A: You always start with the obligatory praises, to butter Him up. Then you ask for more liquor.
Q: How do you blow fire?
A: Take a big suck of air. Pour 151-proof rum into your mouth. Hold a fiery torch near your mouth, at a seventy-five degree angle. Spit for all you’re worth.
Q: How does Big G spend His time?
A: Ducking our questions.
Q: What is the purpose of this book?
A: A catalog of stories and sadnesses, beginnings and endings, the stuff of childhood, death. Nothing new can happen here, so all you do is think about the days of life when possibility hadn’t been ripped from you forever, when anything could happen, and wonder why so much was squandered, so much wasted.
Q: What things do you remember most often, besides your sadnesses?
A: My little brother had a hamster named Eddie. We built him a magical castle made mostly of glass cages connected by plastic tubes, and lined with wood chips we changed every day. We gave him a kitchen, a bedroom, a TV room, a billiards room with a bidet, a concert hall, a gymnasium, an art studio, a science lab, a hall of mirrors, and a room filled with purple smoke. But all Eddie wanted to do was run his hamster wheel all day. It made a terrible noise. He ran himself to death. He only lived five months. You should have seen his face in the little shoebox casket. He seemed relieved.
Q: How does Big G decide who gets into heaven?
A: It’s as arbitrary as everything on the earth. No rhyme or reason, except this: To whom much is given, more will be given. From whom much is withheld, more will be withheld. How long can this go on? Can you help me find a way to end this?
Q: Do you have anything left to say?
A: Only the same things turned over again and again, as though turning them again will bring some new insight. But the new insights are the same as the old insights. Heaven is a hamster wheel.
Why won’t my heart stop beating?
SUSPENDED
THE LOCKER ROOM WALLS WERE PAINTED puke green and lined like a cage with metal hooks, and red mesh equipment bags hung from the hooks like meat. One of the bags was swinging, and I was swinging in it, and Drew McKinnick slapped at it and did his punching, and the janitor got me down.
What did my father say to the principal, and how many times had he said how many things? My boy is not eighty pounds yet. My boy is in the seventh grade. My boy is not a linebacker. Can’t you see I love my boy? If you had a boy to love what would you not do?
What did the principal say to my father? Did he say he had a boy and the boy got caught drinking in the tenth grade and he kicked his own boy out of school, same as anybody else? Did he tell my father what he told us once a year when they brought the boys into the gymnasium and left the girls away? I loved and love my wife, and she is not my ex-wife, not praise Jesus in the eyes of God, despite her running off with the Navy captain, despite it all I wait and wait and one day she will be restored to me. I know it in my heart of faith, I wait as Hosea waited, now let us pray.
Whatever passed or did not pass between them, this once it did not matter how much money McKinnick’s father gave the school, or how many animals he had veterinaried to health, or how many ordinances he had sealed with his mayor’s seal. This once I came home beaten and bruised and told my father, “They suspended him for three days.”
That night I slept and dreamt of three days free of red ears flicked blood red and slapped until I heard the ocean. The bathroom was mine to piss in, free of fear of footsteps from behind, one hand in my hair and the other on my belt, the painful lifting, then my head beneath the commode water.
That afternoon I skip-stepped to the bus, the Florida sun high and hot, and this once thinking the heat balmy and tropical rather than stalking and oppressive. Then, somewhere between the Route 7 and the Route 8, somebody grabbed me by the collar and slammed me against the black bumper. At first I thought it was him, because it looked like him, same dog teeth, same mocking smile, but bigger somehow, and how had it been kept from me he had an older brother?
“You think you’re something,” he said, and lifted me until my feet were off the ground. He was as big as my father. “You ever run crying on my brother again, I’ll beat you within an inch of your life, you hear me? I wouldn’t mind breaking you.”
He had me up against the back of the bus, and somewhere somebody had taught him how to do it, and his brother, too. I can see their faces now, but younger, fleshier, their father pressing their bodies to the wall, and then, older, leaner, their sons looking down at their fathers in their fear, learning.
LAY ME DOWN IN THE BLUE GRASS
MY HANDS HAVE NOT KNOWN MUCH LABOR. I mix oils and acrylics, gouache and watercolor. On this day I don’t paint except in my head. I lack the skill for such dark images as my mind invents. The color palette runs to crimson and deep purples, with brilliant yellow and chartreuse accents where shadows should darken. Imagine a Kentucky mountain as a landscape turned to anger and needing to purge by the rushing of waters. Boulders are flung loose from earth, and massive living trees propel forward as missiles and lodge in the sides of steep rock walls.
Idleness is out of place here. My wife and her three brothers contemplate digging a new well. Their father, seventy-three, is driving the lawn-mowing tractor but not cutting any grass. He’s pulling my sister-in-law and her two small children in a trailer. He’s taking them to the horrible abandoned place where a nineteenth-century barn has crumbled to tangles of moist rotting lumber that used to be a nesting bed for a colony of feral cats, some descended from a stray blooded Persian once owned by my wife. The cats are gone now, and so is Danny, our nephew. Four days ago he walked toward this woodpile with a loaded shotgun and blew off his head. A swarm of flies has taken residence here. The air is thick with decay, and the earth is still soiled with viscera.
•
My wife’s youngest brother, Steve, stands thigh-deep in the creekwater and swings a sledgehammer. From my upstream vantage-point he is John Henry, efficient as a piston, chiseled and thick as two grown cedars. Some years ago a layer of concrete was poured above the boulders and bedrock. He pulverizes it with each blow. The water absorbs the powder and washes it down the mountain. He breaks through the concrete to the layer of stone below and keeps swinging. A pile of debris accumulates beneath him. He lifts the shards and rocks, some large as his upper body, and carries them to a shallow place where the water runs faster. He stacks them against the current and says a brief word in praise of beavers, then goes to work shoveling out the filling reservoir behind his dam. He digs past six feet, so deep he can walk the floor and submerge himself.
This is a wild place. Deer run freely and there are no property lines. Brown bears wander these hollows, and even a buck deer can end a man. Poachers run the logging road at night and slip into the darkness. Marijuana plants grow under cover of protected forest, and these gardens are rigged with homemade booby traps meant to maim if not kill. Venomous snakes wander the hills and valleys and take a few dogs each year. My father-in-law owns the top of this mountain and a hundred acres besides on two others, all carved from the Daniel Boone National Forest and bought for a song. A lone logging road bisects the open range of woods and that only because he granted the federal government a ninety-nine-year lease as a hedge against brushfires.
The creek usually runs behind the two farmhouses as a trickle, but sometimes flash flooding accompanies a heavy rain. Once every fifty years the creek jumps its bed and the mountain resurfaces itself in a fit of violence. Rivers used to do this and still sometimes do, despite the best efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers.