ken*again, the literary magazine. Spring 2012

Space Junk Sounds A Hell Of A Lot Sexier Than It Is   Lynn Beighley
Dust Dancer   Tony Burnett
The Vipers Are Coming   Ann Capozzoli
The Lost Valley Of Glencoe Eric D. Lehman

Barbed Wire Tour Quentin Poulsen
The Sentencing Of Magrigal Orpic Tom Sheehan
Fresh Wolves Laura Solomon
Christmas Island Laura Solomon

“Remember when we were kids? Skylab? We were freaked out, in a Chicken Little sort of way, that the sky was falling, and was going to fall on us,” he said.

He looked up as we walked down the dark street to his car. We were keeping our distance from each other, the newness of being together in the flesh making us much more tentative and awkward than we were online. We both knew that this couldn’t go anywhere. But we were friends, and that was okay.

I figured it was a meteorite. Really, what were the odds that we’d see a piece of the falling space junk? Astronomical.

“When I was 8, my parents took me to Yellowstone. I loved it. These strange, alien pools of boiling water, the geysers, the paths you didn’t dare stray from. I wasn’t the least bit scared,” I said.

“You’ve got to go. Anyway, I felt perfectly safe, even as a little girl. Right up until the park ranger told us that the whole park was a massive volcano just waiting to erupt,” I said. “That scared me. I spent the rest of the trip worried that the very ground beneath me would become a boiling pit of lava.”

“I’d have imagined it as baking soda and vinegar. That’s the only volcano I knew much about at that age,” he said.

“Still are,” he said. I fake punched him, and he grabbed my arm. It felt good. Really good. But he let my arm go.

“I have kind of a volcano obsession,” I said. “I saw lava flowing in Hawaii, felt the heat from it. Stole some brand new cooled lava. Pumice. Whatever.”

“That’s supposed to anger the goddess Pele, right? You aren’t supposed to do that,” he said. “You are cursed!”

“Geek,” he whispered in my ear as he kissed my neck. He stopped after a few seconds and slapped his arm. “Damn mosquitoes. Let’s get going.”

We were both quiet as we quickly reached his car. I saw another meteorite streaking across the sky. It was a sign, I thought. Pele, maybe. Fire in the sky.

“Afraid so. I’ve got to work tomorrow.” I was grateful that he didn’t say anything about her waiting for him.

I told him about visiting Pompeii. About the city frozen in time. And about the casts of people forever in stances of eternal abject horror by a disaster they had no chance of avoiding, a disaster they didn't expect.

“They had no idea,” I said. “Well, they had a little warning that things were not right, I think they must have felt some earthquakes, and seen the eruption. But it was so close, so fast, that even if they wanted to avoid it, they had no chance. They were running and cowering, the ones that were entombed by the ash. Those tragic human statues.”

“My favorite natural disaster is the hurricane. You have enough warning to avoid it, and while it’s horrible, nobody should die in one,” he said.

“And yet people do. Some people simply can’t escape disaster, no matter what they do. Look at New Orleans,” I said.

“True. Sometimes we have no options. And that’s just natural disasters. Think about the man-made ones. 9/11. Fukushima. Hell, this space junk falling on us,” he said.

“Speaking of space junk, look.” In front of us were more meteorites, impossible to miss in the dark sky above the unlit street I lived on.

I watched him get out of the car. As he walked in front of the headlights, in a split second, like lightning, a blinding flash outlined him. The car jerked as he thudded into the hood.

I screeched and clambered out of the car. Space junk had hit him in the chest, the impact creating a crater where his heart was, where the engine was.

My first thought, when I could think again, was that he was absolutely, irrevocably dead.

And then I realized that if I walked in the house, called 911, and reported that an unknown car, a stranger had been hit by something, that she’d never know about us. She’d wonder, but she’d never know. She’d be a survivor, not a victim.

nnabelle’s cousins, Georgann and Stevie, lived with their parents and baby sister in a two-bedroom railroad apartment on the top floor of their grandfather’s house. The layout of the apartment resembled a train, four rooms more or less of equal size lined up back to back. A living room, a bedroom, another bedroom and a kitchen. The living room was the front room -- not the first room you encountered after climbing up the worn wooden staircase from the ground floor, but the first room on the street side, a room with tall, rain-splotched windows that opened out to the streets of Coney Island.

One time when Annabelle was standing beside her father on the sidewalk outside her grandfather’s house, a group of people, twenty or so, strolled past her down the middle of the street, heedless of traffic. They moved in an ever-shifting mass, calling out to onlookers in a strange language – not English, not Spanish, not Italian, not Yiddish. Annabelle couldn’t actually speak Spanish or Italian or Yiddish but she knew what they sounded like. No, the language this unruly swarm of people spoke was none she had ever heard.

The men walked with arms flung around each other’s shoulders. They puckered their lips, and made kissing sounds at the housewives leaning out of windows curious to find out what was causing the ruckus. The semi-clothed children, most of them barefoot, skipped to keep up with the adults. The women wore long, flouncy skirts, shiny bright-hued blouses – vermillion, fuchsia, gold. They wore their hair long and loose or swept back into a thick tail fastened at the nape of the neck with shiny ornaments.

Annabelle began to hop up and down with excitement. She waved back at the children who seemed to be beckoning her to come join them. She wanted to skip with them, to laugh and sing with them, to be part of this festive parade. She started toward them, but her father gripped her shoulder.
“Stay right here.” he commanded.

Later Annabelle found out that those people—that babbling rivulet of men, women and children sauntering down the middle of Neptune Avenue in Coney Island —were gypsies.

She was eight years old then. Now she was almost twelve and wise enough to know that gypsies were dangerous. These days when she visited her relatives in Coney Island, she mostly stayed inside and played with her cousins. On that particular day, she was preparing to tell Georgann and Stevie a joke. She’d positioned herself in the center of the living room under the saucer-shaped ceiling lamp, in the spotlight so to speak. Georgann and Stevie sat side by side on the sway back sofa that had been pushed to the far wall.
“The vipers are coming to get you in seven years – six years, five years, four years, three years, two years …..”

She’d been in luck. Georgann and Stevie hadn’t heard the viper joke yet. She told it in a low-pitched, spooky voice, dragging out the vowels …

“….threeeeyeeeears, twooooyeeeears …” With eyes stretched wide and unblinking, she leaned in closer to Georgann, the oldest but the easiest to scare, keeping her gaze steady on Georgann’s big round orbs as the time of the vipers grew nearer, as the time of the vipers approached slowly yet inexorably.

“The vipers are coming in seven months – six months, five months, four months ….”

“The vipers are coming in seven weeks - five weeks, four weeks, three weeks …”

It was an easy joke to tell – and fun, too. It gave you, the joke teller, a chance to ham it up, really build dramatic tension. But you had to gauge your audience, calculate just how much tension they could handle, not overdo it with the skittish ones like cousin Georgann.

Annabelle miscalculated. She never got to the punch line. Georgann broke into tears and ran out of the room even before Annabelle got to the seconds, while she was still droning “two minutes, one minutes …”

Annabelle glared at Georgann as she scurried down the hall toward the kitchen, pressing her palms flat to her ears. She’d ruined Annabelle’s whole build up.

Annabelle liked the idea that she could scare Georgann. Personally, she couldn’t find anything, not a thing, scary about herself. But if Georgann did, that was just great, especially since Annabelle hadn’t done anything wrong. Technically, that is. How could she get in trouble for telling a joke – a clean joke?

No, at the most maybe they’d say something like: “You mustn’t tell jokes that will frighten your cousins.” But they wouldn’t hit her for it.

“Boy, what a baby,” Annabelle said to Stevie. From the unusually pale caste of his freckled face, she could tell her stylized delivery had its impact on him as well. Yet, although younger than Georgann by almost four years, he had stood his ground there on the sofa.

“So what happens next?” he asked, bravely. “Tell me about the vipers.”

Annabelle was happy to oblige. She continued in her creepiest voice, torso hunched forward, arms outstretched, zombie-like. “The vipers are coming in seven seconds – six seconds, five seconds, four seconds, three seconds, two seconds, one second.”

She paused for dramatic effect, then straightened up to deliver the punch line.

“Ve are the vipers, ve come to vipe your vindows!”

Georgann was ten years old; kind of short and skinny, on the fragile side compared to Annabelle, whom grown ups tended to describe as sturdy. Georgann had those freckles and those big eyes. Face it, she was a lot cuter than Annabelle. Maybe this was one of the reasons Annabelle was jealous of her, why Annabelle couldn’t enjoy her as much as she enjoyed Stevie.

He, too, was skinny and freckled. But he was a boy, the only male child ever to be born of the four Capozzoli brothers. He had a husky voice, a lusty laugh; the sides of his mouth turned up in a permanent smile. Life was fun for Stevie, the youngest of all the grandchildren, everybody’s favorite. But even though he garnered so much of the adult attention, Annabelle wasn’t jealous of him, didn’t resent him —because he didn’t mine for it, he didn’t purposefully set out to hog it all.

Now, on the saggy sofa on that Sunday afternoon, Stevie leaned toward Annabelle, elbows on knees, head propped up by two fists, staring at her quizzically.

“Get it? They have an accent. They talk like gypsies.” Annabelle sidled over to the two tall windows, swooped her right palm back and forth across one of them like a windshield wiper. “Vipe your vindows is what it sounds like, but they mean wipe your windows.”

He still didn’t get it. But he’d had enough of the vipers. He popped up from the sofa like a jack-in-the-box, reached for Annabelle’s hand and sprinted out of the living room, into the dark hallway.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go see if my mom’ll give us some cookies.”

Annabelle wiped her palm on the side of her skirt. She’d picked up some grit from the window. She put her hand in his and let him lead her down the dark hallway, carefully side stepping the spots where the grey and orange linoleum had buckled.

In the kitchen, Georgann was seated at the metal table in front of a near-empty glass of milk and a white plate sprinkled with Oreo crumbs.

“Can we have cookies, too, Ma?” Annabelle had left it to Stevie to ask; she figured surely his mother couldn’t resist his charm.

But she was wrong.

“No, it’s too close to dinner.”

Georgann kept her eyes low, gazing at her glass as if she could read fortunes in the milk residue, pecking at the dark brown crumbs with her index finger, then sticking the finger in her mouth between her two front teeth.

She looked up at Annabelle and smirked.

fter many days of rain, two tourists found the day dry enough to take a long awaited walk. The clouds of the deluge remained, hanging on the craggy peaks as if unwilling to relinquish Scotland to the sun. The boggy heather glistened when the occasional dirk of light broke through. Ilse remarked on this as their small black car wound up the glen.

“Well, let’s hope the weather holds,” Thorstein said. “We want to get up there and back down in time for dinner at King’s House.”

Ilse shrugged. There was plenty of time for all that. The car passed the last of the purple fireweed as the humped walls closed in. Ahead was the curve of the pass that led to the upper valley and to the lonely hotel on Rannoch Moor. But Thorstein swung onto one of the small lots on the south side of the road, pointing up at a tumbling stream that cut a thin steep valley in one of the mountains.

“What do you mean?”
“Well,” she said, pointing to the swirl of contour lines. “Shouldn’t it be over there, by the Study? Isn’t that the Study?” She pointed at the protruding shelf of rock which the road hooked around before continuing up the deep valley.

Thorstein wiped his glasses. “No, you’re seeing it at the wrong angle. We go up there, and then the valley is on the other side.”

“Okay,” Ilse said. What did she care? It was a chance to be outside, instead of cooped up in hotel rooms or in tasting rooms of endless distilleries.

Thorstein stepped out and, handing her the keys, grabbed the rucksack, muttering, “You take the camera.”

She followed him down the rubbled margin by the road, and heard bagpipers. At the next parking lot, a tour bus had stopped, and a piper was providing some sort of entertainment. The full notes over a steady drone echoed off the sides of the mountains.

“Tourist crap,” he said, and hurried up the trail, crossing a narrow wooden bridge over the burn, swollen with the recent rains. The trail led up the grassy slopes, and Ilse followed, her strong legs in good condition despite the week spent indoors. Thorstein ranged ahead nevertheless. She admired his strength, watching him adjust his glasses, glace back at her, and force his way up the green wall. They ascended several series of stone steps, like some ancient road, and soon entered the hanging gorge several hundred feet above the valley floor. Waterfall after waterfall tumbled past, and Ilse stopped to take photos of each, turning around to snap one of the car far below.

As she saw the clouds rolling so close over head, and the sheer cliffs across the valley a minor surge of vertigo assailed her. She turned and quickly strode along the crumbling ledge, seeing her impatient boyfriend far ahead. After another few minutes, they reached a larger waterfall that splashed into a clear pool where the heather and rocks narrowed to a tapered point.

“Imagine trying to attack this position,” Thorstein said. “There’s no way.”

She shrugged and nodded, taking a sip of water and handing back the bottle. Thorstein put it away, and turned, knocking a loose rock into the pool below. He bounded across a slick, sloped rock and then leapt across an empty place onto another angled stone.

Ilse followed, but faltered when she saw the huge flat piece of slick rock, tilted like a spoon in a cup of tea, ending maybe fifteen feet above the pool. One slip here on the rain soaked boulder and she would slide right down with nothing to stop her. She looked down into the clear water and saw the jumble of rocks that woudld crack her head open.

“Sure you can. I did it.” He hopped back over the gap at the top of the falls, and came to the edge, wiping his glasses on his shirt and smiling. “It’s easy.”

Ilse gritted her teeth. Putting one foot gingerly in a slight divot, where Thorstein had stepped, she searched for a hand hold . Her boyfriend’s outstretched hands wavered three feet away from her fingertips.

She pushed off, easily leaping onto the loose gravel, her foot slipping slightly as Thorstein steadied her.

“One more then. Wait until you see the upper section. I wonder where the pass to the lost valley begins.”

“I guess,” she said, walking forward to the gap at the top of the falls. The stony path simply ended, requiring a jump onto another tilted rock before curving around the cliff. Below the gap, white water fled down the mountain. “Oh, no way. I am not doing that.”

“It’s not so bad.” Thorstein wiped the spray from his glasses. “Just don’t think about it.”

Thorstein kicked a small rock into the water. “Come on. There’s a surprise waiting for you.”

“Come on,” he said again after a moment. “Don’t you want an adventure?”
Ilse did not answer, staring at the gap. She could jump it. But why should she? Why risk her life?

Thorstein looked away from her, running his fingers through his short brown hair. “No.”

“Why do you have to ruin everything?” he said, turning to look at the ring of cliffs at the top of the gorge.

“Screw you, Thor,” she said, and crying, made a blind leap across. He reached out an arm to steady her, but she pushed him away, leaning against the cliff.

The clouds gleamed in sunlight, bathing the upper valley in an otherworldly glow. Another waterfall gamboled down a few hundred yards up another treacherous path.

“See,” she said, wiping her tears. “No lost valley, no pass. Wrong again.”

“Stop it.” He began striding up the path. “It’s easy from here.” He walked around a corner, but Ilse didn’t move. He reappeared around another rock, farther up, only then looking back and seeing her standing at the falls. He beckoned, and continued climbing up the gorge toward the next falls.

Ilse gritted her teeth and looked at the rushing water beneath the gap and jumped back across. She made it easily again, and trying not to think, jumped lightly to the small foothold on the next rock, swinging her left leg, and then felt the grip of her boot slip. Her left foot landed, not on the path, but on the tilted boulder, and slipped, too. She fell forward, and her arms grappled with loose gravel and a tuft of heather.

Then all struggle stopped. Her legs splayed across the sheer stone, her left very near to the path. She inched it up until her knee rested on the flat crumble, then with her two hands and knee, pushed, sliding a little with the loose stone, but gaining the ledge with her hips.

After a few moments of sobbing in which she expected Thorstein to return, she crawled forward, forcing both legs onto the ledge, her fingers shaking from the shock.

She stumbled back down the trail, her legs getting stronger as she went, easily navigating the steep stone steps, and breaking into a run on the flatter sections. She passed a large family in rain jackets struggling up the hill, a small boy crying. Only when she crossed the wooden bridge did she look back. Thorstein was nowhere to be seen. Looking down at her feet, she saw her hiking pants had been ripped. Lifting up the right pant leg she saw deep scratches caked with red mud. Shaking again, she hobbled to the river where she washed it off. Only one scratch looked bad, and she could fix it when she reached the hotel. At that thought she panicked, then remembered that she had the keys. With a grim laugh, she walked across the narrow valley and up the stony embankment to the small black car. She got in and glanced at the high mountains, where she saw only the red and yellow jackets of the family disappearing into the gorge.

Smiling now, she put the car in reverse and struggling a little with the foreign controls, managed to get the car into the proper lane and up through the pass of Glencoe. The huge prow of Buachaille Etive Mor rose to her right just as it began to rain. Laughing now, she managed to get the car into the parking lot at the King’s House on the flats of Rannoch Moor.

Grabbing the luggage, she splashed through puddles into the reception area, got her room key, and walked down the hall through the smell of a coal fire. The room had a view of the swollen stream behind the inn. She could make out a few walkers across the stone bridge, hunched against the rain, struggling in from Glencoe. Shrugging deliberately, she drank a glass of water, took a shower, dressed in her best dress, and slipped a pair of sandals onto her sore feet. The scratches on her shin throbbed now, and she applied some iodine and band aids. Looking at the area critically, she decided that the wound made her look tough, and hurried down to the hotel dining room. Two handsome young bartenders with curly hair stood behind the bar cleaning pint glasses.

“Aye.” The bartender turned and pulled it off the shelf. “Will ye be wanting anything else with that?”

“Aye? I’m workin’ until ten, lass, but I can talk to ye here, if you’d like to stand by.”

“Maybe later. I’m in room 115,” she said, then reddened. “I mean for the drink tab.”

She took the small glass of precisely measured whiskey as a group of men in technical climbing gear came into the bar, collapsing into seats along the wall behind her, talking in what she assumed was Gaelic.

“Excuse me.” She raised her glass of neat whiskey. “May I buy you gentlemen drinks to celebrate your victory?”

She saw them nudge each other. Smiling to herself, she was about to order, when at the open door she saw Thorstein. The wet shirt and pants clung to his hard muscles, and he was wiping his glasses with a napkin, looking at her. Without a word, he strode up to the curly haired bartender.

eneath the overcast sky a helicopter droned back and forth. Nelson Street was cordoned off and the cops were diverting traffic. Now we heard them, many voices chanting, like an approaching army. They came into view, marching past the intersection ahead, hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, all in hooded raincoats, some with motorbike helmets, holding banners and signs aloft.

"One, two, three, four! We don't want this racist tour!"

Hori trotted forward to join them, and I followed. The cops stood by in their navy coats, porcelain faces beneath white helmets, fibreglass shields in front of them, batons at their sides. They were the law, the establishment, and they were the enemy.

"Aye, an' good to see you lads taking part too!" A fleshy, middle-aged face peered out of a raincoat hood at us, like some ghostly monk from a horror movie.

I was instantly transported back to a classroom at high school, to a squelching blackboard and clouds of white chalk dust. It was old McDougal from History. "Hello, Sir," I said, like I were his student again.

Hori said nothing, and it seemed a little rude. Yet undoubtedly I was the one who had reacted foolishly. McDougal might have been on this protest march, but he was still the old Jock who had said the Maori ought to go back to where they came from; the same old Jock who had thrown Hori out of his class and got him suspended.

The helicopter swooped low, right over Nelson Street, rotor blades clattering like machine gun fire. Upon its side featured the initials of the national TV station. They were filming us.

"Perhaps we'll get on TV." I nudged Hori with my elbow.

"Let's go get some beer." He scowled. "Game kicks off in an hour."

Twenty minutes later we were back at the flat, glasses of beer in hand, watching the pre-match hype on TV. The South Africans were here for the first time since sixty-five. It was the equivalent of the world championship.

Anne entered the room with plates of spaghetti on toast. "Oh, you're not watching the rugby, are you? We're s'posed to be against that."

"’We?’" Hori gazed up at her.

"We joined a protest march today," I chipped in proudly.

Anne burst into laughter. "You joined a protest march an' now you're back here to watch the game on telly? You guys are unbelievable!"

Hori scowled at me. "You're not helping, cuz. Look, thuz half an hour til kick-off. We can be down the pub in fifteen an' watch it there."

So that's what we did: wolfed down the spaghetti and toast, pulled our jackets back on, and headed out again; the sound of Anne's laughter ringing in our ears.

The back bar of the Station Tavern was crowded with Polynesian railway workers. But no one was playing pool or darts, and the juke box was silent. For all eyes were on the big colour TV at the front of the bar.

From among the multitudes in front of us, a face turned and caught my eye. They were the bearded features of Joe, and beside him stood George and Zak, the three of them at a table near the front. He grinned and gestured for us to join them.

"Surprised all these guys aren't against the tour," I told him, gazing around at the railway workers in their faded dungarees and heavy work boots.

"We're all against it, bro.' But the 'Boks are here anyway an' thuz nothing we can do about it, so we might as well enjoy the rugby, eh."

For an hour and a half we stood transfixed, watching the beefy men in black doing battle with the beefy men in green and white upon that muddy pitch, the packed stadium roaring the home-side on.

Mercifully New Zealand held on. We had won the first test and needed only take one of the remaining two.

-
Friday night, pay in our pockets, the week was done. We were hanging out again. This was everything I needed: Friends, money, a sense of belonging.

Gazing over at the bar, I saw through the smoky haze a group of men standing around a table. They were robust, a little intimidating, and most of them were Polynesian. The one looking back at me, however, was tall and fair. Twelve months' labouring on the construction site had transformed me into a powerfully built young man.

Through the doors behind us came a group of young men, all of them in black leather jackets with 'Warriors' patches on their backs. Among them was Hemi, dreadlocked and tattooed. Swaggering up to our table, he helped himself to my glass of beer and one of my cigarettes.

"Swarming with cops out deh!" he growled.

"Course, bro,'" said Hori. "It's the anti-tour demonstrations. 'Boks are playing here tomorrow."

"I know dat." Hemi leered across the table at me. "How 'bout you, honky? Why aren't you out deh?"

"Me an' Hori joined in a protest march before the first test," I replied.

"For about three minutes!" Hori giggled.

I scowled back at him. "You're not helping, mate."

Hemi's features remained hostile, eyes fixed on me. "An' tomorrah? You gunna be out deh protesting, or you gunna be inside the stadium watching?"

"How 'bout you?"

"Nunna your business. I'm asking you."

"We're all against it, mate. But the 'Boks are here anyway an' thuz nothing we can do about it. So might as well enjoy the rugby, eh."

"No Maori gov'ment would a permitted this tour."

"All the more reason to go out an' protest. I'm not the enemy."

"Who are you to judge us?"

"It's just my opinion."

Hemi exhaled a long stream of smoke directly into my face. Hori began trying to calm his brother down, for it was apparent Hemi was becoming agitated.

"How 'bout I tell me bro's your 'opinion.' What a ya fink would happen den?"

"Leave ya mates out of it," said Hori. "This is between you an' 'im."

Hemi charged into me. Probably he expected to drive me back. Instead I drove him back, my arms tight around his midriff, even hoisting him up at one point, like a sack of cement. My own strength surprised me, and Hemi had no answer to it as I pinned him against the wall.

To my own relief, it all ended there. Hemi didn't come at me again. Indeed, the hostility was gone from his features, and I suspected he may well have been discouraged by his own ineptitude.

We ventured out into the streets to see what was going on. Traffic teemed by. Trolley buses queued at the Courtenay Place shelters, silhouetted beneath the street lights.

A mechanical voice reached us from the direction of Pigeon Park. We wandered over to have a look. Some kind of demonstration but no cops around, just a bunch of people with banners and protest signs. I had thought they were men, what, with their coats, trousers and boots, their short-cropped hair and their rugged faces. Upon closer inspection, however, I could see I was mistaken. 'Women Against Rugby!' one of the banners read.

"Women are fufty-two per cent a the population an' we are opposed to this tour," the mechanical voice droned. "Racism is a male issue . . . "

"Not a Maori among 'em." Hori giggled.

"Think it's funny, do ya?" one of the protestors bellow at him. She moved toward us, brandishing her protest sign.

"I'll laugh if I wunna. It's a free world." Hori started to walk away.

"That's right! You're all cowards. I'll take you on, mate. Any time ya like!"

I hastened after him. "Come on, Hori. Gotta stand up for ya-self, mate."

"I ain't gunna fight no woman, cuz. Forget 'em. The guys are halfway down the street."

From behind us we heard that hateful snarl once more: "Any time, mate! I'll knee ya in the balls. That's all it takes to drop a man!"

At Manners Mall we turned down a dark alley to the Jubilee Bar. An angry din of tuneless music greeted us at the entrance. Freaky people, these. Dyed hair, spiked up, mohicans, shaved bald. They wanted to be different, yet they all ended up looking kind of the same, what, with their leather jackets and tapered jeans, their combat boots, dog chains, silver studs and safety pins.

The guys actually got into a discussion with the weirdoes at the bar beside them. I struggled to make sense of anything until there was a break between angry songs.

" . . . lot of other countries we shouldn't be playing sport with either," one of them was saying. "Look at the Yanks, supplying South Africa with weapons to use against their own bluddy people!"

"That's right," added his companion, an Englishman. "An' then you got the French. Testing their bombs in the South Pacific. That's our bloody back yard! But nobody complained when their rugby team came 'ere!"

"Know what?" said the other. "If this series means so much to everybody that they're out there fighting in the streets about it, I hope we bluddy lose."

I gazed at him in disbelief. Being against the tour was one thing. Hoping your own country would lose defied comprehension. Why, it was akin to treason, changing your religion, or homosexuality or something. These weirdoes, with their spiked up hair and leather jackets, now appeared like aliens from some far off galaxy to me.

The punks took their drinks and walked away. The back of the Englishman's jacket featured a picture of the prime minister’s face – complete with a Hitler mustache. Freaks they may have been, but at least they had a sense of humour.

Finishing our own drinks, we headed back out, soon finding ourselves on Victoria Street. We were walking toward the Arizona Bar.

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young strummed out of the stereo system, a more agreeable sound, by far, than the din we had encountered at the Jubilee.

Heads turned, bearded faces glanced up, staring eyes followed us. Comments were grunted. Somebody howled like a monkey. A doubtful-looking barmaid served us our jugs without speaking. We took a table at the back, by the exit.

"Who let the boonga in?" an older guy called out. He was bald and sported a handle-bar mustache, more grey than red.

"Let me-self in, mate," Zak called back.

The middle-aged bikie continued to grin. "Nah, I mean, who let you into the country?"

Everyone within earshot erupted in laughter.

"The Big Guy in the sky," said Zak. "I's born 'ere."

"Or the Prince a Darkness below!" the bikie intoned, and his companions laughed again.

What went through Zak's mind, I wondered, when he had to put up with nonsense like that?

Up rose one of the bikies and sauntered across the room toward us, holding his beer in one hand. He was very tall. His cheekbones were prominent, his mustache dense, and upon his head he wore a Stars and Stripes bandana.

"Wotcha staring at, boy?"

Hori stood up to confront him. "Dunnoh. Left me book a zoo creatures at home."

Even as we laughed, the bikie reached out with his beer and began emptying its contents onto Hori's head. Before he could complete the act, however, Hori tackled him around the midriff and drove him across the bar, back into his own table, causing a couple of chicks to scramble aside shrieking.

My main concern at this point was that the other bikies would join in. "We might hafta help out," I muttered to Joe.

"Nah, bro.' We'll just sit 'ere an' let 'em show us how stupid they are."

I looked back at him in confusion. Was it possible that, for his robust frame and tiger tattoo, Joe was actually a coward?

In fact, the bikies merely formed a circle around the pair and began cheering them on. The middle-aged guy with the handle-bar mustache yelled encouragement, laughing boisterously all the while.

Hori managed to pin his opponent and looked set to unleash a flurry of blows. But he was surrounded by bikies and appeared to think better of it.

So it all ground to a halt, and the giant with the Stars and Stripes bandana was soon back in his seat, a roll of toilet paper under his nose.
-
There was pushing and shoving near the gate. Batons swung. Angry shouts followed. The cops began to charge, forcing the protestors back. One woman came away with blood on the side of her face and paraded before the TV cameras.

"This was a peaceful demonstration, an' look what the bast'ds a done to me!"

Soon we were among them, heaving forward, feeling ourselves being driven back by the cops. More angry shouts. More bloodied faces. Another baton charge was underway.

"Shame! Shame! Shame!" the chant rose up.

Some unfortunate lost his balance and careered into the cops. They immediately laid into him, chopping him down with their long batons. Now Hori sprang forth, stabbing at the cops with the picket off a protest sign. The cops turned their attention to him, dragging him down among them, and as the blows went in, the guy who had lost his balance managed to get up and scramble away.

I threw myself at the cops. A fibreglass shield slammed into me, and next thing I was on my backside, staring up at the navy blue wall, the porcelain faces beneath white helmets. I leapt up for a second attempt, and again the cops sent me sprawling back onto the road. This time I could only sit there in a daze, pondering my own impotence.

A glimpse of Hori's green helmet bobbing up and down among the scrum of cops. They were leading him away.

"Shame! Shame! Shame!"

I hurled myself at them again, and this time, to my own surprise, I cut right through. The fibreglass wall simply opened in front of me. Then I knew why. Powerful hands seized me and wrestled me to the ground. I, too, had been arrested!

"Shame! Shame! Shame!"

At the police station they led me down a long corridor to a holding cell. When they opened the door I immediately spied Hori, seated upon the bench inside, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees so that I could not see his face.

"The bast'ds!" He raised his head slowly. Thick blood coated his nostrils. "Look what the bast’ds a done, cuz!"

"Hell, mate, reckon they broke ya nose!"

"Nah, not that.” Hori scowled back at me. “We're stuck in 'ere, cuz. How we gunna see the test now?!"

t all came back to him in a maddening rush, the face in the window and the lady with the frail arms. At the moment his body felt hollow, his head light.

Bartholomew Bagnalupus pushed a leafy limb aside and looked up at the window in the minister’s house. My God, the face was there at the highest window as if it had never gone away. It was gaunt and pale and tortured in a sense. Somehow, though, it was pulling at him in a weird sort of way, magnetic.

The eyes of that face, he swore, were hollow, set so far back Hell could have sat there more than a visitor. If he had run across the street to tell his father the first time he had seen the face, there would have been an instant knock at the side of his head. In the pantry or the kitchen, at a distance, his mother at pie or pasta would have tushed him into silence. Her hands would have said such apparitions do not count, have no place in daily converse, are less than legitimate. Her fingers would have waved him off, the flour like a mist of snow falling from the work of those hands, from the gestures.

Hell, ghostly tales brought with them only mock consideration, if any consideration at all.

“But I saw him, Momma. With big eyes and a scary look in them.” Her tush, child returned to him this night as clear as a night cry of his daughter might come to him. And he saw again the back of his mother’s wrist wiping her brow. He could remember the flour mixing with her sweat, the back of her wrist as if checking her temperature.

“Such a kid, he is, poppa. Such a kid!” her head turned, her voice moving across her shoulders to another room; and he could remember the clarity of such far off occasions.

But for now the face was real again. It had always been for him as real as the window, round, high in the peak of the minister’s house, looking like a porthole on the side of a tall ship. He could not count the nights growing up he had slipped into the brush, parted the leaves, looked up at that face. His heart would be beating; and it was like his face was making noises of its own.

And always that face was looking back at him, as if the two of them were night’s companions, night’s strange company in silent acknowledgment. Once he had thought they belonged together; that one could not be without the other. Never was any name known or any other engagement articulated. It was not Minister Orpic’s face. It was not the face of his wife Madrigal. It was not the face belonging to any person he had ever seen around the minister’s house.

Now, twenty-five years had gone by the boards for Bart. His own father was gone and his mother sat sullenly in a nursing home, counting his visits. A late Masters degree had come to hand, a family had been started, and a full life was just around the corner for him. Yet, bidden on this night, he had come silently and darkly once again to the shrub line near the minister’s house, seeking that face. The unsaid articles of a compulsion had impelled him, their strange magnetic forces at work.

Shadows thick as malts surrounded him. The remaining leaves on bush and tree, starlit and burnished, were crisp yet light with moisture. He could smell the acute but passing sweetness of them. Now he knew the slicing distinction of maple leaves and stain-bearing oak leaves, how the mahogany of them traced a pattern in his eyes. Dew, like a late sap, made the sod slippery. The sole distant star was rebroadcast from the filmy grass at last gone brown. The star was a blip on a radar screen. Behind him, at the corners of the old barn and in the late leaves themselves, the breeze talked out to him. The darkness was cool at his feet, carried a bit of dread from his childhood. Cool October wore its touch of midnight confusion.

And the lady of the house, Madrigal Orpic, was no longer a ready tune at the back of his head. There were no quick notes, nothing near the rhymes and ditties that once were quick to tongue. She was now at her worldly and worthy rest, buried just one week earlier.

God, if Melanie knew he was out here after midnight, she’d look at him in that odd way she could ask a question, like, ‘Are you insane?’ the one arm on her hip bent like the question mark, her eyes in other mute declarations.

Life, he suddenly realized, had rushed him with all its energy this quarter century.

It did so every time he thought of the house across the street from his own house. Every time he woke from a deep sleep all the intervening years the house had been present. A child’s midnight cry could do it. Or some contrived timepiece setting him awake. An edge of sadness or discouragement or plain tiredness could do it. It happened every time he thought of the face in the upper window or had seen Reverend Chambers Orpic or his thin, worn-out wife Madrigal Orpic hanging clothes on a line from the second floor porch. The clothesline ran out to a tree in the same shadows and secret darkness he now hid in.

Bart quickly remembered a number of other assessments he had made watching her hanging clothes: She looks like her arms will snap off hanging up a pair of dungarees or a jacket heavy with water. How does a woman so thin and so weak-looking manage to get anything done at all? Will she not break? Why has she not broken? And with such a music to her name? The old pictures came back to him, reruns of his peek-a-boo life. One of the constant images was Madrigal Orpic at the clothesline sitting down to rest after hanging the slightest and lightest of wet haberdashery or lingerie, socks, underpants, undershirts. Even the span of a half dozen white handkerchiefs, easier in the breeze than in her hands, made her sit. Often he thought that her life could be capitulated in brief seconds, her body so brief, and there’d be little left for ashes.

Once, he recalled, he had designated her as a survivor, and for nothing other than her endless work at the clothesline, as slow and as dismal as it appeared, as weak. He’d recall the heavy sense of wet clothes as they hung almost listless even in a breeze, and see the thin arms that had set them in place. Somehow he had known that those thin bones would work until her last breath.

Chance, this night he reasoned, had brought him again under cover of darkness. Chance and the flannel-mouth outpouring of Richie Dunbar who worked, as he had since his junior year in high school, for Knobby Calum the plumber. Richie talked like he worked, slow, steady, without knowing what halt was. That was why Knobby Calum kept him on the payroll for so long. And everyone knew Richie to be the neighborhood blabbermouth bar none.

“Take those Orpics up at the parish house,” Richie said one night at Rico’s Blue Moon Café, three old classmates happening to fall against each other one rainy end of the day, “now that was an odd pair for having God on your side, if I do say so myself.” He had added, “Church never bearing much weight for me, you mind. Her gone and now they tell me the old minister’s got himself real sick. He’s in Time’s hands now from what I hear.”

Richie could put away the Guinness as if he had come from Galway or Kinsale or Elphin or even little old Ballyspittle itself. “One time the old parson had me put in a goddamn toilet in a closet in the goddamn attic, three floors up. Weird set-up if I do say so. Had to run a service line and a waste line down through those three damn floors, took me two-three days to get it done. Then I suspect they had to get a carpenter to finish off what I had knocked out of place. Took a few liberties, I did, knocking some of those old walls asunder.” He swigged again. “Yes sir, some days labor’s not the worst of occupations, no bout adoubt it.”

“Was there an apartment up there, on the third floor, in the attic?” Bart had leaned over at his flannel-mouthed pal of long years still working his Guinness. “How many rooms? Was the place furnished?” He could see the face in the window again, never knowing the age of the face, never having seen the body that belonged to the face.

“I did think that kinda odd,” Richie said, nodding at the barkeep for another round. “Not in the room I worked, though there was a door into another room, but it had a big old lock on it. Knobby’d have my ass if I ever went prowling through a customer’s house without due cause. And I had no reason to look in that room except for my own curiosity.”

All the stuff Richie had said came back to Bart standing in the darkness. Obviously someone was living up there on the third floor. Someone never outside the house. Someone never let outside the house. Someone ashamed of or who would be a point of curiosity. Bart could not imagine what that person could be like. But he had seen him at the window twenty-five years earlier.

He looked again this night. The single star froze itself in a blade of damp brown grass. He saw it on a leaf moving near his eyes.

Then, as if he had beckoned that unknown person, he saw the face at the window. Bart was afraid to breathe. He was afraid to give his place away. But the face was looking right at him.

Bart, in the clutch of minor darkness, lifted a hand, in a questioning salute. He felt foolish, but drawn by time, and his innate curiosity.

He hurried home, unsure of what he had seen, of what he knew. He moved cautiously out of the kitchen and into the bedroom. Melanie only half shrugged as he slipped into bed beside her. At length he went to sleep after seeing the star on a leaf, the face in the window.

Melanie was pushing him awake. “Bart! Bart!” she yelled. “There’s a fire across the street. The minister’s house is on fire.”

The face came at him and Madrigal Orpic’s thin arms, the Cracker Jax arms, came at him. His breath was short. A vision came and went. The smell of smoke was ripe and alive. He leaped out of bed and put on a pair of pants and shoes. His jacket was in the kitchen, on the back of a chair. He grabbed it and rushed outside.

Fire engines were there. The flames were licking at the backside of the house. The minister, Reverend Chambers Orpic, was sitting on the running board of a fire engine. He was rubbing the back of his head, looking like Death itself, yellow, comical or caricatured at once. His eyes leaped with the redness of the fire. His cheeks were sucked in, his breath held deep. Bart heard him say, “I don’t know what happened. It just went boom! Boom!” He waved his hands around. “Boom it went! Boom, that’s all.” It was like he was giving a sermon about the final day, the end of everything.

And retribution. The word popped into Bart’s mind. He didn’t hear it; he felt it.

The chief was standing beside Reverend Orpic. “At least we got you out okay, Reverend. That’s the important part. Now there’s nothing more to do but save what we can of the house.” He patted the reverend on the shoulder and walked away, his boots rubbing, making noises, the flames calling him.

Bart waited for Reverend Orpic to say something. The reverend only looked at the fiery house, and then he looked up at the high window and down at his hands. He did not say anything to the chief walking away from him, back to the fire. He did not say anything to Bart standing near him, and Bart must have thought he was looking down into his soul. Bart wondered about the music lady, Madrigal Orpic, the lady of the thin arms, the twigs of arms, the slivers of arms, who had evoked lifelong energy for an unknown cause, for a cause too difficult for the reverend to mention, and surely to maintain.

t started with just the first wolf. I met him in the forest walking home from Granny’s place. I sensed something stalking me, so I turned around and faced him. He paused for an instant. I took out the gun I had stashed in my knickers and shot him right between the eyes. He keeled over, dead. I picked him up by the forepaws and slung him over my back. Blood dripped down between my shoulderblades. Mother yelped when she saw him.
“Yikes, what’ve you got there?” she asked.
I played it nonchalant.
“Oh, just an old wolf,” I replied.
“Quick,” she said. “Bring him inside the cabin before the other wolves see and start plotting revenge.”
I lugged the wolf inside and plopped him down upon the cabin floor. Mother took out her biggest stewing pot from under the stove and handed me Father’s hunting knife.
“Quick,” she said. “Get skinning.”
I set too with the knife, scraping away the wolf’s skin and then gutting him. The fresh stench of entrails assaulted my nostrils. I cut steaks from the fore and hind quarters and handed them to Mother who chopped them into smaller portions for the cooking pot. Mother took carrots, leeks and potatoes from the cupboard and added them to the stew.
“This’ll be delicious,” she said. “Your father’ll be rapt.”

For the next two months, I did a wolf a week. I started plumping up, my buttocks ballooning, my stomach hanging out above the belt of my jeans. I’d never been so content, so well fed. But then the cravings started. One wolf a week just wasn’t enough. More, more, more cried my stomach, my greed. I started doing two, then three wolves a week. It was sometime in June when the ghosts began visiting. I was lying in bed, reading Wuthering Heights, when I heard a scratching at the windowpane. I rose from my bed and drew back the curtains. Ghostly grey wolf-shaped forms with piercing red eyes hovered on the other side of the pane, dragging their claws down the glass. Wolf incubi! I screamed and called for Mother. She came running, candle in hand.
“Quick,” she cried. “Get the special gun from the mantelpiece. The one with the silver bullets. The one that father keeps for best.”
I ran for the gun and headed back to the bedroom. Mother took the weapon from my hands and shot at the wolves through the glass. To no avail. These were not werewolves, but wolf ghosts – you cannot kill the dead. The glass no longer held them. One of them came through the pane and into me. I looked in the mirror and howled, examining my fangs, my paws, my haunted and hungry red eyes.

know it’s not Hiroshima, but my uncle was at Christmas Island when the Valient dropped the H-bomb. The crew were instructed by the officers to turn their backs to the bomb and to cover their eyes with their hands. The explosion was so bright that the crew could see right through the skin and flesh of their hands to the bone, like an X-ray. Their skeletons lit up. Moments later, they were told to rise to their feet and turn to face the blast. A mushroom cloud gathered on the far horizon. Some people were knocked to the ground. Birds lost their eyesight. Panes shattered. Trees lost their leaves.

Many of the servicemen developed cancer and other ailments such as diabetes. Claims were made to the government and widows who were down on their luck were paid a small pension – not enough to compensate them for the loss of their husbands but still, it was something. My uncle died early; aged fifty-five. There could have been other factors involved in his death, of course – his heavy smoking and drinking, his steady diet of fish and chips.

It’s an image I can’t shake from my mind – the skin covering the hands and the eyelids becoming transparent. The five fingers of the hand, white and skeletal, outlined against the sky - the blast much brighter than the sun.