The Thief of Words

The Thief of Words

Anthony Bukoski

The University of Wisconsin Press

Publication of this book has been made possible, in part, through support from the Brittingham Trust.

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Copyright © 2025 by Anthony Bukoski

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bukoski, Anthony, author.

Title: The thief of words / Anthony Bukoski.

Other titles: Thief of words (Compilation)

Description: Madison, Wisconsin : The University of Wisconsin Press, 2025.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024039495 | ISBN 9780299351748 (paperback)

Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories.

Classification: LCC PS3552.U399 T48 2025 | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20240927

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024039495

eISBN: 9780299351786

For Elaine

The sins of my youth and my frailties remember not; in your kindness remember me . . . O Lord.

—Psalm 25

Contents

King Creole

Star and Star Lover

The Thief of Words

Chokecherries

Lonesome, Ornery, and Mean

The Penitent

Forget-Me-Not

A World of Accordions

The Beauty of Desire

Bread and Wine

English 110: The Literature of Snow and Ice

A Sea Story

Acknowledgments

King Creole

1

The job with the road-paving crew is my first grown-up’s work. Before this, I’d been a paperboy, a dishwasher, and a gas station attendant. I even threw trash when my old man, who wouldn’t let me lay around after high school, got me on with city sanitation. For eight hours a day, I’d emptied garbage cans into the back of a truck. Try sitting in the cab between the stinking driver and stinking Bud Buttwinkle, the other trash heaver, when you escort a load of garbage to the city dump on the shore of Lake Superior.

The garbage truck with hydraulic cylinders compacting the trash; the fat, smelly Buttwinkle; the city dump—visiting this punishment upon me was my old man’s idea. For what? Because I didn’t fight in a war, because I tried to live the life of Riley after high school, because I, Earl Slinker, am more magnificent than a teenager has a right to be? How are my good looks my fault?

When the checks come in from the road-paving job, I’ll save the money. With fifty bucks in my pocket, I can look anyone in the eye and tell them, “I don’t need nothing from you I can’t buy myself.” Eventually, I’ll get a room in town and a jalopy. These days, I don’t eat because it’s too far to the store. Going hungry saves me money. Plus I live rent free. I’m what you call transient.

For a few days, only one person knows my address: Great Northern boxcar #31344 in a trainyard in Superior, Wisconsin. A single-door, forty-foot boxcar, my domicile is a B4 type car, according to the manifest in the clerk’s office. If it was out in the railroad yard, the boxcar might be bound somewhere, but this “empty” stands on a spur track and I’m going nowhere.

Over the years, grain has smoothed and polished the wood that lines the walls of my home. From one end of the boxcar to the other is a long way. When I wake from a dream to hear a yard engine roll by, I wonder if someone’s climbed in the door to hide with me, perhaps a weary rambler off a through freight who’s made his way from another part of town. “Who is it? Who’s here?” When I sing Elvis’s “Baby, Let’s Play House,” it echoes in the empty boxcar. No one says anything. Just the song whispers to me. Who wouldn’t want to play house with Earl Slinker, high school grad and hard-working flagman?

On County Road W when I turn the flagger’s sign from Slow to Stop, housewives whisper about love. Teenage girls and grandmas say about me, “He’s dreamy.” I smile and thank them. I have wavy blond hair, blue eyes, a good complexion. My nose is a little pugged. The Merriam-Webster dictionary says this means “having a slightly concave bridge and flattened nostrils.” One front tooth is recessed from the others, which I alone notice. But there you have me, a tall, thin runaway. There you have all of Earl Slinker, aka “King Creole.”

In the construction zone, cars use one lane. Trucks loaded with asphalt from the hot mix plant rumble by in the other lane. A steamroller smooths the asphalt. At the controls of the steamroller, Hank Majeski sits under his sun umbrella. The “non-potable water” truck makes its runs to the river to refill the tank. The highway project has been planned for months, the angle of the curve on County Road W, the truckloads of sand, the width and depth of gravel on the shoulders. A steam shovel’s dug up the washed-out culvert that needed replacement.

The other flagman, Gerald Tietz (rhymes with “Teats”), is short and flabby. He stakes out his place in the shade. I have no say about which side of the highway to flag on. East, west, sun, shade, I get what I get. Unlike forty-year-old Tits, at least I’m handsome. So handsome that last year when I was hitchhiking, this guy picked me up and hired me to clean the garage at the Olds dealership. “We’ll go to the steam bath after,” he said. Not knowing what to do, I agreed. The car smelled new, but if you ask me they wanted too much for it. Nothing happened in the steam bath, but that’s what handsome gets you, a date with a salesman when you’re thumbing.

Even though I’m handsome, I’ve never had a steady girl. Sometimes when I’m alone in the boxcar, I lack confidence. Between songs, I ask myself where this deficiency comes from. My ma died when I was fifteen. She took so much of me with her that I have no heart left. “Oh, my baby’s good and true,” I sing, then realize that I have no baby, no girlfriend. Nothing’s happened between me and the girls I’ve taken out. I’d hear from their friends that I was too quiet, didn’t act right. Shy as I am, sometimes I can’t even say “howdy-do” to the whispering teenagers where W makes the dogleg, while in the sun I’m directing their parents to stay put or head east toward Gerald Tietz. I’m a high school grad trapped by insecurity.

The slow hours pass. The clay in the ditches bakes hard and cracks. Automobile traffic backs up. In mid-afternoon I long for the boxcar, which will be hot when I climb in, but by night a breeze off the lake often cools the town. The interior of the boxcar is ten feet high, nine wide. The railroad clerk, Mr. Anderson, a neighbor I met a few years ago, told me all this when he was seeing to my comfort. At first, I suspected he was like the friendly Olds salesman and wanted something. “The boxcar’s roomy. I hope it’ll do,” he said, offering to help me up.

“I’ll get in by myself,” I told him.

The first time I saw him at work, I thought his rimless eyeglasses, white shirt, and suspenders made him look like a telegraph operator in a movie like High Noon or 3:10 to Yuma. My boxcar “landlord” slicks down his hair. He lives with Olga, his mother. When he gets home, he parks his car in front of the garage, never on the street. He keeps it clean and is always washing it. I believe his mother plans the days he’s supposed to cut the lawn. Probably six times when I was growing up, I’d said “Hello” when he was in the yard. When we spoke the seventh time, I was in sanitation. On one of those days, I asked if I could have the paperback book he’d thrown out. I took Gumbo Ya-Ya.

My old man said, “Don’t ever go through another’s trash.”

“I don’t plan to. I just quit the job,” I told him.

Six months later (last February), he ripped up the book, which he’d found in my room. He threw the pages in the furnace. If you don’t clean the ashes, the grates of a coal furnace burn out. When I forgot to do it, he’d be furious. He’d yell in Polish, “Don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today—Nie odkładaj do jutra tego.” I’d give him the finger up through the basement ceiling. After I’d scoop out the clinkers and ashes from the furnace into a heavy bucket and empty them in the alley, to punish me he’d say, “Throw in two shovelfuls” and send me back down to the coal bin.

The time he burned the paperback, a page escaped. It lay against a wall of the furnace. The first line of Lyle Saxon’s Gumbo Ya-Ya describes a street in New Orleans. “Every night is like Saturday night in Perdido Street, wild and fast and hot with sin.” I wondered what sin would be like on such a street. I bet everything was sinful in Louisiana, the heat making it easy to take your clothes off. I said, “Eat shit, Bruno!” and swore I was leaving when I got enough money and the weather warmed.

The February night I put the salvaged page from Gumbo Ya-Ya in my desk, placing it in the Current Events World Atlas, I had the radio on. The only light in the room was the orange glow illuminating the dial. Most evenings, I picked up WDGY Saint Paul, WLS Chicago, WOWO Fort Wayne.

The night of the book burning, a new station came in. When I moved the dial, out of nowhere an announcer’s voice said, “It’s a rainy night in the French Quarter.” I’d seen pictures of that famous city, the bend in the river that gives the Crescent City its nickname, the iron grillwork on balconies, the statue of Andrew Jackson. Up north, a blizzard was predicted for later that week. The windows were frosted over. As I wrote a note to myself in the dark, “WOL, New Orleans, Louisiana, February 19, 1962,” the furnace kicked in.

With the old man fed up with me for neglecting things around the house, he threw me out. When I was very young, my mother, me, and Bruno came from Poland under the Displaced Persons Act. My parents labored under dangerous conditions in the sugarcane fields, courtesy of the Louisiana Resettlement Program. They left me with a neighbor all day. I remember Bruno and Ma coming home worn out. Did the work make Ma sicker? Was Bruno ever on Perdido Street before we journeyed north from the cane fields?

Because he’d suffered in life and didn’t want me lazing around, what reason was that to kick me out? His favorite saying in English is “That’s fine!” I said it back when I packed my things. “You don’t want me, that’s fine!” He grabbed the Wards Airline radio from me. Now only Wilbur Anderson knows where I am. I believe the old man has met him, though I’ve never seen them talk because Mr. Anderson and his mother stay to themselves. They speak Swedish at home.

I don’t bother Mr. Anderson when he’s in the yard office putting trains together. He does the paperwork on them. Two checkers in the yard make sure the boxcars are where they should be on the train. One morning he picked me up on my way to work. Driving down Albany Avenue, tired from the night shift, he told me he’d read every book in the back seat of his Oldsmobile. Another time, he came to the boxcar on the spur track. “We’re taking it to the roundhouse. I’ll tell you when to vacate,” he said.

Mr. Anderson looked important around there. My old man never was important, not “Bruno” the immigrant. The man lift at the flour mill would be running from the engine room to the upper floors and down. A huge conveyor belt would be spinning around two cylinders, making a roar that quieted only during power outages or when the mill shut down for maintenance or fumigation, and there was Bronislaw Slinker in work shirt, coveralls, and white grain-miller’s cap. Whether he was shoveling bagasse in Louisiana (the part of the cane that’s left after the sugar’s been extracted) or sweeping dust at the King Midas mill, he’d never had much in life.

Mr. Anderson was no laborer like Bruno Slinker from Łomza, Poland. I believe Mr. Anderson controlled every inch of track from here to the Gulf. Now he had a runaway living in a boxcar.

On hot, humid days, the heavy air muted sounds. Tar from the creosote plant seeped from the ties. In the burning sun, the heat never ceased. There were six hundred boxcars in the yard, some in clusters, others in lines you can’t see the end of. A few boxcars stood on the spur track, one had a dented door, another a “broken knuckle,” yet another a “flat wheel,” terms Mr. Anderson taught me.

One night I heard someone. I thought it was the bulls patrolling the dirt roads that run through and around the yards. “Get the hell off of railroad property!” they’ll yell when they see you. They beat you. They haul you in. Then I realized that no one, not even the railroad dicks, would harm me this night.

Frogs started up in the ditch along Albany Avenue. Aside from them, it was still. When whoever it was called to me, I didn’t move. When I’m ready to rock, I have star power in a white T-shirt, dark tan, and sun-bleached hair. Add to that my singing talent and I become Eddie Cochran in Albert Lea, Minnesota; Bobby Vee in Fargo; Charles Hardin “Buddy” Holly at the roller rink in Lubbock. Finally, I walked to the door. There he was, this goofy kid I knew. I might as well have been alone if a sixteen-year-old was all who was out there.

“I saw you pass my dad’s,” he said. He rested the side of his face on the steel piece the door slides over. The boxcar floor rose above his waist. Sounding like he was daydreaming, he went on, “Say something to me, Earl Slinker. Are you lonesome tonight? I don’t talk to people much. I’m sick and should be hospitalized.”

“I remember you. Your name’s Wallace C. Wilson,” I said. “Are you running away?”

“After high school. Is Chuck Berry your favorite?”

“Don’t know.”

“Who is?”

“Maybe Gene Vincent. Maybe Little Richard.”

“Elvis?” Wallace asked.

“Can’t say.”

Knowing the words would echo in the boxcar, I began a Ral Donner hit. I imagined I was performing in a high school gym on a Friday night.

“That was very, very beautiful,” he said. “Will you sing a fast one?”

“Maybe I just will.” Afterward I said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, that was Earl Slinker. We’ll hear more from him later. Are you coming up in here? Give me your hand.”

“You don’t want to do that. My skin’s infected. I walk out here all night. I give the railroad cops the slip.”

“I remember you, all right,” I told him as he was apologizing, saying, “I have a sickness and am not fit for human company.”

“Everyone runs away in their life,” I said.

Floodlights eighty feet in the air lit part of the rail yard. A thin fog or vapor formed there. A second later, he sprang up and got in. I remembered how he’d been out of place in school. Kids laughed at him. He wore the same clothes every day. The more they laughed and picked on him, the more he tried pleasing them. Nodding his head, he agreed with whatever they said. No matter how cruel kids were, he kept smiling. When someone asked how he could be so happy, he said, “What you think don’t mean nothing to me.”

“When I graduate, I’ll come with you if you leave,” he told me.

“What if I travel alone?”

“I’d do anything to get away. I’d be your backup singer. I’m developing a phobia. Do you remember the yearbook? There was a mark on me. No one else had anything wrong, just me. Something was off, the paper or the ink on that page, and there’s Wallace C. Wilson, the mark on his face. I already had the sickness, then this was added to it. They should’ve reprinted the yearbook and done other things to help me.”

“You looked okay. Someday you’ll be handsome.”

“No,” Wallace said. “I’ll be like this when I’m old. You can laugh, but you’re lucky. What girl would want to look at me? I don’t know what my disease is exactly.”

“Girls afflict me in a way,” I said, not knowing what I meant, except that maybe he needed someone to look up to and I could help by listening to him and telling him I had problems too. Who better than King Creole to hear him? Then he talked about railcars.

“A gondola has a flat bottom, fixed sides, no top. It’s for hauling bulk cargo. A hopper car’s a freight car with a floor sloping down to a hinged door or doors for discharging bulk materials. Chicago & Northwestern is abbreviated CNW. People around Superior call it ‘the Omaha.’ Chicago, Burlington and Quincy is CBQ, Milwaukee Road MILW. These are called ‘reporting marks.’”

“Let me sleep. I have to work tomorrow,” I said. Before I dozed off, I asked if he thought I was good-looking. Did he like my singing? When I woke up, his head was on my shoulder. I pushed him off. Sometime during the night, he said, “You think you know everything. I have almost every disease in the world. Creeping Eruption, Scalded Skin Syndrome. Pyogenic Granulomas.” Then he was gone.

Wallace Wilson was one of the people I knew during the early life and career of young Earl Slinker. There was the paint sniffer with the bad headaches and this fellow who walked around with his head down looking for money. There were the men on the paving crew—Gerald “Tits” Tietz, who said “Coun’y Road W” instead of “County Road W,” and the other workers—and finally the mysterious Wilbur Anderson, who I guess never married, never had a girl in his life, and loved the railroad.

2

A week after Wallace’s visit, Mr. Anderson moved me to the caboose. I grabbed my clothes and threw the blanket from home over my shoulder. So as not to get creosote on his shoes, he stepped carefully over the tracks and ties; “sleepers,” the ties are called. Pointing to the caboose, he said, “You can have this sandwich my ma packed for me. Every day, I tell her no butter. She doesn’t listen. Here’s something for you.” It was a paperback book, The Midsummer Fires. The front cover said “The finest achievement by a new American novelist in over twenty years.”

I watched him return to the office. A lot of guys love the railroad and give their lives to it. The regulations they have to follow make the work harder. Maybe he had trouble with a boss. Perhaps helping me was his way of rebelling. After clerking all these years, he had nothing to lose, I guess. I liked to think that about him. But how could I know what Mr. Wilbur Anderson had lived through?

With the night shift over, he’d head to the neighborhood where my old man lived. The Andersons had a small yellow house on a corner. We’d lived on East Fourth near him and Olga for years. His family, like mine, came from northern Europe. They were Lutheran Swedes. We were Catholics. For almost two weeks, I’d been living in the trainyard where Wilbur had spent a lot of his life.

The caboose had a desk, a stove, two bunks. I was glad to have something better than the boxcar. I was tired after flagging. Though the guys on the crew raked and shoveled asphalt all day, at least they kept moving, whereas I stood in one place shifting my weight from leg to leg listening for Gerald Tietz on the walkie-talkie saying, “I’m sending a line of cars. Hold yours there.” When they got to my side of the work area, the drivers waved, sped up despite the Slow sign, or said, “He’s dreamy.” Another family, another car of teens out to have fun. A minute later, I was a memory to them.

Sometimes a hot wind blew. Flies bothered me. Hank Majeski brought me a poncho, which I kept under a tree to sit on during breaks.

After work, I pulled off my T-shirt, turned on the spigot of the water truck, and washed up. One evening this lady asked why a water truck was here and where did we fill it? She’d left her Chevy Impala on the shoulder of the road. “Do I have to shut my eyes?” she asked when she saw me half dressed.

“If you want,” I said. “The truck goes to the river. The Highway Department has a pump there. We bring water from the river, transfer it into the tank on the steamroller. Tomorrow morning, the water will flow down onto the roller. Otherwise, the asphalt sticks to the roller and nothing gets laid down.”

“I bet you feel refreshed.”

“Lava soap helps,” I said.

“Turn off the spigot. What’s your name?”

“Earl Slinker. I’m a singer who someday is going to have the stage name ‘King Creole.’” When she threw me the car keys, she said, “Start singing then.” I grabbed my T-shirt and work shirt.

“It’s okay if your clothes are dirty.”

Not knowing what to say, I pointed to Hank’s umbrella on the steamroller. “He’s got a nice setup. Can you bring in faraway stations on your car radio? I get a lot of them, like New Orleans, ‘the City That Care Forgot.’”

“I’m going there.”

“The Crescent City?”

“None other.”

When I asked her name, the visor slipped. It brushed my forehead and nose.

“That thing’s loose. It’ll slip whenever we hit a bump. Just raise it up and keep driving. I’m an actress, by the way. I could have been in Come Back, Little Sheba. As it turns out, I’m auditioning for another play.”

When I said, “You don’t look like an actress,” she said, “I’m not in character.”

With the radio going, I drove us, the visor slipping ten more times. I felt stupid not knowing the other plays she mentioned. She laughed at me. Though embarrassed, I wanted to tell her everything stored up in my heart. I wanted her to know she was beautiful, that I’d never had a real girl. I wanted to impress her, but I couldn’t do much better than the songs on the radio were doing. A little bit over from me was a grown woman wearing bright red lipstick. She had this excited look. She needed adventure. The open window blew her hair about. When we got to town, I said, “I’m home.”

“You want me to let you off here? There’s no house. It’s just all kinds of railroad cars.”

“It’s the caboose that says Southern Serves the South.”

“No kidding.”

“I have a friend who’ll tell you about me,” I said.

“Well, he won’t now. I’m going south, or not really. I only have to prepare as though I am. If I get the part, I’ll have wonderful lines. Early in the show when my character sees her sister, she says, ‘Now, then, let me look at you. But don’t you look at me, Stella . . . not till later, not till I’ve bathed and rested! And turn that overlight off! Turn that off! I won’t be looked at in this merciless glare!’ Later, she says to a guy who’s interested in her, ‘Don’t you just love these long, rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour but a little piece of eternity dropped in our hands?’ These are the lines I have to memorize.”

That’s all I could report to Wallace, but I remembered a lot of other things about the actress.

“What’s she like?”

“Dark hair, tall.”

“Why didn’t you invite her in?”

“You want me to escort her through a field of weeds? I didn’t know you’d be here. She’s also a teacher. She must have thought I was crazy telling her about Hank’s sun umbrella on the steamroller. I showed her the flagger’s sign. That’s me, confident when I’m by myself. Then when I get in someone’s company, I act stupid . . . When’s midsummer? July fifteenth? Mr. Anderson gave me a book she’d be interested in, James Aswell’s The Midsummer Fires. It’s about this small Louisiana town. I’ll tell you what else I like. She wanted to listen to me. She might’ve made fun of me, but she was interested in Earl. Heck, I’m driving and talking, looking over at her. She has lovely eyes that get bigger, more surprised, when I tell her about the garbage truck I rode and how hard I work with the paving crew. I know the feeling I have for this lady. I told her my heart has hardened against my old man and how Wallace Wilson—that’s you—are the interpreter of my days, which means that you bring things to my attention. For instance, that I’m well-liked and handsome. If you don’t mind me saying it, you, on the other hand, live in a desperate place.”

“A trainyard’s not desperate. I dream here,” Wallace said.

“Earl?” I heard him later. “I brought you a meal. Don’t worry about me being sick. Anything I touched, I held with napkins. While you eat, I’ll give you my interpretation. Your ma’s dead, and your father’s angry about life. This is what you’ve told me already. I’m telling it again so you can figure out why you lack self-confidence.”

“I had plenty of confidence when I was with the lady. On the way to town, I pretended I was a DJ. I said, ‘I’ve got a stack of the wax in the back of the racks.’ I told her what Luther Mills says on his Night Train Show on WEBC. ‘Blue skies, green lights, live it up and sleep in the streets.’ Maybe I rambled on to her, but I sat in the driver’s seat of that lady’s car and pushed it to seventy. I looked at her legs, turned up the radio, searched the dial, and found ‘Great Balls of Fire.’ When she said, ‘Oh, my,’ I said, ‘You bet “oh, my.” This is Earl Slinker driving!’ How’s that for a confidence booster? I think I impressed her.”

“You sure did, Earl.”

“I think what’s happening and why I never did great with girls is that I’m entering puberty. I’m not sure what it is. She knows, the actress does, what puberty is. We were heading down 105 when she starts describing a play where this man and woman are in a situation I hope to be in with her, and at the same time I’m driving the car, Jerry Lee Lewis is pounding the keys and singing how nervous a girl has got him, sort of like I am feeling now.”

“Great balls of fire.”

“I guess so.”

“Listen to me, Mr. Jerry Lee. Besides studying you these summer days, I’ve been interpreting boxcars for a year. When I find one I’ve never seen, I record it at home. I imagine where the boxcar’s been or is bound. You see how deep I am, the kid no one knows at school? Things get ahold of me. I don’t know when to quit thinking about boxcars. When I tell anyone, they pretend they’re interested. They ask about this railroad and that. They make up names of railroads they’d like to ride, like the Marilyn Monroe Special.”

In the dark, I visualize the habit he has of hitching up his pants with his wrists. It’s stupid because he never touches his belt or waistband. Everyone thinks his skin problem concerns poultry. They nicknamed Wallace C. Wilson “Chick.” I won’t call him odd, for what am I but a flagger on a county road project? The scabs on his face look like crosses. From the door of the caboose, you see him in his old clothes. Sometimes his hair is matted. Dirty socks peek through holes in his tennis shoes. In his nervousness, he runs the back of his hand across his chin. Short, talkative, Wallace must be tough to put up with the teasing.

“You won’t tell no one I’m here, will you? I don’t ever see Southern Railway rolling stock—and look what we’re standing inside of, a caboose of that railroad. While I’m looking for boxcars that don’t come here much, you can go to my house. My parents aren’t home. Dad’s at work. Ma’s left forever. If you’re hungry, pour yourself a bowl of cereal. Have the stew. The lunch meat’s in the refrigerator. You go and take a bath. I left a towel. Bring it here to use some more. Take a bath and do those things, and I’ll look for boxcars. If I ain’t here when you return, I will be.”

3

We climbed the ladder to the cupola. Two narrow seats face each other. Across from them are two more. One side looks out on the rail yard, the other on the field Wallace walks through. So that I might learn more about who I, King Creole, am, I said, “Interpret me, Wallace.” I wanted to tell him about the car salesman. He’d gotten a room for us in the Allouez Steam Bath. With me and him naked, he massaged me, but I REPEAT, whatever was expected by him didn’t occur. I wanted Wallace to know this, but right now he was interested in locomotives. He said, “When you come back from my house, I won’t bother you. I’ll stay in the boxcar you used to live in because you’re my idol, and I mustn’t be in your way.”

“The boxcar’s in the roundhouse. Remember, Wallace? I get hungry before you bring me the suppers.”

“You sure do. When I’m dreaming, I don’t need to convince anyone to like me. Erie and Lackawanna, Louisville and Nashville. ‘Main Street of the Northwest,’ ‘Route of the Zephyrs,’ ‘Orange Blossom Special.’” He’d get nervous when he talked, like he wasn’t sure what anyone expected of him.

He had two years of high school left. He told everyone he wanted to be a pilot, a ship’s captain. The more he said, the more kids laughed. When he started stealing pencils, chalk, and other supplies at school, they laughed at that.

“You can go to the house. Go ahead.”

“You’re sure no one’s home?” I asked.

I watched the dark settle over the caboose and the boxcars. The floodlights came on in the rail yard. Wallace lived a block away. There were more than a few drifters like him around. Maybe with his father at work, the Wilson house could be a hideout if my old man came looking for me.

The place had been a farm. I could make out the chicken coop and an outbuilding. The back shed leaned to the side. A package of bread was open on the kitchen table, the sink full of dishes. In one corner rose piles of newspapers. The linoleum in the bathroom was different from the kitchen. The towel I was to use looked like it’d been ripped in two. I wondered if his ma had washed him after he’d been in the chicken coop.

Railroad yards are dirty. Winds blow wheat chaff, bauxite, sulfur, all kinds of things, plus there is creosote, axle grease, diesel fuel, oil, and the dust from the service roads. During the week, I’d wash up in a laundromat. Wallace had put out a bar of Lifebuoy. The spigot on the bathtub dripped. The drain was discolored. Everything looked out of place, the sink dirty with someone’s hair. I slid the lock shut on the bathroom door.

When I was done, I found our yearbook in his room. On a sheet of paper marking the page I was on, he had a list of boxcar names with notes about railroads. In a dictionary with part of the binding missing, I looked up “puberty”: “the condition of becoming first capable of reproducing sexually.” This happens around fourteen in boys. I was a little late. I had some time to make up for.

Before I left, I played a Duane Eddy song on his portable phonograph, then shut off the lights, closed the door, and hurried past the chicken coop and junked car to Albany Avenue and the rail yard.

4

Our knees touched when I sat across from him.

“I’m in fresh clothes,” I said.

“Did you notice the soap I put out? Does the night air cool you?”

He’d told me that his old man ridiculed him, that his ma’d run off with the Fuller Brush man. I remember the salesman selling my own ma a scrub brush when she was alive. She’d felt sorry for him and bought other items before Wallace’s ma depleted his stock of goods. The Fuller Brush man only had himself left to sell. “Then I was alone,” Wallace told me. “No mother and an old man who doesn’t like me.”

Wallace C. Wilson ran his fingertips down my arm. Outside, a night bird startled us. I thought of how we’d have to get by each other in the cupola to climb down the ladder.

“Don’t leave,” he whispered.

“I ain’t interested in you, Wallace.”

“Don’t go. Someday a woman will do this to you. You don’t need to do it to yourself. Will you watch me?”

I didn’t watch, I couldn’t. His heart was a railroad secret. When he was through, he cried in front of me. I don’t think anybody knew his heart or ever wanted to. Feeling sympathetic toward the poor, diseased kid, I told him if he didn’t ever do that in front of me again, he could come back here to see me.

With him gone, I read Mr. Aswell’s Midsummer Fires, then turned in. I dreamt of the lady who’d asked, “You ever been to the South?” and me saying, “Yes,” and adding as I turned the flagger’s sign, “Southern Serves the South.” In the morning, the dew looked like tears.

Anyway, these were Wallace’s and my midsummer fires that were smoldering when we met Blanche DuBois and she introduced us to a Stanley and Stella Kowalski in a play called A Streetcar Named Desire.

5

I am Doris Koss. On the west side of the rail yard in Superior, Wisconsin, playing the role of Blanche, I pull off where the sign reads “American Welding—Tank Consignment Yard—Stay Out.” Part of the area’s fenced off. A few old sheds stand here. I wait a half hour, leave, come back. “I had the visor fixed, Earl,” I say to myself as though you’re here. “Smitty did it at the Standard station. What was wrong with me for letting that visor go so long? It was a hazard. You yourself said you were embarrassed and frightened when it slipped and hit you the first time we met. I’m the one that should be embarrassed. Plus, you never got my name, just the name of Blanche. In reality, I’m a teacher. You know this now.”

I continue, “Earl, I see a dirty kid looking at me as he runs through a field. He wears a patched-together shirt. I figure he’s your friend. Mr. Williams wrote a one-act play set on a railroad track by a railroad hotel. I could be Willie, the girl in the play. You could be Tom, Earl. No, I’m too old to play Willie in This Property Is Condemned. But we could at least read the play in the caboose. We could act it out, couldn’t we?”

Then there you are at the water truck after I’ve driven out to find you. I feel funny about the sandals that don’t match my cotton dress. “Look at you,” I say.

“Dirty water gets the sweat off too.”

What else was there to say but what you’ve probably been thinking about since you drove my car? You’re a dreamboat. You’re a doll. What else was there for me to think about but the scene where Blanche DuBois, alone in the Kowalskis’ flat, looks up to find a young man collecting for the Evening Star newspaper? She tells him how handsome he is, kisses him, then confesses how she’d like him to stay, but she can’t give in to that impulse ever again. Because I love the play, I had to try out for it. “You must protect yourself from the sun, Mr. Earl Slinker. I’ll bring you tanning lotion,” I, Doris, say.

“It gets hot out here,” you say.

You’re beautiful on this midsummer evening. All boys are beautiful—you, the ones I had in school, the one or two auditioning for the play. I’m thirty-five. It’s getting late in my life. What haven’t the busybodies at Wrenwood High School heard about Doris Koss, English and drama teacher! Darling Doris! But you and I, we don’t have to talk about the past even if we’re lonely wanderers.

I take the washrag. As water drips to the small of your back, I ask, “What’s this on your skin here?”

“Maybe it’s something Wallace gave me.”

With the washrag, I wash your shoulders. “Face me,” I say. “I’ll wash your hands.”

“Can I hitch a ride?” you ask.

“We can go anywhere, even with your wet work boots. My feet have mud on them from walking around here.”

Like any red-blooded boy, you’d lift the front of my dress if invited, just lift it up and dry your face on it. I’d let you. Then it doesn’t matter because you lower one strap of my dress, slide it down my arm, and I act as though I’m surprised. “I never took you to be like this,” I say.

“I sure am.”

You’re about to do things you might never have done. I’m not the one to say no. I ask how old do you think I am? You’re so sweet. You mutter something so that I can’t help love you at this moment when you tell me I’m beautiful. “It’s not my real name, Earl, Blanche DuBois isn’t. It’s a part I want to play. Tell me I’m beautiful. Tell me again and again.”

You lay the poncho on a patch of grass in the woods. Blessed by the river that separates Minnesota and Wisconsin, your hair and face wet with its dirty water, you don’t know how to do the next thing. I’ve known the sensation of love for more years than you’ve been alive. I push against you. I press my lips tight. With you, I want it to be different, Earl. Hold me so that I feel the things you whisper.

When you let yourself go inside of me, Doris, you say, “You’re Blanche DuBois.” The aspen leaves stir as if from the breaths of wind that accompany a welcome summer rain. Such breezes come and go quickly.

You kiss me again and again, telling me how you’ve never had confidence in yourself. “The first time I saw you . . . ,” you whisper. You say nothing more. Then you are still on a hot evening. As we lie there, the purple sky darkens.

“Can I see you again?”

“Why yes,” I reply. “Do you like me that much?”

“I’d go to Louisiana. That oughta tell you something.”

“New Orleans would be a beautiful gift for you decorated in Spanish moss. In the play, Blanche rides the streetcar named Desire.”

“That’s what I just took.”

“You’re the boy at the Moon Lake Casino. The one Blanche hurt. But you’re also different. That boy couldn’t love her or any woman. He was so gentle. What are you thinking?”

“About wherever I go in life, I’m singing about you.”

“Which song, Earl?” When I ask, I place my fingers on your chest, softly. “Which song?”

Over the years, my lovers have taken me to the Starlight Café. Others have gotten angry. All they wanted was company for a night. Suddenly, as if you can’t wait, you’re singing a love song to a woman who’s been fired from her teaching job. I applaud your singing. On this midsummer eve, everything must seem new to you you’re so innocent. Wrenwood, Minnesota, population 189, has a Conoco refinery, the school teams are the Wrens, and Miss Doris Koss isn’t expected back in the fall. With the summer dark upon us, it’s time to leave, for you must be very tired.

I drive this time. Ditches, fields, and woods pass by. The air smells good with the car windows down. “It’s the purple clover and wild roses along here,” I tell you as you sing about summer things. If I close my eyes, I’m as young as you.

Then the sweetest thing. When I let you off, I hug you, as though you’re a pupil on commencement day. When I call you “my Rosenkavalier,” like Blanche does to Mitch in the play, you kiss my hand. You turn to wave. At the tracks, you turn to wave again.

6

When I, King Creole–Big Earl Slinker, get back, I tell Wallace, “She don’t go out in the sun. Except for a small tan-colored mark on her left arm, her skin is white. She has beautiful arms too. I’ve never seen a more beautiful woman. Her eyes get big, like she’s amazed she’s found me. How did I get lucky when I’m only a year out of high school?

“A schoolteacher washed my back, Wallace, the night air smelled like clover, and we did something very beautiful and meaningful together the way we’re taught it’s supposed to be. Now I’ll say no more because of my being a gentleman.” Then I sing “Love Me Tender” and “Don’t Be Cruel” to Wallace C. Wilson before telling myself I’ll read everything Miss Doris Koss gives me, so that I can know Tennessee Williams better than I know Wallace, who is very thin, has chalk dust on his shirt and worn blue jeans from kneeling on track ballast to look under boxcars for the railroad dicks. Wallace lacks maturity. Now in this latest development, he becomes very jealous of me because of my greatness.

Mr. Anderson is the emcee of this Earl Slinker show. If he didn’t have influence around here, the dicks would’ve come for Wallace and me. They would’ve taken Doris in for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, meaning Wallace. I wonder if Mr. Anderson goes home anymore now that I’m here. Sometimes when Wallace and I are talking, he comes out of nowhere.

“What does he know about Louisiana?” Wallace asks one night.

“I’m hardly done with one book, he gives me another. Maybe he knows how my old man and other people suffered down there. I can show you photos. We had no way to get away from the plantation of Mr. La Coco.”

“If that’s so, how’d you make it here? You’re the one who doesn’t know about Louisiana, Earl. You ever hear of Carville?” His eyes drawing me in, he explains his many theories about what bothers him and how a place named Carville, Louisiana, will cure all of them.

“Say what you want, Wallace. The main thing is I know more about Louisiana than you. You ain’t even out of high school. You’re sick and can’t think straight.”

“If your old man worked in the cane fields and was from Poland, why don’t you speak Polish?”

“I do.”

“Say something then.”

I say “sugarcane” in Polish. Then I say “Bez pracy nie ma kołaczy . . . without work there is no bread” before I tell him about the refining of sugar and how, during the cane harvest, trucks speed over the two-lane roads carrying the cut sugarcane from the fields to the mill.

7

After Doris had traveled to New Orleans for the second or third time in a week, I saw her car in the consignment tank yard. When we made love, I’d sing, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On!” She’d respond with song lyrics from Elvis. When we were finished, we blamed Jerry Lee and Elvis for making us do things out of love.

Wallace didn’t like it. He told me about a Chesapeake and Ohio boxcar he wanted to show me. He told me we should move out of the caboose and let my girlfriend the teacher go her way so things could be like they were before.

When I told him lovers like me and her need privacy, he changed a little. “You can go rest at my old man’s. Do your private things if you have to, but I don’t like none of it with her. Bring back canned goods for me to heat up for you on the stove in here.”

“You know that someday me and her might have to make our own plans,” I told him.

“You can’t leave me like Ma did,” he said.

When road construction was called off on a rainy afternoon, Doris and I read to each other. We talked about places we wanted to visit someday.

“Don’t rile Wallace up talking about railroads. He’s probably listening,” I said.

“We have to make him healthy, Earl, mentally and physically. You’ve gotten me better. You have to work on Wallace next.”

“The ability comes naturally to me. I’ll tell you why Wallace’s skin looks red”—but seeing him climb down the ladder, I serenaded her real quick with a song of my own.

“I’m sick of you talking about me, Earl.”

Looking at him with her big eyes and the curious expression she has, Doris said, “You’re okay. You’re part of a new railroad family that’s formed here. The reporting mark of it is WEB—Wallace, Earl, Blanche, the last one being me, Doris. Don’t you want to be caught in a web?”

“You’re always talking, but where’s your family?” Wallace asked.

“You two boys will excuse me. An actress preparing for a part loses touch with reality. Sometimes, I forget who I am, which is for the best. Since you’re curious, I’ll tell you that my family lived on Belle Reve Plantation in Mississippi, the place our ancestors lost with their ‘epic fornications.’ Oh, that’s not true. I don’t think I’ve told you who I am, the loving daughter of the Kosses, a farm family in southwestern Minnesota. I hardly hear from them anymore.

“When I was eighteen, I escaped there. I couldn’t breathe surrounded by two hundred acres of corn and beans. My first acting role came during sophomore year. It was the major production of the summer theater season at the college. On the afternoon of opening night, Mother called to say my dad was busy cutting corn out of beans. They weren’t coming to the show. Here, I’m starring in my first real play and my father is cutting ears of volunteer corn, stragglers from last year, so no impurities devalue the bean crop when he takes it to the mill. Cutting corn out of beans. That was his excuse. God, what I’ve learned about impurities.”

The casual, suggestive way she’d lean against the brocade pillow I’d brought from Wallace’s house drove me crazy. As if deciding whether to say more, she’d study her delicate fingers, then go on about playing make-believe with her stuffed animals as a child or pretending the living room was a stage when relatives came over.

“Later, I tried regional theater, then pursued teaching. I wasn’t scarred. I wasn’t anything. I just could never stand life as it is when I could be someone bigger on stage, someone dramatic. I’d had a good life for twenty-one years, but there were impurities. I never found love, for one, honest, true love. It was no one’s fault. Sometimes, an actress grows desperate for a role. Sometimes, she wants so much that no one can satisfy her.”

When she was done, Wallace told his story. He swore Mr. Anderson would get him to Carville. “You watch. He senses when a person loves the railroad. Why do you think he lets me come to the caboose? He’s getting me help.”

When I explained Wallace’s health problem to Doris, she didn’t believe me. “It’s what I heard, Wallace, about you in the chicken coop.”

“You better shut up, Earl.”

“I know you have a chicken coop. From what you just said, I also know where the only US leper colony is, Carville. Maybe you have emphysema or whatever the skin condition is called, but you ain’t a leper, is he, Doris? That idea’s in your head because you’re an outcast like we are. We could go with you to see the hospital in Carville. If we let you, you could come with us to New Orleans. There was cruelty done to my father and mother in Louisiana,” I told them.

That’s when she seemed like she came up with the idea out of nowhere. In honor of the railroad with the reporting mark WEB, she said we were going to put on a show for each other. Our debut would be on the stage of the Caboose Theater.

All through the week, I practiced at Wallace’s or as I thumbed to work. With another day starting, I said to Tits, “This one’s for you” and cleared my throat. Holding the walkie-talkie like a microphone, pretending I was on stage in the auditorium of my high school, I sang an Eddie Cochran number. When I got to the chorus, I shook my head this way and that. “Any requests for another song?” I asked over the squawking walkie-talkie.

“Yeah. Who’s your woman?” he said.

“Wouldn’t you like to know. I got my mojo workin’.”

When I passed Hank at the asphalt hopper, I asked would he like to be serenaded. The guys said I should get a guitar and learn “Forty Miles of Bad Road.”

Whenever I could, I held the poncho to my face to smell Doris’s hand lotion, her perfume, any lingering scent. I waved to Hank and sang him something.

When she drove to see me, Tits would flag her to stop. He’d ogle her. She could smell him in the heat, she told me. When my voice came over the walkie-talkie, she told me the sweating flagger would say, “I’m foolin’ with your kid.”

“Do you notice that when he talks his eyes stare upward like he can’t control them?” she asked me later. “His head doesn’t move. Just his eyes move as though he’s ashamed of something.” Then she finished the story of how Gerald Tietz told her he had allergies and she replied, “Turn the sign,” and he said, “No, I want to give you a sign,” and she said, “Send me through.” “I’ll send you all right,” he said, making a rude gesture.

With the lives described here, the notebook I write in could be a house like the Belle Reve Plantation that Doris Koss, Blanche, had escaped. If she wanted to be known as Blanche DuBois, I’d call her that.

8

I should have invited Hank to the show. Wallace and I were excited. When I saw Blanche that evening, I thought, What is the word for her, “eth . . . ethereal?” Just as I imagined or dreamt she would, she came in white, including her gloves and the wide hat. Something else gave her the quality of being otherworldly, the way she moved, almost gliding over the railroad tracks. It was as if Wallace and I were admirers on the lawn of a plantation, and Blanche was the owner’s daughter.

That’s when Wallace did a gallant thing. “May I help you up the steps?” he asked.

I was more nervous than before the high school show. This is your chance, I thought. On the caboose platform, I took a deep breath to calm down. When Wallace said, “Now presenting Earl Slinker,” I made my entrance. When I finished “Treat Me Nice,” they clapped. Oil lamps casting shadows, Blanche cooling herself with the paper fan Wallace had given her, I bowed. But something was wrong. Wallace was clapping louder and louder like he couldn’t stop. “Bravo! You’re something, Earl! You’re Elvis!” He tapped a spatula against the potbellied stove. He was going crazy. This was before he said, “I got the goods on you.”

So he’d waited till now to divulge one of the secrets of my life.

Stupid Wallace tried everything. He told Blanche how I had an affliction for him. As she tapped her foot from the last song, I ran about, duckwalked like Chuck Berry, got low down, knowing another revelation was coming with the next song.

“I’ll tell you what happened at the high school talent show,” Wallace said. “What a big shot he was. The band was finishing an instrumental.”

“Tell it all. She won’t care if it’s about me,” I said, throwing Blanche a kiss.

“I’ll tell it, Earl. A teen idol, he’s in a white sport coat with a pink carnation, hair all combed, but he ain’t so great. He’s supposed to sing ‘A Rose and a Baby Ruth,’ but he’s too frightened. Eyes wide, he looks at the crowd. The band starts again. We hear Bill Braman say, ‘Come on, Earl!’ But Earl’s petrified and can’t sing. He turns around to the band, Arnie, Dave, Bill, and sings to them. We could hardly hear him with his back turned to us, to the whole high school. The senior class booed. The guidance counselor booed—”

“Nobody booed,” I said.

My self-confidence grew after the two numbers I sang. I’d embarrassed myself in school, but I’d come a long way since. Confidence is being able to control your emotions. I didn’t push Wallace. I didn’t punch him. When I wasn’t afraid to sing now, why should I care what Wallace C. Wilson revealed about my past? Moths fluttered outside the windows. Wallace was crying his heart out. The past weeks had been too much for him. In chalk on a Northern Pacific boxcar, he’d written “Desire.” When Blanche decided to hold off for a few days before performing her part, she let Wallace leave the mark of a blue kiss on her cheek.

In this talk of love, I wonder if Mr. Anderson, if only once in his life, had loved.

Mr. Anderson, Wilbur Anderson, directed all this. The caboose would be leaving for New Orleans. We had to pack.

Later with Wallace home and Blanche and I planning the trip, a boxcar would creak in the heat, or we’d hear some other noise—in the distance, an automobile horn, a screech of tires. When twilight turned to darkness, sometimes Mr. Anderson would appear. He was a representative for the Bayou State. The WEB Railroad dignitaries were connected there too, Wallace with Carville, me with Plaquemines Parish, Doris Koss as Blanche DuBois with the French Quarter.

“The caboose will be out of service,” he said. “Sometimes it’ll be shunted off the main track. Nobody’ll bother you when this happens. You’ll hook up to a Delta Southern or New Orleans and Gulf Coast train.”

“My sister lives on Elysian Fields,” Doris said, pretending she was Blanche again. “It ‘runs between the L&N tracks and the river in New Orleans.’ Where’s Wallace?”

“Don’t worry,” the clerk said.

Everything grew serious then, though Blanche and I kept pretending. “What executive position will I hold on the WEB?” I asked her.

“Your current one is fine, Mr. King Creole. Put your hands on the throttle and run me south.”

All foolishness. All dreams. If you calculated the savings bonds plus the books of S&H Green Stamps I had in a drawer, I was worth $106. Wallace didn’t have a clean shirt to his name. Maybe he could sell his phonograph records. Blanche had probably saved money from her years of teaching and acting. When we told Wallace about the railroad clerk’s visit, she and I wondered if it had really happened or maybe the quality of the light in the rail yard had led us to imagine Mr. Anderson talking about a southbound freight. On the other hand, Blanche had been a character in plays. Even if she’d only read from them in her classes, she understood the possibility of dreams. By wanting to be famous, I understood the possibility too.

Haunted by the ghosts of swamps and bayous, once in a while we heard Mr. Anderson whistle a song about New Orleans as the screen door slammed at the yard office. To get money for the trip, I could steal a few dollars from Bruno. What did I owe him anyway? If worse came to worst, I could encourage the ladies who’d whispered to me at the dogleg to put up or shut up. “It’ll be twenty cents a kiss, ladies,” I’d say. “Oh, no. I’m not sharing you. You’re mine,” Blanche said.

After work, I sat on the platform of the caboose. The creatures were loud in the woods around Wallace’s. On the phonograph, Wallace played Dixieland in the summer heat.

Mr. Anderson was the real Louisiana man, I thought. Of all places, in Superior, Wisconsin, lived a man who read about the South and, by so doing, encouraged me to read about it just as Blanche had introduced me to Tennessee Williams by giving me paperback copies of his plays. On a map, New Orleans was almost straight south of here.

9

Years ago, Mr. Anderson had gotten very ill and come home to his parents. “I had no choice but to go as far as Fort Polk and the army,” he said. Next, he related to us that tomorrow our train would be ready after dark. Maybe we’d get off it before it reached its destination, but one way or another, we’d get to Louisiana.

He told us how everything had bloomed in his life when he was there. One of his friends had introduced him to a young woman. When he saw Judith for the first time, she was sitting beneath a crape myrtle. It burst with red flowers.

“Unfortunately, I took a wrong turn, as young people do. Imagine soldiers in a New Orleans hotel on a weekend pass. At night, Bourbon Street was crowded. As I walked down Burgundy, now and then a carriage brought lovers past. Shards from broken bottles decorate the top of the walls guarding the courtyards of the French Quarter. When someone whispered to me, I followed her to one of those courtyards.

“I lay on the bed when she came in, her hair falling around her shoulders. The room smelled like lavender perfume. She asked if I had money. When I said yes, she said, ‘Tell me you love me,’ and I did.

“On Bourbon, the crowds had gotten bigger. A sultry night, music everywhere. In the hotel, I washed again, wanting to forget the woman, needing to ask someone for forgiveness. It rained for several weeks. Angry with me, my friend at Fort Polk hinted to Judith about what I’d done. Then it grew hot and quiet, autumn in the South. The still afternoon when I went to see her I asked Judith something very important and she said, ‘I can’t. I just can’t.’ She turned her back to me, looked out the window.

“A year later, when I wrote her, she wrote back that hearing about Lake Superior chilled her so much she couldn’t come up here.”

That was how it ended, Mr. Anderson said. He was silenced by love. Now he had his mother calling through the screen window that she wanted him inside the house. At night at work, he’d observe the stars and the moon.

10

What we’d done—all of it, Blanche dressed in white, Wallace writing “Desire” on everything in blue chalk, Wilbur Anderson showing us the map of his heart—all of it had been artistic. “A true-to-life play,” Blanche said. The great Wilbur’s story captivated us. He’d told it with seriousness and regret. A man in his forties, he had nowhere to go. Tomorrow, he was sending the caboose away with a letter saying it was carrying two lovers and a sickly boy. Money had been paid by a Southerner named DuVair to the railway company. The caboose would be on its way.

When the evening ended, Blanche said, “We’ve been privy to the lost dreams of a railroad clerk.”

With my dad at work the next day, I found the Green Stamps in the dining room buffet. Next, I escorted Blanche through the French door and down the hallway. The railing on the stairs is painted crimson, the spindles ivory. Finding the box I was looking for in the old man’s room, I said, “Rock-a-Hula, baby!”

Curled at the edges, the green and white paper had signatures, scrolls, and a white eagle. The writing said “Republic of Poland. Bond issue of 1920 due 1st April, 1949.” My old man told me a Pole would never cash them in. It’d be like collecting an IOU from a friend, or worse, from someone you dearly loved.

“They aren’t worth anything,” Blanche said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

Later, her car filled with summer clothes, she said she imagined an afternoon with me far away from here. On that afternoon, it rained. The wet leaves sparkled. She said I was lucky to be raised by my father, no matter the difficulties. It was clean where I grew up. It’d been clean at her house in Minnesota. She’d had a wonderful childhood, but Belle Reve had smelled of decay, of old wallpaper in old rooms and locked doors and death. “You can’t imagine it,” she said. “Now we have a train to catch. When we arrive in New Orleans, we’ll forget our cares. We’ll stay someplace nice for a few nights, the Roosevelt Hotel.”

Nervous about leaving Superior, I remembered how my father had taught me to pray. Kneeling with him in the living room as a boy, I’d begin the prayers in Polish.

11

The next night, the switch engine pulls us onto the main track. Blanche’s car with the For Sale sign stands behind the yard office. Through the trees, we see Wallace’s house. The railroad clerk waves goodbye. It’s hard to tell how he feels about us going. Then we’re traveling beside Albany Avenue, then past the crossing lights on 105, past the water tower at the creamery, then over the long, high trestle above the river.

When I wake up, we’re far away.

After I write a letter to “Bronislaw Slinker, Superior,” we meet other trains. In the soft glow, the passengers read books and newspapers, then a last click of the rails and they’re gone.

By the next day, we’ve passed through Tuscola, Arcola, Neoga, Teutopolis. In Centralia, Illinois, named after the Illinois Central Railroad, Wallace and I play cards on the bunk. As we stare out the window or cool off on the platform, Blanche tells me that Tennessee Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi. When he was eight, his family moved to Saint Louis. In the years to come, he’d travel all over.

Wallace and I need something to do, something to show us we’re alive. When he sees Blanche’s lipstick on my cheek, he insults me.

Trains hauling slab wood or soybeans wait on sidings for us to pass. We drop off boxcars, add new ones.

No one talks as the caboose sways on, train whistle blowing. Manners not counting anymore, Wallace removes his shirt. With the paper fan Blanche was using, he cools himself. As he peels an orange, he says, “She loves me, she loves me not.”

“Neither’s true.”

“Please, let’s be friends,” Blanche says.

Wallace is in the cupola when she asks me to hold her. When I say it’s too hot, she says she’s got her eye on the brakeman anyway.

“Don’t call me by my school nickname anymore, Earl,” Wallace says, breaking his silence. “I don’t wanna be called ‘Chick.’” Blanche opens the letters in the shadowy caboose. “We’re in transit to an owner ‘via trackage agreements with Chicago, Burlington and Quincy; Illinois Central; and Gulf, Mobile and Northern railroads.’ Did you know that?” she asks as she reads the letter from Mr. Anderson. “‘Please extend the bearer and passengers, Wallace C. Wilson and Earl Slinker, Superior, Wisconsin, and chaperone Miss Doris Koss, who goes by the name Blanche DuBois, Wrenwood, Minnesota, the rights and privileges afforded riding this line. Cordially, Wilbur Anderson, Railroad Yard, Superior.’”

She reads the other letter, which is a further account of the clerk with the broken heart. He’s closed the letter by writing, “I’m sending my heart with you on the southbound train.”

Even if no one else understood him, he wanted us to. During the twenty years he’d been back home in Superior, maybe his mother didn’t even know what her son had lost.

“They don’t kick you out of the army for a broken heart. He must’ve been sick in some other way to get a medical discharge,” Wallace announces.

Later, with her on the platform watching the lightning over Cairo, he asks, “What happened in school when you were supposed to sing? We clapped and yelled, but you stared like you didn’t know us.”

“I don’t blame you for fussing about that. I’m getting over it now because Miss Blanche DuBois makes me feel good about myself. But you are destined to be lonely, Wallace. How do I know? Because one afternoon, a salesman paid me off with five bucks and a trip to the steam bath. Being immature, I didn’t understand what the afternoon was all about. The salesman called it a ‘rub down.’ When he put his salesman’s hands on me, I didn’t get aroused like he hoped. This is how I know nothing’ll happen between you and me. It can’t because I’m not susceptible to arousement by you. I have what I need with Blanche.”

Taking a magazine picture from his back pocket, he says, “This is my hospital. What was once called leprosy is now called Hansen’s disease. Anyway, I’m going to pack my stuff. Neither of you wants me around. I’ve given you food and been nice to you, but I’m going to hurt you, Earl, for things you’ve said to me.”

“That’s fine.”

“I mean it. People have made me feel terrible.”

“What are you quarreling about?” Blanche asks.

“She’s the third party in our friendship. The Fuller Brush man broke up my family. I heard my dad cry after work one morning. ‘Oh God,” I thought, ‘it’s Ma or something.’ At that moment, she was heading down the road. They’d left a bill on the table expecting Dad to pay for Fuller Brush Mystic Moment sachet, the Lady Catherine hairbrush, and the toilet bowl cleaner. After Dad and I understood what’d happened, he went looking for her. I headed to the chicken coop. It’s like a switch goes off in my head when something bad happens.

“The rooster paced in the yard. The hens laid eggs. I put my hands over my eyes. I swirled about. The noise, the whirlwind. I turned into it. Everything was brushing my face . . . feathers, noise. In my pain, I cried out. A few days later, I saw you on that stage.”

Around where Jerry Lee grew up, the train slows. Trying to catch his breath after I’ve pointed out his failings, Wallace jumps from the caboose. His nervousness and self-doubt have hardened into one. The morning sun is yet to rise. Combined with what he’s been saying about loneliness, Wallace is out of his head. When I jump out, he starts after me with this crazy look.

I should have known he’d do something to get close to me. He grabs me and touches King Creole. “Tell me you’re my friend,” he says. “You saw me in the audience and knew I worshiped you. You are beautiful. I want to smooth your hair, but whenever I tell you what’s in my heart, you push me aside.”

Taller and stronger than Wallace, I throw him down as his balled-up fists keep hitting me while I sit on top of him. He doesn’t quit until the brakeman pulls me off. Even then he comes after me, crying, sweating, trying to hold me. “You’re a bastard like my mother and father,” he says as the brakeman winks at Blanche DuBois.

“Mister, she’s mine, and I’m not afraid to fight you,” I say, before yelling to Wallace, “Where you going? We’re family!”

Blanche can’t breathe all of a sudden. “Sometimes love suffocates me, Earl. It’s like asthma. I’m fading into paleness after the things that have been done to me. Oh, dear, dear Earl, Miss DuBois and I, we were hurt often, but we hid the pain. Believe me, we deserve to wear white for purity. Do you suppose we could have carried on so if things hadn’t been done to us? God puts us here, but sometimes we can’t stop what happens. We’re not strong enough. I know about free will, about good, but the harm that’s been done is sometimes too great. Wallace has been hurt now—and you. Wallace, are you here?

“Stella had left Belle Reve and forgotten me. Stella for star. She was so much younger. What is that sound? A funeral parade down Dumaine Street in New Orleans? A boat whistle from across the river in Algiers? The school board alleges moral turpitude, ‘turpitude’ . . . ‘inherent baseness: depravity.’ Earl! Earl! Are you here at least? Where’s Wallace? We must find Wallace C. Wilson.”

“He’ll be fine by himself.”

12

Ten o’clock. We’re off on a siding. We gather our belongings. The brakeman tells us the owner will have the caboose hauled via crane and a flatbed to where he lives. The caboose will rest on twenty-foot sections of rail.

Pretending to star in King Creole, I imitate the way Elvis as Danny Fisher works his hands as though preparing for a fight. Working my hip and leg, if I can rock out and forget everything that’s embarrassed me, I’ll be a full-fledged American, then nobody’ll need to know where I’m from. “You ever noticed my accent?” I ask Blanche. “When I turned my back on the kids at the show, I came face-to-face with myself. I didn’t believe I was American, not like them. A Polish displaced person, how could I face kids in this country and sing ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’?

“You know what immigrants do? They bow when they pay their grocery bill or pick up their shoes at the shoe repair shop. My old man is so grateful when he’s gotten a loaf of day-old bread at City Market that he bows. ‘Don’t!’ I’ve told him. I guess when you’ve been dead and come back to life, it’s easy to bow. We called Louisiana ‘Black Land, Czarny Ląd.’ The heat in sugar country was hard to adjust to. The wind blowing over the tall cane reminded my ma of the sea.”

“You’re a writer, Earl,” Blanche says, fanning herself. All around us, the dampness of earth and air. The caboose. The sun.

“The old man made eighty dollars a month in the fields and at the co-op. He cut sugarcane, drove a truck, oiled machinery. Eighty bucks and he paid forty of it each month for a wobbly chair, stained mattress, bed, broken picnic table, two drinking glasses, two sheets, two blankets. He paid rent on the shack we lived in. Ma put lard from the commissary in our canned soup. Conditions were worse in some places. Thanks to the president of the US, the government looked into the Louisiana Resettlement Program. Those wanting to leave were sent north. When the bus came to take us away, Mr. La Coco said we belonged to him. ‘You got no right removing this family of people,’ he said. Our bus driver said that all the junk we’d rented from Mr. La Coco wasn’t worth three dollars if it was sold. Now here I am in Louisiana.”

As I talk, I try guessing if we’re in a place that would have disliked us when we came to America. There were plenty of those places. Before he left, the brakeman said we were to be patient waiting for a Mr. DuVair. With a track spike in his hand for protection against me, he handed me the manifest. Eyeing Blanche, the brakeman asked her, “Ever been south? You look mighty familiar.”

13

When I’m hoping Wallace comes back, Blanche says, “Sing, Earl,” but suddenly there was this guy walking toward the caboose. “You the Yankees? Where’s the sick boy?” he asks before turning his attention to the caboose. “Just look at this. My boys’ll transport this example of rayroad history out of here. It’ll stand just off the road at my place. The caboose will be safe on the siding. I ain’t going to walk through it now. It’s too hot. You take the lady’s things,” he says. “I’ll drive you wherever you want, Port Allen, Baton Rouge. Anyone want a drink from the cooler?”

I hand him the bottles from in back.

“I’d normally cradle mine between my legs, but not before a lady.”

Dipping my fingers in the ice water, I touch Blanche’s neck. “She has something she calls a love asthma,” I tell him.

The road follows the tracks from Brusly and Addis through the flat cane country. In Plaquemine, we pass the post office. I picture Ma waiting in the truck Mr. La Coco had let us use.

Mr. DuVair doesn’t say much except to tell us the caboose is his folly.

In the distance I see the sugar co-op where Bruno worked, the piles of bagasse. I’m in Louisiana as a boy going with Ma to the commissary.

“Look, there’s Wallace. Slow down,” Blanche says.

“That the leper?” Mr. DuVair asks. “If you want, I’ll drop you off so you can check him in at the hospital.”

Wallace is hurrying over the ties like he would back home. He looks at us, hurries a few steps more.

“Where you going? Come here,” we yell.

Now, he doesn’t even look at us.

“If you don’t join us,” Blanche says, “I’ll be sick. I’m your chaperone. As a WEB founding member, you’re as important to the railroad as Earl and me. Come meet Dewey. We’re heading to New Orleans.”

I want to tell Wallace, “Go wherever it is you’re going,” but I can’t because he’s my friend.

Mr. DuVair drives slow enough for Wallace to keep up. “We got an ice-cold drink for you if you’ll get out of the mis’rable heat.”

Wallace takes our advice. When he walks through the ditch, he inquires if he can be my backup singer.

“Yes. Come put your hands in ice water.”

Then something preoccupies Mr. DuVair, perhaps the thought of other strangers he’s met.

In Saint Rose, Blanche buys a postcard for the superintendent in Wrenwood. “Flores para los Muertos,” she writes. Asleep with dried tears on his face, Wallace rests his head on my shoulder. By the time we arrive, it’ll be twilight. Mr. DuVair tells us, “An alien thing gnaws at me. I can’t eat and this thing gnaws me with worry.”

“Big Daddy has a similar problem in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

“Next week a brick baking oven will be constructed outside the caboose. A southern breeze will waft the scent of doughnuts my way. We’ll fry them in a pot on top of the oven. I’ll sprinkle the doughnuts with powdered sugar. On Fridays, I’ll say ‘Glaze me one, Hattie.’ I won’t eat it, though, can’t. I have a sickness in my stomach, a cancer. All those enticing smells will be penance for a misspent life.”

“Wake up, Wallace,” I say, nudging him from his nap when I see the city. Mr. DuVair talks about what’s going to happen to him in the coming weeks and months.

“What’s that sound?” Blanche asks, suddenly alert in the heat.

“Likely the Louisville and Nashville train,” he says.

What is it that Mr. DuVair would like to tell us, that he’s a sinner? All he manages to say is “Welcome to New Orleans. Laissez les bon temps rouler,” to which Blanche replies, “Oui, Cher.”

In a city where shadows crowd the evening light, we wave goodbye to him, and I, Earl, say something beyond my years to Blanche and Wallace: “People with nowhere to go sometimes find strangers to comfort them.”

14

This is the short history of the new owner of a caboose that arrived from Superior. I wonder what will happen next to Mr. DuVair. In the land of dreamy scenes, cracked sidewalks tilt toward the street. We smell sewage. Except for this kid pestering Wallace, people pay no attention to us as we set out with our bags.

“We’ll get a room. You take a cool bath, Earl,” Blanche says. “Afterward, I’ll dampen a washcloth, scent it with lemon, wrap ice in it to cool you.”

As we head toward the river, she tells us about the cemeteries where people lie buried above ground, about the murals in the train station, the streetcars. “Look!” she says. The bus coming down the narrow, cobbled street says “Desire.” “It’s not nearly as romantic as a streetcar.”

We find a place on Decatur Street. It has a room for Blanche and me and a separate room for Wallace. “When did we last sleep in a bed? After I freshen up, I’ll slip out a minute. You two take care of things. In a semitropical climate, human creatures—the merchant Kiefaber of Laurel was one—survive and flourish. He’s a character in Mr. Williams’s play. I’ll tell you about him and others. But why think about them when I have beauty in my life? Tired as you are, you’ve never been more handsome.”

“What about me?” Wallace asks.

“I find you striking. You’ll heal now that you’re away from home. It’s best for us to leave the places we aren’t wanted. No one knows us here.”

“You’re known up and down the River Road,” Wallace says. “I think Mr. DuVair knew you and the brakeman on the train.”

“Why do you say that?” Blanche asks.

“I read people. I interpreted Earl remember.”

“Well, you’re wrong about me, Wallace. I resent the implication.”

We watch her go down the street. Though we can’t protect her from herself, Wallace and I will look after her, guard her from the merchant Kiefaber, from Mitch, from Stanley. Though after Blanche leaves I think Wallace must be in the hall or downstairs, I don’t see him till morning.

When Blanche returns, she says, “After walking by these awful places, I need a drink more than you can imagine. At a place called La Casa de los Marinos and this other worse one, the Blue Crystal, men danced together. I was warned about going past the corner of Decatur and Toulouse. I’m afraid there won’t be ice for my drink or for your cold pack, Earl. It was too much to carry back to the room. There’s a bathroom with a tub down the hall, but I’ll wash here at the sink. Why, where’s the young Wallace Wilson? Were you arguing?”

“I want to sleep for days,” I say, but I wake soon after. When she comes to bed, she feels cool beside me. Outside, people yell, fight, and fall in love at the House of the Sailors and the Blue Crystal. When we wake up later, Wallace hasn’t returned.

“I knew that man DuVair. I met him when he came to Laurel on a trip. He was once very large. I pitied him yesterday. You’re different from the men I’ve been popular with. You’re pure no matter what I’ve done to you. We mustn’t be short with each other. I know sometimes I’m not myself. Now I’ve come far away to forget that gossiping town and the school district and the men of Minneola and that horrible, hunchbacked little Hagadorn in Owatonna. In a voice like Peter Lorre’s, he insinuated things about me and spread awful rumors. ‘Don’t you dare talk that way,’ I said. Let’s get a nice place, Earl, maybe not today, maybe tomorrow or the next. I’ve got my teacher’s pay and savings. I’ll let you handle our accounts.”

“Where are you, Blanche?” I ask, as if she’s escaping me.

“With you. Why of course, silly boy, I’m in New Orleans with my gallant hero.”

Blanche and I will start over, I think. The WEB will survive. She’ll guide us. Wallace and I can help her. I’ll get on with a band, be a success. We’ll go to a talent show, surprise everyone, watch them dance.

“That brutal Pol—, I won’t say the word, that brutal Stanley Kowalski said, ‘Liquor goes fast in hot weather.’ What’s the next stanza in the ballad you sang to me last night, Earl? Sing me the next stanza.”

At five in the morning, Blanche in her light-blue dressing gown is pouring a drink.

If I were Elvis, by now I’d have been on the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport. I’d have appeared as Clint Reno in Love Me Tender, Deke Rivers in Loving You. My fame growing, at 5:15 a.m. I give her my heart. Telling her how Ma used to sing to me, how her death destroyed me, I say, “I don’t hate my old man. He’s like he is for a reason. He never got to be what he wanted. When I was living there, I should have helped him. Last month when I left, I wasn’t an adult. I’ve lived alone since then, held a job on the paving crew, befriended a nervous kid I never talked to in high school, protected and worshipped you, Blanche.”

As I tell her this, I curl my lip, shake my leg and hip. I’m trying to fight back the tendency so I don’t end up with a nervous habit like Wallace. Negative on the Rock-a-Hula, I tell myself, which is when I take the bottle from Blanche, who’s leaving reality. Sitting beside her on the bed, I look into her eyes, into her tired face. If I call her Doris, maybe I can keep her with me.

15

I’m not Elvis, not even Bobby Vinton. When she dries her eyes, Blanche pretends she’s waiting for a call from an admirer. The only phone is down the hall. She’d never leave the room without makeup on, especially when a lodger might step from the second-floor bathroom. Drinking in front of Mitch, a gentleman caller, late in A Streetcar Named Desire, she plays another game, pretending the whisky is a liqueur. “‘Ummm, it’s sweet, so sweet!” she says, as Mitch refuses to drink with her under the light of the Japanese lantern. Blanche can pretend all she wants with me. We both pretend, Wallace, too, and the railroad clerk who longs for the young woman under the crape myrtle. My old man, Bruno Slinker, is the only clear-headed one.

“I’ll bring you something to eat,” I tell her.

“Don’t hurry. I’ll pick up a little around here. I always love a new day. Get the paper fan from Wallace’s room. I’ll stir up the air a little. It’ll help me breathe.”

“I got the fan, but he’s not here,” I tell her.

Shade lingers on the courtyards, the banana trees, the streets of the Quarter. The man who rented us the rooms calls the banana trees plantains. Blanche has influenced me to write all of this. So has Mr. Anderson by giving me his books.

One or two people sit in Jackson Square. The cathedral’s quiet, the levee quiet. Three officials of the WEB Railroad have followed the Mississippi River south. In a couple of hours, work will begin at the shipyard. Cars drive over the bridge. A freighter is tied up at the Governor Nichols Street Wharf.

“New Orleans has wakened,” I tell her when I return.

She talks about the money that will be coming when she gets a general delivery address.

We rest until noon. “Does Wallace miss us? Have we been unkind to him?” she asks.

“Hush,” I say.

In late afternoon, I draw her bath. I guard the hallway. If a roomer needed the bathroom, I’d tell him to use the one on the third floor. “Is it safe to come out? Do unseemly men in need of a shave lurk with you in the hall, Earl?” With her hair drying in the turban she’s made with a towel, I escort her to the room. She notices the stray white hair in the middle of one dark eyebrow.

“It’s nothing. You’re beautiful despite that,” I tell her, but I can’t convince her.

“And you so young. Look at the sweet bird of youth in my life. I’ve told you about Allan. I discovered him with a man at the Moon Lake Casino. Soon after this discovery, I heard a shot. Allan Grey had shot himself. I’m almost glad he never lived to see the way I look on this day in the French Quarter because I was young once. Whenever I think of him, I hear the varsouviana that played at the Moon Lake Casino. Invented in Warsaw, 1850. A waltz, a mazurka, a polka. Varsouviana means ‘From Warsaw.’ It’s Polish, Earl. Why did Mr. Williams choose this music for me to hear when I think of Moon Lake? Consider the name of Doctor Cukrowicz in Suddenly Last Summer, which sounds like an insect you find in New Orleans, but in Polish it means ‘to put sugar on, to sweeten.’ Another form of the word, cukrowa, means ‘sugarcane.’ I’ve looked them up. Don’t you think it a coincidence that I have Poles like you and Stanley in my life? What a strange, war-torn country!”

When she’s dressed, she asks, “Do I look okay? A woman’s beauty is 90 percent illusion. Life was cruel at Belle Reve and in the city of Laurel, Mississippi, where I grew up, and at my sister Stella’s. When I arrived here in Mr. Williams’s play, I said to her, ‘Never, never in my worst dreams could I picture you in such a place.’ The Kowalskis’ flat makes this stifling room I’ve brought you to, this spider’s web, look like a suite at the Roosevelt. I have to go out, Earl. I want to feel the night, to hear its sounds. Was Mitch a traveling salesman in the play or was it Stanley? I get confused. No, Stanley knew a ‘supply-man’ named Shaw who traveled through Laurel and said he knew me. Such rumors have been spread about me in the play! The merchant Kiefaber, Stanley, Shaw, the salesman.”

“We can walk to Bourbon Street together, Blanche.”

“Not tonight, sugar.”

Then Wallace comes to us as the dark approaches.

“Where do you go?” Blanche asks. “Aren’t you hungry? I worry about you.”

“I walk around. I check on the bus fare to Carville. I saw someone famous.”

“Isn’t it dangerous alone?”

“Don’t worry. I can take care of myself. I’ll fight anybody. I saw the man in broad daylight on Canal Street. People made a fuss over him.”

“Was it Fats Domino or Frankie Ford who sang ‘Sea Cruise’?” I ask.

Blanche doesn’t care who Wallace has seen, not when she has things to do. Wearing a dress from Belle Reve, she kisses me good night. She’s going to look for the Grey boy, Allan Grey. Men will nod to her. “What are you doing out?” they’ll inquire before she disappears with them. I can’t stand having my heart broken knowing what’s happening to her. Tired of following her, I’ll return to the Tarantula Arms, among the names we call it, to hear a voice on the radio telling me, “It’s a rainy night in the French Quarter,” then Blanche fumbling with the door at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., asking “Allan? Allan?” How much longer will she remember me?

No one fulfills her, yet in life she has no other role. Dr. Cukrowicz in Mr. Williams’s play describes his patient as schizophrenic. The people Doris taught with in Minneola, Faribault, and Wrenwood knew she wasn’t well. I’ve been the pupil of a passionate and lost woman. What will become of Wallace and me without her? With all of our problems, we ride the WEB.

A week later, the money arrives. “This is what retirement looks like if withdrawn early. The pay isn’t good in the rural schools of Minnesota. I’ll hide it in a pocket of ‘the cool yellow silk—the bouclé.’ When we go out, when we take the streetcar named Desire, you keep the money hidden in your pocket.”

“You have four dresses. None is yellow or fancy. You go places in your mind.”

“You know where I go, Earl. With Wallace not always here, I look for the boy I married. The night I caught him with the older man, his friend . . . he . . . I embarrassed them. Now with my escorts, the varsouviana playing, I go to the Blue Crystal. My gentlemen callers promise Allan will be waiting. There’s no need for you to take care of me.”

“I’ll play the radio. I’ll adore you as you sleep. With me beside you, you’re safe. When morning comes, we’ll hear people on Decatur. Life will be normal.”

“Now I’m counseled by a Polish boy, a displaced person, whose concerns sound like the concerns of the Polish psychiatrist, Doctor Cukrowicz. A similar doctor appears in Streetcar, a comforting, helpful doctor. He calls Blanche ‘Miss DuBois’ at the end of the play. When he extends his hands to her, she feels safe. It’s horrible what Stanley, Shaw, and Kiefaber have done to me. And those men from the nearby army camp! Remember them in the play? ‘Not far from Belle Reve . . . was a camp where they trained young soldiers.’ They were out of control.

“I’ve been alone too long. Stella could have saved me if she weren’t here with that ‘disgusting, vulgar, greasy’ Polack, Stanley Kowalski. Oh, what have I said? I deny knowing the supply-man Shaw. I’m sure someone will buy me a drink in the House of the Sailors.”

“I know what goes on there. When I walk by, people whistle at me.”

“Everything goes on there,” Blanche says. “The patrons come from Laurel and Beaumont. From Atlanta. They come off of ships from Tampico, Rio, Buenos Aires. Maybe a car salesman from Wisconsin has been here. Wallace told me about you and the salesman.”

“Wallace can lie about me. No one knows me in Carville, so it won’t matter what he says. We should be quiet. He might be sleeping.”

“Never mind Wallace. Be a dear. Run down the street. Buy me a pack of cigs.”

When I return, she’s on the bed holding the empty Southern Comfort bottle. “I thought you’d never get here,” she says. “Toward the end of the play, things grow dimmer for me. Everything’s far away. My mind feels like that now. You know where the retirement money is.”

“What’s your next role?” I ask her.

“I don’t know. My agent will call. Take this bottle from me. I’m a little unsteady. I’ve kept my shape, haven’t I?”

“Were we in Illinois the day you told me you liked the brakeman on the train? I was angry at Wallace.”

“Blanche is expected at Moon Lake. Hug me while you have the chance.”

I realize how fragile she is. Then the nervous habit I’m fighting grips me. I tell myself, “No, Earl, not now when Blanche is suffering from her love asthma and needs you,” but I can’t control my body or mind. My left arm goes straight up, my right leg starts its wiggle, and the hips, my hips? They rock themselves out of joint. In the Big Easy in a room in a hotel where you see all manner of things, the manager knocks on the door to tell us to keep it down.

Blanche and I don’t speak. We stand still, waiting for the manager to go. Silence between us. No movement. Then she starts something. Dressed for the night, her lipstick and earrings on, she begins to move. “That’s right,” I say to her, then sing a crazy song I make up.

Stand right there,

Shake it for me.

Rock around the clock,

You Blanche of love.

“Now you do it, Earl,” she says. “Put your heart into it. Make us one.”

“We are one,” I say, closing my eyes, dreaming of my days with her. Our bodies join. We’ve never shaken this much.

Later, when the door shuts and she’s gone, I can’t stop myself. The nervous habit worsens till I break down knowing what is happening to Doris Koss.

16

I wonder if she thinks of me, if my old man ever does. He wouldn’t know how to call me, but if the telephone rings down the hall, someone will answer it. I ask Wallace to come in the room with me. I’m unsure what I want him to do. I close my eyes. It’s dark. I imagine I’m with Margaret Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—in the movie, Elizabeth Taylor in a white slip.

The rain begins. There’s no harm in wanting to be comforted. Wallace has gotten me through a lot by explaining to Blanche about my shyness and greatness. He rests his head on my chest. The fog rising from the river dulls sounds outside the window. He asks if I’m sorry. “Sorry for what?” I ask.

“Sorry that we’re here. Sorry about Blanche. Sorry about me.”

“I’ll show you how sorry I am,” I tell him. I can’t see his scarred face when I touch it. I feel the crosses against my fingertips and the crosses on his arms. “They make me holy,” he says.

I’m grateful for his devotion, for the WEB railroad. He holds my hands. He kisses each one. Lonely without Blanche, I permit him to do this.

I see her on a street in the French Quarter. I’ve followed her for three nights. A man will ask her the time; another will seek directions. “I have no watch, and I’m lost like you,” she tells them as they stroll away. When I find her later, I tell her, “Your call came, Blanche. It was Broadway.”

“Oh, Earl. When do I leave? Who wants me? William Inge for a revival?”

“I think so. You have to call. I have the number.”

“What happened at Moon Lake was a tragedy. God help me,” she says as I offer her my arm, which I must keep steady against the habit of rocking out. Once under control, maybe the habit won’t be so bad. Otherwise, the undirected energy of King Creole will have to rock and roll and slide on its knees across the floor of every stage he ever sees. Undirected energy, especially of youth, is a problem in America. I saw it back home, kids running away. I’d see them under the viaduct.

“Wallace is waiting for us,” I tell her.

“Allan? Allan? I knew it. I’ve received word he’ll be in La Casa de los Marinos.”

Perhaps the building, dingy in the light of day, holds different businesses, maybe apartments. In the daytime when Blanche and I have walked past, it looks nondescript. Two fire escapes hang from an outside wall. The interesting thing is the color of the light-blue shutters on the upstairs windows. Blanche says the structure on the roof is a belvedere. Its shutters are also light blue. From up there, you see in all directions.

The place is crowded. On the jukebox, someone plays “Ya Ya.” I don’t know what happens then, except that the sailors who’ve come here from far away have started dancing. When a Latin song plays, one sailor removes his shirt. As soon as Wallace comes in, a boy with undirected energy sees him. After a minute, they’re hanging on each other. They don’t mind the invitations from older men, sailors from Panama, from Veracruz. Men surround Blanche and me. Despite the accent, I understand what one says. “They told me to take a streetcar named Desire.” Another says, “I won’t be looked at in this merciless glare.” They are laughing at her, mocking her. An older man tugs at Wallace’s arm to come with him into the foggy night. Someone tries to unbutton his shirt. The men see the crosses on his skin from chicken pecks. Some bow and make the sign of the cross. Wallace is getting drunker with his friend. I don’t know who I love, but I don’t like seeing him with anyone else. No one will hurt Wallace or Blanche if I watch over them.

I push a man aside. I ask others to stand back. Curious about what I’m about to do, they give me room. When “Ya Ya” stops, that’s my cue. My act has been polished in the boxcar and the caboose. Tonight, La Casa de los Marinos features the top-rated entertainment of Earl Slinker, as handsome a northerner as ever was.

I shake-a my hip,

I curl-a my lip.

Hey, you Squares, get hip.

I pour it on until the onlookers are sufficiently impressed. Wallace pulls his friend from the crowd to dance. Halfway through, I slow my tempo. I sing a line from “Young and Beautiful,” a ballad by Elvis, saying “This one’s for you, baby doll,” then I bring Blanche out of the swoon I’ve induced by going back to where I was.

Big Earl Slinker,

Ain’t afraid of no one.

He’s got the rockin’ bump

And the rollin’ grind.

You know how it is in movies—in the end, the tough but sensitive kid wins everyone over with his singing and dancing. This happens in La Casa de los Marinos. Blanche sways, the men clap in time to the music, everyone’s happy. Me at the center of it, I give them what they’re looking for, low-down moves that even in New Orleans could get a boy arrested.

You know he’s got his hips shaking.

Hip-shaking Earl de la Creole.

Amazed, Wallace and his friend help me finish the song. It ends with three words, which we sing higher each time, “Creole, creole, Cree-ole!” Getting louder and crazier, we can’t stop. “Cree-ole, cree-ole, cree-ole!”

Even in New Orleans, there’s a witching hour. At quarter past three this morning, the sailors return to the docks, the tourists to their rooms. Streetwalkers count what they’ve earned. The owner sweeps the place. He complains about the fog he must drive through to get home to Metairie. When Wallace runs in breathless, he looks both surprised and frightened. He’s seen the famous man again, this time right outside the door. “He’s asking for her,” Wallace says.

“I’m closing,” the owner says.

It’s like the doctor and matron have come for Blanche at the end of the play. The thick fog softens the night. At first, I’m not sure who’s there when I escort Blanche across the street. “Be careful. Watch your step,” I tell her. For a moment, the fog lifts. Under the gas lamp’s yellow flicker, the man lights a cigarette. Motioning to Blanche, he offers his arm, the man in the white linen suit and panama hat.

“I know you’re famous. I’ve seen your picture in books and magazines. I’ve read your plays,” I say to him.

Studying me as though I have something he wants very much, he asks, “Why don’t you join us?” Then he turns his attention to Blanche, his real concern. He says, “Blanche, you’re home. Come with me. It’s foggy. It’s not far to Desire Street.”

When they walk away, the curtain falls.

17

For days, Wallace asks, “Why didn’t you help her? I loved her.”

“What use was there following them? From the beginning, she wanted to star in a play.”

Some nights, he and I look for her. Across from La Casa, we stand guard. But if, as I’ve read, Mr. Williams has left for Key West, why do this anymore?

With Blanche’s extra money coming to us from Minnesota, Wallace and I stay longer in the Decatur Street rooms. We call the place Heartbreak Hotel. Sometimes I look over at the House of the Sailors, but what’s the use? More aimless than before, Wallace stays out four or five nights a week. In the room hoping for a message from Key West, I look at the empty bottles Blanche has left us. She was bad toward the end. I look at her clothes, listen for the phone, for a knock at the door. I lay my head on her pillow. When I see the desk clerk, I ask, “Is there any word from Mr. Williams? Anything from Desire Street?” Nothing. Then Wallace says he’s moving on.

The next week when I’ve said goodbye to Wallace, the desk clerk tells me he’s held the job for twenty years. “That’s a long time,” I tell him, commiserating with him. Mr. Anderson’s also put in his twenty years. How long will I live in Heartbreak Hotel?

My father is a widower. Mr. Wilson, Wallace’s father, has lost his wife. For years, the railroad clerk has missed a girl he knew. I’ve learned the secret of a heart’s loss.

I work in a run-down bar in the French Quarter, not La Casa, not the Blue Crystal, but sailors stop in anyway. The owner thinks I have a future doing the hip moves and anything else I can for pocket change.

In a postcard mailed to the hotel, Wallace in the Carville hospital tells me he’s been hired to work on the grounds. This, they assure him, will be good for him. They’ll treat his condition, which is not leprosy but something akin to stabs or pecks. He isn’t paid much at the hospital but has a clean room and plenty to eat. Before he left, we split Blanche’s money.

His postcard is tucked in a corner of the dresser mirror. I can see it first thing when I walk in. His handwriting has always been clumsy. He begins “Dear King Creole.” He’s written her first name so that I can hardly make out the last two letters. Spelled “Blanc,” it means whiteness, blankness. Under her name, he’s written my name, Big Earl Slinker, saying he loves me.

With nothing to do in the day, I study a tourist’s map of the French Quarter. Canal, North Rampart, and Esplanade streets border three sides of where I live, the river the fourth. Walking west, a person crosses Iberville, Bienville, Conti, Saint Louis; walking south, Burgundy, Dauphine, Bourbon . . . I like to see the Saint Charles Avenue streetcar pass in the early dark, each window lit up. After a half hour, I walk a few blocks to the smoky club. I dance and sing, sometimes twenty-three, twenty-four songs a night. At two in the morning, worn out, shirt soaked with sweat, I’m done. Unless it’s someone who’s promised to bring me something, no one waits outside the room on Decatur Street.

And Blanche? I’ve had no word from her. I learned from the desk clerk that following her instructions he’s kept the Polish government bonds in the hotel safe along with a letter saying that her car is mine. What does it matter when the heart is what matters? Sometimes I think I’ll draw a black line through my heart, write “Out of Order” on it, and in this way join the railroad clerk in his loneliness.

Finally, when I have nowhere else to go, and weary of showing sailors my damaged heart, I call Bruno Slinker, the old man, the immigrant. I ask him to pray for me, and we say the Our Father to each other over the phone.

Star and Star Lover

You pity someone like him. Probably not eighteen yet, and he was starting to look old. Being on his own, he must have been tough. The problem was his appearance. He had some kind of terrible skin problem with red sores on his face and arms. In the hospital for lepers, we know about outbreaks, scarring, suppurations. The boy’s face had healed up, but the marks were indelible.

Wild-looking Wallace Wilson came to us from New Orleans. At first, he was like an apparition, someone or something you wish wasn’t here but whom you eventually get used to seeing. Though there are woods to hide in, and people might have fed him and given him water, it would still be hard to get here on foot. In towns like Gramercy, Union Central, and Geismar, the police watch for vagrants and runaways, and with all the bends in the river, it’s over eighty miles from New Orleans.

No person is above the law, not even among the Catholic Daughters of Charity at this forgotten outpost, but we were pleased he’d come, not sniveling or begging after three days on the road in the July heat and that storm the night before. A young man, he gave us someone new to praise God for and to dwell on. As he walked here, maybe delirious at times, he must have puzzled over why he’d left home. In the end, did it matter when he showed himself to be a hard worker obedient to our rules?

“What do you think, Sister Constance?” I asked at supper the first night he was here.

There are other Daughters of Charity at Carville Hospital: Jo and Constance, of course, but also Agatha, Perpetua, Bernice, Mary Margaret.

“We can’t turn him in to the authorities,” Sister Constance replied and the others agreed.

We sent a hospital aide out with a plate of food. From the window, Sister Perpetua said, “He’s sitting like he’s reached the end of his journey.” Perhaps he had, but we had no lawful right to keep him. No one had committed him, and this is a hospital research center and home to patients with Hansen’s disease, which leprosy has been called for years.

Carville Hospital is built on many acres. We have a church, dining hall, snack bar, movie theater, gift shop, and a club for drinks and dancing. We have a newspaper, the Star, that we’re proud of. Patients ride bicycles or tricycles from place to place on indoor walkways. It’s hard for some to stand or to hold or lift things. Others have poor sight or have lost fingers or toes or need their legs wrapped against the lesions. The boy wasn’t nearly as bad as some of them.

For years, a fence topped with barbed wire has kept in the patients of Carville. Leviticus 13:45–46 reads, “The one who bears the sore of leprosy . . . shall cry out ‘Unclean, unclean.’ As long as the sore is on him, he shall declare himself unclean. . . . He shall dwell apart.” And here he sat on our front steps, a handmade cardboard sign saying “Unclean!” hanging from his neck. Maybe he felt this way about every unclean thing he’d done in his young life.

I, Sister Felicity (the name means Sister Happiness), misunderstood him when he said “unclean” to me as though I had something wrong with me. You’d think we could have put him up somewhere on the grounds when we have so much property, but we couldn’t just introduce him around and give him a bed in a cottage. Sister Jo made up a pallet for him in an outbuilding. When we came in, he stirred, lost in dreams. Scratched up, bug-bitten, that was our poor boy who’d stumbled out of a canebrake. Opening his eyes, he wouldn’t answer when Sister Agatha asked, “Where are you from?” or when Sister Perpetua asked, “Where are you going?”

This isn’t the old hospital established in 1896 by our order of nuns when they arrived at Indian Camp Plantation by river barge. As big as its heart was, Carville has a bigger heart now. Famous doctors have conducted research here. Listen to these names. In 1933, Dr. George Hite and our own Sister Hilary Ross started to test drugs to treat leprosy. In the 1940s, Dr. Guy Henry Faget began using sulfone drugs to treat patients. Now in 1963, we hear rumors that Drs. Paul and Margaret Brand will join us to continue the good work they were doing in India. What a testament to dear Lord Jesus, who cured the leper.

It was several days before the boy’s mind cleared or he trusted us enough to say, “I was bound for this place.” When I asked, “How far have you traveled?” he said, “A thousand miles.”

It couldn’t be. That would have put him so far from his home, whether east, west, or north, that he couldn’t possibly have gotten to Carville on his own. When he’d rested, a nurse examined him. The bruises and bug bites from the journey had healed. The nurse noticed the cuts on his chest and back, which must have been from something that happened long ago. Not cuts exactly. No matter, the boy wasn’t a leper.

He helped us on the grounds. We’d see him in his blue work shirt, sleeves rolled up, pushing a wheelbarrow or a lawn mower, or watering some new thing he’d planted. We paid him a little each month plus gave him board and a room, such as it was. He was never curt when someone interrupted him at his work. If a patient spilled something in the dining hall, the boy cleaned it up. Anything to help. We hoped he’d found a better home with us than the one he’d left.

There was this girl, Halina, who lived here. Her family were Polish refugees come to Louisiana. They worked in the fields and in the sugar co-op over around Donaldsonville, where the cane was refined. The co-op was a frightening place of boiling vats, machinery, and steam. I saw it once. Halina’s and other families lived in shacks. These displaced persons didn’t earn much, but they worked hard, had children, and went to Mass like it mattered to them as much it does to us. Halina Sczypanska was the most beautiful girl in Carville Hospital, where some are hard to look at because of their deformities. It must have worried her thinking she might look like them someday. “Halinka,” the family called her, or “Linka.” Such a clumsy name for a lovely young woman.

She didn’t know the boy’s name, so she made one up. We couldn’t imagine an alphabet that had no v or had both a letter l and a letter ł with a diagonal line through it. Pronounced “Vwah-dek,” she spelled the name she gave him Władek. I saw it on a bookmark she’d made for him by folding a scrap of paper in half. Władek and Halina—although remember that he was American and his name was something else.

We sisters loved the girl. On a sheet of paper, she’d carry lines from a poem. She’d never have been able to understand them without me.

Some months earlier, I’d begun Sir Philip Sidney’s “Astrophel and Stella.” Line by line, I’d told her about the story of the star lover, Astrophel, and the star, Stella. She’d run her fingers through her hair, green eyes fixed on me, and whisper Polish words.

“The star lover loves a beautiful woman,” I told her. “He views her as a faraway star. At night when he sleeps, he attempts to win her in dreams. Nothing works. Everything in the sky is as blue as he is. ‘With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies!’”

I’d have her repeat the lines. “When he asks if the moon, the stars, and the planets enjoy being loved, he really means people on earth that are adored. Do they enjoy the adoration? Do you understand, Halina? The star lover wants to know if his beloved cares at all for him. ‘Do they above love to be loved?’ he writes. Or do they ridicule and scorn their lovers below?” When she didn’t understand the allegory, I’d explain it another way. She felt so bad for the lonely poet, the star lover who watched the night sky.

In that month when the boy showed up, she became his star. He even gave her something he’d brought from New Orleans, something related to the heavens. In age, Halina was a little older than him, Halina with her light hair and fair skin that showed no outward sign of the disease. When he learned what I was reading to her, he gave me the present. “It’s for her,” he said before going back to work. They hadn’t spoken, though he’d wait for her to come outside in the mornings in her gray shift.

At such times, she’d glance over at him. She even wrote him a note that she asked me to give him. On it, she’d drawn a picture, written “Northern Star,” then in Polish, “Gwiazda Polarna.” He wrote back, though not for a day as he must have had to mull over what to say, which wasn’t much—two or three lines. I made certain everything was proper.

By August, he was bursting with words, astronomical words. I accompanied her when she went to see him. She was fascinated hearing about the constellations on the star chart he’d given her. He taught her so gently and quietly how to use it I could see how she’d forget about his appearance. And there I was, Sister Felicity, Sister Happiness, in the white cornette that distinguishes our religious order. Some days, I was so happy I thought I’d flown heavenward.

The black part of the chart represented the night sky. The constellations were named and drawn in white. “There’s Orion’s Belt. There’s the Big Dipper,” he’d say. For all his joy, he looked sad sometimes, as if trying not to ruin things between them. He told us how he’d studied the sky all the way down through the center of the country. But what had happened to him before he arrived? Halina didn’t care about his looks, as I say, and concentrated on other things, on his soul perhaps.

Though they’d not been together without supervision, I found the chart one day set to “North . . . Midnight,” as though Władek had left her directions.

Not for years had I felt this way about anyone, in this case Władek and Halina. Long before I left for the convent, I’d been infatuated with a young man. Afterward, I had too much to do here at the hospital. There was no time for affection—I mean of the purest kind, a desire for nearness and closeness that fills the spirit. My love was for God. It has been hard sometimes watching others in love. But there is so much to do, and I’ve been at it thirty-five years. Now I found myself in love with a star and a star lover.

We knew change was coming. With leprosy less of a threat these days with the treatments and medicines available for it, maybe Carville Hospital would close. Maybe the patients who wanted to remain would be allowed to remain. I wasn’t sure. I do know the Daughters of Charity would soon wear a simple blue dress with a white blouse to honor the Virgin. No more robe, no more cornette for a headpiece, the mark of our order.

In the meantime, Halina volunteered in a shop at the hospital while I went about my duties. I watched over her. I instructed her in English and introduced more of the long poem. As the seasons passed, she and Władek changed the star chart. I exulted in the two youths. There he was planting trees, trimming bushes, sweeping sidewalks. There Halina was bringing his noon meal from the dining hall, singing, “Lass with Lips Like Ripe Red Berries,” a Polish song, as she went. She’d walk so fast I couldn’t keep up with her. And here I was, Sister Happiness, growing old on the grounds of the leprosarium.

In the movie house with Władek, Halina had never seen such things as were portrayed on screen. American life was different than in Eastern Europe. In Poland, the wounded had cried out in every village the family passed through. Her country was lost, and she was a displaced person, like hundreds of others in this part of the state. The love I felt for the young people, this blessing! They were unaffected, natural. They loved simply and rejoiced in everything.

Still, I knew something would break their hearts. It had to. When the honeysuckle bloomed, Władek packed a pasteboard suitcase with clothes and left on a bus for New Orleans. I think his leaving had to do with money, though how much could a young man, eighteen now, be owed—fifty dollars, a hundred? When he was gone, Halina and I turned the star chart to match the day of the month. I’d see her along the fence at night waiting for him. Other times, giddy with the thought that he’d return, I’d race her across the lawn. “Felicity,” the nuns would say, “you’ll wear yourself out.” What I did was prayerful. Then Władek was back with the old marks and scars on him and the experiences and money and everything else he’d brought from downriver. Halina held him for five long minutes.

When we love, we reflect what is greater than ourselves. The sisters in the wards helping patients. This is love. Love can be greater than imagined. I know the Lord gives it to those who seek Him. With us and in us, He is the greatest constellation. The boy done with his work, hands and arms raised skyward, cap falling back on his head as he rushes toward the words of her Polish song: this is love. So too is Halina’s smile. I’m fulfilled when I bring word to him about her or when, the star chart put away, I kiss Halina’s forehead before bed.

On a night when the heavens put on a display that should have stirred great wonder in us all, I allowed them time in private. No one knew they were together until the hour before dawn. How could I have said no? I read to her from Sidney’s poem, “‘Stella looked on and from her heavenly face . . .’” Then I said, “Go, lass with lips like ripe red berries,” and sent her off to explore the grounds.

On such a wondrous night, as the heavens swirled above and I waited for Halina, I said, “It is Your wish, Dear Lord.”

When was the last eclipse of the century? Something of such magnitude as a lunar eclipse that darkens the sky, or an asteroid that brightens the sky, would have been a sign to me concerning the abandoning of my duty. Many signs had been coming about the easing of things at Carville. With the drugs and the research on the disease, the stigma of leprosy was lessening, the rules softening. Lepers got married here and lived happily.

A nearly lifelong resident, I knew so much about the place. Like most, I know the spot in the fence where patients can sneak out, though few ever do. After Władek’s trip to the city, the plan was for Halina’s cousin to come for them when Ursa Major was bright in the sky. Oh, Halina, after I’d kissed your forehead, after Sister Felicity’s last kiss, and with yours and the boy’s star chart set for the next month, you escaped me.

I learned about it in the morning. I didn’t know the answer when the sisters asked, “Where are they?”

There’s more to this. After word arrived that Halina was safe with relatives (where, no one knew), a small, beautiful thing arrived for me. It was months later. “What is it? Who’d send you something in the mail?” asked the sisters. On a small card inside the cover of the box were the words, “This item is handmade. It may have color variations or slight imperfections. These imperfections are inherent in handcrafted items and should be viewed as part of their natural beauty.” The words also appeared in French. “Cet article est fabriqué à la main . . .”

What in this world is without imperfection? I ask myself. The brick steps are cracked out front. The tiles in the hallways are broken here and there. The gardens grow weeds. I, too, have many imperfections. Perhaps the notice inside the package that held the music box should have read “Imperfections are inherent in God-crafted items.” After all the years of struggle, I am imperfect. I do not know if God will forgive me or forgive the star lover and star for leaving.

Halina has written that a similar “musical box” as she sent to me now plays for her baby at home. The delicate song of the music box, boîte à musique. The music box plays “Beautiful Dreamer” for mother and daughter.

I am happy for you, Halina dear, for your Władek, and for the baby Urszula who’s come to you. You tell me you’ll call her “Ula.” And now that this story is over, and you’re living again among your displaced persons, I can grow old knowing I’ve loved you and loved the boy who came from New Orleans and now the baby. And when I’m too old to remember you anymore, I’ll lie down with the lepers of the past.

The Thief of Words

My father came home from the day shift around the same time as my sister, Father carrying his lunch pail, Barbara stepping from the school bus on her crutches. Most of the students on the special bus had polio and were in wheelchairs.

It was better when Walter Wozniak worked nights. Then Barbara and I wouldn’t see him much. He’d go upstairs to sleep around four, which meant we had to be quiet after school, but at least he couldn’t steal from us. During the weeks he worked nights, my friends couldn’t play in the yard, and if they came in the house, they had to whisper the way my sister, Ma, and I whispered.

My dad had been a Great Lakes seaman. He often spoke about his first trip out of Superior. At seventeen, he’d worked on “the Black Gang” of the LaBelle shoveling coal. Just when Walter Wozniak as a young man was settled down to sleep after a four-hour watch with his crewmates, the bosun yelled “Rise and shine, you scum of the sea!” On the lake boats in those days, many jobs went unregulated. One day my father shoveled coal four hours on, four off. The next day he cleaned engines with solvents in unventilated areas. A jack-of-all-trades, now he worked on land. By recalling the past, he tolerated the present.

Perhaps he wanted to steal our words so desperately because at the flour mill it was hard to speak to or to hear anyone. Besides, who was there to talk to? Bruno Slinker? Adam Zimski, the Polish displaced person who couldn’t talk because he was deaf and dumb? Another non-talker was Joe Bluebird, an Indian from Bad River. My dad thought a man should be heard in his own kitchen when he was drinking a beer.

He sat in his T-shirt. As my sister set the table, Ma prepared cabbage rolls. Usually when I came in, I didn’t say anything. Father needed to talk, even if it meant telling us again about the grain elevators of Buffalo.

“But, Papa, let me tell a story,” my sister would say. She’d begin, “Once there was a princess . . .” Understanding it was no use, she’d give up. “Tell us how hot it was when you worked belowdecks. Tell us how the coal dust bothered you. Tell us about the bird that committed suicide.”

“I’ll tell that one,” Mother said. “Your great aunt was bitter. To hear her tell it, nothing had gone right for her. Now she had a parakeet named Squawky. No one could stand to be around her but him. Whenever someone visited, she poked her finger into the parakeet’s cage and said ‘Sing! Sing!’ which sounded like ‘Zing! Zing!’ with her accent. Usually, a bird like that won’t stop singing, but even Squawky, brave as he was, turned against her one day, gave up, and dropped from his perch.”

With the story over, Father through with his beer, we ate supper. In October, the windows steamed up from Ma’s cooking.

So this was the bird story. On the other hand, this is also the story of why a coal heaver on the Great Lakes ended up like he did. For the time being, everything will be about Walter Wozniak. Everything is Walter Wozniak, coal passer, mill hand, forty-five-year-old Polish Club member. When he drank a beer, he looked in the direction of the flour mill. This was when he was on days and could keep a regular schedule for a week.

Understanding that no one’s perfect, there’s more to say about Walt Wozniak and the words we didn’t speak to him. Words were rain. Words were autumn leaves. When he insisted we listen to him, he must not have thought he was stealing. It was important that we knew he paid the bills and didn’t drink too much in a hard-drinking town. Every few years he spent his vacation scraping and painting the house, the wooden extension ladder bowing as he climbed to the second story with a brush and a can of paint. Before I was big enough to take over, he shoveled snow, cut the grass, made sure the car ran, raked leaves, stoked the furnace, put up storm windows, attended Holy Name Society at church and Polish Club meetings when he could; and he walked a mile to and a mile back from King Midas five or six days a week so as not to get the car dirty.

He worked in the roller mill. You can see it from the highway. There are harder jobs. If you talk to “Bull” Milszewski or Ted Nowazinski, now retired, they’ll tell you about this. One loaded boxcars with sacks of flour for eight hours. The other blew grain dust from motors. My father had plenty to busy him. Sometimes for a couple of days he’d run conduit through underground passages—Walt Wozniak crawling around with a flashlight beneath the mill. When he was under there I bet he thought about my sister and me.

Barbara and I had speech problems. There were probably eight or ten words we couldn’t pronounce right. We’d outgrow this, but it troubled our father when I’d say “tagger” for “tiger” or “tall” for “towel.” Barbara, Basia in Polish, would say “Whenesday” for “Wednesday,” “which” for “witch.” “There’s a ‘which’ in the princess story, Father,” she said that afternoon at supper. “Witch,” the thief replied. He corrected Ma on one thing or another too. This isn’t to say he wasn’t a good man. I’m sure he planned for our future during his shifts at the flour mill. Maybe it was the sickness we found out about later that made him steal words or correct us, and so my mother, Basia, and I talked less and less.

Similar worries about raising children must have troubled the ore punchers on the Northern Pacific dock, the car knockers in the railroad roundhouse, the welders at the shipyard, the lime plant workers, foundrymen, butchers, longshoremen, railroad section hands. Some drank away their problems. How would it have helped my father to go to the Warsaw Tavern? What would he confess there, that his family didn’t talk to him? Though living on land, he was drowning, and so he’d repeat to us everything he could about the LaBelle or the Frontenac, two of the lake boats he’d sailed on that were now sinking from memory.

One day an owl had gotten into the engine room at the mill. This is a dangerous place, which is why metal railings surround the machines and the main conveyor belt. Mice and rats have been crushed by the belt. Cats have died there. Hank Goering and the guys thought the owl had flown in through a front door that had been left open. “Things get in,” our father said at supper, “but I hate when it’s an owl. We’ve been taping around the windows and other places. We have to seal the mill to make it tight. Then we’ll shut down for fumigation.”

After informing us of this, he didn’t talk much. He went to his basement workbench to sit. Maybe he whispered to himself down there. Basia said she hoped someday to see a snowy owl. After that, she said only a few words, instead drawing in the sketch pad Ma had given her as I read a book about birds.

The book must have had three hundred color portraits. Plates forty-three through forty-five showed thirteen kinds of North American owls. This is where I learned snowy owls breed “on the barren grounds and islands of the far north,” that “many individuals wander south in the winter to milder climes,” and that “heavy migrations are called ‘irruptions’ and ‘Snowy Owl Years.’”

When my classmates went home for lunch, I’d walk to the bay to look for the owl. The mill stood on a long pier. Grain cars lined the tracks. Unless my father went into the office for something first, he entered the mill through the tall, gray engine-room doors. The place had a vaulted ceiling, arched windows. Machinery pounded, belts spun. A man lift carried workers to the upper floors and back. After the mill’s “sanitarian” had taped up his signs—Danger: Methyl Bromide in Use—and set out his poison, the engine room would be still, except for the owl in the shadows.

When methyl bromide reacts with moisture in the air or grain, a colorless, odorless gas forms. The gas causes the lungs of rodents to swell as they struggle to breathe. My father saw a squirrel die in a grain bin after one mill shutdown. Now an owl was in there, and the mill would close for the poisoning.

Joe Bluebird yelled at the owl to frighten it. My dad steadied a ladder for Mr. Goering. Over the noise of the machines, he said, “Get the long pole from the loading dock.”

High on a ledge, white against the gray bricks, the owl perched. Even with the pole they couldn’t reach it. “It’s too bad. It’s just too bad,” Mr. Goering said.

When my dad saw me, he asked, “Why aren’t you home for lunch, Tomaszu?”

Hoping to impress him, I pointed to the owl and said “biały”—white in Polish.

“Come,” said my father.

With the boiler room doors closed against the sounds of the engine room, we sat beside the coal pile, where he gave me the sandwich from his lunch box.

“You’ll go hungry,” I said.

“Tell your mother to serve your supper as usual. We have to finish here. We shut down after this. Bring a candy bar home for your sister later.” He gave me a nickel for the vending machine.

On the walk to school, I turned to look for the owl.

“I know how to say ‘white,’” I told Sister Benitia when I got back. “But what’s the word for ‘whiteness’ and ‘snow’?”

When my father came in later, he didn’t want to be bothered in either language. Then the watchman from the mill called. With methyl bromide poisoning everything, the watchman, Joe Bluebird, working overtime, wanted to know if he could go back inside to try once more to rescue the owl. “It’s too late,” my dad said. Then he said something I couldn’t hear. Too late for what? With the phone call over, he said, “If it snows, shovel the sidewalk tomorrow, Tomasz.”

Later, my mother saw the light in Basia’s room. She and I were looking at the map of Poland. “Maybe the owl has come from there,” I said. “A lot of names start with ‘white.’ Biała Panieńska is ‘White Maiden,’ Biało Brzegi is ‘White Shore.’”

Basia read more about boreal owls. “Their love song has ‘a curious, liquid note, like ting, ting, ting, many times repeated.’ Another owl makes ‘a screeching ku-wee sound followed by a kind of whistling sound.’” With our father at his basement workbench and the heat registers in the room shut, we talked freely. As if such a thing is possible, we were inventing a language of owls.

So this is the story of the two birds. “Sing! Sing!” our great aunt had said to one of them, and now the snowy owl. These owls “are some of the heaviest North American owls. The female may have a wingspread of over six feet,” I read. The language of mispronounced words my sister and I shared went along with the way father acted when he was getting sick.

“In winter, there’s so much white,” she’d say, lowering her eyes. My shy, quiet sister. On cold mornings, Mother lit the oven in the kitchen. As she braided my sister’s hair, Basia rested her legs on the open oven door. Yet still from my father no talk of the owl.

With Monday being like a day off for him because he didn’t report until the night shift, he could tell the stories he pleased, except none about an owl. No sooner did I ask about it than the subject changed.

After school, I searched by the ore dock and along the Nemadji River, places an owl could hide. Tomasz Wozniak in pursuit of the owl while his sister sat at home with her crutches and braces.

On these late fall days, my heart had turned against my father who didn’t care that something so beautiful had died.

“It is Father,” I told Basia. “On the phone, he was whispering to the watchman about how he’d poisoned the owl. He never talks about it because he’s guilty,” I said, quietly enough that no one could hear.

My poor father. He’d come from northeastern Poland. Białystok, White Slope, lay on the edge of his memory and was fading away like everything else. At least he remembered which shift he worked and remembered about grain weevils and flour beetles. He still remembered how the mill had shut down for fumigation.

On Basia’s name day, she recited how her patron saint had rejected the suitors her father chose for her, how she was imprisoned for converting to Christianity, how her father was struck by lightning, and how people have invoked Saint Barbara’s name during storms. In Polish households, a name day is sometimes more important than a birthday. From my mother and father on this day called Imieniny, she received a wool dress; from me, a set of colored pencils. We celebrated and sang “Sto Lat” to her. “May You Live to Be a Hundred.”

By then, the harbor was icing over. Not long and shipping season would end. Each day, she was impatient with having to walk on crutches, impatient that she had leg braces. When he came from the afternoon shift, his hair and face white with dust, we could hear him cough. We heard him struggle for breath walking downstairs to the workbench. We heard him cough in the middle of the night.

“Why don’t you let me speak?” she asked one day. “You want to cripple me more than I am.”

“I want you to remember me,” he told her.

“If you don’t want to hear me, I won’t remember you.”

Before I came to the table, I looked out the pantry window. We could see the mill. Against the table, Basia bumped one leg brace. Finally, my mother said, “Eat, Basia.” But she couldn’t. When she brought up the owl, my father corrected her.

“I can only say it ‘all,’ Father.”

“It’s ‘owl.’ ‘Ow-ul!’” he replied.

I wanted to stand up for her, protect her.

With him preoccupied, nothing came of this. My sister’s anger passed. We went back to the comfort of old patterns, watching TV, doing homework, attending Sunday Mass. Mother kept the house up. The bills were paid when they arrived, which was “the Polish way,” my father said. Everything was normal.

Day after day, Basia drew her pictures unless I interrupted her to remind her our father was the sanitarian. He’d never told us this, but I knew it as sure as I knew anything.

Once or twice a year, Mr. Goering needed him to return to work. The phone would ring in the pantry. Through the window, we could see if the mill was dark, which meant it had lost power and was down. Whenever Hank Goering telephoned outside of working hours, my father instructed me to tell him he wasn’t in. With my dad signaling “Say what you have to, Tomasz,” I’d blurt out, “He’s gone. He might be at my aunt’s.”

Mr. Goering knew I was lying. “Well, tell him to get down here.”

All this time, I was deciding how to punish my father, to steal my father’s words.

Though winter passed, the cold remained. June was still two months away when clouds sank low and the day grew warm. Dirt lay along the sides of streets. Old newspapers and cigarette butts mixed with the salt and sand the city had applied during the winter.

At school, Sister opened the classroom windows. Though this far north, elm trees don’t leaf out until mid-May, the air was sweet with the smell of balsam poplars. How good the warmth must have felt to a man on the way from work. Even the upstairs bedrooms, warm and stuffy for the first time in months, would feel good.

As my father read the paper, the sky darkened. A few days like this and I’d have to get out the lawn mower.

At seven thirty, we heard thunder. Basia read in her Lives of the Saints how Dioscorus, the future saint’s father, was struck by lightning and turned to ash. I thought that something would come of this night.

“Tomasz,” he said, “can you see the mill?”

“The power’s out down there.”

“You better turn off the television then. We’re lucky to have power. Call upstairs to your sister. Tell her to come down. Are things secured outside?”

As lightning brightened the kitchen window, Father said, “Saint Barbara, help us!”

The phone rang. “Is he in? Is your father in?” Mr. Goering asked.

The kitchen light flickered. Basia said, “Tell him he’s out, that Father’s gone, Tomasz. There’s never been such a terrible night as this one.”

I held the phone so that she could hear Mr. Goering. “I need to talk to him. Tell Walt to get here right away. The mill’s down.”

As Basia watched me, dumbstruck, I didn’t soften toward my father, not even when Mother raised her hands to heaven, said “Jesu kochanej,” and began to cry. As I turned into a thief of words, Mother on her knees praying, I looked at Walter Wozniak, my father, and said to Mr. Goering, “He’s here.”

He was gone a long time. We were lost without him. Mother lit holy candles. In the midst of the storm, the phone rang. Maybe it was Mr. Goering or Aunt Helen. Maybe it was my father.

Finally, the storm quieted. A fog settled in. I left Basia and my mother. They must have wondered “Where’s Tomasz?” Mother probably looking outside and upstairs. As I hurried under the Second Street viaduct out of sight of the house, I realized I’d never been outdoors alone so late at night. What had I done to Walter Wozniak?

When I saw the lights on, I remembered how Father had worked twelve or thirteen hours that day at the mill plus all the worries about the storm.

If the power’s back on at the mill, he’s coming home, I thought. Though sensing I was near where the tracks split, the east tracks going to Ashland and the Upper Peninsula, west tracks to the railroad yard by the mill, I still wasn’t certain where I was. The fog obscured the switches, the boxcars, the railroad water tower. When he was hardly older than I was, my father had walked this way to the freighter LaBelle to sign on as a coal passer. Now where was he?

“Tomasz,” I heard him say, my name softened by the fog.

“Where are you?”

“Stay there,” he said. “We’ll walk together. Your ma will worry, but we’ll be home soon. What are you doing out?”

“I thought the lightning would strike you. I’ve come to say I’m sorry. I thought you’d be turned to ash.”

“I am ash. I’m very sick. I’ve been sick a long time. I’ve done nothing to protect myself. All these years at the mill and on the boats there were no rules, or very few. When I fumigated grain, I got into the habit of not wearing protective gear, if there ever was any. Maybe it’s good you don’t see me. I’ve poisoned you. I’m poisoned. But listen how loud the creek’s running. You know that on the boats carrying grain to Lake Erie and Buffalo in these modern days, the pest control man puts out ‘wheat pills.’ He rigs up a fan system that spreads the poisonous gas around. Then he collects everything and climbs out of the hold, knowing that on the trip, grain pests will suffocate.”

My father went on without making sense. Every word was distilled from the rain, the fog, sounds of a night in spring. Pointing me toward the house, he said, “Help your sister. When you’re older, come here on nights like this to think of me.”

“I don’t want you to leave us again. When you were gone, the lightning hit something close to the house. I don’t like when the mill’s down. I thought it was a sin telling Mr. Goering you were out all those times, but it’s not a sin because I did it for you. You have a right to say no to him, or I will say no for you. You’re tired. I’ve been little help to you.”

“It doesn’t matter. Nic nie szkodzi,” he said.

But it did matter the way I’d been. Now at least I’d returned something to him.

On that night, it rained again, gently. The night was strange and beautiful. If the neighborhood was awake, it would have wondered that something so precious could happen in the East End of Superior, Wisconsin, a father rescuing his son after a terrible thunderstorm. I wanted to be close to him, to touch his work shirt, anything now that I realized how important he was for working like this, for taking care of us. This is the Polish way.

The owl might have been the only creature out that night. In this story it has to be the snowy owl from the flour mill heading north above the creek. It will be best for everyone to read the story this way. Then whoever learns about it can interpret the owl as they wish. Probably some families, the Zatkos, the Moniaks, the Nikulas, and Codas, had opened their windows to let in the air. Maybe they were half asleep. Maybe they were muttering as in dreams. In the morning when the neighborhood smelled like balsam poplar, they would try to explain what they’d heard and seen. I doubt they saw what we did. We’d heard it fly above us.

“Look up there!” he’d said, as he took my hand and led me home.

As the book says, the very secretive snowy owl has a large wingspread. It was returning “to the barren grounds and islands of the far north.” My father had told the truth about the owl. All along, he’d insisted that it had escaped.

After that night, little by little my father grew worse. He’d leave his lunch pail at work or forget to bring the collection envelope to Mass. If you asked about the owl, he had to think for a moment.

His last escape from us occurred on an autumn morning a few years later when he left for work but got no closer to the mill than where the tracks split. We think he didn’t know whether to go on or to walk toward the LaBelle, which, in his mind, was loading iron ore at the NP dock. When the mill called, Mother went looking for him. She found him walking slowly along the bay. He said he was going to sea again.

This has been hard for me to tell. I’ve tried to portray Walter Wozniak as a strong man, a laborer who gave everything to the company that paid him. Despite ill health, he went to his job at King Midas to do what was asked. On Sundays, he attended Saint Adalbert’s, stepping outside when his coughing got worse.

My father’s been gone many years, years of great loneliness for me. I’ve worked hard and have a good job high up with Cargill, the grain elevator company. Basia lives with Mother in Duluth. I have a house in Superior.

Late on foggy nights, I go to the place he told me to return to, down by the viaduct where the creek runs fast after a rain. I imagine him with his lunch box by the railroad shack walking toward me. I can’t escort him to the house because it’s no longer ours, but I can remember him. That’s the Polish way. And each time he’s here, each time I miss him, Walter Wozniak of the Polish Club, Walter Wozniak of the Saint Adalbert’s Holy Name Society, Wozniak the laborer, I say over and over in two languages, “Father . . . Father.”

Chokecherries

Because I must tend to a very sick man, I can only talk a little, Mr. Zimski. I know you arrived years ago, completing the journey from the Soviet border to the settlement camp in Persia, then from there to Liverpool, then New York, then here, where the church took you in. Parish records indicate there were your two brothers, their wives, a nephew, niece, and you, the mute—in all, seven persons displaced by war, living for two years in Persian camps, praying together, protecting each other during the rest of the journey to the heart of America.

I was here when they put you up in the furnace room of Szkoła Wojciecha, Saint Adalbert’s grade school. The furnace room doubled as your home and as a backstage for school plays. The children in their costumes could enter the stage from the side hallways or from the door in the back. The stage rose four feet above the gym floor. Varnished boards covered the well for the footlights. Working as a janitor, I raised a tent on that stage. I brought army cots into the furnace room for you, our guests. The maroon stage curtain was closed much of the time for your privacy.

In the gym, parents, nuns, and students sat on folding chairs the afternoon the seven of you appeared for the parishioners to see the displaced persons, the DPs. When Father Nowak arrived, Sister Benitia played the Polish national anthem, and the curtain opened. When you, Mr. Zimski, “Adam” we call you, entered behind the others from the furnace room, your hands were flying about, as though dancing with the air. The hands are blurred in the photos from 1952. Your throat was forming the sounds we’ve grown accustomed to. Though I’ve had to trouble people to learn more about you, I’m lucky to know what I know.

After taking their bows, your family left you in the care of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Third Order of Saint Francis, though it was not as though you were a child abandoned here. In the pictures you must be thirty, your hair cropped short above your solemn face, your broad shoulders. You learned a routine as months passed. To get oatmeal and dry toast before morning Mass, you came upstairs to the landing below the crucifix. To get soup and bread, you came to the landing after the Angelus at noon. For the potato, waxed beans, and boiled beef, you came after the school had grown quiet. The nuns would bring you the tray as you, the mute, sat on the stairs in the evening.

You, Adam the DP who couldn’t speak or hear, wore a secondhand shirt, dungarees laced in back, and black tennis shoes donated by Lederman’s Clothing. By not talking, you frightened the schoolchildren. Were you praying to get your voice back so you could tell them and us what you’d seen during the war in the old country? A man is sorry to meet such a one as you, Adam Zimski, because he can’t understand you. Ask my father how he felt about you.

Only when you moved out of the backstage area did you become a fixture in your room above the tavern, and in your sweeper’s job that Father Nowak got you at the flour mill. My father, the lone and lonely Indian in the mill, recalls coming to show you something on the flour mill floor, and you not bothering to notice. No one paid attention to either of you, the Pole or the Indian. Your unnoticed lives mirrored each other. When I’d see you from a distance, millers’ caps and work clothes covered with flour dust, faces white, I couldn’t tell the difference between you—except that your hands were so busy with things.

An unnoticed life—that was my father’s at the mill. He didn’t matter, not that anyone did down there. But some men walked to the tavern together after work. Some families went to the Superior Theater on the weekend or to the Arrow Café. Not the Bluebirds, who’d moved here from the Bad River Reservation seventy miles away.

If there was ever a white man Joe Bluebird would have talked to in forty or more years of milling wheat, it was you, I think. This, of course, was impossible. We were the only Indians in the neighborhood, and my father spoke to no one and stayed to himself. And even if you, Adam, could speak, it would’ve been in a foreign language. In all the years you’ve been in the East End not talking, I imagine you, a mute, would’ve liked to tell my father what you know about loss. Joseph Bluebird, Joe, could tell you about loss too, but when you sat together in a corner of the boiler room, there was nothing to say, or at least no way to say it.

He told me that after a year or two when nobody else was working the packing floor on second shift, you’d come over to him. My father would be sweeping dust, wanting to talk to someone about something, anything, and who comes up to him but a Polish mute? The struggle for words, Joe Bluebird walking away when you let the noises crowd up too long through your throat as though you were trying to identify yourself to the world. Neither of you could say anything that made sense.

Now on a beautiful afternoon, my father’s lungs have gotten worse. Taking my mother’s hand, Marie Bluebird’s, he asks her not to let go of their years together. What can she do? Or what can you, the friend who can’t speak, do for my father? Sometimes, like today, you’ve come by to bring us blueberries, hazelnuts, or chokecherries. We’ve seen you look at our broken porch light, at the storm door that doesn’t fit the door frame because the house, shifting over the years, has thrown everything off kilter. When I’ve found you looking at our house, I’ve told you what else is wrong with it. “The eaves sag . . . gutters hang down. My father’s given up. There will be one less Indian in northern Wisconsin.”

Speaking with your hands, you appear to say that the house is like my father; that, like you, it’s fallen. Fallen men in their fallen houses.

In a room with faded wallpaper, window shades are drawn against the light. Sometimes when a breeze lifts the shade, the sun brightens everything. On the dresser, you’ve put a newspaper you’ve brought us. The front page reads the Liverpool Echo, March 25, 1944. This is 1985. Where did you find an old English paper? I wonder as we listen to the elms rustle outside. A clematis vine scrapes the house. A clock ticks. My father says if the clock were cleaned and oiled, a part or two replaced, it could tell time for one hundred more years. In whose house will it stand in 2085?

My father’s weak arms lie atop the blanket. Mother pulls the blanket up to keep the breeze off him. She tries rubbing the flour dust from the creases in his face. Your hair, the wrinkles in your face, Adam Zimski, are no less discolored by flour dust. The dust has worn you both down.

My father’s years in the mill have dulled his shiny black hair. Instead of promoting him to a better job, the company kept him on as a sweeper. My dad is sick, old, and most of the time unwilling to look people in the eye. Toward the end of his working days, he kept his lips tight, filtering the dusty air through his nose. A person could mistake this for a smile. I’d hear him coming home. In the back shed, he’d tell me about his day, speaking in his native language until the coughing got bad. Mother would raise her hands, not wanting to hear Indian talk inside the house. When she did this, he appeared to smile, but it was the smile he brought from the mill, the smile he wore when he occasionally said “Meegwetch, thank you” to someone.

“Why did they ever hire you down at the mill?” Joe Bluebird, my father, asks you, Adam, your lungs and his full of dust. “You never say nothing.”

“Do you hear my father, Mr. Zimski?” I ask you.

“Gerald, you know Mr. Zimski can’t respond,” Mother says to me. “People say he’s partially deaf too.”

“I think he can hear,” I say.

Fidgeting with the jar of chokecherries you’ve brought—chokecherries from a man choking on words—you say something like “a-a-a-a” or “I-I-I-I.” It’s as though you must identify yourself or be forgotten. The last months of nothing come slowly for you and my father, the strawberry moon, September; the raspberry moon, October; the falling leaf moon, November.

“Look who’s come,” Mother says.

“I don’t want no visitors,” my father says.

When the next month drifts in the window, you’ll be burning back blueberry plants on a garden plot in a neighbor’s yard. Will the smoke bring tears to your eyes? They say that you, a grown man, cried in the furnace room when your family left you. I guess they didn’t want to be tied down in a land of opportunity. Now you’ll be twice abandoned. Your friend must leave you, leave us. Survivors will be Marie Bluebird, wife; Gerald Bluebird, son; Adam Zimski, friend. All her life, Mother told him English would be best to speak. It would make us fit in. Not wanting to give up the old ways, my father decided against any language. The less he talked, the less others talked to him. He became your standard wooden Indian. The people closest to us, the Bluebirds of Superior, Wisconsin, were back on the Bad River Indian Reservation.

And you, Adam Zimski, you’re busy in your retirement. You’ve brought that old newspaper again today. A headline reads:

2,500 TONS DROPPED ON BERLIN

RED ARMY’S RAPID ADVANCE

Rolling up the Germans

Above and below

Dniester

The cutline below a photo on page 1 says, “Hitting the trail in Burma.” The armed men walking through water are described: “A Kachin patrol, comprised of US and British officers, American-equipped Chinese, and jungle-wise Kachin natives, leading the way through a Burmese stream, hot on the trail of the Japanese enemy.”

Lower down, another photo shows a house in ruins, a staircase rising into air where a second story once stood. “War Ravaged Europe . . . Warsaw, Poland,” reads the caption. You point so hard at the house that your thick fingernail leaves an impression on the paper.

“I . . . I,” you say.

“Put it down. What do you know about any house?” asks my father. “You see the railing outside, how it needs painting, how the rain has . . .”

Oblivious to him, you describe the newspaper photo with your hands. I think this is what you’re doing, comparing the destroyed house in Warsaw to ours. Otherwise, why do you look up at the chipped plaster on our ceiling? Why point to the holes in the curtains, the tears in your eyes? Do these things remind you of Poland?

Pressing your fingers to the page, you struggle to speak. Again and again, the words catch. Chokecherries. Are you imagining soldiers of the Polish Home Army that I read about in your Liverpool Echo, or are you imagining Indians along the river where my people have lived a thousand years, another home army? The river is named in the Anishinabe language my mother is ashamed to speak. Nemadji River, “Left-Handed River.” She went to an Indian boarding school when she was young. The purpose was to make her less Indian. White people punished her if she spoke the Native language. If she got caught, she was locked in her room without supper. “You’ll speak English,” she told my father when they married.

“Where did you learn to look at things so closely?” I ask you, a Polish DP, when you remove a speck of dust from my father’s pillow.

My father could sit two hundred years and never talk to a white man. Now he speaks to you in a strange tongue about the Left-Handed River.

“This newspaper,” Mother says. “Maybe it’s his house that’s wrecked. There’s no upstairs. See how the stairs lead up, then stop? His home is in some foreign place he can’t tell us about.”

“It’s our house,” my dad says. He points to the picture in the newspaper. “We’re upstairs in it right now.”

“Rest,” I tell him.

“I can’t rest,” he says. He tells me he’d like to speak to you, Adam Zimski. He wants to make up for the years you tried to visit with him at work. Mother used to tell him, “Don’t make out you’re proud of being Indian.” Now he wants to talk in any language.

Mother allows you, a visitor, to fix his blanket and to help him drink his water. As you raise the back of his head, your other hand brings the cup to his lips. When the pain in his lungs and back worsens, Mother measures medicine, the narcotic, from the bottle into another cup. There are no restrictions on how much he can take to relieve his pain.

At night when it’s hard for him to pull the air into his lungs, the pain racks my father. When his lungs clear, then there’s silence—everything quiet but the clock. Then I give him this drink of medicine and summer returns. He whispers to his house, to this country near the Nemadji River, which flows into Lake Superior. He speaks to it in his dreams, whispers in the old language. When I come upstairs again in the morning, I say, “You remember too much, dear father.”

With the three of us there with him in the afternoon, he says, “Does it look like our house? I can’t make it out.” He holds the yellowed newspaper close to his eyes. Sometimes the pain and the medicine make him see what isn’t here. A Pole in an Indian’s house. An Indian outside a house in Warsaw. A flour mill connects them, the thin old men finally speaking to each other.

You’ve brought berries and chokecherries. Your hands won’t be still. You pull words from the autumn air.

“Look at your father’s eyes,” Mother says to me.

You, the visitor, follow his gaze out through the window to the river. My father holds the newspaper at his fingertips, the Liverpool Echo, then looks into the country beyond. Could he be imagining you, Mr. Zimski, in the upstairs room that is no longer there? Your hands signal the way to the country that was overrun when you were young. The German tanks rode over your country, over the lancers of history, and Poland was gone.

“Look!” I say, staring at my father. Have you, too, seen something in his eyes, Adam? Has the medicine helped him come to you after fifty years? In his hallucinations, I think he must be standing outside your childhood home, looking at the history of your agony in Poland.

We’re sitting upstairs. Father has closed his eyes. His fingers tremble. When the newspaper falls, when Mother puts it on the dresser, my father stands outside of his own house again looking at what has been done to it. The trucks that wind past to the mill crack the foundation of this good house, shake its walls. The sound of the grain trucks passing in the night troubles our sleep. The foundation runs deep, so that we’re reminded always of how we gave up our land; like the train whistles take our sleep, it was robbed from us. You have no country either, Adam. Everything was stolen from you. Your artillery and airplanes, your cavalries, have gone away into history.

On the dresser beside the newspaper is the bottle of medicine. When Father comes back from his dream of two houses, everything is just right in the room with Mother praying, with the breeze moving the curtain. It looks as though his eyes can see more than before. In his waking dream, my father tries to get up, motions to me to help him.

“Husband,” my mother says.

My father can’t hear her. I can imagine you racing through the streets of war-ravaged Poland in your own dream, Adam Zimski. It looks like you two can go on forever with this thing you’ve found between you, speechless, saying what it is you’ve begun to say to each other. The voice of sorrow is in your hands, Adam. I see speeches of regret in your eyes. Then you do something I never thought of. You are the only one to hear my father’s wish. You give him another cup of medicine. You soothe his forehead. You lean over to kiss the top of his head. Then there is no more talking between you two, between any of us this afternoon because the horsemen of time have gone away.

Lonesome, Ornery, and Mean

R. J. and Mrs. LaTour owned the gift shop. Either in store or ready to order, they had practically any item large or small having to do with the Bayou State. You could buy cookbooks, jigsaw puzzles, license plate holders, and napkins with pelicans printed on them.

On the day their neighbor Lenwood came in sweating, Kitty LaTour was wearing a Hammond Berries baseball jersey. The LaTours’ shop carried replica jerseys of the Class D Evangeline League teams that had played from 1946 to 1951. She wore a different jersey each day in summer. Today when you wanted a glimpse of her knockers, the team mascot—a luscious strawberry catching a baseball—smiled back from the jersey, Hammond being known for its strawberries.

Kitty was telling a retired couple that she was fresh out of Steel Magnolias DVDs, but she had those tall, thin glasses for mint juleps and the wooden muddlers you use to “bruise” the mint and sugar in the bottom of the glass before adding ice, bourbon, and whiskey.

The shop was redolent of magnolias. As he peered from behind the storeroom curtain, R. J., her husband, knew the smell would change. Lenwood Shipley contaminated every place he went with the odor of a man who’d eaten peanuts and had gas. R. J. wondered why in hell he’d invited Lenwood to drive with him to Shreveport in the U-Haul when he could as easily have gotten Jim Easton or Ralph Broussard. Now he was stuck.

Lenwood stood by the Cards for All Occasions. Baptism and birthday cards, sympathy and wedding cards lined the back wall. R. J. watched his neighbor studying the postcards on a revolving rack. One showed a large machine harvesting sugarcane, over the picture in red letters the words, “Raising Cane in Louisiana.”

“You coming with me to Shreveport?” R. J. asked.

Because Lenwood was out of shape, a T-shirt didn’t become him. The material grew tight around his big ugly belly, as though it would squeeze him to death. Last Christmas, Kitty and R. J. had given him the T-shirt along with a plastic bib to wear to crawfish boils.

“Hell yeah, I’m coming to Shreveport! It’s Saturday, in’t it? You said to be here at one,” Lenwood said.

Every part of the T-shirt stuck to him in the heat. Each place he pulled it away left a nodule in the cotton fabric, so that the words “It’s a Southern Thang Y’all Wouldn’t Understand” began to stand out in relief. R. J. thought that for the holidays this year he and Kitty would buy Lenwood’s demure missus a T-shirt and give poor Lenwood a muumuu. Just then, Lenwood said, “Smells like peanits in here.”

For his part, Lenwood took life in stride. He and Joey, his wife, went to Sunday service and had the gospel on their side. So what if the LaTours had a nicer house. He and Joey didn’t have to be ashamed that her father had paid for their house. Joey took care of it and still found time for her afternoon TV before Lenwood got home. He was a valued employee who, with his workmate, a Black man named Ellard Cobber, drove around in a truck with shovels and brooms in back. A dead racoon on Merchant Street? There they were shoveling it into the truck. An armadillo ready for disposal on MLK Boulevard? Here came Lenwood and Ellard with their shovels and scoops. They had a winch for larger animals.

Say what you would about Lenwood, about his T-shirt, and, well, about his mauvaise odeur, he was more than fair-minded when dealing with others. If Lenwood and his fellow city employee had a particularly bad mess to clean up, he helped Ellard, though he was senior to him at Public Works. If Ellard, a dedicated employee, came to work sick once a year, Lenwood let him rest in the truck while he did the dirty work. Ellard did the same for Lenwood. This work included checking the dumpsters on the edge of town where signs read “No Dead Animals Per Order of Public Works Department.”

Perhaps even more fair and open-minded than her husband, Lenwood’s wife counseled him to be kind during the day no matter the insults people yelled from their cars as he and Ellard broke their backs in the Louisiana heat. Missus Shipley’s forbearance came from inherent goodness, plus watching Judge Judy.

One thing she disliked were some of the novelty items in the LaTours’ shop. Those that made fun of Yankees, rednecks, and the Dallas Cowboys were generally okay. She didn’t even mind the postcard of three women in bikinis waving at the camera—“Greetings from Louisiana. Hurry Back!”—that someone had sent to the pastor of Our Lady of Good Counsel.

There were other things Missus Joey Shipley found very distasteful, however. One was a postcard reading “Sleep Well, Your Polish Air Force Is on Alert!!” The black-and-white photo showed an old man, his chin sticking way out in front of his toothless gums. He must have been eighty or ninety and wore an air force cap and bomber jacket. The second item was a wooden structure selling for fifteen dollars. The sign on it read “Three-Story Polish Outhouse.” It showed a hole in the top floor emptying through the hole in the second floor and that one emptying onto the first floor.

When she was young, Joey had had a friend in Plaquemines Parish where she’d grown up. The friend was the granddaughter of Polish people sent to Louisiana after the war in Europe. Hundreds of them had journeyed to America and had spread out across the cane fields to work. They were referred to as “displaced persons.” By the time Joey had graduated from high school, many of the DPs were gone, while others had changed their names and stayed on. Where was Urszula Sczypanska? she wondered. If she’d never met Urszula, maybe she wouldn’t have cared about the insulting items in the LaTours’ shop. But she missed her friend, whom she used to call Ula. She remembered how pretty she was. It hurt her to see the LaTours selling such things as the Polish Air Force card and the novelty outhouse.

There was something worse in the card and gift shop. Lenwood wondered how, in this enlightened age, the neighbor one house over could sell such a thing. He was glad Ellard never saw it.

When Lenwood had cut the grass at the El Camino Motel as a boy, he’d come upon the postcard in a revolving rack like the one in the gift shop. Then one day the vile object in the motel lobby had disappeared. Now, as Lenwood approached his mid-thirties, it had returned—a postcard of a statue of an old man. The man bowing and tipping his bowler hat resembled Ellard, but it wasn’t Ellard. A year younger than Lenwood, Ellard couldn’t have modeled for the statue, which had stood in the town square but which, thank heavens, had been moved to a remote place on the grounds of the Rural Life Museum at Louisiana State. On the base of the monument pictured on the card, a plaque expressed the town’s gratitude for the faithful service of the Black people of antebellum times, which the postcard spelled “antibellum.”

Much had changed since the statue was erected in town. No expense had been spared to create it. Now who would see it hidden away in Baton Rouge?

In Mississippi on their honeymoon, Joey and Lenwood Shipley had walked through the university campus in Oxford. In front of the Lyceum Building, Black people, university employees, were picketing with signs that read: “There has been change at Ole Miss.” Now Lenwood bet they wanted more change—and fast. Over his years in the Public Works Department, Lenwood himself had changed. He was pleased to see the difference he and Ellard made in peoples’ lives when they pulled up in the truck to scrape whatever it was off the pavement.

Yes, there had been change at Ole Miss, change in the South, change in Lenwood and Joey; then to see this remnant of the old days in of all places the neighbors’ shop. In a section designated Town History were black-and-white photographic reprints of the spiral staircase behind the Schafter Building, colorful pictures of the grand houses around town, such as the Levy House, and now this stack of offensive postcards. Lenwood stuck the whole bunch in his pants pocket.

When R. J. came from the storeroom in his dress shirt and bow tie, he looked as though his neighbor were inconveniencing him when it was Lenwood Shipley doing R. J. the favor of accompanying him to Shreveport. And for what? The promise of a BBQ sandwich and fries at Corky’s Town South after they’d picked up half a truck full of surplus dog food from a place off the Airline Highway.

The shop owner examined Lenwood the way he’d examine similar peculiar creatures. For all the years they’d been neighbors, Lenwood’s lack of sophistication still surprised R. J. LaTour. How sophisticated did you need to be to clean up rotting possums and armadillos? By thinking this way about Lenwood, R. J. was also thinking of Ellard Cobber of city sanitation, whom he’d seen around (unsophisticated) and the Polish people he’d heard about in the parishes south of there (unsophisticated). His thoughts even roamed back to the yeoman farmers and po’ buckra of antebellum times (unsophisticated).

When R. J. had attended LSU–Shreveport for his business degree, he’d taken an elective course in philosophy. He’d tell Lenwood about Camus and Sartre, the existentialists. Hearing R. J. brag in that elevated tone about his “university experience” made Lenwood itch. All that studying had gotten his neighbor a gift shop and a wife in a berry shirt who might be selling her produce to customers. Perhaps R. J., the philosopher, was allergic to strawberries. Lenwood sure wasn’t allergic to them. He and Joey had four kids.

When they were halfway to Shreveport, Lenwood said he was stopping for peanits and a cold drink and would R. J. drive the remaining thirty-five miles to where a company was donating the dog food to the Humane Society back home. “Sho nuff,” R. J. said as though mocking Lenwood. When R. J. tried putting the truck in gear, it stalled. Three times he tried the clutch and stick shift, the lurching and stalling causing Lenwood to spill Coke on his T-shirt. R. J. sat there, hands on a larger wheel than he was accustomed to, and felt the truck cab getting hot, Lenwood munching away, saying, “A cold drink tastes good.” That kind of inanity drove R. J. crazy. Now Lenwood was one up on him because he, R. J., couldn’t drive a truck.

“As I told you, Sartre posits that existence precedes essence. Ooh! Do you have to do that, Lenwood? You disgust me. Open the window.”

Lenwood was man in his natural state, R. J. had concluded years before, man without self-awareness or ego. Lenwood was driving again. At the warehouse, he backed the truck up to the loading dock, R. J. supervising. When his shirt grew damp from the heat, R. J. pulled off his bow tie and undid the top shirt button while directing Lenwood to stack the dog food. “The faster you load the bags, the sooner we eat,” he said, not bothering to help.

With the large door shut on the back of the truck and the truck bound for Corky’s Town South by the LSU–Shreveport campus, R. J. said, “Do you know you’re the simplest man ever?”

“Thank you,” Lenwood said.

“But really, Lenwood, my God, do something different. Buy cashews for once.”

Each time R. J. said such things, Lenwood replied, “I don’t know about that.”

“Well, do you accept that you have a stomach problem?”

“Don’t know,” Lenwood said. The next time R. J. criticized him was the last. How much can a man take before he says to someone like R. J., “You drive!”

This time, to the shop owner’s surprise, when he depressed the clutch and moved the stick, everything worked. Soon they were passing Corky’s Town South.

Things come to a man at such moments. The better he drove, the more confident R. J. grew in his belief that people like himself were selected to carry a bright light in a world of depressing ignorance, a symbol of which darkness sat beside him. The more Lenwood complained “There’s Corky’s. We’re passing Corky’s,” the more R. J. thought his neighbor didn’t deserve a sandwich, not while R. J. was reaching this higher order of thinking. Rolling down the highway, he saw where he’d failed once or twice in life, but he also knew that people looked up to him, a merchant who dressed to meet the public and today had come seventy miles to pick up forty bags of dog food for a good cause.

R. J. thought most people lacked savoir faire. Take Lenwood and Joey, for instance. With their four snotty children, they embarrassed the philosopher. He’d never be seen with them in a nice restaurant like Ralph and Cacoo’s in Alexandria. As for his own wife, he no longer cared who sampled her goods.

Now Lenwood was talking about Black folk and Ellard Cobber and poor whites and Polish people down south here, people who, according to Lenwood, were just as good as R. J. LaTour.

“Don’t argue with me about inherent goodness, Lenwood. It’s over your head.”

“I guess so, but Joey once had a Polish friend, and these days I have my work partner, Ellard. Neither’s done us harm. Then I see the items in your store like these postcards and the Polish outhouse.” Lenwood leaned to the side to free up a buttock so he could get to the wrinkled cards in his back pocket.

“Those postcards you took mean nothing,” said R. J. “Besides, regarding the Polish outhouse, what good is it if you can’t laugh at yourself?”

“How about the statue?”

“It’s not so bad. Google ‘Rural Life Museum at LSU,’ then look up ‘The first statue erected in the South to the memory of the devoted . . .’ See for yourself if it’s hurting anyone’s sensibilities now.”

“You’re some philosopher.”

“Well, just listen to Lenwood Shipley. In case you haven’t noticed, your wife pronounces your first name ‘Linwood.’ Which is it? Here’s some advice, though I doubt you’ve heard of the great Shakespeare and his play Hamlet.”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll change Horatio’s name to Lenwood. ‘There are greater things in heaven and earth, Lenwood or Linwood, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”

“Do you include Polish and Black people in the philosophy?”

“You might say so. Shakespeare talks about smiting ‘the dreaded Polak on the ice’ in Hamlet. In Othello, the main character’s a Moor from North Africa.”

Except for R. J.’s telling him to read Shakespeare during his breaks on the cleanup crew, that was it for the trip to Shreveport. Once he’d dropped Lenwood off and seen the car parked in front of his house, as if the driver were looking for Kitty (there’d been other cars, other men), R. J. kept going to where the taller, better sugarcane begins around Turkey Creek. On past the Welcome to Acadiana sign he drove the U-Haul, on through Ville Platte and Opelousas, where he stopped for a sandwich and coffee. Turning east then south again, he wondered how a high school dropout like Lenwood Shipley could argue with him about race relations.

Having gone through one sweltering Delta town after another, he was feeling lonesome, ornery, and mean. Lenwood could drop dead, Kitty with him. He’d go home when he felt like it, R. J. thought. Maybe he’d be gone a week, maybe two. Nothing would hurt the dang surplus dog food.

The mailboxes along the roads read Kaz, Dobry, Warzik, Lenz, as though they’d been shortened from another language. None was as hard to pronounce as the name of Joey Shipley’s high school friend, Urszula Sczypanska. R. J. thought he’d drive all night to see where he ended up. Kitty, Lenwood, the gift shop, his whole life, it seemed, had built up to this moment. He’d stay on the west side of the Mississippi and not have to cross the Sunshine Bridge. Then he’d gas up, go another hour and another, stopping at roadhouses, ordering Dixie longnecks, playing Waylon on jukeboxes. If he made it to New Orleans, he’d visit any place he could to have a good time.

R. J. had been so lonely with Kitty. What he’d learned years ago in the philosophy course about the loneliness of the existential man was finally making sense. It differed from the kind of burning, low-down hostility and loneliness Waylon and Hank Jr. sang about, their voices rough from whiskey and smoke.

Now R. J. LaTour was feeling less intellectual and more . . . what was the word? More common! All the way to Plaquemine, he’d looked for the word. The more he dwelt on this new sensibility he was developing, the more he felt that if he could drive a U-Haul, why not an eighteen-wheeler? Then he’d escape Louisiana for weeks on end. R. J. LaTour, over-the-road trucker, would see every state in the union while Kitty ran the shop.

In Donaldsonville, the three men appeared in the rearview mirror when he made a wrong turn. Outside of town, they pulled up behind him. R. J. could see the driver of the smoking rust bucket of a car raise his hand to wave. “Nice of him doing that,” R. J. said, smiling.

A big chemical plant lay ahead. He could see towers, vent stacks, burning flares. Where he drove, there was nothing but fields, the woods back a way, and a road that wouldn’t be this well maintained if there weren’t something important here. The river flowed on the other side of the levee. It was early dark.

He’d seen only the one rust bucket in all this time. Its three passengers were laughing and pointing at him and the truck. Who’d be moving to this God-forsaken part of Louisiana? they must’ve been thinking. Then to see a strange-looking guy with a serious face driving that goofy orange, gray, and white-ass truck with whatever was inside!

R. J. was proud of the way he slowed when they signaled him, not jerking the truck as he downshifted. He wished he had a tin of chewing tobacco and a cap that read “Forget, Hell!” to warn them that, unlike many sophisticated people, he wasn’t to be fooled with.

“Where you goin’?” the youngest one asked, shining a flashlight on R. J. when he rolled down the window. He didn’t look over seventeen. “This ain’t no place for you.”

“I want to find out what kind of plant that is.”

The driver spoke this time. “The Dow plant ain’t for tourists or tourism.” He’d stayed in the car while the younger one, the one he called Malvin, looked at R. J. like he was something peculiar, something primitive, this guy in a white short-sleeved shirt. “You a manager at the plant?”

“I manage a store.”

“You see the Samuel L. Jackson movie where he asks a white boy if he reads the Bible?” Malvin said. He was so pale R. J. wondered if he could be seen in daylight.

Suddenly, a Black kid the other two called Fritchy and took orders from said, “I know the Bible.”

“Amen to you, Brother,” the driver said. “You can teach the driver of the U-Haul the goodness of the Book.”

“In the movie Pulp Fiction, Samuel L. Jackson says to this Brett guy before he shoots him, ‘And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.”

“Amen,” all three said.

“That’d be Ezekiel 25:17. He says he’s a store manager,” the driver said.

“He’s whiter than me,” Malvin said. “I bet he likes wearing women’s pannies like the fat boy does in Deliverance. Ask him can he manage to give us the keys to his truck.”

“No,” said Fritchy, “let the man drive himself if he’s so important. We’ll follow him.”

When R. J. started the truck, the U-Haul lurched forward. Though feeling lonesome and ornery, he managed to get hold of himself. The long, high embankment came closer. Overgrown with weeds and grass, it held in the river. The chemical plant lit the night with a strange whiteness. Everything was bright. Steam rose into the humid air. R. J. heard an intermittent clanging.

When the men, riding his bumper, turned the lights off and on to signal him to stop, the driver suggested R. J. enjoy some time by himself, walk down the road, go up on the levee, but leave the keys so they could see what was in the truck.

R. J. could hear railcars moving in the plant. The shell road at the top of the levee ran into the distance. On the slight breeze the river created, he smelled chemicals. Downriver, a tanker tied up on the opposite shore. It was hell in such heat, the brightness illuminating the plant, the levee, the river. It must upset the lives of people for miles. How could a person sleep with the lights of the plant coming into the room, the clanging of the railcars, the scalding steam hissing from pipes everywhere?

The men were driving the U-Haul in front of the rows of shacks that ran below the levee. Dogs barked. The brightness from the plant made everything stand out. That’s when he remembered the postcards. “The first statue,” “in grateful recognition of arduous and faithful service,” and other words of praise. Lenwood had left the postcards when he got out of the truck. In his haste to see what the men wanted, R. J. had left the cards on the seat. Fritchy would see them.

In the strange light, the truck went to each house. It looked as if Fritchy and the white boys were throwing bags of dog food to the owners. If R. J. ever made it home, he’d have the misspelled word on the postcard corrected. Better yet, he wouldn’t display the card again—neither that nor the Polish card and the Polish outhouse, that architectural wonder in all its glory. He wondered if Poles, DPs and their children, lived among the Black people in the row of houses. Maybe Malvin and the other one were Polish.

Forty dogs, forty houses. Done with the delivery, the driver left the U-Haul with emergency lights blinking off and on below the levee. At midnight, a whistle sounded. At 2:00 a.m., a screeching and grinding as a row of tank cars left the plant. All this time, R. J. stood on the levee. The dogs barked as if they were coming for him. At three, the tanker left, heading for the Gulf.

The river wound to New Orleans, Belle Chasse, Naomi, Port Sulphur, Venice, all the way to Pilot Town. Whenever he looked back, R. J. was blinded by the brightness from the plant. Wasn’t someone in the New Testament blinded? When he was growing up, R. J. had learned a lot in Sunday school. He remembered the story of Saul on the road to Damascus. Yessir, he thought, I’m like Saul come to divine light.

Too bad the youngsters weren’t up here on the levee to explain to R. J. how the light wouldn’t let them sleep when they were at home in bed. With the kids here, Fritchy, Malvin, and the one whose name sounded like Gregorsh or something else foreign or Polish, they could tell how their families had labored in the cane fields.

Maybe the three boys in the junk car were helping a stranger find his way on this night. Wasn’t it possible that being disburdened of the postcards, the dog food, and the gas that had been siphoned from the U-Haul, leaving R. J. stranded, was potentially good? Wasn’t Saul enlightened in his travels? Alone now with no one to help him, R. J. was being forced to learn a lesson about how to treat others, about what to sell in the gift shop, about dreaded Polacks and the limits of philosophy.

Certain matters came up. How would he get someone to come from Donaldsonville with a can of gas? How would he tell the Humane Society back home what’d happened or explain it all to Kitty? If Lenwood found out about this, R. J. would never live it down, Lenwood on the back porch laughing with his wife and four brats as he pointed to the lovely house of Mr. R. J. LaTour, who was robbed in the night by highwaymen.

When R. J. looked down, he saw his new friends coming from behind a house, Malvin with a jack and tire iron. Then a white man came to work on the U-Haul’s tires and front bumper, tearing them off. They were arduous, faithful workers even in the heat before the whistle blew and the night shift left the chemical plant.

The Penitent

This is Robert Bednarski, long-distance runner. If you can remember, send the gifts to our house. Among other things, heirloom tomatoes, a box of cucumber seeds, and a Polish Spirit clematis with a staked vine have arrived via UPS and FedEx. My uncle Frank even ordered a gift bag from a famous salt mine in Poland for Grandpa. In Grandma’s case, he forgot she’s on a restricted-salt diet and ordered salt-based cosmetics, including a regenerating cream with brine, which can’t be good for her blood pressure.

When my uncle’s busy at work, the delivery vans bring other gifts he’s ordered for my grandparents’ golden wedding anniversary. The salt is the main one for its healing properties. People the world over come to the Wieliczka Mine outside of Krakòw to breathe the underground air and to enjoy the salt baths. The website says a small linen pouch of Wieliczka salt costs 14,000 zlotys. I admit I was stupid to pour Frank’s gift into a pan of hot water in order to soak my ankle after a cross-country meet, but as a high school sophomore, I can be forgiven.

When Mother comes in, she says, “Your uncle bought that for Grandpa. What possessed you to do this, Robert?”

“l thought we could replace it.”

“That was rock salt, not table salt. You better get to confession. Tell Father you’ve stolen from your uncle.”

Because she’s disgusted with Frank, she calls him my “uncle” instead of his real name. Once when he was here with Aunt Rose before the breakup, a song played on the radio. When my aunt wasn’t looking, he pointed to her, flashed his big smile at me, and sang, “I can see joy and happiness. They’re everywhere I look.” Frank is funny. I idolize him. Every day he adds to the myth of his greatness.

When all this happens, it’s a Saturday in late October. Confession starts at four thirty.

I go to church in my running outfit, warm-up pants, a singlet, and a blue jacket with Spartans in white on the front. I’d pretended I was hurt today so people would cheer me on when I limped to the finish line. To compound my troubles, I have to face a priest from India. It’s hard to understand him. He says “avait” for “await” and says other things differently. Sometimes, it’s like he has ESP.

“Haf you lied? Haf you sworn falsely, Robert?” he asks.

“I lied about hurting my ankle, but I’m not like people that bear false witness against my uncle Frank.”

“That’s their problem. You shouldn’t haf dissolved the contents of the gift bag. Say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys.”

When he asks if I check my spiritual temperature, I tell him it’s low for many reasons, and he says the cold of sin can make a person a loser in the race of life. Hearing this, I feel awful. “Frank bought the gift bag for the anniversary celebration. Now he won’t be able to give it to Grandpa. I’ve wasted it on an ankle that wasn’t really sore.”

“If you want more penance, I’ll give you ten Our Fathers,” he says, until we hear parishioners wondering what’s taking us so long.

They stare at me as I leave. Outside, I run in place, do jumping jacks, then begin to look for my uncle.

Frank works at the sewage plant, also called the water treatment plant. After he prefaces it by saying “Other people’s shit is my business,” he’ll tell you anything you want to know about the place. One story concerns two ladies from church. “They were crying when they came to the plant,” Frank begins. “As she was brushing her teeth one morning, Agnes—I won’t say her last name—left her upper denture on top of the toilet tank. It fell in the toilet, which her sister then flushed. ‘Oh, no, Wanda!’ Agnes cried. We can’t process such objects. Thankfully, augers catch things like that. You don’t want to know the items we get at the shit plant.”

“Yes, I do, Uncle Frank,” I said.

“Twenty dentures a year might float in there. We rinse them off and leave them in the office for pickup. You’d think people would be ashamed to claim them. Agnes’s teeth traveled a long way through the sewer. When she saw them in the lost and found, she opened her mouth, put them in, and smiled. ‘Let’s go to Perkins for Belgian waffles,’ she said to her sister.”

Even Ma laughed.

When I get to the Midtown neighborhood of our fine city, I’ve run two miles. At Belknap and Catlin, struggling to breathe, I massage my side, then head to Tower Avenue. By this point, I’ve said the penance ten times that Father gave me. Because I’ve been recalling Frank’s stories, I’ve mixed up the Our Fathers and Hail Marys.

My parents would kill me if they knew where I was. People say Superior once had more taverns, which is hard to believe. Turning down Tower, I pass the Third Base Bar, the Capri, the Steel Toe Tavern. I see the Palace and the Anchor bars in the distance. Looking for my uncle, I turn down an alley off Twelfth Street. The back entrance to Mama’s Tavern hides in the late afternoon shadows. I’ve heard Frank talking about this place and the Eagle’s Club. Happy to be in the mythical land of Frank Bednarski, I pass Mama’s and have to turn around to where guys are outside smoking in the beer garden.

“Do you know my uncle Frank?”

“He’s inside,” they say, but I can’t make out the name of who he’s with.

It’s bright and noisy in there. Then I see Frank with a lady who looks like she used to be beautiful. She has soft skin and large eyes, but something doesn’t match up. Her hairdo’s old fashioned. The white blouse looks dingy. She’s fiddling with a pack of cigarettes. Putting down her glass of beer, she complains it’s his fault she didn’t bring her walker.

Customers are talking, music playing. The TV’s on. Nobody pays attention to what the lady is saying to Frank.

He looks older than when he’s at our house. The neon sign behind the bar brings out the gray in his hair. When he doesn’t shave, the dark whiskers make his face look pale. On a chalkboard, someone’s written, “Misty Kryzaniak! Big Winner! Monthly Dues Board Drawing.”

“Is this the place Ma says you always go to?”

“One of them.”

He looks embarrassed to be with someone who’s not my aunt.

“Did you win your race?”

“I got hurt. I’m fine. I ran here for penance. It’s like a journey to purgatory.”

“A journey to hell, you mean.”

The lady tugs his sleeve. “I’m tired of bar pizza. Get me something from a fancy place for once. You brag about being a big shot. Go to the Hammond Steak House. Bring back the cattleman’s cut with a potato and fresh garden salad for me.”

“He is important,” I tell her.

“Where’d you come from in that stupid outfit?” she asks. “I bet you didn’t come in first, heh.” When she says the “heh,” her jaw gets crooked and moves sideways.

“This is my girlfriend,” Frank says. “Her first name’s hard to say, so everyone calls her ‘Misty.’ She doesn’t get around like before she broke her hip.”

“Don’t forget the pork and beans,” she reminds Frank.

“I’m not buying her anything,” Frank says when we leave. “If she’s not satisfied with what I feed her, I’ll eat it myself. She can have a beer and a pickled pig’s foot at Mama’s. Misty changed when she slipped on the ice last spring. Tonight, she forgot her walker or left it home on purpose and took her cane. Sometimes she starts a fight with her husband to get out of the house. Her friend Lois drives her here so she can argue with someone. It don’t matter who. You’re young. You shouldn’t hear this. The closer you get to the waterfront the bars get worse.”

“The sign said your girlfriend’s a winner. How do you say her last name?”

“‘Sha-zha-nyak.’ She won when she found me.”

I jog ahead of him, then circle back. “Where we going?”

“To get her a supper.”

Though it’s still light, a neon sign blinks on at the place a half-block down the alley.

Inside is a stuffed eagle in a display case, wings spread. Beneath it, a sign reads Eagle’s Aerie Number 80. “Is this a bird sanctuary?”

“I suppose you could say the place has a split personality. I’m a member of the two clubs that meet here. The main one is the Eagle’s.”

In a room that has a kitchen and a few chairs scattered around long tables, he says, “Can you identify him?”

In the painting on the wall, a man rides a white horse. He raises his hand as if leading an army into battle. Maybe he was a founding member of the Eagle’s.

“He’s a Polish hero of the American Revolution. Kosciuszko,” he says. “I found the painting at the rummage sale where I got my girlfriend’s walker. We have our Polish Club meetings here. The Eagles host us because our own building on Winter Street closed when I was president. The ice machine broke, we needed a new roof, we weren’t getting the walk-in traffic at the bar, all kinds of things. In a closet on the other side of the bar we keep the Polish flag, the constitution and bylaws, the roll of drink tickets, all the necessary stuff. We don’t have many members now. The Eagles feel sorry for us.”

My uncle returns from the kitchen with Styrofoam boxes. “Where am I, the Eagle’s meeting room or the Polish Club’s meeting room?” he asks me.

In the bar a game is on TV. Some of the people have the haunted look they have at Mama’s. My uncle waits till no one’s watching us. Spread before us are sausages, a tray of hot beef, scalloped potatoes, buns.

“Shouldn’t we buy something first, Uncle Frank?”

“This is what a buffet’s about. Eat hearty. Have the lasagna.” As he looks over his shoulder, he says, “I have to remember the pork and beans.”

No place has free meals except the Salvation Army, I think.

“Look at the cheese.” Just as he’s reaching for a slice to put on his bratwurst, I feel his body stiffen. Someone behind us says, “Bed-nar-ski, buy a beer or no food! How many times do I need to catch you stealing from the Saturday buffet?”

“You’ve got an eagle eye. I’m a kleptomaniac, Gene.”

“No, you’re a dumbass. Your girlfriend too. Next time I’ll report you to the president of the Polish Club.”

“Watch what you say in front of my nephew.”

“You need to buy him a soft drink. Otherwise, no dice. We don’t offer carryout for you to bring to your girlfriend. You wanna eat, you buy a drink and keep buying them.”

Uncle Frank leaves the container he’d started filling. It weighs a ton. I add more to it. Frank is with the guys at the bar, telling them one thing or another. The louder he gets I figure the more Gene forgets me. As my uncle says, “You won’t believe what the augers bring in at the plant,” I head for the door, Gene yelling, “Get back here with that!”

Mrs. Kryzaniak can use the microwave at Mama’s to heat her food. I hope she won’t yell at me the way she does at Frank. When I look around for Gene, all I see is the sign: F.O.E. Fraternal Order of Eagles. I’m as alone as before I met my uncle.

Worn out, I realize I shouldn’t have come this far. It’s been a long journey. The run home will be longer. Before I go into Mama’s, I lay the Styrofoam container on the dumpster and stretch my hamstrings. The beer garden’s empty. Thinking of Father Rami and today’s confession, I pray for Frank, for Misty, for myself. But why should I pray for my uncle? I think. He was stealing and encouraging me to steal. Then it comes to me that sometimes you get trapped into things and maybe, if he was feeding the lame, it wasn’t a sin for him to take the food.

I’d run through the alley with the Styrofoam container like I was a hero, like Frank Bednarski must be a hero in his girlfriend’s eyes when he brings her meals. When I think that the two of them deserve prayer, I get confused over whether what he did was wrong considering that she’s recovering from hip surgery.

“I’m starved. Where’s the cattleman’s cut and the baked potato?” she asks.

When he comes in, she pokes Uncle Frank with her cane. “What’re you doing?” he asks, then asks me, “Where’s her meal?”

When I get the food from where I forgot it on the dumpster, he says, “You see how nice I treat her. It’s not like I haven’t spent a lot on beer here and at the Eagle’s. Now suddenly Gene can’t spare her and me a smoked sausage and some beans. I feel stupid. I get nothing for helping people, not even a thank you. Why do you poke me, heh?” he asks her.

“You don’t need penance, Uncle Frank. I do,” I say, remembering that most of a bag of rock salt from the famous mine has gone down the drain to the sewage treatment plant. What I’ve told him about needing penance more than him comes from my heart. I’ve lied about being hurt. I’ve soaked an ankle that wasn’t sore. I’ve been thinking that I’m superior to the patrons of Mama’s when I’m no better than the people in here and at the bird sanctuary. How can I judge others after I’ve paraded around like a big shot when I’m not just a loser in cross-country, but a loser in life?

The low clouds, the drizzle that will start later, if I give in to despair by thinking about these things, what prayer will be left for me? I promise myself to bring Gene money to pay for the stolen food. I promise to join the Eagle’s when I’m older. If Father Rami is still in America in the years to come, I’ll encourage him to be the club’s spiritual adviser.

When Frank and I see Misty content with a beer and her meal, he says, “Come on.”

He’s shaken by what we’ve done.

“How’re you going to run? What about your car?”

“I’ll leave it. Come on.”

He wears funny shoes. I can’t believe he can run in them. After a few blocks, he calls to me, “Wait up.”

We have three miles to go. Frank will never make it. Then around Eisenmann’s Auto Body, he gets a second wind.

“Did you run in high school, Uncle Frank?”

“I run to get away from problems. I’ve been embarrassing myself with Mrs. Kryzaniak. Everyone in Superior knows it. I’ll be thrown out of the Polish Club if I keep going out with her.”

Now I’m falling back. The ankle that wasn’t sore is becoming sore. You feed the hungry and that’s wrong. You love someone like he loves his girlfriend and I idolize Uncle Frank and that’s wrong. Nothing’s clear. He’s ahead of me when I realize he’s a better runner than I am. I can’t account for it. I can only account for myself. I don’t feel good about the food I stole or about the rock salt.

With him so far ahead that I barely see him, I start the penance anew. It’s become a penance in reverse consisting of a three-mile run home and the ten Our Fathers. After that I’ll pray the original three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys Father Rami gave me. Everything’s in reverse, which is good because I’ve run far enough and want to go home.

Back in the neighborhood, I think about the church my grandparents go to with us. When the bishop closed Saint Adalbert’s and other churches because of the shortage of priests, some of the Polish people joined Saint Francis. Now we have a priest from faraway Calcutta, now Kolkata, assisting Father Tobolski. Father Rami looks like he was a long-distance runner. Coming from India, what must he think of Wisconsin where there are many sinners, where Frank has left his girlfriend drinking at the bar, and where I’m losing the race of life because of sin?

The church is dark when I pass by. Before Father Rami says Mass tomorrow, the secretary will print off his sermon so it’s easier for us to understand him. There are always leftover copies of the sermon by the front door. More people should listen to or read along with it. Last week, he spoke about how we await Jesus. I remember these lines: “The danger is for many people to vait to the extent of forgetting the person they are vaiting for. Stay avake, therefore, because He is already at the door knocking.”

If I have to, I’ll stay awake tonight, tomorrow, and next week listening for the knock.

When I get home, my parents ask, “Where’ve you been? You have church in the morning. Get out of that outfit. Take a shower. Frank was here. How many miles did you go?”

“Not as many as Father Rami.”

I have a lot to think about. Maybe if I use the money I’ve saved since the start of school, I can fill the bag of rock salt from Wieliczka with a ten-dollar gift certificate to Eddie’s Supper Club and a fifteen-dollar gift card to Super One Foods. “Home of Better Choices. Lower Prices.” In addition to the little bit of salt that remains, Uncle Frank will have a present to give to his father. If I can add something more to the gift bag for Grandpa, then maybe Frank will forgive me, the last place finisher. Then God might forgive me.

Upstairs, I think of the runs I’ve taken, the things I’ve seen. I hear the ten o’clock news on the TV downstairs. Mrs. Kryzaniak is probably enjoying a cigarette in the beer garden as she waits for Uncle Frank’s return. By ten thirty, I drift off, then wake. In a sermon last week, Father Rami told us to await Jesus and listen for the knock on the door. When I’m this tired, it’s hard listening. I doze again, waking to think of Uncle Frank. He was running from both the family and me, running from everything.

At eleven when I hear a knock on the back door, I peek out and see someone in the dark. Father Rami was right. I’ve waited and here it is, the knock. Sore ankle and all, I limp down the stairs.

“Don’t open it! Don’t defy me, Robert,” Ma says, peering from the kitchen window at the darkness of the world but sensing it’s Frank again.

“It’s Jesus, Ma! I have to open it. I’ve been trying to stay awake for Him.”

“Then Jesus is with a woman,” she says.

“That can’t be.”

Disobeying her, I turn on the light over the back stoop. I think the Lord has come to our house. Wait till Father Rami hears!

Then I notice Aunt Rose looking in. Aunt Rose, Ròża of all people, dressed like I’ve never seen her, like she’s going dancing with Uncle Frank. He’s smiling that big smile like he’s happy that he’s through with Misty Kryzaniak poking him with her cane and saying “heh.” When he steps into the light from the back porch, he’s in the clothes he ran in. Nevertheless, he’s washed his face, combed his hair, and looks like a person who’s vanquished sin. Rose doesn’t seem to mind that he’s in the shoes he wears to the shit plant, the dancing shoes he’ll wear tonight.

This proves many things. One is that the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy are all around us, such as feeding the hungry, Mrs. Kryzaniak, and giving drink to the thirsty, Mrs. Kryzaniak. Another is that people can say what they want about Frank Bednarski, but there’s no denying that he has a way with the ladies, and that too is a gift from God.

Forget-Me-Not

It’s not unusual in Superior for fog and mist to blanket everything. On these days, it’s hard to see the ore docks and the King Midas flour mill. When people drive into the lowlands, they remark “It’s seventy-five degrees and sunny out where we live.”

A place situated below a range of hills on the shore of a great body of water must expect weather changes. Besides the water and air temperature, who knows what else influences a summer here—compressional heating? Pressure gradients? In the fog, Lily went to her boyfriend’s house on a matter of love.

Everything was wet with the mist. “Wait for him as long as you can,” she told herself, planning for a lonely summer without Pete Nowicki, whom she’d still have with her for a few hours today. Fall would be better. As a freshman at the college, she’d study with the intensity her neighbor studied music. With Theresa DeBruyne practicing her cello in the backyard, Lily promised herself to write Pete when he was gone. At ten o’clock when Theresa went in, she often cautioned Lily not to stay out much later. “After second shift, men from the ore dock walk by on the way to the tavern. At midnight, they come back this way to have a tin of sardines and another beer at home. If they see you, they’ll get ideas because you’re beautiful, Lily.”

If Pete and I were married, he wouldn’t eat sardines or drink, she thought. How handsome he was. He looks like a military officer, his mother said, which was fitting since the family had a portrait of his grandfather in uniform. The portrait hung on a living room wall above a lamp. The two squares on the front of the tunic collar had been tinted red by a photographer in the old country. The oil lamp Grandfather Andrzej brought to America had peonies painted on its globe. The swirls of pink and white were beautiful when the room was lit and the moon out. Lily wanted to find beauty in life the way Theresa studied it in music and Mrs. Nowicki sought and sometimes found it in the past. “Miłość karmi sie nadzieja—Hope keeps love alive.” Mrs. Nowicki would say, especially when she thought no one was home, although Lily and Pete were usually around somewhere in the house.

The two of them had many things in common. One was that nobody said their names right. Her last name, Liljeblad, was as difficult as Pete’s. They were the grandchildren of immigrants, Norwegians in Lily’s case, Lily with her light hair and fair skin. Last week, she’d graduated twentieth in the East High class of 1964, Pete seventy-first out of a hundred and two. In September, he would return on leave from basic training as a private in the Marine Corps.

Because their time would pass quickly, Lily hurried down the road that crosses the floodplain of the Left-Handed River. Besides houses and buildings, Superior’s neighborhoods are mainly fields, woods, and swamps. In her Allouez neighborhood and in the East End, trains climb earthen inclines onto the docks. You can hear iron ore roar down the chutes into the holds of boats that transport the ore to steel plants in East Chicago and Gary. Night and day, boats and tugs whistled in the harbor.

After crossing the so-called “singing bridge,” where car and truck tires make a low drone like a lament, Lily had a half-mile to go.

At Pete’s house, they sat in the living room, Pete telling her she’d be proud of him. Imagining himself in uniform, he saluted his reflection in the mirror.

“Are you hungry?” called his mother.

“No, Ma,” he said.

“You, Lily?”

“No, Mrs. Nowicki.”

They played songs on the hi-fi. When they danced to a slow one, she asked, “How should I feel when you’re gone?”

“Feel like you always do. Why change?”

“I’ll be alone. I won’t have you, Pete.”

“I’m doing something great. Don’t you see?”

“Who’s more important than your Lily, though?”

When the light changed in the waning hours of the recruit’s last day home, Lily and Pete could have shaped and planned many things; however, they didn’t and Lily was heartbroken. Pete had often disappointed her. One night with his mother gone out and his father at a meeting, they’d been careless and she was crying. As she worried about what they’d done, Pete asked, “What are you crying for?” but he didn’t comfort or hold her.

Now he asked, “What rank comes after private?”

“Private first class.”

“Yup. I’ll soon be PFC Nowicki. Then Lance Corporal Nowicki.”

After his mother hugged them and said goodbye to Lily, they walked toward the neighborhood where the men of the Great Northern ate sardines and Theresa played her music. “Don’t include anything in your letters to me. No gum or anything. If the drill instructors find it, I’m in trouble.” More and more, Pete sounded like someone she didn’t know. When he came to from his rambling, he realized this was the closest he’d been to leaving. “I can’t walk all the way. I have to get going.”

“Why can’t we stay out?”

“Not tonight,” he said.

The distance between them had grown when they looked back to wave. On the way home from where he’d left her by the Jorgensons’ house, she wondered whether Pete would associate her with the mist and fog, whether he’d think of her when he was away.

A few days later, something curious happened: the summer turned into one of the nicest ever.

In early August, she enclosed with her letter a photo of a small blue flower that looks enchanting on the hillsides of the Left-Handed River. “It’s funny what I remember,” she wrote. “The last day you were here, June 6, I hurried to your place. You were getting ready to pack. I remember the records you played, the way your mother worried about us being hungry. I was so nervous I couldn’t have eaten anything. From that day on, you were gone and I was lost.

“A few weeks later, I went for a walk when somebody from school stopped his car to ask what I was doing. It was because of you that I looked sad all the time. By then, it must’ve been the twentieth of June. Everything was green and lush. You know how blue the lake gets in summer. I told him I was waiting for you when he asked if he could see me some night. He called to ask again. Another time, I went for a walk, and he must have read my mind because he drove past. I still hadn’t heard from you. He said he’d like to take me to a movie. I hated what I was doing, but I said yes.

“Look at the forget-me-not. When you’re home on leave or out of the service, try to recall the memories of your last day with me. If you lose interest, then at least you’ll know how things bloomed here one summer. Forget-me-not, Pete.

Love Always,

Your Lily”

Theresa was surprised that Lily’d written so much. When the second shift ended on the ore docks and the taverns were booming on Second Street, the neighborhood houses were dark for once, but Theresa saw the light on in Lily’s bedroom. Lily was thinking of Mrs. Nowicki waiting for her husband to come from the flour mill, Mrs. Nowicki whispering, “Hope keeps love alive.” If their letters reached Pete on the same day in San Diego, Lily wondered which he’d open first, his mother’s or hers? Lily had written about hope in her diary, written about it in the letters she’d sent to Pete, who’d replied only once in two months.

It began to rain the time she went out with the boy with the romantic name. “It’s Dan Chance,” he’d say when he called. When he asked her to go places, she asked her mother what she should do. When Lily said, “I don’t ever hear from Pete anymore,” Mrs. Liljeblad tried to understand how she felt.

“It’s hard for him being away,” she said. She also knew things had been difficult for her daughter.

In time, Lily, after much worry, threw away her diary. In the back of a desk drawer, she put Pete’s letter and the newspaper article about his enlisting. She returned various items to Pete’s mother, such as his certificate for being named all-city in basketball. She’d done these honorable things before sending her last letter.

These evenings without her son were difficult for Mrs. Nowicki. Nevertheless, on the August night before the news reached Pete about Lily leaving him for the Chance boy, Mrs. Nowicki felt blessed to have a nice house with a garden, a loving husband, and only a few worries.

In the yard in Allouez, Lily whispered to Pete as though he were there, “I’m half the country away. Tonight is so beautiful in Superior. It’s like it’s filled with gentle promises, Pete, and I love everything that’s happening. I want the night to last forever, but Mother’s calling me, saying ‘It’s ten o’clock,’ and you’re not here and except for that one time, you haven’t written me all summer. What is there to do now but listen to Theresa practicing ‘Autumn’?

“When I go in, I’ll tell Mother that Dan is working nights. On Saturday, he’s taking me to the Stardust Drive-In”—the last words being the ones that signaled the end of the affair.

Think of what happens to a young man like this, a man, I should add, with a secret clearance. It’s important to record what can be recorded about him. Perhaps there should be more space between the first part of this story and the second. Instead of words, white spaces to represent confusion and disorientation, the buried secrets, the things that can’t be told about war.

The Polish corporal with his broken heart returned to Superior on a foggy afternoon in 1968. He’d saved her letters, including the one that came when the platoon was at the rifle range. He was so upset when he’d seen the forget-me-not and gotten the news that he’d barely qualified with the M-14. Platoon 146 was the last to proceed through the range before the Department of Defense closed it. Almost half a century of Marine Corps history, and Camp Matthews was gone like Lily. Blame Pete Nowicki for his carelessness in love.

After his time at Camp Pendleton and the tours in Vietnam, he was upstairs in his room finishing a book. Disoriented, he’d get up from the desk to look for himself on the map he’d unfolded on the bed. He sought some latitude and longitude, you might say, to determine who he’d been for the past four years.

The only thing his mother could tell him was that one day Lily’d returned ticket stubs from a concert they’d attended. She’d returned a program from the senior-year concert and pictures of Pete on the basketball court. After four years, he wasn’t sure any of it mattered. In the fall he’d receive the G. I. Bill and figure out what to do next.

There are three ways to her house. After hurrying over an area called “The Fill,” then hiding behind an old railroad shed abandoned on the edge of the woods by the ore dock, he’d watch Mrs. Liljeblad bring in the mail, including letters Pete would send. Meanwhile, the mailman had delivered to the Nowickis a map from the Clarkson Company of Kaukauna, Wisconsin.

On the map were creeks and rivers, a flour mill, a refinery. In the East End, the Northern Pacific water tower and Saint Adalbert’s church were denoted by the letters WT and a steeple and cross, respectively. A little north of the church and the Polish school, Lake Superior dropped twenty feet, forty-seven feet, seventy-eight feet, one hundred feet . . . The houses in Allouez were dots. Lily’s stood on a corner. With his father’s magnifying glass, Pete magnified what was no longer there for him.

The closer the contour lines, the steeper a hill or valley on a topographical map. The Left-Handed River falls slowly between where it enters the town and the bay in the East End. As the crow flies, it’s eight or nine miles to the river’s mouth, then to Lake Superior. However, the river’s overgrown banks first wind miles through the forest.

In Vietnam, he’d picked up messages at the Da Nang Air Base and brought them to the major and the executive officer at the outpost several miles away. Secret messages were marked in red at the top, confidential messages in green. When helicopters brought classified material to their outpost, Pete ran under the blades to retrieve the leather bag from the door gunner. Now he’d go over secrets such as how he’d treated Lily, how he was unkind on their last night, how the next morning he’d taken the Greyhound to Minneapolis where the government put him and other recruits up in an old hotel, given them meal money, and, after their physicals and swearing in at the Grain Exchange Building, directed them to a plane at the airport that left the next evening. There was also the matter of the letter writing. Pete was vigilant about what he said or did.

When he walked alone on the Ninth Street trestle, he thought about how watchful, how vigilant, the holder of a secret clearance must be. The half-mile-long trestle crosses the floodplain. From there, he could see downriver to the singing bridge. Halfway across, he remembered Lily not wanting to see him when he was home on leave. On one of the afternoons when he was in Vietnam, an afternoon before the Buddhist uprisings shut everything down, he and his buddies had had liberty in Da Nang. Pete didn’t go drinking with them. He went to Mass, the lonely Westerner in the Catholic church. The nuns of Saint Adalbert’s would be proud.

He thought of the clipping his parents had sent from the Evening Telegram, July 2, 1965: “Communist guerrillas made a surprise attack on the strategic Da Nang Air Base in darkness early today, killing one American and destroying or damaging six planes. Several other Americans were wounded in the strike on this springboard for US raids on the Viet Cong and Communist North Vietnam.” Mortar rounds had fallen everywhere. Things had gone to hell. First, the war news he’d experienced firsthand on July 2, then a few weeks later, a newspaper clipping from Superior announcing the Chance-Liljeblad engagement. Six months later, the Telegram reported that the former Miss Lily Liljeblad was now Mrs. Chance.

On the Chicago and Northwestern trestle, the railing and the boards of the catwalk are warped, the creosote worn off. Sometimes by Lily’s house he heard the neighbor playing the cello. He waited for Lily to visit her parents. At home when he sought himself on the map, memories came in flashes, bursts of enemy fire. Captain Nicoli said that when a bar of soap got too small to use, we were to save it to give to the Vietnamese orphanage a few miles away. We’d pacify the country if we could give them enough soap chips. It was crazy. He couldn’t stop thinking. More flashes, tracer rounds from an M-14. We guarded the ammo dump at Monkey Mountain. This guy went for a swim. Not sure how clean the water was, no one washed or swam there but Lenny. He said he was attacked at night by someone underwater. No one believed the BS-er, but he had small cuts on his arms and received a Purple Heart.

When Pete heard a train whistle, he’d hurry off the trestle, as if someone were chasing him the way Lenny was chased by the swimmer in the river. Later, his father gave Pete the car keys. “Why do you want to go back to Allouez after four years?” Mr. Nowicki asked.

“I want to wash the car at Pank’s Car Wash for you,” Pete said.

It’s important to maintain secrecy in this report. Houses stand on the avenue where Pete left the car. The houses, some of them, were partly hidden by woods. From there, you can see the Left-Handed River make sweeping turns on its way to the bay. A dirt path leads to the trestle on the Allouez side. The hillside below was filled with forget-me-nots he waded through. It was warm out. Now in July after his discharge from the Marine Corps, he remembered Lily even more vividly, remembered Vietnam, the orphanage, McGuire, Helton, Pugh, Fidazzo, Raymond, Lieutenant Schirra, the rest of the guys in the company. He remembered the Mass in French celebrated by a Vietnamese priest. Forget-me-not.

The weather in ’Nam had grown mild in the fall. Word had gotten out that Robinson, a Navy corpsman, was giving haircuts. He liked cutting hair. Men lined up. When Robinson threw back the sheet that had covered one man, the next took his place.

Pete wanted Robinson, “Robby,” to like him more than he liked the others. Those fall nights after the haircuts someone made his way into the strongback tent. Pete didn’t know who it was. Lifting the mosquito nets at 2400 hours, the corpsman ran his hands over the men. When Pete was the one who needed this, the other marines slept through the gentle touches of the interloper. “Lily! Lily!” Pete remembered thinking, though this was in dreams later. How lonely he’d been with no word from her except what she’d confessed about her summer nights.

This story is like the Left-Handed River flowing through a forest that in summer is as dense as a jungle. Before he was caught, Robinson returned stealthily to the strongback tent. One of those nights, Pete was on guard duty. The officer of the day had checked on him and the other sentries. Miles off, a firefight had begun.

“I will walk my post in a military manner,” Pete whispered when he saw someone in the dark. Robinson knew the password. “Shh—come with me,” the corpsman said, leading him away as if he had something very important, very secret, to tell him. In an empty tent, he held the private, Pete encouraging this. As Robinson unbuttoned his utility shirt, Pete whispered about his girl. “Shh . . .” said the corpsman. It was autumn. East would have a game. Everyone would go to the café afterward, except now Pete was out of high school.

One night, Lance Corporal Butler stayed awake long enough to signal the lieutenant that the interloper had returned—a Navy corpsman. Placed under guard for three days, Robinson was returned to the States to face a court-martial. He must not have said anything because nobody questioned Pete Nowicki, nobody questioned anyone. Pete didn’t want to remember, but he could smell the canvas, hear the firefight in the distance, hear the war, hear the country burning. Things were mixed up. Sometimes, a person can be awake and asleep. There was a guy in the outfit who slept with his eyes open. That late September and early October in Vietnam, Pete had kept his eyes closed. Surely, it was Lily. They’d gone where the outfit stored communications gear, Lily taking his hand. In the tent were PRC-6 radios (Prick Sixes), antennas, EE-8 field telephones, switchboards, other gear, all the devices men communicated with in war back then.

“Lily, is that you?”

“Yes,” the corpsman had whispered when he’d kissed Pete.

A wildflower book says the “Menominee Indians burned the leaves of the sweet everlasting. They used the smoke to revive people from fainting spells and to discourage ghosts that caused bad dreams,” dreams such as Pete was having.

Up on the trestle, he thought about throwing away her letters. He wanted the fourteen letters from a past summer to be carried off on the wind. “Dear Pete.” “I miss you.” “I love you.” “I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

Then he decided to keep them. He’d read the letters he’d brought with him as he walked up the tracks to where he’d never been. He would walk an hour, maybe two. He’d discover a country where wildflowers such as the red baneberry, yellow violet, and white campion grow. There would be forget-me-nots. These would combine with memories of a platoon outside of Da Nang, Vietnam, a platoon at Monkey Mountain first, then moved south to near Division Ridge. The men in the platoon were Captain Nicoli, Lieutenant Schirra, Helton, McGuire, Butler, Fidazzo, Raymond, and many others. It was all a secret what had happened to them over there, all a top secret he’d kept, and now Pete was home in Superior and Lily was Mrs. Dan Chance forever.

A World of Accordions

In spring in the house of purple bouquets, my father played “Pożegnanie Ojczyzny—Farewell to My Country” on his accordion. The stirring melody expresses the romantic character of Polish people. When the Nazis invaded on September 1, 1939, the Polish state radio played a polonaise before going off the air. Certain Polish currency has the opening bars of a polonaise on one side, a picture of Chopin on the other.

My father played the melody by heart as I play back (by heart) this memory to you. You can hear an orchestra play the polonaise if you Google “Mikhail Pletnev conducts Ogiński polonaise . . . Live 2011.” Now I ensure my father’s memory by telling you an old story in the modern age.

Though I can’t feel its sentiment as deeply as he did, Ogiński’s polonaise haunts me as it did my father. He’d come from Poland, somewhere around Augustów, and never returned. On the other hand, I’ve never left this country. In fact, I’ve hardly left this port city in northwestern Wisconsin.

With my parents gone, my wife and I live in my childhood home. We bring in marsh marigolds, lilacs, and peonies like before. Other people in the city remember their past—Finns, Norwegians, Swedes, Irish and Italians, Belgians, Serbs, Native people.

A few years ago, Christina and I watched a program about the interwar years when Poland was free from foreign domination. Following discussions of the cultural, political, and social life of the nation, discussions of Piłsudski’s politics, of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the program turned to the hours before the war. After a charge of lancers, the last footage is from a 1928 movie based on the Polish epic poem by Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz. It shows noblemen and women dancing—stately, haunting music for grand, romantic gestures.

The music plays again at the end when you see the people who’ve been interviewed during the hour, a peasant, a soldier, a poet, a nurse, Polish Jews and gentiles now silent. Only noble faces on a screen, no words from them this time. My grandparents’ faces could have been among theirs. When the credits start, you see who composed the lovely polonaise I’d forgotten over the years when my wife and I were raising a family and starting our insurance agency. Now I underwrite this policy of dreams.

When I hear “Farewell to My Country,” I long for what’s left behind. Years ago, our church closed, then was razed by order of Bishop Hammes. “A shortage of priests,” his excellency explained before closing another Polish church and Saints Cyril and Methodius, the Slovak parish in Superior. Other changes have come to us: the deaths of Adam Zimski and Joseph Bluebird, two quiet men from the flour mill, the deaths of Walter Wozniak, Grandmother and Grandfather Bednarski, and the others I’ve insured. Other changes. Other news, good and bad.

An older man myself, I’ve insured so much—the hotel, the inn, the warehouses on the waterfront. My business represents the companies that really do the insuring. Not surprisingly, I list among my accounts the World of Accordions Museum, which has the largest collection of accordions under one roof in the world. To insure each instrument, the owner, Mrs. Harrington, would need a specialty policy. Who could afford to insure thirteen hundred accordions, “the Magnificent 1,300?” But at least I insure the building that houses them.

This brings me to the man I saw by the grain elevator in the North End. American, Canadian, and foreign vessels put into the grain terminals on the waterfront. Flags of many countries fly in Superior, Wisconsin. I’ve been aboard the Regina Oldendorff and other “salties.”

When these vessels take on grain, large chutes lower from the elevators. Longshoremen direct the grain into the holds. Grain trimmers with scoops and rakes smooth the piles. As the work proceeds, amber dust rises from the holds until, finally, the hour of departure.

Let’s say it’s a Polish ship at the elevator. Why not the Ziemia Białostocka? I am, after all, your Polish insurer. A white eagle decorates the bow, then the deck with its king posts, cargo booms, and hatch covers. Aft on the great hull is the white superstructure, on the fantail the ship’s name and port of registry, Gdańsk. I stand below the vessel in the shadow of the grain silos when the tugs appear and the gangway is hauled up prior to her departure.

It’s a perfect evening for the man on the pier and me. We’ve parked our cars at the end. From nearly a block away, the faint melody he plays echoes from the grain terminal and over the dust-covered water. Neither of us can be insured against the departure of the Ziemia Białostocka for the old country.

When the vessel turns toward the lake, the evening shadows lengthen. How can the sailors hear over the sounds of the tugs’ engines and the banging of the hatch covers? The musician looks as though he has nowhere to go. He’s come to perform for a ship underway.

When he sees me, I say, “Count Ogiński.”

“How do you know his name?”

“My father played ‘Farewell to My Country,’” I tell him, pretending to hold my father’s accordion. “Ojciec.”

“Yes, that’s father in Polish.”

I tell him that my father’s name is Adalbert, my mother’s Janina, that by being here I’m insuring the past. I’m using my dreams as an insurance policy. “Why do you come here?” I ask.

He tells me he’s alone, that he’d lived in Louisiana in the 1950s, in Chicago and Pittsburgh in the sixties before coming here, and that now he’s too old to return to Poland. “Prozdkowie, ancestors,” he says, shaking his head.

There must be someone for him to talk to and not have to come here alone, I think. Relating it makes me sad. I imagine he plays “Farewell to My Country” until the Ziemia Białostocka is out of the harbor and bound for the lower lakes.

Then he must go to a second-floor room on Tower Avenue in the depressed lower quarter of town. Maybe he drinks coffee as he thinks about the ship or other Polish vessels, the Pomorze Zachodnie or the Ziemia Gńieznieńska, say. I’m speculating about this, as though in time I’ll insure him too. Maybe the walls in his room above the Harbor Tavern or above Tyomies, the old Finnish newspaper building, are decorated with pictures of vessels of the Polish Steamship Company. Now in the upstairs room, there’s probably secondhand furniture. He’d hear the drinkers in the bar downstairs, the food frying on a grill.

It’s the loneliness of Superior, of the music played in the bars on Tower, and in A World of Accordions that I, Mr. Murawski, want to insure. Think of the accordions in the museum at the corner of Belknap Street and Hammond Avenue, “the Magnificent 1,300,” the brochure calls them. Think of those who help Mrs. Harrington: the man who repairs the instruments, the women who dust the place. Think of Mrs. Harrington, who’s done so much for Superior.

In my dream policy, I’m insuring them, insuring all the sheet music, the gifts in the gift shop, the books in the museum’s library, the silence on the Hanni Strahl Concert Stage and in the hall at midnight when no one’s in the World of Accordions. I’ve given my father’s accordion to the museum. I’ve donated Charles Kiel’s Polka Happiness to the well-stocked library. I even insure an item a poor lady named Johanna from town left in the museum. I’ve read the sentence in the diary where she confesses that she’s lonely.

As alone as the accordionist must be, I should tell him to come to A World of Accordions a mile from the docks. Open Saturdays 10:00–3:00 p.m., Sundays 3:00–6:00, Mondays 10:00–6:00. If I see him down there when another Polish ship puts in, I’ll tell him about the diary of the lonely woman. Perhaps they can meet.

I have a wife, two children. Still, I too miss something, ancestors. I think of those in whose names I’ve taken out policies, the Liljeblad family, the Nowicki family, the bakery man Leo Kosmatka, who, once a month, brings bread to my office when he stops to visit. All my generous clients. I think of myself, Anton Murawski, who has nowhere to go tonight now that the Ziemia Białostocka is downbound for the lower lakes.

Mrs. Harrington has asked me to return the diary to the Superior resident who left it here, perhaps on purpose, a month ago. In the note, I’ll write, “Please visit us again, dear Johanna.”

In so doing, I’ll reserve for her a place in my dreams too, a policy from the Murawski Agency of Superior, Wisconsin.

The Beauty of Desire

Sunday

Desiree LeBlanc grew hoarse berating the housekeeper. “When I want something, evil gets into her,” she told us. “Making my bed, it’s pull this, yank that—while I’m still in it!”

“Nobody has housekeepers up north, at least not like Ula,” I said to my loving wife.

“Agreed,” she replied, hand over her nose to dull the smell in the room.

Over her nose, Urszula, Ula, placed a makeshift breathing apparatus of gold string and scented tissues. Wearing an LSU Tigers football helmet, she said, “Hut! Hut!” as she yanked another helmet, this one with a fleur-de-lis on it, over Miss LeBlanc’s head. As the helmet squashed the old woman’s curls, she broke out in the New Orleans Saints’ fans’ rallying cry, “Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?” Hearing this, the embarrassed housekeeper lowered her head and said, “Game Day!”

How had we gotten mixed up in this? Though the apartment building had seen better days, Gail thought the visits enhanced our social standing. “Oh, no,” she’d say when I told her I had a lecture to prepare for my history class, “we can’t miss three hours with Miss LeBlanc.” And so, there we sat, the old woman in bed in her football helmet and dressing gown regaling us with tales of the rich and famous. Sitting in fold-up chairs, we heard about Jean Harlowe and Hedda Hopper. Hemingway’s name came up and Lauritz Melchior’s, who’d serenaded Miss Desiree in Copenhagen with “You Are My Heart’s Delight.” She’d even met Zasu Pitts.

At such moments, she was beautiful; it was springtime; she was in love in Amsterdam or Paris. Sometimes Miss Desiree became so excited that the housekeeper had to break out the Depends for her.

Though Gail and I struggled for air, I was interested in the old woman’s view of what brought so many Poles to Louisiana. I carried Heberle and Hall’s The Displaced Persons in Louisiana and Mississippi everywhere. Studying the famous monograph, I’d learned that refugee families, DPs, had lived in leaky, bug-infested shacks in Saint Landry, Iberville, Plaquemines, Assumption, and other cane-growing parishes. In plantation stores, a can of sardines and a block of cheese cost a dollar fifty, a small table twelve dollars, a metal bed twenty-five. Wanting a personal view of Louisiana’s DP problem, I was happy to have found Miss Desiree.

“When the Poles got placed with different families, how did President Truman learn about the trouble? It says here, ‘Many Eastern European DPs were brought to plantations. There would be no experience corresponding to that which was in store for them in the South.’”

“The priests started snooping,” Desiree said. “In 1951, there were probably three hundred DPs west of Baton Rouge and down along the River Road. The women washed clothes, cooked, baked. The men worked the fields. In rainy weather, a week’s salary came to eleven dollars or so. I didn’t understand a word of their talk. It was the worst gibberish. President Truman appointed a commission to investigate the Louisiana Resettlement Program. During that time, I was home from New York visiting, but I planned to go right up to Washington, DC, to talk to that Harry Rosenfield fellow and tell the Displaced Persons Commission that nobody got harmed on our place.”

“That’s not what the monograph says. In some places, a lot of harm was done.”

“Throw the monograph out. I tell you we treated ours right. The Polish were hard workers. I guess I don’t blame them if they complained about living here. The planting season goes from mid-September to mid-October, the cultivating season from February to July, the idle season when the crop’s been laid by, from July to early September, and the cutting and grinding season from September to December.”

After I, Joe Wheeler, proud Wisconsinite, took notes for the speech I was preparing for the town historical society, the rest of the visits followed the old lady’s whims. Now that most of her friends had passed away or stopped visiting, Desiree was happy that Gail and I came over on Sundays. Miss Russell had died, Dorothy Wheat was in failing health, the DeBlieux and Hatchey girls were no longer as charming as Desiree LeBlanc once thought. The last-named mesdames couldn’t stand the stench in Cane Garden Apartments any more than we could. It was awful. On the other hand, one of the oldest Saints fans in Natchitoches Parish had been the belle of Plaquemines Parish. Under that blanket lay a sophisticated woman whose company was worth cultivating.

With Desiree’s friends abandoning her, Gail saw the chance to get ahead if the old woman recommended us to the few ladies left in her circle. She was flattered that our daughter, an LSU freshman, visited Cane Gardens. As recently as the week before, Tissandra, “Pretty is as pretty does,” had said, “Yes, ma’am, no, ma’am” so often that her eyes glazed and her head nodded forward. When Gail nudged her to wake her up, Tissy knocked the lamp off the table.

As clumsy as Tissy was, Desiree was gracious about the lamp. After all, our daughter brought a breath of fresh air. When the Polish woman, Ula, irritated her, however, Desiree’s eyes darkened. The plastic flower in her hair drooped, making her appear like a Busby Berkeley dancer after a demanding rehearsal. The old woman thought the housekeeper was hurting her for how the DPs had been treated.

To get her mind off Ula, I’d say, “Tell us about the South in the days before the DPs.”

Desiree would run her hand over the copies of Southern Living on the bed. “All the old houses faced one direction. When I was twenty, I had Papa build me a studio for books and things. Smaller than this room, it stood among the pecan trees. ‘What’s the idea of having it back there, Miss Desiree?’ the young people asked. ‘Is it because you don’t want to see the levee?’ Everybody wanted to know and to hear about Miss Desiree LeBlanc. Everybody.”

“Judging from the pictures on her dresser, she was a beauty, a willowy blonde with lovely green eyes. Look at her now,” Gail said when we were out of there, “wrinkled up like that. Do you suppose the poor thing ever married?”

“Beauty doesn’t need to marry. I’m just glad I found you,” I told my wife, wondering whether Gail and I should escape hurricane country. If we did, we’d face the endless northern winters. Then two days ago, thinking my wife’s drinking would embarrass her, our daughter forbade us from attending the Miss Louisiana pageant. If Gail and I were there, Tissy feared my wife would explode in one of her rages if our daughter didn’t win the crown. We thought of her as we drove along Front Street where her picture hung in storefront windows. A life-sized cutout of Tissy stood in the Ford dealership. There it was again at Popeye’s Fried Chicken, the cutout of Tissy.

“Pour me a drink, Joe,” Gail said when we got home.

The Treatise on Love

Here I am up close: Joe Wheeler, associate professor, Department of History, Northwestern State University of Louisiana. I have a PhD from the University of Minnesota, a BA from UW–Eau Claire. I could write a monograph about love. “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast.” I could be a therapist of love.

Whereas every time we visit Cane Gardens, Desiree recalls the Champs-Élysées and the walks with her lovers along the Seine, Gail and I have memories of weekend getaways to Duluth, of shopping the Miller Hill Mall, of the sea smoke on Lake Superior, the DM&IR ore docks, smoked fish at Russ Kendall’s Fish House. Whereas Desiree has the Seven Hills of Rome, Gail and I have the Foshay Tower in downtown Minneapolis to remember, the smells from the Farmers Market in Saint Paul. Oh, to be in love in the largest metropolitan area in the Upper Midwest. Gail was as beautiful as Miss Desiree once was. We loved each other in Eau Claire and Minneapolis-Saint Paul. Then Tissy arrived, graduate school wore on me, and Gail began drinking and never stopped.

In addition to being the parents of a beauty queen, we’re royalty in the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase. At school, I advise the Future Teachers’ Club and Mortarboard Society. All of this is wonderful, but love is wonderful too. Without it—and Gail’s done with love—I might eat myself up to 250 pounds. To worsen matters regarding food, Gail, who tells everyone she has a BA from Oberlin when in fact she earned a two-year degree in accounting from a third-rate business school in Wadena, Minnesota, is a member of the town’s Service League. The league publishes the cookbook to which my wife contributed a recipe. Ever since its publication, we’ve had Gail’s bean soup four nights a week.

Someday I’ll submit this account of love to the Service League. For the time being, I’m satisfied to have published my entry on meat pies. When I put in for promotion to full professor, Gail wants me to include the meat pie recipe on my curriculum vitae. The toothsome pie’s savory filling consists of ground beef and pork, onions, cayenne pepper, and coarse-ground red pepper all folded into a floury crust and deep-fried. When Gail is drinking and complaining about me and Tissy, meat pies calm me. These days I’m eating my way through the cookbook’s dessert section. Having made and tried Mrs. Wintle’s lemon curd tarts, trifle pudding, peach melba, and southern ambrosia, my new favorite is apricot dainties. I can no longer buy pants whose Sansabelt waist fits. The last time I shopped, a sales associate told me the style of dress trouser I like doesn’t come in my new size.

I’m well-rounded in many ways. In addition to my academic position, I’m important in the historical society. At present, we’re not in the news as much as Tissy, who’s Miss Natchitoches Meat Pie and today is at the state beauty pageant. No doubt she’s being squired around Monroe with the other contestants in white stretch limousines. The Alexandria Town Talk, the Natchitoches Times, and the Shreveport Times have written about Tissy. After hearing “Don’t Mess with My Toot-Toot,” a song by Rockin’ Sidney I’d forgotten, I call her “my Toot-Toot.”

In addition to the late hours she keeps and Toot-Toot’s vanity, she gets smart-mouthed with Gail and me. Ula Sczypanska sometimes gets that way with the imperious Desiree.

“The old lady shouldn’t talk to her housekeeper like that in the first place,” Gail says. After a couple more drinks, she sings “Min-ne-sota, hats off to thee! To thy colors true we will ever be. Rah! Rah! Rah! for Ski-U-Mah!”

When she’s plowed and telling me “Let the good times roll,” we march to “On, Wisconsin,” the state where I and many of Gail’s relatives are from. If the mood changes, I quote Wilfred Owens’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” about gas warfare during World War I.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—an ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time . . .

Pretending she’s in a trench, Gail heeds the warning. She fits the mask over her blotchy face—the mask that is the hand that serves her well at Desiree’s. “Quit that constant snacking,” she mumbles through it.

“Quit your drinking night and day,” I tell her, then go back to what I was doing. How delightful, apricot dainties! Mrs. G. F. Thomas Jr.’s recipe in Cane River Cuisine reads, “Put apricots, coconut, and pecans through a food chopper. Add condensed milk and rum. Shape into tiny balls. Roll in powdered sugar. Yield: about 4 dozen.”

Midweek

By the time we talk to the housekeeper, things have taken an awful turn. When Ula answers the phone out of breath from bouncing on the trampoline, she whispers that the old woman’s gone crazy. “Are you alone, Urszula? Are you wearing your helmet and gas mask?” Gail asks, motioning to me for a Scotch. “‘Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!’”

“Miz LeBlanc is here. I’ll give her the phone.”

Rolling her eyes, my wife listens to the wound-up old woman.

“The poor dear suffers so. Sometimes I have to side with her,” Gail tells me when she hangs up. “I wonder if the housekeeper does have it in for her. The things I’ve seen Ula do that aren’t right.”

Making a welfare call, Gail asks, “What are you doing?” when we walk in to catch the housekeeper stirring black pepper into a glass of milk.

“She’s crazy having me bounce. When we exercise on the trampoline, she calls me ‘DP.’ I was born in America.”

I’d glimpsed the mysterious trampoline in the next room. It was nuts, a trampoline in the apartment of an eighty-something-year-old woman. At first, I wondered whether my eyesight was going, whether I’d only imagined seeing it. Ula must’ve known I thought of her climbing onto the mesh jumping pad.

Though ten years Toot-Toot’s senior, Ula could have entered the Miss Louisiana competition if she had the right connections. Funny to think that I, Professor Wheeler, can still feel desire for a woman. I wonder how centuries of war and toil have led to there being such a beauty as Ula Sczypanska. She wears her hair in a bun, has blue eyes, high cheekbones. Her sweet red lips form mysterious words. In a phrase book from the Watson Library on campus, I look up może, proszę, other words with diacritical marks. Poland must be filled with beautiful women. What is Gail but a drunk who complains when Maggio’s Drive-Up Liquor is closed? I’m afraid of my wife’s temper.

From the bedroom, Desiree cries, “Ula, I need Oo-a!”

When Ula puts the sandwich and glass of milk on the bedside table, the old woman, face flushed, says, “This is wrong. The cheese is moldy. What are the specks in my milk?”

Throwing her arms about the housekeeper, Desiree says, “Don’t pull like that! Lift me!” With the housekeeper steadying her, the old woman moves one foot, then another across the carpet to the wheelchair, which Ula pushes with its passenger into the next room. A grande dame like Miss LeBlanc could pay Ula to run in place or do jumping jacks in order to feel a transfer of power from the Polish woman. Why a trampoline?

Before liftoff, the housekeeper puts an LP on the old phonograph. The record scratches, then Frankie Yankovic starts playing as Ula prepares to jump. “Bounce! Bounce!” the old woman says. “Reach for the stars! Reach for Jean Harlowe! Reach for Yehudi Menuhin and Tennessee Williams!”

Ula adjusts her LSU helmet, then holds her arms out.

“Looks like fun,” Gail says.

I think of Icarus flying sunward, of John Gillespie Magee’s poem “High Flight,” which starts, “Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth.”

Eyes closed, the old woman in the wheelchair says, “Whee! Bounce me, turn me! Whee! Ever higher! I’m wearing my Saints’ helmet!”

Gail waves her hands, as though directing a band. “Da-dut-da-da-dee-da,” she sings. She gets up to dance. “Come on. It’s ‘The Clarinet Polka.’”

“Too fat,” I reply, pointing to my waist. All we need is for Toot-Toot to burst in and say how stupid we are and that Miss LeBlanc shouldn’t make Ula bounce anymore.

Ducking her head, Ula, the helmeted angel suspended in air, springs upward. I’ve seen Ula fold Desiree in the sheets she’s washed and ironed. She’s helped the old woman in a hundred ways. I think of serfs, masters, life in the old world, how Poland was to be lost to memory in 1792 and 1793. After the Third Partition in 1795, Wikipedia notes: “Total land annexed from Poland, 283,200 square miles. 100 percent annexed. Territory remaining: None.” Nothing left but memory and a white eagle. One hundred and twenty-three years later, in 1918, the republic was reborn before it prepared for extinction again in 1939. What followed is sometimes called the Fourth Partition.

Now, by rising, by humming a melody I’ve heard before, it is as though Ula can leave this place, escape the sorrow her family has known. When she’s bouncing, she’s free. If Poland is “the Christ of Nations” for assuming, through its annexations, the suffering of Europe through the centuries, Ula is one of His angels.

If it were appropriate, I’d assist her from the trampoline. After a courtly bow when she’d returned to earth, I’d cool her with a soft, wet cloth. A lowly associate professor, I’d kneel before her. In doing so, I’d kneel before history, before Ula and her ancestors who survived the Nazis, the Soviets, the cane fields of south Louisiana.

“How much longer?” Ula asks.

Forever is how long I’ll love you, Ula. You are my heart’s delight. I think of the epigraph to The Great Gatsby.

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

If you bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,

I must have you.”

When the music ends, Ula returns her mistress to bed, though all Desiree has done is sit with her feet on the tile floor. The old woman points to the Saints helmet. “Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?” she asks, as we reply, “Who dat?”

With the women talking in the next room, I try lifting myself onto the trampoline. Gripping the frame, I bend my knees. Giving up, groaning, I lay my face on the mesh jumping pad when out of nowhere comes the sweetest voice humming the melody again.

“What are you doing?” she inquires.

“Please,” I say.

She knows what I put up with coming here to see Desiree but mostly to worship and desire Ula, then to leave with my blotchy, red-faced wife. Ula’s seen the phrase book, heard me say, “Proszę, please.” With her hands, she raises my face to hers. She whispers, “Może, maybe.” Then words I don’t understand. Does she say, “Maybe I will love you someday?”

This is world history, Ula and a lonely overeater on a hot afternoon. I resolve to go to TOPS. “I have to fight the battle of the bulge. Too many apricot dainties,” I tell Ula. She doesn’t understand what I say. I’m glad because much of what I share about Gail is, well, personal.

“What is tops?”

“Take Off Pounds Sensibly,” I say as she tells me that in her daydreams she hums, “Oh, our Poland shall not perish / While we live to love her,” and I tell her, “You are Miss World, Ula!”

Following a shouting match the next morning, Ula grabs her helmet and walks out of Cane Gardens. I haven’t slept for two nights thinking of her, the angelic look on her face, her humming the song. When Gail turns up the speakerphone, I hear Desiree relating the story of the breakup of Ula and the old woman from Plaquemines Parish.

“She’ll be back,” my wife says. “Now tell me, are you watching the pageant tonight? Tissy called.”

“Dear me yes. I’ll root for her.”

But worried, we drive over to Cane Gardens. Hungover, ill-humored, Gail tells me that Tissy isn’t as wonderful as the old lady thinks. She reminds me how Tissy clutters up her room with clothes, shoes, nail polish, shampoos, astringents. “No matter what she’s concocted to tell the pageant judges about teaching Black children in rural schools, she has nothing in her head, Joe. Then to have lectured me about drinking, you about eating. Remember when she walked into the breakfast nook in men’s LSU boxer shorts? Where a man’s genitals should hang, the words on her shorts read ‘Hold That Tiger!’ She says I have fat ankles, but she never insults you. Not Daddy and Toot-Toot.”

Pulling up to the apartment, we hear Desiree. “Urszula. Fix my blanket!”

As Desiree lists the housekeeper’s faults, Gail sits in the fold-up chair, confessing how Tissy in her baby doll pajamas kisses me first thing in the morning.

“She turned out like all of them. The worst thing is she’s got a mulatto boyfriend from Melrose,” Desiree says. “The help’s no good anymore. Are you interested in housekeeping, Gail?”

“Joe’d be willing to sweep and dust after his Tuesday-Thursday classes. You’ll help Miss Desiree, won’t you, Joe? If he climbs on the trampoline, it’ll collapse,” she says.

That night, I sample my apricot dainties when Gail turns on the TV. Just as I’m imagining how life has been for Ula’s people, I bet Gail dreams of the television cameras positioned around the convention center, the girls’ last-minute preparations, Miss Central Louisiana “CenLaBration,” Miss Ruston, Miss Louisiana Crawfish Boil, Miss Shreveport. Fussing with their hair, the girls practice their speeches. I watch Gail fixing her hair. “Can’t you do anything but eat?” she says as the orchestra plays and the girls march in.

If I can’t say Ula’s name for fear of raising suspicion, I can think about her. The Displaced Persons had to adjust “to a subtropical climate, to a one-crop system as contrasted to the diversified farming characteristic of Eastern Europe, and finally the adjustment to a biracial rural society. We were therefore not surprised when signs of discontent” arose among the first arrivals.

During the swimsuit competition, Gail says, “Sometimes it’s a beautiful world.” Gail Swanson of Wadena. Her grayish-brown hair, the deep-set wrinkles above her nose, her glazed-looking eyes. When she tries getting up from the couch, she whistles “Wee-ow,” rolls her head, and sits back. Fumbling for a hand mirror on the end table, she sends me a kiss, then sends another until finally she’s able to stand up.

Pretending she’s modeling a swimsuit, she says, “Presenting Miss Southern Cotton Oil Company” and lifts her stained skirt, slurring her words, stumbling as the emcee in Monroe announces, “Each year, ladies and gentlemen, we have in the pageant something called ‘Miss Louisiana’s Farewell Walk.’”

What a vision last year’s queen makes, the belle from Bunkie, Louisiana. Her hair flows in honey-colored ringlets, her gown falls in hooped crinoline to the floor. The name the emcee says sounds something like Pomerinska, another beautiful Polish girl. In one arm she cradles a bouquet of roses.

Just then we’re interrupted.

“It’s her again,” Gail says, clicking on the speakerphone. “Yes. Are you watching our daughter?”

“She telephoned. You know who I mean. She’s with her boyfriend. She called me ‘Miss Derriere.’”

As Gail listens to our friend, I watch the reigning Miss Louisiana promenade down the runway. “The sight of those girls brings back memories,” Desiree says. “I remember at that age I read Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Méllisande and played Chopin. I was invited to all the cotillions. Then those DPs overran everything. Were they ever happy?”

“Yes,” Gail says to comfort her.

“Did they have enough to eat from the commissary store? Was it wholesome and reasonably priced? Do you think they’d return to their shacks some night for a reunion?”

“Yes,” Gail says again, the Scotch taking hold of her. Last year’s queen would soon be history. “Wherever they are, the DPs are waiting for a reunion. We’ll get them to come back here from Wisconsin, Michigan, New York.”

“Ula told me my health isn’t improving from trampolining.”

“You never said anything about exercise before? I’m drunk. It’s the drinking,” she confesses before recalling it’s Miss Derriere on the other end. “Exercise helps.”

“So it does! I knew it!” The old woman’s clapping grows louder over the speakerphone.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, let’s give our past Miss Louisianas in Monroe and across the Bayou State a round of applause,” the emcee announces.

“Those people aren’t happy,” says the old woman about the sullen housekeeper, the DPs, the mulattoes of Melrose and Cloutierville. “I, Desiree, am happy. You can tell Ula that I’m extremely happy. Can’t you hear me? Whee!” she says, her voice trailing off. “Whee! Three cheers for the displaced persons. Whee for last year’s queen, Katerina Pom, Pome, Pomegranate.” Then she hangs up.

The new finalists are from New Orleans, Lake Charles, Monroe, Natchitoches. “Oh, Lord,” Gail says, “Did you hear that? Natchitoches!”

Turning back to the television, we watch Tissy. Smug as always, she knows she’s destined for great things.

“I believe she’s gonna win the whole prize. Joe, oh look! Our Tissy!”

Gail bounces on her toes when the phone startles us. “God, not now with our meat pie on stage.”

Desiree is saying, “I want my fiancé to drive by and see the lights on at the plantation in Plaquemines Parish. I want it to be 1930. I want the DPs back and for it to be 1952 and for one of them to teach me to polka.”

“Not now. I’m very drunk, Miss Derriere,” Gail interrupts her while I think of Polish words and the burned-out country of Ula’s ancestors, think of their suffering and hers, think of Ula when she daydreams of better days with me.

Then my wife lifts her skirt again. “Me, her mother, I’m Tissy’s greatest rival, have been during pageant week. I hate that sow Tissy. Look, Joe. Put down your monograph. Put down your dewberry cobbler.”

“It’s not dewberry cobbler. It’s apricot dainties.”

“I’m not so bad, am I, Joe?” Gail goes on. “Sing to me like they do at the pageant. Are you ready for my entrée right here in the living room? Choose me for Miss Louisiana. Choose Desiree for my runner-up. Wee-oow.”

“I choose you,” I say through the gas mask.

“Look at these legs. Not a varicose vein. I need to answer Desiree to tell her I won. I did. I’m the winner, Joe. Sing me a song if you know any, Joe. Sing me ‘Moon River’ and notice me.”

“It had to be you,” I sing.

“Are you there? Is someone there?” I hear the old woman asking, pleading. “Please someone speak.”

As the night wears on, I realize I’m lucky to have beauty queens in Natchitoches and Monroe, those being my wife and Tissy. I also have Desiree and Ula here to tell my secrets to. If I need to know about Polish people, I can talk to them.

“That’s it. Now you’ve got the spirit,” Gail says, lifting her skirt higher and higher. “Whee!” It’s like a cancan dance she’s doing, except it isn’t.

“Is anyone there?” Desiree asks as I say, “Whee!”

“No, you don’t,” Gail says. “You’re not going to hide behind that mask and say, ‘Whee!’ all night.”

Stumbling toward me, Gail continues, “And the winner of the pageant is—who, Joe? Who? Tissy or me? You can’t get out of this. You’re the emcee. You have to commit yourself to a winner in this house.”

With her skirt hiked above her waist, I’m surprised to see my wife wearing an adult diaper.

“Who, Joe?” she keeps asking. “Who’s the winner?”

I tell her Ula Sczypanska, Miss World, is the winner because I think somewhere she’s probably whispering to me through strawberry lips “Maybe I will love you.” After I decide to wear the gold hat like the man in The Great Gatsby epigraph, it doesn’t matter what my wife or daughter thinks of me. It may take a year with TOPS, but underneath it all I’m not bad-looking. I’ll lose the weight. I’ll work out on a trampoline. I’ll swim in the natatorium at Northwestern State, and when Ula sees me in my Speedo—

“What are you saying? What, Joe? Quit the mumbling!”

I can’t quit. I keep saying,

Then wear the gold hat if that will move her;

If you bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,

I must have you.”

Oh, the beauty of desire! This is before Gail tells me, “She’s winning! She’s won! Toot-Toot of all people! Damn it, Joe, I have to change my diaper. What am I missing? Turn up the volume. If Tissy wins, I win! I’m Miss Louisiana!”

Bread and Wine

In the bread business, rotation is the key to freshness. For thirty-one years, I’ve delivered Dakota twelve-grain, split wheat, English muffin, you name it. What doesn’t sell, I bring to the company’s day-old store. At two each morning, I load the truck. With no wall between me and the trays, the eighteen-footer is wide open and cold in winter. Your Texas toast and stone ground come into the store as frozen as I am.

The Moose Lake Correctional Facility gets eighty trays a day, Cloquet Walmart one hundred and twenty, Nopeming Nursing Home four or five. On my hand truck, trays rise twelve high. Workdays end when the truck’s empty. Around three, I drive back to Wisconsin over the Bong Bridge to run errands, to eat supper with Ma, and to read a book of Lenten prayers and meditations before going to bed in the house where I grew up.

Work is mostly fine. I’m by myself. The pay’s good. I get free bread. When we have birthdays, weddings, or family gatherings, I’m the guy bringing the buns. Once a month, I swing by the insurance agency with a loaf of cinnamon burst for Mr. Murawski.

Despite the freebies and the many good days, I’ve paid a price for thirty-one years. Don’t tell me my hands aren’t sore from arthritis or that my eyebrows aren’t gray from worrying about product placement. And where’s my hair? Thinking this isn’t a good look for a salesman, I say, “What the hey!” and drive three hours to the Hair Club for Men in the Twin Cities. When I see Helen Perala at the convenience store in Carlton, Minnesota, the next morning, she says, “Something’s different. Are you dieting? Have you gotten taller, Leo?”

“It’s this,” I say, pointing to the wig while noting hers and others’ admiring glances.

Just as rotation is the key to freshness with bread, so is it with a wig. Every three months, I remove it for cleaning and styling and receive a fresh one in the Cities. Now that I’m fitted with a toupee, women embarrass themselves. They can’t help sighing over me.

Every day, I tell Ma at supper about the admiration that stems from the beauty makeover. Then coming home from the Harbor Tavern, I get pinched for drunk driving. On the Breathalyzer, I blow a .10, which leads the police officer to say, “You’re legally drunk.” Now when I’m on the town, I ride my cousin Cecelia’s old bicycle with its blue-and-white streamers.

Though the company says little about the incident, I can’t take the car out of the garage now except to drive to work and back. It’s two wheels for Leo Kosmatka of the Hair Club these days. The handlebars are stuck at a forty-five-degree angle—it’s disorienting when the bike goes straight while I look in the direction my hands are turned. A rusted stem bolt is the problem.

Since the November DUI, I’ve stayed in watching Dancing with the Stars and playing solitaire until one night I can’t stand it and have to get out. Nothing’s fancy in the industrial end of my town. There are grain elevators, warehouses, a coal dock, and five or six taverns. During the wheat rush, trucks from the Dakotas line up to unload cargo at the elevators. The coal dock stands on one side of North Tower, shipyard on the other.

For twenty years, Myrtle, the proprietor of the Harbor Tavern, has asked, “How’s your buns, Leo?” “Fresh,” I’ve replied. Now that I’m on the wagon, she asks when I stroll in, “Do you want an O’Doul?” and I say, “‘O’Doul’s.’”

You don’t correct her English, but since I’m a regular and never cause trouble, she lets it slide.

I love the jukebox at Myrtle’s Harbor, the red-and-black décor, the price of a bottle of beer.

When Ceil’s bike leads me there another night, I hear a purse thump down on the bar. Its owner has black hair, dark eyebrows, a thin face. The bags under her eyes match mine. She wears a long coat over her hospital outfit. Tossing her car keys and cigarettes into the purse that resembles a B-57 bomber, she says, “Don’t tell me people still ride those old Schwinns?”

“Lance Armstrong does,” Myrtle says.

“Do you like my wicker basket?” I ask.

“You need a bell on your handlebars,” she says.

“I’ve thought of it.”

When she orders a drink, I say, “I’ll get hers.”

When I ask Myrtle’s customer her line of work, she doesn’t answer. She looks worn out from not sleeping.

“I’ve known Leo forever,” Myrtle says, encouraging her to look my way.

“This Leo?” she asks, as if there could be any other in the bar tonight.

“People have noticed a big difference in me,” I say. “They think I’m thinner or have grown taller. How old do you take me for?”

“Now that it comes in these miniature carafes, you can get a good glass of wine in a place like this,” the lady replies, paying no attention to me. The shadowy nature of Myrtle’s adds to her mystique.

When she isn’t rummaging in the purse, she stares at her rosé.

“I’ll have an O’Doul,” I tell Myrtle.

“Give him a Grain Belt,” she says, which provides me an opening with the mystery lady.

For the next half hour, I talk about bread from two stools away. Informing her what loaves go here, what there, and the mileage I put on the truck, I tell her, “Let’s say a snowstorm’s coming and people need to get out and shop. I have three days to increase my order if I get the call in by 10:00 a.m. of the third day. This is an ‘add.’” Before I start describing a “cut,” I’m interrupted. It’s Ma telephoning. “You get bread on way home, Leo,” she says. “You come home now!”

Pedaling to the store, I wonder what got into me blabbing so much. I like how the mystery lady came in and brought attention to herself with the purse and tales of the nursing home. She was employee of the month. She’d received other honors, she eventually told me, but it was hard work, and she had a health problem plus she was finding it hard to get rid of her ex-husband. Sometimes she looked at me as the night wore on, nodded, and touched her glass to my bottle of beer as if it were a kiss.

Now word is out that I’m dating. When the door opens on Friday nights, my heart leaps. We’ve been busy at work, we tell each other.

This one Friday when I ask, “Can I tell you more about bread?” she says, “There can’t possibly be more to tell,” but nothing stops me. “I sell from 1,200 to 2,400 pieces a day. In the trade, a piece isn’t an individual slice but a package of bread or buns. Do you have a preference in bread?”

“I like the one that says it ‘supports digestive health.’”

“Brownberry? That’s another company,” I say when she starts in about her life. It’s like our time is so precious we have to say as much as we can. She’s glad she works days so we can be together. “Your bicycle running okay?” she asks. “You have a good trip? I see you bought a reflector for your fender. It’s best to follow the law.”

“The ride down here was great. I told Ma I wouldn’t be out long. She keeps her eye on me.”

“Aren’t you a little old to live with your mother?”

“Fif—forty,” I tell her.

“I’m not there yet,” she says.

The jukebox playing, both of us drinking, Betty and I agree that we’ve seen a lot in life. She’s been to rust- and polka-belt cities with her husband. I’ve been to Cleveland with Ma to see relatives. Myrtle’s gone to Epcot Center in Florida. That’s plenty. You can see the echo of faded beauty on her. “Despite the black hair I’m wearing,” she says, “I was a blonde once. After a life like mine, whose shoulders wouldn’t slump?”

Hoping she’d fall deeper for me, I call her one night after Ma’s asleep. We talk, then have to wait to see each other.

Now a confession of something that’s the opposite of sin. With prayer and reflection, I take the good with the bad, the sun with the rain, the good people like Betty Lalko with the selfish ones I meet in the world. I accept the healthy, the sick, the strugglers, the loved, the unloved. At home we have a crucifix on the living room wall. I have one on my dresser, one on my bedroom wall.

Out of place in the modern age, it shouldn’t matter to anybody what I do, but most Thursdays after work, I attend Eucharistic Adoration to meditate on Jesus. From one to three on Thursdays, the blessed host is in the monstrance on the altar providing visitors time for reflection and contemplation. Generally, four or five people are here, including me sitting in the silent church. I could focus on Jesus’s image all day. On Sundays, look for me and Polina, my ma, wearing her babushka in the twelfth pew on the right. We sit below the station that says, “Jesus Dies on the Cross.”

I think of the mystery of the bread and wine, how at Mass priests change the substances, the gifts, into the sacred body and blood of Jesus. I’m grateful to be a salesman of bread. Sometimes it’s hard to believe I’m blessed this way. Ma, Myrtle, Betty, Helen Perala, all are a part of His goodness and glory. Saint Elizabeth, “Betty,” is the patron saint of nursing home services and other things. Saint Helen is the patron saint of difficult marriages and divorced people. Saint Cecilia, my cousin’s namesake, is the patron of music. Now I learn Betty is a karaoke singer famous for her rendition of Tony Orlando’s “Knock Three Times.”

I also learn she’s sick. We are at her house enjoying our favorite beverage. At first, I think the device in the corner of the basement is a dehumidifier. When she presses a button, the machine lights. Drumbeats start, a cymbal. She’s smiling, pointing her loving hands at me. On cue, she begins singing. With the music playing, she raises her hands to her head and removes a wig I didn’t know she had on. Then she looks at my hair. “How did you know I wear a hairpiece?” I ask when I lift it for her to see the tape that secures it. She doesn’t answer.

There she stands, different from a moment before. “I’ve had chemotherapy,” she says, fearful that I won’t like her because of it. The first time I kiss her I raise her face to mine, so that I can see what she’s suffered.

“It’s hard for me,” she says. “Everything’s hard.”

The karaoke machine playing “Midnight at the Oasis,” we hold each other. When I ask does she need any Dakota twelve-grain or other bread, she says, “Shh” and rests her head on my shoulder.

When we go out, Betty puts the wig on as I place the bike in the trunk of her car, part of the rear wheel sticking out. The Harbor Tavern’s empty at nine o’clock. What does it matter? I’ve been lost caring for Ma all my life. Now I’ve found someone.

When Betty steps out for a cigarette, I tell Myrtle, “We may need a maid of honor.”

“I see that. When she comes back, will you run out to get me a sandwich?”

Before excusing myself to make a head call, I tell Myrtle, “Betty and me are adoring each other. It’s Adoration in the Harbor Tavern. Tell her where I’ve gone.”

The floor heaves an inch or two in front of the urinal. Standing there, I’m as lopsided as the bike handlebars. Despite this, I consider myself lucky. Nothing matches the bravery of a woman who’s been sick yet works five days a week and doesn’t complain, except about her ex. When I look in the mirror as I wash my hands, I say, “You’ve got a beautiful gal.”

Peeking out back, I see the slush-covered town, the grain elevators. “Dear Lady,” I say, looking up to the cloud-filled sky. Then I start over beginning this time with the Blessed Virgin’s name in Polish. “Matka Boska, I’ve gotten older since I last petitioned you and I drink too much. My mode of transportation is Ceil’s bicycle. But if you could find a place in your heart, for I’ve found a woman who needs me . . .” Then I recall the crucifix on the wisteria trellis at home. He needs me. I’ve repaired Him and hung Him out there. The wet snow falls around Him tonight as it falls on everything.

When I go inside, this guy with motor oil on his jacket is asking Betty, “Where’s my karaoke machine? Can I get that?”

“No, Claude,” she says, clutching the bomber purse.

“Who’s this?” he asks.

“It’s no one. It’s a guy who delivers buns.”

“He looks soft,” Claude says.

When he jabs my stomach, I twist his finger. Letting go, I grab the one next to it so that Claude Lalko gives himself the finger.

“If you want to argue, take it outside,” Myrtle says.

But if there’s going to be a standoff, it eases. No matter that her ex-husband’s jacket is dirty and he’s on the heavy side, he could find a nice gal, I think. After a few beers, we’re on friendly terms.

“These days, I live in an apartment,” he says. “I’ve been working all day. One of the kids needs a transmission. Betty won’t listen to me, so you tell my ex-wife sitting beside you that I’m no good without her. I’d like the karaoke player.”

“You cheated on me, Claude, never with women, always with your dream cars and your friends. You were never home.”

“Let’s sing,” Myrtle says. “Play John Conlee’s ‘Rose-Colored Glasses.’”

With us sipping beers, Betty grabs her purse. My mind goes blank with love. If nothing else, Claude wants to show he can outdrink me. Then the jukebox lights go off, further disconnecting us. At home, Betty must have endured his pleading with her not to leave. Because of the cinnamon burst and split wheat that have consumed my life, I’ve never missed or cried over a woman. Alone in the bread truck all these years, I’ve deserved pity.

Claude studies the jukebox. It takes a while for Myrtle’s shutting it off to sink in. “When we got the karaoke machine, our singing drove the kids nuts,” he tells me. With him ready to cry and Myrtle saying, “You’re cut off,” she does the opposite of what you’d expect. She turns the jukebox on again. The light and sound surprise us.

When I walk Claude out, his voice cracks. I open the door of his Olds Ciera for him, clean the slush from its windows. Betty’s gone, I see, though the bike’s where I put it when we arrived.

Through the diamond-shaped front window of an empty tavern, Myrtle watches. There’s no sense staying. With Betty off to the Keyport or Les Bird’s, she’s set for the night. On the trek home, I remind myself that tomorrow I’ll have to replenish Ma’s Metamucil.

It’s a two-mile journey past the wastewater treatment plant, through commercial and residential areas. When I get close to home, the oil refinery lightens the darkness. I always thought I couldn’t attract women, but I realize now that emotional rebirth is possible even in a place like Myrtle Olander’s tavern.

Toupee soaked, I steer my bike through the March snow. When I’ve been at it a half hour, I see headlights, hear someone say, “You’re weaving!” Then I see it’s Betty and Myrtle in the bar owner’s beat-up car, which Myrtle calls her “junkmobile.” “Why’d you disappear?” Betty’s asking when they come beside me. “You and Claude took off when I went to buy Myrtle a sandwich.”

“I’ll light your way,” Myrtle says.

As I pedal, looking in the direction of the handlebars, another car pulls up.

“We have grandkids,” Claude says as we park on the side of the street.

“Leave her be,” Myrtle warns. “Everyone leave Betty alone. She’s done so much for you both.”

“I didn’t treat her good,” Claude says.

“I’m telling you, leave her alone!” she repeats.

“Can’t,” Claude says. He confesses the many things a lonely guy might express about marriage. “I’m not allowed in my house. We’re divorced. The kids are gone.” Then he asks, “Can I stop over to the place I helped buy for us?”

“It’s not yours,” Betty says.

“It sure is,” he says. “Half the stuff in it’s mine.”

“Not according to our divorce settlement.”

“Instead of going to her house, come to mine.” I give him Ma’s address, tell him to leave, that I’ll see him later.

Claude don’t budge.

Sometimes I speak in tongues. On hot afternoons on the way to Esko or Barnum in the truck, I’m filled with the Spirit and numbers rush out. “Twelve hundred pieces a day, twenty-four hundred pieces a day. Adds, cuts. Ten trays. Five trays. Eighty trays for Moose Lake. Thirty-one years on the bread route. Bread is the staff of life.”

“You’re nuts,” Claude says.

The next number is mystical. Myrtle takes a minute to figure out why I’m tapping three, then two times on her junkmobile. She understands when Betty sings Tony Orlando and Dawn’s “Knock Three Times.” It’s a great song I hope to hear Betty Lalko perform in a bar where people accompany her by clinking their beer glasses together.

“Listen to this. I’m tapping three times,” I say. When I look around, Betty’s in front of the car. Claude’s drunk. “Everything’s rosy,” he’s muttering. As he looks from Betty to me, he kicks the rear tire.

“Get back in,” Myrtle implores Betty as I sing Kenny Rogers’ “Lady.”

When she asks me, “Do you use Viagra?” I realize she’s pretty drunk herself. She holds on as we fall, laughing like we’re giving up on everything and who cares—it’s a good life. “What about me?” Claude asks as I tell his ex-wife, “I’m never leaving you.” When we sit in the snow, she brushes snowflakes from my toupee. “Always look after me,” she says, rapping on the junkmobile. “Care for me when I’m old. I’m afraid of ending up in the same nursing home where I work. You’ll care for me, won’t you, Leo Kosmatka?”

“Yes,” I say as she prepares further requests. “When we make love, I won’t wear my wig. It itches. But don’t you cry ‘oom-pah-pah’ either, like Claude did during our lovemaking! ‘Oom-pah-pah,’ he’d wheeze. Claude, the old fool, loved polkas. He could listen night and day to Whoopee John Wilfahrt.”

“Whatever I do, I won’t imitate a tuba or similar-sounding musical instrument in front of you, but as a spiritual man, I don’t know if I can make love without benefit of marriage.”

Now Claude gets into the numbers game, kicking Myrtle’s bumper three times.

“This is nonsense. Get in the car,” Myrtle tells Betty.

“I have a request,” I tell my beloved.

“Anything.”

“Next weekend if you sing at the Keyport and I clap louder than anyone for you, then that night will you comb my toupee with me in it?”

“I will,” says Betty.

“We have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Yes, you do,” Myrtle says. “You do, Leo, for waiting all these years to fall in love.”

Her car headlights shining my way to Ma’s, it’s clear now: Though Betty might drink too much, she’s stooping to lift me up. She’s rescuing me.

With Myrtle’s help, I see fine down Fourth Street to where the porch light’s on. Myrtle hits the car horn as our parade of royal dignitaries, Claude included, heads along the street before I stumble into the yard. When I found this other crucifix two years ago, Jesus’s crucifix, the Lord’s arm was broken. It was as if He was saying, “Rescue me. I despaired in the Garden of Gethsemane. I died for you. Now look. My arm. I can’t raise it to bless you.”

Without me, He’d have gone in the trash can. No one would keep a broken crucifix from the stuff we were throwing out of my aunt Ann Novack’s basement. When Jesus was in the department store or wherever my aunt bought Him, the metal wasn’t tarnished on His body. His arms spread three inches across. Pain-wracked on the ancient cross, the body had been five and three-quarter inches, head to toe. After the accident or whatever it was, a nail in His palm held one arm. The other one, the arm with the nail-less palm, hung down so that you could swing it back and forth. When the Krazy glue set, I hung the crucifix outdoors in the fresh air that it never got in Ann’s basement. “God Bless This House,” read the little sign I made for it.

Ma hears me. “Quiet, don’t wake everyone,” she says.

“There’s no one here but ghosts. I was at Eucha . . . , at Perpetual Adoration with Betty.”

“Betty? My name’s Polina.”

Considering how late it is, I forgive Ma for being confused. Outside, the car idles. It’s how things are on slushy nights. No matter, we’re protected, Ma, me, Myrtle, Claude. Betty and I drank and fell deeper in love, but we’re safe. This sounds sinful, the drunkenness in Lent, the arguing with Claude, the way I’ve closed myself off in life. But I’ve been given a gift. From here on, I’ll ride my bike and stay upright for the bread company and for Betty.

On the way upstairs to my bedroom, I say, “Sometimes, I’ve sinned against you with my short temper, Ma.”

“You’ll wake the house with regret,” she says. “Our house don’t need regret.”

I never told Betty I’d purchased a PylePro karaoke system. I figured I’d walk up to her some night when she was about to entertain. We’d sing a duet. Now, I’ll give the unit to Claude so he can sing his way out of pain.

“Ma, I’m gonna practice. I won’t have the machine much longer.”

“Okay,” she says.

“Good evening,” I greet my audience when I grab the microphone. Anticipating how it’s going to be when I serenade Betty, I sing as loud as I can, thinking of how she’ll faint for love.

I bet Claude hears the song through the closed window. Every moment of my life is caught in the song. My heart soars. The splendor of love makes me feel as though I can sing forever.

I’ll go on, but tired from a day on the bread route and a night of abiding love with Betty, I must thank Jesus. Tomorrow, I’ll get new batteries for Ma’s Life Alert. On Sunday, we’ll sit in the twelfth pew. I hope Father speaks of faith and works. Faith alone isn’t enough without works like I’m performing by helping Claude Lalko. Man struggles with sinfulness. Thankfully, my struggle is over for the day.

I think of how on Sunday Polina Kosmatka and I will witness the bread and wine become Christ’s body and blood. I think of Betty and sing about love in the mists of long ago.

Here’s where the big switch comes in when I go from being Leo Kosmatka, the beer drinker at the Harbor Tavern, to being Leo, God’s servant. This is the real me too. “O Lord, thank You for this time with You,” I say.

Next Thursday as the weeks in the Lenten season progress, several people will come to Adoration. As three o’clock nears, I predict that two of us will remain, the bread salesman in the quiet church and Christ in the golden monstrance on the altar. In the midst of this thought on a Friday night, I thank my savior for Betty’s love, for the bread truck and the product I deliver to the hungry, for the bike, the car in the garage, the choir at Mass. I think of and pray a second time for Betty and Myrtle. I ask Saint Christopher to protect her junkmobile.

This is not enough, I think, until I bow before the crucifix on the wall in my room, bow low and worshipfully before the Jesus with two good arms.

English 110

The Literature of Snow and Ice

Nell makes it out before the storm—from here to Phoenix to soak up the sun at her parents’ house while I teach a January-term class at the college. I’m barely hanging on there. For teaching beginning composition each semester and lazing around home the rest of the time, I earn $6,000. Nell works at the unemployment office. If I keep on like this, she’ll counsel me to find work.

Because of her parents’ generosity, we have a prefab house in the country three miles outside of Oliver with its 418 residents and two taverns. Nell’s folks help with our mortgage. “When are you going to get started in life?” her father asks me. With my two classes per year and this two-credit, week-and-a-half-long English 110 course, which I’m grateful to the department chair for “gifting” me, I’ll earn $7,000 for the academic year. I’m a middle-aged part-timer making $7,000 for thinking great thoughts while Nell works her ass off. I’m like the dreamer Peter Trofimov, the eternal student in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. I like dreaming and writing stories. Before she returns from Phoenix, I’ll finish a new one.

With her away, it’s hard concentrating. I can’t hear her in other rooms, can’t watch her fuss with her outfit for the next day, or hear her call her mother. Outside, the wind shakes the guy wire that steadies the power pole. The house rattles. With Nell high over Iowa, she probably won’t text me.

I expect a call from someone else. A nontraditional student, Miss Kobayashi is content in Ross Hall where rooms are large and quiet, the environment more laid-back than in the regular undergraduate dorms. She keeps her blinds drawn and has an aquarium. I learned this on move-in day during WOW, Week of Welcome, when faculty and staff help students settle in. I carried up her luggage, even lowered her blinds when the sun bothered her. For a teacher to fall in love with a student on a college campus is the worst thing. If she were to go anywhere in the dead of winter, her resident assistant would know. He’d call the dean to tell him she might be in danger. Miss Kobayashi could make it to the snack bar or the cafeteria, but the walk back . . . It’s no weather to be out in.

The most snow I ever saw, 36.9 inches, fell in three days when I was ten. It buried my hometown. Today the local reporters announce that a winter storm warning is in effect. Snow will last overnight. “Tomorrow,” they say, “temperatures will dip into the minus-twenty-degree range for northwestern Wisconsin and Minnesota and remain below zero throughout the week.”

Here on the syllabus are my name, office hours, cell phone, and home numbers. “The course considers ice and snow as narrative devices.” Next the usual about class participation, the final exam, the course paper. “We’ll study Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome and Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country. The latter meets the college’s diversity requirement. The college library will also have photocopied stories on reserve. These may not circulate. Be considerate. Leave the stories in the order you find them. Two novels, five stories about cold and snow!”

When Miss Kobayashi calls, she says she’s gotten a ride and is in Oliver on her way here. “What?” I say.

Have we updated the term “sexual harassment” on college campuses? Can anything be done if I’m being harassed? Since Miss Kobayashi is older than me, how can I complain to the dean that she’s slipped notes under my office door, followed me around campus, done bolder things? My conduct’s not perfect, but shouldn’t an international student know better? We’re both at fault for being lonely, needy, and in love.

It was the quiet hour between the end of afternoon and the start of evening classes when she brought a course paper to the room with the viewing booth in McCaskill Hall. Through its one-way glass, faculty members observe future teachers. She’s beautiful but older than I’ve let on. In her descriptive essay, she was to appeal to the senses. “I like to watch you, Professor Janowski,” she wrote. “Please come to my room to see how I fixed it since Week of Welcome.”

I couldn’t believe someone would write this, but one rule of the course was to write about another person. She’d known me for a year and a half, from the times we’d talked on campus, from our classes together. She thought of me all the time, she told me.

It was shadowy in the room with the one-way glass. She looked as though she wouldn’t leave until I held her hand or kissed her.

“Sometimes my handwriting is hard to read,” I said when she pointed to a word I’d written on her paper. “Can’t you tell what I mean?”

She said, “The Japanese word is ai.”

“Write it on the board.”

When she did, she handed back the marker so that I could write “love.” With her hand guiding mine, we wrote it in two languages. We wrote testaments and confessions to each other.

Snow sweeps from the roof. Squalls bend the aspen and birch. It is months later. As I look through the window, a pine bough snaps. From the house to the road is a long way. The lane drifts shut. I’m surprised to see anything in the whiteness.

Nell and I would happily wait for the town to plow us. By the time the weather changed, we no longer cared if we left home. “We’ll make it fine on the supplies we have,” we’d tell each other. It was always peaceful with Nell and me hidden off the road.

Now I see a car or a pickup truck. Someone struggles down the lane. It’s wrong what we’re doing. I don’t expect anyone to like me for it. Adjusting her scarf to protect her face, Miss Kobayashi makes her way through the snow. She’s audited my composition course, then taken it for credit. Now she’s in J-term.

The first time we had a class together—the one she audited—she asked for a favor, although I’m not required to read the work of a student auditor. I was surprised the time she corrected me. I’d been looking over her definition essay in class when I misused a verb. She’d chosen to define “subliminal seduction.” Although she corrected me softly and respectfully, the students heard. After that I wasn’t sure what she wanted. Then the one-way glass in the room. Behind it, someone watched. Dean Lund or perhaps the RA. Now I think someone spies on us in the country.

“The wind will pull off the storm door if I open it. How did you get here?” I ask. “Go around to the back. Try that way.”

On the deck in back, the screen door won’t open. “There’s too much snow caught in it.”

She doesn’t look upset. When I finally open the front door, holding it with all my strength, we stand in different worlds. She’s so slight that the wind could take her. Thinking I’ve added Snow Country to the reading list with her in mind must give her confidence.

She shivers when she steps in. Her wet coat brushing me, snow falls on the rug.

“It’s quiet inside,” she says, handing me the scarf. She’s meticulous the way she’s dressed in the blue sweater, the turtleneck under it, the gray pants that are too light for this weather.

“In the novel I remember that a kotatsu warms the geisha Komako and her lover Shimamura. He wasn’t used to the harsh conditions of snow country. I can’t believe you’ve come.”

We’re unsure what to do. In the lab school, I’d kissed and held Miss Kobayashi.

Before the gas fireplace in the basement, she warms herself. In one room, the concrete floor is gray, the plasterboard walls and ceiling white—everything colorless. We have a washing machine in that room, a furnace, an indoor clothesline. In the finished room, Nell and I have a futon, chairs, framed posters of the woods.

“The plows do the main roads first, then the dirt roads, the lanes, the driveways, though sometimes it takes days. You can read the stories and novels while you’re here,” I tell her. “Move the chair from the fire if you’re warm.”

Thinking I’ll be gone for only a few minutes, I throw on a jacket to shovel the front steps. My guest stares at the fire in the room with the pine wainscoting. She looks out at me shoveling. Few people have come to the house: a furnace cleaner, the plumber Mickey Brandt, the painter Jerry Meitzner.

I’ll prepare a bath for her. Telling her to lie back, I’ll soothe her arms and hands, kiss her forehead, her lips. As I dry her with a thick towel, I’ll ask her the words for this and that. Two semesters ago, I told her, “In this place in the essay, you should use present tense.” Today when I make light of it, she replies, “We’re in the present, teacher.” Blue vein pulsing in her temple, smooth, pale skin, everything is delicate about her. Too old to find a husband in Japan, she’s come to America to look. The reserved, considerate Miss Kobayashi knows what she deserves in life. I’m willingly fooled by her voice and the hesitant way she looks when she wants something from me.

“I’m warmer now,” she says.

In the living room, I tell her I’ve read Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. “What happens when we enter a space that’s not ours? You’ve done that. You’ve come from outside. Bachelard writes about it. He discusses how cellars, attics, and the hearth at the center of a home can have meaning. The living room is the center of this house. Here,” I say as I get the novel from the table. “I’m interested in phenomenology. Read the part where Shimamura comes to the geisha Komako.”

“‘It was as if a dark loneliness had settled itself over the room. Wondering what might be on the other side of the wall, Shimamura had the uneasy feeling that he was suspended in a void.’”

“You see, rooms mean something. Though Komako can leave whenever she wants, she’s trapped. When I graded your papers, I’d look up places on the map of Japan. I’d dream how your house gets snowbound like mine. We have hearts of ice and snow.”

“It’s innocent.”

“Yes, we’ve been innocent all this time,” I tell her.

Weather changes, though, on the west coast of the main island of Japan.

“Listen to the wind. I trace your words. I tape the pages to the walls of my room. Two or three of your words per sheet of paper. I write the things you say. In the light from the aquarium, I study the words. ‘You’ve put a lot of work into this essay, Miss Kobayashi,’ ‘This is a good description of love,’ ‘well done,’ ‘well written.’ ‘You’re coming along,’ you’ve said. It hurts me when you write, ‘Please, nothing about love. I have to be careful.’”

“I have to protect myself in case somebody questions how I grade your essays. I mustn’t have favorites. What matters is that the East has come to the West.”

“The student, Miss Kobayashi, to her teacher.”

I think of her tracing my words. Others will see the compositions. Because of the winter storm, I imagine the resident assistant summoning the campus police. Where could she be on this terrible day? the RA will wonder. Dean Lund will be involved. “Is there someone we can call?” the campus police will ask him. “Get Janowski, the adjunct. We need his number. He’s the one. I bet he’s in love.”

Miss Kobayashi lights Nell’s new scented candles. When Nell comes home and sees the dried wax, I’ll tell her the power went out. When the phone rings, I don’t care if it’s the school.

“Trace my words by candlelight,” I tell the visitor.

My heart beating, I touch her gently like in the lab school. Student and teacher, we’re as quiet as lotus flowers.

When I touch her again, she tenses, lifts my hands to her small white breasts, guides them where she wants.

During the night, she whispers, “I think someone watches us. Your wife, the students, everyone is looking,” she says, worried.

“No one watches us.”

It’s 4:00 a.m. when I get up. The living room drapes frighten her when they move. Someone looked through the one-way glass at school, she says. Now someone watches through the windows. I tell her the warm air coming through the register is what moves the drapes. The sound of the refrigerator making ice bothers her. “The storm’s not so bad,” I say.

She watches from the window. With the snow hanging over the eaves and swirling in the yard, the house looks different when I go up the lane. I walk to the road to see if someone’s in the woods.

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Captain of the Polestar,” Captain Craigie, gone mad, leaves the ship that’s trapped in the Arctic ice. Looking across the whiteness, a member of the search party says he sees something in front of them. “At first it was only a vague darkness against the white ice, but as we raced along together it took the shape of a man [the captain] . . . lying face downward upon a frozen bank.”

Miss Kobayashi is frightened by the story. In the end, Doyle doesn’t say exactly what happens, only that during the voyage of the Polestar, Captain Craigie’s fiancée at home “had died under circumstances of peculiar horror.” I shouldn’t have assigned her the story. She could have read Conrad Aiken’s “Silent Snow, Secret Snow.”

She reads Tolstoy’s “Master and Man,” London’s “To Build a Fire,” Hawthorne’s “The Snow Image.”

In class I’ll analyze a few sentences from Hemingway’s “Cross Country Snow,” where he writes about alpine skiing in Austria. I’ll give the students handouts from Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Mornings are bright. I sit beside Miss Kobayashi when she comes up from the basement. Outside, a light breeze moves a stalk of field grass. Back and forth, the grass draws a half-circle in the snow, a compass and pencil on a sheet of paper. Red osier dogwood adds color to the white woods. Puffs of snow fall from the trees. She says she hopes the dried grass completes the circle, which it’s been trying to do all morning, but the wind-blown grass stops when it strikes the hawthorn bush, only to begin anew when the wind picks up.

Surely, Dean Lund has gone to her dorm room and read my comments.

When she calls, Nell says she’ll come back early.

“No,” I tell her. “Enjoy yourself.”

I email students. They write to tell me not to worry. I struggle through the snow to the mailbox.

Headlights illuminate the driveway on another day. It takes the plow five minutes to power through the drifts, back up around the garage, and leave for the neighbor’s. Two lovers are naked in bed. We pretend we’re in the house where she was raised.

“You may drop a novel from the reading list,” I tell the students. “Think about reading Snow Country.”

“Stay put out there. We’re self-starters. We’ll complete the work,” the students tell me.

Miss Kobayashi is right. Someone’s come. A shape appears three-quarters of the way up the glass door that leads to the deck in back. When I start the space heater, the shape evaporates. Perhaps inside, a draft keeps this part of the door colder, the part six or seven inches across at its widest, two feet high. Something wants to frighten us.

When I leave, I tell her to keep watch.

“The car’s okay. I’ve warmed the engine. Let me in,” I say when I return to find the door locked.

“Go around,” she says.

Maybe Nell’s called while I was out.

I look through the condensation on the back window to see what a watcher might see. Now it’s like someone else’s house in addition to Nell’s and mine. Bachelard could explain the phenomenon.

“Please, I’m freezing here,” I say.

The geisha makeup stops at the bottom of Miss Kobayashi’s neck in the front and back. In contrast to the white makeup on her face, her lips are red when she comes to me by the fire. To redden them, she uses a powder geishas wet with a brush, then apply. “Do you think Komako in Snow Country looked like this? Geishas paint their faces white so they can be seen in dark rooms.” Miss Kobayashi has combed her hair up, holding it in place with a clip.

She streaks my forehead with paint as though marking me. The second she does it her eyes change. She draws back. She’s won. I’m hers, I think.

Nell too has surprised me by doing things to catch me off guard.

Now and then, a plane passes. Dark comes. Lovers wish on cold stars. A flight from Minneapolis brings passengers from the desert. Nell’s not on the last arrival. Tomorrow is the tenth of January, a week since she left.

I tell Miss Kobayashi she should return to the college. The RA calls inquiring about her. My wife calls. If planes are on time, she’ll be home tonight after a layover in Minneapolis. As I listen to the calls and go through texts, Miss Kobayashi reads her assignments.

The resident assistant, the snowplow driver, the students—it’s possible all of them know. Before this, there was the incident in McCaskill Hall. I know Dean Lund was in the booth watching.

“Do you have your things?” I ask. On the bed where my wife and I sleep, I’ve put the geisha paint, the red Kyoto powder, and other items. “Don’t forget them.”

As J-term nears its end, she asks, “Why do you want me to go?”

“Everything’s ending,” I tell her. Though my heart will be broken, at least I know I can justify Miss Kobayashi’s grade.

“Get your things?” I say again as the cold settles over North America.

Her eyebrows must have raised like this when she was a child. Miss Kobayashi is the winter loneliness of middle age.

Before sunset, the condensation returns. The watcher.

“Check if the lock’s frozen on the patio door.”

She steps out.

Watching each other through the screen door and the glass door, we explore the poetics of space.

I can’t understand how the condensation appears when Nell and I have never seen it. Nothing has ever occurred like this in our house. Miss Kobayashi says it is psychological. I say it’s phenomenological.

This is a kaidan, a Japanese ghost story.

Nell says she saw a woman walking toward Oliver. “I’ve forgotten how remote northern Wisconsin is, especially after being in sun country. I bet there are plenty of landscapes like this in what you’re reading. Tolstoy, Hawthorne. I read Ethan Frome long ago,” Nell says. “This is the place to read about ice and snow, northern Wisconsin.”

“You should read Snow Country.”

Nell says the shuttle driver will pick up the woman walking through the cold. Nell has given him money to take the woman to town. My wife says it was strange seeing someone walking as though she had nowhere to go. “Someone’s lover,” she muses.

In a kaidan, a woman without power during her life now seeks vengeance on her tormenter.

“I have to email everyone to tell them I’ll be in tomorrow for class.”

As Nell unpacks, she tells me about the trip.

The car starts in the morning. It’s strange going out. I look for footprints on the side of the road.

No one appears to know anyone else in class. Because I don’t see Miss Kobayashi doesn’t mean she isn’t watching. “Berchild, Harnisch, Longrie,” I say. The students introduce themselves. I apologize to them for missing so much class. Because of my poor attendance, they’ll earn extra credit. They’ll do well on their grades, I promise them. I collect their papers. We talk about the reading they’ve been assigned. “It’s been quite a winter, Mr. Janowski,” one student says.

“It’s been tough.”

“Out of everything we read, which is your favorite?”

“You tell me,” I say.

Later in McCaskill 200 in the lab school, I sit in a desk in front looking at the board. I’ve written “ai” and “My heart can’t take it” there. I search the one-way glass, hoping whoever’s behind it will see me cry like I never have in life—for Miss Kobayashi, for my wife, for myself.

With night coming, the snow beginning to fall, I say her name.

When she comes into the room, someone’s with her. A man older than me, he wears a jacket that says Airport Shuttle on the back. I’ve read about him. He’d jumped ship here twenty years before to claim asylum during Solidarity in Poland. He owns the shuttle service.

Miss Kobayashi erases what I’ve written on the board. As if there’s no hope for me, she erases everything in my life.

The shuttle driver gets angry when the snow picks up. He pulls at the cuff of his jacket. He scratches his arm. He knows the kind of man I am and wants to talk to me about it, about what I’ve done to the international student. He says he’ll drive me through the snow to my car in the lot behind Sundquist Hall. Once his anger is under control, if he can get it under control, they’ll decide what to do with me. Maybe they’ll hurt me. Maybe they’ll leave me on a road far away. It won’t be any worse than how I’ve hurt her, he says.

“Nothing matters to me. She’ll get a good grade,” I say.

“You see to that. She’s a nontraditional student and needs a boost,” he says. “You shouldn’t have led her on. You think about that! And you a professor. I’m not sure what we’ll do. I have the van warming up. Miss Kobayashi, what do you want to do?” he asks.

She looks older, as if every cruelty done to her in life has shown up on her face. She writes a different word on the board than the one she taught me.

“I know what it means. She told me. It’s our secret,” the shuttle driver says, his arm still bothering him.

All this time, he keeps one side of his head turned away from me. “We’ll take a ride in the van. I’m getting sick with something. This arm drives me nuts. Your day has come, Professor Janowski.”

It’s when he turns that I see the mark of geisha paint on his forehead. He too has been charmed by the Japanese student from Ross Hall and, in love, will do what she says.

This is a Japanese story of ghostly revenge, as I say. Maybe if I teach English 110: The Literature of Snow and Ice again, I’ll use the story and lengthen it. Maybe next year, Nell will leave during J-term and never return. When Miss Kobayashi comes to our country house to live, she’ll be prepared for the snow and cold. I’ll have supplies to see us through a few months, through the whole winter and the next and the next until Miss Kobayashi is older than I can possibly imagine, older than the Sea of Japan, older than winter.

Dean Lund will have retired in a few years. And Nell? What will happen to Nell, my wife, during this time? The biggest mystery will be winter and how Miss Kobayashi locks me out whenever she feels like it. When she does, she looks from the basement and upstairs windows and from the patio door window, just stares at me signaling to please let me in. And what is there for either of us now but an old, old woman, Miss Kobayashi, looking out at an old, old man, Professor Janowski.

A Sea Story

Mr. Lucian Stefanski, veteran of war, would drive twenty-two miles to the rehabilitation center to visit his poor lost brother who’d been hurt in an accident. There was no point going there anymore, but Mr. Stefanski had gotten into the habit of it. He loved his brother, though he couldn’t stand seeing him this way. Nevertheless, Johnny was his responsibility, so he drove the half hour to Middle River.

He’d traveled through unending winters and long bleak springs. Spring in far northern Wisconsin is disappointing—a warm day with temperatures in the fifties followed by a week of sleet, snow, and biting lake winds. The visits had gone on for years. Now it was summer. June had been lovely. According to the meteorologists, “a regime of light winds had set up over the region.” Then the unending tropical rain started, as if to remind Lucian that nothing was certain about this or past summers except his brother’s condition. With the younger brother’s health, there’d be no change. He won’t know me, Lucian thought.

When he got to the room, he found his brother fussing as the nurse’s assistant put him to bed.

“It’s terrible weather,” Lucian said. He straightened his brother’s blanket, held his hand. “I had to run through the rain.”

“What’s the name you call him sometimes?” asked the assistant, a young man named Otto who called his brother Johnny.

“It’s Janusz in Polish . . . Ya-noosh. Whenever I visit, I let him in on things. I keep thinking it’s important he hears my voice. He doesn’t know half of what I’ve done in life. When I was in the service, we sailed on a ship in weather like we’ve had here for almost a week. If you count the stops the MSTS Barrett made in Honolulu and Yokohama, it took us twenty-four days to go from the Broadway Street Pier in San Diego to Okinawa. Because of the storm, we stayed belowdecks. Everyone was seasick. The toilets didn’t work. The sinks were clogged. Not even the merchant sailors were permitted on the weather decks.”

“It doesn’t sound good,” Otto said.

“You think he hears me?”

“Don’t know. We’d like him to.”

We? thought Lucian. You’ve worked here a month and it’s we already? “Do you know how he got hurt and why he’s never getting better?”

“An accident at the flour mill. It’s good that you’re socializing.”

What kind of socializing was a one-way conversation with a brother who didn’t know you?

The rehab building shook like a ship at sea—the Barrett, say, in December 1964. Buffeted by great waves on this sea voyage, the old men in the hallway yelled at nothing or no one in particular.

“Listen,” said Lucian, hoping to get through to his brother. “I wish you’d acknowledge me. You’ve got a visitor coming. I know what bad weather is. I was in typhoons. I’ve told you about the trip on the Barrett. Another time when a typhoon headed for Okinawa, we got marched to the Enlisted Man’s Club at Camp Butler. The club was hot with us packed in. We had stuff spread all over, packs, ponchos, helmets, cartridge belts. You name it. It was safer inside the EM Club than in the barracks. I told this guy he could have a sip of water from my canteen if his ran out. A minute later, I caught him drinking when his own canteen’s full. ‘You bastard,’ I said.”

“I’m listening,” said Otto from the hallway. “I hope the power doesn’t go like it did on you in the Enlisted Man’s Club on Okinawa. Was that in 1965? Is that what you said? It’s more than a half century ago. I marvel at this phonograph in Johnny’s closet. At first, I didn’t know what it was.”

“It’s from home. I hope he remembers a few songs. Wait. Before I turn it on, I want to surprise him.”

The way Lucian Stefanski—Sergeant Stefanski once—would when he was home from Vietnam and later Camp Pendleton, he hid a present behind his back. Otto guessed which hand it was in. But from the brother, nothing. “I got this after three years in the service. Look at what I was presented. Can you see the red and yellow bars on the ribbon? I’m giving it to you, Johnny.”

This time for sure Lucian thought his brother would speak. Then it looked like he’d cry. When his brother said, “Oh, God! Oh, God!” the gift-giver said, “People must think I’m hurting you the way you’re acting up, Janusz. There’s no reason for you to be anxious out there just because I’m giving my brother a red and yellow ribbon and a commendation letter that reads ‘To all who hear these presents, greetings. For honorable and faithful service, the commandant of the Marine Corps takes great pleasure in awarding Johnny the Good Conduct ribbon.’” Finished reading, he pinned the ribbon on his brother’s pajama top, Johnny saying, “Oh, God!” as winds rattled the bulkhead and nothing quieted.

“That’s not good conduct. There’s pain in my life too. You’re not the only one who’s sad. You don’t know how hard it is to see you like this. Can’t you get better?”

“How we can have tropical weather in northern Wisconsin is the question,” said Otto. “Do you think the guest is coming?”

“He won’t disappoint us,” Lucian said as the wind and rain blew against the building. “If you were able to, how would you describe me, Johnny? Try to tell me. We were born in the same hospital, you long after me. Now when we’re both old, I come to visit you. One day when you were young, I set up the record player outside in the garden. I don’t know how I got the idea. In July when the flowers were beautiful, the melodies our grandparents and parents loved played from deep inside the garden of sunflowers, hollyhocks, phlox, lantana. Our relatives came to the house. Everything was so lush. You were very young, as I said, but you wandered among the vines and blossoms to find me. It was beautiful. Where have the days gone? We listened to ‘In the Master’s Garden’ and ‘Why Did You Come to My Garden?’”

As he busied himself getting the records from the closet, Otto said, “Someone’s here.”

Saying the wind had nearly blown him over, the man walked in soaking wet, hair matted. “How is he? I thought I heard him yelling all the way down the hallway.”

Lucian Stefanski helped his brother sit up and make the sign of the cross. The visitor, Mr. Flaherty, took the wafer from the gold vessel he’d brought and said, “the body of Christ.”

“Amen,” Lucian answered for Johnny. Accepting the wafer, he gave it to his brother and wondered if, just once since his accident, Janusz remembered the master’s garden.

The men cried when Mr. Flaherty came to them next. He’d brought the sacrament from church to a floor where no one would be rehabilitated. With the rain, the noise of the men growing agitated with everything going on, Lucian thought of Hoi An, of howitzers, of F-4 Phantom jets flying over in the tropical rain. Until his brother drowned him out, he said, “To all who hear these presents, greetings.” Then Otto said, “Mr. Flaherty’s left.”

When Otto opened the window, the curtain blew back and forth. The wind lifted the certificate from the bedside table.

“Be silent,” Lucian said, which made his brother worse. Midafternoon, the sky darkened. Thunder started in the distance toward town. “I’ve given you a Good Conduct ribbon. Show me you deserve it.”

The troop ship pounded through heavy seas. Though the sea will take a man, he couldn’t let his brother drown.

“Listen to me,” Lucian said over the wind that grew louder.

As though he’d gotten through to him, now he was trying to get through to himself—always during a rainy season. “Save me!” he said to his brother and to the men in the hall. After everything he’d done in life, his sins being numerous, including what had happened to an old woman and her water buffalo when his squad was on patrol, he yelled to the others aboard to help him as seas swept the Barrett’s decks.

When Lucian was twenty, a chaplain had come to his outpost. When the chaplain left after saying Mass, the lance corporal and the others patrolled around a hamlet called Dogpatch. “Can you hear me, Janusz? It was nothing and it was everything the day I escorted the old woman to the hamlet. Staff Sergeant Forsyth had ordered me to take her in. She didn’t have her ID with her. We didn’t know who she was, but she had a water buffalo she was bringing out to the rice paddy and she was crying because it wasn’t right what we were doing. How could I take her anywhere when it wasn’t our country? I told her, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ The straw hat fell to her shoulders. A string around the front of her neck held it on.

“I told her that you too cried sometime, that I missed you, my baby brother, that I was from a place on the shore of a big lake. An old woman, a peasant like the people we come from, she didn’t know English. When a helicopter went over, she cried harder. I’d have told her to go on by herself, but I’d be in trouble with Sergeant Forsyth. Now I didn’t want her to see me crying. It was like she was from our neighborhood, from Saint Adalbert’s. I started to sing ‘The Mountaineers Sowed Rye.’ ‘Zasiali Gòrali, Żytko, Żytko . . . Zashali Goorali, Zheet-koe, Zheet-koe.’”

In the months, or years, since the accident, Lucian had not seen his brother so focused. Maybe he understood what the older one had told him about the peasant woman. Maybe somewhere in his mind he knew that Mr. Flaherty, the communicant extraordinaire, had come to him on the second floor at Middle River. All his life, Johnny had received the sacrament, though Lucian Stefanski had stopped going to Mass after the incident in the rice paddy. Now his brother motioned to him. His blue eyes, the expression on his face, made it look as though he recalled something else from evenings long ago. When his family was together sitting by the garden, they called this the Polish Hour. Even on the floor for patients with head injuries, thought Lucian Stefanski, Janusz must remember something.

As though they were in the garden, he started the phonograph. The record was scratchy at first. Long ago, the phonograph had stood beside the gladioli and the peonies, a few rows from where the dill grew and the cucumbers the family would eat with vinegar late in summer and early autumn. The music calmed his brother.

Lucian remembered how he’d hidden from him. He was home on leave. Johnny was crying. When their mother saw the sergeant in uniform by the rain barrel, she said, “Don’t tease your brother, Lucian. Someday you’ll need him.” Back then, his yelling would stop when Johnny spotted the sergeant. “Look, I’m here. I was hiding by the rain barrel. I was only pretending to leave you.”

When, years ago, the sergeant saluted his brother and held him, evening had fallen on the Polish neighborhood. As the phonograph played, the family walked to the house, the whole family. On the kitchen table was a yellow rose with a book of poetry. There was the bottle of Żubròwka vodka with the blade of bison grass. One of the uncles on their mother’s side recalled when Polish general Jòżef Haller spoke at the Androy Hotel in Superior. Busia, Grandmother, remembered how as a school child she’d been forced to sing “Bozhe, tsarya khrani . . . God, Save the Czar” when Russia controlled part of Poland, and how Grandfather had escaped the Russians, sailing from Hamburg on the Bulgaria. His declaration of intention to become an American read, “I will renounce . . . all allegiance . . . to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty.”

When Lucian Stefanski came home from Vietnam, the family was reunited again, Stefankis, Simzeks, Fronckiewiczs, Zuchowskis. The Zuchowskis were displaced persons who’d come north from Louisiana to live. Now they could join the Polish Hour. The stories of czars and princes led to other stories, other voyages. But when Lucian left Middle River many years later to drive through the wind and rain, his dear brother decorated with a Good Conduct ribbon would remain in the building where the sea never calmed. It never would calm, and there was nothing for Lucian at Middle River anymore.

Still, he’d return to the rest home tomorrow and the next day. What would it be like when he had no brother? What was happening to the world he’d known? There weren’t many Polish people around anymore; the Polish Club itself was barely hanging on. Maybe ten members attended meetings on the first Thursday of the month. And which month was this? He knew midsummer was over, Saint John’s Eve past, days getting short.

How would it be when he had an hour left in his life and the winter wind screamed around the house where he and his brother were raised and the garden was covered so deep with snow, when he tried remembering Johnny and other things he’d forgotten? Then how would it be for the sergeant of Polish descent who’d escorted the old woman to her village the way Russian soldiers had escorted his own grandmother long ago? What God gives, will be . . . Co Bóg da, to będzie, he thought, remembering the Polish words. This offered no comfort until he got home and heard the phone ringing. Otto, the assistant, was saying the sea was calm at the rest home, the men at peace, and could he, Otto, play the record? Johnny would sleep better if he heard the record and the song about the mountaineers sowing rye.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Tennessee Williams, whose work has captivated me for years. I am also indebted to Rudolph Heberle and Dudley S. Hall’s New Americans: The Displaced Persons in Louisiana and Mississippi; to Cane River Cuisine, published by the Service League of Natchitoches, Louisiana; to Thomas Sadler Roberts’s Bird Portraits in Color; and to John B. and Evelyn Moyles’s Northland Wildflowers: A Guide for the Minnesota Region.

Ann Cleary of Superior, Wisconsin, inspired these stories. I very much owe this book to her.

Susan Snowden, Hendersonville, North Carolina, and Fraser Snowden, Natchitoches, helped me with The Thief of Words. I also appreciate the encouragement of John Merchant of Loyola University of Chicago, Jo Mackiewicz of Iowa State University, my niece Elizabeth Fletcher of St. Paul, and my friends Thomas Napierkowski, Tom Johnson, Tom Fleming, and Douglas Borsom. As Ben Berryben says at the start of William Goyen’s novel The House of Breath, “I touch you and name you and claim you all.”

My deepest thanks to Dennis Lloyd of the University of Wisconsin Press, who worked very hard to bring the book to print. Hearty thanks also to Sheila McMahon and Marlyn Miller for their careful editing.

The story “The Thief of Words” was previously published in Hypertext Journal. “Chokecherries” appeared as “The Things That Are Wrong with My House” in Mid-American Review; “A World of Accordions” as “Polonaise” in Forkroads: A Journal of Ethnic-American Literature; and “The Beauty of Desire” as “Miss Louisiana’s Farewell Walk” in South Carolina Review. I am grateful to the editors of these journals.

Anthony Bukoski is an award-winning writer and a fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. Born and raised in Superior, Wisconsin, Bukoski is the grandson of Polish immigrants. He served in the Marine Corps, including a tour in Vietnam. He earned a BA degree in English, then attended graduate school at Brown University and the University of Iowa, eventually teaching at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin–Superior. He is the author of eight short story collections, among them Time between Trains, a Booklist Editor’s Choice as one of the best books of fiction for American libraries; and The Blondes of Wisconsin, which won the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was an honoree in the annual Society of Midland Authors award competition. Bukoski is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a past fellow of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. His stories have aired on Wisconsin Public Radio and National Public Radio.