The smudges on my teeshirt look like fingerprints. Thinking this, in October 2015, Oren sets down the bluing rag and the disassembled shotgun barrel on the newspaper covering the kitchen table. He tents the tee out from his body and peers at the blue smudges. Untraceable prints, he thinks, then debates— silently, in the manner of an exile who has spent too many years inside his own head—whether it’s a failing for a sixty-five-year-old contrarian never to have been fingerprinted.
He works late into the evening, restoring the shotgun inherited forty-eight years ago from his Uncle Ian. It must be finished before Miles arrives “sometime Saturday, maybe Sunday.” It is typical of Miles’ self-importance that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, specify a day, the unsubtle implication that his time is precious, Oren’s not.
When the barrel is blued, he’ll varnish the stock. He works on the gun as painstakingly as he would a client’s furniture request, with the same craftsman’s commitment, but also an urgency that the shotgun possess the gravitas to match both its history and its imminent purpose. It’s a single-shot, hammer action, 12- gauge Savage, a “goose gun” with a barrel long as a flintlock’s. The length of it causes Oren, every time he picks up the gun, to unreel in his head how Ian must have managed it. Until an image makes him gag.
April 1967
Ian’s drinking buddy called Grace, Oren’s mother, from the Shamrock Tavern. Ian hadn’t come down for a drink for three days and wasn’t in his room above the bar. Grace sent the boys out to find him (freaking them out, because they’d never seen her agitated). The two seventeen-year-olds—born two days apart, constant pals and shared birthdays since kindergarten—had recently emptied their joint savings account, money earned over the years shoveling snow and doing yard work for neighborhood clients, and bought a ’61 Chevy van. The boys piled into the van and sped north to the West Canada Creek, where Ian had taken them to his favorite trout hole two weeks earlier. He had started out sober that day, but once at the spot he had produced from his canvas Navy rucksack a fifth of Wild Turkey. For the cold, he’d said, and flashed what little remained of his Clark Gable grin. (Grace often insisted that when her brother enlisted in ’41, he had looked like Gable. Now his body was gaunt, the grin toothless, and all that remained was the pencil mustache that made him look louche, Miles’ word, and one Oren couldn’t help thinking whenever he saw his uncle.) Ian held the Wild Turkey out to Oren. Oren eyed the fifth as if it were a syringe of heroin. So Ian swung the bottle to Miles and said, “Help me with this, Slick.” Miles shrugged his signature what-can-one-do shrug, and drank. For the next hour, while Oren tried to fish, the bottle passed between Ian and Miles. Over his shoulder, Oren could see that to Miles it was a happening, catching a buzz with Ian. Ian, twice, burst out that he loved this spot like no other. But soon slumped out cold against the gnarled trunk of a crabapple tree. Then Miles had commanded the cutbank, loudly referring to himself as Gadabout Gaddis, the TV fisherman, narrating every cast like a play-by-play announcer, oblivious to Oren’s censuring silence.
Now the boys found Ian’s beige Falcon parked at the far edge of the public fishing access lot. Seeing the beater’s crumpled rear quarter panel and rusted out wheel wells heightened Oren’s foreboding. He parked alongside, was out the door and striding headlong toward the creek, when he heard, “The windshield.” He turned to see Miles lifting the Falcon’s windshield wiper to retrieve a ticket. And a second beneath the first. Miles scanned one, then the other. “Yesterday and the day before,” he said. Oren wheeled, quickly reached the trees and the here-and-gone footpath along the creek. He heard Miles as he rushed to keep up, “Ian knows what he’s doing out here.” Oren lengthened his stride. He was a head taller and Miles had to run-walk to keep up. Some fifty yards from Ian’s favorite spot, Oren heard raucous squawking and quorking. He ran around a bend in the creek and froze in his tracks: a shocking number of ravens lined the branches in the leafless trees above Ian’s high cutbank. Their noise and number like a scene from The Birds. Miles caught up, clutched Oren’s sleeve. They looked at each other; Oren broke into a sprint. He crested the rise onto the cutbank’s level ground. Ten yards away, three squawking ravens flapped up like vultures from his uncle’s body. As the last bird lifted from Ian’s chest, it trailed from its beak something linguine-like, spooling it from the gaping abdominal cavity until it tautened, and broke, the raven flapping away with its prize. Oren gagged, bile hot and sour in his throat, barely heard Miles beside him wheeze, “God bless Ian.” Irked by the God crap, the smell of decay up his nose, Oren squinted at the body, breathing through his mouth, and heard Miles say: “Intestines?”
Oren heaved, gulped. Willed his throat muscles to relax. “Tapeworm.”
“What?”
His voice constricted: “Grace told me. From some game he poached.”
Long seconds passed. Neither seventeen-year-old spoke. Noses scrunched, shallow mouth breaths, they couldn’t pull their eyes from the corpse. Finally, Oren said, “They can get fifty feet long.”
“Fuck me.”
“That’s why he looked caved-in.”
“Didn’t help that he lost his dentures.”
“No,” Oren said.
“How the hell did he lose his freakin’ dentures?”
Quietly, “He lost everything.” Then, tightly: “Now maybe you get why I didn’t drink with him last time we were here.” Oren took a few angled steps to get a side view, Miles following, but stopped well away from the body. Ian sprawled on his back, the shotgun between his legs, the back of his crania blown out. Like a smashed pumpkin. His grayish-pink guts spilling.
“Something got to him before the ravens,” Miles said.
“Coy dogs maybe.”
“And he must’ve eaten the barrel.”
Oren saw the stick slotted through the trigger guard. He pictured Ian, short, at best 5-7, putting the barrel in his mouth and stretching his toes either side of the stick to spring the trigger. He’d brought the Savage, not his fly rod. So he’d come with intent. The how explained the why, Oren decided, Ian chose the gruesome headshot to prove to Grace that he lamented his alcoholic, manipulative behavior.
Days later, as he and Miles escorted Grace arm in arm from the gravesite—after a local V.F.W. member played “Taps” and another presented the veteran’s flag to Grace—an elderly pear-shaped man with a fleshy face and grotesquely-fitting Marine haircut lumbered to catch up to them. “Harold,” Grace said, and the man spluttered, “There’s things about Ike.”
Oren had never heard his uncle referred to as “Ike.”
“Tell us,” Grace said.
“That flattop went down under’m?” Harold had a violent tic in one eye that twitched his cheek. “I knew he was pie-eyed when he started in ‘bout bein’ in freefall since ‘42.”
Grace nodded. “That long leap from the deck to the burning sea.”
Oren shot Grace a sidelong look. He’d known about the Yorktown, Ian would joke about getting dunked at eighteen, but he’d never mentioned a leap into burning sea. Grace slipped from the boys’ arms and hugged the man. “I’m sorry for the loss of your friend.” Oren welled up with grief, and pride for Grace. The man stepped back from Grace and said in a startling rush, “Little ol’ Polack at the bar stood t’tention for the anthem so Ike give ‘em the Bronx cheer.” He looked at Grace as if he was used to people not following him. Grace nodded, and he said, “He knockt Ike down and Ike dint git up. Prolly cuz he’s jes skin ‘n bones.” He winced and looked down at his shoes, as if he’d said too much, and shambled away. Oren could feel Miles’ eyes on him, knew he, too, was seeing the raven’s tapeworm.
When Grace took Oren and Miles to clean out Ian’s room above The Shamrock, she found a cocktail napkin on Ian’s pillow. Scrawled on the napkin: Ian Kellen Ferguson’s Will. It was dated six days earlier and signed by Ian, then, as witnesses, Harold T. Peck and Anthony Rocci, The Shamrock’s noon-seven bartender. Listed were two items, both bequeathed to Oren: the Zippo lighter Ian had carried throughout the Pacific campaign, and the Savage. Grace handed Oren the napkin. As he read, she said, “Toss the damn gun in that creek.” Her intensity surprised him and he didn’t respond. “Please,” she said. He shrugged, nodded.
A week later, the gun standing tall by Oren’s desk, unflappable Grace, friends nicknamed her “Gibraltar,” began to press him. Still Oren balked. The latchkey son of a two-job single-parent who had, by necessity, trusted him to take care of himself from the age of ten, he had declared his independence the day before high school and now was as hyper-sensitive to his borders as any sovereign state. So he deliberated. Grace had been through the wringer psychologically and financially with her beloved older brother, had far too late come to see that pre-War Ian was as irretrievable as a “Body Snatcher” pod person. Only after countless betrayals had Grace stopped abetting his behavior. Now she was racked with guilt. Feared the curse from the grave in the guise of an old shotgun left to her son.
But that was Grace’s history, not Oren’s. Ian had dubbed “Or” and “Slick” “The Inseparables.” He had taught them to fish and hunt. When he took them hunting he insisted they alternate carrying the Savage, while he walked the woods empty-handed and sober, fully engaged in imparting his knowledge of game and naturecraft. And Oren could visualize him at the bar with Harold and the bartender, ensuring, ceremoniously, that the Savage would pass to him. An heirloom, however macabre.
Oren tried to explain to Grace that the gun, an inanimate object, had no more to do with Ian’s suicide than a glass from which he drank his Wild Turkey. “You men and your goddamn guns have everything to do with it!” Grace cried. She might have slapped him. She hadn’t raised her voice to him in years. Her apology was but an instant ahead of his own. Soon after, he wrapped the shotgun in an old blanket and hid it in the attic crawl space.
December 1, 1969
Oren and Miles rented a house with two friends, dated sisters, and still had their neighborhood work. Between Miles’ charming sales spiel and Oren’s workmanship, they had expanded their client list while upping their skill set to painting, firewood, tune ups, etc. They were each taking night classes at Mohawk Valley Community College. For Miles, the star clearly slumming in his Drawing II and Sculptural Design classes, the 4.0s would burnish his scholarship application to a four-year SUNY school. For Oren—who’d fallen hard for the word autodidact when he first heard it in 8th grade—his history courses had so little depth they were insulting. Every lecture he sat, boiling over with too much knowledge yet loath to draw attention to himself, the pressure of the undisclosed building in him, until finally he’d interrupt the lecture and hotly blurt out information critical to the whole, all too aware, then, of the other students’ snickering looks heavenward.
Still, they were momentous days. Both boys were in the hyper state of first love. (Grace teased that of course they’d fallen for sisters. She left unspoken—because she understood that it was imperative her boys escape Utica, and it pained her—that what really beguiled them was the sisters’ worldliness.) Katrina and Rebeka were born on a U.S. base in Ramstein, West Germany. Daughters of a Montanan flyboy and a war-displaced Berliner who wished their kids to grow up dual nationals, they had lived off base, in a German neighborhood, and their best friends had been “locals.” When Kat turned seventeen she was entrusted to take fifteen-year-old Beka by train to Munich, later Paris, and when no incidents ensued, Amsterdam. Then, disaster. In April ‘69, after decades in Germany, their father was deployed stateside, to Griffiss AFB, in Central New York, which a fellow AF brat who’d “done time” there described with one word: cloudy.
Miles and Oren had never been on a train, let alone a plane, and their idea of a road trip was Buffalo for a Bills game.
The Utica boys met the “German girls” on a cool overcast June day, at a late afternoon kegger on an Adirondack lake’s secluded beach. Everyone knew everyone, save the German sisters. No one seemed to know how they’d come to be at the kegger. There was an alluring otherness about them: the German they spoke to one another, as if they preferred it; their black bomber jackets with a yellow map of West Germany on the back; their cutoff jeans shorts and thick wool socks with clogs they called “Birkies;” and the younger one’s hair, a diagonal bob cut to her chin that hid her left side, the right side of her head shaved three-quarters up. It shouted free spirit, or misfit, and either way seemed cool because she carried it well.
Sunset went unnoticed behind thick cloud cover. When it became difficult to see one another, a bonfire sparked and flared and everyone gravitated. All were high, so there was an interval of mesmerized flame-staring…until music from a boom box startled: “Hello, I love you, won’t you tell me your name,” and immediately from the circle a voice stepped on Morrison’s, “Hello I love you, won’t you jump in my game!” Eyes swung to the gravelly voice. The older German girl. It seemed she was introducing herself, though her sister beside her shrank away, out of the firelight. “Do you think you’ll be the guy-uy, to make the queen of the angel’s sigh?” Her voice growly now, and then a voice jumped in directly opposite, “Her arms are wicked, and her legs are long!” Miles! Smirks around the circle: He had bedded and with zero drama stopped bedding three girls present. Who could stay mad at him? He and the German girl duoed on, then, singing as he went, Miles crossed over to her, showily sidestepping the metaphorical flames, echoed her last “hello!” and bowed deeply to her.
Intent on Miles’ dramatics, no one noticed Oren slipping around the back of the circle to engage the younger sister. His interest had piqued when he first saw her quirky hair; gained momentum when he heard her speaking German, and rocketed when someone overheard and passed along that “Beka” had never seen “Laugh-In.” Throughout the afternoon he practiced the little German her remembered from a high school class, while his eyes kept seeking her out: The hair! And no eyeliner, no lipstick. And she seemed to take everything in, quietly, thoughtfully, so unlike her headlong sister. His first (and lasting) impression that of a European woman far more experienced than himself.
Within three months of meeting Kat, Miles (when stoned) could imagine them a couple in a Brooklyn loft/studio, hosting pot parties for their circle of artsy cosmopolitans, his sculptures casually about. Within a minute of Oren shyly saying to her, “Guten abend, Beka”—Beka had met his eyes, for several beats, as if deciding, he was sure he looked too straight, but then she took his hand, shook it once, sharply, then kept hold and shifted her grip and scraped his fingertips over the stubbled side of her head. Oren, lifted up, floating, then and there set himself the goal of communicating with her in German.
From the start Beka took the lead, as if he were the newcomer. Despite his initial greeting, she didn’t speak in German, he was grateful for that, he didn’t like to be unknowing. And she kept the conversation centered on him, beamed when he called his mother “Grace” and spoke endearingly of her. But minutes later, as he distractedly, dreamily walked up the beach for beer refills, Kat sidled up out of the darkness and said sidelong that Beka had another year of high school. Oren slipped a step in the sand, recovered, and countered that he had graduated only the year before. “Just sayin’,” Kat said.
Still, the sisters were likewise inseparable. Soon the four were double dating regularly. Whenever the sisters spontaneously switched to German, the boys felt the great unknown beyond Utica pulling at them like some Star Trek tractor beam. The girls started hanging out at the boys’ rental. After everything-but sex, Oren the one to agonizingly hold back, he and Beka would lie on his floor mattress and she would gush about the places she’d been. The places she just had to experience with him. Oren, his pulse racing with every placename—Munich! Paris! Amsterdam! —would reach for his shoebox of German flash index cards, within which Beka would have randomly inserted a card that read wanderlust! and when that card was chosen Oren would smile, because he knew it would signal intoxicating talk of a Berlin trip. The Wall! As part of a hitchhike-backpack through Europe! Beka insisted that someday they would live there together! Beka thought Italy, the sun and food and wine. And subsequently, when things got too heated on the floor mattress, Oren would drive them to the secluded beach where they’d met and they’d skinny dip in the cold Adirondack water. It was a summer like no other. Oren’s summer of love.
On the first of December, Oren and Miles woke early. The forecast promised freakishly late Indian summer warmth before a cold front pushed in, so the boys put off prepping for the house party that evening, took their shotguns and Goldbud, Miles’ beagle-collie mutt, and went hunting. The pine forest they chose they’d first hunted at fifteen, with Ian. He had taught them to tread soundlessly, every step taut with expectation of a flushed partridge. But this day, preoccupied, they trod on sticks and several times Oren stopped abruptly on the trail, alarmed by scenarios he’d glimpsed in his future. When a grouse exploded in a panic of wingbeats from close underfoot, the boys raised their guns, but didn’t fire. A half mile on, Goldbud chased a snowshoe hare into a stand of blackberry canes and ran circles around the thicket, yelping with excitement. The boys could hear the hare thumping its hind feet in alarm. “Too close for six-shot,” Oren called, and walked on. Sixty-three degrees at noon, they tied their coats around their waists. Ahead they saw the break in the treetops and came out to open sky above the long-abandoned quarry. They sat on the rim of the granite amphitheater, faces upturned to the sun’s radiant warmth. From an inner pocket, Oren produced a small pipe and a baggie of “gold buds.” He tamped the pipe, dipped into his pocket, revealed the Zippo in his palm, and recited ritually, “Eighteen when the Yorktown went down and he made that long leap into the burning sea.” “Man, he survived all that.” Their eyes leapt to the Savage lying on the granite between them, neither able to forestall the image of the raven flapping up from Ian’s chest. Quickly Miles stoked, toked, passed. After several passes, they sat gazing up as an onrushing tide of smoky gray clouds caught the sun, a platinum effect that slammed a sudden rush to the back of their skulls…until thicker clouds dulled the sun to a pale wafer, and Miles murmured, “Looks like the Alka-Seltzer I’ll need in the morning.” Then it was as if they’d stepped from a warm bright room into a dim walk-in freezer. Chilled from inside out, they donned coats and blew into cupped hands. Goldbud sat away from the rim but was constantly rising and toenail scampering behind the boys, her tail flailing away at her flanks with a hollow thumping sound. She was old and ribby and could no longer scent but she was as integral to the experience as the post-hunt beers fireside at the White Lake Inn. She curled up at the small of Miles’ back, and settled. Everything was still. The boys gazed out over the granite amphitheater to the woods beyond, the leaves gone, the trees skeletal x-rays against the gloaming. The year’s first snow came spontaneous and polite, floating down and warming the boys with emotions, each to his own.
Inseparable as long as memory served, they sat in silence comfortably.
Until Oren gave voice to his thoughts, “Will this ever happen again?”
“Something stimulating will always be close by if you’re open to it.”
It sounded like a rebuke. “And how stimulating does 1970 look right now?”
No hesitation: “SUNY Purchase fall semester. Good foundry program and a short commute to the City, gateway to all that will follow.”
Miles’ certainty irked Oren. “What if your number’s up?”
Miles made a show of consulting his watch. “In seven hours we’ll be partying hearty after our numbers aren’t called until it’s safe.”
“Still, what if?”
“Two-year detour. Luck out, some rear area graphic design job. Then hello GI Bill.”
Oren squeezed his eyes shut to keep from shouting. “There are no rear areas in Nam.” “Okay,” Miles sighed. “Just suppose it’s down to probability rather than destiny. Do I dress in drag, diddle the doc’s scrot? Lop my trigger finger with the circular saw? Nah, I bite the bullet, sorta speak, then get my education paid.”
“Then riddle me this, Slick. We’ve been hunting all day and the Savage isn’t loaded and January rent says yours isn’t either.”
Silence, both withdrawing as that “Slick” expanded, pushed Ian between them.
Oren, annoyed that Miles hadn’t asked him what if.
Miles looked over. “You?”
“My number’s up.”
“For fuck’s sake!” The words amplified in the granite amphitheater. “You could draw a high fucking number, same as anyone.”
Goldbud, agitated, bodied between them, nosed each in turn. Miles laughed. Oren wavered, relented, gave her thumping pats and jostled her ears, the tension relieved. As if unconvinced, the dog plopped down between them, the Savage beneath her. The boys’ silence resumed. Settled. The snow fell soundlessly in the barren woods.
Then, quietly, Miles said, “What about Beka?”
Oren was instantly wary.
“She’s the one, bud. Please, don’t lose her.”
Oren hadn’t been able to tell Beka his decision. If he now told Miles, Miles would tell Kat, and Kat would tell Beka. Or worse, their father, the Colonel. Oren had a secret nickname for Kat: Defender of the Faith. On the foursome’s first date, Miles had made a cautiously probing comment about the War and Kat had let it be known that any criticism of the War was an attack on the girls’ father. Beka had covered her face with a hand, as if it was all too much to deal with. And now, by a sick juxtaposition that seemed to Oren an omen, the Colonel was off to Vietnam in twenty-eight days. “We haven’t discussed what if yet, ” Oren said. Then, unable to look at Miles, “I believe Beka will support whatever I decide.”
September 2015
Oren was using a T-bevel to make an angle cut when across the room his shop phone rang. His carpentry business a solo operation, he let the call go to the answering machine. The volume set high, he heard: “Oren, this is Ivy, Grace’s neighbor. Her yoga partner.” And as he braced himself: “I’m so sorry, Oren.” He slumped down to the concrete floor, his back against the workbench, then covered his face and head with his arms, as if to shield himself from the bombardment of regret.
For the first time in forty-five years, he recrossed the border and returned to the house in Utica where he had grown up. Only upon seeing the house did he remember that Grace had repainted it sky-blue. Inside, the front-room carpet had been pulled up and the wide oak planks beneath had been sanded and stained a cheery blond, a chiding reminder that Miles had made the trip from Brooklyn to do the work. Now Oren sought, and found, a gouge where Miles had lingered with the sander. The room itself had been pared down to a yoga mat and a boom box and alongside it what Oren thought of as dreamy mindfulness cassettes. Grace, at 84, keeping herself fit while being a friend to Ivy, the young divorcee down the street. He hadn’t seen Grace in six years, her last visit. He blew out a long breath, as if he could expel from his physical body the regret for his principled refusal to cross the border. And he knew, after forty years of lone carpentry, that the only antidote for regret was to focus on the minute details of the here and now. That, anyway, was still his credo as he climbed the stairs to the second floor.
His room seemed untouched. He’d moved back for a week before leaving and it came to him now that she’d never utilized the room, so must have expected him to come home eventually. Though in letters, or when she visited, she had never pressed him or expressed an opinion. Neither after Ford’s bullshit sop for Nixon’s pardon, nor Carter’s unconditional amnesty. He sat on the bed and was jolted to see above the desk his old wall map of divided Germany. Sidestepping a bitter plunge into the past, he pushed off from the bed and went to his closet, pulled the light chain—humphed at the hanging Oshkosh overalls, parted them to look deeper in, and went rigid. The Savage, standing tall. His eyes narrowed in confusion, he could see himself hiding the Savage in the attic crawl space. Then how Grace nearly begged him to toss the gun in the West Canada. He felt his eyes smart with sudden tears: she’d found the Savage in the attic crawl space and placed it here, despite the sadness it must have caused her. His impulse to go, now, toss it off the high cutbank into the West Canada. He grabbed the cold barrel and started to withdraw but when he reached for the light chain something on the high shelf caught his eye. Red, white. A folded flag. Ian’s. He took it down from the shelf, a 5×7 manila envelope safety pinned to it. He sat on the bed, unpinned the envelope from the flag, and upended it. Three letters slid onto the bed.
The first was from the Veterans Administration. Dated July 1961, it denied Ian K. Ferguson’s disability benefit due to insufficient documentation. They didn’t know about PTSD, Oren reasoned. He unfolded a second, the words a smudged purple, carbon paper. March 1961, a Dr. Webb supporting Ian’s claim due to “neurological damage and psychological complications caused by medical experiments conducted by the Department of War, in 1942, in Panama.” Oren gaped at the letter. Reread it. Again. Snatched up the remaining letter. Department of Veterans Affairs, to Grace, 1986. Application denied. Sorry to inform…Ian K. Ferguson’s service records lost in the July 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center. Oren sat on the bed, racing, hyper with enraged disbelief: Medical experiments? Records lost in a fire? In Nova Scotia, in self-defense, he’d stopped paying attention to America’s contradictions. Now he wondered if even Grace, Gibraltar, the one human whose staunch optimism he couldn’t help but admire, had succumbed to bitterness. Why else pin the letters to the flag and leave it in his closet for him to discover? He sat on the edge of the bed and reread the letters, tried to imagine medical experiments in Panama. After a time, he replaced the gun and flag in the closet, shut them away.
But a gun and a flag with such history have a particular weighty presence; they couldn’t be shut up in a dark, airless closet and simply forgotten.
Two weeks after Grace’s funeral, returning from signing a lowball offer for the house, he checked the mailbox and found a postcard. “Grüss Gott aus Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin.” His heart fisted. Then raced. Beka had heard about Grace! Which gave him pause: Decades ago, he had fled without telling her. He recalled word for word the note he had sent: The War is insanity. I’m in Montreal and even if you might wish it I cannot have you come because it would destroy your relationship with your father. Your family. When Beka didn’t reply, Oren, then, and time and time and time again over the years, had pondered whether she had agreed with his logic, or simply and cleanly cut him loose. He flipped the postcard and his eye went directly to the closing: Love, Miles. The card hand dropped. A hollow, heavy feeling in his chest. After a long moment he blew out a long breath, then raised the card:
Long time, BFF. Nipper says you’re still in Ugh-tica. Devastated I missed Grace’s funeral, didn’t find out until Nipper e-mailed. If only there were more humans like her. Never met anyone I respect more. On a less somber note: Ich bin ein Berliner! I’m at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, an artist residency. Artists from Djakarta, Lagos, Bucharest. Finish next week, gotta show my face at a Boston gallery, opening of new stuff, then rent a car, detour to Ugh-tica before Brooklyn. E-mail me: milessculpt@gmail. Missed Beka in Berlin. Kat fears the gypsy has moved on, claims she doesn’t know where.
Love, Miles
Beka in Berlin?! Gypsy! His lasting image the seventeen-year-old with offbeat hair that seemed right for her. Wanderlust. His mind so awhirl he had to reset his feet. He went back over the card like a code breaker: BFF?? Ich bin ein Berliner: an American tourist’s facile cliché. Ugh-tica: the sophisticate sneering at the provinces. Missed Beka in Berlin! What was she doing there? Where did she go? Had Miles been in contact with her through Kat all these years and never mentioned it? He tore the card in two. Then, before quartering, stopped himself, the e-mail address still legible.
December 1, 1969
After “hunting,” the boys skip the White Lake Inn beers and drive straight home. The house they rent with two friends sits in a city neighborhood that had been upscale until the late ‘40s and now is a mishmash of college students and African American and Dominican families. The two-story has spacious high-ceilinged rooms, oak floors, and even wainscoting, but it’s uninsulated and has single-pane windows and for most of the year is never warm.
They prep for a Polaroid-worthy bash. No girlfriends, males only, and only those born between ‘44 and ‘50. On the front porch, standing on chairs, Miles holds one end of a makeshift banner while Oren staple guns the other end above the door. When they finish, they step down and stand side by side looking up at their handiwork. Thick red letters: You Bet Your Life. Miles cups a hand to Oren’s shoulder. “We’ll always remember 12-1-69, even more so than 11-22-63.” Oren ducks from under Miles’ hand, “Some will never get over it,” and goes in the front door. Shaking his head at his bud, Miles goes around back, to the small rectangle of yard, where a kiddie’s pool, some former tenant’s, is filled with ice and cans of Utica Club beer and two gallon jugs of Niagara white, though the ice is an extravagance, as the air temperature is mid-30s.
Miles finds Oren in the living room. They shove the couch to a wall and set up ten folding chairs (borrowed by Joe Stick, groundskeeper for St. Peter’s cemetery), two rows in a crescent facing the RCA portable. Miles clumps aluminum foil around the rabbit ears and moves them about until he has a good signal.
As with the house’s Jets-Colts Super Bowl party that began the year, the guests arrive long before the telecast. Unlike that telecast, this one seems like some sick audience-participation game where you dread being chosen. Oren can’t stop thinking of Shirley Jackson’s story but knows that if he tries to discuss it with anyone, it’ll draw a blank. Miles, tacit master of ceremony, is stationed at the front door, handshakes for each new arrival, from whom loud outbursts of nervous pre-selection bravado erupt. On the foyer table is an A&P coffee can. Scotch taped around the can is another label in thick red letters: You Bet Your Life: 1 U.S. Grant. It’s an exorbitant ante, none can afford it, but forewarned each makes a show of stuffing a fifty into the can, one saying, “Take my Grant, please,” another, “Don’t come back to papa!” It’s like a frat party. Brotherly. And more beer than even these ten could reasonably drink. Next to the ante can, a wicker bread basket with ten bomber joints. Next to the basket, the ceremonial Zippo lighter, its history known to anyone who ever shared a toke with Oren and Miles. The afternoon is infused with backslapping, even hugging, a closeness that would, normally, make these young men squirm. Another oddity: no talk of women or sex. Of Giants, or Bills, Rangers or Sabres. It’s all what if? Enlist, endure four years instead of two but allegedly have some say in where you serve out the four? How to flunk the physical? And spoken quietly, to some it still seems cowardly, or unpatriotic: Toronto? Montreal?
Wherever Miles shifts to, the pack gravitates. Their language is competitive, thrust and riposte, Miles the quickest tongue, always delivering the seemingly effortlessly winner. When he shifts to joke telling, they laugh before he gets two words in. Oren, in the background, mans the 8-track. He picks the long and wordy protestation: “Alice’s Restaurant.” But at T-6, Miles punches out Arlo and cranks Mick, and then leads the others in shout-singing “Street Fighting Man.” As the song fades, Miles shouts out the time and they all rush to top off their beers and converge on the TV. Nipper Knapp sees the rows of chairs and cracks that the set-up reminds him of a fookin’ wake. Dick Donkey counters, “Long as it’s Irish.” As the Vulnerable settle into their seats, a Norelco ad, Santa sliding downhill on an electric shaver, gets riotously mocked by the unshaven majority. Then a disembodied TV voice hushes the room: “Because of the CBS News Special Report that follows, Mayberry RFD will not be presented tonight.” The room erupts in hoots and jeers. Miles shouts, “Barney evaded as a hoaxasexual!” Laughter, then shushing as the camera reveals the set: several old fucks in funereal dark suits. One reaches elbow-deep into a clear barrel and hands a blue capsule to another, who pops the capsule and extracts paper and pins it to a large bulletin board. It takes a puzzled moment, before Miles shouts, “They’ve already picked numbers!” Shouts of disbelief, outrage, loud shushing as the camera pans to the foreground where, offstage, Roger Mudd calmly sits. He starts his commentary: blah, blah. But no one wants to hear the blather, everyone on the edge of his seat, zeroed in on the background and faint audio, an old fuck intoning like it’s church bingo, “April 17, 260; August 3, 261.” The Vulnerable shooting glances all round, anyone lucked out? A cut to Mudd, who intones that “September 14” was the first drawn, the camera pans to the board but only reveals the first four numbers, looks all around, but no one reacts. Mudd drones on and on, commentary as irritating as credits in a stag film, as the dates are announced in the background. “Show the fucking board!” Buckets Bertelsman shouts. The camera focuses on the water-cooler-like receptacle housing the blue capsules that look like sphincter suppositories. The old fuck reaches in to his elbow and plucks one and hands it to a stiff, scarf-necked Miss Hathaway look-alike, who splits open the suppository and extracts a fortune cookie slip and passes it along, and still Mudd drones on and even when the board is in the frame it’s out of focus, illegible: “Fuck you, you fucks!” Buckets shouts, near tears, and as if to mock his anger the telecast is interrupted by yet another Norelco ad, fucking Santa, but time enough to gulp some beer, confirm that no one’s number has come up, until, finally, more than seven excruciating minutes in, over Mudd’s shoulder the camera focuses on the board and pans down, blocks of five, Mudd intoning the numbers. At the third block, Stick shouts, “Bing-O! Ja pierdole! I fucking won!” And because it’s known Stick has preemptively signed with a Navy recruiter, when Miles holds forth the A&P can and presents the Bet Your Life pot to Jozef Stolarzyk, the clapping is muted, distracted, attention fixed on the RCA, and out of the corner of his eye Miles sees Oren abruptly stand, stone-faced, and without a word, exit. Miles shoots a look at the TV and runs his eyes down the board: #35, May 7. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He puts a hand on Nipper’s arm, asks him to watch for May 5, then quietly slips out of the room.
From the back mudroom door he sees Oren, hatless, gloveless, sitting by the kiddie pool in one of the two lopsided aluminum beach chairs. The sky the color of curbside slush, undeniably bleak. One more semester in this shithole. He lifts his heavy pea coat off the rack and puts it on, yanks a black beanie down over his ears and shoulder length hair, and goes out. He sits carefully in the wobbly chair, sets his feet. “You coulda at least won the five hundred.”
“Not to be. You?”
“Not yet. Nipper’s on it.”
A moment of silence. Miles shudders from the chill and damp in his bones. Shoves his fists into his coat pockets. He badly wants to go back in, confirm that his number hasn’t come up, his life is on track, but he’s worried about Oren. Senses Oren the contrarian intellectual is rationalizing extreme measures. He waits, his mind buzzing with counter arguments. The cold penetrates his core and he shivers from inside out.
“Sean’ll take the van off my hands.”
Miles gapes at him. Their vehicles define them, none more so than the Chevy van they shared for two years, work and play.
“Six hundred’s fair.”
“If you pass the physical, it’s only two years.” Then, his voice rising: “No. Wait. Enlist! Ask for Germany! Show off your German to the recruiter!”
A contemplative pause.
Miles, encouraged: “While you’re in Germany, put the van up at Grace’s.”
After a moment, Oren says, “I wouldn’t ask this of anyone else.”
Miles nods, Oren’s going to ask him to look after the van while he’s gone.
Oren shifts in his chair, looks Miles full in the face: “Drive me to Montreal?”
Miles flinches. Absorbs. His every impulse to argue: Cross that border and they’ll arrest you if you ever try to come home. Still, for the past year they’ve ended drunken nights debating Tonkin Gulf; Dominoes; Ho, Nationalist or Godless Commie? Geopolitics bleeding into religion, getting personal, Oren poking Miles’ inflamed weak spot, Miles defending his increasingly irresolute faith because it’s Oren doing the poking. Miles sighs, shakes his head. “I’ll do whatever you ask. You know that, right?”
Oren nods. They start to withdraw into silence. But it comes to Miles and he puts a hand on Oren’s arm and says, “Beka?”
A look of piercing pain crosses Oren’s face. “Not eighteen until September. Can’t take her, can’t wait for her.”
“She know you’ve already decided?”
Oren drops his arm to escape Miles’ hand and looks away. “Haven’t got that far,” he says. “But what?” Finally, an edge to his voice, “She runs off to Canada with a draft evader while the Colonel’s flying combat missions over Hanoi, and he never forgives her. Family is everything to her.”
“Tell me about it,” Miles snorts. He slaps his knees, “This sucks.”
“I’ll live,” Oren says. “That’s my decision. Firstly, I will live. All else follows, right? So, go back in. Confirm you’ve lucked out.”
Miles lingers. And lingers. Beka. She’s going to be torn. Even if she wants to go, big sister will invoke Family to stop her. Family wins out. He sits. Won’t leave Oren. He sees this moment as the most momentous in their shared history. Somehow he isn’t as cold as he was before. Oren doesn’t ask him to leave again. Miles is encouraged and starts to take comfort in their shared silence, when the aluminum mudroom door swings opens and whangs against the aluminum siding. Miles looks over his shoulder to see Nipper leaning out from the door frame. “Milo me boy,” he shouts. “Tree hunnert sixty-four! Luck o’ the fookin’ Irish!”
Miles’ breath catches, a voice in his head cries, Yes! But he restrains himself. Oren hasn’t moved a muscle. Two days apart and Oren’s fucked and he’s free. Nipper is waiting for some kind of reaction. Music pours out the open door: “And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?” drowned out by Nipper shouting again, but all Miles hears is “witch’s tit,” before the door whangs shut.
Oren turns in his seat. “Congrats,” he says, and sticks out his hand.
Miles fumbles a hand out of his coat pocket; the chair wobbles, he has to reset his feet. He clasps Oren’s larger hand and pumps it, again, to get Oren’s full attention. “Enlist. Ask for Germany, in German. Really. Beka will join you when she turns 18.”
September 2015
Bluing the barrel, Oren gets more and more curious about what is stamped there, just up from the hammer: Savage Model 94B 1949. Incredulous that someone would choose to name a firearm company Savage, and hoping to learn more about this particular gun, he returns to the Utica Public Library. He’s been going there daily, a break from the house, and it’s his belief that libraries are as welcoming and democratic as it gets in America. He waits until the young reference librarian with the magenta hair and silver nose stud is free. A week ago, not expecting anything to come of it, he asked her a research question. As he steps up to her desk she cocks her head at him, peers, intones, “W-W-2, Navy’s medical experiments.” He nods, impressed. “Got some good leads,” she says, “but no phone, right?”
“I’ll be back,” he assures. Then hands her a slip of paper: Savage Model 94B, 1949 (single shot, hammer action, 32” barrel). “Can you tell me anything about this shotgun?”
Reading, she smiles. “Savage firearms were made right here, in Utica, New York.”
Utter disbelief. A feeling of things predestined.
She has a civic-proud grin. “A mile or so from where you now stand. By Arthur Savage.”
“Huh. And I took ‘Savage’ to be just a catchy brand name.”
“Arthur Savage emigrated from Jamaica and started an arms factory here. Quite the quintessential American immigrant story.”
“Quintessential,” he repeats. “So, an arms dealer is the shining exemplar for America’s immigrants?”
She winces, an abashed look.
“What do you call someone forced to leave his country for political reasons?”
He can see that the abrupt oddity of his follow-up question further unsettles her. He watches her reassessing him, the old apostate standing before her. It’s a Carnegie library, once grand, now inner city, she must get no end of hands on with cultural and political apostates, but he suspects he’s tapped her shallow reserve of tolerance. He had thought her hair and nose stud signified rebellion, so it’s depressing to think they’re merely affectation.
Finally, she says: “Émigré.”
“Well done,” a slight bow. Then, as if quoting verbatim: “Émigré: Personal noun. A conscionable individual forced to flee his or her country for political reasons.”
She looks doubtful. “Webster’s New World College,” he ad libs, “fifth edition.” She visibly relaxes. Probably thinking he’s one of those Luddite intellectuals and thus, ultimately, reasonable. He muses on the subjectivity of the word.
“I’ll find what’s out there about the Navy tests.”
It’s his cue to move along. He walks away, buzzing with the fortuity that the gun was made by a man named Savage, here, in Utica, where he and Miles were born. And the librarian has a lead on the experiments in Panama.
October 2015
Miles hasn’t been back to the old neighborhood since his last visit to Grace, in 2011. The autumn colors on his drive from Boston made him feel buoyant about the day, but now, here in Ugh-tica, the leaves have been storm-blown from the trees and true to memory it’s chilly and damp and drained of color. Blocks from his old house he starts recognizing the houses of clients he and Oren did odd jobs for. They once figured they had clients in every direction for a one-mile radius; Oren called it their “sphere of influence.” When he first said it he had to explain to Miles what it meant, and now Miles smirks—Oren, fucking thirteen, aware of spheres of influence—then frowns—and now, at sixty-five? He’d always been the clique’s intellectual. Always had a book, some tattered Penguin Classics paperback, serious highbrow shit that made Miles self-conscious. Quickly Miles reboots, vows patience, clutches the top of the wheel and pulls himself taller in the seat. What buds we’d been! The Inseparables! Ian’s moniker triggers a montage of memory: he and Oren on trikes; the Christmas Grace gave them matching Schwinns, vastly expanding their range, young Goldie following them everywhere. Sleeping out in the tin-roofed treehouse they’d built in Oren’s backyard apple tree. Playing football in that yard, Oren, taller, heavier, tackling him in a pile of the vomit-stanky gingko berries, pu balls they called them. He slows, coasts through the crescent bend in the street, does a double take, stomps the brake. Looks all about; confirms he is where he thought. His house and the Sullivan’s, gone. In their place, a three-shop cinder-block mini-mall, two shops boarded up, the third a sleazy pizzeria. As he raises his foot from the brake, a sense of how far he’s come, how removed he is from this place. The nostalgia he felt moments ago is swept clean away by giddy relief that he escaped this gray, weather-fucked backwater. He peers down the street to Oren’s house, on the arc of the cul-de-sac. A foreboding: Oren has been here for weeks and hasn’t bothered to let him know his childhood home had vanished. True, they haven’t communicated in years. Hell, the Luddite only suffered an e-mail account for his business, and until recently any personal e-mails sent to it went unanswered.
Grace’s Cape Cod looks small and pedestrian without her. Though parked in the driveway, nose out, is a foreign van. Boxy, ancient. A Peugeot emblem on the flat front grill. Nova Scotia plates. Miles parks and stands on the running board of his rented Highlander, his gaze lifting to Oren’s bedroom window. He slept so many nights in that room Grace bought a rollaway. Thirteen when his father finally left. Another thing he and Oren had in common, though Oren had little memory of his father, likely a good thing. Grace was the hip single parent. Oren’s friends thought her the coolest adult on the planet, Oren’s place like a halfway house for their clique, though only he, Miles, actually stayed there, and for days at a time, sometimes weeks. The others called her “Mo,” stopping short of “Ma.” Only he and Oren called her “Grace,” a distinction dear to Miles that now, decades later, injects a much-needed dose of camaraderie.
No movement from the house. The only sound the yapping of a neighbor’s dog. He steps onto the front stoop. Hesitates. Can’t remember ever ringing a doorbell. He always just walked in, even later, when Oren was gone and he visited Grace every few years. He stands on the stoop, stymied by the doorbell, a rare moment of social indecision. All at once he’s concerned about what Oren will make of him on first sight and recalls verbatim a spiteful ex’s description of him on Facebook—ponytailed pewter-colored hair yanked tightly back like an 18th century French aristocrat whose destiny is the guillotine. He startles at the door swinging open. Can’t control his shocked expression—Oren, old. White facial stubble matching the white stubble on his head. But he’s hard bodied, like a 70-something extreme athlete. Dickies green pants and a tight white tee. Miles knows artists who sport the unshaven prole look, the I’m-not-one-of-you dress code. Miles raises his arms, telegraphing his intentions as one might on a first date, steps forward and embraces Oren, who stiffens, a whiff of alcohol. Day drinker, or for the occasion? He pats Oren on the back, then backs and blurts, “So sorry about Grace.” And at Oren’s pained look, “I woulda hopped a flight if I’d known, no question, but I didn’t find out until after the funeral. Nipper tracked me down on Facebook.” Miles winces, Grace more of a mother to him than his own. Then he’s irked that it sounded like an apology, on his part. He offers Oren an expectant look, an opening for him to say he tried to make contact. But no. Oren tersely nods him inside. He follows, unsettled, he hasn’t yet heard Oren’s voice. He glances into the living room. It’s bare. Says joshingly to Oren’s back, “Either you’re into the Spartan thing or you ain’t stayin’.” No response. Then they’re in the kitchen and Miles smiles at the familiarity, before his smile collapses and he stiffens with recognition. He locks eyes with Oren. Neither speaks.
Until Miles, flummoxed: “Ian’s Savage.”
Oren’s nod is barely perceptible.
Miles makes his face smile, lifts his chin at the Savage on the counter. “Going hunting?”
Oren lifts his own chin to the other side of the kitchen. Miles looks. Can’t stop the grin, a brain rush of nostalgia; on the familiar 50s starburst red Formica table a gallon jug of Niagara white (not full), two red plastic cups, two bomber joints, a hemostat, and, yeah, of course, Ian’s Zippo. Their night’s lineup from summer ’69! Relieved, the gun kind of fits now, Miles steps to the table, shakes his head in wonderment, eyeing each item as if it were a museum piece, which triggers a feeling of things staged. But why? He gives the shotgun a sustained look.
“Nineteen-sixty-nine,” Oren says.
The voice, finally heard, is reassuringly familiar. “Yeah, man, I got that, far out,” Miles drolls. He pinches a joint, chuckles, shakes his head, nah, he shouldn’t, can’t, no way. Picks up the Zippo, bounces it in his palm, shoots Oren yet another inquisitive look.
“Left it behind. Grace stood it on my night stand.”
Miles’ eyes swing to the Savage. “And that?”
“That I hid in the attic crawl space. Forty years later I found it in my closet.”
“Fuckin A.”
“With Ian’s funeral flag.”
Taken aback, Miles tries to put it all together. Fails. He hunches his shoulders, spreads his hands…but Oren’s expression is blank. What comes into Miles’ head spills out of his mouth: “I’d bet the farm you’re familiar with Chekov’s maxim about introducing a gun into a scene.”
“Scene?”
“Yeah. This feels like a scene. Something staged.”
Oren makes a scrunch face, as though Miles is speaking artsy-fartsy. And all at once Miles feels lost. The long day, the long drive. Too much pot, or not enough. He gives the gun a lingering look. With a kind of fuck-it yielding, pivots to the tabletop. “So shit yeah,” his long-discarded Utica voice rising, shifting gears, “this is abso-fuckin’-lutely gonna be memorable.” He shrugs out of his cracked-leather vest, hangs it on the back of the chair, sits, routinely swipes his tightly ponytailed hair, and rubs his hands together in high anticipation. Oren pulls out the chair opposite. Sits stiffly in his seat. After an increasingly awkward interval it becomes apparent he isn’t going to start things, as if he’s the guest. As if maybe he’s making some point about Miles having visited here these last decades when, on principle, he wouldn’t. Miles sighs inwardly, gives yet another fuck-it shrug, he’s willing to shrug through the whole fookin’ day, and takes over. He has to stand, and use both hands, to pour from the gallon jug. Has to hand Oren his cup. Sits back, raises his cup, air toasts, “Glory days!” Drinks, puckers from the sweet-sour Niagara, stops himself, just, from calling it swill, though that’s what they called it back in the day. Swipes up the Zippo, fires up the blunt, sucks a deep toke, holds it, holds it, blows smoke, squeaks harshly, “Ich bin ein Berliner!”
Oren rapid-fires some German at him.
“Whoa! Really? You still sprechen?” When Oren doesn’t answer, Miles senses taboo, shakes his head like a wet dog, blaming the pot for being stupefied. Breathes out through fluttered lips, “Will-l-l-bur,” how they used to mimic Mr. Ed to announce they were officially high. But Oren doesn’t acknowledge their past. No way he doesn’t remember. Miles, wary now, holds up the joint with thumb and forefinger and peers at it from all angles: don’t bring up Beka. Offers the joint. Oren pinches it from his fingers and tokes, holds, exhales serenely, like a pro, and Miles relaxes, Oren the pot-growing master carpenter is doing okay for himself. Quietly, the joint passes back and forth. When too short to pinch, Miles reaches for the hemostat but Oren beats him to it. Miles watches him clasp the roach, thumb fire the Zippo, ignite the roach, offer it. Miles leans, finger closing one nostril, puffs out the flame, inhales nostril to gut, his head flung back as if he’s grabbed hold of a live wire. Stupored, acrid smoke scorching his nostrils, face scrunched, he hears, “There’s something else from the glory days.”
One eye shut, trying to reconstitute his face, Miles waits for it. Certain it’s nothing he wants to hear. Regret about Beka? Whom Kat says won’t talk about Oren. Oren peering at him, Miles says, “Something tells me to stick my fingers in my ears.”
Oren abruptly stands and goes to the counter, hefts the Savage, and says, “Let’s go.”
Stunned, out of nowhere Miles quips, “Is it safe?” A quote, elusive: if a joke, flat.
“Something you need to see,” Oren says.
Staged! But why the fucking fuck?
Oren lifts his chin at the back door. Miles bristles at the chin gesture, hesitates, then shrugs, what can one do? Presses his hands flat on the tabletop and pushes himself up. The pot rushes to his head. Unsteady, at the back door he has to look down at his shoes to negotiate the concrete steps. As he raises his head a puke smell, pu balls! Then sickly-sweet rotten apples. He raises his eyes and is gratified to see in the apple tree the tin-roofed tree house. A welling of pride in how durable they’d built it. Then, on a low branch, something wrapped. A flag?
Of course. Ian’s. It all comes together. Oren’s performance. But if Oren expects him to object…. He looks over. Oren, cradling the breeched shotgun in a crooked arm, dips a hand into his Dickies pocket. Out comes a green shotgun shell. “Ian blew his head apart with the Savage,” Oren says, inserting the shell, “but Grace never accepted the why of it. She wouldn’t stop looking for an answer.”
One is the author of one’s own misfortunes, Miles recalls, a quote long stuck in his head like some banal but hit-home ad slogan. But says, “He was an alcoholic.” Then the image: “And he had that worm eating him inside out!”
“True.” Oren clanks the barrel shut.
Unable to take his eyes from the gun, Miles hears, “Also true. In August 1942, Ian was ordered to take part in the Navy’s mustard gas testing.”
“Huh? Say again?” Though he’d heard perfectly.
“Grace requested his service record, got the cover-up, records lost in a fire, blah-fucking-blah. But it’s all come to light.”
“Mustard gas?”
“Your navy press-ganged sailors, handed out gas masks, locked them in a sealed chamber and opened the valve.”
My navy? Miles thinks, but says, “Un-believable.”
“Really? Do you have even a passing acquaintance with your country’s history?”
“I didn’t mean….”
“It burned them!” Oren’s voice finally rising. “They screamed, banged on the walls! When the door finally opened, they were inspected like lab rats, told they’d be fine. Only decades later was organ damage undeniable. Still, they did fucking deny it, for fifty years!”
“Man, that would explain a lot.”
“About Ian, or your government?”
“What’s this my government shtick?”
“You hadn’t guessed?”
It clicks. Miles nods. “You gave up your citizenship.” And when Oren harrumphs in a “no shit” kind of way, Miles gives voice to the connection: “You and Beka both.”
Oren’s face collapses.
Miles gapes at him. He didn’t know! He hasn’t heard from Beka in decades. Impulsively he moves to hug Oren but Oren holds the gun before him like a barrier. Again Oren points with his chin: “A storm wrapped your flag around that branch. You should unfurl it.” The voice cold, peremptory.
Miles’ stomach churns. He seeks eye contact. Then doesn’t like what he sees, Oren’s bony, white-stubble face set, eyes narrowed with intent. “What is this?” Miles says too loudly. “Some kind of performance piece?”
Quickly: “I’m no artist.”
Miles stops himself, just, from claiming that carpenters are artists, too.
“Your flag,” Oren says with quiet command.
Miles, the quick-witted one, is addled. Blank. Nothing comes out of his mouth. Surf sounds in his ear. Humbled, he glimpses, finally, Oren’s life these past decades. That fucking lottery in 69! Out on miserable cod boats before he made a stake to set up a carpentry shop in backcountry Nova Scotia. Beka, the love of his life, sacrificed. His best friend New York-prosperous. Grace, gone. Grace! Fuck it! Miles strides resolutely toward the flag, summons faith in the past, in Grace, the air rarefied now, the smell of pu balls up his nose, a voice in his head crying out, “I’m in a performance art! Yeah!” But in this heightened state he hears the hammer cocked and despite the past and rarefied air and bravado, he slows, a sudden, too-late understanding that it’s not his BFF raising the Savage, their shared history gone, obliterated by History, he remembers hunting, the boom and brutal shoulder kick of the Savage, winces in advance, his back muscles bunch as if to make himself thinner…Boom! On his knees, deafened, shrieking. And in the years to come, compelled when high enough to tell the story (though fully fucking aware that everyone is tired of that old Nam draft shit), he will describe the birdshot hissing by his ear before it shredded Ian’s funeral flag.
After earning an MFA from the University of Arizona, Bruce Petronio was awarded a Distinguished Artist Fellowship, New Jersey’s top literary award. His work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tucson Weekly, Ninth Letter, American Literary Review, and other publications. He has been a resident artist at Ucross, Blue Mountain Center, Fundación Valparaiso (Spain) and Hawthornden Castle (Scotland).
