
that an hour after the bridge cleared of ambulances and police
that Stratford officers returned with lights, cameras and tape
measures. I don’t know how to explain how I just nodded
when I heard the injuries were worse than they looked and that
the bicyclist wasn’t likely to live. I don’t know how to explain
that we shrugged, hearing that Stratford was preparing for a
fatal, readying their report, before he was dead, and we were
glad it was across the town line, glad it wasn’t ours because
of the paperwork, without regarding him. I don’t know how
to explain that I saw him two hours before all this, peddling
through the night, with his helmet and reflectors, when the
bars were close to letting out on a Saturday night – what an
odd time for exercise, for a ride in the night. This was police
work and my midnight.

I try to sleep right after work, but sometimes it isn’t so
easy. Daylight finds its way through the blinds. A leaf blower
and lawn mower hum from next door. The dog barks and
clicks its nails on the fake wood floor. And sometimes it’s last
night’s call that runs though my head, again and again.

Sometimes I sleep twice. I try to trick my wife into
thinking we have a normal life and let her fall asleep with me
with her. In my last hour before work again, I reach across my
wife’s body to the nightstand to reset the alarm clock, and in
doing so pin her hair into the pillow. She squeaks and rustles
and puts up with the pain. It isn’t long before I finish clicking
alarm clock buttons. I lie back down and pull the covers up
past our shoulders.

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I fall into a gentle fog. My wife starts to breathe slow and
deep. My thoughts drift into a dream, just for a short nap. She
rubs her foot against my leg, a subconscious act of assurance
that I am still there. She scrunches in closer and holds my arm
tight to her waist. It will be just 25 minutes before the witch
cackle whine goes off and this gentle, normal together moment
is over.

The witch cackle sounds. I sit up quick, wary of the temp-
tation to stay, even for a few minutes more. A plump pillow
takes over in my place. She picks her head up for a second then
pulls the covers tight to keep the warmth from getting away. I
slide on some pants and find a clean tee shirt and some black
socks. I feel around for my shoes and a jacket, stuff my gun
into my belt-line and kiss my wife goodnight. I grab my lunch
and some water from the kitchen and make sure all the lights
are off. This is my routine. These are midnights.

My wife tries coaxing me to stay. If it is just to pout, she
doesn’t know how tempting and convincing her pleas to me
are: “Don’t you feel a little sick tonight?” she says, and then
says straight out, “I don’t want you to go.” This is her rou-
tine and her midnights. I pet the dog in the dark. I glance
once more through the bedroom door left open just a crack. I
whisper goodnight. I lock the front door and leave.

Then, after my shift work, it’s the drives — each night
— to unwind on the way home. Those were my moments, 30
minutes or more, to change from being a cop to back into me,
stepping into and out of roles, to sort out the night’s shift in
my head, in the ticking of minutes it took to change clothes,
leave the locker room and make my drive back, at points, dil-
igently talking myself through my nights, on tape.

I always had been placid and quiet. And now here I am,
torquing the tension beneath a stone-face smirk, an eye lash

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fall from unloading. That’s all it would take, my starting-gun,
my mark to overwhelm anything out in the world that stood to
oppose me. That had become a way for me to keep the insid-
ious things I faced from plowing me down and overtaking me.

Everyone says the first year as a cop you’d do for free, and
for the most part, they’re exactly right. What they won’t tell
you, by the end of a career, any one of them is off and ducking
for cover, grateful in hiding out as some evidence custodian in
a windowless room or shuffling parking ticket paperwork in
an office up front, just to regain a semblance of balance from
years and a career in the maw on the road.

How long did it take me, on every fill-up on gas, before
I became devout? It wasn’t in God — but in buying lottery
tickets. Maybe sometime near the start of year-two, when I had
become obtusely hopeful for an escape from all this. Admit-
tedly it came to that — flimsy a voodoo — leaving my decider
in life to a few dollars for the lottery at each fill-up, buying
hope for normalcy, week to week, at long odds.

Meanwhile, my self-conversations, the drive home tapes,
had gauged my dissent. What at first sparked with excitement,
came to lull soberly. I talked candidly back to myself, up until
I had nothing left to say at all. Moments stayed clouded, even
ones I just went through. And at some point, I cringed to click
that button, the red-marked record. Finally, I stopped. I no
longer recorded myself at all anymore. And that left just gas
stations and lottery quick picks and quiet rides home, with less
and less of myself left to cling to.

The rest of those shifts came and went, unrecorded. Time
came and ticked on by. I found my way out, eventually, and
not soon enough. I stepped away from that job I longed to
always have. I circled back to writing and keeping the keel
even for my young family. And out of the blue, I rouse from

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