Why did I do it, she thought. Why did I drive alone? George would have come, and we coulda had some fun along the way, or Sue and Tasha. We coulda made it a girls' night out. Now I'm stalled out on the exit ramp twenty miles outside of Gary, Indiana, ten miles from anything. I shouldn't have been so cheap. Jason told me to do something about that transmission, and he's always been a good, honest mechanic. I said this car was seventeen years old and I would run her into the ground. Well, I guess I did. I ran the old boat right into the ground at three thirty in the freaking morning on the way to Mom's house. If I was going to be this stupid, driving alone through the rust belt in the middle of the night with a car that a mechanic told me could stop dead at any time, I could have at least charged my cell phone first. Mom could come out here and get me or send her boyfriend to pick me up, but she's not going to know I need a ride and a wrecker unless I can find a phone. Francesca got out of her elderly Ford and headed down the shoulder into town. She almost walked into the sign.
As she went through the grass just off the shoulder, she heard a low moan. Francesca jumped. She stopped and looked around. A rusted, green highway sign missing a few bolts was swinging back and forth in the night breeze, its reflective lettering faded and peeling. The sign and the cold air blown across her back, right through her thin t-shirt, made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Francesca shuddered. She had to squint to make out the words. She thought it said “Welcome to Greersville.” She kept walking, faster than she had been before.
The ramp led down into what was probably a main street before they built a bypass. All the stores looked abandoned, their empty windows gaping like open mouths. Most of them were broken. A few were boarded. Some were burnt out, blackened. There was ash and broken glass all over the cracked sidewalk. Francesca was glad she had left her work boots on. The streetlights loomed like skeletal giraffes. None of them were lit. One was leaning at an improbable angle. Francesca wondered if anyone lived here anymore. No one left at this address, she thought. Just me and the ghosts.
On Monday morning, the boss was gone. My coworker found a note on the office door. She was on a plane to California. I was in charge. She had known on Friday that she would be going. In fact, she had known for weeks. She had forgotten to say anything until after our last shift ended the week before. The remaining two lines scrawled on the post-it note told me that the key to the office was at the Reference Desk and wished us good luck. There was no mention of when she would be back. I cursed myself for taking a job at the Durham Public Library.
On the Martin Luther King weekend of my tenth grade year, it snowed in the mountains. My family owns a house up around Boone, but we have never gotten around to buying a car with four wheel drive. Dad's Camry was built for solid, dependable comfort and economy, not rugged terrain. Mom had an aging van, a heavy Dodge. Its six cylinder engine allowed the lumbering vehicle to pull its own weight up the steep back roads of Appalachia in decent road conditions, but it was never meant to clime steep grades on an equal mixture of cracked blacktop and ice. I went to a teen summer job fair on a whim. I had nothing better to do that frosty morning. I was just fourteen years old, so not much was open to me. I settled for filling out an application for a city work program. It seemed like it was mostly for underprivileged kids, but I was told they let in some teens from fairly prosperous, stable families. I was surprised when they called me back.
After a drug test and more paperwork than I had ever seen before, I sat through three hours of City of Durham employee training. I was pretty much useless for the rest of the day. I was so slack jawed and stupid that I missed a downbeat for the first, and, I hope, last, time in my life. In fact, I missed the entirety of Pomp and Circumstance at graduation later that day. After a week off and a mission trip, I started work for six dollars an hour. I worked thirty hours a week, and this added up to a sum I simply understood as more money than I have ever had before or since. It was with this money that I bought my coat and the oldest book in my collection, a little Florentine volume published in 1640. I also saved. The money was nice. I certainly enjoyed it. I had a big problem, though, a personality quirk that made me utterly ill suited to work at the library. I had a work ethic.
I came home and told my mother that I felt like a leach on society the first time my boss told me to take a long lunch. She was a friend of the man in charge of the program, and he gave her as many teens as she wanted every summer. She took three of us and made us do her job while she sat in her office and discussed her medical conditions with friends on the phone. There were two others in the library, one who commonly worked on our floor and another who stayed upstairs. I was in periodicals. There was very little to do except hide from patrons and look busy. I work hard, and I believe in an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. I was getting the pay alright, but no one expected me to do anything. On top of my growing concern about the ethicality of lying on my time sheet more than once a week, which my boss told me to do, was the misery of picking up the paycheck I so prized. Every two weeks, I had to go get it from the man who ran the program in person and listen to him make sexist remarks with a smile on my face. The latter problem lasted the length of the ordeal, but the former was temporarily resolved when my boss up and left for the west coast.
The day ticked by neatly. After all, we had been doing her job for several weeks. The one issue was that she was not around to sign our time sheets, but we assumed she would upon her return. Then Jimmy came back from lunch. Jimmy was our resident pot head. He was a weed aficionado, a real connoisseur of this forbidden plant. He was a decent enough guy, but he was often noticeably stoned. That day, his dealer had found him something special. He described it as best he could in his intoxicated state. It was a cigar laced with some sort of hallucinogen. Then he informed me that the tables were growing legs and walking around. I hid him until it was time to lock up and go home. Things went downhill from there.
Jessica's Song
I found you lost and lonely, last lamb in a den of wolves.
They told me you were slow, but I caught a single glimpse
Of the marble pillars of a hidden mind.
I took half a chance on the girl with the smile.
I gave you a few hours of my precious time,
Tried to help dig your undiscovered soul out of the jungle vines.
Looks like you found a palace underneath.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
I gave you what I had, a place to stand,
Told my friends to keep civil tongues in their heads
When you came around; I made them understand
That you were one of mine, had the right to look us in the eye.
As the months dragged on, I wasn't surprised
To watch you have a fling with Buddha and go back to Christ.
When new ideas set your heart on fire,
You etched a smile into my cold face.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
You bought new glasses with purple frames,
Read The Jungle, celebrated with cheap champagne.
You made socialism your dangerous crush,
The one that you never could bring home.
The same weight was pulling everyone down.
We all trudged along in the same ravine,
But in the dusty corners of your head, you found something that looks like wings.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
We talked on the phone the other day,
And your parents' preacher was telling lies,
Trying to cut Jesus' own words with hate.
You told me you wanted to stand up right there, call it out for the bullshit it was.
I could see righteous rage burning in your eyes
From three hundred miles away.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
I thought of you when first we met,
The shy girl and all of the things we said,
How you broke your own chains and found your way.
You grew up in a house without many books.
Teachers were quick to write you off.
Your accent was country; you reading was rough.
You had no help, but you were smart enough
To see what you were missing and look up.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
No one ever thought you had the guts to do more
Than spit out the ideas you were fed,
But you clawed your way up, and you hacked your way through.
You sat in the back row; you light up the room.
You walked through the desert to drink from life's cup.
Ignore the sugar coated barbs, shut out every “bless her heart,” and rise.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
When I have a heavy weight to carry
And a task set before me puts frost on my soul,
I think of you and know that Goliath still falls.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
Jessica, I've watched you climb.
The park is almost what you would expect. It has a gate, a huge piece of wrought iron that was there when Delokgate was new. The midway is long and flat. The ridge of the only hill in the county hangs over it like a warning. The Ferris wheel stretches its pale, wooden limbs like a dancing starfish frozen in time. The haunted house is down a path to the west that runs along the edge of the forest. It's sad, broken windows look out over the overgrown lawn. It was here before the park, built by the first white owner of this land. After his family was slaughtered by vampires, he drank himself to death. It's a good haunted house, with real ghosts. Three different priests have been brought in to help them move on, but so far no one's had any success. Maybe if I could find someone who wasn't Catholic. Oh, well. They've been there a hundred and fifty years. They can wait a little while longer.
The midway stretches from the gate to the hill's steep sides. It's around a hundred and fifty yards across, maybe seven hundred yards from side to side. It always smells like buttered popcorn and fry oil except late at night and early in the morning in winter. When the park is closed and there aren't any footsteps in the snow, the air is pure and clear. It's like still water. In the half an hour between the setting of the moon and the dawn, when the werewolves walk on two legs again and the vampires have retreated into the dark, my park is the most beautiful sight in the world. There's a kind of rightness in the angle of the rooftops of the booths. The iron fence, and Carl Jaworkski's weed whacker, hold the forest at bay. The paint on the facades of the outbuildings and sheds, the original owner's attempt to recreate his distant hometown in the rosy glow of Victorian idealization, is fresh and clean. The stripes on the tents hold their colors, and the white doesn't look yellowed in the first rays of the rising sun. The poles are perfectly straight. It's my reward for browbeating Sammy Flynn, who is sixteen, into taking his hands off his girlfriend long enough to do the job right. The whole thing looks proper, correct, decent. It looks like a job well done.
Deloksgate is silent in that perfect half an hour. When the gates open, though it fills with all the noise of humanity. People talk and laugh. Babies cry. Lovers argue and make up. Little old ladies argue whether the park has gotten better or worse since I took over. I don't worry about it. Each of them can argue either side, and they switch from hour to hour. Thirteen-year-old boys and girls whisper to each other about ditching their chaperons and heading for the Ferris wheel. The hum, the babble, is like the warm waves of a tropical ocean. It rises and falls, lapping at my ears more or less gently most of the time. Beneath these voices, there's the sub-bass thunder of my train, the piercing falsetto of the whistle. The whistle's cry gets sweeter and more mournful every year. Sometimes, it sounds like the wail of a newly widowed woman or orphaned child. Other times, it's a prayer for the souls of the dead. When it sounds along with the first bright notes of the merry-go-round, it's as haunting as children playing in a cemetery.
The crowds drift from ride to ride in a swirl of color, trailing the smell of candy and fried food that goes sour after they pass. They dazzle my eyes, too used to picking a single movement out of dark monotony. There's always light and music, colored metal spinning. At Halloween, decked out in all her finery, Deloksgate is a grand old lady. My park is also a facade, but that's another story.
The morning I met Aria, I saw the sunrise. I saw the darkness crack and scatter before the pink, then orange, then scarlet glow of the morning. I looked through the back window of the car speeding west down I-40 and watched an everyday miracle play out. I leaned forward in my seat, nervous, exited. I wondered if two and a half years of struggle were about to culminate in the granting of my greatest wish, the achievement of a dream for which so many of my colleagues were too poor to ever hope. We were rocketing towards something that might be a false chance, a red herring, a dead end. However, possibility glitters like metal in the sun. I sat there gnawing a fried chicken biscuit from a drive through window wondering if I was riding towards something like destiny. It was the second day of a summer gathering of tuba players, and I was on my way to meet an instrument I might buy.
Half way through the seventh grade, I was a shy, nervous, nerdy girl with no real passion or direction. A band director told me to go into a practice room and try my hand at the tuba. My life had shifted on its axis by the end of the period. I still wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do with myself, but I knew that whatever it was, it would involve the instrument. I went home and told my parents to start saving for a very expensive horn. While my parents had found ways to put money away, I grew taller, more assertive, more confident. I learned fast, working with all the fanaticism of a convert. By the summer before tenth grade, it was accepted that I would be the highest-ranking tuba player in the school from the coming August on to graduation. As we pulled into the UNCG campus, I reflected on the chance that I might become the first tuba-owning student in the history of my dirt poor school before sundown.
We met the owner of the instrument. My thoughts were cloudy, murky with the early hour. I knew that I could easily end up working with this tuba for the rest of my life. I wondered whether the alchemy of hope and fear churning in my guts was what a person from a culture of arranged marriage feels on the way to meet a likely spouse. A graduate student at the music school led us to a practice room. I had always played American tubas, and this was a German. The proportions, the angle of the bell, the rotary valves like those of a “French” horn were foreign. It looked expensive, intimidating. The thick brass was heavier in my hands than anything else I had played. The bore of the bell and pipes was wide. It took me a few tries to get that colossus to sound. It was only when I began to play that we really met, that I came to understand the power and beauty of this creature of brass and fire.
I saw that she was the pale, faint hue of an alloy between yellow and white gold. The dent guards and the long keys of the valves were silver. She was fire. She was sunlight on Lake Michigan. She was nothing like the plodding, broken down tubas I played at school. This one had a life of her own, or wanted one. I found a yearning cast in brass, a desire to escape. When I later found her only owners had been two old men, I knew why. She seemed to cry out for something more than another twenty years of community band concerts in the park. This was a tuba I could bring back to my school. I told her owner she was satisfactory, that I would speak with my parents. I told my mother I was in love. That evening, we all went out to dinner. My mother gave the old tuba player $3200 in hundred dollar bills.
My parents could no longer understand the daughter whom an urban public school had transformed into a stranger. I performed in a tuxedo and did the work of a man. I fell in love with the son of a repairman who worked for the state and learned to swear. I was a well-respected member of a less than respectable community. All they knew was that the stranger they loved wanted a tuba more than anything else. They found a way to give me one. They bought me an instrument, a companion, a way to keep playing after graduation. It was all they could give a person they no longer knew. I have never seen a more perfect expression of their love.
Aria and I have weathered some storms together these last two years. I kept her safe through severe weather, the occasional outright attack, and a move. Most days, I love her more than anything but God himself. Some mornings, I see the first rays of the sun come through the window and reflect on polished metal. There, before me is the vision of that first morning. Light sparkling on my tuba's contours and dancing on every edge is a lesson in gratitude, in love that outlasts and outlives. That, in my mind, is the image of blessing, of God's grace, of the love of a parent for an unrepentant prodigal child.
I was in my case that morning, locked away in the dark. I had been there a long time. I belonged to an old man. He'd take up with some cute little tuba and left me locked up in that black, plastic shell. He was seventy two, and his lungs weren't what they used to be. The situation wasn't any more his fault than it was mine. It was his nature to get older and mine to need a ton of air. After all, I'm from Germany. Over there, they make us like Hummers. As hard as he tried, Roger just couldn't fill the tank anymore. It got to where I hardly ever saw the sun. After a while, I heard him talk about how I was going to be sold. When he loaded me into his van, didn't know where we were going, but I did know why.
When there was light again, light for the first time in who knows how many weeks, I saw a girl. This was no grandma. She looked like she was about my age. She was an icy blond who had made it to midsummer without getting a tan. I wondered if she would melt if she went out in the sun. Her hands, though, were another story. They belonged to a tuba player. For the first time in so long, I felt myself heating up, absorbing the warmth of a living body. My owner handed her a silver mouthpiece. I lived again, borrowing a pulse and breath from a real organism, a person with a beating heart. That something extra, the music, the way the notes become more than the sum of their parts, was coming out of a human mind and soul.
I saw her. I saw into her. I knew she had been the runt of the litter, the last tuba player made in her beginning band and the only girl. She was also the only one of the five still playing. She clawed her way through the ranks, and now she was about five weeks from taking over the highest position in tuba playing at her school. And the school! Kids planning on sending an applications to Yale ate lunch with hippies and Bloods from East Durham. It was always one desperate quick fix from falling down. This wasn't some old guy who was content to sit in his community band chair until they stuck him in the nursing home. There was fire here, strength and hunger. She wanted to be awesome someday. She wouldn't settle for less. She was going to be one of those people who can take a tuba in their hands and wield it like a force of nature. I was the first nice horn she'd ever been allowed to touch. She was almost intimidated enough to walk away, but I convinced her to stick around. This was my chance to see a bit more of the world, to have some adventures. Besides, as nice as my first two masters were, I'd never fallen head over heels for anyone before. Two years later, we're still together.
Larkin was everything she promised. Besides me, she had seven school tubas and a black sousaphone to her name. She was a crazy workaholic who sometimes went to dinner in full regalia, full freaking penguin suit, before a show. She beat dents out of tubas with machinist's hammers and made a strap out of an old leather coat. There were times she was either working or asleep, but she did find a few days now and then to take me to the mountains. Since she bought me, I've gotten to see all kinds of strange places. We do alright together. We're still figuring things out, still doing our best, still in love.
I used to hear them talking when they thought I was asleep.
“Is it good for her, Gerald? Is it good for a little girl to spend so much time where everything is dark and creepy?”
“She's not a little girl anymore, and it's good for her chances of getting a paycheck someday. There are no jobs, Martha. If she gets work at that park, she'll stay in this town. Our town! You know, where we grew up and fell in love and got married, where we know all our neighbors, where we want to grow old and die?!”
“We're barely making ends meet! If you just went down to the community college, they say they'd give you that retraining for almost nothing. You could get certified to do something, and then you could get a job somewhere else. This place is dying. We could go somewhere there's life. You know, young couples in the neighborhood, people moving in instead of out. How many more years do you think your work'll last? Two? Five? One of our sons got into college, and the other one is a punk musician. My beautiful boy's hair is dyed green and turned into two foot spikes! Two foot spikes, Gerald! That's what living here has done.
“Your beautiful boy just got a record advance he could buy a car with, Martha. He's making a good living, and he loves to play. I've never understood it, but music means the world to him. He got out of here. He played clubs in Chicago, and then it was New York. Now it's an album. You really think our son, the big punk rock guy, is every coming back here except to visit us at Christmas? And his big brother called while you were at the store. He ain't coming back, either. Our boy's going to law school. Law school! He and his brother. They're both gonna be rich, important men. Maybe one'll be a rock star or do a big movie soundtrack. The other, maybe he'll be a great lawyer or a politician or a judge. Besides, that park suits her. Mary Isabelle took to it like Joey-, sorry, Aziziel, the lead singer of Razorwolf Dead, took to that electric guitar.”
“We bought him that, didn't we.”
“Yeah, Martha, that year for Christmas. We had to scrimp and save half the year for it, but he still plays that guitar every night. He's never forgotten it. His tool, his toy, his ticket out of here, that scary-looking thing he calls the Marshfire Rose.”
“That is an awful-looking thing, isn't it, but the smile on his face when he saw that monster-”
“Is a lot like the way Mary Isabelle looks on her way to the park.”
“Are you sure we aren't doing a disservice to her. Sometimes, I hear rumors-”
“Of course you do. It's a “haunted” fun park that's been around since 1889. The owner probably starts half of them to drum up buisnes.”
“Gerald, you moved to this town as a young man. I was here as a child, and, well, strange things happen there. There's an edge here, a borderline, two sides to a coin. Some of these murders lately-”
“A lot of it's the poverty and drinking. Crime's got nothing to do with that park.”
“An ax murderer and a cyanide killer within weeks of each other? Those things you sometimes see out of the corner of your eye? All the maulings?
“Bears.”
“The survivors say wolves, and then we don't see them around anymore. The attacks on the diner by things that look a whole hell of a lot like rotting corpses? Crazy things happen in this town, crazier things around that park.
“Even if they do, Mary's tougher than the boys ever were. Martha, she's a fighter. This is what she does. I doubt we could stop her. Besides,” I found myself drifting off, “he told us he intends for her-” I fell asleep.
“A hundred years! But-but that's impossible. Impossible, crazy, but the deeds don't lie. The house is mine. The house was his and his father's. And Delokgate! I grew up here in Delokgate This place is more home to me than Mom and Dad's house. It was here almost before they'd finished killing the Indians. It says here Von Braun bought the land in 1886 from a farmer, and on this page, in Van Helsing's handwriting, that he was most of the way through drinking himself to death. The man's family was slaughtered by things. And then his wife and daughters kept coming back! Vampires. They came back to him as vampires every night. Then the park opened in '89. I knew that, though.
He was there. He was there, watching the old roller coaster rise, breaking open the crates that held the horses on the carousel. Maybe he accepted the delivery of the first costumes. Maybe he hammered a nail here, kept the books there, sharpened swords. How old would he have been? In '97, he was twenty-two. Thirteen. He was thirteen. He did no worse to me than his own father did to him. Child labor-well, I guess things were different then. Childhood isn't something a man of that time would understand. Could it be true? He did appreciate black humor. Did he play some outlandish prank?
No, that's not like him. Not now. He was just too thoughtful. Seven years ago, when he finally woke up, his first thought was to comfort me even though he was three quarters dead himself. He hung on long enough to tell me to bury his brother. He wouldn't leave a mess, a trick. Besides, the lawyer says it all checks out. He did some quick mental math and turned white as a sheet! This paper has his writing on it, and it's old.
How many nights did he do this? How many times? How many of them did he kill during his long life? There's no way to know. How many years will I be here doing the same thing? A hundred? Two? And does it rub off on the people around me? You've been here a long time, Mrs. Tran, and you haven't visibly aged. Not the whole hundred years, right? But you've been here a while. You said this champagne was set aside for my twenty-first birthday. It looks expensive, but I guess money's not something I have to worry about anymore. Here, have a glass. We'll drink to long life. Here's to our health and to all dead ghost riders. Here's to death, as hard a worker as any that ever rode his-my train. Here's to a good man, finally at rest, and the hope that we'll see him again someday.
Mary didn't mind vampires stopping in for a cup of coffee around sunset or the suspiciously hairy-looking set that would stagger in the night after the full moon and take a couple of tables in the front. As long as everybody behaved and everyone paid, she didn't think their lifestyles were her problem. She never felt it was her place to judge others for their humanity or utter lack thereof. She didn't mind the walking dead. They had the money for good tips. It was the shambling, moaning kind that got to her. She loved her hometown and didn't want to move away, but she already ran her diner under fairly adverse conditions. She wondered if the zombies and revenants wouldn't finally kill her, or her overextended patience.
When the decaying shell of the abandoned factory on the hill had begun to glow green, she told the teenage busboy to leave early. When the smell of rotting flesh drifted down from the rise, she told Ivan that he could head out. He stayed, but he put his knives where he could reach them in a hurry. She called the night manager, a single mother of two, and gave her the night off. Mary called the waitress and short order cook who worked the graveyard shift and told them she was having one of those nights. No one was required to show up. Anyone who did would get time and a half.
She told Ivan to look around for oil, grease, cleaning solvents, anything that would blow up or burn. Ivan nodded his assent. The mouth on his broad face seemed like a vestigial organ. He isn't the kind of guy, Mary often thought, that you'd expect to hear much from. Ivan resembled a boulder, heavy, solid, and low to the ground. If she hadn't known him all her life, Mary would have though he was a big stone that one day got the urge to walk into a restaurant ask for a job. He barricaded the front window with tables. Mary tied up her long, brown waves of hair. The last of the staff arrived. She turned the sign to “closed” and locked the door. They came.
She told Ivan to look around for oil, grease, cleaning solvents, anything that would blow up or burn. Ivan nodded his asent. The mouth on his broad face seemed like a vestigial organ. He isn't the kind of guy, Mary often thought, that you'd expect to hear much from. Ivan resembled a boulder, heavy, solid, and low to the ground. If she hadn't known him all her life, Mary would have though he was a big stone that one day got the urge to walk into a restaurant ask for a job. He barricaded the front window with tables. Mary tied up her long, brown waves of hair. The last of the staff arived. She turned the sign to “closed” and locked the door. They came.
I'm the only techie left from the Majestic's early days. I was hired two weeks after the movie theatre shut down and the place opened up again to show live acts. We had all kinds of people here, back then, and I've got some great stories, especially about the magicians. It was one of those that wrecked the stage back in 68'. The Great Ezmanzeraldo, Magician and Illusionist, had one of the most popular shows. On average, I'd say he cut three pretty girls in half every night. I ran the light board for his acts and we went out for drinks after a good show sometimes. That's how I found out he'd been trying to avoid his wife Trudy for seventeen years.
Trudy was a perfect little hausfrau. She was one of those rare women who likes doing the laundry and having dinner on the table by the time hubby's home. Ezmanzeraldo, real name Joseph Smith, couldn't stand it. She was always badgering him about his tuxedo,ss whether there was something for her to let out or hem or drive to the dry cleaner's. She worried over him when he was sick with aspirin and chicken soup. She never left him alone, never let him be. She called herself Mrs. Joseph P. “Ezmanzeraldo” Smith. In public. He looked for comfort in the flask in his breast pocket and his assistants. She never once raised a fuss. After the house emptied, we would go to a bar. Over my Pabst and his Smirnoff, I would always ask him if he wanted a divorce. He said he couldn't hurt her like that. Besides, he wasn't sure if she could survive on her own.
Anyway, one night, she called him six times in half an hour. The last time, it was to tell him she was on her way to his dressing room with six dozen roses. There wasn't much that needed doing, so I went out to get a pizza for the boss. I got back to find that he had climbed into this steel cage he had, an antique piece he was really proud of, a giant bird cage. It had claws and gilding and filigree, the whole nine yards. That thing was nine hundred pounds before you put the anorexic assistant inside. Well, he hadn't set the lift up right, and because I wasn't there to help, he only used five hundred pound rope. I knew when I saw it I had a disaster on my hands. Lucky for his little woman, he'd made good money as a magician the last fifteen years or so and had one helluva life insurance policy. Trudy became a feminist and was just fine by herself. As the rope broke, he waved at me, smiled, and shouted his last words:
“Cage before Trudy!”
It was almost seven AM on the east coast, and the sun was not so much as kissing the sea as it was slobbering all over it, and the light lit upon die-hard joggers trotting along the shoreline, kicking up dust clouds and dripping perspiration off their noses; it would have been a peaceful scene, with its gleaming seashells and seagulls (who would have been pretty if only they weren't sea gulls) but for the atomic bomb that went off at 7:01 AM.
Major General Howard Cruntz was having a bad day. He was in charge of, among other things, storing leftover missiles from the cold war under a mountain in a remote corner of Colorado. Somehow, a particularly large and powerful piece of Uncle Sam's apocalypse delivery system was aimed at Rhode Island around three fifteen the previous afternoon, or so said the computers. A little before seven, it had somehow gotten fired at the aforementioned state, which was largely obliterated before its residents had any chance to wonder what had hit them. Someone had been horribly, unforgivably incompetent. Apart from any directly responsible parties, whom he assumed would be jailed if not executed or lynched, he knew that someone in the top brass would have to take the blame. Yes, someone's military or civil service career was ruined, and he desperately hoped it wasn't his. It wasn't, he thought as he stormed down a hallway trying to look busy, it wasn't as if I meant to shoot the thing. What has Rhode Island ever done to me? I'm not in charge of the computers. I haven't even looked at the launch codes in years.
He decided that one of the engineers or computer programmers, one of the scientists, had to be to responsible. It must have been one of those egg heads, he concluded and continued down the hall. Most of the computers got their original programing during the cold war, he remembered. Maybe those professors of computer engi-whatever can say someone who's been dead twenty years actually made this awful mistake. I guess people will be angry they didn't fix it, but at least they'll have some kind of excuse. He walked into his office, picked up a ream of blank paper, and stuffed it into files marked “classified” in large, orange letters. He walked back down the hallway, trying to seem like he was doing something to remedy this awful mess.
“Head on home, Cathy. You're mother told you not to say out past sundown until they catch this sicko.”
“We're neighbors, Clyde. I trust you. So does she. I'll go after I help with this firewood.” Clyde grinned.
“Are you sure I ain't what she was worried about?” He raised his ax.
Bobby read his paper in the diner.
“Another cyanide death, John. One of ours. He lived here thirty years, went to Our Lady, drank his usual cuppa Joe here, and collapsed right outside.”
“And yesterday ax murderer got the Greene girl. Crazy times, Bobby”
“Ain't they?”
“You like yours black, right?”
Sixty year ago, the world was turning dark, and, in the Lady's realm, madness spread like a plague and reigned like a king. The people were insane, insatiable, like rabid beasts. Soldiers deserted the Army, leaders forsook their people, and swindlers and thieves patrolled every alley with more regularity than any police or night watch. The world tree's roots were gnawed by an acidic chaos that crept up through cracks between the floorboards of the world. Everyone was drunk. Everyone was high. People, strangers, made a wild, desperate something that cannot be called love openly in city streets. A fragment of the multiverse was dying, as a thousand do every day, and no one but its denizens noticed or cared. Denizens they were, for it was a land of travelers, vagrants, wanderers, immigrants, and refugees, lost souls and ruined people from a million surrounding dimensions. Each searched for success, trying to cut from the fabric of the place a new and mighty self, a personage able to write off past failures as the work of a pitiable inferior and free from the curse of any prior misfortune. Now, they found their lots cast with a dying country.
Some felt cheated and spent their rage pummeling anyone smaller and weaker who happened to come along. Others became resigned to their fate, declared themselves perpetual losers, and finally lost even themselves in the abundance of alcohol that stayed cheap even as the price of food went through the roof because of obscure economic difficulties that only a few of the wizards of the great bankers could understand. The wizards, mathematician-mages, were slaughtered along with their financier bosses before they could do anything to rectify the colossal mess they had made. Some people cried, others quietly hung themselves or left for parts unknown. Many turned to hedonism, violence, and vice as branches of the old ash tree cracked and fell away, forever, into nothingness. The void's un-stomach growled as it laughed at their coming destruction.
Then the trustees, older than the Lady herself, convened and decided that there was no alternative to a cataclysm of biblical proportions which would wipe everything out. Their sorcery would rip the ash out of the ground and throw it into the emptiness of space. Then they would begin anew. These mortal deities had not visited the realm they handed off to a minor goddess in aeons. The roots of the ash tree proved stronger than anyone had anticipated. The trustees decided they would keep the same topography and find an almost entirely new population less depraved than the half-settled nomads, strangers, foreigners, and freaks who were told tho pack their bags and leave. No one particularly wanted to die, so as far as anyone knew, the eviction notice had one hundred percent compliance. Most of the people went quietly off to other places with nothing more than a few good stories to tell, stories their new acquaintances would likely never believe. A few, however, loved their homes. They left to save their lives, but they swore an oath of return.
In the beginning, it was dark. It was cold. I was floating around, an idea waiting to be had, a baby waiting to be born. I was a soul tapping my foot in a lobby hopping my number would come up and whoever's in charge around here would incarnate me already. I was about twelve, then. I knew I was divine, you know, not in charge of the multiverse or anything, but clearly not one of the little breathing things running around down there. Except there weren't any little, warm things running around living and dying the way they do. There was just me, floating in the aether, so incredibly bored. It went on like that for a while, a couple of years. Then an old robber baron looking for something meaningful to do before he died wandered through the nothingness with a handful of dirt and a seed. I was still twelve.
(-) :)>@:'
o'
A girl who wished she could be somewhere, anywhere else stared at her paper, thinking about how she had never had a dentist appointment that she found as unpleasant as third period. She was annoyed at her teacher for ignoring, as usual, the difficulties of having to use a computer for everything. It wasn't like she had many other options. Her handwriting became illegible if she wrote at any speed. She found a way to enter the thoroughly stupid picture on the board into her laptop. She was instructed to turn it into something. As much as she had liked such assignments in the second grade, she could think of a million better uses of two or three minutes of her time as she sat in one of her twelfth grade classes. She added some symbols on her keyboard, thinking to make a monkey wearing a hat. It didn't come out looking much like a monkey, and she found the hat annoying. She decided it would be some sort of ray gun. That better fitted her mood. Then it occurred to her that her school might have a zero-tolerance policy and decide she was a sociopath preparing to kill her classmates if she called it a gun of any kind. She realized she had already mentioned a switchblade in a poem that day and figured she had better not push her luck. She was also worried about ticking off the teacher, or giving the teacher the idea that she was some sort of homicidal sociopath because she was a few hundred miles from anyone else who might write her a college recommendation and felt it behooved her to make a good impression. She added some symbols, hoping it would begin to look like something. Nothing was forthcoming, so she called it a penguin and claimed she had forgotten to add the right wing.
Portrait in Crayola
My outer edge is frozen steel,
A razor drawn in blue and gray,
A switchblade shining in the sun.
That wicked knife, that cold abyss
Uncaring as the distant stars,
Holds those at bay I will not tell
The spending of seventeen years
That makes them longer than an age.
Follow light dancing down the edge.
The metal's pale, blue tint grows rich,
And it becomes the royal hue
Of the people and birds and beasts
Capering on old china plates
In my grandmother's dining room
And curtains hanging dark and thick
From a hall's ceiling to the stage.
My memory is bound in threads
Of mystic azure; locked and bound,
There lie tales I may someday tell.
Walk along those threads of sky
All through the many days and nights.
Pass the shores of a distant lake.
See the haze of approaching heat,
The red of rage, of blood, of flame.
It is the red that drives me on,
Makes my disused tongue a lash.
The red of all-consuming flame,
Of love that, burning, will not die
Orders my days and set my course.
It drew a reader from her chair
And sent her on a strange crusade.
Know this, my nature in crayons,
My story on the color wheel,
And you know more of my nature
Than most I meet will ever learn.
Sonnet to Aria
Where all the days are long and gray, you shine,
My light in darkness, and you pierce the fog
Of hours that grind past wasted and the smog
Of years trying to make more mindless swine
Of intellects bright burning; you're the pine
Bough blazing on December nights, the log
Melting the snow, and, in the spring, the frog
Heralding the first summer night; your fine,
Polished brass sings the contours of my soul.
Golden companion, some would call such love
Of a tuba the stuff of old freak shows,
But your rich thunder, steadfast and whole
Inspires a fountain and a deluge of
Poetry to a muse that no one knows.
The American Vampire
There once was a vampire who ate
More girls than he needed to sate
His thirst; he grew fat.
The doctor says that
He'll have to start watching his weight.
Lunch in the School Courtyard
We laughed around the dusty table.
The food is stale; at least we ate.
These brick walls have us surrounded,
But, out here, in the courtyard,
We can see a pretty sky.
We talked about the stuff outside this,
Where the walls don't rise so tall,
Drifted into where things happen.
It's not much; it's all pretending:
Just aliens on TV,
But there won't be a quiz.
No one shutting down our voices,
Letting us know what we're supposed to think.
They don't care about our stories.
I guess that's how it should be.
A story's safe when they throw it away,
Call it stupid, leave it in the bin at the curb.
No one's gonna pull out its guts
Looking for symbols and themes.
But, before we got done,
A train whistle buried our words.
Then the bell rang like rusty chains
Dragging on ugly, tile floors.
Ballad of a Tuba Player
I'll tell you the tale of a man I once knew
Whose sad story still grieves me even to this day.
For years, he played tuba in so many bands
In a half-ruined school all those long miles away.
Where the brick turned to dust, he worked his hands raw.
In the sweltering band room he sweated, he swore.
Years of wear fell off every tuba he touched
As he labored over them on the grimy floor.
He was first to arrive at every concert,
Walking in the gloom of the still-empty house there,
Lifting weights it was thought that no other could move
Except for a woman with a gold mist of hair.
He didn't just play out his soul on the stage.
Every daily rehearsal, he thundered and roared.
Though the weeks ground like millstones, through sickness and floods,
Over dust, over heat, his song always soared.
He ruined his shoulders; he ruined his back,
But the love of it that burned in him never waned.
He had so much trust in his band directors,
And I hope that they know how their hands are now stained.
He was good at making new tuba players,
So they kept him in lower bands and made him teach.
His reward for showing the young ones how to play
Was to have all advancement kept out of his reach.
Each year they told him it would be the last time,
He'd stop being held back for this reason, they swore.
Each April, like clockwork, they said the same thing:
That they desperately needed him there one year more.
He loved the section leader in the top band,
And long the two yearned to work beside each other.
They were kept distant as the two poles; their chance
To play together they cannot recover.
They bounced him between lower bands as needed
Until a new teacher felt his ensembles could
Do without their steel spine; the tuba players
Were broken in the name of progress and the good.
When he was caught in nets of red tape, not one
Of those he served, body and soul, would stand by him.
No band director would defend their willing
Workhorse; to let their man hang was their heartless whim.
Now he finishes his diploma in dark,
Beneath a shopping mall, so far from all the friends
He had in better days, left with the fading
Hope of salvaging something from all the loose ends.
They left him with his sorrows and the haunting
Memories quick to goad him, slow to disappear
And the specter of a fierce, green-eyed woman
To whom he knows he will never again draw near.
On the Occasion of Breaking Up
The movie ends; the credits start to roll.
Thoughts I cannot express, words I can't say,
Collide in me like clashing thunderstorms.
The world we made, the things we love turn cold.
Someone made rousing speeches on progress.
We knew change sometimes takes her fees in blood,
But no one cared until your name went on
That list with many more we knew and loved.
Friends slipped away into their private tears,
And left us with no band, no hope, no home.
I know you'd tell me to leave you behind,
To journey past the bounds of this lost land
Where I'm just one more looser on the wrong
Side of the times; too old, too brave to bend.
You'd say to run so far, so fast, this flood,
These rising waters, cannot bury me,
But I can't bear those words, to hear you say
That I should live when what we dreamed has died
That I should flee alone, leave you behind.
I lie, and I tell you there was no choice
But to depart so that you cannot say
There's nothing to forgive; you understand
Why I came here tonight to break your heart.
The credits finish, and the lights go up.
Those sticky seats reluctantly release
The threadbare bottoms of our worn-out jeans.
We walk outside, and we say our goodbyes
Standing in the halo of the marquee
That glows above us like a cruel mirage.
Half-Dreamed
A boy sits on the floor dressed in strange livery
Of thick, plush cloth in crimson, gold.
Afraid and near to tears, he waits for me.
I wade through the cacophony, the storm,
Between the drops of madness coming down like rain,
The crowds that snatch up instruments and flow into the hall.
I kneel beside him; black and white
Are thrown against the red and gold.
His silver tuba flashes on my dark jacket.
I work; this is his first concert.
Within a quarter of an hour, within ten minutes,
Two; these mangled valves must move.
My white shirt shines, fresh-ironed yesterday,
Tucked into pressed slacks over studded boots
The hue of the abyss that I polished as the sun sank low.
My tie is straight.
My hands unbend, remake.
I am Order; I walk through the tempest, and, unharmed,
I carry on; the colors on my vest,
The band, the place the day,
Are all irrelevant; now, clear and cold,
I save the night, the show for him.
The dogs begin to how, and jeans are scattered on the floor.
I barely hear; a paper ball,
This morning's news flies past my ear.
Its path bends
Around our warded circle on the dusty tile.
I wind something in wire and pray.
They move; it fades away,
Another miracle well done.
I chose these poems for fairly straightforward reasons. The first one works well as an introduction, a way to tell the reader about myself. That seems like a good way to begin a collection of poetry, even a small one. The sonnet is there for several reasons. I taught myself to write Italian sonnets when I got bored in my eighth grade English class. They are a specialty of mine, something I can do well every time. One form poem was required, and sonnets are my workhorses. They are good, reliable poems for making good grades, getting into anthologies and doing well in contests. Also, if the first poem is like a title page and an introduction, the second is a dedication. In Stephen King's book On Writing, he talks about having a constant reader, someone one imagines peering over one's shoulder as one writes. Mine happens to be a tuba, a seventeen-year-old Mirafone 186 named Aria. I write a lot of poems about the tubas I meet, but the bulk, and best, of them are about Aria, the one with which I have fallen in love.
Poem number three is a limerick. Like most limericks, it is a fun, jokey poem. It did not fit with the much darker tone of the longer poems, so I separated it from them by sandwiching it between the beginning and the fourth poem, which I put in that place because it has notes of fun and disappointment, making it an easy segue into the two long, sad poems that comprise the story I want to tell. Both three and four were chosen to show my versatility. The fifth was chosen because it has tension. That is where I begin the story, fragments and glimpses of the events that brought me to Decatur High. Last year was a time of great upheaval at my old school. Some people did benefit from the changes, but most of us lost much more than we gained. I took a look at one person's tale of woe. This gives the reader the background of the story that is told from a much more personal angle in poem number six. Five and six are about the same people and things, and I am the speaker in both. Six is more about me, and more about emotions, while five is a catalog of events that is far more about the other party concerned. The seventh poem finishes the journey, taking the reader to a place where a hurting, grieving speaker finds some healing and renewal. It resolves the tension in five and six and rounds out the collection like the last song in a set, tying up as many loose ends as is possible in writing truthfully about a real human life.
I thought about several project ideas. My first plan was to bind a book by hand, but I have less than two hundred lines here. It seemed like hardly enough material to fill a pamphlet. Then I thought about a poetry door and realized I have no idea where to buy a used door in Decatur. The idea of a window also seemed attractive, but materials were equally elusive. I thought about covering a cloak in the words, but it would either involve long, painful hours of writing by hand for me or a lot of boring dictation for anyone I could talk into helping. I would also have to buy enough cloth to make one. A fabric store is another thing I have yet to find. In the end, I decided the blog was the best option. It presented an interesting challenge. Believe it or not, I have never presented my work digitally before. I type everything and often store my work on computers, but I have always printed it out to turn it in. I spent the better part of a weekend looking for a good template. Finding the pictures took more time and effort. Then there were the challenges of formatting on Blogger. My lines jumped around every time I tried to use spell check. It was a good experience and I am glad I chose to do the project this way, though, given more time and some art supplies, I might have made something more tangible.
Ballad of a Tuba Player
I'll tell you the tale of a man I once knew
Whose sad story still grieves me even to this day.
For years, he played tuba in so many bands
In a half-ruined school all those long miles away.
Where the brick turned to dust, he worked his hands raw.
In the sweltering band room he sweated, he swore.
Years of wear fell off every tuba he touched
As he labored over them on the grimy floor.
He was first to arrive at every concert,
Walking in the gloom of the still-empty house there,
Lifting weights it was thought that no other could move
Except for a woman with a gold mist of hair.
He didn't just play out his soul on the stage.
Every daily rehearsal, he thundered and roared.
Though the weeks ground like millstones, through sickness and floods,
Over dust, over heat, his song always soared.
He ruined his shoulders; he ruined his back,
But the love of it that burned in him never waned.
He had so much trust in his band directors,
And I hope that they know how their hands are now stained.
He was good at making new tuba players,
So they kept him in lower bands and made him teach.
His reward for showing the young ones how to play
Was to have all advancement kept out of his reach.
Each year they told him it would be the last time,
He'd stop being held back for this reason, they swore.
Each April, like clockwork, they said the same thing:
That they desperately needed him there one year more.
He loved the section leader in the top band.
Though they yearned every day to be with each other
They were kept as distant as the poles; their chance
To play together they will not recover.
They bounced him between lower bands as needed
Until a new teacher felt his ensembles could
Get by without those who were their steel backbone
And broke them in the name of what he said was good.
When he was caught in nets of red tape, not one
Of those he served, body and soul, would stand by him.
No band director would defend their willing
Slave, and to let their man hang was their heartless whim.
Now he finishes his diploma in dark,
Beneath a shopping mall, so far from all the friends
He had in better days, left with the fading
Hope of salvaging something from a million ends.
They left him with his sorrows and the haunting
Memories quick to goad him, slow to disappear
And the specter of a fierce, green-eyed woman
To whom he knows he will never again draw near.
Half Dreamed
A boy sits on the floor dressed in strange livery
Of thick, plush cloth in red and gold.
Afraid and near to tears, he waits for me.
I wade through the cacophony, the storm,
Between the drops of madness coming down like rain,
The crowds that open cases and run out into the hall.
I kneel beside him; black and white
Are thrown against the red and gold.
His silver tuba flashes on my dark jacket.
I work; this is his first concert.
Within a quarter of an hour, within ten minutes,
Two; these mangled valves must move,
But now they are a flattened insect's legs.
My white shirt shines, fresh-ironed yesterday,
Tucked into pressed slacks over studded boots
The hue of the abyss that I polished as the sun sank low.
My tie is straight.
My hands unbend, remake.
I am Order; I walk through the tempest, and, unharmed,
I carry on; the colors on my vest,
The band, the place the day,
Are all irrelevant; now, clear and cold,
I save the night, the show for him.
The dogs begin to how, and jeans are scattered on the floor.
I barely hear; a paper ball,
This morning's news flies past my ear.
Its path bends
Around our warded circle on the dusty tile.
I wind something in wire and pray.
They move; it fades away,
Another miracle well done.
1)I raise my head and blink at the boy kneeling on the band room floor.
2) The room is filled with noise. It's loud, off-key, and weirdly out of place. I chew him out for being obnoxious and creating additional stress on concert night.
3) The concert starts in a matter of minutes, probably less than ten judging by the speed at which everyone moves.
4)I get down on my knees. When the sand and grit on the floor cut into my legs, I notice that I'm wearing some kind of slacks, not jeans. I have on my tuxedo.
5) He wears a strange, red-and-gold, version of the DSA Beginning Band uniform.
6) I notice that he looks like he's about to cry
7)He pushes Decatur High's silver concert tuba towards me.
8) This is his first concert, and his instrument is a wreck.
9) The people around us are moving faster. Whatever is wrong with his tuba, I know I don't have much time.
10) Somewhere, a dog howls, or perhaps a wolf. Others join in.
11) I pull the instrument over towards me as quietly as I can so as not to add to the general cacophony. I sigh.
12) There are jeans and a t-shirt on the floor.
13) I work on his mangled valves.
14) A ball of newspaper flies across the room from nowhere in particular.
15) I feel vaguely annoyed at the insanity and chaos of the situation, but I performed one of those perfectly routine, concert night miracles. I saved a kid's first show for him. I kept the section at full strength and able to do its part on one trippy concert night. Wherever this particular circus is taking place, whoever is the ringmaster, I did my job, and I did it well. I leave the room and walk to the stage.
Dream
I kneel beside a boy in the uniform of the Beginning Band of Durham School of the Arts in the Decatur High band room.
He wears a crisp, white shirt tucked into neat, black dress pants. His stiff, leather shoes are shiny and black.
I have on a tux.
His jaw is clenched.
He squints.
His upper lip twitches.
The concert starts in a matter of minutes, probably less than ten judging by the speed at which everyone moves.
He's upset because his tuba is broken about three seconds before the downbeat of his first show.
I work feverishly on the valves of his horn, one of the two concert tubas here in Decatur with the same kind of adrenaline-laced strength and speed that lets a woman with a 120 lb frame lift up the front end of an SUV because her kid is trapped underneath.
I end up feeling cool, detached, and serene as I watch my fingers flowing over the mangled valves so fast they almost blur.
I'm so focused on my work that I never look down to see what vest I'm wearing and know whether I play for DHS or Wind Symphony. It doesn't seem very important.
I watch myself perform a miracle for this kid, saving his first concert, but it feels so easy, so routine.
His appreciation isn't lost on me even though I've done this dozens of times before. I remember how it felt when someone did it for me.
I raise my head and blink at the boy kneeling on the band room floor.
He sings a song I once heard on the radio. It's loud, off-key, and weirdly out of place. I chew him out for being obnoxious and creating additional stress two minutes before a concert.
I get down on my knees. When the sand and grit on the floor cut into my legs, I notice that I'm wearing some kind of slacks, not jeans. I have on my tuxedo.
He wears a strange, red-and-gold, version of the DSA Beginning Band uniform.
His jaw is clenched, and he looks like he's about to cry.
He points towards a little, silver tuba like one of the Decatur High concert horns. The room seems colder, so I pull my heavy, leather coat off of a chair and put it on.
The people around us are moving faster. Whatever is wrong with his tuba, I know I don't have much time.
I pull the instrument over towards me as quietly as I can so as not to add to the general cacophony of preparation. I think about how it's so loud in here that my family can probably hear it from their seats. I sigh.
I work on his mangled valves with desperate speed. My hands seem to know what they need to do, so I read a bit of the paper, which someone left on the floor.
I'm not exactly sure where I am, who I'm playing for, or what I think I'm doing, but an ice cold confidence that I will at least get this particular tuba to hold up through the evening comes over me. My location and band are unimportant.
I take my coat off. There are jeans and a t-shirt on the floor.
Somewhere, a dog howls, or perhaps a wolf. Others join in.
I have the valves moving again. The boy is grateful and relived.
I feel vaguely annoyed at the insanity and chaos of the situation, but I performed one of those perfectly routine, concert night miracles. I saved a kid's first show for him. I kept the section at full strength and able to do its part on one trippy concert night. Wherever this particular circus is taking place, whoever is the ringmaster, I did my job, and I did it well. I leave the room and walk to the stage.
Dream
I raise my head and blink at the alarm clock.
It probably says 6:02 because the song on the radio gradually wound its way into my dream and pulled me out. If the day seems unlikely to be particularly pleasant, I swear at it, quietly so as not to wake my family.
I get out of bed.
I rarely have the time or energy to make it properly, but I try to leave my red and gold comforter the way a civilized person would.
I walk across the room to my alarm clock.
The house is frigid. I shiver and fantasize about the leather coat hanging in the closet.
I look in on my snake. I hit the button on top of the clock-radio, almost always harder than I really need to.
I leave the room, carefully skirting the sousaphone lying in the middle of the floor.
I try to get across the hall and down sixteen steps with a minimum of creaking and thumping.
I eat one chocolate muffin.
I read the paper.
I put on jeans and a shirt.
I listen to the dog bark at my father returning from his bike ride as if he's an ax murderer come to kill us all.
Then I brush my teeth and hair and leave for school.
