ah, does anybody even visit this place anymore?

Snow fell in modest swirls around the Suburban, but the clouds weren’t thick enough to brighten the midnight sky; one or two stars could still occasionally be seen between rifts in the gray cumulus. Another group of white-tailed deer stumbled and skidded off the icy road before the headlights, bounding off into the shadows of the rocks where snow had drifted high enough to kiss their stomachs. Inside the Suburban the boy driving told the girl next to him, “If we hit one of these, I’m going to make you finish it off.”

“I could do it.”

The canyon narrowed as he drove further up the icy hill past empty fisheries and lonely tourist lodges with large wooden patio tables covered in slabs of snow two feet deep. The snow made stark, bold impressions against the black air and the girl found it hard not to feel sad. It wasn’t even anything really that the boy had said or done, it was mostly just the snow and the stars. Five years ago, she’d been driven through the same canyon, and the snow and stars had made her sad then, too. The cold air and the broad expanses of unblemished snow looked raw and uncompromising. She felt she could run off into it and maybe find some kind of secret sacred portal behind a large bank of snow or inside a stone cave even though she was really quite a rational and cynical girl. If it were up to her, they would never stop driving. She could sit in that passenger-side seat staring out at the stars and the flakes for the rest of her life, she thought. She could ride into the endless night and never look back as long as the engine didn’t die.

But then there was the end of the road. It appeared as a three-foot high wall of snow where nobody felt to clear the roads during the winter because there were no more places to ski after this point. The boy parked the car, but he had already made up his mind not to kiss her there. He just glanced at her, remarking about how they’d reached the end of the road. She didn’t reply because what more could be said about it?

Pulling into reverse, the boy twisted in his seat to look behind them and drove backwards a hundred yards, looking for a place to turn around. The girl continued to look ahead, staring into the black vortex of snow pulling away from her in long white stripes, like that old screen saver that looked like you were in the Millennium Falcon going point-five past lightspeed, except backwards. The road tugged away before her and above her, thinning away in the distance until she couldn’t see the end of the road anymore but just a black sliver between the perimeters of snow.

Finally, the car stopped and the boy steered them left to make their turnabout. The view before the windshield tipped and swayed until they were facing forward again, back the way they had originally come. This time he did kiss her, and for a minute, all was forgiven. For a minute, they could have stayed. Then he pulled away and said, “Parked cars are trouble.” She pulled back as well, but let him keep a hand on her knee, her other leg cocked up with her shoe on the seat, her fingers playing with the holes in her jeans. For a minute, the snow reminded her of years before, when she was just a little more naïve and just a little younger.

Three small deer at that moment stepped before the Suburban and froze. Just before making impact with the center deer, the ones to the side bolted in their respective directions, leaving their middle friend to get hit with the car’s grille against the very center of its side and belly, sending it rolling and rolling before the car, like children when they roll down the grassy side of a hill, nothing but fur then hooves, fur then hooves, fur then hooves, until the ice skidded him to the right where he broke against the bank and lay crumpled, his back snapped, his neck shot backwards, bleeding into the cold white snow.

Silently, the boy backed up the car until he could face the headlights on the deer’s dying body. The boy and girl both stepped out from the car, the boy to check the damage done to the front of his parents’ Suburban, the girl to walk carefully close to the animal in the road. Still alive, its eyes were wild, its nose breathing heavily into the snow, a line of deer snot glistening in a modest arc where the deer’s head had slid against the snow after hitting the bank. Its skin was so furry, she noted. Furrier than a dog’s. She wanted to touch it, pet it, kiss its head, but she knew she was fearsome and predatory to it, something to flee from, and she didn’t want to add to its panic and distress. The deer shook in the cold and the pain, and she shivered. She had once lived in southeastern Idaho and knew how to dress warm, but she lived in Arizona now. She held her arms beneath her thin denim jacket and shook with the deer.

Satisfied that there was no way to fix the broken headlight or the crack in the grille, the boy went back to the car and took his pistol from the bag in the backseat. He walked up to the girl and stood next to her, staring at the dying deer in front of the two of them. “Em, you better get back in the car.”

“No.” He watched her for a moment but she wouldn’t return the gaze, continuing instead to stare at the deer’s eyes. He shifted his weight. “You want to stay out here?”

She nodded her head.

He hesitated again, and asked, “You want to be the one to do it?” She shook her head and he told her to stand back. She did as told, wondering if she should have taken the gun, and right then he shot a 9 mm Luger into the snow behind the deer’s ears. The deer’s breathing grew harder, the fierceness in his eyes increased as he tried unsuccessfully to turn his head away and retreat. The boy took another shot, this time closer and lower, striking the deer in the top of its head, blowing away a piece of flesh, jarring it’s entire body. The deer’s eyes flailed one more moment, it’s front right leg shooting out stiff and jerky, but then it softened and fell, its eyes still and windless. The girl continued to stare until the boy told her again to get back into the Suburban. This time she obeyed. As he drove them away, they were silent, both of them leaving each to their respective thoughts. The snow continued to fall in subtle flurries, but they didn’t see any more deer. The girl was very aware that the next time she found herself driven through that midnight canyon again, she would still be sad. History made it inevitable.

Mrs. Martin - Part II

The art of the dare is lost on most adults. Childhood is concerned with a different sort of wage. Money is less important than avoiding shame, being seen as brave or at least not a cry-baby momma’s boy who pees his pants. Respect is sovereign. It’s all I dreamed of. Me, riding down Della Street and parents pointing me out to their children, “Look, there’s the boy who went into Bear Cave without a flashlight!” or “Golly, Susie, there’s Shamus Best, the boy quickly becoming man who rode his bike off his own garage roof!” or “Wow, there he is! The boy who fake tripped into Mrs. Laramie’s boobs for an Ewok Tree Base! What a brave lad!” A dare is how I ended up face to face with Mrs. Martin.

It happened the day Em and I were mixing a hex for Melissa. We were up way high in the fort she and her Dad built in the crisscross limbs of her “sugar sap” tree. It was a huge maple that oozed sap from the nail holes gouged into the trunk. Em would just run her finger through the cola colored beads and suck at the sugar sap. I’ve never known anyone as moon-wild since. My favorite memory of her is the night we set out to catch a hundred lightning bugs, us leaping and sprinting, snatching stars right from the firmament. When we’d collected about seventy in our mayo jars she told me to pour them all into her hair. I think if I hadn’t been so in thrall with Melissa’s arriving womanhood, Emily would have been my first love. Her standing in the witch glow of dusk, her cattail colored hair lit up like a faerie Christmas.

So Em and I were stirring up a wicked voodoo brew in a Tupperware bowl we’d spray painted black. It was for Melissa who’d broken my heart by kissing another boy. Not just tongues I knew, but a full kiss. With want and surely, love. Our interpretation of it. And so Em had devised a hex that would make their lips glue together for two days. They would have to breathe the same old stink breath until they were unstuck and then they would never want to kiss again after that. After we’d mixed the mashed snails, the onion grass, the raspberry jelly, gum from the road, a hair from Melissa and a piece of paper with my drawing of the boy’s face in our plastic cauldron with some rootbeer to make it all fizz, we said the two lovers names backwards seven times and both spit into the mix.

Just as were talking about how to apply it to Melissa’s stupid old buttface lips, Em paused and said we forgot the last part. She had this odd look on her face, the one she’d get when Melissa would declare we were playing House and she and I were married and Em was our daughter. Em paused again and said we had to seal the mixture with a righteous kiss. I didn’t find out until later that Emily’s Mom, a professor of classics at Western Michigan University, had been reading her some Arthurian legends as her bedtime stories. She’d been trying to reclaim her daughter back from the sway of her rough-housing, man’s man, carpenter husband. These things I knew later from my Mom who talked frequently with her Mom at the mailboxes. I can only imagine this prompted the righteous kiss idea.

I’m not going to try to recapture any dialogue here because of course, it would be a complete falsehood as opposed to my little ones so far . I argue I’m at least still in the spirit of truth whether or not this all happened in one day or even was an episode of Punky Brewster or Facts of Life that I’ve co-opted for myself. I refused to kiss Emily because I told her I was saving myself for Melissa (a funny phrase I’d learned from an abstinence video my Mom showed me) so she upended the brew into my face and slid down the get-away rope. After I cleaned the gunk off and put most of it back in the bowl just in case we could still use it, I went and found Melissa sitting on the woodpile next to her garage. There were highways for tears carved out in her dust caked face. Before I could say anything, she snapped that I could look into the face of the thing I feared most as an alternative. And she knew that was Mrs. Martin, so she’d dared me to do it. And I never turn down a dare.

Mrs. Martin Part 1

I'll call her Mrs. Martin because I’m making up parts anyway. Because it’s memory and I’m always making that up. Mrs. Martin lived in a wheelchair and never left it as far as we knew. In fact, she never moved at all. In all the times we’d ninja into her yard close enough to get a look, we never saw her stir. The room’s only life was the constant flicker of television lighting up the windows and walls. She lived where Della Street U-ed into an industrial road that made the property value of our street just crap enough we could all afford to live there. We being Emily, Melissa, and me.

Our street only had three kids near my age. Em, a tom-boy with her own tree fort who believed in black magic, curses, and hexes. Melissa, a fifth grader who deigned to hang out with us, and would cock her head sideways, stick out her new chest, and tell me I’m cute when I laugh. Which would color me instantly. The third kid was Jason, who I hung out with for a week until we were in the forest playing commandos and he pulled down his pants and threw his own turd at my head.

It’s hard to be a boy with two girls as best friends. What I couldn’t see then is our first sonars of puberty, these first soundings. Sometimes Melissa would reach for my hand during cartoons. Em would wrestle me in her fort and just lay breathless on top of me. Em bought a training bra before she needed it because of Melissa. Melissa was jealous of the tree fort and found a secret place for us between our hedgerows. Once I asked Melissa if we could touch tongues after our daily batch of Kool-Aid. In the middle of her room, our tropical red tongues tipped together. She said later our first kiss was French. Em brained me with a rock when she found out.

We passed Mrs. Martin’s on our way to the forest. It looked all grown-back I told my Mom. I know the word now is reclamation. The twin maples jutted in, scraped against and into the attic window. The yard hadn’t been cut in years and the grass was head deep and pocked with litter. Probably not having noticed, Mrs. Martin had not followed the suburban trend of residing and her house looked bedraggled compared to the plastic sheens of her neighbors. Her house of cards was a fault line of expectations, a paint peeling question mark, a great breath of hesitation before something.

Someone take the lead here...

and figger this sucker out fer me.

I don't think my invitee is 'down' for this. Someone we might look at is Eiryn Jakob, who could provide an interesting vantage. I think she is a phenomenal writer. Czech her here: http://wajok.blogspot.com/

Someone take over on this or it will die on the vine. Someone write something. Do something, dammit. Live.

I was trapped...

...behind a long line of traffic that extended down the single lane behind me, disappearing over the false horizon in my mirrors. In front of me was a shitty white Datsun. The Datsun sounded like a children’s brass band. The side mirrors were cracked. The exhaust spat at me. The taillights were illegible. Strapped to a warped ski rack on top of the Datsun was a slab of inch-thick plywood. On top of the plywood was the severed head of the biggest bull elk I had ever seen. The ragged edges of the bull’s neck were flayed out around the head. The board had blackened from the blood, as though the veins had once pumped old motor oil. The glassed eyes were looking straight up to the sky. The tongue flagged out of the mouth to the side. I imagined that it would have been flapping, but it had stiffened beyond motion. From behind, it looked like the carcass of a primeval spider—the legish antlers extended skyward. The wapiti was strapped onto the roof of the Datsun with nylon cording strung from the uppermost antler point to the lowest and then hitched onto the rack. There it was, the Datsun’s aegis to the cold sun, a blood trophy and mascot, the wagon load of spoils, a hirsute and huge John the Baptist. Without the wind, a host of blue black gunmetal flies would congregate inside it to lay their eggs for the other heads of other creatures one step beyond. All the years eating water cress from the bottom of Beaver Creek, and the battles of antlers and frost, and the thin years and winter months when no Chinook found his harem. The rut and the gravity in the groin—the slicing bugle that could cut ice like a blowtorch. He had survived. So many years of knowing the Targhee better than God himself, and the final ride down a 2 lane state highway atop a sputtering, shitty Japanese compact driven by a man dressed like leaves.