At daybreak William was already awake, anticipating sounds outside at the curb–the engine, the brakes, the driver side door. When the sounds did come, he no longer had to sit up in bed and look. He knew too well the haze of her car’s interior lights and the yellow wedge they made across his grass. He had memorized the trip she made across his lawn, yardstick in one hand, milk jug in the other. He recognized the creak of the faucet next to his front door and the rush of water–his water–through his pipes and the splash as she poured it over the concrete urn. First there had been pansies, then marigolds, now chrysanthemums. Each day she would rearrange the stuffed animals, pop open her trunk, and add a new one to the pile on the grass. For more than six months, twice a week, Monday and Thursday mornings, a few minutes before six, she spent her grief on his front lawn.

When it first happened, he had expected flowers but not the 8×10 laminated photo, not the Mylar balloons, not the football helmet and baseball trophies, certainly not the stuffed animals–rabbits, bears, puppies, unidentifiable creatures with pastel striped fur and strange appendages, breeding and multiplying while he was trying to sleep or while he was at work. There were the notes, “U R the best” and “Keep shining,” and long letters held down by a grapefruit size rock. These long, unsigned letters on lined notebook paper arrived before or after school, the backs and fronts of the sheets filled with all the romantic sentiments and angry clichés young girl hearts could engender. He had read the first dozen, the paper damp with night dew or bleached by the afternoon sun, the penmanship half-cursive, half-print, in smeary pink, purple or turquoise ink.

By the time Will had arrived home from his job on the day of the accident, there were no longer any telltale signs. No tire tracks across the spring grass, no glass on his lawn, no chrome or plastic pieces embedded in the dirt, not even a depression where the car had thumped down. But in the next day’s newspaper, he saw the photos of his house, the crumpled car, the clumps of teenagers from the school across the street. The boy, seventeen years old, a month from graduation, had barreled out of the high school parking lot and into the path of a semi. His car ricocheted off a light pole, winged a pine tree, then flipped. The boy died there on Will’s lawn. A week later the cross appeared, four feet tall, three feet wide, whitewashed, the boy’s name and numbers painted in fluorescent orange, flicking off the lights of passing cars.

On those nights when he had tried bringing a woman home, her car pulling into the driveway after his, her stepping out about to link her arm around his waist, she always saw the cross. The night was all but over then. The women always wanted to hear the whole story, to cry in the dark. They wanted him to get a flashlight and stand with them, his arm around their waist, as they touched the glossy photo of the boy. Will repeated the platitudes from the notes but they never did any good. The women wanted to coo over the stuffed animals–under the streetlights their beady eyes sparkled, the heads of the marigolds looked like cheerleader pom-poms—and rearrange them, unless it had been raining and they were a soggy pile. When they sighed, he sighed. They couldn’t have sex with that outside the window. They just wanted to cuddle.

The first time he met the mother up close it had been the end of June. There were American flags on sticks, a big foam bear in an Uncle Sam costume, and red, white and blue bunting draped over the crossbeam. She appeared unexpectedly when he was out mowing his lawn on a Saturday. She was ten years younger than his mom but had the same sense of style. White ankle socks, blue jeans with an elastic waistband, sweatshirts with birds or flowers, or both, hot-pressed onto them. She stopped the car, popped the trunk, got out her yardstick. She didn’t look at him, clearly his lawn was her public space. She dropped to her knees as she shuffled through the pile. When he came to the edge of the lawn and turned the mower around, she was there in front of him, a short squat woman with black hair like a helmet around her square jaw. Her lips twisted into one word. “Twenty-two.”

He turned off the mower, thinking he had missed something.

“Twenty-two,” she insisted. Her hands were fists about to punch him. For what, he wasn’t sure. Twenty-two? Not the boy’s age. Not the date. Not the number of days he had been dead.

“Only twenty-two. One’s missing. Pink Kitty.”

Only then did he realize she had counted the animals and come up one short. He knew where it had gone. Three nights before he had come home late after a terrible wind storm and one of the creatures was in the road, flattened to a pad of pink fur by passing cars. He knew what you were supposed to do with dead animals–get out a shovel and move it. But this barely qualified.

On a Thursday morning in August, which he figured had been long enough, after the mother left, he tossed the whole mess, the cross, the urn, the notes, the balloons, toys, trinkets, photographs, stuffed animals, into the trunk of his car and put it all in the dumpster behind the auto parts store where he worked. He figured he would have until the next Monday before she discovered it gone. But someone dropping off their kid at the school noticed the theft, and called the mom and the police. By the time the incident was over, there had been seven crank calls, three articles in the town newspaper, a dozen letters to the editor vilifying his behavior, and a conference in his manager’s office about customer relations. The pile was back even larger. Girls from the high school organized a service project, dug up a 2×6 foot patch of grass and planted petunias. Another cross replaced the original, this one bigger and outlined with a string of tiny, battery-powered LED lights and a puddle of cement hardening around its base.

Will knew his crosses: the occupied one in St. Paul the Apostle, the empty one in his own Presbyterian church, the Greek cross, the Celtic cross, the Russian Orthodox one, baptismal crosses, trefoiled crosses, the victor’s cross, the gilded one at St. Nicholas Antiochian, the simple gold-toned stickpin on his grandfather’s lapel. He believed in them, but the cross in his yard was something else, not a father’s emptying but a mother’s filling up, like the one tattoo parlors put above the bikini line or the one Nazi skinheads hide under their shirts.

“Proportion,” his sister Celine said. She was inspecting the page layouts he had hung from a monofilament line strung across his kitchen. A friend had given him a book of Lovecraft’s stories and as soon as he read this one, he knew he had to illustrate it. The narrator on his coming of age tour. The mysterious reef. The inhabitants of Innsmouth with their peculiar and peculiarly similar appearance. The dreaded attraction on the narrator’s face when he sees himself in the mirror. Each night Will’s imagination lived in that strange city and he drew another panel to the story. Whenever he finished all six panels on a page, he hung it up with the others. Celine taught art at the high school across the street and could tell him what he was doing wrong. “Helicopter moms. They’re the worst, Will,” she said, “always hovering, they lose all sense of proportion. You have to be firm with The Mom. Tell her to back off.” She had brought the school’s yearbook. Blue sticky notes marked the pages where the boy appeared. “There he is in the jazz band, here with the football team.”

“Why do boys wear their hair like that?”

“Here’s a close-up. He played right field on the baseball team.”

“Does the school still require driver’s ed?”

“Here he is on student council. He got a scholarship to U of M.”

Celine paged through to the pictures of the high schoolers she had seen on his lawn. She knew their names and their history with the boy. “That’s his sister. That’s the girl he dated all sophomore year. That’s Kristie Culofti, they sang a duet together at the spring concert. And this is the hot little dish he took to senior prom, Brandi Murphy. The Mom did not approve.” He had seen all these girls and more on his lawn. They never came one at a time but arrived like pigeons in groups of three or four, picking through the stuffed animals to check out what was new, comparing cuteness, and leaving a few droppings of their own: a doughnut in a plastic sandwich bag, a Hallmark card, a pair of flip-flops, a pop-bead bracelet, a bandanna, a rock painted with a peace sign, a necklace made of macaroni, a feather, selfies. Will was young enough to remember and foreswear the prickly, self-centeredness of teen girl sex but not old enough to delude himself into thinking he could cure it. He knew he wasn’t a good enough artist that his sister could recognize them in a panel when he needed faces for the loungers leaving the bus stop where the narrator waits.

In October his sister came with more bad news. He had hoped interest in the boy was dwindling, that the high school crowd had moved on to their next tragedy. Celine held out a flyer. The boy’s mother was passing them out at school, posting them at the library, plastering them on the community bulletin board at the grocery store. November 7 was the boy’s birthday. There was going to be a party. On his front lawn.

“You have to say something to her.” Celine’s opinion was that a party was way out of line. “I see moms like her all the time. Push, push, push, won’t let their kids out of their shadow. Poor kid, he can’t even rest in peace without The Mom organizing it.” She was inspecting his recent pages, the ones where the narrator is riding the bus and when he gets to Innsmouth, he goes into the grocery store. “It’s not like he’s buried here. Doesn’t she know what cemeteries are for? It’s your property.” Actually it wasn’t. He had measured it. One morning after the mom left he got out his tape measure and marked off from the center of the road. The cross was two inches inside the public access. With the toe of his sneaker, he pushed the stray animals back across the line

Celine was squinting at the last page he had drawn, approving of the way he had laid out the town in relation to the beach and the way he had drawn the water so that it rippled ominously out along the reef. She went back to the bus driver. “This face looks vaguely familiar.” She hadn’t read Lovecraft, didn’t know this was readers’ first glimpse of the “Innsmouth look.”

“A birthday party,” she laughed scornfully, “give me a break.” She pushed the flyer towards him, then spoke like a true big sister. “Next time she shows up, take care of it.”

The next Monday morning he was waiting on his front step and stopped her halfway to the water faucet. There had been a cold rain over the weekend and a hard frost that night. The grass crunched beneath their feet and in the morning light the cross looked like something leftover from a carnival, its lights casting red, blue, yellow, green across the icy lawn and up into her face and his.

“I don’t think this is possible,” he said, holding up the flyer so she could read her announcement. The moment he said it, he knew it was not his best move. He should have started with something more forceful.

“I’ll tell you what’s not possible.” She had a long story that began with the son’s death and led to the PartyMaster. “I’ve already reserved the popcorn truck and the tent. The food’s been ordered.” She moved past him, water burbled into the jug. “The entertainment’s all planned. Obviously, you’ve seen the flyers.”

He had rehearsed what he meant to say, It’s my lawn. I understand it’s your son, but it’s my lawn. It wouldn’t come out.

She poured water over the flowers in the urn and then across the bed of petunias. Their leaves were blackened and shriveled from the frost, but that didn’t stop her. “We’re going to have a good time, that’s what my boy would want. I ordered the cake this morning and everyone has picked out their mo-mento.” That had been on the flyer too. Everyone was to bring a memento and leave it by the cross as a reminder of the son. More junk.

She went to the trunk of her car and took out her yardstick, a shovel, and a plastic shopping bag. She measured the pile, sorted out the soggy animals from the not so soggy, replaced the soggy ones with three fresh ones from the bag and then remeasured the size of the pile. She paced off three steps towards his house then two steps west. She cut out a square of sod, set it aside, scooped out a shovel full of dirt and scattered it across his grass. She put the soggy animals down in the hole, put the sod back in place, and tamped it all down with her foot. “Cheerleaders have promised to come and the high school choir will be singing. If you have any extra lawn chairs, we could use them.” She took off her gardening gloves, put everything back in the trunk and left without looking back. In the dull morning light, he could see what he hadn’t seen before–a checkerboard of bumps and hollows where she had buried things too deep or too shallow.

Two weeks before the party a teenager appeared on the sidewalk in front of his house. Thin, almost gaunt, she seemed an icicle dressed in a leotard, full skirt and combat boots. She appeared in that moment between when he pulled the car into the garage and when he hung up his coat. He was sure she had not been there when he drove in. In the thin gray light of evening, she was moving down his sidewalk in a slow ballet, practicing turns and steps and twirls and leaps. Every so often she stopped to refresh her MP3, then moved back to the pine tree on the corner, and began the routine all over. Her eyes were closed, her lips moved as she practiced, counting to the music, one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight. She must have sensed he was there in the window because whenever she tried a fancy turn, lost her balance and stepped on his grass, she would glance at him apologetically. Then she would go back to the pine at the corner, hit replay, and start her dance again. He put his jacket back on and sat on his front step. Late that night as he sat drawing he thought he was imagining her. She appeared again the next evening and the next, and for several more. Every day she would add a few more steps to the dance, advancing down his sidewalk from the corner tree, practicing and revising the dance, trying to fit in all her moves before she got to his driveway.

On Saturday he went to the township cemetery and parked in the old part where his grandparents were buried among angels, grapes, and praying hands and where his parents had reserved spots for the whole family. He walked to the new section and found the boy’s row, the sunken, unadorned depression where he had been laid. Will had expected a stone and an even grander display than what was in his yard, something more than the cemetery’s regulation stake with a metal tag engraved with the boy’s name and plot number. Someone, probably the sexton, had killed the weeds and scattered a few handfuls of grass seed across the bare dirt. He studied the matte gray sky, the threadbare pines at the edge of the cemetery, the dry, winter-bitten grass, and the tombstones rolling row after row down one hill and up over another. He wanted to take the mother by the shoulders. “Look here, look here,” he wanted to point, “the body, it’s here. Get over it. Get your cross off my lawn.”

By Monday the temperature had dropped ten degrees. All day at work he had watched a line of thunderstorms move through, and by the time he pulled into his driveway dark clouds were rumbling above his house. The stuffed animals were water-logged and stiff from the cold. The LED lights on the cross had blown a fuse. Raindrops coated his front window, blurring the edges of the lawn and sidewalk. He took an umbrella with him. Instead of sitting on the porch, he held it above her head. She had practiced enough that she no longer stepped off the sidewalk and he could shift this way and that, doing a little two-step forward and back, so that he stayed with her but out of her way. She had no need to look at him. It was as if she had expected this gesture, as if he had become part of the dance. She wore thick wooly socks inside her boots, the tops folded down over the laces. A muslin cape hung like drapery over her leotard. He was close enough that for the first time he could hear the rhythm of the music coming through the headphones. It matched the rhythm of the rain on his umbrella, but it wasn’t moving towards a thunderstorm. It was moving towards a river. His feet, wet from the grass, were already wading in it.

That night he came to the panel where the narrator sits with the crazy man and looks out to sea. He drew the threadbare pines he had seen at the cemetery in a line along the beach front. He speckled the sand at the narrator’s feet with unsprouted beach grass. The bus was becoming a hearse, the reef a charnel, the hotel a funeral parlor. In the reef’s shimmering, he drew a figure as thin as an icicle.

“Have you talked to her about it?” Celine was at his kitchen table. She had taken down the page where the inhabitants are pounding on the door of the narrator’s hotel room.

His first thought was that she somehow knew about the dancer. He hadn’t told her, but perhaps the kids at school were talking.

“Have you told her she can’t have the party here?”

His silence made her sigh. She pointed to the panel where the narrator is at the door of his hotel room. “It’s not clear what’s happening here. I can’t tell, is he locking the door or unlocking it?” He watched her as she studied the drawings, wondering if she would notice who it was that the town’s inhabitants were beginning to look like–a nose here, a chin there, her ears on this one, her figure on that one. The hotel keeper had her square jaw and her helmet-like hair. By the time he got to the angry mob, they would all be the same tribe.

“How’s the boy’s sister doing?” he asked. “How’s the girlfriend?” He had asked Celine to bring the yearbook over again and he began paging through it. He had the impression that the dancer was either the dead boy’s sister or girlfriend. He wished he had paid closer attention when Celine had first shown him their pictures.

“You know kids that age. The girlfriend’s moved on, dating someone else. The sister hits the counselor’s office once a week, she’s always had a smart mouth and her brother’s death has given her one more excuse.” She studied him as closely as she had studied his drawings. “I was afraid this would happen. It’s not healthy. You of all people shouldn’t have to live with this outside your door.” He understood her concern. He had been diagnosed with leukemia two years before, during his junior year of college. Even though the doctors thought it was in remission, grief hung like a fine mist across the face of his life, blurring his future whenever he thought about going back to school or getting a better job, whenever he found himself getting a little too close to a woman he liked. The week before, while he was standing in the grocery store, the face of a young child not more than two looked at him with complete trust. It was a hope he knew would never be fulfilled. It left him in a fog.

Celine put her hands on top of his. “You aren’t fixating on this, are you? It’s all so morbid, have you been depressed? Do you want me to talk to her?” He assured her that he wasn’t, hadn’t been, and she didn’t need to.

After she left, he went through every photo in the yearbook, looking for the dancer on his sidewalk. He found only traces–the right face, wrong body, the right body, wrong face.

On the night before the party he had trouble drawing. He had come to the place in the story when the terrified narrator is escaping and the inhabitants are tramping through the damp, sea-water night, looking for him. Will went back and reread the story–were they coming for him because he is different or because they recognize him as one of their own?

The popcorn truck was the first to arrive, a red and white RV ready to serve cold pop, caramel corn, hot dogs and elephant ears out the side windows. In big red letters the word “PartyMaster” appeared above the motto “One Quick Call Does It All”.

“Are you the mother’s son?” the driver asked, rolling down his window.

Will frowned. “No. I live here.”

The driver looked as if he didn’t believe him. “Well, where do you want me to park it?”

Will directed as the popcorn man carelessly backed up over the curb, a little this way, a little that, until the cross disappeared and the stuffed animals emerged from under the front bumper. The driver opened the awning and ran an extension cord in through Will’s bedroom window. Soon the smell of hot cooking oil wafted across the lawn. When the mom arrived, she was so distracted–the dunking booth, the tent, the DJ, tables and chairs for fifty–she never noticed the cross was hung up somewhere under the back wheel well.

Two cars drove up. Will guessed from the faces that they were relatives, the boy’s siblings, aunts, uncles, a couple grandmas. As the mom dumped her bag of fresh animals on the pile she called, “Mo-mentoes, put your mo-mentoes here.” One relative deposited a panda, one a baby’s rattle. The sister brought a photograph of herelf and the dead brother in prom clothes. The curly-haired grandma brought a sock monkey which, from the looks of it, she had knitted herself out of brown and red yarn.

Soon the partiers took over his lawn, a hundred, maybe two hundred, people circulating around under the tent, across the grass, in the front door to use his bathroom and out the back, students, coaches, teachers, friends from the mom’s work and exercise club, cheerleaders, football players, the chess club, pregnant women, insurance salesmen, used car dealers, the lead singer from a local rock band, a balloon artist, two face painters, three jugglers left over from the Renaissance festival in Holly weeks before, forty very elderly Detroiters—canes, walkers, oxygen tanks–from off a tour bus, guys from the homeless shelter four blocks over who had read the flyer and stopped by. Firefighters were giving tours of their new hook and ladder. Kids took turns sitting in the DARE car. People were lining up for food, sitting at tables or on the sidewalk or curb, eating cotton candy, popcorn balls, frosty shakes, sloppy joes, chili dogs, pigs in the blanket, ham buns, drinking pop, bottled water, sloe gin fizzes and playing ring toss and cornhole and winning giant pandas, fuzzy dice or drinking glasses emblazoned with the dead boy’s picture, the date and the words “First Annual Birthday Bash”. Cheerleaders were doing their routines. Football players were scrimmaging on the side lawn. The mom kept pointing towards the front bumper of the PartyMaster-mobile, calling, “Mo-mentoes, put your mo-mentoes here.” During a lull, she went to the trunk of her car, took out her yardstick and measured. “Come on, we can do it, the bumper’s covered, let’s get up to the headlights.” She brought the cheerleaders over and led the squad in a sis-boom-bah.

Will sat on the front steps, watching the pine tree at the corner, waiting for the dancer to appear, waiting until the last of the crowd disappeared and the popcorn man wrapped up the leftovers, rolled up the awning, disconnected the electric, and tried to settle up the bill with the mom. She was standing at the front bumper, staring.

“They ate a lot more than I thought they would,” said the popcorn man, “and football players don’t come cheap. I got to get going. My next gig’s an hour away.”

It was a huge pile. Party-goers had left all sorts of things, carnations, silk butterflies, shotgun casings, a cowboy boot, pencils, figurines (Will counted seven Snoopys, five gnomes and one SpongeBob), Barbies, windsocks, rocks, refundable pop cans, more rocks, gum wrappers, half-eaten hot dogs, dirty socks, lint from their pockets. But the pile hadn’t made it up to the headlights.

The popcorn driver tried again, holding out his bill. The mother had dropped her megaphone and wasn’t moving.

Will glanced at the mother’s face then at the pine tree. The dancer was there waiting at the end of the sidewalk. Her combat boots were covered with mud. Dirt clung to the hem of her skirt. Again he glanced at the mother’s face then studied the length of the sidewalk. It would never be long enough. He took the bill, “She’ll send you a check,” and watched as the man backed up the RV. The cross was still tucked up under there. Will could hear it rubbing against a wheel, the drivetrain grinding. The driver had to gun it to get out of the grass, down over the curb and out onto the road.

Will put the mom in her car. He put the unpaid bill, the yardstick and the shovel into the trunk. He put the dancer in there too and unloaded it all at the cemetery. As soon as he opened the lid, she unfolded herself, shaking out the wrinkles in her muslin wrap. Taking his hand, she stepped up onto the rim of the trunk then, as if descending a staircase, stepped to the bumper to a nearby tombstone and then to the grass. She moved past the boy’s grave, straight down the row to where the threadbare pine crossed the horizon.

The mom didn’t want to get out of the car at first, so he swung her feet out, pulled her out by the hand and showed her how to sit with her back against a tombstone one row over from the boy.

He could see that the dancer was waiting for his signal so he sat down too. Remembering that the mother had never seen the dance, he put his arm around her shoulder. He knew that his face and her face if he had to draw them would be identical. He gave a little wave, the dance began. He hugged the mother tightly, felt a silent sob. The dance had a long way to go–the length of the cemetery and beyond–and would not miss a beat. It was always a practice run, gravestone to the left, gravestone to the right, and there were surprises–the turn, the spin, the steps backward, the twist, the leap.

 

 

Javier closed up the kitchen for the night and came out of the mess area onto the deck for a final cigarette.  He saw the young woman sitting quietly on the metal scuba grill attached to the stern, her bare legs dangling in the water.  She glanced over her shoulder, then pretended not to notice him and went back to watching the dark water rising and falling against her white skin.

Javier propped himself against the closed door and struck a match, the sudden orange flame lighting the dark stern like an emergency flare.  He exhaled his first drag heavily, making no secret of being there, making no secret of the fact that he wasn’t approaching her.  It was like this sometimes with the women who came on these trips; they were looking for a caballero to match their vision of romantic nights under the warm Mexican skies.  Javier thought it was the rocking of the boat that put this idea in their heads.

This one didn’t interest him so much.  He looked at the halter top tied around the rounded shoulders as he smoked, the way the knobs of her spine disappeared into the waistline of her shorts.  He said nothing, waiting as his lack of conversation solidified between them.  He smoked his cigarette down to the filter, then flicked it over the side of the boat.

“Hammerheads in these waters,” he said, then left for his bunk, listening to the sudden splash of her legs withdrawing from the sea.

 

The ride out of Bahiá de La Paz was rough because of the storm out at sea a day earlier.  The chop was still high as they cleared the harbor, but the captain was a precise man who knew what his clients paid for, and it wasn’t getting stuck in La Paz.

Javier scanned the overcast sky and eyeballed the man-sized waves.  There’d be no whales today, he thought.  But the naturalist would do a slide show, and Javier would cook a gourmet lunch, and no one would complain.

He hoisted himself up to sit on the railing, hooking his bare feet into one of the lower rails to help maintain his balance as the boat pitched up and down the waves.  He kept one hand lightly on the post next to him and looked back toward the town where, on the waterfront, the fronds of the coconut and date palms waved in the wind like hula girls’ arms.

He wished he’d had a longer break before this new group had come onboard, or if he hadn’t, that this had been a fishing trip instead.  He liked the casual masculinity of the deep sea fishing trips better than the touchy-feely whale trips.  The conversation was unbounded and beer was the most important food he served.  They chased marlin and shark, and usually pulled yellowtail and wahoo instead, and sometimes someone would land an enormous grouper that the captain would measure outloud against the record book to make the fisherman feel good, and they would all clap him heroically on the back, because landing a big fish was about as close to being a warrior as most men got in their lives.

A wave broke hard against the side of the boat.  The cold spray felt like a rain of tacks against his skin and he grimaced.  The door to the mess crashed opened suddenly as the boat rolled sideways.  The girl who’d lost hold of it smiled and mouthed the word oops at him apologetically as she stepped through and grappled it closed behind her.

She went to the stern and stood there watching the receding Paseo Alvaro Obregón, her knees dipping slightly as the boat climbed a ten foot wave and then crested and slid down the face at an angle.

“It’ll be calmer out in the gulf,” he told her.

She turned to him, blinking at the spray that flew into her face, but with an exuberant grin.  “No, it’s great!”  She passed a hand over her head to keep her hair from lashing her eyes. She leaned over the railing to look at the water.

Now, in the day light, he estimated she was in her early twenties.  Her t-shirt billowed and flattened against her body in the wind, and when it puffed wide he saw it read “Klaatu Barada Nikto.”  She wore new tennis shoes and socks that shone hard white in the blue air of the former storm.

Watching how the girl was enjoying herself so immensely in the pitching stern, he thought to himself that maybe it would be an easy trip.  It was only a small group this time, just the girl and her parents and another couple, elderly travel-writer types, and it was only ten days before they put into Cabo San Lucas again.

A rogue wave crashed over the side of the rails and swept the deck like an irate child clearing a game board with one swipe.  The sluice of water knocked the legs out from under the girl and she went down in the rush, sliding across the tipping deck and washing toward the railing at Javier’s feet.  Automatically, he reached down to grab for her.

The boat righted and she let him help her up, sputtering and embarrassed.  The drenched t-shirt sucked and clung to her skin.  She looked down at herself, and forced a sheepish laugh.  “I’d better go change.”

“Give me your wet clothes,” Javier told her.  “We have a dryer on board.”

After she was gone, he hoisted himself back up on the railing and leaned back to look for the harbor mouth.  There was no way that she could have actually washed overboard; the railing would have stopped her.  But Javier had seen her face as the wave had swept her towards the edge.  Buried in the froth and turmoil of the water, she had appeared to be drowning, reaching out in panic for the air she knew she’d never breathe again.

Interesting, Javier thought.  She’d never made a sound.

 

That night, with the boat secured in a tiny harbor, he found her on the top deck, her head tilted back to look at the stars.  The water lapped gently at the sides of the boat, and the sway of the sea was a lullaby.

“I brought you these,” Javier said, indicating the pair of socks in his hand.  He’d seen how she had started to go barefoot around the boat like he and the other two crew members did.  The girl didn’t start at the sound of his voice, and he liked her because of it.

“ I’m alright, thanks.”  She acknowledged the offer pleasantly, but made no move to take them from him.  He saw how she had drawn her knees up to her chest in the chair. He approached her, holding out the socks.  They looked at each other over his outstretched fist.  When the girl relented, something that had grown tight in Javier’s chest loosened again.  He backed away to lean against the railing where he could watch her as she unfolded herself and drew on the socks.

When she was done, she raised her arms above her head in a lazy yawn, arching over the back of the chair.  She gave Javier a contented little smile.  He smiled back, as though they were complicit in some secret experience.

“You’re not Mexican,” she said.

He shook his head, and reached for the cigarettes in the back pocket of his shorts.  He knew his lines from a thousand other trips, and delivered them with the world-weary ease of a once famous actor condemned to doing dinner theatre.

“My mother was Honduran and my father German.  I grew up in Biloxi.”  He paused and waited for her to say her next line.  When she didn’t, he asked, “Warmer?”

She nodded, wide-eyed and ironic, as if she were only saying yes to pacify his ego.  He sensed her amusement.  Suddenly uncomfortable, he put a cigarette in his mouth to stop himself from answering questions she hadn’t asked.

“Beautiful spot,” the girl said, nodding at the harbor where the shore was a dark smudge anchoring the sky to the earth.  Javier tucked the extinguished match back into the box from which it had come.

“Where will we go tomorrow?” she asked.

“North.  Past Santa Rosalia and up to San Felipe, then south again.”

“And the whales?”

Javier shrugged.  “Could be anywhere.  All kinds winter here.  Humpbacks, pilots, greys, sperms.  Last trip, we saw some blue whales.  They’re about three times the size of the boat.”

“What a life.”

This time he waited and blew smoke into the dark.  He’d known this kind of girl before, all exclamations marks, fidgety with life.

“The captain told my parents you were a chef for the Ritz in New York.”

This was not what he had expected, and he found himself taking a moment to readjust his reply.  “I trained in Switzerland, then worked my way across Europe, back to the States.”

“You speak French or German?”

“Both, and Spanish, some Italian.  Een-gleesh.” He let the word click over his tongue, and she smiled at his joke.  The girl had twisted on the fiberglass bench to face him but she had not made room for him to sit next to her.  Javier didn’t mind; for now, he preferred to stand so she could consider him.

“And after Europe, you thought Mexico was the place to be.”

“My wife is Mexican,” he said and watched for the expected change in her expression.

The girl nodded, pursing her lips as though it all fit together, but other than that there was no indication that she was disappointed.  She maintained eye-contact with him in a friendly, unperturbed way.  He realized uneasily that she was sure he was hitting on her.  The boat rolled slightly in the water and shifted beneath them.

There was the sound of heavy feet on the metal ladder from the main deck below. The naturalist poked his head up over the deck.  “We’re going to start the slides,” he told the girl.

“Okay,” she replied.  He disappeared again down the ladder.

Javier had used the interruption to his advantage, and when she returned her attention to him, he was sure there was nothing to be read from him now.

She rolled the socks off of her feet, held each one by the toe and snapped it fully extended again.  She folded the cuff of one over the top of the other and slid them across the bench towards Javier.

“Thank you for these,” she said, rising. “See you in the morning.”  In her bare feet, she crossed the upper deck and climbed down the ladder.

Sitting on the bench, Javier picked up the socks and laid them, still warm, over his knee where he stroked them thoughtfully, finishing his cigarette and watching the Pleides turn in the sky.

 

She kept him company in the tiny galley adjoining the main cabin that also served as a meeting room, dining room, and study for the guests.  Sometimes he’d think she was admiring him as he expertly chopped vegetables, then he would look up to see she wasn’t watching him at all, that she was retying her bathing suit straps, or examining one of the latches ship galleys had to keep things from flying loose.  He would watch her lips move minisculely as she silently sounded out the Spanish words on a bottle label to herself and when she looked up it would be he who was watching her instead.  Such moments made him feel he’d lost control somehow.

And yet the fact that she sought him out when she could have been up on the deck tanning, or watching the sea with binoculars, made him think that she was not as disinterested as she pretended.  He’d risked it finally, reaching out to sweep a honey-brown strand of hair back behind her shoulder as she’d stood next to him at the counter, letting the tips of his fingers brush the side of her neck.  She gave no physical sign of having noticed, but she asked almost immediately about his children, and so he knew he was right.  He withdrew his hand and pressed his hips hard against the counter to hide his excitement.

 

In Santa Rosalía, she volunteered to accompany him to re-provision the galley.  On the way to the market, they passed fences covered in colorful tangles of bugambilias and he told her about the copper mining history of the town and pointed out the church which Gustav Eiffel had designed.  She walked next to him quietly, listening, and did not let herself cross the invisible boundary she’d set between them.  For the first time in his thirty-seven years, he did not know whether a woman was waiting for him to act, or would not welcome it if he did.  In the market, he watched her handling the mangoes and paw-paws, and later in the sweltering day, they sat at a picnic table on the plaza and he showed her how to cut the peel from a pineapple in one continuous strip.

 

She was irreverent about their flirtation.  She brushed away any attempt he made for an opening with a gay laugh, a light-hearted roll of her brown eyes, a silly face.  She annoyed him when she refused to take him seriously.  She refused to take herself with him seriously, and this irritated him even more.

As punishment, he decided to ignore her.  She shuffled, puffy-eyed, into the dining room that morning, took a coffee mug from the table where they were laid out for the guests, filled it, then went out into the bright sunlight on the stern without even bothering to smile at him.

“Eres peor que un dolor de muelas,” he muttered, swiping at the counter with his rag as the door clicked shut behind her.

After the noon meal, he took his turn at the watch.  There wasn’t much to do since the boat was equipped with GPS and sonar equipment.  He settled into the padded captain’s chair and rested his bare feet against the large metal steering wheel.  Holding his coffee mug between his knees, he looked out at the Sea of Cortez stretching before him.

On the upper deck, he heard the naturalist call out that there were whales on the port side.  Javier inclined his head a little to look out the windows on that side and saw several fans of spray catch rainbows of sunlight as the humpbacks surfaced.  He reached over and opened one of the windows, listening for the hydraulic blow of the whales.  On the upper deck there were excited exclamations.

Javier took a sip from his mug and wondered if the girl was on the deck with the others, then stopped himself from wondering about her at all.  He shifted in the seat.  The sound of his bare skin coming away from the plastic reminded him of the sound of a wet-suit being peeled away after a dive.

In the drowsy air of the midday, the sound of the whales clearing their blowholes carried over the water.  The dusty orb of the sun beat down and turned the tips of the crenellated waves to flashing mirrors.  It played tricks on unaccustomed eyes, sometimes looking like other boats, or even the oil rigs that his father had worked on in the Gulf of Mexico.  Javier picked at the dried skin on his bottom lip and thought about his father.

He had been working for Shell Oil then, supervising the laying of a new pipeline on the Gulf floor.  Javier’s father and his crew had been out for several weeks on the miserable job.  Laying pipe in the Gulf was a dangerous and difficult job. The waters of the Gulf were so muddy and murky that everything had to be done by feeling alone. The pipes being laid were big bastards, hard to handle on the rig and tricky even once they were in the water.  The men his father supervised were old hands, burly and rough, but they knew their business, and Javier had heard his father remark more than once that he’d have given four pansy Mississippi gentlemen for one of his redneck crew in a pinch.

One of the men on the crew was a Cajun named Alsace Robespierre whose father had worked the rigs before him and whose grandfather had worked the Gulf as a fisherman.  Robespierre was a big, barrel-chested man, with an arm span wide enough to reach halfway around those pipe sections.  He was the best diver on the crew, and there were admiring stories told of how Robespierre could cradle a big pipe section, guide it by feeling into its mate, lock it all down, and unhook it from its wire, all without seeing, in less than five minutes per piece of pipe.  Mostly, though, Robespierre was a good diver because of his coolness in emergencies.  He’d once got tangled in a net being played out on his grandfather’s fishing vessel and dragged overboard.  Another man would have panicked and drowned, but Robespierre kept his head and cut himself free from the tangle with his fish-gutting knife, following the buoyed line hand over hand to the surface.

So it was a puzzle to Javier’s father and the crew when Robespierre came to the surface one day before his shift was up, hauled himself up on deck, dropped his weight belt with a powerful clunk, and retired to his bunk where he turned his face to the wall and refused to talk to anyone for twelve hours.  By the time he rose again, the hair at his temples had gone gray.  It had taken Javier’s father another day to get the story from him, and what Robespierre finally told him was that he had lifted one of the pipe sections and was moving it into place when it swam away from him.  Javier and his father had spent much of their time on that visit home speculating on what kind of fish it might have been that had drained the color from Robespierre’s head.

Feet appeared in the window in front of Javier.  The heels were smooth and uncallused and the Achilles tendon stretched up in a graceful line to the firm flesh of the calves.  He watched as she lowered herself onto his deck in front of the windscreen.  In the window, only her legs and hips could be seen; the rest of her body remained above the top edge of the screen.  The feet stayed where they landed, turning neither left nor right, but facing straight ahead, as though to purposefully block his view.  Then she dropped to a crouch, twisted, and put her suntanned face against the window with her fingers cupped around her eyes so she could see inside.  Spotting him there, she waved at him cheerfully and rose again.  He followed the leg’s progress in the windows as they walked around the side and disappeared.

Javier set his jaw and turned back to the watch.  He wondered if he was going to have grey hairs when this trip was over.

 

The boat was quiet.  Everyone had gone to their cabins except for Javier and the girl.  She sat on the edge of the deck, her feet barely touching the metal scuba grid at sea level. When the boat rocked, the soles of her feet got wet as water came through the grill.

He didn’t know if she was there as an invitation or not. He uncapped two bottles of beer and brought them out.  She seemed absorbed, but made room for him when he joined her.  He put the bottle next to her.  They drank and watched the dark water where an occasional fluorescent squid darted by, and didn’t speak for a long time.

Finally, the girl sighed.  Javier felt this was a cue.

In his bunk later, Javier realized that it was he who had done all the talking.  Each of her sighs had seemed like another question to him, and he had answered them all, telling her about the fast life he’d led in Europe, about the differences between women of different nationalities, about how his children had been the answer to all the questions he’d had.  She had looked at him doubtfully, whether because she didn’t believe him, or because she was not yet in a position to appreciate the truthfulness of his answers, he didn’t know.  When they separated to go to their cabins, the stars were in noticeably different places in the sky than when they’d started talking.  And still he had not felt able to touch her.

He grew angry with himself for revealing so much, but he fell asleep still pondering the only remark about herself that he could remember her making.

“I’m terrified of sharks.”

 

They anchored the next day at the Coronado Islands where the sea lions gathered to play.  The captain stood among the guests on the stern, trying to make himself heard over the coughs and grunts of the colony.  He cautioned everyone that they should not approach the bull who sat on the beach keeping watch over the females, and that if he should slip into the water, they should return to the boat as a precaution.

Javier watched the girl as the captain spoke, but she seemed not to be paying attention.  She stared pensively over the side where the sea lions waved flippers at them as they slid past the boat. The sight of her colorful bikini top and bare torso underneath the black neoprene of her unzipped wet suit was startling.  He himself wore only a pair of trunks, being accustomed to the sea temperatures.

One by one, the clients jumped overboard, holding their dive masks against their faces.  Miguel, the other deckhand, bent at the waist and let gravity take him into the water with barely a splash.  The captain lit a cigar and went back to his charts.

Still, the girl stood considering the sea.  Javier moved to stand next to her. She gave him a look, stricken and embarrassed at the same time, then slowly, determined, she zipped her wet suit, and stepped down onto the grill with her mask in her hand.  Javier followed her.

When the girl made no further move, Javier told her, “There are no sharks here.  It’s fine.”  Again she gave him a stricken look as if to say that if phobias were logical they wouldn’t be phobias.

Tony, the captain’s son and first mate, joined them on the platform.

“C’mon, I’ll hold your hand and we’ll jump together.  Right?”  he said to the hesitating girl.  He was jovial and confident, and though the blood had drained from her brown face, she gave him a firm nod.  She put the mask on her face and took a deep breath.  But when she reached out, it was for both of their hands.

Javier held on tightly as they stepped off, all three of them, in one tremendous splash.  They gave a few kicks of their feet and moved away from the boat and into the swirling, turning, diving sea lions, with the girl still gripping their hands.  After a few minutes, she let go, hovering on the surface and watching the animals beneath her.

Javier swam a bit, then returned to the boat.  He toweled his hair dry and looked for her floating figure in the water.  A baby sea lion was approaching her at torpedo pace. The girl jerked her face from the water with a gasp as if she thought the little creature was going to plow into her, but it dove under her with only inches to spare, and Javier laughed at this trick.  He was surprised to feel a kind of pride when this momentary fright didn’t send the girl fleeing for the safety of the boat.

He lit a cigarette, eyeing the old scarred bull on the rocky beach a hundred yards away.  The bull grunted and barked at the others, and then struck a pose with its head suddenly raised to the sky as though it thought to balance the sun on its nose.  Javier, too, turned his face to the sun and let it dry him.  He decided he would not tell the girl about the hammerhead colony that mated on the opposite side of the island.

 

Javier knew the guests would be hungry after the morning’s excitement.  When he opened the door to the galley, though, he found the girl engrossed in a book, her legs curled comfortably under her.  She glanced up.

“Have you looked outside?” he asked.

She shook her head, closed the book over her hand to mark her place, and rose to her knees to look out the window behind the couch.

“They’ve been traveling with us for the last hour.”

Three sperm whales were directly off the port side, close enough that the fine mist of their blowing could be seen.  The massive bull, easily twice the length of the boat, was flanked by two smaller females.  The dark, solid bulk of their bodies in the giving water was a shock to observe.  Like the disbelief of watching the huge metal bulk of an airliner lift off into air.

The boat plowed through the waves at a smart clip, the engine a steady rumbling more felt than heard.  The whales kept pace easily.  The easy sweep of their tails and disinclination to sound gave the impression that they were merely indulging a slow, noisy cousin.

Javier came over to stand at the window.  The bull had white scars etch into the broad dome of his head.  There was a weird disturbance in the water next to one of the females as she swam, but it was a number of minutes before the girl identified it as a piece of fishing net.

“Oh!” she exclaimed.

“Probably got hooked in her jaw as she was feeding.”

They watched the drag and pull of the net in the water.  Javier wondered if this was why the whales were traveling on the surface.  The fraying blue nylon rope popped and skittered over the surface and then was dragged under again, but the female never faltered.  Javier thought it was distressing to look at, but wouldn’t interfere with her feeding.

He checked  the girl.  Her eyes were sad, haunted.  He wanted to take her hand, to console her.  He could see the fine blond hairs on her arm.  He wanted to lick them flat.  He wanted to crush her in his arms, kiss her, make her forget, make her remember him.  He wanted to pull the round collar of her t-shirt away from her neck and suck the salt from her collarbone.  He wanted to suck the breath from her, yes, that.  Why should she be so sad about a whale?  He wanted to slide his fingers into elastic of her bathing suit and snap it against her skin.  He wanted to feel the rise of the place where her thighs became her ass.  He wanted to turn her over and over under him, to blot out the outside things so that all she could see, feel, know was him, over her, above her, protecting her.  To make her stop looking out the window with this old, desiccated sadness that made her cheeks flush and her eyes drowning pools.
He thought, now I will take this.   I will take this from her, and give her something else in return.  He started to reach for her, his hand nearly on the back of her waist, when she looked at him fully in the face.

It was not sadness at all.  It was anger that colored her cheeks.  And her eyes were sad, yes, but fortressed in tense skin and orbital bone, barbed with sharp lashes, pointed and knowing, yes, knowing whose fault this was, and why did he feel suddenly that it was his fault?  She was a girl, and he was a man, and there was a whale with a rope, and she was sad, and he was strong, and they stood facing each other across a knowing, old as the ocean was deep.  Javier let his hand fall.

The girl delivered another of her cryptic remarks.  “We are hateful.”

 

He sauteed onions and diced carrots, and caught himself calculating ways he could be alone with her before the trip was over.  He did a thing he had not done in many years; he sliced the tip of his finger by mistake, carelessly, absently.

He put the finger in his mouth and sucked at the sharp sting.  With his other hand, Javier opened a cabinet, and took down the first aid kit, rummaging through it for a gauze pad and sterile tape.  Cabo in two days.  This was a thought he would not consider now.

He moved to the sink and put his hand under the tap.  There was satisfaction at the glancing pain of the water running over the cut.  He held his finger up.  It was bleeding fast, and the blood and water mixed and ran down his wrist leaving dewy pink comet trails behind.  He put the finger back in his mouth again.

He sucked with tiny rhythmic pulses and stared out the window, thinking about the copper soil taste of his blood.  She would come in now and gasp at his injury and murmur at his carelessness.  She would lead him to one of the seats at the table, but he would lean on the table edge instead, and she would pull the chair out and sit in it so that she could clean the cut in the finger he held out for her to inspect.  She would be careful not to wrap it too tightly and he would not wince at the antiseptic she applied generously to the wound.

Javier realized he was pressing the cut hard against his teeth.  The boat was rocking more heavily, and he swayed as he took his finger from his mouth.  The cut throbbed as he held it up to the light again to inspect it.

“Ouch,” the girl said, seeing the blood, and he turned to face her, expectantly, now that she was there.   She scrutinized the hand he held stretched out toward her, the crimson beading and the wet palm glistening.  “Use lots of iodine on that.” She turned to go. “Let me know if you need help with dinner.”

 

 

They sailed past Loreto on their way south to Cabo San Lucus and because the fishing was always good in this area, Javier threw in a couple of lines, letting them trawl behind in the wake of the boat.  Eventually the girl appeared, and he saw from her face that she was bored, and wondered if she had always sought him out because she was bored.  He baited a hook, whistling through his teeth in mild disgust, not understanding why she refused do the thing that would relieve her boredom.

He handed her the fishing rod, and for once, she took something he offered her without comment.  She held it awkwardly, slightly away from her body and upright.  She wore cut-off denim shorts with frayed edges over her one-piece bathing suit, and her skin had gone paper-bag brown in the days of sun.

“Like this,” he said, and took up the other rod to show her how to let the tip lie low over the railing, get the measure of the natural drag on the line and keep the pole lightly grasped to feel a strike from a fish in your fingers.  She imitated his wide stance and easy grip, and gave him a sudden, startling grin.  Javier looked away, realizing that she was mocking what she thought was a distinctly masculine pose.

On the starboard side, the Sierra de la Giganta mountains were a spiny ridge down the center of the desert peninsula.  In the heat of the midday, the mountains gleamed like bleached bones.  Silently, Javier named the islands they sailed past:  Isla Carmen, the Danzantes, Catalina.  After the islands, he named beaches along the coast:  Santispac, El Burro, Los Cocos, El Requéson, and when he was done with that, he recited the names of the fish in the waters:  yellowtail, bonita, sailfish, dorado, cabrilla, Jack Crevalle, wahoo, roosterfish, and all the time he watched his line and the girl out of the corner of his eye and did not speak.  He tipped his face to the yellow sun and felt the warm breeze ruffle the hairs on his legs.

When he heard the mild exclamation of the girl next to him, he lowered his face again and leaned down to ram the handle of his fishing rod into its anchor at his feet.  He placed his crossed arms on the top rail and waited.

He saw the rod slip in her grasp at the same time that the tip of the pole did a sudden gymnastic curl towards the water.

“Hang on to it,” he told her, and followed the fishing line with his eye to where it disappeared into the churning wake to see what kind of fish she’d hooked.  The rod jumped again, but she clamped her hands around it this time with a small grunt of determination.  He reached over and lay his fingers lightly on the line, waiting.  When the jerk came again, he took his hand back and resumed his leaning pose against the rail.  He thought this was not a big fish on the line, though there was always the possibility that a marlin was playing with her and had not yet really struggled.

“Pull the tip of the rod up to the sky and then drop it quickly and reel in the loose line,” he directed.  She did as he told her, and he saw how she strained against the water and fish, the muscles in her arms becoming defined, her jaw clenching with the effort.  Javier edged a step closer along the railing, just in case he needed to grab for the rod or, in the case of a really big fish, for the girl, but otherwise made no move to help.

She pulled and reeled the excess fishing line, and pulled again, and eventually small beads of sweat blossomed on her forehead and he could see the glistening sheen of perspiration under her arms.  Once, as she strained to lift the tip of the rod, she gave him a pleading look, but he only leaned out over the rail to look down for the fish.

He had thought that he would stand behind her, that he would let his arms lay along the length of hers and his hands cover hers on the rod handle.  He had imagined he would loan his strength to her, that she would lean back against him, her hips tucked against his, the mirage heat locked between them.  He had thought about it, but now he was not surprised to observe himself do nothing but lean out and look for the fish.

He spotted it finally, a flashing green wahoo, a few pounds at most.  The girl was tiring.  Her hair was plastered to her forehead and she blinked away the sweat that posed on her brown eyelashes.  He left the rail to take the fishing net off the wall behind them.  He stood by her now, coaching her through the final part, and when the wahoo was lifted clear of the water, he reached out for the fishing line with one hand and scooped the struggling fish into the net with the other.

The girl stood back panting, with the handle of the rod resting on the deck now, and watched Javier lift the wahoo out of the net by the line so she could look at it.  Its scales flashed green and yellow and deep sea blue as it twisted in the sun.  Its gills flapped open and shut desperately, but she didn’t turn away from its dying convulsions. Javier had seen this happen before too, when natural squeamishness and pity was overcome by the hard calculating assessment of an enemy that one had just spent long minutes vanquishing.

“How big do you think it is?” she asked, squinting at the fish, and Javier heard in her voice that, to her, the wahoo was enormous, a hundred pounds rather than the two he estimated that he now held on the line.  He laughed out loud.

He cut the fish from the line and gutted it there on the deck while the girl wiped the sweat from her face.  He served fresh sashimi that night as an appetizer, and noted with satisfaction that she helped herself from the platter at least twice.

 

It was traditional the final night of the trip to eat dinner on shore in a little cantina that served authentic pollo mole.  The crew and guests ate this meal together, with the captain sitting at the head of the table.  Javier sat across the table from the girl.  Tonight the guests slept in a hotel, and Javier knew that the girl and her parents were sharing one room, and that whatever opportunity had existed was now past.  He felt a kind of stinging amazement.

There was music in the cantina, three strolling guitarists who performed rousing tunes that made you want to get on the table and stomp your feet, and they came to the table now and yipped and andale-d as their strumming wrists whipped back and forth manically, their fingers moving over the strings too fast to keep track of.

There was a boisterous yell from the waiters who appeared carrying bottles of tequila, and poured shots.  They slammed them first on the table, then pulled back the heads of the tourists as though they were going to slit their throats and poured the fiery alcohol into their mouths.

The girl was enjoying this show, and when a skinny, Latin-eyed boy stepped behind her, cupping a hand under her chin to raise her head gently, she didn’t resist. Javier watched the muscles in her throat as she swallowed.  The waiter patted her on the head approvingly and moved on, and the girl lowered her head and smiled brilliantly at Javier across the table.

Midway through the meal, the waiters came around a second time, and before anyone could protest, had poured a second round down their throats.  With the beer and wine, everyone at the table was starting to get tipsy. The music was whirling around them, and Javier watched the girl take in everything and thought about the wahoo dangling on the line.

Through the window, he could see the ochre Mexican moon hanging in the sky.  Inside, the girl’s fingers tapped the top of the wooden table, keeping time to the manic beat of the music. Sharp bursts of drunken laughter punctuated the songs.  The waiters came around a third time, but the girl slipped her palm over the top of her shot glass and shook her head, mouthing “no mas.”

Javier raised his finger and indicated that he would take the girl’s portion for himself.  The waiter stomped his approval, leaning over the table to pour the shot for Javier, and the girl watched with shining eyes as Javier lifted the glass to her in salute and swallowed his tequila, gritting his teeth against the burn.

 

The universe starts with a shot. A bullet at the beginning, an explosion expanding on.

The glint of a gun lies in the center of the street. A car passes over. A robin lands and perches its foot on the trigger. It aims, I think. It pecks the safety off.

My brother says: I changed the baby’s diaper yesterday and found a gun inside.

I say: Yesterday, I plunged the toilet and a gun floated up. It looked like it was dissolving against the porcelain, so I flushed again and that time it went.

 

 

My neighbor wears short skirts to show off a tattoo of a gun on her thigh. She tells me she has an entire arsenal in her house next to mine. She tells me her family has a room they call the gun room.

Don’t ever try to break in, she says.

Of course not, I say.

Not you, she says. I didn’t mean you.

Of course not, I say.

She takes a sip from her neon-yellow beer.

After I finish my yardwork, we make eye contact again.

I only have one, I tell her. I keep it in a shoebox in my closet. It’s nice to know it’s there. It is nice just to know.

 

 

My uncle calls to tell me he’s bought a silencer but has nothing to silence. My brother’s wife calls to tell me she wakes the kids every time she shoots.

I turn on some music, children’s songs where the composer has arranged gunshots as notes. A gun rotates on my record player, the needle scratching, an aggravating noise.

At the bottom of my coffee mug, a gun. At the museum, a hall of them. On TV, a commercial suggests we all drive guns instead. It says we should use four guns as tires with a fifth sticking its face out the window like a dog and a sixth lolling like a tongue.

 

 

The dryer chugs in the basement, a load of guns pounding out static.

In the park, a ring of small guns surround a larger one. Tulips circle the sculpture, piles of dirt and mulch. A crow flaps by, a gun with wings.

 

***

The president stares into the camera. Under his strange hair is his face like a gun, his eyes gun holes, his nose a cartridge or cylinder or clip, his mouth a curtain over a bullet hole in glass.

He says: Each immigrant has a gun for a forehead.

He says: In cities, everyone has guns for hands and that helps them carry even more guns.

He says: The police have guns too, and those are the ones that will save us.

When you’re hungry, he says, pop a gun in your mouth. It’ll fill you up like a balloon. It’ll play in your brain like a circus.

 

 

My neighbor’s dog barks and tears up her yard. Somehow he shimmies under the fence and tears up my yard too.

At least I don’t have to mow the lawn, I say.

The dog at her feet stares with eyes glassy as a gun. He pants like he’s just run a marathon.

Rex, my neighbor sings. Bad bad Rex.

Next time I’ll shoot him, I joke.

Her laughter carries all the way down the block. Do me the favor, she says.

She reaches over the fence and shows me her palm. The speck in it looks like dirt or dust or a bug. But it’s a gun, a really very tiny gun.

 

 

My father calls to tell me he’s coughed up a gun again, its handle spotted with blood. In the waiting room at the hospital, I whisper the word over and over, feeling the way it starts at the back of my throat, the heel of my tongue wet against the palate. Then there’s the exhale of the second letter and the curl of the last on my teeth.

 

***

I feed the guns in my friend’s aquarium too much flaky food. They eat every bite and die. Their bones are that vulnerable. The water that clear, the glass spotless.

In my basement, the tools all turn to guns. I trim the bushes with them anyway. I pull the ivy off.

The stamen of each Rhododendron is a gun. The radishes in my wife’s garden, bunches of pistols. The trees a line of rifles, semiautomatic.

 

 

A man who robbed me once said: Welcome to the gun show.

Why me? I asked.

Why not, he answered.

I fumbled for my wallet. I gave him thirty dollars.

Nothing means anything, I said.

A gun does, he said. A gun means everything.

 

 

At the flea market, a man stacks guns on his table as if he’s building a house out of children’s blocks. The pockets of his cargo shorts hang heavy with loose bullets.

He catches me looking and gives his pitch:

What if Goldilocks had one of these babies? he says. What if Dorothy, what if Cinderella, what if Little Red?

Under his hands, the guns are wet with grease.

You see what I’m saying? he asks.

I do, I reply.

Do you really see? he asks.

Yes, I say. It’s better to force sad endings on our own happy stories.

 

 

I open a book and find the words are rows of guns, all at different angles.

The book says: colonizers built their houses from guns, and the Native Americans showed them how to bury powder with their seeds. That first year they celebrated a miraculous harvest, a spread of muskets, a colorless array.

It says: when aliens come, we’ll shoot them. When they come again, we’ll shoot them again.

It says: there are 371 million guns in the United States and on average 268 Americans are shot each day.

It says: If a bullet refuses to fire, simply throw your gun like an awkward rock. Throw it like our ancestors once did, the very first weapons.

 

 

In the hotel drawer, I find a gun placed by the Gideons.

Inside a peapod, three round guns.

The heart of an artichoke, a gun. The pit of an avocado.

Out of an egg slips the yolk of a gun.

At the intersection of Gun Road and Pistol Lane, a fender bender. A fire. The mysterious smell of potato.

A day later, at the same corner, a duel. Two guns argue on the sidewalk. One says more, and one says less. One says magic, and the other says magic. One says pain, and the other says pain. One says lion, and the other says lion. One says fear. The other says fear.

 

 

My cousin writes to tell me he and his wife have decided to raise a gun like a child.

In a box of cereal, my sister finds a special prize. The toy in my niece’s Happy Meal, a plastic gun. The giveaway at a Mets’ game. The raffle at a charity auction.

A flag unfurls, a picture of a gun on it. The rabbits all have guns for ears. The snakes guns for fangs and tongues. The rats guns for tails and feet.

I settle onto my couch, alone, though I know my neighbors are close, in their houses, their televisions blazing. Outside, men walk up and down the streets and up and down the streets again. Outside, men have nowhere to go. And they have trench coats and pockets. And they have guns in them. Probably.

 

 

My neighbor tells me, her family calls Monday Gunday. They call Sunday Gunday too.

She describes how the family tradition is to take all their guns and arrange them in patterns on the furniture and walls. They oh and ah, and they say, that’s really nice, that’s really nice. They eat dinner with the guns scattered about.

Does it make you safe? I ask.

It makes us happy, she says.

She takes my hand and leads me up the stairs and into her cluttered house. We climb another flight and walk to the end of the hall.

There they are, on racks, behind glass.

She says: This is a good place.

Yes, I say.

She says: You don’t have be scared here. Not anymore.

But I am, I say. I am.