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Prism international 30:4 / Summer 1992
Prism international
87 Pages
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nn. \W international SUMMER 1992 Contemporary writing from Canada and around the world $4.50 (plus G.S.T.) J\7U international JVAJ international Editor Rodger Cove Executive Editor Patricia Gabin Fiction Editor Francie Greenslade Poetry Editor Vivian Marple Advisory Editor Keith Maillard Associate Editor Murray Logan Editorial Board Terry Armstrong Rita Davies Elizabeth Drumwright James Farenholtz Zsuzsi Gartner Patricia Jones Shelley MacDonald Fran Muir Shannon Stewart Laurel Wade PRISM international, a magazine of contemporary writing, is published four times per year by the Department of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z1. Microfilm editions are available from University Microfilms Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan, and reprints from the Kraus Reprint Corporation, New York, N.Y. Contents Copyright © 1992 PRISM international for the authors. Cover art by Van Newcomb One-year individual subscriptions $16.00, two-year subscriptions $24.00, library and institution subscriptions $22.00, two-year subscriptions $36.00, sample copy $5.00. Canadians add 7% G.S.T. All manuscripts should be sent to the Editors at the above address. Manuscripts must be accompanied by a self-addressed envelope with Canadian stamps or International Reply Coupons. Manuscripts with insufficient postage will be held for six months and then discarded. The Advisory Editor is not responsible for individual selections, but for the magazine's overall mandate including continuity, quality, and budgetary obligations. Payment to contributors is temporarily $20.00 per page plus a one-year subscription. PRISM international purchases First North American Serial Rights only. Our gratitude to the Canada Council, Dean Patricia Marchak, and the Dean of Arts' Office at the University of British Columbia. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Government of British Columbia, through the Ministry of Tourism and Ministry Responsible for Culture. Second Class Mail Registration No. 5496. July 1992 Contents Vol. 30, No. 4 Summer, 1992 Fiction Karen Connelly John Isaacs Christian Petersen Gayla Reid Mary Walters Riskin Jerry Saviano A Bowl of Yellow Flowers Stains the Canvas 31 Georgie's Habit 73 Heart Red Monaco 58 Sister Doyle's Men 7 The Sign 40 Toothpaste and Monkey 25 Poetry Sean Brendan Brown Richard Exner translated by William Cross Richard Harrison C.E. Hull Catherine Hunter Joan Lennon Oscar Martens Alison Touster-Reed Alice Tepexcuintle Mouse and Boa 24 Passion 47 August 6, 1981 49 At The Hockey Hall of Fame I saw 71 An African Hockey Story 72 in-drought 53 out of town by 7 o'clock 56 my skeleton visits the casino 51 afterlife (3 52 Eve Aging 21 Warning to Motorists 22 Brazil 34 Taxidermy 23 toxic WHAT 68 So nobody told you 69 Van Newcomb Cover Art Desert Isle #6 (Water colour) Contributors 86 PRISM international wishes to congratulate Eden Robinson, who has been nominated for the $10,000 Journey Prize for her story "Traplines," which first appeared in PRISM international, Vol. 30, No. 1 Sister Doyle's Men Gayla Reid In this photograph my mother is on horseback. Behind her, there is a row of hills. Gums are tossing in the wind. (They look like gums, anyway.) The horse has its head turned sharply. I suspect she is holding the reins too tightly. This is, as my mother's handwriting on the back of the picture says, "somewhere in New Guinea." At one corner of the photograph you can see the shadow of the person who is holding the camera. You can make out the shape of the hat. It's a slouch hat, pinned up on one side. "Who's that?" I ask my mother, pointing to the shadow. There is a slight pause. Then she says, "One of the men." My mother is wearing trousers and a shirt. It is wartime. My mother grew up in Sydney's eastern suburbs. "Where on earth did you learn to ride?" I ask her. "You learned," she says. "You learned fast. All sorts of things." It is a black-and-white photo, of course, but the contrast is sharp. "The hills look very green," I say. My mothers looks at the photo again. "I was green all right," she says. She laughs. "You can say that again. I'd only been there three-and-a-half months when that was taken." I wondered why she mentioned the months, and so precisely. My mother was a sergeant in the AAMWS, the women's wing of the Australian Army Medical Service. My father was in the Seventh Division. My father was a Rat at Tobruk. When Australia's Prime Minister Curtin brought the Seventh home my father was promptly sent to New Guinea, where he was involved in the fighting around Lae. My father told no war stories, kept no war souvenirs. (Unless, as my brother says, you want to count Mum.) But my mother spoke of the war often, which, given her work, was not surprising. "He brought them home," she'd say, of Curtin. "He was determined that Australia would not go. He gave those Poms what for, he did." When I was a child I thought everybody knew about the Seventh, how the Prime Minister brought them home. My mother met my father in Moresby. They got married right away. Six months later, I was born. As adolescents, my brother and I consider this story. I am horrified. (What if the nuns find out?) My brother, on the other hand, is much impressed. "The sly old goat" he says. "You've got to give it to him." "What was she like when you first met?" I ask my father. He says the usual things: good looker, always one for a laugh. "No," I say, "what was she like, really?" I should know better. "Oh, things were at sixes and sevenses, in those days," my father says. My father is one of those old-style Australians who guards his personal life with a wildly unwarranted tenacity. My father gives nothing away. My mother's secrets are safe with him. Why did she choose my father? My brother and I decided it was because he had come through unscathed. Both in the Middle East and in New Guinea my father was what he calls one lucky bastard. My mother knew she was going to need one undamaged man in her life. For somewhere in the green hills of New Guinea, my mother became acquainted with death. Despite her seamless, unspoiled husband, despite the clamour of her two children, she did not return to the house of the living, not completely. My mother was Sister Doyle. Sister Doyle was in charge of the ward in Rhodes Repat. where they kept the men who had been wounded in the war and who would never recover. Those men, still breathing but in essential ways already dead, were her life. For a child in my mother's house, certain appearances on that ward are mandatory. There is the Christmas party, held in mid-December. We sing away in a manger, no crib for a bed. We pass out gifts: magazines, books, lollies, cigarettes. These last for those who still have lips with which to suck, to smoke. There is the afternoon of Christmas Day itself. We go from bed to bed with trays of fruitcake, with glasses of port and Scotch with straws in them. We take our presents to show the men. We are not the only children summoned to Sister Doyle's ward. Her men are to have music, the sounds of children, singing. The Catholic kids sing "God Bless Our Lovely Morning Land." The state school kids sing "Old King Cole" and (in possibly dubious taste) "I Am a Happy Wanderer." The choirs do not go right into the ward, as we do. They stand at the milder end. If they are lucky they do not even notice the odd small lumps further down the ward. They do not see the beds at the far end. These beds have mysterious hoops in places where faces usually are. Adults come, too, to entertain. On New Year's Eve the local pipe band comes to pipe out the old and in the new. They march up and down the ward, these pipers. But they are grown up. They know when and where not to look. The Scout Master comes to our house with money from the bottle drive. "That will go towards a very fine Easter hamper, and I know you know how much it means to the men," my mother tells him, appreciative. He blushes. They all come—the Rotary blokes, the Lions, the Masons, the St. Vincent de Paul—my mother makes no sectarian distinctions. This is the early Fifties and they wear the little Returned Services League badges in their lapels. They are, all of them, returned men. I learned that phrase naturally, without thinking. Later it seemed to typify the to-hell-and-back theme—which had great currency at that time. For the men on the ward, who did not really return, it seemed especially fraught. When my mother sits with the returned men in the lounge room, they tell war stories. These stories are exceptionally vague, innocent, featureless. Here's one: There was this anti-aircraft gunner in Darwin. Name of Bluey. Anyhow, Bluey, he had this sulphur-crested cockatoo. When the air-raid siren went, the cocky said: "Time to get under the sink, Blue." I did not understand why they found this amusing. But how they laughed. Conversation grows a little more interesting when there are other nurses there. They talk about the tents they used as operating theatres. "Oh, the mud," my mother says. "Oh, the stench," the other nurses say, happily. If I were asked to construct a portrait of somebody in my mother's position at that time, I would certainly make her a monarchist, a believer in religion, and a conservative in politics. But my mother was, curiously, none of these things. She saw religion as having its uses, however. She favoured Anglican funerals. "They give the best send-off," she said. "The flowers of the field." Her interest in politics cut off at 1945. She was not in any sense a cold- war warrior and in that embodiment of Fifties stodge, Australia's Prime Minister Menzies, took no interest one way or another. The Fifties, for my mother, meant Korea. And Korea meant two new men on the ward. My mother worried they wouldn't fit in. They were younger. As a young adult I would say that my mother was, at heart, the universal soldier. (And she really was to blame.) There was this man on the ward, Teddy. He'd been in my father's unit. Came from the bush, out Walgett way. Used to ride in all the shows before the war, my father said. A crack shot, too, was Teddy. That was how my father met my mother—Stan had gone to the hospital in Moresby, looking for his mate Teddy. Teddy could not move. His spine was a write-off. He couldn't speak, either. He could move his eyes from side to side and that was about it. Teddy got totally messed up in New Guinea. Over the years Teddy improved, gradually, until he could manage to talk a little. To the outside it was just gobble-gobble, but Sister Doyle could decipher every word. This is what Teddy said: "I'm in this and I'm doing the best I can." When my mother liked someone, when she considered them to be her friend, she'd tell them about Teddy. When she repeated what Teddy said, she never used the third person. She always adopted the first person: "I'm in this and I'm doing the best I can." "How's Teddy?" my father would ask my mother. "He's a battler, is Teddy," my mother would say. And her voice would be full of something heavy, like love. I think now of how Stan met her when he went to Moresby. She walked down the corridor towards him, listening to the floorboards creak, her stomach in a knot. (Outside, through the louvres, the green hills.) He figured it out soon enough, he realized how things stood with her. And his face barely moved a muscle. That would have reassured my mother, she would have decided then. 10 On Christmas Day, when I am eight, this happens: We are in the ward, and I am sitting at a window. It is a quarter to five, the end of the afternoon. Earlier, we were all here, my father and brother as well. My brother got a cocker spaniel puppy for Christmas, named Queenie—this is the Coronation year. A boy should have a dog, my mother says. Queenie was brought in to show the men. Now my father has taken Queenie and my brother home. My father and my brother are already besotted with Queenie. They take turns carrying her with excited tenderness. The men, those who could reach out, felt Queenie's soft round head, stroked her ears. Those who could see looked into her brown eyes. Queenie was a big success. Around afternoon-tea time there was a full-blown high summer thunderstorm. (My mother hurried to the men who whimpered.) Then the furious rain. Now, it is over and the ward is filled with a peculiar golden light. My mother has thrown open the windows and the smell of rain rinsing through the hot earth, the smell of fallen gum leaves fragrantly rotting, fills the room. My mother is sitting on a chair between two of the beds, and everything is calm. She has brought her men through the fracturing demands of Christmas Day, with its forced cheer. She has given them her children, and Queenie. She has stood by them in the thunderstorm, and now she has for them this coolness, this relief. I look at my mother and with a piercing clarity, I see how she is resolute and obsessed. And I am her daughter. As she is, so I will become. I am suffused with this fact; I am magnified—not by joy but by a terrible certitude. And I am really very frightened. I look away from my mother. I inspect my presents from the other nurses. My favourite is a wooden pencil box. It has two stories. You swing out part of the top layer and there is a secret second layer, beneath. I slide my finger into the farthest recesses of the pencil box, in that second layer, beneath the place for the rubber. I plan what I will put there. It is so quiet I can hear the clock ticking at the end of the ward, near the entrance. Instead of numbers it has the words, Lest We Forget. The small hand is on the E, the big hand has just passed the G. My mother was always so busy that it took me a long time to realize what her main burden was: the slow grinding of time, its absolute refusal to pass. Sister Doyle knows all their birthdays. A good six weeks before the 11 birthday of Shorty or Curly or Jacko (they keep their boyish wartime nicknames) my mother writes to his family. In recalcitrant cases, she telephones. Trunks please, she asks, her voice serious. I wish to place a trunk call. As you know, she says, when the call goes through, Shorty/Curly/ Jacko has his birthday coming up. Can we be expecting a parcel? As you know, he's quite fond of Capstans/Winning Post Chocolates/Pix or Post. And it has been some time, let me see, three years, hasn't it? I'd just like to let you know how very welcome you'd be, if it were possible. At all possible. The parcels arrive—from Dubbo, from Grafton, from Condobolin— drawn by the strength of my mother's will. Sometimes the people come, too. Apart from the holidays, Christmas, New Year, Easter, there is—of course—the big day itself, the one day of the year: Anzac Day. My mother knows which division each of her men was in. She has the ward decorated with the appropriate emblems and colours and mascots. Radios are laid on, and, in later years, television sets. Nobody is to miss out on the dawn service and the march In the afternoon, there is rum and Bonox. So they inch forward, Sister Doyle's men. At the end of the road, there is the funeral. And if only a handful of inattentive relatives can be rounded up (thank God that's over), there is the inexpensive solemnity of the last post. And there is, from the priest or minister, these words: They gave their lives. For that public gift they received a praise which never ages and a tomb most glorious—not so much the tomb in which they lie, but that in which their fame survives, to be remembered forever, when occasion comes for word or deed. I'm not sure where that comes from. It's something I absorbed from my mother, much as other daughters learn to sew a frock or cook a cake. My mother is never completely off duty. We are walking down to Central to catch the train. My mother points out to us—my brother and me— the plaque on the overpass at the Chambers Street end: Past this point marched THE MEN WHO WENT. In Martin Place, at the cenotaph, we are not permitted to giggle and fool around. If there are wreaths—and there often are—we are to read them quietly, and with respect. At school I learn how the Spartans put their children out to die. That reminds me of my mother. If we disgraced her on the ward, I tell my brother, she would put us out to die. She would be capable of it. 12 I am making my mother seem formidable. She was that, indeed. But in many ways she was a permissive parent. My brother and I are allowed to have comics, and she never checks to see if we are doing our homework. A lot of the time she isn't there. She's at work. It is my father who is nominally in charge. My father, the unscathed survivor, came home from the war and got a job as a clerk at the lotteries office. At five sharp he takes the train home and retreats to his shed. In the shed he keeps all his carpentry tools, his workbench and his radio. He also has two old lounge chairs (it's a good sized shed). In one of these chairs he sits and smokes his pipe. The other one is for Queenie, and us kids when we come to watch. My father builds things. In the Fifties my father undertakes two projects that see him through the decade. First, he puts a second story on the house. This is a posh, unusual thing to do in the ordinary Sydney suburb of West Ryde. Then he builds a whole bunch of built-in furniture. Built-in furniture, in highly lacquered wood, is the very latest thing. My brother and I each acquire rooms of our own on the top floor, with windows that look out on the ironbark. In my bedroom my father builds a dressing table that has a bookcase in one side. I can put my hand out and select a book without even getting out of bed. In the kitchen he constructs a breakfast nook: a round pink Laminex table, with a high banquette, just like in a restaurant. But his tour deforce is in the lounge room. There a combined china cabinet-sideboard- radiogram dominates one wall, a triumph in blond wood. It is an extraordinary home. It could look like something out of House and Gardens, only mother doesn't complete the effect. In my bedroom I have some second-hand curtains she picked up at the hospital fete. My brother's friends love the house. Not for its furniture, but because it is always in turmoil. Constantly, one room or another is uninhabitable, owing to the construction work. My mother is not in the least put out by this. Quite the contrary. "We'll just have to make do," she declares, and her voice is girlish and gay. The kitchen is an uproar and my brother's friends are staying to tea. My mother takes the toaster into the lounge room. We have toast and sardines and listen to Pick-a-Box. "The money or the box?" asks Jack Davey. "The bbox, the box," the boys shout, their eyes shining, eager for whatever life will throw at them. They are always around, the visiting boys. There is the marvellous chaos and what's more the place is reliably provisioned. My mother goes 13 to cakeshops and buys lamingtons, sponges, biscuits. This is a shady thing to do, in the Fifties—store-bought cakes are looked down upon. "I simply don't have time," my mother says, firmly. My brother's friends help themselves to the rest of the lamingtons and watch my father working. When they've eaten those they can get some Minties from the shed. My father keeps boxes of Minties down there. Minties have cartoons on the side of the box: a fisherman has just reeled in a pair of ladies' corsets. I don't get in the boys' way (they're just little kids, really, so boring). I'm upstairs, staring out at the ironbark. I'm reading books about girls' schools with no nuns. I'm looking in the women's magazines, examining the Meds ads. No belts, no pads, no pins. No odour. My father, Stan Doyle, had been brought up in a Catholic orphanage. He had left school after sixth class and had learned, as my mother put it, "to turn his hand to anything." Had we lived in the bush, Stan would have turned his hand to sheep and cattle. In the desert, he'd have known exactly where to find water. That a man of manifold skills was putting in his days at the lotteries office was never remarked upon. After the orphanage, Stan was caught up in the depression, and after the depression he went to the war. Yet Stan is a calm man, sweet and peaceable. A man to turn to in time of crisis. My mother had to sign papers to say she'd have the kids brought up Catholic. And sign she did. Off I went to the nuns. When it comes time for my brother to go to school, my mother puts her foot down. He could go for religious instruction. He could make his first communion and all that baloney. But he was to attend the state school and get a real education. "The nuns are good enough for girls but they won't do for boys," my mother says. Stan doesn't argue. He isn't an arguing man. But it makes him nervous, I can tell. Without ever putting it in words, Stan lets me know precisely what he thinks of nuns and priests: a dangerous, slightly looney lot, but powerful. Best to keep on their good side. Hard lessons, from his own childhood. At Sunday mass, my father sidles in just before the end of the sermon and sits, ill at ease, near the door—poised for easy and early escape. He looks just like one of those dumb kids at the back of the classroom. 14 I am the only one in my class who comes from a "mixed marriage." The nuns know. Whose family isn't saying the daily rosary? I have to put up my hand. On the way home from school we exchange insults with the state school kids. Catholics, Catholics eat snails and frogs. We reply with the more esoteric: Proddies, Proddies fall off logs. In this way I learn that one side needs the other, even for the completion of a rhyme. Sometimes in these roaming bands of state school kids I see my brother's friends. My brother himself. I wait for the question: "Isn't that your brother?" We are driving over to my aunt's house. We are in the Holden. As we approach the house we can see all the cars, already lined up. "The football team's out in force," says my mother, signalling disapproval. Her sister's husband comes from a vast family. They dominate these gatherings with a beery, self-congratulatory clannishness. My aunt, unlike my mother, leads an ordinary life. She stays home. She makes elaborate desserts: rice pudding and jelly layered in tall clear glasses. I wish my mother would learn to do things like that. "How's the house going?" my aunt asks my father. He is a fool, her tone proclaims, to squander all that upon my mother, who has not eyes with which to see. "Stan's got a real showplace," my aunt tells one of the football team. "It could be a real showplace, you know," she says to my mother. (If only you were prepared to pull your weight.) "Humm," says my mother, bored. "What a delicious dessert. I don't know how you do it. Really I don't." But when we drive home my mother is in a good mood. The visit to the relatives is behind her, one more time. "That wasn't too bad," she says. "Wasn't too bad, Stan, was it?" She's stuck it out and now it's over. She can get on with things. She can get back to the ward. I look out the window of the Holden and see our ridiculous, extravagant house poking up above all the others. I know we are not a normal family. We are weird. 15 My father, who had no childhood family, isn't much of a patriarch. You could say he never developed the knack. But we learn from him, my brother and I. We sit in the old lounge chair in the shed, chewing on Minties and playing with Queenie, and, without even know what we are doing, find out how to use a padsaw, a mitre block. With my father, I have no quarrel. It's a different story when it comes to my mother. There are scenes. In this particular scene we are fighting, my mother and me. We are shouting at each other, we are choking out sobs and insults. We are in a uproar. Just as Anzac Day is a big day on the ward, it is a big day in our family life. Each year, my father gets out his medals and goes to the march. Each year, my brother and I go with him, to watch and wave and pick him out and feel important. At the end of the march, a photographer takes our picture: my father, my brother and me, standing together in Martin Place. In early years, there were always street photographers on hand. In later years my father takes his own camera and asks one of his mates "to do the honours." When the picture is developed, it stands on the mantleshelf in the lounge room, where it stays until the new one takes its place. In this way (I wrote in my diary) our lives are measured out in Anzac Days (three exclamation marks). This year I'm refusing to go. I've been to see the play, The One Day of the Year. This play—which was, I am convinced, written especially with me in mind—portrays a young man exposing our celebrations, our observances. Anzac Day turns out to be so much drunken jingoism. I came out of the Palace Theatre and vomited into the rubbish bin at Town Hall station. So I won't go to the march, and what's more... "This place is a madhouse," I tell my mother. "You've been ramming it down our throats all our lives. It's crazy. It's sick. I have a life to get on with, in case you haven't noticed." "The war happened," my mother says, sharply. "You could at least stop glorifying the bloody thing," I return. "I do not," she declares, offended to her soul, "I do not glorify anything." "You do, you do," I reply, going for the upper registers. "You do, you rub our noses in it." "I do not glorify anything," she repeats (I have really scored, there). 16 "Except courage, courage in the face of pain and loss and despair." This is as close as I ever come to hearing my mother's apologia for her work. I flee to the shed, to enlist my father's support. "You have to stop her," I inform him. "Show her." He is quiet and mild and he exasperates the hell out of me. "Show her what?" he asks, refusing to be drawn in. "You're both hopeless," I shout. "The pair of you." About this time my mother has a big row with my brother, too. About Teddy. My brother and I joke about Teddy, but most secretly. It is utter blasphemy. My brother is keen on gymnastics, and practises every evening. He stands on his head and he says, for our mutual pleasure: "I'm in this and I'm doing the best I can." We laugh and he tries his best to keep from toppling over. My mother catches him at it. She chases him through the house, trying to grab him and hit him. He speeds out on to the road and my mother—to my surprise—does not pursue him. Instead she sits down in the breakfast nook and begins to cry, in a hoarse, windy kind of way. "You kids don't care about anyone except yourselves, do you," she says. In her voice I hear the beginning of an appeal. I leave the room in a hurry. Eventually my brother creeps back into the house. For about three weeks my mother treats him as if he doesn't exist. My brother and I hold whispered, mutinous meetings in my room. We brim with righteous solidarity. "She should never have taken us to the ward when we were just little kids," I say. "Doesn't she realize we were scared.}" "Dad's just as bad," my brother says. "He just lets her rip," I agree. Even as we speak we can hear him. He is hammering away on the stairs, replacing a baluster. One day my mother comes home early from work. This is a shocking thing, without precedent. I'm at home because it's a big feast day—the Feast of the Assumption—and the nuns have given us the day off. The nuns are always giving us the day off, or so my brother says. It's a wonder you ever learn anything, he says. I go downstairs to find out what's going on. Is she sick? She takes her hat off and puts it on the kitchen table. 17 "Teddy's gone," she says. "Teddy. He begged for it," she says. "For ages and ages. Nothing else. Just that. After all these years. I had to give him what he wanted, you know. I had to." Her voice sounds automatic. (Does she know who she's speaking to? Does she even know she's speaking?) She takes a chair and goes outside to the back patio that my father built a few years ago. She's still got her overcoat on. It is the kind of grey, still day you get once or twice in Sydney during August. A low day. She's still there at a quarter to six when my father gets home. He takes her a rug and a cup of tea. She pushes away the rug and ignores the tea. She sits out there in the dark. My father goes out again, this time to persuade her to come in. I can see him talking to her and I can see her not even turning her head. He comes back in and he's got a funny kind of embarrassed look on his face, as if he's been caught doing something foolish. "Let's have beans on toast, eh?" he says. I make the toast, my brother puts the jug on. My father lights the gas and gets the beans going. We huddle together in the breakfast nook, the three of us, and Queenie. As last she does come in. My brother and I are in my room. We are supposed to be asleep by this time. She goes up the stairs and into their bedroom. My brother and I creep along the hallway and listen for voices. Nothing. What did he say to her? What did she, finally, say to him? It is the late Sixties and my mother has cancer. She is in Rhodes Re- pat. , so she is, in her own way, at home. They are fooling about trying to decide which parts of her to cut out. "I've told them to get on with it," my mother says. "Chop, chop." My mother has a nurse's cheery crudity about such things. Now, of all times, she isn't going to let her men down. She calls for a wheelchair. "They've seen tons of people in their dressing gowns," she says. "Might as well see me." Off she goes to the ward. I wonder if it distresses the men, to have her growing thinner and more determined by the day. By this time there is another war, about which I have come to hold passionate views. (It has given me a glimpse of what my life might be, what I might become.) My days and nights are full of organizing against the war. Our country's involvement in this war has to end, the war itself has to end. So many 18 other things have to change, and fundamentally. There is everything to be done. I go about in a state of euphoric fatigue. These visits to the hospital are really very difficult to fit in. It takes two bus rides and a change of trains just to get here. And I have vital work to do. In my mother's presence I scrupulously avoid all mention of the war. She's the one who brings it up. "I was reading in the Herald," she says, "they can bring boys home now that they wouldn't have been able to before." She says this in a puzzled voice. "They can get them out so quickly, and the know-how is so much better." How can the Vietnam boys (the MEN WHO WENT) be worse off than the men on the ward and still be alive? She looks at me—to me—for an answer. My brother has been conscripted, but has disappeared into Western Australia instead. Wisely, he does not write. Officials knock on the door. Plainclothes men, and, on one occasion, the military police. They come to the house. They come to my flat in Bondi. With my father they are polite. With me, contemptuous, hostile. No, he's not here. No, I'm not expecting him. No, I don't know where he is. No, no, no. When my mother is dying, when she is rambling, out of it on morphine, and there is no more question of her ever getting up and going anywhere, she calls out their names: Curly, Joey, Teddy, Blue, Jacko, Stan, Teddy, Shorty, Rusty, Teddy. With the endless need of the child, I listen for my name, and for my brother's. And when she does not call them, I am affronted. My father is left alone in the big empty house. These days Stan lives with my brother. When I go back to New South Wales, I stay with them. My brother, who runs an orchard on the Murrumbidgee, has an old- fashioned home with big verandahs. At the weekends the place is often filled with friends (the visiting boys). At the back of the house Stan built what he calls a grandpa flat. There's a small workshop down there. Although he is now in his eighties, he is making for my brother a desk out of stunning dark Tasmanian sassafras. "Lovely, lovely," my brother says, stroking the wood with his hand and looking in his father's face. 19 "It'll see me out," Stan says, of the grandpa flat. My brother writes to me, he keeps me up-to-date. We were sorting through some old snaps the other day—my brother wrote—and we came across a really early one of Mum—in her nurse's uniform, on what looked like a troopship. Both arms around some strange young man, a soldier. And smiling. Smiling to beat the band. "Where did that one come from?" my brother asks Stan, "I don't remember ever seeing that one before." "Oh, that'd be Teddy's," Stan says, easily. "Used to carry it everywhere with him." "Teddy's?" says my brother. "Teddy's," Stan says. "Used to carry it everywhere with him?" my brother says. "That'd be right, I reckon," Stan says slowly, evasive now. "Before. Before he. You know. Got messed up." Then—my brother wrote—the old coot gets up and pours himself a cup of tea. Stares off into the middle distance, as if bored. When I come home they drive up to Sydney to meet me: Stan, my brother and his wife. We go to visit my mother's grave. She has a small bronze plaque. The rising sun of the Australian Infantry Forces is in the top right-hand corner. I put my arm through Stan's. I look over at my brother. Stan looks down at the grave, at Sister Doyle's name. I don't say anything. Stan lifts his bony face, sniffing the air. He turns to my brother. He says: "When I get completely buggered I'll go down the back paddock and you can shoot me." "Oh Dad," says my brother's wife. "You mustn't talk like that, not when we love you so. It isn't right." 20 Joan Lennon two poems Eve, Aging He is gone again to tinker near Eden handling the latches hoping for myrrh No need not to trust him. Eden's young as ever, sure but Adam isn't everything he once was and they keep a careful watch upon the gate. When we were young as anybody could be Eden wasn't good enough for him. Oh, he wanted me then, badly more than other things that burgeon. But now Adam is gone to tinker round Eden knocking at the gateway dreaming of dew 21 Warning to Motorists Focusing on the moth inside her windscreen she failed to notice the car in front had stopped. The moth was reborn a poet within whose opus the words "in car" and "incarnadine" appeared with a peculiar frequency. By some celestial quirk the woman became a grain of sand in a well-known and prosperous quarry. She was later transmogrified into a replacement windscreen. In neither instance did the events raise comment. 22 Alison Touster-Reed Taxidermy He stopped by the taxidermist's, Lee New's, to stuff the wings and the body. The mists of the eyes and the bluegrey etchings in the beak—these he would save for himself. He might build a cave for the bird, or stand him on a board, or nail him to the tree that stood windward from his house. Mr. New stopped in his stuffing some old cropped red-bellied head and said, "Now, see here. I don't have the time to take on this one. He is ordinary, eye to ear. He has no special markings on either beak or tail. I cannot take the time." He drew the bird under his shoulder like a package, took the dime ferry crossing, walked two miles, feeling colder wind as he neared home. Children laughed at the beak sticking out his back and at the crazy hem of his pants and at the feathers falling out. Finally, he got home and hurried to his bed. He took the bird and laid him gently down, got a cup of tea, a bowl of brown rice, a patchwork quilt, and a pillow for his head. 23 Sean Brendan Brown Mouse And Boa She is angled smoothness the colour of wallets twisting past her pool of water and driftwood ornamentations; She is pale brown isolation marked with deadly isosceles fascinating, repulsive, falling on the mouse at 3 o'clock- its white delicate ankles and sparrow feet convulsing past her rippled hinges: the mouse a mass the ribs move from behind the boa's neck to her midsection, her eyes lidded, sleepy, tongue flecking aquarium glass as my son stares with livid green disbelief. 24 Toothpaste and Monkey Jerry Saviano You thought of a dream while driving on 1-85. A dream you started making up after passing Thomasville, a dream where you walked past your father and forgot about the Master Sergeant's uniform he had on, or his whistle from the back porch or the Jim Beam at the dinner table. A dream more about forgetting than anything else. Now you are at your father's condominium. When you knocked on the door, from behind it he yelled loud enough to almost hear him forever. You definitely have your father and no other. Once inside, he explains to you that he's been working on the porch: you see he's wearing shorts, this is a little unusual. You stare at your father's legs. They strike you as pale and you think almost ghost colored. Old man legs. You may imagine the day when you'll notice that yours will resemble this. And then you think about other things, like how he buys toothpaste now, four and five tubes at a time. How his bathroom cabinets are full: six deodorants, four cans of shaving cream, six toothbrushes rest in the rack on the wall. In the shower, you think about having to choose between four bottles of the same shampoo. He lives alone. You remember that you confronted him once. You said to him that he has enough hygiene products to last both your lives. "You know me," he replied. "I buy things." So you sit in a lawnchair on the back porch of your father's condominium. You take your fingers and dig at the webbing coming unglued from the aluminum. The man who lived here before him decorated it in some sort of aquatic motif, with little bridges, steps, and portable windows. A white and blue life preserver hangs on one wall. Your father unfolds the chair leaning against the wall and sits beside you. "Look," he says, pointing to one of his bird feeders. You see that a bird has landed on the left bucket and is bending its head inside. He's taken two cheap plastic buckets, hung them and now fills them with bird seed. Your sister bought him what she called an art-deco bird cage, and it hangs between the other two. 25 "What is that? A finch or jay? I've been meaning to bring my book out here," he says. He straightens his hair and puts his cap back on. He closes his eyes and crosses his legs at the feet. You put your feet on the end of the porch. Some of the wood has rotted and falls on the concrete. For a few seconds, you stare at the wood, then remember how you and your two brothers used to plan to kill him. It was your oldest brother who talked the most about doing away with him. A few times at night in the room you shared, all of you discussed the possibilities. Your two older brothers suggested different methods, usually plastic explosives or radiation. Sometimes they argued whose plan was best. You were at a disadvantage, being the youngest and stuck on hand grenades and bazookas. Your inputs were usually ignored, but you scored a point once when you suggested surprising him during Sunday yardwork, and crushing his skull with the shovel. Most of the time you were told to shut up. Then you wonder how the haircuts fit into this. The Saturday mornings in the concrete back driveway, behind the egg-coloured split level bought with the Veteran's loan. He would start with your older brother. He would wrap the plastic apron around the shoulders, then fasten the snap that dug into the back of the neck. He used an electric razor he kept in a shoe box at the top of his closet. You remember how it buzzed, felt warm pressed against the head. How the hair felt, falling on your face and neck. He gave you crew cuts. While waiting your turn, you would watch your neighbours, the Mat- toxes. The two Mattox boys stood at the mesh fence that separated your back-yards, giggling and mimicking the expressions on your faces. "Ignore them," your mother would say. There are a few photographs left today. Your father is smiling and standing over you, holding the razor over either you or your brother's head. The three of you are surrounded by plastic and scowling. Your ears stand out like suitcase handles from the sides of your square heads. One of these pictures your father has framed and hanging upstairs in the guest bedroom of his condominium. One morning you watched him walk slowly up the asphalt of your street, towards the neighbour's house where you were visiting. You remember listing the possible offences you might have committed. Did you leave the tools out again after he warned you? When he reached the neighbour's fence you saw his face, pale like some National Geographic war mask. You ran to him. When you reached him, he pointed his finger. "Listen," he said. "I just cut your brother's hair. And I messed up. You 26 laugh, I swear to God I'm going to cut yours the same way. Do you understand. " When you got back, your oldest brother was almost bald, except for a band of fuzz snaking up from the sides of his skull. His eyes were swollen. He was walking around the back yard almost in a daze. And your mother sat in the reclining lawn chair glaring at your father. You see that right now he's asleep, whistling through his nose. His cat crawls out from under the desk and runs into the tool closet. You watch it eat the dry food from its bowl and you think about travelling to Warner Robbins, Georgia, where the Air Force stationed him. On the way, you came upon a complex of trailers and loud billboards of a roadside zoo. Since children were admitted free, your father gladly paid the admission for himself and your mother. The first animals you saw were a few goats chewing on the feed scattered on the ground of their pen. There was a tiger asleep in a small pen, a thin chain was fastened to the worn leather collar around his neck. You and your brothers thought he was dead at first, but your mother pointed to the slight rising and falling of his chest, reassuring everyone of his health. "He's not dead at all," she said. "He's just got the right idea. In this heat, that's what I'd do. Sleep." Still you felt cheated. To get his attention, your brothers screamed for a little while at the tiger. You stood far away and tossed rocks. He ignored you and all of you went to the monkey cage. They were small and loud monkeys with teeth they bared back and forth at each other. They sat on thin wooden platforms, damaged from intermittent chewing. Two of the smaller ones chased each other around the cage. The largest one occupied the cage's only shade, picking at his fur, stroking his penis. The closest one to you, a medium sized brown one, sat on his perch staring. Your mom bought some peanuts and you threw them at him. Each time you threw some peanuts at him, the monkey attempted to catch the ones tossed nearest him. Your older brother kept missing the monkey with his peanuts. And because he was thin enough to slip most of the way through the bars, he wanted to retrieve the peanuts so he could toss them again. Most of the peanuts were beyond his reach, and your brother stretched further into the cage. The monkey reached out his hand and grabbed the stubble of your brother's head. The other monkeys started screaming. You laughed, but seeing your mother's face, you got scared. Your oldest brother grabbed a branch and tried to pry the monkey's fingers loose from the small stubs of hair he was clutching. Your mother was upset. Wanting to do something, you ran between the compound trailers searching for your father. You saw him come out of the men's room trailer, wip- 27 ing his hands on a paper towel and zipping up his pants. You watched him hear your brother, start with a trot and then run towards the cage. Sticking his arm in the cage, he grabbed the back of the monkey's head and jerked him off the perch. In the same motion, he drove the monkey's head against the cage bar. It released your brother. Your father slammed its head a second time into the cage bar. He dropped him and the monkey lay moving just slightly at the bottom of the cage. The other monkeys went to the far corner of the cage. You and your oldest brother screamed with delight. The zoo's owner ran towards your father, but retreated a few steps from him when he got close to him. You saw that he was a fat, nervous man with a long lit cigarette, and he demanded to know why he had attacked the monkey cage. You stared at the zoo owner's dark red shirt which hung untucked from his pants. Sweat in large even puddles swelled under his arms. Your father started shouting. Your mother ordered all of you back into the car. As you were walking away, you heard your father say "fuck" for the first time. He said, "I don't give a fuck. I'll do it again. Watch me." You had heard the word before. Your brothers would say it when you were alone in the bedroom. You listened to hear if he would say it again. But before you walked out of earshot, you only heard him tell the zoo-owner that he would be lucky if he didn't kill the rest of the monkeys. You climbed into the car, beside the rescued brother who sat quiet against the window in the back of the car. In a few minutes he walked to the car, stopping to pick up a soda can and toss it in the trash. Your brothers and you cheered. He smiled and you watched the monkey killer climb into the Volkswagen. At the next stop, you went to a Howard Johnson's for ice cream. You had neapolitan. Your father had pistachio. Now you stare at the bird's feet perched on the bucket and you watch the way its claws grip the feeder. You shift your position in the chair. The chair moves, making a metallic noise against the concrete. The bird flies away. "You scared him," your father says, "You've got to learn to be quiet." Maybe you think about your oldest brother leaving for good when he was seventeen. His hair was long, and your father tried to punch him when he refused to have it cut. He put duct tape all over his boots and wore an old flight jacket with McGovern pins on it. "I don't want a haircut, " he said. Your father went right for his jaw. Your brother stepped out of the way, and your father broke his hand on the wall. Your brother moved in with his friend's parents. A week later the rest of you went on vacation. You remember that as the week your father wrapped his cast in a bread bag so he could teach you to swim in the motel's pool. Five years later, your other brother told you he had gotten laid twice that week. At 28 the motel's gift shop, your mother bought a photo-biography that was on sale. The Kennedys were her favourites. She would stuff the family photographs in the pages of these books, write the page numbers in the back. "We might think about history when we think about us," she explained once. In this one, on the page where Jackie is smiling, standing beside the President at his inauguration, there is a photograph of your father waving to the camera, holding his cast wrapped in the bread bag away from the water. In another one, that she bought at a yard sale in the neighbourhood, is your oldest brother's graduation picture, with his shoulder length hair and moustache. The picture occupies the space on the opposite page from Robert Kennedy, who is dying on the floor of the Ambassador. You remember him saying "fuck" in front of you for a second time when you were twelve. He said it more and started going out for beers in the evenings. He retired from the Air Force, got a degree in counselling at the community college, and forced you one summer to read Aristotle. In 1978, he bought a cowboy hat. He wore it, along with his boots and belt buckle, in the house one afternoon. You remember watching him as he turned sideways in the mirror and placed his hands on his hips. You stared at his hook nose and saw that he was staring at it too. You laughed. So did he. It was his time to leave when you were fifteen, and you no longer dreamed of killing him. The day he left you helped him load his Toyota. "Your mother and me are having problems," he said. You stood at the garage door for a few minutes. Your hand rested on the string that pulled the door shut. He sat on the toolbox. You went and leaned against the car. You remember that he told you that there are always two sides to every story. You agreed and suggested turning the box containing his cookware diagonally, so you could fit his laundry basket in the trunk as well. You closed the trunk and he went away. As his car was pulling out of the driveway, you wanted to know that if everybody had a father that killed a monkey, would this make a difference. At his condominium at the bottom of his steps, electric blankets are almost being thrown at you. "I got more electric blankets than I know what to do with You sure you don't want one?" he asks. "What about sheets? Do you need any sheets? I got a lot of sheets. C'mon. Take a set of sheets." You choose the blue ones. You tell him the electric blanket he gave you two years ago still works fine. "That's because I read Consumer Reports," he says. "Your old man knows the score." 29 He stands at the door and hands you a grocery bag, tells you that it's little stuff he picked up at the base. And he says if you don't need any of it then just keep it anyway. Inside there are bottles of Mr. Clean and Janitor in a Drum, a few speed stick deodorants, some carpet cleaner, a packet of chewing gum, and a box of chocolate bars. He tells you he has always believed in you and then shuts the door. You stop your car at the end of the complex's parking lot, dig through the bag and unwrap a chocolate bar. You watch a boy drive a remote control pick-up truck in circles outside the fence at the tennis courts. You think about coming up with a dream that might somehow take everything into account. Where the same man who threw Ho Chi Minh's poetry into the antique mirror hanging over the television now mails cans of soup across the country to yoa But you understand that for your life this dream has always been beyond you, and after a few seconds, you take a bite out of the candy bar, and realize that eventually you'll have to drive away. 30 A Bowl of Yellow Flowers Stains the Canvas Karen Connelly Here is a broad stone wall flicking alive small green flames of lizards. The wall is low: I sit on its back, watching the road that curves around the wet blue belly of the sea. The sea is always itself, restless, forever altering its colours like a sad eye; the road itself never shifts; the squat wall I balance on is like the tough arm of an old fisherman. It keeps children and old women from dancing off the cliffs. Here we are, los domingueros, the Sunday people, drunk to exhaustion with light and the dusty scent of African wind. The bright blue benches behind me are soft with the bodies of old people, tense with the knuckles and knees of young lovers. The old people wait patiently for the farther darkness, the young for the closer one. They sigh anxiously, almost painfully, glancing in happy anguish at each other's fingers and chins. If you sit on a bench, the wall cuts the landscape in half: you cannot see the road below or the little restaurant on the beach where black guard- dogs sit on the roof, glaring at customers. From a bench, the landscape is picturesque: you receive the sea rising up like a mirror to the sky, slow ships sweeping the harbour like women in evening gowns, the grand old mansions reigning the far cliffs. If you sit on the wall (but no one else does, for sun, olives, and wind unbalance, and the drop would be lethal), you get a wider angle. The back-arch of the waves stretches towards you, warm as a cat begging hands. There is something about the sea that makes you want to reach out... Below, the beach is speckled with people, scurrying with energetic crabs and children and dogs. The dogs are bounding through sand, barking, pleading with stones to come alive and throw themselves into the air. The dogs see, blissfully, with their noses. They are enthusiastic about dead squid. From here, it looks clean: children tumbling playfully, doll-limbed, the people (featureless, really, at this distance) fine and 31 strong, leaving well-formed footprints behind them. But you also recall occasional smudges of tar, the condom-scatter of spent Catholic boys on Saturday mornings, the shredded glitter of dead fish. Still, from the wall, the scene gleams, glassed-over, lovely. But the view includes the road, which I watch in amazement. The thud bangs in my own bones as I realize what I've seen. A child and a car have collided with the grace of birds; it was choreographed, her skipping down off the path and the black swoop of metal speeding around, catching her at the waist. Her scream is mistaken for a seagull's. There are thirty people behind me, oblivious as I watch a shadow dyeing the road (it does not even appear red—simply dark, like dirt spilling from a bowl of yellow flowers, her head). There are shouts below, the single wail of a woman, but still no one around me hears this, no one leans over to look. I wonder if I am imagining all of it. I blink away sunlight and the cracked body remains down there, utterly still. The people around me (half-hearing the female cry) think only that the beat of the waves has changed. The old people are gazing at the cliffs, ignoring the white threads of cataracts, seeing perfectly the greenness of other lives, other decades, thinking of the ancient lime trees towering beyond them—they were smaller once. I hear serious talk about green beans and rose gardens, the cost of carrots. The laughter of sparrows rings from the trees as always, and the young men and women listen to it, imagining their hearts are birds. A girl with hair the colour of clean straw is staring at her watch, desperate for time to slide open. Her hand flutters at the boy's silk-brown arm and I can see what her fingers are thinking: There has never been flesh this warm. Their hair is tangled and heavy with dropping light. The sun rolls down the hill like bleeding fruit. And on the road below (all I do is swivel three vertebrae in my neck) the scene changes, a world bursts, the magic shadow spreads like a dark angel stretching its wings under people's feet. The bowl of yellow flowers is a rust-red brown. While above, in the little town, old women gossip, girls touch lipstick lightly to their mouths, men grunt at the government, and I sit on the wall, watching all of it, looking back and forth like someone at a stunning tennis match, trembling (remembering all the newspapers I haven't read, remembering the world itself, the wars in the back pages of atlases, whole countries spreading with shadow). This is where you are now. Then you turn your head away and you are somewhere else. The only truth is that there is none: it moves when we blink. The trick of seeing is not seeing everything. If you see everything and feel all you see, you unravel the wrinkles of your brain like a ball of 32 kite string. You drift off and disappear. It is easier to be blind if the choice is between blindness and madness. Learn to see with one eye or both eyes half-closed. I look at the lovers, the lavender-haired old ladies. I look with great concern at my bony feet. Absurd tears there, gems of wet salt sliding towards my toes. Because, below, a child drains. The moment was a pebble-brained shark, and her life a bloody tear in time's soft belly. Now an ambulance clangs everyone awake, the people, even the lovers, crowd to see the crowd below, to glimpse the broken doll, the shadow. A shattered body collapses in my eyes, but I look beyond it. I examine the elegant web of veins on the backs of my hands. (You must look beyond.) I see the Bay of Biscay. I slide off the wall and walk towards a new place. The blood on the road will be gone at dawn and perhaps I'll forget I've written this. Here are the pastel hues (skylight, sea, warm green eyes, pearled skin). And here are the dark oils. And here is your life. This is the only canvas they'll sell you. Do not just paint what there is. (You'll be dust before you've done that work.) Paint what you want to see. 33 Oscar Martens Brazil i.) On a street in Manaus a man grows out of the sidewalk. Half a man, begging there and twice the man I am for having the courage to live half a life in half a body. Two limbs, useless in the air, will not take him to the bridge or into the path of a bus. I could guess that his legs were blown off by an industrial revolution. Or he has been here for hundreds of years, unable to move out of the way of progress, the city streets built around him up to his waist. A gutter dog, bald from disease, sprays hot urine on his back while he waves his useless limbs in the air like a furious tree. His brother returns from the factory to carry him home on his back. In the morning he will stand him in the sun like a shrivelling raisin waiting for the relief of afternoon shade. 34 2.) If my Portuguese were better I could explain to the driver that we are in no hurry to kill anyone. We are in no hurry. Yet the cab parts people like dirty water missing them by a thin cushion of air. Peasants, experts in the art, plant exact steps across the road checking through the sides of their eyes trajectory, velocity, words which they would not understand, movements which they live by. A skinny dog, another expert drops out of sight under the hood, but as I brace for the thump it reappears at the back unharmed, already sniffing a buddy's shit. On our way to the boat there is no reason to rush through this slum of low-lying shacks. I could scream a warning from the open window but the experts in survival need no help from me. 5.) Instead of worms we use steak. Even a small piece of gristle is not acceptable. It seems that blood thirsty fish are fussy eaters. 35 We splash our rods in the water to attract them and they begin to snip off meat with razor teeth like they have done to the tails of slow alligators. They bite everything, including the knife that cuts away the hook. And as they make that thin wheezing sound, trying to breath without lungs, it makes me very happy that fish have no limbs. In the middle of this river I take new interest in the design of this canoe, the way the boards join, how the nails creak when I shift my weight. It has been a comfortable life here at the end of the food chain. I tell my friends not to rock the boat. I am not eager to change the order of things. 6.) without the noisy Germans without my group of red-skinned travel pals without these two guides already bored without the uncertain wooden bridge over this swamp without the white combi that carried us all here in darkness without flashlights that scan for the red eyes of alligators without any other modest statements against nature I would be standing hip deep in primordial soup where I could enjoy a sky full of stars and a night that saves heat for the next day until the life around me began to move toward my naked body 36 an easy meal after all without my civilization 8.) steal my shoes, they want to steal my white Nike hightops bought for this trip, now dusted red with Pantanal soil I did not know my sixty dollar shoes would turn me into a mark, make someone want to rob me they watch my feet at the markets, in the stores of Manaus. I wear one set of originals in a city stacked with fakes one boy makes me nervous with his shameless inspection, his desire to walk in my shoes 9.) My crude camera adjusts to a sunset which will not lie easily on film. I know I will stare at my failed photograph and wonder what it is. Two yellow rings as seen through welding glass. At the end of a Brasilian summer day we stalk through the field of scrubby grass toward a flock of Blue Macaws. 37 I use a glass eye to see them, high in the giant tree, while through their natural lenses they have sensed us but are not threatened. We have come to gather images on film like paper gravestones, pale markers of the past. I walk toward the perfect shot and stumble on my bones in this field. My foot crunches the bones of a capivara a piglike dog a doglike pig with teeth like a beaver. I take a picture of my own death and back away while the field tells me to lie down. The field tells me to lie down among my bones. The field tells me to lie down among the bones. The field tells me to lie down. The field tells me To become a provider I should lie down with my pig dog friend and wait for the first sharp teeth to claim my warm meat, fresh blood, then the beak to pick flesh from those awkward spots between the joints, spearing my eyeballs like cherries. Into the night the mouths get smaller. Insects, the worms demand that I surrender all my protein. 38 My bony fingers, free from any button or lever, make a chewy meal. A million mouths take me in every direction. I cling to a linia with tiny claws. I swim after a bleeding tail. I lie half submerged in this swamp. I expand into this territory consumed and consuming. The animals that I have become scream and macaws scratch their way into the face of the sky. 39 The Sign Mary Walters Riskin The night when Rosamond's husband left was the night which followed the day when the butterflies lay with their wings spread flat along the ground. The children, not knowing that Joseph was about to go, lifted the butterflies by their wings and flung them into the air, but they drifted back down to settle on the pavement and the grass. The children tried not to step on them. The night when Rosamond's husband left was the night before the day when the men in white noticed that Rosamond was living in the third floor suite. She'd been there six months by then, her fatness draped in bright scarlet and turquoise dresses which she washed in the men's room sink, her gold-plated jewellery ringing and clicking as she walked from floor to floor, urging her silent children from doorways and alcoves and out into the incessant sunlight. Her eyes were dark, and glittered. Joseph was small and silent, and he went about his business—which was mending shoes—from early in the morning until long after the others in the building had slipped their money into small grey drawstring bags and gone to sit through the long bright evenings with their wives and families. Joseph had come alone in March from the sunlit street to speak to the building supervisor about the space to let. The supervisor was a tall thin clothing designer who called himself Antonio and wore a gold ring through one ear. The men in white—a barber, a denturist and a chiropractor- saw Joseph pass their doors without looking in, and all of them saw the coolness on him despite the heat in the old building. Antonio warned him about the light that poured into the window of the third floor suite, but Joseph pressed the deposit money into his slender hand. Antonio told him that the third floor suite was bad for business (he'd had it once himself): his customers would never find him there. Joseph shook his head. "I have a sign," he said. It was the only time the people in the building ever heard him speak. The sign came on the morning of the following day. It was covered in flecks of silvered sequins, thousands of them that shimmered with the 40 wind, and his name was on it, and his business, in strands of tiny coloured bulbs that formed the script. Joseph Fanon, Shoe Repair. The words were hard to read in all that sunlight, but no one who saw the sign could fail to imagine how it would look at night. There were two men with Joseph in the cab of the pickup truck that brought the sign, and the men in white came outside to watch where they would put it. For a long time, Joseph's companions stood in the back of the truck, while he stood on the sidewalk looking up at the brick face of the building. At last he nodded and the three of them went to work with ladders and screws and wires, and when they were finished the sign was immense above the door, as though the whole building were Joseph Fanon, Shoe Repair. The men in white went in to phone their wives and after discussing it for a time, they did nothing. After all, their signs, small neatly lettered black on white beside the door, had not been hidden. As soon as the sign was up, Joseph went upstairs to unpack the two trunks of shoes which had been under the sign in the back of the pickup. By the middle of the afternoon, the smells of leather and boot polish had reached the office of the denturist, and he glanced up from the neat rows of headless teeth on his work bench to glimpse the scarlet hem of Rosamond, who was gliding past his door. In time, the rich smell reached the street and the halls were full of people carrying shoes, following the smell past the chiropractor's office and up the stairs to the second floor where Antonio watched them, raw silk and scissors in his hands, and up again until they found the third floor suite where the scent was fullest. The procession grew, bearers of heel- less slippers and broken-soled shoes standing patiently in line, talking to one another about the things they'd read in newspapers and seen on television. The whole building buzzed with their quiet waiting-talk, and the air grew thick with the smells of waxes and creams. And all the time the small children watched the people silently, listening, until Rosamond drifted through and sent them out into the sun. The chiropractor saw that his own clients had to sidle past the line for Joseph Fanon, and that sometimes they became entangled in it and took off one of their shoes to wait the wait and talk the talk and smell the smell. The chiropractor had to go out and remind his clients about their pinched nerves and their spinal realignments before they got too far into the building. Once they were past the designer's door on the second floor, they would not come out of line no matter how he begged them. He sent his wife up there one day, all the way to the top, for he could not go up there himself and leave his own business unattended. He nodded only briefly at her when she reached the place in line that passed his 41 doorway. When she came back down much later she told him that Joseph Fanon had shaken his dark head at her evening shoe and handed it back to her. There was nothing, his expression had suggested, that could be done for it. Others in line had told her that if you watched his hands while he was working, sometimes you didn't hear when people spoke to you, and Joseph had to push your mended shoe into your hands to wake you up. She wanted to try again with her day shoes, but the chiropractor shook his head and gave her a little money, and told her to go home. Rosamond's children heard the men in white talking about the line of people, about Joseph, and wondering if they should complain to the authorities about the sign. But the sunlit days went on and on, one after another, and the line continued to be there every morning after Rosamond had washed their feet in the men's room sink and put their shoes on and sent them out into the sun, and the authorities did not come. In October, there was that day when the butterflies came down. Rosamond went to urge the children away from the line, the alcoves, and the doorways, and she found they were not there. She went out into the street and saw them stepping over nymphs and emperors and tossing monarchs into the air. Rosamond in a dress of vermilion and turquoise, in silver slippers with straps across the arch, crossed into the square and lifted a purple emperor into her hands, bending so close that her earrings nearly touched its trembling antennae. She looked up into the empty trees and placed the butterfly on the grass again, and then she stepped carefully to the edge of the square where she stood for a long time, looking at Joseph's sign. Then she crossed the hot street and went back into the building. In the morning the butterflies were gone and so was Joseph Fanon. The men in white were pleased when the procession dwindled and the leather-polished smell began to dissipate, but they soon tired of going out into the hall to tell the people with the shoes that they needn't bother to climb the stairs because Joseph Fanon had gone. The children were always in the hallways now. Rosamond no longer came to send them out because, although the sun still shone, the air in the streets had grown very cold since the day of the butterflies. When the men in white asked if their mother was in the third floor suite, the children nodded, and the barber and the chiropractor and the denturist climbed the stairs past the designer with wool and scissors in his hands, and they knocked on Rosamond's door. She opened it, and they saw the sun which poured in the window of the third floor suite and struck rows and rows of shoes against the opposite 42 wall. With the light behind her, the men could see the outlines of Rosamond's fat thighs through the carmine and turquoise of her dress. They saw that her bare feet were firmly planted on the wood floor, far apart. She was holding her silver slippers in her hands. "Your husband is gone," the barber said. "He is looking for better shoes to fix." "But people are still coming." "He says their shoes are not worthy of his talent." Rosamond's voice was deep and slow, so that her earrings barely moved when her words came out. "Then the sign should be taken down," said the chiropractor. "It's up to Joseph to take it down." "Is he coming back?" "He has always come back," she said. "Each time, it takes him longer, but he has always come back for the sign." "And what about you? What about your childrea?" asked the denturist. "You have nothing here." They looked around the room. "No stove. No beds." They looked through her skirt at the outlines of her thick bare thighs. "You have no warm clothes, and winter has arrived." "But I have shoes," she said, tossing her head at the opposite wall so that her long hair swung around her shoulders and her fat bare arms, and her jewellery jangled. "When we found Joseph, none of us had shoes. Now we have two hundred shoes." She carried the silver slippers to the wall, and put them in the space on the top shelf. The men in white went back down the stairs and told the building supervisor that the sign must be taken down so that the people (one went by just then and the barber had to go out in the hall and tell him that Joseph Fanon was gone) would stop coming. The dress designer said that as soon as he'd finished with the seam binding, he would take care of it. The authorities came the next day, three people in blue uniforms: a policeman, a by-law enforcement officer, and a social worker who shook her head at the silent children. The men in white stood at the foot of the stairs and watched the authorities go out of sight at the second floor landing. They smiled at one another. "The authorities will take care of it," they said. When the dark began to come, early now that it was winter, the people in blue came back downstairs and walked past the offices of the men in white. "Is it taken care of?" the barber called, snipping hair from the neck of the chiropractor. 43 "We told her the children would be taken away if she did not keep their feet clean," the social worker said, her voice echoing through the building. "We told her we'd take down the sign," called the by-law enforcement officer, farther away, "and she'd have to pay the costs." "We told her we'd evict her," the policeman shouted, "if she didn't pay the rent." When the men in white came out of the building, they saw that the policeman had put canvas bags on the heads of the parking meters in front of the building. "They told me that if I got Joseph to mend their shoes," Rosamond called from the third floor window, her hair falling over her face and her breath turned blood red in the winter sunset, "they wouldn't do any of those things." It was soon after that when Rosamond began to dance. The denturist looked up from an improvement he was making to the second molar in his hand and saw her whirl past, jewellery flashing, bright fabric and dark hair spreading through the air around her as her bare feet moved down the hallway. She danced only a little that morning, her children watching wide-eyed and silent, and then she climbed the stairs to the third floor suite. But as the winter went on, she danced more often, longer, and swung her children around with her until they learned the way, and then all of them danced together or alone from the morning to the night. "When will Joseph come?" the barber called as she whirled past. "When he has found what he is looking for," she said into the door of the chiropractor and added to the denturist, breathing hard, "then, he will need the sign." With the lineups gone and winter here, there was no need to prod her children out into the sun and she whirled for the joy of all that leisure time, gold and red and blue and skin through the empty halls of the building. She spun with the children up and down the stairs, hugging them close to her, and their laughter clicked and shimmered like the sequins on the sign. Rosamond, the men in white discovered as she swung past in February and her skirt flew up to expose bare thighs, was dancing herself thin. The chiropractor looked over the back of the barber, to whose spine he was making an adjustment, and said to the denturist, "Now, no one comes. It was better with the lineups." "How much longer can she dance? She'll have to stop eventually." "When Joseph comes, he'll put a stop to it. He will make them put their shoes on." 44 "The children's feet are no longer clean. They're black, from all that dancing." The barber said they should come in the middle of the night and take the sign down, in order to save their businesses. "But if the sign is gone," the chiropractor said, "Joseph may not find her." "And then what will she do?" the denturist said. "She has nothing but those shoes." "The authorities will take care of it," the barber said. "That's what authorities are for." They met at the church in the darkness, but even from that distance they could see that the light from the sign was shining up the sky. As they came closer they saw that the square was filled with people, hundreds of them in parkas and scarves and mittens, all of them looking toward the building. The huge sign sparked and glittered and shivered and shone, the coloured lights that said Joseph Fanon, Shoe Repair illuminating the thousands of shining sequins. And under it, on the pavement where the heat of the sign had melted the snow, Rosamond danced barefoot on the pavement. She danced and danced until the men grew so tired from watching her that their eyes glazed over and they forgot why they were there. They watched her bright colours spin and twirl, and they watched her leap so high that she became a silhouette against the sign. When she was done, many hours later, there was a long silence and then she made two corners of her skirt and lifted them, and the people from the square crossed over to drop money in the pouch that she had made. For a while the men in white tried to keep busy with the dentures and the alignments and the haircuts of one another and one another's families, but there was no money in it. And so, instead of removing Joseph's sign, they took down their own and they went home to spend their remaining years with their wives and their grandchildren. This soon bored them and they found themselves sleeping late in the mornings to cut short the days, which left them wide-eyed as adolescents when midnight came. They took to meeting in the square to watch the silent dance of Rosamond, to watch her slim bare thighs when her skirt flew up, and her black hair brush against her slender arms. Behind her in the building, Antonio cut through silk and wool and silk, silk with all manner of butterflies printed on it, and he watched her sleeping children, and in the morning while Rosamond slept he washed the children's feet in the men's room sink. The winter came again and the men withdrew money from their banks 45 to buy white goose-down parkas, and they dropped the change into Rosamond's skirt. They wished that their wives would dance. One night in February, when the dance was ended and the people had all gone except the men in white, when Rosamond was putting her money into a grey canvas drawstring bag, a pickup truck with three men in it pulled up to the hooded parking meters. Joseph Fanon got out and looked at the sign and glanced at Rosamond. But he didn't know her thin, and he went past her into the building and up the stairs and the men in white saw the light in the third floor suite come on. Joseph lifted the rows and rows of shoes, and packed them out of sight, even the silver slippers. At last the light went out. Joseph came back down and nodded at his men, who began to take down the sign with ladders and wire clippers and screwdrivers. Afterward they went and got the trunks of shoes from the third floor suite, and put them in the pickup. Rosamond stood in the shadow where the light had been and watched them work. They loaded the ladders and the big dark sign into the back of the pickup truck, their breaths white as ice and coming fast from the effort. And then they drove away. When all sound was gone, the men in white watched Rosamond. She took a step, and then another, spinning and twisting until she lifted herself right off the ground. The doors of the building opened, and Rosamond spun laughing down into the street, and gathered her children into the air with her. The men sighed and lay back in the snow, too tired to find their black and white signs and put them up again. Rosamond ran into the square and danced over the men in white. She danced barefoot across the snow, her feet never quite touching ground, and disappeared into the darkness of the trees—her children dipping and fluttering like butterflies behind her. 46 Richard Exner two poems translated from the German by William Cross Passion for Ingrid The entire lake aglitter from shore to shining shore beneath a waning moon, and above the mist which makes indistinct the still-open blossoms that will be gone by morning. All this I give you for just the nod of your hand. Everything I learned from the smiling Angel and the eternity- crazed windows in Chartres, the castle with its steep plunge into the sea, and the filtered sun on the floor smashed into colours in the streaming ark, Aquileia, where like never before I was walled in alive within infinity's belly: 47 Take all this quickly out of my sight, it's yours. Let your outstretched hand run over me gently, without hesitation, lightly, while my eyelids are closed, already quavering, just before waking, hold all of me. 48 August 6, 1981: for Heinz Piontek The arrival this time smooth and very bright, swans on either side of the pier, then the recognition, quick, light and sure, running just above a squadron of fishes. 2 Reflectively bright day. Clocks still. No ticking. And no trace of the scythe. Not even between sentences. 3 Different than before. Words and glances met up. We could almost have done without the other. * (Translator's Note) The anniversary of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. 49 An entire eight hours. Naturally, no talk of aging. Few words about seeing each other again. And of death: not a word about its anniversary. 4 Before night came we were once more alone. Complete and fragmentary. A chapter from life. 5 On the seventh the wind shifted. 50 Catherine Hunter two poems my skeleton visits the casino the roulette table is a small city, hopscotch and coloured parking lots, lopped-off chimney stacks, a brass rail like a railway track my skeleton gambles the contents of its begging bowl, nightly thigh like a pool cue, leaning on the green dark felt, hip like the handle of a crutch, merely leaning, and whether advisable or ill-advised, it clacks the chips against each other, taunting the other players for what they lose, they can lose once only, while the skeleton knows a delicious repetition of loss over by the slot machine a woman rolls a cigarette with one hand counting up lemons and cherries, her lips flecked with tobacco, she looks out the window there in the sky is her last dime ripe and waiting to be spent the one coin she can never quite get rid of 51 afterlife (3 on the third day my skeleton sadly discovers it has not shed everything rain water gathers in the wide scoop of the pelvis, and the birds still have more wings than humans do I have not paid the ferryman enough or else I disembarked too early the earth persists, a memory scuttles like a mouse in the blank skull, the skeleton turns its brittle neck toward home 52 C. E. Hull two poems in-drought 1. arrival there is nothing much on the coolibah road except sheep pubs & petrol stations the hot smell of in-drought & rotting foxes rotting pigs & kangaroo carrion in dust hit by trucks that only travel at night an emu chick trips in dust & the moon is ochre reflected from dust a pile of wild goats like shag pile carpet pushed together in a heap even the glutted black crows cannot penetrate in-drought ribs protrude & breathe within the living corpse of misery kangaroo come into bre to feed on r.s.l. lawns to drink from plastic water bowls i drive into town with a broken exhaust my spirit broken my facial skin ochre stretched across bone in-drought visions of dying wheat wool & meat i try to find some spirit of place but everyone here is already drunk 2. township ten years ago i came back to live in bre was sober/ in love with the stillness/ the river country/ a local koorie shouted me drinks at the bowling club/ now the aboriginal fisheries are crushed brown 53 glass/ reflected on the skin of our eyes/ locals drift from house to house/ drunk & stoned/ all trying to save a few extra dollars from their pensions/ the first night i stayed in a house/ weatherboard & close to the past/ an inland wind shrieked in me/ the people who knew me cooked yabbies/ shrieking & boiling i died in the pot/ the second night they gutted cod/ during the heat of in-drought afternoon they talked of killing heifers/ killing time/ this is the slow death of the outback town/ gateway to the miserable west/ the polluted darling winds slowly down to south australia/ there is no relief from the big crop duster/ in-drought no-one leaves their houses & the safety of inside air conditioners/ only at night to fish to death the polluted rivers/ ten years on this town is a heartbreaker/ in drought the wild flowers/ snatched from the grave of this dying land/ the blood of an angry culture/ still fresh on the claypan 3. departure on the road out of brewarrina the red dust covers us in hellish blankets my father waves to me from its midsts his face hard & red from grog & sun & dust i drive away from death too fast i see him as reflected in my rear vision mirror i see him as first my father & a man & a stranger & a dot of karki almost as red & olive & brown as the tired trees that thirst in-drought he walks slowly back into town thongs stepping over the carcasses of rotting fleece he disappears from the face of the present 54 into his own world his own life chosen in-drought in bre he is happy but i feel i have lost him like a coin in the dust the cattle grids thunder beneath me the hot wind shrieks in me i will leave my past to die here my father to live in the cemetary 55 out of town tonight by 7 o clock im quick to slip a few clothes into a suitcase i can be out of this city in a few hours no questions you cant trace a name through a ghetto blaster you cant trace a name through stolen no. plates from s.a. especially since youve been living in v.i.c. for 6 months living on the smell of a smith family dishcloth i smashed up a taxi im not insured anyway my mother used to say you cant get blood out of a stone in 48 hours im getting out of this town dont tell no-one id tell my friends if i had some if a few would come with me/ on the dole/ to look for work in q.l.d. if that doesnt stick im pleading insanity they call invalid pensioners the untouchables most well get paid for something takes 6 weeks for the estate agent to get you through the tribunal it takes an hour for me to slip a few boxes into an e.h. thats with a roof rack it takes a tertiary institution 12 mths to trace a false tax file no. to s.a. 56 from victoria return to sender/ no fixed address im pretty good at getting out when the goings tough im tough there right along with it in two seconds i split they cant touch what they cant see i wear dark glasses for invisibility and runners the s.e.c. never question your name on a new account neither does gas phone home on a friends phone try reverse charges first always live alone as ive said im out of town tonight by 7 o clock sometimes i get tired & forget my own lies they would repossess my head if it wasnt screwed on 57 Heart Red Monaco Christian Petersen He yanks the night back as if it were a ragtop. The splintered windshield is tinged with chlorine light, dawn of the third Sunday in July. We speed over the steel beam bridge, above the green current, through the river mist and mill steam. As the car growls up the hill south of town stars are just fading in the rearview mirror, way back in the purple black west of the Nazko country. Thomas whispers, "I'll sleep when I'm dead." He grins, half a cigarette gently clenched between ivory teeth Then he squints his dark eyes at me and casually with his left hand rips the old car screeching off the highway, down through the scarred log arch entrance to the rodeo grounds. The Monaco crowhops in the dirt ruts, raising a flurry of dust. Muscled quarter horses stand tethered to aluminum trailers, curtains are drawn in the cowboys' campers, and the pickup trucks wear wry chrome smiles. He cuts the headlights. We approach the warped backside of the wooden arena, and the corrals where the circuit bucking stock is held, the long- horn bulls and the broncs. There is an overrich focus to this, lingering chemical static in my blood, sporadic shooting flares of hyper green joy, then icy fear, joy, fear. In my jean jacket I slouch against the passenger door, shiver slightly, rub my knuckles in my eyes as the silent tires press over the turf. In draughts through the car vents come scents of trampled bluegrass, fresh-cut sawdust and horseshit. Thomas exhales spicy smoke of his Winstons. A sort of rinsed mind is what I feel, an awakening, and along with it the steady arousal that comes from any night spent on fast miss psilocybin. Six feet from the corral fence the wide red car halts and the V8 idles quietly for just a few seconds. I watch his hand brush the steering column and turn off the key. Silence rushes the windows. Thomas searches the floor and finds the J&B, very last of it. No, I can't drink, can't keep up to you, crazy fool. He downs it himself, then drops the empty green bottle over his shoulder, thuds behind the seat. His anger suddenly fills the car interior and I have to get out, open the door, swing my boots in the grass. I stand and lean against the unfailing body of the car, slide myself forward, haul up and sit on the hood with my back against the windshield. 58 The cooling engine ticks twice. The drugs are wearing off smoothly and the sky is now precious silver. Don't change, don't ever go away. After a time Thomas joins me there, our legs stretch out down the hood of the Monaco and the big light at the end of the rodeo arena makes our boots shine. His are made of lizard skin. The animals are quiet inside the corral, a faint steam rises from their broad warm backs, the bulls have settled in deep sawdust nests and the broncs doze neck to neck. The horses are roughened and musky. Just one is wide awake, curious and stepping forward. He's a dark buckskin, with a black mane and tail, black legs, and his thick neck arched attentively. Thomas lights another Winston, the quick flame startles the horse. He swings his head and mane, his muscles roll and the line of his strong flank deepens as he wheels away. My father was a bush pilot. On the afternoon of October 12, 1979, he got caught in a freak snowstorm and crashed his floatplane while trying to set down on the Blackwater River. The accident made headlines, mostly because his two passengers happened to be the manager of one of our town's largest mills and the representative of a Japanese company looking to invest big money. All three were killed, and some people suggested that my father was at fault, for flying in bad weather. At school that following winter I stuck to myself, spent lunch hours in the library, and pretty much lost touch with the friends I'd had. My studies became an escape, I suppose, from the stupid sort of attention I got after the accident, and from different questions I didn't want to face. But never did I doubt my father's skill or judgement, I'd like to make that clear. Quesnel was a small place. Rumours ran like stray dogs there, rarely worth much, but sometimes troublesome or mean. And for the rest of the time I spent in that town, the spring of my final year at school and the summer after graduation, it seemed that I lived with different rumours concerning myself. Perhaps we always do, and I was just becoming aware of this. Anyway, rumours first involved my father, as I've said, then my mother's seeing Harold Nelson, and finally they got to my own friendship with Thomas Ross. The memories of Thomas are what I'm dealing with now—they are disordered and somewhat crazy, as we were then. But certain moments we shared, and words he said, have stayed with me. The time between then and right here seems only as long as one hard screaming all-night drive, though it has been more than ten years, and I can't say anything about where Thomas Ross might be now. 59 There was another weird rumour going around that spring, which was that a volcano had erupted out west. Somewhere way off in the endless jackpine, not simply another fire, but an honest-to-god volcano. About forty miles out the Nazko road, someone said, past Puntchesacut. Apparently from there you could see the smoke. I imagined the cone rock lip, rising white ash, orange lava. "Listen man," I said to Thomas, while chalking my pool cue, "you and me could be the first to actually see this thing. This is like a big chance." I placed my fingers on the green felt, slid the stick excitedly against the rail, and missed a straightforward shot at my last highball. Thomas then snapped the black eight in the side pocket, and dropped his cue down on the table. He smirked, "Yeah right. Nothin' else to do, I guess." We climbed into the Monaco, Thomas swung by the Billy Barker Hotel and I galloped into the bar to buy a case of beer. We were just nineteen, and being able to do that still seemed a terrific deal. Thomas was not as keen as I was about looking for that volcano. Whatever that country offered he took for granted, even mention of white bears, wild mustangs, or spirits that inhabited the canyons and springs of the Itcha mountains. None of that surprised him, and he seemed to know of stranger secrets. His mother was a Carrier, and as a kid he had lived for a time out on a reserve. He knew that road. Top down, we blasted out of town and our music mixed with the wind. After a fast hour he pulled over onto the gravel shoulder, shut off the engine, stuck out his hand for another beer. He took off his mirror glasses and glanced up the steepness of the mountain. Then he gave me a look which said—This is going to be a real hike, and it better be worth it. It was slow going because we were half-drunk and the smooth leather soles of our western boots slipped backwards on the fine speared grass that grew beneath the pines. Already the ground seemed unbelievably dry, yet the slope was shining with that wild grass, blue juniper, and waxy, thorny Oregon grape. Thomas was a ways behind, crisscrossing up the slope with a beer in one hand, and sidestepping the rocks so he didn't scuff his beloved lizard boots. Up ahead, wisps of white smoke rose from a blackened crust of rock into the sharp blue sky. "I see it!" I yelled back excitedly. His expression didn't change. There were no splashes of lava, but there was a queer smell. My steps had slowed as I got closer, Thomas caught up and stood beside me as I peered over the lip. He laughed, "You're right, this was some big chance, to see a cave full of smoking bat shit." He laughed harder then than I had seen him laugh before. And I laughed with him. He hurled his beer bottle into the cave. A 60 second passed, then the echoed shatter came out like the cave's own guffaw. My foolish attention had been so focused on the volcano that when I turned around the view nearly knocked me backward. Thomas turned and grew silent. Vast pine green country swept out before us, countless jagged valleys, and in the distance blue peaks that stretched away like lifelong promise. Thomas had a hard leaning to violence. He was as physical, as contained as a cougar, and usually he was that quiet. But you could never be certain what would set him off, and if something did, then he was dangerous. From the time he was sixteen no one in town had nerve to fight him. Whenever any guy got close to it, Thomas would stare at him and softly say, "D'you wanna bad time?" A teacher tried to guide him forcibly out of a grade ten gym class. Thomas dropped him on the floor. The man's collarbone broke, and Thomas was expelled. By then I knew him by reputation, but how we first met was like this. He lived in a house-trailer, in a dumpy sort of trailer court not far from the senior high school, and he sold dope. The trailer was owned by his uncle or someone who was never there. One lunch hour Jimmy Gillam took me along to this place to buy a quarter ounce of grass, and then, he suggested, we'd leave in a hurry. Thomas was unfriendly and stared at me when we went in the trailer. But we smoked a joint, and he and I got talking. Turned out we were both Bruins fans. After a bit he looked right at me and said, "Your old man, he was in that plane crash?" "That's right," I replied. A chill crept up my neck and I straightened in the chair. Jimmy was watching me closely and I knew he'd got a bit scared suddenly. What I felt was a mix of tested pride and readiness, because of my father. "He was the pilot," I said. Quietly Thomas said, "Nobody coulda known that storm was comin'." I watched my own hands on the table, traced the grain in the arborite with my little finger. Jimmy Gillam was nervous with the silence, and he kept checking his watch, then looking over at me. I paid him no attention. Thomas started to roll another joint, and as he licked the paper his dark eyes held mine for just a moment. He said, "Jimmy, you're gonna be late for school." Jimmy Gillam picked up his baggie of dope, looked at me curiously when I made no movement, then he left the trailer. Thomas lit the second smoke and passed it to me. Then he put a record on his stereo and took a bottle of Southern Comfort out of the cupboard. As he poured the liquor into coffee cups he said, "Least you know who your old man was, that's more than I do." That first day was probably in March I remember sunshine and wind, 61 with silver ice still thick on the windows of the trailer. The only furniture I recall was the pool table, bought by his uncle from the hotel. The felt was ratty, wood finish gone, and we had to stick quarters in to get the pool balls back, but it was most of our entertainment. There was a small tv too, and I know the Bruins got to the quarter-finals that year, but I do not remember who won the cup. It was around this same time that Harold Nelson began visiting my mother. He sold real estate and sat as alderman on the town council. Although I can see that situation somewhat differently now, at the time I did hold certain mean feelings for my mother, and I had no use for Harold Nelson. He bought a new car every two years, and he thought that was some big deal. And he seemed to think I needed guidance, which maybe my mother encouraged, I don't know. However they saw it, my view was different. It became simplest to avoid much time at my mother's house. The last few months of high school I somehow lost the interest I'd had in my studies and began spending more time with Thomas. Often I left school at lunch hour and spent the afternoon at his trailer. The guys that came to buy dope were puzzled to see me. Supposedly I had been a real school boy, but there I was standing in the kitchen with a can of beer, while Thomas divvied up the skunk weed on the table and took their money. They were afraid of him. They saw the two of us as pretty different, which we were I guess, though it didn't always seem like it. But magic mushrooms or LSD, for instance, were things I had not tried until I met Thomas. Two paper hits: extremely soon the trailer begins humming like a microwave—what day what time is it? Tuesday, 1:43,44pm—white clay sun—turquoise aluminum windowsills—rusted sink—creased cracked brown fake brick linoleum—3:14,15,16pm— please, let's sit on the April rain soft cedar steps—breathe the textured air—cartoon salamander eyelids—my palms sweat glass—wash my shaking fingers in the honeycomb snow in the shade of the decomposing trailer—see new subdivisions' gravel crossroads encroach on the muddy Fraser—water flat and fierce—5:35pm see fear, flood, suffocation— urgently Thomas says, "Hey it's okay man, this is the peak right now, you can ride it out from here, just ride it out."—but I feel naked and strapped to an alien velocity—crawl into the silent Monaco—curl up on the seat like a child—stare fixated at the red vinyl dash and dials of the Dodge Music Master—moocow coming down along the road—spring pink sundown in the mirrors—ride it out... One afternoon, when I was not there, two patrol cars pulled up at the trailer. According to Thomas the police were not polite. When he resisted their search one of them winded him in the guts with the butt of a 62 shotgun. But they did not find the marijuana, which was stashed in the Cheerios box sitting right on the counter. Thomas and I really did not talk a whole lot, but when we did the topic always seemed important—like different girls we knew or whether the Monaco could make it to Cape Horn, the availability of Dodge parts in South America, or the way to properly pass and catch a football. Thomas could be stubborn. He would insist on teaching me things he figured I should have known, how to catch a football, for instance, no matter what I thought. And he could be funny too, though he did not often intend to be. In a very straightforward way he sometimes asked questions which at first made me laugh, because they were impossible to answer, yet he clearly expected a reply from me. As if I knew anything. As if I knew one way or the other if there was a God, or what time really meant. The old Texaco garage up from the BCR tracks had been converted into the town's first nightclub, and we often ended up there on a Saturday after midnight, because we had nowhere else to go. Music hammered against the glossy painted walls, and coloured lights flickered at the edge of the dancefloor. We tended to kick off with tequila, to try and get in the mood, and then drank a mean succession of beers. Always we grabbed a corner table, out of the way, but Thomas still drew a strange amount of attention. People were wary of him, his cutting eyes like wet chips of shale, his sullenness, and occasional violence. Yet they seemed impelled toward him too. Led by nervousness, they would show up at the table. The guys wanted to talk about hockey, or bush work or buying dope, anything just to talk with him it seemed. Girls would come and ask him to dance, which was not a customary sort of thing in that town. It was certain that none of this impressed Thomas. Sitting there, across from him, I could sometimes feel invisible. And I enjoyed this because it allowed me to look at people more freely, to study them a bit, especially how they responded to the charged quality in Thomas. For their part, they only seemed to wonder why I now was his friend. As the snow melted and mild breezes carried into the nights, on any weekend there was commonly a party on the outskirts of town. It was often at the stockcar track. Or it happened in a field or a gravel pit where the cops were not likely to appear. Someone would have stereo speakers set out on the roof of their pickup and the volume cranked full. One or two roaring bonfires formed the centre of the gathering, and there might be hundreds of people. Drunken faces ringed the fire. Bottles were hurled into the flames where they whined, hissed and exploded. There were always fights going on. It was at these parties, well before I knew 63 him, that Thomas made his name. Rumbling vehicles came and went, with just their parklights peering through the dust. Now and then somebody passed out in the grass and got run over. Once a young girl was crippled this way, but I don't recall that anyone was ever killed. One green evening in June we sat on the steps outside the trailer, looking across the new town development to the bank of the Fraser and its muddy highwater. The sun just hung around. We'd been stoned and drinking half the day and now faced another aggravated night in town. It was bronze light in the whorls of the river current that made Thomas think of the hotsprings, and he decided we should drive out there. So we yanked the top down and cruised by The Billy for a case of beer. Jumping into that car always gave me the great sense of doing something. This was partly, I believe, because at that point in my life I really did not know where I was going. But once in the heart red Monaco any direction we headed seemed all right. Plus, with a tailwind that old beast could do a hundred and ten miles an hour. The hotsprings were a fair distance southwest of town, and the rough road slowed us down so by the time we arrived, though the air remained warm, the sky was dark. We were not too happy to see the light of a campfire. A new four-wheel-drive was parked in the trees, and two couples sat by the fire. They did not leap up to greet us either. We were bent out of shape, of course, but still eager to be soaking in that sulphury hot water. Weaving around, we managed to tug off our boots and strip and tiptoe grinning into the steamy pool. I had not been out there before, or to any springs, and it was wild to lie back drunk in warm bubbling water and watch the first stars revealed above the jackpines. The water filtered up between the bed stones, and rippled against the pads of my feet. As the current reached the surface it became visible, faintly traced with silver light. On my tongue the taste was like warm coins and I took a sip of beer. Wanting a cigarette, Thomas turned his shoulders, looking for his shirt which lay just out of reach. He leaned out of the water and stretched his arm toward his Winstons. The sight of his wet body startled me. I had not seen him naked before, not close like that, and I had not really imagined it—though physically, as I've said, he always made himself felt. Now in one breath I was more conscious of myself, my own body. First came a panic that nearly made me shake. Suddenly those rumours were whispering again, bitterly in my mind—maybe others had seen something all along that I had just not figured out, or had the guts to face? But right away an even stranger rush of faith pushed this aside, as if my fear were unimportant. Thomas' body was chiselled and corded with muscle, ex- 64 tended only for a moment while these things passed through my head. Then he settled back in the water holding the lit cigarette in one raised hand. I was staring up at the stars, aware of him watching me now, as if he might have read my senses. Our hair was curly damp and our faces had begun to sweat. Before long we were too hot and both pulled ourselves out onto the smooth stony bank to cool, leaving just our lower legs submerged. I still felt his gaze. Finally he said, "D'you know, I got a question for you..." Then, right before he asked whatever it was, a woman appeared silently between us at the edge of the spring. It occurred to me that I might be hallucinating, but I shifted forward about to duck into the water when Thomas stopped me with a taunting jab of his dark eyes. The woman was somewhat older than we were. She waited half a moment, almost as if to get a power over us, which she did. She said something, I don't remember what she said. Then she dropped her hiker's shorts, pulled her t-shirt over her head, and, murmuring softly, she lowered her body into the pool. Her breasts swayed and shadows caressed the curve of her belly and thighs. I was breathing through my mouth, and could feel the pulse at the back of my knees against the smooth wet rock. She had long coppery hair which she held up with one hand at first. Then she snugged her neck against the stone rim of the pool and there could keep it dry. In the heat her lips expressed a deep-lung sigh. Her white arms circled gently through the water. They folded under, lifting her breasts while the water lapped between and into the hollow of her throat. She moved beneath the water, her leg pressed to my own, and within me came a sudden fierce stir. A breeze parted the steam rising from the spring, and with it drifted the spicy pitch smoke of the fire at the edge of my vision. Light scampered like spirits bent on mischief in the pines. Thomas was leaning toward the woman with his weight on one rigid arm, and a perfectly calm smile on his face. He looked strong, but not at all threatening at that moment. The woman arched her back, so that for a moment my eyes touched her breasts, then fastened on the stem of her throat. She was smiling too. Gradually I caught my breath and then I tried to smile—it appeared to be the thing to do. All my nerves were keen and focused, and briefly it seemed that I had a grasp of some mystery, but then of course she slipped away. "Barbara? Barbara?!" A man's loud voice, angry and very drunk, intruded on the night. Thomas turned his head, I saw the violent glint in his eye and I thought—oh Jesus. The woman in the water had a look on her face that seemed uncertain. Moments passed. And they passed too slowly for me now, because the 65 thought of her husband confronting Thomas had me frightened. We were out in the middle of nowhere. Finally she stood. We were watching her closely. Her skin had flushed with heat. The water on her body ran with starlight. And no trouble did occur, thanks to Barbara, who had the sense to put her clothes back on and return to her husband. She left us her smile. Dawn of the third Sunday in July—Thomas lights another Winston, the quick flame startles the horse. He swings his head and mane, his muscles roll and the line of his strong flank deepens as he wheels away. I shift my back, still reclined against the windshield. Thomas turns his head, toward me but not far enough to meet my eyes. The edge has gone from his mood, or the anger has been replaced by another feeling that at first I can't recognize, not coming from Thomas. His profile is highlit by the big light at the end of the rodeo arena. He asks, "D'you ever wonder what's gonna happen later, like, from now on?" Then he looks right at me, and I nod yes. It is fear. He too is frightened. He says, slowly, "D'you know, what's gonna happea?" He keeps looking at me, and all at once seems so much like a young brother, also without a father, almost innocent—not a tough guy, and sure not a guy with much idea of a future. I want to touch his hair, put my hand on his shoulder, but naturally I don't. More than that I want to tell him that whatever happens it might be okay, the future, but I can't do that either. I look down at my fingers splayed against the warm red metal hood of the Monaco. "No," I say. "I don't." Thomas stares out at the horses. That buckskin bronc is frisking around with the first rays of light, twisting its meaty neck, glaring at us, but most of the bunch are still dozing. Thomas says, "Fuck it anyway." Then after a moment his face flashes with a grin, a devilish sort of look. He says, "Hey man, I got an idea." He hops off the hood of the car, swings over the rails of the fence, and walks in his shiny lizard boots in the soft sand and sawdust inside the corral. Just like a fool he goes over and opens the gate. And then starts walking right at that crazy buckskin and waves his arms. Horse bolts and kicks. He walks around behind the bunch clapping his hands. "Gdyap!" And he chuckles. He moves with a sort of strut, but grace as well. And for all his cowboy boots and jeans and Bruins hockey sweater he looks like some damn Comanche in an old western movie, running off the cavalry's mounts. I laugh aloud. Then I whoop, jump the fence and join in the chase. We run those knot-headed horses helter skelter through the gate. They throw 66 their heels, they whinny and snort, and their hooves pound as they gallop over packed dirt of the parking area. "Heeyeeeeeah! Heee! HEEYEEOOOAHEE!!" Thomas shrieks and howls, while I laugh with each stride, I stumble and reel from laughing, and it seems my laughter bucks along with the freed horses. Cowboys and women step out in their underwear from the doorways of the campers. Their legs are much whiter than their arms, and their hair is all askew. They express an irritable wonder at what the hell is going on. Now Thomas and I are hightailing it for the car. 67 Alice Tepexcuintle two poems toxic WHAT toxic WHAT air pollution so you cant breathe if the air is all plugged up with carbon monoxide fumes OH NO cars and motorbikes do it WHAT pollute like crazy wish i could drive one now but some people might get mad SO WHAT riding a motorcycle is a lot more fun than breathing anyhow dont ask me to give it up please and smoking cigarettes is great too i like doing it right in the middle of gas station puddles WOW psychedelic colours look so beautiful swirling on the pavement i cant wait for them to EXPLODE yeah bits of metal scrap flames and the smell of burning rubber black smoke filling the atmosphere looks like i dig it and the noise pollution too is my favourite loud explosives pieces of machinery scraping the pavement and sparks shooting everywhere is totally cosmic yeah smashed gas tanks smoldering sending up big filthy clouds of exhaust so TOXIC i love running thru it and breathing deeply delicious my head reeling i cant bear the responsibility of my addictions QUICK get me back to the seventies when it was still okay to drive fast 68 So nobody told you So nobody told you kid the summerjunk makes you an addict head home head home kid thru the huckleberry crush so nobody knows you kid lay down the hucklegrass yer veins feel the summerjunk push so nobody told you kid thought you could hold the hucklerush yer small blood delinquent yer red stained dress better head home head home collect yer summer spoils yer nowhere kid the summerjunk fools you stay too long in the bitter sun better head back to where you lose inspiration the cool summer love dwindles to a seed This wild dirt knows yer foot print the huckleweeds swish to cover yer head the trucks fool past this is the honey kid yer heart black pulling you the vacuum cleaner wind this is the honey the hucklejunk thirst you force forward against the sidewalk scorch you make this pact with the purple darkness pull yer honey down drink like its the last time kid yer nowhere just caught red handed in the ramshackle bush better lay down lay down kid let the huckledrug hit you dont remember anything just yer red stained dress yer red stained dress testimony to the first summer killing But sometimes you cant get it sometimes you cant find the trick no bush to ransack in the twilight august all the huckles crushed so you cant lose it kid you cant forget this summers crash landing in the primitive dirt just the shock the sudden realization you wont be getting off the huckletrain the buck stops 69 here the late summer finds no fix the huckleweeds swish grab you dream you cant wash the huckleblood from yer hands you dream the thick guilt the criminal red yer dress forever witness you cant lose it yer bones remember the summer massacre the dust in yer lungs the dust in yer lungs yer mind blown to seed you can only lay down lay down kid pull the night around you like a shroud nobody to save you from this wasteland of longing So you finally blew it kid you finally lose yer passage thru the summers tangled bush yer eyes grow deluded so the bulldozers fooled you thought you could hang around summerlong freeload the huckledrug birds dont flap like they used to the flowers push down blow yer soul to seed you taste defeat now the flavour of gasoline the grass blades cut you dont care you just hang around an empty bottle nobody to fill yer veins running restless across the bulldozer shadows getting larger now plowing you watch the hucklebush go down crash scintillating yer dreams squash all yer summer squalor turns to dust well you lose kid yer scooped up the bulldozers know you cant last one clean season yer red stained dress brands you stand exposed yer body needs the hucklejunk like oxygen better go home go home kid better go back to where you ramble the twilight august to where you hit the infinite hucklerush the lawless horticulture of yer desperation 70 Richard Harrison two poems At the Hockey Hall of Fame I saw the Russian sweaters from '72: they were homemade and eccentric- wool with tiny felt letters sewn on, the letters curled from the wool, like the bits on the costumes my mother sewed for the school Centennial play where I was a boy transported 100 years into the future, to the Canada I'd never see: smooth-running, and prosperous and completely English, like the school. Above their old clothing, the players move in ways only skating can offer: hips extended, heads leading, the hands forging a perfect circuit with the stick and the padded shoulders, legs together to the side, an angle only speed delivers from falling. 71 An African hockey story When the manager of the art gallery in the Hotel Ivoire sees the flag on my pack, he tells me he loves my country and he plays hockey on the rink that lies chilled like a pie in the middle of the hotel on the equator where leaves rot as they grow and the air is sweet as apples with their dying. I say What positkni? He says Left wing. I say Like Bobby Hull, and Bobby's name makes it: he draws his hand up and it smiles at the end of his arm: This is The Shake, the one that begins with the slap of palm against palm, the one between men who've found enough between them to confirm the world for the day and go on. Tomorrow I will skate on this rink like the pros back home, way ahead of schedule and nature; I will tell you I touched the ice and I could be any boy in love. 72 Georgie's Habit John Isaacs My mother was a collector of volume ones. Her shelves were packed with free first volume tomes that didn't quite make it to the letter "b." She knew all about allotropes and antelopes and Anchorage, Alaska. Ask her about baboons or zeppelins and she frowned. Yet her fascination with the "a" section was diversion enough to prevent her from investing in a complete Rand McNally, Funk & Wagnall set. She was on "attic" the day she found my things. It was attic conversion day, a useful idea she had gotten licking her way through volume one of a "do-it-yourself" encyclopedia. She had this notion of turning the attic into a playroom, complete with red cedar ceiling and skylight windows and tongue-and-groove subflooring that would prevent my little brother and me from crashing through the ceiling of my room. I was twelve then, but that's not what stopped her. She scrapped the idea when she found the habit I had put in the attic. She climbed up and down the attic ladder four, five times before calling her sister-in-law, the sister, on the kitchen phone. Buzz and I came out of hiding to listen on the upstairs extension. We put our ears together and did our best not to laugh at Mom's voice. She changed it so when she talked to Sister Georgeanne. It was softer, milder, cherubic, but we couldn't tell Mom this without her raising it and proving us right. Mom went on and on about the habit. "It's as if Nate wanted me to find it," she said in her soft telephone voice. "He knew I was going up there!" Sister Georgeanne promised she'd come to the house sometime the following week—sooner if she could get a break in her teaching schedule- to have a talk with me. She was the closest thing to God Mom knew. Mom stopped going to Mass the day Dad died. She never told her sister- in-law this; instead, she told her how Buzz and I went to St. Sylvester's every Sunday and obligation day. Mom made sure we did. Every so often she begged Sister Georgeanne to come over and put God back in me, something my mother had always relied on my father to do. That's why she called Sister Georgeanne after she found what I put in the attic. Sister Georgeanne calmed Mom down and assured her there 73 was nothing that serious to worry about (Georgie was good that way). When Mom had finished talking to Georgie, she called me into the den and made me stand in front of her while she checked her references. She selected two home medical encyclopedias and thumbed her way through the volume ones. "Why would you take that?" she pointed. We both looked at the habit, draped on the sofa, looking like Georgie's shadow. "And from your Aunt Georgie! She's so good. She's been so good to us." "I know," I said. And I meant it. Georgie had always been special to us, even more so after my father died. She had a strength, a vitality, that rubbed off on Mom, my little brother Buzz, and me. My mother pulled me closer to her and rubbed my scalp like she was looking for something. "You never took anything of mine, did you? A dress? A blouse?" "No," I said, and that seemed to ease her a bit. "What else have you taken?" "Lots of things," I said. "Like what?" "I took some of Dad's things you wanted to get rid of." I was sure she knew this already. "What else have you takea?" I looked away from her. "Answer me." "Once I took a frog's liver from school." "Have you even taken anything else from Georgie? From your friends? From me?" I didn't answer her. She raised my eyelids with her thumb, placed the back of her hand on my forehead, then flipped her way through the volume ones. "Look what you're doing to me," she said, closing her books, bothered that she had tried to find something in the "a's" to explain me. Mom didn't say much about the other things I put in the attic. There was Dad's pocketwatch and protractor and corporal stripes with black thread still looped around the edges, and a girlie magazine and three packs of lubricated Trojans I found in his sock drawer one day. Mom just mentioned these things like she was reading them from one of her books. All she cared about was Sister Georgeanne's habit, and what it was doing in the attic. I took Georgie's habit one summer week she stayed with us between teaching semesters. Georgie taught voice at an all girl's school just twenty miles from our Pittsburgh home. She never wore her habit during 74 her stays, just when she arrived and left. She had her own special wardrobe, suits and skirts, mainly; strong twilled fabrics with diagonal ribs for winter, and over-the-knee, over-the-elbow rayons and cottons for summer. Once in a while I saw her in one of Mom's things, and she smiled and blushed when I told her how nice she looked. Her habit was easy to steal. I just went into the guest room the day after she arrived and took it from the closet. She didn't miss it till the end of the week, while she was packing to go back to the convent. It was black gabardine, belted and pleated at the waist, with a big white collar that looked like angel wings. Georgie had also brought a simple black bonnet which tied under the chin. I took this also. Mom and Buzz had searched the house, but Sister Georgeanne looked at me and said it would show up sooner or later. My mother sent Georgie's habit to the cleaners the day after she found it. She made it clear to me that I would pay for my sin—first in the confessional, then at the cleaners. I did what she said, but not exactly. The day the habit was ready to be picked up, I went to the cleaners first, then carried the habit four blocks to the supermarket, where I bought a pack of baseball cards and a volume two that was on sale before I went to St. Sylvester's. The priest was finishing up morning Mass when I walked into the church. I found a pew and watched him work. He wore a loose fitting outer garment over his sleeveless chausuble. Both looked white and clean, though I suspected he was sweating holy water under all those layers. But he didn't appear flushed at all; rather, cool and reverent with a silk embroidered band about his neck and a short stole hanging from his wrist. The way he moved in his vestments made me think of Aunt Georgie, how her habit brought out the best in people. She had said so many times—people behaved when they saw her in full habit. My mother always laughed at this. Georgie's habit may have brought out the best in people, if only for a while, but it was Georgie herself who always brought out the best in Mom. I thought about the weekends and holidays Georgie spent with Mom and Dad and Buzz and me, gutting fish in the summer, fingering the piano and spinning records in the winter. During Christmas, Dad often asked her to sing for us, and he and I sang along. Dad was flat and I was loud, but somehow Georgie made our trio sound good. Mom was always too embarrassed to sing, but she liked to slow dance with Dad when Georgie sang a capella. I felt bad for Georgie then, while she sang alone, watching Mom and Dad in each other's arms. I'm not sure why I felt that way— Georgie looked so happy and content. She usually talked me into dancing with her, and after a while, we'd cut in on Mom and Dad. 75 I liked to watch Mom dance with Georgie. They taught each other the latest steps, spinning and tapping and waltzing and dipping, finally flopping onto the sofa, all teeth and giggles. Mom laughed a lot then, with Dad at her side, Buzz and me in the chorus, and Georgie in the house, orchestrating it all. I stopped daydreaming when the priest said the final prayer and walked past me on his way to the confessional box. I practiced what I would say to him, how I would tell him about my mother, but I thought too long, and a line of people got ahead of me. The longer I waited, the more I decided I didn't need to confess anything. I ran out of church and down Sycamore hill, the cellophane over the habit rustling in the breeze. When I got home, the first thing my mother asked was if I went to church. I nodded and handed her the habit. She was checking it over when the telephone rang. Buzz answered it. He pulled the cord away from us as far as he could and mumbled something into the mouthpiece before hanging up and running upstairs to his room. "Buzz!" Mom yelled. "Who was that?" "No one," he answered. "It was for me." Mom and I knew he was lying. Buzz was only six. He never got phone calls, though he liked to make them. Mom had tried masking tape over the dial and no television for a week, but that didn't stop Buzz. He liked to see who he could get by picking ten numbers. Mom got out her telephone index and dialed a few wrong numbers before she screamed out my name. "Get in here," she said. "And bring your brother." I ran upstairs and pulled Buzz out from under the bed. "Nate," he said, "it was that same man. He asked for Mom again. I hanged up like you told me to." "Good work," I said. "Now come downstairs. Mom wants to yell at us. No snitching." Buzz ran down the stairs. When he got to the bottom, he put his hand up to his mouth and zipped his lip. "Which one of you has been playing with my telephone book?" Mom asked. She looked at Buzz and he pointed to me. "Nathaniel!" she said. "This has to stop. The phone bill is out of sight. Andyow!" she said, pointing at Buzz. "Keep your fingers off that dial." "But I'm trying to get Dad!" he said. "Oh, Buzz," Mom said, squatting down in front of him. "You're making Mommy poor. You just can't call heaven. There's no telephone pole up there." "Are too," Buzz said. "Nate said so. I can get through if I try real 76 hard." Buzz glanced at me then ran upstairs and slammed his door. Mom turned her back to me. "I don't know what's gotten into you," she said, flipping through the Yellow Pages. She dialed then put her hand over the mouthpiece. "Go check on Buzz," she said. "He's too quiet." I knew Buzz was all right. When Mom wasn't looking, I took her directory to my room and thumbed through the pages. She got a new directory each year, adding and deleting names, addresses, numbers. I was amazed how different Mom's directory was from the year before. There were the schools and Georgie and both sets of grandparents, but most of the names I didn't know. Mom was always updating, redecorating, throwing away the old. But I recognized Dad's work number on page one, a spot it had in all the directories I could remember. Some of the numbers I changed, turning threes into eights, ones to sevens and fours. Others I changed to Georgie's number. After she had finished her call, Mom came upstairs and took the directory away from me. "What did I just say?" she yelled, waving her phone book in front of my face. She carried Sister Georgeanne's habit over her shoulder with two fingers curled around the hanger. "You keep it nice for her," she said, handing it to me. I hung it in my closet. "And you better apologize to her when she comes to get it." "When is she coming to get it?" I asked. "Hopefully, by the end of the week," she said. "And I think she deserves a damn good explanation." "She can't come sooner?" "No," Mom said, squinting hard. She walked to the doorway, looked back at me, then shook her head all the way to Buzz's room. Georgie's habit rocked gently on the hanger. The collar was stiff and turned up at the bottom—too much starch, Mom had complained. But it looked pretty to me, flapping against the black gabardine, white and fresh and clean. All I knew were the sounds of the night, and they told me that Sister Georgeanne wasn't expected early next morning. There were the whispers, the giggles, and before that, the rattle of a car, the click of the front door. And later, not much later, the squeak of the stairs, the rhythm of old springs. There were other sounds too, one that frightened Buzz enough to seek the protection of my covers. "Hey, Nate," he said, shaking my shoulder, "that man was peeing in our bathroom." I had heard it too. I knew it wasn't Buzz. His was a spray, a trickle in the middle of the night. What I heard was the product of a bigger bladder. 77 "It's OK," I whispered. I picked him up and sat him next to me. He put his head under the pillow, and I went under with him. "He'll be gone before breakfast," I said. "You'll see." Buzz slid closer to me. "What's he doing here now?" I took the pillow off our heads and put my arm around him. His breath smelled sweet, like new bubblegum. "Mom let him use it," I said. "His toilet's broken." Buzz laid on his back, thinking over when I told him. "Couldn't he stay home and use a can or something?" "Oh no," I said. "Can't he fix it?" "He's not like Dad," I said. "Dad could fix anything." "Even toilets?" "You bet." "He didn't even flush." "Dad always flushed." "I don't think he washed his hands good." "Dad always washed his hands." I told Buzz about Dad then, the way he fixed things, things Buzz wouldn't have remembered. He was only three when Dad died. When I thought he was asleep, Buzz tapped me on the back. "Why didn't he pay someone to fix his toilet?" I rolled over and thought hard. "He's too poor," I said. "He can't afford it. Can't even pay his water bill. Ain't got a drop of water. That's why Mom let him use our bathroom." Buzz covered me with the sheets, and I left them on, although it was warm in my room. "Poor man," Buzz said. "Can't even afford jammies." He covered himself with the sheets and turned his head. Just then I felt the need to tell Buzz something, something real, something true, but he fell asleep before I could articulate it. I tossed and turned, thinking about the man in Mom's room. Then I thought about the next day, and how it would differ from the Labour Days we celebrated when Dad was alive. My father had taken legal holidays seriously. He always complained there weren't enough of them. But he believed that commemorating the same person every year (always male, usually president) or the same event (usually war related) was a redundant practice that displayed a national lack of imagination. Dad insisted that the actual commemoration was not as important as the family celebration, and he went out of his way to give us days we would always remember. Sundays were common law holidays around our house. No one was allowed to work. Labour Day, when my father was alive, was the ultimate 78 Sunday. We'd take a trip on a liner up the three rivers, or spend the day in the dark of a movie theater, or just get in the car and take a long drive to the country. Dad never drove on these trips. He sat in the back of our VW, pointing out sights of interest while Mom kept her eye on the road. I sat next to her, the map spread out between us. Mom didn't read maps well, and she counted on me to tell her where to turn. That was my job, Dad told me. "Make sure your mother doesn't get lost." Mom was a good driver, and she had a good, preconceived idea of what roads she should take, but once she got behind the wheel, things flashed by her too quickly, and she needed me to point her in the right direction. Dad pointed at cows and cornfields and places here and there that might be good stops for homemade country grub, but Mom kept her eyes straight ahead. "Tell me what it looks like," she said. Dad described grasses with dark red grains, silos and cattle I could never see, and the way the sun reflected off the ponds, making them appear as smooth as ice. Mom had this thought then, I was sure—how Dad's eyes could be bad enough to have her drive, yet sharp enough to see detail roadside and beyond. Mom never articulated this thought to Dad, at least never in my presence. I hoped she had figured it out, like I had. Our country trips stopped soon after Buzz was born. Buzz was a restless traveller, and the smell of field fertilizer and Buzz's diapers was not Dad's idea of holiday celebration. Dad's blood sugar had been fluctuating then also, to the point that he had to tell Mom to pull over two or three times a trip so he could get out his little vial and reagent strips and check how sweet his urine was. "Dad was sweeter than the man in the bathroom," I whispered to Buzz, and he turned around and put his arm around me. In the morning, my mother made me go to church again, and she told me to take Buzz along. She insisted Labour Day was a holy day of obligation. The morning was hot and sticky and I didn't feel like dressing up. Buzz was still toddler enough to get away with shorts, but I had to slip on my Sunday pants and stiff shoes, which meant socks, something I wore in the summer only when I went to St. Sylvester's. Mom cracked ice from a tray. She rubbed the cubes over her neck and forehead. She did this slowly, in little circles, her lips parted and eyes shut. She slid two cubes between her lips to let me know the subject was closed. I told her I didn't think Labour Day was a holy day, but there was no arguing with Mom when she wasn't arguing, which meant she wasn't sure she was right. 79 "I hope Georgie's coming over today," I said. Mom bit down on her ice. "If I didn't know better..." she said, then she pushed Buzz and me out the front door. The walk to St. Sylvester's was ten minutes up Sycamore. Buzz ran up the hill and waited for me outside the church door. He stopped next to three pews before he found the one he liked. He flattened his palms against the seat and pressed himself up and down. "Sit still," I whispered. "You got a bug up your shorts?" Buzz motioned for me to come closer, and I lowered my head. "I got Texas yesterday," he said, curling his dialing finger. "He was nice." I put a finger to my lips as Mass started. Buzz tapped me on the shoulder. "How far is heaven?" he asked. "It's far," I whispered. "Now be good." "It's too far, isn't it?" I slid closer to Buzz. "No way!" I said. "You just have to keep on trying. It's like a game. You pick the lucky ten numbers, then you can talk to Dad." "But Mom says I ain't allowed," Buzz said. "She says I'm making her poor." "She doesn't care about the money, Buzz! She just doesn't think you can do it. She doesn't want you to be disappointed. It takes a clever fellow to pick the right ten numbers. I don't think Mom thinks you're smart enough to do it." Buzz's eyes lit up. "You think I'm smart enough, don't you?" "You're Einstein. Now shut up." I had a feeling this Labour Day was starting off wrong. I missed those Labour Days when my father was alive and healthy. He started Labour Days off with a bang. He'd always have something planned for us. Georgie spent few Labour Days with us. It was usually a busy day for her, preparing for the first day of school. Our last Labour Day with Dad was spent at home. It was a rainy, dark day spent sprawled out on the living room floor around a Monopoly board. We kept an eye on Buzz so he wouldn't put houses and hotels in his mouth. Dad rolled the dice and told us about the squares he landed on, Pennsylvania Avenue and Park Place and jail, like he had been to these places many times, though we knew he never had. Mom never won at Monopoly. Dad teased her about this. She was quite fastidious about the rules though, and whether Dad and I had followed them or not. I think she suspected some sort of conspiracy, but the truth was Mom was a lousy player. She was better as a partner, when she teamed up with Dad against the Quinns and O'Reillys. Once I saw her sneak a few extra houses on her property, but she put 80 them back after looking at Dad, who hadn't noticed, I was sure. Mom always settled for less, Baltic and Mediterranean, Connecticut and Vermont and Oriental, instead of fighting her way around the board and trying for bigger, better things. She gave up easily too, hinting we should start over again when the dice weren't rolling her way. And when Mom lost spirit, she'd take herself an extra deed or two, only to put them back when Dad went on about Marvin Gardens and B&O Railroad and other spaces on the board. Dad was a player, and he never did lose spirit, even when it rained and we were stuck in the living room, listening to the drops splattering off the barbecue. I think that's what Mom loved most about Dad, needed most, and what I missed too, especially on Sundays and Labour Days. There were noises in the night again, and I jumped out of bed and saw that car in front of our house. I heard music downstairs as I checked on Buzz. He was asleep under his bed, already hiding from the morning, his first day of school. As I tiptoed to my room, I heard that deep voice downstairs. I grabbed my flashlight in my sock drawer and opened the door of my closet. The plastic shimmered as I slipped the habit off its hanger. I tiptoed into Mom's room and spread the habit over the pillows, sitting it up against the headboard. I heard that deep laugh. The habit wasn't enough. I found my father's picture in my mother's drawer and laid it on the habit. The music stopped playing and I ran to my room. Metal scraped against the staircase railing, a bracelet, a watch, a ring, I could only imagine. There were sighs and whispers, then the sharp, quick click of Mom's bedroom door lock. I waited and waited before I heard that scream, Mom's, twice, loud into the night. Buzz ran into my room and jumped on my bed, hiding under the pillow. "It's just the television," I said, but Buzz didn't come out. I heard muffled voices—my mother's mostly—then the click of the bedroom door, and heavy footsteps down the stairs and out the front door. The car door slammed and the engine started and the house was quiet again. Mom walked into my room and put on the light. She hung the habit in my closet, slowly slipping it under the plastic, then turned around and looked at me. She stood there for a while, arms folded as if she were chilled. I looked her straight in the eye. She flicked off the light and picked up Buzz and put him back in his own bed. Mom avoided me the next morning. She spent the morning selling Buzz on his first day of school, and I checked Georgie's habit for dust and wrinkles. Buzz said it wasn't fair that I didn't start school for a few days yet. Mom agreed. She hugged Buzz extra tight before she helped him get 81 on the bus. She squatted down in front of him and ran her fingers through his hair. She looked at him with her "my little boy is growing up too fast" face, and it didn't wash off with her morning shower. Later that morning, Mom got out of her volume ones, the "do-it- yourself" decorating guide, and flipped to the antiquing chapter. She went downstairs and spread newspaper on the basement floor. She came back upstairs and I helped her carry Dad's old rocking chair to the basement, the chair she had started refinishing many times before. She cleaned off the old surface with paint thinner and a rag, and roughed up the glossy exterior with sandpaper. But, again, she had trouble with the old chair that morning, trouble actually continuing once she started. She opened a can of satin-finish enamel and stirred it with her brush, looking through the backboards at nothing in particular, it seemed to me. She smoothed the brush against the edge of the can, but she just couldn't get the base coat on the rocker. Mom spent the rest of the morning in the attic with her blueprints, probably to get away from me. Buzz was playing with the phone again when Georgie arrived at 5:30 sharp. "I'm getting closer," he said to me. "I think I'm in the clouds." The doorbell rang and I opened the front door. Georgie hugged me then snuck up on Buzz and gave him a peck on the cheek. I saw her old red Ford parked in front of our house, newly waxed, as usual. "Aunt Georgie," Buzz said, looking guilty. He put the receiver behind his back. "Guess what?" "What?" Georgie asked. Buzz stood on the kichen chair and whispered something in Georgie's ear. Mom came downstairs and hugged her sister-in-law, but Georgie kept her eyes on Buzz, who handed Mom the receiver. "He's trying to call heaven!" Georgie said. Mom picked Buzz up and carried him out of the room. I nodded to Georgie like it was old news. Georgie fluffed up her hair with her fingers. There was a line under her chin where her bonnet strap had been. "Sure is hot," she said. I opened the refrigerator and grabbed her a beer. Georgie liked beer in summer. She tilted her head back and swished the beer around like mouthwash. She sat down and took another sip. She looked funny licking the froth off her lips. "Your mother thinks you need help," she said. "I do." Georgie looked surprised, the same way she looked when Buzz told her about calling heaven. "I didn't expect that," she said. "Not the kind of help she thinks, though." 82 "Uh-huh," Georgie said, tapping the glass with her fingernail. "What kind of help then?" I looked at her eyes, light and clear, the colour of the beer. "I need your help. Mom needs your help." "What is it, Nate?" "She misses Dad." "So do I," she said. "Don't you?" "She misses him at night." "I see," Georgie said, finishing off her can. A line ran down her chin and dripped onto her blouse. "Oh dear," she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. "Oh dear." Georgie looked me straight in the eye. "The way a wife loves her husband ..." she said. "It's special. It's not like any other kind of love. It's deeper than you or I can imagine. It's the kind of love that creates life. Do you understand? Can you see how she would miss that?" "I remember how they danced when you sang for them," I said. "I remember feeling bad for you because you didn't have someone to dance with." "There you are," Georgie said. "Your mother misses that. It's not that she doesn't remember your daddy. It's that she remembers him too much." After dinner, Buzz and I left Mom alone with Sister Georgeanne. They talked late into the night, past Buzz's bedtime. Every so often I'd hear Mom cry out, and I imagined Georgie dancing with her, holding her up, telling her what steps to take. Buzz ran into my room that night and put his head on chest. "I think Mom's crying," he said. "You got it wrong," I whispered. "Georgie's teaching her how to sing." Buzz giggled. "She's pretty bad, then." I flicked his ear with my finger. "She'll get better. You wait and see." Buzz fell asleep before Georgie left. I apologized to Georgie and thanked her for not getting angry about the habit. She kissed me on the forehead. "Where is it?" Mom asked. She looked away, like Buzz did when she caught him with his finger in the dial. "I'll put it in your car, Aunt Georgie." I went upstairs to my room. Buzz was sleeping on his back—it was the only time of the day he didn't look like he was up to something. I opened my closet door and took the habit off the rack. Both collar tips poked through the plastic covering. I pulled off the plastic and laid the habit on the bed next to Buzz for a minute. It seemed right there. 83 It took Mom and Georgie a while to say good-bye. It was dark outside when I put the habit in Georgie's car. I looked back at the house to see if Georgie and Mom were watching me, then stuffed the bonnet under my shirt and folded my arms over it. Georgie hadn't noticed the bonnet wasn't in her Ford, or if she had, she didn't say a word. I think she noticed. I felt good, knowing she'd be back for it soon. Buzz put one hand over another and thumped on my chest. It was his way to wake people up. He had seen it so many times on medical shows, the way doctors brought people back to consciousness. That's what he told me, in his own way, when I yelled at him for pounding my chest in the middle of the night. He grabbed my hand and tried to pull me out of bed. "Please, Nate," he said. "Hurry, before he's gone." I jumped out of bed and looked out the hall window. There weren't any cars in front of the house. Buzz tugged at my arm and led me down the stairs. His hair was messy and it stood up in the back, grazing my arm with each step. "I got Dad!" he said. "You were right. There are poles in heaven!" Buzz pointed to the telephone. The kitchen light was on, reflecting off the white phone plastic. The receiver was on the table, and the cord dangled close to the floor. Buzz jumped up and down. "He misses us. We can go visit him. Ask him how we get there." "Buzz, you can't call heaven. You just can't." Buzz pointed to the telephone. "Pick it up, Nate. Hurry!" I lifted Buzz with one arm. "Listen to me," I said. "I was playing a joke on you. You can't call up there." "Talk to Dad. He misses you too." "It isn't Dad." "Ask him what it's like up there. Ask him what the number is so we can call him tomorrow. I forgot what numbers I did." Buzz stood on the kitchen chair and put the mouthpiece against my chin. I put my ear against the receiver. The connection was bad, a loud crackle, a hiss, but I heard someone on the other end of the line. "Who's there?" I asked. "It's Dad!" Buzz screamed. I was ready to hang up when I heard my name through the din. I made a face at Buzz. "You told him my name." "He already knows it," he said. "Tell him I miss him. I'm gonna get Mom." I pressed my ear against the receiver. I thought I heard Dad call my name, low but clear, as if he was sitting behind me in the VW, but I knew 84 I had imagined it all. Mom followed Buzz down the stairs, and the line went dead. "He hung up," I said. Buzz's eyes started to water up. Mom made a face at me. "But he wanted me to tell you something, Buzz. You're only allowed one phone call in heaven. It's like jail that way. So he told me you can't call him anymore. But he said to look for him at night." "Where?" Buzz asked. "Look at the moon, Dad said. Look at the moon, the stars, the sky, and he'll give you a sign." Buzz ran upstairs and stood on his bed, pressing his nose against the window. Mom was talking insulation the day after Georgie's visit. She found the volume two I had placed on her book shelf, the "b" section of the "do-it- yourself" decorating guide that I had bought at the supermarket. Fiberglass batts, expendable aluminum foil, Mom wasn't sure, but she talked excitedly about getting on with the attic. First she wanted to finish what she had started in the basement, and she spent most of the day there, putting a coat of enamel on the rocker between laundry loads. She let me help her, but when she saw I was getting paint everywhere except on the rocker, she asked me to go upstairs and check the mailbox, then to get her a glass of juice, then to watch for the weather forecast on the noon news. Each time I returned to the basement, the mess I had made was gone. During one of my trips, I blasted one of Dad's albums on the stereo, and as I descended the basement stairs, I heard Mom singing. She was scrubbing her hands in the washtub. She didn't hear me come downstairs, because she never sang to be heard; in fact, I never knew she sang at all. She had a sweet, soft voice, almost as nice as Georgie's. She leaned over the washtub, swinging her hips, shifting her weight from one leg to the other. She shook-her hands over the sink, rocking back and forth to the beat of her song. When she turned around to dry her hands on the towel on the clothesline, she saw me. The blood rushed to her cheeks and she covered her face with the towel. I took the towel from her, placed it on my head, and tied it under my chin. "You lead," I said, humming loud and flat as we danced clumsily across the basement floor. Mom laughed long and hard, in a way I hadn't heard in a long, long time. 85 Contributors Sean Brendan Brown teaches English at Washington State University and has had poetry published in Ariel, Re Arts & Letters, Sunstone, Rocky Mountain Review, Sisyphus, Weber Studies, and the Windsor Review. His fiction has appeared in Pinehurst Journal and The Silver Web. Karen Connelly is living in Avignon, France. Her first book won the Pat Lowther Award. She is now working on a book of short stories. William Cross' translations of Richard Exner have appeared in North America and the United Kingdom. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories. Richard Exner is a German poet-in-exile now living in California. His work is gaining recognition by the major newspapers shaping literary reputations in the German-speaking world. Translations of his work are also beginning to bring him notice in North America. Richard Harrison lives in Toronto. His latest book is Recovering the Naked Man (Wolsack & Wynn, 1991). C.E. Hull was bom in 1965 and lives in Sydney, Australia, where he works as a poet and artist. He received his Bachelor of Creative Arts from Wollongong University, New South Wales, in 1987, and has published in magazines in Australia, Canada, U.S.A., India, and the U K. His first manuscript of poetry In the Dog Box of Summer has been accepted by Penguin Publishers, Australia. Catherine Hunter is a poet living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. John Isaacs is a pharmacist and writing instructor at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a recipient of the Raymond Carver Short Story Prize. His work has previously appeared in PRISM 30:1. First North American Rights for "Georgie's Habit" purchased by Carolina Quarterly. Joan Lennon is a Canadian living in Scotland with her husband, four sons and a cat named Jeoffry. Oscar Martens has work forthcoming in Event, Prairie Fire, and Queen's Quarterly. Van Newcomb is an artist living in Baltimore, Maryland. Christian Petersen now lives in Williams Lake, B. C. His fiction has appeared in Event, and is forthcoming in various other magazines. The "Monaco" story is "one for the boys." 86 Alison Touster-Reed has work collected in two volumes, The First Movement, and Bid Me Welcome. She has been widely published in the U.S.A., Canada, The United Kingdom and Australia in various magazines, including Carolina Quarterly, Jeopardy, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Oxford Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Queen's Quarterly, The Cambridge Poetry Magazine, Poetry Wales, Poetry Australia. Gayla Reid grew up in Australia and now lives in Burnaby, B.C. She has only recently begun to write fiction. Mary Walters Riskin lives in Edmonton, Alberta, where she works as a freelance writer and editor. Her first novel, The Woman Upstairs, was published in 1987. She has since completed a collection of short stories and is now working on a second novel. Jerry Saviano is a student in the creative writing programme at the University of Hawaii. Alice Tepexcuintle is a Vancouver based performance poet, rattle manufacturer and university drop-out. 87 The Vancouver International Writers Festival is pleased to present the fifth off-site event at UBC co-sponsored by Prism International Foremost Italian Writer Dacia Maraini with Genni Gunn Dacia Maraini's bestselling novel, The Silent Duchess, and winner of the prestigious Italian literary prize, Premio Campiello, has just been published in English by Peter Owen. Contemporary writer and alumni of UBC Creative Writing Department, Genni Gunn, is Ms. Maraini's Canadian translator. The Frederic Wood Theatre Thursday, October 22 ~ 12:30pm VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL WRITERS FESTIVAL GRANVILLE ISLAND OCTOBER 21-25 INFORMATION 681-6330 PROGRAMS AVAILABLE AT: FINE BOOKSTORES, COMMUNITY CENTRES, LIBRARIES AND OTHER OUTLETS. p? 1 liadleheaa 1992 Wilderness Writing Contest Better Homes and Gardens (including cats & vegetables) Since so many seized the opportunity to address nature issues and ideas we've decided to offer a contest with a slightly different twist, (and yield to the overwhelming pressure from vegetarians and felinophiles). Interpret the title as imaginatively, or as literally, as you like. Submissions to be no longer than 10 pages per entry; the deadline is December 15, 1992. To permit blind judging, please submit entries without your name on individual pages. Type your name on a special sheet. No submission previously published, or accepted for publication, can be considered. The Entry fee is $16 and includes a year's subscription to The Fiddlehead. Please send a self-addressed envelope and Canadian postage if you wish the manuscript returned. Prizes in honour of Fred Cogswell $200 each for Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction. Winners, and honourable mentions, will be published in The Fiddlehead. Send submissions to: Better Homes & Gardens Contest The Fiddlehead UNB PO Box 4400 Fredericton NB Canada E3B 5A3 1990 is International Year of Literacy. Five million Canadians cannot read or write well enough to function in today's society. Every Canadian has a fundamental right to the freedom that literacy gives. You can help. Become a literacy volunteer. Write to your member of parliament. Read, and read to your children. For more information, or to make a donation, contact: Canadian Give the Gift of Literacy Foundation 24 Ryerson Avenue Toronto, Ont. M5T 2P3 (416) 595-9967 Canadian Give the Gift of Literacy is a project of the book and periodical industry of Canada. A NOVEL IN 3 DAYS? 15th ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL 3-DAY NOVEL CONTEST Labour Day Weekend, 1992 ANVIL PRESS of Vancouver, Canada is pleased to announce the 15th Annual International 3-Day Novel Contest (formerly sponsored by Pulp Press). The contest will once again be held during the Labour Day Weekend, September 5-September 7,1992. Since its inception in 1978 as a barroom challenge, the 3-Day Novel Contest has gone on to garner international attention and a reputation as the cheeky and uncompromising rebel of literary forms. Attracting writers, both professional and first-time, from around the world, the contest remains in a league of its own: The world's most notorious literary marathon. Since its birth, interest in the contest has grown steadily, now attracting over 400 writers annually. Contestants can enter by sending an entry form to Anvil Press (address below) postmarked by September 4, and including an entry fee of $10. For a copy of the rules, an SASE (International Reply Coupons if from outside Canada) will ensure prompt return. For more information, contact Brian Kaufman or Dennis Bolen at AN , LPR [SS LITERAKY PUBLISHERS #15-. . s,B.C. Creative Writing M.F.A. The University of British Columbia offers a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing. Students choose three genres to work in from a wide range of courses, including: Poetry, Novel/Novella, Short Fiction, Stage Plays, <n. Screen &. TV Plays, Radio dren, Non- "tyafa^S^&g^^ffi Fiction and format or tutorial. ^^B-^^^ The thesis con sists of imaginative writing. The Department of Creative Writing also offers a Diploma Programme in Applied Creative Non-Fiction. Faculty: Sue Ann Alderson Han Hanson George McWhirter Keith Maillard Jerry Newman Linda Svendsen Bryan Wade For further information, please write Department of Creative Writing University of British Columbia Buchanan E462 - 1866 Main Mall Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z1 EPOCH SINCE 1947 FICTION, POETRY, ESSAYS . % * Published three times per year. Sample copy $4.00 One year subscription $11.00 Painting (detail) by Richard Estell. Courtesy of Ruth SiegeL Gallery, New York Available from 251 Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 PRISM internati°nal $2000 1st Prize and 5 Prizes of $200 plus publication payment Judge: to be announced Deadline: December 1, 1992 For entry form and rules, please send a SASE (outside Canada enclose SAE with IRC) to: Fiction Contest Prism international Department of Creative Writing University of British Columbia Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z1 Canada Poetry Sean Brendan Brown Richard Harrison C.E. Hull Catherine Hunter Joan Lennon Oscar Martens Alison Touster-Reed Alice Tepexcuintle Fiction Karen Connelly John Isaacs Christian Petersen Gayla Reid Mary Walters Riskin Jerry Saviano In Translation Richard Exner ISSN 0032.8790
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